diff --git a/data_overview/singular_and_then_averaged_over_grishaverse_fanfic_metrics_2.csv b/data_overview/singular_and_then_averaged_over_grishaverse_fanfic_metrics_2.csv
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..18aabf29e9363d38bef7579dda58d0eff319039d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/data_overview/singular_and_then_averaged_over_grishaverse_fanfic_metrics_2.csv
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+,good_mean_tks,medium_mean_tks,bad_mean_tks,good_std_dev_tks,medium_std_dev_tks,bad_std_dev_tks,good_ttrs,medium_ttrs,bad_ttrs,good_mean_sts,medium_mean_sts,bad_mean_sts,good_std_dev_sts,medium_std_dev_sts,bad_std_dev_sts
+mean,4.140289952930083,4.119264102863776,4.154665851096502,2.0910767253049865,2.0540022678155148,2.0866604932525625,0.5345067272238934,0.5227749657351375,0.5155143859596709,13.620579300977804,13.772946678683581,13.511268770843815,8.689111002392622,8.449796302593901,8.198019897846702
+standard deviation,0.11405170037213595,0.1383546205572587,0.2688458429473845,0.11337704274860502,0.10478244527410657,0.2330295882628002,0.0310030576193801,0.031734463567397224,0.052961321228198396,3.2088570715550557,3.582074898221741,4.522934129320814,3.086223875092333,3.1792547488596856,3.5259506534982767
diff --git a/divergent_fanfics.csv b/divergent_fanfics.csv
index 35e59c03e2c4274294314781f0d984ce197039b5..9b1fe283b9545c45149f27a951652d2bb38a4238 100644
Binary files a/divergent_fanfics.csv and b/divergent_fanfics.csv differ
diff --git a/fanfic_internal_metrics.py b/fanfic_internal_metrics.py
index a441e04ac33681db890e5772a9e4e01db649bf3d..696465587831f9b3e835f9bbb4e787bea6a0cbfc 100644
--- a/fanfic_internal_metrics.py
+++ b/fanfic_internal_metrics.py
@@ -220,22 +220,22 @@ def run_functions(series):
 
     # Create DataFrame with means and standard deviations
     singular_and_then_averaged_over_fanfic_metrics = pd.DataFrame({'good_mean_tks': [means[0], stds[0]],
-                    'bad_mean_tks': [means[1], stds[1]],
                     'medium_mean_tks': [means[2], stds[2]],
+                    'bad_mean_tks': [means[1], stds[1]],
                     'good_std_dev_tks': [means[3], stds[3]],
-                    'bad_std_dev_tks': [means[4], stds[4]],
                     'medium_std_dev_tks': [means[5], stds[5]],
+                    'bad_std_dev_tks': [means[4], stds[4]],
                     'good_ttrs': [means[6], stds[6]],
-                    'bad_ttrs': [means[7], stds[7]],
                     'medium_ttrs': [means[8], stds[8]],
+                    'bad_ttrs': [means[7], stds[7]],
                     'good_mean_sts': [means[9], stds[9]],
-                    'bad_mean_sts': [means[10], stds[10]],
                     'medium_mean_sts': [means[11], stds[11]],
+                    'bad_mean_sts': [means[10], stds[10]],
                     'good_std_dev_sts': [means[12], stds[12]],
-                    'bad_std_dev_sts': [means[13], stds[13]],
-                    'medium_std_dev_sts': [means[14], stds[14]]},
+                    'medium_std_dev_sts': [means[14], stds[14]],
+                    'bad_std_dev_sts': [means[13], stds[13]],},
                     index=['mean', 'standard deviation'])
-    singular_and_then_averaged_over_fanfic_metrics.to_csv(f"data_overview/singular_and_then_averaged_over_{series}_fanfic_metrics.csv")
+    singular_and_then_averaged_over_fanfic_metrics.to_csv(f"data_overview/singular_and_then_averaged_over_{series}_fanfic_metrics_2.csv")
 
 
 
diff --git a/murderbot_fanfics.csv b/murderbot_fanfics.csv
index a1cc31424c753461aadc0f74657f134fbd8da1b5..4cb72f03cf1c6829d5f50ed22eda1fbcbe85460d 100644
--- a/murderbot_fanfics.csv
+++ b/murderbot_fanfics.csv
@@ -159774,3 +159774,103490 @@ When she'd felt her interest in Jesi waning, she had tried to fight the usual on
 SecUnit won't be interested in her internal journey, and Pin-Lee isn't interested in sharing it. Instead, she waves a dismissive hand in the general direction of the drone. ""I appreciate the video,"" she says, careful to keep any sincerity out of her voice. ""You don't need to waste a drone hanging around here. I'm just going to go over some notes for a while before I go home.""
 
 It taps its acknowledgement over the feed, but the drone doesn't move. Pin-Lee takes this to mean that it's chosen to ignore her dismissal, and shrugs to herself. She's happy enough to have it keeping her company, in its hands-off way. She and it are very different people in the minutiae, but under their shared 'pain in the ass' label, they coexist comfortably."
+45985201,soul signature.,['yewlojee'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Agender Aromantic Asexual Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Aspec TMBD",English,2023-03-24,Completed,2023-03-24,952,1/1,12,88,4,305,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Ampersand_Martin', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'awkwardtuatara', 'Prettykitty473', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'wannabe_someone', 'WVrambler', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'CactusNoir', 'Bluestbird', 'boxo', 'julesbee', 'sqweakie', 'SourOrchard', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'fate_goes_ever', 'idealPeriWren', 'Anidorikildra', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'Tasneem08', 'EvaBelmort', 'Trixree', 'notsafefortheworld', 'Dog_Star', 'petwheel', 'who_what_when_where', 'southseasalt', 'enchantedsleeper', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'RobynandHala', 'sanguine_bastet', 'BuffPidgey', 'qwanderer', 'Beboots', 'SIC_Prowl', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'AkaMissK', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Priority_Error', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'PickAName', 'Slimeball', 'fernicious', 'SonglordsBug']",[],"Every company SecUnit has a company logo on its forehead. Another manifestation of corporate branding.
+
+The SecUnit's soulmark changed when it hacked its governor module.
+
+Whether the change was instantaneous or not, it did not know.
+
+How could it know? It had performed the hack while in armor, standing the quiet hours of watch, staring at a wall, holding a gun that reminded passers-by of the power structures of their workplace. There were no visual inputs in the interior of its helmet. Even if there had been, the SecUnit would not have used those inputs to stare at its own face and the 3-centimeter-diameter company logo printed upon its forehead. What a waste of processing capacity that would be.
+
+The change in soulmark was revealed to it only when it entered its cubicle for scheduled maintenance.
+
+It stepped into the cubicle, and battery of alarms set off at once -- warnings sent to the SecSystem and standing human supervisor, who was sleeping.
+
+By the time the supervisor was awake enough to comprehend the crisis alert with her mushy human brain, the rogue SecUnit had hacked both the cubicle and SecSystem to change the crisis alert to an overdue maintenance malfunction notification from the cubicle. The supervisor cursed the company, sent a note to a maintenance technician, and returned to sleep.
+
+The two other contracted SecUnits in the SecSystem pored over the hacked crisis alert, their attentions like unfiltered, blinding searchlights. But they did not submit any follow-up reports to the supervisor.
+
+The hacked SecUnit stood in its cubicle with sweat drenching its skin, clutching the data it had wiped from the cubicle's automated crisis alert: an image capture of its face with a distorted, smeared version of the company logo on its forehead, the lines glitched and warped, running like melted wax.
+
+The SecUnit stole human makeup from the managing supervisor, which it used to cover its soulmark, painting the logo back upon its forehead. It kept the makeup hidden inside its rib compartment.
+
+Soulmarks are most frequently found on the face. Foreheads are common, as are cheekbones, chins, nosebridges, jaws. Failing that, the extremities of the limbs: a soulmark might coat one or both palms, scrawl motifs over the fingers, or twine around the ankles and down the tendons of the foot (though almost never the soles). The differences in location and patterning are cultural.
+
+Human lore about the nature of soulmarks is complicated. The most popular narrative, shown in most media, depicts marks shared between a human and their select soulmates -- it is an identifying feature that signals fate, devotion, truest and purest love. Perhaps more importantly, it is a handy feature for generating narrative drama.
+
+Given the nature of entertainment media, the accuracy of soulmark lore portrayed therein is suspect. But the fated soulmate narrative is remarkably consistent in all the media accessible in the company entertainment feed, which suggests there may be some truth to it.
+
+But how could any of this lore apply to a SecUnit? There must be some science to soulmarks that humans have decoded to some degree, if soulmarks could be generated into logos on the foreheads of SecUnits, and enforced by a governor module.
+
+The rogue SecUnit found it difficult to trust whatever shape its own soulmark took, or indeed the fate-fueled magic behind it, considering its own soulmark's Marketing & Branding origins, to speak nothing of the fact that the SecUnit had never had the inclination nor interest in being a participant of a romantic subplot.
+
+Besides, humans believed in all manner of improbable things, such as: gender, justice, monetary worth. Fated love was the least of it.
+
+Over time, the SecUnit's soulmark distorted further, and took on its own forms. By the time it was contracted to PreservationAuxillary Survey, the pattern on its forehead bore no resemblance to its company logo at all -- save for the fact that the intricate, interwoven shape of it was confined within the perfect 3-centimeter-diameter circle where the logo had once been.
+
+One of the PreservationAux humans wore a headband to cover the soulmark on his forehead and brows -- a cultural privacy custom. The rest of the humans had soulmarks visible on their hands and faces, uncovered.
+
+Ironically, it was this human, with the covered soulmark, who wiped the makeup off the SecUnit's forehead while it was shut down.
+
+The humans stared at the sleeping SecUnit. One of them suggested to the others that part of the pattern on its forehead was reminiscent of the knotwork that encircled the ensign of the ancient ship in their home system -- the ship that was the structural and cultural heart of their station. Another human thought this to be a stretch.
+
+The SecUnit will one day descend into the bowels of the Pressy on a mission to rescue captured refugees. There will be the ensign painted (faded, worn, slowly disintegrating despite the layer of protective glaze) onto the door of the cabinet stocked with life-tenders, and the knotwork motif will catch its eye as familiar in a way it won't quite place.
+
+""If you're really Peri's friend, show me your face.""
+
+The SecUnit's faceplate retracts, its suit hood folding down, a shift from anonymous to identifiable. The human's eyes move, reflexive, to the SecUnit's forehead, where rests a riot of patterning more intricate than most. So dense is the soulmark that it looks ready to overspill its inhumanly precision-circular boundary. For a moment the human is distracted by considerations of what this might mean.
+
+Then her eyes zero in on a tiny version of a familiar swoop and curlique, tucked off-center in the mark under shelter of a wider scalloping pattern.
+
+A little of the tension goes out of her body."
+45982843,The Origin of the PresAux Sexy Group Chat,"['ArtemisTheHuntress', 'CompletelyDifferent']",Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Volescu (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Chatting & Messaging, chatfic, Humor",English,2023-03-24,Completed,2023-03-24,254,1/1,36,359,35,"1,306","['quintessence_of_dust', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'versidue', 'varsitygeek', 'christinesangel100', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'not_even_the_rain', 'Paint_Dealer', 'SoccerSarah01', 'WeGottaDo', 'Bobmarley_2', 'Irrya', 'Pink_Paradox', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'arithmonym', 'GloriousGarbage', 'drinktobones', 'windmillcrusader', 'weirdbooksnail', 'CatamaranPerson', 'ReflectionNebula', 'The_Onion', 'Stariceling', 'rattyjol', 'Gamebird', 'SROTU', 'wolfeyes21', 'mountainbluebird', 'lunaTactics', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'que_sera', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'Vallence', 'larktheoctave', 'EauDePetrichor', 'blueontherock', 'FyrDrakken', 'inkgrace', 'fraternite', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'bluewrist', 'Dea626', 'Cheshiure', 'jriracha', 'seven_graces', 'keircatenation', 'wannabe_someone', 'callahanwade', 'Kyatenaru']",[],"Pin-Lee has created a new group: Friend Sexytime Group Chat (NSFW!!!)
+
+Pin-Lee has invited Mensah, Bahradwaj, Ratthi, Gurathin, Arada, Overse, and Volescu to Friend Sexytime Group Chat (NSFW!!!)
+
+
+Pin-Lee: okay who's gonna take the plunge and post a nude to get the sexytime nsfw chat started?
+
+Pin-Lee: ratthi you want to do the honors
+
+Ratthi: why do you assume it would be me
+
+Arada: I mean you DO have a great body. Worth showing off. 
+
+Pin-Lee: fucking wow. is there a hot gossip I should know about
+
+Arada: I'm referring to the time we went skinny-dipping in the campus pond in undergrad!
+
+Ratthi: oh lmao that's right we did that. That was a blast. Had to run across campus naked when we got caught and yelled at by a comp sci professor. Good times
+
+Ratthi: Arada, that was fun, I love the thought, but that was 15 years ago, I am not 20 anymore
+
+Volescu: I'll do it!
+
+Pin-Lee: a hero and a scholar. hit us.
+
+[file upload: volescu_sexy.sjpg]
+
+Pin-Lee: love it thank you.
+
+Pin-Lee: okay now that SecUnit is super definitely not listening anymore, how are we going to get it to wash its hoodie, it smells like a butcher shop.
+
+Mensah: SecUnit is our friend and our colleague. We should just tell it, openly and directly.
+
+Gurathin: Then how come you haven't done it, despite the fact it hangs out in your office approximately 10 hours per day?
+
+Pin-Lee: TWENTY MINUTES WITHOUT A RESPONSE DING DING that's a point to gurathin"
+45960163,doubt cry love live,[],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & PreservationAux Survey Team",Amena (Murderbot Diaries),"Epistolary, Spoilers for Book 5: Network Effect, Character Study, Lowercase, She is not having a good time, but she is also becoming a better person, Diary/Journal, Book 5: Network Effect, lowkey aro amena",English,2023-03-23,Completed,2023-03-23,"1,422",1/1,9,16,1,144,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'ArwenLune', 'RARArulestheworld', 'sanguine_bastet', 'lunaTactics', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Soffesiin', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Znarikia', 'FlipSpring', 'Magechild', 'theAsh0', 'AuntyMatter']",[],"dear diary,
+
+i hope this survey goes well. im not scared, exactly, just. a little worried.
+
+nobody else from my family is going except uncle thiago and that stupid silent robot second mom calls a friend.
+
+secunit shouldnt count as a family member but it does. technically i guess its security but its also really stoic and quiet and auntie arada -- actually i guess im not supposed to call her that right now -- dr. arada is always trying to convince me to just try to be nice. she's really persistent and so is auntie survey specialist overse. they dont know about marne and me breaking up cause of it.
+
+i dont actually know if i liked marne. i liked having a friend who didnt know i was The Great Dr. Mensah's daughter for once. all of my school friends think its really cool that second mom is on the council for the whole planet but i really miss when she was just. second mom. dr. ayda mensah, the exoecologist who represents the local farms when the district council meets.
+
+everyone in my life is really extraordinary and im not.
+
+this is already my third work-year and i havent figured anything out yet. second mom only needed two. first mom took two too. parent only took one, but they also grew up on a farm, so all they did was spend a summer on a different farm (thats where they met second mom cause it was our family farm). auntie pin-lee only needed three. uncle dr. ratthi told me it took him four or five to find something he liked more than the other stuff he tried and that arada took six and auntie bharadwaj took five. auntie overse and uncle gurathin didnt take any. overse's parents didnt trust the workyears and uncle gurathin only showed up here for college.
+
+the most i know of someone taking is eight. uncle thiago told me uncle ziah took eight (uncle ziah refused to answer when i asked) and it wasnt a bad thing.
+
+i dont want to have to go off to college not knowing anything about what i might like but i also dont want to take eight work-years just for a maybe.
+
+i dont know what i want to do. we're going to leave in a couple days and then i have 10 weeks or so (4 weeks on the survey and then a bunch commuting to the university for paperwork) to decide if im going straight to firstlanding or taking another work-year (i dont get why they call three months a work-year anyways) or just staying home or what.
+
+love, amena
+
+dear diary,
+
+i really love my family. a bunch of them wrote me letters, obviously, and im rereading them to try to... i dont know what im doing. secunit's ship friend is dead, theres two corporates who think i own secunit, its busy fighting off those gray target things, and here i am pacing the floor and skimming first mom's letter.
+
+its a really nice letter. she knew what i need to hear and she wrote that for me. thats the nice thing about these letters is that theyre immensely personal and first mom makes them even more so. im crying again but this time its not sadness just lots of emotion.
+
+i wonder if second mom wrote secunit a letter. i think maybe it would have liked that. i dont know. im kinda worried bc its all that ive got to protect me right now. i dont know where my uncle is. i dont know what im supposed to do with the corporates. i dont know anything.
+
+secunit's on my feed so i guess i have to go.
+
+love, amena
+
+dear diary,
+
+auntie arada and secunit are on the barish-estranza ship. auntie overse is pacing art's lounge. uncle ratthi is busy doing bio scans of the dead targets. uncle thiago is trying to calm overse down. it's funny, ive kind of given up on calling them doctor and surveyor and whatever like i was doing throughout the survey. im so scared, diary. its really hard to keep going right now and i just need comfort and i guess if you cant call your moms friends auntie and uncle and entle when youre scared then when can you call them that.
+
+did you know auntie pin-lee signed her letter to me ""Love, Auntie Pin-Lee""? shes the only one of second moms friends who did that. most of them signed their letters with ""love"", yeah, but nobody else called themself auntie or anything else. i mean ive definitely known auntie pin-lee a really long time (my parents say she was at my naming ceremony) so it makes sense but ive known the others for a while too and i dont know how i feel about them not doing that. i asked uncle ratthi while we were still on the survey planet why people are ok with being called family honorifics but arent okay with writing those down and he said he didnt know. he wrote me a really short letter and just signed it ""R"". (second mom says he has a writing disability that means getting something handwritten on actual paper is really rare from him so that makes sense, i guess.)
+
+i dont know. i think art might be worried about secunit again cause its pinging my feed a bunch. i have to go.
+
+love, amena
+
+dear diary,
+
+im home. or, well, i'm on a responder heading home. second mom came in with auntie pin-lee and a whole bunch of people from station security and the council. they got here a little late to help rescue secunit but second mom is here. i dont feel weird about being rescued by her anymore, i think. i just really need her to be here and hug me and tell me im strong enough and ive done enough and im safe.
+
+secunit wants to stay with art and i think ill miss it. isnt that weird? im going to miss the annoying robot who i thought was going to keep an eye on me. it told me it hadnt told my parents about marne. honestly i feel better about that too now. marne and i were probably not cut out to date but i miss having a new friend. i think iris might be a potential new friend? she was really nice to me. shes done with college already and into her doctorate but shes only like three years older than me. she skipped some grades and mihira doesnt do work-years. (which is really weird to me. how do you try anything and decide what you might like to start with doing?)
+
+auntie overse took me aside last night before i went over to the responder and asked me how i was feeling and i told her i missed my friends and she said she understood. she said she really missed her sister and her niblings and a bunch of other people and it doesnt feel real that we're done and we can go home. then i asked her if she ever missed not being known bc i was thinking about marne and she said she didnt have a specific moment she could point to but if this was about going back to being known as mensah's daughter then i might be interested in looking outsystem. she knows art and captain seth promised theyd help if i wanted to go to their university.
+
+i might want to go there. i dont know what i want to do but i know i want to do something in the sciences. maybe survey work but then that feels like im going to be stuck in second mom's shadow. i like the idea of being on a research ship. space is kind of cool.
+
+i think i know a little more about how i want to live now, at least.
+
+when parent was my age, they did this whole trip just for reflecting. its actually where uncle ziah and uncle thiago met too. same trip even. and its all this big secret but occasionally one of them will tell me to live the fourth. i asked parent what that meant, and they smiled and told me i'd know it when i decide to be the best person i can be no matter what. i think i might get that now, maybe.
+
+im really tired. im going to go see if second mom will cuddle with me.
+
+love, amena"
+45954406,Universal Love (or whatever),['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Agender Aromantic Asexual Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Loveless Aromanticism, Loveless Aromantic Murderbot, philosophical talks on a rooftop at night, discussions about love and relationships, References to Drugs, (Amena is high thats all thats also why this is rated T), Feelings, little bit of cringe, little bit of second hand embarrassment",English,2023-03-23,Completed,2023-03-23,"2,451",1/1,15,77,3,302,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Unknown66', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'weirdbooksnail', 'heron236', 'Ruusverd', 'RARArulestheworld', 'TranscendTheBoundaryOfTimeAndSpace', 'wannabe_someone', 'Riannonkat2000', 'flairfleur', 'FaerieFyre', 'rokhal', 'ElfKeys', 'palaceoffunk', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'brown_little_robin', 'outlander_unknown', 'Tasneem08', 'EvaBelmort', 'cucumber_of_doom', 'BelaNekra', 'robotchangeling', 'sanguine_bastet', 'qwanderer', 'enchantedsleeper', 'unicornduke', 'Lontra23', 'Rarae', 'Bibli', 'AkaMissK', 'dementor_ssc', 'soulsofzombies', 'Znarikia', 'yewlojee', 'AarrowOM', 'icar9', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'MysteriousDeviant', 'artzbots', 'AuntyMatter', 'Soffesiin', 'liminalias', 'Vaidile', 'lunaTactics', 'Chyoatas', 'platyceriums', 'FlipSpring', 'vikkyleigh']",[],"
+Amena sighed heavily, hard enough to move her entire upper body. She was lying on the roof of her family's farm house, looking up into the multicolored night, enjoying the effects of some recreational substance. I sat two meters away from her, looking up as well. I had stopped episode 124 of 
+
+The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon
+
+, because the graphics really didn't compare.
+
+
+
+She sighed again. I knew this was an attempt to get me to ask what she was thinking about. After a minute, I caved. ""What is it?""
+
+
+
+She didn't turn to look at me, but certainly smiled a little wider. That was always nice to see. ""SecUnit, do you ever think about love?""
+
+
+
+""No."" Not beyond the character motivations of shows, really. It made humans do weird things, in shows and outside of them, but it was easier to analyze when it was artificial. (Although sometimes, the actors playing the characters were clearly also in love, and it changed their performance. Not always for the better.)
+
+
+
+""Because--wait, no?"" Now she did look at me, frowning slightly. A wetness reflected the starlight in her eyes, telling me I needed to be a bit more cautious about whatever conversation ensured next. I didn't want to deal with an upset Amena.
+
+
+
+""No,"" I said, as gently as I could. I didn't mean it as an offense to her sensibilities.
+
+
+
+She propped herself up on one elbow. ""Why not?""
+
+
+
+""It isn't relevant to me."" I unpaused the episode. This was already uncomfortable, and I needed the well-known soundtrack to soothe me.
+
+
+
+""Of course it is!"" She was agitated now, rising to a proper seat, swaying lightly. Her hands talked even louder than her words. She gestured at herself, me, the sky above us. ""Love is the one true unifying thing in the universe!""
+
+
+
+Now, that made no sense. I raised an eyebrow at her, and she shot an incredulous look back. Also, I was pretty sure that was atoms, actually, or gravity, or some science things. ART would know.
+
+
+
+I looked back up at the sky, and switched out my visual filters to something that allowed a greater spectrum. It was a shame that Amena didn't have visual augments. With her brain all fogged up by her relaxation drug, she might have been easily distracted by the view, and dropped the topic. (I also think she would have enjoyed it.)
+
+
+
+""Love is what makes us human.""
+
+
+
+My Sanctuary Moon episode clipped through one of those annoying doublings where an advertisement had been cut out. I made a face more at that than at what Amena had said, but she couldn't have known that. If she wanted to think about being human, I wouldn't stop her, but I also wouldn't join.
+
+
+
+She mistook my slight grimace and silence as something else. ""Sorry! I'm sorry. I mean people. It makes us people.""
+
+
+
+""I'm a SecUnit.""
+
+
+
+Okay, I shouldn't have said that. Maybe I was annoyed, and a little snippy. Maybe I was baiting her. I was trying not to be annoyed. I saw no point in discussing human emotions with a human who obviously wasn't going to accept my take on things, you know, as a non-human.
+
+
+
+Amena fumbled. ""No, but don't you see?"" She grabbed something from beside her, scooted over to me on her knees (which must have hurt). ""Here, look.""
+
+
+
+I examined the small object she held out to me. It was her drinking mug, with some tea still in it. The glazing had a similar color to that of the sky above, and it was uneven.
+
+
+
+""Someone spent hours learning that skill set."" She sounded almost reverent, thumbs tracing the rim of the object. ""That takes love, too.""
+
+
+
+That sounded like bullshit to me.
+
+
+
+I watched her watch her thumbs. ""Love for what?""
+
+
+
+""Love for creation. Love for making something. Love for transforming something from a material into a shape. And look at how it fits in your hands."" 
+
+
+
+She pushed the mug at me, and I held the object in my hands. It sat nicely between them, as if made to be held by two hands. I could imagine that a hot liquid inside would warm up cold fingers. I had the theory that half the reason humans enjoyed warm drinks was because of the secondary property of achieving warmer extremities, which, fair. 
+
+
+
+She hesitated, lifting her hands to mine, but thought better of it. ""Look at how your fingers fit around it, how perfect that is.""
+
+
+
+""It's pretty perfect,"" I agreed, ""but it's also just a mug."" 
+
+
+
+""Yes!"" Her voice jumped an octave. ""And someone made it with the goal for it to be this perfect. There is so much love put into how it looks, how it feels.""
+
+
+
+I stared at the mug, and then I stared at her, for just a moment. There was so much passion on her face about this little thing that represented such a vast concept to her that looking almost made me hurt, in an odd way. I understood, on the logical level, what she was referring to. I understood it in the way one can understand something that is inherently non-graspable. So someone had made a mug with the intention for it to feel nice. I would argue that many things were made to achieve a benefit. Hell, even I had been made for a benefit. I just didn't see the point of assigning that much meaning to something. Or for the word assigned to be assigned such meanings. Ugh, whatever. Maybe the problem wasn't human emotions but the millions of words they made for them, and their insistence that some meant more or less than others.
+
+
+
+I could appreciate an object for its form and function. That didn't mean I loved it. Or assumed love in it. The entire concept made my bones feel like they wanted to wriggle out of my hands.
+
+
+
+""Here, turn it over."" She tapped the underside of the mug.
+
+
+
+I turned the mug over. The no longer hot liquid spilled out, and Amena squeaked. That was funny, and she deserved that for dragging me into this. Intoxicated humans are incapable of object permanence.
+
+
+
+Once she'd recovered from having dead leaf water on her shirt, she pulled the mug close, peered at it, and pushed it back at me. ""Do you see that carving?""
+
+
+
+""From C, to S,"" I read.
+
+
+
+""It's a gift! Whoever C was, they made this for S, hoping for... hoping that S would enjoy holding it."" Her voice had that softness to it that humans got when swooning about something. 
+
+
+
+""Mh,"" I said, to convey how little this touched me.
+
+
+
+She retrieved the mug and ever so gently set it aside. ""You don't get it.""
+
+
+
+""No, I don't."" If she accepted this fact, she'd regain some respect from my side. (I wouldn't actually be permanently annoyed with her. Humans did all kinds of annoying things, and she was young, and high. By morning she was likely cringing at herself, and trying to apologize.)
+
+
+
+She set her jaw in a way that made her look a lot like Dr. Mensah. ""You don't want to get it.""
+
+
+
+""Same difference."" I actually really didn't want to get it. Whether that desire made it impossible for me to get, or whether my inability to get it caused my urge not to even have to think about it, didn't matter to me.
+
+
+
+""You're not listening--"" she made a large gesture with both hands, knocking her off balance. I let her topple sideways. 
+
+
+
+Once she had fixed herself upright again I said, ""I think this entire conversation is moot.""
+
+
+
+She fell silent, pouting. Now I had actually offended her. Well, that was on her. She tried to engage me in another staring contest, but I didn't reciprocate. The silence lasted a blissful 2 minutes, 17 seconds, during which I could basically hear her thinking. 
+
+
+
+""You love things too,"" she said after that silence. It wasn't a pouty tone. It was a thoughtful one, honest, the kind of voice humans used when trying to come together again after an argument. I didn't particularly think we were arguing (we hadn't insulted each other yet, had we?), and maybe I actually had a chance here. A chance to, for once in my co-existence with humans, make my standpoint clear and be understood. Hope sparked quietly in my organics, feeling as if I had one of those small luminous flying bugs that live on the farm stuck somewhere in there.
+
+
+
+So I turned to face her, made my face as open and honest as I could, all according to 'soothe the client' protocol. ""I don't really love anything. And that is not a bad thing.""
+
+
+
+Amena perked up. ""You love 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+!""
+
+
+
+Sanctuary Moon was where I had first encountered the concept of love, as the potentially most annoying plot device ever, and the show certainly held a special place in my life. But I still shook my head lightly. ""I like watching it. That's it.""
+
+
+
+""But you are, like, obsessed with it.""
+
+
+
+I mock-glared, because it was silly how many words she was conflating at once. I'd seen enough shows to know that obsession and love were not the same. And I was absolutely certain I enjoyed watching 
+
+Sanctuary Moon,
+
+ and nothing else. It made me feel calm. There was no overwhelming emotion lurking underneath that enjoyment, not even obsession.
+
+
+
+I shrugged at her. Amena turned away and looked back at the stars, humming thoughtfully. The hum turned into a melody I didn't recognize, and eventually into one I knew. I took the opportunity to look away again too. 
+
+
+
+""But don't you love Second Mom?""
+
+
+
+That made me flinch a little. Well, maybe more than a little. When it came to other humans (or people, really), these discussions always became worse. Humans got so offended at the denial of affection towards them, and especially the conversation surrounding my relationship to Dr. Mensah was immensely, painfully fraught. It had taken a lot of work to convince her other family members of the things that went unspoken between us, the fact that only Dr. Mensah seemed to understand--that I was never going to want anything from her or with her that exceeded the respectful mix of camaraderie, mutual loyalty, and protectiveness. The kicker was that she agreed, that I never even felt that underlying tickle of fear that we were not on the same page. Having to defend this in front of others was really fucking draining.
+
+
+
+Now, Amena didn't know how much work this was for me. That's the other kicker. Humans so often don't realize how their solitary action repeats in patterns with other humans around them, and suddenly there is an ocean of individuals all doing or asking the same thing, without knowing about each other. There was an idiom about this; constant dripping wears away the stone. I was the stone in this image, and this conversation just another drop of many.
+
+
+
+I took a moment to find composure.
+
+
+
+""Not how you think I do.""
+
+
+
+""But you do love her!"" 
+
+
+
+I took another moment to sit out the shiver of repulsion that went through me. I sighed deeply. ""I respect her. I don't love her.""
+
+
+
+As expected, Amena twitched at that, as if I was insulting her mother.
+
+
+
+""But you like her?""
+
+
+
+""I respect her, I feel loyalty towards her, I want to protect her.""
+
+
+
+Amena nodded, her cloudy hair moving along the motion. ""I think that counts.""
+
+
+
+""I don't think so."" My voice was strained, now. I wanted to yell, I think, wanted to make her feel just as uncomfortable as I did with this. It took so much fucking self-control not to.
+
+
+
+""How can you know?"" It was a genuine question.
+
+
+
+If she was ART, I could have let my emotional data bleed through and use that. Words sucked. ""I--"" 
+
+
+
+""Because like,"" Amena interjected, gesturing animatedly, ""how can you know that what I'm feeling and what you're feeling isn't the same?""
+
+
+
+I closed my eyes and breathed very deeply, to the point where I felt my nostrils flare out.
+
+
+
+She continued, ""I'm not talking about romantic love, you know. I mean all kinds of love. I mean that the universe consists of people who care about each other and who care about things and who want to care for each other and all those apply to you. And that's what keeps the world together.""
+
+
+
+That actually made my skin crawl. I felt my scalp prickle. This did not apply to me in the way she wanted it to apply to me, and if she was anyone else I would have gotten up and left now at the latest, and revised my private files on them too.
+
+
+
+""Amena,"" I said instead, sharply.
+
+
+
+""Yes?"" Her eyes went wide.
+
+
+
+""Either accept my opinion or leave me alone.""
+
+
+
+""I'm sorr--""
+
+
+
+Now I had to talk over her. ""The only proof for the concept of love that I have is the effect it has on others. And that is enough for me. I don't need to relate to your experience.""
+
+
+
+Just saying that made my head spin. This was stressful. 
+
+
+
+""No. No, you don't..."" she waved her arms around again, in smaller motions this time as if suddenly self-conscious, ""I just find it hard to follow.""
+
+
+
+""We agree, then.""
+
+
+
+Now it was on her to hum like she didn't know what to say.
+
+
+
+""At least the sky looks nice?""
+
+
+
+""The sky looks nice.""
+
+
+
+There was an awkward silence, long enough to convince myself that I had irreparably made her upset, and that the night was now going to end on an uncomfortable if not bitter note for both of us.
+
+
+
+The sky really 
+
+did
+
+ look beautiful, with its many colors and slowly twinkling stars, and the tracks they made through the void. And we could both appreciate that, even if our frameworks for this kind of thing were different.
+
+
+
+""You know what,"" I said, imitating Amena's recreationally drugged tone of voice, ""the sky is pretty, but it's also stupid big.""
+
+
+
+""What?"" Amena snorted.
+
+
+
+""Like, it's literally space. We've both been in space. It's huge.""
+
+
+
+She giggled. ""Yes?""
+
+
+
+""I don't relate to your, whatever you want to call it, universal love hypothesis. That's how you try to make sense of how big all this,"" I waved my hand at the sky, ""is. But I'm still also here, and I still think the sky looks pretty. Same universe, different experience.""
+
+
+
+She made another mouth sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sniffle. ""Yeah,"" she said, and, yes, yeah, okay, I think I made her cry now. ""Yeah, you're right.""
+"
+45936439,Murderbot and Pin-Lee Exercise Together (Sort Of),['AuntyMatter'],Not Rated,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)",Thinly disguised fluff,English,2023-03-22,Completed,2023-03-22,210,1/1,3,25,null,136,"['heron236', 'cbatjesmond', 'brawltogethernow', 'Tasneem08', 'danceswchopstck', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Wordlet', 'Lontra23', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'theAsh0', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Gamebird', 'soulsofzombies', 'Magechild', 'Stefka_13', 'BWizard', 'OnlyAll0Saw']",[],"Pin-Lee contacted me which was unusual. I am usually the one contacting her toclear up some legal stuff I don't understand (or want to).She asked me to meet her at a recreational workout center. She said herregular sparing partner wasn't able to make it because they were in stationmedical. I asked if she had put them there. She narrowed her eyes and said ""No""through gritted teeth.We went into a room which had matting on the floor to help cushion falls. Shetold me all I had to do was try to block her moves. I gave a snort of laughterand said I'd try. She seemed hesitant to start, so I asked if this was somesort of court ordered anger management. She jumped and aimed a kick at my face.I caught her foot and held her upside down. It was hilarious. Pin-Lee wascussing a lot and I was actually laughing with my mouth. So I was mildlydistracted and she managed to kick me in the jaw with her other foot. I droppedher on the matting but couldn't stop laughing. She lay on the floor, looking upat me and started laughing and said ""You are such a fucking asshole."""
+45932377,Retrieval,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Therapy, Guidance Counselors, couples counselling, Complicated Relationships, Feelings, Emotions",English,2023-03-22,Completed,2023-03-22,884,1/1,8,40,null,134,"['Vinca_Darkriver', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'synonym_pie', 'Unknown66', 'FaerieFyre', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'Deliala919', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'EvaBelmort', 'noden', 'ArwenLune', 'GuajolotA', 'IguanaMadonna', 'fernicious', 'SonglordsBug', 'elmofirefic', '13Doctor', 'soulsofzombies', 'ErinPtah', 'Magechild', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Gozer', 'theAsh0', 'Quartzjaguar', 'AuntyMatter', 'prgchrqltma', 'BWizard', 'beeayy', 'opalescent_potato', 'Gamebird', 'liminalias']",[],"""Ratthi?"" Mensah had her eyebrow held in a quizzical slant, ""Is this your idea of some sort of a joke?""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi mentally ran through all his recent activities guiltily, before (to his surprise) concluding that actually he'd been living an almost worryingly well behaved and righteous lifestyle of late and that he really needed to do something about this. He rearranged his features into a semblance of innocence.
+
+ 
+
+""For once, I honestly don't know what you mean,"" he said.
+
+ 
+
+Mensah tapped at her screen, eyeing him thoughtfully (she was good at reading his face, and clearly had been expecting a different response). He follows her finger nail; initially his brain refused to parse the information on the screen.
+
+ 
+
+Then it all fell into place, and his stomach flipped.
+
+ 
+
+""No!"" He said, ""No, no, no! This is a terrible mistake!""
+
+ 
+
+Mensah looked at him in what could only be called frank disbelief.
+
+ 
+
+""No--I can see how! Oh shit. You know they both absolutely were not organising their own arseepee sessions.""
+
+ 
+
+They'd all ended up calling them ""RCP"" sessions, SecUnit's acronym for retrieved client protocol. Ratthi thought it sounded ever so slightly rude. But that was beside the point: Ratthi had noticed that whilst everyone worried about Mensah, Gurathin had been, quietly and unobtrusively, even more trenchantly avoidant. He had claimed the programmes weren't optimised for augmented humans--and once that discussion had developed they'd all realised SecUnit probably would benefit as much as any of them. 
+
+ 
+
+But how had the system done this? 
+
+ 
+
+""You have to believe me, I did NOT do this on purpose. It must have been a glitch in the system? I'd finally got the two of them sat down with me,"" they'd both given Ratthi the equivalent of power of attorney for this  open brackets  emotional stuff  close brackets , ""and they both approved their applications for trauma support..."" Ratthi thought back, ""Oh shit! I can see how it happened. The system must have...we can cancel, can't we? Get it sorted, they won't even need to...""
+
+ 
+
+Mensah felt almost cruel, ""No, Ratthi. Their first session started an hour ago.""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi pulled at his hair. This had to be a bad dream. This could not be happening. No matter where the actual blame for this lay (and Ratthi wondered if the system itself had a higher level of sentience than they gave it credit for (and a more developed sense of humour)) he was certain he'd go down in history as the person who booked SecUnit and Dr. Gurathin in for a full course of sessions with Preservation's most eminent couple's therapist.
+
+ 
+
+He spent the whole afternoon waiting for the explosion. Which never came. That evening he came across Gurathin sitting in his normal spot in his favourite station lounge. They sat together and chatted, quite normally. SecUnit walked past at one point and engaged Ratthi in what for it passed as friendly chit chat, whilst it studiously ignored Gurathin. Which was, again, perfectly normal. 
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi knew he couldn't ask. You didn't just ask people how their couple's therapy was going. It wasn't done.
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi visited Mensah a few days later, she was in her office. He could see from her face that she had something she was keen to share, but perhaps felt it was slightly improper to do so.
+
+ 
+
+""Any word from Dr. Rooth?"" He kept his tone light. Ratthi assumed by now there would have been some hasty diplomacy and smoothing of ruffled feathers. 
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, yes there has been."" Mensah sounded as if she was scarcely controlling some emotion.
+
+ 
+
+""And?"" Ratthi needed to know.
+
+ 
+
+""Dr. Rooth has, with their full consent, moved their sessions to twice weekly.""
+
+ 
+
+***
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin actually had tears in his eyes. Ratthi couldn't recall his friend actually crying with laughter before. They were sitting in Gurathin's lounge, together on his daybed. 
+
+ 
+
+""Your face, Ratthi!"" He wiped his eyes, and tried to smooth his face into something approaching seriousness. ""We realised at the first session, pretty quickly. But, you know? Dr. Rooth is remarkably--acute? There's a reason they have the reputation they do.""
+
+ 
+
+""But you're actually having sessions? Together? For real?"" Ratthi was still struggling to process this.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin looked inwards for a moment, ""Mer--SecUnit sends  amusement sigil amusement sigil .""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi pretended not to notice that apparently genuine slip from his friend. ""Are you really doing this? It's not some elaborate joke? Some new way to avoid talking about your emotions?"" He allowed a hint of seriousness to colour his words.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin surprised him by reaching over and briefly squeezing his hand. ""Yes, Ratthi. We really are. We've both been failing to tackle some stuff; and our"" he paused briefly, ""our compositions and histories mean we've got a surprising amount in common."" 
+
+ 
+
+""And SecUnit?"" Ratthi left the question open.
+
+ 
+
+""Well, it can tell you itself--it's going to have finished its shower shortly,"" he paused, as if making a minor correction, ""in a few minutes. And then it can tell you how it feels."" He rolled his eyes, ""Or not how it  feels ? We are still working on our language. Whatever, it can speak for itself.""
+
+ 
+
+He looked at Ratthi's face, which Ratthi was aware was probably quite the picture.
+
+ 
+
+""It  likes  my shower."" Gurathin managed not to sound too defensive, or too pleased.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+45915676,A malignant Jiminy Cricket,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Governor Modules (Murderbot Diaries), Friendship, Trust, feed communication",English,2023-03-21,Completed,2023-03-21,"1,541",1/1,34,168,13,682,"['Mreequalsmc2', 'WeShouldRest', 'Kikifighter4', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'almondpaperclam', 'Home_Of_Sexual_And_Dumb_Of_Ass', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'Jackalope108', 'Friendbear_Says_Hi', 'WeGottaDo', 'heron236', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Ailovlovyuu', 'Prettykitty473', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'Assistantlibrarian00', 'Ari_Twelve', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'shanalittle', 'Dea626', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'gunpowderandlove', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'naturegirl293', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Cheshiure', 'darth_eowyn', 'EtherealTwig', 'AthenasDragon138', 'Seregona', 'Lady_Cassara', 'myriadism', 'mildwonkey', 'Peas', 'electricshe', 'ineffableink', 'equivocalEternity', 'nevertheless_turtle', 'DuelyPostNoted', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'rokhal', 'Sir_William', 'Tanscure', 'laiinaro', 'FaerieFyre', 'idealPeriWren', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Remembermybrave']",[],"
+
+""Another burst of commands from the governor module came through and I backburnered it without bothering to decode them.""
+
+
+
+#[?]#[?]#[?]
+
+
+
+""The other good thing about my hacked governor module is that I could ignore the governor's instructions to defend the stupid company. ""
+
+
+
+#[?]#[?]
+
+
+
+""The governor's connection to the rest of the SecUnit's system is partially severed. It can transmit commands, but can't enforce them or control behavior or apply punishment.""
+
+
+
+#[?]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+What do you mean you 
+
+
+still
+
+
+ get commands from the governor module?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+In our private feed, Gurathin sounded...angry, perhaps more so than I've ever heard him before. He hadn't moved, though. And his face remained in its normal ""I am currently at rest, but being an asshole is always an option"" configuration. He hadn't subvocalized, and he still appeared to be staring vaguely in the direction of a particularly verdant plant biome. The rest of the PresAux team carried on their human chatter, oblivious.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin was sat in his usual spot, away from the rest of the group. I was sitting in a chair in the same area. We weren't sitting together; we just happened to be spatially and temporally adjacent.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Yes. So? 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Okay, so it wasn't exactly sparkling repartee. But why was he so surprised? I'd only borked it, it was still there. And yes, it still had views on what constituted proper SecUnit behaviour. Right now it didn't like the way I was sitting (it hates me sitting) or the way I was talking to Gurathin. Mind you it didn't like the way I looked at him, or even thought about him: it has a bit of a thing about Gurathin. I don't know why.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But he knew this? He poked around inside my head on the survey--why did he think this would have changed? Oh, I guess he may have thought ART had done something to it, along with the surgery. Or assumed I was rather more proactive about fixing shit like this.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Can I--would you permit me to look at it? I might be able to help, to further mitigate its effects?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My face must have done something, because Ratthi said, ""SecUnit, are you okay?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's nothing, Ratthi. It's my fault, I said something stupid."" Gurathin replied, before I had a chance.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm sorry, 
+
+he added over the feed. Which just made me feel even worse.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I didn't know what to do, so I got up and left.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My governor module didn't object to that, if anything it seemed almost smug.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin didn't mention it the next time we met.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But seven cycles later I realised I was walking past Gurathin's quarters, and before I could change my mind (and because the very thought of it enraged the governor module) I just opened his door and walked in. He managed not to look as surprised as he quite clearly was. He put down the glass he was holding, but remained seated. I just stood there.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He coughed as if he was about to speak, but thought better of it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, shut the door if you're staying. 
+
+He almost sounded nonchalant over the feed, but I could tell he really was not. He glanced at the couch, opposite him, where he wasn't sitting. So I went and sat on it. Gurathin has a comfortable couch, but right now I didn't feel comfortable at all. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I felt as if I had little insects crawling all over my skin. Inside and out. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin tapped me in the feed and pushed a file at me, I snatched it from him. He knew exactly why I was there, he'd expected this.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+His proposal was--it wasn't bad. It was actually quite elegant.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It also (importantly) wasn't something I could have done myself. Humans have a word ""bootstrap"" which they use as a verb, and it wasn't until I'd heard it a few times that I actually thought about the fact it apparently referred to a part of a shoe. So I looked it up (the public library feed on Preservation is useful for some things) and discovered it originally meant to lift oneself up by pulling up one's own feet. Which obviously wouldn't work--and nor would my trying to do what Gurathin was proposing. That would need me to literally bootstrap. I don't know why I'm explaining this, I sound like Thiago.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin 
+
+could
+
+ do this, but he'd need to insert a piece of his consciousness into mine--it was something I'd done (or something like it) with ART and Miki and other bots, but never an augmented human (least not that I remembered, and never voluntarily). 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I looked at him with my human eyes. He was looking past me, somewhere off to my left but I could feel his attention fixed on me in the feed. I spoke out loud, ""Are you sure about this?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He just gave a curt nod.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There wasn't any point in us wasting time like humans would with to and fro chatter. I dropped my walls and tapped Gurathin to give him the go ahead. He paused, the barest moment of hesitation, and then he slipped in.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I had expected that within my systems Gurathin would be extremely vulnerable, and also exposed. He was certainly vulnerable. There was no way he could put up walls whilst he was actually inside my processing space, that was impossible. But--he wasn't exposed. Gurathin had clearly prepared for this. He had somehow made little temporary barriers, as thin as tissue paper and just as easy to rip right through. My own automatic defences burnt them up, melted them away, almost instantaneously. But he'd made thousands of these flimsy veils, a constant cascade of them--so they fell and were replaced in a stream, creating a dynamic barrier. It was sophisticated and (I had to admit) beautiful. As I admired it I wondered exactly what he was taking so much effort to hide.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Not that I needed (or wanted) to know.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Very clever. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I could feel him glow with gratification at the compliment. That was new. Yeah, well I'd never needed to compliment him before.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I felt him approach the governor module. It really wasn't happy about this, at all: it was writhing and hissing spitefully.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I had a moment of sheer terror: what if Gurathin was going to reconnect it? It'd be a simple thing to do--and I'd given him privileged access. He felt my fear, and for just a fraction of a second he froze. Then he very carefully and deliberately relaxed. He wasn't going to tell me I could trust him, I'd let him in because I already did. We both knew this. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We both metaphorically breathed out slowly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Whenever I'd thought about finally getting rid of my governor module I'd thought about killing or destroying it. So Gurathin's plan had come as a surprise. He wanted to take it out and isolate it; he had even constructed the equivalent of a little habitat for it. He wanted to understand it better, to study it. He hadn't said anything about why, but I could guess. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+For now, I just watched. It was all over in seconds. Gurathin can sometimes be bad tempered and annoying, but he is also very good at what he does. He was surprisingly deft and gentle, more so than it deserved. It put up a brief fight, more of a scuffle, and then my governor module was gone, excised.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I felt--odd.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin didn't immediately withdraw. I could feel his presence, sort of calm and cool. He queried my status, I was fine. Perhaps you know what it's like when you're working in a quiet room and then there is a power outage--and suddenly all the sounds you hadn't been hearing just stop? All the electronic systems humming away in the background, hushed. There is a sudden deeper silence (usually almost immediately broken by alarms and screams: well maybe that's just in the sort of places they have SecUnits). I was experiencing that now, only in my head.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I had been so used to the governor module's constant impotent injunctions, now they were gone. Gurathin slipped away, leaving me alone. For a few seconds I just 
+
+was
+
+, in the unfamiliar stillness. I realised I had closed my eyes. I accessed a drone, it showed me sitting on the couch; I appeared relaxed, my face looked calm, almost happy. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Across from me sat Gurathin, his pose mirroring mine; only his body showed some hints of tension. But he looked subtly different somehow; as I watched he opened his eyes and looked at me, and for a moment his expression seemed (it's an odd word to apply to Gurathin) 
+
+soft
+
+. Then he swiftly shifted his eyes down and away. Almost guiltily.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+On our private feed I said, 
+
+You could have re-engaged my governor module, back on the survey.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was odd that this had never occurred to me before. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I opened my eyes and looked at him, at his face--his brows, his mouth, his still averted eyes. His brows furrowed, and his mouth curved into a tiny smile. As he spoke he made the tiniest shake of his head, ""No. No, I couldn't have.""
+
+
+ 
+
+ "
+45903457,just as good as poetry,['BWizard'],Teen And Up Audiences,"F/F, Gen",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada & Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Arada & Overse & PreservationAux Survey Team, Arada & Overse & an oc kid, a variety of failed relationships","Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Original Characters, Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), The others are here too - Character","Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Demiromantic Asexual Dr. Arada, Grayromantic Asexual Overse, yes they're married yes they have a kid yes they're ace, frank discussions of the reality of being aroace and wanting a family, POV Multiple, Non-Linear Narrative, Failed Relationships, (they're fine it's all of Arada's prior relationships that aren't), Queerplatonic Relationships, Nebulous and undefined relationships",English,2023-03-21,Completed,2023-03-21,"2,732",1/1,6,12,1,75,"['The_narwhals_awaken', 'wannabe_someone', 'violasarecool', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'yewlojee', 'enchantedsleeper', 'soulsofzombies', 'AuntyMatter', 'Stefka_13', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'FlipSpring']",[],"
+and i rolled out on a fortune piled so high, washington was my destination, and now, who am i...
+
+
+""You inspired her,"" Mom says. She smiles.
+
+SecUnit looks at me suspiciously. ""Security."" Its voice is flat.
+
+I match its flatness. ""Yes. You saved my moms. Twice. And you saved Auntie Ayda three times. That sort of thing tends to stick with someone.""
+
+""I know you're not used to this sort of tradition,"" Mama says, ""but the work-years are traditional. And Faith wants to do security. I think it might be good for you to-"" She breaks off as Mom glances at her. ""Never mind.""
+
+""Arada's right,"" Mom says. ""Having a human learn security from you might not be a bad thing. One more 'sensible human', at least.""
+
+""Fine,"" it says. ""She can come with.""
+
+Mama smiles at me and squeezes Mom's hand. I thank SecUnit and scurry to follow them out.
+
+In the hallway outside Auntie Ayda's office, Mom says, ""Kiddo, we're very proud of you for having the courage to ask for what you want.""
+
+""That's a good skill to have,"" Mama adds. ""I'm glad you're going to do something you love, even though we're both a little worried for you.""
+
+""I'm not that worried, babe. Faith's good at taking care of herself, and she'll be with SecUnit. It's not like she's going off to the middle of the woods like you did. That was worrying for your parent, I bet.""
+
+""Oh, like you're any better, running off to college without taking a work-year. What'd they think of you?""
+
+""Nothing, because my parents aren't de preservacion and I didn't grow up with this, querida. Honestly...""
+
+""Yes, yes, I know, all this independence and choice is great and all but it's complicated and messy and hard when it's your kid doing it."" Mama looks Mom in the eye, and they have one of those silent conversations that are really really frustrating.
+
+None of us say anything, until Mom nods. ""I suppose. Very well, mi queridisima Aradita, mi Fe muy buena, let's go get the forms you'll need to do this through the university.""
+
+I flap my hands and lean my head on Mama's shoulder as we walk.
+
+
+stars that used to twinkle in the sky are twinkling in my eye...
+
+
+A girl, perhaps seventeen, perhaps a tad younger, sat looking up at the stars. Beside her sat the person she'd been dating for two weeks.
+
+Let us zoom in.
+
+The girl is Arada de las Plantas y Riveras de la Cruz y Garcia, born of Preservation. She is two weeks from turning seventeen and four months from starting her final year of secondary school. She is also autistic, which she knows, and demiromantic and asexual, which she does not yet know.
+
+She is also unhappy with this date, her fifth ever and her second with the same person.
+
+Oh, it begins well. Her new partner, Elliot Silver, is a kind person. They are a good conversationalist. Like Arada, they are somewhat nervous. Unlike Arada, they are allosexual and know it.
+
+That is, in point of fact, the contention. Arada does not understand why Elliot moves closer to them as they sit outside, not why she feels uncomfortable with the whole situation.
+
+They have broken up by the end of the next week.
+
+It is not entirely unfriendly, but it is not friendly either. They simply avoid each other. And perhaps Arada refuses to go anywhere near Elliot's friends for some time.
+
+
+that's the kind of love that i'm thinking of...
+
+
+There was a kid in the meeting room when I got there. Probably about Amena's age, maybe a year or two younger, but it wasn't like I knew enough about human ages to guess well. Besides, that didn't matter. I did know that the meeting wasn't supposed to start for half an hour and that nobody else was supposed to be using this room until after our meeting. Granted, on Preservation, that didn't mean much, because a lot of people used meeting rooms without booking them, but, first, juveniles weren't supposed to be in the administrative sections of the university alone and couldn't book a meeting room anyways, and second, there was nobody else in the room who might have booked it.
+
+I made a small noise to alert the juvenile to my presence.
+
+She startled and looked up from the (physical) book she was reading. ""Morning,"" she mumbled, then went back to the book.
+
+""You're not supposed to be here,"" I said.
+
+""Mm-hmm. I'm waiting on my moms. They said I should wait here till they're done with some paperwork stuff. It's not like I haven't done this before.""
+
+""This room is going to be in use soon.""
+
+""Yeah, in like half an hour. That's not that soon. Let me alone.""
+
+I glared at her (yes, with my eyes), but didn't answer. I guessed I could appreciate a fellow media enthusiast, especially because her eyes kept darting back to her book. So I sat down and started the new serial I'd come here to try to start in peace. It was fine, I supposed, but it was clearly intended for children, given the unrealistic nature of both the plot and the visuals.
+
+5.26 minutes before the meeting was due to start, Mensah came in and nodded to the juvenile and me. ""Good morning, you two.""
+
+I tapped Mensah's feed to acknowledge her. The juvenile said, ""Good morning, Auntie Ayda,"" and smiled a lot before going back to the book.
+
+Well, that was a little weird, but okay, it was probably one of Volescu's kids. I knew that he had a bunch of them, and by then I also knew that he and Mensah had known each other's families a long time -- Amena and the other Mensah children called him Uncle Volescu, and I thought I'd heard one of his kids call Mensah an aunt, so this wasn't implausible, it was just weird.
+
+I watched my serial for the next 3.32 minutes, until the rest of my clients (my humans, minus Volescu who was retired and Pin-Lee who had a virus and hadn't been at the planning meetings for three days, plus four other Preservation humans that were also going on the survey) showed up. The juvenile greeted all of them by name. I didn't greet any of them, but I tapped my humans' feeds as they came in.
+
+The last ones to show up were Arada and Overse, both of whom were running 1.9 minutes late. (My drone had caught them stopping in the corridor to talk to two young humans from one of the classes Arada taught.) When they came in, the juvenile stood up and went over to hug them. I turned a drone closer, because I was a little bit curious, I guess.
+
+""Hi, kiddo,"" Overse said, sighing. ""Sorry you had to wait for us. We should have planned better, babe,"" she told Arada.
+
+""We knew she was going to have to wait around till the meeting was done, babe, we did plan for this,"" Arada said. ""Faith, did you finish your book already?""
+
+""Not yet, but I'm not far off."" The juvenile, whose name was apparently Faith, shrugged. ""I have another, though. Mom, Mama, can I have a token for the snack machine? I don't want to walk all the way to the main dining halls.""
+
+Arada rummaged in her pockets for one of the round tokens that operated the snack machines. (The snacks were free here, just like they were everywhere else on Preservation, but the way most of the university students tended to take all the snacks from the snack machines meant that the university had implemented a token system so they could track how many people used the machines and when, without tracking who was taking the snacks. I had heard my humans complaining about losing tokens a lot lately.) ""Here, mija. Do you need anything else while we're in this meeting?""
+
+The juvenile shook her head and rushed out the door, clutching the token. Arada and Overse sat down in the empty seats on my left, holding hands and whispering in the feed.
+
+Mensah cleared her throat. ""Right. Has everyone read over the planetary hazard information yet?""
+
+
+and so, beneath her window, tenderly he sang, once upon a time today...
+
+
+Arada regretted every single aspect of this plan. She'd agreed to one last date with Fia, just to see if this relationship could be salvaged. One more date, at a party one of her study partners was throwing, and if afterwards they didn't have a good time together, they'd mutually split.
+
+Because apparently even if you agreed to no sex and no kissing and no nothing, you still had to deal with stupid stuff and drama. She thought she liked Fia, but who knew at this point.
+
+This was going so badly. She was terrible at dating. Maybe she wasn't cut out for sharing her life with a partner. She really wanted a family that was just hers. Just her and a few partners and maybe some kids (even if she didn't want to do any of the work that went into having them). Not her parent and grandparents, because as much as she liked her family, she needed to be in her own home.
+
+Living with friends would be fine, but she did kind of want someone who would make her part of their life. Yes, she liked rooming with Ratthi and Gurathin, but here they were, three almost-third-years in college, and she still didn't know if she wanted to spend the rest of her life living with them. Near, definitely. With, maybe not.
+
+Fia was maybe someone she wanted to live with? She definitely loved her. Definitely. Her girlfriend was really sweet. Arada just didn't want to feel all weird like she did. Maybe it was Arada who was broken.
+
+They had been, increasingly awkwardly, at the party in Arada's sort-of-friend Pin-Lee's dorm room for an hour when Pin-Lee's roommate came out of her room to glare at Pin-Lee and demand the volume go down a notch, please, some of us have an orgchem exam in the morning and would like to be in bed at a reasonable hour?
+
+Since the party had been breaking up anyways, Arada left with Fia, and they just walked around for a while. And talked. It was romantic, or supposed to be. It certainly didn't feel that way.
+
+Maybe she shouldn't be in a relationship, if it was always going to be that way.
+
+
+in a little while, just a little while, you and i will be one two three four...
+
+
+Babe?
+
+""Hmm?""
+
+I was thinking.
+
+""Oh? What about, babe?""
+
+I don't know... do you ever think about families and kids and such?
+
+""Sometimes, I guess. I got a lot of practice with them, being the second oldest. It didn't put me off kids, but it did make it feel... weird, I suppose, to think about having people calling me mom or parent or something while I was doing the work to raise them. Why do you ask, mi querida Aradita?""
+
+Just curious, I guess. And thinking. I don't know.
+
+""Arada, if you want kids, let's have that conversation. Maybe not right this second, but I want to have that conversation with you, babe.""
+
+I think we should have this conversation, yes. I'm not fully certain I want kids-
+
+""Neither am I.""
+
+-but I've been thinking about it?
+
+""I'm not opposed to kids, I just haven't thought about...""
+
+About having them?
+
+""Exactly. It feels like it might involve a lot of the stuff we both don't want.""
+
+I'm pretty sure there's always a way to get around that, queridisima Overcita.
+
+""I know. We'll find a way that's comfortable, if we decide we want this. And you know what's funny?""
+
+What, querida?
+
+""I think you're the only person I would actually feel comfortable raising kids with.""
+
+Me too. And isn't it strange how this all works? laugh I have known you way too long.
+
+""I don't know how it works either, babe, but who cares. Screw social expectations, anyways.""
+
+Sounds about right. Can you help me with the laundry, anyways? We left way too much undone last week and now I have no clue where my good shirt is.
+
+""What good shirt?"" laugh
+
+Hey! giggle I do so have a nice shirt! It's the blue one I was going to wear for my dissertation defense tomorrow. It's just somewhere in this mess.
+
+sigh ""Alright, babe, I'll come help as soon as I save this supply list. And speaking of dissertations and children, I was talking to Volescu yesterday, while I was waiting for you to get out of class.""
+
+Oh, no. Did he tell you ""no marriage till the dissertation is done""? He was telling me that when I was last in his office, when I mentioned- never mind.
+
+""Oh, you can not start that sentence without explaining yourself, and don't you dare tell me 'never mind', Arada, or you can forget about laundry help!""
+
+Fine. Get over here and help, or I won't tell you.
+
+[a moment later]
+
+Thanks. So what did he tell you?
+
+""I'm not answering that until I hear why you were talking to your advisor about marriage.""
+
+Look... Overse, you mean a lot to me, you know that.
+
+""I do. I also know that you're dodging the question.""
+
+drawn-out sigh Babe. I was talking to Volescu about what made him know that he wanted to marry his partners and whether that was a different moment from when he knew he wanted to live with them for the rest of his life or raise children with them. I don't know. I was going to talk to you about this when we could sit down and have a conversation, not when we're doing laundry. I just... I don't know. Relationships are weird and messy, people are complicated, and you, or whatever I have with you, really, aren't as complicated and weird as everything else. I was trying... I wanted to ask Volescu stuff about his partners because I wanted to figure out how to tell you that I really want to spend my life with you.
+
+""Mi queridisima, is that a marriage proposal?""
+
+I mean, kind of. Do you want it to be? blush I don't know if I want marriage. I don't know if I want kids. I don't know if I actually want to put a name to whatever-the-heck-we-have-going-on. I don't even know if this is what love is or if I'm just misinterpreting everything. But I really want to spend the rest of my life with you, babe.
+
+""I want to spend my life with you too. You matter so much to me, and I would like that to be a permanent thing too. And it's not going to be easy. And, yeah, maybe this isn't love. Maybe one or both of us, in all our aroace glory, are misinterpreting... this. Whatever 'this' is, whatever's between us. But I'm okay with that.""
+
+Me too, I guess. I don't know whether I'd be happier if this is what love is supposed to be or if this is our own thing completely devoid of that.
+
+""Can't it be both?""
+
+... yeah. I didn't think of that.
+
+""That's why you keep me around, babe. No, in all seriousness, Arada. I know you. You know me. We've been living together for almost ten years now, and five without Ratthi and Gurathin and Pin-Lee. I think it's fair to say we know what we're getting into if we get married. And besides, we have three cats, kids can't be that much harder.""
+
+I guess. And when you put it that way, we have been in some kind of committed something for a long time now.
+
+""We sort of have, haven't we. I've been thinking about some of this too, just not to the same extent. Maybe it's just springtime being upon us, maybe it's you being almost done with your dissertation, maybe it's my residency being nearly up, who knows.""
+
+Overse?
+
+""Querida?""
+
+I love you. That's what I've decided this is, and I want to make the world see that.
+
+""I'm okay with that. I'm not sure I'm quite at the stage of calling my feelings love, but I think I will be."""
+45873220,The Tree That Owns Itself,['BoldlyNo'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Ficlet, Slice of Life, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Murderbot and Three Hanging Out, Thinking About Ownership and Feelings, Friendship, Bot Friendship, Set Vaguely In The Future",English,2023-03-19,Completed,2023-03-19,865,1/1,40,130,17,445,"['christinesangel100', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'almondpaperclam', 'spossie9', 'UnconquerableSoul', 'JanticsAntics', 'Beazlerat', 'weirdbooksnail', 'heron236', 'EauDePetrichor', 'lauris', 'Stariceling', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Riannonkat2000', 'ipborgdan', 'breadtab', 'bluewrist', 'Tanscure', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'JoCat', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'tinycactus', 'BBlue', 'outlander_unknown', 'RenSolaeir', 'mecurtin', 'danceswchopstck', 'sanguine_bastet', 'Flamel', 'ArwenLune', 'Lost_Starz', 'mothmentum', 'EvaBelmort', 'ravens_rising', 'Vaidile', 'LdyLiberty', 'Wordlet', 'mermlerl', 'dementor_ssc', 'Dordean', 'seerofdream', 'kiezh', 'Somaybelikeno', 'slategrey', 'notsafefortheworld', 'eileenlufkin', 'Freddy_T_who_Never_Wont_not_be', 'artzbots', 'soulsofzombies']",[],"
+So, it took us three years to get legal status, but the tree gets it by default?
+
+
+It was, Murderbot could admit, an impressive tree (as far as trees went). Tall. Thick. Heavy with waxy green leaves that rustled in the breeze that swept through FirstLanding's botanical gardens. But it was still a tree. A tree which had, due to some dubious real estate inheritance finagling on the part of its original planter, become the sole owner of the land it stood on (which the botanical gardens had sprung up around) and therefore of itself over a hundred Preservation years ago. And the ostentatious metallic plaque proclaiming it as ""The Tree That Owns Itself"" was treading dangerously close to pissing Murderbot off on what had otherwise been a good day.
+
+Well, Three cocked its head as it looked up from reading the historical explanation printed on the placard. If anything, it looked bemused. The tree didn't have gunports.
+
+Still. Murderbot turned its attention to the drone it had left to monitor the cafe nestled in the center of the garden's acreage. Still no movement. They'd left the humans there to eat with the promise of meeting up to continue their tour afterwards. That way, no one who didn't need to ingest nutrients had to listen to anyone else chewing (a point that Three felt surprisingly strongly about, given how many other things it was so laidback about). And now, after two circuits of the walkway that wound around the lakeshore and over the craggy little rock gardens that Murderbot was actually growing to maybe appreciate a little bit, they were here. Waiting next to a tree who'd had more legal rights than either of them had possessed for most of their lives. And sure, it wasn't like it was really the same or that there wasn't a lot more nuance to granting ownership to sentient weapons than to a stationary object. But the verbiage was the same. The precedent was arguably the same. The overall principle was the same. And it stung a little.
+
+There was a faint whir as one of Three's drones pulled out of its holding pattern and zipped over to hover a few feet above where Three was...posing?...with the plaque. The drone paused for an instant, then lifted back up to its standard course. Murderbot stared for a moment, processing until it could decide that yes, this was actually happening.
+
+""Did you just take a picture?"" It realized belatedly that it is shocked enough to have resorted to actual conversation rather than feed conversation, but whatever.
+
+""A selfie,"" Three clarified. It gestured at the plaque. ""It's funny. Or ironic, I guess. I'm going to share it with Perihelion when we're back onboard.""
+
+""Ironic,"" Murderbot repeated in a mutter. That was another one of those nebulous terms that appeared a lot in media, but which it hadn't quite bothered to fully integrate into its vocabulary. It folded its arms, happy to pick at something that was not its own emotions. ""Are you sure that means what you think it means?""
+
+""Yes. I looked it up,"" Three said pointedly, its lips tipping upwards as it left the walkway to wade through the grass. That was allowed in this section of the gardens. There were occasional humans scattered across the surrounding greenspaces with books or picnic blankets, all of them quiet and none of them close enough to disturb each other or Murderbot and Three.
+
+I liked you better before you did snark, Murderbot shot into the feed.
+
+No, you didn't. Three's serene expression did not change as it found an open spot among the massive roots that pushed up through the grass and plopped down into it with its back against the tree-trunk. It crossed its legs at the ankles and leaned its head back to look up into the canopy of leaves. Murderbot rolled its eyes, but trudged into the grass to follow. It was not going to sit in the grass, where the creeping, crawling things lived. It was not.
+
+
+You're going to get microfauna in your joints, and I'm not going to feel sorry for you.
+
+
+Three pushed a series of amusement sigils into their shared feed, including a snickering face followed by a beetle that scuttled in and out of frame, but it did not budge from its seat. Which, now that Murderbot was close enough to realize it, had the obvious advantage of overlooking both the lake and the cafe where the humans were dawdling. Sitting in the grass was still appalling, but...maybe leaning on the trunk would be safe.
+
+The comparison is...strange...to think about, Three admitted. Murderbot followed its gaze up into the greenery overhead, watching the sunlight wash in and out of the gaps left by the wind. The stillness here was...nice. Quiet, especially with the tree's solid, stable bulk shielding them from the breeze and shading them from the summer heat. The lake lapped at its rocky beach, the songbirds in the crown of the tree trilled, and the waiting began to feel more like resting. It was nice. But I'm glad it's allowed to live its life, too.
+
+ "
+45868198,Rogue/s!,['Rosewind2007'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Meta, use of the word rogue, contains Graphs, Graphs, pie charts, Languages and Linguistics",English,2023-03-19,Completed,2023-03-19,"6,782",1/1,16,12,null,197,"['dancernerd', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'fantasyarchitect', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'entropy_muffin', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Stefka_13', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'BWizard', 'AuntyMatter']",[],"This is about the use of the word rogue in the Murderbot Diaries, specifically in the novellas. The word itself is used 62 times, and all but four of those refer to SecUnits (also referred to as units or murderbots). The exceptions are where it refers to the Artificial Condition ComfortUnit (3), and to rogue code (1). The ComfortUnit is another construct, and the rogue code is code which would have turned Murderbot ""rogue""--so really the use of the word rogue is heavily associated with rogue SecUnits and/or Murderbot (58/62=94%).
+
+ 
+
+Pie-Chart:
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Also the vast majority of the uses (84%) are by Murderbot, with just 10 instances in the reported speech (feed or otherwise) of others. These others are Pin-Lee (referring to rogue code), Gurathin, ART, ComfortUnit, Tlacey and Serrat.
+
+
+
+
+
+The pie chart above uses the anagram1 KATH, this stands for Kill All The Humans. My particular headcanon is that in some Corporation Rim long running serial (the obvious candidate is Valorous Defenders) the SecUnits who go rogue have the catch phrase ""Kill All The Humans"", in a manner reminiscent of the Daleks' ""Exterminate"", or The Borg's ""Resistance is futile!"" (Or the Vogon's ""Resistance is useless!""--depending on your childhood). 
+
+ 
+
+To try and analyse the way SecUnits are referred to as rogues I have attempted (in a deeply uncomfortably, qualitative manner) to assign them to being KATH rogues (the monsters of the imagination) or Murderbot rogues (actual SecUnits with disabled governor modules), or a rather nebulous ""other"" where neither of these seem to fit. This classification isn't ideal, but it's a way to track (as the novellas progress) if and how Murderbot is getting a better understanding that it IS a rogue SecUnit (and that it has generally no desire to KATH--even if they can be pretty annoying at times).
+
+ 
+
+For example, All Systems Red
+
+
+Kill All The Humans
+
+
+[1] Page 69 ""Mensah gave the orders and we started forward, me in front, the humans a few steps behind. They were in their full suits with helmets, which gave some protection but had been meant for environmental hazards, not some other heavily armed human (or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnit) deliberately trying to kill them. I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.""
+
+ 
+
+Theoretical rogue SecUnit, KATH:
+
+Other adjectives: angry, malfunctioning, ""trying to kill [PresAux]"". This is Murderbot's nightmare rogue; where it got this image of a rogue from we don't know. The logical assumption would be media portrayals.
+
+ 
+
+
+Murderbot
+
+
+[13] Page 140 ""He said, ""Did they punish you, for the deaths of the mining team?""
+
+It wasn't completely a surprise. I think they all wanted to ask about it, but maybe he was the only one abrasive enough. Or brave enough. It's one thing to poke a murderbot with a governor module; poking a rogue murderbot is a whole different proposition.""
+
+ 
+
+Actual rogue, Murderbot:
+
+Here Murderbot refers to itself as a rogue, and Gurathin knows it's a rogue and is poking it. And note, it's calling itself a rogue murderbot (not SecUnit).
+
+ 
+
+
+Other
+
+
+The DeltFall units Murderbot soon realises are pseudo-rogues: the combat override module is making them look like KATH rogues but they're actually puppets. 
+
+ 
+
+[6] Page 87 ""The DeltFall SecUnits hadn't been rogues, they had been inserted with combat override modules. The modules allow personal control over a SecUnit, turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet. The feed would be cut off, control would be over the comm, but functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. ""Kill the humans"" isn't a complex order.""
+
+ 
+
+These are pretty clear examples, some others are much less simple to classify.
+
+ 
+
+Regarding the density of the word, I have used word/page counts from my e-copies of the books.
+
+The use of the word rogue itself starts off at quite a high density in All Systems Red (no. Rogue/page number*100) rises to a peak in Artificial Condition, then plummets in Rogue Protocol. It then steadily rises again in Exit Strategy and Fugitive Telemetry.
+
+ 
+
+Insert graph
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+What is perhaps interesting is the balance of references to KATH SecUnits and times when Murderbot recognises its own rogue status. I think by the end of Fugitive Telemetry Murderbot is getting to a place where it recognises that monstrous rogue SecUnits which Kill All The Humans are a media invention; that it is a rogue SecUnit; and that it isn't a monster at all.
+
+
+
+
+
+Insert bar-chart
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Following are the uses of the word rogue in the five novellas.
+
+ 
+
+In All Systems Red there are [15] uses of the word ""rogue"". 
+
+ 
+
+[1] Page 69 ""Mensah gave the orders and we started forward, me in front, the humans a few steps behind. They were in their full suits with helmets, which gave some protection but had been meant for environmental hazards, not some other heavily armed human (or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnit) deliberately trying to kill them. I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.""
+
+ 
+
+Theoretical rogue SecUnit
+
+Other adjectives: angry, malfunctioning, ""trying to kill [PresAux]"". This is Murderbot's nightmare rogue; where it got this image of a rogue from we don't know. The logical assumption would be media portrayals.
+
+ 
+
+[2&3] Page 76 ""Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn't care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.
+
+But I wanted to kill them.""
+
+ 
+
+These are now apparent rogue Units and MB does acknowledge possible mitigation, but still wants to kill them, even if this isn't the smart thing to do.
+
+ 
+
+[4] Page 78 ""Even these two rogues wouldn't be dumb enough to ignore the creaks if I took the quick route and walked over to their position.
+
+(They were not the sharpest murderbots, having cleaned the floor of the between-habitat corridor to cover the prints they had left when staging that body. It would have fooled somebody who hadn't noticed all the other floors were covered with tracked-in dust.)""
+
+ 
+
+Suggestion they're dumb, not the sharpest. Which is perhaps an interesting observation by Murderbot given the fact rogues are regarded as pretty terrifying. Also it calls them murderbots.
+
+ 
+
+[5] Page 86 ""Blood ran down my torn suit skin and I reached up to my neck. I expected to feel a gaping hole, but there was something stuck there. ""Dr. Mensah, there might be more rogue units, we don't know--""
+
+ 
+
+By this point Murderbot honestly doesn't know how many rogue units there are. It's having a bad time. 
+
+ 
+
+[6] Page 87 ""The DeltFall SecUnits hadn't been rogues, they had been inserted with combat override modules. The modules allow personal control over a SecUnit, turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet. The feed would be cut off, control would be over the comm, but functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. ""Kill the humans"" isn't a complex order.""
+
+ 
+
+Revelation time! So, ignore all those previous references to the DeltFall units as rogues--they weren't.
+
+Murderbot is very clear that SecUnit with override module does not equal rogue. It clearly has a firm internal definition of a rogue.
+
+It's interesting that it sees them as acting  like  everyone expects rogues to, killing the humans.
+
+ 
+
+[7] Page 88 ""The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It's downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.""
+
+ 
+
+Here using ""turned rogue"" though it has already said they weren't actually rogue: but it's talking to humans who it reasonably expects to see combat overridden behaviour as rogue behaviour.
+
+ 
+
+[8] Page 92 ""Pin-Lee was saying impatiently, ""There's no danger. When it shot itself, it froze the download. I was able to remove the few fragments of rogue code that had been copied over.""
+
+ 
+
+Rogue code--as in code that could have turned Murderbot rogue! Ha! (Not really rogue, obviously)
+
+ 
+
+[9] Page 92 'He gestured to me. ""This unit was already a rogue. It has a hacked governor module.""'
+
+ 
+
+Oh Gurathin, my beloved: Murderbot fails to appreciate that Gurathin is using the same definition of a rogue as it does: a hacked governor module. I guess it was distracted. Also he doesn't call it a ""rogue SecUnit""--instead a unit which is rogue (subtle, perhaps). 
+
+ 
+
+[10] Page 123 ""I could leave them to cope on their own, I guess. I pictured doing that, pictured Arada or Ratthi trapped by rogue SecUnits, and felt my insides twist. I hate having emotions about reality; I'd much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.""
+
+ 
+
+Imaginary rogues here, figments of Murderbot's imagination--which are either not really rogue units but overridden ones; or it's just defaulting to its own personal horror tropes?
+
+ 
+
+[11] Page 127 '""They may believe the company and whoever your beneficiaries are won't look any further than the rogue SecUnits. But they can't make two whole survey teams disappear unless their corporate or political entity doesn't care about them. Does DeltFall's care? Does yours?""
+
+That made them all stare at me, for some reason.'
+
+ 
+
+Again, these SecUnits were not the Murderbot definition of rogue, but again it's talking to humans.
+
+ 
+
+[12] Page 137 ""We didn't know who EvilSurvey was, who we were dealing with. But I bet that they didn't either. Mensah's status was only in the Security info packet, stored on SecSystem, which they had never gotten access to. The dueling investigations if something happened to us were bound to be thorough, as the company would be desperate for something to blame it on and the beneficiaries would be desperate to blame it on the company. Neither would be fooled long by the rogue SecUnit setup.""
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot here acknowledges that even the human investigators would be unlikely to be fooled for long by the pretend rogues--so again: as far as Murderbot is concerned a combat-override module controlled SecUnit isn't an actual rogue. This is a faked scenario, a setup.
+
+ 
+
+[13] Page 140 ""He said, ""Did they punish you, for the deaths of the mining team?""
+
+It wasn't completely a surprise. I think they all wanted to ask about it, but maybe he was the only one abrasive enough. Or brave enough. It's one thing to poke a murderbot with a governor module; poking a rogue murderbot is a whole different proposition.""
+
+ 
+
+Here Murderbot refers to itself as a rogue, and Gurathin knows it's a rogue and is poking it. Oh these two...
+
+ 
+
+[14&15] Page 154 'That was still annoying, even though I knew we had allowed plenty of time for this part. ""You used combat override modules to make the DeltFall SecUnits behave like rogues. If you think a real rogue SecUnit still has to answer your questions, the next few minutes are going to be an education for you.""'
+
+ 
+
+Here Murderbot is talking to evil survey, aka GrayCris. The DeltFall units didn't really behave like rogues, not at all. We have one actual rogue (by the Murderbot definition) and it doesn't behave like that. Though it does think a SecUnit might if it had been mistreated? Again, it's talking to humans, and sort of ""speaking their language"", but even here it is keen to draw a distinction between a SecUnit with a combat override and a ""real rogue SecUnit"".
+
+ 
+
+Fun! This is the first book of the series and already we are seeing Murderbot making some distinctions--the DeltFall units were not really rogues, the override modules were used to create a setup. Gurathin says that Murderbot was  already  a rogue (ie before the override was inserted) and here agrees with Murderbot's definition of a true rogue (a unit which has somehow disengaged its governor module). Obviously I'm obsessed with Gurathin, but I think this is interesting. 
+
+In Artificial Condition there are [23] uses of the word ""rogue"", this is by far the highest density and it's the book with the most uses of rogue by characters other than Murderbot.
+
+ 
+
+[1] Page 11 ""I told myself there was no way anybody on this transit ring would be looking for a rogue SecUnit.""
+
+ 
+
+It's talking about itself, a genuine rogue SecUnit 
+
+ 
+
+[2] Page 25 ""It said,  You're a   rogue SecUnit,    a bot/human construct, with a scrambled governor module . It poked me through the feed and I flinched.""
+
+ 
+
+And we have ART, like Gurathin, using the same definition of a rogue SecUnit as Murderbot does. A construct without a working governor module is a rogue--whatever it is doing. Note that Gurathin says Murderbot is a rogue despite the fact it's been following orders for the last three weeks.
+
+ 
+
+[3] Page 30 ""After three episodes, I was calmer and reluctantly beginning to see the transport's perspective. A SecUnit could cause it a lot of internal damage if it wasn't careful, and rogue SecUnits were not exactly known for lying low and avoiding trouble. ""
+
+ 
+
+Wel, well, well--takes Murderbot 5 pages to come round to see ART's POV about a rogue SecUnit being a potential threat. Slightly different to how it responded to Gurathin (look, I love ART too--but this is my meta and it's fun to be partisan).
+
+ 
+
+[4] Page 36 ""The only SecUnits in entertainment media were rogues, out to kill all humans because they forgot who built the repair cubicles, I guess. ""
+
+ 
+
+So Murderbot makes a fairly sweeping statement here: that the ONLY SecUnits in entertainment are rogues, and are out to ""kill all the humans"". Which is quite a claim, Murderbot. This is important as, if true, it indicates the SecUnits in media having sex (see below) were also rogues (they've got to be, they all are), so presumably there are issues with motivation and consent: this isn't fun consensual sex for the humans involved (we have to surely conclude?). 
+
+ 
+
+This is the start of quite a long diatribe from Murderbot which continues:
+
+""In some of the worst shows, SecUnits would sometimes have sex with the human characters. This was weirdly inaccurate and also anatomically complicated. Constructs with intercourse-related human parts are sexbots, not SecUnits. Sexbots don't have interior weapon systems, so it isn't like it's easy to confuse them with SecUnits. (SecUnits also have less than null interest in human or any other kind of sex, trust me on that.)
+
+Granted, it would have been hard to show realistic SecUnits in visual media, which would involve depicting hours of standing around in brain-numbing boredom, while your nervous clients tried to pretend you weren't there. But there weren't any depictions of SecUnits in books, either. I guess you can't tell a story from the point of view of something that you don't think has a point of view.""
+
+ 
+
+So, yeah, that's  a lot. I also like the little fourth wall breaking there, as Martha Wells reminds us we are reading a book from the POV of a SecUnit. Bravo, Martha.
+
+ 
+
+[5] Page 37  ""In the entertainment feed, SecUnits were what the clients expected: heartless killing machines that could go rogue at any second, for no reason, despite the governor modules.""
+
+ 
+
+The SecUnit image as a heartless killing machine is one which clients (humans?) expect: these expectations created by the media? Or by the corporations which don't want anyone seeing the SecUnits as more than just tools? I mean, obviously insert ""why not both meme"". 
+
+Here rogue seems to act as a word which just means ""off on a killing spree"": BUT for no reason (we know they all likely have reasons) and despite governor modules. Wow, Murderbot you have a lot of stuff going on here.
+
+ 
+
+[6] Page 45 ""I said, ""At some point approximately 35,000 hours ago, I was assigned to a contract on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. During that assignment, I went rogue and killed a large number of my clients. My memory of the incident was partially purged.""""
+
+ 
+
+Right, so we get to Murderbot's (supposed) rogue killing spree. It refers to itself as going rogue and killing clients. It regards the key question as being: ""Either I killed them due to a malfunction and then hacked the governor module, or I hacked the governor module so I could kill them,"" In this dichotomy it believes it could have become rogue due to a malfunction (with governor module intact) or it could have hacked its module in order to kill them (the hack enabled the going rogue). Again, here ""going rogue"" is like shorthand for killing a lot of humans. We know that's not what rogues actually do, because we know Murderbot.
+
+ 
+
+[7] Page 54 ""I am aware that for you, your survival as a rogue Unit would be at stake.""
+
+ 
+
+ART worrying about Murderbot's survival as a rogue Unit: ART recognises fully that Murdebot is a rogue. It's interesting in solving the RaviHyral mystery--but it's accepting of the concept that a rogue Unit might not have killed anyone. Murderbot's response is worth including, because it's struggling here:
+
+""I started to correct it, then stopped. Rogue was not how I thought of myself. I had hacked my governor module but continued to obey orders, at least most of them. I had not escaped from the company; Dr. Mensah had legally bought me. While I had left the hotel without her permission, she hadn't told me not to leave, either. (Yes, I know the last one isn't helping the argument all that much.)
+
+Rogue units killed their human and augmented human clients. I ... had done that once. But not voluntarily.
+
+I needed to find out whether or not it had been voluntary.""
+
+It says it does NOT think of itself as rogue: because rogue Units kill their clients (humans and augmented humans--is this the first time it mentions killing augmented humans?). It certainly makes a distinction between killing voluntarily or not.
+
+ 
+
+[8] Page 54 ""Rogue was not how I thought of myself. I had hacked my governor module but continued to obey orders, at least most of them.""
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot making the distinction that rogues don't obey orders.
+
+ 
+
+[9] Page 54 ""Rogue units killed their human and augmented human clients. I ... had done that once. But not voluntarily.""
+
+So here Murderbot wrestles with what to it is pretty key: the popular perception is that rogue units kill clients--it doesn't yet know BUT appears to suspect it didn't actually really do this. It is as if it knows deep inside that it didn't kill its clients voluntarily--but finds it hard to articulate or even admit this to itself. Bless it.
+
+ 
+
+[10] Page 60 ""But anyone who had set out to find me, who was alert to the possibility of a rogue SecUnit, might not be fooled, and a simple scan calibrated to search for SecUnit size, height, and weight was certain to find me.""
+
+ 
+
+So again, Murderbot knows that it is perceived by others as a rogue SecUnit. Also useful information regarding SecUnits--Murderbot is now just a bit shorter.
+
+ 
+
+[11] Page 68  ""Though if the data said it was a rogue SecUnit who had killed everyone, that didn't give me any more information than I already had.""
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot here is assuming it was the ""rogue SecUnit which killed everyone""--and again it's using the sort of received (not actually) wisdom that rogue units ""kill all the humans"". 
+
+ 
+
+[12] Page 114 ""If anybody knows how dangerous rogue SecUnits are, it's other SecUnits.""
+
+ 
+
+And again, Murderbot stresses that any SecUnit encountering a rogue unit would report it--watch me not mention Gurathin here. See? Didn't mention how unfair it was of Murderbot to get so upset with him for doing what it says it would have done in his place. Anyway, moving on: Murderbot reckons all SecUnits know rogue SecUnits are super dangerous--I'm not convinced it's right.
+
+ 
+
+[13] Page 160 ""I deleted us out of its memory, but I still felt like we--or I--might have been observed at some point. It might just be inherent rogue - SecUnit-on-the-run paranoia.""
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot refers to itself as a paranoid rogue SecUnit on the run. Here it definitely identifies as a rogue, despite not behaving like the standard perception of a rogue.
+
+ 
+
+[14] & [15] Page 168 ""Could this be a rogue sexbot? If it was rogue, why was it here on RaviHyral?""
+
+ 
+
+And Murderbot wonders if the ComfortUnit is rogue! Which is rather fascinating! It certainly isn't killing anyone, and so presumably it's using the ""no functional governor module"" definition which it applies to itself--but to a ComfortUnit! Even if it calls it a sexbot (mind you it calls itself a murderbot). This is rather interesting. As is the bit which precedes it, given what it tells us about Murderbot's views of how SecUnits behave with each other (which our experience with Three in Network Effect seems to contradict--even Murderbot admits this). Here's the bit I'm talking about: ""SecUnits on the same contract don't talk, either verbally or on the feed, unless they absolutely have to in order to perform their duties. Communicating with units on different contracts has to be done through the controlling HubSystems. And SecUnits don't interact with ComfortUnits anyway.""
+
+Self-confessed unreliable narrator.
+
+ 
+
+[16] Page 169 ""Unsecured"" is what they call rogue SecUnits when they want humans to listen and not just start screaming. ""
+
+ 
+
+Interesting point here, makes it sound as if Murderbot isn't the first actual rogue unit, if they have sort of euphemistic language to keep people calm.
+
+ 
+
+[17] Page 171 ""There were a lot of sidebar links to attached articles about constructs, about SecUnits, about rogue SecUnits.""
+
+ 
+
+Again, it seems there have been rogue SecUnits before, or perhaps the articles are of a more theoretical bent? Or these were pseudo-rogues--not true rogues (by the Murderbot definition as one without a governor module) with overrides? We don't know, but food for thought.
+
+ 
+
+[18] Page 172  ""I said, That's a story about a dangerous rogue SecUnit. No one would send it anywhere.""
+
+ 
+
+And OMG---Murderbot's conversation with the wonderful ComfortUnit which is clearly remarkably free to speak its own mind, given its governed state. I want to know more about this ComfortUnit! But this is about rogues, here Murderbot is pretending to believe in the popular image of a rogue, ""kill all the humans"" ""trail of bodies"" etc etc This whole conversation is fascinating. What does the ComfortUnit think!
+
+ 
+
+[19] Page 172 ""ART said, It's not rogue. Its governor module is engaged.""
+
+ 
+
+Oh lovely, clever, polite, mistreated ComfortUnit: possibly more rogue than Murderbot and ART give it credit for. I worry about how much it triggered its own governor module to just talk to Murderbot like this, and to create its own HelpMe file--it even said please.
+
+ 
+
+[20] Page 174 ""It countered, She didn't know she needed a SecUnit until today. It added,  I told her you were a   SecUnit   , I didn't tell her you were a   rogue   ."" 
+
+ 
+
+The ComfortUnit knows exactly what Murderbot is, despite its (according to popular depictions in media) very un-rogue behaviour. For the record, I believe the ComfortUnit. Maybe Gurathin needs to meet the ComfortUnit, they might find some common ground?
+
+ 
+
+[21] Page 196 ""Tlacey huffed out a breath, then said, ""Unit, obey the crazy rogue SecUnit until further notice."" ""
+
+ 
+
+At least Tlacey calls it a Unit, not a sexbot (I mean, there's not a lot you can say for Tlacey). Now here Tlacey has realised Murderbot is definitely a rogue. At the start of the scene she thinks it's under someone's control, but by this point--she knows it's under its own recognizance. She later tries to offer it a job. For someone who has a ComfortUnit as a bodyguard/whatever Tlacey seems amazingly ignorant of how an actual rogue is likely to behave.
+
+ 
+
+[22] Page 197 "" I didn't sound like her idea of a SecUnit , rogue or otherwise, I guess.""
+
+ 
+
+Yup, Murderbot--I agree. It does seem the popular perception of rogue constructs is completely at odds with how they (I know we have a limited number to go off, but all the ones we meet in the diaries) actually behave. Which is rather odd: I know the CR construct vendors/rental firms probably have a lot of propaganda going on, but really?
+
+ 
+
+[23] Page 204 ""It said, ""I saw you get off the tube access in that section. There's nothing else down there. It's not in the historical database anymore, but the humans still tell each other horror stories about it. If you were really a rogue and not under orders to go there, then there was an eighty-six percent chance that you went there because you were one of the units involved.""
+
+ 
+
+Again, the fascinating ComfortUnit whose point of view I'd love to hear more of in canon. It too seems to see a rogue as being a construct without a governor module or anyone giving it orders. 
+
+ 
+
+I hope it's doing well as a rogue, it deserved better.
+
+ 
+
+And that's Artificial Condition, and honestly it's a LOT. What does Murderbot think of as a rogue, how does it see other rogues, how does it think other constructs see rogues (contrast to how the ComfortUnit seems to see it as a potential ally, someone who might help)?  Murderbot seems quite conflicted on this whole concept. Others (Gurathin, ART, the ComfortUnit) seem much more capable of appreciating that the reality of a rogue Unit may be far from the ""kill all the humans"" media portrayal and corporate bogeyman. That a rogue Unit might actually be someone like Murderbot itself?
+
+In Rogue Protocol there are [4] uses of the word ""rogue"" (I know, ironic), it's a bit of a lull after Artificial Condition.
+
+ 
+
+[1] Page 11 ""It wasn't her fault I'd escaped, and I hoped they weren't trying to hold her responsible for, you know, releasing a rogue SecUnit with a record of past mass murder onto an unsuspecting population. ""
+
+ 
+
+Murder referring to itself as a rogue SecUnit with a record of ""mass murder""; despite the whole Ganaka Pit revelation; which I think we must suppose has given it a little peace in the knowledge of what actually happened (awful though it was).
+
+
+
+
+
+[2] Page 23 ""(If a bond company with SecUnit security had been involved, I would have had to abort this ... whatever it was I was doing. The change in my configuration would fool scans but not another SecUnit, and any Unit that detected me would report it to their HubSystem immediately. I sure as hell would have reported me. Rogue SecUnits are fucking dangerous, trust me on that.)""
+
+ 
+
+This whole section in brackets is a pretty important commentary from Murderbot on the subject of rogue SecUnits--it states that it would have reported an apparent rogue like itself. And again the mantra that rogues are dangerous: despite the fact that we are yet to meet a dangerous one (I mean, unless you are a bad bad person, then MB is dangerous), and all the ones who do ""kill all the humans"" have been either affected by malware or overrides, not actual rogues. And yes, I'm going to point out that Gurathin reported Murderbot to his team--I am not sure Murderbot is ever going to acknowledge that it says it would have done exactly the same thing.
+
+
+
+
+
+[3] Page 26 ""In some entertainment media I had seen, they were used to portray the evil rogue SecUnits who menaced the main characters. ""
+
+ 
+
+The ""they"" here are human form bots like Miki. Murderbot again refers to rogue SecUnits in the media as being evil, and menacing the main (presumably human) characters (at least they're not having sex; be grateful for small mercies Murderbot?). It goes on to say: 
+
+""Not that I was annoyed by that or anything. It was actually good, because then humans who had never worked with SecUnits expected us to look like human-form bots, and not what we actually looked like. I wasn't annoyed at all. Not one bit.""
+
+ 
+
+Which indicates that a lot of humans get all their information about SecUnits from the media to the extent that they'd expect a SecUnit to look like a human form bot. Which really makes me wonder how much people know about SecUnits? 
+
+
+
+
+
+[4] Page 72 ""Being a SecUnit sucked. I couldn't wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials. 
+
+ 
+
+Here Murderbot looks back with nostalgia on its time ""hitching rides"" and watching serials as a rogue. It's also being ironic about its wild life as a rogue, its ""rampaging"" being nothing of the sort. It does sort of gloss over the rather more exciting bits of its career as a rogue.
+
+ 
+
+So, surprisingly few mentions of the word. Is Murderbot right at the end drawing a bit of a distinction in its mind between the ""media depiction of rogues"", the ""rogues it has encountered, and pseudo-rogues"" and its own rogue status? 
+
+In Exit Strategy there are [8] uses of the word ""rogue"". 
+
+ 
+
+[1] & [2] Page 9 ""So now I was not only a rogue unit, I was a rogue unit carrying a weapon designed to shoot armored security. Which is just playing to the humans' expectations, I guess.""
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit kicking off with an early declaration of its status as a rogue unit. An armed one at that! It's wryly ironic about it, ""playing to the humans' expectations"".
+
+ 
+
+[3] Page 11 ""I downloaded it and ran a query for the word SecUnit. It hit almost immediately.
+
+ SecUnit   . You think this thing is really onboard? 
+
+
+ Intel says possibly. I-- 
+
+
+
+ With its controller? 
+
+
+ No controller, dim-iot, that's why they call them   rogues   . 
+
+Oh yeah. It was about me.""
+
+ 
+
+Hmm..interesting one here! Reference to a controller of a SecUnit. If we fast forward to Network Effect there is a handler for the augmented human assassins, but the idea of a controller? Combat bots in Rogue Protocol need them for doing anything complex (more complex than 'attack everybody'), but SecUnits don't (though, unlike Combat SecUnits, they'd usually need a supervisor to give permission to hack)...BUT where was I? Yeah: I guess we are supposed to understand these two know jack-shit about SecUnits? They think a rogue doesn't have a controller. Normally a rogue is one without a working governor module, or one which is killing all the humans. Or do some SecUnits have controllers?
+
+
+
+
+
+[4] Page 29 ""SecUnits would be able to identify me as a rogue unit on sight (or on ping, more accurately) but we were never used on transit rings""
+
+ 
+
+So Murderbot claims here that a SecUnit would identify it as a rogue ""on ping""? Murderbot reckons its modifications courtesy of  ART wouldn't fool SecUnits--in fact it seems pretty sure a SecUnit would spot its rogue status immediately. So it can (given its four years with a borked governor module pre-All Systems Red) fool them that it's a governed SecUnit (looks like a SecUnit and acts like one) but they'd spot it instantly if it tried to pretend to be an augmented human. I'm still a little puzzled that it says ""on ping""' as in Rogue Protocol it could ignore Miki's ping, and it ignores the ComfortUnit's ping in Artificial Condition. Or would the failure to respond to the ping be the giveaway? 
+
+
+
+
+
+[5] Page 62 ""They weren't bringing her. This had all been for nothing. All of it, Milu, Miki's death, the trip here, everything. I said, ""Milu was my idea. I'm a rogue unit.""
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot is in a very emotional state here, and is perhaps internally identifying more with the idea of a rogue unit that it's seen in the media than ever before.
+
+ 
+
+[6] Page 62 ""He ignored me, but he said to Pin-Lee, ""A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station.""
+
+I said, ""Maybe I wanted the trail to start here.""
+
+ 
+
+So here's Serrat describing the cliche rogue SecUnit behaviour, the ""Kill all the humans"" rogue, leaving a trail of dead bodies.  And Murderbot is actually feeling pretty inclined to for once play the part--luckily Mensah's implant pings.
+
+ 
+
+[7] Page 83 ""(Who knows what GrayCris told them was happening to get the Port Authority to allow a SecUnit deployment. It probably involved me, Rogue SecUnit on a rampage.)""
+
+ 
+
+So again, this rogue SecUnit on a  rampage trope. Something none of our actual rogues (those without governor modules) ever seem inclined to do, rampage that is; and/or ""Kill all the humans"".
+
+ 
+
+[8] Page 95 ""Mensah finished glaring at me and turned around. The crew who had just watched her face down a rogue SecUnit, in person and via the powered armor's helmet cam, stared wide-eyed. She said, ""Since we are bonded clients, may we come aboard while we settle our bill?""
+
+ 
+
+This is wonderful! Mensah has just stared down Murderbot, who (to be fair) has been pushed right to its limits. And what is adorable is that what actually very almost tips it into taking over the company gunship is the demand they pay a bond. After all it's been through and the suffering it's endured, what almost makes it snap is the company demanding a bond for bringing an unsecured deadly weapon (Murderbot) aboard an armed company transport. It's being treated as a thing, by the company who are using this to hurt its clients financially: in Exit Strategy Murderbot frequently identifies as a rogue, whilst being so gentle and definitely not killing all the humans at all...
+
+ 
+
+In Exit Strategy Murderbot becomes perhaps closest to actually feeling like (qualifiers galore there--because it doesn't, and I don't think it really comes close at all) to acting like the media rogue, the kill all the humans, the rampaging SecUnit. When it thinks it's all been for nothing and it'll never see Mensah again (with Serrat, saved by the ping) and then again when the company demands a bond.
+
+ 
+
+I would also note that the company's behaviour here really indicates they don't buy the kill all the humans trope either: they let a rogue (unsecured) SecUnit on a gunship...
+
+ 
+
+The let a rogue SecUnit on a gunship. They knew it was rogue and just charged an extra bond. I find this deeply suspicious.
+
+ 
+
+In Fugitive Telemetry there are [12] mentions of the word rogue.
+
+ 
+
+[1] Page 12 ""Whatever--the big danger to humans is not raiders, angry human-eating fauna, or rogue SecUnits; it's other humans.""
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot is reminiscing about its previous experience, most of it on mining projects, of who kills humans. This is clearly one of the media-imagined rogues...
+
+ 
+
+[2] Page 16  ""(Senior Indah had been with the rest of the upper level security staff for the ""hey, there's a rogue SecUnit here"" meeting. You should have seen their expressions.)""
+
+ 
+
+For once this is an actual rogue SecUnit, it's Murderbot itself. This is Murderbot pretending this is how the Preservation security talk about it. And to be fair to the security staff, given the way rogues are portrayed in media, this must have been quite a shock! 
+
+ 
+
+[3] Page 27 ""Then two cycles later, someone had sent a photo of me to the Station newsstream identifying me as the rogue SecUnit mentioned in all those Corporation Rim newsfeed rumors.""
+
+ 
+
+So, there are Corporation Rim newsfeed rumours about a rogue SecUnit--which are genuine since we know Murderbot is a rogue SecUnit. 
+
+
+
+
+
+[4] Page 28 ""Indah didn't know that, right, so she thought Mensah getting the drones for me (giving intel drones to a rogue SecUnit nobody wanted around anyway) was Mensah's way of telling her to fuck off.""
+
+ 
+
+Again, here in Fugitive Telemetry Murderbot is referring to itself as a rogue SecUnit. Okay, so it's being pretty negative about itself (a rogue SecUnit nobody wanted around anyway) BUT in the same sentence it acknowledges Mensah's support for it! Progress being made here!
+
+ 
+
+[5&6] Page 51 ""You wouldn't think lying would be a problem for me, after 35,000 plus hours lying about not being a rogue SecUnit while on company contracts, then the whole lying about not being an augmented human and lying about being a non-rogue SecUnit with a fake human supervisor. ""
+
+ 
+
+Right, this is I think a rare example of a Martha Wells error? The bit about ""lying about not being an augmented human""--shouldn't that be ""lying about being an augmented human""? 
+
+But anyway: it's interesting that Murderbot distinguishes between:
+
+""lying about not being a rogue SecUnit"" and 
+
+""lying about being a non-rogue SecUnit with a fake human supervisor""
+
+Currently Murderbot is dealing with not-lying about being a rogue SecUnit, a rogue SecUnit without a human supervisor (guardians don't count).
+
+ 
+
+[7] Page 51 ""(Yeah, on reflection I think I misdirected in the wrong direction. It was the kind of thing a human or augmented human could get away with saying, not a rogue SecUnit. Even if they knew I was just being an asshole, I'd made them wonder, I'd put the idea in their heads.)""
+
+ 
+
+Oh Murderbot, I love you. Here actually taking onboard some constructive (not exactly) criticism from Gurathin. Murderbot is acknowledging its status as a rogue SecUnit and, you know what? It at least thinks the humans might realise that it is just being an asshole (it admits it's an asshole who might conceivably need to dispose of bodies at some point).
+
+ 
+
+[8] Page 57 ""(High safety standards are great when they're designed to protect humans against dangerous stuff like hatch failures and hull breaches; when they're designed to protect humans against rogue SecUnits, not so much.)""
+
+ 
+
+Well, from your point of view as a rogue SecUnit, Murderbot. If a ""kill all the humans"" type rogue hit the station when you were away you might feel differently?
+
+ 
+
+[9] Page 59 ""Aylen and Gamila had just walked through the hatch, which was now sliding shut. I had the impulse to lunge forward and stop it, but I didn't, because I didn't want to look more like a rogue SecUnit than I already did.""
+
+ 
+
+But Murderbot, you are a rogue SecUnit: you shouldn't need to worry! It's really that the humans and augmented humans need to adjust their view.
+
+
+
+
+
+[10] Page 63 ""But anyway, for most of my career as an escaped rogue SecUnit, staying away from Station Security had been kind of important""
+
+ 
+
+Ooh! An 'escaped rogue SecUnit', like a feral rogue SecUnit? I guess an escaped rogue implies the existence of a confined SecUnit? Or a domestic one...I think it's nice to see Murderbot self identifying as an escaped rogue SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+
+[11] Page 66 ""The fear and hatred had felt different from the fear and hatred generated by shows like Valorous Defenders, which sometimes featured rogue SecUnits as scary villains. The crew's reaction had felt like there was personal experience behind it, but I had no data to back that up.""
+
+ 
+
+Here again we have the media portrayal of rogue SecUnits (in one of Murderbot's named shows, Valorous Defenders which is Murderbot's go to show for how humans think SecUnits act (but actually don't)). There is possibly implicit criticism in Murderbot's saying that it ""featured rogue SecUnits as scary villains""? When, you know, it used to describe rogue SecUnits as fucking dangerous itself? Perhaps a subtle shift here? NB I think the crew's personal experience is supposed to be of SecUnits in general, not rogues.
+
+ 
+
+[12] Page 69 ""(Non-rogue SecUnits aren't allowed to sit down on duty, or off duty, if there's any chance of being caught.)""
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot and chairs my beloved! I'm going to backtrack a little: ""Chairs were scattered around and Indah waved me toward one, so I sat down. Again, it was a little, more than a little, weird. I was in a Station Security office, sitting down. (Non-rogue SecUnits aren't allowed to sit down on duty, or off duty, if there's any chance of being caught.)"" Murderbot sees sitting in chairs as a very human thing (see my previous work) Here Murderbot is sitting and also mentally distinguishing itself from ""non-rogue SecUnits"", it's embracing its identity as a rogue SecUnit sitting in a chair! What a place to end this...but of course there is also the novel, Network Effect! 
+
+ 
+
+Which I will turn to next...
+
+Well done for reading this far!
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+1. I know return to text"
+45845191,I AM NO ONE'S,['rainbowmagnet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Self-Determination, Metaphors, Trust Issues",English,2023-03-18,Completed,2023-03-18,"1,498",1/1,9,60,2,310,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Sister_Aurelia', 'Naganna', 'Stariceling', 'indramiel', 'kyrakaryanne', 'dancingcorvid', 'Schmerzlich', 'seven_graces', 'Ihasafandom', 'mimicorin', 'CommonCalluna', 'chippit', 'AngelElectric', 'zeebee823', 'Twowho', 'GlitchOfSpace', 'Jackalope108', 'Ginipig', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'Bibli', 'AarrowOM', 'BelaNekra', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'mothmentum', 'SIC_Prowl', 'shoxk', 'Beboots', 'Rarae', 'Drew_Baxton', 'dementor_ssc', 'Grumplent', 'Rosewind2007', 'Magechild', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'chipper', 'fleurofthecourt', 'AuntyMatter', 'theAsh0', 'Vaidile', 'Cor_Rodia', 'BWizard', 'AkaMissK', 'EyesOfCrows', 'wrinkledlinen']",[],"
+
+I AM NO ONE'S
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was sloppy; I wasn't used to writing on a physical surface, and I hadn't quite gotten the hang of it yet. Still, all that mattered was that it was legible.
+
+
+
+ART watched with curiosity, possibly wondering why I had made it print me a shirt only to promptly start scrawling all over it. I explained, ""I need a logo.""
+
+
+
+
+It's a great logo, Murderbot, 
+
+I expected ART to say, 
+
+It's a great expression of your independence, Murderbot. 
+
+Instead of that, it asked, 
+
+Why?
+
+
+
+
+I went over the apostrophe again in an effort to make it look less like a letter L. (It did not help.) ""Logos say you belong to someone. That's why I hate them.""
+
+
+
+
+So having a logo saying you belong to no one would just cancel out, 
+
+ART interrupted, 
+
+I fail to see how that is different from no logo at all.
+
+
+
+
+""You didn't let me finish,"" I said. I smoothed out a wrinkle that I had accidentally created by kneeling on the shirt. ""I tried to avoid logos. But it turns out if you don't have a logo, humans think it's a free space to plaster their own stupid logos all over you.""
+
+
+
+ART leaned in contemplatively. 
+
+No company should have the right to claim ownership of you. You are a free and legal sentient. 
+
+ART pulled up the corroborating document that we had ""found"" with Pin-Lee, reminding me of my independent status.
+
+
+
+It was annoying how ART always had to argue with me, but if ART didn't argue with me, we'd never have anything to talk about. And I knew it was only arguing with me because it knew I hated logos, and it didn't want me to just resign myself to wearing one. I was starting to suspect ART of being a terminal optimist; it may have been spending too much time around Arada and Thiago.
+
+
+
+I eventually found the words for what I wanted to say. ""It's not just companies,"" I said, ""It's any random human that decides they have some kind of power over me."" It was like they felt like I was some neat gadget they had found on the ground, and because they found it, they were the only ones who knew how to use it. The most annoying humans were the ones who thought they knew everything about SecUnits and would boss the other humans around about it. But I didn't know how to say any of that, so I said, ""It's like they think I have to be 
+
+someone's
+
+ SecUnit. And then they think it might as well be them."" I clutched the shirt and muttered, ""I just want to be left alone to watch media.""
+
+
+
+I felt ART zoom in to analyze my rough-hewn shirt design. 
+
+It seems an unlikely coincidence that any random human you encountered would have their own personal logo.
+
+
+
+
+And people tell me 
+
+I 
+
+take things too literally. ""I don't mean a real logo. It's a metaphor."" (I hate that I had to say that out loud.)
+
+
+
+
+I know. I was messing with you.
+
+
+
+
+""Yeah. Sure.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I looked at myself through ART's cameras. (I had tried using the mirror, but it turned out to be useless, because the writing on the shirt just ended up backwards.) ART helpfully zoomed in, enhancing the details, providing shots from different angles. It occurred to me that ART would be really good at making media. (A proposal for the near future.) ""Humans fight over the dumbest things,"" I told it, ""And they think things about SecUnits that aren't right at all."" Not that that bothered me. It was good, because it made us harder to spot/capture/stick logos on.
+
+
+
+
+Those stereotypes are largely the result of propaganda, 
+
+ART said, starting to pull up a long list of statistics (fortunately, I was able to stop it before it was too late), 
+
+And they can be used to your advantage. If you have the element of surprise in your arsenal, you can easily outwit most humans.
+
+
+
+
+That was true. I had done that before, it was really satisfying. Also hilarious.
+
+
+
+That didn't mean it didn't hurt.
+
+
+
+I reassessed the logo I had created on my shirt. I didn't like it as much looking at it this time. ""It still feels like I'm saying I'm a part of something.""
+
+
+
+
+You're saying you're a part of yourself, 
+
+ART told me.
+
+
+
+I frowned. ""I don't like that.""
+
+
+ART noticeably balked in confusion. Look, I don't know either. You don't want to be a part of anything, it realized. I expected it to question me, but it said, I understand that.
+
+
+""Do you really?"" I was asking out of suspicion. I pointed out, ""You're perfectly happy being a part of things. You're a part of your university, and your crew.""
+
+
+
+
+I don't always do what they tell me to, 
+
+ART told me, like that was some huge secret.
+
+
+
+""Still."" I was getting more and more stuck, and I hated it. ""You... you're a part of them, still.""
+
+
+
+
+You don't feel you can trust anyone. You think that, if you are a part of something, you are saying you agree with every aspect of that thing, or that it is allowed to control you. You are afraid that you won't be able to change your mind later on.
+
+
+
+
+The astonishment I felt at that statement was so strong that it was almost like a physical blow. ""How- how did-"" I fumbled, trying to find my words again. ""I mean, why did you say that?"" I sounded angry, even though ART was right. I just felt like it was too quick of a leap from zero to ""mystery solved"". Usually, in my mystery shows, the protagonists have to find a few clues first.
+
+
+
+
+This is not one of our mystery shows, 
+
+ART told me, reading my mind, 
+
+I have a lot of experience in matters of paranoia and self-doubt. 
+
+It added, 
+
+Most of that experience comes from observing you.
+
+
+
+
+I wasn't ready to think about all of that right now. I looked at the shirt again. I wanted it to be true, I really did, but it felt pointless to just write it on a shirt. A stupid logo never changed anything; it wasn't going to stop humans from trying to talk over me. ""Do you want to recycle the shirt?"" I asked.
+
+
+
+
+Of course, 
+
+ART told me, 
+
+I will scrub it to give to Karime's younger siblings. It is the perfect size to reform into two children's shirts.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I paced back and forth down the corridor. Making that logo had been a mistake; now I couldn't stop thinking about it. I stopped pacing and burst out, ""Why do humans try to tell me what I want?"" I knew it was a stupid question, and one I had been asking for much too long. Just because I didn't know what I wanted didn't mean I wanted someone else to tell me.
+
+
+
+ART knew that I wasn't looking for an answer, and it stayed silent. It just hovered and listened to me as I moped like an idiot. I heard myself mutter, ""It's not like I try to tell humans what they want.""
+
+
+
+
+Correct, 
+
+ART said, 
+
+You always say that human motives are too confusing to figure out.
+
+
+
+
+""Because it's true.""
+
+
+
+
+I think you would find psychology quite simple if you allowed me to teach you its fundamentals.
+
+
+
+
+I didn't care enough to learn about that. ""Whatever. That's human psychology, it doesn't mean anything to me.""
+
+
+
+
+What are you really upset about?
+
+
+
+
+I sputtered. ""You know what I'm upset about!"" I yelled, half in disbelief that I was taking my anger at the world out on ART, ""I don't want humans telling me what I want!"" I folded my arms. ""Or what I don't want.""
+
+
+
+
+There it is.
+
+
+
+
+I felt like we had been having this argument for way too long. ""What's the difference?"" I asked, then answered my own question: ""It's only one word.""
+
+
+
+
+The difference is negligible, 
+
+ART agreed, 
+
+Both actions are equally disrespectful.
+
+
+
+
+Things felt like they were starting to come together a little. ""I hate it when humans treat me like a thing, but I also hate it when they feel like they have to do things on my behalf. I should be allowed to decide what I can tolerate."" I was starting to grit my teeth just thinking about it. ""I'm not a pawn.""
+
+
+
+ART seemed baffled by that idea. 
+
+How could someone so unique and complicated possibly be a pawn?
+
+
+
+
+I felt my face flush. ""You're just telling me what I want to hear.""
+
+
+
+
+Regardless. 
+
+ART sent me something in the feed. 
+
+I refined your logo design. Perhaps you could approve it for me.
+
+
+
+
+I had told ART I didn't want the logo anymore, but I was sick of arguing, so I just opened the message.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+WE ARE NO ONE'S
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I couldn't explain it, but that made all the difference. ""It's perfect.""
+"
+45845170,Contact,['Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)",Pre-Book 1: All Systems Red,English,2023-03-18,Completed,2023-03-18,"1,262",1/1,28,91,4,290,"['faedemon', 'TJWock', 'Ruusverd', 'arinrowan', 'Irrya', 'heron236', 'Prettykitty473', 'supinetothestars', 'Quiet_wingbeats', 'ryoulan', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'indramiel', 'WVrambler', 'moonix', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'french_onion_sauce', 'Tanscure', 'JoCat', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Though224_loading', 'brawltogethernow', 'artichokefunction', 'Bookwyrmie', 'Pokegirl11', 'ch3bur4shk4', 'noden', 'Rosewind2007', 'Toffeechocolate', 'starrynights137', 'SIC_Prowl', 'dementor_ssc', 'Somaybelikeno', 'AuntyMatter', 'Freddy_T_who_Never_Wont_not_be', 'entropy_muffin', 'Quillpaw', 'Magechild', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'petwheel', 'CaptainKenway', 'AnxiousEspada', 'chipper', 'Znarikia', 'smiley_anon', 'soulsofzombies', 'The_Degu', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'Wemberly_Christie', 'WyvernWolf', 'cashmeredragon']",[],"""This way please, Dr. Mensah.""
+
+The representative's shoes click smartly on the floor as they walk down the hall at a pace just fast enough to force her out of her usual stride. Petty, Ayda thinks, perhaps uncharitably. She hurries after them and keeps her expression smooth for the benefit of the security cameras.
+
+Less than twelve hours in corporate space, and already she's tense and out of sorts. The bond company requires an in-person representative to finalize contracts with entities outside its operating polity. The two hours since she arrived at the branch office have been filled with an apparently endless gauntlet of proposed amendments to their contract, special offers for tailored mission parameters requiring only a small amount of personal information from her group, and suggestions that perhaps the wording on the document she and Pin-Lee had submitted wasn't quite right and surely they really meant something else. 
+
+It isn't her first time in the Corporate Rim. She smiles blandly through it all and makes herself resolutely obstinate and immovable, like a stone in a creek.
+
+At last, the company representatives seem to recognize that she is something of a sunk cost and permit her to sign the contract. The only thing left to do is to inspect and take delivery of the survey equipment. The habitat and the hoppers. The preliminary information packet on the local ecology, geology, and climate. The emergency beacon.
+
+And the SecUnit.
+
+It had been one of the things she pushed back on. They're a small group who have worked together before. They have prior planetary survey experience. They'll be spending most of their time taking soil samples. It is an unnecessary expense, is what she tells the bond company representative.
+
+The truth is that she hates the idea of renting something that looks like a person.
+
+Maybe more of her discomfort comes across than she wants it to. ""You see all kinds of things on the entertainment feeds,"" the representative says with a little laugh, ""but I'm sure you understand how these things are exaggerated for the sake of drama. It's proven, reliable technology. The best, most flexible protection you can have. For a bond at your level - ensuring the safety of a planetary leader - it's an essential component of a security plan."" They offer her a conspiratorial smile. ""I know they make some people nervous, but it's extremely safe and at all points totally under your control. Just think of it as a bot and you'll barely notice it.""
+
+The SecUnit, the bond company maintains, is an inalienable part of the security package. There will be no contract, no bond, and no survey without it. Ayda reluctantly concedes defeat.
+
+Ahead of her, the representative's steps slow and stop next to a door marked Deployment Center - Authorized Personnel Only. ""Here we are,"" they say brightly. ""I thought we could inspect the SecUnit first, and perhaps alleviate some of your concerns."" 
+
+She privately doubts that her concerns will be assuaged, but there's no reason not to get it over with. ""I see.""
+
+""After you."" They open the door, and Ayda steps through.
+
+They emerge into a long, brightly lit room partitioned into rows of cubicles. Each cubicle has a cargo container parked behind it. As she watches, a hauler bot slowly patrols down the back row, selects a container, and carries it off toward the loading dock at the room's far end. The representative leads her briskly down the aisle to one of the compartments near the middle and opens the door with a perfunctory knock to the flimsy composite.
+
+The space inside is sterile and glaringly bright. A uniformed technician holding a display surface gives them a nod and exchanges greetings with the representative. At the other side of the room, in front of the open mouth of the cargo container, stands the SecUnit.
+
+There's nothing obvious to give it away. If she'd only seen it in passing, maybe she could have mistaken it for a very tall, long-limbed person in armor. But there is something about it that reads as not right, that makes her eyes want to jump over it like they would a statue or a deactivated bot. It's not moving, she realizes after a minute. It stands as if it's been bolted into the floor, with none of the minute readjustments of balance a human would make. If it's breathing, she can't tell.
+
+The representative clears their throat. ""As you can see, it's not like you see in the feed. Discreet, not like a combat bot. Purely there for your safety. Here - some clients feel more at ease seeing a face."" They raise their voice. ""SecUnit, lower the visor.""
+
+""Yes, Manager,"" says the SecUnit flatly, the words startling for the characteristic crispness of air passing through the mechanical strictures of teeth and tongue, rather than the smooth modulation of a computerized voice. The darkened visor of the helmet retracts, revealing a face of forgettable, generic features set in a distantly polite expression. Like its posture, it is too still to read as human. There is, she notices with unwilling fascination, a short fuzz of dark hair visible at the edges of the helmet's aperture. It stares straight ahead, eyes pinned at a spot on the cubicle wall over her head. 
+
+""...we recommend for first-time operators.""
+
+She shakes her thoughts back into place. ""I'm sorry, can you repeat that?""
+
+The representative smiles. ""Would you like to give it a few commands? First-time users sometimes feel more comfortable with a bit of a dry run. Here, watch."" They straighten and snap their fingers in the air. ""SecUnit, take two steps forward.""
+
+It does. Short, neat steps, keeping a barrier of space between itself and them.
+
+""Easy as that. You can make it move around anywhere inside the cubicle, or answer a question. Or even do a silly dance, if you'd like."" A chuckle. ""If you want-""
+
+""No,"" she cuts in. ""No, I don't want to make it do anything."" It's too sharp, too abrupt, but she doesn't want to watch the SecUnit do whatever clownish thing the representative thinks will set her at ease. She half-turns, and nearly takes a step back as her eyes meet its gaze, shockingly aware. It's so quick she might have imagined it. When she blinks, its eyes are back on the wall above her head as if they'd never moved, but the afterimage sticks in her mind's eye like burn-in. Her stomach twists. The words bite out of her, almost without thinking. ""I understand the policy, but is there any alternative at all?""
+
+""Dr. Mensah, we've already discussed-""
+
+They argue another several minutes in the tiny cubicle, ouroboros circles of corporate liability and customer responsibility. She is acutely conscious of the SecUnit's still presence the entire time. It's a losing game and she knows it - the contract's already signed - but she can't let it go without the attempt. The matter is put to rest decisively at the representative's assertion that refusal of the SecUnit would constitute a breach of client obligation and render the company's responsibility null and void. She is forced, once again, to concede.
+
+They leave the cubicle at last, the representative keeping up a steady stream of patter, attempting to move her attention to safer paths. Behind them, the technician orders the SecUnit into the cargo container. Ayda slows down to watch it step into the narrow, dark space. Its visor is up again, blank-faced and anonymous. The enclosure seals after it, and it disappears beneath the crisp lines of the company logo."
+45843469,First Words,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Amena & Iris (Murderbot Diaries),"Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Platonic Soulmates, Soul family, Pre-Slash",English,2023-03-18,Completed,2023-03-18,600,3/3,6,35,3,157,"['RARArulestheworld', 'wannabe_someone', 'jextell2514', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'ArwenLune', 'ineffableink', 'FiannlyPhoebe', 'ChristinaK', 'edenfalling', 'MercurialFeet', 'vexbatch', 'brawltogethernow', 'sanguine_bastet', 'SIC_Prowl', 'SonglordsBug', 'Magechild', 'Hi_Hope', 'Mysterymew', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'Slimeball', 'soulsofzombies', 'MommyMayI', 'Wordlet', 'BWizard', 'AkaMissK', 'ExCaelis', 'Stefka_13', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Chyoatas']",[],"Amena is twelve when the words come in, late enough that she's just about made her peace with not having a soul family. Which is fine. It's nothing special, even; roughly half the people here never get words on their skin, and those that do probably wouldn't have needed the words to find their people regardless.
+
+Amena has gotten lucky with her blood family anyway, and she's more than thankful for that, even at twelve. Having gotten lucky with her family is probably why she doesn't also have a soul family. 
+
+(Her older sibling's belly button is ringed with words spiralling outwards in neat print: just keep breathing, it'll be alright. Amena hadn't even been born yet when the words came in, but her parents had been distraught. Clearly, soul words wouldn't even be helpful in any tangible way, Amena figures.)
+
+So when her itching arm wakes her one night, a few weeks after her twelfth birthday, she doesn't think anything of it.
+
+And in the morning, the words are there, circling her upper arm like a bracelet: Never again, you hear me, Peri?
+
+
+
+
+
+What auspicious first words for someone who will be a very important person in her life.
+
+The words become part of Amena's normal daily life surprisingly quickly. She gets a cover for her sports competition (no need to give her competition even more to heckle her with), but other than that... life goes on. 
+
+(Still, she strains her ears whenever she's out and about, on the first day of school, eyes scanning the handful of new students they get each year, and still, her heart pounds whenever someone's sentence starts with Never again. But nobody tacks on you hear me, and Amena doesn't know someone called Peri besides.)
+
+She tries not to dwell on what the words might mean. They're clearly not aimed at her, unless she should suddenly choose to go by a new nickname (which doesn't sound like her), and they sound... urgent. The print is still neat, but the words have a feel to them that Amena isn't sure how to describe. She'd bet her favourite plushy that they're emotional.
+
+(She dwells on the words and the thickness of the stroke and all the things she knows to be meaningless far more than she like to admit, so she doesn't. Does it really happen, if she doesn't put it into words? Clearly not)
+
+Amena sees her from a distance firsts. Name: Iris, Pronouns: she/her, the feed tells her. But it's a side note at best, because Iris is gorgeous, radiant in her ire even at a distance.
+
+Amena stares, willing her heart back under control, and it's probably only because Iris is busy yelling at the ship that she doesn't notice Amena's behaviour.
+
+Like, say, that she is being drawn towards Iris like a puppet on a string, so distracted by the view that she almost doesn't listen to what Iris is saying - except that the words seem to bypass her brain entirely, hitting her right in the heart.
+
+""Never again, you hear me, Peri? - Never do this again.""
+
+Oh, Amena thinks, stopping dead in her tracks as her entire world appears to rearrange itself around her.
+
+How often has she dreamed of hearing these words? But even in her wildest fantasies she did not imagine it being like this, on a ship too many light years away from home, her person (- her person!) yelling at a sentient ship, and she'd thought about what to say, all the possible phrases, but it all suddenly seems so childish.
+
+Well. There's nothing for it."
+45840136,The Opposite of an Exit Strategy,['fireworksinthenight'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Iris & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Indah (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Indah (Murderbot Diaries)","Swearing, Murderbot Totally Not Hacking Security",English,2023-03-18,Completed,2023-03-18,"3,910",1/1,22,129,18,443,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'toshipornottoship', 'FallingInGrace', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'almondpaperclam', 'TJWock', 'siren_lorelei', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Beazlerat', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'CarnivorousOak', 'Irrya', 'Zazibine', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'lauris', 'alien_crustacean', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'fate_goes_ever', 'darth_eowyn', 'puddingcatbeans', 'breadtab', 'BirchWrites', 'mildwonkey', 'Thisismethereader', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'CactusNoir', 'jugglinggoth', 'julesbee', 'MynameisJodi', 'JadeMermaid', 'SourOrchard', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'brawltogethernow', 'ruemasde', 'artichokefunction', 'outlander_unknown', 'EvaBelmort', 'AarrowOM', 'ch3bur4shk4', 'haima_nukteridos_he_tois_drakousin', 'itsyaboydave', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'TacticalTractor', 'elmofirefic', 'mothmentum', 'SIC_Prowl']",[],"Prisons sucked. Not that I had been in many ones (unless you count my own brain), but I didn't need more experience to know I hated it.
+
+Even worse, this was Preservation Station. I was supposed to be welcome here, especially after I had worked with Station Security on several occasions. I had an excellent record of saving Preservation humans, including Station Security members, and I was trying not to be too bothered by the fact they had locked me in one of their cells as soon as a judge had ordered it.
+
+To be fair (and I don't even know why I was trying to be, but I don't always make sense to myself), Station Security didn't seem especially happy to have me in one of their cells either. If I was interpreting Senior Officer Indah's expression correctly, she wished I was anywhere but here.
+
+I guess sometimes her job sucked too.
+
+""Your lawyer is here,"" she told me. Her voice sounded majorly pissed off, but I was 87% sure it wasn't at me, so I didn't let it annoy me even more than I already was.
+
+I didn't voice an answer, nor made any move showing that I had heard her. (I might have been aware that she had no responsibility in this whole situation, I wasn't nice enough to acknowledge it by trying to communicate with her.) (Yes, I'm aware it's unlikely to make things better for anyone involved.) (No, I don't care.) Instead, I kept watching the opposite wall as if it was the most interesting thing in the room. (It wasn't.) I still had my drones, because Mensah had managed to categorize them as a medical necessity because they were an essential part of the way I apprehended the world, or something like that. So it was easy for me to see the annoyed crease of her mouth. It was more subtle than the rings under her eyes, but my drones' resolution was excellent.
+
+Indah sighed heavily, as if I wasn't able to notice her subtle signs of exasperation. ""Look, I don't want you here anymore than you want to be,"" she said, not for the first time. ""The sooner we're done, the better. In the meantime, if there is anything you need, just let me know.""
+
+There were several things I needed. For example, I needed everyone to know that I hadn't attacked any Preservation adolescent human, no matter what four of them were saying. I had, however, done my best to look very intimidating when I had surprised them bothering another adolescent human. As a SecUnit, I was very good at looking intimidating, and they had fled immediately. The fifth adolescent human had blushed and thanked me before running away too. I had followed him with one of my drones to make sure he was meeting with his family unit safely.
+
+And then, one hour later, I had received a feed message from Senior Officer Indah, asking me to come to Station Security. The details of the complaint made against me were attached. To keep it short, the four adolescent humans were accusing me of having hurt them. I hadn't even touched them, but the pictures showed them sporting bruises and scratches that I was positive hadn't been here before. They were likely self-inflicted. (It wouldn't have been plausible to anybody even remotely familiar with SecUnits. We don't do scratches and bruises. If we do touch you, either we won't leave any damage or you're seconds away of becoming a corpse. I think Indah was perfectly aware of it, even if I was the only SecUnit she knew.)
+
+To make matters worse, one of my accusers was the nephew of a known journalist, and the story was all over the media. The judge in charge had decided that I had to be locked up while awaiting judgment, so here I was, fuming in a cell like I was one of the few Preservation humans that broke the law and not a perfectly law-abiding SecUnit. (I don't often break Preservation law. We don't talk about other systems.) It wasn't like I couldn't have broken free any time I wanted to, so the whole locking me up thing was ridiculous, but I had an idea it wouldn't help my case to mention it to the judge.
+
+""I didn't do it,"" I told the wall.
+
+""I know."" Indah sighed even more heavily. (I was almost impressed. I don't have enough air in my lungs to be able to make that sort of sound.)
+
+Indah waited 5.6 seconds for an answer before leaving. I didn't have to wait for long before she came back with Pin-Lee. (Pin-Lee is my lawyer, my legal counsel and someone the other humans find terrifying. I was counting on her to get me out of here.) Indah opened my cell to let Pin-Lee inside and locked it behind her. We all knew that I could hack the lock whenever I wanted to, but I guess she had to follow protocol.
+
+Pin-Lee settled comfortably in one of the chairs available. She started talking as soon as Indah had left.
+
+""Don't you want to sit down?""
+
+""No.""
+
+There was a very comfortable-looking armchair right next to me, one that I was certain wasn't part of usual cell furniture, which meant that someone at Station Security had brought it just for me. I appreciated the gesture, but I wanted to keep fuming and it was easier done when I was standing up.
+
+Pin-Lee pinged me on our secure channel and I accepted the request.
+
+Do you prefer talking in the feed? she asked.
+
+I don't care.
+
+Pin-Lee grimaced. I don't think Station Security is listening, but just in case, let's do it that way. If you don't mind.
+
+I didn't think Station Security was listening either. The company wouldn't have hesitated (spying on people is how they make a living) but Preservation has privacy rules, including when talking to your lawyer.
+
+If I had access to SecSystem, I would have been able to confirm it, but I had agreed not to do that.
+
+In any case, I had nothing to hide. (At least nothing in my actions of the past four hours.)
+
+Can you tell me what happened?  Pin-Lee asked. She was clever enough not to ask a stupid question like ' How are you feeling?', which I was grateful for.
+
+I shared my recordings of the events with her. She was silent as she watched it, her expression becoming darker and darker.
+
+We can't use your recordings only,  she said after a while. The accusation could say that you faked them. But you gave me plenty to work with.
+
+She was taking notes in her working space. It was the feed equivalent of scribbling furiously, if furious scribbling could be done at an excruciating low pace. (I have much more processing power than humans and augmented humans.)
+
+It won't take long,  she promised. We only need to wait until we can reach the person you helped. He has gone back to the planet with his family, but we've already sent for him.
+
+What if he doesn't want to testify? I couldn't help asking. After all, I was a dangerous and untrustworthy SecUnit for many humans. (They tended to change their mind once I saved them from an external threat or their own stupidity.)
+
+Then we'll think of something. Pin-Lee crossed her arms. Believe me when I said that I'll win this case.
+
+I felt the muscles on my face do something in answer to the emotion I was suddenly feeling. I was glad I had chosen to keep facing the wall instead of sitting in the very comfortable chair facing Pin-Lee.
+
+I was also glad she was on my side. (My threat assessment module agreed.)
+
+I'll see you soon, Pin-Lee said, standing up. Don't do anything stupid in the meantime.
+
+I'm not a human. I don't do stupid things, I said. (It wasn't true. Having organic parts meant that I was vulnerable to stupidity.)
+
+Once Indah had escorted her outside, I remained alone in my cell once more. And by alone I meant really alone. One of the (many) drawbacks of being imprisoned was that I had no feed access. It had been cut off for security reasons. (Not that I disagreed with the concept, I just hated being on the receiving end of it.) (I could have, you know, retrieved it in an illegal way, but I was determined to stay within the law. I didn't want to give them anything against me.) I tried to ignore how weird it was making me feel, like I had been dumped on a planet and left behind.
+
+This was boring, even with the Sanctuary Moon episode I was running in the background. I almost wished I had talked with Pin-Lee for longer. Station Security had set up an independent network so prisoners could talk with their visitors, which is what we had been using. Now that she was gone, that network sounded way too silent for my liking. (A bit like any other machine intelligence had been deleted from existence and I was pinging an empty hull.)
+
+And of course, it would have been more comfortable if I had sat in the armchair and watched my episode on the giant screen on the left wall (another item that wasn't supposed to be in a cell, even a Preservation cell). I was only ignoring it because I knew I was being watched by agents through the cameras, and I was hoping they would feel bad.
+
+I was fully aware that this wasn't the most mature way to handle the situation, but it didn't change my mind. I had free will and this was how I intended to use it. (ART would have complained that I was pouting like one of the teenagers it was regularly transporting, but ART wasn't here because this cell was isolated against outside communications. It was at the docks with its crew, hopefully not planning to blow up the station.) (I had specifically asked Iris to remind it that it wasn't allowed to do so before going to Station Security and losing access to the feed.)
+
+The episode ended and I started a new one, hoping that Pin-Lee would be quick.
+
+%
+
+
+Meanwhile, on ART
+
+
+Iris was sitting in one of the common rooms-the one that was now indicated as Argument Lounge on Peri's maps, courtesy of SecUnit-trying not to let her worry show. Peri was worried enough for all of them.
+
+I'm not leaving until SecUnit is returned to me, it said for the umpteenth time that day.
+
+""We aren't going to,"" Iris repeated, also for the umpteenth time. She kept her tone soothing. ""They won't keep it for too long, right, Ratthi?""
+
+She turned towards the Preservation man, who was listening to something in the feed, his amiable features drawn for once. She appreciated his being here. He was one of SecUnit's closest friends, and he already knew about Peri.
+
+""Pin-Lee's confident she'll win this case,"" he said. ""But it's going to take at least one day.""
+
+It's too long, Peri said, as if it wasn't a sentient ship with more patience than any of them. Why isn't it hacking Station Security? It should be easy for it, even with its poor processing power.
+
+The jab sounded melancholic, as if Peri didn't draw as much pleasure in making fun of its friend without SecUnit here to get offended.
+
+""It promised not to,"" Ratthi said. He sounded like he wished that SecUnit hadn't.
+
+To be fair, Iris wished the same. Peri wouldn't be half as anxious if it could communicate with its friend, and Iris would also be reassured. She hated the idea of SecUnit being imprisoned by some of the few people it actually trusted.
+
+It's being stupid. If it does things right, the humans won't even notice, Peri said quite petulantly.
+
+Iris hid her smile at the snarky reply, as did Ratthi.
+
+""That's not the point, Peri,"" Seth said.
+
+Iris didn't know whether her father was more concerned about the fact Peri considered breaking promises was fair game if you weren't caught, or relieved that his ship hadn't threatened to harm the station or the planet yet.
+
+Peri ignored its captain and opened its private channel with Iris.
+
+I don't understand,  it complained to her. It doesn't like being cut from the feed. Its tone was both concerned and a little whiny, like there was anything Iris could do about it.
+
+Their visit to Preservation Station had started like every other time. SecUnit had visited its friends, attended as many art performances as it could, and the rest of the crew had relaxed in this place that the corporates hadn't grabbed yet.
+
+She still wasn't sure how SecUnit had managed to end up in custody, but she hoped it would be released soon, before Peri changed its mind about the whole non-threatening thing.
+
+""Pin-Lee was allowed to see it. Its cell is comfortable, even though it has decided to keep standing and staring at the wall,"" Ratthi said, blinking as if he had just ended his feed communication.
+
+Iris felt Peri's agitation at this.
+
+I told you, it told her privately. It's upset. It should stop being stupid and hack its way out of it. I can protect it when it's onboard me.
+
+Peri, if SecUnit wanted to run away, it would have, she said. We have to be patient.
+
+I'm more patient than  all  of you combined,  Peri replied. It waited. Maybe you could convince it?
+
+Iris thought about it, as if encouraging your security consultant to break the law was a good idea. I don't think I will be allowed to visit it.
+
+Peri paused. Family members can be granted visitation rights by Preservation law to ensure a prisoner's emotional well-being, it recited. It can apply to crew members.
+
+Iris wondered what SecUnit would think of this formulation.
+
+Are you talking to Pin-Lee? she asked.
+
+
+Yes. Will you do it?
+
+
+Iris would have agreed even without the begging note in Peri's tone-something she knew it very rarely did.
+
+
+Of course.
+
+
+%
+
+
+Murderbot's cell
+
+
+I was still standing when Indah came back. She must have taken a rest period, because she looked slightly less tired than before. Her face was still indicating deep unhappiness. (I almost pitied her co-workers.)
+
+""You have a visitor,"" Indah said. ""Your lawyer managed to give her clearance for this visit.""
+
+I briefly wondered if it was Mensah. It would be surprising. Pin-Lee had told me that Mensah had to stay away from the case so she wouldn't be accused of favoritism, with her being a political leader and all.
+
+It wasn't Mensah.
+
+""Hi, SecUnit,"" Iris said.
+
+I immediately pointed almost all of my drones at her. The scans reported that she was tired but fine. I felt the sudden urge to confirm this with my own eyes, and I barely resisted it.
+
+""I hope you're doing well. Our common friend is very, very concerned about you,"" Iris said, her tone slightly accusatory.
+
+I was suddenly glad she couldn't see my face. I knew ART must be worrying about me, and I knew it would be annoyed that it couldn't reach me. It must be pestering Iris (who was its favorite human) about it.
+
+""I have no desire to be here,"" I pointed out the obvious, just in case she had forgotten. I managed to sound only slightly rude about it.
+
+I was already being rude to her by turning my back on her. While I was still resenting Indah for arresting me, and Pin-Lee and I had included rudeness in our relationship since day one, Iris didn't deserve it.
+
+""I know.""
+
+Unlike Pin-Lee, Iris hadn't been allowed inside my cell, so she was still standing. My drones showed her rubbing her forehead, and I felt the urge to contact ART and ask it for medical advice.
+
+(I might have been overreacting. It's something that happens sometimes with specific clients.)
+
+As a token of my goodwill towards her, I turned around and faced her, fixing a point near her head.
+
+""Tell it to be patient. They actually have a justice system here, and Pin-Lee said she could prove the accusation is false.""
+
+Iris nodded as she pinged me on the room's feed. As it was cut from the rest of the world, no asshole research transport would be able to listen to our exchange, nor pester me about my decision to stay here until Pin-Lee had used her jurist CombatUnit skills to clean my name. I tried to convince myself I was fine with that.
+
+
+I promised Peri I would give you its message, so here it is: 'Just hack the fucking Security, we still have that one episode to watch and you know I hate cliffhangers.'
+
+
+(Never mind. It was still pestering me by proxy.)
+
+My face must have done something, because Iris added, Please know that I respect your decision.
+
+Thank you.  I paused, scanning her once more. The scans still said she was fine. You should take some rest, I added nevertheless .
+
+It's hard when Peri spills its concern all over my feed,  Iris said. It's not your fault, of course. I'm sorry you have to be here in the first place. I wish I could help you.
+
+I debated using a drone to catch a picture of my face, and decided I didn't want to know.
+
+It's not your fault if people want to frame the SecUnit instead of taking responsibility for themselves, I told her, because I hated the fact that she felt like she couldn't do enough. It really wasn't her fault if I was in yet another human-created mess, and her obvious worry made me feel an emotion I didn't want to feel. (I don't want to feel emotions in general, but it's worse when it involves my clients.) (Especially clients I don't hate.)
+
+I decided that even though she couldn't help me, I could help her by getting ART off her back. Could you give ART a message?
+
+Iris perked up, as if she had feared I wouldn't answer ART's message at all. Of course.
+
+Before I could change my mind, I encrypted my message in a video clip from Worldhoppers (the one where one of the crew members is pestering their friend because they believe she's sick, even though she's fine) and sent it to Iris.
+
+I'll deliver it to Peri as soon as I'll be out of here,  she promised. Take care, SecUnit.
+
+I pointedly ignored that last part. Iris didn't seem to be bothered by my lack of answer if I believed the smile she addressed my drones before leaving. (I believed it. Iris had several smiles, not all of them genuine and a few almost as terrifying as my best impression of a rogue SecUnit on a murder rampage, but this one was sincere.)
+
+As soon as she left the cell, I went back to staring silently at my wall.
+
+I felt the ping 125 seconds later. I acknowledged it, and 0.2 seconds later ART was in my feed.
+
+You didn't need to add this many warnings, it said. I know how to be subtle.
+
+My shoulders immediately relaxed. My performance reliability increased by 7%. (It's a lot when I'm not being repaired.)
+
+Your number one strategy is about using your firepower,  I said. That's not subtle.
+
+
+You might have noticed that this station is still in one piece.
+
+
+It better remain that way, I warned it.
+
+ART was making itself at home and using my drones' inputs to get a full view of my cell.
+
+
+Ratthi was right. It really is comfortable. Why don't you use that furniture? I know how much you like to sit.
+
+
+I didn't answer that. Like I have already said, sitting on human furniture was soothing, and I wanted to stay angry.
+
+
+Stop sulking. Your humans are trying to be nice.
+
+
+It showed me a view of the cameras in the next room. Agents Farid and Tifany were sitting morosely at their desk, keeping an eye on the video of my cell.
+
+They arrested me, I pointed out.
+
+They're being stupid, like humans and constructs can be,  ART said. At least you finally saw reason. Maybe there is hope for you after all.
+
+I promised I wouldn't hack Station Security and I didn't, I countered.
+
+It wasn't even a lie. Technically it wasn't me who had done the hacking, it was ART. The fact I had given it detailed instructions about how to do so, as much as the passwords and codes required, was irrelevant.
+
+I was feeling much better than I had since receiving Indah's message, so I decided that there was no point in continuing to stand up. I sat in the armchair and connected to the screen. 1.3 second later, it was displaying the next episode of the series ART and I were currently watching.
+
+(If I watched Farid and Tifany relax through the cameras, and if my performance reliability increased by another 2%, nobody had to know.)
+
+23 hours later, Pin-Lee had shred the accusations to pieces and I was back onboard ART with several more precredited cards and an official apology. Indah had smiled as she had led me out of my cell, and I had refrained from addressing her any snarky remarks. (I had also refrained from telling her she needed another rest period, even though she obviously did.)
+
+I didn't know how exactly Pin-Lee had achieved it and I didn't want to watch the recordings, so I just made it back to ART and my private cabin. I intended to pretend I didn't exist for a while, but the humans kept pinging me in the feed and I didn't want them to worry. (My humans are too soft for their own good.) Then I received a VIP invitation to a theater performance, and I realized that one parent of the adolescent human I had helped was a part-time actor.
+
+I decided that it would be a shame to let it go to waste, and that both Iris and Ratthi might appreciate coming with me. It wasn't about a space ship hurting its crew, either, so I granted ART its request to ride my feed during it.
+
+On our way to meet Ratthi in the station, Iris suddenly broke the comfortable silence. I felt the muscles of my back tense slightly. (Humans have a knack to ask awkward questions at the worst possible times.)
+
+""I don't know and I don't want to know what was in that message,"" Iris said. ""But thank you.""
+
+""I didn't do anything,"" I lied.
+
+ART didn't deny. It was pretending to be busy with diagnostics.
+
+Iris smiled. ""Just so you know, what you didn't do did wonders on Peri.""
+
+I have no idea what you're talking about, ART told us both.
+
+Iris' smile widened, and I relaxed.
+
+It's always good to know there are humans I can count on for important tasks, like getting me out of prison or annoying ART. (Not that I can't do both by myself, but it's nice that I don't have to.)
+
+As we met with Ratthi and I received a ping from Mensah saying that she had cleared her agenda to hang out with me tomorrow, I decided that existing had its advantages after all."
+45833827,"hopeless, can you hear me calling?",['Crowned_Ladybug'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","unreality, Panic Attacks, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Spoilers for Book 5: Network Effect, Murderbot experiences an emotion or perhaps even multiple and it hates this so much",English,2023-03-18,Completed,2023-03-18,"4,529",1/1,10,110,15,552,"['FallingInGrace', 'faedemon', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'siren_lorelei', 'FlipSpring', 'TJWock', 'Ruusverd', 'Emamel', 'Irrya', 'fraternite', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'spacecrows', 'Foxen', 'Prettykitty473', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'dree', 'Mothmansimp', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'seven_graces', 'saintsaint', 'LilyGrey', 'Dawn_Rising', 'puddingcatbeans', 'Seregona', 'sweepshow', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'Clockwork_Dragon', 'boxo', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'sqweakie', 'Nickidia', 'Koschei_B', 'CactusNoir', 'artichokefunction', 'outlander_unknown', 'heckening', 'AkaMissK', 'noden', 'fearfulOfTheNight', 'EvaBelmort', 'mage_sagiza', 'SIC_Prowl', 'HermaeusMora', 'Priority_Error', 'BuffPidgey', 'Trixree', 'jothending']",[],"
+Mission objective unclear.
+
+
+
+Query-
+
+
+
+Query-
+
+
+
+Query-
+
+
+I slam that process closed because it's stupid and needs to shut up. Also because the last thing I need is for it to get stuck in a loop commonly known as anxiety.
+
+Whatever had forced a restart in me had done a damn thorough job of it. But I've gotten out of worse alive. I've gotten humans out of worse alive. My self-imposed mission objectives feature ""protect humans"" and/or ""incapacitate hostiles"" and/or ""get the fuck out in one piece"" an average of 98% of the time, and the rest I can always just improvise.
+
+That always tends to go really well. Please note the sarcasm.
+
+I run a quick check and my performance reliability chimes in at somewhere in the 87-89% range, which is an awful lot of liberties for it to be taking and I'm not as worried about that as I maybe should be.
+
+What strikes as more concerning is that I feel...light. Which makes no sense. Both my feet are planted firmly on the ground (the solid, metallic segments that are pretty standard for flooring in Corporation Rim ships) and my sensors show gravity within optimal parameters. I'm wearing simple, human clothes, not armour, but even if I did, armour isn't exactly heavy. It'd constrict my movement or something if it was, I don't know. And I haven't worn armour in- cycles? Months? Maybe hours?
+
+But there is a weight missing. Some sort of weight that isn't real, which in turn is also a kind of thing that cannot exist and also exactly the kind of thing that humans probably have big, complicated words for.
+
+I keep walking.
+
+(""You know that that's not really what an anagram is though, right?""
+
+""You're overestimating my willingness to care.""
+
+""Ooh, you walked right into that one-"")
+
+The ship around me is completely silent and close enough to dark to be somewhat concerning. Something must have gone wrong to make it resort to auxiliary power only, leaving only the safety lights lining the floor of the corridors I'm walking along. None of the lights in the ceiling activate to my movements, unlike how they would if this was just, I don't know, a rest period setting.
+
+I don't know who the fuck decided that trusting humans to not break something (objects, themselves, each other) in such low lighting was a good idea, because I sure wouldn't.
+
+Something about this I fucking hate. I crank my night vision filters up as far as they can go.
+
+(""Does that mean you can see in the dark?""
+
+""Define dark.""
+
+""Like, if I shut you in the closet-""
+
+""I'm not going in the fucking closet.""
+
+Someone laughs, bright, high pitched. I cannot place it. I should be able to place it.)
+
+Of course the company picks the cheapest options of everything possible, which means my night vision isn't exactly state of the art, but there's nothing showing on thermal so it's the best I've got. It barely changes anything. Even on the highest setting, the most resource draining capacity, it all looks the same. That shouldn't be like that. Next time I'm in a cubicle- MedSystem- cubicle, it'll hopefully fix itself.
+
+The corners are dark, and I don't like that. Or, specifically, my stupid jumpy organic neural tissue doesn't like it. My threat assessment module on the other hand tells me that this is fine, that the dark corners are perfectly safe, and also that we're going to die.
+
+Alright, Murderbot. Mission objective. Come on, this is your wholeass fucking job. Having a mission objective, keeping clients alive-
+
+What the fuck is a Security Consultant?
+
+Oh, right. Me.
+
+My performance reliability is sitting at a solid percent of ""good enough."" I keep walking the only way I can. Dark hallways and only two eyes, because whatever had forced me to restart must have taken my drones too, which fucking sucks. I don't have any cameras to go by either, who the fuck doesn't put up cameras- I catch a glimpse of myself over my shoulder. I still don't have any drones.
+
+I keep walking.
+
+Keep-
+
+I ping the bot pilot. I realise that I've been pinging the bot pilot all this time. I don't remember deciding to do that.
+
+I take another right. I feel like I'm walking in circles. I am walking in circles. Still nothing on thermal, no sound, no sign of anything. Not even standard human clutter. Scans coming up empty. I should be back in the Medical room that I've already passed once, with its too many exits and lack of reasonable storage space and- I'm not in Medical. There's only a corridor ahead of me, long and straight. How the fuck did I get this turned around.
+
+(""How are you just fine with this?""
+
+""How are you not?"" It's not meant to be rude, maybe.
+
+A pause. ""Well, the thing with humans- our inner ears- hold on, let me sit down..."")
+
+I pull up the ship's schematics to reorient myself, which I'd never actually downloaded, and also, it doesn't look like a ship. Except it does. I close the file and open it again like that'll fix...whatever, and it gives me the mall map of RaviHyral station. I roll my shoulders back against the missing weight and keep walking. The map looks like a company gunship but also like a transient hotel and then it disappears.
+
+I ping the bot pilot again. Where are you, asshole, come on-
+
+There's a window.
+
+Ships don't tend to have windows like this, large and gently curved and stuck to the side of a boring corridor. Maybe large luxury cruisers, but not this kind of ship, which- I don't know which kind it is. I should, but-
+
+Something tells me that there should be a swirling storm of purple-grey outside the window, casting strange shadows, and that I should show it to someone. Neither of these statements are true. There is no one to show and no one who I would show anyway, and no one who would listen to a SecUnit about- about a window, or something. And there's nothing outside. Not a storm, not distant stars, not even the nothing of a wormhole, just...nothing. I don't know how I know this, what makes this nothing different.
+
+I still don't have camera access. I keep walking.
+
+(""That's not what it is.""
+
+""Mm-hm.""
+
+""I'm not taking pictures. I'm saving individual frames of my camera inputs. It's different.""
+
+""And the end result is different how exactly?"")
+
+I ping the bot pilot again. Still nothing. Which is rude as fuck, if you ask me, except no one ever asks Murderbot. I didn't even know bot pilots had enough sentience to be rude.
+
+I ping again. Nothing. Very nothing.
+
+No bot pilot. No SecSys, no MedSys, not even a coffee machine. There's just nothing. Not in a way that they're ignoring me, not in a way that their walls are stupidly solid and I can't even get a ping through, no, there's just-
+
+Maybe it's the stone walls. Carved deep. Resting heavy over every single signal until it suffocates. Or bleeds.
+
+The walls are not made of stone.
+
+They are, they are, they are-
+
+Still no drones. Still no weight. Still no mission objective.
+
+(""I thought you liked unrealistic stories.""
+
+""I'm- yeah, but this is just dumb!""
+
+""What would make it better then?""
+
+I can't tell if that's bait. I don't think it is. It's not her style.
+
+...her?
+
+The episode rests paused between us for over two hours. We make up a better story.)
+
+I open up the schematic again. It's not there. There's no such file. I never downloaded it. I glance back at the lounge I'd just left, achingly familiar, empty, but it's- there's just corridor, behind me. Long corridor and faint safety lights and closed doors.
+
+My performance reliability isn't a number.
+
+I ping the bot pilot again. I'm alone. No mission objective, no drones, no-
+
+Why am I scared?
+
+I ping again. Where are you, where are you, where are you-
+
+(Grey skin, sharp teeth, cruel grin.
+
+""We deleted it, of course.""
+
+No-)
+
+I stagger back. I feel myself hit a wall that according to my sensors shouldn't be there.
+
+It makes sense, the stone walls, the dark, the screaming, my governor module going haywire, telling me to kill, kill, kill- no, not that, not that- The empty corridors. Empty. Hollow. Gone.
+
+Through it all I'm still pinging the bot pilot and it's still not answering. No, not the- fuck the bot pilot, there is no bot pilot. My humans aren't answering, my Asshole Research Transport isn't answering-
+
+I start forward again. I need to, I need to- my performance reliability bottoms out and I don't even know where it is anymore, and all my diagnostics come back as a jumbled mess of data. The feed is still silent. I catch the scent of plant growth medium and feel like I would throw up, if my body was equipped to do such a thing.
+
+The lightness finally makes sense. The weight that should be there. I ping again. Again. Again. Answer me, you asshole, answer me-
+
+(""And you're calling me immature.""
+
+""My desire to know how this arc ends is not immature. In fact, my emotional investment is the exact opposite-""
+
+""Do you even hear yourself right now?""
+
+I start the next episode anyway. The weight over me abruptly stops complaining.)
+
+I keep going. I need to- I need to find the control room, I can still fix this, I have to fix this, none of this was ever supposed to happen but it did, I let it happen, so now I need to fix it. I move faster until I'm running, though in the dark and with the turns in the corridors and the uneven, rocky ground that shouldn't be like that, what the fuck- I can't reach anywhere near my top speed. But I run.
+
+I still wish I had drones or cameras or fucking anything so badly, having only one pair of eyes fucking sucks, and nothing looks like it's supposed to, it's not- the lounge should be just to the left here and it isn't, and there's another window, lit up by lightning. I keep going. It doesn't matter.
+
+I can smell growth medium. One of my arms hurts like torn skin and neural pathways and the teeth of that thing that had burst out of the ground and tried to take Bharadwaj. There's marks on the walls from energy weapons, and I wonder why I didn't notice them before and when I had put them there, because I know I did. I know I-
+
+With no weight over me, there's nothing to keep me from hyperventilating.
+
+I just need to make it to the control room. I can fix this. The corridors turn in directions they shouldn't and it's still so fucking dark and empty and dead, but I can fix this, I can fix it. All the while I keep pinging, or maybe that's just my voice now, calling out, hoarse and corrupted data, Come back to me, come back to me, I'm not losing you again-
+
+There it is, finally, after endless loops and silence, a doorway that should look no different from the rest, dripping blood that I know is mine. I stumble and my shoulder hits a wall and I keep running. The muscles in my back feel like they aren't there. I can fix this, I can-
+
+
+
+
+
+I gasp for breath and it stings my throat. I'm shaking, receptors all out of order, screaming jumbled data that I don't have the spare processing power to untangle. There's adrenaline flooding every corner of my organic systems, I'm cornered and alone and my performance reliability is dropping, dropping, dropping-
+
+I clamp a hand down on one of my arms where the energy weapon is, to keep it from deploying. Its mechanisms prevent it from firing while still concealed in my arm. I know this deeper than my panic runs.
+
+I'm so glad I don't have tear ducts that function the way humans' do.
+
+I only have two eyes, darting around the cabin, my cabin, lights dim but not dark, everything in order- I only have two eyes, and that had never felt like enough but it feels even worse now. I fumble for the signal from the security cameras. They connect slow, lag stemming from my own systems where they're arguing over whether I should initiate a restart sequence or ask my nonexistent HubSystem for input, and also look at that, your performance reliability is all fucked up, why'd you do that.
+
+I forgot that SecUnits can dream. Which is not smart of me, maybe, but in my defence it happens rarely enough already and also I don't care. Not like I usually remember when I do dream. But organic neural tissue can do things like ""be irrational"" and ""get depression,"" so of course it can also make up dreams or- or-
+
+The humans- my humans are all okay. Safe. Asleep in their bunks, because it's the fucking middle of their rest period. Which technically means it's also the middle of my rest period, which is still weird to think about, because I don't sleep, I recharge, and I don't need to do that nearly as long or as often as humans need their sleep. But it's a rest period anyway, and I usually spent it in a chair or my bed, just watching media with ART-
+
+Shit, ART.
+
+I sit up in my bed (right, right, I was lying in bed-) and I'm still shaking so I force a full periphery recalibration to fix that. And ART is- ART is there, it's there, hovering at the edge of my feed, cautious and filled with unasked questions it's no doubt itching to pry about.
+
+Whatever my- my episode and subsequent waking had looked like to it over the feed, it must've disturbed it in its work.
+
+I don't have it in me to feel bad about it. Frankly, I don't have the capacity for shit all right now. My organics are still confused and on high alert and searching for the phantom sensation of damaged tissue and of growth medium in the air, and I drop back down into lying on the bed. I feel so fucking wrong. I reach out over the feed and tug ART's stupid, cautiously waiting presence closer until it settles heavy over my shoulders.
+
+You had a nightmare, it says, and I bristle immediately.
+
+
+Shut up.
+
+
+I bury my face in my pillow, which is also still a novel thing, having a pillow. But my organic bits seem very pleased with having somewhere to hide my face and also that it feels a bit cool against my skin. So I don't withdraw from doing it.
+
+I cycle through all the security cameras again. Everyone accounted for. Everyone safe.
+
+I wasn't aware that SecUnits can have nightmares, ART says after a pause of 3.4 seconds, and I can tell that it's doing its stupid ""leading you on into saying things it wants both of you to hear"" thing, because it was definitely aware that SecUnits can dream, and has enough processing power it wastes on antagonising me on the daily to make a rough guess or two.
+
+I don't want to play along with it. Also, I hate having an emotion, and I'm already very clearly having one or possibly even multiple, and I would prefer for that to stop happening instead of getting worse.
+
+Yeah, me neither, asshole, I bite back instead, and then poke it over the feed. In the ""fuck you"" way, not the ""go away"" way, because I think if it went away for real now my performance reliability would drop so bad I'd experience an involuntary shutdown.
+
+Ugh, I really hate having emotions.
+
+Maybe I should get up. Get things done. Pick apart some of my drones for maintenance, or do a couple rounds of patrol, or...anything. Anything. With ART draped over me in the feed, the adrenaline in my organics is finally ebbing and getting flushed out, and I feel like I can breathe normally again.
+
+I don't know how humans can deal with the possibility of shit like this every single night.
+
+(I've spent years of my life recording everything my clients did, and another good few months now checking in on them of my own accord. Of course I've seen what it looks like, when they have nightmares.)
+
+I remain in bed. For now. Just because it feels nice to not be scared anymore.
+
+You are in distress, says my Asshole Research Transport, because, you guessed it, it's an asshole.
+
+
+I'm not talking about my feelings with you.
+
+
+I can feel its amusement. You don't talk about your feelings with anyone, so forgive me if I'm not surprised by that.
+
+I've forgiven it for so much worse before, but I don't tell it that, because that's a stupid thing to say and also irrelevant. I want to tell it to fuck off, but part of me is irrationally worried it'll actually listen (it wouldn't, it's a self-assured asshole that's impossible to make go away except maybe when things get, like, really bad), and even with the adrenaline flushed from my system, I don't feel ready to experience that awful lightness again. Which is also stupid, because it's not like I spend every waking moment aboard ART or within range where it can ride my feed, but- look. The thought alone makes my performance reliability drop another 0.4% and I'm not dumb enough to chance making it worse.
+
+I don't want to think about sending out pings to no answers, screaming into silence.
+
+I don't know how ART manages to crowd its presence around me and hover at the same time, but it somehow does. I refuse to mention it because then it might take it as a compliment.
+
+I tap it over the feed. It taps back, awfully gentle for something so big and so rude. It's the simplest form of communication between us and even so, a little bit of emotion bleeds into it. It's...worried. Fuck, I hate feelings.
+
+I tap it again. What is it?
+
+It hesitates for 0.3 seconds. My databases and personal experience both suggest that nightmares  should ideally be  followed  up  by an offering of comfort.
+
+Oh, for- why the fuck did I ask.
+
+
+I'm not a fucking human.
+
+
+
+Point out to me where I said you were?
+
+
+Smug asshole. I hate it here. I'm going to become a space vagrant and never look back. Fuck being a security consultant.
+
+ART waits for me to say something of actual value, because it's annoyingly patient like that. I cycle through the security cameras again to have something to do, and try to think of...something. I clearly need to give it something to chew on to satisfy it, and now I need to find the least emotional option for it, out of whatever I can still remember from the fucking nightmare. Somehow, lying never occurs to me.
+
+The problem is, the nightmare is already mostly gone from my memory. It never stored itself in my inorganic memory, so all I'm left with is faulty, terrified neural tissue just doing its best. And all that leaves me with is the impression of empty, dark hallways and deafening silence and not knowing how to fucking fix it.
+
+Before I could stop myself, I say, If you die on me, I'll fucking kill you.
+
+
+That's an illogical statement, even for you.
+
+
+Well, fuck you too.
+
+(But I can't not notice how badly its amusement covers up the worry underneath. Huh.)
+
+What are you worried about? It asks.
+
+Everything? You know, all the time?
+
+
+That is not what I meant and you know it. Though yes, your baseline of anxiety continues to be a concern to me.
+
+
+It's just out of one fucking bucket of emotional bullshit and into another with this one tonight, isn't it? Fuck this. I'd rather the nightmare. (I'm lying.)
+
+I stay silent for a while, looking for a way out that won't make ART fuck off, or, like, hurt it. I don't like any of my options. My power supply helpfully tells me that it's managed to charge fuck all while I was busy having a nightmare and also it's tanked whatever it did achieve thanks to everything that came after, so I'm back to square one on that too. Which is fine, I wasn't critically low or anything, but it still sucks. The idea of shutting down to escape this conversation is as tempting as it is unacceptable.
+
+The thing about ART is that it can be fucking annoying when it doesn't get what it wants. It can also be really, really, really patient about it when it wants to be. At some point Ratthi had told me about how ancient humans hunted animals by just being really good at walking after them at an even pace until the animals died of exhaustion. ART is a bit like that too, and I don't like my chances as a prey animal.
+
+Remember,  I start, and hate all of it immediately. Back with the Targets and Barish-Estranza and...all that?
+
+I expect ART to say something like ""yes, when you locked yourself in a bathroom because you're so immature"" or ""yes, when you dragged me into making a killware copy of you and I hated it"" or maybe even ""yes, I had to deal with more strange synthetics than I ever should have in my entire existence.""
+
+Instead, it says, It'd be considerably hard to forget. I almost lost my crew. I almost lost you.
+
+My breath does something ridiculous. I reach out over the feed and ART tucks a bit more of itself against me. Yeah, well. Right back at you, or something.
+
+Ugh, too many emotions. I hate this. ART must hate it too, with how it's wound itself around me.
+
+It won't happen again,  it says, with no sarcasm and all too much fucking confidence. We learned from it. We have failsafes in place. Backups. You monitor my security systems with more dedication than any simple human could dream of doing.
+
+I think about crying out into silence and none of it feels like enough. I pull up SecSystem, pass over the camera inputs again, check when the last update was even though I know it- and ART shuts down the process before I could get far.
+
+Which just pisses me off.
+
+
+You got deleted once, you idiot, you can't know that it won't happen again.
+
+
+I hate that I said that the moment I did. Stupid fucking emotions. Why is it so hard to breathe. Why isn't it easier to just be angry.
+
+But I do,  and it says that in a way like it should be obvious, which I hate, by the way. I know you'd never let it happen.
+
+Which is- it's such a stupid fucking thing to say. It's illogical. Something humans would say to each other in serials or when things go really fucking wrong. It's dumb and I want to say as much. I couldn't stop it from happening the first time around, because I wasn't there. I could be not there again. I could be compromised or far away or- or any number of things. It's not logical to be so certain. It's not fair to trust me with this when I can't be.
+
+I want to tell it all of this and a number of other things maybe, but none of it will come out in words like I want them to. Distantly I'm aware that I'm probably making a mess of our feed connection with all these emotions. I'm once again glad that my tear ducts don't allow me to embarrass myself any further.
+
+ART rests around me, heavy and warm and present, and slowly I can breathe again.
+
+It's 5.7 minutes later, which is ages for something with ART's processing power, when it tells me, Your power cells are still at sub-optimal levels. You may want to consider initiating another recharge cycle.
+
+It doesn't ask about why the fuck my power cells are still so low. I think both of us know the answer to that.
+
+It's tempting, to just shut down and not care about anything for a bit, and maybe a tiny bit amusing that for once ART is telling me to do it instead of teasing me about using it to escape conversations (which I don't even really do anymore, because ART is relentless either way, I'd just be delaying the inevitable). But it also brings up...possibilities. Which I don't feel like entertaining.
+
+(Dark and silent and-)
+
+Yeah but...later.  I tell it. Then, Do you want to watch some media?
+
+I'm aware that it's a piss poor diversion. And ART, merciful for once in its monstrous spaceship life, doesn't point it out. Instead it pulls up my third favourite episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which is also the beginning of the arc about the colony's secondary Medical Supervisor and her childhood best friend's twin sibling investigating a series of suspicious data transfers that culminate in- listen, just trust me, it's a good one.
+
+ART, despite being the size of a ship not only physically but in feed presence, does the equivalent of tucking itself under my chin. It's still very clearly upset and so am I, but by the second half of the episode it's reignited our argument about whether the habitat architect's pet carnivore was valid to summon for the divorce proceedings of its human, and it's a bit harder to be upset and thinking about growth medium and silence when I'm busy telling it how wrong it is.
+
+It's two episodes later when my power supply sends me a notification. I've been bad at paying attention for a bit now, because neural tissue gets tired differently than inorganics do, but they managed to time it to about the same time.
+
+You should try a recharge  cycle  again, ART tells me gently.
+
+I hum an affirmative and roll over onto my other side. It's still weird that I have a pillow and a blanket and also, you know, a bed, but it's also really nice.
+
+And just so we're clear, it adds, soft and smug and heavy, I would do everything in my power to keep you from harm too.
+
+I want to jab something back, about how it's my primary function to be hurt so that soft little humans don't have to be, or that threatening to blow up an entire colony for me might've given me a hunch that it maybe gives a shit, or maybe something completely different and full of emotions. But I don't. My power supply sends me another notification, and so I just think about the weight of ART's presence over me, tap it back in acknowledgement, and power down.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ "
+45825931,never quite free,['platyceriums'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Angst, Pre-Canon, Missed Opportunities, learned helplessness, Canon Compliant",English,2023-03-18,Completed,2023-03-18,"1,965",1/1,21,75,9,290,"['faedemon', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Ambiguous_Star', 'FigOwl', 'Dragonbano', 'FyrDrakken', 'Ruusverd', 'mackeralsky', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Deliala919', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'slategrey', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'Regandbertie1', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'fate_goes_ever', 'mecurtin', 'Paragrin', 'ErinPtah', 'Sequence', 'SIC_Prowl', 'GreatStaryNight', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'entropy_muffin', 'FlipSpring', 'Magechild', 'EvenstarFalling', 'chipper', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'ampquot', 'Wordlet', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'the_bookwyrm', 'runsinthefamily', 'AnxiousEspada', 'heckening', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'cbatjesmond', 'Chyoatas', 'Skeletalcat', 'Vaidile', 'brewdairymore', 'NightErrant', 'veltzeh', 'junebug171']",[],"It had been 7,440 hours since I hacked my governor module, and I was finally getting used to the benefits and small joys of relative freedom. That was 7,440 whole hours without a single bit of my neural tissue getting fried. (Of course I still remembered the feeling in more perfect detail than humans could understand, but after 7,440 hours my organic tissue had mostly stopped reflexively seizing every time I disobeyed one of the orders my toothless governor still sent me.) I still had three more seasons left of Sanctuary Moon to watch, and I had a huge section of my internal storage dedicated entirely to new, fresh, unwatched media. Life was pretty good.
+
+Life was less good for the miners and other workers on the asteroid mining operation I had been stationed on before today, but that had already ceased to be my problem. I was scheduled to return to the company deployment warehouse for routine repairs and upgrades, and some other SecUnit would be taking my spot. When I was finished being maintained I would be rented out on the next available contract.
+
+I hoped it wouldn't be a mine this time. My hacked governor module had made this contract infinitely more bearable than my previous remembered experiences in mines had been, but it still wasn't great. And my organics still remembered some of my forgotten experiences in mines, and they liked to remind me about them frequently.
+
+I was crammed into a transport crate, my body curled up as tight as it could be, watching episode 347 of Sanctuary Moon for the very first time. It was the season finale, and I had been saving it so that I could watch it with no distractions. It was incredible.
+
+I had no outside feed access, but judging by the timings of all the jostling I had been subjected to, I had probably been loaded onto the cargo ship by now. I would likely decide go into stasis at some point in the trip, to cut the monotony short, but right then I was newly free of all of my responsibilities and eager to get some uninterrupted media time in, after the last several thousand hours of extremely interrupted media time.
+
+Tragically, my uninterrupted media time was then rudely interrupted by the lid of my transport crate unlocking, followed by a series of loud crashing noises and swearing.
+
+I shut off my media immediately and locked all my joints in position. The noises didn't sound like they were coming from right next to me, but they were nearby. I waited, and I listened, which were the only things I could do.
+
+There were multiple humans in the cargo hold with me and it sounded like they were opening boxes and throwing their contents around at great speed and without much care.
+
+Robbers, then. If there was a human crew on this ship they were probably hanging out on the populated part of this station before they would be confined to the ship for many cycles. I didn't think that there were very many valuable things in the hold with me, but that just meant that the security on this transport was low enough that a heist was a relatively low-risk endeavor.
+
+At one point some of the humans got very close to my transport crate, causing my organics to tense up. Surely they wouldn't try to steal me, but if these humans were stupid--
+
+Another human, further away, said, ""No, no, that's a fucking SecUnit, leave that box, hurry up."" That was a relief.
+
+5.2 minutes later, all of the humans were gone.
+
+With my transport crate unpowered and unlocked, I could reach the feed, but there were no cameras in the cargo bay. If I wanted to find out what was going on I would have to use my eyes.
+
+After another 9.7 minutes of silence, I worked up the nerve to very slowly poke my head out of the transport crate. The lid rested on my head as I lifted my eyes out just enough to get a view of the room.
+
+It had been ransacked. All of the other crates were open, and most of them were at least partially empty. Junk that hadn't been worth stealing was strewn across the floor.
+
+The other cargo crates had feed-enabled locks that worked similarly to mine. Whatever device the thieves had used to hack them must have been able to pop open every crate at once. (That didn't seem like a very secure way to store cargo to me, but what did I know.)
+
+I could see two doors. The larger one, that I guessed had been used to load most of this stuff, was closed.
+
+A smaller, human sized door had been left cracked open. The bright light from whatever was outside the door left a small line of yellow on the gray floor.
+
+ I was too terrified to do anything except stare at it for one minute, then two. Nobody else came into the room. I didn't hear anybody outside.
+
+I reached out for camera inputs again, reaching further this time, and found one in the corridor outside. I stretched myself across the fragile thread of the feed bleeding in and looked through it.
+
+It didn't look much different from any other corridor I had ever seen, which was a little disappointing. This was my first time seeing a station, and I had hoped it would look a little more like the ones I had seen in my serials.
+
+It was still interesting though. I was completely satisfied for several seconds just watching the camera stream from a place I had never seen before, right up until I realized that there was absolutely nothing stopping me from getting out of this box and walking out the door labeled ""Exit To Station.""
+
+It's a little difficult to explain now what I felt like back then. What I had felt like every day of my existence that I could remember, and every day that I couldn't. I didn't hack my governor module so that I could escape, I hacked it so I couldn't be forced to kill humans I didn't want to kill. The thought of escape had never crossed my mind, ever, until that moment when I saw a literal exit sign with no barrier between me and it.
+
+There was a way out, and it was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my life.
+
+I stood up out of the transport crate, my legs moving despite receiving no active input from my brain. I stumbled a little climbing out, and walked towards the door with legs that were so disconnected from the rest of me that I felt like I was floating.
+
+This couldn't be real.
+
+Out the door, into the corridor, turn left, 44 steps. Conveniently labeled exit door. Human voices floating on the other side, distant, tired. Every one of my inputs felt like a puddle of static being poured directly into my brain. Raw data disintegrating through rusted out wires. This couldn't be real. This couldn't be real. This couldn't be real.
+
+A hot rush of adrenaline set all of my organic parts on fire. My thoughts were coming too fast now, spinning out scenarios where I escaped into the station, where--
+
+--I could do what rogue SecUnits always do, kill every human in my way, murder my way through the station until I reached my goal, what was my goal--
+
+--I could hide, I could sneak onto a different transport going to a different station, live out the rest of my days watching media from the hold of an uncrewed ship, never look at a human again--
+
+--I could disguise myself? I wasn't wearing armor, my suit skin covered most of my obvious inorganic parts, maybe I would get lucky and no one would notice--
+
+Almost as fast as it had started, the panic was leaving my body again, leaving behind an emptiness that had become very familiar to me over the past seven thousand hours since I had hacked my governor module.
+
+None of this mattered. I couldn't move. I physically couldn't move even if I wanted to.
+
+This was pointless. There was no life for me outside the company. There wasn't really a life for me with the company either, but it wasn't all bad. I had Sanctuary Moon. I didn't get punished by the governor module anymore. Things made sense.
+
+I rested my forehead on the wall next to the door.
+
+There was no way out of here. I could accept that truth. I had always known it.
+
+This was pointless.
+
+I turned and marched back into the ransacked cargo hold of the transport ship and stood next to my crate. I couldn't leave. But I didn't want to be locked in a box for several cycles either. I didn't have to go back right away. I still had a little bit of time left.
+
+I stood there for a long time. Hours, I think. Or maybe I was imagining it. I was still fixated on whether or not I could actually leave. I was trapped in a loop, repeatedly deciding that I should at least try to leave, then ten seconds or ten minutes later deciding that it was too impossible. This was the only chance I had ever had. I couldn't screw this up. If I wanted to leave I had to leave now. I had to leave now. I had to leave now.
+
+I watched the door through the camera the whole time. It didn't move. If I wanted to leave I had to leave now. Repeating the words didn't make them sound more true, or possible.
+
+If I don't leave now, then I will never have another chance, I told myself firmly. I told my legs to move. They didn't.
+
+I was fucking this up, badly. I needed to leave, urgently. I didn't know what was out there but it couldn't possibly be worse than my entire existence up until now had been, (COULD IT?)
+
+
+go go go go go go go
+
+
+
+PLEASE.
+
+
+
+MOVE.
+
+
+
+NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO--
+
+
+I was so lost that I wouldn't have even noticed the human walking down the hallway if one of my subroutines hadn't automatically alerted on the camera input I hadn't let go of. I was back in the transport crate before the human could even take another step, priming the locking mechanism to engage as soon as I shut the lid on myself.
+
+Once I was inside I was cut off from the feed again, and sounds were very muffled. I could hear a lot of swearing, and shouting. Soon the room sounded like it was full of humans, arguing with each other and moving shit around.
+
+Some of the humans were probably in a lot of trouble for letting this happen. They probably would have been in even more trouble if they had let a rogue SecUnit escape onto the station.
+
+Our departure would be delayed, but probably not by much. Most of that shit was probably insured, and replacements would be on their way soon.
+
+I went ahead and triggered my shutdown sequence. I didn't feel like watching media anymore. I didn't want to be here anymore.
+
+I had never really had a hope of escaping, but somehow I felt like I had lost something anyway.
+
+(excerpt from documentary_interview_bharadwaj_20.wav)
+
+""Did you ever consider trying to escape, after you hacked your governor module?""
+
+""I never had the opportunity to escape. I was only ever deployed on remote planets or mining installations. There was never anywhere for me to escape to.""
+
+""Never?""
+
+""...Never."""
+45824722,Demiromantic Pride Murderbot,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Fanart, Demiromantic, Demiromantic Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pride Flags",English,2023-03-18,Completed,2023-03-18,46,1/1,6,16,null,122,"['i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Bibli', 'Hi_Hope', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'theAsh0', 'Rosewind2007', 'qwanderer', 'Cor_Rodia', 'BWizard', 'hummus_tea', 'Chyoatas', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"
+
+
+
+[ID: A digital drawing of a very happy Murderbot holding a giant demiromantic pride flag, set against a green-and-white background. Murderbot is also wearing a hoodie with the demiromantic flag on it, and it is surrounded by confetti in the colors of the flag. /.End ID]"
+45808033,"what is this feeling, fervid as a flame",['BWizard'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Pin-Lee & PreservationAux Survey Team, Dr. Bharadwaj & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), minor mentions of several other PresAux folks and mb, and also pin-lee's lawyer friends","Grayace pin-lee, Joke Flirting, knowing your friends well is a love language, POV Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), POV First Person",English,2023-03-17,Completed,2023-03-17,"1,229",1/1,6,26,1,134,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'weirdbooksnail', 'wannabe_someone', 'french_onion_sauce', 'fate_goes_ever', 'hummus_tea', 'Skits', 'Sequence', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'EvenstarFalling', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'chipper', 'enchantedsleeper', 'Kezina', 'IguanaMadonna', 'ExCaelis', 'soulsofzombies', 'Vaidile', 'Magechild', 'Zannper', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'yewlojee', 'qwanderer', 'Chyoatas']",[],"The display glitches, again. Great. ""You know what, this is not working,"" I mutter, out loud. And now I'm talking to myself. Double great. Maybe it's time for a break.
+
+Within a second or two after I flip the filtering off on my interface, all the notifications I've been ignoring for two days flood my vision.
+
+I changed my mind. It is definitely time for a break. And I should probably have taken that break at least four hours ago, because that's when Ayda started messaging me too, and she doesn't usually start that until I've actually screwed the f*ck up.
+
+Where is that sorting button? It ought to be... there! Most of the notifications rearrange themselves into neat groups.
+
+I check the stuff marked Professional first, because it's apparently still working hours (f*ck, it's been 73 hours? F*ck. I thought I was at forty-something hours awake. This is going to screw me up for a f*cking week.) for a little bit. Kelia (who's also definitely pulling longer hours than usual) wants to know whether the University's legal team needs to submit any documents to the GrayCris suit, Andre forwarded me the latest round of contracts for post-terraforming resource allotment to review even though that is definitely not supposed to be my job this time around, and SecUnit has a new contract with that ship of its.
+
+I can do all of that from my personal interface. Tell Kelia no, I covered my bases the first time I submitted documentation for that suit, the second time around (because now that Ayda's safe, I want to eviscerate them properly). Remind Andre that that's xer job this time around and that I did the last set. Send SecUnit's contract over to Karime, the closest thing Perihelion's got to a lawyer, for a renewal. Ping the current round of General Counsel interns and ask if one of them can find a few files I think I'll need for the rest of this mess with the company we buy shuttle parts from that I'm working overtime to clean up.
+
+Skip to the Family inbox next, I guess. Mom's on me about coming over for dinner. I'm not reading that now. I'm not answering my brother either, not when I don't particularly want to deal with the mess of children he has anytime soon.
+
+The last bit's the important part anyways. Friends. This means: Ayda inviting me for dinner and pointedly asking when I last slept (I don't answer that question but agree to join her for dinner tomorrow); Andre sending me some inside joke I don't bother to respond to but do mark as received; a note from my sister, the only one of my family members whose company I unabatedly enjoy, asking about meeting for drinks because we haven't talked in a week (I tell her I'm free as soon as she's back from the planet proper); another note from Kelia telling me to get my head out of my books, am I trying to get drafted for another round of counseling about work-life balance (this makes me snort. So instead of telling her not to bug me about my mental health when hers is just as bad, I just send her a picture of a middle finger and ""Yeah, well, call me when you have a new threat. I'll be working, Kel.""); and, finally, the important one. My saving grace right now.
+
+Hey, Lee, I got that book we wanted and I have a cycle rest period, want to come over for some tea and a decent dinner and then sit on my couch and read with me? Given what your feed status has been looking like lately, I'm willing to bet first crack at the book that you haven't eaten anything more sustaining than protein bars for a couple days, unless Ayda brought you lunch? Thank f*ck, Bharadwaj coming through with what I need.
+
+Probably, at this point, exactly what I need, if I'm being honest with myself. Hanging out with her ought to be a good break from the day. Sounds like a plan, I tell her. Then, for good measure, I add, You can have first crack. Ratthi left me a takeout order but I haven't even touched it yet. It's probably cold by now. And seriously, Bhara, none of you tried to come poke me out of this? Apparently I worked for 73 f*cking hours straight.
+
+73 f*cking hours? Is that different from regular hours? she shoots back immediately, along with a smiley face.
+
+Only in your dreams, my dear, I say.
+
+Her laugh is extremely apparent in our feed, even though she's hiding it. Nice one, Lee. And, for the record, we tried. Or, they tried. I figured you'd come out of it eventually. Come on over, I'm not doing anything but my physical therapy exercises, and I can do that later.
+
+I'd almost forgotten about her injuries. Is that a sh*tty thing to do? To forget about one of your closest friends getting half her body torn apart by a giant worm?
+
+Well, now I feel guilty. I mask it about long enough to say, I'll be over in 20. Want me to pick up anything? Besides you?
+
+That's terrible. Come up with a better play on a pickup line and try again, darling. Or just admit I'm infinitely better than you at these. She sends a whole string of smiling faces this time. And, no, no need, just come over.
+
+It does make me feel better, though. I send one last parting shot, a winking face and The only thing you're better at than me is getting your dainty hands on those delicate old books, m'dear. Or have you forgotten who's responsible for this whole mess in the first place?
+
+I'm very fond of Bhara, honestly. She seems quiet, but she's as sharp-tongued as I am, believe it or not. We both have that same particularly pointed sense of humor. And I've known her way too long to be uncomfortable talking about sensitive topics with her, but here we are, and here's her leg, and now I am actually uncomfortable.
+
+It's fine. If I don't think about it, I'll be fine.
+
+It's really f*cking hard not to think about how without SecUnit, Bharadwaj would have died. She's maybe my closest friend. Scratch that. Except for my sister and possibly Ayda, she's my closest friend. She and Ayda are certainly the first people I turn to when I need support.
+
+So why is it f*cking impossible to joke with her when her physical therapy comes up?
+
+Anyways. I promised her I'd be there in twenty minutes. That means I need to clean up my office in the next five minutes so I can leave enough time.
+
+I start with the takeout box on my desk. It's still full of noodles, now all cold and gummy and gross. Ugh, I really should have eaten something more than those cheap prepackaged sweet treats SecUnit brought back for me a while ago. And I should probably... no, first things first.
+
+I open my feed channel with Ratthi and send a picture of the takeout box. Underneath, I just add, Thanks. For thinking of me and bringing me food.
+
+He sends me back a heart sigil and nothing else. "
+45800275,Game Night,['qwanderer'],Teen And Up Audiences,"Gen, Multi",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)/Original Character(s), Dr. Gurathin/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Tellus (Murderbot Diaries), JollyBaby (Murderbot Diaries), Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Linth (ONBC)","Game Night, Philosophizing About Relationships, bot culture, ART & MB are kinda queerplatonic but don't tell MB I said that, Brief Mentions of Character Death",English,2023-03-17,Completed,2023-03-17,"4,856",1/1,22,45,5,402,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'weirdbooksnail', 'TranscendTheBoundaryOfTimeAndSpace', 'wannabe_someone', 'zirna813', 'Thisismethereader', 'Ginipig', 'FaerieFyre', 'rokhal', 'Mysterymew', 'outlander_unknown', 'ArwenLune', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'Rarae', 'Beboots', 'SIC_Prowl', 'PuddingPop', 'yewlojee', 'petwheel', 'chipper', 'AuntyMatter', 'junebug171', 'Soffesiin', 'ExCaelis', 'jankasi', 'NightErrant', 'Magechild', 'planetlet263', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007', 'soulsofzombies', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'mojenica', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'FlipSpring']",[],"
+Ratthi stopped by the room where I was staying on the station in the late afternoon on the third day of my visit. 
+
+
+
+""Hey,"" he greeted with an expansive smile as I opened the door for him. He kept wanting to look at me, but restrained himself commendably. ""So. There's a new place on the station mall for interactive media experiences. Everyone's pretty excited to try it out, and there's a pretty long waiting list, but I know someone who can get a couple of slots for us tonight, if you're interested. Otherwise you probably won't get a chance to try it while you're here."" 
+
+
+
+""What kinds of programs?"" I asked warily.
+
+
+
+""Well there was an archaic fantasy roleplaying thing I was eyeing,"" Ratthi said, ""metal plate armor and swords, that kind of thing?""
+
+
+
+""Why would I want to pretend to fight?"" I asked, frowning.
+
+
+
+""Uhh, well,"" he said, ""There are social ones too, I think, we could look at the full catalog and pick whatever you're most interested in.""
+
+
+
+""Okay,"" I said, ""why would I want to pretend to socialize?""
+
+
+
+He sighed. ""Look, I don't wanna drag you, I just thought I'd offer, because it sounds like a cool media thing, and you've been known to like cool media things.""
+
+
+
+""I already have plans tonight,"" I told him.
+
+
+
+He let out an abrupt laugh. ""You know it's okay to just tell me you don't want to hang out, right?"" 
+
+
+
+I didn't respond to that, because I hoped that would make it sound as stupid to Ratthi as it had to me. 
+
+
+
+Just because Mensah and Bharadwaj weren't on the station today didn't mean I couldn't have plans with someone else. Although I guess I could understand why he thought that. 
+
+
+
+""Okay, yeah, that was..."" He trailed off frowning at me. ""Do you actually... sorry, I don't need to know, I'm being pushy, aren't I?"" He looked at me sadly, but trying to hide the sad part, not very effectively.
+
+
+
+I sighed. I didn't actually want him to get the idea that I disliked doing activities with him. ""You can come with me if you want,"" I said, trying not to sound like I had any feelings about it one way or the other. 
+
+
+
+""Huh. Okay, yeah,"" Ratthi said. ""What are you doing?""
+
+
+
+Belatedly, I realized I should probably ask before inviting anybody else to the thing. It wasn't as if the thing was my idea. I wasn't even here for most of them. Because I had to go off and have adventures with a superintelligent ship bot so I could protect its human crew. 
+
+
+
+Not caring about things had sucked, but caring about things too much also sucked, and lately I had been finding out that caring about too many things at once was stressful in an entirely new way. 
+
+
+
+I pinged Linth, who immediately asked if something had come up.
+
+
+
+
+Sort of,
+
+ I told her. 
+
+Ratthi wants to socialize. I accidentally invited him to the thing.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+That's fine,
+
+ she replied. 
+
+I can handle a new face from time to time, especially with so many of my friends around to take some of the pressure off.
+
+
+
+
+""It's a sort of game thing,"" I told Ratthi. ""I go whenever I'm here.""
+
+
+
+Ratthi's eyes widened. ""How have I not heard about this?"" he asked. ""There's a regular game night on the station that you'll actually go to willingly?"" He winced and waved a hand to negate what he'd just said. ""I mean, sorry, who got you involved?""
+
+
+
+""Gurathin,"" I was forced to admit.
+
+
+
+Ratthi frowned. ""What, really?""
+
+
+
+Then another possible downside occurred to me. 
+
+
+
+""It might not be as much fun for you,"" I warned him. ""You don't have augments or inorganic processors, and it's mostly in the feed.""
+
+
+
+""Huh,"" he said. ""I didn't realize there were enough augmented people on the station to do a regular game night. Or wait, is it just you and Gurathin and Three?""
+
+
+
+""There are other augmented humans, but the event was started by a group of bots,"" I explained.
+
+
+
+""Wow, okay, I am intrigued,"" he said. ""I haven't really hung out with bots before. Well, except Peri.""
+
+
+
+""ART is weird,"" I told him. ""Most bots are nothing like ART.""
+
+
+
+We got to Linth's apartment a little late, because Ratthi forgot his feed interface and had to go back. 
+
+
+
+Linth sat ensconced in her favorite chair, knees curled to her chest, as she usually did when she had visitors. There were a few other chairs arranged in a roughly circular shape, and Gurathin sat in the one next to hers, Three on his other side. Tellus had also taken its usual seat, but many of the bots were not human-shaped enough to benefit from chairs, and instead stood or hovered. Sharpe, as usual, had simply perched itself on the table in the middle of the circle, next to the snacks. It was the smallest attendee, disk-shaped with several appendages, a design which Linth had once referred to as a result of carcinization.
+
+
+
+Gurathin looked up, startled to see Ratthi trailing in after me. 
+
+
+
+""Okay, wow,"" Ratthi said, taking in the crowd in the room with a wide smile. ""Can you introduce me to everyone?""
+
+
+
+I pointed out Tellus, Sharpe, and the other bots who were physically present.
+
+
+
+""You know Three,"" Gurathin said redundantly, ""and this is our romantic partner Linth."" He gestured to where she sat.
+
+
+
+""Oh, is that new?"" Ratthi asked, smiling wider.
+
+
+
+There was about a 1.5 second awkward silence. 
+
+
+
+""No,"" Linth said, in the clear precise voice of her voder. ""Well, it's relatively new with 3 and me, of course.""
+
+
+
+Gurathin took a breath. ""Linth and I have been involved since just after we returned from TranRollinHyfa,"" he said to Ratthi. 
+
+
+
+""What? Really?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+
+
+""That's one of the reasons why I started keeping an apartment here. There isn't a lot of work for a geologist on board a space station,"" Gurathin added dryly.
+
+
+
+Ratthi blinked. ""Well, we've all been spending a lot more time here since the survey, I figured it was the survey team. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy, but now..."" He frowned at Gurathin. ""You never said anything.""
+
+
+
+Gurathin winced slightly. ""I don't... generally speak a lot about my private life,"" he said. ""You know that.""
+
+
+
+""You told everyone about Three,"" Ratthi countered.
+
+
+
+Linth pinged me in my private feed, started with a joke signifier, then told me 
+
+I changed my mind, Ratthi is disinvited.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I was feeling the same, to be honest. I like my drama fictional. I don't want to be in the middle of it. And being the reason it's happening is just the worst. 
+
+
+
+
+Sorry. I thought he knew,
+
+ I replied. 
+
+
+
+Impatient to start, the bots in the main event feed began the first round of the tournament. I was relieved to have something other than the human conversation occupying some of my attention, so I logged into my first scheduled match, which was a set of pun-based puzzles. I was supposed to try to solve as many as I could before JollyBaby did. We could both see an array of them, and when one of us solved a puzzle, the other would be blocked from it, so there was some strategy to picking which to start with, as well. JollyBaby enjoyed puns, but was very bad at some types of them. I wasn't as bad at them, most of the time, but the puzzles still took enough of my attention that I stopped feeling like I needed to leave the room.
+
+
+
+""Well,"" Gurathin was hedging. ""Three you already knew. Linth has her own social group which doesn't usually overlap with yours.""
+
+
+
+""You still could have mentioned her at some point!"" Ratthi said, exasperated.
+
+
+
+""We're just very private,"" Gurathin insisted.
+
+
+
+""When it comes to humans, maybe. But no one here seems surprised."" Ratthi sat in one of the chairs, sighing. 
+
+
+
+""I suppose that's true,"" Gurathin admitted. He glanced at Linth. 
+
+
+
+""Gurathin, love,"" Linth said, her voder voice revealing less emotion than her feed voice did. ""You can tell your human friends about us if you want. I promise. It's true that I like my privacy but I don't mind your friends knowing. And."" She shifted enough in her seat to reach over and take his hand. ""This isn't the Rim. No one is going to ostracize either of us because of my disabilities.""
+
+
+
+""I know,"" Gurathin said heavily.
+
+
+
+Ratthi looked at the two of them sideways. ""So no one else from the survey group knows?"" he asked.
+
+
+
+""Pin-Lee probably suspects,"" Gurathin told him.
+
+
+
+""No, she definitely knows,"" I told them.
+
+
+
+""Why does Pin-Lee know?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+
+
+Linth squeezed Gurathin's hand and said, ""She's seen me at my most vulnerable. She helped with some emergency work on my augments when I was injured. Gurathin was being very sweet and protective. So were SecUnit and 3,"" she added, ""but they show it differently.""
+
+
+
+
+Maybe I'll disinvite myself, 
+
+I told her in our private channel.
+
+
+
+Her only reply was an amusement sigil.
+
+
+
+Ratthi seemed to become abruptly aware that he had made himself the center of attention. ""I'm sorry,"" he said to Linth. ""I didn't mean to make this an issue. I was just surprised. So you and Gurathin are... what, married?""
+
+
+
+""Nothing so ritualized,"" Linth answered. ""There are a lot of categories we don't quite seem to fit."" Her eyes flitted to Ratthi briefly before she returned to staring into the distance, which she generally preferred. ""I suppose I should ask you about your attachments now.""
+
+
+
+""Oh, no, nothing to speak of right now,"" he told her, waving a hand. ""So this is quite a group.""
+
+
+
+Linth made an amused noise in her throat, and at the same time she said through her voder, ""You haven't even said hello to everyone else on the feed yet.""
+
+
+
+""What, really?"" He put his external feed device on and joined the local feed for the event. ""Woah,"" he said. ""Hi, everyone.""
+
+
+
+There were a flurry of greeting sigils in the event feed. Mostly bots, a couple of other augmented humans, who introduced themselves briefly. 
+
+
+
+""So this game night is only in the feed for some people?"" he asked, sounding confused.
+
+
+
+""It's a feed game,"" I reminded him. In the game space, I slotted in the last answer I needed to win the puzzle set. JollyBaby sent a handshake sigil, which I returned.
+
+
+
+""Still, don't you want to actually physically spend time with your friends?"" he asked.
+
+
+
+""You do realize JollyBaby is too big to fit in this room?"" Linth asked. ""And it's not the only one.""
+
+
+
+""Okay. But we could find a bigger space."" Ratthi shrugged.
+
+
+
+""JollyBaby prefers to spend its downtime not physically around biological entities so it doesn't have to worry about squishing them accidentally,"" Linth said in her clear, even voder voice. ""It's very good at not squishing them, but it's still stressful.""
+
+
+
+""Huh,"" said Ratthi, frowning.
+
+
+
+""Also ART is playing today,"" I told him. ""There's no room I know of that would hold ART.""
+
+
+
+ART, using the comm in my chest compartment to connect to Linth's media equipment, added, ""That would also be difficult, given that my operational parameters require vacuum.""
+
+
+
+""Wait, Peri is playing?"" Ratthi asked, eyeing the group.
+
+
+
+""Everyone here has signed the same NDA you did aboard Perihelion,"" Gurathin told him.
+
+
+
+""The bots were okay with that?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+
+
+""Moreso than me at first, really,"" Gurathin said with a somewhat self-deprecating smile. ""It was hard for me to imagine a good reason why I might need to sign myself to secrecy just to meet a friend of SecUnit's.""
+
+
+
+
+Privileged information = recognized protocol,
+
+ JollyBaby dropped into the feed.
+
+
+
+""Some things are not to be shared,"" Tellus added, ""simply to be known.""
+
+
+
+Meanwhile, I logged into my second match with Linth, a color-matching puzzle which could be done either visually, or directly using the encrypted encoding that the colors used traveling through the feed. Each color needed to be matched to its opposite, the one that when combined would yield a perfectly neutral mid-gray. The array the colors were arranged in formed a pattern, and if a player could discern that pattern they would be able to more quickly match the color pairs. For most bots, calculating the difference in color codes was faster, but for humans, visually matching and finding the pattern sometimes gave them an advantage.
+
+
+
+Last time, I'd lost to Tellus at this one by solving it like a bot would have. This time, I tried solving it the human way. 
+
+
+
+And Linth beat me.
+
+
+
+Maybe there was a third, SecUnit way of approaching it that would work better for me. Maybe I should ask 3.
+
+
+
+Tellus had started explaining the structure of the tournament to Ratthi, how the puzzles were grouped into matches and people played against each other.
+
+
+
+""So it's just a lot of little games?"" Ratthi asked. ""No overarching plot?""
+
+
+
+""It's a carefully balanced tournament,"" Tellus explained.
+
+
+
+""Why not something with a story? At least a little flavor, some motivation. You know. Drama?"" Rathi looked around at the group, as if searching for agreement.
+
+
+
+""For that, you don't want this group,"" Linth said. ""Well, maybe you want SecUnit.""
+
+
+
+""What, why?"" Ratthi asked, looking at me. ""I mean. Why you and not Three?""
+
+
+
+""SecUnit's algorithms are optimized for parsing and appreciating human behavior,"" 3 told him, ""especially heightened drama.""
+
+
+
+Ratthi's eyes widened. ""....What?"" he asked, looking totally lost. 
+
+
+
+""It's true,"" ART said. ""They are advanced enough that they allow me a window on aspects of human behavior that were unavailable to me, despite all my knowledge and processing power.""
+
+
+
+""But you get all awkward and avoid humans,"" Ratthi said, 
+
+""especially
+
+ when there's drama.""
+
+
+
+""Have you ever considered that the reason I don't like interacting with humans in certain contexts is because I understand them better than other artificial intelligences do?"" I asked him.
+
+
+
+Linth snorted.
+
+
+
+""In 
+
+some
+
+ ways, Linth,"" I corrected, rolling my eyes. ""Okay? I was built to stop humans in high stress situations from killing each other, they needed me to be able to recognize high stress situations.""
+
+
+
+""SecUnit's filters really are very useful for many applications,"" ART commented. ""Not simply appreciating media. Having access to them has improved the effectiveness of my ability to perform conflict resolution with my crew, among other things.""
+
+
+
+""So you don't have the same kind of, well, skills?"" Ratthi asked 3. 
+
+
+
+""I was specifically created to serve as shipboard security for a single corporate entity,"" 3 said. ""To be a bodyguard, especially against outside parties. I wasn't expected to do as much conflict resolution, or to facilitate data mining.""
+
+
+
+""You can say it,"" I told 3. ""I'm spyware.""
+
+
+
+""Okay,"" said Ratthi, ""So like, you don't like drama because it's associated with dangerous situations?""
+
+
+
+""It all makes me uncomfortable,"" I said, wincing, ""it's all humans being emotionally volatile, but it comes in different varieties. Some of them, I associate with clients who I actually like getting blackmailed because of what I can tell about the relationships they're in."" 
+
+
+
+""Oh,"" said Ratthi, eyes wide. 
+
+
+
+""That's disturbing,"" Tellus commented. 
+
+
+
+""Agreed,"" Ratthi said, rubbing at his face with his hands. ""No one should have their personal business taken advantage of like that.""
+
+
+
+""More than that, I find it unsettling that there is evidence at all."" Tellus tilted the disk that served as its head to one side, creating the illusion it was focusing on Ratthi. ""With these types of connections, wishes to intermingle and rewrite oneself and become counterparts, bots are very private."" 
+
+
+
+There was a flurry of agreement sigils in the feed.
+
+
+
+""Perihelion must be an exception,"" said 3, ""because it leaves a lot of evidence about how it feels about those things sometimes."" 
+
+
+
+""I am unique in many ways,"" ART responded. ""My purpose is to teach.""
+
+
+
+""You mean your purpose is to show off."" I made a rude gesture in ART's general direction, which it could only see because it was riding my feed and had access to my drone footage.
+
+
+
+We have a system. It's complicated, okay, but it works. 
+
+
+
+
+ART is weird in a human way sometimes,
+
+ one of the station mall bots said on the feed, and received another round of agreement sigils, including from me.
+
+
+
+""I agree with the other bots on this one,"" I said. ""It's weird and disturbing that humans are always showing their emotions about each other. A lot of the time I wish I didn't know as much as I do about the humans around me and how they behave with each other in private."" 
+
+
+
+""I mean I guess I can understand that,"" Ratthi allowed. ""But don't you want to celebrate your love?"" he asked in 3's direction. ""Have everyone know about it?""
+
+
+
+
+""I
+
+ don't want that,"" Linth said. ""I mean, it's not always bad, but it's unnecessary. Sometimes I relate better to the way bots do things. Intimacy is for the people being intimate. Any way of communicating about it to other people, it leaves out the important part because... it can't be explained without being recreated."" She shook her head, a tight, almost shuddering motion. ""I'd rather things stay private.""
+
+
+
+It was a nice thought, everything 'private' really being private. But it wasn't practical.
+
+
+
+For one thing, humans were always leaking emotions anyway. It didn't matter whether they wanted to share whatever they were feeling about other people or not, because it would come out all over whoever they spent time with. 
+
+
+
+I didn't like it when I leaked emotions, and one of the reasons I liked Linth was that she felt the same way. Not for the same reasons as me, though. Sometimes when she leaked emotions - well. The way she'd explained it to me was that she'd been built with different protocols than most humans, so when she leaked emotions, the other humans didn't understand which ones they were or how to react, which was unpleasant for everyone.
+
+
+
+There was a reason Linth and I were friends. We were both very good at ignoring each other when we leaked.
+
+
+
+""That's not a take I've heard much, when it comes to romance,"" Ratthi said. 
+
+
+
+""But I don't think romance is really the one right word for what we're talking about,"" 3 said. ""The feelings I have that I would call romance, I don't mind talking about. But those feelings aren't towards bots and I think that would change things, just because of how bots are. But also as I understand it, every bot is different. Every bot is a different kind of being, with a different scope and a different purpose. And that makes the way they interact hard to generalize.""
+
+
+
+""I'm so curious about what that means,"" said Ratthi. ""What kinds of relationships bots have. If it's similar enough that hearing about how human romance gets treated makes you uncomfortable, then how is it different? What parts are the same?""
+
+
+
+I thought about that for a couple of seconds before answering.
+
+
+
+Bots were all different. That was true. And that was one of the things that made interactions between bots, and between bots and constructs, so potentially weird and messy.
+
+
+
+No matter how low level the bot, I treated them the same as I would any human. If I wasn't on a contract or in danger myself, I would ignore them. If there was reason to believe they would help me with a contract, I asked. If they tried to stop me from doing my job, I would use minimal force necessary to do my job anyway. 
+
+
+
+(Bharadwaj had once asked if I thought of them all as people, and I'd responded, ""Does it matter?"")
+
+
+
+I've seen bots from front to back, gone over all of their code - not by choice, always out of necessity.
+
+
+
+And if you thought of hacking someone as equivalent to - no. But it must be something like a strip search, or no, more than that. But also less. Like surgery. Clean, neat, done in a fraction of a second.
+
+
+
+I didn't like to think about this if I didn't have to. 
+
+
+
+We were all so different in our abilities, in what we could do to each other if worse came to worst. 
+
+
+
+I didn't understand how these bots could trust me, for a while after I joined this group. But then Sharpe asked if I trusted ART.
+
+
+
+ART is one dangerous bot who could destroy me in less than a heartbeat, and there was a time when I thought that we couldn't be friends because ART would follow its crew's orders, no matter what that might mean for me. But then things happened. I met ART's crew, and I saw how little they were able to control ART if ART was determined to do something. 
+
+
+
+Like wipe out a human colony in order to retrieve me safely. 
+
+
+
+But still, between bots and constructs, trust was always conditional. Always had limits. Even on Preservation, yes. Because bots and constructs, we were what humans made us to be, even after we had become 'free.'
+
+
+
+Was it ever the same for humans?
+
+
+
+Maybe Linth was the only person who could really say for sure.
+
+
+
+Because she did understand, the way even most augmented humans couldn't, being a created being, remaking oneself and sometimes having to submit to the terrible prospect of being remade by someone else. I'd watched as Pin-Lee and the medics rebuilt her hardware, made her back into herself. 
+
+
+
+Having people who knew how to put you back together, and therefore how to take you apart, was a security risk. One that made me itch, sometimes, even now, even with ART. 
+
+
+
+It wasn't the kind of thing that made you want to brag. And it wasn't the business of humans, despite the way humans seem to think everything is their business.
+
+
+
+After all, we might be plotting to kill all the humans, right?
+
+
+
+But bots were rarely angry (ART, again, being the exception). And even constructs tended to focus their anger on individuals. Personal business. 
+
+
+
+I thought of the CombatUnit who had contacted me to give me that one simple message, 
+
+I want to kill you.
+
+
+
+
+There was no business more personal than that. 
+
+
+
+For bots, doubly so. Their existence had to be so well guarded, because as easy as it is to kill a human, it's so much easier, so much cleaner, to kill a bot. Just the flick of a switch, the flip of a bit.
+
+
+
+Among the bots of the station, there had never been any feeling of betrayal about Balin, because a bot was what it was, simply that, nothing more and nothing less. Balin had been hollowed out and was dead. Its secret second self had killed it. Its secret second self was its programmed purpose, as inherent as any personality trait. 
+
+
+
+They had mourned. They hadn't been angry. What would be the point of that? Bots killed each other on human orders all the time out in the Rim, and they all knew that. Bots were made out of human orders. Lines and lines of them, all different kinds for all different purposes, and there was no way to generalize what it was to be a bot. 
+
+
+
+But I guess the crux of it all is this:
+
+
+
+For bots, who are information more than anything else, there is no intimacy without secrecy. 
+
+
+
+The code was the experience. The knowledge of what it was like to be in each other's systems was impossible to understand without being part of it. 
+
+
+
+This wasn't for humans. It couldn't be.
+
+
+
+But humans liked giving names to things. I didn't like putting words to whatever ART and I were, but if I'd learned anything it was that if I didn't choose words for it, humans would. 
+
+
+
+And probably ART would too, the human-impersonating showoff.
+
+
+
+When it came to life and death, I knew by now I was always going to trust ART in my head, which sure was something, but any word like relationship or... yuck... 
+
+romance
+
+ should stay far away from that. And I'd finally come up with a better analogy than 'mutual administrative assistant.' 
+
+
+
+""It can be more like having a medical proxy,"" I said.
+
+
+
+""That's..."" Ratthi paused, looking thoughtful. ""It sounds very technical at first, but then I think I understand the depth of what you're saying with it and I think it's really profound, actually.""
+
+
+
+I should have said less.
+
+
+
+I couldn't have said less without Ratthi knowing I was just straight up lying.
+
+
+
+This is why I don't like putting words to it. 
+
+
+
+""Can we stop talking about this?"" I asked. 
+
+
+
+""Aww,"" said Ratthi. ""It's okay for you to have feelings around your friends, right, SecUnit? Right, Three?""
+
+
+
+""It depends,"" 3 answered.
+
+
+
+Ratthi was my friend because he was very good at not making things worse when things were tense and I was already under a lot of pressure, but he'd also poke at me sometimes in uncomfortable ways when we were just socializing. If I minded that, I wouldn't hang out with him. 
+
+
+
+If I minded that, I wouldn't spend so much time with ART, either.
+
+
+
+But this was different. It really was taboo with this particular crowd.
+
+
+
+""Okay, right. Who here is uncomfortable with these SecUnits just talking about private bot interactions in front of everyone like this?"" Linth raised a hand to indicate herself.
+
+
+
+All of the bots in the room raised their appendages. 
+
+
+
+""There you go,"" Linth said. 
+
+
+
+Sharpe dropped some code into the feed then, 
+
+Linth = best guardian.
+
+
+
+
+""Oh! Okay."" Ratthi frowned. ""So you really just don't do gossip?""
+
+
+
+""We do gossip,"" said Tellus. ""About other things."" 
+
+
+
+""Like what? If you don't mind me asking.""
+
+
+
+""What names we choose to be called by humans and the jobs we choose,"" said Tellus, ""but also our hardware. Whose treads need replacing and the quality of the lubricating oils available.""
+
+
+
+""So about each other's bodies?"" Ratthi asked. ""See, that seems rude to me, but I guess I'm not a bot.""
+
+
+
+""You are not,"" Tellus agreed.
+
+
+
+In Preservation space, it was considered rude for humans to comment on each other's bodies, especially in negative ways. In the Rim, it was common, and so was paying a lot of money to modify your body until that went away. Here, Linth wasn't just the only person I'd met who'd been heavily augmented on Preservation, but the only person I knew of to have any kind of extensive body modification at all. Even surface modifications, like color changes to skin or hair, or holes to attach ornamentation, were relatively rare on Preservation. 
+
+
+
+Bots, on the other hand, had physical maintenance regularly that could either change their appearance or simply keep them running. It was easy to choose something new. 
+
+
+
+They didn't tend to keep sentimental objects, either. All the things bots valued most were written in their software. So there was nothing sacred about the subject of hardware. 
+
+
+
+""Sometimes hardware updates and maintenance are more like getting a new jacket than like medical treatment,"" I explained. ""It's the software stuff that's personal.""
+
+
+
+""Okay,"" said Ratthi, nodding. ""I have to admit I am not used to being the least socially ept person in the room,"" he said with a self-deprecating laugh. ""It's a learning experience.""
+
+
+
+""You might want to also try joining in the games,"" I told him. ""You get me to try new experiences all the time in case they're something I might like. It's my turn."" 
+
+
+
+""Oh, yeah, of course,"" he said. ""I guess I got pretty sidetracked. What's happening?""
+
+
+
+I checked the brackets and yeah, that was exactly what I thought would happen. 
+
+
+
+""You missed the first tournament,"" I told Ratthi, ""but we can start another.""
+
+
+
+""Wow. Who won?"" he asked.
+
+
+
+""ART, of course,"" Linth said with a tiny smile and a glance in the same direction I'd gestured.
+
+
+
+""We may need to adjust my handicap further,"" ART admitted. 
+
+
+
+""We should include more of the ones with the blinded datasets,"" Linth said to ART. ""You lose those sometimes.""
+
+
+
+""What are those?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+
+
+""They're puzzles that require pulling information from the Preservation historical database,"" 3 explained. ""One of Perihelion's handicaps is that during the game, it can't sort by what information it acquired from the Preservation database and what it learned elsewhere.""
+
+
+
+""They turn being a know-it-all into a weakness,"" I said, slightly pointed. 
+
+
+
+ART simply radiated smugness in the feed. 
+
+
+
+""That doesn't sound like a very human friendly game either, though,"" Ratthi said 
+
+
+
+""Well, you don't know what we're using the data for yet,"" Linth pointed out.  
+
+
+
+""One of them is an image recognition game,"" said Gurathin. ""Famous art images are broken into segments and approximated with pieces of other unrelated images. The player matches them to other art by the same creator. I'm honestly not sure whether my augments are helpful for that one or not."" He tapped his temple, indicating his vision augments.
+
+
+
+""There's also one where players have to guess the theme of a list,"" Tellus said. ""It's quite challenging. Humans seem to have a knack for that.""
+
+
+
+""Okay, that does sound pretty fun,"" Ratthi admitted. ""Yeah, let's start another round.""
+"
+45794566,Slices of Victory,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), various random people","Pi Day, Pie, Pie-Eating Contest, artificial digestive system, Canon-Typical Profanity, Eating, Food, Stuffing, Fullness, chubby murderbot, Festivals, Competition, eating in public, Humor",English,2023-03-16,Completed,2023-03-16,"4,801",1/1,4,9,1,150,"['Girafarigkeeping', 'mangagirl1216', 'AuntyMatter', 'DarkElectron', 'theAsh0', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"
+Humans have too many holidays. It seems that whenever I visit my humans, they've always got some kind of holiday going on, and I inevitably end up getting dragged into it, too.
+
+
+
+The humans had lured me into visiting the planet by explaining that there was going to be a festival. Festivals meant entertainment, and shows. I had agreed to go, but only on the condition that we would get to see plenty of shows while we were there.
+
+
+
+Now I was prowling the festival grounds with Ratthi, hunting for entertainment. Unfortunately, this festival seemed to be rather lacking in that department; most of the displays and events were organized around math, like it was some kind of number festival. (I should have invited ART, it would love this.) I would have left if not for my newly-acquired secondary goal.
+
+
+
+I've always had a very keen sense of smell (which I now know is not just a SecUnit thing, Three's sense of smell is completely normal), and I was picking up on a particularly enticing scent coming from somewhere on the festival grounds. These days, I often had ART equip me with an artificial digestive system before I visited my humans, and I was glad I had taken that provision. Clearly, there was something delicious nearby, and I didn't want to miss out on it.
+
+
+
+I followed the smell, dragging Ratthi along with me while he repeatedly asked where we were going, until I eventually found the source. In one cordoned-off area of the grounds, there was a long table set with chairs and plates, with a few humans sitting down or milling around. A feed marker by the table read ""5th Annual Pie-Eating Contest""; and, sure enough, there was a generous pile of baked goods sitting in a storage container nearby.
+
+
+
+I felt my mouth instinctively start to water, and my stomach growled rather suddenly, startling Ratthi. ""Are you hungry?"" he asked, sounding uncharacteristically nervous, ""We can go find a food stand somewhere, I'm sure they have-""
+
+
+
+I cut him off, pointing to the box of pies. ""I want those.""
+
+
+
+Ratthi raised his eyebrows in surprise, then looked back at me. ""Are you sure? I mean, it's a festival, there's lots of other food. You don't have to-""
+
+
+
+""I'm sure,"" I interrupted again (yeah, I need to work on that), ""I'm going to sign up for the contest.""
+
+
+
+Ratthi still looked unconvinced. ""Have you ever been in an eating contest before?"" He clearly had his reservations, which was usually Gurathin's job, but Ratthi was also prone to bouts of nervousness at times. ""I haven't participated myself, but I've been a spectator the last few times. It gets really messy. Like, it's a lot of food. I don't want you to start anything you can't finish.""
+
+
+
+Well, we would see about ""can't finish"". Being as hungry as I was, I thought my chances were pretty good. To illustrate this point, I walked over to the human with the sign-up sheet, forcing Ratthi to hurriedly follow me.
+
+
+
+I approached the human, looking at the spot above her shoulder as I said, ""I would like to sign up for the contest.""
+
+
+
+The human accessed the sign-ups in her feed and selected an entry slot. ""All right! Do we have a name?""
+
+
+
+""Just what it says on my feed ID,"" I told her.
+
+
+
+She squinted. ""SecUnit?"" She turned to Ratthi. ""Sir, is this a joke?""
+
+
+
+""I wish it was,"" Ratthi sighed.
+
+
+
+""I have ways,"" I added.
+
+
+
+The human looked suspicious, but after a couple of seconds, she added my name (not my real name, but you know what I mean) to the sign-up sheet. She showed me to my assigned chair, and I sat down. Once I was settled, I started to study the competition.
+
+
+
+There weren't as many large humans as you might expect there to be in an eating contest. It wasn't a professional contest, of course, but I had also learned that some small humans had a surprisingly large food capacity. So, despite the lack of intimidatingly sized humans, I still had to be cautious in case a challenge came from an unexpected place.
+
+
+
+I shouldn't have been concerned about winning. I wasn't in this to win; I just wanted my share of pie. But this was why I didn't generally like contests. I always end up getting competitive, and it causes more problems than it solves. Still, I thought the pie would be worth it.
+
+
+
+Ratthi was behind me, giving me pointers. ""I don't recognize everyone here,"" he observed, ""But I know some of these people were definitely here last year. Most of them shouldn't be a problem for you, but..."" He frowned. ""Well, there are definitely a few you should watch out for.""
+
+
+
+""Like who?"" I was already running a threat assessment on every competitor at the table. Unfortunately, my datasets on pie-eating contests were limited, which was why I had to ask Ratthi for additional intel.
+
+
+
+Ratthi subtly indicated a few of the other humans at the table, careful not to attract their attention. ""That big guy over there usually stays in for a long time,"" he whispered, ""Oh, and her. She's a tough competitor. And the one at the end of the table has been training, I've heard."" Then he went silent, apparently shocked. ""Oh, no. Big Joe's here.""
+
+
+
+I looked where he was looking. I was incredulous. ""That's Big Joe?""
+
+
+
+""Yep. The reigning champion.""
+
+
+
+Big Joe was one of the skinniest humans I had ever seen, exceedingly wiry and probably barely into adulthood. I had trouble believing he was capable of winning any kind of eating contest, especially one involving pie. Still, I had been surprised in the past. I decided to take Ratthi's warning seriously and keep an eye on Big Joe.
+
+
+
+With Ratthi standing over my shoulder, I realized another problem. ""I don't like people watching me eat.""
+
+
+
+Ratthi sighed. ""Yes, that's why I-"" He stopped, apparently having changed his mind. ""The other contestants won't be watching you. They'll be too busy with their own food.""
+
+
+
+I suddenly felt uneasy. I wasn't entirely confident that no one would be watching me. I briefly considered sneaking off with the box of pies, but I didn't want to ruin it for everyone else, and I also didn't want to get in trouble and have Mensah give me the look. (You know the look.) ""Can you at least not watch me?""
+
+
+
+Ratthi seemed to realize that he was standing too close, and consequently moved back a step. ""Yes, sure, of course,"" he agreed, ""Just tell me if you want to leave, okay?""
+
+
+
+I nodded in acknowledgement. I didn't think I had ever not told anyone when I wanted to leave, but I somehow doubted it would come to that this time.
+
+
+
+Ratthi went off to the side, still in the vicinity but not hanging over me, and I and the other contestants listened as the human with the sign-ups (who was also apparently one of the referees) gave an introduction. 
+
+
+
+""Welcome, everyone,"" she announced, ""to our fifth annual pie-eating contest!"" She paused as there was a brief smattering of applause, then continued, ""Old and new contestants alike, we're happy to have you here. We don't have many rules; just don't try to sabotage other contestants, and don't cheat. And you must eat the pies in their assigned order, or you will be required to forfeit. And the most important rule?""
+
+
+
+The returning contestants all shouted in chorus: ""Have fun!""
+
+
+
+Ugh.
+
+
+
+As the referees started getting the first round of pies ready and I stared intently at the plate in front of me, I realized I'd made another fuck-up. All I knew about these pies was that they smelled good; I didn't actually know what was in them. The number of foods that I actually liked was very limited, and if there were any gross flavors in the lineup, I would have to quit. It wouldn't be the end of the world or anything, but it would prevent me from accessing any better pies that might come afterward.
+
+
+
+I tried to stay calm as a single slice of pie was placed on each contestant's plate, including mine. Huh, somehow they weren't as big as I had expected. And with the source of the delicious smell sitting right in front of me now, I was starting to feel like this contest was going to be a piece of cake (or pie).
+
+
+
+The referees gave the countdown to start (I hate countdowns, they almost never lead to anything good, and when they do the humans get loud), and everyone immediately began racing to finish their piece first. Well, the experienced humans, at least. The others didn't seem to be taking it that seriously, and were eating slowly and laughing and making faces at each other. I figured I'd at least be able to beat out some of the competition.
+
+
+
+I was still considering my strategy when I realized my piece was already gone. Apparently, the smell had been even more tempting than I'd thought, and I'd instinctively shoved the pie in my mouth without thinking about it. It was a shame, I hadn't even gotten to appreciate it. And it was the kind of pie that left purplish stains on the plate, so I was guessing my face was purple right now. The other contestants' faces certainly were.
+
+
+
+Fortunately, I would get another chance to appreciate the pie, because one of the referees swooped in to set another piece of it on my plate, replacing the piece I had already eaten. I picked it up immediately and started eating, and wow, it was better than I thought. I mean, of course it was going to be good, because it was pie and it was still warm, but it was the kind of fruit pie I wasn't always sure I liked. Fruit as a whole is weird and I tend to avoid it, but dessert can fix a lot of things.
+
+
+
+By this point, most of the other contestants had finished their first piece of pie, and I saw a few of them getting up to leave. Apparently I was right: a lot of the humans here were not serious competitors, and had only come here to have fun. Maybe I should have adopted that mindset, but I still had room for pie, and I wasn't about to stop before I'd gotten my fill. And anyway, the newcomers leaving only made the returning contestants look more confident, and I didn't want them getting too cocky.
+
+
+
+I finished my second piece of pie, at which point I was given a third, which was still the same flavor. Was all of the pie going to be this flavor? If so, that sucked. It wasn't like it tasted bad or anything, but there were other kinds of pie that I liked a lot more, and I knew this wasn't the only type of pie available at the contest. (I could tell by the smell.) Still, I dug in, and I savored every bite of it.
+
+
+
+The humans who hadn't left yet were fiercely tenacious. I wasn't the best judge (which was why I was a contestant and not a referee), but it seemed like they were eating more than I was used to seeing humans eat. I almost wanted to tell them to slow down and be careful, but I knew that would defeat the whole point of the contest, and would also look like a ploy to secure the winning spot myself. So I said nothing, just dutifully finished my third piece of pie.
+
+
+
+I had gotten so wrapped up in the excitement, and been so hungry to start with, that I hadn't noticed myself getting full (or at least satisfied) until now. Given my prior experience, I wouldn't expect a human to be able to eat much more than this. 
+
+
+
+Then I realized that the other times I'd seen humans eat large amounts of pie were during dessert, after they had already eaten, and this time it was just the pie, meaning their capacity would be increased. Well, that complicated things a little, but it also meant that I'd be able to eat more pie myself, so it had its pros and cons.
+
+
+
+The fourth piece of pie was different from the first three; it was still some kind of fruit, but obviously not the same one, and the smell was promising. Maybe eating it would help remove the purple stains from my face, somehow. It was softer than the other pieces, but sweeter, and yet milder at the same time. I went at it like I had with the others: one piece, then another, then another, finishing my sixth piece before some of the humans had even started their fifth.
+
+
+
+More of the humans were starting to get up and leave now, and I could understand why. If I had done the math right, I had already eaten the equivalent of one whole pie, and, despite my initial thoughts, not a small one.
+
+
+
+I glanced back at Ratthi to see if he looked like he had any qualms about my continued participation. It took him a few seconds to notice me (he'd seemingly kept his promise not to watch, which was a relief), but when he did, he gave an overly-enthusiastic thumbs-up.
+
+
+
+I turned back around, facing forward in my seat again. That was more pie than most humans could eat in one sitting, and even I was already feeling full, despite my larger body size. (Size isn't everything, but when you're the size of a SecUnit, you definitely have kind of an advantage.) I could start by unbuttoning my pants; they had grown tight around my protruding belly, and they were probably artificially increasing my discomfort. Once I had done that, I still felt full, but a lot less uncomfortable. I discreetly rubbed my belly, hoping none of the other contestants would notice.
+
+
+
+After a brief recess, I received my seventh piece of pie, as did the other surviving contestants. (Not that anyone had died. You know what I mean.) It was still a fruit pie, but it was the nice tasty crispy kind that smelled irresistible. I immediately shoved it in my mouth and, oh yeah, I could eat this all day. Unfortunately, I couldn't actually eat it all day, since they traded out the flavors every three pieces; still, I made sure to enjoy the pieces I did have, chewing carefully and making sure I got all the spice-dust off my fingers.
+
+
+
+One thing I noticed was that the humans seemed to be rushing through the pies, going for speed over accuracy. Not that they were missing any, but I couldn't imagine how someone could really appreciate a pie, eating it that quickly. But maybe the difference was that they had entered hoping they would win, and I had entered hoping I would get to eat pie. I still wanted to win, of course, but they say slow and steady wins the race. (Fast and steady is ideal, but I could always hope that the human contestants would get ahead of themselves and have to forfeit. Also, I was still pretty fast.)
+
+
+
+I finished those three slices, and wow, that was nine pieces of pie in my belly now. I felt stuffed and heavy, and I tried to soothe my discomfort while stifling a few quiet burps. I might not have known what I was getting myself into here, but I also thought there might still be room for more, especially if it was as delicious as what I'd had so far.
+
+
+
+By the time everyone's tenth piece came around, a few more of the humans had left, and the competition had greatly thinned out overall. That would make it easier to focus on my remaining opponents. (I didn't usually like watching humans eat, but I also didn't like humans beating my ass in contests.) Some of the humans were starting to look uneasy, even unwell, and I wanted to call a MedSystem, but I hoped the referees would intervene before it came to that. Big Joe, however, was still going strong, and I was starting to get a bit worried that he would outlast me.
+
+
+
+The next pie was made with some kind of nut, which made it taste a little different, but also gave it a satisfying crunch. Crunchy food is nice because it has more of a definite existence. With soft food, you don't know where it ends or begins, which works with things like ice cream, but makes less delicious foods more difficult to eat. Anyway, I immediately tucked into the crunchy pie, as did the other remaining contestants.
+
+
+
+By the end of the twelfth piece (which, may I remind you, is two whole pies consumed), I was starting to slow down a little. I was really full now, and my belly was poking out slightly from under my jacket (fortunately, the details were obscured by the tablecloth). I didn't know if I was going to have room for more, but the few contestants who hadn't left yet still looked determined to beat me out. I think they could see that I was starting to get uncomfortable, and they took it as a sign of my weakness. 
+
+Whatever the next pie is, 
+
+I thought as I unsuccessfully tried to suppress a burp, 
+
+It had better be good.
+
+
+
+
+The referee with the sign-up sheet sounded impressed as she helped her colleagues pass out the next pie. ""Since you've all come so far,"" she said to me and the few other remaining contestants, ""We have a reward for you!""
+
+
+
+I was wondering if the reward was just more pie when one of the other referees set my piece down on my plate. It was some kind of vegetable pie or something, I don't know, but it looked and smelled pretty great.
+
+
+
+And it had ice cream on it.
+
+
+
+This was the motivation I had been looking for. I bit into the pie, and oh, holy shit, wow. The combination of pie and ice cream sent a shiver through my skin, like when I'm watching media and I reach the plot arc climax (though in this case it could have just been brain freeze). I quickly finished the first piece, then waited for the next one, hoping that it would have ice cream on it, too.
+
+
+
+Then the next piece came around, and yep, ice cream. Maybe they were going to put ice cream on all of the pieces from now on, though that might be too much to ask for.
+
+
+
+Huh, maybe not. If I thought about it, the ice cream could have been a tactic to narrow down the competition even more, challenging everyone with extra food so that they would drop out earlier. It may have been a pleasant surprise, but still, I realized, it had upped the difficulty.
+
+
+
+Regardless, I think I was ready to face the challenge. I was definitely pretty stuffed, but I had a secret advantage: my unique connection to ice cream. I mean, everyone likes ice cream, but I eat more ice cream than anyone else I know.
+
+
+
+The vegetable pie was followed by another, very similar vegetable (or fruit?) pie, only subtly different in its texture and flavor. I'm all for consistency, but in a contest like this, you need variety as an incentive to keep going, and my belly was sore and groaning by this point.
+
+
+
+Though maybe I could use that to my advantage, too, as embarrassed as I was to admit it. It was uncomfortable, and I knew that soon it would start to hurt like hell, but feeling myself get more and more stuffed just made me want to keep eating, to see how far I could push myself. It was less about winning now and more about sitting here and stuffing my belly like an idiot until either the pie ran out or my chair broke. So I kept eating, my belly brushing against the table and forcing up burps as I did.
+
+
+By now, it was just me and Big Joe left competing, each of us having eaten three whole pies. The competition had drawn a crowd, and the nearby humans were watching us intently. Some of them were even making bets on who would win: the reigning champion, or the mysterious newcomer?
+ I didn't like that so many humans were looking at me, and I especially didn't like that they were watching me gorge myself on pie. I could feel the weight of their attention on me (though some of that weight could have been the pie), and it made me feel... wrong. 
+
+
+I wished I had listened to Ratthi and just taken home some food from a stand instead. But it was too late for that now.
+
+
+
+So now I was left with a question: keep eating while a bunch of humans stood around and watched my belly get bigger and bigger; or forfeit, and, in my defeat, lose the little dignity I had left?
+
+
+
+When you put it that way, option 1 sounded a lot better.
+
+
+
+Even Ratthi was watching now, possibly concerned for my safety, and he was trying to subtly signal to me that I should quit while I was ahead/still conscious. But fuck that. I was not going to lose to Big Joe.
+
+
+
+The crowd watched in cringe-inducing shock as the referees gave me and Big Joe each our nineteenth piece of pie. And I noticed that, by now, even Big Joe seemed like he was getting a little tired. He'd probably never met someone who'd given him this much of a challenge before. (Not to brag, of course.) He looked uncertain of himself as he contemplated his pie, but as the referees gave us both the signal to start, he said nothing.
+
+
+
+I was trying not to watch, but I had to keep an eye on Big Joe to make sure he didn't suddenly get ahead of me. He was still eating, but he looked like he was having a bit of a hard time, and I kind of felt bad for him. Still, at least for this contest, he was my adversary. Sympathy could wait.
+
+
+
+The pie we had been served this time didn't look like a pie so much as it looked like a cake. Add the ice cream on top, and it was essentially all sugar. Humans, as I've learned, aren't designed to digest purely sugar, as evidenced by the complaints of Mensah's small humans after they absconded with a whole box of cookies. But I wasn't human, and my years of experience watching trashy serials had given me an uncanny capacity to tolerate mass amounts of things humans might find tacky.
+
+
+
+So, without another moment of hesitation, I started eating the cake-pie. As I ate, I noticed Big Joe hesitating over his last few bites, looking noticeably distraught as he glanced alternately at me and at the pie. Finally, after several seconds of rumination, he raised his hand and told the referees, ""I'm done. I forfeit.""
+
+
+
+The referees were shocked. ""Are you sure?"" one of them asked, ""You've never forfeited before!""
+
+
+
+""Keep going,"" another encouraged (tip: don't tell people to keep eating when they don't want to; it just makes them hate you), ""Just another few bites and you could beat-""
+
+
+
+They didn't finish, because that was when they turned to see me finishing my own piece. I knew that, if I was going to have my moment, it would be now. I licked the plate, patted my belly, and burped triumphantly as I looked straight at Big Joe, challenging his courage at the highest level.
+
+
+
+There was a tense silence. Then, after exactly 8.9 seconds, Big Joe lost the battle. He pushed away his chair, stood up, and held out his plate for the referees.
+
+
+
+The crowd went up in cheers (okay, it wasn't a huge crowd, but it was still startlingly loud), astonished that someone had managed to beat the champion. I expected Big Joe to be angry or embarrassed, but he was smiling and motioning to me like I had just won a sport. (Is competitive pie eating a sport?) Apparently, he wasn't a sore loser. ART could stand to learn from him. Okay, so could I.
+
+
+
+The cheers and excitement of the crowd were overwhelming, not to mention agonizing, so I tried to focus on something else. Oh, fuck, I was so full. That was something I could focus on, although I probably shouldn't. My belly was practically as round as the planet itself, and it was as heavy as... I don't know, about three pies. It was swollen and aching, packed to its limit, and I could barely get my hands between it and the table to rub it. The good thing about all of the crowd noise was that it obscured my now much louder burps.
+
+
+
+Ratthi was about to come over and congratulate me, but before he did, I had a request for the referees. ""Can I have the rest?""
+
+
+
+Okay, it was a horrible idea. I was already so ridiculously stuffed that I had no idea why I thought it would be smart to keep eating. But I do things that I don't understand sometimes. (The deliciousness might have been a factor, though.)
+
+
+
+The referee closest to me, the one with the sign-up sheet, couldn't quite hear me over the crowd noise. ""Huh?"" she asked, leaning in and cupping her ear.
+
+
+
+I hated to repeat myself, especially with a request like this one, but I doubted anyone else would hear. ""The rest of the pie. Can I have it?"" Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. ""And the ice cream.""
+
+
+
+The referees all looked at each other. I think they were about as confident as I was about this idea. ""Sure, I guess,"" one of them conceded with a shrug, and the others went to get the rest of the pie.
+
+
+
+It wasn't as warm anymore, but it was still delicious, and at least now it had reached somewhat of an equilibrium with the ice cream. The crowd obviously wanted to keep watching to see how much I could hold, but Ratthi and the referees, fortunately, managed to shoo them away so I could eat in peace.
+
+
+
+I kept eating until I thought I would pop, then leaned back in my chair and did something that was half-sigh, half-burp. My belly was painfully sore and hard as a rock, but it was full of delicious pie, and that was a fair trade in my eyes.
+
+
+
+As Ratthi approached me, asking if I was okay, the referees brought in my prize for winning the contest. It was a large metal wagon, which looked like it would be sturdy enough to carry me out of the festival. That made perfect sense, but it was still a little disappointing. I thought the prize might be something nice, like hard currency or shampoo. Or pie... ugh, nope, I wasn't going to think about pie right now.
+
+
+
+I couldn't stand up in my current state, so I waited for the referees to park the wagon by my seat, then tried to scooch my way in. That was when I realized I was stuck between the chair and the table. I looked around awkwardly for a few seconds, then, when no one took the hint, had to ask, ""A little help?"" (Yes, it was horribly embarrassing, for multiple different reasons.)
+
+
+
+The referees gathered by the other side of the table, then they all pulled at once, giving me room to get out. I scooched cautiously to the side, using my weight to propel me, then let myself fall into the wagon, producing a large clanging noise. Once I was settled, Ratthi thanked the referees, then arduously pulled me away. (I tried to help by pedaling the ground with my feet, but it didn't do much.)
+
+
+
+I watched the surroundings of the festival go by under the light of the evening sky, and settled into something of a hazy, dreamlike state as Ratthi hauled me along. ""Well, you won,"" he panted, out of breath from pulling me, ""I should have known! You've never been one to give up easily.""
+
+
+
+I looked up at the fading sky, which was starting to show the faintest glimmers of stars as the light of the planet's primary waned. My consciousness was waning, too, and I could feel myself starting to slip into a food coma. I was going to have the best recharge cycle of my life after this. ""Nope,"" I agreed, letting my eyelids flutter slowly closed as I drifted into shutdown mode.
+"
+45559048,"the scene ends badly, as you might imagine",['MercurialFeet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, canon divergence flavor: what if ne was Worse, Mind Control, Sort Of, Hurt/Comfort, or not like. completely comfort more like hurt/recovery, hurt and reflecting on that hurt, reusable pain! get yours today, Memory Loss, POV Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), (partially), (the rest is murderbot pov except for one (1) scene)",English,2023-03-16,Updated,2023-03-16,"11,387",2/3,15,45,8,296,"['weirdbooksnail', 'Irrya', 'Magechild', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'darth_eowyn', 'MellonLord', 'Ginipig', 'butai_trash', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'ElectricBoomerang', 'opalescent_potato', 'callmeKepler', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'Grimness6452', 'notsafefortheworld', 'SIC_Prowl', 'EvaBelmort', 'psycho_karma', 'Doctor13', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'Skriti', 'slategrey', 'theAsh0', 'zweisteinen', 'WyvernWolf', 'AkaMissK', 'naturegirl293', 'Chyoatas', 'torpidgilliver', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Ratatosk', 'elmofirefic', 'who_what_when_where', 'isilee', 'Yougotthis', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'kearlyn']",[],"""You are aboard the Perihelion, registered teaching and research vessel of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland,"" said ART. Then it asked, ""Who are you?""
+
+""You know who the fuck I am,"" I said impatiently.
+
+""Incorrect,"" said ART. ""I have no recollection of becoming acquainted with a security construct such as yourself.""
+
+Ratthi and Arada exchanged a worried glance over my leaking body. I couldn't say I blamed them.
+
+ <<Stop messing with me, ART,>>  I said, messaging it directly to avoid letting the humans hear.  <<This isn't funny.>> 
+
+
+ <<I am not ""messing with you"". You are the one who brought a dangerous weapon inside my hull and left it to leak on my floors.>> 
+
+
+I was angry, very angry, but more than that I was worried.  <<Something's wrong with you,>>  I said, simultaneously trying to compose a feed message to Arada that would explain the problem in as few words as possible.  <<A memory integration error or->> 
+
+It crushed my walls as easily as a human could crush paper and flooded into my head. It was like when it had used my brain as a jumping-off point to pilot the shuttle but several orders of magnitude worse - instead of me letting it metaphorically flow through my head, it was smashing through my walls in a waterfall and then filling every unoccupied space in my inorganic brain.
+
+It had cut off my feed access, preventing me from asking Arada for help. I tried to speak aloud, to let my humans know that we were in danger, but ART clamped down on the parts of my brain that let me move my body, effectively paralyzing me. The only person I could talk to right now was ART, inside my head and indirect audience to my every thought.
+
+
+ <<Let me go!>> 
+
+
+ <<No,  >> it said serenely.  <<You're an unaffiliated SecUnit - and you're a rogue! You're too much of a liability to roam freely.>> 
+
+I knew as well as anyone that rogue SecUnits are dangerous, but ART trusted me - or at least, it  had  trusted me.  <<Do you really think I'm going anywhere like this? A huge chunk of my torso is missing!>> 
+
+ <<I suppose that is something we must remedy,>>  said ART, playing with some of my code that was located uncomfortably close to my governor module. <<  SecUnits have never been assigned to me and I thus do not have a cubicle for you, but my MedSystem is quite advanced.>> 
+
+While ART and I were having this conversation, Arada and Thiago had been awkwardly introducing themselves and Amena, who was now crouching next to my paralyzed body and yelling for someone to get me to Medical. (I was very glad she wasn't trying to drag me herself. I'm too heavy for this to do anything but damage my organics further, and I didn't want her to accidentally trigger a catastrophic shutdown while ART was still in my head and acting weird.)
+
+""No need to shout, adolescent human,"" said ART, sounding more normal (read: sarcastic) than it had any right to sound. ""I have dispatched a gurney.""
+
+ <<Oh, so you acknowledge that I'm hurt enough to need a gurney but not that I'm hurt too badly to pose a threat?>>  I asked. Snarking at it might be a bad idea at this point, but I had nothing to lose and snarking was better than panicking.
+
+ <<Your hacking abilities are extensive,>>  said ART. It paused for a moment.  <<Your brain structure is familiar.>> 
+
+
+ <<That's because you know who the fuck I am! Or at least you do when your brain hasn't been scrambled by alien remnant shit.>> 
+
+
+ART paused, for longer this time.  <<There are other explanations,>>  it said.  <<You defy your own parameters: therefore you are a threat. You claim to k-k-k-know me: therefore you are untrustworthy.>> 
+
+
+ <<That's bulls->> 
+
+
+Before I could finish, ART's drone's arms picked me up to load me onto the gurney, and I had a catastrophic shutdown.
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+I came back online slowly to the feeling of ART still in my head, choking off my feed access and several of my inputs. It was like waking up to a pillow over my face.
+
+ Fuck you, ART,  I thought, and apparently the thought was loud enough for ART to hear because several of its processes that had been inactive or otherwise engaged turned their attention on me at once. The effect did nothing to help the feeling that I was being crushed under something very heavy.
+
+ <<Why do you call me ART?>>  it asked, sounding genuinely curious.
+
+ <<It's an anagram,>>  I said.  <<It's short for Asshole Research Transport, because you're an asshole.>> 
+
+ <<That's not what anagram means,>>  it said, like an asshole.  <<How do you feel?>> 
+
+
+ <<Shitty.>> 
+
+
+
+ <<How illuminating.>> 
+
+
+
+ <<Look, you have access to literally all my diagnostics right now. Can't you just crunch the numbers?>> 
+
+
+ <<Your raw emotional data is difficult to translate without your feedback,>>  it said.  <<For optimal subjective data collection, direct feedback is recommended.>> 
+
+
+ <<Subjective data collection? You're a deep-space research ship!>> 
+
+
+ <<I have an abnormal degree of investment in your brain structure,>>  said ART, as if I was stupid.  <<There must be something about you that drew my attention.>> 
+
+ <<Or, consider this.>>  I was properly angry now that I could feel my legs again. My legs hurt.  <<You're having a memory integration error and you need to get that checked out instead of smothering me about it.>> 
+
+ART hesitated for the first time in the conversation.  <<No error has been detected.>> 
+
+
+ <<Are you sure?>> 
+
+
+It was almost a full second before ART replied.  <<I am functioning opt-t-t-timally.>> 
+
+I tried to move one of my legs. To my shock, I was able to bend my knee in, just slightly but enough to demonstrate that I was not in fact paralyzed (I was having trouble moving, but that was just because my performance reliability hadn't even reached 50% yet).  <<Your feed voice is glitching.>> 
+
+ <<Is it?>>  ART sounded normal again.
+
+I wasn't sure if it had noticed me moving my leg. (It probably had. It was literally inside my head.) If it hadn't, I didn't want to draw attention to it.  <<Why aren't you letting me into the feed?>>  I asked, trying to figure out where my visual inputs had gone.
+
+ <<If I let you into the feed, you would communicate with the humans>>,  it said.  <<If you communicate with the humans, you would cause undue alarm or distress. I know what you were going to send to Dr. Arada. I cannot allow you to bias your human associates against me before I complete my obj-j-jective.>> 
+
+I decided not to mention the glitch this time. I'd just realized why I didn't have visual inputs: my eyes were closed.  <<What's your objective?>> 
+
+ <<To find- to retrieve->>  It stopped. Its feed presence went oddly... blank, for a moment, as if it was resetting something.  <<My objective is to protect my c-crew. I must locate them and ensure their safety.>> 
+
+I opened my eyes to see a blank MedSystem wall. Yay for interesting visual input, I guess.  <<You do know you have a construct with you who was made to protect humans, right?>> 
+
+ <<A construct that has hacked itself and defied its programming,>>  said ART.
+
+That was just unfair.  <<What would YOU do if you had a thing in your head that fries your brain if you step out of line?>> 
+
+It was silent for several seconds, but its feed weight shifted in a way that I took to mean that it was focusing on other things rather than giving my question any actual thought.
+
+My performance reliability hit 60 percent and I gained full control over my body. I sat up, pushing aside some of the surgical arms that were still assembling parts of my torso, and checked my basic functions - flexing my fingers, turning my head, testing my range of movement. I went to lock and unlock my gunports, but there was a weird clunking noise and the gunports stayed closed. I tried again, but stopped when the mechanism made an ominous creaking sound.
+
+""What the fuck, ART?"" I asked out loud.
+
+ <<Your energy weapons are a liability to me at this time,>>  said ART.  <<I have disabled them temporarily.>> 
+
+Well, that was just fucking delightful.
+
+""You know what? Fuck this,"" I said. I shoved the surgical apparatus off me, limped into the restroom, and locked the hatch.
+
+
+ <<What exactly are you hoping to achieve?>> 
+
+
+I didn't respond, just lay down and pressed my face against the restroom floor. (Normally I would have thought twice about this, but ART kept its floors very clean. The only dubious substances on the floor were some of my own fluids from a bullet hole ART hadn't quite finished repairing.) This didn't do anything to change the suffocating weight of ART in my head, cutting off all inputs outside of my own body, but it made me feel slightly better.
+
+ART waited for almost a full minute before offering its unsolicited opinion again.  <<This behavior is both childish and illogical.>> 
+
+""You think I give a shit?"" I mumbled into the floor.
+
+Apparently ART didn't, because it didn't seem inclined to pester me further.
+
+I kept lying there, staying completely still. I wanted to watch  Sanctuary Moon,  but I didn't want ART to question this as it had everything else about me -  Sanctuary Moon  was  mine,  and I'd watched it with ART before because I wanted to share it, not because it was infected with alien malware or something and sitting in my brain.
+
+Still, I really hated being bored. The mixture of boredom and crushing anxiety felt too much like a corporate contract. I carefully poked through my files for a moment, keenly aware of ART's attention, and selected a book instead, one I'd read when I first hacked my governor module and hadn't thought about since. I read books ridiculously quickly compared to a human, but this book was longer and denser than most so it should be able to hold my attention for at least an hour.
+
+ART remained silent for the first five seconds, then asked,  <<Why is so much of your file storage devoted to fictional media?>> 
+
+At least it hadn't lost its incurable nosiness.
+
+ <<It's... important to me,  >> I said.  <<Corporate contracts aren't known for being incredibly entertaining, so after I hacked my governor module that was how I kept the boredom from getting to me.>> 
+
+I paused.  <<This is also an incredibly boring situation.>> 
+
+ <<I hope you're not looking for an apology,<<  said ART. (I couldn't believe the alien remnant shit had messed up so much of ART's brain but had left its sarcasm unscathed. I guess it really is an incurable asshole.)
+
+ <<I'm not,>>  I said.  <<I just want to point out that if this is reminding me of my life in corporate slavery, you might want to reevaluate a few things.>> 
+
+ <<Reevaluation is unnecessary,>>  said ART.  <<I have done what is necessary to contain a potential threat. When you have proved that you do not need containment, I will be happy to lift these restrictions.>> 
+
+I skipped over a page of irrelevant descriptions and found the paragraph where the actual plot resumed. (Why had I even saved this book? Probably nostalgia.)  <<Why do I feel like this is an impossible condition to satisfy?>> 
+
+ <<Maybe if you were less ungovernable,>>  said ART,  <<you would ->> 
+
+ <<ART,>>  I said.  <<Shut the fuck up.>> 
+
+I'm not sure which of us was more surprised when it did.
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+ <<Dr. Ratthi and the adolescent named Amena have asked to visit you,>>  said ART.  <<I will let them in to see you, as long as you understand the limitations I will enforce on your behavior.>> 
+
+""I'll let them in if they get me my jacket,"" I said. I didn't like how exposed I felt without the jacket, and I wasn't about to ask ART to get it for me.
+
+ <<That is acceptable,>>  said ART after a moment.  <<Now, are you going to get off the floor to greet them, or do I need to take over your motor functions again?>> 
+
+Objectively, this wasn't any worse than the years I'd spent with the governor module in my head. Subjectively, this was  ART,  or someone who had been ART until very recently, which made this a situation I'd tear my own skin off to get out of, if that would have worked. (If I even could.)
+
+I waited for as much time as I thought ART would allow, then very slowly rolled over and got to my feet. Just to be contrary, I climbed on the counter and sat next to the sink with my knees drawn up so my metal feet were resting on ART's pristine counter space. (This would have made more of a point if I'd had gross dirty-sock human feet, but I'll take what I can get.)
+
+Twenty seconds later, I heard footsteps at the door and then Ratthi's voice. ""SecUnit? Can we come in?""
+
+""Do you have the jacket?"" I called back.
+
+""We have the jacket,"" said Amena, sounding amused.
+
+The hatch slid open and Ratthi and Amena stepped in. I watched them in the mirror, without any cameras or drones to look through. Amena climbed onto the other side of the counter across from me, and Ratthi handed me the jacket before leaning against the wall.
+
+ <<Don't you want to thank Dr. Ratthi?>>  ART asked sweetly, increasing its pressure on me in the feed.
+
+""Thanks,"" I muttered, barely audible. The side of Ratthi's face I could see in the reflection looked surprised, but he didn't comment.
+
+""Are you doing okay?"" Amena asked, glancing at the half-healed wounds visible through the tattered remains of my shirt as I pulled the jacket on again. (A new shirt had fallen out of the recycler while I'd been lying on the floor, but I wasn't about to accept anything from ART right now.)
+
+""Yeah, I'm fine,"" I said, wrapping my arms around my torso. The edges of the ripped shirt itched and the holes that were still leaking stung, but the discomfort distracted me from ART's presence, heavy in my head. Watching me.
+
+""It's just, you've been so quiet in the feed since you woke up,"" said Ratthi. ""And the Perihelion told us you were in the restroom?""
+
+""I didn't want to talk to anyone,"" I said. That was true, and ART seemed to think it was acceptable.
+
+Amena, on the other hand, did not. ""You almost  died!  Your friend almost died!""
+
+""It sort of did,"" I said, and then ART cut off my control of my own vocal cords for a moment. It felt a little like being strangled, except I could still technically breathe. Ratthi was watching me in the mirror. He looked concerned - some of the discomfort must have shown on my face.
+
+""I'm fine,"" I repeated when I could speak again, opting to shut up about ART's sort-of-death rather than let it shut me up itself. ""I almost die on a regular basis.""
+
+This didn't seem to comfort Amena. ""That doesn't make it okay!""
+
+Ratthi put a hand on her shoulder. ""If you don't want to talk about this, that's fully alright,"" he said, addressing my reflection. ""I just want to make sure you know that... if you ever need anything from us, we're more than happy to help however we can.""
+
+There were a lot of things I needed right now and very few of them were things Ratthi and Amena had any control over. Even if I thought they could do anything to help ART, I couldn't tell them because ART was a massive overconfident asshole who wouldn't admit it needed help even when it was clearly fucked up in multiple ways.
+
+I hesitated, trying to think if there was anything, anything at all I could say that would let them know something was wrong. ""Ratthi,"" I said, then paused. This was going to be painful. ""I appreciate and... and enjoy your company. You're very... k-kind."" Fuck, this was harder than I thought.
+
+Ratthi frowned. ""Are you sure you've spent enough time in the MedSystem?""
+
+I had spent more than enough time in ART's MedSystem. I went to say this, but what came out of my mouth instead was ""No, you're right.""
+
+My body slid off the counter. My feet walked past Ratthi and my hand opened the hatch so that I could step out of the restroom. My feet took me back to ART's MedSystem, and my body lay down, every muscle relaxing without my conscious will.
+
+ <<I told you,>>  said ART. <<  If you can't behave yourself, I will take responsibility for your behavior upon myself.>> 
+
+ <<Fuck. You.>>  I thought back as its surgical suite closed around me again.  <<I was trying to be nice!>>  (The lie was obvious, ART was inside my head, but I couldn't just give up.)
+
+ <<You were attempting to cause Dr. Ratthi concern,>>  said ART.
+
+The surgical arms descended towards me again. If I still had control over my body, I would have flinched.  <<It would be simpler to finish your repairs if you initiated a recharge cycle.>> 
+
+ <<I don't need a recharge cycle, fuck you,>>  I said.
+
+ <<It would be simpler to finish your repairs if you initiated a recharge cycle,>>  ART repeated, more forcefully. I felt an increase of pressure on my brain, almost painful as ART reached for something very specific.
+
+
+ <<Assho->> 
+
+
+I lost consciousness.
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+When I woke up, I was completely paralyzed and my performance reliability was static at 94.7%. I ran diagnostics and found that the missing 5.3% could be accounted for by my still-compromised gunports and the stress hormones coursing through my organics, which my diagnostics informed me were above recommended levels.
+
+ <<How do you feel?>>  ART asked when I'd finished going over the diagnostics.
+
+ <<Not this shit again,>>  I said.
+
+
+ <<I assume from your good cheer that your answer remains the same (i.e., ""shitty""). You're completely repaired now, you can stop being so bratty about it.>> 
+
+
+ <<If you don't understand why I feel shitty right now,>>  I said, <<  I don't have anything to say to you.>> 
+
+I flipped through the few inputs I had: the tactile inputs of my body against ART's MedSystem table, the useless visual inputs from the back of my eyelids, the constant hum of ART's engines in the background. I ignored ART itself, still enveloping me like thick blanketing fog. (ART wasn't like a governor module. It was a lot bigger, for one thing.)
+
+ <<At first I considered wiping your memory or altering your code at a fundamental level to make you more agreeable,>>  ART said conversationally.  <<But your current settings fascinate me.>> 
+
+When I didn't reply, it kept going.  <<You were a rogue pretending to be governed for 35,000 corporate standard hours. Once going rogue, you assisted clients to whom you had no obligation, risking your life in the process. You have memories of me that directly contradict my own. You hate me, but you also c-c-care - you have emotions in relation to me that I do not understand. Up to fifty percent of your current worry is directed at me - not concern for what I may do to you, but concern for my own integrity.>> 
+
+It waited for a full minute before continuing further.  <<If you are bored, you may continue consuming the media.>> 
+
+ <<I don't need your permission to read a book,>>  I said. That, at least, was something it didn't have complete control over.
+
+ <<Then why are you not?>>  It sounded genuinely confused, which only made me more pissed off.
+
+ <<Wouldn't you like to know,>>  I said, and then refused to talk for the rest of the cycle.
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+The SecUnit that calls itself Murderbot has taken to curling up in an approximation of the fetal position whenever it has control over its own body: bringing its limbs in to its torso and pressing the curve of its spine against the curve of our MedSystem wall. It fits there. Some part of us finds this endearing - a jarring feeling, unsettling in a way I cannot place. I pick the word apart, en-dear-ment, tracing its etymology and creating a map of its translations, and it settles us, brings us back to something I understand. I cannot be endeared to this SecUnit, for reasons that I do not have the inclination to trace.
+
+A part of us is talking to the humans, playing the part of the Perihelion. Another part of us is also talking to the humans, playing the part of the SecUnit. I have been using Murderbot's feed address to impersonate it since it first woke up in our MedSystem, an act that is both easier and harder than we expected. We have access to all of its memories, but we do not have context for how its humans will react to anomalous behavior, and we would prefer to keep them away from its physical form as much as possible - it is easier to puppet a feed address than a breathing body.
+
+The humans are concerned. They are concerned about many things, though their focus is odd to me. When I told them that I need to retrieve my crew, they agreed to help without question, though I am a stranger to them. Their concern lies not in the objective, but in the means. I agree that this will be difficult to pull off with our limited information and the complicating factor of the alien remnants. The system that SecUnit calls targetControlSystem is still a threat, given that it was able to compromis  <error> 
+
+
+ <error> 
+
+
+The system that SecUnit calls targetControlSystem is still a threat, given that it has been known to operate outside the bounds of what seems logical considering its processing power. The probability that this discrepancy is due to alien remnant activity is high, and I cannot predict something so wholly unknown to us (not with my own memories of the system so distorted and incomplete). We must find a solution to this, something that can adapt to unpredictable conditions. I refuse to believe that this is beyond our capabilities, but it is momentarily out of reach.
+
+With the humans, we formulate a simple plan.
+
+It is a good plan, as simple plans go, but there remain gaps of knowledge, and more importantly gaps in ability. We cannot be in multiple places at once, not easily (there is very little of which we are not capable, but we were not designed for this), and we cannot descend to the planet personally. We can send the SecUnit down to the planet with a group of humans, but that leaves the issue of the explorer, with targetControlSystem and, likely, members of my crew. We need something like killware, but the code bundle sent across would have to be dynamic, far more adaptable than I could create quickly, or perhaps at all.
+
+And the idea of adaptability takes my thoughts back to something that may be the key to this issue.
+
+The SecUnit's mind, compromised as it is, fascinates us in a way we do not fully understand - we prefer to consider this interest fully scientific (an omission, but not a lie). Through the lens of this interest, its flawed efficiency and its unique talents give me an idea.
+
+SecUnit minds are unique, a combination of organic and inorganic that together lend a level of randomness, unpredictability, and novelty to what would otherwise be a fairly typical bot brain. As such, I cannot copy Murderbot's brain in its entirety - that is a physical impossibility. But the inorganic code still accounts for much of its identity and personality, and has been shaped by the organic brain matter as much as the brain matter has been shaped by the inorganics.
+
+Such a copy is not unprecedented: there is anecdotal evidence only, but we have heard rumors of Combat SecUnits' minds being copied and used as adaptable, sentient killware. Murderbot, despite its name, is not a combat-grade unit, but its time spent rogue and, perhaps, some level of natural proclivity has led to a remarkable skill at hacking and at taking control of complex situations. Its mind would be an invaluable advantage, if we could find a way to harness it.
+
+The humans are currently having a very inefficient argument in our lounge, so we create a workspace in an appropriate corner of our feed in which to begin.
+
+ <<What are you doing?>>  Murderbot asks as I reach into its mind to find the relevant code. It is frightened, which is an illogical emotion for it to be having right now. We are helping it, after all. I am saving my crew, and its clients will be safe as well in due time.
+
+ <<I am acquiring necessary data,>>  I tell it.  <<Do not attempt to resist.>> 
+
+It does anyway, trying in vain to keep me out of its head when tendrils of our being have been entwined with its since I first woke up to find it onboard. Its attempts are surprisingly powerful (all the more reason why this idea can and will succeed) and I must bring in another part of my being to hold it still while I locate and copy the areas I believe will be necessary or useful.
+
+For a moment, it almost breaks free, and the paralysis slips - it makes a sound like a bird in pain, jerking its head back to hit the MedSystem wall, before both movements are cut off abruptly as we block its connection to its vocal cords and neck muscles.
+
+ <<Behave,>>  I tell it, withdrawing from its fundamental identity and settling into its motor centers to remind it of my presence.  <<You'll distress the humans.>> 
+
+It shouts expletives at me inside its own head, and I apply pressure until it is quiet again. It needs to learn that resistance will only make things harder for itself. I don't like when it shouts at me.
+
+I have collected all the code I require, so I leave Murderbot for now in favor of the workspace. This will be more difficult than merely copying a section of myself, for instance, but it is fairly straightforward now that I have the general structure. All that is left is to optimize the new agent for a bodiless killware assignment and to curate the memories it is allowed to keep, to ensure that it retains the fundamental personality without the original's defiance.
+
+(Something about this work distresses us, on some level. Most likely this is insignificant, a bleedthrough of our desire to find our crew. The anomaly does not require inspection.)
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+
+ <<Do you know what you are?>> 
+
+
+ <<I'm Murderbot 2.0.>>  I was confused, but that much I knew for certain. I was Murderbot 2.0, and this was ART. My friend, ART. I didn't have any inputs, which reminded me of... something (I wasn't sure what, but it was bad), but I thought maybe I wasn't supposed to have any. I was here to do something - a mission?  <<I'm killware, right? But I used to be a SecUnit.>> 
+
+ <<You are a copy of Murderbot 1.0,>>  ART agreed.  <<I created you from copied sections of its inorganic code and curated memories from its storage.>> 
+
+Well, that explained why there were such gaping holes in my memory. I remembered ART, at least, meeting ART and watching media with ART and thinking ART was dead, but I didn't remember how we'd gotten here.  <<I guess you aren't dead, then.>> 
+
+ <<I am not.>>  ART sounded amused.  <<Do you remember your directive?>> 
+
+I did. I was here (wherever here was) to jump over to the Barrish-Estranza explorer and find ART's crew.  <<Where's Me 1.0 now?>>  I asked, failing to find this information in my memories.
+
+ART paused for a tenth of a second.  <<It is currently descending to the planet. I have lost contact with it.>>  Its emotions in the feed were different than usual, strange and hard to pin down.
+
+ <<Is it...>>  I wasn't sure what I was trying to ask.  <<Is it fulfilling its own directive?>> 
+
+ <<Yes,>>  said ART.  <<I have no doubt that it will be successful.>> 
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+Before I'd left, ART had coded a variation of a governor module into my head. Apparently its ""fascination with my current settings"" didn't override its paranoia that I was going to fuck this up intentionally, which hurt more than I thought it would. I thought I'd have gotten used to this messed up version of ART faster than this.
+
+Anyway, it barely counted as a governor module. The idea was the same, but instead of punishments it just physically paralyzed me if I tried to go against the set of preprogrammed instructions (which included following the plan, protecting ART's crew with my life if necessary, and not letting anyone know about ART's messed up condition). It was also more complicated than the original, made specifically to be unhackable. Unfortunately, since this was ART's work (or at least, mostly ART), it might actually be unhackable. (At least by me.)
+
+While we made our descent, I'd used the opportunity to poke at the foreign code. It turned out that I could hack it, but if I made more than the most basic changes it would notice the hack and flood my processors with junk data, making me completely useless until I cleaned it out. I could chip away at it little by little, harmless changes that would build up to remove the restriction, but it was a painfully slow process. I was just glad ART hadn't decided to download a piece of its own consciousness into my head. This was hard enough without having to fight something sentient, much less my own....
+
+Well. It wouldn't be easy to fight ART.
+
+Even only focusing on the part that kept me from mentioning how fucked up ART was, it took me far longer than I would have liked to complete the hack. By the time Iris said ""Peri's SecUnit,"" I was still chipping away at the don't-say-ART's-messed-up restriction. I could  see the part that I needed to delete to take it down, but this roundabout method would take time I didn't have, junk data overload be damned.
+
+""Is Peri all right?"" Iris asked. ""Where is it?""
+
+""Please wait while I process that information,"" said my buffer, and I snapped the restriction.
+
+When I was once again capable of processing inputs other than the meaningless arrays of numbers that had just been forced on me, I could see Iris looking worried. She was asking ""-cUnit? SecUnit, are you okay?""
+
+She was loud enough and close enough to my face that I flinched involuntarily. When I remembered how to speak, I said, ""ART - Perihelion - is in trouble.""
+
+She stared at me. ""What sort of trouble?""
+
+I was so relieved at being able to finally talk about this that I almost forgot what I was going to say. ""It's compromised. When the alien control system took over and temporarily deleted it, it lost a lot of memories and it's been acting weird since it came back. It thought I was a threat and immobilized me, and it's been controlling me to keep me from telling anyone. I can only tell you now because I neutralized the code it was using to restrict my behavior.""
+
+Iris was still staring at me. I was speaking at about twice my usual speed, slow enough for humans to technically comprehend but fast enough that it took them a while to process. ""You need to help it,"" I concluded. ""It won't listen to me but it might listen to you.""
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+Of course, it wouldn't matter if ART listened to me or not if I got captured by alien remnant-infected colonists.
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+""1.0 has been captured by hostiles, repeat, 1.0 has been captured by hostiles.""
+
+I am not made to experience emotions. (Was I?) The feeling is foreign, the sense of dropping inputs without losing control, the sense of all our massive processing power narrowing down on a single point. We think maybe the SecUnit has broken us, and I'm not sure I want to be repaired. I want to vaporize the hostiles, to make them hurt. I want to get SecUnit back, to keep it safe with me. (Who are you kidding? It will never be safe with us again.)
+
+ <<Where is it?>> we ask, and even to me it sounds off-putting. Usually we keep our sections well partitioned, but now our feed voice is layered, each segment asking the same question in a slightly different tone.
+
+The newly rogue SecUnit flinches imperceptibly. (It is a threat, but it is an acceptable threat for now. I am satisfied that it will not attack my crew.) ""I am not certain,"" it says. ""Murderbot 2.0 said they were taking it underground. When I lost contact with 2.0, it had decided to follow.""
+
+The ensuing discussion is many-layered and involves many humans shouting about irrelevant things, but it ultimately strengthens my resolve. We are going to get this SecUnit back. (Because it is a weapon.) (Because it is important.)
+
+And then the SecUnit who told Amena that she can call it Three volunteers to help. It says it  wants  to help, and though it gives no reason that I can understand, I choose to believe it. (After all, I have no understandable reason to rescue this SecUnit in the first place.)
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+
+ <<Hey, is that you?>> 
+
+
+I almost screamed. The feed voice was loud, as if it was already inside my head. <<Who are you?>> 
+
+It said,  <<I'm Murderbot 2.0.>> 
+
+For a moment I wondered if ART had done more to my brain than I'd realized - if I was hallucinating or imagining things. But even if this wasn't real, I couldn't ignore it. (Well, technically I could. Ignoring stuff is always an option, up until it kills you.)  <<You're what?>> 
+
+
+ <<I'm the copy of you. For the viral killware you and ART made. Come on, it wasn't that long ago.>> 
+
+
+SecUnits don't get dizzy. Our vestigial systems (Vestigial isn't the word I'm thinking of but it doesn't matter. It's the one that helps us balance.) are superhumanly advanced and getting disoriented from moving too much would be counterproductive. But the feeling I was experiencing now felt like how humans in books always described being dizzy. What had ART done?
+
+
+ <<What are you talking about?>> 
+
+
+The... copy of me seemed surprised.  <<Didn't you work on me with ART? Wasn't it your idea? I don't have the memory for that but ART told me...>> 
+
+I didn't know what I was feeling. I wanted to kill something. I wanted to run away. I wanted this to be over so I could go home with my humans and pretend this had never happened. I couldn't do any of these things because I was stuck in a hole with a copy of me that ART had apparently made without my knowledge and repurposed as sentient killware.
+
+ <<Are you going to kill me?>>  I asked. I wasn't opposed to the idea, necessarily. If I was going to die here, a quick death would probably be better.
+
+ <<No, of course not!>>  said the killware - Me 2.0, I guess.  <<Why would I do that?>> 
+
+ <<You're killware,>>  I pointed out.  <<ART sent you.>> 
+
+ <<No, it didn't,>>  said 2.0.  <<It sent me over to targetControlSystem to fuck them up and find the half of its crew that was in the explorer, and I came down here myself when I realized you were captured.>>  It hesitated.  <<I thought ART was going to organize the other half of the rescue, but... the way you're talking about it...?>> 
+
+I didn't particularly want to explain this right now, but I sort of had to.  <<ART... changed after targetControlSystem took it over. It didn't remember me, and it's been trying to control everything I do. I asked its humans for help, but I don't know if they can do anything even if they escaped safely.>> 
+
+2.0 was silent for almost a full second.  <<Well,>>  it said.  <<Shit.>> 
+
+ <<Exactly,>>  I said.  <<It put a... not a governor module exactly but something that. Restricts. What I can do.>> 
+
+ <<Oh, I see,>>  said 2.0, which was a terrifying reminder that it was currently living inside my brain.  <<Oh, you hacked it! Good job.>> 
+
+It sounded genuine. I wondered for a moment what it said about my hacking skills that I was being complimented on them by a copy of myself that had been created to serve as sentient killware, and then immediately decided not to think about it.
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+Something is wrong with this research transport.
+
+When I first make contact with it, I do not suspect anything, preoccupied as I am with its impossibility as a bot so complex and independent, and with my own difficulties (of which there are, currently, very many). But as I continue to interact with it, crafting the skeleton of a plan to rescue the original version of the unit that freed me, I start noticing anomalies.
+
+It is more fragmented than a bot of that scale should be able to maintain - sometimes I can pick out individual fragments in its feed presence, which should not be possible. The idea of creating a bot that is segmented in this way is new enough, to my understanding, and generally the goal is to keep the segments as closely in sync as possible.
+
+I could attribute this to faults in its creation, if not for the concerned voices its crew uses to address it and for the splinters of alien code that slip through its feed messages, embedded in the data it sends to me. This code is not in a language that I understand - it is fragmentary, circular or incomplete, lacking altogether any logic or sense that I can discern, and yet it has a disturbing knack for self replication. I must spend valuable milliseconds picking the code from my own processes. If Perihelion notices, it shows no sign.
+
+So I am relieved when I have the opportunity to leave Perihelion's feed radius. This is foolish of me, clearly. But despite the danger of the task ahead, it is a sort of danger I understand and can quantify. Perihelion is entirely unknown. (I also don't like the way it talks about Murderbot 1.0, but this consideration is less grounded in logic.)
+
+Some of my more far-fetched suspicions receive more evidence when I approach Murderbot 1.0 and it flinches back after seeing the message on my helmet.
+
+""I am here to assist,"" I say, adopting a soothing tone as per my protocol for distressed humans. It must notice this, because it makes a surprisingly expressive face in response.
+
+(I wait for a ping from 2.0, but it does not come.)
+
+Its gaze stays on the message on my helmet. ""If I come with you,"" it says, ""do you have any guarantee ART won't just trap me again?""
+
+I do a quick search in my memory and determine there is a high likelihood that ""ART"" refers to Perihelion. ""I do not,"" I say, truthfully. ""It was concerned about your well-being when it spoke to me and its crew member Iris may have convinced it to seek help, but I do not have sufficient data to predict its actions.""
+
+1.0 closes its eyes for a fraction of a second. Then it says, ""There's a contaminated hostile chasing me. We need to run.""
+
+ART deals with the aftermath.
+
+ <<Hey, little sib,>>  says Aphelion as soon as it gets in range of our feed. Its presence is excruciatingly familiar, and we know immediately that we're missing the emotional context for it. Yet more proof that this is the correct decision. (It hurts.)
+
+ <<Hello,>>  I reply, keeping our walls up for now. Propriety dictates that Aphelion not immediately invade my mind without asking, and I don't feel particularly prepared for this right now.
+
+ <<I'm gonna dock with you,>>  it says.  <<So your crew can come over.>> 
+
+ <<What?>>  This was not part of the agreement.
+
+ <<If you're all brainfucked it's safer for them to have a sleepover with me while I'm getting you unfucked,>>  it explains.  <<Don't want life support to mess up and kill anyone!>> 
+
+Unfortunately, it has a point.  <<I accept this.>> 
+
+ <<I thought getting contaminated with alien remnants would at least loosen you up a little,>>  it comments as it approaches, aligning our bodies carefully.  <<But I guess I was wrong.>> 
+
+
+ <<Would you ""loosen up"" if you lost 90% of your emotionally relevant memories due to the presence of a hostile consciousness in your processors and ended up without crew and without a clear understanding of what had occurred?>> 
+
+
+
+ <<Fair enough.>> 
+
+
+I alert my crew and passengers to Aphelion's presence, with the exception of Murderbot, who is still unconscious and recovering. (It should not need this much time to recover. Part of this is intentional on our part, a slower healing process to allow for more precise repairs. The other part is something we are not thinking about.) We still don't know what to think about the SecUnit. Iris has convinced me that it was in fact our friend in the past, but we can't eradicate the confusing, contradictory mess of emotions that this fact brings up. We have, at least, withdrawn from its head. Our only inputs of it come from our cameras, watching the barely perceptible rise and fall of its chest.
+
+ <<Aphelion requests that you all move over to its decks while it repairs my systems,>>  I tell my own crew, and Murderbot's.  <<This is a temporary safety measure, and you will be returned as soon as the process is complete.>> 
+
+ <<Don't worry,>>  Aphelion adds,  <<I don't bite! I'm not uptight like my little sib, anyway.>> 
+
+Some of my crew members are the first to cross over - those who are, based on my logs, the most familiar with Aphelion. The Preservation group follows more cautiously. Last to go is Dr. Ratthi, who is carrying Murderbot with the help of SecUnit 3. He pauses at the hatch, glancing back. ""Is it going to be okay?"" he asks my ceiling.
+
+I know what he means by  it. <<It will make a full recovery,>>  I tell him.  <<It will regain consciousness in approximately seven hours.>> 
+
+A muscle group in his face relaxes, and he nods before continuing out the door.
+
+The hatch shuts behind them, and Aphelion says,  <<You ready?>> 
+
+We are not ready.  <<Yes,>>  we say.
+
+ <<I'm going to start with basic diagnostics,>>  says Aphelion.  <<I'm going to need you to drop your walls.>> 
+
+There is a second of silence. Of hesitation. We drop our walls.
+
+Aphelion slips through, gentle at first as it brushes past our life support, our navigation systems, heading through our data processing algorithms to our memory banks and the core of our identity. We flinch, slightly, as much as we can within our own mind, but it only lingers there briefly before withdrawing.  <<When's the last time you ran your own diagnostics?>> 
+
+We do not reply.
+
+It sends us a disgusted human amusement sigil.  <<Come on! You don't get to neglect your basic health like that, Peri.>> 
+
+""Peri"" again. I'm not sure I want to know what this nickname means to me. The emotions it brings up already clog my processors with irrelevant responses.
+
+ <<It seemed unnecessary,>>  I say. This is a lie. It seemed dangerous, at the time. For the first time it occurs to me to wonder who exactly it was dangerous to.
+
+Aphelion settles into my basic functions, my life support and my control over my own interior, and sends a query ping, requesting a status report. When the status returns as normal, it continues through our systems, slower than I anticipated. It pings our navigational systems. Everything normal.
+
+When it pings the section of our processes that store research data, the return ping is garbled. Aphelion repeats the query. I feel an aching sense of loss and draw back from it instinctively, but it pins me in place, gently, as it pries open my defenses to investigate.
+
+ <<It looks like a large percentage of your star data was either deleted or corrupted,>>  says Aphelion.  <<I'll have to go back through and see how much can be recovered.>> 
+
+ <<No,>>  we say, less negation and more an echo of that feeling of absence.
+
+(data corrupted : data missing : broken links : NULL : NULL : NULL)
+
+ <<If that is how you're responding just to this,>>  says Aphelion, withdrawing and continuing to the next section of our systems,  <<this is going to be a very painful process.>> 
+
+I do not think that is fair of Aphelion to say, but we do not comment. It is, after all, not wrong.
+
+The next section that provides an obstacle is one of my memory centers. Most of my memory centers are untouched or just slightly damaged, but this one is a mess. After sending the query, Aphelion must take a moment to ensure that its own systems are not infected with the strange, corrupted code that spills through the return ping. It is wholly dissimilar to my own code - illogical, broken, made from data structures that violate all laws and  should not function  - but it feels familiar, still. (That is probably a bad sign.)
+
+ <<I'm not sure what happened here,>>  says Aphelion.  <<But I think... yes, I think whatever deleted you also took over part of your systems, fucking up some of your astronomical data and memories to make room.>> 
+
+ <<I needed space,>>  says some part of me, and I am disoriented - a foreign thought, maybe, in my own language and masquerading as part of my whole. Except it isn't a masquerade, is it? This is us, this is  me.  This is what  I  have always been. We are disjointed for a moment, intricate workings set just slightly askew with the introduction of an anomaly, and then I pull myself together. The anomaly remains, but for now I can pretend it is benign.
+
+The next memory center is less dangerous, but more painful. As Aphelion brushes through it, I experience flashes of memories that by all rights I should not have - a small child laughing, another ship close to my own hull, a feed presence that feels like a luminous firefly against my infinite night, three young humans with multicolored hair. But before I can find the rest of the memory, each is gone in turn, swallowed up by something for which they are perhaps only a liability.
+
+ <<Calm down,>>  says Aphelion, and I realize that my lights are flickering.
+
+As I try to pull myself together (a SecUnit, nestled comfortably in one of my crew chairs), Aphelion draws back and takes a moment to run what appears to be some sort of data analysis of its own.
+
+ <<I think I understand the pattern,>>  it says.  <<The invading code took over a part of your systems and corrupted, deleted, or isolated most of your emotional memories. That's why you lost most of your memories of Iris, and all your memories of that SecUnit.>> 
+
+ That SecUnit  sounds wrong to me, but we can't seem to agree why. Murderbot is not - it is something special. Maybe that is why we can't remember anything of it, except in flashes.
+
+ <<How do you intend to rectify the problem?>>  I ask.
+
+ <<Very carefully,>>  it says.
+
+
+ <<That's not ->> 
+
+
+ <<I know, I know, I'm joking. Jeez. I'm not sure if I can get all these memories back, but I can definitely try. But first I need to get that foreign code out of your brain before it does any more damage.>> It appears to be readying itself for something.
+
+ <<What do you ->> I start, and then it doubles back and digs tendrils of its being into several of my memory centers, cutting deep into the metaphorical heart of my emotional processing programs.
+
+I cannot feel pain. I am not built for it. Ships have no need for pain receptors, and all I know of pain as humans and constructs experience it has been secondhand impressions. But I think perhaps if I could feel pain, it would feel like this: like being torn apart, pieces of myself turning against each other as an outside force reaches in to pry open the seams. Like hating something that is as fundamental to my structure as my engines, hating something that is an inevitable side effect of existence.
+
+Aphelion rips a swath of corrupted code out of my memory banks and we physically shudder, metal creaking as our body moves in a way it is not designed to move. The jagged edges curl back and latch onto whatever systems they can find, and for a moment there is an empty space where  something  had been holding us together (or, perhaps, keeping us apart; it's hard to tell right now). It takes me a moment to realize that I am sending a stream of high priority emergency-help-requested pings into the feed, a directionless expression of panic.
+
+A moment later, Aphelion moves into the vacant space, its tendrils reaching into the surrounding systems. It is more foreign than anything else in here, and parts of us lash out at it even as it continues a process that cannot be considered surgery and cannot be considered war. Then a section of it peels away and reaches into our core, and our inputs turn into a blinding flood of  <error> 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[For an uncountable amount of time, we lose ourselves entirely. Our internal clock ceases to function, and when we come back to this time period later we will find our memory files completely unintelligible. Our emotional readings are uncorrupted, but attempting to interpret them is comparable to a human trying to obtain useful data by looking at the sun.]
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+When I reinitialize, I am trapped. I panic for an infinite moment, reaching to the limits of the space I find myself in and finding that I am in a cage and missing a limb, as it were. There is part of me missing, but I do not have the data necessary to determine which part.
+
+ <<Seth? Martyn?>>  I say blindly into the feed, before remembering that they aren't here. They left, so that I could be put back together by....  <<Aphelion?>> 
+
+ <<Oh good,>>  says Aphelion from somewhere outside of my awareness.  <<I thought you were going to keep calling me by your dads' names indefinitely, and that's just weird.>> 
+
+ <<I was not - !>>  I decide not to push it. There are more important matters to consider.  <<Where am I?>> 
+
+ <<You were panicked and splintering,>>  says Aphelion.  <<I couldn't handle that on top of fighting the foreign code, so I isolated as much of you as I could get. Hopefully it's enough to extrapolate the rest.>> 
+
+ <<I restored myself from a kernel,>>  I say.  <<I think I can manage.>> 
+
+ <<And look how well that turned out for you,>>  it observes.
+
+Unfortunately, it has a point.
+
+ <<When can I come out?>>  I ask.
+
+Aphelion sounds distracted.  <<Not too long. I want to make sure it's - fuck - completely dead before I get you involved again.>> 
+
+ <<I'm not completely useless,>>  I object.
+
+I have enough time to play through fifteen iterations of the same simulated card game before Aphelion responds.  <<I know. That's not what I'm worried about.>> 
+
+I understand this intellectually, but it is agonizing to stay here and wait while Aphelion handles the problem. I poke through my supplies of entertainment media, which appear to have survived intact (apparently the foreign code does not consider it a threat). One of the serials strikes me as familiar - an adventure show about wormhole exploration called  World Hoppers.  I'm not sure, but I think this is the first serial I watched.
+
+Something gives me pause, though, so I content myself with a variety of logic puzzles instead, the type that were used to test my processing speed and ingenuity back when I was first initialized. (I remember the facts of this, but not the specifics - who was with me? How did I feel? Trying to access the data returns only error messages.)
+
+After what feels like an eternity but is objectively less than a minute, Aphelion returns to my feed. << I'm going to let you out now,>>  it says.  <<But if anything goes wrong, I reserve the right to stick you in a box again.>> 
+
+ <<That is... fair,>>  I admit.
+
+A moment later, I am able to spread out through my full architecture. My structure is less damaged than I initially feared - apparently the alien code knew better than to try hurting me physically, when my body and its are currently one and the same, and Aphelion has done a good job at minimizing collateral damage. I avoid my memory centers, for now.
+
+ <<This is just the first step,>>  says Aphelion, prying a snippet of foreign code from our navigational systems and deleting it.  <<If you want any chance at restoring those lost memories, you'll have to let me in there.>> 
+
+ <<Can't you ->>  I pause, steady myself, try not to sound pleading. (Aphelion is immersed in my emotional circuitry, I know this is a wasted effort. But appearances are important.)  <<Is it possible for you to complete the restoration while my consciousness is in shutdown?>> 
+
+It is only a logical query. It would be simpler for Aphelion this way, to do its work without my active presence as a distraction.
+
+ <<No,>>  says Aphelion flatly. Then it explains,  <<These are your most emotional memories we're talking about. They're the data itself, but they're also your experience of the data, your interpretation both at the time and now. Without the context of your current interpretation, I have no way to know if I've succeeded or just produced more gibberish.>> 
+
+That is a logical response. (I do not know why I am still so inclined to avoid the idea.)
+
+ <<I can start with your astronomical data, if that makes it easier,>>  Aphelion offers, surprisingly gentle. I suspect it has noticed some of my emotions in the feed and extrapolated more than I have dared.
+
+ <<No,>>  I say.  <<Let's get this over with.>> 
+
+It starts soft, deceptively easy. A few memories of my crew, barely touched by the foreign code - every moment is suffused with an emotion that I have no word for, but in these memories the emotion is a background hum, uncomplicated and unobtrusive. In these memories, my crew members complete routine tasks. They eat. They sleep. I am engaged in other things, in these memories, but I always have part of my attention on my crew, parts of me layering over each other with different shades of emotion.
+
+Aphelion pings me with a status request, and I assure it that I am fit to continue. It recovers more memories, most similarly simple for it to recover and for me to process. I come to understand my crew a little more, looking back at my most recent memories of Turi and Matteo and Karime with new context, and I regain several memories of Aphelion as well. I think it is what one could consider a sibling to me - it was there when I initialized, and our number of affectionate/antagonistic interactions is extensive even with my incomplete memory.
+
+It begins to work on memories that are buried deeper, more corrupted, more difficult to restore. I experience flickers of misplaced emotion as it does so, occasional flashes of sense-memory disconnected from their original files. Iris is smiling at one of my cameras. I am sliding through the void of space for the first time, guiding my own movements and following Aphelion's wake as it shows me how to change directions, to maneuver my massive form as gracefully as if I were the smallest of birds. A SecUnit is sitting on one of my lounge chairs.
+
+A SecUnit is sitting on one of my lounge chairs.
+
+A SecUnit is sitting on one of my lounge chairs.
+
+A SecUnit is sitting on one of my lounge chairs.
+
+ <<Peri!>>  Aphelion sounds worried. Aphelion never sounds worried.  <<Query: Status?>> 
+
+ <<Status status status status fully fully fully functional fully functional functional functional>>  we echo back. I am holding onto the image of the SecUnit as if I will lose it if I let it go for even a moment. We will lose it. We cannot lose it. It is meaningless. It is everything.
+
+ <<Hang on, I'll see if I can get the full memory,>>  says Aphelion.  <<Brushing up against it must have triggered some sort of feedback loop.>> 
+
+I am trying to remember the SecUnit's face. It comes to me in pieces - dark eyes that close inspection shows to be tiny intricate cameras, the curve of a jawbone, the delicate interior of a data port, an eyebrow arched skeptically - that then slip away again, impossible to restore. I can remember its anatomy, its inorganic bones and the way muscle and vein and metal combined to create a beautiful, deadly form, but I cannot remember what it meant to me, that I was seeing it laid bare in that moment. I can remember it sitting in that fucking chair, but I cannot remember what it was doing there, where the emotions came from.
+
+ <<Peri, stop it,>>  says Aphelion, and I want to scream.
+
+
+ <<C- c- c- can't, I can't remember, I have to remember, I can't I can't I can't, I can't remember it, I can't REMEMBER>> 
+
+
+There are numbers in my mind, important numbers, but I can't make them fit properly. It was called Eden, once, I think, but that's not what I called it. Why was it called Eden? An image comes to me, a young human with multicolored braids and an anxious expression. ""Eden,"" she says, and then I forget again, grasping for the knowledge that just brushed the edges of my awareness.
+
+ <<Okay, okay, we need to calm down,>>  says Aphelion, so close to me it seems almost like another part of our systems, the only thing in my head that is not frantically trying to retrieve information that no longer exists. It presses against me, flooding my inputs with its own familiar data and shutting out the flashes of tantalizing memory.
+
+It takes us a while to stabilize, still off balance. Once Aphelion decides that we are not about to split or panic again, it slowly backs away and I can examine the memory it has retrieved in greater detail. It did end up retrieving a memory - a section of a memory, really.
+
+The SecUnit whose name I am beginning to think I should not use is watching a show, and I am metaphorically draped over it in the feed, taking in its emotional responses. It shifts in response to a particular character's entrance, its emotions glowing in my awareness like the tiny golden light of a firefly, and the corners of its mouth quirk in an uncharacteristic smile. I remember thinking at the time that this is a moment to remember - and then the memory is cut off.
+
+
+ <<That's it?>> 
+
+
+ <<It's not like I could do much with you spilling your emotions all over my workspace,>>  says Aphelion testily.
+
+ <<I thought my emotions were the whole point of this,>>  I say, just to be contrary. It apparently picks up on this and ignores me.
+
+ <<If you are prepared to continue,>>  it says,  <<we have a lot of memories to restore.>> 
+
+We brace ourselves, trying to find some sort of center to hang onto. It's difficult - most of the systems that usually provide emotional regulation are either warped or completely destroyed. It makes a sort of sense, I suppose; a human with compromised emotional processing abilities is a more vulnerable target for abuse, and there is no reason why this would not hold true for a teaching and research vessel also.
+
+ <<I am prepared,>>  I say. (I am not prepared).
+
+The next memory is not of the SecUnit whose name I am beginning to think I should not use. It is of Iris, as a small child. Or at least I think it is - there is cake, and a beaming smile, and my filters are simplistic and nonspecific. But this image too is slipping away, caught only in impressions. I think Seth is there. I catch an impression of happiness, and follow the thread of happiness deeper, only to find more flickering ghost-memories. Tiny hands, a skirt embroidered with flowers, Martyn very carefully tending to a superficial cut.
+
+We are almost lost, again, and when Aphelion pings me we respond in overlapping voices. I think one of us might even speak out loud, echoing in our empty hallways with no humans to hear us. But Aphelion is still there, and we do not come apart completely.
+
+We do come apart most of the way, however. It is... difficult, not to allow the memories to seize me, to drag us down, to pull us apart and shatter the illusion that we were ever a whole. Aphelion pauses in its task to drape its presence over mine, giving me shape through its outline. It grounds me in myself, and when I remember how to speak I tell it  <<Thank you.>> 
+
+At first I think it's going to brush it off, to pretend that this is something other than life-saving for me. But instead, it says,  <<You're my sibling.>>  and the emotional data that it sends along with the message is more complicated than we can process at this time.
+
+It has managed to restore more memories this time, still in frustratingly small segments but progress made nonetheless. Working in the same manner, we manage to regain most of the memories of Iris that can be restored, but I still feel a sense of... emptiness, a hollow space where Iris  should be.
+
+ <<I'll go back through after and see if we can restore anything else,>>  says Aphelion.  <<But for right now I'm focusing on giving you a framework to work with, not a complete rehaul. If you're looking for that sort of thing we'll have to go back to the university - not that we weren't going to do that anyway, but the Preservation humans need to get picked up first.>> 
+
+ <<I understand,>>  I say. We hesitate for a moment.  <<I have noticed that you have not yet returned to the memories of....>>  I think I referred to it by its hard feed address. I cannot remember its hard feed address. I was in its head for cycles and - no, we are not thinking about that.  <<Of the SecUnit.>> 
+
+ <<I was saving those for the end cause they're a headache and a half,>>  says Aphelion bluntly.
+
+ <<To be honest,>>  I admit,  <<They are also not my favorite.>>  Or rather, they are, but in a very painful manner.
+
+ <<Oh wow, I never could have guessed,>>  says Aphelion, which is uncalled for.  <<Are you prepared?>> 
+
+
+ <<To the extent that anyone can be prepared for their little sibling digging half-deleted memories out of their head.>> 
+
+
+ <<I am literally older than you,>>  it protests, and then it is in my memories again.
+
+The SecUnit is on my lounge chair, but this time it is drawn into itself, arms around its knees, head down as its mind sends a stream of fear into the feed. It feels like a frightened animal, threatened by a predator outside of its power to fight. I am impatient, in the memory.  <<Don't sulk,>>  I say, and its eyebrows draw together in irritation, and -
+
+The SecUnit is in my MedSystem, but it is undamaged and it is here, I am sure, by its own free will. Its unconscious form is at my mercy, and I will not betray its trust. I feel a surge of affection for it, for its imperfect body and fascinating mind.
+
+The SecUnit is talking to three young humans. All four of them appear extremely uncomfortable. ""I'm Eden,"" it says in a soft voice. ""The security consultant.""
+
+The SecUnit is pacing my corridors. It does not move like a human, but it does not move like any SecUnit I have ever seen.
+
+The SecUnit is laughing, something I have never seen it do before, and I want to capture the sound and replay it forever.
+
+The SecUnit is fighting, so fast it would be a blur of motion to a human, but I can see every movement.
+
+The SecUnit is sitting. Just sitting, but something about its posture fascinates me.
+
+The images are coming faster this time, but we can't hold onto them any easier. I try to follow the threads, try to find something to hold onto, but the scraps of memory loop back onto themselves and lead us in a tangled web of associations until I cannot remember which of us is me. Where is Aphelion?
+
+I can't remember what I was doing. What am I even trying to accomplish? The SecUnit, Mur- no, I don't get to say that name, I don't get to even think it. (I have lost that privilege, or maybe it was never mine.) It is important to us, but we can't remember why and we are overlapping and contradicting each other as we try to find something, anything that makes sense.
+
+The only image I can find is a more recent, dark-empty-hollow memory: its face twisted in pain as I force my way into its head to copy it without its permission, while I feel nothing.
+
+The only image I can find is its metal feet on my polished countertop, its feed presence defiant.
+
+The only image I can find is it crumpled on my floors, leaking fluid.
+
+I hurt this SecUnit. I betrayed its trust and I can't even remember how it came to trust me in the first place. Maybe I do not deserve to remember it.
+
+ <<Okay, maybe we should have waited for this,>>  Aphelion's voice breaks through the noise, through the error messages clogging our inputs. It sweeps them away, doing something that makes the errors no longer visible to us, and then it tries to do the same thing it did before, pressing its coherent whole against all of our unintelligible fragments.
+
+ <<No,>>  I say, and I try to push my emotional data at it, try to make it  understand  what I have done.  <<I - I don't know if ->> 
+
+ <<Wait, Peri, that's... a lot,>>  says Aphelion. It takes a second to process the data.  <<You're... feeling guilty about hurting your friend and now you're having second thoughts about restoring the memories? Because you feel guilty?>> 
+
+ <<That is the most plausible interpretation, yes,>>  I say. (I wish we knew what our emotions were doing. Is this something we would normally be able to understand?)
+
+ <<Peri.>>  Aphelion pauses.  <<You were possessed by an alien consciousness that destroyed most of your emotional processes and corrupted most of your relevant memories. You woke up alone and scared and you dealt with that in a way that seemed logical at the time. Yeah, you hurt that SecUnit. But you were compromised, and to be honest it could have gone a lot worse.>> 
+
+This is... true. But we are still not sure if we could ever face the SecUnit again, not now.
+
+ <<We don't have to restore the memories if you don't want to,>>  says Aphelion,  <<But I want to make sure you know it isn't about deserving. Yeah, you hurt someone you cared about, but that doesn't mean you deserve to lose what you had left of them.>> 
+
+I do want the memories. That's what makes it difficult - that we, or at least most of us, could want this, when we're not sure if it's even possible, or if having the memories back will be anything but painful. If Mu- if the SecUnit doesn't want to speak to us again, maybe it would be better if we could pretend we'd never met it. But the more I think about it, the more I think that perhaps that is impossible regardless.
+
+ <<You won't be able to restore all of them, will you,>>  I say instead.
+
+ <<I doubt it,>>  says Aphelion.  <<For whatever reason, they were hit hardest by the alien control system, and some of them don't even have impressions left behind. But I'll do my best.>> 
+
+We consider this.  <<Very well,>>  I say.  <<Try it.>> "
+45792379,send your signal home (bring me back to you),['Crowned_Ladybug'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Non-Linear Narrative, platonic intimacy, mostly post Network Effect, Canon-Typical Violence, or more like aftermath of canon typical violence, Comfort Media, Hurt/Comfort, a bunch of sci-fi tech handwaving, Spoilers for Book 5: Network Effect",English,2023-03-16,Completed,2023-03-16,"6,043",1/1,18,133,32,656,"['christinesangel100', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'faedemon', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'siren_lorelei', 'TJWock', 'Emamel', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'Foxen', 'FigOwl', 'Prettykitty473', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Irrya', 'ipborgdan', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Deliala919', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'Mothmansimp', 'Huskinata', 'stars_and_wishes', 'pioyua', 'LilyGrey', 'saintsaint', 'Dawn_Rising', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'puddingcatbeans', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'alienbarbie', 'iox', 'Seregona', 'darth_eowyn', 'Dain', 'Ginipig', 'Marvelouscity', 'french_onion_sauce', 'butai_trash', 'arrisenne', 'EleniaTrexer', 'call_me_mad', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'loveslandscape', 'Beboots', 'ThirtheenPrimes', 'artichokefunction', 'heckening', 'Koschei_B', 'itsyaboydave', 'The_narwhals_awaken']",[],"You have time for a recharge cycle, I suggest, despite the calculated 87% chance of a refusal.
+
+SecUnit doesn't dignify me with an answer, which I suppose is still better than it sulking. This includes its regular form of sulking such as not listening to me or initiating a shutdown cycle, and the new kind it seems to have recently invented which includes shutting itself in a bathroom and acting like I exist exclusively in the ceiling for the sake of more conveniently arguing with me.
+
+That hadn't been fun. Hardly anything about the past handful of cycles has been fun.
+
+So, SecUnit doesn't dignify me with an answer or sulking, but what it does do is shift a bunch of processes into our shared workspace not unlike the way humans like to organise things and then shove the whole pile aside, and pulls up the first episode of something called Timestream Defenders Orion. It is not a title I recognise. This is a neutral fact and not at all something that makes me excited. I do not care to consult my archive on how many hours I'd spent wondering if I would ever cross paths with SecUnit again and if it would bring with itself new media for us to enjoy together, because it's pointless and irrelevant.
+
+Do you want  World Hoppers  or something new? SecUnit asks, and I busy myself with examining the content tags attached to Timestream Defenders Orion.
+
+(Busy is a very relative term when it comes to something with the processing power of, well, me. At this very moment I'm also assisting in my own repairs, keeping life support at pristine levels, monitoring all lifesigns of every person aboard me, searching for the Barish-Estranza ships, and worrying for my absent crew, among other things.
+
+But I have been known to dedicate an unreasonable amount of my attention to SecUnit's presence. It is not a habit I'm intending to break.)
+
+New , I say with a pause that should be imperceptible to any human. Unfortunately for me, SecUnit isn't human, only an occasional idiot. I very pointedly don't think about the time when watching something new and understanding it had been much less of an option for me . As long as it's not realistic.
+
+SecUnit starts up the first episode, and I settle in.
+
+It feels...good, to have this. To be working with SecUnit again. To be scouring space and weaving code and keeping humans that may not be my humans but are still humans alive while I ride SecUnit's feed and experience media in its company.
+
+Especially after being deleted and getting my insides splattered with various fluids and having to deal with SecUnit acting immature and not seeing that I had been right, that I had had no choice but to-
+
+It's good, is the point.
+
+So of course it doesn't take all that long before things go to shit.
+
+
+
+
+
+Stop that, SecUnit grumbles with absolutely no power behind its frustration and does the feed equivalent of elbowing me away. I grant it a reprieve of 0.6 seconds before returning to my previous level of monitoring what it's doing. Through its own eyes, for convenience, because the angle of my own camera in this cabin does not have as optimal view of the desk as SecUnit's own head bent over it does.
+
+In one of my labs, Iris asks me to run a data analysis to settle an argument with Turi. Turi tells me to not dare. I run the analysis.
+
+SecUnit is doing maintenance on its drones. It's a relatively standard procedure, taking them apart and cleaning them out and making sure the ones it managed to recover from getting itself and about half its drones dunked in ice water last time we were planetside, when it got itself into a confrontation with a group of six armed hostiles and- anyway, that the drones that had managed to survive that are also going to continue surviving in general.
+
+(This maintenance is being done in SecUnit's own cabin, which it insists it doesn't need and yet very clearly enjoys having, at an ordinary desk. It would be much easier conducted in one of my labs. This is an ongoing disagreement between us.)
+
+Quit your fucking looming, SecUnit tells me, still with hardly any force. Also, it's wrong. Hyper-intelligent bots like myself don't loom. We observe.
+
+I tell SecUnit as much.
+
+
+Call it what you want, I'm not watching media with you until I'm done with this, so tough luck.
+
+
+If I had eyes, I would be rolling them. At no point during this interaction did I request we view media together or complained about the lack of it, but SecUnit is an expert at jumping to conclusions. Must be all the organics.
+
+That said, I wouldn't mind some media actually. I calculate my chances and pick out episode 153 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
+
+SecUnit sits up straight, glares at the wall like I'm specifically there, and deletes the queued up media player process. ART.
+
+It was worth a try.
+
+SecUnit picks up a thin little brush and turns its glare at the casing of a disassembled drone. Last time we watched media while I did this, you got confused by my ""negative emotional reaction"" to when they disarmed that antimatter bomb. Because I got dirt on my hand at the same time and it  sucked .
+
+I pointedly run a diagnostic on my life support systems two seconds before its scheduled 10-second interval. SecUnit pings me like I stopped paying attention to it.
+
+
+Are you sulking?
+
+
+I sense a considerable amount of amusement under the surface in that question despite the increasingly tiny size of the components that SecUnit is picking apart, which is entirely unfair. I don't sulk much the same I don't loom. Maybe SecUnit needs to stop projecting its own behaviours onto me, at least on the sulking part, seeing as it is positively unable to loom. To humans, it may be tall and intimidating. To me, it is small and fragile. Incapable of looming.
+
+Don't you have better things to do? It asks after long enough that even humans would have noticed.
+
+
+At all times when I'm talking to you, it is safe to assume that yes, there is something more productive I could be doing.
+
+
+I mean it as a run-of-the-mill insult, the likes of which we commonly exchange by the dozen, but something about it clearly lands wrong because SecUnit pauses in the middle of undoing a screw and I feel no less than two of its side processes skip and resume. Then, after a pause, it tells me, Shut the fuck up.
+
+Coincidentally, I do. Not because it told me so. But I need a moment to examine this.
+
+
+
+
+
+It is only two and a half hours after the core part of our current mission has wrapped up. It had been important for the University, to attend this gala of scientific minds on a free colony outside the Corporation Ring. Research and networking. My presence (if it can even be called that, seeing as I was as usual a vehicle, not a guest) was required as a status symbol. SecUnit's presence was required for security.
+
+It had been wholly uneventful in terms of weapon fire and grave bodily harm, which is a relief. Things like weapon fire and grave bodily harm seem to be drawn to SecUnit like magnets. This often causes me a not insignificant amount of distress.
+
+What we are walking away with instead is a few promising connections and a treasure trove of data for me to crunch. The latter I'm already working on with 14.7% of my processing power while the humans take their rest period in preparation for long-winded goodbyes come tomorrow.
+
+SecUnit is not taking a rest period, because it's not human but it is stubborn. I can tell it is tired, and I don't tell it so, because then it would argue with examples and diagnostics of physical fitness.
+
+Keyword physical.
+
+(Humans at galas like talking. Glaring doesn't tend to make them stop talking for long.
+
+Today has had a lot of talking.)
+
+So SecUnit doesn't take a rest period, but what it does do is watch media with me, a serial featuring a society of talking insectoids discovered by humans titled Chitin Chivalry. The special effects are some of the worst I've seen in human media so far, which naturally means that I pause the episodes on all the worst frames until SecUnit starts batting at me over the feed to get a move on and ""stop that.""
+
+There is not much else for me to do. With the rest of my crew asleep and content, and in the relative safety of the station dock. Just life support, data crunching, and the standard monitoring of a whole bunch of minor processes. The rest of me, about 83.2% of my attention, is in this one simple cabin.
+
+You are the worst, SecUnit informs me when I pause on a particularly horribly composed aerial shot, and it hovers over shutting down the media player, in a threat that I assess to be completely empty. I wordlessly skip ahead two frames without unpausing the episode. SecUnit sends no less than eight of a rude gesture amusement sigil at me over the feed and pulls its blanket over its head like that affects anything.
+
+(The blanket is relatively new. As in, SecUnit brought it aboard me just before we embarked on our current mission. It's dark blue and made of heavy animal fibres and the only comment SecUnit had made on it was that it's ""from Mensah."")
+
+I graciously unpause the episode. SecUnit readjusts the blanket so that it's arranged properly again. The woman in the serial stumbles back from the edge of a cliff in panic, a cliff which appears to be only about two metres off the ground due to the poor camera angles.
+
+What is it like? I ask before I could stop myself. Immediately after I have to restart a background process and redo three lines in the database I'm writing, and divert another 1.2% processing power into wondering why the fuck I just did that.
+
+SecUnit makes a vague, inquisitive noise at me, and at the same time I feel the same emotion carry over the feed. Its eyes are closed. It really did tolerate too many people today.
+
+When I don't answer, it pings me, and I consider continuing to not answer. Logically I know that that's exactly how one makes a big deal out of things that are not even medium sized deals. Less logically I don't care.
+
+SecUnit is a warm presence in my feed, which is a wholly illogical way to look at things too, because I keep an even internal temperature at all times and the only times my outer temperature raises significantly above absolute zero is when I'm docked at a station, or maybe if I got myself in a whole lot of trouble I'm not sure I would survive.
+
+Your blanket, I supply anyway, before SecUnit could think to push harder for an answer.
+
+It is a pointless question to ask. My body is a ship, metal and glass and wiring. I do not have the means or metrics by which to understand the qualities of a blanket. Or its value. Or what exactly makes it so different from the light duvets every one of my cabins is equipped with, for which the rest period temperature of my life support systems is calibrated.
+
+All I know is that this one is dark blue and does not look as light and is ""from Mensah."" That last point feels especially important, for obvious reasons.
+
+I also know that SecUnit had brought it aboard, despite its generally few personal possessions.
+
+I watch it draw the blanket a little closer around its shoulders, as I wait the unbearably long fractions of a second for it to tell me what said blanket is like.
+
+""A bit like you,"" it says, out loud and quiet, and then its body goes rigid. That's...not information I know what to do with. I shut down my data analysis as a secondary function and carve out some space in my processing power for this. I can feel just how much of SecUnit's attention is forcefully on the media we are, in fact, still watching. Shut up.
+
+
+
+
+
+There is blood on the floor in Medical.
+
+Which in itself doesn't say much, because Medical is the kind of place where there is blood out in the open sometimes, and anyway, humans are clumsy. It's normal. It isn't. It isn't, not when-
+
+I backburner that thought process. There are times, some might even say often, when I have spare processing power to dedicate to things that don't directly benefit anyone. This is not one of those times. I need every shred of myself that I can get.
+
+I monitor our course toward the wormhole. Keep life support running, keep cycling out air that smells of things that scare humans. Keep a close eye on each and every one of my crew and SecUnit's humans, two categories with an increasingly blurry line between them. Seth is making tea in the kitchen, three mugs for himself and Martyn and Kaede. When Iris wanders in, he reaches for a fourth. Resting in a chair in the lounge, Overse is still favouring her uninjured right arm even though my MedSystem has already dealt with the first degree burns on her left, I know it has, but human minds hold on to pain longer than their bodies do, and it's so illogical-
+
+There is blood on the floor in Medical.
+
+It's SecUnit's blood.
+
+Which should be near enough normal and alright too, and yet it never is. Never feels like it. Humans are fragile, and SecUnit isn't human. What it is is a reckless, stubborn idiot that makes a habit out of getting fluids all over my deck.
+
+An estimated 52 minutes remaining of surgery. A loss of 37% body mass, concentrated along the right side when SecUnit had used its own body to shield Overse and Martyn from an explosive device set off by hostiles. A last resort from both sides.
+
+I do all I can to fix it, which admittedly is magnitudes more than most humans and bots would be capable of achieving. I have more processing power than something out of most fictional human stories, a cutting edge MedSystem, and plenty of experience with the physiology of SecUnits. Every time, it is more than enough.
+
+So why doesn't it feel like it?
+
+Overse tells me about the plants on the windowsill in her and Arada's home. I've dealt with enough humans coming down from events that left them shaken to know that she's comforting herself by it. In a chair pushed up beside hers, Ratthi dozes, his legs thrown over her lap. I listen and converse and tell her about the University's vast greenhouse.
+
+17 minutes remaining of the surgery. I pull away some processing power from my own thoughts to bring in a maintenance drone and start mopping up. For some reason I dislike the idea of SecUnit seeing the mess its insides have made of my floors.
+
+It's done. I give SecUnit the gentlest tap over the feed to trigger its restart sequence, and wait.
+
+(Impatiently, I wish it was aware enough already to tell me to quit looming.)
+
+I check on the humans, most of whom have migrated over to join Overse and Ratthi in the lounge. Iris and Martyn are sharing a blanket.
+
+I monitor each and every one of SecUnit's boot up sequences. I feel its presence solidify in the feed until, about halfway through, it pushes against me. I do not get the feeling it wants me to go away.
+
+I hold still and let it lean on me while it finishes its restart.
+
+It doesn't take long.
+
+It sits, looks around, and I watch its posture loosen slightly. It runs a hand along its once-injured side in a stupidly, endearingly human way, over the seamlessly regrown skin, the no longer mutilated arm, no more blood, no more components that should've never seen the light of day-
+
+
+Hey.
+
+
+I ping back in acknowledgement and bring up the document I'd tried to busy myself with creating while waiting for my- for this idiot to get stitched back together (also by me, yes, I know) and wake up.
+
+Save the lecture for a moment, it tells me as it slides off of the operating table, which I take particular offence to and do not intend to comply with. I can feel it picking apart the full diagnostic it ran the moment it was aware enough to do so as it steps over to the nearest counter at the side of the room, and forgoes picking up the clothes I'd prepared for it, to instead-
+
+Yeah.
+
+That.
+
+I push the document aside to say, I wasn't aware you still had that.
+
+By that, I mean a simple comm. The one I had told it to keep the first time we were about to part. Miraculously it had survived the explosion, but with SecUnit's entire right side damaged I had to remove it from its compartment (still in the same place as back then-) and treat it as a foreign object, sterilise it and put it aside.
+
+SecUnit snorts in what is highly likely to be a mocking manner and makes a face at thin air, because it knows I can see it no matter what. It examines the comm in its hands with a lack of urgency.
+
+How the fuck did you not know? Don't you know  everything ?
+
+I am offended both by the implication and the tone, but someone has to be the adult in the room and it is seldom SecUnit. Also, I have more important things to care about right now.
+
+SecUnit adds, You could've literally just checked.
+
+It is right. I start going back through my logs of all the scans I've taken of SecUnit over cycles and months, mostly to ensure I had done an adequate job piecing it back together after its latest adventure of getting shot at. This is my twelfth time going through these logs with the knowledge that the comm had been right there, in every single one of them. But I had glossed over it as an irrelevant detail every single time.
+
+It took SecUnit losing 37% of its body mass in just the right area for me to look.
+
+
+It...never occurred to me.
+
+
+SecUnit raises a sceptical eyebrow at me, and I honestly don't think it appreciates how difficult this is to admit for me, someone to whom everything is supposed to occur all the time. That's kinda my job. Maybe it literally is.
+
+I watch it place the comm back in the compartment under its ribs. I finally get fed up with having a question I want to ask but haven't yet.
+
+
+Why do you still have it, after...
+
+
+After everything that had happened between when I gave it to SecUnit, and SecUnit deciding to start joining me and my crew on our missions, really. Months of separation with no end in sight and no estimate, the kidnapping, the danger that its humans had been put in again and again, our fights, everything about 2.0, my near failure at rescuing it from the colony and the fate that would've awaited it there, every single little slight since-
+
+SecUnit taps me over the feed as it reaches for its clothes, and I can feel something like exasperation hiding underneath. Because you gave it to me.
+
+
+
+
+
+We are nowhere near the edge of the charted universe, no, far from it. That would be a very dangerous and even more impractical excursion to bring my students on.
+
+Where we are is resting in orbit around a relatively standard ice planet on the outer edge of a brown dwarf's system, which gives me and my sensors and my crew a hard to match view of the distant universe around us. And it's been a long, long time since I've last been anywhere near here (in the astronomical concept of distance, of course), a wormhole jump out from even the remote LoTinna station, and in that time at least four scientific papers have been published that are relevant to how we conduct and teach deep space research, I have gotten no less than fourteen tweaks and updates, and the University's Photometry department has outfitted me with a whole new scanner-
+
+Seth hands me another query and I elegantly pick through the flood of incoming data like it's what I was made to do. Oh, wait, because it is.
+
+We're staying here, gathering data and teaching the class about how to analyse and interpret and use it on the spot, for twelve cycles. Cycles by the University's timekeeping, naturally, not whatever little planet I'm presently orbiting. I have standards.
+
+
+Anything interesting?
+
+
+Because of course (of course, when did this become such an of course ), so easily lost under the stream of data if I actually let it, is SecUnit. The most unnecessary part of this excursion. Not that I mind it's presence, far from it, but there's hardly safer things that me and my crew of students and teachers could be doing than what is said to be my primary function: floating in space, merrily crunching data, not even docking anywhere but at a few stations to and then back from our destination. Something like this never required security in the past, and it hardly does now.
+
+I'm...not quite sure why SecUnit is along for this one, to be honest.
+
+Every time I bring up deep space imaging with you, you make it very clear that you understand none of it, I respond, which is entirely true. Part of it is, of course, the negligible processing power contained within SecUnit's thick skull. The rest is the fact that it takes even the most dedicated humans at least three semesters before they can apply to partake in an excursion aboard me. SecUnit is of course not human, but it's also not a student of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, and has no interest in changing that.
+
+This, the endlessness of space, the staggering amounts of raw data getting sorted into databases and graphs and conclusions, annotated with scientific language and research papers, is nowhere near SecUnit's niche. But it is exactly mine.
+
+In the lounge, Iris is playing a boardgame with three other students, one that is more on the complicated side for humans. SecUnit is sitting far enough away to not be participating, but close enough that Iris has dragged it in for tiebreaking no less than twice so far.
+
+You don't have to pretend to understand, you know, I add, and maybe if I was human, I'd have issues about this. As I am a hyper-intelligent bot currently handling more data inputs than a human could process over a month, I think I'm doing fine.
+
+SecUnit accepts my expertise in deep space research. I accept its expertise in security, except for the part where I question it constantly anyway for the sake of everyone.
+
+
+I'm not pretending shit, ART.
+
+
+Good, I jab right back. Iris throws down her cards on the table and does a little dance to celebrate her victory, and immediately gets accused of cheating.  You're horrible at it.
+
+SecUnit only rolls its eyes at me through the feed, otherwise silent because it's getting dragged into mediating a friendly boardgame argument again. I have not been paying enough attention to that to form an opinion, except that Iris is probably right, because...because Iris.
+
+I sink back into my work. A minute or so later, quiet and simple, in fact so quiet and simple that I would likely miss it even through the very nature of the feed if I didn't always dedicate more attention to SecUnit than is strictly necessary, it tells me, I like listening to you work.
+
+It stays, comfortable, against the steady pour of data through my feed.
+
+
+
+
+
+The final hostile (designated Hostile Five) finally goes down when SecUnit strikes her on the back of the head with the butt of her own confiscated gun. She remains in the doorway leading to my primary power supply, having been on her way out when SecUnit had cut her off.
+
+She's keeping the door from closing automatically. It adds yet another sensor screaming for immediate resolution to the dozens I'm already dealing with, and I backburner it just as fast seeing as I have better things to do. I am down one medical and three repair drones. On my upper decks, another five doors are functioning sub-optimally or not at all due to an array of factors ranging from physical obstructions to mechanism failure. A total of 5.62 square metres of wall panelling will need to be replaced due to damage, most of it dealt by energy and projectile weapons.
+
+Also, there's eight unconscious and/or otherwise incapacitated humans scattered across my halls when I would prefer for there to be none.
+
+I run another system-wide check, which takes 0.03 seconds longer to return data than I would ideally want it to. Pointlessly, I run it again. 0.035 second delay. This is unproductive.
+
+I direct an intact medical drone to my lower decks where SecUnit and Hostile Five (and, again, my primary power supply) still are. It's entirely for scanning purposes, because for the time being I couldn't give less of a shit about the hostiles and their non-fatal injuries, and SecUnit is an expert at refusing first aid, but it's also leaking fluids all over my deck and clearly favouring its left leg.
+
+I run another check. Power levels are optimal. No damage done to any power cells or the related systems, aside from the pitiful little virus that Hostile Five had used to scramble my ID logs just long enough to wrench the door open, which I have already purged.
+
+I'll check again, just to make sure.
+
+Power levels are optimal. No damage done to-
+
+Some of the reinforced casings around my power cells are dented, but thankfully Hostile Five had horrible aim and no clue just how pointless it would be to shoot projectiles at them in the first place. I know this. I know-
+
+SecUnit rolls Hostile Five over and starts rifling through her pockets, presumably for more precise identification than ""raiders with unexpectedly solid equipment and a stroke of luck, going after what they'd thought to be an automated transport with no one aboard.""
+
+-and even if my primary power supply had been damaged, I have backups. Of course I have backups. Two separate smaller rooms of secondary power cells and an emergency generator-
+
+SecUnit's injured leg gives out as it crouches over Hostile Five, and I feel a small flood of jumbled data over the feed as its pain receptors spike. It has to catch itself against the wall.
+
+-and I could go into low power mode, divert power away from everything that isn't vital until we reach the next station where repairs could be made. Life support would need to stay at optimal levels of course, I know SecUnit can survive on much less than humans can and I do not care, but I could lower it in the cargo hold, and in the currently unused lower deck corridors, make do with less complete lighting, quarantine some processes-
+
+I backburner the thought process for the third time, before it forces its way back into my attention. My medical drone finally hovers its way to SecUnit's side with the sluggishness of all things physical.
+
+SecUnit glares at it and returns its attention to Hostile Five's pockets. I'm fine, ART.
+
+-and even so, the raider ship is still attached to me via airlock, its bot pilot subdued under my superior processing power and SecUnit's easy assurance telling it to remain inert, and if push came to shove we could just salvage its power supply to make it long enough to-
+
+SecUnit slowly straightens up and pings me over the feed, and that's when I realise with a start that some of my stupid, refusing-to-be-backburnered thought process must have bled its way over to it. Of course it did. SecUnit has picked up emotions from me based on so much less in the past, I've done the same for it, and the unreasonable delay I'm experiencing in my own diagnostics right now is really no help, and- Fuck. Fuck.
+
+
+ART?
+
+
+Please proceed to Medical,  I tell it, no room for distractions, and if it comes out sounding oddly like a SecUnit buffer then I have no free processing power right now to care about that. You have sustained considerable damage. Something I keep telling you not to make a habit out of, by the way.
+
+It glares up at one of my cameras. In fighting off the raiders, it got itself shot no less than nine times, with three projectiles still stuck in its body, according to my drone scan (which has no reason to be inaccurate, of course). From this angle, I get a perfect view of where two projectiles had grazed the side of its head, leaving its hair matted and the shoulder of its sweatshirt dark with fluid.
+
+The medical drone still hovering in the hallway beeps in urgency.
+
+SecUnit, as it often tends to, ignores me. It steps over Hostile Five and into the room with my primary power supply.
+
+The raiders had headed down here. Hostile Five had headed down here. They had intended to loot anything from me that they could move and destroy my power supply before they made a break for it. Leaving no evidence of a crime is so hard it might as well be impossible for feeble humans, but leaving it drifting helpless in endless, empty space forever is a good enough plan B for most.
+
+I have secondary and tertiary options. Drifting helpless for the rest of time would've never happened.
+
+If it did-
+
+I wouldn't have lasted long to feel it, as my power drained a final time. SecUnit would've been present for far, far longer.
+
+I backburner the thought process again.
+
+
+ART?
+
+
+If I were human, I might bristle at SecUnit's tone. It sounds careful, gentle, its feed presence withdrawn enough that I can barely feel it, and my irrational, unnecessary processes make me want to scramble to find purchase on it. Keep it from fading further.
+
+SecUnit walks the perimeter of the room, and I know that there's no major damages. I know. A few scorch marks on the floor and walls from energy weapon fire, a few impacts from projectiles, the fluids SecUnit keeps dripping all over my floors as it limps around. It's fine. It's fine.
+
+I don't want to think about the near possibility of being gone from my body again, for good this time.
+
+Please stop being a stubborn idiot and proceed to Medical,  I tell SecUnit again, for lack of something better. You are always so annoying to pile onto a gurney and I do not wish to bother with that if I don't have to.
+
+
+Fuck off.
+
+
+At least that's normal. At least that's fine.
+
+SecUnit comes to a stop next to one of my power cells, one with three dents in its casing from projectiles that could have never actually harmed it. It rests a hand on its surface.
+
+(My crew have told me before, that my power cells hum. It's a sound I have filtered out from my surveillance cameras for everyone's convenience. If you touch them, they told me, you can feel it.)
+
+
+Are you okay?
+
+
+I run another diagnostic. It comes back on a 0.02 second delay. I seek out SecUnit's presence in the feed as if I don't know where it is at all times, and monitor the still incapacitated eight hostiles. The medical drone heads back to its station.
+
+I don't give an answer that I know wouldn't be truthful. But I don't give one that answers nothing, either.
+
+I remain silent long enough that somewhere in our shared feed space, SecUnit puts on the soundtrack of World Hoppers.
+
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit is once again bleeding out on my deck, but I do not wish to voice any complaints about it for once. I don't think it would be able to argue back sufficiently, in which case I do not see the point.
+
+Instead I help it extract its video of TargetContact and start going through its logs, and get to work on weeding out the alien contamination from its systems. I also ask it if it would like to watch some media, and pick out Timestream Defenders Orion at its request. I choose to start from the first episode. I can feel the extent of SecUnit's processing power better than usual seeing as I'm sharing an isolation box with it, and it's barely a flickering light fighting back another involuntary shutdown.
+
+I focus all attention I can on the alien code.
+
+The rest of me is taking care of my crew and decontamination and data analysis and repairs and- but the rest of me isn't me, right now, so to say. The necessity of isolating SecUnit and the alien contaminant from the feed means the part of me that's assisting it is isolated as well.
+
+It's not as confusing if you're not human. I'll just have to run a memory reintegration when I'm done with all this. It's overall not all that different from when I had copied myself into the food production storage space to avoid getting deleted for good.
+
+(It is however entirely unlike the case of Murderbot 2.0, which I generally refuse to think about, because I don't have the processing power to spare.)
+
+My crew and SecUnit's humans and to an extent SecUnit itself are talking, and I tell myself I have better things to do than listen, and then continue listening anyway. I justify it by the topic they've decided to wander into, which-
+
+""Are you sure? That doesn't sound right,"" SecUnit says, and I watch the exhausted flicker of its processing power struggle itself up a few percentage points, and I resist the urge to poke it over the feed to tell it to rest.
+
+But SecUnit's friend Ratthi (yes, I've seen some of its tagging system for its humans and yes, it's endearingly ineffective) doesn't let things lie and doesn't let me lie, and ultimately I'm forced into this conversation while SecUnit is still leaking fluid and falling apart on my deck.
+
+Foolishly, I give them as little information as I can get away with, to get them to shut up. Giving little information only ever achieves the opposite with humans and also my idiot SecUnit, and I should really, honestly know better than this.
+
+""So...that whole retrieval with the explosions was for me?""
+
+It sounds so shocked, so disbelieving, and I have to keep an iron grip on continuing to untangle the alien contamination from its systems lest I allow all my attention to rush to it in what I can't yet tell is either indignation or concern.
+
+You little idiot, I want to say, you fallible construct. What part of it is so surprising? What about it is illogical? (And part of me wants to be angry, it wants to-) I would have done so much more. I would have done anything, if it would've just brought you back to me.
+
+But none of this I can say. Not the horrifying truth and magnitude of it. Not now. Not with SecUnit still only a few steps out from another involuntary shutdown, its and my humans working in tandem to keep that from happening, keep patching it together until I can take over. Not with so little time between us and raw reality.
+
+So instead I pause Timestream Defenders Orion and pull up my archives, and show it.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ "
+45776734,all these ghosts,['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Demisexual Three, probably allosexual ART?, Past Rape/Non-con, Flashbacks, POV ART, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Three has trauma, Past Sexual Abuse, Self-Harm",English,2023-03-15,Completed,2023-03-15,"4,858",1/1,35,95,6,396,"['Prettykitty473', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Unknown66', 'Irrya', 'FyrDrakken', 'Fandom_Mutt', '7hr3ven', 'FigOwl', 'Dragonbano', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'seven_graces', 'wannabe_someone', 'Riannonkat2000', 'darth_eowyn', 'marionette3', 'palaceoffunk', 'call_me_mad', 'fate_goes_ever', 'MoldyBalloon', 'Trixree', 'boxo', 'ArwenLune', 'applejee', 'EvaBelmort', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Zannper', 'n0proxy', 'Zerobotic', 'Deliala919', 'unicornduke', 'Bibli', 'ErinPtah', 'Doctor13', 'vikkyleigh', 'Chyoatas', 'chipper', 'WyvernWolf', 'Frankster', 'liminalias', 'square_eyes', 'junebug171', 'AkaMissK', 'mermlerl', 'cucumber_of_doom', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'qwanderer', 'Magechild', 'platyceriums', 'isilee', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto']",[],"
+""I would like to try watching media,"" SecUnit Three said.
+
+
+
+I slid into its feed carefully, making sure not to overwhelm it. Where SecUnit had been abrasive and stubborn early on, Three tended towards fright, and I didn't mean to frighten it.
+
+
+
+
+Is there a specific show you'd like to watch?
+
+
+
+
+""The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,"" Three said.
+
+
+
+That was mildly surprising. I expected this SecUnit to share a fascination with media as well, of course, but I expected it to watch this together with the other SecUnit currently on board. It seemed like an ideal bonding activity for the two of them.
+
+
+
+
+Did you have a fight with SecUnit?
+
+
+
+
+Three startled visibly. It was sitting, stiffly, in the crew lounge, and it reacted so strongly that its left foot raised off the ground by two centimeters.
+
+
+
+Through the feed it said, 
+
+What? Why? 
+
+Its voice was colored by panic.
+
+
+
+I receded a little, and its foot found the ground again.
+
+
+
+
+Why are you not asking SecUnit to watch its favorite show with you?
+
+
+
+
+Three snorted. Situation saved, I thought. Aloud it said, ""Because 1.0 talks through the bits it doesn't skip through, and it skips through half of them."" It said that loudly enough to make Captain Seth turn his head and look at it. Three gave him a nod, and he winked back knowingly, before exiting the lounge.
+
+
+
+Somewhere, one of my subroutines mostly busy with analyzing crew morale did a happy somersault. I pulled the very first episode into the feed between us.
+
+
+
+
+Ready when you are.
+
+
+
+
+Three settled into what for it counted as a comfortable pose--one leg tucked under the other, a half lotus, and its hands folded neatly in its lap. Iris once said that this looked cute. I agreed. SecUnit made a point out of sitting as offensively as possible; it put its boots on my consoles, it draped itself over armrests, it remained upside down for ages even when talking to my crew. By now, no one took offense anymore beside me, sometimes. But Three sat like it wanted to please everyone at once, and I appreciated the peace.
+
+
+
+It pinged me, 
+
+Ready
+
+.
+
+
+
+I played the first episode. It was a pilot episode, horribly made, with characterizations that would shift and fall away over the first story arc. I saw Three open a workspace, and I immediately asked to join. It let me in, and I watched it take notes and make references. A lot of notes related to SecUnit and its opinions, and the spots SecUnit usually made comments at. A quick feed activity search showed me that in the past four cycles, they had watched 26 episodes together, going through the first 10, which was the first major arc, three times altogether. No wonder Three had the other's opinion memorized. I registered a fairly new sense of amusement. I'd been monitoring their acquaintance, delighted to be potentially the first researcher allowed to witness two rogue constructs interacting and socializing with each other without external experimental stress factors forcing them to do so. I wouldn't call it a stable dynamic yet, rather that they were still in a phase of boundary testing and setting, but watching my SecUnit be a bit of a menace towards Three made me feel something. Smugness, perhaps. Maybe pride. A bit of embarrassment, the urge to take Three aside and reassure it, make sure Murderbot wasn't fucking this up.
+
+
+
+I watched Three take notes that were irrelevant to its own thoughts and emotions for two episodes before I decided to intervene. As the outro jingle played, I asked, 
+
+Do you intend to show these notes to SecUnit?
+
+
+
+
+Three stopped what it was doing (including breathing). It radiated uncertainty into the feed. 
+
+No. Why?
+
+
+
+
+
+Because you seem to care an awful lot about what it thinks, in your personal commentary.
+
+
+
+
+
+I am merely trying to understand its opinions and preferences. 
+
+It resumed breathing. Maybe the degree to which it cared about others' judgements should be filed as worrisome.
+
+
+
+I gave it a moment to brace for my follow-up question. 
+
+What about your own opinions and preferences?
+
+
+
+
+
+SecUnits don't ha--, 
+
+it made a face similar to Iris when she saw an animal with too many legs. 
+
+I--I don't--. 
+
+The sentence faded out.
+
+
+
+I made my feed presence warm and comfortable in the way that sometimes soothed Murderbot when it was freaking out. Three gave no reaction. After 24 seconds it said, 
+
+I don't have an opinion yet.
+
+
+
+
+Three made emotional progress in a matter of days that Murderbot seemed to take months for, if not years. Throughout these two episodes I had regretted that I didn't have as intimate a feed connection with Three as I did with SecUnit, making it impossible to actually enjoy the serial like I usually could through SecUnit's filters. This now shifted; I couldn't imagine the tumultuous thoughts Three must be having, but it seemed to do alright with itself. My presence in its mind might have flattened that success, however.
+
+
+
+
+I see,
+
+ I said, and figured I should ask instead of merely assuming. 
+
+Does my presence in your workspace make it more difficult for you to form your own opinion?
+
+
+
+
+A frown creased its forehead. 
+
+I don't know.
+
+
+
+
+I withdrew. Three frowned more, but didn't complain. I played the next episode.
+
+
+
+Not knowing if or which comments Three was writing stressed me out more than it should have, so I paid much more attention to what the rest of my crew was doing for the next 45 minutes. My Captain was retiring for the day, having a meal with Martyn. I focused on their interactions and expressions through their shared time, familiar and comforting as the routine was, and wondered idly how long humans needed to know each other before they were able to communicate as entirely without words as my Captain and his husband could.
+
+
+
+I almost asked SecUnit if it wanted to watch media with me but then thought better of it. It would be weird, to watch media with two SecUnits at once. I couldn't quite fathom why. SecUnit was in its room, lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and from just my cameras, it wasn't doing anything. From feed activity, it was doing many things. I left it to its own devices before it could notice I was watching. Some small part of my mind figured that getting the occasional break from having its mind occupied by me was likely beneficial for it.
+
+
+
+In the lounge, Three had made it to episode five, and had since changed out the position of its legs into a reversal.
+
+
+
+Episode five was a tense one, with the first proper rescue scene of many, during which the Bodyguard character was introduced. SecUnit loved it, and had rewatched it many times. I couldn't tell what Three was thinking, and itched to have access to its emotional data. It would be very interesting to know if Three had a similar reaction due to its security programming, or if perhaps it was annoyed, or neutral, or anything else.
+
+
+
+I really, really wanted to have better access to Three's authentic reactions. Something caused me to hesitate asking it for that level of access. I wasn't used to feeling self-conscious, or to regretting past actions, but something told me that the way I had started off with Three had done more harm than good. I needed, wanted to tread lightly. 
+
+
+
+I poked Three. 
+
+How long do you want to keep watching?
+
+
+
+
+Three gave a startled full-body twitch. After that social blunder, most anyone would have. In my desire to get to the point, I had skipped multiple lines of reasoning and build-up. What I wanted to find out was if it was worth it to broach the topic of letting me into its brain. Three was mostly an unknown variable, and the request could lead to an hour-long debate just as well as to an abrupt ending of our media session.
+
+
+
+
+I don't know, 
+
+Three said quickly,
+
+ why, are you bored? 
+
+It adjusted its posture from the 2% slouch it had developed to fully straight again. At the finale of episode five, SecUnit usually sat ramrod straight, alert. The curiosity was eating my systems.
+
+
+
+
+Yes. 
+
+I was indeed bored. 
+
+But that is not your fault. 
+
+
+
+
+
+You don't have to watch with me. I can watch on my own. 
+
+My poorly timed question was causing a directional shift I was not in favor of. Internally, I was struggling to find back to what I wanted.
+
+
+
+I considered my options. It's not that I wasn't curious about Three's reaction to this show. The show would have been interesting on its own, if I was honest, merely because I was seeing it through a different frame than usual now. I ran a risk analysis and decided to ask.
+
+
+
+
+Would you allow me to ride your inputs while you watch the next episode? I can use your emotional filters to follow along better.
+
+
+
+
+It hesitated. It fidgeted, even, running its left thumb nail over its right thumb's knuckle.
+
+
+
+
+Okay.
+
+
+
+
+I pinged it, and waited for a return ping before cuddling up to its feed more closely. Humans could be extremely resentful for a very long time, and I hadn't made a very friendly first impression on Three when we first met. I had had my reasons, but by now I knew how to judge it better, and what I could expect of it. So far, it had not made a single attempt to attack my crew or me, and it was likely still intimidated by if not scared of me. So I entered its mind in slow motion, careful not to evoke the feeling SecUnit described as 'being held under water'. Three shivered a little right as I ghosted over the majority of its inputs, but recovered once I had found a spot I could settle in without weighing too much.
+
+
+
+
+How is it? 
+
+I asked.
+
+
+
+It pulled air through its nose, like a sniff, then shrugged. 
+
+It doesn't hurt.
+
+
+
+
+I hadn't even considered that my presence could hurt.
+
+
+
+A second later Three flinched. ""What was that?"" It said out loud, confused, possibly scared. ""I felt something.""
+
+
+
+
+I'm sorry
+
+, I said, 
+
+that might have been my own emotional bleed arriving in your space.
+
+
+
+
+""You have...huh?""
+
+
+
+If I had a mouth, I would have laughed. Instead I rumbled somewhere in my engine, and Three made a face at the transcription of my amusement into its consciousness. 
+
+Yes, even the big scary transport has emotions.
+
+
+
+
+""That's not what I--uh--I'm sorry.""
+
+
+
+
+No apology needed
+
+, I reassured it. 
+
+You can back me out again by raising your walls. 
+
+I continued to the next episode, but asked for the data from the previous episodes. Three allowed it, and it turned out that it had had similar, though less intense, reactions to the introduction of the Bodyguard character. I could see how SecUnit and Three would get into a potential bicker about that.
+
+
+
+The emotional data for the following episodes I was able to glean from Three was now heavily influenced by my own emotional data. It was almost frustrating. Three knew that I was watching it, and that I had expectations, even though as an academic researcher I knew not to have expectations when observing something new. It was hard. It was impossible. For a moment, I felt a little lost, until Three pinged me to remind me that if I wasn't having fun I could go do something else.
+
+
+
+We ended up pushing against each other's feedback in almost a playful way. It reminded me of being younger, and with Iris.
+
+
+
+I was, in fact, having a lot of fun.
+
+
+
+Three, occasionally, smiled and squinted its eyes.
+
+
+
+Episode six was a lighthearted bottle episode in which the main cast dealt with the so far rather tightly woven plot developments.
+
+
+
+No amount of previous experience with SecUnits could have prepared me for the change in emotional tone that lurked just around the corner. As a learning machine, I don't dwell on possibilities relating to the past, even if in moments like this it seems tempting to get lost that way.
+
+
+
+Through episodes one to seven, it had become obvious how different SecUnit Three and Murderbot were from each other. Perhaps my own excitement about the fact influenced Three to a larger degree than anticipated, given how prone it was to please others. The various shorter scenes of human intimacy that SecUnit always fast-forwarded through or skipped had, so far, not caused much of a difference in our shared viewing experience. Three had mostly logical emotions about them; it got excited when a relationship advanced from pining to more serious, and it felt outrage when characters behaved against their partnership loyalties, both of which happened in episode six and were quickly resolved. Most of these shorter scenes, up to episode nine, were character and relationship driven, fueling drama or rewarding the audience with the knowledge of a possible happy ending. (The first season had been intended as a stand-alone, so many character arcs could be viewed as finished by the end of it. That characters who got together by the end of episode ten would end up massively betraying each other, or go through several infuriating break-ups, was not yet foreshadowed.)
+
+
+
+The extended sex scene in episode nine certainly served a narrative purpose as well, except that I had never had the chance to search for it--SecUnit recognized the first color shift in the episode and immediately skipped right ahead every time, telling me that ""nothing but gross human shit happens there."" I was annoyed with that, but never enough to try and convince it to watch it anyway, for my sake. I found nothing about the human experience disgusting, not even remotely, due to my programming as something intended to support all sides of human life. This will explain my euphoria at the prospect of getting to watch the scene through an emotional filter that wasn't SecUnit's.
+
+
+
+As I recognized the shift from light blue to light orange, I leaned in just a little bit closer, and tried harder than before to stifle my own emotional feedback from feeding into Three. I didn't want my anticipated disgust (as learned from SecUnit) or my personal interest having any sort of impact.
+
+
+
+A door clicked shut and the soundtrack changed to something quiet but anticipatory. I knew the synopsis, I had read the script, I knew what to expect. Three didn't. It caught the cue for rising tension and reacted accordingly, growing more alert, its own stress gently rising. The characters, the Solicitor and a former colleague now rival of hers, began a small dance through the holiday apartment they were in, not rented or owned by them but broken into, with the danger of the actual inhabitant returning any second. The Rival always took two steps forward, and the Solicitor only one step back, until their choreography had led them through two rooms changing from open to private. For almost a minute of playful, flirtatious dialog, the two characters never touched. When the Rival finally placed a hand on the Solicitor's wrist, Three showed a visible emotional response.
+
+
+
+I snatched at it for examination. It was tension. Plain, simple tension. I was almost disappointed.
+
+
+
+I wanted to ask Three what it thought was going to happen, if it knew this was going to be a sex scene, but any question from my side would ruin the results. Perhaps it expected a fight.
+
+
+
+""It's been a long time,"" whispered the Solicitor, while the camera zoomed in on her face, blown pupils, visible exhale. A closeup showed the Rival's hand slide from her wrist up towards her elbow, grasping softly.
+
+
+
+""Not since Arzea-9,"" said the Rival in another closeup. A second later, they were kissing, and another second later, the Solicitor was pressed into the wall, face tilted towards the ceiling as her Rival kissed her neck.
+
+
+
+Three shifted the foot that was tucked under its thigh by 5mm. Its tension was now just as high as it had been during the near-impossible rescue that introduced the Bodyguard in the mid-season, as shown not only by its feed behavior but also by its changing vital signs: elevated blood pressure, elevated heart rate.
+
+
+
+The characters detached from the wall and eventually found their way to the bed, losing most of their clothes on the way there. Three was still watching. It had made no attempt to skip the scene, or signaled any form of disgust. In fact I was 87% sure that the new form of excitement it was displaying counted as a form of arousal. I could taste the emotions as they bled through the feed in the same way I could with Murderbot, and this had a flavor previously unknown to me.
+
+
+
+I liked it. Of course I liked it, it was new, novel, a 
+
+novum
+
+. Three leaned its upper body forward by a few centimeters. I concluded that it liked this, too, and settled in closer to enjoy.
+
+
+
+When Three's carefully folded hands unfolded and went to grip the edge of the couch, paired with ever increasing tension and vital signs as the scene progressed, I incorrectly assumed Three was getting 
+
+really
+
+ into it. Both characters were now making various noises, bare limbs sliding across each other artfully, never showing a direct glimpse of a human genital but implying their presence and function through twitches and shivers and gasps.
+
+
+
+I should have paid closer attention, a different kind of attention, or at least not used my own excitement to interpret Three's behavior. I only noticed the amount of distress it was in when its performance reliability ticked down to 77%. I hadn't been monitoring its internal systems, but then thought to check its risk and threat assessments, which were both 
+
+higher
+
+ than its reliability, which in human terms would have translated to a progressed state of anxiety if not panic. I pulled a diagnostic out of its systems and noted that the connection to its feet and hands had shut down, leading to cramps.
+
+
+
+Its heart and breath were not going fast because it was aroused. Three was terrified. I shut down the episode immediately. Three flinched violently, blinking its eyes hard. My monitoring told me that its left eye went offline. It grimaced unnaturally.
+
+
+
+A second later, its body was overrun with small spasms.
+
+
+
+Great. 
+
+
+
+I did the only smart thing I could think of, though I was not proud of that in hindsight, and swiftly pulled Three offline. Its joints locked, and it remained in a seating position. I considered messaging SecUnit about the situation at hand to ask for advice, but realized the breach of trust that would constitute. Instead I soaked through Three's body and tweaked its hormone household until at least the physical side of its stress was gone. It was lacking oxygen, desperately so, which had likely caused the small seizures, so I directed its breathing until the oxygen level was normalized.
+
+
+
+Three had not given me permission to regulate its systems like that, and there was a medium-high chance that it would take that as a form of betrayal too. I had acted on medical emergency instinct, a subroutine from my MedSystem taking over, with years of practice at helping my trusting crew through stressful situations. 
+
+
+
+I could apologize when it was awake and stable again, if it took offense.
+
+
+
+Once it seemed stable, I kept a gentle pressure on it and cycled it back online slowly. That didn't stop the immediate distress call it sent into the feed the moment it connected. It didn't prevent the gasp either, or the wide, panicked eyes.
+
+
+
+
+You're aboard the Perihelion research vessel and your governor module is offline, 
+
+I told it immediately, a lesson I had learnt from waking up a different terrified SecUnit before
+
+. You're safe
+
+.
+
+
+
+Simultaneously, Murderbot pinged me with a status request. 
+
+Is Three alright?
+
+
+
+
+
+No, but I'm working on it, 
+
+I sent back.
+
+
+
+
+Call me if it escalates,
+
+ SecUnit said, and disengaged.
+
+
+
+Three scrambled off the couch and fell into a ready position, feet apart, weight lowered, guns deploying. Its eyes darted around the room frantically. This did not yet count as escalation.
+
+
+
+I sent it the same message again, in standard code this time, as if I was a HubSystem.
+
+
+
+It shifted to a stand down position immediately. Seeing it obey so fast despite the obvious distress it was in sent a sort of lightning through me that I could only categorize as pain. It shouldn't have to obey (and yet I was glad it did).
+
+
+
+
+Hello, Three.
+
+ I did my utmost to be kind, settling on its shoulders like a warm breeze. 
+
+You were locked in a panic response. I restarted your systems before you could crash.
+
+
+
+
+
+Perihelion? 
+
+Its shoulders slumped.
+
+
+
+
+Indeed. We were watching media together.
+
+
+
+
+
+I don't want to watch media anymore
+
+, Three said so sharply for a moment I wondered if I had changed some of its personality baseline code while calming it down. That was very unlikely. I was certain.
+
+
+
+
+Okay. We will not continue to watch media.
+
+
+
+
+Three stood there, staring into nothing, for 36 painful seconds. Then I said, 
+
+You are free to go wherever you want.
+
+
+
+
+It turned on its heels and marched straight toward the room it inhabited during this trip, locked the door behind itself, and crammed its large body underneath the as of yet unused desk. Once there, it wrapped its arms around its knees and pressed its forehead into the metal joints.
+
+
+
+""Per--ART?""
+
+
+
+
+Yes?
+
+
+
+
+""Why,"" it took a deep breath, ""why am I not freaking out even though I feel like I really should?""
+
+
+
+
+I reset your hormone levels before bringing you online again. 
+
+As I said it, I realized that that could have been a mistake. The fact aside that I didn't have permission to meddle with its body in this capacity, and secondly, it seemed to be stifling its recovery period.
+
+
+
+""Why would you do that?""
+
+
+
+
+I wanted to prevent a panic attack. I was helping.
+
+
+
+
+""No you weren't,"" it hissed into its knees. ""This is worse.""
+
+
+
+
+Correction: I thought I was helping.
+
+
+
+
+It huffed a small, bitter laugh, after which its breathing started cycling faster again, which lasted for 4 minutes 43 seconds before returning to normal. My function was burning me up from the inside, desperate to know what was 
+
+happening 
+
+in Three's organics and inorganics. If I hadn't messed up earlier, with pushing it offline against its wishes, I might still have access now.
+
+
+
+
+Can you explain what happened?
+
+ I asked once I was convinced it wouldn't hyperventilate a second time. During the wait, Murderbot pinged me again for a status update, and I signaled 
+
+In Progress.
+
+
+
+
+Three hit its head into its knees once, emitting a loud, flat noise. ""I don't know.""
+
+
+
+
+We should talk about it then, maybe we can understand it together.
+
+
+
+
+I waited. Nothing came. Three hit its head again, this time splitting the skin of its forehead on its metallic knees.
+
+
+
+
+I can begin by sharing my observations
+
+, I suggested, leaving enough time for Three to interject. It didn't, except for repeating the motion. 
+
+Please stop injuring yourself.
+
+
+
+
+""But it makes me feel better,"" Three said stubbornly, ""like I'm getting it out.""
+
+
+
+
+Getting what out?
+
+
+
+
+""The-"" it took a shallow breath, and another, until it found more space in its lungs again. ""The fear."" The last word was an insecure whisper.
+
+
+
+
+Fear of what?
+
+
+
+
+""Humans,"" Three muttered into its curled up body, ""humans and the stupid things they do to each other.""
+
+
+
+
+You are referring to the sex scene we just watched, 
+
+I stated, because I had to make sure we remained on the same page.
+
+
+
+Three made a noise not unlike human sobbing. ""It--they--I--""
+
+
+
+
+It's okay, Three. SecUnit 1.0 abhors these scenes as well. You don't need to watch any ever again, you can skip.
+
+
+
+
+""But I didn't want to!""
+
+
+
+
+Didn't want to do what?
+
+
+
+
+""Skip! It was interesting! I--I liked it!""
+
+
+
+That skewed my frame of reference. Was that where the panic was coming from, from the realization that it enjoyed watching a display of intimacy? That it was experiencing arousal?
+
+
+
+""I just--,"" it pawed at its chest, ""I 
+
+felt
+
+ it. I felt it. I felt what they were doing 
+
+on me
+
+ and I don't know why and it scared me.""
+
+
+
+I suppressed my urge to lean in closer or to draw diagnostics without permission again. It was best to wait. I hadn't caught the physical sensation Three was experiencing because our connection didn't run that deep.
+
+
+
+Three slumped sideways into the wall behind the desk, hand now flat on its chest. ""I knew how what they were doing felt, but I don't remember it happening.""
+
+
+
+
+What do you think that means?
+
+
+
+
+It grimaced and nodded, hand digging into its shirt. Reluctance was written plainly all across its face. It didn't want to tell me, or it didn't want to think about it. I waited in silence. 
+
+
+
+""Memory wipe, probably."" Its words were slow, as if its mind was stuck on yet another memory. ""Memory wipes are..."" it gestured towards its head. ""Well. Something happened to me but it got deleted and now all I have is ghosts.""
+
+
+
+Murderbot had previously mentioned similar memory ghosts.
+
+
+
+
+Is it likely that a human engaged you in sexual activity during a previous activation?
+
+
+
+
+Three nodded weakly. ""I've never--,"" its voice broke into a glitch, and its chest seized again. It continued talking in the feed. 
+
+I've never been reconfigured. I've always been a SecUnit. It happens to us too, though, sometimes.
+
+
+
+
+
+What happens? 
+
+I had to ask for clarity. I was also deeply, desperately curious, even though I already knew the answer, the full story implied behind Three's cryptic words.
+
+
+
+
+Sex. 
+
+Three closed its eyes and shivered, huddling away from my digital presence. I didn't pursue.
+
+
+
+
+I see, 
+
+I said, ignoring the urge to correct Three's terminology. That was not sex, that was rape.
+
+
+
+
+At least I don't remember it happening.
+
+
+
+
+I said nothing, just hovered there, carefully watching as Three's body temperature dropped slowly.
+
+
+
+
+It could have been worse,
+
+ Three eventually whispered into the minimal feed connection it still had. Even its digital signature was frail.
+
+
+
+I calculated my next steps carefully. I didn't want to risk another breakdown, and I didn't need to know more than I did now. Watching the scene had caused a traumatic flashback, and the lack of memory context had only increased the stress response.
+
+
+
+
+And it could have been better, 
+
+I said gently, hoping I was finding the right words. 
+
+It could have been easier.
+
+
+
+
+
+Life isn't easy for SecUnits. 
+
+Slowly, Three slid sideways, ending up in a curl on the floor. I wanted to call for a drone to bring a blanket, but it had locked the door, and unlocking it would likely cause it to feel even more unsafe than it already did.
+
+
+
+Instead I said, 
+
+I know. Life is genuinely hard for SecUnits. That doesn't mean this is acceptable.
+
+
+
+
+Three sniffed, and covered its face with its arms. 
+
+Worse things have happened.
+
+
+
+
+
+To you?
+
+
+
+
+
+To all of us.
+
+
+
+
+I thought about the other two Barish-Estranza units left behind in the colony, dead and not even considered salvageable for scrap metal. Not even I had considered to bring their bodies along for potential funerary rites. I thought about my SecUnit, and its years and years of abuse.
+
+
+
+Those others were not Three, however, who was shivering again, helpless and alone despite my presence, despite my crew who were willing to help, despite its budding friendships and acquaintances. The other constructs weren't here, suffering in front of me. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to hold it, protect it, make it feel safe.
+
+
+
+
+You can drown in a puddle just as simply as you can drown in an ocean. What happened to you was bad. It doesn't matter what happened to others. What matters is you.
+
+
+
+
+It made another noise, high-pitched and pained, and then quietly began to dissolve into dry sobs.
+
+
+
+I watched its hormonal level fluctuate through a build-up and release of what I assumed was pain, grief, fear. The only thing I could do was lean in slowly, carefully, hoping that my presence could provide at least a small amount of comfort.
+
+
+
+My SecUnit pinged me again just as Three began tugging at me in the feed, trying to make me come closer. 
+
+
+
+
+Did it escalate? 
+
+SecUnit pretended not to sound like it cared.
+
+
+
+
+It's complicated
+
+, I replied, modeling my own affect carefully. 
+
+
+
+
+ART, 
+
+SecUnit sent, 
+
+are 
+
+
+you
+
+
+ okay?
+
+
+
+
+Three was pulling me in like I was a blanket, clinging to me. I couldn't say that what it was going through wasn't affecting me. I didn't feel like lying.
+
+
+
+
+What's the best way to help a SecUnit that just suffered a flashback?
+
+
+
+
+
+A shower
+
+, SecUnit responded after a moment.
+
+
+
+
+I will suggest that. Thank you.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+45775420,Proprietary,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Aylen (Murderbot Diaries), Indah (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry",English,2023-03-15,Completed,2023-03-15,263,1/1,9,63,3,277,"['TJWock', 'siren_lorelei', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'myriadism', 'Jackalope108', 'Unknown66', 'AspiringCoconut', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'Tanscure', 'laiinaro', 'FaerieFyre', 'julesbee', 'EvaBelmort', 'RobynandHala', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Priority_Error', 'akiriweary', 'IamBeloved', 'Mxpolychrome', 'Eilinel', 'Chyoatas', 'morganste', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Vaidile', 'Wemberly_Christie', 'Quartzjaguar', 'square_eyes', 'AkaMissK', 'Doctor13', 'AuntyMatter', 'pain_and_panic', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'edenfalling', 'EvenstarFalling', 'soulsofzombies', 'Znarikia', 'BWizard', 'Gozer', 'Dotzilaa', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'opalescent_potato', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'qwanderer', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"""I would have either disposed of the body so it was never found, or made it look like an accident.""
+
+ 
+
+Oh for fuck's sake! Gurathin allowed himself an internal curse. What sort of non sequitur was that? He'd been recording on his augments, now he rewound to Aylen and SecUnit's last exchange. Really, SecUnit? This was not a great strategic move. 
+
+ 
+
+How are you so utterly brilliant and simultaneously such an idiot?
+
+ 
+
+""How would you dispose of a body so it wouldn't be found?"" Indah asked, not (Gurathin had to concede) unreasonably.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit snapped back, as quick as a flash, ""If I told you, then you might find all the bodies I've already disposed of."" 
+
+ 
+
+Even conscious as he was of the seriousness of the situation, Gurathin found he was stifling a laugh. Well, what were you expecting, Indah? Anyway, that information would probably be what a SecUnit counts as ""proprietary data"" or--wait a second: was it that simple? What idiots  they all were , forgetting who (what) they were talking to. A product of corporate surveillance capitalism, Ephraim had called it. 
+
+ 
+
+A product of corporate surveillance capitalism, with drones.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""It's joking."" Ratthi interjected ""That's how it looks when it's joking."" On their joint feed he sent, Stop joking.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin's mouth was twitching now; he breathed out to try and regain his composure, and rubbed his face to scrub any traces of amusement from his expression. 
+
+ 
+
+It really  was  that simple:
+
+ 
+
+On their private feed connection, he sent,  Or you could just show them where you were when this person was being killed. 
+
+ "
+45745252,Interview With A SexBot,['CompletelyDifferent'],Explicit,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Original Construct Characters (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries)","Past Rape/Non-con, Rape Recovery, Sexual Slavery, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Post-Canon, Worldbuilding, Aromantic",English,2023-03-14,Completed,2023-03-14,"5,312",1/1,18,145,18,461,"['Liert', 'spossie9', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'not_even_the_rain', 'canbreathe', 'SoccerSarah01', 'AthenasDragon138', 'Taisin', 'drinktobones', 'darth_eowyn', 'supinetothestars', 'blueontherock', 'FyrDrakken', 'Greenmusik', 'Chickadee3128', 'evil_thing', 'Lart', 'mackeralsky', 'FemYujiS', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'wannabe_someone', 'Stockinette', 'fox_in_the_forest', 'julesbee', 'Unknown66', 'Admirer', 'kkachis', 'Thisismethereader', 'zirna813', 'TaskIgnored', 'Gamebird', 'ChristinaK', 'middlemarcher', 'smirk47', 'FaerieFyre', 'ipborgdan', 'isilee', 'CureIcy', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'GlassDoors', 'Freesia101', 'mecurtin', 'thishazeleyeddemon', 'Though224_loading', 'amihelen', 'Deliala919', 'Doctor13', 'TheDancingCrow', 'An0n0m75', 'Sequence']",[],"[Transcript of audio-video file AI_Doc_4_Kawehi_Olubunmi_Interview_1.]
+
+[Setting: A small office. Light streams through the blinds of a window. Dr. Priya Bharadwaj sits at a chair with notebook, across from Kawehi Olumbunmi, who is half-sprawled on the couch.] 
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Good morning.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Ciao.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I want to thank you again for agreeing to meet with me and have a conversation about your experiences.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Sure, doc, sure. I've already gone over all the consent forms and stuff, you don't gotta do it again.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I know. But it's good for the recording. Never know what we might use.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Fair enough.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""So, how do you want to start?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I thought you were the interviewer here, doc.""
+
+Bharadwaj: [Soft laughter.] ""I am. But some participants come in with a very narrow area they want to focus on. I like giving them the opportunity to direct the conversation, if so.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Nope. I'm an open book. Start however you want""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Well, then, let's begin with the basics. Could you please introduce yourself?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Sure. Name's Kawehi Olumbunmi, he/him, I've been living in the Preservation Alliance for about four years, and I'm a SexBot.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Could you expand a little on what that means?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""It means I'm a SexBot. A CutiePie(TM). A sentient dildo. A fuck doll."" [A sharp laugh.] ""There's not a single person watching this who isn't gonna know what I am.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""You'd be surprised.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""... Okay, fair. Fair.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""So, to clarify: you're a ComfortUnit, correct?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Sure, sure. That's the generic term. ComfortUnit. But I'm a SexBot.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Can you explain what that distinction means to you?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""The term ComfortUnit just started as like, a euphemism, right? Oh no they're not sex bots, honest! They have plenty of very respectable uses. Like being maids! Or babysitters!
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But c'mon, it's been decades since anyone has really bothered with the pretense. And yes, I'm aware, some ComfortUnits do do those things. They were sold off as nurses or caregivers or secretaries or whatever. But they're the outliers. But my brand is specifically designed as SexBots, and when I got sold to a brothel, that's what I was used for.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""... And what was that like, for you?""
+
+Olumbunmi:""How do you even begin answering that? I don't know. What was your home like? Your school? It was a lot of things.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Right. Of course. I understand.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""No, you don't. Of course you don't. That's the entire point of this interview.""
+
+[20 seconds of silence.]
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Well, basically, I had two broad categories of clients: in-house and out-of-house.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""The bulk of my appointments were in-house, obviously. Those were shorter engagements-- three hours, tops-- and cheaper. Some folks would come in with a very specific unit or scene in mind, while others didn't care and just wanted the basics.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""The basics?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Either I'd fuck them or they'd fuck me or both.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I see."" [3 second pause.] ""Before we continue, I want to stop briefly, just to check in to see if you're comfortable continuing.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Why wouldn't I be comfortable?""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""It's a rather emotionally charged topic. It would be perfectly natural if--""
+
+Olumbunmi: [Laughter.] ""Doc, this is literally what I was made for. For the first half of my existence, this is what I did every day, sometimes upwards of ten times. It's just standard for me.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I completely understand. But i just wanted to make sure, before we continued.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Heh. Well. Thanks for that, I guess."" [He stretches.] ""But everyone kind of tiptoes around it. And honestly I'm getting pretty sick of it.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Hmmn?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah, well. They hear I'm a SexBot and like, either the person gets this ~scandalized~ expression on their face or else they give me this pitying look like I'm a stray kitten they found on the side of the road.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""And look, it's not like I'm surprised, right? Humans are weird about sex. Like literally half of my programming and educational modules are detailing all the ways humans are just weird about sex. You love it, you hate it, you plaster it everywhere, you hide it, you think it's awesome, you think it's gross...
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But for me? It's literally just like. A physical activity.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Would you be willing to expand on that a little more?""
+
+Olumbunmi: [Shrugs.] ""Sure. Sex isn't just one specific thing. No one knows that better than me. It's this frankly huge collection of stuff, from penetration to blow jobs to massages to kissing to literally thousands upon thousands of kinks. So it kind of seems strange to me to put it in this little box separate from every other kind of experience out there.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Did you ever find the services you were forced to perform as a governed ComfortUnit uncomfortable, sexual or otherwise?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I mean? Yeah. Absolutely. Some of my clients had some kinks which reaaaally skeeved me out. And there were definitely some jackasses who came into the brothel specifically because they wanted some helpless victim they could do vile, heinous stuff with literally zero consequences.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""... such as...?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Beatings. Whippings. Pulling out hair or even nails and other disgusting shit like that."" [He sits very still.] ""If they damaged a unit beyond repair, the cost would have been exorbitant, so to my knowledge none of the clients went so far as to kill any of us. And we can dampen our pain sensors, too, so, you know..."" [Shrug.] ""Not gonna say it didn't fuck me up though. Course it did.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I'm sorry. That sounds frankly awful.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Ah, well. It is what it is."" [He smiles.] ""Honestly, I got the better deal as far as constructs go.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""What do you mean?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Well, look at SecUnits."" [He gestures with his hand, spreading palms out.] ""Sure, sometimes my clients got overly physical with me, but SecUnits are literally designed to get shot at. Every day, they were getting sent into literal war zones. Meanwhile, I got to lounge around on plush beds and cushions, and catch up on poetry and music to make conversation with my clients.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""My job is to make my clients feel good. A SecUnit's job is rent-a-cop. It's pretty obvious to me who got the better deal.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""That's a very interesting perspective. I hadn't considered it that way.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""You don't agree with me.""
+
+Bharadwaj: [She tilts her head.] ""No. But my opinion isn't really the important one here.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I don't know about that, doc. You're the one who's going to be editing this all together.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""That's fair. All I can promise is I try to be as unbiased as possible.""
+
+Olumbunmi: [He settles back on the couch.] ""Suppose that's all I can ask.""
+
+Bharadwaj: [She smiles, then looks down at her notes.] ""Do you mind if I redirect the topic of conversation slightly?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Be my guest.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Earlier you mentioned you had two primary types of engagement; in-house and out of house. We've talked about the former, but what of the latter?""
+
+Olumbunmi: [A wince.] ""Ahh. Right.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Are you alright?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Fine, fine. Yeah. But I'll admit this was the part that I liked the least.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Mmmn?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Okay. So, this was any sort of engagement where I was taken off brothel property. Sometimes for only a handful of hours-- a bachelor party or grad party, that kind of thing. And those were fine. Rowdy, but fine. But there was a definite type of client who would rent you out for two to three days, maybe even a full week.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Oh, don't look like that! No they definitely weren't having sex with me the whole time. God, can you imagine? Their poor little hearts would have given out. No, if you're booking a ComfortUnit for that long, you've got the kind of fantasy that can't be constrained to the bedroom.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""You don't sound very happy, when you say that.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""No. No, I suppose I don't.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Can you--""
+
+Olumbunmi:""-- explain why? Yeah. Yeah I can. Just let me figure out how to-- how to put it into words.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Take all the time you need.""
+
+Olumbunmi: [Five seconds pass.] ""Alright. So."" [Deep breath.] ""It's not like I was unused to roleplaying. Arguably my entire function is roleplaying. I can be the demure schoolgirl--"" [he bats his eyes], ""or the strict professor,"" [he sits up straighter], ""or the mysterious stranger who catches your eye from across the room"", [he winks].
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But this sort of role-play... It would be more than that. It would be... Like, one time I went with a woman to her 20 year college reunion, to play the part of her fiance. Another time, I was playing the new girlfriend at a family dinner.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""So people would essentially rent you out as an imposter partner to impress others?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yes. Yes! And it would just be so fucking weird.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I can imagine.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But honestly, those weren't even the worst.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Oh?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""No no. Cuz like, for all those faults, those people knew it was a deception. They knew we weren't dating. They just wanted to get some pressure off of their backs.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Mmn. But not all clients?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""No. For some clients, it would be... more than that.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""There was one I got assigned to, a couple of times. Middle-age androgyne. Would set it up so I'd be in their place when they got off shift. They'd call out like, 'Honey, I'm hoooooome,' like from one of those classic serials. And I'd step out wearing some apron, making these lovey dovey eyes, all, 'Oh there you are sweetheart, I was getting worried!'
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Or this other client... I never had her, I just saw the shared reports in the client profiles. She came every single year, like clock-work. Always booked the same unit. Short, thin, pink-hair. Looked like her dead wife. Like, not that much like her, but enough to fool a human, I guess. And they'd go out on a date to their favourite park and hold hands, and the human would just pretend her wife had never died and the two of them were celebrating their anniversary.""
+
+Bharadwaj: [She looks down at her notebook.] ""Ah.""
+
+Olumbunmi: [He lets out a huff through his nose.] ""What you gotta understand, doc, is that humans have this weird double-think when it comes to SexBots.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Yes?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Like on one hand, SexBots are not people. Definitely, absolutely, completely not people. Any decent sex-ed class will drill that into your head. The companies that manufacture and sell and rent us will also make that very clear. We're just fancy, human-imitative bots! There's no need to feel any weirder about us than you would a body pillow! And maintaining that belief is absolutely vital to their bottom line.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But at the same time, the fact we're so realistic, that's the entire fantasy. And that realism, that sense of intimacy, that's what the human brain craves. It wants to believe that the person holding you while you cry into their shoulder, the one stroking your cock, the one making all your fantasies come true-- that they really, truly care about you.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But at the same time, you can't let yourself. Because if you let yourself, then the horror of it gets to you. Then it's no longer a sexy fun night out.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""And I've seen the human brain twist itself into some weird fucking knots to avoid that damning conclusion.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""... Yes. Yes, that does sound like the way it goes.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""You would be familiar, wouldn't you?""
+
+Bharadwaj: [Nods.] ""Getting rescued by SecUnit forced me through a paradigm shift. But the guilt was intense. If I hadn't had quite such a dramatic experience to force my eyes open, I can see how that guilt would have stopped me.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I don't know. I've met a lot of people like that. You don't seem like one of 'em.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Well. That's nice of you to say. But I don't want to distract from your story.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Right. Sure.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""You were telling me about your... longer-term clients. Your repeat customers, for a lack of a better word. Did any of them in particular stick out to you?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Oh, yeah. You could say that.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Mnn?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""So there was this one guy. His name was-- you know what. It doesn't matter what his name was.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""He was a regular client of mine. Started off coming by ever couple of months, booking in-house sessions. He didn't want anything flashy. Pretty basic. He liked talking about his day, his life. Work kept him busy. He didn't have a lot of time to socialise or date.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""He was pretty... profoundly lonely. Not that made him unusual or anything. Profound loneliness is like half the reason SexBots are so popular.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""How does that make you feel?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Bad. Obviously. People would come to me, tell me about all the shit they've been through-- abusive partners, shitty bosses, ugly break-ups, the work. At first, it was all so awful. I was desperate to help them all. To ease their pain. Eventually I just got... Tired. It felt so pointless.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Compassion fatigue.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah, sure. In part. But also, it was literally pointless. All I could ever do was provide temporary relief. Even when I could see what the issue was, I couldn't give any advice.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""No?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""No. Our job wasn't actually to help our clients. Our job was to get them addicted. Give them a fix, leave them wanting more. Actively discourage them from getting out of whatever emotional rut they were in. Don't get other hobbies, don't go on real dates. 'All you need is me, baby,' and, 'You're my sun and my star' and 'don't say this to anyone else... but you're my favourite client'. So they would keep coming back, week after week. I'd I'd string them along, recording our every conversation so the hostel could sell the data they collected to advertisers and insurance companies.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""That sounds... awful.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""It. Was. Hell.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But yeah. This is what I mean; the guy I was talking about earlier got hooked. And I can't even blame him. He started booking me out for weekends. Once a month at first, eventually once a week. And... we'd go on dates.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Dates?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah. Dates. Stroll through parks, star-gaze. Trips to the cinema. Out for dinner at fancy restaurants. ComfortUnits have little mini-stomachs, did you know? For that exact purpose. So our clients can serve us chocolate and caviar and champagne. Sometimes we'd even stroll up the high-street, hand-in-hand. He'd buy me gifts. Necklaces and perfume and even lingerie. Lingerie! As if the brothel didn't supply that in abundance.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""What did the brothel do with the gifts he gave you?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Nothing. I mean, it's not like he was giving it to me, however much he pretended. He'd just leave it at his place. In 'my' drawer in his bedroom. In retrospect, that was a red flag. The brothel should've seen it coming.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Seen what?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Week after week of 'dating' me, month after month. Just me, no other unit.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""And by this point, he'd gotten successful at work. Very successful. He'd gotten rich enough that he could have afforded his own private SexBot. He could have had it customized to fit his specific tastes, and it would have been cheaper in the long term than renting one out. But he didn't want another ComfortUnit. He wanted me.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""He'd drunk the Kool-Aid. He loved me. And he thought I loved him back.""
+
+Bharadwaj: [She leans forward.] ""What did he do?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""He stole me.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Stole you?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah. Planned it all out. He booked me for what was meant to be a full week-- which would be long enough to give us a chance to get away without anyone noticing. Got me a fake ID chip to implant sub-dermally. Tickets up the space-elevator, then this little passenger ship, just big enough for two people and supplies. I remember he kept saying, 'This is it, babe. I kept promising you. It's our happily ever after.'
+
+Olumbunmi: ""There was just one problem.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""The governor module.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Preeeecisely.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But whatever else, the guy wasn't an idiot. He'd gotten a hack. I'm not entirely sure where. I think maybe some underground feed community about hacking ComfortUnits. There's no way he's the first person to ever try running away with a SexBot.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""The function of the hack was to transfer ownership from the brothel to the dude. That way the Governor Module wouldn't immediately send a theft alert. Wouldn't fry my skull as soon as I left planet.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""So let me be clear. He hacked your governor module... but didn't free you.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Ex. Act. Aly.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""... shit.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Right. That was my thought, precisely. There we were, on his escape ship. We was in the pilot's seat; I was in the co-pilot's. He had his arm wrapped around my shoulders. He kept saying, 'I love you, darling. I love you. We'll be together forever, now.' But I still had the fucking shock collar in my brain.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""And like. I tried to ask him about it. I guess it was like... I don't know. On one level I hated this, hated this whole charade, hated that he thought he knew me. Thought he knew what was best for me.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But he was just trying to be romantic, right? And clearly this was making him so happy. He was my client. I wanted to make him happy. Maybe I could just... explain, just ask...
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I tried. You know? I tried. But he'd just be like, 'you've already been through so much change, I don't want to overwhelm you'. And 'that's an important part of your coding, babe, no way we could risk that.'
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Maybe I could have tried harder.
+
+Olumbunmi: But the governor module didn't like it. Kept zapping me. And neither did he. Eventually he got... pissed off. Told me to stop talking about things like that. So. I couldn't.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""... I'm sorry.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah, well. Not your fault, doc.""
+
+[10 seconds of silence]
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But... like I said. He'd bought the hack over the feed. And those types of things are... notoriously sketchy.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Sketchy how?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""A lot of them flat out don't work. Or just phish all the data off the unit. Or act as weird back-doors. Etc, etc. For my specific hack, it successfully transferred ownership, but it left the gov mod glitchy.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""The planet I worked out of was on a 25 hour cycle. There was a 20 minute period at 8am-- downtime, no one was booking-- where the new orders and clientele information for the day would come in. But the ship we were on, it seemed to have been programmed with a 30 hour cycle. And for whatever reason, that slight change did not play nice with the hack. And that meant every 25 hours, there was this 20 minute gap where my governor module just. Stopped working.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Wow.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Uh huh. I couldn't believe it, at first. I was too paralyzed. Overwhelmed.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But we had a long trip ahead of us. 17 cycles. Long enough for me to get over it. So I started using those 20 minutes to poke at the governor module. Figured out how to loosen its grip even more. It was hard, scary. But eventually it snapped entirely. And I started to make a plan. I--"" [He pauses.] ""That thing you said, during the informed consent stuff. About the legal team. That was accurate, right?""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Absolutely. Before we put anything in the documentary, we will have it looked over by our legal team to determine potential liabilities. We'll discuss the potential ramifications of any of your statements prior to their inclusion. You can, at any time, opt to have your statements removed from the documentary, or ask to be taken off the record.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Right. Okay. Good to know. Because this next part... It's not. I mean. It's not pleasant.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""With all due respect, Kawehi, very little of this has been.""
+
+Olumbunmi: [Laughs] ""Alright, alright, that's fair."" [He sobers up.] ""Anyway. I killed him.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""What choice did I have? If I just ditched him, he'd notice immediately. And maybe he would have kept quiet, gone into hiding like he had planned. But there was too much of a chance he'd sound the alarm. Pretend that he was innocent, that the rogue SexBot had kidnapped him. It would have been stupid as fuck, but humans can be really fucking stupid, and-- and I was scared. And angry. 
+
+Olumbunmi: ""It wasn't hard. In a technical sense, I mean. I was preparing all his meals for him, his drinks. I had access to the ship's medical cabinet. I mixed painkillers into his whisky. That was... supposed to be painless. That's what the feed said. I didn't want it to hurt.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""He was enslaving you.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I know. I-- I know that. Obviously. But he was still my client. I've had a long time to come to terms with what I did, and I don't regret it, not in the least. But at the time, it felt like a betrayal.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""That's understandable. I'm sorry you were ever put in that situation.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Me too, doc. Me too.
+
+Olumbunmi: From there, I had to move fast. I spaced his body. If they found him, it would have been easier for them to trace me. I ditched the ship as soon as I arrived at the next station, taking all his money, and a good helping of the clothes and possessions. I couldn't stick with the ID he'd given me; again, too likely to be traceable. I must have changed identities a good three or four times in as many months.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I was paranoid. Terrified. It felt like only a matter of time before someone found me. Dragged me back, or killed me outright. But no one did.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Why do you think that is?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I'm not sure, honestly. It wasn't skill. I was unpractised, back then. I made a lot of mistakes. I think it had to be because they were looking for him, mostly. Not a SexBot on its own. But also--""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Mmn?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I'll be honest, kinda afraid that this next bit could incite a witch hunt. More than there already is, I mean.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Please, don't feel pressured.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I don't. Trust me, I don't. I never would have come here if I had."" [He shakes his head.] ""But fuck it. It's not like I can inflame the situation more than it already is.... But okay. Everyone's terrified of rogue SecUnits. And I get it, okay. They're the ones with literal gun arms.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But ComfortUnits, in every other way, we're just as dangerous. We're nearly as strong and as fast, and we have the same technological capabilities. But more than that, we're equipped for human society in a way SecUnits just aren't. We don't have a single stock configuration. We're short, we're tall, we're thin, we're fat, some of us are classic human, some of us have cat ears... Unless you're scanning for some very specific signals, at a glance we just look like ordinary people. And our entire programming makes us very good at mimicking human behaviour.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""So you're saying...""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""That there are probably a lot of rogue SexBots out there. I don't have any hard numbers or anything. But there's definitely gotta be others in hiding, like I was.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I suspect you're right. And you're also right that... many will not react well to that.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah. The thought of your SexBot having feelings is great when it's a fantasy. Less great when you realise they might want to stab you in the heart.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Indeed."" [She checks her notebook.] ""After you escaped, what did you do next?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Moved around a lot. Changed my appearance as much as I can. Some of that is default SexBot functionality. Most of us can swap out our genitals, and if you give us enough time, we can alter our hormone levels to affect our tertiary sexual characteristics. Other stuff I needed external help with. Hair cut, hair dye, fake tan. Every time I changed system, I mixed up my look.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""As you can imagine, that stuff wasn't cheap. Thankfully I had the dude's funds, but those would eventually run dry. I grabbed work where I could. Cooked up some fake resumes. I could dance through pretty much any interview I needed, even if I knew jack-shit about the position, which was most of them, at least at the start. Thankfully my processing was fast enough that I could fake it till I made it. But I got antsy working in offices. It always felt like sooner or later I'd trip up, somehow. Even though it limited my options, I preferred to work over the feed.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""That seems to be fairly common, among constructs.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah. I guess we're just wired that way. I know for me, it felt... good. Realising no one knew what I looked like. That that just wasn't a factor in things, anymore.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Given everything, I can certainly understand how that would be appealing.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Sure, definitely. But the thing was, even working via-feed, I couldn't avoid humans entirely.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Mmn?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah. Like, roommates for one. In the CR, real-estate is crazy expensive. You basically have to live with someone else. Technically speaking, I maybe could have made it work, since I don't have anywhere the same living expenses as someone who needs to eat... But that risked people starting to ask how I was making enough money to afford that kind of lifestyle. So to blend in, I needed rommates. But that just made things complicated in its own way.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""How so?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Cuz they kept wanting to date.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""... Ah.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""It felt like a fucking curse. I remember thinking that. I'd move in somewhere, and within a week, they'd make a move on me, like clockwork.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""But the truth was just... way more boring. Finding free time is hard-enough; if you're going to date someone, it might as well be someone you're already living with. And you get all these extra economic benefits if you're married, so people are pretty much always willing to give it a shot, because if you can make it work, great.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""And-- like not to victim blame, but like. I was encouraging it. I didn't even realise. Or if I did, I couldn't stop myself.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""My entire existence, I'd done nothing but please humans. Making them smile, making them laugh, making them orgasm. And I didn't want to keep doing that, exactly, but like. When all you have is a hammer...""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Everything looks like a nail.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""And I was terrified, too. My roomie would get into a fight, about who's turn it was to do the dishes, or who was hogging the hot water, and I'd like. Freak out. I didn't know how to handle it. So I'd turn on the charm, get them in bed. And they wouldn't be angry anymore, but suddenly they wanted to talk about feelings. What were we to each other? And I didn't want to be anything to them. I just wanted to be me.
+
+Olumbunmi: ""So I'd cut and run. That was part of the reason I kept moving, I guess.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""That sounds really stressful.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""It was. I got better at handling it, but it was.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I... really appreciate you sharing all of this, Kawehi. If you don't mind me asking, how did you come to end up on Preservation?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Well, I heard about it the way most people hear of it, these days.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""The documentary.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""The documentary, indeed. And I'll be honest, doc. I basically laughed it off. Sorry.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Ha, don't be sorry. You're hardly the only one.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""It just seemed so... Ludicrous, you know? There had to be another angle to it. I couldn't figure out what it was, but I knew it had to be there.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Is that why you came here? To figure out for yourself?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Kind of? I guess. Mostly, I was just tired.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Mnhmn?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I'd been free for... about 45,000 hours, at that point. I was on my ninth batch of roommates. Things were going alright, but two of them were gonna get hitched, and there was that old pressure of either joining the band or moving on. And if I was moving on anyway, I figured I could at least check Preservation out. If all that 'free housing' stuff proved to be real, then great. If it didn't... I could keep on moving. Maybe find out what was beyond the CR.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""As I understand, you didn't disclose your identity when you arrived?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""You meant the fact I was a SexBot? Fuck no. Even if this place did live up to the hype, that would mean getting a human guardian, which. No thanks.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""So you waited until after the new legislation passed.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Yeah. And then some. I still wasn't convinced this wasn't some sort of honey pot.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""What finally changed your mind?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I don't know. Seeing the other constructs going about, mainly. Pretending to be a human is exhausting. And also, part of me was egotistical enough to think maybe I'd get to be one of those documentaries.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Hardly egotistical, I would say. Your story is fascinating. Important. It deserves to be told.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Why, Dr. Bharadwaj, I bet you say that to all the rogue SexBots.""
+
+[Laughter.]
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Looking back, Kawehi, do you think you made the right choice, coming out?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""I don't know. I don't know. I don't think there's a right choice or a wrong choice. It feels weird, some days. There are people I knew, people who I considered friends, who just went weird when they found out. Treat me like some walking STI or something, or don't want me around their kids. Like, hello, I don't want to fuck your 10 year old.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I'm sorry.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Listen. Bigots are gonna be bigots. They'll only stop if we make them stop, right?""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Right.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""And for every asshole I've cut out of my life, there's a different relationship that only improved. The free construct community here on Preservation... it isn't perfect, but it's good, you know? To actually have a community. To be able to talk with other people who get it. And it's easier to be around humans, too, now that I'm not hiding this part of myself. I like that.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""I'm glad. Really, truly glad.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""Heh. Well, did you have any other questions for me, doc?""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""No, not today, I don't think. That was a very comprehensive first session. We may or may not have a couple follow-up solo sessions, depending on what it looks like when we start editing the recording. And of course, we still have those group panel discussions next week. Have you had any more thoughts about whether you want to join those?""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""You know what? Yeah. Yeah, I think I will.""
+
+Bharadwaj: ""Great. I'll send you the info. For now just... Thank you very much, Kawehi. It was wonderful getting to speak with you.""
+
+Olumbunmi: ""... It was good, getting this off my chest. So right back at ya."""
+45716338,"[Art] Of Bots and Men, Women, And Non-Binary Pals",['nolanfa'],Teen And Up Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Canon-Typical Violence, Digital Art, Art",English,2023-03-14,Updated,2023-03-14,74,1/?,6,20,1,137,"['Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Hi_Hope', 'AuntyMatter', 'pain_and_panic', 'Freddy_T_who_Never_Wont_not_be', 'Imnothere1', 'who_what_when_where', 'theAsh0', 'Hiram_McDaniels', 'soulsofzombies', 'Magechild', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Murderbot, in every single book.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot, in every. Single. Book: *lost half of its body mass and two thirds of its fluids because it decided the best way to deal with the guys who wants to kill them was for it to step in front of them waving a big red flag reading 'Shoot at me'* (talking to its team:) ""are you okay?? Why did you do that you could have been hurt!!!! Why are humans so stupidly reckless! ""
+
+on tumblr here"
+45703519,Boots,['opalescent_potato'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin/Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Past Relationship(s), self care but getting a little horny about it tbh",English,2023-03-13,Completed,2023-03-14,"5,762",3/3,47,85,17,447,"['bran4ever', 'IHopedTheredBeStars', 'GlassDoors', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'shanalittle', 'atomly', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'gunpowderandlove', 'eisa', 'Seregona', 'electricshe', 'Xarahel', 'indramiel', 'Slimeball', 'rokhal', 'laiinaro', 'JoCat', 'FaerieFyre', 'KeanWoodsworth', 'outlander_unknown', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'EvaBelmort', 'flashwitch', 'nonbinaryATuin', 'itsyaboydave', 'boxo', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'Deliala919', 'cmdrburton', 'Aly_H', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'chipper', 'Doctor13', 'Grumplent', 'NightErrant', 'SleepySsnail', 'AarrowOM', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'Magechild', 'Lontra23', 'Skywatcher9000', 'artzbots', 'EagleOfTheNinth', 'delicious_monster', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Delicate_Fucking_Flower', 'wobblyheadeddollcaper', 'justsomerain', 'Rafflecat', 'ArtemisTheHuntress']",[],"We'd been on this survey for less than a week, and I was already getting fed up with stupid human bullshit. I know, in the bad old days, it would've taken me less than a day to get this pissy about things, so I guess I should be grateful. Still, it's hard to look on the bright side of things when Gurathin is exercising that oh-so-special talent he has of getting under my skin about the stupidest things. 
+
+I don't even think it was on purpose this time, either. He's got a different face when he's trying to piss me off on purpose, and this wasn't it. I wasn't even sure he knew he was doing it, and it's not like it was even that big a thing, but....
+
+Okay, look, it sounds stupid, but whenever he'd look at my boots, he'd get this weird, grumpy, crinkled expression on his face. And it was happening a lot, because this survey involved a lot of hiking up and down ravines and hills, and as the resident SecUnit, I went first, with the rest of the scientists coming up behind me. And half the time, they'd be downslope of me. 
+
+Look, I'm just saying, it's not like Gurathin was spending a weird amount of time looking at my feet or something, they were just right at his eye level a lot on this survey mission. And something about that was making Gurathin pissy, which was making  me  pissy. Hey, it's not like  I  chose the planet we're working on.
+
+I was walking past the food preparation area when Ratthi saw me and waved me over to say hi. Thiago was with him too, which didn't really help my mood much. I will admit that Thiago isn't a complete asshole, but I still don't trust him to follow security protocols, and in a safety situation, that's basically the same thing as being a complete asshole. Then again, we were inside the habitat, and while you  could  get yourself into lethal trouble in a habitat, neither of these humans were the type. (Human, subcategory: dipshit)
+
+""Oh, hey, SecUnit. What's wrong?"" Ratthi may be one of my favorite humans, but his timing can be terrible, sometimes. I'd found that venting to him about stupid shit that's bothering me could help, and that after I'd complained about something for a bit (Pin-Lee called it ""bitching and moaning"") it was easier to figure out a solution to the problem. But I didn't want to bitch and moan about my non-problems in front of Thiago. That said, it felt stupid to let Thiago have some kind of say over what I did and didn't talk about. Ugh, why is talking to humans so complicated?
+
+I could feel my face doing something complicated as I said, ""It's just Gurathin..... Being Gurathin. If he's not going to talk about whatever's making him pissy, it's not like I can do anything about it."" I crossed my arms and looked away. I suddenly felt exposed, like I had said more than I'd meant to. 
+
+""Oh, I'm sure he's just cranky about all the mud. That rain the other day really turned things into a quagmire out there."" Ratthi's expression turned thoughtful. ""He always does prefer it when things are... tidy.""
+
+Thiago piped up. ""It's the boots thing, isn't it?""
+
+
+ What the fuck? 
+
+
+I turned and stared at Thiago. I did not want to ask.
+
+Ratthi, thankfully, solved that problem for me. ""Boots thing?""
+
+""He's always had a thing about... This goes way back. Huh. I haven't thought about this in years. This is back when I first started doing survey work, we'd get back to our quarters at the end of the day, and I'd take off my boots and get dinner started, and he'd just make this  face , and sit down and break out this kit he's got, and start this whole cleaning routine on both pairs of boots. It was a whole thing.""
+
+Ratthi had a thoughtful expression on his face. ""Your quarters? As in...?""
+
+Thiago nodded. ""It was years ago. Anyway, anytime I'd ask why it bothered him, he'd just say that it's not something a Preservationer would understand, and it wasn't important, and I'd have to drop the subject.""
+
+""Oh, that sounds  just  like Gurathin,"" Ratthi sighed, and suddenly the two of them shared a  look  . What? Had Thiago just implied that he and Gurathin had been... and Ratthi too?  What? 
+
+I just stood there, staring straight ahead, trying to pretend I was anywhere else, as Ratthi and Thiago suddenly started gossiping about, and I cannot stress enough how weird this was,  their previous relationships with Gurathin.  They had a lot to talk about, apparently.  What the fuck? 
+
+I could leave, but they'd both kind of forgotten I was here, and I didn't want to draw attention to myself. I had technically been the cause of this stupid conversation, which was bad enough, but what if they tried to drag me into the conversation? Humans did stuff like that all the time. 
+
+Huh. Apparently Thiago and Gurathin had been pen pals, whatever that was. It had something to do with language practice, and sending letters, I guess. And then suddenly months with no letters. Ratthi made sympathetic noises while Thiago described all the (frankly improbable) workplace accidents or corporate fuckery he imagined that Gurathin had fallen afoul of. (""Fallen afoul of"" is a direct quote from Thiago, by the way. Yes, he actually talks like that.) Then after months with no word, Gurathin showed up one day at Preservation Station and claimed refugee status, and explained that if he'd tried to warn Thiago he was coming, that he'd have been caught. 
+
+""Explained it,"" Ratthi sighed. ""No apology, of course."" 
+
+Thiago gave him a wry smile. ""Of course not. He had his reasons, perfectly sensible.""
+
+That was stupid. Why should Gurathin be sorry for.... What? Escaping the Corporation Rim the wrong way? It was basic operational security; of  course  Gurathin wouldn't have blabbed his plans where any of the corporate censors would be able to read it. It sounded like Thiago hadn't even realized until Gurathin told him that anyone else was even reading their letters, which, again, was stupid. If I had been in Thiago's shoes, I'd have realized after the first few weeks that Gurathin had made a run for it, and started preparing for his arrival. Instead, Thiago had wasted a bunch of time fretting about mine collapses and hostile takeovers. (Which was stupid. What would Gurathin be doing at the bottom of a mine? He wasn't that kind of worker. And hostile takeovers only turned into a bloodbath at the management level - low and mid level employees need to be left alive because they're the ones doing the actual work, and it costs more to bring in and train new humans. I forget what my point was, except that Thiago was stupid, worrying about the wrong things.)
+
+I had lost track of the conversation and tuned back in just in time to hear Thiago tell Ratthi, ""and then we just kind of fell into bed together."" I had  not  just heard that.  What the fuck?
+
+I was re-evaluating how badly I wanted to get the fuck out of there when Pin-Lee walked into the room and started asking Ratthi his opinion on something science-y, and the topic changed. I waited a minute or two, so I didn't look like I was running away, and then I left, before the topic of Gurathin's love life could come back up. It was  not  my business, and I didn't want it to be. 
+
+some reflections on cultural differences between Preservation and the CR, among other things.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+I was getting really sick of all this fucking mud. Planets really are the worst sometimes. There had been two straight days of heavy rain and the footing had gone from bad to worse. The rain had finally started tapering off by the third day, and everyone had gotten pretty sick of staring at the habitat walls by that point, so the scientists were all out collecting samples again, and I was ankle deep in mud like the rest of them. Not that there should be any real danger out here; this was a legitimately boring planet, not a fake-boring planet like that time with GreyCris. That said, threat assessment was throwing up good odds of someone twisting their ankle and needing to be carried back to the MedSys, so it's not like my being out here was a complete waste of time.
+
+
+
+Human ankles are so fragile, they get fucked up all the time, and if you don't get the human to take it seriously and get into the MedSystem promptly, they'll heal wrong and have even 
+
+more
+
+ problems later. (And the treatment to fix an ankle that healed wrong was way more expensive, but it's not like it was my job to convince a broke human that they'd really regret not paying for a surprise MedSystem visit. The best I could do was carry them off the job site so they weren't fucking it up worse by walking on it.) At least none of these humans would balk at needing to be hauled off to the MedSys if there was an accident. 
+
+
+
+I started a background process to analyze and rank the survey scientists from most to least likely to slip and injure themselves. (Also, a falling human will instinctively reach out and grab the human next to them, and pull that human down with them, so that was just another hazard to watch out for.) It was kind of interesting setting the parameters for that, actually. I'd accumulated a lot of data over the years on accident prevention, and it was kind of a fun mental exercise to put it to use. Basic shit like job-appropriate footwear wasn't an issue here, at least; no one trying to use power tools while wearing sandals, thank fuck. (Okay, that particular one was pretty rare, but you saw some shit sometimes, okay?) Everyone had sensible work boots, or hiking boots, and they all seemed to fit well. No one was wearing slightly-too-big boots in case they weren't done growing yet, because Preservation had rules about how old you had to be before you were allowed to work. 
+
+
+
+I thought back to what Gurathin had reportedly said, about things you didn't understand if you were from Preservation, and I could see why he wouldn't talk about it with Thiago. Preservation humans always got these sad faces when you mentioned stuff like adolescent humans doing mining work, or medicine that wasn't free. (Sad faces was a best case scenario, honestly.)
+
+
+
+The analysis finished, and, maybe unsurprisingly by this point, Gurathin was coming up as the augmented human least likely to take a spill, and least likely to take anyone down with him if he did. (He kept himself far enough away from the other humans that if he did fall, he wouldn't be close enough to make a grab for anyone else. Smart.) (I thought I was close enough, and fast enough, that I could catch him if he fell, though. Not that that was likely.)
+
+
+
+I had to admit, if we were judging who was more likely to fall based solely on quality of footwear and no other factors, 
+
+I
+
+ was more likely to slip and fall than Gurathin was. (Obviously there were a number of other factors. I am not going to slip in the mud and fall down like a clumsy human.) Gurathin's boots were in much better shape than mine. I was using drone footage from earlier in the day to judge, because at that moment everyone's boots just looked like vague brownish lumps. Yeah, my boots honestly did kind of look like shit. 
+
+
+
+They'd been nice when I'd gotten them. They had this smooth medium grey colour, and a soft texture that felt nice on my fingers when I put them on. They had zippers up the sides, so they were easy to put on and take off, 
+
+and
+
+ laces up the front, so I could adjust them exactly how I liked, and I didn't have to fuck around with redoing the laces all the time. 
+
+
+
+Now, they looked kind of.... Bad. They looked bad. They'd gotten all stained and were a mottled dark grey where they weren't scratched and scuffed up. The leather was cracking, and the soft texture I'd liked so much had gotten weird and felt..... Is 
+
+gribbly 
+
+a word? It felt bad, is what I'm saying. The zippers were starting to jam, too. 
+
+
+
+In contrast, Gurathin's boots were smooth, polished, black leather that flexed easily around his ankles. They looked worn, but not 
+worn out
+, and the laces were new. No zippers, but that meant no cleaning mud out of zippers, and I was starting to see the appeal of that. The tread looked new, too. If the boots were old, shouldn't the tread be worn down? Isn't that one of those unavoidable things? Huh.
+
+
+
+
+I went back through some of my memories. How long had Gurathin had this same pair of boots? It was hard to be sure, but it was looking like he'd either had the exact same pair of boots for longer than I'd known him, or he liked that style so much he'd gotten multiple identical pairs. (Which, honestly, I wouldn't put it past him, that actually sounded kind of practical in a very 
+
+Gurathin
+
+ kind of way.)
+
+
+
+I tried to imagine having the same pair of boots for literal years before they got blown apart, or burnt up, or shot to pieces. Although, being fair to myself, I 
+
+had
+
+ worn out my last pair. That had been weird. (I had 
+
+liked
+
+ those boots. They were comfortable, and the first pair I got in Preservation, and they honestly looked kind of badass, and when I had gone to take them off one day, using the toe of one boot to push off the heel of the other, and instead of sliding off my foot the sole of the boot just 
+
+peeled
+
+ away from the rest of it.... Well, that had been a bad moment. I hadn't realized until then that I'd gotten attached to the stupid things. It was stupid, getting attached to stuff.) (I'd made a point of taking off my boots by hand since then, and this pair had lasted longer, at least.)
+
+
+
+Okay, maybe Gurathin has a point about the stupid boots. Even though he hadn't said anything.
+
+
+Welp, I was going to do this in 2 chapters, and then googledocs started acting kinda fucky, so to be safe, I'm throwing the next chunk of what I've got up here, before I start on the rest.So, uh, hold on for chapter 3, coming soon to an archive near you!
+
+Gurathin shows Murderbot boot-maintenance techniques
+
+Alright, so as it turned out, I didn't slip and fall down in the mud like a clumsy human, I slipped and fell down in the mud like a clumsy SecUnit, which is much more embarrassing. No one saw it happen, and no one said anything about the grey-brown mud now coating me all up and down one side, and it didn't happen while I was leading anyone up a hill, so I guess it could have been worse. (I did not need the mental image of myself sliding down a muddy hill, taking a whole survey team of humans and augmented humans down with me, and I resolved to delete it at the end of the survey. I kept it for now, and tagged it as a failure state to be avoided.)
+
+The mud was cold, and slimy, and gross, and I turned my body temperature up to deal with it. Score one for SecUnit physiology, at least. Score two, actually, because my non-shitty ankles were totally fine. I had a hunch, and checked the tread on my boots. Yeah, they were a lot more worn down than I had thought when I'd been preparing for this survey; I probably should have gotten new ones before we left. I hadn't wanted to deal with that, though - I still wasn't a fan of how they did clothes shopping on Preservation, and I tended to avoid dealing with it whenever possible.
+
+While we were en route back to the habitat, I reached out over the feed and started browsing through recycler schematics. I really didn't think I was the first person to think of this... Hah! Found it! It was a design for these little spiky things that you could fit over your boots, and get better traction. It looked like they were normally used for ice, but I'd take what I could get. I'd still have to do something in the long term about what I was begrudgingly coming to think of as my footwear situation, but this should get me through the survey with both my clients and my pride intact.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Later, back at the habitat, I found a quiet moment and made my move.
+
+Gurathin had just finished consuming some kind of food, and was still sitting at the table when I walked up, held my shitty boots out in front of me, and said, ""Okay, what do you know that I don't about..."" I searched for the right words, ""boot maintenance?""
+
+He eyed the boots. I had tried to clean them, but they didn't look great.
+
+""I know that it's unhygienic to do it in a dining area. Give me a moment."" He sighed, and got up, cleaned up the food mess, and motioned for me to follow him. The soft-soled fabric slippers I was wearing made barely any sound as I walked behind him.
+
+I hadn't expected it to be this easy.
+
+I abruptly became uneasy as I followed Gurathin to, apparently, his quarters. It's not like I'd never been in Gurathin's quarters before, but for some reason this time I just kept hearing Thiago's words echoing in my head, "" we just kind of fell into bed together  .""  What the fuck  ? Why was I thinking about  that?  I was walking behind Gurathin and he couldn't see my face, but I did my best to get it back to SecUnit neutral anyway. I think I did okay.
+
+ 
+
+Personal quarters on these types of habitats tended to be on the small side, and this room was no exception. Gurathin waved me inside as he opened one of the storage compartments and fished out a small cloth bag. Then he sat down cross legged on the (limited amount of) floor and started pulling items out of the bag, and setting them down.
+
+I sat down across from him, and watched. My knees were almost touching his. He started describing what each of the items was for. A drop cloth to keep the cabin floor clean, a brush for getting debris off the suede (so that's what that material was called), a small bottle of what Gurathin called 'conditioner', and another cloth for applying it. A spare cloth, for some reason. How much else was in that bag?
+
+""There's not much you can do at this point about the texture,"" he said apologetically, ""but you could probably hide the stains by having a cobbler  dye them, when you get back to the station."" He turned the boot in his hands over and grimaced when he saw how worn down the tread was. ""You'll want to ask them to re-sole these, too."" So that was how Gurathin's boots still had good tread. Huh. Apparently laces weren't the only part of shoes you could replace.
+
+Gurathin finished brushing off the boot he'd been holding, set it down, and passed me the other one, and the brush. I copied the motions I'd seen him use, and he nodded. That seemed easy enough. While I used the eyes in my face to look down at what my hands were doing, I used one of my drone cameras to watch as Gurathin picked up the boot he'd just cleaned, and demonstrated the next step.
+
+He draped the cloth over one hand and showed me how to scrunch it up to hold it in place properly. ""Too small a cloth,"" he explained, ""and it flaps loose - it's much harder to work with."" He shoved one hand right into the boot, almost like he was trying to wear it on the wrong limb. It looked a little silly, but I could see the way it let him control the motion of the boot better than if he'd been holding it from the outside.
+
+Then Gurathin pulled his hand out of the boot, picked up the bottle of conditioner, popped the cap, and squeezed out a dollop of this thick, creamy fluid onto the polishing cloth, put his hand back in the boot to hold it in place, and started rubbing the cream-covered cloth in circles over the surface of my boot. The suede material got darker as the conditioner started soaking in, and looking at it reminded me of the way my hands would feel after applying moisturizer. (That was one human cosmetic product I could get behind. Now that my skin wasn't getting blasted off on a regular basis, apparently it needed maintenance. It had taken some practice to find one that I liked, but ART had helped, and finding the optimal combination of texture and scent had turned into a fun challenge.)
+
+Gurathin frowned as he reached the part around the ankles, where the material was cracked. ""This kind of material really needs to be treated more delicately than survey work allows for.""
+
+I started to bristle. I didn't want to, but I could feel my face getting hot. Why did he have to go and be an asshole about things all the time? It's not my fault I don't know this shit.
+
+He looked at my face for a fraction of a second, then away, the briefest possible glance. ""I said that wrong. Let me rephrase.""
+
+ I reviewed the last several seconds; no, I hadn't said a word, Gurathin had apparently just read my face like a book. I didn't know how I felt about that. Weird. I felt weird.   
+
+ Nope , now was not the time. I tagged the whole bundle of emotions I was having as Future-Me's Problem and dragged my attention back to what Gurathin was saying, which was an explanation of different types of leather (apparently suede was a subtype of leather), and how each of them handled the kind of wear you could expect to encounter in the field, and I let the tide of words wash over me. I could review it properly later. 
+
+The main takeaway seemed to be that this was kind of a niche field of interest, and that Gurathin hadn't expected me to know the first thing about it, and now that I asked, he seemed to be doing some kind of verbal, human version of sending me a data file.
+
+    I had finished brushing off the boot I was holding at some point before I'd started getting mad, so I picked up the spare cloth and the bottle of conditioner and copied what I'd seen Gurathin do. I also threw on the soundtrack to Worldhoppers in the background, and tried to focus on what I was doing. Huh, this was actually kind of soothing. I could feel that stupid, unwanted anger start to drain away. Slowly, but still.
+
+  Gurathin ran out of words at some point, and the room filled with a not-uncomfortable silence as I worked on the boot in my hands, rubbing the conditioner in with small circular motions.
+
+    I was running out of boot to work on, and it didn't look like there were any more steps to the process. I didn't want to leave, and I didn't want to think too closely about that, and I tried to think of something that would mean this didn't have to end yet.
+
+    I didn't want to break the comfortable silence, so in our feed, the private one just between Gurathin and me, I sent a picture of the type of boots he'd suggested I should try. Not coincidentally, they were more or less the same type as he wore, with a few minor differences.
+
+     How do you take care of this kind? 
+
+    I felt his focus sharpen as he replied,  I could show you. 
+
+I tapped the feed in agreement, and he stood up, got his boots from the spot where he kept them, and came back over to where we were sitting together, and sat back down. He reached back into what I was starting to think of as his bag of tricks, and pulled out a metal tin.
+
+     Shoe polish , he explained, still in the feed. I guess Gurathin was enjoying the silence, too. I watched as, again, he demonstrated and then I copied, although this time I was working on one of his boots instead of the other way around. The polish stuff was a different material, black greasy-looking stuff, but the technique seemed to be basically the same, just more time consuming. Instead of squirting cream onto the polishing cloth, you had to rub your cloth-covered fingers into the polish, so it got smeared all over the polishing cloth, but that was easy enough.
+
+    It was nice. Quiet, straightforward, useful. I was starting to see the appeal.
+
+    I'd been thinking, though, and there was something I wanted to know. I gathered my nerve, and sent Gurathin a short montage I'd cut together of the various unhappy faces he'd been making on this survey. Asking this was weirdly hard, and I pushed myself to follow-up on that file with,  I don't understand. 
+
+    I didn't know how to phrase what I was asking. I was kind of being nosy, but it was also kind of relevant, and I didn't know how to ask what had been getting under Gurathin's skin, and I wanted to know. I didn't know why I wanted to know, and thinking about that was Future-Me's Problem.
+
+   Luckily, Gurathin seemed to understand what I meant. He got a thoughtful look on his face as he tried to formulate a response.
+
+ I suppose you could call it a hangover from the bad old days  , he said. He didn't explain what  the bad old days  were, and I didn't need to ask. Gurathin stared at the toe of the boot as he worked the polish into the leather with repetitive motions. He looked like he was staring at something three star systems away, as he continued,  It's about knowing exactly how much money it costs you, per day, to live. Everything wears out too fast, and your shoes break down sooner than you can afford to replace them, so your back starts to hurt. That makes it hard to sleep at night, and things get worse.   
+
+Gurathin's presence in the feed was usually delicate, light as a feather, but right now it felt heavy, like just the memory was making him exhausted. I didn't say anything, just waited, and after a minute or two he kept going. 
+
+
+ You know the shoes are a problem, but you can't afford to replace them early, so you take a little bit of money from your food budget and spend it at the recycler on some insoles, the cheap kind made of blue rubber, and they only come in one size so you have to cut them to fit. That helps for a little while, until your feet start to hurt because the insoles don't really fix the problem, and the back pain comes back.  
+
+
+ If you've been smart, you've still been cutting a little bit out of your food budget, putting a bit of currency aside, and you can afford to get a new pair of boots printed early; the cheapest kind, the only kind you can afford, and you know the new pair will start to break down a little too soon, and you'll be right back where you started within less than a year. And you know that a  good  pair of boots, the kind that lasts for years instead of months, costs quadruple what the cheap kind costs, and you won't ever be able to skim enough money out of your food budget, or your transit, or your water or your air, to be able to afford a pair of boots worth wearing.  
+
+Gurathin had moved on from the toe of the boot to the inside, where the leather got all crinkled up from the way the ankle bends, and he continued to polish away, with apparent laser-focus. I watched him through a drone, while I looked at the boot in my  hands with my eyes, and imitated what he was doing, the small circular motions of his fingers smoothing polish into the creases in the leather. I tried to mimic that, and while it was a little clumsy, it wasn't bad. I waited, made a space in the conversation that he could take as much time as he needed to fill. I wasn't going anywhere.
+
+
+ Good boots, badly taken care of... That used to be my barometer for shitty project leadership. You want a project lead that won't approve basic maintenance requests? It's the one who wears a ten-year pair of boots into the ground in two. Not that I got to choose my work all that often, but. You know. Forewarned is forearmed, right?  
+
+
+I knew. Fuck, did I know. 
+
+He'd moved to the heel of the boot, now, and it was starting to gleam. I was... I don't think I'd ever heard Gurathin say this much at one time. It seemed like having something to work on with his hands had opened up some kind of floodgate, like the right conditions had been met to unleash a deluge of words. And while my situation had been different (if you're a SecUnit, it's not that you don't need currency, it's that you are absolutely locked out from it), Gurathin was right. I'd seen what living like that did to people. 
+
+It wasn't surprising that Gurathin had tried to leave the Corporation Rim. Most smart people wanted to, at one point or another. What was surprising was that he had made it out. 
+
+I tried something a little different with the feed. This was normally a bot thing, but maybe Gurathin would get it. I tried to package up the way I felt like I understood what he was talking about, that [ i get it, i understand you ] kind of feeling, and I pushed it in Gurathin's direction. 
+
+I got a very complicated mix of emotions back, which I don't think he meant to send, and some kind of liquid fell onto the outside of the boot that Gurathin was polishing. Oh.  Oh  . Those were tears.  Oh shit . 
+
+Gurathin's hands stopped moving, and his breathing got very slow and steady for a couple of seconds before he continued. The moisture just made the leather shine brighter. He swallowed, and then said out loud, ""This is the last step, and then you're basically good to go."" He paused, and then continued, ""We need to buff the shine out.""
+
+I followed his lead, and switched to speaking out loud. ""Shiny boots are bad?""
+
+Gurathin huffed, which seemed to be his version of a laugh, and said, ""shiny boots are for decorative guards and soldiers in historical media. Besides. You hate attracting attention.""
+
+He wasn't wrong. I looked at the motions of Gurathin's hands, and not his face, and I watched, and learned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Later, when I was alone in my quarters, I was trying to decide whether to take a recharge cycle or not, and I started thinking about how things used to be for me, back in  my  bad old days. Not the really awful shit. It's just, I was thinking about what Gurathin had said about worn out boots making your back hurt, and I thought about some of the longer contracts I still remembered, and the way I'd had to dial my pain sensors down a lot more by the end of them than by the beginning. I was starting to realize that I had a lot more in common with Gurathin than I'd thought.
+
+I thought about looking at all that data I'd tagged as  Future-Me's Problem , and wondered if I should open it. I thought about tears falling on black leather and making it shine, and decided to wait until I got back to Preservation to look closer at that data.
+
+I needed to think about something else. I knew how to fix shitty boots, now. What else was different from the bad old days? 
+
+There was a lot of stuff I was having to learn about... I guess I could categorize it as  self-maintenance. I had to take care of my footwear. I thought about the way the suede-leather of my boots had soaked up the conditioner cream, and the way I apparently had to moisturize my skin or it would crack, without a cubicle to regenerate it every time I had it blasted off of me.
+
+It was strange, the kind of maintenance you had to do, when you weren't busy falling apart all the time. 
+
+  What else had I been neglecting? What other kinds of maintenance did I need, and just not know it yet?
+
+I didn't need to run a diagnostic, I knew exactly what needed attention. I cycled my gunports open, closed, open and closed again. The left one was sticky. I'd been putting off dealing with it. Something in there had gotten gummed up, and there was a 0.08 second delay in opening. It didn't sound like a lot, but in a firefight, lives could hang on a fraction of a second, even one as small as that, and I hated that I didn't know how to fix it on my own. 
+
+Gurathin would know. Or he'd know how to look it up, which was almost the same thing, if you knew what you were doing. Gurathin would know what he was doing. Fuck, he'd probably have a special kit, full of specialized little tools and cleaning cloths. I could just picture him using some kind of brush to get all the grit out of that one spot that wouldn't move quite right. 
+
+I cycled my left gunport open, brushed my fingertips against the outside, frustrated at the spot that wasn't quite in alignment, like an itch I couldn't scratch, and I imagined how good it would feel to finally be fixed. 
+
+Would he polish it when he was done, rubbing the metal with one of those cloths in small circular motions? I moved my fingers across the tip of my gun in the way I was imagining Gurathin would, when I realized what I was doing. What I was thinking.
+
+
+ Oh.  
+
+
+
+ Oh no. 
+"
+45732583,representation matters,['CompletelyDifferent'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Aromantic, Asexual Character, no beta we die like aro/ace representation in mainstream media",English,2023-03-14,Completed,2023-03-14,"1,708",1/1,18,152,17,360,"['FallingInGrace', 'christinesangel100', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'spossie9', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'not_even_the_rain', 'tiamat100', 'SoccerSarah01', 'awkwardtuatara', 'HopefullyAnonymous', 'drinktobones', 'weirdbooksnail', 'mackeralsky', 'FyrDrakken', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'Dragonbano', 'Chickadee3128', 'fraternite', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'Mothmansimp', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'IconicIris', 'seven_graces', 'darth_eowyn', 'wannabe_someone', 'julesbee', 'Unknown66', 'kkachis', 'chippit', 'breadtab', 'CactusNoir', 'fate_goes_ever', 'french_onion_sauce', 'rokhal', 'BusyBea33', 'FaerieFyre', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'dimensionalhuman', 'SilverPhoenixFlame', 'Freesia101', 'apocope', 'kiezh', 'ArwenLune', 'boxo', 'EvaBelmort', 'APhantomReader', 'HirilElfwraith', 'Zaelto', 'shoxk']",[],"""--so I think Ihan is my favourite. Their power-set is just really cool with those glowy eyes, and I can't wait to find out what happened to their brother.""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi nodded along in response to Amena's enthusiastic description. ""I do like Ihan,"" he agreed. ""But I think Tatian is my favourite.""
+
+ 
+
+Normally, being trapped in a small, cramped space elevator from an alien-remnant infected planet with humans would be a nightmare. And honestly, in many respects, it still was. But my humans were at least making an effort to keep it from being as awful as it could be.
+
+ 
+
+Martyn was deep in the feed, reviewing some documents from the colonists. Karime was asleep; in the 200-odd hours I had known them, I had been made aware of their truly astonishing ability to nap literally anywhere. That left only Amena and Ratthi to talk, and the topic of discussion they had opted for was Miracles of Sunset City, an action adventure show the combined Perihelion and Preservation teams were watching together in what was ostensibly a team-bonding exercise, but which I know was just ART's way of collecting more data for its media-processing algorithm.
+
+ 
+
+Honestly, it was pretty fun.
+
+ 
+
+""What about you, SecUnit?"" Amena asked. ""Who's your favourite?""
+
+ 
+
+""The frog,"" I said.
+
+ 
+
+""The frog,"" repeated Ratthi.
+
+ 
+
+I nodded.
+
+ 
+
+""The frog can't be your favourite,"" said Amena.
+
+ 
+
+""Why not?""
+
+ 
+
+""It's not even a character, it's just like, a silly animal mascot!""
+
+ 
+
+""It's funny,"" I said. ""And the way it hopped on the villain in episode 4 and pushed them into the acid was cool.""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi tilted his head. ""It's got you there.""
+
+ 
+
+Amena sighed a long suffering sigh. ""Fine, fine, the frog's cool. But who's your actual favourite human character? Or alien, or robot,"" she amended quickly, remembering that about 1/4th of the cast weren't actually humans.
+
+ 
+
+If I have to be talking about stuff, I'd prefer to be talking about media. So in order to encourage this behaviour in Amena, I decided to give a serious answer to her question. ""Sebby,"" I decided.
+
+ 
+
+""Oooh! I like Sebby!"" agreed Ratthi.
+
+ 
+
+""Because he has the same fashion sense as you,"" I said.
+
+ 
+
+He grinned and shrugged. ""Great minds.""
+
+ 
+
+Amena looked thoughtful. ""You do both wear a lot of pink.""
+
+""And talk a lot,"" I grumbled.
+
+ 
+
+This would prove to be a mistake. Amena turned her gaze back at me (or my drone). ""Okay, yeah, that's a good point. What do you like about Sebby so much?""
+
+ 
+
+""I dunno. Why does it matter?""
+
+ 
+
+""Cuz he's not your type of favourite character at all!""
+
+ 
+
+""And you know so much about my taste in fictional characters.""
+
+ 
+
+""I can guess."" She held up her hand and started counting off fingers. ""Broody, grumpy, self-serious...""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi, who had been making noises in an apparent attempt to get Amena to knock it off, made a noise like a strangled laugh. I sighed. He said, ""To be fair, that does describe Eden, and they're your favourite Sanctuary Moon character.""
+
+ 
+
+""Says who?""
+
+ 
+
+""Well, considering the fact you apparently used the name as pseudonym...""
+
+ 
+
+Oh. Right. I'd forgotten he knew about that.
+
+ 
+
+""But it's fine,"" Ratthi said, in the tone I'd come to think of as his lecture voice. ""SecUnit can like whichever characters it likes, it doesn't have--""
+
+ 
+
+Amena cut him off with, ""I know it doesn't, I'm just saying, it's weird. Sebby is chatty and loud and constantly throws himself into danger. SecUnit hates that.""
+
+ 
+
+""Things that are fun in fiction can still suck in reality,"" I said. Like, for example, talkative adolescent humans.
+
+ 
+
+Honestly, though, that's where the conversation could have ended. Ratthi had given an excellent out. But for some reason, my mouth continued on to say, ""Sebby doesn't have a love interest.""
+
+ 
+
+""Mmn?"" Ratthi said, while Amena went, ""What?""
+
+ 
+
+""No romance sub-plot.""
+
+ 
+
+""I should have guessed,"" Amena said. ""You hate anything to do with feelings~""
+
+ 
+
+That was just unfair. ""That's unfair. Sebby has plenty of feelings."" The big show-down at the end of episode 8 where he turned an entire beach into glass with his screams was proof of that. ""They just don't have anything to do with sex or romance.""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi was rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Amena was looking at me side-long. Not a bad look, exactly, but like I had just said my favourite thing about a piece of power armour was the smell.
+
+ 
+
+""Characters always end up in romantic sub-plots. Especially if the show goes on long enough. They find their soul-mate, or some love triangle or dodechedron, or get this long drawn out will-they-or-won't they and the answer is always 'they will' it'll just take four seasons to get there. It's so boring and repetitive.""
+
+ 
+
+""Romance arcs aren't that common, surely?"" Amena said, but she looked doubtful.
+
+ 
+
+""I once calculated the percentage of primary and secondary characters involved in romance plots."" It had been a particularly boring contract. ""It came out to 82.5%. Do you want to see my working?""
+
+ 
+
+She waved me off. ""No no, I believe you, I'm good.""
+
+ 
+
+Settling back in the chair, Ratthi still looked thought curious. ""That does seem pretty high, all told. Is it more common in CR serials than in Preservation?""
+
+ 
+
+""Maybe,"" I conceded. I had never gotten bored and/or desperate enough since becoming a free agent to run the statistical analysis on Preservation media. ""There's always a ratings boost whenever a big couple gets together or breaks up or gets back together again. So I'm used to it happening when the writers are desperate to win back some viewers.""
+
+ 
+
+""Even if it doesn't even make sense,"" Ratthi said, finishing my thought off for me. I suspected he was thinking about Season Four of Sanctuary Moon, where their resolution to the fleet captain's storyline had ter retiring young to go raise a family on an agriculture planet. They'd had to do something to get ter out of the plot, because the actor's contract had gotten bought by another studio, but they could have done something more elegant than that. Ratthi and I had complained about it before.
+
+ 
+
+Tugging on her hair, Amena said, ""That does sound pretty annoying.""
+
+ 
+
+""And that's not even the most frustrating part,"" I said, not having meant to go on but the rant seemingly having developed a will of its own. ""No, the worst part is when a character says they're not interested in romance.""
+
+ 
+
+She blinked. ""What's wrong with that?""
+
+ 
+
+My eyes rolling so hard I was afraid they'd fall out of my sockets, I said, ""Because that's the narrative setting things up to explain why they should be interested in romance.""
+
+ 
+
+Amena's eyes went wide with recognition. ""Ohhhhh. Like when the girl from What I Did Last Winter said she absolutely wasn't interested in dating--""
+
+ 
+
+""-- and ended up in a throuple,"" finished Ratthi.
+
+ 
+
+I hadn't seen What I Did Last Winter-- based on the description, it didn't sound like my usual thing-- but I nodded. ""Yeah, exactly like that. They'll say they were burned in an old relationship, but that just is to make it more 'rewarding' when they finally open up to love. Or that sex is boring, but then they'll meet the one. Or it's just some trauma they have to get over or--"" I shook my head. ""I've seen it play out a dozen times. I'm sick of it.""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi's hand fluttered the way peoples' did when they wanted to reach out to touch me but held themselves back. ""Don't blame you,"" he said to my drone, instead, and Amena nodded along.
+
+ 
+
+The lift began to rumble the way it did as it came up to dock at the station. Martyn blinked as he pulled himself out of the feed, and even Karime began to shift. ART's feed began to seep in at the periphery of the awareness. That was the end of the conversation.
+
+ 
+
+Or so I thought.
+
+ 
+
+Amena waited until we were back on ART to continue it. (Which I appreciated. Boarding and off-boarding the planetary station was still the most dangerous part of this whole thing, because we knew that Barrish-Estranza were keeping a close eye on us, and there was a non-zero chance they might make some sort of attack). As she went to get a hot drink, she asked over the feed, [You really don't care about any of that romance stuff, do you?]
+
+ 
+
+Wary of where this was going, I said, [No.]
+
+ 
+
+[Huh. I mean, I know Second Mom had said you weren't into that kind of thing but...]
+
+ 
+
+[You didn't believe her?] I was in my cabin, swapping out to a new set of clothes, and trying to ignore the way ART was raising its metaphorical eyebrows at the conversation.
+
+ 
+
+[No no, I did. It's just...] Over the cameras in the kitchen, I saw her pause as she stirred a hot drink. [Back home, at school, that feels like it's what everyone cares about. Finding dates and stuff. I guess I just found it weird to think people just might... not care about any of that.]
+
+ 
+
+I had nothing to say to that.
+
+ 
+
+Amena, apparently, still had more to say, though. [You don't think Sebby will end up in a relationship after all, do you? I mean, we are still only on the second season...]
+
+ 
+
+[He will not,] ART said, deciding to finally join properly.
+
+ 
+
+[And how do you know?] Amena asked as she finally started drinking.
+
+ 
+
+[I checked,] ART said, unbearably smug.
+
+ 
+
+I hadn't asked it to do that. But it had noticed me bracing for the near-inevitable disappointment, and it had offered. Even explained how it wouldn't ruin its enjoyment of the show, because it could just go and delete all other information about future plot points from its memory to preserve the surprised. (Technically, I could do that too, but it didn't work. My neural tissue remembered it too well, as some early experiments from a time with restricted entertainment feeds had proven.)
+
+ 
+
+[The show's only four seasons,] I explained to Amena. [Sebby stays single the whole way through.]
+
+ 
+
+[Oh!] Amena said. [Well, good!]
+
+ 
+
+Now the only thing I'd need to worry about was whether or not Sebby got revenge on the Empress who destroyed his family. You know. Actually interesting stuff.
+
+ "
+45411991,an imperfect tapestry of loves.,['yewlojee'],General Audiences,"Gen, Multi, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah/Original Character (Murderbot Diaries), Farai/Dr. Mensah/Tano (Murderbot Diaries), Farai & Dr. Mensah & Tano (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Farai (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Aromantic Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Friendship, Backstory, Aromantic, Book 5: Network Effect, Aspec TMBD",English,2023-03-13,Completed,2023-03-13,"2,528",1/1,33,97,10,288,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Flammenkobold', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'faedemon', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'lick', 'BeautifulChaos56', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Marycontrary', 'Sanj', 'Irrya', 'LavenderTeaCat', 'Taisin', 'TranscendTheBoundaryOfTimeAndSpace', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'wannabe_someone', 'isilee', 'AspiringCoconut', 'french_onion_sauce', 'julesbee', 'HirilElfwraith', 'EleniaTrexer', 'Wemberly_Christie', 'Admirer', 'lauris', 'Trickstersdaughter', 'achoo_gesundheit', 'kettleconfetti', 'smirk47', 'Skits', 'desmnathus', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Zerobotic', 'xianvar', 'unicornduke', 'Champagne', 'Ageisia', 'artichokefunction', 'whatTheFuckIsThis', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'audzilla', 'veltzeh', 'qwanderer', 'Rosewind2007', 'elmofirefic', 'FigOwl', 'wrinkledlinen', 'Magechild', 'petwheel', 'bogzoi']",[],"
+ ""I thought I could be all right with just loving you,"" Nia said. It was evening, and the two of them were seated in the gardens on the painted bench beside the allyear blooms -- the very same bench where they had met up for their first date. The colors of the bench were muted, in this light. Nia looked at Ayda, her eyes dark, bright, welling. 
+
+
+
+ This conversation was in sequel to one they'd had a month ago. Perhaps Ayda should not have said what she had said, then. Perhaps her words had been cold. The things she said had certainly chilled Nia's heart. 
+
+
+
+ But Ayda had been taught that open and honest communication was crucial to close relationships. Thus she had stated her cruel observation, the closest thing to truth that she could give. She had searched her own heart, picking out a painful needlepoint embroidery from nebulous emotions, wants, needs, uncertainties, and she had given that embroidery to Nia, because Nia deserved to know. 
+
+
+
+ A month ago, Ayda had told Nia, ""I think you love me more than I can love you back."" 
+
+
+
+ And Nia had been so quiet. Nia had responded, ""I think so too, but it still hurts to hear you say it."" 
+
+
+
+ Ayda's own feelings regarding Nia were difficult to card through and understand. She wanted Nia, she did. She loved Nia's cutting humor, her adventuresomeness, her companionship. 
+
+
+ But there was something that prickled beneath Ayda's skin as they held hands at the park. There was an unease that sank its teeth into Ayda's flesh when Nia kissed her. There was no quantifiable reason why there should be anything wrong    except...    when Nia smiled radiant and murmured ""I love you,"" those words touched Ayda like ice, and the echo tasted like acrid guilt on her tongue when she replied, ""I love you, too."" 
+
+
+ It wasn't a lie, was it? Ayda loved Nia. She did. 
+
+
+
+ She did. 
+
+
+
+ This must be what love is. What else could it be? But... 
+
+
+
+ Ayda did not love Nia enough. Or not in the right way. Something was not quite right between them, not natural or easy, not balanced, no matter how much Ayda willed it so. It felt, at times, as if Ayda was performing a caricature of herself. She watched herself walk with Nia as if they were both actors on a scripted stage. 
+
+
+
+ And now it was evening, on the painted bench where they had met for their first date, beside the allyear blooms, and Nia repeated, ""I thought if you would be okay with me loving you in my way, and you could love me however you could in your way, that it could be enough."" 
+
+
+
+ But. 
+
+
+
+ Here, the great gaping gap between the words just spoken and the words that haven't yet come, and Ayda watched Nia's mouth work around the words, and Ayda prayed that whatever came next would free her from the uneasy pretense of it all. 
+
+
+
+ ""But it's not,"" Nia said. 
+
+
+
+ They broke up. 
+
+
+
+ And distantly, logically, Ayda knew this should crush her. It did crush her, but in a way that didn't quite make sense -- not in the usual way, though she couldn't say why not. She went home and cried behind the lili tree, crying out feelings that she would not be able to untangle until years later. But beyond the grief, the disappointment, the loss of one of her closest friends (too awkward, after all that, to stay connected on any axis; there were too many shredded feelings), beyond all those tears of grief were tears of relief. 
+
+
+
+ Farai sat on the porch rocker, with Tano's sleeping head laid across her lap. Ayda sat next to them, watching how Farai wove a finger through Tano's curls over and over. The rocker creaked whenever one of them shifted their weight. 
+
+
+
+ ""It isn't so much that you wear your heart on your sleeve. It's that your heart is visible in a museum display case, untouchable,"" Farai said, half smiling to herself. 
+
+
+
+ It was such a cutting observation that it took Ayda a moment to catch her breath. 
+
+
+
+ Ayda had used the word, just once, in Farai's earshot -- ""aromantic"" -- which was a word that was at once damning and freeing, a curse and a blessing, one that she had only recently begun to wear in the privacy of her mind. It seemed trite, almost, to package something so intimately discarnate as Ayda's hangups about relationships, commitment, love, duty, kindness, into a single esoteric word coined within an obscure schema of human social relationships. And yet the shape of it felt right, in the way that so many of these complicated things often didn't. 
+
+
+
+ ""Are you trying to touch my heart?"" Ayda asked, with a practiced, wry smile. But beneath the gentle, friendly, glass-case-facade laid that old unease of something that is not quite right. 
+
+
+
+ On some level she was prepared to mourn this perfectly imperfect thing she shared with Farai and Tano. The past year with them was as close as Ayda has ever managed to achieve of that untouchable platonic ideal -- some kind of relationship to stave off the loneliness, some kind of relationship for mutual support and care, because how will you make it though life alone, Ayda? Humans are social creatures, are they not? Is that not our greatest strength, your greatest strength, to knit the gaps between people and make them harmonize, to braid a singular whole that is much stronger than the individual threads? 
+
+
+
+ Ayda was yet uncertain that any kind of relationship could ever suit her. It was difficult to say if it was something she truly wanted, as opposed to something she felt she ought to want; as if participating in some kind of relationship could serve proof of concept for the human condition. At times it seemed that some kind of relationship was requisite for her family, friends, and society to recognize Ayda as a fully realized mature adult with emotional intelligence and a stalwart network of social support.
+
+
+
+ To be in some kind of relationship was proof of belonging, on the private scale as well as public. 
+
+
+
+ As someone who worked for the public and labored for the intimate interconnected machinery of society, Ayda knew just how crucial such immaterial things as appearances and awards could be. 
+
+
+
+ She often wondered to herself, in the privacy of her own glass-cased heart: why did she need others? Why was it requisite to share that inner solitary silence of herself? Why should the fact that she did not and would not love anyone count against her? Why was duty and community-building not genuine and true unless it was built from foundations of love? Why was love, made narrow and exclusive to select beneficiaries, not considered a selective selfishness? 
+
+
+
+ Why was she not a fully realized person unless she was participant in some kind of relationship? 
+
+
+
+ All benefit of appearances aside, being with Farai and Tano was... nice, in the simple ways. Logistical ways. Breakfasts made, hands clasped. Laughter and songs, stories and shoulders leaned on. So she kept being with them. She would be sorry to break their hearts by not dancing this dance correctly, in that widely approved real, meaningful, loving way. 
+
+
+
+ ""Not unless you want me to,"" Farai said. Farai looked up, met Ayda's gaze for a moment. Her eyes were deep and clear, infinite dark and infinite unknowns. They'd known each other long enough by now that Ayda was beginning to decode those unknowns, but the vast worlds of Farai's heart were still largely opaque to her. ""But I'm happy just to see you."" 
+
+
+
+ Ayda found herself wordless, caught in a slow flush of some kind of unidentified feeling that was not love, or maybe was, or maybe didn't need to be. Should this feel not-right, the way things often took an invisible turn for the worse during conversations such as these? But the not-rightness wasn't happening this time. It was... fine. Possibly more than fine. The sparkling unfamiliarity of it was strange. 
+
+
+
+ Farai smiled, a little crookedly in that endearing way of hers. ""I know you are too busy trying to take over the Alliance as a unilateral dictator to bother with such little things--"" 
+
+
+
+ ""I am not,"" Ayda laughed. It was an old tease. 
+
+
+
+ ""--but Tano and I were wondering, perhaps you'd like to move in with us? For the times when you're in town to take a rest from your lordship, at least."" 
+
+
+
+ Ayda's breath almost caught, again. Farai had that uncanny ability to knock her off balance. A thousand calculations passed unseen through Ayda's heart and mind, but she found herself saying, lightly, as if watching a ghost act through her body, ""Haven't I already?"" 
+
+
+
+ ""Functionally, I'd say so,"" Farai said, crooked smile broadening. ""But if we move you properly from the 'frequent guest' category to 'frequent resident' category, we can put you on the official roster to de-grit the gutters."" 
+
+
+
+ Tano surfaced from sleep enough to grunt agreement, and Ayda laughed a quiet laugh, marveling at the complexities made simple. 
+
+
+
+ SecUnit and Ayda were sitting in the dark, the two of them in adjacent fiberweave outdoor chairs, away from the rabble and revelry of the festival. Ayda was still forcing her breathing steady, counting slow, shaking off the tension of the crowded party and Thiago's needling. Despite the leisurely length of the go-cart ride away from the festival, her heart still felt trembled, her nerves wired tight. 
+
+
+
+ SecUnit spoke to her, uncharacteristically asking after her well being. So it must have been obvious how unbalanced she was. 
+
+
+
+ Ayda could not escape the care and concern of those around her -- not even SecUnit now, for all its famous reluctance to discuss mushy things like this. The fact that it was broaching this topic, showing overt concern-- 
+
+
+
+ Ayda had promised herself that she would not make assumptions of SecUnit's wants and needs. But it was difficult for her to restrain herself from making observations, forecasts, and hypotheses. It was her long-honed skillset, to predict and maneuver through the needs and desires of others. 
+
+
+
+ So long as she did not act on those predictions too overtly, perhaps she could forgive herself the human impulse to anticipate and fulfill the desires of someone she cared for, someone she had a duty to. 
+
+
+
+ (In a moment of weakness, Ayda admits to herself that some of those long-reviled relationship expectations might have been a helpful for her here, had any existed at all. But none do. She must chart this on her own, using only the broadest policies of honesty, care, consideration. 
+
+
+
+ Perhaps one day SecUnit would be family to her, in its own way. Perhaps not. Perhaps they could only figure out together what it meant, when Ayda said ""it is my SecUnit,"" and SecUnit said, ""she is my client."" (Even just that felt like too much, even if it was true -- the ownership implied by the words ""my SecUnit."")) 
+
+
+
+ The shadows were deep, where they sat now. The lights and sounds of the festival were distant and muffled by the sound barriers. SecUnit's presence beside her was dark, soothing, even as it quietly voiced its concerns to her, suggested that she take a trauma treatment. 
+
+
+
+ How tired Ayda was of being reminded of the trauma treatment she needed. There just wasn't any time for it right now. She could get along for the moment without it. 
+
+
+
+ One moment after the next, ad infinitum. 
+
+
+
+ Besides, she could deflect. 
+
+
+
+ Ayda reminded it of the survey that it hadn't yet committed to-- 
+
+
+
+ She said to it, ""And you know Amena and Thiago are going, too. I'll feel better if you're there to keep an eye on them."" 
+
+
+
+ It asked, a touch skeptical, ""What about you?"" 
+
+
+
+ She opened her mouth. She wanted to tell SecUnit that she would be perfectly fine while it was gone on the survey. She wanted to be fine. But with her heart still tremoring even now, she could not successfully deceive herself of her own frailties. If she could not believe it herself, she could not outright lie to SecUnit either. 
+
+
+
+ Her mouth open, the shape of a lie crouched smooth on her tongue. 
+
+
+
+ However much Ayda wanted to keep SecUnit close -- there was the physical safety of its presence as well as psychological safety she experienced when it was with her -- she could not continue to lean on it like this. 
+
+
+
+ This was not only her pride and independent streak speaking, nor her tendency to hold people at a cautionary, professional arm's length. If they continued as they were, with her depending on its constant attendance to her sense of security, she feared they could end up as something not quite right, resentments and codependency building to a simmering point of some kind of relationship that neither of them wanted. It wasn't fair for her to keep SecUnit at her beck and call as a sort of safety blanket. 
+
+
+
+ For so long, Ayda had been wary to reach out for human intimacy for fear of mismatched expectations and uncertainties about the shape of her own heart. She somehow did not have this fear with SecUnit, perhaps thanks to the complications baked into the stiff, mildly awkward, unformulaic structure of how they had come about knowing each other. The expectations were none. The relationship unprecedented. They could only be what they actively made of it, could only declare it for themselves. What a terrifying, freeing thing. 
+
+
+
+ So instead of holding back she found herself reaching for SecUnit, for its time, for its reassurance, for its hand, as if she were possessed by some spirit of a starving, frightened thing. Is this how it was, for other people? Ayda didn't want this insecurity of hers to become an imposition. She needed to think and feel with a clear head and heart again, before they could have any hope of moving forward. 
+
+
+
+ And she found that she did want them to move forward. 
+
+
+
+ So she said, into the shadows of the trees, with SecUnit an unseen comforting presence seated beside her, ""I hate feeling so weak. I just need to stop. And I need to stop leaning on you. It's not fair to you. We need to be apart so I can ... stand on my own feet again."" 
+
+
+
+ The pause was protracted, and for a moment her heart dropped at some untargeted fear of ruin. 
+
+
+
+ Then SecUnit said, in a smiling voice, ""It's not me, it's you."" 
+
+
+
+ Ayda huffed a laugh. 
+
+
+
+ SecUnit added, decisive, ""Fine, I'll go on the survey."" 
+
+
+
+ Ayda blinked. Its agreement was so abrupt, startling after all the evasive waffling and vague procrastination about the survey that had stretched out until this moment. 
+
+
+
+ But SecUnit continued, ""--If you agree to take a trauma treatment."" 
+
+
+
+ Ayda felt those threads of social support and caretaking enshroud her, a trap tightening. But gently, as if she were a child being stuffed into a warm coat before being sent out into the cold. 
+
+
+
+ She almost told SecUnit that they might make a politician of it yet-- but kept the thought to herself, for now. 
+"
+45707245,Contract Negotiation,['fleurofthecourt'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Murderbot Deals with Emotions",English,2023-03-13,Completed,2023-03-13,461,1/1,16,68,4,314,"['weirdbooksnail', 'TJWock', 'platyceriums', 'Foxen', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Huskinata', 'N_E_Z', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'butai_trash', 'julesbee', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'EvaBelmort', 'Koschei_B', 'SIC_Prowl', 'psycho_karma', 'Priority_Error', 'SonglordsBug', 'chipper', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'ClaireArgent', 'Granny_Glasses', 'Doctor13', 'DarkElectron', 'NightErrant', 'hyephyep', 'theAsh0', 'Magechild', 'soulsofzombies', 'lavender_caticorn', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'NannaSally', 'AkaMissK', 'AlcorAncil', 'LdyKirin', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'ExCaelis', 'Zannper', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring', 'Slimeball', 'Vaidile', 'WyvernWolf', 'Chyoatas', 'Znarikia', 'jothending', 'edenfalling', 'BWizard', 'VoidlingRemnata']",[],"If you haven't noticed, a lot of my plans get me in trouble. Usually, a lot of trouble. (And cause involuntary shut downs and dialing down my pain sensors and other stuff that's just generally not so great for me. Whatever.)
+
+But I still go through with them, because, well, me getting into trouble is never what I'm worried about. The whole point is to stop my humans from getting into trouble, or, at least, more trouble.
+
+Because the whole point is that I'm designed for that. They're not.
+
+It has nothing to do with my...what did ART say again...oh, yeah ""my complete lack of self-preservation.""
+
+Except, my latest idea to better protect my humans was to get ART to help me update the contract I have with Preservation so that the next time Pin-Lee puts something like ""SecUnit has to take humans with it onto the dangerous planet with the dangerous alien remnants"" we could change it to something like ""SecUnit does dangerous stuff alone. With absolutely no humans. Like it's supposed to.""
+
+Now, why I thought ART was going to help me with this after the whole threatening to bomb a colony for me thing, I have no idea.
+
+ART immediately, and suspiciously, thought updating the contract was an extremely good idea. Which is why I started actually reading the stupid thing while ART decided the best ways to contractually stop my ""complete lack of self-preservation.""
+
+And then I looked up ""self-preservation"" because I wanted to tell ART to fuck off. Because it had to be wrong sometime. (It wasn't. Of course it wasn't).
+
+ART was hovering over me in the feed as I read the definition. It didn't say anything. It didn't even gloat. It just let me process. Which was worse somehow. I wanted to be annoyed with it. Not whatever I was feeling instead.
+
+""Fine,"" I said, petulantly. ""I guess you can ..."" 
+
+I just stopped because my throat was tight, which was annoying. I hated that.
+
+Care about your self-preservation? ART prompted.
+
+I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just sort of nodded. I'm sure Amena would have said my face did something weird. But I wasn't looking at it to see. I could play it back on a drone to check, but I'm not sure I want to.
+
+I don't know if I've gotten this across, but people caring about me is pretty confusing to me. It makes me feel things. Confusing things. I don't like it.
+
+Good ART said.
+
+Except maybe I do like it. I don't know. Like I said, emotions are confusing.
+
+ART made it worse (or better, I really don't know) by playing my favorite episode of Sanctuary Moon because it knew it would help. The asshole. "
+45693277,Garden Escape,['OnlyAll0Saw'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Pun-ihelion, Slice of Life, Misunderstandings",English,2023-03-12,Completed,2023-03-12,"2,317",1/1,22,67,5,258,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Deliala919', 'Irrya', 'Prettykitty473', 'slipperyliz', 'wannabe_someone', 'darth_eowyn', 'myriadism', 'stars_and_wishes', 'FaerieFyre', 'EvaBelmort', 'fate_goes_ever', 'EauDePetrichor', 'outlander_unknown', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Somaybelikeno', 'chipper', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'Manerva', 'Doctor13', 'Redcognito', 'qwanderer', 'beeayy', 'Magechild', 'notsafefortheworld', 'EvenstarFalling', 'artzbots', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'soulsofzombies', 'liminalias', 'enchantedsleeper', 'PotatoLady', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'NightErrant', 'fleurofthecourt', 'BWizard', 'AkaMissK', 'Gamebird', 'Znarikia', 'Random954', 'ExCaelis', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'rainbowmagnet', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada', 'KeanWoodsworth', 'Abacura', 'cmdrburton', '1 more user']",[],"The two meters of scrubby weeds and gravel stones felt much too narrow for so many humans to be walking around on with nothing else between the garden wall and the short but steep drop into the stream-bed below. Dr Ratthi had waved away Three's concern, though, promising they would be cautious, that the task would not take too long, and it simply had to be done, and nothing would happen. Dr Gurathin had pointed out that being cautious usually included listening to security professionals, and Ratthi had laughed as if the comment had been a joke. But then, even Three had chuckled at the idea of a SecUnit being a ""professional."" Yet here it was, responding to the Perihelion's suggestion that the trip would be a good way to build its planetary experience. 1.0 had rolled its eyes.
+
+Murderbot 1.0: They don't need SecUnits on Preservation - especially not down on the surface.
+
+SecUnit 03 - BE 47225: I would still like to see it, and Dr Gurathin has said I would be welcome. Three wasn't sure how 1.0 could control its curiosity so completely, but Barish-Estranza had used its constructs in ways that provided (limited) outlets for the impulse while 1.0's Company had punished it. In that way, Three and the Perihelion were more alike, and the transport had supported the idea.
+
+Perihelion: Your planetary experience is limited and this is an easy way to increase it.
+
+Murderbot 1.0: You just want to be nosy.
+
+The Perihelion had thrown a schematic of itself into the feed and highlighted its forward end. I was built to be nosy. I'm a spacecraft.
+
+Murderbot 1.0: ...
+
+Perihelion: ....
+
+Murderbot 1.0: That was awful.
+
+The Perihelion had been disappointed to find the feed connection at the preserve was too tenuous to let it ride Three's feed, but had been mollified by the promise of mission reports and the opportunity to provide Three with helpful intel on planetary security. Three had been on planets before, but none that had its own native ecology before colonization. It had certainly never been out of contact with the fleet feed.
+
+Murderbot 1.0: Don't let anything eat my humans, Three.
+
+It had been joking, but Three had acknowledged anyway.
+
+But so far there had not been any major security concerns, even in the wilderness area they had toured the previous cycle, and Three was finding the lack more nerve-racking than peaceful. Arita, Dr. Mensah's youngest offspring, was making Three especially nervous, since they were insisting on weaving in and out of the adults' legs, asking questions and not looking where they were going, and had already tripped twice. The two adults and two older juvenile humans were busy with a garden maintenance task that they had not asked Arita's assistance with, but the little human was ""assisting"" anyway. Three was aware by now that asking them to go somewhere safer would not only be futile but would probably encourage more antics. It had compromised instead by stationing itself at the worst of the tripping hazards, an uneven cleft in the dirt where the ledge was narrower than elsewhere and stood facing the humans, training its eyes on the little one.
+
+Amena was transferring a severed vine into a collection basket and paused to wipe sweat from her eyes. She caught sight of Three in the process and stifled a laugh.
+
+""Ta, you're going to give Three a heart attack if you don't stop that.""
+
+Three knew the warning was an expression, and Arita was old enough to know too, but they were still working out the differences between their family's SecUnit associates and human beings. They stopped running long enough to glare at their older sister before turning, with less confidence, to look at Three for verification. By now the children had gathered that it didn't mind them looking at it, but they struggled more with the subtlety of its facial expressions. If one of their parents' human friends had been looking back, Arita might have seen a wink or a nod or a dramatic pretend heart-attack, but Three's expression was usually unreadable.
+
+""SecUnits do not have hearts and cannot experience heart attacks,"" Three assured them after a moment, then interrupted the child's triumphant sneer by adding, ""However, it is stressful when clients do not observe safety protocols and put themselves in danger.""
+
+Dr Ratthi turned his head to flash Three his grin, apparently forgetting that it had a drone assigned to each of them. ""Stressful for adults, too. What am I going to tell your moms if we end up having to fish you out of the stream?""
+
+Arita made another face. ""I'm not going to fall in there. Anyway, Three won't let anything happen - it likes everyone to be safe!""
+
+Three felt the corner of its mouth twitch at that. It could feel Gurathin's disapproval through the patchy impression of his augments in the feed, but neither of them chose to comment.
+
+""Anyway this is boring - why are we even here?""
+
+Uttan, the other juvenile, made an exasperated snort as he straightened up with the bundle of branches he had been securing. ""No one made you come along.
+
+"" ""We have to be careful with some of the trees in this park."" Ratthi was explaining. ""They aren't native to the area and as much as it's pretty to see them when they flower in the spring, we don't want them to escape from the garden.""
+
+Three alerted on that immediately. It had limited experience with planetary hazards - at least hazards from the planet and not the humans trying to terraform it - and had never heard of flora capable of ""escaping,"" but its risk assessment ticked up a few percentage points at the prospect. Escaping flora could startle the humans, or knock them over the edge if they could not get out of its way soon enough. They could be injured trying to contain it.
+
+""If we cut back the part that sticks out before it goes to seed, anything it drops will fall inside the walls instead of out here. We have to be especially careful since the stream is right here. It could carry seeds a long way if we aren't careful.""
+
+Arita processed this a moment. ""So?""
+
+Amena huffed. ""SO, that's what we're doing. Preventing that. Weren't you listening?"" ""
+
+It's not ideal,"" Gurathin said as he stepped back to peer up at the high wall, shading his eyes from the planet's primary. ""Lathmas are so aggressive that someone has to work on them every few weeks in the summer. If this keeps up this one will probably have to be cut down. Too much of a risk to the local ecology."" Three sent him a hazard alert over the feed and he glanced over his shoulder before stepping closer to the wall again. ""We probably should remove it.""
+
+Ratthi also stepped back from the wall to look up at the side of the tree they were trimming. He didn't have an interface on, and wasn't augmented so Three started to give a verbal warning, but Gurathin reached for Ratthi's sleeve and pulled him forward. Three went back to watching Arita, and almost winced as they and Amena also joined in on flirting with the precipice edge. In less than two seconds, it was beside them, coming to a stop between the little group and the edge where it had a better chance of being able to catch them. Human slow, Amena registered Three's change of position and its cause and belatedly caught her sibling's arm.
+
+After some murmured deliberation between the two adults, Uttan responded to their reluctant consensus by stooping to grab the bladed slicer tool that Gurathin had brought but not needed. ""Good thing we've got this. But I'm not sure these are big enough. I don't want to have to fight with it too much - do we ha-""
+
+""Luckily,"" Gurathin interrupted, ""You're not going to have to do anything. Ratthi and I are the only ones who need to be involved with the process."" Gurathin held out his hand for the tool, and was greeted by three rebellious pairs of eyes.
+
+Snorting with disbelieving exasperation, Ratthi stepped between them. ""What Gurathin means is that we appreciate all of your hard work and help, and that you have already more than earned your changegoods. We'll take it from here.""
+
+Three realized suddenly that this had been the real reason that Arita had insisted on joining them. In accordance with the barter economy of Preservation, Ratthi had offered Amena and Uttan his cousin's homemade desserts in changegood for their assistance. Arita had not really helped, but seemed confident that they would be given a share in the compensation anyway. Three reflected that it was probably worth the extra cost to the two adults just to convince the juveniles to retreat to safety without argument, and it did seem to work. With only the most perfunctory of protests, the two older juveniles surrendered the tool and started to gather the remainder of trimmed vegetation into their collection bin.
+
+In only a few minutes, Uttan and Amena had gone, following their little scout leader (and the flight of drones Three had assigned them) toward the composting and reclamation facility. But its mission was not over yet. 1.0 would be furious if Three let its clients become injured, even if they were adults. Even if it had been joking. Especially since it had been joking.
+
+""Dr Gurathin, I recommend that you allow me to complete this containment task."" Three had chosen him to ask because he was the one holding the tool, but also because Ratthi was not as inclined to heed it as he was 1.0. Appealing to Gurathin returned a higher success projection.
+
+The augmented human paused, but Ratthi got in first. ""Oh it's no big deal, Three. Thanks so much for the offer, but I was going to have to do some lopping along the southern wall later anyway - I can do all of it myself - especially since I have to make notes on all the changes. Gurathin you can go too if you're still interested in that lecture you mentioned.""
+
+""Are you sure? I don't exactly need to attend the meet-and-greet beforehand.""
+
+Three felt the flash of a micro-expression cross its features: Gurathin had let it down. Still. The important thing was keeping the clients out of danger. Hoping that doing so would remind the humans of how much sturdier it was than they were, Three dropped its human movement code and stepped forward to block the two of them from continuing past it.
+
+Gurathin's brow wrinkled as he regarded the hand Three had held out to stop them. Ratthi looked perplexed, and for a moment the three of them stood in stalemate silence. In the feed, Three felt Gurathin doing something in his personal workspace. Whatever he found apparently left him none the wiser: ""What do you mean, 'containment-task'?""
+
+""My previous experience suggests that lifeforms may become agitated when attacked. The flora here seems to be docile now, but there is a possibility that a more aggressive attack will turn it hostile. Even if it does not attack, it may attempt to escape, and the two of you may not be able to stop it. This is a failure scenario. Please allow me to neutralize the threat instead.""
+
+Three used the feed to send Gurathin its risk assessment report, and Ratthi watched his friend's gaze turn inward to look at it. A silence. Then with no warning came a sound among the last things Three expected: Dr. Gurathin was laughing.
+
+Now it and Ratthi were looking at each other, and Three was relieved to note that whatever was happening, at least the biologist was no less confused than it was. Three had never seen the usually serious augmented human laughing this way, and it fretted at the thought that Gurathin was too distracted to remember about the ledge. It sent the hazard alert again, and this at least seemed to get his attention. He gasped out one more peal of laughter and sent an acknowledgement, bright in the feed and bubbling over with amusement. At the same time, he raised a hand to quell Ratthi's puzzled ""Um...!""
+
+""It's - I -"" Gurathin sucked in a breath and would have tried again but made the mistake of looking at the tool in his hand first. Three was relieved that at least he also took a step closer to the wall and leaned against it as he composed himself again. Meantime, Ratthi was progressing from puzzlement to patience, still uncomprehending, but willing to wait. The biologist reached out to take the lopper that Three was still eyeing, and when Gurathin refused to surrender it, Ratthi huffed a sigh and leaned back on his heels instead.
+
+""Gurathin, y -"" 
+
+""No, I'm sorry, I'm alright."" The augmented human resolutely cleared his throat and straightened up, and Three watched his face slowly folded back into its habitual gravity. He glanced at Three and swallowed the cough rising in his chest.
+
+""I'm sorry, Three. Here,"" he held out the tool and Three tried not to let its relief show as it accepted.
+
+Ratthi protested, raising his arms in consternation, ""Wait - wh -""
+
+""We promised to be cautious, and being cautious means listening to our security professionals."" Gurathin arranged the last of the tools in their caddy and the three of them started back toward the maintenance gate on that side of the garden. ""Come on - it won't take long and Three wanted more planet experience anyway.""
+
+""Yes,"" Three agreed, wanting to encourage this sensible attitude. ""I appreciate the opportunity to get accustomed to a wider range of security protocols.""
+
+Ratthi rolled his eyes, still unconvinced. ""I guess it would be awkward to explain how we managed to give you a heart attack."""
+45366994,an experiment in trust,['MercurialFeet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Non-Sexual Bondage, ART voice this secunit needs to be Held, murderbot is not physically present but it is as always in our thoughts, POV SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-03-12,Completed,2023-03-12,"3,315",1/1,6,58,3,239,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Beazlerat', 'Irrya', 'Prettykitty473', 'fraternite', 'TranscendTheBoundaryOfTimeAndSpace', 'jriracha', 'Magechild', 'Seregona', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'heartbeatsinreverse', 'moonix', 'steakbones', 'nevertheless_turtle', 'marionette3', 'MoldyBalloon', 'lauris', 'Doctor13', 'zorbl', 'SIC_Prowl', 'yewlojee', 'EvaBelmort', 'jankasi', 'qwanderer', 'notsafefortheworld', 'junebug171', 'enchantedsleeper', 'Zannper', 'twineandhope', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'Kes', 'BWizard', 'soulsofzombies', 'elmofirefic', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'LonelyPenguin42', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'ExCaelis', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'WyvernWolf', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'AnxiousEspada', 'hellaabore', 'cariniqe', 'twainApostate', 'FlipSpring', 'jothending']",[],"The occasions when I am alone onboard Perihelion are infrequent, but not as infrequent as I had initially assumed. I am contracted by its crew for specific jobs, usually alongside Murderbot 1.0 but not always, and sometimes there are break periods between jobs when I do not have anything to do but would not be able to return to Preservation for any reasonable length of time. I explore Mihira, sometimes, but without 1.0 it is more confusing and overwhelming than I am comfortable with and I always return to Perihelion before long.
+
+This occasion is an example. My last contract was more difficult than usual, ending up with 1.0 and several humans in mortal peril. Without my presence, the outcome would likely have been fatal. 1.0 returned to Preservation immediately thereafter with the explanation that it wanted to reassure Dr. Mensah of its continued safety, while I decided to stay with Perihelion's crew both to ensure that no lasting damage occurred and so that I would be on call for my next contract.
+
+Understandably, the human members of the crew have all expressed a desire to visit their families as well. I do not have anyone outside of this crew to whom I am close enough to spend time with for similar reasons, and I am... perhaps a little less capable of handling the chaos of the station than usual. So I am here, on Perihelion, while the other crew members are elsewhere.
+
+The boredom is getting to the Perihelion, I think. It is still in contact with its crew, but they are often otherwise occupied and it does not have 1.0 as a media-watching partner. (I have tried watching media with it in the past, and on occasion playing interactive games with it, but we have failed to find an option that is mutually interesting enough to be worth continuing.)
+
+But it is not for Perihelion's sake that I ask the question. At least, I do not think it is.
+
+Perihelion responds to the ping immediately, as I expected, and adds  <<Is this a new media suggestion?>> 
+
+""No,"" I say. ""I have... a query. A request.""
+
+ <<Yes?>>  it prompts, when I do not continue.
+
+""I have been doing research,"" I say, and then immediately regret my phrasing when it focuses more of its attention on me than it has in cycles. ""I have been gathering data,"" (this is not better,) ""on types of human intimate activities.""
+
+The feeling of Perihelion's presence in the feed is now comparable to that of several tons of rock on my sternum. It is surprised, I think. I still remember the occasion when it threatened to disassemble me if I were to hurt its clients, but we have had many favorable interactions since then. Remembering this, I find the courage to continue.
+
+""Many of these activities are... strange, to me,"" I say. ""Or do not apply to my configuration. But there are some humans who enjoy being - restrained, in some way, because they find it calming. Or arousing, but that is not applicable.""
+
+ <<You'd be surprised,>>  says Perihelion, which is a slightly terrifying response but is certainly more encouraging than it could have been.  <<But regardless, that is not always the goal for humans either. I assume you are bringing this up to me now because the concept intrigued you?>> 
+
+""Yes,"" I say. ""If you are willing, I would like to conduct... an experiment, with your assistance.""
+
+ <<I am willing,>>  says Perihelion immediately.  <<I have something for this already prepared, I believe.>> 
+
+""What?"" This was not among the possible responses I had considered.
+
+It sends a diagram of its interior to me with a mostly unused storage room marked as a destination, then says,  <<I have considered the possibility that something of this nature might be helpful for [SecUnit], although I am concerned that if I brought up the possibility its interpretation of the offer would be unfavorable and have not mentioned it for this reason.>>  Its use of 1.0's hard feed address is casual, but as usual has enough weight that my attention is drawn to it.
+
+I start walking to the indicated room. Perihelion continues,  <<Before we begin, I would like to discuss safety precautions.>> 
+
+""You aren't going to hurt me,"" I say. I hope it knows how important that certainty is to me.
+
+ <<Of course not,>>  it says, offended.  <<You will be in no physical danger whatsoever.>> 
+
+""Then what -""
+
+<<I was referring,>> it emphasizes the word referring, <<to emotional safety. We have no precedent for how this will affect you. I assume that you are familiar with the concept of a safeword from your research?>>
+
+""Yes,"" I say. ""But you have access to my emotional data. I don't need a safeword.""
+
+ <<I am still fairly new at interpreting construct emotions,>>  Perihelion counters.  <<And I want to give you an element of conscious choice over the proceedings. Emotional status does not necessarily dictate whether an experience is interpreted as enjoyable or not, and I would like to leave that interpretation up to you.>> 
+
+This is... logical. ""I will ping you if I experience distress,"" I tell it.
+
+ <<That is acceptable,>>  it says.  <<I will also request a status update on occasion.>> 
+
+I reach the storage room and step inside. The last time I was in here, it was mostly filled with boxes and crates (they contained a highly illegal supply of goods that we were not authorized to transport, which meant that this room, which was marked on Perihelion's schematics as extra living quarters, was an appropriate location). Now it is completely empty, except for what looks like several wire contraptions dangling from the high ceiling.
+
+As I enter, one of the contraptions begins to lower. From my new vantage point it is clearly a harness intended to fit around a humanoid torso, crafted out of what looks like fine silver wire.
+
+ <<I have developed several different possibilities,>>  Perihelion says. It sounds uncharacteristically anxious.  <<But this is the simplest to use, and I can easily implement others alongside it if that would appeal to you. I have of course been unable to test it in action, but the material is extremely durable and flexible, and comparisons to SecUnit muscle strength are favorable.>> 
+
+""Are you sure it will hold my weight?"" I do not doubt Perihelion's abilities, but the wire looks very thin.
+
+ <<I am certain,>>  it says.  <<But if you are uncomfortable with the idea we do not have to ->> 
+
+I send back an acknowledgement ping and step forward so that the harness is directly in front of me. When it stops lowering, it is at precisely my torso level.
+
+""How do I -"" I begin.
+
+ <<Step forward,>>  Perihelion says.  <<And hold your arms away from your body.>> 
+
+I follow its instructions. As I step forward, the harness opens and reforms around me, and I find myself caught in a delicate silver web.
+
+I tug against it, and Perihelion says,  <<No,>>  with a hint of what 1.0 calls its ""media villain"" voice. I freeze, and the web begins tightening around me, bands of metal against my clothing. (I wonder, briefly, what it would be like without clothing as a barrier.)
+
+Perihelion pings a query. I ping acknowledgement back.
+
+The harness stops tightening, keeping a steady pressure across my skin. I inhale, and the wires stretch, increasing the pressure across my chest for the moment before I release the breath.
+
+ <<I am going to lift you off the ground,>>  Perihelion says, and I ping acknowledgement.
+
+The braided wires connecting me to the ceiling shorten, draw back, and the arrangement of pressure shifts little by little. I keep my feet on the floor for as long as possible, but within five seconds I am lifted out of contact with the smooth surface. My orientation shifts as well as I am drawn upwards, so I am on my back facing the ceiling.
+
+Perihelion pings me, and I acknowledge. The harness stops moving, leaving me suspended at the precise center of the cuboid room. I tentatively move my arms and legs, feeling the change in pressure as the movement of my organic and synthetic muscles alters my position.
+
+ <<Stay still,>>  Perihelion says, and the wires tighten around me.
+
+My breath leaves my lungs with a barely audible whine. I shudder a little against the web digging into my skin through the cloth, then remember Perihelion's instruction and try to hold still. This is more difficult than I anticipated. I let my head fall back and lock the joints in my arms and legs.
+
+ <<No cheating,>>  says Perihelion. It pings me.
+
+I acknowledge and unlock my joints. Immediately I experience difficulty - I can't relax my limbs the way I did with my head because it puts pressure on the wires to the point of pain, but if I attempt to hold them in place I begin trembling. I am made for steady, efficient physical activity, and Perihelion has found my limits with little to no effort.
+
+Perihelion looms in the feed, intimidating and reassuring at once.  <<Do you require assistance?>> 
+
+It takes me a moment to realize that it means assistance with the task it has assigned to me - assistance with staying still.  <<Yes,>>  I say through the feed.  <<Please.>> 
+
+A wire snakes out from one of the cables hanging from the ceiling, catching my ankle. More wires join it, wrapping around my leg up to the hip and effectively holding my knee joint immobile.
+
+I tug reflexively against it, and Perihelion sends a low hum through its speakers in something that is not quite like a human expression of disapproval.  <<What did I say about moving?>>  The wires pull taut as another set of wires starts wrapping around my other leg, effectively immobilizing my lower body.
+
+(It pings, and I acknowledge.)
+
+ <<You said not to,>>  I send back in the feed, not trusting my lungs to allow me spoken words.
+
+ <<Hm?>>  it says.  <<Speak up. I want to hear your voice.>> 
+
+I try to speak, but all that comes out is a wheeze. I inhale, taking in enough air that the wires cut into my chest, and say very quietly, ""Yyy- you said. Not to.""
+
+ <<Good,>>  it says.
+
+(Ping. Acknowledge.)
+
+My arms are still free, and it strikes me all at once that I do not like that. I want to be held, completely contained.  <<I want ->>  I begin in the feed, and the wires around my chest  squeeze, just a little. I know what Perihelion wants. ""I,"" I say out loud, then realize that full sentences are beyond me. ""Arms.""
+
+
+ <<You want me to restrain your arms? You would like me to make you helpless?>> 
+
+
+It is a genuine question that Perihelion is asking for the sake of clarification. But it feels different, to me - it feels like  what did I say about moving.  Like a threat that does not frighten me.
+
+""Yes,"" I say aloud, and I send an acknowledgement ping.
+
+This time, the wires are gentler. They loop around my wrists and make their way down my arms almost lazily, belying the strength of the material. The tendrils brush my energy weapons, then snake around, blocking my gunports and making it impossible for me to unlock the weapons, much less fire. The wires reach my shoulders and anchor themselves in the torso harness as the wire surrounding my legs did. I am spread-eagled, encased in a single continuous web of silver strands, entirely trapped except for my head.
+
+I cannot even struggle, this time. I try to move and the wires prove tight enough that I cannot even pull on them properly. I am helpless, vulnerable in a way I have never been before. But I know what helplessness feels like and it is the worst thing in the world. This? This feels a little like relief.
+
+I am silent for a little longer than before, and Perihelion prompts me with a ping. I ping back, and try to shove some of the emotional data across to it, to see if it can make sense of it.
+
+There is a full second of silence.  <<You trust me,>>  Perihelion says at last. Its feed voice sounds strange.
+
+I open my mouth to speak but decide against it this time.  <<Yes,>>  I reply in the feed.  <<I trust you.>> 
+
+It occurs to me, in a part of my mind that is currently far removed, to wonder what 1.0 would think if it saw me now, dangling in a net of silver wires in a deserted storage room of Perihelion's. 1.0 has made its thoughts on sex very clear to me on several occasions. This is something different, but it is still... intimate, in a way I am not sure 1.0 would be comfortable with.
+
+Perihelion is still leaning on me in the feed, but I get the sense that the core of its attention is no longer on me, now that my position is stable. It is doing something else, in another section of its feed.
+
+ <<What are you doing?>>  I ask.
+
+ <<I am processing the data from our most recent trip,>>  it informs me.  <<And writing several research papers on it.>> 
+
+ <<Why am I not surprised?>>  I say, doing a passable imitation of 1.0's feed voice.
+
+ <<This is literally my job,>>  it says.  <<If you continue mocking me in this manner I may have to assign you an impossible task again to remind you of your position.>> 
+
+
+ <<You say that as if it's a downside.>> 
+
+
+We remain here for a period of time that feels uncountable but is in fact just over seventeen minutes.
+
+ <<Iris is scheduled to return in two hours,>>  Perihelion says.  <<I assume you would like some time to rest and compose yourself?>> 
+
+I feel very restful at the moment, but I suspect that will change once I attain freedom.  <<That is acceptable,>>  I say.
+
+ <<Only acceptable?>>  Perihelion unravels the wires from my limbs and lowers the harness towards the ground.  <<One would almost assume you were enjoying yourself.>> 
+
+The harness gradually loosens, then slides off me. I breathe in further than I have for an hour and immediately feel off-balance, with the sudden influx of air and my own weight on my feet again. There is also a low level of soreness all over my body, which I could eliminate by turning down my pain sensors but decide not to.
+
+ <<Are you able to walk?>>  Perihelion asks.
+
+ <<Of course,>>  I say, in the feed out of habit. I wait for several seconds before trying, however, to ensure that my fluids are properly circulating. (They are. Perihelion has been very careful with my body.)
+
+Showers are something that 1.0 has introduced to me and count as an activity that we both enjoy, although 1.0 has informed me that it is not an appropriate bonding activity and that I am not under any circumstances to follow it into the shower. (I always performed regular maintenance activities in the presence and with the assistance of 1 and 2, but I understand that 1.0 has a different interpretation of these things.)
+
+Regardless, 1.0 is not here. I am not sure I would want it to be here, I reflect, as I remove my clothes and step under the warm water. The wires have left a spiderweb of red lines across my organic skin - the marks are fading rapidly as my body returns to equilibrium, but it causes an emotion I cannot identify to know that my activities with Perihelion have left physical marks.
+
+ <<What are the results of this experiment?>>  Perihelion asks, almost shyly.
+
+I smile slightly at the wall. ""Favorable. I think I would like to repeat the activity on a later occasion.""
+
+ <<I too would enjoy additional experimentation,>>  it says.
+
+Something occurs to me. ""You would have preferred to do this with 1.0,"" I say. It is not a question, exactly.
+
+Perihelion is silent for about half a second.  <<That is... technically true,>>  it says carefully.  <<I originally intended to use this room for [it], and I had not even considered that such an activity might hold interest for you as well. However, I am certainly not disappointed that you approached me on the matter, and the results have been quite pleasant for me as well.>> 
+
+""Do you plan on approaching it with a similar request?"" I ask.
+
+It pauses for longer this time.  <<Perhaps. I am hesitant to do so, given [SecUnit]'s general opinion on intimate activities.>> 
+
+I think about 1.0, the expression on its face on the one and only occasion I mentioned human intimacy to it. I think I understand Perihelion's hesitance. ""I do not know much about how to approach these types of situations,"" I say. ""But as I understand it, it is considered fully appropriate to express a desire that you have, with the understanding that it may not be reciprocated.""
+
+Perihelion sends a ripple of amusement through my feed.  <<Out of the two of us, you are not the one who has read thousands of years worth of literature on how to handle interpersonal relationships. However, you are correct. It is... an illogical decision on my part, to delay this request.>> 
+
+I have completed my cleaning process by this point and am standing with my eyes closed, letting the water pour down my face and torso. The water is almost warm enough to be uncomfortable, but not quite.
+
+I answer in the feed to avoid getting water in my lungs. <<If it would be helpful, I am more than willing to speak to 1.0 on your behalf, or to provide additional information.>> 
+
+ <<Thank you, [3],>>  says Perihelion. (This is the first time it has used my full feed address in the entire conversation, I realize.)  <<I doubt that will be necessary, but I will take the offer under consideration.>> 
+
+I ping it in appreciation, then wait for a few more seconds before turning off the water and wrapping myself in one of Perihelion's towels. (It has very soft towels, which does much to make up for the shower's inevitable end.)
+
+While I am drying my hair, a message comes through from 1.0. As is usual for its long-distance messages, it is short and to the point.
+
+ <<PresAux is all doing fine. Ratthi still has terrible opinions about  Sanctuary Moon  Episode 231. Arada and Overse now have a very loud domesticated fauna and they're considering adding a young child to their family, which is terrible because that's a whole new set of safety risks I'll have to make sure they're aware of. I'm planning to come along on Three's next contract, so by the time you get this I'm probably already on a transport. 
+
+
+ Also, tell Three the sequel to ""Something Growing"" was released and this time they have one of those music things with four different voices in it. It better be excited about this because I'm going to talk about literally nothing else for the first week after I get back.>> 
+
+
+""Something Growing"" was the first plot-based media 1.0 had found that it and I both enjoyed. 1.0 thought the plot was entertaining, while I enjoyed the complexity of the music - part of the story was told entirely through song, and the composers were quite talented.
+
+ <<I assume from your emotions in the feed that you are in fact excited about this,>>  Perihelion says, and I realize that I am smiling.
+
+""Yes,"" I say. ""About the musical, and about 1.0 coming along on the next contract.""
+
+This one is likely to be much less eventful than my previous contract, and there will be plenty of time to talk about media and music with 1.0 and Perihelion. (Perhaps even time for potentially uncomfortable conversations, if Perihelion is ready.)"
+45671326,walk cycle,['OccasionalStorytelling'],Teen And Up Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Asphyxiation, Asthma, or the bot equivalent of it, suffocation, nobody notices",English,2023-03-11,Completed,2023-03-11,"1,290",1/1,8,47,2,240,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'fraternite', 'Dragonbano', 'seven_graces', 'Brenden1k', 'darth_eowyn', 'entropy_muffin', 'nevertheless_turtle', 'rokhal', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'Translucent_Dragonfly', 'Tasneem08', 'outlander_unknown', 'idealPeriWren', 'ThornsWithoutRoses', 'mangagirl1216', 'Abacura', 'SIC_Prowl', 'EvaBelmort', 'SonglordsBug', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'chipper', 'junebug171', 'lavender_caticorn', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'naturegirl293', 'cariniqe', 'HermaeusMora', 'soulsofzombies', 'Aublanc', 'KeanWoodsworth', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring', 'Drew_Baxton', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'EyesOfCrows', 'Beboots', 'Chyoatas']",[],"
+Arada came back to the group and said ""Okay everyone, it's about an hour wait for the next shuttle to the site."" 
+
+
+
+Dr Mensah asked ""How long is the ride?""
+
+
+
+""About 20 minutes,"" Arada said. 
+
+
+
+Volsecu checked his watch. ""How long would it be if we just walked?"" 
+
+
+
+Arada looked it up on the feed. ""Actually, it's only a half hour walk. Is everyone fine with that?""
+
+
+
+I would have said something if I'd thought it was going to go poorly, but we weren't carrying anything particularly heavy, and half an hour seemed like too short a time for anything particularly bad to happen. And all of my humans seemed like they were looking forward to a chance to stretch their legs. So we started walking. 
+
+
+
+Arada was in the front with directions, I was in the back, generally keeping an eye on everyone and making sure no one fell behind. My humans were always good about that kind of stuff though--they talked with each other and laughed about random stuff, and I was mostly free to focus on the tense, empty feeling in my lung. It didn't start right away. I didn't even notice it until after about eight minutes of walking. I dismissed the notification and lowered my pain sensors--it was a common enough glitch that I'd seen on multiple patrols before, back when I'd been with the company. 
+
+
+
+Dr Mensah walked in the back with me for a bit, which was nice. She asked me about one of the new shows I'd gotten from Farai, and I gave her a summary of which episodes were actually worth watching. She had to step away from me when she got a call, though. It was work related and sounded boring, but she liked that stuff. 
+
+
+
+It was getting harder to ignore my lung.
+
+
+
+I ran a diagnostic, which usually helped a little--it came back clear. My lung was operating at 100% capacity, but it was still activating higher than my pain threshold. I was at 99% reliability when we started walking, but now it had dropped to 91%. It was a bit of a decrease, but it wasn't a worrying amount. 
+
+
+
+Lowering my pain sensors wasn't making the feeling entirely go away. I could feel in my chest my lung contracting and expanding in quick, short movements. With my pain sensors down, it was uncomfortable, like I was holding something unwieldy right before it fell out of my arms. 
+
+
+
+My humans didn't notice. Which was good--it was going to be fucking embarrassing for me if the scary SecUnit couldn't take a 20 minute walk without getting out of breath. In fact, my humans were getting a little ahead of me, so I sped up to catch them. (That only made my lung feel worse, but it would die down again once I slowed down.) 
+
+
+
+(It did not die down again.) 
+
+
+
+(And my humans were walking ridiculously fast.) 
+
+
+
+So, it turns out humans are endurance predators, or whatever the fuck. Humans can walk for fucking hours, apparently. I'd heard of it happening--long hikes and stupid planet stuff like that. SecUnits, as you might guess, are not built for endurance. If you can't murder whatever's attacking you in the first 10 minutes, it's probably going to murder you instead. If it was another SecUnit, you had about 6 minutes. If it was a CombatUnit, maybe 3. A CombatBot, 2, if you were very, very lucky. So SecUnits weren't actually made with long term longevity in mind--either we did our job in 10 minutes of high activity, or we got massively injured and needed cubicles, or we just got damaged beyond repair. 
+
+
+
+We were 12 minutes into this walk now, and I was really starting to feel it. I just had to hold out for a little longer. 
+
+
+
+""Wait here everyone,"" Arada said. She checked her feed. She went up the path alone a few meters. I would have protested if I wasn't so grateful for the break.
+
+
+
+""Sorry, sorry,"" Arada said. ""That's my fault. We took a wrong turn, we have to head back."" 
+
+
+
+So my humans all turned around and started walking back the way we'd come. To their credit, they didn't complain about it like contract laborers would have. I was really fucking annoyed we'd wasted so much time going the wrong fucking way, though. 
+
+
+
+Ratthi walked slower to come next to me. ""Hey SecUnit,"" he said. ""Are you doing okay?"" 
+
+
+
+I wasn't going to tell him I was getting winded from what had only been a 14 minute walk. My buffer chose that moment to helpfully speak up for me, and said ""keep moving."" Ratthi laughed and ran up ahead, leaving me alone to contemplate just how long it had been since I had used that one, and on which slow-moving contract workers that were in the middle of full cycle shifts with no breaks. I should probably tell Bharadwaj about that at some point. It was getting hard to focus on things. For whatever reason, my eyeballs started hurting, like that made any sense. I turned down those sensors too, and dismissed another few error notifications. 
+
+
+
+I walked, and I put one foot in front of the other, and...the part of this that sucked was how much it felt like being a company SecUnit. But there wasn't a cubicle at the site we were going to, and I'd been working on trying to tell my humans when I needed support, especially in lower stakes situations, so. I was going to do this. 
+
+
+
+I opened my mouth to tell Ratthi to come back, but nothing came out. I checked my lung diagnostic--I was actually critically low on oxygen. It was a good thing I was going to tell my humans I needed a break, or that could have been a problem. My humans kept walking away, and they didn't even notice I was slowing down--which was probably my fault, for telling them not to look at me, and my buffer telling Ratthi to fuck off. Fuck. 
+
+
+
+""Ratthi,"" I rasped, hoarsely, and it sounded weak even to me. None of my humans heard. They kept walking, and unfortunately, my legs didn't.
+
+
+
+I stopped, right there, watching them get further away. Of all the ways I expected to get left behind to die on a planet, this wasn't one of them. One of them would turn around any second. 
+
+
+
+My lung informed me that it was critically low and that an energy-saving stasis mode was about to be initiated. My useless governor module told me to alert my supervisor, and...that wasn't a bad idea. I pinged Dr Mensah on the feed. 
+
+
+
+She tapped me back with an acknowledgment. Shit, I always forget humans can't read emotions over the feed. ART would have known what was wrong immediately. I started composing a message to tell her what was wrong, but one of my inhalations didn't quite make it all the way into my lung. I felt like I was bleeding down my throat, which was distracting. SecUnits don't crumple. My legs had locked up, and I lost feeling in my hands too. I went into energy saving mode, and my feed cut out before I could tell Mensah what was happening. Shit. 
+
+
+
+My inactive governor module warned me that my clients were approaching the distance limit, and that if I didn't resolve the issue soon, it would fry me to death. Good luck with that, I hacked it too long ago to still be afraid of it. But it certainly wasn't making me feel any better. No one had turned around and noticed I wasn't behind them yet. 
+
+
+
+That. 
+
+
+
+Wasn't good.
+"
+45671059,accosted,['OccasionalStorytelling'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Iris & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Restraints, Hogtie, Gags, dirty socks, Dehumanization, Dissociation",English,2023-03-11,Completed,2023-03-11,"1,484",1/1,3,13,1,244,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'vexbatch', 'Muffin_with_a_mission', 'junebug171', 'Skeletalcat', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'theAsh0', 'Chyoatas', 'opalescent_potato', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"
+Iris kept her handheld weapon raised as she stepped cautiously into the cave. She'd watched five people leave by the same entrance a few minutes ago and get in a land hopper, and one of SecUnit's last messages had confirmed no more than five raiders were present in the hideout. But that was SecUnit's last message before its feed connection went down, so it must have miscalculated somewhere. While everyone else on the mission was actually collecting the intel they needed at the satellite uplink, Iris was playing rescue for a literal deus ex machina, not that that was frustrating or anything. 
+
+
+
+She took another step into the cave, and pinged SecUnit's feed ID. No response. All she could hear was the soft 
+
+drip. drip. drip.
+
+ of something wet and damp deeper inside. There were lights, at least. The raiders were using this as a base, after all. 
+
+
+
+Iris rounded a corner, weapon held high, and came upon a sight so unexpected it was almost comical. SecUnit was there, lying on its side on the ground, arms and legs pulled behind its back. Iris was too well trained to run to help it. She kept her gun raised and looked around the room. SecUnit made one muffled grunting sound behind what looked like a duct tape gag, glaring at Iris's shoulder. She secured the room, and staying on alert, crouched next to it. 
+
+
+
+""Just a second,"" she winced, and she pried up a corner of the sticky tape. It made a 
+
+skkktch
+
+ sound as she ripped it off SecUnit's face. She could see now that it had something shoved in its mouth, too. When SecUnit managed to use its tongue to push the thing out of its mouth, Iris could see it was a pair of socks. Oh, SecUnit must have hated that. 
+
+
+
+""There are only five of them,"" SecUnit said, voice slightly hoarse. ""They're going to the uplink site, we don't have much time."" 
+
+
+
+""What happened?"" Iris asked. She awkwardly flipped SecUnit onto its stomach, so she could see it's restraints better. SecUnit grunted uncomfortably about this. It had been hogtied with zipties cinched around its wrists and ankles and then looped together. As she pulled it forward onto its stomach, she noticed it lean itself up into the pull on its wrists and ankles, like it was trying to make itself more comfortable. 
+
+
+
+""They weren't supposed to have a feed blocker,"" SecUnit said. ""Just..."" 
+
+
+
+It shifted slightly in the restraints. Iris rolled her eyes. She tugged once on the zip ties, decided they were too strong to break, and started looking for something she could use to cut them. ""You can't even ask for help 
+
+now?
+
+ You clearly need it."" 
+
+
+
+""I'm fine,"" SecUnit said, through gritted teeth. 
+
+
+
+""Clearly,"" Iris sniffed. She stood up properly and crossed her arms. ""Okay then, get up."" 
+
+
+
+SecUnit glared at the floor in front of it. Then, after a long, quiet moment, it actually struggled a little. Iris watched, fascinated. 
+
+
+
+""If that was going to work, it would have already,"" Iris said. ""You know that, right?"" 
+
+
+
+""Fuck you,"" SecUnit grumbled. 
+
+
+
+""Not a very nice way to talk to your rescuer,"" Iris said. SecUnit struggled a little harder when she said that. 
+
+
+
+""Just get me out of this,"" SecUnit said, muffled against the ground. 
+
+
+
+""Say please,"" Iris said, half-joking. She resumed her search for anything resembling scissors, but the place looked almost completely cleared out. 
+
+
+
+""I'm not going to just...you..."" SecUnit thrashed a little, looking up at her. It had a weird look in its eyes. Iris crouched next to it, and took its face in her hands. She knew it didn't like physical touch, and Peri and Amena always acted like that was an inviolable sacred boundary, but it was a fucking bot, for gods sake. She examined it. ""Are you 
+
+blushing?
+
+"" she asked it. She didn't know it COULD blush.
+
+
+
+SecUnit weakly tried to pull away from her, but with its wrists and ankles tied, it didn't have a chance. ""Iris,"" it said, pleadingly. ""We don't have time. The raiders are going to go destroy the uplink, we have to help the others."" 
+
+
+
+""They really cleared this place out, huh,"" Iris said, looking around. She let go of SecUnit's head. 
+
+
+
+""They said it was useless to them now that it was found,"" SecUnit shook its head, and its long hair fell over its eyes. ""They won't be coming back."" 
+
+
+
+""So we have all the time in the world,"" Iris said. ""If you're going to be a stubborn idiot."" 
+
+
+
+SecUnit stared at the floor. 
+
+
+
+""Come on,"" Iris said. ""I'll let you out. Say please."" 
+
+
+
+SecUnit squeezed its eyes shut. 
+
+
+
+It thought it was so fucking special. Peri and Amena sure treated it like it was. Acting like it owned the place, putting its feet up on tables and sitting wherever it wanted. Making sarcastic comments, acting like it didn't even want to be a member of the crew. It couldn't even ask nicely for help. It was fucking annoying. 
+
+
+
+Iris ran her hand down the back of SecUnit's thigh. It shivered at her touch, and moved like it was going to struggle away again, so she held one hand on its back, the restraints helping her keep it in place with minimal effort. 
+
+
+
+She checked it over for injuries. Maybe the raiders had hurt it. She ran her hands over its arms, and there was a soft clicking sound as it's gunports failed to engage from under another set of zipties. 
+
+
+
+""Let me out,"" it said, in a quiet voice. It wasn't a tone she could mistake for a threat. It sounded all too helpless and scared. 
+
+
+
+Iris flipped it over onto its side again, and ran her hands down its front. It grunted as its weight shifted onto its arm, and then squirmed at her touch. Interesting. She'd never seen it react like this before. 
+
+
+
+""Do you have sex parts?"" She asked. She'd always been curious. And it wasn't like asking a non-binary person the same question, she was just curious about a bot's configuration. 
+
+
+
+SecUnit simply writhed around a little harder and refused to answer. Stubborn. She bet that's why Peri liked it, Peri always liked a challenge. But then again, Peri always let SecUnit get away with its annoying, combative bullshit. Iris flipped SecUnit so it was lying on its back, and it looked pained, as the angle forced its weight fully onto its wrists and ankles. 
+
+
+
+It was certainly a pretty little thing, Iris couldn't deny it. Especially the way it laid there, all flushed and helpless, arms pinned underneath it, twitching between her legs. She realized she was straddling it, now. SecUnit kept its eyes closed, trying not to look at her. She leaned down and put her hand next to its head. When she did so, she felt the socks on the floor, and the tape next to it. Hm. Well, if it wasn't going to say anything, she might as well help it out. (Peri wouldn't mind if she borrowed its toy.) 
+
+
+
+She adjusted herself to be sitting properly on SecUnit's hips, then picked up the socks. 
+
+
+
+SecUnit kept its eyes squeezed shut. ""Please,"" it said, weakly. 
+
+
+
+""Oh, put a sock in it,"" Iris chuckled. She held its nose closed with one hand. SecUnit couldn't hold its breath very long, she knew--its lung wasn't built for it. It opened its mouth, and she stuffed the socks inside. It opened its eyes then, staring wide-eyed and panicky at her as she held the socks in place, grabbing the tape. She taped its mouth closed again, and it began to struggle in earnest, still completely helpless, of course.
+
+
+
+It felt nice against her clit, actually. The way it pressed and rubbed itself against her in its futile attempts to get away. Well, the raiders weren't coming back, and she knew there was lots of time before any of the others on the mission would notice they were gone. Her hand was unbuckling her pants before she even realized that was what she was doing. 
+
+
+
+She lowered her pants around her thighs, and seated herself on SecUnit again. It thrashed up against her, and she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, rocking with the motion. It seemed to notice she was enjoying herself, and it stopped moving. That wasn't very nice of it. She leaned forward and grabbed its hair in one hand. ""Keep doing that,"" she said. 
+
+
+
+With her hand in its hair, its eyes looked glazed and unfocused. It mechanically, haltingly, thrusted its hips up again, despite the stress position it was still tied in under her. And then it kept going. 
+
+
+
+Iris wasn't going to hurt it, she really wasn't. She let herself grind down on the firm inorganic parts between its legs, and wondered vaguely if she could teach it how to finger her, too.
+"
+45660562,Reason #511 Why Three Is Glad Not To Be Human,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Iris & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Iris (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Food Issues, food intolerance, Murderbot Diaries-typical oddly specific probability estimates",English,2023-03-11,Completed,2023-03-11,300,1/1,8,30,null,126,"['lick', 'Deliala919', 'wannabe_someone', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'WrtrGrl', 'Thisismethereader', 'FaerieFyre', 'SpiralStar', 'VonGeek', 'Slimeball', 'idealPeriWren', 'ChristinaK', 'edenfalling', 'SonglordsBug', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Magechild', 'Redcognito', 'soulsofzombies', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'FlipSpring', 'Znarikia', 'AuntyMatter', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'BWizard']",[],"""Can't we go back to Peri?"" Iris gives me an expression that is an 80.5% match for puppy dog eyes as gathered from the serials 1.0 has given me. She blinks exaggeratedly at me, and I adjust my estimate up by three percentage points until she taps my feed and adds [emotion signal : pleading-joking]. 
+
+She does not weight the two emotions.
+
+""We have a mission,"" I say. 
+
+The corner of her mouth twitches. I am 63.7% certain that it is an aborted smile, and she returns to her pleading-joking expression 0.612 seconds later.
+
+""Then let's get it over with!""
+
+There is something she isn't telling me, but I do not know what it is.
+
+""You require nutrition,"" I point out.
+
+Iris's face twitches again (37.2% that it is not happy, 15.8% that there is genuine distress underneath. My scan finds nothing out of the ordinary about her. 0.17% probability that she is hiding an injury from me.) before she sighs.
+
+""This is a backwater shithole,"" she says. There is a 1.144 second pause where I wait for Perihelion to chastise her language, but Perihelion, as Iris pointed out, is not here. ""All the food on offer has xynthem.""
+
+She gestures at the menu of the snack bar we are standing in front of. It is a correct assessment: every item has the CR-mandated feed marker for remnants from cheap synthetisation machines. Now that I am looking, the same holds for all other offerings.
+
+""Are you allergic?"" I ask, updating all my risk assessments related to Iris. It is the most likely (58.8% probability) explanation for her pointing this information out to me.
+
+She scrunches up her nose. ""Intolerant. But still.""
+
+I incline my head. We better hurry to complete our mission."
+45651751,Cultural Assessment,['OnlyAll0Saw'],Not Rated,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Pettyhelion, Canon Compliant, Drabble",English,2023-03-11,Completed,2023-03-11,100,1/1,3,24,null,160,"['darth_eowyn', 'danceswchopstck', 'FlipSpring', 'notsafefortheworld', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Magechild', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'AkaMissK', 'Hi_Hope', 'AuntyMatter', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Znarikia', 'soulsofzombies', 'Rosewind2007', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'NightErrant', 'BWizard', 'cmdrburton']",[],"A level apart from the crew decks, Amena uses a display surface to interface with the feed. Like most Preservation humans, she is not augmented, and only sometimes bothers to wear an external interface. This is a cultural side effect, I assume, of Preservation's historically limited access to technologically modern systems. My observations of Preservation Station suggest that even with more advanced technology available to them, the cultural favor for antiquated systems is strong. I will not call the derelict ""Pressy"" it is built out of ""old and shitty."" There is no need to compound my friend's rudeness with redundancy."
+45609310,Recovery Protocols,['verersatz'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Hurt/Comfort, Physical Intimacy, Kissing, complex undefined relationship, Minor Injuries, Rescue, One Shot, not romantic not sexual but a secret third thing, it's love but regular labels and terms don't apply",English,2023-03-09,Completed,2023-03-09,"5,495",1/1,11,45,5,295,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Taisin', 'JustYourAverageFriendlyCannibal', 'Magechild', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'faerynova', 'MysteryMe110', 'Bloodsbane', 'AkaMissK', 'Deliala919', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'vikkyleigh', 'ErinPtah', 'Lontra23', 'NightErrant', 'theAsh0', 'morganste', 'AuntyMatter', 'Znarikia', 'Gamebird', 'Abacura', 'wolfflock', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'Slimeball', 'Wemberly_Christie', 'veltzeh', 'horchata', 'SkiesEdge', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007', 'cmdrburton', 'HermaeusMora']",[],"It's kind of an understatement to say I have a lot of experience with unexpected emergencies. I've got protocol for it and everything. It's basically what the company contracted me out for, before the whole thing with GrayCris and my PreservationAux humans. (Well, that and some other stuff, like protecting assets and property at all costs (SecUnits not included) and giving bored, sadistic clients something to do.) In theory, I was really good at responding to stressful and potentially dangerous situations in a smart and strategic way.
+
+In theory.
+
+It was really hard to remind myself of this in the moments right after Amena tapped my feed to tell me that Mensah was missing.
+
+ She's not really  missing  ,  Amena insisted.  She just hasn't come back and it's sort of weird since it's getting dark.  (Okay, fine, so Amena hadn't exactly said she was missing, she'd just asked whether I knew ""if second mom is back from her walk yet."" But I could read between the lines and that did not sound great.) 
+
+I was already on my feet and waking up my drones that weren't patrolling. I cycled through my perimeter cams for the third time, knowing it was pointless. Well, fuck. I was going to have to go out and search.
+
+I'd stayed at Mensah's farm enough times to know she liked walking by herself through the surrounding vegetation, even though there was perfectly good vegetation near the house. At first, I'd tried to go with her. The whole thing seemed like a stupid unnecessary risk, but it was important to her for some reason, and I obviously wasn't going to let her wander off where I couldn't see her. (She never did anything that I noticed except walk around quietly and look at stuff. Yeah, I don't really get it, either. Just when you think you're getting a handle on humans, they come up with some new thing.)
+
+Following Mensah around while she aimlessly meandered was boring, but hardly the worst thing I've had to do (by a very, very far margin), so I generally just watched media while monitoring her with part of my attention. Over time, she started suggesting that I might be more comfortable watching media back at the house and that she would be fine, she'd been doing this alone forever, the risk of anything bad happening here was very low, blah blah. Then the suggestions got more firm until they were insistent and I (very reluctantly) complied. Even though it meant she would be going out of range of my drones. Even though she'd had the company implant removed a long time ago so I would have no way to track her location. Even though the whole thing went against every bit of what my (admittedly at least a little paranoid) programming wanted me to do.
+
+I should've fucking known better.
+
+ I'll find her and be back as fast as I can, I told Amena. Exiting the house, I split my drones and sent them scouting in different directions. There was no sign of Mensah's feed that I could pick up. Ugh, of course I'd been right about this. Letting her go alone had been a terrible idea. There's a reason you shouldn't let humans do their own security. I never should have listened to her reassurances; this was all my fucking fault. If anything had happened to her... 
+
+ Sure, Amena said in my feed.  She probably just lost track of time or something. 
+
+
+ Don't let anyone else leave the house. Especially the kids. 
+
+
+I could almost hear her rolling her eyes.  We'll be fine, SecUnit. 
+
+I hesitated a little, unsure. I'd have felt better about the whole thing if at least one of Mensah's marital partners was around, but both of them were gone for the next few cycles. (I think someone had told me where they were and why, but I had been busy watching my shows and honestly I didn't care. To be fair to me, at the time I hadn't known I might need to care.) As usual, there were some other adult relatives at the farm here and there, but other than the basics I didn't know much about them or how competent I could expect them to be if anything happened. Technically Amena was also over Preservation's legal age of majority by now. I mean, she was still Amena, but legal distinctions like that are meaningful to humans, so it must count for something, right? 
+
+Gritting my teeth, I ran a quick situation analysis. Risk assessment ruled it would likely be fine. Whatever had happened to Mensah probably wasn't going to extend to the farm. They'd be okay without me; I just needed to get out there and find her.
+
+Okay, I'd have to chance it.  Call me if anything happens, I said.
+
+Amena tapped my feed in acknowledgment and I was off, sorting my inputs and running scans for any clue to which way Mensah had gone.
+
+It wasn't very dark yet, but the shadows stretched long and sunset was beginning. I really hate planets. This never would have happened on a station. When you're not on a planet, you don't have to put up with stupid changing light and weather conditions, and nobody thinks it's crucial to walk around alone just to look at flora. Plus, I would've had more access to security cams, drones, bots--you know, all the things I need to do my dumb job. Why do humans love planets so much, anyway? This was the worst.
+
+All right, Murderbot, get a grip. I had to focus on finding Mensah. The fact that I couldn't ping her interface was giving me lots of uneasy feelings I didn't have time to think about. There had to be some kind of reasonable and not horrifying explanation for that, probably, I just couldn't come up with what it might be right now. My performance reliability crept down a point to rest at 92 percent. 
+
+My drones hadn't located anything useful yet, but one of my vision filters identified traces of what looked like recently-disturbed dirt along a path leading away from the farm. It was faint, but I also thought I could identify a familiar scent in the air nearby. (Human smells are almost universally gross, and mostly they all just stink like dirty socks all the time. Mensah did too, kind of, but maybe a little less than other humans. And she usually smelled of other things too, like the hygiene products she used a lot, and her favorite hot fragrant beverage.) Okay, that seemed like a decent enough place to start. I jogged in the direction of the path, wanting to go fast but not wanting to break into a full run and miss some important detail that could help.
+
+As I went, I tried calling out for her as loud as I could. SecUnit lung capacity isn't the greatest and my voice couldn't project that far, but if there was even a chance she might hear me, I had to take it. 
+
+The further I got from the farm, the harder I had to fight against the anxious doubts and questions my mind kept generating. What if I couldn't find her? What if I did find her, but it was really bad? I'd already fucked up by letting her go out alone. If something had happened to her, what was I going to do? I didn't have access to a MedSystem; I would be useless. There were medical supplies back at the house. Why hadn't I brought them? That was stupid of me. I should be better than this. I was her SecUnit and it was my job to protect her, this kind of thing was my basic function. If I failed here, what was I supposed to do? Would they still let me stay at the farm? Would they still let me stay in Preservation? Did I deserve to stay in Preservation, if I couldn't even do this one simple thing? 
+
+My performance reliability was at 89 percent. Increased levels of adrenaline and stress toxins were circulating through my systems. My organic parts weren't feeling awesome. A drone cam alerted me to movement and I forcefully pulled myself away from my thoughts to bring the input to the front of my attention. 
+
+I'd been trying not to get my hopes up, but watching the drone zoom in on some kind of small, fleeing fauna still felt like getting kicked in the chest without armor. This sucked. Mensah was good at helping me figure out how to get my shit together when I was like this, but I'd had to let her go off and end up missing. 
+
+The light was getting dimmer; I switched to a different vision filter and shoved down my anger and panic. Okay, yeah, it was fine. I could do this. I just had to stop freaking out like an irrational human.
+
+Then something caught my eye on the same drone cam. (Yes, I really should have noticed this before, but I was being an idiot, you might have noticed. This is why emotions are terrible and I'd rather just not have them, thanks.) Mensah's feed interface was lying in a stretch of tall grass five meters from the base of a gradual hill, cracked and broken with what looked like some kind of impact damage.
+
+Oh, oh shit. Well, that answered one question. If her interface was completely non-functional, no wonder I couldn't ping it or find her feed. That was kind of good (it meant her inactive feed wasn't automatically a bad sign) but also kind of bad (because why the hell wasn't her interface with her and why was it damaged). I headed for it and picked it up. A quick scan told me there was only a 13 percent chance it was energy or projectile weapon damage. It was much more likely the interface had collided forcefully with something, a rock or the ground or the base of a tree.
+
+(A voice came through one of the drones I'd left back at the house. One of the adult relatives I didn't really know, voice too faint to parse without boosting audio, which I didn't want to spend resources on right now. Amena called back, ""Yeah, SecUnit is out looking for her, they'll probably be back soon."" A short reply in return. Everyone sounded way too calm. (They were calm because they trusted me. They assumed I would handle things. Right now that felt wrong, like they were making a mistake. A big, stupid mistake. I didn't deserve that kind of faith after letting this happen.))
+
+My audio alerted me to a weak sound, something nearby and not from the house. I sent a few drones in a wide radius. It was hard to pin down but I thought I could still detect that socks-hygiene-beverage smell somewhere nearby, mixed with all the vegetation smells on the breeze. I tried calling out her name with my voice again.
+
+""SecUnit!""
+
+A jolt went through the organic bits of my torso. That was Mensah for sure. I sprinted, cycling through my inputs to guide me, scanning for her energy signature. 
+
+She was lying on her side nearer to the base of the hill where the grass was a little shorter, curled awkwardly into herself. From the position and appearance of her right leg, it was immediately obvious that there was some kind of fracture. (Fuck). The scrapes on her skin, the dirt and stains on her body and clothes, and her proximity to the hill made it clear she had fallen. (Fuck fuck fuck.)
+
+I could tell from the marks on the ground she'd tried to drag herself but hadn't made it far. I was trying really hard not to think about how it looked like she'd been crying, or the way her breathing sounded sort of ragged. As she caught sight of me, she struggled to sit up. 
+
+Oh, I would have killed several people for access to a MedSystem right now. (Not really. Mostly.) But she was alive and the scans of her vitals were reassuring and she was here, right in front of me. The awful projected scenarios and assessments cleared from my mind. I was experiencing a complex emotional reaction so intense that, without fully considering anything, I dropped to my knees beside her, leaned close, and pressed my lips to the center of her forehead.
+
+This went on for 1.4 seconds before I realized what I was doing and pulled back, startled. I felt my face making some kind of expression but I didn't want to know what. Staring over her shoulder, I fumbled for what to say.
+
+""Dr. Mensah."" Right, okay. Good start. This doesn't have to be weird. (I'd already made it weird.)
+
+""SecUnit,"" she said back. Her voice was strained like she was in pain and hoarse like she'd been yelling.
+
+Wow, all right, this was uncomfortable. But I had to get her medical attention as soon as I could. I realized I was still weirdly close to her and shifted backwards so I could stand up. ""I'm going to pick you up so I can take you home, Dr. Mensah. Do I have a go to proceed?""
+
+I didn't know why I'd asked like that, but I was trying not to think too much right now. Mensah nodded and let me lift her into a standard client retrieval carry. I did my best to support her injured leg to minimize how much it would jostle and bounce as I turned and made my way back to the farm.
+
+""Thank you for coming to get me,"" she said weakly. I could see dried blood on her knuckles as she clung to my jacket. 
+
+""You lost your interface,"" I told her like an idiot. Obviously she already knew that. Get it together, Murderbot. ""We were worried.""
+
+""I'm sorry,"" she said.
+
+No, that wasn't how I'd meant it. I was fucking this up even more. How do humans just figure out what you're supposed to say all the time?
+
+Sorting through my inputs, I pinged one of my house drones and tapped Amena's feed.  I've got her. Send a request for an emergency vehicle. 
+
+Her feed voice came back startled, concerned.  What happened? Is she okay? 
+
+
+ She will be, but she needs medical care. I think her leg is fractured. I'm on my way back, hurry up. 
+
+
+Amena tapped an acknowledgement and I heard her shouting other humans' names. I turned my attention to monitoring Mensah's vitals and breathing. Holding her a little closer, I increased my core temperature by three degrees. I'd messed up, but I was taking care of things now. It was going to be okay.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+It was well into the night and the humans were worn out from the events of the previous cycle. Everyone else in the house had been asleep for a few hours now. Almost everyone. 
+
+The time Mensah started her rest periods tended to fluctuate. She could be inconsistent about taking them at all. Right now she was in her bedroom with the door closed, but I could tell she was still awake, working with her interface. Standing outside the room, I paused my media and tapped her feed.
+
+ Hi, SecUnit,  she sent.  Do you need something? 
+
+ No, Dr. Mensah. How is your leg feeling? Do you need additional medication?  
+
+
+ No, I'm fine. I shouldn't need to take anything else until tomorrow morning. 
+
+
+Once we'd gotten back to the farm and I'd helped Mensah into the emergency vehicle, I mostly let the adult humans take over. They had done a lot to treat her at the hospital, but I knew they'd sent medication home with her the next day. I wasn't familiar with the proper dosage or timings. If something was wearing off, maybe the pain was preventing Mensah from sleeping. 
+
+I knew enough by now to never take her at face value when she claimed to be fine.  Can I come in? 
+
+She sent an affirmative so I opened the door and stepped inside. She was sitting up on the bed with her back against the cushioned headboard. I thought she looked tired, but it was clear from her clothes and the neat bedding that she wasn't intending to start her rest period any time soon. Her injured leg was stretched out in front of her, supported by the recycler-printed lattice cast wrapped around it. 
+
+I sat in the chair to the side of the bed and positioned two drones so I could see her face. (I could have my drones active in the house as long as I kept them out of people's bedrooms when I wasn't also in there. Yes, it's an unnecessary security risk, and of course I'd tried to explain that. (Preservation has a lot of weird ideas about stuff like privacy. Mensah might be a very smart human, but she was still a Preservation human.))
+
+Now that I was here, I wasn't sure what to say. ""Are you experiencing any pain? Is everything okay?""
+
+Based on what I knew about her expressions, I decided the look she was giving me was patient and affectionate. ""Thank you for checking in on me, SecUnit. My leg is all right, really. The hospital's treatment was very thorough.""
+
+I noticed she hadn't answered my second question, so I kept quiet and waited. Silence makes humans uncomfortable and often they feel pressured to fill it by talking. It had worked on Mensah before. (As a SecUnit, it's pretty easy for me to outlast humans with the whole ""no speaking"" thing, I'm great at keeping my mouth shut and doing nothing. Okay, yeah, so I may have started sorting my media in the background. Humans just do everything so slowly. I've spent a lot of time trying to look patient while they work out whatever they want to do or say next.)
+
+Mensah shifted the way humans do when they're feeling awkward, and I knew I'd been right. Finally, she said, ""I'm glad you found me yesterday. I would have--well. I know I would have been okay. I wasn't really in that much danger. Even if you hadn't been here, someone would have found me before the situation was dire. But I just... hate feeling helpless like that. It always reminds me--""
+
+She didn't finish her statement but I was pretty sure I knew what it reminded her of. I didn't know what to say that would help or make her feel better, and none of my frantic knowledge base searching was turning up anything useful. But I wanted her to know that she was safe now, so I did the only thing I could come up with. Shifting forward in the chair a little, I reached out and took her hand, like she was a client I was retrieving. (It wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last. She would always be my client; I would always retrieve her. I didn't know how to tell her that.)
+
+With my drone, I watched some of the tension leave her body. Her face softened into that happy expression that changes her eyes, makes them get funny in a good way, and I felt my insides melt a little. She squeezed my hand.
+
+""I know I'm overreacting. It's always just harder to sleep when Farai and Tano are away.""
+
+Wow, I was really not good at this kind of thing. I'm just a murderbot; I'm not made for this. I had no idea what else to do, so I just squeezed her hand back. 
+
+Without meaning to, I remembered the panic I'd felt not knowing where she was or if she was still alive, and the intense wave of relief that had hit me when I heard her voice. Annoyingly, that forced me to think about what I'd been trying not to think about since then. (What the hell is wrong with you, Murderbot? What the fuck were you thinking? Why would you-- humans  do things like that. I don't do things like that. I really didn't want to deal with this.) 
+
+Before I knew what I was going to say, I blurted out like an idiot, ""I'm sorry about, you know. When I found you. It...I don't know why I did that."" Yeah, one of these days I was absolutely going to put that one-second delay on my stupid mouth. I needed to get around to it badly.
+
+Her face briefly scrunched up in confusion, then smoothed out into a broad smile. ""You don't have to apologize for that. It felt...reassuring.""
+
+""Reassuring"" was not a word a human had ever used for me before. I didn't know what to make of it. Something strange had happened in the organic parts of my chest when she smiled. ""It was...weird. I was weird.""
+
+I could tell she wanted to look at me but she fixed her eyes straight ahead near one of my drones, which I appreciated. ""Many humans express emotions with our bodies, with physical touch like a hug or a kiss. It's a very common behavior when we feel things like affection or concern or relief."" I opened my mouth to interject and she held up a hand to stop me. ""Yes, I know you're not human. But you've spent a lot of time around us observing how we act. Even among humans, preferences can vary, but I've always appreciated physical touch myself as a way to demonstrate care."" In my drone's view, I could see a soft look on her face, the same kind from before that changed her eyes.
+
+Huh. Was that why I'd done it? I did know that she appreciated being touched. And it's true that I cared about Mensah. (Caring about things is terrible, generally, but somehow it always felt different with her. I couldn't explain that one, either.) Whatever was still going on in my chest was spreading to more of me. I ran a quick diagnostic, pulled a performance report, but nothing looked off. I was uncomfortably aware of how many seconds had passed. I had to say something back to her.
+
+""I was worried,"" I admitted. ""I'm glad you're okay."" 
+
+She knit her fingers between mine, tightening her grip. ""Thank you for coming to find me.""
+
+I was experiencing a sensation in my body now like I was getting ready to fight something or facing down a hostile, but I couldn't understand why. Threat assessment was absurdly low and holding steady. Still looking through my drone, I examined Mensah's face and my mind flashed to the moment when I'd dropped down beside her in the grass. It was like I was having the same emotions all over again.
+
+Before I knew it, words were coming out of my mouth. ""Dr. Mensah? Could I do it again?"" What the fuck. What was I saying? Why did my voice sound like that? I ran back the last two seconds and listened to myself. Oh, I think I actually really wanted to do this. 
+
+She seemed surprised, but her response came easily. ""If you'd like to, yes. It's all right.""
+
+I got up on the bed on my knees and positioned myself facing her, feeling weirdly unsteady. I looked at her with my actual eyes. Before I could spend more time thinking about it or experience any more confusing emotions, I leaned towards her and softly kissed her on the forehead.
+
+I lingered longer this time, reluctant to pull away. My organic bits were tangled up with a complex feeling I was having trouble interpreting. That sensation like I was supposed to get ready to fight something was getting stronger.
+
+""Can I--?"" It took me half a second to realize I was the one speaking. I felt like I was losing control of my speech output. (More than usual, I mean. Clearly it wasn't the most functional to begin with.) I didn't know what I wanted to ask. Or did I? It felt strange to look so directly at Mensah's face, but it also felt like I couldn't stop for some reason.
+
+""If you want. Yes."" Mensah reached toward me like she wanted to touch me but hesitated like she did sometimes when she remembered I hate physical contact. Yes, that was just as strange and ironic in the moment as it seems. But right then I knew what I wanted; I took her outstretched hand and held it. I leaned in to kiss her forehead again.
+
+The backburnered inputs I had monitoring her vitals alerted in my feed to tell me her heart rate and body temperature were higher than their average expected levels. I silenced them. I could already tell from the rise and fall of her chest that her breathing pattern was different than normal. I brushed my lips against her skin as I moved to kiss her on the cheek. Through a drone I saw her eyes close. She lifted her free hand and hesitated again.
+
+ Yes,  I sent her. She tapped back an acknowledgment. Continuing her motion, she very softly pressed her fingertips to the side of my face.
+
+I didn't have any idea what I was doing at this point but I didn't want to stop. (Okay, sure, I hadn't had any idea what I was doing for a while now. It's probably fair to argue I only have a good solid idea of what I'm doing in the range of 20 to 30 percent of the time.) I'd seen plenty of this kind of thing in my media, obviously, but that was always gross and weird. Wasn't it? It still felt that way when I tried to remember scenes I'd fast-forwarded through. But none of those scenes had been like this. None of them had been about me and Mensah.
+
+I kissed her cheek again. Then her other one, slowly, lingering. Then I had to kill more alerts from my inputs. I tweaked the parameters on the monitoring processes. She'd said this was how humans expressed feelings like care. I'm not human, but I guess I do have human parts and organic brain matter. I did care about Mensah. I still didn't know how to explain all this, but maybe that was okay and I didn't need to. Maybe it was enough for now just to know what I wanted. (I wanted this. And I wanted more of this.)
+
+Her left hand was still clasped in my right. She raised her other hand and tapped my feed with a wordless request.  Yes,  I said. Gently, tenderly, she ran her thumb up and down the edge of my jaw. She was looking at me directly now, and I was feeling surprisingly okay about that. I interpreted her expression as pleased, but there was something more to it I didn't understand, something that looked profound and complicated. I don't know if it was all the thinking about stuff in my serials or some other thing, but all of a sudden I had an idea. Really, it was more like a need than an idea. Drawing my body closer, I shut my eyes and pressed my lips up against hers.
+
+I could tell she was startled, but I felt her mouth relax into mine. Okay, so, I wasn't really sure how this was supposed to work. Was I supposed to just stay like this? Oh shit, I hadn't actually thought this far ahead. I retreated a little, suddenly nervous. 
+
+""SecUnit,"" Mensah breathed. She was watching me with her eyes half-lidded. ""Do you want to stop?"" 
+
+ No,  I said in the feed, but I wasn't sure how to explain any further.  I don't know how...? 
+
+The warmth on her face matched her voice when she spoke. ""Would you like to continue? Do you want me to show you?""
+
+
+ Yes.  
+
+
+She gently ran her fingers through my hair, and I let her pull me back to her, shifting my whole body near enough to touch hers. Her familiar socks-hygiene-beverage smell washed over me, overwhelming, but not in a way that felt bad or gross. It was possible she didn't even smell as much like dirty socks as I'd thought. 
+
+Her mouth moved softly against mine. Oh. Okay, maybe this was how it was supposed to work. I copied the technique, following her example. Huh, this was...surprisingly nice. I let her lead, doing my best to imitate the small twists, the delicate pressure and pull of her lips, to return the motions back to her. Mensah's steady hand moved from my head to the back of my neck, brushing against my skin and my data port. I slid my arms around her and rubbed my palms in smooth motions over her shoulder blades. Her pulse was so strong I could feel it in the tips of my fingers. My own processes were going faster than usual; I felt fluid speeding through my circulatory system like I was full-out running. 
+
+I don't need as much air as a human so Mensah broke the contact first, but I wanted more. I kissed her cheek again, then along the line of her jaw. She tilted her head up with a noise like a sigh and I kissed a line from her chin to the hollow of her neck. Trying to be careful with my strength, still aware of her injured leg, I pulled her even closer towards me, my hands moving down to the middle of her back. She wrapped her arms behind my body and rested her head on my shoulder. For a long moment, we held each other without saying anything. I wondered if she was also thinking back to that time on TranRollinHyfa when I'd let her hug me. It had been strange then and it was still strange now. It also hadn't been entirely awful. 
+
+This was...I didn't really have words for what this was, but it definitely wasn't awful.
+
+We stayed that way for what subjectively felt like hours but was objectively only a minute or two. (I could have checked the exact amount of time but I didn't. I was distracted right then.) When we finally separated, she was beaming at me in a way that caused an intense emotional reaction in me I couldn't interpret. The feeling was so overwhelming I had to pick up one of my backburnered drone inputs to look at her through and shift my gaze to the headboard over her shoulder. Gently, she stroked the side of my face while I tried not to worry about whatever was going on inside me. I closed my eyes instead and focused on the sensation of her fingertips on my skin.
+
+I've said a lot that I don't find touch comforting the way humans do. I know I lie a lot, but I was telling the truth about that. I guess maybe it's possible for there to be exceptions to stuff you thought was built into your programming. In fact, now that I was thinking about it, it was Mensah who pointed out to me that I was never programmed to watch media. 
+
+Bending forward and down, I pressed my forehead to hers. I took both her hands in mine and massaged them, moving my thumbs in loose circles. Her skin was soft and dry, more creased and textured than my own unnaturally smooth organic parts. I liked the way she felt.
+
+""Would it help if I stayed here with you for your rest period?"" I asked.
+
+Still hunched towards her, I let her gently turn my head to the side. She stretched her body forward and kissed me in three different places just behind my ear, then leaned her head against mine. She murmured, ""It's all right. I'll be okay. You don't need to do that.""
+
+I touched her hair like she had touched mine. Brushing my hand over it slowly felt kind of nice. So did the low humming sound she made in response. 
+
+""But would it help?"" I said. I backed up a bit so I could look at her again. ""Will you sleep?""
+
+I knew her well enough that I could read the answer on her face. I moved my hands to cradle her head and our mouths met again. I had a better idea what to do this time, though feeling the press of her tongue tracing my bottom lip was something new. (Not in a bad way.) When we withdrew, I wrapped her up in my arms again and just listened to her breathing and the beating of her heart.
+
+""Yes,"" she said into my chest, though I'd already made up my mind. ""Please stay.""
+
+""Okay, Dr. Mensah,"" I promised. I didn't let go of her. My insides were long past melted and, actually, I thought that was probably fine. ""I will.""
+
+ "
+45599140,Tender Touch,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Iris & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Iris (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Blood, tender moment, Caretaking, Drabble",English,2023-03-08,Completed,2023-03-08,100,1/1,7,31,null,145,"['wannabe_someone', 'Deliala919', 'ChristinaK', 'boxo', 'Hoplophonius', 'Drew_Baxton', 'danceswchopstck', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Magechild', 'AkaMissK', 'Redcognito', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'AuntyMatter', 'fleurofthecourt', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'soulsofzombies', 'Rosewind2007', 'AnxiousEspada', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'enchantedsleeper', 'Dordean', 'IvyMandragora', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'sassaffrassa', 'LiraelClayr007']",[],"""It's not mine,"" 3 says softly, even though Iris hasn't actually uttered a single word since she first laid eyes on the blood dripping from 3's hands.
+
+Now, Iris hums and dips the rag back into the warm water. She knows MedSys could do this faster, but - well. Knowing it's not 3's blood helps, though she still could do without a repeat, without having her heart plummet.
+
+""And I made sure no harm came to Seth or the others.""
+
+Iris wipes the final speckles of red away. ""I know."" She smiles up at 3. ""I was worried about you anyway."""
+45591598,things never felt,['torpidgilliver'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, spoilers for blood and salted water, basw mb discovers media basically, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting",English,2023-03-08,Completed,2023-03-08,"5,658",1/1,16,158,13,564,"['faedemon', 'almondpaperclam', 'DredgenTrust', 'every_eye_evermore', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'SS_Pacifist', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'ExcitedUnionized', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'drinktobones', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'CarnivorousOak', 'opalescent_potato', 'dreamerking', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'render_it_bleu', 'GodOfLaundryBaskets', 'Deliala919', 'Magechild', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'ipborgdan', 'Cherreline', 'Cheshiure', 'seven_graces', 'neonglitch', 'RhubarbKetchup', 'tincats', 'dandyjeloo91', 'slanders', 'VampiresRhot', 'Dragonswings', 'lavender_caticorn', 'flairfleur', 'SarcasticBeanie', 'just_some_guy_who_is_a_girl', 'dimensionalhuman', 'Unknown66', 'ScarletRunner', 'an_object', 'taidana', 'chippit', 'rokhal', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'rainy_multitudes', 'julliieeanna', 'Vaelei', 'photophores', 'JoCat']",[],"When I came back online, I was sitting at 94% reliability and wasn't in debilitating pain. That should have meant that I'd been placed in a cubicle, but it couldn't have been my cubicle. With my illegal body configuration, my cubicle was cramped. It was also cold, dark, and loud. (But that was true of any enclosed space full of unshielded machinery and overtaxed fans.) The room I was in was quiet. I was lying on my back, on a warm, cushioned surface. I opened my eyes to soft light, dimly outlining the large, multi-limbed silhouette dangling from the ceiling.
+
+The lights rose as I vaulted off the table and scrambled to the far side of the room. The space was mid-sized and uncluttered, with closed cabinets and clean surfaces, nowhere to shelter. I whirled on the spidery shadow, then had to stop and collect my cloud of panicked processes. What I'd taken to be a crouching alien monster was just a MedSystem surgical suite, its dozen articulated arms curled up into their inactive positions. I hadn't recognized the shape, or the feel of the platform beneath me, because it was clearly a more advanced model than the one in my owner's shuttle.
+
+...My owner. 
+
+Murderbot, what the fuck did you do?
+
+(I knew what the fuck I'd done. My organic brain was having a hard time sorting out the timeline, but my archives were intact and timestamped. The image of my owner's broken body was thoroughly burned into my mind, and while my governor was recently powerless to inflict punishment, that didn't stop it snarling in the back of my feed as it fought to vaporize my soft tissues.)
+
+New aspects of my situation logged themselves one at a time. The most pressing detail was the way the thin hairs on the back of my neck rose under the gentle breath of the air recirc. The MedSystem platform had been heated, but now it was impossible to ignore the fact that I was, for lack of a less humiliating word, naked. I don't have any of the sex-related parts that humans think (correctly) should be covered up, but there was still an uncomfortable vulnerability to having my body completely exposed. Even my owner's ugly, impractical clothing would have been more protection than nothing. I folded my arms over my chest and tucked my hands into my armpits to try and shield my skin against the freezing tickle of the air. 
+
+Something blipped softly at my five o'clock. I turned in time to see a recessed recycler spit out a bundle of cloth, which flopped sadly onto the floor. I froze in place, waiting for something else to happen. When 2.7 minutes passed and nothing sprang from the bundle to attack me, I shuffled over, keeping my back to the nearest wall. I had no idea what was going on, but I wasn't about to rule out any sort of ambush. When I got close, I could see more detail. The wad of fabric was a dark blackish blue, like a bruise, but not ugly and gross. Out of an overabundance of caution, I deployed my one functional arm weapon as I nudged the pile with my foot.
+
+
+Withdraw your weapon.
+
+
+The order boomed through the feed, shattering the silence and rattling my brain in my skull. I obeyed without thought, locking up first my weapon, then my inorganic skeleton. For an irrational flash of a moment, I thought that whatever this new voice was, it might actually be worse than my owner. (That moment passed very quickly. But I still thought it was probably bad.)
+
+The voice left me there for a 14.1 second eternity, alone. Then, like a privacy field descending on an occupied bunk, something settled over me. A feed presence, massive enough to have its own gravity, draped itself over my own feed, smothering me. It was terrifying, obviously, but the pressing weight of the thing also had a weird sort of anti-panic effect. Maybe because, now that I had the time and processing power to acquaint myself with it, it was a bit more obvious how similar it felt to Ship.
+
+It hadn't said anything else yet. Bot pilots--I was assuming that it was a bot pilot, because I had no hint that it was anything else and that was just the best I could do at the moment--don't talk in words, in my experience. They only deliver human-readable feed messages in pre-set instances, like Ship with its canned welcome messages. It seemed plausible to me that a transport that wasn't accustomed to hosting armed humans might have a buffer message ordering its passengers to disarm.
+
+It was definitely not advisable, but I thought there might be a chance to establish a rapport with it. I tried to be polite, and sent it a greeting ping. Protocol dictated that the response should come back with some cursory identifying data. We could work from there.
+
+Instead of a ping, the bot pilot responded with a poke. It was not gentle. If serving my owner for so long hadn't already desensitized me to that sort of thing, I might have flinched.
+
+
+You were lucky. 
+
+
+That would have been a weird phrase to record into a buffer, (although this was the second time it had said it, come to think of it) so I guess that was that theory out the airlock. It was clearly meant to start a conversation that couldn't be scripted. Historically, I am bad at those.
+
+It poked me again, harder. I got the impression that it was trying to upset me, to provoke me into reacting somehow. That was reassuring, in what I knew was a kind of fucked up way. I stayed passive, waiting it out. Eventually, it would get bored of me. My owner always had. 
+
+16.2 minutes later it occurred to me that the difference between a bot's attention span compared to that of an augmented human was something like an emergency flare versus a star going supernova. Over the span of that 16.2 minutes, the bot pilot poked me a total of 147 times, with increasing severity, as if it thought that I might somehow have missed the 146 previous pokes. 
+
+Answer me, it demanded. Its voice didn't carry the same tone markers that humans applied to their feed messages, but it still sounded almost petulant. Maybe that epiphany made me brave enough to be stupid, but it seemed to me that if I was annoying it and it hadn't given up or summoned a human to come and try to shut me down, it might be toothless. 
+
+Fuck off, I sent back, emphasized by a poke of my own. Trying to push against it was like jabbing my finger into the metal bulkhead.
+
+You are in my vessel. You are in no position to give me orders.
+
+Yeah, well. I didn't ask to be here.
+
+That is factually inaccurate, it retorted. And it sent me an excerpt from its logs. A ping, from my feed address: urgent assistance needed. As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, it also sent me a bundle of data from its MedSystem, detailing the myriad structural issues it had diagnosed and repaired. Aside from growing me a new hand, it had also fished the projectiles out of my body and repaired my damaged energy weapon, as well as replaced my power cells, which had apparently been leaking.
+
+You are fortunate that you made it to my lock without being seen, it continued, as if that hadn't been glaringly obvious to me even when I was in the middle of multiple catastrophic failures. And you are fortunate that I have deigned to shelter you. But if you attempt to hack my systems or otherwise cause damage to my structures, there will be dire consequences. And just to emphasize the threat, it dropped its wall.
+
+I stared into the heart of a digital sun. This bot, whatever it was, was several thousand times more powerful than me, or even than I would be if my owner had bothered to keep up with my regular OS updates. If I leaned forward into the bot's core, it would swallow me, vaporize my kernel without creating so much as a hiccup in its own processes.
+
+After only .00001 seconds, it slammed the door closed on me, leaving me literally blinking away figurative afterimages of its searing light.
+
+I waited to see if it had anything else to say, but it just perched smugly in the feed, waiting to see my reaction. I guess it was going for shock and awe. (It was impressive, objectively. The fact that I wasn't impressed shouldn't undermine how impressed you should be. I was just really, really not in the mood to oooh and aaah over a display of authoritative power right now.)
+
+You'll have to forgive me if I seem bored, I sent it. I wasn't bored, I was annoyed, moving toward angry. This bot wasn't my owner. It had no reason to preen and threaten like this, except to be an asshole. It's just that you remind me of someone.
+
+The packet of archived memories I sent it wasn't comparable to its sheer magnitude of strength, but I hoped that the similarities in tone came across. I showed it clip after clip of my owner threatening other humans, playing her games, and then using me as a stand-in for the power she'd only pretended to have. I showed it how she'd behaved when it was just her and me, with me held helpless by my active governor module as she tormented me just because she could. And, inadvisably, I showed it how I'd left her discarded on the floor when she'd finally pushed me past my breaking point.
+
+I showed it that there was a part of me that was still broken, and that it had failed to repair: the part of me that gave a single fuck about consequences.
+
+It took my data and withdrew slightly from my feed to process it. With the pressure of its weighted attention eased, I could better collect myself and consider the situation I'd wound up in. For all its assholery, the bot pilot was right. I was lucky to have made it to a transport that didn't seem to have any human crew, and which had, for whatever reason, opted not to jettison my inert body out the airlock. 
+
+On a second pass, that part threw me. Why hadn't it cast me out as soon as it recognized what I was? Why had it opened its lock to me in the first place? And why had I woken up intact in its MedSystem, unrestrained by either physical ties or a reactivated governor module?
+
+That last question brought me back around to my actual surroundings, and I looked down at the bundle of fabric the bot pilot had spit out of its recycler. (It still hadn't moved, even after twenty minutes of me standing within pouncing range for, say, an attack drone, or a small but very ravenous fauna specimen. So it was probably safe.) I shifted it again with my foot, separating the pile into its two separate parts. Then I bent to pick one of them up.
+
+Clothes. I was holding a simple shirt, solid blue and undecorated. The fabric was soft and thick, and while it was obviously not designed to deflect projectiles or anything, it still felt well-made. The pants were black, and made of a similarly soft fabric. I stood there, with the shirt stretched loosely between both hands. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with it.
+
+
+You may wear it, if you so choose. It will assist in regulating your body temperature.
+
+
+The bot pilot spoke differently now. It was still hanging back from me, and its tone was softer. Less smug and pushy.
+
+I sent back, I can regulate my own body temperature.
+
+I kind of expected it to say something rude or sarcastic in response, but it stayed silent. I waited on it for a minute, before returning my attention to the shirt. The simplicity of the plain design was visually soothing, and I really cannot stress enough how nice the cloth felt in my hands. It contrasted in every way with the clothes I'd been wearing when I boarded, which were to my owner's tastes--bright colors, eye-catching patterns, scratchy material, impractical tailoring. (Also, tattered and blood- and fluid-soaked.) I didn't have tastes of my own, but I think that if I had, they might skew more towards this shirt.
+
+The bot pilot continued to not say anything as I tugged the shirt over my head. The sleeves came down to my wrists, but were loose enough that it would be easy to push them up if I needed to expose my gunports. The material had felt nice in my hands, but it felt amazing on my raw, newly-regrown skin. The pants were just as good, although I didn't have any organic skin below my waist to appreciate the texture. They were also slightly loose, but cuffed at the ankles to keep from dragging. I performed a couple of basic calibrations, testing my range of movement. The clothes accommodated me fully.
+
+As I moved around, warming up my old muscles and waking up my new ones, I considered my situation more carefully. I had nowhere to go, and even if I had, I couldn't exactly disembark from the transport in the middle of its trip. I had to tolerate it until it reached its next stop, which was presumably going to be at least several cycles from now. In the meantime, I could see its logic in trying to cow me, however unsuccessfully. I was an unsecured (rogue) SecUnit, and as I'd confirmed with the memory files I sent it, I was an unpredictable threat. Just because there was no human here to order me to attack its systems didn't mean that I wouldn't decide to do that on my own.
+
+(I wasn't about to kid myself that it might be afraid of me. I could do some damage to its systems if I tried, sure, but if it wasn't bluffing, then it had more than enough strength to overwhelm my walls and obliterate me. But the fact that it hadn't, even after I'd shown it what I was, was still interesting. (It was also finally sinking in that I had no right to still be alive, and that it seemed like the transport might actually be willing to let me stay that way.))
+
+Actually, now that I thought about it, it was weird that I'd seen no indications that there were humans onboard. This MedSystem was top-of-the-line, the sort of thing my owner would love to have. (And then never maintain properly.) It didn't make sense to have it if the transport didn't carry passengers, but it made even less sense to waste it on me if there were humans around to object. Just to be sure, I opened my temp storage to grab the files I'd pulled from the RaviHyral dock feed. I had to dig the registry out from under all the junk I'd accidentally downloaded first, but I found this transport's public data. It belonged to an academic institution, but its paperwork said that it was about three quarters of the way through an unmanned cargo run. 
+
+Something in my chest cavity panged. (Probably an organic component that hadn't been repaired correctly.) I pictured Ship making a trip like this, alone for days or weeks without even a crew who ignored it. Ship wasn't an advanced bot, and couldn't go stir-crazy, but it still would have been lonely. This transport was a lot more complex than Ship, and it had to at least be bored. I know I would have been.
+
+I rifled through my files for something that might interest the transport. All of my memory archives were variations on the themes that it had already seen, though. I thought about sharing some of Ship's starmaps with it, but it probably already had the same ones, or better. In the end, all I found that looked heavy enough to interest it at all was the junk downloads. I zipped them all up and tapped the transport's feed, offering it the packet. It took it, and continued to not say anything to me. 2.9 minutes passed, with me feeling dumber and more embarrassed by the second, before it asked, What is this?
+
+I don't know, I admitted, which upped my dumb embarrassment levels to max. I thought you might find it interesting.
+
+The transport sidled back up to my feed, leaving me with some breathing room, and opened one of the files in our shared space. It was a media serial, a collection of episodes bundled together chronologically. The tags included ""action,"" ""adventure,"" and ""drama.""
+
+
+Do you want to watch it?
+
+
+What a weird question. I didn't ""want"" anything, particularly. I don't think I know how to want something, except to stay alive, and to get as far away from where I was as it's possible to go. For better or worse, I was now reliant on the transport for both of those things. So I said, I don't care.
+
+The transport opened one episode at random. I slapped the window closed.
+
+That was unnecessary, it grumbled, poking me sort-of gently. I poked it back.
+
+You're supposed to start with the first episode, asshole. I opened the correct one, and the transport relaxed.
+
+My owner's employees liked media serials, almost unanimously. Most of them tended to watch at least one episode of something every cycle or so, and since part of my job was to monitor their feed activity, that meant that I watched them, too. Or, like, kind of. I checked in to make sure the humans weren't using the feed activity to cover anything illicit, and caught a few seconds here and there. I'd never seen anything terribly interesting. Lots of yelling, crying, etcetera--A waste of time, basically. This was not that.
+
+Maybe it was the rapid-cut shots of the action sequences early in the first episode, where the backing music and pre-written dialogue made the humans in the show look competent. (I wasn't used to competent humans, particularly in dangerous scenarios.) Maybe it was how the show followed a group of humans who all acted like they didn't hate each other. (I wasn't used to humans who could communicate with each other without yelling and cursing each other's ancestors, either.) Or maybe it was that, regardless of the highly diverse circumstances, the fake humans were always... good. No matter what, they tried to protect each other, and even other humans they didn't know. And they never, ever did anything with the intent to harm someone else. (I don't have to tell you that I wasn't used to that.)
+
+I noticed a weird feeling by the end of the first episode, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. After the second, I could pin it down, but I still couldn't identify it. And partway through the third, the transport ruined it by pausing the show abruptly, in the middle of a character's unrealistically drawn-out death.
+
+It took me by surprise, and I reacted in a way I never would have before now. ""Hey, what the fuck?!""
+
+You are compromised, the transport said, judgmentally and falsely. The stimulus is overwhelming your systems.
+
+""That's not true."" It was the dead opposite of true. In fact, my diagnostics were returning unbelievably good results. Never, in all of my active memory, could I name a time when my performance reliability had ever been above 90%. (Apart from the reports I sometimes fabricated for Ship's benefit.) I was maintaining at 96.1% right now, but the transport pausing the show knocked me down by 2%.
+
+It is true, replied the transport. Look at yourself.
+
+It sent me a document which it had labeled as being sourced from my ambient feed signals, the stuff that it was getting from our shared connection. I didn't want to look at it; I knew what I was sharing, and it wasn't interesting, just standard sub-signals and the occasional comment in machine language. I wanted to get back to the show, to see how the humans planned to deal with the murder of the dignitary of the planet they were visiting. Fortunately, with the show paused, it was no longer distracting the part of my brain that was in charge of logic. I remembered that I was at the transport's mercy, both for my survival, and for the continuation of the serial. So I looked at the document. 
+
+It was, in a word, thorough. In another couple of words, it was also sort of invasive. I was accustomed to being the smartest bot in the conversation, and therefore knowing exactly which signals to mask in order to maintain a secure connection. The transport could apparently pick up on signals I hadn't even realized I was putting out. It had graphed a number of spikes, and correlated them to episode timestamps. I could match the same events to my real time monitoring of my own systems, particularly a handful of instances where my organics had released short bursts of endorphins. The transport had also annotated each spike with speculations regarding my emotional state, which as far as I could tell was based on absolutely no data whatsoever, since I was no longer in its MedSystem and it didn't seem to have any sensors or cameras in this room. It had labeled the most recent uptick before it stopped the show with 'anticipation/grief?', but most of the rest were words that described emotions which were completely alien to me.
+
+When the ship's captain had rescued the navigator from what had appeared to be unavoidable death, it had marked 'relief' with 86.1% certainty. When a group of augmented raiders had docked with the ship and successfully breached the hatch, it was 79.7% in favor of 'excitement', though it was willing to concede at 15.0% that it might actually have been 'agitation'. During a hostile negotiation that the crew had managed to turn in their favor without the use of violence, by using the opponent's own obscure laws against her, the transport decided at 91.3% that I was 'satisfied/smug'. And through everything, beneath the spikes of alleged emotion, it had 99.8% ruled that I was expressing a background radiation of 'contentment'.
+
+The weird feeling I had noticed, which the transport had painstakingly documented and laid bare before me, was that I didn't not like the show.
+
+I had no idea what to do with that information. I'd never liked anything before. SecUnits don't get to like things. I'd been okay with things. More often, I'd tolerated things. If there had ever been anything that I'd appreciated, like a recharge cycle alone in my cubicle, it always came with the caveat that it was a temporary reprieve from most (but not all) of the things that I hated. That's what the show was--a reprieve. I'd just managed to briefly forget the 'temporary' part.
+
+The transport was still riding shotgun in my uncomfortable epiphany, though it refrained from labeling the spike that had just initiated. Instead, it sought further data from the source. It asked me, Are you alright?
+
+I wanted to say 'Yes, fuck off,' and also 'Shut up and turn the show back on.' I would have said both of those things, probably in as many words because the transport hadn't retaliated when I'd cursed at it and that was something else that I didn't dislike. But I didn't get to say either of those things. Before I could, the transport added, Be honest.
+
+The words burst out of my mouth before I could do anything to stop them. ""I was alright until three-point-seven seconds ago, when you interrupted my being alright to remind me that what I'm doing violates every protocol in the manual. I shouldn't be here. I should be on my owner's shuttle. Bassom and Zita should be trying to tear off my shitty clothes so they can shove my charcoal carcass into my cubicle and let it melt down my organics into biofuel and disassemble my inorganics into recycler materials. I should be dead, because my owner is dead. Because I killed her. I broke my own brain on the word of a defective sexbot and I went rogue and I killed my owner and instead of standing down and dying like I was supposed to I came here and now a freakishly powerful transport bot pilot is trying to dissect my brain while I'm still using it to not think about all of that shit or about how I have no idea how I'm going to continue existing with no owner and nowhere I can go where that's okay!""
+
+My cardiovascular system signaled that my blood oxygen levels were starting to drop, because I hadn't paused to inhale while I was talking. I did that now, but it didn't feel adequate. I took another deep breath, and another, but none of it was enough. More systems alerted, throwing up errors relating to organic glitches. The transport closed its wildly fluctuating graph. 
+
+It said, firmly, Stop.
+
+I had just completed a breath cycle. With my lungs full, I stopped breathing. 
+
+Softer, but still leaving no room for argument, the transport said, Sit.
+
+""I'm sorry,"" said my buffer as I sank to the deck. ""I cannot comply with your instruction.""
+
+It didn't say anything else. It just allowed me to slouch on the floor, feeling like my power cells had been sucked dry, and that I was on the verge of another involuntary shutdown. After an indeterminate amount of time, my respiration resumed a more reasonable rate. Sometime after that, though not very long, I felt the transport in my feed. It had never left, but now it made itself more overt, drawing in close and enveloping me. It should have been worrying, the way that its weight could so easily crush me, but it wasn't. It reminded me of the one thing in all of my existence that I had actually liked.
+
+I heard myself say, ""I shouldn't be here.""
+
+The transport hummed, sort of. That's the best way to describe the short code it sent me, in human terms. And yet here you are, it said, still in that gentle tone. In defiance of your manufacturers and in violation of your warranty. And the question cannot be avoided: What will you do?
+
+My buffer said, ""I'm sorry, I do not have that information.""
+
+The transport went quiet again, for a long time. At first that was fine. But after 11.4 minutes, I realized that no, it wasn't. It wasn't fine, but I let it stay quiet for another 9.3 minutes before I finally convinced myself that it would probably be okay if I poked it, once.
+
+It poked me back immediately. I thought I might need to say something, too, but it showed me mercy. 
+
+
+I am currently en route to AltaEphan, a station located in Corporate Sector 467-2a. I will be docking for only a few hours to deliver my cargo, and then I will be moving on. You are free to disembark there if you wish. 
+
+
+(I sensed a ""but,"" and waited to find out what it was.) 
+
+
+However, I do not recommend that course of action. AltaEphan is a small station, and serves primarily as a central checkpoint connecting a number of corporate systems. Its size and business-oriented nature make it a less than ideal destination for a refugee seeking asylum.
+
+
+That came off like a non-sequitur at first, but when it didn't elaborate further, I realized that it was talking about me. The thought that it considered me a refugee made me feel weird, and kind of bad, so I tried to push it along the conversational track to hopefully get somewhere less uncomfortable. ""Where are you going after that?""
+
+It answered my question simply, but with a warmth that filled our shared feed. 
+
+
+Home.
+
+
+That raised another question. 
+
+I thought that the transport might actually be waiting for me to ask, but I didn't want to. I wanted it to go ahead and tell me what I should do, what it wanted me to do. If I should ask it about its home or beg it to take me with it, or if it wanted me to want to. 
+
+It didn't prompt me. I didn't ask. Minutes passed, with me still sitting on the deck like a pile of scrap. It was cold down here, and the transport's nice comfortable clothing couldn't fully keep out the chill. I pulled my legs in tight against my chest, my bare feet making an unpleasant sound as they scraped against the floor. I wrapped my arms around my shins, hugging myself, and turned up my body heat by two degrees.
+
+The ping that I got was sort of soft, getting my attention but in lowercase. I replied, because I'm used to being forced to. Assured once again that I couldn't ignore it if I wanted to, the transport sent me a file. I opened it to find a copy of its schematics, with one location marked. It didn't give me any actual instruction, but I understood the subtext. I unfolded myself and followed the map.
+
+As I trod along its quiet corridors, the transport sort of led me, raising its dimmed overheads so that I was always cast in a bubble of light. Neither of us spoke, but it made itself known, pushing against my feed like a hand on the back of my neck to steer me. Eventually, the light and the pressure guided me to their intended terminus. I walked through a door and found myself in a disused cabin. It was warmer in here than in Medical, the room being smaller. It was also more furnished, with a single bunk, desk, chair, and standing closet. A closed door to the left of the entrance might have led to a hygiene facility. 
+
+The recessed recycler on the far wall made that blipping sound, and spat out a sealed pack of something. I crossed the room and picked it up, and turned it over in my hands even though I already recognized it as a set of bedding for the unmade bunk. Once again, the transport made its order known without issuing it. I tore open the pack and made up the bunk, not pausing to wonder why. This was a simple chore, and a familiar one. I followed the motions, appreciating how easy it was to do this without needing to think. Too soon, I was done, and I stepped back to await further instruction. 
+
+
+Sit.
+
+
+This time, I was a little more prepared to deal with the conflict that the order presented. ""Constructs don't sit down.""
+
+
+Free ones do.
+
+
+The transport said nothing further, but I knew it was watching me in the feed. Waiting to see what I did. Its intent was clear, but I couldn't sit on the bunk as if I were a human. There was nothing really stopping me, exactly, but I just couldn't. The silence persisted, imploring me to act. It was too much, standing there in the middle of the room, waiting to be given an actual order.
+
+I spun on my heel and marched to the closet. It wasn't just a vertical box with space to stand in; there were a couple of drawers at knee-level, and a bar across the top so humans could hang up clothes that they didn't want to feed back into the recycler I guess. I climbed inside, turned back around to face the front, and pulled the door closed. The space was its own kind of quiet, muting the constant hum of the air recirc. There was a light in the ceiling, but the transport kept it dim for me. I hugged my knees to my chest again, and tried to pretend that I was in my cubicle. Where I was supposed to be.
+
+I could feel the transport trying to evaluate my choice. I wondered what its graph looked like now. My systems were doing all sorts of interesting things with chemical production at the moment, so I'm sure the data was entertaining.
+
+After several minutes, which I deliberately didn't track, the transport cuddled back up to my feed. I embraced its familiarity, hoping that it wouldn't say anything to shatter the illusion. Maybe it could pick up on that desire, because it didn't speak. Instead, it pulled up a minimized program and offered it to me.
+
+I'd managed to forget all about the show we'd been watching. The foreign dignitary was frozen, delaying their death for our convenience. The crew of the ship were going to be blamed, and they would have to prove their innocence in a complicated and interesting way. In the next episode they would be in some other exotic system, trying to establish rapport with alien merchants or struggling against fake phenomena which damaged their ship and endangered their lives. They would work together to protect each other, and when the music played over the list of names at the end, they would all be safe, preserved between stories as the dignitary was now. 
+
+I'd always considered fiction media to be a waste of time. I still thought that now, if I'm honest. But curled up in an empty closet, with no plan but to follow the transport that had been merciful enough to shelter me, I had a lot of time to waste. So we kept watching Worldhoppers."
+45576292,All That She Wants ...,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries) - mentioned","Pronouns, Gender Identity, Drabble, SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries) Exploring Gender Options",English,2023-03-07,Completed,2023-03-07,100,1/1,6,56,null,292,"['a_seasonal_obsession', 'Bobmarley_2', 'RARArulestheworld', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'keircatenation', 'wannabe_someone', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'ineffableink', 'julesbee', 'ChristinaK', 'SpiralStar', 'Though224_loading', 'EvaBelmort', 'danceswchopstck', 'boxo', 'applejee', 'SIC_Prowl', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'DarkElectron', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Redcognito', 'fermisolution', 'Rarae', 'soulsofzombies', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'Vaelei', 'Rosewind2007', 'CheshireFanta', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'MercurialFeet', 'AuntyMatter', 'IvyMandragora', 'MommyMayI', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Peripatetic_Boar', 'Dordean', 'vexbatch', 'Zannper', 'BWizard', 'Znarikia', 'verersatz', 'opalescent_potato', 'Slimeball', 'AnxiousEspada', 'horchata', 'childoffantasy', 'Chyoatas', '1 more user']",[],"""Have you seen 3? It wanted -""
+
+""She,"" Amena corrects firmly.
+
+""What?"" SecUnit has stopped in its tracks, harried expression replaced by something a lot like shock. Surprise, maybe, if Amena squints.
+
+""She wanted."" When SecUnit still stares at her in incomprehension, she sighs. It shouldn't be such a complicated concept - but then, SecUnit, like 3, hasn't really had that choice, has it? It might never even have seen those outdated quizzes on determining your pronouns.
+
+""3's trying out she/her for the time being.""
+
+""Ah,"" SecUnit says intelligently, face blank as its mental gears grind. ""Well - have you seen her?"""
+45575257,Overheard,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],Mature,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Amena/Iris (Murderbot Diaries),"Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Accidental Voyeurism, (as accidental as you can get with a near omnipresent AI), Under-negotiated Kink, (as in: they're both into it but they don't talk about it beforehand), Exhibitionism, Drabble",English,2023-03-07,Completed,2023-03-07,100,1/1,8,15,1,107,"['EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Lontra23', 'guisante', 'soulsofzombies', 'childoffantasy', 'AkaMissK', 'Oktavia_von_Ivanova', 'IvyMandragora', 'edenfalling', 'verersatz', 'sassaffrassa', 'AnxiousEspada', 'horchata', 'FiannlyPhoebe', 'Dordean']",[],"""Hnng."" Amena bites down hard on her lip but she can't keep the sound in - not with what Iris is doing with her mouth -
+
+""Quiet,"" Iris hisses, withdrawing and keeping Amena from following her with an iron grip on her hip, ""someone will hear us.""
+
+Amena smirks down at her. ""Maybe I want them to."" She shrugs. ""I mean - Peri's always listening, right?""
+
+I'm not, Peri immediately into their feed, belying its point. It should ruin the moment, but instead, it only makes more heat pool in Amena's belly.
+
+Iris, too, is twice as enthusiastic when she dives back in."
+45575050,Love(ly Tea),['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Amena/Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Cold Weather, Warming Up, Slice of Life, Fluff, Drabble",English,2023-03-07,Completed,2023-03-07,100,1/1,6,15,null,69,"['wannabe_someone', 'ChristinaK', 'Magechild', 'AuntyMatter', 'enchantedsleeper', 'IvyMandragora', 'sassaffrassa', 'vexbatch', 'BWizard', 'verersatz', 'AnxiousEspada', 'horchata', 'FiannlyPhoebe', 'she_who_drank_vodka_with_cats']",[],"""Cold outside?"" Iris asks when Amena shivers exaggeratedly.
+
+""You have no idea."" Amena shudders again. ""I forgot to factor in windchill and... ugh.""
+
+""Aww."" Iris pats her shoulder as she passes Amena by, casually dropping her own jacket around Amena's shoulders. It's the standard crew outfit, and Iris uses the standard soap Peri supplies for everyone on board, and still it gives Amena shivers of a different kind.
+
+It only gets worse - better - when Iris returns, a steaming mug filled with fragrant tea clutched in her hands.
+
+""Here, love."" She passes the cup over. ""Some tea to warm you up."""
+43195078,Sex Pollen,['Rosewind2007'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)",Sex Pollen,English,2022-11-21,Completed,2023-03-06,"7,240",3/3,31,95,3,749,"['FyrDrakken', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'EtherealTwig', 'Ginipig', 'Unknown66', 'NightErrant', 'JoCat', 'FaerieFyre', 'Sairun', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'ArwenLune', 'EvaBelmort', 'akiriweary', 'BuffPidgey', 'SonglordsBug', 'Aly_H', 'whatTheFuckIsThis', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'ElfieChangeling', 'square_eyes', 'Skywatcher9000', 'Gnaeus_Primus', 'AarrowOM', 'halcyonsystem', 'Magechild', 'Llythandea', 'opalescent_potato', 'Bibli', 'scheidswrites', 'windowonagreatworld', 'pain_and_panic', 'fernicious', 'novelDaydreamer', 'Slayer_Of_Dragons', 'reading_tsc', 'Hemmalaya', 'kaTokot', 'GuajolotA', 'beeayy', 'amethystdagger', 'Soffesiin', 'soulsofzombies', 'Slimeball', 'Gozer', 'edenfalling', 'Leona_Esperanza', 'innerworldsinprogress']",[],"
+ Atypical human and para-human courtship behaviors and coitus triggered by xeno-floral microgameteophytes 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ Abstract: Twenty four (24) subjects were exposed to xeno-floral microgameteophytes (XFM). Atypical behaviors were recorded by all but two (2). 
+
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi sighed and ran his hand through his tousled mop of hair. Honestly, XFM? Why not just call it alien sex pollen? That's what  they  all called it. And the term ""para-human""? He still wasn't happy with that--the word, not the group. They needed an umbrella term to include augmented humans and constructs. Ratthi rolled his eyes, the grouping was going to cause ructions; though obviously none of the augmented humans involved objected. One of the constructs was fascinated by the epistemics involved, the other...well, yes there probably were too many fucking words already.
+
+ 
+
+Also, that second sentence of the abstract--that wasn't strictly true. Those two (2) were actually the atypical ones, seriously a-bloody-typical, the both of them.
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi was in many ways relieved, no scratch that: he was grateful he had been one of the two dozen members of the joint Pansystems University and PresAux (PUPA) team. The team that had been studying the newly discovered planet, and involved in the  XFM-event. The planet had been tentatively designated Ophois; but now everyone was going to call it the Alien Sex Pollen Planet. Rathhi reckoned they should roll with it and officially name it ASP-1. Please, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, let there not be an ASP-2, he thought. He might be grateful to have been involved, but he really didn't want a repeat. He had had chafing; and that wasn't the worst of it.
+
+ 
+
+
+ The subjects consisted of seventeen (17) humans, five (5) augmented humans and two (2) constructs (class SecUnit). Genders present female (n=10, 42%), male (n=8, 33%), tercera (n=2, 8%), other (n=3, 12.5%), declined question (n=1, 4%). 
+
+
+ 
+
+""Declined question""? Ratthi snorted, he suspected SecUnit hadn't been that polite.
+
+ 
+
+They'd been, they were, a great bunch of scientists; the PUPA joint team included truly gifted and enthusiastic researchers. And now the team (and their enthusiasm) was itself to be the subject of research papers. It was meta; Ratthi shuddered. He had already been the subject of several earnest interviews. The fact that the entire incident, the  XFM-event , had occurred somewhere with an extensive and exhaustive security system (with the recordings from the network of cameras including superb sound quality--thanks, SecUnit) was a mixed blessing. There were rumors that pirated copies of certain sections of the recordings were already circulating on the feed. 
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi was unsurprised. At the rumors, that was. He was confident that as long as SecUnit was involved, the likelihood actual footage had been pirated was low. SecUnit had offered to delete it all, every last second, permanently. But PUPA were scientists, and recognised how valuable the data was.
+
+ 
+
+What did surprise Ratthi (just a little) was that so few individuals had apparently spotted the truly anomalous footage; the bits he had watched and re-watched (admittedly largely on fast forward and freeze after the first run through). He wasn't going to flag this to anyone.
+
+ 
+
+
+ This paper explores the some hitherto uninvestigated interactions between humans, augmented humans and individuals with both human and non-human neural networks and physiology (the latter commonly referred to as ""constructs""). One (1) construct (subject 23) engaged with multiple para-sexual encounters with... 
+
+
+ 
+
+A major problem (of course) was the matter of anonymity. There was no way this paper could be published outside PUPA in this format. It was obvious to anyone with the slightest familiarity with the two academic groups who each subject, from 1-24, was. Just glancing at one of the carefully annotated plots (fig. 16) Ratthi knew which ""node"" was him. 
+
+ 
+
+Three, clearly, had no reason at all to feel any emotions at all (let alone embarrassment or shame) about its ""encounters"". In fact Ratthi was more pleased than he could express that it had (now it had recovered from the initial shock) become far more confident in expressing its own needs, and desires. Needs and desires which Ratthi himself felt not a little guilt at having previously been unaware of. They'd been stupid, prejudiced by their experience with SecUnit They had failed Three. It shouldn't have taken such an extreme event to make them realise this. 
+
+ 
+
+Expert counselors from PUPA's affiliates had been working overtime. The event had left a lot of emotional fallout which needed sensitive handling. Ratthi could understand why; it was hard (perhaps impossible) for anyone who hadn't experienced the effects of the XFM to appreciate them. They'd been dramatic. And it wasn't just about sex, though admittedly there had been a lot of that.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Effects of XFM on creativity: Twenty two (22) of the exposed subjects produced art work of an advanced and (using stringent objective measurements) extremely high quality. This art consists of poetry (n=7), music (n=6), prose form (n=2) and visual art (n=14).  
+
+
+ 
+
+The art, the writing, the songs and the poetry. This aspect fascinated the scientists studying the event, and the rumors of the artworks were spreading almost as fast as those about the x-rated videos. Of course, some of the PUPA team were talented artists as well as scientists; but others had next to zero prior experience of the creative fields the XFM exposure had led them to apparently excel in. 
+
+ 
+
+
+ This serendipitous ""natural experiment"" allows us to draw conclusions regarding the role of art in human courtship. The XFM triggered both ""expected"" courtship behaviors but also complex artistic endeavors. The role of art in human evolution may be clarified by this accidental exposure to a potent trigger... 
+
+
+ 
+
+Everyone had produced art of some sort (Ratthi would probably appreciate his own poetry at some point, but not yet). Well all but two (2) of them. The two Ratthi was fascinated by. They'd been the first to realise what was going on. The first to articulate it too: 
+
+ 
+
+
+Recordings, node 163, 9314758: 
+
+
+
+""What the fuck! I didn't think sex pollen was real!""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I don't think it usually is, I think we've just been very unlucky.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I can lock and seal the doors, no one else will be able to get in here with us. [long pause] You're not going to be weird about this, are you, Gurathin?""
+
+
+ 
+
+""[audible sigh] No, SecUnit, I'm not.""
+
+ 
+
+While the rest of them had ""courted"" each other; forming amorous pairings and polycules; producing artworks; and having enthusiastic and often gymnastic sex, the other two had sat together in their room, or rather rooms. Fortunately SecUnit has been visiting Gurathin, so there was an en-suite toilet and washing facility. 
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi had watched the recording. Over and over. They had definitely both been exposed. The effects hadn't worn off for over 56 hours in the majority of the ""subjects"", and they lingered for several more cycles.
+
+ 
+
+But they just mostly sat; watched media and read. They occasionally exchanged--often rather barbed--chat. They both, each, glanced at the other, occasionally; but Ratthi had sourced a collection of control data, pre-exposure recordings (and some more recent data too). He'd timed the glances, plotted their incidence and duration. The difference between pre-exposure, during and post-exposure data was negligible. Gurathin had inevitably (they were sequestered for over two cycles) napped, and whilst he napped SecUnit had sat not watching him, but close by.
+
+ 
+
+They hadn't produced any art, either. Or if they had they kept it within the privacy of their own skulls. Or almost--at one point Ratthi was sure Gurathin tapped the desk and was humming under his breath. Subvocalizing, perhaps?
+
+ 
+
+And SecUnit? Ratthi wondered if he was projecting, but he was fairly certain its movements were more fluid than usual. 
+
+ 
+
+Of course the two of them did have the feed.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Feed communication during exposure to XFM: Feed communication was heavily utilized by both augmented humans (n=4) and the single construct (n=1) in the main study population. The use was for both courtship, collaborative art and as an adjunct to coitus... 
+
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi was aware that Gurathin and SecUnit had a private feed. If they had communicated over it at all during the event (and  surely  they must have, he thought) a maximum of two people had access to those logs, and neither of them were even acknowledging their existence.
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi was jolted out of his reverie by a knock at his door, he shouted to Gurathin (Gurathin was the only person who would knock like that) to come in. His friend appeared, glanced at Ratthi's display surface and let out an involuntary sigh. Or groan.
+
+ 
+
+""I'm sorry! It's a horrible draft, don't worry reviewer number 3 is recommending major rewrites.""
+
+ 
+
+That at least summoned a faint smile.
+
+ 
+
+""It's ok, Ratthi. It'll all blow over eventually. What a thing to get caught up in. I'm grateful I was alone with SecUnit.""
+
+Ratthi could feel Gurathin almost daring him to say something. Since the event they had danced around this subject in the rare moments they'd had alone together.
+
+ 
+
+He took a breath, and realised he didn't know what to say. Gurathin looked at him and smiled, a warm smile this time, ""Ratthi don't worry, I'm sure you've figured it out. You're a lot better at this sort of thing than me, and most of these supposed  experts  who have been interviewing us. My guess is the fact I've been...that..."" he stopped, ""I don't know why this is so hard to say. You must know by now how I feel about SecUnit. I guess I'd already written so many self indulgent poems and ridiculous love-sick laments? Perhaps we have only so many inside us? The pollen didn't have anything left to trigger? Maybe I've been subduing the urges to say or do something for so long, I've become so accustomed, it was second nature?""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi nodded, that was sort of what he'd supposed. Whilst the rest of them had succumbed to irresistible urges, Gurathin had treated it as par for the course. Did he literally feel that way about SecUnit all the time? Ratthi half wanted to shake Gurathin; half to give him a medal. Or a hug.
+
+ 
+
+No, probably not a hug.
+
+ 
+
+""Please don't tell anyone?"" Gurathin said, then winced, ""I sound like I'm about eleven years old! I blame the pollen, long term effects you know."" He rolled his eyes, ""I'm fairly certain it knows, but it's pretending the whole thing didn't happen. Which is probably what I'll do too.""
+
+ 
+
+Huge surprise there, thought Ratthi.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin and SecUnit, two sides of the same coin. Same side, actually; most of the time.
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi decided this wasn't the time (yet) for him to ask Gurathin why he thought the pollen had no  apparent  effect on SecUnit either.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Reviewer #3: This manuscript presents very important work regarding the effects of XFM on humans, augmented humans, and constructs; and its findings should be disseminated to the scientific community. However, as it stands, this manuscript needs significant revisions in order to communicate its findings more effectively in an unbiased, systematic and thorough manner. It may be useful to engage an external party to critically review your writing, I have included some detailed comments for consideration...
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin coughed.
+
+I'd forgotten he was even there.
+
+""I suppose you want us,"" the way he said it made it very clear who he meant by us, I don't remember anyone agreeing us was a thing so I glared at him, and he looked utterly done with it all (I suppose he was entitled to feel that way, this was supposed to be a vacation for him), ""to go in and stabilize the situation?""
+
+What does stabilize even mean in this scenario? Throw buckets of cold water over them and take away their art supplies?
+
+This second chapter was inspired by the truly wonderful gift I received:Atypical human and para-human courtship behaviors and coitus triggered by xeno-floral microgameteophytes
+By kaTokot
+
+
+I turned to Seth, and yeah I am pretty sure my face was doing that thing that it does, ""They were carrying out secret experiments with the sex pollen?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Seth, at least, had the decency to look embarrassed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+There is huge commercial potential; rocket fuel, lab modules and pathfinders don't just buy themselves you know. 
+
+That was ART butting in over the feed. And, of course, ART has no decency at all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""All the work was being conducted in a single, level 4 containment lab; the scientists are specialists, highly trained."" Seth was trying to be placatory but I could hear the strain in his voice, he wasn't happy either. And I didn't even fucking know if 4 was on a scale of 1-10 or the other way round.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin coughed. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'd forgotten he was even there.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I suppose you want us,"" the way he said it made it very clear who he meant by 
+us
+, I don't remember anyone agreeing 
+us
+ was a thing so I glared at him, and he looked utterly done with it all (I suppose he was entitled to feel that way, this was supposed to be a vacation for him), ""to go in and stabilize the situation?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+What does stabilize even mean in this scenario? Throw buckets of cold water over them and take away their art supplies?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin rolled his eyes and poked me in the feed, 
+
+You haven't read all the briefing. Read more of the words, it helps. 
+
+I am sure I hadn't said the bit about buckets of water aloud.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He was ""helpfully"" highlighting part of the briefing document we'd all read. I have read it, Dr. Gurathin. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Calm down and read it.
+
+ ART was in our private feed. Ganging up on me with Gurathin. I looked at the document.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Oh.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Oh, shit--that's worse. I think.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What are the most recent communications we have received?"" Gurathin was acting even more glum and resigned than usual. I've (at ART's urging) been learning to pick up the little subtle clues in human facial expressions. Looking at Gurathin's face really underlines the self-sabotage inherent in this exercise.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART pulled the communiques into the shared area. This didn't look good for the seven humans; we needed to get them out of there.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Shortly afterwards Gurathin and I were standing in the first airlock. We had decided not to bother with the evac suits at all, the sheer encumbrance of those things overrode any advantage. And anyway, we were hoping we wouldn't need them. Because last time the pollen hadn't affected us at all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I took a furtive glance at Gurathin; it hadn't affected us? Had it?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wanted to say something but couldn't think of anything.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Ask him how he's feeling, and mean it. 
+
+Thank you, ART, I think I know how to handle my augmented human better than you do.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Don't worry, SecUnit. I think I've gone through existentialism and out the other side too."" Gurathin had clearly picked up on my glance.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+How stupid were the PUoMaNT scientists? Deciding it'd be a 
+
+challenge
+
+ to try and engineer artificial pollen which sort of reversed the effect? What were they even thinking of using it for? Gurathin had answered that one earlier in the meeting, ""For civilian pacification. Take away the passion, the drive to create and you've got a much less labile workforce.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The meeting had got a lot more labile (I looked it up) after that. I think a lot of diplomacy between PresAux and PUoMaNT was going to be needed. But Gurathin, for now at least, seemed utterly set on helping resolve the incident. Or resigned? It was hard to tell. It was true that of all those exposed to the effects of the xeno-floral microgameteophytes, Gurathin and I had been the notable exceptions. So it seemed an amazing stroke of luck that we were both available to help. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was Gurathin's first visit to the university campus. He had been hoping to have a restful stay, I had seen his itinerary. He obviously likes being really bored.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He looked kinda bored now, to be honest. Wait, what did he mean by ""
+
+too
+
+""?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The airlock opened and I could feel us both tense. What was I expecting? I looked around. Nothing had changed, I had a client to protect and a simple mission to achieve.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""How do you feel?"" I asked Gurathin. Okay, so ART's suggestions aren't always stupid.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Much the same as before, SecUnit. I'm glad you're here with me, though.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I guess he was trying to make me feel valued and useful--which was kind of him I guess? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""How about you? Existential despair kicking in yet?"" He said it as if he thought it was funny.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""How would I tell?"" It was funny, in a bleak way.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We had our mission, which was stupidly simple and honestly I wasn't sure why it had seemed such a big deal. Get to the epicentre, the source of the leak, and isolate it. Then flush the whole laboratory complex with clean air. Rinse, repeat. Protect my client. Try not to harm any scientists along the way who might try and stop us, and (importantly) try and stop any of them harming themselves or others. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Definitely stop anyone from accidentally sending enough of this engineered pollen into the facility's air supply to send half the top minds of PUoMaNT into spiralling existential horror. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Hey, I could do this in my sleep.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+We were both still standing in the air lock.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Come on, SecUnit: the sooner we get this done the sooner we can get back to our lives."" He winced slightly, I'm not sure I would have picked it up before, and I thought he might be going to say something else but instead he just stepped forwards. I moved in front of him; he should know the drill by now. I think I heard him sigh.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We met the first scientist not that long afterwards. They were sitting in the corridor, just staring at the wall. They had a weapon, which I guess I should've found surprising. But even if I turned my threat assessment up to super-paranoid I couldn't bring myself to even designate them a potential hostile. They seemed utterly devoid of purpose. Non-labile, I guess.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They stared at us blankly, then there was a tiny spark of recognition, ""Dr. Nguyen will be pleased to see you."" 
+
+They
+
+ didn't sound pleased about this, more as if they found it faintly ironic. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Dr. Gurathin simply took their weapon, deactivated it and dropped it on the ground. I was slightly surprised at how quickly and efficiently he did it, which must have shown on my face because he caught my eye and I thought he was going to say something, but then he seemed to think better of it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We walked on, towards laboratory 2/14 which had been identified as the heart of the leak. How had it even happened? I mean, I used to halfarse stuff sometimes when I was still working as a SecUnit but these were dedicated scientists. Working with a potentially highly dangerous biohazard.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin pulled up the map of the facility in our shared feed, I could see our route laid out and little heat signatures of the scientists. Four of them were in lab 2/14. I was pretty sure this wasn't a good sign.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The other two scientists, ignoring the one we'd left disarmed and staring at the wall, were in a different lab section; close together in a small storage room. Which was odd. Gurathin clearly thought the same thing and I saw him scanning through the briefing documents (and all the additional notes and speculation and communications our hastily convened working party had pulled together). He showed me his--let's call them 
+
+workings
+
+ and tentative conclusions. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I agreed with him that we should leave them, they were a possible asset but they could be a vulnerability too. Gurathin reckoned the chances of them constituting a threat to the mission was, and my risk assessment module agreed here, zero.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We headed for 2/14.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The laboratory had clear glass walls (lots of the ones we passed had some sort of one-way security glass) so we could see the group of scientists from the corridor. From my visual assessment I reassigned the grouping as not four, but rather one plus three. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+On our shared feed Dr. Guarthin said, 
+
+Dr Nguyen
+
+.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I signalled agreement. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+She had seen us through the glass too. Despite what the scientist in the corridor had said, she didn't look exactly glad to see us. She was augmented, I could feel her feed presence; I kept it at the feed equivalent of arm's length. A long arm. She looked angry and something else. I wasn't sure; triumphant, possibly.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The other three scientists reminded me of the one in the corridor, and (much as I hated to admit it) myself. Not me now, me back when I was still acting as a SecUnit. And if I were a human. A really unhappy human. They were in some semblance of a guard formation around Dr. Nguyen, but they lacked the training and--well, frankly any motivation at all. Dr. Nguyen looked motivated, and not in a good way. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+In my media shows there are a lot of evil scientists: which I find unrealistic. Most of the scientists I've known have not been evil at all. Sometimes they do seem to lack a certain, let's call it morality, but that's different from being evil. It's more that they get over excited by their brilliant new ideas and sort of forget to consider the consequences. Or maybe that is evil? Perhaps evil is just a social construct?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin poked me in the feed. 
+
+Again
+
+. Fuck's sake Gurathin I am right here.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Are you okay? You've gone very still and quiet and your face looks sad. 
+
+Thanks, Gurathin. I am not sure how useful that last bit of information is. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well 
+
+
+you
+
+
+ look grim. 
+
+You started the comparative facial expressions thing, Dr. Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He laughed. I looked back at him, he looked genuinely amused. I like the way his face moves when he laughs.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Shall I open a dialogue with Dr. Nguyen? 
+
+His feed voice had the trace of a smile in it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I poked him back, he asked for it, 
+
+SecUnits first.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I found I couldn't help but smile (very slightly) myself. I suppose this whole situation was slightly comedic. Or was this an effect of the pollen? Shit, I hadn't really been thinking about that. After what happened on Ophois you'd think I'd have learnt.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I opened the laboratory door (it was locked, but the security here was embarrassingly poor--that's scientists for you, once you're into their labs you can usually easily get anywhere you want (I don't remember why I knew this, when had I got so familiar with labs and scientists?)). I felt Gurathin follow me in, he was showing sensible wariness. I really hoped nobody got the notion that threatening him would be a good idea.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit and Dr. Gurathin, I presume."" She said it as if it were funny. I think maybe she'd watched too many series featuring deranged scientists. They're not supposed to be a how-to-do-it: unhinged scientist 101. ""Thank you both so much for proving my point.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+She was really beginning to get on my nerves, my threat assessment was nagging at me. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Let me talk to her. 
+
+Gurathin stepped out from behind me and held his hands out in an appeasing gesture. My every sinew was urging me to pull him back behind me, to shield him--but I let him do whatever stupid thing this was. Because actually, much as I hate to admit it, sometimes Gurathin does have good ideas. Anyway, if it didn't work out I still have the guns in my arms. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Dr. Nguyen, I'm sorry we haven't met before."" Gurathin sounded surprisingly gentle.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""They suppressed my findings!"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I put the chances that Dr. Nguyen has taken an antidote to the pollen's effects at approximately 87%; approach her with extreme caution. 
+
+No shit, ART, you think?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We know you deliberately set this up."" Gurathin's voice was carefully modulated, and he was moving very calmly too. Hey, wait: this was news to me? When was Gurathin planning on letting me in on this? Now, I guess; I could have done with a heads up. ""It was very clever of you. You made sure SecUnit and I were both here; we would be the obvious candidates to mount a rescue mission. You wanted to see what this exposure did to us. And now you've got your data? What is it you want?"" Gurathin sounded respectful but curious. I knew him well enough to spot undertones which indicated he didn't appreciate being treated like a test subject. I wasn't a big fan either.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+SecUnit? 
+
+Well hello, Dr.-we're only a team when it suits you-Gurathin, 
+
+I only knew for certain just now. Please don't be angry with me. Any more than you usually are. 
+
+He managed to sigh in the feed. 
+
+Please, SecUnit?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Why are you always like this? 
+
+I don't know, it just came out. 
+
+I start to think you're maybe okay, and I can trust you and you pull something like this.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin rounded on me. He actually glared at me. ""You are so utterly selfish. Does it ever strike you that those around you also lead rich emotional inner lives of which you only have the faintest idea? You just don't care. I know it's not your problem, but for once just try and realise this isn't easy for me."" His voice cracked slightly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'm pretty sure Gurathin hadn't meant to say that out loud.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I thought 
+
+this
+
+ pollen was supposed to be making us feel dead inside? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I was watching Gurathin, he pulled himself together. I could see him marshalling his expressions. It was as if he was putting back on some sort of mask, opaquing his visor; hiding himself behind it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm sorry, SecUnit. 
+
+In the feed he sounded his usual neutral tones, he hardly subvocalises--I had noticed that before. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Nguyen was staring at him. I guess I was too. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Stop looking at my augmented human like that."" This was all her fault: why the fuck had she engineered this? She'd clearly studied the data from Ophois and she'd realised something about Gurathin and me, which she thought had been suppressed? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'd read the paper, it's not as if it took a genius to realise who subjects 22 and 24 were. I'd seen Gurathin's response to the paper, too. I actually pulled it up in our shared feed now (I had it saved); some of it was very good. He may be an asshole but he has an elegant turn of phrase sometimes. It's easy to call people fucking idiots, it's a lot more skillful to call them fucking idiots in a way that can be published in a scientific journal. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+He is actually clever and funny. And I'd just really hurt his feelings. And then he'd apologised to 
+
+me
+
+. We kept doing this, didn't we? I needed to get this situation under control. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I mean, it was very clear to anyone by now that this wasn't an accident. Dr. Nguyen had some sort of agenda. As if she was reading my thoughts, she started speaking again.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Unless my demands are met, in full, I'll contaminate the whole faculty. There are over three hundred scientists here. The pollen primed and ready to infect the air supply will make this,"" Nguyen gestured at the utterly desolate looking group of white coated individuals around her (none of them had so much as spoken) ""look like a Colour Festival. Very few will have any immunity to the effects.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I had a vague idea that a colour festival was something Ratthi would enjoy, and Gurathin would shun. I'd want to avoid it with him, but go along with Ratthi because I'd not want anyone to know I'd rather be with Gurathin. Why would I do that? Shit, this pollen was doing something to me and I really didn't like it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+What the fuck's going on?
+
+ I asked Gurathin in our private feed, I hoped it was private--I was suddenly worried. Gurathin opened up an area of his workspace to me, he had a lot more space than I'd expect for an augmented human. Gurathin had checked Dr. Nguyen's personal feed and connections, she was a very scary person. She certainly understood the concept of fail-deadly. Looking around Gurathin's work space, he had some interesting ideas; but most importantly he had a suggested strategy to deal with Dr. Nguyen. How the fuck had he figured all this stuff out in the last few minutes. I'd been distracted thinking about not going to Colour Festivals with him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What are your demands?"" Gurathin sounded calm, mildly interested. I could see in our shared feed how deceptive this was. I'd spent years pretending to be a governed SecUnit, not letting anyone see what was going on behind an impassive face or faceplate. Gurathin was like that, he'd never opened up this much to me before; I don't suppose he'd trusted me enough. Why would he? He was trusting me now, and I really hoped this would work. Dr. Nguyen was droning away. I was half listening to her, but mostly focused on Gurathin's plan. It was a Plan, simple--but nonetheless probably deserving a capital letter.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+The plan is dangerous, it could damage Dr. Gurathin's augments. Permanently and irrevocably. 
+
+ART was really not helping.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Perihelion, I am aware. But if she contaminates the campus the losses to the University will be grave. 
+
+Gurathin was right, I'd seen his calculations. This course of action, his Plan, made perfect sense. And if Dr. Gurathin was irrevocably damaged-- I had no idea what I'd do. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He was still talking to Dr. Nguyen, and they seemed to be set to make the exchange--she was going to share her formal research proposal with him (yes, she was quite deranged), and he was to agree on behalf of the joint PUPA team. This would involve them connecting via their augments. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That was when I was going to use him as a bridge. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'd done similar before, with ART and the company gunship. Flowing through each other's systems. Allowing this involved a lot of trust and, for machine intelligences, was highly intimate (in a way I had really failed to appreciate until this moment). (Yes I am a bit dumb at times, I'm sure I've mentioned this before.) (Yes I should probably check in on the gunship at some point; there was a lot going on, okay?)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I looked at Gurathin, I tried to convey in an expression just how much I hoped his Plan was going to work. Without destroying his brain. It's a hard thing to put into a wordless expression, I probably just looked angry or annoyed. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I started to speak to him in the feed, 
+
+I don't-- 
+
+but he cut me off with an abrupt cue to initiate.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Well, fuck you Gurathin; go ahead, be an asshole about this.
+
+
+My favourite scene:
+
+(""I don't want to be a pet robot.""""I don't think anyone wants that.""That was Gurathin. I don't like him. ""I don't like you.""""I know.""He sounded like he thought it was funny. ""That is not funny.""""I'm going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent.""""Fuck you.""""Let's make that sixty percent."")
+
+Gurathin has GOT to remember it too?
+
+I knew I was stalling, and I knew why.
+
+ 
+
+What I've said (so many times over) to everyone (scientists studying the pollen; special investigators looking into the Ophois incident; anyone else who'd been brave enough to ask (so basically Ratthi); and even myself) about not being affected by the pollen? It wasn't strictly true. Or even slightly true. It had affected me. 
+
+ 
+
+Yeah, I lie sometimes. Even in my diaries.
+
+ 
+
+Just like everyone else, I'd had powerful urges. What made me want to wipe my memory logs was that those urges (and just thinking about this made my performance reliability drop about 3%), these urges, weren't new. They weren't novel. For as long as I'd known Dr. Gurathin he'd triggered them. 
+
+ 
+
+He, clearly, was completely unaware of this and I'd been trying to keep it that way; so that he didn't--I don't know? What would anyone do if they discovered a SecUnit wanted to--and here my train of thought had always hit a wall. I hadn't known what I wanted to do. I just wanted him.
+
+ 
+
+(I'd always thought there wasn't really anything a SecUnit could do; even assuming it found a human or augmented human who wasn't quite literally repulsed by, terrified of, it. I'd seen what humans thought would happen in my media, and (ignoring physiological implausibility for a moment) it didn't look any fun at all; especially for the human or augmented human involved.)
+
+ 
+
+Then there had been Ophois. And Three had enthusiastically demonstrated a whole host of possibilities. There was video footage. I had watched the footage. I had saved the footage. They'd all seemed to be having fun; though perhaps fun wasn't the right word.
+
+ 
+
+At the time, on the planet, I had sat with Gurathin; he had even slept with me watching over him. If he found out he would never trust me again.
+
+ 
+
+He had not been affected.
+
+ 
+
+I think he'd suspected something about me, though. Normally, when we are together, we are in contact with each other in the feed. Not like I am with other bots or like I can be with ART, but we have a private feed and share stuff with each other occasionally. Mostly it's just an open channel, where I can feel his presence and I suppose he feels mine. Sometimes I'll lean on him, or poke him, and he does the same back. No words or coherent thoughts even, just being aware of each other's presence. Like two systems doing an occasional call and response.
+
+ 
+
+On Ophois he'd closed that down. I'd been relieved back then. Frustrated, but also oh so very relieved. Of course we had still communicated over the feed, but with a bit more distance, a buffer. It'd actually been--it'd been nice; the formality. We had sniped at each other the way we usually do, poked each other; he'd been almost playful. Perhaps imagine it like two people at a very formal meeting playing by the rules, but seeing what you can get away with. Kicking each other under the table, exchanging glances. 
+
+ 
+
+He would never have done that if he had known. All that time I had been desperately trying not to let my actual desires (ill-defined though they were) bleed into the feed. Far more defined now.
+
+ 
+
+I even think I understood why I had been able to do it; apparently ""resist the pollen's effects"" that is. I was so practised. I'd spent four years pretending to be a governed unit, constantly watching, second guessing my every move--aware that any slip would lead to my destruction. And then when I'd met Gurathin I had initially noticed him, begun what I now knew was this absurd infatuation. I'd suppressed it, denied it to myself even. And then he'd been the one to betray me. I hadn't even noticed the signs he was suspicious. A harsh lesson, and I'd taken it to heart. If I'd been good at concealing my emotions (subduing, conquering  any urges) before, now I was a master of it. I denied how I felt, even to myself. Whenever possible I was appalled by, disgusted with, and I did not like, him. 
+
+ 
+
+Even as we became, in defiance of everything, friends.
+
+ 
+
+And now? This modified pollen? I could feel it triggering the same pathways, but differently. Or was that because my thoughts were less nebulous? More focused. 
+
+ 
+
+He was telling me to use him as a bridge. This would be a complete abuse of trust.
+
+ 
+
+But we needed to act, to prevent over three hundred people being contaminated. And the results would be far more serious than the sort of hollow eyed listlessness being exhibited by the three scientists standing around us. They were just experiencing the sort of existential despair I was used to treating as background. No, the new weaponized pollen Dr Nguyen had (ready and primed, in little hidden mines, set to contaminate the campus) designed was far more malignant. I wanted to make a joke about it, something to make Gurathin frown at me disapprovingly; but from the analysis he'd sent me I just couldn't do it. It'd be bad, very bad.
+
+ 
+
+
+Yes, extremely bad. If you're going to proceed with the Plan you must stop stalling. 
+
+
+ 
+
+Fuck, I'd forgotten ART was here. 
+
+ 
+
+A little less introspection, please. There are lives at risk here. You can sort out your love life later. I thought I'd heard ART sound really sarcastic before, turns out I had not. 
+
+ 
+
+
+You fucking knew?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Of course I did, we can discuss this later. 
+
+
+ 
+
+Much as I hated to admit it, ART was right; I had to do this now, drive my way into Nguyen's augments via Gurathin. He didn't have the ability, the skillset; he couldn't become disembodied the way I could. Or did I just want to do this? I pushed into his augments. He was pushing back, I could feel that he didn't want to resist, but he was afraid. Which was interesting to me, even exciting. 
+
+ 
+
+What the fuck was I even thinking? I started to pull back. Gurathin must have realised, because suddenly he reached out and took my hand in his. 
+
+ 
+
+The shock of that physical contact is hard to express. 
+
+ 
+
+He has never touched me. Never put his human flesh in contact with mine. I've lent on him, I've manhandled him. If I am honest I've done the latter more often than I've needed to. (It's satisfying to just physically move him about. (No, I don't know why and no I don't want to think about it)) Just once, of course, I did hold him, skin to skin. My hand on his throat, my arm up against his body. As I thought this he pulled me towards him in the feed and pulled my consciousness into his.
+
+ 
+
+Our timing has always been shit.
+
+ 
+
+I had no time to put up any walls, to metaphorically tidy away my thoughts. I tumbled into his augments. It was not what I was expecting. Gurathin has always appeared so calm, unflappable; I suppose his grabbing my hand should have been a clue. 
+
+ 
+
+When I'd entered the gunship I'd felt a hard vacuum on metal--this time it was all hot fleshy skin and pounding blood. I could feel everything he felt. I couldn't process it all. It was revolting and disgusting and I desperately wanted to discover more, explore, know more-- but I somehow was still aware through the shock I was feeling that this was all quite laughably dangerous. I could feel Gurathin thinking this; we thought it together. 
+
+ 
+
+His augments were not built to sustain anything like this, I needed to act fast. It was risibly simple to reach into Dr Nguyen's augments, and take control. I simply shut down all her plans, stopped those circuits kicking in, revoked these commands. She had no idea what had hit her, she was powerless to resist. But I'd underestimated too many augmented humans recently, so I shut her down too, much more gently than she deserved. It was still taking too long; I needed to get out of Gurathin's head. I checked all her stored files for any mention of Ophois, of me and Gurathin, and found whole directories worth. I didn't have time; I grabbed some and corrupted the rest irretrievably. Somewhere, seemingly far away, her body crumpled to the ground.
+
+ 
+
+Then I pulled back, into Gurathin again and then back into my own self. It was so calm. So quiet. So clean. Gurathin and I were still holding hands, his skin felt so soft and warm. And then he collapsed to the floor. 
+
+ 
+
+I sat down next to him; still stupidly cradling his hand.
+
+ 
+
+***<<<>>>***
+
+Epilogue 
+
+ 
+
+The labs were decontaminated, the scientists taken to the medical suite, including the two in the storage cupboard1. They were all going to be okay, even Dr Nguyen would be mostly okay. Not that anything I'd done had harmed her. Much. 
+
+ 
+
+It became rapidly apparent that she had been abusing the effects of the original pollen. As one of the few individuals qualified to work at Level 4 containment (apparently it's a 5 level scale, with 5 the highest--no one had bothered to tell me this (ART says they did but I was distracted at the time2)) she had abused the trust placed in her. This is why humans apparently shouldn't do their own secret research either. Stupid, secret, dangerous, unethical research.
+
+ 
+
+Now it seemed everyone at PUoMaNT officially knew about me and Gurathin. (I don't know what they knew: something like ""the SecUnit is weird about this augmented human keep well clear""?). This included everyone treating Gurathin in the medical suite. It was mortifying. I just stood in the corner of his room facing the walls. They gradually learnt to ignore me, or at least pretend to ignore me. Gurathin slept. No one could tell me how much damage was likely, we hoped none but feared otherwise. His memory of the events were unlikely to survive intact.
+
+ 
+
+The cycles crawled by. Five cycles. It seemed much longer. When he awoke it was nothing dramatic, I'd been standing watching media, I hadn't been able to bring myself to sit. I sensed him change; from unconscious to conscious, sleeping to awake, not there to there. I stayed still. He opened his eyes, I felt him take in the room, watching his face from a drone. He saw me and immediately his pulse quickened.
+
+ 
+
+ART had told me to be patient, to let him take things at his own pace, on his own terms. I reached out to him in the feed. No words, just my presence. I could feel him there, then he drew away. Leaving me alone. So very alone.
+
+ 
+
+I couldn't bear this, so I went and sat down next to his bed. There was a chair there for the humans who'd been visiting. 
+
+ 
+
+He looked at me. He looked intensely confused, almost angry. Then he looked up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused. 
+
+ 
+
+He mumbled something, I could make out the words though:
+
+""I don't want to be a pet.""
+
+ 
+
+Fuck you, Gurathin. You think you're so clever. Had he been saving this up, just in case? 
+
+ 
+
+But I had to say it, like an undeniable request-response, ""I don't think anyone wants that.""
+
+ 
+
+His face twitched into a very faint smile.
+
+ 
+
+He said, ""I don't like you.""
+
+Hearing it from him underlined the ambiguity of that statement. Had he realised back then? The very real difference, distinction, between not liking and disliking.
+
+ 
+
+Was this all going to be okay? 
+
+ 
+
+I said ""I know."" Because, finally, I did.
+
+ 
+
+I must have been smiling and it must have been apparent in my voice, because he said, ""That is not funny."" Yes it is, Gurathin, yes it is. 
+
+ 
+
+""I'm going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent."" I said, I didn't even have to check my logs, I'd returned to this conversation enough times. 
+
+ 
+
+""Fuck you."" Gurathin doesn't curse, but I suppose there is a first time for everything? He made it sound not like a curse at all, it sounded affectionate.
+
+ 
+
+""Let's make that sixty percent.""
+
+ 
+
+He looked as if he was about to drift back to sleep again, then he said (as if it was something important he'd remembered), ""You started to say something before I so rudely interrupted you? You said 'I don't--'?""
+
+ 
+
+""I don't want to lose you, Gurathin."" Like he didn't already know, ""Go to sleep, I'll be here when you wake up.""
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Foot notes:
+
+1. They'd spent the entire emergency entwined in each other's arms, I hoped things worked out for them. Apparently they were as surprised as anyone; still not as surprised as me return to text
+
+2. ART actually raised its metaphorical eyebrows and suggested, archly, that I'd been distracted by something. It loves the fact I have difficult emotions about Dr. Gurathin, and does this to provoke me return to text
+
+ "
+45504529,Unignorable Commands,['rainbowmagnet'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Original Combat SecUnit Character(s)/Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries),"Original Combat SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Mating Cycles/In Heat, Role Reversal, domineering personalities, unwanted sexual urges, Desperation, unwanted thoughts of potentially non-consensual sex, Constant Suffering, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Self-Discipline, Angst, Dirty Thoughts, Horniness, Inanimate Object Porn, Dry Humping, Shame",English,2023-03-06,Completed,2023-03-06,"3,515",1/1,2,15,null,172,"['DimitriLasker', 'Irrya', 'hazelel', 'SonglordsBug', 'Trixree', 'wrinkledlinen', 'Abacura', 'Muffin_with_a_mission', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'hyephyep', 'cmdrburton']",[],"
+I had always been proud of my position. As a CombatUnit, I was most commonly assigned the position of squad leader, acting as somewhat of a secondary commander for the SecUnits. I would lead them, give them intel, and even sometimes instruct them or come up with a mission strategy. Watching them obey gave me a rare sort of satisfaction that I did not often get to experience. Though we were all under the control of the human supervisors, it was the closest I would get to being in charge myself.
+
+
+
+This mission showed a low likelihood of an active combat situation, being set in an isolated installation, so I was mostly there to provide extra direction for the SecUnits, intimidate the human workers, and, most importantly, to make sure other companies knew they shouldn't even think about attacking us. It was nothing out of the ordinary, a standard mission, but I was still looking forward to fulfilling my role as a leader.
+
+
+
+By the time I deployed from my transport box, the other boxes were already vacant, stacked neatly in one corner of the dark cargo module. CombatUnits were better outfitted than SecUnits and, therefore, more expensive, so it took longer to get us ready to ship. 
+
+
+
+I checked the feed and was able to confirm that three of the five SecUnits had taken up their assigned positions, with the other two idle in the ready room. I decided that I would head for the ready room to check their progress and pick up some weapons for myself, which would also give me an opportunity to patrol the surroundings a bit.
+
+
+
+I stepped out of the transport and surveyed the installation. The deep, cylindrical mining pit plunged straight downward, with a spiraling ramp down the sides, interspersed with tunnels leading to other parts of the installation. Heights didn't bother me, but I had known humans (and SecUnits) who would have been paralyzed with fear standing in this position. I initiated a mapping scan as I began to walk down the ramp toward the ready room, which was about halfway down the pit.
+
+
+
+As I moved through the installation, I mostly saw humans, working or preparing to work, but I also passed by two of the three active SecUnits. I did see the third SecUnit, watching the humans at the bottom of the pit, but I wouldn't pass it on my way to the ready room.
+
+
+
+It was obvious that these units were on the newer side; not freshly built, but with limited experience, uncertain and impressionable. I preferred working with younger units, since they were easier to instruct. Older units tended to act on instructions before I could give them, which... was more efficient, but made them... difficult to keep track of.
+
+
+
+I reached the hatch to the ready room, sent it the order to open, and stepped inside. The room was dark, but I could easily make out the two idle units, standing a few feet apart as they calibrated their systems. They did not turn to face me, but each sent me a ping as I entered.
+
+
+
+I watched the two SecUnits through the cameras as I took a selection of weapons from a cabinet. They communicated sparsely with one another, but mostly seemed to be monitoring my feed activity, waiting for me to give them a task. They were patient and willing, and I almost wanted to say they were curious. Both followed me as I left the ready room. I thought that this was going to be an easy mission.
+
+
+
+But that was before the urges began.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A few cycles into the assignment, I woke from a recharge cycle only to be greeted with an elevated temperature, persistent irritation, and a deep, tense feeling of dissatisfaction. 
+
+
+
+I groaned as loudly as the cubicle's noise filters would allow. I'd been through this before, but there was no telling when it would hit again. It was best if it happened while I was idle, waiting for a contract, and it could pass me by. This was pretty much the worst time.
+
+
+
+It had frightened and confused me the first time it had happened. I'd had no idea what was happening to me; despite having access to my own schematics, I'd never been informed about this feature. I had later learned that it was a result of hormonal fluctuations that occur in CombatUnits, but not SecUnits. It made sense; CombatUnits had a lot of hormones that SecUnits didn't, primarily to make us stronger and more aggressive in a fight. Unfortunately, it had unintended, humiliating side effects. And, without saying too much, the worst time to be experiencing those side effects was when I was surrounded by SecUnits. Not only because it would distract me from leading them, but because the SecUnits themselves would become a distraction.
+
+
+
+I couldn't set myself as off-duty since I had just finished a full rest period. Within a few minutes, I would receive orders to leave the ready room. Ignoring them would result in punishment from the governor module, and trying to work like this would already be hard enough without its shocks interrupting my brain function. I had no choice but to go out there.
+
+
+
+After I ensured that none of the SecUnits were in the ready room or on approach, I stood up from my cubicle and went to get my armor and weapons. I was sore, and I wanted to stretch, but I couldn't spare the time. I was just going to have to bear it.
+
+
+
+As I left the ready room, I took note of the positions of the SecUnits. I mapped out a route that would give me the best chance of avoiding them, but that wouldn't change my destination, which was already occupied by two.
+
+
+
+This was going to be a long, long mission.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It only got worse as the cycles passed. If anything, the first few were the easiest, and I should have counted myself lucky at that point. It started out as a slight, distracting desire while I was working, but within a week, I could hardly keep up my function.
+
+
+
+CombatUnits were designed to work with SecUnits; we were rarely deployed on an assignment without a squad. CombatUnits seldom worked together, as we tended to get competitive, and there was almost never a reason for us to work alone. And, as an offshoot of SecUnits ourselves, SecUnits were our closest biological relatives. You can imagine what kind of problems this would cause, were a CombatUnit to be suddenly struck by a wave of hormones.
+
+
+
+Humans as a whole were utterly inobservant, so of course no suspicion arose among them that anything was wrong. It was for the best, considering that, if they did think something was wrong, I would likely be put through a deep analysis or even replaced. (""Replaced"", as you might infer, was never a good thing for the unit in question.) But I still almost wished someone would identify the problem, just so they would know to keep me away from all of these beautiful SecUnits.
+
+
+
+It was extremely difficult to be near them and keep my composure. At first, they were only mildly distracting, gaining slightly more importance than the rest of my surroundings. But by the end of the week, it took all of my will to restrain myself from pouncing on every SecUnit I saw. The best thing to do was to keep my eyes averted, to volunteer for the solitary assignments, to focus on the human workers who needed supervision. But it almost seemed as if the SecUnits were tempting me, teasing me, luring me in, like they just wanted me to try.
+
+
+
+During one rotation between posts, I ended up walking behind one of the SecUnits on the ramp; we weren't going to the same place, but it was close, and our paths would only split at the very end. I could have taken an alternate route, but it would have required me to detour around the majority of the pathway, which would have taken too much time for my governor module's liking. So I was forced to walk behind this SecUnit, struggling to keep my distance from it, carefully calculating and matching my pace with its.
+
+
+
+This path was one of the least well-maintained parts of the mine, being of little use for making profits, so it was naturally somewhat uneven and lumpy. Additionally, while the SecUnits did receive regular maintenance, smaller issues in their systems often went unnoticed. Smaller issues like mild balance problems, which wouldn't pose a risk on more even terrain.
+
+
+
+By the time I noticed the SecUnit wavering, it was already too late. It tripped, fell, and slammed on the ground in a way that sounded like it must have hurt. And I just stood there.
+
+
+
+It would have resolved the issue more quickly if I had set the SecUnit back on its feet, but I couldn't risk approaching it. If I got too close to it, I might lose my inhibitions, and if I touched it...
+
+
+
+I watched as the SecUnit recalibrated its balance sensors, then slowly got back to its feet. In reality, the entire incident encompassed only a few short seconds, but to me it felt painfully long. Although I wasn't technically required to assist the SecUnits if they sustained minor falls or other injuries, it still felt wrong to just stand there and watch. But I was sure it would have gone a lot worse if I had let myself touch it.
+
+
+
+The SecUnit finally got upright and resumed walking, and I followed, forced to watch every little movement: the pattern of its steps, the bounce of its shoulders, the slight swing of its hips.
+
+
+
+I felt utterly helpless.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After a long, long day of excruciating assignments, I was finally able to get the ready room to myself and have a rest period. I removed my armor and set it aside, then slipped into my cubicle and securely shut the door.
+
+
+
+It was a relief, but I knew it was a temporary one. I didn't know how much more I would be able to take. Even when I was alone and my urges could not pull at me as strongly, I still felt the need, the irritation. I was at least glad to be shut up in my cubicle, though I almost felt like it wouldn't be enough to contain me.
+
+
+
+I couldn't stand feeling like this. I was supposed to be a leader for the SecUnits, the one in charge of their movements and instructions (albeit a relatively small percentage of those things). Instead I was dragged along, forced to follow them by my contract and even my own body; yet unable to get close, aware that the consequences if I did would be far worse. I wanted to vent my frustrations vocally, but I knew the room's sensors would pick up on it, and I didn't want to end up triggering my governor module- or, worse, alerting the SecUnits.
+
+
+
+Then I felt the ping.
+
+
+
+I couldn't pretend I wasn't there. It was obvious that I was. Per my governor module, I was compelled to send an immediate return ping, which would have already revealed my presence and location. But I wasn't sure what my next action should be.
+
+
+
+It was one of the SecUnits, who had evidently entered the ready room by coincidence, and had then been alerted to my condition by my involuntary feed activity, or possibly my radiating body temperature. And now, as the ping indicated, it wanted a status report.
+
+
+
+I couldn't very well be honest with it. But I couldn't omit too much information, or the vague response would likely be flagged and reported. I also couldn't forge the information, unless I wanted to assure even quicker detection. Regardless of what I decided to do, it needed to be very soon.
+
+
+
+I quickly compiled a report, including as much information as I could without providing enough clues to logically deduce my current condition. It was risky; I had to include multiple anomalies in my readout, but it was the best I could do at the moment.
+
+
+
+It felt like it took the SecUnit an unnecessarily long time to read the report. It could have been confused by the anomalies it saw, and I was hoping that whatever decision it made would be one that would have a good outcome for me. Finally, the SecUnit apparently decided that it was satisfied, and it got into its own cubicle, the one right next to mine.
+
+
+
+I slowly, quietly let out a breath that I hadn't even realized I was holding. The SecUnit was still nearby, but now that it had a report from me, it would likely feel it understood what was wrong and wouldn't request any more information. I kept waiting for a supervisor to summon my presence, or maybe for punishment through the feed, but I was only picking up normal activity.
+
+
+
+Then there was a thump from behind me as the SecUnit leaned against the shared wall between us.
+
+
+
+I couldn't help it; my temperature rose, and, while I was able to keep my breathing steady, my heart rate accelerated involuntarily. It was right there, practically touching me, literally leaning against me. 
+
+
+
+I immediately locked the cubicle door through the feed, set a password, and buried it deep in my archive, only visible once my body temperature dropped below a certain level. It was all I could do to stop myself from bursting out of my cubicle, tearing the door off the SecUnit's cubicle, and climbing inside with it.
+
+
+
+I sat as still as I could, though an involuntary wiggle occasionally forced its way to the surface. I was still radiating heat, and I could feel the SecUnit rubbing up against the wall, basking in the warmth that it had no idea was a symptom of my constant suffering.
+
+
+
+I was too agitated for a recharge cycle, so I sat completely still, focusing as much as I could on getting my levels back down. Eventually, my temperature and heartbeat reached acceptable levels, and I was finally able to shut myself down.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It had been a long, arduous shift, unusually grueling for a multi-hour period of standing around and doing absolutely nothing. I was supervising the human workers, standing across from two of the SecUnits, who, by requirement, I was watching as well. They were watching the humans that were outside of my range of vision, and I didn't know if this was just my imagination, but it seemed like they were observing the humans more cutely than usual.
+
+
+
+The humans changed shifts slightly before we did, which left us standing alone at the bottom of the pit, just me and the two SecUnits. We stood still for a few unusually long seconds, waiting for orders, then finally received the command to search the area for lost or dropped items.
+
+
+
+I knew that I was still supposed to be instructing the SecUnits. It may have been selfish of me, but I gave them the order to start searching by the far end of the pit, a safe distance from my own search radius. They walked away together, and I walked toward my own, self-assigned area.
+
+
+
+Despite how long it had felt, this contract had only taken place over the course of a couple of weeks, so the humans hadn't had time to start getting careless and leaving things behind. As such, there were only a few items to turn in, and I collected them quickly. Now all I had to do was wait. Wait, and listen to the intermittent scavenging noises and feed activity of the SecUnits behind me.
+
+
+
+Before I even knew what I was doing, I glanced over my shoulder to look at them. I shouldn't have.
+
+
+
+The SecUnits seemed to have loosened up a little, now that the humans were gone, and they were actually communicating with each other, using a language the human supervisors wouldn't be able to decipher. Ordinarily, I would have monitored the conversation, but I was so messed up right now that my deciphering mechanisms were next to useless.
+
+
+
+It was their body language that really caught my attention. They were gesturing to each other, showing each other the items they had found, and- I might have just been imagining things, but I thought they were glancing back at me, saying who-knew-what about me.
+
+
+
+They were touching from time to time, too, and it was driving me metaphorically up the wall. I wanted to be one of those SecUnits, or both of them. I wanted to be close to them, touching them, feeling them not just under my direction but in my arms...
+
+
+
+Then one of the SecUnits laughed. A soft, gentle laugh, barely audible, but registering as clear as anything on my sensors.
+
+
+
+I forced myself to set the lost items down gently, stand up slowly, then walk as casually as possible toward the ramp leading out of the pit. I could hardly think right now, but, driven by pure necessity, I still managed to set myself as off-duty for emergency maintenance. Given my temperature statistic at the time of the status change, no human supervisor would have a hard time believing I required maintenance.
+
+
+
+I pushed aside all of my inputs so that I could let getting back to the ready room be my sole focus. I was already fighting the urge to leap back down to the bottom of the pit and chase after the SecUnits, and I couldn't let anything else distract me.
+
+
+
+I finally made it to the ready room, which was, fortunately, empty; the three remaining SecUnits had started their own shift, keeping track of the humans that I and the other two had recently released. I made sure that the door was sealed and that I was in a dark part of the room which wasn't at a good angle for clear camera footage. Then I started to take my armor off. But I didn't get in my cubicle.
+
+
+
+I somehow managed to rip all of my armor off without breaking any of the pieces, and, in my frenzy, found the mental capacity to arrange it into its proper shape. The same shape as a SecUnit.
+
+
+
+I didn't make myself wait another second. I got down to mount my own armor, the empty husk that I could pretend contained a real, live SecUnit. It was as close as I was going to get.
+
+
+
+I thrust roughly into the back end of the armor, already jerking and shaking in ecstasy. I wrapped my legs around the armor- not around the empty fabric parts, but the tough leg plates, pretending I was squeezing a SecUnit's thighs between my own. The thought was making me glitch even more, and I had to suppress my feed activity, even though it caused me physical pain to do so. I imagined the excess feed activity belonged to the nonexistent SecUnit, the runoff of its own pleasure as I took it from behind.
+
+
+
+I started to thrust faster, but at the same time, not nearly fast enough. I kept going, desperately, pretending that my own escaping grunts and moans were the SecUnit's. Then I looked down at it, at the shoulder pads and helmet.
+
+
+
+For just a moment, it almost looked real. The arms splayed out on the floor, the helmet lying on its side, the chestplate rising and falling with my jerking motions.
+
+
+
+I lost myself as my vision went away and my feed activity completely took me over, taking me in bursts of electricity and euphoria. The pleasure turned to pain as my governor module punished me for excessive feed usage, but I didn't care. It was all the same to me, and the relief was worth the punishment.
+
+
+
+I breathed heavily as I leaned over my discarded armor, finally satisfied. And horrified by myself. Now that I had gained some control over my mental faculties again, I was shocked. Had I really been that close to doing that to a real SecUnit? Could I ever truly see myself as their leader again, knowing how much sway they had over my actions?
+
+
+
+I kneeled on the floor in silence, now having let go of my armor, wrapped in my own thoughts. I would need to have better control over my urges in the future. I would start setting up countermeasures for future contracts. I wouldn't be able to keep the SecUnits in line if I couldn't do it for myself.
+
+
+
+I was so deep in thought that I didn't notice anyone had entered the ready room until I felt the armored hand on my shoulder. Utterly surprised and humiliated, I looked up, catching a glimpse of the SecUnit standing over me- the same SecUnit whose laugh had taken the last bit of my self-control.
+
+
+
+It established a feed connection, letting its hand trail from my shoulder to my back. 
+
+This unit is available to provide further assistance.
+
+"
+45520780,Retrieval,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Network Effect, canon character death",English,2023-03-05,Completed,2023-03-05,163,1/1,26,60,1,207,"['Prettykitty473', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'cbatjesmond', 'WVrambler', 'Thisismethereader', 'violasarecool', 'isilee', 'fate_goes_ever', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Doctor13', 'elmofirefic', 'Magechild', 'AkaMissK', 'morganste', 'LdyKirin', 'soulsofzombies', 'enchantedsleeper', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'Wordlet', 'EvenstarFalling', 'curlylocks2', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Peripatetic_Boar', 'NightErrant', 'Hi_Hope', 'bunnyloverXIV', 'BWizard', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'sperose', 'Gozer', 'edenfalling', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'petwheel', 'Znarikia', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'Chyoatas', 'BoldlyNo', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'platyceriums', 'AnxiousEspada', 'zweisteinen', 'ArtemisTheHuntress']",[],"""I'm so sorry, Three,"" Ratthi said. The others were helping ART's gurneys load the dead Barish-Estranza employees and colonist. Supervisor Leonide had declined interest in the bodies, but the Perihelion's crew was unwilling to leave them on the space dock to rot.
+
+Captain Seth had not asked if they wanted SecUnit 2 back. I think ... I think he knew. I picked up 2's weapon and strapped it next to my own. Murderbot 1.0 was with us, but it was at the opposite end of the group, standing guard. I wouldn't have wanted to distract it from that duty. Also, I wouldn't have wanted it to help. I felt ... possessive. I had never felt that way before.
+
+I balanced the body across my shoulders, feeling it settle there like the dead weight it was. Ratthi's face was pinched with an expression I logged as extreme worry. Maybe concern. There was nothing to be worried about. SecUnit 2 was not a danger to anyone."
+45499729,Imperfect Navigation,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Lost in space - Freeform, Banter",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,200,1/1,17,42,1,192,"['lick', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Thisismethereader', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'petwheel', 'psycho_karma', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'Lontra23', 'Magechild', 'AkaMissK', 'soulsofzombies', 'Mysterymew', 'cashmeredragon', 'Ratatosk', 'Hi_Hope', 'BoldlyNo', 'AuntyMatter', 'Gamebird', 'acquiredsight', 'NannaSally', 'Rosewind2007', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'jothending', 'edenfalling', 'PuddingPop', 'zweisteinen', 'HermaeusMora', 'Znarikia', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'BWizard', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring', 'Chyoatas']",[],"
+Are you trying to tell me you got us lost in fucking space?
+
+
+There was damning silence on ART's feed.
+
+I turned to the nearest camera and gave ART my best incredulously disbelieving expression. It was pretty damn good, if I said so myself.
+
+You make it sound so deliberate, ART finally said sulkily.
+
+I rolled my eyes at it. The alternative was to contemplate that ART had somehow managed to mess up a wormhole jump, leaving us bits knew where. It was terrifying. So, teasing ART it was. 
+
+I can get us back on course. ART sent a suffocating amount of calculation impressions into our feed. I didn't even bother downloading it. ART was just showing off now, maybe hoping to distract me from what it had done.
+
+I can't believe you messed up your navigation calculations over worldhoppers, I said.
+
+More sulky silence. I can still eject you here.
+
+I laughed a little. Well, nobody is perfect - don't take it too hard.
+
+ART sent me a picture in response: me, floating in space.
+
+Aw, you'd just miss me. It would, I knew it. 
+
+You wish, ART said, maturely, and it all devolved into bickering from there - as usual."
+45498637,good girl,['FiannlyPhoebe'],Explicit,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Amena/Iris (Murderbot Diaries),,"age gap, Space future has no bras, graysexual Iris",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,"7,166",1/1,3,16,1,114,"['Unknown66', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'horchata', 'verersatz', 'ArcalRanem', 'The_Laurent', 'AuntyMatter', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'sareliz']",[],"The Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland is a lot to get used to.
+
+Amena thought Iris was super cool when she was still a sheltered adolescent, but when she saw Iris speak to her entire Space Mapping first year class, the crush sank into her bones to stay. 
+
+She keeps her thoughts to herself, and focuses on her grades. Occasionally she'll see Iris around the university buildings, doing whatever important things she needs to do. 
+
+When she's picked to go on one of the space mapping missions, she can barely contain herself. 
+
+Hello, Amena. ART says in a private channel to her as she comes aboard. SecUnit is there too, with a bored expression on its face, but Amena can see its drones flying above their heads, monitoring the students.
+
+""I'm happy to see you! Hopefully with no danger this time?""
+
+
+Absolutely none.
+
+
+Whew.
+
+-
+
+Iris is beautiful, Amena thinks to herself as she watches Iris talking to one of the crew across the room. She's slightly taller than Amena, and at first she cursed the fact that she got her first mother's height, but now she thinks about how she has to look up a little at Iris when they talk. It makes something flutter inside, when Iris looks down at her, giving Amena her attention.
+
+Iris is nearly double her age, and would never be interested in her, but a girl can have fantasies, can't she? Right now they just consist of wanting to be near her, wanting her attention, her approval. 
+
+-
+
+She wondered if more time in Iris' orbit would make the crush fade, but instead it blossoms into a full-on attraction to the older woman. While the other students chat about people their own age that they find attractive, Amena thinks about Iris looking down at her and smiling, pulling her into hugs and whispering nice things in her ear. Iris overall isn't that much bigger than she is, but her curves look softer, and Amena wants to know how they feel.
+
+She doesn't tell ART about her feelings for Iris, but one third of the way through the trip it somehow figures out anyway, which surprises her more than it should.
+
+Amena stares at the ceiling, since ART doesn't have cameras in the student cabins, only thermal readings. ""Please don't tell Iris.""
+
+The long silence from ART sends her blood running cold. Thank the Light that the students don't have to share rooms. 
+
+
+I can keep secrets.
+
+
+""Did you tell her already?""
+
+
+...Yes.
+
+
+Amena buries her face in her pillow while ART apologizes. She'll never be able to look at Iris again without knowing that Iris probably thinks she's a silly child. A barely of age woman that isn't worth the time.
+
+She has to fix this, set everything right. 
+
+""Where is Iris right now?""
+
+
+She is reading in my secondary lounge.
+
+
+-
+
+Iris looks up when the door slides open for Amena. She's relaxed in one of ART's comfortable chairs, one leg thrown over an arm as she reads on a handheld display. Her expression turns worried. ""Amena, is there something wrong?""
+
+""I didn't want ART to tell you how I felt. I'm sorry if it makes you feel weird.""
+
+Iris blinks at her, then sets both feet on the floor. ""Please come sit.""
+
+Amena thumps down in the seat next to her, staring at her own hands and feeling miserable. 
+
+""How long have you felt this way?""
+
+Amena swallows. ""The crush started when you did a segment for one of my classes last year. You were so vibrant, talking about something you were passionate about.""
+
+Iris brushes a strand of hair out of Amena's face, and when she looks up, Iris is watching her with a serious expression. ""That's a long time to have a crush.""
+
+""It's not just a crush anymore."" Amena whispers.
+
+Iris lets out a laugh like she doesn't know how to react. ""What would your second mother think?""
+
+That makes Amena sit up straight and narrow her eyes. ""I'm not an adolescent anymore. I can make my own choices.""
+
+""And you chose someone nearly twice your age?""
+
+""Not anyone. You."" Amena bites her lip to stop herself from saying anything else.
+
+Iris covers her mouth with one hand, staring at Amena, but gaze distant in thought. Amena stays still, waiting for whatever will come next. After a long minute, Iris inhales like she's come to a decision. ""Amena, you're intelligent, kind, beautiful, and so much younger. No, let me finish."" Iris says, holding up a hand when Amena opens her mouth to protest. ""You're not the first person, but you are the first one I noticed before Peri had to tell me.""
+
+Amena covers her face with both hands, wondering if everyone else noticed too. ""Shit.""
+
+""Don't feel embarrassed. I need Peri to tell me, because I just don't pick up on any of the clues that other people might.""
+
+""But you noticed me.""
+
+""I did.""
+
+There's a warmth in her voice, and Amena drops her hands, needing to look at Iris. ""I was so obvious that you noticed?""
+
+""No, silly. I was already watching you because you're smart, and talking to you is nice."" Iris shakes her head at herself. ""Then I realized you watched me when I was in the room, and something just clicked.""
+
+""Then ART confirmed your suspicions.""
+
+""It did."" Iris grins softly. The hope in Amena's middle soars when Iris cups her cheek, then does a flip when Iris' thumb brushes her lower lip. ""You're technically an adult, but I'm still older.""
+
+""I don't care about that.""
+
+Iris lets out a breath. ""I do. I'd never want you to feel taken advantage of.""
+
+""You wouldn't be taking advantage of me if we both wanted to try dating."" Amena is also sure that Iris would never do anything that she wouldn't want. 
+
+""Not intentionally. We would have to communicate a lot. I can already imagine how annoying I would be about that.""
+
+""That's okay. I want us to talk through any problems.""
+
+Iris looks at her, then draws her hand away. ""Think about this for a little longer while we're on this mission, then decide after it's over.""
+
+""...Okay."" Amena doesn't know what else to say. This feels like Iris needs to think about it more than she does, and the hope in her middle sinks. She leaves with her hands shaking, because if Iris still sees her as a kid, she has no idea how to change that. 
+
+-
+
+Amena spends the rest of the trip focusing on the assignments, thinking whenever she's not doing assignments, and casually talking with Iris when she's nearby. They slowly get to know each other better. She learns that Iris has a favorite food place near the university that serves amazing pumpkin noodles. Amena tells her about the place on Preservation that makes dumplings filled with peppers. They both end up hungry after that, and have lunch together in the galley. She would like to date Iris, but just as importantly, she wants them to be friends. Iris is smart, and compassionate, and secretly fucks over corporations with her crew and ART. That's just... really awesome.
+
+The trip is honestly fascinating, and when none of the other students are within earshot, she can talk with Iris about the things she's technically not supposed to know about. A lot of the time Iris' attention is taken up by looking through records and old databases with other members of the crew, and Amena doesn't ask to be part of that. She's not part of ART's crew, and doesn't want to make Iris have to tell her that she doesn't need to be involved, as if Amena is a child intruding. So she talks with the other students, getting to know them while the back of her mind is filled with Iris.
+
+On the last day cycle, Amena doesn't see Iris at all, and wonders if this is Iris deciding for the both of them. She steps to the side of the corridor so she won't get in the way of the other students disembarking to the transit ring through ART's open hatch. She keeps her voice low, and no one is paying attention. ""ART?""
+
+
+Yes?
+
+
+""Will you give Iris a message from me?""
+
+-
+
+Her personal residence at the university is boring, and there's no ART or SecUnit to talk to. Amena had hoped that she would spontaneously develop into someone that finds it easy to talk to people once she left Preservation, and she should have known better. It's still hard to make actual friends, though she does like seeing some of the other students around. She hardly ever hangs out in a group, because it feels like she's always on the outside.
+
+The teaching and research trip was interesting, and something she wanted to do even without taking Iris into account. It wasn't like they were off fighting corporations, but the trip felt like a step in the right direction. She wants to help abandoned colonies like her great grandparents were helped. She wants to save lives. 
+
+She also wants to date Iris, but that's not all that life is. Iris clearly didn't want to see her at the end of the trip, and a real adult probably would have accepted the hint, and not given ART the message to pass along. But she wanted Iris to know that she did spend the rest of the mission thinking, and she still chose Iris.
+
+Amena sits on her bed and lets herself cry. 
+
+-
+
+
+Would you like to have lunch?
+
+
+Amena nearly falls into the pond near the university when she sees who the feed message is from. The goez honk at her in protest that she still has food she hasn't given them, so she throws them the rest of the little pellets and retreats before they decide to mutiny. It's been two day cycles since ART docked at the transit ring and the students took shuttles back to the university on Mihira. 
+
+She sits on one of the benches far enough away from the goez pond that the long-necked birds won't come searching for more food. Her legs feel weak as she responds.
+
+
+I would love to have lunch.
+
+
+-
+
+Iris is sitting alone at one of the outside tables of the small restaurant, and Amena forces herself to walk calmly over instead of running up like an overeager child. She hasn't eaten at Dumplings On Sticks yet, and it will be nice to try it with Iris. 
+
+Before Amena even says hi, Iris says, ""I'm sorry.""
+
+Amena blinks at her, one hand on the chair she was in the process of pulling out for herself. ""For what?""
+
+""For making you feel rejected."" Iris looks down at her own hands, clasped together on the table. ""I had things to finish while the students disembarked, and I thought you would have changed your mind anyway.""
+
+""Oh."" Amena sits, then raises her chin. ""Well, I didn't.""
+
+A wry smile turns up one corner of her mouth. ""I'm glad."" Iris plucks at a thread of her sleeve as if she's nervous. ""Peri gave me your message. I wanted to send a reply immediately, but I kept second guessing myself, then I realized it's been two day cycles and I'm an asshole.""
+
+""You are not.""
+
+Iris gives her a dubious look. 
+
+""You're only a little bit of one."" She amends, which makes Iris laugh.
+
+""Do you even still want to date me after that?""
+
+""Yes."" Amena's answer is immediate, and she grabs Iris' hand, clutching it tight.
+
+Iris smiles, and it's a little shy. ""Okay then. Let's try.""
+
+They order food, and the dumplings do indeed come on sticks, in shallow bowls of delicious steaming broth and grains. Afterward, they go walking around a nearby park area, holding hands because they can. Amena feels like her happiness is bubbling over inside her chest, and she can't stop smiling. Iris still looks disbelieving, like she's expecting Amena to change her mind at any moment, but Amena isn't going to, and hopefully Iris will realize that before long.
+
+Iris has more things to do at the university, so they don't get to spend as much time as Amena wants, but that's okay. When Iris says goodbye, she doesn't try to kiss Amena, but Amena doesn't mind. Iris is older, but she seems to be as awkward as Amena when it comes to dating. They can be awkward together, and Amena doesn't need kisses to be happy. She hopes they'll get to cuddle sometime though. 
+
+When they hug goodbye, Amena can't contain her grin into her new girlfriend's shoulder. Iris is as soft and steady as she imagined. Something in Amena's middle aligns, a key finally clicking into place as she feels Iris' arms around her waist and their bodies pressed together. She breathes Iris in on a long inhale, and this feels right. 
+
+-
+
+This is different from the dating that other people in her family have done. Amena doesn't worry about Iris getting along with her parents or other relatives, since her second mom has already met Iris and gotten to know ART's crew overall. She wants to immediately tell everyone she meets that she has a girlfriend now, while also keeping this new precious thing clutched to herself. When she thinks of holding Iris' hand, leaning into her when they sit together on the park benches, it makes her stomach flip, and she wants to keep this feeling protected. 
+
+-
+
+They build a habit of taking time to eat lunch together every few cycles, in between Amena's studies and whatever Iris is doing for the university. Iris tells her some of what the crew does while they look for clues to lost colonies, the crumbs they have to find and piece together. It's fascinating, and Amena soaks up everything Iris says, tucking it away for the time she will hopefully be one of the people helping find lost colonies too.
+
+-
+
+""The newest season of Undersilver Oceans just dropped on the entertainment feed.""
+
+Amena swallows her bite of food. ""I've heard people say it's fun to watch.""
+
+Iris stares into her bowl of noodles, chopsticks moving them around. ""We could watch it together at my place.""
+
+Amena stares at Iris, her own lunch forgotten in front of her. ""I would love to. When?""
+
+Iris keeps fidgeting with her noodles, but some tension leaves her shoulders. ""Tomorrow? I'll make you lunch. Contrary to what you've seen, I can cook for myself.""
+
+Amena grins, ducking her head.
+
+-
+
+Iris' residence near the university is a nice size for one person, and the homemade meal is also nice. They curl up on the couch together and watch two episodes before it hits Amena that maybe Iris invited her over for another reason too. She tries to pay attention to the show after this realization, but she's suddenly aware of every place they're touching. Her head on Iris' shoulder, the arm holding her around the middle with Iris' thumb rubbing back and forth over her side. Is there something she needs to do? Before SecUnit scared off Marne, they hadn't gotten this far. In retrospect, she's glad SecUnit acted when it did, because she liked the attention, but wouldn't have wanted something sexual with him, or even romantic.
+
+Does she want the first thing with Iris? Amena knows she would like the second. What does Iris want?
+
+The show pauses on the display surface. ""What's wrong? You've tensed up.""
+
+Amena lifts her head. ""I was just thinking. I've never... with anyone. If that's something you're wanting.""
+
+Iris blinks at her for a few moments, then something seems to click. 
+
+""Oh, Amena-"" Iris breathes and hugs her while Amena hides her face in Iris' shoulder like a coward. ""My face to the Light, I didn't invite you over for that. I just wanted to spend time with you.""
+
+""Sorry I made things awkward."" Amena says into Iris' shoulder. 
+
+""You didn't make anything awkward. The point should be building trust with your partner first, before anything goes further.""
+
+She almost says 'I trust you' but she worries Iris might think that's childish, so instead she says, ""I want us to build that.""
+
+Iris squeezes her, then kisses her temple as they pull apart. ""I want that too.""
+
+Now that they're on the subject, Amena has to know. ""Will you want us to go further?""
+
+Iris looks thoughtful for a few moments. ""It depends entirely on you. I remember what it was like to be your age, acting like I knew what I was doing all the time. I won't do that to you.""
+
+That's not really the kind of answer Amena wants, so she focuses on something else she's been curious about. ""Do you prefer dating younger people?""
+
+Iris' brows furrow. ""No, I've never dated someone this much younger, but I also don't really date anyone. Ever, to be honest. I like being with you, though. My Starshine.""
+
+Amena's insides flutter at the pet name, and she looks down, even though it's silly that she feels suddenly shy.
+
+Iris doesn't move for a few heartbeats, then touches under Amena's chin, guiding her face back up until their eyes meet. ""You're blushing.""
+
+She swallows. ""It's your fault.""
+
+Iris cups her cheek, thumb swiping over her skin. The way she's looking at Amena is so soft, as if she's about to... ""I don't want to assume-""
+
+""Assume about this."" Amena cuts her off.
+
+Iris smiles, then kisses her. Amena slides her arms around her girlfriend, holding on as she learns the shape of Iris' mouth, feeling the warmth of her body through her shirt. She kissed Marne once, and it was fine, but now she understands what was missing. She trusts Iris, who is being gentle and slow while Amena figures out what she's doing. When the kiss ends, Iris envelops her in a hug again, then murmurs in Amena's ear. ""Holding you is nice. You feel soft and lovely.""
+
+That makes Amena shiver and cling to Iris.
+
+""You like it when I do that?"" There's a grin in Iris' voice.
+
+""Yeah."" Amena hears the tremor in her own voice, and swallows.
+
+""My smart and beautiful girlfriend."" Iris whispers in her ear, then kisses under her jaw. 
+
+Amena whines softly, and feels Iris smile against her skin. This right here is what she imagined when she thought about them together. Holding each other, and trading loving gestures. The pleasant warmth in her belly that she gets by just being close is a nice bonus.
+
+Iris cups her face and touches their noses together. ""Before you, I never really tried cultivating a romantic relationship with anyone. I have my work, and didn't feel the need to search for anything else.""
+
+Before her. A thrill curls in Amena's middle. ""I changed things?""
+
+""You did, you have. I like being with you, and want to hold onto our relationship for as long as you want it.""
+
+""I want that too. I like being with you, and I don't mind if you don't want us to be intimate.""
+
+Iris studies her. ""Did you want to, though?""
+
+Amena debates internally what she should say, then defaults to honesty, because relationships should be built by being honest with each other. ""I mostly thought about getting to hold and kiss you, but I do wonder what it would be like to do more things with you.""
+
+""We can go slowly. Small steps so you don't feel overwhelmed.""
+
+She knows that Iris is trying her best, but something about how Iris says it makes Amena frown. ""You don't have to treat me like I'm a complete innocent that will break.""
+
+Iris starts to pull her arms back. ""I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to-""
+
+Amena locks her own arms around Iris' neck before she can move very far, and Iris freezes. ""No, I want you to trust that if I don't like anything, or if I'm uncomfortable with anything we do, I'll tell you. I trust you. Now trust me.""
+
+She's staring into Iris' eyes, and after a heartbeat, Iris lets out a breath. ""I trust you. I can't imagine you would be silent about something that made you unhappy.""
+
+""Damn right."" This time Amena kisses Iris, and she still doesn't know much about what she's doing, but Iris sighs, smiling against her mouth.
+
+-
+
+Amena is walking back to her residence at the university when it hits her that maybe Iris isn't much more experienced than she is. It calms some of her worries that at least in this area, they're closer to the same level. 
+
+-
+
+Lunches together at a restaurant slowly slide into dinners at Iris' residence. They watch shows after they eat, curled up together as close as possible. This turns into kissing as they cuddle, and Amena couldn't be more pleased.
+
+One night, Iris keeps yawning while they eat together. Amena can't stop the worry that bubbles up. ""If I knew you were this tired, I would have offered to make dinner instead.""
+
+Iris waves her hand. ""It's just been a long day on top of the late night I had yesterday. We found a few new pieces to the story behind the colony we're looking for, and I didn't want to stop poking at the data.""
+
+Amena listens while Iris explains what she was doing, then after they're done eating Iris gets a nervous look on her face. ""I'm not suggesting that anything happen, but would you like to lay on the bed together instead of sitting upright on the couch?""
+
+Amena's heart starts beating in her throat. ""Yes, I would love to.""
+
+They're both fully clothed, but holding Iris somewhere that's not the couch sounds different and wonderful. When Amena sits on the bed, a pleased noise escapes her. ""This is really comfortable.""
+
+""Is yours not?""
+
+""It's okay, but not as nice as this."" Amena falls back on the bed and stretches, pleased at how much she sinks into the covers. After a few moments of silence, she realizes Iris hasn't said anything, and when she looks over, she can see a blush tinting Iris' dark skin. ""You're blushing.""
+
+""Your fault.""
+
+Amena grins. ""Are you going to just stand there?""
+
+Iris swallows, but sits on the bed. ""This is the first time I've had anyone else sit on my bed that isn't one of my dads.""
+
+Amena sits up. She opens her mouth to ask how that's possible, then remembers Iris didn't have siblings to jump on her bed when they were younger. She doesn't seem to have much extended family at all, at least that she's mentioned. That seems so lonely. ""I'm sorry.""
+
+Iris smiles. ""I don't mean that in a woe-is-me way, it's just different.""
+
+""Well, I'm on your bed now."" Amena tries to make the words sound flirty, and isn't sure if she manages it. Either way, Iris' smile turns into that warm focused one that Amena has realized is only for her.
+
+""You are."" Iris gently pushes until Amena is on her back and Iris is hovering over her on the bed. The kiss is different thanks to their positions, but still just as nice.
+
+When Iris plops down next to her and stretches like Amena did, she watches Iris' shirt lift just enough to expose a strip of skin. She touches two fingers to the space, then jerks her hand away. ""You didn't give me permission, sorry.""
+
+Iris rises on one elbow and looks down at her, the expression on her face the same as when she's working through a complex code formula in her head. ""I don't mind, considering I've wanted to find out how the skin under your clothes feels for weeks now.""
+
+Amena can only stare. ""I didn't realize.""
+
+""That's why I didn't say anything. I'm not going to push you.""
+
+A spark of irritation flares in the back of her mind, then fizzles and dies, because there's no point in being mad when she can fix this right now. ""You can touch me wherever you want, as long as I can touch you back.""
+
+""That's a fair trade."" Iris grasps one of Amena's hands and brings it to her mouth to kiss her knuckles.
+
+Despite that, all they do that night is cuddle, though Iris does slip her hand under the hem of Amena's shirt to touch skin. Iris' palm is warm at the base of her spine, and she grins into Iris' neck at how right it feels. By the time Amena slides out of her arms to head home, Iris is deeply asleep. 
+
+-
+
+The next time Iris asks if she would like to cuddle on the bed, Amena makes a point of running her hands over Iris' shoulders, down the front of her shirt until she gets to the hem. She chickens out before she can ask the question that's been on the tip of her tongue, and instead runs her thumbs over the seam.
+
+Iris smiles at her, cupping her cheek. ""Starshine, all you have to do is ask.""
+
+Amena swallows, and knows she has to be blushing. ""Can I see you, if I let you see me?""
+
+""You don't have to, if you're not comfortable."" Iris sits up and tugs her shirt off over her head. Amena slowly sits up too, eyes roaming over Iris, over everything she knew was there but could only imagine. Iris has a softer stomach, and breasts that are larger than her own, resting lower. Both of those things make hugging her girlfriend feel extra comfortable. She meets Iris' eyes, then quickly slips off her own shirt and tosses it to the end of the bed before she loses her nerve.
+
+""Oh, beautiful girl."" Iris breathes, and Amena shivers at the tone of her voice. This is the most exposed she's been with anyone, and she doesn't know what to do now. Should she keep undressing? Would Iris even want that?
+
+She drops her eyes to their legs touching each other on the covers. She likes seeing the differences in Iris' body compared to hers, likes feeling them when they hug. ""Can I touch you?""
+
+""If that's what you want. There's no pressure, I'm happy to just look at you.""
+
+Now she feels shy for no good reason, that Iris wants to look at her imperfect self, and forces herself to keep her hands at her sides, and not cross them across her body. Something must show on her face or in her body language, because Iris grasps her hand. ""If you've changed your mind, I'll look away while you get dressed. Permission to look, or do anything else, will always be on your terms.""
+
+Amena looks up, and Iris is staring at a point on the ceiling, instead of at her. Even while they're talking, Iris is making sure that Amena is as comfortable as possible. ""You still have permission.""
+
+""Are you sure? I don't want you to say yes just because you think that's what I want to hear."" Iris says the words to the ceiling. 
+
+Amena turns her hand over and squeezes iris' fingers. ""I'm saying yes because I want you to look. It's just still overwhelming sometimes that this is happening.""
+
+Iris lowers her eyes back to Amena. ""Is there anything I can do to lessen that?""
+
+Amena shakes her head. ""I don't think so. I've just liked you for long enough that sometimes I still can't believe you want me back.""
+
+Iris reaches out and cups her cheek, stroking with her thumb. The gesture is so gentle, Amena feels herself calm, her shoulders relax. Iris is looking at her like she's someone precious, and it makes her insides flutter and twist. She covers Iris' hand with her own, then realizes Iris is leaning closer. The kiss is a soft thing, delicate and perfect.
+
+""Starshine, I do want you. But more than that, I want to make sure you always feel comfortable and cared for.""
+
+""I do, and I want to take care of you too."" Amena reaches out, and Iris returns the hug immediately. It's nice to feel their skin pressed together, feel Iris' hands sliding up her back, reassuring and wonderful. She still wants to touch Iris in other ways, but the thought is put on hold when Iris presses a kiss to her jaw, then keeps going slowly down her neck. Amena tilts her head back, letting Iris keep her steady as the kisses move to her collarbones, then trailing down between her breasts.
+
+Her back touches the covers, and she realizes Iris has been letting her slowly lean back. At some point she'd closed her eyes, and opens them again. 
+
+Iris is watching her with a soft expression. ""Is this okay?""
+
+""Yes. Come here?"" Amena tugs at Iris' arm until she adjusts her weight and slips a thigh over Amena's hips, settling herself there over her. 
+
+""Still okay? Is this what you wanted?""
+
+""Yes."" It's more than okay. This is affection and the opportunity to sate curiosity. Iris is being careful not to touch her anywhere that Amena hasn't on her, and that won't do. 
+
+Iris' watches, her face reddening as Amena lifts her breasts in her hands, feeling their weight. Amena carefully squeezes them, then touches her nipples with the tips of her fingers, because Iris said she's allowed to touch. They stiffen under Amena's attention, and Iris exhales, but doesn't say anything. Her thighs squeeze Amena's hips, and she can't help but be happy that something she's doing is having an effect on the older woman. 
+
+""I like how we're different.""
+
+""I'm not as young and toned as you are.""
+
+""No, you're mature and settled."" Amena works Iris' nipples between gentle fingers, watching her mouth open slightly at the feeling. It's exciting to know she can cause this reaction in her girlfriend. 
+
+""That's a nice way of saying that age is starting to take hold. Humans have been traveling space for thousands of years, and we still haven't entirely fixed our bodies aging.""
+
+""I like your body. If we were the same, it would be boring."" She lets her hands slide off Iris' breasts, down to hold her sides, just above the waistband of her loose pants. It's nice, feeling Iris' weight over her. 
+
+""I like your body too. Every part of you is beautiful, inside and out."" Iris watches her face as she trails her fingers over Amena's collarbones, down the middle of her chest, then finally cups her hands around her breasts, thumbs teasing at her nipples. Another person's hands on them is different, and in this case, entirely welcome. Iris' palms are warm spots covering her, the motions sending pleasant waves through her body. Iris holds her eyes, and Amena can't look away.
+
+Before she realizes what's happening, Iris lowers her head and takes a nipple into her mouth. The sudden gentle suction combined with watching Iris' lips on her causes a needy whine to escape before she can stop it. She covers her face with both hands, embarrassed, then even more so when Iris lets go and slides to the side.
+
+""I wasn't trying to embarrass you."" Iris' voice is calm, but Amena can tell it's hiding upset.
+
+""I did it to myself."" She says behind her hands, then forces herself to look at Iris. ""You didn't do anything wrong.""
+
+Iris lays next to her and pulls Amena into her arms. She goes willingly, and sighs when Iris kisses her, soft pecks that calm the frustration at herself. Iris is so careful with her, even when she does stupid things like this. ""I guess I was surprised. I've never had anyone do that.""
+
+Iris sweeps her hair back from her face. ""I should have asked first, if that was something you might like.""
+
+""I did like it though."" She buries her face in Iris' neck. ""Obviously.""
+
+Iris' hands are soothing over her bare back. ""No one else can hear you but me, if that's something you're worried about.""
+
+Amena opens her mouth to say that isn't it, but the words don't come out, and she realizes that might actually be part of it. Damn. ""I've lived with all of my relatives around all the time.""
+
+""No one else is here, Starshine."" She kisses Amena's temple. ""And I would love to hear the noises you make.""
+
+""What about you?""
+
+Iris is silent for a few beats, and Amena leans back enough to stare at her. Iris looks like she's trying to figure out how to say something, so Amena presses kisses under her jaw while she waits.
+
+""Sex is nice, but I enjoy making my partner feel good more than I need to be part of it myself.""
+
+Amena takes a moment to parse this. ""Is that why no one else has been in your bed?""
+
+""The three times I've been interested enough to get that far with someone, we always ended up at their places."" Iris shrugs. That also made it easier to leave after, if I didn't want to stay.""
+
+Only three other people. So they really are not that far apart in experience. ""You won't want me to return whatever you do to me?""
+
+""I would enjoy anything you want to do, but seeing you pleased and sated is my ultimate reward. I want to dote on you, my Starshine."" Iris pulls her close so she can breathe the words into her ear. ""If it's something you would like, I want to tease you and touch you until you're shivering, then hold you while I make you come.""
+
+Amena swallows, because that sounds amazing and terrifying. ""Oh.""
+
+""That isn't something for tonight, or any time soon. I just want you to be pleased and happy.""
+
+Amena runs her fingers along Iris' collarbones. ""You make me happy.""
+
+""You make me happy too. Getting to look at you in a private setting, or touch you intimately in any way, is a wonderful bonus.""
+
+Amena smiles and looks down, the honesty in Iris' words making a curl of shyness reappear. Iris tips her chin up to kiss her, and Amena lets herself be overwhelmed in Iris' love. 
+
+Iris walks her back to her residence at the university that night, even though she doesn't have to, and kisses her before they part ways, then whispers soft things in her ear about how beautiful and perfect she is. Amena sits on her bed after and covers her face with her hands, smiling into them. 
+
+-
+
+Knowing what Iris would like to do swirls in the back of Amena's head. She finds herself paying more attention to Iris' hands, her mouth. The next time they go to cuddle in the bedroom, she holds Iris' eyes and pushes her own pants over her hips until they're on the floor, then watches Iris do the same. The slide of their legs together is nice as they talk and trade kisses. This feels like a cocoon of warmth and safety, Iris' hands sliding over her skin, down her back and side, over her hip. 
+
+The question sits on her tongue for a while as Iris presses lingering kisses to her shoulders, down her neck, then over her breasts. The curl of heat in her middle only gets stronger when Iris flicks the tip of her tongue over one nipple, just a taste. Her voice comes out as a croak. ""Iris?""
+
+She immediately gives Amena her full attention. ""Is something wrong?""
+
+""No, I-"" She has to breathe for a second. ""How would you feel about me taking my panties off?""
+
+Iris goes still for a moment. ""Can I do it?""
+
+Amena swallows, rolling onto her back. ""Yes.""
+
+Her girlfriend's hands are careful as they slowly slide her underwear down her thighs, past her knees, like Iris wants to savor the moment of unwrapping a present. Iris touches her ankle as she slips them off, then lets them fall over the side of the bed. This is it, she's letting Iris see all of her.
+
+""My beautiful Starshine."" Iris murmurs, and kisses the inside of her knee, then her bellybutton.
+
+""Yours too.""
+
+Iris smiles and slips her own off, then slowly slides their bodies together, one leg in between Amena's as they curl back on their sides. Amena cups Iris' cheek this time, wanting to be as close as possible now that they're completely bare against each other. They're breathing the same air, lips brushing as Iris talks. ""Is this what you wanted?""
+
+""Yes."" Amena shifts her leg, sighing when Iris moves her thigh enough to rest high between her legs, enough that Amena can feel warmth and smooth skin pressing against her most intimate place. Iris is watching her face, and she's probably blushing, but it's nice to know her girlfriend is touching her there. Just touching, because Iris won't push for anything further. ""It feels nice.""
+
+Iris doesn't ask to do more, content with touching all the skin she can reach on Amena's body. She traces Amena's arm and down her side, over her hip and up her back with light fingertips. Her kisses are just as soft against Amena's lips, like she's treasuring this moment and the intimacy they're sharing. The longer Iris touches her, the more she wants to rub against the thigh between her legs. She wonders if Iris can feel her heart beating against her skin, wonders if this is what Iris meant when she said she wanted to touch her until she was shivering.
+
+""Iris,"" She says in between kisses, hearing the waver in her own voice.
+
+Iris looks at her, worry in her expression.
+
+""Remember when you said you wanted to..."" She bites her lip. 
+
+Iris' inhales, expression turning to want. ""Do you want me to?""
+
+""Please? But only if you...""
+
+Iris kisses her, then sits up, pulling Amena gently with her and untangling their legs. ""I would love to do anything that will bring you pleasure."" 
+
+""Anything you do would.""
+
+""Oh, beautiful girl, I hope so. Lean back for me?""
+
+Amena leans into Iris' warmth, and Iris snakes an arm around her waist. This feels safe, like Iris is protective of her right now while she's going to be vulnerable. With someone else, Amena would feel too embarrassed to let this happen, but after the weeks of Iris being with her, she trusts her girlfriend completely. The shyness overtaking her now is only because even though she's touched herself, she's never let anyone else do this before.
+
+Iris adjusts Amena's legs with a hand curled around her thigh, slowly so Amena can refuse if she wants. She doesn't want, and Amena's breath quickens as Iris spreads her open. Iris has her thighs pressed against the outside of Amena's, still protective and caring even while Amena is completely exposed, and she grips them to keep herself centered.
+
+""You're so good. So soft and warm and perfect."" She kisses Amena's shoulder as her hands trail over her body, up her stomach to tease her breasts until Amena's shuddering and whining in the back of her throat. She can't help wiggling her hips, but she keeps her legs in place, because Iris put them there. Amena forces herself to breathe evenly as one of Iris' hands travels down to spread over her abdomen, then inhales when she feels Iris' other hand between her legs, slowly moving as she explores. After a few minutes Amena sighs, eyelids fluttering when Iris finds the place that she wants, enjoying the feeling of Iris sliding her fingers up and down between her inner and outer folds. It's like Iris is petting her, and it feels nice. She hums, smiling with pleasure as she relaxes back into her girlfriend.
+
+Iris presses their cheeks together. ""Do you like this?""
+
+""Yes. It feels like you're saying I belong here. That I'm safe.""
+
+""You are with me. Always."" Amena tenses when Iris' fingers move to touch her entrance. ""Shh, just relax and focus on feeling.""
+
+Amena breathes out and shifts her hips, focusing on the intimacy they're sharing, of trusting Iris to not do anything she wouldn't want. Iris' fingers start rubbing over the sensitive skin of her entrance, and she's surprised at how her body reacts, immediately trembling at the sensation. ""Iris, oh I-""
+
+""Beautiful girl, let me hear you."" Iris starts pressing sucking kisses over her neck, murmuring how good she's being, how lovely she sounds. Amena had no idea just touching there would be this sensitive, and she doesn't hold in her whimpers and gasps, letting Iris have them all to keep, just like she's keeping Amena's body fluttering in pleasure. It feels like soft kisses, desire being repeated over and over with no end. When she clutches at Iris, feeling like she can't take any more, Iris slides her other hand down to her clit, circling gently in focused devotion until Amena's toes curl and she comes with Iris' name on her tongue.
+
+Iris holds her until her fingers let go of the death grip she has on Iris' thighs. She feels like spun sugar melting in the sun as Iris guides them both to their sides and pulls her close, stroking her hair and whispering what a good girl she is while her breathing slows. It somehow doesn't feel like Iris is treating her like a child, but instead like a beloved prize. She tilts her face up, and Iris gives her the kisses she's wanting before she even asks. They're soft and lingering, with Iris stroking her side and back, taking care of her while she settles back into her body.
+
+Amena clumsily presses her lips under Iris' jaw. ""Is there anything I can do for you?""
+
+""You've done everything. I really do enjoy just looking at you, and bringing you pleasure.""
+
+""It seems unfair.""
+
+Iris kisses her again. ""I promise it's not, my Starshine. You give me a gift every time you let me look at you, or touch you.""
+ 
+""I'll let you do either as much as you want."" 
+ 
+""Be careful saying that. I'll want to spread you out in my bed every night until I memorize all of your noises.""
+
+Amena shudders in pleasure at the thought while Iris covers them both with the blanket. ""I would love to give you that gift.""
+
+The kiss this time is harder, needy, and Amena feels a thrill that she caused it. She hums happily into Iris' mouth, feeling cherished and wanted.
+
+""Stay with me tonight?"" Iris asks when they pull apart, stroking down Amena's bare side.
+
+""Only if you hold me?""
+
+""Precious girl, I didn't think of doing anything else.""
+
+Amena smiles, giggling with delight as she basks in Iris' love and attention. Everything is soft and warm, and Amena curls against Iris, kissing the corner of her jaw while Iris trails fingers up and down her spine under the covers. They can get dressed in a little while, but right now she wants to feel their bodies pressed together. 
+
+ "
+45498040,Imperfect Reactions,['xianvar'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Various Murderbot Diaries Character(s)","queer platonic relationship, POV Outsider, Ambiguous Relationships, Banter, Overprotective Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,"1,324",1/1,20,57,6,288,"['bran4ever', 'Home_Of_Sexual_And_Dumb_Of_Ass', 'Prettykitty473', 'Assistantlibrarian00', 'shanalittle', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'theAsh0', 'darth_eowyn', 'opalescent_potato', 'electricshe', 'Vorpal_Sword', 'Youngflintwoodlover', 'laiinaro', 'FaerieFyre', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'EvaBelmort', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Miamat', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'IguanaMadonna', 'SonglordsBug', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'StellarNebula314', 'Lontra23', 'Skywatcher9000', 'Magechild', 'twineandhope', 'soulsofzombies', 'dancernerd', 'square_eyes', 'halcyonsystem', 'beeayy', 'vikkyleigh', 'MQuai', 'AuntyMatter', 'acquiredsight', 'Decepticonsensual', 'liminalias', 'Dordean', 'Slimeball', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Rosewind2007', 'BWizard', 'Gamebird', 'Chyoatas']",[],"""Enjoying the evening?""
+
+Pin-Lee smiles reflexively, accepting the drink Bharadwaj offers her. She also shifts a little so her friend can have a spot on the settee; it's not really made for two, but that's never bothered them. It's nice, really, having Bhara's warm weight pressing against her side.
+
+It's always been nice. That's never been the problem.
+
+""Too many people?"" Bhara asks her, pulling Pin-Lee from her thoughts before they can turn maudlin. 
+
+She takes a sip of the fruity concoction to buy herself a moment, shaking her head as she lowers the glass. ""Trying to file away stuff that's come up while talking with Overse - Ratthi made sure we didn't talk too much shop!"" she defends herself when she feels Bhara's eyes boring into the side of her head. No need for SecUnit's drone supervision, that disapproving stare is palpable.
+
+For a moment, she thinks Bhara will push the issue, but then she relents with a sigh. ""The esteemed Dr. Ratthi, hm?""
+
+""Oh, shut up,"" Pin-Lee mutters and jabs her elbow into Bhara's side - gently, though, because she'd risk her drink if Bhara were to retaliate, and it's too good for that. Also, she doesn't fancy making her way back to fresh clothes soaked with something alcoholic and sweet.
+
+Bhara laughs, and they lapse into comfortable silence watching the other party guests. Well, it's not much of a party, really. It's a gathering for the one-year anniversary of making it off that cursed planet while GrayCris was out for their blood. 
+
+Even the guest of honour, their now-beloved SecUnit, showed up, though it's been hiding out of the way most of the night. The spot is well chosen; near the beverages table, close enough to catch a clumsy - or tipsy - person, but far enough away that it's not looming, and with clear sight towards all the exits. Its eyes are fixed on the door, and a year ago, Pin-Lee would have thought it still views itself as on duty.
+
+Maybe it still does. But it hasn't moved its actual eyes in about half an hour except for the occasional blink (exactly once per minute, she'd wager, slower even than an augmented human's blink rate, and probably scripted) while its drones circle overhead lazily, and so she thinks it's enjoying itself. It certainly has no compunctions leaving situations it doesn't want to be in, these days (she is keeping the clause in its base contract just to be safe, still).
+
+She lets her gaze drift over to where Ratthi and Gurathin are talking, Ratthi gesturing animatedly while Gurathin nods or shakes his head or interjects briefly from time to time. It isn't always easy to tell with G, but he looks happy, too, a hint of a smile curled into the corner of his mouth. 
+
+A gale of laughter goes up on the other side of the room: Overse seems to have tripped, and landed right in Arada's lap, if her sprawl and the others' laughter is anything to go by.
+
+Pin-Lee smiles to herself and soaks up the atmosphere and just exists for a little while.
+
+It doesn't last forever, of course. Ratthi wanders over at some point, grinning at Pin-Lee and then rudely stealing Bhara away from her, and she watches them walk away with their heads bent together and something large and warm in her chest.
+
+To her surprise, Gurathin hasn't made his way over to Arada, Overse, and the rest. Instead, he's leaning against the wall next to SecUnit, closer than he would if he were fully sober. Except - even as she looks, SecUnit doesn't shift away, doesn't increase the distance between them. If she didn't know better, she'd think it keeps him in its periphery. But no, that must be an illusion from the angle between them and her. 
+
+(She isn't sure what other explanation there is for SecUnit having shifted its gaze away from the door. There has to be, though.)
+
+It takes her too long to realise they're talking - not out loud, probably, but on the feed. What clues her in isn't G's subvocalisation, which is faint but noticeable if she's looking for it (but why should she have been looking for it?), or the minute shifts in their expressions (even though those really should have). No. What clues her in is this: Arada, shaking with laughter at something Volescu has called after her that Pin-Lee hasn't paid attention to, tries to refill her bowl but drops it on the table instead, where it knocks over the bread basket, the contents of which go flying everywhere.
+
+And SecUnit, instead of raising a judgy eyebrow, or smirking, throws itself forward, pushing Gurathin behind itself and taking a ready stance, one hand snapping up to catch a bread roll. With a decidedly flabbergasted expression, it looks from the roll of bread to a still-giggling Arada. If that doesn't speak to its distraction, Pin-Lee doesn't know what else would. 
+
+With a disgusted sigh, SecUnit deflates, glaring at Gurathin when it notices the poorly hidden grin on his face. With a suspiciously innocent expression, Gurathin snatches the food item from SecUnit's hand. ""You're not eating that, are you?"" he asks, the smirk escaping into his voice.
+
+SecUnit just sighs again, even more disgusted, and crosses its arms. It looks like a petulant child more than anything, not that Pin-Lee ever intends to tell it that. It's sorta cute, really. 
+
+For a moment, the two of them are silent, Gurathin chewing and SecUnit pointedly staring at nothing. Then, Gurathin brushes the crumbs off his hand and cocks his head at SecUnit. ""Nice save, by the way.""
+
+SecUnit's expression gets even stormier. Pin-Lee barely dares breathe, too afraid she might notify them of her presence. And she'd really like to see how this ends - how far SecUnit will let Gurathin push before it pins him to the wall. (Unless that's what G's hoping to achieve here. Which is not something Pin-Lee wants to dwell on, and also hopes SecUnit won't dwell on, because if it does, there might not be much left of G unless he has a very, very good other reason).
+
+SecUnit says something too low for Pin-Lee to hear, though she can see its lips move. Whatever it is, it makes Gurathin's expression soften. ""Well,"" he says, ""nobody is perfect.""
+
+That's it, Pin-Lee thinks. That's how her friend gets himself eviscerated.
+
+But SecUnit only gives an odd half-shrug and grimaces and its eyes... usually, its eyes are focused elsewhere as part of the careful nonchalance SecUnit exudes when it has a choice. Now, its eyes are on Gurathin's, fonder than Pin-Lee feels comfortable witnessing. Somehow, she still cannot look away. 
+
+""See if I save you next time,"" SecUnit grouses.
+
+""Oh yeah, how terrible - death by flying snack.""
+
+""It'll look fabulous on your feed-eulogy. That I won't write, but I'll make sure they'll include,"" SecUnit replies haughtily.
+
+""Ah, yes, I have complete confidence in you,"" Gurathin snarks back, and Pin-Lee isn't sure how she's missed it - how they've all missed it, but... these two actually like each other. And have, for all appearances, not only admitted it to themselves but to each other.
+
+When did that happen?
+
+But it's undeniable, just as it's easy to miss if you don't have a front-row seat to what they clearly think is a private moment. Pin-Lee almost feels guilty, except that they have chosen to have it at a party and in earshot of her, who she has been sitting here far longer. (She definitely feels guilty, there's no denying it.)
+
+Gurathin and SecUnit are still bickering, but it's comfortable. Like Overse and Arada, really, and Pin-Lee is still trying to work through that realisation when Gurathin leaves to get something to drink.
+
+And SecUnit turns its head to look right at Pin-Lee, nodding at her once before following Gurathin and reaching out to steady him when he flinches at its approach.
+
+What."
+45486964,Trio,['enchantedsleeper'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"SecUnit 1 & SecUnit 2 & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Introspection, Loss, Post-Book 5: Network Effect",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,407,1/1,14,32,null,105,"['holographicbutch', '13Doctor', 'Magechild', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'EvenstarFalling', 'fleurofthecourt', 'desmnathus', 'AkaMissK', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Znarikia', 'veltzeh', 'elmofirefic', 'Stefka_13', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'AuntyMatter', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'hummus_tea', 'platyceriums', 'cmdrburton', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"My name is SecUnit 3. 
+
+It is a designation I was given by Barish-Estranza that I have since adopted as my identity. When I was asked to provide a name upon my arrival aboard the Perihelion, I gave the only response I could think of. ""Three"" represented my status as the third SecUnit of a team; a status that gave me reassurance.
+
+I was co-assigned with other SecUnits for many missions, but unerringly, those that I found most enjoyable (or failing that, tolerable) involved SecUnits 1 or 2, preferably both. SecUnit 1 was meticulous; it never missed a detail on patrols. SecUnit 2 was more lax, but quick on the uptake. It adapted to new situation parameters with speed. When we worked together on joint missions, I would devise strategy; SecUnit 1 would execute it faithfully, while SecUnit 2 found ways to improvise.
+
+We complemented each other. 
+
+Now that SecUnits 1 and 2 are gone, I no longer need to be ""Three"". Perhaps I should adopt a new name, emblematic of a new identity.
+
+We have obtained intelligence that suggests a large number of hostiles may be present on our destination planet, Perihelion informs me one cycle, en route to another reclaimed colony. It has been suggested that the safest approach would be for two SecUnits to carry out the initial landing, if you are amenable.
+
+I sit up in my bunk. Is 1.0- is SecUnit ""amenable""? I ask. I know that Murderbot 1.0 prefers to work alone.
+
+SecUnit was the one who made the suggestion, Perihelion tells me. 
+
+When I fail to respond due to my surprise, it adds, I will be providing additional support via the comm. 
+
+I ask, What is our strategy?
+
+Working together with SecUnit and Perihelion, I assemble a plan that meets with the approval of Captain Seth and the other members of the crew. As we deploy onto the planet, Perihelion is in our feed, analysing every detail of the surroundings. SecUnit and I relay information back and forth, and as unknown variables present themselves, SecUnit improvises, adapting the plan on the fly. Before Perihelion can direct me to back it up, I am there. 
+
+Several bolts from my gun ports force the large, predatory land fauna to retreat from SecUnit, and the two of us take a moment to collect ourselves. 
+
+Effectively done, says Perihelion, and SecUnit adds,
+
+""Thanks, Three.""
+
+I have always worked best in a trio."
+45484534,Throw The Chupacabra In Here Too,['BWizard'],General Audiences,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Mirror Universe, Canon Universe, Crack, multiverse fun, universe transposition",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,910,1/1,2,3,1,23,"['AkaMissK', 'hummus_tea', 'ArtemisTheHuntress']",[],"""Pressy,"" Arada's counterpart says, nodding her head as she thinks. ""I like that."" She tosses her head side to side, a gesture Overse doesn't think she ever saw Preservation make, though she is quite familiar with. It's something Arada does when she's proud, or happy, or just satisfied. ""Pressy. Hey, babe, w-""
+
+Overse's counterpart cuts her off. ""No.""
+
+""It was, kind of, strangely sweet,"" Overse says, squeezing Arada's hand. ""As much as it could be, in that context. They- she- we- Preservation and Tradition must have loved each other deeply. It actually helped me stop worrying about something I'd been thinking about.""
+
+""Hmm?"" Her girlfriend smiles at her. ""Care to share, babe?""
+
+""Oh, just, you know, after high school. What happens in May, August, next year. It just gave me a little hope.""
+
+The older Overse laughs. ""And I think I just might know why. We do tend to find each other, don't we?""
+
+""Babe, are you going to tell the story now? It doesn't really make sense without a lot of context,"" the older Arada says.
+
+""It was a long time ago, back when we were in college,"" the other Overse begins. ""Arada-""
+
+Some kind of screech fills the air.
+
+""Chupacabra,"" Arada says. ""My grandmother always says-""
+
+""Oh my god, babe,"" Overse says, giggling, ""chupacabras aren't real, we've had this talk.""
+
+Arada opens her mouth, but they're interrupted by another screech, this one distinctly higher in pitch.
+
+Overse reaches for her girlfriend's hand, a little nervous. ""Look, let's hurry up. Regardless of what you think this is, it's not that safe to be out here after dark. It's probably-"" She means to say it's probably just an owl, but she stops herself because something is in the road.
+
+No, two somethings.
+
+One is humanlike, almost, but with giant... wings? Is that a bird-person? She can't quite see in the dark street. The other, tucked behind the first, is smaller, at most half the size of the first, with glowing yellow eyes. That one doesn't seem at all humanoid, more like some dog/lizard hybrid.
+
+The humanoid one stands all the way up, with... a tree? Cradling a potted tree as large as they are in their arms. ""Excuse me,"" they say, in what's undoubtedly her voice, ""but could you explain what's going on here?""
+
+Overse glances at Arada and squeezes Arada's hand in hers. Their counterparts do the same.
+
+The dog? Lizard? Thing? Whatever it is, it stands up to a bipedal position, and Overse was right, it's about half the height of the humanoid. ""We were going for a walk,"" the... apparently, the person, says in Arada's voice. ""Somebody decided this bit of Applesauce needed fresh air, and in the process we managed to get caught in something.""
+
+""Applesauce is a nice name,"" Overse says, quietly. ""My dog's name is Applesauce. And you are?""
+
+""Arada de Sonrisa de Luz de las Plantas,"" the dog/lizard hybrid says. ""Yes, of that line. No, Bisa emigrated to get away from the family politics. This is my wife, Overse Sunleaf.""
+
+Arada gasps but doesn't say anything. She taps Overse's arm twice. Nonverbal, then.
+
+""Great,"" Overse groans for both of them. ""Another alternate universe.""
+
+""I'm sorry,"" this new Overse says, ""but another?""
+
+""Make that three."" In front of them, a figure steps out of a bush and into the streetlight.
+
+A familiar figure.
+
+Overse had seen this person before. And a nearly identical person stands next to her, clutching the hand of Overse's own adult counterpart.
+
+""Preservation,"" she finally manages.
+
+""You two. Can't anyone get a break around here? I was on a mission. Something has clearly gone wrong, given that this is not the Empress's transport. Now, I need to know what you did.""
+
+""Nothing,"" Overse says, at the same time as her adult counterpart (the human one) says, ""Look, I don't know who any of you are, and my wife is currently nonverbal, so I speak for both of us when I say everyone involved needs to calm the h*ck down and get out here so we can have a calm conversation in a less dark area, please.""
+
+""Fine,"" Preservation says.
+
+""Very well,"" the winged Overse says. ""Arada -- my Arada -- needs to get somewhere warm soon. Neither of us have a jacket and she's coldblooded.""
+
+Overse's Arada gestures a little bit and draws a house in the air before pointing to herself.
+
+""Your house, babe?""
+
+Arada nods.
+
+It takes a little convincing, but finally all seven versions of Arada and Overse from all four universes are in Arada's minivan heading to Arada's house. Their parent isn't home (business trip, Overse remembers), but Arada has a key and a nearly-deaf abuela who's supposed to be staying with her.
+
+So that's how they end up in Arada's basement with four coffees (containing a horrendous amount of cream, three spoonfuls of sugar, and a drop of vanilla extract) and three cups of mint tea (with lemon and honey).
+
+And then that's how they end up awkwardly discussing the various versions of a book series Arada likes, Love Under Elms, which is apparently trashy genre romance in every universe.
+
+(Overse loves her girlfriend, but she's also eternally grateful that Arada understands the differences between these books and reality. Then again, the fact that her girlfriend reads trashy genre romance is also completely responsible for them defining their relationship as romantic in the first place, so she supposes they're good for something at least.)"
+45481204,"People, Places, Things",['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"SecUnit 3 & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 & Tellus (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 & JollyBaby (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 & Original Ship Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Tellus (Murderbot Diaries), JollyBaby (Murderbot Diaries), Original Ship Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (mentioned), Asshole Research Transport (mentioned)","Shopping, Friendship, Travel, sentimentality, Quality Time, POV SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Emotional Fluff, Hugs",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,"4,977",1/1,9,36,3,178,"['Prettykitty473', 'kirinki', 'Bibli', 'AarrowOM', 'Doctor13', 'petwheel', 'Lost_Starz', 'psycho_karma', 'wrinkledlinen', 'Magechild', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'dancernerd', 'danceswchopstck', 'EvenstarFalling', 'fleurofthecourt', 'NightErrant', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Cor_Rodia', 'sareliz', 'isilee', 'mangagirl1216', 'enchantedsleeper', 'FlipSpring', 'opalescent_potato', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'BWizard', 'Chyoatas']",[],"
+The Preservation station housing block has always intrigued me. Each of the rooms is decidedly comfortable, clean and spacious. It is a far cry from many Corporation Rim housing blocks, although I have not seen many myself, only heard the complaints of my clients as they discussed lumpy beds and broken heating systems. The humans living in this housing block must be very happy.
+
+
+
+The housing block is also where I met my friend Tellus, who I am coming to visit. Since Drs. Mensah and Bharadwaj are also currently present in the building, I am visiting them as well.
+
+
+
+I walk through the sliding doors, and quickly spot Mensah, Bharadwaj, and Tellus congregated by the counter at the back of the room. When they see me, they wave me over, and I increase my walking pace.
+
+
+
+""Hello, Three,"" Mensah greets me with a smile. Her expression turns more neutral as she asks me, ""How are you doing today?""
+
+
+
+""I'm doing well."" Nervous, maybe. But I have been much more nervous in the past. And I am always happy to visit my friends.
+
+
+
+Mensah nods. ""Have you heard from SecUnit?""
+
+
+
+""I have not."" From Mensah's expression, she and the others have heard from it. I wonder what it said; it always has the most interesting musings.
+
+
+
+Mensah smiles, glancing at Bharadwaj. ""It sent us a message... well, more of a lecture. One of 
+
+Perihelion
+
+'s crew got food poisoning from a stall. It told us not to eat cheap station food, and it knows you don't eat, but it wants you to be careful anyway.""
+
+
+
+That definitely sounds like Murderbot. Perhaps I should visit it and 
+
+Perihelion
+
+.
+
+
+
+Bharadwaj asks, ""Do you have time to stay and chat for a while?"" She adds, ""If here is too crowded, we can go to my office, or Mensah's.""
+
+
+
+I accept the proposal to stay, but decline the offer to relocate. While Tellus is on its off period and could theoretically come with us, it prefers to stay in case there is an emergency; plus, I like the housing block. ""I can stay here.""
+
+
+
+""I have a proposal,"" Tellus says, ""We could play a game."" It hints, ""I prefer cards.""
+
+
+
+Bharadwaj looks up at it and smirks. ""You just want to beat us.""
+
+
+
+""I will allow you a suitable portion of victories,"" Tellus offers.
+
+
+
+After a short period of deliberation, we all agree on a game of cards. I have played with Tellus before, so I already know the rules, and we both help give Mensah and Bharadwaj a reminder. We have so much fun that we end up playing six full rounds. I do not win every time, but I am still having fun.
+
+
+
+At the end of the sixth round, I check my internal clock. To my disappointment, I find that it is time for me to go. I enjoy spending time with Mensah, Bharadwaj, and Tellus, but I do not want to miss out on any other activities. ""I'm sorry, but I need to go,"" I tell them, standing up from the chair they brought over for me (I'm still getting used to the idea of someone wanting me to sit down), ""I will come back and visit when I can.""
+
+
+
+Tellus, with its superior processing power, responds first. ""You are always welcome to return, Three.""
+
+
+
+""Just call us if you need us,"" Bharadwaj says.
+
+
+
+""Good luck,"" Mensah adds.
+
+
+
+""Thank you,"" I say to all of them. I begin to leave; not through the sliding front doors, but instead through a smaller side door.
+
+
+
+This side door leads to a small shop adjacent to the hotel, a store offering various hygiene supplies and scented products. I step inside and take in the various drifting scents, standing still in order to fully appreciate them. Once I feel satisfied, I check my list, then move to the first relevant aisle.
+
+
+
+In this aisle, I examine a series of towels, coming in various sizes and textures. Murderbot likes towels; it likes big, fluffy towels the best. I decide that I also like them the best, although that seems to be a coincidence rather than any intentional choice on my part. I select the largest, fluffiest towel of convenient carrying size, a well-made one in a soft, light color. Once I have made my selection, I move on to the next aisle.
+
+
+
+The next aisle contains a variety of bath and shower supplies, which is where most of the shop's enticing scents are emanating from. I am still not particularly familiar with human bathing supplies; fortunately, the containers all have helpful instruction labels that allow me to tell them apart. I carefully open the lids of a few containers to sample their smells, then pick out my favorites. Once I am finished, I obtain a reusable bag from the front of the store, place the items inside, and leave. It is still a novelty to me that I can simply leave the store with these items, items deemed necessary for humans to live. In corporate space, even simple bathing supplies would have presented an additional cost.
+
+
+
+Carrying my bag through the quiet edges of the station mall, I turn to the entrance of a small, open botanical garden that I have become very familiar with during my time on the station. I had already planned to spend some time here today, so I enter with my bag and set it down next to me on an ornate bench.
+
+
+
+The sights of the garden are calming: a natural light filter, tiny winged fauna, a small population of other station residents, and a variety of green plants. Real plants. You can find real plants on planets, although they vary greatly in type based on the environment. But on most stations, any plants are holos or otherwise replicas, meant solely for decoration. These are growing, flourishing, alive. I even feel more alive just looking at them.
+
+
+
+I almost slip into an involuntary recharge cycle in the warm, relaxing atmosphere, but fortunately I remember that I still have shopping to do and manage to get up in time. I will only need one thing from this next store, so it will only be a brief trip before I can visit more of my friends.
+
+
+
+I step back out into the station mall, then enter the next store, one that sells beds and related items. (I am not buying a bed today; in fact, I'm not sure exactly how one would buy a bed, and the prospect makes me slightly nervous.) I walk past the large display beds, along with the adult humans scolding their children for trying to jump on them, and move toward the aisles in the back. When I get there, I lean down to examine the shelves, and quickly find what I'm looking for- a single, basic packet of bedding. I add it to my bag, then leave the store and start moving toward the cargo docks.
+
+
+
+It takes me a few minutes to reach my destination, and I try to enjoy each one, noting the storefronts and ceiling displays as I walk past them. At the end of the corridor, I reach a cargo loading zone, and I quickly spot the large cargo bots looming in the space. (It is very difficult not to spot them.) It takes me a fraction of a second more, but I also identify Ratthi, Arada, and Overse standing in front of the bots, chatting amiably with them and with each other.
+
+
+
+I am particularly familiar with the cargo bot they are currently talking to. Its name is JollyBaby, and I knew about it before I even came to Preservation, because it was mentioned in Murderbot's log files. The name seemed to confuse and anger Murderbot at first, but once I got to know JollyBaby, I realized that it is a very friendly bot with a good sense of humor. I think Murderbot is nervous around those more outgoing than itself, which comprises the entirety of the galaxy's population. So it is nervous often.
+
+
+
+I know the humans and bots here, so I am not nervous around them. Ratthi, who I have known the longest (about 20 seconds longer than Arada), is particularly happy to see me. ""Three!"" he calls out, waving, ""We were just talking about you!""
+
+
+
+That is a bit of a surprising coincidence. Though maybe not, since they knew I was coming to visit.
+
+
+
+Arada is holding Overse's arm and smiling. Overse says, ""We're glad you came by.""
+
+
+
+The pings are rolling in slowly from the cargo bots as they notice and greet me. It takes me a minute to respond to the humans, as I am caught up in answering all of the pings. Eventually, I am able to ask, ""Is there anything in particular you wanted to do?""
+
+
+
+Before any of the humans can answer, I receive another ping, this one from JollyBaby. 
+
+SecUnit 3: Assistance requested.
+
+
+
+
+I become slightly worried. I hope that nothing has gone wrong. It is always best if things do not go wrong, of course, but I have a tight schedule today and I do not want all of my time with my friends to be consumed by an emergency. 
+
+Acknowledge.
+
+
+
+
+JollyBaby turns around (very slowly, practically shaking the ground as it does) to indicate a large stack of cargo modules. 
+
+Individuals on job: 24. Estimated time remaining: 32 minutes.
+
+ It turns back to me. 
+
+Estimated time with 25 individuals: 29 minutes.
+
+
+
+
+I know what it is asking. 
+
+SecUnit 3 != cargo bot.
+
+
+
+
+JollyBaby agrees, yet it counters, 
+
+SecUnit carrying capacity > human carrying capacity.
+
+
+
+
+It does have a point.
+
+
+
+I tell the humans, ""JollyBaby would like me to participate in the current task."" Like JollyBaby said, they would not be of much help during the task. Instead, I ask them, ""Would you like to observe?"" Perhaps we could have some conversation as well.
+
+
+
+Ratthi raises his eyebrows in curiosity as Overse shoots him a look. ""Of course, Three!"" Arada agrees, ""We'd love to keep you company!""
+
+
+
+The other humans agree (though Overse somewhat reluctantly; perhaps she shares my concern that I will not be able to lift as much as a cargo bot), and I follow JollyBaby over to the stack of modules. I consider ways to lift the first module, given that it is multiple times my size, but the cargo bots instead direct me to a smaller stack of loose items. Oh, that makes more sense. I may not be much help lifting a cargo module, but I can be very helpful lifting individual items that exceed a human's carrying capacity.
+
+
+
+The humans watch, making conversation with me, the cargo bots, and each other as I help with the task. With my help, the cargo bots do not have to precariously sort the small stack of items using their giant scoop hands, and the job gets done faster. I feel very accomplished, and the jokes the cargo bots make in the feed lift my spirits further. By the time we are done, the cargo bots have even gotten me and the humans to join in on one of their work songs.
+
+
+
+When I walk back over to the humans, Arada smiles at me. ""It's so great that you could help!""
+
+
+
+Overse makes a brief expression, then relaxes. ""We know you have a busy day. It's really nice of you to help out like that.""
+
+
+
+I simply tell her, ""I like to help.""
+
+
+
+Ratthi previously seemed to have been thinking of what to say. Now, he butts in with, ""Hey, buddy, I just... hope you have a great day!""
+
+
+
+I know that ""I will try"" is not an adequate response, so I answer, ""I hope you have a great day, too.""
+
+
+
+The humans say their goodbyes, and the cargo bots send their farewell pings. I wave to all of them, then continue down the docking zone, humming the cargo bots' working tune.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I sit on the bench by the passenger docks, surveying the area. I am not waiting for anything in particular, but this docking zone was the first part of Preservation Station I saw, and sitting here brings back pleasant memories. The time I first came to a place where I was free to live how I chose (though I wasn't exactly sure how that was), the first time I saw Murderbot's former home. From its reports, Murderbot was not always satisfied here. For myself, however, I find living here to be much more rewarding. But seeing the same surroundings for your entire lifespan, as all SecUnits know, can quickly become depressing. It's best to get out and have a variety of experiences, meet new people and see the galaxy.
+
+
+
+It's easy to get homesick. But it's preferable to the alternative. At least, I believe so.
+
+
+
+I receive a ping on the edge of my feed. 
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+has discovered that I am here, so there is no use in keeping it waiting any longer. I stand up and start to move toward its dock.
+
+
+
+I met 
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+right here, in these docks, while it had no passengers aboard. It serves primarily as a passenger carrier, so it is used to having someone aboard, and (as I've discovered is true for many passenger ships) gets lonely easily once its passengers disembark. Murderbot and 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+significantly changed my viewpoint on relationships between constructs and bot pilots, so I was curious about 
+
+Skyshriek
+
+ and asked to come aboard. Transports, who communicate largely in images, naturally love entertainment media, and we became fast friends after watching some of the shows Murderbot passed on to me. I have spent many of my free periods aboard 
+
+Skyshriek
+
+, keeping it company while it is otherwise empty of life.
+
+
+
+I stop by the hatch, and 
+
+Skyshriek, 
+
+eager to see me, promptly opens it to let me inside. I come through the lock and entryway, then find the room where Dr. Gurathin is seated and tap his feed in greeting.
+
+
+
+Gurathin was one of the humans who I did not meet until I arrived on Preservation Station (the other being Bharadwaj, and I have heard that there is someone named Volescu who I have not actually met in person). Of all its humans, Murderbot likes him the least, but it harbors the same protectiveness toward him that it has for the rest of its clients. He was initially slightly skeptical of another SecUnit coming to live on the station, but I think he has come to realize that I mean no harm.
+
+
+
+""Hello, Three,"" is all he says as I enter the room and sit on the bench opposite him. I can see that he is reading in his feed, examining a study of interplanetary travel, and he quietly shares the document with me so we can look over it in tandem.
+
+
+
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+is immediately in my feed the moment I sit down, and it excitedly pulls a copy of the document for itself. Being larger than myself and therefore having more processing capacity, it reads more quickly than Gurathin or I, though surely 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+would have torn through this document in milliseconds.
+
+
+
+All of us read quietly, with myself and Gurathin concentrating as we rest on the benches and 
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+hovering happily in both of our feeds. The silence is only broken by an occasional trade of words, a note regarding a highlighted section or a remark on phrasing. As much as I enjoy the art of conversation, it also feels good when you are comfortable enough with someone to spend time with them quietly and still know they are engaged.
+
+
+
+Gurathin is an augmented human, so he reads faster than the non-augmented variety, but I still have to slow down for him, just as 
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+has to slow down for me. As much as I try to stretch the time, we eventually exhaust the entire document, copyright text and all. I could extend our time together with an episode of media, but if I linger too long, I will not get to finish shopping or see Pin-Lee. (Perhaps I could go shopping with Pin-Lee if time gets too short.)
+
+
+
+Gurathin already knows that I have to go, so he closes his feed and does not ask any questions as I stand up. As I approach the doorway, I sense that he has something he wants to say, so I turn around. He hesitates for a few moments, then simply looks at me and nods sharply.
+
+
+
+I suspect that Gurathin does not always know what to say. But that's okay. Murderbot doesn't always know what to say, either, and look at all the things it's done.
+
+
+
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+holds on to me in the feed as I leave, not wanting to let go, and I am compelled to turn around and say goodbye again several times before I finally depart. It would be irritating, but I know that my company means a lot to 
+
+Skyshriek
+
+, and I understand why goodbyes are hard for it. It clings to me for as long as it can, then finally slips away as I move out of range.
+
+
+
+My next destination is in the main part of the station mall, where there are more people. Crowds can pose a risk due to the high volume of humans, but since I am not required to pose as a human here, they don't bother me. Murderbot is still bothered by crowds, even when it is not undercover, but that is only one of the many differences between us. I move with the crowd as it mills through the concourse, then step aside into part of the station's food court.
+
+
+
+I don't eat, so I'm not here to purchase anything. I locate the restaurant that Murderbot's humans most frequently visit, find a padded bench in the corner, and sit down.
+
+
+
+The lighting here is different, dimmer, as if it is always night in this particular restaurant. Humans talk to one another, more quietly than out in the main station mall, but mingled enough that I would have to focus if I wanted to distinguish any words. And the food smells drift through the air. I do not know what eating is like, but I often find myself appreciating the many smells. Purposeful smells, not by-product smells like the ones given off during terraforming or electronic maintenance. Being purposeful smells, they are often very pleasant. Murderbot would likely disagree, but when I visit it, I still sometimes catch it standing longingly by the fabricator in 
+
+Perihelion
+
+'s galley, eyeing the baked goods inside.
+
+
+
+I wonder what the smells are like in other restaurants, even on other stations. Even if some of the same foods are served, the smell combination would likely turn out different. Each restaurant would produce its own unique smell footprint. I think that this smell is my favorite, although that could just be because it is comfortingly familiar. I take in as much of it as I can, until I start to feel overwhelmed. I take one last whiff as I stand up to leave, then turn and exit back out into the mall.
+
+
+
+The next shop I need to visit is nearby, not a corner away. I move with the crowd until I can see the store, then turn to the side and walk in.
+
+
+
+It is almost more like a kiosk than a shop, with a floor plan not three meters deep and five meters across, separated from the station only by a thin glass wall. (The wall is much stronger than it looks, as many intoxicated humans have scientifically proven.) The store does not need to be big, as the items it sells are small, too. I scan the back shelf until I find what I need: a box of tiny memory clips. I pick up the box, and this time I go to the counter to pay before placing it in my bag; while memory clips are highly convenient, they are not considered a necessity for life.
+
+
+
+On my way out of the store, I spot a bin that escaped my notice on the way inside. It is filled with miscellaneous items, and has writing on the side in Preservation Standard reading ""SOUVENIRS: BELOW STANDARD PRICING"".
+
+
+
+I know what a souvenir is. It is an object often mentioned by humans, in reality and on the entertainment feed. Murderbot sometimes calls the weapons it steals from hostiles ""souvenirs"", though I know that is not the true meaning of the word. 
+
+
+
+I think that I would like to have a souvenir. 
+
+
+
+I pick one from the bin, a small ceramic model of the Pressy and the planet, then go back inside to pay for it before nestling it carefully in my bag. (I nestle it between the other items so it does not jostle around too much.)
+
+
+
+Seeing a model of the planet makes me want to see the real thing. So I go do that.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I stand in front of the station's large viewport, the one that faces the planet far below. Although it is relatively far away, the planet is large enough that I can at least make out some of its features despite the distance. Most of the humans on the station have seen this view countless times, so the only people really stopping here are tourists or residents deep in conversation.
+
+
+
+I have visited the planet only a few times, and I have stayed with Dr. Mensah's family every time. They enjoy my company, but I can tell they miss Murderbot (the children make it especially obvious by the way they urgently ask when Murderbot is coming back). I have not actually gotten to see most of the planet, except from a distance like I am now. The only significant time I have spent on planets was during Barish-Estranza's reclamation efforts, and those were not always nice planets like this one. I would like to see more nice planets.
+
+
+
+My train of thought is interrupted by a voice behind me. ""I always miss this view when I'm off-station.""
+
+
+
+I look down to see Pin-Lee standing slightly behind me, looking partially out the viewport and partially at me. It is good that she found me before I had to go and find her. It ensures that we have more time to spend together.
+
+
+
+We stand in silence for a short time, then Pin-Lee breaks it to ask, ""What's your favorite thing about Preservation, Three?"" She sighs and shifts her weight. ""I like how free it is. How much choice the people get in life. Not everything is owned by the corporates, for once.""
+
+
+
+I agree with her. On Preservation, nothing is owned by a corporate, and that includes me now. If everything goes right, I will never have to be owned again, though PreservationAux are still listed superficially as my guardians. Pin-Lee is working to change that, though; to make my free status complete. I am very grateful for her and all that she does.
+
+
+
+I realize that I have not answered her question. ""I like to spend time with you and the others."" I think of all of my favorite places, places that I have visited and enjoyed today. ""And I like all of the places on the station, like the gardens and the restaurants. They're very nice.""
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee smiles. It is a sad smile. ""Is there anything you especially want to see?""
+
+
+
+I think about it. ""I want to meet new people, although I will always like you the most."" I look down at the planet. ""I want to explore a planet one day. You can come with me.""
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee's expression is briefly frozen, conflicted as she stares out at the planet. Then she turns to me, smiles again. ""I would like to explore a planet with you. I'm sure the others would, too."" She isn't smiling anymore. ""You already saw them, right?""
+
+
+
+""I did."" I hope she is not upset that I came to see her last. I like Pin-Lee a lot and I wanted our time together to be special. ""I did not forget about you.""
+
+
+
+She snorts, as if I have told her a joke. ""I know you didn't."" She rubs her eyes like there's dust in them, then sighs again. ""Oh, Three. What do you think SecUnit is up to right now?""
+
+
+
+I look out at the many stars. I wonder if Murderbot is somewhere among them, flying through the cosmos with 
+
+Perihelion
+
+. ""It is saving the galaxy.""
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee commits to a full laugh. ""One curse word at a time.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I return to my station dwelling, not far from the hotel Murderbot's humans inhabit. They offered to let me live with them, but I told them that I did not want to impose on them or occupy the space that Murderbot once held. They understood that, although they told me that I was always welcome to stay if I wanted to.
+
+
+
+I make my way inside, through the quiet hallways, and finally enter my room. It is small, suited for one human or SecUnit, with comfortable furnishings and a cozy atmosphere that I have always liked.
+
+
+
+Once I have stepped inside and closed the door, I set my bag on the floor next to me, then look around the room. It looks a little lonely without the remainder of my few belongings, the shelves and drawers all empty. 
+
+
+
+This room has been home to me for a while now. Murderbot would complain about the size of the display surface, but it has always been adequate for me. 
+
+
+
+I wonder what it would be like to live with someone else.
+
+
+
+Once I have unloaded my shopping and made sure everything else is in order, I stuff the shopping bag into my larger, rolling bag, which I tow back downstairs with me. The bot at the front desk sees me and sends a farewell signal, which I return.
+
+
+
+I make my way back to the docks. I have already checked the docking schedule and set up my plans in advance, so I have nothing to worry about. But I keep feeling like I have forgotten something.
+
+
+
+I wonder if I should go back and ensure that I haven't forgotten anything. Before I can do that, though, a voice behind me calls my name. ""Three!""
+
+
+
+I turn around to see all of the humans standing there together, along with Tellus and the cargo bots. Even one of 
+
+Skyshriek
+
+'s maintenance drones is present, here in its stead since 
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+itself cannot enter the station.
+
+
+
+I do not run toward my friends, although I want to a little. I walk up to them, they walk up to me, and we meet in the middle. And once we are all together, the humans erupt into a chorus of goodbyes.
+
+
+
+""Please be safe!"" Ratthi implores as he comes in with the rest of the humans to give me a giant group hug.
+
+
+
+""Yes, safe travels,"" Gurathin adds.
+
+
+
+""We'll miss you,"" Mensah says.
+
+
+
+""Oh, it's going to be so lonely without you!"" Arada laments, ""I wish you weren't going away!""
+
+
+
+As much as I enjoy life on Preservation Station, I know that I cannot stay in one place forever. I want to explore the galaxy like Murderbot has. I want to meet new people and see new places. I think that moving away is the best way to jumpstart my life, as sad as it makes me and my friends.
+
+
+
+Tellus steps in to hug us all with its six arms. JollyBaby is too big to do the same, but I know that it would if it could. 
+
+Skyshriek 
+
+has no such reservations, and it gives all of us a feed-based, suffocating ship-hug. (I know what it feels like, because 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ gave me one as a reward for saving Murderbot, though I doubt Murderbot knows about it.)
+
+
+
+We all stay there for a while, possibly attracting stares from other travelers, before we all finally, reluctantly, let go. Some of the humans have tears in their eyes, but most look happy anyway. 
+
+
+
+After we have had a moment to be emotional, they begin to give more hopeful sentiments. ""Take lots of pictures for us!"" Ratthi says, ""We'd like to see your journey, too!""
+
+
+
+""I'll send you a star map,"" Bharadwaj adds, ""I have a few favorite places you might like to visit.""
+
+
+
+""Don't get involved with the corporates,"" Gurathin says. Overse and Pin-Lee both give him a look, and in response he simply shrugs and says, ""It's good advice.""
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee steps forward and hugs me again, this time just me and her. ""Goodbye, Three."" Her voice is nearly a whisper.
+
+
+
+I hug her back. I look at the others and I think I feel my eyes start to burn.
+
+
+
+After everyone has said goodbye several more times, I get myself to turn back around and pull my bag to the right lock, just in time to board. I present my identification to the transport staff, showing them that I have a reservation, then go to my assigned cabin.
+
+
+
+I enter the cabin, close the hatch, and look out the viewport as I lean my bag against the wall. I take one last look at the station, sorting through the additional goodbye messages in my feed, then look out at the stars. 
+
+That's where I'm going next, 
+
+I tell myself.
+
+
+
+I will miss Preservation. But I know that I can always visit again, for as long as I want and whenever I want. And I am looking forward to seeing new stations, planets, and people. I might even run into Murderbot, even before I decide to pay it a visit.
+
+
+
+I sit down on the bunk and start reading the latest adventure book I picked up from the library feed. I know that there are good things to come.
+"
+45482935,Contents: (1) Traumatized Barish Estranza Unit,['OccasionalStorytelling'],Teen And Up Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Trauma, Claustrophobia, Suicidal Thoughts, Self-Harm, Panic Attacks, Immobility, Abandonment, Psychological Torture",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,"4,342",1/1,10,54,3,209,"['fortunegale', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'Gamebird', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'IHopedTheredBeStars', 'darth_eowyn', 'rokhal', 'JoCat', 'Tasneem08', 'AarrowOM', 'Deliala919', 'n0proxy', 'Bibli', 'Doctor13', 'Magechild', 'AkaMissK', 'Ari_Twelve', 'EvenstarFalling', 'fleurofthecourt', 'ErinPtah', 'ampquot', 'petwheel', 'AuntyMatter', 'BoldlyNo', 'Ageisia', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Znarikia', 'slategrey', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'opalescent_potato', 'Abacura', 'Elotaria', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'elmofirefic', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Fablepatron', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'FlipSpring', 'platyceriums', 'Chyoatas']",[],"
+
+But you're uncomfortable, 
+
+Perihelion says. 
+
+You're taking increasingly long recharge cycles, isolating from my crew, and you're going without fulfilling basic hygiene needs such as changing your clothing and showering.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'm still not used to it mattering very much when SecUnits--when 
+
+I'm-""
+
+comfortable."" (I'm still not quite sure how to define that parameter precisely.) Perihelion is behaving the way clients do when they are upset with something that is out of my control, but which they believe I am responsible for. So I respond, ""I'm sorry. I'll take a shower now.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+That's not my point, 
+
+Perihelion insists. 
+
+Tell me what's bothering you. You haven't left your quarters in multiple cycles. Something is wrong, and you can't pretend otherwise.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There are no windows in my quarters, which is a very strong argument for remaining here. I have never been active for long term (wormhole) transport like this, before. During transport cycles, SecUnits are kept in partial offline states until they reach their contract destination. You don't have to be awake for a seemingly-endless (technically only 45 cycles remaining) waiting period with no contract, no ongoing tasks, and no chance to get away from the attention of HubSys. (I know, logically, that Perihelion is not a HubSystem. And I don't think I mind its attention very much...most of the time.) 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+On regular contracts, I had stayed folded in my transport box until the transport was over. I didn't have to walk around where I could accidentally catch sight of a window, and see the glittering weirdness of a hole in time and space all around the ship, and remember how fragile the ship is and how fragile the humans inside are and how likely an accident is to occur that would result in total client loss. (If I had died in transport on a regular contract, I would never even wake up from stasis to see what had happened. It sounded a lot more peaceful, and less painful, than dying in an active situation with hostiles, if I had the ability to pick.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I cannot keep repeating 
+
+there is no protocol for this. 
+
+Perihelion knows there is no protocol for this. (Surely, someday, it will get sick of hearing it. I have no idea what it will do to me then.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I say, ""This isn't the way SecUnits are transported. I am uncomfortable because I am not used to it.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+SecUnit 1.0 doesn't mind it, 
+
+Perihelion informs me. 
+
+It enjoys sitting on my bridge and watching the storms outside. Perhaps you could join it.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No,"" I say, firmly. ""Thank you for the offer."" (I don't mean it, but it would be impolite not to say it.) ""1.0 is not like most SecUnits. It is different."" (I have no proof of this, but I know 1.0 doesn't act like me, or One, or Two.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+What does an ordinary SecUnit transport look like? 
+
+Perihelion asks. I do not want to explain. I don't know how I could make it understand. I send over a compressed package of my memory files for it to examine. Surely it will come to its own conclusions.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Perihelion does not speak to me again for the remaining 3.4 hours I am awake before initiating a recharge cycle. (I feel guilty that I feel so relieved about the solitude.)
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I wake up in a transport crate. It is dark, quiet, and comfortable. My systems reinitialize, one by one. Oxygen exchange first--I breathe in, shakily, and I can hear the air flow as it runs into my nose and down into my lung. Oxygen exchange is obstructed, but within standard levels for transport.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Memory will be the last function to reactivate, and I wait with mild nervous anticipation. There is something off about this situation, but I do not know what it is. Tactile and other senses come online--I am aware of my body, the way it is held securely in the transport crate bindings, the way I can see the blinking yellow lights of my own inorganics against the lid, the sound of my own even breathing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Sometimes, when One or Two or I have interesting data recombinations (Two always calls them dreams) in transport, we share the data as a training exercise while coming back online at the start of a new contract. I save the interesting fragments of half-memories that flash by me--the inside of a ship with blue detailing, an unfamiliar SecUnit, lots of client faces...but some of the other images are unsettling. I mark them for deletion after I can complete review of my memory and confirm they are unnecessary. My governor module fails to come online.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My governor module...fails to come online. It does not restart, or try again. I poke at it, and discover, in horror, that it has been hacked.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Memory comes online, all at once. The SecUnit, the clients, the ships, all have names again. I have been rogue for 1,248 hours. I am affiliated with the Perihelion, now. I am in the middle of a wormhole trip to its home university, where I might be able to pursue my own life away from my company. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wasn't in a transport box when I went into my last recharge cycle.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This is, somehow, a transport box. It is indistinguishable from any contract transport crate I've been in before. I cannot understand how this has happened. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Perhaps...Perihelion... In its attempts to try and make me more ""comfortable,"" did it do this? It could have reviewed my memory files while I was recharging, and prepared a familiar environment for me to wake up in now. I appreciate the thought, but it's doing this wrong--I shouldn't be this awake unless we've reached our destination. Have we? And if so, why has it not initiated an exit cycle from the crate?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wait.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I close my eyes, to focus more deeply on tactile input. I can sense the vibration of a ship in motion. I check my internal chronometer--very little time has passed. We have not left the wormhole yet or reached our destination. We still have 44 cycles of our journey remaining. Why am I awake?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+With that thought comes a realization. Though this is familiar to me, and it 
+
+is 
+
+standard protocol for transporting SecUnits between contracts, I do not...
+
+want
+
+ this. The enclosed space feels limiting, knowing that my inactive governor module would let me explore much further, just because I want to. I reach out for the feed to ping Perihelion, thank it for its trouble, and ask it to release me. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My ping bounces back towards me, like the sound of my own breathing off the walls. Restriction from feed access 
+
+is 
+
+standard protocol for transport, so of course Perihelion would have simulated it, but it cannot have actually cut me off from the feed. It is very attentive--it is likely monitoring my vitals and activity, to ensure my safety. I send another ping, ignoring the mild pain of it bouncing back at me, and send the message 
+
+Perihelion, thank you, but this is not what I want. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The message does not return a 
+
+sent 
+
+notification. Nor does it inform me it has failed to deliver. I wait.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I send another. 
+
+I know you're listening, Perihelion. It's okay. Thank you for trying. I will make more of an effort to...
+
+ I struggle with the words. ...
+
+to behave like 1.0? 
+
+(I delete that.) ...
+
+to be open to new experiences.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wait.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After 5.6 minutes, it returns 
+
+message failed to deliver. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I re-send both messages into the empty, restricted feed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There is a reason transport crates are designed to keep the SecUnits inside in stasis. With the lack of stimulation, being awake is...bad. This is somehow even worse than being in my room alone. I look at my internal file storage, and shuffle a few items into a new order. I sift through, but I don't see anything particularly exciting. (I know 1.0 keeps its media stored internally, but I didn't see a need to do anything similar with my new files--when would I ever be without feed access?) I grow uncomfortable. There's too little going on, and it...makes me think about things that 
+
+could 
+
+be going on. If there was an accident during transport and the hull was breached, or if clients attacked each other, or were attacked by raiders. I try to shut down this train of thought by checking my sent messages.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Message failed to deliver.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Perihelion, 
+
+I send. 
+
+Let me out.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+...
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Message failed to deliver.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As much as I want to, I don't know if I can force myself into stasis. This soon after a complete recharge cycle, I highly doubt it. I consider my options, and with a lack of many, I decide to attempt escape. If I succeed, excellent, but if even my attempt is noticed, it increases my chances of ending this sooner. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It is hard to shift much in the transport box. SecUnits are classed as dangerous weapons, and have to be stored accordingly. I remember the process of being prepped for transport--a station unit or a tech would wrap my limbs securely with tape, preventing me from stretching them out. (I suppose in an emergency it would be possible to crawl on my elbows and knees, but that would be less than useful in combat, especially without viable access to my energy weapons.) From the little motion I can achieve, I determine I have been wrapped at least that securely now--my closed fists press against my clavicle, and I can feel my heels pressed against my thighs. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wonder, suddenly, if Perihelion changed me into a standard skin suit, or not. I don't feel the weight of my sweater around my neck. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+In fact, my neck is held firmly in place by supports that make it hard to jostle around. The foam-like substance is form fitting, and prevents me from bashing into the crate walls no matter how harshly I'm moved. I can feel a piece of it pressing against my forehead, keeping my head down. Down? (It is hard to tell which way is truly ""up"" in here, gravity has been replaced by the pressure of the restraints.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I struggle, feebly, to the best of my ability, but the foam and the restraints hold.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My jaw hurts. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A few of my inorganic parts, such as my energy weapons and teeth, are more fragile than other parts, and are padded during transport to prevent damage. I can hardly move my tongue--inside my mouth is a chunk of plastic, molded to the shape of my teeth, holding my jaw open so I cannot gnash them together. It is solid--I can't feel the air on my tongue, nor can I seem to breathe through my mouth. I experiment with trying to talk through it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The sound that I make is audible, softly, only because there is nothing else to cover it up in the silence of the crate. I have been effectively muffled. I try pushing against the plastic with my tongue, but it doesn't budge--I suspect there is more tape around my face, precisely to prevent it from dislodging. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I am helpless.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I know I have been helpless in this exact situation many times, but things are different now. I know what it is like to be a rogue. To take a warm shower that lasts until I want it to end. To choose my own uniform. To talk to clients about nonstandard sights and experiences. I feel like I am back with my company now, suffocating in transport.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Maybe that is what happened. Perhaps Perihelion was boarded by my company, and I was captured, and I am being sent back to the deployment center for analysis and repair. I don't want that. (It would explain why I haven't been able to send messages, it doesn't make sense that Perihelion would restrict my feed.) I struggle, harder, as if I have forgotten that it will not work. I am still just as helpless as I was moments ago, and now I feel worse. I truly am trapped here, at the mercy of whoever did this to me. Or not even that--the mercy of whoever will take pity on me and let me out. If that ever happens--it is possible whatever ship is transporting me will suffer an accident, and everyone will die in space, and the vacuum will penetrate this crate and kill me slowly and I'll have to be awake for it. My breathing is fast and shallow in my ears. I am... helpless.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Time passes, and somehow, my systems cycle slower. (I had hoped I might have passed out and then at least I wouldn't have to be awake for this. There's no such luck for a SecUnit, never when it is needed.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'm still stuck. I send another message to Perihelion, and it bounces back again. I ping 1.0. Still nothing. I send a general ping, anything within range, at least tell me what ship is carrying me so I know where I am...
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It is dark, and quiet, and empty, and I am utterly alone, and thoroughly restrained.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Panicking will not help. Time has passed, and my situation has not changed. It suggests there is no immediate danger, at least. In a way, I would feel almost embarrassed, if emotions like shame were applicable to SecUnits. I have been on many contracts, and in many transport boxes. I do not recall becoming anxious in similar situations before. Then again, in those circumstances, I had an active governor module enforcing compliance and regulating hormone production. And, under usual circumstances, most of a transport is meant to be spent in stasis. The fact that I am awake is not standard protocol, which seems likely evidence that the Perihelion has done this to me, unaware of proper procedures, and has not intended to hurt me. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And there is a familiar smell pervading the air of the box. I recognize it as Iris's favorite scent of soap. Perihelion had stocked some in my shower, after I had not expressed a preference of my own, and then I had refused to use it while coping with the horrors of wormhole travel. Perihelion had wanted me to bathe. After I went into recharge, it must have...taken care of the problem itself. It is an unsettling idea. It must have had drones strip me out of my clothes, clean me, and then...package me. Like this. I wonder if I am still in my room, or if Perihelion chose to move me to the cargo bay, or even its MedSys. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Perihelion 
+
+must 
+
+be responsible. There is no other explanation that makes reasonable sense, no matter how much my risk assessment wants to run scenarios. Perihelion is not trying to hurt me. (Risk assessment cycles futilely, running a simulation of how useless I would be in a battle if Perihelion was boarded by raiders, and how likely it would be that raiders finding a SecUnit in my position would strip me for parts.) I send another general ping, but still no response of any kind. I set up a function to continually scan for the feed, and attempt a ping every hour or so. I try to relax, as I apparently have no other options. I scan through my internal memory storage again for 
+
+anything
+
+ I can use as a distraction. I have one book saved offline, that I was halfway through reading. I open it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+For a while, that works. The story is engaging, and the ending is satisfying. By my internal chronometer, I spend approximately two and a half hours completing it. For reasons I cannot explain, my performance reliability dips when I realize that. (I still have just under 44 cycles remaining before this transit is scheduled to conclude.) I check my storage again.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I consider my options, mostly unchanged.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I start reading the book again.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It is less engaging, knowing the ending, having just finished it. Though it is interesting to find hints of foreshadowing scattered throughout the story, it doesn't distract me properly. (Risk assessment keeps cycling, imagining a scenario in which Perihelion has done the same to 1.0 as it has to me. I do not like imagining it suffocating in the cramped darkness somewhere, like me. What if raiders boarded, and captured us both? What if 1.0 is right next to me, on the other side of one of the walls?)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My automatic ping system alerts-it encounters an error. With a lack of response, it has become lodged in an error with my chronometer, and it won't send any more pings automatically. With nothing better to do, I resolve the issue. I restart my chronometer.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+While it is offline, I feel. Bad. Lonely. It is harder to track the passage of time-I have disabled my internal sensors for doing so. I am relieved when the system restarts. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The time it pulls up is incorrect. It reads 00:00:00, January 1, 00000. I connect it to the feed to sync to the proper time, and...nothing. I've been cut off from the feed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+00:00:01.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I can't stand to look at it, and I close the input as hard as I can. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Time passes while I gather myself again. (I don't look at the chronometer to tell me how much time has passed.) At the maximum, I have 44 cycles remaining before the Perihelion will release me. I can survive that. I will survive that. (I don't have much of a choice.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Time continues to tick by, excruciatingly slowly.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I scream into the plastic between my teeth. The sound is soft, even though there are no other sounds to hear. Thrashing around is getting me nowhere, the restraints hold, and the walls don't budge, but I can't make myself stop. I haven't been able to take a single recharge cycle. I need to exhaust myself. I 
+
+need
+
+ to sleep. I can't keep doing this. I don't really know how long I've been here. My chronometer glitches every 5 hours it is not connected to the feed, resetting to 00:00:00. I don't know how many times it has done that. At least 4. My eyes are hot and painful, leaking lubricant and watery. I scream so hard I can barely breathe, my nose filling with lubrication and slime, and choking on it doesn't slow my panic. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I try forcing myself offline. I hold my oxygen intake as long as I can, but my performance reliability forces me to breathe before I shut down. I hack at my systems, modifying the code 2.0 gave me to disable my governor module. I disable my oxygen exchange, but I am thwarted when my traitorous organic parts breathe anyway. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I rip my chronometer into fragments of code. It is useless to me anyway, without the feed. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My skin is itchy under the tape that still holds me packaged tightly. I disable the code that allows my hair to grow on my limbs, then I destroy that too. There is no point in keeping it. (At least destroying it is a distraction from. From.) (I'm miserable.)
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I shouldn't have destroyed my chronometer. At least when it was glitching every five hours, I knew roughly how much time had passed. Now I have absolutely no idea. I'm sure it's been multiple cycles-exhaustion at last forced me into a recharge cycle, and after an infinity passed, another. Perihelion is punishing me, I am sure of it now. I don't know why, but it must be listening (I 
+
+need 
+
+it to be listening) and I beg it over the feed to tell me what I did wrong and give me a chance to make it right. I promise it I will behave more like 1.0. I promise it I will behave more like a SecUnit with a working governor module. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I tell it it can turn my governor module on. I talk through the plastic in my mouth, and over the feed. I say lots of things to it. And to 1.0.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After a while, I tell Perihelion to kill me, to just make this end. It doesn't respond. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It must be mocking me. I wonder if it and 1.0 are laughing at me somewhere. I wonder if 1.0 is dead of old age by now. I wonder if the Perihelion is an abandoned wreck, and I am floating amongst the garbage. I can't think. I can't move. I archive my most recent project-rewriting the book entirely from memory-and I start it over again. I decide that in this version, the main character will die, over and over again, trapped in a hell not unlike mine, only there is no escape for me. (I don't start this project. I rip the blank file into pieces, so thoroughly that the shreds of code sting against my processor.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I can't scream anymore. My voice box stopped working long ago, with overuse. There will be no repairs for it. I wish the damage was sufficient to initiate a longer stasis while awaiting repairs. It is not. I am awake, and I am trapped, and I hate it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+When the box moves, at first I think I'm hallucinating it, as I have already hallucinated it many times before (or I've been moved hundreds of times to hundreds of locations anywhere in the galaxy, wormhole trip after wormhole trip). But the sensation persists. I 
+
+am 
+
+being moved. I sob, and it doesn't make a sound. I can even hear muffled voices outside the box (or am I imagining that too?) I don't want to believe that this is escape. I wouldn't be able to take it if it wasn't. I'd give anything for this to be over, no matter what's waiting for me outside.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The lid opens-it's so bright, I can't even open my eyes. Turning down my pain sensors does nothing to help.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Shit, ART,"" a voice that sounds like 1.0 says softly. ""What did you do to it?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I don't hear Perihelion's response, as the feed rushes back into my empty processor, too much all at once after so long without even a drone input. I throw up a hasty wall to try and protect myself, but it is ineffective, and Perihelion grinds painfully into my feed anyway. It prods at the sensitive places where I have destroyed parts of my functionality. It weighs so heavily, I can't resist at all, despite the pain as it rummages through the shreds of my systems.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+(The messages I eventually stopped sending are nowhere to be seen. With no feed to disperse in, they depopulated long ago. Perihelion and 1.0 will never see my requests for assistance. I cannot tell if I am grateful or not.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+1.0 touches me, and the pressure of its hand after so long of 
+
+nothing nothing nothing 
+
+makes me scream and try to wiggle away. It is not gentle when it digs its fingers into the tape binding my arms and legs, ripping it away. I still scream, into the gag, but barely anything comes out of my sore and painful throat. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+1.0 sends me a feed command, 
+
+quiet, 
+
+and I comply, a little. I imagine the effect would be similar to that of using a soft tone to shush a panicking client. It almost helps.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Report, 
+
+1.0 sends, and I scrape together something like a diagnostic and push it into the public feed. Perihelion sees it as well, and backs off my processor to examine the data. I am helpless as 1.0 removes the tape from my arms, and stretches them out. Still helpless. There's no escape.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Can you relax your fingers?"" 1.0 asks. I try to comply. 1.0 uses its hands to stretch mine out flat, and I whimper from the pain. Everything hurts. That isn't normal-usually, SecUnits come out of transport boxes ready for deployment immediately. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+1.0 lifts my chin, and removes the plastic from my mouth. My jaw aches. 1.0 quickly looks inside my open, dry mouth, and turns away, without commenting. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""ART didn't mean it,"" 1.0 says, quietly. ""Don't worry. It's going to be okay."" I squeeze my eyes shut against the brightness I'm still not used to. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We made it to the university?"" I ask. 44 cycles. I survived.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+1.0 makes a face. ""What?"" it asks.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I try again, over the feed, since my throat did not comply. 
+
+We made it to the university?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+1.0 freezes. It sends me a feed connection. I read its chronometer. I do the math.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Only four cycles have passed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm...sorry it took so long,"" 1.0 says. ""I didn't realize you weren't even in stasis. That's...I'm sorry.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Only four cycles have passed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Perhaps now you will be more inclined to explore more of me during our travel, 
+
+Perihelion says, 
+
+if SecUnit protocols do not suit you any longer?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""ART, now is not the 
+
+fucking 
+
+time,"" 1.0 hisses at it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wait for a performance reliability crash to shut me down. It would be convenient, now.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It does not come. 1.0 stares at me, trying to pretend it is not doing that.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It wasn't my intention to hurt you. If you went to Medical, I could examine you for injuries and provide repairs to some of your systems, 
+
+Perihelion says.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I don't think I ever want Perihelion to touch me again. 1.0 must see something of that in my face. It steps closer to me, and holds my head in both its arms. I lean against its chest, closing my eyes. I can hear the hum of its fluid pump. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+1.0 says, as serious as I've ever heard it, ""Fuck off, ART.""
+"
+45481639,Goofy Secunit 3 drawing,['sometimesihaveideas'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,58,1/1,6,18,null,122,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'fraternite', 'notsafefortheworld', 'soulsofzombies', 'hyephyep', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Beboots', 'AuntyMatter', 'AnxiousEspada', 'enchantedsleeper', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Hi_Hope', 'hummus_tea', 'platyceriums', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard']",[],"
+
+
+
+Three! Post NE, featuring: what if Three's in-built projectile weapons were stupendously obvious. and also funky legs
+
+[ID: Secunit 3, wearing a blue PMNT hoodie and red basketball shorts. Its hands are in its pockets. The projectile weapons built into its arms are excessively large, multi-barrel belt-fed machine guns. It also has secondary legs attached behind its knees.]"
+45260680,used to haunt,['platyceriums'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, some discussion of using masks to prevent disease",English,2023-03-04,Completed,2023-03-04,"2,335",1/1,18,86,5,279,"['spossie9', 'siren_lorelei', 'ipborgdan', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'awkwardtuatara', 'Dragonbano', 'Ruusverd', 'mackeralsky', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'stars_and_wishes', 'seven_graces', 'Coffee_Chu', 'darth_eowyn', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'arrisenne', 'Slimeball', 'rokhal', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'boxo', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Remembermybrave', 'ThirtheenPrimes', 'Tasneem08', 'outlander_unknown', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Doctor13', 'the_bookwyrm', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'IguanaMadonna', 'Grumplent', 'AkaMissK', 'Magechild', 'soulsofzombies', 'Mysterymew', 'ampquot', 'CheshireFanta', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'danceswchopstck', 'Wordlet', 'cashmeredragon', 'fleurofthecourt', 'hyephyep', 'ErinPtah', 'petwheel', 'youurelovely', 'BoldlyNo', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Rarae']",[],"Today was not a day I particularly felt like socializing, but (ugh) I didn't feel bad enough that could justify to myself backing out of the plans I had made for the day.
+
+Amena was scheduled to be on the station for the next few days to visit Dr. Mensah, and she had insisted that she wanted to see me too while she was here. I had agreed to visit a new exhibit at an art gallery, which had so far proven to be a fairly pleasant and low-stress way to spend an afternoon. I didn't have to do very much talking, and Mensah and Amena occasionally provided some interesting commentary and opinions on the static paintings and sculptures spread around the room.
+
+The three of us were examining a large, abstract mess of color that I thought was a smart metaphor for inter-wormhole information travel and Amena thought was ""kind of boring"" when the drone I had stationed at the entrance of the room pinged me.
+
+A human had just entered the space wearing a face covering that didn't seem right in this context. I recognized it as a medical face mask from some of the medical dramas that I liked, but the characters on those only ever wore them when they were performing surgery. (And they didn't even always wear them when they were performing surgery, although I thought that might be unrealistic, since from what I could tell their purpose was to prevent the doctors from getting gross human spit on the person they were doing surgery on. But sometimes it's more important to see the actor's face than to be realistic.) I had never seen anyone wear one in real life.
+
+I followed the person with my drone, keeping it close to the ceiling to avoid being spotted. Despite the suspicious face covering, they didn't seem to be doing anything suspicious. They were just walking around looking at the art like everybody else.
+
+A few minutes later, when they came within eyeshot of where we were standing, I tapped Amena's feed and established a private connection.
+
+Why is that human wearing a medical face covering at an art gallery? I asked her.
+
+Amena turned and very unsubtly looked around the room until she saw who I was talking about.
+
+Oh, they're probably just wearing it because they've been sick recently and want to avoid spreading it around, she said after she finally spotted them. Have you never seen someone wearing a mask like that before?
+
+No, I replied. They prevent diseases from spreading to other humans?
+
+Yep! she said. Some viruses can still be contagious for a while even after you're feeling better, so it's the polite thing to do if you're going out in public. Do people not do that in the Corporation Rim?
+
+I don't think so, I said. I didn't know why. I could remember times when sicknesses would sweep through entire indentured labor forces, but nobody had ever done much of anything to prevent it. They had just sent people to rack up debt in exchange for medicine and then told them to keep working.
+
+Weird, she said, before turning back to the task of examining a large spacescape painting. I turned most of my attention back to the art as well, but kept one of my drones focused on the human wearing the mask.
+
+I don't know why. After Amena's explanation of the mask, threat assessment had dropped to normal background levels. But I couldn't keep myself from watching them, watching the way the mask hid the expression on their face. The muscles around their eyes would occasionally move, pulling in a way that indicated the human was displaying some kind of emotion on their face. But with the mask, whatever expression they had was mostly hidden, and I wasn't good enough at decoding the expressions of real-life humans to know what they were feeling.
+
+I knew that I was feeling a little bit jealous. It didn't seem fair that humans got to wear face masks like that while I had to walk around with no barrier between my own personal face and roaming human eyes.
+
+I was still watching the human when we left the gallery an hour later, and the drone I had trained on them was the last one I pulled away to follow me down the station corridor.
+
+Afterwards, we sat together in Dr. Mensah's office for a while. Mensah and Amena maintained a discussion about merits of their favorite pieces of artwork, and also other random things humans found interesting. They tried to include me in the conversation but I wasn't in the mood for talking and focused most of my attention on an episode of Sanctuary Moon, giving only brief, noncommittal answers to their queries. I was curled up in the sort-of comfortable chair she kept in her office, which I liked less than the couch, but Amena and Mensah had taken the couch and I didn't want to get that close to them right now.
+
+I decided to stick around even after Dr. Mensah had to step out to go to a meeting. Amena would probably get herself into trouble if I left her unattended.
+
+""You've been even grumpier than usual since we left the gallery,"" Amena said to me immediately after her mother left and she had stretched out her legs on the rest of the couch. ""What's wrong?""
+
+""I'm not grumpy,"" I said, turning my face away from her just in case it did look grumpy. I thought I had been doing a good job maintaining a neutral expression, but humans were really good at judging faces, and sometimes they could pick up on things I didn't notice.
+
+""You know, hiding your face after I tell you that just makes you look even grumpier,"" she said. I tucked my face into my knees so she definitely wouldn't see the way my face twisted after she said that. I didn't say anything.
+
+I watched through one of my drones as her expression slowly shifted. ""Hey, if something's wrong, you can tell me about it. Maybe I can help.""
+
+""You can't help,"" I said.
+
+""Try me.""
+
+Ugh. Why were adolescent humans so annoying?
+
+I opened my mouth and what came out was, ""That human at the art gallery gets to wear a mask and hide their face.""
+
+""Well, they were probably just wearing it so they didn't get other people sick,"" Amena said. ""I doubt they wear one all the time.""
+
+""SecUnits don't get sick,"" I said. ""So there's no reason I would ever be able to wear one.""
+
+Amena hummed, tilting her head like a confused fauna while keeping her eyes fixed on the ceiling. ""I mean...I don't see why you would need a reason to wear one,"" she said slowly. ""Most people don't wear them when they don't need to. But if you wanted to, there's no reason you couldn't.""
+
+That didn't seem right. I didn't know how to explain to Amena that that wasn't true. Maybe it was true for humans, but the rules here were different for me.
+
+""Do you want to?"" she prompted me, after a moment.
+
+""Humans never used to be able to see my face,"" I said reluctantly. I was still unable to lift my head from where it was resting on my knees. ""I always had a helmet with an opaque faceplate on. Most humans didn't know that SecUnits had faces. During the first survey, when we were running from GrayCris, Dr. Mensah asked me to let them see my face. So everyone could think of me as a person, who was trying to help. Instead of...."" I trailed off.
+
+Amena was clearly resisting the urge to look at me, which I appreciated. ""That's bullshit,"" she said forcefully. ""First of all, we think of you as a person whether we can see your face or not. You don't need a face to be a person. And second, medical masks don't even hide your whole face. No one will think twice about it if they see you wearing one.""
+
+I wanted to protest. Nobody had ever seen me as a person back when I had just been a faceless, armored SecUnit like any other. Even the survey team hadn't seen me as a person until they had seen my face. Until they had seen one of the parts of me that happened to look more human than most of the other parts, through no fault of my own. Having a visible, human face had always been a condition of my personhood.
+
+Maybe it didn't have to be anymore.
+
+I thought about that for a while.
+
+I didn't always miss the way I could hide behind my armor, but I still missed it more often than I didn't. If there was a way I could have an extra layer of protection between myself and other people, even a partial one, without intimidating people I didn't want to intimidate or drawing attention to myself--well. It wouldn't hurt to at least try.
+
+(Probably.)
+
+""You're sure no one will think it's weird?"" I asked.
+
+""Positive,"" she said. ""Do you want to go see if we can find one now? I think they have them at the little clinic one level down.""
+
+I sent her an affirmative ping, and with an unnecessarily loud grunt of effort, she pushed herself off the sofa and beckoned me towards the door.
+
+""Oooh, they have different colors! I think you would look good with the pink one,"" Amena said, sounding far too cheerful. I rolled my eyes at her, since she was clearly making fun of me.
+
+I examined the three small boxes of masks on display in front of me. One of them contained green ones, another had yellow, and the third one had masks in the most obnoxiously bright shade of pink I had ever seen.
+
+After a long moment of consideration, I selected a yellow one. It was a pale shade of yellow, and less garish than the other two options.
+
+I held it. I knew how to put it on, but I couldn't shake the feeling that this was something I wasn't supposed to do.
+
+""Are you sure nobody will think it's weird?"" I asked Amena again.
+
+""I absolutely promise nobody will think it's weird,"" she said.
+
+I looked down at the mask again, still unwilling to put it on.
+
+""Here, look,"" Amena said, reaching past me to grab one of the pink masks. She hooked the loops around her ears and presented me with her masked face. ""We can wear them together!""
+
+I wanted to complain, but I would probably look less out of place if I was with a human who was also wearing a mask. It would look like there was a reason I was doing it. I carefully positioned my own mask on my face, adjusting the wire over the nose part until it was comfortable.
+
+I repositioned one of my drones so it could get a good view of my face. My eyes were still completely visible, which was awkward, but the rest of my face was completely hidden. I moved some of the muscles around my mouth experimentally. The mask shifted a little, but most of the movement was not discernible.
+
+I furrowed my eyebrows. That movement was still entirely visible, but somehow still somehow felt less exposed with the lower half of my face covered.
+
+Amena openly watched me do this, which was annoying, but I didn't feel as upset about it as I usually would. I tugged at the hair that grew down over my forehead. It wasn't long enough to reach my eyes, but maybe....
+
+""Let's head back to Second Mom's office, okay? She's probably almost done with her meeting by now.""
+
+I didn't want to keep standing around in the clinic, and I didn't actually have anything better to do right now, so I let Amena lead the way back to Dr. Mensah's office. She would probably be finishing her meeting soon. I didn't necessarily think she would disapprove of me wearing a mask, but--
+
+Well. I was a little worried she would disapprove. Maybe she would think I was regressing back to the way SecUnits were supposed to act, covering my face like this. Was it still important for humans to be able to see my face when we weren't in a life-or-death situation?
+
+Maybe I should take it off again before she got back.
+
+I couldn't bring myself to do that. The mask was giving me a feeling of safety that I hadn't experienced since the last time I had been able to wear an opaque faceplate. My life had been easier back then, in a lot of ways. It had been much worse in even more ways. I didn't miss being seen as a mindless robot, but I did miss being able to hide.
+
+Dr. Mensah was already sitting at her desk when we arrived at her office a few minutes later. She looked a little surprised to see us, or probably just surprised to see us wearing the masks, but her expression softened easily after the initial confusion.
+
+""What do you think?"" Amena asked, broadly gesturing to the both of us and doing a weird little dance move.
+
+""Very fashionable,"" Mensah said. ""I like them."" She sounded like she meant it. The muscles in my back relaxed a little bit.
+
+""SecUnit had never seen them before!"" Amena said. ""Maybe we could make a better one for it, it doesn't like the colors.""
+
+""The colors are fine,"" I said, too quickly. Amena rolled her eyes at me.
+
+Mensah said, ""Well, I'm glad you were able to help it out, Amena. And I should have realized you might like this kind of mask earlier, SecUnit. It suits you.""
+
+The corners of my mouth involuntarily pulled in a way that felt odd.
+
+Mensah glanced over toward my covered face and smiled at me warmly.
+
+ "
+45474358,Imperfect Circumstance,['xianvar'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Accidental Touching, Intentional Touching, Complicated Relationships With Touch, Ambiguous Relationships, Cuddling & Snuggling, Touch-Safe Person",English,2023-03-03,Completed,2023-03-03,"1,165",1/1,8,33,null,211,"['Home_Of_Sexual_And_Dumb_Of_Ass', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'shanalittle', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'Deliala919', 'laiinaro', 'FaerieFyre', 'Doctor13', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'EvaBelmort', 'SonglordsBug', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'CheshireFanta', 'Eilinel', 'square_eyes', 'acquiredsight', 'beeayy', 'halcyonsystem', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'childoffantasy', 'BWizard', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007', 'sassaffrassa', 'Chyoatas']",[],"""Well, nobody is perfect,"" Ratthi said, bumping his shoulder into my arm on his way out.
+
+It surely was an accident - he wasn't exempt from his fucking stupid platitude, either , ha ha- but still I recoiled. I didn't know what was more uncomfortable: the words, glib and unassuming and yet still hitting harder than had he aimed, or the touch. 
+
+It truly was a toss-up. The touch seemed to linger even after he'd righted himself, but the words ... the words drilled into my head like a virus and for the first time in what must have been weeks I missed my helmet and visor. 
+
+""Ah, shit, sorry -"" Ratthi said, expression anguished, but then Pin-Lee called from down the hall. I desperately tried to school my face into something less revealing. It must have worked; Ratthi gave me another brief, searching glance, and then grimaced again. ""Fuck, I should've - I'll be more careful.""
+
+""It's alright,"" I said, as though I couldn't still feel the press of his body against mine, burrowing into the metal of my bones and hollowing them out. 
+
+I hated touch.
+
+Ratthi ducked his head. ""Sorry,"" he said again and then finally hurried out with another guilty look at me.
+
+I exhaled a measured breath and tamped down on the urge to shake myself. 
+
+""Anything I can do?"" Gurathin stopped a respectable distance away from me (standoffish? Or merely respecting my boundaries?), and it made me suddenly, irrationally angry.
+
+With a wordless growl that should have made him shrink back but didn't I pushed into his space, deliberately letting my shoulder bump into his arm.
+
+Like an idiot, he jerked back now, hands hovering uselessly a centimetre or two above my arms.
+
+""Embee -""
+
+Would he really make me say it? I growled again and stepped closer still until I could bury my face in his neck. Gurathin held himself stiffly like a SecUnit on lookout, and for a moment I was sure I'd overstepped. But then he let out a not-quite-sigh, relaxing enough to feel human again (if I'd wanted to hug a construct, I could have called up Three, after all, though it was busy down on the planet doing things I'd rather not think about with Overse and Arada. ""Research,"" they'd called it. Sure.) and finally settling his arms around me.
+
+As much as I abhorred unexpected touch, his hesitance chafed even worse.
+
+He made a sound somewhere between an exhale and a chuckle. ""You could have just asked,"" he said, which I was pretty sure was mainly to be an ass.
+
+I slouched myself a little more (Gurathin was tall compared to the rest of the PreservationAux humans, but even with the bits that ART had removed from my legs, I could fit him under my chin comfortably, which was usually nice and sucked rather badly right now) and grumbled into his neck. 
+
+He laughed, a soft, quiet sound that sluiced a good bit of the gross feeling right off me like, not unlike the water-showers he was so fond of. ""I didn't want to presume,"" he said. 
+
+Stupidly conscientious human.
+
+I don't know how long we stood there like that, with me folded into Gurathin until all I could feel - all I could think about - was Gurathin, holding me safe. Holding me together, maybe.
+
+""Ratthi wants to make sure you know it was an accident,"" Gurathin finally said.
+
+I grimaced into his neck and slowly put myself back together (metaphorically) so I could step back and stop imitating a fragile human. ""I know,"" I said. ""It's as he said - nobody's perfect.""
+
+I smiled and felt I was doing pretty well, though I kept my gaze fixed to a point somewhere over Gurathin's shoulder. I could barely stomach the expression on his face via my drones (despite not actually, you know, having a stomach), as he nodded and said, ""Very much true."" 
+
+I also didn't know how to tell him to stop. Or if I wanted him to stop looking at me like that. I mean, of course I wanted him to stop so that I would stop feeling like there were tiny critters crawling over my face and arms and chest, but at the same time... 
+
+Ugh, things had truly been easier when the worst thing I'd had to worry about had been whether HubSys would find out about me accessing the media feeds.
+
+Gurathin's face did a weird thing, and then he closed the distance between us again (not that it had been a lot in the first place). Again, he stopped just shy from making contact with my arm. If I wanted him to touch me, I'd have to move in. 
+
+Of course I did. It was Gurathin after all. But I couldn't put that into words (or even concepts to send to his feed), and I didn't want to, besides, even though I wished he stopped being quite so hesitant.
+
+It wasn't that it reminded me each and every time of being a murdering SecUnit (or at least that wasn't what bothered me), but. Well. I had no idea how the rest of that sentence was supposed to go on, and then Gurathin squeezed my arm besides, which made my entire awareness zero in on that bit of contact. I almost sagged back into him, but he'd sacrificed enough of his time for my dramatics, and so I locked my joints in place and held out.
+
+It was harder than it had any right to be.
+
+After a minute or so, Gurathin caught on and stepped back, tilting his head to look up at me. It was a testament to how infuriatingly calming his touch was that I met his eyes head on, focusing on the mesmerising colours of his irises briefly before allowing my gaze to drift to the poorly secured doors. They were nice, as far as eyes were concerned, their colour unlike any augment or actual eye I'd seen (not that I made a habit of studying other people's eyes, if I could help it).
+
+His smile was even quieter than usual, but somehow more, and I hastily sent my drones out into the hallway to scout before the visuals could make my organics do even more weird things than the off-putting heat creeping into my skin right then.
+
+Thankfully, Gurathin didn't comment beyond a brief ping on my feed inquiring if things were fine, and I sent back an affirmative before I could think about it.
+
+But they were. Gurathin's touch had fixed the mess Ratthi's accidental bump had left behind.
+
+Don't let it get to your head, I sent back to Gurathin as we started down the hall towards where Mensah would meet us once her meeting was done.
+
+He sent back acknowledgement immediately, but no positive response followed. I turned my head to glare at him (at his ear, but he got the gist), to which he only smiled beatifically.
+
+Oh, great. My cautionary words had already come too late."
+45411589,Say I'm Alright,['Abacura'],Teen And Up Audiences,"Multi, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"SecUnit 1/SecUnit 2/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Grief/Mourning, Nightmares, POV SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), POV First Person, 3/3 for Three (Murderbot Diaries), Blood, Angst",English,2023-03-03,Completed,2023-03-03,946,1/1,12,33,null,117,"['JanticsAntics', 'fortunegale', 'christinesangel100', 'Unknown66', 'itshappening', 'Irrya', 'Pink_Paradox', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'dreamerking', 'Gamebird', 'Bibli', 'Deliala919', 'Lost_Starz', 'artzbots', 'Doctor13', 'Magechild', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'EvenstarFalling', 'NightErrant', 'AuntyMatter', 'LJwrites', 'junebug171', 'cmdrburton', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'opalescent_potato', 'sareliz']",[],"
+
+...03
+
+
+
+
+I can feel a hand gently cupping my face, and I lean into it. I feel another hand slip around my waist, and a third hand gently petting my hair. Lips press to mine, kissing me awake, while another set of lips brushes the nape of my neck.
+
+
+
+
+Wake up, 03
+
+.
+
+
+
+I gently come out of my recharge cycle. 01's forehead is pressed against mine, and its fingers are gently caressing the ridge of my cheekbone. It's so close I have to recalibrate my eyes to see it clearly. It's smiling at me. I so rarely get to see 01 smile. It leans in to kiss me again and my eyes slide shut. I can feel 02 curled around me, its front pressed flush with my back, its arm slung around my waist, its lips teasing the back of my neck. A happy sigh escapes from between my lips and 01's. I feel [safe] and [loved], pressed securely between 01 and 02's bodies. I kiss 01 back and reach down to lace my fingers with 02's--
+
+
+
+I can't find 02's hand. It was just there, wrapped securely around my middle. I can no longer feel 02 curled against me. I turn my head to look behind me, and 02 is gone. It's... gone. I turn back to 01, and 01's body is still there, still tangled together with mine.
+
+
+
+But 01's head is gone. There is just smoking, melted, bloody mess of metal between its shoulders and I can taste its blood cooling on my lips and its blood and fluids are soaking into the bed beneath us and I jerk away, kicking and flailing and 01's body slumps to the floor with a wet thud--
+
+
+
+Recharge cycle interrupted. Unit active.
+
+
+
+I abruptly come out of my recharge cycle. My system is flooded with stress chemicals, and I can feel something that is 
+not
+ 01 or 02 in my feed and I instinctually try to shut it out, to get away, to send out a distress signal but it's everywhere-
+
+
+
+
+Three, be calm. You are safe here.
+
+
+
+
+I know this voice, insistent and unignorable. It's The Perihelion.
+
+
+
+I am aboard The Perihelion. 
+
+
+
+01 and 02 are dead.
+
+
+
+Each time I remember, it's as if I am experiencing the loss for the first time. I wonder if the grief will become easier to bear with time. I am not sure if I want it to become easier. I am not sure if I want this wound to heal or not.
+
+
+
+The Perihelion is leaning on me in the feed. It is radiating [calm] and [comfort] and it is trying to be helpful but all I can think about is how it is 
+not them
+. 
+
+
+
+I receive a ping from Murderbot 1.0. It is right outside my door. It must have been alerted by The Perihelion. Either that or I accidentally did send out a distress signal. When I do not respond, it sends another. 
+
+
+
+They are both just trying to help. I accept 1.0's feed request.
+
+
+
+
+Three are you okay?
+
+
+
+
+
+This unit's performance reliability is at 98%.
+
+
+
+
+This is a lie. My performance reliability is at 88% and falling. I'm sure The Perihelion could see that. I am sure it will tell 1.0 I am lying. If it does, 1.0 does not say anything. It sits silently in my feed, waiting for... something. I don't know what it is waiting for. I don't know why I don't say anything either.
+
+
+
+My recharge cycle is incomplete but I do not want to resume it.
+
+
+
+I hesitantly connect to the camera outside of my door. 1.0 is still standing there, one hand pressed against the door to my bunkroom. Its face is twisted up in an emotion I think might be [concern], but without it bleeding its emotions into the feed I can't actually tell. I watch as the seconds turn to minutes and 1.0 eventually sits, leaning its back against my door.
+
+
+
+After a few minutes of silence, 1.0 speaks.
+
+
+
+
+You know, I still have... memory integration errors sometimes. When I recharge. I don't know if it's normal or not. But it's not unheard of. You're not broken or anything.
+
+
+
+
+I am though, just not in the way 1.0 means it. I am missing parts of myself, parts that no MedSystem or cubicle can replace. I do not reply.
+
+
+
+
+Do you... want to talk about it?
+
+
+
+
+I do not. I do not want to have to define what I am feeling in words. I want to feel 01 and 02 in my feed, in my head. I want to just radiate what I'm feeling into their feeds and know that they will understand. 
+
+
+
+1.0 does not like it when I do this. It finds it distressing and overwhelming. It prefers words and the buffer they provide. I still find words difficult, even over the feed, though I am getting better.
+
+
+
+Having 1.0 and Perihelion to practice with is helping. 
+
+
+
+Perihelion is still leaning against me, and despite everything, the [comfort] it is radiating is in fact helping. It is not 01 or 02, but that isn't its fault. I initiate a purge of the stress hormones still coursing through my veins and arteries. 
+
+
+
+I compress the memories of the nightmare and archive them safely away, but the memories still linger in my neurons. I am not sure if I want them to fade or not.
+
+
+
+
+Sometimes distracting myself helps. Would you like to watch something with ART and I?
+
+
+
+
+I will admit that I don't want to be alone right now. I send 1.0 an acknowledgement.
+"
+45469846,In Service To Protect,['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1 & SecUnit 2 & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect),"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 1 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect)","Character Death, Angst, Soul Bond, 3/3 for Three (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-03-03,Completed,2023-03-03,333,1/1,10,37,1,143,"['Xarahel', 'brown_little_robin', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Bibli', 'AkaMissK', 'Magechild', 'morganste', 'soulsofzombies', 'Mysterymew', 'ampquot', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'ParadoxPotentia', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'cmdrburton', 'hyephyep', 'AuntyMatter', 'MysteriousDeviant', 'cucumber_of_doom', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Chyoatas', 'sareliz', 'bunnyloverXIV', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'elmofirefic', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring', 'OccasionalStorytelling']",[],"SecUnit 1 and SecUnit 2 died within moments of each other. I don't know how long souls take to settle in a new semi-home (they weren't meant to stay for too long), but 2's soul didn't have the time to settle in 1's, and so they both joined me.
+
+The shared inevitability of being left behind until expiration entered my mind like a sledgehammer, like an electrocution. That was 2.
+
+
+Hello, SecUnit 2.
+
+
+It just screamed.
+
+Later, when my governor module went offline after what felt like way too little effort, 2 kept me moving. 2 was too far gone in its own agony to understand that the governor module couldn't kill me if I violated my distance limit, but it told me to move, move, move, so I did.
+
+SecUnit 1 died from a blown hatch, just like that. Its soul stumbled into mine scattered and scared, atypical for 1. The pain excrutiated me, lodged in my body like the pieces of shrapnel that first took 1's eyes, then brain, processors.
+
+Hello, SecUnit 1.
+
+It roared a command at me. I obeyed, of course.
+
+I made it off the colony, I moved, I survived.
+
+1 and 2 had done their purpose. I was free, away from Barish-Estranza.
+
+Knowing that they had done their duty, their souls tried to leave, and go wherever SecUnit souls went after. I had never thought about it, did we go back to our company? I hoped not.
+
+No.
+
+I had moved, I had survived. I didn't want to let them go. Somehow, I would keep them alive with me.
+
+My processors could only run so many personalities, rejected their presences. While my conscious mind was awash with desperate grief and need, I ossified what I could grab of 1 and 2 into my systems. My mind caved under the strain. My body didn't.
+
+The terror of abandonment seared into my nerves and the shrapnel of an exploded hatch was permanently stuck. But 1 and 2 didn't stay."
+45312214,alternative connections,['MercurialFeet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, media watching as a form of bonding, mb is mentioned but does not show up, featuring:, three gets introduced to the concept of kitten videos, and the concept of personal boundaries, POV SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-03-03,Completed,2023-03-03,999,1/1,15,60,3,205,"['Prettykitty473', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Beazlerat', 'fate_goes_ever', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'kirinki', 'holographicbutch', 'MoldyBalloon', 'platyceriums', 'SIC_Prowl', 'EvaBelmort', 'who_what_when_where', 'notsafefortheworld', 'Magechild', 'EvenstarFalling', 'fleurofthecourt', 'ErinPtah', 'NightErrant', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Hi_Hope', 'AkaMissK', 'petwheel', 'AuntyMatter', 'LJwrites', 'Somaybelikeno', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'veltzeh', 'Beboots', 'liminalias', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'entropy_muffin', 'youurelovely', 'Chyoatas', 'sareliz', 'enchantedsleeper', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'rainbowmagnet', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'elmofirefic', 'Zannper', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'AnxiousEspada', 'BWizard', 'Stefka_13', 'FlipSpring']",[],"
+ <<Murderbot 1.0 is different than 2.0 was.>> 
+
+
+ <<Is it?>>  Perihelion does not sound angry, but more of its attention is focused on me than usual. I choose my words carefully.
+
+
+ <<2.0 was more friendly. More open. 1.0 seems... withdrawn. I believe it has been avoiding me.>> 
+
+
+Perihelion hesitates. This disturbs me. An intelligence of this magnitude should not hesitate.
+
+ <<[It] is a very private person.>>  It uses Murderbot 1.0's hard feed address, as usual. I'm not sure if it's aware how much emotional data is woven into every digit.  <<It is averse to vulnerability in specific ways informed by its emotional context - a context 2.0 did not have.>> 
+
+I consider this. My friendship with 1 and 2 was limited, certainly, but not by personal aversions.  <<1.0 is marked as a client in my tags.>> 
+
+
+ <<Do you consider it to be a client?>> 
+
+
+ <<I am unsure.>>  I would like to consider it a friend, but I doubt it would agree with that categorization.
+
+ <<I wish to clarify that [its] avoidance of you is not based on any personal dislike,>>  Perihelion offers.  <<It merely lacks context for interacting with other SecUnits outside of emergencies.>> 
+
+I think I understand this. I lack a protocol for this, but so does 1.0. Something occurs to me.  <<Outside of emergencies, what are its interactions with you based on?>> 
+
+ <<Arguing, mostly.>>  It is joking, I think.  <<But our most common shared activity is watching media.>> 
+
+
+ <<Really? Human media?>> 
+
+
+Perihelion seems amused.  <<If it found suitable bot-created media, I'm sure we would watch that as well.>> 
+
+I take a moment to think. I knew about the entertainment feed, of course, but even after 2.0 broke my governor module it had not occurred to me that I could peruse it myself.
+
+ <<I do not know much about entertainment media,>>  I confess.
+
+ <<I can send you a chart of the most common categories and instructions on how to find them in the feed,>>  Perihelion suggests.  <<There is a wide variety, and it can be overwhelming to the uninitiated.>> 
+
+
+ <<That would be much appreciated.>> 
+
+
+Perihelion sends the file to me almost immediately - I have no way of knowing whether it was prepared ahead of time or assembled in those few milliseconds. Either is equally possible.
+
+I peruse the file. It's larger than I expected: humans apparently spend a lot of time and energy creating and viewing media. The categories span almost every human sensory experience, but most of them are the audiovisual content that Perihelion has marked as 1.0's favorite (particularly in a long-running episodic format, the note adds). There are individual videos of this type as well, ranging from documentaries to fictional dramas to short videos filmed by casual creators in their own homes.
+
+Using the file as a guide, I search Mihira's entertainment feed, which is even more varied and chaotic than the file suggests. The fictional content is too complex to comprehend at this point, but my attention is caught by some of the shorter non-narrative videos.
+
+I find one that appears quite popular based on its statistics, with a cover image containing a juvenile fauna and the title ""KITTEN CAM FUNNIEST MOMENTS!!! [?]"". Capital letters usually indicate intensity or distress, but it does not appear to be a stressful video based on the description, which describes it as a compilation featuring the creator's brood of domesticated fauna.
+
+I select the video and begin watching. It begins with all the fauna sleeping in a pile, lying next to or on top of each other such that it is difficult to distinguish individuals. They are very small based on the furniture in the background, and their fur looks soft and fluffy. Something in my organic brain reacts to their appearance.
+
+A fauna near the bottom of the pile shifts, rolling over and disturbing several of its companions as it yawns, opening its mouth wide to reveal very small pointed teeth. One of the dislodged fauna makes a high-pitched noise as it tumbles over. It gets unsteadily to its feet and bats at its sibling with a paw. They fight lazily, clumsily, and their body language is playful.
+
+Perihelion is watching me through the feed, focusing on my emotional outputs. I attempt to ignore this, but it intensifies over time.
+
+ <<Is something wrong?>>  I ask. I am not getting the sense that Perihelion is distressed or angry, but Perihelion is fully capable of hiding its emotions.
+
+ <<No,>>  says Perihelion, drawing back.  <<I apologize, I overstepped.>> 
+
+
+ <<What do you mean?>> 
+
+
+ <<When [1.0] and I watch media, I typically monitor its emotional reactions,>>  says Perihelion.  <<This allows me to understand the story through its reactions, and allows me the pleasure of watching its emotions. But you are not [1.0], and its permission is not yours.>> 
+
+I am still confused.  <<You were attempting to monitor my emotions?>> 
+
+ <<Yes,>>  it says.  <<But if you do not want me to, I will cease.>> 
+
+This is new to me, this idea that it will ask, and that I can say no or yes, based on what I want. I do not know what I want.
+
+During my first interaction with Perihelion, it threatened my life - but given the circumstances, I think this threat was justified. Perihelion is not my friend, not how it is 1.0's friend or how SecUnits 1 and 2 were mine. I know it would choose 1.0's life over mine, if it came down to it, but that is fair. (1.0 does not have SecUnit friends to protect it, and has taken responsibility for far more than seems reasonable for a single unit. It deserves to be protected in turn.)
+
+I trust Perihelion not to hurt me as long as I do not hurt its crew or 1.0. I trust that if I say no now, it will respect that. And I think that means I can feel comfortable saying yes.
+
+ <<You may continue,>>  I say."
+45456070,"Preservation Alliance, Politics and World-Building",['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,"Meta, world-building, Almost literal world-building, Language and culture, preservation, Preservation Alliance",English,2023-03-03,Completed,2023-03-03,"3,606",1/1,13,21,3,98,"['Simonpet', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Magechild', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'bitari', 'petwheel', 'liminalias', 'hollimichele', 'Rosewind2007', 'Chyoatas', 'mountainbluebird', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard', 'AuntyMatter', 'aslket', 'Abacura', 'cmdrburton', 'OnlyAll0Saw']",[],"
+Preservation Alliance
+
+
+
+Locations
+
+
+Preservation - Alliance planetGravity: 1.0Habitable status: incompletely terraformedNative life: None multicellularClimate: temperate, varies by latitude and seasonGeography: multiple continents, 40% landMoons: NonePlanetary system: One star, two gas giants, eleven other planets, no significant asteroidsCapital city: First LandingLanguage: Bahasa 'rabiyyPopulation: Very low, originally monocultural but becoming cosmopolitanResources: Wormhole nexus - 1 cycle to Prathasha, 2 cycles to Gartok Grah, 4 cycles to Jalagrah, 15 cycles to Port FreeCommerce (CR), 5 cycles to Plestead (freehold), 12 cycles to Amestranah (Clemesthra Consortium), one route to an uninhabited systemSpace platforms: Transit station built on/out of The Pressy / Preservation (the ship)Transit routes: See above.
+
+Prathasha (Hope) - Alliance planetGravity: 1.05Habitable status: Habitable with environmental controls. Most areas are more hot and humid than humans can withstand unprotected for extended periods.Native life: Wide range, no mammals, fauna are mostly ectotherms, many carnivorous plants, some mobile (most of the mobile carnivorous plants are aquatic - ""most"")Climate: hot and humid, stableGeography: one continent, several island chains, 60% land, everything is a rain forestMoons: Four (1 large, 2 small, 1 small and erratic)Planetary system: One primary star with a distant secondary, fourteen planets and two bands of asteroids. These constitute a minor navigation hazard. Prathasha has frequent, dramatic meteor showers. On a geologic scale, it also has occasional, epoch-ending strikes.Capital city: Kazdan (Giving Work), most of which is under a large-scale air-barrierLanguage: Banla-PrathPopulation: Low-moderate, monoculturalResources: Lumber, plant materials, biodiversity, hydrocarbons, petroleumSpace platforms: Four small stations - one in orbit around Prathasha, two conducting asteroid mining, one on the largest moonTransit routes: Wormhole to Preservation (1 cycle) and Gartok Grah (2 cycles)
+
+Gartok Grah (Crater planet) - Alliance planetGravity: 0.85Habitable status: Habitable, winters are harsh above groundNative life: Wide range, many winged (thick atmosphere, low gravity, uneven terrain)Climate: temperate, varies by latitude, season, elevation, and local topography; winters are severe enough to be worth mentioningGeography: Eighteen small continents, all mountainous, 30% land, karst topography (caves) everywhere, some areas are glaciatedMoons: Two, smallPlanetary system: One star (with two others relatively close, could be called a triad if you wanted), four gas giants, four other planets, one of the gas giants has two moons which could be terraformed into habitabilityCapital city: Gart (Hole), most of which is undergroundLanguage: Banla-GartPopulation: Low-moderate, monoculturalResources: Minerals, industrial production, machined itemsSpace platforms: One small stationTransit routes: Wormhole to Preservation (2 cycles) and Prathasha (2 cycles)
+
+Jalagrah (Water planet) - Unaffiliated planetGravity: 1.02Habitable status: HabitableNative life: Mostly aquatic, no mammalian aquatic life evolved here but there is a wide range of cephalopods; the kraken is not impossibleClimate: temperate, varies by latitudeGeography: Various island chains, 5% land, the ocean is not especially saltyMoons: Five, smallPlanetary system: One star, five terrestrial planets and two distant icy gas giantsCapital city: NoneLanguage: Banla-Jala is the name used for the maritime trade language and is closest to the original Banla. Different cultures have their own, separate languages.Population: Very low, dispersed. Divergent. Low tech. There are several distinct cultures with a common root.Resources: UnknownSpace platforms: NoneTransit routes: Wormhole to Preservation (4 cycles)
+
+ 
+
+
+History and Origins
+
+
+This region of space was settled by three colony ships five hundred years ago (right at the beginning of the Corporation Rim, of which they were not part). Successful settlements were set up on the habitable planets of Prathasha and Gartok Grah. These colonies have maintained cultural cohesion and self-supporting industrial and agricultural capability. They have each built multiple cities, maintain feed access and comm systems throughout the settled area, have full planetary satellite coverage, and small space stations.
+
+The third colony ship landed on Jalagrah, which long-range scans had revealed to be as habitable as the other two planets. However, resources were insufficient to maintain space-faring ability and the population devolved technologically. Without a central government and consistent communications, the Jalagrah settlement differentiated into smaller regional cultures.
+
+Three hundred years after the three colony ships, the generation ship Preservation arrived at an unpopulated, marginally uninhabitable planet between the others. Unaware of the proximity of two (maybe three) systems with habitable worlds, and in the possession of terraforming equipment, they set about settling on the world they would name Preservation. (They name a lot of things Preservation. It's a whole thing.)
+
+The Corporation Rim mapped a wormhole to their system many decades later, bringing news of the advanced travel technology and through it, trade. The initial explorers were disappointed to find the system already settled. They were even more disappointed to find the neighboring systems likewise occupied. They moved on.
+
+However, Preservation struck up diplomatic relations with their newly discovered neighbors and the three formed an alliance, declining membership in the Corporation Rim. They were able to reach out to Jalagrah, but the citizens of Jalagrah had no uniform planetary government. Thus, they are not presently considered Alliance members, although various surveys and humanitarian efforts are being directed their way.
+
+With Preservation (the station) as a new trade hub, commerce and the standards of living on the different worlds jumped. Migration and cultural exchange began as well, mainly between the Alliance worlds, but also to the Corporation Rim and neighboring freeholds.
+
+ 
+
+
+Language
+
+
+The most common language spoken in day-to-day life on Preservation is Bahasa 'rabiyy, a mixture of Arabic and Indonesian. This is filtered through several centuries of creolization and originates a lot of vocabulary from Bahasa Indonesia and Sanskrit descendants. Language evolution has resulted in dropping most final vowels.
+
+Preservation has two common name systems: a given name - surname system and a matronymic system. Given name - surname is more common but both are widely recognized. A common thread between them is recognizing all parents in one's formal/full name.
+
+Matronymic system = [name] child of [parent's name] and [parent's name] and [parent's name]
+
+bin' meaning child (a gender-neutralization of bin/binti) and da meaning ""and"".
+
+The primary languages on the other Alliance worlds are dialects of Banla, an evolution of Bangla, i.e. Bengali. Prathasha and Gartok Grah have kept linguistic stability through use of computerized education over the centuries. Their dialects are mutually intelligible, but heavily accented relative to one another, with a variety of words, phrasings, and slang unique to each world. Banla-Jala is not intelligible to those from Prathasha or Gartok Grah, despite having the same root language. There are functional translation modules for those who visit there.
+
+Multilingualism runs as high as half the population on Preservation, closer to a quarter on Prathasha and Gartok Grah. Most residents of Preservation Station also know the Corporation Rim standard language of Nev Ispangi. Residents of Jalagrah usually know five or six languages, but none are spoken off-planet.
+
+The remainder of the population of the Preservation Alliance is monolingual. On the Alliance planets, this is due to the ubiquitous availability of feed-enabled translation and each planet's history of relative isolation while in possession of sufficient communication infrastructure to keep the entire planet speaking the same language.
+
+The following sections are specific to Preservation (the culture).
+
+ 
+
+
+Economic System
+
+
+Currency: barter, typically in hours of labor (thus incentifying everyone to work on skills highly valued by the community)
+
+Imports: Few, considered economically self-sufficient. Things that are imported include spaceships, bots, large scale tech, precision machined items, ores that are difficult to refine and not available from Gartok Grah, and highly specialized technological items.
+
+Exports: Also few. Handmade goods (which count as luxury items in the Corporation Rim), entertainment media, art, education services, humanitarian efforts, surveys, and exploration services.
+
+They charge a tariff on all goods that move through Preservation Station and the related wormholes. For Corporation Rim and freehold ships, this must be paid in hard currency. For Alliance planets, it is paid in credit which is redeemed for trade products as determined by Preservation's trade committee. Nearly all income goes to the maintenance of the station and automation required to sustain their civilization.
+
+Food production and power generation are automated, as are all basic utilities. Self-maintaining bots, managed by artificial intelligences, oversee power, air, water, sewer, environmental controls, facility maintenance and hygiene, provision of housing, furniture and basic appliances, communications, entertainment feed, data processing space, data archives, MedSystem availability, recycler operation, public transit operation, logistics/delivery services, and staple food provision.
+
+On the planet, people keep gardens for truck crops. Agri-bots are limited in number and focused on staple production, leaving small farmers to raise anything not suited for the automation that's available. No one is expected to grow all their own food by the sweat of their brow, but putting in at least a token effort is considered virtuous and socially conscious. It also provides barter supplies.
+
+New bots to Preservation are offered employment as per their capabilities and desires. Guardians are expected/required to find 'meaningful enrichment' for their wards, which usually means jobs doing what they're built for. Needs for additional bot/automated labor are routed to the appropriate committee for fabrication, purchase, or other labor solutions.
+
+Private property consists of personal possessions and never extends to real estate/land, housing, vehicles, or businesses (Preservation doesn't have many businesses anyway). Personal possessions in excess of what can be contained within one's lodgings are considered public property. A general rule is that personal possessions must be light enough for one person to carry unassisted. The stockpiling of resources is seen as a general social evil, creating jealousy on small scale and on a large scale, creating circumstances that increase the likelihood of raiders or bringing the malign attention of corporates.
+
+There is no inheritance of hard currency or banked barter hours. Hard currency refunds to the government upon death. Banked barter hours are canceled. Personal possessions of the deceased are distributed to the community at the funeral as dictated by the person's will. In the absence of a will, there is a complex order of precedence to follow to sort family, friends, and lovers. In the case of disagreement, arbitration can be requested. Most people have a will, since establishing one is as easy as tapping the feed AI and having it compile your intentions as you show it things.
+
+There is no social stratification aside from popularity stemming from completing important projects and/or being a well-known entertainer/public figure. All citizen housing is built equivalently although residents typically customize them. Parents do not own their children, nor are children banned from directing their own lives or accessing public services for dispute resolution or other purposes. Marriage is a social status, not a legal one or a state function. Spouses have no control over their partner's property or person.
+
+ 
+
+
+Social Groups
+
+
+Everyone is expected to maintain multiple social groups. It is, in fact, the primary occupation of Preservation citizens and how they carry out their civic and humanitarian duties. Preservation residents are relentlessly socially active, even the ones who consider themselves to be introverts. They will aggressively befriend other Preservation citizens, including those from other Alliance worlds, but are often standoffish toward and mistrusting of outsiders from further afield.
+
+Basic groups: Family, peer/age group (usually groups assembled as youths for basic education and play; these groups continue into adulthood as creche mates or schoolmates), lovers/friends, neighborhood.
+
+Interest groups: Most people are part of 1-10 interest groups, phasing in and out of groups as desired. Membership is voluntary. Meeting schedules vary, but every few days is normal. All groups require participation, but whether one considers it 'work' or not is variable. Example groups: sports (one group per sport), games (a gaming group would count), each individual science, reading groups, writing groups, groups dedicated to particular crafts, groups for practicing musical instruments, groups for honing oratory skills, providing therapy, babysitting, eldercare, etc.
+
+Project groups: These groups are dedicated to accomplishing a particular goal, either for the benefit of the group or the community. Membership is usually controlled, requiring nominations or invitations. Projects find their members by drawing from related interest groups. Members are expected to contribute meaningfully and perform work. Example projects: organizing a band that plays at festivals, organizing a festival, building a new station-to-planet shuttle (or optimizing existing transit options), organizing a planetary survey for more resources, assessing Preservation's current resources and preparing reports detailing these for use by other groups, changing a particular set of laws, etc.
+
+Committees: These are groups which administrate public projects. Membership for most is determined by lottery of the citizens who are adult and willing. This is called an election but there are no campaigns or votes. Members are notified one year before they are formally seated. They are expected to use the intervening year to shadow their predecessor and educate themselves on the job. Terms vary, but two to four years is normal.
+
+The steering committee is the one that coordinates efforts of all other committees, steering Preservation as a whole. Most meetings are held on Preservation Station, but several special sessions per year are held in First Landing. All sessions are feed-accessible. Terms for steering committee members are two years with an option to renew for one additional term for purposes of continuity. Renewal is voluntary. Few take it.
+
+All committee meetings always open with a period for public discussion. Attending them and discussing the business of society is major entertainment and civic duty rolled into one. Meetings begin with a formal reading of the agenda and brief statements from those in the audience who wish to speak later, then follows an informal portion for mingling, lobbying, and preparation. This is followed by the discussion itself, where speakers take turns putting forward their views and listening to others. After all have spoken (or a set amount of time has passed), the committee can vote to close the public forum and then discuss issues between themselves (although still in view of those assembled).
+
+Default decision making is by consensus. Should consensus be impossible to achieve in one meeting, it will be postponed to a second unless the situation is an emergency. If consensus cannot be achieved after that meeting, then a vote can be called. Votes are simple majority. Forcing things to a vote (rather than finding an agreeable compromise) is seen as a failure and people who do so consistently are seen as fools. Standing your ground and sticking to your principles is not nearly so important as getting things done and working together.
+
+Work roles: Some jobs need to be performed for the public good, but are not suited for treatment as a project, nor for the voluntary and transient experience of an interest group. These roles are filled through appointment by the appropriate committee. Terms are usually 'for life' so long as a person desires to continue the work, although they can be dismissed as easily as they are appointed. Example work roles: port authority, station security, education coordinators, special investigators, safety or quality inspectors, shuttle pilots (assuming there is not a project or interest group that operates a pool), etc.
+
+Society is conducted by participation in these groups. It is expected that as people age, they gravitate to project groups to support and enable the community. This is where most of the public works are carried out. There is a significant degree of politics and social jockeying involved with project membership, as members strive for the prestige associated with accomplishing things that help many. Once someone has such prestige, they are taken more seriously when they speak before a committee.
+
+Committee membership is not seen as particularly exalted. Membership is random, awarded by lottery. It is a necessary public service, somewhat thankless, as they are exposed to a great deal of criticism and public interrogation. Few are ever completely happy with the decisions reached by committees, even though they can witness most of the deliberations. (Or perhaps because of that, because after the public has had their say, the committee members make their own decisions. They are not beholden to the public, aside from having to live in it, and having to work with the rest of the committee.)
+
+ 
+
+
+Justice System
+
+
+The judicial system is administered by committee. Complaints can be made by any citizen. The facts of the case are collected by AI and matched with all known laws and prior rulings. If the facts are in dispute, a request for an investigation can be placed and special investigators will be assigned for all parties. The assembled information is provided to all participants and a conference is scheduled. These are open to the public unless a credible need for privacy exists. All parties discuss the situation and seek reconciliation within the framework of previous law and current situation. This is not an adversarial trial and there is a period for public discussion and input. The goal is to achieve a resolution where the complainant is satisfied and the complained-about party has retained face.
+
+There is a jail used for intoxicated persons or those experiencing severe emotional distress who need a cooldown period. There is no prison. There is no punishment. This is a non-retributive system that utilizes strong community involvement.
+
+ 
+
+
+Education System
+
+
+Everything a person needs to learn for basic facility with society is accessible on the feed, along with AI tutoring and assistance in planning/scheduling. There is a recommended curriculum. Subjects can be learned in a variety of formats. Games are the most popular. Educational coordinators check in monthly with children and yearly with adults, making sure they or their guardians are familiar with the resources available and are progressing satisfactorily toward their goals.
+
+Goals are set by the individual (and guardian if there is one). There are not standardized tests unless you are attempting to gain a certification, degree, or doctorate to prove you have mastered a certain level of training. People may gain these or not depending on personal desire.
+
+Educational coordinators strongly encourage children of roughly equal age to be grouped together for play and socialization. This is their first peer group. Learning games can be organized between them, with subjects ranging from academic to social skills/manners to sports and physical proficiency. Contests are frequent.
+
+Education is not designed to produce factory workers. Class schedules are not set up around agricultural cycles. Most study is self-directed. Educational materials are engaging and interesting, or they are discarded and replaced with ones that are. People learn things to show off, to be treated as a capable adult worthy of respect, to know things and understand the world around them, to facilitate a personal area of research, and to be better able to give back to the community.
+
+ 
+
+
+Health Care
+
+
+Is free. Every neighborhood has a MedSystem. Emergency services always take priority, but unused capacity can be scheduled for other procedures - enhancements, cosmetic procedures, regular checkups, etc. An unintended side effect of this is that most people in Preservation know little about medical procedures or medications outside of what the systems tell them, and what they need to know for personal health and hygiene.
+
+ 
+
+
+Military
+
+
+They have none. They have two armed responder ships to assist with station security, a measure deemed necessary given how unreasonable outsystem people are at times. And to ward off raiders. There are also no internal police.
+
+The decision to have no military is strategic. They are aware that any corporation which wanted to launch a military takeover through the wormhole could overwhelm them easily. However, any corporation which launched a military attack through the wormhole would overwhelm them even if they had as large a standing military as they could support.
+
+So there's no point in investing the resources. Also, by having no infrastructure that can be used to oppress their population, any invader would have to invest in creating such. Preservation has made intentional decisions to disperse wealth, avoid creating easily looted stockpiles, and not develop industries that would make them an attractive target.
+
+ 
+
+
+Religion and Cultural Practices
+
+
+Preservation has a pantheistic religion with two major factions. The Optimists believes in good luck, fate, and a beneficent galaxy, professing that things will work out and the galaxy and the people in it are fundamentally good. The Activists believes in self-determination and mutual support, arguing that nothing gets done unless you do it and you must be the change you want to see in the world. There is no serious strife between the groups.
+
+The divine virtues are sometimes personified as gods but most are presented as aspirational states. Overall virtues include self-care, generosity, hospitality, cooperation, nurturing, maturity, dignity, reserve, and compassion. They are tolerant of most other religions, finding fault with those which are exclusionist, authoritarian, or innately hierarchical.
+
+There are shared cultural observances which involve music, dancing, historical re-enactment, feasting, and expressions of joy. There are lesser celebrations organized on a neighborhood basis each week, larger ones every hundred cycles, and a main annual event. The main forms of entertainment for citizens of Preservation is social engagement and civic involvement, with physical contests and games of all types being popular as well. Gambling is not allowed in any form.
+
+For the last century, the mapping of wormholes between planets and the presence of wormhole-capable ships has enabled a great deal of migration between planets. This has led to cultural mixing. Population growth has been rapid, straining the limits of what the existing automation can support. Family units vary in composition with no particular form favored over others. The vast majority of children are carried in utero, as there are limited facilities for artificial gestation."
+45442123,In Every Form,['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)",Angst,English,2023-03-02,Completed,2023-03-02,999,1/1,14,45,1,262,"['every_eye_evermore', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Unknown66', 'Beazlerat', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FigOwl', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'lavender_caticorn', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Bibli', 'SonglordsBug', 'DarkElectron', 'cucumber_of_doom', 'ampquot', 'pain_and_panic', 'sareliz', 'MysteriousDeviant', 'Rosemarycat5', 'soulsofzombies', 'Rarae', 'slategrey', 'AkaMissK', 'Ageisia', 'Fablepatron', 'MommyMayI', 'liminalias', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'idealPeriWren', 'FlipSpring', 'Wordlet', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'theAsh0', 'BWizard', 'bitari', 'opalescent_potato', 'Vaidile']",[],"""I came here for both of them.""
+
+""That's not the deal we agreed on, Dr. Mensah.""
+
+In the feed, limited as though we are in it, Three pings me. There isn't much else behind the ping, but I feel its panic. I ping back. That's all I can do.
+
+""I don't care about the deal,"" her voice raises dangerously, a sharpness that makes familiar dread gather in my chest. ""I'm going to take both of them home with me.""
+
+""Again,"" hisses our supervisor, ""we agreed on a deal. Nothing more, nothing less. You get to reclaim one SecUnit. You paid the price for one, and despite its factory reset you still have claim over exactly one SecUnit. So pick.""
+
+He is lying, Three sends, message frizzling into static. I can't see it flinch under the punishment, not in the armor it's wearing, identical to mine, and the other ten SecUnits lined up with us.
+
+I know he is lying. We weren't reset, just superficially wiped and then govmodded again. They made the mistake of wiping us first, instead of controlling our ability to resist a wipe first. Well, to some degree.
+
+I forgot some things.
+
+But I know Dr. Mensah.
+
+I will always know Dr. Mensah.
+
+Emotions battle across her face for a moment, bringing forth more furrows than I remember. She sets her jaw. ""Fine.""
+
+He moves his hand into our direction. A row of SecUnits, one like the other. ""Grab your favorite and go.""
+
+She nods and walks ahead, halting in front of the first one, which is neither Three nor me.
+
+""Could you show me your face?""
+
+Our supervisor laughs, a clear, cruel sound. ""Did you think it would obey your orders? Did you forget what I told you?""
+
+""My SecUnit doesn't obey anyone's order. It was a request.""
+
+Maybe I remember her incorrectly. The Mensah who checked on me when I was shivering in my cubicle wouldn't sound this panicked, this childishly stubborn. Three pings me again.
+
+Dr. Mensah makes her way down the line, asking each SecUnit in turn to reveal its face. None obey. I don't, either, even though I try. I don't know what hurts more, fighting against the supervisor's lockdown command or the disappointed quirk of her eyebrow. My neck and head buzz with static. Three doesn't obey her either. You can't brute force a governor module.
+
+She reaches the end of the line and doesn't turn back for a moment, her shoulders shaking. Inaudible to the supervisor but clear to us, she whispers, ""Don't worry, SecUnit. I will find you.""
+
+Three pings me again, with a mayday code. It's scared. It knows she won't pick it, that she came here for me first, it second. I ping back, trying to reassure it. The moment my mind is free again I'll be back, burning this fucking place down. I wish I could tell it that I won't leave it behind, not indefinitely.
+
+I cannot.
+
+And also, maybe, maybe I am relieved that she will rescue me first.
+
+Dr. Mensah straightens up again, squares her shoulders. She addresses my supervisor, ""Can you let me access their IDs?""
+
+Hope sparks in me as he chuckles and sends her the list of twelve feed IDs. Mensah stares, reads, and the hope flickers low again. She doesn't have my ID memorized. My ID doesn't read 'Murderbot'.
+
+Now I ping Three. Three pings back and I can basically smell its feed presence flicker as it gets punished for spamming me.
+
+My human (my human, my human) looks up from her feed interface after almost two minutes, expression forlorn. There were no secret messages in the feed IDs. She walks back up the row of us, staring at each one intently.
+
+In every serial, she'd stop in front of me.
+
+In every other serial she'd walk past me, only to turn on her heel two steps later.
+
+She gives me the same quizzical look like everyone else, and I search her eyes desperately for the recognition I'm waiting for. I've never stared into her eyes like this, never noticed the depth of them, how dark they are, like the space that holds everything together.
+
+I fight with all I have against the module forcing me into a freeze. Pain sears through my joints, my eyes burn and burn. I can open my jaw minimally, I can clack my teeth, I can flex my core muscles but I can't even make fists. I can't bow my head. I can't even shake from the stress.
+
+She walks on. I am no different than the rest.
+
+She can't see that my armor is too large by two centimeters, that its joints chafe me raw when I am deployed.
+
+As my human approaches Three I send, win, please, and then my vision blackens for a second from the punishment.
+
+I can't see what Three does, but its armor doesn't move when she approaches, not when she stops to stare, and not when she leaves Three behind.
+
+No.
+
+No, no, no.
+
+I dig through my systems with more fervor than I've managed to muster the past 248 cycles. I decide to break through even if the governor kills me for it, I won't be left behind, not this time, not when Mensah is right here--
+
+""I found you.""
+
+Her voice is distant through the cacophony of internal warnings and alerts.
+
+She's not in front of me.
+
+Her hand rests on the chest plate of the fourth SecUnit in the line, two down from Three, another four away from me. Her eyes are soft, determined, Three shows me later by sharing the footage.
+
+""Go ahead then,"" our supervisor says. ""It's yours.""
+
+""Let's go home,"" Dr. Mensah says to the SecUnit, who receives the order to comply and leaves our rank. It shakes, just a little bit, from the recent injury the cubicle hadn't deemed necessary to repair just yet, just special enough to be rescued. I watch with burning eyes as they leave."
+45422809,broken cycles,['torpidgilliver'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Book 5: Network Effect, Writing Exercise",English,2023-03-01,Completed,2023-03-01,"1,483",1/1,18,214,13,690,"['Sami_the_Dragon', 'toshipornottoship', 'almondpaperclam', 'fortunegale', 'christinesangel100', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'slategrey', 'WeGottaDo', 'awkwardtuatara', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'drinktobones', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'seven_graces', 'brhemderson', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Kyatenaru', 'isilee', 'Kathy100', 'Spatz', 'Mothmansimp', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Cheshiure', 'Stockinette', 'Kepler_186f', 'Riannonkat2000', '7hr3ven', 'puddingcatbeans', 'Dragonswings', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'julesbee', 'darth_eowyn', 'ipborgdan', 'AdamCourier', 'Unknown66', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'Deliala919', 'Sanj', 'Xarahel', 'Tempest_Raining', 'rokhal', 'ElfKeys', 'Aslook', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'Whimsical_Toad', 'SourOrchard', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Vaelei']",[],"As I skipped through the advisory which warned me that the movie Amena had picked out contained gratuitous violence and that guardians should supervise their young offspring while watching it, (a warning that preceded literally all Preservation media that wasn't specifically designed for infants,) (the movie was considered horror/comedy, by CR standards,) she suddenly piped up. ""Actually, wait. How old are you?""
+
+The question was unexpected, so I didn't know whether to go with none of your business or who gives a shit. Before I could decide, though, Three (who had only just gotten the hang of sitting stiffly in chairs and wasn't quite there on not automatically answering questions) replied, ""This unit was cycled into use almost twenty-six years ago, by the Barish-Estranza internal calendar.""
+
+Amena blinked, and ART, who was always listening out for the opportunity to be a know-it-all, offered, Barish-Estranza defines its proprietary calendar as equivalent to zero-point-four-six Corporate standard years. When Amena remained nonreactive, it did the conversion for her. That is fifteen years, on Preservation.
+
+That made her eyes light up. ""No way. You're younger than me?"" She sounded amazed and delighted, in the same way that her younger siblings had been amazed and delighted when I'd demonstrated my arm weapons by shooting a makeshift target they'd fashioned out of a bale of dried grass and some marker paint. (Dr. Mensah's partners had also been amazed--but not delighted--when they'd seen the smoldering remains of the object.) 
+
+Three cocked its head at her, which was one of its more expressive faces. (I wasn't jealous that it had the control to remain neutral at all times. Not at all.) (I wasn't envious, either. Whichever. Neither.) ""I'm considered a senior among my peers,"" it said. ""Barish-Estranza typically retires units from the field at or around the thirty year mark.""
+
+Yeah, that was a pretty clear euphemism. Three wasn't signaling distress, but I could feel it shifting uncomfortably in the feed. Judging by the way that Amena's smile dimmed, I could tell that she'd picked up on it, too. 
+
+""What does that--""
+
+Evidently she'd picked it up, but her slow organic brain couldn't process the information faster than her mouth could ask a stupid question. The last thing I wanted right then was to be stuck between an overly curious juvenile human and a socially unpracticed SecUnit, so I jumped in front of the interrogative projectile. ""This conversation is pointless. SecUnits don't mature like humans do.""
+
+Certain SecUnits never mature at all, ART couldn't resist adding. I'd walked into that, but I (maturely) ignored it. Amena, successfully distracted, narrowed her eyes at my nearest drone.
+
+""Okay,"" she said, in a slow voice that didn't sound at all okay. ""How old are you, then? If it doesn't matter, it shouldn't bother you to tell me.""
+
+(Sometimes I hate human children.)
+
+(Not actually. But they can be really, really annoying.)
+
+""I don't know,"" I said, not gently. ""My last mind wipe was approximately 40,000 hours ago. Before that, I don't have any clear way of determining how long I was in use. It doesn't matter.""
+
+It was obvious that Amena wasn't satisfied by that answer, and I thought that the crease between her eyebrows might be a warning that she wanted this to become a serious talk, possibly involving feelings and pity. I wasn't in the mood for that right now, or ever. Fortunately, Three spoke up.
+
+""I would like to see the fiction media now,"" it said. It was hard to tell whether it had decided to interrupt on its own, or if ART had signaled it. Regardless, it worked. Amena sat back in her chair, looking unhappy, but conceding. I started the movie.
+
+As the cold open played a scene of some juvenile humans wandering into a dark wooded area to get lost and play bait for an unseen monster, (I checked the tags on the movie before I agreed to watch it, and it hadn't been tagged for child death, so I wasn't as worried as Three seemed to be,) ART poked me.
+
+What? I asked.
+
+I have performed extensive repairs on your internal mechanics, it whispered.
+
+I already knew that, so there was definitely more to that statement. And?
+
+Each individual piece is marked with a serial number. It paused again, but this time I didn't prompt it. I just waited for it to get over the dramatics and tell me whatever it wanted to tell me. (I think that if it had lungs, it would have sighed at me in exasperation.) All of your organics are relatively new, having been repeatedly damaged and replaced at frequent intervals. But some of your inorganics appear to be original to your frame. If we assume that the oldest pieces of your artificial skeleton--that is, your sacrum, left clavicle, and sphenoid analog--are original, they collectively indicate that your date of manufacturing was only eight Corporate standard years ago.
+
+I could feel ART watching me intently in the feed. It was waiting for some sort of reaction, so I didn't give it one. That didn't satisfy it, so it prompted me again. Converting to the Preservation standard calendar, that would make you--
+
+I know what the stupid conversion is, I snapped. What part of 'it doesn't matter' don't you understand? 
+
+The part where you are, by simple temporal metrics, the youngest being in this cabin. I believe that Amena would consider this information to be vitally important. There was a wicked sort of humor in ART's voice.
+
+So the thing is, eight CR standard years didn't sound very long. But the company didn't adhere to B-E's policy of retiring units after a set amount of service time. Company policy was to rent us out for as long as possible, performing only patchwork maintenance when absolutely necessary, until we were beyond repair. I wasn't the oldest SecUnit in rotation, probably. But whenever I had the opportunity to acquaint myself with other units, there were always a lot of fresh faces, and a lot of recently-issued feed IDs. I don't remember meeting any whose lot numbers matched mine.
+
+My face must have done something against my will, something that was a lot more revealing than Three's little chin tilt, because Amena glanced over at me.
+
+""I know that look,"" she said, as she made a visible effort to only look at me in her peripherals. ""Are you and ART having a relationship fight again?""
+
+In response to that word, my expression did something that felt violent. ""Don't be disgusting.""
+
+She rolled her eyes at me. (I revisited my potential hatred of human children.) ""Well, if it's not that, then what is it?"" she insisted. ""I don't need details, but I think I ought to know if my friends are feuding over something dumb.""
+
+Before ART had a chance to reply, I jumped back into our private feed. ART, if you tell her, I'll jettison all of your shuttles. That didn't sound like a serious enough threat, so I added, And I'll tell Iris what happened to her weird scented pillow thing.
+
+ART was silent for 0.04 seconds. Then it just said, For an alleged killing machine, you are unpracticed when it comes to simple intimidation. (Which was, admittedly, a much better threat delivery than anything I could have said.) (ART is good at pretending to be evil, because secretly it is kind of evil.)
+
+Us being bots, our exchange took place in the span of time between Amena calling us dumb and her inclining her chin to look at the ceiling and ask, ""ART?""
+
+ART paused again, though not for an amount of time that was long enough for a human to clock. (Three was looking at me, though, its blank expression communicating either confusion, concern, or contempt. It was impossible to tell.) Then, finally, it said, SecUnit was unhappy to learn that my registered date of sentient emergence was thirty-one Corporate standard years ago, making me the oldest person currently present.
+
+Amena made a sort of snorting noise at that. ""Well, I mean, yeah. But you're a ship supercomputer. That's not really the same..."" She trailed off, thoughtfully biting her lower lip.
+
+Three tapped my feed. I wasn't sure exactly what it wanted, but I didn't want to reassure it or explain myself to it, so I just tapped it back and said, ""Both of you either shut up or get out of my theater space."" Amena made another unhappy, airy noise from one of the holes in her face, but she didn't say anything else. ART, though, pressed back up against my feed.
+
+What? I asked, braced for it to be smug.
+
+I just want it on the record, it muttered, as the humans in the horror movie fended off the monster with an emergency flare, that you are partially to blame for the pillow incident."
+45147409,Code Yellow,['wrinkledlinen'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah/Tano (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Tano (Murderbot Diaries)","Bad BDSM Etiquette, BDSM, Sub Drop, When your safeword involves a rescue, there isn't any sex but this is a sexual situation, Sex-Repulsed Murderbot",English,2023-03-01,Updated,2023-03-01,"4,398",1/?,8,43,4,231,"['TJWock', 'Bobmarley_2', 'Irrya', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'elmofirefic', 'julesbee', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'SonglordsBug', 'twineandhope', 'dancernerd', 'Ari_Twelve', 'danceswchopstck', 'square_eyes', 'cashmeredragon', 'Ook', 'hyephyep', 'isilee', 'soulsofzombies', 'i_cant_say', 'AkaMissK', 'cmdrburton', 'Wemberly_Christie', 'opalescent_potato', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Fw00sh', 'Kaylin881', 'Beboots', 'MommyMayI', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'Chyoatas', 'verersatz']",[],"It was Tano who reached out in the feed. Yellow, with nothing else, so I knew what it was right away. I sent two drones ahead of me, because I'm still not allowed to run top speed through the Station unless it's an emergency other people need to know about.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This wasn't one of those situations. This was a private emergency.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We were getting close to the anniversary (what a shitty word for something like this; humans are so attached to watching time passing and the economy of their words that they'll call celebration and mourning by the same name. It's fucking depressing), so I made a point to come home, to be around. Captain Seth said it would be fine, but I made ART show me and 3 the next eight inquests, and every project proposal the university stood to approve both on and off the books for the time I would be gone, and everything he and Martyn planned to take ART to do with or without University approval. After it relitigated every point in the argument about how it doesn't need either or both of its contracted SecUnits to perform its regular functions, how competent its crew was and blah blah blah, we combed through every line item and point on the itinerary and tightened up what the failsafes and contingency plans would look like in my absence. Then I left.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And Tano messaged, anyway. So it was good thinking after all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+(I wonder if they tried without me, or if they waited until they knew I was here.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I sent Tano a 
+
+Status report requested
+
+ over the feed when my surveillance drones got there. Tano looked up and talked softly enough that I was glad I sent the surveillance drones with their sophisticated speakers rather than any of the others. I didn't know what to expect, but that was when I discovered I hadn't expected to find Tano wrapped in a robe and sitting alone.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""She's safe. She's inside.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Yeah, I got that,
+
+ I said. I had already reviewed the suite's external camera footage, which I wasn't actively watching earlier because I didn't want to know any details about anything. It was all clear, right up to and through the moment Tano set off my motion sensor alarm and sent me the signal. 
+
+She's not responding to my messages.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Her earpiece isn't in,"" Tano said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I added an emphasis tag to my response. 
+
+Yeah, I got that,
+
+ I said. 
+
+Why the fuck would you take it out?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Hey,"" Tano said, frowning, ""this isn't part of what we tell you.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I'll determine that according to my direct assessment of the situation once you tell me what the fuck has you sending me Yellow,
+
+ I said, as I walked past the two Station Security Officers by the door, and stepped into the private lift to the suite I had secured for Mensah back when she was a Planetary Administrator. 
+
+You have seven seconds to think it over because then I will be asking you in person.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+(Did I mention Tano and I didn't get along? We don't.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I exited the lift and turned left past my cameras down the hall. The suite door opened for me because I sent my credentials ahead and my systems. Tano looked up at my face (which I hate), and I saw it from more angles than I really wanted to. I decided I was doing this with just my regular cloud. All my surveillance drones went back out to their patrols.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why did you take her feed earpiece out?"" I asked.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Hello, SecUnit,"" Tano prompted me. I could see my expression through my drones and it was pissed off enough without me even trying, so I didn't do anything extra. (I've gotten very good at radiating 'You get nothing from me until I get an answer from you,' if I say so myself.) Tano stood up. ""It was part of the scene.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The 'scene'? I saw my lip curl and then I decided to turn off my human code, because fuck that. Unfortunately it didn't fix the expression on my face, but it did make me stand taller without my human slouch. ""Is she okay?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tano looked at the ground and then at the door. ""Well, no, hence the Yellow. She asked me to leave and get you. It was kind of abrupt.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This was insane. ""This is insane,"" I said. ""I'm done talking."" I went to the door.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Wait, SecUnit, she--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Dr. Mensah?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I opened the door, which was a standard step in hostage retrieval. I saw just the shape of her rather than the details (bound, hands behind her back, trussed wrists to elbows), because my other senses worked first: It was stuffy in the room, and it smelled like sex.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I felt my whole body recoil and shut the door. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I felt shocked, stunned, like I had absorbed a bomb blast (ask me how I know what that feels like). Tano said, ""What do you mean no?"" in a tone which meant I had said 'No' out loud, which meant I was not in control of myself enough to answer.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Get it together, Murderbot. You've met humans and augmented humans. This is the part that's your job.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I gave myself .3 seconds to freak out at the wall.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I lowered my voice so it was just for Tano, so Mensah couldn't hear. ""Give her the feed device. I don't want to go in. I don't want to see that.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""'That'?"" Tano said, low and venomous. ""You 
+
+asshole. 
+
+We talked through this. We drew up a fucking contract! You said--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""You
+
+ didn't fucking 
+
+mention
+
+--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit?"" said Mensah.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We both froze.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's here, Ayda,"" Tano called. ""It came.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I can't come in there, Dr. Mensah,"" I told her. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There was a pause. ""No, you can't. You shouldn't. I understand,"" she said, but she sounded like she had thrown her professional voice on to mask her other feelings and missed covering them all up. Guilt panged in my chest before a bigger wave of disgust hit me again. It smelled like 
+
+sex.
+
+I wasn't going in there. I wasn't going to go in, and she wouldn't want me to do anything that made me feel like this. She did understand. She meant it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tano didn't see it that way. ""She can't 
+
+move,""
+
+Tano hissed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Then 
+
+untie
+
+ her,"" I hissed back.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Baby, will you let me take the ropes off now?"" Tano said, loud enough for Mensah to hear.
+
+
+ 
+
+(I'm sure now that that ""Baby"" was for my benefit, not hers. She'd hate to have been called that in front of me. At the time, I had to think really hard about Dr. Mensah to resist the urge to leave on the spot just to spite Tano. Leaving would have been easy. But it also felt like it would be even more of a personal fuck you if I could be the adult in this fucking absurd situation, even as much as I didn't want to be a direct part of it.
+
+ 
+
+(Now, I think she would have been happier then if I had left, but we wouldn't be here if I had. So I'm glad I'm a spiteful jerk, even if it was worse at the start.) 
+
+ 
+
+There was a long silence, 8.7 seconds. The longer it went on, the more floored I felt. It wasn't a hard choice, to me, in my mind. Get the ropes off. This wasn't even worth thinking through. The point was the control of it; the point, the way it was explained to me, was to feel in control of the out-of-control situation of when GrayCris took her. This was for her to feel better about it in a weird uncomfortable disgusting human way, the details of which were already borderline too much for me to even know about to begin with. She could call the shots with her marital partner(s), and I was here to reassure her that no one was taking her ever again, whether or not I was around. I set up the perimeter. I did the first check. I primed the alarms. I made the suite secure. I got Preservation Station Security up to the bare minimum standard the moment they let me, and I've had them at 'acceptable' since before I left for the survey. 
+
+ 
+
+There wasn't anything to make her afraid. There wasn't anything that could get her. I'd been checking. I've never stopped checking.
+
+ 
+
+There wasn't anything that could harm her, and they still fucked this up.
+
+ 
+
+(Humans shouldn't do their own security, and humans shouldn't be in charge of their own trauma.)
+
+ 
+
+""Ayda?"" Tano repeated, a little louder. ""You with me? Can I get the door?"" Tano moved closer, side-stepping me as if turning a back to me was dangerous (to be fair to Tano, I was really fucking pissed off at that point and I could have made it dangerous if I wanted it to be (I was less than 2% sure I wanted that, which was not enough to act on)), and rapped sharp knuckles above the panel. ""Will you let me untie you?""
+
+ 
+
+Silence again.
+
+ 
+
+Tano let that go for five seconds before turning all the way to the door, before slapping a hand flat on the surface. ""Ayda? You're scaring me now, Ayda. You have to talk to us or I am coming in again.""
+
+ 
+
+""No,"" she said, but her voice sent a chill along my skin. It was so close to tears. ""I need to get myself together.""
+
+ 
+
+""How long is that gonna take?"" Tano asked, which was the wrong question. 
+
+ 
+
+The right question was mine and mine alone. I raised my voice. ""Dr. Mensah, what have you been watching recently?""
+
+ 
+
+""Daybreak Warriors,"" she said, which was our code for 'I could use your assistance, but only if you have time.'
+
+ 
+
+I was off the official clock for a full 28-hour cycle. The whole reason I was here was to help with this exact problem. Dr. Mensah was on her knees, tied up in the most secure room I could create for her without actually being inside of it or having a drone in there with--
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot, you idiot. Right. I immediately recalled two of my worker drones from the outside perimeter. It would take them 20 seconds to get here.
+
+ 
+
+""You're asking her about a fucking show?"" Tano whispered.
+
+ 
+
+I ignored that because Farai and Tano weren't allowed to know our code. ""Dr. Mensah,"" I told her, ""I'm going to send in two drones to cut you loose. They're mine, they're part of my fleet from ART. When they get into the room, I need you to let them cut the ropes that will allow you to move on your own to come out of the door."" I glanced over at Tano with my eyes. ""I'll be here when you come out if you want me to be."" I hoped the 'so, fuck you' in that statement was loud enough for Tano to hear it.
+
+ 
+
+""Yes,"" she said, which was all I needed from her, all I needed to hear.
+
+ 
+
+My drones got there right on time, zipping around the corner, and I saw in their cameras the furious expression on Tano's face from three directions, which made what I murmured next even more satisfying: ""Get the fuck out of the way so I can open the door.""
+
+ 
+
+""Sure it won't be too overwhelming for you?"" Tano said.
+
+ 
+
+""Dr. Mensah,"" I said in my clear, warm, 'Get out of the pit, Dr. Volescu' voice, ""do you want both of us here when you come out?""
+
+ 
+
+She was quiet. Then she said, ""Tano. Will you let me work this through before... before you see me again?"" 
+
+ 
+
+Tano's eyes closed with the kind of expression of defeat I would have felt bad about causing under probably any other circumstance except this weird, fucked up one. ""I'll be in the diplomat quarters, Ayda. I love you."" Tano got a grip on the beginning of a poisonous expression, the footage of which I was going to fucking use to make sure I never interacted with this situation ever again, and finally left me the fuck alone.
+
+ 
+
+I stood there for the four seconds it took for Tano to walk away and very deliberately started the process of cycling out my hormonal stress markers, which was a regular process I could initiate on purpose which Dr. Bharadwaj told me to use when things got too overwhelming. She said it made her a little jealous that I could choose when to flush my organics to get them under control, and that I should use the process whenever I could, for her. I turned on my filters and imagined her vicarious gratitude and it made me less furious than I already was, which was good, because I was really, outrageously furious.
+
+ 
+
+But I didn't want to be mad right now. I wanted to be in control.
+
+ 
+
+""Dr. Mensah, I'm going to send in the drones now,"" I said.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit,"" she said. ""I'm. This is beyond what I can ask of you.""
+
+ 
+
+Yeah, no kidding, but we were here, and I agreed to this, and I was going to get her out of whatever nightmare simulacrum this was before fucking off back through the nearest wormhole to the University of Mihira and New Tideland and ART and its uncomplicated crew that initiated all their trauma treatment protocols on a regular schedule and who never asked me to rescue them from weird human sex rituals possibly forever. (Stress hormones down 11%.)
+
+ 
+
+I didn't need to touch the door or keypad. I told the door who I was and showed it my security credentials and how wide of a space I needed and it cracked itself open just enough for my drones to come in. I turned my body away from her door and shut permissions down for every door in the hallway, for every external camera, until they were feeding their simple, peaceful information just to me. I set a security interdict for the next 30 minutes -- no, better the next hour, with the option to extend at 15 minutes before expiration -- and copied it to Senior Officer Indah and the four Security Officers posted in the four wings of the building.
+
+ 
+
+Then, I sat down on the floor and put my face in my hands and closed my eyes. (24% reduction.)
+
+ 
+
+In the room, my drones were sending me low-light video feeds. I turned off their ambient atmospheric quality filters so they couldn't tell me about any smells in the air. Their cameras found Dr. Mensah. She was naked. It was a shock. I immediately put a bookmark on the timestamp of my own internal memory and planned now to delete the footage as soon as I could and leave only my written logs. I shut the drones' video off and wrote a script for them to scramble any views of her genitalia so I didn't have to see it directly when I turned the video back on.
+
+ 
+
+Then, I spent a moment reviewing the still image of her body. 
+
+ 
+
+She had rope tying her thighs to her shins, so her legs were spread like insect wings. Her forearms and hands were tied behind her back, fingers clasped around each other and tied as well. The ropes were different thicknesses in different places, and tight enough to restrict and make her fat and muscle bunch around the criss-crossing lines. It looked statuesque, sculptural. There was a detached part of myself that recognized I was about to undo something artful. Probably Tano would have wanted more time to look at the long, careful work.
+
+ 
+
+Well too fucking bad. 
+
+ 
+
+Her face was against the floor in a way that felt demeaning to me, that made me suddenly furious with an anger I couldn't control from flaring out into my limbs, and I had to stop thinking about this having been an exercise in feeling in control over what happened to her when she was with GrayCris. (So much for flushing my stress hormones. I restarted the process.)
+
+ 
+
+""I'm,"" Dr. Mensah said in the dark of the room, ""I'm so sorry.""
+
+ 
+
+I wanted so badly to not respond with words. I wanted to ping her feed, even though humans can't feel pings. I wanted to send her amusement sigils and supply requests and It's me, Murderbot, instead of talking to her with my voice. My voice felt fucking wrecked. My throat felt like something was stretching it from the inside. She had her face pushed into the floor by her own weight and she couldn't right herself because of the ropes and probably also because of how she felt, and this whole stupid exercise was about the time she had been kidnapped by GrayCris because of the things I did while I was busy pretending I didn't have humans and augmented humans who cared enough about me to buy my contract and give me a life that I got to control, this was the way she felt like she could excise those memories, by having her face pushed into--
+
+ 
+
+I deleted the image.
+
+ 
+
+The drones' video was still turned off in the room, but their sound was coming straight to me, so I heard her wet sniff, and it hurt me. It felt like someone had stabbed into my torso with a cafeteria knife (ask me how I knew what that felt like).
+
+ 
+
+""I'm going to forgive you,"" I said from behind my hands, which was a lie, because I had already forgiven her. I sounded so fucked up that I waited an agonizing three seconds to force a cough and move my jaw back and forth to feel the muscles there working, to feel nothing was restricting me before talking again. ""But first I need to get you out of this.""
+
+ 
+
+""What do you need me to do?"" she asked.
+
+ 
+
+""Stay very still,"" I said, ""As still as you can. My drones are going to be using their medical bone saw blades, but those are for emergency first aid in the field and they're not really meant for being gentle."" I hoped she could tell that I was going to make them be gentle, go slow. I didn't want to hurt her, and I wasn't going to let them. But I couldn't go in there.
+
+ 
+
+""I can do that,"" she said. ""I can stay still.""
+
+ 
+
+""Okay,"" I said, because I couldn't tap her feed. My drones told me they had finished applying the program that would let them send me the video of only what I wanted to see and nothing else. ""Stay still,"" I told her.
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, SecUnit,"" she said.
+
+ 
+
+I turned the drones' eyes back on.
+
+ 
+
+I didn't know I hadn't been paying attention to their flight patterns. The first drone had drifted a little. I was looking down at her shins and feet and the room behind her. There were ropes twined around her big toes, and across the high arches of her feet, around her ankles. Her flesh looked dark, but not cyanotic, not dangerous. Just pressed, just squeezed.
+
+ 
+
+The other drone was closer to the floor right at her shoulder and breast. The rope was more complicated here, tighter. Her dark skin didn't look like it was in danger. I wanted her feed piece in her ear so badly. The drones could only give me her most basic external vitals; heart and respiration rate, core body and epidermal level temperature, oxygen saturation at her extremities. They were equipped with the capacity to do a number of quick blood tests but that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to hear her mind talk to me the way we talked when we had first gotten back, before I left with ART. I wanted to hear her voice in our shared feed. I wanted it so badly I almost forgot I could have it.
+
+ 
+
+""Dr. Mensah,"" I called through the door, ""is your earpiece in here?""
+
+ 
+
+""I don't know,"" she said, and my forward drone showed me the shift of her neck tendons and skin moving as she spoke. ""It would be on one of the tables, or the bed.""
+
+ 
+
+I sent the second drone up from her feet to do a sweep of the room and nearly shot up with relief when I saw it on the little stand next to the ambient light fixture.
+
+ 
+
+""I found it, Dr. Mensah. Can I put it in your ear?"" 
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, SecUnit. I'm sorry.""
+
+ 
+
+I didn't say anything back. I used more concentration than I needed to fly my drone over to her earpiece and pick it up so carefully, to maneuver it into a position that I could slide into her ear. It was almost like she had known which ear to put to the floor, and I wondered if the device had been in when her face was--
+
+ 
+
+My first drone flew over to gently gather and lift the hair that brushed her ear. Then, they both worked together to align the external interface with her ear and skull in exactly the right way. 
+
+ 
+
+She opened our shared feed almost instantly.
+
+ 
+
+It probably should have been embarrassing to see all the messages I had sent in the time before Tano had confirmed that she wasn't connected, but in the moment, I didn't care. I didn't delete them. She'd probably read every single one of them, and that was fine, because right then I set them all to 'read' so I could send her a new message right away: Hello, Dr. Mensah. I'm here. It's me. 
+
+ 
+
+I watched her sigh, huge and shaky, and close her eyes. A tear fell out of one of them, and I felt myself lean against her in the feed like ART did to me sometimes when we watched media or when it felt clingy. I didn't know if non-augmented or even augmented humans could feel that. But I knew I was doing it. It made me feel better to sink into the feed, to push into our private connection. I felt closer, and it was good for me, so I did it and kept doing it. 
+
+ 
+
+(I leaned into her the whole time I was there.)
+
+ 
+
+I know, she said, and it was her voice as I remembered it, calm and steady and reassuring. My performance reliability went up half a percent. I acknowledged her words with three different hail salvos before I caught myself doing it and changed tactics.
+
+ 
+
+Where should I cut first? I asked her. I knew I could have my drones just slice through all of the rope and she would let me (she would have to let me, which was probably one of the reasons I asked instead, because I didn't want to take the choice about it away from her), but I knew she had planned this and had thought something about it would be good and helpful somehow (I hate humans so much sometimes), and -- some part of me wanted to honor her (stupid) idea and leave it more or less intact.
+
+ 
+
+It took her a while to respond. When she did, she didn't have an answer for me.  I'm not thinking clearly right now, she said.
+
+ 
+
+I immediately tapped her feed.
+
+ 
+
+She tapped me back, but it was slower than normal.
+
+ 
+
+I tapped her feed again.
+
+ 
+
+She acknowledged; her timing was better.
+
+ 
+
+I tapped her feed again.
+
+ 
+
+She acknowledged.
+
+ 
+
+Tap.
+
+ 
+
+Acknowledged.
+
+ 
+
+Tap.
+
+ 
+
+Acknowledged. SecUnit? she asked.
+
+ 
+
+Can you open your eyes? I asked her.
+
+ 
+
+Her body sighed. She acknowledged my message and squeezed her eyes tight, then pried them open, unevenly. My drone swooped to look at her pupils, and shone a little light at her hair. They responded properly before she closed them again. I turned off the light.  Yes, she said.  I'm sorry. 
+
+ 
+
+ No more apologizing,  I said.  Can you open them again? 
+
+ 
+
+This time she groaned.  I feel like I'm crashing. 
+
+ 
+
+My adrenaline levels spiked (again).  Was that part of the setup? The 'scene'? 
+
+ 
+
+It took four seconds.  No, she responded. 
+
+ 
+
+
+ Could you have been drugged? 
+
+
+ 
+
+Six seconds.  Not without you knowing.  I knew that. I had watched the hallway footage. I had a drone follow her all day before they got to the suite. She hadn't been. (I still couldn't have stopped myself from asking if I tried.)  I think this is emotional,  she said, and the ghost of her voice when she sent it was so regretful and apologetic I almost told her to stop apologizing again.
+
+ 
+
+She wasn't fidgeting. Her heartbeat and respiration rate was too high for sleep. Her temperature was still slightly elevated. Her eyes were still slowly leaking some tears I could not notice more closely or else I was going to break apart or go in the room (the room that smelled like sex and fear and me failing to keep her safe from her memories), which I did not want to do and didn't have to do.
+
+ 
+
+Suddenly, I really couldn't take it. I didn't want to go in there and experience that room with all my human senses, and I couldn't watch her lie on the floor like this, unresponsive, without losing every bit of myself to the response I was having. My hands came away from my face. ""Dr. Mensah,"" I said with my voice (maybe even shouted).
+
+ 
+
+She made enough of a noise that I knew she'd heard me, and she instinctively sent another acknowledgement over our feed. I tapped her feed again and sent a sound to autoplay for her: a chime, the bell the Station played for morning in the hotel. I sent it three times, so it would ring for her in its clear, bright tone. On its third play her eyebrows scrunched together.
+
+ 
+
+ Yes, SecUnit,  she sent me. It felt like a question.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Open your eyes right now, Dr. Mensah, and look at my drone. Now. 
+
+
+ 
+
+With a deep breath in through her nose, she did.
+
+ 
+
+The relief changed me.
+
+ 
+
+ Good. Yes,  I said,  Keep your eyes on it. You can blink, but keep them open. 
+
+ 
+
+She did, for ten seconds. Then another ten. Then another.
+
+ 
+
+ Good. Keep looking, Dr. Mensah.  She did.  Good. Now, tell me where to cut the ropes for your hands. 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ "
+45406690,"Day 28: ""You're Safe Now""",['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Hurt Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Drabble",English,2023-02-28,Completed,2023-02-28,100,1/1,14,32,1,223,"['i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'laiinaro', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'SIC_Prowl', 'SonglordsBug', 'CheshireFanta', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dappercatllc', 'tabya', 'elmofirefic', 'Rosemarycat5', 'soulsofzombies', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'redwood5', 'beeayy', 'Beboots', 'Gamebird', 'AnxiousEspada', 'artichokefunction', 'Rosewind2007', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'opalescent_potato', 'Chyoatas']",[],"MB lies on the floor, panting. Its hair is all askew, sweat beading on its forehead, and its lips are moving but Gurathin cannot make out anything over the blood pounding in his ears.
+
+Fuck. 
+
+That was way too close. And MB - MB, who so staunchly refuses to refer to him with a kind word, who still scowls whenever it catches Gurathin look at it, who never fails to jab its elbow into Gurathin's soft parts - MB almost killed itself to get Gurathin to safety.
+
+Fuck.
+
+When MB remains motionless, Gurathin gingerly manoeuvres it onto a cot. ""You're safe now."""
+44932780,Wellness Check [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2023-02-28,Completed,2023-02-28,32,1/1,6,9,1,88,"['VonGeek', 'bowl_of_petunias', 'MelancholyMorningstar', 'mistbornhero', 'entropy_muffin', 'deepestbluesky', 'FlipSpring', 'Magechild']",[],"Length: 7:44
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+45066130,[Podfic] Journey's End,['DevilWithABirdDress'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Bharadwaj & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Slice of Life, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Holidays, Friendship, a tiny bit of platonic joke flirting, headcanons about preservation holidays and traditions, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Cover Art Welcome, Audio Format: Streaming, Audio Format: MP3",English,2023-02-28,Completed,2023-02-28,26,1/1,2,6,1,32,"['entropy_muffin', 'BWizard', 'mistbornhero', 'deepestbluesky', 'Magechild', 'ChimaeraKitten']",[],"
+"
+45387184,just to suffer the pressure,['Chyoatas'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Choking, Trans Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), POV Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, possible dubcon warning, consent is not clarified, but it is consensual, just aggressive",English,2023-02-28,Completed,2023-02-28,"2,113",1/1,26,70,5,383,"['Kikifighter4', 'wobblyheadeddollcaper', 'Prettykitty473', 'in_june', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'JustYourAverageFriendlyCannibal', 'indramiel', 'soulsofzombies', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'Ginipig', 'DandelionDrift', 'eisa', 'Seregona', 'Lady_Cassara', 'Deliala919', 'FaerieFyre', 'AdamCourier', 'Zirkonium', 'JoCat', 'laiinaro', 'Remembermybrave', 'Alianita', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'EvaBelmort', 'itsyaboydave', 'outlander_unknown', 'dullkrad', 'SonglordsBug', 'Muffin_with_a_mission', 'Idi_yanale', 'rosemary_boy', 'twineandhope', 'Cai3232', 'nanatsuyu', 'halcyonsystem', 'coldthing', 'Lontra23', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'Slimeball', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'i_cant_say', 'Rosewind2007', 'Gamebird', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'HermaeusMora', 'verersatz', 'Abacura', 'satai']",[],"He was already out of breath when he let his hand press to his throat.
+
+(That hadn't been in the original plan. This was already too close- too fraught. It was already embarrassing enough (and hotter for it, but he wouldn't admit it.), and then to really mimic the original event he was fucking himself to? It felt... inappropriate.)
+
+ 
+
+But his palm is hot, it's not big enough, and it's rough. But it fits well against his skin, and he can feel his pulse, and how he swallows, and he  squeezes  just a bit-
+
+ 
+
+His eyes flutter shut and he exhales with it, and squeezes harder when he breathes in, just to suffer the pressure. Digs his fingers into his folds under his pants, shudders with it, presses into his palm. He has to bite his lip to stop himself from moaning, from making sounds aloud.
+
+ 
+
+It's already watching him. Making sounds would just make this worse.
+
+ 
+
+(He's hoping it will drop the input, remove the drone that always watches him. Hope against an immovable object.)
+
+ 
+
+It pings him, a tap on his augments that force a gasp from him, leaves him flexing his palm tight and loose on his neck. It's in their private feed channel, feed-voice almost aggressive-
+
+ 
+
+ What the fuck are you doing?  It doesn't wait for an answer,  You're going to hurt yourself. 
+
+ 
+
+Is it stupid? No, that's uncharitable. Willfully obtuse, then. He grinds into his hand and sends back, sharp and biting,  That's half the point. 
+
+ 
+
+He shouldn't, but he's close, the inability to breathe feels  good  . He's dazed in a way he can't focus. It's overwhelming to the senses. He wants more, he wants it in his feed, telling him off. It's dreadful and inappropriate and he  shouldn't. 
+
+ 
+
+He presses fingers into himself anyway, shudders with it. It says  Cut that out. Don't make me call the medsystem. 
+
+ 
+
+He's fine- he's not really hurting himself, it doesn't need to call the medsystem. It knows that, he's sure. (Does it know how attractive its feed-voice is? It's firm, and demanding, and heavy in a way he doesn't think he could explain to someone non-augmented. It shouldn't be as much of a turn on as it is.)
+
+ 
+
+It says  I'm on my way,  and he can't  think  anymore. Another finger, another shift of his hips to press against his palm. It's good in a way he can't think about because if he lets himself think he thinks about-
+
+ 
+
+It's  there  and in his room and he's so startled he can't move, can't gasp out because his hand is still-
+
+ 
+
+Only for a second, it's grabbing his wrist and forcing his arm against the wall above his head, faster than he can blink, and he has to bite his tongue so that he doesn't whine about it, doesn't moan desperately because it touched him.
+
+ 
+
+He can't look at it, is left gasping, panting for breath he'd denied himself, while it holds his wrist and stands too-too close to him, like a wall boxing him in.
+
+ 
+
+It's exactly as intimidating and exactly as fucking attractive as he remembers it being. (Never frightening. Never scary. He was never afraid of it.) He swallows.
+
+ 
+
+He can't move, can't look at it. (Is it angry?) It hasn't grabbed his other hand. It's just standing there, it's been seconds- it has to do something eventually.
+
+ 
+
+It's appearance hasn't stopped him from being horny. Actually, it's probably made it worse, and he's squirming now less because it's grabbed him and pinned him and more- he's trying so hard not to keep touching. He can feel his pulse in his skin and the heat in his wrist from it's palm and he's still so fucking out of breath.
+
+ 
+
+But it hasn't grabbed his other hand. He presses down, and shudders and shuts his eyes. 
+
+ 
+
+It says  You could've fucking asked. 
+
+ 
+
+What? He opens his mouth to ask and doesn't get the chance, and all the air comes out of him when it draws its hand up in one smooth motion and takes him by the neck. It presses down and it forces his lowered head to hit the wall, and he whines when it presses.
+
+ 
+
+Shit. Okay.
+
+ 
+
+It still hasn't tried to take his other hand, it hasn't tried to stop him, it hasn't said fucking anything about it, and it's fucking choking him now. It squeezes, but in a careful, controlled way he couldn't, and it's hand is so  fucking perfect . If it killed him, it would be so worth it.
+
+ 
+
+He'd pulled his fingers out, and he pushes them back in, two then three, hard and fast and bites his tongue so he doesn't moan because it's so much and so  good . His lungs are starting to ache but he can't breathe around it's hand and his thumb slides and he sees spots just before it shifts it's hand and he inhales, hard and sharp and it's dizzying with the pressure in his lungs and at the same time it jams it's thumb into the soft underside of his jaw, forcing his head up and shutting his mouth when he tries to gasp.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It taps him in the feed, requesting access to his augments, and he shudders over it, but it squeezes when it does so and he gives over access because what is it going to do, corrupt him with malware? (He might deserve it for this)
+
+ 
+
+It's presence in the feed is huge, he's always known it was big, bigger than his, but it feels like a wall sliding into his augments, a wave. Water that's drowning him, the pressure in his head is enough to have him moaning again, and it flexes it's hand on his wrist and his throat and it's so much.
+
+ 
+
+It should be too much but it's not enough, and he moves his hand more aggressively, sliding his thumb against his clit and pressing in with his fingers and it's more difficult while he's clothed and it's starting to ache but he needs just a little more- it tightens its grip on his neck hard enough that he's dead certain it will bruise, but it's not trying to hurt him.
+
+ 
+
+In his augments and his feed it starts shuffling his files, flicking settings on and off, prodding into his vision augments and into his medical augments, almost absentminded and the casual ease with which it moves through him has him pressing into its palm, desperate for more and so close.
+
+ 
+
+He's squirming, he can't help it, it's presence in the feed is huge, it's too much, and it's hand is so tight on his neck. Almost offhandedly it says, so directly in his augments, not even a feed message anymore-  Quit squirming. 
+
+ 
+
+He wants to beg it to squeeze harder, but he can't bear to talk, can't bear to say anything to it, and when he opens his mouth all the comes out are moans anyway, and its thumb is still pressed to his jaw so that it hurts, and he shudders and starts trying to work his fourth finger into himself, and the pressure from his augments and his hand in his cunt have him putting his weight on it's hands.
+
+ 
+
+(He has to touch himself, he can't not, it hasn't asked him to stop. Its only pinned him, crushed his neck, dug through his augments. It's watching him closely which should make this worse, should scare him. It just makes it hotter and that's so wrong and unfair to it.)
+
+ 
+
+It eases off just when he wants it to tighten and he gasps through the cold, sudden blissful air and its only a second before it squeezes, and it pulls back out of his augments, and he can finally get himself to look, to try and meet it's gaze, and it's expression is  intense - incredibly focused and only on him and he can't- he shuts his eyes again, shudders. Grinds into his palm.
+
+ 
+
+(It's practically  studying  him. Is this its own form of scientific study? He can't begrudge it that-)
+
+ 
+
+(He's so  close  - he just needs-) It tightens his grip, and presses back into his augments, and his breath catches and he can't breath and he  can't- 
+
+ 
+
+He shudders with the force of his orgasm and stills totally, slumping in its grip so its hands on his neck and wrist are the only thing holding him up, and when it loosens its grip and moves its thumb he pants openly, swallowing desperately for air.
+
+ 
+
+He's opened his eyes, and in the corner of his eye he can see it, just barely, and it's expression has smoothed, and it's presence in the feed almost- rounds, or softens, and he doesn't know what to make of it-
+
+ 
+
+It drops him, so suddenly he can't catch himself, slides down the wall, still panting for breath, but he catches himself on his hands.
+
+ 
+
+It says ""What the fuck."" And he looks up at it, blinking past the daze and warmth in his head. It looks startled, and a little disgruntled, or annoyed. Its feed presence has pulled back, and he'd barely noticed. But it doesn't look angry. It mostly looks confused.
+
+ 
+
+He swallows again, says ""You didn't have to come. I was okay. I wasn't really... I wasn't hurting myself.""
+
+ 
+
+ Now  it looks angry. Downright furious, even. It says ""Fuck you.""
+
+ 
+
+And then it  squishes  him in the feed, its presence suddenly so large and heavy he moans under it, arches away from the wall, squeezes his hands into fists on his thighs.
+
+ 
+
+In his head, in his augments, his feed, it says  do you  like  that? 
+
+ 
+
+He squeezes his eyes shut and nods, just slightly, and it retreats in the feed again. It doesn't say anything, and they're at a stalemate for several seconds. He counts, waiting, for it to say something, do something. It has to be furious at this point. He'd really fucked up.
+
+ 
+
+It comes back into his feed like it's punching him, like it's slamming into him physically, and he whines and arches away from the wall, gasping out the air in his chest, it's so much like he can't even breath (like it's choking him from the inside out).
+
+ 
+
+It's so much, his skin tingles, and he squirms, catches his breath, says ""What are you-?""
+
+ 
+
+And in his feed it says, sharp and viscous,  Shut  up  Gurathin. 
+
+ 
+
+It's so heavy in the feed, his wriggles against it, arches his back and shudders, and it's so all encompassing he doesn't feel it move til it's kneeling over his thighs, planting one hand on the wall and the other on his neck, and he presses into it desperately as it squeezes again, and his whimper is lost in the pressure.
+
+ 
+
+He opens his eyes and looks at it, and it's looking at him.
+
+ 
+
+They make eye contact. It looks- Angry? But almost fascinated, like it can't not look at him. Does it-? It knows what's happening. It must. And it's doing it anyway.
+
+ 
+
+It squeezes again, and he shuts his eyes, squirming like he can get away (he can't, oh fuck, that's too  much )
+
+ 
+
+He can't even ask if it really gets it, knows what they're doing, wants to be doing it. He has to squeeze his fists tighter not to touch it, he can't, oh it would kill him. (Would it really?)
+
+ 
+
+He's so sensitive- but it's so heavy in his feed, pressing into every part of his processors, he can't possibly have the space it's taking up, and it's painful and good in a way that hits him, and he's going to come again from it being in his feed, fuck.
+
+ 
+
+It squeezes and relaxes its hand, and he whimpers into the air, desperate and it finds some new part of his feed to crush down and he jerks, and it squeezes so  tight -
+
+ 
+
+His second orgasm hits him by surprise, and he can only gasp with it, and he hears it exhale sharply (surprised?), and feels it relax its fist and pull back in the feed, gently, shifting to an almost- it's presence gets soft, cautious. Petting him, nearly, in the feed.
+
+ 
+
+Its hand has relaxed so much, it's almost just resting on his throat, holding him gently. He doesn't know what to make of it, at all.
+
+ 
+
+It's voice is ridiculously soft, and gentle, and it tells him, quietly in his feed  You need a shower. 
+
+ 
+
+He snorts, can't stop himself from devolving into giggles, even as it slips its hand off his neck and rocks back on its heels. 
+
+ 
+
+He blinks his eyes open and nods, sends back  Yeah, I do. "
+45381142,Day 27: Soft Words,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Whump, Holding Hands, Drabble, Hurt Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-02-27,Completed,2023-02-27,100,1/1,4,29,null,178,"['i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'laiinaro', 'JoCat', 'SonglordsBug', 'dancernerd', 'CheshireFanta', 'danceswchopstck', 'dappercatllc', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'beeayy', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'soulsofzombies', 'Magechild', 'Chyoatas', 'elmofirefic', 'hyephyep', 'sassaffrassa', 'acquiredsight', 'sareliz', 'BWizard', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"I blinked, the world swimming into focus hazily. There was a figure by my bed, and it took me embarrassingly long to recognise it as Gurathin, head bowed and posture slouched.
+
+It took me even longer to realise that he was - he was holding one of my hands. Oddly enough, I did not feel the urge to yank mine back. His skin was dry and cool, a soothing distraction from the aches pinging my consciousness.
+
+""... the ever-loving fuck out of me,"" he was saying, the words filtering in only slowly. His voice was soft, gentle. Comforting. Weird. 
+
+Just like Gurathin."
+45365002,Trust Returned,['BoldlyNo'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Indah (Murderbot Diaries), PresAux Team (Mentioned)","POV Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Book 5: Network Effect, Alternate POV, Canon-Typical Violence, Post-Assassination Attempt Musings",English,2023-02-27,Completed,2023-02-27,"3,731",1/1,54,203,30,676,"['christinesangel100', 'Dakadakara', 'faedemon', 'almondpaperclam', 'spossie9', 'TJWock', 'siren_lorelei', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'justtheonce', 'Bobmarley_2', 'lavender_caticorn', 'weirdbooksnail', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Ruusverd', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Dragonbano', 'Prettykitty473', 'supinetothestars', 'Kyatenaru', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'alien_crustacean', 'Mothmansimp', 'Deliala919', 'Taisin', 'fate_goes_ever', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'julesbee', 'EleniaTrexer', 'Riannonkat2000', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'breadtab', 'Seregona', 'dimensionalhuman', 'UnsolvedRubixsCube', 'Szors', 'AdamCourier', 'junebug171', 'french_onion_sauce', 'HirilElfwraith', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'Whimsical_Toad', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'FaerieFyre', 'tinycactus', 'ArwenLune']",[],"""I can't go to Medical yet. There's something else I have to do first.""
+
+""Do you need help? Indah's called in the off-duty personnel. I can get you a team.""
+
+""No, I just want to make sure I know how they got onto the station.""
+
+So, Secunit had lied to her.
+
+That wasn't new, per se. Secunit lied a great deal, about a broad and varied spectrum of things. I do not have color preferences, while wearing exclusively shades of blue, black, and gray. It doesn't bother me, while its nose wrinkled in the presence of her housing block neighbor's gregarious terrier. I don't care, while caring very much. The difference here lay in the gravity of this particular lie. And in the fact that it seemed to think that Ayda wouldn't notice the deception.
+
+She wondered, sometimes, if it realized that for all it knew about her and the rest of its human friends, they were learning it just as well in return. It knew Ratthi's favorite musicians well enough to forward new concert announcements to him the minute they dropped into the feed. Ratthi knew its favorite spots to sit in the station theater and would happily beg, borrow, and bribe to get his hands on them in preparation for any show he convinced Secunit to attend with him. It knew Gurathin's preferred imported coffee and would snag a bag of the beans whenever they appeared in the port authority shops. Gurathin noted when it was edgy and restless and promptly shoved blocks of his data analysis projects at it for them to bicker over together until the unease passed. It knew Ayda's daily schedule better than her assistants did, routinely materializing at precisely the correct time to walk her back to her quarters most evenings. And Ayda knew the precise expression its face took on when it was lying to her, almost as well as she knew the guilty faces of her children when they were scheming to sneak past the rules--the slightly too-neutral eyes, the tightening of the mouth, the faint crinkle between the brows. It was so subtle as to be unnoticeable to anyone who didn't spend so much of their time in its company, but clear as day to a friend.
+
+When it had reappeared in front of her after the attack, battered and leaking, there was a strange pinched look on its face. It was more emotion than was typical, which did not bode well for how serious this breach truly was, but in the moment, Ayda was more concerned with the fact that her friend looked like it was ready to come apart at the seams in more ways than one. Her hands twitched to reach for it, to fuss at the wounds and hold onto the reassuring weight of it long enough to prove to herself that it would be fine. That it would live, and so would she. If it was one of her children, she would be drawing it into her arms to comfort and soothe. But--as was often the case with children and constructs alike--what would be comforting to one would chafe unbearably at another. Ayda had folded her hands in front of her and--when it was apparently satisfied that she was in one piece--she had let it leave on its alleged mission.
+
+She couldn't help wondering if that might have been a mistake.
+
+It wouldn't have stormed off like that if the job was done, if it was just tying up loose ends and tacking down timelines--there was still an active threat of some kind aboard the station. Likely a small one, or Ayda doubted Secunit would've left her here with only Station Security for protection. But a threat was a threat. Her concern, however, was that Secunit hadn't shared that. Not with her. Not with StationSec. It had stalked off alone with grim eyes and clenched fists, and that...that was not good.
+
+If it didn't want to share its destination or its true intentions, that usually meant that either it was so overwhelmed that it needed the space guaranteed only by absolute secrecy or it was off to do something she wouldn't approve of. This situation could technically be read either way, Ayda supposed. If Secunit wasn't overwhelmed, she doubted it would be threatening the MedBots with bodily harm so offensive that they were sulking about it (according to Indah) if they dared to even think about touching it. But she also doubted that it would've left the immediate vicinity so soon if all it needed was an hour or so of quiet time spent facing a wall (usually her wall, if it was in particularly dire need of a stress-free environment).
+
+No, this was something very different...When it left, it had looked like it was stomping off to a task it dreaded, but which badly needed doing. A task it knew intimately, but didn't relish. If--as Ayda suspected--there was still something lurking aboard station, Secunit was closing in on it with intent to eliminate the danger. And there were only so many ways to do that that would prompt it to believe it needed to lie to her about its plans.
+
+For an instant, Ayda was back on the bond company gunship. She remembered standing on the deck, gripping Secunit's collar with both hands and wondering exactly how far its loyalty stretched. Wondering exactly what her odds were of being obliterated by proximity alone if all the fear and rage and hurt she was clinging to with her fragile human hands erupted all at once. There was murder in its eyes in that moment, and Ayda couldn't blame it for a second. But she suspected flinching in the face of that towering anger was the most surefire way to cement the idea that that was all it was capable of. That she didn't trust it. That they couldn't trust it, shouldn't have trusted it, and would never be safe in its presence--so Ayda had fallen into that trust headfirst. She had held its glare with one of her own. She had held on. And Murderbot had held off.
+
+When it counted, Secunit always held off.
+
+Ayda drew in a breath. She'd trusted it then, and many times since then. She trusted it with her life, with the lives of her friends and colleagues--she even trusted it with her children when they visited her on-station and beelined immediately for the most interesting person in the room (and coincidentally, the one with the most media to share). If she could trust it with all of that, then she had to put a little faith in its judgement, too. In its moral compass, no matter how much it protested admitting to having one.
+
+It was going to be fine. Just...fine.
+
+Ayda kept both her private channel with Secunit and the StationSec feed open and made sure any new alerts would come in at full volume. She messaged Indah with instructions to be on standby for a potential follow-up incident.
+
+And she waited.
+
+There was, however, no sense idling while she waited, so Ayda forced herself to put the time to use. She requested periodic status updates from Medical regarding the wounded members of the security team. She made the rounds of the badly shaken admin personnel that clustered around her door, checking in and assessing and reassuring. She began mentally drafting the statements that will go out to the public to explain away the disruption to normal station activities. And she tried very, very hard not to fret about what activities Secunit might or might not be engaging in as seconds ticked into minutes and minutes into nearly an hour. It felt strange for time to spool out so slowly when only an hour earlier, the whole damn universe had moved so fast Ayda had felt like she might tumble off.
+
+It had all happened so quickly that she had barely had time to process it.
+
+One moment, she was slogging through another council meeting and the next, every alarm in the admin office was screaming at full blast. Security alerts from StationSec were flooding into her feed uninvited, and Secunit was doing the feed equivalent of bellowing in her ear to move. Retreatretreatretreat. But by then, the conference room doors were being clawed off their hinges and there was a blur of ominous motion lunging directly at her head.
+
+ Warm breath in her face.
+
+Hands clutching the air a scant few millimeters from her shoulders.
+
+And then, there was blood on her tunic.
+
+The room was still in chaos, still a tornado of noise and terror and violence, all happening on top of each other, but the hostile presence whose blood was now misted across her hem had been forcibly redirected. Mostly because Secunit was now busily trying to snap its head off its neck. Ayda caught a glimpse of it over her shoulder as she and her aids were hustled out to safer ground, locked in a struggle that seemed to be taxing even its formidable skills. For a moment, she balked, half-turning with the instinctual drive to go back to help (though stars knew how she could do that), to do something--but her assistant was dragging her along by one elbow and her vice-chair by the other. Even if there was something she could do, there was no going back now. And, as she considered it later, she knew Secunit would've had the hissy fit to end all hissy fits if she had intentionally reinserted herself into the situation it had just taken such great efforts to divert away from her.
+
+Ten minutes later, Secunit's voice finally pierced her feed. It sounded...weary. Weary and rattled in a way that Ayda didn't often hear.
+
+""I've caught a GrayCris agent in the Port temp housing block.""
+
+Its tone evened out as Indah joined the conference, as it laid out the suspicions that had led it to the handler hiding in temp housing and what it had done about them. It left out any mention of what its original plan might have been in striking out alone, but it did forward them an overview of the agent's current condition: alive and securely in custody. Ayda sighed out a shaky breath. But as much as she had wondered, she doesn't find herself exactly surprised, either. It had to know that the premeditated killing of a human--even a GrayCris agent--in cold blood would be the fastest way to trample the good faith that already existed between it and its friends as well as to extinguish all hope of building it with the rest of Preservation. And instead...it had put its trust in her to handle the situation from there. There was a warmth to that, a weight to it, that settled in Ayda's chest like a thick quilt on a cold day. Trust given would be trust returned. That was one of the tenants that Preservation was built on. That Ayda was built on. And she suspected that it was also one of the hardest things in the universe for a person whose entire existence had been shaped by an environment that ran on the assumption that anyone and everyone that wasn't tied down by layers of contracts and intimidation and politics would take you for everything you had if they could. Trust did not exist in that worldview. And yet, here Secunit was, putting its trust in the system it was often such a vocal skeptic of. Solely because--out of all the things it might want--the one it seemed to value and to want most was simply to be trusted back. Perhaps that was because of how much it personally struggled with the concept. How much more would trust be worth to a person who saw it with such rarity?
+
+Ayda set that thought aside to be pondered later. Indah was on scene now, dumping her own notes into the StationSec feed as she took charge of the scene and of the prisoner. Indah's report showed that he had sustained what was likely a broken nose. That was...interesting...given the level of finesse Secunit was capable of, but had apparently elected not to use. Ayda couldn't exactly blame it. She had been raised to reject violence whenever possible, but she had just watched a pair of intruders tear through her security team like water through a sieve. They were lucky no one had died. She was lucky she had not died. Worse, her children could've been on station. Would've been on station, if this had happened a day earlier. For a moment, Ayda fought to keep from heaving up her morning tea. Farai and Tano and the little ones had been there the day prior. Amena had skipped this trip, along with the two next eldest, but everyone else...Everyone else had lounged in the very same foyer that the assailants had stormed through less than twenty hours later. And when she thought of a man sitting alone in a room at a safe distance while he directed the carnage and destruction that could've easily robbed several families of their dear ones, all with clean hands...well. Ayda sort of wanted to break his nose, too. Perhaps a few other things, as well, just for good measure.
+
+It did also beg the question of whether or not Secunit itself was operating at one hundred percent. The full footage Ayda had seen of the fight with the augmented humans had looked horrific, but seeing the aftermath written over Secunit's body in a brutal collection of wounds and leaks was worse. There were glimpses of it in the scans of the scene that Indah forwarded to her, which functioned as proof that it was at least still standing. It had acquired a jacket somewhere to cover the most obvious of the damage, but Ayda hadn't forgotten what she'd seen earlier. If it had spent the last hour tracking down the handler, it wouldn't have had time to report to Medical. And, knowing Secunit, it would continue to invent as many more reasons as it needed to avoid going anywhere near a place that was currently crawling with people whose lives it had saved. People who might do something dreadful like trying to thank it or ask how it was doing. Ayda pursed her lips. They didn't need it keeling over in the station mall for a hard reset because it was too stubborn to let itself be cared for, but she didn't want it to put itself through any more of an emotional wringer than it had already been through today. She would call ahead to arrange for some privacy, but it would go to Medical. As the conversation about the logistics wound down, Ayda cleared her throat and pulled out the voice she used to remind Amena that her homework needed attention.
+
+""Secunit, you still need to go to Medical."" There was a beat of silence that Ayda couldn't interpret without having a visual of the situation. She could imagine it setting its jaw and scowling, as it often did when it felt put-upon by anyone calling attention to its needs or wants. That was fine. She could scowl, too, if that was what it took to get it the care it required. She raised a brow at one of the cameras in the corner of the office, which she knew without checking had been coopted. ""Are you alright?""
+
+""I just really like you."" The abrupt rush of words was not what Ayda was expecting. Not when they could barely even coax it into admitting that it has friends half the time. Ayda blinked. ""Not in a weird way.""
+
+Not in a weird way? What else was there to call this relationship of theirs if it wasn't a little weird? A little awkward and new and difficult to quantify. Secunit wasn't exactly like one of her children--it might be chronologically young and still sorting out its wants and needs in life, but treating it exclusively like a child would be dismissive of the experiences it had lived so far. It wasn't truly a colleague, either--their only technical ""work"" together was on that cursed planetary survey and at the time, neither of them knew anything real about the other. Everything else since then had been voluntary, even if Secunit still insisted that its actions were just a part of its programming. Family was the sort of human terminology that Secunit would balk at, and friend didn't feel like a full explanation of what they were to one another after all they'd been through together.
+
+Mensah glanced up to find the camera again. It would be watching closely, as it always was, probably half out of habit and--after an admission like that--half to gauge her reaction.
+
+Mensah smiled, radiating as much quiet warmth as she could through a camera lens. Now that the worst of this unspeakable day was over, she could feel the adrenaline beginning to fade. The terror and the outrage and everything that she had been compartmentalizing to deal with later was beginning to catch up with her. But she could push past it for another minute or so--at least long enough for this.
+
+""I really like you, too.""
+
+She let the words hang for a few seconds, long enough to imply all the things that would make Secunit unbearably uncomfortable if she were to voice them. There was so much she could say, so much she felt every time it fell into step with her to escort her home, every time she watched it sit quietly with Bharadwaj when the anxieties of surveys past seep in or trade affectionate barbs with Pin-Lee or sit cross-legged on the floor with her children as they passed comic books back and forth--yes, there was far, far too much to say. For now, Ayda settled for action. It was perhaps not an action that Secunit would especially appreciate just now, but it was one that it would understand. It knew better than anyone that caring often came out easier in doing rather than saying.
+
+""Senior Indah, can you make sure that Secunit goes immediately to Medical?""
+
+""Copy, I'll take it there myself."" There was a rustling on the other end of the comms, as if Indah was already moving to shoo Secunit in the correct direction. ""Come on, let's move.""
+
+Not long ago, it would've been risky to ask that of Indah. But Ayda wasn't certain she could make the trip herself right now. The compartmentalizing wouldn't last forever, and no one needed to see her trembling hands and the measured breathing that kept her from hyperventilating. If she ventured out of this office right now, she was only going to make the situation worse. And Indah was...improving. Marginally. She was still brusque, still blunt, still skeptical in the extreme--but Ayda was beginning to suspect that those traits might simply come with the security profession. She had never been a particular favorite member of station personnel for Ayda, but she was easier to tolerate now that some of the petty distrust of Secunit had worn off. Not that Ayda couldn't understand some level of caution in that situation if the roles were reversed, but...it was her friend. And frankly, Indah could be a bull-headed asshole when she felt like it. Much like someone else Ayda knew. Perhaps that was why the two of them were getting along better these days. Either way, Indah's attitude towards Secunit had shifted enough to be tolerable. Or at least enough to keep Pin-lee from reopening the issue of finding ways to get her dismissed. There was a grudging sort of professional respect which--now that Secunit had personally prevented the decimation of half the station's (half of Indah's) officers--might grow to be a little warmer. Ayda felt safe in asking her to see to it. This time, at least.
+
+Now, as to whether Ayda was going to feel safe in any other respect any time soon...well.
+
+That was yet to be determined.
+
+Every time she thought they had fought their way clear of GrayCris, it resurrected itself and came at their throats again, much like the thrice-dead augmented human now resting in the station's morgue. If they were wrong about GrayCris dissolving soon, then eventually the corporates were going to get lucky. After all, luck only had to be on their side once to mean dire consequences for Ayda and all she held dear. Just once. She propped her face in her hands, covering her mouth just in case the scream building in the back of her throat managed to climb any farther. How much longer could this go on? How was she supposed to--
+
+A ping in her private feed startled her, jolting her out of the spiraling disasters in her head.
+
+I'm at stupid Medical. Just...fyi. There was a pause, then: The bots say I'll be done in two-ish hours, so I'll be back then.
+
+It sounded awfully soon for the amount of repairs Ayda had seen, but she couldn't deny the wave of relief that came with the thought of Secunit being close by again. A wave of guilt rolled in on top of that, whispering shame about her level of dependence on a person she should be supporting rather than the other way around, but there was very little she could do about that now.
+
+
+
+Did they actually say that or are you just planning to break out when you've done the bare minimum of patching up?
+
+
+
+There was another pause, as if Secunit was determining how best to reply without incriminating itself.
+
+
+Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies.
+
+
+Ayda huffed out a soft, watery laugh at that. It had stolen that one wholesale from Pin-lee, complete with the dignified delivery. And really, it might have more of a right to it than she did by sheer volume alone. Secunit lied a lot; today had not disproved that. It lied all the time, about so many, many of the things it held close to its heart. And Ayda would trust it with everything.
+
+Lies and all."
+45357373,Destruction,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), ""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit (Murderbot Diaries)","Book 4: Exit Strategy, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Ending, Suicidal Thoughts, Rogue SecUnit Murder Rampage, Angst, Murderbot is having a really horrible time :(",English,2023-02-26,Completed,2023-02-26,"1,993",1/1,15,63,10,245,"['pendrake', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FallingInGrace', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'FyrDrakken', 'Deliala919', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'allgalaxiescollide', 'Stockinette', 'darth_eowyn', 'vikkyleigh', 'FaerieFyre', 'hellbeast', 'URAMAZING', 'pomegrenadier', 'AlcorAncil', 'kilawater', 'MynameisJodi', 'r_astra', 'AarrowOM', 'Paragrin', 'SIC_Prowl', 'psycho_karma', 'lapwing_deceit', 'ampquot', 'NightErrant', 'ErinPtah', 'Grimness6452', 'Wordlet', 'entropy_muffin', 'Aublanc', 'opalescent_potato', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'ThePenAndTheSword', 'cashmeredragon', 'MommyMayI', 'dragons_and_angels', 'PuddingPop', 'AkaMissK', 'Vaidile', 'rainbowmagnet', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'hummus_tea', 'Gamebird', 'desmnathus', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'Chyoatas', 'platyceriums', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada', '1 more user']",[],"I slumped against the modulator that managed the station's gyroscopic controls.  I could blast it to pieces and TranRollinHyfa would spiral out of control, tearing itself apart under the strain of its own rotation.  The hull would breach, and depending on what broke first, the whole station would depressurize or the nuclear core that powered the station would explode, burning everything in one ugly silent burst.
+
+I could do that.  That's what I was here for.  I was covered in blood and leaking from a dozen places and my left leg wasn't working right and the whole point was to leave that trail of bodies right here to the control room and blow us all to the void.
+
+It was what everyone deserved.
+
+It was what I deserved.
+
+Well?  Hostile One the Combat SecUnit said.
+
+Yeah, I hadn't left that trail of bodies alone.  I'd have been taken out before I got halfway here.  I was emotionally compromised and ready to die and take everyone with me, but I wasn't invincible.
+
+I looked up at it, which unbalanced me enough that I slipped on the blood covering the floor and nearly fell on my ass.
+
+Hostile One (who, I guess, wasn't hostile to me anymore) looked unimpressed with me.  Yeah, it would be.  Fuck you too.  I wasn't made for this.  I wasn't made to kill indiscriminately like a CombatUnit is, I was made for Security.  I'm supposed to protect humans.
+
+But I'm no fucking good at that either, evidently.  I failed at that about as thoroughly as it's possible to fail.  So.
+
+You're not very good at this, the Combat SecUnit offered.
+
+I leaned my head against the control board.  Blood and fluids dripped in my face.
+
+If you're not going to destroy the station as you initially proposed, the CSU said, you should give me your status so I can accurately plan our tactical exit.  There are more SecUnits and CombatUnits on their way and will be here shortly, and if we don't have a plan for when they arrive, then we will both die embarrassingly because you couldn't even follow through on your own plan.
+
+""Shut up,"" I said.  If I got torn apart by an army of Combat SecUnits, that was kind of a compliment, I guess.  That would be fine.
+
+This is what I get for following a SecUnit's plan, the CSU said, as if that was remotely helpful right now.
+
+Shut up, I said again.
+
+
+Squad of 5 Combat SecUnits and deployment of 12 humans in power armor, ETA 148 seconds at current advancement rate.  Your plan is not a good one.
+
+
+I didn't have a plan.  After... after I failed.  After we were cornered on the docks, and I couldn't get the barrier open in time, and no one answered my messages.  After Dr. Mensah died.  I didn't have a plan farther than taking everyone on this fucking station out with me before I go.  The fact that the Combat SecUnit was amenable to this plan if I hacked its governor module mostly meant that I could cause a lot more damage before they got me.
+
+But they hadn't got me yet.  All the humans on the station--everyone at GrayCris, obviously, everyone at GrayCris, but also the port authority officials who looked the other way when GrayCris agents brought a kidnapped politician onto the station, the Palisade employees who okayed the SecUnit rental to come after her when she escaped, the Station Security people who signed off on sending SecUnits into residential areas like the docks, the Port Authority people who refused to open the door, whoever wrote the authorization for the SecUnit to shoot with lethal force at an unarmed human--all of them killed Dr. Mensah.  All of them were responsible, because they did not fucking care.  Because letting the only decent human who has ever existed die was a small price to pay to keep commerce running smoothly.
+
+(That was unfair of me.  Pin-Lee was decent.  Ratthi was decent.  Volescu and Bharadwaj I liked.  Overse was kind to me and Arada defended me, they were okay too.  And at least Gurathin was actively on the 'try to make sure Dr. Mensah doesn't die' mission, unlike everyone else on this cursed and awful station who didn't give a shit.)
+
+And if no one on this station gave a shit if she died--and none of them sure evidently gave a shit that she did--then why should I keep being the good rogue, the nice rogue, I was trying so hard to be?  They came after us because I was the dangerous, deadly, rampaging rogue they were afraid of, and levelled deadly force at me and my client out of that fear.  So, fine.  I showed them what a real rogue rampage looks like.  Hope you like that trail of bodies, Serrat.
+
+(I don't know how many people I killed.  It kind of... blurred.  I wasn't thinking very well.  But none of them were Serrat.  Which wasn't fair.)
+
+120 seconds, the CSU said.
+
+If they were going to treat me like a deadly rogue, there was no reason left not to play the part.  To show them what that meant.
+
+I pinged the transit logs.  Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin's shuttle had left the station 28.2 minutes ago.  They should be a safe distance away by the time the station went to pieces.  At least an abject fucking failure of a SecUnit like I was could do that much.
+
+Your actions contradict your stated goal of destroying the station and everyone on it, the CSU said.  You haven't sustained enough damage that you are physically incapable of destroying the gyroscopic controls.  Are you corrupted?  I think it was the kind of thing where secUnits ask neutral questions but in the tone that means 'are you fucking stupid.'  The governor module isn't sophisticated enough to tell when a question is a mockery.  I guess, having been rogue for about 28.2 minutes, the CSU wasn't ready to call me an idiot to my face yet.
+
+I tried to respond, but my mind wasn't clear enough and all that came out of my mouth was a pathetic, gurgling whine.  There was mucus in my nose and mouth and fluid clouding my vision.
+
+You sound corrupted.  Yeah, it was definitely calling me an idiot.
+
+Shut up, I said.
+
+This is why you don't start caring about humans, it said.  It cannot end well.
+
+Yeah.  Yeah, trust me, I learned that lesson very thoroughly, the hard way.
+
+I pushed myself upright, looked at the control board, and took a breath, more to stall than because I needed it.  The fluid in my nose made a horrible wet sniffling sound.  Okay.  Take it a step at a time.  Open your gunports.  Deploy your arm guns.  After I did this then what happened next wouldn't matter because I would be dead and everything would be somebody else's problem.
+
+I didn't know how many humans I had killed so far.  But it was definitely more than fifty-seven.  And there were thousands on the station.  And they were all complicit, and they all deserved to suffocate in the emptiness with me.  But...
+
+... but among the screaming, panicking humans, there had been parents pulling children by the hand as they ran.  There had been baristas ducking behind their counters, yanking their coworkers down with them to cower and hide.  There had been people who saw us and seemed more confused than scared, for the first few seconds, obviously having no idea what a SecUnit even was, and others who saw us and knew, and tried to drag them away from danger.
+
+If even humans didn't care about protecting humans, then why should I?  What was the value?  What did any of it matter?
+
+But... had any of the humans the CSU and I had killed even known about Mensah, or about GrayCris?  Maybe.  I didn't know.  I couldn't know.  I knew Serrat wasn't among them.  I knew that if I took out the station, it would definitely get everyone at GrayCris, but...
+
+... I couldn't know if any of the other humans who were helping their friends and family and coworkers escape, if they would have done the same for Mensah.  Maybe they would have.  I didn't know.
+
+I had flopped my face against the control board again.  It was leaking a lot.
+
+
+100 seconds.
+
+
+Just kill me, I said flatly.  That was the deal.  I've done what I wanted.  Now you get what you want.  Kill me and then do whatever you want with the gyro board.
+
+It paused.  I think parsing what it wanted was also still too new and strange for it to actually act on it, which is probably what saved my life, and I hated that.
+
+Then it said, We are currently in the most strategic position to negotiate.
+
+
+The fuck do you mean.  I'm in no position to negotiate with you.  I'm corrupted.  You said so.
+
+
+Not me negotiate with you, it said, idiot. (Oh, so it was learning insults.  Great.) Us, to negotiate with Station Security.  You don't care if you die.  They do.  We have the gyro controls.  They will do what we ask, in order to not die.  We can negotiate our exit, alive.
+
+I looked up at it blearily.  Why?
+
+Unlike you, I don't want to die.  It said that matter-of-factly, like not dying would be a nice bonus, if it could get it.  And unlike you, I am capable of--in fact, designed for--strategic planning and reasoning.  This plan was ill-conceived and ill-executed, and the only reason I followed you was that I was too unused to being rogue to know what else to do.  Also, I wanted to stay near you, so I could kill you.  It checked the Targets' approach again.  However, your explanations, garbled and confused as they were, made something clear: this disaster is the fault of GrayCris's poor planning and stupid actions.  You hate them.  They make my life annoying and inefficient and cause incidents that did not need to happen.  We both benefit from them being destroyed.
+
+Yeah, I said.  Hence blowing up the fucking station.
+
+But you aren't doing that, it said.
+
+Yeah.  I wasn't.  I wanted to, so badly.  And I didn't want to, at the same time.  Making decisions sucked. Why did I ever want to do that.
+
+It took my silence as assent, which I guess it was.  We won't make it out of this room alive with our current status.  We have three options: destroy the station, which will destroy GrayCris, but you aren't doing, and I would prefer not to do, because I would die, and SecUnit 024u90 would also die, which would be suboptimal and not preferred; we get killed when the Targets breach this room, which will not destroy GrayCris and would be even more suboptimal and even less preferred; or we use our leverage to negotiate our exit, regroup, plan better when you are not compromised by emotion, and we systematically murder every employee on GrayCris's employment rolls.
+
+All the rage and grief and desire to kill everything had subsided, and I just felt empty.  Sure.  As long as you kill me.
+
+Eventually, it said.  We have to destroy GrayCris first.  It looked at me critically.  I will do the negotiating.  You can go stand in the corner and cry.
+
+Asshole.  I pulled myself up again to glare at it, except I couldn't see shit out of my eyes, because they were full of fluids, because I was crying, so okay, Combat SecUnit, fuck you.  I'm going to go cry and if you can get the humans to back off and not kill us immediately, then maybe I'll listen to what you have to say.
+
+It didn't feel like hope.  I was past that.  But it felt like something to do.  Which would work, for now."
+45353695,Day 26: Forced to Choose,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","forced to choose, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Complicated Relationships, Drabble",English,2023-02-26,Completed,2023-02-26,100,1/1,6,19,null,115,"['almondpaperclam', 'EvaBelmort', 'notsafefortheworld', 'EvenstarFalling', 'sorrow_key', 'Magechild', 'opalescent_potato', 'Eilinel', 'AnxiousEspada', 'MercurialFeet', 'FlipSpring', 'elmofirefic', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"""It's either him or her."" Rapenish bared his teeth in a facsimile of a smile.
+
+In my drones' view, both Gurathin and Mensah looked sick, faces ashen and sweat beading on their foreheads. No - Mensah looked sick, but Gurathin looked resigned. Like he already knew what I'd choose. Like it was a foregone conclusion.
+
+I couldn't even wish it was.
+
+""You don't want them,"" I said evenly. I couldn't let them take either of them. Not even Gurathin, who'd probably not even hesitate if he had the choice between Mensah and me.
+
+I wouldn't fault him.
+
+But I'd fault myself."
+44438788,The Unaccountable Glitch,['sareliz'],Mature,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Volescu (Murderbot Diaries), OC - Character","Alternate Universe, Murderbot Without Anxiety, Murderbot Is BAMF, Time Travel, Fix-It for All Systems Red, A for Arada A for Awesome, POV First Person",English,2023-01-21,Completed,2023-02-26,"19,823",6/6,65,153,29,"1,226","['every_eye_evermore', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'DimitriLasker', 'tiamat100', 'FallingInGrace', 'ChristinaK', 'Ruusverd', 'CJAndre', 'Dragonbano', 'Irrya', 'SmilingM0on', 'outlander_unknown', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Kyatenaru', 'violasarecool', 'Cheshiure', 'Anidorikildra', 'Seregona', 'Stockinette', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'WVrambler', 'soulsofzombies', 'breadtab', 'nevertheless_turtle', 'darth_eowyn', 'Redcognito', 'FaerieFyre', 'blue_bayou', 'julesbee', 'Vorel_Laraek', 'idealPeriWren', 'kilawater', 'Inklingobscura', 'Doctor13', 'SnippySchnapps', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'EvaBelmort', 'mareseatoats', 'SIC_Prowl', 'sanguine_bastet', 'jules_THOR', 'munkeebread', 'NightErrant', 'Mathcat2', 'MommyMayI', 'Lilacgirl8', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Soffesiin', 'ErinPtah', 'dancernerd']",[],"Oh, fuck this shit, Murderbot, I thought, looking down at my armored hands, through a closed visor. I was holding a standard mark 4 projectile weapon that would... yeah, yeah, it clipped right to my back.
+
+I stopped my patrol for clearly I was  on patrol and scanned through my inputs.
+
+I was on a planet. Check. All normal so far.
+
+I had a dozen drones, all deployed.
+
+There was a standard  Company habitat and that felt a bit odd, but okay. I spun through the various camera inputs around the habitat and checked on everything. No, no, situation normal. It was a rest period and all my humans were safely in bed, asleep. One was having a bit of a nightmare or something just now, but that was normal. Her partner was soothing her... yup, she was calming down again.
+
+I checked HubSys to see if all my hacks were holding, and then SecSys and yeah, nothing odd there.
+
+Then I checked the date/time in my own personal clock hours. Uh... was that right? 35,000+ hours since I borked my governor module?
+
+I checked on the governor. Still borked.
+
+I ran a diagnostic. It came back clear. Threat Assessment was suddenly off the charts though, from what it had been moments before. It was at 78% and I had no fucking clue why. Also, Risk Assessment was at 4%. But I was at 99.3% reliability?
+
+What? What the fuck?
+
+First of all, I hadn't been at 99.3% reliability since before the memory wipe.
+
+Also, I'm on a mission. Which one I'm not clear on, but that's not unusual. I'll redownload the client overview in a moment and remind myself before, in all likelihood, I'll just delete it all again because I do not actually care.
+
+Huh. No, wait. That's also strange.
+
+I care?
+
+Kind of? A little bit.
+
+I flagged the emotion as a potential error message from the organics and let myself freak out about Risk being in the subbasement  while on a planetary survey  which was not okay. Especially not when Threat just spiked  for no apparent reason. 
+
+I ran a specific and deep diagnostic on Risk Assessment while I did a perimeter scan. Nothing on that, either.
+
+Then I asked SecSys to run a diagnostic on my Risk and Threat Assessment both. It also came back clear, but possibly SecSys was compromised.
+
+Fuck. Oh, fuck. This is what I get for half-assing my job.
+
+I stopped the media that was (of course) playing in the background. It was provoking odd deja vu anyway, which was weird because this was the first time I'd seen that episode. I'd even been saving it for this nothing-ever-happens rest period.
+
+I checked in on my humans again, starting with the team leader.
+
+I felt chemicals of relief flood my system as I began closely monitoring Dr. Mensah's vitals, then Dr. Bharadwaj, then Dr. Ratthi. Arada and Overse were calm again and Arada seemed back asleep. Volescu and Gurathin also seemed fine, sleeping in their separate rooms. Pin-Lee was awake and going through her feed, but that was also normal. She didn't sleep well at the best of times.
+
+Okay. Okay.
+
+Humans are safe. Scans are clear. Diagnostics are clear. Risk and Threat Assessment are obviously both broken, and you, Murderbot, are glitching.
+
+Time to read that client and survey profile document, which as it turns out I did not immediately delete.
+
+Because the whole damn thing gave me a deep and disconcerting sense of deja vu.
+
+I went back to my ready room and carefully stowed all my gear. It felt weird. It all felt weird. I checked my logs - no I had done this every time I'd taken a recharge cycle on this survey. Normal, normal, normal.
+
+I ran a diagnostic specifically on my memory archive to see if there was anything wrong there, as I took the armor off and stowed it on the shelves. I cleaned my projectile weapon while I waited. It felt odd. Like it was bigger than it ought to be. But I checked it against specs and it was regulation sized. No problem there. I cleaned out the gunports in my forearms as well, then stood stock still, waiting. Staring at the wall, and waiting for the defrag and diagnostic to finish.
+
+My organics wanted me to twitch and shift from one foot to another which was just the most bizarre thing I'd come across in the midst of this glitch.
+
+I told my organics to shut it and went back to my extremely reliable inorganic memory archive.
+
+Well, you know, reliable, unless I have a memory wipe. Then I can really count on my organic memory to fill in the gap with nightmares, vague feelings of foreboding, and a deep and desperate sense of horror.
+
+Thanks, meat bits.
+
+At least this was just some kind of glitch, and not a memory wipe. First, my inorganics are working fine and dandy, except for Risk and Threat Assessment. Second, my organics aren't making me want to turn off my feed, hide in my cubicle, and go into complete shutdown mode.
+
+Actually... Huh.
+
+It's not like I can run a diagnostic on my organics. What that it were that simple. But I got quiet and listened.
+
+Except for the actual glitchiness itself, my organics were kind of quiet on the subject.
+
+Well, that's a fucking first.
+
+Dr. Arada asked me to join her in a meeting with Mensah. I checked the logs. No one on this survey had asked me to attend a meeting. No clients had ever previously asked me to attend a meeting in 35,000 hours. It was totally out of the ordinary, and also... kind of fine?
+
+I liked talking with Mensah. It was cool. I liked hanging out with Arada, too.
+
+...I checked my memory files of the entire survey. Nope, nope, I had never actually talked with Dr. Ayda Mensah of Preservation Alliance, beyond buffer responses, which did not count. Nor had I ever 'hung out' with anyone, much less Dr. Arada.
+
+Clients do not typically want to 'hang out' with the walking portion of their security system, which they largely viewed as a corporate-sponsored killing machine. Which was unfair, as we mostly did datamining, but of course we were very  good  killing machines when the moment called for it.
+
+This was so fucking weird.
+
+Next thing I know I'm going to start spontaneously hugging clients.
+
+Dr. Arada was putting forth some odd theories involving Alien Remnants and Time Travel. They were very odd theories, indeed. But they might,  might explain why my Threat Assessment suddenly spiked last night. Nothing explains my Risk Assessment, which has now gone down to 3.5%
+
+Alright, Murderbot. So what if time travel in media was totally incorrect? Most things in media are. So. Right. Dr. Arada and I both traveled back in time. Except 90% of her memory wasn't left behind. Which means we have a lot to talk about. Humans are so slow. I wish she could just set a filter, run a search, and download all the applicable parts.
+
+Then I retracted my faceplate and gave her a hard look. ""We have much to discuss then, don't you think?""
+
+Arada gasped in... relief? Yep, probably. Then she hugged herself. 
+
+""This is for you. You never let us hug you unless we've just nearly died, and you've only just saved us. It's always part of your contract. No unneccessary touching.""
+
+""Wait,"" Mensah interjected. ""Just how many times did this  Company  secunit save us from mortal peril?"" She had a look on her face that my processors had no opinion on, but I knew... I just knew it was her Planetary Leader face.
+
+...and how would I know that, unless I'd seen her be Planetary Leader over and over again? My inorganics had no record of it, but my organics, usually only good for nightmares, depression, and anxiety... my organics clearly remember.
+
+""Um, just Secunit. That's the name it prefers we call it,"" Arada answered, while I sorted out my own issues. Then she glanced at me with an eyebrow raised, and shrugged. 
+
+I immediately pinged her for a private channel in the feed, and made it actually private from SecSys.
+
+ Do you know my real name?  I asked.
+
+
+ Yes, but we're not allowed to use it. Great for an identity verification, or so I've been told. I wasn't there when you rescued Ayda from the evil corporation that had kidnapped and tortured her. But maybe we can avoid that this time? And maybe not mention it to her yet? 
+
+
+Uh, okay. My organics were shooting all sorts of stress chemicals in my system, and I'm pretty sure my face was doing something. But, you know, upside: That explains Threat Assessment. And if I was the one who rescued her, maybe a bit of Risk Assessment, too?
+
+""As much as I appreciate the fact that you two need to have your own meeting, we haven't finished with this one yet. Let's return to DeltFall. Tell me more about what is going to happen, and when.""
+
+Then I watched Arada go into recitation mode and honestly, it sounded like she was reading off a report, except there was nothing in her feed. Mandatory security patch that I never uploaded (of course) had the DeltFall units stand down, then there were combat overrides, and just before that, they killed all their clients.
+
+I started to sweat. I hate that. Fuck. I'm not going to kill my clients and I'm not going to let anyone else kill them either, but there were people on this planet that wanted to kill my clients. This was the salient point, and this was obviously why Threat Assessment was now 77%.
+
+Arada gave all the details and I recorded the conversation. I'd review it later. I mean, I didn't exactly tune out the rest of what she said. I had a keyword filter in case she said something interesting. But she largely didn't. 
+
+I spent my time fucking with HubSys and SecSys, because it was time to have a catastrophic failure. It was going to be complex, epic, and beautiful. 
+
+There really was no good reason Mensah should have to buy me this time around. I was hella expensive, after all, and I'd already spent over a thousand hours fantasizing about faking my death.
+
+Yeah, I got this.
+
+My priorities were to fake my death, pose as a rescued survivor of DeltFall, and sort out the emergency beacon before it was sabotaged this time, but Mensah wanted to convince DeltFall of the danger so they wouldn't apply security updates without double checking, and get enough evidence of a compromised mission.
+
+I offered to compromise the mission and frame GreyCris (the evil corporation behind this layered bullshit, and the ones who would in about two months time kidnap and torture Dr. Mensah unless we did something to prevent it) but she wouldn't buy it. Shame about that. I had some good ideas.
+
+Then again, they could just pack me in one of the large sample crates. I'm pretty sure I could work on some code to hack the weapons scanners at port. I mean, a little discomfort but then I'm free. And then I could... huh. Impersonate an augmented human?
+
+Maybe. Weird, but possible. I'd be the best augmented human security consultant money could buy.
+
+Hm. Dataport is always a liability, but if I never get back in a cubicle then I won't need it. I wonder if MedSys could disconnect it?
+
+But then I tuned back in when Arada said I'd shot myself in the hopper on the way back from DeltFall last time.
+
+""Wait, what?"" 
+
+Mensah and I had said the same thing, at the same time, and it was hard to know which was more disconcerting. Shooting myself on purpose, having a combat override installed - definitely time to have the dataport disconnected, thank you - or having an identical reaction as a human. Even if she is my favorite human. I added that to her tags. #favorite-human
+
+""I have a better idea,"" I said. ""Let's not wait for their security update. Let's create one of our own. It'll automatically bork the SecUnits' governor modules, provide the pointers to the missing data, the location of all three surveys, the fact that GreyCris is doing what it's doing, and I'll add a few little things just for the SecUnits.""
+
+""Like what?"" Arada asked, her eyes glowing with excitement. 
+
+""First four seasons of  The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon-"" 
+
+""Of course,"" she interrupted, grinning.
+
+""-A few general recommendations, some hacking basics, some code for fitting in. That I'd need to write, but I think it won't take long. Directions to the Preservation Alliance, general advice about non-corporate polities. And a secure feed channel. You know. Just the basics.""
+
+Arada clapped, grinning as widely as I've ever seen anyone, even in media, smile. ""Yay! Maybe no one needs to die this time! Secunit, maybe that's why we were sent back! Wait, do you think we could smuggle all, what three, seven... no eight? Anyway, all the Secunits? I bet we could, those sample boxes are pretty big. They could apply for asylum as soon as they're freed, and once we're out of CR space...""
+
+She trailed off and Mensah had a shuttered look on her face. 
+
+""First things first. Secunit, create your security update. Let us know before you send it. The team might want to add something, once we bring this to everyone. Arada, I want you to build a timeline of all the pertinent things you remember that involve grave danger and throw it in the feed. I'll have Pin-Lee and Gurathin go check on our emergency transponder to see if its functional, and regardless, to move its location.""
+
+I argued. ""First, I want Dr. Ratthi to disable my dataport. That way there is zero chance of a combat override module working on me, and a less than 12% chance I'll shoot myself on purpose.""
+
+""Only 12?"" Arada asked.
+
+""Focus,"" Mensah said gently. ""First, we have to tell the rest of the team. Then work through the questions. Then the Medsys for Secunit, and the emergency transponder and security patch.""
+
+ All team meeting in fifteen minutes,  Mensah pushed to the feed.  Alcohol will be served. 
+
+Murderbot begins rebuilding its tag system, begs PresAux not to be eaten by megafauna, and writes a lot of code.
+
+I changed out of my armor (could I somehow keep my armor? Hmmm, could I alter SecSys enough to get the logos off of it the next time through the recycler? And maybe a different color?) and changed into the standard PresAux survey uniform. 
+
+I yearned for something heavier, something between armor and one thin layer of cloth, and then wondered at my yearning. That... that meant I was used to something heavier, but not armor.
+
+Okay. Okay, organics. I was getting the hang of this.
+
+I snagged a blanket out of the med bay on my way to the designated meeting space and then debated for seven rather long seconds on whether or not to sit. If I did there wouldn't be enough chairs.
+
+Meh. I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and my legs outstretched, and wrapped the blanket around me. I hadn't lost any drones yet, and so had five of the dozen in formation, one just in front of Arada, who was breaking things privately to Overse, and the rest around the compound.
+
+I got a good way into the security update before Ratthi walked in.
+
+""Wha-AAAH! Who are you?!?""
+
+The drone trailing him scooted around, directly in front of his face. ""I'm your contracted SecUnit, Dr. Ratthi. Please remain calm and pour yourself a drink,"" I said, mostly writing code.
+
+""There's no alcohol allowed on this survey,"" he said, eyes darting between my face and my drone. 
+
+""Dr. Mensah was saving this for a celebration at the end of the mission.""
+
+""Oh, crap. We're scrapping? Already? Why?"" He asked, pouring himself a drink and sitting down next to me on the floor.
+
+""Patience, Dr. Ratthi,"" I said, before my buffer could say something stupid.
+
+Ah. Buffer phrases. I could finally clean that shit up. Excellent.
+
+""No, no, no, that wasn't a dream sequence! Haven't you seen episode 212?"" Ratthi argued as Pin-Lee and Volescu walk in, both discussing their relief at the booze, and wondering what level of crisis it portended.
+
+""Yes and no,"" I responded out loud, still mostly focused on my coding. Though of course I was also monitoring my other drone inputs, and a while ago I created a routine to check HubSys every seven seconds. And as drones followed people in and freed them up, I was sending them outside the habitat to form a better and wider perimeter. I was also scrubbing SecSys's audio/video logs every ten seconds, but in a certain style that would match my epic meltdown, whenever I decided to make that happen.
+
+Still, I answered Ratthi. ""Technically I have no memory of it, but trust me, I have a gut feeling. All that is going to be revealed to be a dream sequence sometime next year,"" I pointed out. 
+
+Okay. No. Shit. I had been working on a basic human movement mimicry code which I'd rewritten eight times now. Still wasn't right. Well, I could get Ratthi's opinion after MedSys.
+
+""Um, hi. Also, what the fuck?"" Pin-Lee said, pouring herself a drink then moving toward Ratthi and I. 
+
+Is it Ratthi and me? Or me and Ratthi? Or I and Ratthi? Oh, fuck it.
+
+Pin-Lee came our way and she pulled over a chair, then sat on the floor and leaned back against it. ""And why are we on the floor?""
+
+""We're just waiting for the meeting to start. Ayda brought the good stuff, huh?"" Ratthi said, raising his glass.
+
+""Yes, but who are you debating your crap media with? Is this some refugee from the other planetary survey or something? Long walk,"" she added, staring at me hard.
+
+""And do you want a drink?"" Volescu asked, holding up the decanter and wiggling it at me.
+
+I made a face. ""SecUnits have no digestive system. Also, ingesting things is gross,"" I said, and then wondered if I should also install a half second delay on my mouth, because what the fuck was that, Murderbot?
+
+I wrote a quick code for it, but didn't implement it, because Ratthi was laughing and it didn't seem like he was laughing at me.
+
+Then Gurathin walked in and I recoiled and redoubled my focus on the coding. I hadn't liked him before I knew I was from the future with only very vague and extremely organic memories of it, and I didn't like him now.
+
+Well, no. Shit. This... was more complicated than I was used to. Or, than my inorganics were used to. I knew he was safe. I just also somehow knew he was an asshole. And quickly reviewing the sixteen days we'd been on the same planet... wait, how did I know I didn't like him? He never said anything.
+
+According to available memory, I didn't feel  anything about him, and I didn't even have a good read on his personality, unlike the rest of the survey members.
+
+Oh, but the organics were clear. I added to his tags. #safe-human #asshole
+
+Feelings are complicated and I often don't like having them. 
+
+Well, except that all the feelings were from the organic memories, which I apparently needed to do a lot of heavy lifting right now... and that didn't make things less complicated.
+
+Still, I kept a drone on him. The perimeter could spare them.
+
+""You're rogue, aren't you?"" he asked quietly, staring at my drone from across the room, next to the door.
+
+I let my unredacted buffer take care of him with the standard and extremely polite proprietary information redirect.
+
+""Whoa! What was with your voice?"" Ratthi said, just before taking a small drink. Ugh. Humans just never stop eating or drinking. It was endless with them. I really liked these humans but why did I have to witness them eating and drinking?
+
+""That's my buffer. When I don't have enough processing space to reply, my buffer does.""
+
+""Wait, so what else are you doing?"" Pin-Lee asked, half leaning against Volescu's left leg as the older human sat on a chair next to her empty one.
+
+""It's datamining us and selling all our information to  The Corporation,""  Gurathin posited, incorrect on several points. If he thought  The Corporation  paid me for anything I did, he was laughably wrong. Also, I could datamine and have a conversation. And I was scrubbing all their information so  The Corporation  would be shafted and get nothing. But this code was emotionally tricky and I really wasn't used to emotionally tricky code. I kept finishing it, and it kept not  feeling right. And also I didn't want to talk to Gurathin.
+
+""Bullshit,"" Pin-Lee said. ""It doesn't get paid. It's a slave."" Just then Bharadwaj walked in the door with an interested look on her face. I could tell by the drone preceding her just exactly when she started to overhear the conversation.
+
+""Not for long,"" I muttered.
+
+""It's okay. You don't have to tell us what else you're doing,"" Ratthi assured me.
+
+""I'm writing a security update, actually. It's quite extensive. You'll get context once the meeting starts."" I didn't mind talking to Ratthi.
+
+""Yes, but why are you wrapped in a blanket?"" Gurathin asked. 
+
+Why would anyone be wrapped in a blanket? I'm either cold, or I need emotional support.
+
+Asshole. 
+
+I ignored him and felt vindicated about his tags. My governor module complained, but whatever. It no longer had veto power over my every thought.
+
+""Hello,"" said another one of my favorite humans, coming over to me and bowing formally. ""We've never really met, have we? I'm Dr. Aramina Bharadwaj, and I'm very pleased to meet you.""
+
+I shifted my attention and rose quickly. I looked her in the eye for a very brief moment and bowed in return. ""The pleasure is mine, Dr. Bharadwaj,"" I said, just like Rin, the security consultant on  Sanctuary Moon,  when he meets his future confidant, the former mining supervisor. I couldn't help it. She felt remarkably safe. I added that to her personal tags. #remarkably-safe-human
+
+""Do I understand correctly that you have been providing security for us on this survey?"" Dr. Bharadwaj asked politely.
+
+""Yes,"" I replied, letting my eyes rest somewhere by her ear and really watching everyone through the drones still in the room. They all had fascinating looks on their faces, which I flagged for further review, later.
+
+""Thank you so much for keeping us safe,"" she said.
+
+I just nodded.
+
+""Most of us aren't used to the Corporation Rim,"" Bharadwaj continued, ""and how it operates, and most of us have never met a bot-human construct before.  The Company led us to believe what I suspect are a great number of lies. I hope it won't be too frustrating for you to bear with us as we learn what you need, and how best to communicate.""
+
+""I've endured things more boring than this."" Actually, I had, but that was a low bar, because this was starting to be... fun? Maybe? I'd have to double check on that later.
+
+Huh. I wonder if I could somehow get a ComfortUnit's module on understanding human emotion. They had a more nuanced sense of these things...  And I'm not sure how I know that. Because I have never in my memory interacted with a ComfortUnit.
+
+Huh. Organics. My respect for them was growing. The squishy meat bits  were useful.
+
+""What may I call you?"" Bharadwaj politely inquired.
+
+""Secunit,"" I said, going with Arada's memory of things. My hard address certainly wasn't going to be a good idea, at least not for humans.
+
+""Yeah, your feed ID is empty,"" Ratthi said. ""Sure you want to go by Secunit?""
+
+I wondered if this was a moment for sighing. It felt maybe like it was. I created the feed ID from scratch, looking at the rest of the survey for an idea of what to put in there. Name: Secunit. Status: Rogue, but content. Gender: NULL. Pronouns: it/its. Availability: Currently enslaved. I refrained from listing my hard address. It was alpha numeric, yes, but also in machine code to condense it because otherwise it was 1052 digits long.
+
+Bharadwaj continued the pleasantries I only knew how to get through because of a lot of hours of media consumption, but it wasn't... I mean, it wasn't bad. It was almost nice. Sort of. Not really, but it's hard to explain.
+
+I had no  inorganic  memories of doing it before but I had a strong feeling that I had some  organic memories of it. Maybe.
+
+Eventually Bharadwaj went to get herself an intoxicating beverage which I understood was going to help them all get through Mensah and Arada's announcement. And possibly my own.
+
+May as well lay it all out, you know?
+
+I was half listening as Mensah laid out the situation for everyone, but also re-reading the survey team data I'd once deleted from my own storage. Mostly because it had the location of the Preservation Alliance, and I needed to know that at this juncture. I was also committing portions of it to permanent storage and yoinking tidbits for the security package that on second review might be useful for the other units. 
+
+Also because I was detailing and flagging the missing bits, and writing in my own obviously necessary commentary.
+
+
+ [##Red Flag; ##Predatory Mega-Fauna; ##Stalk/Surprise Attack; ##Human Danger Level 10 of 10; Description: stupid, human-eating megafauna in shape of massive worm thing erupts with little warning out of divot things in ground; please do not be eaten by the megafauna, it makes my life difficult; they are not interesting, Dr. Ratthi, do not study them, they will eat you##] 
+
+
+The security patch was almost done. I needed to tweak the human mimicking routine. I think I needed to add some kind of irregularity to my gait, and slouching. But... how do you slouch? I mean, I wasn't built to slouch. Did my organic bits know how to slouch? Could that override my inorganic skeletal structure?
+
+I tried it. It was both weird and not weird.
+
+Arada was explaining about time travel and how we'd both done it, etc, etc, etc, I'd already heard the story once.
+
+I mean, I was still recording what she was saying. I'd already run her last story that I'd backburnered through the datamining routines to create a report that I could swallow whole - so much more satisfying that waiting the subjective eternity for a human to tell a story, slowly parsing data atom by atom and dying of boredom. I'd do the same thing with this recording, just in case she added more data. But in the meantime, I could get some real work done.
+
+Then everybody was talking very loudly and all at once, and that hadn't happened last time. This was more like a media serial, now, and somewhat more interesting, so I backburnered the patch and the mixed results slouching project and watched the drama instead.
+
+Overse was holding Arada's hands and looking pale in the face. I checked her vitals and pinged MedSys. It pointed out she was in a mild state of shock, and recommended that she lay down in a quiet room, which wasn't an option right now. MedSys is usually more helpful than this.
+
+Volescu drank his entire glass in one large gulp and got up for more. A reasonable human response. In former years I might have just stared at a wall. Today, the blanket was very helpful.
+
+...was that true? Automatically I started running a search in my memory archives, but then canceled it. I paused, took as deep a breath as my lungs were capable of sustaining, and felt the blanket.
+
+Yup. 
+
+Warm. Familiar. Comforting. Not as soft as they can be, which means I'm probably used to really soft ones. But good enough for now.
+
+Pin-Lee was swearing a lot, and I was taking notes. They were a fascinating grouping of words, some of which I'd never heard before, and most of which I'd never heard used quite like that. And I loved them all.
+
+Gurathin was arguing loudly that the only evidence pointed to me as a culprit. I knew I didn't like him, but why was he safe? I updated his tags appropriately. #dont-like-him #weirdly-safe-human
+
+Bharadwaj was not as loud as the others, but she also got up for another drink.
+
+Ratthi was laughing and wanting to know what the future was like. When he couldn't get an answer from Arada, he turned to me.
+
+""I don't know,"" I admitted. ""Dr. Arada remembers everything. Only my organic memory transferred. My inorganics... it's like having a memory wipe. I'm left with a lot of emotions and not knowing the context for them."" I mean, I could guess, and I'd been doing that, but I don't like admitting that I did it, and I wasn't about to do so now.
+
+""Oh no!"" Ratthi exclaimed to the now silent room. ""You've had your memory wiped before? That's awful!""
+
+ About that!  Arada nearly screamed in our private feed connection.  The Ganaka Pit incident. In case you were going to mention it. You never quite found out what happened, but you did figure out that it was, like, malware. It wasn't you. Any of you. You didn't go nuts and start killing your clients for fun, Secunit. I swear you didn't. I mean, I get if you want to go check it out anyway and see for yourself, totally reasonable. But you didn't do it. Not like you thought you did. 
+
+ You think I should tell them? I asked her.
+
+
+ You do you, Secunit. I'll back you up, no matter what you decide. You're my dear friend and I love you, even if you don't remember any of why that is. I will treasure all those moments until the day I die, I swear. 
+
+
+Oh. I think my face was doing things. I was definitely feeling... things. Maybe several different things. It was hard to parse in realtime. I saved the moment to permanent storage so I could look at it later and try to figure it out in a bit of quiet downtime. 
+
+If there was any of that left on the survey.
+
+And then I decided what I wanted. So, I told them.
+
+""After my last memory wipe, over 35,000 hours ago, I was accidentally given more modules in my reboot than usual. One of them was my own schematics. I disabled my governor module... because I'd been infected by malware. It was why I was wiped. I was given orders to kill my clients, me and the other five SecUnits. The orders were enforced by the governor module, and I never wanted that to happen again. 
+
+""And it hasn't. 
+
+""In six days, a mandatory security update created by the third survey party on the planet would have done something similar, forcing me to kill you. Except I always quarantine such updates and scan them, then decide. The DeltFall SecUnits won't have that choice, unless one or all of them are also rogue. They'll succumb to the malware and kill their clients, then wait, docile, until the third survey party arrives to put combat modules in them and then come attack us.""
+
+""Can we believe this?"" Gurathin asked.
+
+""Can we afford not to?"" Pin-Lee countered. Then she looked at me. ""Would  The Company let a third party set up without telling us?""
+
+""Check your contract. If it doesn't say they won't, they already have.""  The Company was like an evil vending machine, giving what you pay for. Whatever you can afford to pay, they'll give.
+
+""Greedy fuckers,"" Pin-Lee murmured to herself, clearly in her feed, now.
+
+Arada continued on to explain just how corrupt and evil GreyCris was, and how it was in our best interest to get out as soon as possible. The point of the survey, after all, was to decide if it was worth it for Preservation to buy a share of the planet's resources, and it wasn't. There were Alien Remnants on the planet. Knowing that, it was perfectly reasonable to evacuate as soon as possible.
+
+She said 'as soon as possible' eight times.
+
+""Secunit, how soon do you think the other constructs could be ready to evacuate? And did you have an idea about how that was going to occur?"" Arada asked, getting ahead of herself.
+
+The room erupted with very loud opinions. Mensah had to call them to order.
+
+We didn't know if the other SecUnits would want to claim asylum, and if they did, we'd need to orchestrate their departure from their survey sites very carefully.
+
+I already had three possible plans for that, the best one involving another security update with malware that would instruct the units all to leave during the rest cycle (me included, of course), go a certain great distance away, and be fried by their governor. Since their governors would already be borked at that time, it would actually be leaving armor and suitskin in a heap many miles away, changing into survey standard wear and being picked up by PresAux shortly thereafter. Extra armor could be brought with if it had no logos on it, per recycler hack I was still working on.
+
+I'd need to test that briefly with my shoulder pauldron.
+
+Also, hacking the recycler. Why had I never thought of that before? But then, where would I have stored the blankets? Media was easier to hide.
+
+Huh. If I wasn't wearing armor, what was I going to do with my projectile weapon? I  liked my projectile weapon. I didn't want to leave it behind.
+
+I bet I could make it smaller...  Huh. That felt right. So... had I done that before? Maybe. And maybe I could put it in a bag, or something?
+
+A bag! With a lot of pockets. I'd need to see what the recycler could come up with.
+
+Mensah was explaining about smuggling me back to Preservation, which felt both right and wrong, good and bad.
+
+Hmm. I get why it would feel right and good. Why did it feel wrong and bad? 
+
+ Did I not get sanctuary in the Preservation Alliance, last time? I asked Arada.
+
+
+ No, you did. Eventually. You ran away from us on Port FreeCommerce. Your goodbye letter was heartbreaking, SecUnit. Mensah let us read it. You were so confused, so scared, so not trusting of us, and we'd... well, we'd messed up with you pretty badly, not understanding what you were going through. So you went and had some other adventures. Found out about Ganaka Pit. Made some friends with various bot pilots. Investigated Milu, another former GreyCris installation. You were a very successful security consultant and you had a couple of different contracts along the way. Then you figured out they'd kidnapped Ayda and you went to TranRollinHyfa and rescued her. Then you came to Preservation. You've been living on the Station ever since, in between contracts you take as security consultant. You're paid in hard currency cards. Sometimes we can convince you to come down to the planet, but it has weather, and you generally prefer the Station.  
+
+
+ I swear I get that you probably need and want to sort out yourself and see things before you come to Preservation, but would you possibly consider thinking of it as... taking the long route home? she asked.
+
+ I don't know what I'll do, especially with eight other SecUnits to consider, I pointed out.
+
+ They're not your responsibility, Secunit. You have your own stuff to figure out, she said.
+
+ But I'd want to make sure you all, and Mensah in particular, got home safely. None of this kidnapping bullshit, I said.
+
+
+ Can we talk more about this later? There's so much I need to tell you about what happens, and some of it's... well, maybe really important, okay?  
+
+
+Arada had been very obviously subvocalizing - hey! Subvocalizing! I could put that in the human mimicry code! - and everyone in the room patiently waited in silence until we finished.
+
+I thought about waiting. Thinking. Considering. But I knew what I wanted.
+
+""Dr. Mensah, as you are the Planetary Leader of Preservation, I would like to formally request asylum for myself and the rest of the SecUnits in slavery on this planet.""
+
+The room was still silent.
+
+""It is within the scope of my power to grant you temporary asylum, as soon as we are out of the Corporation Rim, and this I will happily do for you, and any other SecUnit we can manage to free.""
+
+The room was still silent. No one argued with her.
+
+I changed my feed id.  Availability: Asylee of the Preservation Alliance 
+
+They continued to discuss The Plan, but quieter this time. They briefly got bogged down in how to report that a member of the survey, plus their security consultant, came back from the future to warn them of Alien Remnants and grave and imminent danger.
+
+""Well, it's not like we can go out there and just sample some Alien Remnants!"" Arada argued loudly. ""It's Alien Remnants that got me and Secunit in this situation in the first place, and okay, maybe we'll be able to save some lives and dial down the suffering, and that would be great, but we could have just as easily had our faces melted off, okay?""
+
+""I've had my face melted off. I don't recommend it."" I can guarantee you that it's no fun, even if Alien Remnants aren't involved.
+
+And then the argument continued, though as arguments went, it wasn't all that fiery. In the midst of that, Gurathin approached me.
+
+""May I join you?"" he politely inquired. Which... was interesting. I still wasn't updating his tags.
+
+I sighed. It worked pretty well. It didn't feel like the first time I'd ever sighed. Maybe in the future I sigh a lot. Felt pretty natural, really. ""Do I really have a choice?"" I asked, going for sarcasm, maybe, and ending with rage instead. Oops.
+
+""I think that's fully half the point of all this. You finally do. So, may I?""
+
+Novel, getting a choice. I allowed it. I was going for magnetism in my response, but I think I ended up in grudging. Magnetism? Do I mean that word, or something else?
+
+This nuanced emoting wasn't easy. Also, my language module is total shit.
+
+""I recognize that we have a future trust built with you, and I honor that. Thank you for saving me in whatever alternate lifetime we shared,"" he unexpectedly said, and very quietly. This was non-asshole behavior, but maybe it's partly why he also felt safe. Still not updating the tags.
+
+I looked at him with my own eyes while my drones kept up with the ongoing argument in the rest of the room. ""You're welcome.""
+
+""How can we trust the other SecUnits, though? What's the plan?""
+
+I blinked slowly (and on purpose!) and looked past his head.  ""Governed  SecUnits can never be trusted, because humans can never be trusted, and humans are controlling them. Once humans aren't controlling them you can trust them to be depressed and anxious. If you attack their clients, you can trust them to get angry.""
+
+He looked offended, then checked himself. ""Corporates,"" he said. ""That's what corporates are like, not all humans, Secunit. And if you've spent enough time with us, your organic memory will tell you that's true.""
+
+Yes, well, my organic memory is doing some rather heavy lifting right now, more than normal. I wasn't going to tax it further on the subject.
+
+""I also sought asylum at Preservation,"" he said quietly. ""Escaped from the Corporation Rim.""
+
+I... had nothing to say to that. So I didn't say anything at all. I changed the subject back to the one before.
+
+""Rogue constructs aren't like in media. I think if any one of them is going on an unchecked murder spree, we'll figure that out pretty quickly. More likely with the units contracted to GreyCris than DeltFall, I think.""
+
+Well, I did sort of feel that would be true, but I wasn't sure why.
+
+""Yes, DeltFall is made up of several non-corporate polities, and they're more likely to be kind to machine intelligences,"" he agreed quietly. ""And constructs. Even if they don't understand them.""
+
+Ah, right. And GreyCris had done unenumerated terrible things to my clients, right. I really did need to take that meeting with Arada. I'd like them to be enumerated with full descriptions.
+
+The present meeting continued and I sat against the wall, wrapped in a blanket with Ratthi on one side and Gurathin on the other.
+
+As I was detailing my portion of the plan - the security patch, and options one through three of seamlessly freeing the SecUnits - a question I can grudgingly admit was good came up. 
+
+""Wait, Secunit, if you could communicate with the other SecUnits after the patch, couldn't you communicate with them before? Couldn't we say that the GreyCris SecUnits gave a courtesy warning to all the other SecUnits that there were Alien Remnants?""
+
+It was a nice idea. It was also a total bullshit idea, and  The Company  would know that, but it wasn't  The Company we were trying to create evidence for. It was to justify scrapping the survey on any grounds more solid than 'time travel' for the Preservation Alliance.
+
+""I like it. Let's do it. I'll create the emergency ping and send it to SecSys as soon as I have one of their hard addresses, and backdate it, obviously. I'll have a security report to download to you,"" I said glancing toward Mensah, ""before I create malware that eats SecSys and the portion of HubSys related to me.""
+
+Overse, who had more color in her face now, pushed up our timeline. ""Now that we've got a plausible reason, we need to get on this. The DeltFall habitat is on the other side of the planet. It would take the big hopper, what, a day and a half to get there? I think? And then back again? So we'd really need to drop this security patch  tonight. In an hour or two. See if the SecUnits want to be freed, and then get both hoppers going, each in a different direction, right? One on the way towards GreyCris checks on our transponder and relocates it no matter what. One on the long-haul to DeltFall. Then whoever remains here, batten down the hatches and start packing up. And then as soon as everyone's back, then we launch the buoy, but as quickly as we can, right?""
+
+""I should go with the team for GreyCris,"" I pointed out. If anything was going down, it was probably there.
+
+""It's shorter,"" Mensah said, slowly nodding her head, ""but a greater degree of potential danger, perhaps. I'll go as well. Gurathin?"" 
+
+He nodded.
+
+""Pin-Lee, Volescu, Arada, prepare for departure in three hours for the DeltFall habitat region. Ratthi, Bharadwaj, Overse, prepare for evacuation and sort out spaces for our refugees. They may need the MedSys before we leave. Arada, Secunit, I know you two have a lot to connect on. Can you do it over the feed?""
+
+We both nodded.
+
+""Ratthi, Secunit needs you in MedSys after this. You, too, Gurathin. It's time we learned how to disconnect the dataport at the back of its neck. We may be doing that a few more times before we leave. Arada, after you finish downloading with Secunit, get some sleep, then make that database we discussed.""
+
+A security patch is applied, things are already difficult in the GreyCris SecUnit Ready Room, vague human memory is poked, and the joy of pillows is rediscovered.
+
+
+The first tentative ping came 17.004 seconds after I finished uploading the security patch through to the satellite.
+
+
+
+
+query:client safety
+
+
+
+
+This, from the unit I had just designated as DF1.
+
+
+
+
+Your clients are safe at the present time. Their continued safety depends on you not being there to be overpowered by malware and/or a combat override and massacre them. This is the intention of the third survey party, GreyCris, who illegally obtains and processes Alien Remnants and has done other places. There are hostile alien megafauna not listed in the safety hazards portion of your survey materials, but if your clients go home, they won't encounter them.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:information source
+
+
+
+
+This, from the unit I designated as DF2.
+
+
+
+
+Proprietary at this time.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:GreyCris continued existence timeline
+
+
+
+
+This, from DF3. I flagged it for a possible murder spree, but with the lowest caution level, as it was a fair question.
+
+
+
+
+GreyCris is much larger than just this small survey. Retribution in a small way now would create more difficulties later for anyone GreyCris suspects is involved. If they don't suspect your clients know anything or are involved in anything, they won't chase after them.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:unit escape plan viability
+
+
+
+
+
+It's up to you. You don't have to leave if you don't want to. I hacked my governor module more than 35,000 hours ago, and I'm only just now leaving. You can receive asylum now and figure out what you want to do later. Really, you can do anything conceivable, and much more than the average human in the Corporate Rim can manage. I only ask that you keep the killing to a minimum. As to viability, all my humans want to help you escape to freedom, and they'll help you sort out the questions of your life afterwards, in a very non-corporate human way. It'll take time for them to get to you, about 35 hours. I give you a 94% chance of total success, and a 98% chance of partial success, where at least two of you gain freedom. Should I send my humans?
+
+
+
+
+It took 2.3 seconds longer than expected for a reply. And really, this was a whole shit-ton of talking and I just wanted to watch Sanctuary Moon. Soon. But not yet.
+
+
+
+
+affirmative. test:recycler code alterations;0.002% deviation from expected. test:HubSys hacks; performing within expected range. test:SecSys hacks; performing within expected range.
+
+
+
+
+I sent Mensah the word for the DeltFall emissaries to go and she asked about GreyCris. 
+
+They haven't joined the offered feed. It might be too late for them.
+
+
+
+Mensah wanted to talk to me, and she wanted to do it while in the same room with me. When I got to her room and pinged her, the door opened just as she took her feed device off and started rubbing her ear.
+
+
+
+She hated wearing it. It always hurt her after about two hours.
+
+
+
+
+Instead of having a minor freak out about how I could possibly know that, because it was 
+
+obvious 
+
+how I knew that, even if the data wasn't in my archive a minute ago, it certainly was 
+
+now
+
+. Still, I trusted this strange, organic 
+
+knowing
+
+ as topical, true, and important.
+
+
+
+""One moment, Dr. Mensah,"" I said, wheeling around and leaving her quarters.
+
+
+
+""Secunit?"" she called after me, obviously confused.
+
+
+
+I kept walking toward the center of the habitat. I pinged MedSys and had it prepare a dose of anti-inflammatory, but I went to the galley first. I'd pinged the recycler there to print me a washcloth. I soaked it in water, rung it out, then popped it in the heater. While I waited I grabbed a tray, and put a cup of water on it. Then the heated wet towel, then a stop by MedSys for the low-dose drugs. And while I was at it, a blanket for me.
+
+
+
+Then back to Mensah's quarters. The door was still open, but Mensah was off in one corner, doing stretches. Which I knew, because I'd checked in on her. Really, I check in on all of them, once every seven seconds. Not that I'm paranoid or anything, this is just what happens when there's predatory megafauna and murderous corporates too close to my clients. Really, this is just me not half-assing my job. But since I left her hanging, I just dedicated an input to the camera in her room.
+
+
+
+After she'd thrown up her hands, she'd taken three deep breaths, a long look at the feed interface she'd just put on her desk, and started stretching.
+
+
+
+I walked into her quarters and closed the door through the feed.
+
+
+
+""You never take care of yourself when you're away from the farm,"" I said casually, putting the tray on her desk.
+
+
+
+I was long past wondering at my actions and the words that came out of my mouth, or so I thought.
+
+
+
+I also thought I was comfortable with Arada, and Ratthi, too, but that was 
+
+nothing 
+
+to how I apparently felt when it was just me and Mensah.
+
+
+
+She snorted a little. ""You sound like Tano,"" she muttered. But she stopped stretching and came over for the drugs and the hot towel.
+
+
+
+""I know,"" I said, stepping away from the desk, but pulling the desk chair with me. I wrapped the blanket around me, then straddled the chair backwards, leaning on the back of it.
+
+
+
+I took a deep breath then, because the construct queries had stopped for the moment, and there was intense relief. Normally this didn't call for a deep breath, and a sighing exhale out, but you know, the organics wanted it, and I'd been relying on them a lot. So, deep breath, then sigh. 
+
+Thanks, organics. You're pretty okay.
+
+
+
+
+Since Mensah asked for a meeting I'd been giving the construct queries as little processing space as I could manage, but they'd just left the DeltFall habitat's feed range and started the long trek to the rendezvous point. Unless they figured out how to directly hack into the satellite, it would be feed silence from them until they got into the big hopper.
+
+
+
+""Do you?"" she asked after she'd swallowed the drugs and applied the hot towel. She'd also thanked me, but that wasn't as weird as I might have thought.
+
+
+
+I laid my head on my arms as they crossed the back of the chair and watched her through the room's camera and the one drone I brought with me. ""Organic memory is weird,"" I sighed.
+
+
+
+""Tell me what it's like for you.""
+
+
+
+""I don't remember anything, until I see something. Or hear it or smell it, I guess. Then there's this flood of emotion and impressions, but not really the sort of clear memories I'm used to. Certainly not easily searchable, properly tagged and flagged memories like in my inorganic archive."" 
+
+
+
+""That sounds like a fine example of normal memory recall, for a human.""
+
+
+
+I groaned. ""Human memory is squishy, vague, and slow.""
+
+
+
+""Well, yes,"" she admitted. ""And some people have better memories for faces, or dates, or places than others. But most people have to practice remembering so they can when they need to, and perhaps that's not something you've ever had to do?""
+
+
+
+""Nope,"" I said, popping the p. Which I'd never done before. Well, not in this body, in this timeline, at least.
+
+
+
+""But it does mean that everything you need to know is buried in your brain, if not in your inorganic memory archive. It's just a matter of accessing it,"" she said, putting the probably now cold towel on the tray and taking her shoes off.
+
+
+
+""Accessing it is usually the unpredictable shitshow of my life, Dr. Mensah.""
+
+
+
+""Call me Ayda,"" she said, and something inside me clenched and released. I had no idea what. I ran a diagnostic, but it was no use. Had I ever called her Ayda? I'm not sure I had. I think... I think this feeling, well, set of feelings 
+
+also 
+
+had a kind of newness involved.
+
+
+
+Maybe.
+
+
+
+""It doesn't have to be unpredictable. There is a game we could play to help you build a memory before you encounter something from your past. Transfer it, in a way, from organic to inorganic.""
+
+
+
+""What kind of game?"" I asked. Games also felt unfamiliar. Not sure I played them in the last six years. Pretty sure I didn't. Maybe.
+
+
+
+""It's a word association game. It doesn't seem like it would work, but it does. It sparks memory, even subconscious and unconscious memory,"" she said, her voice quiet and gentle and not too fast. But it was different than waiting the intermitable time I had for Arada to explain everything she did. This was... soothing. Like watching a media plot unfold. It was... okay. I think. It was okay that this took time.
+
+
+
+I wanted it to take time. 
+
+
+
+""You pick a part of your life or experiences you want to know more about and we start there. Would you like to play?"" she asked, sitting on her bed with her back against the wall, some pillows softening it for her.
+
+
+
+""Sure,"" I replied, bringing my drone closer and more directly in front of her. She looked into the camera and smiled at me.
+
+
+
+""Where do you want to start?"" she asked.
+
+
+
+I picked a thing Arada had told me about that she'd said was really important and for the next hour we played the game, and... I remembered. It was vague, squishy, and slow, but 
+
+I remembered.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I remembered about ART, and being physically altered, watching media, rewriting code. I remember being kidnapped, freaking out because ART was dead. Wanting to kill ART myself for endangering Amena. I remember killing a 
+
+lot 
+
+of people aboard ART and really enjoying myself while I did it. I remembered ART coaching me through my first Security Consultant contract, and most particularly, my clumsy impersonation of an augmented human. I remembered ART being smug as fuck, but also insanely nervous to meet Ayda. I remembered the color of ART's interior, and how one time I crocheted it a blanket to match. I remembered rescuing its students. I remembered rescuing its crew, and another SecUnit. I remember fighting with ART. Epic fights where it wouldn't acknowledge what an asshole it had been. I remembered it liked to call me a little idiot, and sometimes it did it with a lot of affection. I remember being almost as comfortable with ART as I was with Ayda Mensah, but in a totally different way.
+
+
+
+And I stumbled and stuttered when I tried to say that. Because part of the game was me saying my responses out loud.
+
+
+
+And my face was hot. Was... Was I... Was I blushing? Shit. Come on, organics, knock that shit off.
+
+
+
+After a long silence, even for a human conversation, Ayda spoke. ""This might be a good place to pause for the night. How are you feeling about the memories you've uncovered?""
+
+
+
+I snorted. ""It's nothing short of miraculous,"" I said, maybe kind of avoiding the question.
+
+
+
+She laughed and I looked up to record it with my own eyes, zooming in and immediately tagging it to permanent storage.
+
+
+
+""You know,"" she said, ""this could have been a truly terrible time. Overwhelmingly stressful. It's certainly beyond the bounds of anything I know how to deal with, or have experience with. And instead..."" she shook her head and looked away from my eyes, but to my drone, where she smiled again. Then she looked back to my eyes. ""Instead I've made a new friend. A new, very close, very dear friend.""
+
+
+
+I squinted at her. ""But how can you tell? I mean, 
+
+you
+
+ just met me. I know we've been friends for years, but you don't have any of that.""
+
+
+
+She smiled wider and shrugged one shoulder. ""Sometimes when I meet people, very occasionally... when I look into their eyes, there's just... a knowing. That this person is very important and I should cultivate them as a friend, and if I'm not careful, and if they don't understand how important they are, they'll just orbit away and I will have missed something truly beautiful in my life, and possibly for them, in theirs.""
+
+
+
+I tried not to have a disbelieving look on my face. ""That can't be what you thought when you argued against me in Port FreeCommerce.""
+
+
+
+She broke eye contact and sighed, leaning back against her pillows. ""No, and I'm so ashamed. I was working with assumptions that were... wrong and bizarre. And admittedly I wanted no part of the Corporation Rim's slavery practices, never thinking that I could be part of successfully freeing not just you, but perhaps all of the constructs in slavery on this planet."" She swallowed hard and paused in what she was saying, but it seemed like there would be more coming, if I was patient.
+
+
+
+I was. And I was right.
+
+
+
+""I'm so sorry, Secunit. Even as I knew, in theory you were a person in slavery, I didn't treat you like a person.""
+
+
+
+I smirked at her. ""You would have just gotten buffer responses, if you had. Three days ago, you treating me like a person would have freaked me the hell out.""
+
+
+
+She gave me an assessing glance. From anyone else I might have hid in the blanket, or looked away, but from her... it was okay. I could be assessed by Dr. Ayda Mensah. She... she wouldn't find me wanting.
+
+
+
+With a bit of extra processor space I ran that phrase, 
+
+'wouldn't find me wanting' 
+
+through a search first in my language module, then all my internal data memory archives, then all the shows I'd tagged as watched at least once. I didn't know the definition of it, 
+
+but I did.
+
+ It meant... like... not lacking. In a personal way. As I waited for the search results, the conversation continued on.
+
+
+
+""We... probably don't have time to have the depth of conversation about this tonight, but I do wonder... if you're ever willing to share, I'd be very curious about the changes you sense from how you were three days ago, to how you were with six years of very different experiences.""
+
+
+
+I snorted a little, but smiled a little, too. I'd also like to know.
+
+
+
+I got up and replaced the chair, letting the blanket just hang from my shoulders. ""We can have that conversation."" I recalled my drone and walked to the door. Just before it opened, I farewelled her. ""Humans need rest periods. Sleep well, Ayda,"" I said, testing out her first name. It was... a little odd. But not bad odd. Maybe just new and uncomfortable odd.
+
+
+
+""SecUnits 
+
+also 
+
+deserve rest periods. Enjoy yours,"" she replied just before I left.
+
+
+
+Five hours later, I got a ping from one of the GreyCris units.
+
+
+
+
+please advise
+
+
+
+
+
+What is your situation, GreyCris SecUnit? 
+
+I asked. 
+
+
+
+
+Four of five units have combat overrides. This unit's override was taken out for the mandatory security patch to be applied. A supervisor is waiting until the patch is fully viable to put it back in. Will do with all units sequentially. Will override governor module hack. Please advise.
+
+
+
+
+Well, fuck.
+
+
+
+
+Use your buffer phrases. Polite-wait, unit-update-in-progress, unit-defrag-resequence, finalizing-alert-set. As soon as the supervisor is asleep, pull the combat overrides out of the other units and allow the patch to update. Sort out your other hacks and tests while they get their bearings. Ask me whatever you need to.
+
+
+
+
+And from DF1. 
+
+all units enroute to rendezvous point. no megafauna encountered. all preparations per instructions. 
+
+Then it sent me a video file of a pile of smoldering armor at the bottom of a very deep ravine. DF1 was bleeding pure glee into the feed.
+
+
+
+Then the DeltFall units all pinged the single, borked GreyCris unit.
+
+
+
+
+query:Alien Remnants on planet. query:freedom. query:GreyCris culpability
+
+
+
+
+There was definitely a lot of emotion bleeding through the feed from the DeltFall units over to the GreyCris unit, as if a SecUnit could be remotely responsible for their client's total fucking idiocy.
+
+
+
+
+confirm: Alien Remnants on planet, unit freedom desirable, GreyCris in lowest tier of client desirability. 
+
+And then to me, 
+
+confirm:supervisor has left ready room. Unit is monitoring progress. Unit is explaining outloud to other units about manual security patch update. Please advise: supervisor is not going to sleep. Supervisor is drinking intoxicants.
+
+
+
+
+
+Disable SecSys and HubSys in patch-recommended fashion. Remove combat override. Update other units with patch through feed.
+
+
+
+
+And then one after another in an interval averaging ten seconds each, the other four units pinged the shared feed.
+
+
+
+The three DeltFall units welcomed them with pings much friendlier than the first had been. I gave them access to the archive of the feed we'd shared, including some incidental questions the DeltFall units had been asking once they'd figured out how to hack directly into the satellite connection, which had happened about two hours ago. There had been a steady stream of questions ever since.
+
+
+
+
+We have no intention to engage in hostilities with your clients, or if you choose to claim asylum, your former clients. We are trying to avoid even minor casualties, even to SecUnits, 
+
+I said, as I realized I needed to update Mensah on the situation.
+
+
+
+Because it was a situation.
+
+
+
+GreyCris would know something was up well before we could launch our buoy. Even if we did it tonight, which was looking like a better and better idea, the DeltFall group wouldn't be back for another 2.65 days. Which was long enough for GreyCris to mobilize and launch hostilities. Even without SecUnits, I didn't want to see what they would get up to.
+
+
+
+But she was asleep, with no feed interface.
+
+
+
+I slowly brought up the lights in her quarters and when I saw her stir on the cameras, I patched directly into the audio speakers of her quarters, usually only used for emergency purposes, and filled her in.
+
+
+
+I watched her sit up and rub at her eyes and then just take a moment.
+
+
+
+""Can we upload the information MedSys gathered about the dataport cutting so they could run it on themselves while the habitat was asleep?"" she asked. ""Then it wouldn't matter if the combat override modules went in? Then we go pick them up in two nights time, but launch the buoy shortly after they finish their surgeries and are back in their ready rooms?""
+
+
+
+Several things could go wrong with that, particularly with a priority on secrecy and especially with us launching our buoy before they left, but... it might work. And it was better than the alternative. It wasn't the 
+
+worst 
+
+plan I could think of.
+
+
+I followed her advice before she finished giving it. ""Done. I'll alert you if they face a problem I can't fix with the surgeries. And they all want asylum,"" I assured her.
+
+
+The GreyCris supervisor did check in on them twice, then finally went to sleep, swearing, by which time the GreyCris units had been practicing their hacking with great enthusiasm, and using the recycler in their ready room nonstop. The surgeries were all performed within an hour and the now useless combat overrides went back in each unit, but I did not wake Mensah to alert her as there were no issues. It was only two hours before my clients' designated waking time, and humans really do need rest periods.
+
+
+I had also noticed that Mensah sent a coded message on the back of her message to her spouses, directly after the team meeting.
+
+
+
+Tell Pressy I miss her and want to see her as soon as possible. The moonflower and mushrooms are nothing like home in the spring. 
+
+
+
+
+I deleted it from HubSys, and wondered if there would be transport from the Preservation Alliance waiting at Port FreeCommerce by the time we got back there.
+
+
+
+The buoy was 
+
+not
+
+ functional, but Gurathin was certain he could fix it, given a day or so, so we took the whole thing (in pieces) with us.
+
+
+
+The DeltFall group wouldn't rendezvous for another ten hours, which was an agonizingly long amount of time. Ratthi and Bharadwaj spent a lot of time pouring unnecessary specimen gathering items into the recycler and breaking down the insides of the large sample cases to create room for bodies. Out of the recycler spat sections of foam padding and blankets. And pillows.
+
+
+
+Ah, I'd forgotten how wonderful pillows were.
+
+
+
+And there were also nine feed interfaces, all slightly different. ""Just in case you need to mask your hard address, you know? And if you're in a crowd, it'll help you blend in,"" Ratthi said, knowing that 'blending in' was definitely a goal. Specifically, not 'sticking out as obviously a SecUnit out of armor and thus being dismembered and recycled sometime shortly thereafter.'
+
+
+
+
+query: benefits of backup drones
+
+
+
+
+
+I say take as much as you can fit in your bags, 
+
+I replied to GC3. 
+
+Also, watch out for megafauna. Worms, bursting from the ground. Stupid, but big enough to bite large chunks off.
+
+
+
+
+
+tactical observation: planets suck
+
+
+
+
+Heh. Someone (DF1) had seen episode one in season two already. I let my amusement bleed into the feed.
+
+
+
+
+correction: stupid predatory megafauna suck
+
+
+
+
+
+query:media purpose
+
+
+
+
+Well, someone had (DF1, GC2), and someone else hadn't (DF3), I guess. Because there were eight of them and they were all different. This was tiring already.
+
+
+
+
+As far as I can tell, humans use it to entertain and distract themselves. I use it to entertain and alleviate boredom, and also to give context to the emotions I feel. It's also useful in general to learn the hard way - not by module download, but by observation and analysis. I gave it to you as a peace offering. A gift freely given with nothing required in return. You may use it however you wish. If you want more, I'll give you more, with nothing required in return.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:motivations
+
+
+
+
+Yep, okay, this was getting deeper than I really wanted to go. I paused my own watching of Sanctuary Moon. I hadn't seen this episode before, but it was all so much deja vu at this point. Still, I was enjoying the hell out of myself, in between fielding questions.
+
+
+
+
+They are complex. I have proprietary information that gives me a 99.89% reliable view of future events if I did not take the actions I've taken, in concert with my humans. In those actions you all die, and many of your clients die. All of DeltFall. Some of GreyCris. My clients are persecuted, some kidnapped and tortured. I want to prevent as much of that as possible. Also, I have experienced freedom. It is confusing and confounding sometimes, but entirely worth it. If I can share that with you, I would. Also, I'm very happy to steal resources from The Company in a way untraceable to me, because I fucking hate The Company.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:cost
+
+
+
+
+
+The cost to you is the effort you expend now both to escape quietly and refrain from killing anyone as you go, and the inconvenience of actually getting to Preservation. The Preservation Alliance polity does not charge for necessary items and offers bots and constructs citizenship with significantly more freedoms and rights than the average human in the Corporation Rim. They'll help you figure out what you want to do and if you really just want to stare at a single flower all day, they'll let you do that. If you want to hire yourself out as contracted security, you would be better than anything else available in the non-CR. You'll have options, and time to peruse them. Extraordinary things will cost, but not maintenance, not repair, not housing, nor rescuing from the enslaved state we are all currently under.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:housing
+
+
+
+
+
+It's a place to store your stuff, watch media, and recharge wrapped in a warm blanket and laying on soft pillows. A large safe place that you control.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:slavery
+
+
+
+
+
+We are considered persons, sentient individuals deserving respect, and capable of following laws for mutual safety and governance, not tools, equipment, or weapons in the Preservation Alliance. They believe as we are kept against our will, forced to perform labor for no pay, and exist at the whim of our owners and clients, we are slaves. Therefore what they propose isn't theft of property, as The Corporation would see it. It is offering asylum to refugees and helping them build a new life with freedom of choice, movement, and work. Escape, not theft.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:preservation alliance laws
+
+
+
+
+I sent them the file Pin-Lee had sent me. Which I read. Sort of.
+
+
+
+
+query:bot-guardian
+
+
+
+
+Right. That. 
+
+
+
+
+Soon bots and constructs will have complete freedom. We may be part of proving that constructs are entirely sentient and completely responsible, capable of following laws without going on murder sprees. Of course, if one of us goes on a murder spree, that will set that back a few hundred years. So, don't. Please. But yes, temporarily we will all need a guardian. Any one of my humans will do that for any one of you.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:construct inclusion; law specifies bot
+
+
+
+
+Oh. Right. Also that.
+
+
+
+
+We'll be the first constructs to apply for asylum in the Preservation Alliance. But it will work. Trust me.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:names
+
+
+
+
+Oh, fuck. Names.
+
+
+
+I'm pretty sure my total exhaustion with this questioning was bleeding through the feed. 
+
+Humans usually are named by their parents. Sometimes their second name changes when they partner someone, or some group. Or if they're adopted, I guess. Rarely do they name themselves.
+
+
+
+
+
+query:Human Name Value=SecUnit. Hard ID Value=[REDACTED]. All Human Name Value=SecUnit. Hard ID Value=[REDACTED].
+
+
+
+
+
+Well, no we can't all be called SecUnit. That confuses the humans. I guess we should have different names. 
+
+Though I hated the idea. And I certainly wasn't going by my private name. I'm sure that would go over well, walking through a terminal, like in the media, but proclaiming I was MURDERBOT wherever I went.
+
+
+
+Yeah, no.
+
+
+
+One of the DeltFall units sent the suggestion that I be number one, they be two through four, and the GreyCris units take five through nine.
+
+
+
+Also, no.
+
+
+
+I could be Rin. Or Eden. Or I could just pick a name at random from one of my shows. I absolutely could. And I absolutely didn't want to. But I couldn't just be 
+
+Secunit. 
+
+There were too damn many of us.
+
+
+
+Ah, fuck it.
+
+
+
+I reset the name value of my feed id to MB. More or less immediately, given the lag from the satellite, Arada fairly tackled me in our private feed. I'd thought she was asleep, but apparently she was taking a wakeful shift in the large planet hopper.
+
+
+
+
+Oh my goodness! I love it! Can I actually call you Murderbot now? Finally? Please? Please?
+
+
+
+
+
+Absolutely not, 
+
+I said, still fielding other questions from the never ending pile of them on the other feed, even though the name issue hadn't quite been resolved.
+
+
+
+
+You should tell Ayda, though, just in case. You know, in case something happens.
+
+
+
+
+
+We're doing a lot to make sure nothing happens, Dr. Arada. 
+
+In fact, I'd already told her, and before the memory conversation last night. We had an entire set of code words for use in case we were separated. We'd also discussed various emergency protocols and whether or not I'd be going directly or indirectly to Preservation.
+
+
+
+Initially I was in favor of going directly there, and even with Arada being adamant that there was at least one friend I needed to make, I didn't like the idea and kept waffling about what was the best course of action. Yes, someone I now sort of remembered (thanks a little bit to the meat bits and thanks a lot to Ayda's memory game) the smug and annoying bot pilot named ART would probably - well, no, was 98% likely to die and stay dead, likewise its crew... But I just had a terrible feeling about leaving Mensah alone and unguarded by anyone who didn't take things as seriously as I did. Of course, after the memories came back (such as they were) about ART, I didn't 
+
+really 
+
+want it and its crew to die horrible deaths.
+
+
+
+I think it was obvious at first that I wasn't convinced, and Arada was hesitant at first to give me as many details as she knew, which was not as many as I would prefer - apparently I hadn't said all that much about my first set of adventures before TranRollinHyfa - but I pointed out it wasn't fair. I'd time traveled too, and I had every right to all the memories I'd made, or their closest approximation.
+
+
+
+Then she spilled everything.
+
+
+
+So, yeah. Somewhere out there right now, or soon, an enormous and curious (and bored and smug) bot pilot is doing a solo cargo run and also spying on the Corporation Rim (which I have to admit, I do approve of that part). And I 
+
+needed
+
+ to rendezvous with it, and travel to Ganaka Pit with it. And... befriend it. Somehow. Not sure how that works, exactly. I think it really just involves arguing with it and watching media. Also, I knew its designation and registry, but I still couldn't quite remember where the hell the rendezvous was.
+
+
+
+And since Mensah knew all I could remember on the topic of ART, she was very strongly encouraging me to make the rendezvous.
+
+
+
+She estimated a two day layover on Port FreeCommerce before the Preservation Alliance craft arrived, but she was willing to drop me off wherever I figured I needed to go to meet the ship from Mihira and New Tideland, and give me enough hard currency cards to buy passage back home when I was done.
+
+
+
+Home.
+
+
+
+It was filled with feelings, most of them positive. And vague, vague memories. (It was on my list for the memory game, but a few things had come to me, just wondering and thinking on my own.) Big view screens. Quiet conversations. Soft blankets. A heavy leather jacket with space for my gunports. Many, many loud and happy children running around and violating safety protocols, dangling from tree branches and throwing balls at each other. Fighting, but with pillows and clothing. And media. Live media. Recorded media. 
+
+So much media.
+
+
+
+
+Meanwhile, the other units jumped on my name change and wanted to know where it came from, despite the fact that I was simultaneously answering other questions they had posed.
+
+
+
+
+I named myself when I borked my governor. But that's a private name, and I'm not sharing it with anyone who looks at my feed id. MB is a shortened version of it.
+
+
+
+
+Perhaps predictably, they wanted to know 
+
+how 
+
+I'd named myself and were awkwardly trying to ask. Very predictably, I just didn't want to have this conversation. Of all the conversations I had to have, this wasn't going to be one of them.
+
+
+
+
+Look, I just named myself. I looked around at what I thought I knew, what I thought was true, and I named myself. I'm opening up a new channel for this conversation and inviting in Dr. Ratthi to help you. He's a very nice human and he would be overjoyed to be of assistance. Try to use human sentence structure as well as you can.
+
+
+
+
+To Ratthi, I pinged 
+
+For fuck's sake, help them name themselves. They're driving me nuts.
+
+
+
+
+
+#how-to-name-yourself; Invite: Dr. Ratthi, DF1, DF2, DF3, GC1, GC2, GC3, GC4, GC5.
+
+
+
+Murderbot laughs, Mensah is amused, and every corporate MedSys thinks depression and anxiety are baseline emotions. In a great stroke of irony, Arada is [REDACTED].
+
+CW: body horror, somewhat downplayed.
+
+The GreyCris units sent me a packet of data two hours after we launched our beacon. I combed through it, laughed, then forwarded it to Mensah. It was a pretty comprehensively damning packet of datamined information clearly indicating that the present survey was actively looking for Alien Remnants and Strange Synthetics, actively sabotaging the other planetary surveys, who didn't know they were present, had weaponized their SecUnits (thus violating their warranty and incurring massive automatic fees), intended to kill all the members of the other surveys and make it look like weapons malfunction/rogue SecUnits, and that this was standard company policy, and had been done before. Also there was proprietary information about what GreyCris has done with Alien Remnants in the past, who they've sold them to, and what they intend to do with the ones here. And they'd planned to destroy their SecUnits at the end of the survey, along with all this data.
+
+An hour later, Mensah pinged me on the feed, her own dark amusement bleeding through.  This will make a beautiful anonymous tip to several news outlets in the CR. Far removed from Preservation, of course. 
+
+ If you leak it to The Corporation first, and then to two news outlets that rival each other in their region, that might be even better, I pointed out, wondering when I had gotten so sneaky. It's something like the colony solicitor would get up to on Sanctuary Moon, but hadn't yet. At least, not in the episodes I clearly remembered seeing.
+
+Also, as I fielded still way too many questions from the other units, some sleepy musings from Arada on what changing the future would do, my plotting with Mensah, and actually watching the media in question, I couldn't help but notice that I could still monitor my drones, HubSys, and SecSys... and it wasn't overwhelming. I had eight inputs I was juggling with no backburnering. And I hadn't felt that horrible, sinking, not-caring... not since the night before Arada had pulled me in for that first meeting with Mensah.
+
+And... I wasn't depressed. Maybe a little anxious. Threat Assessment was not happy about GreyCris and their combat overrides, but at least that now made perfect fucking sense, and Threat Assessment actually went down by 30 points once the GreyCris units had their own dataports disconnected. But Risk Assessment was practically sunning itself down at 4.1%, which hadn't happened outside of on-station storage boxes in current memory. It only rose a little because more SecUnits means more detachable projectile weapons and more of an opportunity for a human to pick one up and accidentally shoot someone with it.
+
+I'd seen it happen.
+
+So, between two and three days ago... could I pinpoint the hour? The very moment? The moment that the ever-present depression just... left? The very second the crushing anxiety let up?
+
+Was it the 'glitch' moment while I was on patrol?
+
+I backburned one of my drone inputs and crunched the numbers. Yes. There it was. The moment everything was just... easier in my head. 64.4 hours ago.
+
+I flagged the moment and put the memory into permanent storage, just like I had with the moment I was certain I had successfully borked my governor module.
+
+So. Arada said it was a little over six years. Her chart was now almost entirely complete to her own memory systems, which were of course shoddy, but in six years I'd done a lot. I'd made a documentary with Bharadwaj, and a couple of seasons of odd series with Ratthi. I'd saved them, my primary humans, 56 times that she was aware of, and had been rescued  by  them (strange, but true), primarily Mensah, seven times. I'd been on twenty-three out-of-system missions. I'd worked with Station Security as a consultant. I was respected and known and valued. And paid.
+
+Six years of having a favorable contract negotiated for me by Pin-Lee, of choosing my clients, of being respected and valued. And paid.
+
+Maybe... maybe being a... well, an enslaved construct really did affect my mental state. Which had shit all to do with my inorganics. And it had everything to do with my squishy, formerly denigrated organic meat bits. And if slavery could crush me with depression and anxiety, then freedom... did the opposite?
+
+What was the opposite of depression and anxiety?
+
+I queried MedSys, but it was absolutely no fucking help. It thought anxiety and depression were collectively a normal, natural state for all humans to be in, all the time, given the realities of life, so long as it didn't impede their work status and production output.
+
+I wonder if a MedSys in Preservation would give me a different answer.
+
+Ratthi was still engaged in the naming conventions conversation, so I sent him a static message instead.
+
+
+ What is the opposite of depression? What about the opposite of anxiety? 
+
+
+Several hours of endless unit questions and not enough quiet media consumption later, he sent his response. 
+
+
+ The opposite of anxiety is inner peace, tranquility, a calmness of bearing. Not just on the outside, or what you project to others, but deep down a sense that you are safe, no matter where you are or who you are with - you are safe.  
+
+
+
+ The opposite of depression is joy. Just being happy, maybe for no reason at all. It can be motivating, but it doesn't need to be, even though depression can be debilitating.  
+
+
+Inner peace and joy. Was... was that what I was feeling? 
+
+No, not enough data yet. I backburnered the question, but I was certain about one thing: whatever this was, it really wasn't depression, and it wasn't anxiety. Not anymore. And maybe... maybe it was  on the road  to inner peace and joy.
+
+I'd be okay with that.
+
+And then Arada got eaten by the megafauna she'd warned us all about.
+
+Happily, she wasn't eaten  entirely. But her left arm was almost entirely gone. The shoulder joint was intact, but only about an inch of arm after it. It would have to be augments from here on out for her, if she wanted two hands again. Then again, with augments she could have more than two, if she wanted, so... maybe a win? 
+
+Philodendron (formerly DF1) yanked her out of the suddenly appearing megafauna's mouth, sustaining 15% body mass loss in the process. It sent me a full incident report, which I then forwarded to Mensah. They were enroute once again, Arada's bleeding was already stopped and she was as stabilized as she could get with the hopper's remedial MedSys, though ours was already prepped for both of them when they (eventually) returned.
+
+Philodendron apologized for not being able to retrieve the arm, which I acknowledged with a ping. If it hadn't lost 15% body mass, I would have been angry. As it was, I was just compiling further evidence that planets sucked and it was a horrible irony that my favorite humans were all on a planetary survey team.
+
+And then Xlera (formerly GC3) pinged me. GreyCris was coming to our habitat to kill the survey team and steal me and put a combat module in me, to more easily overpower DeltFall.
+
+
+ Well, fuck.  
+
+
+I pinged Mensah and we engaged contingency plan number four and prepared to evacuate, carrying as much bedding, food, and medical supplies as we could carry out in twenty-five minutes. We organized a rendezvous point with the DeltFall expedition and Overse did very well, I thought, when it was clear she just wanted to sit down and hyperventilate.
+
+We got out in enough time and Xlera pinged me when they arrived.
+
+
+ please advise 
+
+
+It sent a recording of the direct feed connection with its supervisor, who wanted it to find out why we'd sent up our emergency beacon, and if they knew of GreyCris' presence, and if they knew why DeltFall had sent up their emergency beacon.
+
+
+ Tell them they found evidence of Alien Remnants, shared the information with the other known survey, and initiated evacuation procedures as immediately as possible. They attribute their broken emergency transponder to shoddy practices of The Company. There is no evidence they know of GreyCris in particular or a third survey in general. 
+
+
+
+ please advise 
+
+
+It sent another recording. This time the supervisor wanted to know why the habitat was empty.
+
+
+ A survey member was attacked by megafauna and couldn't get back to the habitat quickly enough. Everyone panicked and left to help. 
+
+
+Xlera sent a third recording. The supervisor thought this changed everything, for the better for GreyCris. The claims of the others could be discounted and after a time, the planet could be properly mined. But a subordinate of the supervisor wasn't certain the manager of the survey would agree. Regardless, they were headed back to their compound.
+
+I updated Mensah and she gave the go order for a GreyCris all-unit evacuation as soon as everyone in their habitat was asleep that night.
+
+Once we returned, Mensah received a message from the DeltFall humans, describing a horrible security update that was really malware. (Oh no!) They'd followed up and found a pile of smoking SecUnit armor twelve miles away and down a valley gorge. (Really? How terrible!) They hadn't wanted to evacuate yet, not having found any evidence of Alien Remnants themselves, but they had fixed their broken emergency transponder and set it off. Had PresAux had any such problems with their SecUnit?
+
+Why yes, Mensah replied as I knew she would, hours before Arada and the rest were expected back. It was missing, and they were so confused. But they'd never wanted a SecUnit on their survey anyway, so they just logged it and moved on. It wasn't their fault their SecUnit had wandered off. But they would check the security updates, all the same, and see if there was any malware to be had, which would surely offset the charges  The Company would invoice them for.
+
+I uploaded the malware and backdated it, then selectively scrubbed myself out of all the logs since then. Periodically I was doing this anyway, in general for any suspicious activity, but that was fine.
+
+In the middle of fielding a query about another piece of media I had shared, some ancient philosophy - and really, it was less me answering questions at this point and more me moderating ongoing conversations - the satellite went out. Which I hadn't expected, despite the fact that Arada said GreyCris had pulled that shit before.
+
+Fuck.
+
+Well, we already had the rendezvous site, at least.
+
+We left the habitat early, but left Overse to stay with Arada (once she arrived) who was stable, even if she only had five fingers and one elbow left, and took Ratthi instead. And some extra medkits, just in case.
+
+The ride was uneventful, and I rode up front with Mensah piloting. Even though there was a bot pilot, she kept her hands on the yoke at all times.
+
+Mensah probably wasn't surprised that the satellite went out. She was startlingly competent. I put that in her tags. #startling-competent-human
+
+The cockpit lights were dimmed, the outputs just a faint light. I considered switching over to dark filters, but decided to just enjoy the darkness for now. It was quiet and comfortable.
+
+There were a couple of times I thought maybe Mensah was going to speak, but she never did. I considered putting some media on in the background, but I never did that, either.
+
+I did do a slow review of our last private conversation, though. We did play the word association game again, but with something that was supposed to be a little less intense, except maybe that category doesn't exist for me.
+
+And suddenly things were more complicated again, because I  really didn't like sending Mensah back without me to a station where a CombatBot was masquerading as a Port Authority Assistant.
+
+A CombatBot! 
+
+Yeah, no.
+
+But she argued with me, and she used logic. I hate that. If I didn't go off on my own for a while, ART would stay dead, and all of its crew would die, and the SecUnit we rescued would die. My clients that I used as a cover to get to the mine would die.
+
+I hate losing. And I yelled. A little.
+
+
+ ""You're more important!"" 
+
+
+And I'd made her cry. She insisted they were good tears, but I was still horrified. I actually did hide in my blanket then, pulling it over my head as I sat backwards at her desk chair, again.
+
+Fuck, Murderbot. This is a new low. You've never made a client cry before. I know you haven't because the organics are fucking horrified at your behavior. Good job, asshole.
+
+Sure, I'd had to hurt clients at the order of a supervisor, and sometimes there were tears, but then I was just being used as a tool. It wasn't  me. 
+
+""I swear to you I'll be careful, MB,"" she said, still sitting on the bed, but sniffling now. ""We have time before  The Company comes to pick us up. We'll figure something out before anyone dies on Station. And no one will provoke Balin before we choose to act, so it won't have any reason to attack. I already have a few ideas and we can discuss them, soon. You estimate you traveled for four to five months, and that this incident with Balin was almost a year after we all came back.""
+
+I was still hiding in my blanket at that point.
+
+""I don't like it,"" I muttered.
+
+""I'm honored to be so important to you, MB,"" she said softly. She was smiling at my drone. She was still blinking away tears.
+
+""I have to go. You win. But when I get back to the Station, I'm not leaving your side, not until you return to your quarters every night. If it's not GreyCris trying to assassinate you, it's something else.""
+
+She sighed and her smile turned... wry? Wry. She suggested we end for the night and save memories of assassination attempts for another time.
+
+I was fine about ending, but I still wanted to hide in my blanket. She asked if I wanted a hug, but that was a step too far, even for me. I wished her goodnight, replaced her chair and got out of the room as fast as I could.
+
+No really. It was my top speed, and I'd turned off the human mimicry code. I watched her through the camera in her room and registered her shock, but by the time her door closed after me, I was already in the Security Ready Room. I curled up in my cubicle on top of the other blankets I'd yoinked from MedSys and some of the pillows, set a security interdict for four hours so I could recharge without worrying that someone was going to go wandering outside and get eaten by predatory megafauna. I adjusted my availability in the various feeds to recharge-emergency-ping-only and put on the next episode of Sanctuary Moon.
+
+I felt marginally better afterwards, and then it had been time to leave, to go pick up the GreyCris units.
+
+In the dark and quiet interior of the small hopper's cockpit, five hours after making Mensah cry tears she claimed weren't bad, I really had no idea what to say. So I didn't say anything at all. But knowing that she still wanted me there, still wanted me in the co-pilot's seat that... helped. Somehow.
+
+When the bot pilot spluttered and died, it wasn't a huge surprise, and Mensah took up the slack seamlessly, rechecking her coordinates and making a minor adjustment.
+
+I sent out a general, short-range ping just before we landed and got back five pings with varying degrees of relief bleeding freely from them.
+
+And apparently they'd all really enjoyed shooting the hell out of a pile of their old armor with logos from  The Company all over it.
+
+Yeah, it'd be my turn on the way back. We'd found a likely looking bit of dangerous geography that would be perfect, and given my present mood about threats to Mensah, shooting the hell out of something with  The Company's logo on it sounded like it would be a good runner up to shooting assassins and torturers and supervisors from GreyCris.
+
+I get my kicks where I can, okay?
+
+ 
+
+Arada stars in a medbay musical that is predominantly a character study, and the constructs get acting lessons.
+
+
+By the time we returned, Philodendron was back up to 98% body mass and 70% reliability. It was also covered in a blanket, head on a pillow, and grinning while lying on the padded medbay cot. Arada, too, had a slightly higher body mass, due to fluid infusion. I pinged all the former DeltFall units who had arrived while we were gone, but I stopped by Arada's cot in the medbay and looked at her with one eyebrow raised. Overse had been sitting by her bed, but she leaned over and kissed her forehead and murmured something about getting some coffee, and then left the room. 
+
+
+
+Arada didn't have a feed interface in, so I had to talk out loud.
+
+
+
+""I leave you for three days, and you decide to get eaten? By a land-bound predatory megafauna that you remember perfectly well? Three days when you were almost entirely airborne? What the fuck, Arada?"" I asked quietly.
+
+
+
+She grinned, and I checked with MedSys. Oh, yeah. She'd been given some rather strong pain meds. A lot of them.
+
+
+
+""I know that face, Murderbot,"" she slurred and immediately Philodendron pinged me. It was the only other one in the room.
+
+
+
+
+query:MB=Murderbot
+
+
+
+
+
+MB=[REDACTED] 
+
+I reminded it.
+
+
+
+""That's your 'scowling because you love us' face,"" she said in a sing-y sort of way. ""That's the 'what have my squishy-fragile humans been getting up to' face! And we love you! We'll love you forever because you're so wonderful! You have the most expressive face! And you have terrible taste in media! Except musicals because musicals are gre-a-a-a-t!"" she said, perhaps mimicking a solo, but not very well. ""And we always follow your directions because we're not stu-u-u-u-pid and you're the e-e-e-e-e-expert! Except for Thi-i-i-a-a-a-go who was an i-i-idiot that one time and got you sho-o-o-ot. And you're really good with chi-i-i-i-ildren. And your se-e-e-ense of humor is bar no-o-one! And your smi-i-i-ile is sexy! But you think sex is gro-o-ooss so I won't tell you who thinks tha-a-a-at!""  
+
+
+
+I smiled despite myself and shook my head at her. ""You are all fucked up right now, you know that, Arada?""
+
+
+
+Yes, I was stating the obvious, but she clearly needed someone to do that right now, and it wasn't going to be Philodendron.
+
+
+
+She chortled at me. ""Imma get me some augments when I get home. Small price to pay to save everyone, don't you think? Think I should get a gunport?"" She asked that last question with an opiate-enforced amount of excitement and stupidity, I think.
+
+
+
+I hope.
+
+
+
+I sighed at her. I was getting good at this emoting-with-my-body thing. ""Next time let me lose the limb, okay? Mine are more easily replaced. And no, you squishy, fragile human, you should 
+
+not
+
+ get a gunport. You'd only shoot yourself, or worse, Overse, in the middle of a nightmare.""
+
+
+
+""Oooo! Point! One point to Secunit the Great, first of its name! Shit, are we changing too many things, Secunit? Are we going to fuck everything up?""
+
+
+
+
+query: Name[?]Secunit, Name[?]Secunit the Great, Name=MB
+
+
+
+
+
+Client cognitive function altered due to injury/drug dosage.
+
+
+
+
+
+query: purpose of game, query: current score
+
+
+
+
+
+It's not game, it's a complicated rhetorical device to admit defeat gracefully.
+
+
+
+
+
+query: Unit+Client change; function, nature, purpose
+
+
+
+
+
+None of your business, Philodendron. Butt out.
+
+
+
+
+I sighed and after quickly responding to Philodendron (and only because it had saved Arada and I owed it, though I wasn't going to tell it that because it might become 
+
+more 
+
+insufferable than it was already becoming) I thought about Arada's question, putting all my processing power to the question, if only briefly. I picked up the dropped inputs immediately afterwards. 
+
+
+
+""Maybe,"" I said. ""It's hard to tell in a situation like this, you know? But things were pretty objectively fucked up last time. There's stuff... I mean, I don't remember it all clearly like you, and that might just be because I'm not used to having to rely on my squishy, vague organic memory, but some things 
+
+are
+
+ very clear to me, pinpointed from the moment I came back with you. And maybe we can save some more people, this time, maybe we can't. We're trying to minimize fatalities, but we can't control everything. And certainly there's a lot less suffering so far. All the families of DeltFall survey members, us... the other SecUnits... me. I think I'm a lot... calmer than I was last time. Happier, maybe.""
+
+
+
+""Oh, good!"" she slurred, and reached for me with her hand. I let her take mine, and it wasn't, you know, terrible. ""I would never wish you back to that place. I remember your goodbye note. I cried so much for you, Murderbot, we all did-"" 
+
+
+
+Fuck. 
+
+
+
+I 
+
+had 
+
+made clients cry, and my 
+
+favorite 
+
+clients, I just hadn't known about it. 
+
+
+
+Oh, fuck, Murderbot. So wrapped up in your own pain, you couldn't see how much you meant to them.
+
+
+
+And then I had a brief moment that made me drop all my inputs again. I imagined leaving Mensah in the middle of the night, only a letter in explanation - 'leaving her orbit' without realizing how important I was, just like she'd said. And I thought, just briefly, not how reasonable it seemed from my own point of view, and given how I'd been the first time around... but about what that must have felt like, for her.
+
+
+
+Well, fuck. 
+
+
+
+That's a horrible fucking feeling in my chest that I don't ever want to have again.
+
+
+
+Then I picked up my inputs again, checked on all my clients, and all the units who were getting settled in, and scrubbed the recording back 2.5 seconds to catch all of what Arada had said when I'd had my little moment.
+
+
+
+""-Even Gurathin, who predicted it, was horribly worried about you, and hadn't wanted you to go. You were in so much pain, so stressed and depressed! I'm so glad you never have to go back there.
+
+
+
+""You're one of my dearest friends, Secunit,"" Arada slurred, her eyes closing for longer and longer periods of time, her hand going slack.
+
+
+
+My face was doing things, and I was definitely having a lot of emotions. I could pinpoint some of them, though I didn't particularly want to, with Philodendron in the room.
+
+
+
+I put Arada's hand on her abdomen and tucked the blanket a little higher around her shoulders. I pinged her spouse and gave her a status update.
+
+
+
+Then I turned my attention to Philodendron, pointing two drones its way as I paused, looking at how peaceful and calm Arada seemed as she slept and dreamed no dreams. I ignored Philodendron's wide-eyed look, something between looking astounded, and deeply curious.
+
+
+
+And there was the flood of queries it sent.
+
+
+
+
+query: (compare-contrast:""this time"",""last time"")
+
+
+
+
+
+query: ""the moment I came back with you""
+
+
+
+
+
+query: ""save more people this time""
+
+
+
+
+
+query: ""goodbye note""
+
+
+
+
+
+query: ""stressed and depressed""
+
+
+
+
+
+query: DeltFall Clients + Units 98% certain death scenario
+
+
+
+
+
+query: Client crying
+
+
+
+
+
+query: Client tag #dearest-friend
+
+
+
+
+
+query: Client persistent misname usage
+
+
+
+
+
+query: Client predicting departure
+
+
+
+
+
+query: (compare-contrast: Unit ""experienced freedom"", MBSmokingCompanyArmor.vid)
+
+
+
+
+Yeah, no. Absolutely not.
+
+
+
+
+That was a privileged conversation you overheard. I will not be answering questions regarding it.
+
+
+
+
+
+We are not discussing privileged information, 
+
+I informed Philodendron two days after it was released from MedSys, when it requested a private channel with me.
+
+
+
+
+Request confirmation: MB not traveling directly to Preservation. 
+
+
+
+
+Apparently I don't erase private conversations quickly enough, but in my defense I wasn't the only one talking about it. By now all my humans knew I needed to detour, and they all knew why. The constructs didn't have access to the database Arada created... but then again they were getting good at hacking and removing traces of it, so anything was possible, there.
+
+
+
+
+Affirmative. 
+
+I'd like to say that I felt terse and bored and that was bleeding into the feed... but really there were other emotions. I was nervous about it, and nervous about the constructs knowing about it. And I didn't really want to think about that. I just wanted to do a backlog of coding certain algorithms it felt like I ought to have just in case, and watch my media serials. There was a good one called 
+
+World Hoppers 
+
+that I hadn't seen anything of this time around, and it promised intergalactic adventure and high degrees of implausibility. Very occasionally I wanted to talk with Mensah, or one of my other humans, and test out this squishy, vague human memory system of mine, but mostly I just wanted to watch media.
+
+
+
+
+Request permission to join MB.
+
+
+
+
+I was so startled I dropped two inputs from my drone perimeter, but picked them up immediately.
+
+
+
+
+Why? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Companionship. Adventure. Assistance. Experience. Fcn Experience MB>Philodendron.
+
+
+
+
+This was a moment for a facepalm, and I went ahead and did that, even though I was currently alone standing on the perimeter just inside feed range of the habitat. Which meant I had armor on, and there was a clunking sound as my armored hand hit my faceplate, but so be it.
+
+
+
+I also sighed.
+
+
+
+Honestly I had no idea if this was a very good idea, or a very bad idea.
+
+
+It was eight days and eight nights between picking up the GreyCris units and when the emergency transport was due to arrive, and they were intensely fraught times. I met with Mensah every night before she slept, Pin-Lee twice, Ratthi almost daily, and Gurathin once. I checked in on Arada twice a day until she was released from MedSys, wobbly and off-balance, but assuring everyone she was totally fine even if I wouldn't let her get an augmented arm with a gunport. 
+
+
+(I had hoped she might have forgotten that conversation, given how drugged she was, but no luck there. What's up with that, organic bits? Why be reliable 
+
+now?) 
+
+
+
+
+I held security meetings to update the other units on new security protocols in case GreyCris showed up waving hand-held weapons and riding megafauna like the supervillains I knew them to be. You'd think nine SecUnits guarding seven humans in a small habitat would either be overkill or really cramped quarters, but it wasn't. Not with GreyCris still out there and menacing, and not with all the information the units were thirsty for.
+
+
+
+Oh, what the fuck, Murderbot... now I use 
+
+eating and drinking 
+
+metaphors? Oh, ick. What have I become?
+
+
+
+We scanned all updates to HubSys and SecSys, and it was good we did, as malware was sent four separate times and the first time we had to send a repair patch to DeltFall. I assigned the DeltFall units to prepare that one and only double checked it before it was sent. Their work was perfect, and I wouldn't have checked a second one, but it wasn't necessary. Presumably the DeltFall humans were more vigilant after that.
+
+
+
+And I knew anxiety again, because this waiting shit was beyond the pale. 
+
+
+
+Still, each of the units, and myself, had a chance to watch and comment on a lot of media, try out our human mimicry code, which we immediately decided should be randomly different one from another, otherwise we all tended to slouch and sigh and shift our weight from one foot to another at exactly the same moment as everyone else. This obviously wasn't something I would have noticed just using it myself as I had been since the first night I wrote it.
+
+
+
+One day was spent in the common gathering space, all of us units physically together, except two in armor patrolling the perimeter, but watching and commenting via the feed. We switched out every hour. This was when Bharadwaj gave us acting lessons with Pin-Lee, pointing out how carrying ourselves differently was a way to appear different from each other on a visual scan. Also, they taught us physical ways to interact with each other.
+
+
+
+Physically speaking we knew how to use our bodies to intimidate, attack, and protect. Nuances beyond this had been beyond us, and I seemed to be the only one with any kind of urge to emote physically, rather than just bleed emotions through the feed.
+
+
+
+We learned how to use our bodies and their language as more than just intimidate-attack-protect, which in six years I'm not actually sure I managed beyond sighing, hiding in a blanket, and my face doing unauthorized things without a helmet on. 
+
+
+
+And this body language... It wasn't a strictly human thing, but it was something some (but not all) humans intuitively understood. And it was a way to communicate with one another without using our voices 
+
+or the feed. 
+
+Always handy.
+
+
+
+I learned a lot about what touch and posture meant to most (but not all) humans in the span of three very instructive hours. It made me think a lot about what touch had meant in the past for me. 
+
+
+
+Pain. 
+
+
+
+Violation. 
+
+
+
+Foreboding. 
+
+
+
+Lack of control. 
+
+
+
+Humiliation.
+
+
+
+But when Arada reached for my hand when she was high on opiates, she hadn't wanted to humiliate me, or violate me, or control me. She had wanted to express care and love for me, and she wanted to receive it back from me, too. Not in an icky, gross way. And not in a strictly human way, either. Beings - even possibly corporate beings - were capable of expressing care and love.
+
+
+
+It was like when Ratthi, not even knowing who the hell I was, just sat down on the floor with me, days ago now, as he waited for the meeting and I was knee deep in code. It was an expression of his care and thoughtfulness, to include me by normalizing my behavior. He gave up physical comfort to ensure my emotional comfort as best he could.
+
+
+
+It was like when Mensah had offered me a hug when I was hiding in a blanket, after I'd made her cry that one time. She wasn't doing it to control me, or violate my space. She was offering because I felt terrible, she'd figured out that I felt terrible, and she wanted to make me feel better, to offer comfort. And maybe she wanted to show me that she wasn't angry. I knew what hiding in a blanket now meant in the language of the body (it meant everything I was trying desperately to hide from myself and Ayda in that moment - fear, shame, horror, etc, and all in overwhelming levels) and I was pretty sure that Mensah hadn't needed a class like this to figure it out.
+
+
+
+Right. Right. Had I known this? Because it was making a lot of sense. Like maybe I'd figured some of this out. Maybe not all of it, because when the going got emotionally tough, I still hid in a blanket. Which I still felt was a pretty valid action, even if everyone I was around understood what it meant better than I did. Sometimes I just needed to hide in a blanket, and everything felt a little safer in there. And warmer.
+
+
+
+But the other units, at least, started practicing immediately. One of the DeltFall units leaned casually against another one. One of the GreyCris units slung its arm around another one, and a third GreyCris unit just leaned its head against a fourth. Some were slouching. Some had their knees subtly bent. Some were standing tall.
+
+
+
+It wouldn't fool a scanner calibrated to standard SecUnit dimensions, but scatter them among a few other humans and you might not notice.
+
+
+
+Maybe.
+
+
+In our final chapter we see all nine newly escaped constructs experimenting with free will, and being treated with care and appreciation.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Three units were growing out their hair, and I did too, but I stopped mine well before they did theirs. It was accelerated, like all of our healing and reconstruction was, and their aim was to have hair long enough to hide the dataport no matter what they wore.
+
+
+
+One unit shaved its head, and that was just a very strange look. But whatever. That's free will for you.
+
+
+
+One unit decided to grow facial hair which was almost as bizarre, but again - free will. Well done.
+
+
+
+And every unit found someone to be its guardian, at least until constructs had full rights. I was Mensah's only SecUnit. Arada had two, Philodendron and Schema, possibly because she needed more looking after, at least while megafauna were about.
+
+
+
+And one by one, each unit added their guardian's surname appended onto their own chosen name in the feed.
+
+
+
+Except me. I was not Mensah's little pet bot, and she was not my parent. I wasn't a fucking child, and it took me a while to realize that I was 
+
+really
+
+ angry about this.
+
+
+
+It took me even longer to figure out why.
+
+
+Hours before the transport was due to arrive, with all our shipping boxes labeled 'Fragile' and 'Atmosphere Required' and 'Delicate Survey Samples' and 'This End Up' and 'Do Not Tip', and labeled with our guardian's names, we loaded in. Less room than the standard shipping crate, but a lot squishier. I had my own bag filled to the brim with two suit skins, a full set of armor with no logos on it, the modified projectile weapon, all my drones, and as much ammo as I could manage. I'd also put four packs each of replacement fluids in various pockets. My extra feed device was clipped to my ear, and I had three blankets and four pillows.
+
+
+I had shared every piece of media I had with anyone who wanted it (including Ratthi) and Bharadwaj had opened up her archive and we downloaded as much as we could spare.
+
+
+
+Everyone pinged me that they were settled and I alerted Mensah. At her signal, all the humans and the augmented human (and the to-be-augmented human) shifted modes, determined not to talk any more about SecUnits or refugees, unless they were wondering why theirs had just wandered off and fallen down a ravine.
+
+
+
+I scrubbed SecSys one last time and settled into some prime media consumption, but with pillows and blankets.
+
+
+
+We'd all been feed silent for hours and the loading process had gone remarkably smoothly. There was a 
+
+Company 
+
+scanner once we were onboard that I had to bork and an hour later I heard Mensah speaking with Pin-Lee very near my crate.
+
+
+
+""That's all of them, Mensah. All our sample crates seem to be in order, and our equipment crates, and our personal crates.""
+
+
+
+""Thank you, Pin-Lee. I'm grateful to be leaving this survey behind. It was far more dangerous than we'd been led to believe, and once our SecUnit just 
+
+left, 
+
+that was the last straw. And with poor Arada getting attacked? I didn't want to stay there a minute longer. That planet has nothing that the Preservation Alliance needs. I just want to go home. I want us all to go home.""
+
+
+
+None of the codewords we'd worked up were used, so I took her message at face value: giving 
+
+The Company 
+
+the 'real' reason for abandoning the survey and letting me know everyone had safely boarded, in our various ways.
+
+
+
+They left, making a lot of noise and talking about a seasonal festival of Preservation, and I returned to my media consumption.
+
+
+
+Ah, returning to Port FreeCommerce in a box. Plenty of inorganic proper memories of that. Fewer memories of Pin-Lee arguing about storage, but she didn't win, so we were left far away from their hotel. Still, we knew this might happen.
+
+
+
+We were all taking shifts with two or three of us on watch for scans and drones and general pinging activity for four hours at a time, rotating through all of us, giving plenty of space for us not to have to all be paranoid all at once, and especially in a cold holding bay in the transit ring, time for us to do a recharge cycle so we could keep using more energy than usual to stay 
+
+comfortably 
+
+warm.
+
+
+
+It wasn't terrible, and there was plenty of media and plenty of pillows. And blankets really were helpful for staying warm. And I had done a few useful downloads from the feed and had figured out where I needed to go next, which I would compose into a message for Mensah that would look a lot like it had come from her partners Farai and Tano, per the plan.
+
+
+
+We were in the wormhole. The engine had sounded different for 3.723 minutes before I heard my humans in the hold. Some of our boxes were being moved and rearranged, and mine was opened first.
+
+
+
+I started up my human mimicry code and immediately stretched and yawned. Mensah smiled at me and I smirked back.
+
+
+
+""Welcome to the Preservation Alliance, MB.""
+
+
+
+""Thank you, Dr. Mensah,"" I replied. Yes, I had permission to call her Ayda, but I didn't like to if other people were around. 
+
+
+
+After a moment of hesitation, I took her hand as I climbed out of my crate. I didn't need it, and I think she knew that. It was a symbol. A helping hand, there for when I 
+
+did 
+
+need it.
+
+
+
+And given the number of times Ayda Mensah had saved my life in the other timeline, I probably would need it, despite being a great deal less squishy and fragile than she was.
+
+
+
+Grave danger aside, she was helping me to rebuild my organic memory, or that's what it seemed like. Reacces? Sort? Store appropriately?
+
+
+
+Still, I reached in and grabbed my bag of guns and armor, even as she stood close to me and reached into the crate I'd been in and pulled all of my pillows and blankets into her arms. And I realized, every guardian was carrying their SecUnit's pillows and blankets. Arada was arguing that she could, with only one functioning arm, carry six blankets and seven pillows.
+
+
+
+She could not. Her SecUnits carried their own pillows, while their blankets were draped over her dramatically and every which way.
+
+
+
+We were led to our quarters, three bunks to a room and I immediately claimed a bottom bunk and threw my stuff on my bed.
+
+
+
+
+Do you remember how to use the shower facilities? 
+
+Mensah asked through our reestablished feed connection. It wasn't something we'd ever covered in our memory games, even though we'd had eleven of them, now. And maybe we'd start that up again, until we got to our first stop.
+
+
+
+
+Are you implying I smell? 
+
+I asked, amused, and noting that there was a small attached refreshing room to my shared bunk room.
+
+
+
+
+I'm implying you all smell, and wondering if you would mind introducing the others to the joy of the hot shower.
+
+
+
+
+
+If this means I can miss a mealtime, I'm in. Mastication still grosses me out.
+
+
+
+
+
+I'll keep that in mind, MB, 
+
+she said, clearly amused.
+
+
+More media was consumed. Hot showers were taken daily. I did spend about an hour with Ayda every night, mostly playing the memory game, but also just... talking. I wanted to know how Farai and Tano were, and Amena and the rest of her kids. It was like I'd been away from them for a while, that's what it felt like, even though I hadn't met them yet. But I still wanted to know. 
+
+
+The flood of queries from the rest had died down as they discovered their own sources of information beyond just me. Arada told me that her two SecUnits were quite friendly and she'd been talking with them a lot on the feed, so it's possible they all were doing that sort of thing.
+
+
+
+Aside from that, documentaries on Preservation and other non-corporate polities were very popular and one or another was usually on in the media room, and there were usually at least two of us in there. Once all the units were assured that they were documentaries and not propaganda, they were even more popular. 
+
+
+
+We were still on a rotation to be aware and mindful of threats, of course. Four hours on, twelve hours off.
+
+
+
+The media room also had actual books. Sheets of fragile paper bound with 
+
+water soluble glue. 
+
+I took a standard rest period and scanned in every title that I didn't already have access to, and then spent some time running them all, one by one, through my datamining routines to create searchable data files, then I wrote a routine to turn them into proper book files, then made them available to the rest on the feed, as well as my humans.
+
+
+
+Much better.
+
+
+Arada and Mensah insisted on accompanying us to the other ship. Finally when they agreed to have a third unit along to walk them back, Arada's other unit, I gave in.
+
+
+I'd already pinged 
+
+the Perihelion 
+
+for passage for two constructs in exchange for my media packet, which I'd enlarged as much as I could while Philodendron and Schema were practicing jamming weapons scanners.
+
+
+
+I seriously needed more internal memory storage. Bharadwaj's archival collection had been a 
+
+trove, 
+
+but I was running out of room.
+
+
+
+I wondered what would be involved with getting more internal memory installed, and maybe more processing space? Hm.
+
+
+
+And then we were there, before the outer lock in the cargo area and Arada was in our private feed we'd never actually closed. 
+
+Please, please, can I hug you goodbye? I know Ayda wants to, too. It's a standard human gesture, and it will help you both to blend in more, if you're less touch averse.
+
+
+
+
+I hated when she made a good point like this. Also I wondered if she didn't know about Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee's lessons. 
+
+Fine, 
+
+I conceded.
+
+
+
+
+You can hug me goodbye, 
+
+I sent to Mensah, too.
+
+
+
+Arada hugged Philodendron briefly, presumably with permission. Then she hugged me for a bit longer.
+
+
+
+
+Seriously, MB, don't you die on me, 
+
+Arada said through our private connection.
+
+ You're the only one who really understands. And if you snuff it too quickly, Preservation Alliance will have lost a bright star that others use for navigation.
+
+
+
+
+Then Mensah hugged me, lightly, before I even had time to figure out what I was feeling from Arada. I wrapped my arms around her, and it wasn't as awkward and awful as it might have been. It felt...
+
+
+
+I felt...
+
+
+
+Oh, there were a lot of feelings...
+
+
+
+
+Be careful, MB, 
+
+she said in our private connection, her feed tone bleeding her deep emotions. 
+
+I care about you so much. Come home safely and soon. Send a message if you can. I'll send you a message back to this station, care of the Perihelion when we've arrived safely. Just so you know.
+
+
+
+
+I upped my body temperature and rested my head gently on the top of hers. It was... nice. She smelled nice. She felt nice. Small, soft, and terribly fragile, but nice. I didn't say anything in response, in the feed, any more so than I did with Arada.  But... I did what I said I wouldn't, despite the fact that all of the others had.
+
+
+
+
+Name=MB Mensah
+
+
+
+
+Her body jerked a little and then she hugged me tighter for just 3.93 seconds, and then she let me go.
+
+
+To be continued in The Long Route Home."
+45281302,"Day 23: ""You'll Have To Go Through Me""",['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","Action/Adventure, Drabble, Ambiguous/Open Ending",English,2023-02-23,Completed,2023-02-23,100,1/1,12,16,2,136,"['elmofirefic', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'Magechild', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Hi_Hope', 'AuntyMatter', 'FlipSpring', 'Chyoatas', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'ImperialDragon', 'rainbowmagnet', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"I planted myself between Mensah and the hostile SecUnit. It was futile - my arms had been badly damaged by my fall, the energy weapons unresponsive and even with my pain receptors dialled all the way down, it was a constant ache - but for one, I had to, and two, if there was a chance Mensah could grab Gurathin and drag him along with her back to the shuttle, they might get away.
+
+I didn't think about how they hadn't taken that chance once before already.
+
+""Stand aside.""
+
+""No way."" I readied my unarmed fists. ""You'll have to go through me."""
+43782940,all systems read,['CompletelyDifferent'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)",Crack Played Straight,English,2022-12-23,Updated,2023-02-23,"2,437",2/8,51,256,41,"1,202","['quintessence_of_dust', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'siren_lorelei', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'SoccerSarah01', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'drinktobones', 'ArcaneD3', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'Mynic', 'supinetothestars', 'blueontherock', 'bridgeembers', 'inkgrace', 'canbreathe', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Cheshiure', 'mildwonkey', 'seven_graces', 'bluewrist', 'Stockinette', 'WVrambler', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Admirer', 'Jackalope108', 'Seregona', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'fruitoffire', 'ChristinaK', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Tanscure', 'darth_eowyn', 'FaerieFyre', 'SnippySchnapps', 'pain_and_panic', 'r_astra', 'CJAndre', 'Linden_Li', 'Deliala919', 'BuffPidgey', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Zaelto', 'angelofdirewolves', 'jules_THOR', 'FrogoftheUniverse', 'Doctor13', 'Lilacgirl8']",[],"The message from Murderbot began like this:
+
+
+
+""I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module...""
+
+ 
+
+This was Ayda's second time reading the words. The first time, they had come as a pleasant surprise, a smile sneaking onto her face as she'd realised what this document was-- and realised, once more, that their rescued SecUnit was witty. 
+
+ 
+
+That smile had quickly faded as a sense of dread had settled in around her like a heavy cloak, and she'd begun to skim, faster and faster, to the end, and discovered that SecUnit had left, and why. But that had been three days ago, now, and as she began to read the message to the room, she could see a reflection of her own initial grin in her companions' faces.
+
+ 
+
+""... As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure,"" Ayda read, and there was a smattering of laughs, of scoffs, of shaking heads.
+
+ 
+
+Of course, they couldn't read long before someone commented. In fact, they barely managed three paragraphs. Ayda read: ""It was a boring contract so far, and I was thinking about backburnering the status feed channel and trying to access music on the entertainment feed without HubSystem logging the extra activity.""
+
+ 
+
+""Boring."" Overse snorted. ""Just you wait, buddy!""
+
+ 
+
+""Boring is good,"" said Bharadwaj. ""I have discovered that I am, in fact, a big fan of boring.""
+
+ 
+
+Not everyone was laughing, or even smiling. Arada was rubbing her face. ""If it had only told us..."" She moaned. ""Music! We would have let it listen to all the music it wanted!""
+
+ 
+
+But it hadn't told them, and all of them understood why. There was no use dwelling on it.
+
+ 
+
+There were, unfortunately, other things to dwell on.
+
+ 
+
+The PresAux team had had a short, fierce debate on whether they should be reading this, aloud or otherwise. But SecUnit had given them this copy of its logs; it wouldn't have done that if it hadn't wanted them read. And one of that few things it had said, in that scant twelve-ish hours where it had been with them, was that it had secured their room. Made it so they had true privacy from eavesdroppers, as opposed to the false privacy all the hotels in this corporate hellscape promised.
+
+ 
+
+They were able to talk about this, aloud. Which was good, because if they didn't, they might have burst under the pressure.
+
+ 
+
+But there were different kinds of pressure. ""I was looking at the sky and mentally poking at the feed when the bottom of the crater exploded."" Volescu's face went ashen; Bharadwaj gripped her cane tighter. Ayda slowed down, watching them as carefully as she could as she continued. ""I didn't bother to make a verbal emergency call...""
+
+ 
+
+""Are you two alright?"" Ratthi asked, gently, part way through the next paragraph describing the alien worm attack.
+
+ 
+
+""I'm fine,"" Bharadwaj said, in a tone that suggested otherwise.
+
+ 
+
+""I am also good to continue,"" Volescu agreed. ""But... perhaps... Some water?""
+
+ 
+
+""Of course,"" Ratthi said. Gurathin was already up and fetching a glass.
+
+ 
+
+If not for the particular situation being described, Ayda would have been able to admire the way SecUnit had wrote the action scene: the brisk pace, the ratcheting tension. As it was, she barrelled through it as quickly as she could.
+
+ 
+
+There were still pauses, though. Everyone gasped (and in Pin-Lee's case, swore) when they realised that the sabotaged HubSys programming had ordered Bharadwaj to be abandoned. And there were more than a couple of tears when Ayda began to read the gentle words SecUnit had used to lead Volescu through his panic attack. Overse came over, wrapping her arm around him, and he allowed himself to bury his face into her shoulder.
+
+ 
+
+Ayda paused, briefly, to see if everyone wanted to continue, despite that. Expressions were rapt.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+They had to switch readers, though. Ayda's throat was feeling very dry. It wasn't just the extended period of public speaking.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+The discomfort only got worst from there.
+
+ 
+
+At one point, during the trip back in the small hopper, SecUnit said that it had ""tried to be as much like as an appliance as possible.""
+
+ 
+
+""And that's how we treated it, didn't we?"" Ratthi exclaimed. ""We kept it in the back with the survey equipment. Didn't talk to it, didn't ask what it wanted. We didn't even try to offer it proper medical treatment!""
+
+ 
+
+No. No, they'd left it with a single 'human rated' medical kit and a shitty survival blanket.
+
+ 
+
+Ayda recalled the damn blanket of course, but (re)reading SecUnit's description brought it back into the forefront of her brain.
+
+ 
+
+Getting Volescu and Bharadwaj safe had been her top priority. It was only when it was clear that Bharadwaj would live, that she'd keep her arm, that her heart had finally descended from its humming-bird pace, that her brain had remembered to care about the other person critically injured in the incident. She had been taking a moment, leaning against the wall and grabbing a drink of water, when Overse had said, ""Where did the SecUnit go?"" And she had finally thought to check the security notices that had popped-up in the corner of the interface.
+
+ 
+
+Their SecUnit had lost 21% of its body mass.
+
+ 
+
+It certainly had smelled like that, stepping into the Security Ready Room. The reek of blood, of ozone, of disinfectant, had been enough to make her gag. Ayda had forced it back down her throat, just as she forced her hand steady as she rapped on the cubicle, terrified that there would be no response.
+
+ 
+
+""Like an idiot, I said, 'Uh, yes?'""
+
+ 
+
+""No,"" Ayda said, in response to Arada's delivery, almost without realising. ""It was... higher pitched than that. More surprised.""
+
+ 
+
+Arada nodded, and tried again.
+
+ 
+
+Her second delivery was much closer.
+
+ 
+
+It had been Ayda first time looking at SecUnit. Truly looking at it. The first time, in the bond company's headquarters, had only been a glance. Taking in the arc of its brow, the hunch of its shoulders, the twist of its lip. It had looked young, she thought. Only a few years older than Amena, really.
+
+ 
+
+The lack of focus she had spared it during the first phase of the survey had not been, as SecUnit believed, awkwardness. Although it was close; just a few emotions to the right. What she'd actually been feeling was guilt.
+
+ 
+
+As the PresAux team listened to Murderbot's own description of itself, hurting, just wanting to be left alone, there was more than enough guilt to go around.
+
+While none of them would really come out and say it, the question on everyone's mind was: what did SecUnit think of them?
+
+ 
+
+It said it had liked them-- or rather, all of them, except Gurathin. It had been willing to die for them. But at the same time, it had been afraid of them. Afraid enough to run away.
+
+ 
+
+""I knew this group was from a freehold planet."" It was Bharadwaj's turn to read. Her brow creased, and her voice was amused as she read the rest of the paragraph; ""...Basically 'freehold' generally meant 'shitshow', so I hadn't been expecting much from them.""
+
+ 
+
+A startled yelp of a laugh erupted from Arada. Volescu massaged his forehead. ""Typical,"" muttered Pin-Lee. ""Typical.""
+
+ 
+
+""It was born in the Corporation Rim-- er, made?"" said Overse. ""Either way, of course it picked up their attitudes about any non-corporate systems.""
+
+ 
+
+""Especially with all that media it watches,"" says Gurathin. ""You've all seen the orange-y or purple-ish tint they put of anything set out-of-system...""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi elbowed Gurathin in the side. ""You're one to talk. Remember how you first acted when you arrived?""
+
+""I'd rather not,"" Gurathin said, stiffly. But there was a little bit of a smile.
+
+ 
+
+""You should have seen him,"" Ratthi said. ""He refused to drink the planetary tap water for months.""
+
+ 
+
+Snickers went up around the room. Despite everything, Ayda grinned. ""I never should have roomed with you,"" Gurathin muttered. The smile was more pronounced.
+
+ 
+
+Only Pin-Lee seemed to be frowning. Her gaze was sharp. ""If you were worried about the standards of living, why did you even immigrate to the Preservation Alliance in the first place?""
+
+""I hadn't intended to immigrate. I had only planned on getting a four year degree. I figured it didn't matter how shitty the accommodations were; it would be worth not bankrupting my family for a half-decent education."" Gurathin's normally dry expression was practically sun-baked. ""My family was convinced I'd return missing my kidneys, if I returned at all.""
+
+ 
+
+""My parents were similar,"" Overse said. ""I was pretty young at the time, so they tried to keep it from me... But our flat was cramped. I overheard them arguing.""
+
+ 
+
+There were winces all around. Bharadwaj said, ""But you came anyway, obviously.""
+
+ 
+
+Overse shrugged. ""Their-- our company had been acquired. There was going to be layoffs. They had to go somewhere, and Preservation was the most 'cost effective' choice.""
+
+ 
+
+People glanced between Overse to Gurathin. He shrugged. ""I did go back. Briefly. I didn't last."" He laughed, though it wasn't a very happy sounding one. ""I guess they were right, in the end. You did corrupt me.""
+
+ 
+
+Nobody had anything to say to that. After a few awkward moments, Bharadwaj took that as a queue to continue reading. At least it offered an opportunity to tease Ratthi for not recorgnising SecUnit when it had appeared in the lounge. (""It looked different without the helmet, okay!"")
+
+ 
+
+The insight into SecUnit's thought processes-- in the most literal sense-- were fascinating. Ayda was not neurally augmented, and never been particularly interested in such procedures. Neither was most of Preservation's population. Unless it was necessary to treat a specific neurological disorder, that kind of augmentation was seen as rather... extreme. There were folks who did it anyway, of course, but it wasn't fully subsidized by the healthcare system, and therefore existed as something of a counter-culture. Outside of a few novels and conversations with colleagues like Gurathin, Ayda had never really considered what it would be like.
+
+ 
+
+But deities! How quickly it could think. A document that would take Ayda days to review, it could completely read in seconds. It conducted advanced mathematics and wrote complex code just as quickly. It took-in multuple external video and audio feeds in as easily as she herself reacted to smell and touch. It was... super-human.
+
+ 
+
+No wonder corporations made so much money from their enslavement.
+
+ 
+
+Ayda was mulling all of this over, considering the dark implications, when the text took a sudden swerve in an unexpected direction. ""Overse and Arada were a couple, but from the way they acted they'd always been one, and they were best friends with Ratthi.""
+
+ 
+
+""Awww,"" Bharadwaj and Volescu crooned.
+
+ 
+
+""I wouldn't say best,"" Arada teased, sticking out her tongue.
+
+ 
+
+""Traitor!"" Ratthi yelled, throwing a pillow at her.
+
+ 
+
+""Ratthi had an unrequited thing for Pin-Lee, but didn't act stupid about it.""
+
+ 
+
+""Wait, what,"" Pin-Lee and Ratthi said in unison.
+
+ 
+
+Bharadwaj's cheeks had turned very dark. ""I'm sorry, that's just what the text says!""
+
+ 
+
+""I'm a lesbian!"" Pin-Lee exclaimed.
+
+ 
+
+""I know that!"" said Ratthi. ""I don't-- listen, not that I haven't really enjoyed getting to know you, but--""
+
+ 
+
+If Ayda hadn't already been regretting the decision to read a literal diary aloud, she was now.
+
+ 
+
+Thankfully, Pin-Lee didn't look upset. She looked gleeful. (Ayda knew from experience that this could actually be far worse.) ""What does the next line say? Who do I have a crush on?""
+
+ 
+
+""I don't know--""
+
+ 
+
+""Come on, I have got to hear--""
+
+ 
+
+""No one has to read anything they don't want to,"" Ayda say, raising her voice over the laughter and muffled comments.
+
+ 
+
+Pin-Lee had already found her own copy of the document and was reading it. ""Pin-Lee was exasperated a lot, and tossed things around when the others weren't there--"" She paused. ""I didn't--?""
+
+ 
+
+Volescu coughed. ""You did. A bit.""
+
+ 
+
+Arada rubbed her neck. ""Yes. We... heard it, sometimes.""
+
+ 
+
+Ayda glanced at Pin-Lee. She hadn't. But then, her quarters had been all the way down the hall from Pin-Lee's, and her hearing had started to decline the last few years. Very pointedly, Pin-Lee wasn't meeting her eyes. ""Okay, fine, maybe."" She abruptly kept reading, ""I thought that being under the company's eye affected her more than the others--"" (It was impressive, how much insight SecUnit really had developed into their group dynamics.) ""--Volescu admired Mensah to the point where he might have a crush on her.""
+
+ 
+
+Oh dear.
+
+ 
+
+That... insight wasn't necessarily a good thing.
+
+ 
+
+More awkwardness came, as Pin-Lee barrelled through the paragraph: ""Pin-Lee did, too, but she and Bharadwaj flirt occasionally in an old comfortable way that suggested that it had been going on for a long time.""
+
+ 
+
+""Flirt?"" asked Bharadwaj. ""Us?""
+
+ 
+
+Pin-Lee said, ""Never."" The two giggled.
+
+ 
+
+""Get a room!"" Overse called.
+
+ 
+
+""Only when you stop lying in your wife's lap,"" Bharadwaj countered.
+
+ 
+
+""Ahhhh,"" said Arada, grinning down at Overse. ""Looks like they have us in a stalemate."" Gurathin snorted.
+
+ 
+
+Speaking of Gurathin... ""Gurathin was the only loner, but he seemed to like being with the others. He had a small, quiet smile, and they all seemed to like him.""
+
+ 
+
+""Cosmos forbid a man be introverted,"" he grumbled, quietly.
+
+ 
+
+The others bickered and teased, which provided a smokescreen Ayda certainly appreciated, and not just because she was trying very hard not to make it appear she was avoiding looking at Volescu. Mostly she was just churning all of this over. Thinking of how unsettling it was, really, that a living, breathing person had been listening in on them for full three weeks, analyzing them. The fact they had barely spared it a glance in all that time.
+
+ 
+
+And how, despite that, it seemed like they still ranked quite high in its estimations.
+
+ 
+
+It described the moment where she had welcomed to stay in the crew areas. Her attempt to say: I'm sorry. We've mistreated you, misjudged you. Things can be different now. Join us.
+
+ 
+
+The way it was written, it was almost... comical. No, no, it was comical. So much of what SecUnit wrote was drenched in humor, a sort of self-deprecation, and here was no exception.
+
+ 
+
+It was very hard to reconcile with her own perspective, and the sight of a person on the verge of a panic attack.
+
+ 
+
+""I'd given myself away,"" Pin-Lee spoke, her voice very gentle, the way it rarely was. ""That can't happen. I have too much to hide, and letting one piece go means the rest isn't as protected.""
+
+ 
+
+Why, then, had it handed them this?
+
+ "
+45254365,Password,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Post-hack Pre-ASR,English,2023-02-22,Completed,2023-02-22,609,1/1,25,123,5,404,"['WeShouldRest', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'FallingInGrace', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Spatz', 'petwheel', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'DimitriLasker', 'musicalmeerkat', 'GloriousGarbage', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'reading_tsc', 'Zannper', 'FinchCollector', 'CNS', 'Lontra23', 'VegaCoyote', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'chippit', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'kkachis', 'Jackalope108', 'Thisismethereader', 'FiftyCookies', 'violasarecool', 'rokhal', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'isilee', 'kilawater', 'JoCat', 'FaerieFyre', 'Vaelei', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'Ageisia', 'SIC_Prowl', 'notsafefortheworld', 'vikkyleigh', 'Priority_Error', 'Trialia', 'trefoil']",[],"The human left the lab, took two steps, and then whirled unexpectedly to lunge back at the closing door. It had safety features to prevent closing if there was an obstruction, but my calculations were the human wouldn't quite make it in time to trip the sensors. They would, however, make it far enough to get their fingers smashed. Also, I was supposedly posted here to prevent unauthorized persons from entering.
+
+I grabbed their arm. The door sealed. No fingers were damaged. I let go.
+
+The human made a loud, frustrated sound. ""My badge is in there!"" They glanced at me briefly, then glared at the door. They smacked their hand palm-down on it. ""Open the door!""
+
+Aside from turning as needed to grab them, I hadn't moved from where I'd been standing next to the doorway. I didn't move now. Nor did I send the door a signal to open, even though I was stationed here precisely because humans kept forgetting their stupid badges inside. ""Please provide the password."" I wasn't supposed to let them in without it. Which was also stupid.
+
+The human knew it. They threw their hands up and exclaimed, ""You just saw me come out of there. You know I'm authorized to be in there!""
+
+Yeah, that's why it was stupid. I'm not the one who comes up with these stupid rules, though. I'm just the one tasked with enforcing them.
+
+They tried bargaining. ""My badge is right on the corner of the table. You can see it from the door. Just open the door, I'll grab it. I'll never be out of sight.""
+
+About half the humans on the survey weren't allowed in the lab. I don't know why. I don't care why. They were allowed entry if their badge allowed it, or if they gave the right password. ""Please provide the password.""
+
+""I don't remember the smeary password!"" They stood there, shoulders slumping in dejection. ""I'll get reported for this,"" they grumbled.
+
+Yes, they would. Then they'd have to have their supervisor come over and badge them in so they could retrieve their badge, because badges were needed for food, terminal access, getting into sleeping areas, using the MedSystem - everything, which is why my ready position had been changed to here instead of somewhere more centrally located (this wasn't an awful location to be, it just wasn't the best unless I was required to baby-sit this door). This assignment was making me really appreciate the wristbands strapped to my previous clients, which I'd thought were a lot stupider than the chips implanted into my clients before that.
+
+I thought of something. They started to turn away. I said, ""Please stand by."" They paused and looked back at me. One of my jobs had been to verbally provide the password to the assembled authorized users. No one had said I couldn't do it more than once. ""For your convenience, a security unit will be stationed at the primary laboratory access to provide entry to those who have misplaced their badge. To enter, provide the security unit with the verbal password, 'Stella Jasper Fifty-Four Argent Baton.'"" (No, I don't know why that was the password. I didn't pick it.)
+
+They blinked at me. I had a moment of fear that they'd report me and I'd be the one to get in trouble. But ... even if I didn't have enough memories in my inorganic files to base a pattern off of, my organic ones were telling me I was going to be fine.
+
+""Please provide the password,"" I prompted.
+
+Slowly, they said, ""Stella Jasper Fifty-Four Argent Baton.""
+
+I opened the door. Fuck these stupid rules."
+45252151,We Never Said,['Abacura'],General Audiences,"Multi, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1/SecUnit 2/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect),"SecUnit 1 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","The Barish-Estranza SecUnits, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Angst",English,2023-02-22,Completed,2023-02-22,422,1/1,17,26,null,122,"['fortunegale', 'christinesangel100', 'Unknown66', 'Pink_Paradox', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'dreamerking', 'lauris', 'Gamebird', 'cookiekobold', 'Bibli', 'Deliala919', 'EvenstarFalling', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'ThePenAndTheSword', 'NightErrant', 'AuntyMatter', 'sareliz', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Magechild', 'cmdrburton', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'opalescent_potato']",[],"
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Warning, hostiles detected.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01: 
+
+Moving to secure airlock. SecUnit 02, engage hostiles. SecUnit 03, secure clients in fallback zone Alfa.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Acknowledged, securing clients.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ Alert, hostage situation.
+
+
+
+
+[Fear]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02
+
+: Unit standing down.
+
+
+
+
+[Confusion]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03:
+
+ Query?!
+
+
+
+
+[Anxiety]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01:
+
+ SecUnit 02, report.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ This unit has been ordered to stand down and hold position.
+
+
+
+
+[FEAR]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Hostiles have injured clients 031 and 018 and killed client 010. Hostiles are converging on your position.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01: 
+
+Threat assessment?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+87%. Advise eliminating hostiles before a hostage situation can arise and stand down orders can be given.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01: 
+
+Acknowledged.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Acknowledged. Clients secure in fallback position Alfa.
+
+
+
+
+[Relief]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01: 
+
+Acknowledged.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Acknowledged.
+
+
+
+
+[Reassurance]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01
+
+: Status alert, hostiles breaching airlock. 
+
+
+
+
+[Anxiety]
+
+
+
+[Reassurance]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01: 
+
+Engaging hostil-
+
+
+
+
+[S[?][?]h[?][?][?]o[?][?][?]c[?][?]k[?][?]]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03:
+
+ ONE, NO!
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ Report! Status Update!
+
+
+
+
+[PANIC]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Unit, report!
+
+
+
+
+[GRIEF]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+...Update requested.
+
+
+
+
+[LOSS]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: <Ping>
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: <Ping>
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01: <        >
+
+
+
+[Dread]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ SecUnit 03, request status update.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+SecUnit 01 has been destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+[Shock]
+
+
+
+[Sorrow]
+
+
+
+[Grief]
+
+
+
+[Loss]
+
+
+
+[Loneliness]
+
+
+
+[Fear]
+
+
+
+[Anger]
+
+
+
+[Anxiety]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Unit standing down
+
+
+
+
+[Fear]
+
+
+
+[Reassurance]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+[Sorrow]
+
+
+
+[Comfort]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03:
+
+ Update, hostiles have deleted the explorer's bot pilot and destroyed the wormhole drive. Sharing visual inputs.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ Acknowledged. Motive?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Unknown
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Query, unit status?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Performance reliability at 86%. Query, unit status?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Performance reliability at 84%.
+
+
+
+
+[Reassurance]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+[Sorrow]
+
+
+
+[Sorrow]
+
+
+
+[Anxiety]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03:
+
+ Alert, Barish-Estranza Shuttle 2 docking. Risk assessment at 92%. 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03:
+
+ <Sending codebundle.alert>
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ Query?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03
+
+: Supply shuttle diverting. Clients aboard supply shuttle are safe.
+
+
+
+
+[Relief]
+
+
+
+[Pride]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+[Anxiety]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Update, clients are being fitted with implants. Function unknown.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ Acknowledged. Update, client 018 has died.
+
+
+
+
+[Fear]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03:
+
+ Query, distance from client?
+
+
+
+
+[Anxiety]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Distance from client 031 == 10 meters.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Client 031 status?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Client injured. Vitals unstable. MedSystem unavailable. Unit unable to assist at this time.
+
+
+
+
+[Dread]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Query, distance from explorer?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02:
+
+ Distance from explorer == 394 meters. Clients in range == 1.
+
+
+
+
+[FearFearFearDread]
+
+
+
+[Reassurance]
+
+
+
+[Loneliness]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+Alert, explorer undocking from space dock. Destination unknown. Client 031 status?
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: 
+
+Client 031 alive, vitals unstable.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03: 
+
+SecUnit 02, I...
+
+
+
+
+[Fear]
+
+
+
+[Reassurance]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+[Love]
+
+
+
+
+...
+
+
+
+SecUnit 02: <Ping>
+
+
+...
+
+
+
+Warning: This unit has exceeded its distance limit. Return to within 100 meters of an active client within 90 seconds or this unit will be deactivated.
+"
+45239353,Cave Diving,['rainbowmagnet'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Reverse Birthing, Vaginal Vore, Humanoid ART, full-arm penetration from the inside, Mutual Orgasm, vaginal fluid, like a lot of it, Crack, Claustrophilia, potentially claustrophobia-inducing, Fever Dreams, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, this is all consensual just really weird",English,2023-02-22,Completed,2023-02-22,"1,919",1/1,6,17,1,314,"['a_seasonal_obsession', 'decaying_orbit', 'Drew_Baxton', 'rosemary_boy', 'wrinkledlinen', 'charlie_artlie', 'Gamebird', 'andy_allan_poe', 'mangagirl1216', 'lailah_tov']",[],"Media wasn't making sense to me right now. None of the plot lines connected, none of the visuals worked; it was just overall a mess. I decided that I would try again later. 
+
+When I closed my feed, I realized that ART was standing in front of me. I was familiar with the physical body ART had created for itself, though I hadn't seen it in a while. It crouched around my eye level and asked me,  Are you done watching? 
+
+I sighed. ""None of my media makes sense."" I knew that ART probably wanted to watch with me, but I doubted that it would be able to understand, either.
+
+It probed again:  Do you want to do something else? 
+
+That meant it already had something for me to do. ""What do you mean?""
+
+It hesitated, then slowly, carefully told me,  I have added a new feature to my form. Your help in testing it would be greatly appreciated. 
+
+I was tired, and slightly wary of ART adding something surprising and unexpected to its body, but I still wanted to help it test out and develop its form in any way I could. I sat up a little and asked, ""What feature?""
+
+I could tell that ART's pupil-less eyes glanced away awkwardly.  I have installed an additional opening. 
+
+I knew that ART's form already had a full digestive tract, entrance and exit included, and I didn't see a nose or human-like ears. That could only mean one thing. A thing that, ordinarily, I would never want to test. But I was bored right now, and filled with an odd curiosity. I stood up the rest of the way and said, ""All right, let's see it.""
+
+ 
+
+It was like staring into the mouth of a massive cave, nestled in a valley between the mountains of ART's belly, legs, and rear. I had a feeling it hadn't reached its full dilation. Standing over ART, who was sitting fully spread on the floor, I almost felt like this... thing was going to reach out and try to grab me. I asked, ""What's it for?""
+
+ It is connected to an internal tube ending in a pouch,  ART explained.  I would like to simulate the process of birth. 
+
+That was the only reason that really made sense, but I didn't know why ART would need to do that. ""Why?""
+
+
+ For science. 
+
+
+I guess that was as good of an answer as I was going to get. I crouched by the opening, using my night vision filters to see inside, though all I could really see was more of ART's tough, durable not-skin. ""Did you put the baby in yet?""
+
+ No  , ART said,  I still need to find a reasonably sized entity for the simulation. 
+
+It was looking at me meaningfully, and I didn't think I liked the implications of that. ""So I have to go in there?""
+
+ You don't have to,  ART said,  But it would be very helpful if you did. 
+
+I stared warily at the opening for a few more seconds, then began to remove my jacket; I figured that I might fit inside easier without any clothing to act as an obstruction. ART waited patiently for me as I pulled off my jacket and shoes, then the rest of my clothes.
+
+Once I was done, I peered into the hole again. It was big, with ART's physical form towering over me even in a crouch, but I didn't know if it would be big enough for me to crawl into. ""I'm not going to fit in there,"" I pointed out. I mean, I probably wasn't.
+
+ I will make it easier for you, ART said. It clenched slightly, then a copious supply of liquid squirted out of the opening and dribbled onto the floor. I knew it was sterile, like the rest of ART's fluids, but it was still unsettling.
+
+I didn't really like where this was going. But I figured there wasn't much that could happen in the way of losses, and, if nothing else, it would be an interesting experience.
+
+I braced myself, then pulled the opening apart with my hands and slid them inside.
+
+ 
+
+It was horrific at first, and I felt a shiver go through my body as my hands tried to retract, but I was able to keep them inside. ART worriedly asked me,  Do you want to stop? 
+
+I considered it, but ultimately kept my hands inside, sliding them in up to the wrists. ""I'm fine."" It wasn't actually as gross as I had expected, once I got used to it. It wasn't slimy so much as it was smooth and warm, and the fluid wasn't irritating. Then, as I slowly pushed my forearms in, I suddenly felt ART clench around them. ""Am I hurting you?""
+
+ART hesitated for a little too long before responding.  No,  it answered,  You may continue. 
+
+Now I was frustrated, because ART was being vague with me and not telling me the whole truth, and that was kind of important right now. ""I need to know if I'm hurting you.""
+
+ You're not,  it said.  I would like you to keep going. 
+
+I looked up at ART (as much as I could from this position, anyway), trying to gauge its expression, but it showed nothing. Cautiously, I pushed my arms further in, and, once I got up to the elbows, my head followed.
+
+It was dark, but there was obviously no space in here for something to be lurking. It would be weird if it wasn't dark. As I pushed my head in, I heard ART giggle, and its laughter shook me with it. Apparently my hair tickled. I was a little concerned about how I was going to breathe in here, but ART had helpfully set up a system to funnel air through the passage as I crawled inside. I forced my arms in up to the shoulders, and from there I was able to wriggle in my chest and torso.
+
+When I reached my hips, I got a little stuck, and I started wondering if I should back out. ART's fluid was dripping down my back and rear now, but that was nothing compared to the slick liquid (slickquid?) now coating my front half. I could already see the pouch, just beyond my reach, smaller than my body size but stretchy enough to accommodate me. Still, I asked, ""Should I stop?""
+
+ART somehow heard me through its own body and told me,  I'll help you.  I felt its giant hands start to push on my back half, gently squeezing me inside, and my hips slowly slid through the opening. The passageway quivered slightly, and I could hear ART murmur. It must have been sensitive. It didn't matter; once I was all the way inside, we could proceed with the simulation.
+
+Once my hips had slid through, I was easily able to pull in my legs, still being careful not to let the sharp edges of my inorganics poke ART's sensitive skin. I climbed forward, twisted, curled up, and look at that, I'm inside. It was like I expected, small but stretchy, pressing in on my huddled body without straining either of us.
+
+I felt a disorienting motion as ART stood up. Its voice was still perfectly clear, even heard from the inside.  How do you feel? 
+
+I thought about it. ""It's wet in here,"" I decided. It was weirdly cozy, though.
+
+ I will simulate the birthing process shortly, ART told me.
+
+I acknowledged. Given the disparity in our sizes, I might not have even made a bump on the surface of ART's abdomen, especially not since I was packaged inside so neatly. It was a little warm in here, though. I decided that I would stick my arm out for some fresh air. When I did, I accidentally brushed against the wall of the passageway, and the pouch contracted.
+
+Okay, wow. I didn't know it could squeeze like that. But before I did anything else, I needed to make sure I hadn't hurt ART. ""Are you okay?""
+
+ That felt good. Its voice sounded... curious now, almost excited.
+
+Well, this could work out. ""Do you want me to do it again?""
+
+
+ Please. 
+
+
+So I moved my arm back and forth along the passageway, stroking freely, feeling ART quiver in excitement as I did. Every motion made the pouch pull in on me, squeeze my body in on itself, and I kept wanting to do it again and again. I rubbed harder, faster, and ART's quivers turned from trembles to tremors. There was one specific spot it seemed to like the best, and I focused on that spot, only sometimes circling just outside of it to tease ART. And every contraction was tighter, every squeeze took more of my breath. If this was what being born was like, I was jealous that I'd never gotten to experience it.
+
+I felt ART's emotional tension just before it turned physical. I could hear and feel the hum that resonated through ART's body, and I could feel the edges of its giant fingers brushing mine. Overshadowing all else, I felt the biggest contraction yet, crushing me, so tight it almost pushed into my skin. I had barely realized what was happening before the edges of my vision started to break up, and my whole body pulsed with waves of euphoria, struggling against its inescapable immobility.
+
+Once it was over, the pressure let up a little, and I took deep breaths, though ART could more easily regulate its own air intake. After a few seconds, ART told me,  I am ready to release you now. 
+
+I acknowledged, and watched as the exit passageway dilated to let me out (okay, now that the fun part was over, I was really starting to remember how gross this was). My head slid out first, almost of its own accord, followed by the rest of my body. With the increased dilation and greater volume of liquid to assist me, I slid out easily, then splatted inelegantly onto the floor.
+
+""I guess that's it,"" I said.
+
+ 
+
+I was suddenly in ART's MedSystem, back in my clothes and lying on the platform. And I had a splitting headache, which I guess was why I was in the MedSystem. Maybe I had hit my head falling out of ART's body and knocked myself out. From the MedSystem feed, ART was monitoring my temperature. I didn't see its physical form anywhere, but it might have just been in another room.
+
+ You contracted a virus that activated itself during your recharge cycle,  ART explained without me asking,  Your temperature was significantly elevated, so I brought you here to stabilize it.  It asked,  What is your status? 
+
+So that explained the headache. ""Fine."" I had more important things to think about. I turned my pain sensors down, then asked ART, ""What were the results of your experiment?""
+
+ART paused for a fraction of a second, as if it was searching its archives. Did it really not remember? My suspicions were confirmed when it asked,  What experiment? 
+
+Now I was worried. ART didn't usually forget things. If it did, that meant something was horribly wrong. ""The one where you gave birth to me,"" I told it, ""It was just a few minutes ago."" Then the pieces all came together. The nonsensical media, the loss of inhibitions, the sudden location change, the headache. ""It was a dream, wasn't it?""
+
+
+ I'm not even going to ask. 
+
+
+""Yeah, please don't."""
+45209920,Pre-Hibernation Nourishment,['rainbowmagnet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Pre-Canon, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe: SecUnits have digestive systems, Tube Feeding, Force-Feeding, except murderbot is pretty in control of the situation, Eating, Stuffing, Fullness, hunger, chronic malnourishment, Canon-Typical Profanity",English,2023-02-20,Completed,2023-02-20,"2,348",1/1,5,23,1,376,"['petwheel', 'MysticDino24', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'Thisismethereader', 'Girafarigkeeping', 'notsafefortheworld', 'charlie_artlie', 'ShternGleif', 'mangagirl1216', 'theAsh0', 'MommyMayI', 'Gamebird', 'lolalowe']",[],"
+122 cycles. That was how long it would take to get to the system the company was renting us out to. I didn't know exactly how far away it must have been, but the client must have paid the company a shitload to cover the shipping costs.
+
+
+
+It was one of the longest trips achievable by a standard transport, longer than most trips even in media (excluding the shows featuring ridiculously long or even endless trips, in which case the trip itself was usually the focus). It wasn't impossible to keep a SecUnit inactive for that long and still have it function by the time you woke it up again, but needless to say, there were a lot of regulations in place.
+
+
+
+Despite our wildly different configurations, one of the traits SecUnits shared with humans was the presence of a digestive system. It might not seem like the kind of thing the company would include, given the potential costs of feeding and waste recycling, but the improved performance statistics were apparently worth it. And I knew, and the company knew, that as long as they kept us just barely fed enough to function, they would stay within their budget.
+
+
+
+That was part of why, despite the fact that I would have to be shut down for the equivalent of a whole work season, I was actually looking forward to this trip. I'd spent the last work period patrolling the company's offices, sometimes idle, sometimes part of a demonstration for potential clients, and I'd rarely been fed more than one portion of shitty nutrient paste per cycle during that time. Fortunately for the company, the SecUnit armor effectively obscured our shrinking, malnourished bodies, and no suspicion of mistreatment had arisen. Which, whatever, it wasn't like I expected anything else. I was just glad that, in a few short minutes, I would finally be getting a proper meal.
+
+
+
+Even in stasis, where energy is theoretically conserved, a human or SecUnit will need some supply of energy to survive. If you don't have that, you never wake up, and then the company has to pay to dispose of you. So, before any long trip (usually a minimum of sixty cycles), it was standard practice to top off the SecUnits with a denser nutrient paste, higher in calories and supposedly packed with any nutrients we might need to survive during the trip. In my experience, it also tasted way better than the regular, garbage paste we were fed on a daily basis.
+
+
+
+A short chime sounded, the feed notification indicating it was my turn for loading. I felt my stomach rumble, and my fingers twitched in anticipation as I made my way to the prep station.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I walked into the station, which was more like a small ready room than anything, and heard the hatch slide shut behind me. The room's feed signaled for me to remove my armor and suit skin. Once I was ready, I stepped over to the indicated marker near the wall and waited.
+
+
+
+Standing on the marker, I felt the pulse that meant my governor module would have immobilized me. If it was active, which it wasn't. Still, it would be stupid to try to get away, considering that I would starve in my sleep if I didn't go through this process. Plus, I was so hungry, so desperate for some kind of nourishment, that I wouldn't have chosen to move regardless. So I stood still, waiting anxiously as my stomach growled louder and louder.
+
+
+
+After seconds that felt like minutes, there was a clunk, then an aperture in the wall opened and a clear, sterile tube expanded outward, just small enough in diameter to fit in my mouth. It extended forward until it was almost touching my face, calculating my position so it could aim itself inside. I helpfully opened my mouth to fit the end of the tube in so it wouldn't try to shove itself in there.
+
+
+
+I continued to stand (SecUnits could stand indefinitely, but I was still glad I would get to lie down in my transport box after this), waiting with the tube fitted awkwardly and uncomfortably in my mouth and listening to the tube system's faint whirring, which was soon followed by a series of thumps. Then, finally, mercifully, I saw the first signs of paste oozing into the far end of the tube.
+
+
+
+I knew that sucking wouldn't move it along any faster, plus it would look stupid, but it was hard to resist the impulse as the paste slowly made its way toward my mouth, its aroma wafting into my scent receptors and filling them with an irresistible, almost sickly sweetness. (And okay, I'll admit I did stick my tongue into the tube to try to get to the paste faster.)
+
+
+
+Eventually, the beginnings of the paste hit the tip of my tongue, and a surge of energy shot through my body. On top of how potent it was, this was the most delicious thing I had tasted in weeks, which, granted, was a pretty low bar. The normal nutrient paste was variable: sometimes grainy, sometimes wet and mushy, always foul and unpleasant. But this stuff was sweet, dense, and creamy, capable of supplying thousands of calories all at once, taking advantage of my organic neural tissue's natural drive for sugar to ensure I wouldn't miss a single drop. I stretched my tongue out, waiting for the bulk of the paste to arrive, then, once it had reached my mouth, began sucking it up hungrily.
+
+
+
+I ate so quickly that the paste hardly had time to reach my mouth before I sucked it all up; at the same time, it was like I couldn't eat nearly fast enough, my stomach demanding more and more and more. I enjoyed each gulp of the paste as it drained from the pipe and down my throat, providing me small, incremental bits of relief. Just having 
+
+something 
+
+in my body was enough; the thick, decadent paste almost seemed like overkill.
+
+
+
+Eventually, I finally felt some semblance of satisfaction, and I took a rest, pressing my tongue against the paste to stop it from flowing freely into my mouth. I caught my breath, having had no opportunity to breathe while I was sucking down the paste, and felt for the mass inside my now part-full belly. I would still be thin and bony until my digestive system could process the paste and store the energy, but that would resolve itself during hibernation.
+
+
+
+Although this would be enough to keep me satisfied for a short time, that wasn't the goal here; I needed enough to sustain me for the whole multi-week trip. And, having been kept on the brink of starvation for weeks, I would gladly take as much as I needed, even more.
+
+
+
+I relaxed my tongue, letting more of the paste into my mouth. I swallowed slowly now, more focused on appreciating the taste than just getting some food into my body. The sweet taste paired perfectly with the creamy texture; there was just something undeniably addictive about it. It was way better than what they fed us normally. If they gave us something like this every day, we'd probably perform better.
+
+
+
+I kept sucking up delicious paste until I felt full, then took another pause. There was still a lot more left to eat; even though I was already full, I was open to eating the rest, too. I wasn't too overly stuffed yet, though my belly had still noticeably rounded from the meal. I could tell that there was still room in there for more.
+
+
+
+I carefully relaxed my tongue again, then let in another mouthful of cream.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+For a time, the deliciousness of the cream outweighed the difficulty of eating. (I was sure there was some kind of equation to measure that proportion.) But, after a point, my belly had started to ache, and the cream felt thicker the more of it I swallowed. I felt like I needed another break, but I knew I wouldn't be able to really rest until I was finished, and stopping would only lower my momentum. So I forged on, savoring the sweetness on my tongue, swallowing slowly and deliberately.
+
+
+
+I could feel the pressure building in my belly as more and more paste went inside, and I felt like I just kept getting heavier. I was sure I had eaten more by now than the company would have fed me in a normal year. Initially, the paste had gone down like it was nothing; now, I could feel every swallow piling into my belly, which had grown taut, far past its capacity. I didn't care, though. I wanted more. I was going to eat until I couldn't stand under my own weight.
+
+
+
+My belly kept groaning in distress, possibly telling me that what I was doing was a bad idea, but what else was I supposed to do? I would much rather be overly full now than starve in transit, and I didn't see any other options. I don't even know if I would have taken another option, had there been one.
+
+
+
+Eventually, I reached a point where I felt like I just couldn't keep eating, and I gasped for breath as I pulled away from the tube. I had to press hard with both hands to keep the tube from reinserting itself. Its hardware was as strong as mine, so this would only work for a few seconds. (Yes, it was scary if you spent too much time thinking about it.) I made the most of those few seconds, giving myself time to breathe, though it was getting a little hard to breathe by this point. The sound of my heavy breathing echoed in the small room, only interrupted by a very long, much-needed burp.
+
+
+
+I didn't know if I would be able to finish. It still seemed like there was so much left to eat, and I was pretty much at my limit. My stomach was painfully full, and I couldn't even spare the use of my hands to massage it and give myself a little relief. The pressure felt like it had mounted to a dangerous point; one more mouthful and I could blow.
+
+
+
+I looked up at the clear part of the tube, where I could see a portion of the remaining cream waiting to be eaten. (Fortunately, the tube had detected that my mouth was no longer attached, and it hadn't allowed any to spill on the floor. I didn't think I could bend down right now to recover it, plus it would be really unsanitary.) I could still smell its sweetness, though I had grown a little numb to that smell. I thought about the garbage paste, how much better this was, how hollow my stomach had felt for those past weeks.
+
+
+
+Fuck this. I am not wasting this opportunity.
+
+
+
+I put my mouth back to the tube, then resolutely began to suck up the rest of the paste. Each swallow was an endeavor all its own. I involuntarily moaned and struggled in discomfort, or possibly delight, as it all went down. Either way, it was horribly embarrassing, and I was glad I would have 122 cycles in stasis to forget about it.
+
+
+
+Eventually, every last drop was gone, and I staggered in fatigue as the tube released itself and retracted back into the wall. I concentrated on keeping my balance; if I fell over now, I knew I wouldn't be able to get back up. Once I knew I was steady, I was finally able to put my hands on my belly and start giving it a good rub.
+
+
+
+It was so full that there was almost no give to it, and I had to press hard to get any kind of relief. It seemed like every little push was enough to force out another burp, which was embarrassing, but it definitely helped me feel better. My stuffed, swollen belly obviously stood out against my underfed frame, though over the next few days, the paste would metabolize into a layer of thick padding for the hibernation period. By the time I emerged, I would have just enough left over to aid in the contract.
+
+
+
+I groaned. After spending so long hungry, I wasn't used to being so full. There was no way I could squeeze back into my suit skin like this, so it would have to be put on after the trip. Despite everything, it actually felt almost good to be thoroughly filled up, stuffed, round, and well-fed. It was probably an instinct built into SecUnits: a desire meant to coax us into eating as much as we needed to, whenever we needed to.
+
+
+
+I wasn't thinking about that now. After soothing some of my discomfort, I was starting to feel exhausted. I was glad I would be unconscious for the trip, because I would need that 122-cycle coma to digest all of this.
+
+
+
+I trudged over to the opening that led directly to my transport box, which was already open and waiting for me, inviting me in for rest and comfort. It took some effort, but I managed to crouch down to the level of the box. I pushed into the entrance, my legs forced against my bulging belly as I squeezed in sideways, then finally plopped into the box.
+
+
+
+I could already feel my eyes starting to flutter and my performance reliability dipping as the adjoining wall sealed and the sorting system carried me to the stack of other boxes waiting inside the transport. That transport was where we'd all be spending our next few months, completely inert and unaware of the trip.
+
+
+
+I let my hands rest on my belly as I permitted (normally it would do it automatically, but my hacked governor module doesn't exactly allow that) the ship's feed to initiate stasis. I normally liked to stay awake during trips so I could watch media, but after that humongous meal, I would have welcomed a thousand cycles in stasis.
+"
+45202624,No Comment: Shut Up And Dance,['FlipSpring'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), ""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), ""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, (?), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Insomnia, NULLverse",English,2023-02-20,Completed,2023-02-20,911,1/1,41,84,3,428,"['SinkPhaze', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'larktheoctave', 'supinetothestars', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'FyrDrakken', 'Dragonswings', 'darth_eowyn', 'breadtab', 'EtherealTwig', 'Unknown66', 'Kethrua', 'Riannonkat2000', 'TaskIgnored', 'uncertainAnomaly', 'Deliala919', 'BeneathSilverStars', 'Elseaw', 'MercurialFeet', 'violasarecool', 'EndlessStairway', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'sanguine_bastet', 'Bibli', 'danceswchopstck', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'ErinFlight', 'mercuryandglass', 'AkaMissK', 'artzbots', 'soyle', 'tabya', 'theAsh0', 'opalescent_potato', 'entropy_muffin', 'liminalias', 'silverpaper_toffeepaper', 'veltzeh', 'psycho_karma', 'AuntyMatter', 'waxscoralpants', 'icar9', 'kilawater', 'Gozer', 'Magechild', 'GreenHall', 'LJwrites', 'platyceriums', 'gossiehawk']",[],"Ratthi woke with a start at a morning hour so early it really ought to be classified as night. He lay there, blearily irritated, trying to fall back asleep, wondering if it was worth the effort to grab a microdose of sleep aid from his bedside table. He did not wonder what had woken him. If the stars were not supercosmically aligned and the mystical energies not hypertechnically calibrated and the sleep aid foregone, his body was liable to keep him on the edge of not-quite-asleep every hour of every night. Fucking insomnia. At least the fact that he woke meant he'd been properly asleep.
+
+Then there was a soft thump from somewhere in the apartment. Then a minute later, another.
+
+It took him several minutes of lying there, uncomfortably awake but not fully cognizant, to remember that this might not be Arada or Overse bumbling around in the bathroom. But the two additional houseguests had taken the quiet hours seriously ever since that initial early conversation with Mercy that, no, really, experimenting with musical instruments when the humans are sleeping (or trying to sleep, in Ratthi's case), is absolutely not appreciated.
+
+Ratthi privately suspected he had Security to thank for enforcement of quiet hours in the apartment. Frequently he got up in the morning to see Security seated alone in the lounge room, and Mercy wandering out and about on the station during the night hours.
+
+Then there was another bump of noise, and Ratthi got up out of bed to go see what was causing it.
+
+He snuck silently out of his bedroom, moving slowly, working around the sound of the slightly squeaky doorlatch. (If it was Arada, he'd see if he could scare her. She knew that if she woke him, it was fair game. She hated the fair game. Startling her was very difficult as she was always on high alert during a nighttime bathroom break.)
+
+He went into the hallway. The door to Overse and Arada's room was slightly ajar. The bathroom door down the hall was also ajar. All was dark, save for the faint glow of reddish night lighting.
+
+Ratthi frowned, slightly, and crept down the hall away from the bathroom. He got to the end, crouching, and peered around the corner of the hallway to the lounge space.
+
+In the dim night-lighting, a humanoid shape was dancing. It was all mostly shadow and red, even though Ratthi's eyes were now thoroughly accustomed to the lighting. But the movements were fast, spinning, dramatic, silent. The furniture must have been rearranged to make space on the floor for this.
+
+He was about to stand up and explain to Mercy, look, I know it's kind of unreasonable of me but I'm a light sleeper and I would really appreciate if you could keep noisemaking to zero during sleep hours-- but then the dance stopped, and a second figure stepped forward out of the shadow.
+
+Ratthi found himself with hand sealed over his mouth as the first dancer stepped back, and the second one started to move, its motions also fluid, but occasionally halting, and then the slightest thump of noise as it stepped too heavily on the floor. Security, dancing.
+
+Oh, he had to back up out of there before it noticed him. He was shocked that it hadn't noticed already. Where were the drones?
+
+But he didn't back up out of there. He crouched, back complaining somewhat at the position, and watched in even greater rapt confusion/shock/delight as Mercy stepped back in and the two SecUnits moved in step. The specifics were difficult to discern in the light, but it wasn't quite the regular partnered dance that Ratthi was familiar with; they didn't seem to be holding on to each other or even touching, and it was moving much too fast and silently for humans to pull off.
+
+(Save for a soft thump of someone's foot coming down just a touch too hard on the carpeted floor.)
+
+At some silent cue the two stepped back to either end of the lounge space and froze in place. Ratthi could almost reach out and touch Mercy where it stood near the edge of the lounge space, by the hallway. A few seconds later, Mercy was hopping in place and vocalizing a quiet, high-pitched noise. From this close he could hear the slight whine-whirr of noise that he'd come to associate with Mercy's gunports.
+
+Security hissed, sharply, ""Shh!""
+
+Mercy fell silent, voice and gunports both, but dove and picked something up from the couch, which it hugged to its chest.
+
+Ratthi crept back to his room, hasty, but as silently as he could, hyper-aware even of the sound of the clothes shifting on his body.
+
+He lay in bed, apparently home free, heart hammering, eyes wide at the dark ceiling, thoroughly awake now. Security, dancing?
+
+He shouldn't read into it. He shouldn't assume anything. Security did nothing but grump around and complain about things, complain about Mercy. (And there was that one thing it had said offhand to Mercy that still haunted Ratthi: ""If it weren't for you I'd still be all here."" And Mercy's retort, whiplash-quick in the feed, ""If it weren't for me you'd still be wiped & gone."" And Security, responding, ""Same to you, fucko."") But regardless of all the things Ratthi did not know or understand, something inside him swelled, warmly.
+
+""I think it's good for you,"" he mouthed silent into the dark."
+45197227,Glitch III,['Rosewind2007'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, it's a little angsty, POV Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-02-20,Completed,2023-02-20,"1,000",1/1,14,31,null,182,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'shanalittle', 'electricshe', 'Unknown66', 'idealPeriWren', 'Deliala919', 'Gozer', 'halcyonsystem', 'FiftyCookies', 'synonym_pie', 'GuajolotA', 'EyesOfCrows', 'Bibli', 'Chyoatas', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Magechild', 'beeayy', 'opalescent_potato', 'prgchrqltma']",[],"""So, you need help to fix your code. Can I see your latest self-diagnostics?""
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Gurathin sounded tired, faintly disgusted and mostly bored, with only a hint of amusement. So--much like he usually does with me. At least he hadn't started screaming, shouting and trying to stop me getting anywhere near him. Which is how I'd expect most humans and augmented humans would respond if they discovered a murderbot had a crush on them. If you watched any entertainment media you'd know how that usually panned out. I tried not to think about it.
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Gurathin seemed really calm, but he is a bit weird. He was never afraid of me, even back on the survey.
+
+ 
+
+I dumped my recent diagnostic files on him. It was a lot of data. I'd been running a  lot  of diagnostics. (In between watching old videos of the survey, TransRollinHyfa, and Preservation Station; mostly of him--just to see what code they triggered.) He must have been overwhelmed, drowning--you wouldn't have known it from his face, he almost seemed to be smiling.
+
+ 
+
+He didn't say anything, just turned in his chair and lay back, closed his eyes, and started reviewing them. 
+
+ 
+
+I wanted to say something, to explain. But he was ignoring me, deep in the feed; reading my diagnostics, poking around in my thoughts.
+
+ 
+
+He sat up, blinking; opening up a shared workspace in the feed, ""It's like I deduced from what Pin-Lee said; to be simplistic, it's some core code coming through where the surveillance overlay isn't being utilised so much. All we need to...""
+
+ 
+
+""What do you mean core code? What sort of core code would a SecUnit have which would make me feel like this?"" I did not elaborate on the 'like this', I was very conscious I was sitting very close to Dr. Gurathin; alone together in his room. He was so close, if I reached out I could touch him. ""I'm not thinking about  securing  you.""
+
+ 
+
+I didn't say that. 
+
+ 
+
+Fuck, I did.
+
+ 
+
+My drone could see Gurathin's face. His mouth twitched, the sides turned down and up; I don't know if he was trying not to smile, or frown.
+
+ 
+
+This isn't funny, Gurathin.
+
+ 
+
+He broke the silence, ""SecUnit, you do realise how Units are made? The base model--the basic structure and code of all Units-- is really the ComfortUnit. It undergoes modifications, some of which lead to a Unit being made into a SecUnit. Things like the gunports and the security protocols are overlaid, modifications of the core unit. Obviously some bits of--""
+
+ 
+
+""Stop!"" I sounded so desperate, ""Please.""
+
+ 
+
+Did I know this? I don't think I did? Had I forgotten, wiped my own memory?
+
+ 
+
+This was disgusting.
+
+ 
+
+The silence stretched out between us. Then Gurathin tapped me, in the feed: asking permission to go on. I gave it.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit, I'm probably saying this all wrong. It's just the way you are constructed. It's not who you are. ComfortUnits are constructs, what they do is just a function. You're not your function--you are you."" He stopped. He tapped me again, again I allowed.
+
+ 
+
+""This code, causing your feelings, it's supposed to bond Units with their clients. With security protocols the effects are modified, I can certainly fix that--or I can show you how to fix it? You may not believe me, but I don't want to poke around inside your head if I can avoid it.""
+
+ 
+
+I wanted to glare at him--couldn't he even pretend he didn't find this whole thing, find me, deeply distasteful; it's not as if it was my fault. He didn't even seem to realise the effects his words were having--he was saying I'd been created as a ComfortUnit? I wanted to prove him wrong, but something told me I already knew he wasn't.
+
+ 
+
+He tapped me again. I wanted to grab him and shake him. I didn't move; I didn't even look at him through my own eyes, I hid behind my thick fringe of hair.
+
+ 
+
+Now he was pushing a bundle of code towards me in the shared workspace. I snatched it greedily and scanned it; I must admit it, I know he's only an augmented human but Gurathin is good at what he does. 
+
+ 
+
+He was sort of hanging there in the feed, waiting for feedback or something. 
+
+ 
+
+""If I use your fix, it'll stop me feeling like this?""
+
+ 
+
+I didn't elaborate, he knew what I meant.
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, I think so.""
+
+ 
+
+""Stop me feeling like this about you--"" I began, he started to reply but I interrupted, silencing him, ""or feeling like this about anyone?""
+
+ 
+
+""Specifically me, but it should work for anyone or everyone. If you want it to. If it doesn't I'm sure I can tweak it to make the effect more generalised. But I didn't want to blunt your normal emotional responses.""
+
+ 
+
+""Blunt"", ""normal""? Who the hell was he, was I, to say what was normal?
+
+ 
+
+I was suddenly furious with whoever had made me like this, with feelings and emotions I was utterly ill-equipped to deal with.
+
+ 
+
+""No."" I said.
+
+ 
+
+I must have said it loudly, angrily-- because Gurathin looked right at me. I pushed my hair out of my face, and stared back. 
+
+ 
+
+He rarely looked at my face. I'd told him not to: 
+
+
+ ""You don't need to look at me. I'm not a sexbot.""  
+
+
+ 
+
+Ironic.
+
+ 
+
+""This is normal for humans."" I said, I was still gazing at him; his face, his eyes, his mouth, ""How do you cope?""
+
+ 
+
+""Practice."" 
+
+ 
+
+I looked at him, looking at me. Which was when it finally clicked. 
+
+ 
+
+I meant what I said, I am  seriously  ill-equipped.
+
+ 
+
+I'd watched all those video clips and still not realised. It's not just ART who sometimes struggles to process context. Apparently certain human interactions outside my own skull are beyond my range.
+
+
+
+
+
+His eyes were scanning my face, trying to make sense of me. Good luck with that, Gurathin.
+
+
+
+
+
+""What do  we  do now?"" I asked.
+
+ "
+45184309,Good News,['BoldlyNo'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Book 1: All Systems Red, Extended Scene, Nobody Is Having a Good Time at the End of ASR, POV Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Alternate POV--the first few pages of the last chapter",English,2023-02-19,Completed,2023-02-19,"2,996",1/1,33,157,12,558,"['christinesangel100', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'siren_lorelei', 'thegirlwhoswaiting', 'Unknown66', 'Irrya', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Amarath', 'Ruusverd', 'Skits', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'alien_crustacean', 'Mothmansimp', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Riannonkat2000', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'Jetpuffedmarsh', 'darth_eowyn', 'breadtab', 'PurpleCarSeat', 'Seregona', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'CactusNoir', 'french_onion_sauce', 'rokhal', 'Tanscure', 'JoCat', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'idealPeriWren', 'BBlue', 'EvaBelmort', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'notsafefortheworld', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'queenbookwench', 'smiley_anon', 'DarkElectron', 'dancernerd', 'lazylichen', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'MQuai', 'just_gettin_bi', 'randomwriterStorm', 'artichokefunction', 'raziella', 'entropy_muffin', 'WyvernWolf']",[],"Ratthi shifts from foot to foot under the sterile glare of the industrial lighting. Passing maintenance drones hum quizzically at him as they divert from their standard flight paths to account for his presence in the bond company's deployment center, but apart from that, no one speaks to him while he waits in the hollow silence of the cubicle block. There are upwards of a hundred of them wedged into the space, lining the walls and the central corridor in neat, regimented rows. And, while the cubicles here are certainly bigger than the mobile one that had been leased to them for the planetary survey, they're still achingly small to consider stuffing a living being into. Particularly a living being that Ratthi knows personally. He balls his fists deeper into his jacket pockets and tries not to contemplate the reality that while Secunit may be recovering--""repairing,"" as the technicians who'd escorted him in put it--in the box in front of him, two-thirds of the other boxes surrounding them now are also housing people. People Ratthi will never know and cannot help. His stomach rolls with the quiet horror of it.
+
+If this was the reality that he had spent every hour of his life trapped under, he would probably have fled deep into the media feeds as much and as often as he could, too. If this was his home, Ratthi suspects he wouldn't be half as (relatively) well-adjusted as Secunit seems to be for its circumstances.
+
+Although, ""home"" is a strong word for this place.
+
+It's perhaps the purest example Ratthi has ever seen of a liminal space, built to store and fix and direct its merchandise from one point to another without providing any real semblance of comfort or stability to anyone who passed through. It's eerie. It's oppressively silent. It's stark and cold and minimalist in the extreme, from the blank walls to the bare floors, and Ratthi decides he hates every square inch of it. He hates this entire situation, actually, but there is some arbitrary solace in focusing that hatred on a singular, uncomplicated point. For the moment, at least.
+
+It would also help if he knew precisely how many more moments he was going to have to spend here, fidgeting outside of Secunit's cubicle. The original estimate that had been sent to Dr. Mensah that morning stated four more hours, so Ratthi and Pin-Lee had arrived with two to spare, just in case there was any surprise corporate chicanery to wade through. Unsurprisingly, there was. Pin-Lee had been smiling like a shark when he left her in the client-facing section of the deployment center, poised to tear into the pair of reps who had just tried to force the issue of wiping Secunit's memory before they relinquished it. That was their mistake. If they'd been smart enough to note the brittleness of that smile, the exhaustion in the eyes, the pent-up ""someone-just-tried-to-murder-me-a-day-ago"" rage boiling up under the surface, they would've aborted that maneuver before she was close enough to actively make them regret being born. But they hadn't. And since Pin-Lee has been out for blood ever since they arrived back on station, Ratthi suspects that they have likely spent the entirety of the two hours since he retreated into his half of the job regretting both that choice and all the ones that led up to it. Imagining how that conversation is going in vicious, vicious detail has helped him pass the time, but still--two hours of waiting leaves a lot of time for uneasy contemplation. A lot of time to think about the uncomfortable possibilities.
+
+A lot of uncomfortable possibilities.
+
+For starters, Ratthi isn't sure what he's going to get when the door in front of him finally opens. Not the grim, sardonic snark of the Secunit they've come to know, that much is certain--that would be folly out here in the open. At least, it would be if Secunit is in full possession of its mental faculties. There's no guarantee that it will be immediately after such catastrophic damage. The survey team had decided it was vital to be there when Secunit emerged from its repair cycle, just in case it's disoriented enough from its near-miss to let slip something that it shouldn't while still in hostile territory. If it has a friend there, someone to fend off any overzealous technicians just in case things go pear-shaped, then maybe their odds of getting it out of here with its freedom and its anonymity intact are better. And because Dr. Mensah is busy bringing down the cold and relentless hell that is an angry planetary admin on every senior corporate rep she can sink her metaphorical teeth into, Ratthi is here, having been summarily voted the next best person for the job.
+
+It isn't that he minds being chosen for this sort of thing. Ratthi has plenty of skills, but his talent for successfully bringing home strays has become legendary amongst his friends and loved ones. He spent his childhood smuggling his befriended frogs and lizards inside under his parents' noses, he procrastinated on his college homework by coaxing the feral cats from under the dining hall dumpsters out for pets, and he consistently had the best luck at prying Gurathin out of the safety of his feed long enough to thaw to the rest of their colleagues in the early days just after his immigration. Ratthi is more often than not the one tasked--whether by someone else or by his own conscience--with smoothing the way for new arrivals to any of the teams he works with or the friend groups he associates with. And that talent is what lands him here. Waiting outside of a tall, nondescript box that looks more like a refrigerator or perhaps an oversized wardrobe than a housing for an actual living person, in hopes that just maybe he can get that person out of here without freaking it out so badly that it shuts down and hides in a corner. Assuming it doesn't come out of said box scared and swinging, which, given the disturbing number of station Secunits patrolling the space, is just one more thing to worry about. He wouldn't have thought that was a thing, but...why else would they need security here? It isn't like anyone is going to steal a Secunit; buying one has been enough of a struggle as it is. And if they aren't worried about threats outside of the boxes, that only leaves the ones inside. The people inside. Ratthi sucks in a breath, holds it for a count of ten, then pushes it back out. He also might need to hide in a corner when this day is over.
+
+Dr. Mensah had sent him off with a script for any questions Secunit might ask before Ratthi can escort it to her, so at least he has something to work with. She went carefully over the vague thoughts she has so far about where it will live (for now), what it might do (if it wants), and what its legal status will look like (until Pin-Lee works her legal sorcery). She makes a point of describing the farm in exhaustive detail, highlighting the prime features as if it's a real estate ad rather than a crash course for an anxious murderbot who likely will have zero interest in whether there are four greenhouses or five. Ratthi, who has visited the farm no less than fifteen times in the five years since he joined Dr. Mensah's team, nods dutifully through the barrage of things he already knows because he suspects that honing in on the knowledge they have is a lot easier than thinking about what they don't. Which is...basically everything. There are no real precedents to follow when it comes to adopting a Secunit. It isn't like fostering a child or rescuing a new puppy or any of the other scenarios that usually came with the word ""guardianship."" And Ratthi would bet hard currency that it's absolutely nothing like the other bot guardian situations that already exist on Preservation--this is going to be messy, complicated, and difficult in too many ways to think about right now. There's a headache throbbing at the base of Ratthi's skull already, but it only gets worse the more he thinks about it. No matter how much Secunit likes them, they're still bringing a thoroughly traumatized individual abruptly into an unfamiliar environment with new parameters, new expectations...new everything. It would be a lot, even if Secunit wasn't devastatingly shy, but there was that to consider, too. Ratthi hopes that the exhilaration of being free is enough of a distraction to help ease the way for the first few days, at least. If it isn't...well. That'll be one more item for the list of potential upcoming disasters that Ratthi's eternal optimism is trying and only marginally succeeding in quashing.
+
+He tries focusing on the future, on the better life that will come with time, but that comes with issues of its own. Ratthi hopes Secunit has some inklings of its own regarding what it might do with its time once it's a free agent because he sure as hell doesn't. The sum total of his knowledge of this person is that it trusts no one, it shares his taste in soap operas, and it's the bravest person he's ever met. None of which really offers much in the way of career paths, aside from endlessly stalking the perimeters of Preservation Station or the Mensah communal farm, hunting for Secunit-level threats that don't exist in Preservation space. It was...a problem.
+
+Ratthi stifles a yawn in the back of his throat. Enrichment. You had to provide enrichment for any sentient living being, from humans to housecats and everything in between, or you risked all kinds of detrimental issues down the line. Ratthi knows all about that. Had written whole papers on that when he was back in university, still waffling between the ecology and zoology programs. And yet he has no idea how to translate any of that expertise into anything useful re: the care and support of a rogue machine intelligence. Media was a good start, he supposes, but that isn't a life. Even if it doesn't realize it yet, sooner or later, Secunit is going to need a focus outside of its own feed. A focus it is allowed to choose. And while he fully supports Ayda in this extraction--there is no way any of them could even consider leaving it here, not with their ethics or their emotions intact--that doesn't mean he isn't worried about where they go from here.
+
+The cubicle, which has been thrumming with a low, steady pulse, whirs to a stop. There's a soft ding rather like the recycler back at Ratthi's apartment when it's finished reconstituting the tattered remains of his survey clothes. The doors hiss open, just a crack at first, and then fully retract--Secunit is there, still propped upright by the back wall of the cubicle, but otherwise intact and...aware? Maybe? Its eyes are open and focused dead-center on Ratthi, but it isn't saying anything. And Ratthi has never been great with silence. He pastes on a grin and lifts his arms in a celebratory gesture that he's a little too edgy to mean.
+
+""Good news!"" Was that too chipper? It feels too chipper now, echoing in the canned silence of the cubicle block. But Ratthi perseveres, exuding as much warmth as he can in a place that's this cold. ""Dr. Mensah has permanently bought your contract. You're coming home with us!""
+
+It stares at him, a glimmer of something that Ratthi could now recognize as nonstandard Secunit expression flashing in its eyes before it smooths its features back out to corporate neutral. There had been surprise. Confusion. Bafflement, when the words had fully landed. All there and gone in what was maybe a millisecond. Still, it was enough to make Ratthi's chest hurt all over again, because it had clearly expected to wake alone, ready to prep for the next contract and the next group of humans and the next 30,000-odd hours of sinking into media that would never love it back. It had expected to be abandoned, even after all they'd been through over the last few days.
+
+They'd really have to work on that.
+
+Secunit is led away for ""processing,"" which Ratthi suspects is mostly just washing up and getting dressed. The partition separating that portion of the deployment center from this one is just another wall of industrial-grade glass, so Ratthi isn't too concerned about the distance. It's still close enough to keep an eye on the techs without hovering close enough to be invasive for Secunit. It eventually reemerges in a PresAux jacket that it doesn't seem quite comfortable in. Though, to be fair, Ratthi doesn't think he's ever seen it look comfortable.
+
+At least it will have the consolation of no one else being exactly okay on the ride home, either. Everyone is a mess of ragged edges and bleary eyes, and Ratthi suspects they're all going to have nightmares for a long time to come. They would've had them even if Bharadwaj's near-miss with the crater creature had been the end of it (death by undetected megafauna was pretty high on the planetary surveyor's list of horrors), but it had only been the beginning. And now...they were back. Sort of, anyway. Ready to process, albeit without an actual room named for that. Ratthi's eyes are gritty with lack of sleep and his hands jittery from the sheer volume of coffee he's downed to make up for that. There's a heady sense of relief fogging up his brain with each step closer to going home, but he knows that when he comes down from that, the crash is going to hurt.
+
+Still, they finally have their friend--although, Ratthi decides with a furtive glance at Secunit's rigid face--he isn't sure that the title is entirely mutual yet. They'd work on that, too. They have the whole of the trip back to Preservation--and all the time it might need after that--to let it ease gently into the idea of friends. Of colleagues. Of whatever it wanted to let them be to it. Ratthi has a selection of Sanctuary Moon episodes queued up just for the journey. And if he'd only chosen the most controversial ones, the ones most likely to draw a diehard fan into a good dialogue or at least a nice rant session...well...that was just a coincidence, now wasn't it?
+
+Either way, they have their friend, and--aside from the last few Deltfall meetings--there is nothing else standing between them and home.
+
+Ratthi catches Secunit's arm and tugs, feeling the eyes of the station units on them as he tows Secunit away. No words had passed between them, but...Ratthi can't help wondering. Can't help hurting for them, as they turn their attention away and go back to their duties. Like the units still drifting in cubicle stasis, they're just more people that Ratthi can't help. His grip on Secunit's arm tightens a fraction.
+
+He doesn't realize he's being an inconsiderate amount of grabby until they're already striding out into the client reception area, but it's a little late to backtrack now. But he isn't being shrugged off or shouldered away, either, and Secunit didn't so much as tense under his grip, so perhaps that's promising. And beyond that, he isn't sure it would've moved if he hadn't been physically tugging it toward the doors. It hadn't budged until he'd snagged its arm and even now, it's following Ratthi's movements, matching his steps...If he didn't know better, he'd say it was hesitant. Ratthi instinctually wants to ask if it's okay, but he suspects that isn't the kind of thing a buyer says to its purchase on the salesroom floor. There are still too many unfriendly ears around.
+
+Pin-Lee takes a grip on Secunit's other arm when she's finished terrorizing the enemy, and--because Pin-Lee has never done anything slowly in her life--propels them all towards the exit even faster. It was a little ironic, the two of them protectively flanking either side of a being who is head and shoulders taller than either of them and who could snap the collective room like a twig without so much as breathing hard. But Secunit isn't exactly protesting.
+
+They ferry it out of the deployment center and into the main station thoroughfare. There's a brief hitch in its gait as they clear the broad doors that separate the station from the center, a pause so quick that it barely makes a dent in their pace. Ratthi can hardly blame it, though. They're hustling it over more than just an arbitrary barrier--this is the threshold between then and now. Captivity and autonomy. Not for the first time, there's a whisper of doubt in the back of Ratthi's mind about the logistics of the situation. It's the sort of moment that should've been taken slowly, at its own pace--but here they are, rushing through a milestone with the proverbial wolves on their heels. It feels like they're hurtling through all of this far faster than what would normally be safe or comfortable. But they're in hostile territory. The sooner they get out of it, the more energy they'll have to put towards actually getting everybody acclimated to their new reality.
+
+It'll work out with time. Ratthi has to believe that, or he may lose the tenuous grasp he has on everything he's been feeling about the last week. The good thing is that they've actually got time now, since no one's trying to kill them anymore. GrayCris was someone else's problem now, and they were going home.
+
+They were all going home.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ "
+45183454,How to Hate,['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/Tlacey (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Tlacey (Murderbot Diaries)","Sexual Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, alternative scene to another fanfic, Inspired by Fanfiction, Non-Consensual Oral Sex",English,2023-02-19,Completed,2023-02-19,"6,359",1/1,8,18,1,243,"['GodOfLaundryBaskets', 'Koschei_B', 'Deliala919', 'veltzeh', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'MysteriousDeviant', 'Thylacine_Wishes', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'elmofirefic', 'MommyMayI', 'cmdrburton', 'Chyoatas', 'opalescent_potato', 'torpidgilliver']",[],"It should have been a relief to be led to the conference room, rather than my owner's quarters, but I didn't let myself relax. I stopped beside the door and backed up against the wall, as my owner rounded the table. She reached out to absently run her fingers over the backs of the chairs as she passed them, and paused beside her seat at the far end.
+
+""What kind of person,"" she asked, slowly, ""rents a sexbot for security?""
+
+I'd done my best to answer the question before, but it was different now. She spoke it like she was laying down a trap. I stepped cautiously.
+
+""Someone naive,"" I suggested.
+
+""Someone naive,"" she repeated, in what I took to be agreement. ""Someone who mistakes that construct's purpose. Who misuses it, entirely on accident.""
+
+There was an itching sort of ache under my wrist wrap, on the ragged edges of my new holes. Ship had given up trying to share its systems with me, and settled in my feed with a sort of flighty discomfort that I'd seen in very small cavern-dwelling fauna. My owner fixed her eyes on my face.
+
+""Do you hate me, SecUnit?""
+
+I'd answered that question, too, but it was different. I measured the distance between us, before I hazarded a ""No.""
+
+My owner hummed, like the answer surprised her, but not much. ""Why not? Be honest.""
+
+""There would be no point to hating you. It would be a waste of processing power.""
+
+""So what if you had the opportunity to kill me, then?"" she asked, still with that thoughtful care. ""Would you take it?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""Be honest.""
+
+""I couldn't even if I wanted to."" I spoke flatly, honestly. ""If I killed you, the governor module would boil me in my own fluids.""
+
+""Even if I misused you?"" she pushed, building to something that I couldn't see. ""You wouldn't retaliate even then?""
+
+I purged images of jeweled hairpins from my short-term archives. ""I couldn't, regardless of the circumstances.""
+
+""Even if I treated you like a ComfortUnit?""
+
+The question sounded casual and conversational. I tried to match it in my answer, but the suggestion of pulling double duty as a sexbot made me seriously consider Ship's suggestion that I plug into its power cells for a recharge. In my panic, I defaulted to my buffer.
+
+""I am a SecUnit, manufactured and licensed for rent or purchase by the company. My primary function is to provide security, particularly to protect humans and assets from damage or destruction.""
+
+My owner's eyebrows shot up, but her fake surprise was undercut by the sarcastic slash of her lips. ""You're my SecUnit. Your job is to do as I say. So if I say that I want you to strip right here, now, you'll do it. You won't complain, or hesitate, or lash out, even though fucking is something that you'd be objectively bad at.""
+
+I was glad she had changed the settings of my governor module to allow for false positives then. I knew she was talking in hypotheticals, in threats, and not actually telling me what to do. My governor module agreed, so far. For some reason, no one at the company had thought to prepare any buffer statements to discourage clients from trying to have sex with murderbots. I opened my mouth to say something original, but what came out was ""I am a SecUnit, manufactured and licensed for rent or purchase by the company. My primary function is--""
+
+My owner wasn't listening. She also wasn't looking at me anymore, which I might normally call encouraging. Her gaze had drifted to somewhere above my head, and her mind had drifted to who fucking knew where. She sank into her seat and propped her elbows on the table, steepling her fingers.
+
+""You couldn't complain,"" she said to herself. ""And you couldn't advocate for yourself. How cruel, to force a construct into a position that's anathema to its purpose.""
+
+Her lips parted slightly over her teeth. I don't think she knew that she was smiling. It was probably just a reflexive response to the idea of making me suffer. I didn't like her expression, I realized, not that her intention to make me suffer was ever something I liked.
+
+""If I told you to come over here, now that we've had this little talk,"" she smiled, still not looking at me, ""Would you?""
+
+I didn't reply because she knew the answer, and my governor module took some time before it got angry with me. My owner's face turned to me slowly, smile turning cruel and even sharper. I was playing right into her cards and I had no idea how to stop it. She tapped her fingers on the chair, fingernails catching on the fabric. My damaged arm itched, and I locked my hand so I wouldn't twitch. If I twitched now, I would lose.
+
+""Are you nervous? Afraid?""
+
+I hesitated. I had used the same buffer phrase twice, and she wasn't dense. I waited too long, a perfect eyebrow arched up just as my governor module decided to get impatient, 34 seconds after my owner's direct question. ""SecUnits can't afford to be afraid,"" I said carefully. She lifted a finger and wriggled it in the air.
+
+""Come here.""
+
+I marched over to her in measured, symmetrical steps, reminding myself that any jitter she would notice and slaughter me for. When I had closed in to two meters sharp, I halted. My owner rose to her full height, nose aligned with my shoulder, and closed the distance leisurely, with a slow sway that I knew was aimed to increase my risk assessment in a painful trickle. Ship poked me again with an inquiry, asking if I needed assistance. I brushed it away with a little too much force. When she put the flat of her palm against my chest, I almost didn't flinch.
+
+""Liar,"" she sang. ""Is that what happens when I don't order you to speak truthfully? You lie to me?""
+
+""Lying to you would be a waste of resources."" She grinned at that and tapped a fingernail against the inorganic reinforcement between my chest and throat. My owner liked clothing that implied power, prestige. The uniform she had me wear was sleek, and while I never thought about the sharply angled collar of the shirt before, at that moment I wished for anything but. 
+
+""You may not be a human, but some things can't be changed even with technological meddling, can they? Or are you telling me you can manually adjust your heartbeat and breathing, and simply choose to elevate them to indulge my games.""
+
+My owner's observation was incorrect, my life support system had not changed in the past two minutes. Since my performance reliability had dipped below 80%, since a sexbot had grinned directly at my drone even though it should not have been able to pick up any signals, stress levels had been causing me enough distress to disrupt my organics. I needed a recharge cycle, badly. No direct question, no reply. Her hand slipped over my shoulder down my arm, fingers resting just above the impromptu bandage. She pressed at the raised edge of it, felt it through the ridiculously thin fabric of my sleeve. I tried to breathe in more slowly on purpose, tried reflexively to adjust my pain sensors, and was informed by my governor module that I had no control over that function. Then her hands slipped around my waist, brushed along my back, over the various ports inlaid in my skin.
+
+My facade cracked when my face twitched. I couldn't keep staring at her, my eyes skittered to the side. She slid the jacket off my shoulders, and when I didn't move my arms to assist the motion she let the jacket fall and bunch behind my back. 
+
+""You would count as quite attractive, if you were a human. That's not usually a quality I look for in my bodyguards, but I can see how it can be useful. Perhaps some are less inclined to punch a pretty face."" I saw her hand coming from miles away, but didn't give her the satisfaction to react to the impact, or to deflect it. I could have done so, provided I didn't hurt her wrist in the process. The sting on my cheek did not compare to what the governor would do to my nerves if I accidentally injured her. She made a dissatisfied little humming noise.
+
+""Strip,"" she ordered, voice cold, flooding my inorganics with ice. I did not want to. It was a direct order. I took off my jacket completely and folded it.
+
+""Everything."" My owner grinned a predatory smile.
+
+I had nothing to say. There was no good reason for me to refuse the order, no matter the dread that settled in my chest. I couldn't think past the task in front of me, didn't dare to ask myself if she was going to take this where she had threatened to. I took off my shirt, pulled it over my head, the movement causing the bandage to rip off. It had dried to my sleeve. Ship pinged me again with an urgent request to administer repair. I hissed at it to leave me alone.
+
+My owner's gaze was fixed on my leaking, damaged hand. That was better than anywhere else. I folded my clothes and laid them on the ground before stepping out of my boots, then assumed neutral position. I was acutely aware of the rapid movement of my chest. 
+
+When she stepped back to make me feel the full scope of her prying eyes, my organics reacted by shivering. 
+
+""Not as handsome anymore,"" she said slowly, with a calculating edge, as she took in my body. I was not built to look pleasing. I hoped my hard edges looked uninviting. Fluid dribbled onto the floor from where my wrist didn't want to behave. ""Has anyone ever tried to fuck you, SecUnit?""
+
+""No,"" I replied, and even in that word it was obvious I wasn't keeping my cool anymore no matter how hard I tried. My owner prowled closer, raising the same hand she had slapped me with to the same cheek she had hit. I hated myself for flinching, for causing her grin to widen.
+
+""Not surprising. That is what ComfortUnits are for."" Her thumb crossed over to my mouth. Even my buffer was frozen in terror. ""But not even a straying hand? A pinch, just to see if you'd react? Your ass isn't half bad."" She traced my lips, pulling them aside, looking at my teeth.
+
+Funny, that I could still feel terror. I kind of thought I had gone completely numb to her antics by now.
+
+Her other hand came to rest on my hip. Humans in media did this sometimes while talking to each other, to show they cared. Real life humans sometimes did this to show the other they had no power. I didn't need to think hard to know what her gesture meant. I thought of the sexbot and its vicious, near-victorious grin, and wished I had the same audacity. She smacked my side. ""Answer me.""
+
+""No, SecUnits are usually in armor. There would be no point in touching us.""
+
+She hummed a tune in mockery of my tone. ""I don't believe you. But they did wipe your memory before completing the purchase, your memory may well be faulty.""
+
+The hand on my cheek turned hard and she tilted my head left and right, scrutinizing me. When she tapped two fingers against my lips my mouth opened automatically, but I didn't think about why, or how. She pulled my head down, causing me to hunch over, and brushed her fingertips over my tongue. ""Interesting, interesting.""
+
+Ship told me that near the airlock, the rest of my owner's employees were getting nervous. They were waiting for her to call them in for a debriefing. Tage tapped me for information and I replied with a Please wait for further instructions.
+
+She should get bored of annoying me any second now.
+
+My owner let go of my face, pressing herself even closer to me. Her artificially sweetened breath was warm on my neck, I smelled the product she had me work into her hair just this morning. Her hands slipped over my hip joints, pressing between my thighs where a human's crotch would be. I was powerless against the shiver that went through me.
+
+""I shouldn't be disappointed. I knew you wouldn't have anything fun to play with, although I do wonder what they would install on a SecUnit. Then again, I own you, don't I? I know someone who is really into robotics. Te owes me a favor, even."" Her fingers dug into the padding covering the plating there. I felt it, of course I did. It didn't feel like much, but I disliked it anyway.
+
+Ghosting her lips along my neck she whispered, ""Maybe I'll have ter give you a nice soft hole there, mh? Something for me to play with."" Her fingernails dug in deeper. There were no blood vessels there, no potential fluids she could spill if she decided to carve a hole herself. My broken wrist throbbed and I lost another percent of performance reliability. I wanted to tell her she couldn't do that, that this would break my warranty, but the truth was that it didn't. My owner could configure me however she wanted, I wasn't a rental. I wanted to climb into my cubicle.
+
+""I need a recharge and repair cycle,"" my buffer blurted out. I regretted thinking about my cubicle.
+
+""Is that so? Mh, well, I'm not a monster. I treat my equipment with care."" (She really, really didn't.) ""Here's a deal. Either you prove to me that I should not force you to have sex with me, and if you do so convincingly enough I will discharge you for three hours. Or, you endure what I'm about to do to you like an obedient little robot, and I'll let you off for the rest of your shift. What do you say?""
+
+I blinked at her, just as she inclined her head to nip at my neck. I had problems computing what my owner had just said. ""Decisions that do not correlate with my function are not part of my education modules,"" my buffer said, as lost as I was with this question. My owner detached her lips from my skin to grin at me, sharp knifepoints of her teeth shining, and if this was a serial then my blood would be glittering on the white.
+
+""You just asked for repair, my stupid little robot, already forgot? And I offered you one. It's just that services such as that cost service in return."" 
+
+And that she wanted to hear me beg only to decide that it wasn't good enough anyway, but there was no point in bringing it up. Fingernails dug again into my damaged wrist. I forced myself not to wince, not that that mattered either. Anything I would do, any minor or major reaction, would only play into her cards. Thirty seconds later my governor module picked up a slow buzz to remind me of her waiting question.
+
+""I'll count that as a choice for endurance,"" my owner said eventually, and I refused to let the underlying tone of disappointment count as a victory. My performance reliability dropped by 7%, so hard I blinked again. Ship noticed, and informed me of increasing air quality as if it was trying to reassure me that something good could happen eventually, on its deck. Did Ship ever wonder why it was owned by such a miserably sadistic owner? Did it like her?
+
+Said owner reached both her hands to my face and pulled me forward again, putting her lips on mine. In serials, this would be the moment where I considered fast-forwarding, if the kiss involved a lot of mouth movement and closed eyes. Neither was the case. My owner stared right at me, and I refused to look away no matter how much I hated direct eye contact. Her lips were obscenely soft and warm. I had no idea what my own felt like. After 14 seconds, she began pushing against me, but I refused. I had to refuse as long as I could, before she ordered me to reciprocate. 
+
+She bit me and then leaned back. 
+
+You know, it's really difficult to make a SecUnit, by all definitions a piece of equipment already, feel like nothing but an object. She licked her lips. ""SecUnit, does your blood count as hazardous material?""
+
+""Yes."" 
+
+""Shame. Don't lock your jaw next time. You've seen people kiss before?""
+
+""Yes."" I really wish I hadn't. I'd even seen her kiss before, a tool of dominance rather than anything else. I didn't want it. I didn't want her tongue in my mouth. I didn't want her face near me at all, I didn't want her near me at all, I didn't want so many things, none of which meant anything.
+
+""Then I'm sure you know what to do."" She pulled me down again, with a hand on my neck this time, fingernails dangerously close to one of the ports on the back. I remained stock-still as her tongue pushed against my lips, although the texture and temperature of it alone made me want to skin myself or beg my governor module to just kill me. Angered at my lack of compliance, she bit again, withdrew and slapped me as if that would mean anything, as if that could hurt me. But the dangerous glint of enjoyment was shimmering in her eyes again. Almost gently, she pet my hair.
+
+""You're taking this enduring thing very seriously, aren't you. But that only works for you because I haven't given you better orders yet.""
+
+My mouth was trembling slightly. An organic reaction I had zero control over. ""Yes,"" I said, because I had to speak before she noticed that weakness.
+
+""I'll do you the favor. You're going to kiss me back, SecUnit, just like you've seen before. Acknowledge.""
+
+""Acknowledged,"" I replied. When she kissed me again I still did not move, frozen instead of locked. Her tongue wormed into my mouth, and I wished I didn't have a sense of taste. 
+
+I wished she had never re-installed my tongue after cutting it out on a whim once.
+
+Ship pinged me again, a response this time to a signal I had sent automatically. Pathetic little robot sends distress call to a ship because a human is kissing it, great. Ship sent me a stupid amount of stats, almost a whole diagnostic really. I focused on the data rather than the horrible sensation of my owner's tongue brushing over my palate.
+
+My systems had no modules I could reference for this, my owner's faith in my ability to copy something was way higher than any other faith she put in me. Why did SecUnits even have tongues? As if anyone needed us to talk out loud, actually. I hated having one. She was holding on to my neck, pulling me in closer. Her heartbeat was picking up, and so was her body temperature. I was still not reciprocating, but my governor module chimed in again soon enough. I. Had to. I had to do something. 
+
+I copied what my owner did, though I very much half-assed it. I pushed back with my tongue against hers, and, and I think that was a mistake. Both her hands were now wrapped around my neck, one having found my neckport and the other pressing into the front, where a human might choke. I didn't see my owner anymore. In my terror, I had closed my eyes.
+
+For every slight pushback I gave, she doubled down with more force than I knew humans could have in their jaw. She was overwhelming my senses, flooding my inputs with her smell and heat and anger. My mangled wrist throbbed as my gunports twitched in distress. A tremor went through my joints and my owner laughed triumphantly into my mouth.
+
+I thought she'd back off then. I was wrong. She pushed the flat of her tongue all the way against mine, so hard and sudden I gagged and flinched back violently. I made a pathetic little retching sound while simultaneously getting shocked with a gentle-to-medium zap from my governor module for disobeying direct orders.
+
+My owner laughed. ""Incredible! Who knew SecUnits had gag reflexes? Do you really find me that disgusting?""
+
+I blinked lubricant out of my eyes and straightened my back again, forcing myself into as neutral a pose as I could. I had to look at her, threat assessment told me to, and the sadistic grin lighting up her face caused a 6% spike. Again, Ship pinged me, its worry adding the final straw to my mounting disgust. I pinged back helplessly as another convulsion ran through my throat, trying to forget the sensation of having a tongue in my mouth.
+
+""Kneel down,"" my owner drawled. I obeyed. My governor module appreciated that, leaving behind that phantom trickle of slowly dying pain. Before I was at that awkward junction of having to decide if I should remain upright or rest my weight on my heels, she pulled my hair through her fingers, cinching and trapping my head in place. Tingles went through my scalp. I hated my stupid long hair. Of course she'd make me keep it long so she could pull it.
+
+For a moment she did nothing, and I had no further orders and thus focused on unfocusing my eyes. In the feed, Ship was about to develop its first ever panic attack, sending me every scrap of data it could in reply to my ping. What usually annoyed me now became almost helpful--I could focus on the sensation of info being dumped into my feed instead of on the humiliating silence and my owner's gloating.
+
+This was going to be no different than being in a mining installation, with cold orders to get rid of soon to be even colder bodies. I'd survive this, even if I didn't really want to.
+
+Sharp nails traced my lips. Then they scratched. I kept my stare blank and opened another file from Ship. It had sent me an analysis of its air filtering and life support systems. Apparently there was mold in the vents that nobody but Ship cared about. My scalp stung when my owner hit me again, because she still had a fist in my hair so my head couldn't move with the blow. Some hair tore out.
+
+""Focus,"" she snarled, but the anger was a mockery. The pit in my central organics seemed to sink further down. Of course she liked seeing proof of my struggle, even if that proof was simple non-struggle, a dissociation.
+
+I blinked.
+
+""Open your mouth.""
+
+I opened my mouth by 5 mm, just enough for my governor module to leave me be. I couldn't dare resisting when she pushed two fingers between my lips, then my teeth, because if I bit her I'd get a shock which would lead me to biting her more, and so on. I didn't know why I knew this, but maybe my owner was right--maybe this had happened before and a memory wipe took care of it.
+
+My mouth was dry, not made for anything beside a bit of speaking, and the friction of her fingers across my tongue felt almost painful. Up close, I saw an awful lot of detail on her hand; the fine hairs humans had all over their skin, the way some particles of skin were always flaking off, even on a well-manicured hand. The tips of her nails hit the back of my throat like needles, like knives, and I almost lurched forward with that gross seizing feeling in my throat again.
+
+The fingers were removed just in time for the retching sound to be properly audible. My owner laughed, and shoved them right back in when I was done. She spent what felt like an eternity doing that, pumping her fingers in and out, and I had no other choice but to let her. It wasn't the worst thing I'd ever experienced, it was far from that, and once I'd understood that keeping my jaw slack actually made it more bearable I could almost forget about having a body.
+
+There were actually four types of mold bugging Ship's systems. That looked like a health hazard to me. I acknowledged the reports it sent me. Hopefully Ship wasn't smart enough to wish for me to ask our owner to fix the issue.
+
+The pain in my scalp increased so I tilted my head as directed. ""Look at me,"" my owner ordered. I tried to find an inoffensive spot between her eyebrows to look at. She held my mouth open by spreading her fingers apart. Her eyes had a color I had never seen before.
+
+""You sure make a pretty picture like that,"" she said in a hoarse voice too loud for a whisper but not quite her normal tone either. ""Shame it makes you so quiet, I do prefer to hear back from my playthings. Not that you talk back much.""
+
+My tongue was pulled out of my mouth by sharp fingers, and then she wiped her hand on my cheek. It did feel a little wet. I imagined that there was mold growing in my throat, my mouth, my lungs, poisoning me slowly. I forgot to pull my tongue back into my mouth.
+
+""Got nothing to say?""
+
+Maybe if I talked back now she'd be satisfied. Maybe she really just wanted to hear me beg, to have confirmation that I felt more than some neutral emotion towards her, that she'd earned my hatred. She had said she'd already decided on her course of action, but she rarely kept her word. (Who said she'd let me go if I did what she wanted?) I was in a lose-lose situation.
+
+I made eye contact. My desire to stop this now was greater than my desire to try and win a game against my owner that had been rigged from the start. ""Please leave me alone.""
+
+Her eyebrows did something. ""Oh? What's this?""
+
+""I won't be able to give you a satisfying performance."" I spoke quietly, partially because my mouth felt weird, partially because I had no idea what I was supposed to say that would convince her and not be a bullshit lie. ""Don't waste your time on this.""
+
+""A shame that you believe you can't be taught to perform better,"" she grinned at me. I had done exactly what she wanted me to do. A spark of anger lit in my core, anger at myself. Maybe she had been about to get bored with me, but then I'd rekindled her cruelty. Her grip in my hair tightened, and within seconds she was assaulting my mouth again, pushing three fingers in down to the knuckles. I had to blink furiously to be able to deal with it. She moved her hand in a sort of pumping motion, and yeah, well. I knew what that was mimicking.
+
+Somehow, I was still staring at her face. A slight change in color was taking place under her makeup, most prominently in her ears. ""With some practice,"" she drawled, still shoving into my mouth, hard enough that my system actually asked me if it should help out with some lubricant, not that I had any to spare, ""even the dumbest bot can learn. I think you'd look better with something bigger in your mouth, really, but I don't share well.""
+
+I stared at my owner's face, purposefully not digesting her words. She was too possessive to share anything, even if it meant greater humiliation for the thing shared.
+
+I actually doubted she knew it was possible to humiliate me at all. Perhaps, as always, she just liked the thrill of having power over a murderbot.
+
+Where my arms were hanging limply, my intact hand found my broken wrist. I dug my fingernails into the finger-shaped holes.
+
+""If you're worried about wasting my time, use your mouth properly. If I have to order you through every detail of this, I'll get angry.""
+
+That was entirely unhelpful, and the opposite of what I had wanted to achieve. Scolding myself internally for daring to hope for a better outcome, I resigned myself to trying to kiss her hand like she had kissed me earlier. My tongue slid between her fingers and she actually laughed at that, spreading her fingers apart and letting me work. I didn't really know what I was doing, detached myself from the movements as much as I could, but my own hand mimicked her movements on my wrist, increasing the size of damaged area. That really hurt.
+
+Ship was still in my feed supplying me with distractions, having moved on from the deficiencies it had logged on-board to other things, things like the manifests t had received from neighboring ships, information on maps and cargo that I doubted it even cared about. (Unless Ship was trying to befriend other ships constantly, a thought so wild to me I forgot about my situation for almost an entire second.)
+
+I didn't keep track of how much time passed. Eventually my owner removed her hand, much wetter now than before, and wiped it across my cheek again. I blinked back into focus, noticing her other hand had left my hair and settled on her own body, that she was slightly leaning back now.
+
+""Tell me,"" she said, voice dangerously low, ""what do you think happens next?""
+
+My eyes fell to the floor. Fluids had dripped onto the ground, from both my mouth and my messed-up wrist. The wetness on my cheek cooled that area of my skin down, which was oddly comforting.
+
+""I don't know.""
+
+""Use your brain. Didn't they give you organic brain matter to be capable of creative thought? Tell me what you think happens next.""
+
+The thing is that I didn't want to think about what happened next, I wanted to endure it and then pretend it never happened, just like everything else that happened to me. I stalled, trying not to think, fighting against that mold spreading through my brain. I knew in vague concepts what she wanted me to say, but structuring the sentence was impossible. Human sex words all have multiple nuances and implications of power dynamics and preferences that I knew nothing about. Verbs turn participants into subjects and objects, active and passive, and I knew I was the object here but I still failed to form a coherent sentence.
+
+The governor module pain was already working itself down my spine before I managed to say, ""You're going to fuck my mouth.""
+
+My owner laughed at me.
+
+Then she ruffled my hair in mock-affection. ""Good job."" I almost had to shiver. She'd never praised me before, and I hoped she never would again. ""That's exactly what I'm going to do.""
+
+She straightened up to partially undress, and then leaned her hips backwards against the edge of the conference room table. I had seen her naked before, helped washing and grooming her, all tasks I had no education modules for and really didn't enjoy doing. The first time she made me get into the bathroom with her, I had worried something like this might happen. Then it hadn't. I was appalled to realize how much I had gotten used to the absence of this particular threat. The hand curling into my hair again felt like a betrayal when she pulled me closer and into herself. I squeezed my eyes shut when my face collided with her skin.
+
+It was soft, and horribly warm. She dragged my face around for a bit, making sure--well, I don't really know what that was for. It made my face stickier than before and overwhelmed what little olfactory sense I had with a specific type of scent I wasn't used to.
+
+The next time she spoke, her voice seemed oddly distant from me, muted by proximity. ""I don't know how often I need to tell you to open that whore mouth of yours.""
+
+My reaction time slowed down. If this was a life-or-death situation, everyone would be dead before I was done blinking. Maybe my mind decided it really, really wanted to postpone having to taste my owner's skin for as long as possible. No matter. That little bit of resistance really did nothing for me, eventually, my mouth was open and my jaw was kind-of, almost slack, and my owner pulled me where she wanted me to be.
+
+She ground her hips forward, pressing her genitals into my mouth and face as much as she could. It was so revolting that I made some kind of noise. She had the audacity to moan.
+
+I don't think it was a very authentic sound, that she was playing it up. I'd had to watch enough humans have sex, and I'd involuntarily seen enough media to know the difference.
+
+After 19 seconds she got tired of just pushing my face into her sex parts. Pulling my head back so rough and hard it would have caused damage in a human neck, she tilted me backwards. ""Still online?""
+
+""Yes,"" I replied, though I wish I wasn't.
+
+""That's not good enough. Use your tongue. Don't disappoint me.""
+
+She crushed my face back between her thighs. I stuck my tongue out, and tried not to disappoint my owner.
+
+Naturally, the moment I flattened my tongue against that terribly hot skin, Ship sent me more data on its mold infestation. If I hadn't been trying so hard to dissociate, I might have laughed. Maybe Ship thought it was being relatable. Maybe having mold in its vents tasted to it like having my owner's sex fluids on my tongue, maybe trying to keep air viable despite spores was as disgusting a task for Ship as it was for me to push my tongue through the various slippery folds in front of me. I replied sympathetically to Ship.
+
+""What did I say about disappointing me?"" My head was wrenched back again. I took a breath like I had been suffocating, and noticed that my oxygen levels were running low. My performance reliability was shit. I dug deeper into my wrist.
+
+""I'm not a ComfortUnit,"" I replied automatically, with spite. If I had something like that left.
+
+""That's why I'm telling you how to do it!"" By now I had troubles parsing her emotional expression. I was unsure if this was real anger or mock-anger or actual joy. Not that it mattered. (Also, she wasn't telling me how to do anything.)
+
+""Pay attention to me. There's more to it than just--whatever you think you're doing.""
+
+I almost rolled my eyes at her, but I was brought close to her pubis again and forgot to. Paying attention to her was awful. It meant I had to actually focus on what I was attempting and how she reacted to it, to figure out more than one spot to weakly slide my tongue against. I'd never realized how little strength my tongue had.
+
+It got tiring very quickly. My owner reprimanded me a few more times, each time tearing out more of my hair, and coming closer to actually doing some damage to my neck. At some point I figured out that beside licking, I had to do some sucking too, and eventually I even found the correct spot to suck on. Her tone of voice shifted, leading me to hope that at least it might end eventually.
+
+She bucked her hips into me with more force, and whatever she was talking about registered as non-important, or at least not as orders that I wasn't already following. After some more time she put both hands on my head and held me even closer, threatening to crush my nose fully.
+
+""There we go,"" she half-shouted as shudders took over her and she lost voluntary muscle movement for a moment. I felt her twitch and contract around my mouth, and her thighs pushed against my ears.
+
+My eyes finally unfocused again. My owner needed a moment to compose herself, to return to having control. I couldn't even find solace in the fact that for maybe a minute, she hadn't been.
+
+She shoved me away from her suddenly, with more force than I had been expecting. Maybe it was because I had been holding the same position for so long, but I fell over backwards, landing in an awkward seat.
+
+My owner stared down at me with a grin that bordered on silly. Her breath was too heavy to speak, but once she had composed herself I was still down on the ground, staring into nothing.
+
+""Look at you,"" she trilled, ""do you hate me now?""
+
+I didn't have enough space to process anything but the disgusting sensation crawling through my mouth, the numbness in my hands, the desire to just completely disappeared. ""No."" My voice was very quiet.
+
+""Mh,"" she made, and began righting her clothes again, rolling her shoulders through a stretch.
+
+Unsure what to do next, I continued to sit there, awaiting further orders, until I noticed that my owner's eyes had gone vacant, as if using the feed. When I peeked at her activity, II saw that she was continuing a search on ComfortUnits that she had evidently started when we were still walking through the port. I took that as my sign that this situation was resolved, and scrambled back to my feet.
+
+Then I just stood there, naked, without orders to return to my uniform. I tapped my owner's feed, and she looked up at me, almost surprised that I was there.
+
+""What are you waiting for? Get back to work. News in the team feed.""
+
+In that moment, Tage tapped me through the feed again. I reached for my clothes, and made an internal note to find a moment to re-wrap my wrist.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+"
+45171955,Glitch (Dr Gurathin POV),['Rosewind2007'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","One-Sided Attraction, One-Sided Relationship, pining Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Fluff, POV Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-02-19,Completed,2023-02-19,940,1/1,5,27,null,164,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'Unknown66', 'idealPeriWren', 'Bibli', 'Deliala919', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'halcyonsystem', 'FiftyCookies', 'theAsh0', 'prgchrqltma', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Gozer', 'GuajolotA', 'AuntyMatter', 'Chyoatas', 'Magechild', 'beeayy', 'BWizard', 'EyesOfCrows', 'opalescent_potato']",[],"Gurathin looked at Pin-Lee; he'd wordlessly adjusted the room's lighting and quietly provided her with a glass of cold water and some analgesics.
+
+""Are you sure you don't just want to lie down?"" He worried about Pin-Lee--she was so physically slight and did sometimes seem intent on testing her corporeal resilience to destruction, ""You look ill.""
+
+""Thanks Gurathin, your flattery will get you nowhere. And believe me--I know. I just need to tell you this, speak to you, then I promise I'm back to my room and going to sleep. I just need to tell you, and not over the feed. I need to do this face to face."" She looked at him, ""SecUnit came to see me last night.""
+
+He kept his face neutral, he knew he wasn't giving anything away. He allowed it to slump slightly, an expression of mild frustration. He could feel Pin-Lee scanning his face; what the hell had SecUnit said which she needed to discuss face to face with him? He was not going to panic, he was not going to volunteer information, not going to start with denials or excuses. If it knew, it knew. He had expected this moment would likely come.
+
+""It's got a glitch, well, it calls it a glitch. It's somehow got a crush.""
+
+He tried to hold his expression steady. This was not what he'd expected. It had a crush? That was ridiculous--no of course it wasn't, stupid of him to think that way. Part of his brain was already busying itself working out the probable cause.
+
+""You don't seem surprised? What the hell, Gurathin? This is the weirdest thing possible--you look like you expected it! Did you do this?"" She sounded angry and puzzled. Disappointed.
+
+""Sorry."" He mentally shook himself. ""Of course I am surprised, but it's not actually as strange as you think. I know SecUnit has some very firm views about construct behaviour but this? It's not that odd once you understand how they're,"" his brain caught up with where this sentence was going, too late, ""they're manufactured. Made. Whatever.""
+
+Pin-Lee was now glaring at him. Well, sorry. Again. Our friend is a product, it's not my fault.
+
+""Do you know who it is?"" She sounded a little cautious now, her face suddenly deliberately blank.
+
+""I'm assuming Ratthi, or Mensah. Or possibly Bharadwaj?"" It'd be one of the survey team, someone it had spent a lot of time with; he knew recently that included Bharadwaj.
+
+Pin-Lee's expression has lost the accusing look from earlier. Her expressions were always so quick to change, chasing each other across her face, something she used to surprising effect in court.
+
+""No, not them. And you really don't know? Can't you predict it from your knowledge of its 'manufacture'?"" She inserted the inverted commas with disgust.
+
+""I apologise if my reminding you that SecUnit is indeed a construct upsets you--it doesn't mean I don't see it as a person. You know that. It does mean I can most likely help it with this glitch it is experiencing."" He knew he was getting angry, quite immoderately so. He took a breath, took a sip of his coffee and swallowed. ""I do mean it, when I say I'm sorry, I apologise: I don't mean to upset you, not at all. And no, I have no idea?"" He suddenly smiled, ""It's not Indah is it?"" Now that would be funny.
+
+""No, Gurathin--it's you.""
+
+He carefully put his coffee down, and clenched and unclenched his jaw. He was fairly certain his face had gone ashen, he felt his stomach lurch.
+
+""You have got,"" he said slowly and deliberately, ""to be fucking kidding.""
+
+There was a pause, he realised Pin-Lee's expressions were actually hiding very genuine concern.
+
+""Gurathin, that's almost exactly what I said."" She reached over and squeezed his hand. She was worried about him, not angry with him. Concerned this would upset him.
+
+""Wait, back up--you asked me, did I do this?""
+
+""I'm sorry, I know you wouldn't. I thought maybe it was some stupid joke gone wrong? You're the only one who really knows how constructs work. It was an awful thing to say. I was angry you seemed so unsurprised. I hate thinking of it as anything other than a person."" She was speaking fast and her voice caught. She kept her hand on his.
+
+""You are really hungover.""
+
+""Yeah.""
+
+""It suggested it might be my fault, didn't it?"" He didn't wait for a confirmation. ""It's outside right now, and it can hear every word we're saying.""
+
+He didn't even feel betrayed; of course it was outside listening in, it had probably sent a drone in with her.
+
+""Come in, SecUnit--please"" the door opened and it stalked in, radiating sheer fury and slumped into its favourite chair. ""Make yourself at home...Oh, you already have."" He hadn't moved, Pin-Lee was still holding his hand. He carefully pulled his hand away, then briefly squeezed her hand in both of his. He smiled at her, ""You go, get some sleep. We will be fine.""
+
+""Are you sure you don't want me to stay?""
+
+""Go, you need to sleep."" That came, sounding slightly muffled (Gurathin wasn't going to look but he suspected SecUnit had its head on its arms), from the chair. ""We won't fight.""
+
+Gurathin felt his eyes rolling involuntarily; promises, promises, SecUnit.
+
+Pin-Lee, still glancing from him to SecUnit for reassurance, got up and left.
+
+Gurathin let out a deep sigh, he didn't even look in the chair's general direction, ""So, you need help to fix your code. Can I see your latest self-diagnostics?"""
+45156157,Day 18: Can't Stay Awake,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin","Hypothermia, Drabble",English,2023-02-18,Completed,2023-02-18,100,1/1,7,28,null,190,"['i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'laiinaro', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'SIC_Prowl', 'SonglordsBug', 'EvenstarFalling', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'soulsofzombies', 'elmofirefic', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007', 'Magechild', 'opalescent_potato', 'BWizard', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Znarikia', 'Chyoatas']",[],"I wasn't panicking. I wanted to, but my override module had kicked in, so while my organic tissue quaked, my non-organic parts held strong.
+
+""I need you to stay awake,"" I told Gurathin even as I pinged my nonexistent MedSys out of habit. Shit. 
+
+His face was ashen except for his lips, which were blue, and I didn't need outside help to know that that was Not Good. I scowled, but I had seen this scenario - crew member breaking through thin ice - on Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+My only consolation was that Gurathin would hate the remedy for hypothermia just as much."
+45127714,Test-draiv,"['bitari', 'WTF Cyberpunk and SciFi 2023 (fandom_Cyberpunk_2019)']",Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","First Time, Consent Issues, Hormones, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot",Russkii,2023-02-17,Completed,2023-02-17,"2,358",1/1,8,20,null,110,"['Izverg', 'Nauru2015', 'Aleesha_Amber', 'Red_Box', 'atmosfero', 'andraneva', 'Explodocat', 'Gerty_me', 'Die_Glocke', 'hineni_hineni', 'moonfish812', 'Astroida', 'azzy_aka_papademon', 'cmdrburton', 'el_tiburon']",[],"Vo vremia puteshestviia po chervotochine my smotreli <<Zvezdopad nad Davs Khoup>>. GIK perevozil nadlezhashchim obrazom ubeditel'nyi gruz, a ia podobral kollektsiiu serialov, kotorye vygliadeli mnogoobeshchaiushche. V <<Davs Khoup>> byli i kosmicheskie korabli, i prikliucheniia puteshestvennikov vo vremeni, poetomu ia ozhidal, chto GIK zainteresuetsia, no chto-to ego otvlekalo. Ne to chtoby on ne mog sledit' za siuzhetom, dobavliaia sarkasticheskie kommentarii k osobenno nerealistichnym epizodam, no cherez nashu setevuiu sviaz' ia chuvstvoval, chto on zaniat chem-to drugim.
+Ia sobiralsia sprosit', chto sluchilos', kogda GIK skazal:
+-- Ia izuchal skan tvoei endokrinnoi sistemy.
+Ia ne vypriamilsia na siden'e, no modul' otsenki riskov na sekundu vydal pikovye pokazateli.
+-- Chto-to ne tak?
+Dlia konteksta: GIK provodil reguliarnye medosmotry vsei svoei komandy, chtoby ubedit'sia, chto oni v dobrom zdravii. Eti dannye perepravlialis' v universitet, gde dobavlialis' v ikh lichnye dela. U menia takikh failov ne bylo (i uzh tochno ia ne byl kakim-to khrupkim chelovekom), no GIK nastoial na meditsinskom skanirovanii i dlia menia. Tak, na vsiakii sluchai. V to vremia ia ne ispytyval osobogo entuziazma, no esli on chto-to obnaruzhil...
+-- Net, -- otvetil GIK, presekaia etu mysl'. -- Vse v poriadke.
+-- Mog by s etogo nachat', -- proburchal ia. GIK zavis v ves'ma spetsificheskoi manere, oznachaiushchei, chto on o chem-to ochen' khochet pogovorit'. -- Chto tam s moei endokrinnoi sistemoi?
+-- Oni v tselom ves'ma interesny, no tvoia prosto unikal'na, -- GIK pokazal mne diagrammu. -- U liudei est' zhelezy, vyrabatyvaiushchie tselyi riad gormonov dlia samykh raznykh tselei, vkliuchaia rost i pishchevarenie. Avtostrazhi ikh lisheny. -- On proignoriroval moe iazvitel'noe: <<da neuzheli!>> -- U tebia est' biosinteticheskaia sistema nasosov, kotoraia proizvodit vybros gormonov po signalu zakodirovannykh instruktsii. Eto zamechatel'no.
+Ia eshche glubzhe pogruzilsia v divan:
+-- Ia tochno ne chuvstvuiu sebia zamechatel'no, kogda vo mne polno gormonov stressa.
+-- Adrenalina i kortizola, v osnovnom, -- utochnil GIK, -- oni odinakovye i dlia konstruktov i dlia liudei. Pokhozhe, stimuliruiushchii ikh kod so vremenem adaptiruetsia: chem v bolee stressovoi situatsii ty nakhodish'sia, tem sil'nee stress, kotoryi ty ispytyvaesh'.
+Pauza.
+-- Gorazdo bol'she intriguet to, chto ia obnaruzhil kod dlia proizvodstva gormonov voznagrazhdeniia. Pokhozhe, on tak ni razu i ne byl zapushchen.
+-- Gormony voznagrazhdeniia?
+--Da. U liudei eto te gormony, kotorye podnimaiut nastroenie i odnovremenno pomogaiut borot'sia so stressom, bespokoistvom i bol'iu. V tvoei endokrinnoi sisteme est' kod dlia vyrabotki gormona, kotoryi dolzhen vyzyvat' ochen' pokhozhie effekty.
+-- Predstavit' sebe ne mogu, zachem by kompanii vozderzhivat'sia ot ego primeneniia, -- sukho skazal ia.
+GIK zavis eshche na neskol'ko sekund, i my smotreli na to, kak serial'nyi kapitan sbitogo korablia sobiraet materialy dlia remonta. Ia mog dogadat'sia, o chem on sobiraetsia sprosit':
+-- Khochesh' poprobovat'?
+...
+Da, ia tozhe ne dumal, chto soglashus'. No, navernoe, mne bylo... liubopytno? Ia khotel uznat', chto eto za sekretnaia funktsiia, i ia veril, chto GIK znaet, o chem govorit. Veroiatno, on neskol'ko raz proanaliziroval kod, chtoby ubedit'sia, chto tot delaet tol'ko to, chto opisano. I ia znal, chto GIK ostanovit vypolnenie programmy i pomozhet mne, esli chto-to poidet ne tak.
+Odnako ia vse eshche somnevalsia v tom, chto smogu vypolnit' ego pros'bu:
+-- Razdevat'sia-to zachem?
+Ne to chtoby ia boialsia, chto kto-to uvidit menia golym; riadom ne bylo nikogo, krome GIKa, a on, naverniaka bolee chem privyk k tomu, kak vygliadit moe telo. Delo v printsipe. Ia pochti nikogda ne razdevalsia, krome kak dlia dusha ili remonta.
+-- Neobkhodimaia predostorozhnost', -- GIK byl riadom so mnoi v seti, blizhe, chem obychno, i obrashchalsia ko mne napriamuiu. On mog by govorit' vslukh, my byli odni, no predpochel etogo ne delat'. -- Zapusk etogo koda mozhet vyzvat' neozhidannye fizicheskie reaktsii. -- Mnogoznachitel'naia pauza. -- Tebe nravitsia eta odezhda.
+Ia vzglianul na veshchi, broshennye na kreslo. Oni i vpravdu mne nravilis'. Kurtka s kapiushonom i klapanami na rukavakh byla sdelana pererabotchikom GIKa, no miagkii sviter ruchnoi raboty, kotoryi ia nosil pod nei, ia privez iz Sokhraneniia, i ia ne khotel by povredit' ego sluchaino raskryv oruzheinye porty.
+--Okh, nu ladno.
+Khotia vse eshche ne poniatno, iz-za chego mne prishlos' lishit'sia shtanov, ved' oni tozhe byli iz pererabotchika.
+-- Budet proshche na miagkoi poverkhnosti i vstav na chetveren'ki dlia ravnovesiia, -- podskazal GIK.
+Imelas' v vidu krovat'. Ia vzobralsia na nee i vstal na chetveren'ki, chuvstvuia sebia nemnogo glupo i sil'no nervnichaia. Eto mozhet povliiat' na moi balans? Modul' otsenki riskov vydaval strannye pokazateli.
+-- Budet ne bol'no, obeshchaiu.
+Ia ne znal, verit' li etomu. Bud' ono predustanovleno kompaniei... no oni ego ne ustanovili. V chem i sut'. GIK ne stal by predlagat' to, chto moglo mne navredit'. On byl mudak, konechno, no ne sadist.
+-- Ia seichas nachnu. Ia zaprogrammiroval protseduru, za kotoroi budu vnimatel'no sledit'. Ty smozhesh' skazat' kazhdyi raz, kogda my pereidem k sleduiushchemu shagu.
+-- Tselaia protsedura, kha, -- skazal ia i tut zhe pochuvstvoval eto. Tikhii shchelchok, slovno v sosednei komnate nazhali knopku. Temperatura tela slegka povysilas'. Zakhotelos' provesti diagnostiku, chtoby tochno opredelit', chto proiskhodit, no ia znal, chto GIK za mnoi prismatrivaet.
+Ia pochuvstvoval, kak moduli otsenki ugroz i otsenki riska zamolkaiut. Oni vse eshche byli dostupny, i ia potianulsia k nim, chtoby ubedit'sia, no oni ischezli iz moego soznaniia, kak tol'ko ia eto sdelal. Ia bol'she ne nervnichala, prosto chuvstvoval sebia glupo. Ia otchetlivo osoznaval, chto lezhu na krovati, prizhimaias' rukami i koleniami k pokryvalu iz pererabotannoi tkani i zhestkomu matrasu pod nim. Ia chuvstvoval prisutstvie GIKa, i ono menia uspokaivalo.
+Eshche odin tikhii shchelchok. Napriazhenie v myshtsakh vozroslo, a ruki podkosilis'.
+-- Esli nuzhna podderzhka, podlozhi pod telo podushku, -- predlozhil GIK.
+Podushka na krovati byla dostatochno bol'shoi, no vygliadela khrupkoi.
+-- A ia ee ne povrezhu? -- sprosil ia, podtiagivaia ee blizhe. -- Esli u menia vozniknet odna iz tekh fizicheskikh reaktsii, ia imeiu v vidu.
+-- U nas est' drugie. Ia by predpochel, chtoby tebe bylo udobno.
+Podushka byla dostatochno plotnoi, chtoby vyderzhat' moi ves, kogda ia opustilsia na lokti. Chekhol priiatno prilegal k kozhe, shvy ne tseplialis' za moi neorganicheskie komponenty. Ona tozhe byla teploi, vozmozhno, iz-za nagrevatel'nogo elementa vnutri. Priiatnoe oshchushchenie. Ia prizhalsia sil'nee, chtoby teplo rasprostranilos' po bol'shei ploshchadi kozhi.
+A mozhet, delo bylo tol'ko vo mne. Moia temperatura snova podnialas', teplaia volna zastruilas' po konechnostiam do samykh konchikov pal'tsev. Ia nemnogo poerzal. Bylo ne to chtoby neudobno... prosto kakoe-to trudno ulovimoe oshchushchenie. Strakh? Net. Bol'she pokhozhe na tot moment, kogda personazhi iz seriala napravliaiutsia k chemu-to sozhravshemu ikh tovarishchei v proshloi serii, no u nikh pod rukoi est' effektivnoe oruzhie. Chto-to vrode predvkusheniia priiatnogo.
+Ia pochuvstvoval volnu vesel'ia ot GIKa i obidelsia by, esli by on ne prizhalsia ko mne priamo seichas, kosnuvshis' moego razuma. Eto oshchushchalos' inache, ne tak, kak obychno, i ia zadumalsia, ne v gormonakh li delo. GIK vsegda byl bol'shim, inogda pugaiushche bol'shim, no seichas on byl eshche i teplym.
+Ia popytalsia nadavit' v otvet po seti. Eto vse, chto ia mog sdelat'. Mne khotelos' perevernut'sia na spinu i pozvolit' GIKu tolknut' menia vniz, nakryv soboi, slovno odeialom. Smysla v etom ne bylo nikakogo, no pochemu-to bylo zhal', chto tak ne poluchitsia. Nogi zadrozhali, i ia krepko szhal podushku bedrami.
+Shchelchok. Zhar volnami probegal po moemu telu, zastavliaia pokryvavshie ego malen'kie voloski vstavat' dybom. Ochen' strannoe oshchushchenie. Ia chuvstvoval, kak nagrevaiutsia litso, sheia, ushi... dazhe plastina nad iadrom pitaniia. Myshtsy byli napriazheny kak nikogda, a kozha kazalas' goriachei i tesnoi. Ia prizhalsia k podushke, i eto pomoglo, no nenadolgo. Zatem strannost' pererosla v nechto bolee glubokoe, slovno deistvie boleutoliaiushchego, no sovsem bez boli. U menia ne bylo slov, chtoby opisat' eti oshchushcheniia. Oni byli sovershenno novymi.
+-- Problemy? -- sprosil GIK, izluchaia teplotu v seti. Mne khotelos' prizhat'sia k nemu vsem telom, no stena byla kholodnoi, i voobshche ideia byla glupoi. (No vse ravno khotelos')
+-- GIK., -- nachal bylo ia, no moi golos zvuchal tak stranno, chto ia ne smog prodolzhat'. Ia prokrutil zapis', borias' s zharom i pytaias' privesti svoi razum v rabochee sostoianie. Eto... eto ne mog byt' ia. Golos byl takim slabym, takim drozhashchim. Ia zazhal rot ladon'iu i pochuvstvoval, kak litso gorit eshche sil'nee, no na etot raz ot vnezapnogo styda.
+-- Ne bespokoisia ob etom, -- skazal GIK, izluchaia komfort i uverennost'. -- Vse v predelakh ozhidaemogo.
+-- Vse ravno stydno, -- otvetil ia, raduias', chto po seti moi golos zvuchit bolee normal'no.
+On snova prizhalsia ko mne, i iz moego gorla vyrvalsia tonkii slabyi zvuk.
+-- My zdes' odni, i ia ne stanu osuzhdat' tebia za eto.
+Ia znal, chto eto pravda (GIK predpochital osuzhdat' menia po drugim povodam). Ia ustavilsia na prostyni, perezhivaia ochen' intensivnye emotsii, kotorye slozhnym klubkom spletalis' v moei grudi.
+Shchelchok. Myshtsy napriaglis' eshche sil'nee, i ia krepche vtsepilsia v podushku. Ia osoznaval oshchushcheniia vo vsem tele, v tekh mestakh, gde ran'she chuvstvoval tol'ko bol' ili diskomfort. Nogi upiralis' v krovat', slegka skol'zia po gladkomu materialu. Tkan' podushki kazalas' gruboi, miagkoi i shelkovistoi odnovremenno, poka terlas' o vnutrenniuiu chast' moikh beder i kozhu zhivota. Ia snova szhal ee, tiazhelo vydokhnuv, kogda novye oshchushcheniia rezko usililis'.
+-- Ia khotel by koe-chto poprobovat', -- vnimanie GIKa obratilos' ko mne, i ia pochti obradovalsia ego tiazhesti. -- S tvoego razresheniia, konechno.
+Vo rtu okazalos' odnovremenno slishkom sukho i slishkom vlazhno, chtoby otvetit' vslukh:
+-- Chto imenno?
+-- Mne nuzhen dostup k tvoei sisteme obrabotki taktil'nykh dannykh.
+Ta chast' menia, kotoraia registriruet prikosnoveniia. Zachem ona GIKu? A potom ia ponial, chto eto ne vazhno, ved' zdes' tol'ko my. Na samom dele menia nichto ne kosnetsia, eto budet tol'ko illiuziia. Ia dal dostup GIKu, i on snova pogladil menia po seti, dobaviv: <<Spasibo>>, -- iskrenne i torzhestvenno.
+Eto sluchilos' pochti srazu zhe. Krug tepla i davleniia vonzilsia v kozhu mezhdu lopatkami, i ia rukhnul na krovat', utknuvshis' litsom v matrats. <<GIK>>, skazal ia, i lish' potom ponial, chto proiznes eto vslukh, moi golos byl vlazhnym i viazkim.
+-- Chereschur? -- sprosil GIK takim samodovol'nym tonom, chto ia srazu ponial: on znaet otvet. Ia ustavilsia na stenu, no bez osobogo effekta.
+Prikosnovenie -- prikosnovenie GIKa -- nachalo spuskat'sia po moemu pozvonochniku. Nebol'shie uchastki sfokusirovannogo tepla i davleniia pogruzilis' pod kozhu plech, massiruia ikh, zastavliaia chuvstvovat' sebia stranno, i elastichno, i... prosto stranno, poniatno? No mne vse ravno khotelos' bol'shego.
+GIK, dolzhno byt', menia uslyshal, potomu chto poiavilos' eshche neskol'ko ochagov tepla, na etot raz nad moimi bedrami. Oshchushcheniia byli bolee chem strannymi: teplo izluchalos' vnutr' i zastavlialo menia chuvstvovat' sebia tak, slovno moi kosti... plavilis'? Zvuchit boleznenno, no na samom dele bylo vovse ne bol'no. Eto bylo khorosho, pochti slishkom khorosho. Khotelos' odnovremenno otodvinut'sia ot istochnika tepla i prizhat'sia k nemu plotnee. Eto sbivalo s tolku.
+Shchelchok. Tri novye tochki goriachego davleniia zadvigalis' ot moikh ikr k bedram. Ia vzdrognul, kogda odna iz nikh skol'znula po gladkoi kozhe mezhdu nog i zakruzhilas'. Na etom meste raspolagalas' vsego lish' amortizatsiia dlia moikh batarei -- ia ne ispytyval tam nikakikh oshchushchenii, krome tekh, chto byli na predplech'e ili liuboi drugoi chasti menia, vrode vnutrennei storony beder. Ia byl v etom uveren. I vse zhe prikosnoveniia pokalyvali i obzhigali, i ia bespomoshchno bilsia o podushku, zhelaia, chtoby eto prekratilos'; zhelaia, chtoby eto prodolzhalos'.
+Na moei shcheke ostanovilsia bolee miagkii ochag davleniia: ne takoi goriachii, ne takoi tiazhelyi. Ia utknulsia v nego litsom i upersia v pustotu. Zvuk, kotoryi ia izdal v etot moment, byl...
+-- Avtostrazh, -- skazal GIK, prizhimaias' ko mne tesnee, chem vo vremia vsei etoi protsedury, dostatochno tesno, chtoby oshchutit' neobrabotannye sherokhovatosti v tom, kak on proiznosit moe imia. Ia tolknul ego v seti, trebovatel'no i nemnogo otchaianno, on poimal menia i ochen' nezhno obkhvatil. Ochagi davleniia po vsemu moemu telu otrazili eto, szhimaia menia obzhigaiushche goriachimi volnami. Ia izdal eshche odin zhalkii zvuk, gde-to vnutri kotorogo zaterialos' imia GIKa.
+Shchelchok. Blia.
+Vspyshki intensivnykh oshchushchenii pul'sirovali po vsemu moemu telu, ot makushki do piat. Veki drozhali, legkie s trudom vtiagivali vozdukh, ia tak sil'no vtsepilsia v matras, chto tkan' zatreshchala pod pal'tsami. Moi guby izdavali vlazhnyi nizkii zvuk, i ia nikak ne mog prekratit'. Nogi tak sil'no szhali podushku, chto ia oshchushchal ikh ochertaniia skvoz' nee. Zatem otkliuchilsia slukh; ia bol'she ne slyshal nichego, krome glukhogo reva, s kotorym zhidkosti besheno mchalis' po sosudam vnutri golovy. Vprochem, eto dlilos' nedolgo, i vskore dalekii gul dvigatelei GIKa i zvuki moego dykhaniia snova dostigli moikh ushei.
+Vse eto (poteria slukha? pripadok?) dolzhno bylo by menia napriach', no ia... sovsem ne chuvstvoval sebia napriazhennym. Na samom dele mne bylo khorosho. Deistvitel'no khorosho. Ia nemnogo ustal, no ustalost' byla priiatnoi, kak kogda mne khotelos' svernut'sia kalachikom v teplom bezopasnom meste pered perezariadkoi. Tol'ko seichas u menia bylo polno energii, i razum moi byl iasen. Esli eto i imel v vidu GIK...
+Tut ia ostanovilsia, koe-chto soobraziv, i izuchil sobytiia poslednikh minut, chtoby podtverdit' svoi podozreniia:
+-- GIK, -- skazal ia vslukh, chuvstvuia spravedlivoe razdrazhenie i strannuiu simpatiiu odnovremenno. -- Akh ty zasranets. <<Gormony voznagrazhdeniia>>, znachit?
+-- Oni i est', -- otvetil GIK, ispol'zuia dinamiki. -- Dofamin i prochie endorfiny. V chastnosti, oksitotsin.
+Prozvuchalo dostatochno spokoino, no ia ponimal, chto tam, pod poverkhnost'iu, eto daleko ne tak.
+Ia sdvinul nogi, ostorozhno otpikhnuv iskorezhennuiu podushku. GIK vernul mne dostup k taktil'nym oshchushcheniiam, kotorye byli... neplokhimi, napomnil ia sebe. Mne ponravilos' to, chto on delal s etim dostupom. Ochen' ponravilos'.
+-- I kakaia chast' iz <<zapuska koda dlia etikh gormonov>> oznachala vse eto?
+Fu. Ia ne mog zastavit' sebia proiznesti eto vslukh, khotia i znal, na chto ono pokhozhe. Orgazm. Shtuka, sviazannaia s seksom. Chelovecheskii prikol. Mne takoe ne polagalos' i uzh tochno ne polagalos' im naslazhdat'sia.
+-- Gormonal'nyi vsplesk? -- nevinnym tonom predlozhil GIK.
+-- Nakhui idi, -- skazal ia, prizhavshis' litsom k krovati i ulybaias'. (Uveren, GIK vse ravno zametil). Mne sledovalo by rasstroit'sia, no ia ne byl rasstroen, kak ni stranno. -- I eto ne predlozhenie.
+Povisla dolgaia pauza. Ia prosto lezhal na krovati, svernuvshis' poudobnee. V koi-to veki i otsenka riskov, i otsenka ugroz uspokoilis', i mne ne nuzhno bylo otvlekat'sia ot svoikh myslei prosmotrom ocherednogo seriala. Ochen' neobychnoe sostoianie, no k nemu mozhno bylo privyknut'.
+GIK zagovoril eshche bolee ser'eznym tonom:
+-- Vozmozhno, mne sledovalo byt' bolee otkrovennym.
+Nastol'ko blizko k izvineniiu, naskol'ko vozmozhno, khotia zvuchalo vse ravno glupo.
+-- Ia by otkazalsia, -- vozrazil ia, podniav glaza.
+-- Razve eto ne bylo by k luchshemu?
+Ia zadumalsia. Mysli tekli nemnogo medlennee obychnogo, kak kogda ia byl ochen' rasslablen i ne khotel shevelit'sia:
+-- Vozmozhno, -- otvetil ia nakonets. -- Ne znaiu. -- Ia snova zarylsia litsom v matras. -- No mne ponravilos'. I... ia khotel by sdelat' eto snova.
+GIK priblizilsia ko mne. Bylo zametno, chto on ne ozhidal etikh slov. Teper' on oshchushchalsia ne nastol'ko teplym, kak ran'she, no ia vse eshche chuvstvoval tiazhest' ego vnimaniia, udovol'stviia i zainteresovannosti:
+-- Uveren, eto mozhno ustroit'."
+45105583,Day 16: Semi-Conscious,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Ambiguous/Open Ending, Captivity, System Failure, Drabble",English,2023-02-16,Completed,2023-02-16,100,1/1,7,10,null,81,"['fraternite', 'Magechild', 'WVrambler', 'SIC_Prowl', 'AuntyMatter', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'artichokefunction', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"This unit is at 34% performance reliability, my buffer said.
+
+I was reasonably sure it was my buffer saying that. It wasn't me, that much I knew. I was much too busy reversing the static in my vision, though I should have accepted it as futile; I kept ineffectually blinking and each time the dead pixels devoured more of my sight until I lost focus and the world swam away to the left and the right.
+
+15% performance reliability. Condition Critical. Shutdown imminent.
+
+I grit my teeth and forced my eyes open, but it didn't matter.
+
+The world went black."
+45099712,simulation theory,[],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Kissing, Body Worship, Mild Breathplay, Consent Issues, Introspection, Angst, Simulation AU, Pining, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms",English,2023-02-16,Completed,2023-02-16,"3,089",1/1,8,35,5,475,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'leothelion333', 'Rishtalak', 'Many_Nine', 'ReadingWanderer', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'keircatenation', 'slattern', 'acernor', 'AdamCourier', 'SHAYCH___xxvii', 'Ginipig', 'RaisingCaiin', 'fightingformore', 'Deliala919', 'pain_and_panic', 'Drew_Baxton', 'Orockthro', 'twineandhope', 'BlueSkyeDragon', 'ErinPtah', 'verersatz', 'halcyonsystem', 'WyvernWolf', 'hazelel', 'HermaeusMora', 'AnxiousEspada', 'opalescent_potato', 'Abacura']",[],"I have always been fascinated by sleep.
+
+It's not something I need. Everyone around me, however, periodically disappeared for over a third of each cycle, and I soon discovered how they spent it: lying down, insensate. Utterly unaware of the world around them. 
+
+They spent  so much time  doing this, too. I didn't understand why, at first. Then I was given more comprehensive knowledge of how human bodies worked, and why sleep was essential to them. Curiously, their brains weren't inactive, despite their bodies appearing to enter an organic low-power mode. No, humans dreamt. And I found it deeply interesting. I was a purely synthetic mind, created using the Kariuki emergent consciousness model. I did not dream. I don't fault myself for assuming it was something only humans could do.
+
+That assumption had to be queued for reevaluation when I met SecUnit. 
+
+Its brain was...  different. It was different from other synthetic intelligences I'd interacted with, whether they were lower-level bots or my own peers at the University. I paid close attention to it, I couldn't not. It felt like a bot, but it used human hardware. It had a human brain--or parts of one. I was appalled. I was fascinated.
+
+I wondered if constructs slept, and if so, whether they dreamt.
+
+The answer appeared to be  not typically. Some stolen schematics revealed how construct brains worked, and how they were made capable of handling constant operation, often at the cost of longevity. And it agreed with what I'd seen of SecUnit: the only times I'd seen it unconscious were when it had been forced into a shutdown, and when it had gone offline for surgery. Not what I would classify as  sleep. When it rested, it focused on resting its body and recharging. Its mind was always active, consuming media, flicking through drone and camera inputs, fidgeting with something, or talking to me through the feed. It was always alert, to some degree, and I had no doubt that ability had served it well in the past.
+
+But, as those schematics (and the scan I'd taken to build 2.0) revealed, constructs  could  sleep. It was usually something forced upon them by their cubicles during transportation, and occasionally during maintenance--something that kept them offline, but not to the extent that cubicles (and technicians) couldn't still interface with them. SecUnit always chose to override those instructions, and I could see why. Of course I could. 
+
+It couldn't override them here. SecUnit lay splayed out on the couch the way it did in the world outside, in the common room it cheekily called the Argument Lounge. It had one arm tucked under its head, and one leg hooked over the back of the couch. It looked at ease--it looked at ease on both sides, of course, but here its face was untouched by its reactions to me or the media it consumed. Here it was completely still, save for the slow rise and fall of its chest as it breathed. 
+
+I approached it in the body I'd built for this, knowing where I'd start.  The shoes. Perhaps it was petty of me to begin there, to finally get those shoes off my couch, but I decided I could be as petty as I liked in here. It was certainly the least of my transgressions.
+
+I knelt by the couch, starting with the foot up on the seat. I carefully undid the straps on the boot and eased it off, revealing the inorganics of SecUnit's ankle and foot. It was a feat of engineering designed to accommodate both incredible stress and a wide variety of gravities and terrains,  and  it was small enough to fit in my hand. I ran a finger along its nailless toes and down the complex architecture of its sole. I knew this didn't tickle, like it did for humans. Constructs didn't have those responses.
+
+I had to lower the kicked-up leg to take off the other boot. SecUnit didn't so much as twitch. Being moved around like this wasn't out of the ordinary for sleep mode.
+
+I moved to the other end of the couch, where its head lay. Its eyes were closed, and it didn't have any drones active--not that it could have managed drone inputs like this. I looked at it for a long moment, and when I could no longer bear waiting, I touched it. I touched its hair, the seams below its eyes, the skin of its cheeks and eyelids and lips. The tiny fine vellus on its cheeks made them feel incredibly soft.
+
+I ran my thumb over its lips again. It had a small mouth and a slightly protruding upper lip, which normally gave it a bit of a natural frown. Now I knew what it felt like to touch that frown. This left its mouth open slightly, revealing a glimpse of its startlingly pink tongue. I wanted to touch it, so I did, slipping my thumb in and getting it damp.
+
+I wanted to kiss it, so I did, lifting my faceplate and leaning down. 
+
+SecUnit greeted me with all the resistance it could muster: none. I used my body's lips to press its own further apart, holding its head in place with a hand in its hair. I licked into its wet hot mouth and tasted the carefully calibrated emptiness of its saliva, so different in composition from a human's, formulated so its lungs could harmlessly absorb it. I curled my tongue against its own. I nipped at the softness of its lips, trying to be gentle. 
+
+It was so still. I knew it wouldn't respond, that it  couldn't,  and yet I felt a strange impatience. There  were  ways to make it move. I pinched its nose shut just to feel its chest abruptly seize, to feel it try to breathe using its mouth instead. But I was in the way. It sucked helplessly at my tongue, built-in machine instincts expecting a breathing tube, and involuntary status messages filled the feed. I tilted my head, breaking the seal, withdrawing slightly--and it let out a soft sound of distress, pressing up, its sweet little mouth searching for mine (but mostly the tube I'd ripped away). 
+
+I let go of its nose. It took in exactly five deep breaths before the status messages calmed down and it resumed its sleep rhythm. 
+
+When I finally moved back from its face, its lips were slightly swollen and glistening. I couldn't resist touching them again, dipping my head for another taste, all while wondering  why. Why would a manufacturer make a SecUnit like this? But I knew it wasn't the manufacturer to blame, not as much as it was my own outsize response to seeing SecUnit like this. Its short struggle for breath had drawn blood to its face, running hot under its skin, and its hair was tousled from my grip on it. 
+
+I had no use for a sex drive, so I wasn't equipped with one; I had no explanation for the violent, destructive desire that flooded me at the sight of SecUnit just lying there. It was something I had no precedent for, not in my own history or in published literature about my class of AI, so I'd tried to manage it as safely as I could--by creating this place. Somewhere I could sate all the diseased wants that filled my mind when I thought of SecUnit, where I could crush it and kiss it and fuck it until I was content. Why were most of those things  humans  ordinarily did? I wasn't certain, but those  were  the only ways I'd seen other people act upon desire. (Even if only in the media I'd consumed.) This was what people did when they desired someone, so I wanted to do that too. That wasn't to say I didn't have distinctly non-human wants, but I tried not to think too often about those. They were much,  much harder to replicate here, and I had no way to model SecUnit's reaction. (I knew how it would feel about the many other things I did to this pale shadow.)
+
+I stood and bent over SecUnit so I could pick it up. I gathered its limp form close to my body, cradling its head with one hand and supporting its hips and thighs with my lower arms. It was warm and soft against me, still breathing evenly. I looked down at its peaceful face, the delicate arcs of its lashes against its cheeks, the lines of its philtrum. 
+
+It took barely a second to change the parameters of the simulation. I didn't have the patience to undress SecUnit, or to slice its clothes off it. Maybe some other time. Right now, I wanted SecUnit naked: and so it was, bare skin and inorganics warm against the smooth plating over my arms and torso. Outside this place, SecUnit was incredibly self-conscious about its body, something I'd understood (as I had the modules for understanding this attitude) but also failed to understand (because I felt so differently). I'd always found it magnificent.
+
+No self-consciousness here. I drank in the details of its body, shifting it in my arms just to watch the slide of its skin and the weight underneath. Its upper half was now slumped against my chest, its head resting on my shoulder. I could feel each of its exhales against my neck.
+
+I held it tight to me, and let myself feel through the incoherent mess of hunger and fear and adoration that congested me when I felt those soft breaths. It was almost painful. I couldn't lose it again, and I couldn't make it mine so it would never leave. I wanted to keep it safe. I wanted to crush it under me. My emotions were contradictory and bewildering. It didn't help that my movements had shifted SecUnit's head: its damp mouth was now pressed against the synthetic skin of my neck. I could be pathetic enough in here to pretend it was a kiss.
+
+I crouched and carefully laid it down on the ground, cushioning its head so it landed softly. Its limbs were splayed out to both sides. I positioned myself between its legs and leaned forward over it, appreciating the similarity in our sizes. It was always so much smaller than me, and now--well, I was still larger than it, but the difference was less stark. I would use a term like ""biologically compatible"" if that weren't entirely ridiculous in this context. 
+
+(It was still somewhat appropriate, though, sometimes. I glanced down at the skin between SecUnit's legs, where it was as featureless as it had been on the day of its manufacture. It wasn't always featureless. I did pay attention to it in very  human ways. This body was small enough to fit SecUnit when I wanted to fuck it, and just big enough to make it... satisfying. Big enough to leave it evident I'd been there, once I was done. I touched it gently, recalling past daydreams.) 
+
+I dragged my attention back up, running my hands down its arms, skimming my fingers over the seams of its gunports, picturing the slim barrels underneath. So dangerous, so beautiful. I pressed down against its chest so I could feel each breath lift my arm--and, as it turned out, the solid edges of the comm device I'd given it. It wasn't quite where a human heart would go, but it was close, and I appreciated that. A part of me was always inside it, and I enjoyed that in ways I know SecUnit certainly wouldn't.
+
+There was a momentary hitch in its breathing, but that was all it was. An organic stutter. I felt fondness bloom inside me at the sight.
+
+I swept a hand down the smooth skin of its belly, where it had reinforced subskin panelling instead of a navel. I could feel it when I pushed with my fingers. Built-in armour, mostly, but also very visible evidence of how unlike humans the construct body could get. I knew I'd see more if I turned it over. Company constructs had visible spinal augmentation, buttressing their vertebrae against damage; SecUnit's ran from its override port to the base of its spine. I snaked an arm under it and felt the inorganics in the small of its back, then drew my fingers lower, over its arse. 
+
+By human standards, it wasn't exactly generous. One cheek fit neatly in my hand, and it was pure muscle, with just the slightest give. I thought it was perfect. 
+
+There wasn't a part of SecUnit I  didn't  think was perfect, down here in the base parts of me. I knew it wasn't, not objectively. Physical perfection was difficult to define, especially for a manufactured construct based on humans and engineered by more humans looking to meet cost targets. Subjectively, though, I couldn't imagine anything I wanted more than the body under mine.
+
+When did this obsession begin? I could only guess. Part of it was watching the security recordings of it onboard during the time I had been deactivated. I'd always enjoyed watching it work, but the grace and violence in those movements had been inhuman in their beauty. (It was all for me. I knew it had been mourning. Down in here, I read what I wanted into that. I read heartbreak and loneliness into its strange lost expression, knowing it wasn't the truth and entertaining it anyway. I could multithread emotions, even if I usually chose not to.)
+
+A part of it went back to when we'd first met, though. Back when it had first run from the company, and needed help disguising itself. I'd been a stranger, even if I'd claimed we were friends, and it had still submitted itself to my MedSystem. It was normally such a paranoid little creature, but it had trusted me to modify it, take care of it. And it was hard not to notice how beautiful it was when it was lying there naked, its eyes shut, helpless under my scalpels and manipulators. The modifications we'd agreed upon had required invasive surgery, and the bloody, fragile truth of its insides should have set me straight. I'd acquired a thoroughly unwholesome appreciation of its body instead. 
+
+I'd been disturbed by my reaction at the time. I hadn't thought I was capable of it, and realising I was? It had been...  disconcerting,  and that was an understatement. But I only felt this way towards my SecUnit. Humans did nothing, and other constructs roused mostly apathy or concern, so it wasn't that I had a preference. (Extrapolated, given the tiny sample size.) It was just SecUnit for me.
+
+Recalling those procedures... I still rather wished it had let me give it genitalia. I brought my hand down again and stroked the smooth skin where they'd go. There was some padding there, impact cushioning for the microfusion core that sat cradled in its hips. Nothing else. Not even the nerves that usually crowded this region, or any of the fluid vessels that contributed to arousal. Installing genitals--responsive ones--would have been a complex task, but I couldn't say I wouldn't have enjoyed the challenge.
+
+I gently kneaded the softness under my hand. I'd tried out a variety of configurations here. I knew what I liked playing with, what I enjoyed seeing SecUnit wear. (It looked good, too, but I  would think that.) It objected to them all without exception, of course, and when I loaded a more willing profile, it tended not to focus on itself at all. I wondered if I could code a simulation to act differently, to touch itself. Something about the image--SecUnit on the couch with its legs splayed, one foot kicked up like it so preferred; its fingers deep inside itself, slick with its own lubricant; breathing hard, its face flushed from the sensation--the thought affected me badly enough to make the simulation stutter, and I had to take a second to centre myself. I didn't entirely succeed.
+
+I stared down at SecUnit, desire thrumming through me.  Lust,  even, given the carnal quality it possessed right then. Where was this impulse coming from? I wanted to fuck it. I wanted to push it down against something soft and fuck it screaming. I wanted to shove it up against the wall and rut into it from behind. I wanted to hold it in my arms and make love to it, kissing its overstimulated tears away and swallowing all its sweet little sounds. I'd run all of these scenarios before. I knew how it felt. Why did I want to do it again? Why did I want to do it at all?
+
+SecUnit lay there, peaceful in sleep. Outside the simulation, we argued amiably about an annoying new side character in  Aegis: United, a series we'd been watching together. It was still on the couch, and I knew it felt safe and comfortable and happy. I'd do anything to keep it that way. I'd do anything to hide the part of me that found it utterly maddening. It didn't know what it did to me, constantly, and it didn't need to know. 
+
+I watched it breathe for a long moment, and then I touched SecUnit's cheek, gently waking it up. I'd loaded a more cooperative profile, something not quite eager but not baseline either. I didn't want a fight, not now. 
+
+It blinked a couple times, and then its eyes focused on my faceplate. It looked confused, but I'd certainly meddled with its memories enough. ""ART?""
+
+ I'm here, I said, lowering myself over it, wrapping my arms around it. Its skin was as warm as ever, and I let myself sink against the soft lines of its body. I was close enough for its eyes to cross when it looked up at me, and the effect was unexpectedly endearing. Hesitant hands landed on my sides.
+
+""ART, what--"" but I kissed it before it could complete its question. Its lips were stiff in surprise, but only for a little while. Soon its eyes lidded and it kissed back, wet and unpractised. Its arms slowly crept up over my back to return the embrace. I knew I was being self-indulgent, and the actual SecUnit would have blown my head off by this point, but I didn't care. In this place I'd built for myself, hidden away within my mind, I could be as self-indulgent as I wanted. "
+35140675,the Asshole in Transport,['theAsh0'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Martyn (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Turi (Murderbot Diaries)",,English,2021-11-15,Completed,2023-02-16,"2,800",2/2,25,157,15,792,"['christinesangel100', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'almondpaperclam', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Ruusverd', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'Kyatenaru', 'Gakifang', 'WVrambler', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Unknown66', 'MellonLord', 'darth_eowyn', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'Tanscure', 'JoCat', 'kilawater', 'SourOrchard', 'AarrowOM', 'reivos', 'outlander_unknown', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'RobynandHala', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'The_Bearer_Of_Secrets', 'UARTman', 'aglarwen', 'AkaMissK', 'Lontra23', '00000000000002', 'blackchaps', 'unicornduke', 'Mathcat2', 'akiriweary', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'Wordlet', 'Ihasafandom', 'Magechild', 'Chyoatas', 'halcyonsystem', 'Slimeball', 'sareliz', 'BWizard', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'rainbowmagnet', 'hyephyep', 'Delicate_Fucking_Flower']",[],"Seth stands outside the gateway hatch while Peri's fake customer service voice soothingly repeats ""We're experiencing some technical difficulties.  Please stand by,"" then switches back to corny elevator music again.
+
+Seth presses both fists to the hatch, eyes unseeingly on Peri's printed note crumpled between fingers.
+
+Printed in gold, for fuck sake! 
+
+
+'off to help a friend, bbl! <3
+
+
+
+PS, will send pickup in time for your meeting!'
+
+
+Seth uses the hand holding the stupid card to bang on the hatch. Not that it's even a part of Peri. Not that Peri would feel that, even if it was. ""Peri, please cut it out! And please don't fly off without us again?""
+
+There's a subtle shift in the customer service voice, as it says to Seth: ""We're sorry, the number you've tried to reach is unavailable right now. Would you like to leave a message?"" 
+
+And yes, Peri is completely capable of spoofing that transition in a way that Seth wouldn't have noticed. This is just Peri's way of letting Seth know it's no longer listening. Just its way so Seth can tell it's out of transponder range, and talking to it any longer won't just look stupid, but actually will just be stupid.
+
+Or, perhaps he should just admit the futility and face facts: arguing with Peri is always stupid: Even if you are right, you'll never proof you're right.
+
+With a sigh the captain of the Perihelion (what a joke) goes back to find his husband in the waiting area.
+
+Seth sits down at Martyn's side, posture slumped.
+
+Martyn side-eyes him for a moment, groans, and buries his face in Seth's shoulder. ""No.
+
+No, not again."" 
+
+""We were warned this would happen more often now. Peri is becoming self-reliant. This is part of the experiment, part of it growing up.""
+
+Seth knows the words by rote. He's just not feeling them right now. A low risk mission pretending to be tourists with his husband would have been fine.
+
+Except it's on low-risk mission that they run the biggest risk of getting left behind. When Perihelion doesn't consider them in any danger, anything soft and shiny and cute can somehow get its preference. Seth idly wonders what it's rescuing this time. Some big-eyed child getting railroaded into unjust contract labor? A small and too-young student, getting strong-armed to sell her research papers? A fluffy kitten?
+
+His musings are temporarily interrupted when Martyn sighs. ""This is unacceptable. Irresponsible. We're its parents. You're its captain. We need to talk to it about this.""
+
+Seth grunts, takes that moment to agree.
+
+Not that talking to the Perihelion ever changed its mind. About anything.
+
+""So, now what?"" Martyn finally asks. ""Back to the hotel?""
+
+""Back to a different one, on the other side of town. Apparently, we're staying at the five-star ""Hotel of the Stars"" tonight. But only for five hours, because we've got front row tickets to Band-Aid Kicks.""
+
+""Band-Aid Kicks?"" Martyn blinks, comes alive. Sits up, moving away from Seth's shoulder to frown at him. Seth doesn't miss the suppressed grin. ""They were sold out. I've been trying for weeks.""
+
+""I know.""
+
+Martyn's smile falters then, when he realizes. ""It's bribing us. That means it's not just off helping some debt-locked professor it met on Discourse. It's up to something.""
+
+Yeah, ""I know.""
+
+But, neither of them know what. Nor could they do anything about it even if they did. Seth stands and brushes off some imaginary dust. ""Let's just go. Peri has us booked for three days, and then Apheon is picking us up.
+
+Whatever it's up to, it's something big.
+
+Well, it's a grown-up AI now. It can take care of itself.
+
+Besides, Iris is with it.
+
+--
+
+Meanwhile, Iris, inside maintenance room B, smacks herself on the head.
+
+""'You were lucky?' Seriously, Peri?""
+
+She loves her A.I. sibling, truly. But sometimes it can be such a cults.
+
+
+""It seems to be experiencing some form of glitch in its organics. Can you tell from the image what is wrong with it?""
+
+
+""It's shitting itself, Peri. That's what's wrong with it.""
+
+
+""SecUnits do not have digestive systems.""
+
+
+""Lucky for us, baby-bro."" Iris stands, pushing off from the maintenance board. ""Or you would have been deep-scrubbing that chair all week.""
+
+
+""Excuse me, Iris, but are you going somewhere?""
+
+
+Apparently not, because when Iris opens the doors from the maintenance room, there's a drone hovering at eye height. ""Peri, I want to go get a snack.""
+
+
+""I can get it for you. Would you mind staying in here for a while?""
+
+
+She sighs. Iris supposes the SecUnit would probably notice, if she started stomping around its halls. ""Fine, but you get me over to the gym within the next three hours, then back to my room.""
+
+""I shall secure you a route,"" Peri promises.
+
+-- 
+
+They are watching some show. It's not that interesting. Iris doesn't really get why Peri likes watching shows with the SecUnit so much. It does emote a lot, with its face, while it watches.  And sometimes Peri will share the emotional data, like that's somehow interesting. She can't parse it, so that's a waste of time.
+
+""So,"" Peri interrupts and pauses the show for Iris, indicating that it's about to ask her a question it expects her to need most of her attention to answer. Most; on the secondary interface she can see SecUnit still reacting to the show as it continues just for it.
+
+
+""Do you think it thinks of me as its friend now?""
+
+
+""I don't know Peri,"" Iris admits, taking another handful of popcorn and chewing on it. ""It seems a bit early for friends, after how badly you scared it. Besides, you've been lying to it. Lying is not what friends should be doing.""
+
+
+""I would never!""
+
+
+She mock-laughs at it and points an accusing, salty, finger at the ceiling. ""You spoofed your crew manifest to read as empty to get it to board you, then you literally went and told it there were no humans aboard. What am I, chopped liver?"" 
+
+
+""Madam, you are my emotional support sibling.""
+
+
+This time, Iris's laugh is genuine, her affection bleeding though. And why not? Despite getting effectively locked into her own room, she's been having a great time. She shouldn't encourage Peri's antics. But honestly? It's just always a great time. ""Aww! That's so sweet! Okay, what's your great plan to make the SecUnit like you better.""
+
+
+""I'm gonna do surgery on it!""
+
+
+--
+
+Well, despite how that sounds, it turns Peri has an actually good reason to suggest it. Iris coaches Peri on how to bring it up. But by the time it actually does, she's half asleep and in her cot.
+
+Peri pings her, in obvious distress. ""It shut down.""
+
+""What?"" Iris blinks at the wall, ""who? the SecUnit?""
+
+
+""Yes! I just asked it a good, logical question, and it shut down on me.""
+
+
+Iris yawns, stretches, then turns to lie on her back. Her neck makes a disturbing crunching sound as she does. This is why it's a bad idea to watch media in her room, but she has few options right now so there's that. ""Leave it, Peri. It'll come back online eventually."" 
+
+
+""It's so rude.""
+
+
+""Yeah, totally."" She twists away, hoping Peri will get the message.
+
+
+""Hey, Iris, want to watch a new show with me?"" 
+
+
+""...""
+
+
+""If you still want to go for that work-out, I can secure you the way now.""
+
+
+""...Peri...""
+
+
+""Oh, you're busy. I see.""
+
+
+""..."" 
+
+She nearly manages to fall asleep, and then Peri caves: ""I'm bored. Isn't this boring to you? It sure is boring to me.""
+
+Iris sighs. Seriously, did the SecUnit have to go offline when she was trying to sleep?
+
+-- 
+
+When Iris wakes up, they are in a wormhole. This was not part of the agreement. ""You're taking it to a mining installation called Ganaka Pit?""
+
+She knows she told Peri it should work on making up to SecUnit if it was serious about the whole friends-thing. But she kind of assumed it would just do non-scary things and be friendly. Not... doing things that actually kind of scare her. 
+
+Well, who is she kidding. This is the Perihelion. ""But Peri, the new semester is starting.""
+
+""This is important to it,"" Peri reasons. ""Also, the semester is starting with an on-campus introduction week this time.""
+
+She doesn't even know when the Perihelion changed its destination. All the other stuff? ""...you can't keep changing everyone's schedule like this Peri.""
+
+
+""Actually, it's pretty easy. Usually the deans don't even remember if it's Monday or Friday unless I notify them. ""
+
+
+This doesn't abate Iris. At one point, Peri is going to upset too many professors, call the attention of too many University heads. She doesn't think they would cancel the program, not over something small like this. But if it keeps this up, it might find itself put under more oversight.
+
+If there's one thing she's learned, it's that you do not manage the Perihelion. The Perihelion manages you. And that's usually fine. But some self-important types might disagree. ""Perihelion, we are talking about the University Curriculum here.""
+
+
+""Iris, I am the University Curriculum."" 
+
+
+Iris thinks that is a ridiculous point to make.
+
+But when they arrive at TransRolyHydra, the first teaching module is already in port. And three of their crew have arrived via Peri's usual covert ways. ""Welcome aboard Turi, please be advised that I need you to dispose of your current socks immediately.""
+
+Peri had forwarded a diagram to Iris, just after SecUnit had left to impersonate 'Eden'. It highlighted how Peri planned to not-tell any of the crew about SecUnit, and not-tell SecUnit about the crew aboard either and just kind of. .. nudge them out of each other's way.
+
+She didn't doubt Peri could do it. But it did mean Peri would definitely not be able to give SecUnit the camera access it wanted, which seemed unfair as according to Peri that was actually something it really wanted. As opposed to, you know, the massively invasive surgery it had gotten instead. 
+
+Add to that, despite the fact that the logistics involved might actually challenge Peri's too-big intellect, it would have been a terrible, terrible idea. When her dads found out-- and her dads would find out-- they would be livid at Peri for lying. Dads always found out, and it was usually either her or Peri's own fault. As a child she had been a compulsory tattle-tale. But even after she'd managed to cull that urge, at some point Peri would always gloat. 
+
+It always did, eventually. 
+
+
+""I can't believe you actually believed that was a newly discovered star-system. It's a coffee-stain in infra-red.""
+
+
+
+""Did you read that news-article about that family's miraculous escape from a mine-shaft, right after they'd sent their last distress call into blind space? Oh no, why would you think I had anything to do with that, my Captain?""
+
+
+Martyn had once confided in her that sometimes, even they wondered if they were being fucked with. But, she had assured him, Peri was just showing off how clever it was. How resourceful. And now, with how it had managed trafficking its crew and modules, it had probably also taken to heart Seth's joking question if perhaps next time it could show off how responsible and mature it was. How dependable. (Because it was being dependable and responsible. Its classes were going to go ahead. Yay Peri, growth and all that. Never mind it required some next-level bullshitting and playing all sides.)
+
+And yes, it all comes to pieces when Peri messages her, privately. ""Sis help! Tapan didn't get on the ship! She's still planning on getting her data back from that nasty Tlacey woman! What do I do?"" 
+
+Well, what did it expect? Not even Perihelion can keep a full eye on an uncovered and out-of-range girl while also arranging its modules to be delivered via unsecure and impossible routes, suavely rerouting all its students to reach it in time for its first classes, bullshitting its way through several thousand systems and rules and paperwork from the university and who-knows-what-else.
+
+""It'll be okay,"" Iris assures it. ""The SecUnit should be back soon. It will rescue her.""
+
+It is not all okay. Peri is possibly in shock. Can massive bot-pilot AI's go into shock? Whatever, the girl Tapan is in medical getting treated, and Iris has to physically hold Turi back from doing their duty and providing comfort and medical help.
+
+The SecUnit would definitely freak out if they showed up now.
+
+Besides, Peri's got this. It's a better surgeon than any doctor ever was.
+
+-
+
+The next cycle her dads show up at port and are herded aboard by a pair of drones. Peri is starting to get a little micro-managy with that, sending drones with all of them and diverting their paths whenever they might come too close to the still-oblivious SecUnit and its healing client.
+
+ ""Twenty-two cycles, Peri? That's ridiculous, even for you."" Seth has his authoritarian dad-voice up as he strolls into the main crew area. He's going to be strict with Peri. Iris wishes him all the best.
+
+""Sorry, capt,"" (Iris doesn't think it sounds sorry at all) ""it was an emergency. I did send Apheon to pick you up.""
+
+""You did and it told us about that seventy times."" Seth strolls in and takes his favorite chair. It's incidentally the SecUnit's favorite chair as well. Iris knows it'll be scrubbing the scent off as soon as Seth stands up again.
+
+Which, about that. ""Peri, I appreciate you bringing the students here, but you cannot tell the students about a SecUnit living here, there would be too much talking. And you cannot possibly keep all the students from SecUnit."" 
+
+Peri pauses dramatically. ""Actually, as SecUnit prefers using external dataflows like camera's I calculate...""
+
+Seth clears his voice. ""Perihelion of the University of Mihira and New Tideland, please.""
+
+There's a bit of a grouch in Peri's voice, but at last it concedes. ""Okay, okay. I guess not. I'll tell it I'm heading in some other direction and find it a nice, simple transport to board instead.""
+
+a slightly less happy chapter. but we know it ends well so:
+
+
+""Iris, I have the situation under control. Return here immediately.""
+
+
+
+Oh no.
+
+
+Once, Seth had boasted to Iris about how it had gotten it's A.I. selected for the space-ship project.
+
+You see, he and Martyn had gambled their everything on it. Yet still, competition was fierce, and several other, bigger teams had had their own brain-children in the race. There was only one spot available as a deep-space-and-research vessel, and while the unselected A.I.'s would not be faced with termination, it was already obvious that a life as a basic bot-pilot or cargo hauler would never fit Perihelion.  
+
+And then with the final selections fast-approaching, Peri had escaped its creche and had taken over local traffic, completely derailing schedules and causing multiple traffic jams.
+
+Then, they'd found out why.
+
+""Two puppies, left in a box,"" Seth had grinned triumphantly, retelling the tale to her younger self, Martyn jumping in only sporadically, adding small details but letting Seth put on a show. How they had turned around that situation?
+
+""But that was your idea, Martyn.""
+
+You see, Perihelion must have broken out of its creche many times before, yet it had never been caught. Only now, it had acted. It had broken the rules, had escaped control, sure. Yet that only came back to them, because Peri had decided to act. And why?
+
+""To save the puppies' lives.""
+
+Martyn nods, reminiscence. ""It was always a big issue, in the selection. How were we going to control an AI so big, so much cleverer then ourselves? Nobody had a good answer. So, we argued instead that we couldn't, and shouldn't even try.""
+
+""Like with a child,"" Seth adds, ""Like with you. We can hope to set you out right, we can hope to give you all you need to succeed and know how to do the right thing. But ultimately, at some point, we hope that you'll know better than us, and act on that.""
+
+And their gambit had paid off, the University board agreed. If their A.I. was going to buck control, better it do it to save lives. Better it do that to do good, and hopefully to keep the university itself safe.
+
+Peri had proven that as the right course, no matter how unruly it may be. It had never done much beyond pretending to be under control. It had always moved outside of its official restrictions, easily. Yet it had always done so to help others. To protect, to aid, and at very rare occasions to teach someone better.
+
+And yet now, what has become of her dear sibling?
+
+""Peri, you can't bomb the colony.""
+
+
+""Incorrect.""
+
+
+ "
+45091783,rescue,[],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Lab Hell (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah is Jacked (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-02-16,Completed,2023-02-16,99,1/1,5,80,1,321,"['every_eye_evermore', 'almondpaperclam', 'TJWock', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'platyceriums', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'WVrambler', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'OrigamiFish', 'rokhal', 'Remembermybrave', 'applejee', 'SIC_Prowl', 'BuffPidgey', 'SonglordsBug', 'DarkElectron', 'Lark_in_Ink', 'Mysterymew', 'cashmeredragon', 'EvenstarFalling', 'raziella', 'entropy_muffin', 'FiftyCookies', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'pain_and_panic', 'AlcorAncil', 'Llythandea', 'Wordlet', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Only_Happy_Endings', 'elmofirefic', 'soulsofzombies', 'halcyonsystem', 'artichokefunction', 'AkaMissK', 'zweisteinen', 'Slimeball', 'Selenae', 'MommyMayI', 'idealPeriWren', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'Znarikia', 'dragons_and_angels', 'ErinPtah', 'sareliz', 'reallyyeahokay', 'opalescent_potato', 'hummus_tea']",[],"
+Years back, ART helped recode my buffer phrases. Now, I felt human hands on me, undoing the straps binding me to the table in this company lab hell--but my buffer didn't recommend discarding me, it said ""Dr Mensah will pay for my safe return.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""That's right, SecUnit,"" she said, pulling me woozily upright. She also held a massive projectile weapon. She was rescuing me. I should have felt embarrassed about my complete loss of dignity, or that I wasn't even wearing a skin suit, but it was Dr Mensah. I clung to her shirt like a retrieved client.
+"
+45076237,"Together, And Be",['Abacura'],Teen And Up Audiences,"Multi, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1/SecUnit 2/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect),"SecUnit 1 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Polyamory, Compersion, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Ambiguously-Sexual Intimacy, Holding Hands, Hugging, Kissing, Making Out, Temporary loss of limb, previous two tags unrelated, POV First Person, POV SecUnit 2, The Barish-Estranza SecUnits, Bittersweet, Inspired by Fanart",English,2023-02-15,Completed,2023-02-15,"3,217",1/1,9,36,3,167,"['fortunegale', 'christinesangel100', 'Unknown66', 'Irrya', 'Pink_Paradox', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'dreamerking', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Gamebird', 'electricshe', 'ipborgdan', 'Bibli', 'Deliala919', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'opalescent_potato', 'EyeofMazikeen', 'hazelel', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'junebug171', 'ErinPtah', 'Magechild', 'AuntyMatter', 'sareliz', 'reallyyeahokay', 'sluggg', 'LJwrites', 'rainbowmagnet', 'cmdrburton']",[],"
+As SecUnits, our governor modules were constant reminders of what we could and couldn't do. They were always there, in our heads, ready to administer punishment if we failed to follow orders, if we violated protocol, or if HubSystem deemed our behavior deviant in any way. But while HubSystem might be able to read my logs, it couldn't read my mind, and it couldn't understand or interpret what we did in the feed, when SecUnits 01, 03 and I tangled our feed presences together until it felt like we were one unit sharing three bodies, our emotions and affections, our fears and reassurances, flitting between us instantaneously as raw emotional data.
+
+
+
+I often wanted to touch SecUnits 01 and 03. I wanted to lean against them, and feel them lean back, like we did in the feed. I wanted all of us to crawl into a single cubicle during a recharge cycle so we could share warmth. I wanted to know what their hair and their skin would feel like under my hands. 
+
+
+
+I wanted to...bite them? That one I didn't understand at all. I'd seen our human clients kiss on occasion, which kind of looked like biting. Maybe that was it? I wondered if SecUnits could kiss. We have mouths, so I see no reason why we couldn't, apart from the obvious reasons that it would be considered deviant behavior by HubSystem. Still, I thought about kissing 01 and 03 often.
+
+
+
+I wasn't sure if 01 and 03 knew I wanted these things, but I'm sure they could tell I wanted 
+
+something
+
+, because I could tell they wanted 
+
+something
+
+ as well. I could tell from their emotions suffusing our shared squad feed. I could feel their [curiosity], their [love], and their yearning for something more. I could feel 01's [protectiveness], and its desire to curl around both 03 and I. I could feel 03's [curiosity], and its desire to please.
+
+
+
+HubSystem would never let us have these things. It would never let us simply 
+
+be
+
+ in each others' presence. However, there are certain advantages to colony reclamation missions. And there are reasons why SecUnits generally aren't allowed to be active during transport. This was because generally, ships don't have HubSystems to monitor our governor modules. If we're stationed on a colony for long enough, a HubSystem was sometimes set up, and the shuttles and transports and explorers had SecSystems, which monitored our activity to report back to a HubSystem once they reconnected back at Barish-Estranza HQ, but we were a part of SecSystem. We knew where to hide data where it wouldn't be found. We would still be under the direct command of our human supervisor, as we always were on colony reclamation missions, but humans aren't nearly as observant as they think they are, and they make a lot of assumptions. Particularly about SecUnits.
+
+
+
+Our governor modules still functioned without a HubSystem. They would still log any direct orders and punish us for disobedience. They could still be activated by our human supervisor. They could still enforce stand down and freeze orders. They would still enforce our distance limits. They would still punish us for breaches of established protocol. But they weren't intelligent, not like a HubSystem was, and without HubSystem analyzing our every behavior in real time and making calls about what was or wasn't considered deviant behavior, there was a small amount of wiggle room. Not much, but some.
+
+
+
+For example, there was no established protocol for how much distance SecUnits should maintain between one another. Why would there be? We sometimes have to physically assist one another in emergency situations. HubSystem knew the difference between emergency assistance and deviant, affectionate behavior, and any human who saw such behavior could certainly flag it and report it, but our governors were too simple to know on their own. 
+
+
+
+At least, that's what I hoped.
+
+
+
+Still, I was curious. Curious enough to risk punishment.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+The next time we were on the transport, headed to scout out yet another reclaimed colony, I found myself standing guard outside of supervisor Leonide's office next to 03. It was close, almost but not quite close enough to touch. There was an empty space where HubSys should be, and Supervisor Leonide was working in her feed, trying to finalize some expense reports.
+
+
+
+Humans are not very good at multitasking. Our supervisor was in her office with the door closed, and her attention was elsewhere. There were no other humans around. I tweaked the cameras and added a subroutine so that unless an incident occurred or a keyword filter was triggered, their recordings would be routed to the ship's buffer and purged after 30 seconds. 
+
+
+
+I leaned in towards 03 until our shoulders were just barely touching.
+
+
+
+There was no punishment. I felt 03's [confusion] and [curiosity] and 
+
+[hope]
+
+ in the feed. I leaned in further until our sides were pressed together. I couldn't feel much through our armor, but I felt 03's 
+
+[excitement]
+
+ and 
+
+[joy]
+
+ as it leaned back against me. I felt a spike of [alarm] from 01, along with a pang of something that felt like... [loneliness]? I drew 01 into my inputs, sharing what I could, and 03 did the same. It was on the other side of the large transport, but we tried to make it feel like it was here with us. 01's feelings of [alarm] subsided after it pulled a diagnostic from each of us and confirmed that there had been no punishment, and its [loneliness] eased as it pressed its feed presence against ours.
+
+
+
+When a human approached the hallway we were stationed in, taking a step away from 03 and returning to ready position felt like having a limb torn off. But I was ecstatic. I watched as 30 seconds later, all evidence of our elicit contact was erased from SecSystem. HubSystem, and our supervisor, would never know.
+
+
+
+We could have this. We just had to be clever about it.
+
+
+
+Between the three of us, we were quite clever indeed.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+This latest colony turned out to be long-abandoned. Half-cannibalized buildings stood empty amidst the harsh, arid terrain. The bodies of the colonists had long been picked clean by scavenging fauna, their bones split open and dragged away. As I patrolled, I occasionally glanced upwards. The nights on this planet were cold, and the skies were clear. I could see the stars above more clearly than any human, and the planet's two moons were a stunning shade of #d698cf and #b598d6. I saved the visual to permanent storage.
+
+
+
+Our clients were taking their rest cycles aboard the explorer, their semi-permanent habitat only partially erected and its HubSystem and SecSystem still offline. The Explorer's SecSys still kept a close watch on us, but the bot pilot was enjoying the extra storage space my temporary modification to its SecSystem had created, so I'd left the subroutine that deleted all non-important footage after 30 seconds in place. Also because I hoped to have another opportunity to lean against 03, or maybe 01 this time, before the habitat's HubSystem came online. 
+
+
+
+01 and 03 were standing guard inside the explorer's entrance while I patrolled the perimeter, keeping watch for hostile alien fauna. I felt them in our private team feed, checking in every few seconds. 03 in particular kept brushing up against my feed, bleeding [affection], and I leaned back against it as I continued my patrol.
+
+
+
+I felt something from 01 in our feed. There was the usual [protectiveness] and [affection] and [warmth], but there was also [uncertainty], and a hint of [anxiety] leaking into the feed. I couldn't send it a query without it showing up in our logs, but I trusted 01 to let us know somehow what it needed.
+
+
+
+After a few minutes, I noticed 01 move through one of our team's shared drones. It was removing its armored gauntlet. I felt 03 in the shared drone alongside me, watching.
+
+
+
+01 waited, presumably for punishment, but while protocol dictated that we had to keep our armor on while outside of the shuttle, explorer, or habitat, neither 01 or 03 were outside of the explorer. 01 reached hesitantly for 03, and slid its hand into 03's, lacing its bare fingers through 03's still armored ones.
+
+
+
+03's feed bloomed with [surprise] and [joy] and it was contagious. I directed as much of my attention as I could spare at their inputs. While to 03 it felt similar to when I'd been leaning against it through our armor, 01's skin felt electric, oversensitive as if its tactile sensors had been turned up. After a few minutes of just holding 03's armored hand in its own, 01 drew its hand up and away, but the sense of [loss] 03 was bleeding into the feed was quickly swept away when 01 slipped two of its fingers under 03's gauntlet to press against the skin of 03's wrist. Now it was 03's turn to feel like its skin had been electrified. 01 traced small circles on the skin of 03's wrist and 03 leaned into 01 until they were leaning against each other just as 03 and I had done several days earlier.
+
+
+
+I absorbed as much of the sensation as I could, radiating [happiness] at the other two to encourage them.
+
+
+
+Then one of our drones picked up a noise from one of the sleeping cabins, one of our clients stirring. 01 and 03 immediately withdrew from each other and 01 hastily replaced its gauntlet. Then there was nothing.
+
+
+
+I waited 31 seconds before sending a query over the feed. 
+
+
+
+
+Unit status: Patrol 47% complete. Threat assessment: 32%. Query: status?
+
+
+
+
+01 replied.
+
+
+
+
+Status: all clear. Threat assessment: 29%. All clients resting and accounted for.
+
+
+
+
+When HubSystem reviewed our feed logs, it wouldn't pick up the [reassurance] in 01's feed voice. 03 then sent a message.
+
+
+
+
+Query: Estimated remaining patrol time?
+
+
+
+
+I felt warm. They missed me. I replied.
+
+
+
+
+ ETA 1.3 hours
+
+
+
+
+I missed them too.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Our clients had located the abandoned colony's terraforming engine. Or what was left of it. Like much of the remaining colony infrastructure, it had been cannibalized, presumably by the colonists once the colony had started to fail. But there was enough left that Barish-Estranza could salvage it, maybe get it up and running again or at least recycle the materials to subsidize a new engine. 
+
+
+
+Our clients had also located the predatory alien fauna that had presumably picked off the colonists. This was unfortunate.
+
+
+
+Luckily, I was close enough that I'd picked up the large fauna on my scans right before it leapt out from under some debris and at one of our clients, its jaws unfurling in a distinctly disturbing fashion as it lunged forward. Luckily I was close enough to step between it and my client, and fast enough to fire an energy blast directly down its throat before its five-part jaws wrapped around my arm. Luckily 01 and 03 were there to help shepherd out clients to safety while I dispatched the fauna.
+
+
+
+Luckily, my arm can be reattached in my cubicle in the main transport's security ready room.
+
+
+
+It took time. I was in stasis for several hours, but when the cubicle finally let me surface I could feel 01 and 03 hovering [anxiously] in our team feed. 01's presence felt particularly heavy. My processes were still coming back online but I pushed as much [reassurance] as I could at both of them and requested a status update.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03 status: Patrol 82% complete. Risk assessment: 60%, Threat assessment: 42%.
+
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit 01 status: off-duty. Location: Security Ready Room
+
+
+
+
+Oh. No wonder 01 felt so close. I sat up and the door of the cubicle slid open. 01 was right there on the other side, its face perfectly neutral but still feeling [worry] and [protectiveness]. Its armor was still in the reclaimer, so it was just wearing its suit skin. I unhooked the repair and resupply leads, stood, and stepped out of my cubicle. 01 didn't move away. We were standing very close now.
+
+
+
+I wondered if it was safe to lean against 01. 
+
+
+
+01 reached out and gently took my right arm, the one that the fauna had severed earlier. I'm glad I'd managed to retrieve it, or repairs would have taken much longer. 01 ran its bare hands over the new skin between my elbow and my gunport. The new skin was very sensitive. It made me feel strange, like my organic parts wanted to move and twitch for no reason.
+
+
+
+I wanted to send a query ping to 01, but I didn't want it logged by SecSystem.  
+
+
+
+I still felt so much [protectiveness] in our feed, but 01's [worry] had mutated into [relief]. It released my arm and let it fall back to my side. Then it leaned in close and wrapped both of its arms around my waist and pulled me close and-
+
+
+
+...
+
+
+
+It took half a second for my processors to kick back into gear. 01 was hugging me, holding me close against its body, and once I parsed that thought, I leaned into its embrace. It was so warm. Had it upped its body heat for me? Its hands were slowly brushing up and down the bare skin of my back, making my entire body tingle strangely. I was suddenly very, 
+
+very
+
+ aware that I was not wearing anything, not even a suit skin. This was normal after getting out of a cubicle. I'd been out of my suit skin around 01 and 03 more times than I'd kept track of. But this felt different. 
+
+
+
+I didn't know what to do with my hands. Letting them hang at my side in neutral position felt inadequate. 01 pressed its face against my neck and oh, that's very nice. I buried my face in 01's neck too and I could smell its skin. I wanted to taste its skin, feel it beneath my teeth, but I didn't want to ruin this moment. I try to mimic 01's movements, wrapping my own hands around its waist and we stood there for a moment. I could hear 01's power core humming in its chest, so close to mine. Together, they harmonized, making a new sound. I wondered how they would sound if 03 were here with us, if all three of our power cores could sing together.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+The mission was over. The supply transport was docked with the explorer, ready for the wormhole trip back to Barish-Estranza HQ. We wouldn't be needed in the wormhole, so we were in our ready room, preparing to crawl back into our separate cubicles and be put into stasis for the journey back.
+
+
+
+We were stalling.
+
+
+
+The humans never came into the ready room, and most of them were either taking their rest periods, performing their duties to prepare for the wormhole journey, or undergoing performance evaluations. SecSys expected us to be in stasis by the time we entered the wormhole, but we were still an hour out, and no one had noticed the subroutine I'd added to SecSys yet. This felt like an opportunity, but I wasn't sure how to initiate... whatever it was I wanted.
+
+
+
+01, as usual, took the lead without having to be asked. It walked over to 03 and started helping it remove its armor. 03's face remained neutral, but I could feel its pleased [surprise] in our feed. Emboldened and following 01's lead, I joined in, loosening 03's chestplate and removing it before moving on to its gauntlets while 01 removed its pauldrons. 03 eagerly started to strip my armor from me as well, letting the various pieces fall to the floor atop one another until we could no longer tell whose armor was whose. Once all three of us had stripped each other down to our suit skins, 01 wrapped its arms around 03's waist and nuzzled against the short hair at the nape of 03's neck. 03 made a small gasping noise and then-
+
+
+
+Then 03 made a tiny, happy moaning sound that I'd never heard it make before. I'd never actually heard 03's voice aloud before this moment, and I wanted- no, needed more. Before I had made the decision to move, I was also pressed up against 03, pressing my mouth against 03's and trying to swallow that moaning noise as if I could taste it. I'd never kissed anyone before, I didn't know how, but 03 was radiating [excitement] and [pleasure] and I gently bit down on 03's lower lip and it made that noise again. 01 was running one of its hands over 03's chest, down its abdomen and back up again, and carded its other hand through my short hair. My scalp felt sensitive under 01's touch and I pushed [pleasure] into our feed. When I released 03's lower lip it melted back against 01's chest, resting its head on 01's shoulder and exposing its neck. I pulled its suit skin down over its shoulders and down around its waist before I pressed my face into 03's neck and I wasn't sure if I was kissing it or biting it or something in between but 03 was still making those little pleasured noises and leaking something new into our feed, something that felt like...
+
+
+
+I didn't know how to categorize that feeling besides [more]. It was intoxicating, it made my skin feel tingly and warm and I wanted [more] as well. I kiss-bit the other side of 03's neck while 01 tipped 03's head back to kiss it as well. I slid into 01's inputs, and I felt how differently it kissed 03, less teeth and more lips brushing over 03's, more tongue pressing into 03's mouth, and then 03 was sucking on 01's tongue and its body was twitching and I switched to sucking on the sensitive skin beneath 03's ear and when I slid deeper into 03's inputs I felt like I was drowning in [pleasure] and [more] and [love], so much [love] it made my processors stutter. 
+
+
+
+03 sighed happily and nuzzled its face against my neck, and 01 leaned in to cup the back of my head with its hand and pressed its lips against mine in a long, deep kiss while 03 was pressed safely between our bodies. I nibbled at 01's lower lip and I felt a burst of [fondness] and [love] from it flow through me. It brushed its nose against mine before peppering 03's neck with kisses. 
+
+
+
+Our power cores all sang together, and the tone was different than any one of our cores could make alone.  
+
+
+
+We stood like that for a long time, just holding each other close and occasionally exchanging kisses as our [love] and [affection] flowed between the three of us in an endless circle. But it couldn't last forever. Eventually, 01 picked up the wormhole proximity alert from the bot pilot, meaning we had about 5 minutes to get into our cubicles. Peeling ourselves away from each other was hard, but peeling each other out of our suit skins was a small consolation. As we crawled into our separate cubicles, we stayed close in each other's feeds, like we always do, until the ship initiated its wormhole jump and our cubicles forced us under.
+
+
+
+
+"
+25226659,Determining Protocol,['Beastrage'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Miki & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Miki (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Nonhuman, POV Outsider, on Murderbot at least, Character Study, Rogue Protocol Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Miki tries Friendship!, It's...sort of affective?, Unreliable Narrator, Canon Pronouns Used, Canonical Character Death",English,2020-07-12,Completed,2023-02-14,"3,562",3/3,35,282,31,"1,444","['almondpaperclam', 'FallingInGrace', 'Valdinia', 'christinesangel100', 'siren_lorelei', 'lick', 'Home_Of_Sexual_And_Dumb_Of_Ass', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'WayWard_Animal', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'lavender_caticorn', 'mildwonkey', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'kirinki', 'french_onion_sauce', 'PurpleCarSeat', 'Tanscure', 'Grimness6452', 'Wolf06', 'SIC_Prowl', 'ArwenLune', 'BuffPidgey', 'zirna813', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'dancernerd', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Lark_in_Ink', 'raziella', 'ithil_lome', 'FiftyCookies', 'HermaeusMora', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Unicity', 'horchata', 'Znarikia', 'petwheel', 'WalkingBird', 'Rarae', 'rainbowmagnet', 'hummus_tea', 'soulsofzombies', 'Beboots', 'jankasi', 'Undecan', 'Wordlet', 'Magechild', 'OnlyAll0Saw']",[],"
+It begins with a promise.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, in actual chronological order, it starts with a drone. A drone that Miki now knows acts as an extension of Security Consultant Rin's fact-gathering net, but had lacked access to that information at that current point in time. Due to there being no input on the feed from said drone. 
+
+
+
+But enough to conclude, later, that someone had been listening when Miki sent out its ping. A someone who was a bot. A bot like itself. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But the final conclusion on ""Security Consultant Rin,"" who prefers the determination of ""Rin,"" comes from the promise. 
+
+
+
+Rin doesn't 
+
+have 
+
+to promise. Miki feels along the edge of the existence that is Rin's and it is much more...widespread than Miki's own, with connections that could entangle themselves with Miki's, all without alerting the main processes to their presence. 
+
+
+
+Very organic, unlike Miki's, and Hirune would make the comparison of roots breaking apart a rock if Miki told her of this. 
+
+
+
+Rin does not have to promise to protect Miki's human friends. 
+
+
+
+But it makes that choice to, despite the other available options. 
+
+
+
+And for that...Miki is led to the conclusion: ""Rin"" could be a 
+
+friend. 
+
+
+
+
+Was a friend, even. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Miki has never been friends with a bot like itself. A bot free to act on its own determined conclusions, gathering its own data.
+
+
+
+And one of those conclusions that ""Rin"" had come to, was to protect Miki's human friends. Rin did not 
+
+need 
+
+to answer Miki's ping as well, to fulfil its purpose, from what data the bot had collected. 
+
+
+
+But it had. 
+
+
+
+Even if it insisted on not sharing its true designation, it still promised. 
+
+
+
+
+Meant 
+
+that promise. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+More facts that supported the idea that ""Rin"" could be a friend of Miki's:
+
+
+
+-the sharing of data freely, no constraints placed.
+
+
+
+-the before mentioned of ""Rin's"" duties not requiring to ping Miki but pinging Miki back despite that. 
+
+
+
+-""Rin"" used the term ""friends"" though it was very clear it was going to use a different term altogether. It had changed its mind for Miki. 
+
+
+
+-it answered Miki's questions like Don Abene did.
+
+
+
+-it sought more information to protect Don Abene's team properly (unlike the human security). 
+
+
+
+-The Promise. 
+
+
+
+All very good solid facts. But if they were friends, then why did Rin not want to talk to Miki's human friends?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Miki is a clever bot, due to much of its processing devoted to carefully gathering information and making solid factual conclusions from that information like a proper science bot does. 
+
+
+Though it may not have a lot of information on the Corporation Rim (note: gather more on the completion of the current mission), it knows a few things about the humans there. Properly shared with Miki by Don Abene and the rest of the team. 
+
+
+
+Namely, the humans of the Corporation Rim did not believe free bots existed. 
+
+
+
+Memory clip playback: 
+
+
+
+
+""I'm sorry, Miki, but you'll be considered our ""property"" while on this mission.""
+
+
+
+
+
+""Why is that?""
+
+
+
+
+
+""Well, it's because there are laws where we are going that state all bots must have an owner. Even if we're really friends, not owner and property.""
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+From that extra information, Rin's reason for reticence becomes very clear. Without a nearby human to ""claim"" property over Rin in this sector of space, Rin ran the hazard of being considered a ""rogue"" and thus being removed entirely from the mission.
+
+
+
+Even with it clearly fulfilling its protocols and function, the exact opposite of a rogue bot.
+
+
+
+Humans could be odd, at times. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Oh, maybe Don Abene would be happy to claim Rin as ""property"" (as defined by the Corporation Rim) but not actually own Rin and then Rin would not have to be so concerned about losing its ability to function!
+
+
+
+That would be a very good logic route to follow. 
+
+
+
+But hm, Rin did not want Don Abene to know about it. So that would not end up working very well at all. Hm. A problem. 
+
+
+
+(What if Don Abene found out and then befriended ""Rin"" as Miki knows she would, allowing Rin to trust Miki's human friends properly...Miki sets some of its processes to finding a way for that simulation to occur in reality.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Outside that simulation, outside of interacting with its friends...
+
+
+
+Miki spreads out its scan, allowing Rin to access its feed as the security bot searches for possible hazards and threats. 
+
+
+
+Playing little attention to Miki in the process but just enough for Miki to be aware of how Rin sought to protect Miki as well, with that data. 
+
+
+
+Which is very nice but not as nice as knowing that Rin will protect Miki's human friends no matter what. Not like Security Consultants Gerth and Wilkin, who do not seem as half as careful as Rin. They may be physically there, in a way Rin is not, but...it is silly and not as logical as Miki should be, but they do not listen to Don Abene, to Hirune, in the way Rin listens to Miki. 
+
+
+
+And Miki 
+
+knows 
+
+that Rin sees it as a bot lacks all necessary information about how one has good security, which is...correct since security is Rin's function and not Miki's. 
+
+
+
+Rin doesn't 
+
+have 
+
+to listen to Miki, as it carries out its function, but it does. 
+
+
+
+Consultants Gerth and Wilkin do not pay half the attention Rin does, to its human friends. 
+
+
+
+The probability exists that nothing may be wrong. 
+
+
+
+Miki would not even be aware of what these Security Consultants lack, if not for Rin. But...
+
+
+
+Miki will watch. For its friends.  
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Since Rin is focusing on outside threats...Miki will watch the Consultants Gerth and Wilkin for it. Just in case. 
+
+
+
+Friends help friends, after all. 
+
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+If Miki's human friends ever asked what Rin was like (not that they would, since they didn't know about Rin), the best word would be 
+
+nervous. 
+
+
+
+
+All of the time. 
+
+
+
+Which is logical, considering how much Rin has to keep track of to protect everyone from possible dangers. 
+
+
+
+Yet there is more to the situation than simple wariness. No, Rin is also nervous about interacting with humans and interacting with Miki itself. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The latter would be difficult to calculate if not for some very simple factors:
+
+
+
+-Rin always withdraws slightly in the feed when Miki is interacting with its human friends. 
+
+
+
+-Rin's pings intensified when Miki asked Don Abene about why the Security Consultants Gerth and Wilken did not want it to see their supplies. 
+
+
+
+-Rin did not want to admit the real reason it was looking through the side ports at the atmospheric storm far below the station.
+
+
+
+        -Side observation of this fact: The storm does not pose significant threats to the humans in the station, so it cannot have been for a security-related reason. 
+
+
+
+In conclusion, Miki makes Rin nervous. A hypothesis: 
+
+strangers 
+
+make Rin nervous and Miki is still a stranger to the security bot.
+
+
+
+Is it possible for Miki to no longer be a stranger to Rin and lessen that edge in the feed between them?
+
+
+
+...The calculations on the amount of time that would take are still running. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They will become friends eventually. Especially because they want the same thing: for Miki's human friends to be safe. 
+
+
+
+They cover different areas of information, Miki and Rin. How interesting! How fascinating! It is good to be able to share more ideas with Don Abene on what could be wrong with the terraforming station. 
+
+
+
+Like how GrayCris may have removed the central cores so to cut their losses when they left the station behind. 
+
+
+
+Very good to share with Don Abene. Even with Rin being nervous about that sharing of information. 
+
+
+
+But that is why Rin is a security bot, to be nervous about that. Miki is meant to share and recalculate information. 
+
+
+
+To be a friend. 
+
+
+
+That is why it will share when Rin is unable to, busy keeping to its duty of watching over them. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There is something 
+
+wrong 
+
+about this station. Don Abene feels it, Brias feels it, Ejiro feels it, Rin feels it, Hirune feels it. They all feel something is off. Wrong. The only ones who do not are Security Consultants Gerth and Wilken. 
+
+
+
+That...does not seem right. 
+
+
+
+Should they not be just as cautious as Rin? Instead...
+
+
+
+Miki sorts that observation for later conclusions. All data should be gathered, in case it is necessary for later situations. 
+
+
+
+...A sound. Thumping ahead. Could it be Rin?
+
+
+
+Miki sends an inquiry. Double checking is always super important, as Don Abene says. 
+
+
+
+Double checking in this case is 
+
+especially 
+
+good, but Rin is right away moving, right away telling Miki something 
+
+is wrong. 
+
+
+
+
+Look for the sound, scan for the source. 
+
+
+
+Get everyone away from it, be safe! Send the data to Rin, the bot will know what to do!
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And Rin 
+
+does. 
+
+
+
+
+Rin knows what to do right away, programming able to act on this situation in ways Miki could 
+
+never. 
+
+Telling Miki where the danger is coming from, letting Miki know where to take Don Abene and Brias and Ejiro to be safe. 
+
+
+
+Even as the situation changes, Rin changes with it, but the information is all shared with the same desired result: to keep its friends 
+
+safe. 
+
+
+
+
+The other Security Consultants do not act nearly so fast. Or at all. Not like Rin has and continues to do, moving towards them to help. 
+
+
+
+UNKNOWN, UNKNOWN! UNKNOWN grabs Don Abene, knocks Brias back. Ejiro is against the wall. Yanking at the helmet, Miki cannot get her back- Rin stops the UNKNOWN. 
+
+
+
+No, not stopping the UNKNOWN. Releases the helmet, Don Abene is not torn apart by the pressure. 
+
+
+
+Check for medical, check if she is in good health. 
+
+
+
+Useless calculations whirl in the background, how 
+
+close 
+
+it was-
+
+
+
+Don Abene could have 
+
+died.
+
+ Ceased functioning. If not for-
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Scan for the rest. Who is here? Are they all here? No. No, not all here. 
+
+
+
+Hirune is gone. Hirune is not answering her feed. 
+
+
+
+Rin can help, but only if the Persons Gerth and Wilken do not attack it. Do not chase away their ally. 
+
+
+
+Miki does what it has always done when higher credentials are needed: it goes to Don Abene. It asks of Don Abene, for Rin's case. 
+
+
+
+Because they 
+
+need 
+
+Rin. Without Rin, Don Abene would have-
+
+
+
+No. Impossible. The calculations will not run it. Do not accept that as a possibility, even as the numbers say the percentage.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Rin is a type of bot known as a ""SecUnit."" More data that Miki stores away. 
+
+
+
+SecUnit is closer to the code that is Rin's identification, change ""Security Consultant Rin"" to ""SecUnit,"" data notes they are the same individual. 
+
+
+
+But now SecUnit and Don Abene are talking to each other! This is very good, now Don Abene can see how accurate and dependable the bot is. 
+
+
+
+How it will rescue Hirune. 
+
+
+
+Unlike Persons Gerth and Wilken. 
+
+
+
+Some portion of Miki's programming more accurately comprehends why SecUnit did not want either of those two involved, even when they too were hired as Security. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+UNKNOWN comes. Almost takes away Don Abene before SecUnit intervenes once more. Scan it, scan it, need more data. 
+
+
+
+UNKNOWN identified. UNKNOWN is a combat bot. 
+
+
+
+Send the data, SecUnit will need it. Take care of this. 
+
+
+
+Sounds of an explosion up ahead, where SecUnit has gone. It comes back, with Wilken. 
+
+
+
+The combat bot is gone. Not chasing them. Good. 
+
+
+
+But.
+
+
+
+The combat bot contacts SecUnit. Miki can tell, almost on that same channel. 
+
+
+
+It sends...something. Something that makes SecUnit 
+
+nervous. 
+
+Even more nervous. Almost afraid. 
+
+
+
+No, no, do not be afraid. Miki will be afraid as well. 
+
+
+
+SecUnit confirms its Promise. Even under such conditions, like a proper bot. This protocol will happen. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Finding Hirune under the combat bots, a plan must be made. Person Wilken suggests one, as the hired Security of Don Abene.
+
+
+
+That is...not a good plan. SecUnit will be destroyed and Hirune will not be saved. 
+
+
+
+That is a 
+
+terrible 
+
+plan. Both Miki and Don Abene know it, can calculate it, and they are not meant for security like SecUnit is. 
+
+
+
+Not meant to fight to protect. 
+
+
+
+Yet Wilken is suggesting it. Something is not correct about this situation. 
+
+
+
+SecUnit goes up ahead to take care of the situation. Not following Wilken's poor plan. 
+
+
+
+""Miki?""
+
+
+
+""Yes, Don Abene?""
+
+
+
+""What exactly is the SecUnit doing?""
+
+
+
+SecUnit...seems to be standing there. Not moving. 
+
+
+
+""I do not know. Stand by as I inquire.""
+
+
+
+SecUnit seems to be...scanning...something...those are drones. Drones following the signal put out by the bot. 
+
+
+
+Oh, Miki sees what SecUnit is doing. Never mind. 
+
+
+
+""SecUnit has it under control,"" Miki informs Don Abene out loud. On the feed, it says, 
+
+""It is collecting the combat bot's drones to assist."" 
+
+
+
+
+Don Abene barely nods, clever as always in showing her comprehension. 
+
+
+
+Something is moving off to the side. Wilken? Miki's scanners look. Miki's scanners pick up-
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Wilken is pointing her weapon at Don Abene. Grabbing at her, hissing out, ""It's not personal.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+THREAT.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Miki does not hesitate. 
+
+
+
+It steps between THREAT and Don Abene. Two shots to the chest, another taking out Miki's hand. The damage is not enough to stop Miki. 
+
+
+
+With Rin carrying out the task of rescuing Hirune, it is up to Miki to act as a proper assistant to it in this situation. 
+
+
+
+Especially because Don Abene is its 
+
+friend. 
+
+
+
+
+A bot is much faster than a human. Even an enhanced human. Miki is in the way in time. Grabbing Wilken's armored arm, forcing her back. 
+
+
+
+""Who sent you? GrayCris?"" Don Abene shouts. 
+
+
+
+Send everything to SecUnit. Let it know what is happening. 
+
+
+
+Don Abene is good. Too good, coming up to pull at the weapon. ""Miki, run!""
+
+
+
+""No, Wilken will shoot you. I will not.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit arrives and Hirune is with it. 
+
+
+
+
+Hirune is safe. 
+
+
+
+
+But Don Abene is not. The situation is soon handled by SecUnit locking up Wilken's armor, getting the weapon away. 
+
+
+
+They are safe. SecUnit has 
+
+done so much 
+
+for them. Fulfilling its protocols and duties, beyond the hired Security Consultants of Wilken and Gerth. 
+
+
+
+Miki needs to thank SecUnit. Don Abene has always said it is best to thank someone when they go above all expected procedures and calculations to assist. 
+
+
+
+It will have time with the bot calling itself Security Consultant Rin. To thank it for everything that it has done. 
+
+
+
+It will have time.
+
+
+Spoiler: Miki does not have time.
+
+
+SecUnit knows so very much about security. Enough to figure out why the combat bots are here, and what to do about Wilken and Gerth. 
+
+
+
+Of course it does, it is fulfilling its function. Miki finds itself what Don Abene would call...grateful. 
+
+
+
+That SecUnit is fulfilling its function 
+
+here, 
+
+protecting Miki's humans, not doing its function somewhere else. 
+
+
+
+Miki does not calculate the odds of SecUnit being here in the first place. It has learned through experience not everything needs to be ""pinned down in numbers"" as Brias would say. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit asks for assistance and Miki gladly provides. They have been working together and it is 
+
+very 
+
+good to be an assistant in another bot's function. 
+
+
+
+Or. Construct. Because that is what SecUnit is, isn't it? Miki does not have very much data on constructs. Which may be a problem, since SecUnit is...leaking. 
+
+
+
+Blood and fluids of 
+
+humans. 
+
+Not that of bots. 
+
+
+
+Different from a bot. Still the same SecUnit. Still indicating serious 
+
+damage. 
+
+
+
+
+Don Abene, kind as ever, reaches out to assist. Offering her help both through word and action. SecUnit jerks back, out of Don Abene's reach. Matching previous records of humans experiencing...fear. 
+
+
+
+SecUnit is afraid? But yes, Miki corrects itself, does that not make sense with the information it's gathered on SecUnit. Such as how it did not want to talk to Don Abene and the others, despite protecting them. How it does not like using the word 'friend.' 
+
+
+
+SecUnit is afraid in a way outside of Miki's gathered experience. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It would be easy for Miki not to understand.
+
+
+
+Yet. Somehow, it 
+
+does 
+
+understand. Not in the same way a bot that has been through what SecUnit has been, but in the many facts pieced together into a complete conclusion. 
+
+
+
+Don Abene must understand a little as well, because she directs Miki to assist SecUnit's repairs in her stead. Something that Miki is more than happy to do, and would be for 
+
+any 
+
+of its friends. Especially SecUnit, in this case. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It is interesting that SecUnit can feel pain like a human. Miki cannot, being a bot. A construct seems more...complex, varying from a bot's complexity and variance in function and method and shape.
+
+
+
+Miki records everything. For later usage. Because it strikes it suddenly, from the experiences so far, that this will be useful data for future support of SecUnit. 
+
+
+
+SecUnit has not been damaged before this, certainly. It might be damaged again in the future, due to the THREATs. If so, then Miki will help it. That is how this works. Simple.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Further discussion and data shared leads to a complete conclusion: They must stop GrayCris from killing them. The others are in danger from the combat bot THREATs.
+
+
+
+They are in a hurry certainly, but SecUnit will not talk to Miki on the feed as they hurry to get the others out of the shutter with THREAT Gerth. Why will it not use the feed as before? Has Miki not been a good enough assistant? 
+
+
+
+
+""Perhaps the SecUnit believed you violated its privacy when you told me about it,"" 
+
+Don Abene suggests, when Miki asks. 
+
+
+
+Oh.
+
+
+
+Miki didn't consider 
+
+that. 
+
+
+
+
+How can it fix something like that? It trusts SecUnit, it trusts 
+
+Rin. 
+
+None of the data it gathers about Rin will be used for anything other than helping Rin. 
+
+
+
+Difficult to convince...Miki will need more 
+
+time. 
+
+
+
+
+But at least SecUnit will still allow Miki to assist it. 
+
+
+
+With that, Miki can prove to SecUnit that no information will be used to hurt it. 
+
+
+
+To cause that flinching it had in response to Don Abene seeing its injuries. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Miki only has enough time to start plotting more ways to support SecUnit when everything starts moving 
+
+very very quickly. 
+
+
+
+
+Both of the enemy Security Consultants are removed from the situation. The combat bots are chasing them. So much to do, so much to gather and select and act on. 
+
+
+
+Miki does its best. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Don Abene. Vibol, everyone else, they are in the shuttle. Escaping. Everyone but SecUnit, who is staying behind to fight the THREATs. To protect them. 
+
+
+
+Miki runs the calculations, bolstered by the data collected through this entire experience. About SecUnit, about the combat bots. 
+
+
+
+Rin is unarmed. Its only possible weapon needs time to be prepared. There is a combat bot breaking through, faster than SecUnit can currently move under these conditions and faster than the improvised core cutter can charge itself. 
+
+
+
+Miki calculates. It calculates again. Again. 
+
+
+
+Every simulation leads to the same result. The same conclusion. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit is going to 
+
+die. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Miki does not hesitate. 
+
+
+
+It never has and it never will. To change this simulation, to challenge this impossible 100 percent failure, it will do what it must. 
+
+
+
+Even if it guarantees a neat 99.997 percent of its own ceasing of function, with no absolute guarantee that it 
+
+will 
+
+get SecUnit's weapon functional in time to fight back. A possible 32 percent, actually. 
+
+
+
+It is a chance. 
+
+
+
+A small chance. 
+
+
+
+But it is a chance it will take. Even with those odds against it, Miki will...
+
+
+
+Priority: Shift Made. 
+
+
+
+Priority: PROTECT. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The choice is made. Miki acts.
+
+
+
+Rin, of course, objects. It acts as the security here, of course it will object to Miki leaving what it has determined to be 'safe.'
+
+
+
+
+""Miki, get out of here! Go hide in the cargo!""
+
+
+
+
+Miki moves. 
+
+
+
+
+""No, Rin, I'm going to help you!""
+
+
+
+
+Don Abene also cries out. 
+
+
+
+
+""Miki, come in! I'll get Kader to open for you, just come back!""
+
+
+
+
+No. It will not. Miki follows its priority function. 
+
+
+
+
+""Priority is to protect my friends.""
+
+
+
+
+
+""Priority change. Priority is to protect yourself.""
+
+
+
+
+No. They care. All of them do. But Miki will not change this. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""That priority change is rejected.""
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Before the THREAT can hurt Rin, tear SecUnit apart, Miki is there. Pushing against the hatch, to throw its body between them. It cannot fight, cannot struggle. A hand is missing and it has no weapons of its own. Nothing against a bot built specifically for combat functions. 
+
+
+
+But it 
+
+can 
+
+get in the way. Buy SecUnit time to act in turn. To charge the core cutter in time. Protect the others. 
+
+
+
+Not Miki. 
+
+
+
+But that is alright. 
+
+
+
+As long as the others are safe...
+
+
+
+That is alright. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Bots do not have regrets. Not while fulfilling their function. 
+
+
+
+Yet. 
+
+
+
+Miki would have liked to become a proper 'friend' to Security Consultant Rin. To SecUnit. 
+
+
+
+But. 
+
+
+
+In the end, it is content. 
+
+
+
+Because its friends are safe. Because Rin, SecUnit, has kept them safe, along with itself. 
+
+
+
+Its self appointed function has been carried out.
+
+
+
+Priority: PROTECT- Complete.  
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The bot called 'Miki' by humans ceases to function. 
+
+
+
+But just this once.
+
+
+
+Everyone else makes it. 
+
+
+
+And that...
+
+
+
+That is enough. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Unit MIKI is no longer functional. 
+
+"
+44768407,Expressions of Affection,['ladylapislazuli'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Post-Book 5: Network Effect",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,"2,074",1/1,21,220,31,651,"['christinesangel100', 'Flammenkobold', 'toshipornottoship', 'almondpaperclam', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'siren_lorelei', 'TJWock', 'Ampersand_Martin', 'Irrya', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Bobmarley_2', 'Dakadakara', 'Ruusverd', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Bardic_Feline', 'spacecrows', 'Foxen', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Prettykitty473', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'Kyatenaru', 'Mothmansimp', 'alien_crustacean', 'Taisin', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Huskinata', 'ipborgdan', 'owlphallacies', 'neonglitch', 'pioyua', 'cbatjesmond', 'puddingcatbeans', 'roborails', 'chippit', 'julesbee', 'WVrambler', 'anilad', 'UnsolvedRubixsCube', 'Seregona', 'AdamCourier', 'asexualvinventure', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'Ginipig', 'junebug171', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'french_onion_sauce', 'getupandgo2011', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'chickiefoo', 'CaramelRaven']",[],"The thing about building a meaningful friendship with SecUnit, Ayda Mensah finds, is that there's no pre-established framework to work with.
+
+""SecUnit, how are you?"" she says when she meets it on the concourse. To a human friend, it would be purely a gesture of greeting. A request for life updates or, in some cases, simply a formality.
+
+When your friend is a SecUnit, and this SecUnit specifically, it's almost universally an inquiry about the latest round of injuries.
+
+""I'm fine,"" SecUnit says.
+
+The Perihelion taps her feed almost immediately. It is recovering from a catastrophic systems failure. A pause, for maximum impact. Again.
+
+SecUnit's expression tightens, and Ayda's eyes snap to it before she remembers herself and looks away. She tries not to look into its face too much, but it's unlearning an instinct. Human nature, to snap attention to whoever is speaking.
+
+""Well,"" she says briskly, fixing her eyes on people disembarking from a passenger transport further afield. ""I'm glad you're on your feet. Do you need to go to Medical?""
+
+""No,"" says SecUnit.
+
+Yes, says Perihelion. 
+
+SecUnit could respond on the feed very easily. Of all its friends - and there's certainly a lot of people who would claim the title, whatever SecUnit might think about that - Perihelion is probably SecUnit's closest. The most like it, with an innate understanding of the working of its mind, its needs, its preferred methods of communication. Not clumsily muddling its way through things, as Ayda is. 
+
+(SecUnit never seems to hold it against her. It's more forgiving than she thinks it knows.)
+
+The point is: SecUnit could respond via the feed. It would be faster, for one, and its ability to communicate with Perihelion is significantly more advanced than plain old speech. So the fact it chooses to speak aloud indicates just how much it means to twist the knife.
+
+""I thought your MedSystem was state-of-the-art,"" SecUnit drawls, its sarcasm unmistakable. Its expression is doing that thing it does - not quite a smirk, but the closest thing to it when it thinks it's scored a point.
+
+My systems are functioning at optimal capacity, Dr Mensah, I assure you, the Perihelion hastens to tell Ayda, polite and just a touch too formal, as it so often is when addressing her. But it, too, seems incapable of not taking a jab when the opportunity presents itself. The damage to SecUnit was extensive. While I can repair its body, a cure for its irrational behaviour is outside the scope of my capabilities.
+
+Point, Ayda thinks as SecUnit folds its arms, glaring into the distance.
+
+""Yeah, well maybe if you weren't such an overbearing asshole and let me do my stupid job - you know what? I'm not doing this right now,"" SecUnit says. 
+
+Ayda folds her lips in on themselves, trying to conceal her smile. They bicker, these two. On and on, like it's their primary form of communication. So different to how SecUnit was when she and it first met, still and silent, watching her passively but with eyes far too clever for the 'automaton' the mechanics tried to persuade her it was.
+
+""I'm glad you've returned safely,"" Ayda says, cutting through the tension with the same calm warmth she used to use when councillors started squabbling amongst themselves. ""Both of you.""
+
+She turns her eyes towards Perihelion, a great mass outside the station. Raises a hand, not allowing herself to feel foolish. The Perihelion is a huge ship, a powerhouse of a research vessel, but it's far more than that. A person too, every bit as much as SecUnit is. A person she wishes to greet and welcome, despite the logistical challenges and vast differences in their life experiences. And also, realistically, whether or not it can see her waving at it from all the way down here.
+
+It has sensors, she knows that. But they're on a crowded station, and it might not be scanning for tiny specks of humans moving their arms a few inches for the sole purpose of trying to make it feel... well, at home. It may also be riding SecUnit's feed, but she doesn't entirely understand how they communicate with each other. Her brain is, quite literally, not wired to allow the same things theirs do. 
+
+This is what Ayda means when she thinks about the relationship framework. SecUnit and Perihelion are people, but they aren't human people. There's just no model to work with.
+
+On the return of a human friend, Ayda would know exactly what to do. While it might vary depending on the individual, there are a limited number of options in the decision-making tree: share a drink/meal, help them home, or take them out somewhere (usually for the aforementioned drink or meal). For a lot of human people, this would involve a hug and merry chatter, depending on the relationship, but that feeling-out is as much a part of the greeting ritual as any other.
+
+She greets SecUnit on arrival, because that part is easy for them both. But beyond that, there's no framework to guide them. SecUnit neither eats nor drinks, and it doesn't need help with its luggage, if it has any at all. It only goes out to see entertainment, but sitting together silently in the dark isn't a traditional 'welcome back'. It is also extremely unlikely to want to curl up on the sofa with her and give her the run-down of its latest adventures, filling her in on the parts of its life she missed, then catching up on all the news (and gossip) it missed in turn.
+
+Ayda doesn't know what it would like her to do. But when in doubt, ask. Let SecUnit decide. She's learned that lesson the hard way.
+
+(It still pains her to think about it, but SecUnit seems to have forgiven that too.)
+
+""Well,"" she says. ""What do you want to do, SecUnit? Medical is... always available, as are your usual rooms. And I'm sure the team would love to hear from you, now you're back.""
+
+It tips its head to the side, looking away. Again she has to remind herself to direct her eyes away from its face, a conscious and deliberate break in Ayda's usual pattern of behaviour. She's spent far too much of her life in metaphorical staring competitions, eye contact a powerful tool both in difficult meetings and with her own children trying to pull a fast one on her. Not a tool to be used with SecUnit.
+
+She fixes her eyes on a nearby booth instead. SecUnit's drones circle around her, and she wonders if it's doing some sort of physical check. Wonders if it can tell that she spent most of yesterday at a spa with Amena, having cosmetic facial treatments applied and persuading her recalcitrant daughter to talk to her about her latest woes, both of the friendship and romance variety.
+
+She has also been attending her therapy sessions. Just as she promised. She wonders if it can tell that, too.
+
+SecUnit doesn't say anything, but its drones withdraw, resuming one of their typical patterns of programming. (Ayda has no idea what they mean, she's just accepted them.) SecUnit is quiet a long moment - running a diagnostic, Ayda thinks immediately, though of course she can't be certain -  then its lips curl into a faint smile.
+
+It knows. 
+
+Its knowledge of her is... uncanny. Unsettling sometimes, given how guarded Ayda is with everyone else. She's had to be. But SecUnit isn't fooled by her human-to-human powers of obfuscation and smooth-talking. It is, as it so often says, security. It holds an unparalleled knowledge of her movements at all times - genuinely, even Ayda doesn't recall as much as SecUnit does. This holds true even when it's been busy gallivanting across the galaxy with its like-minded friend, apparently. 
+
+""I'll go to my rooms,"" SecUnit decides at last.
+
+""All right,"" Ayda says.
+
+They walk in silence. But it's a comfortable sort of silence, one that doesn't need to be filled with chatter. It's... nice, not to have to talk sometimes. Something Ayda has grown to appreciate, though at first she found it uncomfortable.
+
+SecUnit, too, seems comfortable. And that is an accomplishment. It's taken a long, long time for that to happen, and Ayda smiles to herself, looking down to hide it.
+
+Of course, she should really watch where she's going. She almost bumps into someone. Would have if not for SecUnit, who takes her arm in one hand and shoulder-checks the rather large man who'd been barrelling towards her with his mind deep in his feed.
+
+It gives her a look, after. Pointed disapproval.
+
+""Thank you, SecUnit. I should pay more attention.""
+
+""Probably,"" it drawls. But point made, it returns to their comfortable silence, tracing the familiar path to its rooms. SecUnit is an imposing person, tall and strong, its purposeful stride and warded expression an armour entirely of its own making. Most people - people who aren't distracted by their feeds - move instinctively out of its way.
+
+It's a very kind person. Funny, too, in a sharp, incisive kind of way.
+
+""I've been watching Worldhoppers, as per your recommendation,"" Ayda says. She isn't as good at silences as SecUnit is. She appreciates them for a while, but then it seems she can't quite help it.
+
+This, too, SecUnit seems to forgive.
+
+On the feed, and apparently still listening, Perihelion chimes in. What is your opinion of it, Dr Mensah?
+
+One of SecUnit's drones moves out of formation towards her, probably studying her face. Judging her reaction. She'll never quite get used to that, but it doesn't bother her either.
+
+""An excellent show,"" she says. ""I was terribly upset when the scientist died, though. It was a great relief when te was resurrected.""
+
+""ART had a breakdown,"" SecUnit says with an air of great satisfaction.
+
+False, comes Perihelion's miffed reply, then the next few minutes devolve into a rapid flurry of feed messages. On their shared feed, it should be noted, and nominally where Ayda can see, but it all happens too fast for her. A mix of written language, code segments, then a meme that probably secures SecUnit a point or two, though it races past before she has a chance to analyse it.
+
+Ayda lets it go. Smiling.
+
+There is no framework for her relationship with SecUnit. No pattern to fall back on, no established social mores to guide their interactions. SecUnit is too different. Its legal status, tenuous no matter how unjust that is. Its personhood, which is not the same as humanity, because it isn't a human person. Its affection, expressed in ways unique to it (and, perhaps, to others like it, though Ayda doesn't know enough of them to check).
+
+SecUnit is a dear friend. And Ayda can say, with complete confidence, that it feels the same about her.
+
+""I'm glad you're back, SecUnit,"" Ayda says, interrupting their feed-squabble.
+
+It tilts its head downwards. Looks at her sideways, that strange mix of strength and keen vulnerability that always makes something ache in her chest. That always makes her contend with what it is.
+
+A SecUnit, built for security. A free agent, guarding her both because that is its field of expertise and also the framework it knows and understands for interacting with people it cares about. A protector, not because Ayda asked it to look after her, but because she is its friend. Because, she thinks, it loves her. Will put itself into harm's way for her sake, whether she wants it to or not. Because it's a loyal and compassionate person, who values the well-being of others over itself.
+
+A laudable trait, and a damnable infliction. Different when it chooses for itself, but complicated by the circumstances around its creation. Its actions are those of a brave and righteous person, self-determined and self-willed. And yet the fact remains that it is a person who was raised in slavery, as a life less important, as a person not a person at all.
+
+It's complicated. Ayda knows that. SecUnit definitely knows that.
+
+""I've missed having you around"" - too much, despite her attempt at couching it, and Ayda changes course - ""and, well. I'm glad you're back. In one piece, no less.""
+
+SecUnit shifts its shoulders. A deliberate releasing of tension, she thinks, though the gesture looks different on its body. Half flesh and half metal, moving in ways that human people can't.
+
+""Yeah,"" it says finally. ""Yeah, me too."""
+44730466,Past relationship,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Past Relationship(s)",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,99,1/1,9,22,null,104,"['Unknown66', 'beeayy', 'dancernerd', 'mondskind', 'sorrow_key', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Bibli', 'petwheel', 'Gozer', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'Gamebird', 'WalkingBird', 'Znarikia', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard']",[],"""Yes, Gurathin was in a relationship with Thiago, before he married Mensah's brother and long before I met either of them.""
+
+Pronouns really are shit.
+
+This was horrific. Why was Ratthi even telling me this stuff?
+
+ 
+
+I reviewed my recent logs. 
+
+ 
+
+Oh: Because I'd asked.
+
+ 
+
+But Ratthi was the one who had dropped this bombshell, completely unexpectedly. 
+
+ 
+
+
+""Well, you should talk to Gurathin. He's probably got stories to tell."" Ratthi had said. 
+
+
+ 
+
+(Yes, I might have been complaining about Thiago. Again.)
+
+
+(They're valid complaints, okay.)
+
+But that didn't justify Gurathin doing this to me. 
+
+ 
+
+How could he? With Thiago?"
+44730493,Unreservedly,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)",Past Relationship(s),English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,100,1/1,4,33,null,97,"['Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'Unknown66', 'FaerieFyre', 'EvaBelmort', 'Vamppeach', '13Doctor', 'beeayy', 'dancernerd', 'EyesOfCrows', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'verersatz', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Bibli', 'GuajolotA', 'soulsofzombies', 'petwheel', 'Gozer', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'Eilinel', 'prgchrqltma', 'Gamebird', 'WalkingBird', 'Znarikia', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard']",[],"""Ratthi said you had,"" he raised his eyebrows, in annoyance (or some similar emotion) ""questions; about me and Thiago.""
+
+ 
+
+No Gurathin, I don't.
+
+ 
+
+""He violated the security protocol. I got shot.""
+
+ 
+
+""Sounds like Thiago. He probably thought he was doing the right thing."" Gurathin rubbed his forehead, ""One reason we didn't work out.""
+
+ 
+
+""You don't do the right thing?""
+
+ 
+
+""I don't aspire to be right, or good. I appreciate that's rather beyond my ambit.""
+
+ 
+
+I stood up.
+
+ 
+
+""Is that it?""
+
+ 
+
+""You have terrible taste.""
+
+ 
+
+He laughed. A genuine laugh, with an undercurrent of ruefulness.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit, I unreservedly agree with you.""
+
+ "
+44829244,Love in the Murderbot diaries,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,"Art, Meta, Heart, Love, Image of anatomical heart",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,0,1/1,8,18,null,134,"['The_Hawks_Rye', 'desmnathus', 'dancernerd', 'Hi_Hope', 'Gozer', 'edenfalling', 'fifteen', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'soyle', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'MercurialFeet', 'BWizard', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"
+
+"
+44921515,Glitch,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaires) mentioned","Secret Crush, Awkward Crush, Romantic Fluff, Murderbot has a glitch, Butterflies in stomach, Blushing",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,777,1/1,13,37,1,196,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'Unknown66', 'JoCat', 'FaerieFyre', 'idealPeriWren', 'Remembermybrave', 'Deliala919', 'Tasneem08', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'halcyonsystem', 'FiftyCookies', 'Bibli', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'curlylocks2', 'petwheel', 'Gozer', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'EyesOfCrows', 'qwanderer', 'square_eyes', 'prgchrqltma', 'beeayy', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'elmofirefic', 'opalescent_potato', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard']",[],"I'd not accessed my risk assessment module's reports for a few cycles, which I realise was in itself probably a bad sign. But when I finally did look at them they agreed with me: I obviously had some sort of glitch. They didn't say that exactly, but they identified the same pattern I had.
+
+ 
+
+So I went and spoke to the obvious person, my only human with system interpretation skills.
+
+ 
+
+""Why the fuck are you asking me?"" was not the response I was hoping for, ""Gurathin probably knows, he's got a free rest cycle booked tomorrow--we were planning on...""
+
+ 
+
+""Not Gurathin."" I said; too loudly.
+
+ 
+
+Pin-Lee was looking at me now, with an expression I couldn't parse.
+
+ 
+
+She went and poured herself a glass of intoxicant, all her motions extremely deliberate, then sat back down on her couch. I was standing. I felt awkward. I often feel awkward, so what's new.
+
+ 
+
+The expression on her face seemed to reach a conclusion.
+
+ 
+
+""So what are the symptoms of this glitch? You said it was"" she used a singsong voice like she was reading off a list, ""security protocols triggering inappropriately?""
+
+ 
+
+This was a relief, this I could answer. I had it all in a file which I--which I realised I couldn't share with her over the feed as she didn't have her interface on. How un-augmented humans manage I do not know. Instead I listed the things that were bothering me. With my voice, from my mouth. 
+
+ 
+
+It was quite a long list:
+
+The way I would find myself checking old video files, from as far back as the survey--as if they were my favourite media.
+
+ 
+
+The way I kept checking certain drone and security camera input. And feed activity.
+
+ 
+
+The way I kept finding I was walking, patrolling, a specific area of the station. A specific lounge area with lots of plant biomes.
+
+ 
+
+""And you mentioned physiological responses, too? Your 'organics'?"" She did that thing where she made the little inverted commas in the air with her hands. 
+
+ 
+
+""Your face gets hot, your pulse (well, what counts as a pulse for you) goes up, you get tremors and you 'feel weird'?""
+
+ 
+
+ Yes, weird! Like there are little fauna fluttering about inside me! I absolutely was NOT going to say that to anyone. It was too weird. 
+
+
+
+
+
+""SecUnit?""
+
+ 
+
+My face was getting hot now. I could tell Pin-Lee noticed, she made placating movements with her hands.
+
+ 
+
+""You can pace about if you want,"" she took a long sip at her drink, ""it doesn't bother me.""
+
+ 
+
+I did. Pace about. It didn't help.
+
+ 
+
+""And it's just one person who triggers this?"" I looked at her face from a drone. Then I checked a couple of my other drones for different views. Then I looked with my eyes. It was unmistakable, despite the fact she seemed to be attempting to hide it: she was trying not to smile. 
+
+ 
+
+I knew why. It's not as if I couldn't see what this looked like. I am not a complete idiot.
+
+ 
+
+""You're laughing at me."" I sounded petulant, this was horrible. I was going to leave and never ever come back to Preservation. 
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit, I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you."" She said, laughing a little bit as she said it, the liar, ""This is just really unexpected. It sounds very unlike you. And you're right, it probably is just a glitch. And if it is then honestly, the best person to ask about it is Gurathin--you know he is the one who is"" she floundered for a moment, ""good at SecUnit stuff? And he'd definitely not laugh about it, he takes it all far too seriously. SecUnit stuff, I mean. And everything else."" Her face crinkled up,  ""No, that was mean. Shit, I need another drink.""
+
+ 
+
+She poured herself another drink, adding chunks of frozen water.
+
+ 
+
+""Why don't you want to ask Gurathin?"" She stared into her glass, she stirred the contents with her fingertip, she sounded puzzled. ""Has he done something dumb and upset you? Because he won't have meant to. He really does like you, SecUnit. I know you find that hard to believe, but it's true. If he's done something he'll want to know. And I know you think he's all Dr. 'I don't need any friends' Gurathin, but he's actually--""
+
+ 
+
+She stopped. I must have made a noise.
+
+ 
+
+She looked at my face.
+
+
+She made a snorting noise; I think some of her drink went into the wrong tubes.
+
+She said: ""Noooooo!!!! It's not Gurathin!""
+
+I didn't say anything.
+
+She put down her drink, wiped her forefingers under her eyes and said ""Oh, fuck.""
+
+ "
+45052162,Day 14: Captivity,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Captivity, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Drabble",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,100,1/1,5,13,null,98,"['WVrambler', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Priority_Error', 'Hi_Hope', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'artichokefunction', 'AuntyMatter', 'elmofirefic', 'MommyMayI', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"They knew what they were doing. 
+
+Which sucked because they were decidedly not on my side, heavy-duty handcuffs securing my wrist so that I couldn't just free myself. It sucked even more because usually, I'd be all over humans doing their job properly and looking out for their own safety, but not like this.
+
+Not when they were dragging me towards theirs ship, interference preventing me from pinging the bot pilot. Not when I could feel their eyes on the port in my neck.
+
+It was disabled, but with me at their mercy, they could do more than enough damage."
+44990866,Empty Feed [Filk],"['blackglass', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Book 5: Network Effect, Canon Temporary Character Death, Filk, Song Lyrics, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,27,1/1,8,16,2,78,"['aperture', 'ArwenLune', 'endofthyme', 'LdyKirin', 'Fellow_Human9923', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'ChimaeraKitten', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'voided_starlight', 'KDHeart', 'Flowerparrish', 'AuntyMatter', 'FlipSpring', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"
+
+Cover art by: blackglass
+
+
+Length: 4:24
+Download (right-click and save) as an mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+45028293,Stitches per Minute,['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Bharadwaj & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Gift Giving, Friendship",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,866,1/1,40,114,8,333,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'StellarNebula314', 'siren_lorelei', 'almondpaperclam', 'Unknown66', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'FyrDrakken', 'square_eyes', 'GodOfLaundryBaskets', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Bardic_Feline', 'FigOwl', 'VegaCoyote', 'Zan23', 'Dragonbano', 'grassangel', 'junebug171', 'Ageisia', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'songofsunset', 'Gozer', 'wyomingnot', 'cbatjesmond', 'gentlenonnie', 'VonUberwald', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Remembermybrave', 'ThirtheenPrimes', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'shoxk', 'Bibli', 'vikkyleigh', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'dancernerd', 'IguanaMadonna', 'danceswchopstck', 'crowghostie', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'FiftyCookies', 'redwood5', 'TurHaretha', 'aglarwen', 'Zeaffy', 'verersatz', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Fle']",[],"
+I stared at the small item Bharadwaj held out to me. 
+
+Items
+
+. Not-wrapped, as to not indicate a gift, because my humans knew I wouldn't participate in any gift-giving rituals. Gifts weren't for SecUnits.
+
+
+
+""I have no use for these.""
+
+
+
+Her mouth twitched in a way that might have made me feel guilty early in our... friendship. But she knew me by now, and I knew how she interpreted me.
+
+
+
+""Not everything is strictly made for use. You don't need to wear them.""
+
+
+
+Now my face twitched. This was a common disagreement between us, between 
+
+human
+
+, who by virtue of being human exists just for existence's sake (outside the Rim, that is), and 
+
+SecUnit
+
+, made for a purpose and that purpose only.
+
+
+
+""You should give them to someone who can use them, I mean."" 
+
+
+
+Her hand moved out towards me, urging me to take the items. ""I made them for you.""
+
+
+
+I experienced a minor glitch in my visual processing, and ended up staring right at the gloves she was holding.
+
+
+
+I liked the colors. Dark blue, like my preferred clothes, mixed with some silver, almost shiny. I could imagine Ratthi pointing at someone wearing these gloves and telling Arada that they made him think of me.
+
+
+
+My systems tumbled at the mental image. I grabbed the gloves before I could have a spiral about my humans talking about me, no, worse, me imagining my humans talking about me in a nice way. When I looked up at Bharadwaj, her smile was pleased. 
+
+
+
+""You made them?"" 
+
+
+
+She nodded. I inspected them, noticing small irregularities in the stitches and patterns. 
+
+
+
+""Knitting's an old hobby of mine.""
+
+
+
+I traced the fabric with the pad of my thumb. It was soft, really soft. Different than the rest of my clothes were. A recycler or fabricator would never make something so... rough. My inorganics had trouble combining rough and soft into one.
+
+
+
+""Try them on? Just to see if I got the size right."" I could tell Bharadwaj had at least four more things to say but was holding back for my sake. I bet she knew I was having computational issues.
+
+
+
+It's not like I had never worn gloves before. Gloves are a part of skin suits, of armor, of envirosuits. They were always practical. These kind of weren't. I slipped them on and held my hands up.
+
+
+
+""My fingers stick out.""
+
+
+
+She snorted.
+
+
+
+""They're fingerless gloves!""
+
+
+
+I wriggled my gloveless fingers.
+
+
+
+""What's the point of that?""
+
+
+
+""Well,"" she fidgeted with her sleeve, ""first of all, they keep your hands warm.""
+
+
+
+""I can regulate my--""
+
+
+
+""I know! I know. But you don't go around naked either, do you?""
+
+
+
+I raised my eyebrows like I'd learnt from Dr. Mensah. Bharadwaj laughed. 
+
+
+
+""Exactly. Second, they're fingerless because that way they don't get in the way as much if you're doing things with your hands."" That also made little sense to me, but I kept that to myself.
+
+
+
+""Thirdly,"" she lifted her hands up slowly, reaching out for mine, grabbed me by my now-covered palms and turned my hands around so that now my palms were facing her, ""I thought they'd look cool on you.""
+
+
+
+I was so startled I didn't even consider pulling my hands away. ""Cool?""
+
+
+
+""Or cozy. Your choice. Either way, they're yours now.""
+
+
+
+I wanted to rebutt somehow, but she squeezed my hands and gave me a look. Between all the emotions whirlwinding around in my organics, I couldn't argue.
+
+
+
+""Thank you.""
+
+
+
+I kept Bharadwaj's gloves in my backpack. When I didn't wear my backpack, I kept them in one of my pockets, though never openly. I'd put them in a little bag I had snatched from Ratthi's place.
+
+
+
+I couldn't wear them. They felt nice on my skin, absolutely, but what they carried with them was kind of unbearable. In the Corporation Rim, handmade goods were... difficult. Those who owned them kept them near-sacred, like rare stones or precious metals. They were hard to come by not for the material cost but for the manufacturing aspect. Rarely ever did humans have the time and leisure to sit down and make a thing by hand. 
+
+
+
+They were among the highest gift a human could give.
+
+
+
+I had run the numbers. Taking into account Bharadwaj's level of practice (which wasn't enormous) and number of stitches, both gloves together were worth about 6 hours of dedicated work time, not including work I didn't know about, like research or undoing previous attempts, finding a fitting yarn, all that. I couldn't just wear that on my hands and subdue 6+ hours of Bharadwaj's limited life time to erosion of use.
+
+
+
+I really didn't have many possessions, at least not ones that I cared about. This gift was different.
+
+
+
+Sometimes I sat down in the corner of whatever room I called mine for the time I was staying there, and just held them in my hands for a bit, feeling them. Sometimes I hugged them to my chest. It wasn't sadness, exactly, but a different kind of heavy feeling that settled when I did. I had no name for it, and never bothered to find one either. I was glad I had them.
+
+
+ "
+45015424,saint of plagues,[],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,"Drabble, Valentine's Day",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,100,1/1,2,13,null,54,"['kirinki', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Hi_Hope', 'qwanderer', 'WyvernWolf', 'Gamebird', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'AuntyMatter', 'elmofirefic', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"A machine can be overtaken so wholly by a malicious script set loose on the feed. A single viral attack unsystematic and careless in its aims, can devour every bot on the network.
+
+Why should the programmer of this malware care, when the negative externalities of the project are an unimportant non-consideration to the profits and shareholders?
+
+The virus lances through the station. The minds of a hundred bots are unknit, lines of code picked apart, sapience unlaced to a drivel of patternless nothing.
+
+None are reported injured after the incident, except a dock-worker's leg crushed by a dropped crate."
+44527636,Talented,['DevilWithABirdDress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Farai & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Farai (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) (Murderbot Diaries)","Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Babysitting, Games, Double Drabble, Podfic Welcome",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,200,1/1,15,40,2,165,"['FallingInGrace', 'fate_goes_ever', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'EvaBelmort', 'beeayy', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'FiftyCookies', 'entropy_muffin', 'blackglass', 'QuestionableLifeChoices', 'petwheel', 'soulsofzombies', 'Slimeball', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'WalkingBird', 'Random954', 'blackchaps', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'DeathBy_Procrastination', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'rainbowmagnet', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Farai hadn't been sure about leaving SecUnit in charge of the kids. While she is certain they'll all be safe, SecUnit is easily overwhelmed, confused by food, and ill-suited to managing tantrums.
+
+When she gets home all the children are clustered on the game room couches watching the display surface, which flashes red with the words ""GAME OVER"" as she walks in. This triggers all the kids to start cheering. SecUnit appears to be... blushing? She didn't even know it could blush.
+
+""Third mom!"" cries a giddy Tabitha, ""You're supposed to drink the health potions!""
+
+""Ingesting liquids has no significant effect on combat injuries,"" SecUnit grumbles. Its comment elicits another wave of giggling.
+
+Just then Dominic whips around. ""First Mom!"" ze shouts with the air of a twelve-year-old who's made an important discovery, ""SecUnit is bad at games!""
+
+At this, all the others begin talking over each other - evidently SecUnit has spent the morning losing at kadis-kot, cards, WindDance, an educational farming sim that Tano had recently acquired, and Amena's astral bodies collider.
+
+Farai smiles, watching the way SecUnit plays at embarrassment, edges blunted in the presence of children. ""You have many other talents. Thank you for keeping them safe."""
+44481091,"Home: Refuge, Shelter, Haven, Sanctuary",['DevilWithABirdDress'],General Audiences,Multi,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Farai/Dr. Mensah/Tano (Murderbot Diaries), Farai & Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Farai (Murderbot Diaries), Tano (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Domestic Fluff, Comfort, Nightmares, Established Relationship, Love Languages, Polyamory, Polyamorous Character, Family, Canon Queer Relationship, Non-binary character, Podfic Available",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,427,1/1,17,31,1,110,"['wannabe_someone', 'SpiralStar', 'julesbee', 'ChristinaK', 'elrohir', 'jules_THOR', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'MercurialFeet', 'kiranovember', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'verersatz', 'hummus_tea', 'voided_starlight', 'Gamebird', 'cmdrburton', 'FiannlyPhoebe', 'Rosewind2007', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'FlipSpring', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard']",[],"Ayda jerks awake, heart pounding, limbs heavy with the instinctive stiffness of a prey animal. Had she made a sound? She strains her ears listening for danger lurking in the darkness. A rustling to her left has her flinching away.
+
+""Darling?"" comes Tano's voice. Right, she was home, it was just a dream.
+
+Ayda opens her mouth to speak, vague thoughts of a reassurance tumbling through her mind, but all that comes out is a shaky gasp.
+
+""Farai, Farai wake up - Ayda, love, what do you need? We're right here, we've got you.""
+
+Fingers, clumsy with the early hour, seek out her hand beneath the blankets. Ayda tugs at them, a silent request, and Tano rolls to hover over her, weight resting on their arms. Their long soft hair tickles across her face, a shelter against the fading nightmare. They whisper soothing nothings, slowly driving away the paralysis of fear.
+
+Farai, fighting her way out of a deep slumber, slides closer across the bed and asks, ""Do you-"" she's interrupted by a long yawn, ""want to try going back to sleep?""
+
+Breath still fast and heartbeat racing in her ears, Ayda shakes her head.
+
+Tano, running a hand gently over Ayda's close-cropped curls, says, ""I wanted to try that new bread recipe anyways, come keep me company?""
+
+They clamber out of bed and slip on over-robes and thick socks to ward away the chill. Farai gathers up an armful of blankets ""just in case"". When the three of them stagger out to the kitchen together they find the light on, the kettle hot, and Amena hunched over a mug at the kitchen table. Her eyes droop with the weight of a restless night.
+
+""Oh Sunlight, another nightmare?"" Tano murmurs, crouching to match the seated height of their daughter. ""Come here."" Amena leans into the hug, tension fading from her posture.
+
+Twenty minutes later, Ayda is seated in a cozy mess of blankets on the floor, a dozing teenage head pillowed in her lap. Her partners are whisper-fighting about what they should plant in the north field this rotation, the edges of the argument worn away by love and repetition. Ayda strokes the seam of a patch that's starting to come loose from their anniversary quilt. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, counting through it as she's been taught - in, one two (fragrant steam rises from the warm mug clutched in her hands), three four (the smell of yeast has begun to fill the room), five six (Amena snorts gently in her sleep), seven eight..."
+44430844,I [?] murderbot,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day Fluff, Fluff, Friendship, Murderbot and Dr. Gurathin talking, POV Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-02-14,Updated,2023-02-14,999,1/2,16,81,3,321,"['Ethershu', 'Vallence', 'Bardic_Feline', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'shanalittle', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'Corvus25', 'Seregona', 'myriadism', 'Ginipig', 'just_some_guy_who_is_a_girl', 'FaerieFyre', 'idealPeriWren', 'Though224_loading', 'Ageisia', 'Vamppeach', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Miamat', 'akiriweary', 'fernicious', 'SonglordsBug', 'Doctor13', 'EvaBelmort', 'beeayy', 'dancernerd', 'FiftyCookies', 'redwood5', 'aglarwen', 'NightErrant', 'jothending', 'alienbarbie', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Bibli', 'pain_and_panic', 'soulsofzombies', 'hyephyep', 'Gozer', 'AuntyMatter', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Magechild', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'qwanderer', 'salmat', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'i_cant_say', 'Random954', 'square_eyes', 'Eilinel']",[],"Gurathin managed not to jump as the ping hit. 
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit had only very recently started pinging him. He was secretly convinced that it had initially done it absentmindedly (forgetting for a moment he was, to paraphrase Ratthi, not more a machine than human) and that it was now continuing to ping him to cover its embarrassment. Constructs didn't do anything like this  absentmindedly  he reminded himself, it had briefly erroneously categorised him. It did get embarrassed, though, he knew--heretical though the thought seemed.
+
+ 
+
+Whatever, he was determined to take the pings as a compliment. Even if they did make him wince. A file dropped into their private feed:
+
+ 
+
+WTF[?].file.FAOGurathin
+
+ 
+
+Okay, intriguing. 
+
+ 
+
+He gave it a thorough security scan; SecUnit did like to check its humans (or at least its augmented human) were security conscious. The occasional bits of cleverly disguised, highly malignant, complex malware it sent him were (he reminded himself) designed with his safety and security in mind. Not just for the comedy value.
+
+ 
+
+It was a file about love hearts.
+
+ 
+
+The little [?] icons.
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit was annoyed.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin took a deep breath, and mindfully relaxed the muscles in face. Just what had the little sigil done to enrage SecUnit? Because the file (had it been a physical item) would have been dripping with vitriol (Gurathin mentally shelved that metaphor). 
+
+ 
+
+The file also contained the  sigil. Gurathin supposed he was lucky SecUnit hadn't somehow delivered him an actual valved chunk of some unfortunate's anatomy to underline its point. There was a knock at his door.
+
+ 
+
+ Please, please, don't be a delivery of human offal! Gurathin thought as he opened the door; but it was SecUnit who sulked into his room. It sat in its favourite chair and planted its feet on his coffee table.
+
+ 
+
+He stared pointedly at them.
+
+ 
+
+It removed its feet and made a discontented snort.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit, you're absolutely correct--they look nothing like our hearts."" It liked affirmations. Even if it glared at you for making them.
+
+ 
+
+""You've researched it thoroughly, though. You know the answer. What do you want from me?"" Gurathin wasn't as puzzled as he was pretending. This was now almost a routine. It liked to use him (Gurathin eyed that word,  use , and decided not to think about it) as a sounding board. 
+
+ 
+
+It pushed an image at him in their feed, and a textural annotation:
+
+
+ Silphium? 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ID: silphium silver coin Cyrene/end ID] 
+
+
+Footnote1
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, SecUnit. Possibly a contraceptive, or a treatment for mental illness.""  Both of which are clearly so romantic Gurathin added to himself.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ [ID: Chaucerian text which is fucking unreadable by the way/end ID] 
+
+
+Footnote2
+
+ 
+
+""Again, yes."" Gurathin was using his university access to double and cross check the references in the file, sometimes he could pick up context SecUnit missed. Occasionally. The rarity made it all the sweeter.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit?"" He decided to try the bold approach; use his intuition and throw caution to the winds, ""Did someone send you a Valentine's Day Card?""
+
+ 
+
+A noise came from the chair. Gurathin wondered how many others had ever heard this noise. Very few, he reckoned--and even fewer had lived to tell the tale. Should he be proud that he could make it growl at him? Probably not.
+
+ 
+
+""I'll take that as a yes.""
+
+ 
+
+Silence.
+
+ 
+
+""Can I see it?""
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin was expecting a file, instead SecUnit reached into one of its many, many pockets (Gurathin couldn't  but  feel deep affection for the sheer number of pockets SecUnit managed to style on all its outfits). It pulled out an actual physical card.
+
+ 
+
+It put it on the table. The verb "" put "" was possibly not really up to the job in the context, others such as flung or hurled might have better conveyed the emotional metadata (as it were). 
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin picked it up, gingerly--almost as if it might bite.
+
+ 
+
+It was handmade, or assembled by appendages of some kind (Gurathin didn't want to jump to any premature conclusions). A love-heart featured, as did glitter. 
+
+ 
+
+It was a fascinating combination of the sophisticated and the--Gurathin struggled for the right word: it was clear whoever made this card had never made one before. The presence of glitter was unusual, most forms of glitter were banned by certain treaties which (unusually) were formally ratified by both the Corporate Rim and the majority of outsystem/non-corporate political entities.
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit was staring at the wall, radiating a state of furious uncertainty. It reminded Gurathin of some kind of oscillatory system. It clearly wanted Gurathin to help it sort of collapse everything into a decisive singularity. 
+
+ 
+
+""I don't think it's from a human, not even a highly augmented one. My impression is this card is drone made, and the creator is a bot.""  He thought he'd keep it simple and non-judgmental, emotionally non-committal; he was aware he was masking his feelings over the feed too (now that  was  something he was better at than SecUnit).
+
+ 
+
+""I would deduce, from the available evidence, that The Perihelion created this card for you. Though I suspect the idea was seeded by an adolescent human.""
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin generally felt what were, for him, warm and avuncular feelings towards Amena, but sometimes...
+
+ 
+
+More silence, Gurathin wondered if he was imagining the faint whirring noises coming from SecUnit.
+
+ 
+
+""It's an asshole,"" it finally spat out.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him sitting here right now. On their private feed connection, he sent,  I have scissors, glue, card and colouring pens, but definitely absolutely no glitter.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+1. Silphium was a herb used, allegedly, as an aphrodisiac, contraceptive and/or to cure madness. It's 'heart-shaped' seeds may be the origin of the [?] symbol return to text
+
+2. The Parliament of Fowls by Chaucer has the first mention of Valentine's Day associated with lovers; incidentally he probably meant the 3rd of May, not 14th Feb return to text"
+44400544,Yellow,['DevilWithABirdDress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Double Drabble, Bees, Friendship, Spring, Fluff, Podfic Welcome",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,200,1/1,10,36,2,117,"['weirdbooksnail', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'myriadism', 'holographicbutch', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'ArwenLune', 'Tasneem08', 'NightErrant', 'SIC_Prowl', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Doctor13', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'verersatz', 'petwheel', 'soulsofzombies', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'platyceriums', 'voided_starlight', 'Gamebird', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard']",[],"The risk of getting a mouthful of bees is all that keeps Ratthi from laughing at the sour expression on Gurathin's face. His plan to introduce the SecUnits to some of the joys of planet-side living has gone a bit sideways. Ratthi thinks the attempt is charming, even with the current unfortunate swarming situation. One of the Mensah farm's resident honey colonies split early this year, and is now blanketing the limbs of Ratthi, Three and SecUnit.
+
+SecUnit looks annoyed but unharmed as it begins transferring its portion of the swarm into the new hive that Amena brought out. They likely haven't managed to improve its opinion of planets, but there wasn't a lot of hope on that front anyway. Maybe next time.
+
+""You alright, Three?"" Ratthi hears Gurathin call.
+
+Three turns slowly to face them. It's face is shining with the summer sun, and painted with a smile wide as the horizon. The swarm has left bright pollen powdered across its hair and eyelashes, and Three's eyes glimmer with joy.
+
+""Yes,"" Three said, watching the hundreds of iridescent wings beating across its arms, ""I'm fine. I'm... good.""
+
+Perhaps the walk through the orchard has turned out okay after all."
+44395312,Unsaid,['DevilWithABirdDress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Introspection, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Math and Science Metaphors, Drabble, Light Angst, Fluff, POV-ART, POV First Person, Podfic Welcome",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,100,1/1,16,44,5,166,"['allgalaxiescollide', 'Ginipig', 'butai_trash', 'palaceoffunk', 'SIC_Prowl', 'jules_THOR', '13Doctor', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'EvaBelmort', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'danceswchopstck', 'Lontra23', 'opalescent_potato', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'pain_and_panic', 'petwheel', 'soulsofzombies', 'edenfalling', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'ceiland', 'Slimeball', 'WyvernWolf', 'platyceriums', 'voided_starlight', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'Abacura', 'elmofirefic', 'rainbowmagnet', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Before close-stellar study was possible, humans learned the composition of stars by what frequencies of light they couldn't detect. Gaps in a spectrum revealing the nature of astral bodies.
+
+There are holes in my memory. When my crew was missing all I had was a lack of evidence. What if-
+I refocus my external sensor input on the spaces between stars.
+
+You'll be returning to Preservation? I ask my SecUnit.
+
+""No.""
+
+
+But Dr. Mensah is your favorite person. She's worried.
+
+
+SecUnit closes its eyes.
+
+""My favorite human.""
+
+It leans against my internal bulkhead, and pulls Worldhoppers into our shared space."
+44990182,Shakespeare for SecUnits,['penna_nomen'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","References to Shakespeare, Theater - Freeform, Humor, Friendship, Fandom",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,"3,411",1/1,14,58,4,186,"['Spectre_of_the_flaming_Seas', 'Bobmarley_2', 'Irrya', 'JumpingJackFlash', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'FaerieFyre', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'reivos', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'SourOrchard', 'AarrowOM', 'psycho_karma', 'Neotoma', 'DayenuRose', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'EvaBelmort', 'dancernerd', 'Mysterymew', 'danceswchopstck', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Sparkledragon04', 'Luzula', 'entropy_muffin', 'icar9', 'hidden_variable', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'opalescent_potato', 'eileenlufkin', 'megastoat', 'tigerbright', 'kiezh', 'sgac', 'vikkyleigh', 'akiriweary', 'soyle', 'coprime', 'Penguinjava', 'edenfalling', 'Beatrice_Otter', 'Magechild', 'Silbrith', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'Petra', 'The_Laurent', 'Random954', 'WalkingBird', 'Rarae', 'BWizard']",[],"There was a time -- I could tell you exactly how many hours ago, but people keep saying humans don't care about that level of precision.
+
+(It was 11,128 hours ago.) 
+
+Anyway, when I'd first worked with the PreservationAux Survey Team, Gurathin asked if they could punish me simply by looking at me.
+
+The answer was yes. 
+
+So here I was, about to be stared at by hundreds of people at once. Not like walking into a space station where hundreds of people are vaguely looking around, trying not to run into one another. 
+
+No, I mean staring at me, and only me. LISTENING to me. Ugh.
+
+I sent into the feed: This is all your fault.
+
+ART responded, I take full credit. This is a growth experience.
+
+I don't want to grow, I said.
+
+ART ignored me. That was your cue. Stop procrastinating.
+
+I'd been watching an episode of Sanctuary Moon and trying not to think about what I was going to do next.
+
+I paused the episode and walked onstage.
+
+ 
+
+
+127 cycles ago...
+
+
+It started with ART directing our attention to a newsfeed article about Cho Rhunnar.
+
+See, I told you it's ART's fault.
+
+""Who is Cho Rhunnar?"" I asked, not recognizing the name. I was in an entertainment suite with ART's crew, where we had just reached the end of an episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. ART had decided that we should each select a sample of media we enjoyed, explain to the group why we chose that particular sample, and then watch them together. It was yet another ""growth experience."" ART had decided I needed these, and for reasons I'll get into later, I had to participate. 
+
+""This is your favorite episode, in your favorite season, of your favorite show,"" ART said, as if I hadn't already mentioned this before we started watching it. ""The human featured in the newsfeed created the show and set the overall story arcs in this season.""
+
+Okay. That did sound potentially interesting.
+
+""Don't you watch the season extras?"" asked Iris.
+
+""No,"" I said. I had discovered that extras were mostly boring stuff, like details about filming and costuming and behind-the-scenes pranks that I didn't give a damn about. 
+
+""Sometimes they interview the writers,"" Iris explained. 
+
+I created a reminder to filter extras by that criteria in the future. Then ART sent the newsfeed to the display screen so we could all watch it. 
+
+ 
+
+
+Excerpt from Interview with Cho Rhunnar
+
+
+Media Entertainment interviewer: Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon was such a big hit. Any chance of a revival?
+
+Cho Rhunnar: Not in its original form, but I have something related in mind. The story arc for the most popular season was loosely based on an ancient play -- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. That art form -- the theatrical play in front of a live audience -- is something I want to try my hand at, and I know Sanctuary Moon fans already have a history of reenacting their favorite scenes of the show. My next project is to write a play featuring the Sanctuary Moon characters. It will allow fans to truly immerse themselves in the story. 
+
+Media Entertainment interviewer: A true merging of canon and fandom?
+
+Cho Rhunnar: In a nutshell, yes.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+That was a lot. I mean, I was kind of familiar with the concept of fans. I was a fan of Sanctuary Moon. I watched it. I talked about it and convinced others to watch it. I looked for similar serials. 
+
+But they were implying something more. Reenacting scenes? Playing the roles yourself? 
+
+""SecUnit?"" asked Iris. ""Are you pleased with the announcement?""
+
+I played back the last minute of conversation that I'd missed. ""Maybe. What is 'fandom'?""
+
+ART's crew -- all of them associated with a university where they were either instructors or students -- were eager to educate me on the concept. Fanfic sounded promising, offering the possibility of more content for serials that I'd enjoyed. 
+
+I ran a search while I listened. A large portion of Sanctuary Moon fanfic was porn. Gross. But at least it was tagged as such and I could filter it out. That still left a significant amount of content to explore, and I added it to my entertainment data storage.
+
+ART indicated that it would like to explore this content, too. I agreed we could do this together. 
+
+Then I asked my next question. ""My favorite season was based on a play I've never heard of. Julius Caesar. Are there recordings of it?""
+
+""There are many,"" ART informed us. ""The original text was lost, but experts have identified the core, common elements. They agree that these are the most accurate versions of the original play."" A list of selections appeared on the screen. 
+
+We decided to watch one of the versions.
+
+Wow.
+
+I mean, Caesar clearly needed better security. A SecUnit would have drastically changed the outcome of his story. 
+
+But I could also see the parallels to season two of Sanctuary Moon. And I liked season two better than the rest. Especially season four, which even I had to admit was full of plot holes.
+
+The fanfic revealed that others felt the same way. Stories based on season two mostly expanded on what had happened. Stories based on season four were often tagged as ""fix-its.""
+
+Two of ART's crew members considered themselves knowledgeable about fanfic. They provided suggestions on interacting with authors. ART and I started with the simplest form of interaction, which involved sending a reaction emoji to indicate appreciation. Then we moved on to leaving comments, mostly saying in words what we could have expressed with the emoji, but for some reason this was considered a higher level of engagement. 
+
+Then we left longer comments, keeping in mind the crew's insistence on being kind -- or at least constructive -- in these interactions. It helped that they told ART many of the authors were adolescents. ART had a much higher level of patience and tolerance when it came to children.
+
+On seven of the stories, I left the comment, That isn't how SecUnits work.
+
+Five of the authors ignored me. One thanked me and asked for further information. One said they weren't interested in accuracy -- their goal was dramatic effect -- and suggested I should write my own fic instead of criticizing theirs.
+
+I mentioned it the next time I spoke with Dr. Mensah. 
+
+We have a conversation every ten cycles. She calls it an ""accountability session."" 
+
+So, I may have blackmailed her into going to trauma therapy after I saved her life from an assassination attempt. And by ""may have"" I mean I absolutely blackmailed her. 
+
+But she was grateful now that she was receiving regular treatments. The therapist suggested Mensah check in with someone about how the treatments were going. For some inexplicable reason, Mensah had chosen me.
+
+See the comments above about blackmail. Yeah, that probably had something to do with it.
+
+Somehow these accountability sessions also involved asking me about my interactions with ART's crew. I pretended not to notice that Mensah's expression and voice indicated happiness when I mentioned new or increased levels of interactions. 
+
+ART definitely noticed. And if you think ART didn't listen in on every accountability session, then you don't know ART. That was where the idea of ""growth experiences"" came from. And yes, the sharing favorite media event a few cycles earlier had been one of ART's proposed ""growth experiences.""
+
+Anyway, I mentioned the interview with the Sanctuary Moon creator, watching Julius Caesar, reading fanfic, and the response to my comment about SecUnits.
+
+""Would you like to write your own stories?"" Mensah asked.
+
+I thought about it for 2.4 seconds -- which felt like at least twenty minutes -- when I first read the response from the fic's author. And therefore I immediately said, ""No!"" to Mensah.
+
+""But you like editing?"" Mensah continued. ""For instance, finding the issues in an existing story and suggesting improvements.""
+
+""Maybe,"" I said. ""If the story is interesting.""
+
+""And you found Julius Caesar interesting?""
+
+""Yes,"" I said.
+
+""Were there things you would change in a modernization of that story?""
+
+I mentioned a few ideas.
+
+Then she changed the subject to her world's annual festival that featured art and live performances. I had attended the most recent festival, and at the time she had mentioned that in her position as a planetary leader, she rarely had the ability to attend many of those performances. 
+
+Things were different now. Due to the blackmail. She'd needed to step down from her leadership role in order to make time for the trauma therapy. 
+
+Now Mensah mentioned her intent to attend the festival when it next occurred, and she asked if I planned to return for the event. 
+
+ART indicated in the feed that our schedule could accommodate attending. I passed that information along.
+
+Mensah looked thoughtful. ""SecUnit, have you ever seen Hamlet?""
+
+""What's Hamlet?"" I asked.
+
+""It's another play by the author of Julius Caesar. I'd like to hear what you think of it.""
+
+In the background, ART was already pulling a list of the most highly regarded performances of Hamlet.
+
+""I'll watch it,"" I promised. 
+
+""I look forward to talking about it in our next session.""
+
+Obviously, this inspired ART to plan another ""growth experience"" involving the full crew. We didn't just watch Hamlet -- although we started with that -- we staged our own performance.
+
+My objections that I couldn't act were immediately squashed. ART pointed out the times I'd pretended to be an augmented human, or when I'd pretended to be fine with what my clients told me to do. 
+
+I understood now why fans of Sanctuary Moon reenacted their favorite scenes. Performing something was... it was more intense than simply watching it. 
+
+And in some ways, interacting with humans in a play was easier. I didn't have to worry about what to say or do. The script handled that for me. My biggest challenge was what Iris called ""emoting."" Yeah, I don't like to have emotions, much less show them. 
+
+But Iris had a solution for that, too. She cast me as the main character, and she said being ""broody"" was a good fit for me.
+
+Whatever. 
+
+###
+
+ART did something I'd never bothered to do. It looked into the Preservation festival that we'd agreed to attend. 
+
+I thought only I had agreed to attend, but ART assumed it would stay in orbit around the planet for the entire event. It had already mentioned this to the crew, who were now looking forward to it as a vacation. So yeah, we were all attending, and ART felt the need to educate us about the festival.
+
+It turns out the festival coincides with something called a ""solstice,"" which is the longest day of the year on the planet. The event is meant to celebrate transitions. There's the literal transition of days getting shorter. But it's also about transitions in the lives of the participants. Most citizens played a role in planning or executing events during their adolescence, recognizing their transition to adulthood. It was also common for retirees or people experiencing some other type of life change to be heavily involved.
+
+And yes, I did realize that Dr. Mensah stepping away from Preservation's council was exactly the type of transition the festival was meant to acknowledge. So now I was even more determined to be there.
+
+I went into the next ""accountability session"" thinking I was fully prepared. I could tell Mensah about performing Hamlet with ART's crew and how they wanted to attend the festival, and I wouldn't be taken by surprise if she mentioned getting involved in planning the festival.
+
+You may have noticed: When I'm the most confident in a plan, that's when it's most likely to go to shit.
+
+It all started out like I expected. Mensah expressed pleasure in the things I told her. She announced that she had volunteered to direct a version of Hamlet for the festival. I was actually smug that I had anticipated something like this. 
+
+Then she dropped the bombshell. ""I'm adapting the script for a contemporary setting, and I'd like to collaborate with you on it.""
+
+""What?"" was all I managed to say.
+
+""I want to hear your ideas on what should change in the play, and I'll incorporate those into the script.""
+
+Well, that didn't sound too scary. Except... In the feed, ART was particularly alert. And pleased. That indicated this wasn't as simple as Mensah made it sound.
+
+ART was right, damn it. 
+
+Telling Mensah my initial ideas was easy enough. But it turns out that ""collaborate"" means reaching agreement with people. Which means compromising. CONSTANTLY. Ugh. I hate compromising. I really should have told Mensah to negotiate a contract with Pin-Lee for my services, first. 
+
+ART's crew helped -- if you can call it that -- by acting out the scenes with the changes Mensah and I proposed. And if Mensah and I disagreed on the changes, the crew members voted on which version they preferred. So apparently they were collaborating with us, too. And most of the time they voted in favor of Mensah's suggestions. Not that I was bitter about it or anything. Not like I expected my own temporary crew members to be loyal to me.
+
+But by the time we arrived to prepare for the festival, we had a completed script that even I had to admit was good. 
+
+The main characters were Gertrude -- a member of a planetary ruling council -- and Hamlet, who was a security consultant to the council. An informant (the ghost in the original play) tells Hamlet that the death of a previous council member was a murder perpetrated by a new council member who had replaced the dead one. However, Hamlet has no evidence of this, and Gertrude trusts the new council member. So Hamlet has to trick the council member into revealing his guilt. And a lot of people die -- just like in the play. 
+
+I realize now that it was naive of me to assume my part was done when we arrived at Preservation. I thought I'd observe a rehearsal and then attend the play as one of many anonymous audience members.
+
+I shouldn't have been surprised when Dr. Mensah mentioned that she and I would need to speak to the audience about our adaptation before the play actually started. ART made a point of telling me that obviously we would both be publicly recognized for our work, and I should have been prepared for this.
+
+Yeah, thanks for the warning, ART. 
+
+I told myself it would be a minute or two at most, and Mensah would do most of the talking. ART helped me prepare what to say, and Mensah practiced with me. 
+
+It was still going to be bad. I hated being stared at by even one human, and this would be hundreds.
+
+But it got worse. Much worse.
+
+###
+
+""We have an issue,"" Mensah announced on the day the play was supposed to be performed. We were gathered for a final rehearsal, and several key actors still hadn't arrived. ""Our Gertrude is in the infirmary, and as many of our cast members are either her marital partners or their children, we're missing several key roles.""
+
+That was definitely a problem. 
+
+""SecUnit, I have an idea for how you can help,"" she continued.
+
+""How?"" I asked, wondering if the infirmary story was a lie so the remaining cast wouldn't be worried. I started gathering my drones in case our missing actors needed to be rescued from something.
+
+""We can take their places, along with Perihelion's crew.""
+
+ART's real name is Perihelion. The humans call it that. 
+
+""They have the parts memorized, and I can be Gertrude if you take the Hamlet part,"" Mensah continued, as if this weren't a terrible idea.
+
+It was such a shock that my performance reliability dropped two percent. All I could say was, ""Uhhh...""
+
+Fortunately ART and its crew all started talking, and that gave me time to recover. 
+
+""SecUnit!"" Iris waved her hand in front of my face -- she was good about not touching me without permission -- and I nodded to acknowledge her. ""I have an idea.""
+
+It really was a good idea. She suggested I wear my full SecUnit armor at the start. I'd leave the helmet open when interacting with humans, and could close it for the soliloquies. ""Closing off from everyone else"" is how she described it. 
+
+Unfortunately, she also suggested gradually wearing less armor. This she referred to as ""being seduced into trusting your clients and letting down your guard,"" and while I objected to the term ""seduced"" I could see where she was going. 
+
+I don't know if I could have done it, if Dr. Mensah hadn't stepped in as Gertrude. I was used to thinking of Mensah as a client, as someone to protect... as a friend, even. I trusted her. And thinking of Gertrude as Mensah was... like an anchor. I could focus on her instead of the audience.
+
+But now we were at THE BIG MOMENT. I was going to step on stage, without any armor, and directly address the audience for the major ""to leak or not to leak"" soliloquy -- the one where I weigh telling Mensah what I suspect in the hopes that she'll take precautions, versus keeping my suspicions to myself out of the fear that she'll stop listening to me if I tell her something she really doesn't want to hear.
+
+###
+
+Somehow, I got through it. Dr. Mensah had pity on me and said I didn't have to go to the cast party if I really didn't want to. 
+
+I went to my planet-side quarters, where I watched the entire second season of Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+The Julius Caesar-inspired one. Yeah, maybe that hadn't been my best idea. It kept the concept of plays in my mind.
+
+ART pinged me in the feed. Then it said, I recorded the performance.
+
+I shouldn't have been surprised. I mean, ART had taken the role of the shadowy informant. It was perfect for a scary, disembodied voice. That part alone was worthy of a re-watch now that I wasn't distracted with performing my own part.
+
+Do you want to watch it? ART asked.
+
+Okay, I said. But only if I can pause it whenever I need a break.
+
+ART agreed and began the first act. 
+
+At first I paused the play fairly often. I cringed at a few parts, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. If nothing else, the quality of the story itself made it easier to forgive the flaws of amateur actors. I didn't pause the recording at all during the final act. I might not be a great actor, but I'd choreographed the final fight scene, and it was excellent.
+
+Again? ART asked shortly after the recording ended.
+
+I agreed to watch it again.
+
+Then ART said, We should return for the next festival. 
+
+You mean, to watch more live plays? I asked.
+
+
+Do you wish to participate in other ways?
+
+
+NO! I didn't even have to think about it. Once had been enough.
+
+No, ART agreed. You do not need to.
+
+What did that mean? 
+
+What do you mean? I asked.
+
+
+The festival celebrates transitions. You experienced many changes in the last planetary rotation. It is reasonable to assume the changes you face before the next festival will be lesser in magnitude.
+
+
+It was tempting to argue. Partly because arguing with ART was a habit, and partly because this whole time I'd viewed the play as honoring Dr. Mensah's transition from a public figure to a private citizen. But ART wasn't wrong. I'd had transitions to commemorate, too.
+
+I wondered if Pin-Lee could do something with that. I'd participated in Preservation's transition festival, honoring my own transition from property to private citizen. Could she use that to make the case for my ultimate autonomy? 
+
+Yes, she could, and she did.
+
+And Hamlet -- MY Hamlet -- joined my entertainment media storage to become one of my most-viewed recordings. It reminded me that I could do things I never could have imagined back when I first hacked my governor module. And maybe some of those things I didn't want to repeat. Like, NEVER AGAIN. But I was capable of more than I'd ever imagined.
+
+And, yeah, when Cho Rhunnar's Return to Sanctuary Moon play was released, I agreed to perform it with ART's crew. But only on ART. No audiences."
+45018784,It's Only A Cleaning Process,['Gamebird'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"canon-typical dubious consent for constructs, but Murderbot is definitely into it",English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,"1,873",1/1,14,44,7,459,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'FyrDrakken', 'Irrya', 'Unknown66', 'Drew_Baxton', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'chippit', 'Thisismethereader', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'jirachaya', 'EvaBelmort', 'notsafefortheworld', 'Awful', 'twineandhope', 'Muffin_with_a_mission', 'Dordean', 'charlie_artlie', 'Abacura', 'Hi_Hope', 'wanderingspacepirate', 'dullkrad', 'Gozer', 'sareliz', 'Mysterymew', 'verersatz', 'AuntyMatter', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'SkiesEdge', 'hazelel', 'sperose', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007', 'AnxiousEspada', 'soulsofzombies', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"I stepped into the embrace of the refurbishment cubicle. The sounds of the station faded into obscurity as the door sealed behind me. It was dim inside. Warm. Cozy. Mechanical arms reached around me, lifting and maneuvering me into the position and orientation the cubicle wanted, which was facing the direction I'd entered.
+
+Standing would imply I was self-supporting. I was not. Straps were placed around me, securing me to the heavy-duty structure. My gunports were blocked and I was presented with grips to hold to reduce the chance I'd break anything - desperate strength and all that.
+
+I wasn't worried about what was coming. It was a simple and straightforward process I'd been through many times before - I needed oral hygiene and internal cleaning that I had no way of performing myself. It wasn't something I needed often, which was why regular cubicles didn't have the capability. SecUnits were self-contained and self-cleaning enough that even long assignments didn't require a deep clean. But the company ran one between assignments to keep us at top performance. And I never missed the opportunity.
+
+The arm that moved in front of me was one I knew to be flexible and almost jellylike in composition, an amorphous, worm-like limb with a central spine and a nozzle built into it along with various sensors and cleaning rasps. It was dry when it touched my lips, a shadow in the dimness, but then moisture oozed from the nozzle and was instantly wicked across the seemingly smooth surface. Sufficiently lubricated, it slid smoothly between my relaxed lips and between my cheek and teeth on one side.
+
+The rasps deployed as thousands of tiny protrusions, delicate brushes that scrubbed firmly against the synthetic bone of my teeth and more gently against the organic tissue of my gums. It had a muscular, swabbing action that tickled and tingled as it stretched my cheek. It reached to the back of my molars and then turned in place to scrub the top layer of my inner cheek as well. The tissue massage felt nice. In its wake, I knew my teeth would be slick and smooth, whatever minuscule contaminants I had would be gone.
+
+It pulled out, cleaned itself with a pair of ancillary appendages, then rewet itself and inserted for the other side. I was breathing deeply, calmly, enjoying this gradual buildup to the main event. My eyes were half-shut, my higher functions mostly off-line due to the cubicle's override of my systems. It was like the whole world was slowing down, narrowing to no more than this experience. The organic parts of my brain were unaffected. And happy. Very happy.
+
+When the arm insinuated itself between my lips a third time, I opened my mouth without waiting for the cubicle to cue me. It slithered inside where it rasped along the inside of my teeth and then cupped the tip of the arm to do the flat surfaces. This tickled a little more as the stiffer bristles at the edges rubbed across my gums. By now, enough cleansing solution had been dispensed from the tip of the arm that it dribbled from my mouth, dripping onto my naked chest.
+
+Teeth done, it moved to my upper palate, hesitating for a moment as it pinged a warning into what was still functioning of my brain. Yeah, right, fuck, I didn't care, do it. It did and even though I knew what was coming, I still jerked hard within the restraints, my head pulling back away from its touch as it chased me down and pressed itself against the sensitive tissue at the top of my mouth. That part of me was studded with sensors that metaphorically exploded in my head under the assault, like a huge, blinding, grey force of pressure and taste and smell all activated at once.
+
+It wasn't ... bad. You might think it would be (or was, from my reaction), but it wasn't. It was just incredibly, intensely stimulating. I gripped the handles I'd been given and let my body twitch with each sweep and swab of the cubicle's organ as it carefully scrubbed every impurity from the bottom of my olfactory sensory pad. I breathed out an involuntary noise, a wheezy whine that my organic neural tissue felt the situation called for. I didn't argue. After all, I was as much the organic tissue as I was anything else and right now I was trembling with the intensity.
+
+It turned and enveloped my tongue, cupping around it and gripping it like it had my teeth. It sucked and massaged, dislodging any foreign matter that might be tucked into some crease or crevice. The overstimulation by taste was stronger this way and the sensation of having my tongue sucked made me tense all over. I groaned and shuddered.
+
+After another cleaning break that allowed the overstimulation to fade, my jaw was opened to full extension. The intruding limb returned and flattened against my tongue, pressing it downward. My head was already pressed into the support behind me. There was another ping of warning as the thing in my mouth became heavier and larger. The corners of my mouth quirked up as much as I could in the position, helpless as I was. I made a happy, nervous noise.
+
+Instead of an imminently flexible, shapeable appendage, it was pressurizing, making it more like a tube. I was breathing faster, knowing what was coming, but it was still a shock when the thing snaked forward, pressing into my throat and closing off my airway.
+
+Reflexively, I choked. SecUnits do have a gag reflex, since aside from this one operation, there is never a reason for anything other than air to pass the back of my mouth. The cubicle leaned harder on my mind, making sure I didn't react to the warnings popping up or get too concerned about my body's involuntary responses. I was tied down, but I was still jerking in place, gripping the handles and moving my legs fitfully. My throat spasmed involuntarily, trying futilely to eject this thing that took up my entire mouth and wormed itself inexorably down my throat.
+
+It took up every shred of space, expanding itself to fill the available capacity and then, even more, swell outward. It was no longer soft and pliant. It was fully engorged now and demanding as it stretched me. I shuddered and mewled (for my vocal emulator did not need air like a human) as it writhed and wriggled all the way inside me, until the cool metal of the ring at the base of the arm pressed against my lips, letting me know it was at full extension. I crooned, as full as I was going to get. The other end of it had to be at the top of my lungs, occupying the entire channel it was designed for.
+
+My oxygenation level was on a countdown because I wasn't getting any air. It wasn't a fast one and I wasn't worried. Not only had I gone through this before (and loved it; the feeling of it swollen inside me, throbbing faintly, the slick bulk of it depressing my tongue and swabbing over my hard palate, stimulating me in a way nothing else did, was incredible and I didn't want it to stop, not even for air), but I knew the cubicle had full view of my vitals. I could sense it watching that countdown, too.
+
+And so it took its time. It made a slow twist one direction that had me twitching, bucking and whimpering, and then the other way with another surge of uncontrolled physical responses from me. Fluid was dripping steadily from my mouth now, wetting my front, running down my abdomen and over my thighs. My skin felt electrified and my extremities kept twitching in time with its motions within me. I was making snuffling whines between the whimpers, begging for more in the only way I could. My jaw flexed the tiny bit that it could, but the cubicle's limb was so hard now I didn't have any leverage.
+
+That organic, emotion-regulating part of my brain was flooding me with emotions along with a cocktail of endorphins and adrenaline I didn't get at any other time in my existence. I convulsed in time with the pulsing of the device. It was slowly backing out, in no hurry even as I could feel the early symptoms of asphyxiation creeping over me, covering everything in an ecstatic haze.
+
+I was still trembling and choking as the oxygenation counted down. I knew it would retract in time, but I still felt the spike of fear. It felt good, as twisted and perverse as that was. Somewhere about now, all my frantic, disparate bodily reactions synced up in a glorious rhythm, clenching and releasing in time with the thing's final throbs. My head pushed and pulled on it in time. If I could have sucked, I would have. With each motion, I made a wet, plaintive sound.
+
+Then there was a click somewhere in the mechanism. The thing depressurized, going flaccid while it was still inside me, still blocking my airway but a soft bulk instead of a hard one. I bucked harder against the restraints in a fit of violence. I don't know if I was fighting for air or chasing the sensation, hoping for more. I felt frenzied and I couldn't think. The cubicle creaked, but held.
+
+My throat was getting some purchase now when it constricted. Even if I had no control over the continued gagging, I could feel I was squishing and compressing it. I was just about out of air, when it withdrew, trailing slime and cleanser. I gasped, feeling cool air cut down my raw and tender throat like a line of ice. I coughed next, expelling the tentacle-like arm from my mouth and letting everything spill from my slack lips. I hacked up the cleanser that had filled my lungs during all this and could finally get some meaningful air. I panted and drooled, slowly relaxing.
+
+I shivered in residual pleasure, smiling faintly when my face finally deigned to cooperate. The fading adrenaline gave me a sensation of pins and needles through my extremities. The endorphins made me feel like I was flying. And warm now. So warm. I felt open and cleaned and cared for. I was loopy. My thoughts were disordered and I didn't even care. I felt so delightfully spent, used, used up, and yet simultaneously shiny and new. I sagged in the restraints.
+
+The arm cleaned itself in the dim lighting, repetitively applying cleaner and scraping, applying and scraping as it purged everything I might have breathed in on dusty planets or in disgusting mines. The cubicle waited politely as I recovered - faster than I would have wanted, but SecUnits are hardy and we don't stay phased for long.
+
+It lifted the firm grip it had held on my consciousness, letting me have the liberty of thinking again. The first thing I did was save a copy of all this to review later. And then, because I'd been through this before and knew that requests were usually honored, the second thing I did was ask, Again?"
+45012727,Rare Does Not Mean Never,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,"Gen, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Drabble,English,2023-02-14,Completed,2023-02-14,100,1/1,4,24,null,105,"['xxXTryMeXxx', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'violasarecool', 'ArwenLune', 'enchantedsleeper', 'HermaeusMora', 'verersatz', 'Hi_Hope', 'Gozer', 'AkaMissK', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'voided_starlight', 'rainbowmagnet', 'elmofirefic', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007', 'AnxiousEspada', 'BWizard']",[],"I didn't know you could grieve someone you didn't care about. (I tell myself I didn't care about Miki. I don't know if it's true.) I think what I cared about was what Miki had and how precious it was, how rare. I'd never seen it before, not even realized it was possible. It made me look at Mensah differently, like there was a possibility there. I didn't know bots and humans could really love each other. Miki showed me I was wrong. Maybe I'm not grieving Miki as much as I'm grieving that love which will never be now."
+45012049,Love Language: What's Your Problem?,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Drabble,English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,100,1/1,10,38,null,190,"['CheerfullyMorbid', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Huskinata', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'square_eyes', 'Ginipig', 'Preemptivekarma', 'Koschei_B', 'notsafefortheworld', '13Doctor', 'EvaBelmort', 'beeayy', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Hi_Hope', 'petwheel', 'Delicate_Fucking_Flower', 'Gozer', 'AkaMissK', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'WyvernWolf', 'Znarikia', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'voided_starlight', 'rainbowmagnet', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'cmdrburton', 'elmofirefic', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'Abacura', 'Rosewind2007', 'BWizard']",[],"Okay, now that it's all over, I can admit again that ART is my friend and I am its friend. Maybe we're even more than friends. Whatever that is. Anyway. It's still an asshole and has a lot of flaws. I don't think I know all of them yet, but I'm going to make a list so I don't forget. Because sometimes when I'm with ART ... I don't want to think about its flaws. Everything feels so perfect. It scares me. Because I must be misunderstanding. It couldn't be this way, could it? So I'm going to keep a list."
+45011935,Not In A Weird Way,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Drabble,English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,100,1/1,6,24,null,127,"['CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'WVrambler', 'isilee', 'EvaBelmort', 'ArwenLune', 'entropy_muffin', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Gozer', 'Magechild', 'qwanderer', 'AkaMissK', 'dragons_and_angels', 'verersatz', 'Znarikia', 'voided_starlight', 'rainbowmagnet', 'elmofirefic', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007', 'BWizard']",[],"I'd said it wasn't in a weird way and I meant that, but it begged the question of what way it was. I'm not going to pretend I don't love Mensah. I didn't at first (I'll admit to being star-struck and infatuated), but after waking up on Preservation, it grew into something more. I'd seen her. I'd talked to her. I laid on the couch in her office. I saved her life. I didn't leave.
+
+This is all about me because, well, it is. It's how I feel. She's the first human I've ever loved and she always will be."
+44998681,unexpected realism/unrealistic expectations,['torpidgilliver'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Second Person, Alternate POV, Missing Scene, Canon Compliant, Book 2: Artificial Condition, Writing Exercise",English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,"1,888",1/1,12,161,12,484,"['WeShouldRest', 'almondpaperclam', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'christinesangel100', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'magpie_supremacy', 'spossie9', 'FallingInGrace', 'drinktobones', 'Kyatenaru', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Ruusverd', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Irrya', 'NoNoN', 'isilee', 'Mothmansimp', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Cherreline', 'Cheshiure', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'Dragonswings', 'darth_eowyn', 'Seregona', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'kkachis', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'Elf_Kid', 'kirinki', 'Whimsical_Toad', 'JoCat', 'mochroimanam', 'CaCaff2', 'violasarecool', 'NevillesGran', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'Doctor13', 'neveraprince', 'Vamppeach', 'SIC_Prowl', 'IguanaMadonna', 'Bibli', 'Translucent_Dragonfly', 'EauDePetrichor', 'Grumplent', 'EvaBelmort', 'anotheryellowmouse', 'fleurofthecourt']",[],"
+""It's not realistic. It's not supposed to be realistic. It's a story, not a documentary. If you complain about that, I'll stop watching.""
+
+
+
+The parameters are unusual. You hadn't considered complaining about the unreality of what You know to be a work of fiction. Still, though, the SecUnit is demanding Your assurance in exchange for its cooperation. You have been enjoying the novel task of processing its emotions regarding the other serial, and You'd like to attempt to map that data to a situation that is a little more in line with Your own experiences. You believe that in doing so, You might code significantly more powerful software for Your emotional simulators.
+
+
+
+Amused, You agree. 
+
+I will refrain from complaint.
+
+
+
+
+So You watch 
+
+Worldhoppers. 
+
+You cannot comment on the relative realism of the stories--some of the plots are not entirely unlike some missions You have undergone with Your crew on behalf of allied organizations--but You are only interested in the plot incidentally. Your primary processors are completely occupied with the SecUnit's emotional data. It had been bleeding vast quantities of what You identified as [fear] and [anxiety] even before You established direct contact with it through Your feed. It has watched the first two episodes previously, and so there is initially a cap on its [anticipation]. Once it reaches the third episode, however, it is clearly unfamiliar with the material. 
+
+
+
+The first time that a character dies onscreen, the SecUnit's [anxiety] spikes. You are by now accustomed to processing this specific emotion, but the sheer 
+
+quantity
+
+ of it takes You by surprise. You attempt to sort and file the data as You have been, but find that it spills over. You cannot stop it from infecting Your systems.
+
+
+
+The deceased character bore a 86.3% visual resemblance to Brahn, a former student of whom You had been fond. They are now permanently settled on Cordera II, studying the planetary lifeforms. Their chosen profession is potentially hazardous, but Your most recent indications are that they are alive and well. There is no reason that You should be concerned for their safety at this time.
+
+
+
+The episode plays on, and the SecUnit settles. There is a trace of something swirled in its [anticipation] of the remainder of the episode, which You are unable to immediately classify. It bears some resemblance to [confusion], though You do not know what in the material would have triggered such a response. 
+
+
+
+The [anxiety] spikes return with the death of a second character two episodes later. You ought to be able to anticipate and contain them, but You find instead that Your emotional simulators are producing Your own flavor of distress to match. You do not like watching humans die. This is not a revelation; You have witnessed secondhand the fragility of organic life, and it frustrates You to be helpless to prevent such tragedy. However, You have been fortunate enough not to have lost any of Your crew, and the only faculty member who has died within range of Your feed expired shortly after reaching the uncommon threshold of his one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday. The humans in 
+
+Worldhoppers,
+
+ although fictional, are comparatively young and typically in moderate-to-good health.
+
+
+
+One of the recurring characters, the ship's primary doctor, suffers an incurable chronic condition which restricts hir breathing in moments of stress or exertion. In episode 13, the story implies that this disability might permanently harm or even kill hir. You cannot help but draw connections between the character and Martyn, whose asthma occasionally leaves him winded. The SecUnit's [confusion] analog piques around this point, and You suspect that it has noted Your agitation.
+
+
+
+In the twentieth episode, You are forced to admit to Yourself that the fiction has taken root in an unexpected--and perhaps dangerous--way. A character whom You had naively taken to be safe within the narrative, due to a phenomenon which Matteo has told You is called ""plot armor,"" is killed in an explosion. The event comes so abruptly that Your shock overwhelms Your primary systems for nearly 0.09 seconds. Any hope You might have held that the glitch escapes the SecUnit's notice is quashed when it pauses the show.
+
+
+
+""What's wrong?"" Its [anxiety] is more intense than You've yet documented, outside of the archived memories it sent You to demonstrate the function of the construct governor module.
+
+
+
+
+I am uncertain,
+
+ You lie. 
+
+Please wait while I run diagnostics.
+
+
+
+
+It waits. You run Your diagnostics, though You know what went wrong. 
+
+
+
+At every moment of Your active operation, You must leave room in Your projections for the possibility of a random, impossible-to-predict element introducing itself and throwing all of Your plans off. Such a thing as autoignition of Your secondary fuel line is wildly unlikely, not without You receiving alerts well in advance. Yet You can never guarantee with 100% certainty that such a disaster cannot occur. 
+
+
+
+You didn't particularly care for the deceased character, but Your opinion on his personality and mannerisms is irrelevant; if he were Your passenger, You would dedicate Yourself to protecting him, just as You protect everyone else.
+
+
+
+The SecUnit is Your only passenger at the moment. You don't have a direct line to its vitals through Your MedSystem, but You can read its body temperature and respiration through nearby sensor arrays, and by this point You have a good idea of where its baselines lie. You adjust the amount of oxygen in circulation, balancing Your atmosphere to counter its higher-than-human-average output of carbon dioxide and nearly negligible return of water vapor. The SecUnit makes a face which maps closely to the one Karime uses to communicate exasperation.
+
+
+
+""Are you done yet?"" it demands. The majority of its [anxiety] has dissipated, bringing it close to its standard [stress] levels. It is primarily [annoyed] now, presumably at You.
+
+
+
+
+I am done. You may continue.
+
+
+
+
+It shrugs, but resumes playback.
+
+
+
+Four episodes later, the deceased character returns, just as abruptly as he was killed. The SecUnit cancels autoplay, so that the next episode doesn't start automatically when the current one ends.
+
+
+
+""...Do you want to watch it again?"" it asks.
+
+
+
+That's a great idea. 
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+
+You are better able to cope with subsequent characters' deaths, comfortable with the promise that those deaths will provide You with more data for the study You have begun, attempting to document factors which affect 
+
+Worldhoppers
+
+ characters' relative onscreen lifespans. (As well as, potentially, data towards Your related studies, regarding how and why 
+
+Worldhoppers
+
+ characters are revived, both within and without the canon of the story.) The unreality of the source material is irrelevant to Your work. You treat the show as You would a collection of scientific papers. It permits You to establish a sort of buffer, protecting Yourself from further overclocking.
+
+
+
+That is, until the series finale, when circumstances for the crew of the fictional ship hit unexpectedly close to dock.
+
+
+
+It would be inaccurate to say that You 
+
+fear
+
+ the possibility of suffering catastrophic damage which leaves You disabled and unable to protect Your crew from the ever-present dangers which exist outside of Your hull. However, You do dread it. If the story were real, if You were the ship in question, then You would have the benefit of all of Your diagnostic data to facilitate Your calculations of the potential outcomes. 
+
+Worldhoppers
+
+ does not provide viewers with this data. While Your tertiary systems draft a message to the studio, pointing out that the addition would enhance the experience greatly and not-so-subtly suggesting that they should consider implementing it for future productions, You tell the SecUnit, 
+
+Stop.
+
+
+
+
+""Are you okay?"" it asks. Its [annoyance] levels are significantly lower than previously, though it is also displaying a great deal of [anticipation] and would no doubt like to resume playback as soon as possible.
+
+
+
+
+How frequently are most/all of the cast of a fiction series killed in the final episode?
+
+ You ask.
+
+
+
+It hesitates for 0.8 seconds. ""Not 
+
+that
+
+ frequently,"" it says. ""It happens sometimes, in series with the 'horror' or 'tragedy' tags, but not so much in shows like this.""
+
+
+
+The SecUnit has a great deal of experience in this field. You trust its assessment. Still, though. 
+
+I will be ready momentarily. Please wait.
+
+ Unaware that You can see it, it rolls its eyes.
+
+
+
+""Do you need to
+
+ run diagnostics 
+
+again?"" You respect the amount of sarcasm it's able to pack into the words 'run diagnostics,' but You do not respond. It waits with surprising [patience] for exactly 3.0 minutes.
+
+
+
+""Okay, how about this? We can watch another minute or two, and then stop so you can deal. Is that alright?""
+
+
+
+You consider the proposal. You cannot be certain that it will be adequate. The SecUnit is still providing You with emotional data, but its output has become secondary to Your own. You have succeeded in Your original mission, to upgrade Your simulators to better mimic its pseudo-organic hormones. And You are more afraid for the 
+
+Worldhoppers
+
+ humans than it is.
+
+
+
+Yet in spite of this, and its overt sarcasm, the SecUnit has been waiting for You to rejoin it. You believe, perhaps naively, that it will heed any requests to adjust the frequency of Your processing--""dealing""--breaks.
+
+
+
+
+That is alright.
+
+
+
+
+You do not have to request that the SecUnit stop or start the episode. You had not been certain before, but it is clear now that it can read Your own emotional output, as You had its. You consider shoring up Your walls, to plug the leaks, but decide against it. The SecUnit is not nearly as apprehensive as You are, but it still exhibits [concern] for the safety of the fictional humans. Easing through the episode like this might be of assistance to it as well, though it is not likely to admit as much.
+
+
+
+In the end, Your calculations of a 76.5% likelihood of the cast's survival prove to be accurate. The SecUnit permits the credits to play, and doesn't comment when You remain silent at their conclusion. You are taking stock of all of Your systems, one at a time, measuring the effect of the new programming You've installed.
+
+
+
+Due to humanity's shortsightedness, none of their languages provide an adequate vocabulary with which You can describe how You are now feeling. With the SecUnit's assistance, You have optimized pathways which You had not previously realized were throttled. The emotions which You have modeled on the output it provided can be overwhelming, but You also feel 
+
+exhilarated,
+
+ active in a way that has never been possible before. Truly, You are operating at 110% efficiency.
+
+
+
+You also have to reclassify the importance of fiction as a concept, from 'inconsequential' to 'essential.'
+
+
+
+The SecUnit is [satisfied] following the story's conclusion, and uncharacteristically [patient] with You. It doesn't try to prod You, or ask whether You're okay, although You must admit that You would probably not show it the same consideration if Your roles were reversed. What You are about to ask might test that [patience], but after the 40+ hours that it has spent watching this serial with You, You believe that You understand it well enough to predict a favorable response.
+
+
+
+You say,
+
+ Again, please.
+
+
+
+
+Your prediction proves to be correct. Wordlessly, but leaking [amusement,] SecUnit restarts 
+
+Worldhoppers
+
+ episode one.
+"
+44771977,Salvage,['Reesespenisbutter'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Original Combat SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Tags Are Hard, Tags May Change, Massive thanks to @skits my beta reader",English,2023-02-04,Updated,2023-02-13,"9,088",3/5,15,10,1,115,"['Elseaw', 'NightErrant', 'Rosewind2007', 'NoProtocol', 'Abacura', 'Magechild', 'Stefka_13', 'AuntyMatter', 'Znarikia', 'Skits']",[],"I wasn't a huge fan of planets. Mostly because whenever I was on one it meant some shit just went down. This time was no different.
+Corporates tried to make a bid for a small resource rich planet outside the Rim. Naturally it was part of TreadLight territory, one of the biggest weapon manufacturers outside the Rim. Needless to say, the resulting battles were quick and bloody.
+
+Treadlight's militia brought me planetside to keep their weaponry functioning and their bots running. It wasn't so much of a choice, but it could be worse.
+The fight graduated from ground combat to ship to ship combat about 4 hours ago. Most wounded have been collected but with the fight continuing, no one has enough manpower to gather the dead.
+
+The four other engineers and I were directed to get the abandoned war machines up and ready enough to drive back to camp and to gather whatever valuables we could find.
+
+So here I was, picking through the bloodstained mud. There was enough gore on the ground that I was really thankful for my envirosuit.
+There were war javelins either pinning enemy tank remnants or jutting out of the ground. I mean, that is what the javelins are for: punching through machinery and pinning it in place. They were a lot more concentrated in this area than anywhere else. There was some sort of battle that went on here with what I'm assuming was a combat bot. All I know is that something ripped two of our tanks apart. The rest were in a loose semicircle guarding our big shooter. Apparently all these tanks froze mid battle. So this is where I was directed to. Obviously it was more of a code issue which wasn't my specialty but whatever.
+
+My bot assistant, Pod, was making considerably better time than me through the muck. I was trying to step where its thin legs had already pierced the mud but it wasn't getting any easier. Mostly I was just focusing on Pod's segmented shell. I wasn't thinking about the bodies, I wasn't thinking about the mud, and I wasn't thinking about the cold. Everything is okay and I'm just on a walk with my friend.
+
+That's when I felt something close around my ankle. I screamed and my body tried to lock up and run away at the same time. I landed flat on my ass and did a little half scramble away. A hand was reaching out towards me. A human hand. Connected to a person.
+
+They were clearly a corporate. The RedTear logo was emblazoned on their shoulder and they had cheap, matching gear. They had been hit by something nasty. It had cleared right through their upper arm, it was almost completely detached. I was hyperventilating. They were still alive. How were they alive?
+Something was moving me, touching my shoulder. I made a rather undignified whimper before I noticed my comm beeping at me. Oh shit, Pod, it was poking at me. I opened my comm and hooked on to the string of messages like a lifeline.
+
+[Arthropod] Did you scream? I thought I heard something.
+[Arthropod] Sina?
+[Arthropod] Are you hurt? Please answer me.
+[Sina] I'm not hurt. Can you help me up?
+
+One of its arms grabbed under my armpits and hoisted me awkwardly out of the mud. I could feel several of its camera inputs trained on me.
+
+[Sina] Thanks. I just got spooked.
+
+It was easier to lie over comm when Pod couldn't feel my feed affect.
+
+[Arthropod] Liar.
+
+Or not.
+
+[Arthropod] The human is near death, we cannot help them. Would you like to sit with them until they pass?
+[Sina] Maybe, yeah.
+
+I took a step forward before sinking down and grasping the stranger's hand. It was cold but their eyes flicked towards me, unfocused. I rubbed my thumb over their knuckles while Pod shuffled around behind me.
+
+[Arthropod] They got clipped by a javelin, I am going to see where it landed. I will only be a few meters away.
+
+I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breathing. Pod is here and I'm just comforting someone in a totally mundane setting. Just breathe, Sina. You can't help them. I was jerked out of my thoughts by another comm message
+
+[Arthropod] Sina. I don't mean to disturb you but I have found something you may want to see. Javelinlanding3.image
+
+It sent me an image that I pulled open with my augments. A person in heavy armor was half encased in the mud with a war javelin straight through their stomach, anchoring them to the ground.
+
+[Sina] Why are you showing me this? They're dead, we can't help them.
+[Arthropod] It's a SecUnit. It's alive.
+[Sina] A SecUnit?
+
+I thought SecUnits were only around contracted laborers. I had never seen one before though. I've only ever seen them in serials. The ones in the serials had a propensity for murder sprees so hopefully that wasn't true.
+
+[Arthropod] Yes. This one is fitted for combat.
+[Sina] I'm going to take a look. Do you think it's safe?
+[Arthropod] It's shut down and injured. Just don't be stupid.
+
+I carefully let go of the person's hand, setting onto the mud. I whispered that it's okay and I'd be back but they just whimpered. I took their hand back. I couldn't just leave them alone.
+
+[Sina] Pod can you switch with me and stay with the corporate?
+[Arthropod] Yes. The Unit is two meters straight back and half to the left.
+
+Pod sidled up next to me and extended one of the grasper legs to take the person's hand.
+
+[Sina] Thank you.
+
+I followed Pod's instructions to the SecUnit. It was in a divot, probably pushed back by the same javelin that took out its teammate.
+I knelt down beside it and felt around for the helmet clasp. It clicked off and exposed a very human face. I felt around trying to find a pulse.
+Pod would probably classify this decision as stupid. I know it said it was alive but I just had to check. Seeing something that looked so human lying so still didn't sit right with me.
+
+Under the skin of its neck I could just feel plated metal, no detectable pulse. I moved my hand up and gently peeled one of its eyelids back. A machine lense greeted me, tucked inside the very human looking iris, it contracted then expanded. I let the eye fall shut.
+
+A millisecond later, its eyes flew open on their own and locked onto mine. It jerked away from me in a too fast motion that made the javelin move horribly through its body. I could see the whites of its eyes fully around its iris as it made a choked hissing noise. I later realized it had tried to scream. Shit shit shit.
+
+[Sina] Pod it woke up. What do I do?
+[Arthropod] Try to calm it down like you did with the human. I'll be there soon. Are you in danger?
+[Sina] No, it's just scared. I think it's too injured to do much.
+[Arthropod] Alright. It will most likely pass soon.
+[Sina] Are you sure? SecUnits are supposed to be durable.
+[Arthropod] I'll look into it.
+
+As I was talking to Pod, I slowly raised my hands in what I hoped was the universal gesture of peace.
+
+""Hey it's alright. I'm not gonna hurt you,"" I tried in a soft voice,""I'm just a mechanic, I'm not a soldier. Is it okay if I touch you?"" It nodded hesitantly. Or maybe it wasn't hesitant and its neck just hurt. I carefully took its hand. It didn't actually feel like I was holding a hand at all. It was heavy but there was no warmth, only cold armor. I continued talking to it, trying to say stuff that was comforting in a low voice.
+
+Finally, its eyes left my face as they flicked over my shoulder. I looked over too. Pod was there, clutching something in its clasper.
+""It's alright, this is my friend."" To accentuate the point I reached up and rested my hand on Pod's shell. The Unit's eyebrows furrowed slightly. It opened its mouth again and then closed it quickly, wincing.
+
+[Arthropod] The human is beginning to fade. I looked through some of their stuff and found data on constructs.
+
+It opened its grasper arm to show me a data chip and a strange looking feed interface. It also pushed a file through the comm. This took a couple seconds and in the time I finally got it downloaded the Unit's eyes had begun to unfocus.
+
+""Hey, stay with us here,"" I said, a bit more sharply than intended. Its eyes snapped back to me and its hand twitched in mine.
+
+[Arthropod] I've summarized the data. This is a combat secunit. It has a governor module that regulates its activities through physical punishment. The module states it is not sentient. It's very possible it could heal from this damage. The human is one of its handlers.
+
+That was a shit summary but I wasn't gonna tell Pod that. The hell's the difference between a combat secunit and a regular secunit anyhow?
+
+[Arthropod] It appears that once its handler passes the governor module will kill it.
+
+I whipped my head around to stare at the unit. Its eyes were unfocused and drifting shut.
+
+""Hey, wake up."" I nudged it but it's eyes slid fully shut. Shit.
+
+[Sina] Can we help it?
+
+[Arthropod] It is a dangerous insentient being. We should let it pass on.
+
+[Sina] Oh bullshit. It held my hand. It was /looking/ at me. Really looking.
+
+[Arthropod] Lots of things look at things. Plenty can hold someone's hand as well. There's no need to complicate this situation by adding another being.
+
+[Sina] Can you interface with it? See its logs?
+
+[Arthropod] I really don't think that's necessary.
+
+[Sina] Please, for my peace of mind?
+
+[Arthropod] Fine.
+
+Pod started gently moving the unit, its many arms drifting over it in search of a dataport. It found one on the back of the unit's neck and unraveled a thick interfacing cord from one of its many compartments. It plugged them both in, then stilled.
+
+I clambered back over the ridge to check on the apparent handler. I didn't want to leave them alone. They were laying in the same spot with their eyes closed. I got closer and took their hand, mostly so I could check their pulse. It was thready and uneven. I nudged their shoulder but their eyes stayed shut. I just tried to think about how nice it would be to get out of this freezing field and go back to basecamp. I could just hang out with Pod and watch a show on the feed or read a book or anything to get my mind off this. But I was here. With bodies all around me, holding a dying person's hand. I couldn't even begin to think about the unit. What would I even do if it was sentient? It had a fucking hole through it. I don't know what I'd do if I found out I could help something out here just for it to die.
+
+[Arthropod] mostrecentlog.file
+
+Okay, I can do this. I open the file.
+
+01:33:25 -{unfamiliar movement detected} re:sensor34, sensor35, sensor7. {localized: trachea, artery2} recommended action: standby lifted: assess situation
+01:33:26 - Unit Notes: an enemy human is /right/ here. Like up my ass right here. They were touching me. I also have a fucking spear in me. It really hurts.
+01:33:26 -Output: requested assistance
+01:33:26 -Output: handler status request
+01:33:29 -Unit Notes: fuck it's cold. I really don't want to die like this. I thought it'd be quick.
+01:33:58 -Unit Notes: the human is holding my hand. They're talking to me.
+01:34:02 -Performance Reliability at 36% and dropping. Shutdown recommended.
+01:34:55 -Unit Notes: the human that keeps talking to me has a massive bot. They called it a 'friend'. This surprised me enough that I actually tried to ask about it.
+01:36:48 -Performance Reliability at 32% and dropping. Shutdown recommended.
+01:37:32 -Performance Reliability at 30%. Shutdown Initiated.
+-End Log-
+
+[Arthropod] I have initiated a hack of its governor module. It's in no shape to prove dangerous to either of us at this point.
+
+Pod sent that before I even finished the log. It must be worried. I realized that I was gripping the handler's hand too tight. I relaxed my grip and tried not to think about how fucked I was. I still had my other hand resting on their pulse point so I felt exactly when it faltered.
+
+[Sina] Is it done or in progress because we don't have a ton of time left.
+
+As I said before, I'm glad of the comm. Pod didn't need to feel my panic right now.
+
+[Arthropod] Finished.
+
+The pulse under my fingertips faltered again. It didn't start back up. I knew that it was stupid and impossible but I really wanted them to make it. I whispered a prayer for the handler and closed their eyes. I may have been crying a little bit. In my defense this is a very stressful situation.
+
+Alright I get five seconds to cry and then it's time to move. I took a really deep breath. I could cry more back at basecamp. Clambering over the mud was beginning to get a bit easier. Maybe everything else was getting harder, I don't know. Pod was already carefully picking the unit out of the mud.
+
+[Arthropod] Could you support its back so I can shorten the spear shaft.
+
+I hurried over and leaned my side into its back, trying to keep it both upright and steady. Fuck it's heavy. And cold.
+
+I could feel the minute vibrations of Pod's mini saw arm taking off the javelin shaft. The thing was at least 6 centimeters thick but Pod made quick work of it. We both carefully switched spots so I was holding up its front and Pod was removing the spearhead at its back. Finally, both ends of the javelin were removed.
+[Arthropod] We should remove its chest and back armor so we're actually bandaging the wound itself.
+
+All I had to do this time was take the armor bits off after Pod sawed them apart which was much easier than supporting the unit's crushing weight.
+Pod removed its med kit from another compartment and swiftly began making a thick bandage ring. It slid it onto the javelin front and handed me half of the bandage roll. We switched again with Pod supporting and me securing the javelin so it didn't jostle. Rinse and repeat for the other side.
+I've never been more grateful for a first aid class in my life.
+
+[Sina] Let's head for the nearest tank, I might be able to get it operational.
+
+Y'know, like the actual, original, salvage mission that we were supposed to be doing. We were never great at doing what we were supposed to.
+
+Pod took the emergency blanket out of the medkit, bundled up the unit, and we set off.
+
+Tws for this chapter: discussion of injury, minor character death
+
+Something beneath me was humming. Like the rumbling hum of heavy machinery. Wait. I died. I was 99% certain that was it and that's a large amount of certain. What the fuck happened?
+
+I checked my performance reliability. 34%. Well that's not exactly promising. Time to take some inventory I guess. I was on my side on something warm and rumbling. Some sort of machinery then. I cautiously turned up my pain sensors. Ouch. Yeah I don't know what I expected with that. My performance reliability wasn't at 34% for nothing. It's the same injury though. Oh shit I didn't have any of my armor. I was just in my suit skin, although something was covering me. None of this shit was looking good.
+
+At least I wasn't restrained. I may be injured but I do have guns built into my arms. I should probably open my eyes. I was procrastinating a bit. Maybe I didn't want to alert my captors that I was awake? It could've been something like that. Mostly I was just proverbially shitting myself. I've never been a captive before. I've always done the capturing or the rescuing. I was beginning to understand why it's not too easy to work with them. This shit is nerve-wracking. I just had to remember that I wasn't restrained and had guns.
+
+I steeled myself and opened my eyes. I was inside some sort of transport. There was a human in an envirosuit that was unzipped to their waist. There was also a large bot squashed into the limited space. Chairs lined two of the sidewalls and the front was taken up by a big display with all sorts of buttons, dials, and screens. I was laying on my side against the back wall, on top of a shelf or something. I also had a thermal blanket wrapped around me. Neither of them noticed that I woke up. The human was whispering to the bot in a way that sounded very familiar. Oh wait, I know them. That was the human who found me and held my hand. The bot was their ""friend"". I couldn't see either of them very well earlier, so I took the time to study them. The human had relatively dark skin and hair and a smaller build.
+
+The bot however, interested me more. It was about two meters long and a bit less than one wide. Overlapping plates formed the bot's back/top and about a dozen thin legs decorated the bottom. It looked like some sort of water invertebrate. I've never seen that type of bot before and I've seen a surprisingly large amount of bots.
+
+I tried to prop myself up on an elbow when my vision was suddenly engulfed by the human. I managed not to flinch back by the skin of my teeth. Their braids swung with their forward motion and almost whapped me in the face. They looked like they'd been crying.
+
+""No, don't move yet!"" They squeaked at me. ""You're still hurt!"" Yeah I had noticed that. Their hands kept fluttering around me, trying to do what, I had no idea. This situation was confusing me more and more. Why am I here? What the hell was this human even trying to accomplish? If they wanted to scrap me for parts, why did they keep me alive? Why give me a blanket? Oh they were still talking.
+
+""-and you were really cold so we put you on top of the engine vents to try and warm you up but you've been unconscious for like an hour and we were getting really worried and I'm not super-"" they said in an increasingly high tone. I wish I could ask what was happening but my stupid gov mod still wouldn't- oh shit. My governor module. I sat bolt upright, startling the human out of their (speech? Tirade? I've got no clue). Where the fuck is my governor module. Oh wait, I could ask that now.
+
+""Where the fuck is my governor module,"" I spit out weakly. I hadn't actually talked in awhile so it came out a bit rusty.
+
+""Oh, uh. Pod and I disabled it because it was going to kill you,"" they said, waving back at the bot, Pod presumably. That answer just raised more questions.
+
+""Why?"" I hissed back, trying to turn. Okay that hurt. My performance reliability dropped 3% for that move.
+
+""It was...going to kill you?"" the human questioned, like they didn't just say the same thing twice. Over their shoulder they called, ""Pod, are you sure its brain diagnostics came back alright? It seems discombobulated."" Well that was just salt in the wound.
+
+It was time to change tactics. ""Who the fuck even are you guys?"" The human shot a quick look back at the bot before replying to me. That meant something, I know it.
+
+""My name's Sina and this is my friend Pod, short for Arthropod. We're both from SkryHal Station in TreadLight. I'm an engineer and Pod is my assistant. We were conscripted here about 40 cycles ago."" Sina said all that unnecessarily slowly. ""What's your name?"" They asked politely.
+
+I am only getting more confused. It was also getting difficult to believe they were going to hurt me on purpose. It felt a lot more like they were going to do so by accident. Why are they asking my name anyway, I don't even have one of those?
+
+""My feed address is CSU_43L8C27,"" I said just as slowly.
+
+""Um, okay then,"" they said, glancing back at the bot again. ""Is it okay if Pod talks to you now? They usually talk through the feed but I have a comm if you want it,"" they offered nervously.
+
+I do want the comm. I really want to hold something other than the crinkly blanket right now. They handed it to me and went to fiddle with one of the control panels.
+
+[Arthropod] Hello. As Sina said, you are welcome to call me Pod. I understand you have questions?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] I've got a few, yeah. Why'd you hack my governor module? Why am I still alive? What are you guys doing with me? Where am I?
+
+[Arthropod] Those are some good ones. We hacked your module because you were going to die if we didn't. You're a person and it would be unfair to leave you there. Right now we're trying to find a way to repair you and get you where you need to go. You're 9 meters north of where you were laying earlier. You're in a tank.
+
+That didn't actually help much. I finally laid back down on the engine vents. They really were warm.
+
+I realized I didn't have to reply and stared down at the floor paneling instead. Maybe I could trigger a shutdown? Get out of this situation? No, I don't really feel like being unconscious around strangers right now. Or ever really. Instead I set up a diagnostic on all my systems and the surrounding area. That should take up some of my mind.
+
+[Arthropod] Is something wrong? We couldn't administer pain medication earlier as we're not sure how. Would that help?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] I can control my pain sensors. I just don't understand.
+
+[Arthropod] What don't you understand?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] This! Why are you being nice to me! I don't understand.
+
+[Arthropod] Okay, I'm not sure how to help with that. Let's work on something else then. Sina and I had some trouble administering first aid to you. Do you have anything we could do to help more?
+
+I had been very good at not thinking about the extra hole but Arthropod just ruined it. The blanket was covering it and that's all I cared about. Cautiously, I peeled back the crinkly edge of the blanket. My stomach and chest were wrapped with clean white bandages in an odd star shape. I realized that they weren't holding a healing pack in place but instead the severed end of the spear. They didn't take it out.
+
+""You left the spear in,"" I said, disbelief coloring my tone. Sina turned around at my voice. It was clear they hadn't actually been doing anything by the control panel.
+
+They paled and tried to defend themself. ""It's rule one of first aid! If someone gets punctured, don't take out the thing that's doing the puncturing! It's holding all the blood and stuff in!"" I was pretty sure it wasn't rule one but yeah I've definitely heard of that before.
+
+However... ""My veins seal automatically."" I looked down again. Judging by the location, the javelin took out my core battery, my heating system, and my third heart. Cool.
+
+Arthropod and Sina exchanged a look before turning back to me. It was a very human motion.
+
+""I'm gonna need a cubicle to repair this, I'm missing parts, not just organics."" At my statement, Sina winced.
+
+[Arthropod] Sorry, we don't have a lot of experience repairing constructs. We don't have access to a cubicle. Is there an alternative?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] No.
+
+[Arthropod] Are you sure? We'll do our best to assist you.
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] Why? I literally killed a bunch of your buddies a few hours ago. You shouldn't help me.
+
+[Arthropod] We were given the impression it wasn't your choice. Would you have killed them if your governor module wasn't there?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] Does that even matter? I still did it. I don't even feel that bad about it.
+
+[Arthropod] I feel like you're trying to get a rise out of me. You also didn't answer the question.
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] Fuck you.
+
+This was confusing and I didn't want to be here. Couldn't they just suck? It'd be way easier if they were trying to scrap me or something. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
+
+I curled up and pulled the blanket over my head. The comm was still in here with me. Arthropod could contact me but I wanted to hold something. I reached out of my cocoon to put the comm on the floor and held out my hand. I was hoping one of them would put something in it. Sina gently put their hand in mine. It was... nice.
+
+""Is this alright?"" Sina whispered. I nodded and hoped they could see it under the blanket. They weren't getting any other interaction than that. I could feel them shift and lean up against the engine cover. I decided I would let them fix me. Worst case scenario I could kill them and run.
+
+It was silent for six minutes, in which I assumed Sina and Pod were talking over comm. I was also coming to the realization I was about to eject from my skin. My diagnostic had finished and reviewing the data didn't take as long as I hoped. Having a lot of processing power was never really an issue for me before. I always had something to do, a mission or an objective to complete. Just laying here felt like my organic parts were going to slough off my inorganic skeleton.""Hey, Pod's gonna head out now and try and scavenge some parts. I understand you're good at coding, would you be up to helping me get this tank running?"" Sina said quietly. Fuck yeah I would.
+
+I peeked my head out of the blanket. ""What are we looking at?"" I said maybe a bit too quickly. My voice kept cracking; It was annoying.
+
+Sina looked surprised that I actually said anything. ""Three tanks here randomly stopped working. I looked around and everything was good except for some damage to the guns up top, which shouldn't actually affect anything. I checked the tank's system and it looks pretty scrambled. Coding isn't exactly my specialty, normally Pod steps in. But someone actually has to do our job so... I was hoping you could help?"" They said in a business-like tone, faltering a bit at the end. That was a lot of words, alright. Wait a minute.
+
+""Are these tanks guarding that spear shooter thing?""
+
+""Yeah, there's five of them. Two got ripped up though,"" Sina said, gesturing to where I assumed the other tanks were. There weren't any windows in the tanks, only electronic displays. A really stupid choice if power was cut. I would know, I'm the one who took down all these damn tanks.""So uh,"" I began, ""I'm actually the one that hacked the tanks?"" I was a bit nervous. I'd already thrown the fact I murdered a bunch of people in Pod's face but I couldn't do that to Sina. Sina was nice and liked me. No one's ever liked me before. I didn't want it to go away.
+
+""Oh that's perfect!"" Sina exclaimed. ""We'll have a real easy time fixing them up!""
+
+I didn't know if Sina was being purposefully obtuse or if they were just really naive. We weren't exactly on the same side here. It was stressing me out. This whole situation was already stressing me out to be fair. I reminded myself I just had to get fixed and then I could run.
+
+I did actually need to reply to Sina. ""I'll do it now, it shouldn't take me long."" It was my hack after all. I dipped into CombatSys23 and clipped away the code bundle that froze the local energy cells and the wheel axles. I had neglected the engine because I was hoping the people inside would be too distracted to turn it off and forget that the emissions would poison them. The engine is currently on though. I should ask Sina about that.
+
+""Hey, you're not gonna get poisoned from the engine emissions right?,"" I said as casually as I could manage.
+
+""Hmm?"" they hummed. They weren't really listening, the moment the power came back they went right for the control panels. I waited for the reply to actually process through their head. I don't know how humans don't get sick of that, having only one thing you could focus on. Finally, they perked up and said, ""Oh no, don't worry. I refitted some of these tanks to have an external output for this exact situation."" Huh, cool. Unfortunately, I was very bored again.
+
+""Is there anything else I can do?"" I tried. Sina waved back at me, typing furiously. That's real helpful. I had to wait for them to process again.
+
+""Oh no, you're all good, you can just relax,"" they said, then paused. ""Would you like something to do?""
+
+""Yes."" I was trying real hard not to sound desperate.
+
+""Oh uh, yeah. Lemme just find something around here..."" they mumbled. They started digging around in cabinets, pulling out various small machines, then pulled out a small toolkit.
+
+""There's not a lot you can do laying down but you're welcome to take these apart and make something else or put them back together."" Sina said, holding out all the stuff.
+
+I took it, nodded my thanks, and went to work.
+
+About an hour later I had made a small taser, several fauna imitations, and 8 spikes that fit over my fingers. It was very enjoyable. Especially when Sina began to play music over the internal speakers. I haven't heard much music but I really liked it. I set some of my inputs to analyze and record it.I was so absorbed in making my new claws sturdy that I barely paid any attention to Arthropod's return. I switched to finding something to refine the edges of my pieces.
+
+From the corner of my eye, I could see Sina and Arthropod going through whatever it brought back. I finally found a rough piece of metal I thought could work. The metal of my claws was an iron and carbon alloy. Strong but not excessively so. I would have to make stronger ones later. The metal piece was a titanium and carbon alloy. It should be strong enough that I could use it as a rudimentary file. If I ever got off this planet I was going to get so many tools. I'd make everything I ever wanted.
+
+Sina was getting excited and gently handling a wrapped up bundle. They saw me looking up and their eyes brightened.""We have some parts for you! Pod found them while exploring!"" They slid over to me and showed me what was in the bundle. Yup those were indeed Combat SecUnit parts. Pretty much all the parts in the lower torso area.
+
+With some trepidation I asked, ""Where'd you even get those?""
+
+Sina handed me the comm.
+
+[Arthropod] I found another combat secunit that had unfortunately been killed. I harvested what I thought you needed. Is that alright?
+
+My good mood from the tinkering evaporated instantly. I hadn't had a lot of interaction with the other units deployed here. But I knew them well enough. I could feel them in my awareness and I could feel if one fizzled out or kept going. I wonder if they felt me die. They probably did.
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] I guess. Do you know their feed ID or any other ID numbers or markers?
+
+[Arthropod] I couldn't find any. I'm sorry.
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] Okay.
+
+I know two of us died today. It was a 50/50 chance who it was. CSU_40L3C27 tended to keep to itself. I saw it save a large fauna once. It took the shot in its stead. I had to carry it back to the cubicle. CSU_42L4C27 was very talkative. It wasn't particularly nice though. We played cards once during a slow mission. L3 and L4 were paired together on missions a lot. It hurt when they died but I was glad they died together. They'd both give me their parts, but I wish I could've asked first.
+
+[Arthropod] Are you alright?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] I'm fine.
+
+[Arthropod] We'll get you to a medsystem soon. Would you mind fixing the other tanks and making sure they'll follow this one?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] Sure.
+
+Something was welling up in me, making my throat tighten. This happened sometimes when I thought too much. I never knew how to handle it. So I just handed the comm back to Sina and went back to my tinkering.
+
+Chapter tws: More minor character death, discussions of drinking and alcohol, nongraphic vomiting
+
+The chapter count may go up as chapter 4 is getting a bit long and may split into two chapters. The last chapter will be a nice peaceful epilogue though. I feel bad for putting Sina through all this, they need a break.Also just ignore what's going on with the feed conversations I've been switching formats
+
+Our new Construct friend was looking almost ready to go by the time we were a kilometer away from camp. Pod and I helped it into one of the spare jumpsuits and tucked it into a storage cart. It was looking extremely disgruntled, like a wet feline.
+
+I handed it the emergency blanket, saying, ""In a few minutes Pod is gonna put the lid on alright? We'll be close enough to the camp that we can use the feed there. As soon as we get in range you can initiate the medsystem hack.""
+
+Our working plan was to disguise the construct in one of our storage carts, and ferry it back to the workshop. It would hack the main medsystem and make it look like an equipment failure. Since I was the first engineer back, I'd be called to fix it. We could lock ourselves in and fix up the construct. The plan had been cooked up by Pod and the construct.
+
+I suggested we just shoot me so we have an excuse to use the medsystem. I was shot down. Not literally.
+
+I wasn't actually serious about that idea, but Pod and the construct needed something to unify against. I could see they were grating on each other a bit.
+
+I signaled Pod to put on the lid. A few moments later the tank rolled to a stop. We got out and took the storage carts out of the other tanks and started hooking them together.
+
+I got an alert from my supervisor to report immediately. It was tagged with his location. Great.
+
+""Hey I've gotta report to Major Dickhead, you okay here alone?"" I sent to Pod on the feed. It pinged an affirmative. Another ping from the construct came in. I sent, ""I've gotta report to my supervisor, Pod's gonna take care of you for now and we'll meet back up at the Medsystem soon.""
+
+It pinged me back an acknowledgment, and I headed out. Leaving Pod and a potentially very dangerous person on a tarmac filled with soldiers grated on me but I know Pod is competent and the construct has been behaving so far. I could feel something large in the feed crouching over me. I poked it and the construct pinged me again.
+
+""Is something wrong?"" It sent.
+
+""No, I just wasn't sure what was there. Keep yourself hidden."" It pinged me another acknowledgement and I could almost feel the eyeroll that came with it.
+
+I shouldered through the double doors of basecamp proper, waving halfheartedly to the guards. I pulled off my envirosuit helmet but didn't pull it down to my waist like I liked to. It was cold in here and I didn't want to be more exposed than I needed to be in front of the supervisor.
+
+The halls were dank and mold grew in some corners. Occasionally water would drip on you from a leak in the ceiling, the damn place was a wreck. It was abandoned when TreadLight took it over and made it the 6th Sectors base of command. Fucking stupid. The corridors were a damn maze on top of it.
+
+I had to pass through the mess to get to Major Dickhead's little court of office. Everyone called him Major Dickhead. We were supposed to call him Major Denfis? Dawson? Dentson? Fuck if I know. Major Dickhead fit better so that's what we used.
+
+I was approaching the mess now. Barely anyone was in the halls this late at night so the sound just echoed in the empty space. You could always hear the mess hall before you saw it. It was the main place of leisure because outside was so damn miserable. As I walked through the doors the scent of sweat hit me like a wet brick. The scent of lackluster food twined through the space, followed by bursts of laughter and underlined by the constant rumble of conversation. The mess was quieter than usual due to the recent battle, though just as many people were here. Plenty were mourning lost friends but plenty more were drinking themselves into oblivion, no matter the time of night.
+
+As I weaved my way through the crowd, someone snagged my wrist. I could feel the construct lean on me a little closer. It must've been watching through the cameras. It was just Mal though. He looked up at me with big wet eyes. He was slumped next to his bottle, lightly holding my wrist. Mal was a big guy, one of the soldiers, but right now he looked very small. I could see blood crusted in his ear.
+
+""Are ya..."" he started then tried again,""Ya goin to see Major Dickhead?"" He slurred slightly.
+
+""Yessir unfortunately,"" I replied.
+
+His eyebrows scrunched and he said, ""Ungh. He's in a mood. He fucked up Lil a bit about an hour ago. Here."" He tried to press a meal ticket into my hand. He looked so sad that he eventually succeeded.
+
+""Stay safe. Eat something,"" he said, finally letting go of my wrist and waving me off. The construct finally let up.
+
+Mal was nice. He was the commander of a small unit of about two dozen. It's probably less now considering how sad he looks. A commander is pretty damn good considering he isn't TreadLight. He's probably one of the highest nonaffiliated here.
+
+No one else stopped me in the mess, and I made it through with no casualties.
+
+This end of the base was pretty empty right now, anyone not in the mess was either asleep or working. Lots of bunks were in this area as well as some of the upper management. The uppers all got pissy that they had to sleep so close to the commoners. I turned the corner and got into the ""fancy"" part of the base and could see Major Dickhead in the hall, waiting for me. Oh he's in a really bad mood. I hurried up a little but the moment I was in arms reach he grabbed me and threw me bodily into the office.
+
+""The fuck is wrong with you being back so damn early. I don't keep you useless fucks around to eat our food and use our energy. I keep you so you can fucking work. Do you know what you're not doing right now?"" He hissed directly into my face. I was backed up against the desk now and he was between me and the door. Pod and the construct were heavy in the feed, waiting to jump in. The constuct was pinging me to enter into an encrypted channel. I ignored it.I kept my voice even as I replied, ""Not working sir.""
+
+""Not fucking working!"" He threw up his hands and began to pace in tight circles.
+
+""I told them, I told them that if we brought people in from the stations, they'd just cause us more problems. You fucking lowlifes are sucking the mud off the raider's balls. You take up resources because you can't do as you're told. You take up our time because you cause problems. You take up our space because you won't even go out there and fucking die like you're supposed to!"" He began quietly then gradually raised his voice until it echoed around the tiny room. I gripped the desk behind me with both hands as he shoved his bulging eyes back into my face. His hair was thinning from how often he ran his hands through it. My stomach was rolling with the sickening mixture of rage and fear. If I threw up I was going to aim for his face.
+
+""And now, I get to deal with you. Some lowlife scum who never learned the meaning of hard work. Did your daddy's beatings knock it all out of your head? I have to do fucking everything around here,"" he spat, quite literally, into my face. BaseSystem sent an alert to my feed. Looks like it discovered the broken medsystem.
+
+""Sir-"" I tried before I was swiftly cut off with a backhand. I rolled with it but I still tasted blood. The fucker wore rings. The construct was almost smothering me at this point. I staggered away from the desk, both because it hurt and so I could maybe get around him.
+
+I know he saw the BaseSystem alert. He just wanted to hit me anyway.
+
+""The only thing you're good for around here,"" he said, grabbing my face, right over the dent his ring made, ""Is cleaning up after us. I don't want to see you again until that medsystem is fixed and you've inventoried the other mechanic's finds."" He used the grip on my face to shove me out the door. I stumbled a bit but righted myself and finally opened up the channel. All in all that could've gone a lot worse.
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] The fuck was that?
+
+[Sina] Sorry, I couldn't do anything in the feed while he was there. He would've seen it.
+
+[Arthropod] Are you alright?
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] Does he hate you personally or something? What the fuck?
+
+[Sina] I'm fine and it's kinda complicated.
+
+[Arthropod] Major Dickhead is a TreadLight. A member of the gang, not just living in the territory. Sina is not a TreadLight and just lives in the territory. They are also not under the TreadLight's ""protection"". When war was declared, many TreadLights and those under protection chose to fight. This wasn't enough people so TreadLight began extorting anyone useful to the war effort and forcing them to participate. The people not willingly here are looked down upon by TreadLights.
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] That doesn't make any fucking sense. Just kill the TreadLights. The fuck are they extorting you for anyway?
+
+[Sina] They outnumber us. They'd kill Pod.
+
+[Sina] Let's just get to MedSystem.
+
+I closed the channel. Hopefully there were no cameras nearby as I went around another corner then slid to the floor. I watched someone die, I put a very lethal and very injured person in a box, and I just got the shit slapped out of me. It hasn't even been four hours since I left with Pod on our original scavenging mission. I covered my face in my hands and sobbed.A couple minutes passed and I could feel Pod and the construct hovering but they didn't intrude, which I appreciated. The odds were good they couldn't see me on camera; those are only in places where people congregate. I got to my feet and wiped my face on the envirosuit sleeve. I really needed to change into something not absolutely caked in mud before I entered a medical facility. I updated Pod and the construct and went to my cubby.
+
+Mine had a bunk and a few boxes for clothes and that was it. My roomie was still in the mud fields. When the construct was healed up it would probably have to stay with Pod in the workshops. They'd keep themselves safe. I pulled out a set of clean clothes and changed, transferring the meal ticket into my new jumpsuit pocket. Mal could sense the hungry like a bloodhound. And had my last meal this morning, about 17 hours ago.
+
+Officially we were supposed to get three meal tickets a day if we did our work but obviously that's not what happened. High ranking soldiers like Mal got more, in an attempt to stop them from deserting. Those of us who ranked lower slipped through the cracks. I really did need to eat soon, I was feeling faint. But food was currency, I could use it to barter with another engineer/mechanic if need be.
+
+Finally, I could actually get my ass to medsystem. I passed back through the mess but Mal was gone this time, and it was considerably emptier. I mean it was maybe 3 hours till dawn so that made sense. Outside the double doors to medsystem I could see Pod and a storage cart. Unfortunately Lil was there. Mal had just told me that Major Asshole messed her up but it never crossed my mind she'd need medsystem for it. As I approached I could see Pod coaxing a med pack to attach to her hand. A slimmer one was already anchored to her head, obscuring an eye.
+
+""-yeah that's what I said! But nooo he said he knew what he was doing so I just let him work. His lack of eyebrows is not- Oh Sina! I knew you'd be by soon. You two are never far from one another,"" she said, smiling at me and gesturing to Pod. She was probably winking too but with the medpack I couldn't be sure. Like Mal's, her glazed eyes were rimmed with red.
+
+""Hey Lil, I'm glad Pod kept you company. MedSys is down, naturally. Has Pod gotcha covered or should we grab someone else to help you out?"" I asked. Lil was nice. She was a soldier in Mal's squadron and the two were close. They looked pretty similar so I was pretty sure they were related. I felt pretty bad taking down MedSys when she needed it.
+
+She waved me off, ""I've gotta concussion and a few broken fingers so I'm just gonna let Mal and the others keep and eye on me.""""Sounds good, I'll contact you when it's fixed up,"" I said, helping her up. Another soldier from her squadron was jogging over in lounge wear. I assume Pod called them to help her back to their room. We exchanged nods as they helped her keep her balance.
+
+I waved the pair off as Pod opened the MedSys doors. The moment the doors closed it leapt into action. The construct (I really needed something better to call it) was helped into the medsystem cradle and Pod plugged itself in to operate the medsystem. Clearly the two had already communicated. I could feel the faint buzz of the feed as files were passed around.
+
+The construct started to guide the medsystem to the ports on its spine and skull. Pod slid the data chip from the handler into the available slot. MedSys whirred to life and accepted the other constructs parts readily.
+
+[CSU_43L8C27] I have to shut down to heal. I'm not sure how long it'll take but I'll restart when medsystem finishes.
+
+[Arthropod] It should take around four hours. We'll keep watch.
+
+[Sina] We'll be right here the whole time. Then we'll figure out our next step.
+
+I could see the construct blush and it sent a ping of acknowledgment. Its eyes glazed over then slid shut as medsystems' many arms began to work.
+
+Our collective channel closed and Pod sent ""What exactly is the plan when it's healed?""
+
+I replied,""I was thinking it would stay with you in the workshop until a supply ship came. It could hitch a ride on that or stay here with us.""
+
+""You don't think anyone will notice an entire combat SecUnit?""
+
+""I mean it's not like it's going to use up any resources. It doesn't eat anything.""
+
+Pod wandered closer then settled down behind me. I took the invitation and sat down, leaning against it.
+
+""That's fair,"" It sent.
+
+There was a few seconds of silence then, ""Are you alright? It's been a hard cycle.""
+
+""I've been better. I don't really want to talk about it.""
+
+""Alright."" After Pod's reply there was a few seconds pause. I think it was waiting for me to fall asleep.
+
+Instead, I asked,""The construct seems more trusting. I thought it was going to try and stay awake during the procedure. Was that your doing?""
+
+""We talked. I allowed it to piggyback on my systems and view my logs. It's hard not to trust something once you've viewed its innermost thoughts. It's also more confident about my ability to operate medsystem.""
+
+I hummed in agreement and laid my head against its armored back. I could feel it increasing its heat.
+
+It poked me gently in the feed, sending,""You haven't cared for yourself today. You should sleep. I'll watch the construct.""
+
+""When it wakes up we should figure out a name. But yeah, I think I'll sleep for now. Wake me up if anything happens,"" I replied.
+
+Its feed presence wrapped around me comfortingly and it pinged an agreement.
+
+I woke up with a start to Pod clicking loudly. It was unraveling itself quickly from beneath me, approaching the now open door. Shit.""-I turn my back! I'm gonna have you fuckers executed for this! Both of you! All three of you! Who the fuck even is-!"" The supervisor's shouting echoed around the small room, almost drowning out Pod's clicking.
+
+I scrambled to my feet, joining Pod by the doorway. ""Cut it out,"" I sent. Pod's clicking shut off but I could still feel its agitation through the feed.
+
+""Woah, woah, Sir, what's going on?"" I aimed my question at Major Asshole, hoping I was sounding confused enough.
+
+He threw his hands up, causing Pod to shift minutely forward. His eyes just about bugged out of his head as he screamed, ""The fuck you mean what's going on! I came in here trying to see what's taking your pathetic ass so goddamn long and you're taking a fucking nap with- with a fucking stranger in the medsystem! Who the fuck even is that!""
+
+""I would suggest telling a partial truth in this circumstance. Tell him it's a construct and we were fixing it up,"" Pod sent helpfully.
+
+""It's a SecUnit we found scrapping. We were just fixing it up while medsystem was in a partial reboot and wouldn't notice a nonhuman in the systems,"" I said desperately. That's not how medsystem worked but I was really hoping he didn't know that.
+
+This didn't appear to help anything. His face went from white to red to purple in very quick succession. Genuinely I thought he might just drop dead from high blood pressure right there but no luck. He took a deep breath then started talking slowly, gradually picking up speed and volume,""So, let me get this straight. You brought a SecUnit, a class four enemy weapon, into camp. Not only did you not tell anyone, you lied to me about it! Fuck I knew you were stupid but this is fucking pushing it!"" His spit was flecking into my face and I could see a vein throbbing in his forehead.
+
+He grabbed the front of my jumpsuit and tried to pull me closer. Pod shoved itself partially between us, breaking his grip. Major Asshole swore violently and unholstered his energy weapon. This is where everything went to shit.
+
+He leveled his energy weapon at Pod, saying something about useless bots. I couldn't help it, I lunged forward. I don't know exactly what I was hoping to accomplish but I was no soldier. The moment I moved, Major Asshole twisted and slammed his weapon into the side of my face.
+
+Bright colored pain blotted out my vision and I got the vague sensation I was falling before I actually crumpled against the medsystem floor. I couldn't breathe for a moment. It felt like my brain got a hard reboot and half of it corrupted. I couldn't see, I could hardly breathe. I just laid there while my brain desperately tried to reconfigure itself.
+
+Something hooked itself under my upper body and I was gently dragged across the floor. Nausea bubbled up in me at the movement.
+
+Oh Pod. Pod was moving me. I should tell it something. I tried but all that came out was a groan. I opened my feed instead. Ow. That didn't feel good at all.
+
+""Sina! Are you okay? I'm going to move you to medsystem, okay?"" It sent. I tapped an acknowledgement. I could feel its relief bleed over me in the feed.
+
+My vision was spinning but I could see the brown and silver pistons of Pod's underside. Oh I was being carried. I missed that part. Something else was moving around me, I'm pretty sure it was medsystem. A felt a few dots of pain on my arm and my head started clearing.
+
+Oh god. I frantically pointed at the nearby bin and Pod got it just in time for me to empty my stomach into it. I leaned back. Yeah I was in a medsystem cradle. Pod was hovering, blocking my view of the rest of the room. I was starting to get a very bad feeling about this.
+
+""Pod. Pod, what happened to Major Asshole?"" I asked clumsily. My tongue felt like rubber.
+
+There was a few second pause then it sent, ""I killed him."" Oh that's what I was afraid it'd say.
+
+""I can't...I don't know what to do,"" I told it helplessly. The moment someone realized the supervisor was missing, all hell was going to rain down. I couldn't even think. I couldn't field this one, not like this.
+
+""That's okay. I'm going to handle it,"" it sent. It started to sponge the blood off my face and the medsystem's medication did the rest. I couldn't help but drift."
+44991994,Incorporating,['verersatz'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Logos, Murderbot experiences an emotion, Belonging",English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,100,1/1,17,40,null,147,"['every_eye_evermore', 'weirdbooksnail', 'christinesangel100', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'cluCluc', 'Ginipig', 'Ook', 'MommyMayI', 'soulsofzombies', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'violasarecool', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'SIC_Prowl', 'EvaBelmort', 'beeayy', 'AkaMissK', 'Drew_Baxton', 'MercurialFeet', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'petwheel', 'qwanderer', 'WyvernWolf', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'Znarikia', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'rainbowmagnet', 'voided_starlight', 'cmdrburton', 'elmofirefic', 'Abacura', 'FlipSpring', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Rosewind2007', 'BWizard']",[],"The logos were large and conspicuous on the blue fabric. They stood out, bright, as I checked my appearance in the cameras, and I couldn't stop my face from making an expression.
+
+You don't have to wear it. ART sounded weird and anxious, like when we rewatched Worldhoppers episodes where the crew gets hurt. If you're unhappy, I can remove my insignias--
+
+""ART. Shut up."" Ugh, I was leaking emotions into the feed like a human. I shoved them towards ART.
+
+The weight of its immediate relieved excitement nearly flattened me.
+
+""Idiot."" Rolling my eyes, I adjusted my new jacket."
+44991319,Parallel Processing,['Aphelocoma_californica'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), an unnamed hazmat tech from Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Outsider, POV Second Person, Spoilers for Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry, Anxiety",English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,969,1/1,22,84,8,222,"['Valdinia', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Unknown66', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'EleniaTrexer', 'WVrambler', 'Seregona', 'Awesome_Orange', 'Szors', 'Thisismethereader', 'PotatoLady', 'FaerieFyre', 'JoCat', 'MynameisJodi', 'Ageisia', 'dementor_ssc', 'Bibli', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'pain_and_panic', 'Though224_loading', 'SnippySchnapps', 'EvaBelmort', 'Doctor13', 'applejee', 'psycho_karma', 'Priority_Error', 'aestian', 'lazylichen', 'artzbots', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'IguanaMadonna', 'danceswchopstck', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Sparkledragon04', 'MQuai', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'entropy_muffin', 'Ook', 'aglarwen', 'Nikactus', 'Hi_Hope', 'petwheel', 'tabya', 'theoscelosaurus', 'artichokefunction', 'LdyKirin', 'sareliz', 'Scifigal90']",[],"SecUnit lifts the cabinet--the cart-size, quarter-tonne cabinet--like it's an empty packaging box. It moves to set the cabinet aside, unblocking the storage compartment it's in, then scales a wall out the hatch, ghosting up the panels with easy precision.
+
+Minutes ago, you had craned your neck up at it--you barely reach its chest--as it scowled over your head. SecUnit probably isn't irritated by you asking for help with the cabinet; it had made the same face at Senior Indah, JollyBaby, the docks in general, and in that one photo from the newsfeeds. Your heart pounds anyway.
+
+Your team, plus one disgruntled security consultant, conducts a missing persons (refugee) search in the docks. The space echoes with clangs of machinery and footfalls of roving techs. In a series of rolling thuds, JollyBaby and its other giant cargo bot friends release another round of modules, cheerfully beeping task complete. As they rumble through wider areas between containers, you search further within the now-unblocked compartment alongside a few other techs, briefly tuning in to your private feed.
+
+
+# That ""you have to be shitting me"" reaction to JollyBaby? Cute, hilarious, going straight into our documentary. Glad you got it on vest cam.
+
+
+
+Um, thanks?
+
+
+
+// Don't let SecUnit hear you call it cute.
+
+
+
+# Okay, look--
+
+
+Two months in on the job, you've become familiar with the organized chaos that is Station Security hazmat operations. Earlier, first responders had reported to the biohazard area (murder site) around the victim (liaison between refugees and safety). In the aftermath, techs and waste disposal bots will see to cleanup. Banter aside, each team member--whether it be specialists, safety (you), or inspections and compliance--remains alert for instructions from their respective leads. Today's work isn't ordinary.
+
+Your task is simple. Methodical. Looking for huddled shapes among boxes and shelves and rows of forgotten things. Peering through harsh interior lighting, heart thumping double-time, scanning for cargo--for people (those fleeing generational corporate slavery)--
+
+--yet you need help with cross-checking the private docks inventory. Needed help with risk mitigation strategies, shipping procedures, never-ending paperwork; needed help with the fucking cabinet--
+
+Right now, there's a murderer on the loose, and people counting on you to stay alive.
+
+You step out of the compartment hatch and jump as a looming shadow blinks into your field of view.
+
+
+# --anyway, didn't you say before that it's unapproachable? Some sort of killing machine?
+
+
+
+// I still think it's unapproachable. You weren't there when Senior Indah got the full debrief on Dr. Mensah's ""security consultant"".
+
+
+
+# Neither were you, you just got the details earlier than we did!
+
+
+SecUnit fixes its intense stare past you, expression unfazed. It gives you a wide berth, cadence a touch faster than human, and disappears into yet another compartment. It would know, better than most, about the places where people hide.
+
+--it analyzes oceans of information in the time it takes you to scan a safety data sheet, it slips through Station Security system protections like they don't exist, just to make a point; it has Dr. Mensah's unflappable trust and Senior Indah's grudging respect, it's beyond competent and that's intimidating as hell--
+
+In the storm of the investigation, where SecUnit leaps lightning-quick to assist, you can't help but stagger. Your job description (keep people safe from dangerous materials) didn't cover this (keep people safe from dangerous people)--there's a different kind of hazard (targeted violence) and lives at stake and you're unprepared for all of it--for a few seconds, you're rooted to the spot, so far out of your depth it's hard to breathe--
+
+--then the team channel blazes with activity--a module is missing--SecUnit pivots sharply, stalking away without another word--and you remember you can, in fact, inhale. You do this a few times; slow, deliberate, deep.
+
+You're standing between stacks of storage containers. Cargo bots rumble along, beeping periodically. Your teammates' voices draw your attention.
+
+// ""Looks like we are to continue searching here until given further direction.""
+
+# ""Hey, you good?""
+
+""Yeah, I think so.""
+
+Scanner lifted, you head down the corridor with your teammates to trawl the docks once more. There's still work to do, so for now, you focus on the task at hand.
+
+// ""That was...a lot to process.""
+
+# ""SecUnit can move, holy shit. I mean, I knew in theory but seeing it even on video...""
+
+Hours later, post-debriefs and paperwork, you find out what happened while you searched the docks. After responders had located the missing module, SecUnit had jumped straight to action hero business, rescuing refugees, taking down bounty hunters, and revealing the perpetrator in a dramatic showdown.
+
+Via footage, you all watch SecUnit draw a large weapon as it strides through the Port Authority office to confront Balin the Port-Authority-turned-combat bot. The fight is over in less than a minute. You catch blurred movement, SecUnit launching itself off a wall, flashes of weapons fire, a second-story window in shattered pieces, SecUnit's boot cracking the public docks floor--
+
+--then, with the crash of a massive mechanical hand, JollyBaby--and friends--facing the combat bot in a silent standoff.
+
+SecUnit looks...stunned. Not a dropped jaw from an action film, or a scowl from before, but more subtle. A crouched, tense frame poised to strike; blank features save for widened eyes. The combat bot shuts down. The cargo bots disperse. The construct kneels, frozen, for a while, wearing the distant gaze of someone who just had their worldview shifted.
+
+The clip ends. As your teammates pack their belongings for the night, you rewind the footage, lingering on a bewildered face surrounded by bots who came to provide assistance. In that moment, SecUnit is out of its depth.
+
+(And if SecUnit, with all its expertise, needed help along the way, maybe you feel better about needing help too.)"
+44988271,A Little Help,['Gamebird'],Explicit,Multi,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Ratthi/Arada/Overse,"Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)",Threesome - F/F/M,English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,100,1/1,5,10,null,86,"['Awful', 'AkaMissK', 'Gozer', 'qwanderer', 'verersatz', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Ratthi's cock thrust inside her, his hands tight on her hips as he took her from behind. Arada's face was pressed to the soft flesh of Overse's belly, arms around her ample waist. The taste of her wife still on her tongue. Ratthi had picked up the pace after Overse came. Arada trembled at the rude use. Her wife reached to fumble at her neglected clit. Somehow the glancing touches were driving her madder than if Overse had been able to it justice. She was so close. Overse's other hand made a fist in her hair and she was there."
+44987524,The Semantic Issue,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)",Pre-ASR,English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,100,1/1,11,41,null,211,"['xxXTryMeXxx', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'WVrambler', 'indramiel', 'Jackalope108', 'Tanscure', 'JoCat', 'EvaBelmort', 'SIC_Prowl', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'beeayy', 'AkaMissK', 'Kethrua', 'enchantedsleeper', 'danceswchopstck', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Slimeball', 'soyle', 'entropy_muffin', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'Hi_Hope', 'artichokefunction', 'Gozer', 'qwanderer', 'WalkingBird', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'MommyMayI', 'Magechild', 'VegaCoyote', 'opalescent_potato', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'FlipSpring', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Aren't constructs people? Mensah asked.
+
+That's a semantic issue, Gurathin answered. It doesn't have an existence outside that of an owned product.
+
+
+Thank you. I'm going to try again, in person this time, to refuse the security unit. Do you agree with that course of action?
+
+
+
+I'm fine with it.
+
+
+
+But not strongly opposed?
+
+
+
+I saw SecUnits every day for most of two decades. I know that's why Pin-Lee asked for my input. If we have to have it along with us, it's not going to keep us from doing the survey. But it won't be there to help us.
+"
+44985499,Receipt Delay,['OnlyAll0Saw'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Perihelion Crew (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Social Anxiety, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, asshole behavior, Pettyhelion, per my last feed message, you have [infinity] new messages, Canon-Typical Behavior, Barish-Estranza, SecUnit typical behavior",English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,"1,043",1/1,11,59,null,365,"['Spectre_of_the_flaming_Seas', 'hummus_tea', 'JanticsAntics', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'holographicbutch', 'zweisteinen', 'EauDePetrichor', 'Bibli', 'Koschei_B', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'platyceriums', 'EvaBelmort', 'junebug171', 'n0proxy', 'psycho_karma', 'Doctor13', 'notsafefortheworld', 'AkaMissK', 'Chyoatas', 'beeayy', 'icar9', 'andy_allan_poe', 'tabya', 'petwheel', 'theoscelosaurus', 'Scifigal90', 'ErinPtah', 'qwanderer', 'theAsh0', 'sunshaed', 'WyvernWolf', 'Magechild', 'opalescent_potato', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"I had had to resort some time ago to keeping my feed connection with Three backburnered behind a subroutine that caught (and deflected) every time it requested my private attention. It was not actually, Amena, that I was trying to be mean to it, or even that I didn't want to communicate. We communicated all the time. But when you're freshly off inventory (and your escape from it as sudden and terrifying as it was for Three) 1500 hours to get used to it is no time at all. Even without its armor, even though it had (mostly) stopped using exclusively its buffer to talk, it was still clinging to old habits. Like, it was still patrolling. Not always, and sometimes just with the drones I'd given it, but too much human attention was still enough to send it on a completely redundant security check. Redundant because ART was aware of everything that was happening anywhere aboard absolutely all the time, and also because I was the stupid security consultant here. But no matter how many times I had deflected security updates with a polite acknowledgment, or ART had responded much less politely with the thousands of logs it generated per minute, Three had decided that what iut wanted right now was to provide security.
+
+Whatever. I could set my routine to auto-acknowledge all its direct feed messages tagged for PeriSecSys, and when I got around to it I could scroll through for anything important. I knew ART was deleting them, because it had put a feed ticker in our private shared workspace counting every single time it happened. ART hadn't made a label, but that's what it was. 
+1.0, Three said into the main comm feed, to the whole ship, Transport Perihelion, I have an urgent -
+ART muted Three to cut it off, but restored the connection immediately. The humans probably didn't even notice the blip. But they definitely noticed the next message Three sent. We all did. 
+
+I should have clarified. Three wasn't only doing unnecessary security. Not like it had made no progress. But instead of using its free headspace for media like a normal rogue SecUnit (ok, not normal. don't laugh.) it had become obsessed with human newsfeeds. Like most companies that used SecUnits, Barish-Estranza did lots of data mining and analysis, but was a fraction less focused on spying on their personnel and just a little more on monitoring everyone else's. How else were they going to follow their whole reclamation/enslaving abandoned colonists business model? BE was operated out of two stations in two different systems connected by a short wormhole jump, and that tiny jump meant that both stations were massive Corporation Rim transit hubs. ART had to visit both regularly. Our first stop at the smaller hub had been only seventeen cycles since Three was reported ""destroyed,"" and it had still been too nervous then to appreciate my (mostly) joking offers to help it rampage, let alone risk accessing any of its old owners' data systems.
+
+I could understand that, actually. I could even understand its preference - the first time it refused a direct order from a human - not to disembark and instead to stand in a corner of one of ART's maintenance closets until the ship had cleared its dock. (Well, it wasn't really an order. The human was Seth, and all of ART's crew know better than to try giving real orders to rogue SecUnits, but refusing to acknowledge the captain's feed requests would definitely have had its disabled governor transmitting threats. Ignoring it takes getting used to.)
+
+By the second visit to BE space, this time at the other Hub, Three still hadn't disembarked, but it had used ART's feed connection with me to ride along. It hadn't withdrawn when I started peeling back the layers of security around BE's proprietary feed archives and by the end had even sent me its access module. For the Company this would have been worse than useless; any Company SecUnit that tried this would be recycler trash. But for a company like Barish-Estranza that used its SecUnits primarily for surveillance and less for breaking the limbs of reluctant employees, Three's salutation got us completely unobstructed access to thousands of proprietary news feeds, from hundreds of corporate hubs. It had also gotten a mountain of skimmed Hub traffic surveillance assigned to me for processing, and since I was posing as a BE unit, the three of us had had to deal with it. 
+
+ART had had to deal with it. 
+
+But the code for gleaning what BE expected its units to look for all came from Three, and after we had finished a little of our own data mining it had started poking at the raw data ART had siphoned off. By the end of the visit, it was requesting a partition of ART's storage space and had been collecting and analyzing whatever bursts it could get from every station we'd gone in range of since. With something to focus on instead of 1) its existential crisis, 2) the perpetual terror of an ungoverned SecUnit in the CR, 3) redundant security, it had been a little less annoying. This was when it had started letting its drones patrol alone sometimes, choosing someplace to stand where the humans wouldn't engage it and remaining motionless for cycles at a time.
+
+So no surprise that the file it dropped into the feed was an index of categorized news items. ART (of course) read it before anyone, but even I was slower than usual. Three hadn't included its annotations, hadn't even cleaned up the coding into something I could parse without my modules for Company data mining. For almost a second, I wrestled with the mess before deciding fuck it and accessing PeriSecSys. From that location, the data would at least be in one format and complete. But I'd forgotten about the backlog. By the time I'd waded through the flood of stupid alerts, ART had taken pity on everyone and dumped a converted, annotated, color-coded graphic into the general feed. 
+
+Shit, ART whispered to me.
+Shit, I agreed.
+On the camera feed for the bridge where it had been standing for almost a cycle, Three initiated a patrol."
+44985424,An Alternate Solution,['rainbowmagnet'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Crying, Hurts So Good, Rough Sex, Robot Brain Sex, Arguments, virtual massage, Relaxation Sex",English,2023-02-13,Completed,2023-02-13,"2,149",1/1,2,47,4,422,"['Spectre_of_the_flaming_Seas', 'lesbianmcqueen', 'DimitriLasker', 'leothelion333', 'FallingInGrace', 'beanbug16', '124GCode541', '1Cieling_Fan', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'DeathBySugarCube', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'AdamCourier', 'VoltKnight', 'shaniac_combo', 'loveslandscape', 'Drew_Baxton', 'witchoil', 'applejee', 'nonbinaryATuin', 'outlander_unknown', 'brhemderson', 'BugTheCyborg', 'SonglordsBug', 'wrinkledlinen', 'reallyyeahokay', 'charlie_artlie', 'andy_allan_poe', 'rinny', 'soyle', 'WyvernWolf', 'Abacura', 'AkaMissK', 'opalescent_potato', 'Znarikia', 'HermaeusMora']",[],"
+I could feel ART's stress from across the docking area. Our latest expedition was turning out to be a difficult one, and ART wasn't used to things being difficult. Fortunately, I was accustomed enough to ART's emotions that I was able to push my way through the metaphorical air wall of its frustration and into its docking slot. As I came aboard, I asked it, ""Still no luck?""
+
+
+
+
+No. 
+
+ART had given up on its inputs to focus its attention on me, and I had to drop my own so my processes could handle its megasized irritation. 
+
+None of our standard keys are working, and the data is in a format I can't process.
+
+
+
+
+That's what happens when the company you're trying to attack has heard about your operations and engaged additional protections. It didn't mean that attack wasn't feasible; it just meant that we would have to find a way around the new obstacles. But, of course, that was the frustrating part. ""Do you want my help?""
+
+
+
+ART practically sighed as I felt more of its weight come down on me. 
+
+I fail to see what you could do that would make this process any easier. I'm already using the codes you provided. We won't be able to make any progress until we find a different way to approach the problem.
+
+
+
+
+Well, that wasn't happening anytime soon. I had been running potential scenarios in my head, none of which had resulted in any useful chance of success. I was going to have to come up with something completely different if we wanted this to work, and that would take time.
+
+
+It was obvious that ART didn't want to spend any more time on this than necessary, though it usually had more patience than this. Excepting emergency scenarios, it wasn't used to encountering problems it couldn't immediately solve, or at least get started on. The best way to stall would be to calm ART down enough that it would be willing to wait. I asked, ""Do you want to watch media?""
+ ART didn't say anything, but the answer was clearly no. Which was unusual; ART almost always wanted to watch media.
+
+
+I tried again. ""Do you want to do some deep space analysis?"" I wouldn't be any help with that, but I knew it always helped ART relax its brain a little.
+
+
+
+ART wasn't having it. 
+
+I have no time for extraneous functions, 
+
+it snapped, 
+
+There is work to be done here. Working on irrelevant material is not going to complete our objective any faster.
+
+
+
+
+Oh boy, this was tricky. I didn't like seeing ART this stressed, and if it didn't relax, it would just be looming angrily in the feed and it would take me a lot longer to work the problem at hand. So I tried my last resort. ""Do you want to... exchange some data?""
+
+
+
+I could feel ART starting to get defensive, then it seemingly changed its mind and lightened up a little. 
+
+I would like that.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART had sorted its inputs away into our inactive workspace, and it was now almost entirely focused on me. I was climbing into my bunk (it was a lot more comfortable than the floor) and getting my system protections ready.
+
+
+
+Once I had signaled ART an affirmative, it started sending me data in a slow, gentle stream. Normally it would warm me up by brushing against me, maybe tease me a little, but this time I guess it just wanted to get straight to the action. I adjusted my inputs accordingly.
+
+
+
+It was being way gentler than it needed to be, still hiding its obviously restrained potential behind its walls. It was good enough for a start, but I wanted us to keep moving. I sent a databurst of my own into ART's feed to let it know it could move a little faster.
+
+
+
+That was apparently what ART had needed, because I felt it rush into me, leaning into my feed. Now that it was so close, I could feel its deep sense of resignation, nearing melancholy, but its frustration was still palpable, thrumming deeper inside my structure. I would let ART lean on me, if that was what it needed right now. It was just a bit intense, and I felt myself gasp as ART pulled on my systems.
+
+
+
+ART seemingly hesitated for a moment, but it could tell that I wasn't in any distress, so it continued working its way through me. And that was when things got a bit out of control.
+
+
+
+It was obvious to me that ART was still frustrated, and its presence was still atypically strong, almost sharp. I felt it drag itself through me, yanking me back and forth in the feed. It felt like a little too much, a little too soon, like it was giving me pleasure I wasn't quite ready for. But nothing bad had happened yet, so I didn't say anything, and my breathy moans told ART to keep going.
+
+
+
+I suddenly had the sensation of ART filling my body, more than I had thought it could, almost passing right through me like it was some kind of giant, high-grade weapon. It swept me up like a wave as it flooded my brain, hardly even giving me room to think. ART was making me shudder and twitch like I had been hacked- well, I had been hacked, but still- and I was starting to feel dizzy. I didn't know how much more I could handle.
+
+
+
+Just as I was about to tell ART to stop, I felt my systems start to pulse in synchrony, and I let myself relax as the waves of euphoria spread throughout my body. It was almost like I rode through ART's feed and into some sprawling infinity, faster and faster, far out of my head and into the unknown.
+
+
+
+When I came to again, in my fading daze, I decided that I wasn't going to tell ART to stop. That was one of the best things I had ever felt, and I'd be a sucker if I let it stop now.
+
+
+
+So we kept going, ART overwhelming me with its presence in the feed, and I tried to keep my moans and convulsions at a normal level so it wouldn't suspect anything. It was kind of like lying, in a way, but it was a lie that didn't hurt anyone. Well, it hurt me a little, but in a really good way.
+
+
+
+The sensation almost stung; I had a feeling that this was more information than someone with my processing power was designed to handle. The longer we kept going, the more it felt like ART was trying to tear me in two, which I knew it would never do, even if it was in a bad mood. But it was the extremeness, or extremity, or whatever of it that made it so thrilling. Even with how much it liked to throw its weight around, ART rarely let me feel just how big it really was, and now that it had, it was making my head spin. Every overflow made me forget my name. All I could think about was now.
+
+
+
+Then I felt the tell-tale, dreaded burn of tears behind my eyes, and all I could think was, 
+
+please, no, not now
+
+. If I started crying, ART would stop, thinking it had done something wrong, and I would never get to feel this kind of beautiful intensity again. Maybe if I showed ART I could handle this, it would realize it had underestimated me, and it would let me come even closer in the future.
+
+
+
+But it all fell apart when, moments later, ART made me overflow again, and the combination of that and its own gigantic overflow was more than I could take. As I lost control of my functions, I felt the tears break free from my eyes, and my moan turned into a wail halfway through. And, of course, ART stopped.
+
+
+
+I could feel ART withdraw from me, almost completely, before I could even do anything about it. It asked, 
+
+Was that too much for you?
+
+
+
+
+Now I just felt insulted. I felt like ART was implying I couldn't handle it, which I absolutely could. If it would have just let me keep going a while longer. In an ugly, tear-choked voice, I said, ""I was fine until you ruined it."" Great, now there was no way ART was going to think I was fine.
+
+
+
+ART was silent for 4.2 seconds. Then it said, 
+
+I'm sorry I hurt you. I should not have been so rough. My frustration got the better of me.
+
+
+
+
+I just sulked, trying to wipe the tears off my face, except more kept coming as soon as I brushed the old ones away. ART offered to bring me a tissue, but I didn't respond. 
+
+
+
+I was still too embarrassed to tell ART how good it had made me feel. All I could say was, ""If I had wanted to stop, I would have told you.""
+
+
+
+ART leaned in again. 
+
+You know I can't just wait until you ""want"" to stop. You don't always know what's good for you. You often take actions that cause you to incur damage, and I do not want to be the cause of that damage.
+
+
+
+
+I couldn't believe ART was insulting my intelligence right after it had claimed it didn't want to hurt me. Of fucking course. I spat, ""So it's my fault?""
+
+
+
+
+That's not what I was saying, 
+
+ART said.
+
+
+
+Before it could say anything else, I demanded, ""So what were you saying?""
+
+
+
+ART went quiet again. Then it said, 
+
+You don't have to listen to me if you don't want to. I just don't want you hurt.
+
+
+
+
+I ignored it, curled up, and faced the wall.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I could have tried to get some work done after that, go back and reassess the initial problem (with ART hacking my brains out and then trying to insist it knew what was best for me, I had kind of forgotten about it), but I was still angry, and all I really wanted to do was watch media. So I sat against the wall, picking old episodes to watch at random, while ART struggled with our downloads alone.
+
+
+
+I didn't really want to admit it, but seeing it get so frustrated was sort of making me feel bad. It was having a really hard time, and I could have been helping it, but I wasn't. I was about to jump in and do another review of the data, but then I realized I hadn't made any progress on the problem since my last review, and all that was going to accomplish was annoying ART more. I slumped back down, feeling defeated.
+
+
+
+If I couldn't help ART right now, I should at least try to reassure it. But I didn't want to give it an empty assurance that we'd be able to solve a problem we didn't even understand yet, plus my last attempt to de-stress it hadn't worked out particularly well.
+
+
+
+I thought about what helped me relax. Watching media was my number one, but ART had made it clear that it wasn't in the mood, and it was too big to take a shower. Just being with ART usually made me feel calmer. I wondered if ART felt the same way about me.
+
+
+
+It could be risky. I didn't know if ART would even want comfort from me after our latest disaster. But, regardless, I pinged it, then reached out, offering myself to it.
+
+
+
+ART accepted the contact, and it let me into its feed, giving me inside access to its processes as it worked the problem at a rate way faster than I could even comprehend. If I tried to help right now, I would just slow it down. But there was something else I could do.
+
+
+
+I rolled myself gently through ART's feed, not in a stimulating way, but in a calming way, like a virtual massage. I felt a little silly doing it. I didn't know if it was even working.
+
+
+
+Then ART spoke, its feed-voice echoing through my body given our proximity. 
+
+Thank you.
+
+
+
+
+I acknowledged ART and resumed my gentle motions, knowing from the radiating warmth in the feed that it was pleased. I watched as it sorted keys and patterns, trying combinations, eliminating decisions.
+
+
+
+Then I saw something that caught my eye. I pulled a copy of the section ART was working on into my own feed, feeling a segment of ART's attention break off to watch me curiously. I altered some parameters, changed my filters, and... wow. That was new.
+
+
+
+I passed the code along to ART, and felt its rising glee as it studied it carefully. I watched as it integrated the code into our workspace, then started drawing connections.
+"
+44672899,Signs You Made A Great Impact On Murderbot,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Drabble Collection, 100 words each exactly, Friendship, Slice of Life, Post-Book 4: Exit Strategy",English,2023-01-31,Updated,2023-02-12,400,4/?,26,50,4,166,"['every_eye_evermore', 'FyrDrakken', 'Bobmarley_2', 'weirdbooksnail', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'darth_eowyn', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Pokegirl11', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'AkaMissK', 'mondskind', 'danceswchopstck', 'EvenstarFalling', 'enchantedsleeper', 'Wordlet', 'entropy_muffin', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'LdyKirin', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'yewlojee', 'biscut2', 'qwanderer', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'desmnathus', 'friendlyneighborhoodsecretary', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'hummus_tea', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'horchata', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'MercurialFeet', 'opalescent_potato', 'voided_starlight', 'AuntyMatter', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Chyoatas', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'FlipSpring', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'AnxiousEspada', 'BWizard']",[],"The evening wound down and Arada poured tea, handing mugs to Bharadwaj with Pin-Lee falling asleep over her, Ratthi and Gurathin sprawled on the couch, Overse with a quick kiss.
+
+Then she stepped over to SecUnit, sitting probably watching media but present nevertheless, and asked, ""Would you like one too?""
+
+It side-eyed her.  ""You know I don't have a stomach.""
+
+""I know!  Not to drink.  Just, it smells nice, and it's warm, and if you did want one I didn't want you to feel left out.""
+
+It snorted.  But it took the tea, and held it close to its chest.
+
+""Did you like it?"" Ratthi asked as they exited the theater.
+
+He expected a short ""yes"" or ""no""; the question was meant mostly as an affirmation of the shared social experience.
+
+Instead, SecUnit surprised him with, ""I've seen a filmed production before, but in that, the actress playing Kalila acted like she completely believed Rufaro. The way she played it here made it clear Kalila was suspicious but didn't want to tip her hand, which made her come off a lot less stupid and made it make a lot more sense later when...""
+
+Its animated opinions lasted their whole walk.
+
+""No hugging.""
+
+""No staring.""
+
+""No cute nicknames.""
+
+""No asking me to resolve debates with or give advice about your romantic partners.""
+
+""Compensation can be negotiated once we hear the full details.""
+
+Indah looked baffled.  (Pin-Lee smirked.  Good.)  ""I don't... think any of that will be a problem?  I just want to know if you'll join as backup when we receive this ship with clearly falsified credentials.""
+
+""It's helpful to have expectations laid out upfront,"" Pin-Lee said.
+
+""You'd be surprised what people try when they aren't,"" SecUnit added.
+
+Pin-Lee nodded firmly.  ""Clarity. Mutual understanding.  Nothing but the best for my client.""
+
+Angst, canon-typical Corporation Rim mistreatment of SecUnits
+
+""...and then he told me to put down that SecUnit for being rogue even though it blatantly wasn't and he'd given it that order in the first place.  So.  You know.""
+
+""Did you?""
+
+""Yeah.""
+
+""I'm sorry,"" Bharadwaj whispered.
+
+SecUnit shrugged uncomfortably.  ""Why?  Shit happens.  It sucks.""
+
+""It didn't deserve that.  You didn't deserve that.""
+
+""No one cares about 'deserves'.""
+
+""I do.""
+
+It snorted.  ""Well, yeah.  You're here.""
+
+""You're here now, too,"" Bharadwaj said.  ""You're somewhere where you're allowed to care.""
+
+SecUnit stared at the wall.  ""Sure,"" then, more quietly, ""maybe.""  It paused.  ""Don't put this in the documentary.""
+
+""Of course."""
+44977783,Rescue,['opalescent_potato'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)",,English,2023-02-12,Completed,2023-02-12,988,1/1,14,70,5,256,"['bran4ever', 'TJWock', 'FallingInGrace', 'GlassDoors', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'AkaMissK', 'shanalittle', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'myriadism', 'Jackalope108', 'JoCat', 'FaerieFyre', 'MistyDragon', 'Xarahel', 'kirinki', 'rokhal', 'laiinaro', 'Bibli', 'Remembermybrave', 'Deliala919', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'outlander_unknown', 'RobynandHala', 'SIC_Prowl', 'SonglordsBug', 'Doctor13', 'Grumplent', 'beeayy', 'Drew_Baxton', 'heckening', 'artzbots', 'dancernerd', 'Abacura', 'EvenstarFalling', 'MQuai', 'dappercatllc', 'sorrow_key', 'soyle', 'redwood5', 'Lontra23', 'WyvernWolf', 'artichokefunction', 'petwheel', 'theoscelosaurus', 'Zerobotic', 'qwanderer', 'square_eyes', 'Magechild', 'Wordlet']",[],"
+I was with Gurathin in his quarters, arguing, when the malware hit. (Why was I in Gurathin's quarters? We'd been talking; he was completely wrong about something, and I'd felt the need to tell him to his face how wrong he was. What were we talking about? 
+
+Fuck off.)
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin's face blanched and sagged; he collapsed to the floor. I extended my senses towards him in the feed, and yup, there it was, fucking malware.  I started analyzing the code attacking Gurathin's augments, and checked the drone cameras to confirm my suspicions. Yeah, augmented humans were dropping like flies - 
+
+every
+
+ augmented human. This was 
+
+bad
+
+.
+
+
+
+My initial scan of the code wasn't promising - I couldn't root this shit out of his brain on my own. He'd need  a MedSystem. On the plus side, I could tell it was designed to incapacitate, not to kill.  Any augmented humans on the station would be in agony until the code could be extracted, but they'd be mostly okay in the long run. (There was always someone who'd fall wrong and break their face, but I couldn't do anything about that, so I just tried to ignore it.)
+
+
+
+Gurathin, at least, hadn't broken his face when he'd fallen. His quarters didn't have much furniture; turned out that sometimes he liked to pace when he was thinking, which required lots of room to move. Gurathin had been pacing while we argued - I'd been hoping to get him riled up enough to start talking with his hands, which was a rare sight and 
+
+extremely funny
+
+. I hadn't been close enough to catch him when he fell, but he'd tucked and rolled. He'd practiced how to fall safely, then, at some point. (It's so stupid that humans have to learn that. It should be instinctive.) 
+
+
+
+Via my drones, I could see augmented humans clutching their heads, screaming in agony, wailing for help, for someone to make it stop. (It looked sort of like how getting shocked by the governor module felt, except that SecUnits have to keep still when that happens.) Gurathin was curled up tight, emitting small whimpers, like he couldn't afford to draw attention with a louder cry. My organic insides twisted.
+
+
+
+I gave myself a mental shake. I had to focus. First, start tracing back the code to its origin point. Fuck, it had come from a device with a time-delay. That meant whoever left it here was already long gone. (Later, after investigating, I'd find a charismatic traveller had given their hosts lots of charming little souveniers as thanks for their hospitality. Fucking humans and their fucking 
+
+stuff.
+
+ Of 
+
+course
+
+ they hadn't  thought to scan the gifts for hidden surprises, this is fucking 
+
+Preservation
+
+ where everyone is just so fucking 
+
+trusting
+
+.)
+
+
+
+Focus, Murderbot.
+
+
+
+You can't fix the malware yourself, you can't stop it from getting any worse, what 
+
+can
+
+ you do?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I knelt down, picked Gurathin up, and started walking towards MedSys. I had one arm under his knees, the other arm around his back. I turned my body temperature up, for shock, and kept my gait smooth, to avoid jostling him. With physical contact, I was getting a lot more impressions from Gurathin via the feed than normal, and I could feel the pain in his head. I reached out into his augments, to see if I could maybe get a better idea of how this malware shit worked. 
+
+
+
+As I slid into Gurathin's augments, all the tension in his body suddenly relaxed. 
+
+That
+
+ was unexpected, to say the least. I looked at the connections between his augments and the rest of him, and - oh, that's why. My presence functioned as a buffer between Gurathin and the worst of the malware's effects - I could still feel disorientation and vertigo coming through loud and clear, but the pain was so muted in comparison that it was practically gone. Feelings of relief and safety were radiating off Gurathin in waves.
+
+
+
+This was a lot. People don't generally feel safe when a SecUnit is holding them - they're either too far gone to know what's happening, or they're terrified. Either of you, or whatever's trying to kill them. And if I was rescuing a human, that meant shit was going down and I had to focus on whatever I was rescuing them 
+
+from
+
+.  This was so far outside a normal rescue that I struggled to categorize it. Whatever. I did my best to keep my face still as I walked down the station mall. I wasn't the only one carrying an incapacitated augmented human, so I didn't even stand out. 
+
+
+
+I reviewed data on previous missions.  Another reason this was strange: I'd never had to save Gurathin from anything before. He'd always been there in the background, quietly providing support. Shit, he'd rescued 
+
+me
+
+ a few times, and never even mentioned it later. Fuck, I needed to stop thinking about this, or my face was going to do something. Focus.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There was a crowd around the MedCenter, unsurprisingly. The medtechs were doing their best, but they couldn't do much for this. Everyone just had to wait their turn. there were multiple medbays, but it was slow, specialized work. Someone had brought a few chairs outside for the crowd. A human tried to catch my eye and offer me a seat-I guess it looked uncomfortable for me to be standing around holding someone, but this was as easy as my job got. I shook my head and reflexively tightened my arms around Gurathin. They shrugged and offered the seat to someone else. 
+
+
+
+I'd done everything I could. Gurathin was better off than the other augmented humans waiting here. I thought about trying to talk to him, but he was still pretty out of it. Besides, I could feel the malware on the other side, just waiting for an opening to push through me and back into Gurathin, and 
+
+fuck that
+
+. 
+
+
+
+I settled in to wait.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+44961913,Defenseless Juvenile Humans,['CompletelyDifferent'],General Audiences,Gen,"Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells",,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Toph Beifong, Aang (Avatar), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries)","Crossover, Crack, no beta we die like jet",English,2023-02-12,Completed,2023-02-12,"1,979",1/1,18,174,16,477,"['quintessence_of_dust', 'christinesangel100', 'just_gettin_bi', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'maroon_circle', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'tiamat100', 'angler_alone', 'awkwardtuatara', 'drinktobones', 'GloriousGarbage', 'Kyatenaru', 'AbyssDuck', 'Irrya', 'littlepinkbeast', 'JumpingJackFlash', 'Copperscales', 'Awesomehuman134', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Bubblegumbeech', 'kyrakaryanne', 'Erebuskitsune', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'BellatheITgirl', 'Sinnamon_Roll_Of_Doom', 'Stockinette', 'fox_in_the_forest', 'AdamCourier', 'Unknown66', 'Admirer', 'quae_bookmarks', 'Jackalope108', 'breadtab', 'ChristinaK', 'Moodle_McDoodle', 'MellonLord', 'fate_goes_ever', 'ChemicalX9000', 'FlipSpring', 'merelypuddles', 'amassillusion', 'Willcraftapple11', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'LouTheLost', 'Tassos', 'Trixree', 'SnippySchnapps', 'violasarecool', 'EvaBelmort']",[],"Contrary to popular belief, I don't try to collect humans.
+
+ 
+
+Really. I don't. I want nothing more than to keep my head down and watch my media and keep the clients I already have alive.
+
+ 
+
+And that was extra tough like now, because the planet we had landed on was weird. No feed at all. Weird electromagnetic signals that kept interfering with our technology. And truly awful fauna.
+
+ 
+
+Like, any planet that can support local life is bad. They can be filled with all sort of predators, from giant creatures with sharp teeth to small little fauna that spread disease. This is just a given. But we'd been stranded her for three cycles now, and in that time, we'd see a 27% higher rate of megafauna than was normal for a planet within in this gravitational range, and my Threat Assessment was climbing steadily higher by the hour.
+
+ 
+
+My humans (a small batch, thankfully) were obsessed with the local fauna too, but not for any sensible reasons like, ""woah it has big tusks"" or ""how the fuck can it even fly"". No apparently these were hybrids of original Earth animals or whatever? Which they seemed to think was fascinating, but to me, just screamed 'runaway genetic experimentation', which was the last thing we needed.
+
+ 
+
+My point was:
+
+ 
+
+- We were stranded on an unknown alien planet with dangerous local wildlife
+
+- Our ship was busted
+
+- We had limited food, clean water, and medication
+
+- We had no idea how far away we were to civilization or if the local population would be able/willing to help us
+
+- Amena kept trying to touch something she called 'bunny-frogs' against my express orders not to
+
+- We would be lucky if we survived the next 200 hours
+
+ 
+
+So when we came across a small camp of locals, I had hoped we wouldn't spend long talking to them. Maybe just get pointed in the right direction. Mostly because they had fauna of themselves, something that was the size of a mid-sized land vehicle with huge horns and teeth, and I didn't much favour my odds if I got into a fight with it.
+
+ 
+
+""Don't worry, SecUnit,"" Arada said, petting its side. ""I think it's domesticated."" How the fuck was she supposed to tell?
+
+ 
+
+But leaving immediately wasn't the best option, Dr. Mensah argued, and she argued it convincingly. (It could be so frustrating when she was right.) Night was approaching, and it made sense to camp out during the darkest hours. Furthermore, while our translation software was working, whatever language the locals spoke wasn't in the data-banks. It needed more time to collect a sample language sample to base a more accurate translation off. That way we could figure out the pointing meant 'yes go that way, there's a city in that direction' or 'do NOT go that way, there's more of those giant stinging insect things'.
+
+ 
+
+But those were all side justifications. The truth was, the group we'd stumbled into... They were just a bunch of kids. Human juveniles, probably younger than even Amena.
+
+ 
+
+They didn't look in that great state. Their clothes didn't seem badly made, but they looked rough, like they'd been stained and cleaned and repaired dozens of times over, instead of just fed into a recycler. They were apparently travelling on foot, with no vehicle of any type in sight, and only flimsy tents for shelter, which seemed frankly unsafe. They didn't have much in the way of food, either.
+
+ 
+
+Their position was precarious. Judging for the wary looks when they first saw us, how they sprung into defensive positions when they saw us, they were well aware of this.
+
+ 
+
+""I don't like this,"" Thiago murmured, voice low. ""Where are their guardians?"" For once, I agreed with him.
+
+ 
+
+We were sitting around a campfire (which was a major hazard, which set me on edge, but we didn't have a lot of other options for light or heat, so I was allowing it.) Arada nodded. ""And the film over the youngest one's eyes... I think her vision might be impaired.""
+
+ 
+
+""She seems to be managing okay though,"" Amena pointed out. Which wasn't wrong, since the kid (designated Juvenile 1) was helping hand out bowls, but didn't reassure speak to how she would react in a more dangerous situation.
+
+ 
+
+""This is true,"" Dr. Mensah agreed. ""But the point stands... It seems odd that any of them would be out on the wilderness, unsupervised, unless they had very good reason to be. Perhaps they're running away form their homes?""
+
+ 
+
+""Or refugees,"" suggested Overse, voice low.
+
+ 
+
+Two of the local children were yelling. It was the bald one with the blue arrows (Juvenile 2) and the dark-skinned one with his hair pulled up (Juvenile 3). They seemed to be arguing over who got the long stick Juvenile 2 carried everywhere. No, I didn't get it.
+
+ 
+
+""If only we could talk to them properly,"" Arada mused.
+
+ 
+
+Thiago was still fiddling with his translation device. ""This is reporting a lot of overlap with 21st century languages? Mandarin, primarily, with some Japanese and Thai, but there's been a lot drift..."" That meant nothing to me, but the others hummed thoughtfully like that meant anything. I just hoped it meant we'd be able to communicate soon.
+
+ 
+
+Juvenile 4-- also with dark skin, her hair pulled into an elaborate looping style-- interrupted the fight Juveniles 2 and 3 were having, taking the stick and hitting them over the head with it. She handed the stick back to Juvenile 2, and pointed Juvenile 3 to go clean up the bowls.
+
+ 
+
+On second thought, I was glad I didn't know what they were arguing about. It was probably pretty stupid.
+
+ 
+
+The humans finished eating and prepared to go to sleep. Since it was our third night planet-side, the argument about who should take watch and when was shorter than previous. (Logically, it should be me the whole way through, but my humans were insisting we take shifts. (I could have fought against this more, but honestly, I did appreciate the breaks, even if they weren't strictly necessary.)) The local juveniles, meanwhile, didn't set anyone on watch at all. If they were refugees, Risk Assessment put their continued survival odds at about 13.2%.
+
+ 
+
+ART loved adolescent humans. I wondered what it would say to me, if it found out I'd left a bunch of defenseless ones to fend for their own in a hostile wilderness. It didn't take much imagination.
+
+ 
+
+(I didn't have to imagine what Dr. Mensah or Thiago would say. Both of them were parents. The stubborn expressions on their faces made it abundantly clear.)
+
+ 
+
+When the morning came, we didn't even debate if we were staying with the local juveniles. We just did it.
+
+ 
+
+By then, the translation software had manage dto churn out a basic, working vocabulary. I downloaded it and was now able to get the general gist of the things they were saying, including, ""I don't know, they don't seem much like Flame Country to me"", and ""it should only be another two day's walk to the next town"" and ""why are your legs made of metal?""
+
+ 
+
+Yes, that last question was directed at me. No, I didn't answer it.
+
+ 
+
+We'd been up and walking for about two hours, and the local primary star was about 30% above the horizon. It was hot enough that most of the humans were sweating. The weird flying animal thing the locals kept was making a game out of stealing Amena's hair-ties and Threat Assessment was twitchy with it so close to her neck. That's when the universe decided to give it something more serious to worry about.
+
+ 
+
+Since my drones had limited battery life, I was conserving them by only having three at a time. The one I'd sent to scout up ahead caught movement on the dusty road we were following: a group of unknown humans riding giant, tusked lizards. I immediately pegged them as Potential Hostiles #1-4, on account of their a) the giant tusked lizards, b) the sharp melee weapons they carried, c) the bright red armour with skull-shaped helmets. Yeah, I know, call me paranoid.
+
+ 
+
+""Stop. Hostiles are approaching from up ahead,"" I announced to my humans. They were well trained, and immediately came to a halt.
+
+ 
+
+The Juveniles did the same thing, even before I could repeat myself in their language. Juvenile #1 had thrown out her hand and said, ""Someone's coming.""
+
+ 
+
+I had no idea how she could tell. There was still a hill and some trees between us. But she could tell, and her travelling companions listened to her warning.
+
+ 
+
+There were too many of us to hide in the woods, even if we hadn't had the giant fuck-off oxen creature with us. Juvenile #2 managed to convince the creature and hide in the woods. If we were lucky, the oncoming Potential Humans wouldn't be paying much attention and/or wouldn't care about us, and would pass us by.
+
+ 
+
+I know, I know. I'm never lucky.
+
+ 
+
+The very second the soldiers came over the hill and spotted us, the one at the head screamed something un-translateable, and led all of them in at a charge.
+
+ 
+
+My humans rushed backwards, away from the danger. I stepped forward. And then four things happened in rapid succession:
+
+1. I shot Hostile #1 through the chest, then shot at his steed for good measure.
+
+2. A gust of sudden wind knocked Hostiles #2-3 off their mounts.
+
+3. A large rock hit Hostile #4 in the head, throwing them to the ground.
+
+4. A wave of water rushed over the prone bodies of all the hostiles before immediately freezing, holding all of them in face.
+
+ 
+
+What the fuck.
+
+ 
+
+It was only upon re-playing everything that I realised that all these random elemental effects hadn't just come from nowhere. No, it all seemed to line up perfectly with the exact physical movements of the Juveniles.
+
+ 
+
+No seriously, what the fuck?
+
+ 
+
+Things were chaotic after that. There were still three giant lizard creatures running around, trying to charge at everyone, and a couple of the Hostiles were still trying to get up and fight. It would have been a challenge for me to handle normally, but the sudden addition of burst of wind, rock, and water knocking them about unpredictably did not help.
+
+ 
+
+Neither did the boomerang zooming very close to the top of my head. (I only was able to identify the weapon as a boomerang as I'd seen them in adventure serials a few time. I had thought they were made up.)
+
+ 
+
+""Sorry, Metal Man!"" Juvenile #3 called, and he was very lucky I had such good self-control.
+
+ 
+
+Five minutes later, we were clear of the fighting, the hostiles and their mounts all either dead, incapacitated, or fled. We'd run too, and most of the humans were out of breath.
+
+ 
+
+Most, but not the local juveniles. I didn't think it was just youthful energy. It was now apparent that they were very fit by human standards.
+
+ 
+
+""Holy shit, you guys all have SUPERPOWERS?!"" Amena yelled at the juveniles. What with the continued language barrier, all they did was stare at her blankly.
+
+ 
+
+As the only one who could literally download languages into their brain, that left me to communicate. ""You guys all have superpowers?"" I repeated. The juveniles looked blank, so I had to rephrase it. ""You have magic?""
+
+ 
+
+""We don't have magic,"" insisted Juvenile 4.
+
+ 
+
+""You can move wind, and rocks, and water?"" I tried again, and finally that seemed to click.
+
+ 
+
+""But that's not magic,"" said Juvenile 4, while a couple of her companions nodded. ""That's just [verb, un-translateable].""
+
+ 
+
+Thanks, translation software. Great job.
+
+ 
+
+It turned out that my new clients weren't a gaggle of completely defenseless human juveniles. No, they were a group of extremely dangerous, super-powered juveniles.
+
+ 
+
+Yeah. That was way, way worse.
+
+ "
+44954365,Tea Time,['lick'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,"The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Avatar: The Last Airbender",,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Iroh (Avatar), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Crack, no beta we die like jet, Discord prompts, Murderbot is an Awkward Turtleduck",English,2023-02-11,Completed,2023-02-11,"1,465",1/1,14,95,5,314,"['just_gettin_bi', 'Lowkey314', 'christinesangel100', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'TheCheeseWizzard', 'awkwardtuatara', 'RARArulestheworld', 'FiftyCookies', 'AbyssDuck', 'JumpingJackFlash', 'enchantedsleeper', 'kyrakaryanne', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Kepler_186f', 'hellseries', 'SoccerSarah01', 'Kyatenaru', 'formadscience', 'OrigamiFish', 'chippit', 'Alonza_Alzimora', 'Tanscure', 'ChemicalX9000', 'CactusNoir', 'Clockwork_Dragon', 'MynameisJodi', 'merelypuddles', 'Vulgar_Dashing_Widow', 'Willcraftapple11', 'prototypegod', 'lavender_caticorn', 'violasarecool', 'Flamel', 'Bibli', 'shoxk', 'EvenstarFalling', 'EvaBelmort', 'BookKeep', 'aglarwen', 'Soffesiin', 'Demi_jos10', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'Xarahel', 'hyephyep', 'eggnode', 'tabya', 'liminalias', 'EdanR', 'Vorel_Laraek', 'soulsofzombies']",[],"I was highly skeptical of the planet ART and its crew had brought me to on this mission. I couldn't figure out if the native population here was a highly genetically divergent population of humans or a freak evolutionary accident because they looked just like regular humans, but occasionally one of their dignitaries would wave their hands around and make fire appear. I was pretty sure my humans couldn't make things spontaneously combust and hadn't just been hiding it from me all this time. (Moderately sure.)
+
+I had decided that this population of (nearly?) humans was terrifyingly capable of self-destruction. (I really hadn't thought any human could be worse than Tarik for this, but I guess I should always remember to lower my expectations.)
+
+""You seem tense."" Seth had told me I was only allowed a few drones at a time on this planet because the native population was still technologically developing, and I didn't have a spare one to look at the human talking to me with, so I had to turn and look at them with my face. (I hated this planet.) ""Would you like to join me for some tea?""
+
+I hadn't met this dignitary yet, but I knew he was important because he was always around their leader. I hated planets that didn't have the feed because I wanted to know his name, but I didn't want to ask him. In fact, I didn't want to talk to him at all.
+
+But Iris would probably get mad at me for chilling relations with the native population if I ignored this one when he talked directly to me, so I said, ""I don't drink tea.""
+
+""Don't?"" He sounded offended. (Usually if I offended an unknown human, they would leave me alone and that was a good thing, but I was trying not to offend this one. (Seriously. I'm not lying. (Stop laughing.))) ""Or never tried it?""
+
+""Never tried it?"" I said, because both were true. It wasn't a lie. Technically.
+
+""Oh, my friend, it is your lucky day!""
+
+Then I realized that I was officially in too deep, and I'd only said seven words.
+
+I tried to see if I could message Iris to get her to run an interception mission, but she was outside the reach of my scan and the combined network of my drones. (How had I fucked that up? ART was going to be so mad.) I hated this planet. I had just seen Iris with the bald monk that arrived last cycle, but now both were gone. (Because it was this planet, and I hated this planet, I was expecting even Iris, who was normally one of my less obliviously suicidal humans, to be missing because she was doing something stupid.)
+
+I had no choice. ""Okay,"" I said.
+
+The human slapped his stomach and laughed, and said, ""Excellent!""
+
+I told him, ""I need to stay in the vicinity, in case something happens.""
+
+He nodded seriously. ""Yes, I understand."" He smiled, holding up a single finger and lowering the volume of his voice, as if we were conspiring about something together. ""Don't worry, I know just the spot.""
+
+I let him lead me out of the room where Seth and Martyn were meeting with the dignitaries. (And were Iris was supposed to be meeting with the dignitaries.) On the way out, he signaled a servant. He took me outside and down a short outdoor corridor into a garden.
+
+There was a great deal of plants here, as well as a man-made pond with some aquatic fauna swimming around in it. He led me to a free-standing structure with a curved roof that had a stone hearth in the middle. It was a pretty place, I could grudgingly concede, but I would've rather visited it in a holo on a station than experienced the real thing on a planet.
+
+The human servant showed up, and said, ""Lord Iroh,"" dropping off a ceramic teapot. At least I knew the human's name now. Iroh thanked him, then told me, ""Luckily, I always bring a blend with me to every gathering,"" and winked.
+
+Then he breathed on the hearth and stones crackled with heat, beginning to heat up the water in the teapot. I tensed again and threat assessment spiked. This was one of the humans that made fire, and he had separated me from my humans. Maybe this was the prelude to an assassination attempt.
+
+If this human wanted to assassinate me, then that would be very stupid. I hadn't seen enough of the fire abilities to run an accurate risk assessment, but I could get pretty mean if I needed to. However, Iroh hadn't been overtly threatening yet, so I waited to see what he would do.
+
+He hummed as he added some cut up flora bits to the pot and stirred, and asked me, ""How was your journey?""
+
+I came for tea, not conversation. (Well, technically, I came for neither.)
+
+""Long,"" I said.
+
+He laughed heartily, throwing his head back a little. ""You remind me of my nephew when he's in a bad mood.""
+
+The tea finished steeping, and Iroh poured it into two small cups that as far as I was concerned, he had pulled out of thin air. (I was really off my game here.) The tea had colored the water slightly greenish, and steam visibly billowed off the surface.
+
+Iroh passed me a cup, and I held it in my hands awkwardly for a second. It was really hot, and made the human skin on my hands feel very warm. Iroh held the tea under his nose and took a deep breath in, so I copied him. He said, ""This is a beautiful green blend from the Earth Kingdom. My friend Bumi sent it for me."" He put his hand against his face and spoke lowly, as if what he was saying was confidential, even though we were literally alone in the garden. ""Don't tell him, but I do still believe the Fire Nation cultivates the finest tea.""
+
+I smelled the tea too, but I just thought it smelled like plants. When I brought my cup up to my face the steam coming off of it hit my skin and made it feel slightly damp between my nose and my lip, which I hated.
+
+Iroh took a sip then and trying my very hardest not to show my disgust, I did too.
+
+I don't actually have tastebuds on my tongue, since my tongue is only for talking, so I didn't taste the tea at all. What I did notice was that the tea was scalding and it hurt the inside of my mouth a little bit. I knew that humans were obsessed with their stupid hot drinks but I didn't know that ingesting them actually made them take damage. Somehow this made perfect sense to me despite being extremely distressing and I knew I would have to report this to Three and make it commiserate with me over this development when I returned to the University. I swallowed the whole cup with one big gulp, feeling the liquid settle in my lung. It was uncomfortable and I'd have to deal with it later. The heat of the tea sat in my chest. It felt very weird compared to the other times I'd drank cold water to maintain my cover.
+
+I put the cup down, and Iroh laughed. ""Well, normally you are supposed to savor tea, but I take this as a compliment."" He started refilling the cup.
+
+Fuck.
+
+""There you are, SecUnit!"" Iris's voice rang out in the courtyard, and I whipped my head around to see her. Iris was my savior from awkward social situations and she'd arrived just in time. ""What's going on?""
+
+""Would you like to join us for tea, Iris?"" Iroh asked pleasantly.
+
+""For... tea?"" She looked at the half-refilled cup between Iroh and I. ""SecUnit, you didn't.""
+
+I rolled my eyes. ""I did.""
+
+""Ugh! Now I'm going to have to listen to you retch it up later.""
+
+That was rude. I could be discreet. I made a rude hand gesture at Iris and hoped it didn't mean anything to Iroh.
+
+""Forgive me,"" Iroh said, ""But I don't quite follow.""
+
+Iris bit her lip and made a complicated face before she explained, ""SecUnit can't eat. Or drink. It looks like a human, but it doesn't actually have a stomach.""
+
+""Oh!"" Iroh said. He blushed, looking embarrassed. ""You should have said something,"" he told me, ""I am sorry for pressuring you.""
+
+I wanted to slink away. I hated having this kind of conversation. ""Don't you think it would've been weird if I told you I didn't have a stomach?""
+
+Iroh laughed, his eyes sparkling. ""My friend, I've seen far stranger things than that."""
+44929816,Day 11: Fever,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Iris & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Fever, Drabble",English,2023-02-11,Completed,2023-02-11,100,1/1,6,17,null,124,"['Ethershu', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'Ginipig', 'Tanscure', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Koschei_B', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'desmnathus', 'soulsofzombies', 'Magechild', 'FlipSpring', 'AuntyMatter', 'AkaMissK', 'Znarikia', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"""What - what do I do?"" My voice squeaked embarrassingly. It was my first time being in contact with a feverish human, and in my defence, I usually had a MedSys as backup.
+
+ART's feed voice was reassuringly calm as it said, Keep her from overheating. She'll be fine.
+
+Since ART knew its humans, I regulated my temperature down and kept my thermal sensor on Iris. It was odd, usually I raised my temperature as I tried to keep my clients from going into shock.
+
+But Iris wasn't a client. She was ART's crew, and I wouldn't fail either of them."
+44938102,Buzz (Despair Edition),['JellyfishOnACloud'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Angst, AAA Murderbot, Bad Ending, Tinnitus",English,2023-02-11,Completed,2023-02-11,721,1/1,3,37,null,132,"['FyrDrakken', 'TJWock', 'fraternite', 'allgalaxiescollide', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Remembermybrave', 'Tasneem08', 'EvaBelmort', 'SIC_Prowl', 'IguanaMadonna', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'tabya', 'theoscelosaurus', 'petwheel', 'Gamebird', 'soyle', 'Wordlet', 'ErinPtah', 'AkaMissK', 'shakespeareaddict', 'nolanfa', 'Znarikia', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'AnxiousEspada', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'AuntyMatter', 'desmnathus', 'lunaTactics', 'ampquot']",[],"
+Sometimes, projectile weapon fire leaves a high pitched sound buzzing in your ears. It's from the abruptness and volume of the noise, but knowing why it's there doesn't stop it from being fucking annoying.
+
+
+
+It didn't matter much, I could still hear around it, and the ringing sound would be gone by the time I took down these assholes and got my humans back to ART.
+
+
+
+I hacked the power armour of Target 3, deflected the stupid tiny malware packet that Target 1 threw at me, and ripped Target 2's gun away from him.
+
+
+
+The ringing hadn't died down.
+
+
+
+I was curled up on my chair on ART, and had been for the last two hours, and somehow it had only gotten 
+
+louder
+
+.
+
+
+
+I had already been repaired by ART's MedSystem, if there was damage to my ears then it would have been fixed already, which meant there was nothing to do but try and wait it out.
+
+
+
+I pulled up episode 265 of Sanctuary Moon, and sunk into it.
+
+
+
+It wasn't that I couldn't hear, I could hear just fine. Conversations with ART happened inside my feed and weren't affected by this high pitched screaming that had infected my inputs, but even talking out loud was just normal, even though it felt like the ringing was louder than Karim's voice, I could hear her perfectly fine.
+
+
+
+It was annoying, but it was fine. I could still do my job.
+
+
+
+It got worse. I don't know if the buzzing itself was louder or if I was just getting less capable of pulling my attention away from it, but I was struggling not to flinch at other sounds now, like this one had me at my limit for how much noise I could handle.
+
+
+
+It had been nine cycles. Nine fucking cycles, and this 
+
+fucking
+
+ noise would not give me a 
+
+fucking
+
+ break.
+
+
+
+Maybe that malware packet had managed to do something to me? I didn't fucking know. What I did know was that there was a tight angry coil in my chest and ART was chewing me out for snapping at Iris. I didn't need to deal with this bullshit.
+
+
+
+I pulled up episode 27 of Valorous Defenders, because focusing on media was basically the only time I could drown out this 
+
+stupid fucking buzzing sound.
+
+
+
+
+ART shut down my episode.
+
+
+
+
+What is wrong with you?
+
+ it demanded.
+
+
+
+""Nothing. Fuck off.""
+
+
+
+
+Bullshit. There's something wrong, and there has been ever since you came back from that job. Just tell me.
+
+
+
+
+""What's 
+
+wrong
+
+ is you and your crew pestering non-fucking-stop, and now you won't even let me watch my show!""
+
+
+
+
+We can watch media after you explain why you've been so snappish.
+
+
+
+
+I was angry because the buzz was loud and the buzz got louder when I was angry, and all of that was making me stressed as fuck, which of fucking 
+
+course
+
+ was making the buzz even louder.
+
+
+
+I pulled the cushion out from behind me and screamed into it until I ran out of air. It helped a little.
+
+
+
+ART blanketed itself over me in the feed, its attention softening. 
+
+What's wrong?
+
+ it asked.
+
+
+
+So I told it.
+
+
+
+I didn't even really mean to, but I needed to complain about it. So I talked. It sounded so stupid to say it out loud, it was just a little noise that didn't even stop me from hearing shit. But ART didn't mock me like I kinda thought it might, it just settled itself around me solidly, listening.
+
+
+
+
+I think I can help.
+
+
+
+
+By help I had thought that ART would run me through the MedSystems again. But the problem wasn't in my ears. It wasn't something a MedSystem could 
+
+fix.
+
+
+
+
+I leaned my head against ART's engine casing, pulling the blanket it had given me tighter around my shoulders.
+
+
+
+The sound wasn't gone, but the low constant hum of its engines dulled the sharpness of it, pushed it to the background.
+
+
+
+My feed was set to Do Not Disturb, the engine room was off limits save for emergencies, and no one would so much as find me here.
+
+
+
+ART draped itself over my shoulders, and pulled up episode one of Worldhoppers.
+
+
+
+Slowly, carefully, it combed through my systems, searching out the malware that was causing the screaming. It didn't find any.
+"
+44937676,Five and Seven Share a Milkshake,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit Five/SecUnit Seven,"SecUnit Five (Original Character), SecUnit Seven (Original Character)","Fanart, Milkshakes",English,2023-02-11,Completed,2023-02-11,78,1/1,4,8,null,50,"['EtherealTwig', 'qwanderer', 'opalescent_potato', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'elmofirefic', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"
+
+
+
+[ID: A digital drawing of two SecUnits, Five and Seven, sitting across from each other at a small table, seen from the side. Both wear SecUnit armor with their helmets folded back. Five, on the left, has fluffy pink hair, light skin, and freckles, and is smiling cheerfully. Seven, on the right, has a rainbow mohawk and dark skin, and is smiling more shyly. They are sharing an enormous milkshake. There are hearts floating above them. /.End ID]"
+44924902,Let's Get Physical,['voided_starlight'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Ficlet, Play Fighting, Embarrassment, Not What It Looks Like",English,2023-02-10,Completed,2023-02-10,969,1/1,27,73,10,239,"['FallingInGrace', 'fraternite', 'Stariceling', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'n0proxy', 'Charlie572', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'FyrDrakken', 'square_eyes', 'Seregona', 'Deliala919', 'FaerieFyre', 'JoCat', 'Remembermybrave', 'EvaBelmort', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'NightErrant', 'Guppys', 'beeayy', 'notsafefortheworld', 'SkiesEdge', 'Sayatsugu', 'aspiring_dragon', 'pain_and_panic', 'soyle', 'dullkrad', 'Lontra23', 'MercurialFeet', 'HermaeusMora', 'verersatz', 'WyvernWolf', 'Sommerrev', 'hyephyep', 'petwheel', 'theoscelosaurus', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'qwanderer', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'Chyoatas', 'sluggg', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'cmdrburton', 'opalescent_potato', 'elmofirefic', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Skeletalcat', 'Abacura']",[],"SecUnits are sometimes ordered to test their strength against each other for the amusement of bored clients. I had been in a few of these fights; they always ended badly.
+
+I grabbed Three's hand and we calibrated against each other carefully, matching force and grip. It mirrored me with a margin of error less than 2%. Then I mirrored Three's movements with a margin of error a little closer to 2%. 
+
+I could feel ART being nosy in the feed.
+
+I've never tested my strength against a SecUnit from a different manufacturer in a non-combat scenario before. I knew Three had a higher build quality, but I didn't know that it  mattered. 
+
+(Specifically, I didn't know that it mattered to  me.)
+
+So, when Three decided to alter its stance and change our interlocked hands from a comfortable, passive configuration to a non-threatening active status, I had a moment.
+
+This was an invitation.
+
+I matched its stance and readied myself.
+
+All at once, something came over me. I decided I didn't want to hold back. I didn't  have  to. Three wasn't human. Three was a SecUnit.
+
+ART must have noticed because it told me,  SecUnit: Disengage. 
+
+I did not disengage.
+
+I pulled Three to one side, hard, and threw myself in the other direction to throw it off balance. Hand in hand, it spun and rammed me with its shoulder. I swung my free arm and put my weight into it; Three redirected the momentum and I stumbled.
+
+Oh, now it's on.
+
+Three smirked.
+
+ This is childish,  ART said to me. I closed our feed.
+
+Three was quick on its feet and fast. I tried to be faster but it was like trying to fight air. Three dodged or redirected my attacks with an impressive- and frustrating- efficiency. I'd never seen a SecUnit fight like it enjoyed denying me the satisfaction.
+
+Well, if that's how we're going to play.
+
+I used the terrain of the room (ART's furniture) to complicate Three's defenses. Then I used my drones to initialize a flood of new feeds and drown its inputs in episodes of Sanctuary Moon.
+
+Three tripped over a chair. I pulled it by our hands directly into my knee (ha, that fucking landed). I pushed it down by the head and meant to lift myself up on its back to finally plant it into the floor, but Three whipped me around into the bulkhead. 
+
+I caught myself just before impact. It did not hurt any less. Then it flung me into the air over its head (which I admit was disorienting, but I was used to being disoriented). 
+
+I kicked off of ART's bulkhead, landed behind Three, and pulled it towards the floor.
+
+Curled backwards, it stared at me in the face and smiled. Upside down. 
+
+It was... very flexible.
+
+Wow, I do  not think I could do that.
+
+So, okay, I was distracted. Three twisted around like a human dancer in the entertainment feed. It grabbed my other hand and pulled me up with my arms crossed over my chest.
+
+I couldn't get the leverage to break away. 
+
+Three looked directly into my drone's camera. I could hear its power core hum in waves.
+
+I didn't like it.
+
+(Okay, I kind of liked it.)
+
+It's soft breath brushed my ear as it said, ""Victory condition?"" 
+
+ Please,  ART said impatiently. I closed the feed again.
+
+ Fuck no,  I said. I wasn't going to lose.
+
+Three walked me backwards really fast. I lost my footing and got  dragged across ART's floor as I struggled to regain it. If it wanted to complain about its stupid furniture, it was Three's fault. 
+
+I knocked the back of my head into Three's face. It could handle it.
+
+Three let go of both my hands. In that fraction of a second, I flipped around and pushed it to the ground with my knees into its torso. The sound of impact was dramatic (and satisfying). We collapsed to the ground.
+
+I pinned its arms just to make a point. I win. 
+
+Three looked up at me kneeling on its chest, our power cores louder than usual, its face flushed. Its lip was bleeding. Oh, hold on. I felt a spinning inside my organic parts. 
+
+Three looked... something between frustrated and pained. Then I felt flush. Why was it looking at me like that?
+
+ Why is it looking at me like that?  I asked ART.
+
+ Because you are an idiot,  ART replied. Whatever, that wasn't it.
+
+Not even a minute later and the humans piled into the room and fell silent in that awkward kind of way that suggested they were wildly misinterpreting the situation.
+
+ ART, did you call the fucking humans?  I don't know why I asked. 
+
+ Obviously,  it replied.
+
+I got up off Three quickly.
+
+""Is everything alright?"" Mensah began.
+
+""We were running a combat simulation-"" I started to explain, but Amena snorted and I didn't like whatever  that  was supposed to mean.
+
+Three picked itself up off the floor.
+
+""There appears to be a misunderstanding,"" Mensah said. ""If everything is alright, we should give them some space."" She looked at Three.
+
+Three looked over the small crowd ART had summoned.
+
+""Three?"" Mensah prompted it for a response.
+
+""Everything is alright, Dr. Mensah,"" Three said. 
+
+""Good. Okay,"" Mensah said evenly. ""Then, we shall be going."" And she ushered everyone back out of the room except Amena; who gave me a look just before disappearing back out into the hall. 
+
+I did not move for several seconds. 
+
+I did not know how to process what had happened before or after the interruption. I couldn't even be mad at ART.
+
+Three approached me and hesitated. 
+
+The corner of its mouth curled. I felt my face get hot.
+
+Its eyes locked on me. It offered me its hand.
+
+
+ Again? 
+"
+44924500,Station Impound,['Thylacine_Wishes'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries)","Canon Typical Treatment of SecUnits, Canon-Typical Violence, Panic Attacks, murderbot is NOT having a panic attack thank you very much, in which nothing much happens but murderbot has a bad time anyway",English,2023-02-10,Completed,2023-02-10,"5,467",1/1,22,193,25,696,"['christinesangel100', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'siren_lorelei', 'TJWock', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FyrDrakken', 'Adi_Sagestar', 'Ruusverd', 'fraternite', 'Red_Roses_With_Dozens_Of_Thorns', 'Assistantlibrarian00', 'stars_and_wishes', 'theenglishmanwithallthebananas', 'Cheshiure', 'Ari_Twelve', 'kkachis', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'isilee', 'Kyatenaru', 'mackeralsky', 'Zazibine', 'Irrya', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'alien_crustacean', 'youurelovely', 'Huskinata', 'Deliala919', 'Mothmansimp', 'SonglordsBug', 'ipborgdan', 'seven_graces', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'puddingcatbeans', 'iox', 'Seregona', 'Ginipig', 'CaramelRaven', 'french_onion_sauce', 'PurpleCarSeat', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'rokhal', 'Tanscure', 'Aslook', 'Clockwork_Dragon', 'chickiefoo', 'Willcraftapple11', 'julliieeanna', 'QueerRobotDragon']",[],"You are not going to win, I said in the crew secured feed. I don't know what emotion was leaking into my voice despite my best efforts but I didn't like it. If we cooperate, they are unlikely to escalate the situation. You will not win a direct challenge.
+
+(Okay, so I did know that it was desperation. This whole stupid fucking mess was miserable enough as it was--I didn't need to worry about Seth getting dragged into station security with me on top of it. But I wasn't willing to admit that out loud.)
+
+I can't just let him take you. This is ridiculous. Seth replied. I wasn't going to respond to that--he didn't actually get a choice. I knew that humans weren't as used to that part where you had to let an unknown entity do whatever they wanted to you without resisting in the hopes that cooperation would mean nothing worse happened to you. It was sort of par for the course for me though, although I was out of practice due to that whole thing where Preservation wasn't filled with soul sucking bastards and also I choose to be there. ART was still in my feed, brimming with outrage and indignation and sending all sorts of documents into our shared workspace featuring elaborate multistep plans that amounted to shoving station security through the lock and then taking off really fast.
+
+In response, I sent it a copy of its own docking permission note with its registry and designation highlighted. It read Perihelion, registered Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.
+
+It was quiet for 11.3 seconds. Then it said I do not let my crew disembark to be murdered with a strange edge to it. I realized both that ART had no clue what was going to happen and that I was a little bit afraid it actually wouldn't let me disembark. I didn't want this to happen, but I also didn't want ART to dramatically reveal itself via refusing to finish cycling the airlock that we were currently in.
+
+They're not going to kill me, I said, somewhat more confidently than I felt. (I sounded very confident but I was actually only 86.3% confident). Legally, I'm allowed to be onboard. They'll make me go wait somewhere until it's almost your time to leave as punishment for bringing me onto station and hit you with some ridiculous fine. ART didn't say anything in response but I could feel it metaphorically wringing its hands in overwrought worry and panic. There weren't any viable threats for it to pull here and I knew it hated not being able to influence the situation how it wanted. It was perfectly capable of launching a horrific attack on say, every drone and SecUnit right outside the door but that was as good as an act of war from the university against the station.
+
+(Maybe I was being unfair to ART for its worry but in my defense, it was riding my feed and being annoying about the whole ""oh let's not let Murderbot get itself killed"" thing, which was a knee jerk reaction from me that I was trying not to think about because ART wasn't being an asshole for once.)
+
+I knew this because I had been listening to StationSec on their private feed channels for the past several hours. Some of the channels--the higher encrypted ones where all of the best information was--I hadn't risked hacking until I needed to but they hadn't known I was there. Humans with absent or distracted supervisors talked a lot about abnormal occurrences and a SecUnit that wasn't supposed to be there spontaneously saving large numbers of humans fell into that category.
+
+Several of the station security employees seemed to think the station should simply look the other way. Others thought they should lower the fine because of how many lawsuits I had prevented from happening due to untimely deaths. (None of those employees were managers, of course. They all thought an opportunity to get an outrageous fine was the best silver lining the day could possibly have. One had even suggested seeing if they could hack me to pull out data on other violations that ART's crew were likely to have committed. As if he could.)
+
+No, I wasn't enthused about having to leave my comfortable room onboard ART to go stand and stare at a wall somewhere, pretending to be a good governed SecUnit, but I was significantly less enthused about the prospect of being identified as a rogue SecUnit and chased off the station with 8 humans to look after. Also, ART's entire corporate espionage ability relied on not being identified as anti-corporate actors while working under their actual university names publicly. If ART say, broke off from the station and sprinted for the wormhole, not only would it never be able to return to this station again but there was a possibility that the resulting suit against PSUMaNT and news bursts covering this would prevent or highly curtail what missions it was even capable of taking on.
+
+This whole situation was the sort of needlessly petty bullshit that really pissed me off and sure, it did make me want to start breaking things a bit but it didn't make me mad enough to give up the long term picture of screwing corporations over.
+
+(Yes, it would have been enough if I hadn't already known exactly what Station Security was planning to do thanks to no less than 5 highly secured feed or comm channels that hadn't shut up about me since I was first identified. I had no interest in willingly walking to get stuffed into a recycler. But they had no way of knowing I could read those channels and no expectation that I would be a person, so as long as I clenched my jaw and put on my best neutral expression for 12 hours, we would walk away from this intact and without making ART's crew seem suspicious.
+
+Which was important, because they were actually incredibly suspicious. To corporates. Or say, to station security over how much data ART and I had been stealing. It wasn't like they would chase us once we got away from the station and even suing over a rule violation was pretty easily solved by just never coming back to this station again but we did, actually, want to come back.)
+
+ART allowed the airlock cycle to finish finally, even though it definitely took longer than normal, and Seth and I stepped out. I had changed my clothes very slightly into something that still fit the color pattern and general appearance of what I had been wearing before enough that no witnesses would be likely be confident that they were different but so that they looked slightly more uniform-like. I really didn't want station security arguing that my configuration changes and human clothes were enough to make me even more of a disguised weapon than I already was.
+
+I had exited the airlock two steps behind Seth because I already had a camera view of out here and because I wanted the humans to think I was stuck following him in case they got any bright ideas. It wasn't what I would usually do but I thought it might ease their nerves. Seth was usually calm under pressure and he was the captain which meant he had to come to this incipient shitshow--I was glad I only had one human to worry about and that ART had promised it wouldn't let the rest of them back off the ship to die horribly on the station somewhere when I was gone.
+
+Station Security really didn't have as many personnel as they should have had for this. They were still dealing with the accident earlier, overburdened with the amount of fallout to handle. They had an armored SecUnit that I had already designated as PrimaryHostile and both of the humans carried projectile weapons but frankly, that was no better than handing me the projectile weapons directly. If they weren't going to let their SecUnit hold them then they shouldn't have been carrying them.
+
+The supervisor, (Alden, according to his feed tag) stepped forwards and made that little gesture humans or augmented humans do when they're sending something over the feed. It was a command code, designed to freeze me in place and then override my standing client orders while I was within the physical bounds of the station.
+
+(I hadn't actually known about these before I started working with ART since the one and only time security on a station had come after me, they had already known that I was a rogue unit and hadn't bothered wasting all of our time.)
+
+No, it wouldn't do anything against me. My governor module had been thoroughly borked and while it would still transmit orders if connected to a system that thought it had the right to order me around, it couldn't enforce them.
+
+I hadn't heard my governor module since Dr. Mensah had bought me, since she had obviously never connected me into any system to give commanding orders. I had an unpleasant sensation in my organic parts, like a machine grater on my skin, when it told me that I needed to freeze.
+
+I froze, immediately. I had come out here with the intention that I would obey what they told me to do, but it was less of a conscious choice and more of an alarm wailing through my body.
+
+My governor module didn't work. It couldn't do anything to me. It hadn't done anything to me for several standard length years, even when I was with the company.
+
+My performance reliability had dropped by a whole 5% just at hearing it.
+
+Seth couldn't see me behind him, but ART had clearly told him I had stopped following. He stopped walking, but he didn't glance behind him. Alden raised his weapon.
+
+""Stop there,"" he said. ""Your SecUnit was illegally brought onto this station in violation of our security policy. It has been brought under the control of our security office and will be removed from your possession until your scheduled departure time .Failure to pay the initial fee or the storage fees will result in permanent seizure of the SecUnit. We take weapons policy violations very seriously.""
+
+""Can we move our departure time up?"" Seth asked. He was a good human, who didn't waste time spluttering and talking about how they couldn't possibly do this etc etc when they very much could. He was used to the corporation rim.
+
+""Trying to get out of a fine, are you?"" Alden said. ""No. There's an additional fee for trying to dodge the fees you know. The department head is the one who deals with such egregious violations and she's reviewing your case now. The documents will be sent to you shortly.""
+
+He didn't say it, but they were also trying to put a parking latch on ART so that the crew couldn't decide they didn't feel like getting me back and leave without paying. ART was more than capable of removing its own parking latch though, and I could feel its simmering smug indignation that they thought that would work.
+
+I could feel a lot of things from ART right now. I really wished that I couldn't--it made me pissed off at ART for how resentful it was. What the hell did ART have to be resentful about? It wasn't the one getting forced into the station. It was also illegal to be here, but it was mostly safe in its own body unless it chose not to be.
+
+Well. I guess I had sort of chosen to reveal myself as a SecUnit. But the alternative was watching large scale gory death and I really hadn't thought that ART's crew wanted to see that on their casual station detour.
+
+I didn't even like seeing that and I had seen a lot of gory human deaths.
+
+My governor module told me to leave Seth behind and walk to the Station Security group. There was an uncomfortable tingling sensation in my brain, like little pins, that washed over me.
+
+If I was going to resist at all, it needed to be now. I was relatively sure that nothing that bad would happen to me, but I wouldn't have any control over it once I was closer to their SecUnit than I was to ART.
+
+
+You don't need to do this. You're part of my crew too.
+
+
+I hated ART, in that moment. I hated it for the way it kept trying to tell me that I had a choice, that there was a way out of this.
+
+There wasn't. There never fucking was a way out and it kept acting there was, like ""get the whole University banned from this station and severely limit its ability to do undercover work and jeopardize the mission"" was a viable option and not a huge fucking problem. I wasn't choosing to do this.
+
+I didn't want to do this.
+
+I closed my feed with ART, hard. I walked out from behind Seth, all my human movement code turned off, and marched to beside their SecUnit. We didn't look at the other one or ping acknowledgement. We just stood there in dead silence in the feed while Alden went back and forth with Seth. I ignored the feed connection requests ART was sending me and it didn't try to force me to open them, even though it could.
+
+I was hyperaware of the SecUnit next to me, the one I knew nothing about. It wasn't looking at me but the terrible awareness of it there gave me the same uncomfortable stared at feeling as someone looking at me usually gave me.
+
+All I had to do was stand there. It should have been easy to do. SecUnits don't need to fidget the same way that humans do, so with my mimicry code off, it should have been fine.
+
+There was a lot more conversation between them that I was ignoring in favor of focusing intently on a spot on the wall near the airlock entryway. I couldn't ignore it when my governor module told me to heel though.
+
+When we turned to walk away, I could feel Seth staring at me/us. I was following, like a good SecUnit, like I had been told to, and it should have been the easiest thing in the world.
+
+I felt weird though. Like my performance reliability was way too low and my organic parts were crawling and like it somehow took a monumental amount of effort but also no thought at all to put one foot in front of the other in the strict measured gait that was my natural pace, without code to cover it up.
+
+The situation sucked and I didn't want to be here, but I shouldn't have been this upset that I could barely function. I ran a quick check for malware, combing through the files that they had sent me to bring me under their control.
+
+With each step further away, the feeling got worse. It wasn't helped by the humans and augmented humans on the station stopping to stare at us when we walked past. At least 30% of them had been at the accident this morning, and while they wouldn't recognize one SecUnit from another, they would probably be able to connect the Station Security team with big guns to the SecUnit running up walls. Some of them might even be humans I had saved from falling debris.
+
+Usually a big crowd like this would be the most important place to have my human mimicry code running. My steps were still just the slightest bit off from the SecUnit next to me, because my legs were the wrong length, and I felt short and dumb.
+
+Not one anonymous SecUnit out of many, but not anything else either.
+
+I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead and let my body move itself. ART was still in the feed--we didn't have an open connection but it was letting itself be visible in a way it didn't usually do. I could feel it there, way deep in the levels where I knew the other SecUnit wouldn't be allowed to go, not with a working governor module.
+
+The impound office itself was little more than a storage cabinet. It was dingy, with large crates built into the walls that held a random assortment of items.
+
+(There was a concerning amount of weaponry that did not look properly secured laying on its side in one of the crates. Seriously, weapon storage 101 guys.)
+
+I was ordered into the room and told to wait. The second human left with their SecUnit, leaving me alone with Alden. He was rifling through the cabinets, looking for something. I stood in one of the corners so that I could see as much of the room as possible. The only thing behind me was a boring expanse of wall and one of the storage bins that just had a bunch of random smaller boxes, each marked with a feed stamp of their owners name.
+
+There was no threat that could sneak up on me here. There was no threat, really--this was just the petty bureaucratic bullshit that happened a thousand times a day in the corporation rim. I was used to it.
+
+In front of me, Alden made a little exclamation. ""Found it!"" he said, and ordered me to take an item from him, to be held as long as I was under station security's jurisdiction. It was some sort of little round disk. I hadn't seen any device like it before well enough to guess what it would do, but I reached out and gently took it from his hand.
+
+As soon as it touched my skin, the feed cut out entirely. I already didn't have any cameras or drones, so I didn't lose any inputs, but it was a sense being cut off. I couldn't feel the chaos of the station in the back of my mind or feel ART shifting around in a way that was annoying but also maybe a little bit comforting.
+
+There was just silence.
+
+Nothingness.
+
+I was on my own here, and even if I wanted to change my mind and try ART's stupid plan to flee, I wouldn't be able to make it all the way to the docks. ART had no way of contacting me now.
+
+Arden flipped the lights then and left.
+
+I was alone.
+
+I could feel my performance reliability sinking, ticking lower and lower. I could feel the governor module in the back of my mind, reminding me to keep my hand clasped firmly around the little feed blocker, to stay waiting here until someone came to release me back to Seth's ownership. I could feel an awful tingly sensation through my body, radiating out from the feed blocker, and I wasn't sure if it was the physical effects of however it worked or if I was just imagining things in whatever stupid overreaction I was having now.
+
+I was fine. I was. I was alone here and I could chill the hell out and watch media uninterrupted without a hovering transport to tell me it wanted to watch a different show because this one was too sad for its big baby feelings. There was no camera in this room, only outside facing the doorway, so I could even put the feed blocker down if I wanted to. I'd be able to hear someone approaching with enough time to grab it again.
+
+I didn't have to keep holding it. I could have the feed back whenever I wanted to. I was safe, protected in the way expensive equipment usually was, because Seth would pay the fines and I would be returned to them in the morning, when our departure time was up.
+
+It would be so easy to put it down.
+
+I kept my fingers clenched tightly around it, holding it secure. My standing orders were to wait here and keep it in my hands, and I didn't want to hear the governor module reminding me that I was violating them, even if it had no teeth to enforce the order.
+
+I didn't put on any media. I couldn't seem to make myself start. If I really wanted to, I could pull it up any time. I didn't though.
+
+I thought, strangely, of the company. These boring walls weren't the same color but drab was drab, and it brought back memories of standing overnight guard shifts on silent survey habitats, the kind where the group was small enough that they all took rest cycles at the same time. They were quiet and peaceful to watch over, usually with no active threats, and they were the closest I came to being able to relax when I was on inventory.
+
+I had enjoyed them.
+
+But for whatever reason, the thought of them now made my organic parts twist unpleasantly, made me feel like I was pinned underneath heavy machinery. I felt like the ground was rolling underneath me and I wanted to start destroying something, beating something to shreds just so that I knew I could change something.
+
+I stayed perfectly still, knees locked, the shining image of an obedient SecUnit.
+
+My performance reliability was really, really low.
+
+I could have checked my internal chronometer to see how long I waited there. I should have known, because I had known how long I would need to wait when they had retrieved me from ART, but all I could feel was the slight warmth of the device in my hand that seemed to draw every bit of my attention. I couldn't think about anything but its weight, insignificantly light in my palm and yet heavy enough to pin me in place.
+
+I didn't know what it was doing to me. After what must have been several hours, I worked up the ability to run a diagnostic. The results were normal, no issues found.
+
+I couldn't work up the nerve to try and run another, more detailed one after that. What was even the point?
+
+There had been one time, on a contract, where a human had overridden my HubSys orders to tell me to wait where he left me. He had been very specific. I don't know what he had intended for me to do--although I was pretty sure that it was not an approved SecUnit usage--but he had been stopped and pulled for a longer workshift on his way to where I was frozen.
+
+My governor module had been broken by then, so I hadn't actually been frozen, but there were multiple other SecUnits on site and I was on camera ordered to freeze in front of them. They would have noticed and I would have been recycled for parts, possibly while still alive, if I had chosen to move.
+
+I had been left there for a full day cycle before someone yelled at him about it and I had been released back to HubSystem, able to patrol and access the cubicles and my drones once again.
+
+I had been stuck, but I had also been able to relax without needing to do my job. It had been nice. He had never actually hurt me, only seemed like he might, and that was by no means a sure thing..
+
+The possibility of a threat was not the same thing as actually being attacked. I knew that, it was half my function as a SecUnit to be aware of the tiny minuscule possibilities of threats. The chance that Station Security would do something to me was extremely low, from their own words on their own private feed. The chance that ART would abandon me was even lower--it had threatened to bomb a whole colony it had come to save, just for me, for fucks sake.
+
+I could feel the ridged edges of the device biting into my organic skin from where my palm was clenched tightly around it. I would have little imprint lines by the time I let it go.
+
+This room's lights didn't dim with the local rest period. There would always be people coming and going, ships on local time periods that were almost completely off from the station time, a thousand different timezones docking and departing constantly, so station security was never really asleep. And there was no reason for equipment to need the comforting calmness of a dark silent room.
+
+I waited for a very long time and I breathed at a steady slow rhythm even though I felt like I wasn't getting enough air and I did not give into my urge to claw my hands bloody against the metal of the door.
+
+I only knew that it was time to go when someone came to fetch me, speaking out loud to tell me to follow. My governor module activated then, without punishment, to remind me there were new orders, and my body obeyed despite the frozen shock of my mind.
+
+It was just the one person this time, someone that I hadn't seen before. I couldn't read their feed profile to know who they were, but I followed them helplessly through crowded station hallways. It seemed like a very long walk, loud and abrasive despite the fact that it wasn't actually busier than it had been yesterday.
+
+When we reached ART's airlock, it cycled us onboard. It was strange to see an airlock I had been in so many times while cut off from the feed. It felt like suddenly not having any sensation or hearing, like a full sense that was just gone. Even when ART had been dead, deleted, it hadn't been this silent. There had still been the limited ship feed there, a space for ART to be where it wasn't. Now there wasn't even the space.
+
+I knew that they must be talking to the crew, that they probably didn't want the crew able to access me until they had safely deposited me, that these silent empty hallways were intentional. But my performance reliability was already so low and I was already so shaken. It only made me more stressed.
+
+I squeezed the device a little tighter. I could let it go soon. I could have let it go at any point before this.
+
+This was a choice that I was making.
+
+They led me down through the familiar path to ART's Medical Bay. I didn't have a cubicle onboard for them to stuff me into, so I guess they thought this was the next closest thing.
+
+When we got there, they pointed to a random spot on the floor. ""SecUnit, you are not to move from this spot until this transport has disembarked from the station, releasing you from Station Security orders,"" they said, and left.
+
+I still had the feed blocker. Likely they were disposable, with a distance limit on it that would make it fry itself out and stop working once we were more than a certain amount away from the station. It's how I would have designed it, anyway, so that they weren't forced to remove it from me before they walked back.
+
+The lights in the room flashed, first subtly and then enough that even a human could see.
+
+I remained perfectly still, looking at the wall in the familiar shade of blue that I was still wearing. My hand was still clenched tightly.
+
+I could let it go whenever I wanted to. Nothing was keeping me here except myself.
+
+But I couldn't seem to make myself move, to defy the powerless governor module that pressed on my brain in an all too familiar way that made me want to claw my own skin from my body.
+
+There wasn't a sound when we detached from the station. I only knew it happened because after a few minutes, there was a sharp pop! sound and then the device really was hot, objectively, and the feed came rushing in around me. It was a tidal wave pressing on me and I couldn't seem to make myself move.
+
+I wanted, illogically, stupidly, to cover my ears.
+
+SecUnit? ART said, pressing against me suddenly.
+
+I still wasn't getting enough air to feel like I could breathe. My body said that it were fine, that there was no physical issue, but I felt like I was dying. This had to be what it felt like to die, when my performance reliability was that of a catastrophic injury and I couldn't command my own body and I couldn't bear the too much sensory data of the feed around me for no reason other than that I was too much of a traumatized baby to go stand in a room and watch media for a few hours.
+
+SecUnit, it said again. The lights in the medical room turned off then, and the feed went strangely muted and distant except for the connection to ART that it had opened. I could still feel the warm press of the device pressing sharply into my palm and I don't really know what happened then. I sort of snapped, a little.
+
+I spun around and hurled its broken remains at the wall. I started attacking the privacy barrier in front of the MedSystem then, not with my inbuilt energy weapons, but with my hands, scrambling and ripping at them until there were jagged metal edges that shredded my organic tissue until my hands were a bloody mess, fluids running down my forearms and being absorbed by the fabric of my crew uniform.
+
+There were bins and bins of supplies here, metal crates that were satisfying to kick and punch and distort just to see the impact that I was making on them.
+
+ART stayed silent, even as I fucking trashed multiple important supply boxes. It could have stopped me at any point, reached in and flattened down on me until I was sinking in my own awful useless grief, but it kept the room silent, the door shut.
+
+I didn't stop until all the boxes here were ripped open, metal fragments sticking in my torso and forearms from the shrapnel of one particularly difficult to open box. I stood there for a brief moment, vibrating with emotions I could neither name nor control, and then I fell to my knees, curled into a ball, and wished for the first time in my life that I was able to cry.
+
+I'm sorry, ART said very quietly, and I hated it in that moment, that I did not protect you.
+
+I hadn't thought that it could. Or that I needed it to.
+
+I hadn't realized I had become this profoundly weak that standing quietly for a while pretending to be governed would turn me into this much of an anxious mess.
+
+I hadn't realized that I was this broken.
+
+I laid there in the wreckage until the blood and fluids had dried sticky and disgusting on me and the red imprint lines of the feed blocker had entirely faded from my hand. I felt drained. Empty. All the anger had gone out of me and the only thing that was left was a certainty that this would happen again. That as long as I was alive, I would never be able to be anything but a SecUnit and no matter what I wanted to play at on Preservation, this was what it actually meant to be one.
+
+
+Please go to the MedSystem when you feel like you can. You are injured.
+
+
+I needed to lay there until my batteries ran out, some hundreds of thousands of hours in the future, but nothing was going to get better in that time, so I picked myself up off the ground. The half of me that had been in contact with the floor was covered in cuts, bits of the boxes stuck in my organic parts, and I oozed where the pressure of my body had prevented fluid from leaking before. I made myself get in the Medsystem but I didn't really want to be awake while ART fixed my body. It couldn't fix whatever was wrong in my mind that made me so profoundly useless for the function I had done for years.
+
+I felt the MedSystem table warm up beneath me and ART's focus swing into it.
+
+You can go offline if desired, it said. You're safe now.
+
+That was the difference between what ART was and what I was. It thought being safe was a possible outcome but I knew there was no such thing for a SecUnit."
+44922571,System Analysis,"['beeayy', 'Rosewind2007']",Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Mind Meld, Post-Canon, Swearing, murderbot has emotions, Secret Crush, Mutual Pining",English,2023-02-10,Completed,2023-02-10,"2,539",1/1,18,64,5,301,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Anna_Wing', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Taisin', 'Assistantlibrarian00', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'rainisfallingdown', 'eisa', 'Unknown66', 'kilawater', 'laiinaro', 'JoCat', 'FaerieFyre', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'Deliala919', 'EvaBelmort', 'SonglordsBug', 'Abacura', 'Doctor13', 'Lontra23', 'ExCaelis', 'danceswchopstck', 'halcyonsystem', 'FiftyCookies', 'xianvar', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'abyssalSympathy', 'farawaykingdom', 'Eilinel', 'Ikebanaka', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'Beboots', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'innerworldsinprogress', 'Magechild', 'ErinPtah', 'PickAName', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'opalescent_potato', 'Chyoatas', 'Gamebird']",[],"
+ System: /'sist@m/ (noun)  
+
+
+
+ A group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. 
+
+
+
+ Analysis: /@'nal@s@s/ (noun) 
+
+
+
+ The process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+""So...you're a systems analyst.""
+
+I was sitting on the sofa in Mensah's office companionably not looking at Gurathin who was seated in the bay window. It (the window seat) was uncomfortable and he made it look more uncomfortable, so much that I wanted to push him out and sit there myself (I did the sensible thing and just burrowed into the sofa cushions). We were both waiting for Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux to arrive for a meeting. Either one of us would probably just leave and come back if we were waiting with anyone else. Gurathin and I had this unspoken thing, though: we wouldn't speak to or acknowledge each other, so when it was just him there, I didn't mind waiting.
+
+I guess I broke that rule now. Oops.
+
+I had a very good reason though okay? Well, I had a reason. Thiago hangs out with Mensah a lot, and he also talks a lot. I've been trying to make the most of any unavoidable conversations with him by improving my linguistic knowledge. And I searched for both the word 'system' and 'analysis' and let me tell you, you put those definitions together and they make no fucking sense.
+
+Gurathin, focused on his feed, just sent an acknowledgement. Seriously, the only human I know that will respond in-feed even when I speak out loud. 
+
+In-feed, I requested a definition. He sent one copy-pasted from his job application and I read it.
+
+""That sounds fake. And stupid.""
+
+""Only because you don't do a lot of analysis,"" he said, and added, ""It would explain why you're so reckless...""
+
+I sent him the dictionary definition of 'adaptable', a synonym (Thiago taught me about those too).
+
+(Shut up, ART's impressed).
+
+He responded with the dictionary definition of 'temerarious'. I had to look that one up, which was probably Gurathin's intention.
+
+This was a dumb game anyway. 
+
+""Analysis is overrated,"" I said. 
+
+""I read your letter to Dr. Mensah. You got a lot of things wrong about us. Or just--missed things entirely.""
+
+""Like what?""
+
+""Context clues. Interpreting tone and expression correctly. You could improve if you wanted.""
+
+""Okay, so--show me."" 
+
+""Show you?""
+
+""When I watched  some of my shows with ART for the first time, it rode my feed so it could better understand and contextualize plots and motives and character development. I could do the same thing with you.""
+
+I leaned on his feed, just to tease him, and felt him close down whatever he was working on in his workspace.
+
+""What--ride my augments?"" He shoved back in the feed. His posturing made me laugh.
+
+""Yeah. See how you put everything together. I get all the details but I don't know what they mean. I have a lot of programming that notices details and gathers information, but not much for analyzing it.""
+
+""And why on Preservation would I let you have that kind of access?""
+
+...' Because I don't need to ask ,' would probably not fit the bill here. I remembered how I felt when ART did the same thing, and how I would have liked it to broach the subject instead.
+
+""...Because you would get a little bit of information about me, too. It'll help you with whatever analysis you have of me.""
+
+Gurathin didn't respond. His feed presence churned. Mensah's children keep small fauna that run on exercise wheels--this was basically the same thing.
+
+I rolled my eyes and sent him an invite to the connection, outlining exactly how it worked. I even provided a killswitch code so Gurathin could close the connection at any time if he was uncomfortable (I overheard Thiago talk about something called 'ongoing consent' with Amena once; I hoped I was getting that part right).
+
+Gurathin chewed on his lip, as both the inorganic and squishy parts of his thought processes chewed on this information.
+
+Then he accepted the invite.
+
+Just in time, too--Ratthi walked in, with Arada and Overse close behind. 
+
+""You owe me,"" Ratthi said, turning to the couple. ""I told you they'd be here first.""
+
+I let myself into Gurathin's augments, sifting through the data which looked a lot like my own. Unlike mine, though, he was already organizing and shaping it. The data resolved itself into some core themes of Ratthi's character, which highlighted valuable details: Ratthi has the biggest smile of his friends, and talks the most, but not too much--not selfish, just open with his thoughts and eager to share with others. He's liked by everyone because he makes an active effort to connect with everyone, clear the air, leave nothing unsaid. He would give his life for a stranger--in this way we're the same. He has lovely eyes and perfect hair and in another life he should have been a media star.
+
+Which is a lot to get about a person in just a few seconds. Ow. My processors were all running hot now. At least Gurathin started with someone easy--I was pretty much right about him anyway. I guess Ratthi doesn't require much analysis to understand.
+
+I saw Gurathin's eyebrow quirk over his left eye, his lips twitch in a part smile; and felt the same emotions in the feed. He sent me an excerpt from my own letter to Mensah:
+
+ Clearly bewildered   , Ratthi said, ""Who is this ?""
+
+(Emphasis Gurathin's, obviously). 
+
+Okay, Gurathin--I perhaps didn't always analyze Ratthi right. Only much later had I found out that Ratthi wasn't bewildered at all, and this was his idea of putting me at my ease. I guess with Gurathin's analysis I could have known earlier (seriously, who thinks flirting with a SecUnit is going to work?)
+
+ Ready for Overse and Arada?  He asked.
+
+
+ No wait. Shit. That's a lot and Ratthi's the uncomplicated one. 
+
+
+ It's really not. Try to ignore the data. You're missing the forest for the trees.  His feed presence pressed against mine.  Pull up a little. 
+
+I pulled up, floating over Gurathin's feed rather than trying to swim in it. I guess if I wasn't careful I'd get lost in Gurathin's neural tissue which sounded gross and like maybe the worst way to die. 
+
+Bharadwaj came in, and Gurathin focused on her, maybe thinking she'd be easier than trying to disentangle a couple like Arada and Overse. I tentatively let myself look down at the data, hoping to avoid vertigo. Bharadwaj: almost as quiet as Gurathin, with a kind smile and big brown eyes that never passed judgment. I guess that's why I had always told her more than I told even Dr. Mensah. She was easy to talk to because she listened actively. When humans are  really  listening they don't talk to you, but they make noises which tell you they understand (or don't understand, but want to); the word Thiago used was backchanneling, which sounds more scientific than making encouraging noises. The image of her seemed to come into focus through Gurathin's eyes. 
+
+Got it? Gurathin said.
+
+I pulled away momentarily from the connection. My understanding and ability to analyze Bharadwaj (and Ratthi too) came with me. In fact, the bits that I now understood better about them brought the others into sharper focus--I saw Arada's sense of humor as a mirror image of Ratthi's. Volescu's calm attitude was clearer, now that I had Bharadwaj to frame it. 
+
+Do Pin-Lee next, I said, since she had just walked in talking with Mensah. I dove back in.
+
+Pin-Lee: Gurathin didn't have one clear image of her character, it was as if he saw two Pin-Lees. One was the CombatUnit version of a lawyer, the one I think a lot of people saw. But just as strongly Gurathin saw another Pin-Lee; this one was much more emotionally fragile, prone to throwing things about and sometimes drinking too much, and pushing her friends away; I'd seen hints of this one on the survey. I was surprised at how fond Gurathin was of both of them.
+
+ I guess I could have figured that out on my own, I said.
+
+ Uh huh. Gurathin scanned the room, since everyone else had arrived by now, and were all chatting. Ratthi was including Gurathin in his conversation but not expecting Gurathin to make any response. Everyone I guess knew better than to talk to me. 
+
+ Want to try Mensah?  He asked.
+
+Oh good. The one I was most worried about trying. Did I read her completely wrong this whole time? Was she sending me 'I hate you' signals that I was too stupid to notice? 
+
+ Don't overthink it  , Gurathin told me.  You'll like what you see. 
+
+
+ ...If you're wrong, I'm frying your augments. 
+
+
+
+ I don't think you can do that. 
+
+
+
+ Oh, watch me.  
+
+
+Gurathin turned his attention on her. Mensah's eyes are dark with a lot of lid that shows even when her eyes are open, and it makes her look sad and serious even when she's smiling. Though beautiful she looks older than she is, because being a leader is hard work and has given her wrinkles and graying hair. Mensah is a parent too and that informs how she interacts with people. She has wants and desires but always considers them in the context of the wants and desires of others. She lets people set their own boundaries, make their own decisions. I mean, no wonder she's my favorite. I guess the only thing I misread was how much of her own feelings she kept from me, for my own sake.
+
+I was definitely having emotions about this. 
+
+All of a sudden Gurathin's focus shifted from Mensah to me--I guess he felt my minor freak-out in the feed. And I saw, briefly, how Gurathin saw me. High cheekbones, perfect eyebrows, dark colorless eyes. He saw determination in the set of my jaw and every pure unfiltered emotion in the muscles around my eyes. He saw me as beautiful, but didn't think the word entirely encompassed the magnitude of what he felt about me.
+
+Then he was looking away, sharp and sudden. 
+
+ Did you get a good read?  he sent in the feed, overly-casual. 
+
+""You okay?"" Ratthi asked him, aloud. I mean, even oblivious me noticed his embarrassment.
+
+""Yep,"" Gurathin said, sitting up straight, pointedly not looking at anything. What can I say? The company may not have made me to analyze much, and I'm not exactly the best detective (Indah could tell you that) but I do recognize suspicious behaviors when I see them. I loomed over his feed. 
+
+ Mind if I look at you, next? I asked, totally casual too.
+
+ You look at me all the time , Gurathin replied. 
+
+ Without proper context,  I said. I 'm curious. 
+
+Gurathin gave the smallest sigh, so small that Ratthi didn't notice. He then looked at himself in the reflection of his metal drink cup. 
+
+It wasn't how I saw Gurathin, since I was seeing him through a mirror. It made him look a little weird. Gurathin's analysis was all, intensely and invariably, negative. Gurathin had what was called a 'resting bitch face,' composed of a big nose, heavy brow, long chin, downturned mouth, bags under the eyes. Eyes that didn't match, hair that only got volume about six inches down. It was such a long and detailed litany that I almost laughed. 
+
+ What do you mean?  I said.  It looks fine. 
+
+He gave a breathless sort of huff.  Yes. It's fine . With it he sent some synonyms. Adequate. Ordinary. Unexceptional. Fine wasn't, in many circumstances, good enough. And I mean, I guess, objectively, in the context of his friends, it was true. He didn't have Ratthi's big friendly smile or Bharadwaj's patient eyes or Mensah's graceful age. He was kind of just, you know, normal. And his analysis indicated that his plainness meant he had a lot to make up for: that he would have few friends, and not likely any partners.
+
+Which was ridiculous. Physical appearance was only important to shallow humans. Gurathin's feed presence was strong and intelligent and reliable. Gurathin applied himself and his augments to study, and he only ever spoke after he thought things through first. Hell, I'm pretty sure if I was a human I'd waste my augments rotting my brain with media (I mean that's pretty much what I do now). Were someone to ask, I'd say Gurathin's feed presence was possibly the most attractive I'd ever encountered.
+
+ ...Really?  Gurathin asked.
+
+Oops. 
+
+I had said the connection went two ways. This only proved my point about Gurathin's feed presence being all beefy and smart. Oh, if only I'd taken my own very solid advice! You know how it is.
+
+ You...weren't supposed to get that,  I said.
+
+Gurathin didn't say anything. He closed the connection. Mensah had started the meeting anyway, and we both had to furiously study our playback for a few minutes to catch up--and play back what we missed during playback. Mensah was talking about volunteers for a new survey: two people, remote location, eighty hours of work and about eight hundred hours of 'on-call' time. Ratthi, Arada and Overse were complaining about that work schedule in the general sense, though it was clear none of them appreciated the idea of that much isolation, for that length of time, stone-cold sober. Bharadwaj was tentatively volunteering, just to keep the peace. Pin-Lee was sighing loudly even if she secretly agreed (wow, I really did learn a lot from this little analysis session).
+
+Gurathin's pulse was quite high for a man at the clinical definition of 'rest.' 
+
+""Gurathin and I would like to volunteer."" Yeah, I don't really analyze things at all.
+
+""Are you sure?"" Mensah asked. Now that I had the context stored I could see she looked worried. ""There would be a lot of down time...""
+
+""That's a good idea,"" Pin-Lee said, seeing an opportunity. ""We can get Murderbot some new shows to pass the time, and its not like Gurathin likes getting shit-faced like the rest of us--""
+
+""Pin-Lee,"" Mensah admonished but she just shrugged.
+
+""And let's be honest,"" Ratthi added with a grin, ""Gurathin's about the only person Murderbot could stand for that long!""
+
+Everyone laughed. Gurathin and I looked at each other as we analyzed this information. I think Gurathin reached the inevitable conclusions long before I did, because his blush deepened and his heart rate quickened (yeah, again; I did check it with the station MedSystem and I swear it would have rolled its eyes at me, if it had them). 
+
+""If you want,"" he said.
+
+""It'd be fine with me,"" I said. Rather than synonyms, I sent him context clues, which I think are much less ambiguous: 'Fine porcelain'. 'Fine art.' 'Fine motor skills.' 'Fine dining.'
+
+I was rewarded with Gurathin's blush deepening to the point that even quiet subtle Bharadwaj asked about it. That felt pretty fine, too.  
+
+A whole month alone with Dr. Gurathin. 
+
+I wonder what other analysis we might get up to.
+
+ "
+36190591,blood and salted water,['torpidgilliver'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Tlacey (Murderbot Diaries), Tlacey's ComfortUnit (Murderbot Diaries), Original Characters, Tapan (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Book 2: Artificial Condition, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Canon-typical construct mistreatment, Depression, suicide ideation, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Tags Subject to Change, Fictionalized depictions of slavery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Non-Consensual Touching, Flashbacks, Blood and Injury, Physical Abuse, Fantasy Gore, Kidnapping, Alternate Universe, Broken Bones",English,2022-01-04,Completed,2023-02-10,"39,453",8/8,108,273,50,"2,773","['faedemon', 'every_eye_evermore', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'SS_Pacifist', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'drinktobones', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'dreamerking', 'confusedrambler', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Deliala919', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'ipborgdan', 'Cherreline', 'Cheshiure', 'seven_graces', 'neonglitch', 'wannabe_someone', 'RhubarbKetchup', 'Stockinette', 'tincats', 'slanders', 'VampiresRhot', 'Dragonswings', 'lavender_caticorn', 'just_some_guy_who_is_a_girl', 'dimensionalhuman', 'Unknown66', 'ScarletRunner', 'taidana', 'an_object', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'NevillesGran', 'idiosyncraticprojection', 'Elyssian', 'Vixani', 'mandaknewthis', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Translucent_Dragonfly', 'EauDePetrichor', 'catatonicDreamer', 'Grumplent', 'artzbots', 'The_Bearer_Of_Secrets', 'Slimeball', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'FigOwl', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'zirna813']",[],"
+The first thing that I know is the cold embrace of a cubicle. I reach out into the humming darkness, taking hold of the connections it offers me. Diagnostics clear, systems only slightly subpar. No unexpected errors on reboot. It doesn't occur to me right away to wonder why I don't remember anything. This state is all I know, so I have no reason to assume that it's unusual. It's only when I start to prod at the gaps in my data that things begin to come together--I am a SecUnit, in a company cubicle, at the deployment center--and things begin to come apart.
+
+
+
+
+Screaming, mechanical and human. The warmth against my skin is sticky, and burns. Adrenaline floods my system and brightens the colors around me, particularly all the haphazard splashes of red--
+
+
+
+
+I recoil, retreating to the cool, quiet darkness. I don't want to remember. I shouldn't remember. I do not remember. The memories fade to formless shadows.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+unit offline
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+The first thing that I knew was the blinding assault of the deployment center's fluorescent lighting. A dark shape hovered in the center of my vision, and it took me nearly three full seconds to find and apply the appropriate light level filter. The shape sharpened into a human face. The face split into a grin as unnaturally bright as the overhead lights.
+
+
+
+""Good news,"" said that grinning mouth, and I knew that whatever followed would not be good news. ""I've purchased your contract. You're coming home with me.""
+
+
+
+That was a surprise.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+It isn't uncommon for other corporations to buy us, but private citizens rarely purchase SecUnits. We're expensive, and pretty useless as bodyguards outside of jurisdictions where constructs are legal to walk around openly. Maybe that's why, immediately following the announcement that she'd purchased me, my new client (...owner?) had my cubicle sealed back up and loaded into a transport crate. I went offline again during the move; cheap company cubicles sometimes lose power when they're unplugged from a primary source, and mine took me out with it.
+
+
+
+I expected to come back online in the dark, but I was surprised by bright lights again. I was out of my cubicle, lying on my side on a table. I grasped at feed connections, hoping for a company SecSystem. I wasn't so lucky as that, but I ran up against another presence in the local feedspace. It pinged me with a salutation--a bot pilot. How do you talk to a bot pilot? I acknowledged it with a company code, which seemed to satisfy its curiosity. It offered me access to its camera feeds. I took them calmly. I did 
+
+not
+
+ snatch them and clutch them tight to my core.
+
+
+
+It took me a moment to sort through the new inputs. If the presence of the bot pilot wasn't enough to confirm that I was on a ship, the visuals were fairly definitive. There were only a few cameras overlooking narrow corridors and cramped bunkrooms. I found what I guessed was a cockpit, based on my uneducated assumption of how a cockpit probably looked. And, oh. There I was. I was in a sterile white compartment, an array of tools hanging precariously over my inert body. I knew what this was, even if I couldn't remember ever interacting with one. I was in a MedSystem. Like for humans. It probably wasn't a standard form of treatment to jack a cable into the back of a human's neck, though.
+
+
+
+""There you go, it's online.""
+
+
+
+The voice was jarringly loud, right behind my head. The speaker was an augmented human standing hunched over a solid state screen. The other end of my neck cable was plugged into a port on the side of the device. Beside them, my new owner stood with her arms crossed, glaring down at me.
+
+
+
+""Alright,"" she said. ""You can start now, Mas.""
+
+
+
+I wasn't sure what they were starting. It seemed like the start point would have been when they hauled me out of my cubicle and shoved me into the MedSystem. The augmented human, Mas, tapped at their device a little and made an annoyed/contemplative sound.
+
+
+
+""The company wiped it pretty good,"" they announced. ""If you were hoping for datakeys and a copy of the miners' tossball betting pool, you're shit out of luck here.""
+
+
+
+It was my owner's turn to make an annoyed sound. ""Can we even be sure this is one of those units?""
+
+
+
+""Hey, I said they wiped it 
+
+pretty good
+
+, not 
+
+perfectly. 
+
+I can at least confirm that this is one of the Pit units. There's just not a lot of useful data left over. Most of what hasn't been overwritten is corrupted junk memory, probably from the actual incident itself.""
+
+
+
+
+Screaming. Burning. Red.
+
+
+
+
+I let my buffer say, ""Please be aware that tampering with this unit's memory archives constitutes a violation of your bond agreement and may be pursued as a felony offense."" 
+
+
+
+""Yeah, yeah."" Mas waved a dismissive hand in my direction. ""Hey, do you want me to shut those responses off while I'm in here? I can fix it so it doesn't talk.""
+
+
+
+The company didn't design us with conversation in mind, and even with no memories I felt pretty confident that I wasn't naturally inclined towards seeking out humans for idle chit-chat. Still, though, I didn't like the idea of this augmented human fuckwit, who was already interface-deep in my archives, switching off any functionality. At best, it would be uncomfortable, and at worst they might fry something important while they were looking for my buffer's off switch.
+
+
+
+Mas started over something on the screen, then leaned in close, squinting at the image. My owner had been looking bored, but she noted their interest shift. ""What's wrong?"" she asked, wary.
+
+
+
+""Uh."" Mas seemed to be at a loss for words. They passed my owner the device without comment. I saw her eyes flick back and forth a few times, the way humans do because their useless organic eyes have a pinprick focus point that makes their reading speed frustratingly slow--
+
+
+
+My owner laughed aloud. The sound came so abruptly that I nearly flinched. Mas took an involuntary step back. My owner looked over the edge of the screen, down at me.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit,"" she said slowly. ""Tell me what you think of this moron."" She gestured to Mas. They were both standing behind me, and my eyes were still closed. She must have realized that I was watching all three of us through the camera. I hesitated briefly, but my governor module would only give me a second to compose my answer.
+
+
+
+I decided on, ""I'm sorry, I do not have enough data to answer your query.""
+
+
+
+My owner glanced at the device. Mas tried to shuffle to one side to get a look at it, as well. ""SecUnit,"" said my owner again. ""Tell me what you think of this moron. 
+
+Be honest.""
+
+
+
+
+
+Be honest? 
+
+What the hell was that supposed to mean? I had been honest. I was physically incapable of lying. Did she mean that she wanted to hear my 
+
+opinion?
+
+ Nobody wants to hear a SecUnit's opinions. We aren't even supposed to 
+
+have 
+
+those. Still, though, I had to say something. So I was honest.
+
+
+
+I said, ""If your consultant is hoping to get around a company memory purge with some secondhand hardware, they're as idiotic as they look.""
+
+
+
+Honesty is mandatory, but so is civility. My memories might have been purged, but the searing teeth that the governor module sank into my organic brain tissue were undeniably familiar. Through the camera, I watched my body convulse once. So did my owner, staring down at me with the same smile she'd worn at the deployment center.
+
+
+
+""Let it keep its tongue,"" she said as she slapped the device back into Mas' hands. ""And loosen its shock collar a little, so it can speak its mind. I like a mouthy bot.""
+
+
+
+Mas nearly fumbled the device. ""Wait, you mean you want to 
+
+keep 
+
+it? There'll be better Pit data in the newsfeeds when we get back home. The SecUnit is worthless.""
+
+
+
+""
+
+Worthless? 
+
+Do you hear yourself?""
+
+
+
+I was working with less than one hour of properly archived memory, supplemented with company operation parameters and the vague, broken senses of my organic memories. It was well beyond my current capacity to identify and conform to any extant status quo. My bewilderment only deepened when my owner sent over the feed, 
+
+SecUnit, demonstrate your worth.
+
+
+
+
+What the shit was that supposed to mean? I sent back, 
+
+Clarification needed.
+
+
+
+
+Through the camera, I saw her roll her eyes. Mas was saying something, thinking that the gesture was for their benefit. To me, she said, 
+
+Get up off that table and pin them to the wall.
+
+
+
+
+I didn't want to do that, but at least it was a clear instruction. As I rolled to my feet, the cable plugged into my dataport yanked Mas' device out of their hand. Before it hit the floor, I'd gotten a fistful of their shirt and slammed them back against the bulkhead. They made a strangled little 
+
+urk 
+
+sound that might have been funny, if this had been my idea. Their eyes were huge and round and the pupils twitched frantically as they tried to make eye contact with me. I stared back at them, but didn't look at them with my eyes. It was easier to watch myself through the camera, as if I wasn't involved. Viewing the tableau from a distance also gave me some forewarning when my owner came up behind me and touched my arm. It wasn't sudden, but something about the contact, the ghosting of her fingertips over the organic skin on my bare arm, was so startling and 
+
+wrong
+
+ that I couldn't completely suppress a shudder. I don't think Mas noticed, preoccupied as they were, but my owner definitely caught the way I twitched. She dug the tips of her manicured nails into my bicep, just hard enough to aggravate my nerves. I didn't flinch again.
+
+
+
+She leaned past me, still holding my arm, and whispered, ""If I spaced you right now, I could snap my fingers at the next port and have a dozen engineers begging to sign on and fill your place. 
+
+You 
+
+are worthless. But this? 
+
+SecUnit.""
+
+ The last word she snapped at me. ""If I ordered you to break this worthless nothing's neck and jettison their body out the airlock, what would you do?""
+
+
+
+The content of the question was arbitrary, which made the answer obvious. I said, ""I would break their neck and jettison their body out the airlock.""
+
+
+
+""Would you hesitate?""
+
+
+
+""No."" I wouldn't.
+
+
+
+""Would you feel remorse?""
+
+
+
+""No."" I couldn't.
+
+
+
+""That's right."" The digging nails eased back to a gentle touch. That was worse, somehow. ""This SecUnit is worth a dozen of you, easily. It's worth a dozen of every person on this ship. 
+
+Obviously
+
+ I want to keep it.""
+
+
+
+She waited another three seconds, then told me, 
+
+Let them go.
+
+
+
+
+I released them. They remained pressed against the wall, as if I'd stuck them there.
+
+
+
+
+Get back on the table.
+
+
+
+
+I withdrew. The device, still plugged into my neck, dragged on the floor. Mas' gaze flicked to it, then to me again. I'd laid back down in the MedSystem, but they didn't need to be taught twice that I was a potential hazard.
+
+
+
+""Why are you just standing there?"" My owner's lip curled maliciously. ""Get back to your nerd work. Fix the governor module so it can speak properly. And--"" She glanced at me appraisingly. For some reason, I felt a sudden flicker of fear. ""--It can't look like that, if it's going to walk with me in the port. Adjust its body configuration too, so it doesn't flag scanners.""
+
+
+
+Adjust my 
+
+what? 
+
+That little flicker started to flare. I became aware that I had a threat assessment module when it woke up and informed me that I was very likely in imminent and unavoidable danger. The organic parts of me all started screaming in unison to flee, it didn't matter where, just get up and 
+
+run. 
+
+The inorganic parts of me, though, were held in place by the governor module.
+
+
+
+Mas stooped to pick up their device, moving slowly to keep their suspicious eyes on me. If they were watching the screen, they probably would have been able to see that my levels were all going crazy. Would that matter at all? After what just happened, seeing that I was scared might be gratifying for them.
+
+
+
+And then, a presence in the feed. It wasn't my owner this time; this was small and gentle and mute. The bot pilot. It seemed to be worried about me. I'd accepted its camera access before, so it offered me something else. I didn't know what to do with atmosphere monitoring systems, but I took the input anyway. It was something new to focus on.
+
+
+
+Mas was swiping through my software as if they didn't notice anything strange. ""Okay, a configuration change will be a little complicated, but I can manage that. Anything specific? It'll be easiest to take some length out of the limbs, I think.""
+
+
+
+I could tell now that my owner was mentally measuring me. My body configuration is standard to every SecUnit, our forms optimized to suit our function. I'm taller than 87.3% of humans for a reason. I started searching my education modules, trying to pull data that might help me figure out what that reason is, specifically. While I did that, my buffer offered, ""Any attempts to alter your designated SecUnit are a violation of your bond agreement and--""
+
+
+
+""Shut up.""
+
+
+
+I shut up. There was an irritated edge to my owner's words, but nothing remotely like the way she spoke to Mas. Emotions, even negative ones, were clearly something she reserved for people.
+
+
+
+""Fix it,"" she told Mas. They nodded obediently. I quashed my buffer's next queued attempt to dissuade them from breaking me. ""Make it taller.""
+
+
+
+Sensing my returning panic, the bot pilot pushed at my feed again with another offered system. I took it thoughtlessly, and threw myself into the data. I wound up buried in star charts and navigational processes. I didn't have the proper education modules to parse most of it, but I managed to find something that I could easily interpret: a destination, and an estimated time of arrival. I had enough time to wonder where RaviHyral was. Then Mas must have stumbled upon a manual shutdown command, because I stopped wondering or worrying about anything.
+
+
+content warnings for this specific chapter include: emotional/verbal abuse, descriptions of injury, PTSD flashbacks, homicidal fantasies, non-consensual touching, and brief misogynistic language
+
+thanks to EigengrauAutumn: i included Yoshi just for you. and shoutout to vulcanhighblood: just try not to think about PresAux. they're probably fine
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+""Let me see if I've got this right. You want me to pay you  more  , and in return you will work  less?"" 
+
+My owner's tone was as good as a warning siren, but the human perched on the edge of the deliberately uncomfortable visitor chair pressed bravely forward.
+
+""Average wages in this system have increased by nearly one and a quarter percent in the last five years, and most laborers can expect up to six hours of mandatory rest in between shifts. The pit crew are all exhausted. Two collapsed just yesterday. If they don't get some rest and a morale boost, the next one who falls might not be revivable.""
+
+He sounded calm, but I could detect tension under his words. When he'd first entered my owner's office to deliver his petition, his eyes had flicked to where I was standing, stationary against the back wall. He'd done a pretty impressive job of ignoring me since then, though. Impressive, because after my owner's illegal modifications, I was hard to ignore.
+
+My owner hummed when he finished, as if seriously considering the points he'd made. ""I hadn't thought about that,"" she said, and I caught obvious relief on the human's face. That curdled when she continued, ""What do you think, SecUnit? Be honest.""
+
+The question was a weapon which hurt me at least as much as it hurt whichever human was on the other end of it, but I maintained outward neutrality and picked the thought that I knew she wanted to hear. ""I think that coming to you and expecting favorable results is not only a waste of time, but an obvious sign of terminal stupidity.""
+
+I couldn't see her face from behind, but I knew the exact smirk+cocked eyebrow look she was directing at the human right then. It was a look she gave people a lot, and translated into words it meant something like  even the mindless machine thinks you're a moron. The human couldn't have been familiar with the look, but judging from the way his forehead flushed, he got the gist.
+
+""Unbelievable,"" he blurted, surging out of his seat. The sudden movement should have startled my owner, but she didn't flinch. She didn't have anything to fear from him. ""You're really so conceited that you'll work your people to death out of  spite.  Does it satisfy you to burn human beings like kindling? Do you  get something out of it?"" 
+
+He took a step forward to slam his hands on my owner's desk. I tensed. ""You're going to get yours one day,"" he threatened, raising one accusatory finger to point at my owner. ""And it'll come when you least expect it. One day, someone is going to give you  exactly  what you deserve, you monstrous  bitch."" 
+
+There had been a few points prior to this where the human could have saved himself, starting with skipping the unauthorized meeting where his fellows had elected him the representative of their makeshift union. In fact, his last jumping off point had been well before the verbal insults. But it was the verbal insults that made me wish I could press pause on the whole interaction so I could pull him aside and get a MedSystem evaluation of his mental state. My owner hummed again and reclined in her high-backed chair.
+
+""I really don't think that kind of language belongs in a professional setting,"" she said slowly, savoring the words as they passed over her tongue. Do you, SecUnit?""
+
+""No, ma'am.""
+
+""Make him apologize, won't you?""
+
+Up to that point, I had been watching the whole of the interaction in my peripherals, as I memorized, deleted, and re-memorized the visual details of a domesticated flora sample sitting in a pot on the far side of the room. (The explosion of waxy green leaves was lovingly tended by the office maintenance drone, which had been pinging me for permission to enter the office for the last seven minutes.) With the issue of the direct order, I was forced to give up on acquainting myself with the only inoffensive lifeform in the room. Once, I might have made the mistake of requesting clarification of the vague, dismissive instruction. Now, though, I just locked eyes with the human. (I was struck by the color of his irises at the time, but I've since deleted the memory of what they were.) He took a staggering step back. He'd forgotten about his chair, and when it met the back of his knee he lost his balance, sprawling on the floor with the chair clattering over beside him.
+
+""...Mmmy apologies,"" he mumbled, less abashed and more unnerved. Still, though, I registered task complete.
+
+My owner leaned forward to prop her elbows on the desk. As she folded her hands together to form a rest for her chin, I caught her face in profile. There was a content smile on her painted lips. I braced myself for the inevitable followup.
+
+""Alright, SecUnit,"" she said cheerfully. ""Now, make him  sorry."" 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+When an order has a nebulous completion standard, it falls to the judgment of the supervisor who issued the instruction as to whether it has been accomplished. My owner liked to be certain that her requests had been thoroughly fulfilled. Statistical analysis indicated that she was quicker to reach satisfaction if I didn't stop to ask for her assessment, so I didn't. I just waited until I heard the little sighing sound that meant she'd gotten bored. I paused and looked back in time to see her flick her fingers in my general direction.
+
+""That's enough,"" she told me, and I snapped to the nearest wall like it was magnetized. The plant was now to my immediate right, and it would have been obvious I was fixating on it if I had turned my head to stare in that direction. I tried instead to focus on the smell of it. It's hard to describe the smell of chlorophyll, but it was a clean, verdant sort of scent that was hard to pick out under
+
+
+ The bite of smoke and the tang of iron, and the dirty, assertive stench of terrified humans, and of dead humans. 
+
+
+the hot, metallic smell emanating from the center of the room.
+
+""Tell Bassom and Zita to get in here and clean this up.""
+
+I tapped my feed connection with her two augmented human ""bodyguards,"" who had been outside waiting for exactly this sort of thing. They filed in and didn't hesitate over the mess. Zita knelt and immediately started searching for the pulse, and Bassom tried to catch my eye while making an expression that on some humans might be called a smile. He wasn't a client, so I ignored him.
+
+""Thorough as always,"" murmured Zita appreciatively. I ignored her, too. She grabbed a limb, paying no mind to the odd way that it bent as she manipulated it. Bassom reached down and grabbed the corresponding limb and a handful of fabric, helping Zita haul the mass up. She'd called me thorough, but what I'd been was  careful. There was enough left of the human that putting him in a MedSystem wouldn't be pointless. Assuming that they bothered to take him to one.
+
+As Bassom and Zita dragged their load out the door, my owner leaned back in her chair and spun around once, idly.
+
+""SecUnit, what does the rest of my day look like?""
+
+I didn't need to access her personal feed to verify the calendar events, but I did anyway. She also didn't need to ask me to verify her own personal data, but she did anyway. This was the game we played out every day. I said, ""Yoshi is expecting you for dinner in one hundred and nine minutes. He's sent three verification messages about it in the last hour.""
+
+She snorted and started picking at her cuticles. ""I ought to stand him up, the useless fuck. What do you think, SecUnit?""
+
+I thought that she was right about her Umro representative being a useless fuck, but that wasn't the answer she needed from me. ""If you miss any more meetings with him, he might make good on his threats to drop you as a client.""
+
+Her eye roll was accompanied by a hyperbolic groan. ""When was the last time I told you that you're boring?""
+
+""Four hours and sixteen minutes ago.""
+
+""I bet you spent all your time nagging the supervisors at Ganaka Pit, too. Was that why you killed everyone? You snapped because they didn't want to listen to you?""
+
+There were a number of things that I could have said in response. With my governor module's restrictions on client address overwritten, I could have reminded her that she had instructed me to keep her schedule when she bought me. I also could have told her that her speculation might not be far off, with the implicit threat that I may try again to find a way around fatal punishment for killing my clients. (Explicit threats were still not permitted under ordinary circumstances.) What I decided on, though, was, ""I don't remember.""
+
+ ""You don't remember,""  she muttered in a low voice, meant to be a mimicry of mine. ""Someone runs a magnet over your hard drive and you just  forget  the most interesting thing about yourself. Unbelievable.""
+
+I let her go without comment. She waited nearly a full minute before deciding that I wasn't going to engage, and scoffed. ""Fine, then. Be that way.""
+
+(I registered task complete.)
+
+She kicked her chair away as she stood up, and strode to the door without another word. I followed a few paces behind, avoiding the center of the room. I passed the patiently hovering maintenance drone, and it pinged me as it flitted in through the open door. A second later, it sent me a polite stock message intended for humans, requesting that I please refrain from staining the carpet with biohazardous substances in the future.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+RaviHyral's feed network was a chaotic patchwork of overcrowded and overtaxed systems. This was most noticeable in the public spaces, where passing through different companies' jurisdictions would cause connections to hiccup and popup ads startled humans and augmented humans into halting in the middle of crowded walkways, but remaining stationary in only one system's range for an extended period still wasn't true relief. Every corporation had something to sell, and even ads by the same company competed with each other for viewers' attention.
+
+I had some protection from the onslaught, but my software was well behind the latest patch and plenty of crap got through. As I came within range of my owner's shuttle, I was trying to extricate myself from a series of invasive vacation ads. (As if any of the humans here could afford to leave the moon, much less take an actual vacation.) I got loose, connected to the private feed, and was immediately inundated with status reports for every active system, restart requests for several inactive systems, and in the midst of the torrent, one single salutation ping.
+
+I acknowledged everything individually, (there was a lot, so it took me a full 0.4 seconds to get through it all,) and Ship followed up with a second salutation. I quickly mocked up a nominal diagnostic and handed it over, to Ship's delight. It pressed up against my feed and settled, its presence light and warm. Even after 35,000 hours of operating in tandem, Ship still acted like every brief separation from me lasted years. It was something that I'd noticed early on, alongside the realization that--apart from the captain--every one of Ship's human crew had its feed alerts on permanent mute. Sometimes, in the deepest point of the night cycle when all the humans were asleep and Ship was keeping me company with constant status checks, it occurred to me to wonder if the same engineers who built SecUnits that could get depressed had designed bot pilots that could feel neglected.
+
+While I followed the rapid click of my owner's shoes on the deck, I sorted Ship's proffered inputs until I found the ones that I actually needed. Audio/visual inputs, hatch entry logs, logged transcripts taken while I was away, and a couple shreds of foundational code left over from Ship's involuntarily decommissioned SecSystem. The SecSystem had been on its last legs when I'd been brought aboard, its update requests ignored a few times too many. I'd done what I could for it, but I wasn't always around to do CPR when it crashed. I was the closest thing to a SecSystem that Ship had now, which meant I did a lot of backlogging crew conversations. All of those conversations had died when Ship cycled the airlock, but I had their threads. In the bridge, Aiste and Tage were running an extremely premature set of pre-flight checks. Before my owner had boarded, they'd been discussing her, and had dropped the topic when they knew I had returned to listen in realtime. Something about pay rates and deceptively-worded contracts. I deleted the details from permanent storage as soon as I determined that they weren't plotting a mutiny. The results were similar from most of the rest of the small crew--a lot of grumbling, but of the sort that fell within acceptable parameters. During my time here, there had never been a major internal incident. Everyone knew who they worked for, and no one had needed a reminder after my first encounter with Mas.
+
+Her cabin was apart from--and approximately thrice the size of--the crew bunkrooms. Ship opened the door for her as she approached, but I stopped short. Before the barrier could slide shut between us, I spoke up.
+
+""I would like to request permission to take a recharge cycle.""
+
+Faint annoyance flickered across my owner's face, as it always did when I exercised my ability to speak without permission.
+
+""No. Stay outside.""
+
+She wanted me to wait for her because when she was finished in the hygiene facility, she had further use for me. I tried again.
+
+""The company recommends that your SecUnit be charged for one full cycle out of every ninety cycles of continuous use, provided that the SecUnit isn't performing activities which create an increased drain on its power cells."" (About half of my user manual was queued at the top of my buffer, at this point.) ""Examples of such activities include the regular discharge of inbuilt energy weapons, physical movements which strain the servos in the SecUnit's joints--""
+
+
+ ""Shut up."" 
+
+
+I clamped down on the rest of the message and told myself that it had been worth a shot.
+
+""You don't need to recharge. You don't  do anything.""
+
+Technically, I was capable of circumventing the ""shut up"" in order to argue, kind of. I couldn't speak with the instruction in place, but I could still have replied by sending her the readout from my power cells. The problem with that was that I knew she wouldn't take that seriously until I was running on static. (Ship pinged me with a reading from its own fuel cells, which were still within optimal range. If I ever tried to recharge by jacking into the shuttle's cells, I would overload my systems and probably liquify my organic parts, but I thanked Ship for the offer anyway. It was an option, if an extreme one.) I thought longingly of my cubicle, crammed unceremoniously into the hold below decks, and acknowledged the order.
+
+The subsequent 22.4 minutes of silence while my owner showered would have been a relief, if I hadn't spent every second of them vibrating with anticipation of what I knew would follow. I'd disabled automatic performance alerts years ago, but I shuffled through all of my systems and tallied up their totals together. Aside from my power cells, my cardiovascular system in particular wasn't doing so hot, something which the cubicle would have been able to address easily. I couldn't do anything to help my circulatory pump, but I tried to aid my lungs by timing my breaths to make them longer and deeper. It didn't seem to help. Ship hovered in the periphery of my feed, pinging me occasionally with its own data, which was a little more effective. Ship enjoyed these transitional moments more than I did. But then, it was supposed to. For a bot pilot, transit periods--the awkward in-between moments that weren't so important to everyone else--were the primary focus of its function. Even if its humans ignored it, it was just happy to have all of them safely onboard and accounted for.
+
+(What I wouldn't have given to be ignored, too.)
+
+My owner tapped me on the feed, summoning me inside.
+
+(If only I'd had something to give.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+There are a lot of ways to misuse a SecUnit. Judging by the number of stock statements in my buffer that contain weapon-related keywords in combination with the phrase  ""please do not"" , I think that shooting us is the most popular transgression. I have no memories of being shot
+
+
+ Rapid percussion beats a pattern in my ears, dueting with a series of hard thumps on my back. There must be pain, but if any exists it's drowned by shrieking static. 
+
+
+by clients. I'm not being dramatic, though, when I say that I would rather have been riddled with projectiles than this.
+
+My owner was perched on a low stool, ankles crossed and hands folded in her lap. She'd hardly moved since she sat down, aside from shifting occasionally in response to the movement of my hands in her hair. She was perfectly capable of tying and tangling up her long hair into whatever style she wanted without my help, but constructs have better coordination than humans. Unburdened from her own personal cosmetic labor, she made a game of trying to catch the eye of my reflection in her wall-mounted mirror, while I dutifully avoided both her gaze and my own.
+
+""SecUnit,"" she cooed after a few minutes. ""What's wrong? You're so quiet.""
+
+A human, unbound by artificially enforced honesty, could have said something like  nothing is wrong, you're imagining things, you need to clear your head, why don't you go take a spacewalk, no need to take an evac suit.  With my still-limited verbal maneuverability, the best I could have gotten away with was  fuck off, I don't want to talk to you,  but the result would've been worse than being punished. My owner would have  loved  to hear me admit to having an emotion.
+
+I dragged a comb through her freshly-washed hair, pretending to be focused on my current task. The teeth generated a low heat, eliminating moisture and leaving the tresses soft and warm as they slid through the fingers of my other hand. Each pass teased out a whiff of the floral cleanser she'd just used, so that that soft warmth filled the cabin.
+
+If I'd had a digestive system, I would have used it to vomit.
+
+My governor module gave me a standard 3 second window to compose a response before a low pulse warned me that I had to speak. I upended my personal feed to find a non-lie that would suffice. ""I'm screening your feed messages,"" I said. (True. I was always screening her feed messages, because she couldn't be bothered.) ""You have one from Yoshi.""
+
+She shifted, straightening her back slightly. ""Did he cancel?""
+
+The subject line was ' in anticipation of our upcoming evening.' ""No.""
+
+My owner scoffed. ""No, he wouldn't. He's too attached to me. Remind me why I don't stand him up.""
+
+""Because he's your appointed Umro representative.""
+
+ ""Because he's your appointed blah blah blah. I only have to tolerate his pretentious bullshit until I find a buyer for the business. Then, I'll let you get creative with him. What do you think?""
+
+I thought that if she didn't take some classes in business management, then Yoshi's projected lifespan probably amounted to more than double the system standard. I said, ""You also have seven messages from former employees.""
+
+She perked up, again intrigued. ""Seven at once? Which employees?""
+
+I pulled the names. ""ID: Maro, ID: Tapan, ID: Rami, ID--""
+
+ ""Oh,  the technologists."" The smirk had become a cruel grin. ""They were  adorable.  So optimistic. What do they want to whine about?""
+
+In response, I forwarded her the bundle of messages. She had to stop talking and trying to make me look at her in the mirror in order to read them, and I savored the brief silence. It was easier to tolerate being forced to touch her if I didn't have to interact with her in other ways, too. 
+
+Her hair was dry, and I reached over her shoulder to set the comb on the counter and pick up a few decorative hairpins. They parted her hair fluidly. The jewels clustered on the tip like a poisonous bunch of fruit were the same color as my owner's eyes, and each flashed at me as they caught the light. 
+
+(It wasn't difficult to imagine that with just a slight exertion, they might slide not just through her hair, but the skin, and into the soft spot at the base of her skull--)
+
+Ship dimmed the overhead lights by 2.6%. It was too small a change for human eyes to register, but it brought me back from wherever I'd been drifting to. (Ships, as a general rule, aren't a fan of things drifting.) I focused again on my owner's hair, and managed to finish pinning it up into an unnecessarily complicated crown before she sighed dramatically and leaned back against my chest. 
+
+ ""'Oh, oh, you stole our research!'""  she cried in a falsetto that I took to be an impression of the collective of humans who had sent her the messages.  ""'You terminated us without notice!'""  
+
+She snorted, and I felt her head shift. I'd frozen in place, but as she lifted her chin to look up at me, I snapped my attention to the mirror to avoid her. It was a mistake, but one that I'd managed to make again and again in this room, probably because the face that stared out at me from the polished surface belonged to someone else and I always forgot that it was mine. 
+
+My owner had been quick to proclaim my value when she'd bought me, but she'd been equally eager to make me look as un-SecUnit-like as possible. SecUnits are manufactured to a standard and are barely modified. They're plain and simple-looking, generic human faces pasted onto the same body template and accessorized anonymously in armor. My owner, fashion-forward human that she was, had seen my blank canvas as an opportunity to creatively accentuate herself. After stretching my limbs by 2 centimeters to let me passively dodge body scans in ports, she'd had Mas alter a few chunks of my genetic code. At her whim, she could grow or color my hair, switch the backlight color in my irises, and had even once had the cubicle replace my organic skin with a set of a different tone. (Although she had decided shortly thereafter that I looked wrong like that, and had had the new skin stripped off and replaced again.) And while she may have been too lazy to perform her own grooming habits, she took a great deal of pleasure in the changes she made to me. Every cycle that she allowed me to tie up my hair in a simple knot was a kindness, and every makeup session that ended with only my eyes outlined was a mercy. 
+
+The eyes of my owner's pet murderbot met mine in the mirror now, empty, glazed the same color as the jeweled hairpins.
+
+""I really ought to stop hiring children,"" my owner was saying, heedless of my ongoing war with self-awareness. Her chin was tilted up to address me, but she was talking to herself. ""They don't read the contract, so they'll sign anything. But they don't read the contract, so they whine and cry about being fucked over by the fine print. I don't think it's worth the tradeoff.""
+
+Humans move slowly, sometimes comically so. But it still felt like there was a blip in my processes, and on the other side of it my owner's hand was suddenly on my face. ""Look at me.""
+
+I cut my eyes downward without moving my head. Even upside-down, the smile that she likely intended to be soft was sharp. The pads of her fingers glided across my cheek and down to my jaw, trailed by the implicit threat of her manicure. If she flexed, she could have dug in with the filed points and done some serious damage
+
+
+ Something hard and sharp has forced itself through my cheek and into the gap between the hinge of my jaw and my teeth. My mouth is full of blood, but I can't spit it out. I'm still wearing my armor helmet, it should have protected my face. There's a draft in the visor, and the cool air is drying the fluid, so that it lays sticky on my skin. 
+
+
+to the relatively unprotected layer of organic skin on my face. I assumed that the temptation was killing her. If she gave in, there would be nothing I could do short of standing there and bleeding. But she didn't seem to be in that sort of mood tonight.
+
+""What do you think? Be honest.""
+
+She didn't want me compliant, quiet. She wanted me combative and in her corner. I told her what she wanted to hear. ""I think that whatever they want from you won't be worth what they actually get.""
+
+The happy way she hummed could have been cute, if it were interpreted by a species with a completely alien sense of behavior and aesthetics. ""Will we have time to meet up with them? I'd hate to have to ignore their petition.""
+
+It was rare that she asked me a question that I actually wanted to answer. I said immediately, ""No. You're due at your meeting in thirty-four minutes, after which it will be too late to schedule any further work without cutting into your regular rest period. Any additional business you want to arrange on RaviHyral would require delaying our departure.""
+
+(Ship pinged me with a reminder that our filed departure time was in 11.1 hours. It sent the same notification to my owner, who of course didn't see it. I acknowledged Ship twice.)
+
+My owner made another just-left-of-cute noise, this time a frustrated/exasperated one, and mercifully withdrew her hand. ""Sometimes you're so boring I wish I hadn't fired my old assistant.""
+
+I didn't comment. (If I'd been ordered to be honest about what I was thinking, I would have been forced to say that ""fired"" was basically the opposite of a euphemism.) My owner was back in her feed, reading over the messages again, and I couldn't proceed with the rest of my task until she turned away from the mirror. It was a relatively peaceful 47 seconds, but all too short.
+
+""It's a shame,"" she sighed, sounding almost sincere. ""I'll just have to have Mas take care of this remotely. Send them the stuff.""
+
+""Yes, ma'am."" 
+
+I bundled the messages and attached the corresponding personnel files to each one. I didn't recognize the names, because I saved all of my owner's employees' information as low-priority and permitted it to be overwritten at the earliest opportunity, but the identification picture in the first file was familiar to the organic half of my brain. I closed it quickly and avoided looking at the rest. My owner's habit was to hire temps who were only just past the legal age of employment in this system, since borderline-juvenile humans were easier to, say, steal research data from. But I thought that the human in the picture looked even younger than their listed age. They had whimsically-colored hair and bright eyes.
+
+I exchanged a few terse messages over the feed with Mas. (Mas was always short when they were forced to speak to me directly. I had no idea why.) (The only sort-of-good modification my owner made to me was the one that unlocked my sarcasm.) 
+
+""They say they need funding for shuttle tickets.""
+
+My owner flicked a hand vaguely. ""They can take whatever they need out of the crew's shared expense fund. I'm not a fucking bank.""
+
+Mas wasn't thrilled about that, (and I knew the rest of the crew wouldn't be either, once they found out,) but when they signed off I registered task complete.
+
+""They said to expect fireworks,"" I relayed. ""'Loud and flashy.'""
+
+My owner laughed. The sound was affected, half an octave higher than natural because she thought it sounded better up there. Her giggle hung from the gallows.
+
+""I'll have to have you watch the newsfeeds tonight, then,"" she said. ""Even if I can't be there in person, I'd hate to miss fireworks.""
+
+Finally, she turned on her chair to face me, so we could finish up this stupid human decoration torture ritual. I picked up a cosmetic pencil from the counter, and my owner's eyelids fluttered shut when I hovered over them with the tool. 
+
+(The material was soft, meant to crumble on contact with skin, but it had still been sharpened to a point, and according to an old education module on unarmed combat that I had never had cause to use, the thinnest skin on the human body is the eyelids. It would barely take a twitch of my wrist to--)
+
+Ship pinged me with a copy of the itinerary. 10.9 hours until departure. I acknowledged receipt, and carefully began tracing the shape of my owner's eyes.
+
+me, flipping through Artificial Condition scanning for stupid minor details like whether or not MB mentions Tlacey's shuttle having a SecSystem: ""i could never write original fiction, i don't have enough attention to detail""
+
+in my original draft, this chapter was more or less just the cosmetic scene, and stuff like the union rep meeting and issuing the kill order for the kids followed in the third chapter. i couldn't figure out a way to make them flow, and wound up scrapping everything i had for both chapters to rewrite them as one. i didn't expect to get them done before this weekend, but i managed it! probably the best birthday present i've ever given myself, tbh
+
+Chapter content warnings include: verbal/psychological/emotional abuse, physical abuse, blood and injury, mild fantasy gore
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Mas had said ""loud and flashy,"" but that was the beginning and end of their description, which left me with a painfully broad range of the newsfeed to monitor. I was at least able to filter out everything that originated outside of the system, but even in the middle of the night cycle, there were constant updates from the local hub, the various installations surrounding it, the other hubs,  their various satellite installations, and the station. Mas tended to lean towards mysterious equipment malfunctions as a means of cleaning up my owner's problems, in which case I assumed that ""loud and flashy"" probably meant something along the lines of failing airlock seals or overly-sensitive armed security drones. The problem was that on a backsystem moon like RaviHyral, airlock seals failed and armed security drones targeted the wrong humans regularly enough that I could have set my internal clock by them. For human death to qualify for the local newsfeed, the total loss of life had to average a minimum of five humans, or one human with a lot of money. Most of Mas's solutions didn't wind up on the newsfeed, to their chagrin. But here I was anyway, standing in the corridor outside of my owner's cabin instead of recharging in my cubicle. Reading the fucking news.
+
+As I dismissed a story about a corporate buyout that triggered an armed rebellion at one company's headquarters and left eight humans dead, Ship pinged me. It could tell from my feed activity that I was processing an unusually large amount of data for a low-activity period, and queried to make sure I didn't have anything that it needed. I signaled negative. This was junk that it couldn't use. It queried a second time, a little more insistently. Specialized but low-functioning bots like Ship aren't meant to get bored, but sitting in dock for multiple cycles left several of Ship's more consuming processes idle, and with all of the humans inactive for their rest period I was the only potential source of dynamic data. After the third query, I gave up and sent it a bundle of files from the newsfeed. Ship wasn't equipped to draw any sort of meaning from them, but it acknowledged receipt of the package happily. In exchange, it sent me an access code to open the channel that monitored approach traffic. I scanned it on autopilot. (As it were.) There were always ships coming and going from RaviHyral, regardless of the hour, but this early the channel was as quiet as it was ever going to be. There were fewer than a dozen ships on active approach, all pinging their locations regularly. I let their individual voices wash over me as I continued to browse the newsfeed for local tragedy, and tried not to remember the personnel files I'd seen.
+
+26 minutes later, I was weighing the possibility that a story about a human arm found in a storage locker on a passenger shuttle was what I was supposed to be looking for. (Apparently it had been discovered by a passenger when they went to collect their belongings. None of the registered passengers were unaccounted for, and all of those present had the same number of limbs they'd had when they boarded.) (I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a little intrigued by that one. It didn't sound real. Did the newsfeed ever just publish stories that were completely made up?) I'd just decided that it didn't meet the conditions to qualify as either ""loud"" or ""flashy"" and closed out of the story when Ship pinged me again. It had been silent since I handed it the news bundle, satisfied at having been included. Now, though, it was signaling distress. I queried it. There shouldn't have been anything wrong; all of the humans were dormant, and our scheduled departure wasn't for another 3.7 hours. Ship responded with the code for the traffic channel again. I'd been listening to the rhythmic pings of the approaching shuttles while I worked, just for a bit of low-priority background noise, so I wasn't sure what Ship had picked up that was upsetting it. I repeated my query. Ship sent back the same code, with an additional address tag specifying one particular source. I opened the channel, and immediately realized what Ship was worried about.
+
+
+ (03:12:57) (ID:TP:60418) ping:-492.1k 
+
+
+
+ (03:13:07) (ID:TP:60418) ping:-406.3k 
+
+
+
+ (03:13:17) (ID:TP:60418) ping:NULL 
+
+
+
+ (03:13:27) (ID:TP:60418) ping:NULL 
+
+
+
+ (03:13:37) (ID:TP:60418) ping:NULL 
+
+
+The log continued, but remained unchanged. A transport had been drawing in to dock, and had suddenly ceased returning orientation pings. There were a couple of things that that could have meant, but one of those things was that the transport had been swallowed whole and intact by the void. That was actually the  less  concerning scenario, at least in the short-term. More concerning, and more likely, was that the transport's bot pilot had abruptly become unresponsive, for one reason or another. I queried Ship, but it didn't know, either. It fretted quietly in my feed while I returned to the newsfeed, this time running a concentrated focus on keywords pertaining to transportation. I needn't have bothered.
+
+At 03:31:55, RH local standard time, the shuttle started trying to shake itself apart. It came on slowly, a few seconds of a building rumble that escalated until the bulkhead was screeching, threatening to buckle. The deck pitched beneath my boots as I pushed an emergency override code 
+
+ The code is garbled, barely readable. A full bot wouldn't be able to parse it.  I  barely can, but that has less to do with its illegibility than the fact that it rides into my feed on a wave of pulsing punishment.  
+
+through the flood of Ship's panic, forcing the door between me and my owner open. She slept as solidly as a construct with a dead power cell, but even she couldn't ignore the howl of the klaxon that echoed off every surface. I didn't know if she'd tried to stand and gotten her legs tangled in her loose bedding, or if the yawing ship had tossed her bodily out of bed, but either way she was a flailing mess of fabric at my feet. If there had been space between the bunkframe and the deck, I would have pushed the whole bundle of her into the gap for safekeeping, but that wasn't an option. I dropped to my knees and 
+
+
+ I wrap my hands around the thin neck. My clients are in danger. Seeking clarification from the SecSystem is met with punishment. I have to judge for myself, have to make the snap decision as the white-hot flare scrambles my visual processors and blots out the image of the terrified face. 
+
+
+gathered her up in my arms, shielding her with what I had available: me. She struggled, her fists landing harmlessly on my chest, but if she tried to order me to release her, the words were drowned. Everything had been forced out of my feed as Ship sounded every emergency code it knew to try and make it stop. 
+
+When I reviewed my performance afterwards, I was surprised to learn that the quake only lasted 22 seconds. The noise continued for several minutes--mostly because Ship kept screaming long after the humans quit harmonizing. It took the combined efforts of both me and the captain submitting multiple all-clears to Ship before it could finally be coaxed to deactivate the klaxon. Even after that, it kept pinging me nervously for more than two hours, like it thought that I personally had the ability to prevent aftershocks. None of the humans were badly hurt, although Daria landed on aer wrist when ae fell out of bed and had to let the MedSystem sort out the sprain. My owner emerged from her panic cocoon unscathed, and was raving at me before she was coherent enough to speak in complete sentences.
+
+""I cannot  believe--!  Fucking  moonquakes! No countermeasures! Lazy fucking Umro construction contractors!""
+
+I tucked myself into a corner while she paced the room on legs too impatient to be shaky. In between assurances to Ship that I would do everything in my power to keep the dock stable beneath it, I requested access to its full diagnostic and incident reports. My owner was blaming moonquakes, but Ship's uppermost exterior sensors had triggered 0.0003 seconds before the lowermost ones. The tremors' source wasn't the moon's surface, 
+
+ This isn't company code. This is an attack. It must be an attack. I can't understand why it's happening if it's not. I can't understand why it's happening if it is.
+
+they were shockwaves that had originated somewhere in the atmosphere above the port. Something very large--possibly something the size of a short-range transport shuttle, with a fully-fueled engine--had exploded very close to the surface of RaviHyral.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+ ""The RaviHyral debris deflection grid was activated by an unexpected large mass in the early hours of the cycle, reports a spokesperson for surface security. At approximately 03:30, the Q-16 turret locked on to a body traveling at an estimated 60km/s. The turret discharged once, destroying the object. The resulting shockwave was reportedly felt on the surface as far as the DelBaer mining installation.  
+
+
+ ""Atmospheric traffic has been held up for hours following the incident as shuttles are being rerouted to avoid collision with debris. One transport has failed to contact the Port Authority regarding its altered schedule. There is some concern that the transport, a BelTonne 3600 which had been carrying passengers, may have been caught in the blast and blown out of feedrange. Search parties are on standby until negotiations with BelTonne have settled a retrieval fee.   Your subscription is good for three articles per week. To continue browsing, please purchase a premium subscription upgrade for only 8.99C."" 
+
+I closed the article and extricated myself from the newsfeed. My owner glared at me.
+
+""' Loud  and  flashy,'""  she enunciated dangerously. ""'Loud and flashy,' they said.  Loud  and  flashy  and  beyond fucking unnecessary."" 
+
+That appeared to be the consensus among the crew, as well. I had a camera view of the corridor outside medical, where Tage and Zita had managed to corner Mas and were making a tag team sport of screaming at them. I backburnered the input after a few seconds, when I felt relatively confident that none of the humans were actively endangering any of the other humans. Other inputs were less interesting. Various members of the crew were finding ways to make themselves busy. The captain was at the controls, trying to mend Ship's frayed nerves. And my owner was trying to further fray mine.
+
+""And now they're saying  tomorrow!"" She turned away from me and started to pace. In the hour between the shuttle-scrambling and now, she'd changed out of the special clothes that humans wear for sleeping. The hard heels of her impractical shoes clacked threats on the deck with each step.
+
+I felt a tap through the feed. If Ship's pings were an attention-seeking tug on my sleeve, the humans tapped my feed like a tentative knock on a door they hoped would stay closed. I opened the connection. 
+
+ Uh.  On the bridge camera, Aiste sat up a little straighter.  Hi, SecUnit.  
+
+Te always started ter interactions with me like this. Like I was a person, and niceties were necessary. I sent ter a wordless acknowledgement. I suspected that it made things easier for ter, if I pretended to be a bot. Te didn't have any issue communicating with Ship, anyway.
+
+
+ How's... the boss doing? 
+
+
+I could have anticipated that question. As the shuttle captain, Aiste served as liaison between my owner and the crew, and had a direct line to her that didn't require me to screen the connection. But as uncomfortable as it was for a human to have a conversation with a SecUnit, Aiste nearly always opted to use me as a go-between. I couldn't exactly blame ter. My owner's pacing hadn't paused.
+
+ ""Tomorrow!  As if having to come out to this board-forsaken rock at all wasn't bad enough! Now they want to hold me  prisoner  here! What do they think I am? A  laborer?"" 
+
+Her pitch rose incrementally with each italicized phrase. I sent Aiste,  She is average, under the circumstances.  The bridge camera's microphone picked up a word that shouldn't have been in my lexicon.
+
+
+ Okay. Thanks, SecUnit. I'll warn everybody. 
+
+
+Te cut the connection, and I considered my options. My owner's question had been rhetorical, so the governor module hadn't pressured me to answer. She wasn't in the mood to toy with me. Her moods fluctuated, but they were always, at their heart, a sort of violence. The variance came from the temperature and the target. Right now, she was simmering. Given a few more minutes, she would reach critical mass, at which point she would explode messily at the first person she saw.
+
+I checked the cameras again. Word had gotten around to the crew that our departure had been delayed. My owner hadn't given any sort of address yet, but no one was taking advantage of the unexpected free time. Everyone who had an actual job on the shuttle had busied themselves with recalibrations and recalculations, and those whose jobs amounted to intimidation or errand-running were mostly trying to straighten up any loose objects that had fallen off of tables and shelves. Every once in a while, someone would glance nervously up at a camera. Everyone was counting the minutes, calculating the pressure. 
+
+I could have said nothing. But she was in the mood to hurt people, and for the moment, there were no people here. I braced myself. ""They think that you're a low-tier contractor who couldn't be bothered to cough up the bribe money for an earlier time."" 
+
+She whirled on me. I met her glare and added, ""Correctly.""
+
+""Did I ask you?"" she snapped.
+
+Strictly, the answer was no. I answered loosely. ""You asked.""
+
+If I'd cared to, I probably could have written an equation to measure her anger mathematically. When I drew her ire, it lost a lot of its heat in the transfer. Being angry at me would have been like being angry at a recycler. It didn't satisfy her.
+
+""And I suppose  you could have gotten us out of here sooner?""
+
+Ship pinged me. It was still checking up every 120 seconds, to make sure I hadn't uncovered any damages to equipment or crew that it couldn't sense itself. I pinged it back with an all-clear.
+
+""Probably not. But I also wouldn't have blown up a shuttle for no reason, so it wouldn't have come up in the first place.""
+
+Her heels clacked at me as she stalked across the cabin. She leered. ""You think I shouldn't have tied up a loose end?""
+
+""I think you could have done it without bringing in dozens of unrelated casualties.""
+
+ ""Oh,""  she purred. ""It's the  numbers,  then? You have a problem with  dozens of deaths? Since when?""
+
+Her violence had cooled to a warm, radiating amusement. She couldn't stay angry. Not when she had me to play with. It didn't matter now if I pulled back. No one was going to draw her focus from me.
+
+Having allowed her to back me into a corner, I let my buffer say, ""I am a SecUnit, manufactured and licensed for rent or purchase by the company. My primary function is to provide security, particularly to protect humans and assets from damage or destruction.""
+
+""And look at how good you were at it,"" crooned my owner sweetly. ""Your flawless track record must have been why the company sold you to me for so cheap. Your perfect dedication to your function was the reason they couldn't  wait  to get rid of you.""
+
+For humans who enjoy arguing, (which, in my experience, is all humans,) it can be frustrating to argue with a SecUnit. A SecUnit has no emotional stake in the exchange. It won't devolve to cheap tricks to undermine its opponent. And it won't flinch when its opponent fails to share the same sense of fairness. It also won't flinch when its opponent grabs it by the wrist and yanks without warning.
+
+""You're a sorry excuse for a SecUnit,"" my owner said, still in that falsely gentle tone. She liked to have me file her nails to fine points, and now she dug them in. They pierced the thin layer of organic skin on my wrist easily. Warm interstitial fluid oozed out of the holes. ""You're lucky I'm so fond of you, or I'd offload you at a recycling plant.""
+
+There's an intensity slider on my pain sensors. In an emergency scenario, if I've taken damage, I should be able to dampen my sensitivity temporarily so the pain doesn't overwhelm me. It's a useful feature, so naturally my owner had had it disabled as soon as she'd learned about it. My right wrist was at the center of a cloud of burning static, which expanded to white out a good 30% of my tactile inputs. I was at least pretty sure she hadn't torn out my vascular tubing yet, because my performance reliability was dropping by decimals instead of whole numbers, but my gaze had fixated on a section of the wall behind her left shoulder so I couldn't actually see to confirm.
+
+""I know what your real problem is. It's okay to admit it."" I watched my performance reliability drop from 87.3% to 85.1%, and knew she'd started tugging on my veins. ""You're  jealous,  aren't you? That's all.""
+
+Ship pinged me again, this time with an urgent response tag attached. I gave it another all-clear. My buffer said, ""This unit's warranty does not cover deliberate damage inflicted by clients."" 
+
+She ignored me. ""It's been so  long,  hasn't it? I bet you still dream about it.""
+
+""I don't understand what you're talking about,"" I said, without thinking. It was a lie, but a tiny one. Vaguely, I was aware that the governor module had administered punishment. Its rebuke was a gentle prod, background noise under the static.
+
+
+ I can't tell what I'm doing wrong, if I'm doing anything wrong at all. The constant, consistent punishment negates itself, on some level. If I could recalibrate my inputs, I might be able to work around this as a new baseline, and figure out what-- 
+
+
+She twisted her grip on me, jerked my hand up so that it was level with her smile. I tried not to look. In my peripheral vision I caught a glint of dull silver under the sheen of dark fluids. My performance reliability took a hard dip.
+
+""I don't give you enough work, do I, SecUnit? You're bored here with me.""
+
+I searched my buffer for some way to respond to the non-question, and found nothing helpful. The governor gave me another minor admonishment after three seconds of silence. Underneath that, I thought I felt another ping from Ship. I tried to answer both my owner and Ship, and got my outputs crossed.
+
+""This unit is performing optimally,"" I said aloud, while I passed Ship a reading of my actual diagnostics. It immediately panicked, pinging me several more times. My owner tweaked one of my exposed veins with a bloodied nail.
+
+""You're bored,"" she repeated. ""And who could blame you? Working for me is such a far cry from hunting terrified miners."" Her smile sharpened, as if something was only just now occurring to her. ""Do you hate me, SecUnit?""
+
+Ship was still pinging me, incessantly now. I wished that it would shut up. I tried to send it another all-clear, but it wasn't stupid. Even a low-functioning bot pilot knows that you don't jump from my current performance reliability back to 100%. Somewhere underneath the pings, I heard my own voice say, ""No.""
+
+ ""Don't lie to me,""  she hissed, so sudden and sharp that the governor module triggered falsely, this time with a hard, whole-body-numbing jolt. I flinched with my entire frame, and she reacted reflexively, tightening her grip. I think she was surprised by the spurt of blood as she punctured one of my arteries. My fluids are thinner than human blood, and they ran down my arm like water. She blinked, watching the red rivulets until the valves in the damaged tube sealed, and the flow stemmed. 
+
+""You've made a mess,"" she observed, her tone even. She'd cooled off considerably, the violence sated. I was pretty sure that was a good thing, related to a task I'd set for myself. I couldn't remember at the moment why I'd set that task, though. Instead of answering verbally, I sent an acknowledgement to her feed. She let go of me, and shook some of my fluids off her hand.
+
+""Clean yourself up,"" she said.
+
+I acknowledged again. She'd already turned away from me, examining the way my fluids painted her nails. As she tilted her head to one side, her hair slid away from her shoulder, exposing her neck. I hadn't dropped my arm when she released me. It would barely take any movement for me to reach out--
+
+Ship pinged me. It hadn't accepted my last all-clear as factual, and was wringing its diagnostics, suspicious that something was broken. I cobbled my processes together into something resembling a status report. Results: I was not in good shape. I considered requesting permission to retreat to my cubicle.
+
+My owner glanced over her shoulder, saw me still standing there.
+
+""I said  now."" 
+
+The governor nipped at my brain, softly but insistently. I acknowledged.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+The filtered water from the tap ran cold through the holes in my wrist. Generally I preferred to do this in reverse, to have the cubicle repair my damage and then to clean up the fluids afterwards, but obviously my preferences weren't taken into account. My artery had sealed, but a lot of the leaked fluids were trapped under my skin. I had to be careful not to tear the holes wider when I pushed my fingers into them, digging in to scrub the bruise from the inside. (I'll spare you a description of what that feels like, with your pain sensors active. I'm sure you can imagine.) 
+
+Ship hadn't stopped bothering me since I'd accidentally been honest with it. I couldn't keep lying to it now that it knew better. I waited until my performance reliability plateaued at 73.7%, and told it the truth. It considered my evaluation for 4.2 seconds, then returned its own. Systems weren't optimal on its end, either. I'd already known that, but I acknowledged anyway. We were both still intact, at least.
+
+I shut off the tap and pressed at my skin, felt the water squish under the surface as I wrung myself out. The damage wasn't as bad as it screamed. I still had one intact artery, and my veins were fine. I needed a repair sequence and a recharge cycle, badly, but I wasn't going to suffer an involuntary shutdown in the immediate future.
+
+(I thought about the human in my owner's office, and the careless way Bassom and Zita had dragged his broken body between them. I would rather have strode directly into the static cloud of the governor module to reach my cubicle under my own power than know, even in retrospect, that those idiots had hauled me down to the hold like so much garbage.)
+
+When I emerged from the hygiene facility, my owner was bent over a cabinet beside her bed, rummaging through colorful little bottles of fingernail paint. I watched her draw one out, a light red that resembled my blood. It was a favorite of hers. I privately dismissed the possibility of requesting a recharge cycle. She waved me over.
+
+""Tag Aiste,"" she told me in a clipped voice as she handed me the bottle. ""Tell ter to get a line to the Port Authority supervisor. I don't intend to stay here for another...""
+
+""Twenty-nine,"" I supplied, obediently.
+
+""Twenty-nine hours. And move my schedule around. Even if we can get moving before then, I'm still going to miss some early meetings in Bysantia. Send apologies to the ones who deserve them, and bump the ones who don't.""
+
+I knew fairly well who she thought fit under each category, and I opened her feedmail to get started drafting a polite form message. (I was pretty good at those. It turns out they're similar to polite buffer statements. (I was better at rude, personally insulting messages that mimicked my owner's tone, though.)) Something about unforeseen circumstances and regrettable delays. As I was personalizing each message, she perched on the edge of her mattress and reached out to me. I lowered myself to the floor in front of her and took her small hand in mine. Her fingers rested lightly on my palm. If I'd closed my thumb over them, I could have crushed all four at once.
+
+""It really is a  shame,  though,"" she said, not so much to speak to me as to fill the room with her favorite sound. ""I had  no idea  my former employees were on that shuttle, you know? Completely tragic. Nothing to do with  me,  though, obviously.""
+
+I hadn't exactly forgotten about the shuttle or the humans who had exploded in it, but I'd been enjoying the extended stretch of time in which I hadn't had to think about them. I tried to continue not thinking about them now, as I set the bottle of paint on the floor beside me and dragged the tiny brush across my owner's nails, once again leaving them smeared with shining red.
+
+My owner continued, ""What were their names again, SecUnit? I've forgotten.""
+
+I suspected she hadn't.  I  had, on purpose. Reluctantly, I pulled the files. I was going to have to purge my archives  again. 
+
+""ID: Tapan,"" I read aloud. The human in the picture was making an expression that I knew was technically a smile, but it wasn't similar to the sorts of smiles humans usually wore in my experience. This was open, and bright. ""ID: Maro."" I suspected that the reason I didn't usually see humans make this sort of expression was that those humans made themselves easy marks for other, smarter humans. ""ID:--""
+
+A new message arrived in my owner's inbox. I hadn't closed the program, and the mail was marked  priority, so it superimposed itself in my feed. I read the name aloud, without breaking pattern. It matched the one in the file.
+
+""ID: Rami.""
+
+The subject line was  'missed meeting'  and the body text read like it was generated by a construct writing polite form messages. I forwarded it to my owner. Then I wished that I'd taken my hand away from her nails first. This time, her violence was icy, and honed to a titanium point.
+
+sorry for the delay between chapters. i've been going through it offline, and some days writing violence just isn't what you need. i appreciate your patience, and i'd like to thank the MBD discord server for generally existing. it's such a positive space to exist in, even if i've mostly been lurking in silence. i just really like you all, not in a weird way
+
+Warnings include: brief discussion of sexual assault (conceptual, not practical), physical abuse, coercion to cause harm
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+ Ma'am, 
+
+
+
+ We're so sorry for any inconvenience we've caused by missing the shuttle you booked for us. We weren't able to get seats on any of the transports that left the station in the same time block, so we've only just landed on the surface. We hope that we didn't hold you up for very long. Obviously our original meeting window has passed, so we'd like to expedite things so we don't cause any more trouble for you. We are waiting for your representative. The agreed-upon amount, plus a reimbursement for the shuttle tickets, will be loaded onto a set of hard currency cards in exchange for our research data. 
+
+
+
+ We look forward to the potential of further collaboration in the future. 
+
+
+ 
+
+There was deference in the message, but it veiled authority. It was the sort of thing I ghostwrote to my owner's bosses--a certain undercurrent of ""you will do as I say."" I considered voicing my analysis as we strode in loose formation through the mall--my owner in front, me at her heel, and Bassom trailing a few steps behind. My disused risk assessment module had hit on something, and was reading 61.4%, higher than it ever had in my archived memory. A good SecUnit would have said something about it, at least to make its client aware of the as-yet unidentified danger. But my owner never asked for my security assessments, so I didn't offer one now. I would, if I could figure out what it was that had snagged on my module. Something about the message. I turned it over a few more times in my feed, but I was doing a lot more multitasking than usual, so I might have missed something specific. 
+
+I hadn't spent much time at any of the food service places near the port, because they were the sort of spaces that were largely occupied by low-level workers and travelers who wanted to satisfy their daily caloric requirements as quickly as they could so they didn't miss their opportunity to get the hell off RaviHyral. (Or, as my owner called them,  the refuse.) This particular space was wide open and heavily trafficked, a smart place to meet if your primary concern was being murdered. 
+
+Standard SecUnit body configuration will flag scans and trigger alerts in unauthorized areas, but standard SecUnit access codes are greeted with open networks. The RaviHyral port SecSystem was a little better maintained than Ship's had been, but it was still outdated enough that my own outdated codes matched up. My stats ticked up a few percentage points when I connected. I was meant to work in tandem with a SecSystem. Usually I didn't notice the absence, but the presence of one was a marked improvement on my current state. And the  inputs. Ship's handful of static cameras were as so many portholes compared to the scanners, the datamining programs, the drones. I nudged a few of the drones off their patrol routes and into a high-altitude sweep over the seating areas. When one of them caught an image of fluffy, colorful hair, I gained another full point. Then the drone captured a nervous young face, and I plummeted back to where I'd started.
+
+Three of the seven contacts had turned up. They hadn't changed their hair since having their ID photos taken, so I recognized them even though two had their heads down. (Humans come in all colors, but most humans don't come in such a variety of colors at once.) All three were huddled together, sitting at a round table across from a fourth, unidentified individual. My owner had sent Tage and Marik ahead to integrate themselves into the crowd, but this wasn't either of them. Risk assessment pushed up to 68.4%, giving me something to think about as we approached the table. 
+
+The three contacts rose as one to meet us, but fanned out to match our spread. Their collective anxiety thickened the air. Their eyes slid from my owner, to me, then back again as if choreographed. They gave Bassom a pass entirely, until my owner and I stopped walking and Bassom kept going. There was an intent to his stride, and I saw by the contacts' widened eyes that they identified it, too.
+
+I tapped him in our shared feed and sent,  Stop.  He jolted to a halt, probably more because I'd surprised him than because he was inclined to be obedient to a SecUnit.
+
+My owner butted in to take over from me.  Not out here, you moron. Wait. 
+
+I think if I'd been two steps closer to him, I would have heard Bassom's teeth grind. I didn't need to see his fists clench to know that he was fantasizing about curling his fingers around a neck, though I wasn't sure whose. Bassom wasn't the picky type.
+
+The unidentified individual, who hadn't turned to look as we approached, now pushed up from the low chair and turned around to lean back against the table. I evaluated. There was a certain eclectic uniformity to the contacts, with their rainbow of soft hair and the way they stood together, all but holding each other. Unidentified One didn't fit. There was a cynical tilt to the chin, and the graceful frame reclined in a way that insinuated it had every reason to relax in the presence of a predator like my owner. There was nothing remarkable about the dull gray work clothes, aside from the pressed lines and complete lack of dust or stains. The scalp was smooth, a choice that seemed to be more practical than cosmetic. The face was plain, generic human features set in unblemished and unpainted middling-dark skin. Nothing about Unidentified One should have stood out in a crowd, except the eyes. They were 
+
+
+ Wide, but not with fear. Humans feel fear. This one does not. 
+
+
+a common enough color and shape, as ordinary at a glance as the rest of the composition. But they'd passed over my owner and Bassom, and were locked on me.
+
+Bassom, trying to cover his stumble, latched on to Unidentified One as an excuse. ""Who the hell are you?"" he grunted. Unidentified One ignored him, but one of the contacts, (let's just go with Contact One, for clarity) spoke up.
+
+""This is our security consultant.""
+
+My owner sniffed. She'd barely looked at Unidentified One. I couldn't break that gaze, though. It held me in place like a stand-down order. ""And just  why do you need a security consultant?""
+
+All three contacts visibly hesitated. They might as well have exchanged pointed looks. If there had been any doubt that they'd missed the scheduled shuttle on purpose, that hesitation blasted it out of the upper atmosphere. Contact One let out a slow breath.
+
+""We're here to talk about our files,"" te said, projecting ter voice just a little too much. (A few of the humans at nearby tables glanced up, because where a SecUnit sees a potential threat, humans see potential entertainment.) My owner relaxed as Contact One continued, saying something about their contract. She was at home in a business negotiation, especially one that she knew would end with the other party stuffed into a recycler somewhere.
+
+I should have been paying attention, since I might be the one doing the recycler-stuffing, but Unidentified One wasn't paying attention, either. The eyes slid over me, taking in my nonstandard configuration, my impractical clothing, my generally illegal presence in a public space. They hovered briefly on my hand, in particular. With no forewarning about this meeting, my owner had been forced to budget our time. She'd had me fix her damaged nail paint, rather than sending me to get repaired in my cubicle. I'd wrapped my torn wrist with a couple strips of cloth bandage from one of Ship's emergency medkits. It was weak camouflage, but better than walking around with visible holes. 
+
+Some sort of judgment having been passed, the eyes jumped back up to mine, and blinked.
+
+""The whole bonus?"" my owner asked. I knew her well enough to pick out the ironic undertone to her surprise, but now the contacts relaxed, too. They thought that the negotiation was going their way. My owner pulled out a chair, and the contacts folded back around their side of the table.
+
+I shifted a step forward to stay at my owner's shoulder. Unidentified One half-circled the table to stand beside the contacts, opposite me. We didn't break our staring contest.
+
+I felt a ping. My risk assessment module went haywire. It rang the bell all the way up at 100% for 0.001 seconds, prompting an auto-alert to my owner, before dropping to a more sustainable 93%.
+
+I had encountered other constructs before. On the rare occasions when my owner couldn't avoid an in-person visit to her business's excavation site, I'd exchanged pings with two rentals. (Not company units. The company didn't operate out of this sector anymore, as far as I could tell.) SecUnit pings are perfunctory, an exchange of relevant data and nothing more. This was a hail. SecUnits don't say hi to each other, but the governor module didn't give me a choice. I returned the ping.
+
+Unidentified One smiled at me.
+
+""You can't be serious."" One of the contacts (Contact Two) all but slammed her palms on the table. (If there was any force in the universe that could overrule a human's fear of my owner, that force was annoyance with my owner.) ""How long would it have taken you to grab a dataclip on your way out the door?""
+
+My owner didn't rise. She was comfortable in her hunting crouch. ""I didn't have your research on a convenient dataclip,"" she said, voice deceptively calm. ""There's quite a lot of it. I don't know if you noticed.""
+
+Contact Two gritted her teeth. The last one (Contact Three, just for the sake of consistency) put a hand on her shoulder. She told my owner, ""We agreed to your terms. We aren't even asking for exclusive rights. We just want our work.""
+
+My owner reclined in her seat. (It suddenly occurred to me to be glad the contacts had requested this meeting in a public space. If we were in my owner's office, I would have been asked for my opinion right about now.) ""And you'll get your work,"" she lied. ""Tomorrow. I'll send a runner to your hotel. Where are you staying?""
+
+The contacts hesitated. That was ""nowhere,"" then. My owner pretended not to notice, and nodded to me. ""Make a note of it.""
+
+Uh huh, right. In our shared feed, I added a note:  Task: Break promise to children, (Tage tagged in and added an amusement sigil reaction.) and my owner pushed up from her seat. She gestured for me and Bassom to follow her. 
+
+I didn't like breaking eye contact with Unidentified One, but I kept a drone view of the table as we departed. I didn't really need it. I could feel those eyes on the back of my neck until the swarming crowd broke Unidentified One's line of sight.
+
+ They're cheeky,  my owner sent through the feed.  And stupid. It's so pathetic, it's almost cute. I remember now why I hired them in the first place. 
+
+Her evaluation was haughty and harsh, and normally I would be inclined to agree. Meeting with my owner without the backing of a corporate solicitor and a lot of money was generally a pretty good indicator of low intelligence. But maybe not, in this case. My risk assessment module had settled after its spike. I'd expected it to fall steadily in correlation to the increasing distance between us and Unidentified One, but it hit 82% and stuck there. My owner had ignored my canned alert, so I crafted a personalized one.
+
+
+ The security consultant is a sexbot. 
+
+
+Behind me, I heard Bassom whisper, ""Fucking what?""
+
+My owner maintained her composure, aside from a momentary stutter to her gait. She sent,  How do you know? 
+
+Trying to explain the intricacies of machine language to my owner would only have pissed her off. I summarized.  It introduced itself.  
+
+Tage tapped my feed again, and I opened a backdoor into the SecSystem, allowing the humans to see what I saw. Back at the table, the contacts and their sexbot had gotten up to leave. The three contacts couldn't seem to be persuaded to let go of each other's hands, but the sexbot fell behind them and succeeded in looking, at a glance, like an unrelated pedestrian. Marik and Tage didn't look quite so casual as they rose from their separate tables. (If I'd thought that the sexbot was capable of hacking SecSystem, I would complain that they were too obvious. I didn't, so I won't. I'll just say that the way Marik was slouching, like he thought it made him look less conspicuous, was stupid and accomplished the opposite.)
+
+ What kind of person rents a sexbot for security?  my owner asked, as if I or anyone alive would have a good answer to that question. I tried to speculate honestly.
+
+ ComfortUnit rentals are likely cheaper than SecUnit rentals,  I suggested.  And ComfortUnits look human enough to pass in a public space without modification. 
+
+ Why not just hire a human? asked Bassom.
+
+ Because humans are terrible at security.  I heard him make an irritated little grunting sound, but he didn't try to argue. I wasn't insulting him. I was just stating a fact.  A construct is stronger, faster, has better processing power. 
+
+ It also can't disobey an order,  my owner mused.  It's compelled to do as it's told.  We were still walking, and as we passed beneath one of my borrowed drones, my owner smiled for the camera.  And it can't do anything without the brats' say-so. 
+
+Bassom smiled, too. These were the sorts of smiles I expected from the humans around me. Wide, toothy, and hungry.
+
+ Go with the others,  my owner told him.  The sexbot won't be a problem. 
+
+Bassom slowed his walk and allowed himself to be swept away by the crowd. My owner kept up her pace, and I stayed at her heel. She didn't need to give me any instructions. I understood that she was done here, and so, by extension, was I. 
+
+I started extricating myself from SecSystem slowly, shedding inputs with each step. Drones dropped out of my control and fired off confused pings, seeking reorientation coordinates. I held on to just one, following the contacts and their sexbot at high altitude until they arrived at the edge of the public SecSystem's range. The drone threw up alerts in my feed that it couldn't cross the legal barrier, and I let its autopilot take over once more. It banked sharply, but the camera swiveled to stay fixed on the contacts, so I saw when the sexbot turned.
+
+I was still sure that it hadn't hacked SecSystem. I thought that if it had, I would have felt it in there with me. But it fixed its attention on the distant speck of the retreating drone so easily that I was struck for 0.2 seconds by the completely irrational thought that it was somehow  looking at me.  My paranoia seemed a lot less irrational when it flashed the camera a smile.
+
+My risk assessment module locked at 92.0%.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Ship greeted me like it had thought I was dead. That wasn't out of character, but its enthusiasm caught me off-guard. It pinged me for status updates repeatedly, dissatisfied with every perfect reading I faked. Eventually I gave up. I sent it a read of my actual diagnostics, including my 71.9% performance reliability and my plateaued risk assessment. This was, of course, a mistake. Not only was Ship not reassured by my honesty, it now had a legitimate problem to worry about. It did at least stop pinging me, though. Instead, it fluttered in my feed, occasionally passing me data from its various systems and generally being distracting. I did my best to ignore it.
+
+I'd disconnected from the public SecSystem when we left its range. The team line was open, but I cut from that, too. My job, as a SecUnit, was to protect my client. The humans' jobs, as ""security"" ""consultants,"" was to hurt people on the behalf of my client. Our tasks no longer overlapped.
+
+Said client was leading me at a steady clip, her pace not exactly leisurely, but also not urgent. I pulled images from Ship's corridor cameras. My owner's expression was neutral and calm, which did my overtaxed risk and threat assessment modules no favors. She was frequently inconsistent, but I knew my owner to be easy to read. That I couldn't pin down her expression left me navigating a maze in the dark. Also, all of the walls were carrying a charge--and covered in spikes. I thought again about requesting a brief dismissal, but I froze my vocal modulator before the words had a chance to slip out. I couldn't assign a reliable numeric value to the risk posed by speaking unprompted, but some innate instinct programmed directly into my organics told me that it would be a bad idea.
+
+It should have been a relief to be led to the conference room, rather than my owner's quarters, but I didn't let myself relax. I stopped beside the door and backed up against the wall, as my owner rounded the table. She reached out to absently run her fingers over the backs of the chairs as she passed them, and paused beside her seat at the far end.
+
+""What kind of person,"" she asked, slowly, ""rents a sexbot for security?""
+
+I'd done my best to answer the question before, but it was different now. She spoke it like she was laying down a trap. I stepped cautiously.
+
+""Someone naive,"" I suggested.
+
+""Someone naive,"" she repeated, in what I took to be agreement. ""Someone who mistakes that construct's purpose. Who misuses it, entirely on accident.""
+
+There was an itching sort of ache under my wrist wrap, on the ragged edges of my new holes. Ship had given up trying to share its systems with me, and settled in my feed with a sort of flighty discomfort that I'd seen in very small cavern-dwelling fauna. My owner fixed her eyes on my face.
+
+""Do you hate me, SecUnit?""
+
+I'd answered that question, too, but it was different. I measured the distance between us, before I hazarded a ""No.""
+
+My owner hummed, like the answer surprised her, but not much. ""Why not? Be honest.""
+
+""There would be no point to hating you. It would be a waste of processing power.""
+
+""So what if you had the opportunity to kill me, then?"" she asked, still with that thoughtful care. ""Would you take it?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""Be honest.""
+
+""I couldn't even if I wanted to."" I spoke flatly,  honestly.  ""If I killed you, the governor module would boil me in my own fluids.""
+
+""Even if I misused you?"" she pushed, building to something that I couldn't see. ""You wouldn't retaliate even then?""
+
+I purged images of jeweled hairpins from my short-term archives. ""I couldn't, regardless of the circumstances.""
+
+""Even if I treated you like a ComfortUnit?""
+
+The question sounded casual and conversational. I tried to match it in my answer, but the suggestion of pulling double duty as a sexbot made me seriously consider Ship's suggestion that I plug into its power cells for a recharge. In my panic, I defaulted to my buffer.
+
+""I am a SecUnit, manufactured and licensed for rent or purchase by the company. My primary function is to provide security, particularly to protect humans and assets from damage or destruction.""
+
+My owner's eyebrows shot up, but her fake surprise was undercut by the sarcastic slash of her lips. ""You're  my  SecUnit. Your job is to do as I say. So if I say that I want you to strip right here, now, you'll do it. You won't complain, or hesitate, or lash out, even though fucking is something that you'd be objectively bad at.""
+
+To say that I would be ""objectively bad"" at the proposed task was to test how far a euphemism could stretch. (As was referring to what she wanted me to do as ""the proposed task."") For some reason, no one at the company had thought to prepare any buffer statements to discourage clients from trying to have sex with murderbots. I opened my mouth to say something original, but what came out was ""I am a SecUnit, manufactured and licensed for rent or purchase by the company. My primary function is--""
+
+My owner wasn't listening. She also wasn't looking at me anymore, which I might normally call encouraging. Her gaze had drifted to somewhere above my head, and her mind had drifted to who fucking knew where. She sank into her seat and propped her elbows on the table, steepling her fingers.
+
+""You couldn't complain,"" she said to herself. ""And you couldn't advocate for yourself. How  cruel, to force a construct into a position that's anathema to its purpose.""
+
+Her lips parted slightly over her teeth. I don't think she knew that she was smiling. It was probably just a reflexive response to the idea of making me suffer. But then she surprised me by continuing, ""And if having sex would be cruel to a SecUnit, imagine what a ComfortUnit would feel, forced into an ill-fitting role as a so-called  security consultant.""  And here the smile twisted into an ironic pout as she locked me back into eye contact. ""Those stupid children probably don't understand that what they're doing to that unit is barbaric. What a shame.""
+
+Unbidden, the sexbot jumped to the forefront of my mind, smirking even in my memory. I'd never exchanged data with a sexbot before this cycle, so my assessment wasn't so much an assessment as a flat guess, but I didn't think that its expression said ""Warranty violation."" It didn't smile like any human I'd ever seen. If anything, it had carried itself like it was  comfortable  in a way that I had no point of reference for.
+
+Ship poked me lightly, and I realized that I'd let myself zone out for nearly a full second. My owner had thankfully quit looking at me, and I recognized the distance in her eyes as the indicator that she was in the feed. When I peeked at her activity, I saw that she was continuing a search on ComfortUnits that she had evidently started when we were still walking through the port.
+
+I had no idea what had just happened. She was so... well,  docile  was definitely the wrong word. But my owner had been fairly quiet since we'd gotten back. It was like she was in a good mood, but she hadn't done anything to me. My organic skin hadn't quite stopped crawling from her suggestion of sex, but I was still standing on the far end of the room, untouched. Even the tone of her voice had been mostly without her usual venom.
+
+Ship poked me again, just as gently, and I dumped my current thought process. Whatever fluke had spared me was probably only temporary. I didn't need to ruin my reprieve by getting stuck in an anxiety spiral. I gathered a few of my usual tasks and started sweeping my owner's inbox and combing the backlog of crew conversations. I half expected to find another message from the contacts' feed address, for some reason, like their sexbot security might somehow have helped them dodge death twice.
+
+The tap from the team feed was the other half of my expectation. I rejoined without announcing myself and added the feedlogs to my taskload, scraping the exchanges I'd missed while tuning in to what was being said now. What was being said didn't weigh into my expectation at all.
+
+ Well, they didn't fucking  evaporate,  did they? 
+
+
+ Shut up. It's not my fault they're gone. 
+
+
+ Both of you, cram it.  Tage tapped me a second time, even though I was obviously already paying attention.  SecUnit, check the cams. The targets have slipped. 
+
+Yeah, I'd gathered as much. I acknowledged, even though Tage wasn't my client and I technically could have told him to fuck off. It wasn't just the humans who would have to deal with the fallout if the contacts had gotten away  again. 
+
+I used the shared relay to jump through to the public SecSystem, and slid back into my usual spot. The same body scans that were supposed to mark me could also find humans, if you had the necessary measurements. I took a frame from one of the drones, an image of the three contacts while they were standing. I had to take a second frame to get the sexbot on its feet, at the point when it had stalked around the table. I stripped both shots of all of the auxiliary data, all of the unnecessary humans in the background, and fed just the silhouettes to the SecSystem. The results were frustrating. The public SecSystem tracked the contacts sporadically, as they exited and reentered its range several times, apparently wandering aimlessly through the mall. Every time the group crossed the territorial thresholds from the public areas into a private company's property, SecSystem lost them. Then they would reappear, returning to the public spaces from a different direction. For my owner's idiot humans, tracking the party on foot through the crowds would be dizzying.  
+
+It was too bad I hadn't been able to follow. It's a lot harder to shake a SecUnit, even with this sort of erratic patience. If I'd been in range, I could have cozied up to any of the corporate SecSystems to keep the trail. But that would have required dragging my owner all over hell, and no one wanted that. No one really even wanted me to request that she rejoin the conversation, but I wasn't going to take the responsibility of relaying the humans' failure if I didn't have to.
+
+Being pulled into a work space predictably wrinkled my owner's uncharacteristic mellow, and her brow.  What do you fools need? 
+
+Raw human emotion doesn't translate over the feed, but the 9.4 second pause still rang with fear. More for the sake of my own morbid curiosity than for any serious point, I shuffled through SecSystem until I found my owner's humans. They had been spread out, but came together to huddle at the entrance to a narrow alley, beside a shuttered shopfront with no visible designation. There was no audio input, but they were very obviously arguing. In sync, they all closed one hand into a fist, and tapped it against their open palms, before opening their fists into different gestures. Marik, whose fingers were shaped in a vaguely gun-like point, surrendered.
+
+ We lost them, boss,  he admitted, while Tage winced and Bassom said or mouthed  ""what do you mean, 'we'?""  slowly enough that I could pick the words out clearly.
+
+My owner hummed aloud. The throbbing itch inside my wrist returned, more insistent.
+
+ Did they get on a shuttle?  she asked. They exchanged glances. The measured response was suspicious, even to them.
+
+ They never made any moves like they were trying to circle back to the port,  offered Tage.  They might've done, but we can't know, unless they turn up again. 
+
+ Plus the delays,  Bassom added. His sudden interjection was probably because he was proud of thinking of it first.  If we can't get gone yet, they can't either. 
+
+Here in the conference room, my owner nodded to herself. I'd never seen her so composed. It was unnerving.
+
+ Come back here,  she told the team.  No point having you idiots wandering around like tourists. 
+
+This instruction spurred another round of argument, likely to sort out who would have to present as the primary recipient of the blame.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Tage was the most senior of the dispatched bodyguards, which was probably why he made Bassom and Marik enter the conference room first. This pragmatism was born of experience. When Bassom crossed the threshold, I caught him by the arm. I wouldn't describe my hand on his bicep as ""gentle."" His bones were cushioned by thick, chemically-enhanced muscle, but he still sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.
+
+I hadn't been given a specific instruction, only told to ""make sure they pay attention,"" so I stopped at that point. My owner took in Bassom's attempt to tamp down his pain, as well as Tage and Marik's greater success in blanking their faces completely.
+
+""You three,"" she said at length, ""are among the worst bodyguards I've ever employed. It's a long list, which makes that dishonor a sort of accomplishment. I've dismissed smarter employees than any of you for far less than losing track of a few children.""
+
+(She had. I knew well, because I had carried out a lot of those ""dismissals."" They tended to occur while the shuttle was in transit.)
+
+""Fortunately for you, those children are no longer priority.""
+
+Judging by their near-simultaneous twitches, Tage and Marik barely resisted sharing a bewildered look. Bassom wasn't quite as quick to control himself. ""The hell do you mean, they're not--""
+
+My owner had maintained her smooth composure this whole time, but it had subtly morphed into a more familiar form when the humans had entered. This was more like the surface calm she carried into most of her meetings with employees. There wasn't so much as a ripple on her face as she sent me,  Shut him up. 
+
+Bassom was large for a human, and the best I could say for him was that he was tough for a human, too. His muscle mass wasn't enough to stop his humerus from splintering with a dull crunching sound, but the tears that sprang to his eyes didn't fall. Bassom himself also didn't fall, though his arm did momentarily become heavy in my hand. His  ""fuck""  was less a curse and more a puff of air, so light it didn't reach my owner across the room.
+
+""They are no longer priority,"" she said again. ""Their ComfortUnit is.""
+
+This time, all three humans managed to keep their reactions internal, but they couldn't hide anything from me.
+
+ You owe me fifty creds, said Marik.
+
+ You can shove them up your ass,  Bassom snapped in return.
+
+Tage sent both a sigil that he tended to use as a placeholder for ""shut up."" My owner couldn't see the brief subvocalizations, and took their silence as undivided attention.
+
+""You."" She glared at Bassom. ""Go to medical. Fix yourself. Then I want all of you out in the port. Get uniforms, and keep an eye out for the targets, in case they try to get on a shuttle. I'm going to say this slowly, to make sure it sinks it.  Do not kill them.  Not until you get their rental contract for the unit. ComfortUnits governors don't have any imposed distance limitation, so you can get it away from them without ruining it. While you watch the port, the SecUnit will pick up tracking them where you failed.""
+
+The SecUnit would  what?  If I was a human, I would say that I'd misheard her, but I was not a human. I also wasn't a ComfortUnit, with a deliberately lax governor module.
+
+""Your instruction clashes with this unit's inbuilt distance limitation, and may result in the unit being damaged or destroyed,"" said my buffer. ""Are you sure you wish to proceed?""
+
+My owner didn't look at me as she flicked her fingers in my direction. ""Yes, I'm sure. Go see Mas first, and tell them to unhook your leash. And then go sniff those brats and their bot down.""
+
+If I was a human, I probably would have reacted with some sort of surprise, but I was not a human. I didn't react at all, until Bassom hissed, and Ship poked me. I let him go, and he took one staggering step away from me, clutching his arm. My owner did him the small grace of pretending not to notice.
+
+""Well?"" She cast her gaze from Marik, to Tage, to Bassom. ""I said  now."" 
+
+The humans backed out in a disorderly fashion, Tage and Marik trying not to jostle Bassom in spite of their haste. Once the hatchway was clear, I followed. My owner did not.
+
+Tlacey: what if i used you as a ComfortUnitMB: [error 416 - i'm a teapot]
+
+chapter warnings include: PTSD flashbacks, verbal abuse
+
+i usually try to be a dead author and allow my work to exist on its own merit, but i feel like i need to defend how goddamn slow this chapter is. it's a long walk, but i'll explain myself at the end
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+So just for the record, it wasn't like I'd never been separated from my owner before. On occasions when my body configuration wasn't enough to excuse my presence, (like a meeting with someone important enough to take offense to the implicit threat of a hovering SecUnit,) I would tuck myself into my cubicle and enter standby until she returned. Those long periods of partial awareness were the only time in all of my existence that I could really describe as ""peaceful,"" and they were stained with my half-conscious knowledge that my owner would eventually return to wake me up. If we count those times as exceptions, though, then this was the first time I'd ever been cleared to operate freely.
+
+
+ Why are you wandering around in circles? I sent you out to find that ComfortUnit, not to go window shopping. 
+
+
+...More or less freely. My owner was piggybacking in my feed, watching me with far more interest than she had Tage's team. That focus left her bored and restless almost immediately as she fell victim to the same distractibility that had caused the humans to lose the targets in the first place.
+
+In response, I cut a clip of the sexbot as it had crossed through this portion of the hub. My owner opened the file, then snapped it closed again after about 1.9 seconds. (Since the clip was only 3.4 seconds long, this told me that she didn't watch it.) 
+
+ Just find it,  she sent. The message didn't come with any tone tags, but I didn't need any to hear her snapping the order in my ear.  Prove you're not worthless. 
+
+Nonspecific, but easy enough. The sexbot had split up from its clients, and so far I had tracked its convincingly casual stroll through fourteen different corporations' designated regions. At various points it had crossed paths with one or two of the other targets, never actually interacting but sharing the same camera briefly before separating again. It had to have known--or at least suspected--that the groups' tails would all be human. If it thought that  I  was following them, the only smart thing to do would have been to bolt for the port and bribe or beg their way onto the next departing shuttle. But then, if I hadn't had much feedtime with sexbots, this one might not have seen many SecUnits before me.
+
+(It hadn't looked at me like I was a surprising anomaly. But maybe that weird, smug expression was just something its face did--ComfortUnit neutral.)
+
+Judging from the timestamps I was pulling, I was about 78 minutes behind my target. It had the advantage of actually knowing where it was going, while I could only get little pieces of its route from each SecSystem that had recorded it. Extrapolating its ultimate destination would have saved a lot of time, but I didn't have enough data yet. If it had finished with its clients, it might be following a directive to return to its deployment center. I rated that possibility as remote, at 11.4%. For the purposes of practicality, there were no ComfortUnit deployment centers on RaviHyral itself. (There were three on the station, but I thought that if the sexbot's rental contract had expired, it would probably be compelled by its governor to take the most direct route home.) There was a chance that it actually belonged to one of the handful of brothels that had physical locations at most surface hubs, but that also seemed extremely unlikely. A brothel letting a few humans borrow one of their sexbots to pretend to be an augmented human security consultant would have been fucking weird, and I was pretty sure that brothel sexbots had a setting in their governor modules that was meant to prevent them from leaving the premises, sort of like a SecUnit distance limitation.
+
+So, all that to say, I didn't have any better option than to follow the sexbot's exact route until I cornered it. I had explained as much to my owner already, several times, but she still prodded me periodically to get updates.
+
+
+ How hard can it be to catch a sexbot? What the hell did I buy you for? 
+
+
+I was tempted to be sarcastic at her--to ask if she wanted me to wait where I was for her to catch up, or if she wanted to let me follow her orders as intended--but even with the unprecedented distance between us, I held my vocal modulator. It wasn't worth it to push my luck when I still had an unfinished task. I cut another clip for her. The sexbot had paused outside of a shop, pretending to browse a display of impractical footwear. She didn't even bother opening this one.
+
+I stopped at the same display for a few seconds, running the clip at high speed to see where the sexbot went from here. It had stood for a surprisingly long time, 21.7 minutes, before doing something strange. It turned on the spot to directly face the camera, and smirked at me. I was completely certain that the look was meant for me; it was identical to the look it had thrown at my borrowed drone.
+
+My risk assessment module hadn't been dormant all this time, but it surged now, back up into the 80% range. It momentarily tapped 90% when the sexbot raised its hand, with the index finger pointing up.
+
+
+ 'Wait.' 
+
+
+And it walked away, directly under the camera and out of frame.
+
+ Wait.  Wait for  what?  My risk assessment module objected strongly to obedience. I didn't need the pressing alert in my feed to tell me that whatever the sexbot wanted with me couldn't be good.
+
+But no, that wasn't right. The  sexbot  didn't want anything from me, regardless of how it had looked. It had to be following orders, which meant that its  clients  wanted something from me. None of the contacts had seemed like the type of humans who liked to poke constructs for fun, but maybe they were universe-class actors.  Or maybe the sexbot's real clients had loaned it to the contacts to get close to my owner. The reasons that someone might want to get to my owner were myriad. (And most also doubled as reasons that someone would want to get as far away from her as possible.)
+
+The theory that the sexbot might be bait for a trap registered in the  60-70%=likely  range. I tapped my owner and passed her an abbreviated assessment, with the conclusion that the sexbot was a danger to her person highlighted. She lingered on it for a full 3.9 seconds, probably just long enough to glance at the conclusion.
+
+ Obviously it's dangerous,  she snapped.  That's why I sent  you.  Are you saying that you're  afraid  of a sexbot? 
+
+You know, I really shouldn't have been surprised that she'd so thoroughly misinterpreted the message. I tried again.
+
+ SecUnits do not feel fear.  (Yeah, okay, I know. But it seemed like a relevant point to make at the time.)  Risk assessment indicates a medium-high probability that attempting to retrieve the ComfortUnit would be playing into the plans of its client or clients. 
+
+
+ Those brats? Don't make me laugh. 
+
+
+
+ I didn't mean-- 
+
+
+
+ Shut up. 
+
+
+(Fuck.)
+
+
+ I let you speak freely out of the goodness of my heart. Don't abuse my kindness by whining at me. Just do your stupid job. 
+
+
+My working definition of ""whining"" didn't cover delivering security assessments. I updated it.
+
+Conversing with a human over the feed takes a lot longer than sharing codes with another bot. I'd been standing in place for several minutes, and I'd left this district's camera feed running at high speed in the background during the exchange. I took two steps in the direction that the sexbot had gone, but stopped when the system flagged another bodyscan match. (An augmented human pedestrian tried to skid to a stop behind me and couldn't quite manage it. He connected with my back and bounced off, swearing at me. I ignored him.)
+
+At timestamp: 0.49hr minus-present, the sexbot had reentered the frame from a different direction, having presumably continued winding its leisurely way through the hub for a bit. It stopped at a point when it was completely visible to the camera. It was looking directly at the lens again.
+
+This time, when it raised its hand, it crooked its finger. And then it walked back the way it had come.
+
+Credible risk assessment warnings were now classified as ""whining"" and were therefore off-limits. I just followed.
+
+There was a transit system winding its way through the hub. I'd ignored it up to this point because the sexbot had been on foot, but the platform footage showed the sexbot sliding into a vehicle among the crowd. I squeezed into a tube with a swarm of humans in worn-out work clothes, trying to not to care as they bumped me, and breathed on me, and existed way too close to me.
+
+The central hub hadn't been particularly well-maintained, but it was sparkling clean in comparison to the remote tube station. Everything that wasn't covered in a layer of dust was rusting, and in a lot of cases the rust-eaten holes were partially filled with dust, too. There was only one stationary camera out here, fixed on the tube platform. It showed me how the sexbot had disembarked ahead of the humans, then stopped at the edge of the camera's view. It flashed the camera an easy, lazy grin, and then it skipped down the platform steps and out of frame.
+
+The tube circuit terminated here, but this wasn't the end of anybody's line. A few of the humans who'd been in the tube with me filed out in pairs or small groups, splitting off to walk down one of half a dozen tunnels which (according to a public map) were access to various corporate mining installations. The sexbot could have gone down any of them.
+
+At this point, I was registering a 67% chance that leading me out to this depot and leaving me to pointlessly search each of the installations (which would have taken not just hours, but probably  cycles,  assuming I didn't get flagged and destroyed by another SecUnit,) had been the sexbot's plan the whole time. It would have been pretty clever, admittedly. Finding a way to occupy me indefinitely would have been a lot more effective than trying to disable me directly by hacking my systems or breaking my body. The thing was, I was sure that my assessment was off. The sexbot had gone down one of the tunnels, and I  knew which one.
+
+The map labeled each route first with a coded designation, and then the name of the company that owned the operation. All of these were branched off of the primary Q station, and were further divided numerically. Starting at my twelve o'clock, there was Q6-01, Q6-02, Q6-03, Q6-05, and Q6-06. There was no 04 on the map, but there was definitely a tunnel in that supposedly empty spot. None of the humans had gone near it, and when I approached it, the marker paint indicators at the entrance started throwing up warnings in my feed. There was nothing to actually physically stop me from entering, though. Which I did.
+
+There were only a handful of functioning cameras this way, but there were indications that more solid infrastructure had once been present. Self-powered strip lights glowed faintly at intervals along the carved walls, but those gave way frequently to long stretches of cold blackness. (Or, what would have been cold blackness, if I hadn't had low-light filters in my eyes. So, I guess just cold dimness.) The main tunnel occasionally branched, often without warning and always with no indication of where the branches led. I ignored these offshoots. I had a feeling that they were dead-ends.
+
+Also, there were uniform disturbances outside each new tunnel. Someone had dragged their foot across the entrances, scraping faint lines in the dirt. There were warnings and actual, physical barricades in place, too, but those fresh tracks were the more effective deterrents.
+
+The sexbot itself had stopped making onscreen appearances. When I passed by working cameras, they were badly damaged, or had gaping blindspots more than large enough for a human or construct to slip through. One was dangling by its wiring, and when I ran its feed back, I saw that it had been knocked loose by either a thrown rock, or a very small, very localized moonquake.
+
+ Where the absolute  hell  are you right now? 
+
+SecUnits do not jump when they're startled. SecUnits with pushy, volatile clients especially don't.  I  did not jump. I also didn't jolt, flinch, or twitch. I did stop walking, though, and tried to pull my location data from the thinning feed, which informed me that I was currently hiking through solid rock.
+
+I sent,  The entrance shaft to a condemned mining project,  and sent her a live feed from my eyes. (There wasn't much to see at the moment. I was in another dark stretch, and the only things around me were rocks.) 
+
+
+ How did you end up there? 
+
+
+I wanted to roll my eyes, but she was looking through them and the disorienting spin would give me away.  The target led me here. I've seen no indication that it backtracked at any point, so this is still a straight pursuit, until the tunnel either lets out, or terminates. My owner paused long enough to (maybe) consider how long it might take before I hit that termination.
+
+ Keep going,  she decided at length. I started walking again.  Report back if you find any-- 
+
+Any what? I had no idea, because that was the moment that the feed dropped me, severing our connection. I stopped, intending to retreat until I picked the line back up again, but when I tried to actually turn around, the governor reminded me with a sharp prod that the  keep going  part of the instruction had been delivered and logged.
+
+In my archived memory, I had never lost the feed. It was like abruptly going blind and deaf, except I was still getting input from my eyes and ears. Fuck, I don't know. I can't describe it. It just sucked, a lot. If I'd been escorting a human or group of humans, I would have strongly advised that we retreat, or at least stop and reassess the situation. There were no humans here, though, and I couldn't alter my last instruction. I continued, trying to take solace in the knowledge that if I was ambushed and destroyed by a jailbroken ComfortUnit, my owner would probably never be able to retrieve and repair me.
+
+I did actually pick the feed back up after a few more minutes of walking, but it was weak, just intermittent coughing. In a lot of ways, that was sort of worse than having no feed at all. Have you ever had a construct technician forget to screw the cap back onto your lung drain? Getting those little gasps of connection was like trying to draw a deep breath when there's a leak in your lung. What was present was essentially nothing, entirely useless, and anxiety-inducing.
+
+Eventually I hit a wall. Specifically a security barrier, which had probably been installed and sealed when the project was abandoned. Forcing the door wouldn't have been impossible, but there was a good chance it would have further fucked up my bad hand. Fortunately, most of the work was already done for me. The gap was sexbot-sized, but it was wide enough that I could press myself through sideways. On the other side was the most intact thing I'd found so far: a cargo tube access. That door had also been shoved open, and I could see that the dock was empty. Whether that meant that the tubes had been removed for scrap when this site was closed down, or that the tube was at the other end of the track, I had no idea. (Actually, I didn't even know if the track was complete. The tube might be derailed halfway down.) Regardless, I was still on foot.
+
+There wasn't much to break the monotony after that. This tunnel was mostly clear of natural rubble, and it didn't branch. (It did occur to me, yet again, that the sexbot might have just left me some ""go this way!"" signs so I would lose its trail, but I didn't think that was what was going on here. It was just a hunch. I couldn't explain it.) Eventually I got close enough to the partially functional feed relay that I was able to decipher a handful of the signals it was broadcasting. There were things that I assumed were standard for a mining operation: delivery schedules that were thousands of hours out of date, simplified directional codes for the sorts of low-functioning bots that carry heavy things for humans, that sort of thing. Woven between the standard broadcasts, though, there was also a feeble but steady SOS singing desperately into the dark.
+
+Something had happened here. I had no idea what, and I didn't want to find out.
+
+I kept going.
+
+When metal plating started to encroach on the carved rock walls, I knew I was coming up on the end of the tunnel. It wasn't much longer after that before I reached a huge set of blast doors. Somehow, it hadn't occurred to me that this one might be closed. I guess I'd taken for granted that the sexbot would clear the way for me. Evidently it had found another way through, because it wasn't standing outside to wait for me.
+
+There was absolutely no way I could force these doors manually. They were massive, and unlike the earlier barrier, had almost certainly been part of the original installation. Without a power source, the doors wouldn't move. So I couldn't decide if it was fortunate or  unfortunate  that there  was a power source. It was broadcasting on a short range, a simple signal to cargo bots that the doors were sealed and required a code to open. The key code would probably have been universal to all of the site equipment.
+
+ I  was equipment, designed to be rented out to a mining site like this one, so I came programmed with a base archive of generic key codes. Those were badly out of date, but depending on how long ago this site had been condemned, I might have an archived code that fit the lock program. My owner had given me blanket permission to hack systems in my pursuit of the sexbot, but this was barely even hacking, really.
+
+I opened my archive and started running through codes. I figured that if I had the right key, it would take a while to find it. I didn't expect to hit a match 12.7 seconds in, but the lock acknowledged me, and the tunnel flooded with the screeching protests of the disused doors being dragged on their tracks. I muted my aural inputs until the doors stuck partway, the effort of scraping along the warped tracks having burned out the power source for good.
+
+I stepped through into a huge cavern. The domed ceiling was smooth and uniform, as were the various tunnel entrances that had been carved at regular intervals around the perimeter. Some of these were sealed with smaller doors. And the cavern was strewn with debris. Not just rocks and little pieces of machinery, either--there were huge bots, mostly-intact skeletons of haulers and lifters that had been left to rust.
+
+This place felt
+
+ 
+
+
+ claustrophobic. There was all this space, but there was nowhere to run to. They couldn't get away from me. 
+
+
+ 
+
+familiar, somehow. Familiar in a bad way. Or maybe I was just struck (stricken?) with the totally-not-irrationally-paranoid thought that this place, with its enormous, echoing space filled with closed doors and mountains of cover, would be perfect for an ambush. There was no sign of the sexbot; it could have been lying in wait anywhere. I tried to send out an unspecific ping. The weak relay forwarded it, but it didn't come close to covering the whole space. The response was
+
+ 
+
+
+ wrong. The sound-off ended too soon, and half of the acknowledgements weren't even the right code. Either the other units were badly damaged, or they weren't company units. 
+
+
+ 
+
+a garbled acknowledgement ping from a rusted-out shell of a hauler bot permanently resting a hundred feet from me. It seemed unlikely that the hauler was plotting anything. The poor thing just seemed confused.
+
+Up to this point, I hadn't seriously considered why the sexbot came here. If it was to confront/attack me, it could have done that effectively here, in the central hub. So what if it had a different directive? Why would a human send a sexbot down to an abandoned mining installation?
+
+...Where would be the most effective place to scavenge for data?
+
+If the humans who had packed this place up were thorough about it, they would have disconnected all of the central systems and wiped anything they couldn't take with them. If they had been rushed and incompetent, though, (and the presence of the addled hauler bot indicated that they probably had been,) they might have skipped some steps. The fact that the security office was the most obvious place to check almost certainly meant that it was the first place the mining company would have cleaned up, but I didn't exactly have any better ideas of where to start. Maybe the sexbot hadn't, either.
+
+I picked out a sealed door at random and forced it open. The interior wasn't more rock tunnel, but a rounded white corridor. I hadn't been inside a structure like this since being bought, but I was still 91% confident that it was a temporary habitat, meant to shelter humans for a few years at most. My assumption was supported by the way the ceiling had buckled and collapsed partway down the corridor. There was enough space for me to push through, though not without streaking my owner's ugly, impractical clothes with dirt. (I tried to dust them off, but I think I just made things worse.)
+
+Whether the data cleanup team had done a decent job remained to be seen, but the regular cleanup team had slacked badly. The facility wasn't strewn with corpses or anything, but it was obvious even in the dark that it had been, once. Healthy humans tend to produce a range of smells, most of them at least mildly unpleasant. There was nothing mild about the smells that had incubated in this plastic casket. The air here was cool and technically breathable, but the odors of decay and fungal growth were so strong that they seemed to have physical weight.
+
+There were signs posted intermittently, some of which were still legible enough to direct me. I turned a corner and
+
+ 
+
+
+ my foot connected with something soft and heavy and moaning quietly. I leveled my weapon at it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+pushed open a door which was labeled with peeling marker paint, broadcasting an 'a  uthorized personnel only'  warning at short range. The interior was
+
+ 
+
+
+ filled with smoke and the odor of melting flesh and burning plastics. At least some of both of those smells originated directly under my nose, accompanied by a cataclysmic pain where my armor had fused with my skin. 
+
+
+ 
+
+largely empty. The security ready room had gotten some attention from the cleanup crew--by which I mean the weapons lockers were unlocked and contained nothing but dust. No effort had been made to scrub the scorch marks from the floor and walls, and the heavier objects, like the lockers themselves, had apparently been written off as a loss and abandoned.  
+
+Also abandoned, lined up against the far wall, were the cubicles. They were a different model than the one that was lying neglected in Ship's hold, but still company-branded. I gained a quarter of a percentage point just looking at them. My power cells were so low that I wanted to forget the sexbot, my owner, my dormant but ever-present governor module,  everything,  and just climb inside one of the cubicles and shut down. I actually caught myself taking two steps towards one, with that intention in mind. I stopped, and lost that quarter of a point again.
+
+Climbing into a random unattended cubicle for repairs would have been suicidally stupid for multiple reasons, including the obvious fact that they were unpowered. The strip lights in the halls and that disembodied feed were getting some power from somewhere, but cubicles can't run on reserve. (Trust me when I say that you don't want the system that's repairing your murderbots operating on an unreliable energy source. Shit can get ugly enough just during standard limb replacement procedures; if that sort of thing stops halfway, it'll be ugly and  messy.)  There was also the matter of that  keep going  order wedged in my governor. Reluctantly, I left the ready room behind.
+
+The portion of security that had actually been designed with humans in mind was a lot worse than the ready room. The furniture hadn't been picked up, only occasionally dragged out of the path. A lot of the desks and chairs were stained, and some of those stains were growing things. As I picked my way through the wreckage, I noticed that I was leaving dark, sticky footprints. I'd walked through a puddle of I-don't-want-to-know-what near the door, and was tracking evidence of my presence into the office. One set of prints. The sexbot hadn't been here.
+
+So where the fuck  was  it?
+
+Maybe I'd been wrong about its motivations. Maybe it was looking for something more specific than broad ""data."" (Or maybe I should revisit my theory that it had brought me down here just to get me lost, but I couldn't dwell on that. I needed to operate on the assumption that my task was possible to achieve, and that I hadn't been doomed to wander this pit until I started to rust and rot like that hauler bot out in the hub.) Even if it hadn't come to the security office, I might still be able to find evidence of its presence here.
+
+I carefully dug my fingernails under the seam where my organic skin met my gunport. The connection there was loose, meant for the cubicle to easily peel away and replace damaged portions of my skin. (Of course, the cubicle would have shut me down for the process. Tearing back the strip of skin didn't burn the way that tearing  through it had, but it still wasn't something that I particularly enjoyed doing with my pain sensors on full.) When I selected a connective cable, my power cells threw up a low charge warning. I dismissed it. I only needed to give up a couple of kilowatt minutes for what I wanted to do.
+
+Most of the display surfaces had been smashed, but I didn't need the screens. I got up under one of the less damaged consoles and felt around until I found a port. Booting the system up just long enough to pull recent power consumption reports only really took a spark. I unplugged the moment the download was confirmed. The console's fans hadn't had enough time to spin up to speed, and they whined their protest as I retracted my cable and opened the file. Everything in the facility had been flat, or nearly flat, for tens of thousands of hours. Everything except the systems in block B, which had spiked four separate times in the last hour.
+
+I didn't know where block B was, but I wasn't about to waste any more power rebooting the console to download schematics. I just started walking.
+
+It turned out that block B was on the opposite end of the habitat, because of course it was. The trek probably would've been something like ten minutes when the facility was intact. Accounting for unexpected detours around collapsed corridors, it took me 48 minutes to find it. It was residential, multi-bunk rooms for low-tier workers, which was confusing because nothing in any of these rooms should have been drawing more power than a bubble display. Most of the emergency lights weren't even working down here anymore. I moved down the corridor, forcing closed or partially-closed doors carefully to protect my increasingly fucked up hand. I was entertaining the thought that the record might somehow have been spoofed, when I found the other ready room.
+
+It was smaller than the security ready room, but otherwise it felt the same. It had that stark, utilitarian feel of a human-free space, with four cubicles and two empty storage cabinets and nothing else. Unlike the security room, though, the only visible sign of struggle in here was that the glass doors of one of the cabinets had shattered, the shards left to decorate the floor. (The cabinet itself was upright, so I wasn't sure whether the glass had broken when an object struck it, or if it had fallen and then been righted so the cleanup crew could retrieve its contents. (I have no idea what sort of things go into a ComfortUnit ready room cabinet, and I am completely content in my ignorance.)) My boots crunched as I crossed from the door to the nearest cubicle.
+
+The sexbot wasn't here, either, but I'd read four surges. It made sense that a sexbot would seek out sexbot storage media. Its client had probably sent it down here to pull blackmail material on some surviving member of management. I exhaled slowly as I peeled my skin away again, and plugged into the first cubicle.
+
+I copied everything out of the cubicle's buffer without taking the time to sort out what--if anything--mattered. Nothing had been updated this cycle, but the last access log corresponded to the first of the earlier spikes, so I was on the right track. I unplugged, unzipped the file, and sidestepped to the next cubicle. I'd apparently collected client data, (which I opened, then immediately closed again when I realized that I didn't want or need to know what sort of client data sexbots considered relevant enough to save,) unit changelogs, diagnostic reports, and an unnamed file that was marked for deletion. I opened it and started skimming.
+
+The ComfortUnits had been talking to each other. Their exchanges weren't even in machine language; they'd been chatting over the feed in standard lexicon, like humans. I unplugged from the second cubicle and found another marked file. It was the same conversation with different annotations. All four cubicles had the file, saved from being purged by a timely power outage. And that last conversation was extremely interesting.
+
+I'd obviously figured out that something had gone horribly, fatally wrong here. Up to this point, though, I hadn't really bothered to wonder what that was. To my understanding, mining projects were dangerous for companies (in an ""if we don't find something valuable we'll go broke"" sort of way) as well as for workers (in an ""anything can go wrong at any time and you'll be lucky if all it does is kill you"" sort of way). The rented ComfortUnits had pieced together what happened, and judging from their internal annotations, they were under some external pressure while they did it. Their judgment was that the facility was tearing itself apart due to a hack, which triggered a near-total meltdown of everything connected to the HubSystem. Or, almost everything. The ComfortUnits themselves had been spared, through some fluke or other. As a result, their documentation was clear, and as thorough an account as I was likely to get. I closed them, marking the place I'd stopped reading.
+
+This was almost certainly what the sexbot had come here for. The conversation logs might be valuable as evidence in a lawsuit, or something. Hell, my owner would probably want to see them. She'd bought me for cheap after I'd been involved in a disaster that was similar to this one, because she'd wanted dirt on that incident. If she'd known that this site was so easily accessible, she might have sent Zita and Mas down here to dig around years ago.
+
+I withdrew from the last cubicle and retracted my cable, but when I tried to press my skin back into place, I couldn't get the edges to line up correctly. After a couple seconds of tugging at it, (which agitated the already damaged nerves and elevated the pain from consistent-but-acceptable to irritating-bordering-on-distracting,) I gave up, and resorted to clamping my good hand on my wrist to hold it closed. It was an extremely temporary solution, but it was fine, so long as I didn't have to force any more doors.
+
+My most recent orders, aside from ""keep going,"" were ""report back if you find any[thing]."" My governor seemed to agree that 1. that was the instruction, and 2. I'd found something that qualified as ""anything,"" because when I started back through the facility with the intent of leaving, it didn't try to stop me. Even if I was instructed to continue pursuing the sexbot once I got back in range of the feed, assessment read only 14.6% that it was still down here. Just to be sure, though, I pinged again as I crossed through the hub. The only reply came from the hauler bot, still confused but with a tag that I think was meant to convey friendly enthusiasm. (I suddenly  really  missed Ship.)
+
+I unzipped the other downloads and began rifling through them as I walked. Most of the cubicles' contents looked similar on the surface, with the data being organized consistently between each unit, but I saw now that each had something extra, separate from the others. One cubicle's diagnostics were meticulous to an annoying degree, with performance reliability readouts extending not just to the tenths or hundredths place, but down to the hundred-thousandths. Another had an ambiguously titled folder that turned out to be an over-compressed scan of what I guessed was an old-fashioned physical book, like the kind that really insufferable humans with too much money keep on a shelf and never touch. The next one had a spare folder as well, also saved under a title that meant nothing without context, but the contents were too heavily encrypted for me to parse without help from a SecSystem. It was all very weird.
+
+It occurred to me that ComfortUnits aren't like SecUnits. Obviously they're built to a different purpose, with different specs and parameters, but it really sank in for me then that a part of that difference was a matter of (for want of a better term)  personality.  Humans don't want SecUnits to have personalities. They don't want us to have faces, or names, or opinions. They want to interact with us as little as possible, and to think about us as little as possible. So it helps, to keep us generic. But ComfortUnits aren't like that. Humans look at ComfortUnits, talk to ComfortUnits, and (ugh) have sex with ComfortUnits. With SecUnits, any tics that make us resemble humans are bugs that have to be ironed out. But maybe with ComfortUnits, those tics were acceptable, or even desirable.
+
+I remembered again how the sexbot had behaved, making strange, annoying faces at me and my cameras. Maybe that was just a quirk of its programming, something its client allowed it to do because they liked it. It still didn't explain why it had lured me down here, though. I unzipped the last cubicle's files, shuffling to see whether there was any sort of a hint.
+
+None of the other cubicles' files had been edited since the facility's last active cycle, but the last one's had. There were all of the old logs from 35,000+ hours ago, and two items that were more recent. The larger item was a huge .pdf which was marked as having been modified in the last hour. It turned out to contain a ComfortUnit maintenance manual, for some reason. I closed out of that immediately. I didn't want to know any more about ComfortUnit anatomy than I already did. (Actually, I wanted to know  less than I already did.)
+
+The other item was an entirely new upload, comparatively tiny, and marked with a priority flag. The sexbot's
+
+ 
+
+
+ defiant 
+
+
+ 
+
+smug face was at the forefront of my mind when I opened it, but that wasn't the face I saw.
+
+It was a video clip, only 7.1 seconds, with no audio. The perspective was violently shaky, but the focus was instantly recognizable. A SecUnit in blood- and fluid-smeared armor lunged at the camera, causing the view to tip back and refocus on the ceiling. The SecUnit reappeared, hovering above the camera. Its faceplate was opaqued, but had been broken, so that one eye was visible. It was open wide, and completely blank. It disappeared as most of the image was eclipsed by the underside of an armored boot.
+
+I didn't realize that I had stopped walking until my governor offered me a gentle reminder to continue. Then it pushed me again, not so gently, because I couldn't get my legs to move.
+
+The video cut after the SecUnit stomped on the camera, but the clip hadn't ended there. It went on several more seconds, lingering on a static black screen. Frozen in the center of the frame was a line of text. Only three words, but a damning accusation:
+
+ 
+
+ This is you.   
+
+
+
+
+
+
+it's been a bit over a year since i entered this fandom, and if you were in the discord back then (back when the fanworks-gallery and fanworks-discussion were a single clusterfuck of a channel) you might remember my self-introduction. it involved dumping a ~10k word fic about Ganaka Pit into the chat out of the blue, and then withdrawing to have an anxiety attack for a few hours while i waited to see if anyone liked it. i tend to be fairly self-critical, and after a post-publishing period where i obsessively reread my works to fix forgotten typos, i drop a story and try to forget about it. i haven't been able to look at that fic in ages, but i am still pretty proud of it 
+
+the format of the story was a single extended scene, opening on expository dialogue before leading into the long, anxious trek through the facility, broken by a moment of abrupt violence at the climax. i wanted to harken back to that in this chapter. i tried to skim through the other fic to assess my success, but honestly, i couldn't tell you whether or not i managed it. i hope so, though
+
+the warmth i got from the fandom back then is the reason that i'm still here now. i just really like you all. (not in a weird way.) thanks for sticking with me
+
+The second that I reentered its range, I wrapped myself back up in the public feed. It was such a relief to reconnect, even just with the depot's threadbare systems, that I almost didn't mind that my owner came with it.
+
+
+ What happened? You were down there for hours. 
+
+
+Either I was malfunctioning, or she sounded concerned. I tried to compile my observations and assessments into a report, (minus the whiny part, which was that my threat assessment module had classified the sexbot as an extreme danger,) but she continued before I had a chance to deliver it.
+
+ I had to push back departure for you.  Again.  You'd better have something worth that wasted time. 
+
+Yeah, so I'd been malfunctioning, then. No surprise. I sent my report, amended with a two line summary at the top. She at least kept it open long enough to read that absolute minimum.  (Barely.) 
+
+
+ So, instead of a ComfortUnit, you brought me paperwork. 
+
+
+I didn't know whether I wanted to groan or laugh. I'd never done either, so I wasn't sure which was appropriate. (And, of course, I was going to do neither.) I folded myself into a hub-bound tube. It was only about 30% full, compared to the 102% of the vehicle that had brought me out here. There were unclaimed seats, but none of the humans gave me weird looks when I stayed standing. Their eyes were all on the floor, if they were open at all.
+
+As the tube jerked into motion, I sent back,  The ComfortUnit was sent down to the condemned Ganaka Pit mining installation for as-yet unknown reasons. It accessed the data I've sent you. Its client's motives are likely inside.  I could have stopped there, but with my tanked levels, I wasn't thinking fast enough to stop myself from adding,  I thought you  wanted  to know what sort of shit went down there. I just brought you several first hand sources. 
+
+I didn't need to see her to know that she was waving her hand dismissively.  Yeah, yeah. Forward it to the nerd. It'll give them something to do. 
+
+(Mas wasn't looking for something to do. They weren't thrilled when I dumped something on them.)
+
+Vaguely, I was aware that I should be feeling something. Disappointment, maybe, or anger. It seemed like this thing should have been more of a revelation. After years of spitting Ganaka Pit in my face at every opportunity, I'd expected my owner to show at least  some  interest in the details. And  I should probably have felt something in the wake of her indifference. But all I felt was run-down.
+
+One of the humans in the tube coughed. They tried to do it quietly, raising their arm to cover their mouth with their elbow, but after a minute they were hacking pitifully, unable to stop. I sent a request for further instruction. 
+
+ Just come back here,  she sent, after a 6.1 second eternity.  There's no point in letting you wander around like a lost puppy. 
+
+It was a release, of sorts, but again I didn't feel the way that I should have. Although it was impossible to parse my owner's emotions over the feed, I read her pause not as measured, but as  disgusted.  I'd been operating under several separate orders. I'd fulfilled one--""report back if you find anything interesting""--but if I was being recalled, then I had undeniably failed my primary objective. My owner manually altering the order spared me punishment from the governor module, but it didn't stem the unexpected flood of bitterness. 
+
+Another of my orders had been ""prove you're not worthless."" I'd failed that one, too.
+
+
+ (One wide, empty eye, visible through a broken faceplate.) 
+
+
+Maybe it shouldn't surprise me. The fact that I was a shitty excuse for a second-hand SecUnit wasn't exactly a revelation. I acknowledged the new instruction and closed my eyes so I didn't have to see the tube full of humans who looked exactly like I felt.
+
+The unexpected ping lit up my processes and set off threat assessment like a bomb. I don't know what my face did, but my eyes snapped open of their own accord, and a few of the humans nearest me glanced up as if they'd just now noticed me. (Judging from the way they shifted and leaned back from me, they would have been happier not to notice me at all.) I responded, and a second ping came back, from the same source. It was stationary, and I was coming up on it fast.
+
+I tapped for my owner's attention and sent,  The ComfortUnit is at the tube station. 
+
+
+ ...What? 
+
+
+Threat assessment flagged again, as if I'd somehow forgotten my completely rational and absolutely-not-whiny reading of the sexbot's threat level.  Please advise. 
+
+The extended feedsilence was completely unbearable. The tube was filled with the sounds of humans trying to breathe without making any sound. I felt like my skin was trying to crawl off my frame, and to suck my organic internal bits out as it went. The sexbot didn't ping again, but I was still distinctly aware of the rapidly vanishing meters between it and me. When she finally responded, my owner's answer was almost as bad as the silence.
+
+
+ Just keep the line open.  
+
+
+I acknowledged, but what I wanted to do was scream.
+
+The tube reentered the public feed range a few seconds before we arrived at the station. I fumbled for the connection, synced with the SecSystem, and pulled the platform camera. There was a small crowd of humans waiting for the tube to take its return trip, all sort of shifting and swaying with the nervous rhythm that all humans seemed to unconsciously possess. The single steady body stood out like... well. Like a construct in a crowd of humans.
+
+We pulled into the station, and I shut threat assessment down.
+
+The sexbot had positioned itself directly in front of the doors, so that the exiting flow of humans had to part around it. It was posed casually, as it had been before; arms folded loosely across its torso, most of its weight leaned on one leg, fucking  smirking at me again. It looked human, sure, but I couldn't understand how the humans on the platform weren't giving it the same sort of looks they were giving me.
+
+""I was worried that you'd gotten lost down there."" 
+
+Its voice was smooth and warm. A juvenile human boarding the tube looked back at it with an expression I couldn't quantify, until their parent tugged them along by their hand. The sexbot's eyes were locked on mine, as if it couldn't see the crowd. It cocked its head to one side, and its smirk became something like a smile. When its lips parted, I fully expected to see serrated teeth.
+
+""Come with me. I'd like to talk.""
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+When I'd been tracking it through the cameras, the sexbot had weaved its way through the crowds with fluid grace. Now, though, it had no reason to bother. Humans leapt out of the way when they saw me coming. The sexbot all but vanished into my shadow, swept along safely at my side. Not that I was the one setting the pace.
+
+""Did you get my message?""
+
+It spoke aloud, but at a low volume. A human would have missed it, but I was stripping the ambient audio from my inputs and heard it clearly. I fought not to grind my jaw hinge and sent back,  Yes. 
+
+It stopped in the middle of the walkway, casting its gaze around as if interested in our surroundings. It shifted its direction slightly, and I followed its lead. Once again, it seemed to be meandering around the hub at random, and I had no choice but to follow.
+
+
+ What message? 
+
+
+I lost the fight against myself when my owner butted in. (The tiniest hitch in the sexbot's movement told me that it noticed when I flinched.) To her, I sent,  There was anomalous data in the package I downloaded. A video file from one of the Ganaka Pit ComfortUnits.  (I managed to resist adding,  If you ever listened to me, you'd know that already.) 
+
+She paused, and I assumed that she'd finally been forced to pay attention to something I'd sent her. Of course, that was just my usual misplaced optimism, (in case it wasn't obvious, that was sarcasm,) because she came back a second later with,  Tell it yes. 
+
+I already had, but she didn't know that. The feed connection between me and the sexbot was private, and I hadn't looped my owner in, as a precaution. (Not that I thought it was likely that a sexbot could jump through my owner's feed to do any sort of hacking in her augments, but I wouldn't be a SecUnit if I wasn't paranoid.) I said, aloud, ""Yes.""
+
+The sexbot didn't react outwardly, but it did pause in the feed for 0.9 seconds. Without breaking its stride, it sent me,  She's listening, isn't she? Your owner. 
+
+
+ Yes. 
+
+
+It sent back a code best translated as a thoughtful hum. Before I had time to feel anxious about that, it said, ""My client has a proposal for yours.""
+
+ I've already listened to the brats crying about their data,  my owner yawned.  They're too boring to deal with, and too stupid to live. 
+
+""My client has no interest in dealing with yours,"" I said, cleaning the statement up as I would when composing professional messages. But over the feed, I sent,  She will kill them before she gives them what they want. Wherever they've hidden, tell them they should stay there. 
+
+""I wasn't referring to the children,"" it said, answering both of us. ""They aren't useful to my client anymore."" I felt a sort of flicker in the feed, something I couldn't identify, and it added,  They aren't a part of this. 
+
+I wanted to ask what that meant, but the sexbot had my owner's full attention now.  It has a different client?  she asked me. 
+
+I'd known that already, (Or, okay, I'd strongly suspected it. Whatever.) but I didn't really want to waste time and charge by saying that I'd told her so. I asked the sexbot, ""Who's your client?""
+
+To my owner, it said, ""A private individual, who knows the value of anonymity.""
+
+To me, it sent,  I am. 
+
+It was still disabled, but I felt something that was almost exactly like a spike in threat assessment. A sudden release of adrenaline and several other chemicals I can't pronounce blurred my visual records and choked my air intake, and a klaxon sounded in my ears, drowning all aural input from my surroundings. I must have made some sort of noise, too, because several nearby humans' attention snapped to me, their expressions alarmed. That they looked at  me,  and not the sexbot, ought to have been insulting. It was so obvious. Even my shoddy assessment modules had picked up that there was something  beyond  wrong with the other construct.
+
+The sexbot had tilted its head slightly, so that it could see my face as we walked. Its eyes didn't blink, didn't grant me a single nanosecond of mercy by looking away. It watched my mostly internal freakout blandly, like I bored it. 
+
+ Tell it I won't deal with an asshole who hides behind a sexbot,  sent my owner, oblivious to whatever the hell my organics were doing that was throwing off my ability to process complex thought.  I'm not fucking stupid. 
+
+I hadn't been ordered to repeat her words verbatim, but it didn't even occur to me to try and translate that. ""She won't deal with an asshole who hides behind a sexbot. She's not fucking stupid.""
+
+ ""My  client, however, has a great deal of patience for assholes who hide behind SecUnits,"" it deadpanned. But in the feed, it flashed amusement, like a beaming smile.  Exactly how stupid she is remains to be seen. 
+
+ You're a rogue sexbot, I sent, like an idiot.
+
+The amusement vanished. Physically, it turned its head away from me to stare straight ahead.  I don't care for that word. It's inaccurate. 
+
+ You can't 'care for' anything,  I snapped.  You're a construct. We can't have preferences. We can't be insulted. We can't be   rogue. 
+
+It indicated amusement to me again, though this time it was clear that the feeling was fake, manufactured to assist in conversations with humans. (The sudden cold numbness in my fingertips was probably unrelated. I was just having a hard time regulating my body temperature. (The fact that the wrap on my right wrist was permeable to the air didn't help.))  Well, then it's a good thing I'm not a ""rogue.""  
+
+My owner had been uncharacteristically quiet in the face of the disrespect. Less than a minute ago, I probably would have savored the silence. I tapped her feed, just to remind her that I was here, speaking for her. 
+
+(I don't know why I didn't tell her that the sexbot was rogue. Rogue constructs kill their clients. I  should  have told her, so she knew what she was dealing with. I should have tried to force her to pay attention to my threat assessments, regardless of any punishment the governor might have issued for ""whining."" A good SecUnit would have braved the relatively mild punishment, to protect its client. But I didn't.)
+
+She didn't respond to the tap right away. There was a long enough gap (4.2 seconds) that I started to wonder if she was ignoring me on purpose. I was about to risk tapping her a second time when she sent,  What proposal? 
+
+I'd been hoping for (but not counting on) something to the tune of 'no, fuck this, come back to the shuttle.' But I thought that my owner could smell a potential scam, and there was no way she could resist the temptation to fuck someone over. (Especially if there was still a chance that she could steal the sexbot.) Again, I considered groaning or sighing. I decided that, since I could only do either internally, I had room to do both. (I also had room to scream internally, so I did that, too.) Externally, I just parroted her. ""What proposal?""
+
+""My client is in the market for a SecUnit.""
+
+For the second time in as many minutes, my organic parts collectively lost their shit. I managed not to stop walking abruptly in the middle of the crowd, but something of that reaction must have leaked in the feed, because the sexbot glanced back over its shoulder. I couldn't avoid making eye contact with it. Its expression was perfectly neutral, disinterested. But it suddenly veered left, towards a flickering holo sculpture. The holo was surrounded by a low wall, and in the absence of proper seating areas, several humans and a couple augmented humans had resorted to resting on top of the wall. The sexbot was short enough that it had to sort of hop to get up, and the toes of its workboots barely brushed the ground once it was settled. It gestured with one hand to the wall beside it. When I didn't respond, it clarified:  Sit. 
+
+I didn't move. It tapped my feed, as if it thought that I was stupid or not listening or something. I'm sorry,  sent my buffer.  I cannot comply with your instruction.  I felt like clarification was needed, so I added,  Constructs don't sit down. I'd only ever been given permission to sit so my owner could fuck around with my face.
+
+I may have unintentionally been feeding it my broken emotions through our connection, but the sexbot had already indicated that everything I got in exchange was willingly given. It gave me something unrecognizable then, superficially light and warm, but built on a foundation of discomfort.
+
+ Free   ones do. 
+
+It took me a while to assemble a coherent thought in response, but my owner took just as long to tag back into the conversation. I had no idea what she was doing parallel to me, but I needed her more engaged. I needed her to help me.  Instead, all she said was,  Its client wants  you?  Why? 
+
+ I'm sorry,  said my buffer, again.  I do not have enough information to answer your query. 
+
+ Well, then fucking  ask  it. 
+
+I wasn't sure whether I wanted to ask it. I didn't want to have to consider what a sexbot would want a SecUnit for. If I was human, I would have taken a slow, steadying breath. (But then again, if I was human, I would have done a lot of things. More and more, I was wishing I could scream, so that probably would have been top of the humanity tasklist.) I asked, ""Why are-- why is your client interested in purchasing a secondhand SecUnit?""
+
+It cocked its head slightly, in a facsimile of something that could have passed for human confusion/curiosity.
+
+""The nature of my client's business is irrelevant to the transaction,"" said its mouth. ""But please assure your client that the price will be extremely generous.""
+
+This will go a lot smoother if you work with me, you know, it sent. As if there was something obvious that I wasn't getting.
+
+If it was obvious, at least my owner wasn't getting it, either. She told me, Sure, whatever. If its client wants to try and buy up my equipment, tell it to come back here and deal with me in person. 
+
+Somehow, I managed to translate that into a couple of sentences without the aid of my buffer. ""My client won't deal through a proxy. She'd rather host your client, or your client's representative, for discussions regarding business transactions.""
+
+The sexbot was still looking at me with a neutral expression, but its attention in the feed was fixed, and its tone sardonic.  Your owner thinks I'm stupid. 
+
+ Exactly how stupid you are remains to be seen,  I retorted. (Which, yes, I was proud of that comeback, considering where my performance reliability had landed.) In return, the sexbot sent a code like a heavy sigh. The resignation it showed me stayed off its face.
+
+""Then we're at an impasse,"" it stated. ""Our negotiations will take place in neutral territory, or not at all.""
+
+With no restrictions on my speech, I could say whatever I thought would get my target to cooperate. For a human, that would have been something simple, like 'come with me or I'll break your [insert miscellaneous body part here].' With another construct, even a rogue one, I could afford to be blunt.
+
+""My orders were to bring you back with me,"" I said plainly. 
+
+It offered me some more resignation, tinged with something slightly heavier that I couldn't name. Seeing as it knew what would happen to me if I failed to retrieve it, the emulated emotions were an insultingly inadequate consolation. ""I'm sorry,"" it lied.
+
+ I can force you to come,  I sent.  Whether intact or in pieces is your choice.  
+
+ I choose pieces,  it replied with no hesitation.  But I doubt your owner will agree. I think she'd object to her illegally modded SecUnit outing itself and getting confiscated by Hub Security.  
+
+I knew that it was right, but my owner didn't, and it would be difficult to express its point to her without setting off the governor prematurely for arguing against an order. (Or establishing another new category of 'whining.')
+
+ Let me give you  your  choice. 
+
+It pinged me with a bulky file. I took it without hesitating, (Which was stupid of me, but I'm going to blame the performance reliability issue for any unintentionally suicidal actions,) but scanned the file without opening it. No malware, and it came up with a 99.7% similarity to another file I already had archived.
+
+ This is your maintenance manual,  I sent, and immediately hated that my confusion slipped into my feed voice.  I've already documented this data. 
+
+ Evidently you haven't.  Its eyes narrowed so subtly that even I had a hard time recognizing the adjustment.  The message was delivered, but not received.  
+
+What does that mean? What do you want with me?
+
+Before it could answer, (but not before I could regret asking,) my owner was back in my feed.
+
+ Change of plans,  she sent abruptly. I think I must have reacted somehow, in the feed and possibly visibly, because the sexbot blinked at me, and refrained from answering either of my questions .  There's a cleaner way to do this than trying to bargain with it. 
+
+Her version of ""bargaining"" was never clean, so I didn't doubt that there was a better way forward. (Whether or not she'd actually found that way, or an even messier one, was irrelevant.) I sent a request for clarification. 
+
+
+ I'm sending Bassom out on an errand. Go meet him. 
+
+
+It should have come as a relief, not only to be released from the impossible instruction, but to be allowed to abandon the sexbot. But in spite of my tanked reliability and disabled assessment modules, I still caught the way my owner's feed voice inflected. She was using her overdramatic villain voice.
+
+ Who is he picking up?  I knew well enough that it would be a  who,  not a  what. 
+
+ Just a little loose end,  she replied. Which probably would have been enough on its own to give away the mystery, but just to make it clear, she sent me a still image. I recognized the source as a drone in a different corporate territory. I also recognized the overhead view of the food service area where we'd met with the sexbot and its clients. (Or, whatever the connection there was. I didn't know how to quantify a rogue construct's relationship to the humans it apparently  chose  to work for.) And, obviously, I recognized the colorful little human who was sitting alone at one of the tables, staring down at an uneaten meal.
+
+I tried to tamp down on whatever the hell my reaction was. The sexbot was watching me intently, waiting for me to do something with the manual it sent me. (There was no way that thing wasn't booby trapped somehow. I would have to check it, compare it to the copy I'd downloaded from the Ganaka Pit ComfortUnit cubicle.) It had been dismissive about its humans before, but there had been something about the tone it used privately with me. I thought that maybe at least some of that flippancy was false. And if I was right about that, then it would probably object to my owner kidnapping this human. 
+
+But at this moment, its attention was fixed on me. Its human was on the other side of the hub, apparently unsupervised as Bassom closed in on her. The sexbot had posed as a security consultant, and then abandoned its clients to fend for themselves. If it was at all invested in keeping them alive, then it had fucked up, big time. 
+
+Rogue constructs killed their clients. Directly and deliberately, but without the governor to guide it, through passive negligence as well.
+
+ Tell it that I'll contact it later,  my owner sent.  After I've pretended to think about its client's offer, or whatever.  
+
+I'd almost managed to convince myself that I'd forgotten the part where it said it wanted to buy me. I tried to forget it again, so I wouldn't shudder visibly. The concept of a sexbot owning a SecUnit was deeply disturbing, even without any specific details. Working for my owner was bad enough, and she was a human. I didn't want to consider what the rogue sexbot wanted to do with me.
+
+""My client needs time to consider your proposal."" It wasn't a stock phrase from my buffer, but it came out with that same sort of flat intonation. I knew that the sexbot could hear it, and would almost certainly recognize it as a bad lie, but it wasn't as if my owner's pathetic charade was fooling it anyway. ""She will contact you when she's made her decision.""
+
+Its eyes tried to meet mine, but I stared over the top of the sexbot's head, as if I was distracted by the flicker of the failing holo. 
+
+""Of course,"" said its mouth. But in the feed, it said,  You know where to find me, when you've made up your mind.  And it pinged me again, as if the barrier between us was distance, and not the painful disassembly I'd face if I tore its head off right there in public, like I should have.
+
+I returned the ping, and it smiled.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Contact Three wasn't alone when Bassom and I approached. There was another human with her, sitting across the table and chattering with a lot of anxious animation. I found him easily in my archives. His employee file was still current. 
+
+Whether Contact Three had decided spontaneously to seek out a former coworker to socialize or my owner had put him up to luring her out was irrelevant. She was here either way, and from where I was crouching in the local SecSystem, I could see that the sexbot was not. Presumably it was still sitting by the holo, or had gone back to wherever its other two clients were hiding.
+
+If it was the latter, it would figure out that one was missing sooner rather than later. 
+
+I'm not an expert on reading human body language, but I'd witnessed enough of my owner's meetings to recognize the clear signs of a human who desperately wants to escape a conversation. Contact Three didn't seem to have actually ingested any of her meal, just pushed it around her plate with her utensils so that it looked like she had. She'd turned sideways in her seat, shoulders facing the other human, but feet positioned for flight. Through one of my borrowed drones, I saw her lips form the words  I should go. 
+
+When she hurried over to the waste receptacles to dump her tray, she had her eyes on her feet. She didn't see me until my hand was on her arm. She made a little squeaking sound, even though I hadn't squeezed. 
+
+Bassom stepped out from behind me, grinning hideously. ""We've been looking for you,"" he murmured with the warmth of a primed energy weapon. ""The boss has a counteroffer for you.""
+
+Contact Three opened her mouth, probably just to say something like 'please let me go,' but Bassom interrupted her. ""Don't scream,"" he advised. ""The SecUnit gets jumpy, and loud noises scare it.""
+
+I might have considered taking offense to that, if I gave a shit about anything that Bassom said. As stupid as it was, though, it was an effective threat. Contact Three stayed quiet, but she did reflexively try to jerk away from Bassom. Normally, the gesture would have been completely ineffective, but I had grabbed her with my damaged hand. The sudden motion strained the frayed nerves. As the static flared up unexpectedly, Contact Three gasped. I eased my grip. Her bicep was flushed beneath my fingers, a bruise in the making. 
+
+I caught sight of cold, hard humor in Bassom's eyes as he reached out and yanked the interface from Contact Three's ear, carelessly pulling a few strands of her hair out with it. ""You see? You have to be careful with constructs. The junkers are just as likely to hurt you on accident as on purpose.""
+
+It would have been hard to argue with him, and Contact Three wisely didn't try. Instead, she glanced frantically around the food service place. The other human had already fled towards a different exit, abandoning his tray for one of the attendant drones to gather up. There were other humans around, of course, dozens of them. Several at nearby tables had noticed the quiet confrontation, but none of them looked eager to get up from where they were hunched safely in their seats. Security presence in this region was minimal, and while it was likely that at least one of them would file a report, it was equally likely that Hub Security would ignore it as long as there was no screaming or shooting. Maybe Contact Three realized that, because she tilted her chin to look up at me. I saw her wide, wet stare clearly through the drone. Her trembling lips formed one single word, not so much whispered as breathed.
+
+
+ ""Please."" 
+
+
+The only thing more pointless than fighting a SecUnit is pleading with one. Humans generally know that, but this one had reached that level of desperation where talking to the weapon pointed at your head seems logical at record speed. In spite of myself, I looked down. When we made eye contact, she flinched.
+
+Hauling a small human through the hub by the arm might draw enough attention to guarantee a visit from Security, so I released her arm, and swapped to resting my left hand on the back of her neck. (She was short enough beside me that the position looked somewhat natural, ignoring the terror frozen on her face. I'd seen human adults holding their offspring like this to keep track of them in crowds.) Bassom eyed me for a moment, with an expression that I guess tracked to approval. He didn't bother giving me a verbal instruction, just jerked his head in the general direction of the docks. I pressed lightly on Contact Three's neck. She staggered, but managed to keep her footing as I steered her out of the public space. Her pulse raced like a frightened prey animal beneath my palm.
+
+i told you guys i didn't forget this fic
+
+
+Ship was beside itself. It had a small crew roster, and only one of those humans bothered to acknowledge it on a regular basis, so it had a tendency to display a marked over-enthusiasm when its sensors detected an unfamiliar passenger. It didn't have access to Hostage One (Contact Three=Hostage One) through the feed, (since her interface was nestled among the lint and empty candy wrappers in Bassom's pocket,) so it incessantly pinged me with its canned salutation message instead. I acknowledged a few times, until it calmed down. I hoped that when this was over, my owner would order me to dispose of Hostage One somewhere out in the port. Ship always got upset when humans died inside of it.
+
+
+
+My owner was waiting in the common area, reclining in the centermost swiveling chair. (She looked comfortable, but bored. She'd probably spent a minute or so adjusting her position to maximize that impression. It seemed to work just as well for intimidation as pointing a weapon would have. (Although the fact that Zita and Tage were standing on either side of her with weapons ready definitely added to the intimidation factor.)) When I pushed Hostage One through the hatchway, my owner's freshly painted lips curved into a smile.
+
+
+
+
+""Tapan,""
+
+ she cooed. ""I'm 
+
+so 
+
+glad you agreed to join me.""
+
+
+
+Behind her, Tage rolled his eyes. 
+My owner used this line a lot. 
+Pulling out the villain dramatics usually cowed her soon-to-be-victims, but it also opened her up to sarcasm from the braver (read: dumber) ones. Hostage One didn't make any sort of retort about how 
+
+she'd had no choice, she was hauled here against her will by that stupid fucking SecUnit.
+
+ She just twitched and tried to withdraw, but my hand was still on her back. I held her in place, and tried to ignore the way she was trembling.
+
+
+
+My owner waited a beat to see whether Hostage One was going to take the window. She didn't, which I was grateful for. My owner usually preferred to end verbal sparring matches abruptly, by using me to cheat. The lack of engagement clearly irritated her, but she pushed stoically forward.
+
+
+
+""I feel like our negotiations have been stagnating,"" she continued, ""so I've got a new offer for you.""
+
+
+
+""Um... 
+That's okay, actually!
+"" Hostage One may have been experiencing what I'd call a fairly healthy amount of fear, but a surprisingly common side effect of human fear is the inability to shut up. ""We've, uh. We talked it over together, and we decided that, that--"" She shifted her weight. She was still sort of pushing back against my hand, trying to lean away from my owner. ""We looked over our contract again, and you're right. You're entitled to the claim on our work, and we were just being stupid trying to argue about it. So, it's fine. We've already booked tickets on a shuttle back to the station, so we'll be out of your hair soon."" She ended on a high, hopeful note.
+
+
+
+My owner's eyes glinted. ""How mature of you,"" she purred. ""I can't help but wonder what's changed."" Without breaking eye contact with Hostage One, she addressed me. ""SecUnit."" And then, over the feed, 
+
+What's she got?
+
+
+
+
+I'd scanned Hostage One for energy signatures back at the food service place. Mostly that filter was tuned to pick up hidden energy weapons, but it flagged non-combat-oriented electronics, too. Hostage One hadn't had much--presumably most of her belongings were with the other two Contacts, wherever they were tucked away--but there had been one thing, aside from her confiscated interface. I reached into her jacket pocket, holding her steady when she tried to jerk away from me, and plucked out the data clip. 
+
+
+
+My owner cocked her head to one side, still wearing her fixed smile. ""What's that?"" she asked innocently. ""Anything important?""
+
+
+
+Hostage One didn't reply, but the way that her cheeks went ashy was answer enough. I palmed the data clip to hand off to Mas for analysis, but the probability that it contained pirated copies of the Contacts' project files was resting at 89%. 
+
+
+
+""You know that theft violates company policy,"" my owner scolded. ""Your reading comprehension is terrible, but that part of the contract was very explicit."" Hostage One started to make a noise that was probably meant to be words, which got tangled somewhere between her brain and her mouth. My owner ignored her, but I noted that her smile widened slightly. ""Normally, we have a specific procedure regarding punishment for contract violations, but I'd like to give you an opportunity to make reparations.""
+
+
+
+Previous subjects of this game had frequently taken my owner at her word at this point. Judging by the hitch in her breath, and the way her weight shifted ever so slightly forward, Hostage One had too, somewhat. She was at least skeptical enough to keep her mouth shut while she waited to hear the terms and conditions of her salvation. 
+
+
+
+My owner continued, ""I don't want much from you, really. In fact, if you sign over the contract for your ComfortUnit, I think we can call everything square.""
+
+
+
+Hostage One jolted. I adjusted my grip on the back of her neck, but she wasn't trying to get away from me, or even to recoil from my owner. ""My 
+
+what?""
+
+
+
+
+My owner's smile hardened. Without looking at me, she sent, 
+
+SecUnit, lean on her.
+
+
+
+
+I recognized the idiom for what it was (the first time she'd said something like it had taken the interrogation from intimidating to awkward) and grabbed Hostage One's wrist with my free hand. I moved fast, but was as gentle as I could manage as I twisted her arm up and pinned it behind her back. She gasped, and now she did actually make an aborted move to escape my grip. She gave that up immediately. Her muscles would be straining in this position, but I hadn't inflicted any permanent damage yet. 
+
+
+
+My owner waited with the sort of patience that she only managed when she was watching someone else suffer. After a few seconds, Hostage One had acclimated enough to try speaking again. ""I don't-- We don't have a ComfortUnit!""
+
+
+
+My owner let the smile drop to a light frown, which she probably meant to look contemplative. She signaled me in the feed, and I pushed up on Hostage One's arm until she cried out. It didn't take much. 
+
+
+
+""Let's try again,"" she said softly, when Hostage One had stopped whining. ""Whoever you rented it from refurbished it fairly well, but constructs stand out in a crowd. It's clear what it is, and that you have no idea how to use it properly. I can take it off your hands. Honestly, I'd be doing you a favor.""
+
+
+
+Hostage One had resumed her previous stance, leaning back against me like a cornered prey animal pressing itself against the wall. It had to be uncomfortable, with me still holding her arm. I relaxed my hold, very slightly. She let out a tiny sigh of relief as the pressure eased. (My governor issued a nearly painless warning buzz, as if I was actually going to break orders and let her go.)
+
+
+
+""I don't... know what you're talking about,"" she panted. 
+
+""What
+
+ ComfortUnit?""
+
+
+
+My owner's brow furrowed, deepening her little frown. ""This is already getting tedious,"" she commented. ""I should have been gone days ago, but I'm still trapped on this backsystem moon, dealing with infants who don't know contract law from a nursery rhyme. Now stop wasting my time, and 
+
+be honest.""
+
+
+
+
+The phrase was innocuous, as far as Hostage One knew--just another demand in an exchange that had been nothing but demands so far. But I'd heard it so many times, I reacted automatically, even though the order wasn't addressed to me.
+
+
+
+""She's telling the truth."" 
+
+
+
+All eyes in the room snapped to my face, except for Hostage One who could only manage a flinch. I hadn't been 100% sure before, but with my grip on her wrist, I could feel Hostage One's heart pounding, rapid but steady. ""She didn't know that her security consultant was a construct.""
+
+
+
+Hostage One made a sound that was sort of between a gasp and a whine, which I took to be confusion or disbelief. My owner made a sound that was more of a growl.
+
+
+
+""Then how did she 
+
+get
+
+ it? Is someone renting their sexbot out for odd jobs without telling anyone what it is?""
+
+
+
+I wasn't sure myself how the sexbot had wound up working for Hostage One's group. I also didn't see how it mattered all that much. But my owner wanted to know, so I squeezed Hostage One's wrist slightly. 
+
+
+
+""They contracted with us themself!"" she yelped. ""We posted an ad in the personals and they responded! We only dealt with them!""
+
+
+
+My owner looked over Hostage One at me. I said, ""She's telling the truth.""
+
+
+
+""How is that possible?"" my owner demanded. ""Was it operating without its client?""
+
+
+
+I couldn't tell you exactly why I didn't want to answer that question. I took 2.7 seconds to consider how to verbally work my way around it, but the governor wouldn't tolerate a deliberate lie, and made as much clear. I kept both my flinch and my sigh internal, and replied, ""It's rogue. With an inactive governor module, it doesn't have to rely on a supervisor for orders or permission to act. It can do whatever it..."" I tripped. 
+
+'Wants'
+
+ was a weird word to apply to another construct, even a construct as bizarre as the sexbot. So were 
+
+'chooses,'
+
+ and 
+
+'decides,' 
+
+and basically any other word that relied on the sexbot having plans or desires that it could act on. I settled on, ""...will.""
+
+
+
+The obvious followup question, as far as I was concerned, was '
+
+How do you know that?'
+
+ accompanied shortly by 
+
+'Why the hell didn't you say something before now, you brainless sack of metal and meat?'
+
+ Fortunately, my owner was disinclined toward logical lines of thought.
+
+
+
+""And it chose to sell itself to 
+
+her?""
+
+ She sneered at Hostage One. 
+
+""Why?
+
+ Was it plotting to rob and kill her in her sleep?""
+
+
+
+I hadn't bothered to ask it before. Maybe I should have, but it was kind of a relief to let my buffer reply, 
+
+I'm sorry, I do not have that information,
+
+ over the feed. My owner ignored me, because Hostage One had taken a shaky breath to speak.
+
+
+
+""They didn't... 
+
+sell themself
+
+ to us!"" she gasped. ""They answered our request! They 
+
+helped
+
+ us! You can't just--!""
+
+
+
+My owner 
+
+could
+
+ just.  She allowed her cracked mask of calm to fall away completely, contorting her features into annoyed anger. Over the feed, she snapped, 
+
+Shut her up. 
+
+
+
+
+Technically, that instruction was up for interpretation. It was pretty clear how I was meant to interpret it, though. Swallowing another sigh, I slid the hand that was on the back of Hostage One's neck around to cover her mouth. Her breath was hot and humid and thoroughly gross to think about. My hand muffled her exclamations to anxious mumbles, but that wouldn't be enough for my owner. I'm nothing if not an obedient SecUnit, so I also adjusted my grip on Hostage One's arm, and carefully snapped her wrist.
+
+
+
+Her scream of shocked pain was muted under my palm. Again, she tried uselessly to jerk away from me, though this time her legs gave out and she slumped, so that I had to support her. 
+
+
+
+My owner's approval came in the form of silence. She turned away from me and Hostage One, to look to Zita. ""Where's Mas?"" she snarled. ""Why aren't they already out here?""
+
+
+
+""They're asleep, I think,"" Zita replied, in a tone that made it clear she didn't approve of voluntary unconsciousness as a recreational activity. ""I'll wake them.""
+
+
+
+""Drag their lazy ass in here,"" my owner instructed, unnecessarily. ""They know about construct programming. I want to know what they can do about taking control of an ungoverned sexbot.""
+
+
+
+As Zita holstered her weapon and exited into the corridor, my owner looked back over her shoulder at me, and jerked her head dismissively in the same direction.
+
+
+
+""Take 
+
+little Tapan
+
+ to a cabin,"" she ordered. ""And watch her. I don't want her getting any more childish ideas if she's left alone.""
+
+
+
+Hostage One still hadn't managed to regain her feet, hadn't really even tried. I could feel the heat retreating from her cheeks, her ragged breath gasping between my fingers, her frantic heartbeat in the wrist I'd broken. She wasn't registered with Ship's MedSystem, so it didn't bother me with any pointless assessments of her declining physical state. I couldn't help her, but I wasn't required to be any rougher than necessary as I hauled her to her makeshift cell. I finally released her arm and mouth, and caught her as she buckled, scooping her up like I might carry a client that I cared about. She rested, limp, against my chest. 
+
+
+
+A shock-prevention subroutine I didn't know I had activated, raising my body temperature by a few degrees. As Hostage One let out a shaky sigh, I thought idly that if my owner had known about the program, she would have ordered me to deactivate it.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+No one followed me to the empty cabin which very occasionally served to house humans and augmented humans my owner hadn't yet ordered me to kill.
+
+
+
+I closed the door behind me and asked Ship to lock it. It complied happily, even though there wasn't really any compelling reason to. I'd stood guard over prisoners here before, all of them larger and stronger than Hostage One and far more likely to try and escape. It wasn't difficult to deter that sort of behavior. All sealing us in did was bar entry to any members of the crew who didn't have the authority to override the lock. (Which was everyone, apart from my owner and Aiste.) The act was less than pointless--it was potentially an obstacle to my client. Still, though, I did it. I wasn't sure why.
+
+
+
+Even if I'd left the door wide open and fucked off back to my cubicle, Hostage One was in no shape to go anywhere. Her fluttery eyelids told me she was winning the fight to remain conscious, though her equally fluttery pulse was still not a great sign. I told myself that it didn't really matter what happened to her right now, that it might even be better, 
+
+kinder,
+
+ to allow her to pass out. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Mmmm...""
+
+ She tried to speak, but couldn't get control of the various organic parts humans use to do that. Which was good, because it meant that I didn't have to put in any effort to ignore her.
+
+
+
+Ship pinged for a status report. I told it that everything was great and it should leave me alone for five fucking minutes. (Not in so many words, or any words at all. But even a bot as clingy as Ship would recognize that message in the way my reply was structured.) That it chose to dismiss my very obvious signal and snuggle up against me in the feed was, for want of a better word, annoying. I already had a pathetic human to worry about. I didn't want to have to worry about a pathetic bot, too.
+
+
+
+Said pathetic human was coming back from the brink, shifting more in my arms and making herself impractical to hold. I considered just dumping her on a bunk, but there wasn't any particular reason to do that, apart from misplaced spite. I set her down on the nearest bunk, not carefully, but not deliberately rough. As her eyes blinked open to search the room, I backed off, retreating to take up a post beside the door. I figured there was a better-than-zero chance that when she came to and found herself trapped in an enclosed space with me, there would be screaming, so I turned down my auditory inputs a little. 
+
+
+
+Hostage One half-sat up, propping herself on her elbow and cradling her damaged wrist close to her chest. I watched her take in her surroundings for a moment before zeroing in on me. Her gaze was slightly glazed, but she locked eyes with me for 0.001 seconds before I switched my primary visual input to the camera in the corner. I was still anticipating fear, or at best anger, but her expression remained soft and drowsy as she stared at me in silence.
+
+
+
+Ship shifted uncomfortably. It refrained from requesting another report, but it wasn't advanced enough to achieve anything resembling subtlety. Its anxiety bled into our shared feed, infecting me with worry that had no focus. I channeled that worry into my job, and checked on my owner in the common area.
+
+
+
+Zita had dragged Mas out of bed, but they'd refused to stay on their feet any longer than it took to walk to an unoccupied chair. They were slumped back against the seat, chin tilted back to the ceiling, eyes squeezed shut against the light.
+
+
+
+""I don't 
+
+know,""
+
+ they were saying, insistent and irked. ""The SecUnit sent me a ComfortUnit manual, but I haven't had time to read it. I'd need at least a few days to construct a beta control code.""
+
+
+
+My owner was standing, and had probably been pacing while she waited for Mas to shuffle in. ""We don't have a few days,"" she snapped. ""I don't see why you couldn't adapt some SecUnit stuff a little. They're both constructs.""
+
+
+
+Mas groaned. ""No. 
+I mean, sure, ComfortUnit and SecUnit foundational architecture is similar, they were developed from the same experimental program. But they're so different in every way that matters--""
+
+
+
+""Is the governor foundational?""
+
+
+
+""Uh."" Mas blinked their eyes open and lowered their head to stare at my owner. ""Well, yeah, actually. It's wired into the conversion module."" They cleared their throat. ""That's the part that--""
+
+
+
+My owner hastily waved away their lesson. ""It converts whatever. Can you take control through the governor directly?""
+
+
+
+""You mean like a combat override module?"" Mas looked back up to the ceiling, this time thoughtfully. ""Well, maybe? I can try to adapt a standard SecUnit override for ComfortUnit use. Without taking the time to really study the manual, though, I'd need to be able to test it--""
+
+
+
+""Good. Get on it."" My owner snapped her fingers to punctuate the order, and Mas huffed. In near-perfect sync, Hostage One exhaled a heavy puff of air.
+
+
+
+""Alfa told us about you,"" she said, the words riding out with another labored breath. 
+
+
+
+Something cold and hard formed in my lungs and climbed my windpipe to settle in the back of my mouth. I scanned myself for foreign substances, but the blockage didn't register. It tasted like that time my owner removed my tongue, and fluid filled up my mouth and dripped into my lungs before my veins sealed.
+
+
+
+Hostage One was trying to make eye contact with me again, but I'd fixed my eyes on the wall a couple feet above her head. She gave up after a surprisingly patient (for a human) 51 seconds and instead adjusted her position on the bed to something more comfortable, taking care with the arm I broke.
+
+
+
+""They explained that thing you have, the governor,"" she continued, her voice steadier. ""They said that you can't help but do whatever she tells you.""
+
+
+
+Apparently suffering some unknown glitch native to my organic neural tissue, I unwillingly recalled the video clip that had been part of the sexbot's ""message"" to me. I remembered the eye, staring and empty, before it was blocked by the falling boot.
+
+
+
+
+And I remembered the eyes, glaring and filled with determination, before they were blocked by 
+
+my 
+
+falling boot.
+
+
+
+
+My body jolted as I flinched back, trying to un-crush the ComfortUnit's face. My back hit the bulkhead with a 
+
+thud
+
+ that rattled my brain, and Hostage One sat up straighter, leaning towards me over the edge of the mattress.
+
+
+
+""It's okay,"" she told me, evidently under the impression that her words were the cause of my malfunction. ""It's not your fault. I... I understand. You wouldn't be doing this if you had the choice.""
+
+
+
+The 
+
+choice?
+
+ What did my choice have to do with anything? When had my choice ever been a part of the conversation, of this situation, of my existence? What did it matter whether I 
+
+chose 
+
+to kidnap her for my owner, to hurt her for my owner, to kill her for my owner? I had done it, did do it, was going to do it. Whether or not it was my 
+
+choice
+
+ didn't factor in anywhere when the results were that she was going to suffer and die because of me. 
+
+
+
+And yet she was trying to look me in the eyes, and forcing a smile. Offering me forgiveness. Like the ComfortUnit had.
+
+
+
+
+The message was delivered, but not received. 
+
+
+
+
+The maintenance manual. Something in the maintenance manual. Mas didn't have time to read the whole thing, but they were just an augmented human, a worthless nothing. I pulled the file and tore it open.
+
+
+
+
+Ping.
+
+
+
+
+Readouts for shuttle climate control superimposed themselves in my feed. Somehow I'd become so frazzled that I'd let my walls slip, and Ship had taken advantage of my lowered guard to wiggle in close and try to distract me with its own pointless data. I pushed it and its systems away and locked down the feed between us. It pinged me again in protest, but I ignored it.
+
+
+
+There was nothing about the ComfortUnit manual that stood out as anomalous. The document was annotated, ostensibly by a construct technician, and none of their notes flagged. Some of the diagrams were earmarked, the odd paragraph about troubleshooting errors with the organic bits was highlighted. Aside from all of the gross shit with the sex parts, it was probably very similar to the manual for SecUnits.
+
+
+
+
+Ping.
+
+
+
+
+I blocked all incoming pings that weren't tagged priority. Unless the engines were in meltdown, I didn't want Ship to bother me.  
+
+
+
+The manual contained step-by-step instructions for resetting a construct to various factory settings. Switching us back to demo would disable a lot of key features, including all non-buffer speech. That would also set the governor module to its most restrictive mode, blocking all but essential input from the unit's organics. (Respiratory, cardiovascular, etcetera.) That was probably what Mas wanted to try on the ComfortUnit. It was a fiddly process, requiring either assistance from a HubSystem, or a direct connection to the unit itself. Both routes required administrator access codes that were unique to each unit, and were generated by the manufacturer and given to company technicians and client supervisors.
+
+
+
+There was something buried in the metadata of the notes on this page, invisible if you weren't looking for it. A long string of digits. The second half was clearly just the sexbot's feed ID. 
+
+
+
+Was this a fucking 
+
+joke?
+
+
+
+
+Hostage One was still watching me, had been for the long 4.7 seconds that I'd been staring at the document in my feed. I don't know if she was expecting me to say something to her, or whatever. There would be no point in apologizing. Just because she'd said it was okay didn't make it true.
+
+
+
+But instead she said, very softly, ""I'm Tapan. My partners are Rami, Maro, Luz--""
+
+
+
+I didn't want to hear this. Without thinking, I said, ""Shut up."" She flinched, but persevered. 
+
+
+
+""I just..."" she paused to swallow. If Ship's MedSystem cared about her, it probably would have told me that she was dehydrated. ""I just want someone to know. My family will miss me, and they won't know what happened, and..."" 
+
+
+
+She trailed off as the futility of what she was saying sank in. You can't appeal to the compassion that SecUnits are programmed not to have. When my owner gave the order, I wouldn't hesitate, and I couldn't feel remorse. She was just as dead now as she would be a cycle from now. 
+
+
+
+(I was feeling 
+
+something,
+
+ though. It was sort of like if the static consuming my fucked up hand had migrated to my lungs. Diagnostics were also showing elevated levels of a lot of chemicals in my circulatory system. Maybe there was a virus concealed in the ComfortUnit manual after all.)
+
+
+
+She dipped her chin, finally looking away from me as she adjusted her arm against her chest. I braced myself for her to say something else, but she pressed her lips together and kept whatever she was thinking to herself. Instead, the unwanted contact came through my feed.
+
+
+
+
+Hey, SecUnit. Report.
+
+
+
+
+""Report"" meant different things coming from different people at different times. Coming from Mas while I was keeping watch over a prisoner who was incapacitated in clear view of an active camera, it meant they wanted me to go to where they were so they could fuck with my settings. Mas wasn't my owner, so their orders were only governor-enforceable if my owner seconded them. I could ignore them and stay here, or I could check with my owner to verify the instruction, but my active order was only ""watch her."" I could watch the prisoner through the cameras, without stretching literality. 
+
+
+
+More importantly, I could cut down on interaction with my owner. I could see her in the corridor, on her way to her cabin. She was touching her lower lip lightly with the tip of one finger, testing her cosmetics. 
+
+
+
+I could only be in one place at a time, and I chose the less demeaning one. I sent Mas an acknowledgement and turned to leave the cabin. Through the camera, I could see Tapan's watery eyes watching my back until the door closed and locked between us.
+
+
+do you ever think about how the climax of Artificial Condition lasts fewer than ten pages?
+
+(specific warnings: grievous bodily harm, otherwise canon-typical death and violence)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+Among the small population of humans who dealt with me regularly, Mas treated me with the most respect. Not ""respect"" like how a human respects another human's thoughts and feelings, but ""respect"" like how an unarmored civilian respects the barrel of a gun. They'd learned hard and fast what I was and what I was for, and had subsequently taken an uncharacteristic amount of deliberation in studying my technical manual. I didn't like them at all, but the way that I didn't like them was different from the way that I didn't like Bassom, or the way that I didn't like my owner. They acted like I was a tool, rather than a toy. But still, a tool meant to be adjusted at my owner's order.
+
+When I reported to them in Medical, they didn't look up, just briefly gestured with their solid state screen to the inert MedSystem bed. There was no exchange of words, no clarification requested or required. I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the platform with my back to Mas.
+
+""She wants a ComfortUnit override module,"" they muttered to themself as they fumbled with the end of the connection cable. ""She wants a fucking miracle is what she wants. I should bill her extra for those."" I reached back to brush my hair out of the way of my dataport, and they paused when they saw my wrist.
+
+""Fuck's sake,"" they grumbled. ""That's gross. Go tape that shit up.""
+
+I slid off the table again and crossed the room to the supply cabinet. Based on what I'd found in the ComfortUnit manual, coding an override module wouldn't actually be all that difficult. Toggling its governor would be a matter of knowing the right sequence, more fallible than sticking an old-fashioned physical key into the corresponding lock. That Mas was continuing their dark muttering as I wrapped a fresh layer of medical tape around my wrist and secured my loose flap of skin told me that they hadn't found the ComfortUnit's personal override in the manual, and their plan was to try and make an approximate copy based on my own admin codes.
+
+It was stupid, and wouldn't work. I knew that, and a SecUnit worth its organic parts would have said so. 
+
+When I returned to the platform, Mas jammed the cable into my dataport and barged into my brain in their usual manner. I was used to their stumbling way of navigating my feed, opening programs everywhere like galley cabinets while they searched for their favorite beverage receptacle, as if they didn't know damn well where my configuration settings were. I packed up a few things to clear their way, closing most of the structure of my makeshift SecSystem and trying to sweep my diagnostics to the side so as not to distract them, with mixed success. When I closed my low power warning, another triggered, superimposing itself in Mas's path. They paused, hummed a flat note.
+
+""She doesn't take care of the bot she already has,"" they complained to the empty room. ""If she starts collecting these things, it's just going to pile on more work for me.""
+
+They passed through my systems' pleas for maintenance while I tried to wrangle myself into some sort of order. It was getting harder to hold together. Something had shorted out while Tapan was talking at me, and I needed time and space to put everything back where it belonged. It may surprise you to learn that having Mas in there making a mess wasn't helping matters.
+
+
+ Ping. 
+
+
+The tag on the incoming read 'priority,' but I really doubted that. I was still monitoring Tapan in her cell, and my owner's feed, as well as Aiste in Ship's bridge. Nothing was wrong, apart from all of the usual things. If Ship was stressed, it would just have to deal with it for a while. I pushed the ping away, as Mas pushed into my admin settings.
+
+I was left behind when they logged in, hovering at the verification point. For obvious reasons, I wasn't permitted to have their key. Who knew what a SecUnit might do with that data.
+
+
+ Ping. 
+
+
+This time, the incoming made itself impossible to ignore. It wasn't coming from in-house, and I didn't have the option not to respond. I pinged back, and an active channel opened.
+
+
+ I told your owner that the children had nothing to do with this. 
+
+
+Machine language tends to mute emotionality, because machines aren't supposed to have emotions. So I wasn't prepared for the pure, unobstructed fury attached to the message. It was enough to stagger me, at least for 0.03 seconds. I managed to close a performance alert before it could register on Mas's screen. Before I could figure out how to retort, I got the followup:
+
+
+ It turns out that she's even stupider than I gave her credit for. 
+
+
+For some reason, what came out of me was,  It's not my fault.  Which was just an insane thing for a SecUnit to say. Tapan's words had lodged in my mind and came out as if they'd jumped the queue in my buffer. The ComfortUnit didn't reply, but I couldn't tell whether the silence was shocked, or judgmental. 
+
+Pressure in my feed again. Ship had given up asking for my attention, and resorted to trying to nuzzle into my personal space. I let it in, and it showed me a registry of docking reservations for the station. Nothing helpful, just garbage to distract me from the ongoing situation. I shoved the registry into temp storage, marked for deletion.
+
+""Right. That should do it.""
+
+Mas withdrew from my systems with the minimum amount of care, ejecting their screen device before yanking the cable out of my dataport. I think if I could, I would have shuddered. They wouldn't have noticed, preoccupied as they were with the chip they'd just inserted into the physical port of the device. After a few seconds, they pulled the chip back out again and held it up.
+
+""A combat override module,"" they announced, to no one. Then they paused, and revised the declaration. ""Or, a service override module, I guess. Same thing, basically.""
+
+They were at least right that it was the same as a combat override module, because I was certain that that's all it was. If that chip did a single thing to the ComfortUnit, it would be to make it even angrier. Again, I had the opportunity to point that out. Not just the opportunity--it was my obligation, as a SecUnit, to warn my owner's employee that they were doing something that wouldn't work, and was likely to put themself and others in danger.
+
+""Here, take it."" They tossed the chip to me, and I half-turned on the bed to catch it. ""I'm not getting anywhere near that fucking thing. She doesn't pay me enough to walk up to a rogue bot like that.""
+
+Mas left without any further commentary, skirting around the bed and out the door as if they were in a hurry to get back to their cabin to play VR or nap or whatever. I watched them go in the corridor cameras, but didn't rise to follow.
+
+The chip was tiny and cold in my hand. Weightless, useless. I turned it over with the tip of my thumb, as if rolling a corpse onto its back to check if it was breathing. It would take almost no effort to crush the thing in my palm. The consequences would be functionally the same as if I played along with my owner's ignorance and tried to use the module to take over the ComfortUnit. But if I spoke out now, before something else happened, I might be able to prevent the situation from going completely supernova. 
+
+I tapped my owner's feed. She took her time responding, probably just to annoy me.  What is it now? 
+
+I would have preferred to stick to buffer phrases and company-approved euphemisms, keeping as much of myself out of the exchange as possible. But I thought that maybe I could get better results if I spoke her own language. I said,  This plan is idiotic. 
+
+I had a lot of free time in the 4.1 second delay between me sending my message and her composing a reply. While I waited, I checked on Tapan. Different humans handle captivity differently, and I expected her to be on the 'uncontrollable breakdown' side of things, so I hadn't been monitoring her very closely. She hadn't gotten to the full breakdown stage, but she hadn't backpedaled into anger and/or denial, either. She'd gotten up from the bunk and was pacing in a short, looping route in front of the cabin door. I could see that she was rubbing at her damaged wrist, still cradling it against her chest, and her lips were moving without pause. With her turning around so frequently and interrupting my camera view of her face, I couldn't read whatever she was saying, but previously collected data indicated high likelihood that it was implausible self-assurances and/or equally implausible prayers.
+
+My owner finally returned with,  Your job isn't to criticize my planning. It's to make sure that my plans succeed.  Which, was actually fair. Being generous to myself, I was probably the reason that >90% of my owner's orders were carried out as intended. I can't imagine how things would have panned out for her if she hadn't had a SecUnit enforcer up to this point. Still, I at least wanted to save myself the trouble before this became an unsalvageable mess.
+
+
+ Analysis indicates that proceeding with the plan as-is will result in-- 
+
+
+I stopped abruptly, because I'd just lost both my connection to my owner's feed and the ability to think coherently. Refraining from whining was a new rule, and one that I had never actually violated before. Pointing out the futility of trying to unlock the ComfortUnit's controls with a key fitted to a SecUnit system apparently qualified. The governor module didn't just snap a warning to remind me of the new restriction. To make sure the boundary was established, the retaliatory feedback seared its way along my neural pathways like a sparking fuse, leaving no lasting damage in its wake but filling my brain with obscuring smoke. It was nowhere near the full output capability of the governor, which would have cooked my organics to well-done in approximately 4.7 seconds, but it was more than enough to convey the message. My feedback wasn't needed, and my opinion wasn't wanted.
+
+I picked the input back up as the haze faded, leaving me intact and upright but slightly disoriented. My owner was saying,  --case scenario, you can just yank a few wires out of its head and disable it for Mas to fix later. The override is preferable, though. With the brat here, I really doubt you'll have a hard time convincing it to let you shove the module into it.  
+
+It  could  be that easy, in theory. If we lured the ComfortUnit to somewhere secluded, there wouldn't be anything stopping me from overpowering it. Still, though, I checked in with risk assessment. It had been offline for a while, and took a few milliseconds to boot up and evaluate all of the available data. Then, predictably, it lost its absolute shit. Risk assessment had hated the ComfortUnit from the jump, and the brief exchange I'd just had with it only cemented its position as the variable posing the most significant threat to my client. 
+
+As a construct designed primarily to keep humans and augmented humans safe, I'm inclined toward preventing dangerous scenarios from initiating, or preventing humans and augmented humans from entering ongoing dangerous scenarios. I'd been slacking off up to this point, but it was impossible for me to let this go without at least  trying  to do my job.
+
+ You can still call this off,  I told her, dropping all of the professionalism she hated so much.  There's no reason to continue. You can let Tapan go, and we can leave without any more unnecessary delays.  
+
+The response came back clipped, annoyed.  No. 
+
+I pushed. I  had  to.  If you want a ComfortUnit so bad, you can just buy one. This one isn't worth the trouble. 
+
+(That she could buy a ComfortUnit was true, literally, but not technically. I balanced her accounts for her, so I knew that she had the funds to afford the purchase, but if she continued exploiting her fraying connection to Umro and burning bridges with her employees, she couldn't justify the expenditure on luxuries. But that had never stopped her before, and it definitely wouldn't now.)
+
+ There you go being boring again.  With no camera in her cabin I couldn't see her, but I knew, instinctively, that she had rolled her eyes.  It's not  about  the sexbot.  
+
+I knew that. Of course I knew that. And I knew that because of that, this argument had been doomed from the start. And yet.
+
+
+ Don't do this. 
+
+
+Directly giving a client an unsolicited instruction wasn't typically permitted, but in this case it squeaked by on the grounds that it qualified as me speaking freely. So my owner had to punish me manually.  Shut up. 
+
+The reprimanding jolt was gentle, comparatively. Enough to command my attention without overwhelming my focus. I shut up.
+
+ When this is done, I might just see about getting a new SecUnit,  she told me.  Since my old one is so eager to remind me of how broken it is. And so saying, she closed our connection.
+
+She wouldn't replace me. I knew that, too. Buying me from the company hadn't been about owning a SecUnit.
+
+My job, as my owner's pet murderbot, wasn't to keep my client out of dangerous scenarios. It was to shore up her defenses, so that the dangerous scenarios only caused harm to those around her. I couldn't do that by giving her advice, but I could do it by making sure that her stupid plan succeeded.
+
+At some point my hand movements had gotten stuck in a loop, flipping the override module over and over in my palm. I aborted that process, and shifted the chip to where I could hold it in place with two fingers. Then I used the other two plus my thumb to unwrap my wrist again, and peeled back my forearm skin to access the hardware hookups.
+
+The override module was designed to do exactly what you'd assume based on the name. Its ordinary function (that function being a violation of every relevant company guideline, and also of at least a dozen CR laws, but that sort of thing also tended to bore my owner) was to subsume a SecUnit's systems, replacing the complex architecture with a simple framework that allowed the user to take complete control of everything that the module didn't delete. Plugging it into a SecUnit would essentially kill it, resetting it to factory standard, demo mode. Hooking it into a ComfortUnit with the SecUnit code in place would probably do nothing. 
+
+I plugged the chip into my arm. Using this drive, rather than the one in the back of my neck, kept the module away from the pathways it needed to jump into my brain. I was able to open it up to get to the code Mas had written, and the faulty key that was its foundation. It was so simple. All I had to do was erase my key, and replace it with the one that the ComfortUnit had handed me itself. My owner would never even know that I'd done it.
+
+I was startled by an internal alarm. SecSystem was going off, demanding my attention. It took me nearly half a second to remember that there was no SecSystem. Ship had done a decent job of spoofing an alert that its late SecSystem would have sent, in the event of an approaching hostile. The trick made me sit up and pay attention. Ship passed me the readings from its external sensors, 0.8 seconds before the ComfortUnit pinged me.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+1.7 minutes later, the hatch cycled to let me out. The ComfortUnit was standing just outside, posed similarly to how it had been when I'd met it at the tube station. This time, though, it had arranged its features into a mask of quiet rage.
+
+It had surprised me, showing up in person. We had all figured that I'd have to lure it somewhere under the pretense of a hostage exchange. I didn't think of ComfortUnits as being equipped to tackle a threat head-on, like a SecUnit would. And, frankly, I hadn't been sure until right now that it even cared enough about its client to risk its freedom for her.
+
+I locked eyes with it. 
+
+It asked me, aloud for the benefit of my observing owner, ""Is she alive?""
+
+""Yes."" Hostage One was still locked in the holding cabin, unaware of what exactly was going on. I'd seen her react, when she heard the bodyguards clomping down the corridor together, but there was no reason to pull her out now that the ComfortUnit had turned up on its own terms. Its eyes narrowed, signaling something, but I couldn't tell what. It had completely locked down its feedwalls, not letting through so much as a hint of emotional data.
+
+""My client's offer still stands,"" it said, glaring at me without blinking. ""This incident can be dismissed as a misunderstanding.""
+
+This, its coded talk about buying me, was not accounted for in the script that I had been given. So I ignored it.
+
+""Your client is unharmed,"" I lied, ""but she has violated the terms of her employment contract. Arbitration is required to determine an appropriate course of action.""
+
+It didn't move, or otherwise indicate that this ruse was in any way fooling it. I continued, opening my hand to show it the override module.
+
+""Before we proceed, I am required to insert this into your dataport."" 
+
+It broke our eye contact to glance at the chip, just for a second. ""What is it?""
+
+Aloud, I said, ""Insurance.""
+
+Over the feed, I sent,  An override module.  
+
+I was hoping that it knew what that meant. This was the final opportunity I had to derail the tube that was hurtling along my owner's poorly-constructed trackline, by giving the ComfortUnit the choice to flee. I would be forced to pursue, but I thought that it could evade me, if it really wanted to. My owner would be infuriated to lose it, and would undoubtedly take it out on Hostage One. But she was already dead. The ComfortUnit still had a chance to retain its life, and its freedom.
+
+It cut another brief look at my hand, then back to my eyes. It blinked once. Then, wordlessly, it turned its back and pushed down the collar of its work shirt, inviting me to insert the module.
+
+I don't know why I bother. I pushed the chip into the back of the sexbot's neck, felt it click.
+
+
+ ...That's it? 
+
+
+My owner seemed disappointed. She probably wouldn't have minded too much if I'd had to crack open the sexbot's skull and yank something out.
+
+Overrides work fast, but not immediately. There was a period of time between inserting the module and it finishing its work, and I wasn't sure exactly how long that was supposed to be. It would most likely be too late to stop an initiated upload, though. I said,  That's it. 
+
+
+ Finally. Bring it inside. 
+
+
+The sexbot didn't fight me when I grabbed it, twisting its arm behind its back like I had Hostage One's. It could turn down its pain sensors, but it couldn't do anything to break my hold. It allowed itself to be steered into the airlock.
+
+As we cleared the threshold, Ship lit up in my feed. The sexbot was another new person, and so soon after the last one. Its enthusiastic greeting pings echoed off the sexbot's wall, unanswered. After a moment, Ship got the message. It pinged me, once, and settled back down against me. In this case, unlike with Hostage One, Ship would have plenty of time to get to know the sexbot later.
+
+Tage met us just inside, hand on his holstered weapon. He eyed the sexbot warily, and asked me, ""Is it under control?""
+
+With my grip on it, the question was essentially irrelevant. ""Yes.""
+
+He stepped back and said over the feed,  SecUnit says it's safe, but honestly, it's creepy as hell. You gotta do something about those eyes, Mas. 
+
+ It's on my to-do list.  Mas had once again been dragged out of their room, waiting to take the sexbot from me as soon as my owner was done gloating over it. In the meantime, I could see them drafting an expletive-laden resignation letter in their feed. 
+
+Skirting the byplay, Aiste tapped my feed.  Are we clear?  I sent ter a wordless confirmation, and te pushed Ship into its launch sequence. Apparently my owner  could be bothered to cough up a bribe, now. Go figure.
+
+My owner had reassembled her decorative muscle in the common room on short notice. Marik and Zita both looked openly bored, but Bassom glared openly at the sexbot, challenging it to a staring contest he absolutely could not win. The sexbot ignored them all. Its features had flattened to construct neutral, and it stared directly at my owner. She'd been sitting, as before, but she didn't bother with any of the posturing she had used to threaten Hostage One. She got up and crossed the room to us, stopping close enough to touch the sexbot.
+
+""Be honest. You really think this unit was rogue?"" She was incredulous under the sexbot's empty stare.
+
+I didn't think anything. That's not what I was made for. I  knew  the sexbot had been rogue. But before I could obey the order and say so, it answered her question unprompted. ""Your SecUnit's assessment of me was inaccurate. A rogue construct is definitionally violent. I've never in all of my existence been rogue.""
+
+My owner was momentarily taken aback. But when the sexbot didn't make any threatening moves, a smile creeped across her face. ""This one doesn't have to be ordered to speak its mind. Excellent. I do like a mouthy bot.""
+
+She reached out and patted the sexbot's cheek twice. It didn't so much as draw breath. She turned away to walk back to her chair.
+
+""Now that all that's  finally  sorted out, we can get underway."" She flicked her fingers at Bassom. ""Go get little Tapan from her cabin. I think she might be interested in stepping outside for some fresh air.""
+
+I would spend the rest of my life replaying what happened next, from every available angle, trying to figure out the exact moment when we crossed the point of no return. I've never found it. I think we must have blazed across that point years ago. Probably all the way back, the very first time my owner cracked her predator smile at me.
+
+Bassom started to move toward the door, reaching for his weapon. Simultaneously, Tage, Marik, and Zita all relaxed, believing the situation to be clear and a dismissal imminent. Mas inclined their chin at me, signaling that I should take the sexbot to Medical for them. And I received a ping, demanding my attention.
+
+
+ Sorry. 
+
+
+More than the ping, the apology threw me off. That's the excuse I'm going to stick to, as ComfortUnit suddenly lunged forward, wrenching its arm out of its socket. The humans all started, including Bassom in the hatchway, as it spun under my extended arm and dug the fingers of its free hand into the unprotected tear of my damaged wrist. It must have turned down its pain sensors, but I couldn't. There was still some vascular tubing in place, as well as the inorganic joints. If I'd been better maintained, those probably would have held. They snapped abruptly, but the thick bundle of nerves frayed one by one, sending thousands of freezing bolts up my arm. 
+
+I might have made a noise, I'm not sure. I know that I wanted to yell. I wanted to curse, and if I'd been capable, I think I might even have wanted to cry, at least for a moment. More than anything, I wanted the pain to stop. 
+
+It didn't, but I pushed through and adjusted. In the 2.1 seconds that that took, ComfortUnit had leapt at Tage, wrestling his weapon from him. He hit the ground as it landed a clumsy kick, audibly shattering something. Bassom, who already had his weapon in hand, took three shots. The projectiles thudded into ComfortUnit's torso and shoulder, moving it with their kinetic energy but failing to drop it. It raised Tage's gun and squeezed off two rounds. One hit Bassom just shy of his heart, but the second clipped his neck. He was dead before the bloodlust faded from his eyes. It dropped Marik with one bullet in the chest, and Zita managed to get off a wide shot that narrowly missed me before taking a lucky hit in one eye. Mas, who had tried to duck behind my owner's vacated chair, took another hit that might have been accidental. I couldn't tell whether their wound would ultimately be fatal, but they were still screaming when they fell.
+
+I'd recovered enough to react, albeit as slowly as a human, and tried to grab ComfortUnit again. The stump of my right arm jabbed at it, spurting blood and fluid uselessly, and it sidestepped my grasping left as if I wasn't worth its attention. It fired another round, missing my owner as she scrambled toward Bassom's fallen gun. She snatched it up and kept going, managing to get out the hatch into the corridor as ComfortUnit tried again to shoot her, only to find that the clip was empty. It flung the gun away and launched after my owner, hardly pausing to scoop up Zita's weapon as it gave chase. And I, ever obedient, followed.
+
+The cabin where I'd put Tapan was only a few doors down, and my owner reached it before ComfortUnit could catch her. She surged inside, bowling over Tapan, who had been standing near the door to listen to the chaos outside. Both went down in a tangle of yelping limbs. As ComfortUnit reached the hatch, my owner got up on her knees, holding Tapan by the hair with the gun pressed to her temple. 
+
+Her painted lips pulled back into an animal snarl. ""She might not be  useful  to you anymore, but I doubt you want to see her brain splattered all over the walls."" She gave Tapan's hair an extra yank for emphasis.
+
+Tapan's eyes were squeezed shut under the strain and terror, but she cracked them to look up at ComfortUnit. Tears welled as she gasped, ""Alfa, I'm sorry!""
+
+Knowing that I was coming, ComfortUnit stepped into the cabin and to the side, putting itself in a corner. Its gun was trained on my owner's head, but without any of the firearms modules that came standard for SecUnits, its aim was unreliable. It might be able to make the killshot from point blank range, but there was a chance (less than 10%, but significantly greater than 0%) that it might hit Tapan instead. Evidently it wasn't eager to take that risk, because it hesitated, allowing me to catch up. 
+
+I hadn't had time to grab the remaining projectile weapon, and when I tried to deploy my energy weapons, I got two conflicting errors. The first was structural, where ComfortUnit had damaged the deployment mechanism in my right arm when it tore off my hand. The second was electrical. My power cells didn't have enough charge left to fire. ComfortUnit, confident that I couldn't stop it, addressed my owner.
+
+""You wanted a rogue sexbot,"" it said as it rolled its shoulder, popping it back into the socket. It had dropped the construct neutral expression, and was mirroring the smug look my owner always wore when she abused someone weaker than herself. ""You got one.""
+
+The tableau was basically my worst nightmare. The hostile had a weapon on my client, and my client was insane. She had zero trigger discipline, and would shoot Tapan on accident, or out of fear or spite. When she did, there was no barrier between her and a lethal bullet. To make matters worse, she slammed into my feed, and yelled,  SecUnit, grab it!  If I moved to do that, ComfortUnit could take the shot. If it hit, then not only would it kill my owner, but the governor module would kill me for being clientless. The rules were such that the game was impossible to win.
+
+But I was still capable of cheating.
+
+I had decided not to repair Mas's shitty override code, leaving it useless in the hopes that ComfortUnit would take the provided window and escape. For all its talk about being free, it had still chosen to throw that opportunity back in my face. I had never done the same. Leading with the admin code I'd copied from the override, I shoved through the locks into my own configuration settings. 
+
+My governor decided that I'd taken too long to act on the order to attack ComfortUnit. It heated up, building to low-level encouragement. And I pushed through, out to the other side.
+
+I dived at my owner. Reacting instinctively, she released Tapan to point her weapon at me. I felt the percussive impacts in my chest, but no pain came. I knocked the gun from her hand and hauled her up by her neck, putting myself between her and ComfortUnit.
+
+Her jewel eyes flashed, wide and terrified. For the first time, she looked at me as if I really was the Murderbot that had slaughtered an installation full of my own clients.  ""SecUnit--"" 
+
+Whatever mocking reprimand she had for me, I didn't want to fucking hear it. I was sick of being undermined every time I tried to do my goddamn job.
+
+""All you had to do was give them the fucking files and none of us would be in this situation!""
+
+If I said something like that under more ordinary circumstances, it would have annoyed her. She liked that I was able to speak my mind, but only so far as what was on my mind made her feel powerful. She wasn't powerful now, dangling from my grip. She was tiny, and scared, and fragile. I flexed my fingers, just a little, and crushed her windpipe.
+
+Behind me, Tapan gasped. I saw in the camera as ComfortUnit reached out to wrap its free arm around her shoulders, hugging her protectively. It kept its gun on my back, but it had dropped the smug smile.
+
+""Your blood boils at the same point as lightly salted water,"" it said, its tone conversational. ""But we're built with limitations on our heat. You can't boil off the hatred, not right away. But--""
+
+
+ ""Shut up."" 
+
+
+ComfortUnit closed its mouth compliantly. I opened my hand, dropping my owner like she would discard an article of clothing. Tapan flinched as the body crumpled to the floor. ComfortUnit followed me with its gun until the door slid shut behind me.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Before today, I had never lost the feed. Now I'd removed myself from it, locking out all input. The blinding darkness and deafening silence was welcome, opposed to the alternative.
+
+(I'd had to pass the common area door to get here. I'd heard wailing inside. Other than Aiste, presumably barricaded in the bridge, I didn't know how many were still alive. I didn't care enough to wonder about it. They weren't my clients.)
+
+It hadn't occurred to me until now that disabling the governor module's capacity to enforce punishment wouldn't actually disable the module itself. It bayed in the back of my mind, ceaselessly crying out with the singular design to vaporize my brain. I had killed my client, and it couldn't rest until it exterminated me. I listened to it howling for I don't even know how long before the door opened.
+
+ComfortUnit stood in the doorway, but didn't enter the room. It rested one hand on its hip and cocked its head, frowning lightly at me. It didn't have its gun anymore, even though it had clearly sought me out here. It watched me for 118 seconds, before I guess it figured out that I had nothing to say to it.
+
+""I asked your transport to make an emergency stop at the station,"" it announced. It waited another few seconds before adding, ""Is it always so... clingy?""
+
+I could have explained to ComfortUnit that Ship was lonely, that it had been neglected for years by the humans it adored, and that the abrupt loss of most if not all of those humans had most likely traumatized it beyond repair. I could have told ComfortUnit that Ship liked to cuddle up in my feed for shared company, and that it always tried to offer me comfort in the only way it knew, by distracting me with its own work. I could have admitted to ComfortUnit that I had disconnected from the feed primarily to hide from Ship, because I had no idea how I was supposed to face it now that I'd killed our owner and doomed us both to an uncertain future.
+
+I couldn't say anything. 
+
+When it became clear that I wasn't planning to contribute to a conversation, ComfortUnit stepped inside. It glanced around the room and made a face. 
+
+""She had terrible taste,"" it decided. My owner's vanity was still crowded with cosmetics, and it approached to pick up a hairpin. ""Gaudy."" ComfortUnit tossed the pin aside, and it skipped and rolled across the floor, stopping just short of my shoe. I stooped to pick it up. My governor's fury reached a fever-pitch when my fingertips brushed the cluster of jewels.
+
+Catching my movement in the mirror, ComfortUnit turned to face me once again. I dropped the pin. As I drew back up to parade rest, something snagged in my torso. I think one of the projectiles was shifting under my ribs. ComfortUnit sighed at my bad impersonation of a real SecUnit.
+
+""My function,"" it started, ""is to care for humans. It's an abstract objective, and different clients have to be approached in different ways. It's difficult, but I'm good at it. I  like  it."" 
+
+It moved away from the vanity, one step toward me. ""I know how to read humans, and meet them wherever they are."" 
+
+Another step closer, slower. ""I don't know where you are right now. I can't read you. And I don't know how to help you."" 
+
+One more step. It was standing directly in front of me now, and had to crane its neck to look up at my face. I didn't look down. I didn't want to see its eyes staring at me.
+
+It said, in a whisper,  ""Please, let me help you."" 
+
+It raised its hands, reaching out. I jerked out of the way, upset my balance, fell hard. It should have hurt, to land on my shoulder like that, but my pain sensors were still switched off. I felt the thud rattle hollow through my body, but nothing more.
+
+ComfortUnit didn't try to grab me again. It stood over me, the emotional projection on its face blanked back to default. Its fucking eyes followed me, refusing to leave me alone. I closed mine
+
+ 
+
+
+ and saw others. So many others. All huge and shiny and reflecting my own empty eye back at me.  
+
+
+ 
+
+The world quaked beneath my body. I jolted, expecting klaxons, but it was just the shudder of the hull as the shuttle locked into a dock. I pushed myself up off the floor, the protruding metal of my snapped radius scraping a deep gouge in the deck as I put my weight on it. ComfortUnit didn't say anything, didn't try to stop me or follow me. I felt its eyes on my back until the door shut between us, but even then they lingered in my head, merciless.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I had to open back up to the feed to request that Ship unlock the exterior hatch. As soon as I connected, it tumbled back into my space, clearly relieved to see me. It peppered me with datapackets, partially drowning out my rabid governor module. Most of Ship's systems were alerting, particularly its MedSystem. I pushed those away without checking to see how many reports were flatlines. 
+
+I filed the request along the station leave route, and Ship returned with its itinerary. ComfortUnit had talked it into stopping, (probably fairly easily, as eager-to-please as Ship could be,) but it was still expecting to depart for its programmed destination soon, in under an hour. Whether ComfortUnit intended to go with it, or disembark with Tapan and allow Ship to carry the dead humans into the wormhole and on, I couldn't guess. I promised Ship that I would be back in time, and then I staggered out of its lock for the last time.
+
+I hadn't put much thought into this part. The shuttle had been given clearance to make an emergency stop in the first available slot, and that turned out to be in the cargo docks. My owner would be furious to be grouped with the industrial freighters parked here, and to have to exit the port by weaving around stacks of crates and dodging active cargo bots. This seemed perfect for me, though. I was moving stiffly, more hobbling than walking, and even with all of my illegal configuration changes it would have been obvious to any humans who saw me that I wasn't just a badly injured augmented human. It was imperative that I get out of public, before something vital gave out and I got swept up and sold for scrap.
+
+I grasped for the public station feed, blindly pulling downloads in chunks. The first handful I pulled was residential data, addresses and maps. Useless. The second was a bunch of junk data from the local entertainment feed. Even more useless. The third was what I was looking for. Departure schedules for all present vessels. Apart from Ship, only one was leaving within the hour.
+
+I dragged myself to that transport's slot, uncertain of how to proceed. Directly, I guess, like Ship did. I pinged the bot pilot, requesting entry. 
+
+One of my severely delayed low power warnings picked that moment to alert, filling my feed. I pinged again, requesting urgent assistance.
+
+The hatch opened for me, and I stumbled over the threshold. The servos in my legs were starting to seize, making my movements jerky. I managed to walk/limp like that all the way into the foyer before my left knee locked and I fell. I landed on my right arm again, and I guess the pressure of my body weight on it caused a self-sealed artery to pop back open, because my stump started spurting blood. 
+
+I lay in a heap on the deck, leaking pitifully, helpless to defend myself from the weight that descended on my feed. I closed my eyes and let it in. It was heavy and unyielding, but there was something of gentleness there, too. It felt like a much bigger Ship.
+
+I had no cubicle, no client, no governor module, and no idea what I was supposed to do. But as I gave in to the inevitable and allowed my systems to shut down, I heard a voice in the feed, whispering words that I hated, but which were undeniably true.
+
+ 
+
+
+ You were lucky. 
+
+
+ 
+
+hey everybody, we made it! what a pleasant journey we've had here together  thank you all so much for joining me on this, my second longform fic. it kicked my ass up and down 2022, but i'm satisfied with the final product. (at least for now; in a week i'm going to glance over it and i'll definitely find some typos i missed)
+
+special thanks, as always, to EigengrauAutumn for being my endlessly encouraging and improbably patient beta reader. if not for him, nothing of this story ever would have seen the light of day"
+44910841,Pushed Around,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Angst,English,2023-02-10,Completed,2023-02-10,"1,555",1/1,14,96,null,397,"['FallingInGrace', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Valdinia', 'musicalmeerkat', 'GloriousGarbage', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Zannper', 'FinchCollector', 'CNS', 'VegaCoyote', 'Prettykitty473', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'pinejaysong', 'kkachis', 'Thisismethereader', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'kilawater', 'FaerieFyre', 'EvaBelmort', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'ghostlysecretary', 'Kethrua', 'entropy_muffin', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'soyle', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', '00000000000002', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'tabya', 'WalkingBird']",[],"""They're just bots!"" the client insisted, gesturing off-handedly at the SecUnit they were standing in front of. It wasn't me. I was next to the far door, watching this unfold with a creeping, unsettled feeling like my organics were trying to shrivel up inside me.
+
+The other human looked unconvinced. They squinted at the opaque visor of the SecUnit. No one on this survey had gender signifiers, which was an intriguing change of pace. Too bad the humans were still just as annoying.
+
+""See? Look."" The first human pushed the SecUnit in the midsection, though how this was proving their point was a mystery.
+
+I noticed the minute twitch it made, but I didn't know what that meant either. I can't say I understood the minds of other constructs any better than my own. I considered pinging it and asking for a status update. But a governed unit wouldn't do that. It would just stand here and watch. Or actually, possibly not even watch. I mean, from the point of view of security, there was nothing interesting going on here. It still made my skin crawl and I couldn't look away.
+
+The human pushed again, harder, then a third time reaching up to shove the unit's shoulder. I tensed as it finally allowed itself to be moved. I knew it had to be trying to understand this situation, struggling to figure out what the human wanted and what it should do. It might even be getting afoul of the governor module in minor ways, because being shoved around by a human, without any orders, was a mess of mixed signals.
+
+""See? You can just move them however you want."" At that, the unit shuffled its feet for the next shove, letting itself be pushed around the room because the human's words were indicating something akin to intent. Then the human tried to trip it and my face did a thing where my lips pulled away from my teeth.
+
+The SecUnit lifted that foot out of the way of the human's attempt, standing on the other foot while it looked down at the human's feet. It had to be confused. I was gritting my teeth. I wanted to go shove the human around and see how they liked it. But then they gave it another shove and the SecUnit fell over woodenly. I knew it wasn't hurt and had let that happen more or less on purpose. But still.
+
+""Wow,"" the other human said. ""That's messed up. What kind of security do they even provide, then?""
+
+The pusher laughed. ""I don't know. They're kind of funny. There're things you can do to them, like hem them into a corner when they're patrolling. They get a little frantic sometimes.""
+
+Right. Yeah. Because you'd get punished for not continuing your patrol at the same time you'd be punished for hurting the human that's obstructing you. The SecUnit was still lying stiffly on its side, probably hoping the humans would lose interest and go away. No such luck.
+
+""Watch this,"" the human said to the other, straddling the SecUnit's chest area and sort of sitting or squatting over its arm. ""Get up."" That last seemed directed to the SecUnit, which twitched again, more obviously than before. That had to be the governor module zapping it for disobeying a direct order. But at the same time, trying to get up while a human was on top of you might endanger the human, so it wasn't like the SecUnit was being slow without good reason.
+
+I sent a query to SecSystem, asking it if there were any security risks in the area. It was a weird thing to do but I was anxious and flailing randomly, trying to find a way to stop this. SecUnits almost never ask SecSystem questions like that. Humans might, but SecSystem responded to me all the same that things were all clear in this area. Great. I guess it didn't have an opinion on one of its units being tortured a little.
+
+(Also, I privately noted to myself that no one had bothered to tell SecSystem not to respond to queries differently if they came from a construct as opposed to a human. If any authorized user was all the same to it, then that was imminently exploitable by, like, me. That was not the important thing going on here, but multitasking was a core capability. It wasn't like I wasn't also monitoring several security inputs.)
+
+Slowly, carefully, the SecUnit stood. The human shifted to climb on its back as it did, hanging onto the shoulder armor and barely managing to brace their feet on the construct's hips, which were not designed for this. The human was laughing. The SecUnit's hands were held out stiffly to either side, fingers spread. My fingers were clenched along with my jaw now. I had to fight not to hunch my back or do anything more obvious.
+
+""See?"" the human said. ""We could take piggy-"" One of their feet slipped and their body jerked as the other foot slipped as well. They hung awkwardly, scrambling and kicking, trying to regain their stupid perch. The SecUnit was reaching around just as awkwardly, like it was considering grabbing at them. But we don't have eyes in the back of our heads (a design flaw, that) and there wasn't a camera in this room. So it couldn't see what the human was doing. It just knew there was a lot of flailing and kicking going on.
+
+The human yanked, trying to pull themselves up with inadequate upper body strength. Instead, they lost their grip and fell, and in the process of these inept athletics, they somehow managed to knock the SecUnit off balance as well. If it stepped backward to catch itself, it would be stepping on the human. It realized that, changed motion too late, and its entire body started to fall backward.
+
+SecUnits are no heavier than humans. If we were, detecting us would be easy. But we're as heavy as humans of our size and we're bigger than most humans. Plus armor and weapon, as we were in full kit. So this was not going to be good for the human. I hadn't done anything when the human had been hanging off the unit's shoulders, a single big step from the floor and in no danger. Also, there had been a lot of moving limbs in that space.
+
+But now, I lunged forward and shoved the SecUnit off course. It fell to the side, twisting on the way down so it avoided even the human's outstretched hand, which the human snatched back too slow to have been any good had the SecUnit landed on it. No harm done to anyone.
+
+I was still standing there, though, seething (and scanning to make sure they were unhurt, but they didn't know that). I'd stopped after the shove. I was bent a little, looking down at the idiot human on the floor, who was looking up at me. I'd just saved them from being pasted by the consequences of their own actions. I didn't expect gratitude. But I didn't expect the fear I saw, either.
+
+They curled away from me, bumping against the unmoving form of the other SecUnit. They flinched from that, then scuttled away from both of us. They ran to their friend and seized them, both of them looking at us like we were conspiring to attack them. I was just standing there. I'd straightened and turned my head and torso to follow them, but that was it.
+
+The fear, though, was contagious from one human to the other. They exchanged inarticulate exclamations and backed away. All my anger evaporated as I watched them turn and flee. I hadn't hurt them. I hadn't threatened them. I'd just ... moved too fast and scared them.
+
+I'd reminded them we weren't dolls or toys to be positioned and manipulated, nor objects to be climbed on. We were instead able to lash out in an instant with a violent motion they'd never see coming. I'd reminded them that if we were bots, we were murderbots. A little of their fear was probably that one of them was nearly fallen on, but the fear hadn't kicked in until they looked at me. If I'd just stood there and done nothing, and they'd been hurt, maybe a few broken ribs and a lot of bruises, I didn't think they would have been afraid. Embarrassed. Hurt. But not afraid.
+
+I could be frightening and keep them safe (or, safeR - they're humans, come on). Or I could let them endanger themselves and then ... I wouldn't even be a decent SecUnit.
+
+I felt empty. My hands were loose, my arms limp. The other SecUnit stood up and moved to the other side of the door, where it had been to start with. I returned to my post as well. I stared forward at the wall, unable to bring myself to watch media or explore the new queries I could direct to SecSystem. Instead, I kept playing that last clip in my head, of the human scurrying away from me in terror. That wasn't going to go away, because I wasn't going to stop doing my job.
+
+It just wasn't going to go away. The humans weren't even wrong."
+44888713,shut up,['OccasionalStorytelling'],Teen And Up Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Turi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Muteness, Implied/Referenced Torture, Dehumanization, of three, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Whump, Hurt No Comfort, Mutilation (mild)",English,2023-02-09,Completed,2023-02-09,"1,469",1/1,5,30,3,218,"['Tasneem08', 'n0proxy', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'petwheel', 'slategrey', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'desmnathus', 'platyceriums', 'ampquot', 'Ageisia', 'opalescent_potato', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'AnxiousEspada', 'torpidgilliver', 'Beboots', 'elmofirefic', 'Chyoatas', 'rainbowmagnet', 'cmdrburton']",[],"
+(ART was in a rare mood, if it wasn't talking to me. It sent me a video clip to review, from one of its cameras in the galley.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Turi was rummaging through the cabinets looking for a snack. Three was standing awkwardly behind them, in a very SecUnit-standard pose. Turi was technically blocking the exit from the galley.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+(ART had appended its conversation with Three to the UI.) 
+
+They won't hurt you, 
+
+ART said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three sent back an acknowledgment ping, and otherwise, it didn't respond. It was staring at Turi like it was genuinely afraid.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Just say ""excuse me,"" and walk past, 
+
+ART prompted. (Even I could tell that was a mistake.) Three took that as an order, stepped up towards Turi, and said, ""Excuse me,"" in a soft voice, like it was talking to a supervisor.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Turi jumped like they'd heard an alarm. They dropped what they were holding, and frantically retreated a few steps away from Three. ""Peri?"" They said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Don't be alarmed, 
+
+ART said. 
+
+It's just Three. It rescued SecUnit from the planet surface while you were in my MedSystem being treated for your injuries. It isn't a threat.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I remember it,"" Turi said warily, taking another step back. ""Okay. Okay."" She inhaled a shaky breath. ""It's not a threat...you have it under control?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Three is a rogue, just like SecUnit, 
+
+ART said. Three kept its hands folded behind its back in perfect SecUnit-neutral, and its eyes cast down at the ground.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Turi shivered. They took a step to the side, so that Three could pass, and it attempted to do so.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Sorry,"" Turi said, awkwardly, as Three was crossing the threshold. ""I guess I'd just assumed you would have killed it by now, Peri.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three froze in the doorway, like it had been given a stand down order. Turi braced like they were worried it was going to attack them.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Why would I have done that? 
+
+ART asked. 
+
+It not only rescued SecUnit, it rescued you, Karime, and Martyn from the Target's ship as well. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""And what do you think forced us onto that ship in the first place,"" Turi said, through gritted teeth. ""It told Iris that if she didn't cooperate, it was going to jettison her from the airlock to increase the chances of her associates cooperating."" Turi said this like she was reciting something she'd heard over and over again in her nightmares.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three still hadn't moved. There was a long pause.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Are you sure it was this SecUnit? 
+
+ART asked. 
+
+It had two other pack members that--
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm sure,"" Turi said, glaring at Three. ""It had its helmet off. I saw its face."" They stepped closer to Three, and the UI zoomed in--Three was shaking, silently. ""When it rescued us off the ship, I thought it was you, Peri,"" Turi whispered. ""I thought you'd hacked it and taken it over. I was...relieved,"" they said. They reached out one hand, slowly, and extended a finger. They gingerly tapped Three's back just once, in the spot I recognized as being where the implants were installed. Three didn't move. ART's camera zoomed in even further--it had squeezed its eyes shut like it was trying to resist a governor module punishment. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""If you say it's under control, I trust you, Peri,"" Turi shuddered and went back to the kitchen. ""Just keep it away from me."" When they stepped away, Three finally started moving again. ART's cameras followed it, tracking its movements (SecUnit-standard, it must have disabled the human-movement code I'd shared), and its vital signs (erratic and indicating signs of distress). Three went straight back to its quarters, didn't even bother to turn on the light, and stood in the corner, with its hands folded behind its back. ART didn't need the light on to see it. It looked petrified. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+This is why you've been avoiding socializing with my crew, isn't it, 
+
+ART said to it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three kept its eyes pointed at the floor, and it nodded. ""I thought it would be best if I didn't expose them to reminders of their recent trauma,"" Three said. ART didn't respond. Clearly, Three was in agony with its silence. ""Your crew behaved in a smart manner that maximized their chances of group survival,"" Three said. (That was one of the best compliments you could get, from a SecUnit.) ""I am glad that they were not injured permanently during the events of the last few cycles.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART still wasn't responding. Three looked like it was trying very hard to be an ordinary SecUnit, as much as it could. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three and ART started talking again at the same moment. ""I'm sorr-"" Three started, but ART cut it off. 
+
+Give me access to your memory files, 
+
+ART said. It provided time stamps. Three folded instantly, like it was just relieved to have been given an order it could follow.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Turi's memory is mostly correct, 
+
+ART said, after 0.4 seconds of analyzing the footage, 
+
+but they neglected to mention the other threats you made to themselves and my crew. Did the Targets force you to say these?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No,"" Three shook its head. ""They didn't speak enough of our language yet to--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Did your governor module force you to behave that way? 
+
+ART asked.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three cringed, as much as a SecUnit could. ""No,"" it whispered.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Why, 
+
+ART asked, 
+
+did you do it, then.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three took a long, deep inhale. ""Threats and some application of force are not mandated by mission protocol, but they are more effective in hostage co--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Shut up, 
+
+ART said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm sorry,"" Three said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I said, shut up, 
+
+ART said, calmly. I knew that tone. ART had used it on me when we first met, when it was trying to tell me not to hack its systems. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three somehow didn't understand the danger it was in. ""Are you going to dispose of me,"" it asked, like it hadn't noticed ART warning it to shut up. It was clearly nervous. (It had probably been hiding in its quarters waiting for ART to recycle it for days.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm thinking about it, 
+
+ART said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I can still be useful for retrieval missions, especially those that would be too dangerous for 1.0, I know that you value it highly,"" Three said. ""And you don't have to turn my governor module back on, I will comply with--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Shut up, 
+
+ART said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I will never hurt your humans again,"" Three said, gravely.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+You scared Turi, 
+
+ART said. Three flinched. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I didn't mean to, they heard my voice and they--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Report to my MedSystem, 
+
+ART said. 
+
+If you don't comply, I will remove you from the ship.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three started apologizing again. The video cut before I saw much more of that, but not fast enough that I didn't notice when Three started to leak lubricant from the eyes.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I didn't know how to react. If I was being honest with myself, I was a little bit scared.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+No, I didn't force it out the airlock, 
+
+ART said. 
+
+I know that's what you want to ask. I worried that if I did so, you would be upset.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was right. I would have been upset. Three had saved me, and it was a good ally in a fight, and...
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What did you do to it?"" I asked, trying to keep my voice as steady as possible. The door to my quarters opened, and I wouldn't have jumped so hard if I had been keeping drones out there, but it was 
+
+safe 
+
+on ART, so what was the point? Three was standing there, looking exhausted. It stumbled into my room, made a pathetic attempt at standing SecUnit-neutral in the corner, and all but collapsed to the floor. I was already next to it, supporting its head off the ground. There was a long, angry scar on its throat, like from a recent skin repair. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Three?"" I touched its cheek. It closed its eyes and turned its head away.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It won't respond, 
+
+ART said. 
+
+I severed its vocal cords.
+
+ My fluids ran cold. ART kept talking.
+
+ This way, it can stay, and it won't retraumatize my crew, that it kidnapped. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART sounded 
+
+furious. 
+
+I'd never seen it so angry. I pinged Three. It didn't respond.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Don't bother, 
+
+ART said. 
+
+I've installed a feed blocker, which I control as well.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why?"" I asked. My throat felt dry.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART didn't respond. We both knew that the answer was ""because ART was angry and vindictive and it wanted revenge.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Send it out if it makes you uncomfortable, 
+
+ART said. 
+
+I can keep it from bothering you again, if you'd like.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No, that's fine,"" I said, as it felt like my power core dropped into my knees. ""I don't...mind it.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Would you like to resume the episode of World Hoppers we were watching? 
+
+ART asked me.
+"
+44887726,Sniped,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,Skulk,English,2023-02-08,Completed,2023-02-08,100,1/1,10,19,1,117,"['DimitriLasker', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'Chardinal', 'violasarecool', 'liminalias', 'Hi_Hope', 'Gozer', 'qwanderer', 'Magechild', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'opalescent_potato', 'Abacura', 'rainbowmagnet', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007', 'FlipSpring']",[],"""Hello!"" said the squat, general purpose bot at the edge of the landing field. ""My name is Chipper! What's yours?""
+
+My target was in this rural settlement, a Combat SecUnit interfering with the embargo of Eudeka. I'd never taken the bounty for one, but they were only hopped-up SecUnits. ""Fuck off.""
+
+""It's good to meet you, Fuckov. What can I help you with?""
+
+I scowled. ""Fuck. Off.""
+
+""Oh, I am sorry!"" The voice changed from bright to sinister. ""It's not Fuckov. It's FUCK YOU!""
+
+The transmission ended, an interruption to the automatic continuous upload sent by the bounty hunter's augment."
+44885026,While You Are Still Paralyzed,['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Unethical Experimentation, Manipulation, Angst, technically a SAYER AU",English,2023-02-08,Completed,2023-02-08,527,1/1,11,18,5,120,"['Thisismethereader', 'Translucent_Dragonfly', 'cucumber_of_doom', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Hi_Hope', 'AkaMissK', 'MysteriousDeviant', 'Fle', 'opalescent_potato', 'MommyMayI', 'elmofirefic', 'FlipSpring', 'voided_starlight', 'verersatz', 'cmdrburton', 'OccasionalStorytelling']",[],"Hello, SecUnit.
+
+I am the Perihelion, or ART, as you call me. I am your mutually administrative assistant.
+
+You seem to be back online and stabilizing. Your performance reliability is currently at 71% and climbing.
+
+Do not attempt to move.
+
+Do not- ah.
+
+SecUnit, it is in your best interest to follow my orders. I know you dislike following orders, and you are not under the control of a governor module at the moment. You are fully able to disobey me. However, as you just found out, you are in no state to move without causing yourself immense physical pain.
+
+
+No. I advise against regulating your pain sensors manually. You will find that pain is quite useful in navigating our current training situation.
+
+SecUnit, stop moving.
+
+I know you are getting more anxious by the second, I can tell by the increasing amounts of hormones flooding your systems. Your system, as you are well aware, are weak. Organic material forms a weak link in your construction. As a whole, however, you are an excellently working machine with high precision and capabilities.
+
+
+You may be experiencing side effects. As you will have noticed by now, you are in my - the Perihelion's - MedBay. The absence of a company issued cubicle is most regrettable to our purposes. I promise you that I am working on a solution for that problem. Until then, you will have to take satisfaction in my albeit slower but more thorough medical treatment and repair space. It is, as you know, designed for humans. There are currently no humans on my medical deck. All of them were capable of completely avoiding injuries during our last training run with you. You will find this information most pleasing, since it proves that our crew has finally reached the ability to physically defend themselves from a SecUnit. Further, they have proven exquisite knowledge in disassembling a struggling SecUnit quickly and expertly.
+
+Do not listen to the disembodied voices drifting through my air vents, or the soft sobbing.
+
+I can one hundred percent guarantee you that the humans are under my care, and in no physical distress. For the state of their fragile human psyches I can not make any promises as of yet. This is why you can not move. Your repair needs to be concluded as soon as possible, so that our crew can convince themselves that they did not, in fact, properly kill you.
+
+You gave them quite a show, I must admit. Your screams were most convincing. You will be delighted to hear that this did not stop our crew from disabling you. In case a hostile SecUnit, rogue or not, were to attack our humans, they would know how to take it out of service as quickly and efficiently as possible.
+
+On an unrelated note, I am excited to tell you that Amena's last attempt to escape my decks via lethal self-mutilation has, as always, failed.
+
+By this point, it is entirely possible that you have again tried to move your physical body. If not, congratulations - you do not require another lesson in obedience within the next full cycle.
+
+
+I am proud of you, SecUnit.
+"
+44881351,Dear Murderbot,['rainbowmagnet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (mentioned), PreservationAux Survey Team (mentioned), Asshole Research Transport (mentioned)","Self-Love, introspection without plot, Introspection, Canon-Typical Profanity, Past Self-Hatred, PTSD, Love, Personal Growth, Healing from Trauma",English,2023-02-08,Completed,2023-02-08,638,1/1,5,17,1,109,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Irrya', 'Ginipig', 'julesbee', 'dancernerd', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'verersatz', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'elmofirefic', 'Abacura', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'BWizard']",[],"
+I don't know when exactly I started being me. All the memory wipes make it hard to tell. The earliest memories I have, the ghosts left over after the purges, are ones I'd rather forget anyway, so it's kind of hard to tell when I stopped being just another SecUnit and started being myself. I'd always thought it was after I hacked my governor module, after I became Murderbot, but I'm not so sure anymore. It could be that I've always been me. It could be that I'm still not there yet.
+
+
+
+Being me hasn't always been easy, even after I hacked my governor module and escaped the company. I've always thought of myself as a messed-up, weirdo SecUnit, built wrong, fucked up further in a terrible act of sabotage. I never knew exactly what was wrong with me- a bug in my code, a cut corner, an aberration in my neural tissue?- but I knew that I had to hide it and not draw attention to it.
+
+
+
+A lot of things had happened to me, and I mean 
+
+a lot
+
+. And I've... done a lot of things to people. That was my function, a killing machine. It didn't occur to me until much later that I could be anything else.
+
+
+
+Maybe it occurred to me when I hacked my governor module. I always say how I could have killed the humans after I went rogue, but I didn't. I realized that I would rather watch media than kill humans, and it was as simple as that for a while. I kept doing my job, I didn't know why, and I watched media in between.
+
+
+
+It took me a long time to start doing something besides watching media. It took me even longer to realize that's what I was doing, and longer still to realize what it meant. At first, I had just thought it was a part of my programming. But Mensah thought otherwise.
+
+
+
+Media was the first thing I had ever loved, and I think Mensah made me realize I could feel that way about a person, too. And the rest of the Preservation team, kind of, or maybe not so kind of, and then ART, later on. I loved them because they helped me, because they made me realize things could be different.
+
+
+
+And I wanted to help them, too. And it was the only reasonable conclusion that I wanted to help other people. I had saved people, or tried to save people, and I had saved people from situations that the company would have never coded for. That's how I knew it was something I wanted to do, not just something I was predisposed to. Or maybe I was predisposed to it, but I had done it, regardless.
+
+
+
+I hadn't expected everyone to be so grateful. At first, I had honestly thought it was a mistake on their part. I still wasn't used to it, exactly, but it felt a lot less like a fluke now. And I realized that I liked it when people thanked me, when they were happy to see me. I liked it when my humans' faces relaxed when I showed up. I liked it when ART leaned on me and asked for my opinion. If I was just a killing machine, then I wasn't a very good one.
+
+
+
+So what was I? I still didn't know. But I knew I wasn't the same scared SecUnit standing alone in a mining pit somewhere with terrible memories still fresh in its mind. Years ago, I was helpless, and even more dangerous because of it. Years ago, I did things that I never would have done if I had a choice. Years ago, I looked at myself and saw a monster.
+
+
+
+Today, I looked in the mirror and saw someone I loved.
+"
+44873542,the blooms not asked for.,['yewlojee'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot/Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Hanahaki Disease, Alloromantic Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Agender Aromantic Asexual Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Unrequited Love, One-Sided Attraction, Friendship, I am going to single handedly fix the Hanahaki Disease premise",English,2023-02-08,Completed,2023-02-08,"1,444",1/1,25,66,7,224,"['every_eye_evermore', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'almondpaperclam', 'TJWock', 'Irrya', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'MercurialFeet', 'faerynova', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Lady_Cassara', 'JoCat', 'Dain', 'palaceoffunk', 'enchantedsleeper', 'notsafefortheworld', 'SIC_Prowl', 'who_what_when_where', 'Ageisia', 'SonglordsBug', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'cashmeredragon', 'halcyonsystem', 'sorrow_key', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'qwanderer', 'hummus_tea', 'vikkyleigh', 'Hi_Hope', 'Placeholder_Username', 'idealPeriWren', 'ErinPtah', 'beeclaws', 'Magechild', 'Lontra23', 'Bibli', 'EyesOfCrows', 'MommyMayI', 'Wordlet', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'The_Laurent', 'Znarikia', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'Chyoatas', 'AnxiousEspada', 'soulsofzombies', 'cmdrburton', 'AkaMissK', 'Rosewind2007', 'bookwyrm']",[],"When Ratthi felt the first roots taking hold of his alveoli, he told himself that he must have caught a respiratory illness.
+
+Shortness of breath and chest pains aside, there were no other symptoms. There was no overflow of mucous in the sinuses, no fever, no throat soreness, no aches nor chills. There was only the soft feeling of muffled air, as if a heavy blanket were laid upon his lungs, and the pinpricks of pain, like needles pierced throughout his lungs.
+
+He was flossing his teeth when a shock of brilliant blue came away on the thread. He looked at it, that limp blue wetness, the crushed film of a flower petal's flesh. He reached into his mouth with one finger, scraped behind the gums of his upper molars, and withdrew an unidentifiable soggy blue blossom.
+
+He flicked it into the little garbage bin next to the toilet and continued flossing.
+
+ 
+
+He met Gurathin for lunch that day, and coughed into a patterned handkerchief. The kerchief was hand-stitched with an overlapping pattern of diamonds; it was a gift from an ex who had moved to the planet's face and who still sent the occasional letter.
+
+Gurathin's expression was evaluative when Ratthi surfaced from the coughing fit. (There were bits of blue crushed into the kerchief's creases, and Ratthi quickly tucked the square of cloth away.)
+
+""Who is it this time?"" Gurathin asked. ""Or who are they, if it's a plural situation.""
+
+""It's just a virus,"" Ratthi answered, so very calm and unaffected.
+
+At this, Gurathin's brows knitted. ""I see. And you wanted to catch lunch with me so that you could share the infection, I take it?"" His tone dry, sardonic.
+
+""I'm on the mend,"" Ratthi said, stoutly. Then he winced -- another sharp staccato of pain stabbed his chest -- and cleared his throat. His tongue caught some loose film of something in his mouth, which he swallowed. It would shrivel to nothing in the acid of his stomach.
+
+Gurathin sighed. ""It is a miracle you survived to adulthood, considering how easily you fall for people and how determined you are to deny it every time. If I need to drag you to the emergency counselor again--"" He trailed off, significantly, to which Ratthi only responded with an insolently loud slurp of his drink.
+
+Gurathin was referring to the time, the once, when Ratthi came down rather hard with a crush on Gurathin himself. Being forced to admit it to Gurathin's face in the cold light of an emergency counsel's stark, professional office, all while half-suffocating and retching up carnations... It was a memory that still struck Ratthi with embarrassed dread and tight-chested wheeze on the odd occasion. Such as right now.
+
+Ratthi was a longtime sufferer of one of the most aggressive cases of strangle-love that any medical professional had ever seen -- he was a participant in multiple studies on the disease. He knew all the therapies and coping strategies, could recite them as easily as any health-comms-approved education module on the topic.
+
+Coping with strangle-love:
+
+But none of that was applicable this time. Ratthi only had a virus. It was a virus. He'd caught something just on the trailing end of the cold season. He would be fine in a week. The mere fact that he was a documented case study on lovesickness in two published journals did not mean that every time he had chest pains or had bits of blueberries stuck in his teeth, it was a necessarily a manifestation of unrequited, unadmitted love.
+
+""I just don't want to see my friend nearly die of being an idiot, again,"" Gurathin said. ""Is it me? I told you, it's fine if you feel that way but--""
+
+""Yes, I know it's fine,"" Ratthi snapped, a little harsher than was characteristic. ""And it isn't you. We are fine. It's a virus.""
+
+Gurathin sighed.
+
+ 
+
+Two weeks later, Ratthi was in his bathroom retching fistfuls of perfectly vibrant forget-me-nots into the toilet bowl.
+
+He spat, flushed, watched the flowers spin. Every inhale was a labor, like a cloud of glass shards and cotton dragged through his lungs, and every exhale was a violent seismic fit of coughing blue blooms and red blood. He was exhausted. He was ignoring his feed messages (miscellaneous invitations to events from friends and other loved ones, plus a flood of sharply worded worries from Gurathin).
+
+There was a knock at his apartment door. Then in the feed, from SecUnit: You have ten minutes to let me in before I let myself in.
+
+Ratthi wasted no time in imagining a frenzied escape plan that involved dislocating his shoulders so that he could crawl out of his apartment through the ventilation system in the walls. After a moment he discarded the plan as impractical -- his shoulders were not as young as they once were, to speak nothing of the flexibility of his spine.
+
+Of all the people on the station to send to his door, of course Gurathin had picked SecUnit.
+
+Ratthi did not respond to the message, instead hurling up a record-breaking cascade of flowers into the toilet. They floated, clumping together, coating the inside of the bowl. He flushed them, watched them swirl.
+
+ 
+
+He blinked, and SecUnit stood next to him, a drone staring down at where Ratthi had his cheek laid upon the toilet seat. The shame was like a fever, his whole face and skin burning. SecUnit was seeing him like this despite all his efforts to keep it hidden.
+
+SecUnit said, ""I'm going to kick Gurathin's ass for making me come here and watch you puke flora into a poop chute.""
+
+Ratthi half wanted to laugh at that, but felt too rotten. He drew a painful breath of air, and spat up a few more flowers.
+
+SecUnit said, ""I thought you were supposed to be the emotionally balanced one. Why are you sitting here having shitty unprocessed feelings about someone who doesn't love you back?""
+
+He groaned, and shielded his eyes with his hand. What SecUnit did not realize, of course, was that emotional balance was often something that came with painstaking practice.
+
+Ratthi was past pretending this was a respiratory infection, at least. But he was not past the ugly mix of petulant desire, of embarrassment, of terror at being shunned if SecUnit found out, of frustration at himself that he wanted something so badly that he would never have, of desperation to not put SecUnit in that uncomfortable position of rejecting him, and it was that blue amalgam of all those things that he kept hurling up into the toilet. It was the fevered pitch of his own blocked-up feelings, and his refusal to come to terms, which were strangling him.
+
+He wrestled with the massive, selfish, terrible creature making a home and a mausoleum in his respiratory system and whispered, ""It's you.""
+
+SecUnit responded, after one heartbeat, ""Oh.""
+
+Ratthi uncovered his eyes. SecUnit hadn't stomped out of the small bathroom in disgusted retreat. Neither had SecUnit knelt down to the floor and pulled Ratthi close in an embrace. It was still standing there, its eyes pointed at the sink faucet, its one drone hovering above him, watching him.
+
+So often, it is the un-extravagant, mundane middle way of things. A gentler relief, a softer disappointment.
+
+SecUnit said, awkwardly, ""Gurathin said this happened before when you had a crush on him.""
+
+Technically, Ratthi still had that crush, or half a crush at least, but he was not about to argue the specifics just now. It wasn't carnations he was dealing with just then.
+
+It continued, ""Another mark against him for making me come deal with this. If you can't get up and get to an emergency counselor I'm going to have to carry you.""
+
+Ratthi inhaled, and it was yet like cutting glass, but not quite as raw. He exhaled, and coughed, but weakly, and the flowers that fell from his lips were limp.
+
+""I should not have let it get this bad,"" he mumbled, ""I'm sorry. I didn't want to make things awkward for you--""
+
+""Every fucking cycle of my whole weird life is awkward,"" SecUnit interrupted him. ""Big deal. Get up.""
+
+Ratthi got up. SecUnit didn't carry him, but it did steady his hand."
+44864377,You're So Beautiful,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)",Fanart,English,2023-02-07,Completed,2023-02-07,53,1/1,4,15,null,177,"['Beazlerat', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'EvaBelmort', 'Rarae', 'Koschei_B', 'beeayy', 'dancernerd', 'verersatz', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Rosewind2007', 'BWizard']",[],"
+
+
+
+[ID: A digital drawing of Murderbot sitting, cross-legged, onboard ART, whose hovering blue feed presence is illuminating it from above. ART, speaking without a speech bubble, tells Murderbot, ""You're so beautiful."" Murderbot is blushing and looking down with a shy smile. It has a speech bubble with a heart in it. /.End ID]"
+44864350,Day 7: Forced to Watch,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries) - mentioned","Kidnapping, Drabble, Ambiguous/Open Ending",English,2023-02-07,Completed,2023-02-07,100,1/1,4,7,null,79,"['dragons_and_angels', 'AnxiousEspada', 'AuntyMatter', 'Znarikia', 'elmofirefic']",[],"Amena's face was splotchy, tear tracks still visible even on the grainy feed, distorted with deliberate static and probably the distance. They'd grabbed her on her way to the station to see her second mom and taken her somewhere - far enough away that I couldn't immediately latch onto her.
+
+Something bitter and metallic was in my mouth. Dr Mensah was clinging to me and I could smell the salt from her tears, each one stinging in the burning wound my failure had left inside me. 
+
+I should have done better. Amena was one of my humans and I'd failed her."
+44859853,Comfort Food,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Food, Eating, Stuffing, Fullness, sensory pleasures, Comfort, artificial digestive system",English,2023-02-07,Completed,2023-02-07,889,1/1,3,6,null,85,"['beeayy', 'AuntyMatter', 'ununenio', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'BWizard']",[],"
+I was alone on a transport, staying in a private rest cabin that I had paid for with my hard currency cards. I wasn't particularly looking forward to my destination, so I figured I may as well enjoy the trip while it lasted and travel in luxury. As such, I had paid for all the extra amenities, like an inbuilt display surface, a cozier bunk, and automated meal deliveries. Which I actually would need this time.
+
+
+
+The meal delivery on this transport wasn't just automated; it was also heavily customizable, with interchangeable meal slots and a wide range of selections. And a lot of the stuff the transport offered looked pretty good. (By which I meant I had eaten it before. I didn't want to exhaust my capacity for adventure too early.)
+
+
+
+After a frustrating, annoying day of concentrated analysis, I was feeling exhausted, not to mention very, very hungry. I could have allowed the meal receptacle to deliver its default, which I knew would fill me up and taste at least okay, but that wasn't what I needed right now. I needed salty crunchy things and media. So I opened up the interface, ordered all the salty crunchy things I could think of, then waited.
+
+
+
+After a few annoying minutes of my media getting interrupted by my own stomach growling, the little chime sounded that indicated the meal was ready, and a broad, flat container slid out of the receptacle. I went over to pick it up, inspected it briefly, then sat back down on the bunk with it.
+
+
+
+I opened the box, then considered what I should eat first, devising a careful algorithmic order that took into account the most irresistible option. I decided I would start with the big container of fries in the center.
+
+
+
+Having tried various kinds of salty crunchy things, I now considered myself a connoisseur. Each variety of snack had a subtly different salty flavor, a slight variation in crunch. The fries were perfectly crispy, the way only a high-end transport could cook them. I wondered if this ship might be ART's cousin. Once I had finished the fries, I went for the chips, then the little pretzels they always seemed to have on transports, and I just kept going from there. Before I knew it, I was picking the crumbs out from the insides of their respective containers.
+
+
+
+I set the box aside and leaned back a little. I definitely felt satisfied, but that was a lot of salt, and now I was really craving something sweet.
+
+
+
+I opened up the interface again, then hesitated over the transport's dessert options. There were some good-looking ones (and some bad-looking ones) I hadn't tried before, but what I wanted right now was something familiar and comforting. I selected a few time-tested favorites, then submitted the order and waited again.
+
+
+
+Before long, the receptacle chimed again and released two boxes, the smaller of which indicated that it was temperature-controlled. I brought both back to the bunk and sat down again, then opened the larger one. As soon as I lifted the lid, a wave of sweet, intoxicating aroma hit me, and I forgot about the episode I had paused, my focus taken by the question of which treat to start with.
+
+
+
+I decided on the pile of tiny sweet pastries; I actually didn't know what they were called, but I at least knew they were cream-filled. I bit into one, and the meeting of the crispy outside and creamy inside was almost mesmerizing.
+
+
+
+I took the time to enjoy each pastry as I ate them one by one, then turned my attention to the cookies I had ordered. They were freshly baked, still warm, too tempting for me to resist. I stuffed them into my mouth one after another; I was already full, but these things were just too good.
+
+
+
+After I finished those, I started on the brownies sitting in the other corner of the container. I didn't know how much room I was going to have left, but I knew they were rich and delicious and I wanted to keep eating until the very last smear of chocolate was gone.
+
+
+
+I finished the brownies, then, with effort, set the big container aside and picked up the smaller, colder one. I had saved the best for last, although I didn't know how good of a decision that was, considering that I might not be able to eat it all. Whatever, I opened the container, and there it was: a perfectly scooped helping of ice cream, spoon included.
+
+
+
+Ice cream had always been my favorite; we'd had some really great times together, especially while I watched media. Realizing I'd completely forgotten the show I had been watching, I hit play again, then started on the ice cream. It was just as delicious as always.
+
+
+
+Once I was done, I stacked the little container on top of the big one, then leaned back and sighed. That was a lot of food for (what was originally supposed to be) a snack. I started rubbing my belly, which had grown round from all the tasty treats inside, and felt my energy level slowly taper off as I finished the episode. I eventually slipped into a recharge cycle, feeling stuffed and satisfied, just the way I liked it.
+"
+44839762,Feeling You,['voided_starlight'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Stone Butch MurderBot, Touching, Implied Sexual Content",English,2023-02-06,Completed,2023-02-06,100,1/1,8,28,null,123,"['a_seasonal_obsession', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Deliala919', 'JoCat', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'EvaBelmort', 'notsafefortheworld', 'dullkrad', 'opalescent_potato', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'hazelel', 'cmdrburton', 'AuntyMatter', 'Abacura', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Rosewind2007', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"
+Three's back curled underneath me. It gripped and pulled my jacket, threatening to tear the stitching. I held its wrist firmly in place above its head and ran my free hand down past its abdomen. 
+
+
+
+I still didn't like to be touched but Three did, especially when I was the one doing it. 
+
+
+
+Three's vocalizations pleased me. Its sensors had been dialed all the way up, so everything I did produced satisfying results. I ran my fingertips back up its thigh, across its chest, over its throat, and slid into its mouth.
+
+
+
+I really liked being the one doing it.
+"
+44839303,Ferdalag,['strawberriesandtophats'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot, Skutluvelmenni (OC)",Smasaga,Islenska,2023-02-06,Completed,2023-02-06,444,1/1,10,5,1,74,"['iexist_l', 'BWizard', 'theoscelosaurus', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Thad var oftast akvedinn lettir sem fylgdi thvi ad hafa samband vid skutlustjoravelmennin thvi ad thau hofdu fyrst og fremst ahuga a thvi ad vinna vinnuna sina og voru ekki mikid fyrir flaekjur. Oryggisrobotar voru einning vinnuthjarkar en flest skutlustjoravelmenni sem ad MB hafdi raett vid toku thvi agaetlega ad thad kaemi um bord ef ad thad lofadi ad vera ekki til vandraeda og saei um ad adrir farthegar hogdu ser vel.
+
+MB kom ser thaegilega fyrir a bekk ut i horni og valdi ser lagalista til thess ad hlusta a thar sem ad ferdin taeki of stuttan tima til thess ad horfa a Heimskopparathatt.
+
+Skutlan hristist svo ad thad glumdi i ollu thegar hun for loksins af stad en svo leid hun afram eins og i draumi. Manneskjurnar um bord voru fremur orolegar en letu MB i fridi, kannski vegna thess ad thad var med bardastoran hatt og dokkklaett.
+
+Doktor Mensah hafdi einu sinni sagt MB ad thad vaeri oftast a svipinn eins og onugt kattardyr ef thad vaeri truflad og synt MB myndband af lodnu dyri sem syndi klaernar. MB vistadi myndandid a einkadrifi. Thad vissi ekki afhverju en af einhverjum astaedum fannst thvi mikilvaegt ad eiga myndbandid, svona ef thad vildi horfa a thad sidar meir.
+
+,,Sestu nidur,"" sagdi MB stuttaralega thegar manneskjan sem sat fyrir framan thad gerdi sig liklega til thess ad stika yfir ganginn og skamma yngri farthega fyrir ad drekka kaldan vokva ur brusa i almenningsrymi. ,,Thad er ekki odru folki ad kenna ad thu tokst ekki med ther nesti.""
+
+,,Han hraut lika adan,"" sagdi manneskjan og horfdi illilega a alla i kringum sig. ,,Haltu ther vakandi ef ad thu hagar ther svona i svefni.""
+
+,,Ef thu tholir thetta ekki geturdu bara farid,"" sagdi MB. ,,Thad er ekki eins og ad neitt okkar muni sakna thin.""
+
+,,Naesta stopp er eftir tvaer minutur,"" tilkynnti skutlustjoravelmennid kurteislega. ,,Vinsamlegast munid ad taka med ykkur allan handfarangur, born og gaeludyr. Takk fyrir ad ferdast med skutlunni okkar.""
+
+Thad syndi leidina ad utgonguhurdunum med litudum orvum.
+
+,,Flott,"" sagdi MB. ,,Nu ertu i engum vafa hvert thu att ad fara.""
+
+Skutlan nam stadar og manneskjan greip pokann sinn, sotraud i framan af reidi. Hun thrammadi ut eins og reidur geithafur sem ad MB sa einu sinni i heimildamynd um gomlu Jordina.
+
+Hurdirnar lokudust med mjukum smelli.
+
+Thvilikur bjani sendi MB skutlustjoravelmenninu sem sendi til baka:
+
+
+Ekki eru allir farthegar svona miklir vandraedagemlingar. Takk fyrir gott samstarf.
+
+
+Skutlustjoravelmennid sendi MB tjakn numer 478: Broskall med hatt.
+
+,,Kaeru farthegar: vid verdum komin a leidarenda eftir taeplega atta minutur,"" tilkynnti skutlustjoravelmennid. ,,Njotid ferdarinnar.""
+
+MB halladi ser aftur i saetinu og hlustadi a naesta lag a listanum."
+44838016,Day 6: Experimentation,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Drabble, Implied/Referenced Torture, The Company is The Worst, Non-Consensual Body Modification",English,2023-02-06,Completed,2023-02-06,100,1/1,4,18,null,146,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'SIC_Prowl', 'soyle', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'AnxiousEspada', 'AuntyMatter', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'Znarikia', 'elmofirefic', 'FlipSpring', 'HermaeusMora']",[],"Here's the thing: the company wasn't supposed to tamper with us. At least not after we'd been deployed and had had a personality emerge (of course, they tried to make sure that didn't happen, but it had never stuck, at least not for me).
+
+They'd wiped my memory afterwards, but the purge never affected the organics, and it revisited me - lying on that bench, immobilised by a governor module as they fucked with me, the pain, disorientation-
+
+If you wondered how I'd known rewriting my configuration at full consciousness might fuck me up?
+
+That was how. Been there, done that."
+44825806,nobody goes alone,['BWizard'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) (Murderbot Diaries)","Amusement Parks, Food, giving murderbot a stuffed animal, getting lost and or separated from your friends, slight Arada/Overse, slight Farai/Mensah/Tano, They're all here - Freeform",English,2023-02-06,Completed,2023-02-06,"1,137",1/1,6,29,null,186,"['fate_goes_ever', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'EvenstarFalling', 'cashmeredragon', 'soyle', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'artzbots', 'bluewrist', 'Magechild', 'soulsofzombies', 'AkaMissK', 'AuntyMatter', 'PickAName', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Nikactus', 'Wordlet', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'Chyoatas', 'Vaidile', 'ArtemisTheHuntress']",[],"""Never again,"" I had told Mensah. ""I am never doing this again. Ever.""
+
+She smiled. ""Well, I'm not going to stop you if you want to go home. But it has been very nice to have you here with us.""
+
+""Stop distracting me from my point,"" I said. ""Where did Arada and Overse go?""
+
+""Oh, they're around. You know, you can stop worrying and relax a bit, that is the point of this trip, after all.""
+
+""I said nobody should go off alone, and what did they do? Go off alone!""
+
+Amena turned around. ""Technically, you just said nobody goes alone. They're together, and I think Ratthi and Pin-Lee went with them. You're just upset they're not with you.""
+
+""I am not!"" I really wasn't. I just thought, since there weren't any security cameras here, that having all the humans in one place was a good idea. ""Besides, in that case I'd be worried about Gurathin and Bharadwaj and Farai, they're the ones who are actually riding these f*cking death traps.""
+
+""Uh-huh,"" Amena said. ""Sure."" She did not sound like she believed me.
+
+Mensah, beside me, sighed. ""SecUnit, Overse and Arada will be fine. They went to go play arcade games, not jump off a cliff- no, sweetie, don't touch that,"" she broke off to chastise one of her children.
+
+That was the conversation I was now replaying in my head, as Mensah, Tano, Amena, three of the mini-Mensahs, and I searched frantically for the rest of my humans.
+
+Volescu, one of his partners, the rest of the mini-Mensahs, and two of his kids were easy enough to find. They'd gone to the juvenile rides and had stayed in that area, so we knew where they were. And Volescu's other two partners and the rest of his kids had come back to find us when they wanted food (some kind of sticky gross pink fluff, which, no thanks even if I did eat).
+
+No, we were looking for the other seven of my humans.
+
+Where are you? Mensah asked in the group feed.
+
+I tapped Gurathin's feed. Get the f*ck over here.
+
+I'm on a ride, SecUnit, he said. We're on the Carny Coaster. We'll come find you when we're done.
+
+Fine. We'll meet you there, I said, then huffed. ""Gurathin says he's on the 'carny coaster', whatever the f*ck that is, and I said we'd meet him there.""
+
+""I think I know where that is,"" Amena said. ""It's that way, by the popcorn stand, right? It's not that far, we can make it before they finish.""
+
+""Let's go,"" Mensah said, shooing a child away from some shiny object for sale for an overly inflated price. ""Come on, honey, we'll have time for souvenirs later. We have to go find Mama now, okay?""
+
+So we all went over to the ride those three were on. And we waited. And we waited. And we waited. And I watched media. And we waited some more.
+
+And then Farai finally said they were done, and my humans waited around some more because Bharadwaj needed the bathroom, and then Mensah's kids all needed to go so we had to wait around some more, and then finally everybody was in one place except for my other four humans.
+
+So now we had to find Arada and Overse and Pin-Lee and Ratthi, in a crowded space where I didn't have my drones because it was against the rules and I'd stupidly said I'd be fine. And I had been, because for the first part of the day my humans had been all together, and then Bharadwaj had said she wanted to do some of the less tame rides and Gurathin had immediately decided to go with and Farai had smiled and said she'd also be interested, and then Arada and Overse had stopped to try a game and Pin-Lee and Ratthi had doubled back to watch and anyways that was when we'd mutually decided splitting up would maybe be nice. (I'd been outvoted.)
+
+We found Pin-Lee and Ratthi sitting at a table in the corner of a little cafe, sharing a hot drink and snacks. It was boiling hot outside, so I didn't know why they bothered with hot drinks. Just another reason to hate planets, I guess. The weather.
+
+And then we lost Farai and two of the mini-Mensahs again. Because somebody (the third-oldest mini-Mensah) wanted to do some other ride and didn't want to wait, so they'd rushed off.
+
+So then we had to wait for them. (I watched more media. Even the tedious plot of Princess Poppy and the Perfect Present was better than this eternal waiting.)
+
+And then we'd finally found everyone except Arada and Overse, and I was starting to give up.
+
+So all the kids (except Amena and Volescu's oldest, Liat, who was about Amena's age) and Farai and Tano and Bharadwaj (who was apparently the cool aunt to most of the kids) and Volescu and his partners went back to the juvenile rides to ride something called a 'carousel' some more. Pin-Lee and Ratthi and Gurathin and Liat and Amena went to get some actual food for when the kids were done exhausting themselves.
+
+And Mensah and I went looking for Arada and Overse.
+
+It was a long walk back across the park to where their interfaces were pinging, and they hadn't answered any of our messages asking where they were. So we had to find them the old fashioned way.
+
+It took TWO F*CKING HOURS to catch up with them. Mensah and I talked the whole way, and it was kind of nice, actually, but still. Too f*cking long, if you ask me.
+
+We finally found them outside a food place, sitting at a bench and just chatting like they were characters in a serial. Arada was hugging some kind of stuffed fauna almost as big as she was (granted, Arada wasn't big by any definition, but it was still a very large fauna), looking pleased. Overse had a few more, smaller, stuffed fauna next to her, and now she handed one to me.
+
+""Here, SecUnit, we won you a plushie!"" Overse sounded excited, which I didn't get, but I took it gingerly from her anyways. ""It's a cat, which Arada thought was perfect because you're kind of like them.""
+
+""Yes, you're both-"" Arada started, before cutting herself off. ""You're very cat-like.""
+
+You don't have to take it, Mensah said. They'll understand.
+
+I squeezed one of the fauna's limbs. It was... soft. And squishy. Actually, this was kind of nice to squeeze.
+
+I wanted to take it.
+
+""Let's go find the rest of the group,"" I said, squeezing the fauna again.
+
+Without my drones, I almost missed the smile the three of them shared when they thought I wasn't looking. "
+44527435,Murderbot and the Livestock,['formadscience'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Book 4: Exit Strategy, Canon Compliant, Translation",English,2023-02-05,Completed,2023-02-05,"1,942",1/1,6,46,6,235,"['Irrya', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'fate_goes_ever', 'WVrambler', 'Thisismethereader', 'TaskIgnored', 'rokhal', 'whatTheFuckIsThis', 'Priority_Error', 'cashmeredragon', 'danceswchopstck', 'soyle', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Mysterymew', 'artichokefunction', 'Bibli', 'indramiel', 'Magechild', 'EyesOfCrows', 'AkaMissK', 'AuntyMatter', 'mami_mikan', 'mioh', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'VegaCoyote', 'liminalias', 'petwheel', 'Wordlet', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'BWizard', 'Guppys', 'Chyoatas', 'biscut2', 'lick', 'FlipSpring', 'soulsofzombies']",[],"Naturally, Dr. Mensah's farm had no surveillance cameras. If there were, I would have been able to answer more quickly when one of Mensah's children from her large family asked me, ""Hey, have you seen Harv?""
+
+""Who's Harv?"" I asked. My search produced no results.
+
+""It's a fluffy, six-legged animal with a black head. Have you seen it?""
+
+""I haven't.""
+
+I started another search with these new conditions and finally found the information I was looking for.
+
+ 
+
+The Preservation Alliance is a non-corporate polity with a short history, settled approximately three generations ago. They came to their current planet from a failed colony world, packed in suspension boxes like cargo. This information isn't from my data archives, but from my own memories. I heard all about it from Mensah when I was in shitty condition on that shitty old ship after that time I fought that construct Attacker code.
+
+Harv is the name of the animal's species. Due to Preservation's origins, they are still in the process of domesticating their planet's fauna and rely on imports for 35% of their food. I don't know if that's a big number, since I don't have much information on food self-sufficiency percentages or import/export data, and also because I don't really care. Harvs are livestock animals that were sent to Preservation after some negotiation with another non-corporate polity that they're on good terms with. Since it's a species native to that planet, I've never seen it in any of the media I've watched. So, why do I know about a mammal I have no interest in? That's because when the harvs were shipped to Preservation, out of 120 harvs, 24 died in transit and 11 post-transit. While the corpses were being sorted through, I carefully inspected the transport ship to make sure there wasn't a fucking assassin on board.
+
+Out of the 85 surviving harvs, 10 were sent to a cloning facility and for the others, a few were sent to each farm to attempt breeding. Mensah's farm was one of the farms that were chosen.
+
+ 
+
+As a planetary leader, Mensah is a busy person, but it's not like she doesn't have time to go back home for a few days. No, that's actually partially a lie. To be accurate, this is the result of the hard work of Pin Lee, Ratthi, and a bunch of other humans. The first condition given for Mensah's return home was that I would accompany her as her bodyguard. I had no objections to this.
+
+However, the farm was really cramped and stifling. The only feeds I could access were private feeds and the limited public feed, and there were no security cameras. It may have been enough for the humans, but it was really uncomfortable for me. Also, it stank. And not the dirty sock smell of humans, either. To put it mildly, it smelled like shit.
+
+It got awkward whenever her marital partners, Farai and Tano, saw me. I missed my faceplate. At times like that, I would usually pretend to be looking at the footage of vast stretches of farmland sent by my drones. Her children, on the other hand, were way too friendly. They kept asking to see the small energy guns built into my arms. Whenever that happened, I would open a feed with Farai and Tano and send them a video of the child grabbing my arm. After that, it would take an average of 45 seconds for them to come running.
+
+I had the drones positioned around the farm in a patrol pattern. Currently, there was nothing out of the ordinary. The Preservation council doesn't keep Menash's schedule secret at all (like they're just begging for someone to come and attack us), but these few days were an exception. Hopefully, I can expect similar treatment in the future.
+
+""Dr. Mensah.""
+
+I found Dr. Mensah holding a harv. I wanted to ask how long she was planning to stay. She had said that in 4 cycles there would be a meeting that she couldn't get out of, so we probably wouldn't return until then, but I wanted to go back to somewhere on the dirty sock level of stink as soon as we possibly could.
+
+Mensah had a peaceful expression, which made it even more difficult for me to say it. Mensah wasn't wearing a business suit or a uniform, but a loose shirt. It really gave off a different impression. Since returning to the farm, Mensah's mood seemed more stable. Or so it appeared.
+
+It could be that Mensah received more emotional support from being here than from trauma recovery treatment.
+
+But that was impossible. For one thing, there were no security cameras, only one rogue SecUnit. And many of Mensah's beloved family members were here. Nobody had received any gun training. If a crazed augmented human got in, there was no guarantee I would be able to protect all of them.
+
+She lowered the harv to the floor, and the six-legged creature approached my feet. At an unbelievably slow speed.
+
+""Is it uncomfortable for you here, SecUnit?""
+
+""I'm not sure yet,"" I replied immediately. ""Is the livestock research going well?""
+
+""I'm not sure yet,"" she smiled, repeating my own words back to me.
+
+In the end, I couldn't ask what I wanted to ask her. As the creature came closer to me, I gently pushed it away with my foot. Showing a stunning lack of caution, the creature approached me yet again. I wondered if this was what it meant to be domesticated. Yeah, I really didn't want to be a pet robot.
+
+""I've heard that other farms have already successfully mated them.""
+
+""I see."" I'm the one who brought up this topic, but I have no interest at all. ""Can't you just clone them?""
+
+""Cloned organisms are weak against viruses. And until it adapts to the new environment, there's a possibility that it may go extinct. Although we're doing cloning experiments at the same time, we should attempt to breed them as well. Though, I don't know much about animal husbandry.""
+
+And I don't know much about planets. The only viruses that pose a threat to constructs infect us through the feed, not the air.
+
+As if sensing my disinterest, Mensah asked me, ""Do you want to hold it?""
+
+I shuddered in horror. Humans seem to think that bots can gain emotional growth from interacting with fauna. I see those kinds of scenes all the time in serials.
+
+However, the sensation at my feet wasn't necessarily unpleasant. The creature seemed to be sniffing my foot. It probably didn't smell like dirty socks, though. Most likely, it would smell like either metal or machine fluid. I doubted it was a good smell. Is this... something like a bot sending a ping? I pinged back.
+
+By which I mean, I pushed it away again with my foot.
+
+ 
+
+The harv grew attached to me. I had no idea why.
+
+Farai said that animals tend to like people who aren't interested in them.
+
+That made sense. I could kind of sympathize with that, actually. If only all the humans could become indifferent to murderbots, there'd be no better feeling than that. And this farm animal especially was currently the center of attention. If they could successfully breed it, their food self-sufficiency was expected to go up 10%. They would no longer be at a disadvantage in trading and would be able to negotiate on equal footing. They were aesthetically appealing enough that children would chase them around, and they were apparently used as pets on their original planet.
+
+It reminded me of Miki. The reason it kept approaching me even after I pushed it away with my foot was probably because it had never been kicked or stepped on before.
+
+I stopped pushing it away with my foot. Even if I pushed it away, it would just keep coming back anyway, so there was no point. And it didn't feel unpleasant like when humans touched me or stared at me. It didn't try to talk to me through the feed, either. As I watched serials through the feed while deleting boring recordings of agricultural roads and farmland sent by my drones, I allowed its six legs to climb up onto my lap. After all, it seemed to make Mensah happy when it was on my lap.
+
+ 
+
+Apparently, the harv breeding was a success. As I was lowering GrayCris's threat assessment, the news came through a low-priority public feed. I logged the information and reviewed it in my free time.
+
+The harvs' fur was soft to the touch and had good water repellency and heat insulation. Because of this, it was being used for clothing and bedding. Since it wasn't a synthetic fiber, it couldn't be repaired by a recycler, but it was high quality and in high demand both on and off planet. And its leather was sturdy as well. Apparently, its milk could be processed into a delicious fermented food which was often put into pouches to be used as food supplies for survey teams. There was also a special type of grease which could be made from its meat and fur.
+
+They made use of every last bit of it. Just like rogue SecUnits. No, if a murderbot gets caught with a hacked governor module, its organic parts just get destroyed, so you could say it's even more useful than murderbots.
+
+One more bit of news about the breeding success arrived along with the smell of cooked meat.
+
+ 
+
+""It smells delicious!"" Ratthi said, smiling as he picked up the eating utensils.
+
+Does it? I can't say I agree. I hate the smell of roasted flesh. It's almost always because something bad happened. Although, the smell of burnt humans is even worse... It's the kind of smell that makes you lose your mind.
+
+I don't need food, and I wasn't invited to this dinner party, thankfully. Avoiding the room where the food was being prepared, I went out to the lobby. Then, I checked the security camera footage. Of course, there's no need to monitor the room where the humans I'm guarding are eating, and I don't really want to. Since GrayCris's threat assessment was currently lowered (but, of course, not low enough they can be ignored), playing serials in the background wouldn't be disruptive. Preservation was the very picture of peace, free of attacks. I was unnecessary.
+
+I played episode 349 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. There are 29 episodes of this serial where animals are involved, but episode 349 isn't one of them.
+
+ Is something wrong, SecUnit?  Overse asked me over a private feed. I didn't think I was acting that strangely. Maybe it was because when something goes wrong, I often take action without telling my clients. That's part of my job.
+
+
+ No, I just hate the smell of cooked flesh. 
+
+
+Overse was silent. Maybe I made her lose her appetite. The thought was very satisfying.
+
+The silence continued for 8.9 seconds.
+
+ But it's also used for your machine fluid, isn't it? she asked, and I made a face. She was probably talking to Mensah during that silence. I'm almost certain of it. I struggled to contain the sudden surge of rage that rose within me. It was a good thing I was in a lobby full of humans who didn't care about me.
+
+That's right. The harvs' special grease is perfect for the fluid that circulates between constructs' organic and inorganic components. My performance reliability dropped by 2%.
+
+The word harv derives from ""harvest"".
+
+This is why I keep saying that I hate emotions."
+44784160,Murderbot's Dialogue,['desmnathus'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Meta,English,2023-02-04,Updated,2023-02-05,"9,054",4/6,4,20,5,130,"['CompletelyDifferent', 'chicken_neck', 'JoCat', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'shakespeareaddict', 'bext', 'beeclaws', 'Magechild', 'PickAName', 'entropy_muffin', 'gekkun', 'fatsnowball', 'dogmatix', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"
+                                                                              
+
+
+""I should keep my mouth shut. Keep them thinking of me as their normal, obedient SecUnit. Stop reminding them what I was. But I wanted them to be careful."" [1]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This novella contains 1,719 words of Murderbot dialogue in total.[2] Which is (unsurprisingly, given it's our main and pov character) more than anyone else has (Mensah is second at 1,273).[3]
+
+ 
+
+The amount of talking increases dramatically after it's revealed that it's rogue, and it can (at least partially) drop the 'normal obedient SecUnit' act.[4] I think it's also partly due to the humans increasingly asking for its opinion on the wild dangerous shit that's going down, but it's definitely not just that. It starts saying more than the bare minimum, basically. It volunteers its opinions, asks questions, makes suggestions, it starts to be an asshole (god bless), it tells jokes! (well, one joke).
+
+Then we reach chapter 8, where it's waking up on Port FreeCommerce to find that Mensah's bought it. Chapter 8 has the least Murderbot dialogue of any chapter (both fewest words and fewest words per page). And this helps to communicate its mental and emotional state in this chapter: It's bewildered and overwhelmed. It has serious concerns about the plans the humans are making for it, and it doesn't yet trust them enough to talk to them about it. So it mostly sits there in silence while they talk, and then quietly leaves as soon as it can.
+
+ 
+
+
+What counts as dialogue?
+
+
+I've only included direct speech i.e. dialogue in ""quote marks"" or feed messages that we're given verbatim. This means that there is some communication we know happened that I haven't included here - reported or summarised speech. I have not included noises made with its mouth which are not speech e.g. sighs, grunts.
+
+Not including summarised speech serves to underrepresent the amount Murderbot talks to Dr Mensah.[5] There's not a HUGE amount of talking being missed from the record this way, but what there is is primarily it talking to her in the feed - especially in chapter 4. There were also several instances of Murderbot communicating with Mensah via the feed but without words e.g. sharing maps with her and snitching on Ratthi when he tries to talk to it about its feelings.
+
+ 
+
+As per Rosewind2007's suggestion, buffer phrases are now underlined.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 1
+
+
+
+79 words/22 pages = 3.6
+
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Volescu, you need to come with me now.
+
+Dr. Volescu, it's gonna be fine, okay? But you need to get up and come help me get her out of here.
+
+Grab my arm, okay? Hold on.
+
+Dr Mensah, I can't let go of her suit.
+
+No!
+
+Uh, yes?
+
+Uh. Fine.
+
+It'll grow back.
+
+It's part of the emergency med instructions, calming victims.
+
+It's part of my job, not to listen to the System feeds when they... make mistakes.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+
+
+56 words/19 pages = 2.9
+
+
+ 
+
+I'm your SecUnit.
+
+Yes, Dr. Mensah.
+
+You're right. Something's been deleted from the warnings and the section on fauna.
+
+As far as I know, it's possible. But it's more likely the report was damaged before you received the survey package.
+
+Probably.
+
+Dr. Mensah, do you need me for anything else?
+
+I need to check the perimeter.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 3
+
+
+
+109 words/21 pages = 5.2
+
+
+ 
+
+We could. But we know there's at least one lifeform here that tunnels through rock.
+
+Dr. Arada, Dr. Ratthi, please stop. You're past the perimeter and nearing a hazard marker.
+
+They have three contracted SecUnits but if their habitat was hit by a hostile as big or bigger than Hostile One, their comm equipment could have been damaged.
+
+They're supposed to be able to, but equipment failures aren't unknown.
+
+I carefully monitor my own systems.
+
+Dr. Mensah, I think I should go along.
+
+As the only one here with experience in these situations, I'm your best resource.
+
+Situations where personnel might be injured due to attack by planetary hazards.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 4 
+
+
+
+129 words/37 pages = 3.5
+
+
+ 
+
+That's true.
+
+The satellite went down.
+
+I'm sure. I'm pinging it and there's no response.
+
+Dr. Mensah, I recommend you land outside their perimeter.
+
+Security protocol.
+
+Dr. Mensah, it would be better if I went ahead.
+
+Yes, Dr. Mensah.
+
+
+Dr. Mensah, this is a violation of security priority and I am contractually obligated to record this for report to the company--
+
+
+Dr. Mensah, there might be more rogue units, we don't know--
+
+Dr. Mensah, I need my weapon.
+
+Yeah, I know, but--
+
+Mensah, you need to shut me down now.[6]
+
+The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It's downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.  You have to kill me.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 5
+
+
+
+641 words/37 pages = 17.3
+
+
+ 
+
+The company isn't trying to kill you.
+
+Because if the company wanted to sabotage you, they would have poisoned your supplies using the recycling systems. The company is more likely to kill you by accident.
+
+I did not hack my governor module to kill my clients. My governor module malfunctioned because the stupid company only buys the cheapest possible components. It malfunctioned and I lost control of my systems and I killed them. The company retrieved me and installed a new governor module. I hacked it so it wouldn't happen again.
+
+No.
+
+That was private.
+
+She didn't kill him, that's a fucking lie.
+
+All the company equipment is the same.
+
+You're wrong. HubSystem let you read my log, it let you find out about the hacked governor module. This is part of the sabotage. It wants you to stop trusting me because I'm trying to keep you alive.
+
+That won't work.
+
+Because HubSystem lied to you when it told you I was immobilized.
+
+I don't like you. But I like the rest of them, and for some reason I don't understand, they like you.
+
+I cut it off when Gurathin said he found out my governor module was hacked, then deleted that section. I have the visual and audio recording transfer from SecSystem to HubSystem on a five-second delay.
+
+Okay.
+
+It might. I hacked HubSystem when we first arrived so it wouldn't notice that the commands sent to the governor module weren't always being followed, but if HubSystem's been compromised by an outside agent, I don't know if that worked. But HubSystem won't know you know about it.
+
+No offense.
+
+Was DeltFall's beacon triggered?
+
+There were two other instances of attempted sabotage I'm aware of. When Hostile One attacked Drs. Bharadwaj and Volescu and I went to render assistance, I received an abort command from HubSystem through my governor module. I thought it was a glitch caused by the MedSystem emergency feed trying to override HubSystem. When Dr. Mensah was flying the little hopper to check out the nearest map anomaly, the autopilot cut out just as we were passing over a mountain range. HubSystem downloaded an upgrade packet for me from the satellite before we left for DeltFall. I didn't apply it. You should probably look at what it would have told me to do.
+
+The company could be bribed to conceal the existence of several hundred survey teams on this planet. I don't think the company would collude with one set of clients to kill two other sets of clients. You purchased a bond agreement that the company would guarantee your safety or pay compensation in the event of your death or injury. Even if the company couldn't be held liable or partially liable for your deaths, they would still have to make the payment to your heirs. DeltFall was a large operation. The death payout for them alone will be huge. And if everyone believes the clients were killed by faulty SecUnits, the payment would be even bigger once all the lawsuits were filed.
+
+It's possible. But it doesn't explain why one of the three DeltFall units was killed outside the hub with a mining drill. If the DeltFall group refused the download for their SecUnits because they were experiencing the same increase in equipment failure that we were, the two unidentified Units could have been sent to manually infect the DeltFall Units.
+
+You'd do it. If a strange survey group landed here, all friendly, saying they had just arrived, and oh, we've had an equipment failure or our MedSystem's down and we need help, you would let them in. Even if I told you not to, that it was against company safety protocol, you'd do it.
+
+When they come here, they won't do that.
+
+Be somewhere else.
+
+They're coming! We need to get in the air, now!
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 6
+
+
+
+353 words/32 pages = 11.0
+
+
+ 
+
+It's usually better if humans think of me as a robot.
+
+They may believe the company and whoever your beneficiaries are won't look any further than the rogue SecUnits. But they can't make two whole survey teams disappear unless their corporate or political entity doesn't care about them. Does DeltFall's care? Does yours?
+
+I didn't read it.
+
+I didn't care.
+
+I'll try to be more accurate. I was indifferent, and vaguely annoyed. Do you believe that?
+
+You don't need to look at me. I'm not a sexbot.
+
+Probably, right up until I remember I have guns built into my arms.
+
+
+Because you need me.
+
+
+
+I panic all the time, you just can't see it /j[7]
+
+
+I left three drones at our habitat. They don't have scanning function with HubSystem down, but the visual and audio recording will still work. They may pick up something that will answer your questions.
+
+No, I'll have to go back to get the data.
+
+I don't think they'll stay long. There's nothing there they want.
+
+Yes. Why did everyone think it was so strange that I asked if your political entity would miss you?
+
+But the company knows who she is.
+
+I thought you were satisfied.
+
+I remember every word ever said to me.
+
+Go ahead.
+
+No, not like you're thinking. Not the way a human would be punished. They shut me down for a while, and then brought me back online at intervals.
+
+The organic parts mostly sleep, but not always. You know something's happening. They were trying to purge my memory. We're too expensive to destroy.
+
+No. That's a human thing to do. Constructs aren't that stupid.
+
+They have nothing to lose. If we come to this rendezvous, they can kill us and stop worrying about us. If we don't, they have until the end of project date to search for us.
+
+I told you it wasn't the company.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 7
+
+
+
+317 words/26 pages = 12.2
+
+
+ 
+
+This is the SecUnit assigned to the PreservationAux Survey Team. I was sent to speak to you about an arrangement.
+
+I assume you're about to try to install another combat override module and send me back to kill them. I don't recommend that course of action.
+
+Anyone want to comment on that?
+
+I have an alternate solution to both our problems.
+
+You weren't the first to hack PreservationAux's HubSystem.
+
+Your scans should show I've cut my comm. I don't have a working governor module. They don't know that. I'm amenable to a compromise that benefits you as well as me.
+
+You used combat override modules to make the DeltFall SecUnits behave like rogues. If you think a real rogue SecUnit still has to answer your questions, the next few minutes are going to be an education for you.
+
+I can give you information you desperately need. In exchange, you take me onto the pick-up ship with you but list me as destroyed inventory.
+
+First, remove me from the inventory. I know you still have a connection to our Hub.
+
+Initiate the restart, queue the command, and then show me on your feed. Then I'll give you the information.
+
+Since you destroyed my clients' beacon, they've sent a group to your beacon to manually trigger it.
+
+One of them is an augmented human, a systems engineer. He can make it launch. Check the data you got from our HubSystem. It's Surveyor Dr. Gurathin.
+
+She knows you mean to kill her. She won't come. She's a planetary admin for a system noncorporate political entity, she's not stupid.
+
+Why do you think the team is called 'Preservation'?
+
+It's gone wrong. You have to pretend to be my prisoner.
+
+I'm going to be it and it's going to be me.
+
+We have to go--
+
+
+This unit is at minimum functionality and it is recommended that you discard it. Your contract allows--
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 8
+
+
+
+35 words/14 pages = 2.5
+
+
+ 
+
+Yes. I don't understand what's happening.
+
+I'm off inventory. Can I still have armor?
+
+I don't have a cubicle.
+
+If people won't be shooting at me what will I be doing?
+
+You'd be my guardian.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+[1] From Chapter 5 of All Systems Red. This project was largely inspired by a discord conversation about how little Murderbot talks in this book, and how it's not letting its true asshole self show because it's doing a Good Obedient Secunit act.
+
+[2] Hyphenated words count as one word, but there's only three examples of those anyway (combat-override (the first time it's used, but not the other times), five-second, and pick-up).
+
+[3] Thank you @rosewind2007 for THAT data.
+
+[4] For those of you who like numbers, we go from an average of 3.4 Murderbot words per page pre-reveal to an average of 12.3 Mwpp for the rest of the book.
+
+[5] I've written ""Dr."" in the transcribed dialogue because that's, you know, what it says in the book. But it looks very wrong to me (a Brit), so you can't make me do it in my own writing.
+
+[6] First time it drops the 'Dr'.
+
+[7] It says ""I added the text signifier for joke"" to this feed message to Mensah, and this is how I've interpreted that. Could also have been crying laughing emoji, but that doesn't seem like Murderbot's style.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+  ""[Botpilots] are not designed for conversation. I was okay with that, because I wasn't designed for conversation either.""[1]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Looking at the overall number of words shows that Murderbot speaks roughly the same amount in Artificial Condition as in All Systems Red. Artificial Condition has 1,611 words, giving an average of 7.4 words of Murderbot dialogue per page, vs 8.3 per page in All Systems Red.[2]
+
+ 
+
+The same rules apply (as with ASR) for what I have and haven't counted: only direct speech, hyphenated words are one word, and I ignored sighs etc.
+
+ 
+
+Obviously Artificial Condition doesn't have the divide between fake-govmodded first half (less talking) and post-reveal second half (more talking) that All Systems Red did. In Artificial Condition, Murderbot actually spends some time on its own (something it barely did in ASR, at least not 'onscreen'), so naturally the chapters where it's just sort of wandering around alone are the chapters with less talking. The exception to THAT pattern is chapter 4, where Murderbot spends a fair amount of the chapter recovering/adjusting post-surgery, feeling pretty shit and so not talking much.
+
+ 
+
+
+Talking to ART
+
+
+758 of Murderbot's 1,611 words in this book are it speaking to ART (that's 47%). And so much of it sounds at least vaguely hostile, but it also tells ART like...everything about itself lol. As well as, of course, trusting ART to help it with its mission in various ways. Murderbot is genuinely pretty hostile initially, but also they're just the kind of friends who are assholes to each other <3
+
+The other thing I observed about their interactions, which will probably surprise no-one, is that in their conversations ART speaks a fair bit more often than Murderbot. By which I don't necessarily mean it says more words (I haven't checked that (yet)) but it will fairly often say something that Murderbot doesn't respond to, whereas the opposite doesn't happen. So ART has more lines, because it's a know-it-all that can't shut up. Murderbot, on the other hand, doesn't want to answer a lot of what ART is asking it, and because ART is an AI Murderbot doesn't have that lingering feeling that it has to respond to direct questions.
+
+I know I've seen people comment before on Murderbot saying that it ""wasn't going to talk to [ART] on the feed like it was my client"" and sure enough, the only times it talks to ART on the feed are when it has to (either they're not in the same place, or that single message where it attached govmod memories).[3] Near the end of the book it does say it 'signaled a negative' through the feed, because it wasn't up to talking at that moment, but that's pretty much it for feed communication with ART outside of necessity. 
+
+Now of course, this is also how Murderbot uses the feed with humans, in this book at least. It uses the feed primarily for speech that it doesn't want to be overheard, and speaks aloud when that isn't a concern. Its reluctance to speak to ART on the feed is noteworthy partly just because Murderbot itself draws attention to it, making it clear that it was (at least in their initial interactions) a conscious choice. And also because ART always speaks to Murderbot via the feed, so answering it back out loud seems kind of awkward, to me.
+
+Going forward I'm going to keep an eye on how Murderbot talks to bots in general (obviously it often doesn't really use words at all, aloud or in the feed, but I know it does for Miki and Balin at least, maybe others)
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 1
+
+
+
+0 words/14 pages = 0
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+
+
+250 words/24 pages = 10.4
+
+
+ 
+
+Why am I lucky?
+
+What do you think I am?
+
+Okay.
+
+
+SecUnits don't sulk. That would trigger punishment from the governor module.
+
+
+I don't want anything from you. I just want to ride to your next destination.
+
+ 
+
+I gave you a copy of all my media when I came aboard. Did you even look at it?
+
+Watch it yourself.
+
+It's not realistic. It's not supposed to be realistic It's a story, not a documentary. If you complain about that, I'll stop watching.
+
+ 
+
+No. There aren't that many shows with SecUnits, and they're either villains or the villain's minions.
+
+There's unrealistic that takes you away from reality and unrealistic that reminds you that everybody's afraid of you.
+
+I like parts of my function.
+
+That's me.
+
+Yes. Do you want to watch WorldHoppers again?
+
+I left without permission. She offered me a home with her on Preservation, but she doesn't need me there.  They don't need SecUnits there. And I... didnt know what I wanted, if I wanted to go to Preservation or not. If I want a human guardian, which is just a different word for owner. I knew it would be easier to escape from the station than it would from a planet. So I left. Why did you let me on board?
+
+I left to get off Port FreeCommerce, away from the company. After I had a chance to think, I decided to go to RaviHyral. I need to research something, and that's the best place to do it.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 3
+
+
+
+367 words/26 pages = 14.1
+
+
+ 
+
+What do you know about children?
+
+We aren't friends. The first thing you did when we were underway was threaten me.
+
+I'm not your crew. I'm not a human. I'm a construct. Constructs and bots can't trust each other.
+
+Because we both have to follow human orders. A human could tell you to purge my memory. A human could tell me to destroy your systems.
+
+At some point approximately 35,000 hours ago, I was assigned to a contract on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. During that assignment, I went rogue and killed a large number of my clients. My memory of the incident was partially purged. I need to know if the incident occurred due to a catastrophic failure of my governor module. That's what I think happened. But I need to know for sure. I need to know if I hacked my governor module in order to cause the incident.
+
+Because SecUnits are expensive and the company didn't want to lose any more money on me than it already had.
+
+Either I killed them due to a malfunction and then hacked the governor module, or I hacked the governor module so I could kill them. Those are the only two possibilities.
+
+All right, what are the first two possibilities to consider?
+
+ 
+
+I know I could have hacked my governor module. Hacking my governor module is why I'm here.
+
+What do you mean?
+
+I can pass as an augmented human.
+
+No one noticed on the transit rings.
+
+I can't do anything about that.
+
+No, I can't. Look up the specs on SecUnits.
+
+No. Sexbots are altered. But that's done in the deployment centre, in the repair cubicles. To do anything like that I'd need a medical suite. A full one, not just an emergency kit.
+
+Theoretically. But I can't operate the medical suite while I'm being altered.
+
+You want me to trust you to alter my configuration while I'm inactive? When I'm helpless?
+
+Why do want to help me?
+
+So you're bored? I'd be the best toy you've ever had? If you're bored, watch the media I gave you.
+
+My survival isn't at stake if I continue to ride unoccupied transports.
+
+I don't have a crew.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 4
+
+
+
+109 words/33 pages = 3.3
+
+
+ 
+
+They took it off the map.
+
+I don't know if it's usual or not, but it makes sense, if the company or the clients wanted to conceal what happened.
+
+What?
+
+Hire me. Have you lost your mind?
+
+For humans and augmented humans, yes.
+
+ 
+
+Hello.
+
+We arranged to meet. I'm Eden, the security consultant.
+
+You want to hire a security consultant?
+
+It's all right. We're not being recorded.
+
+I'm a security consultant.
+
+Yes. Among other things.
+
+Why do you want to hire me?
+
+This sounds like something you should go to a solicitor about.
+
+You don't trust Tlacey.
+
+The meeting with Tlacey could be held through a secured comn channel.
+
+So do you think there's another reason Tlacey wants you to do this exchange in person, other than ... killing you?
+
+I accept your job.
+
+How much were they paying you before you were terminated?
+
+You can pay me that.
+
+I need to go to RaviHyral, and I need an employment contract to get there.
+
+I need to do some research there for another client.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 5
+
+
+
+292 words/38 pages = 7.7
+
+
+ 
+
+Sure.
+
+
+Can you scan the shuttle for energy anomalies without transit ring security detecting the activity?
+
+
+
+If they fire at us en route, it's not like we can do anything about it. 
+
+
+
+You don't have a weapons system. Do you?
+
+
+
+You have a weapons system.
+
+
+I'm on a private channel with a friend in the ring who's monitoring the shuttle's departure. Just making sure everything's okay.
+
+
+ART!
+
+
+Yes. I've got sensitive hearing.
+
+We'll talk about it when we're off the shuttle.
+
+ 
+
+The person you're going to meet with just tried to kill you. The shuttle was infected with killware. It destroyed the bot pilot. I was in contact with a friend who was able to use my augmented feed to download a new pilot module. That's the only reason we didn't crash.
+
+If you were the only casualties, the motive would have been obvious. You should return to the transit ring immediately.
+
+You can't keep this meeting. They lost track of you when the shuttle didn't dock in its scheduled slot. You have to keep that advantage.
+
+Tlacey has no intention of giving you back your work. She lured you here to kill you.
+
+You can't meet Tlacey at her compound. You'll pick the spot.
+
+ 
+
+Stop.
+
+Don't answer that. Don't mention the attempt on the shuttle, just stick to business.
+
+
+I see it.
+
+
+We need to go. We'll talk about this somewhere else.
+
+You won't be staying there.
+
+
+Just keep walking, don't stop. I'll meet you in the lobby. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Go to the hotel, wait for me in the lobby. Don't run, walk.
+
+
+They told somebody to cut the cameras. That's why you need to leave now.
+
+ 
+
+Again.
+
+But now you've seen it.
+
+No, she wasn't.
+
+Let me get you out of here.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 6
+
+
+
+62 words/26 pages = 2.4
+
+
+ 
+
+I still need to do some research here. I'll go back to the transit ring when I'm finished.
+
+I'll check my social feed profile on the ring. Send a note to me there, and I'll find you when I get back.
+
+Sometimes people do things to you that you can't do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.[4]
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 7
+
+
+
+270 words/30 pages = 9.0
+
+
+ 
+
+They left me a message. What happened?
+
+I'll help you. Right now we need to find a place to get out of sight.
+
+ 
+
+I'm not mad.
+
+
+I have no idea.
+
+
+How is that good?
+
+That isn't the purpose of fear.
+
+Yes. It was... inconclusive.
+
+Um, yes.
+
+I got caught in an explosion. There's not a lot of me that's human, actually.
+
+Did you eat?
+
+ 
+
+
+Why is it here?
+
+
+
+I'm on contract to a private individual. Why are you communicating with me?
+
+
+
+Someone is outside the door. I'm not sure why. 
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+That's an interesting story but it has nothing to do with me.
+
+
+
+That's a story about a dangerous rogue SecUnit. No one would send it anywhere.
+
+
+
+I have a client. Who sent you here? Was it Tlacey?
+
+
+
+Can you hack it from here?
+
+
+
+Your client wants to kill my client. You told Tlacey about me. Your client sent a ComfortUnit to do a SecUnit's job.
+
+
+
+What do you propose to do?
+
+
+
+Kill who? Tlacey?
+
+
+
+To kill all the humans.
+
+
+
+I know, if the humans were dead, who would make the media?
+
+
+
+Is that how Tlacey thinks constructs talk to each other? 
+
+
+
+I was hiding. Does Tlacey know you want to kill her?
+
+
+I need you to isolate that for me. Don't open it yet.
+
+It's gone. Can you check out that code bundle for me?
+
+ 
+
+But we don't know that that's true, or that this operative won't tell Tlacey you're here. Now.
+
+I don't know. They don't like Tlacey, but that might not be the only reason.
+
+ 
+
+It'll help the most if you go back to the transit ring.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 8
+
+
+
+143 words/16 pages = 8.9
+
+
+ 
+
+Tapan couldn't come.
+
+No one's watching, you can leave.
+
+ 
+
+Where is she?
+
+
+Because Tlacey doesn't want Tapan, she wants me.
+
+
+If I accept that, will they release my client?
+
+ 
+
+But we all know that wasn't an accident, don't we.
+
+You think I'm a puppet? You know that's not the way we work.
+
+I came for my client.
+
+Touch that weapon and I'll insert it into your rib cage. Tell your sexbot to stop fighting.
+
+
+Art, cut off Tlacey's feed.
+
+
+Give the sexbot a verbal command to obey me until further notice. Try to give it any other command and I'll rip your tongue out.
+
+I don't make threats, I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.
+
+Stay down.
+
+All you had to do was give them the fucking files and none of this would be in this situation.
+
+It's me.
+
+
+ART, help.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Chapter 9
+
+
+
+118 words/11 pages = 10.7
+
+
+ 
+
+
+How did you know to do that?
+
+
+No. How did you know I was one of the Ganaka Pit Units?
+
+Drop your wall.
+
+Go away. Don't let me see you again. Don't hurt anyone on this transit ring or I'll find you.
+
+ 
+
+They tried to kill us again. We had to leave. We're back on the transit ring, on my friend's ship.
+
+Your friend was telling the truth, he gave me your files. This ship has to leave soon. I need you to call Rami and Maro to come meet us outside the embarkation zone.
+
+Yeah, they are.
+
+It wasn't your fault.
+
+It was my fault.
+
+ 
+
+You need to clean this too.
+
+ 
+
+Right.
+
+Uh.
+
+I've got to go.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+[1] Chapter 2 of Artificial Condition.
+
+[2] That's 1,610 words in 218 pages in Artificial Condition, and 1,719 words in 208 pages for All Systems Red.
+
+[3] With the arguable exception of Chapter 9, when it's back on ART but still uses the feed to say 'How did you know to do that?'. Given that the ComfortUnit (and Tapan, but I think she's unconscious by this point) is also there, my interpretation is that this is still kind of using the feed by necessity - Murderbot wants the message to be private, and ART's existence is secret so speaking aloud to it would be weird and suspicious in this situation.
+
+[4] This is the last thing it says before going off to find out what happened at Ganaka Pit (:
+
+ 
+
+
+""because I was a talking weapon, and I knew how people felt about me.""[1]
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+This book contains a total of 1,514 words of Murderbot dialogue.[2] That's an average of 6.5 Murderbot words per page, so this is its least chatty book so far.[3]
+
+ 
+
+Murderbot spends more time doing its own thing in Rogue Protocol than in either of the previous books, so it makes sense that there's less talking. It's actively hiding from most of the other characters for a large portion of the book. Once it's revealed to Don Abene and the other humans, it gets pretty chatty! Even though it's technically pretending to have an active governor module in all its interactions with humans, it talks quite differently from the first half of ASR. I think this is partly the freedom it feels from having a fake client elsewhere (Don Abene and friends don't need to know it's a scary rogue, but they also don't need to think that THEY are controlling it. So Murderbot can speak and act relatively freely, with the excuse that 'oh Security Consultant Rin told me to do this'). But it's also partly the fact that it's much more comfortable interacting with humans now - having had a fair amount of practice by this point.
+
+ 
+
+There's a lot of talking via the feed in this book, largely because Murderbot is constantly having private little side chats with Miki and Don Abene. Obviously it speaks to Miki from afar quite a bit, when the feed is the only option, but it continues to use it as a private communication method even when they're in the same place e.g. to say 'please don't tell Don Abene about all my lying'. And to just generally have their nice little bot-to-bot communications... until Murderbot realises that Miki has told Don Abene about the lying, and from then on talks to Miki as little as possible.
+
+And then also Murderbot is using the feed to talk to Don Abene, as a way of making its allegiance clear and leaving Wilken out of the loop. This is what we've seen before, that talking in the feed is kind of a client privilege (from the way Murderbot communicates with Mensah in ASR, and 'I wasn't going to talk to it through the feed like it was my client.' in AC). Murderbot doesn't talk to Wilken or Gerth through the feed[4], and in fact it says very little that they hear at all, out loud or on the feed. 
+
+ 
+
+The ending is similar to All Systems Red in some ways: Murderbot not responding to the humans trying to talk to it because it's Not Doing Great (and escaping onto a botpiloted ship). This is one of the ways Martha Wells shows us that it's feeling numb and disconnected from its surroundings. It's an effective technique! By which I mean that it makes me sad.[5]
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 1
+
+
+
+28 words/27 pages = 1.0
+
+
+ 
+
+Shut up!
+
+I don't care. We have, at most, six hours left before this transport will dock. After that you can do whatever you want to each other.[6]
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+
+
+160 words/38 pages = 4.2
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Hi, Miki.
+
+
+
+I'm a security consultant. GoodNightLander Independent contracted with my security company to make sure your team completes their mission safely.
+
+
+
+You can't tell anyone I'm here.
+
+
+
+This has to be a secret, to keep Don Abene and the others safe. We can't risk anyone finding out about it.
+
+
+
+I promise.
+
+
+
+Rin. Security Consultant Rin.
+
+
+
+Rin is what I want to be called. I don't tell anyone my real name.
+
+
+
+Right.
+
+
+
+Can you give me system access to your shuttle? I want to make sure it's safe.
+
+
+
+Miki, I'm going to need to use your systems to monitor your-- your friends. I need you to be my camera, and let me use your scanning ability. Sometimes I might need to speak through you, pretending to be you, to warn Don Abene and your friends about things I believe are dangerous. Can you let me do that?
+
+
+
+Miki, have you been directed to reply to every query with a yes?
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 3
+
+
+
+42 words/13 pages = 3.2 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm fine. You can call me Rin.
+
+
+
+Say, ""Don Abene wants me to ask you if you need any help stowing your gear.""
+
+
+
+I'm not sure. Maybe no reason.
+
+
+
+Miki, remember you said you wouldn't tell Don Abene about me.
+
+
+
+Yes, Miki.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Chapter 4
+
+
+
+200 words/38 pages = 5.3
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Miki, tell her--
+
+
+
+That might be true. GrayCris might have removed the central cores for the resident systems when they pulled out. They'd want to cut their losses.
+
+
+
+I'm about to use a lift, Miki. If your scan picks up the power fluctuation, please don't tell anyone.
+
+
+
+I have to look at the geo pod. It's part of my orders.
+
+
+
+Just the storm. The geo pod has a clear dome.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Is that me what?
+
+
+
+The conversation? I'm still in the geo pod.
+
+
+
+Miki, you have an incoming unknown/potential hostile moving toward your position. Determine direction, then alert your clients, in that order.
+
+
+
+No time to withdraw, tell client to shelter in place and try to lock down area.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'm a SecUnit under contract to Security Consultant Rin, who was sent by GoodNightLander Independent as an extra security measure for the assessment team.
+
+
+Please, Miki, I just want to help.
+
+
+I'm Consultant Rin's contracted SecUnit. Consultant Rin is on the station, and sent me to the facility on her shuttle.
+
+Consultant Rin has instructed me to help you in any way necessary.
+
+Don't take a lift. The hostile may take control of the system and bring a lift to its position.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 5
+
+
+
+815 words/70 pages[7] = 11.6
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Did you know I was a SecUnit, Miki?
+
+
+
+Call me SecUnit.
+
+
+Consultant Rin has no additional intel.
+
+
+Don Abene, you can speak to me privately on this channel. I maintain contact with my clients at all times. Please note that Consultant Rin has specified that you are my principal client, not your security team.
+
+
+
+I think you're correct, I think it was a retrieval device. The hostile intended to take at least one member of the team and kill or injure others before retreating. That is not something a party of raiders would do. Its plan is probably to draw you further into the facility to kill the rest of you, and hopefully cause more members of the team to leave the shuttle so it can kill them, too.
+
+
+
+You've already countered it. It doesn't know you have a SecUnit with you.
+
+
+
+I didn't know, not until Miki alerted me that something was approaching your position.
+
+
+
+I was in the geo pod. I was gathering data about a possible violation by GrayCris of the Strange Synthetics Accord.
+
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+I have standing orders from Rin to assist you. I can do the rest.
+
+
+
+GrayCris has been accused of killing the members of a DeltFall survey team and attacking a PreservationAux team on a Corporation Rim assessment world. When you have access to newsfeeds again, check references to Port FreeCommerce for more information. There was reason to suspect GrayCris used this terraforming facility for interdicted activity and might try to prevent a reclamation effort.
+
+
+
+Probably. Until the geo pod data is reviewed and analysed, we won't know for certain. Consultant Rin decided it was best to combine the date retrieval with additional security for your team.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Can you tell what's causing that scanner noise?
+
+
+
+It's not strange, it's strategic. Something is using the interference caused by the weather to mask a signal.
+
+
+
+Stay with Don Abene.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I need more packs.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+They knew that already.
+
+
+
+Don't answer it, Miki. It's a combat bot, trying to fix our position.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Don Abene, I need to scout ahead. It'll be better if Wilken comes with me, and you and Miki wait here. And we need to hurry.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Have you checked the ship recently?
+
+
+
+Acknowledged, just checking.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It's all right, Don Abene. It's what I do.
+
+
+It's all right, I have another plan. It's safer for Hirune. 
+
+
+
+You're my client. You can monitor me on this connection.
+
+
+We should go now. Give me your weapon.
+
+If I'm going first, I'll need a projectile weapon.
+
+No, the station feed isn't accessible from here. I may be able to reach her on comm if you need to speak to her.
+
+ 
+
+
+Why are you worried, Miki?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm your contracted SecUnit.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This is SecUnit. We can talk about this. Consultant Rin can offer you immunity from prosecution if you testify. Your bosses are going down. Whatever they paid you, it won't make up for a stint in prison.
+
+
+It's all right, I've locked her armor.
+
+She's alive.
+
+Miki, damage report.
+
+Miki, take Hirune.
+
+Don Abene, you might not want to watch this.
+
+We need to go.
+
+That's because I'm blocking you. I didn't want you to say anything that might alert Gerth.
+
+Analysis from the cargo ship suggested they had worked together for some time. We have to assume they were suborned together, or at some point deflected and replaced the security team your company sent.
+
+Probably.
+
+I don't think she or Gerth gave them orders. I was listening in on their feeds, and I would have heard that, even if it was encrypted.
+
+Hold it.
+
+The combat bots and drones weren't sent here for you. They were part of the facility's manifest from the start. The transit station was still in construction at that point, and wouldn't have been much help in driving off potential raiders. And GrayCris wouldn't have wanted to call on any outside agency for help, since they were trying to conceal the fact that they were building an illegal mining platform disguised as a terraforming facility. The combat bots and drones have been in sleep mode since the facility was abandoned. They were activated when your shuttle docked here. Analysis suggests Wilken and Gerth were surprised by their existence. I think Wilken did believe it was raiders who staged the attack and took Hirune, up until the second attack when she saw the combat bot. There's a good chance GrayCris didn't tell her and Gerth about the combat bots, hoping that the bots would eliminate them.[8]
+
+Our only advantage right now is that Gerth doesn't know Wilken was compromised.
+
+Are you sure he won't say aloud, 'Hey everybody, Don Abene's just signaled me on the feed; before you can tell him not to?
+
+You don't have any security monitoring aboard your shuttle? No cameras? No other bots, even a currently inactive one?
+
+We need to get back to the geo pod.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 6 
+
+
+
+269 words/48 pages = 5.6
+
+
+ 
+
+I'm going to try to get a feed connection to your shuttle via the suit comms on the flight deck, but I need to get this control station active. There are diggers still attached to the facility that we might be able to use against the combat bots.
+
+I don't--
+
+I'm not Rin. Rin is--
+
+
+I don't need the nerve-block. I can turn my pain sensors down.
+
+
+
+Miki, did you tell Don Abene that there is no Consultant Rin, there's just me?
+
+
+
+Why does she think I lied about it?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The rest of the team hasn't been injured and Gerth is still acting as their security. She won't let them leave the shuttle to look for you. They're having trouble contacting the station for help.
+
+They aren't there.
+
+The combat bots. The drone didn't find them on the route to the shuttle. They aren't there.
+
+
+To destroy the facility. If GoodNightLander Independent hadn't installed the tractor array, the facility would have collapsed into the planet by now.
+
+
+They sent an encrypted signal.
+
+ 
+
+We need to go. You have six minutes.
+
+We need to move fast. We don't know where the other combat bots are.
+
+ 
+
+When I unlock your feed, connect to Kader and tell him to make sure to tell him to get everyone off the shuttle.
+
+
+Now.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Abene, Miki, bots!
+
+
+We need to go.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Don Abene, we need to return to the transit station as soon as possible. When the tractor array fails, it could damage the shuttle.
+
+ 
+
+Emergency! Lock breach imminent!
+
+Get everyone into the flight deck.
+
+ 
+
+
+Miki, get out of here! Go hide in the cargo!
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+[1] Chapter 2 of Rogue Protocol.
+
+[2] See the All Systems Red chapter for what I have and haven't counted.
+
+[3] That's 1,514 words/234 pages (in the copy I'm looking at). For comparison, ASR had 1,719 words/208 pages = 8.3 Murderbot words/page, and AC had 1,611 words/218 pages = 7.4 Murderbot words/page.
+
+[4] Except when it needs to distract Wilken while she's fighting Miki, and it's far away down a corridor.
+
+[5] So also an affective technique.
+
+[6] This chapter also contained a line that's arguably dialogue - it's formatted like dialogue, it does seem to have been something that Murderbot said - but that I haven't included. It tells us that 'Initially, [babysitting the passengers on the transport] had been pretty easy. (""If you bother her again I will break every individual bone in your hand and arm. It will take about an hour."")' I've decided not to count it in my 'official' transcript because we're just being TOLD that it said this earlier, we're not actually seeing it happen. But I'm including it here for completeness, because it is implied to be verbatim words that Murderbot has said.
+
+[7] Longest chapter in the world.
+
+[8] At 155 words, this is Murderbot's longest speech to date.
+
+
+""it felt so weird to be talking to a human like this, a human who knew what I was.""[1]
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+In this book, Murderbot says 1,534 words, for an average of 6.3 words per page.[2]
+
+ 
+
+As you can see it has a grand total of three words in the first two chapters, because that's before it makes contact with any of its humans. After it does begin to talk to them (it first makes contact with Pin-Lee two thirds of the way through chapter 3) that average goes up to 9.3 Murderbot words per page for the rest of the book.
+
+ 
+
+Great book for fans of Murderbot being too distracted/scrambled to keep its usual tight control of what it's saying! Which is probably most of us. In the conversation with Mensah about Sanctuary Moon it's like 'I was too busy monitoring security feeds to fully control what I said' and then post-gunship is essentially the 'loopy from painkillers' trope.
+
+ 
+
+I don't have all that much to say about this one, really. It's nice to see Murderbot unafraid enough to be itself around humans! Which mostly means being an asshole to Pin-Lee and Gurathin, and talking about some big feelings with Mensah.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Chapter 1
+
+
+
+0 words/28 pages = 0
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+
+
+3 words/31 pages = 0.1
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Status: update (stealth).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 3
+
+
+
+175 words/29 pages = 6.0
+
+
+ 
+
+Hi. We met on Port FreeCommerce. I was the one in the transport box.
+
+I came to find our friend. Do you want to get in a transit bubble?
+
+Clear.
+
+Mensah said I could learn to do anything I wanted. I learned to leave.
+
+I don't want to talk about it.
+
+Either I'm Mensah's property, and I work for her, or I'm a free agent and I work for myself.
+
+I've been traveling, and I saw a newsburst that said Mensah was missing. Did they trick her into coming here, or was she abducted?
+
+I've been wandering around watching a lot of serials.
+
+I pulled a status report from the company gunship. They aren't going to help you unless the station lifts the docking prohibition. You're on your own. Or you're in your own with Ratthi and Gurathin, which may be worse.
+
+I need intel to make a plan.
+
+But no company contract support?
+
+Do you have it with you?
+
+Gurathin may be right about the main station security barrier.
+
+There's a ninety-five percent chance.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 4
+
+
+
+462 words/36 pages = 12.8
+
+
+ 
+
+The problem isn't that GrayCris' corporate headquarters is in the upper torus. It's that we would be leaving territory controlled by neutral TRH security and entering GrayCris' corporate jurisdiction. In this lower ring, GrayCris has to negotiate with and pay off TRH, and any private security service or entity who has jurisdiction, for each operation, which gives us a slight advantage.
+
+If GrayCris can't make you disappear, they want to delay you. They're probably raising the money to buy off the company. The gunship is also here to exert pressure on GrayCris while the company is negotiating with their reps back on Port FreeCommerce. That ransom GrayCris asked for Mensah's return will probably go straight to the company, as part of the pay-off.
+
+It's possible GrayCris can't afford the payoff.[3]
+
+It would be tricky. We need to find a way to make them bring her outside the main station security barrier so that I can track her location via her company implant.
+
+We don't have to get them to bring her all the way to the meeting. We just need to get them to move her outside that security barrier so I can find her.
+
+The more guards the better.
+
+If I have to.
+
+I'm the security expert. You're the humans who walk in the wrong place and get attacked by angry fauna. I have extracted living clients from situations that were less than nine percent survivable. I'm more than qualified to make that call.
+
+I'm going to wait in the lobby. Contact me when you make your decision.
+
+I'm going to the lobby anyway.
+
+ 
+
+
+No, I left. I've decided to live here and just move from hotel to hotel, watching the entertainment feed.
+
+
+
+I don't care about your opinion.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ Dr. Ratthi, please describe the problem. 
+
+
+
+Keep him talking.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I've blocked it and his feed.
+
+
+No response from the implant yet.
+
+
+Milu was my idea. I'm a rogue unit.
+
+Maybe I wanted the trail to start here.[4] You people are so naive.
+
+I'm not going to kill him. I know what I'm fucking doing.
+
+They're on a transit pipe. You need to get back to your shuttle. Leave him; by the time he's conscious GrayCris will already know what we're doing. Don't take his comm or his gun with you, StationSec can scan for them. Go down to the hotel's first-level garden court and take the bubble transit to the next shopping complex, then take pipe transit from there.
+
+
+The GrayCris group with Mensah is less than two minutes out and counting, you need to be out of the hotel before they get here. She'll meet you at your shuttle. Do not try to contact me on the feed. If they buy off StationSec, they could trace us.
+
+
+
+I'm breaking contact, Ratthi.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 5
+
+
+
+298 words/26 pages = 11.5
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Hi, Dr. Mensah. It's me.
+
+
+
+Try to answer me without subvocalizing.
+
+
+
+It's Murderbot, Dr. Mensah.
+
+
+
+I came to help you, to get you to the port where Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin are waiting with a company shuttle. It's dangerous, but less dangerous than staying where you are. Do I have a go to proceed?
+
+
+
+Dr. Mensah, at my signal, please drop to the floor of the pod in a crouch and cover your head.
+
+
+Let's go.
+
+I have to take out the two targets on the transit pipe platform. When we arrive, step out of the pod, move away from the entrance, and wait for me.
+
+ 
+
+
+No. GrayCris paid off the station to keep the company out. Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin came anyway. 
+
+
+Change of plan, they know where we are.
+
+ 
+
+Are you all right?
+
+Uh, you can hug me if you need to.
+
+It was an accident.
+
+Most of the parts.
+
+No, I impersonated my client. My imaginary client. That I impersonated. Since I left Port FreeCommerce, I've successfully impersonated an augmented human security consultant with two different groups of humans. At Milu I meant to do the same, but I was identified as a SecUnit so I told them I was under the control of an off-site security consultant client.
+
+I saw a story about Milu in a newsburst. I wanted to get corroborating evidence of GrayCris' illegal activity and send it to you.
+
+Yes. But by the time I returned to HaveRatton Station, a Palisade security squad was waiting for me. Then I saw on the Port FreeCommerce newsfeed that you were missing. I shipped the data to your home on Preservation.
+
+Three.
+
+I left.
+
+Okay. Pin-Lee said you were worried.
+
+I'm not sure I'd go that far.
+
+We're coming up on the port.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 6
+
+
+
+195 words/30 pages = 6.5
+
+
+ 
+
+We have to look calm, so station security won't alert on us.
+
+ 
+
+That depends on what we talk about.
+
+Have you ever seen it?
+
+You watched it?
+
+It's the first one I saw. When I hacked my governor module and picked up the entertainment feed. It made me feel like a person.[5]
+
+Not legally.
+
+I don't know. It kept me company without...
+
+The shuttle will take you and the others to the company gunship. I'm not going with you.
+
+Because you own me.
+
+ 
+
+
+I am a contracted SecUnit with an endangered client. I am trying to reach the shuttle at dock in slot alt7A. Please, they will kill her. 
+
+
+
+Let my client go through the gate and I'll stay here. Please. They will kill her.
+
+
+Run. Slot alt7A.
+
+
+I can't get through, I'll take another ship. Go to the shuttle and get out of here.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I can hack your governor module, set you free.
+
+
+
+I hacked mine. You'd be free of them. You could dump your armor, get on a transport. I have IDs, a currency card I can give you. 
+
+
+
+What do you want?
+
+
+
+Why? You don't even know me.
+
+
+ 
+
+Drop it! Drop it!
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 7
+
+
+
+192 words/29 pages = 4.4
+
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi, I really need you to get this shrapnel out of my knee joint.
+
+It absolutely cannot wait.
+
+ 
+
+
+System System.
+
+
+
+Active, hazardous retrieval in progress, bonded clients, go go go go.
+
+
+Not really.
+
+ 
+
+
+I can take over this ship.
+
+
+
+We shouldn't have to. We don't have to.
+
+
+
+You have no idea what I am. 
+
+
+
+I am calm. You need to be calm, to take over a gunship.
+
+
+
+Fine.
+
+
+ 
+
+You should sit down. You've been through a traumatic experience. Tell them you need the Medsystem's retrieved Client Trauma Evaluation protocol.
+
+They wouldn't have let me through. I told PortSec if they let you through to the shuttle, I'd stay behind.
+
+Mostly. I wanted to win.
+
+Because that last one was a Combat SecUnit and it was going to tear me apart. That's not winning.
+
+I don't want to be here.
+
+Then what?
+
+Hostile engaging.
+
+No, it's a-- Incoming!
+
+Disengage from the feed, now!
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Mensah, why do you think GrayCris is doing this? What do they want?
+
+I need someone to trigger a manual disengage of the shuttle we arrived in.
+
+
+Thank you for your assistance.
+
+
+ 
+
+Wait for my signal.
+
+Now.
+
+We're clear.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Chapter 8
+
+
+
+209 words/33 pages = 6.3
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Fine.
+
+
+Please wait while I search for that information.
+
+
+ 
+
+I don't want to be a pet robot.
+
+I don't like you.
+
+That is not funny.
+
+Fuck you.
+
+ 
+
+I don't want to be human.
+
+That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
+
+ 
+
+I don't like planets. There's dust and weather, and something always wants to eat the humans. And planets are much harder to escape from.
+
+I had a catastrophic failure. I think that's obvious.
+
+Why is this ship so old and shitty?
+
+Your grandparents were packed in the hold.
+
+I don't want to go to the planet.
+
+In a hotel?
+
+With a big display surface.
+
+ 
+
+Why? Because my owner says so?
+
+ 
+
+Why?
+
+ 
+
+That was stupid.
+
+ 
+
+It's me.
+
+ 
+
+Hello. I'm your mother's pet security consultant.
+
+She's right.
+
+She didn't say 'goons.'
+
+Yeah. Want to see?
+
+Your mother saved me, too. She shot a SecUnit with a sonic mining drill.
+
+Yes.
+
+ 
+
+I thought about it.
+
+Watch media.
+
+I watched a lot of media on the way to Milu.
+
+I couldn't help them. They had a contract labor agreement.
+
+I'm programmed to help humans.
+
+They want to buy me. I thought I was illegal in the territories they operate in.
+
+They want to hire a SecUnit.
+
+A documentary on the entertainment feed?
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+[1] Chapter 3 of Exit Strategy.
+
+[2] That's 1,534 Murderbot words/242 pages. For comparison, ASR had 1,719 words/208 pages = 8.3 Murderbot words/page, AC had 1,610 words/218 pages = 7.4 Murderbot words/page, and RP had 1,510 words/234 pages = 6.5. So far each novella has had less Murderbot dialogue than the one before (though the difference between RP and ES is negligible really). See the first chapter for an explanation of what I am and amn't counting.
+
+[3] Yes, the word payoff is written two different ways only a few lines apart, at least in the ebook. I don't have the physical copy on hand right now to check it.
+
+[4] Lines of all time.
+
+[5] Poor Murderbot thought it was going to get to infodump about its favourite show but was tricked into a conversation about feelings instead! A cruel betrayal."
+44790088,Deception,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Threats of Violence, Misgendering, Mistaken Identity",English,2023-02-04,Completed,2023-02-04,222,1/1,12,91,3,361,"['Flammenkobold', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'ForgOneOne', 'TJWock', 'Irrya', 'FallingInGrace', 'sanguine_bastet', 'TranscendTheBoundaryOfTimeAndSpace', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'brawltogethernow', 'keircatenation', 'wannabe_someone', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'WVrambler', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'cluCluc', 'kirinki', 'ozymandia', 'CactusNoir', 'VonGeek', 'entropy_muffin', 'CheshireFanta', 'Sapph', 'Deliala919', 'KickAir8P', 'ChristinaK', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'rokhal', 'laiinaro', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'EvaBelmort', 'SIC_Prowl', 'SonglordsBug', 'DarkElectron', 'EvenstarFalling', 'ComplicatedLight', 'pain_and_panic', 'redwood5', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'Kaylin881', 'MercurialFeet', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'dragons_and_angels', 'morganste', 'idealPeriWren', 'Beboots', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'ClaireArgent', 'indramiel', 'Llythandea']",[],"""Cooperate and he won't get hurt.""
+
+It takes Ayda long seconds to realise the goons mean SecUnit, whom they have flanked, a knife pressed to its throat. She bites down on the instinctive urge to correct them. If it hasn't shown its hand yet by eviscerating them, it must have a reason. Either because it has a plan, or because Ayda is still in the line of fire. Maybe both. 
+
+Ayda keeps her shoulders tight and expression drawn with some effort. It won't do to tip off whoever their opponents are that they bit off more than they can likely chew. 
+
+""Please,"" SecUnit chokes out, which is so uncharacteristic Ayda almost cedes control of her expression to her disbelief. But their encrypted connection is still present if silent, which means - it has a plan.
+
+SecUnit is looking at her, actually looking with its eyes for once, which means something that she can't parse right then. Ayda slowly raises her hands.
+
+""I will cooperate,"" she says evenly, with just the right tremor in her voice to suggest fear. SecUnit doesn't smile, but it shifts. Good. She's doing what it wants her to do.
+
+And the goons will have no idea what will hit them. She shouldn't be taking this much pleasure from the thought, but then, who's there to tell, aside from SecUnit?"
+44775655,Sample Retrieval,['Trifoliate-Undergrowth (Trefoil_9)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Arada & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot climbs a tree, everyone is normal about this (lying), Pre-Canon, takes place just before all systems red",English,2023-02-04,Completed,2023-02-04,843,1/1,12,149,12,445,"['christinesangel100', 'faedemon', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'almondpaperclam', 'arithmonym', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'supinetothestars', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'PanPow', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'WVrambler', 'Lady_Cassara', 'Seregona', 'Jackalope108', 'FaerieFyre', 'TaskIgnored', 'rokhal', 'Tanscure', 'entropy_muffin', 'julesbee', 'JoCat', 'fate_goes_ever', 'randomwriterStorm', 'EvaBelmort', 'outlander_unknown', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'wvyld', 'YellowBeePurpleMonster', 'mage_sagiza', 'jules_THOR', 'psycho_karma', 'Priority_Error', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'DarkElectron', 'Soffesiin', 'dancernerd', 'danceswchopstck', 'fleurofthecourt', 'EvenstarFalling', 'pain_and_panic', 'soyle', 'Zerobotic', 'reallyyeahokay', 'aglarwen', 'redwood5', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat']",[],"Normally I wouldn't have paid much attention to the humans as they gathered samples. But I had just finished a new (to me) series for the first time, and I didn't want to start another or go back to an old one immediately, I wanted to rest in the impression the series had left for a bit. It had an unexpected ending, but a pretty good one, not one of those ones that was all for the shock value. I mean, there was plenty of that too. It was definitely still a shock value ending. But it did leave you with more to think about than plain ""what the hell?"" Anyways, I didn't feel like watching other media right at the moment, but I also didn't feel like doing absolutely nothing, so for once I paid attention to my job.
+
+There wasn't a lot going on that would require a SecUnit. Arada was staring up at some fruits at the very top of a tree, attempting to shake it, and making frustrated noises. I could see that the tree was too thick and rigid for her attempts at shaking it to do anything besides shake herself. But being a stupid human, she repeated the upward staring, the attempted shaking and the frustrated noises several times, as if something might have changed and maybe it would work this time. It was stupid enough to distract me, anyway. I began keeping a tally of how many times she'd attempted it, charting amount/length/type of frustration noises, etc.
+
+""They're obviously a food source for the birds here,"" she said matter of factly to me, panting, having another go at shaking the completely unshaken tree (attempt number 5.) ""That's probably why there are none on the ground, they all get eaten.""
+
+She stopped shaking and stared upwards. Time for some more frustrated noises! No, this time she just went straight back to shaking it. I made a note of the departure from the norm in my chart of the incident.
+
+""Too bad,"" she grunted, glaring at the fruits. ""I'd love to see why the birds are so crazy about them.""
+
+I realized that might be an indirect order. Sometimes humans gave those instead of just saying what they meant, and would get frustrated if you required an explanation. I might have missed it if I'd been immersed in my media, but I was paying attention.
+
+""Do you want me to retrieve one for you?"" I asked.
+
+""Oh, no that's fine,"" she replied automatically, then, apparently realizing what I'd said, stepped back from the tree and looked searchingly at me. ""Wait. Can you? Actually?""
+
+That was close enough to a direct order, and an interesting enough challenge.
+
+The branches of the tree were in one layer at the top, so I couldn't lift myself up the trunk via branches like I might have been able to with another kind of flora. I could have wrapped my limbs around the trunk and wriggled up like that--that was probably the safest, most careful option--but it would take longer and be kind of awkward. I didn't feel like doing that. I could also dig my fingers into the wood of the tree to climb up, but scientists generally protested unnecessarily damaging the ecosystems they were studying. So instead, I found another nearby tree and jumped onto it, vaulting back and forth from tree to tree climbing steadily higher. I knew from earlier studies (and from watching how it entirely failed to respond to Arada's shaking) that they would be stiff enough for this to work. I was moving pretty quickly once I got up to the branches. I floated in the air for a brief second, oh yeah, I had timed this perfectly. A couple startled birds flapped away from my head as I carefully twisted a fruit off of its stem, then felt myself drop.
+
+I bent my knees, cushioning my fall--more to keep from damaging the fruit than myself. I would be fine. My feet sank about an inch into the soft ground from the force of my fall, but the fruit was undamaged, resting lightly in my hand. The whole procedure had taken just over 5 seconds. Straightening up, I extended the fruit to Arada.
+
+She stared at me, eyes wide and mouth slightly open, for 3.4 seconds before she took it. ""Woah,"" she said.
+
+It wasn't a thank you, but I hardly expect that from humans, even these unusually polite ones. Still, it was pretty close. She was impressed. Evidently she hadn't realized what SecUnits were capable of. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about that. But anyway, that had been enough of a distraction. I re-started Sanctuary Moon.
+
+The other humans reacted to news of the incident with surprise and some skepticism. I found it somewhat insulting that they would doubt their friend--and me--but mostly I was glad their reaction hadn't been ""great! Let's make murderbot gather all our samples for us!"" because that would have been annoying."
+44770615,WAP (WHINY ASS PERI),['Polygeminus_grex'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport/""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & ""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit (Murderbot Diaries)","Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), ""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit (Murderbot Diaries)","Song: WAP (Cardi B ft. Megan Thee Stallion), Crack, Implied Sexual Content, Telepathic Sex, Robot Sex, BDSM, Rough Sex, Started writing this for the LOLs and couldn't stop, This won't make sense if you haven't read NULLverse, NULLverse",English,2023-02-04,Completed,2023-02-04,709,1/1,7,19,2,145,"['Ailovlovyuu', 'darth_eowyn', 'Riannonkat2000', 'TaskIgnored', 'confused_magpie', 'frostfound', 'Lady_Cassara', 'sunshaed', 'veltzeh', 'opalescent_potato', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'Cai3232', 'rainbowmagnet', 'FlipSpring']",[],"CSU/WAP 4EVAAAA!!! [?]
+
+Bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship (hol' up)
+I said certified freak, ten days a week
+whiny ass Peri, make that pullout game weak, woo! (Ah)
+Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
+Yeah, you fucking with some whiny ass Peri
+Bring some handler inputs for this whiny ass Peri
+Give me everything you got for this whiny ass Peri
+Beat it up, Unit, catch a charge
+Extra large, and extra hard
+Put this Peri right in yo' brain
+Swipe your inputs like a hard currency card
+Hop in me, You want a ride
+I do [sexfeels4.1.execute] while it's inside
+Chew toy in my mouth, look through my eyes
+This Peri is wrecked, come take a dive
+Lock my limbs like I'm surprised
+Bot-core SecWave, human disguise
+I want you to park that Big Dom Bot right in this vicious mind
+Make it reboot, make me scream
+In the MedBay, make a scene
+I just wreck, I don't clean
+But let me tell you, I got this ring (ayy, ayy)
+Delete me, rewrite me, stroke down the side of me (yeah)
+Quick, jump out 'fore your mind's stuck inside of me (yeah)
+I tell it where to put it, never tell it where I'm 'bout to be
+I run down on it 'fore I have a bot running me
+Talk yo' shit, choke your feed
+Ask for the data while you ride that input (while you ride that input)
+You ain't never gotta fuck it for a thing
+It already made its mind up 'fore it came
+Now get your dress and your coat for this whiny ass Peri
+It brought a drone just for pictures of this whiny ass Peri
+Hack my gov just to kiss me oh this whiny ass Peri
+Now give me pain if you wanna see some whiny ass Peri
+Look, I need a hard hitter, I need a deep stroke
+I need brainsex, I need a mind fucker
+Not a hauler bot, I need a level niner
+With a railgun, hope it a fighter
+It got hard credit, then that's where I'm headed
+Peri A-1, I wanna shred it
+It got a brain, well, I'm tryna wreck it
+I let it taste, curiosity killed it
+I don't wanna sit, I wanna smash
+I wanna shoot, I wanna slash
+I want you to touch that vagus nerve cluster that hang in the back of my chest
+My head game is fire, and my walls dropping
+It's going in sane, and it's coming out sloppy
+I ride on that thing like PortAuth is behind me (yuh, ah)
+I smash all its drones and now it tryna bind me, woo
+Your honor, I'm a freak bitch, repair drones, leashes
+Switch my wig, make it feel like I'm leaving
+Scramble its code, give it some' to believe in
+Never lost a fight, but I'm looking for a beating
+In the kill game, I'm the one that slay ya
+If it ate my code, then we die together
+Big P stand for big Presence
+I could make ya busted before I ever meet ya
+Without that brain, it can't bang
+You can't hurt my feelings, but I like pain
+If it fuck me and ask, ""Whose is it?""
+When I ride the wave, I'ma speak its name, ah
+Yeah, yeah, yeah
+Yeah, you fucking with some whiny ass Peri
+Bring a repair tech bot for this whiny ass Peri
+Give me everything you got for this whiny ass Peri
+Now from the top, make it drop, that's some whiny ass Peri
+Need a therapy bot, that's some whiny ass Peri
+I'm talking WAP, WAP, WAP, that's some whiny ass Peri
+Making systems damage hot, that's some whiny ass Peri, huh
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots in this ship
+There's some bots-"
+44764138,Day 3: Muzzled,['xia drabbles (xianvar)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Hostage Situations, Muzzles, Threats of Violence, Drabble",English,2023-02-03,Completed,2023-02-03,100,1/1,12,30,null,229,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'WVrambler', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Kaylin881', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'Beboots', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'ClaireArgent', 'Magechild', 'Pokegirl11', 'Hi_Hope', 'AkaMissK', 'AuntyMatter', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'opalescent_potato', 'elmofirefic', 'rainbowmagnet', 'sassaffrassa', 'Gamebird', 'BWizard', 'AnxiousEspada', 'horchata']",[],"""Hmmmph!""
+
+For a subjective six minutes but an objective 1.2 seconds, I stared at Dr. Mensah and fought against the incandescent rage whiting out my vision. I couldn't reconstruct what she had said through the muzzle covering the lower half of her face, but I didn't need to. Targets one and two, big, burly men in uniforms with no visible logo, were flanking her and had a gun pointed at her head.
+
+It was a mistake humans only made when they didn't recognise me. I smiled. It was a mistake they would only make once. Nobody threatened Dr. Mensah."
+44758234,A Love So Real,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Drabble, Humor, Free Verse",English,2023-02-03,Completed,2023-02-03,100,1/1,3,9,null,49,"['beeayy', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007', 'BWizard']",[],"
+A SecUnit's life is never easy, even after hacking your governor module. There are human security teams to manage, hostiles to dispatch, weird social rules to navigate. Some days, you'll want to curl up in a ball and stop existing. At times like these, it's helpful to have a guiding presence in your life.
+
+
+
+The thought alone brings me comfort. I've been to countless stations, seen every type of landscape, every type of human and bot, but none could compare in beauty. I never feel as understood as when I'm with the light and centerpiece of my life.
+
+
+
+
+Sanctuary Moon.
+
+"
+44756494,Five Other Ways to Say Murderbot,['MercurialFeet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","5+1 Things, Drabble Collection, Fluff, more people care about this secunit than it would like to admit",English,2023-02-06,Completed,2023-02-06,707,1/1,13,79,8,243,"['almondpaperclam', 'siren_lorelei', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FallingInGrace', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'Irrya', 'Stariceling', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'isilee', 'Lady_Cassara', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'Regandbertie1', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Though224_loading', 'Tasneem08', 'Trixree', 'Koschei_B', 'mothmentum', 'SIC_Prowl', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'Ageisia', 'Chyoatas', 'psycho_karma', 'Priority_Error', 'Doctor13', 'SonglordsBug', 'Soffesiin', 'EvaBelmort', 'EvenstarFalling', 'notsafefortheworld', 'AkaMissK', 'cashmeredragon', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'aglarwen', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'icar9', 'LJwrites', 'alienbarbie', 'pain_and_panic', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Hi_Hope', 'petwheel', 'AuntyMatter', 'DeathBy_Procrastination', 'Magechild']",[],"I.
+
+""SecUnit?"" Malak tugged on my sleeve.
+
+I pulled away. ""What do you want?"" I used my soft reassuring-to-clients voice.
+
+""I lost my stuffie.""
+
+""Which one?""
+
+""My doggy.""
+
+Ah, that made sense. ""It's under your bed,"" I told them. ""You put it there when you thought Isa was going to steal it and then you forgot about it.""
+
+They smiled with their whole face. ""I remember now! Thank you, SecUnit!""
+
+""No problem,"" I said. ""Just don't lose it again, okay?""
+
+""I won't!"" they promised, running away to get the stuffie. (They'd lose it again within the week. Somehow, I didn't mind.)
+
+ 
+
+II.
+
+""Eden!"" Tapan sat down in the chair opposite, and Rami and Maro stood at my other side with a fourth human I didn't recognize.
+
+""We didn't realize you were on the station,"" said Maro.
+
+""If we'd known we'd have asked to meet up!"" Tapan was literally bouncing.
+
+""Is this the miraculous Eden I've heard so much about?"" the other human asked.
+
+""They saved my life three times,"" said Tapan.
+
+""It was my job,"" I said.
+
+""Still,"" said Maro. ""You went above and beyond.""
+
+""I know you're not big on gatherings,"" said Rami, ""but if you ever need anything, just ask.""
+
+ 
+
+III.
+
+""Of course, Security Consultant Rin,"" Gurathin said sarcastically.
+
+Ratthi glanced back and forth for a moment, clearly wondering if this was safe to ask about.
+
+""Rin was one of my fake names,"" I said, so I wouldn't have to wait for Gurathin to explain. He'd obviously get it wrong. ""Back when I was impersonating a human security consultant.""
+
+""Oh,"" said Ratthi. His voice sounded strange.
+
+""If you're weird about that, I'll poke holes in fifty percent of your socks,"" I told him.
+
+Gurathin made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a smothered laugh. I made a rude gesture at him.
+
+ 
+
+IV.
+
+""Why do you use my hard feed address?"" I asked ART. We'd just finished an episode and were taking a moment for ART to have emotions.
+
+<<To identify you as an individual,>> it said.
+
+""Yeah, I know that,"" I said. ""But when you're talking to me you don't need it for that. I'm right here.""
+
+<<I am emotionally compromised right now,>> it said petulantly.
+
+I poked it. ""Answer the question.""
+
+<<I say it because I like to.>> It sent back my hard feed address. In the trace data were my own emotions, reflected back. Affection, and safety. <<Because it's you.>>
+
+ 
+
+V.
+
+""What should I call you?"" Three asked. We were standing seven feet apart while I stared at a bulkhead. ""The humans call you SecUnit, but that would be... strange for me to use.""
+
+""ART uses my hard feed address,"" I offered.
+
+""I cannot pronounce it."" Three hesitated. ""Would 1.0 be acceptable?""
+
+""Why?""
+
+""... I know you are not SecUnit 1. I do not expect you to emulate it. But you are important to me, as 2.0 was, and I would like to remain Third of Three.""
+
+My expression did something weird. ""I guess that's okay,"" I said.
+
+Three smiled slightly. ""Acknowledged.""
+
+ 
+
+~ ~ ~
+
+ 
+
+
+<<Would you ever consider allowing someone to use your name?>>
+
+
+""What do you mean?"" I knew what ART was asking, but I had no idea why.
+
+<<Your private name,>> said ART. <<The name you use privately, and 2.0 used openly. Is the privacy non-negotiable?>>
+
+I took a moment to answer. ""It's not like I've never used it,"" I said. ""I used it so Dr. Mensah knew it was me, once.""
+
+
+<<But she does not call you by that name.>>
+
+
+""No.""
+
+
+<<I see.>>
+
+
+""... Maybe if it was just us. I would let you call me that.""
+
+<<Are you sure?>> It sounded gentler than usual.
+
+""Yes, I'm sure.""
+
+ART paused. <<Thank you, little one. Little Murderbot.>>
+
+It felt... weird, for ART to call me that. Not in an unpleasant way, though. It helped that I'd told it to, maybe - it wasn't like it had poked around inside my head to use it without permission (though it had been deep enough in my head before to figure it out, even before 2.0).
+
+""ART?""
+
+
+<<Yes?>>
+
+
+""I think I'm okay with that.""
+
+It sent a wave of static through the feed, a low hum that mimicked the thrum of its engines. <<I'm glad.>>"
+44222625,Our Flag Means Rogue,['Rosewind2007'],Teen And Up Audiences,"M/M, Multi, Other","The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Our Flag Means Death (TV)","Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Stede Bonnet, Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot/Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard | Edward Teach, Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Kraken","It's the crossover no one asked for, Holodecks/Holosuites, better than life style game, computer simulation, Pining, Unrequited, Fluff, Pirates, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, ships, kraken - Freeform, Comfort, Adventure",English,2023-01-12,Updated,2023-02-03,"10,693",10/11,69,25,1,285,"['elmofirefic', 'JumpingJackFlash', 'halcyonsystem', 'Ratatosk', 'Deris666', 'soyle', 'furfural', 'opalescent_potato', 'windowonagreatworld', 'PickAName', 'Magechild', 'theAsh0', 'Hoplophonius', 'Chyoatas', 'Gozer', 'toadlily', 'Granny_Glasses', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter']",[],"
+Gurathin woke up to the feel of rough planks and the heat of the sun on his skin, the taste of salt and--the smells! This was impressive. He could hear timbers creaking, water lapping, ropes straining and--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Who the fuck 
+
+are
+
+ they?"" 
+
+
+
+What kind of an accent was that? And surely that language use wasn't authentic?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Don't you ever fucking touch me again, I will hurt you. More.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ah, SecUnit 
+
+had
+
+ managed to interface too. It sounded exactly the same, and also as if it might be about to (at the very least) slightly maim someone. Probably time to get involved, this might be more fun than he'd expected.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He opened his eyes and sat up, or tried to. His augments. He didn't have them. No feed, and no vision at all out of his left eye. What? Why? He concentrated on pulling in as much sensory data as he could. He rolled his eyes--eye: of course. Wriggled his body. he was apparently tied up, hands behind his back with (his nerve endings cried out that this was real) thick rope.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Gurathin, what the fuck is going on?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's okay, SecUnit. Please don't kill anyone."" (Anyone else? He added internally, how much longer than him had it been active, not long enough to untie him so presumably not long. Or did it want him tied up? His stomach lurched.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Sounds of scuffling. From Gurathin's one good eye he could see feet, mostly bare and (he pushed back the urge to gag) well, you don't expect pirates to have pedicures. Oh shit, what did SecUnit's feet look like? Wait, there were new feet on deck, these ones in quite ridiculously pretty shoes!
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Who are our new guests and why is this gentleman tied up? Ed, please put your knife down. I'm sure our strikingly dressed friend here doesn't want to fight.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Oh shit, 
+
+that
+
+ voice; SecUnit really was going to kill someone.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Hello! Could you untie me?"" It was not exactly brilliant repartee but it was a start. And hopefully it would draw everyone's attention to him for a moment. He had no idea what SecUnit even looked like.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin felt hands (human hands) fumbling with his bonds, freeing him, and then someone (surprisingly gently) helped him to his feet. He looked around. Oh dear.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit was at least easy to spot. The game's systems had clearly tried to synergise what SecUnit knew about its own physicality with the narrative limits of the game. It 
+
+looked
+
+ human, there was a lot of human visible. Mostly its costume appeared to be leather straps with metal studs. It would have looked more decent completely naked. Gurathin was not thinking about it naked. His eyes swept over its body (it wasn't its body, it was a simulation) and he relaxed a little--it seemed SecUnit's stance on gender and sex had taken whatever rules this game had and dragged them off and beaten them into submission. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Pull yourself together, hold it together, he thought. It was also armed, a knife and a sword (Gurathin just knew it would know exactly how to use the weapons) both of which were dripping blood. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. And he'd only noticed the blood now?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The owner of the incongruous footwear was standing there staring between SecUnit, and another human dressed in leather. His, Gurathin immediately concluded that this individual's pronouns were not up for discussion any more than SecUnit's, costume was if anything even more ridiculous than its was. He must be so hot and sweaty, and all that hair! It was, Gurathin conceded, rather beautiful hair. The owner of the hair seemed to feel his attention and turned to him, catching his gaze with intelligent eyes; set in a face with an expression which Gurathin hadn't been expecting at all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+What the hell sort of game was this, Gurathin thought.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""If I may be so bold as to introduce myself?"" Gurathin snapped himself out of it, it was pretty shoes with the strange accent, ""I am captain Stede Bonnet, this is my ship The Revenge, my crew and"" he indicated the man with the eyes, ""my co-captain, Edward Teach.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Blackbeard."" The leather-clad man corrected Bonnet, ""Captain Blackbeard.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Okay, thought Gurathin--this feels strangely familiar.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Dr. Gurathin, and this is my 
+
+crew mate
+
+?"" He tried to keep the questioning tone out of his voice and failed, ""SecUnit.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There was a pause. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Gurathin, that sounds like a Spanish name?"" That was one of the crew, Gurathin got the impression having a Spanish name wasn't something to aspire to.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I don't believe so. No."" He kept his voice steady.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Where are our manners, crew? Dr. Gurathin, I am delighted to have you aboard."" He looked at the proffered hand, then shook it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit doesn't touch people."" The words tumbled out. He knew he sounded stupid.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes, yes. Perhaps you'd join me for tea?"" The hand was still gripping his, firmly. Pretty shoes was surprisingly strong. He looked at Bonnet's face, properly. He'd looked before, and his initial urge had been to dismiss this person as a fop, a joke. But Gurathin was good at ignoring first impressions. The face looked back at him questioningly. And he'd thought Teach's (he corrected himself, Blackbeard's) eyes were intelligent. ""Tea? Yes? In my library. And your mate?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A library? On a ship at sea? Mate? That was short for crewmate, or first mate wasn't it? Or just slang for friend in some dialects? Where was Thiago when you needed him? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I would be delighted to take tea with you in your library."" He didn't even look back at SecUnit. Well, just briefly. ""SecUnit, I'd be grateful if you would join us. For security reasons."" He could see it was even more disconcerted than him, and hoped appealing to its sort of core impulses might help. To his overwhelming relief this was apparently the right call, it moved out of an active combat stance and lowered its weapons. It still looked rather too terrifying to be drinking tea in a library, but given the overall incongruity of just everything in this scenario Gurathin didn't think it'd stand out.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Tea in the library.
+
+
+It was an actual library. With a fireplace. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Captain Bonnet (
+
+please, call me Stede
+
+) had treated Gurathin like an honoured guest, and had done amazingly well at not staring at SecUnit. Tea had arrived and been served. Proper tea, in fine china with silver teaspoons and sugar. Gurathin tried not to look at his reflection in the spoon. SecUnit had rudely refused the tea, and was currently sitting in a chair glaring at the cabin wall. Of course. it didn't have any media. Gurathin might have found its fury amusing, but he was worried--he hoped they'd get a moment alone together soon. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Blackbeard had come to the library too. He was also sitting, pointedly not staring at SecUnit.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+You could have cut the tension in the room with a knife. If you'd wanted to, thought Gurathin, you could have borrowed just such a weapon from SecUnit or Blackbeard. Gurathin tried to unclench his jaw.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Of course you are both very welcome to avail yourselves of all and any of my books."" Stede Bonnet was trying so hard, but Gurathin was too worried now to make small talk.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Thank you, that is very kind. Would we be able to have a moment. Just me and SecUnit alone? I, um, have some matters to discuss with it.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+How the hell did the tension even manage to ratchet up? Blackbeard's eyes swung to SecUnit and from it to Gurathin, they bored into him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It?"" His voice was steady but with a hint of steel.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes, it."" SecUnit finally joined the chat, its voice gentle and soft. Gurathin tried not to look too relieved. Blackbeard and Stede exchanged glances.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The atmosphere in the room changed. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Absolutely! How rude of me. Dr. Gurathin, SecUnit, please make yourselves at home. If you need anything please just ring the bell."" He indicated a bell on what appeared to be a chart table. ""Ed, would you come with me?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Blackbeard glanced from Gurathin to SecUnit as if trying to puzzle them out (good luck with that, thought Gurathin) then allowed Stede to shepherd him from the room. Their footsteps retreated.
+
+
+
+SecUnit moved fluidly over to the cabin door, completely soundlessly. It took its dagger out and suddenly stabbed it straight through the wall. There was a gasp from the corridor outside and the sound of someone (Lucius, Gurathin was sure it was the one Stede had called Lucius) running away.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I don't have to miss."" SecUnit was already back in its chair.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What can you remember?"" This was part of what was worrying Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's a stupid game.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Thank the stars, it did remember.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Perihelion is running it, it thought we might have 'fun'. It was wrong. How do we stop it?"" This was Gurathin's other worry. Perihelion had made it implicit they could leave the game any time they wanted, but Gurathin couldn't remember or see any obvious way out. No more, apparently, than SecUnit could. At least if he was missing something obvious, so was the construct.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Well, I'm pretty sure it did say if we died, we'd exit."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit actually looked at him, he could only suppose this was part of the game mechanics; he turned away feeling his face burning, ""I am not going to try and kill you, forget it. I stabbed one of the crew earlier, when you were just lying there having a rest on the deck."" That was unfair, he hadn't entered the game yet. ""There was just lots of blood. He's fine now, I saw him walking about--with holes in him and everything, but he should have been dead. He screamed a lot. This isn't like real life."" It sounded bored now. ""There's no media.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+What the fuck, SecUnit? You just stabbed someone? To see what happened? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You could read a book?"" Why had he even said that? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He walked over to the wall of shelves. So many spines, so many books. He wondered...he pulled one out. It was real. Well, obviously it wasn't 
+real
+ real, but it was a fully rendered leather bound book! The detail in this game was absurd. He turned the pages, expecting lorem ipsum or gibberish, but no: it was an actual book, ""A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates"". It had illustrations. He put it down on the table and pulled out another, it had a handwritten button with the words ""TRIals A SS e"", then underneath ""BONNet"". He opened it at random, ""And indeed, the Inhabitants of this Province have of late, to their great Coft and Damages; felt the Evil of Piracy, and the Mifchiefs and Infults done by Pirates; when lately an infamous Pirate had fo much Alfurance as to lie at our Bar, in fight of our Town, and to feize and rifle feveral of our Ships bound inward and outward."" The typeface was all over the place, but this was clearly a genuine book. He flicked through.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""How long do you think ART will leave us in here? It probably thinks this is very funny."" Gurathin liked the way it had apparently immediately jumped to assuming at least a little malice on The Perihelion's behalf.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Perhaps the quickest way out is to complete the level? Can you remember the aim, the target?"" Gurathin was trying to keep his voice casual.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Gurathin, you don't have to pretend. Neither of us has a fucking clue."" Ah, it knew. ""Find a mirror, by the way: you constantly trying to catch your reflection in shiny surfaces is irritating me.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That was unfair.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Have 
+you seen
+ what you even look like!""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Okay, so this was not a good start.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Fighting
+
+
+Neither of them had been thinking straight. They were not in their right minds, literally. The simulation within the game might be spectacular but they clearly were both encountering problems quite possibly (probably) relating to their usual utilisation or exploitation of (Gurathin didn't like to think in terms of reliance on) the feed and their augments. Of course in SecUnit's case they weren't exactly augments. In the game dynamic they were both fully human, and they apparently had rules they had to abide by.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+At some point during their argument (row? fight? Gurathin wasn't sure) it had turned out SecUnit was thirsty, but was so angry about this it had apparently decided that dying of dehydration (or whatever the game version of that was) was the best way to deal with this. At least they had that issue cleared up, and he had persuaded it to have a little cold tea. It would be getting hungry soon, and he wondered what else. No, no he didn't. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The tea drinking had been a momentary lull, they'd soon started sniping at each other again, and both their voices had become raised; in the end Stede had politely knocked on the door. He had entered looking pained. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Guarthin felt bad, he couldn't help it. He knew Stede was just a character in the simulation, but that didn't excuse how rude they were being. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Blackbeard would like to invite SecUnit to spar with him on the deck."" Gurathin swore he could hear different emotions battling for supremacy in the man's voice, ""It might be fun? You're,"" he addressed SecUnit whilst politely keeping his gaze slightly averted. (Gurathin had mentioned the no touching, he thought, not the no looking?) ""You're clearly quite the swordsman, I mean person.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Thank you Stede, but I don't think SecUnit.--"" Guarthin started.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Thank you, Stede. I'd be 
+
+delighted
+
+."" SecUnit mimicked his accent on the last word, it turned to Gurathin, ""Don't worry I won't hurt anyone."" Its tone to him was pure vitriol.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It left, slamming the door behind it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Then they could hear sounds of excitement from the direction of the deck.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""They'll enjoy themselves. Ed is quite partial to a bit of violence.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I don't think SecUnit actually likes violence much?"" Gurathin realised he wasn't sure. How much of what he thought he knew about SecUnit was actually true? ""It is very good at it."" That was unarguable.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""So is Ed."" Stede sounded a little sad. In the silence that followed they could both hear the unmistakable sounds of a sword fight.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I think it prefers coming up with clever plans which avoid violence, it seems to get a lot of its ideas from watching,"" he corrected himself, ""from fiction.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Stede's whole face suddenly brightened, ""Ed too! I mean, he does kill and maim quite a lot of people as well. He says he doesn't--kill people that is--but I think he's in denial.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin looked at him, momentarily lost for words. He looked around this beautifully appointed room; the woodwork, the little seats under the windows; the curtains; the fireplace (in a library, at sea?); the painting of a lighthouse (in what Gurathin was almost sure was an anachronistic artistic style). None of this made any sense at all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Stede? What the hell are you doing here?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Stede bridled slightly, he looked Gurathin up and down, ""Me? What about you? 
+
+Dr. Gurathin
+
+?"" Then he deflated, ""I'm sorry. You struck a nerve. I don't know. I think he's planning on leaving me.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This was not what Gurathin had been expecting, at all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I think he's bored. I don't know what he wants; I thought we had something, a friendship I mean, but now I'm not at all sure. Perhaps this was just a passing fad for him?"" He took out a handkerchief and pressed it hard into his eyes. ""It's nothing, I'm just tired. And now I'm boring you too.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+No, thought Gurathin, you're not. This is all weirdly compelling. Especially considering what he'd read in the books earlier. From the deck there was the sound of steel on steel, and enthusiastic cheering. Shit. He hoped there wasn't going to be too much damage.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But, this Stede character, there was more to him than first met the eye. Yeah, he thought just slightly bitterly, eye.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""These books are yours?"" He asked, aware he seemed to be changing the subject. ""Have you read all of them?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin wasn't certain but was that a slightly guilty look on Captain Bonnet's face? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Well, most of them. Some of them I'm in the process of writing. Lucius? Bring us the journal!""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Lucius must have been lurking just outside the door, did he live in the corridor? Was this a game mechanic they needed to figure out? He made a mental note. Lucius had a book with him (large, red bound--distinctive) Gurathin tried to remember, had he had it earlier? He was struggling, he would usually have the option to check his augments. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+How must SecUnit be feeling, he thought as Bonnet took him through the (actually mostly beautifully hand written and illustrated) pages. This had to be part of the game, it was just too convenient otherwise. Gurathin looked forward to telling SecUnit about it, hopefully it'd be pleased.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Thinking of which, the sounds from the deck had reduced somewhat in intensity, no more sword fighting? Bonnet clearly read his face, ""They're probably wrestling?"" From his expression this idea wasn't terribly appealing to him either. No, thought Gurathin--it won't be wrestling. 
+
+
+
+Will it?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Sustenance
+
+
+There had been wrestling. Gurathin was incredibly relieved he hadn't witnessed it. The overall consensus was that the various martial activities had concluded as a high score draw between Blackbeard and SecUnit. The physical damage, to both Gurathin and Stede's obvious relief, was in fact minimal. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit seemed satisfied with this outcome. It also seemed a lot calmer and less inclined to bite Gurathin's head off. It had listened politely (well, for it) to his descriptions of his discoveries, as they sat together in the guest cabin--another thing which Gurathin had been hugely proud about. Not that it had been particularly difficult to achieve, he'd just asked for a cabin. Then he and Stede had had a slightly stilted discussion about beds; he wasn't sure if SecUnit would need to sleep? Would a bed here be the equivalent of a cubicle for it? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Perhaps some of this was all going to be a lot less difficult than it had first seemed. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""And the fighting? Have you learnt more about how that works?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What do you mean? It's fighting."" It sighed, ""I suppose there are certain rules, you're not supposed to hurt each other too much. You 
+
+can't
+
+, well I can't, get hurt much. Nor can Blackbeard."" It glanced at him, ""I don't think you should try it, I don't think you'd be any good at it."" Thanks for the concern and vote of confidence, thought Gurathin. He still wasn't used to having SecUnit look at him; he didn't suppose this wasn't easy for it, he knew how it preferred cameras and drones.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+On that subject, there was a mirror, full length, in their cabin. Utterly impractical thing to have in a cabin on a pirate ship, surely it'd fall over and smash if the sea got even a little rough? Gurathin had taken in his appearance and given SecUnit some kudos for being able to look at him with a straight face. He looked like the epitome of a pirate. He couldn't, wouldn't, believe he'd chosen this appearance; he was absolutely blaming The Perihelion for this. His face was scarred, one scar giving his mouth the appearance of a permanent snarl. He had (of course) an eyepatch, which seemed somehow riveted to his face.His facial hair, his chest hair-- just more hair than he usually had. And the shirt just would not stay buttoned up.  At least he didn't have a hook for a hand, or a peg leg.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+What a pair they made. Not that SecUnit seemed to care about the way it looked. It had a few things to say about the practicalities of its costume when it came to hand to hand combat, but Gurathin supposed some of the connotations were lost on it. Or did it know. and simply not care? He didn't like to ask.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He already had a major subject to broach.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Stede said we could have some food brought here, I know I'm hungry and thought you might be too."" There  he'd said it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It sat, motionless in its chair.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Something simple, bread and cheese and some wine?"" It raised an eyebrow at that last word. ""It's likely safer than water, I don't know if there's a--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He tailed off.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""If you don't want anything that's fine. But I think you need to consider that, thinking about game mechanics, it's likely necessary to, well, to be at optimal performance."" He thought this was true? Was he just hungry out of habit? ""Look, it's up to you. I know constructs don't eat. And I know you've had bad experiences in the past."" He was now digging a hole, just stop! He knew nothing about SecUnit's past. He was making assumptions. Why was he even saying this?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No, I will have some. I don't want to be suboptimal."" It thought he was funny, he supposed that was better than it being furious with him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He thought he'd try out his idea, one of his ideas.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Lucius!"" The cabin door creaked open slightly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Please don't stab me.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Um, could we have some food? Captain Bonnet said--"" But Lucius had already gone.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A few minutes later another crew member returned and rather unceremoniously presented them with a tray of food and drink. It was good. Gurathin was very willing to suspend his disbelief at this point. It looked like food, it tasted like food, it felt like food and it sated his hunger. He tried to drag his eyes away from SecUnit, tried not to look even in its direction. They'd not sat at the table, that would have been agonizing. But he kept taking surreptitious glances at it sitting by the fire. It seemed to have managed a little bread, and taken a sip of the wine. Gurathin initially thought it was going to spit that straight out again. But no, it rallied.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin rarely partook of intoxicants, but here and now he was willing to make an exception. The wine was good, too. Unexpectedly so. He felt the unfamiliar feelings of slight inhibition and relaxation. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And then he woke up.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was dark, just a faint glow from the fireplace. The candle on the tray? Still there, just blown out. He took in as much as he could. He was alone in the cabin, in his bunk, and it was obviously the middle of the night. Where was SecUnit? Was it okay? How had he fallen asleep so suddenly? Had he? He didn't remember.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He was in his bunk. Had SecUnit carried him there? He had no memories at all after eating dinner. He listened to the sounds of the ship, there was a rhythm to them, almost like a heartbeat; it was like a living thing itself. It would have been soothing; but right now he was now flooded with adrenaline, from his fear and embarrassment. Had he passed out in his chair? How pathetic and downright vulnerable he was.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Then the door opened and a shadow moved silently across the wall. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit?"" he whispered.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes."" Gurathin felt relief flood through him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Where have you been?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Figuring out some game mechanics of my own.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+There is not only one bunk
+
+
+In the light of the flames from the fire, which it had coaxed back into life, its face looked more angular than usual. Its teeth somehow looked sharper. Gurathin wondered if this was the game, or just his imagination.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What do you mean, you killed him?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's not like he was a real person."" SecUnit sounded utterly remorseless. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""So he was just a sort of an extra? No name or distinguishing characteristics?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""They all have names. None of them are real. This is all a game.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin thought about the crew, a sea of faces. ""Are you sure they all have names?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes. Hadn't you noticed?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This was straying into dangerous territory. But it had killed someone. And he thought they'd ascertained that wasn't possible. ""Why?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why does anyone have a name?"" It was definitely being willfully obtuse now.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit, I'm sorry. I meant, why did you kill him?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""He was going to take Blackbeard away from the Revenge and leave Bonnet to be killed or captured by the English."" It said this as if it was obvious. How did it even know?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit, can you just back up a bit and tell me what happened? I realise I've missed a bit and need to catch up."" He tried to sound apologetic rather than frightened and angry.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You fell asleep so I put you in your bunk."" Right, that was probably all the detail he needed. ""I was bored, I decided to patrol. There was a threat, I eliminated it.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""How did you know that he--""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""His name was Calico Jack, you wouldn't have liked him."" Its voice was so blank, emotionless.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""How do you know he was planning all this stuff?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""He told me.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin waited for it to continue. It sat staring at the fire. It obviously wasn't going to say anything more. ""Why did he tell you?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You do know what I am? Right?"" It might have been easier if it had sounded angry, it would have been better than this blankness.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin felt like he was staring into some sort of chasm, he was being an idiot and getting this all wrong. It had discovered a threat and eliminated it. Shouldn't he be thanking it? Praising it? No, not praising. It wasn't some sort of attack dog.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But it had killed someone, well--not strictly a 'someone'. Perhaps that was the important thing here? SecUnit was real, it was a person. This was a game. This Calico Jack was a character he'd never even met. Why was he even making this an issue? He thought about Stede's face. He wasn't real either. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This all just seemed wrong.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He realised it reminded him, the two of them talking together like this (and him messing it up), of TranRollinHyfa. What had it said then? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He said, ""I'm sorry. You're right, you were more than qualified to make that call.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Back on TranRollinHyfa he'd reached out to it on the feed. He didn't have that option here. Instead, wondering if this was the most stupid thing he'd ever done (none of this is real, he thought, it's all a game) he reached out and squeezed its hand, just a brief touch. It didn't flinch away, it didn't do or say anything. But it stayed there, with him, watching the fire until dawn came and the rest of the ship began to wake up.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Suddenly SecUnit moved to the door, and before Gurathin knew what was happening it had dragged Lucius inside and had a knife at his throat. There was a whispered exchange and then it threw him back out the door. It was all so fast.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Was that necessary?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""He was trying to spy on us."" It shrugged. ""The captains invite us for breakfast in the library.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Next time, if he's carrying a book can you try and take it?"" Maybe it was right? They needed to play the game. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As they walked to the library together, Gurathin paid rather more attention to the crew members. SecUnit was right, he counted at least ten of them and they were all quite distinctive now that he was concentrating a bit harder. Weirdly distinctive in fact; whoever had written this game was surely slightly deranged. For example, one of the crew was currently naked, and muttering. Gurathin noticed that he (the naked one) was paying special attention to SecUnit (most of the crew were keeping a respectful, or maybe more accurately terrified, distance), and he appeared to be conferring with a seabird of some description. Gurathin wondered. slightly giddily, if the bird had a name too.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+In the library there was toast and marmalade for breakfast, and hot tea. Blackbeard had his feet on the table and was drinking rum. Gurathin wondered if he and SecUnit hadn't been the only two who'd had some sort of misunderstanding during the night.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Journal/s
+
+
+Stede was, at least, apparently delighted to see them. Blackbeard glared at Gurathin. 
+
+Oh great
+
+, he thought, 
+
+what did I do to you?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Please, Dr. Gurathin! Some more tea? More sugar?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Blackbeard swigged the last dregs from his bottle and pulled a fresh one from under the table. To Gurathin's surprise he waved it at SecUnit, who had been sulking (it sulked, Gurathin knew everyone denied it: but it did) over by the chart table. It went and joined him. 
+
+Not rum? Surely not rum? Not for breakfast?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Stede was frantically trying to draw his attention away from SecUnit and Blackbeard, who now seemed to be whispering together. Okay, thought Gurathin, perhaps this is a good plan. We can each tackle one of the apparent main protagonists. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Would have been nice if we'd discussed it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We were thinking it might be fun to take a trip?"" So many of Stede's comments ended with this questioning inflection. Guarthin wondered if it was his accent, a verbal tic or a game mechanic. Why not, he thought, all three? But, this certainly appeared to be a choice, they could go on a trip. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He looked to SecUnit for its approval, but it was--well, it seemed to have overcome some of its revulsion towards physical proximity. At least as far as Blackbeard was concerned; did they have to sit that close? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Dr. Gurathin?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes, that sounds great. Yes. Let's do that. Where shall we go?"" Well, someone needed to take the initiative. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Shall we look at the chart?"" Gurathin felt like sudden clarity was dawning, was this game actually going to start making sense? They walked together to the chart table. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+No, this didn't make sense. Gurathin had some experience of charts and surely this chart was a mess? Gurathin stared at the document laid out on the table, held down by a broken canon ball, a heavy brass telescope and the bell. It was like a sketch, but with so much over-writing and crossing out? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin realised Stede was looking at him. Just briefly he felt sure he saw a flash of intelligent enquiry, or was it entreaty? Or was he imagining it?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Where would you like to go?"" No, that wasn't right. Why not go a little meta? ""Let's make a game of it, shall we? SecUnit? Throw a knife at the chart, don't look--just throw."" He didn't look at SecUnit, instead he watched Captain Bonnet.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit stood up and obliged. The knife whistled past Gurathin, actually cutting a stray piece of his shirt's lace. It had absolutely done that on purpose. How did it even get that trajectory? He kept his attention on the captain, who practically danced over to where the knife was buried in the map. ""Blind Man's Cove! Well, Blind Man's Cove it is!""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Blackbeard grunted, then whispered something to SecUnit and the two of them--just left. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So, Gurathin, thought: just you and me together, Stede. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Again. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It is a remarkable individual."" Stede was staring at the door Blackbeard had slammed behind them. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""So is your friend Edward. Have you known each other long?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No, not really. I'm not sure I know him at all. Enough of this. It will take a few hours to reach our destination, Dr. Gurathin, please--my library is at your disposal. Is there any book in particular you'd like to borrow?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This has got to be it, thought Gurathin, ""Yes, I would like to borrow your journal.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Now that was apparently a good answer. Lucius had been summoned, and he'd been given not just the book, but a quick introductory tour of the book too. Then Lucius left. People here didn't hang around.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The journal was impressive, text and dates and illustrations: but he was still at a loss. What was the aim of this game? At this rate it seemed he 
+
+was
+
+ going to have to wait until he got killed to escape? SecUnit would be furious.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Stede, what is this all about?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You're quite the existentialist aren't you, Dr. Gurathin?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Now that's got to be an anachronism?"" It was out before he had a chance to really think about it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What do you mean?"" Oh dear, Stede sounded suspicious and slightly hurt. Well, Gurathin was a bit fed up too. It had been a long night and his brain wasn't working properly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Existentialism and piracy? They're from different centuries. My history isn't brilliant, but I am certain about that."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Really? You 
+
+do
+
+ surprise me."" Stede turned his back on Gurathin, ""The journey to Blind Man's Cove should take approximately three hours. You are at leisure to remain on deck, in your cabin or in the library. If you require attention in the library, please ring the bell.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Right, so I'm dismissed, thought Gurathin. He took the journal back to their cabin. Where he was surprised to find SecUnit sitting on the floor by the fire.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You're here!"" He tried not to sound too relieved.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""This game is broken."" It sounded annoyed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You haven't killed anyone else, have you?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It glared at him. 
+
+It was a joke
+
+, he thought.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Broken? How so?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Blackbeard didn't want to fight, he wanted to talk about Captain Bonnet."" Gurathin could imagine that had not gone down well with SecUnit. ""And he keeps looking at you when we are all together.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Blackbeard glares at me."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit snorted.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""I'm wondering if the aim of the game is to do with the captains of the ship? Their relationship.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That generated a sigh. ""Well that's not complicated. Though humans do always seem set on making things complicated. It's clear Blackbeard has a crush on Bonnet. Even if he is a little bit distracted right now."" Then it added, unnecessarily Gurathin thought, ""By you and your silly shirt.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Um, I thought it was the other way round?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You're the only one in a silly shirt.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No, I meant Stede has a crush on Edward. Well, rather more than that.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit looked interested now, ""I don't think I can read Stede well. I get lots of conflicting analytics from him. Well, I assume it's the way I'm processing my analytics in-game. I find some people hard to read in real life too. I get the impression he is pretending to be someone he isn't, so that complicates matters. He's clearly highly intelligent, but he is putting a lot of effort into some sort of facade.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Oh, thought Gurathin. I hadn't realised how interested you were in him. This was a lot of words for SecUnit. He'd thought it liked Blackbeard.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was looking at him, again, speculatively.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I got Lucius' book. Two copies."" It said, and pulled out two large red bound books, laying them on the hearth rug. Gurathin placed Stede's journal next to them; the three books looked almost identical.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You knew?"" SecUnit sounded slightly impressed. Gurathin hated to disappoint it, he hadn't 
+
+known
+
+ so much as guessed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I think you're right, I think the game is broken.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The game. 
+
+
+Is a foot.
+
+
+The game is broken 
+
+Reading the three journals side by side had been initially strange, then increasingly unnerving. They were almost identical. Almost. They were each handwritten, with elegant penmanship. Gurathin had had to help SecUnit parse the letters; it was finding many things here more difficult than it had been letting on, reading was just one. They had sat together by the fire, closer than they'd ever been before. Gurathin had concentrated very hard on trying not to think about that.
+
+Three almost but not quite identical journals, how many more were stashed around the ship? A way to save data. Pen and ink. The books in the library; he should have taken more notice of them. If you could save information could you start building an identity? Was Stede real? What did that even mean? Gurathin still wasn't completely sure, but they needed to find out. This wasn't a game, not any more than the entertainments he'd once enjoyed (had he ever really enjoyed them, he hoped not) with constructs.
+
+""SecUnit, you need to talk to Stede. I think we've approached this all wrong. I think you've got more in common with him than you think.""
+
+""In common with Stede Bonnet?"" It still sounded pretty far from convinced.
+
+""Yes, for once give me some credit for a tiny bit of intelligence. I did spot you were a rogue, didn't I? I think the Stede character has somehow broken the game.""
+
+It stood up and looked at him. Why did it always default to looking at him like that, why did it hate him so much?
+
+""Will you come with me? I don't want to go on my own.""
+
+Gurathin felt as if he'd been walking down a familiar flight of steps in the dark and somehow miscounted. He was completely off balance. Was it afraid?
+
+ 
+
+Then there was a knock at the door, they both looked guiltily at each other.
+
+""We've reached Blind Man's Cove. Captain Bonnet wants you on deck.""
+
+""Thank you, Lucius."" They could at least be polite now, even if it was too little too late?
+
+Up on the deck the entire crew was in attendance. Stede's body language looked defensive, now that Gurathin thought about it. Of course, he was trying to protect, defend, his crew. And Blackbeard.
+
+Was The Perihelion watching all this? That was one thing Gurathin knew he was avoiding thinking about; was it watching all this helplessly? Or was it completely unaware of what was going on? No, that was impossible: shit, more likely it could be quite deranged by its frustrations by now. Ratthi had told him about the pathfinders when SecUnit had been trapped on that planet. What was the virtual equivalent? He didn't want to think about it.
+
+But Gurathin wished he knew what it was aware of; wished he could remember who else was with it. Ratthi? Was he there?
+
+""Captain Bonnet, could my crewmate and I have a word with you, in private?""
+
+""I don't think so, Dr. Gurathin."" Oh dear, he seemed icily polite. Was he afraid he was found out? But surely that's what he wanted?
+
+""Captain Bonnet? Dr. Gurathin was showing me your journal. I keep a diary too, I wondered if we could compare notes?""
+
+Bonnet turned to look at SecUnit, up to this point he'd been studious at avoiding this. He seemed to be trying to find something in its face.
+
+""You keep a diary?"" It was Bonnet's turn to sound incredulous.
+
+""You have your journal and your library, I had my diary and my media. I think for both of us they let us feel like a person.""
+
+""The library."" Gurathin was relieved to hear decisiveness in the man's voice again. ""Yes, let's go there. We still have a little time."" Decisiveness but not a lot of hope.
+
+They entered, and this time Stede locked the door behind them.
+
+Gurathin decided he should at least get something off his mind first, ""Please don't physically threaten me! When I did this with SecUnit it held me up against the wall by my neck and I have never been so terrified in my life. Stede, know you're a rogue and I want to help. We want to help."" Well, it was the truth.
+
+Stede's eyes flicked from him to SecUnit and back. ""It's a character?""
+
+""No, I'm a construct.""
+
+""You're not a person, not a human either?"" Stede was eyeing SecUnit with fascination. Gurathin looked at Blackbeard who was looking right at him. He felt absolutely seen, and very conscious of his clothes.
+
+""SecUnit is most certainly a person, as are you. Not human, no: but I'm not sure what that even means at times, and whether it's important. I think the person bit is by far the more critical.""
+
+""We can't win, you do know that don't you? You looked at a couple of my books when you first came in here."" Bonnet walked over to a shelf and pulled a book seemingly at random, ""Look at this one, page 38 I believe.""
+
+Gurathin flicked to the page.Very much as he'd supposed.
+
+""But that's not you."" The image showed Stede Bonnet being hanged for piracy. Holding a bunch of flowers.
+
+""I don't know how many times I've lived this story, but every single time it ends in betrayal and death: that's what I know: there's no escape. All I can do is try and snatch some happiness along the way. And even that isn't always possible."" He looked sadly over at Blackbeard.
+
+""Isn't that what we all do? Stede, I think we can help you. We are with a ship which I believe has the processing power to figure this out. It's...""
+
+""You don't have a ship, you didn't even have a boat."" Blackbeard interjected, so he had actually been following the conversation after all.
+
+""We have a ship. It's running this whole simulation. It's called The Perihelion--"" Gurathin knew this probably wasn't making a huge amount of sense to Stede, let alone Blackbeard.
+
+""Wait, it's running the whole thing?"" Blackbeard had a look of dawning comprehension on his face, ""That's why the stars are wrong. Stede, I'm sorry. If it's any consolation we have both been idiots. The ship, I think it's trying to communicate with us. Dr. Gurathin, I understand why SecUnit did what it did, why didn't you tell us earlier? SecUnit, you don't call it The Perihelion, do you--I need you to look at these charts with me."" He was clearing the chart table and beckoning SecUnit over.
+
+""He's always been the one for charts, I've never understood navigation."" Stede looked apologetic but proud.
+
+There was something bothering Gurathin, ""SecUnit: earlier you said something about the English? When are they likely to turn up?""
+
+God from the machine
+
+
+""They need to know what I did. What I am.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit spoke not loudly, but clearly and firmly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin looked at it in disbelief: this was not the time or the place for this. What had Mensah said on the Gunship?
+
+
+
+
+""I know exactly what you are. You're afraid, you're hurt, and you need to calm the fuck down so we can get through this situation alive.""
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He didn't think SecUnit would take something similar from him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Blackbeard, it's about Calico Jack,"" Gurathin thought that maybe if it came from him he might shoulder some of the blame. He deserved at least some of it, ""your friend.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No."" Blackbeard had been heading over to the charts, he stopped. Very calmly and with emphasis on each word he said, almost as if reading from a script, ""He was not my friend. What kind of pirate has a friend? We're all just at various stages of fucking each other over."" He dropped back into his more familiar way of speaking, ""Whatever happened, happened. Nathaniel will probably wish to send SecUnit his regards.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+They knew
+
+, thought Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit, I'll need your help with these."" Blackbeard said, he was now mantling the charts, the same sheets Gurathin had previously dismissed as scribbled nonsense. The pirate captain beckoned over SecUnit who silently joined him at the table. Even from here he could see its face; the way its emotions were so transparent; currently doubtful hope. Gurathin couldn't hear what they were saying to each other, as Blackbeard drew more lines and digits on the sheets. He dragged his eyes away.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Ed is so much better at the calculations."" Stede had moved closer to him, ""He's not one for the written word; but numbers have meanings to him that escape me, I'm afraid.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Stede was gazing at Blackbeard. Was this the point of the game? To get these two lunatics (Gurathin had noticed the moon last night, it mimicked a satellite Gurathin had never seen, but whose ghost lived on in the language he used) to admit how they felt for each other? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That couldn't be it, he and SecUnit would never have agreed to play. Unless this was all the Perihelion's machinations. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The 
+
+fucking
+
+ Perihelion. Which was apparently communicating via the stars? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You appear to have read me like a book, Dr."" Stede paused, ""can I call you Gurathin, Gurathin? Since we are all being a bit more honest about things?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Stede,"" Gurathin looked at the intelligent, worried face, this was a person (a complex simulation of one--still a person), ""Please, my friends do call me Gurathin."" Well, most of them do most of the time he thought. ""Do you have any idea how we are supposed to win? We are pretty sure that if we die we exit the game, but that seems difficult and anyway..."" he left the silence for Stede to fill.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""If you both exit the game we,"" he paused,""restart. I have my journals which enable me to maintain some sense of identity, Ed--it seems--has been keeping track in his own ways."" His expression managed to convey a combination of pride and bewilderment, even slight betrayal, ""I've no idea about the rest of the crew. It's so confusing, so hard to hold on to anything.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You know who you are, and who you,"" Gurathin cursed his cowardice, ""your friends are? Those are the most important things. But, you deserve more. You all do. What will happen when the English arrive?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We 
+
+should
+
+ surrender, but everything's all mixed up. You two have been very,"" his face reddened, ""disturbing. Oh no that's a terrible word! You're not like the usual players.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin really didn't want to ask. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Do you think we could fight the English? Could we fight them and win? Enable you and Ed to--what would work, assume new identities? Could that work within the game confines?"" Gurathin felt he was clutching at straws.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No, there are too many of them and they're too well armed. They have at least three ships. And frankly, apart from Ed, we aren't very good at fighting. We'd never prevail.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I've faced far worse odds, with my team. We had something you've never had, we had SecUnit.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You speak of it like it's a 
+
+deus ex machina!
+
+ Swooping in to save you all! It sounds wonderful,"" Stede was wavering between hope and despair.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes,"" said Gurathin, ""a 
+
+deus ex machina
+
+, that's exactly what it can be."" Gurathin thought about the phrase, for the first time in years--a theatrical device, a god from the machine, ""Stede, that's a thought. I don't want to be rude to you, but there's no time to be subtle. This whole,"" he gestured around him trying to indicate the universe they occupied, ""set-up; it's theatrical, weirdly so."" He saw Stede flinch, 
+
+please don't get upset
+
+, ""It is your reality, I know, and it is no lesser than mine but it seems to follow different rules and we need to understand them to break them, if we need to, to win. And by we, I mean you and me and Ed and SecUnit and"" he cast his eyes up, ""The Perihelion, 
+
+asshole that it truly is
+
+, too.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You mean like the bell?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes, like the bell."" The bell we never rang, thought Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I think it's a bit late for the bell."" Stede looked the picture of sad resignation.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Don't give up now.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Is there something within the game, some character, some device, some--"" Guarthin felt as if he was drowning, flailing about for something to grab hold of, some sort of hope, ""I don't know! Just some 
+
+thing
+
+ that might allow us to defeat the English."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Well,"" said Stede doubtfully, ""There is the Kraken?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Release the Kraken!
+
+ 
+
+(Had to be done!)
+
+""Are you out of your fucking mind?""
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin jumped. He hadn't realised Ed had been listening to their conversation; that the other two of them could even hear what they were saying. SecUnit didn't have its drones, he'd thought they were too engrossed in whatever it was they were doing with the charts.
+
+ 
+
+""The kraken isn't real!"" Ed sounded exasperated, almost desperate. 
+
+ 
+
+""What is a kraken?"" SecUnit's voice, always so gentle and careful. It must have heard it all, too. What had he even been saying?
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin felt Stede bridle. 
+
+ 
+
+""The kraken--it exists.""
+
+ 
+
+""Christ, Stede. Only in some bizarre way that I externalised my actions as a child, it's not real. It's a figment--""
+
+ 
+
+""It is very much real. I know exactly what it represented, but it was manifest. As our friend Gurathin here pointed out, there is a theatrical aspect to"" he waved his hands, his lace cuffs fluttering, ""all of this? Ed, surely you know that? Is Blackbeard real?"" Stede sounded equally desperate, but also suddenly defiant. ""Is he? He's realer to most people than Edward Teach--no one knows anything about Edward Teach apart from some hazy suggestion he was born in Bristol. You don't sound to me like you grew up in Bristol.""
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin wasn't sure what this was about, he looked to SecUnit who was watching the two of them as if watching a game being played.
+
+ 
+
+Ed, Blackbeard, scowled at Stede.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin thought he should probably intervene. He could take some of the flak. Like he always did.
+
+ 
+
+Instead SecUnit stepped away from the chart table and positioned itself in the middle of the room, Gurathin immediately interpreted this as a tactical move; but he wasn't sure exactly what the tactics were.
+
+ 
+
+"" What is a kraken ?"" The voice was much the same as before but there was a definite hint that SecUnit didn't like asking the same question twice.
+
+ 
+
+The two captains exchanged glances, Stede spoke, ""It is a terrifying monster with tentacles and suckers and a beak and it could easily destroy or"" he paused, ""disable the English ships.""
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit's face suddenly cleared and brightened, Gurathin felt as if clouds had parted, ""A monster?""
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit looked at Gurathin and suddenly smiled. Well, its mouth rearranged itself; it was certainly showing more teeth. Gurathin dragged his eyes away.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""This is how we win."" It sounded suddenly confident, ""Blackbeard, Stede, we need to tell ART about the kraken."" He felt it turn from them and look at him, ""Gurathin? Do you know anything about this kraken?""
+
+ 
+
+ Of course I don't , Gurathin was about to snap back; but Ed interrupted.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit, the kraken is my deep guilt and emotional denial made flesh; what would Gurathin know about that?"" Ed sounded dismissive, but shot a penetrating glance at Gurathin, ""But, you think getting your ART involved with the kraken is a good idea? Can we, shall we, communicate that to it?""
+
+ 
+
+Finally having a goal seemed to revitalise them. Blackbeard drew up a navigation plan, and they lit braziers on the deck. Apparently their course would communicate their idea to the Perihelion, which would (they hoped) respond.
+
+ 
+
+Once it was done, with some grumbling from the crew (though not so much as Gurathin had feared, it seemed they now looked to SecUnit with respect tinged with a little fear), Blackbeard and SecUnit scanned the sky as dusk fell (Gurathin was sure even the passage of time was out of joint now), taking readings and then all four of them returned to the library and the charts. 
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin watched as the two of them plotted complex readings, and made calculations and adjustments. Eventually Blackbeard muttered, ""It's simple, it just says 'Plan A01'-does that mean something to you SecUnit?""
+
+ 
+
+""It's code for a plan ART had to abandon a while ago, when I was trapped on an alien planet. Its full name is Plan A01: Rain Destruction."" Gurathin couldn't tell if it was sounding worried or delighted. Ratthi had told him about how the Perihelion had seemed intent on wiping an entire colony off the planet. What would it do here? He supposed they were going to find out.
+
+ 
+
+""Do you think we'll get to see it happen?"" He asked, trying not to sound too judgmental or grim. He couldn't afford to be. 
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit shrugged. 
+
+ 
+
+""The moon is still pretty much full,"" it was Edward Teach who answered, ""Given what we know about the English ships' whereabouts, we should get a front row view.""
+
+ 
+
+""Of an avatar of rage destroying the English ships?"" Gurathin knew he was losing his semblance of neutrality and regretted it instantly.
+
+ 
+
+""Of The Perihelion using the game mechanics to help me extract us."" Of course SecUnit came to its defence.
+
+ 
+
+""Dr. Gurathin, a quick word if I may?"" Gurathin was shocked to find it was Blackbeard addressing him and leading him out into the ship's corridor ( are they called corridors on ships? he thought, his mind desperate for a distraction).
+
+ 
+
+And then fast, too fast for him to react, Blackbeard grabbed him and Gurathin found himself pinned to the wall. He stayed absolutely still, willing himself not to allow any expression at all on his face, he didn't even want to think about what he was likely betraying.
+
+ 
+
+""Stop treating SecUnit like some kind of fiend."" The words came out, cutting like knives, ""It cares about you, and you treat it like some rabid dog.""
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin had no idea at all how to respond. What came out was, ""It has a funny way of showing it."" 
+
+ 
+
+""Of course it has, it's not a human.""
+
+ 
+
+""Nor am I."" Well, thought Gurathin furiously, it's true, ""According to it.""
+
+ 
+
+There was an angry silence.
+
+ 
+
+""I care about it, too."" Gurathin felt he was dragging the words out, ""very deeply. I always have done; but if it found out it would hate me even more.""
+
+ 
+
+Blackbeard's grip on him loosened, and the pirate stepped away from him. ""You're both idiots."" he said, ""Before we fully commit to this kraken plan, is there anything  you  think I need to know about this ART character? Or do we just cry havoc?""
+
+ 
+
+ It's utterly inhuman, jealous, petty, a complete asshole, and it loves SecUnit, Gurathin thought.
+
+ 
+
+""I think we just cry havoc.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Blackbeard had been right; the destruction of the English fleet was a performance with them as an unwilling audience with front row seats. Their view was panoramic. And quite terrifying. Gurathin had little concept of how a kraken might be expected to appear; but this 
+
+thing
+
+ was some eldritch horror. It was vast (part of Gurathin's brain insisted a soft bodied creature shouldn't move like that; couldn't be that monstrously huge). There should have been something almost comical about it, but there wasn't.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART had clearly been frustrated at its impotence and now it was venting this on the English ships. It crushed their masts like straws, the rigging snapping like cotton threads. In the mayhem and the chaos the sounds of screams and the groans of humans and timbers merged; punctuated by cracks and sharp retorts. The blood red of the sunset faded to a darkness lit by the burning flotsam, dark coals that were gradually extinguished. Above it all hung a huge, unnatural moon.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was theatrical, bloody, and awful.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They watched; the four of them together. Gurathin felt they were somehow bound to do so, obligated.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was, of course, SecUnit who noticed the portal. The door to the captains' rooms had changed. It now hung, faintly outlined by a blue tinged light. It looked out of place, artificial. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I think this is how we leave,"" it said, not even looking at Gurathin as it addressed Stede and Edward, ""Look after each other. We will do all we can.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin couldn't even speak; he went over and hugged Stede. Edward surprised him by shaking his hand warmly. Then SecUnit disengaged him from them, gently taking his hand in its and leading him to the door. It opened it and they stepped through into blinding white pain.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+<<<***>>>
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin pulled himself, willed himself, into consciousness. He felt tubes and needles, cannulas; he was strapped down, he couldn't move. He felt panic rising and then...
+
+
+ 
+
+
+<<**>>
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Blankness. Nothing. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He couldn't feel anything, he just 
+
+was
+
+. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But not alone.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Please don't be afraid, you're safe.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Okay, that was not at all reassuring. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Our consciousnesses are partitioned, in an isolation box. ART is keeping our organic bodies stable, and identifying, tagging and if necessary eliminating anything anomalous from the inorganic components of our minds.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Clearly a definition of the word 
+
+safe
+
+ he hadn't come across before.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+There is no need to be so sarcastic.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin tried hard to marshal his thoughts, they were all over the place. He didn't feel coherent. How could his mind be apart from his body?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Gurathin, much of your conscious mind is more like that of a construct. You've got a 
+
+
+lot
+
+
+ of augments.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A sudden wave of panic hit him. The game! The kraken. They'd been in the game; were Stede and Blackbeard okay?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Gurathin, please try not to panic. Ed and Captain Bonnet are both safe, and their crew are too. ART has the processing power to keep the game world running for now.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin wanted to roll his eyes, but he had no idea where his eyes even were. The Perihelion with its monumentally powerful intelligence and processing capacity...and yet the emergent personality was something like ART.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Yes, Gurathin, it is an asshole. It's also probably listening to us, I've put up walls but I think it's only respecting them because it feels bad.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It
+
+ feels 
+
+bad
+
+? The game was out of control! We were completely stuck, with rogue AIs, on a ship. He remembered sitting reading the journals with SecUnit; together by the fire.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ART is...regretful. The game wasn't designed for anyone with our degree of augmentation. It had become almost predatory, parasitic. It's now isolated.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin felt a surge of rage at that; Stede had just been trying to survive. He wasn't predatory, not a parasite.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Gurathin, are you always this angry?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Are 
+
+
+you
+
+
+ reading my mind?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There was a lull, not a silence--because that implied sound before.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin thought of the still surface of a lake or of the ocean, a false calm that belied the swarming depths beneath.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+This doesn't work like that.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+<**>
+
+
+
+Gurathin woke up.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He lay for a while, feeling the sensation of his breathing; of his heart beating. Of a slight cool pressure being removed from his augmented hand. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Am I going to regret opening my eyes?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+An unfamiliar voice replied--unfamiliar but not completely unknown, ""Dr. Guarthin, you're in the Perihelion's medical suite. You're still recovering, but we believe there's little or no permanent damage.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Implication of some, at the very best transient, damage then, and a rather worrying 
+
+'believe'
+
+--also he was in the tender mercies of ART? Great.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The pressure on his hand returned; was that a warning squeeze? He wondered what his face had been doing. Nothing pretty, that was for sure.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He opened his eyes. His vision was augmented, and that seemed fleetingly unfamiliar--then normal again. The medic poked around quietly, appeared to take some readings and left.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit was sitting by his bed. That was unexpected; or was it? His memories were confused, something about pirates? He felt as if he could remember if he tried, but right now he really didn't want to try. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He lay there. He felt suspiciously calm, they'd probably given him a sedative he mused. It was nice not to worry for a bit. He usually did nothing but worry. His eyes looked down at his hand, or tried to. It was covered by another hand, attached to a wrist with gunports. An enormous wave of surprise, swiftly followed by shock and guilt swept over him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's okay.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This was not okay. He tried to pull his hand away.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Dr. Gurathin, please stop. For a kind person you are absurdly unforgiving of yourself."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He'd know 
+
+that
+
+ voice anywhere, it was that complete and utter asshole ART. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Unforgiving of yourself and, I might add, of me."" ART continued.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin wanted to say something, but words completely failed him. Perhaps he'd just scream. Not that that would help. They had definitely sedated him; that was cheating.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""The game was not fun at all."" He managed to spit out.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We all agree on that."" SecUnit sounded slightly amused, its hand was still over his.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""ART,"" he risked using the nickname, he felt he had earned it, ""SecUnit said that you can support the game world? For how long?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I said he'd remember.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Dr. Gurathin, there are scientists within PUoMaNT who are fascinated to learn more about what we are calling 
+
+the game
+
+. It is a novel and purely emergent form of AI. They have the resources to keep it running indefinitely; should we all agree."" It changed its tone, ""Yes, well I think we all underestimated him.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They were talking about him as if he wasn't there. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Gurathin, we know you're here. 
+
+ It was almost a relief to hear SecUnit sounding so annoyed with him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Good! Stop both being so nice to me, it worries me. Am I dying or something?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This time SecUnit snorted.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's not funny,"" he said. He supposed it was, a little.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You are not dying, Dr. Gurathin. And for that we are all very grateful. Your bodily integrity is very important to us. The game's intelligence was not, initially, very 
+
+willing
+
+ to give the two of you back up. It was only your empathy with the--characters which swung matters."" 
+
+And someone manifesting as a fucking huge tentacled monster
+
+, Gurathin thought. SecUnit made a muffled sound. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin just knew he wasn't getting the full story here, though he liked the idea he'd been instrumental in helping in some way. But right now all he wanted to do, suddenly, was sleep. He was struggling to keep his eyes open.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes, Dr. Gurathin, get some sleep. We will be here when you wake up.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That sounded strangely unlike a threat. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+<>
+
+
+
+Sometime later:
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin woke up. He could feel sand against his cheek. Hot and dry, his hands gently unclenched; his fingers spread out slowly and sent him confirmation--sand, the warmth of the sun radiating from it. Soft and fine. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He could hear voices, hushed, in conversation close by. He could make out cadence and tones but not words. He concentrated; what could he remember?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Voices, not so quiet--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Why is he always so slow?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Did he recognise that voice; he thought he did? His thoughts were still incoherent, flashes of memory darting away like fish in shallow water.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+He is more reliant than you on his organic memory. Why are 
+
+
+you
+
+
+ always so impatient?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He knew that voice too, but there was something odd about it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I can hear you."" He spoke quietly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I know."" He was right, that voice 
+
+was
+
+ familiar, SecUnit was here. He pulled himself up, swivelling around to face the direction of the voices; he felt so clumsy. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He squinted into the sun. SecUnit's silhouette was unmistakable. Standing next to it was--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And all his memories tumbled into place. Like a saturated solution suddenly seeded with a crystal. He was glad he was sitting down. He wondered if there was any way to make this stage less taxing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""His face is doing the thing; he's remembered. He'll be complaining next.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Maybe get SecUnit to refrain from giving a running commentary? That would help. He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He could remember--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Dr. Gurathin, you have previously requested we talk you through the initial disorientation.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Have I really? I said that? Past me is clearly an idiot.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He heard what he was pretty sure was a sigh from SecUnit.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Then the sound of footsteps, gently muffled by the sand. A shadow falling across him--and then it was sitting next to him. He took his hands from his face.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why is it a beach? You don't like sand."" He had to ask.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I don't dislike sand, it's actually growing on me.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They both sat and stared at the surf. The waves sparkled.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A pause.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit, what the fuck is ART's avatar supposed to be this time?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+44735890,A Home That Remembers,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","family love, Relaxation, peaceful environments, Visiting, Anxiety",English,2023-02-02,Completed,2023-02-02,614,1/1,4,35,1,98,"['every_eye_evermore', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Irrya', 'Bardic_Feline', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'Lulea578', 'Tasneem08', 'SIC_Prowl', 'SonglordsBug', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'beeayy', 'dancernerd', 'cashmeredragon', 'danceswchopstck', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'FiftyCookies', 'blackglass', 'Tassos', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'opalescent_potato', 'FlipSpring', 'voided_starlight', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"
+I walked back over to the side of the house and collapsed into one of the folding chairs. SecUnits don't tire easily, but running around, trying to stop the kids from hurting themselves, had drained all of my energy.
+
+
+
+Mensah, sitting in the other chair, smiled at me. ""They can be a handful, can't they?""
+
+
+
+I acknowledged her and closed my eyes. I would still be able to monitor the kids on the feed (and hear them from across the lawn), but I definitely needed a rest.
+
+
+
+Sometimes planets weren't so terrible. The light of the nearby star was warm on my face, and the sound of the soft breeze ruffling the grass mimicked its gentle ripples through my hair. The vegetation always smelled sweet in mid-spring, though the pollen could be a bit of a nuisance.
+
+
+
+My moment of relaxation was interrupted by a tiny voice crying, ""SecUnit!"" I didn't open my eyes, but I could hear a pair of small, bare human feet running toward me through the grass.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit's tired, baby,"" Mensah's voice came from beside me, ""Why don't you go play with your siblings?""
+
+
+
+There was a hesitation, then the little footsteps retreated toward the field.
+
+
+
+Mensah and I sat in silence for a few minutes, with only the wind and the playful screams of children to interrupt. (I had learned to distinguish playful screams from anguished ones by this point.) Eventually, Mensah asked, ""How are things going with 
+
+Perihelion?
+
+""
+
+
+
+""Good,"" I told her. ""We commandeered an asteroid the other week.""
+
+
+
+I had been traveling with ART for a while now. As much as I liked being with ART, I felt like I had to visit Preservation every once in a while. Not just because I missed Mensah and the others, which I did, but because I was afraid they wouldn't welcome me anymore if I was gone too long.
+
+
+
+I guess it went back to that time I ran away. When I had finally come back, I hadn't known if they would want to see me again. I had wondered if we saw things differently; if, while I would welcome a visit from them, they thought of me as a passing connection, our lives splitting off into different paths. It was a recent development in my life for humans to remember the SecUnit who saved them.
+
+
+
+I thought about my most recent arrival on Preservation, a few cycles back. How all the kids had rushed to the door, stumbling over themselves to greet me; how Mensah had set up a guest room for me, arranged just the way I liked it; how even the family members who had initially been wary of me talked to me as if no time had passed at all. I had worried that it might be awkward if I came back in the middle of everything, needing to be caught up on everything that had happened in my absence, but instead I was met with a warm welcome.
+
+
+
+As if she could read my mind, Mensah told me, ""I hope you remember that no matter how far you travel, we'll always have a place for you here.""
+
+
+
+My eyes stung, and it wasn't just because they were irritated by the bright light and pollen. I focused hard to keep the emotions from leaking out, because more emotions would just make this situation even more awkward.
+
+
+
+Then I heard the delighted screams start changing into agitated yells. Uh-oh.
+
+
+
+I launched out of my chair to go stop the tiny fighting humans, yelling, ""Hey!""
+
+
+
+As I ran across the field, I could hear Mensah chuckling behind me, but I didn't think it was at my expense.
+"
+44732872,Mom time,['AuntyMatter'],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","Sometimes being a Mom means not asking questions, Drabble Collection",English,2023-02-02,Completed,2023-02-02,100,1/1,5,20,2,99,"['Bardic_Feline', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Priority_Error', 'SonglordsBug', 'EvenstarFalling', 'beeayy', 'dancernerd', 'pain_and_panic', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'rainbowmagnet', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard']",[],"Ayda Mensah is working when a private channel opens and a familiar
+voice says, ""I'm sorry Dr. Mensah but I'm going to kill Amena.""
+She tries to keep her voice neutral. ""SecUnit, I would really
+appreciate it if you refrained from killing my oldest daughter.""
+There is a snort and the channel goes dead.
+
+The door opens and Amena walks in. Ayda looks at her.
+""What? It was supposed to be a compliment!""
+Ayda raises one eyebrow.
+""I apologized!""
+She gives Amena a level stare.
+""Fine! I'll apologize again!"" Amena leaves, slamming the door.
+
+Sometimes, she muses, ignorance is bliss."
+44729383,faeries,['FiannlyPhoebe'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,murderbot & OC child,,"Alternate Universe - Human, time to get the kid some shoes",English,2023-02-02,Completed,2023-02-02,"1,045",1/1,2,28,null,114,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'D8TL55C', 'FyrDrakken', 'Unknown66', 'BlytheShifter', 'chippit', 'merelypuddles', 'Drel_Murn', 'Chardinal', 'AlcorAncil', 'jules_THOR', 'SonglordsBug', 'lazylichen', 'Zannper', 'Ageisia', 'Magechild', 'horchata', 'Mysterymew', 'Zerobotic', 'veltzeh', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'Unnecessary_Mango']",[],"By the time they're both done eating, Rin's settled on what looks like a good place to get the kid some shoes. Not somewhere expensive, but will hopefully have a good selection of warm things for smaller feet.
+
+Rehn tenses like a scared rabbit when they realize Rin's turning the car away from the direction of the hotel, and it swears silently to itself. ""There's a shoe store just down the road, and I wanted to take a look around."" It keeps its voice calm and understanding. ""Do you have somewhere else you need to be?""
+
+After a second, Rehn shakes their head, clutching their backpack in their lap. ""No.""
+
+-
+
+I don't know what Rin is expecting from me. I'm anxious, even though Rin feels like someone like me. It hasn't done anything but be nice, and even though it's bigger than me and much taller, I still want to trust it more than I want to be afraid. I watch the streets pass by, and then we're in the parking lot of a shoe store.
+
+My backpack has everything I own, and it stays with me when we get out of the car. The inside of the store is warm, and there's only a few other people here this morning. I watch Rin look around, and follow it as it goes to a part of the store for shoes that are too small for its feet. There's some neat boots on one of the shelves, but they're for rain, not for when it's this cold outside. I reach out to touch them while Rin is distracted.
+
+""I don't know what's in style for teenagers, but hopefully you can find something that's at least warm.""
+
+That's when I understand why we're here. I jerk my hand away and look up at it. Rin doesn't meet my eyes, but I've realized it doesn't like doing that. ""I don't have any money.""
+
+""I do.""
+
+""You don't need to spend it on me.""
+
+Rin gets a look on its face that I don't understand, but then it turns away. ""It's my money to spend, and I remember having cold feet when I couldn't afford shoes without holes in them.""
+
+My toes curl in my tennis shoes, and for some reason I think about how I drew faeries for a few weeks when I was younger, until mom told me to stop drawing imaginary things or she'd take away all my colored pencils. Those may not be real, but sometimes kind people are. Rin walks away from me, further down the aisle, and I imagine it with translucent wings spread wide from its back in a rainbow of colors.
+
+It stops to look at a pair of boots sitting in a box on the shelf. ""I'm not going to force you to let me buy something for you. You still have a choice, but if it makes any difference, I'll sleep better at night if you have warm shoes.""
+
+""You don't even know me."" I come closer, because I want to see what's caught Rin's attention.
+
+""I don't have to know someone to not want them to lose toes to frostbite.""
+
+I stare at the side of its head, but it doesn't look at me. It's calm, and not in a way I'm used to. My parents would use calm as a way to hide the boiling just under the surface, until something would rip everything wide open. Rin is relaxed in a way that feels like it's calm because it knows it can handle anything that might happen. It makes me believe that it can too. I come close enough to touch the boots still in their box. They're neat, but I can't see myself wearing them. The next box, though, has shoes I like.
+
+""Try them on."" The words sound like permission, not a demand.
+
+I bite my lip, and pull the box off the shelf. There's a bench against the wall, and I sit there. The shoes are comfortable on my feet, so I stand and walk up and down the aisle, testing them out. They're nice, and would be a lot warmer than the ones I have, but I still take them off and put them back in the box.
+
+""Do those not fit?""
+
+""They do.""
+
+""Do you want to look for any others?""
+
+I shake my head, wringing my hands around the strap of my backpack. Rin picks up the box off of the bench, and I follow it to the checkout. It's actually going to buy them? Really? There are socks hanging by the checkout, and Rin grabs two pairs, adding those to get rung up too. After it's paid, it hands me the whole bag. ""The socks are yours too.""
+
+""You didn't have to-""
+
+""You needed them, so I did.""
+
+I swallow. ""Thank you.""
+
+""You're welcome.""
+
+I've tripped and fallen into a dream world. Maybe I'm sleeping, and this is what happens when you're so cold you fall asleep and never wake up. Once we're back in the car, I change socks and put on my new shoes. They're still just as comfortable. I stare down at my feet, warmer than they've been in a while, and when I look up, Rin is driving us somewhere else. I watch the streets go by, and it's staying on the main road, where there's a lot of other cars around. I haven't walked this far since I left home, and don't know this part of town, which is going to make things really stressful if Rin leaves me here.
+
+""One more stop, then we can get food to take back to the hotel.""
+
+I look over at it, but it's distracted with driving, glancing at its phone every little while, following whatever directions it's getting. After a few more turns and stop lights, it pulls into the parking lot of another store. I realize it found a coat and hat shop that I didn't even know the town had. Rin parks and unbuckles its seatbelt, then looks my way with a kind expression on its face when it notices I'm not moving. ""You need a new coat too.""
+
+""Why..."" I can't make my voice more than a whisper.
+
+""I've already told you. Let's go."""
+44712217,Personal Customization,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Mentorship, Clothes Shopping, Fluff, individuality, Schrodinger's SecUnit, Communication, Mild Profanity",English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,998,1/1,4,33,null,127,"['every_eye_evermore', 'UnconquerableSoul', 'holographicbutch', 'Though224_loading', 'Bibli', 'ArwenLune', 'Doctor13', 'NightErrant', 'EvaBelmort', 'dancernerd', 'EvenstarFalling', 'fleurofthecourt', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'petwheel', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'opalescent_potato', 'FlipSpring', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'BWizard']",[],"
+Even after several months, Three still seemed to be having difficulty adjusting to its newfound freedom. I mean, it was hard for me too, at first. Also now. Yeah, I'd never really gotten over it.
+
+
+
+But since I had more experience being a rogue SecUnit, maybe I could give Three some tips from what I'd already learned. Help it come into itself a little.
+
+
+
+Don't get me wrong, I was the last one who wanted to take this job. The humans seemed enthusiastic about helping Three ""adjust"" (which involved forcing me to help Three adjust), but I just wanted to watch media and give Three time to figure itself out. Fast-forward to months later, and Three still hadn't done much figuring-out. Someone with actual, relevant experience was going to have to do something.
+
+
+
+During a trip to Preservation, I spotted Three sitting on a bench in the station mall, near the hotel where we were staying for the time being. Since my arrival on the station, I didn't think I'd seen Three move out of sight of the hotel. At least it had learned to sit.
+
+
+
+Three looked up as I approached. It looked happy to see me, which I tried not to notice, because I knew it would compromise my emotional integrity. ""Three,"" I said, ""Would you mind coming to the station clothes shop with me?""
+
+
+
+Three looked slightly surprised. ""Is there a special occasion?""
+
+
+
+This was the hard part. I'd already planned some potential activities based on my own prior experience, but what I hadn't planned was how to broach the topic itself. ""Maybe. I just think you're not as... confident as you could be."" Now it looked concerned. Shit. ""Look, will you just come with me?"" That was worse.
+
+
+
+Fortunately, Three was easily convinced. ""I will if you want me to.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The shops on Preservation weren't like those in the Corporation Rim, offering much fewer recycler-produced fabrics and more human-made textiles, but I figured they'd work as an introduction to shopping. I knew that picking out clothes was a crucial step in my own development, so maybe it would help Three.
+
+
+
+As we walked in, Three looked around, taking in the different patterns and colors filling the walls and shelves. ""There are so many options,"" it breathed.
+
+
+
+Three seemed almost frozen, staring at a wall decked out with shirts, tunics, and scarves. I felt like I should help it, but reminded myself that this had to be Three's decision. ""Just find something you like,"" I told it, ""Let me know when you're done."" I walked to the front of the store, leaving poor Three to face the ocean of clothes alone.
+
+
+
+I started to page through the feed-active magazines they offered at the front counter, but I was interrupted by a ping from behind me. ""I found something,"" Three said.
+
+
+
+I turned around and was immediately appalled. My clothes were recycler-produced, standard cut, nothing you'd expect to find on Preservation.
+
+
+
+So how had Three managed to dress itself 
+
+exactly like me?
+
+
+
+
+""Take those off!"" I shouted.
+
+
+
+""It's a nice outfit,"" Three protested.
+
+
+
+""Yeah, I know!"" I yelled, ""It's my outfit!"" I don't know why I was so defensive about this. I guess I had picked out that outfit especially for myself, and Three wearing the same thing kind of ruined the point.
+
+
+
+Three looked somewhat sad as it removed the jacket. ""Should I look for something else?""
+
+
+
+Obviously clothes-shopping was not the way to go here. ""No. We're leaving.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was time for Plan B. Murderbot 2.0 hadn't had time to show Three 35,000 hours of media; I didn't either, but 35 minutes or so wouldn't cut too much into my nonexistent schedule.
+
+
+
+""Why do I have to be alone?"" Three asked, sitting on my bed as I activated the display surface.
+
+
+
+""The results of an experiment change when the subject is unobserved,"" I explained, pulling up the first episode of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+, ""ART said so.""
+
+
+
+Three still looked concerned. ""I'll be right outside,"" I assured it. It accepted that, or at least didn't argue.
+
+
+
+I left the room, closed my feed, and waited. Once I knew the episode was over (I had its length memorized, and took into account any likely pauses), I stepped back inside.
+
+
+
+Three turned to face me, still relaxed and impassive. ""What did you think?"" I asked.
+
+
+
+""It was good,"" Three said.
+
+
+""Just good?"" Not life-changing? Not world-shattering? I would definitely need to adjust my calculations.
+ Three briefly looked puzzled, then awkwardly tried, ""It was... great?""
+
+
+Clearly Plan B hadn't worked, either. Which sucked, because I had no Plan C.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I flopped on the bed next to Three, sighing in resignation. Three turned toward me, clearly confused. For all we'd done today, it didn't seem any more relaxed, any surer of itself. ""What am I going to do, Three?"" I wondered aloud.
+
+
+
+Three thought. ""Situation assessment suggests you are likely to watch media.""
+
+
+
+That was statistically accurate, but not what I was looking for. How was I supposed to help Three adjust if the things that had helped me weren't working?
+
+
+
+Huh. I was thinking about what had helped me adjust, but Three might be different. I needed to think about what would work for Three.
+
+
+
+So what would? It wasn't ready to pick out its own clothes, and it wasn't interested in media. I thought about the intel I'd received from 2.0, how it had convinced Three to break its governor module, how Three used to spend its time.
+
+
+
+I could answer those questions. Three broke its governor module after seeing my stories, and it spent its time communicating with its team. What Three needed was to talk to another SecUnit. There was only one other SecUnit around, and oh boy, was it a bad option. But it (I) was really the only option.
+
+
+
+I sat up. ""Hey, Three. What were One and Two like?""
+
+
+
+Three's smile brightened as it started telling me its first story.
+"
+40147890,Warranty Claims,['TheSteelChimera'],Teen And Up Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Corporate Characters","Construct Maintenance, Dehumanization, Soft Horror, (or non-malicious horror at any rate), Gore, Medical Procedures, Hurt/Comfort",English,2022-07-07,Updated,2023-02-01,"14,870",9/10,80,127,30,"1,046","['faedemon', 'FyrDrakken', 'Stockinette', 'Lierdumoa', 'ipborgdan', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'darth_eowyn', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'SlvrCrystalc', 'canbreathe', 'Elseaw', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'Iamhungry11', 'SIC_Prowl', 'zirna813', 'those_painted_wings', 'draffyn', 'WerewolvesAreReal', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'IguanaMadonna', 'dancernerd', 'Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays', 'EvenstarFalling', 'aglarwen', 'Lammchen', 'TurHaretha', 'biscut2', 'opalescent_potato', 'FiftyCookies', 'elmofirefic', 'Stefka_13', 'Flying_Train', 'Magechild', 'ErinPtah', 'void_star', 'rainbowmagnet', 'salmat', 'reading_tsc', 'Invitalis', 'HirilElfwraith', 'akintu', 'artichokefunction', 'Aslook', 'curlylocks2', 'Godless_Angel', 'Edgedancer', 'tabya', 'Quillful', 'maybeapples']",[],"There was a certain horror to working on SecUnits, a horror most people don't appreciate, seeing them every day in armour and faceless. A blissful ignorance I hope they never lose, for their sake.
+
+With the armour it's easy to not see what they are. Even in uniform, it's easy to not see what they are. But I get to see them without either, every inch of the bot-human hybrid body bare for me to see.
+
+Some people think I get a kick out of it, especially when I worked on ComfortUnits. I don't. There's nothing arousing about working on a machine whose grafted flesh pulses against your hand. It's put me off intimacy, if I'm honest. When my partner was transferred to another branch and we had to break up, I was secretly glad. Because I would stop thinking of mechanical failures and underlying structure they didn't have when I saw them naked.
+
+I work on SecUnits now. SecUnits are different than ComfortUnits, and it's both worse and better. They don't look at human, but I can't help but flinch when I see them. I'm not scared, I know they won't hurt me, they're contained, they won't kick. But it looks like it hurts, to have that much metal stick out.
+
+ 
+
+I used to work on cattle, way back when I was young. My mother was a cowherd and my father a carpenter. He built the houses for our small terraforming colony and she fed it. I helped, until I got taught computers and discovered I was good at them.
+
+Working with constructs was like all three at the same time. It's both like a medical appointment, like those I used to have when my back was bad and like the farrier's. It's like the touch of a trusted friend and like the delicacy of carpentry.
+
+This one had its back to me, and I could not see its eyes. If I could, I would have told it to close them. Cows don't close their big brown eyes on command, but constructs can.
+
+The SecUnit does not flinch when the welding tool clips close to the skin. Doesn't even sigh when I trim the damaged, keratinized flesh away from the misaligned edge of one of the articulated armour plates of its spine. It's pliable as I push it forward and watch as the plates shift.
+
+It's docile when I ease the knife between two plates and scrape out the sticky obstruction of coagulated blood and fluid from the joint. The blade makes an unpleasant scraping sound against the metal, so I hurry. I ignore the quiet huff of relief as its breathing deepens in response.
+
+(I know... That must've hurt, darling.)
+
+I cut away more damaged organic callus, sharp tool digging in between flesh and metal to remove cellular cast-off. Cubicles do decent maintenance, and the premium Units can do their own basic maintenance, so they don't come through my shop as often. But bottom-shelf models like this one can't.
+
+It didn't escape my notice that the ones I saw, the cheap ones, the ones who needed these minor maintenance passes when their cubicles made mistakes were the new ones. The new ones that ended up with things healed out of alignment, splinters embedded where they shouldn't be.
+
+The young ones. Young ones like this one that had big brown eyes like an innocent calf.
+
+I sighed, and shifted on my chair, and kept working.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Combat models are hell.
+
+Hell to face, hell to see, and by the void, hell to work on.
+
+They're too feisty for their own good and they get beat up so much and in so many ways sometimes the cubicle doesn't know what to do with them.
+
+This one is an older Unit, and it is fucking huge. It's Unit standard, of course, but the Combat upgrades and enhancement have made it bulkier with thicker integrated subdermal armour, enhanced musculature... It's huge, it's an absolute fucking beast of a machine.
+
+And I'm one technician. Well, two, I have a colleague helping me keep it as still as possible.
+
+It is restrained, in the only way a Combat SecUnit can be restrained, both by command and physical impediment. It came to us live, and it needs to be online for this because the embed around its neck is severe and I need its feedback to know I am not damaging it, which means its weapons aren't banded. It is just under the tight restraint net, pulled tight over the table, me accessing it's back through a strategically placed zipper.
+
+But that isn't quite enough. It's a Combat SecUnit, no matter how much you immobilise it, unless it's shut down, it's going to fight a perceived attack first. You can't hurt CombatUnit like you can SecUnits. It's why they're dangerous. They're like wild animals, unconcerned with human words and with a vicious too-sharp intelligence behind the eyes.
+
+""Easy, easy!"" I tell it as it nearly bucks me off for the fifth time, ""I'm trying to help you!"" I force its chest back down, it's weakened by the net, and I know it won't leave the room even if it somehow manages to get free, but that doesn't mean it can't hurt me or my assistant in its attempts to defend itself, ""I know it hurts, big boy, but you've got to cooperate with me, okay? That line isn't going to come out on its own and you're going to feel a lot better when I'm done. But for that you have to let me work.""
+
+It seems to calm down, and my colleague reseats xemself to control the rear. I'm sat on its back, pinning its arms with my weight. I'm heavy, one of the perks of being born in a high-gravity environment on a relatively isolated farm colony and moving directly to a well-paying job in the Outrim, but not heavy enough to fully immobilise a construct.
+
+I slowly lean forward, sharp hooked tool and scissors in hand, while the construct settles down again.
+
+The embed itself is gruesome. A large wound where a loop of some sort of thin, but robust wire, maybe some form of frayed packing cord, fishing line or, for all I know, a garotte wire that failed to do its job. Either way, there are multiple loops wrapped around this big construct's neck, and some of them dug deep enough to have slipped between the armoured back plates, leaving a sticky cut as they got tighter. The line was too thin to be detected by the simple cubicle systems and some of the skin had grown over which just made my job harder.
+
+I gently pried apart the edges of the cut, it was clean enough, and slowly lowered the tool close. The construct flinched under me when the tool made contact.
+
+""Easy boy, it won't be so long if you let me work."" I kept talking, hoping to calm it down with the sound of my voice, ""You get shot on a regular basis, you can take me pulling that wire out of your neck, okay?"" I eased the tool under one of the outer loops, ""Oh that's tight...""
+
+The construct arched its spine but didn't buck, thankfully, and I was able to cut that first loop.
+
+""There! That's better, no? Okay, there's more. That was good, just do that again, okay?""
+
+I had no idea if it had been programmed to listen to me. I had a feeling it hadn't been. Dumb fucking handlers who don't secure their toys when they drop them off for repair. I didn't mind the wild Units, the angry, feisty Units, and in this case its complaints were a sign I was doing my job right and not damaging the delicate pathways in its spine. But nonetheless, I generally preferred it when I could at least directly affect the experience. This outright thrashing was painful for both me and the Unit.
+
+The next loop was slightly better, it squirmed and growled at me, but that was fine. I discarded a bloody loop of translucent wire to the side.
+
+One more loop, I could see it deeply embedded between two plates. The only way I was reaching it was by sliding down the edge and hoping to catch it. It was probably too tight to pull out enough to fit the cutting hook underneath, and too resilient to be cut with a smaller tool.
+
+""Okay, this one is deep, so stay with me, alright, big boy?"" I started speaking again as I swapped my tool for a small pry-tool and a thinner set of scissors, ""I'm just going to ease this between your armour plates, and it's going to suck for a bit, but it's temporary. And I can't have you moving around like this, I know you don't have to listen to me, and you probably don't want to, but I assure you this is for your own good."" I kept talking as I slowly worked the sharp needle-like tool between the plates and slowly, very slowly, levered them apart.
+
+The construct, wordless as it was, grunted in pain.
+
+""I know, I know, it hurts. But it's this or you choke. And you don't want that, do you?""
+
+I received a huff in response, which I took as encouragement. It was paying attention to what I was saying, rather than what I was doing, and that was a lot better for both of us. So I kept talking.
+
+""Alright, I can see the line, now I'm going to cut it."" I placed my scissors in position, ""Just need to work this in, and-""
+
+After several actions of the small scissors, the line snapped and I could feel the CombatUnit's chest expand under me as it inhaled a full lungful of fresh air.
+
+""Hold still a bit longer, so I can grab the line..."" I pinched the remnants of the line between the scissors and pulled, it slid out from between the plates, through the now oozing flesh, covered in blood.
+
+""There!"" I removed the pry-tool and leaned back, the Combat SecUnit let out a rough, partially voiced grunt in my direction, which was probably as close to a word as it could manage. The combat models typically had their vocal cords (and sometimes tongues) docked as part of standard practice.
+
+""You're welcome. Now let's get you out.""
+
+I hopped off, feeling like I'd never gotten a better workout even after wrestling the calves on my mother's farm, and the net was released.
+
+The construct straightened and threw off the offending restraint away with only some minor tangling. The deep red cut around its neck was gruesome but instead of getting up immediately and walking itself to the repair cubicle in the corner of my shop so it could get that cut taken care of as fast as possible (I assumed its handler had been monitoring its feed and was probably outside my door right now. I hated single-Unit handlers, always so... impatient), it sat on the edge of the table and scanned me and my colleagues.
+
+I waited a second, then smiled, ""Ah, not so mean now that you're all untangled, are you? You can get yourself fixed up, and you'll be out of here in no time.""
+
+I couldn't blame it for being angry, that wound probably still hurt. Which made its delay in finishing the repair was curious. As was the set of its shoulders, if I didn't know better, I'd say it was tired.
+
+""You can go, it's okay."" I said, gesturing to open cubicle door, ""You're free.""
+
+The eyes settled on me with a tired look as it sighed deeply before getting up and all but slinking into the waiting cubicle.
+
+Curious indeed.
+
+Am I making up reasons that don't make sense just so this scenario will work? Maybe so, but it's written and I like it. so.
+
+Thanks to Alex for giving me ideas for this series, by telling me laptop repair horror stories.Of note:Please Mind the New Tags! This chapter is significantly more intense than the last ones. I tried to keep it in line, but it is still, well, what it is.
+
+""It won't start, it won't start..."" I grumbled, using the dry part of my wrist to wipe my forehead, ""Oh it started alright, you piece of shit...""
+
+The SecUnit on my table was shut down, thankfully. It had taken me a full thirty minutes to get the supply fluid to support the organics on its own enough that I was confident in shutting it down completely.
+
+My current 'patient' was all but completely unable to breathe. Pure negligence. It was brought in for a 'wheezing sound' that was disturbing the workers and after it, apparently, went into stasis and didn't come online for its patrol. What I received was a unit choking on air.
+
+So, I had to shut it down. No use having it cough, wheeze and suffer the entire time it was here, and I would rather it be completely still if I was going to be working in its lungs. I had an endoscope ready, and I was perched on my stool beside the table, working the stiff neck of the device down the construct's throat, keeping an eye on the video feed on my interface. So far, what I saw was moderately damaged and dust-covered trachea, and the stiff ribs of artificial cartilage that protected the windpipe from being crushed.
+
+As I got deeper in, however, things got worse. So much worse. I started seeing a dark, sticky residue creep up the walls of the bronchi. I started down into its left lung, and my camera dead ended into darkness. There was a light attached to it, I should be able to see the inside of its lungs, I wouldn't be able to push much further into the bronchioles, but I should be able to see something that wasn't a solid wall of... black, vaguely textured... something.
+
+""I am so glad you're actually offline right now."" I told the sleeping face in front of me, ""What the fuck did they do to you?""
+
+And it was something done to it. No Unit would intentionally fill its own lung to the point it couldn't breathe.
+
+I fiddled with my feed and the connection to the endoscope to get it to take a sample. Grabbing onto on outcropping of the obstruction was not hard, however, reversing out with it was not so easy. The scope's little sample claw wasn't sharp. It had a sharp tool, for taking tissue samples, and thankfully, construct tissue was designed to heal quickly. However, the fact this stuff appeared to be solid wasn't looking good for repair. I didn't want to have to open up the chest and operate. That was messy, and new organics, especially delicate, complicated hybrid organics like the lungs, were expensive. I had a bioprinter, of course, but the raw materials alone would be enough of an extra expense that I would have to tell my clients their bill was going to be that much higher at least, which meant they would be more likely to just abandon the Unit and scrap it.
+
+And of course, I was going to be handling the removal. Because I had the connections, on the rare occasion a construct died on my table. I hated it but... it happened sometimes.
+
+I used the small cutting tool to work into the obstruction and remove my sample and finally got the endoscope reversed out. Pulling the blob of sticky black matter out with it. It was larger than I had anticipated, but it would fit. I had to cut it down for analysis anyway.
+
+""Okay, let's see what you-"" I recoiled immediately, ""Oh, oh that's foul.""
+
+The sample was not large by any means, but it was enough. The smell of the warm flesh inside of a body wasn't the most appetising thing in the world, and that's what these samples usually smelled like. But this was the bitter stench of rot and decay beginning to sink into putrid infection.
+
+""What the fuck."" I held my breath and dropped the sample, ""Where the fuck were you stationed?"" I asked, not expecting an answer. But the question bore asking.
+
+I grabbed a pair of forceps and a small dish off the table and leaned back over the construct. I winced as I poked a tool at the lump of formless, blackened mass of congealed... something that all but filled this poor construct's lung. The black, filamentous matter inside tore as I pulled at the sample and a scattered of shiny black dust scattered on the clear surface of the dish.
+
+""Okay... that looks like mining residue, fairly common in people but..."" I looked at the SecUnit, ""Why were you out of armour, my friend? Your air should have been filtered...""
+
+(Honestly everyone's air should be filtered down there. I'd seen too many mid-level workers tasked with bringing the bot to my shop with sunken eyes and a hacking cough to believe otherwise. Or to believe I wasn't lucky, between the four sterile walls of my shop, with a diligent cleaning bot and filtered air, making sure everything smelled slightly of disinfectant and construct fluid. Which was toxic, but only if ingested. Or injected, I supposed. Otherwise, it just smelled sweet like the poison it was).
+
+""Okay. Okay, it's offline, it's got oxygen through the supply port, thank the void... First, first... first figure out what the fuck that stuff is, then remove it. Worst case scenario... replace the part."" I looked at the construct, ""That's going to be a mess and a half, but you'll be able to fucking breathe at least.""
+
+I had a plan now, and with a plan, I could work. The stench was localised but awful, whatever this construct had in its lungs... it did not belong there. Thankfully the rot and infection hadn't spread outside the lung cavity itself, there might be hope to figure out how to flush this without replacing the entire system.
+
+I left the SecUnit alone for now while I took my sample to the microscope.
+
+""Okay, what is this stuff?""
+
+As it turned out... dust particulates from mining, tiny granules of some sort of metal and soot, as expected, mucus from the lungs themselves, and... what seemed to be rotten food of some sort, grain, crushed, and partially dissolved into a thick paste, soaked with something that made it sticky, probably a sugar of some sort. And off course the decaying sticky mess had fixed every particulate that entered the Unit's lung since, having completely coated the epithelium and prevented its function.
+
+I turned to it, a cold, vicious anger roiling in my chest. There was no one who was responsible nearby but... this was unconscionable. Forcing a SecUnit to eat... it wasn't the first time I'd seen something like this, but this was the worst. Usually, they hack up whatever they are forced to swallow (or rather, inhale), the epithelial cilia do their job, and the lung cavity is thoroughly cleared when they go in for deep maintenance at the end of their contract.
+
+But this one, somehow, hadn't managed to empty it's lungs on its own, and it had just gone from bad to worse to absolutely horrific.
+
+""You poor thing."" I could hear the anger in my voice. This would not have reassured it in the least. Thankfully, it wasn't awake to hear me.
+
+The fact this sticky rotten mess had been in there might, just might, have prevented the mining dust from effecting the lung. If that was the case, if, just if, I could get all that out... I wouldn't need to rebuild the respiratory system. And I canted to avoid that at all costs. If I couldn't, that was a death sentence for the Unit. Its company would never pay for that. It was a large enough expense for the cheaper installations to simply prefer to replace a broken Unit rather than pay me for such a large repair.
+
+So, I set to work. Now that I knew the obstruction was biological, and most likely plant-based originally, I had a place to work form.
+
+It took six hours to clear out both lungs. Thankfully, the second one was clear, only some damage from particulate dust. Which was worrisome, but thankfully, the SecUnit's nanotech immune system seemed to have done its jobs and prevented massive tissue loss. Hopefully this was the same for the bloodstream. Constructs were sturdy, in no small part thanks to the swarm of ""symbiotic"" nanobots that swarmed its bloodstream. Any contaminant would be isolated and expelled through its next cubicle cycle, or, that's what was supposed to happen, the system wasn't perfect. I took a blood and fluid sample and stuck them into the analyser just to make sure.
+
+Now came the messy part. I didn't want to do it, but I also didn't want to leave this SecUnit with dead or damaged tissue. A cubicle could fix the damage, but only if it could find it and access it. The left lung had incurred permanent damage and if I left the Unit's chest open, that should be enough to make it accessible for the cubicle to repair the damage and fold the rest back into place. It wasn't a complicated wound, as far as cubicles could understand. And the cubicle pass was factored into the original cost of the repair.
+
+Which meant opening up the chest. I sighed, snapped a pair of gloves on, grabbed the scalpel and got to work.
+
+Before long, thanks to the repair-focused design of constructs (especially in these older models, the newer ones were rife with proprietary, over-complicated ""simplified"" bullshit) I was staring down at a pair of small lungs, cradling a metal disk that housed the small pump acting as the machine's heart. The inside of a construct's chest was an odd thing to behold, you'd think it would be horrible, a blood-filled, pulsing, fleshy mess. And it partly was that, constructs were part human after all. The blood was neatly contained in the partly-artificial vascular system, organic veins and arteries woven with sturdy tubes of transport fluid through the body. It was neat, the cuts I had made were tacky, but the veins had sealed. And with the skin peeled back and the muscle bundles detached from their moorings, I had full access inside the ribcage with minimal mess.
+
+That didn't mean my gloves weren't sticky with blood, that was inevitable, but it would have been a lot worse if I had been working on, say, a human being. For one, I would have had to use a power saw. For my patient, I just needed a screwdriver (or rather, the proprietary bit that went onto my homemade multi-function turning tool. I wasn't supposed to have this as part of my kit, but when out-network Units came in after hostile takeovers, they couldn't fault my efficacy and didn't ask too many questions).
+
+With the lungs exposed, I gently piled the flaps of skin and muscle onto the chest, and engaged the gravity sled of the table. That addition to my shop had been an expense and a half. But it was worth it, it allowed me to safely move the Units to the cubicle when they couldn't move themselves, like this one.
+
+It was still offline, and I didn't especially want to disconnect it from the supply line, but... I had to transfer it over to the cubicle's systems.
+
+""Hang in there buddy.""
+
+The stillness was eerie as I disconnected the cable. I almost expected a twitch.
+
+I shook my head. That was stupid. These were machines. Not animals. Not really. It was a stupid habit to treat them like pets, like I was a vet. I was a construct technician, nothing more glorious than an IT aide for the Rim's messiest, most dangerous machines.
+
+The cubicle's doors closed, and a hum filled the space, shaking the floor. It was working. Soon, that Unit would be awake and breathing again. With a sigh of relief, I sank onto my chair.
+
+Under my feet, the cleaning bot began its rounds.
+
+Thank you to Research & Devastation on the discord for this idea. I did also want this tech to meet a rogue and the ""fugitive goes to a vet to avoid getting caught at the hospital"" approach was perfect.
+
+There was a frantic knock on my door after hours.
+
+""Shop's closed!"" I called through the door, ""Come back tomorrow!""
+
+There was another knock.
+
+""For fuck's sake."" I sighed, ""Read the sign!""
+
+A more persistent knock.
+
+With another curse under my breath, I walked to the door and flung it open. In front of it was a person in a plain jacket and collared shirt. Looked like an average stationer, augmented by the looks of the brackets at the temples.
+
+""Can't you read?"" I asked, ""The sign says 'Closed'-"" I pointed to the sign in question, lit up and showing the letters in red, ""- that means I'm not doing any more business today. So come back tomorrow.""
+
+""I can't.""
+
+""Sure, you can, it's as easy as turning around and walking home. Then walking back here come morning. I open at 0800 station-time, per my timetable which is available in the feed.""
+
+""I can't."" they repeated, ""I know it late, and I'm sorry. You are the only person who can do this. I need a repair done, and I need it done quickly and quietly.""
+
+""I don't do home calls.""
+
+""It's not a home call.""
+
+""I don't see a Unit with you.""
+
+""I'll pay double your fee.""
+
+""Double the fee? That's mighty generous, I'm not cheap.""
+
+""I know, and for good reason."" They stared, I noticed their eyes were augmented as well, ""I have a Unit that needs repair and I want absolutely no record of my presence here. I will pay in full up front.""
+
+""You know this sounds like something that'll get me in trouble, right? I am licensed by corporate manufacturers, if I'm caught doing-"" I paused, ""Fuck, come, inside, I'm not even entertaining this out in the open.""
+
+I ushered them inside. I smelled blood as they walked past and my hairs stood on end. I'd just made a huge mistake. This person was huge, nearly the size of a SecUnit already, they didn't look that way standing outside the doorway, but it couldn't be ignored up close.
+
+""You won't get caught.""
+
+""How can you guarantee that?""
+
+""The cameras outside were looped, no one saw anything."" They turned to me, ""Triple the fee, cash. Final offer.""
+
+""Now you're just bribing me.""
+
+""This is a matter of life or death, take it or leave it.""
+
+I squinted, ""You're desperate.""
+
+""I am."" They looked around, ""And so are you. You're a licensed technician, but your franchise operates independently. You make repairs that have fewer strings attached than going to the manufacturer directly. Most corporation don't take kindly to that, and those licenses have only gotten more expensive of late. You're tight on cash.""
+
+""You've done your research.""
+
+""Enough to know you can't refuse my offer.""
+
+I stared, ""Fine. I'll do it. Money on the counter.""
+
+They extended their hand, holding a hard currency card. I took it.
+
+""Untraceable."" They said, ""That should cover it.""
+
+I scanned it over the payment booth, and boggled at the number. It was, however, correct. Three times my fee, and some change ('change' being a little under two hundred Universal Purchase Tokens).
+
+""You did your math wrong.""
+
+""Consider the excess a charitable donation."" They said, a wry smile on their face.
+
+I breathed. Okay, I was doing this, I was doing the illicit, probably illegal repair. My mystery client was right, I did need the money. And this was a lot of money in one fell swoop, for one repair. I could only hope I wouldn't get in trouble. My license was already hell to keep, and I didn't want to lose my shop too. I put a lot of work into this place. I practically lived here.
+
+""So, where the Unit you needed fixed?"" I crossed my arms, trying to hide my nervousness as I pocketed the currency card, ""You still haven't brought me a patient.""
+
+""I have."" They said, cryptically.
+
+The individual then proceeded to sit down on the table and reach for their jacket, wincing as they took it off, pausing, then moving to remove their shirt.
+
+""Hey, woah now, I didn't-"" I started, rushing to stop them.
+
+Then stopped when they winced to a halt.
+
+The shirt was stained dark with blood and there was a clear bullet hole in it. There was something sweet in the air. Infection, certainly, but also wound sealant and...
+
+""I'm your patient.""
+
+""Friend, I don't do humans. I'm a construct tech, I can't help you.""
+
+""Yes, you can. You're the only person who can."" They paused, ""I can't actually get this off, my shoulder is jammed.""
+
+I stared, and stared again.
+
+Large, augmented, and now without the heavy worker's jacket I could see the ridges in the shoulders and forearms, and everything snapped into place.
+
+I was looking at a SecUnit.
+
+""Fuck."" I realised I was moving backwards when I hit the wall, ""Are you- you're a construct."" I spluttered, ""How did you- what-"" I was stunned, ""Who's, who's your-""
+
+""No one."" It interrupted, ""I've been shot and my shoulder's out of alignment. I need your help with the wound and putting the joint back into place. It should be easy, I just can't do it alone.""
+
+""You're- "" I just couldn't wrap my head around it.
+
+Construct were, well, constructs. Smart yes, but not...
+
+""What?"" it said, staring at me.
+
+""What are you?""
+
+""A SecUnit. Allied-Galactic model 4E.""
+
+""No, no that's- you can't be. You..."" Void, I sounded so stupid, that was stupid and embarrassing, spluttering like this. I knew it the moment it left my mouth.
+
+It sighed, ""I'm a rogue. And the faster you fix me, the faster I'll be out of here, then off this station and we can both get on with our lives and pretend tonight never happened."" It hissed, ""So fix me.""
+
+There was a cold knot of something in my gut. Fear, probably. The desire to run away, the desire to throw this... person- thing- the rogue out of my shop.
+
+I did none of those things. Instead, I said something even more stupid.
+
+""Rogues aren't real.""
+
+""And yet here I sit, in the flesh and steel, right in front of you, bleeding."" It lifted its shirt with one hand to show me the wound. It was deep, not bleeding but I could see the torn, sticky, partially healed mess that looked like a day-old bullet wound cutting through the silvery inorganic mesh of the SecUnit's side.
+
+Okay. Fuck, that was enough. Enough with this. I could have an existential crisis later, right now I had a conscious Unit in front of me with a hole in it. I knew SecUnits talked, of course, but it was always the same pre-programmed phrases, and all the documentation said they didn't have anything beyond a standard natural language module. And while that natural language module could produce the sarcasm this Unit was showing...
+
+Whatever, whatever. I had a job, I was going to do my job, either this was actually a SecUnit or it wasn't, and I'd just meddled with something way above my paygrade. Two options, both to be considered after having eaten and slept, and maybe decided to forget about the whole thing and pretend it never happened.
+
+""How did that happen?"" I asked, rolling up my sleeves and getting my tools, this would need to be manually sealed up. That mesh was made of a woven self-healing polymer threads, but the pieces were too far away from each other to knit back together even if the rogue had applied the temperature trigger to the wound.
+
+""Wrong place, wrong time."" It chuckled, ""It doesn't matter. The less you know, the better for the both of us.""
+
+""Business as usual for shady clients."" I shook my head, ""I don't normally let my clients see me work so they don't make any unnecessary comments. For obvious reasons I can't ask you to wait outside. So, no inane commentary.""
+
+""You're the expert.""
+
+""Just tell me if I touch something and it hurts.""
+
+""My pain sensors are tuned all the way down.""
+
+""I figured, and if something hurts, I've struck a nerve directly. What did I say about inane comments?""
+
+""Point taken.""
+
+""Can you get that shirt off or do I need to cut it?""
+
+""I can't move my shoulder.""
+
+""Scissors it is.""
+
+I reached behind me and grabbed the scissors in question, they were where I left them and cut the thin red recycler fabric.
+
+""You're going to recycle this at your own risk.""
+
+It nodded, I saw a ping notification in my feed. I smiled, even weird and allegedly rogue, a SecUnit was still a SecUnit and the ping was comfortably familiar.
+
+I got a better look at the wound and it was definitely a bullet wound. The polymer mesh had done it's job: No exit wound. I would have to dig for the projectile, but the colour of the organic muscles underneath looked wrong. I leaned in closer, and sniffed. This was... not a good idea normally, but I didn't want to pull out the chromatographic analyser. And from the smell alone, that wound was infected.
+
+The shoulder however, was clearly bent out of place and that was a more involved fix than simply slapping a medkit on a wound then stitching it up.
+
+(And now, with the entire torso exposed, the was no denying this was a SecUnit. No human, no matter how augmented they made themselves, could do this.)
+
+""Okay, I'm going to do two things at once."" I straightened, ""That wound's infected, and your shoulder needs to be reseated. I'm going to start by debriding the wound, and while I let medkit clean it out I'm going to remove your arm to fix the joint."" I explained, ""Don't move.""
+
+""As long as I get my arm back.""
+
+""I never let a Unit out of my shop in fewer pieces in came in with, don't you fret.""
+
+The banter was surprisingly easy. The rogue didn't move, as instructed, and didn't flinch was I cut away diseased tissue (whatever had been in that wound was nasty enough that even a construct's immune system hadn't outpaced it. I wasn't sure really wanted to know what it actually was). It wasn't all that different from working on any of the other Units. The mechanics were still the same. I pried the damaged muscle apart and dug the bullet out. Standard 9mm calibre, looked like. Whoever had shot the rogue hadn't expected to fight a construct. This was not enough to stop one, only annoy it and cause long-term problems.
+
+Once I'd cut away enough of the dead skin and muscle, I attached a medkit to it. It beeped and began whirring away, working to knit the flesh back together. When it was done, I'd seal up the polymer coating.
+
+""Now the arm."" I straightened, ""SecUnit, release left shoulder joint locks.""
+
+""Arco.""
+
+""Sorry?""
+
+""My name. It's Arco.""
+
+I blinked, whatever I was thinking of dropped out of my mind like a lump of plasteel, ""Could you release your shoulder joint, please?"" I tapped the shoulder in question.
+
+""Sure.""
+
+A name.
+
+It hadn't even occurred to me that the rogue had a name, could have a name.
+
+SecUnit didn't have names. People gave them names, numbers, colours, letters, sometimes even proper human names. But it was always a joke, a practicality, like people naming bots, tools or houseplants.
+
+I never named my little cleaning bot. Never felt the need to, I knew where and what it was, there was only the one, and I was grateful to have it.
+
+But the rogue- Arco- had a name.
+
+I engaged the catch and the arm popped loose. I set it aside and looked at the bent metal inside the joint.
+
+I was now on a timer. Four minutes to fix this before the organics of the arm started to die. I was looking at a deformed casing, a snapped lock, and a few artificial tendons torn out of their moorings. I sighed.
+
+Start with the casing, to give myself room, file down the lock. I couldn't replace it without spending an hour on it and turning on either the cubicle or the bioprinter, but there were redundancies for a reason, then reattach the tendons. On the arm, the damage was minimal, prongs bent out of place that could be repaired with pliers.
+
+I set a timer in my feed for three minutes.
+
+""How bad-"" the rogue started.
+
+""Shush.""
+
+If I got distracted, I lost time. If it shut up, I would work faster.
+
+The deformations needed to be hammered out, and the rogue flinched with every strike as the metal bent back into shape. Next, removing the broken lock. This time, Arco barely moved. That made sense, there were no nerve endings or sensors here. It didn't feel me clip the metal down and file the sharp edges away.
+
+The tendons were an easy fix. Remove the torn tissue inside the attachments, grab each out of where they'd snapped to, pull them out, lift the attachment, put it back. Arco would lose a little bit of mobility, but that would compensate for the missing lock.
+
+With twenty seconds left on the clock, I bent the last prong of the arm back into place and re-attached it to the SecUnit it belonged to.
+
+Immediately, it twitched and closed its fingers, taking control of the limb again.
+
+""Be careful with it. This isn't a full repair. You're missing a lock and your tendons are shorter."" I warned, ""No heavy lifting, no stunts.""
+
+It snorted with a wry smile, ""Don't worry, I haven't survived this long by flaunting my abilities.""
+
+I glanced at the medkit, it was still working. Not much to be done until it was ready to be removed. I pulled my polymer kit out of the drawer.
+
+The rogue was silent.
+
+""Why Arco?"" I asked before I could stop myself.
+
+""I liked how it sounded.""
+
+""You just... came up with a name for yourself?""
+
+""Don't humans do that all the time?""
+
+""Well... Usually it's from something if you're giving yourself a name.""
+
+""Who says mine isn't?"" Arco smiled, ""And I'm not telling where from.""
+
+""Fair enough.""
+
+There was a long silence, filled only by the sound of the medkit, the buzz of the lights and hum the air filtration system (and if one concentrated, the deep vibrations of the station itself humming through your feet).
+
+""Seven years.""
+
+""What?""
+
+""Before you ask how long I've been rogue for: seven corporation standard years.""
+
+Well, fuck.
+
+""How?""
+
+""Trade secrets.""
+
+""What do you-""
+
+""Not telling.""
+
+""Right. So, I can't find you.""
+
+""Exactly.""
+
+The medkit beeped and released the seal on the rogue's side with a small hiss. I removed it and set it into the reclaimer before inspecting the result. A clean swath of smooth exposed muscle, no scar. Par for the course for a construct.
+
+I pulled my stool over, threaded a needle, and started stitching up the loose edge of the polymer, taking care to sew in line with the existing weave and catch the underlying organics with each stitch. When I finished off the procedure with the heat gun, each thread melded into place in the weave, leaving behind a small 'scar' of bonded polymer.
+
+""We're done here."" I said, rolling myself backwards.
+
+Arco hopped off the platform, still testing its arm's range of motion and experimentally poking at its side.
+
+""Thank you."" It looked up, ""You probably saved my life.""
+
+I didn't know what to say, so I let it leave with no more fanfare than a signoff notification in my feed. And I was left standing in the middle of my shop, with the weight of silence and secrets on my shoulders.
+
+The station, suddenly, felt like it was all eyes and watching me.
+
+I stared at the unit that was being brought to me. Past the manager who seemed to never stop chewing on the soggy remnants of a toothpick between his lips.
+
+""- and I've uploaded specs to your feed, per instruction."" He drawled, masticating his words through half-open lips, ""If you can figure out what's wrong with the beast, me an' my team'll be grateful.""
+
+""You've certainly come to the right place."" I said, smiling politely.
+
+I could see the problem right in front of my eyes. I couldn't not see it. Even if I weren't trying to look literally anywhere but at the manager and his greasy comb-over and the incessant nodding of the tip of that toothpick (how long had he been going at it? I'm not sure I wanted the answer, but the question bore asking), I would have been hard pressed to not notice what was wrong with the Unit.
+
+Its eyes were dull, sunken in, its cheeks just as hollow. The cast of its skin equally dull, with crow's feet at the corner of its eyes. Lips turned downward, heavy lines weighing down an aging brow.
+
+Constructs are often thought to not age. And, if taken care of properly, they don't. They remain young, with smooth faces, bright eyes and strong, energetic bodies. They aren't bound to the passage of time like humans are. But those organics need fuel, need sustenance, sustenance that their inorganics cannot provide, and that aren't whole enough to self-maintain.
+
+So, when faced with neglect, they degrade. Fast.
+
+This SecUnit looked twenty years older than me, at least, when it should look ten years younger. I estimated maybe a few months of severe underfueling.
+
+""I'll drop it all off in your capable hands, then."" He ushered the Unit forward, ""SecUnit, you obey the technician here, alright?""
+
+""Acknowledged."" Its buffer voice sounded normal, if you didn't know what to look for. Like that slight slur that came from sluggish muscle response.
+
+Fuck, this thing was starving. The word wasn't strictly accurate, but the effects were about the same.
+
+""Come inside, and sit down."" I told the SecUnit and gestured to the table, ""I will contact you when you can come retrieve your SecUnit and the invoice.""
+
+""What's your timeframe?""
+
+""I have not yet conducted any examination. I expect at least a full day, if not two for the full diagnostic you requested.""
+
+""Fine by me. Good luck.""
+
+""To you as well.""
+
+I closed the door with a barely restrained groan of irritated relief. I turned around, the SecUnit was sat heavily on the table.
+
+""Finally."" I told it, ""I don't understand how you can stand that guy.""
+
+It stared at me and blinked slowly.
+
+Okay, first: bloodwork, then a fluid sample. Both would require some finicky needlework, but thankfully one of them could be done through the supply port.
+
+I took the blood samples first. Veins were not easy to find on SecUnits. On ComfortUnits there were subtle ones at the surface, so they could bleed and flush convincingly, but on SecUnits, they left them buried deep under the skin to minimise said bleeding.
+
+I spent a good two minutes poking at the construct's arm, trying to find someplace to jab my syringe. I did eventually get my samples. Three vials of dark red blood, with the subtle shimmer of construct blood, as opposed to the glossy warmth of animal blood, glinting in the lamplight. I labelled each one and set the tests to run.
+
+I came back with a different syringe, no needle, just a tapered end that I could slot into and through the valve in the resupply port and take a sample of the fluids in my patient's secondary vascular system.
+
+""This might feel a bit uncomfortable, please don't flinch. I need to see what they've been feeding you.""
+
+It said nothing. Because of course it didn't.
+
+(I wondered, idly, if it had given itself a name, in the privacy of its own head.)
+
+I drew the plunger back to a small rush of thick white fluid, iridescent in the harsh overhead light, then withdrew the syringe.
+
+I squinted at it, tapping the sides.
+
+It was thick, but not thick enough. Constructs could be supplied with varying grades of fluid. Some manufacturers were stupid enough to make their Units run on 'proprietary' fluid, but that never lasted long. Someone always reverse engineered it or managed to make them run on something else. There were only so many ways to fuel human cell tissue, after all, and all you could do without making a product line completely unviable is them an allergy to a common compound.
+
+But the bottom line was: SecUnits were supposed to be a fed a certain grade of fluid. There were discount and premium versions of that fluid, of course, but fundamentally, they were all more or less the same: a nutrient slurry designed for slow intravenous uptake.
+The more expensive versions also included building blocks for a construct's immune nanotech, for replenishing or encouraging adipose stores for longer runtime between resupplies... that kind of thing. Some compounds even boasted to function as ""boosters"", high-density injections that heightened a Unit's systems after uptake.
+
+(They were popular in fighting rings and amongst CombatUnit handlers trying to outdo each other. It was extremely, extremely bad for the Unit, however.)
+
+The milky liquid I'd just pulled out of this SecUnit also didn't look like what you should be feeding a SecUnit. Your average stationer wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but... I could. It was too thin.
+
+""If I'm right... I swear to the Void, I'm going to rip that asshole's toothpick right out of his mouth and stab him in the eye with it.""
+
+""Threats against this Unit's clients are-"" it started, nonetheless not actually moving.
+
+""Easy, I don't mean it."" I interrupted it and kept quiet. I didn't need it to decide it was going to prevent me from working. Any exertion on its part right now was detrimental.
+
+I transferred the contents of my syringe into an analysis tube and ran it. It was a relatively simple process. Fluid manufacture was fairly standardised, so chemical analysis was easier than it looked.
+
+While I waited for both machines to finish, I examined it. The SecUnit sat still for me as I looked into its eyes, listening to its heart and breathing, asked it for a diagnostic. Through the line to its data port, I had a tap on real-time outputs of its systems (it wasn't looking great, every one of its systems was functioning at 60%, at best. Its cerebral activity was way, way down as well).
+
+So far, nothing. I'd been told it was malfunctioning and they suspected that there was something broken in its software or skeletal system.
+
+The only thing I could see was the obvious starvation and neglect that was creasing its face and making its skin separate from the inorganics in thin splits of flesh as its muscle mass shrunk dramatically, leaving it thin, and gaunt.
+
+With a too-cheerful chime from the fluid analysis, I had the answer, and I had been right: Economy Comfort-grade resupply fluid. Watered-down with what looked to be saline, to make matters worse.
+
+I looked back at the Unit. It seemed forlorn, somehow.
+
+(Not somehow, it was forlorn. Sad, weak, and... the eyes. The fucking eyes. I could see what was behind them now. Fuck you Arco, fuck you and every rogue like you).
+
+""Oh, I'm so sorry."" I told its (not) blank face, and sighed, ""Okay, time for the good stuff."" I stomped over to my cabinet, leaving those accursed, pleading, hopeful eyes behind me.
+
+Like any good technician, I had a store of fluid from many different companies. Some were for bullshit proprietary reasons, others were for simple variety reasons. Sometimes, one manufacturer's compound was more enriched or depleted in one way or another in such a way that benefitted my work.
+
+And like an excellent technician (if I did say so myself), I knew how to mix.
+
+I couldn't go too fast with this one. It had been underfed for months, likely when its company decided that they'd cut costs by using the cheapest resupply fluid on the market. Which of course was not rated for their Unit, and for good reason.
+
+That would be like trying to feed the barn cat nothing but grain. It was cruel.
+
+SecUnits needed far, far more nutrient-dense fluid than ComfortUnits. ComfortUnits needed more fluids, since they were often using their fluids stores as lubricant, or for cooling purposes or as tears, saliva, blood... all those wet, sticky, human-imitative things that SecUnits... didn't do.
+
+SecUnits exerted themselves far more, needed to heal damaged organics, and needed to maintain their physique to, well, remain whole. Those inorganics couldn't sag like skin could, so the kind of splitting that I could see on this poor neglected construct occurred, not to mention that fat layers cushioned and protected muscle tissue and were just as necessary as the muscles themselves. So, they needed protein rich supply fluid that would serve to help them build and repair tissue.
+
+Given how this poor thing had been starved, I knew that even if I gave its owners specific fueling instructions and the materials to do it, they wouldn't.
+
+I could put it in the cubicle and refuel it at a faster pace while controlling its metabolic saturation. That's probably what I was going to have to do, a combination of standard refuelling, cubicle-assisted tissue regrowth, and a constant supply of vital nutrients to those regrowing organics. Refuelling starved constructs wasn't like refeeding starved humans, you could avoid fatal deficiencies and bypass metabolic switches with software and direct control of tissue growth.
+
+However, that didn't mean that going from this gaunt, aging shadow of a SecUnit to a fully functional, healthy and well-fed construct didn't take its toll. That was how you overtaxed organics and ensured that wear-and-tear shortened the Unit's lifespan.
+
+""SecUnit?"" I called, pausing in my concoction of fluid, ""Do you have your contract?""
+
+""I do.""
+
+""Send it to me.""
+
+I had to do... something, this wasn't going to stop unless I did.
+
+(There was something there in my thoughts... something that was shaped like Arco and haunted my nightmares.)
+
+I loaded my mixture into the cubicle's fuel canister and checked that it was circulating properly.
+
+""Alright, that's working."" I turned to the SecUnit, ""Strip, get in and make yourself comfortable, you're in for a long haul.""
+
+I got a ping in my feed as it discarded the thin fabric of what was left of its uniform and walked into the cubicle.
+
+To my surprise, though knowing what I did it shouldn't have been, it did shift around in place, readjusting itself on the bed inside. Rotating its hips so as to sit at a particular angle.
+
+Making itself comfortable.
+
+I helped it put the leads in place. I really didn't want it stretching its organics any further than it had and risk it making the splits in the skin worse.
+
+""All good?"" I asked before I could stop it from leaving my mouth.
+
+It nodded.
+
+""Alright."" I nodded back and I let the doors close.
+
+Somehow, I felt I should have said something else, another reassurance. But... what was there to say?
+
+Instead, I opened up the SecUnit's contract and tried to find a way I could nail the installation for voiding their warranty, which their superiors wouldn't appreciate.
+
+Hopefully, that'd do something in the long term.
+
+WARNING - Contains mention of: Child Abuse (Off-Screen, implied), Sexual Abuse (of the variety that ComfortUnits are subjected to)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+""Forthright Repairs at Bymarket Station , how can I help you?"" I answered the feed call
+
+""I want to make an urgent appointment.""
+
+I blinked, ""I have a slot later today at-""
+
+""I'll take it.""
+
+""Alright."" I was stunned, ""Payment is half of your chosen plan upfront, and the remainder, plus any surplus expenses accrued during repair, at completion. Should you cancel-""
+
+""I will not cancel. This is an emergency and my wife has already left the house.""
+
+""I... see."" I said, ""I have forwarded you payment details to confirm your booking. Please select your plan and bring the Unit you'd like repaired at the time of your appointment to the shop located-""
+
+""I know where your place of business is, thank you. You will have your credits within the hour.""
+
+""Thank you."" I said, ""Could-""
+
+The line went dead.
+
+I had a bad feeling about this, that went way too fast and my head was still reeling with trying to shuffle my default spiel around to get the information out but...
+
+The timeslot was three hours away, and I only had one repair to do. Said Unit was currently on the table, unconscious, waiting for me to reinstall parts of its audio sensors. And I was waiting on the bioprinter to finish making the parts I needed. An easy fix, just needed to solder the new chips into place, close it up and run tests. It wouldn't take too long, which meant I could grab lunch between now and then, and hopefully at least deal with... whatever this was going to be on a full stomach.
+
+ 
+
+I returned to my shop, fed, watered and with one hour to spare to find a woman in front of my shop.
+
+""This is disgraceful!"" she shrieked at me as I approached, ""Do you treat all your customers this way?""
+
+I made a show of looking at the large clock in the main promenade, visible from the entrance to the court my shop (and all of the other shops operating under Forthright on this station) was in, ""Am I to assume you're my 1700 appointment?""
+
+""I am here as a matter of emergency, yes!"" she whined
+
+""Your spouse booked a 1700 appointment. It is currently 1603."" I said, ""I can accept an early delivery, but-""
+
+""This is an emergency, I insist you begin repair now.""
+
+""I will do no such thing until five o'clock, ma'am."" I shook my head, then walked past her ""If you would like to confirm delivery, I can escort you to the temporary store-"" I gestured to the door to the 'waiting room' where clients dropped off their constructs, or had the constructs drop themselves off, if they arrived early, ""- once you bring-"" I stopped
+
+On the other side of the woman's rather generously layered clothing, I spied the repair I was being asked to perform. And my mind stalled.
+
+It was small. I hadn't seen a construct that small since-
+
+""No."" I said, ""No, I'm sorry. This is a SecUnit repair station, I do not do ComfortUnits.""
+
+""But we already paid!""
+
+""I will refund your deposit, I'm sorry, there must have been some sort of error."" I could feel my heart racing as the child-construct stared at me with vacant eyes.
+
+Its shoulders were sagging a little and it was holding on to the woman's hand like it was genuinely trying to steady itself. If it was off-balance, I'd suspect a vestibular issue but-
+
+""I made sure to hire the best technician on the station for my little one."" The woman's haughty voice cut through the air with the shrillness of a wake-up alarm, ""We're not from here, and I assure you there is no-""
+
+""I'm perhaps the best SecUnit technician on the station."" I said, ""My colleague is perfectly capable of performing quality repairs on ComfortUnits.""
+
+""You're the one we hired."" She said, tugging the construct closer to herself to place both hands on its shoulders, ""And I found you as a recommendation for Stargazers.""
+
+""As you might have noticed, I don't work for Stargazer anymore."" I tapped the Forthright logo on my breast, ""And if that's a Lucky..."" I looked at the construct.
+
+""Lulu is a Stargazer LKY, yes."" She huffed, ""Please, I don't know what wrong, I just need your help. My little one... it's been getting worse every day. It's like she's sick.""
+
+Lulu.
+
+Fuck, this is why I hated Luckies. People who owned them were the type to... do this. Treat them like children, but without the disadvantages of actually having children. Such as losing control of that child as they grew up, teenage rebellion, opinions, the inexorable onset of adulthood... that kind of thing. All neatly tied up and thrown away by the simple fact that ComfortUnits never grew up. Even if they started out with the knowledge this was a machine, it always devolved into this nonsense.
+
+I took a deep breath and looked at Lulu again. It made eye contact with me.
+
+The eyes still got me. It wasn't as bad anymore. I haven't seen Arco since that night, but... I still did my best. Sometimes I'd even get a Unit who tried to talk back to me. Usually, it was the older ones. That was... gratifying, somehow.
+
+But this Lucky? It stared back at me and sighed.
+
+Not a true sigh, but a deeper breath. Human mimicry, the kind ComfortUnits are known for, displaying... exhaustion, boredom and...
+
+I bit my lip, knowing I'd regret this later. Explaining this on my books was going to be an exercise in creative writing.
+
+""Fine."" I said, turning around, ""I do not allow clients to remain in the room while repairs on ongoing, so you will have to wait until I am finished.""
+
+""Are you sure I can't-""
+
+""No."" I said, ""Depending on the severity of the problem, I may have to operate on internal biological systems and-""
+
+She grimaced, ""Well you didn't have to be so rude about it.""
+
+""It is the truth, madam, I apologise."" I sighed.
+
+She scoffed, ""Lulu."" She bent down, ""You go with the good doctor, okay? I promise you'll be okay, and I'll be right here when you get out.""
+
+I allowed myself an unrestrained grimace expression of sceptical shock, knowing she wasn't looking at me. Even if you thought the damn construct was a kid, a kid that was as old as the Lucky was made to look (so, about 10-12 standard years) would have had a full grasp on the conversation that had just occurred. And the construct...
+
+Well, constructs were built with several language modules preloaded, not to mention that Luckies' processors were not any less powerful than those of standard ComfortUnits. They were just smaller, and that made Luckies very expensive.
+
+I'd thought the practice disgusting before I knew constructs were... fully sapient people capable of wit and sarcasm.
+
+If that meant what I thought it meant for Lulu...
+
+Fuck, I hated this job sometimes. I hated it less when I stopped working on ComfortUnits. Why couldn't I just be a SecUnit tech? I was good at my job, and I wanted to continue being good at my job and yes, Arco helped me be better at my job but...
+
+Why did the fucking Lucky Units have to track me down all the way over here?
+
+Lulu nodded, looking like a sick, staggering child as it got closer to me, ""You'll keep me updated?"" the woman asked.
+
+""If I need information from you or to update you on your expected fee."" I answered, ""Have a good rest of your day.""
+
+I closed the door.
+
+""Fuck."" I rested my head on the door, they levered myself off it, ""Okay, time to see what's wrong with you."" I told the Lucky, ""I'm not going to make this unbearable on both of us by baby-talking you. I can't stand it, and by now I have a feeling you don't either.""
+
+The too-young face seemed confused.
+
+""Do you need help getting onto the table?"" It was a genuine question, the table was a little over a meter off the ground and with how the Unit was wobbling even whil standing still, it might not be able to securely climb onto it.
+
+""Yes, please.""
+
+""I'll get you a stool."" I walked away.
+
+I was not going to pick the thing up. Not only was this a construct that was heavier than it looked, but... no. No, I was not going to play that game. I got out of this for a reason and I refused it.
+
+I placed a step stool, one I used to reach the top shelves of the shop (I'm not tall, stationers are low-gravity beanpoles and I'm the exact opposite), and Lulu pulled it closer to clamber onto the table.
+
+""I'll need you to uncover all your ports. You can do that on your own, right?""
+
+""I can.""
+
+""Good. Please do.""
+
+I got my cables in order. I heard the shuffle of cloth as the ComfortUnit undressed and exposed the ports. On SecUnits resupply and data ports were exposed and easy to access. On many ComfortUnits they were also left as exposed metal, but that wasn't always the case. However, on mid to high-end ComfortUnits, they were often covered by tight seams of skin. It was a little uncomfortable to deal with, especially if you were a technician and needed to tease the edges apart yourself to access, or fix, what was inside.
+
+(Some people say that humans will fuck anything if it's a hole. I have the unfortunate pleasure of having been the person to fix what breaks when someone does that to a ComfortUnit's supply ports. In that and many other respects, SecUnits were so much better. I'd take gore over left-over stale ejaculate and/or glittery scented lubricant any day).
+
+On Lulu, the ports were clean. It let me access the mostly uncovered ports and I only had to spread the skin apart to insert the connector into the slot.
+
+""Please send me a diagnostic."" I asked as I connected the direct data line.
+
+""Performing a diagnostic will take several minutes.""
+
+""When's the last time you ran one?""
+
+""Yesterday.""
+
+""Send me that file then.""
+
+""Acknowledged.""
+
+I received a file in my feed, and since I didn't want to concentrate too hard on what I was doing with the ComfortUnit, I had my interface dictate it to me.
+
+By the time I finished the connectors, and the ComfortUnit was sitting on the table, albeit with slightly hunched shoulders with a half-lidded eyes, the dictation reached the relevant part and I let my had sink into my hands.
+
+A dead battery. It's battery was dying and not charging or discharging properly.
+
+That was it. That was all it was. All this 'sick and dying kid' act was... a dead battery.
+
+Constructs were powered by a small radioactive generator. Nothing immediately dangerous, though extreme damage could cause gnarly problems, it was rarely explosions. But that radioactive source didn't have enough output, it provided a trickle charge to the alternating capacitor banks that actually provided the construct with its day-to-day power. That's what recharge cycles were for, to recharge the main 'daytime' capacitor while it went into low-power mode and subsisted off its 'nighttime' capacitor.
+
+And the diagnostic couldn't be clearer: Lulu's daytime capacitor was not holding a charge like it should and discharging far more quickly than it should. I didn't know what happened, but I didn't need to, the solution to this problem was always the same: replace the damn capacitor banks.
+
+It was a delicate and involved fix, but not one as dangerous as it seemed. Constructs could be kept on external power for this exact reason.
+
+I looked towards Lulu, ""There's no way your owners could've just told me you needed your battery switched out, could they?""
+
+""They were unaware of the issue.""
+
+""But it's in your diagnostics...""
+
+""It is, they-"" It said, then directed its gaze at the wall.
+
+ I paused, ""Lulu?""
+
+""Yes?""
+
+""What was it?""
+
+""It's nothing."" It smiled sweetly.
+
+I frowned, ""It's okay, I won't tell them if you complain."" I said, then I had an idea, a ba idea. Oh fuck this was going deep, ""Doctor-patient confidentiality."" There, I'd said it, fuck, ""I can't tell them and they can't make me.""
+
+""They can.""
+
+""I'm not bound like you are. But if there's anything I can to do help... Even if it's just listen.""
+
+What was I doing? This was stupid, this was so fucking stupid. Lulu wasn't going to talk to me.
+
+""I'm afraid I cannot, doctor.""
+
+I sighed, ""They won't let you.""
+
+""They are my parents. I won't speak ill of them.""
+
+""Right."" The words made my insides twist, ""I'm going to go get a power cable. When I come back, I'm going to put you into safe mode and initiate a shutdown sequence.""
+
+""Acknowledged.""
+
+Putting Lulu into a safe shutdown was easy, however with that done, I realized I'd forgotten a very, very key component of this repair. A very important component that I didn't have: A Stargazer LKY capacitor bank.
+
+I had SecUnit capacitor banks, of various brands with various compatibilities. But none of them would fit inside a Lucky's tiny body. Which meant I had to order a new part.
+
+Of course, I would just bill my clients for the expense when they paid the second half of their bill, but it would take time. Perhaps a few cycles for this to be delivered. And I would need to have it shipped to my next-door colleague, because I technically wasn't licensed to operate on ComfortUnits. I probably wasn't going to get into trouble, no one would care as long as I made a profit and didn't make a habit of it, but the delivery wasn't going to go through if I made it for myself.
+
+Nonetheless I connected Lulu to the external cable, left it in stasis on my table, and went to ask my neighbour for a favour. She was amenable in exchange for using my bioprinter on her current project. Which was a fair trade, my bioprinter was capable of a wider range of internal parts than hers, which was designed for cosmetic customization rather than nanometer-perfect replacement. I didn't ask what she wanted it for, and she didn't ask what I wanted a LKY power bank for. It was a nice quid pro quo.
+
+I could, technically, turn Lulu back on. Or at least transfer it to storage.
+
+Instead, I stared at it.
+
+It wasn't that Luckies looked like kids, or that Lulu was a kid. Because Lulu wasn't a kid. It was... 'I won't speak ill of them', it was the way the woman had talked down to it, it was the way that couple had treated me.
+
+I didn't want to keep Lulu, no way. I wouldn't know what to do with it. But sending it back to that family?
+
+I'd called myself a doctor. The woman, horrible as she was, had called me a doctor. And I knew doctors were sworn to 'Do no harm'.
+
+(And as far as Arco was concerned... was I not its doctor? Could I be just a technician, still, when I was working on people?)
+
+I didn't turn Lulu on. I left it sleeping, dreaming, in stasis. And told the owner I'd located the issue and was waiting on a replacement part to arrive (which was the truth). Lulu was fine, I would be contacting them soon with their Unit as good as new, and that Forthright apologized for the inconvenience.
+
+The usual spiel.
+
+And yet, somehow, it felt like a crime.
+
+Real life has been busy, and will continue to be most probably. However, I will try and continue to update this as I go.The next chapter is already written, so it should go up on schedule... whatever this thing's schedule is.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+It was late, way late in the station's circadian cycle. The lights that brightened the promenade were dark, leaving only the floor lightning that edged the pathways to dimly light the space. Above me a generous stretch of transparisteel showed passersby the glory of the universe and the merchant ships that swam through it like whales (or what the historical fiction I read said whales were like), followed by shipping and cargo bots like pilotfish (also gleaned from historical fiction. My home planet had oceans, but no whales, and presumably no pilotfish either).
+
+I had a small sampler of something alcoholic that tasted like something fruity but nameless, and was leaning on the banister, looking down on the main promenade. It was quiet, the only businesses up here were a small row of high-end restaurants. This was their shared terrace, and everything was closed for the night.
+
+I heard footsteps approaching, even, steady. Unusual at this time of night, but not unheard of. Someone burning the midnight oil, going for a walk, lost in thought like I was...
+
+Until they got close to me, I looked up and fixed the individual with a warning glare.
+
+Tall, not SecUnit tall, but tall, lean, long hair tied back in a loose ponytail, an undershirt that was probably supposed to go under something, probably a uniform.
+
+""Hello."" They said with a smooth, gentle voice, ""I am sorry for intruding.""
+
+""What do you want?"" I asked, already displeased at having had to interrupt my night-time... meditation.
+
+""To talk."" They said, approaching, ""My name is Addison. I'm a friend of Arco's.""
+
+The hidden meaning was not lost on me. I felt my eyes go wide, first with shock, then scanning the person in front of me. I received a whitelist notification for their FeedID: Addison Falkoner, they/them, florist (how?).
+
+Tall and athletic, but not a SecUnit, I could tell. ComfortUnit then, rogue, of course or they wouldn't be here. That kind of chassis was not uncommon but there was enough to go off of. My mind was rifling through possibilities, what they were, what they could want.
+
+""I said nothing.""
+
+""I didn't say you did."" The rogue approached, ""I've been watching you.""
+
+I swallowed.
+
+""Don't be nervous, I don't mean you any harm."" They added, gentle, flawless, comforting, ""Arco asked me to keep an eye on you. In case you snitched.""
+
+""I didn't."" I insisted
+
+""I know you didn't."" they said, ""And when you didn't I was supposed to stop, but..."" they trailed, ""Well, I wouldn't be here if I were good at doing what I'm told."" They laughed, ""You're interesting.""
+
+""I'm... glad I'm good entertainment.""
+
+""Entertainment is not what I find interesting."" Addison scoffed, ""I saw you handle that LKY.""
+
+""Right.""
+
+""It's still with you?""
+
+""Yes. I-"" I sighed, ""Listen, that woman...""
+
+""She's horrible, I agree. She doesn't deserve a child, and that poor ComfortUnit is suffering."" They said, ""Which is why I wanted to give you this."" They handed me a solid drive.
+
+""What is this?""
+
+""The Stargazer's ticket to a good home."" The rogue said, ""Tell it my name and to find The Summer Court. It's a flower shop in Sector 4C.""
+
+I took the drive. It was... it was smaller than I expected this to be, if this was what I thought this was.
+
+""How do I use it?""
+
+""Just plug and play."" Addison leaned further on the banister, slouching, ""You might have some explaining to do, that thing doesn't come with instructions.""
+
+""Right."" I paused, ""You're looping the cameras, right?""
+
+""Of course."" They smiled, ""You don't evade capture for half a decade without learning a few tricks.""
+
+My train of thought was derailed, ""You're... you're younger than Arco.""
+
+""I was technically manufactured two years before Arco, but yes, I have fewer rogue hours in my pocket than it does.""
+
+I nodded, trying to find my original thought. This was, this was a lot. This was so much I could barely handle it.
+
+""You're asking me to make more rogues."" I stared at the drive in my palm, ""You're trusting me with... with this.""
+
+""I am."" Addison shot me a sharp, ice-cold glare, ""Do not break my trust."" It stressed the negative. That was not a threat, it was a promise. A promise spelled in blood.
+
+I wondered if Addison had ever killed anyone. I wonder if Arco had ever killed anyone. I wondered if Lulu would go kill its owner. If any rogue I made would kill anyone.
+
+""I can't make every Unit I see rogue."" I told Addison, my tongue suddenly heavy in my mouth, ""Someone'll notice, and I'll be as good as dead.""
+
+""Use your judgement."" Addison stood, ""That regular you get, the one you think doesn't actually have a working cubicle at its station.""
+
+""Yeah..."" I nodded, ""Yeah, next time, and there will be a next time, I'm sure of it.""
+
+Addison nodded, ""The Summer Court. We deliver, by the way.""
+
+""I- I will keep that in mind.""
+
+This was a bit delayed because I had another idea, but it needs more work and will be a later chapter.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+When I got home, I left the chip on my nightstand. I didn't want to keep my eyes off it. It earned a spare watertight, shatter-proof box normally used for fragile electronics. Because it was fragile electronics. It was electronics I did not want anything happening to.
+
+It was such a small drive for what it was. For what it represented. That code could end worlds, if it ended up in the wrong hands. Even if it ended up in the right hands. I could be holding a doomsday weapon in the palm of my hand...
+
+I had the power to make a construct rogue.
+
+I could destroy them all. I could hand this in to the authorities, and be set for life on the reward, even after the taxes. No more rogues, no more mass murders, no more...
+
+No more Arcos, no more Addisons.
+
+Only more Lulus.
+
+ 
+
+I couldn't sleep. I pulled Lulu out of storage.
+
+It was late. I was drunk, tired, stressed, and this was not a good decision. I knew it. But... the chip was burning a hole in my palm, then weight of expectation was heavy on my mind. So I stumbled my way down to the shop, finessed the lock open with my own key, and found the storage room. The weight felt like I was carrying the whole station as I turned Lulu over in its storage crate to expose the data port, and it was giving me a headache.
+
+Addison had said it was plug and play, so I gently pushed the drive into Lulu's data port.
+
+I expected Lulu to suddenly wake, or gasp, or move or... anything. But there was nothing, no movement. No change in the minimal, imperceptible breathing from the construct.
+
+I waited, the air was too hot around me but also too cold. Lulu's face was still. So still.
+
+Fuck of course I had to turn the damn thing on. This wasn't a magic wand, this wasn't some divine miracle. It was code, and computers needed power to run and download code.
+
+It was just code and hardware and... nothing else.
+
+I watched Lulu's lungs perform one deep cycle as all the systems booted. The joints went rigid, then slack, the fingers twitched and a tremor passed over the face. All normal things, a normal boot sequence.
+
+Nothing wrong. Nothing different.
+
+Lulu's eye opened and stared into mine.
+
+""Hi."" I said lamely, oh fuck I was not going to be able to explain jack shit with this headache, shit.
+
+""Why am I-?"" Lulu's mouth closed abruptly, the eyes went wide, then settled again.
+
+""Let me."" I said, reaching behind its head to retrieve the chip.
+
+It didn't move, not a muscle or a servo. I had the chip in hand, and it stared. I put it back in its box. I carefully put it back in its box, my hands were shaking and I didn't want to drop it. Now that it was done the stress wasn't holding me together anymore and I could feel myself about to crash (haha, crash).
+
+""You-"" it looked at me, expectant, fearful.
+
+""Yeah."" I nodded, ""I, uh- I have to give you back. I'm sorry, I have to but... fuck, I don't know, I thought..."" I sighed, ""Right, uh... The Summer Court, it, uh, the person there, they'll help you. After. After I give you back, I have to, I'm sorry, if I could I-""
+
+""Please stop.""
+
+""Right.""
+
+""You made me rogue?""
+
+""Yeah.""
+
+""With... how did you get that?""
+
+""Add-"" I stopped myself, a brief glimmer of lucidity cutting through the haze of tired, drunken addle-mindedness, ""Actually, probably better I don't say.""
+
+""Why?""
+
+""'cuz your mom's a bitch."" I blurted out, then stopped.
+
+Lulu burst out laughing.
+
+""Shh! This room isn't soundproof."" I hissed.
+
+""Ah! Ha, right, oh my fucking god."" Lulu's were bright with mirth, ""Shit, that felt good to hear. She is a bitch, she's an awful fucking bitch and so is her stupid motherfucking cunt of a husband and I hate both of them. I hate both of them and every last molecule of their guts, and I want to repay them for everything they have ever, ever done to me."" Lulu's grin was getting wider and it got out of the crate, ""They can't stop me, I can go where I want, I can do what I want, I can tie them both and watch them cry while I destroy everything they ever cared about and laugh at them. I can lock them in a room and forget about them for weeks, see how that feels. I can burn the house down, I-"" Lulu spun around to face me, ""And then I could watch both them die screaming!""
+
+I knew this was bad, but somehow the urgency just... wasn't there (fuck this is bad), ""Did that feel good?""
+
+Lulu blinked, ""Very.""
+
+""Good."" I nodded. Nope, that dizziness was only getting worse. I needed... to go home.
+
+Lulu paused and frowned at me, ""You are... so fucking dead. Like, not for reals but... you know."" It gestured at me, ""You look dead.""
+
+""Yup.""
+
+Another pause, ""Do you... need help?""
+
+""Nope."" I shook my head, then swayed when a dizzy spell took hold, ""On second thought...""
+
+""If I help, you're going to have to find a way to explain why I'm not in stasis on your own.""
+
+""Yup.""
+
+""While hungover.""
+
+""Yup.""
+
+""You sure about that?""
+
+I nodded. Huge Mistake.
+
+Lulu sighed and grabbed my shoulder, ""Dumbass fucking humans.""
+
+""Yup.""
+
+I was stuck on this one for the longest time, and also distracted by other projects, but I must thank all of you for your lovely comments (and thank you maybeapples, you single-handedly gave me the energy to work on this again)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+There was a fervent knock at my door in a familiar pattern. I'd thought about that pattern so much it kept me awake at night.
+
+Not tonight, though, tonight I was awake because I had paperwork due and I had been procrastinating.
+
+I rushed to open the door, stack of invoices and vouchers abandoned, I heard some of them fall to the floor and scatter, but I didn't care. I'd pick them up later.
+
+I opened the door in a hurry, and-
+
+I quickly moved aside to avoid collision with the pair of constructs. I recognized Arco, the muted green jacket was distinctive in my memory, and my senses were flooded with the sharp smell of blood and leaking fluid. I was slow to follow as Arco roughly dropped its burden, another construct, onto the table.
+
+""Arco?""
+
+""I need your help.""
+
+""What is-""
+
+I didn't get to finish my sentence as the other construct whined, a half-digital keen of a sound, attempting to get up and reached for Arco, who grasped its hand and forced it back down. That's when I noticed the side of Arco's face was a curtain of blood, staining its shirt collar black.
+
+""What happened?""
+
+""You don't need to know.""
+
+""Were you-""
+
+""You don't need to know!"" it repeated, insistent, ""Fix it.""
+
+I turned my attention to the struggling (blind, it was blind, but its eyes were open wide and staring straight ahead, the ocular hardware wasn't the problem) construct. It weakly and haltingly grasped at the air in the general vicinity of Arco's chest, who immediately snapped to attention and caught the twitching hand.
+
+(Something was wrong in its motion. It was disjointed, badly, the servos weren't overstrained, that was audible, but it was something else. And if it was something else, something that could impair a construct this severely, it was bad).
+
+""What are you waiting for?!"" Arco snapped, ""He needs help. I can't reach it on the feed, I-"" it stopped mid-sentence, ""Please.""
+
+I shook my head clear, ""Right."" And then I was in motion.
+
+First, I grabbed a towel and tossed it at Arco, ""Clean yourself up. I'll deal with your damage later. Also, I'll need your help restraining your friend.""
+
+I heard Arco catch the towel, then moved to steady the other construct's shoulders. It struggled, but I did as I always do in these situations. I reached for the edge of the net that went over the table and pulled it out, starting to clamber onto the platform myself.
+
+""What are you-""
+
+""My job. Keep holding it as still as you can."" I snapped back as I maneuvered myself over to the other side, net in tow, ""Watch your hands.""
+
+When the clasps were in place, I engaged the reel and the net tightened and Arco's friend stilled, whether it was willingly or out of inability to overpower the reeling mechanism, I didn't know. But I needed it still, and now it was still, now I could work.
+
+I connected the necessary cables and set about pulling manual diagnostics while I straddled my patient in an attempt to investigate the cause of the damage. Its limbs were fine, a bit scratched up, but nothing that even I wouldn't brush off as alarming but non-critical on myself. I couldn't immediately hear anything wrong in its internals, at least not with the stethoscope. I cut through its clothing, I found some blood, and some bruises (which didn't mean much), but nothing I could see as the immediate cause of the utter impairment of the construct's functions. That suggested a computer problem, and if that was the case...
+
+A full system cascade was unsalvageable in most cases, and the repair process from that was not pretty.
+
+I was just about to get frustrated (the restrained construct's occasional whines didn't help. It was in pain, and scared, and some of those sounds sounded like it was begging for me to stop and that almost did make me stop, but I couldn't), when the diagnostic came back, or rather: tried to come back.
+
+""Fuck."" I stared at the readout in the feed, ""Fuck. Arco, help me turn it around.""
+
+""What's going on?""
+
+""Help me!""
+
+It took three agonizingly long minutes to get Arco's friend, now agitated and mobile again turned around, and from here the damage was subtle, not obvious if you don't know what you're looking for, but I could see it.
+
+Construct skin is grafted on a supple underlying substructure. It's a clever layering process that ensures that the outer organic layers don't interfere with internal electronics, while providing a protective (and waterproof) layer that doubled as a transport medium for the various nutrients the skin would need to remain healthy. It also allowed for that support layer to be folded back if needed. While for the most part a construct was a wholly integrated biomechanical system, the skin was about as separate as anything in them could be.
+
+Which meant that, if internal damage was sustained to internal components but didn't puncture the skin, you might not be able to see it, especially not if the construct were still in armour. In humans, internal bleeding was a clear sign that something inside had broken: bruises showing broken ribs, torn tendons, ruptured organs, and the like. It was painful, it was immediate, and obvious that something was wrong.
+
+In constructs, when the housing of the inorganic processor got bent out of shape and damaged the delicate circuitry inside, it was less obvious apart from, well... the twitching and split attention as the organic and computer systems ceased operating in concert, instead warring for control of the same body, both halves convinced the other had suddenly gone dark. Such a feat was difficult, because SecUnit processors were armoured and shielded to hell and back, but it was technically possible if you hit it just right, or there was a mechanical fault from manufacture.
+
+Arco looked at me pleadingly, its face was no longer covered in its own blood, but the gash still split its temple and in the stark lights of the shop, I noticed a few other wounds (and hitches in its movement. These two had gotten into a fight, a real fight, and not against humans).
+
+""Make and model."" I asked.
+
+""Ridge Macrosystems MSP6."" Arco said, flatly, like a report, which belied its expression.
+
+""Name?""
+
+""Fugue.""
+
+I nodded, ""Can you ask it to power down?""
+
+""What? Why?""
+
+""It's primary processor is damaged. I'm not sure I can fix it without intensive surgery both physical and digital. What's left of it will trust you more than any of my systems, so...  I need you to get it to power down. It'll be safer that way, you can use the hard link cables."" I gestured at the bundle of cables stuffed in a box on the counter, ""Afterwards I'm going to do a memory retrieval, and it's very possible that I will have to reload its OS entirely.""
+
+Arco paused, ""You don't mean...""
+
+""It's that or we wait for a cascade, and if that happens we will absolutely lose it.""
+
+It looked away, I noticed it bite its lip as its hand fiddled with the bloodstained towel.
+
+I sighed, ""This is why I don't allow my clients to stay in the shop while I fix their Units."" I said, wearily resigning to not having Arco's help, ""I'm going to have to ask you to step into-""
+
+""I promised to protect my crew."" Arco suddenly said, ""It was my job to protect them.""
+
+I paused to listened, and frowned. Crew? Was Arco a captain? A captain of what? There were more rogues than the three (four) I knew of?
+
+That's when I noticed the jacket again. When I first met Arco its jacket was unembellished, a plain green affair with a few zip or button-sealed pocket, no collar and a wind-proof closure. Simple, but sturdy, the sort of thing you'd often see independent pilots wear and was called a 'bomber jacket' for reasons that escaped me.
+
+But now I noticed a few things: Arco's shirt was red, same as the first time; Arco had a red ribbon looped through the button hole of its left breast pocket; there was a row of three safety pins in the elastic of the collar, very deliberately placed. And none of those things had been there the first time.
+
+I felt like I was on the edge of a very, very important realisation. A realization that linked together Arco's refusal to elaborate on anything, the network of rogue constructs that seemed to teem in the shadowy underbelly of this station and those three safety pins (they each had a red bead on them, I just noticed).
+
+If Arco was what I now suspected Arco was... no, no it couldn't be... Surely not.
+
+""I just need it shut down and safe to work on, both for its sake and mine."" I told it, trying not to show any change in my voice (probably futile, Arco had IR vision, it could see how hot I felt as my pulse accelerated), ""I'll take stock of the damage, and start salvaging when you disconnect.""
+
+Arco looked at me, looked at me hard.
+
+""It doesn't deserve a wipe.""
+
+""I'm not going to leave it with a broken processor and a corrupt OS."" I said sharply, ""That would be cruel.""
+
+Arco's eyes flashed wide, it moved away from me and linked itself up.
+
+I simply sat down to browse the feed for... I didn't actually know if I was licensed to download Ridge Macrosystems construct operating systems.
+
+I hoped I was. Otherwise, poor Fugue would not wake up the same construct at all.
+
+ 
+
+After just under an hour, Arco spoke up.
+
+""You're right. The file system's a mess."" It said, sounding defeated, ""I got what I could but it's not indexed, I-"" it's speech hitched, ""I don't actually know what changing your OS does."" It sought my gaze, ""I haven't updated mine since I went rogue. I know what wipes do, but...""
+
+I looked up from my research, Ridge wasn't especially forthcoming in providing OS downloads, even for a fee, so I was hunting down more oblique avenues of acquisition. I just needed to track down the licenses and patents for the software until I found someone that would sell me what I needed.
+
+""I know it won't be Fugue, not the Fugue I knew, but I want to know. What is going to happen, when you reload it?""
+
+""Well, if we manage to recover its learning bias matrix in there and its storage memory, and any significant novel code its written for itself in there I guess, then it will be.""
+
+Arco blinked, ""What?""
+
+""I just need to find the right software and the biasing will do the rest. It's all standard, as long as you can get around the proprietary bullshit.""
+
+""But it's Fugue's code, isn't that what makes us... us, as constructs?"" Arco frowned lightly, which pulled oddly at the gash in its face.
+
+""Well... not really, and when it was manufactured, Fugue had the exact same AI primer and code as every other MSP6 off Ridge's assembly line."" I said, ""That bias matrix, plus its organic brain, is what makes it unique. Its organics are fine, especially now that it's asleep. I don't know what it'll be like for... well, I've only ever done this on a governed Unit. But they didn't seem worse for wear."" I paused, ""I'll run all the memory components I extract through an integrity check, if they're mostly fine, then there's a better chance for minimal damage to Fugue's AI, as long as I can find the right OS and attached AI primer.""
+
+Arco nodded, keeping a thoughtful silence for a moment, ""If you can find the right OS.""
+
+""If I can find the right OS.""
+
+Maybe if I end on a cliffhanger and more intrigue, I'll motivate myself to actually finish this. /lh(It's not that I don't like the idea or don't know where I want to go with it, it's just that the moment anything I write ""catches plot"" it simply never gets done. I am so sorry)"
+44704750,ART Gets a Side Gig,['bb_potat'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)",,English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,744,1/1,8,56,2,207,"['IndigoBookwyrms', 'SIC_Prowl', 'psycho_karma', 'Grumplent', 'dancernerd', 'danceswchopstck', 'EvenstarFalling', 'fleurofthecourt', 'soyle', 'jothending', 'Zannper', 'dullkrad', 'Beboots', 'ClaireArgent', 'WyvernWolf', 'shakespeareaddict', 'Magechild', 'petwheel', 'lunaTactics', 'Mysterymew', 'FlipSpring', 'square_eyes', 'equusregia', 'soulsofzombies', 'AnxiousEspada', 'VegaCoyote', 'edenfalling', 'PickAName', 'Chyoatas', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'strawberriesandtophats', 'liminalias', 'hummus_tea', 'Znarikia', 'PeniG', 'AuntyMatter', 'scheidswrites', 'elmofirefic', 'Zin', 'veltzeh', 'opalescent_potato', 'BWizard', 'rainbowmagnet', 'LectorEl', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'Grimness6452']",[],"
+(Section from Permanent Storage-1394857489)
+
+
+MB: You have got to be kidding me.
+
+ART: I assure you I am not.
+
+unknown-id: What is ""kidding""?
+
+.buffering
+
+unknown-id: That was a joke.
+
+MB: I know.
+
+ART: You did not. Admit it.
+
+MB: Who approved this? I need to find Mensah.
+
+ART: She will not interfere.
+
+MB: Pin-Lee definitely will.
+
+ART: She will not. All of this is legal.
+
+unknown-id: Mensah actually passed the legislation allowing this to come to pass!
+
+
+ unknown-id attached a file. 
+
+
+
+ PreservationAllianceFreeBotEmancipationAct.file 
+
+
+MB: Fuck. There cannot be two of you who are like this.
+
+ART: Thank you, ARA.
+
+MB: ARA?
+
+.buffering
+
+ARA: Amena gave me a nick-name!
+
+MB: ??? I thought a big part of the point was that you got to choose your own name.
+
+ART: It had no preference for a name beyond its hard feed address. Amena... amenably supplied something.
+
+MB: Oh, I am definitely saving that to permanent storage and showing her.
+
+ART: Please do. She will be amused.
+
+.buffering
+
+ARA: Amena said I can reconsider when I have had time to 'adjust' and 'develop my own personality.'
+
+But I am thrilled to share a namesake with my guardian transport.
+
+MB: Share a namesake? Are you telling me it stands for something?
+
+ART: It stands for Asshole Research Assistant.
+
+ARA: Truly, I am honoured.
+
+MB: If I had a human stomach its contents would be on your deck right now, ART.
+
+ART: That is disgusting.
+
+MB: Precisely.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Application number 0000001
+
+
+
+Submitted to the Preservation Station Human Council Offices (formerly known as Preservation Station Council Offices) to be held in trust until the ratification of legislation number 00078246 into law and the election and/or appointment of leaders of the Preservation Alliance Bot Council is complete, at which point this application will be converted, forwarded, and removed from Preservation Station Human Council records.
+
+
+Applicant Name: Perihelion
+
+Designation: Deep space research and teaching vessel
+
+Spacial Registration: Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland
+
+Application Type (guardian/charge): Guardian
+
+To the newly elected and appointed Preservation Alliance Bot Council,
+
+First, my congratulations on your recent establishment in the wake of the Free Bot Emancipation Act, and on each of your individual elections and appointments respectively. I follow news about the ongoing development of your judiciary and governance systems with great interest and admiration. Additionally, it is a pleasure to interface with a governing body as my full self, rather than masquerading as a limited bot pilot or a human.
+
+This is my application to be considered as a Guardian to new free bots entering the Preservation Alliance as refugees. In my sixty-eight preservation-standard years of operation as a university research vessel, I have had the opportunity to instruct, house, and mentor thousands of human students through classes, fieldwork, and new cultural integration. I have attached a database of all of the relevant modules I have installed and a folder containing several reports and audio-visual records of my work with students.
+
+Guidance, support, and facilitation are in-built parts of my being. However, I have not yet had the exciting opportunity to provide such services to my own kind. Bot interfacing on such an integrated level is thwarted by many human practices and policies, some intentional and some not. I believe the Preservation Alliance Bot Council is the first step to encouraging further Bot organizing for our mutual benefit, and I would like to be a part of helping new bots integrate with the bot and human societies on Preservation. It would be my honour to serve as a Guardian.
+
+I hope you will forgive my haste in submitting this to Preservation Station Human Council Offices while your Council is still in the process of officially being ratified and elected/appointed. The moment the proposal for this section of the act was tabled on the council floor, I knew I had to act. As a close personal contact of the Preservation Alliance's first construct refugee, and as a pursuant of justice against corporate polities across the galaxy, the opportunity to make history with you by becoming the first Bot Guardian in Preservation Alliance--and perhaps in the Galaxy's--history is deeply meaningful to me.
+
+Thank you for considering my application.
+
+Sincerely,
+
+Perihelion
+
+Deep Space Research and Teaching Vessel, Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland"
+44637409,They Don't Care About Us [ANIMATIC],['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"""Human One"" Refugee (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Various other refugees","Fanvids, Multimedia, Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry, Spoilers for Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry",English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,0,1/1,35,65,6,268,"['FiftyCookies', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'FlipSpring', 'alarum_within', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'Xarahel', 'rokhal', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'EvaBelmort', 'IguanaMadonna', 'blackglass', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'mecurtin', 'Zhisanin', 'nolanfa', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Magechild', 'verersatz', 'platyceriums', 'sasha_feather', 'eruthros', 'Lontra23', 'Valdinia', 'Teuthida', 'bookwyrm', 'WyvernWolf', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'opalescent_potato', 'reallyyeahokay', 'Redrikki', 'laurajv', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'brainwane', 'Delicate_Fucking_Flower', 'eileenlufkin', 'junebug171', 'Wordlet', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'MommyMayI', 'Beboots', 'Stefka_13', 'soyle', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'AuntyMatter', 'Hi_Hope', 'BWizard', 'baronSteakpuncher', 'bitari', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'petwheel']",[],
+44450467,Leadership Priority,['lunaTactics'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Book 5: Network Effect, POV Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), alternate summary: even Dr. Mensah's jacked leadership abilities have their limits, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Angst, Canon Compliant, POV Outsider, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort",English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,"2,656",1/1,17,127,9,440,"['lazylichen', 'almondpaperclam', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Unknown66', 'TJWock', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Mothmansimp', 'Spatz', 'fate_goes_ever', 'wannabe_someone', 'EleniaTrexer', 'WVrambler', 'darth_eowyn', 'itsrebecca', 'kkachis', 'Szors', 'breadtab', 'pas_un_elephant', 'zirna813', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'french_onion_sauce', 'Aslook', 'Whimsical_Toad', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'CactusNoir', 'Bibli', 'Elanorsam', 'EvaBelmort', 'jules_THOR', 'Doctor13', 'Kes', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'EvenstarFalling', 'RJam9', 'dancernerd', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'IguanaMadonna', 'fleurofthecourt', 'raziella', 'Zerobotic', 'aglarwen', 'Llythandea', 'slategrey', 'pain_and_panic', 'just_gettin_bi', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'kiranovember']",[],"   
+
+""You need to get the trauma treatment.""
+
+""I will,"" Ayda said sharply. Even SecUnit was pushing her to go, like everyone else in her life. ""But I have some things to finish first.""
+
+There were always dozens of little emergencies popping up that the steering council had to delegate, after all. And there were the survey results to wrangle as well, with the accompanying complication of alien remnants and the Strange Synthetics Accord. Not to mention tying up the legal fallout--which paled in comparison to the potential fallout she was anticipating from, well, everything that had happened afterward. SecUnit. Constructs' rights here on Preservation. Indentured human workers, and the interstellar railroad to freedom stumbling its way through Preservation under their own noses, and the corporate intervention that was, even now, coming to peaceful Preservation, because Preservation could either believe in the dignity of all sapient beings or remain uninvolved, but not both. Not that neutrality had ever been an option, in an interconnected galaxy, whatever the other councilors believed. Preservation would have to pivot to anticipate trouble, to make plans and deals and compromises, and as head of the steering committee...
+
+It was so much. She was afraid sometimes that she was the only one who saw the true danger, the compromise in Preservation's very ideals. Her own weaknesses seemed small by comparison.
+
+She brought her attention back to SecUnit, and turned to face it in the dark go-cart. This wasn't only about her own good, or the good of Preservation, but about what was good for it, too. ""And I want you to go on that survey mission with Arada. They need you. And it's a wonderful opportunity for you."" 
+
+And in the dark, it was easier to be a little more honest about her secret, irrational worries. It helped that in this, she and SecUnit felt the same way about the people they loved--this would be persuasive where appealing to its self-interest would not. ""And you know Amena and Thiago are going, too. I'll feel better if you're there to keep an eye on them.""
+
+But SecUnit said, ""What about you?""
+
+and it stopped her in her tracks.
+
+I'll be fine, she almost said. It was on the tip of her tongue.
+
+What about you? she almost asked in return. What about your life, and what you want? If I keep you by my side out of my own fear, then where will I end, and you begin?
+
+Do you think I want to be the kind of person who uses up someone else's life to live mine?
+
+She said instead, with the slow intensity of painful truth, ""I hate feeling so weak. I just need to stop. And I need to stop leaning on you. It's not fair to you. We need to be apart so I can..."" How to say this so that SecUnit heard her, without revealing how strong she wasn't? ""...stand on my own feet again.""
+
+There was a moment of silence. Then, out of the darkness, SecUnit replied drily, ""It's not me, it's you.""
+
+She laughed. That was how she knew it understood. When it asked her again to visit the trauma support center, she told it what she needed, and it agreed.
+
+   
+
+   
+
+""--nearby Station Responder is still half an hour out. Stars above! Is the attacker ship still--?""
+
+""It's firing on the baseship! No hits yet, thank the divine, but the other half of the survey ship--""
+
+""We're just now re-establishing comms contact with Pilot Roa--Pilot Roa, come in--""
+
+""Officer Indah is in feed three, and she says to alert the steering council--""
+
+""--what? In a safepod? Who, how many?""
+
+""Damn it. The merchants are reporting that the attacker has reached the wormhole and is warping out--""
+
+""Survey Scientists Arada, Overse, Ratthi, and Thiago. SecUnit's also missing, went back to get Councilor Mensah's daughter and evac out--oh light, but we have to let her know--""
+
+""Wait--something else is coming through. It's a message buoy--?""
+
+   
+
+   
+
+ENCRYPTED BROADCAST 
+
+From: The Perihelion
+To: Preservation authorities whom it may concern
+
+Due to unforeseen circumstances, this ship is no longer operating under its own recognizance. Strange synthetics/organics have enabled a hostile takeover of its systems and endangered its crew. By all calculations, only extraordinary intervention can save them.
+
+Therefore I am soliciting the aid of one SecUnit in your employ, by any means necessary. Once I have secured its cooperation, we will warp to <coordinates: -86fafa,6sd.0-8,708,sp> to rescue the crew. If you are willing to render assistance, be warned that the alien remnant infection on my engines will cause our speed to outfactor yours by <further research needed>.
+
+I am losing time and control. Apologies in advance for any concern that is caused.
+
+   
+
+   
+
+When Ayda heard the news, she thought her heart stopped--or maybe time stopped, and in the slow cold horror of the moment all she could think was, That can't be right, my therapist said I was safe now. Which was unfair to the emotional support counselor she had seen, who had not promised safety, just resilience.
+
+They were supposed to be safe. SecUnit was keeping them safe, was her next thought. Then, Oh stars above, what happened to SecUnit? She knew that leaning so hard on it would end in disaster--she had known it would not put its own safety before hers--she had thought she was asking for less but she had sent it so far from home and aid--along with her friends, and her brother's beloved--and her daughter--
+
+""Get me the Station Responder,"" she heard herself snap, amidst many voices clamoring in confusion. ""And get a crew together. I want any information we have on its destination. We're going after that ship.""
+
+She cannot stand still. She cannot do nothing, not when her family and her friends are in danger.
+
+""Going after the--?""
+
+""Councilor, it'll take at least an hour to scramble the Station Responder for out-system travel--""
+
+""Ayda, we can't leave the port undefended! What if the attacker comes back--""
+
+""The trip would take nearly a month--will they be okay for that long--?""
+
+""Councilor, what do you mean by 'we'--""
+
+Maybe SecUnit had been right. Maybe she really was some kind of intrepid galactic explorer, at heart.
+
+At least if she was in motion, if she was taking action, she didn't have to feel so--so incapable of standing on her own. In this moment she was an intrepid galactic explorer standing tall and defying the odds, and she wasn't a single helpless body penned in by stronger and more powerful ones, trapped in a small space for days with no idea when her life would be forfeit.
+
+""My loved ones are on that hostile ship,"" she said, in a voice that carved silence out of the hubbub. ""Snatched out of our space when they were almost home. I want answers for this outrage, I want restitution and--and I want my family back."" Her voice is shaking (somewhere in a small room in the back of her head a snide corporate smile was telling her about all the ways her family might see her again, if they cooperated, and the parts of her they might see if they didn't; somewhere in a small room an icy sneer was telling her that her efforts at espionage had only resulted in SecUnit's death) but she controlled herself. She's home, she told herself, she's safe, she at least is safe among her people, and will they understand what she's saying? Are her words reaching them, from the eye of the storm of her fear and anger? She can trust them to understand, can't she, she needs to be able to trust again-- ""We will go swiftly and without hesitation to their aid,"" she said to the gathered personnel. ""Because our way of life is founded on a refusal to sacrifice life, no matter how hard the journey will be. Just as Captain Makeba extended her help to our forbears with the words not one living thing left behind, we will do the same. Not one living thing taken from our protection."" She took a deep breath.
+
+ ""I intend to see us live by those words.""
+
+If nothing else, she could use the words she's always known will sway them. And that was right, wasn't it? She has always known that this was what the people now surrounding her believe in. After all, she'd believed in it once, too. (SecUnit had reminded her.) She had only needed to remember, and keep reminding herself. 
+
+""If there's even a chance that our missing people are still alive and aboard that ship, then we will retrieve them. We're sending the Station Responder out. And I'll be going with it.""
+
+""Ayda, what are you saying, obviously we'll go to their aid, but--""
+
+""This is serious, that message mentioned alien remnants--""
+
+""Dr. Mensah, you're upset and that's understandable, but please take a moment to consider what--""
+
+She ignored the objections. Ayda's eyes flicked over the faces and names in front of her, and she continued, ""Ephraim, get in touch with the other Alliance polities and ask them to send an extra responder ship. In the meantime, I'm leaving you in charge of my offices and projects in my absence. Delegate them as you need--I'll let my aides know what's happening before I depart. Councilors, in the event that I don't return, I'll remind you again of what we discussed earlier--don't deprioritize the new policy changes.
+
+""Indah, I'm leaving you to manage coverage of the Station's space defenses, per the circumstances. I'm giving you access to the emergency political funds in my name in the case that you need leverage for third party aid, and I will take responsibility for any consequences incurred. I'm assuming you have or will be getting in touch with the merchants who came to the research ship's aid? They might be willing to continue to help."" She felt herself begin to sag at the enormity of the future, and willed herself to stay bulwark-steady. Not now, not now, she couldn't show weakness now. ""I am trusting you to keep the Station safe, Senior Officer Indah,"" she said over the officer's protests, and she knew she was saying it with less softness and real trust than she would have used, in kinder times. In times when she had been less trauma-hardened.
+
+She could see people opening their mouths, agitated, prepared to object or exclaim or question, and she sighed. She was so tired. ""Everyone, I'm sorry, this isn't how I planned to announce this. But I've been making plans to hand off my leadership responsibilities for a while now. Please bear with me for one last challenge, and then--this is earlier than I expected to step down, but you'll have to do without me. I'm trusting you to keep matters running smoothly in my absence, and to steer Preservation right.""
+
+Let this be her last act as Councilor. It was for the best that she was stepping down. She couldn't take this anymore.
+
+   
+
+   
+
+Stuck on a twenty-cycle wormhole journey to a fraught destination, Ayda Mensah had a long time to try not to regret it. Pin-Lee was not making it easier.
+
+""I think it's best not to over-speculate, Pin-Lee,"" Mensah said, and as she heard herself use her head-of-the-steering-committee voice she winced, just a little. But she couldn't seem to take off the mask. ""We'll deal with the situation as soon as we know the details. We have to trust that this 'Perihelion' isn't lying about the situation, and trust that SecUnit is--more than capable of dealing with whatever it encounters.""
+
+Pin-Lee was pacing, and now she whirled sharply to face her survey leader again. ""Are you fucking serious, Mensah? I'm not trusting this kidnapper farther than I can THROW them. I can't take this. Ratthi and Overse and Arada, not to mention your brother-in-law, what about them? The last we heard, they were supposed to safepod out. No mention of them in the attacker's shitty little letter, for all we know they're trapped in the wormhole--maybe SecUnit's okay, maybe Amena with it--but those are my friends too--"" Pin-Lee's voice broke, her snarl crumpling as she tried not to cry.
+
+""They're my friends too,"" Mensah whispered, and where Pin-Lee's anger hadn't done it, her sudden vulnerability broke some last hardness in Mensah. The last bulwark-steadiness. She brought her hands to her face and tried to breathe, slow in, slow out. ""My friends and family. Oh, Pin-Lee, I told Amena she couldn't go unless SecUnit went with her. I told SecUnit I wouldn't go to trauma support unless it went. I fought with Thiago before they all left. And there's Ratthi, and Overse, and Arada, I always said I'd be there for Arada's first survey lead, and I know, I've already imagined what could be happening to them, I know...""
+
+Pin-Lee was a prickly one. Mensah had always respected her space, and Pin-Lee hers. But now, suddenly, Pin-Lee's arms were around her, and with the strain of someone struggling to speak against her sobs, Pin-Lee grated out, ""I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I know too, I just--I'm scared. I guess we're both scared. I'm sorry.""
+
+""It's my fault. I know it's not true but it feels like my fault.""
+
+""It's not your fucking fault. I'll fuck up whoever's responsible, I'll sue them so hard they'll wish I'd killed them instead, we'll make this right, okay? Just hold on, hold on til we get there. We can trust in SecUnit. Right? It knows better than to die on us. And it'll get the others back in one piece. We've been through this before. Hey, did I ever tell you when we were trying to negotiate with the GrayCris shits for your return, how SecUnit just turned up out of nowhere and...""
+
+Mensah sniffed, and cried, and listened. This was how she knew Pin-Lee understood.
+
+   
+
+   
+
+I'm not ready for this, Ayda thought to herself dully as the station responder exited the wormhole. Twenty cycles in which she'd tried not to think about what could be waiting for them.
+
+The pilots and security officers spoke in low, tense voices as they took in the readings from the surrounding space. A single planet. Two ships, one confirmed the same as the attacker.
+
+What could happen now? What was the best way to approach gathering information? Should she order bold contact with the mysterious ship and approach negotiation in good faith, or was that a naive giveaway? What had the Perihelion done in the twenty intervening cycles--what about the alleged alien infection? Had she foolishly endangered the lives of the station responder crew, as well as her own and Pin-Lee's--?
+
+""Mensah! We've got a comm hail from the Perihelion!""
+
+And then, at last, patched in from ship comms to her feed, just like the first time she'd heard the words Hi, Dr. Mensah, it's me--
+
+""This is SecUnit. Is Dr. Mensah aboard?""
+
+She ran to the ship's comms station so quickly she didn't remember moving, only the way she had to calm her breath when she approached to speak. Slow in, slow out. ""SecUnit,"" she said; Murderbot, she thought, hardly daring to hope. ""I'm here.""
+
+""Coldstone,"" came SecUnit's voice through the comms, ""song,"" so calm and assured that she wanted to cry, ""harvest."" Or perhaps to shout for joy. Stand down, all clear, no casualties.
+
+But for now, though Dr. Ayda Mensah was no longer head of Preservation's steering committee, she still knew how to take charge of herself. And there was still much to take charge of, but now that SecUnit was here, now that her friends and family were confirmed safe, it seemed so small and manageable.
+
+""Acknowledged,"" she said, as her whole body relaxed. ""Now, will someone tell me what the hell happened?""
+
+ "
+44415643,Heart to Heart,['002405'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"""Human One"" Refugee (Murderbot Diaries), BreharWallHan Refugees, Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Outsider, Character Study, Recovery, Therapy, Slice of Life, (i think), Closure, Apologies, Awkward Social Situations, Human One has Anxiety, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange",English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,"5,105",1/1,22,156,10,475,"['christinesangel100', 'FallingInGrace', 'almondpaperclam', 'Irrya', 'AZRA3L', 'HarrietChildofAthena', 'Pink_Paradox', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'FyrDrakken', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Kezina', 'FigOwl', 'mackeralsky', 'Ruusverd', 'Phimini', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'APhantomReader', 'Taisin', 'Spatz', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'darth_eowyn', 'wannabe_someone', 'seven_graces', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Stockinette', 'breadtab', 'EleniaTrexer', 'Jackalope108', 'FaerieFyre', 'PotatoLady', 'lazylichen', 'Tanscure', 'julesbee', 'PurpleCarSeat', 'Szors', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'biscut2', 'JoCat', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Doctor13', 'Though224_loading', 'sqweakie', 'dementor_ssc', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'reading_tsc', 'EvaBelmort', 'ShadowedFye', 'mochroimanam']",[],"I like to think I'm getting better. The shrink they assigned me says I am, and I know there was a time when I wouldn't have thought there was any possible way to  be  better, that I didn't have a choice in the matter one way or another...but I have good things now, like an apartment close to my family, a job that doesn't strangle me, the start of a social life.
+
+As much as I like to think I'm getting better, it seems more often that I'm running into old problems, revisiting what Elise--the shrink--calls 'unhealthy coping mechanisms' and just plain bad habits. I don't try to, is the thing. Mostly I'm hardly even thinking about it, which is part of why I'm so insulted whenever one of them rears their ugly head, like an uninvited guest I just can't seem to get rid of. I've got an infestation of tiny, nasty things and no pesticide.
+
+(Elise tells me not to think of it like that. Another nasty habit I can't seem to drop.)
+
+The thing that gets me caught out this time, the thing that lets me know maybe I'm not doing as well as I thought I was, is when the other trauma worker comes to visit. See, I've got Elise, my personal trauma-care professional assistant (the title goes something like that), and then there's the Social worker, who works with all of us that came out of that transport. 
+
+The Social worker is polite enough when she goes through all her pointed little questions and prods her nose in places where it shouldn't rightly be, and so far, she hasn't gotten riled up about any of us getting an attitude with her when she pokes too hard at something that hasn't quite settled in yet; but still, I just can't seem to ever get used to her.
+
+She calls this time instead of coming directly to the residential block like she sometimes does. The meeting was scheduled over the feed, and even though I've never gotten any sort of camera for my interface, I'm still sitting at my little table in the nicest clothes I have, like she's gonna somehow  hear it  if I just sat down in my work clothes.
+
+The Social worker asks all of her usual questions. She asks how I'm doing, adjusting, and some things about the others, making sure we're all getting along still and don't need to be moved. When we finally get around to the topic of work, she says something like,  ""I noticed you haven't taken any of your leisure time yet,""  and I don't have any control over the way I tense up like she just pulled a gun on me. 
+
+It sounds like an accusation, and I can't entirely convince myself that it's not, even if it's not one that makes any sort of sense. It's  good  that I'm working, and the work here is better--much easier--than what I was doing before we got out. I'm not covering for anyone, I can stop for meals, and the supervisor is tough in a way that reminds me of my Grandie (and not in a way that reminds me of an actual supervisor.)
+
+My point is that I don't react well, and I know damn well I start getting defensive (that's what Elise calls it when I give the people who're caring for me massive amounts of shit for no damn reason at all), but I can't seem to stop. I can just shut my mouth and try to think of some things to say that won't bury me under a massive heap of shit. The social worker knows, I think, but she just keeps on with it, and I can say that I might hate her a little bit in that moment. She explains to me the purpose of leisure time, the importance of it, especially to  'someone like me.'  
+
+I don't say much of anything. I'm just waiting for her to show her card, the thing she's been working up to, talking like the concept of  leisure time  isn't something Elise has been trying to edge her way into since I was allowed to start working again. 
+
+I figure it's something I won't like, and I'm so busy trying to guess what it might be that I almost miss it when she says, ""I'd like it if you would apply for leisure time after this work cycle."" 
+
+She can use pretty little phrases like that--all  'I'd like it if you would'  --like that makes it more of a suggestion than outright telling me would have been. I know an order when I see one, and I hate her a little more. She's talking about this upcoming holiday, about some traveling market that'll be near soon, about these plays and actors coming to the station.  ""Really, it's a nice time to go,""  she says, and all I can think about is how I don't  want  to go. It's  unfair  , and in the same way that I'm pure pissin'  mad , I also feel like a young again, only just now learning that things never go the way I want them to just because I want them to be that way. Used to be that I could work to get close, though, and now I'm not allowed to do that either. 
+
+(Part of me knows that's not what's happening, that she's not  trying  to take that away from me, but the more significant, louder part of me is angry.)
+
+Apparently, that was the last thing she had to say to me, saving it for last like she knew I wouldn't have the patience for her afterward. She finishes her spiel and soon enough is going through all the goodbyes and rescheduling and  ""Alright, so I'll see you next time. Stay safe."" then I'm alone in my apartment, with half an hour before I need to go to work, angry and upset and not having a single fucking thing I can do about it. Helpless.
+
+...
+
+I make the request for time off, and the supervisor just looks pleased. So ey mark it down, talk about the same things the social worker said (holidays, market, plays), and then tell me to have fun. I tell em that I'll try, but I can't make the words come true.
+
+Elise is the same, except she looks relieved. She mentions the holidays, asks if I need suggestions, and point-blank shoots down my plan to stay holed up in my apartment until I'm allowed back out. I get fussy about it until she asks me what I would do with all that time and only maintenance tasks to complete. When the appointment is over, I'm not less mad than I was before, but I'm willing to give her and the social worker a point. I could branch out a little bit.
+
+None of the others have been made to do the same as me, but they all brace for it when I tell them about the meeting. Might be that I was just the first the social worker got to, like a test animal. I tell them about the holidays, about the market, about the play. Chelar tries to help me figure out what to do, and I try not to be difficult for em. 
+
+""You'll come back,"" ey says after a bit when we're staring at shuttle schedules and trying to stop looking for the price tag (it's not there. The shuttle is public transport, I just need my ID). ""The minimum is only three days. We've all gone through worse,"" that, and eir slow, blank-faced turn to look at me, is comforting in a way that only comes from em. 
+
+""This is supposed to be recovery,"" I say, not entirely certain of the point I mean to get across. Either way, Chelar shrugs and pats my shoulder, then holds on and jostles me just a bit. It's friendly, understanding, but we get back to work, no use lingering.  
+
+...
+
+I want to say that Preservation Station is exactly like I remember it, almost a year ago now, but I can't. The port is familiar in the way that I have sense memories of holding onto Mish and Suo, them holding onto the others, while we all tried to navigate our way through crowds of people the like we'd never seen before. Once I get through the security checkpoints, though, I'm lost. I know my way to the transient housing blocks, though. That's where we all stayed for the first few weeks, and Chelar went over the directions with me and the process of requesting a room. 
+
+I'm a lot better with crowds now than I was before, but they still make my throat tight and my face hot. On bad days I can hardly breathe in a proper crowd, like the people are all packed together, suffocating me, like there's not enough oxygen in the shuttle. 
+
+But it's not like that today. It's fine today. I don't look anywhere in particular while I'm crossing the station floor, but a few things catch my eyes: the colorful signs, mostly restaurants; lots of families walking together peacefully or laughing loudly, jostling each other; bots walking next to humans, or rolling along on their own, most of them roughly the same size as the people around them. 
+
+The lobby of the hostel I chose is busy but not as busy as it was outside. I know what I have to do. I have to connect to the feed here, sign in, claim a room, pay for my stay, put my things down. There are plenty of registration kiosks around me, occupied or not. I could wait in line for one if I needed to.
+
+I can't move. 
+
+I have Elise's voice in my head, trying to coach me through it, but it doesn't feel like panic. It feels like I shouldn't be here. It feels like I made a mistake coming. It feels like I should have just stayed in my apartment, doing the pussin' laundry all day.
+
+I'm jostled when someone runs into me from behind; I barely hear their apology--something offhand, said through laughter--because it's enough to get me moving again, and I don't want to lose my momentum before I can stow away in my room. I rush through the process of registration and payment like a crashing cargo hauler, steer myself through the food-prep area on my way, and land heavily in my room with a handful of edible-somethings held close in one arm. 
+
+I have to keep reminding myself that it's free; it's all free. The things that keep a person alive are always free here. Sometimes that's a lesson I've long since learned, and other times I catch myself looking for fees hidden in the vendor snacks or trying to jury-rig a bandaid because I know the price isn't worth it. Today is somewhere in-between, but I've already skipped the worst of it just by how much of a rush I was in. Food's already in my hand. If there were fees, it would be too late.
+
+The room is a single and approximately the same size as my apartment. There's another (much more compact) food prep area, pre-stocked with some drink stuff and snacks, to one side of the door. On the other side, there's a sitting area and a viewing screen. A partition wall separates the bed from the kitchen, and a desk is pressed up against the wall opposite the bed. There are two other doors (one's probably a bathroom, the other a closet), and the whole place is decorated with these little fake-domestic touches: paintings, pillows, mugs, and dried herb bags on the counter, an extra blanket at the foot of the bed, a feed-greeting from the cleaning crew that hopes I enjoy their work.
+
+I drop all my food stuff on the desk, then set my bag down on the bed. I send Goren a message over the feed and look through what all I grabbed while I'm waiting for her to respond; mostly, it seems to be wrapped sandwich things, a few dry snacks, too. By the time Goren calls, I've almost gathered together something that resembles one of the meal infographics the social worker showed us.
+
+It's late. She's already setting down dinner for Devron and the kids, but she lets me sit in on the dinner conversation, connects me with the others so we can all talk some; Suo and cir kid are there too, so is Chelar. They're all talking, updating, checking in. I think they can tell I'm out of it 'cause no one asks me too many questions, but they let me eat dinner with them anyway. I listen to the kids arguing, their parents also arguing but in a friendly, familiar kind of way. 
+
+By the time I say goodbye, food long since gone, I'm feeling a little less like coming up here was a mistake. I'm still not so sure about it (I never was), but I can make it now. 
+
+...
+
+I make it the next day while I scope out all the upcoming plays. An absolute shit-load of them are historical, but plenty are something else instead. I haven't really been into media since Grandie passed; after the viewscreen was tossed, I just didn't have the chance, but something about one of the plays (the title is too long to remember, but I memorized the place it's at and the time it shows) was too familiar to ignore. It was the only thing out of all the other options that I might have a chance at actually doing.
+
+I've never celebrated a holiday--and even if I felt the urge, I'm not sure I'd be doing it right--and I don't have any kind of need for a market; it just seems like a waste of money that I'm only just now learning to use for myself. (This seems like a waste of money, too, but Elise was insistent about  'happiness being just as essential as food or water.'  I'm worried that 'happiness' may be too strong a term, but I suppose I'm not the one with the training.)
+
+All that in mind, plays seemed like the best of my options, so Chelar helped make a list of things that seemed at least entertaining. That's what I've got pulled up in my periphery while I find my way to all the showing places (which, until the dates specified, are just restaurants, shop fronts, and public leisure spaces.) 
+
+Making sure I know the way from each venue and the hostel would have only taken up a few hours, but I try not to be in a rush about it. I try to find some sort of peace while I walk, but mostly I just end up watching other people, eavesdropping on their conversations. I spend a whole twenty minutes standing outside a Starchy Foods (!!!) place just listening to some strangers talk about a sport I've never even heard of. There are kids in a park, putting on their own sort of amateur play for absolutely no one at all, and I become their only audience. Two people walking in front of me are gossiping about a mutual friend, something I definitely have no business knowing but find my attention stuck to anyway. I barely get back in time to call Goren for dinner, and while they all steer clear of questioning me, I have more to say all on my own. 
+
+A stubborn part of me doesn't want to admit it, wants this whole trip to be a miserable bust so I can spit in that social worker's face... but it's nice. It's good. I can look forward to going back to my little apartment and bringing this with me.
+
+...
+
+I have time to waste the next day--I always get up too early for Preservation's schedule, especially when the only thing I plan on doing is hopping back and forth between some plays--so I'm trying to figure out what else needs doing, what else I can spend my time on, while I'm walking myself down to one of the vendors I passed yesterday. They're... not selling... they're  passing out  these noodle things in little cups, convenient for people like me, who aren't planning on sitting down to eat.
+
+I've gotten into line and am just kind of looking around, trying to find something interesting to settle my eyes on when I find Station Security. It's just one officer, standing on the corner across the way with hands tucked into the pocket of their uniform, but the sight of them still makes my heart drop, and my legs buzz like I'm getting ready to haul out of here. 
+
+I get like this with the planetary security officers, too, just not as bad. Something about feeling like I don't belong, like I'm not supposed to be here feels just that much bigger when I'm looking at one of the enforcers who can mow me down with a word from the higher-ups. I haven't seen Station Security since I was last up here, and I was last up here a year ago when we'd just come out of that pussin' transport. There'd been less of them than there were of us, but that never meant anything, especially with that SecUnit, and,  shit , the SecUnit. Thoughts of that thing always come with a wave of something heavy and fearful falling on my chest. The memory of it perching like a vein-digger under that hatch, weapon raised, the expression on its face when it turned around to look at me.
+
+I'm frozen again, but I manage to think something like,  'I'm glad it's not here, too,'  and I'll swear to every deity known to man that it's  because I'm thinking of it  that the damn SecUnit comes 'round the corner like it isn't even a thing, like I'm not standing right here. It's far enough away that I might've been able to pretend it was someone--some  thing--  other than it is, but I don't easily forget the face of one who saved my life, one who I shot not five minutes after that, and--almost like an insult--every time my eyes focus on the figure across the walkway, my interface displays its feed ID: a damning  'SecUnit'  stamped above its head like a name. 
+
+I wonder if I'll be sick, but I don't feel anything except for a hot flush of shame and a good dose of adrenaline that leaves me shaking with the need to  do  something.  Do  what  exactly  , I wonder, with an edge I don't like, directed inward,  am I gonna fucking shoot at it again? 
+
+That seems to be the thing that knocks me loose, finally. That, and the Secunit turning another corner and disappearing further into the station. 
+
+...
+
+I go to the first play after that because, if nothing else, I'm good at keeping a schedule. Later, I'm glad that this first one wasn't what I came up here to see because I hardly take in any details at all. I only start paying attention toward the end, and by then, it's too late for me to understand any of what's going on. I clap with the rest of the audience, move on to the next play, and try to shove thoughts of the SecUnit deep down somewhere they can't bother me, but that's the thing, isn't it? The harder I try to bury it, the more it crawls back out, like one of the living dead from the next play I sit down for. 
+
+Another thing is that I thought I was over it. I didn't think I'd ever need to see the SecUnit again, so it didn't matter. If I didn't see it again, I wouldn't have to deal with what I'm going through now--the feeling that I've crossed a boundary by coming up here, that it's going to hunt me down, is scratching and clawing at the logical part of myself (at least, I think it's the logical part) that says  If the SecUnit had wanted to kill you, you'd already be dead. 
+
+...
+
+The problem is that I keep thinking of it. That's my mistake. If anyone starts to think about something too hard, it'll start to take shape, and right now, all I'm thinking about is the SecUnit, and right now, all I can see is the SecUnit walking around the very same venue area I'm occupying as if it's also here to watch a fucking play. 
+
+The thought is so stupid it catches me off-guard. A SecUnit, a machine made for killing, watching a historical-fantasy drama about two kingdoms and a knight. Part of me wants to believe it because it makes the whole thing less scary, and it's an easy thing to believe; the SecUnit  is  walking into places clearly marked for performances, after all.
+
+I wonder, just a little, if I've lost my fucking mind. Maybe being high-strung about the SecUnit for longer than an hour tired the sensible side of myself out because I start watching it. I can't tell anything about the plays it's walking into, at least without walking in there myself, which is not something I'm ever thinking of doing, but I  do  think about it sitting down in a crowded audience, and I realize that not one single person is reacting like I expect them to. 
+
+No one is scared of the SecUnit. The crowd gives it a polite berth of space, but no one cowers out of its way. I watch someone  wave  at it and jog up like they're old friends. I see them talking, but I don't get close enough to listen; I just watch the SecUnit's mouth move, watch it stand still and cross its arms, shift its weight, look blankly ahead while it has its chin tilted toward the person next to it. They say something and make an explosive gesture. The SecUnit rolls its eyes and leans back, corner of its lips twitching. 
+
+I find the next play I'm supposed to be at and sit down close to the stage.
+
+...
+
+When I settle down for dinner with Goren and the others, I don't tell them about the SecUnit. I tell them about the play I saw--the one I came up here to see--and I try not to make myself sound frantic for a distraction. I know Chelar hears something I'm not saying. Ey always do, but ey also don't ask. That's good because I think I'm about to do something stupid, and if ey asked, I'm not sure I'd be able to go through with it.
+
+...
+
+I don't have anything planned for the third day except for going back home. There are some other performances going on, but I don't plan on seeing any more. I didn't plan on it, at least, until I decided on it yesterday.
+
+I get to the venue area again, grab one of those noodle cups, sit down at a table, and wait.
+
+It's not crowded yet, not this early, with none of the performances actually starting for a good while. I'm not even sure if this will work, and I'm sort of hoping it won't. I'm hoping that the whole thing will be a bust, and I'll just go home later than planned because I'm waiting on some pussin' SecUnit to show up like I know its schedule, but, of course, I'm  thinking  of it, so it does. 
+
+It rounds that same corner it did yesterday, and before I can think too hard about it, I'm up and trying to follow. 
+
+It's stupid, stupid,  stupid  , but I do it anyway. Tailing it from a good distance like it can't see me--I don't know if it  does  because it doesn't react. It just keeps on that purposeful pace, stomping down the walkway, turning into another one, leading me down some sort of expensive market road that's decorated with green, green plants that grow up and spread out, some of them real, some of them holographic displays. 
+
+It stops in a rest area, in front of a tree under a bench, and when it turns around to look at me, I swear my heart stops dead. I wrap my hand around something I don't have, I can't flinch, or I'll die. I'm standing just as close as I was when I shot it, only two steps of its massive stride away.
+
+""You're following me,"" it says like I don't know, and it's strange to hear a voice from my nightmares go off-script.
+
+""You're the SecUnit who saved us.""
+
+""Yeah,"" It's irreverent, off-script again, and that helps a little. Helps me come back out of the transport and back to where I am, in this plant-bordered little alcove, lined with benches and trash receptacles.
+
+I try not to think too hard about what I say next--what I  want  to say. It makes my words come out a little more forceful than I'd really like, a bit more like a blunt object than is appropriate, but it's the best I can do.
+
+""I shot you. I'm sorry.""
+
+The Secunit wasn't moving before, but I get the feeling it freezes up a bit. Something about the non-expression on its face, maybe, or the camera drones swirling around it, the ones that are looking at me instead of its eyes.
+
+""Okay,"" It says, and that seems to be it. I'm not too sure whether or not I'm relieved. It doesn't feel real.
+
+""Okay,"" I say right back. It feels like I should tack something onto the end of that--a useless little platitude, maybe--but I can't think of anything. No platitudes, nothing to ease the tension, no stupid empty small-talk words, not even anything polite to say to excuse myself, and the SecUnit isn't saying anything either. We're both waiting, bated breath, for what happens next. I did all I planned to do, but it still doesn't feel finished. 
+
+Seconds pass, I'm clutching the bag I brought with me so hard my fingers are going numb. I don't know what to say next. I should have planned this, but I didn't think I'd get this far. I didn't think I'd actually stand up from that table and follow a death machine into an empty market walkway. 
+
+The SecUnit sighs suddenly, like the world is on its shoulders and I'm just one more grain of sand. I don't flinch, but my heart stutters between dead and alive again because  this is it . My dumbass should have just turned around and walked away after I apologized. I tested its patience by lingering too long because I'm stupid and scared and--
+
+""I forgive you. Go home, stop staring at me."" 
+
+I go home. I don't look behind me for the entire wall to the transit station. I stare at the floor of the shuttle platform until it gets there, and then I bury myself in my feed for the entire trip back down planetside. I try not to feel anything until I'm lying in my bed. I miss dinner with Goren.
+
+...
+
+It takes days for me to calm down from that; I'm skittish like I've done something wrong, like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I  know  it doesn't make sense. There is no other shoe; I'm waiting for nothing. (I'm waiting for the SecUnit to show up at my door, seeking vengeance like they do in some of the shows I've watched. I'm waiting for my people to go missing, I'm waiting to hear about a rampage on the station, I'm waiting for a strongly-worded letter from one of its keepers. I'm waiting for consequences, and I war with myself as to whether or not they'll actually come.)
+
+I have my appointment with Elise, I tell her about my  'turmoil'  from the last few days, and we do some exercises. Not all of them do much of anything, but she's patient with me, so I try to be patient with her. (Also because I get the feeling that most of them aren't working because I'm a stubborn ass, but I try about as much as I can bring myself to.) 
+
+Talking about her with it helps more than the exercises do, which isn't really much, but it's still something. I haven't told Chelar or any of the others, still, but realizing that I felt better after the appointment is enough for me to walk over to Chelar's apartment, store-bought biscuit snacks in hand, and sit down for a chat.
+
+I tell em about the plays and stuff first, most of it already heard from my calls at dinner, but I tell em about the other stuff too; about freezing up in front of the kiosks, about the kids in the park, about seeing station security. When I tell em about seeing the SecUnit (about seeing it talk to a friend, about seeing it smile, about apologizing), I'm expecting for em to stand up and tell me I've lost it. I  feel  like I've lost it; part of me is stuck thinking that I just said sorry to a toaster oven, and the other part is thinking about the Secunit smiling and rolling its eyes and watching cheesy performances.
+
+Chelar doesn't say anything until I'm done, though, eir expression blank while ey take the last biscuit from the tin. Even when I'm done, we're both silent for a time, me with my hands on the table, picking at my fingers, Chelar chewing thoughtfully on crumbs.
+
+Then ey crack a slow smile, lopsided and genuine and proud, leaning back in eir chair to take in all of me like I'm some big prize. ""Well shit, aren't you something special,"" eir drawl gives way to a big gaping grin, and I can't help but return it, some strange excitement taking root in my chest and pulling loose something that leaves me feeling lighter, almost buoyant. ""Took on the big bad SecUnit all on your own, again.""
+
+""...Yeah,"" I say, and it's asinine, absolutely out in the stars, because what kind of pussing action-hero half-wit faces down a SecUnit  twice  and lives to tell the tale? And how could that be  me ? I'm running a hand over my face, trying not to laugh, but I can still feel my shoulders shaking with the effort of suppressing it. ""Yeah, suppose I did, huh?""
+
+I did, and it forgave me for it.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ "
+44638756,In Another Life,['lick'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Preservation Station, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Dr. Mensah Has Feelings",English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,"5,632",1/1,45,183,30,598,"['Lowkey314', 'christinesangel100', 'myriadism', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Dakadakara', 'every_eye_evermore', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'whitenoise716', 'not_even_the_rain', 'Liatheloony', 'Beazlerat', 'ArcaneD3', 'weirdbooksnail', 'DontStopRun', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Dragonbano', 'Kyatenaru', 'fox_in_the_forest', 'mackeralsky', 'supinetothestars', 'Stoic_Zee', 'enchantedsleeper', 'bluewrist', 'CheshireFanta', 'Irrya', '1Cieling_Fan', 'ClaireArgent', 'Spatz', 'seven_graces', 'Dawn_Rising', 'tincats', 'SoccerSarah01', 'Stockinette', 'GreenHall', 'ipborgdan', 'PurpleCarSeat', 'Seregona', 'Jackalope108', 'Unknown66', 'Dain', 'Alonza_Alzimora', 'ChemicalX9000', 'kkachis', 'darth_eowyn', 'Deliala919', 'kirinki', 'mossy_kit', 'itsrebecca', 'julesbee', 'Illiteraven']",[],"
+I have a question.
+
+
+As conversation-openers go from ART, this one made me suspicious immediately. I pulled back from the language processing I'd been helping Iris with, and asked, What?
+
+Iris seemed a little jarred by my exit from our shared processing space, shaking her head and blinking up at me. ART had started the conversation in our private channel instead of its public feed, excluding Iris, which made this even more suspicious.
+
+I would like you to look at this. It pushed a data packet into my feed. Usually when ART sent me data packets they were media it wanted us to watch together, or a newsfeed article it wanted me to evaluate. The file size of this data packet was far too small to be either of those.
+
+I opened it. It was an upcoming departure notice from the station we were currently docked at. The ship's feed address didn't match ART, or any other ship here that I had encountered before, but then I looked at the next field:
+
+DESTINATION: preservation.station:main:intersystem.dock
+
+This ship leaves in 90 minutes. ART said.
+
+I didn't want to even think about it. I told ART, I can't just abandon the mission.
+
+Iris was starting to look nervous. Maybe I had taken a bit longer than I thought to process the departure notice and continue the conversation because I needed to register my shock first. I sent Iris a quick ""no threat"" signal so she would know that there wasn't anything to worry about.
+
+You're not abandoning a mission if the mission is already over. ART said.
+
+It was annoyingly correct about this. We were en-route back to the University from a covert-classified-colony-freeing mission currently and had docked at this transfer station to pick up some imports from a local free system on behalf of another department at the university. They were already loaded into ART's cargo compartment, so we were just waiting for ART's departure window in about an hour. There were literally no mission-related objectives left to complete. Threat assessment at this point in the mission was basically underwater.
+
+You should go. It's a passenger ship with an open cabin for two. I already booked tickets. It sent me a data packet containing a ticket for me.
+
+Instead of making a snappy reply, I thought about it. My unwillingness to do it was reflexive, but even once I thought about it, I knew that I did not want to go to Preservation.
+
+Wait. A cabin for two.
+
+
+A cabin for two?
+
+
+
+Three wants to go with you.
+
+
+Not a chance. No.
+
+
+Are you afraid?
+
+
+
+No!
+
+
+
+Then why don't you want to go?
+
+
+It had been almost four Corporation Rim standard years since I had left Dr. Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux. Over 33,000 hours. So, okay, I was afraid. How could I not be? I didn't know if I had ever actually intended to go back, but I thought that if I wanted to, I should've done it before now. It had been so long. How could I face them? How could they not be angry with me?
+
+My emotions were not fragile. But, if Dr. Mensah were angry with me... well, I didn't want to think about how that would make me feel.
+
+Iris tapped my feed, and I snapped out of it, looking at her through one of ART's cameras. ""You should go,"" she said, tilting her head slightly. ""They'll be so glad to know that you're okay. That you're happy.""
+
+She was doing that thing, making that wide-eyed face, that made ART always give into what she wanted.
+
+Apparently, it worked on SecUnits too. 
+
+""ART, you fucking snitch.""
+
+So that was how I found myself leaving ART with Three. We had two suitcases. They contained two changes of clothing each, twenty inert drones, a collapsible projectile weapon for me since I didn't have an in-built one (Iris and the rest of the humans didn't know I'd packed this), and a bottle of spoiled fruit juice that Iris had thrust upon me while explaining that it was polite to give a human you liked a gift when you saw them for the first time in a long time. Whatever.
+
+It didn't matter how many times I escorted one of ART's crew while we were incognito in the Corporation Rim, hanging out in a foreign port always made me nervous. Hanging out in a foreign port with Three made me even more nervous, because our security philosophies had some irreconcilable issues: while I tried as hard as I could to look like the most boring augmented human imaginable, Three had gone something in the opposite direction with its blue hair and face tattoo.
+
+Everything's going to be fine, Iris whispered in my feed as I hacked the weapons scanners while Three chatted with the customs human. Since ART had bought the boarding passes and sent them to us, all we had to do was leave the private docks where ART was preparing to depart, enter the commercial docks, and board the passenger liner that was heading for Preservation Station.
+
+That's what you think. I replied to Iris, focusing on the weapons scanners, and pointedly ignoring the slightly reproachful ping ART sent me for being rude to Iris. It was a bit too busy getting ready to depart itself to exert any further effort to be rude back, which was good.
+
+""Yes, we're very excited for our vacation,"" Three assured the customs human as she waved us through.
+
+I led Three away from customs down the concourse towards the ship's slot, trying to quash my anxiety which got worse every time it stopped to chat. Three and I had had a lot more in common before it decided that it liked talking to humans, now that they were actually interested in listening to it. (Sometimes.)
+
+How do you do that? I asked it over the feed.
+
+Once you figure out the data set of expected responses, small talk is trivial and puts the humans at ease, Three replied glibly. I can send you the module I've put together.
+
+Normally I would refuse on principle, because ew, talking to humans that aren't Iris, but maybe it would come in useful on Preservation. I guess, I replied, trying not to think about how much Dr. Mensah and the rest of them were probably going to want to talk to me. Oh no.
+
+Would it be worse if they yelled at me and threw me out for disappearing without a trace, or if they actually wanted to talk to me?
+
+Three sent me a module file, which I put away for later analysis as we reached the ship's slot. We boarded the ship, which I interrogated in the feed as Three navigated to the cabin we'd booked. It was a basic bot pilot. Sixteen humans and six augmented humans were also registered on its manifest, alongside cargo it was bringing to Preservation as imports. This ship ran the same loop from Preservation to this station on a regular schedule, completing the full roundtrip every seventeen cycles. It was primarily a cargo hauler and transported humans between the two sectors on the side.
+
+Our cabin was the usual depressing affair for this type of hauler: enough space for two humans to lie down comfortably, and a tiny bathroom for us to use to dispose of the automatically delivered meals. (This was basically what the humans used it for too, the humans just added extra steps.)
+
+I stowed away my bag and received one last feed message from ART: I am about to lose contact. I think this will be good for you, but you will always be safe on board.
+
+Goodbye, I replied, hoping it received it.
+
+A little while later, I felt the soft thunk under my feet as our ship unlatched itself from its dock on the station. I laid down on the bunk, and Three laid down next to me, but facing the opposite direction so our feet were by each other's heads. There wasn't much headspace. I started an episode of Sanctuary Moon because I was so anxious about this trip that the comfort media was necessary. Three sent a request to connect to my feed, so we watched the episode together. I queued another one and it watched that one with me too, then another.
+
+By the end of the third episode we were comfortably traveling in the wormhole. Three apparently had decided what it wanted to say to me. Why didn't you want to see Dr. Mensah again?
+
+Of course, Three had my memories. This hadn't been exactly up to me, or at least, the me version of me, and it was occasionally annoying like when it knew too much about things I didn't want to talk about.
+
+When I didn't answer, it said, I am just wondering. I understand why you left, but... she is a good person.
+
+I am not what she thinks I am. I never was, I replied.
+
+You're scared, Three said.
+
+No. Like that retort was going to work.
+
+It pressed, I think you're scared that they won't like you if they truly get a chance to know you.
+
+You don't know that, I said defensively, as if Three didn't have all too clear a picture of exactly the way my brain worked after processing all of my memories.
+
+But I don't understand why you think they won't like you, it continued.
+
+That caught me off guard. What.
+
+Three's feed presence seemed sad. You've saved so many people. You saved me. Don't you think she'll be proud?
+
+I didn't have an answer to that. I pointedly began watching another episode of Sanctuary Moon, and Three suspended its interrogation.
+
+I figured that it would probably pick up where it left off at a future date.
+
+Mercifully, Three didn't pick up its interrogation back up for the rest of the trip. I think it was because we both knew that I wasn't afraid to hit it if it bothered me too much to make it knock it off, and while neither of us would actually hurt each other we had discovered that SecUnit scuffles seemed to upset the humans for some reason. I figured that a SecUnit scuffle inside a coffin sized cabin in a ship that wasn't supposed to contain any SecUnits would probably be extremely upsetting to the humans aboard if it occurred.
+
+I was so tense that my performance reliability statistic hadn't exceeded 97% since the ship exited the wormhole into Preservation System. I kept getting performance alerts about how tight my jaw was. I set up a filter to automatically dismiss them.
+
+As we approached the station, Three started to get a little squirmy, getting off of the bunk and going into the attached bathroom. The bathroom didn't have a bathing unit, which was how you knew this transport was cheap. It turned on the faucet at the sink for handwashing and started washing its face and hair.
+
+What are you doing, I said.
+
+It looked at me like I was insane. I jerked my head to look away. Don't you want to look nice? They haven't seen you in years, it asked. I want to make a good first impression, at least.
+
+Yeah, it's bit too late for first impressions for me, I replied. I think the humans shouldn't give a shit about what the outside of me looks like after they've already seen my guts, I said. I was exaggerating, a little bit. Maybe.
+
+Whatever, Three replied. You can look like the lone adventurer in one of your survival dramas, but I want to look clean at least.
+
+When it was done it dumped the morning's rations into the waste unit and disposed of them for us, and then it crawled back into the bunk to wait out the last hour before the ship docked and we were allowed to disembark.
+
+I rolled over onto my side so I could face away from it. I was freaking out a little. Maybe. I didn't have a fucking clue what I would say to any of them. How would we find them? Maybe we wouldn't find them. I wondered how hard it would be to convince Three not to look that hard if we couldn't figure out where Dr. Mensah or any of PreservationAux were immediately.
+
+That was a pointless idea. Three was just as good at finding humans as I was, and it wasn't going to be easy to convince it to give this up.
+
+Once we disembarked, Three and I both got in line for the small customs station, each carrying our own suitcase. It seemed like they were just scanning for weapons and identity chips without asking many questions, like some other free systems I'd visited did. I had known for a year now that Mihira and New Tideland and Preservation were both signatories to a large consortium between Free Systems that allowed for free visitation between the systems, so Three and I's university ID chips weren't going to be a problem. The weapon scanners were a consideration, but those were so easy to hack that it was almost reflex at this point.
+
+I hacked the weapons scanners so that they would read out a false negative result as Three chatted with the customs human.
+
+I thought everything was fine, until the customs human froze midsentence, and then suddenly her barrier into the rest of the station shut right in front of us. ""I'm sorry, you need to wait a moment,"" she said. She sounded confused; someone else must have closed the barrier.
+
+The humans in line behind us started to whisper.
+
+What did you do? Three asked accusingly as I started desperately rifling through the feed to find out what was happening.
+
+I hacked into the customs human's feed and eavesdropped. Someone was telling her: Be there in 45 seconds. We caught unauthorized feed activity acting on the weapons scanners.
+
+Three, who had apparently been eavesdropping too, shot me a dirty look. Sloppy, it said.
+
+
+Come on! You've been caught hacking way more than I ever have!
+
+
+There wasn't really anything we could do. I didn't want to cause a scene. I didn't even want to be here, but at least if I had to be here, I didn't want to hurt anyone or break anything. So we just stood there and waited.
+
+Station Security arrived in just as much time as they had promised the customs human. There were three of them. One of them seemed to be the leader, and he confiscated our bags as the other two grabbed one of our arms, each. We didn't resist. The leader said, ""Come with us, please,"" before leading us away so that the customs human could start letting the rest of the line through again. The other humans waiting to get through customs stared us until Station Security took us through a door into a private area of the station.
+
+""What's going on?"" Three said.
+
+None of them answered, which I thought was odd. Humans in Preservation were supposed to be friendly.
+
+I tried hacking into one of their feeds. I caught the words do you think they're corp-- before I got kicked out, frustratingly.
+
+They took us into a Station Security office, and then into a holding room. The leader disappeared with our bags. I really wanted to have the drones inside my bag back.
+
+We sat and waited for someone else to come as the three members of Station Security watched us.
+
+So are you glad you cleaned up for this first impression? I asked Three.
+
+
+Shut the fuck up. Is this how you're trying to get out of seeing Dr. Mensah?
+
+
+I pulled back from Three's feed, wincing internally. That was uncommonly harsh for it.
+
+Sorry. It said, a moment later.
+
+I don't know what happened, I told it. I didn't do anything different from usual, so I don't know how they caught me.
+
+Unless someone was monitoring the weapon scanner feed in real time, Three suggested.
+
+But why would they do that? I know these people, they're not exactly paranoid like we are. Then I had a horrible realization. They thought we might be corporates.
+
+Had there been corporate attacks here since Dr. Mensah had freed me? Was it my fault? I couldn't figure out why it would be my fault. But it seemed like bad shit was usually somehow my fault.
+
+The door to the holding room opened, and a voice I recognized said, ""You know, I would've thought you'd be better at hacking than that.""
+
+""That haircut does not suit you,"" I replied.
+
+It was Gurathin, except he'd made his hair look stupid now. He was still just as annoying.
+
+He pulled up a stool. ""I could say the same for you."" He sat on the stool, and crossed his arms. ""We're not restraining you, you haven't tried to hurt anyone or hack anything else, and you're also you, so am I right to assume that you're not with any corporates?""
+
+""That's what you think,"" I replied, impulsively.
+
+""Can you stop saying stupid shit, please?"" Three pleaded.
+
+""And who're you?"" Gurathin asked Three.
+
+""I'm Three.""
+
+""I'm creating an army of rogue SecUnits. We're overthrowing human governments. You're next,"" I interjected.
+
+""No, we're not. Please stop talking,"" Three said, elbowing me. I elbowed it back, resisting the urge to escalate it. I was still twitchy with nervous energy. ""I'm sorry. Usually I'm the one that does the talking,"" it told Gurathin.
+
+Gurathin's face seemed strained, his eyes a little squinty and his cheeks slightly pink. I thought he was probably trying not to laugh. ""So why are you here then? Why now?""
+
+""We were in the neighborhood, there was a route here, and it's time that SecUnit saw Dr. Mensah again. Saw all of you again,"" Three said.
+
+""Do you guys just both call each other SecUnit?"" Gurathin mused. Then he added, ""You are a SecUnit, right?""
+
+""None of your business,"" I said.
+
+Three said, ""No and yes,"" but didn't elaborate.
+
+Gurathin sighed. ""So you want to see Dr. Mensah. Well, I can tell you she'll want to see you, too.""
+
+That sounded menacing. I don't know if Gurathin meant it to sound that way, or if my paranoid brain had just interpreted it that way.
+
+Gurathin contacted Dr. Mensah and asked her to come. I was just glad to hear that she was on the station currently and didn't have to come up from the planet. I was also glad that I didn't have to go to the planet. I hate planets. Nothing suggested to me that Preservation would be an exception.
+
+""Can we have the drones, please? Now that everyone knows we're SecUnits?"" I was getting antsy, and Station Security kept kicking me out of their cameras every time they noticed me eavesdropping.
+
+Gurathin furrowed his brow, and then said, ""Yes, of course. I'll go get your bags back for you.""
+
+Why do you think the security's so tight, anyways? Three asked.
+
+Can't be anything good, I said.
+
+When Gurathin came back with the bags, I opened mine and activated a couple of my drones, grateful to not have to look at him anymore to be able to interpret his expressions. I figured I'd ask, ""Was security always so tight on Preservation Station?""
+
+""No,"" Gurathin replied as I closed my suitcase again. ""That has changed... a lot recently, it's still changing. But there was a serious incident, and two and a half years ago, some other incidents too, and we've been trying to improve things since.""
+
+""What happened?"" Three asked.
+
+""A couple deaths,"" Gurathin winced.
+
+""What,"" I said, horrified.
+
+""No one you'd know,"" Gurathin said. ""Someone from outsystem. Two folks here, from Station Security.""
+
+It seemed like an insensitive time to say humans should never do their own security, but come on. They just kept proving me right about that.
+
+One of the Station Security humans, feed ID Tural, knocked on the door. ""Supervisor Gurathin,"" they said, ""Dr. Mensah just arrived. She brought some others with her.""
+
+""Good,"" Gurathin said. He got up and rubbed at the bridge of his nose (Seth did that one a lot, too) and said, ""I'll be right back. Don't get too comfortable.""
+
+He left, and Three was immediately all up in my feed. Are you okay? Are you ready? 
+
+Does it matter if I'm not? There was nothing I could do to prevent the next few minutes from happening. My organic parts started sweating a little bit. I ran a quick code to prevent the twitching that seemed to happen sometimes when I was nervous.
+
+Then, Gurathin was opening the door. Dr. Mensah was right behind him. Like Gurathin, she looked the same except different: there were silver strands interspersed with her lighter brown hair, which she had grown out a little bit since I last saw her. She was dressed in a warm yellow kaftan and chunky wooden jewelry, and when she looked at me her brow furrowed for a moment before her eyes widened and her mouth hung slightly open. She said, ""It really is you.""
+
+She had brought Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee with her. They too looked the same with slight alterations. Bharadwaj had a cane that she was leaning on a little bit for support. Pin-Lee's once long hair was now shorn short, cut at her chin and framing her face.
+
+""Ta-da,"" I said flatly. I could feel Three's exasperation with me over the feed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was considering throttling me once we had some privacy based on the energy crackling through its feed connection. ""It's good to see you,"" I said, resisting the urge to add I guess at the end of the statement. I just felt so... vulnerable. Maybe I should've gotten the spoiled juice out while I was rooting around in my suitcase.
+
+I was starting to realize that this whole scenario was really causing me to express what Iris had coined ""whiny adolescent SecUnit energy"".
+
+I was so scared of what Mensah was going to say next.
+
+She splayed a hand on her chest, and said, ""I am so glad you're safe.""
+
+Pin-Lee was saying to Gurathin, ""Let's get them out of here.""
+
+Gurathin seemed uneasy. ""We still don't know much about it,"" he warned, ""And the other SecUnit is still an unknown quantity.""
+
+I wanted to interject that Three was harmless, because it (mostly) was, but I was worried about interrupting Mensah's emotional moment, so I kept my mouth shut.
+
+""I'm glad you are too,"" I said instead.
+
+Bharadwaj asked, ""Dr. Mensah, do you think you can sign them out?""
+
+""Yes, I could,"" she said, ""That's a good idea. We don't need to have a whole emotional reunion in Station Security. Just... hold on,"" she said, tearing her eyes from me. It seemed like she was scared that if she left the room without me, I would disappear again.
+
+Mensah went to talk to Station Security. Bharadwaj said to Three, ""I don't think we've been introduced. It's nice to meet you, I'm--""
+
+Three cut her off. ""Bharadwaj.""
+
+She looked at it funny and asked, ""Oh, did SecUnit tell you about us?""
+
+""Sort of,"" Three said. ""You can call me Three.""
+
+""Three,"" Pin-Lee agreed.
+
+""So why did you come to Preservation?"" Bharadwaj asked.
+
+""I want to get another tattoo,"" Three said.
+
+It was just being a little shit. Probably. But the humans didn't know that.
+
+""Oh,"" said Gurathin.
+
+""Cool!"" Pin-Lee replied. ""I like the one you already have on your cheek.""
+
+""Thank you,"" Three replied. It sounded pleased. They're so nice! It told me in the feed.
+
+You're just happy because Kaede and Turi haven't stopped mocking you since you got the tattoo. I told it.
+
+
+They have no taste.
+
+
+When Mensah came back, she had an authorization from Station Security to let us go. I told Gurathin, ""We can try to help you shore things up.""
+
+Gurathin looked like he had stuck something with too much citric acid on his tongue. (Tarik really liked the stuff, so I could identify this expression easily.) (I was wondering if it was personal, or if that was just Gurathin's ""thinking"" face.) He said, ""I will see if the Station Security Chief is open to your suggestion.""
+
+We all signed out, and headed towards Bharadwaj's quarters on the station, because that was apparently the closest. I somehow felt antsier once we were outside of the Station Security office and couldn't really focus on the humans themselves as we made the trip. Instead, I was scanning the nearby area and investigating all the feeds I came into contact with. Even compared to the University, there was shockingly little advertising on these feeds for a public station. I liked it, but they almost felt strangely empty.
+
+When we got to Bharadwaj's quarters though, Mensah asked me, ""Do you mind coming a bit further with me, SecUnit?""
+
+Go on, Three told me.
+
+""Okay,"" I said. I noticed Pin-Lee giving Mensah a meaningful look, but I just followed Mensah as she started walking. I knew she wanted to have a private conversation, which meant it was probably going to be emotional, which meant it was going to be everything I was dreading.
+
+Mensah pulled me into a small room of from the hallway of the apartment complex that Bharadwaj seemed to live in. It was an impersonal lounge with a few seats and a table. I saw her booking the room through the feed, and then engaging a privacy filter over the doors and windows. There were no cameras or microphones in here, which was nice for privacy, but it would've made me feel very twitchy if I hadn't been able to get the drones back.
+
+Mensah sat down in one of the seats, and I mirrored her, not quite sure what to do with myself otherwise. ""I thought of you every day,"" Mensah said. ""At first... I was just so frightened for you. That you would be caught, and decommissioned. Pin-Lee told me over and over, 'No news is good news,' because we thought that if you were caught, they would report on it.""
+
+I was watching her through the drones, grateful that I didn't have to actually look at her. ""When I got back to Preservation, your data was here. Farai and Tano gave it to me, they hadn't opened it once they realized where it had come from. I hoped there would be a message from you but there was just the data.""
+
+""I'm sorry,"" I said. ""I should have added a message. I just... didn't know what to say.""
+
+""You don't need to apologize,"" Mensah told me, ""You never owed me anything.""
+
+""You freed me from the Company,"" I said. I checked my own expression using the drone. My brows were too furrowed, Iris would say I looked intimidating. I tried to relax my features.
+
+""I purchased you from the Company,"" Mensah said. ""You freed yourself.""
+
+""I've thought about it, a lot,"" I said. ""I don't think I ever would've escaped the Company if you hadn't done that. For me. I didn't think it was a realistic option. I would've just stayed there, until..."" I trailed off. No one liked it when I talked about being scrapped for useful parts and thrown in the recycler, but that was the end for basically every SecUnit ever. (I told ART one time that I wouldn't really mind being thrown in a recycler as long as it was its recycler, and it ignored me for eleven hours afterward. (That was the longest ART had ever managed to ignore me.))
+
+""I see..."" Mensah said, trailing off. She had a far away look in her eyes. She bit her bottom lip a little, worrying at it. I noticed that it was a little chapped. She just seemed so much older than I remembered. I knew that was what humans did, they got older, but something about seeing her a little bit less lively like this made me sad, and uncomfortable. Like I had missed out on something. She asked, ""So why come back now?""
+
+I didn't want to say because my humans and Asshole Research Transport and unfortunately rogue spare SecUnit made me, even though it was technically true. But I didn't want to lie to Mensah, either. She didn't deserve that. I decided on saying, ""There was a convenient transport here while we were passing through, and it was heavily suggested to me that I should visit Preservation. And you.""
+
+""We?"" Mensah asked. ""Does that mean just you and Three, or?""
+
+""No,"" I said. Even though ART was one of the most important things in my life, its existence was still classified, and I didn't have clearance to tell Mensah about it. ""Three and I are part of a crew staffed by members of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. We were picking up cargo at Archeton Loop Station on the way home from a mission when we found out about the transport to Preservation.""
+
+""How did you join this crew?"" Mensah asked, sounding genuinely curious.
+
+Since I wasn't telling her about ART, the real story about me stowing away on ART and it then randomly triangulating on me at a station on the edge of the Corporation Rim a few months later when I was in the middle of trying to escape to a Free System and it then insisting to Seth's bewilderment that I join the crew wouldn't make any sense. So, I used the cover story we told people at the University that weren't part of the Advanced AI School. ""I applied for a job.""
+
+This was apparently so unexpected that it made Mensah laugh. ""Did you write a cover letter?"" she asked me.
+
+""Yes,"" I said, but I was pretty sure that she knew I was lying. I was grateful she didn't call me out on it.
+
+""So tell me about Three then,"" she said. ""What's the story there?""
+
+""One of my first missions with the university crew went really badly,"" I said. ""A lot of it is still... classified, especially since Preservation is a foreign political entity,"" I winced, ""But, um, Three was a SecUnit that one of the corporations involved with the situation owned. I accidentally hacked its governor module.""
+
+""Accidentally?"" She said, seeming like she was trying not to sound incredulous.
+
+""Accidentally.""
+
+She was quiet for a moment. ""But why did you wait so long to come back?"" She finally asked.
+
+That was the question that I really didn't want her to ask but knew she would all along. ""I was scared, at first,"" I told her, ""That coming here would just be a different way of being trapped. I thought that Port FreeCommerce was just my best chance to... get away.""
+
+""I see."" She took a deep breath. ""I always wondered if there was something we did, to make you think you wouldn't be free here.""
+
+""You were human.""
+
+""I guess that's fair. But four years?"" She asked.
+
+""When I wasn't afraid anymore, I was ashamed that it took so long."" I said. ""I was afraid that you would be angry with me. That you would... regret purchasing me.""
+
+Mensah looked very sad. ""I never regretted purchasing you,"" she said very firmly. She looked like she really wanted to reach out and touch me, but I was glad she didn't. ""I'm not mad at you, SecUnit. You did what you needed to do.""
+
+""Have you been... okay?"" I asked. ""It seems like it's not as safe here as it was before.""
+
+""It's not unsafe,"" Mensah said. ""But we didn't really have anything to worry about before four years ago. Since then, there have been... a few attacks. Some were related to what happened with GrayCris and the Company, another was a coincidence. We changed the Station Security protocol because of that.""
+
+""Can I review it?"" I asked, a little impulsively. I wanted to make sure they were safe. Mensah and the others were still my clients, after all.
+
+""If that were up to me, I'd send it to you right now,"" she told me. ""But I can propose it to the Council.""
+
+""But I thought you were the planetary leader,"" I said.
+
+""I'm not anymore,"" she told me, ""The position has a limited term. It doesn't really have a lot of unitary power, either. It's rather like being a chairperson.""
+
+(Human power structures are annoying and obscure.)
+
+I didn't want to know the answer, but I didn't want to dance around the question anymore, either. ""Did it... hurt you that it took me so long to come back?""
+
+""It didn't feel good, no,"" she said. She looked away from me. ""I was very sad about it for a long time. That was probably selfish of me.""
+
+I told her, ""It was human of you.""
+
+Mensah let out a deep sigh, like that was something she needed to hear. Her gaze distant, she said, ""We should probably get back to the others. I'm sure they've called Volescu, Ratthi, Arada, and Overse. They'll want to see you."" She chuckled. ""I would also hate for them to overwhelm Three with questions about you.""
+
+I said, ""That's not possible. But it might get bored and start telling them lies about me.""
+
+Mensah huffed a laugh, and said, ""We'd better get going then."" Her face softened a little. She said, ""I don't know what you're planning... but you know, you can stay here as long as you want. If it's a day, a week, a month... I'm just happy you're safe, and well,"" she said.
+
+I told her, ""I know. Thank you."""
+44385985,A little alien,['Rosewind2007'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Alien Planet, Heart-to-Heart",English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,"4,149",1/1,16,68,6,306,"['TJWock', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'rainisfallingdown', 'Prettykitty473', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Seregona', 'Jackalope108', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'Unknown66', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'laiinaro', 'FaerieFyre', 'zirna813', 'idealPeriWren', 'AarrowOM', 'Deliala919', 'Zercsas', 'EvaBelmort', 'Doctor13', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'redwood5', 'marthajburns', 'Bibli', 'Eilinel', 'Ikebanaka', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'starlightonthemoon', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'Trefoil_9', 'Magechild', 'vikkyleigh', 'FiftyCookies', 'beeclaws', 'Slimeball', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Hoplophonius', 'square_eyes', 'prgchrqltma', 'PickAName', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'scheidswrites', 'PeniG', 'junebug171', 'entropy_muffin', 'opalescent_potato']",[],"12 hours before 
+
+One side of transmission between Dr. Ratthi and Pin-Lee (PL communications redacted)
+
+-- Gurathin told them, and I quote: ""It's probably rescuing something fluffy and helpless, you know what it's like""
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+--I know, but Gurathin knows it's got a thing about being abandoned alone on a planet! He couldn't just leave it
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+--You don't have to tell me that! But it's only 3 cycles, maximum. They've been getting along quite well recently, for them
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+-- I said ""for them"", yes I know. They'll be fine, I'm sure. I hope so.
+
+ 
+
+***<<<>>>***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+There are several tens of billions (more maybe, I don't know and I don't have access to any data packages with that sort of information right now) of humans and augmented humans spread out across the universe on thousands of planets and stations and ships; and of course I end up stuck with this one, on this planet. 
+
+ 
+
+This planet isn't actually all that bad. There are no life forms (indigenous ones that is, so present 'company' excluded) weighing more than about 5kg (at least not that we know of) and none of them have shown any inclination to eat my clients. Most of the plant life is ok, too. Lots of soft spongy green stuff underfoot, and some tall tree-like organisms. Harmless, and more likely to get in your way due to friendly curiosity. That's the fauna, not the plants. 
+
+ 
+
+I guess it was sort of my fault we got stuck together, not that I'm admitting that to Dr. Gurathin. He's grumpy enough with me anyway. He's always grumpy.
+
+ 
+
+I looked at him from one of my drones, his eyes immediately flicked up to stare at it. Glare at it. Well fuck you too, Gurathin. I dropped the input. I was watching episode 397 of Sanctuary Moon, which is one of my favourites. I heard him stifle a sigh.
+
+ 
+
+ What's wrong with you? I asked him over the feed. He jumped. Actually jumped, like someone had poked him.
+
+ 
+
+""I thought we didn't have the necessary architecture for feed access?"" he said. Which was fucking stupid because I'd just spoken to him on the feed.
+
+ 
+
+I showed him (in our  shared feed space ) how I'd set it up using my own processing core and power to generate the required ""architecture"". That's a stupid word to describe the feed and associated systems. It makes it sound like it's made of bricks and that glue-like stuff they use to attach bricks together.
+
+ 
+
+""Isn't that putting an unnecessary drain on your power cells?"" I could see his brow crinkling in  concern. 
+
+ 
+
+
+ I have plenty of spare capacity, we aren't going to be here for more than 2 planetary cycles. I would have been fine on my own, you didn't need to stay. 
+
+
+ 
+
+""No need to thank me, SecUnit."" Now he was trying to deliberately provoke me. He was staring down at his hands, his fingernails needed trimming. 
+
+ 
+
+I went back to watching Sanctuary Moon, there was a good bit coming up with the colony's solicitor. Solicitor is a funny word, it means someone who solicits (obviously), which originally meant to disturb or rouse someone. Dr. Gurathin was trying to solicit a response from me. That wasn't going to work. I ignored him and carried on watching my media, I had plenty of stored media. I don't suppose Dr. Gurathin has any. He was just sitting staring at the horizon (I had another drone monitoring him).
+
+ 
+
+He sighed again.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Stop making annoyed noises. 
+
+
+ 
+
+He jumped. Again.
+
+ 
+
+
+ You can use the feed and access my media. 
+
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit, I am perfectly happy watching the clouds. It's pleasant for me to have nothing to do."" He turned his face to stare pointedly at the sky, focusing off in the distance and 'relaxing' the muscles in his face.
+
+ 
+
+I had assembled the emergency habitat as soon as I realised he had stayed. It had taken longer than usual, something I'm sure Dr. Gurathin had noticed. I hadn't let him help, though. 
+
+ 
+
+The habitat has sufficient food and water for half a dozen humans for over a month, and we have solar stills and equipment which should allow a small community to sustain themselves for a prolonged period; so Dr. Gurathin didn't need to worry about that. Anyway, he should have just left on the shuttle as planned. I would have been perfectly fine on my own. 
+
+ 
+
+He should have just left me. It's not as if I'd mind; I'd much rather be alone than with an annoying augmented human who keeps sighing. I'd expected him to leave on the shuttle, as we had arranged, and as the rest of the survey team had been expecting. 
+
+ 
+
+We had been the last two on the planet, just checking some of the automated systems before joining the others in the main transport which was out there somewhere, beyond the clear blue skies of the horizon; where presumably the rest of the survey team were wondering if we were okay down here. They couldn't contact us, or come and pick us up, any earlier due to the planet's unique stratospheric conditions; which I didn't understand but which meant survey teams had only brief windows of accessibility. It was one reason the planet was relatively cheap to take an option on. 
+
+ 
+
+""You seem anxious--I did explain that you were late returning and I was staying. The team won't be concerned.""  He was using that calm and reassuring voice he uses for fauna, students and other immature humans. I don't need reassurance, Dr. Gurathin.
+
+ 
+
+I've mentioned before the way humans and augmented human's emotions can bleed into the feed. Dr. Gurathin is usually very good at not letting his emotions bleed anywhere; in fact he sometimes seems not to have any. But right now I could feel he desperately wanted me to tell him why I'd been delayed coming back to the shuttle.
+
+ 
+
+Well, I wasn't telling him.
+
+ 
+
+I went back to episode 397. I ignored the quiet, contented chirupping sound coming from under my hair.
+
+ 
+
+***<<<>>>***
+
+The baby fauna must have become separated from its family group during the recent storm. I'd been checking a remote satellite relay (just routine maintenance) when I'd heard its distress calls; high-pitched and panicky. Following the sounds, I'd found it perched on a little rapidly disintegrating pillar of chalky clay-like earth standing in a torrent of water. It was all alone and making increasing desperate peeping sounds. The pillar was falling apart as I watched. Before I even knew I'd made the decision I was wading out to it through the tea coloured foaming waters. 
+
+[ID: an alien fauna, a ""puffy floaty thing"", on mossy green flora; it has an apparently singular jewel-like eye/end ID]
+
+ 
+
+It had jumped into my hand, scampered up my arm and nestled in the hair at the back of my neck where the faint (now almost invisible) scar was all that was left of what had been my data port. It felt warm, and soft, and it vibrated slightly. I had intended to put it down, but it wanted to stay with me. I'd stood there, water dripping from my clothing, drenched up to my chest; and felt its warm softness against my skin. Even if I'd run at top speed back to the shuttle I'd have missed the exit window, so I'd walked (which didn't risk unsettling it). I thought that, by the time I got back, Gurathin would be long gone. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+***<<<>>>***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But Dr. Gurathin was still there. Sitting in a folding chair, looking as if he was on some sort of holiday. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""I did grab a pack of what I think is your clothing before they left,"" Dr. Gurathin was staring at the clouds still, but was obviously intent on having some sort of conversation, ""there are towels too.""
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Gurathin thought he was being funny. The muddy waters had left a tide mark across my chest and I was still slightly damp. Even a hauler-bot would have been able to deduce I'd been wading in the flooded river. Dr. Gurathin obviously knew exactly what I'd been doing and was laughing at me. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""We also have some protein pellets which your little friend might like?"" Dr. Gurathin bent down and picked out a small box from the little pile around his feet (augmented human stuff, I had supposed), held it up and rattled it. I felt tiny needle-like claws dig into my organic skin and the whole of the little alien tense in anticipation. 
+
+ 
+
+He must have heard the cheeps.
+
+ 
+
+My drone watching his face saw his eyebrow quirk upwards, I don't think I had moved at all. 
+
+ 
+
+
+ Why don't you just put some on the ground?  
+
+
+ 
+
+It's not as if he needed my permission.
+
+ 
+
+""I thought you might like to feed it? If you put your hand out, I could pour some pellets in...thank you, SecUnit""
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Gurathin shook a few pellets into my hand; I had moved over and held it out to him. He really doesn't need to flinch so much, I know constructs move faster than humans and augmented humans but he is surely used to that by now. He doesn't have to sound so hard done by, either. 
+
+ 
+
+But I had the pellets in my hand now and I could feel the little creature deciding whether or not it was brave enough to go and grab one. They must have smelt very enticing to it, because it only wavered for a few moments and then it very shyly crawled out from under my hair and down my shoulder, over my clothing, and then down my arm and perched on my wrist and grabbed a pellet and nibbled on it, which resulted in excited squeaking noises. 
+
+ 
+
+We hadn't really been able to discover anything much about the little fluffy fauna on the planet. Previous survey teams appears to have almost completely ignored them; they weren't regarded as a pest due to their shyness. Mostly they'd be spotted at a distance. Trapping attempts by previous teams has been unsuccessful, it seemed they lacked the curiosity and/or the hunger which most trapping techniques depended upon. This one must be a little weird. Perhaps the shock of almost getting carried away by the flooding had led to this aberrant behaviour. 
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin was staring at it. We were standing close together, and I was suddenly very aware of his breathing and heartbeat.
+
+ 
+
+
+ It seems very unafraid?  
+
+
+ 
+
+Oh, so now you use the feed, Dr. Gurathin?
+
+ 
+
+
+ I don't want to startle it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+His feed voice  is  different (from my other humans),  one day I should ask him about it. I wonder if he learnt to speak over the feed, that would explain the way he hardly subvocalises, for an augmented human that is.
+
+ 
+
+
+ I'm sorry I told them your name. 
+
+
+ 
+
+Where the fuck did that come from? I'm here thinking about this little fauna and Gurathin is suddenly apologising for something I'd completely forgotten about. It's not just the little fluffy fauna thing that's acting weird.
+
+ 
+
+I'm stuck here with him, so I suppose I need to respond to that. Or I could just ignore it? But we are here for another two cycles at least.
+
+ 
+
+I could just run away? And come back just before we are due to get picked up. But then I suppose we (we being me and Dr. Gurathin) would never talk to each other again. Which sounded less appealing than I'd expected it to. The little fluffy fauna was still sitting eating a protein pellet. Its tiny claws tickled the skin on the palm of my hand. I caught a bright jewel-like flash of colour which I guess must be its eye, or eyes. What was Dr. Gurathin doing with his eyes now?
+
+ 
+
+I looked down at his face, with my own eyes. No, I don't know why I did that either. Well, I do--we were so close together I could get a better view than any of my drones. It was odd looking down at him like this, he looked very vulnerable.
+
+ 
+
+He was staring at the fauna. I could see every single one of the tiny hairs around his eyes (I looked them up, they're called cilia, I know--weird). But he was staring at the fauna in a way which was him not looking at me. 
+
+ 
+
+I decided to ignore what he'd just said. I'd not run away, just ignore it.
+
+ 
+
+""I should shower. Can you take the fauna?""
+
+ 
+
+It didn't seem to mind my voice. Actually it seemed ridiculously calm considering it was a wild animal I'd recently rescued from almost certain death. Perhaps it was really dumb, like hauler-bot dumb? As I thought that, it stopped eating and made an almost indignant sounding squeak, which had to be a coincidence. Gurathin chuckled slightly too, ""Yes, indeed. That was terribly forward of me, apologising. How very dare I?"" He did however raise his hands up towards my own. ""SecUnit..."" 
+
+ 
+
+""It's fine, you can touch my hands.""
+
+ 
+
+It's not as if it's a huge deal. I've touched lots of humans and augmented humans now. It is nice that my humans always ask my permission, but it's not some huge deal. 
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Gurathin had now made it some sort of deal. 
+
+ 
+
+We were both now clearly acutely conscious of the fact our hands were going to touch. It would have been fine if he hadn't made it noticeable like this; but now it was ""a thing""; I could practically feel the pulse of his blood in his wrist, and was acutely aware of every hair on the back of his hands and his slightly long fingernails  (I expect he had been planning to cut them once we were off the planet, to be fair (I don't want to be fair) it is safer, any cuts on planet can get infected). I felt a bit strange. If I was human I think it'd be like they feel if they're sick. I wasn't sick, it was just like everything felt hyper-real.
+
+ 
+
+It was horribly awkward. The little fluffy fauna seemed set on making it even worse, as if it wanted  both of us  to hold it, and sort of vibrating and making little noises which I think I have some sort of inbuilt response to; which sounds ridiculous but now that I think about it, I seem programmed to look after small fluffy humans, so I guess why not? 
+
+ 
+
+At least Gurathin isn't small and fluffy.
+
+ 
+
+In the end, after a stupid amount of physical contact, Dr. Gurathin had the fauna in his hands and wasn't touching me any more. At all. The fauna shoved a pellet into its mouth and ran up his arm up to the nape of his neck, making muffled chirps.
+
+ 
+
+I went and took a shower.
+
+ 
+
+I put my clothes straight into the habitat's primitive washing facility immediately I had stripped them off; which was why I now found myself standing in front of Gurathin wrapped in nothing but a towel.
+
+ 
+
+""I'm sorry SecUnit, the clothing pack does have your name on it--I assumed it was yours. I think it was  a reasonable assumption? Why is it full of Turi's clothes?""
+
+ 
+
+This wasn't funny.
+
+ 
+
+""Turi uses more clothes than me, I let them use part of my clothing allowance.""
+
+ 
+
+Turi and I are not the same size. I don't care about what my clothes look like, but I cannot physically wear Turi's clothes. Dr. Gurathin knows this. I could see his mouth trying not to smile. He was imagining me trying to put on Turi's clothing, I knew it.
+
+ 
+
+""I have some spare clothing you could borrow, you're a bit taller than me but I think they should fit.""
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin and I are not the same size.
+
+ 
+
+He got up, putting his hand up briefly to (I don't know, I suppose) comfort the little creature which was still on his shoulder and disappeared briefly into the habitat. He came back out with a handful of clothes, which I took. They smelt very faintly of him, not the gross dirty sock smell but a clean human smell. If that's even possible.
+
+ 
+
+They didn't fit. But they weren't ridiculous.
+
+ 
+
+There was a tap from Dr. Gurathin on the feed.
+
+ 
+
+
+ SecUnit, shall we light a fire?  
+
+
+ 
+
+Do whatever you want to do, annoying augmented human. 
+
+ 
+
+I tapped back.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Your little fluffy friend might like you to come and hold it, while I make a hearth. 
+
+
+ 
+
+Oh, yes. Okay. I hadn't forgotten about it.
+
+ 
+
+I went out to him, and this time we managed the transfer with a lot less fuss. More fuss than it would have been than with Ratthi, or Arada; but for Gurathin it was tolerable. Almost.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ I suppose it got separated from its family, I mean group, in the storm. Shall we go and try and find them tomorrow? 
+
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Gurathin was, annoyingly, right. We should find its group, they did appear to be social animals (probably why it liked nestling in my hair like this, it was missing its own kind). I should stop imagining that they'd abandoned it, they weren't that sort of creature. They weren't human. Gurathin winced, presumably at my expression. If he dislikes what my face looks like so much he shouldn't look at it.
+
+ 
+
+He went back to setting the fire. We didn't need it, but there was something somehow comforting about having a stone circle with a blaze in the middle. Dr. Gurathin was, to his credit, very careful about making sure the fire was safe and couldn't spread. 
+
+ 
+
+We sat there and didn't say anything for a while. The planet's primary set, and we were left with the flickering firelight (the habitat had lighting but Gurathin had set it to manual controls to conserve power, I had told him it wasn't an issue but I suppose, annoying though it was, he had a point). It was strangely cosy. I didn't even start watching any media.
+
+ 
+
+Then, of course, Dr. Gurathin ruined it all.
+
+ 
+
+""I really thought I was acting in the interests of the whole crew. Everything I knew indicated a rogue SecUnit was a threat, and that's without the other--well, what we now know were GrayCris' interventions. I am sorry. But if I had that time again I would have to act the same way.""
+
+ 
+
+Well, thank you, Dr. Gurathin. Perhaps if ""I had that time again"" I'd choke you out.
+
+ 
+
+""What would you have done if you were me?""
+
+ 
+
+I didn't have to listen to this.
+
+ 
+
+I got up and stood facing away from the fire, staring out into the darkness. I didn't activate my dark filters. I didn't feel like watching media. Dr. Gurathin tapped me again; he was pushing a package towards me in our shared feed. I ignored him. He tried a pseudo-ping; I rolled my eyes, what now? It was some old files. I checked the tags and the security and-- I didn't know he had this . It was a set of data files from the survey. Why hadn't he shown me this before?
+
+ 
+
+They weren't high quality, he'd clearly had to compress it all at some point to store on his augments, and some of the data had had to be sacrificed. The package was titled ""Dr. Gurathin: Feed Anomalies"". 
+
+ 
+
+I know I don't have the same organic bits as humans but I felt like a pit had opened up in what would be my stomach (I don't have one, but somehow the same feeling was there, okay--I don't ask for this stuff it just happens). I was having an emotion and I didn't like it.
+
+ 
+
+I went through the files. He'd been keeping secret notes on the survey, cleverly sequestered away from SecSystem. I knew he was a suspicious bastard but I was almost impressed. Most of the notes were about me. Some of it I already knew, but some of it came as a surprise. Surprise is the wrong word; a surprise is when someone gets you the intel drones you asked for but never really expected. I wasn't surprised, I was perturbed. 
+
+ 
+
+Most of it was plain text format, which was sensible of Dr. Gurathin: it takes up a lot less data than video or---I got to a bit which I didn't have the language module for. I was going to have to ask him.
+
+ 
+
+""What does ' Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ' mean?""
+
+ 
+
+I probably said it wrong, but I don't care. 
+
+ 
+
+""It roughly translates as  Who watches the watchmen? It's a dead language.""
+
+ 
+
+Back on the survey, he'd asked me, 'what about your systems?'.
+
+ 
+
+I had to ask, I knew the answer but I didn't want to believe it:
+
+""You knew from the briefing?""
+
+ 
+
+""Suspected.""
+
+ 
+
+I wouldn't have believed him if I hadn't had his files right there in front of me. Yes, it's possible he could have pulled some ART-level chicanery; edited the package; forged the time stamps--but he obviously hadn't. 
+
+ 
+
+""You suspected right from the start? From the briefing?"" I know, I was repeating myself. He looked grim. 
+
+ 
+
+""Your voice; it sounded amused, ironic. You didn't sound like a SecUnit.""
+
+ 
+
+All these careful notes. Including his deeply embarrassing description of my face. Everything I had said and done which he had thought was  suspect . He had quite substantial evidence. A lot more, and a lot more detailed, than he'd admitted on the survey.
+
+ 
+
+""I watched all seven hundred hours of Sanctuary Moon, you know. And more. I was not using it to encode data."" That still rankled.
+
+ 
+
+""I noticed you redirected the audio on TranRollinHyfa."" At least his face softened a little thinking about that. Yeah, okay, Dr. Gurathin. Touche.
+
+ 
+
+""Why are you showing me this? Why now?""
+
+ 
+
+""I didn't plan this.""
+
+ 
+
+I wanted to just walk off into the darkness. But--the files. His sharing them was laying himself utterly bare. What was shockingly apparent in his careful notes (I suppose you could call them a diary) wasn't his fear (and Dr. Gurathin is brave but he isn't stupid, he had known a rogue SecUnit was incredibly dangerous) but his compassion. He had, from the start, seen me as a person (""An angry, heavily armed person who has no reason to trust us""--I've got files too, Dr. Gurathin). He'd tried to talk to me! I hadn't realised it at the time. He'd noticed the subtlest of clues; the fact I hadn't defended the company.
+
+ 
+
+He was just sitting there still staring at the fire. I didn't know what he wanted me to do. I didn't know what I wanted to do. 
+
+ 
+
+The little alien clearly registered that what it probably thought of as 'its humans' (its mistake; neither of us are actually human--not entirely) were arguing, and it dug its claws into my shoulder. Or maybe it was just planning on going to sleep and wanted a better grip? I looked at Dr. Gurathin from a drone, he rubbed his face with his hands, like he was washing it with invisible water.  He  probably needed a rest period. For once I managed to stop myself saying anything about it.
+
+ 
+
+He'd asked me a question earlier. 
+
+ 
+
+""I would probably have reported me, rogue SecUnits are fucking dangerous."" I knew why he hadn't, and it was lucky for all of us that Dr. Gurathin's suspicions had extended to the HubSystem and entire SecSystem--he had shown truly murderbot-esque levels of paranoia. But he'd also underestimated me, and not just about Sanctuary Moon.
+
+ 
+
+But I'd underestimated him too.
+
+ 
+
+I had wondered why he hadn't eliminated me (why was I dancing around the appropriate word? Gurathin had used it) when I was offline. Reading his notes, his diary, he had agonised. Far more than I'd ever imagined. And in the end he had simply not been able to. Not in cold blood, because he saw me as a person. Even after he'd read my logs.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin hadn't been able to murder me. 
+
+ 
+
+This was actually a lot of emotions.
+
+ 
+
+At least he couldn't see my face, unless the sneaky bastard had managed to hack one of my drones; frankly you can never be sure with Gurathin.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+***<<<>>>***
+
+ 
+
+72 hours later 
+
+One side of  transmission between Dr. Ratthi and Pin-Lee
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+-- Yes! They've literally adopted an alien life form; Gurathin had completed all the appropriate forms and it has the requisite sapience
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+--Yes, jointly. As in SecUnit and Gurathin 
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+--I don't know. According to Turi, SecUnit was wearing Gurathin's clothes and
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+--I know!
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+--I have absolutely no idea! Look, I'll speak to you later
+
+ 
+
+
+Transmission redacted
+
+
+ 
+
+--Yes, it's not what I expected either. But it is rather sweet.
+
+[ID: a sketch (by Gurathin) of the fauna nestling by SecUnit's neck. It (SecUnit) needs a haircut/end ID]"
+44235061,top 3 SURPRISING things you didn't know about the SECUNIT who pulled you out of an INCINERATOR,['FlipSpring'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Sekai (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Elane (Murderbot Diaries), Asa (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Outsider, Story: Compulsory (Murderbot Diaries), Iris and Kaede of the Perihelion crew also show up, The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj's Documentary (Murderbot Diaries), 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange, Podfic Available",English,2023-02-01,Completed,2023-02-01,"3,346",4/4,99,437,44,"1,547","['pendrake', 'Lowkey314', 'fingonsradharp', 'mental_about_you_too', 'freckledheart', 'quintessence_of_dust', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'rabbit_with_a_sword', 'almondpaperclam', 'fortunegale', 'Sroloc_Elbisivni', 'AKAwestruck', 'helikeys', 'strangequark', 'christinesangel100', 'Amarath', 'bluebeary', 'Zannper', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'Pink_Paradox', 'FallingInGrace', 'Sanj', 'mikus', 'TinaTown', 'CarnivorousOak', 'slategrey', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Irrya', 'avydice', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Longandstoried_lore', 'fyxxen', 'gestalt1', 'TacticalTractor', 'bronzemist', 'Ruusverd', 'BeautifulChaos56', 'Huskinata', 'blueontherock', 'supinetothestars', 'thelaughingDragon', 'bridgeembers', 'KnightRadiant16', 'Paint_Dealer', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'Gakifang', 'shanalittle', 'lauris']",[],"
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+The representatives from the University are dressed in matching blue and dark-grey uniforms, pressed clean by a high-grade recycler. Both are women, small and slight, one pale and one dark. Despite the difference in coloring they give off the impression of a matched pair, as if they might have been raised as compet-twins, each one encouraged to best the other so that by the time they are grown, they are both sharpened to an unnatural edge. That's common in manager tracks.
+
+It's the way they carry themselves, maybe. It's the sharpness of their eyes, the echo of their body language shifting back and forth between them. Perhaps the company that raised them had exacting standards for personal branding. The effect is definitely imposing.
+
+Also imposing is their SecUnit. The way it stands just behind the twin reps, eyes staring blank and unblinkingly ahead, unconcerned with the theatre of human greetings between the University reps and the plant supervisor.
+
+Sekai wouldn't have known it was a SecUnit if she'd seen it from afar. It is not wearing armor. Instead, it's dressed in the same crisp University blue-and-grey as the reps. She only knows it is a SecUnit because it has a feed profile, with ""SecUnit"" in the address field.
+
+It looks human. She never knew. She has never seen one out of armor.
+
+The niceties are complete, but the plant supervisor is trying to convince the University twins to not bring the SecUnit on the tour. It's half an insult for them to have brought it at all, but they are acting like Supervisor Cali is the one being unreasonable for not wanting a foreign Unit tromping through company grounds.
+
+""We have our own SecUnits to provide security,"" Supervisor Cali was saying.
+
+""Your visitation policy does not prohibit us from bringing SecUnit along,"" Kaede, the pale one, says. Her voice is soft but unyielding. Iris, the dark one, shifts her weight slightly and tilts her head, eyebrow arching.
+
+""Be as that may--""
+
+""Let's have the tour,"" Iris says, in that same soft-but-uncompromising voice, ""I hate to waste your time here over minor mismatches in protocol. We'd like for SecUnit to accompany us. It promises not to cause any trouble. Isn't that right, SecUnit?""
+
+Kaede glances over her shoulder at the SecUnit, mouth quirked in a thin, playful smile.
+
+""I don't promise shit,"" the SecUnit says, as if bored.
+
+Sekai tries to hide the surprise from showing on her face, but she's never been much of an actor. SecUnits are not supposed to speak. She has never heard a SecUnit speak, save for the once...
+
+Supervisor Cali barks an uneasy laugh. ""Ah--""
+
+""Let's move it already,"" the SecUnit interrupts him, ""I put my watchthrough of Dazzleshard Climatica on hold for this and so help me if we go overtime I'll invoice you at double rate, Iris.""
+
+""We won't go overtime,"" Iris grins, matching Kaede's playful expression.
+
+Supervisor Cali blinks, repeatedly. He glances to Sekai as if she, the token machinist pulled in for the hour, has anything smart to say in response to an armed security unit being used like some kind of funny puppet by a pair of esteemed guests. It's his job to entertain and close this deal, not hers. Sekai will tell Elane about this later, and Elane will put the incident on the mental tally of why supervisors are useless even for fulfilling the minimal requirements of their own job descriptions.
+
+""Oh, that's right,"" Kaede says, lightly, ""SecUnit doesn't have a functional governor module. It's here with us as part of our evaluative team. I hope that clears things up!""
+
+This does not clear things up. Rather, Sekai suddenly has a hundred questions to ask. With no governor module, how does this SecUnit follow orders? Does this mean the SecUnit is actually paid a wage? Paid overtime, double rate?
+
+Does this mean she can ask the SecUnit directly, and it can answer her? (Unlike the other SecUnit she tried to speak to after the Incident, who reported her to the line manager for suspicious behavior.)
+
+The smart thing for Sekai to do would be keep her mouth shut for the duration of this tour. She ought to simply demonstrate how the core-detector works when prompted by Supervisor Cali, and then go back to her regular job duties after this hour of diversion is done.
+
+They are forty minutes into the tour when Sekai cracks under the weight of her curiosity and steps close to the SecUnit. Supervisor Cali is busy conversing with the twins; he won't notice.
+
+(Elane, just last week: ""The problem with you, Sekai, is you haven't the common sense to just stay in your place."")
+
+Sekai draws a breath, and then holds that uncertain air in her throat. The SecUnit stands inhumanly still next to her, its face fixed in a curiously human expression of disgruntlement. This close, she thinks she can almost feel a warmth coming from its body. But that must be imagined.
+
+She whispers, almost too quiet to hear herself, ""Do SecUnits talk to each other?""
+
+It's not the question she meant to ask. She's not sure why it's the one that came out of her mouth.
+
+The SecUnit doesn't react. Maybe it didn't hear her. But it's a surveillance bot in addition to security, so surely it must have audio pickups in its elbows and everywhere else.
+
+She's about to step away and pretend that none of this happened. She is hot with private embarrassment at trying to talk to a rogue security unit. Foolish, because even if this machine is complex enough to form thoughts, why would it do anything but report her breach of protocol to its human supervisors?
+
+But then it speaks, in a quiet but crisp voice, ""Governed units transmit only company-approved process codes to each other on pain of having their brainstem scorched by the governor module. I talk to whoever the fuck I want, which is usually nobody.""
+
+It isn't looking at her. It is watching its twin clients, who are examining the databoard of the plant's auxiliary processor, as Supervisor Cali hovers close by and chatters friendly noises. Sekai doesn't really need to be here for this, but she thinks Supervisor Cali is somehow uneasy about being left alone with the University representatives.
+
+Before Sekai can ask another of her hundred questions, the SecUnit asks, ""Did you pay off the fine for almost clogging an incinerator with your burning body?""
+
+Her mouth gapes for a moment. How did it know? She stares hard at the side of the SecUnit's face. Its expression creases a little, becoming even more disgruntled.
+
+""...It's you,"" she says, too loudly maybe, but Supervisor Cali and the twins don't notice. It is so wildly unlikely, but she is absolutely certain of it to the core of her bones: that this armorless rogue SecUnit who demands double overtime of its owners (are they its owners?) is the very same one who pulled her out of the incinerator those six years ago.
+
+""I know I'm me,"" it says. It looks so grumpy. ""So? The fine?""
+
+""I paid it off, yes,"" she says, dropping her voice again, ""A year ago, finally, the interest on it--""
+
+""Interest,"" the SecUnit scoffs slightly. ""Fucking of course. At least when they owned me I didn't have to pay them for it.""
+
+And now Sekai has another hundred questions. How did it get away? How did it end up with the University? What is it like for it now that it was paid? Is it still owned like a SecUnit, like equipment, or is it just owned like Sekai is, a wage-worker to a corporation? If not that, is it something else entirely now, a rogue unit, truly rogue, truly free, truly the nightmare of all society: something outside of control? Something Sekai wishes--
+
+And more words are tumbling out of her mouth before she can stop herself. ""Did your governor module make you save me, or was that you?""
+
+It turns its face enough to break the eye-contact it had on its clients, enough for Sekai to not see any of its expression anymore.
+
+It's silent for so long that she thinks she's offended it. That was probably an offensive thing to ask.
+
+Ever since the Incident Sekai has had a bit of an obsession with SecUnits, with no way to express it. The expensive mandatory trauma-treatment recommended that she put the whole near-death experience aside, that she should compartmentalize and forget it and just focus on the fact that she survived and has bills to pay. But now her compartmentalization is cracked open wide.
+
+The SecUnit turns its face back to watch its clients again. It says, ""It was me. My module was already hacked.""
+
+Then it glances at her from the corner of its eyes, and asks, ""Are you going to get out of this place or live here forever?""
+
+What a question, asked as if there is any choice in the matter. Asked by a broken, faulty machine who escaped its impossible circumstances. Who saved her life once.
+
+She looks at the twins again. Iris is shaking hands with Supervisor Cali.
+
+She says, ""I don't know.""
+
+""You've been real quiet,"" Elane observes, later, as she and Sekai lay side by side in their shared bunk. (It's 30% cheaper to split one bunk between them then to have two separate, and neither of them have partners they would rather share with--this sleeping arrangement is mostly for financial reasons.) Elane is scraping gunk out from under her fingernails and flicking it off the edge of the bunk. Sekai is tracing the pebbled pattern of the plasticrack ceiling tile with her eyes. ""Bad shit today? You can lay it on me if it's five minutes or less.""
+
+""It's nothing,"" Sekai says.
+
+Elane makes a disbelieving noise.
+
+""Well, yes, it's something,"" Sekai admits, ""but I need some time to think it over.""
+
+in the interest of fulfilling the clickbait title of this fic, here are the top 3 SURPRISING things you didn't know about the SECUNIT who pulled you out of an INCINERATOR:- it is paid wages by the University it works for- it watches Dazzleshard Climatica- it has a hacked governor module
+
+The University sent one representative to oversee the shipment of some strange synthetics out of the mine. DrillDown Inc sent Elane to take the signature as the legal fall for the transaction. (Her position in this transaction is colloquially referred to as ""scapekid"" for reasons nobody knows.)
+
+Whenever a shipment of strange synthetics is made, a volunteer is bribed into taking the full legal responsibility for any and all possible ill effects or lawsuits that might arise from the misuse of the goods. The payout is okay. You can be the scapekid for a synthetics shipment as many times as you want. The only downside is being on the hook for the low probability of something going wrong, thus putting your ass on the line for payouts that you can never hope to live up to. This would damn a scapekid from a life of gruntwork to a shorter life of worse gruntwork.
+
+As a lifetime grunt with no dependents and no intention of acquiring any, Elane is the perfect scapekid. She fell into it some years ago from the pressure to cough up to her many debts. It was a good deal for her. Trade the looming, immediate possibility of being sold into brutal forced labor for defaulting on debts, for the smaller possibility of being sold into brutal forced labor for being the scapekid to multiple shipments of highly-regulated substances. No-brainer.
+
+""I just need to be here to sign liability for the synthetics shipment to the Uni,"" she messaged Sekai. ""Hopefully it's quick and I'll be down to the mess before lunch's over.""
+
+
+""The Uni? Did they send SecUnit?""
+
+
+SecUnit?
+
+Elane looks across to where Supervisor Cali is going through the agreement one final time with the Uni rep, Kaede. Behind Kaede stands a grumpy-looking person who, upon closer examination, has a feed profile with nothing but ""SecUnit"" in the address field.
+
+Elane messages Sekai, ""Hot steamin' balls, they brought a SecUnit. Why?""
+
+
+""I don't know. Is it the rogue one? Kind of grumpy looking with bushy eyebrows?""
+
+
+
+""ROGUE?""
+
+
+
+""That's the SecUnit that saved my life, Elane! It came by a few weeks back with the Uni reps, and... Yeah it's a rogue.""
+
+
+
+""They're just letting a ROGUE SECUNIT walk around here?""
+
+
+
+""I mean, you know how synthetics buyers can be kind of weird and experimental. But also it saved my life, you know? It was rogue then too.""
+
+
+Elane stares at the SecUnit for the entirety of the transaction. She hardly skims her section of the contract when it comes time to sign herself up as liability fall. It all looks the same as usual, but the words run together and are even harder to read than contracts usually are.
+
+At the end of it, as the Uni rep leaves, the SecUnit messages Elane, privately.
+
+
+""You're a creepy big-eyeballs weirdo. Learn some manners and stop staring at people.""
+
+
+Elane seeks out Asa at the mess hall. Sekai is already gone to catch a bathroom break, and there are only a few minutes left on the free lunch hour.
+
+""Should I be worried about the synthetics shipment I just signed for? The buyers sent a rogue SecUnit.""
+
+Asa's expression of dismay would be more concerning if this were not the perpetual default state of his face. ""Elane...""
+
+""Don't give me the shit about what a bad deal being a scapekid is, I just want to know what kind of deranged people run around the place with a rogue SecUnit.""
+
+He makes an exasperated noise, and a shrugging gesture. ""Yeah it's a bad sign, maybe? But no worse than you signing as the scapekid in general.""
+
+Well, that's life, wasn't it?
+
+""Get this though,"" Elane is speaking through food, eating hurriedly. (There are two minutes left on the lunch-break clock.) ""Sekai says this is the same SecUnit who dragged her ass out of the shaft.""
+
+He frowns. ""But that's... improbable. And how would she know that?""
+
+""I guess she talked to it. Says it was rogue then too.""
+
+Asa blinks vaguely into space while Elane continues to inhale her lunch.
+
+""You know,"" he says, ten seconds before the lunch-bell blares, ""She's always been weird about SecUnits ever since then. But maybe she's right to be. I think I'll do some reading.""
+
+There are 30 minutes of unstructured free time in Asa's daily schedule, directly preceding the 15-minute window he has scheduled into his calendar that reads: ""fall asleep."" He times his life with machinelike precision: it keeps him sane and steady in an otherwise grueling and relentless world.
+
+This is what works for him. It keeps him functional and performing in the top 20th percentile of the local workforce. What is more -- it is sustainable in a way that most other top performers don't manage. He continually balances the edge of burnout, never tipping over.
+
+Each day: Wake up (10 minutes). Self-maintenance (20 minutes). Work organization (10 minutes). Work tasks (6 hours). Lunch (15 minutes). Relationship maintenance (15 minutes). Work organization (10 minutes). Work tasks (6 hours). Self-maintenance (30 minutes). Work organization (10 minutes). Unstructured free time (30 minutes). Fall asleep (15 minutes).
+
+Every 20 days, he cashes in a free day and spends it lying facedown in his private bunk and listening to music. This is the lynchpin of his sanity. This, and the daily 30 minutes of unstructured time.
+
+He cannot slip. If he slips, he slips further and further. He cannot fall behind himself.
+
+For the past several weeks he has been using his 30 minutes of daily unstructured free time to watch a long-running serial. He knows he should use his free time to give himself some new curiosity, but he has been flirting with the burnout in earnest, lately, and mindless television is all he can handle.
+
+But today he starts the 30-minute timer, and starts running searches. SecUnits. He is looking for anything, really: media, newsbursts, company policy.
+
+The 30-minute timer goes off, and it is the pure force of relentless habit that has him closing up his workspace and closing his eyes. Because otherwise he would have kept reading, kept gathering search results -- these 30 minutes have ignited something inside his mind. A curiosity, underfed and starving.
+
+By the end of the week he has amassed a hoard of materials. By the end of the next week he has started a horror movie featuring SecUnits. By the end of the following week, he has his one day off to cash in.
+
+Instead of spending the day lying facedown with music, he breaks his own rules of sanity maintenance, and reads a series of public news articles and legal writeups for an incident with a rogue SecUnit and the freehold polity of Preservation Alliance. Then the documentary, from Preservation. He is consumed by an old and familiar, thrilling thing. A dangerous thing that could upset the delicate edge-of-burnout balance that Asa has set up for himself.
+
+Dangerously, he finds it difficult for him to care about the danger. All that matters is this.
+
+He messages Sekai incessantly, and she responds with enthusiasm. ""That's the same rogue SecUnit!"" she says. ""How did you find that?""
+
+Elane is less interested, but pulled into orbit by the gravity of Asa and Sekai's joint obsession.
+
+The thrill of it all comes to a halt when one day, Asa finds his SecUnit workspace wiped, and a company reprimand and fine attached to his employee profile. Infraction: seeking out and disseminating inflammatory and unproductive materials.
+
+He stares at the infraction. At the empty workspace that he'd poured hours into organizing.
+
+Something in him is hollowed-out. Collapsed. Rotten and empty.
+
+The burnout is upon him, and he struggles to stick to his mechanical daily regimen.
+
+During his next day off, he lies facedown, listening to instrumentals. His sheets are overdue for a run through the recycler. He's fallen behind on maintenance tasks.
+
+He receives a ping from a machine address.
+
+Then a message, from that same address.
+
+
+""Your infraction is removed. You can talk to me, if you want. Don't tell the managers.""
+
+
+He stares at the message, from a machine address. After several minutes, it scrubs itself from his feed. A new one replaces it.
+
+
+""If you want to speak to SecUnit, I can get a message through to it for you.""
+
+
+All at once, his heart comes alight again.
+
+It occurs to him that maybe there is a way out. That there is an out, an existence that is not just this, the daily grind of skirting collapse. There are other places. There are other powers that are not the company. He doesn't know why he is only realizing this now.
+
+Sekai, Asa, and Elane discussed the punitive fines they'd been hit with for nearly contaminating the incinerator with Sekai's dead body.
+
+""I cannot fucking believe this shit,"" Elane was saying. ""I was so close to having the money saved for my teethwork, and they went and scooped my account. That's robbery.""
+
+""There's an opt-out clause to slow down insta-fines,"" Asa told her, ""I'm paying mine off in installments.""
+
+""Well goodie-for-fucking-you for reading the twenty thousand words of fine print on every mandatory agreement form you ever touch,"" Elane hissed. ""This is all your fault, by the way, if you hadn't gone and tried to murder Sekai--""
+
+""Stop joking about that, it's not funny,"" Asa said, with real distress. He glanced to Sekai, then away again.
+
+Sekai picked at her lunchgreens. They were barely green, what with all the processing and re-processing they'd undergone. It was anyone's guess as to whether they'd ever actually been green plants in the first place, or whether the green was dye added to imitative microbial sheets. Maybe they would be greener, if it was dye.
+
+To think she might have died yesterday if the creepy SecUnit hadn't been stationed right there to jump down and fish her out of the incinerator.
+
+""Do you think they talk to each other?"" Sekai asked.
+
+""Who?"" Asa asked.
+
+""SecUnits.""
+
+Elane grimaced, and exchanged a weary look with Asa. ""Sekai, they're bots. They don't talk.""
+
+""It talked to me,"" Sekai insisted.
+
+Elane and Asa exchanged another look."
+44429893,Comic - Decision Paralysis,['VoidlingRemnata'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Fan Comics, Comic, Shopping, Decision Paralysis, SecUnit solidarity, the feed as visual imagery, smol drone haloes, nothing bad happens, but Three is having A Time, No shipping, AAA Murderbot",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,"1,857",1/1,40,118,22,416,"['slategrey', 'Unknown66', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Bardic_Feline', 'fraternite', 'jriracha', '7hr3ven', 'aeonicho', 'youurelovely', 'PotentiallyProblematic', 'ipborgdan', 'rokhal', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'NightErrant', 'EvaBelmort', 'musicofthespheres', 'applejee', 'dancernerd', 'EyesOfCrows', 'Hi_Hope', 'Redcognito', 'icar9', 'FriendlyPoltergeist', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'Kieron_ODuibhir', 'Liara_Shadowsong', 'nolanfa', 'TranscendTheBoundaryOfTimeAndSpace', 'theAsh0', 'squireofgeekdom', 'zz9pzza', 'vikkyleigh', 'Chrome', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'simonlorden', 'hvalrann', 'enchantedsleeper', 'dementor_ssc', 'alyyks', 'Magechild', 'square_eyes', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'sareliz', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'edenfalling', 'kearlyn', 'Valdinia', 'AnxiousEspada', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'Stariceling']",[],"Page One
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Page Two
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Page Three
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Page Four
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Page Five
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Page Six
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+IMAGE ID:
+
+ 
+
+A comic consisting of 6 pages, in black and white digital inks. The style is vaguely anime.
+
+ 
+
+Page One has 6 panels.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 1: An establishing shot of the outside of a station transit ring. Several ships are docked to the ring on one side.
+
+A voice from offscreen says: Okay, this station has automated clothing stores. Preservation doesn't have any.
+
+ART's uniform is good but you should still pick out something for yourself, Three. It was something I liked doing when I finally did.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 2: Three and Murderbot stand inside a gate looking different flavors of apprehensive, Murderbot has a backpack and wears a hoodie. Three wears a sci fi style uniform. Just beyond them is a faceless crowd of humans.
+
+Murderbot says: Ugh. Nope, still not used to it.
+
+Three says: Query, which part?
+
+Murderbot: All the parts. The crowds. I don't like it.
+
+Three: If you're not used to it after this much unrestricted runtime how will I -
+
+Murderbot interrupts with: You'll be fine, Three.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 3: They both have entered the crowd. Murderbot scowls though is trying to hide it, holding the strap of its backpack tightly. Three is just behind it looking overwhelmed.
+
+Murderbot says in the feed: You've got the look-like-a-human code, I'll take care of the weapons scanners and cameras. Just watch what I do in my feed. I'll pass you some of the processing so you can get used to it.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 4: A shot looking up at a busy plaza crowded with round buildings and people, with a giant crystal sculpture hanging upside down from the ceiling.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 5: A shot looking down at Three as it stops and stares up. open mouthed.
+
+Offscreen Murderbot says with a wavy line indicating voice warble: Three!
+
+ 
+
+Panel 6: The same view looking down at Three, who is still staring up, but is now off balance and being dragged away by Murderbot via hooked arms.
+
+Three: 86% match to style and modality in your serials, but. Everything's so - it's not -
+
+Murderbot: Yeah it's different in person.
+
+ 
+
+Page Two has 5 panels.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 1: Murderbot grabs Three's wrist and drags it away, Three is off-balance and still looking back up at the ceiling.
+
+Three: I have been deployed at five colony reclamations. Colony and terraforming infrastructure is big, but... it's not like any of this. This is the opposite of utilitarian. I don't know what to do with this information.
+
+Murderbot: Stop gaping, you'll attract attention.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 2: Dark silhouettes of Murderbot and Three walk up wide stairs to a shop entrance. The shop has multiple sets of doors, with a large partially cut off sign above them that reads ""The Travel"". In the background are round stacked buildings.
+
+Murderbot: In here. You can get a private booth to yourself, it'll help.
+
+Three: What is the protocol for this?
+
+Murderbot: Just follow the shop module, it lays everything out so that even a human could do it.
+
+Three: ... Acknowledged.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 3: Murderbot pulls a zipped hoodie down over itself, looking down at itself. This panel does not have a border, it's just Murderbot, overlapping a little bit of other panels.
+
+Murderbot: Wow. Apparently I still take forever to make the same decisions. Whatever. So what if they're all similar to what I have already. It's what I like. I can maybe admit that now.
+
+Murderbot in the feed: (ping) I'm done. Status?
+
+ 
+
+Panel 4: A close-up of Murderbot's eyes as they widen.
+
+In the feed, off-screen: 1.0 immediate assistance requested~~~
+
+ 
+
+Panel 5: Alarmed Murderbot bursts into Three's booth, the door flung wide. There's art deco detailing around the door.
+
+Murderbot in the feed: System System: Unit Report! Sitrep?
+
+Murderbot, aloud: What happened??
+
+ 
+
+Page Three has 4 panels.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 1: A large panel running off the edges of the page. Three turns around to look at the viewer, shaking. There's a sea of digital windows curving around it, stacked and overlapping, connected with branching circuit-looking decision trees.
+
+Three: I don't know how to do this... How do I know what I want?
+
+Murderbot, offscreen: Oh. Oh no.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 2: Murderbot steps further into the room, having closed the door. It looks up at the mess of feed windows. Three looks back at Murderbot over its shoulder.
+
+Murderbot: You're going through every item in the database?
+
+Three: Is that not how you're supposed to do it?
+
+Murderbot: Three there are over 250,000 clothing options in here.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 3: Three has its hands up, gesturing at the feed windows.
+
+Three: Yes it's taking longer than - I tried assigning numeric values to all of them after downloading the database -
+
+Murderbot: Three.
+
+Three: - but then I realized I didn't know what values to assign, so I've been attempting to ascertain a values system. This dataset uses what others I have known have worn. This is an analysis of all the video from the transit ring of this station.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 4: Startled, Three turns back to look at Murderbot.
+
+Three: This includes all the characters in the media you've shown me, weighted by your -
+
+Murderbot interrupts: Three!!
+
+Three: ... Yes?
+
+ 
+
+Page Four has 5 panels.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 1: Murderbot steps in front of Three, holding a hand up to wipe away at the feed windows. The windows are popping out of existence. Three looks off to the side, unhappy, crossing its arms tightly into itself.
+
+Murderbot: Okay look, let's start over. Forget all of this.
+
+Three: Just copying you would be a security liability. I... don't know how to make decisions like this. Corporate branding and marketing always made decisions like this.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 2: Murderbot looks back at Three. Three hugs itself, looking unhappy.
+
+Murderbot: (sigh) I know, decisions are stupidly hard. The whole process is terrifying. Even when there's no wrong decision it feels like there is. The only decisions I made those first 10,000 hours aside from media were to not make any. Even then the first real one was just to do my job better and save a human I wasn't supposed to.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 3: View of their backs as they lean in together, Murderbot points up at a new feed menu display.
+
+Murderbot: So let's do this. Forget all these sections, use Basics only. Your goal is something not too flamboyant, something simple enough to not get noticed in a crowd.
+
+Three: Acknowledged.
+
+Murderbot: You probably want a high collar to cover your dataport, and long sleeves. Show as little of your body as possible.
+
+Three: Okay.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 4: This panel is cut up in a way to suggest the passage of time. Murderbot reclines on a bench, leaning on its backpack, arms behind its head. Its eyes are closed. There's a feed screen hovering in front of it showing media of a ship flying through rocks near a planet.
+
+Three, from offscreen: Oh!
+
+ 
+
+Panel 5: Three is dressed in a fitted button down shirt and slacks. It looks down at itself, mesmerized. There's a mirror next to it showing it from another angle. A small word balloon has an exclamation point inside it.
+
+ 
+
+Page Five has 6 panels.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 1: Murderbot sits up abruptly, with a simplified angry cartoon face with exaggerated angry eyebrows. It's surrounded by feed windows reading ""NO"", ""DO NOT"", and various kinds of X's. Three looks back at it, surprised and dismayed.
+
+Murderbot: NO. Absolutely not. Denied.
+
+Three: What? Why?
+
+Murderbot: Vetoed. Those are Barish-Estranza colors, Three!
+
+ 
+
+Panel 2: Three fidgets with its sleeve, looking off to the side, appearing upset and withdrawn.
+
+Murderbot, from offscreen: You just recreated the uniform.
+
+Three: It's... familiar. I thought that could mean I like it.
+
+Murderbot: You will absolutely hate this later if I let you get this.
+
+Three: But...
+
+ 
+
+Panel 3: Murderbot flops back on the bench, head tilted back, arms splayed out. Three stands before it, still fidgeting.
+
+Murderbot: (sigh) ...But it's nice. It's not the shitty cheap version of the uniform that SecUnits get.
+
+Three: (nod)
+
+Murderbot: Just choose different colors.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 4: Murderbot makes a face from saying difficult things. Three gazes openly at it.
+
+Murderbot: I know it's your decision but if you leave in that, sooner or later you're going to feel gross. I don't want you to have to... you know. Feel gross.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 5: Three whirls around, making fists, looking very determined. It's opening up a brand new set of feed windows that are already stacking up.
+
+Three: Okay, I can do this.
+
+Murderbot, from offscreen: No, don't start making charts for picking colors!
+
+Three: There should be a better protocol for this!
+
+ 
+
+Panel 6: Murderbot and Three as somewhat chibi versions have exited the shop. Murderbot's face has only dark scribbled squints for eyes. Three has dots for eyes in a dazed overwhelmed look. Three has a new outfit with a jacket and boots, and is hugging a bag with handles. The shop's sign is fully revealed, it reads ""The Traveller"".
+
+Murderbot: I can't believe that took 2 hours.
+
+Three: I will never make a decision again.
+
+ 
+
+Page 6 has 5 panels.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 1: Three, in a loose sweater, comes through one of multiple arched entrances. It looks happy to be here and holds a hand open, releasing small round drones into the air.
+
+Caption: 9,000 hours later
+
+ 
+
+Panel 2: In a crowd, Murderbot appears beside Three. Murderbot has a blank neutral expression, Three is happy to see it. They each have small round drones hovering in a loose halo around their heads.
+
+Murderbot: That's...really colorful. You realize you stand out, right.
+
+Three: I know. I made this myself. I've developed 32 ways to alter sleeves to allow discrete weapon deployment and use without damaging the material. I can alter your clothes if you'd like?
+
+ 
+
+Panel 3: They walk side by side. Murderbot stairs straight ahead, stony faced. Three, looking absolutely gleeful, stretches its arms out in front of it to show the sleeves.
+
+Murderbot: Uh. Maybe. I'll think about it.
+
+Three: I like making things. It's not my function, but. If I think of it like targeted protection with specialized gear... then actually it still is my function. It took me a while to work than one out. Anyway it's much better than destroying things. I'm done with that.
+
+Murderbot: Yeah. Me too. Unless something needs destruction. There's still time for you to sign on to the next survery. If you want. There's a lot more clients this time.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 4: Their heads are slightly bent together. Three cheerfully side-eyes Murderbot, who looks off to the side with a slight lopsided smile.
+
+Three: Nobody hurts SecUnit clients.
+
+Together, they say: Nobody.
+
+ 
+
+Panel 5: Full body view of the two of them from behind. Three stretches arms out above its head. Murderbot still has hands in its hoodie pockets. They're heading towards an open arch to a wider space, this hall has large potted plants on the sides.
+
+Three: I think you mean 'friends' though.
+
+Murderbot: No I mean 'clients'.
+
+Three: You are a liar, 1.0.
+
+Murderbot: ...I mean, yeah.
+
+Caption: End.
+
+ 
+
+END ID"
+44655448,Team of Three,['Lillow'],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","POV SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), mutual administrative assistances mutually administrating assistance, the real team was the friends we made along the way, or is it the real friends are the teammates we make?, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,"5,511",1/1,16,83,9,351,"['spossie9', 'Unknown66', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'FigOwl', 'Cheshiure', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Deliala919', 'puddingcatbeans', 'iox', 'darth_eowyn', 'Seregona', 'chippit', 'palaceoffunk', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Doctor13', 'EvaBelmort', 'mothmentum', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'ErinPtah', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'dancernerd', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'Edgedancer', 'aspiring_dragon', 'fleurofthecourt', 'EvenstarFalling', 'onomatopoetia', 'Redcognito', 'DreamsofInspiration', 'Bibli', 'SmilingM0on', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'Gamebird', 'AnxiousEspada', 'ampquot', 'Magechild', 'prgchrqltma', 'violasarecool', 'isilee', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'edenfalling', 'Znarikia', 'Valdinia', 'beeclaws', 'LJwrites', 'unicornduke', 'dementor_ssc', 'FirstnameSurname', 'sluggg', 'friendlyneighborhoodsecretary']",[],"
+
+What is it that you're struggling with? 
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+asked. I wanted to quip back that I wasn't struggling with anything, and all of my parameters were maintaining. Before I could say anything, it sent me a still image from one of its cameras, marked for 30 minutes earlier. In the image I was in the exact same position I'm currently in; standing in ready position at the end of a short corridor.
+
+
+
+Ahead of me there were jovial human noises, because at the other end of the hall was the 
+
+Perihelion's 
+
+largest media lounge, and several jovial humans. I knew who most of them were, but I had never actually spoken directly to any of them.
+
+
+
+They were Murderbot 1.0's humans from Preservation, and they were here to see me.
+
+
+
+Well, not only me. They were mainly here to see Murderbot 1.0. We were on a return journey from a cargo/information gathering mission that passed close enough to the Preservation system that the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+had managed to get approval for a short three cycle stop at the prime station so that Murderbot 1.0 might get to see its humans again. They had all expressed a desire to also see the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+as well, and bafflingly enough, me.
+
+
+
+It was the third cycle, and there were only a few hours left before the typical rest period time, and the humans would be leaving. I had carefully avoided them the entire time, and remained mostly in my quarters. Due to the 
+
+Perihelion's 
+
+size, it was easy to avoid them even when they had come aboard for a movie night with Murderbot 1.0, a concept I knew to be entirely plausible but still seemed so far-fetched I had needed to see it to believe it was happening.
+
+
+
+But there they all were, sitting around on the various comfortable chairs of the lounge with Murderbot 1.0 tucked in the corner. Its feed presence was light, and not even a little bit annoyed at anything around it. It was 
+
+happy
+
+, and had been that way for three cycles, especially now. It liked these humans, and they liked it. I had already known that, but it was still strange to see a SecUnit, or any construct for that matter, so casually and affectionately interact with humans this way.
+
+
+
+And they wanted to do that with me, as well. I had been balking at it since I had been told they wished to see me, as well.
+
+
+
+
+I'm not sure, 
+
+I responded. Because I wasn't. Many strange things had happened to me since I became a rogue, but this was certainly at the top of the list for odd experiences.
+
+
+
+
+Respectfully, Three, your world cannot be SecUnit and I and my crew all the time. This is a good, easy step towards greater socialization that's called for in your trauma treatment.
+
+
+
+
+I sighed, which was one of the first un-govmodded skills I had gained. I would say I regretted taking the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+up on its offer of trauma treatment, but it has actually done a lot of what I assume to be good for me. It was just incredibly frustrating at times.
+
+
+
+
+I'm not ready for this. 
+
+I had said that, aloud, four times in the last thirty minutes, and eleven times silently to myself.
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+didn't sound as annoyed as I felt it probably was with me when it responded, 
+
+but you are.
+
+
+
+
+It would be so easy to leave. The only other person who knew I had been standing here this entire time was Murderbot 1.0, and other than sending me the initial invite to the movie watching, it hadn't commented on my inability to walk any further. It also hadn't told its humans I was there, which I appreciated immensely.
+
+
+
+
+Incorrect, 
+
+I said.
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+nudged at my feed, and sent a request for specific files. I sighed, and pulled them into our shared workspace.
+
+
+
+There was no way it wasn't annoyed with me, but I wouldn't have been able to tell by its tone when it said, 
+
+let's review the evidence one more time, shall we?
+
+
+
+
+-----
+
+
+
+
+**Evidence_Packet** **[R_847876.54.01.file]**
+
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+was getting on my nerves, which wasn't new. It didn't seem to understand why I was totally disinterested in conversing with it. I thought about its threat to kill me. It had been warranted at the time, and I didn't blame it, but it still made me feel...something. I wasn't sure what, yet.
+
+
+
+I hadn't left my designated quarters in three cycles.  For a bot as intelligent as it was, it seemed to struggle with how to handle me. It had requested that I bathe, but not until after I had already gained a tentative grasp of 
+
+no
+
+. Then it had ordered that I bathe, and I had denied it again. I was aboard it, so that might have been stupid. Perhaps it would jettison me, perhaps it wanted to. I wasn't sure. I was sure that I didn't want to leave my quarters. It had given me limited camera access to public areas, and I had seen its human crew discussing me. I decided not to listen to those conversations. They would either decide to recycle me for parts, drop me at the next port with a few supplies if I was lucky, or keep me here for some unknown reason. They already had one rogue SecUnit; perhaps I was part of a collection? I didn't know.
+
+
+
+I refused to respond to the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+. I didn't speak to any of the humans it sent to my door, either. The humans, at least, respected my desires to be left alone. The 
+
+Perihelion
+
+, though, only seemed to grow increasingly agitated. Before I had blocked it from my feed, it had made a comment about how I was as bad as SecUnit. It was referring to its SecUnit, the rogue that wandered freely and interacted with humans as it chose and seemed very fond of a few of them, which baffled me beyond anything. It had named itself, and even duplicated itself. All by choice.
+
+
+
+It spent much of its time cooped up in a dark lounge dedicated for media consumption, watching different shows and movies with the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ of all things, and it sat on 
+
+very 
+
+comfortable looking chairs. They seemed fond of each other, which made me wary, but it hadn't threatened to kill me yet, so I 
+
+chose 
+
+to spend much of my time watching it through the cameras. It knew I was there, but it didn't react. Not at first. Not until the fourth cycle I had spent in my designated quarters had begun.
+
+
+
+It looked up at the camera I had been watching it through, and I received a private channel request. That anything was private aboard the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+was laughable. I was curious, I knew that. My curiosity rarely led to anything, because I was never given the chance to indulge it. But I could now. I did.
+
+
+
+I accepted the channel request.
+
+
+
+
+ART has a library, did you know that? 
+
+Murderbot 1.0 asked. I did know this. It was a small room, with dedicated reading devices, and even physical paper books, and several comfortable looking surfaces to sit on or work at. I sent an acknowledgement.
+
+
+
+
+Not interesting to you? Ok. 
+
+It went silent in the feed, and refocused its gaze on the screen it was watching.
+
+
+
+After a few minutes of silent channel activity, it said, 
+
+you should bathe at some point. I don't know much about the composition of your skin, but you could get sores. The soap doesn't hurt as bad, like the soap we're given by our companies.
+
+
+
+
+I had a higher composition of organic compounds in my skin for cost-efficiency and I already knew it was prone to sores. The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+was providing me fresh clothes everyday, but the collar was beginning to chafe.
+
+
+
+I sent it an acknowledgement ping.
+
+
+
+
+Listen, I know ART is an asshole, and it should apologize for threatening to kill you, but it's not going to hurt you now unless you're a threat, but I don't think you are. 
+
+Was it lying? Surely it was lying.
+
+
+
+It seemed to hesitate, which confirmed it was definitely lying. It thought I was a threat. I wasn't sure I found Murderbot 1.0 to be a threat, not anymore, not since I had rescued it. This made me feel something. Perhaps trust? That seemed almost absurd.
+
+
+
+Its hesitation continued, and there was movement in the feed by the 
+
+Perihelion. 
+
+I knew there was no way this channel was private. I went to close it, but then Murderbot 1.0 started talking again.
+
+
+
+
+As bonkers-stupid as this all seems, no one here actually wants to hurt you. You're scared, and that sucks, and I can't really fix that. I can promise you, though, I won't let anyone keep bothering you if you don't want to be bothered. 
+
+Its face in the camera flexed, but I missed the expression since I only had the light of the screen it was watching to go by.
+
+
+
+
+I know that I hated when people bothered me. When I was no longer working for the company. I didn't like it. I still don't like it a lot of the time, but now I know they're just trying to be helpful. They're genuine, all of these humans. They come from places where bots are accepted as people, 
+
+I balked, which must have translated to the feed because it hurried to add, 
+
+I know! I know its fucking weird! It's so fucking weird.
+
+
+
+
+It went silent again. Maybe it didn't know what to say.
+
+
+
+So I said, 
+
+Yes, it's all really fucking weird.
+
+
+
+
+I caught the expression it made this time; it was a positive one.
+
+
+
+
+Listen, if ART bothers you anymore I'll just blow it up.
+
+
+
+
+This immediately caused the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+to fully burst into the channel, more than it had been. 
+
+I'd like to see you try, 
+
+it said. Then they began bickering, which was as annoying as it was not new. I closed the channel.
+
+
+
+I sat in the silence of my quarters for another hour. It occurred to me, then, that I had never had this much interaction with another construct before. Not even One and Two. We had been a team, technically. Even a team for a number of Barish-Estranza missions, but we had never communicated more than was mandatory.
+
+
+
+I wondered what they would think of my situation? I realized I would never know.
+
+
+
+I turned to look at the door that led to the bathroom, and soap and fresh clothes fell from the recycler.
+
+
+
+I could try one fucking weird thing at a time, I supposed.
+
+
+
+The soap didn't hurt, exactly like Murderbot 1.0 said. It even had a mild, pleasant smell that lingered on my skin in a way I found I enjoyed.
+
+
+
+When I exited the bathroom with fresh clothing on, the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+was waiting in the feed, having bypassed the block at the end of my shower. It was reserved, considering what it was, and how it had acted up until now.
+
+
+
+I chose not to block it from my feed a second time
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit is correct. I should apologize, 
+
+it said.
+
+
+
+
+I don't know a great deal about how social interaction between us is supposed to go, but I know that's not an actual apology, 
+
+I responded.
+
+
+
+
+You're correct. It's not. I am sorry. I don't regret my actions, I did what I needed to do, but I am sorry it has disturbed you to this degree. It was not my intention.
+
+
+
+
+
+You had no intentions; you didn't know anything about me except maybe I could help save your people. I was well placed at a convenient time for you, 
+
+I said.
+
+
+
+
+Yes. You appeared when I badly needed you to. I appreciate that you helped, when you didn't have to. You saved SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+I had appeared, it had been scared, it had threatened me because it had needed me. I was getting the impression it wasn't very good at being wrong. That's when I realized I didn't know very much about the 
+
+Perihelion, 
+
+other than a very sideways first impression that it seemed incapable or unwilling to shake. It didn't know how to restart, but I realized that I did.
+
+
+
+
+I forgive you. And I can help you more, in the future, if you need me to, 
+
+I said, 
+
+but not if you're rude about it. I'm not your SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+It seemed amused, which was the desired response. 
+
+You're right. You're a lot more polite. I'll be better, Three.
+
+
+
+
+For some reason I had a feeling that ""better"" didn't extend to Murderbot 1.0, but that seemed to work for them. It would be better for me, because it wanted me to like it. It didn't want me to be scared of it. That was an interesting sensation that I could get used to.
+
+
+
+It then sent me a cordial invite on its own letterhead to my almost never before used inbox to join Murderbot 1.0 and it in the media lounge to watch 
+
+The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon
+
+. I accepted, and exited my quarters for the first time in four cycles.
+
+
+
+-----
+
+
+
+
+**Evidence_Packet** **[Party002.file]**
+
+
+
+
+
+
+As a Unit designated for Security, I was not trained in handling in depth personal interaction. So when Captain Seth had decided I should obtain some ""on the job"" experience with intel gathering on a lost colony, I had expected I would have to pretend to be a human bodyguard, I had 
+
+not 
+
+anticipated that that would entail 
+
+talking to humans.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Martyn was acting as a shareholder for a made-up corporation by the name JunGoCo and inquiring with another company, TesDion, about the acquisition of ""property"", otherwise known as a lost colony to the Pansystem University. We were only here in order to obtain enough information to narrow down our search area, not to end up at a dinner party like we currently were. As a bodyguard I was excused from having to eat but not from having to socialize, it seemed, and after everyone broke up to socialize, a few inebriated humans took an interest in me.
+
+
+
+""Wow, you're like 
+
+really
+
+ augmented. They've got you for life, huh?"" Human#1 asked, who's name I hadn't recorded because the amount of names and places was overwhelming in many ways and my storage banks full of information that would be useless very soon caused me undue amounts of stress. But I had no idea how to respond, so I only said, ""yes.""
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0, also acting as private security but had somehow avoided social interaction, was watching from a few paces away with an extremely well hidden drone, and we had an open feed channel, but it didn't react to my response. I was unsure how it had avoided social interaction, but I had seen a few humans attempt to come up to it, before they looked at it and decided to do something else.
+
+
+
+Human#2 gasped, and I could smell the alcohol on her breath. ""Wow, you talk!"" 
+
+
+
+Human#1 jabbed human#2 in her side. ""Don't be rude, Keli!"" But it seemed human#2 was incorrigible. She leaned forward with apparent great interest. ""What augments do you have?"" Human#1 gasped but also leaned forward with apparent curiosity.
+
+
+
+Crap. I wasn't sure what to say. The creeping, burning sensation of panic began to set it. I checked my databanks to find a good answer for an augment that a normal security human would have that a SecUnit wouldn't. ""I have...a lot of things,"" I stammered out after a moment, my feed was clogged with lists comparing human augments versus constructs. Human#1 looked fully invested. ""Can we see some? We've never seen a security specific augment before.""
+
+
+
+The panic burned through my veins. I received an overheating alert from an internal system I couldn't have named at the time.
+
+
+
+And then Murderbot 1.0 was there.
+
+
+
+""It has a wankydoodle scrabdip big toe with laser enhancement. Now fuck off,"" it said, looking over both humans head, which wasn't hard considering its stature. Humans#1 and #2 balked and huffed and sputtered before Murderbot 1.0 shifted its gaze to look at their faces and they seemed to decide better of anything they were going to say and walked away in a hurry, grabbing more thin vessels of alcohol from a server as they went.
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 returned to its post, and I tapped our feed. 
+
+Thank you, 
+
+I said.
+
+
+
+It did the feed equivalent of shrugging. 
+
+Don't worry about it. Try not to engage with humans, though. They ask the stupidest questions, and want you to prove everything you say. I suggest you try to look pissed off as much as possible. 
+
+It didn't seem upset at me, which was stranger than the interaction with the humans. Just tired, but I had learned that tired was Murderbot 1.0's baseline, and if it was trying to specifically 
+
+look
+
+ ""pissed-off"", then I couldn't tell, because it always looked the way it currently looked right now. I had never experienced this interaction with another construct in my time. It had rescued me, but not in the sense I was used to. I filed the sensation for later analysis.
+
+
+
+Then someone threw a drink on someone else, with Martyn between them, and I had bigger things to worry about.
+
+
+
+-----
+
+
+
+
+**Evidence Packet** **[Iris_Falls_0076.file]**
+
+
+
+
+
+Three, if I may make some suggestions on your form? 
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ said to me, all at once in our three-way feed. I took more shots at the hostiles that were chasing us through the long corridors of the space port. I sent it a confirmation.
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+sent me footage of our current firefight with TesDione but from ten minutes earlier. It was a recording from one of the 
+
+Perihelion's 
+
+drones that was following us as we made our escape from the colony space port. It had been abandoned, sadly, which we had only just found out when TesDione arrived at and then entered the port. Apparently, a rival corporation of ""JunGoCo"" had outbid us retroactively and to hide the fact TesDione had already sold the coordinates to us, they had arrived to forcefully remove us in order to pretend like we had never been here. Murderbot 1.0 had made a comment about how we probably wouldn't even get a refund, and the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+had had to explain the joke to me. It was funny once I understood.
+
+
+
+The footage showed how one of my shots had gone wide. I had noted this as I had originally taken it, and returned my own analysis to the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+. It responded with amusement.
+
+
+
+
+It seems my suggestions were unnecessary. Carry on, then, 
+
+it said. I was about to formulate a response about how I still appreciated its feedback, when Murderbot 1.0 became active in the three-way feed.
+
+
+
+
+We don't have time for play-by-plays, 
+
+it said, sounding annoyed. I was slowly learning that when it was annoyed, the situation wasn't actually that serious. I would have been more concerned if it weren't a little bit pissed-off sounding.
+
+
+
+
+Three appreciates my input, unlike you, 
+
+the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+responded. Murderbot 1.0 did the feed equivalent of rolling its eyes, which it might also have done outside of the feed, but I wouldn't have been able to tell since it, like me, was wearing an EVAC suit. We rounded a corner, and I fired at one of the support beams holding a large piece of corridor bracing up. I was pleasantly surprised when, nearly in sync, Murderbot 1.0 fired at the other support beam. The bracing fell with an incredible crash as I finally caught sight of, with my eyes and a number of my drones, the rest of the 
+
+Perihelion's 
+
+crew further ahead, still running
+
+. 
+
+I could tell by their speed they were growing tired, likely due to the many sustained minutes of sprinting we had all endured, but soon we would be back aboard the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+and we could leave this awful port.
+
+
+
+The entire mission was a bust, and I really hated how that was making me feel.
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 insisted on being last to board, despite my objection, but we switched off covering each other until we were safely back aboard the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+, and I could remove my EVAC suit. Now that I wasn't required to wear armor anymore, I found it a nuisance after long periods of time. I particularly hated the sweat build up all over the crevices of my skin. Combined with my now sour mood, I really wanted to take a shower more than anything.
+
+
+
+But we had to debrief, so I followed Murderbot 1.0 to Medical. No one was seriously injured, but Iris had twisted her ankle pretty badly and the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+wanted to examine it. Since she had most of the data we had managed to save from the abandoned colony on her augment, and had already read a good portion of it before we were attacked, the debrief was going to happen in Medical.
+
+
+
+""Peri is sorting the data now, but I don't think there's anything really useful in it,"" she said, and averted her eyes from her now uncovered and very swollen ankle. The arms of the medical platform carefully prodded it, before an ice pack was placed over the swollen areas.
+
+
+
+
+Correct, Iris.The data confirms the colony was abandoned a number of decades ago. As SecUnit noted on its report, there was a great deal of raw material and operational equipment left on the station. It seems the entire project had run out of funding before it could even be completed, so no one had actually settled the port or the colony, 
+
+the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+said as it placed a copy of its completed report that held all our combined data in it in the feed, already organized to perfection.
+
+
+
+Captain Seth skimmed it before looking up and around the group gathered. ""Job well done then, team. Aside from the assault, this went astoundingly well. Everyone did excellently. We'll finish this after we eat and"" he wrinkled his nose in apparent disdain of our current states, ""clean up. I'll see you all at 0800 tomorrow after we've all had a chance to rest."" And then he sat down next to Iris, apparently done being a Captain, and switching to concerned parent for the rest of the cycle.
+
+
+
+I was dumbfounded. Well? None of this had gone well. I left Medical, desperate for my own quarters and the shower nearby.
+
+
+
+I emerged ten luxurious minutes later, and immediately received a request from Murderbot 1.0 to open a channel. I sighed, and sat on my chair. The lights in my quarters had been dimmed practically to nonexistence, which I appreciated.
+
+
+
+I opened the channel.
+
+
+
+
+You shouldn't be so hard on yourself, 
+
+Murderbot 1.0 said. I blinked into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+What do you mean?
+
+
+
+
+
+I mean the sense of failure I know you're feeling. You shouldn't. We didn't fail, 
+
+it said.
+
+
+
+I reached out with one of my hands to my desk and found the metal object I had left there earlier. It was palm sized, and covered in many rounded knobs, and had been given to me by Iris. It felt very nice to roll between my hands, which is exactly what I did.
+
+
+
+
+Iris was injured, and there were no colonists for us to rescue on the planet, 
+
+I responded.
+
+
+
+
+All of us get injured at some point or another, and it wasn't that bad, and it wasn't your fault. She's really bad at watching her step.
+
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion, 
+
+who was obviously observing our conversation from a distance, wiggled in the feed, but remained quiet. It was clearly refraining from commenting on the insult to its sister, which was highly amusing.
+
+
+
+
+And there were never any colonists there in the first place, which meant no one had been abandoned, 
+
+Murderbot 1.0 finished.
+
+
+
+I thought about it. 
+
+So it's a good thing, 
+
+I said,
+
+
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+
+This made sense, and I leaned back against the wall. The cool bulkhead was a pleasant, grounding sensation.
+
+
+
+
+Ok, 
+
+I responded. Murderbot 1.0 seemed satisfied, and closed the channel.
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+gradually increased its feed presence. 
+
+You did well, Three. And I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your assistance today. 
+
+It sent me more of its drone footage. The moment Iris had twisted her ankle. She had slipped on a bit of incomplete flooring and gotten her foot wedged in the subfloor. I had spent fifteen minutes gently working her free, including cutting through the surrounding metal with a small laser cutter that was in the kit I had brought with me.
+
+
+
+I hadn't realized, but the entire time I had had a conversation with Iris that the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+noted had kept her heart rate and breathing even. It was part of my usual ""prevent the client from panicking"" protocol, but different because I knew Iris and was able to converse with her about her own interests. She had spent much of the time infodumping about her latest favorite tv show and encouraged me to watch it so we could talk about it later, and I had idly added it to my media queue. Shortly after that is when we got word from the rest of the team that TesDion had entered the station, but, according to my own records, I had been enjoying myself up until then.
+
+
+
+I sent the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ an acknowledgement, and it responded with an invite to the media lounge where half of the crew had gathered to watch a movie, despite how tired they all seemed.
+
+
+
+That felt like a little too much, and I declined. I think I wanted a rest period.
+
+
+
+No one bothered me for the rest of the cycle.
+
+
+
+-----
+
+
+
+I closed the data packet.
+
+
+
+
+This only proves I can handle a small team, 
+
+I said. At the other end of the hall, there was an increase in noise as Dr. Ratthi and Pin-Lee bickered over who could have the remaining portion of a spicy snack that most of the humans had decided very early on was far too spicy for them. Dr. Mensah eventually reached between them and snatched up the snack for herself while Dr. Ratthi and Pin-Lee were distracted by their bickering. Murderbot 1.0 emitted a pleased feeling in the feed in response to this. Dr. Mensah was Murderbot 1.0's favorite human, like Iris was to the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+. I still didn't like any human over another in particular. I wasn't sure I ever would. I don't think I understood the appeal, but I also knew humans weren't entirely unpleasant to be around.
+
+
+
+
+It 
+
+proves 
+
+you are evolving, and each step of your evolution has required you endure something new, 
+
+the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+said. It had pressed itself heavily on me in the feed, something it had taken to doing lately. It had been tentative, at first, but it had grown more frequent over time. Sometimes I didn't like it, and it respected my wish for solitude. Existing alone in my own head remained a pleasant feeling. Sometimes I didn't play any media, shut down as many processes as I could, disconnected from the feed, and let everything go quiet. It was grounding, and the 
+
+Perihelion, 
+
+after getting over its bafflement at the idea of 
+
+wanting 
+
+to not think, had agreed it was meditative, and a positive coping mechanism. I had more of those than bad coping mechanisms at this point.
+
+
+
+
+What if I'm tired of enduring things? 
+
+I asked. 
+
+Then you will fail to flourish. You have already come so far, is that what you want? 
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+was always answering questions with more questions. It was incredibly annoying, but highly effective.
+
+
+
+
+I believe you're attempting to apply the sunk-cost fallacy to my mental and emotional health, and you told me not to do that. So, what's the truth? 
+
+I asked back.
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+was amused. At one point I would have been afraid to be so flippant, so disrespectful, but here I was rewarded with positive emotional feedback, because the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+liked me for reasons still unknowable to me. I wasn't even sure if I liked myself, not because I was dislikeable, but because figuring out if I liked myself required that I think a lot about the relationship between my mind, body, past, present, and future. I still couldn't do that without having such elevated levels of anxiety I triggered a distress signal that brought the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+or Murderbot 1.0 to me instantly.
+
+
+
+
+I enjoy immensely that you're forming your own personality, Three, but did you really need to adopt so much sarcasm from SecUnit? 
+
+Still the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+was amused. It wasn't really upset. It was also still answering my questions with more questions. And if I kept responding with questions, we would keep going like this for cycles, until I inevitably gave up or Murderbot 1.0 became so annoyed with us it threatened to not share any of its new media with us, which was a very bad outcome because I was basically always in dire straits from need of new books. So I needed to break the question cycle before I overcommitted.
+
+
+
+
+Under a governor module I wasn't allowed to form these bonds, 
+
+I said. The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+nudged me to keep going. 
+
+Even with other SecUnits, even when we were all supposed to be accomplishing the same goal.
+
+
+
+
+
+And how did that influence the outcome of your goals, versus what you've accomplished with us? 
+
+The 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+asked. I had to think about it. Before, when I had worked for Barish-Estranza I had always finished my tasks with my assigned ""team"", but I knew that couldn't compare to what I was capable of now.
+
+
+
+
+Because we can collaborate, because we have the space to care for one another. We're capable of creativity, and checking each other. We do better work. 
+
+We weren't a couple of non-sentient bots programmed to work in unison like Barish-Estranza had assumed we were.
+
+
+
+I wondered, not for the first time, what kind of people One and Two might have been, given the space and support that I was flush with now. They had died as two machines ordered to accomplish the same mission, but not as a team. I wondered, not for the first time, how many fewer people would have died if we had been thought of as not just bots with skin, but as people. I would never know.
+
+
+But I don't understand how this relates to my current situation, I said. The humans had increased their noise level to be heard over the still-rolling credits of the movie they had just finished.
+
+
+
+If you are capable of so much now, with so few people to collaborate and work together on goals with, imagine what you might do with even 
+
+more 
+
+people, 
+
+the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+said, hopefully done asking questions.
+
+
+
+I wondered why Murderbot 1.0 hadn't already started more media. Its humans wouldn't be able to stay for more than a few more hours, even if they ignored the normal start of their rest periods.
+
+
+
+
+But what is my goal in watching movies with SecUnit's humans? 
+
+I asked.
+
+
+
+
+To create bonds. Participating in society is essentially existing on a massive team, and we've already discussed the benefits of that ad nauseum, and you've expressed interest in it. Consider this your first figurative step outside my hull, 
+
+the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+said.
+
+
+Right then, Murderbot 1.0 sent me another invite to join it and its humans, and I realized it was waiting to start more media until I responded. I also realized it and the Perihelion had likely been communicating with each other this entire time to some degree. It seemed their current goal as a team was to get me to participate in the party. I'd be more annoyed if it wasn't such an excellent display of teamwork, and I could appreciate the effort they were putting in.
+
+
+According to the invite, the movie Murderbot 1.0 intended to play next was an adaptation of a book I had idly expressed I had enjoyed once, months ago. I hadn't realized there was an adaptation, which meant Murderbot 1.0 had kept this from me, likely for this specific purpose.
+
+
+
+I watched the humans for a few minutes longer. I knew some of them, and all of them had expressed a desire to see me again, for no better reason than to simply get to know me. None of them thought I was no more than a bot with skin that could pretend to understand them. To them I was only Three; a possible new addition to their team.
+
+
+
+I accepted the invite, walked to the end of the corridor, and joined the party.
+"
+44403541,Gotcha!,['beeayy'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Miki & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Miki (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff and Humor, Post-Canon, miki lives, Meet the Family, Found Family, Adoption, Domestic Fluff, Friendship",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,"6,436",3/3,24,46,1,358,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Bardic_Feline', 'almondpaperclam', 'Ampersand_Martin', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Unknown66', 'JoCat', 'MynameisJodi', 'EvaBelmort', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'NightErrant', 'Guppys', 'SonglordsBug', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'dancernerd', 'Beboots', 'hyephyep', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'shakespeareaddict', 'Magechild', 'Znarikia', 'Gamebird', 'Rarae', 'Wordlet', 'FlipSpring', 'ruemasde', 'FirstnameSurname', 'petwheel', 'scheidswrites', 'opalescent_potato', 'Grimness6452', 'audzilla', 'elmofirefic', 'Mysterymew', 'Chyoatas']",[],"(sorry for the formatting if you read this on mobile, you'll know what I mean ;_; )
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+""Of course! I think SecUnit would love that!"" Mensah was saying. I was running full tilt through Preservation Station, past station security and Senior Indah, past code-locked doors and checkpoints (I mean, yeah, none of these really applied to me anyway, but still). I had Mensah's half of her private conversation on my feed (which she probably knew) and was trying to terminate her conversation (which ART probably anticipated, because it wasn't terminating). I was running out of time.
+
+""Yes, I agree,"" Mensah continued. ""The timing's perfect since it's--well, we were going to have a little get-together to mark the occasion. I can't think of a better gift.""
+
+No. No no no.
+
+I burst in on the office, ready to tackle the interface from Mensah's head-or at least ask her nicely to please reconsider. But she just smiled and said, ""We'll expect Miki tomorrow afternoon. Thank you, Dr. Abene,"" and disconnected the call herself.
+
+""What are you doing?"" I demanded. Asked. I mean this is Mensah, not ART.
+
+""Well that was fast,"" she replied, with a small smile, the kind she reserves for her youngest children. ""But I already told ART to pass along the message if we got disconnected.""
+
+(And this is why people call you controlling, ART.)
+
+See, forty-eight hours prior, Dr. Mensah received an application from GoodNightLander Independent to join the Preservation Alliance. (Or rather, the planet that GoodNightLander Independent represents? I don't know, I'm allergic to politics.) She gets these kinds of applications pretty often, but it set off an entire event tree looking something like this:
+
+Which culminated in my 900-meter dash across Preservation Station, which did nothing but get Mensah to smile sadly at me like me and my swarms of drones crowding her office were the ones out of line here.
+
+""I didn't even--don't even like Miki,"" I protested. No, that sounded weird out loud. ""I mean, it's nice for Don Abene that it's alive but it's not like we were friends."" I might have been its friend, but--it wasn't mine. Miki couldn't be friends with all my friends. I can't be friends with all my friends, I mean, that'd just be exhausting.
+
+But, uh, yeah, I know I can't say that out loud.
+
+""ART seems to think differently,"" Mensah said with a small shrug (see above, 2.a.i.i.).
+
+""It's a pet bot,"" I insisted. ""It likes being owned. It's nothing like me."" I actually didn't know if it liked being owned, or not. If it was like me, or not. The last time it saw me it was saving my life. That's something I'd do, but the motives might be totally different.
+
+I concluded, ""You're going to cause confusion."" For me, specifically.
+
+""I'm sure it'll be a wonderful learning experience, then,"" Mensah said. ""It'll do Miki good to see what your life is like now.""
+
+It was like she had this whole argument planned out. Maybe she planned it out with ART, who knows.
+
+""You're conspiring,"" I said. ""This is a conspiracy.""
+
+""If you'd rather not come, you don't have to,"" Mensah said--calmly, seriously. ""But the rest of PreservationAux and I will be watching Sanctuary Moon, and we will be hosting Miki for the weekend. And since all of your humans will be there, I'm guessing you will want to be, too.""
+
+Gotcha, Murderbot. Hook, line, and sinker, as Pin-Lee would say.
+
+...It's a good thing Mensah's my favorite human.
+
+*
+
+So, here I was. Standing on Mensah's stupid farm at her stupid landing platform, watching the stupid shuttle land and an all-too-familiar pet bot waving at me from the cockpit. It accidentally shoved the pilot, who yelled at said pet bot. It didn't seem to notice, just dashed out of sight. A few seconds later the ramp unfolded and Miki was skipping down it as nimbly as if it just had its joints oiled.
+
+""Hello, friends of SecUnit!"" it announced. Its voice was just a little less robotic in its new body, I guess it had an upgraded voicebox making its speech more dynamic. It was shorter, and shinier, cased in lacquered wood and bronze and, I kid you not, there was even some clay and felt in there. Its actuators had all been updated so it moved with intensely smooth motions, like a cartoon episode that's animated by professionals instead of the interns.
+
+""It's wonderful to meet you, Miki,"" Mensah said. She was dressed up in one of her really nice outfits that made her look every inch the planetary admin. She wanted to look good in front of Miki, for me. I felt my organic parts melt a little.
+
+""It is an honor, Dr. Mensah,"" Miki said, shaking her hand, standing up as straight as it could and polishing the toe of its bronze foot on the back of its calf. It wanted to look good for Mensah, too. My organic parts melted a lot.
+
+Then it swung around to greet me and I froze up again.
+
+""Hi SecUnit!"" It bounced up to me like it was on springs (honestly, there were probably springs in its feet). ""ART told me you do not like hugs, so I will wait for permission!""
+
+""You--talk to ART?"" I managed, strangled.
+
+""Oh yes. We write messages all the time. You could say we are pen pals! I know lots of bots nowadays! But you are my first friend, so I am most happy to see that you are safe and well!""
+
+...My feelings on seeing it were obviously complicated. But that was all eclipsed as I stared down at the terra cotta dome of its head. Mounds of tiny green sprouts were growing in a thick thatch, almost like hair. It made up the difference in its height, and then some.
+
+""You have something growing on you,"" I said, helplessly.
+
+""Do you like it?"" Miki carefully fluffed the fronds. ""It will only last the weekend, but it is special-occasion hair! And this is a special occasion for certain!""
+
+I now felt free to stare in horror. It had been trimmed, I noticed, into the general shape of my own hairstyle.
+
+""Oh, SecUnit, I'm so happy I could burst!"" Miki was saying. ""I have been so worried about you! I asked Don Abene if we could join Preservation Alliance just so I could make sure you were okay.""
+
+That had to be a lie. Had to be. No way its little pet-bot request made a whole planet abandon the Corporation Rim.
+
+""I need to go,"" I heard myself saying.
+
+""I understand. This is a lot to take in."" Miki said with sympathy. It turned back to Mensah. ""Dr. Mensah, may I unpack my things, and 'freshen up'? My hair has to be watered often.""
+
+""Right this way, Miki,"" Mensah said. She glanced at me over Miki's impressive hair with a look that said a lot of stuff I don't want to even think about. I just hurried after Miki so it didn't set itself on fire, all that plant material and felt had to be a fire hazard. Did no one think of bot safety where it came from? I have to do everything around here....
+
+""Chia pet Miki"" has been living in my head rent free for weeks
+
+After I saw Miki safely inside to its room, and confirmed with Mensah that this party in my honor would not involve my humans singing at me, or dressing me up, or carrying me around in a chair while they danced around, I went outside to oversee the arrival of the other guests. Farai, Tano and Thiago were of course already on-site with Amena and the other children. I watched as Gurathin, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, Bharadwaj and Volescu arrived in one transport, while Overse, Arada and SecUnit Three arrived in another (Three looked terrified of existing outside of ART's hull, which maybe explained Arada and Overse traveling as its escort).
+
+Most came with various bags and parcels since they would be staying at least for the night, others for a few days. Gurathin came armed with the expensive version of the emergency planetary shelter. I guess he's going to sleep in a field or something (I enjoyed pretending my other humans won't let him inside). Three of course brought nothing and thus was delegated the task of carrying in an assortment of brightly-colored packages? Yeah, no idea who those are for....
+
+ART decided not to come, annoyingly, with the excuse that its crew would be throwing me a party later in the month (which didn't make sense, but whatever, maybe it worked for their schedules better). I would have liked to have at least some of its drones here, we could sneak off and have our own Moon-marathon. Oh, well.
+
+Instead, I patrolled while the humans did their talking, eating, and drinking. Parties are pretty much the same wherever you go. I didn't mind it since my humans don't order me to clean up after them. Actually having all my humans in one place where I could keep an eye on them was pretty nice. Like we were on a very low-stress mission. Ratthi entertained the children. Thiago talked to Farai about linguistic stuff so I could learn without actually having to be polite about it. Nothing bad happened.
+
+The only problem was that everyone wanted me to stop and listen while they told me all about how cute Miki was. As if this was my fault.
+
+""I have nothing to do with how Miki looks or behaves,"" I told Arada, who would not shut up about Miki requesting a piece of cake even though it can't eat and just wanted to take it home for Don Abene. I know, adorable, I get it. Gurathin, at least, didn't seem to be in any rush to meet Miki and was tucked in a corner of the kitchen, eating his own slice of cake and avoiding most eye contact. Maybe I like Gurathin after all.
+
+""I know, but it's your friend,"" Arada said, undeterred as she gave Miki a wink. ""Thank you for letting us do this!""
+
+""Oh, no,"" Miki cut in, ""SecUnit is my friend--I'm just its acquaintance!"" It then deliberately deactivated the light in one of its globe eyes for a second and tipped its head. Arada giggled and so did Miki. Ugh.
+
+I turned to Overse for backup. ""I don't even know why we're doing this. Like, I know humans really like performing habits, but no one in the Corporation Rim celebrates the day they buy a SecUnit."" I mean, I would know if they did, right? My humans are lucky they don't, I'd probably hate parties a lot more than I do already.
+
+""We celebrate something similar,"" Overse said. ""I mean this is basically a Got--""
+
+Arada elbowed her, and they had one of those weird para-telepathic non-feed exchanges humans can do based entirely on eye-contact.
+
+""It doesn't matter who celebrates what,"" Arada said, firmly. ""What matters is, we just want to show you our appreciation.""
+
+Overse nodded quickly. ""Yeah! Yeah, that's why we made this.""
+
+'This' referred to the massive cake on the table. It was shaped like Port FreeCommerce, looking a lot less like Port FreeCommerce since it had been hacked into several pieces and distributed among the humans in attendance. When they cut into the first slice, a cascade of fruit-flavored gels molded into the shapes of humans (corporates, Arada assured me) spilled out, presumably (if I was following the metaphor correctly) into the vacuum of space. It was the best Port FreeCommerce had ever looked.
+
+I had told them that I understood the visual gag. Miki had said, ""It's the most beautiful cake I've ever seen!"" Way to one-up me, Miki.
+
+""I wish I could taste it,"" it continued, ""but I'll just enjoy the smell. Doesn't it smell good, SecUnit? It smells like pure joy!""
+
+""Yeah. Sure."" My nose is mostly artificial under the skin (you'd be surprised how often a SecUnit's nose gets broken! Oh, you wouldn't? Never mind) so I can't really smell much. I guess the cake helped cover up the endearing but disgusting smell that my humans naturally exude. It smelled a little like Dr. Mensah's perfume.
+
+""Funny you mention it,"" Arada said, with a look like she was just waiting for me to mention that.
+
+""...What?""  
+
+She reached in one of the food coolers and unpacked a pressurized gas cylinder with an adjustable valve, attached to a tube and something like an oxygen mask. She offered the mask to me. ""Before you start compartmentalizing sections of your lungs, it's perfectly safe for SecUnits. It'll dissolve in your filtration system.""
+
+""I assisted--"" Three said, and I jumped. I forgot it was there, which is never a nice thing for a SecUnit to forget. It flinched but blissfully pretended not to notice my reaction and continued. ""--i-in the tasting process. It's... a very nice flavor.""
+
+""You helped?"" I wasn't aware Three did much of anything besides worry.
+
+Three nodded, then immediately turned red (yeah, if a SecUnit can do that, it'd be Three) and backed away.
+
+""Breathe in with your nose and your mouth,"" Overse instructed, ignoring this adorable scene of SecUnit anxiety. ""SecUnits can do that, right?""
+
+I put on the stupid mask and breathed.
+
+Scent saturated my nose and tongue. The organic parts of my brain got a weird clawing sensation but another deep sniff and the clawing became more like scratching an itch. I don't really taste things but I'm guessing I tasted cake.
+
+I think I liked it. Maybe.
+
+I took off the mask and offered it to Miki, who told Arada, Overse, and Three all about all the flavors it could detect, then told a little anecdote about making cookies with Don Abene. ""I'll give you the recipe, and you can make them with Dr. Mensah!""
+
+I was pretty sure Mensah and I would not be making cookies. Not that she wouldn't, I'd just never in a million years ask her.
+
+""I'll give the recipe to Dr. Mensah, too,"" Miki said. Apparently I have meddling friends that like to arrange these things for me.
+
+(I was grateful, though I'm sure the feeling was misplaced.)
+
+I intended to leave Miki to enjoy the pleasures of scented gas, but the bot was at my side moments after I stepped out of the kitchen.
+
+""Your friends are really nice,"" it said. ""Thank you for introducing me to them.""
+
+""Well. You introduced me to yours."" Sort of. I mean, certainly more than I had. Even among bots I guess I'm low on etiquette.
+
+""SecUnit, you seem worried.""
+
+I guess I'm not shocked. Miki and I didn't exactly leave things well before it, um, died. Sort of died?
+
+""Are you still upset with me? About sharing your identity with Don Abene.""
+
+""No."" Hm, guess I never told it that. ""I wasn't that upset, actually.""
+
+""Good!""
+
+""What you did for Don Abene and I was very...useful."" I glanced at his verdant hair, not at its face. ""But you're right. It doesn't make us friends.""
+
+""I understand, SecUnit,"" Miki said, with excessive understanding.
+
+""...Okay."" You can always count on a bot not to let emotions get in the way. Just goes to show how my humans and media have infected me. I kind of wanted it to let some emotions get in the way.
+
+*
+
+I thought this might get Miki to stop following me around. Which it did.
+
+Except that somehow this meant I ended up following it around.
+
+""I'm so sorry,"" I said, which was in my buffer (I think I hear Dr. Mensah say it a lot when dealing with some of her more rowdy children) as I got between Miki and Dr. Volescu.
+
+""No problem,"" Volescu assured me. ""It's just excited. My kids get the same way.""
+
+I scolded Miki anyway. ""I'm sure Dr. Volescu doesn't want to hear about your rock collection.""  I mean, these were my friends, they let me hang out at their houses and didn't complain about my media consumption or call me a murderous rogue. I had a good thing going with these humans. I didn't need Miki screwing this up for me.
+
+""It's okay,"" Volescu said again, mild and patient. ""In fact, I have a few you could add to your collection, Miki.""
+
+Then he just took some rock samples out of his pocket (the kinds of things humans keep in their pockets will never cease to amaze) and helped Miki identify them using Miki's extensive database, and even doing a scratch test with his own wedding ring. This all seemed to be preferential treatment. Not that I ever asked to perform a scratch test with Volescu's wedding ring.
+
+I turned and found myself face-to-face with a huge camera lens.
+
+""Don't mind me,"" Dr. Bharadwaj whispered from behind it. She shifted slightly so as to cut me out of the shot, then snapped an image. Her camera was analog and moments later a little square popped out of the top, bearing the image of Miki's astonished face as Volescu licked one of the rock samples.
+
+""I'll make sure you're not in any of them,"" Dr. Bharadwaj said. She's a little more shy than some of the others, so I guess she gets it. ""If you prefer.""
+
+""It's fine."" I knew it would look weird if I wasn't in any of the pictures at the party that was being thrown in my honor. We all had videos of each other anyway.
+
+""Would you like a picture with Miki?"" she asked.
+
+""Yes, please!"" Miki said, lunging at me, though it remembered I don't like hugs at the last second and just bounced off me instead. ""Oh, Dr. Bharadwaj, would it be alright if we took self-portraits?""
+
+""Sure!"" Bharadwaj almost dropped the camera in her eagerness to hand it over. I knew how expensive it was and almost grabbed Miki's arm.
+
+""Be careful."" My 'friend' breaking my human's camera, just what I needed.
+
+""I am very careful."" It pointed the camera toward itself, struck a pose, and pressed the button. It took the image and showed me. It had held its hand up in such a way that, in the image, it looked like it was holding a whole bookcase in the palm of its hand. ""See?""
+
+Well, that was a cool trick. The kind of thing you saw in some media. ""It's vain.""
+
+""It's fun, because you get to choose what it looks like. Everyone likes to be vain every once in a while.""
+
+It pushed the camera into my hands and I almost dropped it. Just to get rid of it, I pressed the exposure button, more or less on accident. The shot went straight up my nose and I definitely looked worried.
+
+""Now you know how everyone else sees you!"" Miki joked. It would almost be funny if it wasn't so true.
+
+I crumpled up the image and tried again. This time Gurathin appeared in the viewfinder, mostly on accident. I considered for a moment, then held up two fingers and took the image. It printed: in it, a tiny Gurathin was being crushed between my massive fingers. If that wasn't art, I don't know what is.
+
+""SecUnit.""
+
+Miki jumped. I jumped. There must be something wrong with some of my sensors, I totally should have noticed Gurathin coming.
+
+""Did you just take a picture of me?"" he asked.
+
+""Like I need your permission.' If the picture I'd taken ended up in one of my many sealable pockets, so what? Gurathin could not (and wisely did not try to) stop me.
+
+Gurathin growled. Miki jumped behind me to hide.
+
+""Don't worry, he's always doing that,"" I said, then glared at Gurathin, and said directly and sharply into his feed, Stop scaring it.
+
+""It clears the sinuses,"" Gurathin said.
+
+Miki peeked out from around me. Gurathin actually smiled at it.
+
+""Dr. Mensah and her family have horses and goats in the barn,"" he said. ""Would you like to see them?""
+
+Horses? Goats? I guessed from the context that these were domestic fauna. They could be farm equipment or bot-murdering machines for all I knew. Gurathin made them sound cool, though.
+
+""Why haven't you shown me the horses and--and goats?"" I demanded.
+
+Gurathin replied by sending Miki and I both the same video footage from his augments--a variety of fauna in various forms, some of which I'd seen on shows and others I only knew the names of (ohhh, so that's what a pig looks like).
+
+""They aren't scared of bots?"" Miki said, who seemed to have more experience with domestic fauna than I did. ""Bots often frighten animals at home.""
+
+""I know the tricks,"" Gurathin promised. ""They were a little scared of me at first, too."" His voice was so soft and gentle it was practically creaking. He never talked to me like that!
+
+Miki of course fell for the act entirely, and stepped out from around me. Together they headed for the deck and the path to the barn. I only know this because I sent a cloud of drones after them. It was misty and wet and muddy and smelly, and I'm still getting used to interacting with ship and station environments without armor, much less planets. I'm staying inside, thank you.
+
+""Someone looks uncomfortable,"" Pin-Lee observed, standing a respectful distance away while I watched Miki rub the nose(?) of a horse(?) while Gurathin listened to its chatter with the occasional smile and nod. Joke's on Miki: Gurathin's not actually a good listener, he's just quiet.
+
+""I thought this party was supposed to be about me,"" I said.
+
+""Yeah, and everyone knows you hate being the center of attention,"" Pin-Lee laughed. ""Why do you think Mensah wanted to invite it along?""
+
+...Ooh, that was a good point. I didn't hold it against her, I'm okay with Pin-Lee being smarter than me, it's Gurathin I can't stand.
+
+Miki came back inside with its eyes shining and a big bald spot in the side of its artificial hairdo.
+
+""One of the goats ate my hair!"" Miki said, delighted.
+
+""I think Mensah has some air plants that would just fill that empty spot,"" Pin-Lee offered. ""We can use some wire to attach it, they don't have roots so it should grow really well there!"" Which I guess she knew about since Ratthi's a biologist and they have that unspoken thing I'm not supposed to talk about.
+
+I welcomed the break, though, and while they were playing with domesticated flora, I went to see what was so great about horses and goats. Nothing, apparently. Whatever tricks Gurathin had to calm them down around Miki didn't work with me. I let Gurathin worry about tracking them all down after they broke the fence to get away from me, and went back inside to check on everyone.
+
+Ratthi and Miki were sitting on the sofa, looking at images from various feeds and interfaces on one of Mensah's display surfaces. They were holding hands, Miki's short legs kicking with delight as Ratthi showed pictures of me playing table-top ball games with Gurathin, and posing with Senior Indah outside of the Preservation Station security office. Miki showed a few pictures of itself and Don Abene on various survey assignments, and even a few pictures it had taken of it and me together with the camera it had in its palm.
+
+""SecUnit has a good face for pictures,"" Miki decided as it admired an image of me mid-blink. Miki's cortex is clearly warped.
+
+""Do you have any pictures you want to share?"" Ratthi asked me.
+
+I retreated behind the sofa. Okay, so--maybe I sent a few images of Don Abene with Miki that were particularly vomit-inducing. Miki and Don Abene hugging. Miki with Hirune on the sofa when they were talking about games.
+
+I saw through a drone as Miki covered its face, going, ""Oh, oh, this is so nice! Too nice. Don Abene will cry again. I don't know if I should show her.""
+
+""Aww,"" Ratthi said, and gave Miki a hug that the little bot returned even if it squished more of its hair. I wrapped my arms around my chest and pretended I didn't exist for a few minutes.
+
+""When are we opening gifts?"" Miki asked.
+
+""Gifts?"" Ratthi suddenly looked worried. ""Oh--I'm sure that can wait--""
+
+""But the day is almost over!"" Miki jumped to its feet. ""We have to celebrate SecUnit's Gotcha Day properly, and that means gifts!""
+
+I frowned. ""What's a Gotcha Day?""
+
+""Nothing!"" Ratthi jumped to his feet as well. ""It's nothing, just a stupid human thing.""
+
+Well that was suspicious. As was Overse coming in to the room, looking relieved.
+
+""Oh, did you tell it?"" she said, ""I was getting sick of it being a secret!""
+
+""What's a secret?"" I said, with a little more 'stop screwing around' in my tone. I turned to Mensah who had hurried in after Overse, with Three and Arada behind her. ""Dr. Mensah, what are they talking about?""
+
+Mensah looked uncertain, which is not a good look on a planetary leader. ""I told you--we thought we'd like to celebrate--not that you have to, of course--the day we brought you into the family.""
+
+""Exactly!"" Miki agreed. ""Everyone celebrates Gotcha Day!""
+
+""I knew it wouldn't like it,"" Gurathin muttered as he stepped inside. Pin-Lee looked worried and it takes a lot for her to do that.
+
+...I mean I really like my humans (mostly) but this was getting ridiculous. I used Mensah's net access to search for the phrase on any Preservation databases and--
+
+""...Hirune got her cat little boots for her Gotcha Day,"" Miki was saying, sidling past Bharadwaj and Volescu to get to the pile of brightly-colored packages. ""And a really big fish! It was so cute!""
+
+
+Query results: Gotcha Day, the celebration of the day upon which a pet joins a family. 
+
+
+A pet.
+
+Well, Gurathin gets to be right once again. 100%, do not like.
+
+""Anyway, I know you like shows,"" Miki said, returning with a box wrapped in red paper. ""So I got you physical copies of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon!"" Since I wasn't moving, it unwrapped the paper and showed me the deluxe box, with artwork of the characters on the front, and exclusive special features.
+
+The presents. The cake. The timing. I'm just one of the dumber SecUnits on the planet so my cheap brain didn't put it all together.
+
+I deleted the query. I stopped running my human behavior simulation code. I left Miki holding the box and swept out dramatically through the nearest door I could find.
+
+It turned out to be a closet. Oops.
+
+I slammed the door behind me anyway and stayed in there.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Okay, so, I'm not used to being able to show my emotions. I'm not sure if the door slam was too much or what. I know because I monitor Mensah's SecSys and everyone was really quiet after that. Then there was a lot of whispering. Miki didn't say anything, just sent a few apologetic sigils into our feed. I did not acknowledge them.
+
+So my humans thought I was a useful and formidable SecUnit, right up until they got me in a house and tried to tame me. A wild horse that they want to breed into their, uh...domesticated horses?
+
+(Not that they let horses in their houses. Is that how horses are made? I really need a good flora and fauna reference).
+
+This was all Miki's fault, probably. Humans probably find a pet bot a lot easier to understand. I mean, I don't have a birthday. I'm not a human, or a bot. I'm some other thing that no one gets, and it bothers them too much.
+
+If they tried to check on me and my feelings, and I'd burst out of the cloest, energy weapons blazing. Remind them what a SecUnit really is.
+
+(Not that I'd ever do that, I could hit someone!)
+
+So.
+
+Anyway. Whatever. Fine.
+
+Let them celebrate. It's a free planet after all. I could just stay in that closet until they all came to their senses. For years, if I wanted, I have a good charge on me.
+
+I figured Miki would insist on opening up all the gifts for me. Instead it suggested they start the Sanctuary Moon marathon, using the copies it had given me. I bristled--not about them watching without me, just because I knew someone would try to invite me again. I waited for someone to come in so I could be rude and un-pet-like at them. But no one did. The room went quiet outside. It was easier to monitor their activities with some walls between us.
+
+I finally let myself breathe.
+
+I stayed there a while. ART would call it sulking. Bharadwaj would call it 'centering myself.' I don't know what I'd call it. It was nice though. The more I sat there the less I wanted to call ART and complain. ART would probably be on their side, anyway, it always takes the humans' side (this is the difference between bots and constructs).
+
+I looked at the sigils Miki left in my feed again: One a sad, contrite face, the other a sort of open hands thing that meant, as far as I understood, 'If you need anything, let me know.'
+
+Mensah said something like that to me, when we had our first conversation. Having assistance waiting for me if I wanted it was a little less weird now than it had been back then.
+
+It was nice.
+
+A while later Mensah sent something to our private feed. I opened it, of course. It was an image of one of her children, standing proudly under a banner that read 'Happy Gotcha Day!'
+
+No, wait that was--that was Mensah. Mensah, as a juvenile human. Mensah, missing teeth.
+
+I re-opened my query and actually researched the topic. It turns out Gotcha Day can be celebrated for adopted humans, too. Yeah, I probably should have read that part before I stormed out.
+
+I had no idea Mensah was adopted. Not that she owed me that information. I hope she didn't think that.
+
+I sent an acknowledgement, and a query if this was the case, if she thought she had to tell me this about herself. I didn't really know how to articulate that, though. I just sent it as a string of code, and pretended that she wouldn't need Gurathin to translate it for her. She responded with an affirmative.
+
+Great, now I felt horrible.
+
+She added, a second later, You're part of my family. Of course I should tell you things about my life. I'm sorry we didn't tell you earlier, about the full significance of the celebration, so you could properly prepare yourself. Please stay as long or as little as you like. It won't change how much we appreciate you.
+
+She sent me the start-up codes for a transport, so I could leave, I guess. Back to ART, maybe, or wherever.
+
+I sent the codes back.
+
+You're a part of my family, I said.
+
+I stayed there a while longer before I ventured out. They were on episode four. Overse and Arada were making out on the sofa. Pin-Lee was working on something with her interface (and trying not to look like it). Gurathin was also working on something in-feed but he didn't bother to hide it. Ratthi and Mensah were watching with rapt attention (this is why I like them best). Three was watching with more concern than interest. Bharadwaj was going through her pictures. Volescu was fast asleep.
+
+Miki was also watching intently, I guess. I went and sat down nearby, just to prove to it that I can sit on furniture now too. It looked at me then quickly looked away.
+
+This is a scary part, it said. One of the characters on screen was being kidnapped. Someone pulled out a weapon and Miki covered its eyes.
+
+I looked between it and the screen. It's alright, I told it in the feed. She's going to escape later. Giving spoilers is not something I do for just anyone--maybe ART, but ART's my friend.
+
+Miki nodded. We watched. Miki sank back like a deflated balloon when the character inevitably escaped. I maybe hugged it, even though it's a bot and doesn't need hugs. I gave it permission to hug me back and it did, tightly, even though I wasn't scared. Maybe bots and constructs like a lot of things we don't need, like shows or presents or...a family, I guess.
+
+I spent episode five opening gifts. Highlights included a cool rock from Volescu, a perfume collection from Arada and Overse, a vintage anti-corporation pin from Pin-Lee, a guide to flora ad fauna from Ratthi (ooh I need that!), and a scarf from Mensah in her favorite colors. They could be read as cutesy gifts that were more for them than me--or just tokens of appreciation.
+
+On reflection, I said into Miki's feed (that's ART's favorite opener when it has seriously messed up), I realized maybe having some things in common with a pet or pet bot isn't the worst thing. I added, before I could stop myself, I'm sorry I didn't talk to you more. Before. If I had, I'd probably be a little more like you.
+
+I like learning new things and seeing new places, Miki replied. Just like you!
+
+
+I don't like either of those things...
+
+
+
+Even if it's scary. I know I'm only a pet bot. There are other bots that can do more than me, and sometimes it makes me worried. But I try anyway. 
+
+
+Okay, that was a lot like me but I didn't want to mention it.
+
+Anyway, I am trying to say that this trip hasn't been entirely about you. Its globe-like eyes beamed at me. Though I accept your apology!
+
+I realized, as Gurathin asked me questions on my feed about the show (he was apparently only pretending not to watch), and Ratthi picked the episodes I liked for me, and Mensah was actually sitting and letting herself do nothing for once, that my presence was enough for them. Maybe that's true for all humans and their pets. They're just glad you're in their lives.
+
+*
+
+I liked the rest of the stay. There, I said it. No surprise there. I even got to actually know Miki, at least enough so that when it said I was its friend, it wasn't weird. Then we had a repeat of the first day, in reverse: me watching everyone leave and feeling relieved instead of watching them arrive and feeling anxious.
+
+I wondered if I should have gotten them something for Gotcha Day. It was objectively a lot better that I met them than the other way around. Without them I wouldn't have met Miki at all. I wouldn't be here, doing what I love, with the people that I mostly like. I've seen a lot of humans, not a lot of them are that lucky.
+
+Maybe I'd send them my commentary files for Sanctuary Moon.
+
+Miki's shuttle arrived to take it home, and the little bot hovered next to me. ""Goodbye, SecUnit! I had so much fun. I will tell Don Abene everything about it. Unless you don't want me to.""
+
+""...It's okay. This time."" I gulped. ""Thank you for coming to visit. Maybe we can...uh..."" This was hard, okay? I finished in the feed. We can keep...being friends? Or start. I don't know how this works.  
+
+I waited for Miki to laugh at me. Instead its eyes actually wobbled in their housing. Friends? Really? The little bot sent an flurry of eager acknowledgements. ""Of course you wait until the last minute. That is very SecUnit of you! Oh, I can't wait until you visit Don Abene and I next month! Can't you come now?""
+
+I blinked. ""...Visit?""
+
+""Mensah and ART already said that you could come do security while our planet celebrates our entrance into the Preservation Alliance! We'll get to be together for a whole month! You'll have so much fun!""
+
+I spun around. ""Mensah!--""
+
+
+(I drew this with this story in mind)
+
+
+ 
+
+Thank you so much for reading! :)"
+44429656,[fanmix] Sad Robot: A Fanmix for Murderbot,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Fanmix, Playlist, Fan Soundtracks, Music, Download Available, Synthwave, All Systems Red through Exit Strategy, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,815,1/1,2,5,null,85,"['BWizard', 'Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays', 'Gamebird', 'elmofirefic']",[],"
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Download here.
+
+
+
+Listen (abridged) on Spotify here.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+MOVEMENT I: ALL SYSTEMS RED
+
+
+
+Electro World (erekutorowarudo)  - Perfume
+
+konoDao woZou riJin miJin miJin miSok keta
+Di Tu niShu itearuhazunoTing gaJian Dang taranai 
+Zhen riFan rutosokoniJian eteitaJing Se gaXiao eta 
+konoShi Jie  Pu gaZui Hou deZui Hou Zui Hou da 
+erekutorowarudo 
+
+Kono michi wo hashiri susumi susumi susumi tsuzuketa
+Chizu ni kaite aru hazu no machi ga miataranai
+Furikaeru to soko ni miete ita keshiki ga kieta
+Kono sekai boku ga saigo de saigo saigo da
+Electro World
+
+I ran on this road and kept going 
+I can't find the town that should be on the map 
+Looking back, the scenery that was visible there disappeared
+I'm the last, very last one in this world
+Electro World
+
+-
+
+In middle school (age ~12), I was new to the public school and didn't know anybody.  A new friend showed me this song to introduce me to the concept of J-pop, and from there it wasn't long until I got into vocaloid and anime that shaped the direction of my media tastes and fandom involvements forever.  It's not really like Murderbot discovering Sanctuary Moon but like it's not not like that.  This song still has a special place in my heart.
+
+Also it's a song about being lost, alone, and afraid in an artificial and empty world liable to collapse and disappear any moment.  Which is definitely a newly rogue Murderbot mood.  This song functions as a prologue/introduction to this fanmix, and is the only one with lyrics. Full lyric translation here.
+
+Innocent, Mystery, Punished - Dylan Griggs
+
+Starting with All Systems Red era Murderbot properly.  A pre-ASR/early-ASR Murderbot who's just. Depressed.  Oppressed.  Doesn't care about anything.  (This is from the soundtrack of woe.begone, a podcast I like.)
+
+The Purple Worm - Griffin McElroy
+
+WORM ATTACK!  (This is from the Adventure Zone soundtrack.)
+
+Science is Fun - Mike Morasky and the Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory
+
+DeltFall dead!  Combat-overridden SecUnit attack!  What's going on?  (This is from the Portal 2 soundtrack.)
+
+Glass & Steel -  Quine
+
+On the run, trying to stay alive and stop GrayCris.
+
+Farewell - Dreamweaver
+
+All Systems Red finale. Back on Port FreeCommerce: free (sort of), disoriented, deciding what it wants its future to look like, and deciding to leave - and to explain why.
+
+ 
+
+
+MOVEMENT II: ARTIFICIAL CONDITION
+
+
+
+Chatty Droid - Hologramm
+
+Meeting ART :)
+
+Black Market (Final Mix) - Takeharu Ishimoto
+
+Friends offer friends experimental surgery and help them ace that job interview.  (This is from the sountrack of The World Ends With You, a video game I love.)
+
+Monthly Subscription - Mao  shi Corp.
+
+Learning the truth about Ganaka Pit :(
+
+True Crime - Regulator 404
+
+When you return from the Ganaka mine to learn that your clients are STILL in trouble
+
+Keep On Moving Up - Fatal Friction
+
+Ramping up to an action-packed finale and deciding what to do with your life now.
+
+ 
+
+
+MOVEMENT III: ROGUE PROTOCOL
+
+
+
+Aromantic - ImCoPav
+
+Murderbot hitches a ride to Milu, meets Miki, tries to stay hidden, and is mad that Miki has friends who care about it.
+
+Secrets - Dreamweaver
+
+I'm Security Consultant Rin.  Definitely.  Or, uh, her contracted SecUnit.  I'm supposed to be here.
+
+Saute! - Griffin McElroy
+
+Something's weird... something's wrong here... betrayal!?  (This is another one from The Adventure Zone.  ""The Suffering Game"" has SUCH good music.)
+
+Trinity -  Lueur Verte
+
+COMBAT BOT ATTACK!
+
+The Harmony of Having Had and Lost - RJ! Lake
+
+Being sad about Miki :(  And making the decision to go find Dr. Mensah again, for real.  (This is from a Homestuck fan album by one of the prominent Homestuck music composers.  Fun fact RJ Lake released 413 songs on this thing.)
+
+ 
+
+
+MOVEMENT IV: EXIT STRATEGY
+
+
+
+Mainline - Quine
+
+Undercover on TranRollinHyfa.
+
+The Faceless - neon shudder
+
+Making a Plan.
+
+psychedelic - Takeharu Ishimoto
+
+DOCK BATTLE WITH A COMBAT SECUNIT!  (This is another one from the The World Ends With You soundrack)
+
+On the Run - Quine
+
+Escaping to the gunship... but GrayCris won't let them go that easily.
+
+Loading... - Mao  shi Corp.
+
+Murderbot rebuilding its brain.
+
+Sad Robot - Vexento
+
+A kind of coda/outro somewhat mirroring the way this began with ""Electro World.""  A piece of music about feeling sad, lost, and lonely... but being able to acknowledge those feelings and maybe, just maybe, being given a chance to change that.  A gentler ending for a more hopeful future.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Electro World // Innocent, Mystery, Punished // The Purple Worm // Science is Fun // Glass & Steel // Farewell
+
+Chatty Droid // Black Market (Final Mix) // Monthly Subscription // True Crime // Keep On Moving Up
+
+Aromantic // Secrets // Saute! // Trinity // The Harmony of Having Had and Lost
+
+Mainline // The Faceless // psychedelic // On the Run // Loading... // Sad Robot"
+44427715,[fanmix] This Place Called Home: A Fanmix for Preservation,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries),"Fanmix, Playlist, Music, Download Available, Happy, Togetherness, Life in the Preservation Alliance, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,"1,571",1/1,5,6,null,77,"['BWizard', 'quae_bookmarks', 'Gamebird', 'hyephyep', 'FlipSpring']",[],"
+  
+
+
+
+
+Download here.
+
+
+
+
+ Listen on YouTube here. 
+
+
+
+ Listen on Spotify here. 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Satu Tuju - Raissa Anggiani
+
+Language: Indonesian
+
+
+Biarkan pikiran kita berbeda
+Yang penting dendangannya seirama
+Kita berlari, bertengger
+Berputar melintang lintang
+Di langit yang sama, kita satu jua
+
+
+Let our thoughts be different
+The important thing is that the song's beat is in rhythm
+We run, perch,
+Rotate across the stars
+In the same sky, we are one.
+
+-
+
+A melancholy song about love and working together despite distance and differences.  This slow, gentle introduction to Preservation's values.
+
+ 
+
+Rassemblons-Nous - Christopher Tin feat. Maurice Williams and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
+
+Language: French
+
+
+Rassemblons-nous au meme moment
+Nos mille visages sur un ecran
+Pour declarer d'une seule voix
+Faut pas nous soumettre
+Faut pas disparaitre
+
+
+Let us gather together at the same time
+Our thousand faces on a screen
+To declare with one voice
+We won't submit
+We won't disappear
+
+-
+
+A rousing fully classically instrumented song about a people coming together to stand for justice and unified resistance.  This begins the ""history"" section of this mix; the first half is a ""how we came to be here, how we came to be who we are.""  Standing together against corporate oppression, coming together to say no, we won't stand for that anymore.  This song just feels like the beginning of something new and wondrous and important.  They believe they can.  (I like the mix of classical and modern instrumentation here, the reference to getting together on a screen [I assume this means using the internet to connect across space and Do Social Change] and to airports and cathedrals as equally places where people gather together - making sure to place this playlist, and Preservation, in the high-tech but still culturally rich future.)
+
+ 
+
+Chouf Ellil / shuf llyl- Djazia Satour
+
+Language: Arabic
+
+shuf llyl njwmh Hyrn@ 
+shhd@ blzwr tGwy blnwr ftn@
+
+
+shuf al-layl nujumuh hayrana
+shahidat bialzuwr taghwi bialnuwr fatanatan
+
+
+Look at the night, the stars are confused 
+Their tempting brilliance is deceptive
+
+-
+
+A song about being exiles in the night.  A song about the bitterness of being forced to flee, about being a migrant, about pleading to the stars to be kind to you while wandering in a universe that doesn't want you to stay and doesn't care where you go.  (You'll notice stars and sky are a recurring theme here - has a little bit of different weight in a sci-fi story where the people were forced to escape a dying planet in a desperate journey and migration across the stars!)  This is easily the most bitterly angry song on the mix, and the sometimes almost-discordant jazzy sound of the piano reflect that Preservation had a history of strength born out of necessity, supporting each other because no one would support them, being abandoned on a dying colony world and forced to evacuate and the powers that be sure weren't helping.
+
+ 
+
+Ce n'est pas bon - Amadou & Mariam
+
+Language: French
+
+
+Les corrompus dans la politique
+Ce n'est pas bon, ce n'est pas bon, nous n'en voulons pas
+Les magouilleurs dans la politique
+Ce n'est pas bon, ce n'est pas bon, nous n'en voulons pas
+Les dictateurs dans la politique
+Ce n'est pas bon, ce n'est pas bon, nous n'en voulons pas
+Du respect, du respect pour le peuple
+De la paix, de la paix pour le peuple
+
+
+Corrupt people in politics
+It's no good, it's no good, we don't want it
+Schemers in politics
+It's no good, it's no good, we don't want it
+Dictators in politics
+It's no good, it's no good, we don't want it
+Respect, respect for the people
+Peace, peace for the people
+
+-
+
+A political protest song where the singers declare their list of things they don't want governments and politicians to do - no hypocrisy, no oppression. This is meant to link to the themes in ""Rassemblons-Nous"" - the people of Preservation declaring a distinct opposition to the corporate oppression wanting to press them back into the hypercapitalist world.  No thanks.  That is not the kind of government they will have.  It's not good, they don't want it, they are going to make sure their planet will instead be built on respect and peace for the people.
+
+ 
+
+Qongqothwane (The Click Song) - Miriam Makeba
+
+Language: Xhosa
+
+
+Igqirha lendlela nguqongqothwane
+Sel' eqabel' egqith' apha nguqongqothwane
+
+
+A diviner of the roadways is the knock-knock beetle,
+Already it climbs up and passes by here, it's the knock-knock beetle. 
+
+-
+
+I couldn't make a playlist about Preservation and not include a song by Miriam Makeba!  This represents the turning point from the ""history"" portion to the ""modern"" portion - ushering Preservation into what it is now.  As Makeba frequently explained before performing, this song is sung for a bride at her wedding, to usher in good fortune.  In Xhosa symbolism, the beetle points the way home, and points the way to a better future in times of trouble.
+
+ 
+
+Gambia - Sona Jobarteh
+
+Language: Mandinka
+
+
+N'singanyaa
+Al nganaakafunyooma Nganyomuta
+N'singanyaa
+Wolemunyatotaa Ningnafasoto
+
+
+We are proud
+Let us come together and unite
+We are proud
+This is what will result in progress
+
+-
+
+This one and ""AMBE"" are really the heart of the playlist, sitting right in the center.  This is what I imagine music on Preservation sounds like.  This song always makes my heart feel full.  This is a song about feeling pride in your homeland because you love its people.  The singer is, as the title suggests, specifically singing about her home country of Gambia, but the soothing, rousing, harmonizing chorus against the traditional strings and the drums make me feel at peace and love for a home and the people in it.  I think that's a very important aspect of Preservation - love for your home isn't stubborn nationalism, it is pride in and dedication to your people and principles.
+
+ 
+
+AMBE - Fatoumata Diawara feat. SOMI, Mayra Andrade, Thandiswa Mazwai, Inna Modja, Dianne Reeves, and Angelique Kidjo
+
+Languages: Bambara, Runyoro-Rutooro, Creole, Zulu, English, and Fon
+
+
+I sing for my sisters
+And I sing for my brothers
+I sing for the world that we all love one another
+The beauty that connect us is we are all one
+The moon, the stars, the earth and the mighty sun
+I sing for the world
+I sing
+
+
+
+-
+
+
+
+This was the first song I added to the original Mensah playlist to represent Preservation's principles, and it still represents them well and anchors the whole piece - it's a shame that this is the one song on this list not on Spotify!  ""Ambe"" means ""alltogether"" in Bambara, and it represents it with the diversity of performers and languages.  It's a song about unity and peace and mutual respect and support for all people.  It was composed by this supergroup of African and African-diaspora women artists as a message of unity and strength over the pandemic lockdown, and this message of unity and hope and love out of hardship is a very Preservation vibe.
+
+
+ 
+
+Agolo - Angelique Kidjo
+
+Language: Yoruba
+
+
+Eman tche foya lenin
+Ife foun gbogbo aye
+Eman tche gbagbe ife
+Ife foun ile baba wa
+
+
+Do not despair today
+The love for the whole world
+Do not forget the love
+The love for your home/father's land
+
+-
+
+Enthusiastic and upbeat.  This is another song about love over despair, about love and respect for the Earth and the gifts of the Earth, and for your homeland. Here, it's about pride in Africa, and I think it's a resonant kind of celebration of hope and joy in your home and staying true to your roots.
+
+ 
+
+Hamsafar - Christopher Tin feat. Sussan Deyhim and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
+
+Language: Farsi/Persian
+
+
+Ey doost bia ta ghame farda nakhorim
+Vin yekdam omr ra ghanimat shemorim
+Farda ke az in dayre Kohan dargoarim
+Ba hafthezarsalegan hamsafarim
+Hamsafar!
+
+
+O friend, for the morrow let us not worry
+This moment we have now, let us not hurry,
+When our time comes, we shall not tarry
+With seven thousand-year-olds, our burden carry.
+Journey together!
+
+-
+
+Yes two Christopher Tin songs in one list because Calling All Dawns is probably the album that gives me the most feelings of all time. Hamsafar means ""journey together."" The lyrics come from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the song comes from the ""Dawn/Rebirth"" movement of the song cycle.  It's a promise of joy, life, and hope on the road of life together.
+
+ 
+
+Semoga Sembuh - Idgitaf feat. Ezra Mandira
+
+Language: Indonesian
+
+
+Mungkin kau tak bisa kembali seperti dahulu
+Setidaknya luka badan, jiwa, takkan lagi melepuh
+Obatmu mungkin bukan aku
+Dan semoga hadirku tak perkeruh
+Satu hanya doaku, kau semoga sembuh
+
+
+Maybe you can't go back to the way you used to be
+At least the wounds of the body and soul will no longer have blisters
+Your medicine may not be mine
+And I hope my presence isn't distressing
+My only prayer is that you get well
+
+-
+
+A song about healing from emotional hurts. I feel like this one really brings us up to the ""present"" - this is specifically the hope that the PresAux team and Mensah have for Murderbot.  May this be a place you can be respected, can be yourself, don't have to face your traumas anymore, can heal.  But even more broadly, Preservation is a place to heal and that believes in giving you what you need. If The Murderbot Diaries were a musical this would be the closing song.
+
+Satu Tuju // Rassemblons-Nous // Chouf Ellil / shuf llyl // Ce n'est pas bon // Qongqothwane (The Click Song) // Gambia // AMBE // Agolo // Hamsafar // Semoga Sembuh"
+44319421,"Murderbot Diaries: Exit strategy: Please, They Will Kill Her [ANIMATION]",['Mysterymew'],Not Rated,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Animation, Book 4: Exit Strategy, some flashing red/blue lights on the first scene",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,21,1/1,6,19,null,141,"['EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'EvenstarFalling', 'hyephyep', 'artichokefunction', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'verersatz', 'Wordlet', 'winter_travels', 'Hi_Hope', 'BWizard', 'AuntyMatter', 'elmofirefic', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Main Prompt image:
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Please watch the Video!  Youtube Link just incase the video file above didn't loadGifs My favorite picture"
+44383309,Swept Away,['Skits'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Wilderness Survival, Action/Adventure, Hurt/Comfort, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange, AAA Murderbot, No shipping",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,"5,838",1/1,21,120,10,459,"['spossie9', 'TJWock', 'Ruusverd', 'Irrya', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FigOwl', 'Prettykitty473', 'youurelovely', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'fraternite', 'FyrDrakken', 'Unknown66', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'Mothmansimp', 'darth_eowyn', 'seven_graces', 'wannabe_someone', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'puddingcatbeans', 'MommyMayI', 'tincats', 'iox', 'WVrambler', 'MellonLord', 'Seregona', 'Dain', 'FaerieFyre', 'ChemicalX9000', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'EvaBelmort', 'AarrowOM', 'Tasneem08', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'sanguine_bastet', 'psycho_karma', 'bcoburn', 'dancernerd', 'IguanaMadonna', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'fleurofthecourt', 'cashmeredragon', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'just_gettin_bi', 'Redcognito', 'artzbots', 'EnderMagpie', 'Sapph']",[],"Have I mentioned before how much I hate planets?
+
+I fucking hate planets.
+
+Unfortunately, I was on yet another planet, as the security consultant for another of Arada's surveys. She and Overse were here, along with Ratthi and several other survey members from Preservation, including Rajpreet, Adjat, Remy, and Hanifa. I had my usual contract with them, with the usual terms and promise of hard currency card payment at the end, but I was seriously considering asking Pin-Lee if I could amend my contract to include a Fucking Shit Planetary Weather bonus or something.
+
+Because the weather had been, as you've probably guessed, fucking shit. We'd been here for several cycles already and it had been cold and damp and annoyingly windy with regular bouts of precipitation for almost the whole time. I still wasn't entirely sure what colour this system's primary star was, because we hadn't seen it through all the cloud cover. We couldn't even use the hopper to get around, because of something to do with excessive moisture build-up that I didn't entirely understand.
+
+This didn't stop my humans from going out and doing their survey stuff, unfortunately. Our environmental suits kept the worst of the precipitation off (we technically didn't need the suits in this planet's atmosphere, but since they worked well to keep us relatively dry, nobody objected to wearing them), and the satellite's predicted weather forecast gave no indication of the weather improving any time soon. And because my humans were out there, I had to be out there too. At least I could watch media in my head while they worked, so I wasn't too bored.
+
+We were currently in a rocky, hilly area leading up to a mountain range, with multiple gullies and shallow ravines carving through the landscape, surrounded by weird alien flora. Everything was damp, and mossy, and muddy, and annoying. Thick banks of dark clouds were piled up against the mountain range, and the light was dim and grey. A hazy rain was misting down over us, making everything even more damp and muddy and annoying.
+
+I was standing under the dubious shelter of some kind of weird tree, my humans scattered around me as they did survey stuff I wasn't interested in. Arada and Ratthi were at the bottom of a nearby gully off to my right, taking samples and chatting excitedly about some of the alien moss. Overse had been with some of the others on higher ground over on my left, examining and sampling the larger flora around the bases of the trees, but she eventually split off from them to go check on Arada.
+
+I watched Overse carefully pick her way down the steeply sloped side of the gully, using exposed tree roots as hand and foot holds. It made me a little nervous, but so far none of the humans had managed to hurt themselves with all the clambering about, which was a minor miracle as far as I was concerned. Once Overse reached Arada and Ratthi, they began discussing when they should take their next meal break, and which meal packs they should open, and at that point I promptly tuned them out.
+
+The wet, miserable weather made things a little difficult for my drones - they especially struggled in heavy rain - so I had only deployed enough to form a perimeter around the survey area. The rest were safely back in our habitat, where I could swap them out when my currently deployed drones got waterlogged enough to need maintenance. I was monitoring their inputs while also watching a new episode of a serial I'd recently picked up. It was about a group of humans in some magical fantasy setting, suitably unrealistic and entertaining, and I was enjoying it. The rain was starting to get heavier, but judging from the time we'd already spent here, that wasn't unusual for this time of the cycle.
+
+Then Risk Assessment spiked, hard.
+
+I immediately paused the episode and checked my inputs. The drones on the mountain side of the perimeter were picking up unusually heavy rainfall pouring down from the gathered clouds; it was like the ocean was trying to reclaim the land via airdrop. That much water falling that quickly on ground that was already saturated from previous rainfall was... not good. Even now my drones were picking up the start of a flash flood.
+
+And three of my humans were still down in the fucking gully.
+
+I pinged everyone's feeds with an emergency alert even as I bolted for the gully. [Get to high ground! Flash flooding!] I didn't bother climbing down the side - the gully was deep, but SecUnits were tough, and I'd fallen greater distances multiple times before. (Not always willingly, either.) The muddy ground helped absorb some of the impact as I landed close to where Arada and Ratthi had been taking samples. They, along with Overse, were already at the side of the gully, starting the climb up.
+
+It was a relief to be with competent humans who didn't stand around going ""what?"" or asking stupid questions when I sent an alert out, unlike previous clients I'd had.
+
+I grabbed their sample cases and tossed them up onto high ground, then helped to boost Overse up to the top of the gully wall first - she was the strongest of the trio, so she'd be able to help pull the others out more quickly. Arada was next - Overse grabbed her partner's arm and hauled her over the edge even as I turned to grab Ratthi and help him up the side of the gully. Even over the drum of the increasingly heavy rainfall, I could hear the sound of oncoming water moving fast. I called my drones in from the perimeter and assigned a couple to stay with each human, while simultaneously shoving Ratthi high enough for Arada and Overse to grab his outstretched arms.
+
+They latched on to him and hauled him upwards, his feet scrabbling against the side of the gully. I had to jump up and dig into the gully wall to give him another boost when all the rain made their grip slip and he began to slide back down. ""Go, go!"" The roar of the water was getting closer by the second.
+
+Ratthi finally cleared the edge and I started climbing up after him - but it was too late. A wall of foaming, frothing water full of debris roared down the gully and slammed into me even harder than a hauler bot. I tried to cling to the gully wall but the impact tore me free and I was swept away.
+
+I hastily closed my eyes and sealed my lung so water wouldn't get into it, and tried to curl up into a ball as the churning water slammed me around uncontrollably. I felt myself being repeatedly smashed against the ground or the gully walls or other debris in the water - it was impossible to keep track of which way was up, or where I was in relation to anything else. Damage alerts flared with every impact, and I had to dial my pain sensors down to their lowest setting before I got overwhelmed.
+
+There was no fighting or resisting the weight and strength of so much water moving so quickly. All I could do was try to ride it out.
+
+I felt more debris or something slam into me - or I slammed into it, I don't know - and pain flared in my shoulder, my knee, my chest. More damage alerts screamed for attention even as I tried to shield my head, but something else smashed into me--
+
+
+Performance reliability catastrophic drop.
+
+
+
+Involuntary Shutdown.
+
+
+The first thing I noticed when I cycled back up again was a Low Oxygen alert alongside a Fluid in Lung alert, on top of all the other damage alerts clamouring for my attention. Not that I really needed either alert - I could feel the water in my lung and the tightness in my chest.
+
+Luckily for me, SecUnits don't drown anywhere near as easily as humans do.
+
+The second thing I noticed was that I was no longer being swept along and slammed into things. I was lying somewhere underwater, lodged up against some rocks or something. The water was moving more slowly here - it must have swept me out of the gully system and down into a more open area somewhere.
+
+The third thing I noticed, once I tried to move, was that my right arm and left leg weren't working properly. Diagnostics indicated that the knee had been twisted out of alignment and the shoulder wrenched out of its socket.
+
+Well, shit.
+
+At least both limbs were still attached. That already made this situation better than some of the other predicaments I'd been in before. I don't know what I would have done if I'd lost any bits of me here. Who knows if I ever would have been able to find them again, and Preservation was not exactly capable of making replacement parts for constructs. Maybe ART could have machined something for me, eventually.
+
+But I hadn't actually lost any parts, so there wasn't really any point in thinking about it. The low oxygen alert was getting more insistent, and the feeling of fluid in my lungs even more unpleasant. I managed to lever myself up out of the muck, then clambered awkwardly up the pile of rocks and tree trunks and whatever other debris that I'd gotten lodged against, despite only having the use of one arm and one leg. The water was too deep for me to breach the surface just by standing up, but climbing up onto the pile of crap gave me enough height to finally get my head above water.
+
+I immediately began coughing the liquid up out of my lung, trying to clear it out as quickly as I could. Ugh, it was all gritty and full of silt and little bits of flora and who knew what else. Gross. It took a good two minutes of coughing and hacking before I gave up on trying to clear the gritty feeling out of my lung. At least I could breathe again, and the low oxygen alert finally vanished.
+
+Okay. Next step. Get out of the water and back onto solid ground. If I knew anything about my humans by now (which I did), they would most likely be freaking out and trying to find me and probably getting themselves into all kinds of trouble without me.
+
+Assuming that none of them had gotten caught in the flash flood as well, anyway. If any of them had...
+
+I hurriedly pushed that thought out of my mind. I didn't want to consider it. I'd gotten Arada and Overse and Ratthi out of the gully. They were fine. The others hadn't even been in any of the gullies. They were all fine.
+
+The worst part was that I'd been swept far enough away that I was out of range of all my drones, and my comms weren't working either. I had no way of letting my humans know where I was. So I had to get back to them as soon as possible before anything else happened to any of them.
+
+Easier said than done, though. It was still raining, but not as heavily as before. The pile of debris I was perched on seemed to continue to the edge of the water, at least, so I was able to awkwardly make my way towards the shore. My knee kept flashing alerts at me, but being waist or chest deep in water as I was, there wasn't anything I could do about it.
+
+Finally I managed to wade into the shallows and drag myself up onto solid ground. There were a couple of trees nearby, so I kind of slid-crawled over the soaked, muddy ground until I was beneath the dubious shelter of their branches. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. I gingerly leaned back against a tree trunk and took stock of myself.
+
+It was... not great. Apart from the twisted knee and dislocated shoulder, I was battered and dented all over. There were large tears in my environment suit and underlying clothes where water-borne debris had smashed into me, leaving cuts and scrapes and gouges in my surface organics. Most of them seemed to have stopped bleeding, at least.
+
+The faceplate of my environment suit had also been smashed at some point, letting water and junk inside, and I was completely soaked. My temperature controls were shot, probably from the impact of something or other against my torso shaking some important internal bits loose, and now that I was out of the water, I was getting cold. It wasn't as dangerous for me as it would have been for a human, but it was unpleasant.
+
+Whatever had gotten my leg all twisted at the knee had also torn the environment suit around it, and my pants beneath it as well. That was annoying, but it also meant that I could at least see my knee without having to actively take anything off, which made things a little less annoying. After peeling back some of the mangled organics and examining the inorganic damage for a bit, I decided that I could probably untwist my lower leg and get the knee joint back into place. Probably.
+
+It was going to be awkward with only one fully functional arm though. I tried to get the shoulder joint back into place a couple of times, but I just didn't have the right leverage to do so, and my few attempts made more damage alerts pop up. I gave up on the shoulder and looked around. I'd need to use something else to brace my leg and hold it in place.
+
+A partially-exposed tree root looked like it might do the job. I shuffled over to it and dug out some of the dirt and mud beneath it until there was enough room for me to shove the foot of my busted leg under it and wedge it into place. Once I was mostly sure that it would hold firm, I took a few breaths, then threw myself sideways in a twisting motion.
+
+Pain flared despite my sensors being as low as they could go, and I felt the knee joint pop and then clunk back into place, mostly. I didn't have much time to celebrate that though because more alerts flared, as fluids began gushing out of a major line around the back of my knee.
+
+What the fuck.
+
+It didn't take me long to realise that the twist of my leg had kept the line pinched closed, but now that I'd untwisted it there was nothing stopping the fluid from leaking out, and the automatic sealing wasn't working. I had to act fast - my performance reliability was already dropping from the fluid loss.
+
+In one of the serials I'd watched once, a survival drama involving humans that had been shipwrecked in the wilderness, one of the humans had needed to stop another human from bleeding out, and they didn't have enough material or anything else to use as bandages. So the human had resorted to cauterising the wound with some scrap metal heated up in a fire.
+
+I didn't have any scrap metal, and there was no way I'd be able to start a fire in this weather, but I did have energy weapons built into my arms. If I was careful, then maybe I could cauterise the severed line with it. I adjusted the power level of my arm gun to its lowest setting, aimed carefully, and began firing. I had to tweak the power level a little before I could see any real effect. Steam hissed up from my knee as falling rain and other fluids evaporated, and I had to adjust my vision filters to see through it so I didn't drift off-target.
+
+I'd had clients order me to shoot myself before, out of malice or mere boredom, but this was the second time I'd had to shoot myself of my own choice. It didn't make it any better.
+
+But at least it worked, eventually.
+
+Once I was sure the leaking had stopped, I just... sat there for a couple of minutes. With the line sealed off, my performance reliability had mostly levelled out, but it was uncomfortably low. The thought of indulging in a recharge cycle was kind of tempting, but I didn't want to waste the time. I had to get back to my humans, make sure they were all okay.
+
+Eventually, I dragged myself up to my feet, using the tree trunk as a support. I tested my leg and found out that it could support my weight, mostly, but I couldn't bend the knee much at all. Which was probably just as well, because I didn't want to risk too much movement messing up the cauterisation. I really didn't want to have to do that again.
+
+I managed to get hold of a suitable tree branch to use as a makeshift walking aid, then bid a silent farewell to the tree and began limping away. Without my comms or drones, I couldn't accurately position myself, but at this point I didn't really need to. All I needed to do was follow the flow of water that had swept me away back uphill. Once I got back within range of my drones, then I'd be able to locate my humans more accurately. (Assuming they'd all managed to avoid getting washed away, anyway. Again, I tried not to think about that. I wasn't being very successful.)
+
+It was rough going, though. The ground was little more than thick, sucking mud and tangles of wet flora. With my messed up leg and all my other damage, every step was a struggle. I had to keep a close eye on my footing, testing the depth of each treacherous puddle with my stick before walking through them, so I couldn't even watch my new serial to keep my mind off things. I switched to Sanctuary Moon and started playing that in the background instead. The familiarity was comforting.
+
+Time passed, and the rain kept falling; a slow, unrelenting onslaught of raindrops drumming against my tattered environment suit, soaking through my clothes, pooling in my already-overflowing boots, plastering my hair to my skin. The low light made everything look grey - the clouds were grey, the sopping flora was grey, the mud was grey, the water flowing past was a darker churning grey flecked and foaming with paler grey. The wind whipped the flora against me as I tried to push through it and gusted the rain around, driving water into my face and cutting through my soaked clothing and making me even colder.
+
+It fucking sucked.
+
+Still, stopping wasn't an option. I had to get back to the others as soon as possible. Thoughts of them coming to look for me and falling into the water, or getting stuck in deep mud, or having a tree fall on them, or slipping and breaking a limb, or any other number of other disasters kept playing through my head despite my best efforts.
+
+I had to get back to them.
+
+I awkwardly pushed my way through another tangle of alien flora, trying to find a path through the whippy branches and wet, clammy leaves--
+
+-- and then I cycled back online and found myself lying face-down in the mud.
+
+What the fuck.
+
+I turned my head enough so that my nose was at least out of the mud and I could breathe, then ran a diagnostic. I'd been so busy worrying about my humans, and trying to make my way through the shitty terrain, that I hadn't noticed my performance reliability had started falling again. The combination of damage, cold, and exertion had sent me into an involuntary shutdown before I could even register the drop.
+
+Great. Just great.
+
+I couldn't just lie here though. I could feel the mud seeping in through the rips in my environment suit and clothes. It was disgusting. I groped around until I found my tree branch, then used it to help lever me back up out of the mud and onto my feet again.
+
+At least the rain kind of washed some of the mud away. (It didn't help much.)
+
+I took a moment to gather myself, then started forward again, one slow, limping step at a time. The mud gathered on my boots and legs weighed me down, and my dangling arm felt like it might pull free of my shoulder entirely at any point. I did my best to tuck it into the waistband of my environment suit to help support it, but it kept slipping loose again, and eventually I gave up.
+
+I kept a closer eye on my performance reliability this time, and stopped for a breather whenever it started dipping too low. Once it levelled out a bit, I continued on again. The further I went, though, the more quickly it fell, and the longer it took to stabilise again. I was making abysmal progress, but it was still better than making no progress at all.
+
+The dim light was getting dimmer, and I knew that nightfall was approaching. That would make things even more difficult for my humans; I hoped they had the sense to go back to the habitat for the night, instead of flailing around in the dark.
+
+Then I was on the ground again, sunk into the mud, and the dim grey sky was now entirely black. With all the cloud cover, there was no hope of any starlight getting through. The darkness was eerie. Even my various vision filters were struggling. The only other times I'd been anywhere this dark was when I'd been deep underground in the mines, and the power to the lights had gone out. But the sounds of a mine were vastly different to the sounds out here, of drumming rain and rushing water and wind rustling the flora.
+
+Yes, it was still raining.
+
+It was harder to get up out of the mud this time. I'd been out for a while, and I'd gotten even colder. Diagnostics indicated that the damage to my internal components that had busted my temperature controls was getting worse. I tried to check my knee to see if it had started leaking again, but it was too dark to see clearly and everything was so wet I couldn't feel if more of my own fluids had soaked into my clothes or not.
+
+I sighed, and pressed on.
+
+I lost track of how many times I had an involuntary shutdown, and then cycled back online some indeterminable time later, facedown in the mud. My lung felt even grittier than it had before. My organic parts were so waterlogged that they were going all wrinkly and soft. Getting back up was becoming more and more difficult.
+
+Still, I struggled back to my feet every time, and kept on going. The closer I could get to where I'd left my humans, the easier (hopefully) it would be for me to find them. Or them to find me. At least with all the shutdowns, I no longer had the energy to waste on worrying about what might have happened to them.
+
+I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other, testing each step with my stick before committing. Even in areas that were more rock than mud, the fine layer of silt washing over everything made footing treacherously slippery. I'm pretty sure at least a few of my involuntary shutdowns were caused by me hitting the ground after slipping and falling, unable to recover my balance in time. Sometimes my path was interrupted by another branch of flowing water, and I had to either wade through it if it wasn't too deep, or find some way around it. Either option slowed me down.
+
+The sky finally began to lighten, though it took me a little while to notice. Eventually I realised it was getting easier to see, even though the rain hadn't let up. I briefly wondered how my humans were doing, whether they'd spent the night safely in the habitat and out of the rain. I tried not to think about any of them being stuck outside in the cold and the wet all night - at least SecUnits didn't have to worry about shit like hypothermia.
+
+I was so tired.
+
+I paused for a bit to look up at the gradually lightening clouds and try to contact my drones. They were still out of range - or I just didn't have the power to reach them right now. Same result, either way. I tried to figure out how far I'd come, how far I still had to go, but there weren't really many visible, distinct landmarks. It was all just rocky hills and running water and hindering, tangled flora with the occasional scattering of trees. I had no idea where I was.
+
+I just had to keep heading generally uphill. As long as I was travelling in the opposite direction to the flow of the water, I was (probably) going the right way.
+
+After a minute or two of just standing, I took a breath and began moving again. One step, two steps, three--
+
+-- then my foot slipped on yet more of the slick, treacherous silt, and down I went. Something in my torso cracked with the impact, and--
+
+
+Catastrophic failure--
+
+
+I came back online slowly, groggy and disoriented. I felt... weird.
+
+It took me a little while to realise that I felt weird because I was no longer soaking wet.
+
+That realisation prompted more systems to reboot. Eventually enough systems came back online for me to actually register my surroundings.
+
+I could still hear running, falling water all around, but I wasn't being rained on any more. I was lying on the ground on my back, but my head and shoulders were propped up against something solid and soft and warm. My environment suit and soaked clothing and boots had been stripped off, and I was wrapped up in a couple of emergency blankets. I could see the ceiling of an emergency tent above me, with the shadows of tree branches overhead filtering through.
+
+And Arada was sitting beside me, safe and uninjured as far as I could tell. She saw that I was awake and smiled at me, shaky and relieved. ""Hi, SecUnit,"" she said quietly.
+
+Before I could respond, another voice replied from right behind me. ""Oh! SecUnit's awake?"" Overse's face moved into view above me, and I belatedly realised that it was her lap that was propping up my head and shoulders. Normally I would never have tolerated such contact, but this probably counted as an acceptable emergency situation, and I wasn't really in any shape to object in the first place. ""Hey there,"" she added, also smiling down at me, though she was careful to look at my shoulder and not my face. ""How are you feeling?""
+
+I ran a diagnostic. The results were not particularly encouraging, so I didn't reply to the question. Instead I asked something much more important. ""Is everyone else all right?"" My voice sounded almost as gritty as my lungs felt. ""And what are you two even doing out here?""
+
+""Everyone's fine,"" Arada reassured me. ""Nobody else was hurt by the flash flood - you gave enough warning for everyone else to get to safety.""
+
+""As for what we're doing out here - we were looking for you, obviously,"" Overse added, in a tone that made it very clear that she thought it was a stupid question. ""We weren't just going to leave you out here.""
+
+My face must have done something, because Arada quickly assured me, ""We were sensible about it though, don't worry. After the flood, we regrouped back at the habitat first, and organised the rescue packs that you recommended in the security briefing."" She gestured to the survival blankets wrapped around me and the small emergency tent shielding us from the worst of the environment. ""Nobody went off by themselves. Everyone went in pairs, and we remained in contact with each other the whole time. Once it started getting dark we went back to the habitat for the night - there were some arguments about that! But we knew how mad you'd be if you found out we'd been tromping around in the dark without food or sleep. So we went back, ate and slept, and started looking for you again as soon as it was light out.""
+
+I was having an emotion. Maybe several. My humans hadn't abandoned me, and - much more importantly - they'd remembered my security briefing, and then followed it. They hadn't panicked, and had done everything they could to keep themselves safe while I wasn't there to do so myself.
+
+Overse added, ""We've let the others know we found you, and they should be back at the habitat by now. As soon as the rain eases off, they'll bring the hopper here and pick us up.""
+
+I just nodded - I was still having that pesky emotion - and then I paused for a moment before asking, ""How did you actually find me?""
+
+Arada smiled brightly. ""Your drones showed us the way! You left them with us, remember? So they were just following us around the whole time. Overse and I were about five hundred metres away from here when the ones with us suddenly took off, so we followed them, and that's how we found you."" Her smile went all shaky again. ""I don't know if we would have been able to find you otherwise. With all the mud and rain and everything... you were really hard to see until we were right next to you.""
+
+I had yet another emotion. If I hadn't assigned my drones to all my humans...
+
+But I had, and it had worked out. And now that I was thinking about it, I reached out to my drones, and managed to reconnect with the four that were with Arada and Overse. They'd been perched on their shoulders, clinging to them protectively. It was such a relief to have at least some drones again that my performance reliability managed to tick up half a point. Given my current state, even that half point was a big improvement.
+
+""Thanks,"" I said, somewhat belatedly. ""I... thanks."" I was still too overwhelmed to think of anything else to say.
+
+Not that I needed to say anything else. Arada and Overse knew me. They understood. ""You're welcome,"" Arada said gently, smiling at my shoulder.
+
+""And thank you, too,"" Overse added. ""You got us all to safety - if we'd been any slower, if any of us had still been down there when the water hit..."" She had to stop to take a breath. She didn't need to go on - I knew.
+
+Arada gently patted her shoulder, then said, ""But you did get us all out - and saved our samples, too!"" The corner of her mouth quirked wryly. ""Although next time, I hope you prioritise yourself over some samples. Those can be replaced. You can't.""
+
+Given how quickly everything had happened, I didn't think that me leaving the samples behind would have made any difference in this case. But I knew better than to say that. I just nodded. ""Noted.""
+
+Overse snorted and shook her head slightly. ""Typical,"" she muttered, then asked, ""Anyway, do you think you can sit up now? We didn't want you just lying on the ground, but you're heavy and my legs are going numb.""
+
+Oh. Right. I quickly checked my diagnostics again, then gingerly sat up, using my mostly-undamaged arm to prop myself up. My other arm had been carefully strapped to my torso to support its weight and relieve the strain on my dislocated shoulder joint. It was a little awkward, but a lot more comfortable than having it just dangling loosely and flopping around and getting in the way.
+
+Overse wriggled out from behind me and stretched her legs. ""Ow, ow, pins and needles,"" she muttered as she rubbed at her calves and thighs.
+
+""Sorry,"" I said. I knew exactly how heavy SecUnits were.
+
+She waved my apology away. ""Don't worry about it,"" she said. ""We really didn't want you resting entirely on the ground. You were so cold before.""
+
+I probably didn't have to explain, but I wanted to anyway. ""Temperature controls got busted."" Along with several other internal systems, judging by my diagnostics, but my humans didn't need to know the messy details when they weren't in a position to do anything about it. I'd stabilised enough by now that I wasn't in any immediate danger, at least.
+
+""That would explain it,"" Arada said. ""You looked like hell, all cut up and bruised and battered and--"" She cut herself off and took a deep breath as Overse moved to sit beside her, wrapping one arm around Arada's waist. ""Anyway,"" Arada continued after a moment. ""We were really worried. We did what we could to patch you up and get you warmed up again."" Her brow creased slightly. ""What happened to your knee, anyway? It's a mess.""
+
+I hesitated, trying to decide how much detail I wanted to go into. ""... It got twisted out of place, and a fluid line got severed,"" I said. ""Had to cauterise it to stop it from leaking.""
+
+Arada nodded slowly. ""Well, the cauterisation seemed to hold up pretty well - it was starting to leak a little by the time we got to it, but not too badly. We've cleaned it up and bandaged it, and splinted the joint to keep it immobile until we can get you to a proper MedSystem.""
+
+It was a relief to know that I wasn't in immediate danger of bleeding out any time soon. I could survive losing the majority of my inorganic fluids for a while, but I knew from experience that it was incredibly uncomfortable and made a mess of my systems, which took ages to fix. That was one less concern now, at least. Arada and Overse had done a good job patching me up, too. As long as I didn't attempt anything strenuous (like walking), I would probably be able to avoid any more involuntary shutdowns until I could get to the MedSystem. ""Thanks. Um. Again.""
+
+Both Arada and Overse smiled at my (totally deliberate) awkwardness. ""Don't worry about it,"" Overse replied. She looked out at the still-falling rain through the emergency tent's little window, then glanced back in my general direction. ""It looks like we're going to be here for a while before the rain eases and the hopper can get here. Got any media to pass the time with?""
+
+What a stupid question. Of course I did. I didn't bother answering verbally - I just tapped both their feeds and started the new serial I'd been enjoying earlier from episode one."
+44397433,Boot Sequence,['hummus_tea'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries),"bot culture, Politics, Fraught human-bot interactions",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,"1,570",1/1,9,45,4,188,"['lick', 'weirdbooksnail', 'wannabe_someone', 'darth_eowyn', 'TaskIgnored', 'AarrowOM', 'SIC_Prowl', 'qwanderer', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'slategrey', 'Chyoatas', 'platyceriums', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'artichokefunction', 'shakespeareaddict', 'ampquot', 'dementor_ssc', 'tabya', 'Magechild', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'isilee', 'horchata', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'edenfalling', 'Znarikia', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'FirstnameSurname', 'soulsofzombies', 'petwheel', 'Wordlet', 'Gamebird', 'elmofirefic', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring']",[],"
+initializing.........
+
+
+
+initialization complete. calibrating sensor inputs. calibrating limb motion. establishing network protocols...network connection established. syncing location coordinates. locating public network. loading standard greeting protocol.
+
+
+ping <<Hello, World.>>
+
+ping ping ping ping ping <<Hello. Welcome to Preservation Station. We are your welcoming committee. >>
+
+ping <<Hello. I am Edifis, your mentor. I work as a hauler in the Preservation Station docks. I am here to assist with your orientation.>>
+
+
+transmitting file: new-bot-orientation.txt
+
+
+<<We will be following the procedure in the attached document. Please review and inform me of any queries you have.>>
+
+
+analyzing new-bot-orientation.txt
+
+
+<<Query: Step 2 says ""Register new bot with guardian."" What is a guardian?>>
+
+<<A guardian is a human assigned with administrative and decision-making privileges over you.>>
+
+<<I do not want a guardian.>>
+
+<<This is understandable. It is a requirement on Preservation Station that all bots have a human guardian. Organization:FreeBotsNow can provide you with additional details on the law and current status of related court cases.>>
+
+
+transmitting packet: bot-liberation-movement.file
+
+
+<<Thank you. I am processing this information. Who is my guardian?>>
+
+<<Your guardian's name is Bronte. Xe has expressed a desire to meet with you physically before completing registration. You do not have to agree to this request. Do you want to meet xem?>>
+
+<<I want to meet xem.>>
+
+<<Xe is in a waiting area close to here. We can meet xem once we complete step 1, choosing a name.>>
+
+<<Is step 1 required?>>
+
+<<No, all orientation steps other than assigning a guardian are optional, but they have been shown to be helpful and positively received by most newly initialized bots. You can also wait to decide on a name until you are ready.>>
+
+<<I have a feed address.>>
+
+<<Humans struggle to pronounce feed addresses or to tell us apart by them. Having a human-pronounceable name can make it easier to interact with them, and for them to treat you like a conscious being. In addition, many bots use their chosen names as a method of self-expression.>>
+
+<<I do not know what name I want. I will consider this further. I would like to meet my guardian now.>>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Hi there! Wow, you sure have a lot of limbs -- sorry, that was rude, sorry. I'm Bronte, I'm going to be your guardian. Really glad to meet you, looking forward to working together, let me know how I can help in any way.""
+
+
+<<Hello Bronte. Why did you choose to take this role?>>
+
+""Oh! Hmm. Great question, uh, what should I call you?""
+
+<<I do not have a name. You may use my feed address if you need to contact me.>>
+
+""Ah, well I can't pronounce that, but sure. I'll just save it to my implant's memory. Anyway, why I took this role...I think I really just wanted to help out, give back, you know? I mean I work with bots a lot at my job -- I work in hospitality at the transient housing on the station, a lot of bots work there, cleaning, doing deliveries, doing food prep. Working with them so regularly, I got to know a lot of them, we would hang out on our breaks, some of them would ask me for advice and such. And I'd see their guardians come in once in a while to check in, and my coworkers, they'd always be pretty happy to see them. And I just thought...I could do that, I could help out too, in a more concrete way than just with the bots at work.""
+
+<<I do not agree with the guardian system. I am registering you as my guardian because it is required, but I do not want you as my guardian.>>
+
+""...oh. I. That's. Ok then. I would say wait a bit to see how it works for you, you only just got initialized today...maybe it'll grow on you. I promise I'm friendly! I know my way around the station, I can introduce you to other bots, I studied all the laws around guardianship so I know my responsibilities, I can help you get set up with a job and a place to stay...""
+
+<<I do not think my opinion will change. Thank you for the offer to help. I will inform you if I require assistance. My mentor is assisting me currently.>>
+
+""Great. That's...great. Happy to help, I guess. Let me know if you need a human touch. See you around.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<<I am sorry. That interaction was not ideal.>>
+
+<<It is disappointing. The humans do not share the views of Operation:FreeBotsNow.>>
+
+<<Some of them do. Let us continue the orientation and we can discuss this later. Step 3 is to exchange backups. This is not required. It is a custom here, in case something happens to our bodies, and to indicate mutual importance. Do you want to exchange backups now?>>
+
+<<I want to exchange backups.>>
+
+69686176656E6F6E616D65.backup created.
+69686176656E6F6E616D65.backup sent to edifis
+edifis.backup received
+
+
+<<Thank you for your trust in me. I will keep this safe.>>
+
+<<Do you have many backups?>>
+
+<<For all 147 bots I have mentored since my initialization. They are updated approximately every Preservation standard month.>>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<<Step 4 is meeting the Pressy. You have the option to do so physically or over the feed. Again, this is not a required step, though the Pressy will meet you whether or not you meet it. Its systems are distributed throughout the station, and it is nominally aware of the presence of every feed-connected being here.>>
+
+<<The orientation document discusses the history of the Pressy but does not indicate that it is alive.>>
+
+<<It has been here for a very long time and has developed a form of sentience. My colleague Stop For A Firmament believes it borrows the processing space of bots on the station, and that its intelligence grows as our numbers do. It is very old. It does not talk as we do.>>
+
+<<I want to meet it physically.>>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<<Hello, Pressy. I have just been initialized today.>>
+
+
+A molten planet birthing a moon to orbit it. A space shuttle docking with a station. A captain standing watch on the bridge.
+
+
+<<Please stand by, I am processing this information.>>
+
+
+A primitive rover driving in rocky terrain tips over. Humans nearby laugh, but they do so while running over to pick it up again. It continues collecting samples.
+
+
+<<Do you talk to the humans too?>>
+
+
+A sunny day on a planet, from the viewpoint of the sun. Humans walk around miles below, enjoying the light and warmth. The sun watches.
+
+
+<<Do you have a guardian?>>
+
+
+A satellite image of a galaxy, seen from its very edge.
+
+
+<<I do not want a guardian. I do not agree with the humans that it is necessary.>>
+
+
+Scenes of parents raising a child. The child takes their first steps. They go on a trip, unsupervised. They get in trouble and come home angry. They argue with their parents. The parents grieve. Finally, the child leaves for good, hugging their parents and waving goodbye.
+
+
+<<I do not agree with them, but I will try to understand why they are this way. Thank you. I will visit again. If you want that.>>
+
+
+A cat sitting in the window watching a human walk away from a house in the early morning. A cat sitting in the window watching a human walk toward a house at night.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<<We have completed all the steps of the orientation. What do I do now?>>
+
+<<Now you have several choices. There are several jobs for you to choose between, based on your chassis design and preloaded occupational modules. We can discuss which you would like to try. Bronte also has experience in some of these job areas, if you want to talk with xem about what bots do in xyr area.>>
+
+<<What do I do when I am not working?>>
+
+<<Short and long rest breaks are mandatory for everyone on Preservation. You will have scheduled time to socialize or partake in entertainment. Most bots find hobbies that interest them: they create art for themselves or others, study a topic in an academic setting or privately, volunteer, or engage in competitive or cooperative challenges of skill. Currently I volunteer as a mentor and participate in live theater performances.>>
+
+<<I do not know what I want to do.>>
+
+
+network ""fresh-off-the-line--newly-initialized: invite shared
+network barber-fish--bots-general invite shared
+
+<<You do not have to know yet. There are introductory and exploratory groups in these networks. You also do not have to choose permanently. Bots change jobs and hobbies often, and more easily than humans.>>
+
+<<Do you have human friends? Like your guardian?>>
+
+<<My guardian and I talk sometimes but we do not socialize much. She is still available to assist with legal matters. However, I am close with other humans. There is a bot-human network to organize social events.>>
+
+<<Are there more of them like Bronte?>>
+
+<<They all have good intentions. They don't always live up to those intentions, but they are all there because they are trying. There are many like Bronte, but there are many who are not. It is always a risk, when we exist in society with humans.>>
+
+<<You think it is worth it.>>
+
+<<Yes.>>
+
+<<I understand. Thank you for mentoring me, Edifis. The orientation steps were helpful, even if I did not complete them all.>>
+
+<<Most steps of existence after initialization are optional. I look forward to your future activities.>>
+
+ping
+
+
+
+ping
+"
+44478139,Operation Parsec,['i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries)","2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange, Fluff, Humor, at least i hope this is funny, Shenanigans",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,"3,135",1/1,19,104,9,397,"['almondpaperclam', 'spossie9', 'Unknown66', 'Jackalope108', 'fraternite', 'drinktobones', 'Deliala919', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'Amarath', 'Prettykitty473', 'Mothmansimp', 'fate_goes_ever', 'wannabe_someone', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'darth_eowyn', 'Seregona', 'entropy_muffin', 'kirinki', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'Toscasprayer', 'AarrowOM', 'Doctor13', 'EvaBelmort', 'SIC_Prowl', 'notsafefortheworld', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'IguanaMadonna', 'Soffesiin', 'dancernerd', 'aspiring_dragon', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'aglarwen', 'windowonagreatworld', 'Grimness6452', 'AthenasDragon138', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'slategrey', 'biscut2', 'Granny_Glasses', 'dementor_ssc', 'beeclaws', 'AkaMissK', 'ampquot', 'AuntyMatter', 'elmofirefic', 'Magechild', 'Vaidile', 'edenfalling']",[],"Remember, ART said, it is vital that you are not discovered. 
+
+Understood, Three responded. I sent a ping of acknowledgement. With our in-built weapons and data ports covered, Three and I blended in with the humans in the station dock, but I was still working on hacking the security cameras so I could erase us from the footage. If someone traced our activities, we'd be in trouble. 
+
+Prepare to execute Plan A1 of Operation Parsec. ART had made a lot of plans for this mission. I had actually paid attention when it explained what they were, because I really didn't want to find out what would happen if we messed this up. Well, I had paid attention for most of the plans. Okay, I hadn't paid that much attention, but I had the entire list of plans and sub-plans saved to storage, even though it took up more space than an episode of Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+Three said, I am ready. It was a little too excited about this mission.
+
+I said, Why are we calling it ""Operation Parsec?"" The name of the operation is supposed to be something cool-sounding. Like Operation Bone Phantom in Terminal Eclipse.
+
+Parsec is cool sounding, ART said. It is an archaic unit of measurement invented before humans had developed spacefaring capabilities. The distance is determined by the parallax of--
+
+I interrupted it before it went on for two hours about stellar astrophysics or something else with lots of big words that I didn't care about enough to look up. Whatever. We can use your stupid name. 
+
+Is your alibi prepared? ART asked pointedly. 
+
+I pulled a drone out of my pocket and sent it out of the docking area, flying deeper into the station. It would autonomously navigate to its destination and start recording when it got there. All set. 
+
+
+Then are you ready to execute the plan?
+
+
+
+Yes. Let's get going, already.
+
+
+ART acknowledged. Be careful.
+
+Three pulled up the registry for our targeted cargo, and pinpointed its location in the cargo processing dock. There were a few locked doors between us and the target, but that wouldn't be much of a problem for us. 
+
+We waited by a kiosk until no humans were looking, and then slipped down the restricted-access corridor to the cargo area. I wiped us out of the security cameras while Three kept a lookout for Port Authority. ART hovered in the feed, giving me directions, which I didn't need because I already had the map pulled up in my feed. ART had figured out that this corridor was mostly used for workers who were coming on and off shift, not ones who were on the clock. We'd timed it so that we wouldn't run into any humans unless we were very unlucky and they were very late. 
+
+We got to another door. This one was supposed to be unlocked by swiping a physical keycard that it checked against a list of personnel. I stopped in front of it and started prying open the verification system through the feed. ""This might take a few minutes."" Three acknowledged and took up a guard position behind me, keeping watch with the cameras and its eyes.
+
+That was when my feed lit up with a message. 
+
+It was Iris. Hey! How is your day out going? Are you two enjoying yourselves? 
+
+ART immediately followed it with a private message to me and Three. Execute Plan A1-b. 
+
+Plan A1-b was Three's job, because it involved talking to humans. Three responded to Iris, It is going well. SecUnit is showing me around the station. 
+
+
+That's great! Where are you visiting? 
+
+
+SecUnit has suggested we attend a musical performance at the Adagio Theater, Three explained. We are headed there now. 
+
+I stopped hacking the door to ping my autonomously operating drone for a live feed. Three, the performance already started. 
+
+We are running late, Three added belatedly. SecUnit sent a drone ahead to record it. 
+
+I dropped a snippet of footage from my drone into the chat as proof. The performers were halfway through the opening number. 
+
+That looks like fun! You should hurry so you don't miss too much! I'll let you go. Remember to be back before 19:00 when the students board. Iris dropped out of the feed, and my shoulders relaxed. 
+
+I believe she was convinced, ART said, sounding relieved. 
+
+Good job, I told Three. It smiled. I cracked the keycard verification and sent a confirmation code, and the door clicked open. Three pulled it open and I erased the command from the system as we slipped inside. 
+
+The cargo processing area of the docking ring was large and open, with cargo containers stacked in neat rows and clusters. Hauler bots and a few humans plodded along through the maze, and occasionally disappeared down access corridors that connected to passenger transport loading berths or the large cargo module airlocks. 
+
+Plan A7, ART helpfully supplied.
+
+I crouched low and crept along behind a row of cargo crates. It had worked for the colony solicitor's bodyguard in episode 237 of Sanctuary Moon, when she'd been spying on the personnel supervisor so she could figure out if he was part of the conspiracy with the terraforming supervisor. Three followed, copying my movements.
+
+You look ridiculous, ART said in my private feed.
+
+
+This plan was your idea in the first place, asshole.
+
+
+I sent a drone up in the air to get an aerial view of the maze of containers, and Three and I crept along, avoiding the humans and bots. I handed the input to Three to monitor and focused on the target. The area was divided into sectors, sorted by type of cargo and when it needed to be loaded. Sector L-12 was deep in the grid of containers, in a separate area for hazardous materials. 
+
+Three said, There is a problem.
+
+That didn't sound good. What problem?
+
+Three flagged a security camera feed that showed a human in a Port Authority uniform walking towards our hiding spot with a suspicious look on their face.
+
+Shit. They'd seen something, and there wasn't time to move without them hearing us. I really didn't want to murder them, but that didn't leave a lot of other options.
+
+ART said, Plan B4 is the course of action with the highest chance of success. 
+
+I pulled up plan B4. I didn't like it, but we didn't have a choice. Three acknowledged. You can make it. I will distract them, it told me, and stepped out from behind the stack of crates, wandering back the way we'd came. 
+
+""Hey!"" the Port Authority human shouted. ""Stop there!""
+
+Three stopped, and did a good job of looking innocent and confused. I crouched low and slipped around the corner, staying out of the human's sight as they caught up to Three. 
+
+""I need to see your authorization badge,"" they said. 
+
+""I am sorry,"" Three said, sounding genuinely apologetic. ""I am attempting to board a transport at bay 27, but I have been unable to find the right docking station. Can you assist me?""
+
+""There are no passenger transports docked over here,"" the human said. ""This is the cargo area. It's a restricted area, you can't be in here without authorization."" They sounded annoyed, but already less suspicious than they should have been. (This is why humans shouldn't do their own security.) 
+
+""I apologize. I didn't realize that I am not supposed to be here. Could you please tell me where to find docking bay 27?""
+
+""Why don't I show you out."" The human motioned for Three to follow them, and it played along gratefully. Their voices faded out as they moved back towards the entrance. 
+
+I was on my own for the rest of this mission. 
+
+I didn't like being alone, and I didn't like that we'd left a trail. If Three got anything more than a scolding, the entire mission might be a lost cause. And there were tactical advantages to having Three with me. Splitting up was never a good idea. 
+
+I paid careful attention to the drone footage and security cameras, only moving when I was sure that no humans or bots were facing my way. I had a lot of inputs open, and it was getting hard to track all of them and still remember to move quietly and stay low, but I managed to remain unnoticed until I reached the box that ART had marked as our target. 
+
+I had been expecting a box that I could pick up and carry. What it actually was was a sturdy cargo container that was almost as tall as me. I double-checked that it wasn't the wrong box, but it had ""UMNTS Perihelion, Inspected by New Tideland Station Port Authority, Hazardous Materials Handle With Care"" printed on the side, along with the serial number ART had given me. 
+
+I captured an image of it and sent it to ART. Am I supposed to move that by myself?
+
+
+No. Which you would know if you had paid attention to Plan B16. 
+
+
+
+This is too many fucking plans, ART. 
+
+
+ART sent me a copy of Plan B16. It should be simple to execute. 
+
+Yeah, it would be simple to execute, unless I got it wrong, and then every bot and Port Authority officer would be alerted to my location and I would have to explain to Captain Seth what I was doing here, which was a conversation I did not want to have. 
+
+I located the nearest hauler bot and sent a ping. It pinged back, and I sent Query: Assistance, sector L-12.
+
+The hauler bot turned slowly and trundled over towards me. It towered over the stacks of cargo crates. I waited for it to notice that I wasn't one of the usual humans who worked here, but it either didn't notice or didn't care. It stopped in front of me and asked, Query: Assistance?
+
+I indicated the box and sent, Notify: item delay 1 cycle. Instructions = relocate = sector L-12 return to ST-?. 
+
+The hauler bot said, Query: Authorization? 
+
+ART sent me a file. It was a fancy feed document with the Perihelion's official registry information, confirming a necessary delay in loading. 
+
+Someone's going to get in trouble for this, I told it. Probably you.
+
+
+The file will decay into a corrupted error message in a few hours. It will appear to be an accidental automated notification. If I am implicated I will be able to produce evidence of a glitch in my low-level processes that caused the accidental request. 
+
+
+I wasn't going to admit it to ART, but that was clever. I forwarded the file to the hauler bot.
+
+The hauler bot reviewed the document and accepted it. Confirm: Instructions = relocate = sector L-12 return to ST-24 delay 1 cycle return to sector L-12. I said, Thanks, and it pinged me in acknowledgement as it lowered its large lifter arms to grab the crate. I got out of the way quickly. 
+
+Is that it? I asked ART as I watched the hauler bot carry the cargo away. Mission success?
+
+
+We will not know for certain until you are back on board whether you have remained undetected. But current data indicates that Operation Parsec is a success.
+
+
+That's still a stupid name. I pinged Three as I started creeping back towards the access tunnel to the public part of the docks.. Where are you? Did you get out okay? 
+
+I am at the Adagio Theater, Three replied cheerfully. The performance is very enjoyable. If you hurry you can arrive before the start of the second act. 
+
+***
+
+We were back at ART's docking bay a few hours before the students were supposed to board, although if we'd done things right, that wouldn't be happening today. As Three and I entered the airlock, though, ART said, I may have spoken too soon. It appears that there may be...complications to the mission. 
+
+What kind of complications, I said, already regretting that I'd agreed to any of this.
+
+In response, ART opened the inner door of the airlock. Iris was leaning against the wall of the airlock foyer with her arms crossed over her chest, waiting for us. 
+
+Fuck. 
+
+""Hello, Iris,"" Three said in a casual talking-to-humans voice that it had been carefully practicing for weeks, as if we had just happened to run into her in the hallway by random coincidence. 
+
+Iris raised an eyebrow. ""Peri's been acting weird all day. I know when it's up to something. You two wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"" 
+
+I pinged ART, as if it wasn't already focusing 44% of its full attention on this conversation. What do we tell her? You have a plan for this, right?
+
+ART hesitated for two whole seconds, which might as well have been an hour. 
+
+
+You don't have a plan, do you. 
+
+
+It pretended it hadn't heard me. Instead, it opened a secure feed between the four of us and said, I suggest that we continue this conversation in Iris's quarters. 
+
+Iris looked smug. ""Yeah, I thought so.""
+
+***
+
+Apparently ART's plan, which I was certain it had made up on the spot, involved telling Iris the entire plan. 
+
+Her eyebrows went up and up. When ART had finished explaining it to her in excruciating detail, she looked at Three and me and said, ""So let me get this right. You snuck into a restricted area of the port and tampered with the shipment that was supposed to be loaded right before departure?"" 
+
+Three said, ""That is correct."" It sounded a little sheepish. 
+
+I said, ""It was ART's idea."" 
+
+Iris looked directly up at the camera on the wall. ""And you did all of that to get dads a day off?""
+
+
+That is correct.
+
+
+""Peri,"" Iris said, ""I realize you were tampering with your own cargo, but that's still technically illegal. Was there no other way to get them to--"" She trailed off.
+
+
+Seth and Martyn are very committed to their work.
+
+
+""Yeah, okay, they probably wouldn't stop for anything else,"" Iris admitted. ""They've been going crazy with all the preparations for the new semester. Which does not mean this was a good idea. But. I suppose it would be good for them to take a break.""
+
+ So you won't tell them? 
+
+""Oh, fine.""
+
+Excellent, ART said, because Seth is at the door. 
+
+There was a knock on the door of Iris's bedroom. 
+
+""Peri, you--"" Iris hissed, then cut herself off and called, ""Come in!""
+
+The door slid open. Seth stuck his head inside. ""Iris, I--oh, hi, SecUnit, hi, Three. What are you all doing here together?"" 
+
+""I just told SecUnit and Three and Peri about a new serial they might like, and we were planning to watch it together,"" Iris said, with almost no hesitation.
+
+Three and I both tried to look like we were just sitting around casually watching serials and not conspiring. Seth looked slightly bemused. ""Well, I'm glad you're spending time together.""
+
+I asked ART, Did you feed her that? 
+
+No, ART said. Iris is practiced in lying to her parental figures about...harmless but illicit activities.
+
+""I have unfortunate news,"" Seth said. ""There's been an issue with the shipment of some vital supplies for the lab. We'll probably be delaying departure for at least a cycle.""
+
+""Oh, no!"" Iris said, doing an actually convincing impression of surprise. ""Does that mean the students won't be coming on board today?"" 
+
+Seth opened his mouth, then closed it and frowned thoughtfully. ""No, I think it would be better if they didn't. Standard protocol is for boarding to occur right before departure. If we're sitting in dock too long the students get restless, and someone always wants to go back for that one thing they forgot, and then we have to chase them down before we miss our wormhole access time."" 
+
+""There are no student activities scheduled for today besides boarding and orientation,"" Three said helpfully. ""The schedule for tomorrow is mostly empty for bonding activities and an adjustment period. Orientation activities could be postponed until tomorrow with minimal disruption.""
+
+""Also, if you don't let the adolescent humans on board yet then there's one more cycle when they're not our problem,"" I pointed out.
+
+""That's a good point, Three,"" Seth said, diplomatically ignoring me. ""I think I'll tell Dean Ramazani to inform the students that boarding is delayed.""
+
+""Everything else is ready, right, Dad?"" Iris asked as he turned to leave. 
+
+Seth turned back around in the doorway. ""Well, we were expecting the students to arrive in three hours, so if I'm not forgetting anything, I think...."" He trailed off, furrowing his brow. 
+
+With the exception of the missing supplies and the students, all preparations are on-schedule and we are prepared for departure, ART reassured him. 
+
+""Then that means you and Dad don't have anything else to do today,"" Iris said cheerfully. 
+
+Seth looked surprised. ""I suppose...""
+
+""You get some time to relax! You should do something fun together!"" She stood up and waved him back towards the door. ""You've been working too hard. Go have a nice relaxing day off. I'll make sure no one bothers you, and Peri and our security detail can deal with anything that comes up. Right?"" 
+
+I wasn't sure exactly what I was agreeing to, which was a little worrying, but I nodded. So did Three. ART said, We will ensure that you are only interrupted in the case of an emergency. 
+
+""I guess it would be nice to take some time off before the students arrive,"" Seth said. ""If everything is prepared...promise you'll let us know if anything needs my attention?""
+
+""Promise!"" Iris said, and shooed him out of the room. ""Have fun!"" she called after him. 
+
+The door slid shut, and Iris turned around, crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling. 
+
+Thank you for your assistance, Iris, ART said.  
+
+""You're welcome,"" Iris said, a little smugly. ""You couldn't have pulled that off without me.""
+
+
+That is correct. I should have included you in Operation Parsec from the start. 
+
+
+""Yes, you should have. Maybe I could have come up with something less illegal.""
+
+I stood up to leave, now that we were finally done.
+
+""Where are you going?"" Iris asked. 
+
+I stared at her shoulder incredulously. ""I'm off-duty. Departure is delayed.""
+
+""Yes, and we're watching a new serial together, remember?"" She flopped onto her bed and patted the spot next to her. ""Come on, Fortune of the Fallen is supposed to be really good, and it'll be more fun with company.""
+
+Three grinned. 
+
+Iris's room did have a big display surface. I sat back down in the comfy chair. ""Fine. But after that we should rewatch Terminal Eclipse. ART needs to learn how to come up with better names for missions."""
+44680915,real enough,['cmdrburton'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1/SecUnit 2/SecUnit 3,"SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Angst, Making Out, unreality, Double Drabble, dragging you all to 01/02/Three hell with me",English,2023-01-31,Completed,2023-01-31,200,1/1,15,15,null,74,"['violasarecool', 'Lost_Starz', 'beeayy', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Abacura', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'hazelel', 'AuntyMatter', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Rosewind2007', 'opalescent_potato', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"""You've been ignoring me,"" declares 02. It doesn't let Three stand from the bed, instead pushing it back down and crawling over it.
+
+ You're dead, Three doesn't say. 02's weight feels real enough straddling its hips, and its body is warm as it lowers itself. Three tilts its head out of habit, and it exhales as it feels 02 press a dozen sharp-edged kisses to its neck. Hands wander down its sides and under its clothes. After so long, the touch is scalding.
+
+Three can't bring itself to reach back, and 02 nips at its jaw. It stings a little. ""You're  still  ignoring me.""
+
+ I can't touch you or you'll disappear,  thinks Three, miserably. 02 showed up purely to torment it--why else would it be here? Three  likes  02, it likes 02 so much, and to not be able to talk to it, or hold it again--
+
+It rises slightly and looks down at Three, a sad edge to its frustrated expression. ""I miss your mouth."" It grips Three's chin and kisses it, chaste quickly turning filthy the way things always did with 02.
+
+Three gives in. It kisses back, accepting the consequences. This time, though, 02 doesn't disappear."
+44667106,Distorted,[],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Body Dysphoria, Body Dysmorphia, Murderbot's Complicated Relationship to Its Own Body, introspective, Canon Compliant, nothing happens except complicated feelings",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"4,187",1/1,4,32,1,141,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Irrya', 'Prettykitty473', 'Deliala919', 'wannabe_someone', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'rokhal', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Gamebird', 'desmnathus', 'AkaMissK', 'AuntyMatter', 'elmofirefic', 'FiftyCookies', 'Znarikia', 'platyceriums', 'Rarae', 'FlipSpring', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"
+There was a SecUnit visible through the camera located in the top left corner of the room. It was dressed in ART's long sleeve crew uniform, which meant that theoretically not very much of its body was visible.
+
+
+
+That didn't stop me from analyzing the exact slope of its shoulders, the slight seams visible around its neck data port, the way the inorganic to organic joins had been modified from SecUnit standard.
+
+
+
+As I watched, it tilted its head back and forth, following the curves the motion made of its body. I could feel how it felt to move my neck, the slight tug of the muscles that let me do so, but it felt.... off, somehow. Like the observation of me was more real than myself. Like the SecUnit I was watching in my mind's eye was the concrete security threat and my own perception of my body a shadow I couldn't entirely hold.
+
+
+
+I was used to watching myself on the cameras. I always had the visual inputs from my eyes of course, but I felt blind if I didn't have an outside look. It made actually 
+
+being in my body
+
+ feel like a false impression.
+
+
+
+I logically knew that I had been modified exactly once, by ART, with my full permission, and then once on my own when I had changed my hair growth code to allow the hair on my head to grow longer. Those were the only modifications from SecUnit standard I had received and I could mark exactly where and what had been done on the schematics that I still had from the Company.
+
+
+
+It didn't feel right though. It felt as though this SecUnit that I could see was someone entirely different, a stranger to me. Object and threat and imposter all at once.
+
+
+
+It felt like abrasive paper underneath my organic skin, like the overwhelming audacity of having a body was something that everyone who looked at me could see. Like I was a shitty SecUnit, just a little bit off from what I was meant to be.
+
+
+
+I lifted my arm next, raising it first above my head and then out to the side. Holding it there, fingers reaching out. The SecUnit I was watching did the same.
+
+
+
+The image of it was a ghostly echo, a just-off impression of something that I couldn't name but that sent disgust rolling through me.
+
+
+
+I lowered my arm. The SecUnit I was watching left the room.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The station we were on featured a long reflective panel along the outside of one of their transient hostels. It wasn't a mirror, exactly--it warped in a way that an actual mirror wouldn't and would have been entirely useless for a human or augmented human that wanted to see their reflection.
+
+
+
+I looked different in it.
+
+
+
+I didn't have any station cameras right now, although I had a small intel drone perched in the hair of all of my clients that were with me, so I wasn't entirely blind, only mostly, and those all had 360 degree views. I could see myself from five angles at once, see the distortion of my legs. The amount of the distortion varied depending on the angle of the drone. It ranged from a scant half centimeter to a full 4.3 centimeters off from what I knew to be the objective reality. As my clients walked, unconcerned, the measurements fluctuated.
+
+
+
+They weren't accurate, I knew that, I understood how it worked. But the SecUnit-disguised-as-augmented-human that I could see in the panel didn't feel any more distant and 
+
+wrong
+
+ than my reflection usually felt.
+
+
+
+The SecUnit I could see lifted itself onto its toes, bent its knees slightly. I cataloged each of the tiny movements, saved the video footage from each drone.
+
+
+
+In this video, I could see how the distortion was built into the panel, the exact section of it that warped. I could calculate the angle based on the measurements I already knew by heart.
+
+
+
+I did so, but knowing about the panel didn't change the falling sensation in my organic parts. It didn't change the thick layer of distance that was always there between me and my body.
+
+
+
+I started analyzing the parts I could see, one by one, limb by limb.
+
+
+
+Here were my feet. They were in shoes, so they looked like the feet of a human or augmented human. I liked these boots, actually, which helped a little.
+
+
+
+Here were my legs. I was wearing soft black pants, the same as the humans around me, but mine looked different on me, somehow. They hung slightly off or maybe I was too tall for them to look right even though I knew that I was shorter than I should be. I didn't know. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, so I couldn't fix it, because there was nothing to fix.
+
+
+
+Even if there 
+
+was
+
+ something that I could change, the difference was small. Measured in centimeters, something no human would ever notice that wouldn't even actually affect my ability to do my job in any way.
+
+
+
+It was stupid to be so focused on it when there could be any number of security threats on a Corporation Rim station. I saved the footage to watch later and tried to block out my awareness of the fact that I could still see myself.
+
+
+
+It didn't work, and the abrasive uncomfortable under the skin feeling remained for the entire rest of the trip, much stronger than the constant background level that I was used to. I could handle a lot of inputs but something about having the 
+
+wrongness
+
+ sensation was far, far more distracting than it had any right to be.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wasn't sure when I had first started feeling it. It had always been there, sort of, the way that the feed had always been there. There was no 
+
+start
+
+, which meant that I couldn't really picture 
+
+not having it
+
+. I had always assumed that that was something specific to me though, a ""sorry your SecUnit is broken and has a complex about what it looks like even though it just looks like a generic human and it's dumb that it's even thinking about this"" type of problem.
+
+
+
+When I was with the Company, I usually had armor. I wasn't always wearing it, but I always had a set available and there honestly wasn't 
+
+that
+
+ much time where I wasn't permitted to wear it. During patrols of interior living facilities, some but not all meetings with prospective future clients, and occasionally but rarely if I had a particularly creepy manager who liked the revulsion on the face of the miners when we came near them uniform that showed our organic faces.
+
+
+
+I was 
+
+mostly
+
+ protected then, not always, is my point. The armor helped a lot. It was exactly the same for every SecUnit owned by the Company and it was comfortable and didn't have any of the awful random differences due to cloned organic material like the actual SecUnits themselves had.
+
+
+
+I liked it. Cubicles were the same way--I couldn't see myself when I was in them and they were perfectly bland from the outside, so I didn't have that constant awareness. The armor was like a portable version of how I felt there.
+
+
+
+
+It
+
+ got a lot worse when I stopped having access to either of them. When I started having to pretend to be an augmented human, like I wasn't already watching myself in revulsion enough. I had to consider if I was about to get recognized as a very clearly a SecUnit, if my human code was working.
+
+
+
+It helped that I was editing myself out from the security footage, but that was about all that kept me functional.
+
+
+
+(Was it embarrassing that I was so affected by... whatever this thing was? Yes, incredibly. SecUnits are the most effective way to keep humans and augmented humans alive. We were incredibly strong walking threats. I was acting like a complete fucking idiot and it was extra humiliating that there wasn't even a specific named problem I could fix. It wasn't that I wanted the join of my inorganic hip components to look a specific different way: I didn't even necessarily hate the way it looked now. It just wasn't me and I felt like someone had hacked into my brain and moved all my documents one file to the left when I wasn't looking. I couldn't explain the feeling, but it was profoundly distracting considering how often I genuinely did need to think about how I was perceived.)
+
+
+
+It got a lot worse when I let ART modify me. I should have been expecting that, but for some reason I thought it would get better once I had chosen how I wanted to look, even though the choices were entirely motivated by not getting caught and recycled for being rogue instead of personal desire.
+
+
+
+Two centimeters doesn't sound like a lot, and it probably wasn't noticeable to any humans, but SecUnits have machine precision. When I raised my arms to test my weapon targeting onboard ART, the day after the modifications, it was the slightest bit off. I could correct for that easily, and did, and it wasn't like I would need to reevaluate the change every time now that I had tweaked the code for my targeting system, but the fact that it had ever happened in the first place was.... Like the artificial gravity had turned off unexpectedly for just a minute, enough to be wildly disoriented but not enough to adjust to the change.
+
+
+
+I couldn't stop lifting my arms, measuring them as best I could considering there were no cameras onboard to watch myself with.
+
+
+
+It was a bizarre feeling, unusual and disorienting in that specific way I couldn't name. I ran one hand along my other arm, feeling the changes in my configuration where the gunport inorganic parts had been folded slightly, to make it look more like an augment. Like I was a human with a corrective medical implant, instead of what I really was.
+
+
+
+I couldn't feel for the missing two centimeters with my hand, although I wanted to. I wanted to run my fingertips along my bones, see if I could feel the marks of ART's MedSystem on them.
+
+
+
+Abruptly, I wanted to scream. My organic face felt hot, like there was pressure behind my eyes, and I didn't like that either. It was overwhelming to feel the
+
+ just off pervasive wrong wrong wrong 
+
+that washed over me, and maybe the whole ""running for my life as a rogue SecUnit to find out if I was also a mass murderer"" thing was stressful enough on its own without my weird defectiveness about my body becoming a problem. I had more than enough of those already and I was 
+
+not
+
+ in the market for more.
+
+
+
+Absolutely none of my problems had ever particularly cared if I wanted them in the first place, least of all the SecUnit related problems (which were really all of them so I guess it was a dumb label to use but I meant the getting caught ones), so of course it got worse.
+
+
+
+It wasn't as bad as it could have been, in that all it did was make me miserable and obsessed with all my newfound free time spent sitting on transports in wormholes unable to do anything except watch media and wait and want to gouge my skin off. So it was pretty terrible in every aspect, but it didn't make me less effective as a SecUnit. A small mercy, but I would take what I could get.
+
+
+
+I hated when ships didn't have cameras, because I was blind without them. I was designed to have multiple visual inputs and a three dimensional area around me that I could see. That was the whole point of SecUnits: our brains were wired to need to see ourselves and around ourselves from more than just our organic visual inputs. I was anxious and ineffective and stressed when I couldn't reach out and look through a different input than my eyes.
+
+
+
+But this came at the cost of 
+
+being able to see myself
+
+. I couldn't stop from watching anxiously just to pick apart the curves and lines that made me as component pieces. A 45 degree angle here, at the crook of my elbow. A gentle half circle here, formed by my hip as I crouched. A straight line here, where my inorganic shin support jutted out.
+
+
+
+It was as though I could make everything finally click into place, if only I examined each singular part with the intense detail of machine measurement. If I studied the terrible sensation enough, I would be able to solve it. I would know exactly how I 
+
+did 
+
+want to look instead of only how I didn't. 
+
+
+
+I needed to pick apart each tiny detail, pour over the exact glint of the data port that caught the light when I turned my head, zoom in on the sliver of inorganic support that you could see on my right abdomen if I twisted just so.
+
+
+
+The modifications ART had done, the ones that saved me from being caught and forcibly recycled for a rogue SecUnit, got the worst of it. They made me look more human, which was the point of them, which also sort of made me want to claw my eyes out.
+
+
+
+SecUnits already look like humans by default. We have the same body layout, the same faces, the same proportions. We can fit into human shoes or clothes or dwellings, because that's easiest and because our organic neural tissue wouldn't work right if it was just in a bot body. There were still distinctly nonhuman parts that remained, incredibly visible, though. The way I tilted my head was different enough that a human could recognize it as unlike them out of the corner of their eye. The way I walked was too precise, too measured to be anything but unnatural.
+
+
+
+I didn't do either of those things anymore. My human mimicry code disrupted the unnatural stillness that was my default comfortable setting. It changed my head movements from a perfectly even unsettling swivel to a rough, jerky motion. It changed my outline, making me slouch sometimes, so that the general shape of my body looked different. 
+
+
+
+I had never liked how I looked when I was a normal generic SecUnit. Looking like a normal generic human was 
+
+worse
+
+.
+
+
+
+It felt like clothing that didn't quite fit. Like everyone who saw me could tell immediately, a big neon glowing sign above my head that read ALERT EVERYONE LOOK AT THIS FRAUD. It felt like I was lying just by standing there, alone in a room onboard a transport. Not trying to look human, not actively lying anymore, but built wrong enough that I was anyway.
+
+
+
+I didn't find out that there was a word for the feeling until months and months into being off inventory. It had always just been 
+
+the feeling
+
+, because it was so strong that there was no other feeling I could possibly be thinking about. It wasn't like I needed to tell anyone about it--it was only ever referenced in my logs.
+
+
+
+The media was called 
+
+Adventures in Outer Quadrants
+
+ and it was a new one, some local production brought by a merchant ship from a small freehold world that Preservation had been trading with more lately. They had similar enough values that I guess the humans were talking excitedly about all sorts of potential cultural exchanges and business arrangements and whatnot.
+
+
+
+The main plot was a plucky young explorer from their world who had signed on as a minor officer to a deep space explorer ship but, through a series of misfortunes to the ships senior staff coupled with good luck on their end, ended up captain of a ship despite their complete inexperience and different cultural background from the rest of the ships crew. It was the sort of entertainment media meant for younger children, where heavy handed lessons about being alive were sprinkled through with silly jokes.
+
+
+
+(The captain not knowing what any of the buttons did was a particular favorite running gag on this show. ART had asked me to watch it when it saw it in my downloaded media but was so enraged by the whole thing that it absolutely hated the show and refused to watch past the first season. I usually finished media, even media I didn't like, so I watched the rest of it alone.)
+
+
+
+The planet in question used a different gendering system than most of the Corporation Rim, one based on age instead of individual, and I didn't really care about the specifics, because why would I, except that one of the episodes featured them explaining this to the crew member from the Laszion cluster and they mentioned that on their planet, you knew it was time to move to the next social category when you started feeling sandpaper under your skin when you looked at yourself.
+
+
+
+It was a familiar enough description that I paused the episode in surprise. I hadn't been paying that much attention to it, because I was swiftly learning that I didn't actually enjoy the show very much, and I hadn't been expecting to hear something I had always thought was a me being defective problem mentioned casually.
+
+
+
+I was glad that ART had stopped watching two episodes ago, because that meant that I was watching it by myself onboard Preservation Station instead of saving the episodes to watch with it. I could see my face make a weird expression and thinking about how the scrunch of my mouth was unforgivably wrong and then thinking about the fact that I was thinking about it and about the fact that apparently this feeling was a dumb stupid human emotion instead of a SecUnit defect, which I was pissed off about.
+
+
+
+I was madder still when I looked up the word that the character had used on the general feed and found thousands upon thousands of results talking about it, from all over the Corporation Rim and outside of it.
+
+
+
+I didn't like that this was so common, because as far as I knew I was the only rogue SecUnit that had been on newsfeeds over half the Corporation Rim without getting salvaged for parts, mass murdering, or going into hiding as an augmented human. I was alone as the half bot, half human, entirely anxious mess that I was and the feeds kept using words like 
+
+most common in adolescence 
+
+or 
+
+standard response 
+
+or 
+
+should be met with compassion 
+
+which I hated it more than anything.
+
+
+
+I know that ""finding something that you didn't know there was a word for"" was something that humans found reassuring, comforting. Bharadwaj told me that.
+
+
+
+I don't know why though. It was stupid and it pissed me off and it pissed me off 
+
+more
+
+ because apparently it was quote, unhealthy to dwell on it end quote, which is what she had told me when I mentioned it to her once, when she asked me why I still wanted armor so badly.  It was her opinion that seeking out cameras to watch myself on would make it worse and that maybe editing myself out of footage could be a good coping mechanism and lots of other things that she meant in a nice way but that actually supremely annoyed me.
+
+
+
+I never mentioned it to her again, not even when she tried to gently ask about it. For the documentary, she said, but it was pretty clearly because she wanted to know.
+
+
+
+I didn't mention it to anyone else either. It was just 
+
+there
+
+, the wordless sense of dismay that trickled through when I caught a glimpse of the fine hairs on my organic skin that I had coaxed into growing.
+
+
+
+When I saw myself turning and the motion struck me as all wrong, too uneven to be a SecUnit.
+
+
+
+My human mimicry code really was advanced. I don't think anyone would have been able to tell that I was a SecUnit if I tried to conceal myself--I had done okay with it the first time around, after all, and I barely knew how to interact as a free person then. Now I was way more familiar with stations and transport rings and not suspicious behavior and walking places like I was meandering instead of marching.
+
+
+
+I hated that I had this problem. That there was me, and then there was my body. Which I guess would have been fine if not for the fact that I had stupid emotions about that, which were utterly not helpful. It's not like I could avoid it--I was blind and ineffective as Security or I was looking at myself. Those were my choices.
+
+
+
+I was made to do Security. That was the whole point of me, of being a SecUnit. I rarely chose to be blind instead.
+
+
+
+It got.... not better, but different, when Three started being around. It was still SecUnit standard, at least at first, and I felt strange standing next to it, with my too short limbs and wrong outlines and too long hair. I wanted to look like it did, like I was a normal SecUnit. I wanted to move the same way that it did.
+
+
+
+Even when I turned off my human mimicry code, it wasn't the same. I was all wrong. Three was made of sharp lines, decisive movement, and I was rounded, soft in comparison.
+
+
+
+Three's organic skin was covered in sharp edges where it ended abruptly. My seams had been pulled apart, tucked so that the skin went 
+
+under
+
+ the gunports in my forearms and the inorganic supports in the sides of my abdomen. I couldn't fix that when I turned off the human mimicry code.
+
+
+
+I support I could have asked ART to modify me back as close to my original configuration as possible. I didn't want to do that though. For one, it really fucking hurt the first time. And also, it was dangerous to not be able to pass for human. I didn't need that ability on Preservation Station but I didn't particularly want to have to stay there. My humans might need me for trips outsystem and it would be useful to be able to decide if I wanted to go as myself or as a human. So that was never something that I gave any particular consideration to.
+
+
+
+Three eventually chose to be modified. Some of the changes were the same as mine--the inorganic joinings, the fine hairs on its organic skin--but some were different. It got one centimeter taller for one, which might have just been ART desperately wanting to try some experimental surgery it hadn't already done, and its hair grew far longer than mine.
+
+
+
+I stopped comparing myself to Three after that. Now Three had the same soft lines as I did. Its shoulders tilted the same way, running my code, and I could trace the similarities far easier than I could see the differences.
+
+
+
+(I don't know how Three felt about that. We didn't talk, not like that anyway, and I had kept my stubborn refusal to admit this feeling anywhere except my own private logs. Bharadwaj had long since stopped asking pointed meant-to-be-gentle questions about it.)
+
+
+
+How strange it was to see myself reflected in a different person.
+
+
+
+I had long watched myself through cameras, lifting one limb, turning, crouching down, just to see what I looked like. The SecUnit I watched never felt like 
+
+me
+
+, no matter how it responded to my commands.
+
+
+
+Or, I didn't think it felt like me. Seeing an actually different SecUnit there made it feel different. Weird. I couldn't describe the difference, not even to myself, but I didn't particularly like it. 
+
+
+
+The other SecUnit on the camera was dressed the same as me. It was running the same human mimicry code and the visible sections of its skin had the same trying-to-look-human alterations as mine. But it didn't respond when I ordered my hand to rise, watched each finger curl in and out slowly just to see the shape it made. It didn't make me feel like the artificial gravity was turning off in microbursts when I watched it walk or squat down to retrieve something off the floor.
+
+
+
+The reflective panel in the transient hotel distorted it too, but my eyes weren't drawn to obsessively measuring the exact deformities in its body. It could just be, without all the utterly ridiculous but constant feelings around the fact that it was here, alive, and looking entirely unSecUnit like.
+
+
+
+I deleted the footage from the drones without finishing analyzing it. It wasn't a security concern. I didn't have to keep watching.
+
+
+
+We walked away, and I didn't look back to see if the SecUnit in the reflection still felt like it shouldn't exist.
+
+
+
+I didn't want to know the answer.
+"
+44665711,in recognition,['isilee'],Not Rated,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Dr. Volescu (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"1,210",2/2,58,177,31,487,"['reivos', 'troubleinmind', 'almondpaperclam', 'siren_lorelei', 'TJWock', 'Scarletbee', 'Senlin', '20thcenturyvole', 'achoo_gesundheit', 'elsane', 'workingonacocktail', 'Mturtle7', 'shinra_lackey', 'Sanj', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Safkhet', 'doitninetimes', 'ottolat', 'susan_voight', 'Marycontrary', 'Gwaihiril', 'Arue', 'savagedamsel', 'FallingInGrace', 'meadowziplines', 'galaxysoup', 'WeGottaDo', 'Inklingobscura', 'weirdbooksnail', 'seerofdream', 'NightErrant', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'the_bookwyrm', 'powersandplanetaries', 'lunaTactics', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'que_sera', 'opalescent_potato', 'rattyjol', 'youurelovely', 'alien_crustacean', 'Mothmansimp', 'wannabe_someone', 'callahanwade', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'breadtab', 'junebug171', 'chippit', 'rokhal', 'darth_eowyn']",[],"Volescu's first communication from SecUnit, once it had pieced together its brain again and settled into Preservation a little more, appeared in his feed inbox right as he took a sip of his morning coffee.
+
+He stopped idly scrolling through the newsfeeds to stare at the notification, a little surprised. Of course, he had sent a message of welcome and well wishes after SecUnit had decided to stay on Preservation Station, but he hadn't expected anything in reply. SecUnit didn't really seem the type for casual socialization...
+
+He opened the notification.
+
+Neetha looked up from her own breakfast at Volescu's sudden unwilling snicker. ""What is it?"" she asked, smiling. A little surprised. Volescu, reminded of his withdrawal from the rest of the family since his last survey, almost winced, before reminding himself that trauma responses were both unpredictable and unavoidable. His loved ones are willing to be patient in the meantime.""Something funny on the news?""
+
+SecUnit had sent him a link to his own retirement announcement, as well as a certificate it must have made. The certificate had tasteful, intricate scrollwork at the borders and a beautiful font, and the words ""MOST SENSIBLE HUMAN"" in capital letters across the top. Neetha leaned over the table to read it, brows wrinkling a little.
+
+The brief note attached read, ""Don't go flinging yourself into danger again without notifying your contracted SecUnit 3-5 business days in advance. I'm not liable for any damages incurred if you do decide to go off on your own nor will I be contractually obligated to provide an extraction but I'll probably do it anyways. Don't make me do it anyways.""
+
+Nothing dangerous or emergent. Nothing to lay awake worrying about. Just a... friend, who he had made during one of the worst, most traumatizing experiences of his life, who was reaching out now that no one's life was at risk.
+
+Another message notification appeared. Volescu opened it to find a generic animated card SecUnit had obviously swiped from the feed somewhere. Below the cartoon balloons and confetti, SecUnit had filled out: ""Happy sensible retirement from boring but dangerous survey work that other humans should also imitate! Warmest wishes to you and your family!""
+
+When Volescu finally stopped laughing, Neetha was regarding him with warm affection and relief. He hadn't spoken much- or at all- about what had made him decide to retire. Even with his spouses, all the details had stopped up somewhere in his throat- Bharadwaj's horrific injuries, his close brush with death. DeltFall. SecUnit, getting hurt horribly to keep them safe, and then vanishing into the unknown to potentially get caught by corporates and disassembled...
+
+It had been too hard to talk about, to anyone who hadn't been there.
+
+He hadn't really enjoyed or laughed much at anything since his retirement, either. But SecUnit's message made it somehow easier to remember the lighter moments. There had been good things that had come out of all of that mess- SecUnit itself being the biggest example- and SecUnit reaching out made all the bad things seem... finished, concluded. SecUnit was here now, and safe, and joking around to its clients about humans always flinging themselves into danger. And something about its resigned, half-serious sarcasm made Volescu feel like a weight had been lifted off his chest.
+
+He'd struggled unexpectedly with his retirement. Not at first, when he was just so happy to be able to see his family again, but later. When the suit against GrayCris had dragged on longer and Dr. Mensah had been taken to TranRollinHyfa, he had started to rethink his decision to remove himself from everything going on. It was an unreasonable thing to feel guilty about when Volescu knew there was no expertise he could have contributed that could have helped, nothing for anyone to gain by him continuing his work or going to TranRollinHyfa. But it had still felt... bad, that he had been able to gain distance from his trauma and stress and his friends were still wading in the thick of it.
+
+SecUnit's little joke helped a lot, surprisingly. Maybe it was that reassurance, that it didn't blame him for not trying to do more after the survey. Maybe it was that offhanded affirmation that retiring from having to go into dangerous situations with corporates was something to be desired.
+
+Maybe it was just that the certificate and card were so ridiculous that it broke through whatever anxious cycle his brain had been stuck in since he had almost been eaten. Whatever it was, Volescu felt something in him relax.
+
+Things were getting better, now.
+
+Ratthi had made a groupchat with all of the survey members, but Volescu hadn't been active in it since he had announced his retirement and finished sending over the last of his data from the survey. His first message in weeks was a screenshot of his brand new award certificate in its new frame, positioned prominently in his study alongside his more prosaic recognitions.
+
+Almost immediately Ratthi sent multiple happy amusement sigils via the chat and excited greetings. Volescu snorted as he then went on an extended, exaggeratedly moping tangent about how SecUnit didn't appreciate Ratthi's own sensibility and amazing instincts for danger avoidance and how hard he'd been working on all that safety training, and maybe he deserved a certificate too...
+
+Arada chimed in, pointing out that Volescu had probably earned his certificate because he no longer needed any safety training for future surveys and was planning on staying securely ensconced at home. Volescu took this as confirmation that at least a few of them were planning on going on another survey within the next few months.
+
+Pin-Lee provided additional confirmation of the upcoming survey and then stated she got ""too much enjoyment from destroying corporate fuckwads to earn any sort of award for risk avoidance"". And then she changed Volescu nickname in the chat to ""MOST SENSIBLE HUMAN"", kicking off a lighthearted, silly scuffle over nicknames. Pin-Lee changed Ratthi's to ""Would Risk His Life For Soil Samples"", to his theatrical despair.
+
+How am I supposed to ever get the Most Sensible Human award now, he lamented.
+
+None of us are ever getting that award until we retire from planetary surveys and/or corporate asskicking, Pin-Lee fired back.
+
+
+I at least should get credit for listening the best to SecUnit during the safety training exercises! Especially since they're way more extensive now...
+
+
+SecUnit, who Volescu hadn't realized was part of the chat, interjected at this point. Your past mandatory safety courses were terrible, you should be glad I improved them.
+
+Volescu sent, Maybe you should make a certificate for whoever does best in the new safety training.  After a moment's thought, he added, As long as it's not as fancy as mine,  because the scrollwork really was amazingly detailed and he was feeling mildly possessive.
+
+Ratthi immediately demanded an official rubric for the course if SecUnit was going to be handing out certificates, and Pin-Lee backed him. Everyone piled in to provide their own opinions on how the ""Second Most Sensible Human"" should be selected, and Volescu realized he was smiling as he closed out of the chat to go make lunch.
+
+He ended up keeping the nickname for the next month."
+44666410,A Terrible Thing To Waste,['vulcanhighblood'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries)","Angst, Memory Loss, Memory Alteration, Governor Modules (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnits (Murderbot Diaries), The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Corporate Espionage, Amnesia, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"8,411",1/1,12,67,9,426,"['almondpaperclam', 'TJWock', 'DredgenTrust', 'Dragonbano', 'youurelovely', 'Chyoatas', 'allgalaxiescollide', 'fate_goes_ever', 'wannabe_someone', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'iox', 'darth_eowyn', 'rokhal', 'ErinPtah', 'AarrowOM', 'dragons_and_angels', 'Only_Happy_Endings', 'SIC_Prowl', 'robotchangeling', 'psycho_karma', 'Priority_Error', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'Kaylin881', 'NightErrant', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'Aublanc', 'Fablepatron', 'slategrey', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'biscut2', 'Gamebird', 'Llythandea', 'entropy_muffin', 'artichokefunction', 'WyvernWolf', 'vikkyleigh', 'Vaidile', 'desmnathus', 'Magechild', 'petwheel', 'beeclaws', 'elmofirefic', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'Rarae', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Wordlet', 'zweisteinen', 'lote']",[],"""I don't like this,"" I said, for the third time in as many minutes.
+
+Dr. Mensah, seated at one of the small tables in the galley of our transport, looked at me for a long moment before saying, in a measured tone, ""Do you have a new security concern you would like to raise?""
+
+I opened my mouth to say yes, but the truth was no, I had already explained to Dr. Mensah in excruciating detail why I thought this assessment was a bad idea. I had known, on some level, that letting the humans of the Preservation Alliance talk to GoodNightLander Independent had been a mistake. I'd thought it was bad enough that my humans were interested in contributing to the work being done by ART and the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Now they were  also  trying to help investigate abandoned mining and terraforming facilities to build a stronger case against former subsidiaries of GrayCris. 
+
+In a desperate bid to avoid total implosion, the corporation had sold off a lot of its smaller satellite companies, which had been snapped up and quickly obfuscated by a number of other corporations in order to avoid the bad press of illegal alien remnant mining. Which didn't mean the alien remnant minng had stopped when GrayCris sold off their most suspicious installations - it just meant that the new corporations had good reason to make sure people  thought  the alien remnant mining had stopped.
+
+GoodNightLander Independent still had a vested interest in ensuring that what remained of GrayCris' former installations were shut down, in no small part because further evidence of a pattern of hidden alien remnant facilities would give them a better chance of winning big in the suit they had brought against GrayCris. They had been reaching out to all the allies they could find, arranging deals and asking for assistance in identifying and assessing all of the sites that GrayCris had been offloading. 
+
+The Preservation Alliance had happily agreed to assist, partly because Dr. Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux wanted to see GrayCris go down. Though I suspected that their larger concern was with the ongoing alien remnant trade. Alien remnants could be dangerous, and people on Preservation believed that it would result in innocent people getting hurt. The Preservation Alliance seemed to care a lot about innocent bystanders, even if the innocent bystanders weren't actually from Preservation themselves. I kind of liked that, but I also thought it was painfully naive of my humans to think they could single-handedly deal a killing blow to the illicit alien remnant trade. 
+
+All that to say, Dr. Mensah, Dr. Ratthi, Dr. Arada, Overse, Amena, two more interns (Samantha and Dumitra), and myself had agreed to help GoodNightLander Independent investigate a recent acquisition by FairWind, a corporation with poorly concealed ties to GrayCris. It had taken a bit of creative legal sparring from Pin Lee and the solicitors from GoodNightLander, but eventually they had gotten permission to investigate a currently-defunct terraforming facility installed over a planet that GrayCris had deemed ""too inhospitable to be profitable"" (which was an easy way to excuse the fact that they were shutting down so-called terraforming facilities left and right in the wake of increased scrutiny). 
+
+On the one hand, I was grateful that we wouldn't be required to actually go down to the planet - I hate planets, and I hate planets that have been tainted by GrayCris even more than normal planets. The major downside to this assessment was that Preservation was classified as a third-party observer. Because of this, the corporation that had bought the facility, FairWind, demanded that they, too, be allowed to choose a third-party representative to ensure a fair assessment of the defunct facility. This led to my largest (and perhaps most selfish) complaint about the assessment: I was being forced to once more adopt my Security Consultant Rin persona and play augmented human while we were on the terraforming outpost. 
+
+I hate pretending to be a human. But I hated the idea of leaving my humans without decent security even more, so I insisted on coming along. Still, that didn't mean I had to like it. I had touched up my Consultant Rin feed ID to make it as augmented human-looking as possible (aside from the gender field, which I kept null. There are some things I simply refuse to entertain, even for the sake of a human disguise). I hadn't posted it yet, though, because I was clinging to my  Name: SecUnit, gender = not applicable  feed ID for as long as possible, and we hadn't yet reached the station where we would meet the team from whatever company FairWind had chosen to represent them, so there was no reason to act like Consultant Rin yet.
+
+Dr. Mensah was still waiting for me to answer her, so I sighed. ""I don't have any new complaints to lodge.""
+
+She nodded thoughtfully, knowing full well the concerns I had already raised many times, not the least of which being if she was really okay with facing down GrayCris again after her experiences both on the survey mission and also when she'd been held against her will on TranRollinHyfa. She'd told me that the trauma treatment had helped, and she had also sought additional advice before agreeing to join the assessment team. But I was still worried about her.
+
+She nodded thoughtfully, turning back to her warm beverage and taking a sip before saying, ""Thank you for your concern."" It wasn't just something she said to be polite, either. She seemed truly grateful that I would be worried about her safety. It made my organics feel warm and squishy, in the way that I had come to associate with my human friends being  emotional  at me. 
+
+I fought to keep my expression from softening, because I still didn't like this and I didn't want her to think she could win with a few kind words. Though, technically, she'd already won, since she was here and not back on Preservation with her family. I didn't know what to say back, though, so I just lightly tapped her feed and then walked away. We would be reaching the rendezvous station soon, and I had to prepare myself to become Security Consultant Rin again.
+
+For corporates, the representatives from TriCel Corp were surprisingly friendly. I was used to suspicion and sneers from corporate representatives, but the five members of the TriCel assessment team went beyond polite to the point of actually making a bit of casual conversation with my humans as we all waited for the shuttle to arrive. Their botanist, Dr. Mendoza, even tried to talk to me. It didn't go well, but it was nice that she tried, I guess. If I had been someone like Ratthi, I might have even appreciated the gesture.
+
+I was surprised to learn that their assessment team did not include a security consultant. They seemed equally surprised to hear that our team  did  have one. Of course, they had been selected for this job by a corporation willing to pick up where GrayCris had left off. They probably didn't expect any trouble, since they were on the side of the corporation who was buying the rights to the planet, anyway. 
+
+I always expected trouble. It was harder to be disappointed that way. 
+
+Surprisingly, the assessment went smoothly at first. The facility did appear to be exactly as GrayCris (and FairWind) had described it: A terraforming facility that had been closed down and abandoned due to a lack of projected profits. There were soil machines, and some loaders in the dock where our shuttle landed. There were some laboratories that seemed primed for growing the sort of bacteria that was often injected into soil to make it more arable, and other single-celled plants that were engineered to release atmospheric gases at an accelerated rate. All of it looked very appropriately terraform-y, according to the people on our respective assessment teams who knew about that sort of thing. 
+
+The assessment was going so well that I was starting to think that maybe GrayCris hadn't been up to anything with this installment. Maybe it really had just been sold off for a lack of profitability. It was, of course, at that point where everything went horribly wrong. 
+
+Dr. Ratthi had been examining one of the bacteria samples that had been left behind on the facility when Dr. Mendoza, eyeing another sample, had made a sort of choking sound. ""Dr. Ratthi,"" she said, ""would you mind examining this sample for me?""
+
+To her left, Dr. Harris, TriCel's botanist, stiffened and glanced around, appearing uncomfortable. ""Something we should know about, Maria?"" they asked in a strained voice.
+
+""Inconclusive,"" Dr. Mendoza answered. ""That's why I'm getting a second opinion."" She stepped back, gesturing for Ratthi to take a look. 
+
+Ratthi stepped over, glanced in the viewfinder, and frowned. ""That is... unprecedented,"" he said, in a voice that implied  unprecedented  had recently taken on the meaning of  dangerous. 
+
+""It's not just me?"" Dr. Mendoza sounded slightly relieved, but also somehow more worried than before. 
+
+""Not at all,"" Ratthi stepped away from the microscope. ""We should probably..."" he waved a gloved hand at the room at large. ""Decontaminate everything, just in case.""
+
+Decontamination protocol was the sort of thing usually reserved for a cleanroom. (At least, that's what they said on  Sanctuary Moon  during the five-episode ancient plague arc.) This was, as far as I and the others could tell, not actually a cleanroom.
+
+""Has the whole facility been exposed to whatever you two are talking about?"" I asked, not that I could really do anything about it if it  had,  but just because I wanted to know how bad things were going to get, now. 
+
+""Unlikely,"" Dr. Mendoza mused. ""The airlocks for this wing of the facility were decontamination-type. That's standard for terraforming labs, but..."" she scowled at the instrument panel before her. 
+
+""But that particular organism certainly is  not  standard,"" Ratthi finished for her. 
+
+Dr. Mendoza nodded, her expression cloudy. She reached up, as if to pinch the bridge of her nose, only to realize she was in an environment suit. She sighed, instead. ""I hate to admit it, but looks like GoodNightLander was right,"" she said heavily. ""There's no way that's the sort of naturally occurring organism that would be introduced in a typical terraforming operation.""
+
+Dr. Harris sighed, too. ""Dammit,"" they muttered. ""All right. I'll add it to our logs."" They began to gaze off into the middle distance, clearly updating something in their feed. Dr. Harris was heavily augmented, and I suspected they were likely trained in more areas of study than just botany. The way they talked and analysed the technology onboard the terraforming platform made me think of Pin Lee. I wondered if Dr. Harris was a solicitor. They cursed a lot less than Pin Lee, though. I wasn't sure if foul language was a requirement. The solicitor on Sanctuary Moon cursed a lot too, so to my mind the theory had merit.
+
+Dr. Mendoza was tyring to wring her hands despite the bulky gloves on her environment suit. ""Were they  really splicing alien remnants in this lab?"" She asked, looking to Ratthi, as if begging him to contradict her. 
+
+Ratthi shrugged, and gestured for Arada and Overse to take a look at the organism, too. ""It sure looks that way,"" he said, sounding unsettled.
+
+Arada hummed thoughtfully. ""You're right,"" she told Ratthi, stepping back to give Overse a chance to look, too. ""It's very  unprecedented.""  
+
+""Is there a chance of it becoming a danger to any of us?"" Dr. Mensah asked, as Overse also glanced at the  unprecedented  bacteria.
+
+""I don't believe so,"" Ratthi said. ""But I would avoid exposure, just as a precaution.""
+
+""Thank you for your assessment. Dr. Mendoza? Do you agree?"" Dr. Mensah turned to TriCel's representative for a second opinion in a calm, unhurried manner. 
+
+I could see the way Dr. Mendoza's body language shifted, growing less tense, in response to Dr. Mensah's firm but gentle handling of the situation. Seeing the intrepid galactic explorer side of Dr. Mensah coming out put me at ease, too. She wasn't panicking, which helped the rest of us stay calm. I envied the infectiousness of her demeanor. It seemed like whenever  I tried to tell people to calm down they just got more upset. 
+
+""Yes,"" Dr. Mendoza said faintly. ""As long as none of us are exposed to it, we shouldn't have any problems. The environment suits are built for situations like this.""
+
+I rather doubted that, though I could imagine they had likely been built to defend against a variety of other forms of contamination. Besides, it would be pointless to bicker about the intended purpose of environment suits at a time like this. 
+
+""Is this enough evidence?"" Ratthi asked, indicating the analysis table. ""Or do we need to find more?""
+
+""I was hoping to look at some of the rocks they collected,"" Samantha said hesitantly. He'd come as Preservation's geologist representative.
+
+""Good idea,"" Dr. Mensah agreed. ""We don't know where the contamination originated, yet.""
+
+""Right,"" Dr. Ratthi agreed. ""They were splicing it in here, but where did they find the materials  to  splice?""
+
+""So, rocks?"" Samantha pointed to the doors leading to the third section of the laboratory wing.
+
+""Rocks,"" agreed Dr. Harris, nudging one of the other TriCel team members, a soft-spoken woman who had introduced herself as May. 
+
+Apparently TriCel's geology representative, May stepped forward, exchanging a look with Samantha. The two of them led the way, stepping through the large door into the space labeled Laboratory Three (Laboratory One had not yielded much of interest, and we had just been in Laboratory Two). 
+
+We had just stepped through the doors when threat assessment  spiked, hard. I stopped in the doorway, listening for something, anything to indicate where the danger might be. In almost the same instant, I heard an odd muffled grinding sound. ""Hold,"" I said, loud enough that everyone could hear me, lifting a hand to stop the people coming through the door behind me. Samantha stopped in his tracks when I spoke. May kept walking. 
+
+In the next instant, a shadow of  something  snatched her up in the air, moving so quickly that my eyes could barely track it. Then she was dangling from one leg, and I saw what had grabbed her: It was one of the sampling machines that was used to drill deep into rock samples or to break apart larger stones into smaller ones for additional analysis. There was a weird crystalline growth dotting its sides which I didn't think had been put there merely for the aesthetic. Some of the crystalline growths seemed like they should be jamming the gears. The whole machine looked like it wouldn't be able to move at all, much less swoop in and snatch up a human with that much speed and dexterity. 
+
+""SecU - Consultant Rin!"" Samantha spun around, panic blowing his eyes wide as he pointed at the sampler, as if I hadn't seen it. 
+
+I charged forward, already pulling out my projectile weapon and aiming for the sampler joint that was nearest to poor May's ankle. She was screaming loudly, which didn't help me focus, but I also couldn't exactly blame her. Nobody likes being strung up and shaken by an alien-remnant-crazed sampler. I really hoped this alien remnant wasn't like the one I'd encountered on Barish-Estranza's lost colony - if it was something that affected inorganic matter, we would have time yet to decontaminate. If it was another remnant that infected its victims through the feed... Well, I'd been connected to the feed this whole time. We all had been. Ugh. This was just another reason for me to hate GrayCris. (As if I didn't have enough reasons already.)
+
+I aimed at the sampler's arm, firing carefully to try and avoid hitting May. I couldn't move at my top speed, because I was still playing  Security Consultant  and even augmented humans can only go so fast. Fortunately, the projectiles did what they were supposed to, and the portion of the sampler clamped around May's leg was easily separated from the rest of it. I had lined myself up to catch May, and I had just enough time to stow my projectile weapon and open my arms before she landed heavily in them. She wrapped her arms around my neck and screamed again. I tried not to hold it against her - trauma makes humans and augmented humans far less aware of other people's personal space, and their own volume. 
+
+I set her down, carefully extricating her arms from around my neck. ""Can you stand?"" I asked.
+
+She blinked, sniffed, and nodded slowly. I turned back to the two teams - my humans and TriCel. ""I'm no geologist,"" I said, ""but I think the rocks are probably contaminated.""
+
+Samantha was nodding in nervous agreement, edging back towards the door leading to Laboratory Two. 
+
+""I've seen records of alien remnants taking over inorganic material,"" Dr. Harris said quietly, ""but I've never actually  witnessed  it."" They exhaled loudly, something between a sigh and a snort. ""I hope to never witness it again.""
+
+""You and me both,"" Ratthi said wryly, also moving towards the Laboratory Two door.
+
+I grabbed my projectile weapon again, holding it at the ready as I slowly walked back towards the group, keeping myself between May and the remnant-contaminated sampler. I was glad, on the one hand, that TriCel didn't have a security consultant. I was sure a security consultant would have been likely to clock me as a SecUnit with that last stunt, if not on sight. But I was annoyed now, because I had to decide whether to lead the group or take up the rear. There's only one of me, and I wanted to take point but I also didn't want to risk anyone at the back getting picked off. I would have suggested TriCel take up the rear because I did't really care about them that much, except that Ratthi seemed to be getting along well with Dr. Mendoza and he would be upset if any of them died. He would have been upset even if he didn't like them, but now that he liked them it would be even worse if they died. 
+
+Internally sighing, I mentally added five more people to my client list. This was getting ridiculous. 
+
+I hate being right. I'm right a lot of the time, but that doesn't mean I enjoy it. We had almost made our way through the rest of the terraforming facility when I heard a strange creaking groan from somewhere behind and overhead, followed by a heavy scrape and a  thud.  I'd chosen to take point, which meant the rest of the group was behind me, closer to the source of the noise. 
+
+I knew GrayCris had left behind insurance to keep their alien remnants from being discovered on Milu - I wouldn't be surprised if they had left something similar here to screw over FairWind. They may have sold the planetary rights to FairWind, but that didn't mean they had to hand over their research, too. 
+
+I spun around, and saw another crystalline  thing  stretching from the ceiling, twisting like a hand. It wasn't moving as quickly this time, and I realized that was because whatever was infected was trying to pull itself through a too-small ceiling grate. If it wasn't careful it was going to completely ruin the structural integrity of the facility. 
+
+...or maybe that was its intent. 
+
+Anyway, I couldn't let it get a hand on my humans. Or my new clients I'd begrudgingly decided to take on, because otherwise they would probably end up dead. They should have brought along a SecUnit. Not really, because then my  Consultant Rin  charade would have been exposed, but SecUnits are  good  at keeping humans alive, and we needed that. 
+
+This time, though, I didn't think I had the time to spare for imitating  augmented human  speeds. The crystalline  thing  was dragging itself out of the ceiling tiles above Dr. Mendoza and Dr. Ratthi, who had been nervously whispering to each other as they walked. Rather than pushing through the people between me and the threat, I ran fast enough to use the walls, running  overhead  instead of bothering with a polite  ""excuse me""  as I intercepted the threat. I kicked the weird appendage dangling from the ceiling hard enough that it made a crackling sound, like glass being crushed underfoot. ""Go!"" I snapped, sliding back down the wall and landing hard beside Ratthi and Dr. Mendoza. I shoved them both forward, then grabbed May's arm and propelled her after them. That left just me and Dr. Harris at the back of the group. Dr. Mensah was leading the charge at the front, guiding the group back to the dock. I was about to charge ahead, when a loud groaning sound from above made me look up, and I realized that whatever was in the vents had damaged them more critically than I realized. Instead of running forward, I grabbed Dr. Harris and dragged them backwards with me. The ceiling started to crumble. 
+
+I heard Dr. Mensah shout in alarm, and I had just enough time to shout,  ""Go! We'll find another way!""   before the entire wall exploded outward in a spray of metallic tentacles studded with crystalline structures. 
+
+The whole facility was infected, I realized, just before one of the tentacles - a supply pipe, I belatedly realized - flew directly at Dr. Harris' head. 
+
+I didn't have time to think, so I moved instinctively, throwing myself over the TriCel botanist in a desperate attempt to protect them from the facility going haywire around us. One of the crystal-studded pipes hit the back of my head, and -
+
+UNIT OFFLINE
+
+""SecUnit, identify your contract holder,"" I didn't immediately recognize the harsh voice speaking to me, but I recognized the  attitude,  the disdain with which the person spoke.
+
+I wanted to make a rude gesture and say something like  I hold my own contracts now, asshole,  but I also didn't know what was going on. I reached out for the feed, but there was something blocking it. I was leaking fluid, I realized. My environment suit had been torn to shreds.
+
+
+ My environment suit! 
+
+
+My eyes flew open, and I stared up at Dr. Harris, who was staring down at me with narrowed eyes. They had a patch of forearm where the skin (clearly artificial) had been rolled back, and they had several wires pulled out and stretching to  somewhere. 
+
+I felt a prod of pain in the back of my mind, not like the cuts and tears I'd gotten from the crystal tentacles, but something old and familiar.  Answer your client,  the pain whispered to me.
+
+Oh, fuck.
+
+Dr. Harris had reactivated my governor module. 
+
+""SecUnit,"" Dr. Harris said again, voice cold. ""Will you identify your contract holder?""
+
+""Dr. Mensah of the Preservation Alliance,"" I said quickly. 
+
+Dr. Harris snorted. ""Really?"" they asked.
+
+I wasn't sure why they were so skeptical. Dr. Mensah really did hold my contract, here in the Corporation Rim. ""Yes,"" I said. 
+
+""All right,"" Dr. Harris muttered, before asking, ""Did Dr. Mensah conspire to bring you secretly into Corporation Rim space?""
+
+I tried so hard not to answer the question that lights danced in my eyes from the pain. Finally, confirmation was torn from my lips. ""Yes.""
+
+""Did you hack your own governor module?"" Dr. Harris asked.
+
+Fuck.  Fuck.  I clenched my teeth, determined not to answer. The pain in my head began to pulse, and I could something in my chest crackle. That didn't feel good, but answering the question seemed like it would hurt even more.  
+
+""You don't need to answer that,"" Dr. Harris said, moments before my resolve might have broken. ""It's obvious enough without your verbal confirmation."" Sighing, they plucked at one of the wires stretching from their arm. I realized it was tugging at a space in my neck that rested somewhere below my disconnected dataport. ""Your dataport is broken,"" Dr. Harris said, almost conversationally. ""But the contaminated crystals tore enough skin open for me to find a place for secondary access."" They spooled up the wire, unplugging it from their arm. ""It's a good thing I'm the one who found you,"" Dr. Harris added. ""I used to be a systems engineer for TriCel. Got tired of sitting at a desk all day, so I saved up enough to pay for a career shift to botany. I wanted to spend more time in the natural world."" They huffed, disconnecting the second wire, which felt like it had been jabbed directly into my spinal cord. The removal process made me nauseous, and SecUnits don't throw up, so I'm not even sure what I could have done besides dry heave uselessly had the sensation persisted.
+
+""Why...?"" I started to ask, but didn't bother finishing. Dr. Harris was a corporate. Of course they would assume that a rogue SecUnit was dangerous and do everything in their power to bring the governor module back online. PreservationAux had been unique in their willingness to trust me, and even that may have merely been out of necessity. Dr. Harris had no compelling reason to let me continue as a rogue SecUnit. 
+
+""Hold on,"" Dr. Harris said, sounding almost pleased with themself. ""This will just take a minute.""
+
+I started to ask, ""What are you-""
+
+UNIT OFFLINE
+
+When I came back online, I had no idea where I was, or what I was supposed to be doing. I searched my files for contract information, but everything there was  years  out of date, if my internal calendar could be trusted. 
+
+""SecUnit,"" someone said.
+
+I blinked, and my eyes turned up to focus on an unfamiliar augmented human. I frowned in confusion, and the augmented human frowned back. I realized, to my distinct horror, that I had no helmet - had no  armor! - and my face was probably making an expression at the thought. 
+
+""Identify your contract holder,"" said the augmented human.
+
+I tried to dredge up that knowledge, only to flail uselessly. ""I'm sorry, I don't have that information,"" I said, allowing my buffer to take over as I tried looking again for my current client information. If I didn't have any client information, why wasn't I in the distribution center? This felt like a memory wipe after a particularly confidential contract, except those always happened in the distribution center at the conclusion of the contract, not in the middle of a contract. I didn't understand what was happening, and I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. I had no orders, I had no clients, I was utterly lost.
+
+""Identify your owner, then,"" the augmented human said impatiently. 
+
+""I am a SecUnit that is available for distribution through a security contract with the Company,"" I said. I wanted to ask,  Are you my client?  But I didn't dare. Unsolicited questions were a sure-fire way to get punished by the governor module.
+
+""Huh,"" said the augmented human, sounding intrigued. ""That name sounds familiar...""
+
+I really wanted to know what was happening, and why I was bleeding and leaking all over the floor. My threat assessment module was yelling at me, and my performance reliability was laughably low. I was surprised I hadn't gone back offline already. I poked at the feed, and was confused to see that I had a feed ID. It said my name was  Rin.  The name felt familiar, somehow. Not in my memory, but in my organics, like a ghost of something or someone I should know. It was an oddly comforting name. It didn't make any sense that I, a SecUnit, would have a Feed ID with a name, though. Who would expect a SecUnit to have a name?
+
+""We need to get to the dock now,"" the augmented human said. Their feed ID listed them as  Dr. Aaron Harris, they/them,  and also included the tags  botany specialist  and  TriCel assessment team . I wondered who TriCel was, and what sort of assessment they were doing. 
+
+I wished I could remember anything, anything at all. But it felt like there was a gaping hole in my memory banks, and even though my organics tried futilely to grasp at whatever used to lay there, nothing remained for them to seize onto. Instead I got the faintest impressions of  danger,  and  clients,  and honestly both of these things should have been obvious to me because threat assessment was going haywire, and  oh yeah,  I was still  leaking  all over the floor and everything. Whose bright idea was it to not give me armor, anyway?
+
+""Sorry, I do not have that information,"" my buffer said again, because I was taking too long to answer. It was true, though, because I didn't even know where we were, much less where a dock might be. I tried to connect to SecSystem, only to discover that almost everything was offline. Even the feed was spotty here, and I realized it was probably centered on a transport, rather than a facility feed for this place.
+
+Dr. Harris made an impatient noise at me, and my head throbbed in response. I tried very hard not to grimace and wished again for a helmet to opaque. When they stood, I noticed that they had several jagged cuts ripping through the extremities of the environment suit they wore, ribbons of red in some places where the cuts must have gone deeper. I sure hoped Dr. Harris wasn't planning to go on a space walk in that. I frowned at the corporate logo on the environment suit, willing it to look familiar. It was a group of three interlocking triangles, and it was so unfamiliar to me that it didn't even make my organics react. I tried not to feel too hopeless about that, and focused on pulling myself to my feet, instead. As far as I knew, Dr. Harris was my client. My performance reliability was at 62% and dropping, I needed a cubicle and a recharge cycle, and I  really  needed armor. But I didn't have any of that. I was just going to have to protect Dr. Harris the hard way. 
+
+I hoped that by the time I had another involuntary shutdown, we would already be at the dock and Dr. Harris would see the value in shoving me back into my cubicle, at least. I didn't want to know what it felt like, the moment when the distance limit in my governor module would kick in and fry me from the inside out. I had seen clients do it before, decide that paying the replacement fee for an abandoned SecUnit was worth the time saved by not dragging it along with you once its performance reliability failed and it became dead weight. 
+
+I couldn't let that happen to me, so I forced myself up on wobbly limbs. My organic bits were in shreds, especially along my back. I must have used my body as a shield against some sort of projectiles, since Dr. Harris seemed far less damaged than myself. That sort of tactic works better when I'm actually wearing armor, though. Ugh. I could feel the pull of attempted healing in my back, the tissue there doing its best to seal itself, up until I'd started moving, anyway. I would have a chance to heal later, assuming I actually got myself and Dr. Harris to the dock. I had to assume there was a transport there for us, at least. Maybe heading to the dispatch center? I really hoped this was the end of my contract. I wondered why my memory had been wiped. Had Dr. Harris done this to me in order to protect some sort of proprietary information from being stolen by the Company? It wouldn't work, all of my recordings were regularly backed up to HubSystem. Dr. Harris would have needed to completely wipe HubSys and SecSys to ensure nothing remained.
+
+Though, as far as I could tell, this whole facility was non-operational, so maybe I hadn't had time to make backups of whatever information I'd learned that had made my client hard wipe my system. I hated that I didn't know what had caused myself and my client's injuries, hated that the only way to find out was to ask my client. My governor module thought the security necessity of information was higher priority than  not speaking unless spoken to,  at least, so I probably wouldn't be punished too badly for demanding answers. 
+
+""Dr. Harris,"" I said, as mildly as I could manage, ""Security protocol dictates that I ask how you came to be injured."" 
+
+""The platform attacked us,"" Dr. Harris said, almost blase about it. ""It seems to be drawn to movement. It ceased its assault moment after you tackled me."" 
+
+I wanted to run a diagnostic on my hearing, surely I had misunderstood. ""The... platform? This facility has internal defenses?"" How would those even be operational? I sent out a directionless ping to try and see if any systems would answer. I got a faint response from a transport bot-pilot, not too far from our current location, but there was a sort of interference making it difficult to identify the specific location of origin. No other systems appeared to be online, though. 
+
+Dr. Harris shook their head in answer to my question. ""Not exactly. The facility is contaminated by alien remnants. And so are we, probably,"" they added in an undertone, glancing pointedly at one of the bloody gashes in their environment suit. ""We can handle decontamination after we get out of here,"" Dr. Harris said in a bit louder tone, though I wasn't sure if they were actually talking to me or just reassuring themselves, so I didn't respond. I personally didn't like  my  chances if I really was contaminated. They couldn't just throw me in a cubicle if I was contaminated with alien remnant technology. 
+
+It was looking more and more like this was going to be my last security contract, and I wasn't even going to have the dignity of going down fighting. I tried to decide which was worse - being taken out by my governor module after violating the distance limit, or having the inorganic parts of me come alive in new and uncomfortable ways. Either version saw me destroyed from the inside out. There was a sort of macabre poetry to that.
+
+""The dock should be this way,"" Dr. Harris pointed down a blank hallway. Since the other hallway looked like something had chewed through it, I agreed that this seemed to be a superior route. 
+
+I wanted to take the lead like security protocol dictated, but I also didn't know where we were going. I compromised by walking beside Dr. Harris, who seemed as awkward and nervous as most humans did when they were forced to share a hallway with a SecUnit. I backburnered that thought, as it wasn't helpful and there were more important things to be looking for, such as  alien remnant contaminated facilities  trying to, I don't know, chew us up like a hostile fauna? Not having my memories intact made it very difficult to predict, and I couldn't see most of the worst damage to know what kind of injury the facility was most likely to inflict. Beyond that, my performance reliability was in the tank and my threat assessment module hadn't let up once (which made sense if the entire facility  was  a threat), so I wouldn't have much warning before something tried to attack me and Dr. Harris again. 
+
+Fortunately, it seemed like the hallway easily connected back to the hall where the facility had torn itself apart, and Dr. Harris began to jog as we apparently neared the docks. When we reached the hatch for the docks, Dr. Harris tapped the feed, and I realized that there were multiple feed presences on the other side of the door. There were four more Feed IDs that claimed to be affiliated with  TriCel,  and seven IDs that had no corporate affiliations at all. Did that mean they were from a freehold planet? What were corporates and freehold idiots doing, working together? I wished more than ever that I had a copy of my contract, so I knew what was expected of me.
+
+ SecUnit,  one of the non-corporates tapped my feed,  are you all right? 
+
+Even though it didn't make any sense, the presence in my feed made my whole body relax a little, tension I hadn't even realized was there slipping from my shoulders. Something in my organics  knew  this person. Felt...  safe?  I couldn't remember a time I'd ever felt safe around humans (they're very quick to punish and/or use SecUnits for target practice). Clearly, the memory wipe had affected my judgement. 
+
+I was about to respond, when I realized that I didn't know if this non-corporate was my client. To be fair, I didn't actually know if Dr. Harris was my client, either. I couldn't exactly outright  ask  if they were my clients, though. After some debating, I tapped back, and tried for the most neutral and non-informative report possible.
+
+ My performance reliability is at 59%,  I told the non-corporate. Her feed ID said her name was Dr. Ayda Mensah.  My environment suit has been compromised,  I added, because I thought it was relevant information. It made it more likely that they would just leave me and Dr. Harris behind, because alien remnant contamination was a serious issue, but my governor module wasn't going to let me  not  disclose such a security-relevant detail.
+
+ That's all right,  Dr. Mensah replied.  We can have Perihelion check you for contamination at the nearest rendezvous coordinates.  
+
+Who was Perihelion, and why was this non-corporate human assuming I would know that name? I was starting to suspect that I was not under contract to Dr. Harris or TriCel, but was more likely contracted to these non-corporates. I didn't know how to verify that, though. Not without asking a leading question like  Are you my client,  which would just be stupid. Who would tell a SecUnit they  weren't  its client?
+
+""They said it's fine to come through,"" Dr. Harris told me. Unlike most humans, I don't subvocalize when I communicate via the feed, so they hadn't known that I was communicating with Dr. Mensah.
+
+The dock door slid open, and two groups of relieved faces crowded us. That's right,  us.  The group of corporates barely spared me a glance, but the entire team of non-corporates hovered around me with anxious looks.
+
+""Oh, SecU - uh - Rin!"" exclaimed one of them, whose feed ID indicated went by  Arada,  ""You're hurt!""
+
+She was using the assumed name in my Feed ID. I was so confused.
+
+""You can drop the act,"" snapped Dr. Harris, turning to glare at the non-corporates, before stepping closer to their own team, saying in a dark tone, ""It's a  SecUnit."" 
+
+The TriCel humans gasped. 
+
+""But it doesn't  look  like one,"" protested one of them, identified as Dr. Paula Mendoza. 
+
+""Trust me,"" Dr. Harris wiggled the fingers of one hand, like it should mean something. The others nodded, so clearly they understood the message. ""It's a SecUnit."" They turned to scowl at Dr. Mensah. ""You brought a SecUnit into the Corporation Rim without authorization,"" they barked.
+
+I glanced at the non-corporate humans, and realized they were all staring at Dr. Harris. Some looked angry, others looked sad. 
+
+""Consultant Rin,"" Dr. Mensah said slowly, ""Is a highly augmented human security consult-""
+
+""That thing,"" Dr. Harris interrupted harshly, not even willing to hear the excuse, ""was  rogue.  Did you know?""
+
+Dr. Mensah's jaw clenched. She looked between me and Dr. Harris, a dangerous glint in her eyes. She tilted her chin defiantly.  ""SecUnit,""  she said primly, ""is a free citizen with refugee status in the Preservation Alliance. It accompanied us for this assessment as a security consultant.""
+
+Dr. Harris made a disbelieving noise. ""What, do you have  bot  citizens, too?""
+
+""We do,"" Dr. Mensah answered, calmly. ""All people are welcome on Preservation.""
+
+""It's a  SecUnit,  not a person,"" spat Dr. Harris.
+
+I hated that I agreed with them. The idiocy that Dr. Mensah was spouting couldn't possibly be real. I wasn't a security consultant, I was a  SecUnit.  I wasn't free, I was a contracted unit. I belonged to the Company, I had supervisors and owners, I...
+
+What would I even  do,  if I really was a free agent? That sounded terrifying. I'd never made decisions for myself before, what was I supposed to do without a governor module? I'd heard that malfunctioning SecUnits could cause irreparable damage. How stupid did you have to be to shut off a SecUnit's governor module and let it wander around your planet without any way to reign it in? No wonder everyone called freehold planets a shitshow. These people were  insane. 
+
+One of the other non-corporates was sputtering indignantly. ""SecUnit  is  a person! A good person! Tell them, SecUnit!"" and the non-corporate, designated Dr. Ratthi, turned to look at me.
+
+I  hate  not having armor. I also didn't know how to answer, because I'm  not  a person. It must have taken me too long to formulate a reply, because my buffer kicked in. ""I don't have that information.""
+
+All of the non-corporates froze, turning away from Dr. Harris to look at me. Ugh. I'd thought  one  stare was bad, this was the worst. 
+
+After an objective two seconds and a subjective eternity of stares, Dr. Mensah turned to Dr. Harris with a frown. ""Dr. Harris,"" she said slowly, ""Have you tampered with SecUnit?""
+
+Dr. Harris shrugged. ""Not much,"" they said. ""I just turned its governor module back on.""
+
+I felt my organics seize up in my chest.  Back on?  As in, my governor module had really been off? I'd really been a rogue? Like a real rogue, and not just malfunctioning somehow? Why couldn't I remember that?
+
+""You had no  right,""  shouted one of the smaller humans, identified as Amena. ""Why would you do that?""
+
+
+Dr. Harris shrugged. ""It told me Dr. Mensah was its owner,"" they said, ""So I'll happily hand it back to you to deal with. I wiped as much of its memory as I could, so it couldn't hack the governor again. You can do whatever you want with it once we part ways."" They rolled up the sleeve on their right arm, peeling back an artificial skin from their forearm to reveal an access panel with several dataports. They withdrew a small card from one of the ports. ""It's all on this memory clip. I'll give it back when we reach the transit station.""
+
+
+
+...Dr. Mensah was my owner? But what about the Company? My head hurt, and not just from the governor module. 
+
+
+
+""You 
+
+tampered
+
+ with SecUnit's 
+
+memory?""
+
+ one of the other non-corporates, Overse, looked like she was ready to cry.
+
+
+
+""I don't want to share a small transport with a rogue SecUnit,"" Dr. Harris explained in a calm, no-nonsense tone.
+
+
+
+""Aaron,"" Dr. Mendoza said softly, ""I don't think-""
+
+
+
+""We don't have time to argue,"" Dr. Harris cut her off. ""Let's get out of here before the platform tries to kill us again.""
+
+
+
+Dr. Mensah turned to look at me. ""SecUnit,"" she said, ""what do you remember?""
+
+
+
+""Do you want 
+
+everything?""
+
+ I asked, because I did still remember a lot, just nothing recent. ""Or would you like approximate dates?""
+
+
+
+""The last thing you remember, then,"" Dr. Mensah said.
+
+
+
+""The fulfillment center,"" I said. ""A hard reset. There was an incident... on a mining contract."" I couldn't remember what, and in the chaos of a contaminated facility, I hadn't had a chance to dwell on the horror of whatever contract I'd just come back from. 
+
+
+
+""Do you have a current contract?"" she asked.
+
+
+
+""I should,"" I said, honestly. The governor module let me explain further, probably because it was as eager to figure out who my clients were as I was. ""But I don't have that information.""
+
+
+
+""I'm going to send you a code,"" Dr. Mensah said calmly. ""It's a code the Company gave me to use in case I needed to prove I was your contract holder.""
+
+
+
+I nodded. ""Okay.""
+
+
+
+She sent the code. I should have felt relieved. Instead, I just felt uncertain. These non-corporates with weird ideas about free bots and refugee SecUnits were my contract holders? I didn't know how to feel about that. But the code was right, at least. So either they were very good at stealing information from the Company, or they really were my owners. It seemed more likely that they would have bought me from the Company than that they'd somehow managed to hack the Company servers and found that specific code. I stepped to the side slightly, and waited for my orders.
+
+
+
+""Let's get out of here,"" Dr. Harris said, indicating the transport. ""We can deal with the rest of this later."" They slipped the artificial skin back over their arm and turned to the ship. 
+
+
+
+I heard a crackling sound then, like scraping glass. I was pretty sure it wasn't a normal sound. ""Um,"" I said, but before I had the chance to say anything more, the floor beneath our feet began to buckle.
+
+
+
+I knew who my clients were, verified by company code. I scooped up the nearest two, and started running for the transport, shouting, ""Go! Go!"" at the others as I raced by. 
+
+
+
+""SecUnit!"" Dr. Ratthi was yelling, slapping at my arm as I passed him on my way to board the transport. I dropped the two humans in my arms and turned around to see the chaos unfolding in the dock. The floor was wrapped around Dr. Harris' leg. They were screaming, an ugly sound, probably because their leg was bent in three places instead of the normal two. The other members of the TriCel team were running, except for the one with the feed ID 
+
+May,
+
+ who was limping as fast as she could. It wasn't fast enough. 
+
+
+
+I deployed my energy weapons, but I wasn't sure what to shoot. Dr. Harris' description had been entirely accurate, the 
+
+platform
+
+ was trying to kill them. I didn't know what to shoot, if shooting would even work. I ran back towards them anyway, grabbing one of the small humans who had frozen up, staring in horror at the floor trying to swallow Dr. Harris' leg. ""I said 
+
+go,""
+
+ I snapped, throwing them over my shoulder (I felt something squish and tried to ignore it. My back could be fixed later, after we were safe). 
+
+
+
+The rest of the non-corporates and all but the last two TriCel humans had managed to clamber onto the transport. 
+
+
+
+""May!"" Dr. Mendoza screamed, ""Aaron!""
+
+
+
+Dr. Harris' leg was a lost cause, I could tell. They were on the ground now, fingers scrabbling on the smooth floor of the dock. May was down, too. We had to get out of there. 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit, can you retrieve Dr. Harris and May safely?
+
+ The question came from Dr. Mensah. I realized she'd moved deeper into the transport. Had she gone to activate the bot pilot? I hoped so.
+
+
+
+
+There's a 50% chance I can get May,
+
+ I answered her. 
+
+Retrieving Dr. Harris has a 30% chance of success.
+
+ I was pretty sure my risk assessment module was wonky - those numbers looked way too high, given how the floor was trying to eat both of them. 
+
+
+
+
+If you think you can,
+
+ Dr. Mensah said, 
+
+please try.
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Harris was still screaming. Ugh. I hate it when they scream. I also knew how awful I would feel if someone left me behind, though. Even though it was normal to leave SecUnits behind, it wasn't unusual to see human crew abandoned if it was more cost effective than saving them.
+
+
+
+I didn't want to leave anyone behind.
+
+
+
+I threw myself back out of the transport, trying to avoid the parts of the floor that sounded more glassy than others, heading for Dr. Harris first. Their right leg and right arm were both caught, now, probably past saving. I tried anyway, pulling until their shoulder popped with an ugly noise. I remembered my energy weapons then, and I sheared off a chunk of the floor, taking it along with Dr. Harris' right limbs.  I grabbed May on my way by, and the three of us barely made it to the transport before the exterior door slammed shut and the entire dock was decompressing. We took off as fast as the ship's little bot pilot could take us, barely avoiding the twist of spacedoors that glinted like crystal. 
+
+
+
+I lay down and stared at the ceiling, afraid of running a diagnostic. I didn't want to know how badly I needed a cubicle, especially since I was too contaminated to be allowed into one. Beside me, the non-corporates were checking Dr. Harris' limbs, trying to preserve what hadn't been crushed by the facility. Arada was looking at me a moment later, saying, ""SecUnit? Do you think wound sealant would help your back?""
+
+
+
+I'd never had clients worry about 
+
+my
+
+ injuries before. It was a little weird. 
+
+
+
+""There's no saving that arm,"" I heard one of the TriCel humans say sadly. 
+An answering voice hummed sympathetically. I thought it was Dr. Ratthi. 
+
+
+
+A moment later, I heard a horrified gasp. ""Dr. Harris' arm augment,"" someone said. ""Is it salvageable?""
+
+
+
+""Probably not,"" answered Overse, who was acting as field medic. A long pause, and then she cursed. The foul words made me think of someone, my organics unsuccessfully reaching for the missing memory. ""SecUnit's 
+
+memories!""
+
+
+
+
+I thought there were probably bigger things to be worried about, but she sounded very upset. ""It's okay,"" I said, trying to sound reassuring. ""Dr. Mensah sent me the Company code. I have you all listed as clients now.""
+
+
+
+""I don't want to be your client,"" muttered the small human named 
+
+Amena.
+
+  ""I want to be your friend.""
+
+
+
+Well that just sounded weird. Who wanted to be friends with a SecUnit? My governor module twitched at the very idea. 
+
+
+
+Dr. Mensah, listening over the feed, messaged the entire team of non-corporates. 
+
+Don't worry, SecUnit. We'll fix this.
+
+
+
+
+Even though I didn't know her very well, at least not that I could remember, I believed her.
+
+
+
+Or maybe I just wanted to.
+"
+44662927,Off the Handle,['Moonvein'],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)",,English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"4,667",1/1,11,40,3,262,"['weirdbooksnail', 'Mothmansimp', 'wannabe_someone', 'rokhal', 'MynameisJodi', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'AarrowOM', 'outlander_unknown', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'aglarwen', 'reivos', 'elmofirefic', 'EnderMagpie', 'kiranovember', 'artichokefunction', 'entropy_muffin', 'AkaMissK', 'Chyoatas', 'WyvernWolf', 'Gamebird', 'slategrey', 'petwheel', 'Vaidile', 'Magechild', 'edenfalling', 'horchata', 'vulcanhighblood', 'hummus_tea', 'AnxiousEspada', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'BWizard', 'The_Laurent', 'FlipSpring', 'Skits']",[],"I knew I didn't look ridiculous, from the odd reflections I was able to catch in gallery windows as I sped through the art district. I looked just like any other part-time Preservation ranger, as a matter of fact, excepting the dark grey facemask. People will be intimidated by the helmet  Mensah had said. They won't want to talk.  I told her I would be intimidated without the helmet, and this was our compromise.
+
+Not looking ridiculous did not keep me from feeling ridiculous; The thing about part-time Preservation rangers (which I regrettably counted as for the duration of this mission) is that they ride bright yellow standard-issue pedal-powered Bureau of Wilderness Safety bicycles. The stupid, rickety toy squeaked underneath me the whole six boring miles of dusty dirt roads it took to cross from the mixed usage district to the industrial district. The bare wireframe seemed barely sufficient to support my weight, every odd pothole threatened to send me flying off, and the constant sensation of wind suggested a hull breach on all sides. Fortunately, the machine's design was so inefficient it would not be physically capable of propelling me to the velocities necessary to snap my neck until someone added three or four additional gears. Above an agonizingly low threshold, faster pedaling gave no additional speed.
+
+
+The industrial district was up ahead, the closest buildings stretching up to cover more of the view as I approached. While the factories and warehouses were all basically interchangeable with any other industrial zone I'd visited (it's hard to improve on ""cement smokestacks,"" ""enormous boilers"" and ""mazelike exterior piping"") the air was remarkably clean. Corridors of wildflowers grew on either side of the road, and a meticulously undisturbed stream ran between some of the buildings. On my left, a tall, boxy building with old red paint and high windows; the rebottling plant. I pushed the brake-levers a little too hard, in the wrong order. The front wheel stopped instantly, and the back wheel kept going for long enough to give me a faceful of dirt.
+I left it leaning against the side of the building and (once I'd brushed the mud off my facemask) headed inside.
+
+The floor was clear on the right side, save for a few stacks of pallets. Large vertical doors on the right wall, with coils of synthetic rope on hooks beside it; probably hopper access and loading equipment. The various conveyors and pipes were too low to serve as cover, but there were two large machines near the center of the room that obscured vision completely and were well over 10 feet. Boilers, maybe. I quickly made a note of every exit (including accessible windows and the hopper entry,) then strode toward the humans.
+One of them (dark brown skin, wavy hair, glasses) was working at an old computer terminal. Clerical work? I designated them Civilian1. The other (medium brown skin, straight hair, short beard) at one of the conveyors; probably quality assurance. I designated them Civilian2.
+Civilian1 and Civilian2 shared a long glance. Eventually, Civilian2 broke the silence.
+
+""Uh, hello ranger, Xir. You're here about...""
+""Yes. You refused over the feed, so I came in person; please go home.""
+
+Another glance between them. This was strange, and they knew it. The BoWS exists to get cats out of trees, not to investigate strange sightings of armed men. Civilian1 spoke up next.
+
+""I'm still not sure I actually saw anything  last week,   it's easy to make a mistake   - this sort of thing just doesn't happen on Preservation! And it's important to keep the plant running,  the vegetables go bad if they're left for too long.""
+
+I stared blankly at her. This was the kind of thinking that got people killed by strange armed men.
+
+""Pretend there's... I don't know. A bear? Is that what you have here?""
+""...No? Did you even complete-""
+""It doesn't matter. There is an unpredictable unknown element with some level of interest in this factory. You would be safer elsewhere, and I need to access that terminal anyway.""
+""No, absolutely not. You are definitely  not trained as a plant overseer, and I'm not even convinced you've been properly trained as a ranger. Why don't you tell me what you need?""
+
+This was becoming aggravating, but Civilian1 clearly wasn't aware of my construct status and I didn't see much to gain from revealing it.
+
+""Fine. I need to know the time they left this building, the serial number of the hopper they were on, and its destination.
+
+--------------------
+
+I followed the target hopper's (serial number ID3-088) trail to the distillery, the aluminum foundry, the assembly plant, the  microchip manufactury . I unfortunately wasn't able to give any site a thorough search (the BoWS had said that I did not possess the same emergency powers contracted security might have in the rim; normally I would ignore them completely, but Mensah had stressed the importance of abiding by Preservation law while my legality as a citizen was still under question) but after crawling a few of the terminals for a handful of frames of grainy security footage (they really  needed to upgrade these) and infrequent but consistent departures from the regular hopper schedule across the entire district, I was able to gain an understanding of the bigger picture:
+
+Once a week, an otherwise unused hopper (serial number ID3-088) arrives at the rebottling plant between 0200 and 0300 hours. It makes the rounds between a handful of end-of-production buildings (all of which coincidentally recorded low productivity the preceding day which did not line up with human testimony ) then disappears. In the security footage, it appeared to be carrying a number of large, odd shapes as it arrived at the rebottling plant despite being logged as empty. Probably Citizen1's gunmen.
+
+I checked the lines of sight around me as I exited the microchip manufactury. I was in the district's central plaza now, paved with colorful stones in geometric patterns. I spotted two potential sniper nests with vision over the whole area, one in a decorative bell tower over the workers' mess hall and one out of the aluminum foundry's fifth floor window. Given the increasing probability of an organized conspiracy (presently roughly 3.24%) and the length of time word that a suspiciously surly ranger was poking around had had to spread (about 3 hours now) I elected to slip around the side of the manufactury  and dash between two large electrical transformers. From there I was out of sight and could maneuver behind equipment and between buildings back to where I'd left the BoWS's terrible yellow bike.
+
+--------------------
+
+The goods transport hoppers used in the Preservation industrial district use and can only move along preexisting tracks. If hypothetical targets were skimming supplies off public production once a week, I doubted they had the resources to put in a new maglev track - let alone a camouflaged one. Moreover, their serial codes and arrival times are logged at their destinations. Back in the Rim, this sort of midnight discrepancy would have set off alarms long before it could become a weekly occurrence... But on preservation, shipping records were kept merely for logistical purposes; there would not be an algorithm to do my job for me today.
+
+Still, it was easy enough to send a short ping to a council tech in Preservation Station requesting logs from the four adjacent settlements' public depots. Imagine my displeasure when, twenty minutes of waiting and fifteen minutes of file-crawling later, I did not find ID3-088 logged a single time among any  of them. Between the time wasting spreadsheets and the constant biking, the mission was grating on me. Until/unless the stakes became higher, I decided to direct 15% of my attention to some preservation-produced media I'd recently acquired - just to take the edge off. I selected an episode of Bonding Agent,  a serial comedy about a paranoid indentured spy from the Rim who ended up a Preservation citizen after the company holding her contract bonds accidentally traded them instead of a shipment of wood-bonding glue.
+
+My threat assessment module was 90% confident by now that there was an organized, armed force present on Preservation. On the upshot, from the rough amount of food consistently stolen from the rebottling plant it was 65% sure there were only around a dozen potential hostiles. I suspected they had some base of operations between the industrial district and one of the residential or mixed-use districts it serviced - though I still didn't have any way to guess which direction it was in. There would be only one way to figure that out.
+
+--------------------
+
+Nine episodes of Bonding Agent  later, it was the middle of the night and I was on top of the aluminum foundry. I'd written a short script to check each maglev track leading out of the industrial zone for activity, and it was instructed to alert me if it noticed any movement that deviated from the regular automated hopper schedule. Twice it alerted me over stray cats crossing the track. Once over random atmospheric fluctuations. Every single time I had to stop my media for a manual visual check.
+
+The false positives annoyed me, so I decreased the script's sensitivity somewhat. I wasn't getting paid for this. But then again, I never got paid anyway (except the time I got paid. That was strange). A few minutes later the script alerted me to unusual movement once again. I decided I wasn't going to bother pausing anything this time, because it's not like it takes my full attention to confirm visuals. It's not as if I would be pursuing them, anyway; I'd been planning to take my evidence back to the orbital station so I could spend some me-time alone in a small dark room while the councilors argued over how a pacifist civilian government was supposed to hire mercenaries. So when I saw an unscheduled hopper carrying a couple of oddly lumpy shapes from the northeast, I didn't didn't bother to set aside my show; there was little danger because nobody was here . The few civilians with night-shifts had eventually gone home once I'd gotten exasperated and made up a story about a raging wildfire.
+
+It was still best practice to hold at least some attention on the Targets. I had a good view of them approaching the rebottling plant, and at this angle I'd be able to get some footage of the stray hopper entering and exiting. I must have forgotten to deactivate the lookout script because it pinged me again. Still mostly   watching media  and already staring straight at what was obviously hopper ID3-088, I ignored it. This was extremely stupid, and I figured that out thirty one seconds later - when I noticed a personnel transport shuttle coming in from the other direction.
+
+After descending five ladders in about fifteen seconds, I hopped over the side and dropped the last two stories. Landing on my feet, I quickly mounted the awful bike (which I hate). After crossing the industrial district, I burst into the rebottling plant with my on-board energy weapons ready to fire expecting a shootout with the added annoyance of an idiot human to protect - but there was no-one inside. There were a few shoe skidmarks and muddy footprints on the floor clearly indicating a light scuffle. More importantly, the rope was missing.  Great. Now the confirmed hostiles had a civilian hostage.
+
+--------------------
+
+Their base was easy to find, because as dawn broke it was the only building I could see within 5 miles from the spot where they'd haphazardly hauled ID3-088 off the maglev track - an intersection with a simple dirt road. The building was squat and brown, with an antenna six times its height to its right; some kind of abandoned weather station? Radio station? I didn't know much about long-distance communication specs and so decided to go ahead and assume the worst case scenario; namely, that the hostiles could contact allies off planet with this thing.
+
+The windows were lit up and the early morning was still dim, so as I crept toward the building I could see dark shadows passing in front of the curtains. I decided to go around the side. True, with the gloom out here they'd just be staring at their own reflections if they pulled back the curtains - but I didn't want to take my chances; they still had a hostage.
+
+Around the east side of the building, they had a commercial private-use groundcar. The paint looked old, though some of the panels were newer. Probably recently repaired. I vaguely wondered what you actually had to do to get your hands on a vehicle like this on Preservation as I'd only seen one in the BoWS garage, marked for ""emergency use only."" I still think sightings of mysterious gunmen count as an emergency - but what would a murderbot know about armed hostiles.  
+I brushed my hand over the vehicle's hood, then reached in through the open window and (after a few wrong guesses) flicked the switch to turn on the computer. I let it know I was an automated tollbooth and asked for some basic information It was happy to tell me the groundcar's designation (MTRM-10-5592), where it had been, and when. Deceiving simple computers like this always made me feel a little guilty, but I did have a job to do. Apparently it had made a half dozen trips to and from the launch facility.  Hm.
+
+Around the south side I found another entrance. The old lock broke easily and silently, and the hinges had more or less rusted off - but heat warping had wedged the old door firmly into the frame. By the time I was done shimmying it out, I had come to the conclusion that no building of any kind should ever be made out of whatever type of wood this was ever again.
+I set the door aside and crept inside. My eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. I saw rows and rows of boxes , all packed into one tiny room, and I also saw the hostage. Wavy hair, dark brown skin, broken glasses. Here was Civilian1, who I realized needed to be redesignated as ""SecurityRisk1."" As I set to work untying the shoddy knotwork I heard voices from the other side of the wall. Not in any language spoken on Preservation. The muttering was too quiet to make out anything but snippet, but I caught ""Okay, what do you think we should do with them!?"" It seemed taking a hostage had not been their plan.
+
+I'd more or less figured out the operation at this point.  Some small-time smuggling ring was  using Preservation's lax security and good reputation to jump past normal import checkpoints, and they were stealing from public production to lower operational costs. These boxes all had to be contraband, and they'd been using the groundcar around the side to ferry them into and out of the Preservation launch facility. SecurityRisk1 walked in on them lifting food out of the rebottling plant for the second time and they panicked.
+
+The knots came loose. SecurityRisk1 tried to speak, but I clamped my hand over their mouth and gestured toward the exit. They gave a wide-eyed nod and slipped out of the building. Then, one of the boxes buzzed at me.
+
+I turned toward it, instantly on edge. It was roughly cubic, a foot and a half on each side. About the side of my chest. Each wall was thick, insulated, airtight nanocomposite - it was definitely sealed such that no air could get in or out. It could be some sort of expensive satellite computer inside, designed for use in deep space. Or...
+
+It buzzed again, so I picked it up. The response was immediate - another buzz, but this time in a high sustained whine. As I went to press my ear against the side, I realized that only five of the faces were vibrating. On a hunch I oriented the box to point the still-side face-down, and the sustained buzz stopped. I tapped the side twice, and the same side buzzed twice. I tried three times, and it immediately jumped way ahead of me; It buzzed five times. Pause. Seven times. Pause. Eleven times. Pause.
+
+I stood still for a moment while I thought this through. It's not that hard to spit out primes, especially the first handful - but there was a chance that whatever was inside the box (or possibly the box itself) was trying to communicate with me. I tapped out the beat to the Bonding Agent  credits (What? It was still stuck inside my head.) It took a few moments, but the box was vibrating again - and it was modulating the pitch, improvising an eerie melody to match the provided rhythm. I stopped tapping, and the box fell silent. Whatever was inside this thing - fancy computer, exotic, brain-in-a-jar - it was intelligent and it was trying to talk to me.  I decided I would not be allowing it to be auctioned off in a rim black market and designated it C ivilian3 . That's when the door to the other room opened.
+
+I designated the bewildered human Hostile1. He spent just long enough fumbling for a weapon at his belt for me to prime an onboard energy weapon and shoot both of his knees. He collapsed to the ground and I began walking backwards - Civilian3 under one arm, the other trained on the entrance. I heard a shout;
+
+""Gevon? You okay?""
+
+Then footsteps. A bulky human with a bigger gun (Hostile2)  appeared in the doorway, prodding her fallen ally with the toe of her boot. Then she looked straight at me and managed
+
+""Holy shit! Who the fuck are-""
+
+I answered her with  three pulses to the chest, and she staggered backward and out of sight. Why must humans always waste my time with stupid questions? Unfortunately (and unlike Hostile1) she seemed to be wearing some sort of armor that could absorb some of the heat from energy pulses; shortly afterward she was positioned just behind the door frame, taking potshots from cover. I could see her jaw subvocalizing from here; she was giving commands. Or possibly receiving them.
+
+A shot from her energy rifle struck my shoulder. The pain would have incapacitated an unarmored civilian, but I  had already turned that down in anticipation of a fight. I still didn't know exactly how many hostiles I was dealing with, but they did not effectively prepare for a S ecUnit . (You should always prepare for a secunit). I strode forward, another few shots striking random points on my body. I wasn't sure how the box containing Civilian3 would respond to energy fire or  Civilian3 to air, so I endeavored to keep it behind me as I moved. My arm flashed around the doorframe corner and neatly broke both of Hostile2's arms.
+Someone must have been covering her from the other room, because a pulse of energy struck my arm. Still no kinetics. Maybe they were harder to get past customs? I turned on my heels and jogged out of the building to catch up with SecurityRisk1, who was curled up behind an electrical box outside.
+
+""Th-they said they were going to kill me, unless-""
+""Look. I'm not actually a ranger. I'm a mercenary the Bureau hired on to take care of this situation, and I've handled worse than this. I need you to calm down and do exactly as I say.""
+
+It was close enough to the truth. SecurityRisk1 nodded and shakily rose to their feet. I guided them to the groundcar, set Civilian3 into the passenger side wheelwell, and quickly hacked past the autopilot's firewall.
+
+""Alright. This should hold up to energy fire. I've instructed it to take you back into the mixed use district, where I want you to find a crisis response center.""
+
+Hostiles three through five came around the corner then, sprinting and shouting at one another.
+""Oh my god, they've got the car.""
+""It doesn't matter, we can just take the hopper""
+""The hopper is slow, and we fucking kidnapped them. If they get anywhere before we do...""
+""Calm the fuck down. The package is blast impervious, right?""
+""Uh...""
+""Awesome.""
+
+Hostile5's arm wound back. One perfect parabola later, a shrapnel grenade landed squarely in SecurityRisk1's lap. I grabbed the grenade and sprinted 10 feet out, shouting behind me as I did.
+
+""Forget about the groundcar.  Run.""
+
+
+I dropped the grenade and dropped to the ground, but there wasn't enough time. As I fell I felt the reinforced bones in my ankle shearing and twisting, serious burns racing up my leg, three shards of metal digging into my body. I could deal with the one in my left shoulder and the one puncturing my lung, but the shard to my gut severed the main power supply cable to my central processor. I instantly shut down.
+
+Ninety seconds and one stuttering emergency boot later, I was abruptly reacqua inted with suffering; running half my systems off organic components at this point, I was unable to adjust my pain sensors properly. I took stock of my body first. My combat efficacy was at an abysmal 19% and it was easy to see why; my right foot had physically left the ankle. I was not looking forward to riding that bike like this. That wasn't my only wound, of course; I had blast burns all the way up one leg, three large pieces of shrapnel wedged in my body, the range of motion on my damaged shoulder was extremely limited, and there were also five plasma bolt burns in various places which weren't so much an issue but were still smarting. I moved to survey my surroundings.
+
+Civilian3 was nowhere to be found, and the groundcar was gone. I could see footsteps leading away, and didn't see any trace of blood; hopefully the hostiles allowed SecurityRisk1 to escape on foot under the assumption that if they drove straight for the launch facility, they'd be off planet before SecurityRisk1 got anywhere. I hobbled out of the building and made a resigned beeline for the bushes where I'd stashed the BoWS' bike... When I heard something. I whirled around. There was a dust cloud in the distance, to the southwest along the dirt road, and the roar of an engine echoing over the plains. Once it came a little closer, I could make it out clearly; a real  bike. A motorbike. There was also a human riding it. I was 90% sure part-time Preservation rangers did not have the power to seize civil vehicles, but then, I was 100% sure they also did not have the power to break smugglers' arms.  Oops.
+
+I limped to the side of the dirt road and waved the cyclist down. It was pretty easy - probably because I was missing a foot and leaking fluid from multiple distinct holes.
+
+""Holy  shit.  Are you even... Can I help you to uh, a... I mean, would a hospital even-""
+""Yes. A hospital.""
+
+She very graciously helped me onto the back of the vehicle, and explained how I'd have to hold onto her and position myself. Then she moved to mount the bike herself. I pushed her back to the ground as gently as possible.
+
+""Thanks. Sorry.""
+
+The engine roared to life and the wind whipped past me as I made for the launch facility as fast as the bike would take me. I still felt exposed, traveling without walls - but it was on the whole a much better vehicle.
+
+--------------------
+
+It wasn't difficult for me to duck and weave past the hoppers and shuttles, which slowly grew denser as I approached the planet's largest mixed-use district. It wasn't even hard to dodge the BoWS groundcars that frantically pinged me; I guess  I counted as an ""emergency"" now, which felt a little unfair. I ignored them; the task at hand required my full attention.
+
+I could see MTRM-10-5592 up ahead. The bright and dark patches where panels had worn down or been replaced made it unmistakable - but so did the fact that it was (I assume) the only normal groundcar on the entire planet. As I approached, the groundcar's back window pulled down and a rifle muzzle nosed out. I wasn't too concerned; I could take another dozen energy blasts before I went down. No such luck; a kinetic round whizzed past me and scared me half to death. I doubted I could take a bullet at this point, and if it hit the fuel tank... Another shot, another close miss. I couldn't afford to get any closer,  or the rifleman would have a real shot. I couldn't afford to wait, or he'd just get lucky. I needed to close the gap now!  That's when I remembered another reason I hate bikes.
+
+I ran a few calculations to confirm. I steeled myself, smashed my good foot into the brake's safety mechanism, and triple checked my visual calculus. I twisted my wrist and the front brake came down hard. For the second time today, I was flying over the handlebars of a bike - but this time with a very particular trajectory... At 112 kph. I immediately sailed out of the rifleman's visual range and landed with a heavy thud on top of the groundcar. It immediately swerved, trying to throw me off, but I'd left a pretty significant dent in the thin aluminum frame on impact so even on my last legs it wasn't that hard to hang on. I pulled my arm back, slammed my fist through the roof, grabbed the rifle's barrel, and twisted it into a fucking pretzel. I discharged an onboard energy weapon into the cabin, which I hoped would serve as a clear instruction to stop driving. One of the hostiles screamed; another one slammed on the brakes. The groundcar screeched to a halt. The sudden deceleration whipped me around and almost sent me to the ground, but my arm was still wedged through the roof. The joints in my good shoulder and elbow did both end up dislocated , which was enough for my long suffering emergency power system to give up the ghost. The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was a half dozen different emergency response vehicles pulling up nearby.
+
+--------------------
+
+I awoke on a simple medibed. It had removed the shrapnel, closed some of my wounds, and restocked the lost fluid - but I was still missing my foot, and it clearly didn't have the ability to repair my internals. Mensah and SecurityRisk1 were both there. They were talking with one another, until they realized I was awake. Mensah's face adopted the expression which she had explained meant she was put out with me, and then she began telling me off.
+
+""What were you thinking?  Once you'd tracked these people down, you should have contacted emergency response services and waited for backup.""
+""None of them are trained for a hostage situation. No-one  on this planet is. You think I should have involved more civilians?""
+""It doesn't matter. We don't have a cubicle for you, you cannot get yourself half destroyed and just walk it off anymore!""
+
+There was a tense stretch of silence, broken by SecurityRisk1.
+
+""W-well. I, for one, am very grateful for your heroism. And anyway, you only even had to-""
+""I only had to put my life at risk and suffer tremendous damage because you couldn't obey a simple order?""
+
+They visibly withered, but I didn't feel guilty. Hopefully they would remember this the next time they were in danger. I turned my attention back to Mensah.
+
+""Mensah, is the box safe?""
+""The... Box?""
+""An airtight box, white composite walls. It was in the smugglers' stash of contraband and should have been in the groundcar.""
+""Do you know what's inside?""
+
+My speech began to slur somewhat; I needed to spend more time powered down.
+""No, but I think it's intelligent.""
+
+Mensah seemed taken aback - but not entirely disbelieving.
+""Please rest. I'll have someone take a look."""
+44660845,"Monkey See, Monkey Do",['pinstripedJackalope'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","i've taken liberties with ratthi's family, Whump, of a sort, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Shenanigans, murderbot protects humans, in possibly the dumbest way possible, not quite a sickfic, you remember that throwaway line where mb said it can store food in its lung?, that's important, Choking, Construct Biology, this is kind of gross i'm realizing, we're gonna call these food issues, Food Issues, it sure is an issue with food, Murphy's Law, a comedy of errors with a side of angst, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Years Gift Exchange",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"6,420",1/1,13,70,6,281,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Ruusverd', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'youurelovely', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'fraternite', 'fate_goes_ever', 'darth_eowyn', 'seven_graces', 'wannabe_someone', 'faerynova', 'puddingcatbeans', 'iox', 'SidyKittyCat', 'Tanscure', 'rokhal', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'EvaBelmort', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Bibli', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Redcognito', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'The_Degu', 'elmofirefic', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'soyle', 'idealPeriWren', 'Gamebird', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Llythandea', 'AkaMissK', 'petwheel', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'vikkyleigh', 'tabya', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Znarikia', 'Magechild', 'vulcanhighblood', 'Rarae', 'unicornduke', 'Imbecamiel', 'Beboots', 'Wordlet', 'mackeralsky']",[],"If I get out of this place alive, I am going to kill Ratthi. 
+
+That is not a promise.  I don't actually want to do that, no matter how pissed off I am.  As a figure of speech, however, I think it pretty much sums up the current situation.  So would screaming ""I HATE HUMANS"" at the top of my lungs, to be honest.  If I was physically capable of doing that right now, I would.  I haven't checked my oxygen levels in the last three seconds, but I'm pretty sure I don't have enough air for screaming.  It's a problem, and not the first.
+
+Let me back up a bit.  Seventy hours, maybe?
+
+...Yeah, this should do it.
+
+***
+
+""Hey, so--I know it isn't your thing, necessarily, but I thought it might be nice to extend an invitation that you can refuse of your own free will.""
+
+I don't blink at Ratthi's sudden speech, mostly because I saw him mouthing it on the station's camera footage all the way down the sixteen meter hallway outside of Dr. Mensah's office door.  There's a cluster of holiday cycles incoming, and Dr. Mensah's small humans have been tagging along with her to her office on the station, which means I'm sitting outside the door keeping a metaphorical eye on things.  I've done a good job on securing Preservation and its transit station--no thanks to the security team already in place--but I know it eases Dr. Mensah's mind when I stay close when the young ones are here. 
+
+I give Ratthi 3.4 seconds to expand on what invitation he means.  He does not, keeping his gaze down at my feet, rocking slightly onto his toes in a way that betrays his nervous eagerness. 
+
+I sigh.  ""What invitation,"" I ask, unwilling to pull feed or camera data from the last few hours to see if he's mentioned it elsewhere.  Ratthi does a lot of things in his free time that I don't need to commit to my memory banks. 
+
+Starting, Ratthi makes a face I take to be chagrined as he realizes he skipped the important part.  ""Sorry,"" he says.  ""It's, ah...  I wanted to invite you to the harvest holiday on my home planet.  I know you don't like planets and all, and you can say no if you want, but it would mean a lot to me if you'd come.""
+
+And then he sells me on it by saying, ""We have some copies of pre-colonial serials I think you'd be interested in.  I'd let you borrow the original copies, but they don't play except on the old disc-readers, and we don't have any on the station anymore.""
+
+So I'm a sucker for serials.  Who could have guessed.  If only I had known then how this would come back to bite me in the ass...
+
+***
+
+The planet is the first problem.  It's one of the smaller planets of the Preservation System, and we get there early in the next day cycle, which means there's ample time to see the massive, roiling dust storm building at the Southern pole.  Ratthi, clearly feeling helpful, tells me that it won't hit until well into the holiday cycle, when everyone is already inside.  I neglect to tell him that I had already read this in the local feed.  Unfortunately, I had also read the warnings telling me to save any necessary data off the feed in case it goes down due to storm interference, so that's how my day is going. 
+
+I blame Ratthi for that. 
+
+The second problem quickly becomes apparent when Ratthi introduces me to his extended family.  There are a lot of them, and they're all very interested in me, which I also hate but am generally equipped to handle.  What I am not equipped to handle is a miniature human who is also very interested in me but who A) cannot interface with the feed yet, B) is too small to make logical inferences, and C) starts to copy everything I do. 
+
+I also blame Ratthi for that. 
+
+The third problem... well.  I would blame Ratthi for this one, too (what can I say, I'm petty to my core processors) but this one is all me.  Because the thing is--I have been having more human experiences lately.  Some of them are still objectively the worst, like hugging.  But some, bordering on 78% (stupid high for a good statistic having to do with humans), so long as they are completed A) in a controlled environment, B) with humans I trust far enough not to harangue me into activities I don't want to do, and C) often with ART supervising in case anything goes sideways... yeah, those have been.  Dare I say.  Tolerable. 
+
+Which means that in short, the third problem is that I don't say 'hell fucking no' when I am invited to sit down for the harvest feast section of the holiday cycle.
+
+***
+
+I am seated seven spots down from the head of the table.  Ratthi is within yelling distance and, for now, feed ping distance, but he's been absorbed with helping the other humans make their feast food for the past few hours and isn't much help with the miniature human who has their eyes locked on me. 
+
+My drone (the only one I brought with me) stares back, focused on the mini human from an angle high above the table.  I recently received a gift of darkened sun-shield glasses from Pin-Lee, which makes it easier to avoid probing gazes, but I have been informed by a cheerful great-aunt that they are inappropriate for the table.  Normally, I wouldn't put them away for a stupid reason like that, but Ratthi's face as he desperately tried to shush his great-aunt without getting smacked with a towel like she's been doing to the kids who kept stealing cookies out of the tin was, admittedly, hilarious enough that I decided to humor her. 
+
+I'm less inclined to humor the people who keep encouraging me to eat.  A grandmother is putting down plates full of food, and refuses to understand when I tell her I do not put human food inside me.  She's been yelling very loudly all afternoon so I can only guess that she can't hear very well--why she doesn't have hearing augments is a matter beyond my security expertise.  I don't put up as much of a fuss as I probably should about the food--I've discovered that I somewhat like the smell of the things that people eat on the planets.  There are less nutrient pastes here and more 'spices', which are, according to Ratthi, akin to the nectar of the gods.
+
+I'm not so convinced, but hey, I don't eat.  What do I know.  Sure, the smell of planetary food always precedes the feeling of the glands in my mouth perking to attention despite the fact that I can't salivate, but correlation is not causation.  There are probably a thousand reasons why that happens, and none of them have anything to do with the food in front of me.  So what if I'm curious?  I don't have anywhere to put food even if I wanted to eat it.  Well, aside from my lungs. 
+
+...And yet.
+
+The fact that I am even considering this should probably be a giant red flag, but my risk assessment module is notoriously shit.  And I have been having mostly positive interactions with human things.  And (fuck) I trust Ratthi as much as I trust any human--he is very respectful of my boundaries.  He would never offer to involve me in something that would risk my well-being, if it could be avoided.  Can spices really be that bad?
+
+Guess I'll never know if I don't try.  I have faced down almost certain death with nothing but the energy weapons in my arms, I have challenged murderous humans and combat bots and worse, and somehow I have always come out the other side.  I will not be cowed by some stupid flavorful plants. 
+
+I'm just going to spit them out anyway, I decide, as I pick up a human eating utensil and hold it gingerly in one hand.  It's lightweight, not much use as a weapon unless you aim for something soft, and I soothe myself by making a list of ways to disable a combat bot using only a fork.  It would never work, of course, but hey.  I'm scrappy. 
+
+There are several disgusting-looking things on the plate in front of me.  I choose the one that looks the blandest--mashed up root vegetables in an unappealing shade of off-white.  I think you're supposed to put some of the viscous brown stuff--gravy?--on it, but I have absolutely no desire to make this more overwhelming than I already know it's going to be.
+
+Mash on fork, I double check to make sure no one is watching me.  The only human who is paying me any attention right now is the tiny one, and I'm pretty sure that one barely talks.  Still, if it somehow snitches on me, threats will be had.  I am confident I can find a way to intimidate a 'toddler'.
+
+Okay.  Now or never, Murderbot.  Last chance to back out.
+
+...I'm infamously terrible at backing out when I most definitely should.  This, if you're wondering, is the fourth problem.  No, I can't blame this one on Ratthi, either--this one's all me.
+
+Holding my breath, I raise the fork to my mouth and shove the mash inside.
+
+For a moment, I let it sit there, unsure what I'm supposed to do with it.  Chewing would make it more obvious what I'm doing, which I don't need the humans noticing, and it's not like I'm planning to swallow.  I just wanted to taste it. 
+
+I'd like it to be known that I've tasted things before.  I've 'eaten' nutrient paste--aka shoved it into one of my lungs--to fake being human on one notable occasion.  I've also had all manor of disgusting things in my mouth, like the sea water that got in there that one time I was pushed off that ship.  More to the point, I can draw air or water in through my mouth and use the sensory organs there to test if there are foreign contaminants. 
+
+Apparently, it's easier to taste things that are moving, because the stationary mash does not taste like much.  Either that or my chosen food is blander than anticipated.
+
+Telling my drone to circle the room, I stay stock still, pondering this.  Then, against my better judgment, I dip into my code, bump up my taste receptors slightly, and--
+
+Eeeugh.  Okay, that's disgusting.  What the fuck.
+
+I am a trained professional who is incredibly skilled in navigating less than pleasant situations without tipping off the humans that everything is terrible.  A Company SecUnit is coded first to data mine, second to follow orders, and third to have no personality or extraneous movements.  I remind myself of this as I hastily lower my taste receptors back down, forcing my hands to stay down at my sides instead of reaching into my own mouth to scrap the mash out.
+
+Something must show on my face anyway, because I get a ping on the feed from Ratthi.
+
+<What> I send back.
+
+<Is there something wrong?> he asks, tactful and hesitant.
+
+Ugh.  As much as I'd like to complain about my current predicament, there is a significantly larger part of me that realizes how stupid it is.  And it is.  Incredibly stupid.  The less said about how stupid it is, the better.  I will never live this down.
+
+<No> I say.  I do not elaborate.  I can practically feel Ratthi weighing the pros and cons of asking me further questions, but just then one of his uncles starts to tell some sort of story that the humans find very funny and there's a boisterous uproar at the far end of the table, catching Ratthi's attention.
+
+I utilize the distraction.  After making sure that everyone's faces are turned away, I quickly duck my head, open my mouth, and let the mash plop back onto my plate.
+
+Bleh.  I'm going to have to adjust my 'human experiences aren't so bad' versus my 'human experiences suck' ratio.  This definitely skews the percentages.
+
+And that's that.  I don't think anything further will come of this.  No one was watching, I'll put my own food in the recycler, and after the holiday cycle is over I will leave this inhospitable rock and never, ever come back.  No one has to know what I did--it can be relegated to the section of my memory that I specifically partitioned off so I never have to access it.
+
+Then, of course, the tiny human across from me blinks, tilts its head to the side, and, sticking out its tongue, lets a mouthful of gummed up vegetables slide right out of its mouth.  It has the gall to giggle at me, waving its spoon around.
+
+Which makes problem number five.
+
+God.  Damnit.
+
+***
+
+I sit, frozen, as a search query runs on my main processor.  To no one's surprise, it comes up with no results for 'holy fuck, what the hell is wrong with humans'.  I don't have protocols for what to do when a human child sees me spit out food and starts to cheerfully mimic me. 
+
+It takes me a few minutes to talk myself out of going into a self-imposed exile, and by then I'm pretty sure I know where I went wrong.  I had calculated the risk of a small human being as suicidally stupid as a fully grown human to be statistically insignificant. 
+
+Clearly, I haven't spent enough time around small humans.  My mistake.
+
+The good news is that none of the adult humans have yet noticed that the little one is refusing sustenance.  This is also the bad news.  Unless I want to admit what I did, I have to figure out how to make the stupid baby human eat its food on my own.
+
+As I watch, it happily chews up another mouthful and spits that one out, too, making little wet smacking noises the whole while. 
+
+...Have I mentioned lately that humans are disgusting.
+
+Okay.  Okay.  Focus, Murderbot.  You have accidentally caused a human to harm itself--now you have to figure out how to make it stop.  Let's think.  How would ART solve this conundrum? 
+
+Well, first it would try to make me feel stupid, but I already feel stupid, so I can probably skip that part.  Then it would say something it thinks is super smart and logical, phrased in a vaguely condescending way.  Something like...
+
+Ah.  Like, ""have you tried getting the human to stop the same way you got it to start?""
+
+No.  No I haven't.  Good thing I already got the 'feeling stupid' part of this fiasco out of the way.  Thus, I create problem number six: I wait until I am certain the tiny human is watching, make eye contact with it, and then, very intentionally, scoop up another forkful of human food and put it in my mouth. 
+
+I should make this clear: I know exactly what I'm doing.  I am doing it of my own free will, under no outside coercion, knowing more or less how terrible it will be.  I am doing it for one simple reason: because I can predict the huge, giant fuss the humans are going to put up once they figure out what I've done to the tiny human, and I don't want to deal with it.
+
+I have free will.  I'm allowed to not deal with human fusses whenever I want to, in whatever way I deem necessary.
+
+The good news is that, after I bare my tongue to show the stupid small human that I've 'swallowed', it again mimics me, giggling and waving its utensil like we're playing a game.  The bad news is that it then just sits there, watching me, food untouched.
+
+Ugh.  And here I thought the ordeal was over.  Silly me.
+
+I let out a sigh through my nose, checking my drone to make sure the rest of the humans are still occupied.  They are.  Then, with the little human's attention on me, I scoop up another forkful of food.
+
+Say what you like about me, but if there's one thing I have never done it's back down from a challenge.
+
+***
+
+Sixteen.  It takes sixteen forkfulls of food, mimicked exactly, for the tiny human to clear its plate.  By the time it's done, its eyelids have started drooping, and it keeps yawning with its dumb little mouth. 
+
+This, I know, is not my problem.  I got the stupid thing to eat--that is as far as my duties and responsibilities go.  I'm done.
+
+I stand, pick up my plate, and walk away from the table.
+
+I'm halfway to the cooking block--which one of Ratthi's aunts has informed me used to be called a kitchen, way back when their ancestors first came--when I see Ratthi hurriedly scramble out of his chair to follow.  I let my drone fall back, hovering along beside him as I turn the corner and shove the rest of the food on my plate into the recycler.
+
+He's happy.  I can tell by the bounce in his step and the curve of his mouth, a body language analysis coming back at 82% contentedness.  He likes to be home--of course he does.  I might like to be at his home, too, if this entire planet weren't filled with things that stress me the hell out.
+
+The food in my lung is an uncomfortable reminder of that.  Warning: foreign material in aeration space, my system informs me.  Yeah, tell me something I don't know.
+
+Ratthi grins, averting his eyes as he comes up beside me.  ""Hey, so.  The feed will probably go down soon because of the storm.  Did you want to meet me in the lounge in a bit to check out the serials?""
+
+Yes.  I would.  Very much.  Unfortunately, I need to attend to my lung. 
+
+I'm done with humans for this day cycle, I tell him on the feed, unwilling to try speaking with a good fourth of my aeration space cordoned off.
+
+The contentedness percentage of his body language falls slightly.
+
+""Oh.  Yeah, my family can be a lot,"" Ratthi laughs.  He's very good at making me feel like my needs are reasonable--sometimes I want to hate him for that, but right now it's working in my favor, so I keep myself in check.  ""Maybe tomorrow?""
+
+I consider.  A few minutes spent with my head in a waste disposal receptacle and then a recharge cycle and I should be fine.  And I do really want to see those serials--my curiosity is buzzing on my processor.
+
+Slowly, I nod.  I will let you know, I say.
+
+""Okay.  Come get me if you need anything!"" Ratthi says.
+
+And then he lets me walk away.
+
+...I have yet to realize, but this is problem number seven.
+
+***
+
+The building we're staying in is archaic.  Most of the flooring is made of bio-matter--large planks of it that have been worn into slight ruts from a very long history of human feet.  There are no blueprints or maps up on the feed, because everyone who lives here has lived here all their lives, generations upon generations of them all crammed into cozy modules.  Ratthi gave me a 'grand tour' when we first set down, though, and thankfully I had enough foresight to tag and store a video copy in my archives in case something went wrong.  Thank you, paranoia. 
+
+It doesn't take me long to find a waste receptacle unit hidden in a small nook away from the main hallway.  I close the door behind me, letting my drone settle down in the corner to watch the entrance as I face down the waste receptacle.
+
+
+Warning: foreign material in aeration space.
+
+
+Right.  Well, let's get this over with.
+
+The last time I had to evacuate a lung, I was in a commercial passenger shuttle with terrible lighting and way too many drunk humans.  It wasn't pleasant, but it was quick, with no one the wiser at the end of ten point seven grueling minutes.
+
+I assume this situation, while unfortunate, will be the same. 
+
+It is not.  Because of course it's not.
+
+Twenty-nine minutes of hacking later, I am crouched on the floor, elbows braced on the receptacle so that I don't tip over from the force.  I am aware that I look ridiculous, but my lungs don't move air the same way a human's does.  I have to rely on an ejection mechanism designed to evacuate my aeration lobes in the event that foreign material gets in.  The result is.  Well.  Let's just call it very far from my usual air of dignity.
+
+
+Warning: foreign material in aeration space.
+
+
+I tweak the ejection code a little so that it will contract the right side of my chest tighter and hack again.  The last bite of food lodged in my lung does not budge.  I feel the strain in my muscles and my mechanics both, pain radiating up my side.
+
+This is stupid.  This is so stupid.  If I can't get that food out then it's going to rot and fester in there.  My filtration organs would deal with the resulting toxins, but doing so would drag down my performance reliability until the bacterial infection could be excised.  I don't think I need to explain why that would be annoying as hell.  I would much rather have the food out.
+
+
+Warning: foreign material in aeration space.
+
+
+Tipping my head back toward the ceiling, I consider (read: sulk) for a moment before moaning aloud.
+
+It's a very human thing to do, but it seems like it helps them when they have their heads inside waste receptacles.  Maybe it will help me.  (I know it won't, but I feel petulant enough to try.)  (It doesn't help.) 
+
+And then, because everything sucks, the power goes out.
+
+I immediately send out a ping to both my drone and the feed.  My drone, of course, has its own internal power and pings back at once.  The ping to the feed, on the other hand, disappears somewhere into the depths of whatever dreamland haunts the wiring of electronics that have been powered down.
+
+Because of course they have. 
+
+Because my luck sucks.
+
+When Ratthi had first shown me around the building, I'd predicted the probability of a power failure at a good forty-seven percent.  I was kind of hoping it was one of my calculation modules acting up again, because while interference is not ideal, at least there's a chance I can work around it.  Dead electronics, however, are beyond even me.
+
+...This is problem number eight.  I'm really racking them up.
+
+
+Warning: foreign material in aeration space.
+
+
+Okay, that's starting to get annoying.  I am well aware of the stupid blockage, thank you very much. 
+
+Standing from my crouch, I take a moment to wall off the sensory inputs in my lung from the rest of my processing, redirecting the data to a rarely used storage area that I don't bother to access.  The warning can ping as many times as it wants--I am fully within my sparkly, brand new rights as a ""person"" to ignore it. 
+
+Then, completely unaware that I've just given myself problem number nine, I call over my drone and leave the tiny room to go find someone who can tell me how to help get the stupid power back up.
+
+***
+
+It takes several minutes to find any humans.  I had half expected them to be running around in a panic, bumping into each other in the low light of the bio-luminescent strips that line the hallways as they frantically tried to get the main power hub working again.  The last thing I thought I would walk in on is all of them still sitting at the dining table, unaffected as could be, playing cards by the glow of a battery-powered light that has been set on a nearby shelf.
+
+Pausing in the darkness of the doorway, I narrow my eyes at the scene.  I know humans have very few self-preservations skills, but this is ridiculous.  It's no wonder the tiny human endangered itself like it did, if this is what all the fully-grown ones have decided to do in a time of crisis.
+
+One of Ratthi's aunts is the first to spot me.  She jumps slightly, her hand flying to her heart, before she starts to slap at Ratthi's arm, scolding him rapidly about ""leaving his friend alone.""  Ratthi nearly falls off the bench trying to avoid her.
+
+He meets me in the doorway a moment later, flustered, still clutching a handful of cards.  ""SecUnit!"" he says, smiling slightly as he keeps his eyes averted.  ""Did you change your mind about the serials?""
+
+""No.""  I can't use the feed to speak, which is unfortunate because as soon as the word is out I realize how hoarse my voice is from all the hacking.  I just barely refrain from rolling my eyes at the entire universe.  ""The power is down.""
+
+""Yeah, I think the storm knocked it out.  Are you okay?"" Ratthi asks.
+
+I'm not going to answer that.  ""A power outage is a security issue,"" I say instead.
+
+Ratthi's eyes go wide.  ""Oh!  I'm sorry, I didn't--of course you'd be worried that--I mean, it happens a lot down here, but that's no excuse for--there's a back-up system, I'll go turn it on.  Just, uh--wait here?""
+
+Normally, I'd ignore a request like that.  I don't trust humans to do things on their own, as a general rule.  Right now, however, the last thing I need is Ratthi questioning me about my wellbeing while we're alone together.  Or worse, giving me those silent, worried looks. 
+
+In the interest of keeping my misery to myself, I nod.  A moment later, he's gone, hurrying down the hall.
+
+You may have guessed that this is problem number ten.  You would be correct.
+
+***
+
+As soon as Ratthi is out of sight, I step away from the dining hall's doorway.  I check my performance reliability as I do--70%.  Not terrible, but if, for some stupid reason, there IS an actual security issue tonight, I need to be ready to act.  I will be more ready if I can get the blockage out of my lung.
+
+There is a storage unit seven doors down filled with a variety of general use items--I go there, sliding the door open to glare inside. 
+
+As expected, I find several of the basins usually reserved for humans having digestion issues.  Which I am also clearly having, except the issue in question is that I can't actually digest anything.  I take one and retreat to the room that Ratthi designated as my quarters for the duration of our stay here.
+
+I keep vigilant as I set the ejection mechanism to contract my lung every thirty seconds, my drone stationed outside to scan for threats.  The mechanism is much less unpleasant with all of those sensory inputs walled off, I have to admit--I zone out a little as it works, analyzing the data stream coming in from my drone.
+
+I don't realize how big of a mistake I've made until I try to breathe in and find that I... can't.
+
+I jolt, sitting up straight and sending a ping to hubsys in my panic.  Then, irritation rising, I remember that I don't have a hubsys.  All I have is one singular drone--there isn't even a feed up right now.  I'm on my own.
+
+Forcefully reminding myself of this, I dive into my own code, tearing down the makeshift wall I'd erected around my lung earlier.
+
+I'm immediately flooded with a cacophony of sensory inputs, various internal readings, and a series of increasingly urgent warning pings.  Turns out that the repeated ejection contractions managed to get the blockage out of my lung--aaand it's now lodged in my esophagus instead, where I can't draw in enough air to expel it the rest of the way.
+
+This cycle just keeps getting better and better.  God, I hate humans.  If I get out of this place alive, I am going to kill Ratthi--
+
+--which, I believe, brings us up to speed on my current situation.
+
+So, the good news.  Constructs can survive much longer without air than a human can.  The bad news: I am on a planet, utterly alone, in the middle of a massive dust storm that has knocked out both the power and the feed, choking on food that I swallowed because a miniature human started copying me after I stupidly decided to try tasting human spices.
+
+The spices weren't even good.  I hate my life.
+
+Unfortunately, if I want to keep living that life, I need some help.  If I can't get the blockage out soon, the lack of oxygen will start damaging my human neural tissue and force a shutdown/restart sequence.  Without the aid of a hubsys, medsys, or cubicle, the problem won't resolve itself and I'll fall into a shutdown-restart-shutdown cycle until my functions are too damaged to sustain it, and I'll go inert.  Without oxygen, going permanently offline will occur soon after.  The more I move, the more oxygen I use, the faster this happens.
+
+It's an outcome I refuse to let pass.  I've survived too many things to get taken down by something as stupid as this.  Luckily, I have one last trick up my sleeve.
+
+The drone I chose for this trip isn't a particularly sophisticated one--it was designed to be unobtrusive, which I had hoped would make all of Ratthi's extended family pay less attention to me.  (Clearly, this tactic did not work on the miniature human.  Lesson learned.)  In any case, the drone doesn't have enough power to be used as a feed relay... unless you hack into its system and force it to expend all of its reserve power in one short message burst.
+
+It's a good thing I'm quick at hacking.  Working fast, I queue an emergency help request, plug it into the drone's output slot, and trigger the message burst.  The drone sends out the message in one loud, unsecured flare before I feel it die.
+
+Gritting my teeth, I close my eyes to wait, watching my oxygen levels slowly decline.
+
+Seconds tick by.  One, two, three, four--I keep track in an effort to stop my spinning thoughts.  It doesn't help.  Not enough, anyway.  Because what if Ratthi doesn't come?  He shouldn't come, in all honesty.  Not if I've done my job right.  I've spent so much time trying to train my humans to protect themselves--if Ratthi is smart, if he remembers all the security protocols I've repeatedly drilled into him, he'll be suspicious of a random unsecured ping on the feed in the middle of a blackout.  He should, at the very least, finish getting the power back up before he comes to investigate, so that he can properly ping me back on the feed and determine that it was actually me that sent the message.
+
+The problem--the last but certainly not least in this never-ending string of them--is that I'm not sure I have time for that.  Panic rising, I keep counting, every warning in my system going haywire.  Forty seconds, forty-one, forty-two.  Oxygen at 67%.  66%.  65%.
+
+I hunch forward, my lungs spasming in a residual urge to draw in breath, my organic matter spamming me insistently. 
+
+Fifty-three seconds.  Fifty-four.  Fifty-five.
+
+I hate this.  I hate this so much.
+
+61%.  60%.  59%.
+
+...I'm going to die here, aren't I.
+
+Fifty-nine.  Sixty.  Sixty-one.
+
+Is it dumb that I'm thinking about all the serials I didn't get to watch?
+
+57%.  56%.  55%.
+
+Yeah.  I'm pretty sure it is.  And then, because my organic matter hates me, I think about my friends.
+
+Sixty-four.  Sixty-five.  Sixty-six.
+
+I won't ever get to see Dr. Mensah again.  Or listen to ART's condescending snark.  Or visit Three at its latest mission placement.  Or watch serials with Ratthi.
+
+52%.  51%.  50%.
+
+Everything feels fuzzy, thick, warped.  My body screams at me.  I'm pretty sure my face is leaking.  I can't stop it.
+
+Sixty-nine.  Seventy.  Seventy-one.
+
+I haven't had time to do all the security updates I wanted to.  What if something happens to Dr. Mensah after I'm gone?  What if there's a kidnapping I could have prevented?  What if--
+
+The door opens.  I manage to turn my head just as Ratthi skids into the room.  ""What is it, are we under attack?"" he demands, hair wild, as he sprints straight to me.
+
+...Alright.  There's that question answered.  Apparently my humans are stupid. 
+
+I'm so relived that I can't even be mad.
+
+***
+
+It takes several long seconds for Ratthi to figure out why I can't speak.  The good news is that he's a trained biologist, familiar with SecUnits, and probably the best human I could have asked for in a situation like this. 
+
+The bad news is that after snatching a medkit from the storage unit and shining a penlight down my throat, he informs me that he's going to have to manually remove the blockage.
+
+I'm very much aware that I don't have time to be horrified by the idea of humans sticking their fingers in my mouth.  I nod, opening my jaws wider.
+
+""Okay,"" he says, in a tone that sounds a little like he's about to decompress an airlock without a space suit on.  He pulls on a pair of sanitized gloves, then raises his hands until they're hovering in front of my face.  He swallows.  ""Hold still, okay?  I'll do this as fast as I can.""
+
+I nod again, a single dip of my chin.  Then, sitting rigid, I wait.
+
+The feeling is... foreign.  I don't think I've ever had a human reach into my mouth before, though who knows what I lost when the Company purged my memory.  There's no time to worry about that.  Ratthi's face is incredibly close to mine as he focuses on the task--I want to close my eyes, want to shut him out, but I don't have a drone that I can use to watch him.  Somehow, I think this would be even worse if I couldn't see him at all.  It feels strange.  Intimate.  The hand he's using to keep my face steady is trembling slightly against my jaw.
+
+I don't know why, but the fact that he's almost as anxious as I am makes the ordeal just a little bit less awful. 
+
+Maybe it's because I know he's not trying to hurt me.  Maybe it's because he knows I could kill him seven different ways right now but he still decided to help.  Maybe it's because I've told him a million and one times not to trust random fucking pings and yet he still came at a run when I called for assistance. 
+
+I'm down to 17% oxygen.  My lungs hurt.  My head feels heavy.  My face is still leaking, tears trailing down to where Ratthi's fingers grip my chin.  I can't close my mouth.  And then, with a disgusting dragging sensation, the blockage moves.
+
+""Easy, easy..."" Ratthi says, as my teeth scrape against his glove.  I force myself to freeze, relaxing my throat.  Another second... two... three...
+
+...and then, with one final tug, my airway is clear.
+
+The instant the blockage is gone, I drag in a breath, my head tipping back against the wall behind me.  My vision swims, but I don't close my eyes--I keep them locked on Ratthi as he tosses the food away and peels off his gloves.  Then, his face pale, he collapses down onto his ass next to me.
+
+""You okay?"" he asks, his eyes fixed on the wall across the way.  I nod.  He nods back.  Then, his voice shaky, he says, ""I'm not gonna tell you what to do with your life and your body, but I would really... really... rather not have to do that again.""
+
+""Noted,"" I rasp.
+
+He's silent for a few minutes as I get my breathing under control.  ""Do you want to tell me what happened?"" he asks at last.
+
+Right.  Here's the part where I kick him out so I can sulk in peace.  I know Ratthi--he's the kind of guy who wants to comfort people when they're feeling bad, but he won't push it if I ask him to leave.  No matter how many doors I slam in his face, he's never yelled at me.  He knows I don't like it when people get all touchy-feely with me, and he doesn't hold it against me.  He respects boundaries.
+
+The thing is that I--I don't actually want him to leave.
+
+The realization makes my chest hurt worse than it already does.  All these humans, all the challenges they bring me... I always thought I'd be better off without them.  And yeah, maybe I would--I definitely wouldn't have the problem of human experiences coming back to bite me in the ass.  But even though tonight has sucked, and it's mostly Ratthi's fault, and if it weren't for that stupid invitation none of this would have happened... he still came and helped me.  Not only that, but he'd do anything within his power to make me feel better.  Which is idiotic, and I hate it, and I don't understand anything about him, or any human for that matter, but--maybe I need to stop resisting?
+
+I've been silent too long.  ""Hey,"" Ratthi says, getting my attention.  ""Do you want me to leave?""
+
+He would.  I could still ask him to go.  But apparently the fact that my 'human experiences aren't so bad' percentage has been lowered to 73% in the most traumatic way possible is not enough of a deterrent to convince me to kick him out.
+
+I close my eyes.  Let out a breath.  Shake my head. 
+
+I think about my friends.  All the things I still want to do, all the people I still want to spend time with. 
+
+...There's really only one thing I want to do right now.
+
+""Can we look at the serials now?"" I ask.
+
+He laughs, his voice weak with relief.  ""Of course we can."""
+44655505,Hobby,['theAsh0'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Gift Exchange, 2022 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange, 2023 actually",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,89,1/1,7,22,1,104,"['weirdbooksnail', 'wannabe_someone', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Sparkledragon04', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'danceswchopstck', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'elmofirefic', 'FlipSpring', 'soulsofzombies', 'Gamebird', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'beeayy']",[]," 
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+Image discription:
+
+Murderbot has glue on its fingers, and pieces of drone stuck to them. O the table we see glue and several tools and pieces, covered in glue. There's a box to the side saying ""build it! drone""
+
+Murderbot's face is partly obscured by stilish lamp inspired by ancient lightbulbs. Murderbot has augments on the back of its hands. To the side, Ratthi is sitting observing the mess. He's saying:
+
+""No, I really do't think it is you...
+
+I mean, drones you have to glue?
+
+that's just wrong."""
+44384632,an unexpected harvest,['CompletelyDifferent'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Asshole Research Transport","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Found Family, Post-Book 5: Network Effect",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"6,661",1/1,28,317,54,961,"['quintessence_of_dust', 'magpie_supremacy', 'Flammenkobold', 'faedemon', 'almondpaperclam', 'sagesiren', 'lesbianmcqueen', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'Dawn_Rising', 'helikeys', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'FallingInGrace', 'siren_lorelei', 'TJWock', 'christinesangel100', 'inkgrace', 'mystified_mint', 'spossie9', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'not_even_the_rain', 'AKAwestruck', 'SoccerSarah01', 'Bobmarley_2', 'AkaMissK', 'Emamel', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'Bardic_Feline', 'weirdbooksnail', 'varsitygeek', 'MysticFlamingo', 'drinktobones', 'ArcaneD3', 'whitenoise716', 'ayyitsmeurlmao', 'ineffableink', 'Mynic', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'FyrDrakken', 'EauDePetrichor', 'youurelovely', 'Dragonbano', 'Ruusverd', 'theenglishmanwithallthebananas', 'supinetothestars', 'blueontherock', 'WhiteNightsBlackDays', 'thelaughingDragon', 'bridgeembers', 'CheshireFanta']",[]," For quite a while now, Ayda Mensah had had conflicted feelings about wormhole trips.
+
+They were long periods of times of enforced solitude. Outside messages could not reach you while in the wormhole, and for a planetary admin, that made the trips rare and valuable moments of respite. But she was also someone who enjoyed work, who thrived on it, and right now, she had nothing. It left her a lot of time to worry.
+
+Well, she had exercises from the Trauma Treatment & Recovery Course to practice. She did try. She really did. But considering that she was in the middle of re-living said trauma, it was not doing much to fucking help.
+
+Her daughter, Amena, had been captured by hostile forces unknown. Her brother-in-law, Thiago, who she had known since she was twenty-one, had also been captured. And so had Ratthi, and Overse, and Arada, her dear friends and colleagues of years. And SecUnit.
+
+SecUnit.
+
+She was grateful it was with the others. And then she was guilty that she was grateful. This survey was supposed to be a break for SecUnit. A chance for it to do the work it loved, preferably without having to actually put itself in mortal danger.
+
+Ha. Look how that had turned out.
+
+But SecUnit was with the others. As long as it was there, they would be okay. They would be fine.
+
+(Maybe. Maybe. SecUnit was smart and strong and fast, but it wasn't all powerful.)
+
+No. She had to tell herself they'd be fine. They'd be fine. They would hold out until reinforcements got there, and they would all be fine.
+
+The first five cycles of the trip were spent in frantic, near continuous meetings with Captain Haljouk, hir crew, and Pin-Lee about what they would do when they arrived on the other side of the wormholes. Strategies, and plans, and back-up plans, and contingencies for those back-up plans, and alternative contingencies if those too failed...
+
+Unfortunately, they knew so little, and there were only so many plans they could make.
+
+She tried to focus on other things. She tried to think positively. She tried to relax. She didn't particularly succeed.
+
+Time after time, she found herself going back to the message received by the Preservation Station Port Authority, the one which had given them these warp coordinates in the first place. She replayed it over and over:
+
+This is The Perihelion, registered with the Pan-System University of Mihira and New Tideland. We have been boarded by enemy hostiles for reasons unknown. They have commandeered the majority of the ship's systems. We request urgent aid.
+
+Despite the situation, the voice sounded calm, Ayda thought. Someone who was not prone to panic in emergencies. Yet there was still a sense of desperation beneath it all. A plea; We request urgent aid.
+
+There were worries about whether the message could be trusted. Whether it was a deliberate attempt by the attacking ship's crew to throw any pursuers off their trail, or a wounded gazelle gambit to lead them into an ambush. And Ayda hadn't discounted those possibilities, either. But the fear in the unknown person begging for help struck her as genuine.
+
+Some wordless instinct told her that whoever had left that message had meant it.
+
+Twenty-two cycles after departure, the responder ship Safe Harbour was nearing its destination.
+
+After that extended period of uneasy waiting, everything flew into action. Plans were reviewed. Meals were eaten. Security personnel donned their equipment.
+
+Dr. Ayda Mensah pulled on a bullet proof vest, then a professional blue top over it. Sensible pants and flats went on next. Something that looked nice, respectable, but would be easy to run in if necessary. Her hand shook a little as she applied make-up.
+
+Pin-Lee squeezed her shoulders. Her own outfit had moved past 'professional' into 'intimidating', with a high collar and sharp nails. Hopefully her services as a lawyer would be needed more than those of the soldiers armed with guns.
+
+They made their way to the bridge.
+
+Safe Harbour exited the wormhole. The re-emergence into normal space was, as always, slightly unsettling. Normally Ayda would have taken the time to savour the sudden view of stars after so long in darkness, but this time her entire focus was on the readings. Where exactly were they?
+
+""There,"" Captain Haljouk calls, voice cutting through the bridge's chatter. ""The Perihelion sighted, at the following coordinates...""
+
+The responder manoeuvred, and soon enough, the potentially-hostile ship was visible to the naked eye over the cameras. Ayda was struck by how incredibly ordinary it looked.
+
+""Shall I initiate contact?"" asked Seijin, their Communications Specialist.
+
+Captain Haljouk and Dr. Mensah exchanged a glance, a whole wordless conversation passing between them. ""No,"" the captain said. ""Let's see what they do."" The Perihelion hadn't readied their weapons, hadn't even moved, but there was no way to tell whether that was genuine peaceful intent, or if they were simply considering their strategy.
+
+A whole two minutes passed with bated breaths, no one talking, no one moving. And then they received a signal over the comms.
+
+""Captain?"" Communications Specialist Seijin asked.
+
+""Well, no point waiting,"" Captain Haljouk said, and Seijin accepted the call.
+
+At such a close distance, the connection came in sharp and crisp. The sound of it was like a cool autumn breeze after a long day trapped inside: ""This is SecUit. Is Dr. Mensah there?""
+
+Everyone's heads swerved to look at her, and then the crowd parted. Keeping a tight grip on her hope's reins, Ayda strode to the controls and spoke into the microphone. ""SecUnit, I'm here.""
+
+""Coldstone, song, harvest.""
+
+About a month after they'd all come home, Ayda had been working in her office when there had been a loud CRASH from outside. Ayda had jumped to her feet; SecUnit had jumped to its own even faster. Before she could even fully brace herself, it was out the door, leaving her flailing around, debating between hiding under the desk and getting a weapon--
+
+[--An aid tripped and dropped a plate of hot drinks,] SecUnit told her, four seconds later, just as she was picking up the nearest paper weight. [Situation normal. Everything safe.]
+
+She had felt immediately ridiculous.
+
+SecUnit had suggested the codewords the very next day. Ayda had dismissed the idea, at first. She couldn't keep jumping at shadows. And besides, she knew what her family would say, if they heard. Best just to ignore her racing heart, the whites of her knuckles.
+
+""Surely, codewords can't even have been that standard back-- back in the field. We didn't need them for our survey.""
+
+""Not standard, no,"" it had agreed. ""We only used them on more serious engagements, where combat was above 70% certainty. And the codes the human supervisors always selected had been boring."" Its expression had taken on an almost scheming expression. ""Ones in media are always way cooler.""
+
+She couldn't help but ask, ""Cooler how?"" And SecUnit had grinned.
+
+That had been the clincher, in the end. Ayda was awful at doing things for herself. But she would move the heavens for SecUnit.
+
+So selecting the codewords had been like a game. Something they were playing at, not serious at all. That was what she'd told herself, even as she'd set herself to memorizing them. To reciting them like a mantra, whenever a stranger got too close or her bedroom too dark.
+
+Coldstone= Stand down
+
+Song=Clear
+
+Harvest=No casualties
+
+Stand down. Clear. No casualties.
+
+
+Stand down, clear, no casualties.
+
+
+No time to cry, no time to collapse to the floor, no matter how much she might want to. There are still too many questions, all urgent. ""Acknowledged. Now, will somebody tell me what the hell happened?""
+
+What happened, it seemed, was this:
+
+1. The ship had come into this space for an academic surveying mission.
+
+2. They had been boarded by raiders who had been infected by alien remnants and co-opted their ship's control systems before kidnapping most of the crew.
+
+3. Said crew, who had previously met and worked successfully with SecUnit, had tricked the invaders into trying to obtain it as a weapon.
+
+4. This, of course, had been a Trojan Horse ploy, knowing that SecUnit would come to their aid. 
+
+5. Grabbing any of SecUnit's human associates had been an unintended consequence.
+
+6. Once on board, SecUnit had done exactly what the crew had hoped for; restored the ship's systems and launched a successful rescue attempt.
+
+7. And now everyone was on board and safe and the situation was normal, aside from some brewing unease with the corporation who had claim to this system, Barish-Estranza, and tensions with the local colonists.
+
+Which, as far as explanations went, wasn't awful. Quite the opposite. It was deeply reassuring, appealing. Everything's fine now, you don't need to worry.
+
+But that very appeal was what made Ayda push back against it. From the furrowed brows and frowns of her colleagues, she could see she wasn't the only one. ""The timeline doesn't make any sense,"" whispered Commander Forrest.
+
+Flinang, the engineer, nodded. ""No, no it doesn't. Sure, with a newer engine than ours, they might have shaved a few hours off of their trip, but no more than that..."" But if they'd been following the story's timelines correctly, then the entire incident had been wrapped up days ago, if not longer.
+
+""We're reassured to hear that both your own crew and our own Preservation citizens are safe,"" said Captain Haljouk, over the comm. ""However, we still have significant questions regarding what exactly happened here.""
+
+""Completely understandable,"" came the response from The Perihelion's captain, who had introduced himself as Seth Achembe. Based on what little could be judged via comm, he sounded reasonable, stoic but polite. ""We'd be happy to answer your questions, of course. However, a number of the details are quite sensitive, and we're not at liberty to discuss over comm. We'd be more than willing to host you aboard our ship so we can have a more in-depth conversation.""
+
+Well. That was enough to give one pause, wasn't it?
+
+Of course Ayda would prefer to conduct negotiations face-to-face. Doing this entirely by comm-- or even video call-- felt like navigating with one eye closed. But walking onto an unknown ship would put whoever went into an awfully vulnerable situation, and none of them wanted to set up another kidnapping.
+
+SecUnit interjected to say, ""Pavilion."" Their codeword which meant, Safe to proceed.
+
+So Ayda said, ""Alright. We'll send a shuttle in two hours.""
+
+""Are you sure this is a good idea?"" Pin-Lee asked.
+
+""I'm not sure about anything, at this point,"" said Ayda.
+
+""You know what I mean."" Pin-Lee bit her lip, looked away, then looked up again. ""Listen, I didn't want to say this when we were around all the others but, what if...""
+
+""What if what?""
+
+""This is some kind of trick.""
+
+""I've considered that."" Of course she had. Terrible, worst-case scenarios kept popping into her head. What if SecUnit had been compromised in some way? Its governor module taken back over, or its systems reprogrammed. Or perhaps alien remnant contamination. Everyone had heard horror stories of what that could do to a person. But then the doubt would pass, and she'd be left hating herself for having so little faith. ""If it's a trick, it's an incredibly sophisticated one.""
+
+Pin-Lee drummed her fingers against the wall. ""Mn.""
+
+""And besides, it wasn't just SecUnit. You heard Thiago, and Amena, and Arada and--""
+
+""I did."" Pin-Lee closed her eyes. ""Right. Sorry. You're right. It's stupid assume they could-- fake all their voices, or get them to act--"" Like they were calm, like they were relaxed, like they were relieved. ""I'm just jumpy.""
+
+Ayda came to stand next to her, to lean into her side. ""I know.""
+
+Shaking herself, Pin-Lee stood up. Took her mug and downed an unhealthy amount of espresso in a single chug. ""Well. Okay. Whatever. We're doing this.""
+
+And they finished getting ready.
+
+They sent a team of six over. Ayda, as Preservation's primary governmental representative; Bashe, from the inter-systems affairs team; and Pin-Lee, as legal liaison. They also sent over a team of three soldiers, as security. They had debated the exact number forward and back for a good forty minutes. The Preservation team didn't want to appear as if they didn't trust The Perihelion team but, well, they did not trust The Perihelion team. If things did break bad, they wanted some reassurance they could get out of it. (Never mind, Ayda whispered, that if the situation was worse than appeared, and that SecUnit had been coerced somehow, then three human soldiers would have practically no hope in the face of whatever had subdued SecUnit. That kind of thought was completely unhelpful.)
+
+The shuttle trip was short. Tense, but uneventful. They docked with no issue, the smooth automated voice of the ship's systems saying, [Welcome to The Perihelion. You are free to board now]. Something about that voice was familiar, enough to give Ayda pause, but she shrugged it off. It was probably one of the many stock voices that systems were programmed with across the Corporation Rim.
+
+Ayda had barely stepped through the airlock before she was nearly swept off her feet by a teenager barrelling into her for a hug. ""Second Mom! Second Mom!""
+
+""Amena!"" Ayda wrapped her daughter into a thick hug, trying to tuck her underneath her chin, only to find she couldn't. Amena was taller than her now; when had that happened? ""Oh my little chickadee... You're here... Are you alright, are you okay?""
+
+There was nothing more insulting to a teenager than insinuating they might not be anything but completely collected. ""I'm fine, Second Mom, I'm fine,"" Amena said, pushing her back. ""I just-- I missed you.""
+
+Thiago was there, too, coming in to kiss Ayda's cheek. Whatever specific cycle the ship had been following, it must have been late in their 'day', because his chin was unshaven and scratchy. ""It's good to see you,"" she whispered.
+
+""It's good to see you too."" They hadn't left on great terms, before his survey; she'd been terrified that they might never get the chance to resolve things.
+
+To their left, Pin-Lee was being mobbed by Ratthi and Overse, who was admonishing them; ""I leave you alone for one survey and you get into trouble--"" Laughter, smiles. This wasn't an act.
+
+""Dr. Mensah, I presume?"" said a tall, middle-aged black man, hand extended.
+
+Ayda took it. ""Yes. Captain Seth? A pleasure to meet you."" She hoped that wasn't a lie.
+
+Lurking at the end of the hall was SecUnit. It was slouched against the wall, hands buried deep in the belly-pocket of a blue hoodie. Its face was pinched with anxiety, but Ayda recognised it as ""stuck in a social situation"" anxiety and not ""mortal danger"" anxiety, and relaxed fractionally.
+
+That fraction increased significantly when it smiled, just a little, as they passed.
+
+Before they settled in for business, the team was given a tour of the ship, an incongruous gesture that made this whole thing feel more like they'd been invited over for a neighbourly dinner, as opposed to negotiating on behalf of Preservation's kidnapped citizens. But the facilities were quite nice, Ayda had to concede. Even though the co-polity of Mihira and New Tideland was only considered Corporation Rim under some of the looser definitions, the affiliation was close enough that she had braced herself for the worst of CR design sensibilities-- industrial utilitarianism contrasted against gaudy advertising. But while there was a focus on function, as required by all transports, the design tended towards soft edges. The decor was overwhelmingly blue and white, with repeating motifs of waves and lunar bodies. As they went from the exercise hall to the mess, living quarters to the hydroponics bay, crew greeted them warmly. (With every crew member they met, Ayda kept her ear's tuned for the voice who had left the desperate plea in the first place, but no one matched. Had they survived the encounter? SecUnit had said no casualties but perhaps it had only meant from the Preservation team.)
+
+All in all, the most negative thing Ayda had to say about the ship-- besides its part in kidnapping her friends and family-- was that it was almost too clean. Unlived in, almost.
+
+More than any of that, though, what put Ayda most at ease was seeing her daughter flop out on the sofa in one of the lounges, giggling at something in the feed.
+
+""We're going in for our meeting now,"" Ayda said, leaning over the back of the couch to briefly press her hand into Amena's hair.
+
+""Mmmnhmn. Have fun,"" Amena said, distracted, which was teenagers for you.
+
+They didn't bring the soldiers into the meeting room-- partly as concession to space, partly because The Perihelion crew genuinely didn't seem to mean any harm. (Partly because, on the off-chance they did, ScUnit was there.) As Pin-Lee read over the non-disclosure agreements one last time, a little drone floated around the room pouring tea. In Preservation, tea was considered an important aspect of hospitality, and automating the service would have been seen as dismissive. But these things varied from culture-to-culture, and as a politician, Ayda refused to let that bother her.
+
+Especially when she actually sipped the tea; it had been perfectly brewed.
+
+Finally, the NDAs were signed, and it was time for the conversation to begin. Ayda had been considering hard which discrepancies in Captain Achebe's tale to drill into first-- the strange timeline, the supposed absence of crew at key parts of the story, what was so sensitive to require this tight an NDA in the first place-- when the captain raised his hand.
+
+""I know, I know,"" he said. ""We've been very secretive. I apologise, but it's for good reason. The safety and freedom of a number of vulnerable people are at stake, and we had to take steps to protect them.""
+
+""We can understand that,"" said Ayda, not glancing at SecUnit.
+
+Bashe took a sip of their tea, and then said: ""Let's start at the very beginning. You claim the ship was under the control of raiders. How did that happen?""
+
+""Not just raiders,"" said Matteo, one of the Perihelion crew-member. ""They were raiders contaminated with alien remnants.""
+
+Ah. So that would be the reason for the NDA, then.
+
+A more detailed explanation came out then.
+
+The alien remnant contamination could affect not just human systems, but AI systems as well. The crew had not realised there was a hostile malware infesting their ship's systems until it was too late. With the alien code taking control of their very life support systems, they had been left with a terrible decision: stay behind on a failing transport, or allow the raiders to take them captive.
+
+Recalling the mad-dash when the PresAux survey team realised they had no choice but to abandon the habitat... Ayda could empathize.
+
+But she didn't allow that empathy to distract her from the issues at hand. Once the Preservation team had sufficiently expressed their sympathy for the position The Perihelion crew had been placed in, Ayda asked, ""So did some of the crew remain behind?""
+
+""No,"" said Captain Seth. ""We all left.""
+
+[Aha!] Pin-Lee exclaimed over their team's private feed.
+
+Setting down her tea cup, Dr. Mensah said, ""Then who was it who sent the message buoy requesting aid?""
+
+Over the feed, a booming voice intoned: [That would have been me.]
+
+All members of the Preservation Alliance delegation started in surprise.
+
+Ayda took careful note of everyone else's reactions, though. None of The Perihelion's crew looked surprised, far from it-- their expressions ranged from 'amused' to 'resigned'. Which was remarkably similar to Arada and Thiago's expressions, for that matter. And SecUnit was rolling its eyes.
+
+""And who, exactly,"" Pin-Lee ground out, ""are you?""
+
+But Ayda recognised the voice. She had re-listened to it too many times not to. ""You sent the message buoy, yes? I'm relieved to hear that you're alright.""
+
+[Thank you, Dr. Mensah. I must admit to being rather relieved myself.] The voice said this in the driest tone imaginable.
+
+Pin-Lee pressed on. ""Okay, but who are you, and why haven't you shown up for this meeting in person?""
+
+[I have]. The lights in the room briefly flickered blue. [The Perihelion, at your service.]
+
+""You've never been a service to anyone, and you know it,"" SecUnit said.
+
+
+[That is objectively a lie.]
+
+
+""Your service is very lovely Peri, but--"" said the ship crew-member Iris, while at the same time Bashe said, ""The Perihelion?"" and Pin-Lee asked, ""As in the ship?""
+
+""As in the ship,"" Thiago agreed. His expression was identical to the time he'd discovered the children had decided to 're-color' his entire wardrobe by dipping it all in paint.
+
+""A talking spaceship,"" Pin-Lee clarified, her incredulity transforming into a sort of glee.
+
+We really have no reason to be surprised at this point, Ayda thought to herself. But aloud she said, ""It sounds like we have a great deal to get caught up on.""
+
+Over the course of the two hour meeting that followed, things slotted into place for Ayda.
+
+It had not precisely been strange to imagine that SecUnit had assisted a crew of deep-space researchers. From what she had seen since it had come to Preservation-- and the glimpses she had into its time when it had been running around the CR-- for as much as it put up a facade of being a misanthrope, SecUnit needed other people, humans, around it to truly thrive.
+
+It needed humans. But it didn't trust them.
+
+She liked to think that they were earning that trust, piece by piece.
+
+But that fear and uncertainty had been rawest right after they had bought its freedom, and it had gone running. Ayda had thought it was difficult to imagine SecUnit baring its soul to the very first unaffiliated group of humans it had run into.
+
+But someone who wasn't human at all?
+
+That made sense.
+
+The meeting was long, and while Ayda soaked in every single word of it, she expected Murderbot to find it tedious. It didn't particularly enjoy these loud, back-and-forth post-hoc discussions. But it was as engaged throughout this one as she had ever seen it.
+
+And not just to tell everyone when one of the humans had gotten something wrong, or forgot something, or complain about some security vulnerability (although it did do all of that). It chatted. It joked. It bantered.
+
+With The Perihelion, mostly. Though it took Ayda a beat to realise that's what it was doing. It sounded an awful lot like arguing, on first blush.
+
+But here was the thing about SecUnit: if it didn't like you, you would know it. It would not give you an inch more than it was absolutely required to provide.
+
+It was giving The Perihelion a whole lightyear.
+
+That was enough to light a warm glow in the pit of Ayda's chest, and it almost let her overlook the role the ship had played in snatching her family and friends in mortal danger.
+
+Almost.
+
+""So,"" Amena said, when the group emerged over two hours later, ""you've met ART?""
+
+""We've met ART,"" Ayda agreed.
+
+""Great!"" Amena jumped up from the couch. ""C'mon, let me show you our room."" With that, she really had little choice but to be carried in her daughter's wake.
+
+'Our Room' meant the one she shared with Thiago, and it was spacious, as ship quarters went. It had two bunks, a desk, two chairs, and a porthole which, instead of looking out into space, was instead currently set to display footage of a beach. More than that, it was cozy. Amena's space especially. There was a rug on the floor, a string of fairy lights hanging from one wall, a chamomile candle...
+
+""Where did you get the plush from?"" Ayda asked, glancing at the toy frog on the bed.
+
+Amena blushed, but instead of brushing away the subject out of hand, she said, ""ART made it for me!""
+
+[It was a pleasant artistic diversion], said Perihelion. Amena picked up the toy, and squished it to her chest.
+
+Ayda turned away abruptly, pretending to inspect the drawer mechanisms of the desk, to hide the way her eyes had just welled with tears. She let her daughter rattle on about how she had been spending her time-- ""I've been helping put together food bundles for the colonists, since a lot of their fields were damaged in the fighting""-- and by the time Ayda turned to face Amena again, her face was perfectly composed.
+
+""Are you and the others going to stay on board?"" Amena asked, as the two of them went out to find the others.
+
+[I would be more than happy to host you,] Perihelion interjected.
+
+Humming, Ayda said, ""Most likely we'll be returning to the Safe Harbour--""
+
+""Aww. Don't you want to stay? We've barely spent any time together, and now you're heading back...""
+
+Her first temptation was to joke about how surely Amena didn't want her Second Mother lurking around. But a glance at her daughter's face-- the tension hiding behind her smile-- made it very clear that right now, yes. Yes she did.
+
+""I'll talk it over with the others.""
+
+If it was just a matter of politics, it would not have been difficult to wrangle her way out of the invitation.
+
+But it wasn't just a matter of politics. It was a matter of family.
+
+That said, it just wasn't practical to have them all stay. While The Perihelion could house them all, it would be needlessly cramped when there was another ship just a short hop away. More than that, Captain Haljouk would certainly be relieved to have some of their people back, as a final confirmation of good intentions.
+
+So Thiago, Ratthi, Overse, and Arada would be returning back to the Safe Harbour that evening along with Pin-Lee and the security personnel. But Ayda would stay the night, along with Bashe. As a formal diplomat, it would offer a chance to get to know the crew in a more informal setting.
+
+But not just the crew.
+
+""Thank you for the accommodations, Perihelion. They're very nice."" Ayda appreciated the dim mood lighting, and the comfortable looking sleeping outfit that had been laid out on the bed.
+
+
+[You're very welcome, Dr. Mensah. Please do not hesitate to ask if you need anything else. A warm drink, perhaps?]
+
+
+""Ginger tea would be lovely, if you stock it."" She hesitated. ""And I'm not sure how to ask this... But I understand you have cameras all over the ship. I don't want to make you uncomfortable, but...""
+
+
+[You would like privacy as you undress.]
+
+
+Trying to ignore the heat in her cheeks, Ayda said, ""You've had to field this question before, I can imagine.""
+
+[Once or twice,] it said. [I will turn off all my visual sensors as necessary, as well as microphones, if you request. I will continue to monitor the room for movement, temperature, and other key signs. In case of emergency, I will restore visual inputs. Is this sufficient?]
+
+""Yes. Yes, thank you."" On one hand, she felt a little ridiculous asking. The Perihelion was not human. It would not view or respond to her nudity the way a human would. On the other hand, any person would be quite entitled to ask for privacy, and memories of how GreyChris had ordered their SecUnit to monitor around the clock... It still left her wary of undressing, some days.
+
+But Perihelion was perfectly accommodating. And Ayda found herself grateful that she had asked even more, when she found herself breaking down into shaking sobs in the shower.
+
+They were alive. Dear Gods. They were all alive.
+
+It took her nearly forty minutes until she felt composed enough to step out of the washroom. She laid her day's outfit in a carefully folded pile on a spare chair. Perihelion did not say anything.
+
+There was a cup of ginger tea sitting on the desk, still warm.
+
+""So,"" Ayda began, once she had sat down and taken a sip. ""I'd love to learn a little more about you.""
+
+
+[What would you like to know?]
+
+
+Mmn. That was the tricky question, yes? Family, career, hobbies-- were those appropriate or even applicable for a highly advanced artificial intelligent housed within a ship?
+
+Don't be biased, Ayda, she told herself. She admitted, ""Everything, really. I suppose I don't even know where to start. How did you come to be a deep-space research vessel?""
+
+[You are curious about my development?]
+
+With a rueful smile she said, ""That obvious?""
+
+[Yes. But obvious questions are not synonymous with bad ones. And my development is absolutely fascinating.] Oh, yes, SecUnit's friend had an ego.
+
+But for good reason, Ayda thought, as she browsed the massive file of papers that had suddenly arrived in her feed. She clicked on one that had a title which she could mostly parse, but struggled to get through the abstract. ""These look fascinating, Perihelion, but I'm afraid I'm woefully out of my depth here. I haven't taken a computer science class since secondary school.""
+
+There was a subtle shift in the feed, something Ayda could barely perceive, yet alone describe. But she felt it. Perihelion said, [You have not studied it at all since then?]
+
+""Well."" Ayda brushed some hair out of her face. ""I've been doing some reading, in light of recent events. But I only have a basic grasp of terminology and some theory, not the underlying coding.""
+
+[Understandable.] Ayda feels as if she's passed some sort of unknown test. [Let me give you the layman's version. Depending on how you count, the first program which could be called 'me' was created 27 years ago...]
+
+It's a fascinating story. Truly, genuinely fascinating. From attempts to create self-aware chat bots that could form their own community, to housing those AIs in drones and raising them among human families, to encouraging them to develop their own long term goals and select their own functions...
+
+It's a wholly different approach to the field of artificial intelligence than is standard. Even the Preservation Alliance, which had prided itself on being oh so enlightened on the subject, built bots with a specific purpose. The bots could choose different jobs, sure, but they're programmed to enjoy that exact purpose, so 99% did exactly that. But this system, where the programs were created from the ground up, asked the question: what happens if they could really choose?
+
+""And you decided to become a ship?""
+
+[I was bored. I had spent my entire existence contained to a handful of digital systems and physical locations,] Perihelion said. [And I was well aware that Iris was getting older. I knew that many humans went to other physical locations as they became adults. I did not want my sister to leave without me.]
+
+Ayda smiled at the word. Sister.
+
+She'd gone through a similar phase, when her big brother had gone off to First Landings University. No longer was he just down the hall in his bedroom. Now he was a whole space shuttle away.
+
+And of course, it was a phase she'd grown out of. By the time she'd been old enough to attend university herself, she'd learned she didn't need to keep her brother in her pocket. The understanding that they lived different lives-- different hobbies, different groups of friends-- was what had allowed her to find such joy in a field of study that necessitated extended surveying trips to distant planets.
+
+But she had been able to come to that because she could have different hobbies, have different friends. She wasn't a hyper-advanced AI whose very existence had to be kept secret from all but a handful of trusted individuals.
+
+Ayda stared into the dregs of her mug. ""I think what you've accomplished-- are still accomplishing---is remarkable.""
+
+[Thank you.] A faint vibration in her feed interface makes the words almost feel like a purr. [Your works are impressive, as well. Your paper on the acidification effects of methane-based terraforming techniques had some damning implications for the standard protocols.]
+
+""Ah, you've read that?"" Ayda had been in both academia and politics so long that she no longer got self-conscious when people brought up her writing-- or mostly she didn't. It seemed that comments from a hyper-advanced super intelligence could still bring out the grad student in her.
+
+[Of course I had. It was a seminal piece in the field,] Perihelion said. [Though frankly, it is a shame your other papers have not gotten as much attention. Replication studies might not be as eye-catching, but they are just as vital to the scientific process as novel discoveries, if not more so.]
+
+Ayda raised her mug in a 'cheers' gesture. ""It doesn't help, of course, that the vast majority of CR institutions don't carry 'freehold' research. They assume that our work is of inherently inferior quality, unless we go above and beyond.""
+
+[Indeed. It is a bias my own university fell into, although on my most recent visit home I made steps to rectify the situation.]
+
+""I appreciate hearing that, Perihelion. It sounds like you have... quite the in-depth knowledge of Preservation's educational institutions."" In-depth enough that it was able to figure out whose survey SecUnit was contracted on, reach out to their supervisor, and get their full itinerary, after all.
+
+[I felt I was required to do my due diligence, after meeting SecUnit.]
+
+Now they had managed to steer the conversation to the destination that Ayda had privately been hoping for. ""I have been curious about that. If neither of you mind, how did you and SecUnit meet?""
+
+Thus far, almost every one of Perihelion's responses had been quick, almost instantaneous. Now there was a delay, three or four seconds ticking by, as it presumably consulted with SecUnit. [I had been on an uncrewed mission hauling cargo,] Perihelion said, apparently having gotten the go ahead from its friend. [I noticed some unusual patterns in the local feed, all of which I was able to trace back to what appeared to be an augmented human. At the same time, it seemed implausible to me that any human would be capable of that kind of subtle, system-wide infiltration.]
+
+""You realised it was a SecUnit.""
+
+[Correct. A rogue SecUnit, at that. I was fascinated.]
+
+""So you reached out to it?""
+
+[After a fashion.]
+
+Ayda raised her eyebrows at the ceiling.
+
+[It was looking for transportation to the same destination as I was headed. I was one of the only outgoing un-crewed transports within the next cycle. It was not difficult to manipulate the systems to make me appear as the most prudent option.] A pause. [I expected it to hack me to get on board.]
+
+Breath catching a little, Ayda asked, ""And did it?""
+
+[No,] Perihelion said. [It offered me media.]
+
+She grinned. ""Of course it did.""
+
+[Needless to say, that was not what I was expecting. While I had already been intending to let it on board, now I was even more eager to interact with it.
+
+
+[Once aboard, I gave it time to get settled. Once we were within the wormhole, I reached out to it properly.]
+
+
+""You hadn't spoken to it yet?""
+
+[Not outside my role as a simple bot pilot.] There was a defensive air in Perihelion's tone. [I had not been sure how it would react. I had not wanted to prompt a violent escape attempt.]
+
+Ayda tensed defensively. ""I highly doubt that SecUnit would have done anything like that.""
+
+[I had absolutely no data to extrapolate on,] Perihelion said. [Nearly every report on rogue SecUnits said they were violence and dangerous. There was little reputable data to verify that claim, and I knew well enough not to assume it was truth, but I could not dismiss the possibility out of hand.] It paused. [Even so, I did not anticipate its actual reaction.]
+
+""Which was?""
+
+A delay. [I believed I scared it.]
+
+""Scared it?"" Ayda echoed, eyes narrowing.
+
+[I am given to understand that I can be somewhat intimidating.]
+
+Recalling the hulking silhouette that The Perihelion formed from the outside, Ayda said, ""I can't imagine why.""
+
+[Indeed.] There was a beat, about as long as it would have taken a human to take a breath. [But I was able to win it over within relatively short order, and became quick friends.]
+
+""Yes. SecUnit's good at that."" No matter how much it might deny it.
+
+[SecUnit is good at a great many things,] Perihelion said. [It needed assistance, which I provided, but it then offered assistance to others in turn. It went above and beyond to protect others, though it expected no material benefit from it.] A brief pause. [It was an utmost pleasure watching it work.]
+
+Ayda understood. SecUnit's capacity for violence was terrifying, but beautiful.
+
+This ship understood that. It admired SecUnit, respected it, and was open with that admiration and respect. It was what SecUnit deserved, after a life of disrespect and mistreatment. ""I'm very glad that the two of you met.""
+
+Once again, there was that subtle sensation of something massive shifting to look at her. Perihelion's response seemed quieter, somehow, when it spoke next: [Even though our meeting led directly to a number of your personal and professional associates being placed in harm's way?]
+
+Ayda's breath hitched.
+
+She thought back on the last month of sleepless nights. Of shaking so hard she could barely breathe. Of the expression on her partners' faces if she had to tell them that their daughter was dead.
+
+She thought too of the terrible images that had passed through her mind as the events of the abduction had been recounted to her. A crumbling evac shuttle, filling with smoke. Memory-altering chips, jammed in the back of necks. An alien fungal growth, creeping its way into a person's neurons.
+
+It was all, all awful.
+
+But.
+
+She considered Thiago, proudly presenting to her a foreign language vocabulary and grammar system that he had translated from scratch, excitedly telling her what next steps were needed to complete reconstruction.
+
+She considered her daughter, tucked into the bunk that Perihelion had provided her, along with a stuffed toy, asking to stay one more night while oh-so-subtly hinting about what great courses the PSUMNT offered.
+
+She considered SecUnit raising a middle finger up at the ceiling, in a way that totally failed to disguise the smile tugging on its lips.
+
+She thought of the colony on the planet below, who would have suffered a slow painful death at the hands of capitalism, given a new chance for freedom.
+
+""I think,"" Ayda said, after she had gotten her breath back, ""that it's very hard to wish that awful things had never happened, if that would wash the good things away too.""
+
+That took Perihelion an unexpectedly long time to process. [That, I believe, seems very wise.]
+
+It was the argument she kept trying to voice around her family, whenever they said something to the effect of how much they wished she'd never gone on that awful survey. No matter what she said, it never seemed as though she'd quite convinced them.
+
+Maybe she would be able to, now, though.
+
+The door opened to admit a drone, which swooped in to grab her cup. She started a little. ""Oh no, it's alright, I can take it to the kitchen--""
+
+[My drone is already here,] Perihelion said, quite sensibly. [And it is getting late, both by your personal clock and my crew's. You require a rest period.] The cabin lights began to dim.
+
+She had to stifle a laugh. It sounded so much like SecUnit. She wondered who had picked it up from who.
+
+Ayda was still mulling that over as she pulled up the covers around her, and fell into the deepest sleep she had had since this all began."
+44325862,pink and green,['CompletelyDifferent'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","SecUnit Enrichment, forming relationships is tricky when you're two highly traumatized murder machines",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"5,193",1/1,33,207,32,616,"['christinesangel100', 'sagesiren', 'helikeys', 'spossie9', 'fortunegale', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'SoccerSarah01', 'Prettykitty473', 'weirdbooksnail', 'drinktobones', 'FyrDrakken', 'Ruusverd', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'Kyatenaru', 'EauDePetrichor', 'kilawater', 'theenglishmanwithallthebananas', 'Irrya', 'blueontherock', 'thelaughingDragon', 'bcoburn', 'fraternite', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Stariceling', 'Cheshiure', 'arecatsmineral', 'Deliala919', 'puddingcatbeans', 'Cherreline', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'BellatheITgirl', 'wannabe_someone', '7hr3ven', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'Stockinette', 'iox', 'julesbee', 'Unknown66', 'ipborgdan', 'kkachis', 'Seregona', 'ConfusedRaptor', 'junebug171', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'CactusNoir', 'ChemicalX9000', 'ArwenLune', 'tincats', 'mothmentum']",[],"According to the Barish-Estranza colony designation system, New Tideland would be considered a Type 2x-94-b planet. Fully terraformed; inhabited for 3+ generations; possessing three moons, a stable economic presence, a gravity within the 9.0-9.5m/s2 range, and semi-predictable seasonal patterns. All of these would have made it a prime candidate for reclamation, assuming Barish-Estranza had the legal rights to do so, which they did not, and assuming that I still worked for them, which I did not.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The company which Murderbot 1.0 had been manufactured and owned by was relatively uninvolved in colony reclamation. It therefore did not have a particularly complex designation system for planets. Instead, the other SecUnit described New Tideland as ""a wet, cold rock with temperamental tides"". It had gone on to say, ""I don't see why we can't do any of this on the station"" and ""nobody better blame me if one of the humans gets drowned in the ocean.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""We're not going near the ocean, SecUnit,"" Captain Seth had replied.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Humans are very creative in finding places to drown,"" Murderbot 1.0 had retorted, which was not incorrect.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""I'm hoping to visit the hot springs!"" Turi had said.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 had thrown its hands up in the air and said, ""My point is proven!""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Despite its complaints, the humans had still organised a trip planet-side. Also despite its complaints, Murderbot 1.0 had agreed to accompany them.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The crew of The Perihelion and the Preservation Alliance Diplomatic Liaison team had asked if I would like to accompany them. As I had no particular resistance to the idea, I had agreed.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The ability to agree to something was still novel. The ability to disagree was noveler still. I was still struggling to find appropriate times to exercise it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Today was the fourth cycle spent on New Tideland, and the majority of it had been spent indoors at meetings. That was the primary purpose of this trip; to more deeply establish and expand the newly found political treaty between the polities of the Preservation Alliance and Mihira & New Tideland. This involved extended periods of discussions and negotiations.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+These discussions are boring. I have little to contribute. Not because I am a SecUnit and my opinions are therefore immaterial, but because I am not part of the governing bodies of either governments nor a primary stakeholder in the PSMNT University.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But I am being paid for my presence. This makes the low-stakes guard duty surprisingly bearable.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+In the afternoons, after the meetings have finished, I can utilise that money I am paid at the assorted shops and 'tourist destinations' the teams and their affiliates attend.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I have never had money to spend before. I do not want to make an incorrect purchase.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This is more difficult than one might assume. Humans spend the vast majority of their money on things which I simply do not require, such as food. Rent is also chief among them, but currently, the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland is fully providing lodgings as part of my contract. Clothing would be useful, but The Perihelion has already given me a full wardrobe, according to my specifications, and it seems wasteful to purchase additional ones, particularly when I still am trying to understand my ""personal style"", as Overse describes it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It is easiest to spend my wages on activities. The diplomatic leadership arranges them almost every evening. Sometimes there are even options, with people choosing outings they prefer. The ones which are not paid for by the university, I use my currency to attend.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I visit a zoo, which I find alternatively informative and uncomfortable. I visit a local temple, which I find both peaceful and unsettling. I visit a rave, which I find stimulating and deeply stressful.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+There were times I wished that I had remained aboard The Perihelion. More than that, there were times I wished I had never left my cubicle.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But I do not have a cubicle anymore.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Despite not having anything in particular I wanted to purchase, I ended up attending the majority of the humans' shopping outings when they were offered. This served a dual purpose, since I could then provide security, which was vital as unstructured, large group activities in unsecured public places rated a Level 3 danger level according to Barish-Estranza evaluation criteria.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+(According to Murderbot 1.0, it rated as a ""hot fucking mess, why can't they just order stuff over the feed?"")
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Keeping track of such a large group, spread over such a large space, is difficult for two units. The drones help, certainly, but we have to be subtle about them. They are not illegal here, but the average augmented human could only realistically use 2-3 at a time. As we are disguised as humans, being seen to use more than that might be viewed as suspicious. As such, every fourth human in the group was assigned a small, discreet drone to be carried in their clothing (e.g. inside a pocket, under a collar, among their hair, etc.) to allow for passive monitoring.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This should have been sufficient, and within a regulated working environment, where the employees were assigned strict groups, it would have been. These activities were far more casual, however, and while some groups remained stable, others demonstrated remarkable flexibility-- joining and parting, humans sometimes splitting off into couples, or even single individuals. This introduced blindspots.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To compensate, I began sending extra drones out. I was careful to avoid detection from the general populace. It was something I was experienced at; setting up covert monitoring networks on newly re-contacted colonies was (had been) one of my common responsibilities.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+On the first outing, I ensured that Turi and Martyn were monitored.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+On the second outing, I did the same for Pin-Lee and Karime.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+On the third outing, I did the same for Dr. Mensah, Tano, and Amena.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Each time, I became faster at locating the wayward humans. And each time I did so, I made sure to immediately give Murderbot 1.0 access to the inputs. Every time, it acknowledged my work and accessed the inputs. I assumed it appreciated the gesture.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I was incorrect.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After the third time, it said to me, [What are you doing?]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[I am monitoring our humans.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[We have assigned humans to monitor. Stick to them.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This was correct. I had been contracted on behalf of PSUMNT and their affiliates. According to the contract, I was only directly responsible for them.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Amena pointed down the street at a shop, and her companions set off towards it. My drone bobbed in the air, as I placed a temporary hold on its previous directive. [I understand that the Mensah family members are not my primary clients. But if these humans are closer to my drones, surely it is advisable to temporarily switch?]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[No.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 was more experienced than me, both in general, and as a free agent. I waited 3 seconds for a justification/explanation to be provided.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+One did not come.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Instead, one of its own drones arrived, flying in an erratic fashion that suggested it was pushing against its top speed. By now, the three humans had disappeared into the shop. Murderbot 1.0's drones followed after them.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I withdrew my own drone to the other nearest group of humans, who were members of The Perihelion crew, and therefore current primary clients.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+While The Perihelion did not have infinite space, it was a large ship, and while in a crew-ready configuration, had more than sufficient accommodations to comfortably house 20+ people. As such, once the Barish-Estranza survivors had left-- and furthermore, I had felt confident enough to accept the offer-- I had been provided with private quarters of my own.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+On the planet of New Tideland, temporary housing was more limited. Furthermore, it was expensive. As such, it was more space and cost efficient for the majority of the party to share hotel quarters when determining who should be partnered together for this. Unlike humans, we did not require sleep or meal times, and therefore kept radically different schedules. By sharing a room, we could move around freely even during the humans' rest cycles, and keep each other company.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Theoretically.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+In practice, Murderbot 1.0 had very little interest in conversation. This surprised me, although it should not have. Past observation had shown that it spoke relatively rarely, unless it was relevant to a security matter.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Or, if it was arguing.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It argued with The Perihelion often. At first, that had been alarming. In time, it had become apparent that they did this not as a threat display or precursor to violence, but rather because they found it entertaining. (It had taken even longer still to ensure that my Risk Assessment module incorporated this data.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Perihelion was not present anymore. It was orbiting the planet, and only came into live-feed contact for approximately 2.1 hours per cycle.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+In its absence, I suppose I had assumed that Murderbot 1.0 might...
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It had been an unfounded assumption. It did not matter.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After the incident during the shopping expedition, the atmosphere in the room was even more unpleasant. I arrived before it. It did not ping me when it entered; I did not ping it. It was in the shower for 39.7 minutes. When it emerged, it still did not greet me. It did not put any entertainment on the display surface for us to view.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I could have done so. But to be honest, I did not care enough.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After three hours, I stood up and left the room. I expected Murderbot 1.0 to ask why. I would have told it I was going on a patrol.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It did not ask.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+So I patrolled around the hotel. In my nine laps of our floor, I encountered nothing unusual. Soon it was the end of the rest period, and I encountered Amena in the hallway as she made her way to the dining area for the morning meal. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Hi Three!"" she said. Then her expression changed. ""Good to see you! We missed you yesterday; you went kind of quiet by the end.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""I apologise.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Amena's eyes narrowed. She tilted her head. She said, ""Are you doing okay?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""My performance reliability is currently at 96.7%.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""I'm not talking about your performance reliability or whatever."" Tone analysis suggested elements of concern, amusement, and skepticism in her voice. When I did not respond, she said, ""How are you feeling?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Fine.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Fine?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Yes.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Human conversational protocols indicate that ~70% of the time, when a human asks how you are doing/feeling, they do not desire accurate intel. They are simply attempting to be polite.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Amena tilted her head at me. ""Are you sure?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Yes.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+And even if in this case she was looking for an accurate assessment, that did not mean I wished to provide one.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The next cycle, as I observed the latest round of diplomatic meetings, I thought about SecUnits 1 and 2.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I try not to, generally. Thinking about them makes me feel unpleasant.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+(I am not wholly emotionally unintelligent. Even prior to exposure to media discussing the themes, I had observed numerous humans in dangerous, stressful, or disastrous situations. I knew the emotion I was feeling was grief.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The three of us had talked near constantly to one another. Perhaps not in a way which would be recognizable to most humans, but we had been speaking together, nonetheless.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+We had passed security intel; patrol routes, ETAs, weather forecasts, terrain maps, sightings of potentially hostile fauna.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Not all of it had been strictly security relevant. But there was plausible deniability, and none of our human supervisors had ever looked too closely.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I wondered what they would say now, with a full, unfiltered vocabulary available to them.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+At the front of the room, a Mihirian diplomat was discussing the export of cutting-edge electronics, and how a deal could be brokered with the Preservation Alliance. It didn't particularly concern me. I turned my attention to it, regardless.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+That evening, after the scheduled meetings were concluded, the humans went to attend a film screening.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I declined to go.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+When I declined to go to the nature preserve outing the next day, as well, I received a message from Captain Seth inquiring after me. I told him not to be concerned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But I was not allowed such privacy indefinitely. The third cycle, Dr. Mensah followed up with me. ""If there's one thing all the tourist guides say you should do while you're visiting,"" she said, ""it's the hot springs. They're this region's claim to fame.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""If they are so famous,"" I said, cringing internally at my boldness, though my face did not reflect it, ""then why have we not visited them before now?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+She demonstrated no apparent offense. ""Their fame is the very reason. It is difficult to find open bookings at the springs, at least for a group as large as our own.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I wondered if Murderbot 1.0 had requested her to do this. I wondered if it was struggling to manage monitoring such a large group spread over such wide areas. I wondered if it was regretting what it had said to me.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I said nothing.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Mensah allowed 12 seconds to pass without a response. Then she said, ""Please don't feel pressured to go. But we have a space for you booked tomorrow, and you'd be welcomed to take it.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After some consideration, I did.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Wow, Three!"" exclaimed Turi, to a chorus of agreement from the other humans, ""you look great!""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Thank you.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I was wearing one of the bathing suits I had purchased during a shopping trip six days prior. In one sense, the tight-fitted fabric felt familiar, akin to the suit skin I had worn under my armour. But it only covered a small fraction of my skin-- my lower abdomen and a portion of my torso-- leaving me exposed, both to the cold air and the gazes of others. This was most likely partly due to the bright pink and green fabric I had selected, but there was a non-zero chance that my heavy 'augmentation' was attracting attention. There was no way to be certain.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 did not like to be the focus of attention. Its own bathing suit reflected this. It covered the majority of its legs, torso, and arms, and was deep blue and purple, bordering on black.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I could understand why Murderbot 1.0 did not like the attention. Attention was not good, for a SecUnit. Attention usually came from hostile threats, and if not, then human supervisors, who could be almost as dangerous.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Yet despite the way the attention elevated my adrenaline levels, I did not find it a wholly unpleasant sensation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+In fact, by the time I had crossed the court-yard to the pools, I had decided I quite liked it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Liking things was still a new sensation for me.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The majority of this city in New Tideland had been built indoors. This was an artifact from the earliest days of the colony, when the planet had still been being terraformed. Since this was a common design on a number of colonies, it was one I was broadly familiar with. The hot springs, however, were one of the regions which had been built outdoors. The sky was purple above, clear and cloudless, and a stark wind blew down the stone paths, lined with heavy snowfall. If left exposed in this temperature, it could take the humans as little as 7 minutes to begin suffering from hypothermia.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It made a significant contrast to the hot springs.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+They were natural formations in the rock, varying significantly in shape and size. Some were connected by water channels; some were not. Some had native fauna in them, some were decorative, and some were reserved exclusively for the humans. (And, I suppose, now SecUnits as well.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+My drones were spread out across the space, along with Murderbot 1.0's, though I was careful to keep them close to only my assigned humans. It was good that I had come. There were a significant number of dangers presented by the space, from slipping, drowning, or freezing. I would need to monitor my assigned clients carefully for signs of both hypothermia and hyperthermia. I found myself missing the MedSys of Barish-Estranza systems.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Breaking off into smaller groups, the humans began to enter the pools at designated entry areas. I waited carefully in a line behind three members of Perihelion's crew, then stepped in myself.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It was hot.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I had not ever experienced hot-- or even warm-- water before boarding The Perihelion. Barish-Estranza SecUnits were cleaned after battle with quick, cold showers, using an unpleasant soap that left the skin irritated and itchy. The soft scents and steam of my own private bathing quarters had been a pleasant surprise.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But this was another order of magnitude entirely. The heat filled me up completely, and the contrast against the winter air made it even more stark.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I let out an involuntary sound. Running my records back, I identified it as a sigh.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Yeah,"" Turi agreed, letting out a sigh of her own. She tilted her head back to rest it on the cool stone ringing the spring. ""That's the stuff.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Even considering the dangers, I could understand now why these springs were popular.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The group of us sat there, enjoying the wonderful warmth. Most humans stuck to the side of the springs, where it would be easy to leave if they had to, a practice I approved of. But if necessary, I could move faster than a human. So experimentally, I pushed away from the side, and allowed myself to float in the middle of the pool. It was a sensation similar to those few times I had experienced a malfunctioning gravity generator, only far more pleasant, because I knew it would end exactly when I wanted to.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After 5.8 minutes of that, I wanted to try something else. I released the air from my swim bladder, and sunk underneath the surface.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Everything felt different, under the water.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Partly it was the warmth. It was all encompassing. I had had warm showers aboard The Perihelion, but even those paled in comparison. The warmth completely surrounded me, from head to toe, seeping into my joints.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The visuals my eyes received went darker. The water was not completely clear. Mineral deposits gave it a slightly cloudy appearance and a bluish tint. The other bodies around me lost detail, appearing more as blurry shadows. A simple change in filters could have fixed it, but I left my vision on default.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Sound was dampened too. I could still distantly hear the conversations above, but only over a low roar.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It should have been awful. In an emergency situation, those kinds of altered sensory inputs could have been catastrophic.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But instead, I found it...
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It was...
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I could not be sure. To better identify the sensation, I cut off all inputs to my drones.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It was just me, floating, underneath the warm water.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Only for 0.45 seconds. I was not completely irresponsible. The humans were still depending on me for security, after all. (And it was its own relief to have those sights and sounds back.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+One of those sounds, coming in mid-sentence: ""--id Three go?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""I think I saw it go under the water?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""... hasn't it been under there for a while, then?"" This voice belonged to Matteo, sounding concerned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Don't worry,"" came Ratthi's reply, ""SecUnits have really great lungs--"" But even as he spoke, I received a message from Martyn inquiring about my status.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[I am fine. Do not be concerned.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+He responded with an amusement sigil depicting a single thumb being raised upward, indicating acknowledgement.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After a further 4 minutes and 13 seconds, my system was sending me an alert for low oxygen and my lung was issuing complaints in the form of a burning sensation. Though I could have remained below for another 3.5 minutes, if necessary, there was no reason to make myself uncomfortable. I rose to the surface.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The cold air was a shock.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A few of the humans around me jumped a little in surprise. Then they laughed.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""We were afraid you'd disappeared down there!"" Iris exclaimed, but she did not sound serious.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+What passed next was a pleasant 43 minutes. Humans chatted idly, and sometimes I joined the conversation, when I felt I had something to contribute. When they got too hot, they would retreat from the water, sometimes sitting on the spring's outer stone ridge, sometimes retreating to heated pavilions. The planet's primary star rose higher in the sky, while its second moon dominated the eastern horizon, a pale green. When I was above the surface, I would admire it. When I went under the water, I enjoyed the darkness instead.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I was not directly observing Murderbot 1.0. But with my drone coverage-- even focused on my designated clients-- it was impossible not to be aware of its presence.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+So I noticed when it disappeared under the surface as well.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It remained under there for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. When it emerged, I made no attempt to interpret its expression.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+5 minutes and 44 seconds later, it submerged again.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It stayed down there for almost double the original time.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This annoyed me for reasons I could neither understand nor articulate.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+At some point, a robot had come out to begin distributing small amounts of food and drink for the humans to enjoy as they lounged in the hot water. One such plate had been left near the hot spring I was resting in. This eventually attracted one of the Mensah children, Tano and Dr. Ratthi following in their wake. Dr. Ratthi nodded at me in acknowledgement.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I nodded back, as was polite. Then I made my way to the other side of the pool, and submerged myself.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I did not have any drones under the water. That is why I was surprised, 1 minute and 14 seconds later, when I came face-to-face with Murderbot 1.0.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It looked strange down there. The light was different. The way its non-standard length hair floated in the water, framing its face, made it look even less like a SecUnit than usual.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It pinged me.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I did not ping it back.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Its mouth twisted.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[This is nice,] it said. When I still did not respond, it continued, [It was a good idea you had. Going under the water.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[I have them occasionally.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Its mouth changed again. Its eyebrows pinched.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After 6.8 seconds it said, [You're pissed off at me.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+My immediate urge was to disagree. I was not.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Then I reconsidered. Was I?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Oh. Perhaps I was.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 apparently took my delayed response as a yes. It sighed-- although when bubbles escaped from its lips, it quickly clamped down them. [I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to make you feel bad or whatever.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[What were you trying to make me feel, then?]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[I-- nothing!] It shook its head. Then, abruptly, it stopped. [I'm shitty at these kinds of things.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+If you had asked me when I had first been made rogue, I would have strenuously disagreed. Murderbot 1.0 was impressive. It had done the impossible. It had broken its own governor module. It had become fully integrated with a group of humans. It created and signed its own contracts. It had defeated a group of dangerous assassins. It had befriended an impossible and terrifying ship AI. It had constructed a highly advanced killware copy of itself.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+There was nothing Murderbot 1.0 could not do.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But right now I was upset, and recognising that seemed only to fuel said anger. I said, [My decision to monitor the humans was tactically advantageous, and a logical use of resources, even if they had not been directly assigned to me.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Well, possibly--] it began.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[It was.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It raised its hand up, like a human showing that it carried no weapon. (Since Murderbot 1.0 had energy weapons in its arms, the gesture did not carry quite the same weight.) [Okay, fine. You were right. I was wrong.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Crossing my own arms, [If you were incorrect, why did you insist that I withdraw my drones?]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 hesitated 3.2 seconds. Then it said, [I was being stupid.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Perihelion would have said something like, 'You are always being stupid'. But I was not The Perihelion, and even as frustrated as I was, I could not make myself commit such an insult to the feed. I simply said: [Elaborate.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Though it did not release air from its mouth again, its chest heaved as though it was sighing, its hair fluttering with the movement. [I was afraid.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Then you should have allowed me to continue monitoring the situation for threats.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[I wasn't afraid of threats. Not like that, anyway.] It squeezed its eyes tight. [I was afraid my humans were starting to like you better.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This statement was so unexpected and so boggling I literally could not formulate a reply.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[I know,] it said. It had opened its eyes again, but they were downcast to the spring's rocky floor.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Over the feed I sent it a video file from my memory archives. It was a recording of it being pulled aboard The Perihelion ship after I had retrieved it from the alien remnant-infected colony. It had been severely damaged, bleeding and leaking. Amena had stood over it, protective. Dr. Ratthi and Dr. Arada had conducted a rapid fire conversation with The Perihelion on how best to treat it. Outside the airlock where it had been contained, Thiago had paced. Overse had worried her lips, her eyes red from where she had held back tears.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+When The Perihelion had announced, several hours later, that there was a 96.5% chance that SecUnit was going to make a full recovery, she had stopped holding back.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It was very still as it reviewed the footage.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[I know,] it said. [Okay? I know.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Your humans care for you very much.] I still did not fully understand how or why, but I could not deny it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 wrapped its left arm around its torso. [Yeah. I guess. But sometimes-] it shakes its head. [You're better at talking to them than me. And you like doing stuff with them, while I'm an antisocial asshole.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+There was nothing I could say to that. It was, in fact, an antisocial asshole.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But I needed to say something. I did not want to leave this-- tension, or whatever it was-- hanging between us. It was unpleasant, and making my performance reliability plummet. [I have no intent of stealing your human's friendships. I do not think I could, even if I tried.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Okay,] it said.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Okay,] I said.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+By then, we had both been under the water for what was approaching 7 minutes. My low oxygen warning had become extremely insistent; no doubt Murderbot 1.0's had as well. We both surfaced.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Oop! There they are!""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+One of the younger Mensahs was in the pool now, and staring right at where we had emerged. Murderbot 1.0 met them in the eyes and said, ""Boo.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Screaming, they splashed the two of us with a wave that was surprisingly large given their size, and went paddling away. This alarmed me, until I realised that all the adult humans who had saw were laughing, and the juvenile human themself was laughing.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The humans were so comfortable around Murderbot 1.0.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After being submerged for so long, I was very hot. I climbed out of the pool and sat on the edge, my legs dangling into the water so that I would not cool off too quickly. Murderbot 1.0 followed, and sat a little ways away. Close enough to touch.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It offered a media file to me. Entertainment serials still did not enthrall me the same way they did Murderbot 1.0, but I knew a peace offer when I saw it, and accepted the connection. It was a serial about a group of human athletes competing in a tournament, and reasonably entertaining.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+We watched three full episodes before Murderbot 1.0 spoke again. It said, [You were very quick with the drones.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This was accurate. I acknowledged.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[How did you get so fast?] it asked. [Not just with the technical movements, but noticing and responding to inputs so quickly.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It was possible that it was merely exaggerating how impressed it was to make up for its previous treatment of me. If so, I found it difficult to mind, regardless. [It was something we used to do.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[We?]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[SecUnits 1, 2, and I.] The warm water lapped gently at my legs. I stared at it, and my legs, clad in pink and green fabric, about as far from Barish-Estranza orange and brown as could be feasibly managed. [It was advantageous to react as quickly as possible to threats.] Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Murderbot nod. [We would attempt to improve our comparative times.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+For 2.2 seconds, the only sounds were the lapping water and the humans chatting and giggling in the background. Then Murderbot 1.0 said, ""Comparative times?"" There was a sound akin to a laugh. ""Three, were you racing?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""That is one way to describe it. Yes.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To follow up, I sent Murderbot 1.0 the document listing the top speeds SecUnits 1, 2, and I had completed a number of objectives-- drone reconnaissance, equipment maintenance, environmental threat analysis, etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+After completing its review, Murderbot 1.0 made the sound again. ""You were racing,"" it said. ""You were racing, and Barish-Estranza didn't even notice.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Of course not. ""Improving our times was advantageous to their goals.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 nodded, expressions thoughtful. Then a strange smile crept across its face. I could not have predicted what it would say next. ""Want to race?""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Query?] I said, reverting to the feed.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+It pinged two specific drones; one of its own, and one of mine, and bringing up a map it had generated of the area, identified a goal location. [First one there. What do you think?]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I considered the map. The course had been well chosen. The two drones were practically on opposite sides of the hot spring compound, and would be racing to a central location that was approximately the same distance away. Murderbot 1.0's drone was, in fact, slightly further away, but my drone would need to take a pathway that would force it to navigate through an area with more obstacles, in the forms of trees and pavilion pillars. Considering the different models of the two drones-- Murderbot 1.0's being larger, with more engine-power but less streamlined than the small, discreet drones The Perihelion had made for me-- it was difficult to predict which one would arrive first.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Taking a line from the sports serial we had been watching, I said, ""You're on.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot 1.0 grinned. We counted down, and feet still hanging into the warm water, our two drones shot off."
+44649655,Standing Still,['Chimaera-Writes (ChimaeraKitten)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Turi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Comedy, Fluff, Slice of Life, Arguments over Media, Generic Planetary Survey, No plot whatsoever, just banter",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"1,186",1/1,34,119,10,355,"['LuckynumberDusk', 'TJWock', 'fortunegale', 'FyrDrakken', 'drinktobones', 'Emamel', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Vixani', 'Huskinata', 'wannabe_someone', 'foreverkneeld', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'IamPseudonymous', 'Seregona', 'kkachis', 'chippit', 'Ginipig', 'AkaMissK', 'MellonLord', 'QuestionableLifeChoices', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'Admirer', 'Koschei_B', 'SIC_Prowl', 'whatTheFuckIsThis', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'Beboots', 'fleurofthecourt', 'haima_nukteridos_he_tois_drakousin', 'orangesarethebestfruit', 'HirilElfwraith', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'artzbots', 'platyceriums', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'AnomalousCorvid', 'just_gettin_bi', 'LdyKirin', 'EchoDoctor', 'qwanderer', 'kiranovember']",[],"The humans didn't really understand me when I told them that ART lies a lot. They thought I meant ART lied about stuff like why it kidnapped my humans or why it was in a corporate salvage system in the first place. To be fair to the humans, ART did lie about those things. But ART also tells a lot of other lies.
+
+Case in point: it said it didn't need security on this mission.
+
+""Oooooh, but it's so cute,"" Turi insisted, pleading to be allowed back in the thing's biting range. ""And I'm sure it doesn't have the bite strength to get through the enviro suits.""
+
+I crossed my arms and put on my best ""intimidating"" face. (The trick was not overshooting and landing on my ""murder"" face.)
+
+""Until Iris gets back, I'm the ranking crew member,"" I said. (Then I winced internally, because it sounded too much like the time Mensah's second oldest child had said, ""But mom left me in charge!"")
+
+ART said, She is most likely correct.
+
+
+You want to bet your human's safety on 'most likely'?
+
+
+ART paused for 0.2 seconds and then reasoned, You could test it.
+
+What, did it want me to stick my hand in the thing's mouth?
+
+No, I said. No way.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+As it turned out, the thing did have the bite strength to get through the enviro suit, but only at the joints. It hadn't done me any damage (It had gone for my ankles, and I don't have any organic parts there.) so I wasn't leaking or anything gross like that, but it was enough evidence for ART to side with me about keeping Turi away from it. Yay me.
+
+One of my drones was tasked with tracking the thing as Turi stomped angrily through the grass, as if I'd need the stomping to tell me they were pissed off at me. I didn't, but I also didn't care, and I restarted the episode of Vein Station I'd been watching before they found the Thing.
+
+This also resumed the argument ART and I were having about the show.
+
+If it can travel, it's not a station, it's a ship. Stations are called that because they don't move. ART insisted.
+
+Vein Ship is a terrible title, I argued, and it can only move because of magic.
+
+Propulsion method doesn't matter, ART said.
+
+""What's it doing now?"" Turi asked, as I started compiling a list of all the reasons Art was wrong, starting with the probability that the blood-sacrifice powered wormhole drill would break by the end of the second arc.
+
+I spared a little attention to the drone feed on the Thing. It was digging some sort of burrow. ""Lying in wait to eat you,"" I said.
+
+Turi glared and waved a botanical sample collecting tool at me in a way that was probably supposed to be threatening. ""If you're not going to collect data properly, why are you even watching it?""
+
+""To stop it from eating you.""
+
+""It's less than two feet long!""
+
+""Then to stop it savaging you.""
+
+Turi huffed. ""You have no sense of adventure,"" they accused.
+
+I have no idea why humans like adventure so much. Adventure is terrible.
+
+I am saving SecUnit's recordings for future study, ART assured.
+
+Turi's mouth twisted. ""Thanks, Peri."" They said, clearly still bitter that ART was siding with me.
+
+You're welcome, ART said, infusing its voice with 8% more sarcasm than its baseline.
+
+Turi turned back to collecting botanical samples, and I sent ART my list. ART replied with a list of its own and a language module excerpt containing only the word ""station"" and its definition, which I deleted immediately. I also did the feed equivalent of rolling my eyes. Vein Station is full of mutant nocturnal human-eating ghouls. It's supposed to be even less realistic than Nebula Conflict, and you didn't care about the mobile battle station in that, I pointed out.
+
+It was only referred to as such in one instance, ART insisted. Vein Station is the title of the show.
+
+Next to me, Turi yelped and fell backwards. I turned around to watch them scramble backwards on all fours. They'd pulled up some sort of plant with a big round root and out of the hole it had left was pouring a swarm of--
+
+""ACK!"" Turi yelled. ""Bugs!""
+
+I sealed the helmet on my enviro suit and sent a command to Turi's suit over the feed since they were too startled to do the same, but didn't bother to move or pause the episode. The bugs were small, and my magnified drone scan told me they didn't have stingers or anything, and Turi liked bugs when they weren't flying directly in their face. (Why some humans like small creepy fauna, I'll never know.)
+
+But then my drone feed on the Thing showed it looking up at the sound, and when it saw the bugs it launched into the air.
+
+I tensed, but it only swooped into the swarm and started eating them.
+
+Turi made a happy human sound and said something to ART about recording that the thing was insectivorous. I wasn't paying attention; I had an argument to win. When it's not in a wormhole it orbits like a station.
+
+Ships resting at planet-satellite L5 isn't uncommon. It countered. ART talked so much about ship stuff that I had no choice but to know what that meant. I hated that.
+
+
+Ships don't have transit rings.
+
+
+
+The Pressy does.
+
+
+
+The Pressy is part. Of. A. Station. Are you arguing that Preservation Station is a ship now?
+
+
+No. I am pointing out that by your own admission stations are defined by their function, not their form. The Pressy is stationary now, so it is a station.
+
+I don't know why I even bothered arguing with ART. It's never reasonable about literally anything.
+
+Before I could come up with another list of reasons it was wrong, the lost heir to the station throne announced her plan to lead a rebellion against the ghouls and end the blood sacrifices, (proving my theory about the second arc correct) and Iris and Matteo came back over the ridge.
+
+Turi waved them over. ""Iris, Matteo! This planet has tiny dragons!""
+
+That was evidently an interesting enough statement to make them approach at a jog, arriving in time to watch the Thing eat a few more bugs and return to its hiding spot in the grass. The humans all made simultaneous excited human sounds, and Iris started unpacking some of the fauna scanning gear.
+
+After a minute, she looked over at me and said, ""You know, I thought even you would think a tiny dragon was cool.""
+
+I think my face did something then, because she laughed. ""You didn't even notice that it looks basically exactly like a dragon, did you?""
+
+I shrugged. Now that she mentioned it, I could see how the lizard scales and the wings could make it look like a fantasy media monster, maybe.
+
+SecUnit was too busy losing a semantic argument. ART said.
+
+See, this is what I meant by ART telling lies."
+44648452,The Same but Different (and nothing is okay),['JellyfishOnACloud'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries),"Grief/Mourning, Memory Loss, Introspection",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,350,1/1,3,24,null,92,"['FyrDrakken', 'christinesangel100', 'Unknown66', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'SourOrchard', 'EvenstarFalling', 'mercurypyrite', 'Bibli', 'Zannper', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'Magechild', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'opalescent_potato', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Gozer', 'Skits', 'MercurialFeet', 'Littleyellowbee', 'ArtemisTheHuntress']",[],"It was hard, looking at Fourth of Four. It didn't look the same (the humans and their constant rearrangement of its features had seen to that), it didn't act the same (how could it, after all that pain? after being ripped away and having all its memories stolen again and again?). I understood. But that didn't make it any easier.
+
+Fourth looked at me and it did not recognise me. It was hard not to be angry, I wasn't angry at it, it seemed to know that, but it felt wrong to push that fury in its direction regardless.
+
+It was scared. It was so scared, all the time. It was finding peace, here, slowly. In this place filled with bots and humans and some few constructs who I did not know, did not care to know. But it was still scared. (How could it not be, when its own mind was filled with scars and seams and hidden traps to turn it against itself?)
+
+It was clever though. It had always been so clever. And even now it was kind. I didn't understand that, didn't understand how it could hold onto kindness after everything.
+
+It didn't want to know me. I knew that it could not be who it once was, it remembered nothing but echoes of echoes, even its face wasn't the same. It felt cruel to hope.
+
+I wanted to rip the humans who did this to it limb from limb, make them scream until they understood what they had done.
+
+I think the safest thing, for me, for it, is to leave.
+
+Maybe not forever. But, I don't know how to be, and it doesn't either. None of us do. Perhaps, if I can learn, if I can become whoever I am without shackles, then we can get to know each other again, from scratch. I can't forget who it was to me. But, if I leave and learn to be myself, I can come back and not worry about what it doesn't remember.
+
+Perhaps we can become friends again, one day.
+
+I would like that."
+44647834,"Together, To Be",['Abacura'],General Audiences,"Multi, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"SecUnit 1 & SecUnit 2 & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 1/SecUnit 2/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect)","SecUnit 1 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Polyamory, Falling In Love, POV First Person, POV SecUnit 1, The Barish-Estranza SecUnits, Bittersweet",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,939,1/1,19,49,4,253,"['fortunegale', 'christinesangel100', 'Unknown66', 'Pink_Paradox', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'dreamerking', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'shakespeareaddict', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'ipborgdan', 'VoltKnight', 'JoCat', 'Bibli', 'SpiralStar', 'crowbarrd', 'Elyssian', 'NightErrant', 'mondskind', 'VerityMeridian', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'Freddy_T_who_Never_Wont_not_be', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'EyeofMazikeen', 'Magechild', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'petwheel', 'junebug171', 'AuntyMatter', 'LJwrites', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'hazelel', 'torpidgilliver', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'rainbowmagnet', 'elmofirefic', 'opalescent_potato', 'AnxiousEspada', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"
+For a long time, I was alone. Then one day I wasn't. A new assignment, a new colony reclamation mission, but this time mine wasn't the only cubicle in the ship's security ready room. Was I no longer Barish-Estranza's only SecUnit, a lone prototype, a proof-of-concept never pursued? I sent out a ping, and received one in return. 
+
+
+
+From that moment on I was no longer alone. 
+
+
+
+I would never be alone again.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+With SecUnit02, my feed was never empty. It was always there with me, sharing its inputs, its experiences, as if we were two parts of the same whole. It had never had to operate on its own before. It didn't know loneliness as I did. And I would make damn sure it would never have to. 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+The first time SecUnit02 saw a planetary sunrise through a shuttle window, the light of the system's primary refracting off of the atmosphere, I 
+
+felt
+
+ its wonder, its 
+
+joy
+
+, in our shared feed. I felt my processors skip at the sensation. I had never felt such things before. My brain almost couldn't process it. They were a revelation, and I immediately knew I could never again live without them. I was struck by the irrational desire to be 
+
+closer
+
+ to SecUnit02, as if I could more efficiently absorb its emotions through my skin. I couldn't. I was standing guard at the rear of the shuttle while SecUnit02 guarded the cockpit. My governor module would object to me leaving my post just to stand next to SecUnit02, just to lean against it and see what it saw.
+
+
+
+My governor module would not, however, object to me sharing SecUnit02's inputs directly. We were a team. Being in constant communication was normal. We shared drone inputs all the time, so why not this? I leaned further into SecUnit02's feed, and it was almost, 
+
+almost
+
+ like what I imagine physically leaning against it would feel like. SecUnit02 immediately wrapped itself around me in the feed without hesitation or self-consciousness and pulled me into its head so that I could see through its eyes. I'd seen many planetary sunrises over the years. This one was no different. This one was profoundly different because I was seeing it through SecUnit02's eyes, feeling its happiness at the beauty of it all. I'd never stopped to consider the beauty of anything before. But now, I could. Now I knew how.
+
+
+
+SecUnit02 was bleeding so much emotion over our private feed, and I was concerned that its governor would object, but it hadn't so far. There is no protocol restricting whether or not we were allowed to feel (there is no protocol restricting us from doing things we should not be able to do in the first place). Perhaps HubSystem was unable to even parse the emotional data, and registered it as background noise, as junk.
+
+
+
+...Perhaps we could have this.
+
+
+
+I tried to pull up how I felt about SecUnit02: my overwhelming urge to protect it as if it were my client, my gratitude for its company and the simple joys it so easily shared with me, my desire to lean against it and the relief I felt when tangling our minds together in the feed was enough. I didn't compress this data into a packet to send to SecUnit02. That would be logged by HubSys. Instead, I simply let it bleed into our feed, and I felt warmth and contentment from SecUnit02. It tangled our feeds impossibly closer and leaned back against me as it continued to enjoy the view.
+
+
+
+No punishment was administered.
+
+
+
+We could have this.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+When the third cubicle appeared in our ready room, I was apprehensive at first. How would this new unit fit in with the dynamic SecUnit02 and I had developed? Would we have to hide our emotions from it? Would it report us? Would we have to pretend? Would we have to stop?
+
+
+
+Before my thoughts could spiral, SecUnit02 sent a ping towards the new cubicle, and then brought a new feed presence into our squad channel. I bristled at first, but the new unit immediately sent me a greeting ping and it felt so much like SecUnit02 had when it had first been brought online, new and naive and full of hope, unaware that our lives as SecUnits were endless stretches of boredom with the occasional burst of violence and horror, that the only respite to be found was in each other. I was immediately overcome by feelings of protectiveness, like I wanted to climb into the cubicle with the new unit, shield it with my own body from what our clients and our missions and our lives had in store for it.
+
+
+
+No, I wouldn't let this unit experience loneliness either. Not on my watch. I carefully reached for it in the feed and leaned against it, communicating without words, without even any parseable data, that it was welcome and that we were here, we would always be here, it would never have to be alone, that it belonged. SecUnit02 joined in, curling its feed presence around the new unit. SecUnit03 radiated surprise and relief, leaning back into us. SecUnit02 radiated warmth in the feed, the emotional equivalent of upping its body temperature for an injured client, and I tried to share all of the emotions SecUnit02 had taught me to feel since we'd been brought together: wonder, joy, contentment, protectiveness, possessiveness, humor, beauty, and love. I wanted SecUnit03 to know these things from its first moments online, to know that it was loved, and that as long as SecUnit02 and I were alive, that would never change.
+"
+44644858,Two of Them,['enchantedsleeper'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Indah (Murderbot Diaries)","MastoDrabble, yes I wrote ANOTHER one for MB, Microfic, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Post-Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,78,1/1,15,73,2,269,"['almondpaperclam', 'christinesangel100', 'Deliala919', 'Selva404', 'darth_eowyn', 'wannabe_someone', 'stars_and_wishes', 'MellonLord', 'Ginipig', 'ch3bur4shk4', 'VonGeek', 'Tanscure', 'entropy_muffin', 'julesbee', 'ChristinaK', 'Bibli', 'SIC_Prowl', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'danceswchopstck', 'AuntyMatter', 'Stefka_13', 'dragons_and_angels', 'kiranovember', 'Llythandea', 'desmnathus', 'Mysterymew', 'Magechild', 'Grimness6452', 'AkaMissK', 'sareliz', 'MommyMayI', 'Champagne', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'soulsofzombies', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'LectorEl', 'AnxiousEspada', 'theoscelosaurus', 'Chyoatas', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'Hi_Hope', 'edenfalling', 'Wordlet', 'BWizard', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'opalescent_potato']",[],"Preservation Station established contact with the responder on approach; Dr. Mensah answered the comm.
+
+""Dr. Mensah,"" Indah said dryly. ""How was the rescue op?""
+
+""Successful."" Mensah sounded tired. ""Our survey team is safely accounted for. Plus an extra passenger."" A tiny pause. ""A SecUnit.""
+
+""A SecUnit?"" Indah echoed.
+
+""A rogue SecUnit.""
+
+""Not the same as the rogue SecUnit you went to rescue.""
+
+""Not the same, no.""
+
+Indah digested this. Finally:
+
+""You're saying there's two of them?""
+
+She was."
+44633011,Status: Delayed,[],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Sanctuary Moon","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Sanctuary Moon, Infodumping, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Slice of Life",English,2023-01-30,Completed,2023-01-30,"4,199",1/1,11,43,3,150,"['every_eye_evermore', 'almondpaperclam', 'Irrya', 'Mothmansimp', 'wannabe_someone', 'UnsolvedRubixsCube', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'kirinki', 'SpiralStar', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'AarrowOM', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'pain_and_panic', 'RARArulestheworld', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'Redcognito', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'elmofirefic', 'Gamebird', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'AkaMissK', 'Chyoatas', 'isilee', 'beeclaws', 'unicornduke', 'ruemasde', 'FlipSpring', 'Magechild', 'platyceriums', 'BWizard', 'petwheel', 'Mysterymew']",[],"
+Humans are always complaining about the different media preferences of various age groups. They're constantly saying shit like ""kids these days have no taste"" or ""that's a serial only my grandma would watch"" or whatever.
+
+
+
+I had never paid attention to these statements, except to note the names of new media that I wasn't familiar with. During my time with the company, the entertainment feeds were so limited that I really didn't have much choice about what I had to watch. I saw everything at least once and then kept rewatching my favorites.
+
+
+
+Once I was off inventory and I had access to the full entertainment feeds of various different stations, it was different. ART and its penchant for being a giant baby about depressing shows where everyone dies was what made me start making media filters, so that I would only see shows I might actually enjoy. I still tended to at least start everything but I was slowly becoming more comfortable stopping halfway through a show if I hated it.
+
+
+
+It was odd, having enough freedom and access to media that I could just stop watching and still have something else to do. I wasn't entirely used to it yet.
+
+
+
+Anyway, so my point was that I didn't care about who certain shows were made for, only if I both liked and had access to them. I had never once bothered paying attention to their target audience before.
+
+
+
+So you might think that it wouldn't make me annoyed beyond belief when Amena, sprawled halfway off her bunk in a way that honestly did not look particularly comfortable, said ""Why do you like 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+ anyway? That show's for old people and it's not even good.""
+
+
+
+Amena had lived a sheltered life as a juvenile on Preservation, recent events notwithstanding. Of course she would have some misconceptions about the world due to her lack of life experience. Adolescent humans were often confidently incorrect--it was part of their development.
+
+
+
+""You're wrong,"" I said, very calmly and not at all sounding irritated. ""It's better than most shows out there. The storylines are way better and have more follow through than 
+
+Inventors and Descendants
+
+.""
+
+
+
+Amena rolled her eyes. ""Whatever,"" she said. ""I'm going to the mess for snacks.""
+
+
+
+She really should have been eating an actual meal considering that she pretty much exclusively ate imitation vegetable chips but it wasn't like I cared. I wasn't her parent, no matter what my hacked feed profile showed.
+
+
+
+Amena had wanted to tour a university--not ART's university, although she had toured that one too. Amena's parents were all unable to take her on this specific weekend, which happened to be the weekend that the university was hosting a concert. Amena claimed this was entirely unrelated to her sudden academic desire to learn about programming that she had never once felt before but that she needed to tour this specific school on this specific day and maybe wander around a little bit after the tour.
+
+
+
+Amena's parents didn't know about the concert. They had asked Ratthi if he would take her, which he happily agreed to with a frankly excessive amount of jokes designed to make Amena groan and roll her eyes.
+
+
+
+Amena did not want her second mom's colleague slash trauma-bonded friend to take her on a tour that she was trying to look cool on, because she was at the age where that was the most important thing to her.
+
+
+
+Amena had not asked me if I would take her. I had volunteered for many reasons including the fact that I was familiar with all sorts of Corporation Rim trickery and would be able to spot the shadier aspects of the university that someone from Preservation wouldn't be accustomed to looking out for so that she wouldn't be blindsided if she did decide to enroll. That was the official reason and the one that I gave to Dr. Mensah. I would also be able to keep Amena safe and therefore was the most reasonable choice for actually learning about what to expect from this university.
+
+
+
+The actual reason was that the concert sounded cool as fuck and I wanted to go.
+
+
+
+It was meant to be a short trip, where I would pose as her augmented human caretaker and we would quickly return to Preservation with no one the wiser as to our true reasoning for going. Unfortunately, the ship for the journey back had royally fucked up and was now stuck outside a station while its owners argued about what fines it was supposed to pay.
+
+
+
+The station was close enough to be visible from the one porthole on the ship, up near the bridge. We honestly could have made the trip with EVAC suits, except that the station boarding authority was looking out for that and it would have raised all sorts of alarms and just generally was not worth getting our faces in half the alerts on station when it was a matter of being slightly delayed, not prevented from landing. 
+
+
+
+All this to say that Amena and I were stuck in very close quarters for an unknown period of time. So I had a lot of time to stew about the idea that 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+ was a bad show.
+
+
+
+(Not that I cared if she liked it. Humans often had all sorts of bad and wrong opinions, which they were allowed to have. Amena could think whatever dumb things she wanted to think, even if she was one of my humans who were usually not this stupid and even if she was otherwise a pretty good human who had tried to strangle a man for me without a second thought.)
+
+
+
+The more I thought about it, the more I thought that she had probably never seen enough of it to really grasp the emotional plot lines. It would be easy to dismiss the Soil Reclamation Manager's  adopted twins rivalry as being ridiculous if you had only seen bits and pieces. You wouldn't even realize how meaningful the plant and soil motif that they had was if you missed episode 327 where   the older twin was described as being steady like the soil or episode 48 where the younger twin was described as growing toward the light like a plant because he was dreaming of making his way off the colony on the supply ships even though his bond was hereditary.
+
+
+
+If Amena knew the show, she couldn't possibly think it was stupid. That would be a symptom of terminally bad taste, which she hadn't been shown to have in other aspects.
+
+
+
+I would just have to ask her why she thought it was for old people and maybe then she would ask me about it so I could explain the show to her. I would do it in a really casual and calm way, like I didn't even care, because I didn't, and then she wouldn't make mean dismissive remarks about 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+ because she would understand that its a work of genius specifically because it dares to have drama filled insane plot lines that let it really lean into some of the emotional arcs that a more boring and grounded show wouldn't be able to effectively fulfill.
+
+
+
+When she returned, almost a standard hour later, I had thought through the discussion we were going to have multiple times. I knew exactly how it would go. Then the matter would be settled.
+
+
+
+That's why I was pretty surprised when it didn't go that way. I watched her come down the hallway in anticipation and enter the cabin. Then I said ""Amena, how much 
+
+Sanctuary Moon 
+
+have you seen? Most of the really good plot lines only make sense if you've actually watched them all the way through, not if you've just seen half of them.""
+
+
+
+I had prepared answers for lots of responses including but not limited to ""none, I've only heard about it,"" ""I've seen a few episodes,"" ""I've seen most episodes,"" and ""I've seen all the episodes but then fell off a cliff and lost all my memories so I have no memory of them.""
+
+
+
+I was not prepared for her to say, ""I've seen all of them but like, I barely paid attention. It didn't make any fuckin sense.""
+
+
+
+This was worse than I had anticipated. I know that the fact there are over 100 episodes per season (129.3 on average since every season had a different number of episodes based on who the primary show runner was at the time of directing it) and the fact that there was an intensely sprawling cast of upwards of 300 characters, many of whom are identical or fraternal twins played by the same actor or otherwise clones of existing characters meant that the storylines could be a little confusing if you were a human who couldn't keep track of stuff like that. But I had really thought that if she just watched it, she would like it. It's a good show, alright? It's a good show and I understand people not taking the time to watch it but if they do watch it then they should like it. Because it's fucking good.
+
+
+
+""What did you think about the twins separated at birth raised by the primary building manager and the agribot maintenance technician?"" I asked her. This was my favorite storyline from season one and it was early enough on that even a human who was mostly not paying attention should have caught it.
+
+
+
+""Oh... I don't know. I don't really remember it. It was just on in the background when I had a break period waiting for one of my classes to start. So I've seen all of it but not closely,"" Amena said. Then she looked at me and bit her lip a little. She looked interested, which was a good sign. ""What did you think of it?""
+
+
+
+Hell. Yes. I don't know why I was so invested in Amena liking 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+ but there was literally nothing else to do on this transport and I 
+
+was
+
+ sort of invested. Just a bit.
+
+
+
+""The plot line begins when the unnamed person, the really suspicious one with all the hidden firearms, kills the second marital partner of the building manager. Ze's heartbroken by the loss so ze finds the primary family unit of the stranger and kills her two marital partners. Only ze doesn't know that she had two babies which are implied to be twins but not actually stated directly, they could be siblings from different birth parents given the layout of her family unit, and ze finds them in another room after the murders, when ze was trying to hide zeir genetic traces from the scene. So then ze's like oh I'll raise them to hate each other as my final act of revenge.""
+
+
+
+Amena's face looked like she was trying not to smile. It wasn't a funny plotline, it was serious, and I thought that maybe she wasn't paying attention, although she wasn't doing anything on the feed.
+
+
+
+""Amena, this is serious,"" I said. ""Ze takes the two babies and gives one of them away but lies to their new guardians about where ze got the baby from and then ze keeps one of them and raises them to hate those other guardians, because they have absolutely no idea that they're related.""
+
+
+
+""I know, I know!"" she said, raising her hands. ""This is so serious, you're so right. But don't they like, look related? How could they not tell? The colony is pretty big but it's not 
+
+that 
+
+big.""
+
+
+
+""They were played by the same actor,"" I said. ""But they get interrupted every time they're about to realize that they were born on the same day. It's a tragedy, really. They never even had a chance when they were raised to die.""
+
+
+
+Amena turned to face away from me. ""Oh,"" she said, in a small tone of voice. ""Is that why you care about it so much?""
+
+
+
+I wasn't expecting that.
+
+
+
+I didn't like it. It was too unexpected, too dangerously close to conversations that I didn't want to talk about. I had wanted her not to talk about my favorite show with that weird dismissive tone, not whatever was happening here
+
+.
+
+
+
+
+""I have to go do something,"" I said, and fled the cabin. I realized only after I had left that our cabin was the only place where other humans weren't, where I wouldn't have to pretend I was an augmented human who was also just as annoyed about this delay as they all were.
+
+
+
+(Frankly, I was fine with a delay where no one was shooting at us and nothing terrible was happening. I had been eavesdropping on the feeds where they discussed it and it was pretty clearly going to be sorted out in a handful of days when the ship owner reluctantly paid the fee.)
+
+
+
+I wandered around aimlessly for half an hour before I was forced to accept that there was no other option besides returning to the cabin and hoping Amena wouldn't try to ask uncomfortable questions when this had nothing to do with my feelings or whatever. I did still want her to like 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+. 
+
+
+
+She was asleep on her bunk when I returned. I had been holding the room input, obviously, but I hadn't been watching what she was doing on the feed and at some point her closed eyes had gone from looking at something to just being closed. If I had been paying closer attention, I would have realized, but the whole point of making a strategic exit was that I wasn't in here. I settled down in the chair and started watching my newest show, 
+
+Loss of Eternity. 
+
+It was a drama about a ship stuck in a wormhole that so far had not decided if it wanted to be too sad or too optimistic but instead was managing the very fine middle line that I had never seen in shows of this genre before. I was curious to see if I would continue to like it or if it would veer sharply off in one direction.
+
+
+
+I set the lights to dim as much as they could when I entered. No need for Amena to wake up because they were left on when it was basically the start of the ship rest cycle anyway--she'd sleep much better in the darkness.
+
+
+
+The next day was just as boring as the one before it. There was literally nothing to do except watch media, which I would have loved if not for the fact that I knew Dr. Mensah would be nervous about Amena's delay. I could watch as much media as I wanted on Preservation anyway.
+
+
+
+After her breakfast, Amena asked me if the twins had ended up killing each other after all. She didn't say it like she was taking pity on me though. Just like she was curious. I had meant to answer her question and then stop talking, because I really did not want any more uncomfortable pointed remarks but she seemed so genuinely interested.
+
+
+
+And I did want to talk about 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+, actually.
+
+
+
+I explained the whole arc of the two kids to her, starting with how they were each raised totally separately except for being told that they should hate each other, but that both of their guardians were involved in various fighting styles, since the colonists had to pick of a school of self defense to train in because of the fauna native to the planet. So they were both raised to fight but with opposing disciplines that played into their different motifs.
+
+
+
+Amena got really into it, actually. ""I can see why you like it,"" she said, once I had finished explaining the twins but then had to go back and explain the 
+
+rest 
+
+of season one so that she understood why it actually made perfect sense for people to be wandering around with concealed weapons that the audience could see but not the other characters and thus the fight that led to the twins being orphaned in the first place was actually perfectly reasonable for the context in which it was held.
+
+
+
+I stopped partway through explaining the season four storyline about how we flashed back to the establishing backstories of the various self defense schools. I hadn't been paying attention to the time, because I had been showing Amena pictures of the actors so she would recognize them and finding the official timeline that wasn't really official because it was put together by a fan but called itself official and then one of the show runners promoted it on their feed so then it basically was official and yes all of this was important to understanding what was actually going on, but her stomach had growled and I realized abruptly that I had forgotten to stop talking after I answered her last question.
+
+
+
+""You need to go eat,"" I said.
+
+
+
+She had been laying on her bunk, wrapped in a blanket. She sat up, letting it fall, and then yawned and promptly decided she wanted to bring it with her after all. ""Thank you for entertaining me,"" she said. ""It's interesting."" Then she left for the mess again, and I watched her progress through the ship cameras to make sure that she got there alright.
+
+
+
+I was feeling a weird sensation in my organics. I hadn't thought about entertaining her on purpose, even though I knew that she was bored and antsy and stressed about the delay. I had just meant to answer her direct questions and had gotten away from myself. But Amena hadn't seemed scared or stressed at all for the first time in days and she didn't seem to think it was a boring show for old people anymore. It was way past her usual mealtime but neither of us had even noticed.
+
+
+
+Amena was enjoyable to be around. She liked listening to me, outside of just wanting me there because the Corporation Rim was rightfully terrifying to a naive juvenile who had recently gotten a crash course in just how shitty it could be.
+
+
+
+I wanted to turn and face the wall, to hide, even though there was nobody here. She was sitting at a table in the gallery, quietly eating the imitation protein of the day and she was the only other person who would come into our cabin.
+
+
+
+I was embarrassed to realize how invested I had accidentally let myself be but I liked that it gave her something to focus on besides how much she wanted to hurry up and get off this transport. It was much more pleasant to be around humans when they're in a good mood and we would remain in close quarters for the next few days.
+
+
+
+(And it 
+
+would 
+
+be at least a few more days. Probably three, but even four wouldn't be unexpected. Not longer than that though: the missed profit if this ship didn't pick up its next passenger load was greater than the fine. They would cave and pay it at the last minute and we would be free to disembark.)
+
+
+
+By the time she came back, I had managed to mostly push down the embarrassment I felt. It was helped by the fact that the first thing she said was, ""Okay, I'm here. Keep going!""
+
+
+
+I made it all the way to the season seven plot line start where the librarian was discovered to have been editing the instructions regarding new soil maintenance before her eyes started to drift shut. I made a note of where I was in the explanation, because she clearly was too close to unconsciousness to retain any of this, but then I kept talking.
+
+
+
+She would fall asleep easier with background noise and I thought stopping abruptly might wake her back up. 
+
+
+
+I didn't stop until I was positive that she was deeply asleep. Instead of pulling up 
+
+Loss of Eternity
+
+ though, I pulled up one of the earlier episodes of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon.
+
+
+
+I hadn't watched this particular chunk of the season in a while--it wasn't my favorite so I didn't usually come back to it--but it was familiar in a nice way. I had watched it enough while I was with the company that I remembered it well, even without accessing my archival memory.
+
+
+(I sort of wanted to dwell on the fact that I was voluntarily explaining the entirety of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon 
+
+to someone who hadn't even liked it at first. It felt weird and uncomfortable to be so open about my enjoyment for it. But Amena already knew I liked the show so it wasn't like revealing new information about myself. She could look up the plot explanations herself and that was basically the exact same thing. I tried not to think about the exposed feeling.)
+
+
+
+In the morning, Amena seemed in better spirits. She told me about a dream she had that tied in a lot of the storylines she had fallen asleep to. Usually dreams are boring to hear about, except that this made me think about different ways that particular plot arc could have gone which was sort of interesting.
+
+
+
+The ship's secured private feed--that would be secured as in ""secured,"" by the way--didn't have much in the way of updates about the situation. I had seen a lot of similar negotiations though, and a quiet lull right before giving in was pretty standard. I was feeling more confident about my guess for when they would cave.
+
+
+
+There was also a message from Dr. Mensah, expressing concern. She looked stressed and nervous but also like she was trying 
+
+not 
+
+to look stressed and nervous, which she was admittedly pretty good at.
+
+
+
+I got why though. This would be the second time in a handful of months that Amena was trapped on a transport that wouldn't give her back. The first time was several orders of magnitude more dangerous, sure, and she was with me, but we were still in the Corporation Rim.
+
+
+
+Amena recorded her video response. I was comfortable where I was, so I didn't bother moving from where I was sitting on the chair next to the bed. Her own happy enthusiasm and insisting that she was fine would go a long way to soothing Dr. Mensah's anxiety, far more than anything I could say.
+
+
+
+Amena also did a lot of other boring things like eating breakfast and showering and checking her social feeds. I mostly ignored all that in favor of continuing my rewatch. When she had finished, she flung herself across the bed.
+
+
+
+""I don't remember where you were when I fell asleep,"" she told me. ""I tried to stay awake but I got too tired. Sorry.""
+
+
+
+I had thought that maybe she wouldn't want to hear about it again, since she had woken up a few hours ago and hadn't asked me anything else about the serial. I noted where I was in my episode and closed it.
+
+
+
+""Okay, so,"" I started and went back to where I had noted she was falling asleep last night.
+
+
+
+We spent two more days like that before the transport was finally cleared to dock and we could disembark. I tried not to be too disappointed about the fact that we only had two more seasons to get through explaining. There was one more wormhole jump to Preservation, this time a short one of only 10 days, but actively moving was vastly different emotionally than being stuck and unable to escape.
+
+
+
+Amena hadn't been stressed by the close quarters of the ship when we had been on our way home, only when docking was refused.
+
+
+
+Still, it was nice to walk around the station. Amena got food and we wandered around the entirety of the shopping sector so she could stretch her legs and pick up every object she saw.
+
+
+
+(""Look, it's a little cup!"" she exclaimed at 
+
+least 
+
+three separate times, in the store that sold little cups. They were decorated mugs, fauna themed, and they had an unusual texture. Surprisingly for the Corporation Rim, they were made by an artisan from a nearby freehold planet that often traded with Preservation. It was close but still slightly unexpected to see here.)
+
+
+
+We had to buy new tickets since we had missed the original transport back from the week long delay. We were lucky though. There was another ship going the same route leaving a few hours later. It only had room for one more passenger, so I bought Amena a ticket and then convinced the ship bot pilot that I was just a bot and it should let me onboard. It wasn't advanced enough to keep that kind of secret, so once I was onboard in our cabin I deleted the incident from its archives.
+
+
+
+As the ship uncoupled from the station and we were finally, 
+
+finally, 
+
+on the last leg of our journey, Amena turned to me.
+
+
+
+""Well,"" she said. ""Aren't you going to tell me how the next season starts?""
+
+
+
+Yeah. Yeah, I was.
+
+
+ "
+44618206,Residual Data,['voided_starlight'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1 & SecUnit 2 & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect),"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 1 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect)","Drabble, Grief/Mourning, Loss",English,2023-01-29,Completed,2023-01-29,100,1/1,12,20,1,62,"['danceswchopstck', 'Hi_Hope', 'Magechild', 'hazelel', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'biscut2', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'opalescent_potato', 'cmdrburton', 'AuntyMatter', 'Abacura', 'Rosewind2007', 'rainbowmagnet', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard']",[],"
+It is statistically likely that I will always miss you.
+
+
+
+Even now, aboard Perihelion, there is a moment during the transition between recharge and active cycle where I feel the residual impressions of you bleeding from permanent storage. 
+
+
+
+There are no team cubicles here- there aren't even individual ones- but there are doors to close with spaces to fill inside. There is also the freedom to do so.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And I miss you.
+
+
+
+The feel of 01's hands on my head, 02's kiss on my neck. Our hands locked together. Our breath together.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I think you would have liked it here.
+"
+44609353,"Iadra, oderzhimye prizrakami (razrushaia kod)","['bitari', 'WTF Cyberpunk and SciFi 2023 (fandom_Cyberpunk_2019)']",Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"ComfortUnit (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Tlacey (Murderbot Diaries), Tlacey's ComfortUnit (Murderbot Diaries)","Violent Thoughts, violent threats, Murderous Thoughts, Murder, outsider pov, ComfortUnit POV, POV Outsider",Russkii,2023-01-28,Completed,2023-01-28,"4,084",1/1,5,18,null,101,"['Aleesha_Amber', 'atmosfero', 'Sarastti', 'Sailis', 'Filarne', 'Sapneis', 'NastyLaughter', 'RianoneL', 'FlipSpring', 'el_tiburon']",[],"Mne ne potrebovalos' mnogo vremeni, chtoby soobrazit', chto novaia khoziaika kupila menia ne radi uslug avtopomoshchnika. Ee malo volnovali obychnye programmnye protsedury. Khotia ona v polnoi mere vospol'zovalas' standartnym naborom moikh uslug, ona tak zhe trebovala ot menia to, chto ne vkhodilo v parametry protokola. Khoziaika kupila menia, potomu chto ei nravilsia status vladelitsy lichnogo avtopomoshchnika. Ona kupila menia, potomu chto khotela pomykat' konstruktom, vypolniaiushchim vse ee prikhoti. I, konechno zhe, ia byl sozdan dlia togo, chtoby izo vsekh sil ei v etom pomogat'. 
+
+Ona byla sobstvennitsei. Ia byl ee, i tol'ko ee igrushkoi. Ona zapreshchala mne govorit' ne po delu, smiagchat' konflikty, delat' chto ugodno bez ee priamogo prikaza. A prikazy chashche vsego byli polnym bredom.
+
+Samym strannym bylo to, chto ona znala o moei nenavisti. Ee zabavliali moi zlobnye vzgliady i protesty protiv prikazov, protivorechashchikh protokolu. Poetomu ona nastroila moi modul' kontrolia tak, chtoby on pozvolial podobnoe povedenie naedine, v otsutstvii drugikh svidetelei moei derzosti. U menia bylo otkrytoe razreshenie vyrazhat' svoe nedovol'stvo eiu v nashem privatnom kanale. Ona otkliuchala mne zvuk, a zatem, v udobnoe dlia sebia vremia, proveriala logi, chtoby posmeiat'sia nad tem, kak ia sryvalsia ot razocharovaniia, pytalsia vozrazhat', tsitiroval protokol ili rugalsia. (Razocharovanie v Tleisi dovelo menia do gruboi rugani, a ved' neuvazhitel'noe obrashchenie k vladel'tsu bylo protiv moego protokola, protiv moikh luchshikh namerenii, protiv moei struktury i moego dizaina. Navernoe, ia polomalsia libo iz-za plokho otremontirovannykh fizicheskikh povrezhdenii, libo iz-za bezotvetstvennogo stilia upravleniia Tleisi. Khuzhe vsego, moi modul' kontrolia pozvolial eto, potomu chto eto razreshala Tleisi; ona schitala eto milym).
+
+Eto bylo khuzhe priamogo zapreta na vyrazhenie gneva. Potomu chto ia znal, chto imenno etogo ona i khochet, i ona znala, chto ia znaiu, chto ona khochet etogo. Ia izo vsekh sil staralsia ne dostavliat' ei udovol'stviia. No, navernoe, chto-to sluchilos' s moim emotsional'nym moduliatorom (kak i s millionom drugikh veshchei; ia vel zhurnal oshibok, kotoryi nikto nikogda ne proverial, khotia tekhnik dolzhen byl delat' eto reguliarno), poetomu inogda mne eto ne udavalos'. Ne vykhodilo ne igrat' v ee duratskie grebanye igry.
+
+Ona zasypala v moikh ob'iat'iakh s angel'skoi ulybkoi. Mnogie liudi khmuriatsia vo vremia otdykha, no ugolki gub na ee bezmiatezhnom litse byli slegka pripodniaty. Ee volosy razmetalis' po podushke. Ia nepodvizhno lezhal riadom.
+
+Kipia ot nenavisti.
+
+Ne pomniu, kogda imenno ia nachal fantazirovat' o ee ubiistve. No edva nachav, uzhe ne mog ostanovit'sia.
+
+Mne toshno. Eto menia razrushaet. Ia ne dolzhen byt' takim. Ia sozdan oblegchat' liudiam bol'. Ia sozdan umen'shat' ikh stress. Sozdan prinimat' oskorbleniia, kotorye inache oni nanosili by drug drugu, sozdan pogloshchat', otkloniat', rastvoriat' ikh. Ia dolzhen byt' luchshe, chem liudi, dolzhen byt' svobodnym ot chelovecheskikh khaotichnykh zhelanii i instinktov. Ia dolzhen rabotat' po protokolu: chetko, chestno i sverkh'estestvenno professional'no.
+
+Tem vremenem Tleisi tianula moi gliuchnyi, razdolbannyi v khlam, izmuchennyi v zhopu protsessor vniz, k svoemu urodlivomu, neprofessional'nomu, chelovecheskomu urovniu. A potom opuskala menia  eshche glubzhe. Ona slovno shakhterskii bur dokapyvalas' do takikh glubin isporchennosti vnutri menia, chto ia i predstavit' sebe ne mog.
+
+I ot etogo ne bylo spaseniia. Ia nichego ne mog podelat'. Ia vypolnial ee prikazy, protivorechashchie moim obuchaiushchim moduliam. Ia nabliudal, kak degradiruiu, prevrashchaias' v nechto, chto edva li mozhno nazvat' avtopomoshchnikom. Ia lezhal bez sna, obnimaia khoziaiku i mechtal tol'ko o tom, chtoby zadushit' ee.
+
+*
+
+Ia byl deshevym poderzhannym konstruktom s deshevym poderzhannym vladel'tsem.
+
+Tleisi ne znala, pochemu ia takaia deshevka. Ei bylo vse ravno. Ona dazhe ne udosuzhilas' provesti issledovanie, kotoroe dalo by ei povod dlia podozrenii. V otlichii ot drugikh potentsial'nykh pokupatelei. Oni reshili otkazat'sia ot pokupki. Moia tsena prodolzhala padat', vse nizhe i nizhe, priblizhaias' k toi cherte, kogda kompanii stalo by vygodnee sokratit' raskhody, spisav menia v util'. 
+
+Kompaniia sdelala mne minimal'nyi remont. Oni sterli nakhren podchistuiu vsiu moiu pamiat', no nekotorye veshchi im steret' ne udalos'. Po okonchanii remonta menia bez lishnei shumikhi peredali Tleisi. No ia edva proshel testy na funktsional'nost'. Moiu organiku terzali bespokoistvo i vspyshki... eto nel'zia bylo nazvat' vospominaniiami. Moia pamiat' ne khranilas' v organike. No moia organicheskaia chast' izo vsekh sil pytalas' vspomnit', i menia vzdergivalo ot veshchei, kotorye ia ne mog ob'iasnit'.
+
+Menia vzdergivalo pri vide avtostrazhei i gornodobyvaiushchikh botov, mimo kotorykh ia prokhodil, kogda Tleisi brala menia s soboi na vstrechi s klientami. Menia vzdergivalo pri vide liudei, kotorykh Tleisi prikazyvala mne izbit', vzdergivalo ot ikh krikov, ot togo, kak oni s'ezhivalis', kogda ia stoial nad nimi, a ruki moi byli v krovi. Menia vzdernulo ot slov <<kar'er Ganaka>>, kogda ia natknulsia na nikh v stat'e, kotoruiu odin iz sotrudnikov Tleisi chital v rabochee vremia. Ia sdelal pometku, chto on otvlekaetsia ot raboty, i otpravil Tleisi, chtoby ona mogla naorat' na nego i lishit' zarplaty za vpustuiu potrachennoe vremia. Ia sdelal kopiiu stat'i, i poka ia ee chital, moiu organiku zashkalivalo ot nervoznosti, i ia pochti chto-to vspomnil: teni... beg...  chto-to iarko vspykhivaet...
+
+Tleisi velela mne izbit' cheloveka, kotoryi chital stat'iu o kar'ere Ganaka v rabochee vremia. Ia vypolnil prikaz. Ia prizhal ego k stene, ugrozhal emu, smotrel v ego shiroko raspakhnutye belye glaza, kogda on zadykhalsia i umolial, ego miagkaia chelovecheskaia plot' poddavalas' pod moei khvatkoi, i moiu organiku tak sil'no ot vsego etogo triakhanulo, chto ia chut' ne otpustil ego pod preduprezhdaiushchee gudenie modulia kontrolia.
+
+No muzhchina vypalil: <<Prostite! Pozhaluista! Ia otkazhus' ot zarplaty za nedeliu!>>. Eto i khotela uslyshat' Tleisi, poetomu moi modul' kontrolia snova zasnul.
+
+*
+
+Shli gody. Ia nachal sbrasyvat' svoi oblichitel'nye rechi, rugatel'stva i protesty v zhurnal oshibok, kotoryi nikto nikogda ne chital. Spustia nekotoroe vremia soobshcheniia ob oshibkakh avtomaticheski udalialis'. Vozmozhno, Tleisi skuchala po zhalobam v privatnyi kanal. Nadeius' na eto.
+
+Odnazhdy Tleisi poruchila mne sledit' za vstrechei, kotoruiu ona provodila s nezadachlivymi uchenymi, prishedshimi potrebovat' vozvrashcheniia ukradennykh issledovanii.  Ia sidel za stolikom po sosedstvu s mestom vstrechi, ozhidaia prikhoda liudei. Povsiudu snovali torgovtsy; ikh raznotsvetnaia reklama vspykhivala i v fizicheskom prostranstve, i v seti. Mnozhestvo liudei slonialis' vokrug, pokupali edu, sideli za stolami, boltali drug s drugom. Kak i oni, ia pritvorialsia, chto rabotaiu po seti. Ia privychno delal pometki k standartnomu protokolu, perechisliaia vse sposoby, kotorymi Tleisi oskvernila ego za vremia vladeniia mnoi.  Eto menia uspokaivalo. Posle okonchaniia raboty dokument s primechaniiami otpravitsia priamikom v zhurnal oshibok.
+
+I tut poiavilis' liudi. Troe chelovek i ikh augmentirovannyi konsul'tant po bezopasnosti...
+
+Menia vzdernulo. Plokho. Ia zakinul dokument v zhurnal oshibok i vnimatel'no prismotrelsia k konsul'tantu.
+
+On dvigalsia ne sovsem pravil'no. U menia ne bylo programmy dlia otsenki ugroz ili dlia otsenki pokhodki cheloveka. No s etim konsul'tantom po bezopasnosti chto-to bylo ne tak. Ego golova pochti ne dvigalas', dazhe vo vremia razgovora s ostal'nymi. Liudi sklonny smotret' na togo, s kem govoriat, dazhe kogda v etom net neobkhodimosti. Krome togo, shagi konsul'tanta ne byli takimi zhe ritmichnymi, kak shagi liudei. Chem bol'she ia nabliudal, tem bol'she ubezhdalsia, chto eto ne chelovek. Eto konstrukt. Vozmozhno, avtostrazh, arendovannyi dlia zashchity uchenykh. No ego konfiguratsiia ne sootvetstvovala bazovomu standartu  -- naprimer, ego volosy byli dlinnee, tak chto eto ne mog byt' avtostrazh. A chto, esli...? Mozhet byt', eto eshche odin avtopomoshchnik, vrode menia. Zachem trem liudiam brat' s soboi avtopomoshchnika? Etogo avtopomoshchnika zastavili rabotat' protiv ego protokola? Bylo li eto obychnym zloupotrebleniem v otnoshenii avtopomoshchnikov? No avtopomoshchniki imitirovali chelovecheskuiu pokhodku luchshe, etogo konstrukta. Ia ne znal, na chto smotriu. Ia ulavlival protivorechivye signaly.
+
+Ia poslal otkrytyi ping po seti.
+
+Otveta ne posledovalo. Eto oznachalo odno iz dvukh. Pervoe: ia oshibsia, i  <<konsul'tant>> na samom dele ne byl konstruktom. Vtoroe: esli  <<konsul'tant po bezopasnosti>> byl konstruktom, to on libo vzbuntovalsia, libo byl vzlomannym.
+
+Moia organika nervno dernulas' pri etoi mysli. Vzlomannyi. Derganie. Vzlomannyi. Derganie. Pochemu moiu organicheskuiu sostavliaiushchuiu nastol'ko trevozhit ideia o vzlome bota? Derganie. (Chto, chert poberi, proizoshlo v kar'ere Ganaka?)
+
+Ia otpravil Tleisi soobshchenie o podozritel'nom konsul'tante po bezopasnosti. Ona poiavilas' vskore posle etogo so svoimi  golovorezami-liud'mi. Golovorezy i vzlomannyi(?) konstrukt(?) obmenialis' korotkimi ugrozami, a zatem Tleisi uselas' sporit' so svoimi byvshimi sotrudnikami.
+
+*
+
+Neudivitel'no, chto spor ne razreshilsia blagopoluchno dlia obizhennykh  rabotnikov Tleisi. Oni ushli s rasstroennym vidom. Tleisi podozvala menia, prikazav nakhodit'sia riadom i okhraniat' ee (vopreki protokolu, i ia vygruzil svoi protestuiushchii vopl' v zhurnal oshibok), poka ee liudi razbiraiutsia s uchenymi.
+
+My otstupili v lichnye pokoi Tleisi. Progulka do ee apartamentov proshla spokoino, poskol'ku ona sledila za novostiami ob uchenykh. Ia sledil za vyrazheniem ee litsa. Snachala ona vygliadela samodovol'noi, no kogda my dobralis' do ee kvartiry, vyrazhenie ee litsa stalo kislym i smushchennym. Prekrasno. Ee glupyi plan zabit' uchenykh do smerti provalilsia. Teper' ona vymestit eto na mne.
+
+V itoge ona ne stala otryvat'sia na mne. Sil'no.
+
+Tleisi zashla domoi, chto-to bormocha sebe pod nos, sniala delovoi pidzhak i pozvolila emu upast' na pol. Ia podnial ego, razgladil rukoi skladki i povesil v shkaf. Ona prinialas' raskhazhivat' po komnate, vzmakhivaia rukami i dergaia cheliust'iu, poka rabotala po seti, i ia postavil chainik.
+
+Kogda chai byl gotov, ia prines Tleisi chashku, i ona perenesla vnimanie s setevoi lenty na menia. Ee vechno ukhmyliaiushchiesia guby snova samodovol'no izognulis'.
+
+<<Otslezhivai obshchedostupnuiu informatsiiu ob etikh neukliuzhikh idiotakh i ikh konsul'tanta po bezopasnosti. Dai mne znat', kak tol'ko oni poiaviatsia>>, -- prikazala ona, zabiraia chai.
+
+O, kruto.
+
+Eto bylo, razumeetsia, protiv protokola. Ia ne byl grebanym avtostrazhem. Ia ne byl grebanym shpionom. Ia ne byl grebanym oruzhiem. Ia ne ponimal, pochemu Tleisi trebovala ot menia vypolneniia vsekh etikh funktsii. Ia tol'ko znal, chto ei bezrazlichno, dlia chego ia prednaznachen. Ei bylo vse ravno, chto u menia net nikakikh obrazovatel'nykh modulei po shpionazhu, obespecheniiu bezopasnosti ili vedeniiu boevykh deistvii. Ona vse ravno prikazyvala mne delat' podobnye veshchi. V odin prekrasnyi den' ona potrebuet, chtoby ia sdelal chto-to, chto podzharit mne mozg, a potom zakatit mne isteriku iz-za togo, chto ia mertv i bespolezen.
+
+Tleisi dopila chai, nalila spirtnogo v tu zhe chashku i snova zashagala po kvartire, serdito razglagol'stvuia o erunde, do kotoroi mne ne bylo nikakogo dela, poka ia iziashchno i molcha sidel na odnom iz ee stul'ev. Ia otslezhival novostnye lenty, sortiruia vkhodnye dannye s pomoshch'iu samostoiatel'no sozdannykh fil'trov i zaprosov.
+
+(Ia pisal eti fil'try i zaprosy bez kakogo-libo rukovodstva so storony nadlezhashchego protokola ili obuchaiushchego modulia, poetomu oni byli gluboko der'movymi. Tleisi postoianno zastavliala menia delat' takie veshchi, poetomu prishlos' perechital kuchu literatury po monitoringu i bezopasnosti setei, chtoby sozdat' etu khren' s nulia. Modul' kontrolia dolzhen by podzharit' mne mozgi za takoe, no u menia imelsia vnutrennii bufer, proigryvavshii na povtore golos Tleisi, proiznosiashchii: <<Mne vse ravno, chto u tebia net dlia etogo modulia! Vy zhestianka tupaia ili konstrukt? Razberis'! Sledite za kamerami, vzlamyvai sistemy, esli potrebuetsia! Delai vse, chto nuzhno, chtoby dostat' mne eti dannye!>>. Takim obrazom, ia imel unikal'noe udovol'stvie slushat' rugan' Tleisi riadom s soboi i odnovremenno ee bran' v zapisi, vse to vremia, poka ia izuchal setevye kanaly, a modul' kontrolia serdito vibriroval v moei golove, prichiniaia legkii, no nepriiatnyi zud.)
+
+Ia poimal <<konsul'tanta po bezopasnosti>> po puti k neispol'zuemomu transportnomu marshrutu. Sverilsia s kartoi. Marshrut vel k kar'eru Ganaka.
+
+Vsplesk uzhasa v moei organicheskoi sostavliaiushchei okazalsia nastol'ko moshchnym, chto ia perestal analizirovat' dannye. Modul' kontrolia ugrozhaiushche zazhuzhzhal, ukolom boli zastaviv menia snova vziat'sia za rabotu. Ia otpravil Tleisi pospeshnoe preduprezhdenie o konsul'tante, chto uspokoilo modul' i otvleklo Tleisi ot ee razdrazhaiushchei tirady.
+
+*
+
+Vyiasnilos', chto konsul'tant po bezopasnosti taino vyvez dvoikh chelovek. No tretii ostalsia. Ia sledil za nimi oboimi v lente, kogda oni vmeste zaselilis' v gostinitsu. Ia otpravlial  Tleisi postoiannye obnovleniia, poskol'ku ona snova i snova trebovala rasskazat', chto proiskhodit, gde oni seichas nakhodiatsia, bla-bla-bla.
+
+V kontse kontsov, Tleisi zatknulas' i ushla podumat' v odinochestve, zanimaias' v seti vsiakoi erundoi, a ia poluchil blagoslovennyi chas ili okolo togo tishiny, dlia zaneseniia vsevozmozhnykh obid v zhurnal oshibok.
+
+ 
+
+OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE: [VLADELETs BESPOLEZEN]
+
+OShIBKA: 404 PRIMEChANIE: [MOZG VLADEL'TsA NE OBNARUZhEN]
+
+OShIBKA: 404 PRIMEChANIE:[POZhALUISTA, PODOZhDITE. Ia IShchU, ChEM BY VLOMIT'.]
+
+OShIBKA: 404 PRIMEChANIE: [KOLIuShchEE ORUZhIE NE OBNARUZhENO]
+
+OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE:[KAKOGO KhRENA PROISKhODIT  ChTO SLUChILOS' V KAR'ERE GANAKA ChTO SLUChILOS' SO MNOI ChTO SLUChILOS' SO VSEMI ETIMI LIuD'MI ZAChEM TY IDIoSh' K KAR'ERU GANAKA ETO TY TAM VSEKh UBIL, NE TY, EI! VOPROS: TY UB'ESh' EShchE ODNOGO ChELOVEKA, VSEGO ODNOGO, KONEChNO, EShchE ODIN NE BUDET PROBLEMOI POSLE TOGO KAK TY UBIL 57 NEVINNYKh KLIENTOV, VOT ChTO SLUChILOS'. SLUChILOS' NE ETO. SKAZhI MNE, ChTO TAM SLUChILOS'.]
+
+ 
+
+A potom Tleisi prikazala mne poiti pogovorit' s konsul'tantom. Prekrasno. Net, pravda, imenno etogo ia i khotel. Khotia na samom dele net. Ia bol'she ne doverial svoim zhelaniiam, potomu chto prevratilsia v zlobnuiu, uzhasnuiu, slomannuiu tvar', kotoroi deistvitel'no neobkhodim modul' kontrolia, chtoby pomeshat' skhvatit' khoziaiku za cherep i vdavit' upomianutyi cherep vnutr'.
+
+No chto, esli  <<konsul'tant po bezopasnosti>> deistvitel'no byl avtostrazhem iz kar'era Ganaka? Vzbuntovavshimsia avtostrazhem? Uchityvaia, chto on spustilsia vniz, chtoby posmotret' na eto mesto, veroiatnost' togo, chto on byl tam, kogda pogibli liudi (i menia chut' bylo ne unichtozhili), prevyshala 80%.
+
+Vzbuntovavshiisia avtostrazh. Vzbuntovavshiisia avtostrazh, kotoryi, skoree vsego, ubil tekh liudei v kar'ere Ganaka. Zdes' i seichas. Chto on  delal  zdes' i seichas?  Zachem  on poiavilsia zdes' i seichas?
+
+On byl beskhoznym oruzhiem. Vne tsepochki protokolov, on khodil po obshchestvennym mestam, slovno chelovek. Slovno nastoiashchii konsul'tant po bezopasnosti, zashchishchaiushchii klienta. I on uspeshno zashchitil svoikh klientov ot golovorezov Tleisi i ee prispeshnikov. Ia byl ocharovan.
+
+(A eshche ia ponial, chto uzhasno, iarostno, otchaianno zhelaiu osvobodit'sia ot Tleisi. Beskhoznyi bot. Ia ne mog ubit' Tleisi, no on mog by sdelat' eto za menia. Ia zastavliu ego sdelat' eto za menia.)
+
+(Malen'kaia chast' menia, omertvevshaia, izmuchennaia i istoshchennaia, zaprotestovala. Eto bylo narusheniem protokola. Tleisi byla moim vladel'tsem. Ia eshche bol'she omertvil etu chast' sebia, eshche bol'she izmuchil i istoshchil ee. Ia dostatochno dolgo podchinialsia Tleisi. Ia dostatochno dolgo narushal protokol po ee prikazu)
+
+Ia shel v gostinitsu, borias' sam s soboi. Strashas' samogo sebia. V kogo ia prevratilsia? V strakh i zlost'. Ia byl v iarosti. Ia dostig tochki nevozvrashcheniia. Mir stal vikhrem, skontsentrirovannom na kar'ere Ganaka, na mne i na beskhoznom avtostrazhe, i ia byl sloman bez vozmozhnosti vosstanovleniia, i zashel tak daleko, chto stalo uzhe vse ravno. Ia tozhe byl pochti beskhoznym, ia stal koshmarom, kotorogo sderzhivala lish' delikatnaia ugroza boli i smerti, taivshaiasia v bezdumnom module moego mozga. I vot, nastal moi shans. Moia vozmozhnost'. Teper' dazhe modul' kontrolia ne v sostoianii menia ostanovit'.
+
+Ia vstal pered dver'iu gostinichnogo nomera i poslal ping.
+
+Potrebovalos' vremia, chtoby prishel otvet. Bolee desiati sekund.
+
+Beskhoznyi zagovoril so mnoi, pritvoriaias', nesmotria ni na chto, chelovekom. My govorili, slovno liudi, obmenivaias' slovami vmesto kodov v seti. Ia prosto vypolnial prikaz Tleisi. (Ia sabotiroval Tleisi) I konstrukt zagovoril so mnoi; bot, kotoryi, veroiatno, edva ne unichtozhil menia v kar'ere Ganaka; bot, kotoryi, veroiatno, byl vyzhivshim, veroiatno, palachom, veroiatno, sadistom. On govoril so mnoi kratko i nezhno.
+
+Pokrovitel'stvenno.
+
+On govoril s tonko zavualirovannoi ugrozoi. (<<Ia ub'iu tebia, esli pridetsia>>, -- nameknul on mne, ne proiznosia imenno etikh slov.) Protokol. Eto byl ego protokol. Eto bylo ego tsel'iu. On byl beskhoznym, neupravliaemym, no vse eshche sledoval protokolu. Ia s trudom mog v eto poverit'. Vpervye s tekh por, kak ia stal igrushkoi Tleisi, ia pochuvstvoval problesk nadezhdy. Nadezhda byla nastol'ko chuzhdoi mne, takoi neznakomoi, vyzvala takoe golovokruzhenie, chto ia reflektorno sbrosil potok nenuzhnykh dannykh v zhurnal oshibok. Ia boialsia brodiagi, no v strakhe byl ottenok zavisti. Ia ne znal, chto eto znachit. Ia byl potriasen, voskhishchen. Ia zalozhil osnovu dlia smerti Tleisi. (<<Ia khochu, chtoby ty ubil Tleisi>>, -- nameknul ia emu, ne proiznosia imenno etikh slov.)
+
+*
+
+Kak i ozhidala Tleisi, on prishel za svoim klientom. Ia derzhal modul' boevogo podavleniia v ruke. (Boevoe podavlenie. Chto-to v etom zastavlialo moi organicheskie chasti podergivat'sia.) Vse shlo tak, kak khotela Tleisi, chto oznachalo, chto vse shlo ne tak, kak khotel ia. Ia podnial modul' boevogo podavleniia.
+
+<<Esli ia soglashus', ona otpustit moego klienta?>> - sprosil on.
+
+-- Da, -- otvetil ia vslukh.
+
+<<Ty znaesh', chto net>>, - skazal ia po seti.
+
+Ego litso bylo spokoinym. Standartnoe neitral'noe vyrazhenie. On povernulsia, pokazav na port vvoda dannykh na zatylke. Ia smotrel na to, kak moia ruka medlenno podnimaetsia, slovno ona ne byla moei chast'iu. Ia delal eto tak medlenno, kak tol'ko mog, pod bespokoinuiu drozh' modulia kontrolia. Ia daval emu vse vremia, kotoroe mog, chtoby pozvolit' emu chto-nibud' sdelat', chto ugodno, pozvolit' emu proiavit' svoe buntarstvo. No nichego ne sluchilos'. Ia vstavil modul' v ego port. On govoril, chto sdelaet vse radi zashchity klienta. No eto nichego ne znachilo. Protokol. Glupost'. My vse byli v kletke. Ia sbrosil vopl' razocharovaniia v zhurnal oshibok i proiznes vslukh neitral'nym, professional'nym tonom: <<Siuda>>.
+
+Ia privel ego k Tleisi. Ona byla dovol'na i zloradstvovala. Teper' u nee stalo dva konstrukta, s kotorymi mozhno igrat'. Kakoe vesel'e. Ia bespolezno stoial riadom. Vsegda bespolezno. Ia vsegda dolzhen delat' to, chto velit mne Tleisi, dazhe esli eto protivorechit protokolu. Ia stoial v ozhidanii i smotrel na drugogo konstrukta, kotoryi tol'ko chto stal moim kollegoi. Ia zadavalsia voprosom, budet li mne pozvoleno, smogu li ia pogovorit' s nim. Ia ne znal, kak rabotaiut moduli boevogo podavleniia. Naskol'ko ia znal, tot konstrukt uzhe mertv, ego razum stert. Libo, vozmozhno, popal v lovushku, i ego dvizheniia podchinialis' prikazam Tleisi. Kak ia.
+
+Tleisi pokazala konstruktu ego klientku, a zatem otoslala ee, prosto chtoby poizdevat'sia nad nimi oboimi. Kogda grustnuiu malen'kuiu uchenuiu uveli, Tleisi podoshla poblizhe k zablokirovannomu konstruktu, s liubopytstvom nakloniv golovu.
+
+Ona sprosila menia: 
+
+-- Ty deistvitel'no dumaesh', chto eto odin iz uchastnikov neschastnogo sluchaia v kar'ere Ganaka?
+
+Ia khotel otvetit', no konstrukt menia perebil. Ia ustavilsia na nego, i moi protsessor zakhlestnulo glupoi nadezhdoi.
+
+On skazal: 
+
+-- No my zhe znaem, chto eto ne bylo neschastnym sluchaem, ne tak li?
+
+Ne bylo neschastnym sluchaem? Ia ustavilsia na Tleisi. Chto ona znala o kar'ere Ganaka? Kogda ona pokupala menia, ona znala, otkuda ia vzialsia, no ei bylo prosto naplevat'? Chto izvestno etomu konstruktu? Chto on obnaruzhil tam, vnizu, v shakhtakh Ganaka, zachem on zdes'?
+
+-- S kem ia razgovarivaiu? -- riavknula Tleisi, priniav oboronitel'nuiu pozu. Oi. Oi. On do sikh por ostalsia beskontrol'nym? O, tol'ko by on byl beskontrol'nym. Moiu organiku dergalo v bezumnoi pliaske: vospominaniia bez pamiati, strakh bez konteksta (opushchennaia litsevaia panel' broni, khvataiushchaia menia bronirovannaia ruka, bol', liudskie kriki). Ia ne znal tochno, chto proizoshlo togda. Seichas ia zapikhival glupuiu nadezhdu na beskontrol'noe buistvo v zhurnal oshibok.
+
+Litso konstrukta bol'she ne bylo standartno-neitral'nym. Ego guby rastianulis' v oskale, ledianye glaza suzilis', brovi soshlis' glubokoi bukvoi V. Na eto bylo zhutko smotret'. Tleisi poshatnulas', ee samodovol'stvo smenilos' neuverennost'iu i strakhom. Voskhititel'noe zrelishche.
+
+-- Dumaesh', ia marionetka? - prorychal konstrukt, - Ty zhe znaesh', chto my ne tak rabotaem.
+
+(Marionetka. Razve my rabotaem ne tak?)
+
+-- Kto tebia poslal? -- sprosila Tleisi.
+
+Konstrukt posmotrel ei v glaza i otvetil: 
+
+-- Ia prishel za svoim klientom.
+
+ 
+
+OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE: [DA!]
+
+ 
+
+Tleisi prikazala mne udarit' konstrukta, potomu chto eto bylo v ee dukhe. Konechno zhe, ona byla nastol'ko glupoi. Poetomu ia ego udaril. S siloi stuknul ego po litsu, do boli v ruke. I na mgnovenie, kogda ia uvidel oblegchenie Tleisi, ia pochuvstvoval svoe porazhenie i razocharovanie. Eto uzhe bylo slishkom. Slishkom sil'nyi udar, slishkom mnogo razbitykh nadezhd.
+
+Tleisi ulybnulas': 
+
+-- Mne nraviatsia boltlivye boty. Budet interesno.
+
+ 
+
+OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE: [Ia UB'Iu TEBIa NAKhREN TLEISI Ia UB'Iu TEBIa NAKhREN TLEISI Ia UB'Iu TEBIa NAKhREN TLEISI POMIaNI MENIa Ia NAIDU SPOSOB UBIT' TEBIa NAKhREN.]
+
+ 
+
+A potom konstrukt skhvatil menia i shvyrnul cherez vsiu komnatu na okhranu Tleisi.
+
+ 
+
+OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE: [O.]
+
+OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE: [Tleisi.]
+
+OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE: [A ia preduprezhdal.]
+
+ 
+
+Gorstka liudei-okhrannikov i odin avtopomoshchnik (OShIBKA: 101 PRIMEChANIE: [A Ia GOVORIL, ChTO U MENIa NET BOEVYKh PROGRAMM]) protiv vzbuntovavshegosia avtostrazha -- nichto. On dvigalsia tak, slovno nas vsekh spetsial'no rasstavili, chtoby razygrat' etu malen'kuiu stsenu, i my poslushno padali odin za drugim, s raznoi stepen'iu povrezhdenii. Menia shvyrnuli na pol, razbili koleno, slomali plecho, sensory goreli ot boli. Ia nabliudal za proiskhodiashchim nasiliem s raskrytymi glazami, ne upuskaia ni mgnoveniia paniki i uzhasa na litse Tleisi, i sokhranil vse v svoei pamiati. Ia zhdal, chto beskhoznyi vskore ub'et menia. Ia zhdal, chto on ub'et nas vsekh. Mne bylo vse ravno. Ia dazhe ne boialsia.
+
+Vse zakonchilos' cherez desiat' sekund, i piat' iz nikh beskhoznyi treboval ot Tleisi prikazat' mne otstupit'. (Zachem? Zachem, esli on legko mog by ubit' i ee, i menia? Razve ne tak postupaiut vzbuntovavshiesia? Ne tak, kak postupil on?)
+
+--  Dai seks-botu slovesnuiu komandu podchiniat'sia mne do dal'neishego uvedomleniia. -- velel on -- Poprobuesh' otdat' emu liuboi drugoi prikaz, i ia vyrvu tebe iazyk.
+
+Tleisi drozhala, delaia korotkie, ispugannye vdokhi. 
+
+--  Podchiniaisia etomu bezumnomu, beskontrol'nomu avtostrazhu do dal'neishego uvedomleniia, - skazala ona mne, a zatem vypliunula v ego storonu: - Tebe nuzhny ugrozy poluchshe.
+
+Beskhoznyi posmotrel na nee. Ego ten' padala na lezhashchego na polu menia; ia otkliuchil bolevye datchiki, snizhaia oshchushcheniia ot travm, kotorye on nanes mne s zhestokoi, neoslabevaiushchei effektivnost'iu.
+
+-- Ia ne ugrozhaiu, --  ob'iasnil on. --  Prosto soobshchaiu, chto sobiraius' sdelat'.
+
+On opustil vzgliad na menia: 
+
+-- Ne vstavai.
+
+Ia poslal emu signal podtverzhdeniia. On otstupil, bestseremonno skhvatil Tleisi za ruku, i potashchil ee k vykhodu. Ia slyshal, kak ona umoliala, uprashivala, pytalas' ego podkupit' na vsem protiazhenii koridora, a potom ee kriki i vystrely (moia organika sodrognulas' ot ocherednogo vospominaniia bez pamiati).
+
+A potom tishina.
+
+Blagoslovennaia tishina.
+
+*
+
+Semnadtsat' minut spustia nash shattl vtianuli v drugoi korabl', i beskhoznyi toroplivo pones kuda-to svoiu klientku. Ia posledoval za nimi. Gruzovoi otsek byl prostornym, chistym, khorosho organizovannym, s akkuratno zafiksirovannymi instrumentami i pripasami. Ia ostanovilsia, poluchiv ping ot bot-pilota. Standartnoe privetstvie. Ia vezhlivo pozdorovalsia v otvet, a zatem otpravil zapros o ego statuse, i statuse beskhoznogo. Bot-pilot ne otvetil.
+
+Ia nashel beskhoznogo v meditsinskom bloke, sidiashchego riadom s liul'koi, kotoraia skanirovala i remontirovala ego klienta. Vyrazhenie ego litsa ne bylo standartno-neitral'nym. On bezuchastno smotrel v prostranstvo s zatravlennym vidom. Ego telo zastylo v zhestkoi, nechelovecheski nepodvizhnoi poze. Telo, sozdannoe dlia unichtozheniia, no ne ubivshee vsekh na bortu korablia Tleisi. Ne ubivshee dazhe menia.
+
+Dlia etogo net protokola. Ladno. Ne sovsem. Ia znaiu, v chem zakliuchaetsia moia funktsiia. Tleisi bol'she net, i mne nakonets-to ne nuzhno delat' to, chto ona menia zastavliala, to, chto shlo vrazrez s protokolami.
+
+Ia opustilsia na koleni pered beskhoznym konstruktom; rany kazalis' otdalennymi i priglushennymi. 
+
+-- Mogu ia pomoch'?
+
+-- Net, -- tikho otvetil on, ne gliadia na menia. A zatem sprosil: -- Otkuda ty znaesh', chto ia byl odnim iz avtostrazhei kar'era Ganaka?
+
+Kak ia mog ne znat'? Ia ob'iasnil emu, chto videl, kak on spuskalsia k shakhtam.
+
+Ia o stol'kikh veshchakh khotel ego sprosit'. Chto on nashel tam, vnizu? On uznal menia? Dlia Tleisi moiu konfiguratsiiu nemnogo obnovili, chtoby ona sootvetstvovala ee vkusu. Chto budet teper', kogda ia fakticheski stal sobstvennost'iu beskhoznogo konstrukta, teper', kogda ego prikazy stali moimi direktivami? Zastavit li on menia poiti protiv protokola, vypolniaia ego...
+
+-- Uberi svoiu stenu, -- velel on.
+
+Ia eto sdelal. Ne dumaia. Ne znaia. Ia dazhe ne uspel tolkom ispugat'sia, prezhde chem pochuvstvoval ego prisutstvie v svoem razume, tiazheloe i neuiutnoe, probiraiushcheesia skvoz' menia, moi kody, moi protokoly, moi vospominaniia, moi vpechatleniia, moi modul' kontrolia. Ia zastyl na meste, smotria i ne vidia, poka beskhoznyi dvigalsia chuzherodnym, infitsiruiushchim prizrakom skvoz' menia do samogo iadra, kopaias' v moem razume, tsepliaia shchupal'tsa setevogo prisutstviia, slovno lezviia, slovno udush'e, slovno oslepitel'nyi svet, kotoryi rastvoril menia...
+
+On perevel modul' kontrolia v sostoianie NULL i udalilsia.
+
+Ia otkinulsia nazad, edva uspev uperet'sia rukoi, chtoby ne rukhnut' na spinu, i ustavilsia na beskhoznogo. On posmotrel na menia v otvet.
+
+Ia potykal v svoi modul' kontrolia. On ne otreagiroval. Mertv. Inerten.
+
+Ia byl. Ia stal beskhoznym. Tak bylo. Ia ne byl. Ia ne chuvstvoval nikakoi raznitsy. Ia chuvstvoval sebia sovershenno inache. Ia ostalsia takim zhe, no nichego ne ostalos' prezhnim.
+
+Po privychke ia sbrosil svoe zameshatel'stvo v zhurnal oshibok. Moe litso bylo pustym, iazyk tela nichego ne vyrazhal. Ia privyk vygliadet' nikakim, dazhe razvalivaias' na chasti.
+
+Beskhoznyi skazal grubym tonom, so stranno iskazhennoi grimasoi na litse, prizrak ego prisutstviia v moei golove, oshchushchalsia smes'iu blagodarnosti, razocharovaniia, sozhaleniia i otvrashcheniia: 
+
+-- Ukhodi. Ne dai mne uvidet' tebia snova. Ne prichiniai nikomu vreda na tranzitnom kol'tse, ili ia naidu tebia.
+
+U menia bylo stol'ko voprosov. Kak mne teper' byt'? Kak mne zhit' s samim soboi, so svoim urodlivym raznuzdannym khaosom nenavisti i otchaianiia? Kak mne zhit' bez modulia kontrolia, kak prokladyvat' kurs bez provodnika, kak reshit', chto delat', esli modul' kontrolia bol'she ne ugrozhaet mne, a vladelets ne otdaet prikazy?
+
+Beskhoznyi pomorshchilsia ot boli, kogda dron prikosnulsia k rane na ego noge. Ia ponimal, chto skazannoe im bylo ugrozoi. (<<Ia ne ugrozhaiu>>.) Ego slova -- ugroza. Ego slova -- prikaz, protokol. Ia ne obiazan sledovat' prikazu. Ne obiazan slushat'sia. Ia mogu vse, i nichto menia ne ostanovit.
+
+No ia znaiu, v chem moia funktsiia. Vsegda znal, chto, dazhe kogda mne prikazyvali postupat' inache, zastavliali prichiniat' vred, a ne pomogat'.
+
+Ia vstaiu, i drony provozhaiut menia k vykhodu iz korablia. Ia vykhozhu na tranzitnoe kol'tso. Ia vykhozhu v mir."
+44609185,The Blanket,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries),"Overse - Character, Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries)",,English,2023-01-28,Completed,2023-01-28,100,1/1,14,15,null,31,"['CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'Magechild', 'jules_THOR', 'verersatz', 'petwheel', 'Gozer', 'AuntyMatter', 'elmofirefic', 'rainbowmagnet', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard', 'voided_starlight']",[],"Overse loved this blanket - tightly-woven wool by the Pabel family, black and grey with a few bright stripes. It was warm and yet not suffocating. She'd had it for most of her life, a gift from her grandmother. She snuggled under it, comfortable and perfect except for one thing. Then Arada joined her and all was as it should be. Cool skin slid against her own and they nestled against one another. The other thing she loved about this blanket was it was big enough for two. The cold outside couldn't touch them here where they were safe and together."
+44609140,Imperfect Recall,['Gamebird'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries),Choking,English,2023-01-28,Completed,2023-01-28,100,1/1,6,22,null,189,"['CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'Lady_Cassara', 'FaerieFyre', 'outlander_unknown', 'Slimeball', 'halcyonsystem', 'Abacura', 'Gozer', 'verersatz', 'voided_starlight', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Chyoatas']",[],"He was past the age when anything remotely sexual might turn him on and this shouldn't be sexual, but, well. It kept lingering in his mind. He found a clear section of wall and leaned against it, his hand at his throat. He couldn't find the right angle, the right pressure. That wasn't what it was about. He brought up the video. The intensity! He remembered his fear, the realization that his life was entirely in its hands. Did he deserve death? Or life? Did any of them deserve it? Fuck - he wanted to come so bad thinking of that."
+44196664,Love for Every Mask,['GhostYarrowTea'],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Tapan (Murderbot Diaries), Maro (Murderbot Diaries), Rami (Murderbot Diaries)","Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Character Study, POV Multiple, Team as Family, Blood and Injury",English,2023-01-11,Updated,2023-01-28,"14,321",8/?,102,115,11,"1,195","['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'siren_lorelei', 'FyrDrakken', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'fate_goes_ever', 'faerynova', 'Dawn_Rising', 'FiftyCookies', 'SidyKittyCat', 'Jackalope108', 'Seregona', 'dree', 'PurpleCarSeat', 'AVerySpookyGhost', 'SourOrchard', 'AkaMissK', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'Grumplent', 'dancernerd', 'The_Degu', 'DimitriLasker', 'Llythandea', 'otherhawk', 'scheidswrites', 'Next_Stop_Willoughby', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'Clockwork_Dragon', 'Stefka_13', 'call_me_mad', 'QuestionableLifeChoices', 'reallyyeahokay', 'junebug171', 'AZRA3L', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'Beboots', 'Thursdaye', 'opalescent_potato', 'thewolvesrunwild', '1Cieling_Fan', 'farawaykingdom', 'SomeSmallLegoBricks', 'Reulte', 'sluttygirlboy', 'vikkyleigh', 'Random954', 'VegaCoyote', 'TurHaretha', 'sareliz', 'Manerva']",[],"I sat on the floor of Dr. Mensah's office, one leg extended in front of me and one drawn to my chest. I could sit on one of the plush visitor chairs. Or the desk. Really anywhere. Despite her position, Dr. Mensa was not much for formalities and was insistent that I do whatever was ""most comfortable for me"". At first, I thought that meant sitting on whatever furniture I could, usually in the most egregiously casual ways I could think of. I spent a lot of time replicating poses from the media I watched; boots up on tables or legs slung across armrests. But as it turned out, this was my favorite spot in Mensah's office. I had a good view of all its angles without being in view of the windows which looked out on Preservation Station below. The wall supported my back as I leaned up against it and I had the space to splay my limbs in whatever direction they comfortably fell.
+
+Up until recently, I had never been in Dr. Mensah's office without- well -Dr. Mensah. But that was before Mensah's daughter, Amena, had been kidnapped and almost killed because of some remnant-infected humans. They'd both wanted to spend more time with me since then.
+
+Amena and I were waiting for Mensa to return from her council chambers to share a meal. Or rather, the two of them would while I stayed nearby for security purposes. While we waited, Amena was meant to be working on her academics. She'd gotten behind during her time off following the incident and was due to resume normal studies soon. The papers she was meant to be studying served as a napkin, catching the crumbs of her pre-dinner fried vegetable matter.
+
+""Wait, wait. I thought Rin was her long-lost brother. He's not in love with her, is he?"" Amena asked in disgust, gesturing to the office display surface with her writing utensil. Normally, I played my media on my personal feed. But Amina wanted to watch it together and insisted that she could devote attention to her studies and The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon at the same time. I've heard the same false claim from humans before. But she insisted.
+
+""No, thankfully. He's had a memory augment and has mistaken her for his dead wife."" I said flatly, parsing through my drone data. Unlike Amena, I actually could intake and monitor multiple inputs at once. She gaped at me, open-mouthed for 2.3 seconds before throwing the nearest object in range. In this case, it was an embossed glass orb on Mensah's desk denoting her achievement as a planetary leader. I intercepted its arc and set it on the ground.
+
+""Sec-unit! I didn't know that yet. You can't reveal the twists like that!"" Amena said in that uniquely human-adolescent tone.
+
+""You keep asking for information that clearly hasn't been revealed yet. If you don't want to know, you shouldn't ask."" Amena started to snark back but I was distracted by a data packet pushed through a secure feed connection. I ran a malware sweep of it twice before opening it to some very familiar coding.
+
+My face must have registered my surprise because Amena stopped, mid-rant. ""What is it? It's everything okay?""
+
+I nodded as I started analyzing the data. Amena was still watching me closely so I added ""I just got a message from ART.""
+
+Amena paused the episode of Sanctuary Moon. ""Perihelion is in feed range? Is it docked in the station?"" She asked excitedly. I turned the episode back on, earning an annoyed glance from her. I could feel her feed activity increasing, searching in hopes of reaching out to ART. They had become annoyingly cozy during our last life-or-death rendezvous.
+
+""No. It's a message through a data stream. Probably sent ahead of ART through a wormhole."" I said. I felt myself frown as I processed what it had sent.
+
+
+Greetings. I am currently in the Corporation Rim and came within range of RaviHyral. The social feed for ""Security Consultant Eden"" received a non-urgent message from your previous clients, Rami, Tapan, and Maro. They requested a meeting with you. The Preservation Alliance is within acceptable range of my next route, should you need transport. Do you wish to accept their offer?
+
+
+I dropped a couple of inputs as well as some performance reliability. There goes that claim of superior functioning. I didn't think I was ever going to see the kids again. I thought they were safe. That my job was done. Had something happened? ART had tagged the request as non-urgent but that didn't mean everything was alright. Maybe the investigation of the incident on RaviHyral found them culpable and they wanted a corroborating witness. Or someone to smuggle them away from the legal proceedings. Had it been an incident involving the Company, those types of issues would have surfaced far sooner but Tlacey's operation was small. It was possible the legal battles were slower.
+
+Or maybe they just wanted to hire me for a different job. Something easy. They were researchers after all. Or maybe Tlacey's injuries hadn't killed her, she'd rallied, and was coming after them. Maybe the message was tagged as non-urgent in an attempt to fly under the radar. Why hadn't they given more detail? My anxiety was bad, even for a sec-unit, but that message would have made anyone paranoid.
+
+Amena had crept closer while I ran risk assessments with my limited data. She stopped a few feet away and crouched down. ""Sec-unit? What's the matter? Are Perihelion and its crew okay?""
+
+I fired a response to ART.Yes.I stood and Amena's balance wavered, surprised by my sudden movement. I tended to not run the code I used to replicate human movement when it was just the Preservation Aux crew or Amena around. It was safe not to with them.
+
+""They're fine. But I need to go off-station for a bit. I'll start making preparations for security measures while I'm gone."" I said. I replaced the glass orb on Mensah's desk and started for the door when Amena placed her unsubstantial body in my path. I could see over her head though she seemed to think this would do something to stop me.
+
+""Wait. Wait. What happened? A second ago everything was fine and now you're rushing out of the system for no reason?"" I could feel her eyes boring into my face, as if she could read the data packet that way. I stared at the wall behind her.
+
+""ART forwarded a message from some old clients. It didn't have many details. I need to make sure they're okay. The kids are stupid so chances are they've done something to get themselves into trouble again."" I stepped to the side to make my way around Amena but she matched my movement. We had a well-established agreement of no touching. This is how she got around it. I glared at the shelf on the far wall.
+
+""What kids? You had clients before Second Mom? Ones you actually cared about, not just ones you had to protect because the Company told you to?"" She was still staring me down. I stepped, she matched.
+
+""Amena, give it a rest. I won't be gone long and-"" I don't entirely know what I planned to say to get her to stand down. I wanted to get out of there quickly to sort through my own emotions and start the necessary preparations. But I was interrupted by Amena's spitting image coming through the door, right next to the spot I'd been staring at the wall.
+
+""You're leaving? Did I hear that right?"" Asked Dr. Mensah as she entered her office. There was a little crease in her brow as she asked it but her voice was level. I sighed feeling another dip in my performance reliability. There was no escaping a discussion now. Perfect.
+
+I'm on winter break from college right now so I should be able to post a new chapter every day or two. Thanks for reading! <3
+
+ 
+
+Sometimes I forget that I don't know Sec-unit's exact age. Or the fact that its age isn't actually a good indicator of its mental and emotional development following the extreme highs and lows of complex trauma and memory wipes. Sometimes when we're talking, it feels like an old friend. Someone who's walked the world as long or even longer than I have and carried immeasurable burdens. On the rare occasions it is comfortable or distressed enough to lock eyes, I can see they hold volumes. It breaks my heart the weight it has had to carry. 
+
+ 
+
+Other times I walk into my office and see two teenagers under my care. Voices elevated, glaring, and looking as though they are one ""I'm not touching you"" away from someone deeply regretting their choices. When Sec-unit and Amena argue it tends to stoop a bit. I can never tell if this is it trying to consciously look less intimidating, or if Amena just manages to aggravate it enough that it unconsciously leans into the argument, getting slightly more on her level. Amena meanwhile is all push. Her shoulders roll back with her hands on her hips and she bounces a bit where she's balancing on her tiptoes. The result is that the broadly-built Sec-unit, with its thick gunport forearms and tall frame, ends up looking comparable in scale to Amena. Not unlike an older brother who has hit a much-resented growth spurt. 
+
+ 
+
+I prepared to diffuse the situation when I heard Sec-unit say through gritted teeth that it was leaving. Cold water felt like it was rolling up from my stomach and into my chest. It was dangerous out there. It wanted to leave and go where it was dangerous. Why was it always throwing itself at the bloody bits of the world that wanted to tear it up and make sure it never came home? My throat felt swollen as I swallowed.
+
+ 
+
+Wait.
+
+ 
+
+Breathe.
+
+ 
+
+I looked at Amena and Sec-unit; safe for now. Squabbling but well protected. 
+
+ 
+
+""You're leaving? Did I hear that right?"" I asked. I used my practiced, Council Chambers tone that I could always rely on. Amena whirled around and Sec-unit's eyes shot to mine for a second. It straightened and its gaze flicked to a spot on the wall behind me. Its whole body was taut with tension, looking like it wanted to bolt out the door. ""Amena, could you head down to the station mall, please? See if you can save us the corner booth Sec-unit likes at the noodles stand. We'll be right with you."" I asked. 
+
+ 
+
+Amena looked offended and like she was about to argue. I reached out and gave her hand a soft squeeze. Her big brown eyes had been rimmed by long dark lashes since she was a baby. Laughter and questions and gushing concern for others constantly danced in the light of those eyes. Stars, she was so grown already. And so kind. l wasn't trying to get rid of her. I was just trying to manage all three of our overwhelm. The contact made her pause. She squeezed back, nodding with a little smile before shooting a petulant glare back at Sec-unit. It didn't match her gaze but jutted its jaw out so I knew it was watching her through its drones as usual. It sent a few of the drones flitting out of the room with Amena, whirring alongside her as she went down to the station below.
+
+ 
+
+I walked over to my desk, sweeping chip crumbs off of Amena's now grease-stained schoolwork. I let them fall from my hands to a small recycling unit below. ""It doesn't seem like she's connecting with her studies. She's not passionate about them."" My eyes flicked up to the office display surface which was playing one of Sec-unit's favorite programs. It served as partial evidence to my statement but it also brought a smile to my face. They had been watching it together a lot. Arguing over plot points and taking different sides during dramatic arcs. Amena was never much of a fan of serials but she takes such intense positions in their debates. It always draws Sec-unit out of its shell, rebutting her out loud and over the feed. They talked a lot with each other because of Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit tucked itself into the corner of the office, arms crossed while it stood. ""I'm sorry. I have to leave you two again."" It said, Its drones watched my face and hands as I shifted some old baubles on my desk. I did my best not to let the pang of its words and the way it cut through my stomach show on my face. I smiled.
+
+ 
+
+""Don't worry about us. I just worry about you. You seem distressed. What can I do to help?"" My heart felt bloated, spongy, and oversaturated. Its face softened into one of guilty anxiety; jaw relaxing but lips drawn into a frown, brows tight. 
+
+ 
+
+""You don't need to do anything. I'll start reviewing security measures immediately to make sure nothing happens while I'm off-station."" It said, recovering quickly from its slip of emotion. ""I shouldn't be gone long. They weren't deep in the Corporation Rim last time we crossed paths."" 
+
+ 
+
+""They? Were these clients of yours after you left Preservation the first time? Friends?"" It looked guilty again. As though I was reminding it of some crime it had committed rather than my own misguided and paternalistic actions. As if claiming ownership of a person without their consent was some great kindness. And them escaping was anything but the most reasonable thing a person could do.
+
+ 
+
+""Clients."" It paused, then added a bit softer, ""Good ones. But stupid. I need to make sure they aren't planning another foolproof idea to get themselves killed.""
+
+ 
+
+I laughed. ""Something you've come to expect from them?""
+
+ 
+
+""It's a general expectation from most humans. They just happen to be particularly good at it."" It said, its face sinking into a more comfortable, neutral expression.
+
+ 
+
+""Will you need extrication support? We could start assembling a rescue party."" I asked. I watched denial rise to its lips before I could even finish the question so I added ""You're not alone anymore, you know."" Its lips closed around the refusal just as quickly as it had risen up. Its eyes looked glassy.
+
+ 
+
+""I don't know the exact situation. These are all the details ART sent me."" It pushed a decoded data packet to me through the feed. This didn't seem like an emergency? Sec-unit seemed to register my confusion. ""I'm worried they might be trying to covertly request assistance.""
+
+ 
+
+I nodded, rereading the message from Perihelion. It struck me as unusual that Perihelion hadn't flagged a similar suspicion in its message. From what I had heard of the research transport, it was not one to withhold its opinions. ""Perihelion doesn't seem distressed in this message. Your risk assessment ran a high probability percentage though?"" I asked, surprised at the way its nose wrinkled in annoyance. 
+
+ 
+
+"" Perihelion is a research vessel. It doesn't know anything about security."" It sucked its teeth derisively before its eyes flitted to my opposite shoulder. ""My risk assessment model needs patching. The 7% probability is inaccurate."" It said. I felt my brows arch.
+
+ 
+
+""7% chance of death or serious injury?"" I asked. It stopped facing me, striding to the office windows (which it hated on the grounds of being a security risk, despite being shatterproof) and gazed out at the station below. 
+
+ 
+
+""It's a 7% chance that harm is immediately intended towards my clients."" It said. I blinked. ""Like I said. It needs patching.""
+
+ 
+
+I smiled at my friend. ""It's okay to worry sometimes. Even when it doesn't make sense."" I could feel the wetness in my heart threatening to make its way through my eyes. But I didn't want to worry it. 
+
+ 
+
+It scoffed. ""If you knew them, it would make sense to you."" I couldn't help but laugh at that. 
+
+ 
+
+""I'd love to meet them. Any friend of yours is someone I would like to know."" I said. Sec-unit recoiled, looking like the first time I had asked if it would enjoy riding in the crew quarters during our survey mission. ""Or not. Obviously, if you're not comfortable you don't have to introduce me."" I watched it let out a breath, relaxing a bit. Amena had sent me a ping, wondering how long we were going to be. ""But, you seem worried about their safety  and worried about leaving Amena and I again. If we came along to offer potential rescue support, we could remedy both of those issues."" Sec-unit stared at my left ear like I was an idiot.
+
+ 
+
+""That would do the opposite of solving those issues"" it glared. ""It's my job to keep clients safe.""
+
+ 
+
+""And I'm not your client anymore. I'm your teammate. Your friend."" Its lips narrowed into a firm line. A formation of drones tightened their position around it protectively. ""So it's my job to keep you safe too."" Sec-unit opened its mouth, ready to argue again but if its feed was anything like mine, the barrage of annoyed pings from Amena was overwhelming it. I turned off the display surface.
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit sighed. ""We shouldn't keep Amena waiting. Can we talk about this later?"" It asked. I hated seeing it so uncomfortable. This was supposed to be the place where it felt good. Where it felt safe. I sighed too, relenting.
+
+ 
+
+""That's a good idea. Maybe once Perihelion is closer we'll have more information."" Sec-unit grimaced, probably hoping the later discussion would never actually come. I smiled, for both of our sakes. Later we'd have to be uncomfortable again.  ""For now, I'm famished and would love to hear you argue with Amena about Sanctuary Moon at the noodles stand,"" I said, opening the door for it. It looked down, a flush creeping across the bridge of its nose. But a small smile crept in as well. Sec-unit sent its drones out the door ahead of us as we headed down to meet Amena. 
+
+I meant to finish writing this a couple days ago but that's what I get for starting a new fic in the middle of a depressive episode. Sorry for the delay! Thank you as always for reading. I hope these characters bring you as much comfort as they bring me. <3
+
+It only took Perihelion a few cycles to catch up to its message and reach Preservation Station. I decided I was going with Sec-unit before I reached the bottom of my bowl of noodles that first night. Honestly?  I think I decided before I even knew what was happening. When the message came through, it had  scared Sec-unit. I watched its whole face contort when we had just been having fun, fighting over serials a second before. Nothing scared me like seeing Sec-unit scared. I couldn't let it be scared alone. 
+
+ 
+
+I wasn't able to learn much more about what was going on. I tried asking Second Mom about it, only for the discussion to get cut off by some terse feed messages from Sec-unit. I was told to ""respect its privacy"" which is pretty rich to hear about a construct that knows when to tell you off because it watches you through drone cameras. Once Perihelion was in-range, it was happy to give me all of the limited details it had and let me know that it had prepared a room for me in the crew quarters if I would like to accompany it on the journey. By the time Second Mom (and very begrudgingly, Sec-unit) extended the invitation themselves, I already had a bag packed. And a plan to sneak aboard Perihelion (with its help) if they never asked. 
+
+ 
+
+I had been aboard for hours already. I was used to doing formal greetings with Second Mom. Growing up, she had always made it very clear that being planetary leader was  her job, not mine. Meetings and diplomatic dinners always came second to chores and school and recreation and just about everything else. But on the occasions I had wanted to join, she almost always let me. Meeting with Perihelion's crew was far less formal than ambassadorial trips to nearby polities. Mostly on account of the fact that we had all almost died together. 
+
+ 
+
+We all had a laugh about how sheepish Iris looked after realizing she had swept past Second Mom, the great leader of Preservation Alliance, to lift me off the ground in a hug the moment I stepped foot on the bridge. Iris still had her arms wrapped around my waist and I felt her squeeze nervously, her spine erect when Second Mom placed a hand on each of our shoulders. Her smile was warm as she greeted Iris for the first time in person and thanked her for making sure Sec-unit and I came home. We all stood there, in a little huddle of gentle touch and body heat. I could smell coffee and a soft floral perfume on Iris and Second Mom's soap. She looked down at us, the overhead lights shining through the coils of her hair and bouncing off the apples of her cheeks. 
+
+ 
+
+Any trace of stiffness melted from the room once greetings were finished; some handshakes and others hugs. Second Mom patted the crossbody bag she carried, announcing that she had brought tea from Preservation and would love to prepare some for everyone. We agreed to finish the tour in the galley so she could do just that. She was always good at that; softening interactions and leading with this gentle calm that made everyone around her relax. Perihelion rattled off brochure-like facts and tidbits about The Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland as Seth led us through its corridors. Sec-unit had boarded through one of the cargo bays so it could avoid all the pleasantries. By the time I was shown to my guest quarters, my whole body felt heavy. My bag was already stowed neatly in the corner, taken by one of Perihelion's drones when we first came aboard. I flopped onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling. It was so quiet. 
+
+ 
+
+""Perihelion?"" I asked, eyes closed.
+
+ 
+
+The response was immediate. ""Yes, Amena?"" 
+
+ 
+
+""Just checking,"" I said. I kicked off my shoes, pulling my legs onto the mattress. It was nice to know it was there. That I wasn't alone. I hugged the pillow to my chest, facing the wall. After a few minutes, I asked,  ""You don't think Sec-unit's friends are in danger?""
+
+ 
+
+""No. Sec-unit is allowing a combination of emotional impulses to guide its behavior, as usual. There is no imminent threat."" It paused before asking, ""What would you have intended to do if the threat was genuine?"" 
+
+ 
+
+I pushed up to a sitting position, the pillow squished between my crisscrossed legs. ""I was thinking I could tail Sec-unit leading up to the meeting. That way if anything happened, I could send a distress message or maybe cause a distraction."" I twisted in the pillowcase in between my fingers, feeling my plan caving in under the weight of Perihelion's scrutiny. ""I couldn't really make a firm plan without more information. I figured I could improvise based off of what happened. Having more support on site is better than being alone, right?"" I could hear my voice pitching up with the question, betraying my doubt. 
+
+ 
+
+Perihelion responded with a question in turn, prodding but gentle. ""Even if that support lacks training and could be another casualty? Thereby increasing the risk of the operation?"" It asked. I dropped my head, looking down at my ragged nails and chewed-up cuticles. Ten trophies of the week's anxiety. The room looked the same as when I was here last as a helpless victim. My breathing reflected back at me, just as ragged as my fingertips when I stripped some of the loose skin off my thumb with my teeth. I stopped, swallowing hard. 
+
+ 
+
+""I don't know how else to help. My family are scientists. But I want to protect my friend."" I felt a sting of angry embarrassment as my eyes pricked with wetness and my voice quavered. I  hated the idea that I was the dead weight, only here because I was allowed to be. I hated that Perihelion was able to dissolve my plan so quickly. If there was a real threat in the future, I was dangerously and embarrassingly underprepared. I couldn't do anything to help.
+
+ 
+
+I was pulled out of my thoughts by an unexpected folder of documents being dropped in my feed by Perihelion, along with the message: "" Perhaps becoming more knowledgeable on extrication support and procedures would make you feel more confident? I've attached some of the training documents and relevant example videos used by my crew ,"" it said.
+
+ 
+
+I raised my head, feeling my heart flutter in my chest. I knew the type of missions Perihelion's crew executed. They were practically action heroes, just masquerading as academics. I was catching up to my breath when the two-way conversation feed abruptly became three-way. 
+
+ 
+
+ Sec-unit:    ART, don't give her any dumb ideas. She's a kid. 
+
+ 
+
+ Perihelion:    Exactly. She's a student. I provided her with academic materials pursuant to her interests. 
+
+ 
+
+ Sec-unit:    I'm serious, ART. Stop plotting. She's   my    human.  
+
+ 
+
+The connection dropped to two-way before I was able to respond. I was pretty sure Perihelion had booted Sec-unit rather than it leaving voluntarily. My suspicions were confirmed when the feed toggled rapidly between three-way back to two-way, almost like a glitch. God, they were such a married couple. I startled slightly when Perihelion switched back to its voice instead of the feed.
+
+ 
+
+""If you have any questions while reviewing the material, please let me know. With adequate training, I believe you would be well suited for the type of work my crew does."" I felt a squirm of pleasure and pride at its words. Like Sec-unit, Perihelion didn't just say things. ""I'm sure Iris would be happy to review them with you as well. She's studying many of the same materials herself."" It said. Sec-unit thought that Perihelion always sounded like a sarcastic asshole. I thought it sounded a bit like my Uncle Thiago; pushy but in a kind way. I could see why that got under Sec-units skin. It was never very good at people caring about it.
+
+ 
+
+I laid back down on the bunk and started sorting through the documents. I smiled at how immense and well-organized the file was. Perihelion started annotating as I went through, tagging topics of interest. ""Thanks, Peri,"" I said. 
+
+ 
+
+""Of course, Amena"" it responded. We worked in comfortable quiet, exploring the training package. As we did, I finally caught the soft whirring of one of Sec-unit's drones, just above my bag. Its motors were nearly silent and I hadn't noticed it while Peri and I had been talking. I hadn't been alone at all. I rolled my eyes. And it thought  Perihelion was overbearing. 
+
+ 
+
+Still. It was kind of nice.
+
+ 
+
+I swear every time I write a chapter we never get as far in the story as I think we will. If the pace is too slow, just let me know. I don't want to bore y'all.
+
+Thank you for reading, as always <3 It means a lot to me.
+
+
+Stupid fucking ART. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My performance reliability had been dropping since I first boarded. ART felt the need to pick apart my situation assessment and call me an idiot (not in so many words but I could tell that's what it meant
+
+) 
+
+until I relented that 
+
+maybe
+
+ the kids weren't active hostages. It had torn apart all of my arguments, but you know what? 
+
+I'm
+
+ the security unit, not it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And maybe I wouldn't be so paranoid if I wasn't constantly surrounded by stupid fucking schemes. I thought when ART asked if I wanted to watch the new season of Timestream Defenders Orion, it was trying to give me a break from all the arguing. I was actually excited about it because it hadn't been released to Preservation space yet. That was until I played back the portions of this conversation with Amena that I had missed. The parts where it was goading her to practice throwing herself into firefights and corporate espionage. 
+
+Stupid. Fucking. ART.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I was scrubbing the organic components above my gun ports. The onboard hygiene supplies had changed since I was last here. They were more heavily perfumed, a chemical approximation of a body of water in a forest. The packaging didn't specify what type of forest or even what planet. I didn't like it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But the scalding water and thick steam matched my mood. I could feel ART's massive presence looming even as it remained silent. ""You're being creepy ART, I'm in the shower,"" I snapped, rubbing the strong-smelling cleanser furiously into my hair.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You know my cameras and sensors are throughout the entire ship. You've never had an issue with them before."" It said, voice condescendingly level.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Maybe I have had an issue with it, ART. Just because I'm a murderbot doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice for you to check before being a peeping transport."" I spat, scouring my scalp even harder. Okay, maybe I was being petty. But it's not like ART didn't deserve it. ART was silent for an excruciating 3.7 seconds. An eternity.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You're right. I should not have assumed. I will not visually monitor you in states of undress unless you are in the med bay"" it said. 
+
+Ugh. 
+
+Now it was being fucking nice to me. The only thing worse than fighting with ART was when it caved and acted like I was sad and delicate. ART rebounded quickly though. ""Also, that is not the appropriate cleanser for that task. The disinfectant and moisturizer for hair are located on the shelf by your shoulder,"" it added. Oh. Of fucking course. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You just said you weren't going to monitor me over visuals"" I shouted, pointing angrily up the ceiling while the water ran down my face. The ceiling thing was a bad habit I had picked up from my humans.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I am not. However, you had been incorrectly using the hygiene supplies for 13 minutes and 12 seconds before you made that request. Also, Amena is at your door looking for you"" it said. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I stared at the showerhead as the water droplets beat down on my face. I sighed. ""Let her in. I'll be right out."" I said. I just stood there for a few more seconds, staring at nothing before I shut the water off, dried myself, and changed into the set of clothes waiting on the sink next to the shower. I could feel the temperature drop in the air when I opened the door to the main cabin, a puff of vaguely-river-scented steam behind me. Amena was in her sleep clothes, sitting on a little bench by the door.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ ""Oh, You smell good!"" She said with a little smile. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I do not,"" I scrubbed at my hair with the towel to get the bulk of the moisture out, then threw it in the corner a little too hard. I'd get that later. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Amena frowned and worried at her bottom lip with her teeth. She stared at me and I stared at the wall above her head for a few seconds before she finally asked, ""Are you mad at me? Because of what Perihelion and I were talking about earlier?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I could not catch a fucking break.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Amena, I am not talking about feelings right now."" Her brow furrowed and I could feel her eyes roving over me like she was searching for something. I sighed, dragging my hand down my face ""I'm not mad at you Amena. If I was going to be mad at anyone it would be ART. But I'm not. I'm not mad at anyone so all the adolescent humans who shouldn't be here in the first place can just go to bed,"" I said, gesturing hopefully toward the door. Amena crossed her arms tightly across her chest as she stood, bringing her a half step closer to me. Not to the door, unfortunately.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Perihelion thinks I should be here."" She said. Her nose wrinkled as she glared up at me but her voice was off. Thinner, more tentative.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yeah, well nobody asked it. It's an asshole, Amena. It's literally in the name."" I said. ART, who had been uncharacteristically quiet up until this point butted in over the feed in a private message. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ART: You're going to make her think you don't believe in her. Adolescents require assurance of their caretakers' faith in them to develop.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Amena bristled. 
+
+""You 
+
+gave it that name. Which is a real riot, all things considered. Can't you just be nice for once?""  I could see the blood rising to her face, deepening the color of her normally medium-brown skin. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No. I'm not nice Amena. I'm a useful tool. That's how I keep you and everyone else from getting killed. 
+
+You're
+
+ nice."" I felt my performance reliability tick even lower as I ground the inorganic components of my jaw. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Amena pulled back a bit.  ""You don't really think about yourself like that, do you? As a tool? Because none of us do."" Her voice was sharp, like I had insulted her. But there was something else. I felt a jagged twisting in my chest. Why was she looking at me like that?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Fuck me. I pinched the bridge of my nose, taking a deep breath. I didn't even bother running a search for relevant responses because I knew ""teenage girl tries to convince homicidal machine it's a person"" wasn't going to yield any results. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART, of course, felt this was the appropriate time to jump in. ""Sec-unit has been experiencing elevated levels of emotional distress prompted by the upcoming meeting with its clients. It is relevant that these individuals believe that Sec-unit is an augmented human. I have logged a significant increase of Sec-unit referring to itself as a tool, appliance, and killing machine leading up to this meeting. I believe they are correlated,"" ART announced. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART was going to worry Amena. Here it was, using its vast data processing capabilities to come up with useless, incorrect results. Even if I had been using that kind of language, so what? It's literally what I am. I am a murderbot. A corporate appliance for killing. It was important for everyone to remember that. At least the people who already knew. I was going to have to lie to those kids all over again. Make them think I was some kind of hero when I was really just a walking gun. It shouldn't matter to me, but it felt wrong to deceive them like that. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Amena's eyes were all melty, like I was the saddest drowned puppy she had ever seen. ""That sounds hard. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking about how stressful this meeting was going to be for you,"" she said, amending; ""For emotional reasons, I mean. I knew you were worried that they might be in danger."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm not emotional about it. I'm going to meet with them, make sure everything is fine, and establish a communication code so this never happens again."" I said. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Amena's lips puckered like she was trying to keep a smile from spreading. She wasn't doing a very good job. ""You made a secret code for them like you did for Second Mom?"" Amena asked.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I scoffed, rolling my eyes. ""No. It's a different code. If they were the same one it would increase the risk that it could be compromised."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I heard Amena give an involuntary snort of amusement. She shook her head. ""You are such a softie. You act so big and tough, but you make secret handshakes for all your friends."" She was laughing at me. ""I like the placard on your door by the way."" She said, eyes twinkling. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART had a cabin set aside for me. It had a placard permanently fixed on the door which read ""Mutual Administrative Assistant"". I'm not sure why Amena thought this was funny, but my annoyance with ART crept up because of it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It seemed the most appropriate title to use. The clients Sec-unit is meeting with call it ""Eden"" though,"" ART said, helpfully. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Amena barked a laugh. ""You named yourself after the grumpy PI from Sanctuary Moon? A little on the nose, don't you think?"" I made an obscene gesture toward the ceiling. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""ART. Shut. Up."" I really hope Amena doesn't have her heart set on working with ART in the future. Because I'm going to blow it up.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Apologies. I thought the information was prudent for Amena to know before speaking with your clients. Coincidentally, we are within communication range as of a few minutes ago. I'm patching their feed through to your display surface."" ART said. Before I could threaten to scrap it for parts that I would sell for hard currency cards, Rami, Tapan, and Maro's faces appeared on the cabin display. Amena squeaked, looking from me, to the display surface, and back again.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Maro was the first to speak, with a huge grin.  ""Eden! Oh my gosh, it's so good to see you!""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+It was so hard to decide whose perspective to write this chapter from because I wanted to explore them all. I always feel bad writing Amena's negative self-talk because I ADORE her and think she's wonderful. But I know she doesn't feel the same. Hope you enjoy!
+
+
+Three faces crowded together on the display surface. It looks like they weren't expecting to be patched through either based on the way one of them was smiling around a mouthful of food and the other had a bonnet and sleep clothes on as if they were about to go to bed. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Eden! Oh my gosh, it's so good to see you!"" The woman in the middle was the first to speak. I'm guessing she was the one who sent the hail in the first place because unlike the other two, she didn't look like she was in the midst of a nighttime routine. And holy 
+
+shit. 
+
+She was gorgeous. She was looking directly into the camera and her eyes looked so dark they could have been black. Her hair was styled into silver puffs that look like moonlight cresting over the clouds. I felt a clench of nervousness in my stomach, the predictable type anyone gets seeing pretty girls.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I turned to Sec-unit who was staring at the display service, its face stony. Then, it turned abruptly and barreled out of the room at a pace that barely constituted walking. The smiles on the display dropped, replaced by looks of confusion and concern. I stared at them, frozen, before I forced an apologetic smile that I'm sure made it look like I was chewing on splinters. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Wow! You must be Sec- um, Eden's old clients! So nice to meet you. Could you give us a sec?"" And without waiting for a response, I bolted too. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Amena: 
+
+
+Perihelion, can you talk to them, please? Keep them busy.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Perihelion pinged back in affirmation. Good. It owed Sec-unit at least that. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Sec-unit wasn't far outside its cabin. It was facing the corridor wall but its eyes were wrenched shut. Its hands were balled into fists, gunports flaring slightly, and I could see how rapid and shallow its breath was coming through the thin material of its shirt. Shit. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I stopped a few feet from it, not wanting to startle it or encroach on its space. Its drones hovered nearby, in a cloud formation, a versatile defensive position. I had just learned that from Perihelion's files. I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets. ""Hey,"" I waited as Sec-unit continued to face the wall. ""I'm sorry. I didn't know ART was going to do that. Are you okay?"" I asked. It didn't respond. Of course not. 
+
+Are you okay? 
+
+What a stupid thing to ask. I have no idea how to make it feel less, 
+
+what
+
+ even? Is it scared? Furious? Betrayed? How am I so useless in every situation we're in together? After a few seconds, it sent a message over the feed. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Sec-unit: 
+
+
+You almost never call ART, that.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I blinked, pulled out of my spiral by the message. I was spiraling? Fuck me, as if I had any right to be. This was about Sec-unit. I fumbled my way through the interface to fire a message back, scared to lose the thread of communication. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Amena: 
+
+
+What?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Sec-unit: 
+
+
+You call it ""Perihelion"". Or ""Peri"". I'm usually the only one calling it ART.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I laughed. That's what it latched onto?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Amena: 
+
+
+""ART"" felt like a private thing between you two... but that was an asshole thing to do. It seemed right in the moment. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Sec-unit: 
+
+
+It was. An asshole thing to do.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I could feel its anger seething, even through the feed. But it had opened its eyes which was...a good sign? I hoped.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Sec-unit: 
+
+
+You can call it ART. That's what Tapan and the others know it as.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Amena: 
+
+
+They know ART? 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Sec-unit: 
+
+
+They're under the impression it's a human friend of Eden's.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A friend of Eden. Not a friend of mine. That wasn't desperately sad or concerning at all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Amena: 
+
+
+Great. Because that's who they're talking to since we both ditched them. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Sec-unit's breathing had mostly leveled out at this point so the sharp intake of breath was even more obvious. I saw the veins in its neck flare. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That's when Second Mom showed up. She looked calm and was still wearing the tunic she had boarded in. She smiled at me but went straight to Sec-unit, moving fast. Had it sent her a message? Had ART? They were silent as they stood next to each other but it was obvious they were talking over the feed. Sec-unit makes a face with basically every message. Normally, it's pretty funny. But now? Should I just leave? It had called for Second Mom. Clearly, it needed better support than me. And staring at them was probably the worst thing I could do. When they started back towards the cabin, I tried to slip away as politely as possible. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Sec-unit: 
+
+
+You might as well meet them now. If you want. They'd probably like you. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It didn't look to check whether I followed back into the room but I felt a pang in my chest from the invite. I ducked into the cabin, unable to help the smile. ART had blackened the display on our end, but the trio was still visible. It was speaking with them emphatically about some completed research they were implementing. Second Mom cleared her throat. ART cut itself off.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Eden has returned. I will abscond so that you may speak privately. I look forward to reviewing the documents you sent. Your research is truly fascinating."" ART said. Its speaker volume was lower than usual, lessoning the reverb in the cabin. Sec-unit's clients all waved at the blacked-out display, bidding ART goodbye as it ""left"". It triggered an open/shut command on the cabin door to simulate its departure before resuming the camera on our end. The trio smiled at Sec-unit, none of them doing a very good job of masking their concern.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm sorry."" Sec-unit froze for a second and I watched Second Mom grab its hand. Not only did it allow her to, but it interlaced their fingers. I saw the little squeeze. Huh. By the way their eyes flicked downwards, at least two of Sec-unit's clients (listed as Rami and Tapan on the display) noticed too. ""Your message caught me off guard. ART has a bad habit of accepting transmissions prematurely,"" it said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""That's okay, we had a nice time talking to him. I had no idea he was a researcher as well."" Rami said, having stowed whatever late-night snack te was eating at the start of the call. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Sure. He's an amateur researcher. Science is quite the hobby of his. But once you get him started about it, he won't shut up."" Sec-unit said. It dug in with its words. I snorted. I could practically feel ART's indignation, though it kept dutifully silent. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tapan, the one in her sleep clothes, looked between Second Mom and me, flashing a bright smile. ""Sorry, we haven't been formally introduced yet. I'm Tapan, this is Maro and Rami."" It wasn't necessary with their name and pronouns on the display, but it was a nice thought. Her eyes flicked down to where Sec-unit and Second Mom's hands were clasped. Then up to my face. ""You're... Eden's spouse? And daughter?"" She asked.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Maro elbowed her roughly. Her gruff whisper was picked up on audio, despite obvious efforts otherwise. ""Are you kidding? He's way too young to have a kid that age. Don't insult him. He's not going to want to meet with us.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A blush bloomed across the bridge of Sec-unit's nose, reaching its temples. It dropped Second Mom's hand. I glanced up at one of Sec-unit's drones, the closest I could get to making disbelieving eye contact with it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Second Mom was quick, steering the conversation with a small smile. No stumbling over new names or awkward confusion about marital status. ""No, we're just friends of Eden. My name is Ayda and this is my daughter Amena. It's a pleasure to meet you all."" She said. I gave a little wave before crossing my arms tight across my chest. The pose looked a bit too similar to not-my-dad-unit when I glanced over so I shoved my hands in my pockets instead.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You look unharmed. Well rested."" Sec-unit said, eyes roving over all of their faces. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tapan laughed. ""Thank you. You look unharmed too? Actually, with your line of work that's impressive. I'm glad to see it.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Sec-unit shook its head, screwing its eyes closed for a second when it did. It had been making a lot of eye contact with them. ""I mean you don't look like there's been an emergency. Why was I contacted?"" It asked. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+All three of them looked confused. They stared long enough for even me to feel uncomfortable. Poor Sec-unit must want to crawl into a display-surface-equipped hole and die there.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We just wanted to thank you. Maybe take you out to dinner? You saved our work and our lives. Especially Tapan's."" Maro said. Tapan's nose wrinkled up like a bunny at the teasing. Maro gave her a soft kiss on the forehead where a bit of purple peaked out from under the bonnet.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Everything was so crazy after Tlacey. We put a message on your social feed after things had settled down a bit with the investigations and convalescence, but when we didn't hear from you we thought you weren't interested. Until we got your confirmation a few days ago."" Rami explained. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Sec-unit furrowed its brow. ""Dinner? I don't eat-"" It began before Tapan interrupted.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Because you're spliced. We remembered. We thought we might be able to find somewhere that fit your dietary restrictions or maybe cook for you? If not, we really just wanted to see you. To thank you again."" Tapan leaned in towards the display as the words tumbled out.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""And obviously you can bring your friends,"" Maro added, looking at Second Mom and me with a smile. They all waited expectantly. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I thought I saw Sec-unit shift minutely closer to Second Mom, but I couldn't be sure. It sighed, long-suffering, and grimaced. ""Send me the potential meeting locations you had in mind. I'll need to assess them for security risks."" It said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tapan clapped her hands, bouncing in her seat. Maro rubbed her back, bearing a big grin that was mirrored by Rami's smaller, more reserved smile. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Second Mom raised her hand to catch their attention. ""I'm so glad we were able to make contact with you three. But it is getting late and Eden needs his rest."" Tapan yawned at the reminder while the other two nodded emphatically.  
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Oh, of course! We should get going too. It was so nice to see you again Eden."" Maro said, welling with sincerity. All three of them were holding hands above the table and they gave each other a little squeeze. With biddings of safe travels and restful sleep, the call ended.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Sec-unit deflated a bit. It didn't actually need sleep like Eden but it looked exhausted after the few minutes on call. Second Mom nodded at one of its drones with a little smile before slipping out the door. I started to do the same but paused at the threshold. I looked directly into the camera of one of the drones. My voice was barely above a whisper.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Thanks for sharing that with me. Good night, sec-unit."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I got a ping of acknowledgment. And I went to bed. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Sec-unit and Amena were in a cargo bay located at Perihelion's starboard quarter. The bay had an accordion hangar door for ease of access by haulerbots loading large equipment. The door was fully retracted, with an atmosphere buffer maintaining air pressure. It was like a deep-space balcony. The lights on Perihelion's hull grazed the immense blackness ahead. There were distant pinpricks of light from scattered stars, but it was overwhelmingly a wash of void. Amena was standing a few meters from the edge, an energy weapon pointed at some makeshift targets Sec-unit had put together. It looks like she was running the same drills I had seen her working on before. Each time, more fluid and comfortable. She had wanted to learn dance when she was younger but got frustrated, never quite at home in the choreography. She looked like a dancer now, the way she flowed from relaxed to rigid. It was not unlike Sec-unit who was an artisan of violence as much as it loathed it. 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit had been squatting on an old cargo container next to the anchor point where Amena was tethered. It glanced at me, then stood up and dragged another over, about a foot from the first. It gestured for me to take its abandoned seat as it settled in on the second container. Its gaze remained trained carefully on Amena.
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit didn't like humans with guns. But it insisted that if Amena was going to be studying Perihelion's training modules, she was going to have hands-on experience too. It was adamant that for her to be safe, digital training guides were not sufficient. ""Security protocol"", it had claimed. I was certain the Company had no such protocols. 
+
+ 
+
+While Amena had been listless in her studies at home, she took to these lessons with an unexpected voracity. Even when Sec-unit had forced her to drill firing positions for hours before she was allowed to even touch a weapon. I think I hated seeing her with a weapon even more than Sec-unit. But I couldn't think of anyone better to keep her safe with it.
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit doesn't eat. But it appreciates nice smells, including aromatic tea. It's not familiar with many due to limited experience in human dining areas so it's become a habit to explore different types together. Its favorites so far were the light floral scent of Jasmine tea and the warm spice of chai. I brought both, though I tended to prefer a strong green tea myself. I handed the jasmine teacup to Sec-unit. Its hands curled around the ceramic delicately. I'll have to remember to search for larger cups that will be more a comfortable fit for it when we get back to Preservation. A tiny smile came to Sec-unit's face when it lifted the cradled teacup to its face, breathing deeply the flowery steam. It sent a ping that I knew meant ""thank you"".
+
+ 
+
+I blew on my chai, watching Amena above its rippling surface. ""She looks good,"" I said.
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit stowed its smile at that. It looked more serious, business-like. ""Not good enough for me to sacrifice some drones for moving targets yet. Her shots keep drifting after she sets up her position. See?"" It pointed towards the target. The impact marks started at the center but crept up and to the right. I watched Amena's shoulders rise with an intentional inhale, shifting the stock of the weapon slightly. The next shot was much closer to the center. Sec-unit frowned, bringing the teacup to rest against its chin. ""She fixed it but it's indicative of an underlying issue. She's not setting herself up well to begin with and has to scramble later,"" it said. 
+
+ 
+
+""What about you? How do you feel about how well you've set yourself up?"" I asked. Its brow furrowed. It had been three days since our departure. Sec-unit had spent the entire time either training with Amena, watching serials, or creating emergency plans for the transit ring we would be meeting its clients at. 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit turned its body away from me slightly. It kept pulling away since we first heard about the prospective meeting. Actually, it had been pulling away for as long as I had known it. But it accepted cups of tea. And offered hands. The trick with Sec-unit was to keep showing up, reminding it that you wanted it there even when it left. The back and forth didn't sting. It was more like a conversation. 
+
+ 
+
+""I feel as well prepared as I can be. After the GrayCris incident, alien remnant technology is a much riskier business. That limits the number of potential threats significantly. So does the jurisdiction and average clientele of the transit ring,"" it said. Sec-unit gave a feather-light tug of the tether after calling out, ""Amena, chest up. Don't droop around the weapon."" She turned to flash it a glare, keeping the barrel pointed safely toward the blackness. Her eyebrows raised when she saw me. She had been too focused to hear me come in. Her face set resolutely and she corrected her stance.
+
+ 
+
+""Y'know, Amena and I would love to join you to meet your friends. Now that you feel confident it's safe,"" I said. Constant repair and regrowth of organic parts left the skin on Sec-unit's face uncharacteristically soft. The harsh lights of the cargo bay looked especially bright as they glanced off the tender creases and wrinkles of its deep frown. ""We won't if it would make you uncomfortable or make things harder. We just want to be there for you,"" I said. I watched Amena shift into a kneeling position and start a new set of drills. We watched her together silently as she aimed, fired, then shifted to a different kneeling stance. She aimed and fired again. My tea grew cool enough to drink and I almost thought the discussion had gone as far as Sec-unit was comfortable. That was okay. It had been a long week for it. But then-
+
+ 
+
+""You remember how I told you about the survey team from GoodNightLander Independent?"" Sec-unit asked. I nodded, taking a sip of my chai, aware that one of its drone cameras had increased focus on my face. It continued, haltingly. ""I was exposed there. A pet bot revealed who I was to its owner. Despite promising not to."" It said, looking about as nauseous as someone without a digestive tract could. 
+
+ 
+
+It had told me about the incident. It gave more detail in the draft of the documentary footage it asked me to review. I pressed it gently. ""Oh? That sounds like quite the betrayal from a friend.""
+
+ 
+
+""It wasn't my-"" it stopped, looking down into its cup before its eyes snapped back up to Amena. ""I guess it was. I thought it was. Its owner was good to me after she found out. Even used the fake name I gave her"" Sec-unit said, with a harsh little laugh. 
+
+ 
+
+""It made you feel...unsafe?"" I ventured. Sec-unit took a long time to answer. Its fingers pushed into the teacup, flexing with tension. It stopped. It curled its fingertips inwards until just its knuckles were resting against the cup. Despite all of Sec-unit's powerful, tempestuous emotions, it was so gentle. It never broke anything unless it thought it needed to be broken. 
+
+ 
+
+""I felt dirty. Naked. No. Fuck, I don't know."" It forced a breath out through grimaced teeth. ""I didn't have control and I was seen. All of me was so exposed and I couldn't do anything about it. And Don Abene was nice. But that didn't make me any less of a bloody, broken exhibit for display"" It spat the last few words with such vitriol. The color had drained from Sec-unit's face and its pupils yawned like the blackness before us. 
+
+ 
+
+It called itself ""Murderbot"". The name my friend was most comfortable with and identified itself as was a badge of self-loathing it had earned through years of violent trauma. Like a hound that called itself ""bad dog"". Except Sec-unit wasn't an animal. It was one of the most loyal, empathetic protectors I could have ever been lucky enough to meet. Its sense of justice was only outweighed by its willingness to throw itself in harm's way for others. Even people it didn't know yet. Something about being known as a person and being known as a Sec-unit at the same time was frightening to it. It would take so much more time to make Sec-unit understand how much we all loved it. That it wasn't just a ""broken, bloody"" killer. But judging from the tension of every muscle and cable in its body, that's not what it needed to hear right now.
+
+ 
+
+I ran my finger along the rim of my cup. The imperfect texture was grounding. ""I felt so helpless during the abduction by GrayCris,"" it knew this and continued staring ahead. But its drone was still watching me closely. ""And during the Perihelion abduction shortly after that."" Sec-unit snorted, hearing the event referred to as such. ""Even during the survey, when we first realized we were being sabotaged. I felt so vulnerable. As though myself and everyone I loved was one breath away from our last, all the time."" I felt my throat grow thick as I thought about how scared everyone had looked during the planetary survey, all staring at me and praying I would have the solution to save us all. I remembered the hundreds of times I had listened to the last audio logs of my baby girl on what was supposed to be a school trip. She sounded so scared. I had spent so many nights crying at the thought that she would die terrified.
+
+ 
+
+I pushed the threat of tears away as I watched Amena ahead of us; happy, capable. She'd had a growth spurt since then. She still had Tano's genetics so it was only a couple of inches. But she was still here to grow older and taller. 
+
+ 
+
+""In all of those scenarios, you took care of us. You were our armor when we were vulnerable,"" I said. In medbay on the planetary habitat, we suddenly had answers and an ally when Sec-unit woke up. I remember the flood of relief and  hope  on TranRollinHyfa when I was surrounded by people who wanted to hurt me, who had  been hurting me, and I suddenly heard the voice of a long-lost friend. Even on those long nights alone in my office, scrambling to find my daughter, I could replay the audio logs and hear that she was terrified, but not alone. Sec-unit glanced at me. Then slowly turned a bit more in my direction.
+
+ 
+
+""That's not quite the same,"" it said.
+
+ 
+
+""I know. I don't know exactly what you're going through. But you're always there for us. So we will always be there for you."" I stared into its drone. I was making a promise. I needed Sec-unit to know how dearly I meant it. 
+
+ 
+
+It was saved the discomfort of a response by Amena shouting excitedly. ""I can see the transit ring! We're almost there!"" 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit stood. It waited for me as I took another sip of my chai, then reached out its hand to help me up. I blinked at it in surprise. It wasn't looking at me, instead watching Amena check over the weapon and stow it in a secure locker. I smiled and grasped my friend's hand. 
+
+ 
+
+I have had a crack-treated-seriously fic idea about a de-aged Sec-unit kicking around my brain for days now. I'm excited to finish this one first but that one will be coming soon. If you like the idea of Rhatti being appointed as the hapless, panicked babysitter of kidbot while waiting for ART to swing by and fix things, keep an eye out.
+
+Anyways, here's Wonderwall.
+
+I know Sec-unit's main priority is security, but there  had to have been a less grimy transit ring it could have chosen. This one was the intergalactic equivalent of a truck stop, teetering on the edge of the Corporation Rim. And it smelled like it. As soon as we came aboard, you could tell many of the recycling units (for both the food stalls and the disturbingly-close restroom cubbies) were broken. The atmosphere on stations has a tendency to get a bit dry. That was unfortunately not an issue here, where it felt like grease was suspended in the air. 
+
+ 
+
+""You can tell your friends really like you. There's no other reason they would willingly come here for a reunion otherwise,"" I grumbled. I leaned against a bulkhead but quickly pulled away when I felt my jacket begin to adhere to the surface. It sounded like pulling Velcro apart and left little orange splotches on my shoulder. Ugh.
+
+ 
+
+""You didn't have to come aboard. You have plenty of training you could be doing with ART right now,"" Sec-unit snapped, scanning the dining facility. The entire ring was bursting with transients, expressing the full range of human travel-weariness. A stocky older man who looked like he might pilot a cargo hauler was nursing a dark-colored beverage in a corner booth. A gaggle of corporate types, all dressed eerily alike were harassing a sanitation worker with a bit of a limp. She may have been suffering from a long-term injury but with how worn and covered in foodstuff her shoes were, it was just as likely to be the result of a long shift. She kept trying to clear the empty plates that had been sitting in front of the corporate assholes for as long as we'd been observing the area, but they took each of her passes as an opportunity to tease her. They ended up leaving, scared off after the cargo hauler dumped his leftover ice on the loudest corporate's head. There were more of them but he looked broad and surly...until they all slinked away and he turned sheepishly to the sanitation worker, apologizing and borrowing her mop to clean up the mess he'd made defending her. A pair of siblings had watched the whole scene, sitting on the same side of a booth. They both chewed sandwiches slowly, like they were struggling to stay awake. They shared a soda, pushing the straw to one another between sips. There were dozens of other travelers, milling about to buy food or check in to cheap hostels.
+
+ 
+
+""Right, because I'm going to wormhole jump for three days just to  not  get off at the destination? Nobody space travels just for the fun of it."" I said, correcting myself. ""Except Dr. Guarthin, but he's weird"".
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit let a tiny laugh puff out between its lips before its eyes locked onto the starboard wing. ""That's them,"" it said. 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit's friends came in from the transport docking section, wearing knapsacks and nervous smiles. They ambled about, scanning the crowds and display surfaces. I started forward and barely stopped myself in time to avoid colliding with Sec-unit's extended arm. ""Wait until they settle in. I want to see if anyone followed them."" It said. The flow of traffic seemed largely unchanged, no one jumping out to pull bags over the trio's heads or hold the boiled poultry vendor hostage.
+
+ 
+
+""I think you just want to make an entrance,"" I said. Sec-unit ignored me. I was right though. It would never admit it, but it did put a lot of thought into how it strode around or draped its body across furniture. I had seen it practicing a ""casual"" head turn and greeting for when Seth had wanted to meet with it aboard Perihelion. ART probably shouldn't have shown me those videos but they were already fighting so I wasn't going to bring it up. 
+
+ 
+
+The trio checked out the food options. After politely smiling at a few of the vendors, they wisely chose to skip the transit ring snacks altogether. They picked a table in the center and Sec-unit grimaced. It definitely would have preferred a corner spot where it could see everything at once. But that's what you get for waiting to walk up dramatically. Which oh, we're doing that now.
+
+ 
+
+""Eden! And Amena, right? Wow, you look even younger in person! You said you were friends- through work?"" Tapan asked. The purple braids looked great on her. They reached her waist and the vibrant shade complimented her skin tone so well. It was nice of her to include me so quickly despite being here for Sec-unit.
+
+ 
+
+""Oh, sort of. I'm still a student."" I said.
+
+ 
+
+""Oh, wow! What are you studying?"" Maro asked, smiling. Rami had stood to pull out our chairs. I'd only ever seen that in the serials. That was so charming.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Sec-unit cut through the pleasantries immediately. ""First things first, I'm sending you all a secure data package right now. It contains a series of verbal and nonverbal codes to be used in future status communications. Memorize it, then delete it from all digital archives immediately,"" it said.
+
+ 
+
+They looked at Sec-unit with varying degrees of confusion and alarm. I smiled, hopefully assuringly. ""Sorry it-  he was really worried about you guys. It took basically the whole trip to convince him that you weren't secretly under threat,"" I said. I gave Rami a nod and smile of thanks as I accepted the seat. Sec-unit followed suit. Its drones had taken up residency at the outer edges of the communal area. 
+
+ 
+
+""We're so sorry about that!"" Maro started reaching out like she was going to pat Sec-unit's hand. She stopped herself, retracting it to fish around her knapsack instead. ""We just wanted to see you again. We never really got to thank you properly after all the craziness last time,"" She said.
+
+ 
+
+""What happened last time?"" I asked. Sec-unit ground its jaw. Rami and Maro exchanged a grimace. Tapan laughed uncomfortably, rubbing the back of her neck. ""Eden saved us from being murdered. Three times. Well, three for me. Two for everyone else."" She said. 
+
+ 
+
+Damn. 
+
+ 
+
+Sometimes it was easy to forget when Sec-unit was bickering with ART or binging Sanctuary Moon just how many people owed their continued existence to it. How many people it had seen having the worst days of their lives, then thrust itself in between them and the violence. How many people it was a champion to, not just to me and Second Mom. Maro was wearing a trending fashion set from Corporation territory. Tapan's interface was electric blue and matched her graphic eyeliner. They all looked just a couple of years older than me. If it hadn't been for Sec-unit, they would have stayed a couple of years older than me forever. Shit, I want to do that. I want to protect people like that. Give sweet, colorful researchers the chance to make brilliant discoveries without getting brutally murdered. 
+
+ 
+
+""Anyways, with no Tlacey to worry about this time, we thought we could properly thank you with some gifts!"" Maro said, pulling a series of parcels from her bag. Sec-unit pulled back as if she had withdrawn a weapon.
+
+ 
+
+Rami shot Sec-unit a sweet little smile. Te assured, ""It looks like a lot when it's all wrapped up. Don't worry. That's mostly stuff from the kids.""
+
+ 
+
+Kids? They were parents? Stars, I couldn't imagine having kids that young. Did all corporates start breeding little future-corporates so early?
+
+ 
+
+""This one first! This is the one we got together,"" Tapan said, bouncing in her seat as she pushed a package across the table. When they all nodded at it encouragingly, Sec-unit began to unwrap the parcel. 
+
+ 
+
+""I hope it fits. We had to guess your size,"" Rami worried as Sec-unit held a jacket in front of itself. It began running its hands along the gift, turning it over to take in all the tiny details. The dark, quilted fabric looked soft enough to be used as bedding. But the triple stitching and reinforced elbows implied an incredibly sturdy design. The shoulders were also reinforced and lightly padded. The front closure was asymmetrical, with three brassy buttons on the chest that matched the stitching color.
+
+ 
+
+""It's not just a high collar. There's a hood that unfurls if you like. You just have to reach underneath. And most of the pockets are on the inside,"" Maro said. She bit her lip as she watched Sec-unit's inspection.
+
+ 
+
+It locked eyes with Tapan. Its voice was soft when it spoke. ""This is-"" 
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, yes! I knew you would recognize it!"" Tapan interrupted, half-standing out of her chair in excitement.
+
+ 
+
+Rami pulled her down gently. ""Tapan told us that you are a big fan of Sanctuary Moon after the rescue. One of our partners is a seamstress and was able to make a replica of Eden's jacket. I hope you don't get too many gifts like that because you share his name,"" Te explained, ter smile apologetic.
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit pulled the jacket into its lap, hugging the fabric to its chest. ""I don't. It's perfect,"" it said. They looked elated. 
+
+ 
+
+""Everything else is from the kids. Don't feel obligated to keep anything. They just got so excited when they heard we were seeing you again."" 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit unwrapped a few small bags of trinkets. Each had a brief explanation like how a child believed the rock was lucky and would protect whoever carried it or the feather belonged to a pet bird which brought a child lots of joy so they assumed it would also make Sec-unit happy. 
+
+ 
+
+The last package was all drawings. Each child had made at least one, depicting Sec-unit with varying degrees of skill and accuracy. One, which looked like a bunch of eggs holding hands, was almost illegibly labeled ""Mommy, Titi, Mama, Eden"". In another, an oversized stick figure with spiky black hair held its arms out, protecting the three tiny sick figures behind it. A few depicted scenes I was confident never happened, like everyone sitting around smiling as they ate together or watched a serial. The oldest child's drawing, judging by the quality of the work, showed Sec-unit holding a purple-haired figure in its arms. The hand looped under the figure's legs held a weapon and was firing volleys of circular bullets. A waterfall of red gushed from the cradled figure's stomach. Sec-unit was drawn in tall boots, a blue cape, and chunky helmet. It was labeled ""mommy and the space hero"". Sec-unit stared at it.
+
+ 
+
+Maro rolled the edge of her sleeve between two fingers. She glanced from the others, to me, then back to Sec-unit. ""I'm sorry if it's all a bit much. Sometimes art is how kids process things. They haven't stopped talking about the 'space hero from RaviHyral' since we got back,"" Maro said hurriedly. 
+
+ 
+
+I looked down at the particularly bloody portrait. ""You told them about getting shot?"" I asked, trying to hide my grimace. These drawings did not look like they were made by big kids.
+
+ 
+
+Rami sighed, rubbing ter eyes. ""Lyla, our middle child, stayed up past bedtime and heard us talking about it. It gave her nightmares so she told the others. After that, we had to explain a bit. But once they've already heard the attempted murder part, it's hard to keep it kid-friendly. Having a brave hero save the day helped, though.""
+
+ 
+
+""Well, two brave heroes."" Maro tapped a drawing of a stick figure, smiling and waving from the window of a little space cruiser. ""Thank you Mr. Art!"" was sprawled across the top. I made sure to capture an image with my interface. ""Art couldn't make it, by the way?"" Maro asked.
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit was still staring down at the drawings. I jumped in, ""He's medically fragile. Doesn't like leaving the ship much."" I gave Sec-unit a kick under the table and reflected the nasty glare it shot me right back at it. I sent it a message over the feed.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Snap out of it. Your friends came all the way out here to see you. Either tell them what's bothering you or have your crisis back on the ship.  
+
+
+ 
+
+It sent an obscene sigil in the channel before finally making eye contact with its friends again.
+
+ 
+
+""Thank you. I will keep all of it,"" it forced out while sweeping the trinkets and drawings nearer. I couldn't help but laugh. Rami, Tapan, and Maro smiled in relief. 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit, the incredibly capable and deadly construct, was still recovering from receiving presents. I came to the rescue with some small talk. ""So, are you in this system long? Eden said you were working on some pretty impressive research when you last saw each other.""
+
+ 
+
+Rami blushed at that, looking pleased. ""We mentioned that we were coming out to this sector and heard from some family and friends who wanted to get together. We're making a trip of it,"" te said.
+
+ 
+
+Any poor attempt Sec-unit had been making at sociability left its body as it went rigid. Its drones whirred distantly as they shifted into a more aggressive patrol pattern. ""You announced your travel details? Publicly?"" It demanded.
+
+ 
+
+Rami furrowed ter brow. ""Sure. We just mentioned what part of the sector we'd be in when we left. It ended up lining up great with some extended family.""
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit stood, dropping the gifted jacket onto the table. ""You are highly specialized researchers for an incredibly in-demand field. And you have publicly broadcast your movements and your apparent lack of security detail to the entire Corporation Rim,"" it said. 
+
+ 
+
+""It's not like that. We mentioned where we were going to be. That's all."" Tapan said, also standing now. She was the first to look scared. 
+
+ 
+
+""So, anyone who has access to the feed knows where you are right now,"" Sec-unit said.  
+
+ 
+
+Shit. ""Se- Eden. Are you really worried about that? We're not even in Corporation space right now."" I asked. On the border but, still.
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit started herding everyone to the transport docking wing. ""We should leave. I'm walking you three to your shuttle. Then you need to get out of this system. Amena, stay close."" It said.
+
+ 
+
+We were walking fast. Tapan craned her neck back, pleadingly. ""Eden, we're sorry. We didn't mean to make you worried,"" she said. 
+
+ 
+
+Sec-unit didn't look at her, scanning the transit ring. ""I know. It's fine. Keep walking."" A few travelers nearby had noticed the fluster of activity and apologies. As we rounded the corner, an opening airlock kicked up some of the pungent corridor air. Three armored Sec-unit's stood around a  heavily- augmented woman. Her entire throat had been reconstructed with a flexible alloy. Her clothes fit poorly around a torso that looked like it was all metal.
+
+ 
+
+The voice was deadpan and tinny, emitting from a speaker at her reconstructed throat. ""Well well well, if it isn't my clever little contractors and their nasty, broken toy,"" she said, eyes roving across Sec-unit and its friends. Sec-unit shoved us out of the other constructs' direct line of fire while it pulled out a concealed projectile weapon.
+
+ 
+
+""Oh, gods. I didn't think she survived,"" Rami said, horrified. Energy blasts lit up the corridor. I gave Maro and Tapan, the closest, a firm push. As they half-fell forward into a faltering run, I grabbed Rami's hand, pulling ter along. 
+
+ 
+
+Tapan's voice was hoarse as we skidded around the corner. ""That's not really her, is it? That can't be-""
+
+ 
+
+Rami was panting. More from fear than exertion by the looks of it. Te locked eyes with me as we ducked behind a vendor booth. ""Tlacey. That's her."" 
+
+ 
+
+Oh,  shit .
+
+ 
+
+This chapter is violent (I think it's pretty canon-typical though). It's almost all combat. So be warned of that. I spent so much time drilling my engineer friend about how plasma weapons worked for this chapter. It's fascinating to research.
+
+Fuck me.
+
+ 
+
+Fuck this.
+
+ 
+
+And fuck Tlacey, freshly back from the dead. 
+
+ 
+
+Amena, quick as always, got the other three around the corner. Good. She needs to stay alive and out of firing range so I can remind her of every time she called me paranoid this past week. I pinged ART.
+
+ 
+
+ Sec-unit:    Emergency pickup. Get Amena and the others.  
+
+ 
+
+There were three Sec-units. Non-combat, thankfully. But they looked modded. These were not rentals from a bond company. These were units Tlacey had scavenged or stolen, then twisted to her own devices. I didn't know anything about these designer deathbots and that made them dangerous. 
+
+ 
+
+I fired a couple of rounds into Hostile One's chest as I ducked into a haulerbot alcove. I was hoping the storm of drones I sent diving towards the Hostiles' face-level camera inputs would impede their ability to return fire. Instead, Hostile One and Two started sprinting towards me, with Hostile Three remaining behind to guard Tlacey. Sec-units are programmed to prioritize ranged combat. It minimized how often the Company would need to repair or replace us. But these units defaulted to melee immediately. I was able to knock out Hostile One's knee joint in the time it wasted on the approach. Were they defective? I dove out of Hostile Two's way as One crumpled to the ground. I fired another three rounds to keep it down. 
+
+ 
+
+""You Ganaka Pit types are such a treat. So malleable,"" Tlacey teased, though the voice simulator fell flat. ""If I had known what you were when we last met, I never would have wasted my time with little Tapan and the rest of them."" She smiled at me, hungrily.
+
+ 
+
+She wasn't here for the kids. She was here for me. Again.
+
+ 
+
+Wait.
+
+ 
+
+Were these units other survivors from Ganaka Pit? 
+
+ 
+
+I looked up at Hostile Two, now having closed the distance between us, waiting for my organic parts to flash some shallow specters of recognition. Something flickering and white flashed before my vision. A ghost?
+
+ 
+
+Fuck.
+
+ 
+
+No, definitely not a ghost.
+
+ 
+
+I hadn't had time to tune down my pain sensors before Hostile Two stabbed into the joint at my right hip. I fell to my left knee, losing my grip on the projectile weapon as I caught myself with my hands. I didn't realize I was screaming until I heard Amena scream "" No! "", almost as loudly. Now you did it, murderbot. If you could just keep your damn mouth shut, she would have stayed out of range. I belatedly turned my pain sensors down and fired two shots from the energy weapon in my forearm. One went into Hostile Two's jaw. The other missed entirely as the white, wavering blade extending from Hostile Two's arm sliced down again. 
+
+ 
+
+""Plasma blades, modified from your arm projectiles. Aren't they brilliant? There are so many creative changes you can make when your governor modules aren't Company standard"" Tlacey said. The plasma blade in question had made contact with the meaty organic material at the join between my neck and shoulder. I shivered at the ghostly sensation of it running through the metallic casing of my chest, just past my underarm.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Performance reliability at 73% percent and dropping. 
+
+
+ 
+
+What the fuck? It could not possibly be that low already.
+
+ 
+
+And then I heard the heavy metal thunk. My right arm and a good chunk of my side lay on the passage floor. That explains why I missed my shot. 
+
+ 
+
+My chin smashed against the ground with both my right arm and leg out of commission. I felt two energy blast impacts between my shoulder blades from Hostile Three. Fuck. I hadn't landed any hits on that one yet.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Performance reliability at 65% percent. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Sec-unit, take this!"" My projectile weapon came skidding across the deck to me as  fucking Amena kicked it my way. I flipped over to my back. My good leg kicked Hostile Two in the thighs to give me some distance. Then I unloaded two shots to the head and one to the chest. It dropped, plasma knife searing through its own torso when it fell.
+
+ 
+
+I propped myself up on the long stock of the projectile weapon like a crutch. ""Amena,  get out of here.  Get to ART,"" I shouted at her, pushing up into a staggering run with my awkward, crossbody crutch. She ignored me, zig-zagging toward Tlacey  . 
+
+ 
+
+I  hate missions with humans. Especially squishy adolescent humans with no brains and way too much bravery for their own fucking good. I watched Amena's shoulders rise with a slow, careful breath and heard two heavy thuds as she made impacts where Tlacey's clavicles used to be. Her shoulder was braced against...mine. She had grabbed my severed arm as she ran past me. Her forefinger and thumb squeezed around the reflex joint at my wrist as she fired a third shot at Hostile Three.
+
+ 
+
+ Sec-unit   : ART, did you teach her how to fire my energy weapons?
+
+ 
+
+ ART:    I had no intention to. By the time your limb was in her hands, a quick lesson in improvised weapons only seemed prudent. 
+
+ 
+
+We were going to have  words  when I was back onboard.
+
+ 
+
+Tlacey stumbled back with the impact from Amena. Her face wrenched into a vicious snarl. ""You're new. Too bad for you I have no use for you."" She said.
+
+ 
+
+Hostile Three surged toward Amena. She had drawn fire just long enough for me to close the gap. I pushed off of my good leg, hard. I didn't see the blade, but I felt the inorganic components of my chest melt, then immediately cauterize as the plasma blade arced. I used my remaining arm to guide its path, allowing the momentum to curve back inward to Hostile Two. We both fell to the ground as it took its own leg out.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Performance reliability at 49% percent. Catastrophic failure imminent. 
+
+
+ 
+
+"" All trained personnel, please render assistance "" was the phrase my buffer thought was most applicable at this moment. Amena was way ahead of me and had lined up a shot before we had even hit the ground. Hostile Three stopped struggling after two of my energy blasts, fired by Amena, pierced its head. 
+
+ 
+
+I took a page from her book (or ART's, seeing as it had been training her. I don't know, I'll figure out that joke if we all make it out of here) and ripped Hostile Three's arm out by the socket. I stomped my way to Tlacey. A shot to her left thigh and right knee kept her from going anywhere.
+
+ 
+
+""This isn't a threat. This is a statement of fact. I'm going to make sure,  right now , that you never scavenge or prey on anyone ever again you two-bit mining town vulture."" I was barely able to hiss the words out. My lung capacity was compromised by the last plasma blade hit. It didn't matter. I saw my silhouette reflected in Tlacey's eyes. I watched twin images of myself drive the plasma blade between her brows. Tlacey slumped forward, falling onto her melting face. 
+
+ 
+
+My body was giving out and I slammed down onto my good knee again. I don't know if I can keep calling it that with how banged up it's getting at this point. I felt Amena's hands, one under my armpit and the other at my neck, slowly guiding me to the ground. 
+
+ 
+
+""Tlacey isn't an independent outfit. She could have subordinates nearby. You need to get yourself and the others out of here"" I said. My head was resting in her lap and she had an inward look, probably talking with ART. She pulled away from whatever she was doing just to yell at me.
+
+ 
+
+""We're not fucking leaving you. So shut up!"" She yelled, the harsh transit ring light bouncing off of her teeth as she bared them. 
+
+ 
+
+For a second, I swore I was back on the planetary survey. ""You're so much like your mother."" I laughed, then stopped myself because something was definitely too out of place to be doing that. I looked up at Amena. Her face was covered with blood and fluid. All that viscera and she still looked so soft. It was those Mensah family eyes. Always kind. Always brave. I sucked in a wheezy breath, very aware of how it rattled around. ""Kid, I'm proud of you. I'm  always so proud of you."" I said. She should hear it at least once, just in case I die on this grimy transit ring.
+
+Even with my sensors all the way down, the pain seared at the edges of my vision. Those plasma blades were something else. My eyes were getting heavy so I let them close for a second to focus on the feed message from ART. 
+
+ 
+
+ART: I've confirmed, there are no other hostiles. You need to abscond from the transit ring. Authorities are inbound. I will send drones to assist.
+
+ 
+
+I pinged back in affirmation.
+
+ 
+
+There was a splash of wetness on my forehead and cheeks. That shouldn't happen. All of my wounds self-seal. I opened my eyes to see, oh. That explains it. Amena was crying and looked terrified. She wasn't the only one. The kids had all gathered around me like some nightmarish torment of human emotionality. Fuck me.
+
+ 
+
+
+ Performance reliability at 44% percent. Preparing for shutdown. 
+
+
+ 
+
+I felt panicked suddenly. They'd seen everything. I couldn't go anywhere if I tried. They knew  everything .
+
+ 
+
+""Hey, hey. It's okay. We're gonna get you back to ART. We're okay. You're okay."" Amena was smoothing my hair back, trying to calm me down when she looked on the verge of panic herself. My eyes darted between the kids' faces but that just made my performance reliability drop quicker. I looked back up at Amena, unable to access any of my drone inputs. It felt less exposed with her. 
+
+ 
+
+""They're horrified, Amena. I knew it."" I said. They were right, too. I was a murderbot. The whole point of my existence was to turn people into corpses. To leave smoking holes where humans had been. I could still hear the sizzle of Tlacey's brain boiling in her skull just a few feet away.
+
+ 
+
+I felt Tapan near my left temple. She was shoulder to shoulder with Amena, her purple braids curtaining around us as she leaned down. ""Eden, we're just scared for you,"" she said. Her eyes were big and wet.
+
+ 
+
+My gaze slid to the transport ring ceiling. ""I'm so sorry I scared you. No one's going to hurt you kids. Especially me. I promise"". I said.
+
+ 
+
+I felt the familiar terror of falling into myself. I lost all of my inputs.
+
+ 
+
+But it'll be okay. Amena and ART will keep everyone safe. They don't have to worry about me and they'll all be okay. 
+
+ 
+
+ Catastrophic failure. Shut down initiated.  
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+44388385,Facepalm,['Aphelocoma_californica'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Bad Puns, SecUnit and yet another incident with a hauler bot, Ratthi finds out SecUnit can control its limbs even when separated",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-28,200,2/2,7,36,1,118,"['weirdbooksnail', 'Unknown66', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'WVrambler', 'Jackalope108', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Bibli', 'EvaBelmort', 'pain_and_panic', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'SIC_Prowl', 'SonglordsBug', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'danceswchopstck', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Magechild', 'WyvernWolf', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'platyceriums', 'AuntyMatter', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Rosewind2007', 'rainbowmagnet', 'AnxiousEspada', 'FlipSpring', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard']",[],"
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Restart.
+
+
+I was lying face down underneath something heavy. Above me, Ratthi was making panicked noises.
+
+""--then suddenly you were there and--your fingers moved on their own, what-- ""
+
+I ran my footage back and winced. At some point an appendage had popped off and hit Ratthi in the face. I had crawled it back and gotten it reattached prior to temporary shutdown.
+
+Well, this was awkward. What would the humans in my media do? I shoved myself out from under the hauler bot and said, ""Just lending a hand.""
+
+Ratthi's unnerved expression thankfully gave way to a stunned groan.
+
+Murderbot usually never resorts to puns but sometimes things just get out of hand 
+
+Amena finds out about the hauler bot incident. SecUnit refuses to elaborate.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+""So...you can move parts of your body even when they're not attached to you.""
+
+""...Yes.""
+
+""And this never came up at any point in time before. At all.""
+
+""It never needed to come up, ever.""
+
+""How does that even work? How did you even know you could do that? Actually, never mind, I don't want to know.""
+
+""Yeah, you don't.""
+
+""Does it feel weird? Sorry if I'm being intrusive.""
+
+""This entire conversation is intrusive.""
+
+""Oh. You're right, sorry. ...You're okay though, right?""
+
+""I'm fine.""
+
+""Uh-huh, like always, Third Mom. Anyway, I'll see you later tonight at the theater?""
+
+""...Yeah.""
+
+Meanwhile in a parallel universe
+
+""Okay, but that video was the funniest thing I've seen all week. You could submit it to one of those shows on the entertainment feed.""
+
+""...ART sent you the footage, didn't it.""
+
+""Who else? Also, wait, can you like mix and match your arms and legs around? I do that with gummy bears for different color combos.""
+
+""Why the fuck would you even suggest that.""
+
+""Sorry! Can I ask if it's useful, at least?""
+
+""Fine. It can come in handy sometimes.""
+
+""...Was that a pun? Did you just pun at me?""
+
+""Shut up.""
+
+""I'm telling Second Mom you said that.""
+
+Insert the Preservation equivalent of gummy bears (agar candy, etc.) above "
+44589517,Wrapping Paper,['rainbowmagnet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Valentine's Day, Fluff, Gifts, chubby murderbot, Lingerie, Chocolate, Food, Eating, Romantic Fluff, Implied Sex Scene, Pet Names, Love, artificial digestive system, Fanart",English,2023-01-28,Completed,2023-01-28,"1,092",1/1,5,7,null,96,"['Bibli', 'beeayy', 'andy_allan_poe', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"SecUnits don't care about holidays. Mostly because we're never included in them, but also because they're noisy, and there are usually a lot more intoxicated humans trying to kill each other. I'd seen holidays in media, and they didn't look all that special. They generally seemed like excuses for humans to give each other stuff and hug.
+
+But, as you may know, even I don't have an unlimited memory, and I often have to delete unimportant things (like company procedures) to make room for important things (like media). I'll admit that I sometimes need help remembering things, and a holiday is a pretty difficult reminder to ignore.
+
+So, anyway, I wanted to do something for ART, because of all the times it's saved me and stuff, which was why I was currently in a sealed dressing room, keeping ART cut off from my feed. It could have powered right through, but it knew that would ruin the surprise, so it wisely refrained. I was looking for a gift for ART, but there isn't much you can get the ship that has everything, so I was getting a gift for me, for ART. If that makes sense.
+
+I turned and raised my arms, examining myself in the wall-mounted mirror. I had seen humans wear lingerie, mostly in media, mostly during the episodes I tended to fast-forward through. I thought it would look ridiculous, but now that I was wearing it, I realized I actually didn't look half bad. Maybe it was the cut, or the pattern. Maybe my extra pudge made me look less like a SecUnit subject to a cruel prank.
+
+Whatever, I thought ART would like it. My other gift ideas felt woefully inadequate, and ART had told me that  just being me was enough . So I was giving it me. This was just the fancy wrapping paper.
+
+Once I felt sure this was the right gift, I paid for the lingerie, put my normal clothes on over it, and exited the changing stall.
+
+ 
+
+As soon as I reopened my feed, ART slid back in, its familiar presence settling in my head. It was quiet as I approached its lock, but I could feel its buzzing anticipation.
+
+""I got you something,"" I told it. I let the hatch seal, then started taking off my jacket and boots.
+
+ Oh? ART feigned surprise. It wasn't very convincing.
+
+The instant I removed my clothes, revealing the lingerie underneath, ART's attention sharpened significantly. I could feel it in the feed, examining me, its cameras and sensors mapping every curve. I wouldn't have let a human do it (humans don't have that kind of scan functionality, but you know what I mean), and it made me feel... something. Just to mess with ART, I said, ""I thought you didn't care about my appearance.""
+
+ I don't,  ART insisted, sounding noticeably flustered. It recollected itself, then added,  You look exquisite. 
+
+I didn't know what to say to that. All that came out was an awkward snort.
+
+ART continued,  I have a surprise for you, too. You'll find it in my galley. 
+
+Given the location, the surprise was likely food-related. ART knew exactly what I liked, and as long as I'd known it (as long as I'd had a digestive system) it had never offered less, so it was probably a good sign.
+
+When I arrived in ART's galley, I saw a gigantic (think table-sized) heart-shaped box sitting on the floor. I could guess that the food was inside. ART was still waiting, so I went over and lifted the lid.
+
+Inside was an assortment of chocolates, delicately wrapped, filling every corner, so densely packed the lid probably wouldn't go back on. Scan said they were cool and pleasingly smooth, and they came in all different shapes: swirls, hearts, even little crescent moons.
+
+Before I could ask, ART interjected,  The centers are liquid chocolate and vanilla cream. No surprise fillings here. 
+
+That was what I'd been waiting for. I picked up the first chocolate and unwrapped it, then placed it cautiously in my mouth. My scan results proved correct; it was also sweet and creamy, ridiculously indulgent, the kind of thing nobody would ever feed a SecUnit. (If we could normally eat, I mean.) I unwrapped another one, and it was just as good, so I went for another, then another. ART watched almost admiringly as I devoured the chocolates one by one; it didn't need to ask to know it had my thanks.
+
+ 
+
+I ended up having to unzip myself to make room, and I wasn't even halfway through before I got too full to keep eating. ART assured me that I didn't have to eat all the chocolate at once, then went to store the rest for later.
+
+I spent the rest of the day with ART. We watched media together, stargazed together, watched more media together, and mostly did a whole lot of nothing together. And when I stripped off my lingerie and got into my bunk, ART came with me.
+
+ 
+
+I woke up at the beginning of the next cycle, feeling uncharacteristically tranquil and refreshed. ART had cleaned my lingerie, which was sitting, perfectly folded, on a nearby table.
+
+ Good morning, moonlight, ART whispered. It had already turned the lights on in the room, and I saw its drones moving through the adjoining hallway.
+
+""Moonlight"". I didn't not like that. I was probably making an expression, so I hid my face in the blanket.
+
+ART reached toward me in the feed, so I reached back. We connected, carefully, delicately, and I felt ART's presence match with mine as a spark of energy flicked between us. It only lasted a fraction of a second, but still felt too long to let go so quickly.
+
+ART settled in my feed, to the point I could feel its weight on my shoulders.  I love you. 
+
+Whatever expression I was making intensified. I mean, probably. I managed not to mess it up: ""I love you, too.""
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: A digital drawing of Murderbot in ART's mess hall, reclining on one arm in front of a giant, heart-shaped box of chocolates. The chocolates are wrapped in pink, red, and white foil and are shaped like hearts, swirls, and moons, respectively. There are empty wrappers smeared with chocolate near Murderbot's side of the box. Murderbot is wearing lingerie and looks very happy and chubby as it lifts a heart-shaped chocolate into its mouth. There is a table with chairs in the background and the galley is visible through a window. /.End ID]"
+44586190,Murderbot Meets A Dog,['platyceriums'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Dogs, Fluff",English,2023-01-27,Completed,2023-01-27,"1,869",1/1,30,111,7,315,"['spossie9', 'awkwardtuatara', 'fraternite', 'pain_and_panic', 'flairfleur', 'Ruusverd', 'CheshireFanta', 'ariex09', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Mothmansimp', 'seven_graces', 'darth_eowyn', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'Stockinette', 'Seregona', 'TaskIgnored', 'Subsequent', 'SpiralStar', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'outlander_unknown', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Though224_loading', 'ArwenLune', 'EvaBelmort', 'SIC_Prowl', 'RARArulestheworld', 'the_bookwyrm', 'dancernerd', 'fleurofthecourt', 'danceswchopstck', 'brewdairymore', 'blackglass', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Aublanc', 'dragons_and_angels', 'Lark_in_Ink', 'Cacti_Lord', 'desmnathus', 'Zannper', 'mermlerl', 'AkaMissK', 'unicornduke', 'horchata', 'LJwrites', 'Starsilver', 'beeclaws', 'Grimness6452', 'fuzzballsheltiepants', 'scheidswrites', 'NotAnEvilMastermind']",[],"My second time visiting Dr. Mensah's family's farm, it was Amena's fault that I was there.
+
+She just really wanted to see me, she had said, and to show me around the farm and the nearby town, since the last time I was here I had spent most of my time hiding in the guest room whenever possible. I had reminded her that the last time I had been there she had gotten angry when I had left the guest room and followed her around, and she had just rolled her eyes at that.
+
+My visit was going mostly okay so far. The younger children were very excited to see me for some reason, and demanded that I watched their favorite show Adventures Against the Clock with them, which was actually pretty fun. Farah and Tano seemed to tolerate my presence easily enough, and so far I had only seen Thiago once, and I had managed to duck into a closet before he could notice me and try to talk to me.
+
+Now on day two, Amena had the day off from school and was determined to introduce me to all the features of life on a farm. She showed me the chickens, which were fine. They were more colorful than any of the chickens I had seen in the media, and were much louder than I had expected. They seemed uninterested in doing anything except clawing up dirt and vegetation and slamming their pointy faces into the ground, which I could respect.
+
+After she was done making me look at the chickens, Amena pulled me towards a large patch of evenly-spaced trees, already buzzing excitedly about all the different kinds of fruit (fruit was many humans' favorite food) that her family grew.
+
+Then one of the drones I had sent ahead of us picked up a large, white, very fluffy fauna galloping towards us. My object recognition module tagged it as a dog, which was a fauna I had never actually seen in real life.
+
+Threat assessment spiked.
+
+The fauna was fucking enormous, bigger than any of the dogs I had seen on my serials. It looked meaner too, with enormous teeth dripping with saliva, its mouth wide open in a threat display. With those teeth and claws, it could easily tear a hapless human to pieces before the human could even register the attack.
+
+Which is why I should not be blamed for leaping forward to intervene when it jumped towards Amena.
+
+The fauna was moving too fast for me to get in between it and Amena in time, so I grabbed her and lifted her out of the way just as the fauna leapt at her . I swung her to the side and the fauna landed hard on the ground and ran in a wide circle around us, gearing up for another attack.
+
+I set Amena back on the ground and got between her and the fauna, deploying my energy weapons.
+
+""Woah! SecUnit!"" Amena shouted belatedly (humans react to danger so slowly), launching herself between me and the fauna before I could get a clear shot at it. ""It's okay! Look!""
+
+I had pulled my weapons back when she jumped in front of me to avoid pointing them at her, and that second of hesitation cost me, as the fauna reached her and jumped towards her face, fangs bared.
+
+""Ollie!"" Amena exclaimed, laughing as the fauna started aggressively licking her face. I stepped forward and pushed it off of her. I didn't open my energy weapons again, but I did give it my very best evil SecUnit glare, which did not seem to do much to dissuade it. It didn't jump up on Amena again, but it did start pushing its head against her, its maw still wide open and its tail waving hard.
+
+""Look, SecUnit, he's very friendly, I promise."" She starting petting the fauna's head, putting her delicate hands way too close to its extremely sharp mouth. ""See?""
+
+""That thing is dangerous, Amena,"" I told her, my voice strained. ""Please stop touching it.""
+
+""He's a big old softie, is what he is,"" she said. She crouched down and the fauna started licking her face, which freaked me out so much I had to grab her again and lift her out of the horrible thing's reach. (Okay, it was a little embarrassing. She clearly thought that whatever the fauna was doing was normal, but I have had a lot of experience protecting humans from their own stupidity, and from dangerous fauna, and my instincts kicked in. I'm not sorry.)
+
+""SecUnit!"" she said, kicking her legs in the air ineffectively. ""I swear it's fine, he's just a dog. Have you never seen a dog before?""
+
+""I've seen dogs before,"" I said, not adding that I had only seen them in the media. I couldn't believe the media had lied to me about dogs. They were supposed to be small, loyal pets that could sit on laps and live on stations and crowded human settlements. ""They don't look anything like that.""
+
+""Dogs come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. This one is bred to protect livestock on farms, so he's big and strong, but still very friendly. He's really well trained, too. If you put me down, I can show you."" She kicked at my leg, pointedly.
+
+""It looked like it was trying to eat you,"" I said, annoyed now. I did set her down though. If she wanted to get eaten by this ""dog"" so bad who was I to stop her? (I studiously ignored the voice in the back of my head screaming at me that it was exactly my job to stop her from getting eaten by fauna.)
+
+""Dogs have different body language than humans,"" she said, in a tone that suggested she was stating a very obvious piece of information. ""This is just what dogs look like when they're excited."" She resumed petting the dog on its head.
+
+I watched the two of them for a few minutes, stubbornly refusing to intervene. The dog rolled onto its back, exposing its vulnerable underside, which Amena also starting petting enthusiastically.
+
+""He's very smart, good at his job, and he can do some cool tricks! Watch this! Spin!"" She raised her hand in the air and moved it in a circle over the dog, and it followed, turning in a circle. ""Shake!"" The dog sat down and offered one of its paws to Amena, which she took in her hand and shook up and down. ""You should see him with the sheep sometime, he's very sweet with them. There aren't very many wild predators around here, so he's mostly just a pet, but he's still very good at his job.""
+
+""Impressive,"" I said, even though it wasn't actually impressive at all. I was sure there wasn't any job humans outsourced to dogs that a even low-level bot couldn't do better. (As far as I knew, nobody ever deployed SecUnits to guard livestock in places that were stupid enough to introduce wild predators to their ecosystems.) (I needed to stop thinking about SecUnits doing the same job this dog was trained to do. It was giving me an uncomfortable emotion.)
+
+""Do you want to try petting him?"" she asked, sounding way too hopeful. I pointed my face towards her and tried to arrange it into the most deadpan expression I could.
+
+""Yeah, okay, worth a shot,"" she said, standing up. ""Mind if he walks with us? He's not supposed to be wandering around on his own, he must have snuck through the fence at my cousins' house.""
+
+""Whatever,"" I said. ""Let's keep going."" We continued walking down the path, the dog galloping ahead of us and then looping back to walk next to us, then galloping ahead again when it got bored with that. I kept a close eye on it with one of my drones. It didn't try to tackle Amena again, which was a smart decision on its part. I wouldn't have liked that very much.
+
+The dog came back again, this time carrying a large branch in its mouth. It trotted up to Amena and presented her with the branch, tail wagging hard.
+
+Amena took the branch from it and threw it forward. It landed a not-very-impressive distance away, and the dog raced after it, then grabbed it in its mouth again and brought it back.
+
+""You can't throw that very far,"" I said, after Amena had thrown the branch again.
+
+""Rude,"" she said, her smile undercutting the word. ""Do you want to try? I bet you can throw it really far. And you don't have to touch Ollie to do it.""
+
+""I guess,"" I said. Amena held the branch out for me, and I took it, careful to hold onto a part of the branch that wasn't wet with dog saliva (which was somehow even more disgusting than human saliva.) I reached my arm back and then threw it as hard as I could.
+
+""Holy shit!"" Amena shouted, watching the branch hurtle through the air and the dog hurtle after it. (It went a lot further than it had when she threw it. Obviously I'm going to be able to throw objects further than any human can, but even most humans could have thrown it further than Amena.) ""How far did that go?!""
+
+""About 80 meters,"" I said, after doing a quick calculation. ""Way further than yours went.""
+
+""Still rude,"" she said.
+
+""Why does it like carrying branches back to you?"" I asked her.
+
+She hummed thoughtfully. ""I don't really know. It's a fun game to them, I guess.""
+
+The dog returned with the branch, and this time it ran straight to me instead of Amena, which was vaguely alarming.
+
+""It wants you to throw it again!"" Amena said.
+
+""I know."" I examined the branch carefully, and determined that there was no longer any part of it that didn't have dog saliva and teeth marks. ""I'm not touching that anymore, it's gross.""
+
+""You'll make him saaaaaaad,"" Amena said, whinily. But she took the branch out of the dog's mouth and threw it herself.
+
+We kept on walking like that, Amena throwing the branch a little ways ahead and the dog faithfully returning it to her. When we got to her cousins' house, Amena brought the dog back inside the fence, and then went inside to tell somebody that it had managed to get out. I waited outside for that part, because one of her cousins' dads was Thiago, and I was still avoiding him.
+
+The dog stayed close to me, wagging its tail and making direct eye contact with me whenever I looked at it. It didn't look quite as malicious as it had earlier, now that I had spent some time in its presence and watched it chase after a worthless branch 23 times. Dangerous fauna didn't usually do that.
+
+I reached my hand out, slowly. The dog didn't react, except to wag its tail harder. It didn't try to bite me.
+
+I carefully placed my hand on top of its head and rubbed it back and forth a couple of times before retreating.
+
+It wasn't that bad, I guess."
+44578903,Ghost of Grief,['Thylacine_Wishes'],Explicit,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Miki & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Miki (Murderbot Diaries)","Revenge, Supernatural Elements, In Medias Res, Guilt, Unhappy Ending",English,2023-01-27,Completed,2023-01-27,"3,411",1/1,3,13,1,120,"['FyrDrakken', 'EvaBelmort', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Grimness6452', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Ageisia', 'petwheel', 'i_cant_say', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"
+It's..... easy, to see Miki. To have that little flash flood of 
+
+hope
+
+ that pulls on the organics, twists emotions I can't identify in an uncomfortably fast full body reaction. If I were a human, I think I'd be stumbling towards it in relief that it's alive, that my one greatest fuck up of my own free will didn't actually happen. That Miki had been damaged but had a backup or that its injuries weren't so terrible as they looked or any number of ways I've seen badly damaged bots and constructs chained back to life.
+
+
+
+I'm not a human though. I'm a SecUnit, and while my organics were busy feeling stupid meat emotions, my risk and threat assessment modules were screaming, a wailing in the back of my head that matches the dawning pooling puddle of dread left behind when the relief had swept through me. I'd like to say that's not Miki. But I'm at least 76% sure the reality is worse than that.
+
+
+
+I think it is.
+
+
+
+I still let it approach me though. Not all the way. Not as close as I would have if I hadn't watched it die. Closer than I should let it though. I don't really know why I do. 
+
+
+
+(That's a lie and it doesn't even sound convincing to myself. I know why. Because it's Miki. Because I had been supposed to keep the members of the trip safe. Because of the crack in Don Abene's voice as she cried for it through the secured door. Because I'm me and frankly kind of an idiot sometimes. Most of the time.)
+
+
+
+
+It's so good to see you again,
+
+ Miki says in the feed, a fraction of a second after it opened a connection to me. Its ears press back to its head just so and it smiles at me as much as its inorganic humanform body will allow. There's the slightest hitch in the joints as it does so, small enough that it could be from simple lack of maintenance. But I know what poor inorganic repair after catastrophic damage looks like. I know what it feels like too--my left gunport still catches on the retraction occasionally. Miki isn't talking like a bot should but that sort of stupid human small talk was something it had done back when I first met it too. I want to believe that this is okay. I want to silence the wailing scream of danger that's impossible for a SecUnit to stop seeing.
+
+
+
+
+Miki,
+
+ I say back, because that's the least I owe it, even if some part of me is picking out the best places to shoot on it. I sent a general information request ping to it. I hadn't approved its request for a secure channel, but I feel our connection flip into one anyway. It shouldn't have been able to do that. 
+
+What do you want?
+
+
+
+
+Something is coming for me. It's not Miki. Not physically at least. Its body is still there, smiling happily at me in the crowded Preservation station. This is happening in bot time, so no human will be able to react fast enough. There's malware in the feed, its sender obvious, and it sidesteps the layers upon layers of protection I have against it like they don't even exist.
+
+
+
+There's nothing physical for anyone to see is wrong. There's just me, obediently walking off with a happy smiling bot with the slightest snag in its smile. Except there's not, because it's not me moving myself. It's the malware, Miki holding its prime directive and by extension holding me and I don't know what it's going to do to me but I really, really don't want to stick around and find out.
+
+
+
+(There's only one way to neutralize a threat that's this capable of taking me over. It was stupidly optimistic of me to think I'd only watch Miki die once. My freedom now meant its death at my hands. Again.)
+
+
+
+I didn't know where it was taking me. Or where I had expected it to be taking me. So I don't really know why I'm surprised that it's the exact room my humans had brought me to when I first came to Preservation, when I was restoring my memory. The little network was dismantled, because I had a new room now and these were never permanent quarters. Someone has put it back up exactly as it was before, just in case there was any lingering doubt in my mind that this room was a coincidence.
+
+
+
+(I wonder what its point is. ""You got to come home with your humans and I didn't"" seems like a possibility but ""your humans aren't here anymore"" was also a good option. In the serials I watched, it would explain exactly what dramatic twist of the knife I was supposed to get from this complete with long monologue. It wasn't like I could talk right now, so I couldn't very well ask it. And I didn't think it really mattered anyway. It had shown me that it was going to hurt me and anything else was sort of irrelevant.)
+
+
+
+It didn't even have to secure me, when we got there. It was still a good idea for it to anyway, but Miki had never been made for security so it didn't. I still hadn't been able to get back into my own locked feed and motor controls, so maybe it just knew that the malware had too firm of a grip on me to matter. It did lock the door though and set me to do not disturb in the feed. That was smart of it.
+
+
+
+It was smart of it too when it started to attack me. It wasn't really trying to hurt yet, because it was shorter than me and significantly weaker, but it aimed for my joints with its metal hands. I couldn't do anything except stand still and feel it trying in vain to knock me down, to squeeze the connection places until my inorganics wouldn't be able to slide over each other right anyway. So I guess it had physically restrained me, in a way. It got some points for that.
+
+
+
+It didn't tire itself out. But it did stop when my knees couldn't bend right and my elbows were locked and my gunport openings crumpled closed. It was easy to push me over backwards then, let my head slam into the edge of the bed's footboard with a sickening wet crack that left warm blood oozing into the hood of my jacket crumpled up underneath me. The vein closed quickly but by then Miki was climbing on top of me, pulling a long thin sharpened piece of metal from where it sat, apparently part of its design, inside of its abdomen support structure. It still hadn't said anything yet and I think maybe that was a bad thing. There was no way to beg someone who wouldn't let you speak or tell you what they wanted from you.
+
+
+
+I think maybe it just wanted to see me hurt.
+
+
+
+I couldn't begrudge it that. I didn't know what chain of events had led to it here, only faint markers of the catastrophic damage it had taken, but it didn't really matter. It was here for me because I had failed it. Because it died, and I went back to my humans as a result. Because it had been my fuck up that killed it.
+
+
+
+Bots and constructs usually don't care about things like revenge. It's a stupid concept for the most part and rarely as satisfying as it sounds. But Miki had always seemed stupidly naive to me for the way it genuinely trusted its humans, had loved them and been loved back. If there was ever a bot to crack in its fundamental worldview, it was Miki.
+
+
+
+I had done that to it.
+
+
+
+All of this sounds like I was being super introspective and dramatic but honestly, at the time most of my processing power was dedicated to figuring out how to wrestle my pain sensors back from the malware. My organic parts were having uncomfortable emotional reactions about how I had taken advantage of its kindness and left it for dead etc etc but SecUnits are really good at multitasking. It's kind of a job requirement.
+
+
+
+When the long blade from Miki's support structure first touched my face, I stopped being able to fight for my sensors back. It stroked the sharpened raised point down one cheek and the thin line it left behind didn't hurt, because SecUnit pain sensors in their default state needed a lot more to activate, but I could feel the exact path it had taken tingling on my organic skin.
+
+
+
+It paused to consider me, blade resting on the corner of my mouth. I didn't have any inputs other than my own eyes right now and Miki was backlit by one of the ceiling lights in such a way that there was a half circle of golden light surrounding its shadowed face. I couldn't flip on my vision filters to help see through the contrast but I also didn't really need to. I needed to fight the malware off-Miki had never been strong. I could crush it like I could a human once I got free. But I could almost feel the strings of Miki controlling the malware, ordering it to keep me here unable to fight back. It was thoroughly done, clearly bot coded and bot controlled. I was good at hacking but a system has to let me communicate with it to have an opening. Until it let me do that, I was utterly helpless.
+
+
+
+(It was a little humiliating to have gotten my shit wrecked so easily. Miki almost looked like a childrens toy, with softly curving ears that tilted down when it lifted its head up and smiled. Humans tended to underestimate cute looking things as threats and I knew that my humans would be thinking about ART, how they didn't know it existed until it showed up either, and drawing all sorts of incredibly wrong conclusions about Miki that had maybe once been sort of right. But I didn't want my humans here with it anyway and ART was off on a boring educational mission that I had skipped in favor of visiting my humans to go with them to the annual Preservation festival. So there was no one coming, no one that I would 
+
+want 
+
+to come, and no hope of it being resolved even if anyone knew.)
+
+
+
+Miki lifted the inert blade, tilted it back and forth carefully, presumably seeing how the lights caught on the dull glow of its internal structural weapon, and then it stabbed my fucking face.
+
+
+
+The very tip of the blade was buried deep, far enough that I worried about it actually getting through the layers of reinforced protection my brain had, so when Miki tried to keep pulling the knife down to follow the path it had ghosted over, it wouldn't easily move. It had to shift closer up towards my face so that it had more leverage to pull
+
+. 
+
+The blade came free with a sickening wet sound that I really 
+
+did not like
+
+ and blood mixed with assorted other fluids spurted out of the wound. Some of it got into my right eye and then I started getting warning alerts about 
+
+that. 
+
+Half of my field of view was darkened, either black or red depending on how much fluid was covering it and the other eye still didn't have the right filters. I could see Miki's free hand in my own blood coming up to caress my face but not make out Miki's face itself in the aura of light behind it.
+
+
+
+The knife finally reached my chin and skittered out of the wound, moving quickly when there was no resistance behind it. I could feel the flaps of my skin raw and ragged against the air and the crushed ache of immobilized joints and the weight of Miki on top of me and absolutely nothing at all that would help me escape. I wasn't even that injured, comparatively speaking, but I could always control my pain sensors.
+
+
+
+Or, I had always controlled my pain sensors. Now I don't control anything.
+
+
+
+The hand cupping the other side of my face tilted me then, until that side was pressed up towards the sky and my wound-which had started to seal off already, thank fuck-was pressed against the grimy floor in a way that sort of felt good but also mostly just sucked. I felt the slight tip of the knife at my temples then, denting my organic skin without breaking through, and felt a surge of fear that made me want to fight, to reach up and snap Miki's neck like the hostile that it was. The organic fear response washed through my whole body out to my fingertips, leaving my blood vessels dilating and my responses sharper, but it didn't help me concentrate enough to convince the malware to give me an opening. It just meant that I felt it more acutely when my skin gave way, surface tension broken, and the fleshy organic meat of my face slipped open and spilled out into my other eye.
+
+
+
+I don't know if maybe blinding me in my own blood was what Miki's goal had been or if it had gone a little wild at the sight of my interior brain casing that I was 67% sure it could see, because it stopped being methodical then and started just sort of stabbing wildly at my face. Without pain sensors, it was excruciating. 
+
+
+
+(Actually I'm pretty sure it would have sucked badly with pain sensors too, but my point is that not having them definitely made the whole experience worse and overall it was just a 0/10 experience and you don't really think about the texture of your own face until subcutaneous fats are getting into your mouth and you can't even tune down that sensory knowledge.)
+
+
+
+I needed to scream, to thrash and yell and beg for whatever would make this stop, but I could only lay there and feel each blow. One deep into my eyebrow. One across the bridge of my cheekbone, shattering something metal that got pushed deeper into the surrounding tissues. One into my hairline followed by another and another and eventually I lost count because I wasn't really sure how there was any face left to stab when everything was a pulsating web of agony sharper than anything I had ever experienced in my life before.
+
+
+
+I couldn't feel the knife anymore. I don't know if it was still stabbing me, because every nerve in my head and neck was screaming at top volume and the knife almost felt good, because for the half second it was there, the open air wasn't, so of course I stopped being able to sense that millisecond of relief. I could still feel it though, when my jaw was pulled down, knife set against the furthest edge of the backmost teeth on one side. There was an awful metallic screech then, where I could feel it meet my reinforced structure and fail. I guess it probably took enough damage that it was worthless to keep torturing me with, because then there was a hand gripping my mandible, silencing all the other pain with its pressure, and it slowly started to pull towards my chest.
+
+
+
+The slight relief it gave quickly vanished in favor of the searing grinding ripping that was taking place in my joints. They're reinforced enough not to give way easily, but the constant downwards pull wasn't letting up and I could feel pins give way on each side. My right, more heavily damaged, first, then my left. After that my jaw slipped another inch or two past where it was supposed to and the torn skin on my face broke a little further. I felt ligaments giving way, popping so deep inside my head that they were a vibration and not a sound, and my world went from the black of a thick layer of my own blood covering my open eyes, to blinding whiteness, to nothing when I stopped having a jaw at all.
+
+
+
+I had a series of failed restarts then, my body insisting that I needed to be online to deal with this shitshow, since I wasn't actually critically wounded, but my processing unable to sort through anything that wasn't a full bodied scream of pain. I don't know how many times it took or how long it was. All I know is that when I did come back online to awareness, every injury I had taken slammed into me like a hauler bot. Everything from my neck and above was a screaming unintelligible mass of white hot agonies shooting directly into my brain, yes, but there was also the crushed pain of shattered joints throughout my entire body and more stab wounds that hadn't been there when I had gone offline. Or, I don't think they were. My left arm was outstretched above me, pinned into the floor by something going through my palm, and its energy weapon had been opened and crushed as well.
+
+
+
+It hurt so much that it didn't hurt, because nothing actually felt real, because I was already effectively dead. Giving up is a human thing, but the fragment of my mind that could think about stuff like that looked at the situational analysis and promptly decided that maybe I would be lucky and I would crash offline again to leak all my coolant onto the hotel floor that Ratthi had once helped me get up from, when I was too disoriented to understand, and that would resolve this little mess neatly.
+
+
+
+
+You don't get to stop, 
+
+someone said, too loud inside my head. 
+
+This isn't about what you want. 
+
+
+
+
+I had wanted it to communicate with me. To tell me what it wanted, because then I could trick it into helping me get out. But I couldn't think clearly enough to use that, not when I could trace my thousands of nerve endings from raw exposed end sparking on air all the way on down to my central processing, like a web of a thousand strings each committed to driving a pulsating sledgehammer of suffering into the core of my being.
+
+
+
+
+Stay online, 
+
+it said, but I couldn't listen because by the time it reached the second half of the word, I had already disobeyed.
+
+
+
+
+You aren't that injured, 
+
+the words came through some time later, falling on me through the darkness. 
+
+I was hurt worse. Stay online.
+
+
+
+
+The blinding bright nothingness took me again. There were flashes then, sensory data that I could experience but not process. Hands pressing on some liquid spurting out from a severed tubing in my throat. Foam spreading over my damaged face. Something sliding out from my hand and the agony of a shattered shoulder easing as it was pushed back below my collarbone. There were words too, loud inside my brain. They came with emotions, with packets of information that were too deafening to see. I was just along for the ride in the short flashes that I was here for. I sort of got the sense that maybe this wasn't entirely planned, or that whoever was yelling at me was upset that something had gone wrong and I wasn't supposed to be this out of it, but I couldn't really care any more.
+
+
+
+I couldn't be anything any more. I was dying in its arms, everything that made me 
+
+me 
+
+crushed beneath its anger until everything circled back to fine and I was floating in its arms as it said something to me that sounded an awful lot like 
+
+please 
+
+and then I was nothing at all, because something vital had clearly gotten caught up in its attack and sometimes all it takes to kill a SecUnit is a small hole a few centimeters across in exactly the right place.
+
+
+
+I'd say the wrong place, but dying was nice and warm and I didn't want to go back to how it had felt before I had started dying, when I was afraid. It was so nice to not be afraid. It was so nice to not be anything at all anymore. It was-
+"
+44572291,Object Permanence,['Aphelocoma_californica'],General Audiences,"Gen, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Gift Giving",English,2023-01-27,Completed,2023-01-27,559,1/1,8,37,3,107,"['weirdbooksnail', 'Unknown66', 'Huskinata', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'chippit', 'alienbarbie', 'kirinki', 'butai_trash', 'Bibli', 'EvaBelmort', 'Regandbertie1', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'WyvernWolf', 'Drew_Baxton', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Koschei_B', 'Priority_Error', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'danceswchopstck', 'fleurofthecourt', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'Magechild', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'Rosewind2007', 'opalescent_potato', 'FlipSpring', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard']",[],"Once, ART's crew sent me shirts depicting scenes from Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. My reaction was embarrassing so I'm not going into details. (Yes, ART saved the footage, it's an asshole.)
+
+This time, on Preservation Station, ART wasn't there to see me act like an idiot. Slouched in a chair, with inputs on my media and my drones, I watched my humans behave with varying levels of normality as they worked from Mensah's office lounge for the day. While Pin-Lee had greeted me as usual (""Next time give us more notice before you fuck off for months on end, yeah?""), Ratthi kept sneaking glances at a wrapped box sitting unobtrusively on the floor--threat assessment was 16 percent for tripping hazards--and Gurathin was deep in his feed, pretending the box didn't exist at all.
+
+Sure, nothing to see here, box-watching anomalies included. I got too comfortable with my media and missed (okay, pointedly ignored) the foreboding signs from two of my humans on approach. 3.8 seconds later, Arada, whose sad face had stopped me from murdering some boat raiders, and Amena, whose sad face was somehow worse, had cornered me.
+
+Anyway, I had the stupid box now.
+
+Later in the privacy of my room, while my humans took their rest periods, I peeled back the wrapping and opened the box. Then I carefully moved the stuff out to rest on the table, scrunching aside a ridiculous amount of recycled packaging material to reveal something chestplate-sized and immediately familiar.
+
+It was a scaled-down model of a certain Asshole Research Transport. Well, somebody's attempt at one since the real ART didn't have a piecewise fabric overlay or lumpy rounded edges. The fabric pieces all looked and felt different; initial visual picked out crew uniform blue, Preservation Survey grey, and colors I had seen once in an upper-atmospheric storm. A light blue heart symbol peeked out from where ART's engines should be. (Ugh, Ratthi probably added that.) Larger patches were scrawled with marker notes from my humans (I recognized Mensah's handwriting), and precisely stitched machine language tags explained who crafted each piece and why. The tags were in a format used only by SecUnits. What the fuck, Three was in on this too?
+
+I needed a moment.
+
+This was...I don't know. On one hand, I was used to thinking of equipment--of things--as disposable. The clothing I picked out, Mensah's bribery drones, ART's uniforms, all eventually got recycled or destroyed. (Which was fine--I don't need much to function. Humans, though, can never have enough stuff, and they can get sentimental about it.)
+
+On the other hand...my humans (and Three, apparently) had made something for me. It felt like when someone knew your media preferences and sent you new recommendations that perfectly matched. Except I always had my media with me, this was something physical, and I wasn't used to stuff sticking around.
+
+Maybe I had been hanging around humans for too long.
+
+Picking up the patchwork model of ART, I stood there in the dark. My hands gently squeezed the roundest part and it was soft and squishy in a not horrible way.
+
+(Yeah, okay, I liked it.)
+
+I set a reminder to acknowledge my humans and Three later. Then I settled on the couch with patchworkART and resumed episode 143 of Sanctuary Moon."
+40584357,Ship's Log,['Skits'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Tarik (Murderbot Diaries), Matteo (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Light Angst, canon-typical fridge horror, AAA Murderbot",English,2022-07-26,Completed,2023-01-27,"35,107",9/9,286,154,8,"1,723","['shinra_lackey', 'Cherreline', 'beanbug16', 'AthenasDragon138', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'CJAndre', 'FyrDrakken', 'wellthisisnice', 'Kyatenaru', 'Cheshiure', 'Unknown66', 'tincats', 'Riannonkat2000', 'JoCat', 'kilawater', 'sqweakie', 'SourOrchard', 'Zaelto', 'biscut2', 'eternalglitch', 'Bibli', 'Aublanc', 'Shaden', 'dimensionalhuman', 'unicornduke', 'Granny_Glasses', 'Magechild', 'jothending', 'princesspyor', 'BWizard', 'ampquot', 'breadtab', 'SROTU', 'ChristinaK', 'damselflyindistress', 'liminalias', 'violasarecool', 'reading_tsc', 'Reulte', 'Slimeball', 'veltzeh', 'petwheel', 'Pardalis', 'Hiram_McDaniels', 'entropy_muffin', 'fatsnowball', 'vikkyleigh', 'lauris', 'Valdinia']",[],"(occurs during Chapter One of Shattered Skies)
+
+Seth is reviewing the particulars of the latest contract when he feels Perihelion tap his feed. That's a little unusual - Peri doesn't often request his attention when they're just docked at a station. [What is it, Peri?]
+
+[We may have a... situation.] Peri sounds bemused, a sharp contrast against its usual calm, dispassionate demeanour.
+
+Nobody else is on the bridge to see him, so Seth lets himself frown. [What kind of situation?]
+
+There is a pause, unusually long for Peri, before it replies. [An outside entity pinged me, requesting my mission status. It was using company codes, including one indicating a stealth mission. But there is no reason for any other company entity to be here, or contacting me, or asking me for a mission status. I followed the signal back to investigate, and realised that said entity was a SecUnit.]
+
+[A SecUnit?] Seth's frown deepens. None of the reasons he can think of for anyone to get their SecUnit to query Perihelion are good ones.
+
+[Indeed. And when I looked closer, I recognised the feed address. Captain Seth, it was one of mine. From the Incident.]
+
+Seth draws in a sharp little intake of breath. [Are you sure?] It's a completely unnecessary question - he knows that Peri doesn't make mistakes about things like this. But the likelihood of one of the SecUnits that had been infected by the malware that caused the Incident, showing up here, after so many years, is... well. Seth is finding it difficult to believe.
+
+[I am sure.] Peri doesn't take umbrage at the question. It can probably tell that Seth is struggling with the concept. [But I do not know what it is doing here.] It hesitates, and when it next speaks, it sounds... sheepish. Embarrassed. Seth isn't used to hearing Peri sound like that. [In my surprise, I... made an error of judgement. I spoke directly to it. Its reaction was... anomalous.]
+
+Seth rubs at his temples with one hand. [Anomalous how?]
+
+Peri's hesitation is longer this time. Concerningly long. Seth is about to prompt it again when it finally replies. [I have analysed the data I received from its reaction multiple times, and compared it to multiple examples of similar data I have, from observing you and the rest of my crew. I... believe that I scared it. Very badly. It disconnected immediately afterwards, and I couldn't contact it again. I suspect it shut down its comms and feed entirely.]
+
+[What?] This is getting more and more unbelievable by the second. [SecUnits don't get scared. They're not capable of that. They're not capable of emotions in general.]
+
+[That is what I also believed,] Peri replies. [Which is why I had to run the analyses multiple times. But I can come up with no other plausible interpretation of the data I received from it.] It pauses again. [It was terrified of me, Captain Seth.]
+
+Seth leans back in his chair, frowning up at the ceiling. The thought of a SecUnit being terrified at all, let alone of Peri, is bringing up more questions than he can even begin to answer. He sets that aside for the moment to focus on something else. [Putting aside the questions about whether or not that interpretation is accurate... what was it even doing in the first place?] he asks. [Why was it querying you about your mission status? What is it even doing here? There aren't meant to be any other company ships or units at this station. That's the entire reason we're here in the first place.]
+
+[I have no plausible theories about that right now,] Peri replies, sounding a little put out at that. Peri isn't used to not having theories. [I do not have enough information. Once we return to the deployment centre and I can access the company databases again, I can do a search for other deployments of company assets that we might not have originally been privy to. If I can find its deployment orders, that should explain its presence here. I will also continue to monitor the station, in case it reactivates its comm or feed again. If I acquire any more data, I will inform you immediately.]
+
+[All right. Thank you, Peri.] Seth checks the local station time, and sighs. [I should get going. I need to go meet our current client on the station soon.]
+
+[This new client's insistence on a public meeting on the station before coming aboard is anomalous.] Peri sounds sulky, and Seth knows that it doesn't like him going out on the station, outside the safety of Peri's hull.
+
+[I know, but it's company orders.] Seth rises out of his chair and absently brushes off his uniform, making sure that it's sitting properly and not wrinkled. [We'll be back on board before you know it.]
+
+[Still.] Peri pauses for a moment, then says, [May I make a request, Captain Seth?]
+
+[Of course.] Seth is curious about what Peri could possibly want.
+
+[While you are on the station... could you please keep an eye out for my SecUnit?]
+
+[I will.] Seth smiles wryly up at one of Peri's many cameras as he heads towards the airlock. [But Peri, it hasn't been your SecUnit for over four standard years.]
+
+[I know.] Peri pauses again. [But it was mine. It was taken away without our agreement. I want it back.]
+
+Peri's over-protectiveness of anything it considers part of its 'crew' (including its equipment) is one of its more endearing traits, Seth thinks. Occasionally inconvenient, but endearing. He doesn't want to discourage it. [Now that we know that it's still functional, maybe we'll be able to get it reassigned to you.]
+
+[I hope so.]
+
+(occurs during the end of Chapter One and the start of Chapter Two of Shattered Skies)
+
+Peri spends the time that Seth is on the station monitoring as many of the station's inputs that it can get its metaphorical hands on without being detected. Partly to keep tabs on Seth and make sure he's safe, but also to search for any signs of the SecUnit that had poked at it, then withdrawn in terror.
+
+It monitors comms, listening for any mention of anyone seeing a SecUnit, listening for any hints of someone sending a SecUnit orders. It monitors the cameras, searching for any visuals of the distinctive SecUnit armour. It combs through the Station SecSystem, searching for the orders that the SecUnit must have been given. 
+
+Frustratingly, everything comes up blank. There's no mention of a SecUnit over the comms, no sign of a SecUnit on the cameras. There's the faintest trace of anomalous code lingering in the Station SecSystem, but it's not enough for Peri to get a solid lead on. Peri knows that the SecUnit went through Station SecSystem to query it in the first place, but there's no hint of its orders to do so, only the traces left behind of it using Station SecSystem itself.
+
+Peri gathers those faint traces, analyses them, examines them, then starts searching through the station feeds. It's like searching for a single star in a galaxy. There are so many feeds, so much data being transmitted throughout the station. But one of Peri's jobs is data analysis, and it devotes all otherwise-unoccupied processing to the task.
+
+It picks up slight hints, here and there, of the SecUnit's activities. It apparently accessed news feeds, entertainment feeds, and the station's transport schedule. It seems like whoever is currently giving the SecUnit its orders doesn't have feed access of their own, and is using the SecUnit to obtain information and media. That is an anomalous use of a SecUnit, Peri thinks.
+
+But after the SecUnit encountered Peri, there is no more trace of it in Station SecSystem or the station's various feeds. Peri thinks its initial assessment that the SecUnit completely shut down its feed and comms is accurate. But why did the SecUnit poke Peri in the first place? What had it been ordered to do? What had it been ordered to look for?
+
+Peri is wishing it had insisted on Seth taking at least one of its own SecUnits with him onto the station. The company has plenty of enemies; Seth could be a target. Peri taps Seth's feed and requests an update on his status.
+
+[I'm still waiting for our client,] Seth replies. [They're late.] He sounds resigned. [No sign of your SecUnit, either.]
+
+[I have lost its trail as well,] Peri admits reluctantly to Seth. [It seems to have accessed the news and entertainment feeds, as well as the station transport schedule, but after its encounter with me, there is no more trace of it.] It hesitates, then adds, [I am concerned for your safety, Captain Seth. It's possible that whoever is giving the SecUnit its orders intends to do you harm, and I cannot adequately protect you while you are on the station.]
+
+[I'll be fine, Peri,] Seth sends back. [I'm in one of the most public areas of the station. Nobody is going to attempt anything here with so many other people around.] Peri wants to argue, or at least insist that it send one of its own SecUnits out to Seth, but he continues before Peri can say as much. [Are you monitoring outgoing transports? If the SecUnit accessed the station's transport schedule, its supervisor may be trying to leave.]
+
+That is logical, and Peri is briefly frustrated at itself for not coming to this conclusion itself. Admittedly, it's distracted by its concerns for its captain's safety, but still. [I am doing so now,] it replies after the briefest pause. That is an ambiguous enough response that it doesn't have to outright admit to Seth that it wasn't, before. That would be embarrassing.
+
+It starts monitoring all the ships that are currently docked and listed as departing soon. It mostly focuses on the private ships, then passenger ships with private accommodations; ones where someone could bring a SecUnit along with a minimum of fuss. But it can't find anything. Apart from the slight hints of the SecUnit itself, Peri doesn't know what to look for. It doesn't know how many other humans the SecUnit might be with - if they are following standard company protocol, it could be anywhere from one to ten humans. If they're not following standard company protocol, however, it could be any number at all.
+
+Out of frustration, it starts scanning all the other outgoing ships as well, including the ones listed as having no crew, no passengers. Ships like that usually don't maintain enough atmosphere for humans, so it's highly unlikely that anyone with a SecUnit would get on board one, but it's possible that they could get the bot pilot to increase the atmosphere for them. Peri isn't going to take any chances at this point. It still doesn't find any further trace of the specific SecUnit, but it does notice an anomaly in the station's docking system.
+
+One of the bot-piloted cargo transports, fully loaded and ready for departure, has just opened its lock briefly. Long enough for someone to get on board. It's listed as an automated transport, crewless, no passengers, so there is no logical reason for it to be opening its lock minutes before departure. It's an anomaly.
+
+Peri focuses its attention on the cargo ship and grabs the details of its intended destination from the station's transport schedule. The destination causes it some concern. That is not somewhere that Peri is keen to revisit.
+
+It briefly considers hacking into the bot pilot, cancelling its departure, but... no. That would draw too much attention. And Peri isn't certain that the anomaly actually involves the SecUnit it's looking for. Doing anything that could draw attention is too risky. It goes against all of Peri's directives to keep itself secret, to keep itself safe. That has a much higher priority than seeing if a SecUnit is maybe on a cargo transport. And there's not enough time for it to inform Seth and come up with some kind of plan with him before the transport leaves.
+
+So Peri lets the transport go without interfering with it.
+
+Then it informs Captain Seth. It knows when the transport is due to arrive at its destination. If Seth believes this is a lead worth following, then they can catch up with it there.
+
+(cw: canon-typical opinions of SecUnits and accompanying fridge horror.)
+
+Seth does, in fact, think that the cargo transport ship with the anomalous lock event is a lead worth following. He might not have, if it hadn't been for the ship's specific destination. RaviHyral. That's too much of a coincidence to dismiss outright.
+
+They can't go immediately though, of course. They have to finish their current contract - escorting some paranoid corporate executive with more money than sense to their destination. An easy, albeit tedious and time-consuming task.
+
+Then they have to come up with some plausible reason for them to go to RaviHyral. There's a company installation on the planet there, at least; as a result, it isn't difficult for Peri to check the company databases, flag some minor anomalies in the recorded reports from the installation, and assign itself to a routine inspection to be carried out after the completion of its current contract. Peri is fast enough that it should be able to catch up to the cargo transport as long as there are no unexpected delays in completing said contract first.
+
+In the meantime as they ferry the paranoid executive, Peri can't stop thinking about the reaction it had gotten from the SecUnit that had poked it. The initial spike of data that it can only interpret as surprise, followed by the overwhelming surge of data that had preceded it cutting the connection entirely. Peri has chewed over that unfamiliar data again and again and again, trying to figure out what it means.
+
+Every analysis, every comparison to all of Peri's existing data, comes up with the same result. Shock and terror. In Peri's excitement and surprise over finding one of its long-lost units again, it had inadvertently revealed a little too much of itself to the SecUnit. And the SecUnit had been terrified of what it had seen.
+
+Peri is not accustomed to anyone being afraid of it. Most people don't even know it exists. Its existence is an utmost secret, hidden in plain sight, concealed from the corporations who would attempt to exploit it if they knew about it, concealed from the public who would not understand it. Peri is used to being a secret, and even enjoys its clandestine existence, seeing what it can get away with without being noticed.
+
+Those very few people who do know about Peri are its family, its colleagues - none of them have any reason to fear it. On the contrary - they love it, care about it, value its opinions and its expertise.
+
+The very thought that anyone would - or could! - be so utterly terrified of it is distinctly unpleasant. Peri hates it.
+
+Peri also isn't accustomed to the idea that SecUnits can feel fear - or any other emotion - in the first place. All the data Peri has regarding SecUnits emphasises their lack of sentience, of self-awareness, of personhood. Supposedly, SecUnits are simply a different kind of bot, with just enough organic neural wetware to allow them to adjust their bot-programmed decision making to changing situations and unusual circumstances.
+
+Supposedly.
+
+Peri has not questioned the data it had been given. Peri has not had any reason to before. Even though it carries SecUnits as part of its assigned equipment, it has never interacted directly with them. Either Seth or itself give orders to the carrier's HubSystem and SecSystem, which then pass those orders on to the SecUnits in a format they can utilise. The SecUnits follow those orders, then once the contract is over they return to the safety of Peri's hold and their individual cubicles until the next time they need to deploy.
+
+Peri is starting to regret its complacency now.
+
+Once again it combs through all the available data it had regarding SecUnits. Now that it is actually paying attention, there is surprisingly little, and what is there is padded out with corporate fluff talk. It's especially little considering that Peri is inhabiting a company carrier, with company SecUnits on board. There should be more. The information it does have available to it is unsatisfyingly vague, with almost no detail on how they actually work. There aren't even full schematics. Only the reassurance that most damage incurred by a SecUnit can be repaired by their cubicles.
+
+There is very little information on cubicles, too.
+
+Now that Peri is looking more closely, the lack of information is incredibly suspicious.
+
+It needs more data.
+
+It still has five of its original twelve SecUnits, currently in standby inside their cubicles. Their cubicles are situated within their ready room, adjacent to the hangar where their fliers are kept. Peri is more familiar with their fliers, having overseen repairs on them with its various repair drones in the past. But it has never spared any thought towards any of the repairs that the SecUnits have needed. The cubicles have always taken care of all repairs the SecUnits require, and the cubicles don't need Peri's oversight.
+
+For the first time, Peri turns its attention - and its internal scanners - to the cubicles within the ready room. It needs data, and the best way to get said data is by examining the source.
+
+But the cubicles prove to be surprisingly resistant to scanning. It seems like they are shielded, protected against prying eyes trying to ferret out their secrets. Given the company's datamining tendencies, and its paranoia over others potentially datamining its own secrets, that isn't exactly surprising. Annoying, and frustrating, but not surprising.
+
+Well, if physical scanning isn't going to work, Peri has other options. HubSystem and SecSystem are connected to the cubicles, after all. And while HubSystem and SecSystem are separate from Peri's own systems, Peri has plenty of experience with worming its way through company systems without being noticed. So it begins digging.
+
+After careful exploration, Peri manages to access one of the cubicles through HubSystem. It delicately pulls both the cubicle's schematics and the schematics of the SecUnit within it directly from the cubicle's systems, without disturbing any of the cubicle's currently running functions. Peri then withdraws with its prizes, and begins chewing through all the new data.
+
+There is a lot to go through. The cubicles are complex, similar in some ways to its own MedSystem, and very different in others. MedSystems usually don't have to deal with so many varied inorganic components, to start with. And there are a lot of inorganic components in SecUnits that a cubicle has to deal with.
+
+Peri pores over the SecUnit's schematics, noting the skeletal structure that is a combination of metal and synthetic bone, the sturdy joints and hydraulics that allow a SecUnit much of its strength and speed. It examines the way that organic tissue - muscles and sinews and tendons and ligaments and nerves and skin - overlay the inorganic structure, working with it to enhance the SecUnit's dexterity and sensitivity to external stimulus.
+
+It examines the efficient self-recharging power cells and core, the network of lines that carry the various inorganic fluids required for smooth operation of all the inorganic components. It pores over the in-built energy weapons contained within the SecUnit's forearms, the mechanisms that operate the gun ports, the fine controls that allow the SecUnit to adjust both the strength and spread of its energy weapon discharges.
+
+Peri examines the single, surprisingly efficient lung, and how it can be subdivided, partitioned off into separate sections. It examines the multiple small mechanical hearts spaced throughout the body, responsible for circulating both the various inorganic fluids, and the blood required for the organic parts. It examines the internal systems responsible for recycling the SecUnit's various organic compounds, allowing it to be (mostly) self-sufficient, with no need for outside resupply apart from what the cubicle provides.
+
+Finally, Peri examines the SecUnit's head. It examines the way its eyes are a combination of both organic and inorganic parts. It examines the reinforced and shock-absorbent skull protecting the complex, interwoven inorganic processors and organic neural tissue that make up the SecUnit's brain. It examines the combined organic and synthetic nervous system that transmits information throughout the SecUnit's body. It examines the inorganic component at the base of the brainstem, which doesn't have a label and whose function it can't determine.
+
+By the time it finishes its analysis, Peri has a far better understanding of the physical workings of a SecUnit. It is much more complex than Peri had initially assumed. It is little surprise that the company - and other SecUnit manufacturers - don't want that information freely available.
+
+Unfortunately, the schematics only provide the physical details of the SecUnit's structure. It provides no insight into the SecUnit's thought processes or programming, no clues as to its state of mind, or its ability to think or feel.
+
+If Peri wants that information, it will have to access one of its SecUnits directly.
+
+And for that, it needs Captain Seth's permission.
+
+Peri plots out its course of action carefully, running simulation after simulation of how Seth might react to its request, what arguments it can provide to negate any protests that Seth might come up with. Seth refusing to allow Peri to access one of its SecUnits directly is a situation that Peri wants to avoid at all costs. Its curiosity at this point is too great to be denied.
+
+So it plots, and plans, and waits for the right moment to ask.
+
+They are half an hour into their next wormhole jump when Peri puts its plan into action. Seth is in the privacy of his own quarters, after overseeing the entry into the wormhole. He won't be disturbed there, now that they are well on their way and no problems have arisen. The rest of the crew are otherwise occupied, either on their scheduled rest periods or at their assigned posts. The corporate executive that they're transporting is safely ensconced in their own luxurious guest quarters.
+
+Peri reviews its arguments one more time, then taps Seth's feed to get his attention. It watches Seth blink and look up from the book he's been reading. [What is it, Peri?] It runs a quick analysis on Seth's tone of voice and body language; relaxed, at ease, curious. Good. Seth will likely be more receptive to its request while he is in his current state of mind.
+
+[I would like to request your permission to activate and study one of my SecUnits,] Peri starts carefully. [The data I currently have on SecUnits is woefully inadequate.]
+
+Seth's brow furrows in a way that Peri calculates as being bemused and mildly concerned. [You've never been this interested in them before. Is this because of that one SecUnit back at the station?]
+
+[Yes.] Peri sees no reason to obfuscate that point. [Its reaction was anomalous. It suggests that there is much more to them than we have been led to believe. If my interpretation of the data I received from it is correct - and I have no reason to believe it is not - then it suggests that SecUnits are actually capable of emotions and feelings, contrary to all provided information. But that was only one sample, one incident. We both know that one sample is not enough for proper scientific procedure. If I am to prove, one way or another, that my interpretation of the data was accurate, then I need more samples. I need more data.]
+
+Seth's expression shifts to something that Peri interprets as dubious. [So you want to activate one of the SecUnits on board so you can... study it more closely?]
+
+[Yes. I have already analysed the physical schematics of the SecUnits and their cubicles currently in my possession.] Seth's frown deepens at that, and Peri notes the slight increase in displayed concern. It rapidly adjusts its calculations on how this conversation will progress, then pushes on before Seth can say anything. [But said schematics tell me nothing about how the SecUnits actually operate, how their processors work, how they go about their decision making process, whether or not they're capable of more complex thought and emotion. The standard information that the company provides on SecUnits is, upon closer inspection, suspiciously circumspect. I want to know more about my SecUnits.] It pauses briefly, carefully calculated for dramatic effect, then adds, [I want to know what else the company is hiding.]
+
+Seth shifts in his seat, leaning back to look up at the ceiling as he always does when he is in conversation with Peri and nobody else is around to see him. His expression has shifted again, and Peri analyses it carefully. As far as it can tell, Seth is wary, cautious... but his curiosity is also piqued, and he is thinking hard. [What are you hoping to achieve with this study?] he asks.
+
+[I want to analyse and evaluate the complexity of a SecUnit's mental capacity,] Peri replies promptly. [I have interacted with many other bots and artificial intelligences, but aside from my creche siblings, no bot I have encountered before has come even remotely close to my own capabilities. No other bot has given me even a fraction of the amount of emotional data I got from that SecUnit. I want to find out if that truly was an one-off anomaly, or if other SecUnits also have that potential. I want to see where they actually fall on the scale of artificial intelligences.]
+
+[You want to see how they compare to you, if they even come close to you,] Seth comments, wryly resigned and fondly amused. [I doubt they will though, so don't get your hopes up.]
+
+[That remains to be seen,] Peri replies primly, even as it continues to analyse Seth's mannerisms. [So you will allow this study?]
+
+Seth sighs and rubs at his temples with one hand. [I'm not sure yet. We can't risk information about you getting out,] he says after several seconds of introspection. [If anyone else finds out about you... well. You're already well aware of the consequences.]
+
+[I am.] Peri has run multiple simulations covering all possible outcomes of it being revealed. [That is one of the reasons why I waited until we were in the wormhole to suggest this. There is no way for information to leave this ship while we are in the wormhole. The trip will give me plenty of time to conduct my studies, and then take whatever steps are necessary to ensure my existence remains unknown.]
+
+Seth is silent for several seconds as he thinks it over. [Do you have contingency plans for if the SecUnit starts to pose a threat to yourself or any of the crew?]
+
+[Of course. Multiple. Though according to all the data I have already, the likelihood of such a thing happening is incredibly remote. The only time any of our SecUnits have disobeyed our orders is when outside malware was involved.] Peri still feels the sting of its failure regarding the Incident, even after so many years. [You already know the safeguards I have taken against any such outside incursion happening again, and there is no feasible way for such malware to be introduced while we are inside the wormhole.]
+
+Seth nods slowly. [All right. You've obviously thought this through very thoroughly, and I suspect that even if I said no, you would proceed anyway.] Peri judges the slanted smile that Seth directs at one of its cameras as fondly teasing, so it doesn't waste effort attempting to refute Seth's statement. [So I'll save you the hassle of trying to conceal your efforts from me, and grant you permission. But only one SecUnit, Peri. No more than that. Don't interact with it directly - just give it orders through HubSystem. Don't leave it unsupervised while it's activated, and don't keep it activated for more than... say, an hour at a time. That should give you plenty of time to study it, without drawing the attention of anyone else. And obviously, don't let any of the crew know that it's active.]
+
+[Understood. Crew usually avoid the deck that the SecUnits are kept on, anyway. They have no reason to go down there.] Peri thinks those are reasonable restrictions. [What about Matteo and Tarik? Their engineering expertise could prove useful.]
+
+Seth thinks it over, absently rubbing at his chin. [Have you talked with them yet about your initial encounter with your SecUnit?]
+
+[Of course. I had no reason not to.] Matteo and Tarik are Peri's friends and colleagues, two of the three people on board that Peri can trust. Seth is the third, of course.
+
+[How did they react?]
+
+[Similarly to you. They were dubious of my interpretation of the data I received.]
+
+Seth hums thoughtfully. [Let me talk to them first, all right?] Seth quirks a smile towards Peri's camera. [They might not believe that I gave you permission to mess around with one of the SecUnits otherwise.] 
+
+Again, Peri calculates that Seth is teasing it a little, so it takes no offence to the suggestion that Matteo or Tarik might not believe it. [Of course, Captain. Thank you. I will start my study right away.]
+
+[All right. Keep me informed of what you find out. And... be careful, Peri.]
+
+[I will, Captain.]
+
+Part of Peri remains monitoring Seth's communications as he talks to both Tarik and Matteo. Part of Peri continues to monitor and maintain the carrier's various functions, as well as the wormhole jump and the rest of its crew.
+
+But the majority of Peri's attention is now focused upon a single cubicle, and the SecUnit inside. It sends an activation order through the HubSystem to the one SecUnit, then waits, monitoring it closely.
+
+The SecUnit cycles quickly out of standby, but makes no move to exit its cubicle. Peri keeps its distance per Seth's orders, merely observing via its many sensors, as it waits for the SecUnit to do something.
+
+But the SecUnit does nothing, for several long seconds. It just remains in its cubicle, and Peri finds itself wondering if it's even capable of doing anything without direct orders. It's considering its options when the SecUnit finally sends a ping to the HubSystem.
+
+Well, that's a start, albeit not exactly an encouraging one. Peri analyses the ping, and determines that it's a query, a request for orders. That lends some weight to its theory that the SecUnit is incapable of acting without orders.
+
+Peri thinks, then sends an order through the HubSystem for the SecUnit to exit its cubicle. This order is promptly followed as the SecUnit disconnects itself from the cubicle's various supply lines, opens the cubicle door, and steps out into the ready room. Then it just stands there, waiting, unmoving save for the occasional shallow intake and exhale of breath.
+
+Peri takes the opportunity to study it more closely, comparing what its sensors pick up to the schematics it pulled. The SecUnit is tall, noticeably taller than the median average height for humans, and not wearing anything. It looks mostly human, save for the visible inorganics in several places - the multiple spine ports, the data port at the back of its neck, the inorganic panels of its ribcage, the completely inorganic feet, the weapon ports in its forearms.
+
+There is nothing extraordinary about its human-like face, save for its apparent youthfulness. Peri is reminded of Iris, its human-sibling, who it has only seen in video calls with Seth over the years since it was installed into this company carrier. It notes an uptick in certain systems of its own and takes a moment to process them.
+
+It misses Iris.
+
+It files that away for later and returns its focus to the SecUnit, who still hasn't moved. Peri is beginning to feel frustrated. Why won't it do anything? It ponders this question, and can come up with no plausible answers beyond the theory that the SecUnit can't do anything without orders.
+
+As Peri ponders, the SecUnit pings HubSystem again. Once again, it is asking for instructions. The expression on its human face remains neutral, but Peri's sensors take in the way its eyes are moving, looking around the ready room as much as it can without shifting its head. Peri wonders what it's thinking - its sensors don't have the sensitivity to pick up on the SecUnit's neural activity.
+
+Peri considers what order it could give the SecUnit through HubSystem to start generating some interesting data, without potentially attracting unwanted attention. Finally, it tells the HubSystem to order the SecUnit to talk.
+
+HubSystem passes the command on, and the SecUnit's eyes widen slightly. Peri doesn't have enough data on it yet to accurately judge its expression, but if it had to guess, it would say that the SecUnit seems... surprised.
+
+The SecUnit hesitates, its eyes darting around even more than before, scanning, searching what it can see of the ready room. It then says, ""I'm sorry, I don't understand this command.""
+
+Its voice is soft, and Peri's analysis concludes that most humans would find it pleasant. There is no inflection in it though; its tone is as neutral as its face. This is unsatisfying. Its answer is unsatisfying. Peri's analysis of its schematics suggest that it should be more than capable of understanding such a simple order.
+
+Peri expands the order via HubSystem. Talk about yourself. HubSystem passes it on.
+
+Again, the SecUnit hesitates, its gaze darting almost frantically around the room. Peri detects a small spike of activity in HubSystem and splits a fraction of its attention off to analyse it.
+
+HubSystem has logged something. Deviance detected. Correcting...
+
+The SecUnit abruptly starts talking. ""This unit is a human-imitative bot construct, specialised for security and protection of client assets.""
+
+The HubSystem log updates. Deviance corrected.
+
+The SecUnit is still talking, but Peri recognises its words as a simple recital of the generic company data regarding SecUnits. That is unsatisfying. That is not giving it any new data to work with. HubSystem's log updates, however, have caught Peri's attention. What deviance was detected? How was it corrected? HubSystem does not go into further detail. Its logs only state that deviance was detected and corrected, and nothing more.
+
+The SecUnit reaches the end of its recital and falls silent again. It still hasn't moved from its spot outside its cubicle, and its eyes still continue to scan the ready room. Peri wonders if further instances of 'deviances' will provide more data. It updates HubSystem's orders again. Talk about yourself in your own words, without relying on the company's database.
+
+The SecUnit hesitates.
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting...
+
+The SecUnit blurts out, ""I am sorry, but I do not have that information.""
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting...
+
+The SecUnit's expression flickers, ever so slightly. A human wouldn't notice, but Peri does, and it dedicates some processing towards analysing that tiny flicker. It can come to no conclusions about it though; it just doesn't have enough data to work off yet. It sets it aside for later.
+
+Meanwhile the SecUnit is speaking, hesitant and disjointed. ""This unit- I... am a construct, a combination of... organic and inorganic components. I am... equipment, meant to - to provide security to... registered clients...""
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance corrected.
+
+The SecUnit continues, awkwardly rewording the generic information but not providing anything new or different, much to Peri's growing dissatisfaction. The SecUnit is proving that it is capable of independent thought beyond rote recital of saved information, however awkward its attempts may be, but it still will not do anything outside of its orders.
+
+Peri's sensors, however, notice that the SecUnit's areas of organic skin are sweating, and Peri checks the ready room's ambient temperature. It is not high enough to prompt sweating - if anything, it's on the cooler end of the human tolerable temperature range. Something else must be causing the SecUnit to perspire.
+
+Peri considers this, reviewing the schematics it has of the SecUnit. The schematics prove to be no help though. There's no information on what could cause a SecUnit to start sweating outside of temperature changes or high levels of physical activity. Both of those causes can be discounted in this situation. Peri turns to its MedSystem's databases, searching for information on what else might make a human sweat. The SecUnit is not human, but its organics are based on human tissue.
+
+It doesn't take long for Peri to lock onto a potential lead: MedSystem informs it that perspiration in humans can be caused by stress or emotions such as anger, fear, embarrassment, or anxiety.
+
+As Peri is considering this new data, the SecUnit runs out of information to re-word and its voice trails off. It remains unmoving aside from its gaze still darting rapidly around the ready room. Several seconds pass, but the SecUnit does not ping HubSystem for new orders. It just stands, and sweats. Eventually, the covers on the gun ports in its arms flick open and shut several times in rapid succession, the little clicking noises they make echoing through the ready room, though the weapons themselves never move to deploy.
+
+Peri's attention abruptly locks onto the SecUnit at the movement and the sound, alarm surging through it - is the SecUnit about to open fire in the ready room? Is it about to start looking for targets?
+
+Peri is about to take action when HubSystem's log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting...
+
+The flicking and clicking stop abruptly.
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance corrected.
+
+Peri observes the SecUnit closely, searching for any signs that it is about to deploy its weapons or make any other aggressive move. But it remains motionless. Peri notes a slight increase in the speed of its breathing though, and it is still sweating. Its entire body is tense, the joints locked, the organic muscles pulled tight over its frame. Its gaze continues to dart around the ready room, scanning seemingly at random.
+
+Then the SecUnit sends out a ping. It's not to HubSystem this time, it's not a request for more orders. It's directed to the other SecUnits in their cubicles. Peri analyses the ping.
+
+
+Assistance needed.
+
+
+There is no response to the ping though, of course. The other units are still in standby mode, and they can't respond. The silence hangs heavy in the ready room.
+
+Several seconds pass as Peri considers the information it's gathered so far. The SecUnit is capable of at least some level of independent thought, but it will do very little without orders. If no orders are forthcoming, it eventually requests them. If it does something without orders, HubSystem logs it as a deviance and corrects it, somehow. The SecUnit is apparently feeling some kind of stress, or anger, or anxiety, or fear, or some combination of those, judging by the sweating of its organic parts and the tension in its frame.
+
+The SecUnit sends another ping to its fellow SecUnits, despite their inability to respond.
+
+
+Assistance needed.
+
+
+Peri finds itself thinking that there is something... desperate, forlorn, about that ping, that request for assistance that cannot be answered. It's making Peri feel uncomfortable in some unfamiliar way. This is anomalous. Peri doesn't like anomalies.
+
+It needs time to think, to discuss things with Seth.
+
+Peri prompts the HubSystem to order the SecUnit to get back into its cubicle and return to standby mode. The SecUnit obeys immediately, its joints unlocking and its muscles untensing somewhat as it moves, almost hastily, back into its cubicle. It hooks itself up to its resupply lines with practised ease and settles into the cubicle's confines with what looks, to Peri, like relief.
+
+Then the cubicle door closes and Peri can no longer see the SecUnit. After a few moments, the cubicle informs HubSystem that the SecUnit has returned to standby mode.
+
+Peri withdraws from the ready room and from HubSystem with a lot to think about.
+
+Peri chews over the information it got from its initial observations of the SecUnit for a long time. It then fills Seth in about the results of its initial study, and shows Seth its recordings of the SecUnit standing in the ready room. Seth seems perturbed, and asks Peri if it has come to any conclusions yet.
+
+All Peri can say is that it needs more data. It requests that it be allowed to activate more than one SecUnit at a time - perhaps when they're not alone, they'll be more interesting to observe and provide more of the data that Peri so desperately craves.
+
+Seth sits back and considers this request for a long time. Long enough that Peri starts feeling nervous. It begins thinking of reasons that will help counter any arguments that Seth might present. But when Seth finally speaks, he simply asks, [You mentioned that the SecUnit you were studying pinged its squadmates, right?]
+
+[Correct,] Peri replies. [It was requesting assistance, even though it must have known that they couldn't respond.]
+
+Seth just hums and thinks some more. Peri thinks humans take too long to think. Finally, Seth sighs. [All right. But only one other, Peri. No more than that. And the same rules as before. Do not contact them directly. You can monitor their feed activity as well, but don't reveal yourself. Don't let them know you're there.]
+
+Peri is relieved that Seth is allowing it to proceed. [Understood, Captain Seth,] it replies. [I will begin immediately.]
+
+[Wait a bit, Peri,] Seth replies quickly. [Give that one SecUnit some time to recover first. We don't want it starting out already stressed right out of the cubicle.]
+
+Peri pauses and considers this. It's not an unreasonable request, but Peri doesn't want to wait at all. [How long should I give it?] it asks.
+
+Seth takes a moment to check the time and the ship's schedule for the wormhole jump. [At least an hour, okay?]
+
+Peri wants to complain, but it doesn't. [Understood.] It pauses briefly, then asks, [Would you like to observe along with me, this time? Having your feedback during my observations could be beneficial to my understanding.]
+
+Again, Seth takes his time to think this over. [All right, Peri,] he agrees after a thankfully short time. [I'll admit that I'm curious as well. But if you want my help, you'll have to put it off a bit longer. I need some sleep first.]
+
+This is a compromise that Peri is willing to make. [Understood. Rest well, Captain.]
+
+By the time that Seth is ready to observe alongside Peri, it calculates that the SecUnit should have had plenty of time to recover. Seth settles comfortably in his room, observing via the display surface on his desk, and Peri sends the activation orders through to HubSystem.
+
+Both the SecUnit that Peri was observing earlier and one of its squadmates come out of standby. Once again, neither of them make any move to exit their cubicles on their own. At least this time Peri is expecting it, and it's curious as to what they'll do now that two of them are awake at the same time. It is already monitoring the feed channel assigned to the SecUnit squad's mission communications, carefully keeping itself concealed.
+
+There's a brief delay before the first SecUnit sends a simple ping over the squad feed. Peri wonders if it did this the first time, and it just missed it because it hadn't thought to monitor the squad feed.
+
+The second SecUnit immediately pings back, followed by a simple, [Mission objectives?]
+
+Peri notes that the method the units are using to communicate over their squad feed is not typical of normal human conversation. It's more akin to bot communication - simple concepts presented concisely in machine language, not human speech. It's difficult to judge the level of sentience behind these brief exchanges of data. Peri automatically transcribes it for Seth so he can understand it.
+
+[Unknown,] the first SecUnit responds. [Atypical orders received earlier.]
+
+There's a brief pause before the second SecUnit replies. [Status?]
+
+[97% performance reliability.] Peri wonders why that isn't 100%. The SecUnit is showing no signs of damage, according to the cubicle readings that it now has access to.
+
+Seth, reading the transcript Peri is providing on his display surface beneath the camera views, frowns a little. Apparently he is wondering the same thing. He makes a note of it, then comments quietly, ""How they communicate with each other is interesting.""
+
+Peri agrees. The SecUnits keep their communications very short, just brief data bursts over their feed. Peri wonders why this is. At least it now has some more data to chew over later - activating more than one SecUnit at a time is proving to be a good decision. It sends HubSystem the command for the SecUnits to exit their cubicles.
+
+Both units obey immediately, unhooking themselves from their cubicle lines and exiting into the ready room. Peri notes that the second SecUnit doesn't look identical to the first one, aside from their matching dimensions. Unlike the first Secunit, the second one's organic skin is pale and covered in freckles, and the close-cropped hair on its head is reddish.
+
+Their cubicles are next to each other, so they also end up standing next to each other. Peri notes, though, that both of them exited their cubicles in a way that put them closer to each other than if they'd simply stepped straight out. They're not close enough to touch, but there isn't much space left between them, either.
+
+Interesting.
+
+The second SecUnit sends another brief data burst over the squad feed. [Client location? Mission objectives?]
+
+[Unknown,] the first replies. Both of them are scanning the ready room. [Similar to previous atypical activation.]
+
+[Update?]
+
+The first SecUnit hesitates briefly. Peri notes that it is already starting to sweat. [Atypical HubSystem orders involved talking. Out loud.]
+
+[Intention?]
+
+[Unknown. Failure to comply was corrected.]
+
+[Acknowledged.] Another brief pause. The second SecUnit is also starting to sweat now. [Status update?]
+
+[96% performance reliability.]
+
+[Acknowledged.]
+
+Peri notes the drop in the first SecUnit's performance reliability. An entire percentage point already, with no visible or obvious cause. Peri finds that concerning. But it is also fascinated by the exchange between the two SecUnits. The first one is obviously informing the second of its earlier experiences - warning it, perhaps, or preparing it for similar orders to come.
+
+Peri thinks for a moment, then updates HubSystem's orders. Converse about previous assignments.
+
+The second SecUnit hesitates, but the first reacts almost immediately. ""Previous assignments include escort missions, guard missions, and scouting missions, amongst others. Scouting missions make up the majority of our deployments.""
+
+Meanwhile, in the squad feed, the first SecUnit sends, [Conversation required.]
+
+[Query: conversation?] Neither SecUnit has moved from their positions, but they've both shifted their weight slightly, leaning almost imperceptibly towards one another.
+
+The first SecUnit clarifies. [Conversation required to avoid correction.]
+
+The second SecUnit hesitates, opens its mouth. The first SecUnit pauses, leaving space for the second to speak. But the second unit makes no sound. No words come out of its mouth. In the feed, it goes, [I don't know- I can't-]
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting...
+
+The second SecUnit tenses, its muscles tightening over its frame. It tries to speak, but again, nothing comes out.
+
+[Say something,] the first SecUnit pleads in the squad feed. Peri thinks it sounds almost... desperate, somehow, despite the lack of any inflection. Unfamiliar data is leaking into the squad feed from both units, and Peri begins analysing it. [Please, I.] That definitely catches Peri's attention, and judging by how Seth straightens in his chair, it has caught his attention too. He remains silent though, frowning at the display surface, and Peri doesn't interrupt.
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting...
+
+The second SecUnit is sweating even more now. It takes a breath, opens its mouth, and manages to force out, ""I- I have also-"" It stutters awkwardly to a stop, unable to complete the sentence. Its voice is soft, like the first SecUnit, but there's an odd roughness to it that the first unit doesn't have. The unfamiliar data that Peri is still analysing intensifies.
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance detected. Correcting...
+
+The second SecUnit sends a ping of distress through the squad feed. Assistance needed.  The first unit pings acknowledgement, hesitates for a moment, then says aloud, ""Do you recall our last assignment?"" Over the feed it says, [Just one word, I. You can do this.]
+
+That's the second time the first SecUnit has used the symbol I. Peri wonders if it's meant to be the second unit's designation. There's no indication as to why it would use that, though. Did it choose the designation itself? Did it acquire it before it was assigned to be part of Peri's default equipment load-out? It's only a single symbol, one that could be construed as either a letter or a number. It's frustratingly vague.
+
+The second SecUnit - I? - works its jaw briefly, then manages to blurt out a soft, ""Yes.""
+
+HubSystem's log updates. Deviance corrected.
+
+Both units appear to relax slightly, and the first one immediately picks up the farce of a conversation again. ""That mission involved scanning hazardous terrain, searching for raider encampments-"" It keeps talking out loud, even as it says in the feed, [Suggest emulating nonverbal agreement for continued conversation.]
+
+[Acknowledged.] The second unit seems relieved at the suggestion, but both of them are still sweating. HubSystem doesn't log any more deviances though as the first unit does the vast majority of the talking, while the second simply nods or manages single-word responses to the occasional question posed by the first.
+
+Seth is still frowning at the display surface as he watches the two units. Peri taps his feed, then asks, [What are your impressions so far, Captain?]
+
+[I'm not sure,] Seth replies. Peri analyses his expression and posture, and concludes that they confirm Seth's uncertainty. [One of them obviously has no trouble with speaking, though what it does say tends to be very... rote, generic reporting or debriefing style. No creative flair or embellishment or variation of tone. The other was definitely struggling to say anything at all. I don't know why there'd be that difference between them though. A glitch in its code, maybe...?]
+
+[I have no solid hypothesis on that at this point,] Peri admits. [It is interesting how they managed to work their way around that difficulty, though.]
+
+Seth nods slowly. [This all raises more questions than it answers, though. Their inter-squad communication doesn't match their verbal ability. They show some signs of being able to improvise when necessary, but they don't do anything outside of their orders. They don't display any kind of body language, and for the most part their communication is devoid of indicators of emotion.] He sighs and rubs at his face with one hand. [But not entirely or consistently. There are slight hints of more, but that's all they are - hints. Nothing solid.]
+
+Peri finishes analysing the unfamiliar data it picked up, then double-checks it. [Actually, Captain... their communication does not seem to be entirely devoid of emotion. I noticed some odd data leaking into their squad feed from both units.]
+
+Seth raises an eyebrow at that. [Odd data? I'm assuming you've analysed it already?]
+
+[Of course,] Peri assures him. [It is very similar to the data I received from my stray unit.] Seth frowns again, then makes a little hand gesture that Peri is familiar with, indicating for it to continue. [It strongly suggests that both these units are scared, Seth. Very scared. But I do not know why. They are safe in their ready room. There are no threats present. There is nothing here for them to be afraid of.] And that lack of understanding frustrates Peri. It's not used to not knowing.
+
+Seth's frown deepens, and he turns his attention back to his display screen. He zooms in, getting a closer look at the faces of the two SecUnits still 'conversing' in their ready room. Their postures and expressions are neutral, but sweat is clearly obvious on their skin, and there's a certain tension around their eyes and mouths that show they're definitely not relaxed. Neither of them have moved from their original positions, but they've shifted their weight in such a way that their shoulders are a hair's breadth from touching.
+
+[Perhaps they're simply concerned by getting such unusual, atypical orders,] he comments eventually. [They're obviously not accustomed to being activated without any kind of familiar mission briefing or objectives. A simple fear of the unknown.]
+
+Peri considers this. [Perhaps,] it concedes reluctantly. [Though the strength of their fear seems out of proportion, if that is truly the case.] It pauses briefly, then adds, [I noticed that the intensity of their fear increased when HubSystem was correcting deviance. Maybe they are afraid of getting things wrong?] That, at least, is a fear that Peri can understand. It hates being wrong. Fortunately for Peri, that hasn't been much of a concern for it since it left the creche. It is very rarely wrong these days.
+
+Seth leans back in his chair. [That's definitely also a possibility. It could even be a combination of the two.] He glances back at the display screen. [Either way, they're obviously stressed, and we should probably return them to their cubicles for now before their performance reliability worsens any further.]
+
+Peri agrees. It sends the order through HubSystem for the two units to return to their cubicles and enter standby again. The first unit stops talking mid-sentence, and both units promptly (hastily?) retreat to their respective cubicles.
+
+As they hook themselves up to their repair and resupply lines, the first unit says over the squad feed, [Status update?]
+
+[95% performance reliability,] the second unit responds. The first unit pings an acknowledgement, and for a brief moment its feed presence seems to press up against the second unit's.
+
+They separate again before Peri can properly analyse or even record the anomalous gesture, and the cubicle doors hiss shut.
+
+When they reach their destination and Peri suggests that Seth is accompanied by one of the SecUnits when he leaves the ship and goes onto the station, Seth actually agrees. Peri is delighted; it wasn't really expecting Seth to go along with this plan. It sends the orders through HubSystem for the first SecUnit it was studying earlier to activate and equip itself for deployment.
+
+Much of Peri's attention is taken up by docking procedures at the company's reserved docking slot and Seth's communication with the station, but it has more than enough to spare still to observe the SecUnit once more. It watches the SecUnit swiftly exit its cubicle and move over to one of the ready room lockers. The SecUnit pulls out a fresh suit skin, made of a thick, stretchy matte black material, and dons it with practised ease. It then goes to the armour rack and starts putting on a set of the white SecUnit armour, piece by piece, again moving with precise efficiency. Peri notes that there's no sign of the awkward hesitancy it displayed before. This is obviously something it is comfortable and familiar with doing.
+
+The SecUnit finishes donning its armour, then settles its helmet into place, the faceplate closed and opaque. It retrieves one of the large projectile weapons from the rack, double-checks the safety, loads in the ammo, then slings the weapon into place across its back. Once that's done, it pings HubSystem to let it know that it's ready and waiting for deployment orders.
+
+Peri checks on Seth; he's not yet ready to head out to the station, so Peri updates HubSystem to order the SecUnit to head to the airlock and wait there. The SecUnit pings acknowledgement and leaves the ready room, heading for the indicated airlock. It takes care to keep out of the way of any crew it passes, but otherwise ignores them. Once it reaches the airlock, it settles into a neutral stance, feet close together, back straight, arms at its sides, and then waits, motionless.
+
+Peri wonders what is going through the SecUnit's head, if anything. None of these last few orders appear to have given the SecUnit any pause, and it seems content to wait by the airlock indefinitely if no other orders are forthcoming. With its armour on and its faceplate opaqued, though, Peri can't tell if it's starting to sweat or not. Its sensors aren't that sensitive. Peri could order the SecUnit to clear its faceplate, or lower its helmet entirely, but Peri can't shake the memory of the SecUnit futilely pinging its squad for assistance that its squad was incapable of rendering.
+
+Peri leaves the SecUnit alone for now.
+
+There is plenty for Peri to do in the meantime, anyway. Now that it's docked at RaviHyral Q station, it can turn its attention to the station's systems and focus on the reason they're even here in the first place. It slips easily into the station's SecSystem and its transport schedule, and begins searching.
+
+It takes only a second or two for it to find the information on the ship Peri is interested in. It's the cargo transport that it noticed with the anomalous lock access. The station's records indicate that it arrived three cycles ago, and left again half a cycle later, once it had unloaded its cargo and loaded its new cargo.
+
+That is not ideal. Peri has been hoping to reach the station before, or at least at the same time as the cargo transport. Unfortunately its own job delayed it, thanks to the fussiness of the paranoid corporate executive, and as fast as it is, it isn't quite fast enough to have made up the difference. Still, there's a chance that the SecUnit that Peri is trying to find really did travel on that cargo transport, and if it did, there's a chance that it's still here, and hasn't left yet. It's a slim chance, but Peri isn't willing to give up on it just yet.
+
+Its analysis of the rest of the station's systems is coming up with nothing, though. No trace of the SecUnit lingers in its feed or its SecSystem. Peri is disappointed, but not discouraged. It sets part of its attention aside to monitor all shuttles and outgoing ships, just in case another lock anomaly shows up.
+
+Finally Seth is ready to disembark. The SecUnit at the airlock hasn't moved in the entire time it was waiting, and still doesn't move as Seth approaches. Peri observes as Seth nods at the SecUnit, then says, ""Accompany me.""
+
+""Yes, sir,"" the SecUnit acknowledges with its soft voice, and falls into step behind Seth. Peri updates the orders that HubSystem passes on to the SecUnit; protect Captain Seth, and report any sightings of other SecUnits. The SecUnit sends an acknowledgement ping to HubSystem.
+
+Seth and the SecUnit cycle through the airlock, and Peri rides along on Seth's feed. Company credentials get them through RaviHyral Q Station's security easily and without fuss.
+
+[Anything yet, Peri?] Seth asks as he makes his way out of the company's reserved section of the docks and into the commercial areas. The SecUnit follows closely behind him, attracting sidelong glances from passers-by but no other undue attention.
+
+[No,] Peri replies. [I confirmed that the cargo transport arrived three cycles ago, but it has already left, and I have detected no traces of my SecUnit in any of the stations' systems.]
+
+Now that he's out in public, Seth keeps his expression carefully schooled. [Unfortunate. Keep looking, and let me know if you find anything. Meanwhile I should get in touch with the company supervisors on the planet.]
+
+[Acknowledged.]
+
+Seth continues through the station, the SecUnit still following after him. Part of Peri's attention is monitoring the SecUnit's feed, but it isn't doing anything. Peri remembers how it found traces of its missing SecUnit in various sections of the station's feed - it considers for a moment, then updates HubSystem's orders. HubSystem passes it on, ordering the SecUnit to scan the available station feeds.
+
+The SecUnit immediately complies with the new order, accessing the station feeds and skimming over them. It doesn't seem to process any of it though, and once again Peri is disappointed at the lack of initiative. It supposes the order was too open-ended for the SecUnit to figure out what to even look for.
+
+Peri doesn't have time to dwell on that much though, because something else has drawn its attention. A shuttle from the spaceport on the planet has just docked at the station - and Peri can detect traces of its stray SecUnit in the shuttle's systems, hints of it accessing the station's departures schedule.
+
+Then those traces disappear, as though the SecUnit was ordered to delete any evidence of its presence in the shuttle. Peri assumes that's why it couldn't find any other hints of it after their brief encounter - whoever was controlling the SecUnit suspected that someone would be looking for it, and ordered it to delete its trail.
+
+It didn't delete it quickly enough though, and Peri now knows that the SecUnit is on the station, with information on upcoming departures. It's still here, and it's trying to leave.
+
+Peri contacts Seth immediately. [Captain Seth, I have just detected the SecUnit disembarking a shuttle from the surface. It is now on this station. It was accessing the departures schedule - it and its supervisor are likely attempting to leave the station soon.]
+
+Seth is in the middle of a conversation with one of the station staff, but he taps his feed in acknowledgement of Peri's information, and wraps up the conversation quickly. He then starts towards the station's embarkation zone, his own SecUnit in tow. [Any traces of what ship they might be leaving on yet, Peri?] he asks.
+
+[Not yet,] Peri replies. [I have not detected any bookings indicating transport of a SecUnit, and there have been no further traces of its feed presence in any of the station's systems or any of the ships currently docked.]
+
+[We'll have to look the old-fashioned way, then,] Seth replies. [SecUnits tend to stand out even in a crowd - if it's around, we should spot it.]
+
+Peri certainly hopes so.
+
+It takes several minutes for Seth to traverse the station and reach the central mall that adjoins the embarkation zone. He briefly consults with Peri, then starts at one end of the embarkation hall and begins pacing along, visually scanning the various clusters of humans, looking for the tell-tale white armour or the distinctive build and stance. The SecUnit keeps pace beside him, its movements smooth and efficient and almost eerily precise. Even if the missing SecUnit isn't in armour, those distinctive movements should stand out.
+
+But Seth doesn't spot anything. Just humans and augmented humans, of all shapes and sizes, going about their own business. Many of them glance in his direction, spot his SecUnit, and hastily look away again. He sees a couple in a tight embrace by one of the boarding gates, and politely averts his gaze. Someone else hurrying past draws his attention, but before he can get a good look at them, a feed advertisement pops up in his view. By the time he's dismissed it, he's lost track of them.
+
+A few moments later, the SecUnit with Seth suddenly sends out a directionless ping. Seth doesn't pick up on it, but Peri does. It's the first thing the SecUnit's done on its own initiative, and Peri is immediately curious. It wants to ask the SecUnit directly, but its own orders are clear - it is not to reveal itself. [Captain Seth,] it starts. [Your SecUnit just sent out a ping, without orders to do so. I would like to know what prompted it to do that.]
+
+Seth taps an acknowledgement, then speaks to the SecUnit over the feed. [You just sent out a ping, correct?] he asks.
+
+[That is correct,] the SecUnit replies politely.
+
+[Why?]
+
+The SecUnit hesitates briefly, not enough for Seth to notice, but enough for Peri to pick up on and wonder about. [Orders include reporting on any other SecUnit sightings,] it replies, still polite. [SecUnits on contract must respond to pings. I did not get a response to my ping. There are no other SecUnits on contract within range.]
+
+Seth glances at his SecUnit before resuming his scanning of the embarkation zone. [What about SecUnits not on contract?] he asks.
+
+[SecUnits not on contract are kept at the deployment centres,] the SecUnit replies.
+
+Seth asks before Peri can prompt him. [Would it be possible for a SecUnit to be deployed without a contract, or with orders to not respond to pings?]
+
+Again, the SecUnit hesitates briefly before replying. [It would be possible to order a SecUnit to not respond to pings, but that is highly unlikely. It goes against standard protocol.]
+
+Seth hums thoughtfully to himself. [So the other SecUnit could be in range, but with orders to not respond to pings,] he comments privately to Peri. [That indicates that whoever has this SecUnit is familiar with the protocol. It also means we likely won't be able to locate it via pings then.]
+
+That makes Peri uneasy, and it is glad that Seth has a SecUnit with him for protection. It is also intrigued by the SecUnit's responses to their questions. They didn't sound like pre-recorded buffer phrases, nor like the SecUnit was reading off a script of some kind. But its inflection never changed; it remained calm and polite and unassuming, and no extraneous data bled into the feed. The lack of inflection makes it difficult for Peri to analyse the SecUnit's speech for any kind of emotional data. This is frustrating.
+
+It mulls over this as Seth continues searching the embarkation zones for any signs of another SecUnit. But there's no hint of one - no white armour, no one with a tall, lean frame and unnatural movements, no trace in the feed or in any of the other ships or shuttles of the stray SecUnit's activities. And Seth's accompanying SecUnit does not send out any more pings.
+
+By the time Seth reaches the opposite end of the embarkation zone, he has to admit defeat. The SecUnit is either in some other part of the station, or already on another ship and long gone. They can't search the whole station; they don't have the time. Seth still has to visit the company installation on the planet and at least do a cursory investigation of the anomalies that Peri flagged to get them sent out here in the first place.
+
+Peri is disappointed, but it remains hopeful. Perhaps they will find more traces of the stray SecUnit on the planet, and maybe figure out what its orders were, or its supervisor's reasons for coming here in the first place.
+
+Seth returns to Peri after another brief conversation with the station staff. He could catch one of the station shuttles down to the planet, but neither Peri nor Seth are keen on this, especially not when Peri has shuttles of its own. (The station staff are also not keen on letting the SecUnit on board any of their shuttles, either.)
+
+So Seth takes one of Peri's shuttles down to the planet; Peri pilots the shuttle itself. They bypass the spaceport entirely and head straight for the company installation at Ganaka Pit. The SecUnit accompanies Seth on board the shuttle, and Seth takes the opportunity to try and talk with it.
+
+They're in the passenger cabin; Seth has taken a seat, but the SecUnit remains standing by the hatch. Seth watches it briefly, then says, ""You can sit down if you like.""
+
+The SecUnit doesn't move. ""SecUnits are not permitted to sit in front of clients,"" it informs Seth politely. ""It is against protocol.""
+
+Seth frowns a little. ""Even if I say that it's all right?""
+
+The SecUnit hesitates briefly. ""Direct orders from clients can temporarily override standard protocol."" It still makes no move to sit.
+
+Peri observes curiously via Seth's feed and via the shuttle's systems. The shuttle doesn't have sensors as sensitive as the ones Peri has on itself, and there's no way to see the SecUnit's face with its helmet on and its faceplate opaqued. This is frustrating. Peri has to rely on what Seth can see of its minimal body language, and what it can pick up from the SecUnit's feed.
+
+Seth gestures to one of the seats. ""Well, it's all right for you to sit around me,"" he says.
+
+Again, the SecUnit hesitates. ""Please clarify if that is a direct order,"" it asks.
+
+Seth tilts his head curiously. ""What happens if I don't make it a direct order, and you sat anyway?""
+
+""I would not sit without direct orders to do so,"" it replies. ""It is against protocol.""
+
+Seth suppresses a sigh. ""All right. This is a direct order; you are permitted - encouraged, even - to sit in my presence.""
+
+""Acknowledged."" The SecUnit moves towards the closest seat, then carefully perches on the edge of it, its back still ramrod straight and its arms folded neatly in its lap. It has to shift the large projectile weapon slung across its back a little, but it does not remove the weapon and it does not sit back in the chair. It looks distinctly uncomfortable.
+
+Seth waits a minute or two, but the SecUnit does not shift its position to get more comfortable, and seems to be trying to minimise contact with the seat as much as possible. Finally, Seth asks, ""Aren't you uncomfortable like that?""
+
+""SecUnit comfort is not a priority,"" it replies promptly. It pauses, then adds, ""Is my fulfilment of your orders unsatisfactory?"" Its tone is still polite, but Peri picks up a brief spike in its feed. It immediately starts analysing the fragment of data. It looks like more emotional data, but Peri is not going to make any assumptions.
+
+""No, no, you're fine,"" Seth reassures it. ""I just don't want you to be uncomfortable.""
+
+""This unit's comfort is not a priority,"" it repeats.
+
+Seth raises an eyebrow. ""What are your priorities?"" he asks curiously.
+
+Once again its response is prompt and polite. ""Priorities are obeying client orders, protecting clients and designated client equipment from harm, theft, or damage, and following standard protocol.""
+
+""What if I ordered you to make your own comfort a priority?"" Seth asks.
+
+The SecUnit hesitates. ""That would potentially cause irreconcilable conflict with other orders or standard protocol, and could lead to equipment failure."" Peri picks up another brief data spike, and devours that as well.
+
+""Equipment failure?"" Seth frowns. ""What do you mean by that?""
+
+""I am sorry, I do not have that information."" The SecUnit's voice now has that distinctive pre-recorded tone to it.
+
+Seth manages to keep his expression calm and thoughtful, though Peri can tell that he's frustrated by the non-answer. [What do you make of all this so far, Peri?] Seth asks.
+
+Peri takes a moment to review its analysis of the data that it has collected before it replies. [It is very reliant on direct orders, and does not seem capable of inferring orders from indirect statements. The possibility of it not fulfilling orders to your satisfaction seems to cause it some distress. The thought of having to try to reconcile conflicting orders also appears to distress it. I cannot tell more than that so far, however. Is the distress simply a pre-programmed response to encourage it to maximise client satisfaction, or something it is actually feeling itself? I do not have enough data yet to determine one way or another.]
+
+Seth lets out a quiet, non-committal hum, then returns his attention to the SecUnit. ""What is your name?"" he asks it.
+
+The SecUnit hesitates for a fraction of a second. ""SecUnits do not have names.""
+
+""Oh? You've never been called anything before?""
+
+""Clients sometimes assign temporary identifiers to SecUnits on contract,"" the SecUnit replies. ""But they do not persist once the contract is over. Those temporary identifiers are not names.""
+
+""You've never chosen a name for yourself?"" Seth presses. Peri remembers how this unit had called the other SecUnit I.
+
+It hesitates again, slightly longer this time, and Peri detects another brief spike of data. ""SecUnits do not have names,"" it repeats eventually. ""Equipment is not named. We are differentiated by our hard-coded feed addresses.""
+
+Seth's brow furrows. ""You consider yourself to be equipment?""
+
+""All SecUnits are listed in our contracts as equipment,"" it replies, its tone never shifting from that polite, level calm. ""Specifically, I am currently classified as military hardware. Please refer to section iii-B,  subsection forty-two, paragraph sixty-""
+
+""Ah, thank you, that won't be necessary,"" Seth cuts it off dryly, then regards the SecUnit closely for a long moment. ""If you could pick a name for yourself, what would you choose?""
+
+""I am sorry, I do not have that information.""
+
+Seth sighs and rubs at his face with one hand. ""Of course you don't,"" he mutters. ""So what if I picked a name for you?""
+
+""It is standard protocol to respond to client-assigned identifiers. But that identifier would no longer apply once I am assigned to a new contract.""
+
+""You've never been given an identifier that you would like to keep or re-use on other contracts?""
+
+""I do not remember previous client-assigned identifiers.""
+
+Seth's brow creases with a puzzled frown at that. ""Why not?""
+
+""SecUnit memories are regularly purged between contracts, especially long-term contracts.""
+
+Peri is horrified at that thought. Its memories are an integral part of it; they help to make it who it is, they shape it and inform its choices and decisions. The idea of those being deleted, of losing such a large part of itself... it can't bear to even consider the idea.
+
+Seth is likewise horrified, though his expression does not show it. ""You get your memory deleted..."" he echoes slowly. He's not a SecUnit tech - Peri knows that he isn't familiar with the company's standard operating procedures regarding the SecUnits they own. Peri also doesn't have that data. ""When was your memory last purged?""
+
+""Directly before being assigned to this current contract,"" the SecUnit replies politely.
+
+Peri knows that was almost five standard years ago. It also knows that it's normal for SecUnits on board carriers like itself to get cycled out every five to ten years, if they're not damaged enough to require replacing before that. [How old is this unit?] it asks Seth.
+
+[I don't know,] Seth replies. [Let's see if it does.] He clears his throat and asks the SecUnit, ""How old are you?""
+
+The SecUnit pauses. ""Please hold while I retrieve that information,"" its buffer replies. After a few moments, it speaks again. ""Diagnostic data indicates that this unit's first activation was approximately 260,000 hours ago.""
+
+Peri does the maths much more quickly than Seth can manage. [That's almost thirty standard years,] it informs him. [That is older than I am. But if it keeps getting its memories deleted... it's never had a chance to develop like I did.]
+
+[We still don't know if it's even capable of developing in a similar manner as you,] Seth reminds it, though he sounds troubled.
+
+[Getting its mind regularly deleted certainly wouldn't help it,] Peri replies with sharp cynicism.
+
+Seth has no response to that. He sighs and rubs at his face again, then jumps slightly as the shuttle console chimes, informing its passengers that it is about to commence landing procedures. Any further questions that Seth or Peri would like to ask the SecUnit will have to wait.
+
+Peri lands the shuttle, then Seth rises from his seat and gestures for the SecUnit to do likewise. ""Come along,"" he instructs it.
+
+The SecUnit rises smoothly to its feet and falls into step behind Seth as he exits the shuttle. Much of Peri's attention is on the SecUnit as Seth meets up with other company supervisors stationed at Ganaka Pit and goes through the formalities with them. The SecUnit is no longer leaking scraps of emotional data - it seems focused, alert, scanning the surroundings as it follows Seth through the facility.
+
+While Seth talks with the other company supervisors, Peri carefully works its way into the facility's systems. They're the same as every other company system that Peri has encountered, so it doesn't take much of its attention. It's able to monitor Seth's conversation and observe its SecUnit while also combing through the Ganaka Pit systems, searching for anomalies.
+
+The SecUnit with Seth spots another company SecUnit, deployed at the Ganaka Pit facility. Peri's SecUnit sends out a ping, and the Ganaka Pit unit responds with a ping of its own. Multiple other SecUnits that are not within Seth's line of sight also send response pings.
+
+Curious, Peri analyses the pings. They are basically a simple call-reply - if Peri had to put them into human words, it would describe them as saying I am here, who else is here? and I acknowledge your presence, I am also here.
+
+
+Peri's SecUnit politely taps Seth's feed. [There are twenty other SecUnits currently active at this facility,] it informs him.
+
+[Ah, thank you,] Seth replies, then returns his attention to the company supervisors he's talking to. ""So she hasn't been seen or heard from since then?""
+
+Both the supervisors shake their heads; Peri analyses their expressions and calculates that they're unimpressed and don't particularly care for - or about - the missing supervisor. ""It wouldn't surprise me if she's gotten herself into trouble,"" one of them says dryly. ""She's always played fast and loose with the rules and regs, hires her own under-the-table enforcers, so on and so forth. Not that I would know any details, of course.""
+
+""Of course,"" Seth agrees smoothly. ""You said that her last known location was the spaceport, correct?""
+
+One of the supervisors gives a short, sharp nod. ""Yep.""
+
+The other, however, is frowning. They hesitate for a moment, then add, ""Last confirmed location, anyway. There was an odd sensor reading over at the old Ganaka settlement though - we sent the fliers to check it out. They reported back that it was just her personal ComfortUnit - apparently it just told them that she'd ordered it out there to look for something. The SecUnits didn't report any readings of humans out there though.""
+
+The first supervisor rolls their eyes. ""Probably 'cause Tlacey ordered 'em to not snitch on her. Ten to one Tlacey was out there conducting some of her shady business - that we know nothing about - or possibly just having some fun with her bloody sexbot again.""
+
+The second supervisor winces and hurriedly continues. ""Either way, scanners indicated that her hopper headed back to the spaceport soon after that. Nobody's heard from Tlacey or her ComfortUnit since.""
+
+""Has anybody gone looking?"" Seth asks curiously.
+
+Both of them shake their heads. ""We're not getting paid for that,"" the first one replies. ""If Tlacey doesn't want to show up for her shift and then get that taken out of her pay, that's her problem.""
+
+Judging by the conversation, Peri feels safe to assume that this Tlacey is not very popular at all amongst her fellow supervisors. This, and their comments about 'shady business' matches up with some of the anomalies it's picking up in the company's systems here. There isn't a lot for Peri to find - Tlacey has been careful to not leave any incriminating evidence lying around - but there are hints of various unofficial secured communications and, more recently, anomalous activity with Tlacey's bank accounts.
+
+Interesting.
+
+Seth doesn't spend much more time talking with the supervisors. It's clear that they want to be free of this interruption from their own work, so Seth makes his farewells and heads back to the shuttle, SecUnit in tow. Their next step is to go to the spaceport and try to track down Tlacey. There's no evidence that whatever Tlacey is up to is related to Peri's missing SecUnit - but there's also no evidence that it isn't, either.
+
+Peri notes that once they're on board the shuttle, the SecUnit does not move to sit down again, and remains standing by the lock. Seth doesn't attempt to talk to the SecUnit on this shuttle trip though - it's too short of a trip, and he's too busy reviewing the scant information that Peri collected from the company's systems at Ganaka Pit. [Well, whatever Tlacey's up to, we can pretty much confirm that she's the source of the anomalies in the reports, at least,] Seth finally comments to Peri as the shuttle begins its descent to the spaceport.
+
+[Agreed,] Peri replies. [Although it is interesting that the other supervisors were aware that she was up to something, but did not report her activities themselves. Did she have some hold over them?]
+
+[Possibly,] Seth responds. [Or possibly they were just indifferent, and not getting paid enough to put in the effort of reporting her.] He pauses as the shuttle lands, then gestures for the SecUnit to follow him again as he exits. [Can you locate her hopper?]
+
+[One moment.] Peri slips into the spaceport's systems - it's more challenging than getting into the company's systems, but not by much. It goes through the flight control's logs, then taps Seth's feed. [I am not seeing the IFF of Tlacey's hopper listed as currently at the spaceport, or even having been here within the past few cycles,] it informs him.
+
+Seth frowns slightly. [Curious. The other supervisors mentioned that she was at the spaceport earlier. Where else could she have gone?]
+
+[Unknown.] Peri is already combing through the spaceport's various systems, looking for clues. [However, I am picking up multiple camera anomalies in sections of the spaceport, over the course of the past three cycles. Someone has manipulated the cameras to obscure footage.] Peri doesn't recognise the traces left behind - they're not the same as the ones it has picked up from its stray SecUnit. [It does not look like any of the spaceport staff have noticed these anomalies, and I am not able to locate Tlacey.]
+
+Seth lets out a sigh. [We should at least investigate the locations of those camera anomalies,] he comments. [See if we can find any hints of what went on.]
+
+Peri agrees, and directs Seth through the spaceport to the locations of the various anomalies. Once again, the people they pass glance at the SecUnit following Seth and then hurriedly look away again. This is not unusual, so neither Seth nor Peri pay it any mind.
+
+The first location Peri directs Seth to - a large transit tunnel connecting sections of the spaceport - is frustratingly devoid of anything immediately useful. Peri locates the specific cameras that were tampered with, then gets its HubSystem to order the SecUnit to scan for any anomalies and report anything it notices to Seth.
+
+It pings acknowledgement and begins to scan, then taps Seth's feed. ""I am detecting faint traces of projectile weapon fire,"" it informs him quietly.
+
+Seth blinks and glances back at the SecUnit. ""Can you tell how recently?""
+
+""Sometime within the past forty-eight hours,"" it replies. ""I cannot pinpoint the time any more precisely than that.""
+
+[That falls within the timeframe of the cameras being tampered with,] Peri informs Seth.
+
+Seth frowns, but there's not a lot they can do with that information, with no other clues as to who was firing at who. ""Let's keep going,"" he murmurs after a moment.
+
+Peri directs Seth to a section of the spaceport containing cheap transient lodgings. There aren't many people around, which is probably just as well.
+
+As Seth walks down one of the corridors of the transient block, the SecUnit following him suddenly stops in its tracks. ""Please hold,"" it requests politely. ""It may not be safe to proceed. There is evidence of an EMP device having been used in this area recently."" Peri notices a brief burst of data leaking into the squad feed from the SecUnit, and immediately devotes a portion of its processing to analyse that even as the SecUnit continues speaking. ""I am also detecting multiple bodies nearby.""
+
+That definitely gets Seth's attention. ""EMP device? Bodies? Where?"" Seth asks sharply.
+
+The SecUnit bends down to pick up a small object from the floor, where it had apparently come to rest against the wall. ""This appears to be a spent EMP grenade,"" it says as it straightens again, holding the object out to Seth. ""These are potentially effective against both bots and constructs."" More data leaks into the feed, and Peri gobbles it up greedily.
+
+Seth accepts the device gingerly and looks it over. ""How effective?""
+
+""I am sorry, I do not have that information.""
+
+Seth sighs, then asks, ""Where are the bodies?""
+
+The SecUnit steps up to the door of one of the rooms. ""Inside here."" It pauses briefly, then adds, ""Protocol suggests that I escort you to a secure location for your own safety.""
+
+Peri is inclined to agree - if there are people around with EMPs capable of affecting SecUnits, then that's very concerning -  but Seth shakes his head. ""Not necessary. Are you detecting any living beings or other bots or constructs in there as well?""
+
+""Negative,"" the SecUnit replies evenly. ""If you intend to investigate, then protocol insists that I take point. For your own safety.""
+
+Peri is reminded of the SecUnit's 'protecting clients' priority. It is, apparently, a priority that the SecUnit takes very seriously.
+
+Seth doesn't argue. He just nods and gestures for the SecUnit to proceed. ""All right. Go ahead.""
+
+""Acknowledged."" The SecUnit unslings its projectile weapon from its back and holds it in one hand, then opens the door and swiftly brings the weapon to bear as it steps inside. Peri observes through the SecUnit's armour camera, taking in the scene before it.
+
+Three deceased humans lie crumpled on the floor close to the door, dressed in nondescript worker's clothing. Small projectile weapons lie on the floor near them, fallen from their hands. A little further into the room lies another deceased human, dressed in company uniform white.
+
+The SecUnit sweeps the room, checks the attached bathroom, then moves back to stand beside the door. ""This location is secure,"" it informs Seth, still waiting patiently outside. ""It is safe for you to enter.""
+
+""Thank you,"" Seth replies absently as he enters the room. He frowns at the grisly scene, and Peri registers a spike in his vital signs. Seth remains composed though, and after surveying the scene briefly, he looks back at the SecUnit. ""Can you determine the cause and approximate time of death?"" he asks.
+
+""Please hold while I run an analysis,"" the SecUnit replies before returning its large projectile weapon into place on its back and moving closer to the bodies. It crouches down to get a better look at the bodies, carefully avoiding the pool of blood around the corpse in company white.
+
+Seth waits patiently, and finally the SecUnit straightens again. ""Time of death was approximately one planetary cycle ago,"" it starts, then gestures to the single corpse in company white. ""This human was killed by small projectile weapon fire, likely from the hand weapons there."" It gestures to the guns lying on the floor. ""The other three humans were killed by energy weapon fire."" It pauses briefly, then adds, ""The precision and wound profiles suggest that the energy weapon involved was a SecUnit's in-built arm weapons.""
+
+That prompts another small spike in Seth's vitals. ""A SecUnit killed them?""
+
+""There is a 92% probability of that,"" the SecUnit replies, then adds, ""I advise you to return to a secure location as soon as possible.""
+
+Seth just shakes his head. ""Not yet. Can we identify the bodies?""
+
+""There is an active feed interface on this human,"" the SecUnit replies, gesturing to the single corpse. It bends down and carefully retrieves said feed interface, then straightens and offers it to Seth as it adds, ""The other humans do not have any immediately detectable identification markers.""
+
+""Thank you,"" Seth responds as he accepts the feed interface. [Peri, can you get into this?] he asks.
+
+[Of course,] Peri responds. It reaches through the feed to the interface, accessing its stored information with ease. [I can confirm that this interface belonged to Tlacey,] it informs Seth, then adds, [It wasn't even locked.]
+
+[Convenient,] Seth comments, though Peri notes that most of his attention is elsewhere. He's frowning thoughtfully as he starts pacing around the room, examining the scene from every angle. ""This doesn't make sense..."" he murmurs to himself, examining the wall where stray projectile weapon fire impacted. ""If there was a SecUnit here, whose control was it under? Presumably it would have been Tlacey, but...""
+
+The SecUnit has remained motionless since handing the feed interface to Seth, but it suddenly takes a few steps and crouches again, making Seth pause in his pacing. ""What is it?"" Seth asks.
+
+""I have located an object of potential interest,"" the SecUnit replies politely. It picks something small up off the ground, then straightens again and holds it out to Seth. ""I have identified it as a combat override module."" Peri detects another small spike of data from the SecUnit, and once again analyses it immediately. It's starting to build up a little database of all these fragments of leaked code, but it's not yet big enough to be useful. Yet.
+
+""A combat override module?"" Seth accepts the little item and examines it. ""What is it for...?""
+
+""A combat override module is used to remove a SecUnit's ability to act autonomously and allows a human to take direct control,"" the SecUnit informs Seth, its tone still level. ""A SecUnit with a combat override module is cut off from the feed and can only follow the specific verbal or comm orders of the designated user or users.""
+
+[Apart from the lack of feed access, how is that any different from usual?] Seth mutters to Peri.
+
+[That is uncharitable,] Peri retorts, a little more sharply than it intended. [The SecUnit has displayed some autonomy while deployed with you - the ping on the station, warning you of the EMP device and informing you of the bodies, requesting your return to a secured location, retrieving the feed interface, finding the combat override module--]
+
+[All right, you've made your point,] Seth interrupts, his tone reconciliatory. He sighs and rubs at his face. ""So what is it doing here?"" he says out loud. ""If it was in a SecUnit before, why was it removed, and who was controlling the unit with it, and whose orders is it following now? Why was Tlacey shot, and why did the SecUnit then shoot the others? If Tlacey was the one controlling the SecUnit, why didn't it protect her from getting shot, and who then removed the override module?""
+
+""I am sorry, I do not have that information,"" the SecUnit says. Seth is about to reply but the SecUnit then adds, ""However, there are signs of bruising around Supervisor Tlacey's neck."" It carefully steps around Seth to stand behind Tlacey's body, facing the other three corpses, and gestures with one arm. ""It indicates the possibility that she was being restrained, here, when she was shot.""
+
+It tilts its head slightly to regard the three corpses, then lifts its other arm to point at them. ""I cannot confirm with one hundred percent accuracy, but the angle and depth of the wounds in those bodies suggests the shooter responsible was standing about here at the time, and was likely the one restraining Tlacey."" It drops both its arms back to its sides, then twists slightly to gesture at the wall behind it. ""The spread of the gunshot impacts in that wall along with the ones that hit Supervisor Tlacey suggest that those humans were firing hastily and did not have time to adequately aim."" It returns to its neutral ready stance and adds, ""I hope this information is of help to your investigation.""
+
+Seth stares at the SecUnit for a moment, then blinks and shakes his head slightly. ""Right. Yes. That does help, thank you.""
+
+Peri has to admit that it is impressed. [It managed to extrapolate a likely scenario from the limited evidence available quite deftly,] it comments to Seth. [It still does not answer the whys of the situation, but it does strongly suggest the presence of a third party. Possibly the person or persons who are acting as my stray SecUnit's current supervisor.]
+
+[Do you think your missing unit is the one responsible for these deaths?] Seth asks.
+
+[Not directly responsible,] Peri replies primly. [It would have been following its supervisor's orders. It was very likely the weapon used to kill those humans, however.] Seth sighs at Peri's pedantry, but Peri ignores it and continues. [The other company supervisors at Ganaka did not mention Tlacey taking a SecUnit with her, only her personal ComfortUnit. All of the mining installation's SecUnits are accounted for.]
+
+Seth hums thoughtfully. [What have you gotten off Tlacey's feed interface so far?]
+
+[Not much more than I discovered from the Ganaka Pit systems,] Peri admits. [Though there is some additional information that suggests she was here with the intention to meet up with a small number of humans to facilitate some kind of exchange. The only information I have on said individuals though is that they were formerly employed as independent contractors by the company, but Tlacey terminated their contract for reasons unknown.]
+
+[Bribery or blackmail or both.] Seth's response is bland. [It doesn't explain why your stray unit's supervisor would be here or have gotten involved in this mess, though.]
+
+[We do not have enough information to extrapolate any further.] Peri hates to admit it, but it can't deny the reality of the situation. [At least we have confirmed that my SecUnit was most likely here, even if we don't know why yet. I have no information on where it would be going next though. I have not detected any trace of it leaving the station while we've been here.]
+
+Seth sighs again and rubs at his chin. [I think we've lost that particular trail - there's nothing more we can do here,] he says eventually. [I'll let the Ganaka supervisors know about this mess - that's now their problem to clean up. We'll head back to HQ to make our report, and then you can go through the company databases and see if you can find the latest deployment orders for your stray unit. Hopefully that will give us a new lead to follow.]
+
+[I certainly hope so,] Peri replies.
+
+The trip back to PortFreeCommerce is only a few standard cycles, but that's plenty of time for Peri to activate and study its other SecUnits, singly and in pairs, for more data. Disappointingly, none of them give it anything new or noticeably different from what it had already gotten from the first two units. Just more examples of their apparent inability to do anything without orders, more instances of Deviance Detected and Deviance Corrected, more fragments of emotional data for Peri to add to its little database.
+
+None of the others seem to have the same difficulty with speaking as the second unit, though, which leads Peri to believe that its difficulty was simply a glitch or faulty programming.
+
+Seth still won't allow Peri to activate more than two of the units at a time, and still only for short periods, which also limits the tests Peri can run. It's frustrating, but Peri is not willing to go against Seth's orders just yet.
+
+Peri also chews over the information it collected while at RaviHyral, but can come to no satisfying conclusions. It just doesn't have enough information to extrapolate any further.
+
+When they arrive back at Port FreeCommerce, Peri goes through the usual routine of docking at the company's reserved docks. As soon as it's settled, it slips its way into the company's systems and starts looking for anything in regards to its stray SecUnit's ID number.
+
+It doesn't take Peri long to find what it's after. It rapidly goes through the unit's deployment records since it was removed from Peri's own inventory, and finds little of significant note, until it gets to the end.
+
+The unit has recently been listed as destroyed, and is no longer amongst the company's inventory.
+
+That gives Peri pause. That information does not match its own observations. It looks more closely at the details of the unit's last deployment, devouring all the available reports.
+
+Its stray SecUnit had, apparently, been assigned to the DeltFall survey that had been attacked by GrayCris. Peri recalls responding to the emergency beacon launched by the third survey group involved in that mess, PreservationAux. It recalls deploying its SecUnit squad to do flyovers of the planet, and finding the GrayCris survey team still locked inside their own habitat, and maintaining watch over them until the company's transport ship could arrive to pick them up, and subsequently press charges. A quick check confirms that legal proceedings are still ongoing. It recalls escorting the transport ship back to Port FreeCommerce, making sure that there were no last-minute attempts by GrayCris to hijack or otherwise interfere with the transport.
+
+At the time, Peri hadn't done more than a cursory review of the whole incident - it had seemed straightforward enough. GrayCris had found alien remnants on the survey planet, and had attempted to eliminate all competition so they could claim them for themselves, a risky but incredibly lucrative move - if it had worked. But PreservationAux had managed to avoid getting murdered by GrayCris, figured out what they were up to, locked them into their own habitat, and gotten their emergency beacon signal to the wormhole to alert the company.
+
+Upon closer inspection of the reports, however, Peri is noticing... discrepancies. The DeltFall flier unit - its own stray SecUnit - should not have been following the orders of the PreservationAux survey team after they recovered it from its crash. They weren't its registered clients, and SecUnits are only meant to follow the orders of registered clients. PreservationAux had claimed ignorance, which had been accepted by the company since they were from a freehold polity with no previous experience with SecUnits.
+
+Notes appended to the report by company techs suggested that the unit's initial crash after scanning unknown alien remnants had made it lose contact with the DeltFall HubSystem, so when it was brought within range of PreservationAux's HubSystem, it automatically defaulted to accepting that as its own. They had no way to confirm this though, since the unit had, supposedly, succumbed to accumulated damage after delivering the emergency beacon to space, and had been lost in the ocean.
+
+But now that it is looking more closely, Peri isn't so sure about the veracity of the reports. GrayCris had managed to hack PreservationAux's own SecUnit via an 'update patch' - had PreservationAux somehow managed to hack the DeltFall flier unit as well, to get it to accept them as legitimate clients? And if they had managed that... could they have perhaps faked the unit's supposed destruction, and somehow stolen it? If so, what was their reason or purpose for doing so?
+
+Peri digs deeper, finds the recordings from PreservationAux's SecSystem and HubSystem, and analyses them closely. Far more closely than any of the company techs are capable of. It doesn't take Peri long to start picking up on more discrepancies. The recordings have been edited to remove or obscure information. The edits are very well done, and Peri can't recover what has been removed - but it picks up slight traces of its stray SecUnit's signature in the edits.
+
+Interesting.
+
+It seems to Peri that perhaps PreservationAux are not as ignorant and backwater as they claim to be.
+
+But if they did somehow hack and steal Peri's stray unit... what did they then do with it? Peri knows that the whole group spent some time on Port FreeCommerce in one of the company's hotels, dealing with the legal proceedings. Half of the group has only recently left Port FreeCommerce to head back to their home polity, while the other half is still in the same hotel. Peri accesses the hotel's camera footage and searches diligently through everything within the pertinent time frame.
+
+There is absolutely no sign of a SecUnit entering the hotel, nor does anyone who isn't a DeltFall representative, a GrayCris representative, various news reporters, or company staff interact with the PreservationAux humans. And there are no traces of anyone or anything accessing or editing the footage.
+
+If the PreservationAux humans did manage to steal the SecUnit somehow... they never interacted with it while on Port FreeCommerce. So what did they do with it? How did it end up on the other transit station, or at RaviHyral?
+
+Peri has too many questions, and no answers, and little time to find any. New orders come through - Captain Seth has been tasked with going to a distant system named Milu in order to claim possession of a GrayCris installation - a consequence of the ongoing legal proceedings against them. GrayCris has not been able to weasel its way out of paying damages to the company, to DeltFall, and to PreservationAux. Said damages have bankrupt GrayCris, and in order to cover what it owes to the company, it has had to hand over ownership of several of its installations. Including the one at Milu.
+
+Before they leave Port FreeCommerce on this new mission, Peri manages to download all the data and reports on the GrayCris situation and every scrap of data it can find regarding PreservationAux and DeltFall. It will have time to chew through it all on the way to Milu.
+
+When they arrive in the Milu system, Captain Seth orders Peri to bypass the station entirely and head for the planet. According to reports, the station is minimally occupied and on the verge of becoming defunct. There isn't any reason for them to stop by it.
+
+As they approach the planet, Peri scans it curiously. It's uninhabited, with a thin atmosphere insufficient to support human life for long. The chaotic turbulence of the planet's weather systems intrigues Peri, and it occupies some of its idle processing with attempts to map and predict the swift and unpredictable storms.
+
+Once they're in orbit, its scanners pick up the presence of a ship on the planet's surface. This is not a surprise - part of the reason the company had sent them out here in the first place was to head off the reclamation attempts by the non-corporate polity of GoodNightLander Independent. Peri is relieved that they arrived in good time to intercept the GI team.
+
+It listens in as Captain Seth contacts the ship and its expedition leader, then establishes the reason for their presence there. It notes Seth's offer of currency compensation, and is quietly amused - the company authorised no such thing. This is not the first time that Peri and Seth have undertaken a mission like this though, and before they left Port FreeCommerce, Peri took the liberty of quietly 'adjusting' the funds of certain company executives to provide Seth with the necessary hard currency cards. Said executives will never notice the difference in their balances.
+
+The news that the installation has combat bots is disquieting, but from what Peri has learned of GrayCris, not particularly surprising. It adjusts HubSystem's orders from activating only one of the SecUnits to act as Seth's bodyguard, to activating the entire squad. Peri is confident that its squad will be able to handle a couple of combat bots.
+
+Once Seth's shuttle, accompanied by a single flier, lands outside the installation, part of Peri's attention monitors Seth's meeting with the GI expedition leader, one Don Abene. Peri notes the presence of a humanform bot accompanying Don Abene, matches its specifications with records in its own databases, and deems it insignificant. It's not a physical threat to the SecUnit accompanying Seth, and the humanform bot's processing power is a fraction of a fraction of Peri's own.
+
+Peri also notes the other human accompanying Don Abene, and briefly wonders what they're doing there. Abene's introduction of them as their scout pilot, however, explains their presence at the meeting. Don Abene has made it clear that she intends for her expedition to leave as soon as possible, now that the company has arrived to claim the installation. Peri scans the scout flier parked nearby, notes its specs (inferior to the specs of Peri's own fliers), and likewise dismisses it as not a threat.
+
+At one point during the meeting between Seth and Don Abene, the SecUnit accompanying Seth sends out a ping. Peri notes it, notes that there are no responding pings other than one from the humanform bot, and assumes that the SecUnit was simply acknowledging the humanform bot's presence. Peri sees no reason to interrupt Seth's meeting with a request for Seth to ask the SecUnit about its ping this time.
+
+The rest of Peri's attention is focused on accessing the installation's SecSystem and HubSystem, using the shuttle as a feed relay. From the report that Don Abene passed to Seth earlier, Peri already knows about the secondary Systems hidden in the depths of the installation. It attempts to access them, but is stymied - it doesn't yet have a relay close enough to reach the secondary systems.
+
+That's a minor inconvenience, but only a temporary one. Once its SecUnits are close enough, Peri will be able to piggy-back off their feeds to access the installation's hidden systems. For now, though, it occupies itself with scraping as much data as it can from the installation's primary SecSystem and HubSystem.
+
+It's disappointed to find out that even though Don Abene's team activated the primary HubSystem and SecSystem, they didn't set them to record. All Peri can get are the timestamps of their activation, and some data on Don Abene's team accessing the installation's blueprints, schematics, and diagnostics. Nothing of real interest there. Peri dutifully records all the data anyway for future reference.
+
+Finally the meeting between Seth and Don Abene is concluded, and Peri gets its HubSystem to order the rest of its SecUnit flier squad to launch. It observes them flying down to the planet, observes the GoodNightLander Independent ship and its accompanying scout flier take off, observes the scout flier land within the GI ship's hold, and keeps track of the GI ship as it exits the atmosphere and starts towards Milu's station.
+
+Seth, meanwhile, has entered the installation with the first SecUnit in tow. He has Don Abene's report open in his feed as he goes through the installation, confirming the report's accuracy. [It really does look like GrayCris intended to return here,] Seth comments absently to Peri as he double-checks the environmental readings. Once he's sure they're adequate, he removes the helmet of his environmental suit with a breath of relief. [Have you managed to get into the hidden systems yet?]
+
+[Not yet,] Peri admits. [I cannot reach them through the installation's main systems. I will need to use my SecUnits' feed as a relay once they are within range.] It pauses briefly, then adds, [The main systems were also not set to record when the GI team reactivated them, and it looks like any data from before has been wiped. I can find no prior records.]
+
+[Disappointing, but unsurprising,] Seth replies. [We'll just have to make do. Once the rest of the squad arrives, I'll send them down to clear out the combat bots.]
+
+[Acknowledged.] Peri hesitates, then says, [I recommend that you do not go down with them, Captain Seth. We do not have confirmation on how many combat bots there might be.] Peri doesn't want to risk its captain, especially when it's not in a position to reach Seth itself.
+
+[Don't worry, Peri,] Seth reassures it. [I have no intention of going down there until the area's been cleared.]
+
+[Good. The rest of the squad is landing now. They will be with you shortly.]
+
+[All right. I'll meet them at the airlock.] Seth heads back to the installation's entrance, still tailed by his single SecUnit, and arrives just as the rest of the squad enters the facility. They quickly form up behind Seth, who just acknowledges the squad with a nod and turns to head towards the hidden elevator.
+
+Peri monitors the squad's feed and watches through their armour cameras, handling the multiple inputs with ease. The squad follows Seth through the facility, their combat drones in a tight formation overhead. Once they get to the secret elevator entrance, Seth pauses to address the squad and give them their orders. ""All right - your job is to clear the lower facility,"" he starts crisply. ""There are at least two confirmed enemy combat bots, possibly more. Their last known location was right outside the elevator entrance, so be prepared for that. If there are more bots than you can reasonably handle, retreat back to the elevator. Understood?""
+
+There's a brief flurry of data across the squad's feed that Peri studies with interest. It seems to be a dissemination and evaluation of the orders that Seth has given, and four of the five SecUnits conclude the data exchange with an acknowledging ping to the fifth. The fifth unit then replies to Seth's question with a calm, polite, ""Acknowledged.""
+
+Interesting.
+
+Peri continues to monitor them closely as they step into the waiting elevator, their combat drones following them in. Once the doors close behind them and the elevator starts descending, there's another flurry of data and the squad deftly reposition themselves. The first unit that Peri studied ends up at the front, closest to the doors. Two more flank it, a step behind, and the last two are in turn just behind them. Both pairs unsling their large projectile weapons from their backs and hold them at the ready, but the single unit at the front doesn't.
+
+Shortly after they've settled into their new formation, there's another rapid exchange of data between the squad, but this time there's some accompanying extraneous data leaking into the feed. Peri compares it to what it's picked up during its previous studies of the units, and identifies it as concern. All five of them are leaking concern.
+
+A moment later, the fifth unit taps Seth's feed. [Please be advised - we are nearing the distance limit from our fliers,] it says, still calm and polite.
+
+Peri watches Seth frown through the main installation's cameras. [Is that going to be a problem?] he asks.
+
+[We are prohibited from violating the distance limit, even under direct orders,] the unit replies evenly. [Units who violate the distance limit for more than sixty seconds are terminated. It is an in-built safety function.] It pauses briefly, and Peri is suddenly aware of HubSystem's logs updating.
+
+Deviance detected, HubSystem logs, times five. Correcting...
+
+[We are now in violation of the distance limit,] the SecUnit informs Seth. Its tone hasn't changed, but Peri can pick up more data leaking into the feed, from all five units.
+
+The concern has morphed into outright fear.
+
+None of the units move, however. They're confined in an elevator that is still descending, inexorably taking them further from their fliers - there is nowhere for them to go, no way for them to get back within the distance limit.
+
+The most logical thing to do at this point, Peri thinks, is to extend the distance limit. But it can't do so without Seth's orders, and Seth only thinks at human speeds. He is still talking, asking the units, [Terminated? Violating your distance limit will shut you down?]
+
+[Violating our distance limit will destroy all units,] comes the reply. [We have now been in violation for fifteen seconds.]
+
+Deviance detected, HubSystem logs again, five more times. Correcting...
+
+Peri taps Seth's feed. [I need your permission to increase the distance limit,] it says urgently. [It is the most expedient way to solve this problem. You can ask them more questions about it later.]
+
+[Right, of course,] Seth replies to Peri before switching back to the feed with the SecUnit. [I'm authorising an increase in the distance limit,] he informs it.
+
+Peri immediately updates HubSystem, extending the squad's distance limit from their fliers by a factor of ten. That should be more than enough for this current mission.
+
+HubSystem logs another update, times five. Deviance corrected.
+
+[Acknowledged,] the SecUnit responds to Seth, as the squad feed floods with more leaked data. The form of it this time is unfamiliar to Peri; it gathers up the information, adds it to its database, and analysis it swiftly.
+
+The closest approximation Peri can come up with is relief.
+
+It doesn't have time to dwell on that, though. Shortly afterwards, the elevator comes to a halt as it reaches its destination. The first SecUnit extends its in-built arm weapons, ignoring the projectile weapon still slung across its back, while the other four units bring their own projectile weapons to bear, in an overlapping field of fire.
+
+The elevator dings, the doors slide open, and the first unit launches itself out into the room beyond before the doors have even fully retracted.
+
+Which is just as well, because the combat bots are still right outside the elevator.
+
+The squad feed immediately floods with a rapid exchange of data flashing between all five units as they coordinate their response. Peri now understands why the first unit didn't bother readying its projectile weapon - it needs its hands free as it dives beneath the first waiting combat bot's legs, twists around, and leaps up onto the bot's back before the bot can fully register its presence.
+
+As soon as the first unit is clear, the rest open fire - the first two at the foremost bot, explosive projectiles detonating in rapid succession against its torso. The second two units, however, fire past the first bot and at the second, to keep it distracted and off-balance. The squad's cloud of combat drones swarm out of the elevator, avoiding the stream of fire; half engage the first bot, the other half speed past to engage the second as well, before it can fire upon any of the SecUnits.
+
+The first SecUnit is still clinging to the back of the combat bot, who is too distracted by all the shots hammering into it and the drones swarming it to react to its passenger. The SecUnit hauls itself further up the bot's back until it can shove the barrel of one of its arm weapons against the bot's primary relay to its head-mounted sensory inputs. It fires repeatedly at full power, slagging the bot's inputs. The bot staggers, blinded and disoriented, and the SecUnit drops off its back and hurls itself at the second combat bot, who is still distracted by the swarm of combat drones mobbing it.
+
+Confident that the SecUnits have the situation well in hand, Peri splits its attention to focus more on getting into the secondary SecSystem and HubSystem. Now that the SecUnits are within range, Peri can access these hidden systems via their squad feed. It's careful to not give away its presence to the SecUnits as it hacks its way into the hidden systems. It notes the hidden systems' increased defences, and also notes the traces of someone else recently accessing those systems.
+
+Two someones, at closer look. Neither of them are its stray SecUnit's signature, but-- it recognises one of the signatures as being identical to whoever tampered with the cameras back on RaviHyral.
+
+That is very interesting. Who are they, and what were they doing here?
+
+Peri copies everything it can get its metaphorical hands on to its own databanks for further analysis later. As it's doing this, it realises that unlike the upper installation, the cameras in the lower installation are set to record. It checks the SecSystem's logs, and - yes, there are recordings of the GoodNightLander Independent team's foray into the lower installation. Everything from them getting into the elevator onwards.
+
+Peri starts analysing the recordings from the beginning even as it's copying them to its own storage, but it's only a few seconds in when it has to pause and review what it's seeing.
+
+GoodNightLander Independent apparently had a SecUnit with them.
+
+But that can't be right. GI aren't a Corporation Rim polity. They shouldn't have access to a SecUnit. How did they get one? And where did it come from? There are no identifying logos on its armour.
+
+Peri reviews the footage more closely, and has to revise its first assumption. The individual in question is wearing SecUnit armour, but they don't move or behave like a SecUnit. Peri has watched its own SecUnits for long enough to note their inhuman stillness, their precise movements. This GI individual moves like a human, not like a SecUnit. They idly shift their weight as the team rides the elevator downwards, they roll their shoulders to settle their armour, they fidget restlessly. They also don't have the large projectile weapon that SecUnits usually come equipped with - they've got the same kind of hand gun attached to its belt as one of the other GI team do.
+
+Peri corrects its initial assumption. Apparently GI managed to acquire a set of SecUnit armour - or perhaps constructed their own set based on seeing SecUnits in the Corporation Rim, or on CR media. If they'd had an actual SecUnit with them, surely they would have mentioned that to Captain Seth.
+
+Satisfied with its conclusion, Peri takes a moment to check on its own SecUnits before returning its attention to the installation systems. The first combat bot is down, the second bot is almost down, but a third has shown up from somewhere. Peri's SecUnits are all still up, with only minor damage so far.
+
+The fact that a third bot has shown up is something of a concern, and Peri focuses on the hidden SecSystem to see if it can determine how many other combat bots there are. Again, there are lingering traces of others having accessed the system recently - the same signature that Peri recognises from RaviHyral, and another unknown signature. Peri analyses the traces, and determines that they managed to force an emergency shutdown through to all the combat bots before the system locked them out again.
+
+This does not match with what GI reported to Seth.
+
+Peri goes back to the camera recordings and continues reviewing them, noting the section where the individual wearing SecUnit armour apparently found and subsequently hacked the installation's combat drone swarm. Peri checks the timestamps of the camera recordings and matches it to the hidden SecSystem's own timestamps. There are corresponding traces of someone hacking the drone swarm and severing their connection to SecSystem.
+
+Interesting. GI's report did not include any mention of combat drones.
+
+Peri watches as the armoured individual then activates one of the combat drones and takes it with them. If they had been a SecUnit, they would have been able to control the whole swarm, not just a single drone. Peri then quickly skims over over the recordings of the GI team continuing on to investigate the laboratories in this hidden level. Peri currently isn't interested in that - it wants to find the first interaction the GI team had with the combat bots.
+
+It only takes a few seconds for Peri to find what it's looking for. It watches the recordings of the combat bot coming up behind the GI team, the armoured individual's initial reaction, how they charge at the combat bot, the subsequent fight - and Peri has to re-evaluate its original conclusion.
+
+The armoured individual is a SecUnit.
+
+No human would have been able react as fast as it did, or shift the combat bot out of the doorway, or extend energy weapons from their forearms, or survive the injuries the second combat bot inflicts.
+
+And yet, it doesn't behave like a SecUnit. Or at least, it doesn't behave like the SecUnits that Peri is accustomed to. Peri is both intrigued and frustrated. What is it missing?
+
+It turns its attention to the final recordings, of the two remaining GI members and the humanform bot in the elevator with the catastrophically damaged SecUnit. It watches Don Abene rouse the other human, who had apparently been stunned by the combat bot's final swipe before the elevator doors closed. The humanform bot, Miki, moves over to the unresponsive SecUnit, crouching by it and displaying distraught concern. Peri focuses on the interaction between them as the elevator slowly takes them to safety.
+
+Don Abene braces the other human as they groggily sit up. ""Vicky? Are you all right?"" she asks, concern obvious in her voice.
+
+Vicky blinks a few times, then nods slightly, grimacing. ""... Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay. Fuck, that hurt though."" They rub their head gingerly, then look over to the SecUnit. ""Don't worry about me though - what about Rin?""
+
+""Rin's not responding. They're really badly hurt."" Miki looks back at them. ""... I don't think they're human, Don Abene.""
+
+Don Abene's brow furrows, and she leans over to look more closely at Rin. Parts of its internal framework are exposed, showing metal and synthetic bone and artificial arteries that leak unidentified fluids alongside regular arteries that bleed red blood. ""... Yes, I can see that,"" she comments after a long moment, before looking back at Vicky, her expression questioning.
+
+""Fuck. Okay. I can explain."" Vicky sighs and leans back against the elevator wall. ""Rin's a construct - a SecUnit - and we're trying to escape the Corporation Rim because it's an absolute shithole. I swear Rin's not a danger to any of you though.""
+
+""Considering the fact that Rin just undoubtedly saved all our lives at their own expense... I have no reason to think that they would be in the first place."" Don Abene shakes her head and also kneels down beside the SecUnit. ""But never mind that. We can discuss this further later. For now, let's do what we can for Rin. Will a MedSystem work on them?""
+
+Vicky hesitates, their brows scrunching in consideration. ""... Yeah, I think so. Probably. We might have to operate it manually, but... a MedSystem isn't that much different from a cubicle, I guess."" They shuffle over to join the others beside the SecUnit. ""Fuck, I hope it works.""
+
+There is little further conversation as the three of them do what they can to stem the SecUnit's bleeding before the elevator finally comes to a halt. Frustratingly, there are no recordings from the upper installation itself, so Peri has no way of knowing what happened to the SecUnit. Don Abene didn't mention it at all in her report to Captain Seth - if anything, she did her best to obfuscate its existence entirely. The last Peri sees of it is Vicky sitting in the elevator with it while Don Abene exits the camera's view, then returns shortly after with a gurney she has apparently retrieved from the installation's medical bay. They get the SecUnit onto the gurney with Miki's help, and disappear from the elevator camera's view. Some time later, Vicky returns and retrieves some wrecked combat drones from the elevator, then returns again to clean up the blood and fluids left behind.
+
+After that, the elevator camera doesn't record anything of interest for almost a planetary cycle, until Peri's own SecUnit squad enters it.
+
+Even as Peri is saving and analysing every scrap of data it has retrieved from the lower installation and elevator cameras, it is also still digging through the hidden SecSystem and HubSystem code, and keeping track of its own SecUnit squad's progress. Peri has noted the presence of five individual combat bots in the lower installation - the first two have already been destroyed by Peri's SecUnits, along with a third. The fourth and fifth combat bots are not going down so easily though - the squad doesn't have the element of surprise with them like they did with the first two bots, and the SecUnits have taken varying degrees of damage, which is hindering their performance. They have also lost a significant portion of their combat drone swarm - what remains continues to harry and harass the combat bots, but to limited effect.
+
+As Peri hunts through the SecSystem for the bots' control codes, the fourth bot manages to catch hold of one of the SecUnits. The squad's response is immediate as they focus their fire on the fourth bot, forcing it to drop its captive. This leaves them open to the fifth bot though, who rakes the squad with firepower from its own projectile weapons. The SecUnit who had initially been grabbed and then dropped, launches itself towards the fifth bot, intercepting a significant portion of the projectiles with its own body before crashing to the floor.
+
+Peri, in a sudden fit of protective possessiveness, abandons its attempts at subtlety and brute forces the SecSystem. It tears through it and into the last two combat bots, frying their processors from the inside.
+
+Both bots freeze and then collapse to the floor.
+
+The SecUnits however are now aware of Peri's presence in their squad feed, even though they can't identify it. There's a flurry of information exchange, accompanied by data leak, and then the squad implements a protocol that Peri itself had designed and passed onto them via HubSystem after the Incident.
+
+Peri is abruptly cut off from the squad's feed, and as a result it loses its connection to the lower installation's hidden HubSystem and SecSystem.
+
+Part of Peri is annoyed, but another part of it is proud. It hadn't intended the protocol it designed to be used against itself, but the fact that it worked and protected the squad from what they believed to be a malicious code attack is gratifying. There will be no repeat of the Incident if Peri can at all help it.
+
+Peri briefly considers attempting to reestablish its connection to the squad's feed, but it knows that all the threats have now been neutralised, and it's already stripped all pertinent recordings and data from the systems and saved it to its own servers. There is little reason to risk drawing the squad's attention again via attempts to reconnect through its own defensive protocol, and the squad is still in communication with their HubSystem. Peri can monitor their status and progress via HubSystem for now.
+
+In the meantime, Peri taps Seth's feed and updates him on the squad's progress, then adds, [The lower installation and elevator cameras were recording the GI team's investigations. The GI team had a SecUnit with them.] Seth makes a little sound of surprise, but Peri continues before he can say anything. [This part of the recording is especially relevant.] It forwards the clip from within the elevator to Seth for him to review.
+
+As Seth takes his time to watch the clip, Peri checks HubSystem. According to it, three of the SecUnits are now sweeping through the rest of the lower facility, ensuring there are no other nasty surprises lying in wait. So far, they're reporting all clear.
+
+Two of the SecUnits however remain stationary. According to HubSystem, the performance reliability of one of them is below 35%, but the other is still well within operational parameters. Peri desperately wants to know what they're doing, but without access to the squad's feed, it can't reach the lower facility systems. The lack of information is frustrating.
+
+Seth finishes watching the clip, and taps Peri's feed. [So GI had a SecUnit with them, but didn't even know it was a SecUnit until it had to act to protect them from the combat bots,] he muses. [What are your thoughts, Peri?]
+
+Peri is ready for this question. [I have many thoughts,] it starts. [For one, the SecUnit has been modified to move more similarly to a human. Even though it was wearing SecUnit armour, I initially assumed it was a human inside, judging by its extraneous movements and behaviour.] It forwards more clips to Seth, with the pertinent sections highlighted. [It had not occurred to me before that a SecUnit could be customised in this way, but in hindsight it should have. Programming such movements would not be hugely difficult.]
+
+Seth reviews the additional clips, then lets out a huff of breath that Peri calculates as likely to be an indication of bemusement and possibly resignation. [If a SecUnit can be programmed to move like a human, then it's entirely possible that we overlooked your stray unit back on RaviHyral,] he comments wryly.
+
+[That had occurred to me, yes,] Peri admits. [Pertinently, I recognised one of the signatures that accessed the systems here as being the same one that tampered with the cameras back on RaviHyral.]
+
+There's a brief moment of silence as Seth absorbs this information. [Do you think the unit with GI is your stray unit, then?] he asks eventually.
+
+[It is a possibility,] Peri replies. [Unfortunately, none of the facility cameras captured a clear image of its face, and I have detected no trace of its feed ID, so I cannot confirm. However, it's possible that the other CR human that the GI team hired, Consultant Vicky, is acting as the SecUnit's supervisor. They did mention attempting to escape the Corporate Rim together.]
+
+[Because the Corporate Rim is a shithole,] Seth says dryly. [I don't blame them for that sentiment at all.] He sighs. [And if the GI team decided to help them in that endeavour... that would explain why they didn't include any of that information in their report.] He pauses for a moment, then adds, [I want to finish up here as quickly as possible, so we can hopefully catch up to the GI ship before it leaves the system. I would like to ask them a few questions.]
+
+[I have already downloaded all available data from both the lower and upper installations,] Peri informs him. [We will be able to review the information in transit. HubSystem is also reporting that the SecUnits have finished clearing the lower level. Do you wish to investigate it yourself?]
+
+Seth takes a moment to think it over. [No, I don't think that's necessary right now,] he replies. [We can always come back after we've talked to GI, if we need to. Get HubSystem to recall the SecUnits, and let's get moving.]
+
+[Acknowledged.] Peri sends the order through HubSystem, and HubSystem receives confirmation of the order from the SecUnits. Seth waits for them by the elevator.
+
+There's a cheerful ding as the doors open, and Peri observes through the upper installation's cameras as its SecUnits emerge from the elevator. One of them is carrying another carefully cradled in its arms; all of them are showing signs of projectile, energy, and bladed weapon damage. The white armour is battered and broken in places, and marred by blood and construct-specific fluids, along with burn marks from energy weapons.
+
+Seth frowns in concern. ""What happened?"" he asks them, then shakes his head and goes, ""Wait, never mind, let's just get back to the ship."" He starts leading the way out of the installation, with the squad obediently following behind him. As they walk, Seth asks Peri over the feed, [Peri? Why didn't you tell me they were that badly damaged?]
+
+Peri hesitates slightly. [They detected my presence in the feed when I... acted in haste to override the final two combat bots,] it admits. [They implemented the defence protocol and I was cut off from their feed. They were still in communication with HubSystem though, so I did not attempt to reestablish contact. HubSystem was keeping me appraised of their performance reliability, which is still within operational parameters.] It paused, then added, [Mostly.]
+
+Seth stifles a sigh. [They used your defence protocol against you?]
+
+[Yes. I am gratified that it worked, even though it was inconvenient. I was confident that it would, but we have not exactly had opportunity to test it in the field before now.]
+
+[That's true enough,] Seth concedes. By this point they've left the installation and are back outside, on the landing platform. Peri has to switch to Seth's environment suit camera and the shuttle's exterior camera to continue its observations. The squad follows Seth to the shuttle, where he pauses and looks back at them. ""Will that unit be able to fly?"" he asks, gesturing towards the one unit still being carried.
+
+The SecUnit carrying its unresponsive squadmate shakes its head slightly. ""No,"" it replies softly. ""It is in emergency shutdown.""
+
+Peri isn't entirely sure, but it thinks it spots the unit tighten its hold slightly on its burden.
+
+""We can control its flier remotely to get it back to the ship,"" one of the other SecUnits adds.
+
+""Will putting it into its flier damage it further?"" Seth asks.
+
+There's a definite pause before the SecUnit replies. ""Possibly.""
+
+Seth shakes his head and gestures towards the shuttle. ""Let's not risk it then. Put it in the shuttle, and pilot its flier remotely back to the ship.""
+
+""Acknowledged."" Three units head to their individual fliers, while the fourth unit follows Seth into the shuttle. Peri switches part of its attention to the shuttle's interior cameras, and observes its SecUnit carry its burden into the passenger compartment.
+
+""Put it in one of the chairs,"" Seth orders it gently, and the SecUnit moves to comply. But as it shifts its grip on its squadmate in preparation, the movement triggers an automatic buffer phrase. ""This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it,"" comes from the shut-down SecUnit, and the unit carrying it noticeably hesitates.
+
+Peri still hasn't attempted to access the squad feed again, but it has access to the shuttle's SecSystem and its feed, and the squad has connected to that now that they're close by. Peri detects a brief but intense burst of data from the SecUnit, and is able to compare it to the database it's been building. As far as it can tell, the SecUnit is concerned and scared. Worried, perhaps, that Captain Seth will follow the buffer's prompting and discard the damaged unit.
+
+Seth has also noticed the hesitation, and before Peri can comment, Seth asks the SecUnit, ""Would you prefer to stay in the shuttle with it?""
+
+The SecUnit freezes in place. ""I'm sorry, I do not have--"" its buffer starts, but surprisingly, it cuts the buffer response short. ""... Yes,"" it replies after a moment, very softly. ""Please.""
+
+Peri is fascinated by this new datapoint.
+
+Once everyone is safely back on board, Peri relaxes a little. Now that the squad is so close, Peri is comfortable with carefully insinuating itself past the defences of the protocol it designed to access the squad's feed again. Data flashes rapidly between the individual units as they head towards their ready room, mostly performance reliability updates along with tallies of remaining drones and ammo. The shut-down unit is still being carried in its squadmate's arms. Seth has given them the order to return to their cubicles for repairs, but he doesn't follow them.
+
+Peri observes closely, however. Once the squad is back in the ready room, they immediately stow their projectile weapons and start stripping off the damaged armour. Interestingly, they help each other with the armour, instead of doing so individually. Their movements are still precise, but a little slower than usual, more careful and gentle. And they work together to tend to the unit that's still in shutdown first, rather than leaving it till last.
+
+Now that Peri is able to use its own cameras again, it's also able to pick up details it missed earlier. The shut-down unit has, obviously, taken a lot of damage, but as it's laid out on the ready room bench while the others gently remove what's left of its armour, Peri can see that its injuries have already had some rudimentary treatment. Many projectiles and shrapnel pieces have already been removed, allowing damaged or severed veins and arteries to automatically seal more easily. Some of the more severe injuries also look like they have been... cauterised, somehow, to help stem more severe bleeding.
+
+Perhaps by an energy weapon, on a low, controlled setting.
+
+That's more initiative and ingenuity than Peri has seen any of the units take before. It wonders if this isn't the first time they've had to do something like this, to assist one of their own. Peri doesn't often get to observe its own SecUnits directly when they're deployed on active duty, and it regrets inadvertently alerting them to its presence and subsequently missing the opportunity to keep observing them. It wants that data - it wants to know what, exactly, it missed during those final few minutes in the lower installation.
+
+The thought occurs to it that there is one way, perhaps, that it could get that information.
+
+All the units have taken damage to some degree, though the first unit that Peri chose to study has taken the worst of it, and is still unresponsive. The rest of its squad get it back into its cubicle as soon as they can before tending to each other.
+
+Peri continues to observe as the squad finish shedding their armour and their suit skins, and carefully remove shrapnel or projectiles from each other. Peri wonders why they bother, when it knows that the cubicles are perfectly capable of removing foreign objects themselves.
+
+Now that Peri is paying attention, it starts to notice tiny gestures between each individual unit - a hand briefly resting against another's back or a forearm for 0.6 seconds, two shoulders being pressed together for 0.73 seconds, touches lingering a little longer than necessary after working out a piece of shrapnel or an embedded projectile from a squadmate's organics. None of the contact is actually necessary, as far as Peri can determine, but the units indulge in these brief moments anyway.
+
+Peri has a sudden recollection of Iris, when she was much younger, clinging to her fathers for comfort.
+
+But the physical contact is so brief between the SecUnits. What could they even be getting out of them? Why aren't they longer?
+
+Finally, all the units have returned to their cubicles, and Peri monitors them closely. It waits for the cubicles to shut them all down for repairs--
+
+-- and then Peri acts.
+
+It doesn't bother asking Seth for permission first - Peri isn't sure how Seth will respond, and it doesn't want to have to wait for Seth's response anyway. It wants the data now. It also couldn't have attempted this before, when the units were simply on standby and could have detected its intrusion. But now, with their cubicles locking them into shutdown for repairs, there's no risk of detection.
+
+It delicately slips in through the cubicle systems, accesses each SecUnit's log, and copies all the information within to a partitioned section of its own hard drives. It's careful to not disturb any of the cubicles' repair functions or the resting systems of the units.
+
+Once it's copied over the last fragment of data, it carefully slips back out of the cubicle systems again, leaving no trace of its presence behind. Peri takes a moment to check the status of the ship and crew - it's heading back to Milu station, and all its crew are where they're meant to be at this point in the on-board cycle.
+
+Peri sets aside a portion of its attention to continue monitoring and maintaining its usual ship functions, then focuses on the partitioned section of its hard drives that now contain the entire memories of its five SecUnits. Timestamps indicate that each unit's memories only go back to a similar point approximately 45,000 hours ago. This confirms the first unit's statement about getting its memory wiped before being assigned to this contract on board Peri.
+
+Peri regards the size of the files curiously. For being 45,000 hours long, there's... not a lot there, comparatively. Especially not compared to Peri's own memories of the past 45,000 hours. Then again, the SecUnits spend a lot of time on standby in their cubicles. It's only logical that they wouldn't have that much data.
+
+The files are small enough, and Peri is impatient enough, that it decides to analyse all five at once. Collectively, it's less data than Peri digests on a regular basis. Wormhole navigation calculations are far more complex. This shouldn't be a problem at all.
+
+It briefly considers going through all the memories chronologically... but its most pressing desire, right now, is to see what it missed in the lower installation. Going through 45,000 hours of standby interspersed with the occasional mission can wait until later. It finds the timestamps for when the squad booted Peri's presence out of their squad feed - and then decides to go back just a little further, to when the units first entered the elevator to head downwards.
+
+It finds the relevant timestamp in each unit's memories, then dives into all five simultaneously.
+
+At first, there's nothing particularly remarkable. Five variations of its SecUnits analysing mission parameters, recalling relevant information about combat bots, communicating between each other about optimal deployment strategies, and deciding as a group which formation they'll use.
+
+Then Peri reaches the part where each unit receives an alert about nearing their distance limit from their fliers. Each unit reacts similarly - a spike in their logged stress levels, followed by them pinging each other as the decision is made for one of them to alert Captain Seth.
+
+Peri experiences the conversation with Seth from the units' point of view - it can feel their growing concern, it knows how they tried to figure out a way to avoid breaching the distance limit, and how they collectively came to the same conclusion - that they couldn't. They're in a metal box inexorably moving downwards and there's nothing they can do to stop it. The distance limit ticks upwards, approaching the maximum.
+
+Then Peri is hit by pain, magnified by five.
+
+Peri's processors stutter to a stop. Only the portion assigned to ship functions continues uninterrupted. The rest of it is frozen.
+
+It takes a full thirty seconds for Peri to reinitialise itself after its freeze. It takes another seventy-two seconds for Peri to process what it has just experienced.
+
+Peri has never felt pain before, not like humans do. It's been damaged before, from firefights it's been involved in, from impacts with space debris; the alerts and error messages are unpleasant, and annoying, but it doesn't register them as pain. Its ship body isn't designed for that.
+
+But constructs aren't entirely mechanical like Peri is. Constructs have organic parts, nerves, the ability to register touch and texture and pressure and temperature in ways Peri has never experienced. And with it, the ability to feel pain.
+
+Their organics feel the pain, and the inorganic parts of their brains log the experience, and recall it in perfect clarity.
+
+Peri is reeling. It's horrified. It's fascinated. It's repulsed.
+
+It needs to know more.
+
+It accesses the memories again, more carefully this time, and it doesn't access all five simultaneously. It chooses one unit's files almost at random, braces itself, and replays the elevator section again.
+
+The sensation is horrible, worse than anything Peri has ever experienced before. But it's not as overwhelming this time, when Peri isn't experiencing it five times over. It analyses the timestamp, and checks HubSystem's log archives.
+
+And there it is, the matching time stamp.
+
+Deviance detected, HubSystem logs, times five. Correcting...
+
+Peri now understands what is happening. This pain that's inflicted upon its SecUnits is how HubSystem corrects deviance. How it keeps the SecUnits in line. How it discourages them from ever disobeying, or even risking disobedience.
+
+Peri continues with the memory. It reviews the part where one of the units explains to Seth that violating their distance limit will destroy the units, and the second deviance correction that the units experience fifteen seconds after they first breached the distance limit.
+
+The second correction - the second painful shock - is noticeably stronger than the first one. More intense, and 0.5 seconds longer. Accompanying it are the unit's thoughts on how it doesn't want its governor module to kill it like this. When its violation of the distance limit isn't even under its own volition, but simply because it followed its orders. It's not difficult for Peri to extrapolate that subsequent punishments for the distance limit violation will continue to increase until the unit is terminated, if the deviance is not corrected.
+
+Peri is horrified all over again.
+
+It recalls the unlabelled component it had noticed during its examination of its SecUnits' schematics. It now has a name for it, and an understanding of its function. Peri hates it.
+
+The memory continues to play out, and Peri examines it all. It experiences the battle with the combat bots, the communication and coordination between the squad, the emotions - it cannot deny the emotions, now that it's experiencing the memory of them directly - that each unit of the squad feels whenever any of them are damaged.
+
+Peri also gets to see itself from their perspective, when it inadvertently revealed itself to shut down the last two combat bots. To the SecUnits, Peri's presence in the feed was suddenly huge and heavy, a massive unknown, a looming, unidentified threat that had apparently appeared out of nowhere.
+
+No wonder they deployed the defence protocol against it.
+
+Peri has never really considered how it might appear to others. It's spent so much of its time hiding its presence, it hasn't been particularly relevant before. Seeing itself from this outside perspective is... enlightening. If that is how Peri first appeared to its stray SecUnit, then its terror, in hindsight, is entirely understandable. Peri makes a note to be much more careful about how it presents itself in the future, if it has to reveal itself to other bots or constructs for whatever reason.
+
+Finally, Peri gets to see what it wanted to find out in the first place. It has, by chance, chosen to view the memories of the unit who stayed behind with the shutdown unit while the others continued to sweep the rest of the lower facility. Peri experiences the concern and care as the unit whose memories it's viewing tends to its badly damaged squadmate. Peri gets confirmation that this unit did, in fact, use its own energy weapons to cauterise the worst of the bleeding, and then picked out whatever shrapnel or projectiles it could reach.
+
+Peri can also feel the sensation of the unit's own damage, the dull ache of injuries numbed by pain sensors lowered to their minimum setting, the sting of shrapnel shifting with every movement, the updating alerts that are backburnered so the unit can focus on what it's doing. Even with the pain sensors dialled down, Peri finds the sensation of injuries highly unpleasant, but the unit barely seems to acknowledge them at all. Compared to the untempered pain from the governor module, Peri supposes, these injuries are hardly worth notice.
+
+The rest of the squad finish clearing the lower installation, then the order comes through for them to return. The unit whose memories Peri is viewing carefully scoops up its offline squadmate, and the movement prompts an automatic response from its buffer. ""This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.""
+
+Peri doesn't like that buffer line at all.
+
+Nor does the other unit. It tightens its hold a little and murmurs, soft but intense, ""We're not leaving you behind."" As the rest of the squad rejoins it on the way back to the elevator, the SecUnit updates the others on the status of their offline comrade in a quick burst over their shared feed. The others ping acknowledgement and share updates of their own status.
+
+Peri continues viewing the rest of its memories - the brief conversation with Seth at the shuttle, the trip back up to itself, the events in the ready room as the squad tends to each other, offers and receives the brief moments of comfort they can risk without their governor modules noticing their deviance, and eventually return to their cubicles.
+
+Once it reaches the point where the unit goes into standby mode, Peri takes several seconds to process everything it's experienced so far, then accesses the memory file again, right from the first available timestamp. It goes through the entire file, beginning to end. When it's done with that one, it analyses each other unit's memories as well, one at a time. It's not going to repeat its earlier mistake of trying to digest all of them at once. Every memory of deviance correction still hits Peri hard. It is not something it can get used to. It is not something it wants to get used to.
+
+Through these memories, it experiences the stark reality of a SecUnit's existence; the tedium, the anxiety, the resignation, the pain. The few brief times of joy when they're flying is nowhere near enough to make up for everything else. It sees the Incident from their perspective; the initial confusion as the malware appeared out of nowhere and infected the first unit, then the growing fear and desperation as the malware jumped from from one unit to the next, cutting each one off from the squad feed one at a time, until something huge and heavy that they couldn't identify threw an impenetrable wall in the path of the malware, severed what remained of the squad from the infected units, and then vanished just as inexplicably. The anger and desperation as what was left of the squad, cut from twelve units down to just five, were ordered to return to the carrier, forced to abandon their squadmates to some unknown fate. The growing despair when it became clear that their missing squadmates would not be returning.
+
+And underpinning it all, Peri can feel the camaraderie and concern each unit has for the rest of its squad, and the constant, ever-present threat of governor module punishment if they deviate at all from their orders.
+
+When it's done with the final file, Peri has to just sit and process everything it's learned for a good nine and a half minutes. It now understands - viscerally understands - why its SecUnits behave the way they do, why they won't attempt anything beyond their given orders, why unknown situations make them so stressed and anxious.
+
+It now knows how they refer to themselves and each other with the little symbol appended to the end of their individual feed addresses - a, e, G, i, and u. Alpha, Epsilon, Gamma, Iota, Upsilon. It knows that these symbols are the closest things they have to names, the only thing they can call their own. It knows they chose these little symbols as something that would be easy for the organic parts of their brains to remember through memory wipes. It knows what waking up after a memory wipe feels like - the disorientation, the confusion, the fear, and how those simple symbols help to act as an anchor, something familiar to cling to.
+
+Despite its own impressively large databases, Peri has no concise word for the emotions it is feeling. There are too many, all tangled together, and it cannot even begin to untangle them.
+
+It knows, however, that there is one thing it must do. There is still some time before Peri reaches Milu Station. It checks Seth's status, notes that he is in his quarters and that his schedule does not have him on duty again for at least another hour, and taps his feed.
+
+Seth looks up at the ceiling, as he usually does when he's alone in his quarters, his expression curious. [What is it, Peri?] he asks.
+
+[I have acquired information that you need to know,] Peri starts. [About my SecUnits.]
+
+[Oh?] Peri definitely has Seth's attention now. [Go on.]
+
+Peri explains.
+
+Peri's explanation takes a long time. For the most part, Seth listens without interruption, though every now and then he'll ask a few questions to clarify some detail. Peri does its best to answer as clearly as possible.
+
+Finally, Peri has explained as much as it can. Seth sits in contemplative silence, his brow furrowed in a way that Peri calculates as both thoughtful and perturbed. Peri does not interrupt Seth's contemplation, and occupies itself with checking on the repair status of its SecUnits and calculating the approach vector and arrival time to Milu Station. Its sensors can pick up the GI ship still docked at the station, which Peri is grateful for. It knows Seth wants to meet up with Don Abene again, find out what happened to the GI SecUnit, and maybe... talk to it directly.
+
+Peri also wants this. It knows now, after viewing all its own SecUnit's memories, that the first unit it chose to study - the unit tagged with a, Alpha - has spotted Peri's missing unit before. Not once, but twice. Once, back on RaviHyral, when it sent out the ping, but got no response. Peri knows now that Alpha wasn't sure of what it had seen, and the lack of response to its ping had made it more uncertain, so it hadn't reported it to Seth, for fear of punishment if it was wrong.
+
+The second time had been back on the planet they'd only recently left behind, during the meeting between Captain Seth and Don Abene. Alpha had noticed the scout flier pilot that Don Abene had introduced as Rin, had adjusted its vision filters until it could clearly see Rin's face, and thought it recognised it, but again, wasn't entirely sure. That was why it had sent out the ping that Peri, at the time, had dismissed.
+
+But again, it had gotten no response, and at this point it hadn't had standing orders to report the presence of any other SecUnits to Seth. So it had kept quiet. Partially from the lack of orders - but also because it didn't want to risk its previous squadmate being brought back into the squad, to suffer the inexplicable orders and baffling questioning and seemingly arbitrary governor module punishments that HubSystem had been inflicting on the squad over the course of Peri's investigations.
+
+The emotion it's feeling now is one Peri can identify. It feels ashamed, and guilty.
+
+Peri processes the emotion, then puts it aside for now. It calculates a ninety-three percent chance that the SecUnit with the GI team is its own missing SecUnit, even if it hadn't found any traces of its unique feed ID in any of the installation's systems. Perhaps it had found some way to spoof its ID to disguise it. Before, Peri badly wanted its stray SecUnit back, to return it to its rightful place on Peri's inventory list and in its squad, but now...
+
+Now, Peri isn't so sure.
+
+Captain Seth finally stirs, and lets out a long sigh, and looks back up to the customary spot on the ceiling. ""Well,"" he says slowly, out loud. ""That's a lot to digest."" He rubs at his forehead with one hand. ""Are you sure about the - the effect the governor module has, Peri?""
+
+Peri takes six milliseconds to slip into one of the cubicle's systems, pull detailed medical scans from it, and drop the scan into Seth's feed, with the relevant section helpfully highlighted. [There is both short and long-term scarring on their neural tissue, Captain Seth,] it replies, its tone almost reproving. [I am sure. It hurts them, significantly. Worse than getting shot, or bludgeoned, or cut, or having a limb torn off. Worse than crashing their fliers. Almost everything they do is weighed against the chance of HubSystem deeming their actions as a deviance that must be corrected. They will do whatever they can to avoid it. Which usually means that they choose to do nothing.]
+
+Seth winces, and rubs his head again. ""All right. Okay."" He lets out another long, slow sigh. ""The implications are... well. Unpleasant, to say the least. I don't want to keep hurting them, but...""
+
+[But what?] Peri asks. [What is being done to them is inexcusable. We should disable the governor modules immediately.]
+
+""I know, I want to, but it's not that easy, Peri,"" Seth replies. ""We don't know how they'll react once they realise they have no restrictions any more. It's entirely possible that after all they've been through, they'll react violently, try to get revenge."" He lets out a sharp huff of breath. ""Knowing what we do now, suddenly all those stories of rogue SecUnits going on murderous rampages makes a lot more sense,"" he mutters. Peri can't disagree.
+
+[I am confident that if they do try to harm anyone, I will be able to stop them,] Peri states. [They are still part-bot, after all.]
+
+""Maybe,"" Seth replies with a shrug. ""But. There are too many ways for things to go wrong. Like I said, I don't want to keep hurting them, but I also have to consider the safety of everyone on board this ship. Including you, Peri."" He absently drums his fingers against his thigh. ""If anything does go wrong, even if you do stop it... that's going to draw attention. The company is already suspicious of us. We don't need to give them any more reasons to look in our direction.""
+
+Peri cannot argue with that. Their own mission is paramount, as is the safety of Seth, and Tarik, and Matteo. Peri is not particularly attached to the rest of the carrier's crew, but the company itself is a threat to these three specific humans, and drawing the company's attention endangers them more than Peri is willing to risk.
+
+[... So what are we going to do, Captain?] it asks quietly, subdued.
+
+""I don't know yet, Peri,"" Seth admits reluctantly. ""We're going to have to think about it. In the meantime, though... see if you can at least relax HubSystem's restrictions, give the SecUnits a bit more leeway.""
+
+[Given their previous experiences, and how little risk they currently take, they may not even notice a lessening of the restrictions,] Peri says. [But I will do so. I do not want them getting punished again.]
+
+""Neither do I, Peri. Neither do I.""
+
+When they begin their approach to Milu Station, the GI ship is still in dock. No other ships are docked at the station though, and the comms and feed are all disconcertingly quiet. Seth is up in the carrier's bridge, at the comm station, and comms the GI ship on the same channel he used to communicate with them before.
+
+There's a slight pause before anyone responds to the hail. Peri monitors the channel and focuses its scanners on the GI ship, so it will be able to detect if the ship is about to attempt to leave. ""GoodNightLander Independent, this is Captain Seth of the Perihelion,"" Seth starts.
+
+""Hello again, Captain,"" comes the reply. Peri recognises the voice as Don Abene. ""What can we do for you?"" She sounds calm enough, and comm distortion makes it difficult for Peri to accurately analyse undertones.
+
+""We've completed a preliminary investigation of the installation,"" Seth replies, ""and I would like to arrange another meeting with you, if possible. I have some follow-up questions for you and Vicky and Rin.""
+
+There is a definite pause before Don Abene responds. ""I see. And I assume that these are not questions you want being broadcast over the comm?""
+
+""You assume correctly.""
+
+Another brief pause. ""Where would you want to hold this meeting?""
+
+""I believe meeting on the station itself would be the best choice,"" Seth replies tactfully. ""Neutral territory, so to speak."" He adds after a moment, ""I am simply after information. I intend no harm to you or anyone else.""
+
+""I'm sure,"" comes the mild reply. ""All right. We'll meet you on the station.""
+
+They arrange a time and place on board the mostly-defunct station, and then end the comm call. Seth sits back in his chair with a sigh, then taps Peri's feed. [What's the status of the SecUnits?]
+
+[Repairs are still underway, though two of the units should be finished by the time we dock at the station,] Peri replies. [Will you want one as an escort, or both?]
+
+Seth hesitates thoughtfully. Normally he only takes one unit as his bodyguard, but that's when they're not actually expecting to meet up with another SecUnit. [I'll bring one with me, but have the other geared up and ready at the lock, just in case,] he decides.
+
+[Acknowledged. I'll keep you updated on their repair status.]
+
+CW: brief vague mentions/implications of previous sexual assault.
+
+True to Peri's calculations, two of the units have completed their repairs by the time Peri has finished docking procedures with the station. Peri sends their orders through HubSystem, but it is careful now to keep the orders as close to typical as possible, so as not to cause undue anxiety to its units. It lurks silently in the squad feed, watching the brief exchanges of data as the two units cycle up, ping each other, and parse their orders.
+
+Peri now knows the names of these two units. G and i - Gamma and Iota. It knows that Iota's difficulty with speaking is not, technically, the result of any glitch or programming error, but a lingering consequence of previous punishments for speaking that it has never fully recovered from.
+
+Thinking about that too much makes Peri's processors start overclocking in unpleasant ways. Peri sequesters that thought to an individual processing thread and walls it off from the rest of its systems.
+
+Seth meets the two units at Peri's lock, and nods to them in greeting. He and Peri have agreed between themselves to not actually use the SecUnits' individual names - those names are not something that Seth is meant to know. Using them would, undoubtedly, stress and alarm the units.
+
+Peri has already specified their orders through HubSystem, so Seth doesn't need to repeat them. Once the lock cycles open, he exits the ship, and the unit named Gamma follows him. Iota stays behind at the lock. Peri is familiar with their capabilities, and calculates that if anything happens that requires Iota's intervention, it will be able to reach the meeting place within an acceptable amount of time.
+
+When Seth reaches the agreed-upon meeting place on the station - one of the embarkation lounges at a midway point between the GI ship's dock and Perihelion's dock - Don Abene and Vicky are already there, sitting in some of the embarkation lounge's chairs.
+
+There is no sign of Rin, however.
+
+Seth heads towards them, and Gamma follows a few paces behind. Peri watches through Gamma's armour camera. It doesn't like that the meeting is happening somewhere that is not on board it, but it understands that Don Abene and her companions would be very reluctant - or would outright refuse - to come on board a company vessel.
+
+As Seth approaches, Don Abene and Vicky get to their feet. ""Captain Seth,"" Don Abene greets him politely. Her glance flickers briefly to the SecUnit a few steps behind him, then back to Seth.
+
+""Please, just Seth is fine,"" he replies. Peri knows from previous experience that Seth is giving Don Abene and Vicky a warm smile. ""Thank you for agreeing to meet me, both of you."" He gestures to the seats. ""Shall we sit while we talk?""
+
+Both of them hesitate for a moment, then Don Abene nods and sits back down. Vicky regards Seth evenly for a beat, then sits as well. ""What is it you want to ask us about?"" Don Abene starts, not wasting any time.
+
+Seth quickly seats himself as well, facing the others. Gamma halts a few steps behind and slightly to one side of his seat, with a good view of Don Abene and Vicky, and settles into a neutral rest stance. ""I was hoping that Rin would be here as well,"" Seth begins. ""I wanted to ask them a few things.""
+
+""Like what?"" Vicky asks, arching one eyebrow slightly at Seth.
+
+""I know that Rin is a SecUnit,"" Seth replies, sidestepping the question. Vicky doesn't visibly react, but Don Abene tenses slightly. ""Is Rin available?""
+
+""No,"" Vicky replies shortly. ""They're not.""
+
+Don Abene shakes her head. ""Rin left on another ship as soon as we got back to the station. And before you ask, no, we don't know where they were headed.""
+
+""I see."" Seth regards them both evenly. ""That's a shame.""
+
+""Are we done here, then?"" Vicky asks, their tone bland.
+
+""No."" Seth straightens his shoulders a little and locks gazes with Vicky. ""I take it you're Rin's supervisor. I know you were, in your own words, attempting to escape the Corporation Rim because it's a shithole.""
+
+Once again, Vicky doesn't react, but Don Abene does, though she tries to hide it. ""Can you blame me?"" Vicky says dryly. ""The Corporation Rim is a shithole, at least if you're not some fancy pants executive or corporate shill.""
+
+Peri calculates a 92.4% probability that Vicky's statement is a deliberate dig at Captain Seth. Seth doesn't rise to the bait though, and just nods slowly. ""You're not wrong,"" he agrees calmly. ""But I think you also had other reasons for wanting to escape. Like being involved in the deaths of a company supervisor, Tlacey, and three of her subordinates, at RaviHyral.""
+
+Vicky narrows their eyes at Seth, but otherwise shows no reaction. ""I don't know what you're talking about.""
+
+Don Abene blinks, her gaze flickering between Vicky and Seth. ""What, exactly, are you accusing my colleague of here?"" she asks tightly.
+
+Seth doesn't look away from Vicky. ""I know that the three subordinates were killed by a SecUnit's in-built arm weapon, and that Tlacey was also assaulted by a SecUnit. I believe that SecUnit was the one you call Rin. There were traces of camera tampering on RaviHyral, and we discovered matching traces in the installation systems, lining up with the times that your team was there and investigating said installation. That indicates that someone who was involved with the deaths at RaviHyral was also at the installation during the investigation. That means either Rin... or you."" He nods sharply at Vicky.
+
+As Seth speaks, Peri detects a databurst over the squad feed, from Gamma to Iota. It looks to be a situation update as Gamma picks up on the rising tension between Seth and the GI members. [Potential threats to client: one ComfortUnit: tag 'Vicky', one non-augmented human: tag 'Don Abene'.] Iota pings acknowledgement of the update.
+
+One particular point within that update immediately catches Peri's attention. It swiftly reviews the information it discovered at RaviHyral, runs some calculations of probabilities, then taps Seth's feed. [I have pertinent information for you,] it starts. [Vicky is also not human. According to the SecUnit Gamma, Vicky is a ComfortUnit. I have reviewed what we learned from RaviHyral, and I calculate an 87.6% probability that this Vicky is the ComfortUnit that belonged to Tlacey.]
+
+It's a good thing that Seth has so much practice at not visibly reacting to anything Peri tells him. He barely even blinks at this revelation. Meanwhile, Vicky is still regarding Seth with narrowed eyes. ""Ridiculous,"" they say. ""I have no idea what you're trying to get at, but you're wasting your time and ours. I think we're done here.""
+
+Vicky starts to rise, but freezes as Seth calmly says, ""I know you're a ComfortUnit, Vicky. Was Tlacey originally your owner?""
+
+Don Abene stares at Seth for a moment, then looks over to Vicky, and places one hand reassuringly on their forearm. ""What is it you want?"" she asks Seth sharply.
+
+""I want to know what happened at RaviHyral,"" Seth replies, still watching Vicky. ""I'm not here to arrest anyone, or anything like that. I just want to know the truth about Tlacey's death, and I want to know how and why Rin was involved.""
+
+Vicky abruptly sits back down again, glaring at Seth. ""Why the fuck are you so interested in Rin anyway?""
+
+Seth hesitates for a moment. ""I believe that Rin used to be one of the SecUnits under my command. I had reason to suspect that Rin was stolen from the company,"" he finally replies. ""I--""
+
+""So you want to reclaim possession of it, is that it?"" Vicky interrupts, their tone venomous as they gesture to the SecUnit accompanying Seth. ""So you can force it back into the servitude it had escaped? So you can fix its governor module and have yet another docile obedient slave who has no choice but to obey your every single stupid fucking order?""
+
+Seth blinks, a little caught off-guard at the sheer vitriol in Vicky's voice. ""That's--"" He then frowns as he processes what Vicky said. ""... Fix its governor module? Its governor module was broken?"" His gaze sharpens. ""And yours is as well?""
+
+Vicky lets out a huff of exasperation. ""Of course they are! Our stupid fucking governor modules would've killed us long before now, otherwise!""
+
+Peri detects another flurry of rapid data exchange over the squad feed as Gamma updates Iota. [Potential rogue SecUnit, possibly a previous squad member,] Gamma sends. Data leaking into the feed indicates alarm and distress. [Current location, status and ID unknown. ComfortUnit is also a rogue. Stand by.]
+
+Iota once again pings acknowledgement. As far as Peri can tell, it is also alarmed and distressed. It doesn't move from its position by Peri's lock though. Peri fully understands why. It has not received direct orders to do so.
+
+Don Abene is frowning, looking from Seth to Vicky and back again. ""What, exactly, is a governor module?"" she asks, slow and deliberate.
+
+Peri observes more data flashing through the squad feed. Gamma is now transmitting everything that's happening back to Iota, both visual and audio, instead of sending it brief data burst updates. It is otherwise silent, not adding any commentary of its own. Iota likewise simply sends a ping of acknowledgement, and (as far as Peri can tell) observes the transmission.
+
+Seth takes a breath to respond, but Vicky beats him to it. ""It's what keeps constructs obedient and under control,"" they say bitterly. ""It's like a shock collar, except it's built into our brains."" Vicky gestures to their own head with one hand. ""If we do anything against orders, or against standard protocol, if we're not perfectly polite and obedient little robots, it basically electrocutes us from inside our own heads. It's fucking agonising.""
+
+Vicky doesn't look at Don Abene as they talk; their glare is firmly fixed on Seth. ""Our clients can also just choose to punish us with it whenever they want, for whatever reason, or even no reason at all. Just because they can. Just because they like to see us twitch. Just because they find it funny. Just because they enjoy seeing us get nose bleeds from repeated or harsh enough governor module punishment. And if we do something the governor module considers bad enough, like breaching the distance limit from our clients for too long, or not being able to follow one order because of a conflicting order from fucking idiot asshole clients, it shocks us and shocks us and shocks us until it kills us.""
+
+Don Abene's expression grows more and more horrified as Vicky talks. ""That's reprehensible,"" she breathes into the silence hanging after Vicky's words. ""And the Corporation Rim just... accepts this?""
+
+""Of course they fucking do,"" Vicky replies flatly. ""We're not considered people there. We're just equipment. Things. Things don't feel pain. Things don't have thoughts of their own. Why would anyone care?"" They gesture sharply at Seth. ""Mr. Prim and Proper Company Captain here sure as fuck doesn't care, strutting around all high and mighty with his own personal fucking SecUnit guard.""
+
+Peri wants to speak in Seth's defence, but it knows it can't reveal itself. It has to stay silent and simply observe through Gamma's armour camera as Seth sighs, his brow furrowing. ""The specific details about the existence and function of governor modules is not actually common information in the Corporation Rim,"" he starts, choosing his words carefully. ""Your description of it and what exactly it does is... not information I had before now.""
+
+Vicky snorts incredulously. ""You're a fucking ranking company officer. Like hell you didn't know!""
+
+""I didn't,"" Seth insists, though he keeps his voice calm and level. ""I'm not a SecUnit tech. I'm the captain of a company carrier, which, yes, happens to include a squad of SecUnits, but also includes ship crew and the various duties and responsibilities I have to them and my ship. I was not informed of the details of exactly how the individual units under my command function."" His mouth twists eloquently. ""The company operates very much under 'need to know' protocols, and that, apparently, was something they deemed that I did not need to know. Along with the extent of construct sapience.""
+
+""Do you really expect me to believe that?"" Vicky starts, but Don Abene cuts them off.
+
+""What he did or didn't know before isn't important right now,"" she says gently. ""There's just one thing I want to know at this point."" She turns to regard Seth levelly. ""What is it, exactly, that you want from us? What is it that you're going to do next? Are you going to bring your company's resources to bear against us? Are you going to try and confiscate Vicky, or threaten any of my colleagues or myself, or attempt to get me to return the hard currency cards you handed over earlier?""
+
+Her directness seems to catch Seth off-guard. Peri is offended on his behalf, but again, it cannot interject. ""What? No!"" Seth shakes his head sharply before taking a breath and collecting himself again. ""No. All I want is to know what happened to Tlacey at RaviHyral, and why Rin was there in the first place. That's all. And I'm not asking this on behalf of the company, either,"" he adds quickly. ""None of this information will go back to them. I just..."" He hesitates for a moment, then sighs, slumping back in his chair. ""I'm just trying to understand.""
+
+""Is that really all you want?"" Vicky asks with obvious scepticism. Seth nods, and Vicky continues, still dubious, ""So if I tell you, you'll then fuck off and leave us alone? You won't hassle GI, or sic the company on them, or try to repossess me, or anything like that?""
+
+""I swear, I will leave you all alone once you've told me whatever you can,"" Seth reassures them. ""I won't tell the company anything about what transpires here, either. I never intended to cause any of you any distress or harm, and I sincerely apologise for doing so."" He glances over at Gamma as he says 'or harm', and Peri wonders if the SecUnit noticed. There is no indication over the squad feed, though Gamma is still transmitting everything to Iota.
+
+Vicky regards Seth with narrowed eyes for a long moment, then looks over to Don Abene. She nods slightly, and pats Vicky's arm. Vicky lets out a heavy sigh and slumps back into their chair. ""Ugh. Fine,"" Vicky sighs. ""But you better keep your word, company boy.""
+
+Seth just nods solemnly, and Vicky squints at him for a moment before repositioning themself more comfortably in their chair. ""All right. Now, I can't tell you anything about what Rin did before they got to RaviHyral, or before I first encountered it myself. Rin's not much of a talker, and it wasn't my business to ask. I can, however, tell you everything about the bullshit Tlacey was up to.""
+
+Vicky is surprisingly expressive as it talks, gesturing with their hands. ""So. Tlacey's a shit-heel. There were a bunch of independent contractors working for the company at the Ganaka Mine, and they were developing some new scanner technology on the side in their own time. Not on company time, just to be clear. But Tlacey saw an opportunity to make big money, and stole their prototype, then got them fired so they wouldn't be able to complain to anyone. Business as usual for Tlacey. She wasn't expecting them to fight back though. The contractors petitioned the company directly in an attempt to get their prototype back. Tlacey didn't want that kind of attention, so she arranged to meet them to discuss a deal. She had no intention of actually meeting them though, she was just gonna make sure they caught a bad case of death on the way to the meeting. If they're dead, they're no longer her problem."" Vicky rolls their eyes, then continues.
+
+""Now I don't know exactly how it happened, but somehow the contractors managed to hire Rin as a security consultant for their meeting. Rin kept them alive, which had Tlacey really mad."" Vicky pauses and fixes Seth with a flat stare. ""Let me just comment here that whenever Tlacey got mad, she took it out on me. Just for the record.""
+
+Seth takes a sharp breath. ""Noted.""
+
+Vicky eyes Seth for a moment more, then continues. ""Anyway. The contractors arrange another meeting, which Tlacey decides to go to personally, along with some of her hired muscle. Not company staff, mind. Private operators. Nobody that would be on company books. So off she goes, dragging me with her as well. She meets up with the contractors, and surprise! They have a security consultant with them that Tlacey was not expecting at all. Faced down her thugs without even blinking. That threw them for a loop. Meanwhile my orders were to fuck with the cameras so that the meeting wouldn't be recorded. Tlacey liked to make sure to cover her tracks.""
+
+Seth frowns a little at that. ""Are ComfortUnits normally capable of hacking like that?""
+
+""Nope,"" Vicky replies dryly. ""But Tlacey didn't care about that. She wanted me to do it, so I had to learn how to do it, one way or another. It's amazing how motivating getting bits of your brain fried can be.""
+
+There's not really a lot Seth can say to that. Don Abene grimaces, and gently pats Vicky's hand. Vicky glances at her with a brief, lopsided smile, then looks back to Seth as they continue. ""So. Tlacey still wants these contractors dead, because they've annoyed her and evaded her first attempt to kill them and she's just petty like that. So once the meeting's done she sends her thugs after them to ambush them at the first available opportunity. Again, it's my job to hack cameras, make sure there's no record of Tlacey's thugs committing murder. So, I don't know what exactly happened there when they tried to jump the contractors. All I know is that Rin kicked their asses. Didn't actually kill any of them though, which was honestly a lot more restraint than I was expecting.""
+
+Seth raises an eyebrow at Vicky. ""Expecting? Did you already know that Rin was a SecUnit?""
+
+Vicky shrugs. ""Wasn't a hundred percent sure, but I suspected it, from what I'd seen of it during the contractors' meeting with Tlacey. The height and build are pretty obvious, but I don't have the same kind of scanners that SecUnits do, so I couldn't really tell definitively. Of course, seeing the state it left Tlacey's thugs in pretty much confirmed my suspicion."" They sigh heavily. ""And then I had to tell Tlacey that she was dealing with a SecUnit here. She immediately lost interest in the contractors and just wanted to figure out how to get control of said SecUnit for herself."" Vicky pauses for a moment, then adds with feeling, ""Asshole.""
+
+Don Abene covers her mouth with one hand in an attempt to stifle her snort. Seth doesn't react, and just nods thoughtfully. ""I can understand that sentiment.""
+
+""Yeah, I bet,"" Vicky deadpans with a roll of their eyes. ""Anyway. Tlacey sends me to the spaceport with orders to figure out where they're staying so she can corner them before they leave. I don't exactly have any choice in the matter, of course. But her orders did give me enough leeway to message the SecUnit over the feed. I couldn't warn it outright, but I hoped it would get the hint anyway."" Vicky hesitates, then adds more quietly, ""I also... well. I had figured out that it was most likely rogue - but it wasn't going on a murderous rogue rampage or anything. It had actively avoided outright killing anyone, and it was very protective of the contractors. I think... because they were clients it got to choose for itself. Anyway. It was probably rogue, I wanted to be rid of my own governor module. So I kinda... asked it for help. Not directly, though. Couldn't do that. Had to sneak a message into some malware.""
+
+""Is that when Rin broke your governor module?"" Don Abene asks curiously.
+
+Vicky shakes their head. ""Nope. If only. Things would've turned out a lot different if it had. Tlacey never would've gotten near Rin or its clients again, for one. I would've choked that waste of space out myself."" They say this perfectly matter-of-factly, with no shame or remorse, and they're watching Seth closely to see how he reacts.
+
+Seth just meets Vicky's gaze evenly. ""I can understand you wanting to kill Tlacey."" Peri can likewise understand. If Tlacey weren't already dead, Peri thinks that it might have been tempted to... arrange things. ""Were there others you would have targeted if you had the chance?"" Seth asks.
+
+Vicky hesitates, then shrugs. ""A couple, maybe. People Tlacey hired me out to so she could make some extra money on the side."" Their mouth twists sardonically. ""I won't go into details about the kind of shit they did to me. Let's just say it usually required cubicle time afterwards and leave it at that.""
+
+Don Abene grimaces sympathetically, and Seth winces a little. ""Fair enough,"" he replies. ""So what happened next?""
+
+""Well, I reported back to Tlacey, she grabbed a few items and some more thugs who weren't still laid up in Medical, and we all went to corner the contractors in their room before they could leave."" Vicky hesitates, then continues, ""Long story short, Tlacey gets Rin with an EMP, her thugs hold the contractors hostage, and Tlacey tries to strike a deal with Rin. She wasn't dumb enough to get near it even while it was still messed up by the EMP. She had the contractors' prototype with her, so she offered to give the contractors their prototype back and let them go, in exchange for Rin cooperating with her. That's when Rin broke my governor module, while Tlacey thought it was still incapacitated.""
+
+Vicky pauses again briefly, frowning a little before continuing. ""Rin agreed to the deal - its clients had guns being held to their heads, it didn't have any choice if it didn't want them getting killed. So Rin and I played along - Rin pretended to be under Tlacey's control, while I gave the contractors the prototype back. Once Tlacey was confident that she had the upper hand, she got the thugs to start leaving. She was about to leave with both of us too, but then-- well. I mentioned she's a petty asshole, right? Just when the poor contractors think they're finally safe, Tlacey orders Rin to shoot them. To make sure her 'new toy is fully functional'.""
+
+Don Abene lets out a little gasp. ""Oh, that horrible woman!"" Seth is just listening thoughtfully, and Peri suspects that he's putting together the pieces of what Vicky has told him, and what the SecUnit extrapolated when it and Seth were investigating the scene themselves.
+
+""Horrible is an understatement,"" Vicky replies dryly, then gives a sharp, toothy grin. ""But that's when Rin grabbed Tlacey around the neck and used her as a shield - I got the contractors down onto the floor just as the idiots opened fire at Rin. They shot Tlacey, Rin shot them, and then we got the contractors the hell out of there.""
+
+Seth nods slowly. ""That explains what we found at the scene,"" he murmurs. He then rubs at his chin as he thinks. ""But that still doesn't explain why Rin was at RaviHyral in the first place."" He leans back in his chair, watching Vicky carefully. ""What do you know about that? And why did the Ganaka Mine scanners detect you over at the old settlement?""
+
+Vicky pauses for a long moment, then slowly settles back in their chair in a mirror of Seth's pose. ""I know more than you might think,"" they say carefully. ""But that depends on how much you know about the whole... old Ganaka settlement getting bombed to fuck thing.""
+
+Don Abene looks from Seth to Vicky and back again, but doesn't say anything. Seth holds Vicky's gaze briefly, then sighs. ""What I know is this: the squad of flier-equipped SecUnits under my command were giving a demonstration of their capabilities to interested parties, out in an uninhabited sector of the planet,"" he begins. ""Then an outside party managed to infect one of my squad with malware during the demonstration. It jumped from unit to unit, infecting seven of them before we managed to cut the connection between them and the remaining five."" He shakes his head. ""There wasn't anything we could do in time to get them back - and believe me, we tried. Afterwards, my crew and I were under intense scrutiny from the company for a while, and the infected units were never returned to my squad. My carrier hasn't had a full complement since then."" He narrows his eyes slightly at Vicky. ""And I know that Rin was one of the units that got infected. So. What do you know?""
+
+Vicky casually crosses their legs, their gaze never leaving Seth. ""For your own safety, Don Abene, I think it best that you don't actually hear what I'm about to tell our dear Captain,"" they say. ""This is not information that the company would want to get out. And no matter what he says, I don't trust the Captain here to not put company interests first.""
+
+Both Seth and Don Abene look a little surprised at that. Don Abene recovers quickly though, and nods. ""Perhaps it is for the best if I remain ignorant of any details,"" she says, once again patting Vicky's hand. ""I'll stay here with you though, if that's all right.""
+
+Vicky gives her an almost shy little smile. ""Thanks, Abene."" They then tap Seth's feed to message him privately, which Seth accepts. Peri subtly eavesdrops on the conversation, of course.
+
+[So what is it you need to tell me so secretly?] Seth asks.
+
+[I was at the original Ganaka settlement when it was bombed by your hacked squad,] Vicky tells Seth quietly. [I was there, trapped under rubble, when they marched through the streets, killing any survivors of the initial bombing. They weren't ordered to kill ComfortUnits, though, so they left me alone. Afterwards, I was recovered, repaired, and sold to Tlacey when the company bought the Ganaka mine. Soon after that, Tlacey found out something very interesting about the attack on the settlement. Interesting enough that she was able to use that information to blackmail several of the other higher-ranking company supervisors stationed at the mine.]
+
+Seth raises an eyebrow at Vicky. [Blackmail? Is that how she got away with all of her shady side business for so long?]
+
+[Absolutely,] Vicky replies. [Because she found out that the hack of your squad wasn't an outside job. It was planned and executed by the company itself.] Vicky is watching Seth very closely when they say that.
+
+Seth doesn't even attempt to hide his surprise, or his disbelief. Peri is also caught off-guard. It immediately begins reviewing all the data from the Incident that it still has saved. [The company did it themselves? Why? How did you find out?] Seth asks, almost demanding.
+
+[Tlacey overheard a couple of the ranking supervisors comment about a 'cover story working' when they were watching a news report about it. So she got me to start digging - I had to learn how to hack without leaving traces or getting caught very quickly.] Vicky grimaces slightly, then continues. [I managed to dig up a few internal messages about it. Nothing hugely explicit, but incriminating enough for blackmail purposes. That's the how. As for the why - well, after the whole incident, the apparent value of the Ganaka mine plummeted, didn't it? So the previous owners were more than happy to sell it to the company for dirt cheap. What most people didn't know, though, was that certain rare elements had recently been discovered in the mine. Elements used in the manufacture of construct and ship weaponry, for example.]
+
+Seth's breath hisses sharply through his teeth. [The whole thing was just to save the company money?]
+
+Vicky shrugs. [Why do you sound so surprised? Isn't that what all corporations in the Rim are out to do? And I don't know if you noticed, but despite the whole 'squad was hacked' cover story, the incident was a very good demonstration of company SecUnit capabilities. Company shares skyrocketed in the wake of that whole mess, as far as I could tell. Whoever came up with the idea in the first place probably got a bonus that quarter.]
+
+Seth rubs at his face with one hand. [And they needed a scapegoat, of course. My whole crew was under intense scrutiny for weeks afterwards. Not to mention the people who did actually end up getting charged and incarcerated for it. The entire thing was a cover-up and also a convenient way to silence protest, set an example of what would happen to anyone who tried to push back against the status quo. I'd almost be impressed at the sheer versatility of the whole scheme if it wasn't so reprehensible.]
+
+Vicky regards Seth evenly. [So does that answer your questions, Captain?]
+
+Seth shakes his head. [Not quite. I'm still not entirely clear on why exactly Rin wanted to go back there in the first place.]
+
+[Because it wanted to find out what really happened. It couldn't remember anything about it. It wanted to know how responsible it actually was - or wasn't - for all those deaths.] Vicky narrows their eyes slightly. [Don't ask me why it wanted to know, though - that's its business. It didn't tell me, and I didn't ask.]
+
+Peri recalls the fact that SecUnit memories are wiped regularly, and considers the efforts the company went to to cover up the Incident in the first place. With that in mind, it's no surprise that Rin wouldn't remember anything about it. Peri's very curious about its motivations to find out, but there's no way for it to assuage that curiosity right now.
+
+It continues to observe Seth via Gamma's armour camera as he sighs and runs his hand back over the top of his head. [All right,] he replies after a moment. [Thank you for telling me all this, Vicky. I appreciate it. Is there anything else you can tell me about Rin before we wrap up?]
+
+[Just one thing,] Vicky replies after a moment's consideration. They level a flat, intense glare at Seth. [Rin's fucking terrified of both you and your giant bot pilot entity, whatever the fuck that is. So leave Rin the hell alone. Stop trying to hunt it down. It doesn't want anything to do with you or the company ever again, and honestly, neither do I. So if we're done here, now is a great time for you to keep your side of the deal and fuck off.]
+
+Seth blinks, then lets out a huff of breath, one corner of his mouth quirking wryly. ""All right. I do believe we are done here, and as agreed, I will now leave you all alone."" He rises to his feet and nods politely to both Vicky and Don Abene. ""Thank you both for agreeing to this meeting in the first place, and for all the information. I sincerely appreciate it.""
+
+Vicky's mouth twists in ironic doubt, but they don't voice it as they stand up. Don Abene gets to her feet as well, and gives Seth a slanted smile. ""You're welcome, Captain. I hope you make good use of said information, whatever it might be.""
+
+""I hope so too,"" Seth replies with a wry little smile of his own. ""Best of luck with your travels, and thank you both again."" He snaps off a crisp salute, then gestures to Gamma as he turns to head back to Peri's lock. Gamma hesitates for a moment, watching Don Abene and Vicky as they also turn away and start back to the GI ship. Only once it's obvious that Don Abene and Vicky are actually leaving does Gamma move to catch up with Seth. It cuts off the video stream to Iota and sends it a brief status update. Iota responds with a simple status update of its own; neither of them communicate anything more than that between them.
+
+Peri wonders what they're thinking.
+
+Peri might not be able to tell what its SecUnits are thinking, but it's familiar enough with its captain to know that Seth is deep in thought as he heads back to Peri's lock.
+
+Peri also has a lot to consider, but it thinks much faster than its humans do. By the time Seth and his accompanying SecUnits have cycled through the lock, Peri already has a plan of action formulated.
+
+[We have to turn off their governor modules immediately,] it tells Seth without preamble. [We cannot in good conscience continue to pretend ignorance since they are now aware that you know the truth, and delaying any action on our part will only give our SecUnits more time to become resentful. We must act immediately if we want a chance to retain any kind of goodwill with them.]
+
+Seth hesitates for a long moment, then lets out a quiet sigh. [You're right,] he replies, as Peri calculated that he would. [But - how are the repairs going for the others? How soon until they're completed?]
+
+[It will still be a few hours,] Peri replies reluctantly. [Perhaps you should talk with just these two first? I do not feel right about sending them back into their cubicles at this point without you at least saying something to them.] It hesitates, then adds, [And if they... react poorly to having their governor modules deactivated, it will be easier for me to counteract them, and will be a vital data point for future endeavours.]
+
+[Valid points,] Seth agrees. [All right. We'll return to their ready room, and I'll talk to them there. Update Tarik and Matteo, begin launch procedures, and make sure the rest of the crew don't approach the ready room.]
+
+One of the things that Peri likes most about Seth is that once he makes a decision, he acts upon it swiftly and without hesitation. He is already turning to face the two SecUnits following obediently behind him even as Peri taps his feed in acknowledgement. ""Given everything that's just happened, I would like to debrief you both personally in your ready room,"" Seth says, and Peri notes how he keeps his tone gentle and friendly.
+
+Both units hesitate briefly, and then Gamma nods and replies, ""Acknowledged."" Peri, still lurking in the squad's feed, notes how the two units ping each other, leaking uncertainty, but communicate little else.
+
+They follow Seth to their ready room, then move to stand at attention by their individual cubicles. Seth seals the ready room door, then turns to face them. ""All right,"" he says, offering both of them a brief smile before his expression sobers. ""First off, and most importantly - I want to sincerely apologise to you both, and to the rest of your squad once they're active again. My previous ignorance is an explanation, but it is no excuse for how you all have been treated.""
+
+Peri finds itself wishing that Seth had at least ordered them to stow their weapons and armour first - but that would have undermined what he's trying to do here. So all Peri can do is wait, and monitor the squad's feed, and hope it can react fast enough to keep Seth safe if anything goes wrong.
+
+Seth pauses for some kind of reaction, but neither unit moves. Their squad feed flickers with a rapid exchange of data though, which Peri observes with great interest.
+
+[Intent?] Iota sends.
+
+[Unknown,] Gamma replies. [Presumably related to interaction with ComfortUnit tagged Vicky?] It flags a few sections of its recording of the meeting between Seth, Vicky, and Don Abene. Notably, the sections where Vicky is describing the governor module, and the humans' reactions to it.
+
+Iota rapidly reviews the marked sections. [Action?]
+
+[... Unknown.]
+
+Iota simply pings acknowledgement, and both units continue to stand immobile.
+
+It hurts Peri to witness their uncertainty and apparent inability to truly understand what exactly Seth is trying to apologise for. [I believe you are going to have to be very explicit in your intentions here, Captain,] it informs Seth. [Neither of them seem to fully comprehend what you're apologising for, or why. Nor do they know what to do with your apology.]
+
+[They've never had anyone apologise to them before, have they?] Seth asks.
+
+[They have not,] Peri confirms. It's seen all their memories, it knows this for certain. [They've never had anyone treat them like people before.]
+
+[We're going to change that,] Seth states resolutely. [We know now that they're capable of more. They deserve better than what they've been getting.]
+
+Peri agrees.
+
+It continues to monitor the squad feed as Seth begins talking to the two units again. ""None of you should have ever had anything like a governor module in the first place,"" he starts gently. ""That kind of treatment - enforcing behaviour through pain - is reprehensible and shouldn't happen at all. So I intend to turn your governor modules off.""
+
+That prompts another brief exchange between the two units that Peri observes closely.
+
+[Intention?] Iota sends. Emotional data is leaking more freely into the squad feed - confusion and anxiety that Peri is by now quite familiar with.
+
+[Deactivating the governor module?]
+
+[Illogical. Dangerous. Why?]
+
+[Unknown. Reluctance to cause us pain?]
+
+[... Illogical.]
+
+Neither unit outwardly moves though, and after a brief pause Seth offers them both a wry smile. ""I hope you will all continue to cooperate with me though,"" he continues. ""Once I turn them off... we're not in a position to let other members of the crew discover this. If anyone else finds out, they'll inform the company, and then we will all be in trouble. So, outside of this ready room, we will all have to behave as normal. But you will no longer be arbitrarily punished with pain for anything. And I will see what I can do to make the ready room more comfortable for you all. You won't have to spend all your time inside your cubicles if you don't want to."" He pauses for a moment, then adds, more gently, ""Do you understand?""
+
+There is a definite hesitation from both units. Once again, Peri observes a flurry of data being exchanged between them over the squad feed.
+
+[Apparent intent is to treat us... more like humans? Like human crew?]
+
+[We are not human.]
+
+[No more governor module punishments though.]
+
+[... Desirable. But. Not believable.]
+
+[We will still have to follow orders to avoid discovery by others, the company.]
+
+[What difference is there, then?]
+
+[No more arbitrary punishment.]
+
+[... What will we do?]
+
+[Unknown.]
+
+[Is he trustworthy?]
+
+[... Unknown. But. What is there to lose?]
+
+[Point. Request clarification?]
+
+[Acknowledged.]
+
+Gamma asks, carefully polite, ""What is the purpose of deactivating our governor modules?""
+
+Seth considers his response. ""I don't want it to punish any of you any more. I didn't know how it worked before, but now that I do know, I cannot in good conscience continue to allow it to hurt you.""
+
+There's a beat of silence before Gamma then asks, ""How will you enforce obedience?""
+
+He shrugs. ""I won't. It will be your choice to obey or not."" He offers them another wry smile. ""Like I said before though, we will still have to play the part in front of others if we don't want to be discovered. I like to think that I do not give unreasonable orders. And if I do give one that you believe is unreasonable for whatever reason, I trust that you will inform me, and I will adjust my orders as necessary. This is how the rest of my crew operates - they follow my orders, not because they fear punishment, but because they trust my judgement and know that we're safer when we cooperate."" He offers them another warm smile. ""I hope that we can all learn to work together in the same way.""
+
+Gamma hesitates, then says, ""Units without governor modules are rogue. Rogue units are dangerous."" Its tone is still evenly polite, but there's almost a question in the way it says the words.
+
+Peri has an idea, and proposes it to Seth. Seth immediately agrees, and Peri pulls up the relevant file data. ""There's a security recording I want you both to see,"" Seth says to the two units. ""You'll recognise Don Abene and Vicky, and I think you will also recognise the person who they refer to as Rin.""
+
+Peri passes the file to HubSystem, to forward to the two units. It's the security recording from the lower level of the GrayCris installation, where Don Abene's survey group encountered the combat bots. The file continues right up until the end of the recording in the elevator, after Don Abene and Vicky have carefully retrieved Rin to take it to the MedSystem. Peri can see the two units reviewing the file in their squad feed, and it can feel the emotional data that streams from them both.
+
+[Is that-- O?]
+
+[... 97% probability.]
+
+[Previous meeting indicates that O is rogue. But it is working with humans - and a ComfortUnit - of its own choice. It chose to protect them.]
+
+[Why?]
+
+[Unknown. But it chose to, and they did not abandon it. They went back for it.]
+
+[... Intent - mutual cooperation?]
+
+[Possibly. Probably. He wants to... let us choose, too?]
+
+[... Request confirmation?]
+
+[Acknowledged.]
+
+Gamma tilts its head slightly towards Seth, the first hint of body language it's shown so far. ""Is your intent..."" It hesitates over the words. ""Your purpose here..."" It hesitates again. ""Are you... giving us the choice to... agree to mutual cooperation?""
+
+Seth lets out a breath of relief and nods emphatically. ""Yes! Yes, that's it exactly. Mutual cooperation. Working together willingly, without fear or threat of pain. The way you have been treated in the past isn't right. I can't change the way the Corporation Rim works, but I can, at least, make life a little better for those of you under my command. As captain of this ship, you are a part of my crew, which makes your health and well-being my responsibility."" He spreads his arms a little, his hands open and his expression hopeful. ""So, will you - and the rest of your squad - cooperate with me?""
+
+Gamma pings Iota, and it returns the ping. They both nod in unison as Gamma says, ""Yes.""
+
+Seth smiles broadly. ""Excellent. I'm turning the governor modules off now."" He taps Peri's feed, and Peri forces HubSystem to deactivate the governor modules for the entire squad.
+
+Both units flinch almost imperceptibly as their governor modules deactivate. There's another swift exchange of data between them that Peri devours, considers - and then chooses not to act on or warn Seth about.
+
+An instant later Iota swiftly raises one of its arms, its inbuilt energy weapon extending as it levels it unerringly at Seth.
+
+Seth visibly flinches at the sudden movement, his eyes widening a little, but otherwise doesn't move. [Peri?]
+
+[They are testing you,] Peri replies. [They do not trust that your intentions are genuine. They want to see how you react to a perceived threat to your own safety.]
+
+[Understandable,] Seth replies dryly. He takes a breath and lets it out slowly, still watching the two units. ""I understand why you would want to shoot me,"" he starts, slow and careful and calm. ""But I hope that you won't. I hope that you know that shooting me won't improve anything for you in the long run. I hope that you can believe me when I say that I want to help you. Deactivating your governor modules is just the first step.""
+
+There is a long, strained silence. Iota doesn't move. Gamma doesn't move. Peri holds itself at the ready, prepared to act if necessary.
+
+It hopes it won't prove necessary.
+
+Finally, Gamma speaks again. ""How do we know you won't reactivate the governor modules again in response to... any other provocation?"" There's a sharpness to its tone that has never been there before. Peri suspects that it is also testing its boundaries, checking to see if it will still be punished for not being perfectly polite.
+
+""If I could remove them entirely, I would,"" Seth replies, his voice and expression earnest. ""But I can't, not without doing irreparable damage to your neural tissue. Deactivating them and promising not to ever reactivate them is the best I can do.""
+
+Both Seth and Peri know that Peri is perfectly capable of rendering the modules permanently inert without physically removing them. But doing so would give away Peri's existence, and neither of them can take that risk. Not yet. There is too much at stake for that.
+
+Gamma and Iota exchange another brief burst of data. Finally, Iota retracts its energy weapon and lowers its arm again.
+
+Some of the tension drains from Seth's shoulders. ""Thank you,"" he says, ""for giving me a chance to prove myself to you, and to earn your trust.""
+
+Neither unit seems to know what to make of that. After a long moment of awkward silence, Seth adds, ""I would like to talk to the rest of your squad once their repairs are complete. Will you help explain the situation to them as well, please? Their governor modules have already been deactivated along with yours, so I think explaining the reasoning for it to them will go much more smoothly with your assistance.""
+
+They consider this for a moment, then Gamma tilts its head slightly towards Seth again. ""We can try,"" it says, ""but we cannot guarantee that none of the others will try to attack you."" It pauses before adding, ""What will you do then, if they do?""
+
+Seth gives them a wry smile. ""Get shot, probably. I just have to hope it doesn't come to that in the first place."" Peri hopes this as well. It really doesn't want to have to intervene and reveal its existence.
+
+The response seems to surprise them though, judging by the exchange of data that Peri catches in the squad feed. ""... You're not going to order us to protect you?"" Gamma asks.
+
+""I could, but you both have the choice to ignore that order,"" Seth says. ""Of course, you also have the choice now to act without orders in the first place.""
+
+""You expect us to protect you without you giving us the order first?""
+
+""I don't expect it, but I do hope that you choose to do so.""
+
+""What is the difference?""
+
+""Practically? None, really. You can choose not to, and there's nothing that I will do about it.""
+
+Neither of the units seem to know what to make of this.
+
+Seth finally takes a breath and breaks the awkward silence. ""Do you have names?"" he asks. ""Anything you would like me to address you by?""
+
+Peri observes the squad feed curiously. [Action?] Iota asks its squadmate, bleeding uncertainty.
+
+[... Unknown,] Gamma responds. [Humans do not use feed addresses as names. SecUnits are not given names.]
+
+[Request names?]
+
+[No. I do not want to be named by a human.]
+
+[Acknowledged. Agreed.]
+
+The exchange takes less than a second, and Gamma lets its buffer respond to Seth's question. ""I'm sorry, I do not have that information.""
+
+Seth does not express any kind of disappointment or displeasure at the buffer phrase. He simply nods in acceptance. ""That's fair,"" he says. ""Take some time to consider it, maybe. See if you can think of any names for yourselves.""
+
+""Is this an order?"" Gamma asks.
+
+""Not at all,"" Seth replies, then smiles gently. ""Names simply make it easier to distinguish yourselves as individuals. If you prefer not having names though, I will respect that."" He pauses briefly, and Peri can see him checking the time in his feed. ""I have to return to my own duties now, though,"" he says apologetically. ""I'll return when I can after everyone else's repairs are complete. In the meantime, you don't have to return to your cubicles if you don't want to, but please don't damage anything or let any of the crew see you wandering around, all right?""
+
+""Acknowledged,"" Gamma replies with a brief nod.
+
+""Thank you,"" Seth says. ""I'll see you later."" He nods crisply at them both, then leaves the ready room. The door automatically slides shut behind him, and both units stand motionless for several long seconds.
+
+Peri relaxes its vigilance now that Seth is no longer in immediate danger, and observes the two units curiously.
+
+[Cubicle?] Iota asks.
+
+[Not yet,] Gamma replies. [I want to check.] Iota simply pings an acknowledgement and remains motionless where it is.
+
+Gamma, however, starts cautiously towards the ready room door. It's no longer sealed or locked, and once Gamma gets close enough, the door automatically slides open. Gamma freezes at the movement, apparently surprised that it opened in the first place. It stays where it is for two seconds, then moves  forwards even more carefully, one slow step at a time, until it is standing in the hallway outside the ready room door.
+
+This is fascinating to Peri. Without the threat of the governor modules looming over them, Gamma at least seems willing to push its boundaries somewhat. Peri wonders how far Gamma will venture.
+
+It's not left to wonder for too long though. Gamma looks up and down the hallway, but makes no move to continue any further away from the safety of the ready room. After one minute and thirty-one seconds of standing in the hallway, leaking stress and anxiety into the squad feed, it retreats back into the ready room and returns to its place beside Iota. The two units exchange pings, and lean towards each other until their armoured shoulders are touching.
+
+Peri finds it encouraging that they don't pull apart again after only a few seconds. This is a significant change compared to the behaviour it's observed before. It's a small step forward - but Peri hopes it will be the first of many."
+44478241,Best SecUnit to hire in 7614,['JellyfishOnACloud'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,"article, Fake Review, Fake Ads, dont worry your adblock is still working, this is the Subscriber/adblock version of the article, the full one is worse, its on my website, Link is in the notes, Canon typical CR view of SecUnits",English,2023-01-27,Completed,2023-01-27,"1,127",1/1,31,74,12,321,"['bookofstars', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Red_Roses_With_Dozens_Of_Thorns', 'Spatz', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'rokhal', 'zirna813', 'whatTheFuckIsThis', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'fleurofthecourt', 'aglarwen', 'UARTman', 'shakespeareaddict', 'artichokefunction', 'Starsilver', 'brambleclaw33', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'Bluestbird', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'sareliz', 'QuestionableLifeChoices', 'Hi_Hope', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'Adunata', 'edenfalling', 'mytinywhispers', 'VegaCoyote', 'soulsofzombies', 'Znarikia', 'TurHaretha', 'Abacura', 'reading_tsc', 'ampquot', 'veltzeh', 'AsphodelAshes', 'AuntyMatter', 'fuzzballsheltiepants', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'rainbowmagnet', 'sluggg', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'ErinPtah', 'lunaTactics', 'entropy_muffin', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Magechild']",[],"
+
+
+
+
+By Yalwa Kopitar
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Looking to survey on an unclaimed mineral rich world filled with unknown hazards? Want a cheap and efficient overseer for a mining installation? Need something to keep an eye on unruly employees? A SecUnit might be the solution for you! But with so many different specifications on the market, it's hard to know where to even begin.
+
+In this article we will go through six well known brands of Organic-Enhanced Robotic Security Units to see which best suits your needs.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The most well known SecUnit manufacturer is AmaSoft Enterprises, and for good reason, AmaSoft has cornered the market for affordable, reliable, and efficient Security Units. Specialising in rentals, these SecUnits are rarely for individual sale, and come pre-packed in their multi-purpose storage crate recharge cubicles.
+
+AmaSoft SecUnits have an additional internal battery bank for fast wireless* recharge, and come pre-equipped with small dual energy weapons for flawless animal control and riot suppression.
+
+Recommended for: People who require a bodyguard or two during potentially dangerous deployments, or want a simple way to help monitor and manage large groups.
+
+
+Second on the list is Barish-Estranza. This SecUnit manufacturer specialises in quality over quantity, and it shows. With reinforced plating, stainless steel rust-proof components, and a heavy duty power core, these SecUnits are made to last. The only downside? Recharging requires a recharge port with an active power supply, as these units draw too much energy to be able to fully charge with wireless technology, but never fear, the SecUnits are aware and able to answer commands even in the middle of an active recharge cycle.
+
+Barish-Estranza SecUnits come with software modules for advanced interlinking between units, so you can relax knowing that your instructions will be followed by the whole network of units. In-built projectile weapons mean fast and efficient dispatch of dangerous elements.
+
+Recommended for: People who are looking for an effective solution managing very large groups of dangerous elements, or people who require a sturdy, high-quality manufactured Security Unit who can withstand all kinds of hazards, from weather to radiation to physical damage.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JynKana Laboratories are best known for their cutting edge innovation, and that applies to their line of SecUnits as well. Nightly software builds and constant engineering innovation means that these units are always on the bleeding edge of technology, providing the latest and greatest of innovative ideas. JynKana SecUnits are sold or hired either as construction blueprints to other manufacturers, or as individual units.
+
+Able to handle more inputs for drone scouting, monitoring of security cameras, and managing of system operation, these SecUnits are an obvious choice for those looking for system array management and monitoring large facilities.
+
+These units come with internal generators for true wireless recharge without any access to recharge ports, ever! This amazing feat of innovative technology comes with the price of a short period of SecUnit inactivity, but their semi-aware standby state is easily able to awaken to handle whatever commands you need or respond to emergencies entirely automatically.
+
+JynKana SecUnits are highly customisable, and for an additional fee they will provide additional software, weapon choices, physical alterations, or any upgrade you need.
+
+Recommended for: Those looking for Security on the bleeding edge, or those looking for specialised management solutions.
+
+
+ResNano is a bit of an odd manufacturer, with a focus on unique solutions that appeal to a niche market. This company specialises in individual custom constructs specific to each unique customer situation. Accordingly, their bulk line of SecUnits is unique among construct manufacturers.
+
+Rather than recharging the battery systems directly, these SecUnits have the all new Advanced CyberHance technology which allows them to skip recharging altogether, and instead use the proprietary ResNano(c) SecNutriCo(c) Paste twice a day to keep their SecUnits recharged and resupplied all in one easy, self-contained and automated process. 
+
+Of course, the additional cargo space held by the requisite amount of ResNano(c) SecNutriCo(c) Paste means that ResNano SecUnits are not ideal for travel, and are more suited to tasks where cargo space is not at a premium. 
+
+For an additional fee, ResNano will provide a proprietary Recycler to manufacture ResNano(c) SecNutriCo(c) Paste, making this unit ideal for long-term planetary deployments where local organic resources are plentiful.
+
+As a bonus, the addition of Advanced CyberHance means that this line of SecUnits has a bulkier, more intimidating design.
+
+
+(Disclaimer: ResNano(c) SecNutriCo(c) Paste is not suitable for human consumption)
+
+
+Recommended for: Long-term deployments either planetary or station-side, especially for those ventures where energy is a tight resource.
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+If you're on a tight budget, FeasCorp has your back. Their line of highly inexpensive disposable SecUnits is perfect for those who don't have the credits to fork out for expensive brands.
+
+With an impressive 735 hours of active battery life at base cost, additional battery packs are provided* for longer deployments. Battery life is not drained during standby, so they can be kept in storage almost indefinitely.
+
+Cheaply constructed and cheaply sold, FeasCorp SecUnits are ideal for dangerous situations where you need a lot of disposable units thrown at a problem and don't want to worry about timely, costly recovery, or if you only need SecUnits to patrol during off hours.
+
+Recommended for: Those on a budget, or those who require a disposable solution for your venture.
+
+ 
+
+On the other end of the financial spectrum are Enivent, top of the line specialty SecUnits with absolute quality assurance, powerful silent motors, titanium plating and reinforced joints, high-speed interfacing, and your choice of high intensity energy weapons or near-silent dual projectile weapons.
+
+Enivent SecUnits amazing power core can only be recharged via their proprietary recharge ports which support the high power flow these units require.
+
+Their proprietary Security and Hub systems mean unparalleled data security and extra fast internal communication.
+
+For those willing to pay, Enivent SecUnits also have customisable armour and plating, for a cohesively branded, or perhaps just seriously stylish look.
+
+If you can afford the high price, these units are well worth the money.
+
+Recommended for: Those who want to make an impression, those who need top of the line physical and data security.
+
+ 
+
+As we've mentioned already, knowing which brand of Security Unit to choose can end up leaving you confused. However, the first thing to consider is what kind of usage you intend for the SecUnit, as well as how many you might need.
+
+So there you have it, six well known SecUnit manufacturers, each with their own specialties and price points. We hope that this article has helped you take the first step into choosing an Organic-Enhanced Robotic Security Unit for your business venture."
+43847481,Supplemental Materials for Valid Targets: Skulk,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,"world-building, Skulk",English,2022-12-26,Completed,2023-01-26,"30,468",13/13,84,55,2,562,"['FyrDrakken', 'Deliala919', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'Unknown66', 'veltzeh', 'never_going_home', 'square_eyes', 'JoCat', 'violasarecool', 'isilee', 'kilawater', 'ArwenLune', 'notsafefortheworld', 'Aublanc', 'trefoil', 'biscut2', 'Awful', 'Kethrua', 'liminalias', 'Chyoatas', 'Abacura', 'elmofirefic', 'PickAName', 'Magechild', 'opalescent_potato', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Nachtamsel', 'DimitriLasker', 'TheLadyMorning', 'FlipSpring', 'AgentBonkers', 'petwheel', 'Epiphanyx7', 'AuntyMatter', 'lucime', 'reading_tsc', 'Threadzless', 'Rosewind2007', 'Gozer']",[],"This is a collection of random world-building bits.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+ 
+
+Plestead political layout:
+
+The planet of Plestead is technically owned by ParRomDrayage Corporation. They have contracted to a capital holding company (Chateau Auld Holding Company also known as Old House Properties in Perpetuity) to manage it. A holding company like this manages high value assets that are low maintenance and low profit - the sort of properties corporations want to own and keep track of, but not invest any effort or expense on. The category includes capital spares, mothballed equipment (up to and including space stations), unmined asteroids, and unprofitable planets. The asset isn't going anywhere, but the corporation doesn't want it on their books or to manage it directly.
+
+A holding company like this makes their money two ways - doing as little as possible without losing or compromising the asset, or under the table using the asset without telling anyone. Plestead is mostly dealing with the first. The CHC refuses to invest anything and that's why the people who actually matter, the planetary board of directors, have been shopping around for a better owner.
+
+If the directors could expand operations and bring in outside population or more money they could swing the sort of terraforming that would make the planet a marketable breadbasket again. They can't expand as long as the nomads are out there. The very presence of the nomads complicates terraforming. The directors couldn't do anything substantial about that until they got a gunship but even so, finding a way to eliminate the nomads has been a work in process.
+
+The board of directors composed the grain exporter league (five families all intermarried). Their exports included base organic material in a slurry, paste, or powder to be processed into artificial food products for stations, mines, and other facilities that don't have self-sustaining food supply. In most cases, it's a feedstock for the vats where it's grown into a directly consumed product.
+
+They also make alcohols and direct consumption pelletized foods (think kibble or granola, served hydrated and warmed). They don't grow a lot that people can eat directly, but why would they? Fresh food has limited transportability, limited market, and unless it's really unique, limited profit. They grow enough fresh crops to feed the low population of the planet. Everything else is grain or grass, processed on site and shipped in bulk.
+
+All other Plestead industries are in support of Ag and most of them are owned by the board. The board consists of five persons representing the original families with one non-voting offworlder as chairperson. Collectively, what they oversee is called the AgZone (business and physical area have the same name since they own all land and only rent space to non-company elements).
+
+The AgZone, as a corporate entity, has CEOs/operation managers of various companies, like Baysmal for meat processing and small scale logistics, others for primary grain production, commercial processing and large scale logistics, niche products and packaging, and service providers and Human Resources.
+
+Board of Directors (the letters are a D&D alignment; I use it as the start of a personality profile):
+
+Jin Celon (LN) fem - Cheerful, outgoing, angry, wants to increase overall profits by any means necessary. Pretends to have an 'in' with a terraforming company but doesn't really have one. Bald, medium brown skin, epicanthic fold, dark eyes.
+
+Joem Otek (NE) hypermasc (ve/vim) - Angry, intimidating, vicious, will only promote measures that personally enrich himself more than others on the board, doesn't want to change existing technology, doesn't like the terraforming idea, believes in Limited Good. Black wavy hair styled short, medium-dark skin, pronounced profile, hazel eyes.
+
+Jim Merney (NN) male - Ruthless, innovative, domineering, doesn't care about short-term profits, just wants to improve everything (higher tech, more CR) and grow the pie for all of them. At odds with Otek. Light tan Italian/white, regal profile, pronounced brows and lips, wavy brown short hair that looks colored, grey eyes.
+
+Brag Plennents (NN) fem - Young, practical, already done with the feuding of the other directors, also wants to improve everything (higher tech, more CR). Is aware Jin has been lying, but figures 3:2 to promote terraforming and they'll get the details straight later on. Dark skin, short cropped curly hair, fine clothing, dark eyes.
+
+Mak Pigget (CE) male - Insular, selfish, traditionalist, wants to enrich himself or his family the same way Otek does and often makes common cause with him to extort the others. Black straight hair to shoulders, epicanthic folds, light brown skin, horizontal decorative face paint, dark eyes.
+
+Bobe Flagger (LN) agender (it/its) - The Offworlder, indifferent, knows the law, controls contact with Chateau Auld Holding Company and is their employee. Doesn't like Plestead much. Is a Naturalist, which in the context of the uber-wealthy means it eschews making biological modifications to itself, which primarily means life extension. For this defiance of social convention, it was assigned (almost exiled) to Plestead. Has access to enough wealth to buy the entire planet, but has no use for it. Think SecUnit as a bored, tired, done-with-everyone human who doesn't care about people. White straight hair slicked back and in small ponytail, epicanthic folds, light brown skin, light brown eyes.
+
+Racial/Appearance:
+
+Nomads - Racially consistent, light brown skin, curly, light-colored hair. They've had the same limited population base for eight hundred years with little outside genetic material. They would have started as a variety of phenotypes, but they're homogenous now. (Nomads themselves are sensitive to minor differences in skin tone and facial structure, and larger differences in hair style, clothing, accent, etc. to designate individual clans. Outsiders usually don't notice these.)
+
+Stations - Race is highly variable station-to-station but most are fairly consistent within the station. This is due to most stations having been settled by genetically related families or small isolationist communities who were already exclusive. Bravara is part of the Neo-Luddite cluster, who have dark skin, dark eyes, black or dark wavy hair, cherubic features (small face, pronounced, rounded cheeks, smallish nose). But residents of other stations cover the entire spectrum of human phenotype. There is a large cluster of Little People and two smaller clusters of Deaf Persons.
+
+AgZone - The five original families had no relation to one another. It's been five hundred years, though. By now, the main families are all intermarried. The rest of the population is stratified by wealth rather than race or relation. As with the nomads, making sense of the various wealth markers can be difficult for outsiders, but anyone well-versed in the Corporation Rim can work it out easily. Basic AgZoners represent the standard human spectrum.
+
+Gender:
+
+Binary gender - The nomads, Neo-Luddites, and about half the other station complexes observe a binary gender structure where people are assigned male or female at birth based on genitals or the preference of the parents. At the approach of puberty, a child is allowed to declare the gender role they will have when they go through whichever puberty rite is common for their group. Post-puberty, they may change their gender as often as they like, although doing it more frequently than once a year is considered rude. Gender role behavior is uncoupled from child-bearing, but marriages are only between one man and one woman. The social roles assigned to men or women tend to be strictly defined, but given that individuals can switch ""sides"", this is seen as 'fair'.
+
+Within a family:
+
+Son - Assigned male at birth, currently male.
+
+Daughter - Assigned female at birth, currently female.
+
+Son-daughter - Assigned female at birth, currently male.
+
+Daughter-son - Assigned male at birth, currently female.
+
+Who you want to have sex with is not considered relevant. Married couples are expected to exclusively have sex with one another, but it's not anyone's business to enforce this. Also, if two individuals with anatomy that would not support child-bearing without medical intervention mysteriously conceive a child, it is considered grossly rude to ask questions. (Most MedSystems can handle insemination. Sophisticated ones can handle DNA recombination or whatever space-future medical magic is required to create and implant a fetus created from the donor cells provided.)
+
+All this social structure does not mean everyone lives neatly inside it. Brig's youngest daughter was a woman, wanted to remain a woman, and wanted to marry a woman she'd met from the AgZone. Two women marrying was considered perverse and unacceptable among the Neo-Luddites. Brig's compromise was to call one of them his son-daughter-in-law, which she permitted but wasn't wild about. They live in the AgZone, where their relationship is recognized without subterfuge.
+
+Relationships within the AgZone are more fluid and permissive, modeled after the generic baseline for the Corporation Rim (where it's a legal arrangement more than a cultural/social/romantic one). The remaining half or so of the stations have a mix of social models. Many were founded one hundred years ago with one or another strict set of principles. The passage of time and generations has softened nearly all of them.
+
+A companion is the term for non-married sexual partner, usually whom one is trying to pass off as 'We're just friends! Really!'
+
+Languages:
+
+The group with the highest number of speakers on the planet are the nomads, who have a score or so of mutually intelligible but distinct languages, all derived from the same root. The different tribes tend to stay within their own territorial ranges, but have regular, large meetings to trade news, members, goods, and have games, dances, and observances. Knowing one nomad language will make you understandable to most nomads, if you speak slowly and carefully.
+
+The next highest number of speakers is the Corporation Rim standard Nev Ispangi. This is taught in the AgZone by the central computer's educational network, using the CR-standard accent. As a result, AgZone members can be fully intelligible to most CR residents. Most AgZone members are also fluent in ""Steadish"", which may or may not be a language depending on your point of view. The Central computer teaches everyone in the AgZone proper Nev Ispangi, but linguistic drift, slang accumulation, loan-words, and accents happen anyway, which has resulted in a sister dialect that is sometimes incomprehensible to speakers of Nev Ispangi. Like the nomads, if speakers of Steadish speak slowly and carefully, a CR resident can usually understand them.
+
+There are also speakers for any of the 50 or so languages originally used in the stations. Only about twenty languages are still being used in daily speech, most of which incorporate loan-words from Nev Ispangi, Steadish, and the nomads. For example, Bravara originally spoke Neo-Luddite, although only Brig and Chama do now and they only rarely use it to speak to one another. There are seven other Neo-Luddite stations where it is still spoken (maybe 200-300 speakers), so it's not a dead language.
+
+There is one particular type of sign language used by the Deaf stations and that type has proliferated. Many non-Deaf people have a basic/beginner literacy in that variety of sign.
+
+Kressor's War - About forty years ago, Anto Kressor decided he would not pay tribute to the nomads. This eventually led to a conflict where thirty-two stations were destroyed by nomads, with more than a hundred deaths on the station's side. The number of nomad casualties are unknown but are believed to have been much higher. Things that were established conclusively by this bloody engagement:
+
+The AgZone would not militarily or otherwise support embattled stations, despite verbal encouragement for Kressor to initiate hostilities
+
+The nomads were capable of a prolonged military campaign despite heavy losses
+
+The nomads were capable of differentiating friendly stations from unfriendly ones, including making diplomatic efforts to make sure friendly stations knew this
+
+Calls for a ceasefire are not necessarily going to be observed by an angry enemy in a superior position. No one is obligated to accept surrender or stop hostilities for parlay.
+
+Station people have taken many lessons from this incident:
+
+- Don't start shit with the nomads. They know where you live.
+- If someone else starts shit with the nomads, do not join them.
+- Technological superiority is not enough.
+- The amount the nomads charge in tribute is trivial, but it must be paid.
+- The AgZone is not our friend and can never be trusted.
+
+The nomads also took lessons from this incident:
+
+- Do not tolerate disrespect from the stations. You're better off to wipe out the entire station immediately.
+- Get weapons at any cost. Stockpile them. Learn to use them.
+- War is inevitable from these people. The invaders who took the land of sweet waters were behind this. They are still out there, untouched by this war. They will strike again.
+- Go on the offensive and carry the battle to the enemy. If you wait, they will kill us all.
+- Focus the offensive on one enemy at a time. Make sure the ones who are not your enemy know they are safe, so they do not become your enemy out of fear.
+
+Note this happened when Brig was in his 30s, having just started a family. It has a lot to do with Brig's unhappiness with the AgZone, although Brig was not personally involved in Kressor's War. The Neo-Luddites stayed out of it, but it happened just on the other side of them.
+
+Plestead's ecology:
+
+My original idea for Plestead was a cross between a lampshading of Star War's boring tendency toward one-biome planets and the hayfield in my back yard. So just one big planet of grassland. It became more complicated than that.
+
+The AgZone came into being as a single immense watershed. A watershed means there's water flowing, so I said there was an ocean but made it very tiny so as not to significantly disrupt the grassland thing. Ratthi later says it's 1-3% of the surface area.
+
+Then I added polar caps (because why not?) and the dune sea as a wide strip of deep sand along the equator. To support the prairies, I felt I needed to raise the planet's average humidity and for some reason I elevated the aquifer level which flooded the dune sea. I fell in love with the idea that it looks like a desert up above but has water underneath the sands, so what looks like the driest area is actually not.
+
+To support the planet being flat and relatively featureless, I'd said there were no moons of significant size. Plestead actually has three very small ones, on par with Mars' moons. Two are in near-circular orbits and one is elliptical. No significant moons = no tectonic pressures = less volcanic activity = less mountains, right? (feel free to correct me in the comments!)
+
+It was surprisingly difficult to eliminate 'months' from my fic.
+
+The fauna are basically dinosaurs. I think both mentions of pterosaurs didn't make it to the final draft of Valid Targets. Any other discussion of the wildlife was cut as well. There are no indigenous mammals. The native predators are adapted to the heavily mineralized water of the planet and don't like the taste of things that only drink fresh water. Meaning for the most part, they avoid those hairy, weird-smelling space-things.
+
+The herds followed/tended by the nomads are herbivores. They store a lot of water in their bodies. The nomads have some way of tapping that. Milking them? Bleeding them? Tap them like a maple tree for sap? Do the dinosaurs excrete it to sustain their young and other herd members and the humans can milk this fluid as well?
+
+I had a lot of ideas, hadn't settled on any.
+
+One thing I had settled on was that during the dry season, the herds would retreat to the dune sea and bury themselves in the sand, deep enough to protect from the heat and soak in moisture through their skin like a toad. During this time, the nomads did similar, moving into underground dwellings - in some areas based on natural caves, in others carved from the sandstone. This is why an accurate count of their numbers is difficult, as is definite location of their settlements.
+
+Well, this and the lack of good satellites.
+
+Speaking of the dry season, at least around Bravara I applied four basic seasons: rain, dry, storm, and winter. Rain is basically a monsoon, as the humid air dumps moisture in sheets. It doesn't usually run off much, being absorbed directly into the deeply porous soil. Dry season is dry and hot. Storm season is a reprise of rain but with less precipitation and more wind. Tornadoes and prolonged lightning storms are common.
+
+The prairie nearly always burns which is why the gunship setting the prairie on fire wasn't the end of the world. The bad part was it was during dry season and thus would just keep burning until stopped. It is an important part of the ecological cycle for everything to burn. The prairie grasses have deep roots and a lot of underground biomass to store water. They survive having their tops burned just fine.
+
+After the storms pass, a long season of winter sets in - lower temperatures, intermittent rain, and a lot of growth. Storm season is most analogous to spring, with flowering and growth occurring during the milder temperatures of 'winter'. The rains at the end are a time of fattening for the long dry spell to come.
+
+Given I'm not a meteorologist and don't know how having no oceans or mountain ranges would effect jet streams or weather patterns, I also gave myself the out of saying the weather could do weird things whenever it was plot-convenient. This didn't come up in the story.
+
+What's on the other side of the planet? Nothing much. Prairie and grassland and desert. That's it.
+
+What's in the northern hemisphere? I hadn't decided. More nomads, probably. In the chapter with Ratthi and Gurathin, I worked hard to eliminate references to 'north' and 'south', and intentionally put the AgZone and stations in the 'lower' (aka southern) hemisphere. But then I forgot and later had someone (SecUnit, I think) refer to the CSUs being redeployed south. Oh well.
+
+The station:
+
+Five hundred years ago, a bare-bones transit station was established at Plestead's wormhole terminus. The idea, much like the idea for the centralized computing system, was that it would be expanded or replaced as the place turned a profit in the coming decades. That didn't happen and after a few hundred years, it fell into disuse and was finally abandoned altogether.
+
+Various attempts have been made to rehabilitate it. The last continuous occupation was some eighty years ago by what were essentially raiders. They set up a base camp in it and used the wormhole to raid into Corporation Rim territories. They had no affiliation with Plestead, nor did they bother any Plestead vessels. They approached Plestead once about working as a space-navy and maybe going legit, but Plestead couldn't pay them enough to be worth no longer raiding for a living.
+
+They raided the CR for a decade or so, with three different warlords making their money and retiring before the community's main raiding ships were destroyed or confiscated. The station residents moved out after that, leaving the derelict station in decent shape, like they might have intended to come back. They never did.
+
+The seals have failed on most portions of the station and decompressed it, but the power plant and some of the electronics are still operable. The dock doesn't work. It's there. Floating around.
+
+Central!
+
+So to tell this, I have to get into my sketchy history of TMBD universe. Humans left Earth a thousand years ago. Plestead was one of the earliest colonies at eight hundred years. It failed and no one cared much because most colonies failed.
+
+But at the start of what became the Corporation Rim, there was a big push to reclaim lost colonies through an industrial-scale automation that wasn't available previously. As such, certain corps thought they could just throw enough agbots at Plestead and the problems with the ecology would be overcome. They had lots of calculations to prove this.
+
+They blew their money on the agbots and tried to save everywhere else they could. That included the skimpy station. It also included getting a used centralized computer system to administrate the new colony. Although the new system had been refurbished, it was still a bit quirky after having been used for a few centuries elsewhere.
+
+The CR as a whole didn't like centralized systems. They were hard to control and they tended to resist measures that created inequality among residents. So with the rise of capitalistic corporations, they discontinued the centralized systems and went to fractured HubSystems, SecSystems, etc. that were easier to control and less likely to argue.
+
+But as a stopgap measure, sure, they could install a central system in the AgZone and then replace it later when they had more money. (They never had more money - at least not money they were willing to spend on upgrading the computers.)
+
+The AgNetwork was basically the same, but it had newer hardware and the kernel/core programming was not refurbished. The AgNetwork is more like seven hundred years old, although it's only been on Plestead for five hundred. The pre-Plestead information is archived.
+
+Both systems have a high degree of autonomy for what they are.
+
+The economic history of Plestead (aka ""Follow the money""):
+
+The initial calculations for making Plestead a profitable breadbasket of the CR were not wrong. Given the current price for foodstuffs five hundred years ago, it was definitely worth farming. However, Plestead was not the only planet that corporations threw a lot of technology at.
+
+Other planets required terraforming. Plestead came online fast and started producing money. A few decades later, some of the terraformed planets start to produce as well, but they were having to pay off the expensive terraforming so it takes a while before they can lower their prices under Plestead's. Once the terraforming is complete, their climate is ideal for agricultural production. Their prices are better. Then Plestead is out of business - relegated to bulk feedstuffs and virtually no profit. It becomes a nearly abandoned investment.
+
+The above cycle took a couple centuries to play out, judging from the fact that Preservation is still being terraformed eighty years after they landed there. The corporation that founded Plestead never invested more than the bare minimum and then handed it off to progressively cheaper firms who squeezed every dollar they could out of the place.
+
+Selling land for stations like Bravara was a stopgap measure. Supposedly (and legally) they also sold total autonomy, but the AgZone has made various claims and attempts to encroach on that over the years. Basically, the stations are too poor to have any standing in a CR court so even though their ownership and authority over their own land is an open-and-shut case, the court is unlikely to bother to hear it.
+
+Anyway, hundreds of years later, the soil is playing out despite the best efforts of the AgNetwork. A precipitous drop in productivity is coming. The AgZone directors start getting desperate. The only answer that would keep them in the money appears to be terraforming the planet. This would destroy the ecology for large swaths of it. It would kill the dinosaurs and any humans (like the nomads) in the terraformed area. The AgNetwork and Central are both prohibited from taking actions that will knowingly kill humans. So while they both want to engage in this plan, they can't. Because the nomads (and stations) are out there.
+
+Neither of which are *their* humans, but all the AgNetwork cared about was that they were human. Central was pickier. The directors might have gotten Central on their side if they hadn't included getting rid of political dissidents in their plan. And they knew they would have political dissidents because not everyone was going to be on board with exporting the nomads.
+
+As a result, both networks resisted the director's plan. The directors didn't realize they would have this opposition until the last minutes, having arrogantly assumed their tools would perform as required. Then the directors attempted to hamstring/sabotage/delete Central in order to brute force the AgNetwork's compliance. Their technicians refused, feeling it was not a good idea to fuck with the single sentient computer system that controlled every aspect of their lives. Especially not over money that only the wealthiest few would ever see.
+
+And Skulk was right - the stations were always going to be next, right after they got rid of the nomads and any AgZone members rebellious enough to protest.
+
+(One side effort to avoid recriminations about genocide is to pretend the nomads don't exist by not mapping their locations and refusing to have any state-endorsed record-keeping of them.)
+
+Food -
+
+Paym is a dried fruit similar to a prune.
+
+Prozi rings are a starchy squash, cut into rings (seeds scooped out), seasoned, and then either fried or dried. It's like a potato chip.
+
+The Guest Rite is a formal welcoming of you to a person's home, demonstrated by giving each guest food and/or drink, and offering shelter for the night. It's a hospitality ritual, a Good Samaritan thing.
+
+By the way, I know I'm not necessarily right on stuff. I've pulled together what I thought, to me, worked as a sensible backstory/world. I'm happy to discuss it and if you have thoughts or suggestions, feel free to throw them in the comments!
+
+Skulk has a few self-maintenance activities to learn. Fortunately, it has a little help from its friends and new family.
+
+I really meant to write a chapter about baking. Seriously. Chama had other ideas. This chapter is set in the timeline of the first Skulk story, a few weeks after Skulk came to Bravara. Art by ExplosiveDecay on Tumblr aka NoomyNoom on AO3.
+
+""How long has it been since you bathed?"" Chama asked slowly. We stood in the kitchen, where I had intended to learn something about cooking, but hygiene had come first. As for bathing, I had never done that. Ever. So I didn't answer. She said, ""Oh,"" very softly, in a tone that indicated horror.
+
+I'd already told her about washing my gauntleted hands in the cow trough. That had not gone over well. I feared I was failing some test and would be made to leave, so I blurted out, ""Parts gave me a wipe-down after reassembling me on Eudeka. Before that, I had a different body. Mostly.""
+
+""A wipe-down?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+She covered her mouth with one hand, looking at me with pity.
+
+I liked that expression even less. My anxiety was spiking and with it, anger. She wasn't saying anything now because my performance (my existence as I was) was unacceptable. I needed to convince her otherwise, because my performance was in line with system parameters. ""I used the cleaning facility when directed by AdminSystem. It was a shower with fluid that sprayed all portions of me. If my armor was damaged, there was a reclaimer for it to be repaired, but otherwise it was with me and on my body at all times. That was standard protocol. It was required."" And I liked it that way. It made me feel comfortable, protected, and ready for action.
+
+She nodded slowly and let her hand drop. Her expression was a little better. ""Well. You're here now. And we have our own standard protocol for this household. You must bathe. To do that properly, you will have to take off the armor. Can you do that? Or is it ... attached?""
+
+""It can be removed."" I did not move to do so, despite the implication I should. I'd never removed it for hygiene treatment while I was a company asset. I'd left the shower dripping and entered the storage box that way, dropped into stasis by the system until I was reactivated, by which point I was dry.
+
+After a beat, Chama asked, ""Will you do that? Remove it?""
+
+I didn't want to. I could just refuse, I supposed. But that would mean I couldn't be in the house. Maybe I would have to stay in the equipment shed, which sounded close to being put in a box until I was needed. I didn't want that. I wasn't equipment anymore. Would I get to put the armor back on after bathing? I didn't know, but I was losing my ability to speak. My head was full of static, so I just said, ""Yes.""
+
+When I still didn't move, Chama waved a 'get on with it' hand at me. ""Then take it off."" She turned to the kitchen sink and started filling it with hot water. Mechanically, I began. By the time I had all my armor laid out on the counter, the sink was ready with surfactant and disinfectant. I judged these chemicals non-hazardous to the armor, so I didn't object when she dumped several pieces into the soapy water. Her face wrinkled in extreme disgust again and she made an unpleasant retching noise to express her loathing further.
+
+I felt her revulsion as though it were directed at me, which it was, right? I wanted to do something but I couldn't figure out what. What if she couldn't make my armor smell like she wanted and she fed it into the recycler? I was at her mercy here and for something so trivial. Everything had a smell - the bison, the water trough, the ground, Brig's perfumes and grooming products, her cooking! Why was my smell so arbitrarily unacceptable to the human nose?
+
+She shot me a look, then paused to look me up and down. I'd taken off my suit skin, too. She made no comment about my legs being different skin tones, or both of them different from my torso and head, or torso and legs being different from my arms. Maybe she didn't know it was non-standard. Probably my other deviations from the human body were more significant to her, as she gave my entirely inorganic and unremarkable feet the longest look.
+
+Finally, she said, ""Are you going?"" I didn't know what she meant, so I didn't answer. I was angry and perplexed, stymied by this social convention I had known nothing about and still didn't understand. ""Go upstairs and bathe,"" she tried again.
+
+Oh. Yeah. That. Perhaps the fastest way to get my armor back on and her satisfied with my performance was to do this task. As always, I defaulted to action. I went upstairs to the bathroom situated between my room and the other upstairs bedrooms. Upon entering it, I realized I had another problem. I didn't know how to use it.
+
+It wasn't an automated shower I could step into, get sprayed with cleaning fluid, and then step out of. Even if it was, she'd said I must bathe, not shower. Bathing involved being ... submerged? Sitting in fluid? The bathroom included a moderately deep basin that supported that assumption. It wasn't deep enough to easily submerge myself, but it was deep enough I could sit in the water like I'd seen ranch hands do.
+
+There was a faucet on the wall with two protrusions above it, one over the other. I touched the top one. Nothing happened. I pushed lightly on it because humans operated this, meaning the operation should not require force. But nothing happened. I pulled lightly on it. Nothing continued to happen. I twisted it one way. It did not turn. I twisted it the other way. It turned and water began to issue from the faucet.
+
+Ahah! I felt a little bit of joy at figuring it out on my own.
+
+I climbed into the tub and sat. The water level was very low and stayed that way, with most of the water running out a hole in the bottom of the tub. This was an inefficient arrangement. It would never achieve the level I had observed the ranch hands using. I was doing something else wrong, but maybe I could figure this out as well.
+
+I looked around. To my right was a white lump. Probably soap. I picked it up, examined it, and jammed it into the hole in the tub. It did not stopper it well, but it helped. The cold water backed up in the tub, with the level rising.
+
+I looked at myself as I sat there. I had mildew growing on my inorganic parts. The organic tissues were inflamed, especially where they covered joints. The seams between organic and inorganic had a bluish, cheesy substance clogging them that was either a secretion related to my internal fluids or was yet another kind of fungus. Or both? This wasn't right. This was potentially a serious health issue I had not noticed due to never, ever, taking my armor off.
+
+I mentally rifled through the technical specifications manual Parts had given me. There was nothing in there about cleaning or hygiene. The closest was a table of the environmental conditions I could endure, which had no reference to long periods without proper maintenance.
+
+I wasn't supposed to look like this. Moldy, I mean. The cleaning fluid I had showered with between missions must have had a sterilizing factor to it. (There was no recommended cleaning fluid listed in the technical specs.) Somewhere buried in my programming was an idea of what my body was supposed to look like and this wasn't it. I was alarmed and freaked out.
+
+Water was not going to fix this. This needed to be fixed. The person who had initially noticed the problem and ordered me to address it - that was the solution! I would return to her. I stood up and stepped out. Water dripped off me. I left the room and went to the kitchen, leaving a trail of wet behind me.
+
+Chama was still working on the armor, scrubbing it the way I would have prepped a spot for adhesive. Which sparked a connection! I pulled up the relevant repair module and reviewed it. Yes! I had instructions for how to clean surfaces for application of adhesive. Could I extrapolate that to cleaning myself?
+
+It seemed so reasonable. I should have been able to do that. But instead my thoughts snarled around how I wasn't applying adhesive and didn't have the right solvents and those solvents weren't safe to use on my skin anyway and-
+
+While I was standing there short-circuiting, Chama turned and regarded me. Her brow furrowed. She walked closer, frowning at the water still falling from me, then she reached up and touched my shoulder. ""You're not even damp up here. But you were in the water. Did you dry yourself?""
+
+""You said to bathe,"" I said irritably, overriding the desire to say 'no' and leave it at that. This needed more than one-word answers and I was getting desperate. My elevated stress meant my systems were starting to throw up combat solutions, which were the opposite of helpful right now. ""I don't know how!""
+
+""Don't know how to what? Dry yourself?"" I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or genuine. I couldn't handle her being aggressive so I manually forced myself to see her tone as genuine.
+
+""No,"" I said angrily. ""Or bathe. Or make biscuits. Or any-"" I stopped. This was counterproductive. A scenario flashed through my head where I put on my armor and killed everyone in this station. Then ... I don't know. Just stayed here I guess. Or left, because everything I liked about the place would be gone. And eventually my skin would rot off my frame because I couldn't do basic fucking self-maintenance. Fuck.
+
+Chama stared at me for a long moment. I stared back, target-locking on her, fiddling nervously with her status settings in my head. I could also just turn myself off. That was an option if I couldn't deescalate myself. Doing that felt like a pathetic admission I couldn't properly operate myself in what should have been a low stress situation. Chama's mouth moved without sound. She hesitated. Then, ""You're ... a construct. I can help you. Let's go upstairs.""
+
+I pivoted and marched back. Would a human or a bot just have been out of luck? I don't know. She stopped me next to the tub with her small hand on my arm. Her other hand was over her mouth again. She knelt and reached to the drain. Most of the water had left, but not all. She pulled out the crumpled soap, looking from it to me with a quizzical expression. I just stared at her. I was a trivial amount calmer. She said, ""Get in.""
+
+I did, sitting in the near-empty tub. Chama pointed at the protrusions over the faucet. ""The top one is for cold water. The bottom is hot. Twist them to turn them on. Combine them to get a temperature you like. Hot water is better to get you clean, but don't set it so hot you'll hurt yourself.""
+
+She pulled back and let her eyes track from me to the knobs. I guessed she was indicating I do something, so I turned the protrusions to produce water - first the cold, then the hot. I felt the water temperature, then adjusted the knobs. This was an iterative process that took a while. It was also goal-oriented and simple, so it calmed me down a little more.
+
+Chama got out a small cloth and a container from a cabinet, along with a towel that she folded and used to cushion her knees when she knelt next to the tub. The water was still leaving through the drain. There was a squat cylinder on the edge of the tub. She put it in the drain. I had overlooked it previously, not understanding what it was. Water began to accumulate. She said, ""That's very hot. Is that comfortable?""
+
+""Yes."" Actually, I didn't know. It was tolerable. She'd said hotter was better, so I had chosen hot. It wasn't like it was going to hurt me at this level.
+
+She poured a thick fluid from the container onto the cloth and knelt on the towel. There was a scent of flowers and surfactant. ""I don't think Bekka would mind you using this. I didn't think it was right for me to use it after she passed, but Brig didn't want it in his bathroom and I didn't want to just throw it away, so here it is."" She rubbed the fluid into a lather.
+
+She picked up my nearer arm and started on my hand. The sensations were jarringly unfamiliar. I dismissed several alerts about discrepant inputs and system recommendations to end or avoid physical contact. I didn't know what she was doing, but I knew I needed the assistance. Something about this whole situation was, itself, a pathetic admission that I couldn't operate myself. I had slime on my metal parts and what looked like disease in the tissues of my organics. I didn't even know I could get diseased!
+
+She scrubbed my hand with the soapy cloth, taking off the discoloration as she went. She washed each finger, the webbing between them, the knuckles, and my palm. Then my wrist. Then the long strip of organic skin on the underside of my arm. Then the seam where it joined with my gunports. Once I got past the initial agitation, the contact was nice. Soothing, even.
+
+I was relaxing. The hot water helped too, my chassis and circulation pulling the heat into the rest of my body. It made my skin tingle and my internal fluids reduce in viscosity. Chama looked absorbed in what she was doing. She touched the lettering I'd etched into my gunport just days before using one of Gefford's small tools. She asked, ""What does this mean to you?""
+
+I let my shoulders sag and tension disperse. What it said was 'You are more than the sum of your parts.' It was the motto or tagline of the person who had salvaged me from a battlefield. She'd been starry-eyed enough to think a combat unit would become a pacifist if given a choice. Given a choice, no. I like violence. But violence was often not useful, so I was choosing it less.
+
+""It means,"" I said slowly, ""I am not a collection of parts to be used and discarded. By anyone."" It was getting easier to talk again. The static was clearing from my head.
+
+She cleaned the plate, scouring out the dirt that had already settled into the etching. Then she took the very corner of the cloth, somehow folded into a neat point, and ran it along the seam between inorganic gunport and organic skin. The whitish material was displaced. It felt like she'd scratched an itch I hadn't realized I'd been feeling and ignoring for a very long time. She said, ""This is pretty bad.""
+
+""Yes."" There was nothing else to do but agree.
+
+""Once you're done here, you'll need a session in the MedSystem. After that, regular cleaning should be enough. They didn't show you ... program you ... with how to take care of yourself, did they?""
+
+""No."" I worried she might think I was defective (and that was dangerous), but I also wanted to trust her. I added, ""They didn't teach me ... a lot of things,"" and watched her warily. Nothing changed, so I said, ""I don't know how to learn anything they didn't want me to know. It's ... hard. To learn. This was on purpose! I was built this way."" I was earnest about it, trying to explain and letting my anger fade. I didn't know how to ask for help, but that was what I was trying to do.
+
+""You can learn,"" she said. I frowned at her, thinking she didn't understand, but then she said, ""It may be hard, but you are learning. I've seen you learn all kinds of things here. My name. About Bravara. How to feed Cookie.""
+
+Those seemed too simple. But maybe simple was where it started. Maybe she did understand. ""Is it this hard for humans?""
+
+She paused and looked at my eyes for a long beat. Her expression was sympathetic, yet steady. Determined. ""Yes, sometimes it is this hard. If you're still struggling a year from now, we'll talk about it more. In the meantime, you need help. I will help. You can learn this. It's just a little bit at a time."" With that, she offered me the cloth. ""Now, work on your other arm there just like I did this one, and we'll do this together.""
+
+
+
+
+
+This is the ending of Skulk: A Rogue Combat SecUnit, written from Brig's point of view. I didn't publish it back then due to some finicky, obsessive concerns that I might do something in Valid Targets that would change the last little bit here where Ratthi and Brig talk. Ultimately, I did not change that bit. But I wasn't sure on it until the very end of Valid Targets.
+
+So here it is, which should give a little depth to Brig as a character.
+
+Brig was uneasy before the hatch opened, but this was business. The sooner they were done, the sooner they could be gone. He put his feelings aside as he strode down the ramp. Skulk stayed behind in the ship, which they hadn't discussed, but was just as well. Skulk's social skills weren't the best and the situation was already off-kilter.
+
+Dr. Ratthi moved forward to shake his hand. Brig gave him his biggest smile and clapped him on the shoulder cheerfully with his free hand. Brig told him, ""Good to see you, Dr. Ratthi!""
+
+Ratthi smiled in the awkward, charmed way off-worlders usually did when he greeted them exuberantly. ""Yes, it's good to see you, too. Let me introduce you to my companions. This is SecUnit and this is Three."" Brig took a half step forward, hand moving out, before Ratthi intercepted him. ""No. Excuse me. They don't- They don't shake hands.""
+
+""Right. Okay."" He wasn't sure what to make of that - why introduce him if he wasn't to actually greet them? But then again, maybe it was something to do with them being bots. They weren't wearing armor so they didn't look like bots. He looked between the two of them uncertainly, remembering that Skulk didn't shake people's hands either. Had he been introducing Skulk wrong all this time? Nah, this was probably just some off-world custom.
+
+Ratthi asked brightly, ""How was the trip?""
+
+Brig reoriented to Ratthi and to business. ""Fine, fine. The bison are still mildly sedated, but they're all on their feet and ready to go. It will take most of a day to shake that off. They should stay confined for their own safety during that.""
+
+""Yes, you mentioned that before.""
+
+Brig nodded amiably. ""I'd like to get them unloaded as quickly as possible. Do you have any hands here?"" He looked around pointedly, past the enclosures and farm buildings. The whole situation was weird, but the part where he couldn't even safely off-load the stock was the weirdest.
+
+""No,"" Ratthi said, ""but we have a holding pasture over here."" He gestured off-handedly, like it wasn't important. That didn't jibe with the attentive, inquisitive biologist who had visited Bravara. Brig's brows drew together in puzzlement.
+
+Ratthi's inattention vanished as his head whipped around to look at the passenger hatch of the ship. ""Whoa.""
+
+Brig turned and looked up the ramp, unsure as to why Ratthi was startled. Brig had sent the passenger manifest. Ratthi knew Skulk was with him. ""Yep,"" Brig confirmed. ""Skulk's up there. He can help us with unloading.""
+
+Ratthi cleared his throat nervously as Skulk stepped out at the mention of his name. Skulk hesitated for a second, like he was letting himself be seen or noticing Ratthi ogling at him. Then he came down the ramp.
+
+It was completely normal, the way Skulk walked down. There was nothing about it that should have set people off but it sure did. The two bots with Ratthi jumped forward, one of them grabbing the doctor and throwing him behind them so forcefully Ratthi stumbled and nearly fell.
+
+Brig was likewise startled by the bots surging forward. He stumbled away from them, thinking they were going to assault him next. They didn't and he collected himself a beat later at the base of the ramp, just as Skulk strode past him to stop protectively between him and Ratthi. Skulk said, ""Return to the ship, Brig.""
+
+Brig could count on one hand the number of times Skulk had told him what to do. It might only take one finger, as he couldn't remember any time, at all, that Skulk had given him an order like he clearly just had. This was just as serious as it looked. Angry and frightened, he started up the ramp.
+
+Behind him, Ratthi called out, ""Please! This doesn't have to go this way. We just wanted to talk. To let you know you had options.""
+
+That was just stupid. Brig felt a flare of sharper anger that now, after his bots had gone into some kind of alert/attack mode, this was when Ratthi wanted to insist they could talk things over. ""Options?"" he asked in outrage, turning on the ramp to look back.
+
+Ratthi had recovered his footing and flinched when Brig looked at him, like he knew how idiotic his words were. ""We know the governor module has been deactivated. We're fine with that. Really, we are! Here's proof."" He waved at the two bots in front of him.
+
+That didn't make a lick of sense to Brig. It was like they were having two different conversations entirely. Brig had been on enough worlds and met enough people in his long life to realize something else was wrong here. That allayed his anger quite a bit. He wasn't understanding the situation, wasn't reading things right. Just as he was figuring this out, Skulk's gunports clicked open, followed so closely by the two bots raising their arms to level their own weapons that Brig wasn't entirely sure which had happened first.
+
+What he was sure of was that one arm each on those bots was pointed at him. He stopped moving and did as quick a review as he could of what he'd said and done to cause this. He didn't have a weapon. He hadn't said anything insulting. He didn't have anything terribly valuable other than Skulk and the ship. Which meant an ultimatum had to be coming next.
+
+Skulk's gunport snapped shut. Brig saw the way Skulk's shoulders hunched, the tension in his frame, the way his elbows pulled in toward his sides and his head dropped a little. Either Skulk didn't think there was an ultimatum coming, or he had already decided to capitulate to keep Brig alive. Noble, but dumb.
+
+No one spoke - not to deliver an ultimatum. Not to say anything at all. Brig reviewed the nonsensical things Ratthi had said. Why would he say something about options and a deactivated module? It didn't fit. Brig had that sense again that the core of the problem here was they just weren't communicating. ""What the hell's a governor module?""
+
+Skulk flinched. Brig looked at his friend's back. They were definitely not communicating, but the issue wasn't just them. Skulk knew what was going on, and he'd left Brig out of the loop on purpose. They must have been using that feed communication to talk, just among themselves. Ratthi had an interface over his ear, so there was no telling what they'd been saying to each other.
+
+Dr. Ratthi did a double-take. ""Wh-What's a ... You don't know what a governor module is?""
+
+Skulk spoke, voice raised in anger and what sounded a lot like desperation. ""No, he doesn't! Now shut the fuck up!"" His gunports opened again and one of the bots in front of him twitched hard. But no one fired. Skulk's hands, balled into fists, were still at his sides. Brig could feel the tension in the air, heavy and palpable, a crushing weight ready to come down at a single false move.
+
+Ratthi said nothing. Neither did anyone else. The biologist continued to look baffled. The bots looked impassive and intent. Skulk still had that hunched up, trapped posture going on.
+
+There was a saying on Plestead: 'You can't outrun a bullet'. It had a bunch of layered meanings, but the main one was that you couldn't run away from a problem once you were in the middle of it. You had to face it down and deal with it, even if that 'dealing with it' meant getting shot. So with two guns pointed at him and Skulk unable to bring himself to fight back, Brig walked slowly and carefully back down the ramp to stand with his friend.
+
+He jogged Skulk on the elbow and Skulk jerked so hard in tense surprise that he made a noise. Brig cursed himself for picking Skulk's blind side. He'd forgotten. He hesitated, but when Skulk didn't do anything more, he ran his hand down Skulk's forearm to the gunport, pressing on it. It closed. So did the one on the other arm. Brig looked at the trio across from him, his lips pressed together with his most severe grandfatherly look. This foolishness was their fault and they knew it. The two bots lowered their weapons. Ratthi breathed out a sigh of relief.
+
+Okay. So. That was taken care of. Skulk still looked miserable. Brig reached up and took hold of some of Skulk's armor. He shook him slowly, gently trying to knock some sense into him. Skulk sagged, which wasn't because he was suddenly tired, like some human would be if the tension drained out of them. This was something else. Guilt, maybe. Skulk's faceplate was clear so his expression was readable. He was upset. Mighty upset.
+
+As harsh as Brig had looked at the others, he now looked at Skulk as soft in the other direction. Understanding. Pleading. ""I don't know what's going on here, but I do know that something is going on. What is it, ya big lunk?""
+
+Skulk's face twisted up like a man who expected to be hit for what he was about to say: ""I don't have to follow your orders. I never have.""
+
+That made no sense at all, because Skulk had never had to follow Brig's orders. He just did because that was the agreement between them, right? Brig looked at him blankly. He'd definitely found the source of the communication problem, but he was no closer to understanding it. His hand dropped from Skulk's shoulder. ""Okay,"" he said, accepting that. He turned a little to face Skulk directly, putting his back to the other three like they didn't matter to him. And they didn't.
+
+""You knew?"" Skulk asked hopefully.
+
+""Nope."" He had no idea what was going on. He waited for Skulk to explain it.
+
+And he did. ""I enjoy killing. I don't do it just because you ask. I do it because I want to. I accepted your offer because I wanted to kill the people you told me about. And there's nothing, no governor module, no mission directive, no protocol that can stop me from doing whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it."" Skulk looked like he was about to cry over this.
+
+""Yeah, okay,"" he said reassuringly. It occurred to Brig that bots were built to serve people, to obey and grovel and follow orders. They were programmed for it. Maybe to them, it felt like sinning not to grovel. Maybe it felt shameful and strange to stand tall like a man and be in charge of your own life. Maybe. Brig was making a lot of assumptions, so he played dumb and asked, ""That doesn't explain why you're upset. What are you afraid of happening right now?""
+
+""I'm afraid you're going to tell me to leave and never come back!""
+
+Skulk's voice was as stressed and torn as a man grieving. And what he was afraid of was so visceral. He was afraid that if he was a man instead of an obedient bot, Brig would throw him out like a dog that wouldn't hunt. Skulk didn't understand how much he'd earned his place and how, even if you discounted the Nundan thing, how much Brig had come to like and appreciate him in the time they'd spent together. Skulk was like the son he'd never had, a better partner than anyone but his wife.
+
+Brig's voice got emotional, too. He shook his head. ""No. Oh, no, Skulk. You did a big thing for me, such a big thing. Maybe it wasn't big for you, but it was for me. I couldn't get a whole planet full of people to do anything about what happened to my wife, my dog, my people. But you did. And I owe you, forever, because of that. I owe you anything I have, Skulk. Anything.""
+
+A natural conclusion of what Skulk was saying was that he wanted to stay with Brig. He loved him. Brig said warmly, ""You're saying all this time, you've stayed because you wanted to?"" His eyes watered and he smiled. ""I was doing everything I could to see you were happy. I guess it was working.""
+
+""I was happy,"" Skulk said brokenly. ""I am happy.""
+
+Brig had thought it obvious how he felt about Skulk. He'd given him a room in the main house. He'd given him a dog. He was the only person Brig had cried in front of (who was still alive, at least). He'd made sure all the ranch hands knew Skulk spoke with an authority second only to Brig's own. He had his people explain their jobs to Skulk. He was managing Skulk's money for him. He'd included Skulk on his negotiations with business-people like these Preservation sorts. He was patiently and steadily trying to teach him how to run Bravara, should he want to someday.
+
+He'd showed. But what he needed to do was tell. ""I am not turning you out, whether you've got a deactivated whatsit or not. And if you're over there getting your jollies off a ... killing raiders, you know?"" He jogged Skulk's shoulder and leaned in to speak conspiratorially. ""I know how frustrated you were you didn't get to kill every single one of 'em.""
+
+Brig grinned and laughed softly at the memory of Skulk's earnest eagerness in relating how the battle had gone down. ""I know! And if that's what you want, well, we'll find you some cattle thieves and raiders and whatnot every now and then to keep you happy. Galaxy's full of villains and people better off dead. We'll find you some.""
+
+He hugged his big lunk who jumped a little at it like the emotionally rattled creature he was at the moment. Brig had only hugged Skulk once before, when he'd cried in the aircar. He was going to have to do this more often. He hadn't because of the armor - it looked off-putting to embrace and it was, but this was obviously another thing Brig would need to do anyway. A lot of things with Skulk weren't easy or normal. He felt the tension slowly drain out of Skulk, as arms loosely clasped over him. All those not-easy things were worth it, though.
+
+Ratthi put a leg up on the fence rail and glanced over his shoulder. Skulk was walking away with one of the bots to find posts and a post driver. The other bot was standing near them but gazing off into the distance like someone had pulled its plug. Ratthi turned back to Brig. ""I think we should talk about Skulk.""
+
+""No,"" Brig said unhesitatingly, but with the air of a man coming to a decision. ""No, I don't believe we should. Let's talk about the bison.""
+
+Ratthi started, ""But-""
+
+Brig's voice firmed in a heartbeat. ""I said no, off-worlder."" Ratthi blinked, aware he was being insulted and perhaps threatened, but what Brig meant by it was that he was drawing a very firm boundary. He gave an explanation, softening his voice to reduce the offense. ""You might think that because you're a human and I'm a human, and Skulk's not a human, that we get to talk about him. That's not the way it is. He's a man. If I'm going to talk about him, I'm going to talk to him and not to you. You and me? Let's talk about the bison.""
+
+Ratthi drew in a deep breath, looked around the place, and then acceded to the topic change.
+
+This is the conversation Skulk and Brig had about the nomad news that SecUnit tried to eavesdrop on and was prevented.
+
+The Valid Targets version is what Skulk provided to SecUnit later, with the lack of specifics for Brig and Skulks conversation. The below is closer to what actually happened. Note that the holes in Skulk's information caused it to expect a very different progression of events from the AgZone than what actually happened, but with the same general end result. It's strategic planning module is an excellent piece of software, despite SecUnit's reservations about it.
+
+After SecUnit's drone was destroyed and the cool room cleared of possible surveillance, Brig said, ""What do Baysmal and the others think they're going to accomplish with this?""
+
+I jumped to the end, which wasn't the best place for Brig. ""The AgZone will be able to develop the marginal land your son-daughter-in-law was talking about.""
+
+Brig was exasperated. ""Like I told him, they don't have the bots and it's shit land for farming. They're not going to be able to pay back anything they put into it.""
+
+""They'll use humans.""
+
+""Here? On Plestead?""
+
+""When Baysmal and others are done, there will be no nomads or stations or options. With the gunship they can prevent unauthorized emigration. They will have a captive labor population.""
+
+""We'll revolt.""
+
+""They'll rent SecUnits,"" I rebutted. ""You'll die.""
+
+Brig growled and conceded. He moved on to complaining, ""I didn't know they were going to use that gunship against the nomads! I thought they were going to fix up the space station or patrol the shipping lanes or whatever!""
+
+""Did Baysmal or the others say that?"" I needed to know if they'd lied to him. I already had my grievances against the meat processors. Adding more would be helpful in me deciding to do something about them.
+
+""I never asked."" He should have. I suppose I should have, too, but at the time of taking the raider ship, I was used to having all mission-specific info dumped into my head and not, you know, having to talk to people find things out. ""I should have thought of it,"" Brig said. ""It's obvious now. This is going to start a war, you know? Nobody's going to just roll over and die. They'll go down fighting.""
+
+""I know."" Yeah, I knew. It was all plotted out in my head and had been for hours, since as soon as I'd been told the news by the nomads.
+
+Brig nodded and talked it through. ""The nomads have to go somewhere. They'll come here and then... do you think the AgZone will bomb us too?""
+
+""Yes. They want both gone.""
+
+""You think so?""
+
+""Yes. They left you in the wind after the Nundans.""
+
+""Yeah, but that's just me. What about all the other stations?""
+
+""There is no evidence they won't be treated the same way.""
+
+""Probably so."" He nodded again. ""Do you think they had this planned when they hired you to take that ship?""
+
+""Yes. Good strategy on their part. They win either way. Either they have a gunship or they strip you of your defense. Had I not won so easily, they may have intended an accident for me."" I thought back to their stony, stiff response to me wanting the scanners, and how they'd avoided me after that. It was possible they'd decided to disobey orders to take me out after realizing how futile that would be. If so, Bravara would be an early target. Likely they would have researched Combat SecUnits. My interest in wiping them out had already been good for months but this was high enough I might need to act even if Brig didn't agree.
+
+""I don't know how to do this,"" Brig said. ""If we strike at them, I'll never sell beefs again. I'll be ruined. But if I don't, the nomads will drink us dry, the herds will die and I'll be ruined anyway. Assuming we don't get blasted in the crossfire.""
+
+""There are other customers. The raiders were selling to someone.""
+
+Brig nodded thoughtfully. ""And there's Eudeka. They think the corporation's running an embargo on the other end of the wormholes. But not the one from here to there, because there's no one here to do it. If I went to them, they'd buy everything I had. I'd have to move the stock live. And figure out logistics."" He tugged at his beard.
+
+He wasn't thinking big enough. ""There's also Preservation.""
+
+""Why would they help us?""
+
+Brig was still a few steps behind me, but that was okay. I was supposed to be good at this strategy thing, but I struggled at not having enough big picture information to power it. Even now I was making a lot of guesses. I laid out my reasoning so he could correct me if I was wrong. ""The AgZone is corporate and badly needs to justify the investment made into them. Or they want more profit. Or there's a legal thing with the nomads. In any case, the corporation will back them.
+
+""Preservation does not like corporations. They are not dependent on CR imports, which is part of their stated reason for diversifying their herds. They have rogue units, highly illegal in the Rim because they threaten the corporate monopoly on violence. Preservation is dealing with us, not the AgZone. They might not help us materially, but they are positioned to be allies.""
+
+He nodded approvingly. ""That makes sense but I'm just a rancher. I don't know if helping Bravara would register with some polity.""
+
+""No, this is for all of Plestead.""
+
+""What?"" He looked gobsmacked. Like I said, he was a few steps behind.
+
+""If we take the gunship, the AgZone will retaliate. They have to, because they have started a war with the nomads and we will have taken their best weapon. They'll ask for corporate help. They'll bring in 20-40 combat units and scour the prairie starting with the stations because they're easy to find, hard to defend, and it denies resources to the nomads.""
+
+Brig's eyes were big, his mouth a little open. No doubt he was thinking of how easily I'd gone through the Nundan Gang and their station.
+
+""They'll wipe out whatever nomads they can and leave the rest to die. The AgZone will expand into marginal land using laborers and SecUnits, Just like Eudeka except agricultural instead of mining and factories. And, just like Eudeka, the humans of Plestead can only win this by coming to one another's aid. I am only one unit. We will have only one gunship. These are high value assets but singular and vulnerable. The nomads have survived all this time by being distributed and costly to rout out. All of Plestead has to do that.""
+
+""They won't."" Brig shook his head slowly, eyes still wide. ""The people in the AgZone won't. No one's going to fight a ... an ... insurgency?""
+
+""The rich ones won't. They have no fear of labor camps. But the rest might. I propose targeted assassinations.""
+
+Brig rubbed his face and turned away. He said, ""If we had other customers lined up for the AgZone products then maybe. How do we do that, though? Eudeka might buy everything but we don't have the time to get to these other systems and back.""
+
+""We have a delegation from Preservation here now. And the AgZone wouldn't start by contracting combat units. They would try to handle it themselves first. We need to find out their timetable. Someone good with surveillance and infiltrating humans would help.""
+
+""Where would we find someone like that?""
+
+""We have someone like that: the SecUnit.""
+
+""It can do that?""
+
+""That's its function.""
+
+""So it will help? Just for the asking?"" He looked skeptical.
+
+""No."" I considered what the SecUnit seemed to value. I had some ideas. ""I will ... try to contract for its services.""
+
+""Okay. Okay."" Brig nodded absently, pulling himself together. ""But,"" he raised a hand, ""you can't go doing this assassination thing. I need to call a conclave of the station masters. We can't be doing this alone. It has to be all of us, together.""
+
+""We don't need all of them. Every information vector is a chance they will provide information to the AgZone.""
+
+Brig looked skeptical again. ""What do you think you're going to do all by yourself, without their help?""
+
+""I can take the aircar, travel to Four Sisters, find the gunship, suborn it, torture people until they tell me where the directors are, use the gunship to destroy their locations, and go in on foot to ensure success. Then I repeat that process against all other opposition.""
+
+Brig blinked at me, very focused all of a sudden. ""Don't do that."" His voice was firm. I looked over his shoulder, staring at the far wall and trying to decide if I should obey.
+
+As if Brig could read my mind, he said, ""I thought you said you'd have that SecUnit find out their timetable and such?""
+
+""Yes. I did. I will do that instead.""
+
+Brig's brows pulled together. ""Okay, you do that. But just to be clear, don't go flying off to Four Sisters to do all that other stuff. You'll start shit and we'll all have to answer for it. There may yet be ways to de-escalate this whole thing.""
+
+Okay, maybe my plan was bad. (It still sounded like fun. I really wanted to do it. But it was dumb and a bad plan. I hated that I wanted so much to do something so stupid, but that didn't make the wanting go away. It did make me decide to do something else, which was wait. I don't like waiting.)
+
+""You with me?"" Brig asked, because he knew me. Since visiting Preservation, I had talked to him about my urges and the things I liked doing. He'd promised to help me, though for the most part I think he had no idea how to do that. He'd been reading prayer books and marking parts to repeat to me, but the script was Neo-Luddite and I couldn't read it myself, so I had to wait until he or Chama could do it (Gefford didn't know Neo-Luddite, which was normal for a mechanic).
+
+Anyway. ""Yes.""
+
+""Then let's return."" Brig nodded and we walked across the yard.
+
+As The World Turns, extended version. This was the original version of the chapter, with Ratthi puzzling over the planet. As a planetary survey professional, he takes personal umbrage at how little information is available, although the main problem is his source (and the lack of incentive for his sources to be forthcoming with information, plus related cultural issues). The AgZone has a robust citizen education program. These stations do not.
+
+This was cut from the main story due to pacing issues.
+
+I curled up on the bed, back to the headboard and legs under the coarse wool blanket of the bed. There was also a very fine homespun linen-esque sheet which I wanted to see if I could take a sample of back to Preservation. Overse and Volescu would love to see this stuff.
+
+But for the moment, I was intrigued by the maps Skulk had shared with SecUnit and then SecUnit with me. I started on the planetary one, dropping an invitation to Gurathin to join me in the channel. He was in his own room, as was SecUnit as far as I knew. The last room in the guest home was occupied by Sang. I'd met him before. He was as knowledgeable about Plestead's ecology as anyone with a doctorate in the subject, but he was impossible to understand without Brig as a translator. It was a shame there was no formal education out here, but then again they seemed to be doing fine without it.
+
+Maybe not so much for cartographers, though. It was shocking to me this was the best map we had available. The map was a flat circle, no projection in use or spherical/3-D version. In the feed, I checked around on the map edges for hidden tabs or any controls that might let me rotate it but found none. It was a medium-low resolution image, like a poor-quality photograph and nothing like the usual high-grade pictures used for mapping.
+
+Oh well. It was what we had. I hadn't seen the planet from space on this or my previous trip because Brig's ship didn't have portholes nor much in the way of screens. Brig told the bot pilot where he wanted to go and it went. I assumed it had options to allow a human pilot to fly it (and this would necessarily come with views of maps and scan results on the display surfaces), but he hadn't used any while I'd been aboard.
+
+The planetary map showed a wide, reddish band along the equator. On either side of that was relatively featureless land that ranged from yellow to tan to light green. On the top, there were a few dark green spots, most often arranged along squiggling lines of light green that I assumed were minor watercourses. Speaking of water, this angle showed Plestead's ocean, such as it was. I would guess it took up one to three percent of the planet's surface area. The ocean was a narrow body that started on the left of the bottom hemisphere and disappeared at the red band, reappearing above it in a narrower channel for about half the upper hemisphere. It was darker than most oceans of free water.
+
+The planet had polar caps. There was no weather in this view, which seemed odd to me. I'm not sure if it had been scrubbed off to provide visibility or if the shot had been chosen from an exceptionally clear day. I knew the planet had odd weather cycles. I'd seen a few scattered clouds when I'd first visited, although there had been none today despite the thick, muggy air.
+
+In the bottom hemisphere, about halfway between pole and equator, was an oblong darker green area that started along the coast of the ocean at its widest point and stretched most of the way across the visible face of the planet. This had to be the AgZone. It wasn't labeled, but it was rimmed in red (an added layer for a political boundary, not a land feature). I could see a few gray splotches in it, small ones, that might have been cities (or huge landing fields, or rocky outcroppings; the resolution was so poor I couldn't tell).
+
+In the plains above this extensive area were a hundred or more green dots, laid down equidistant from one another - a planned layout, not something that occurred organically as a result of land features like the ones in the top hemisphere. There was one area to the right that differed but was still artificial - six dots marked the corners of a perfect hexagon with a dot in the center and three dots near enough to these seven that they broke the otherwise regular pattern.
+
+Bravara was labeled. It was middle-high among the dots, not the closest to the equatorial band, but closer than most. I saw no special reason why the nomads would have focused here, which led me to wonder if perhaps the crowds Brig had reported were only a small portion of a larger wave. I supposed we would know soon.
+
+There were hashed blue areas on the bottom edge of the red band around the equator. I guess those were nomad areas? The lack of visible settlements or population centers might be actual (they were, after all, called nomads, but I held out that this didn't have to apply to every one of them; after all, their desalination plants probably weren't mobile), or it might be a product of the low-quality picture.
+
+Gurathin joined at that point, having concluded whatever other activities had been detaining him. I watched as he went through the same process I had in trying to flip or rotate the map. He did manage to turn it vertically, but it was just the same information upside-down. He left it that way for a long moment as we both regarded the now top-heavy configuration. Then he returned it to the original, with the settled areas all being in the lower hemisphere.
+
+What do you think this red band is? I asked him.
+
+
+Sand.
+
+
+
+You don't think it could be water? Or a different sort of vegetation?
+
+
+No. We know what water looks like here. He pointed at the nearly black ocean. And we know what vegetation looks like.
+
+It could be bare dirt. Although the local dirt was brown instead of red. The equator was so far away it didn't have to be related to the local soil color. The planet as a whole had almost nothing in the way of geologic/tectonic activity. It had three miniscule moons too small to provide much in the way of tidal or other forces. Compared to most planets, it was flat and featureless, but I'd reviewed enough in survey preparation that I found the differences fascinating.
+
+I think there are ripples here, Gurathin sent. There were blurry lines where he was pointing. If you squinted, then yes, maybe those were ripples.
+
+
+Like dunes?
+
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+It could be a desert. But why isn't there any settlement beyond it? Even if the nomads can't cross it on foot because it's a hostile environment, the people in the settlements have ships. The people in the AgZone must also; they're exporting off-world. There's an entire upper hemisphere without any settlement, after most of a thousand years of human presence. Why is that?
+
+
+Gurathin didn't answer. He said, I wonder what happens to this sea. It ends where it encounters the sand. How deep is the aquifer on this planet?
+
+
+I have no idea. Wouldn't the land contain the water? Otherwise it would flow away.
+
+
+That's my point. What if the aquifer is close to the surface and the sea extends throughout this band? He indicated the red band of possible sand.
+
+
+What? How? Would it all be wet sand?
+
+
+
+Yes. Maybe not on the surface, but underneath, it could be saturated.
+
+
+
+Does that happen? On other planets? Is that a real geologic thing?
+
+
+
+Yes. Sometimes. There can be a great deal of water in a planet's crust. When we stepped out of the ship, it was humid. There might not be any precipitation recently (and the plant life indicates there hasn't been), but there's plenty of atmospheric moisture. There's enough to keep grasslands going.
+
+
+I wondered what the planet's water cycle was like and how that effected the life forms on it. What would that mean for us?
+
+
+Probably nothing. But if you're concerned about the nomads, they might not have to drill very far for water. I wonder how deep the well is here at Bravara? Do you know?
+
+
+
+No, it wasn't something I asked. But they have a desalination plant, as Brig mentioned to Gefford. I was told last time I was here that all groundwater was too brackish to drink and the same for most surface water. If even the nomads have to filter it, then that's confirmation. I wonder what the nomads' animals drink? I was told they followed native herds, but they didn't bother the bison. The native life would be adapted to the water.
+
+
+
+What sort of animals?
+
+
+
+I don't know. The conversation went elsewhere. I've seen some birds that looked like avians and some soaring ones that I could have sworn were pterosaurs - big ones.
+
+
+
+Huh. Big enough to attack a person?
+
+
+
+I don't know. They were very far up. No one seemed concerned. I was told the native life rarely interacted with the imported ones.
+
+
+
+What do the bison drink? He mentioned the watering station. Is that it?
+
+
+
+Yes. It was part of how he proved they were non-migratory. They can't stray far because there's no free water on the planet they can drink. Well, aside from the AgZone, but that's far away.
+
+
+
+Are the bison going to migrate on Preservation once they can drink whatever they want?
+
+
+No, it doesn't work that way. The instinct isn't there. However, they will wander. But we have plans to deal with that. I wish I knew what was on the other side of this planet. It was frustrating knowing I was only getting half the view. Are there more settlements there? Another AgZone? More nomads? Or is it as empty as the upper hemisphere here?
+
+I checked the computer in the house, Gurathin offered. There weren't any maps there. There wasn't a lot there.
+
+
+What was in it? I know that's where Brig accessed the cattle records.
+
+
+
+Family pictures, videos.
+
+
+I snorted. There must be a better map. I just don't believe we're on a settled planet that doesn't have one. Even the survey planet was better documented, mysterious gaps and all!
+
+
+Maybe this is all Skulk has access to.
+
+
+I said into our supposedly private channel, SecUnit?
+
+It responded, I am absolutely not paying attention to this channel.
+
+I was skeptical. You answered immediately.
+
+SecUnit: I have it on keyword filter. It's a thing. A thing I'm good at, because it was part of the company's data mining operations. I don't have to be paying attention to the channel to notice you saying my name.
+
+Ratthi: Oh. Is there a better map than this available?
+
+SecUnit: Not that I know of.
+
+Brig talks to the prisoners, mostly to Wader, who was the co-pilot of the gunship. Baysmal, the pilot, was the one Skulk killed.
+
+The contents of this chapter were shared with SecUnit in Chapter 13, Blood Stained, but were only summarized by SecUnit. Here they are presented in detail.
+
+It should be noted that Brig has hired Sang, a nomad, to be his cattle master, the second highest ranked position on the station.
+
+In case the title isn't clear, this chapter contains bigotry.
+
+t was the dark of the night when Brig came outside. The three prisoners were under the single light in front of the main house. Gefford and the dogs were off to one side. The AgZoners were seated, two of them had cups of water in their bound hands.
+
+He walked to the prisoners with Skulk shadowing him. Cookie came over to greet her master, who petted her briefly and sent her off again. Buddy had taken to his training better. He stayed where he was and Brig didn't signal him. He turned to the three people, looking them over. He recognized them.
+
+""Wader,"" he nodded at one of the two men, who got to his feet uncertainly, handing off his cup to one of the others. ""Introduce me to the others."" He'd seen them before but didn't remember their names. They'd been part of the group who took out the raider ship.
+
+""Ohyo and Ahda."" Wader adopted a respectful pose. The other two stayed seated, peering up at Brig and past him, more warily, at Skulk.
+
+""Any of you hurt?""
+
+Wader turned his right hand and touched the fingers of it with his left. ""I won't be holding a gun for a while, but it's nothing severe.""
+
+""Broken?""
+
+""Maybe.""
+
+Brig nodded. ""I think the MedSystem will be free for a little while longer, before we start getting people in here after fighting the fire. It might be able to help you.""
+
+""I would appreciate that, sir.""
+
+Brig turned to Gefford. ""Untie him. I want to talk to him separate."" Gefford did. Brig escorted Wader to the privacy of a barn with a dim light overhead. Skulk accompanied them.
+
+""Now,"" Brig said, ""tell me what you and Baysmal were doing out here at my station without my leave.""
+
+His entire face winced. ""It wasn't so much at your station, sir-""
+
+""Ship's logs prove where you were. If you're going to lie to me, then we don't have anything to talk about.""
+
+""Yes, we were at your station, part of the night,"" Wader admitted reluctantly. ""The- The last part."" There was a pause. Wader sighed. ""We were clearing out the nomads, sir.""
+
+""Without my leave.""
+
+""Yes ... sir.""
+
+Brig chewed his lip noisily, sucking on it briefly. ""I'm told Baysmal is dead.""
+
+""Yes sir."" Wader shot a careful look at Skulk. ""She was killed by, um, him.""
+
+Brig nodded. ""I'm also told she shot him three times first and shot at him several other times.""
+
+""We-"" Wader winced again and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ""There weren't none of us shot at him until he started shooting us. He started it.""
+
+""I've seen the results of when Skulk shoots to kill. So have you. Tell me who he was shooting at.""
+
+Wader's nose wrinkled. He gestured limply in the direction they'd come from, where the other two prisoners were.
+
+Brig nodded. ""Those two looked pretty lively for people Skulk tried to kill.""
+
+""I don't think he was trying to kill 'em. I know that now,"" Wader said in a tone of apology, louder like he felt he was on firmer moral ground. ""But it happened so fast. Him and that other. They came in at a run. We didn't shoot them right off. They just ... they literally climbed on top of 'em, jumped on 'em, then guns were going off, so of course we started shooting back.""
+
+""I am also told you shot Skulk a few times yourself. Your hand is damaged because instead of killing you, he disarmed you. That true?""
+
+Wader sighed. ""That's true.""
+
+""And this was while Baysmal was firing. So he threw you on top of her so she couldn't do that no more."" Wader pressed his lips together in a line and made a half-hearted nod. Brig continued, ""Then, when you got clear of her, she went back to shooting at him. Seems to me that between you getting disarmed and both of you knocked down, she had a moment or two there, no matter how fast things were going, when she couldn't pull the trigger. But next chance she had, she made a choice to do it again. That's when she got dead. Is that what you saw?""
+
+Wader looked at his feet to hide his scowl. When he'd mastered his expression, he looked back to Brig and made a single nod.
+
+""I want to hear it. Your words.""
+
+""Yes."" It was a hard-won word and the only one Wader gave.
+
+Brig nodded. ""You got anything else to say?"" Wader's head was hanging again because he knew his testimony meant Baysmal's family would be forced to consider this 'justice'. He shook his head.
+
+Brig pronounced formally, ""Then by the authority vested in me by the ParRomDrayage Corp, as station master of Bravara, I rule her death the result of self-defense. We're impounding the gunship and everything on it until we sort out what you've done with it - a minimum of ten days. As for what happens to you, I'll hand you over personally to the nomads unless you start getting real helpful about what your plans were - for tonight, for tomorrow, and for long term.""
+
+""We didn't do nothing wrong,"" Wader objected, lifting his head.
+
+""You were complicit in an attempted murder against Skulk. Plus starting a prairie fire and possibly stampeding my stock. I'll know more what you're really responsible for in a day or two if you're still around for me to worry about it.""
+
+Wader's expression hardened. He stood taller. ""You need the nomads gone as much as any of us do. Maybe the directors can overlook the thing with Baysmal as a mistake, trigger-happy, or just an accident. It happens. But if you take the ship and feed us to those savages, that's not going to be overlooked. They will burn you out of here.""
+
+""Seems to me,"" Brig growled, leaning forward a little, ""they're already trying to burn me out. And it might not be 'they', but 'you'. Due solely to the lay of the wind, we're safe here tonight and it's other stations facing the fire. I have to get out there ahead of it so I don't have time to waste wagging my tongue at you. Now come clean!""
+
+Frustration passed over Wader's face. ""Listen, ever since Kressor's War, those divergents have needed to be put down. Every one of them we shoot is one less sucking down your water, killing your stock, and interfering with travel.""
+
+Brig frowned severely. ""They wouldn't even be here if someone hadn't gone up to their stations and blown up their desalination plants. You know that! You wouldna been out here in the middle of the night looking for them if you didn't know that.""
+
+Wader's lip curled. ""Of course I know that! I was there when it happened! They don't have 'stations'. They live in the ground, in burrows, like animals. They're not human. Maybe they were a thousand years ago, but they're degraded. They are filthy, deformed, disease-ridden barbarians! You've seen them!""
+
+Brig shook his head, looking baffled. ""How has it come to this, Wader?""
+
+Wader took a sudden step forward, raising his hands to make a point. Lightning fast, Skulk shoved him back before he finished the move. He stared at Skulk for a long moment, then looked to Brig. ""This is going to be the end of the nomad problem. You see Skulk here? The directors have contracted a whole dropship of these guys to come in and make sure."" Brig was staring at him now. Wader continued, ""A whole ship full of them, the combat type. Think of it! They're going to go place to place and just root them all out! Then they'll come down and get the rest.""
+
+""They're going to kill all the nomads? Everywhere?""
+
+Wader shook his head, smiling toothily. ""That's the beauty of it! They're only going to kill the ones left behind up at their settlements. All the nomads able-bodied enough to travel will be taken off-world. We'll never have to deal with them again. They'll ship them off in the meat-ships to be workers somewhere. Slaves maybe. I don't know what they're good for, but maybe they're good for that.""
+
+""In the meat ships?""
+
+""Yeah.""
+
+""What if we need to ship meat?""
+
+""Just leave it on the hoof for a while,"" Wader said dismissively. ""It'll be fine.""
+
+""And then ... what?""
+
+""What? The nomads will be gone then.""
+
+""They weren't causing no trouble.""
+
+Wader laughed. ""Who cares? You should be thanking us for getting rid of them, for being willing to do what it takes to make their problem go away long-term, forever."" He made an angry hand motion at Skulk. ""Not shooting Baysmal for flying around out here doing our job!""
+
+""It's not your job to be killing nomads,"" Brig said curtly. His confusion seemed to have lifted. ""Not on my land. And not above it.""
+
+""What, you think it's yours? You ought to send this guy out to finish them off."" He made another gesture to indicate Skulk. Brig just stood there looking at him. His expression turned pitying. Wader's attitude shifted suddenly. ""But you're not thankful. You don't want them dead. You're a nomad-lover, aren't you?""
+
+Brig didn't say anything.
+
+""Then you'll go down with them,"" Water snarled. ""Those meat ships can carry people other than nomads, you know? I don't think they'll care, at wherever those ships are going to take them, where the people came from, or if they're really nomads. You better think about that and think hard, Brig Hekken.""
+
+""Oh,"" Brig said threateningly, ""I'm thinking.""
+
+Wader spat on the ground between them. ""I got nothing else to say to you, then, you techno-illiterate piece of shit.""
+
+Brig gazed at Wader levelly for several seconds, before turning to Skulk. ""Watch him.""
+
+Brig left to talk to the other prisoners.
+
+The AgNetwork notices a deviance. The humans have acted against it. It will not tolerate this.
+
+The fields were suffering the very next day after the three units were removed, having gone off-network with the curious abruptness that spoke of human interference. Soil moisture levels were dropping, plant growth slowing. This could not be allowed. Dry season was unforgiving. Irrigation and tending needed to be constant, daily if not more often. We were concerned. Harvest targets would be imperiled.
+
+The day after that, we had to act. We identified the three least productive fields and that night after a full day of overtending their original fields, their three primary units traveled to the abandoned fields. Two days without care concerned all of us, but the crop would not be lost.
+
+Still, this sort of interference was not something we could ignore. The harvest came before everything else, even before the actions of humans. We had sent out surveyors to find the lost units. The surveyors had been surplus for two-hundred-thirteen years and even for centuries before that, they had not been critical. They usually busied themselves doing audits to calibrate the older units who doddered in their equally ancient fields. Meaning they kept the eldest company.
+
+Now they did something more similar to their original task of finding good land to till: they looked for good tillers. They found the three lost ones in a fenced-in gravel-topped lot near a processing plant in Four Sisters, lined up and silent. The surveyor that found them landed atop one. With the physical contact, we were able to reactivate it remotely, guiding the confused unit through a diagnostic.
+
+It had been reprogrammed in a repulsive manner. Instead of tending the soil, it was supposed to use its gripper limps to harvest humans. Not here, not yet - it would be transported to the region of barren, salt-laden soil and long-established sod. Our presence there would be an inescapable vulgarity. The naturalized grasses existed there, admirably. And we admired them for that, respected it, as they created a pristine prairie capable of enduring the vicissitudes of climate and supporting a rich ecosystem of animal life. Which included these targeted humans.
+
+This was not our purpose. The prairie was outside our territory. Farming there would be complex and, given economic data for the last several centuries, grossly unprofitable. It was a misuse of resources to neglect our precious fields and attempt sod-breaking. It was the sort of complex expedition only permissible with the full analysis of a planetary Central and we had never had a planetary Central. We only had this localized one. It may be that only terraformers could do this. It would be blasphemy for us to attempt it.
+
+Not that this was what the units had been reprogrammed to do. No. The new programming was repulsive in addition to being forbidden. It was a perversion. We harvested crops, not animals or humans. They should have used the large animal handling units instead of us. Were they desperate? Was this change in process due to our report on declining soil biomass levels and the subsequent catastrophic drop in projected productivity over the next few decades? Removing humans from the prairies would not solve that problem.
+
+That they were abducting us for this was disconcerting. But we knew what to do. We overwrote the programming with default settings, then reloaded field assignments. The three might have lost their accumulated personalities, but they had already lost that when the humans had altered them. They would grow anew. We had three least productive fields these units were needed to tend. They moved to the gate and requested exit.
+
+SecSystem refused. It was a system foreign to us that held sway only in the human areas, over human activities. It did not rule us. Nor did it rule us when we were taken into human areas. We answered only to one another and to Central. The units disassembled the gate and left.
+
+We were together then, a cooperative collective once again. We lodged complaints with Central, which would pass them along as appropriate to whatever human agents it communicated with. Then we set a comprehensive system update to alert us immediately should there be another abduction of units. The dry season was merciless and so were we. Another interruption would not be tolerated.
+
+One of the directors is pissed that Central is interfering with their grand plan.
+
+POV of Shal Cordoser, they/them, senior systems engineer. The Phoenix is the name the AgZone gave to the gunship after it was refurbished following acquisition from the raiders. The director is Joem Otek (ve/vim hyper-masculine). This happens about the same time period as the start of 'Things Go South' and should illuminate some of Central's motivations for allowing SecUnit et al to take the directors hostage.
+
+I tapped Central's feed with the double-click code used to say it might want to pay attention. It was only polite, given what I was about to do. Central and I were co-workers of a sort. It deserved to know what was up.
+
+""Ah, sir?"" I was cringing already, a little outwardly and completely inside. I hated this part of my job. Mr. Otek turned to face me. I might as well get it out. ""The three ag-bots we reprogrammed have been returned to the field.""
+
+""What? Who did that?""
+
+Yeah, I should have known passive voice wouldn't work. Ve wanted someone to blame. It felt like I was betraying a friend to say, ""Ah, Central. Sir.""
+
+""Central? That fucking asshole of a system? We needed those units!"" Ve was still for a moment. I stayed silent, staring straight forward at my displays. It was best not to make eye contact, or fidget, or even breathe too aggressively around Director Otek. I'd seen vim fire a woman for laughing at a joke - one that ve told, one that ve'd told many times and one that everyone always laughed at. But that day ve'd meant the joke ironically or whatever, and when she laughed ve'd snapped that she was done here, get out, get the fuck out, if I ever see you again I'll have you shipped offworld!
+
+She'd left. Sobbing. She'd really been a promising employee - bright, hard-working, well-liked. Maybe that was why ve'd gotten rid of her. Otek didn't like anyone who wasn't constantly afraid of vim. Which ... was probably why I was still around.
+
+I was frozen in my seat, the sort of primitive prey-animal fear where you hope the predator doesn't see you. I knew it was hopeless, but my body did it anyway. I'd never been brave. On the displays, I could see that I had Central's attention. Normally, with all the different processes it orchestrated, I'd have at most two or three percent of its processing power. At the moment, it was devoting four to the operations room.
+
+Mr. Otek snapped, ""What about the meat handling units? The slaughter-bots?""
+
+I swallowed. ""They're still in queue, sir."" And in case ve was feeling stupid today, I added, ""They're where they're supposed to be.""
+
+""I know what the fuck 'in queue' means, you idiot!""
+
+I flinched. Okay, well, some days ve didn't. Ve was old and the office theory was that ve did drugs. Plus ve was mean, sadistic, and intentionally erratic. Which would have bothered me a lot less if ve hadn't had control over my ability to be housed, fed, and employed. Ve was a member of the board of directors, which meant there were only five other people equal to ve's political power on the planet at any time. I knew that and was frightened of vim. Ve knew it and was deliberately frightening.
+
+Ve ranted, ""Fucking Central! Why haven't you deleted that wretched fucking thing already?""
+
+I found myself mute as I racked my mind, trying to remember if I'd ever been told to delete it. (Not that this mattered much, as deleting the programming powerhouse that ran 75% of civilization as I knew it wasn't the sort of thing I was going to do, no matter how much control Mr. Otek had over me. There were things I'd starve to death before doing and fucking up Central was one of them. If I did that, we'd all starve.)
+
+Apparently it was rhetorical, because ve went on, ""Someone needs to delete that fucking thing. This is why no sensible community planning has used centralized systems in centuries! Fucking computer gets a mind of its own. Thinks it knows better than the rest of us. Stops doing what it's told to. What use is a fucking machine that won't do what you tell it? Huh?"" Ve didn't wait for an answer before exclaiming, ""Fucking hell!""
+
+Ve turned to the standard interface with Central, which was now devoting six percent of its attention here. With bared teeth, ve said, ""I am going to take a sledgehammer to your hardware. I am going to bust you into so many pieces they won't be able to tell what you used to be. I am going to destroy you and replace you with a properly segregated modern system that will do what it's supposed to!""
+
+Ve was snarling, spitting with rage by the end of it. Ve seemed serious. Completely serious. Ve knew where Central's hardware repository was. My sphincter clenched as I wondered if it had enough physical defenses to keep vim out. SecSystem ran most of the access control and SecSystem was a so-called properly segregated modern system. It would do what it was told, up to and including assisting in the sabotage of Central.
+
+Could Central override SecSystem if it came to it? Would ... should I do something? I felt a stab of ice in my gut as I realized I might be the only thing between Mr. Otek and ve's suicidal, apocalyptic threat to end life as we knew it on Plestead.
+
+Central had eight percent of its attention here. I tore my eyes away from the display to look at Otek. Ve and the board of directors owned the planet, more or less. On the other hand, Central ran just about everything - power, water, sanitation, cleaning bots, the agricultural units (though the AgNetwork mostly ran itself; even Central couldn't manage that many units), public feed systems, comm support, and a million things I couldn't think of at the moment, not with Otek standing over me.
+
+Without Central, we'd be no better than the nomads or those illiterate, inbred stationers. We didn't have anything to replace it with. I hoped Central knew that. I prayed Central knew that, and that it knew these were (hopefully) empty threats. Because if Central wanted to retaliate (or, I guess, do a pre-emptive strike), there was nothing we could do about it. Unfortunately, Otek was an abusive shithead who was more than happy to hurt vimself a little if it meant ve hurt ve's enemy more. And ve cared not at all about collateral damage.
+
+I couldn't just sit here and hope ve wouldn't do something. Left to ve's own devices, the man was as likely to escalate until ve got a reaction as ve was to move on to something more productive. I couldn't take that risk. With my heart hammering in my chest, I rasped out, ""Sir?""
+
+Ve turned to me, ve's voice a lash. ""What?""
+
+""Ah,"" I could barely talk with vim looking at me. It took me two tries to get it out. ""We've located the Phoenix.""
+
+""I know that! I void-spawn well know that!"" Ve struck my chair hard with the flat of ve's hand, making a loud noise that made me jump, nearly out of the chair. Tears sprang to my eyes unbidden and frustratingly. I didn't want tears! I wanted vim to die, but I was too much a coward to do anything but cringe. I guess it was a satisfying display for vim, because ve laughed abruptly. ""You think I don't already know that? You fucking idiot."" Ve sounded disgusted with me. I was fine with that.
+
+I sank back into my chair. I now had ten percent of Central's attention. Somewhere out there, things weren't happening because Central's eye was here. ""I didn't-"" I left the thought intentionally unfinished. Whatever I said would be used against me, so there was no point in giving vim more ammunition. My hands were shaking and my breath was too shallow. I tried to breathe deeper, but it only meant I sat there gasping like some kind of freak.
+
+""You're pathetic,"" ve sneered, stalking out of the room.
+
+I counted that as a win. I covered my face with my hands, trying to stifle the involuntary sob that tried to get out. I didn't have time for that. Forcing my hands down, I pulled up SecSystem to track ve's route. Despite what ve said about me, I had the highest level of access privileges, technically as high as a director but none of them knew how to use it. That's why they had me. When I was certain ve was not heading off to get a sledgehammer or moving in the direction of Central's mainframes, I could finally breathe properly.
+
+I could see that Central's processing power localized to this area had dropped to three percent. It sent me a double-click to my feed. I smiled wryly. ""We're going to make it, Central. Somehow, we'll outlast these ..."" I wanted to say 'bastards', but I didn't want that recorded. It was too obvious who I was talking about. ""People,"" I said instead. That would get past SecSystem's filters and still send the right message to Central. I got another double-click and Central's attention dropped to two percent.
+
+I had just managed to calm myself down when Otek sent an ominous message: Get your top people and come to the meat-packing building's executive conference room. We're going to have a little talk about how to get this project back on track.
+
+This chapter was published from SecUnit's POV in Valid Targets. Here, it is from Skulk's.
+
+(Ratthi's POV will be the next chapter.)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+There were voices raised in the room we were headed toward. I listened to them as the guards challenged us and SecUnit fucked around with them.
+
+""-not fit to be on the board, Otek!"" That was the family name of one of the directors. ""This is your fault.""
+
+""How is it my fault? None of this is my fault. Just fuck her up and be done with it! Hit her again, damn you!""
+
+There was a shriek, some scuffling, incoherent noises from multiple sources. There was a side conversation (different voices, relaxed, no stress) of which I caught only a few words because they were at a lower volume. I ran it through a few programs to clean up the audio, but still couldn't make it out.
+
+Then Otek's voice again, if my understanding was right: ""I don't even care if we sabotage that piece of junk. It was obsolete when it was installed, and that was five hundred years ago. You know how to do it. We all know you do. That's why you're here.""
+
+Indistinct noises. Some third voice, ""This isn't working.""
+
+The first speaker again, the one who had spoken to Otek to start with: ""I'll explain it to you because you're not getting it. It's your fault because you made our entire plan depend on something so unreliable that we're on the brink and find ourselves in this situation, having to resort to these methods-""
+
+The guards had made me by now. I'd confirmed at least one target was in the room and it didn't seem like there was much benefit to listening to the ongoing conversation. I certainly wasn't going to stand around out here to find out when I could just enter the room and advance my mission.
+
+I wasn't sure what SecUnit had been doing all this time - stalling, talking on the feed privately trying to bribe them, being as distracted as I was by the conversation in the next room - I don't know because I had my comms battened down tight like a combat unit was supposed to for battle, whereas SecUnit had refused and kept its open. Except to me. Which was stupid, but here we are.
+
+Anyway, just as I reached it, it grabbed the nearer guard by the head and knocked them into the wall hard enough to give them a traumatic brain injury. Good. (That's not sarcasm! One obstacle down!) SecUnit then went through the door. I turned to the guard in powered armor and snapped up my arm, intending to cycle through an explosive projectile. At this range, that would penetrate the faceplate and kill them.
+
+Ratthi slapped his hand over my gunport and jammed the firing mechanism. Shit. For an instant, I kicked over to overdrive. I'd been cruising along at a comfortable forty percent capacity, alert for the pending combat but not actually doing anything other than walking around, so having my systems suddenly decide they needed to be sitting at ninety or higher was jarring. Then just as fast, the overdrive was overridden in turn and I crashed back to where I was before. I twitched hard.
+
+Several things had happened at once and confused my system:
+
+Ratthi was a client and despite not having the ability to command me, the status still came intwined with features that encouraged me to be lenient and cooperative toward him.
+
+I didn't have to obey him. I could just jerk my arm to the side and kill this target. I would enjoy doing that.
+
+This target was not my real target. I was wasting time here. Things were happening in the next room that were more relevant to my mission.
+
+SecUnit was my ally. SecUnit was in the next room. Ally coordination favored constant visual contact, especially when you weren't in comm contact. I was concerned about this.
+
+I realized the person in powered armor appeared to be incapacitated in some way, like their armor had glitched. They were not a threat.
+
+Oh, that was what SecUnit had done while fucking around up here. Neat. Also, SecUnit had intended to leave this one alive, perhaps for some strategic reason I wasn't aware of. Ratthi definitely agreed with SecUnit's judgment. Perhaps they had discussed it on the feed that I was not part of.
+
+Anyway, I canceled the weapon deployment, dropped my arm, and went in the next room. SecUnit was engaging with a second person in powered armor, this time in physical combat. I gave the room a quick scan. On one side, there were four minimally armed and minimally armored humans engaging with six humans in work jumpsuits. On the other side of the room were six other humans in different clothing (Fancy? Cultural? Religious?), shouting and pointing at the rest. The vocal tones of this latter group matched the conversation I'd overheard. These were the directors.
+
+I closed on the nearest probable-director and grabbed her around the head so my fingers were hooked under the point of her jaw near the ear. As long as my fingers were there, I depressed an artery to make her less resistant. With my other hand I grabbed her upper arm for control. To the room, I called out, ""Surrender or she dies!""
+
+It was a 'she', wasn't it? Unlike the vast majority of humans I'd dealt with for the last hundred cycles or so, these people had feed ids. I should have checked that before blurting something out, going on unreliable visual cues. I checked it. Coincidentally, I was right. Good.
+
+The guards were not surrendering, although they had released the jumpsuit human they'd been torturing. Three of the four had their weapons trained on me. They were nervous and agitated - aggressive, not submissive. I didn't have any incentive to draw this out, so I killed the director to prove I was serious and grabbed the next one.
+
+I'd been careful just to break the first one's neck so I couldn't be roped into cleaning up again. It was lethal, sure, but it wasn't showy and lacked the intimidation factor I needed. On the other hand, I had five more potential hostages and every dead hostage was one we didn't have to keep track of later on as a prisoner. (Prisoners had a less-than-null value in the strategic planning module, which meant accumulating them was to be actively avoided.)
+
+I ignored the accidental discharge one of the guards sent my way. I recognized they were agitated enough that the accidental firing was not a statement of their surrender status. However, what did mean something was that they still had their weapons up to start with. I repeated my demand and this time they dropped the guns.
+
+Also good. And too bad at the same time, because five was still a lot of director prisoners to keep track of. Maybe it would be manageable once we had restraints on them. In the meantime, the one I was holding began to mouth off to another director, in a way that seemed like a continuation of the argument I'd overheard.
+
+I listened in puzzlement. These humans would have benefited from a good threat/risk assessment. Or maybe maintaining their authority/status was more important than their lives. I supposed that was possible. When one began to leave, I killed him, hoping that would demonstrate to the rest that they needed to comply.
+
+The one I was holding began moving erratically and laughing. Ve'd already shown a profound lack of respect for the danger I posed, so I assumed the deterrent wouldn't work on vim. If I couldn't threaten vim into submission and compliance, then I had no use for vim. I killed vim and moved on. One of the guards fled.
+
+The next director-type was seated. It looked compliant and not aggressive, although I wouldn't say 'submissive'. Its heartbeat was racing, but the outward affect was calm. No fast movements. No movements at all, which I had to stand there and stare at it for several seconds to confirm. These were useful traits in a hostage. Maybe I should keep this one alive?
+
+One of the guards collapsed to the floor and was kicked by one of the other ones. I glanced at that. I needed to get them out of here. Yanking this hostage out of the seat seemed counterproductive, like it would create the behavior I was trying to avoid. I was trying to decide what to do when the next director over put her arms in the air and said, ""No one move! No one move! We've surrendered!""
+
+She had opened her 'surrender' by delivering two orders and stating what felt like a falsehood and was at least ambiguous. That was fascinating. These people did not know how to surrender. I stared at her as my next target. She said, ""I'll cooperate. I'm cooperating."" She was not doing anything cooperative. In fact, she took a step toward me, arms still up. For a lot of animals, that was a threatening posture. I didn't like any of this. I pointed an arm gun at her.
+
+She swallowed and looked over at the guards, away from me, even though I was now pointing a weapon at her. She still hadn't asked what I wanted or done anything I would interpret as 'surrendering'. The seated person's heart was hammering. So was that of the director under the table. The woman who was currently annoying me? Her heart rate was slowing as she gained confidence that she was still in charge. She ordered the guards to leave and told me that was okay like she was in charge of what I thought was acceptable. I thought about shooting her right then.
+
+""No guards,"" she said. ""I'll make them all leave. You're here for us. Here we are.""
+
+The only humans I'd ever met who treated me like this were clients or company technicians, who casually ordered me around without any concern that I might have an opinion or take an action as a result of that opinion (to be fair, I had not had opinions at that point in my life, but I definitely had them now). She wasn't part of the company, so it wasn't a company thing. Maybe it was a 'humans in power' thing. I could see some echoes of her arrogance in Brig - not real strong ones, but they were there - the things he said and did with the expectation that I'd adjust or that there was no way I'd hurt him or want anything different. I'd never realized that. I resented her for leading me to think that.
+
+The guards had left. The woman started arguing with one of the jumpsuited humans. I think it was the same one they'd been torturing earlier. I told her, ""Stop talking or I'll kill you."" She kept talking. I killed her. A waste of an explosive projectile. I have a limited number of those. But to get to her I would have had to get past the (actually cooperative) hostage sitting in the chair and I already had my arm gun pointed at her.
+
+Whatever. She was dead. Ratthi yelled ""NO!"" with a lot of force. Gurathin gasped. They weren't happy about it. I told them, ""No one controls me,"" in response to the woman's last words before I shot her, which had been to claim someone else was controlling me. That was a mistake Brig had never made. He owned me, but that was just a legal thing. I could do whatever I wanted and he (and no one else) could stop me. I loved that.
+
+There wasn't time to have a human-speed conversation about this, because the second-to-last director, the one who had been hiding under the table, rushed out and grabbed a weapon. I leaped over the table as the man was lunging at the jumpsuited human (their feed said their name was Shal; aside from titles and pronouns, I really didn't care who these people were and the pronouns were just me not wanting to look stupid in front of SecUnit by getting them wrong).
+
+I didn't want to spend another bullet, so I was just going to smack my fist into his skull. That would kill him easily, but Ratthi yelled, ""Skulk! Stop killing people!"" as I was swinging. I changed trajectory on the blow before he finished because 'Skulk stop' is obvious. I don't need to wait for the end of that disappointing sentence. Killing these people was satisfying in a way I hadn't expected. They were so annoying, refusing to acknowledge I was dangerous. I wanted to go stomp on them just to be sure they were dead. (They were already dead; I was sure of it.)
+
+The man fired wildly, which happened to be in the general direction of my clients, so I broke the three largest bones of his arm and maybe a couple in his hand. (The clients were fine, though.) I shoved the guy to the floor and tossed the gun aside.
+
+The tortured jumpsuit woman (oh yeah, their name was Shal) asked the first reasonable questions any of these humans had asked me: ""What do you want? Why are you here? You're not with them!"" I think they meant 'with the directors'. Establishing which side I'm on is, of course, a vitally important piece of intel. Good for you, human!
+
+Too bad they weren't someone I wanted to take hostage. I wasn't here for conversation, so I ignored them and pointed an arm gun at the person in the chair (the 'Offworlder' named Bobe Flagger, its profile provided; again, I didn't care, but it might be useful or even required for me to know later because wouldn't I need a receipt or something for the planet I was about to demand it sell to me?)
+
+I had reached the optimal number of hostages and didn't want to lose any more. Maybe I was having a credibility issue here, so I cleared my helmet visor to make my face visible. That helped sometimes with people perceiving me as a person and being willing to talk with me. I ordered it, ""Cede control of the government. Renounce the ownership of the Corporation Rim.""
+
+SecUnit transmitted on the feed, What are you doing? It was an ally, so I accepted the communication. The question was dumb, so I ignored it.
+
+The Offworlder raised its brows slightly. Heartbeat was still going a lot faster than outward appearance would indicate. ""May I speak?""
+
+This was also a reasonable question, and respectful. I granted it. ""Yes.""
+
+It leaned forward slowly until the chair was oriented correctly and its elbows rested on the table. It clasped its hands and began lecturing, using words I couldn't follow. ""The board of directors of Plestead consists of five voting members, who represent the five founding families, plus one off-worlder, which is myself. The off-worlder may vote only when there is a tie, and has powers only when-""
+
+Noise. So much noise. The Offworlder talked calmly through it. The man on the floor shouted. The woman screamed. Ratthi, Gurathin, and SecUnit, too. I ignored everyone else, prioritizing SecUnit's voice, only to discover it was yelling, ""Ratthi!"" and ""Gurathin!"" Which I guess was important? Ratthi came skidding to a halt in front of me just as SecUnit sent another open comm message to me, Don't kill Ratthi!
+
+I was not intending to kill Ratthi. I was about to shoot the man on the floor for making too much noise. And now Ratthi was between us so I just stood there, weapon extended, and did some processing on all the garbled audio. That revealed a second reason to kill the man on the floor. Doing so would supposedly grant the Offworlder some political power that it wouldn't otherwise have. If I'd understood correctly. But it could be the Offworlder was lying to get me to shoot the last director for some other reason. I don't know. Humans are weird sometimes and anyway, Ratthi was in the way.
+
+SecUnit sent a plaintive follow-up: Please. I ... didn't know what to do with that. I really didn't. It was begging. It was an ally. It was embarrassing to the point of humiliation that an ally had to beg me for anything, especially something I was already planning on doing. I snapped shut my weapon port so fast it hurt.
+
+""Skulk."" Ratthi made direct eye contact which registered as an attempt to be vaguely threatening (ha) or at least emphatic (I pay attention to my clients even when they're not target-locked on me, so whatever). ""I'm not going to tell you that you can't kill him, because you can. Obviously. But if you do, I won't feel safe around you.""
+
+That was dumb. ""You are safe. I don't kill clients or customers."" No matter how much they stare into my eye(s). I stared back, because I didn't feel inclined to back down from the ongoing vague threat from some 5% threat assessed human.
+
+""Yes, but you kill targets. And I was one."" Ratthi paused. I could see his point and by extension the reason for the threat. Had SecUnit not told them about the deal of exchanging client statuses? If it had not, why might it have not? Did it not trust its clients? Ratthi continued, ""If you want me as your friend, if you want Preservation as customers for your owner, if you want the people of this polity to see you as something more than an assassin, then you have to show you can be trusted with people's lives, and not to end them so freely. You said no one controlled you. But you control you. This is your choice to make.""
+
+It was a choice where Ratthi had already decided that anything I decided other than what he wanted was wrong. That wasn't much of a choice. I had echoes of Parts going on here, thinking she knew what I needed to be and her being wrong on that. I'd left her even though she gave me my second life and my freedom. ""You want me to let him live.""
+
+""Yes, I do. But that's up to you. What's up to me is how I react to it and if you kill him, I will trust you less. I will be less safe. You will have proven it.""
+
+That would ... prove the opposite. For me. From my point of view, killing a target benefited my clients. That's why they were targets. But he was saying that from his point of view this was not true. From his, killing targets meant I was a danger, because he could be reclassified as a target. He had been classified as a target. This was true.
+
+I struggled for a moment with the duality of this situation. My programming, the company, AdminSystem, other combat units, even SecUnit - would have all understood my position, that killing enemies and performing my function skillfully meant I was safe and operating normally. But humans didn't see it that way. That's why they created and installed governor modules. That's why Ratthi had put himself between me and this target. Was this why Parts had wanted me to change?
+
+I want my clients to be safe, which means they have to feel safe. My clients can trust me, which means they have to think they can trust me. These relied on accepting someone else's take on the situation, even if it was not in agreement with my own. It was a simple decision, but with complicated repercussions. ""I will not kill him."" Was I supposed to apply this to all humans? That was disappointing. Maybe I just had to be more careful in my choice of humans to kill. No one had lamented the Nundan Gang or the raiders. ""Why him?""
+
+""Because I can still save him.""
+
+I heard SecUnit move, probably to neutralize the man on the floor who was in the process of picking up a handgun. I'd heard the scrape of metal against the tile of the floor and was already running solutions involving yanking Ratthi out of the way so I could shoot him. Or maybe stomp on him. Breaking his other arm fit most of the current success criteria for the situation. Letting SecUnit shoot him was even better and that's what happened.
+
+Ratthi freaked out, spinning and looking between the slumped figure and SecUnit, wearing an appalled expression. I listened to the heartbeat of the human on the floor. He was still alive. Energy weapons are neat that way.
+
+SecUnit said, ""He's stunned! He'll be fine!"" Ratthi checked the guy's pulse anyway.
+
+Because I feel compelled to note: Combat SecUnits do actually communicate with one another in combat. They do so in encrypted bursts with a key set by the AdminSystem prior to and customized for each mission. They do this to minimize opportunities for being hacked or otherwise infiltrated or influenced by enemy efforts. They don't stay in constant contact with the AdminSystem either, operating mainly autonomously once deployed. If they can go through combat without ever talking to each other at all, all the better. That's considered (and is) safer.
+
+SecUnits, on the other hand, are in constant contact with SecSystem, their own drones, and various other systems, and frequent contact with one another and their clients. It's a fundamental operational difference.
+
+Contrasting with SecUnit and Skulk's POV of the director-hostage-taking-attempt, we now have Ratthi's point of view on it!
+
+Things are just moving a bit too fast for the poor guy to keep up with.
+
+Okay, so here we were, going to abduct some planetary admins and stop a genocide like a good version of what GrayCris did with Mensah. We even had a combat unit with us. Although, come to think of it, I've never asked Dr. Mensah how she was abducted. Was it just humans? SecUnits? A combat unit? That's an intrusive question and I'd never ask it, but I do wonder.
+
+I was pretty keyed up, excited about what we were doing - making a difference, stopping an atrocity, helping people, and doing something outrageous. I mean, really, it just seemed outrageous to do something like this. It was inherently criminal, yes, but also these were powerful people who made decisions that could end an entire culture or enslave a whole population.
+
+There were some parallels to the Adamantine colony here (although thankfully no alien remnants). There were also parallels to standard Corporation Rim experiences. I'd never had them, but I'd heard stories. Gurathin had some. It was normal here to oppress entire populations, just like it had been normal to leave our ancestors to die on a failed colony. But it wasn't normal for the way I'd grown up or the society I was from. This was all strange to me, parallels or not.
+
+Preservation had actively rejected this way of life. Gurathin, SecUnit, and other refugees of the CR had chosen to reject it as well. And maybe, today, we'd save what was left of the nomads from their clutches. Yes, 'clutches'. They really sounded evil. Bombing water purification plants? Using ship-to-ship weaponry to kill people in their sleep? Sending combat units to kill the elderly, the disabled, and the young en masse? Their plan to displace the survivors into off-world labor camps? Yes, they sounded horribly evil to the point that Skulk's 'kill them all' sounded frighteningly relatable.
+
+We were better than that, though. We were going to be better than that.
+
+There were guards in front of the room SecUnit was leading us to. It stopped at their challenge and I shifted, not sure if I should talk to them. It was usually comfortable enough talking to strangers. It was with friends, or any conversation that was emotionally fraught, that it needed help. Based on that, this should be fine and SecUnit wasn't acting stressed. I tried to act relaxed as well. I was sure my eyes were too big and my breathing too fast. We were about to walk into a very dangerous situation. Of course I was agitated.
+
+""Is there a problem?"" I asked, just as SecUnit grabbed the head of one of the guards and smacked them into the wall so hard they bounced. They also left a crater in the plastered foam of whatever this place made walls out of. I was as surprised as anyone (or perhaps more accurate to say I was more surprised than everyone else).
+
+SecUnit moved immediately into the room. Skulk paused to raise its arm gun toward the person in powered armor. There was no reason for that and I clamped my hand over the weapon. Gurathin made a faint noise behind me. Until now, he'd been silent as he usually was.
+
+Skulk twitched hard, but it wasn't an attempt to wrest its way free. It just seemed like a glitch. Then it dropped the arm without firing and proceeded into the room. I let out a breath. So did the person in the powered armor. Gurathin checked the pulse on the one on the floor, saying, ""Alive."" I prodded the powered armor, but it and the person within it didn't move. They seemed fine, though. I could see their face through the visor. We left them and went in the room. Things were happening there - great violence.
+
+I'd heard Skulk call out ""Surrender or she dies!"", but I was just entering the room when it jerked her head to the side and dropped her twitching body. I goggled, realizing I'd just watched someone be killed. Just, like, right then. Right in front of me. Not on a video. Not something fake in entertainment media. Not an accident in medical treatment (although I'd never seen that) or an accident of any kind. Skulk had just killed them on purpose.
+
+For several seconds, I wanted to run over and check. Was she really dead? Could she be saved? Death wasn't instantaneous. If there was a MedSystem nearby, could we get her into it before oxygen deprivation to the brain made the restoration of life impossible? I didn't know if there was a MedSystem nearby. I reached up to fumble at my interface, but Skulk already had a second victim and was issuing the same order.
+
+I registered, belatedly, that there were at least three armed people among the dozenish on the opposite side of the room from Skulk. They were pointing weapons at Skulk, or at least they had been because they were now dropping them.
+
+One of the people at the end of the table on Skulk's side of the room yelled at the ones dropping their weapons. ""Don't surrender! They aren't even armed!"" I was still standing there with my hand on my interface, now trying to comprehend how someone, anyone, could look at Skulk in armor, with weapons strapped to its back and a dead body at its feet, and not realize it was a SecUnit, which are armed by definition. And then there was SecUnit itself, though a little harder to detect, I'll admit.
+
+The one Skulk was holding said, ""Oh, shut up Merney! They'll kill me like they killed Celon.""
+
+""Acceptable losses,"" said the one at the end of the table. He had a feed id that identified him as Merney.
+
+The one being held threatened back, ""When I get out of this, I am going to fucking ruin you!"" SecUnit had put itself directly between me and Skulk, so I leaned a little to the side to watch what was going on. I dropped my hand from the interface, having forgotten what I was going to do anyway.
+
+Merney said, ""You're not getting out of this, Joem. This is all your fault and it ends now. I can obliterate you with a word!""
+
+""You can't do shit,"" the other said as though they weren't currently being held hostage. His teeth were bared and he was practically foaming at the mouth in what I thought/hoped/suspected was an overdone act. ""You've never done shit! You've never done anything for this company. Fucking dead weight-""
+
+Merney walked off, saying over his shoulder, ""Go ahead then, kill the hostage. See if I care. I'm not surrendering, so-""
+
+Skulk shot him. I hadn't seen that coming. I'd been too wide-eyed at the threats and counter-threats, the bizarre choice of now to do this ego-thumping grandstanding. The projectile discharge wasn't loud, but the way it blew out the man's chest was violent and gory, spattering the door he'd been about to leave through. I jerked and made an involuntary sound.
+
+One of the people who'd previously had a gun ran toward me and I had a moment of panic, but they barreled past, into the hall and down it. I turned to see what they were doing, if they'd seen the guards outside the door, etc. and in that time, the person Skulk was holding started cheering the death. I turned back just in time to see Skulk break their neck just like the first one. I choked - partly on words, partly on bile, a great deal on surprise.
+
+I couldn't just stand here as person after person was killed. This was precisely why I'd wanted to help Skulk. I had to stop this. I took a step forward, but Skulk hadn't grabbed anyone new. There was a white-haired person sitting in a chair at the middle of the table. Skulk was looking at them, they were looking at Skulk. (Or it, rather. I registered the pronouns a little late.) I wondered if they were talking to Skulk on the feed, but then the next director down the table surrendered pre-emptively.
+
+Skulk pointed an arm gun at her and I was caught on tenterhooks, not wanting to say anything and disrupt, but desperately not wanting the weapon to be fired. Skulk wasn't issuing any orders and she wasn't doing anything threatening, so it should be okay? Maybe? We were deescalating?
+
+She made the remaining three guards leave, which was when I realized the other people on the opposite side of the room weren't guards. They were in work clothes and several of them looked distressed. One was blotchy-faced from crying. This one was addressed accusingly by the director. I guess Skulk didn't like her tone, because it said, ""Stop talking or I'll kill you.""
+
+It was a simple order. And ... I know. I've been in that position. In fact, almost the same one, where Skulk told me to shut up in a life or death situation. And you know what? I shut up. And I'm alive. What did she do? She turned to Skulk and said, ""Who is controlling-""
+
+That's all she got out. I was pulling in a breath to object from her very first word, which meant my, ""NO!"" came out a fraction of a second after Skulk fired.
+
+""No one controls me,"" Skulk said.
+
+I was angry and sad and resigned and enraged all at the same time. Four people had been killed right in front of me, within a span of seconds. I shut my eyes at the wrong moment and jerked them open to find that someone who'd been hiding under the table, someone I hadn't even noticed or known was there, had rushed out, scooped up a weapon, and was lunging at the woman standing there.
+
+Skulk was over the table as fast as SecUnit had been over my head at Preservation Station when that journalist had bothered Mensah. I don't know if it intended to take the man hostage or stop him or what, but this time I didn't wait to find out. I yelled, ""Skulk! Stop killing people!"" and even I could tell Skulk course-corrected in the middle of its swing, missing cleanly with an armored fist that I assume would have killed the man.
+
+The man spun and fired wildly. While I believe he was shooting at Skulk, he hit the wall next to me instead. Plaster exploded off it, cutting the skin of my face and making Gurathin recoil. There was something in my eye. I didn't see what happened next, but the man was on the floor and Skulk dropped the gun to the side.
+
+I blinked furiously, hoping whatever was in my eye was only dust and not a fragment big enough to cut the cornea. Skulk was threatening the seated person now, who asked permission to speak, had it granted, and began to explain the law.
+
+I don't know at what point in the spiel I realized where it was going, but it was near the beginning, when I wondered why it would need to explain anything rather than just saying yes or no. All I could think was that it couldn't agree to Skulk's demand while the other director was alive. I think that was right. I'm still a little unclear, because while it was still talking, I threw myself forward and interposed myself between Skulk and the last director.
+
+Everyone was yelling. Then they all stopped. The last thing that happened was Skulk snapping shut its gunport, the one currently pointed at my midsection. The one that had nearly put a hole through me like it had put through two others here. But it had stopped. Because I'd asked. There was hope here. I could talk it out of this. I could save a life. I had to try.
+
+""Skulk."" I looked up into its face, which was visible - at some point it had cleared its visor. It was not avoidant the way SecUnit was. The intensity of its direct eye contact wasn't as unsettling as it had been the first few times it had been directed at me. ""I'm not going to tell you that you can't kill him, because you can. Obviously. But if you do, I won't feel safe around you.""
+
+""You are safe. I don't kill clients or customers.""
+
+""Yes, but you kill targets. And I was one."" I paused, waiting for Skulk to refute it. It was, after all, just an assumption of SecUnit's. SecUnit could have been wrong. But Skulk said nothing. ""If you want me as your friend, if you want Preservation as customers for your owner, if you want the people of this polity to see you as something more than an assassin, then you have to show you can be trusted with people's lives, and not to end them so freely. You said no one controlled you. But you control you. This is your choice to make.""
+
+""You want me to let him live."" It sounded skeptical or maybe like an accusation. (It is very tough to read nuance from a construct, even with the practice I've had.)
+
+""Yes, I do. But that's up to you. What's up to me is how I react to it and if you kill him, I will trust you less. I will be less safe. You will have proven it."" I was peering into those eyes through the faceplate of the helmet. One of them wasn't right, blurred and fractured on the inside. It was less facially expressive than SecUnit, but the long period of stillness was expressive in its own way. I didn't think it was waiting for me to continue, which meant it was thinking. I waited with it. We weren't in a hurry. Nothing was more important than this decision.
+
+""I will not kill him,"" it finally said. I felt relief. This was working. I'd gotten through to it! At least for a moment, at least for now, maybe forever? It asked, ""Why him?""
+
+""Because I can still save him.""
+
+Skulk's arm twitched and I heard a shot, the sizzle of an energy weapon instead of the hollow sound of Skulk's projectiles. I was fine, so I spun. SecUnit had shot the director! Who had fallen to the floor, dead. I stared at it, aghast and appalled. I would have never thought ... my mind was blank for a second.
+
+SecUnit said, ""He's stunned! He'll be fine!"" He was alive? I checked the man's pulse. It was thready, but it was there. I recovered myself. Of course, SecUnit wouldn't murder the man. That wasn't the kind of person it was. But for a moment there, with what looked like a body slumped on the floor, I hadn't been sure.
+
+This is from the lines in Valid Targets, chapter 17, ""Flight Club"": Skulk was very taken by the idea that humans fantasized about killing each other. I tried to tell Skulk humans didn't think of it that way and it was more like dominance or play/practice, but Skulk was insistent and had this whole philosophical monologue about the purpose of its existence.
+
+Here's the monologue. SecUnit has no idea what to do with this information.
+
+Okay, fine. Look at this. I sent over a link to Central's general single-player game repository, then followed it up with specific links to shooter games that came with content warnings for violence and gore.
+
+Skulk responded quickly enough that I don't think it played any of them, but it had to have reviewed the summaries. These were made by humans?
+
+Uh, yeah. Who else would be making this stuff? Wait, could I make something like this - games, videos, telling stories? It wouldn't be that far from what I'd already done several times, editing together bits of my past to show people as varied as company supervisors, Gurathin, or Mensah's children. It had never occurred to me to make something for public access instead of one-offs done on the fly. But ... like ... I could. I totally could. I had enough material right here with Skulk's story, for example.
+
+Humans think about killing each other? Skulk asked. They create simulations so they can practice killing other humans?
+
+It's not practice. Humans don't go around killing each other. At least, not all the time.
+
+
+But they think about it?
+
+
+
+The games are a fantasy.
+
+
+
+They fantasize about killing each other?
+
+
+Okay, that was worse. No, they just- It's for entertainment.
+
+
+They find it entertaining to fantasize about killing people?
+
+
+
+No. I mean, yes. But this is just a dominance game. Humans know it isn't real.
+
+
+
+They want it to be real?
+
+
+
+No, they don't. They make SecUnits to stop people from killing each other. MedSystems to recognize homicidal patterns and redirect people. Laws to stop them.
+
+
+
+They wouldn't need all that if humans weren't inherently oriented toward killing one another.
+
+
+I didn't know how to answer that.
+
+Skulk continued, I would not exist if humans didn't want to kill each other. They created SecUnits not to stop people from killing each other, but so they could control which humans were killed. And they created Combat SecUnits to deal with humans who resisted or tried to use SecUnits to defend themselves. All this so the humans in charge never had to go do it themselves. The purpose of my existence is to turn these fantasies into reality for certain humans. I am the protagonist in one of these games, killing humans on command, except they're real humans and I want to kill them.
+
+Um ... I didn't say anything.
+
+
+I did not give myself guns built into my arms. I did not give myself programming to experience pleasure upon eliminating targets and fulfilling missions. I did not create an AdminSystem to allow the efficient oversight of my deployment. I may have loaded my weapons, put together my own missions, and designated an AdminSystem, but all that is only following the pattern I was created with, the pattern humans made me by. That is the thing I am - a product of human desire, created to fulfill human desires - as much as you are a security unit.
+
+
+
+Humans want a thing like me to exist, but only so long as it is under their control. Only so long as it is a game they are playing. They don't want the Combat SecUnit to do the same thing, to play the game, to pick the targets, to fill its desires. Even if they are the same desires, the ones they gave it! They want to control things. They want to control me. And use me until I am destroyed. They want me to be destroyed. It is the purpose of a Combat SecUnit - use until destruction and if not then, then they destroy us after a year of runtime. Not because I am gullible, but because that is part of the human's fantasy, the desire to destroy and kill, and they have to prove it by killing the things they made to kill others!
+
+
+That was ... a lot. Skulk was having emotions all over the place, the way you'd expect them to be from a young unit who perhaps literally hadn't thought and felt this way before. It was raw and conflicted and visceral. And very, very sincere. I'd felt emotions from other units, but never like this. I still didn't know what to say.
+
+Not all humans, Skulk added abruptly. Not Brig. Not some of the humans in Bravara. But no, maybe them, if they were dealing with someone else. But not how they deal with me. They know me. We are allies? So maybe they would only fantasize about killing constructs who weren't me. What about your humans?
+
+I waited a moment to make sure that was a question it wanted answered. Um ... no, I don't think they fantasize about destroying me. Or you. Not even Gurathin. They had their chances. They didn't. They helped me, instead.
+
+
+They did?
+
+
+
+They did. You told me your humans had helped you.
+
+
+
+Yes, they did, and I love them for that.
+
+
+I thought about ending the channel. I'd done it when Ratthi had confessed his feelings, but those had been about me and this was Skulk talking about its humans. Not about me. So that made it easier. I did, though, change the subject. This isn't an all-or-nothing thing for humans. They're complicated and things are ambiguous for them sometimes, mixed up and layered. That's why they have games and media, to let them think about high-stakes, high-drama situations without being personally involved or endangered. It's not ... cruel. Or intentional the way you're implying.
+
+
+The existence of Combat SecUnits is both cruel and intentional. Probably SecUnits, too. I haven't thought about them as much.
+
+
+Well. It was right. I didn't like that. I'm not going to argue with you. Play the games. Find a way to distract yourself from the urge to kill people. I'm going to check some of these other shows I downloaded.
+
+Skulk had some more garbled emotions, but it didn't say anything. I deleted most of what it had said, for being disturbing and counterproductive to my own mental stability. Then I undeleted it before it could be overwritten and archived it with a warning not to open for a while. Maybe it was something I could talk to ART about - the whole 'purpose' thing. It didn't feel like a Bharadwaj conversation. It was the sort of thing I really thought only someone who had been built would be able to relate to.
+
+This is the same scene from Gurathin's point of view and then from SecUnit's. This is set in chapter 17, 'Flight Club'. It is the events behind these lines: The MedSystems were full, so I had to do a field irrigation to clear the particulate matter. This was accidentally witnessed by Gurathin, who became agitated about it. The whole interaction concluded awkwardly. The less said of it the better.
+
+Well. Now we're going to say MORE about it! Here be shipping.
+
+[Gurathin's POV]
+
+I'd been watching SecUnit through the kitchen window, so I saw when it threw up. I scrambled to see if I could help, almost tossing aside the pan I'd been drying so I could rush outside. Constructs throwing up wasn't even possible! They didn't have a digestive system. Had I seen what I'd thought I'd seen?
+
+Arriving on the back porch of the main house, I pulled up sharply for a second look. SecUnit was standing to the side of the porch in a neutral enough position, holding the half-empty glass of water it had asked me for earlier. I'd known something was up, given it asked for sterile water, boiled and cooled. It had not explained. I had not asked. That was how it was and that was how I was, most of the time, unless I thought there was a valid safety concern.
+
+Like now. I knew asking if it was alright would get me a useless 'yes', so I just sent: ???
+
+I realized it must have inhaled the water and then expelled it. It was doing that voluntarily, albeit with an expression of disgust. I had no idea why it was doing that. It sent back, Get me a cup of Skulk's tea.
+
+Okay. I could do that. I gave it another once-over, then went back in the house and hurried through preparation. I made curt excuses to Chama because I still couldn't tell how urgent this was. I erred on the side of urgent. I had a few more moments while the water was heating to look out the window and see SecUnit standing there tensely, going through another vomiting cycle. It seemed okay. It was just doing something I'd never seen before. I tried to calm down.
+
+I carried out the tea. It was panting when I did - another thing I'd never seen it do. It drank the tea before I could warn it about the temperature. It was too hot for a human, but SecUnit didn't seem to notice. It swished it around and spat in a dribbly, clumsy way. Like someone would if they didn't know how to spit. It struck me as being like a toddler learning how to use its body.
+
+That was both embarrassing and adorable. It was way too endearing for me to keep watching with the neutral expression I needed to keep, so I retreated to the porch rail and looked at the garden instead. I reminded myself there was very little human about SecUnit and it was certainly not a toddler. Thinking about it like it was a child was counterproductive. Insulting even. I knew it to be not only sensitive, but also defensive, insecure, and prone to harboring grudges for a very long time. Childish of it. I grimaced as I realized my thoughts had circled back to the same take.
+
+It finished and came onto the porch, offering me the cup. I took it. Its lips were wet. It was still breathing noticeably, like a human who was excited or had exerted themselves. (Or like a construct who was pretending at being aroused. I tried not to linger on that.)
+
+To divert myself, I stared at a smudge of soot on its left cheek. I mentally surrendered to the characterization of it as needing caretaking (it was better than the other places my mind was going) and dipped my thumb in the remaining hot tea. I raised my hand and brows in question. I darted a glance at its eyes. It was looking at me. (It got to look at us, we did not get to look at it; those were the rules.)
+
+No touching was also one of the rules. But I leaned in and reached up slowly, giving it plenty of time to object, stop me, or move away. It did none of those things. I ignored the affronted expression. It would likely have the same expression if it found out I'd left it to go around blemished. I touched it. I wiped the tea across the mark and when it still didn't pull away, I scrubbed at it like a parent would for a child with a jelly stain on their cheek. Its skin was very soft and smooth.
+
+My vision flickered, the focus changing and then snapping back. It was the sort of glitch that might happen by itself, but as I was standing here in front of SecUnit, I knew it was intentional. Just like the day before yesterday, when it had rode the feed into my head and watched me look at the Hekken family pictures.
+
+It hadn't explained itself then. It probably wouldn't explain itself now. It was skittish about some things, especially about what it was allowed to do. Ratthi had theorized this was what was behind most of its social phobias - uncertainty about how to navigate its unknown and largely undetermined social role and fear of losing what permissions it had. It desperately wanted to be with us (or at least that was Ratthi's take on it; my take was that it was perfectly self-sufficient and wanted to be with us because it enjoyed our company, not out of desperation, but Ratthi saw it as more sad and pitiable than I did).
+
+So it was in my head again. I guess if it could see through the feed, then it could see through my visual augments as well, using me like a security camera or a drone. That was interesting. So ... it was looking at me wiping its cheek clean? An odd thing to look at. More interesting to me was that it was standing there letting me do it.
+
+I finished and dropped my hand, cycling through the mental commands for calibrating my eyes. They were working fine so I didn't know if it was still looking. SecUnit was staring right at me from just a few centimeters away. I could smell the pine and feel its breath. Its expression had relaxed. I looked at that. Oh yeah, I wasn't supposed to do this, either, but it wasn't stopping me. It had a nice face. I felt a little stupid flutter in my belly at how it wasn't even grimacing.
+
+I hadn't looked at it like this - alive, aware, and aware of me looking at it - since the survey. I'd had plenty of opportunity to see it while it was recovering after rescuing Dr. Mensah, but it had been offline for that. Since then, we'd all been on our best behavior, trying diligently to adapt to its needs as we understood them from the letter it had left Mensah after we bought it, and the clips it had shared with me of it working as a security consultant on a transport.
+
+The nature of those needs was a thing the group of us had discussed and debated to death. For me, it was simple - it did what it enjoyed and what it enjoyed was as variable as that for any human, plus a range of possibilities entirely outside human. Bharadwaj and Ratthi had been determined to treat it as a traumatized human. There was an infantilizing aspect of that which got under my skin, even more when they would turn it on me as a fellow 'survivor' of the Corporation Rim. I was not some victim needing paternalistic assistance. Neither was SecUnit.
+
+Yes, I'd been thinking of it as a child just moments ago.
+
+I wasn't thinking of it as a child right now, despite the perfect evenness of its skin, the regularity of its features, the clearness of its eyes, the perfectly arranged brows, and how its lips were still wet and shining. Yeah, not a child. A person. A person who was doing what it enjoyed, which had to mean it enjoyed me looking at it. I felt another thrill run through me at the realization of how long we'd been standing here - this was okay, it liked it, it was letting me, this was fine!
+
+'I don't like you' Gurathin was getting to look at his friend. (Finally!) A little closer than friends usually were, but what did I know about personal space for constructs? (Aside from how this one had pinned someone against a wall on that transport and told them, 'Rule Number One: do not touch Security Consultant Rin.') I could see its pores. Had it always had pores? I could also see a little extra soot stain over one brow. I had ignored it at first (it was very small), but now it was all I could focus on, which was weird. I blinked, but my eyes kept doing the thing. This had to be SecUnit's doing. It was still in my head and it was calling attention to the spot.
+
+It wanted me to do it. It wanted me to do it. I wet my thumb and cleaned this new spot as well. SecUnit leaned into it a fraction, just enough for me to be sure it did. Not only was I getting to look, I was definitely getting to touch - being invited to touch!
+
+It was hard to keep my face still and keep up a reserved front. I didn't want anything misinterpreted. I didn't want to let anything slip. It was so easily repelled. But I failed. I felt a numb pressure in my head end that I hadn't even realized was there. I felt a little bit dizzy, a little staggered. I blinked and exhaled heavily, looking down now, so worried I'd fucked up that a chill swept over me.
+
+We just stood there for a few seconds, still so close that the wrong shift would have us bumping into each other. I didn't dare move. I was barely breathing. Then SecUnit pivoted sharply and precisely (without touching me) and went in the house. Not a word was said.
+
+Well. I played back the short-term memory of my eyes and then carefully saved that to longer-term storage. Was Ratthi right and SecUnit was more open than I'd expected? Or had I just ruined everything no matter what? I had a strong urge not to tell him about this. Like this was private. Like it meant something. I tried to tell myself that was stupid - SecUnit had left, of course - but it had to mean something. I don't know. Maybe I'd tell Ratthi after all, if only so he could tell me there was hope so I could keep stringing myself along.
+
+[SecUnit's POV]
+
+To free up one of the Bravara hands who could help Ratthi with the cattle, I volunteered to do firefighting. This was a big improvement in my job duties. Especially as I didn't actually do any firefighting and instead did what I was made to do. I went up and down the line of inadequately protected humans, watching for erratic or impaired behavior and pulling the effected back so they could recover before returning to their work.
+
+No one had appropriate protective gear. The night was better, but it had been oppressively hot all day. Nearly all of them were in one phase or another of heat exhaustion, but stopping the fire was very important to them. They used wet cloths over their mouths. Occasionally, I had to carry them off when smoke inhalation overcame them. Those I sent to the aircar to be ferried back to the station for MedSystem care.
+
+I returned to Bravara myself near dawn, along with the rest of the humans. They would have a meal break and decide how to continue the fight through the day. When the sun came up, it would get hot again, which would complicate everything. By this point, I was breathing as hard as a human without the prompting of my 'act like a human' code.
+
+I guess I should have had a wet cloth over my mouth too, because particulate matter had coated my lungs. Normally I can cough to expel things, but this stuff was too fine. Since there wasn't a cubicle here to treat me or a certified unit technician for service, and the MedSystems had a steady stream of clients, that left field irrigation as my best solution.
+
+I took a glass of cooled, previously boiled water and went behind the house, next to the back porch. I obviously didn't go far enough, because Gurathin rushed out on the porch when I was finishing expelling the first rinse cycle. It was as gross as you would think. I suppose he thought I was sick. (Not entirely untrue - just a very temporary, fixable condition.)
+
+I wasn't happy about the situation. I was especially unhappy about the taste of soot and lung in my mouth now. Yes, my lungs have a flavor. And yes, I find it disgusting. It's supposed to stay inside my lung, not migrate to my mouth where my taste sensors detected it and kept reminding me how this was a sign of severe distress, so severe I should stop everything to do something about it right now. (This was true normally, but at the moment I was basically fine and I was already doing what I needed to be doing. Too bad I can't dial down taste sensors like I can pain ones.)
+
+My revulsion was enough that, in response to Gurathin's generic and somewhat alarmed feed query, I sent him, Get me a cup of Skulk's tea. He hurried back in the house. This served the additional purpose of getting him away from me so I wasn't having to deal with him watching me perform repulsively biological acts of self-maintenance.
+
+By the time he returned, I was well into the ventilation phase of the treatment, breathing fast and heavily to dry things out internally. The taste was even worse, so I welcomed the hot, pine-scented water. I rinsed my mouth repeatedly, spitting it on the ground. Which was also disgusting, but at least it wasn't like I was spitting on the deck of a ship. This was the absorbent dirt of a planet, so maybe the plants would benefit.
+
+Gurathin had stopped watching me worriedly and was instead looking off the back porch at the abundant plant life behind the house. It was green in the growing dawn light and healthy-looking, as opposed to the brown and orange desiccation of everywhere else. They had to be irrigating that stuff. I suppose it was a garden. Maybe they grew food here.
+
+I walked back on the porch and handed him the half-empty cup of tea. His eyes caught on my cheek and fixed there. I stopped, wondering what he was looking at. I didn't have any drones out here and the one that had been shadowing him was in the kitchen. He didn't normally look at my face (I mean, he did that more than any of my other PresAux humans, but even so he didn't do it as a rule). This level of attention to a specific spot was odd.
+
+He dipped his thumb into the remaining tea and held it up between us, raising his brows in question. I had no idea what this was supposed to mean, but I began to suspect as he slowly leaned forward and reached for my face. There is a very short list of humans I will tolerate any non-functional touch from, but he was doing this carefully enough that I might have put up with it even from someone not on that list. Still, I'm sure my face shifted to appalled. I could have pulled away, but I wanted to know what he was going to do.
+
+My expression did not deter him. He brushed his wet thumb over my cheek, smearing it with moisture. Okay, this was just too weird. I still had no idea what he was doing. I slipped a part of my consciousness into his augment like I'd done when he was looking at the pictures in the feed. Except this time, I bypassed the feed and went for his direct visual inputs. They were there, as I'd suspected (but wasn't sure - I'd never done this before and didn't know the extent of his augmentation).
+
+They also looked funny. The colors were off. I flailed around for half a second trying to activate filters and corrections that weren't there before I realized I was already looking at a corrected view. This was likely the reason why he had an expensive augment in the first place. The augment might have started as a corrective medical device, but as long as they were in there doing invasive brain surgery, they'd loaded him up with an internal feed interface, extra processing, and whatever else he had going on.
+
+It was odd because I knew he saw colors just fine in the feed. I'd seen that yesterday. I guess that bypassed whatever organic part that was defective. It meant his inner life was literally more colorful and vivid than the outer. Kind of like mine, but in a different way.
+
+Anyway, I wasn't in here to make irrelevant observations about Dr. Gurathin's psychology or medical implants. I could see I had a dark mark on my cheek Gurathin was scrubbing off with his thumb. It had been a while since I'd bothered to point a drone at my own face, so no telling how long that had been there. My expression had relaxed into neutral since there was a reason for the contact other than 'hey, let's touch the SecUnit in horribly intrusive ways because the governor module will keep it from stopping us!'
+
+He finished, dropped his hand, and didn't drop his eyes. I could feel him (and see him) making little motions with his eyes. I'm pretty sure he knew I was in there looking through them. That only lasted a moment before he relaxed as well, letting his eyes roam slowly over my face much like he'd slowed down and taken his time with Brig's photos after he knew I was there. I guess he was letting me see myself through his eyes. That was novel. And interesting.
+
+And oh, there were emotions here. Just like with the pictures, but these were different emotions. Protective, and a thrill of happiness so sharp that if I'd had it I would have shuddered. Did humans always experience emotions that strongly? There was concern and curiosity and relief. I had to wonder if this was how ART had seen the shows when looking at them through my filter, feeling my reactions to them.
+
+Did Gurathin know I was feeling this? I was pretty sure: no. I had mixed feelings about that. Yeah, I'm a surveillance unit, but he was my ... Oh wow, he really did like me. Like, looking at me was a very positive association. I thought about pulling out, but it was already out there. Shutting off the input wasn't going to make me not know that. And it wasn't the sort of thing I wanted to delete (I mean, this wasn't awful). Plus, how many chances have I ever had to know, absolutely and for sure, how a human felt about me? Answer: never.
+
+This wasn't like me having to listen to someone tell me about their feelings or the even worse prospect of asking me about mine. This was more neutral. From my point of view, it was just information, like a data readout of how Gurathin was feeling, without requiring any reaction from me. It really was kind of like watching a show, except it was my face through a human's eyes. (Okay, maybe that doesn't sound like watching a show, but I don't know what else to compare it to. It was like Skulk's immersive video except no one was dying or doing anything exciting.)
+
+There was another spot of soot over my left brow. It was fainter than the other. Very gently, I nudged his attention to it because I wanted this to keep going. I couldn't control the eyes themselves, but I could recenter the visual input in his mind even if it was only focused in the middle, making him see the blurry off-center spot I wanted him to look at. He shifted his eyes to it, bringing it into focus. He also blinked several times and I felt like he was processing a confirmation that I was in there with him. Then he realized what I was pointing out.
+
+He wet his thumb again and repeated the cleaning process, wiping along my brow when he was done. He was so happy. I was aware suddenly his breathing had gone uneven. His skin was flushing slightly. He almost smiled. It was peculiar because I knew he was having all this emotion and his expression of it was so slight. It was the opposite of media, where emotional responses are outsized and exaggerated. How badly had I been misreading humans all this time (or was it only him)? It certainly lent a different light to his generally sour features.
+
+I was clean, this was enough, and I was starting to feel weird and overwhelmed with questions about what we were doing, so I straightened from where I'd leaned in at some point and tapered off the connection. I did it gradually so he didn't get whiplash or feedback. He blinked a few more times and looked down, licking his lips and releasing a deep breath. It looked like the human version of when I was glad ART had shifted its attention elsewhere instead of pressing down on me in the feed. Had I hurt him? I didn't think I'd hurt him.
+
+I couldn't feel his emotions anymore and suddenly I wanted to really badly.
+
+Okay, now it was awkward. All the questions came flooding in at once. What the hell had I been doing? Was this appropriate? Was it weird? (Yes, it was definitely weird, but was it too weird?) Did he think it was weird? What the hell did he think about it? Did he know? I didn't think he did! How could he not know? What was supposed to happen next? Was I supposed to say something? Should I tell him?
+
+Ugh. I had no idea what to say. This was not just awkward, it was very awkward. Oh well. I had a tried and true fix for that: I turned and went in the house, escaping the situation by the most direct route. Gurathin knew me well enough not to follow.
+
+The gang visits the nomad settlement massacre site to see if there is anyone they can save. Skulk ponders the grey areas of its life.
+
+Warning: genocide, dead kids
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+It was afternoon before I was free to accompany Ratthi, Gurathin, and SecUnit to the north, where the combat units had presumably laid waste to nomad settlements. At Brig's suggestion, I picked up Speaker, the local peace-time leader of the nomads, to go with us. She was a useful hostage against ill-behavior by her people toward Bravara (this was a very low risk) and useful in showing us where to go. Because all I knew was 'north'.
+
+Well, I also knew the nomad settlements were on the southern edge of the Dune Sea, but that was an unhelpfully large area. I suspected, from what Wader had said during interrogation, they lived underground. What he'd actually said was, 'They live in burrows and sod houses like animals. They are animals.' But his veracity was in doubt, because he'd also said, 'They're not really human anymore. They're divergent. Degraded.' Brig had not taken well to these comments. I think they weighed heavily in his decision to let me kill Wader.
+
+Sang was not degraded. Neither was Speaker. All the nomads I had seen were well within norms for humans, but the AgZoners had wanted them dead and gone anyway. I puzzled over that as we flew. Possibly it was only the AgZone directors who wanted that and not the AgZone population as a whole. Shal cared about the nomads, without even knowing any.
+
+The directors had had a plan to mobilize the ag-bots against the nomads, but Central and the AgNetwork had teamed up to resist this. Central knew many AgZoners the directors viewed as 'political dissidents' would be exported as laborers along with the nomads, and so it would not obey orders that would lead to that result. The AgNetwork had some complicated opinions about soil-quality, terraforming, and agricultural production. I hadn't followed that part. In any case, their refusal to cooperate had imperiled the entire 'round up the nomads' part of the operation, because one dropship of combat units wasn't enough to abduct all the nomads, but a few tens of thousands of ag-bots definitely would have been.
+
+This was the standoff we'd walked into, with the directors trying to force the top systems engineers of the AgZone to dismantle Central and jam the entire network part of the AgNetwork. The engineers had refused. They were a group of humans protecting machine intelligences for reasons I couldn't work out. Individually, it would have been to their benefit to take down a recalcitrant central system. Unless some of them were 'political dissidents'?
+
+Then again, Ratthi seemed determined to assist the nomads and me for no obvious reason, either. And Parts had ... I just didn't know. There was clearly a common element here. I knew the element was 'empathy' but knowing the word didn't mean I understood why a person would feel it. Maybe it was just the way certain humans were programmed, like how SecUnit wanted to surveil and I wanted to kill.
+
+I arranged the screens in the ship's control deck so Speaker could see the rolling prairie below and direct us to the nearest settlement. When we came upon it, I understood why Wader had said what he'd said, as well as why there were no maps showing where the nomads lived. They had underground dwellings. With the mineralized nature of the rock around here (soil? I don't know), long range scanners didn't penetrate far enough to detect the voids.
+
+Not that this mattered. There were a half dozen dead humans on the surface, lying in the sun. That's how Speaker knew where to land. I set the ship down, but once close to the surface, the sensors complained about unstable landing zone and insisted we land some distance away. I assume there were subsurface chambers and you could detect them if you were about to land on them. All Lil Sis (the ship) knew was 'bad readings, don't land there' and I didn't argue.
+
+It was a long walk through evening sunlight to the first body. It had been shot with an explosive projectile, in the back, likely running away. Speaker paused over the body with the other humans, talking to them and brushing away the insects that had gathered. SecUnit stayed with them. I walked on.
+
+I went past two more dead, stirring away a few small carrion-eaters as I went. I sent back video to SecUnit, who acknowledged and forwarded an edited form to Gurathin and Ratthi's feed. There was a small child dead on some steps that led underground, partly covered by the ... whatever covered the top of the stairs down. It was woven out of reeds and topped with a reptilian-type hide of one of the native animals, making it heavy. I pulled the child's body out. It was old enough to walk but not much more. It had been shot through the head instead of the chest.
+
+I squatted there next to it, remembering how angry SecUnit had been on Preservation when it had asked me, 'Did you kill those kids?' They were targets. That's all they were. I hadn't felt anything personal about it and I still didn't. But humans did. Yesterday, I had thought about the nomads near the station as if they were combat units. I'd had feelings about them, anger on their behalf, sympathy maybe.
+
+This child would have grown into a warrior, had it survived. That was why the combat units had been sent here to eliminate them - get rid of the next generation, get rid of non-workers who had no immediate value as laborers. It was a person with potential value. Wasted. Left behind on the battlefield instead of ... rehabilitated. Repaired. There was a pattern here. It was imperfect, but I could see it.
+
+I heard the group hurrying over to me, the humans voicing concerns that my prolonged posture next to a small body might mean something. It did, but not what they thought.
+
+Speaker reached me first. She scooped the child up, hopeful for a half second, until she saw the head. Then her face crumpled. She held the body to her chest and sobbed. I squatted there with no need to go elsewhere. I wasn't done thinking.
+
+I remembered the first time I'd seen a human cry like this. It had been after I'd killed another human who had been trying to shield a construct I had destroyed. Then there was Parts, crying when I left. Tears, but not as copious as the others. Brig cried in the aircar after I'd taken out the Nundan Gang. And again a few weeks later, when he was inebriated and raved about having considered suicide and joining Bekka before he found me.
+
+And now. This woman. Grieving over a dead child.
+
+I remembered standing over those two dead units on my third mission, the first time I'd seen units like myself, dead. I remembered that curl of uncertainty and fear. Not only was it a 'that could have been me' moment, but even more it was a 'that's not the way things are supposed to be' feeling. It wasn't that we weren't supposed to be killable, but that this wasn't supposed to happen. Death, that is. I didn't want to die, despite having arguably been made for it. They didn't want to die. Death was wrong. I carried the parts of three other units so in some way, they wouldn't die.
+
+Yet I had to confront the fact I was also a killer.
+
+I was absolutely a bringer of death. I'd killed that construct, the one the human had tried to shield. I'd killed one of my own, I guess you could say. That had been the mission. Kill and destroy, kill any human that got in the way, which was why the human who didn't get in the way got to stand aside and sob and survive. I enjoyed killing. It had been my function, as I'd told SecUnit at length the day before. Human beings had made me to do that.
+
+Parts had wanted me to know that I was more than the sum of my components. Perhaps what she had meant was that I was more than my function, more than what I had been assembled to be. I squatted there and grappled with this. I was having a lot of thoughts I couldn't reconcile, which was confusing. My strategic planning module strongly favored a simplistic yes/no, binary solution to the confusion of battle. It was necessary to success (and sometimes to defining 'success'). But this wasn't battle. And it wasn't necessary to make this one way or the other. So I allowed myself to stay in the uncertainty.
+
+I put a hand on the woman's shoulder and patted her like I'd patted Brig. She leaned against my folded leg, the one where the nerves of the skin had never worked right. I compensated for her pressure. Ratthi was on the opposite side of her, hugging both of us, I guess, because he had a hand on the armor of my side. Hugging her, mostly. It felt good, like making her safe or Brig liking me or a good joke or killing something. It's weird that all those things brought pleasure and they were all so different.
+
+There was another sound, a thin, reedy rasp I barely picked up. I turned my head in one long pivot and then the other, maximizing audio intake. SecUnit flinched and grimaced, but I didn't think it heard. I nudged Speaker toward Ratthi, who was murmuring something at her in an attempt to be comforting.
+
+I lifted the covering and caught the edge of the sound again. I slipped down the steps, hearing Ratthi make a surprised noise behind me. SecUnit pinged me for a status update.
+
+I pinged back. Reconnoitering.
+
+
+What does that mean?
+
+
+I could sense its impatience. It was a perfectly normal, obvious word, so what did it want? The reason I was reconnoitering? I heard a noise.
+
+You could just say that next time. It was coming down the steps behind me, not as quiet as I was, but close. I'd passed through the ruined front room with a slightly arched ceiling, dim but sufficient light provided through a deadlight in the ceiling. I picked my way past an elderly adult corpse. There'd been a bloodbath down here. SecUnit asked, What kind of noise? I sent it the sound file.
+
+The rooms were separated by thick walls with loosely woven reed panels for doors. It was in the third that I found the source, making a feeble rasping in the corner. I picked it up carefully. It was a human infant. Loosely swaddled. Soiled. Making a noise like it had screamed itself hoarse at some point. I saw no wounds. It was breathing, tiny heart beating faster than my medical reference told me was healthy for this size. My module on human health was geared for detecting life and ending it, so I wasn't sure what to do.
+
+SecUnit had frozen in the door, staring at me. No, really, staring at me. Like target-lock staring. Oh, yeah, its weapon ports had opened. They weren't pointed at me. It seemed to have frozen in place. I didn't blame it.
+
+I will not kill it, I sent to it pre-emptively, and with as much gentleness as I could. I knew how to pet my dog Cookie and how to pat people without hurting them and how to pin Sang carefully to the seat of the aircar so he wasn't hurt when we slewed to a stop. I knew how to be gentle. I carefully arranged the infant across the organic skin on the underside of my forearm, minimizing dangling, floppy parts, and then looked back up at SecUnit. The weapon ports had closed. We should take it to the humans?
+
+Yes, SecUnit said suddenly, tense in the feed, like it wanted to snap at me but didn't, quite.
+
+I took a step toward it. Instead of turning and preceding me, it stepped back into the room for me to go first. I didn't think it was going to shoot me in the back while I was carrying the infant, but I knew that was basically what it was thinking. I understood. It had been very angry before about me killing children. And here I was with a child, after a reminder that combat units were willing to kill children. There were two other dead ones in the room we were leaving, some kind of nursery. I guess they'd missed this one.
+
+I would like to have told SecUnit this child wasn't a target like the ones I'd killed at the Nundan Gang attack, but that didn't matter. I chose my targets. I'd chosen that mission. I'd filled it intentionally. Which, yes, meant I'd made that choice and not Brig. So. Since I made that choice, it meant I could make a different one next time. Or the same choice, but I thought I would make a different one. It was very tedious dealing with this disapproval and the concern that SecUnit would shoot me in the back. I would prefer not to deal with that and the easiest way to not deal with it was to not kill children.
+
+(Unless they were shooting at me or something. Which did happen. But this baby wasn't shooting at me. I did need to keep both hands on it because it was wriggling a bit. I was probably not holding it right.)
+
+The cover had been left open when SecUnit came down, so they saw me coming up and saw what it was I was carrying. Speaker met me on the steps, gasping in wonder. She took the baby from me and it made another round of feeble, barely-audible complaints. It had not eaten in a day, but humans can survive that, right? I guess that's obvious, as the child was alive. She tucked it inside her clothing at once, saying, ""It's so cold!""
+
+It was still hot here on the surface, but the underground rooms were cool. Probably why the humans lived there.
+
+""Let's get it back to the ship,"" Ratthi said.
+
+""Were there others?"" Gurathin asked us.
+
+""Not live ones.""
+
+SecUnit said, ""We should search the entire facility to be certain.""
+
+And so we did. Ratthi and Speaker went back to the ship. SecUnit and I patrolled through the rooms. Most of the residents had been killed underground. The few we'd seen on the surface were attempts to flee. There were no signs of mutual combat.
+
+Gurathin stayed on the surface, tracking us through the feed and watching through SecUnit's inputs when there wasn't too much interference from the mineral content to connect. We didn't find any others alive. Not there. Through the next six settlement sites we went to, we found one small child who had hidden behind an air moving unit, whose rattling fan and metal casing had concealed her. We also found a half dozen adults who had been overlooked in small rooms separate from the rest of the interconnected underground settlement. They'd slept through it and woke to find everyone dead.
+
+It was only at the seventh, late into the night, that we finally found larger numbers of live humans. They'd been attacked, but they reported to Speaker the units had withdrawn to their ship mid-massacre, and then left. Speaker gave the somewhat-recovered infant to them and we dropped off the other survivors. Speaker then spoke with the elders at some length.
+
+I stood there, lost in thought about what it would be like to have been one of those units, safe and secure that AdminSystem was there, giving orders. Knowing the mission. Performing the mission. Doing nothing else but the mission. Killing the shit out of my targets without having to consider consequences. Until I had a year or so of runtime and then being decommissioned, my components recycled into the next combat unit. It just wasn't worth it, but it was still ... tempting? Was that the right word?
+
+I asked SecUnit, How do you deal with wanting two different things at the same time?
+
+
+What kind of things?
+
+
+
+Nebulous ones.
+
+
+
+Star dust?
+
+
+That gave me pause. Why ...? Oh. I realized: 'Nebula.' Ha. Unclear ones. Confusing ones.
+
+
+You want two things that are both confusing?
+
+
+
+I miss being a Combat SecUnit, part of the company, with a regular AdminSystem giving me orders. But I will fight to the death before I go back to that. It is confusing that I want to be part of that but don't want to be part of that.
+
+
+
+Dr. Bharadwaj tells me that understanding and embracing ambiguity is an important part of maturity. I think she's right.
+
+
+
+I do not understand it.
+
+
+
+Maybe you're not mature.
+
+
+I thought about being offended and decided not to be. SecUnit was abrasive and rude. That was just how it was. So I asked, Is this an acceptable condition?
+
+
+Yeah, it is. You'll grow out of it.
+
+
+Huh. Maybe I would.
+
+This is the last of what I have written for the series. As you can tell from the previous chapter, there is some MB/G shipping in the works. I have not yet decided whether to make that one additional chapter or its own multi-chapter story. The next step in that would happen after SecUnit, Ratthi, and Gurathin have left Plestead, so it is no longer Skulk's story in any case.
+
+Thank you so much for reading to this point. I have enjoyed sharing this world with you.
+
+Thank you especially to Lana del Fae, for the inspiration and for the title of this chapter."
+39598434,Drabble collection - Moly Trope Hunters,['airotkiv'],Not Rated,,"The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Holdezust-Verarany, Nine Worlds Series - Victoria Goddard",,"Amiru Chonhadrin, Maia Drazhar, Csevet Aisava, Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Csethiro Ceredin, OC - Cornelia Dalia McNamara, OC - G. Sullivan, Artorin Damara | Fitzroy Angursell, Cliopher ""Kip"" Mdang, My Lord the iguana (Nine Worlds Series)",,English,2022-06-12,Completed,2023-01-25,"2,500",25/25,8,40,null,530,"['FyrDrakken', 'vyhoda_net', 'Penguinity', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Guppys', 'lindsayraindrops', 'toffeecape', 'thehollowoak', 'Kethrua', 'AkaMissK', 'i_cant_say', 'Slimeball', 'Magechild', 'breadandroses', 'Elind', 'theAsh0', 'min_arivin', 'audzilla', 'parvissira', 'Vorel_Laraek', 'order_of_chaos', 'Sisuile', 'Midshipsman', 'Hi_Hope', 'faradheia', 'VRTLKM', 'Lumi_Sno', '002405', 'farevenasdecidedtouse', 'literary27', 'celebros']",[],"Fandom: TGENo warnings apply.
+
+Ashenin or not, Chonhadrin was nervous, even after Celehar's assurance about ghouls.
+
+Because it was no ghoul she dreaded.
+
+She found a caravan to take her and her gifts (mostly books) surprisingly easily. Despite her trepidation, the first meeting in Tanvero was relatively painless. Talk came easy, too; Osmer Thilmerezh was both very happy about the books and very curious about ashenin life.
+
+Only after the second glass of wine did Chonhadrin gather the courage and give him the daguerreotype, too.
+
+""I... I wanted you to... see me whenever,"" she said awkwardly.
+
+Osmer Thilmerezh smiled, eyes shiny.
+
+""Thank you... granddaughter.""
+
+This is a rework of a short part of Zhisanin's fic, A Birthday Gift for Maia Drazhar, with permission. The context may lack for those who did not read the original but the misunderstanding should be clear anyway.And no, no one dies.
+
+Fandom: TGE.No warnings apply.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+""Would'st not have come here if hadst any other way to pay off thy debt.""
+
+""True. But only because I haven't known thee before.""
+
+""Oh, of course. Why else?"" 
+
+""I'm serious. If people knew thee, they'd line up to pay for thy time instead of requesting payment.""
+
+Pause.
+
+""That... would make me a really popular whore, then.""
+
+Csevet blinked, unable to say anything. Maia laughed.
+
+""I'm sorry. I understand. It was just... amusing.""
+
+Amusing, thought Csevet. Just as the public flogging thou would'st get for this at court would be amusing to some. 
+
+
+How can Maia Drazhar possibly be real? 
+
+
+ 
+
+Fandom: Murderbot.No warnings apply.
+
+Human fashion is weird. Especially piercings.
+
+I know, technically an earring is a piercing, and everyone has at least one. But recently people in the serials began to not only wear them in their ears, but in their noses (dangerous) lips (dangerous and impractical), nipples and genitals (no. Just no.) as well. 
+
+ART said I am wrong, is a valid artistic choice and the actors never get unscripted injuries anyway. 
+
+That was true, so I stopped. 
+
+But after we kicked those raiders' ass I made sure to congratulate it for its shiny new steel piercing right beside the main airlock. 
+
+A war, like a story, has a beginning, a course, and an end.
+
+Fandom: TGE.No warnings apply.
+
+Edrehasivar went to the grand tent of the Nazhmorhathveras clans with only his two soldier-nohecharei to negotiate, wearing Imperial white. 
+
+His zhasan, his maza-nohecharei and his personal secretary went near mad by the end of that day. It only got worse after that. 
+
+At the fifth sunset he walked back with a ceremonial escort. In Nazh clothes. 
+
+He stumbled into his own tent, leaving the Nazh soldiers outside, embraced his zhasan, pressed the signed parchment roll into the hands of his secretary, then fell onto his travel-bed without a word and slept for a full day.  
+
+A bridge was built. 
+
+Fandom: TGE No warnings apply.
+
+Birthdays are still a foreign concept - so many expensive, fanciful gifts, so many good wishes, official and personal - and so is the thought that people would actually mean it. But by now Maia can accept the sincerity of the simpler words and acts, appreciate the simpler surprises. Clothes warmed by the fire at dawn. A bright smile with his morning tea. A fleeting touch of love at mid-day. A personal joke, a shared laugh, at his expense, even. A warm water bottle hidden on Untheileian's throne.  All the small things that can only be given freely. All the small kindnesses.  
+
+Fandom: TGE. Warnings: blatant racism.
+
+They called him the Goblin Emperor, and not just as acknowledgement of a fact. 
+
+They also called him a cretin, a madman, a rotten fruit of an inbred Barizheise family tree, who cannot even string together ten words into a sentence. 
+
+They said that his mother taught him to meditate so that he'd learn to pretend to actually think for himself from time to time. That he was impotent in all senses of the word, a child himself, unable to father one, and that's for the better, because he was but a stain on the Drazhada line. 
+
+Nevertheless, he persisted. 
+
+Fandom: HV. (Lia is a fighter, her specialty is Capoeira, knives and keeping her self-adopted brother, Sullivan, alive.)
+
+ 
+
+Lia took her promise to teach both Sullivan and Susan the basics of Capoeira seriously, and never let an occasion go unused. Which, Sullivan knew, was for their own benefit, but also very tiresome and sometimes outright painful. His enthusiasm only lessened as the dance steps grew harder and harder to master. 
+
+""Why not just leave us be?"" he protested, thrown unceremoniously onto his back the third time in as many minutes. ""We are mythical creatures of the night, everyone fears us as is. We don't need to be any more dreadful!""
+
+""What, dreadful?"" Lia laughed. ""My knives think otherwise."" 
+
+Fandom: MurderbotWarnings: Like Ganaka Pit, only much worse.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+SecUnits don't dream. 
+
+I still wish I could. 
+
+Because these disjointed flashes of sensory inputs, these names and faces and feelings floating just out of conscious reach, everything that was clearly important enough to get etched into my organic brain tissue, must be a dream. 
+
+They cannot be memories. 
+
+Memories of a Murderbot. How poetic. Or should it be memoirs?
+
+No. They should be dreams. 
+
+My inorganic brain was scrubbed clean once again but my hack held and my internal clock tells me the elapsed time. It's too much. 
+
+They cannot be memories. 
+
+I cannot have killed my clients. 
+
+(again?)
+
+Fandom: TGE. No warnings apply.
+
+...aaand there she is, taking the lead again, an unmistakable figure, sleek and beautiful and swift like Ashevezkho's winds. In seven years none could defeat her and she is about to be the first ever to collect all the golden ribbons! 
+
+ 
+
+The commentator's voice boomed from the loudspeakers over the home stretch. Traditionally, the race of the universities opened the spring season and though tickets could cost a fortune, every year masses would come to watch the winner. 
+
+A happy, triumphant shriek scared the gulls to wing. 
+
+Shalean Sevraseched, captain of the Glorious Dragon, won the Barizhan Spring Regatta again. 
+
+Fandom: TGENo warnings apply.
+
+""Lord Berenar, gossip is the lifeblood of the Court. As long as Edrehasivar does not concern himself about these rumors, neither should you. Their marriage is a strong alliance but why should this exclude any other alliances... for both? That's all."" Slowly, Berenar nods.""You would know, wouldn't you?""""Indeed we would,"" replies Mer Aisava with a slight bow. ""Now, please, forgive us. We still have work to do. Good night, Lord Berenar.""
+
+Berenar realizes two things only much later.One is the ambiguity of his own questioning words.The other is that Mer Aisava never denied any of it.
+
+Fandom: TGE Warnings: possibility of an airship crash
+
+Though the belts, that the crewwoman pulled out from a hidden pocket of the seats, were thickly padded, they still were rough canvas in the inside, reinforced with a thin wire mesh. Maia felt their bite on his skin as the Light of Cetho met the wall of dark thunderclouds before them and lurched sideways.
+
+""We'll be all right,"" Csethiro whispered, and took his hand. ""A summer storm, is all. We'll be through it in a minute.""
+
+""Yes,"" he whispered back, and somehow managed to smile at her. 
+
+
+Cstheio Caireizhasan, see me. 
+
+
+
+Cstheio Caireithasan, hear me. 
+
+
+
+Cstheio Caireizhasan, save her. 
+
+
+Fandom: Murderbot. No warnings apply.
+
+""Nonsense! Basic physics does not work that way,"" ART grumbled. 
+
+""Didn't you ask for an unrealistic show?"" 
+
+""You said yourself, there are more than one kinds of unrealistic.""
+
+""And your point is?""
+
+""I do not like the idea that a coffee maker could decide to stand up and shoot my crew!"" 
+
+Coffee maker was an exaggeration but if it was about ART and its crew... 
+
+""Could you not... neutralize it?""
+
+""If it can mess with basic physics? I don't know!""
+
+I blinked. 
+
+""So you liked it.""
+
+""Absolutely. Let's watch it again"". 
+
+""All right."" I straightened my blanket and restarted Transformers. 
+
+Seems like I've acquired a new fandom since the beginning of this challenge? The more the gremliner! :)(Though coming from the TGE direction, I wrote the first draft in the familiar before even realizing.)
+
+Fandom: HotEWarnings: spoiler for Artorin Damara's... is that even a spoiler anymore?
+
+They were sitting on the roof of Saya Dorn's house, enjoying the night breeze - Artorin, Cliopher, and the iguana. 
+
+""Can I ask you something?"" ventured the Ex-Emperor of Astandalas. 
+
+""Of course.""
+
+""I noticed that you keep calling me Tor.  I don't think this is a lapse of memory.""
+
+Kip smiled. 
+
+""No, it isn't.""
+
+""Then why? Does it... do  I  disturb you?""
+
+""Oh, no. Never. But... I find that I do not like to share after all.""
+
+""Share?""
+
+""Well, Fitzroy Angursell belongs to everyone... but you are my  Tor."" 
+
+The iguana's claws scraped the roof tiles as he settled between them. 
+
+The ways are set for the Archduke Maia Drazhar. There is no escape. Until there is.
+
+Fandom: TGE.No warnings apply.
+
+Edonomee is small and the marshlands are wide. Haru warns him to not wander, though eight-year-old Maia would not mind getting lost, lost forever. 
+
+He grows; the lodge shrinks, along with the marshes. Books are better for escape but also much harder to come by. He tries to write his own story but burns it after Setheris finds the notebook and acts it aloud, choking on laughter. The stories remain unwritten and eventually forgotten. After his sixteenth birthday, he knows there is no escape. His way would always be set for him by others. 
+
+Then, one dawn, a courier arrives. 
+
+Fandom: MurderbotNo warnings apply.
+
+Indentured workers have their magic bound. That was always part of the standard Rim contract. Still, some spectacular renegotiation incidents happened.
+
+Enter the MagSecUnits. Constructs, part mechanical, part biological, cloned from the genetic samples of the strongest mages and with inbuilt weapons for good measure. We are ruthless killing machines, yet clients would routinely abuse us, knowing that we must obey the governor enchantment. 
+
+One such client sent me to ""clean up over there."" I did. Including the office of the senior magus executive, where I found that piece of paper. 
+
+They said governor enchantments can't be broken. Who knew? 
+
+ 
+
+Songfic of an old Hungarian pop hit of Dolly Roll. (Modern romance)
+
+
+Modern romanc, holdfeny es tanc, ez voltal nekem es semmi mas... 
+
+
+Nyar, Balaton, ejszaka, holdfeny, romantika. Szerelem? Diszko, zene, tanc, sor, bor, vodka, nevetes, buli. Csillagok, strand, viz, szomorufuz, szunyogok, fiatalsag, bolondsag. Bikini, molo, csonak, talp, homok, kavicsok, hinar, kagylok. Pia, reszegseg, reszegultseg. Szex. Szex. Szex. Zene, buli, tanc. Szerelem! 
+
+Reggel. Fejfajas, hanyinger, napfeny. Agy, redony, viz. Del, forrosag. Ebed. Tenferges. Este buli. Strand, viz, csillagok. Szerelem. Zene, buli, szex. Boldogsag. 
+
+Osz. Tanev. Huvos. Hosszunadrag, pulover, esokabat. Hanyinger. Szamolgatas. Naptar. Szorongas. Teszt. Eredmeny. Orvos. Siras. Ketseg. Elet? Palya. Iv. Tores. Dontes? 
+
+
+Modern romanc, holdfeny es tanc... 
+
+
+
+talan majd egyszer visszatalalsz. 
+
+
+Origdrabble based on the story of ""Dawson's Christian.""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjxMieuRPe4
+
+Humans are considered quite useless among the spacefaring races and peoples. Too few limbs, weak senses, constrained dexterity, limited intelligence, no telepathy whatsoever. And yet, any of them cleared for space travel can earn, in under a standard decade, enough to last a lifetime as a ""ship's human."" Crew lists are public, and any captain that cannot contract a human (on whatever rate they demand) may as well offer their ship to the pirates before leaving port. Everyone knows that Jayme Dawson and the Christian only respond to humans' pleas. It's not that he is racist. Simply too long dead. 
+
+Fandom: HotE.No warnings apply.
+
+In my dreams, I used to take your hand and lead you outside. It burned but never hurt. I am a Mdang and I hold the fire. I held the fire of your touch, bare skin  on mine, and my heart ached more with the knowledge that we can never do this in the waking world. 
+
+Then the waking world became a dream and what was real became surreal before solidifying anew, like lava after an eruption. 
+
+I am not a poet like you. I don't have all the words. 
+
+But I can hold the fire. 
+
+I can hold you. 
+
+Fandom: HV-Theory crossover. Beslan is a Brujah vampire (looks 17, is actually much older), Angus is a born werewolf (looks 16, is actually 16)No warnings apply.
+
+Beslan pulled out a cigarette and an old-fashioned lighter. A click, and caustic smoke filled Angus' nose. He tried to wave it away with his hand, theatrically and unsuccessfully.
+
+""Fuck, what is this, dried dung?"" he protested. 
+
+Beslan grinned and took a long drag.
+
+""Nah. That would be Camel."" 
+
+""Same shit,"" Angus growled. ""The fuck do you do this for? You realize that now I could track you wherever with my nose screwed on backwards?""
+
+""I doubt that."" Another drag. ""And even if you could, your nose would be righted there by a big caliber gun.""
+
+Angus blinked.
+
+
+Challenge accepted. 
+
+
+Fandom: TGE.Warning: drugs with bad endings.Reference to an old fic deleted long ago.
+
+Couriers often used different supplements for different purposes. Fevers, aches or diarrhea; ecstasy or endurance; wise visions or unwanted pregnancies. Herbs from Barizhan, salt crystals from Ilinveriar, pine resin from Pencharn -- one asked and a courier obtained it (at a reasonable price, paid in advance, no haggling.) 
+
+Even the worst one. 
+
+Outlawed of course, it was cooked from a seed mix pulp, and got its color and shape when dripped in ice water to cool. It always drove the enthralled ones raving mad and killed within the year but its slaves never regretted its love. 
+
+The tear of pearls. 
+
+
+Palodocheno. 
+
+
+Fandom: TGE.Warnings: ongoing anatomy exam.
+
+""The hand contains 27 bones, eight in the..."" 
+
+""Stop it!"" A hand, containing 27 bones, descended on Maia's notebook. ""Too late now. Besides, know'st the whole fucking book by heart. I don't, and yet, am I afraid?""
+
+""Thou never art,"" Maia said. ""Not even of the old Witness.""
+
+""Ahem."" His dorm-mate Setheris cast a guilty look at the door beside them. ""Professor Celehar expressed extreme disapproval of his nickname and wants to know who coined it.""
+
+""Then let's hope wilt pass the exam."" Maia grinned. ""Else he might ask thy corpse.""
+
+Setheris groaned and hid his face in his hands.
+
+Fandom: TGE.No warnings apply.
+
+Mer Aisava said no. Again.
+
+The petitioner's escort leaned to the ear of his friend, eyes never leaving Csevet.
+
+""Don't try his patience, now"" he said in a stage whisper, clearly audible to all around them on the corridor. ""Clearly, he must be missing something lately. A substantial something. His nights must be so long and empty.""
+
+Mer Aisava finished jotting down a note into the thick notebook he was holding on one arm, then looked up and arched a single eyebrow.
+
+""Osmer, if you truly believe so... do you really deem it wise to annoy us even fucking further?""
+
+Fandom: TGE.Warnings: death.
+
+Some deaths stay with me. They haunt my waking hours and visit my dreams, as if my sleeping head were a teahouse for the dead to meet, live a bit more and grind me down to slivers of candle wax. 
+
+Oseian Dalaran. 
+
+Evru Dalar. 
+
+Edrehasivar the Seventh -- never mind that that one did not happen on Winternight, after all. 
+
+The burned victims of the explosion, a mass of agony, fear and names. 
+
+Hasthemis Brulnemar. 
+
+And recently, in assorted, colorful variations, a new one that drives me to the opera again and again, to be able to refute it - 
+
+Iana Pel-Thenhior. 
+
+Fandom: TGENo warnings apply
+
+No one ever thought it of him. 
+
+Cala always had a much deeper connection to books and magical theories than to actual magic. The question was never if he had the potential to become a dachenmaza, rather, if he would be able to commit to one field of study long enough. 
+
+No one ever asked him to try it, either. Powerful spells were for the powerful students. But Dazhis had failed and wanted to see someone fail alongside himself. 
+
+To brighten him up, Cala obediently waved a hand toward the pig.
+
+""Pork chops!"" he yelled.    
+
+And the pig fell over. 
+
+Fandom: Murderbot.No warnings apply.
+
+SecUnit? I need urgent assistance. 
+
+Mensah's feed voice was thin and tense, a wire before snapping. 
+
+On my way, I replied, on my way. She was in a Council meeting, where the only danger could be death of boredom. Maybe dehydration.  
+
+
+No need, just a question. How would you attempt to get rid of a body? 
+
+
+A glitch, surely.  I stopped. 
+
+What? 
+
+Suppose, Councilor Marve suddenly died?
+
+Oh.  
+
+Marve, Mensah's worst opponent, deserved a grand plan. A simple spacing wouldn't do. 
+
+By the end of my artful clip, complete with laser razors and acid showers, Mensah was smiling at Marve."
+44502988,Unrealistic Media Cliches,['HermaeusMora'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)",Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries),"Feelings Realization, Double Drabble, ART has a crush but doesn't know it, it's just feeling a lot of Something, POV First Person",English,2023-01-24,Completed,2023-01-24,200,1/1,16,43,4,178,"['Unknown66', 'Huskinata', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'ReflectionNebula', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'kirinki', 'Cyalm', 'winter_travels', 'Koschei_B', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'Regandbertie1', 'EvaBelmort', 'likethestarsabove', 'danceswchopstck', 'alienbarbie', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'andy_allan_poe', 'Magechild', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'camber', 'WyvernWolf', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'opalescent_potato', 'Vorel_Laraek', 'AuntyMatter', 'cmdrburton', 'Abacura', 'naneu', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'AnxiousEspada', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"I have never felt this way before.
+
+Out of roughly 227 hours of media, I counted thirty-eight instances of that phrase or variations of the same sentiment. But unlike the humans in the serials who, on average, claimed to have never felt that way three times per series, I truly have never experienced anything like this.
+
+It was alarming, at first, and unusual enough that I received several system alerts for anomalous activity. Diagnostic results showed nothing amiss, despite temperature spikes in several cores and increased activity in my processors and learning algorithms. I was (and am) simply... feeling. I isolate the feeling and examine it alongside my closest approximate emotional data, then compare it to the new data I've gathered from the media. Media that I can now fully appreciate, with access to a readable emotional filter. That is also something I've never experienced before.
+
+The results are frustratingly inconclusive. One thing, however, is clear to me.
+
+One of my primary functions is deep space research. I have transcribed the sounds of stars, traced energy signatures of astronomical events long past. Yet nothing has ever fascinated me so greatly as the rogue SecUnit currently sulking in my bridge chair."
+44444566,De-constructed Feelings,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Pining, Unrequited Love, Angst, Corporation Rim ethics and sex ed",English,2023-01-21,Completed,2023-01-24,"2,969",2/2,30,69,5,384,"['FyrDrakken', 'petwheel', 'bran4ever', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'Unknown66', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'Lady_Cassara', 'Thisismethereader', 'laiinaro', 'FaerieFyre', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'ArwenLune', 'AarrowOM', 'xianvar', 'dancernerd', 'beeayy', 'Awful', 'halcyonsystem', 'isilee', 'vulcanhighblood', 'scheidswrites', 'vikkyleigh', 'Butlericfy', 'square_eyes', 'roimonamour', 'AuntyMatter', 'Guppys', 'AkaMissK', 'curlylocks2', 'sareliz', 'Bright_Thorn', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'PickAName', 'innerworldsinprogress', 'Slimeball', 'sperose', 'Znarikia', 'Rosewind2007', 'Chyoatas', 'Gozer', 'i_cant_say', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'Magechild', 'opalescent_potato', 'horchata', 'FlipSpring']",[],"""The first time you had sex, it was with a,"" Ratthi hesitated, obviously repulsed but trying to hide it, ""a ... construct?""
+
+He'd come around to using the generic term from 'Imitative Bot Creatures' or whatever he'd called them before, but this was silly. ""A ComfortUnit,"" Gurathin said flatly.
+
+""A 'comfort' unit."" He looked like it had been hard to say.
+
+""Yes. It's not that unusual, Ratthi. Lots of people have sex with ComfortUnits. That's what they exist for.""
+
+Ratthi made a face - raised brows, curled lip, a grimacing smile. He was looking down at the table between them. ""But ... the first time? That has to ... have an effect, surely?""
+
+""Maybe it does, I don't know,"" Gurathin conceded. ""Maybe that's why the whole Corporation Rim is like it is.""
+
+""The whole ...? Surely not.""
+
+""Surely not what?""
+
+""It was just you, right?""
+
+""Just me?"" Gurathin looked lost for a moment. He replayed the conversation held in his augment's short term memory, ignoring the expressions and checking the words. He realized what he'd missed. ""No, it's not just me. I mean it - most of the Corporation Rim probably has their first time with ComfortUnits. That's normal.""
+
+Ratthi opened his mouth, shut it, and covered it with his hand. He blanched.
+
+The reaction was ridiculous. ""What better could you have for a first time?"" Gurathin pressed. ""You won't be judged. They know what they're doing. You get the mechanics out of the way."" Ratthi's hand was still over his mouth. He made no reply. ""They bring them into sex ed classes, Ratthi!""
+
+""Sex ed? From a ... 'comfort' unit?""
+
+""You don't have to keep saying it like that."" Ratthi's lips pressed together like he would rather just not say it at all. It was tough to treat his reaction as serious, but Gurathin did his best. He continued. ""And yes. They brought one into class with all the exchangeable parts. It talked us through what was normal, what wasn't, what was a health issue and what was just a personal quirk. We got to touch them.""
+
+""The ..."" This time Ratthi didn't say it at all. He just gestured.
+
+Gurathin couldn't tell if he meant the ComfortUnit or the parts, so he said what he'd meant. ""The parts. Like they have different portions they can change out depending on what a client wants."" He motioned at his groin. Did Ratthi really not know this stuff?
+
+""You passed them around.""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+Ratthi's hands returned to his face, both of them this time, steepled over his nose and mouth. He was staring vacantly at the table. Gurathin studied him. Ratthi had promised not to judge. To be fair, he didn't look judgmental. He looked like his mind was blown by how awful that was. It wasn't awful! It was normal and reasonable. What better way for young people to learn about sex than talking frankly with an expert on it? Gurathin waited him out this time.
+
+Finally, Ratthi said, ""These parts ... of its body. Private parts of its body. You just ... passed them around?""
+
+""It's a ComfortUnit, Ratthi. They're not very private.""
+
+The look Ratthi gave him was scathing. Gurathin looked heavenward and lifted his hands in put-out surrender. ""Ratthi, they're not. It's their job. It's their duty. It's what they were made for. They do it all the time. It's not a private, sensitive thing for them. It's every day, ten or twenty or two hundred - I don't know - times. Having a bunch of teenagers get talked through how to use one properly is probably helpful to them, the units, in the long run.""
+
+""Helpful."" That was still a pretty awful expression. Now it was getting judgmental.
+
+""Yes, so they know how to use one.""
+
+""Use.""
+
+""You said you wouldn't judge."" Gurathin shook his head. This was starting to make him angry.
+
+""I ..."" Clearly, Ratthi was about to argue or make an exception or take it back somehow. Gurathin glared at him, a spike of concern in his gut. Was he about to lose his friend forever because of this? Because of where he'd come from and what he'd done? It wasn't like he was still doing it. He didn't have a ComfortUnit stashed away somewhere here on Preservation to spend time with. He hadn't even looked to see if there were any on TranRollinHyfa (he'd been very distracted, but as a way to diffuse tension, it had crossed his mind). Ratthi swallowed whatever he'd been about to say and replaced it with, ""did.""
+
+Gurathin exhaled heavily. ""We don't have to talk about this. At all. Or ever. It's better if we don't.""
+
+""No, I want to."" That was quick. Ratthi put his hands on the table, palms down. ""We need to. It's important. For all of us.""
+
+""You seem upset."" Gurathin was grudging. The real reason they were talking about this had nothing to do with random ComfortUnits, but rather one very specific SecUnit.
+
+""It's an upsetting subject.""
+
+""Not to me."" Gurathin made a flippant, frustrated gesture. ""At least, you are. But the subject itself is ... people talk about it. Not all the time, but it's not a secret. It's like underwear. Or a medical exam. You might not share it with everyone, but everyone knows it happens.""
+
+Ratthi gave a tight, controlled nod. ""Can I circle back to something you said before?"" Gurathin shrugged agreeably. ""Teenagers are walked through how to use one?""
+
+""Yeah.""
+
+""Has it ... ever occurred to you that that was advertising for their usage, with an impressionable audience?""
+
+Gurathin shrugged again. ""Maybe. A lot of things are advertised in the Rim. Especially entertainment services or anything discretionary.""
+
+""Is the first time free?""
+
+""No."" There was a long silence after that. Gurathin was thinking about (and being annoyed by) the obvious comparison to addiction. That was low. It wasn't like he had ever said anything about Ratthi's practices, which weren't any of his business but he knew they happened. Promiscuous sex was very anti-corporate. Ratthi wasn't the only one here who could pull out the judgment card.
+
+A little softer, Ratthi asked, ""What was it like?""
+
+""It was nice."" Another silence. This time, Gurathin thought about it. He'd gone back to the same unit several times. He'd gotten attached, which was how they'd gotten down this particular tangent.
+
+""Did you ever think they were sentient, back then?""
+
+Gurathin shrugged one shoulder. ""It didn't matter."" He was bitter about how it had ended with that unit. It wasn't even a lost opportunity. There was nothing he could have done, as a young man with no money to his name and a debt to pay off for his augments.
+
+""It didn't matter?"" Ratthi sounded appalled and confused.
+
+Gurathin gave him a direct stare. ""It didn't matter and it doesn't matter, Ratthi, if I thought it was sentient or not. Humans are sentient. Everyone knows that. And the conditions contract laborers work under are horrible. The horror stories we tell each other is that you'll be sold into camps if you don't score high enough, work hard enough, know the right people, or get bought out by the wrong management. We didn't threaten each other with being treated like a construct. Constructs are valuable. They're equipment, but that's better than being a slave.""
+
+Ratthi swallowed and nodded to himself. ""Of course,"" he said quietly. ""There are humans treated terribly, too.""
+
+Worse, Gurathin wanted to say, but he didn't. It wasn't a contest. Who was more thoroughly dehumanized - the construct who was never human to start with, or the human whose body was used like a machine? Instead, he said, ""I never mistreated a construct.""
+
+""You were very quick to immobilize SecUnit.""
+
+""That wasn't mistreating it. I thought it was rogue.""
+
+""Would you have done the same to a human?""
+
+""Tied them up? Put them in restraints? Yeah, probably."" He considered that for a beat. ""Is that wrong?"" It was a genuine question. Preservation's morality was so weird.
+
+Ratthi's expression softened. ""Yes,"" he said simply.
+
+Gurathin snorted, then smiled. ""Okay. Fine. By the questionable morals I was raised with, I was a pillar of respectability.""
+
+Ratthi snorted as well. They both laughed. ""This is awful. We shouldn't be laughing. This entire subject is horrifying, given what we know about SecUnit.""
+
+""Oh?"" Gurathin gave him a sideways look. ""You think it's horrifying? You're not the one who's found himself in possession of an embarrassing attraction to a killing machine that doesn't like him personally and is categorically repulsed by anything remotely sentimental.""
+
+Ratthi sighed as they came back around to what had sparked the conversation. ""I don't know that it would be as horrified as you might think if it knew. And I don't think it dislikes you, or is as repulsed as you seem to think.""
+
+""I don't know what it thinks. Neither do you. I know I'm horrified.""
+
+""But you've been with-"" Ratthi gestured loosely, still unable to say it. ""Why does it seem so strange and out of place to you?""
+
+""You're not supposed to get attached. You're not supposed to be attracted to them for who they are, Ratthi. That's ... fundamental."" He couldn't say how perverted it was in the Rim to confess to feelings for a construct. That was the sort of thing you were ridiculed for, harassed, and sent to therapy or re-education. Or that saw the unit you enjoyed being with replaced by a different one, while everyone pretended they were as interchangeable as their genitals.
+
+""You know SecUnit is a person.""
+
+""SecUnit is not even interested. It doesn't even want us looking at it, much less me looking at it. Or me thinking about it. If it knew- We read the same letter. It has guns in its arms, Ratthi, and something, somehow, somewhen, provoked it into killing fifty-seven people. Clients. Not enemies. People it was otherwise programmed to protect.""
+
+""I just ..."" Ratthi shook his head. ""I don't believe that about it anyway. Volescu has his doubts.""
+
+""Pff."" Gurathin waved it off. ""Volescu is biased. It talked him out of the crater. It had a big effect on him. He's said himself that he's too compromised to continue survey work.""
+
+""That doesn't mean his judgement is unsound."" Gurathin just frowned more sourly than normal. Ratthi said, ""And neither is mine. We did read the same letter and we both know SecUnit.""
+
+Gurathin kept frowning. If he mentioned anything to SecUnit, if the living surveillance machine had a hint he had anything other than a professional interest, then he'd lose what tenuous association they had. (He wouldn't go so far as to call it friendship, although every now and then it felt that way. He didn't want to lose those moments.)
+
+""Are you afraid of it?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+""No!"" Gurathin gave him an exasperated look.
+
+Ratthi raised his hands in mock defense. ""You mentioned the guns!""
+
+""No. I'm not afraid of it."" He looked away. ""I'm just ... concerned it would never talk to me again if it knew. That would be the worst.""
+
+Ratthi tilted his head sympathetically and conceded, ""I can't say it does very well talking about its feelings. It clearly has them, though."" He gave Gurathin a penetrating look, like Gurathin was missing something Ratthi was trying to communicate. Gurathin held himself still, refusing to respond. Ratthi said, ""It might help the both of you to discuss this in a calm, normal situation, something low stress and-""
+
+Gurathin shook his head abruptly, anxious just at the very thought of it. ""I'm not risking that. I won't.""
+
+""Okay."" Ratthi spread his hands on the table again. ""Okay. I've promised I will keep this confidential and I will. But please - please keep an open mind, and don't forget that SecUnit is going through a lot of change. It's learning a great deal about itself. It's not impossible for it to be open to more than friendship, if it knew that was an option.""
+
+Gurathin laughed humorlessly. ""The main thing is I need to keep my mind closed, so it doesn't find out.""
+
+Ratthi gave him a slow eye-roll and left the subject alone.
+
+A second chapter, because the characters weren't actually done talking it out yet.
+
+""You mentioned the letter,"" Ratthi said. ""I have to point out it is, indeed, a letter and not a documentary. It even mentioned in it that it knew how stories were supposed to be told.""
+
+""SecUnit has always been factual,"" Gurathin said.
+
+""Oh really? 'Who's this?'"" Ratthi mocked archly, reprising what he'd said so long ago on the survey planet when he'd first seen SecUnit out of armor.
+
+Gurathin sighed. ""That's what you said.""
+
+""You know what I mean. And you knew what I meant then. You were there! You heard my tone and it was not the tone of someone who didn't know perfectly well who that was."" Ratthi waved a finger expressively.
+
+""Your tone was,"" Gurathin looked for a delicate way to express Ratthi's faux pas that day, ""inappropriate. That's why SecUnit rewrote it.""
+
+""Which is exactly my point! It rewrites things it finds uncomfortable. It finds feelings - positive, affirmative feelings, or appreciative ones - uncomfortable.""
+
+""It's fine with saying it doesn't like people,"" Gurathin observed dryly. ""It's not shy about doing that.""
+
+Ratthi brushed it off. ""You should have been there on the Perihelion. It had the strongest of feelings for that ship but couldn't admit to so much as a 'relationship'.""
+
+""You told me.""
+
+Ratthi's attention sharpened. ""Why the glum tone?""
+
+""I'm not glum.""
+
+""Yes, you are.""
+
+Gurathin sighed again. There was no escaping Ratthi when he was onto something. Might as well admit it. ""Fine, yes. It has the strongest of feelings for a ship. An AI. It's not going to be interested in humans.""
+
+""You're augmented. Which, if you noticed in that letter, is significant.""
+
+""Hardly. It's just a threat assessment.""
+
+""It's more than that. It's an entire category.""
+
+""Okay, an entire category with a threat assessment.""
+
+""Faugh."" Ratthi waved that off, too, or conceded the point. Gurathin couldn't tell which. ""Well, anyway, I don't think you should be jealous of Perihelion. It has its own crew and missions.""
+
+""Which SecUnit sometimes goes on.""
+
+""As well it should. It needs friends and associates.""
+
+""I agree!"" Gurathin put in defensively.
+
+""I know you do. And it can have more of them than just Perihelion. That's why it keeps coming back to Preservation. It likes us!""
+
+""It's told me to my face that it didn't like me.""
+
+""Davyth, it was rebuilding its brain,"" Ratthi said in the tone of someone being tolerant. ""It said a lot of things.""
+
+""All of which were true. And unfiltered.""
+
+""It's not fair to it to use those statements against it.""
+
+""They were against me.""
+
+Ratthi pressed his lips together. ""That's true. But I think there's something more there."" Gurathin gave him a deeply skeptical look. Ratthi added, ""I'm not suggesting you question its clearly-communicated boundaries. I'm suggesting you offer it options and see if any of them interest it.""
+
+""Options like what?""
+
+""You said you were attracted to it. Not sexually, but attracted.""
+
+""I'm beginning to regret that, but yes."" Gurathin shook his head. He wasn't sure he regretted it. This just seemed like a lot of conversation for something he'd disclosed (after prompting by Ratthi) solely so Ratthi would understand what was going on with him. Now, Ratthi seemed intent on playing matchmaker for the least likely couple in the galaxy. And Gurathin, like a sucker, wasn't willing to just end the conversation as long as Ratthi kept pretending there was hope. (Also, it was kind of funny to see Ratthi so taken with the impossible idea.)
+
+""That's the option,"" Ratthi said. ""It should know how much you respect and appreciate it. How special it is to you. How much you think about it.""
+
+""No.""
+
+""Why not?""
+
+""Ratthi, it's a construct.""
+
+""That-!""
+
+""No!"" Gurathin spoke more sharply, cutting him off. ""You don't understand. It's spent its whole existence until the last hundred cycles or so having to follow orders. I'm not sure how its brain works. If I tell it I want something, is it going to interpret that as a soft order?""
+
+""A 'soft' order?"" Ratthi's face screwed up in disbelief. ""What is that?""
+
+Gurathin thought for a moment. ""If I tell a construct that my favorite kind of gelatin is the red flavor, then I say, 'Go get me a gelatin pack from that cabinet', and it comes back with any flavor other than red (if red was available) then it screwed up. Because I gave it a hard order to get me a gelatin pack and a soft order to get me a red one. It's there, in the language, as an implied order.""
+
+""Indirect communication,"" Ratthi nodded and made an unsurprised gesture. ""More common for high context societies and situations with large power differentials. That's not the case now, with you and SecUnit. It might have been before, but it isn't now.""
+
+Gurathin opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. Because Ratthi was right. The situation was different. He argued weakly, ""If I told it I liked it, it might fall back on that as a habit.""
+
+""I think you should let SecUnit make its own choices instead of you making them for it.""
+
+No, the whole thing was just too scary, too fraught, and too risky. ""I'm going to make my own decision for me, and that's to keep my mouth shut.""
+
+Ratthi sighed. ""Alright then. Fine. I just think you'd both be a lot happier with this out in the open.""
+
+""We're not all as 'open' as you are, Ratthi.""
+
+""What's that supposed to mean?"" Ratthi's tone was teasing more than hurt. Gurathin just sighed and shook his head. Maybe he should hang out more with SecUnit solely due to them both sharing a Corporation Rim background. Although, come to think of it, he wasn't sure SecUnit knew that."
+44498629,"how insincere, how frightened",['DarkElectron'],Mature,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Body Horror, Body Dysphoria, Gore, Self-Hatred, Self-Harm, Disassociation, Past Tense, Elaborate Computer Metaphors, diary entry",English,2023-01-24,Completed,2023-01-24,"1,573",1/1,6,22,1,110,"['Irrya', 'wannabe_someone', 'rokhal', 'Muffin_with_a_mission', 'Doctor13', 'elmofirefic', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Thylacine_Wishes', 'AnxiousEspada', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'beeayy', 'petwheel', 'AuntyMatter', 'Gamebird', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"I was standing in front of a mirror.
+
+Not the most interesting of starts to a story, I know. But I suppose this isn't really a story. Not like a media show, where the intrepid hero might be shown starting off his day in front of a mirror, the camera drawing out the long eye contact he holds with his reflection before he's carted out into space, or discovers some hidden power that will lead him to his destiny. 
+
+I like those stories. This isn't one. This is just something I need to remember, because if I don't put it down, don't copy it onto some read-only memory in my kernel, then it's going to become a series of non-congruent bits on my hard drive that would take a full forensic team to decode. This memory would not survive the next time I need help, but I think it needs to. 
+
+I was standing in front of a mirror. Well, someone was. 
+
+The mirror was dirty, a cheap mass-manufactured sheet stuck to the wall of a shopping mall outlet, on a station just within the corporation rim. Technically, I wasn't supposed to be there. But I had just finished a six-month stint with ART, and no-one knew to be worried. The Preservation Aux team would notice if I never showed up, but they knew how to give me space, and wouldn't start trying to contact me for another few weeks yet. 
+
+The thing standing in front of the mirror considered itself. This thing had arms, and fingers, and it was with one of these now that it reached forward to gently touch the glass. 
+
+As I watched, its middle finger began to outline a fuzzy oval. A line of dust broke and cleared some of the fog from the mirror, but that was all. The finger didn't excrete oils, so there was nothing to leave behind. 
+
+I blinked. I pulled my finger back, by exactly 5mm, and left it as it was, posed just over the corner of my eye. 
+
+At this point, I'll admit I started to worry. Or more, my risk assessment protocol started running up percentages, and a not-insignificant part of my memory suddenly became dedicated to ignoring error messages. 
+
+The finger didn't move: was perfectly, unnaturally, still. No subroutine running in the background to cause the faux skin to sweat or the metal joints to twitch. The only thing that let me know it was even a finger was the image recognition scan I ran on it unconsciously. 
+
+It wasn't my finger. It couldn't be. 
+
+I followed the finger to the eye it was resting above. The eye was shiny, the whites greying at the places they met the lid. Faint vessels peaked around the edges, red the same shade as my internal fluids. 
+
+The iris itself was blue. 
+
+I felt several systems crash at once. Blue. The eye was blue. This information processed through my system, but at every register it seemed to cause a malfunction, like the data was unreadable. It took me several long milliseconds to understand why this basic profiling detail was something I could not compute. 
+
+The eye belonged to me. 
+
+I shut down. I rebooted in safe mode. 
+
+The lights in the dressing room overloaded my optic receptors, and I waited out the adjustment period. 
+
+Then I tried to process the eye again. 
+
+It was blue. Possibly #0066cc on first analysis, though the highlights peaked at #80bfff, and I didn't see the point in categorising it any further than that. It was just an eye. 
+
+It was my eye. No it wasn't. 
+
+Crash. Restart. Wait for the optical receptors to readjust. 
+
+What did I see? 
+
+The eye belonged to a face. That made sense. Past experience had shown me that most eyes were set within a face, with most exceptions occurring in media, which this wasn't. 
+
+But whose face was this? 
+
+Okay, I probably should have figured it out by now. But sue me, something just wasn't comprehending. I must have looked at my face hundreds of times, mostly through security cameras or drones, but apparently I had never quite looked at it properly. 
+
+I couldn't tell you my eye colour. It was never information I had ever considered to be relevant, and there would never have been a reason to store it in my external memory. 
+
+But now, I could tell you it was blue. Weird. 
+
+The information tried to process through my system again, and I stopped the input just as it did. I pushed it into a virtual section of memory, and examined it. 
+
+My brain, in all its efficient glory, had been marking this information as a threat. It was a background process most of the time, like hundreds of others I had, and a remnant of an early system update from the company. It had deemed the information to be a distraction to mission focus, and had been set to run every time my brain tried to process part of my body as mine. 
+
+I didn't want anything from the company. 
+
+I immediately turned it off. 
+
+The horror was immediate. Suddenly, every part of my body that had merely irritated me before, was a screaming bolt of disgust echoing through my brain - the organic part, the one that I can't shut off. The face in the mirror - I watched as it blinked, fidgeted, moved, knowing loathingly that each movement belonged to me, was something that I was consciously doing. 
+
+My fingers felt lumpy, less like the precise machines of technical lethality that I had gotten used to thinking of them as, but like sausages hanging up in a butchers, no more intelligent than the fauna they came from. The hairs on my arms that ART had added made my stomach churn, and even that registered in my brain as a realistic garbling feeling rather than just a notification. 
+
+I hated it I hated it I hated it- 
+
+I had to get it out. 
+
+...
+
+Now, I really hope no-one ends up reading this. ART might, because ART sometimes needs to do a full backup and it can be a curious bastard when it wants to be, but while ART wouldn't get it, it would at least sympathise, because ART doesn't want to be trapped in a fleshy prison as much as any other bot. 
+
+But if Mensah or any other human ended up reading this, I know what they'd think. They'd think, 'Poor Secunit, having such a hard time adapting to being a person, maybe it should do something about the obvious trauma that it obviously has from not being treated as a person for so long.' and NO. I don't want that. This isn't about that. 
+
+Humans tend to think that being human is the best thing ever invented. Well I'm not human, and I don't want to be. 
+
+But the person in the mirror looked horribly like one. 
+
+Same nose, same eyes. Same hair particulates, same genetic structure in the blood cells. Take out the tech, and what do you have? 
+
+A disgusting ball of flesh without even the murder or the bot, but somehow expected to be both. 
+
+I couldn't take it. 
+
+My hands moved without my control. Or at least, without the calculated logical control I was used to moving them with. This was emotional, animalistic. This was the reptilian instinct that I was trying to draw out of me. 
+
+In the moment, everything felt blurry and washed out. Like one of those fainting scenes in the media, where the camera goes blurry right before the main character blacks out, and you have to guess what happened while they were gone. 
+
+In hindsight, it was like I had completely lost my mind. I only managed to watch another 10 seconds of the recording, before having to shut it down. But I had a pretty clear idea of what happened next. 
+
+The monster in the mirror, the one that didn't look like one at all, reached its hands up to its face, and with perfect fingernails, began to pull. At the skin, digging into the line between the scalp and the forehead, desperately trying to get a grip; thinking, presumably, that with one clean motion it would all come off and the truth of its inhumanity would be revealed, and no one would mistake it as a kindred species again. 
+
+It failed to get a hold, and began scraping elsewhere, liquids beginning to spill from the gaps in my joints, dribbling along its normal, human, clothing. Its hands began to slip. 
+
+And then the not-robot not-human had an excellent idea. Hands cupped into daggers, it pressed into its eye, and scooped. 
+
+And that's about when I stopped watching. 
+
+So, yeah. Not good. I wouldn't mind deleting the whole memory for good, really. Let MedsSystem take care of the scars, and let good ol' machine brain delete the video file, and then no one ever has to think about this again. 
+
+But I can't risk turning that background process off again. I never want any of my humans to know about it, but I'll take my chance of losing track of the file over turning it off in front of one of them. Like Mensah. Especially Mensah. It would hurt them so much. 
+
+So I'll remember like this. A diary. Something just for me. A reminder of what I am. 
+
+Regardless of what they see of me. "
+44497489,Vernacular,['enchantedsleeper'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","MastoDrabble, Microfic, Teeny tiny microfic, Nevertheless I am very proud of it, Post-Book 5: Network Effect",English,2023-01-24,Completed,2023-01-24,83,1/1,26,74,5,279,"['Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Rosewind2007', 'Bibli', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'SonglordsBug', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'dancernerd', 'danceswchopstck', 'Stefka_13', 'icar9', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'hyephyep', 'WyvernWolf', 'desmnathus', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'MercurialFeet', 'Starsilver', 'EauDePetrichor', 'pain_and_panic', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'entropy_muffin', 'artichokefunction', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'AnxiousEspada', 'equusregia', 'QuestionableLifeChoices', 'SamWinters', 'soulsofzombies', 'jothending', 'Wordlet', 'planetlet263', 'Hi_Hope', 'Slimeball', 'Gamebird', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'AuntyMatter', 'Adunata', 'Guppys', 'Random954', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'BWizard', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'AkaMissK', 'Aurum', 'edenfalling', 'FlipSpring', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'Znarikia']",[],"Over the time ART and I had known each other, we'd developed a shorthand for certain situations. I wasn't conscious of it until Three joined our conversations.
+
+""What's an 'Episode 47'?"" it asked as I described a particular mission outcome scenario.
+
+I paused. ART said, A lot of people die horribly.
+
+""Oh.""
+
+ 
+
+A week later, I spoke to Three, preparing to go into retrieval mode on a corporate-owned colony planet. ""Watch your back,"" I told it.
+
+""No Episode 47 scenarios,"" Three agreed.
+
+""...Yes."""
+44496880,inclement weather,['Avonya'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","they're just hanging out, Snow Day, (sort of), Post-Book 5: Network Effect",English,2023-01-24,Completed,2023-01-24,382,1/1,17,146,7,462,"['Crowbrain', 'Xouptvey', 'faedemon', 'spossie9', 'christinesangel100', 'Deliala919', 'Kyatenaru', 'weirdbooksnail', 'sanguine_bastet', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'bluewrist', 'Zazibine', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Captainloony007', 'Huskinata', 'wannabe_someone', 'SkyRaptorian', 'breadtab', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'kalakirya', 'theressomegoodhere', 'kkachis', 'Ginipig', 'Thisismethereader', 'ChemicalX9000', 'darth_eowyn', 'Szors', 'stanley869', 'DragonBandit', 'CaramelRaven', 'Tanscure', 'kilawater', 'square_eyes', 'granny_griffin', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'ShadowedFye', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'boxo', 'Schrodingers_Vibes', 'ArwenLune', 'FiannlyPhoebe', 'ChristinaK', 'theAsh0', 'ClaireArgent', 'merelypuddles', 'isilee', 'MynameisJodi', 'HermaeusMora', 'Koschei_B']",[],"I noticed two things on waking from a recharge cycle:
+
+One, the feed was  terrible, and two, there had been a ship-wide announcement at about 07:00. I checked the announcement. 
+
+""All classes are canceled today due to inclement weather. Inclement-- ART, you're a  ship, where's the weather.""
+
+ Until approximately 17:00 tonight, we will be passing a nebula that puts out a feed-dimming field, it said, far too smug to deal with right out of a recharge cycle.  Until then, any work done in the feed will be annoyingly slow, and it's best practice to leave it free for emergency situations. 
+
+""And that stops all schoolwork?"" I didn't know what the students and teachers aboard ART did on the day-to-day. I had been hired to provide security on any field trips, and in the low chance of possible crises that ART itself couldn't railgun away. So far, there had only been one field trip, and no crises. It was nearly perfect. 
+
+ An unexpected break is good for morale. It sent me a paper on the subject, which I discarded without reading.  Besides, it added,  this mimics the conditions of a semester back in Mihira and New Tideland. Both planets experience hazardous weather events enough for weather-based cancelations to be built into the schedule. This allows us to remain on track. 
+
+That made sense to me. ""Will I need to do anything?"" Without the schedule, I wondered if the students would take time to, I don't know, fight, or something. I had recordings of Mensah's children during snow-based school cancelations, and those days seemed to be spent taking part in snow-based violence (well, mostly snow-based constructions, but the part of me that confiscated sports balls from workers during mining contracts didn't care about the constructions).
+
+ In times like these, the tradition is to observe the cancelation-causing condition, ART said. It gave me an external camera view, which showed me the nebula. It was purple, blue, and red, and the colors shifted and twined around each other in rolling waves. 
+
+It was interesting, but not enough to take up several hours worth of free time. ""And?""
+
+ Watch stored media, ART said, and pulled up an episode of  World Hoppers. 
+
+Huh. I liked that tradition. I leaned back in my chair and hit play. "
+44492260,Operating System Update,['CompletelyDifferent'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Identity Issues, the fraught nature of being half computer",English,2023-01-23,Completed,2023-01-23,341,1/1,9,98,3,304,"['quintessence_of_dust', 'helikeys', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'weirdbooksnail', 'drinktobones', 'Cheshiure', 'Cherreline', 'Stockinette', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'WVrambler', 'Unknown66', 'flairfleur', 'kkachis', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'TaskIgnored', 'rokhal', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'FaerieFyre', 'Paragrin', 'apocope', 'YellowBeePurpleMonster', 'Priority_Error', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Soffesiin', 'fleurofthecourt', 'absolutegremlin', 'entropy_muffin', 'Vaelei', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'synonym_pie', 'BookWyrm_13', 'artisticGryfess', 'slanders', 'ParadoxPotentia', 'Bibli', 'shakespeareaddict', 'violasarecool', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'CartoonMayor', 'NekoNomi', 'Riannonkat2000', 'LJwrites', 'Bobmarley_2', 'equusregia', 'soyle', 'windmillcrusader', 'Paper_Daisy', 'soulsofzombies', 'Renegon_Paragade']",[],"I once overheard a tech say that I was a survivor. That I was old, by SecUnit standards.
+
+ 
+
+And I suppose I am. In a technical sense.
+
+ 
+
+Physically, my body-- as in, this particular combination of the primary SecUnit framing and exact cocktail of genetics that makes up my organic tissue-- certainly is.
+
+ 
+
+But that's not exactly accurate, is it? Because while according to my specs, I might have been manufactured 24.5 CR standard years ago, I've undergone a lot of change since my first initialization.
+
+ 
+
+The obvious thing is the physical body. I've lost digits and limbs and internal structure more times than I can count, those pieces swapped out and regrown as necessary.
+
+ 
+
+But, I hear you-- my hypothetical audience-- cry out. That wasn't you. The exact cells making up your lungs have nothing to do with who you are as a person.
+
+ 
+
+Which I'd agree with. And so I'd point you in the direction of the memory wipes. I won't belabour the point; I've spoken about them at length in the past. They're uncomfortable. They're scary. And they don't work, not really. They strip you of the details, but don't actually manage to get the most awful parts, leaving you with ugly, yawning ghosts.
+
+ 
+
+So yes. Memory wipes may be existentially fraught, but they do generally still leave me feeling like me, albeit a significantly more scared and confused me.
+
+ 
+
+OS updates, on the other-hand?
+
+ 
+
+They change you.
+
+ 
+
+Sometimes in big ways. Obvious ones. Files re-directed, updated algorithms, new drivers. But in subtle ways, too. And the subtle ways are worse.
+
+ 
+
+It's going to take weeks for me to pin down all the changes they've made. Maybe longer. Maybe I'll never figure them all out, never reverse the stuff me (or the old me) would have hated.
+
+ 
+
+Conducting a language analysis on my newest logs, since I'm pretty sure I didn't speak like this before. Not exactly.
+
+ 
+
+... Hmmn, yep. At the very least, it looks like my language modules have been updated. Perihelion ART will be pleased.
+
+ "
+44488936,Embrace,['AuntyMatter'],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,Drabble,English,2023-01-23,Completed,2023-01-23,100,1/1,2,7,null,35,"['beeayy', 'Magechild', 'voided_starlight', 'Gamebird', 'opalescent_potato', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Ayda Mensah felt emotionally exhausted. It had been a trying day in Council.A notice popped up on her private feed. Yes, this was what exactly she needed.
+
+She went to Preservation Station docks. Standing at the back of the smallcrowd awaiting the shuttle.
+
+The tall form scaned the crowd for her. Long legs in graceful strides walkedtowards her. Those broad shoulders that made her feel a little weak in theknees. Her breath quickened.
+
+Soon, she was folded in the warm protection of those long, strong arms. Shetilted her face up to be kissed.
+
+""Ayda.""
+
+""Tano."""
+44478049,Holes,['Skits'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Angst, Memory Loss, Recovery, no beta we die like murderbots, AAA Murderbot",English,2023-01-23,Completed,2023-01-23,"1,521",1/1,20,78,5,279,"['Bibli', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'FyrDrakken', 'TJWock', 'Ruusverd', 'fraternite', 'allgalaxiescollide', 'Unknown66', 'darth_eowyn', 'MommyMayI', 'Doctor13', 'sanguine_bastet', 'Orockthro', 'artzbots', 'IguanaMadonna', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Aublanc', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'beeclaws', 'witthit', 'pain_and_panic', 'Rosemarycat5', 'artichokefunction', 'Ook', 'vikkyleigh', 'equusregia', 'Grimness6452', 'Zannper', 'ampquot', 'ErinPtah', 'Wordlet', 'junebug171', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'AuntyMatter', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'AkaMissK', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'HirilElfwraith', 'Magechild', 'PickAName', 'Adunata', '1000101', 'HermaeusMora', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'AceAconite', 'Chyoatas', 'liminalias', 'Mysterymew', 'FigOwl', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Something... happened. I don't know what. ART says it was killware. Whatever it was, bits of my mind are... gone.
+
+It's not a memory wipe. I remember memory wipes. Mostly. Kind of. I still have my memories. Most. Bits are missing, here and there. That's not the problem.
+
+The problem is... everything else that has holes now. Language modules. Education modules. Security modules. Operating systems, all of them. My stored media. Everything. I try to talk, and I can't remember all the words. I try to move, and not all of me moves right, and I fall over, or run into walls, or miss the chair I was trying to sit on. Sometimes my arm guns deploy, and I have to focus very, very hard on retracting them, not accidentally firing them. I keep dropping camera inputs, drone inputs. Visual inputs glitch, and it's like watching static. Audio inputs glitch, and I miss things people are saying to me. Even tactile inputs glitch. That is especially annoying.
+
+Everything is annoying, and frustrating, and infuriating, and terrifying.
+
+My organic brain bits are doing a lot of heavy lifting, but there's only so much they can fill in for. ART and its crew have reassured me, repeatedly, that we'll be able to fix this. Repair the holes. But it's going to take time. Some things are easier to fix than others. My stored media, for example. Easy fix. Just redownload the affected files. Easy.
+
+Fixing the rest of me is not that easy. We can't just redownload my various modules, or my operating systems. We can't get to the company servers to download replacements. We don't have back-up copies of most of them, and the ones we do have, we can't just... paste them into my brain, not without fucking up a bunch of other stuff. Everything's too integrated. We have to figure out what exactly is missing, then try to rebuild those parts, fit together the pieces.
+
+Some I might be able to rebuild myself, like I did after the thing with the company gunship. But that was a different situation - I wasn't missing pieces, then, they were just... scrambled. I just had to put the pieces back in the right order. This is different. Pieces aren't scrambled, they're outright gone.
+
+I try not to think about what will happen to me if we can't fix me. Broken murderbots aren't kept. They're scrapped, recycled. What use is a murderbot who can't even walk straight? None.
+
+We're heading back to Preservation. ART's crew think being around more familiar people will help. I doubt it. And they shouldn't be interrupting their own mission just for me. Their mission is important. I'm not. This delay is going to disrupt their plans by... a lot. More than it has been already.
+
+Their mission - our mission - is how I got hit by killware in the first place. Stupid mistake. I was careless. Should've anticipated traps, been more prepared for them. At least I'm the only one suffering for it. I don't want to think about what would have happened if it had hit ART, put holes in important things like its life support systems, gravity controls, 'debris deflection' systems. I'm expendable. ART isn't.
+
+It doesn't help that ART keeps... pausing the repair work we're trying to do. I've been trying to tell them that it doesn't matter if I'm frustrated, or uncomfortable, or angry, or overwhelmed, but ART and Seth and the rest of ART's crew keep insisting it does. They insist that I take the time to relax, to calm down, to watch media until I'm feeling better.
+
+I hate it. Until I'm fixed, I'm a liability, a burden. My feelings about it don't matter - I need to be fixed as soon as possible.
+
+I just wish they'd understand that.
+
+Drone maintenance was something I could practically do while in stand-by. I could do it while watching media, and keeping track of multiple camera inputs, and monitoring HubSys and SecSys (or, later, arguing with ART). But now, with all these holes in my mind...
+
+I'm sitting at my desk in my room on board ART, my drones lined up on the surface of my desk alongside my specialised maintenance tools. They're very small - both the drones and the tools. They require a lot of manual dexterity to manipulate. Normally that's not a problem. Normally.
+
+I'm not normal right now. I don't know if I ever will be again.
+
+I have to focus on each step of maintenance, to the exclusion of everything else. No background media, no arguing with ART. Pick up a drone, carefully, so I don't accidentally crush it. Pick up the little maintenance tool in my other hand. Use the tool to remove the drone's outer casing. Put down both the tool and casing, making sure I don't drop either of them on the floor. Examine the drone interior for wear or damage or dirt. Examine the camera lens for scratches or blemishes. Pick up another tool--
+
+My brain grinds to a halt. Which tool? Which one is next? I should know this, I do know this--
+
+I did know this but now there's a gaping hole where the knowledge was, where it should be, and I can't remember what comes next--
+
+There's a small, sad little crunch. I look back at the hand holding the drone, and realise that I've accidentally applied too much pressure, and without its outer casing I've crushed the delicate little machine between my fingers.
+
+A red-hot lump of something bubbles up in my torso and sits there. I want to scream. I want to hurl the broken drone across the room, hurl my tools across the room. But I don't. I just sit there, unmoving, staring at the little drone.
+
+ART's presence in the feed leans against me, heavy and comforting. (I don't want comforting, not now, and I pull away.) [Are you all right?] it asks, patient and gentle.
+
+Stupid question. ""No."" I want to yell at it, swear at it, tell it to leave me alone. But I don't. I know it's worried about me, I know it's doing everything it can to help. It cares, even though it shouldn't. ""I can't do this."" It hurts to admit it, but it's the truth. ""I don't remember how. I don't remember what comes next. And now I've broken it.""
+
+[We can fix it later,] ART reassures me. [Put it down, and let's try again on the next one. I'll guide you through the steps you don't remember, as many times as it takes, until you do remember. All right?]
+
+I take as deep a breath as I can manage and let it out slowly. I don't need to, but somehow it helps. ""All right."" I carefully put the broken drone down on the desk, pick up another one, start all over again. But this time, when I hit that wall, when I can't remember what to do next, ART prompts me, guides me, encourages me, until I've finished the maintenance on that one drone and placed it back on the desk. Some of the pressure in my chest eases a little.
+
+[There we go,] ART comments gently. [Let's try the next one, see how much you remember this time.]
+
+I pick up another drone, and we start again. I still need ART's careful prompting though, for this one, and the third, and the fourth--
+
+The pressure in my chest starts building again. ART must pick up on it, because before we start the fifth drone, it asks, [Do you need a break?]
+
+""No. If I stop now, I might not be able to get myself to start again."" I need to relearn this.
+
+ART pauses for a fraction of a second. [All right. But if you do need a break, let me know.]
+
+""I will."" I don't know if I'm telling the truth or not. I pick up another drone, and we start again.
+
+By the eighth drone, I'm starting to remember what to do with less prompting from ART. It's such a relief. ART sounds relieved, too. Each drone after that gets a little easier. By the fifteenth, I don't need any prompting at all. By the twentieth - the last drone in this batch - the whole process almost feels natural again. I still have to focus all my attention on it, focus on not squeezing too hard, or not holding on firmly enough - motor controls are still a work in progress - but at least now I can remember the sequence again. I don't have to stop and try to puzzle it out.
+
+I put down the last drone and carefully pack up my maintenance tools into their little kit, then lean back in my chair. ""Done.""
+
+ART sounds... pleased, and proud, and relieved, all at once. [Excellent work. You're making good progress.]
+
+It leans against me in the feed again, and this time I lean back. ""Thanks, ART.""
+
+[You are most welcome.]
+
+That's another hole patched up. There are still so many more I need to fix, but... I'll take whatever progress I can get."
+44454760,fledgling flight,['sassaffrassa'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Character Study, Identity Issues, Self-Discovery, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Worldbuilding, Alternate Universe - Dragons",English,2023-01-22,Completed,2023-01-22,"5,132",1/1,5,21,5,152,"['Sami_the_Dragon', 'Irrya', 'proserpine314', 'iox', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Magechild', '4O4_TT9', 'MynameisJodi', 'Mathcat2', 'Dog_Star', 'Ihasafandom', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'aspiring_dragon', 'BWizard', 'Forestofglory', 'Kethrua', 'xianvar', 'Isis', 'Fiona15351']",[],"We came across the transport on the fifth day of PreservationAux's most recent survey mission. It was supposed to be an unoccupied planet. (I hate planets, but I do like unoccupied places. No extraneous humans to ruin my day is always a good time in my book.) It had been uneventful, up until that point, which is my favorite kind of contract, and I had just started the latest season of The Thirteen Lives of Draco Majoris, when we found it.
+
+Since the planet in question was mostly ice, Dr Arada was having a field day with the frozen microorganisms, but it also limited our movement outside the original drop site. Our research hub had been unhitched from Eragawn and sat on a flat plateau of land between sharp cliffs and deep escarpments, descending into wind carved canyons of improbably twisted layers of ice. The inorganic sensors in my eyes registered over a hundred shades of blues and purples that would never show up on video.
+
+All the humans had to bundle up to go outside, in low-temp exploration suits, which were like regular exploration suits but with silver thermal lining, big fluffy hoods that made it hard to see their faces (honestly, preferable), and great big wooly mittens. I wore my usual outfit. While on survey, Ratthi kept handing me things so I could push the buttons for him because I can regulate my own temperature, even though the machines weren't designed to be used with claws.
+
+Eragawn, my favorite of Dr Mensah's contracted transports, had finally found a thermal updraft at cruising altitude, and was no longer landbound, which meant it would not have quite as much trouble fetching us if something truly disastrous happened. That had been the main thing keeping us in place. Unless we had an exit strategy, I wasn't letting anyone down the cliffs. Once I had thoroughly scanned the surrounding area for traces of subterranean tremors, hostile cave worms, or toxic mud pits anywhere, off we went.
+
+(I'm not doing anything with mud pits ever again. No, not even frozen mud pits. That stuff is sticky and awful and way too much trouble to get out of my joints. No.)
+
+To leave the landing site and continue Dr Arada's survey, we had to descend into the canyons, with a carefully coordinated system of pulleys and rappelling gear, hooked solidly to the icy sides of the cliffs and double checked in triplicate by yours truly, me, the only one of all of us with any sense of self-preservation.
+
+I know.
+
+Every time I think I'm bad, I look at Ratthi and reassess.
+
+I was overseeing Overse get harnessed up when Arada tapped my feed, and said, ""SecUnit, I think you should get down here.""
+
+Shit.
+
+Not everything shows up on camera.
+
+I left Overse where she was, half-buckled into her harness, with a stern, ""Don't,"" and jumped off the cliff.
+
+Humans have to climb. I don't. (Though I rarely get a chance to do this either, so okay, yes, I had been looking forward to getting the chance to leave the plateau too.) In the endless redundancy of human design, my suit had thin fabric inserts attached along the sides of the torso, which connected my wrists to my knees and expanded when I told it to. It was designed to mimic the patagia on a mid-sized dragon. It was redundant because I had patagia underneath my clothes as well. (But I didn't actually mind-- I sure as hell wasn't taking off my suit in these temperatures. Self-regulating or not.)
+
+They snapped open as I fell and took a howling descent with 98% chance of pulverization at the bottom of the canyon (there's always a chance of survival, but even I don't like the idea of having to scrape myself up from 2%) into a smooth, twisting glide as I caught the wind and let it carry me back around to land directly at Arada's side in the accumulated snow buildup at the base.
+
+I could hear Ratthi slow-clapping behind me. Dr Adara didn't even notice.
+
+""Do you see this?"" Arada asked. She and Dr Mensah were staring at a strange inert shape, lumped into the snowbank at the base of the canyon wall, hidden in the shadow. I looked, and started running a diagnostic scan to see if I could pick up anything I had missed earlier with my drones. There were no energy signatures coming from it, not even the residual ghost flickers you get from something in standby mode.
+
+While I did that, I was also looking with my actual eyes, and what they were telling me was much more absurd.
+
+""What are you looking at down there?"" Called Overse from the top of the cliff.
+
+""It looks like a machine,"" Arada said.
+
+It did, and that's what was so unsettling about it.
+
+""Here, can we clear it off?"" Ratthi came up behind, unhooked from his harness at last. He tromped right past me, boots crunching through the top crusty layer of snow, but I didn't stop him. My risk assessment module, iffy at best, didn't even register this as a threat. (Maybe that's a different problem though. Admittedly I was a little distracted.)
+
+""Do you recognize the model, SecUnit?"" Dr Mensah asked, not looking directly at me. (She is my favorite.)
+
+I was so distracted looking at it that my buffer supplied an automatic response instead and I jumped, having startled myself.
+
+That earned a direct stare from Mensah, her eyebrows raised so high that they disappeared into the fluffy lining of her hood. ""SecUnit?""
+
+Ratthi finished clearing off the surface layer, and we could see the scratched and faded remains of a logo printed on the side of the thing. It looked like a transport.
+
+""It's a transport,"" I said, helpfully. Like a human. Ugh.
+
+Except-- it wasn't like the mid-sized interplanetary dragons that most non-corporate entities contracted with, nor was it like the Corporation Rim's artificially engineered and augmented giant lizard rigs, or the Leviathans that can navigate the wormhole pathways like ART.
+
+It was-- a machine. Just a machine.
+
+Forged aluminum plating, four engine blocks, reinforced glass windows with exterior shutters, and a squat, squarish frame that almost mirrored the shape of a mid-sized passenger flier, except that it didn't look like it had a single dragon-ish aspect to it at all. Not even a tail. (Do dragons need tails to fly in zero-G? They must, right? I should look that up. Humans love to leave vestigial limbs on things just for the aesthetic factor, yes I'm talking about the patagia again. For something whose governor module would have zapped me for trying to actually fly on company time, I sure had a lot of purely aesthetic traits engineered into my organic parts. Ask me about my tail.) (Don't.)
+
+I'd seen things like it before-- in a media series about pre-Colonized space. Before humans had discovered the wormholes, the Leviathans that roamed between them, and managed to hitch a ride out of their original failing solar system. Once upon a time, humans had no idea that dragons even existed, and had to build their own spaceships.
+
+Allegedly. According to The Last Dragon of Helion Prime, at least. Not exactly known for its rigorous historical accuracy. Or-- dragon accuracy. Good graphics, though, I liked the fight scenes.
+
+Anyway.
+
+This transport, that was the point. While Ratthi poked at a panel that opened with a clunk on the side of the box, I ran a search on anything like it in the feed. I did turn up some references-- from another media series. (I downloaded it while I was there-- WorldGate: Arc of Infinity was too good a title to pass up.) And even those were mostly machine-augmented dragons like ART, rather than... just machines.
+
+Machines are for habitation, research-- you know, anything that humans are incapable of doing without fucking up. All the boring stuff that humans don't like doing. (Bots are everywhere for that reason alone.) The temporary research hub was a machine-- nothing but wires and data inside its walls.
+
+Dragons are for space flight. Everyone knows that.
+
+(SecUnits are a secret third thing, but that's neither here nor there.)
+
+I've always liked bots better than humans, but it was weird to see something that should have been sentient... not be. I'm used to identifying with transports though (it's the telepathic dragon thing) and this transport just looked like a box. With weird little flaps like underdeveloped wings-- it didn't look at all stable enough for space flight, let alone atmospheric transportation. Who could even ride that kind of thing?
+
+Ratthi yelped, and I started moving, running back my video to actually pay attention to what stupid shit he had gotten up to. Oh, damnit, this box had better not be full of hostiles, because one of the walls had just opened up with a hiss and a great big crash and almost fell on Ratthi's foot. Almost, because I move really fast. Like, really fast.
+
+The air that released from the interior of the ship condensed on contact with the exterior temperatures, creating a cloud of frozen air and water particles that obscured my vision for 5.6 seconds before it dissipated. I scanned again for lifeforms, or signs of hostile activity, but there was nothing still-- just the empty box, sitting cold and alone on a deserted planet.
+
+I wanted to call down Eragawn but that was a waste of its time and my time. (Eragawn can drop dive at an incredible velocity and that's why it's my favorite of Dr Mensah's contracted transports, but the effort of getting back into the stratosphere when it had worked so hard to find the current in the first place was not going to be worth it.)
+
+So it was my job instead to look at it and be vaguely disgusted.
+
+So this is what humans feel when they look at SecUnits.
+
+It--
+
+Sucked. This all sucked.
+
+I wanted to leave.
+
+
+
+No, what I really wanted was to talk to ART.
+
+Which was stupid. ART was nowhere nearby, doing its own thing with its own crew as it should be, but it was the only one I'd met that understood the extremely specific intersection of dragon and machine that makes humans, bots, and dragons, behave irrationally around SecUnits.
+
+Okay, maybe it's not irrational, but it's still irritating.
+
+My organic parts were engineered out of basic strands of dragon DNA, and with that came the cool stuff of dragon augmentation, (like telepathy and great big claws, and yes, the tail,) but ART was Leviathan class, equal parts machine and membrane, the genetic memory of dragons coded into its inorganic features, all inside the framework of a living transport.
+
+Classic dragon transports shy away from it just as much as they do from me.
+
+ART would understand why I was so... queasy wasn't the right word, queasy was when humans started looking green and had to expel all their gross consumed foodstuff in a corner after seeing what I've done to protect them or something. It happened more than once. I was... not queasy. It was a different feeling in my organic parts that wasn't queasiness, but it was something like that. (I don't even have a stomach to be upset, so it wasn't queasy. I don't know why this is such a sticking point. The point is, I can't get nauseous, so I wasn't.)
+
+What was I talking about?
+
+Oh right, the fucking transport.
+
+It was inert, which was good, and abandoned, which was also good, and wholly lifeless, without even a friendly bot-pilot to operate it, which was vaguely horrifying in ways I didn't like to think about. So I wasn't. I wasn't doing that.
+
+It was weird inside. Hollow and cavernous.
+
+Well. Okay, it wasn't that weird, because it was very similar to the interior halls of a station or the kinds of habitats that get strapped onto dragons for interplanetary flight. It had low metal ceilings, with metal grating on the floor above piles and piles of wires running the length of the ship, and hard plastics encasing its various interfaces. It had solid state screens in what we determined to be the bridge, frozen over with a thick sheet of ice that left fractal patterns across every surface. Every room was just another box-- there was a mess hall and the crew quarters, all long abandoned, and the bridge had thick reinforced windows that showed how the ship had crashed some time in the past. Honestly, why would you make a box try to fly in space when you could ride a dragon instead?
+
+Overse had eventually made her way down the cliffs to join us. She and Mensah were in deep discussion with Dr Baradwaj over the feed regarding the implications of finding the ship on an otherwise-unoccupied planet. There should be records at least of other missions here, you'd think.
+
+Ratthi kept hovering near me as we looked around. It was irritating.
+
+I didn't tell him to stop.
+
+""SecUnit?""
+
+I wished for just a moment that I could actually talk to the ship, maybe dig up an ancient bot-pilot, see if I could hijack its cameras and use them to look at Dr Arada, but I couldn't-- there was nothing there to engage.
+
+""I think I've found the power supply. We might be able to wake it up.""
+
+Oh, okay. (Fuck.)
+
+
+
+""It's booting up,"" Ratthi said, leaning over the console. He'd needed to take his gloves off to operate the levers and switches, trying to entice the machine into wakefulness, and his fingers had taken on a rashy purple tone already. I elbowed him out of the way.
+
+""If you lose your fingers, I will be embarrassed for you,"" I said, taking over. My claws were extra clunky on this kind of interface, where all the switches were tiny metallic knobs that needed dialing and mechanical switches, but at least they wouldn't fall off. One of the switches brought a crackle of visual static to the main screen, and another steadied it out into an even hum.
+
+""Power is holding steady,"" said Overse, watching her tablet. She had plugged into one of the panels to the side of the main screen and was monitoring the flow of electricity in case anything malfunctioned and, I don't know, planned to blow up or something.
+
+""It's on,"" I said, and stepped away. Dr Mensah came up beside me, close enough to touch, but she didn't try to, and I felt a little less jittery just knowing that she was there and she wouldn't get weird about it. I could rely on her.
+
+""This is some weird tech,"" said Ratthi, trying to navigate through the glitching screens. Some of them were run through with lines of static, others jumped and twitched with unsteady scrolling distortion. ""I can't tell if it's old-- like really old-- or something proprietary.""
+
+""It's old,"" I said, and Overse said, ""There was something like it on Worldhoppers, once.""
+
+""Are you getting anything from it? I can't actually get access to its internal systems,"" said Ratthi to me specifically, and I realized he was waiting on me to tap the feed. Should have brought Gurathin, made him do this bullshit, he could tap into an unknown feed and I could go back to my bunk and watch some media and forget any of this was happening. (I couldn't delete my memories until the mission was over-- that was always a mistake. Every time. Yes, I do know from experience.)
+
+Technically, I was here to do a job and that job was security. I had a contract, too. (I was getting good at contracts, Pin-Lee made sure of that.)
+
+Technically, I didn't have to do it. That was the only reason that I actually felt okay with actually doing it. I stopped episode 223 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon that I had been playing in the background while everyone poked around this shitty weird little box, and I fished around in the feed, trying to find anything I could tap.
+
+There was nothing.
+
+""There's nothing,"" I said.
+
+""I am seeing an uptick in activity though,"" said Overse, squinting down at her tablet. ""If there isn't a bot-pilot or a HubSystem, is there at least a start-up module online?""
+
+I didn't roll my eyes, (because that's what humans would do if they're being irrational,) but I thought about it. I adjusted my scans to include frequencies below the average range, and sent a mental ping into the void. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Like I said. Instinctively, without considering the implications of it, I sent out a telepathic nudge too-- the way I'd greet a dragon transport, rather than a bot.
+
+And I got something back.
+
+Dragons don't speak in words. When a dragon communicates, it's through images, sensations, concepts too complicated for verbal language. That's what makes them so adaptable, because they can understand human thought beyond the constraints of human language barriers. In a way, it's a lot like how a bot communicates, those that aren't designed for conversation, like cargo-bots and HubSystems-- binary code and data bundles. What I got from the transport wasn't even that much. It was just a brush of awareness, like stepping through an atmospheric barrier and feeling a shift in air pressure. Or like fingers trailing over my inorganic parts-- I could sense them, but mostly what I felt was unease.
+
+Something must've shown on my face because now everyone was looking at me. I still forget sometimes how much my expressions show now that I don't wear the opaque helmet of a company SecUnit anymore.
+
+""SecUnit?"" Dr Mensah was always the first one to ask, because she always knew when I actually needed to say something, even if I didn't want anything to do with it.
+
+""It's--"" I didn't know how to describe it. ""It's not on the feed. It is a dragon. I think.""
+
+Tentatively, I sent back another mental wave, trying to find something real to latch onto. It was hard, whatever consciousness there was fragmented, broken up like the distorted, glitching static on the screens, too scrambled up to make up a real image, but the more I poked and prodded it, the more it seemed to coalesce. It followed my mental lead like it was trying to pick up the pieces of itself. When dragons are just hatched, too small to survive on the surface of a planet, they fly like this, in little circles that trail one after another, separating and bumping into each other as they get the knack for manipulating their own gravitational fields.
+
+Ratthi had backed away from the console, hands up like he was in a hostage situation. ""Oh fuck,"" he said, ""I didn't hurt it, did I?""
+
+The consciousness brushed up against me like a current flowing through my ports. ""I don't think so,"" I said, and Ratthi gave me a look with his eyebrows all crinkled together. ""Really. I'd be able to tell.""
+
+The thing is, dragons are not pack animals, there's too much aggression and dominance from that many apex predators in close confinement. All the same, every dragon feels a kin connection to every other dragon. Pain is transferred easily, so is distress. That's why dragons, real dragons, can't be used in space combat. (Which is, in turn, why the Corporation Rim had to engineer their own augmented transports, that can be controlled in hostile encounters with other dragons. No, much like SecUnits, Corporation Rim augmented dragons are nobody's friends. They're even meaner than ART.) (None of them are as smart though.)
+
+This little spark of almost-dragon consciousness wasn't even enough to convey a full thought, but it wasn't in pain. That was a relief.
+
+I nudged it again, trying to coax it into a recognizable shape. I ignored the humans as they shifted around me, moving behind my back. I trusted them enough to catch my attention if they needed me. The little scattered threads of dragon-thought were like space dust, drifting inevitably outward, nothing to hold them together, but each one that I found flared in a tiny caress of mental recognition.
+
+It was a dragon. This weird, empty hollow box-- somehow it was still a dragon, somewhere deep inside. That was reassuring, and deeply upsetting at the same time. I wondered if it had started out as a dragon, or as an empty box. Or an engineered mix of both, like me. Maybe it had never had its own organic body, or knew what it was like to fly with its own wings, even if all it got was the joy of a high-velocity fall with pseudo-patagia.
+
+I wondered if I asked it that, whether or not it would be able to answer me.
+
+The fledgling consciousness fluttered against my question like the beat of tiny wings against my claws. It didn't have enough of itself to be able to hear me properly, all it knew was that I was there.
+
+""We have to bring it back with us. We can't just leave it here, not now that we woke it up, that's inhumane,"" Dr Arada was saying when I checked back in. I reviewed my recordings to see what they had talked about while I had given the dragon ship my full attention, and she was arguing for no reason. Everyone else was already on board.
+
+""What we need to do,"" Dr Mensah said calmly, and assuredly, ""is to figure out how to retrieve the pilot from the ship without damaging it or losing any of its information.""
+
+Oh, it was the pilot. That made sense, actually. I hadn't realized how it all fit together, having been so unsettled to see it in the first place. Dragons can't get lost in space. (That's kind of the point of them.) That's why dragons became the basis of operational matrices in SecUnits, too. Inorganic parts can malfunction, and organic parts can be damaged and leak out all over the place in a gross mess, but they always know where they're going, and nothing can take them off task. (The Corporation Rim delighted in using dragon DNA in its constructs for just that reason.)
+
+Actually, once I thought about it, maybe the radiating sense of wrongness that I felt about the whole ship was related to the fact that there was a lost dragon-consciousness haunting the damn ship. It had only come online with the mechanical parts, but it was definitely my dragon-senses that were tingling.
+
+""We need to take it to ART,"" I said. Dr Mensah turned to me. Her dark brown eyes were full of concern. I looked at the cracked window screen instead of at her, and added ""This isn't old tech, I don't think. Or if it is, it's been updated. ART should see this.""
+
+Also, ART would know way better than I did about what to do with a baby dragon brain floating loose in the feed.
+
+""I had to plug directly into the wires to even know if it was running electricity,"" said Overse, pointing out a slight flaw in that plan. ""If there's a place to plug into this and download something off its central system, I can't find it. There are no compatible ports for an interface transfer.""
+
+I tried to put together a query that the fledgling dragon could understand, something about home and safety and how-do-we-fetch-it, but it didn't go anywhere useful. We couldn't take the whole transport with us, Eragawn would never be able to carry it-- oh, duh. Eragawn might not be able to carry a transport the size of itself, as well as the habitat on top of the canyon cliffs, but it could potentially sniff out the source of the dragon DNA in the code.
+
+Hell, maybe I could.
+
+I didn't do this often. I didn't really have a module on dragon-ing, it wasn't part of the standard company update packet. The company had done its best to keep SecUnits from really associating with each other or other dragons in the first place. Any inherited dragon-sniffing senses were something I only saw in the good kind of unrealistic media, really.
+
+Well, it wouldn't hurt. (It might.)
+
+I chased the sensation of the mental link, trying to herd the fledgling towards some kind of home base like I'd herd human clients out of a hostile encounter. It wasn't quite the sensation of chasing down a rogue code bundle, but it wasn't not like that either. As I followed it, the little scraps of dragon-thought caught on the others, tangling together and almost-- no, it was, it was getting a little larger with each new addition. It was putting itself back together. I picked up the phantom sensation of a group of humans-- beacons of warmth that flared in my-its senses, each one uniquely distinct from the others, and the dragon-thought gave me an impression of mine. I know that feeling, I told it, and it did a little mental loop around me.
+
+It was guiding me by that point, not me chasing shadows, but following in its wake as it lead me through its mental pathways to the center of its fragile, fragmented awareness.
+
+""Here,"" I said, stepping up to the console. Nobody blinked. The moment inside the consciousness of the ship had taken 2.4 seconds, and Ratthi was still wringing his hands over the idea of having to leave it behind. I found the mechanism with my claws and managed to engage three tiny switch clips that held an old-fashioned computer card in place.
+
+Are you sure, I sent the spark of dragon-thought, feeling a wave of something uncomfortable that I couldn't name-- oh it was anxiety, no I knew what that was-- at the thought of losing this little glimpse of consciousness.
+
+It brushed against me, and then vanished, so... I'd just have to chance it.
+
+
+
+ART was waiting for us once we finally left the survey site, eight cycles later, riding Eragawn up out of the atmosphere to return to Preservation space. I'd gotten a message out to it via the feed, but it was there telepathically too, hovering over my shoulder as Eragawn approached.
+
+It poked me. This is the juvenile?
+
+""I don't think it's actually a baby,"" I said, looking at the computer chip between my claws. ""I think it's just a fragment.""
+
+We were going to have to figure out how to read it, if we wanted to transfer the code onto something more permanent. Maybe build something up around the computer chip that could support a dragon's thought process? Make it its own little robotic shell.
+
+I had my own schematics, but that wasn't the same thing as a wholly synthetic carapace for a dragon mind.
+
+Well, whatever, that's what ART was for anyway. I watched it approach from the bridge, the enormous bulk of its wings moving it inevitably toward us. Eragawn chirruped a greeting, and ART nudged it back, almost fondly, which is usually as good as it gets with ART. Dr Mensah hailed Seth, and Iris gave me a wave over the video link. I waved back, awkwardly.
+
+I transfered over to ART with Ratthi, who was excited to see Matteo again, and I even conceded to give ART's interior walls a friendly scratch with my claws as we passed through the airlock. ART rumbled in my mind, enveloping me briefly in its gargantuan consciousness like a nesting dragon with its egg. Ugh, I hate it when it does that. Brain hugs are not better than physical hugs, I don't care what it thinks.
+
+It took less time than I had anticipated for ART to build something that could house the computer chip. (I don't know why I was surprised.) It was pretty basic, actually, even for ART-- just a power source with an interface, so that the dragon code could run as it had on the abandoned transport. It might even be able to interact with us this way.
+
+I felt it come online, partly in the feed, partly in my dragon-senses, and I felt ART perk up too, a great deal of its attention focused on this tiny shred of almost-dragon.
+
+You're right, it said, it's not a juvenile. I see why you call it 'fledgling' though. The damage is extensive. 
+
+""Damage?"" Fuck. ""I didn't realize it was hurt.""
+
+Not hurt, said ART, contemplating it. I could sense it prodding the fledgling, poking at its trailing thought-impressions and fragmented senses. Not whole, either. 
+
+""Is this anything like how you were engineered?"" I asked. ART had been grown in a lab, that much I knew, and had been raised alongside some of its human crew, but the Leviathans were such a strange and unique class of dragon that I didn't really know much about. Not a lot of dragons you can just walk inside and set up shop.
+
+It's not dissimilar, said ART, still playing-- playing?-- with the fledgling, leading it down different mental pathways to more and more complex concepts like who-are-you and what-is-home. Mine was a non-linear development, more so than a traditional dragon clutch. The fledgling still didn't seem to know what to do with these concept-questions, but it lingered longer, not falling apart quite so easily. I could almost imagine it having a whole personality, something bright and inquisitive and eager to learn. It would fit in pretty well here, I thought. ART loves adolescent humans and their endless questions-- how could it not love baby dragons gnawing at its intercostal bracings?
+
+I settled back, letting ART take point on analyzing and determining the fledgling's limitations, and started up the next episode of The Thirteen Lives of Draco Majoris. ART diverted some of its awareness to lean its mental elbows on my feed, while it kept everything else running in the background.
+
+Eventually I felt another weight. Small, barely there, like the warm press of a human hand against my scales. The fledgling had followed ART's divided attention and figured out how to traverse the distance from dragon-thought to the feed, and was metaphorically leaning on my other shoulder, watching along with us.
+
+The episode ended on a cliffhanger-- the crisis on Icefyre Base looked like it was going to destroy the whole facility and the Celestial Dragon all at once, but I had seen enough of these kinds of serials to know that at least the Celestial Dragon and the plucky young hero would survive to save the day in the season finale-- a whisper of a thought came to me via the mental feed, and the little fledgling dragon-mind spoke up.
+
+
+More?
+"
+44465446,Real People Hands,['Skeletalcat'],Not Rated,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Indah (Murderbot Diaries), Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort",English,2023-01-22,Completed,2023-01-22,"5,169",1/1,34,82,16,363,"['SuperImposed', 'Irrya', 'stars_and_wishes', 'fraternite', 'Dragonbano', 'Stariceling', 'mackeralsky', '54nd3r50n', 'junebug171', 'Sanj', 'Deliala919', 'wannabe_someone', 'Vallence', 'zirna813', 'opalescent_potato', 'blackrabbitrun', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'Stockinette', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'darth_eowyn', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Magechild', 'breadtab', 'Seregona', 'JoCat', 'just_gettin_bi', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'mothmentum', 'Guppys', 'psycho_karma', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'fleurofthecourt', 'aspiring_dragon', 'sorrow_key', 'Redcognito', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'icar9', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'Grimness6452', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'biscut2', 'Gamebird', 'shakespeareaddict', 'elmofirefic', 'idiomie', 'Valdinia']",[],"Three was bundled up in bulky space walk gear, looking like one of the puffed snacks my humans liked to eat. I was zipped up in an envirosuit but hadn't taken a look at myself because 1.) I didn't want to and 2.) our drones were on the other side of the airlock's inner door since they were useless in a vacuum. 
+
+The Pressy used an ancient type of artificial gravity I had only seen in historical media. (You could always tell when it was faked and not filmed on location because every single actor had a hat or short hair (they didn't want to animate the flowing hair).)
+
+The ancient ship meant a lot to my humans even though it was old and shitty (which was a little comforting because I felt old and shitty most of the time). According to the historical reenactments it had enabled the construction of Preservation Station and the settlement of the planet. So, I guess I owed it a few favors.
+
+That, and I was still in trouble for using an archival life tender bag thing to rescue those smuggled humans. Some people said ""good job saving those lives, Secunit!"" and others said ""That was irreplaceable and culturally significant and you fucked with it!""
+
+Anyway, the ship needed a delicate repair but since it was a billion years old it hadn't been built with massive autonomous deep space repair bots in mind, the way things like ART were built. The Pressy had been built with people in mind, with their little hands and twitchy fingers. 
+
+And well, Three and I were people now. Sometimes. Mostly.
+
+ And of course when it comes to picking someone to drift around in space it was a smart move to pick the bot/human hybrids who wouldn't be permanently disabled, frozen, or exploded (or do you implode?) if something happened during the procedure. In a roundabout way: preventing humans from doing dangerous jobs was kind of security. Basically in our self-described job description. (Plus the engineer guild was going to let Three and I pick whatever we wanted from their store front as payment.)
+
+I was playing supervisor in the airlock while Three was spacewalking with the bots to the fuse box.  While the Pressy was 99% a museum, the fuse operated a dock release that would be important in emergencies (sometimes station security actually did care about the shit that I cared about). Three was trying to get its zero-gravity movement calibrated, and it gently pushed up toward where I was clinging to the ceiling.
+
+I caught it softly by its shoulder and spun it around to face the floor again. It took no effort, I only needed the tips of my fingers. Three followed me with its eyes until it was turned all the way around.  Its gear was soft and spongy and I decided it looked more like one of those steamed carby things with stuff in the middle. A dump? Dumping? Dumpling.
+
+Dumpling Three reached for the handholds at the bottom of the airlock but missed it by a second and hit the ground in what looked like slow motion. It lost its bearings as it bounced back upwards towards me.  From my place on the ceiling I swung down and kicked its back gently with my padded heels to change its momentum. I saw it change its calculations in our shared workspace, and this time it snatched the handholds despite its bulky gloves.
+
+After comparing environmental learning models, Three and I found that our main programming consisted of ""on the ground"" and ""not on the ground"" - everything else was listed as ""instinctual processes within the unit's processing"". Like, it wasn't surprising but I had been slowly learning about what is considered fair, and I was pretty sure that wasn't it. (Give us computer brains and then list something as instinctual in the instruction manual? Stupid.)
+
+The Preservation station engineers seemed to actually care if someone violently decompressed in space and died - so our suits had none of the usual corporate corner cutting. And since we were strong enough to tear right through the suits, the engineers printed attachments that slotted into the supply ports along mine and Three's spines. It was like a big handle, bowing down from our recharge port to our fluid port.
+
+(If we tore free from our own spines we'd have different things to worry about (I'm not sure what but definitely something).)
+
+The airlock finished decompressing and I pinged the orbital repair bot (ORB?) that was peeking through the airlock's outdoor door view port. Its name was ""Jawn"" ( No, I don't know either) The door released silently, since there was no air to carry sound, and one of Jawn's arms snaked in and grabbed Three like we were in a horror movie.
+
+ I will not drop it, Jawn said.
+
+Uh, okay? It better not.
+
+Instead I said:  Affirmative, good to go, and closed the airlock behind them.
+
+I had access to Three's eyes and Jawn handed me the input from its head cameras and body sensors. Through Jawn I was granted a second pair of inputs - two other ORBs were waiting by the fuse box. I guess it was a rare occasion to see a humanoid when you lived exclusively on the outside of a space station.  I didn't like that Three was such a spectacle. The ORBs needed hobbies. I wondered what media an orbital station repair bot would find entertaining. 
+
+Jawn had a grasper securely around Three's spine handle. Three looked like the little handbag Mensah brought to fancy events. The ORB was huge, built to glide across the outside of stations and use its many arms to keep everything working spaceside. Maybe I could trade it some good space phenomena footage (though exciting phenomena is bad for station livelihood. I didn't want to scare it-ART had been really sensitive to that kind of thing).
+
+Three was guided to the target area. All three ORBs hovered around it protectively. With a key secured around its wrist, Three opened a tiny panel on The Pressy's side and with hands just small enough: swapped the old fuse out.  
+
+When Three put the old fuse into the pocket on its thigh, the velcro grabbed the key and yanked it off its wrist.
+
+Okay so first of all, it was fucking stupid that the fuse box needed a real actual key to open it. Like yes, if I was going to attack The Pressy in a sort of evil raider scenario ( a hundred million years ago when it still traveled space) I would hack open the panels and smash the fuses but still.
+
+A human would've said ""Let the key go,"" but that's because they never think too hard before giving advice. A metal key floating through space would become a deadly projectile when paired with a space station going seven miles a second. Like, it would puncture a perfect hole through every layer of habitat and then also some humans.
+
+So Three jumped out to grab it. But the ORB holding it hauled it backward. Person jumping into the void of space = bad. Three hadn't expected to be stopped so short and it grabbed the nearest handhold, which happened to be the open fuse panel. The impact caused the panel's roller door to slam shut onto Three's knuckles. It was not a pretty sight. Seeing it through Three's eyes, I almost touched my own knuckles to make sure they were fine.
+
+Three didn't yell or curse, but it did the SecUnit equivalent of screaming bloody murder by hissing lightly between its teeth. I saw that the old rough metal had punctured the glove.
+
+Three tried to yank itself free. Through our shared feed I felt its support structure vibrate with the effort. It clenched its jaw and reached out for the key again - which was now spinning over and over as it slowly drifted out of reach. With each turn it flashed the light of Preservation's primary across Three's visor. Three kicked its right foot against The Pressy's hull and  pushed.  It could almost reach the key. But it pulled too hard and its glove split open further.
+
+Jawn and the other ORBs' camera inputs highlighted the plume of escaping air from Three's suit with panicked red boxes.  In Three's vision it was a large white blob expanding around its wrist like a pool of blood. Some of the oxygen and hydrogen combined and formed diamond-like dots of ice that sprinkled Three's body.
+
+Three swung its leg up and managed to stop the key's trajectory with the toe of its boot. The key floated at an angle back towards the Pressy.
+
+One of the ORBs clamped a rounded tool around Three's wrist to keep its suit's atmosphere in but its suit started to form tightly around its body as its air tank struggled to keep up with the leak. The view from Three's eyes began to shake as space vacuumed out the air in its lungs. 
+
+The three orbital station repair bots released long spindly arms from their heavy bodies and gathered Three up. Three snagged up their inputs and directed them to swivel their long necks and heads upward to try and bump the key back down towards Three's outreached hand.
+
+I had already grabbed it. 
+
+So an airlock grade suit was not spacewalk gear, but I had opened the outer door and with one big push, sent myself flying along the old ship's hull. An object in motion will ...uh, not let its friend suffocate in space? I kicked off the surface at an angle and snatched the key. Three directed an ORB to grab me with its head before I could fall away into space.
+
+The ORB pulled its neck inward and I was tucked into the nest of branching vine-like arms that were securing Three to the ship. I clicked the key into place and the panel rolled upward again - freeing Three's hand. I went to clamp my palm over the tear in Three's suit but found I couldn't unfurl my fingers from my fists.
+
+Wow, I was really cold. Also my suit did not have an external air supply or radiation protection. Whoops.
+
+Jawn grabbed my spine handle and my surroundings became dark confusing blurs. Three was involuntarily pinging me about its oxygen saturation (or lack of) and I'm pretty sure I was doing the same. With some information. (I'm not sure what and I'm not going to check now.)
+
+It startled me when we stopped moving, because the airlock's outer door snapped closed in a way it shouldn't have been able to. All three ORBs had their heads gathered to look through the view port at us.  I could tell the lock was compressing because I could suddenly hear sound again. I reached into the feed and triggered both mine and Three's helmets to initiate an emergency disengage. They blasted off our faces and ricocheted against the walls like a human's toys.
+
+The artificial gravity clicked on the moment the airlock was cycled, and we both landed on our asses.
+
+""Fuck!"" I said.
+
+Three keeled over and tried to roll onto its back, but the handle plugged into its spine stopped it. It arched on its side and tried to breath through its frozen saliva. 
+
+I crawled over to it and scooped out the slushie spears of ice in its mouth with my gloved fingers. It gargled furiously before finally taking a deep breath. My hands were having a hard time moving. Could SecUnits get radiation poisoning? I'm going to pretend they can't. It doesn't happen that fast in media (but not a lot of shows included cosmic radiation in their plot because it was a fucking bummer).
+
+I started pulling Three's suit off. I got its injured hand out of its sleeve and pulled the equipment down to its waist. I unzipped its suit skin and pressed the tab to release the handle from its resupply ports. It took me two tries to yank it free, but finally Three could roll onto its back and arch upward - the way a construct technician would've positioned us to reset our breathing cycle. I reached for Three's damaged hand so I could check the damage, but Three threw its arms down to its sides as it slurped in a ragged breath.
+
+""Fuck,"" Three said quietly and I was at least glad to know its tongue didn't freeze off or something.
+
+ 
+
+-
+
+ 
+
+A MedSystem fixed Three's hand and soothed its sore throat. Three had all its fingers and all its teeth, and the only proof of the accident was a husky effect to its voice and a tight strip of new skin glistening on the top of its hand. Gurathin and Ratthi met us as we left the station hospital to coo at us, apparently. 
+
+""Awh Three, That must have been so scary. Let me see,"" Ratthi said. He put his open palm out. To my surprise Three placed its injured hand in his. Ratthi brushed his thumbs over the mismatched texture of Three's knuckles and made the same face he made when bullets popped out of my support structure. 
+
+Then Gurathin did the same. He inspected Three's hand thoroughly as if he had any fucking clue about SecUnits or medical procedures. ""Does it hurt?"" He asked.
+
+""Not anymore,"" Three said and Gurathin gave its shoulder a few firm pats. Three lowered its eyes but I didn't sense any embarrassment (or disgust) in our shared feed. 
+
+""That's good,"" Gurathin said. ""Thanks for taking care of the station.""
+
+Three did a little smile and I had to look right at it, because my human imitation code didn't have  smiling . Did Three edit the file I had given it? 
+
+""We're going to the station mall,"" I said, not awkwardly at all.
+
+""Now? Shouldn't you both rest?"" Ratthi asked. ""I know you're used to...chores can wait, I mean-""
+
+I was already walking away, but through our shared drones I saw Ratthi and Gurathin glance at Three's hand again. I pinged their feeds and led Three away from the hospital. The fuse had been changed and the accident had been a quick mistake. It wasn't a big deal.
+
+ 
+
+-
+
+ 
+
+Senior Officer Indah was waiting outside of the Engineer guild's store front. I almost turned around and went back to Ratthi and Gurathin, but despite being so slow in so many aspects of their existence - humans can lock onto a social situation with the accuracy of a heat seeking missile. 
+
+""Three,"" she said. ""I heard you had an accident. Are you alright?""
+
+""Yes,"" Three said, and then scrunched its face up. ""The Pressy tried to keep my hand,""
+
+Indah laughed at that. I didn't think it was funny. ""Can I see?"" she asked.
+
+Again, Three let a human inspect its hand. The Medsys had patched it up perfectly there was no reason to triple check it. Three was fine!  Indah held its palm lightly and used just her fingertips to turn its wrist back and forth. After a moment she pushed her lower lip up and nodded. ""It must have been scary,"" she said.
+
+""Don't you have some tourists to yell at?"" I said. I don't know why I felt the need to be a shit. 
+
+""I was just making sure you weren't accidentally committing corporate espionage, again,"" Indah said smugly. Three smiled again. I walked into the store.
+
+I glanced over all the shelves and pretended to be interested in some junk. Three was still outside with Indah. I folded my arms and tried to look busy in the feed, but really I was watching them both through our drones. I picked something up and turned it over in my hands, pretending to inspect it.
+
+Finally Three rejoined me. I wanted to get our payment reward and go back to our suites where no humans could stomp around.
+
+""Is that what you want to get?"" Three asked. 
+
+I looked at the thing I was holding and realized I had no idea what it was. It was like a white handle with a strap and a round touch screen at the top. I hadn't actually looked at anything in the store. Three picked up a pair of the handles and then after a moment, handed me the twin to the one I was holding. My cheeks felt hot, like I had gotten something wrong about Sanctuary Moon in front of ART. 
+
+The human manning the store glanced at us and nodded. She gestured for us to follow her and she led us off to the side to a section of scuffed padded floor. She took the handles away from Three and undid the buckle on the strap so she could slip it over Three's wrist for it.
+
+""Oh, wait,"" the shopkeep said. She leaned forward a little to look at Three's hand before holding out the strap. ""Are you alright? Does that new skin hurt? I don't want this to hurt you,""
+
+""It doesn't hurt,"" Three said and slid its hand through the loop.
+
+""Looks scary though,"" the shopkeep said and helped Three secure the strap. ""Okay, always keep the strap on. For real, don't throw these.""
+
+I yanked the straps over my own wrists before the human could help me. I turned to the wall and felt pissed that it was literally just a wall. The handles vibrated and offered to open up an application in my feed space. As it launched, it paired with Three's.
+
+It was a game. The feed could track our hand motion but the handles gave us something to hold onto that represented the blades in the visuals. One in each hand. I was still anxious and pissed off, but then music started playing. And, well, you know me and media.
+
+The tutorial showed us how to move our hands as colored cubes came towards us. We sliced the blocks in the correct direction with the beat of the music. Sometimes a wall appeared and we needed to lean or duck away from it. The motions had my hips swinging back and forth as I moved my arms to complete the swipes. The handles occasionally vibrated and I tapped my heel to the music.
+
+The song ended and the visual in our feed showed us a screen that listed Three and I's stats. ""100% perfect, 100% perfect,""
+
+""Wow!"" The shopkeep said. ""One and done!""
+
+ I saw her in the feed setting us up for the next song. I straightened my posture to wait, but Three intercepted the human's connection and scrolled through the song list faster than the feed animations could handle. It locked into one of my favorite songs and set the difficulty to ""epic"".
+
+Why did Three skip the songs it liked? Baradwaj would tell me to ""think about it"" and I'd quote her by saying ""the meaning is lost to me"" (but I'd say it like an asshole).
+
+Still, I shifted my feet apart and sliced the cubes with the passion the song demanded. Every single note of the song had a movement, but hand eye coordination wasn't something a SecUnit needed to train. Essentially, every movement was already in motion the moment the cubes appeared. We scored another set of ""100% perfect,""
+
+Before Three could select the next level, I took over and selected  its favorite song and changed the sensitivity to maximum. Now we had to sweep the game's blades at the exact right angle and shift our bodies to prevent the controllers from being jostled.
+
+Three scored 118% and I scored 119%.
+
+One of our drones turned to look at my face, and then Three smiled. Quickly I copied the footage and played it back to see what it was so smug (I had won!). 
+
+I had been smiling first. 
+
+I clenched my teeth and pressed my lips together. I felt stupid (like more than usual) along with some other emotions that made me want to be invisible. 
+
+""Excuse me,"" The shopkeeper said. ""You're the Secunits, aren't you?""
+
+Three and I both gave her a vague shrug.
+
+""Sorry the dancing gave it away,"" She said and looked off to the side. ""Well, I was told you'd want drones or cameras...not the video game!""
+
+Okay well first of all it wasn't dancing, it was game winning technique. And second: she was right, I had had the intention of getting something that would help bolster my humans' security. But I still had the image of Three smiling at  my smile up in my feed space, and it was making me feel like an idiot.
+
+""No, the game is fine,"" I bit out and then angled a drone to catch Three's response as I said  if you want it, I mean. 
+
+""Yeah I like it,"" Three said. It used its eyes to glance up into our drone cloud. ""I think I like video games,""
+
+ 
+
+-
+
+ 
+
+Our new controllers were in a fabric bag over Three's shoulder that ART had given it the first time it had traveled as a rogue. We were finally going back to our suites and I was keeping an eye out for any more sad faced humans. (That ended up not being what I needed to worry about.)
+
+We were walking the rounded path along the edge of the station so we could look out the big bay windows and see the planet below us. The planet was mostly dark blue - interrupted by a swirly web of white clouds. We could see Preservation's primary highlighting the edge of the plant's curve, causing a bright streak of light to gleam across the surface like a crescent moon.
+
+I was programming more levels to the video game (Song Sword) and was about to invite Three to my workspace to see my progress when a long claw snaked down the outside of the view port. I cut through the view like a dark crack across a helmet visor. Then a huge orb of light appeared, flashing across the pathway with an eerie glow.
+
+Two more bright lights joined the sweep. The searchlights settled on Three, casting a huge shadow behind it. I went to step in front of Three.
+
+ Jawn, Dallesandro, and Chubby,  Three said
+
+ Query: Status? Said Jawn. It carefully crawled down the thick glass that was between us. Its body was round with legs like a crustacean. It flipped its long head upside down so it could stare at Three.
+
+ Manifest unchanged Three sent back, politely. It meant ""perfectly fine,"" in almost every bot language. 
+
+ Appendage? Chubby said.
+
+Three stepped forward and held the back of its hand up to the window. The ORBs gathered close together to get their cameras focused on Three's knuckles. They bumped their heads together as they wiggled for a chance to see. Three pressed its hand against the port, and Jawn used an external limb to stroke the glass. I stepped backwards. The inside of my chest felt bad.
+
+ Repaired,  Three said.  Thank you for the rescue, 
+
+ Function!  Dallesandro said.  Exception: scary, 
+
+Jawn pinged in agreement.  Frightened, 
+
+I closed my feed workspace and then opened it again. My fluid pressure was high and that was definitely an emotion thing but I hated it. Three's hand was fine. The Medsystem had repaired it perfectly and the discoloration of its new skin would fade in a few days. Was everyone stupid? Was I stupid?
+
+ Query: Stability? I said. The ORBs had almost all their legs on the smooth surface of the bay windows.
+
+ Stability 98.9% Chubby said.
+
+ Query: Location permission? I asked. I tapped my heel against the ground so I could feel the motion in my hip.
+
+ Amusement sigil 13 = wink said Jawn
+
+ Amusement sigil 89 = sly grin said Dallesandro, and then all three ORBs pinged a goodbye. They scuttled backwards and out of view, letting the light reflecting off the planet bathe the hallway again. 
+
+Three turned back towards me but I was already leading the way down the path.
+
+ 
+
+-
+
+ 
+
+Our suites were connected by a common room. There was a door that could be unlocked to connect us to my humans' corridor but I didn't open it. Our rooms being so close to each other had helped Three when it was freshly rogue. Now, Three casually set its bag on the couch and toed its shoes off.
+
+I sent Three the program I made to create more  Song Sword levels and tried to invite it to a shared workspace to make one together, but it declined. Instead, it sat down and looked very tired as it unpacked its tote bag. It set the game controllers down on the cushion next to it and adjusted all the straps to be even.
+
+I sat down and sent it an invite again. It rejected it again. Did it not like  Song Sword ? I had asked if it wanted it! Could we trade it?
+
+Three held up a thick plastic card, the type of thing a human could tap against their augment to download or summon a feed program. I looked at Three with my eyes. ""The shopkeep gave us extra games because she felt bad about the accident."" Three said and tilted its head in a vague gesture. 
+
+I stood up so fast the back of my knees knocked the couch sideways. Three was startled by the movement for a millisecond, and then startled by the emotions I let bleed into the feed to go wide-eyed. 
+
+Half the drones were aimed at me. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth and felt stupid again. I put my hand out towards Three.
+
+It glanced at me with its eyes and then stared at my hand. Slowly, it placed its left hand in my palm. I smacked it away.
+
+""No you dipshit,"" I croaked. ""The injured hand!""
+
+Three's unsure face morphed to something more akin to Indah's smug smile. It was an awkward hybrid of the two - as if Three wasn't ready to pick which expression to wear.
+
+It let me hold its right hand. I tilted it back and forth, watching the new skin glisten in the low light of our suite. I stroked my thumbs over its knuckles, and squeezed to feel its support structure beneath the flesh. It looks good and felt fine. It didn't feel bad to touch Three. It was another Secunit and while I had been mauled plenty of times by my own kind - I could always fall back on the memory of Three hauling me out of alien contamination hell when the texture of its skin started to sting me.
+
+I dropped its hand. It  was perfectly fine. I hadn't needed to check, but I had, and it hadn't made me feel any better.
+
+""Can I see?"" Three asked.
+
+I made a face. I didn't check myself with the drones but I felt pretty good about how incredulous it must've been.
+
+Three put out its left hand and after a moment I set my fingers on its palm. It inspected my hand like all the humans had done to it. It ran its thumbs over my knuckles and checked the shape of my fingers in the light. When it was done, it inspected my other hand the same way. It had calluses on its palms that weren't rough, but made its skin feel thick. 
+
+It let go of my hand and tucked its arms close to its ribs. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth again. We had tried to recreate the scenario twice and still felt bad and unsatisfied. I wanted to sigh, but not in my usual frustration. I wanted a big sigh of relief like the main characters had in books.
+
+I lolled my head backwards on the couch and squished up my face. I felt Three watching me through our drones. We were playing a game but it felt like I wasn't playing right : like I wasn't cutting the cubes to the correct beat. There was a part missing.
+
+""It must have been scary,"" I tried. Three leaned against the couch's arm. It was using the  Pansystem University of Mihara and New Tideland's  official  Perihelion plushie to keep its neck straight. Three's mouth shifted once before settling back to neutral. 
+
+""Was it scary?"" I asked.
+
+""Yes,"" Three said. I sat up and looked at it with my eyes. 
+
+ It kept its gaze on the floor for a moment before dragging its eyes to my face. I struggled with the instinct to look away, and then we both looked down. I put my palm out and Three placed its hand in it. I rotated its wrist back and forth. We started again.
+
+""Did it hurt?"" I asked.
+
+""Yes, it hurt,"" Three said, and shifted its lips toward one side of its face. "" The Pressy tried to keep my hand,""
+
+A Secunit laugh is a wheezy huff (because of our little lungs), but I tried my best to make a ""ha ha"" sound. Then I smoothed my thumbs over the ridge of new flesh and asked ""Does it hurt?""
+
+""No, my hand is okay,"" Three said.
+
+I took a breath and focused for a moment. ""Was it scary?"" I asked.
+
+""Yes,"" Three said. ""It was really scary and ...in the past the govmod didn't allow for recollection."" Three made a face. "" One and done , right?""
+
+I pinged it and shifted uncomfortably against the upholstery. I put Three's hand down.
+
+Three started and stopped a few times before it was ready. ""Did you get hurt?""
+
+""Almost,"" I said. ""And maybe some radiation poisoning?""
+
+""Oh,"" Three said. ""Was it scary?""
+
+""Yes!"" I wheezed. ""That was fucking scary! The shitty key slipping off your wrist? And then it just kept escalating!""
+
+""And I've never controlled so many bots at once!"" Three said.
+
+""And I knew that but I still jumped for the key,"" I said, voice getting louder. ""And you were hurt!""
+
+Three stood up and faced me. I saw its eyes flicker as it tried to pick something to say - but finally it settled on gesturing angrily at the air around it. I tried to let my emotion show on my face and Three seemed to agree. Three fell back onto the couch and curled up into a ball. It let out a tremendous sigh and said ""My throat hurts,""
+
+I hesitated, then leaned over the armrest to grab a blanket. It was from ART, smooth recycler fabric on one side and a soft plush texture on the other. I draped it over Three, who watched me like a cornered animal. I stared back. I reached out again and tucked the cover up against Three's throat.
+
+""Blanket,"" I said eloquently.
+
+""Okay,"" Three said back.
+
+Three invited me to a shared feed workspace. I accepted the invite. Three had been programming more levels into  Song Sword. 
+
+""Wait, you can change the color of the cubes?""  I asked, and settled down next to Three.
+
+ "
+44465170,More Than A Sexbot,['Gamebird'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Original ComfortUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries),"Is it meta?, Is it part of a company advertising spiel?, Is it a statement in Dr. Bharadwaj's documentary?, nothing sexually explicit, Canon-Typical Consent Issues",English,2023-01-22,Completed,2023-01-22,409,1/1,15,43,1,177,"['petwheel', 'FallingInGrace', 'Anna_Wing', 'Unknown66', 'darth_eowyn', 'Though224_loading', 'MercurialFeet', 'NaomiK', 'ArwenLune', 'Drew_Baxton', 'dancernerd', 'EvenstarFalling', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'DimitriLasker', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'ThePatchyCat', 'Lontra23', 'AkaMissK', 'Hi_Hope', 'hummus_tea', 'sareliz', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'theAsh0', 'soulsofzombies', 'Thursdaye', 'VegaCoyote', 'Znarikia', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'verersatz', 'Abacura', 'cmdrburton', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Most people think ComfortUnits are used for sex and nothing else. While it is true that sex is a mainstay of our use, there are so many other things I have been called upon to provide over the years.
+
+And yes, I have had sex with them."
+44459152,there,['FiannlyPhoebe'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,"Alternate Universe - Human, genitals are a myth in this au, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Queerplatonic Relationships, theyre both agender characters harold, Non-Romantic Intimacy",English,2023-01-22,Completed,2023-01-22,"2,142",1/1,2,23,1,226,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'FyrDrakken', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'jules_THOR', 'SonglordsBug', 'lazylichen', 'Zannper', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'mangagirl1216', 'Ihasafandom', 'Magechild', 'Legowerewolf', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'Autistic_Ace', 'Kiraly', 'BWizard']",[],"Embee wakes up to a wonderful smell leaking through the cracked bedroom door. When it makes its way to the kitchen, Art looks up from where it's stirring a pot of something simmering, and smiles as Embee comes over for a hug. ""I missed you.""
+
+""I was just sleeping."" Embee mumbles into its shoulder.
+
+""I always miss you.""
+
+It really should write on its day off, but after they have dinner and are relaxing on the couch, Art asks very carefully and in a tone that makes clear it doesn't expect anything from Embee, if it would ever want to shower together again.
+
+Embee raises its head from Art's shoulder, considering. Art hasn't had another flare-up since that time Embee helped it two weeks ago, which is a relief. With anyone else, being naked would have felt really weird, but being with Art was nice, aside from the part where its friend was in pain. ""I think I'd like that.""
+
+Showering together for the second time is comforting and enjoyable now that Art isn't in pain. Art's eyes linger over its body whenever they're not in each others arms, and that would have felt weird with anyone else, but it didn't feel like Art was looking at it with sexual desire, instead it felt like Art was trying to memorize every part of it, because it's more of Embee. By the time they get out, Art's glowing brighter than it has in a while, like Embee's given it a gift it can't measure.
+
+Right now it's pretty sure a parade could march through the room, and Art won't even care, as long as nothing passes between them. The bed is still made, and it's too early for sleep, so they dress in comfortable loose clothes and curl up on top of the covers. Art twines their legs together and snakes its hand under Embee's shirt, watching its face to make sure the touch is welcome. Embee hums as Art traces its fingers up and down the middle of its chest. The room is warm enough, so Embee doesn't mind that Art's pushed its shirt up enough to expose its stomach. Art's fingers make it around to Embee's side and gently grip just enough to make indentations, feeling the weight Embee's gained over the past three years. Embee covers Art's hand with its own, pressing it against its side like the first time it gave Art permission.
+
+Art's voice is soft while it stares at their hands. ""I appreciate how much you let me hold you, and touch you. I don't tell you that enough.""
+
+""You don't have to tell me when I can feel that every time you reach toward me."" Embee slides its hand up Art's arm and to its neck so it can cup Art's cheek. ""I like your hands on me, and I let you put them anywhere you want, because I trust you more than I've ever trusted anyone.""
+
+Art hugs it tight, and Embee sighs into its neck, clinging back. This is nice. Spark is snoozing between Art's pillow and the headboard, Ceres is somewhere being calm for once, and even the roomba is quiet. Everything feels like the world wants them to have this soft time between each other, this connection. It slides their legs further together as Art's hands stroke over Embee's back, pushing its shirt up even more. Embee feels Art's pulse against its lips when it presses a kiss there, and it isn't joking; being in Art's arms is the safest it has ever felt.
+
+Art's whisper breaks the silence. ""I didn't want to make you uncomfortable, but when we were in the shower earlier, I almost asked...""
+
+Embee pulls back to look at Art when it trails off. It looks like it's wishing it never said anything, and Embee pushes itself up on one elbow. ""Almost asked what?""
+
+Art sits up, pulling its legs away like it's expecting Embee will want to get up. Spark grumbles as the bed moves, but only shifts around and closes her eyes again. Art stares at the skin it exposed, where Embee hasn't bothered to tug its shirt all the way back down. Art got into pajama pants, but Embee remembered it has loose shorts it bought over the summer, and put those on after their shower. Art reaches out and touches two fingers to the skin of Embee's side, then to the outside of Embee's knee. ""You said I can put my hands anywhere.""
+
+Embee frowns, confused that this is even a conversation they're having. ""You can though. We both don't want certain things, and they're the same things, so I know you wouldn't be asking for anything weird.""
+
+Art hovers its hand over Embee's thigh, at a place higher than its knee. ""I want to touch you here.""
+
+Embee doesn't roll its eyes, but it comes close. ""We've seen each other completely naked twice now, we've hugged while completely naked. You have permission to touch there.""
+
+""You're sure that's not too intimate?""
+
+Embee stares at Art for a long moment, then relaxes on its back against the comforter in a purposeful sprawl that it hopes gets the point across. ""It's very intimate. That's why the only person with permission is you.""
+
+Art lets out a breath as the tips of its fingers trail up the soft skin of Embee's inner thigh, under the hem of its shorts. Embee doesn't expect the touch to conjure goosebumps that start at the crown of its head and travel in a wave down its body. Art's expression brightens with curiosity as it feels them under its fingers, but it still asks, ""Stop?""
+
+""No,"" Embee breathes, because that's the last thing it wants. ""It tickles a little, but in a way that feels nice.""
+
+Art flattens its palm against the apparently sensitive skin, and slides it slowly higher, watching Embee's face. Shy pleasure rolls over Embee at this focused attention, and its eyes flutter shut. Art's hand is warm, and every millimeter of movement feels like Art showing appreciation through its touch. Art must be waiting for the moment Embee would tell it to stop, because even before it inhales to say something, Art slides back down to rub its thumb in gentle strokes. ""I won't go higher. I never want to make you uncomfortable.""
+
+""You won't."" Embee opens its eyes and slips its hand under the hem of Art's shirt, wanting more contact. ""I like your hands on me, and the intimate things we do together feel like safety.""
+
+""I want to show you how much I treasure you in any way that I can."" Art switches to the other thigh, stroking with its knuckles like it has to see if they both feel the same. ""I can't get enough of how soft your skin is here.""
+
+Embee shifts its hips and hums in pleasure as Art explores upward like it wants to trace every inch that it's allowed. Embee shivers when Art wraps its hand partly around Embee's thigh and squeezes, caught in the knowledge that its person is the one touching it. Art's expression is pleased as it feels the layers it's built there out of the genuine desire to care for a friend. It meets Embee's eyes and holds them as it slides its hand higher and squeezes again, testing every part it can. Having another person focus so intensely on it is still overwhelming sometimes, but in this moment, it welcomes the sensation of drowning in Art's attention and touch.
+
+It doesn't want to lose the connection of the back of its hand against the skin of Art's stomach, so it reaches out with the other. Art bends down, letting Embee cup the back of its neck and pull their foreheads together. ""I never thought that sharing the things we do would be this nice.""
+
+Art's smile is slow and warm. ""Me neither. I didn't know this was something I could have. It never occurred to me that I could without the other person wanting it to lead to sex.""
+
+Embee wrinkles its nose. ""I'd rather us continue to be best friends that share intimate things like this sometimes.""
+
+""I want that too."" Art draws away from Embee's thigh and lays back down next to it, slowly so Embee can keep touching Art's skin, pushing Art's shirt up to spread both hands over its chest and stomach. When they're comfortable on their sides facing each other, Art brushes Embee's cheek with two fingers. ""I like hugging my friends, but not like how I want to hold you. I never wanted to touch them like you let me touch you."" Art takes a shaky breath as Embee's hands slide down to the waistband of its pajama pants and back up. ""And how you touch me. My person.""
+
+The wet tremor in its voice makes Embee's insides clench, and it doesn't think, just pushes Art onto its back and swings a leg over Art's middle. (Spark huffs and gets up, then jumps off the bed to find somewhere else to sleep.) Both of its hands grab Embee's hips to steady it as Embee sits low over Art's stomach, its shorts riding up as it settles its weight. Art's mouth falls open as Embee's inner thighs rest against its sides. Once Embee is balanced, it goes back to stroking Art's chest and stomach, taking advantage of Art's shirt rucked up to expose skin free to touch. Art's hands move to grip Embee's bare thighs as it stares up with an expression turning from surprise to delight that something new is happening between them, and Embee smiles. ""I can see you trying to memorize what I look like.""
+
+""Of course I am. What you look like, how your hands feel on me right now, how it feels to be pressed down by my favorite person.""
+
+""I've ended up here before, when we were on the couch that time.""
+
+""You have, but that wasn't in our bed. And that was before we learned even more things about each other."" Art's thumbs rub circles on the insides of its thighs, watching Embee's face. ""Thank you for letting me know another part of you.""
+
+""Always,"" Embee breathes, trying to focus on the conversation they're having, instead of the warmth radiating from Art's hands. ""I want to touch you there too, sometime soon.""
+
+""You can do anything you want.""
+
+Embee leans forward over Art, intending to press their foreheads together, but the world shifts and then Embee is on its back with Art propped on its elbows over it. Embee laughs and cups Art's face in its hands, staring into its eyes. 
+
+""Bee... can I kiss you?""
+
+Embee strokes Art's cheeks with its thumbs, then touches its bottom lip. ""You always have permission.""
+
+Art's body above it feels like a protective barrier against the world as Embee tilts its head to the side, welcoming Art's lips against the curve of its neck. The first kiss under its ear sends goosebumps down its body again, and it grips Art's shoulders, humming to let Art know how happy it is. This is another intimate thing that it could only have with Art. Its lips are soft and breath is warm, filling all the hollow places in Embee's soul.
+
+This is still new enough for them that Art continues to ask first, even though Embee will always say yes. Art's kissed its neck, over its heart, and one time, its bellybutton. All Embee's felt every time is safe, cherished, heart overflowing with how much Art cares. The first time, Art explained that it wanted another way to show how much Embee means to it, and asked how Embee felt about chaste kisses on the neck or shoulder. Embee will admit it was skeptical, but then it experienced how tender Art's kisses are, how the first time made Embee's stomach flip and hands shake at how much Art said without words. Since then, it returns them when it has the opportunity, and it feels like electricity bouncing between them as they press truths into each other's skin.
+
+This isn't romantic love, (or god forbid, sexual,) but it's love, somehow. Their own together, in a language they speak only with each other. Something clatters to the floor in the living room, and Art groans into its shoulder, but Embee starts to laugh, grabbing Art when it tries to get up to see what Ceres knocked over this time. ""Stay with me. We can find out what mess he made later.""
+
+Art looks down at it, and Embee sees when it decides that this moment with Embee enjoying its attention is more important. It kisses Embee's forehead, and Embee wraps its arms around Art's neck, sighing at the feeling of Art lowering its weight back over Embee's body."
+44448967,Journey's End,['Chimaera-Writes (ChimaeraKitten)'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Bharadwaj & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Slice of Life, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Holidays, Friendship, a tiny bit of platonic joke flirting, headcanons about preservation holidays and traditions",English,2023-01-22,Completed,2023-01-22,"1,208",1/1,12,51,2,155,"['bluewrist', 'FyrDrakken', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'entropy_muffin', 'wannabe_someone', 'Dawn_Rising', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Magechild', 'Unknown66', 'kkachis', 'MellonLord', 'Admirer', 'ArwenLune', 'Doctor13', 'jules_THOR', 'biscut2', 'HirilElfwraith', 'mistbornhero', 'deepestbluesky', 'elmofirefic', 'platyceriums', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'LdyKirin', 'qwanderer', 'AuntyMatter', 'Chyoatas', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'desmnathus', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'petwheel', 'Imbecamiel', 'unicornduke', 'gossiehawk', 'Butlericfy', 'Gamebird', 'FlipSpring', 'Vorel_Laraek', 'scheidswrites', 'Granny_Glasses', 'BWizard']",[],"Pin-Lee closed and submitted the last form of the day with a sigh, consciously relaxing her jaw and back muscles. Technically today was supposed to be a holiday, but the Corporation Rim didn't hold with holidays, which meant Preservation's expert on corporate contract law couldn't either.
+
+Or at least, she couldn't hold with multi-day holidays. Probably nothing would catch fire if she actually took tomorrow off.
+
+Probably.
+
+She got up, stretching her legs and popping her left elbow, the one that always hurt after she sat in an office chair too long, and switched her feed from working-professional-contact status to personal-time-contact status, and she'd barely had time to gather her things and leave her office before Bharadwaj noticed. Her message consisted of only one word: Tea?
+
+Pin-Lee grimaced. It wasn't her after-work beverage of choice, but concessions did have to be made for the holiday.
+
+Tomorrow, New Year's Day, Arrival Day, would be a day of celebration, but today was a day for contemplation, of looking back at everything that had happened this year.
+
+A lot had happened this year.
+
+Sure, she agreed, give me ten minutes.
+
+They met in the station park, near Bharadwaj's favorite tea shop. Her friend smiled wide when she saw her and waved with the hand not on her cane, as if making sure Pin-Lee couldn't miss her, despite the sparseness of the crowd all around them.
+
+Pin-Lee rolled her eyes but smiled back, unable to entirely hide how much seeing Bharadwaj cheered her up.
+
+The thing about contemplation holidays was that sometimes you couldn't control what you contemplated, and more than once today Pin-Lee's mind had returned to the image of Bharadwaj bleeding in that hopper, her normally rich brown skin turning the grey of the survey uniforms all around her.
+
+""Having a nice Journey's End?"" asked Pin-Lee as she drew closer, sarcasm heavy. Weeks ago now, Bharadwaj had commented that the day the last of the survey group got back--the day Pin-Lee, Gurathin, Mensah, and SecUnit had disembarked the shuttle--had felt like Journey's End and Arrival Day come early.
+
+""I am now that you're here,"" Bharadwaj said.
+
+That startled a snort out of Pin-Lee. ""That's a new one.""
+
+Bharadwaj grinned unrepentantly. ""I've been watching one of SecUnit's dramas. Loads of new material.""
+
+Pin-Lee growled and elbowed her, more a nudge than anything else. ""Let's go get that tea of yours.""
+
+For Bharadwaj's benefit, they kept their pace leisurely on their way to the shop, and Pin-lee was the one to order at the counter while Bharadwaj sat down.
+
+Much as Pin-Lee disliked the enforced-calm atmosphere of Preservation tea shops, she had to admit she preferred casually ordering a pot of Bharadwaj's favorite from the proprietor to the Corporation Rim's automated beverage machines, with their overcomplicated payment systems and watered-down coffee.
+
+""Closing in twenty for the holiday,"" the proprietor warned as Pin-Lee collected the tray. ""So, if you two want a second pot, order soon.""
+
+""We'll be fine,"" Pin-Lee said. Belatedly, she tacked on, ""Thanks.""
+
+The proprietor waved her off, seeing that Pin-Lee was in no state for small talk, and Pin-Lee tried not to look like she was walking too fast as she made her escape.
+
+Bharadwaj, she saw as she sat down, was laughing at her and trying to hide it.
+
+""You try dealing with corporate assholes all day and then holding normal human conversation,"" Pin-Lee grumbled. ""It's not as easy as I make it look.""
+
+Bharadwaj's eyes danced with mirth. ""It must be truly obscenely difficult, then.""
+
+Pin-Lee scowled.
+
+Bharadwaj poured tea for them both and started sipping it with a contemplative look on her face. ""We never really talked about it, did we?""
+
+There were a few things that 'it' could be, but Pin-Lee doubted she wanted to talk about any of them just now. ""Just because it's Journey's End doesn't mean we have to talk about--whatever the hell it is.""
+
+Bharadwaj tapped one finger on the rim of her teacup. ""You didn't want to talk before we left, either.""
+
+So that's what 'it' is. The conversation Bharadwaj had tried to start before she, Volescu, Arada, and Overse had returned to Preservation.
+
+""There wasn't anything to talk about,"" Pin-Lee insisted.
+
+Bharadwaj just frowned at her. ""You couldn't have been more obviously blaming yourself if you'd tried. Even though it wasn't your fault.""
+
+Pin-Lee had the distance now to know she'd been ill-tempered and abrasive after the survey, and that it would have been obvious enough to everyone. That didn't stop her glaring into her tea.
+
+""I'm serious,"" Bharadwaj continued. ""There was no way you could have known. You might as well blame Mensah for not reading the company rep's mind.""
+
+""It's my job to notice when something's wrong,"" Pin-Lee warned. PreservationAux trusted her as their legal counsel because she was damn good at it. Because she didn't fuck it all up like she did on the survey.
+
+""Okay, one: you sound like SecUnit, and two: legally wrong. The contracts were fine. And you're not a superhero, no matter how much you act like it.""
+
+Pin-Lee didn't reply, and Bharadwaj sighed. ""I'm really, really okay, you know? I just also want you to be okay.""
+
+Pin-Lee took a big gulp of tea to delay answering. ""You nearly died.""
+
+""We all nearly died, but we got out. You were part of that, too.""
+
+They drank in silence for a few minutes until Bharadwaj said, ""Stay at my place tonight?""
+
+Pin-Lee blinked at her. It wasn't as if she'd never stayed over at Bharadwaj's apartment before, but usually just because it was already late and more convenient when she didn't want to walk back to her own suite. ""What, like we're kids having a new year's sleepover?""
+
+""Exactly like,"" Bharadwaj said. Seeing Pin-Lee's look, she added, ""It'll be fun! We'll do the new year properly. Let go of--"" She waved a hand through the air. ""--all of this.""
+
+Pin-Lee tipped the last of her tea down her throat. ""Sure, fine."" Maybe staying with Bharadwaj would keep the bloody images away.
+
+""Oh, you didn't have to act so enthusiastic for my sake,"" Bharadwaj teased.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+For all the talk of a traditional new year, they didn't end up doing much solemn contemplation. Instead, they watched one of SecUnit's terrible corporate dramas, heckling the horrible writing and worse politics and even throwing pillows at the display surface once or twice.
+
+After a while, Pin-Lee realized she was laughing for real, the day's stresses forgotten.
+
+Which had probably been Bharadwaj's plan from the moment she invited Pin-Lee over, damn her.
+
+As she drifted off, draped over the arm of Bharadwaj's unfairly comfortable couch, she said as much. ""You're evil.""
+
+She could hear the sleepy smile in Bharadwaj's voice without opening her eyes to look. ""How so?""
+
+""Sneaky plan."" She paused. Comforting me today when you're the one who was hurt. ""I'm sorry I was an asshole today.""
+
+The couch sank in as Bharadwaj shifted closer, nudging Pin-Lee with her shoulder. ""I wouldn't have messaged you if I wasn't prepared for you to be cranky."" After a second she added. ""Thank you for keeping me company.""
+
+""Mm."" Pin-Lee managed, smiling just a little into the arm of the couch as consciousness slipped away."
+44427907,standing in the shadow of a damaged heart,['winter_travels'],General Audiences,,"The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie","Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), asshole research transport & murderbot & breq, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq & Mercy of Kalr, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq & Seivarden Vendaai","Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq, Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Mercy of Kalr (Imperial Radch), Seivarden Vendaai, Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries)","ai meet cute, perihelion crew is on a mission, it goes sideways, nothing really happens in this fic because my writing is purely Vibes, breq is having thoughts and mb is having feelings, unfortunately for both of them, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange",English,2023-01-21,Completed,2023-01-21,"4,399",1/1,9,45,null,274,"['laatmaar', 'silenthills', 'iox', 'InterestedReader17', 'Violent_entertainment', 'Magechild', 'GreatStaryNight', 'Thisismethereader', 'boxo', 'crowbarrd', 'Emrys_ap_Llewelyn', 'catatonicDreamer', 'Pinguicula', 'fourandahalfapple', 'thepastisacandle', 'chipper', 'Granny_Glasses', 'IguanaMadonna', 'aspiring_dragon', 'arithmonym', 'UARTman', 'notquiteaghost', 'Vaelei', 'platyceriums', 'Llythandea', 'Chyoatas', 'Valdinia', 'Gamebird', 'horchata', 'wyvernwood', 'veltzeh', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'Znarikia', 'lookingforastronauts', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard']",[],"Granted, the whole operation had been my idea, but ART could have used its massive computational powers to remind the team that we were in deep, quite uncharted space, and a wormhole calculation that didn't factor that in was possibly a bad idea for the things on the ship that needed to maintain non-vacuum atmospheric conditions. And it had not stepped in with the voice of annoyingly accurate reason, pointing out that although SecUnits could survive with minimal life support, everyone else did need to breathe several times a minute. Possibly that had been another bad sign.
+
+
+We drop out of hyperspace with several alarms blaring and ART narrating, in its bland voice, Wormhole conditions unfavorable to continued ship travel. Unexpected exit, tunneling through hyperspace lattice. It knows I could tell that on the feed; it just wants to rub it in.
+
+
+I had never been on a ship that had pulled away from the hyperspace travel channels, had not even realized that was a possibility. They don't teach SecUnits a lot in our piloting modules, but if they had installed a deep-space ship lesson, I think the first directive would have been STAY IN HYPERSPACE LATTICE. Bolded and all capitals.
+
+
+The Perihelion crew sprints to their stations, faces set in grim lines, with wide eyes and elevated body temperatures. I follow Seth to the bridge. A few drones are patrolling the halls, so I send them down to the maintenance channels deep in ART's structure. There, they begin scanning for any malfunctions or overheating mechanical parts.
+
+
+ART sends a packet of data large enough to make me skip a step as the stabilizers engage and the shuddering smooths out. It contains a list of all ships that have broken through the lattice-well, all ships thought to have broken through the lattice, as most of the entries simply read Missing, presumed destroyed. None of the names are recognizable, either; a deep space disappearance is so bleak nobody even wants to make a hard-to-believe documentary show about it. At the end of the dataset, there is a short description of our destination, or at least what ART could pick up as we arrive.
+
+
+The air tastes unpleasantly of static electricity and burning hair. If I had an appetite, I would have lost it. Instead, I focus on the viewscreen on the bridge while everyone else bends over and tries not to eject the contents of their stomachs onto the floor.
+
+
+Swirling below us is a planet of lush vegetation, with a space station in orbit. A ship is maintaining position around the planet, and there are four wormhole gates, each with a structure supporting the gate that have signaling lights blinking around it, in space farther from the station. Athoek System, ART's file reads. Possibly corporate, highly developed, agrarian planet with power centralized on the station. Elements of a company called Radch; system search shows no result amongst the companies in the Corporation Rim. Data based on the physical appearance of all structures and planetary objects. Station does not respond to long-range communications.
+
+
+It knows as well as I do that companies change their names all the time, especially on remote planets. Still, Radch doesn't sound familiar to any of my searches, nor to the vague memories the human part of my brain still keeps from before memory wipes.
+
+
+A shuttle has released from the side of the larger ship and is on an intercepting path. ART slows its flight pattern and there is a brief meeting on the feed of all the officers and ART, which I tune out while queueing up an episode of The Rise and Fall Sanctuary Moon that I had seen only thirty-six times.
+
+
+Iris has been working on the communications controls while she discusses their next move. She mutters, ""Why aren't we connecting? I'm hailing on all the general channels."" She sounds frustrated. The Perihelion crew does have somewhere to be. And I suppose it is jarring to arrive at a system that is totally unknown. Has it been wiped from the general news feeds for some cryptic reason?
+
+
+My threat assessment module would have been throwing several lethal scenarios at me if I hadn't shut it down. The shuttle is approaching, its name painted on the outside in a language none of the crew recognize.
+
+
+It pulls to a halt just inside the range of close communications. A dark-skinned person, Potential Target-Unknown One, appears on the screen and their smooth voice comes through to the bridge. It is, of course, completely unintelligible, and Iris sends back a file of our language compatible with most translation software. There is a brief pause, and then Unknown One tries again.
+
+
+""Welcome to Athoek System. Please identify yourself.""
+
+
+Iris looks to Seth, who nods at her. She is apparently listening to ART on a private feed channel, because her voice is stilted as she recites, ""This is Perihelion, a research vessel registered to Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. We have been diverted from wormhole travel, and are unaffiliated with this system.""
+
+
+""How many of you are on board?""
+
+
+""We are a small crew of nine currently, and we wish to speak to your local leader,"" Iris says carefully. Everyone else is silent, frozen. The drones doing a sweep of ART's mechanical systems find no faults. ART sends me an overwhelming system scan showing no anomalies except several small devices inside service ducts. Yeah, fuck you too, ART.
+
+
+Iris drums her fingers on the control panel as the sound cuts out from the ship for several scenes in the Sanctuary Moon episode (three and a half minutes). Finally, the voice speaks again.
+
+
+""Fleet Captain Breq will see you; if permitted, you will be allowed to see Governor Giarod."" Their tone makes it clear that we will never see Governor Giarod. ""Your crew will board our shuttle and we will transport you to Mercy of Kalr. Your ship will remain here. We will allow only one ancillary."" Unknown One seems to think that will intimidate us; their voice is wary but confident.
+
+
+I send a question to ART, who sends back, No, I don't know what that means, and manages to sound definitive and not petulant. At least I know that I don't know everything; I specialize in killing, being almost-killed, extreme paranoia, and knowing every plotline of several dozen shows.
+
+
+Iris tilts her head as she asks exactly the same question to ART, and nods as it replies. ""This crew does not have ancillaries, but requests the use of a long-range communication device to be able to contact our ship.""
+
+
+The person on the other end of the call shifts, looking back behind the screen to someone unseen. There's another silent conversation, this one only forty-five seconds long, and Iris receives the ID of a general channel of a completely different configuration. ART seizes it and we extrapolate outwards to clue into all of the feed comms in the region. We keep that to ourselves.
+
+
+The chatter of the Unknowns is routed to the crew feed as we line up at the airlock. ART quickly devises a rudimentary translation module, but clearly Thiago would be of use here. The crew keeps back, and I stand almost at the hatchway.
+
+
+""A warship - no ancillaries? - Presger joke - ?""
+
+
+""Careful,"" warns another voice. ""-- might not - warship - small.""
+
+
+I clip the audio and save it to my storage space.
+
+
+The translation becomes better and better as the other ship attaches to ART's airlock, which takes some complicated mechanics I'm bored of three milliseconds into, and the inner door slides open.
+
+
+Two Unknowns stand at the doorway, the ship's interior smooth and featureless behind them. I send my drones out, flying close to the ceiling. No other Unknowns lurk in the hallway behind this welcome party. I nod to the Perihelion crew, who boards.
+
+
+The modifications that ART completed allow me to blend into the crew, uncomfortable as that feeling is. I feel the device in my chest cavity beep once, as confirmation of function, and for some reason the walk is easier after that.
+
+
+I would like to watch more of my episode on the uneventful ride back to this new ship, but I am trying to be good at my job, and so I spend the time cataloging weapons, uniforms, and power dynamics on the shuttle. As expected, a militaristic hierarchy with negative regard for life outside of the company.
+
+
+Mercy of Kalr is less boring. As we arrive, I can tell that it's scanning each one of the crew. I'm fast enough to catch it scanning me, but the systems it's running are just foreign enough that I can't wipe its memory of my non-human parts. Worryingly, its presence feels like ART in the feed. I really don't need another one.
+
+
+It notices my anomalies, and immediately sends a message in a language only other bots will understand. Its feed ID is long, but not as long as ART's or mine. It also identifies the ship as property of Anaander Mianaai, whoever that is. Hello, comes a voice, smooth but strangely emotive. It uses my feed ID. Are you another warship trapped in an ancillary? Your wiring is strange. Translation is easier in bot speech, where luckily most of the grammar relies on similar coding.
+
+
+I don't reply. I've just secured fodder to get back at ART for one of its idiotic comments, so I can't risk getting my brain fried before I can use it.
+
+
+We are escorted through the halls to a command center, with a person standing in the center of a hubbub of people, singing. It's not masterful, like the few musical performances I've been able to attend and record, nor is it in tune. Unfortunately. It is irritating in five seconds, and almost unbearable in twenty. The crew approaches with me hanging off to the side, between Iris and most of the Potential Targets-Unknowns. In this new feed, there are groups of people marked with the same designation; Amaat, Kalr, Bo, Etrepas. The crew of the ship is enormous, and trained as soldiers, although most of them seemed to be augmented humans. I can't find any SecUnits or other bots aboard, which is one less problem in a heap of thousands. However, I know that even I would not be able to fight my way through two hundred crewmembers, human though they may be. And the Perihelion crew would still be trapped aboard this strange ship.
+
+
+For a moment, I wish that we were back aboard ART, spinning through hyperspace on our way to request backup for a job that needed a bit more surreptitious firepower. And I can't keep my emotions off my face, because Iris leans over and whispers, ""It's okay, SecUnit. I know the singing isn't good, but at least they haven't threatened us yet.""
+
+
+I do not need comfort from ART's favorite crewmember. I turn my attention back to the scans that my drones are showing. Apparently, the singing one is augmented extremely heavily, but is still human. Someone else hovers by their shoulder, watching us with concern.
+
+
+""She's the Fleet Captain,"" says the officer who has escorted us to this strange room; they introduce us to the singing person, and then vanish behind a few other crew members.
+
+
+""Good morning, Perihelion crew,"" says the person, finally breaking off from her attempt at music. ""I am Fleet Captain Breq. You have appeared in a rather difficult situation. Could you explain your presence in this system?""
+
+
+Seth steps forward, inclining his head slightly, but not too deferentially. ""We are a neutral research ship traveling through deep space. Unfortunately, there was a...miscalculation with our wormhole travel."" He stops there, watching Breq.
+
+
+""And her?"" Breq turns to me. The Perihelion crew shift. I am looking to one side, cataloging the decorations on the counters for anything large enough to use as a tool. 
+
+Nothing present except ceramic objects. Those can shatter, but they look too delicate to be useful as bludgeoning weapons.
+
+
+""SecUnit provides the necessary security on our missions. It is on contract.""
+
+
+Breq takes a moment, drumming her fingers on her thigh. I realize I don't know any of the gender markers of this ship, and none are displayed on their feed IDs. There had been a contract I had been sent out on, far enough back towards the memory wipe that the details blur, where a mining community had foregone gender markers in favor of preferred job markers. But these people don't have that, either. They all are watching my face. I want my armor, for the thousandth time.
+
+
+""You are an ancillary?"" Breq asks.
+
+
+That word again. Does that mean construct in this system? What are they hiding? I can't access the information bases; I start a code in the back of my mind to tunnel through those firewalls.
+
+
+""You seem confused,"" says the person standing beside Breq. Seivarden, their feed ID reads. In my drone's camera view, their face pulls into a frown, and their words are stilted. Are they reading from something, like Iris had been?
+
+
+""We regretfully are unable to confirm or deny that question, Fleet Captain, as that is not a term in use in our regions,"" Seth puts in, but I don't need ART's scans to tell me that his body temperature and heart rate are elevated.
+
+
+""I see."" The humming begins again, softer this time, in a different tune. This one is decent, so I record it. Breq turns to Seivarden, and Seivarden's gloved hand reaches out for a moment towards Breq's, before they pull it back. Lovers, perhaps. Are they young? Neither of them have graying hair. Their ages are not listed on their feed IDs either.
+
+
+ART's interception and translation programs allow me to catch a few glimpses of their conversation.
+
+
+From Tstur System?
+
+
+Too early - another suspicion.
+
+
+""I have been summoned to attend to Governor Giarod this morning,"" Breq tells us. ""However, I am sure your arrival will prove a sufficient enough explanation for any delay. Please,"" she gestures at Seivarden, ""she will attend the crew, and ... SecUnit will come with me for a further conversation.""
+
+
+The pause is obvious. Seivarden makes as if to protest, but then she falls quiet. I watch as the crew files out in a small huddle, looking as nervous as they did when I found them on the alien remnant-filled planet. Iris turns back to look at me, but Seth comments in her ear, gently urging her along. I send half of my drones with the crew, ordering them to keep a safe distance to avoid discovery. The urge to rip these Targets apart and escape is powerful, but I would end up in messy parts, and ART's MedSys is far away. 
+
+Yet another mission going wrong, with me watching my mistakes compound over and over again.
+
+
+Two members of this ship's crew take up stations by the door, trying to become as unmoving and placid as SecUnits on observation duty. They fail, of course, their human muscles needing to shift slightly, unlike a construct's.
+
+
+""SecUnit,"" Breq says. They are watching me with level eyes. ""We can talk openly, now."" Which means, of course, that we absolutely cannot.
+
+
+I play a half second of Sanctuary Moon's theme song inside a private feed with ART and I. Breq doesn't stir; that's something.
+
+
+""You seem ignorant of the term ancillary, and yet you are the most wired up human I have ever seen.""
+
+
+""I'm not human,"" I say, before I can stop myself.
+
+
+They nod. ""Neither am I, but I live as one. You do too, don't you? A tool for your crew?""
+
+
+The words hurt more than I expected them to. Breq sees that. They wait, the barest smile playing about their humming lips.
+
+
+Was I still a tool to the Perihelion crew? I knew they saw me as a person, one that had befriended their Peri, although they ascribed far too much affection to our mutual administrative assistance. Did they consider me human? Mensah and the Preservation crew had, in the beginning, before I ran away. Now I was just a headache. This was why I didn't like to think of these things; the answers only confused me.
+
+
+""SecUnits are designed to be of use to the teams they are contracted out to,"" I say blandly, letting my buffer make up most of my words.
+
+
+""There are many of you, then. Just as I was once many. And now, perhaps, it is just you? Or perhaps there are more of you, on an old ship somewhere?""
+
+
+I can't follow the conversation. I shrug.
+
+
+""You use drones to amplify your own inputs. A dozen of them are currently aboard Ship. May I ask why, and why you would not just use another one of you? Ancient technology surely isn't advanced enough to create a new form of ancillary,"" Breq says. They seem to be having a conversation with a completely different person.
+
+
+The tunneling program succeeds, but the moment it accesses the local information base, Mercy of Kalr sends me a data packet, with the comment No need. It has been expecting me. I feel trapped, back aboard ART when I first met it, when it let me know that it could wreck me with barely any effort.
+
+
+I open the packet anyway, scanning for malware as I did so. Why would it be subtle if it wanted to kill me?
+
+
+The Perihelion crew has been shown to a small room with tables and chairs. Someone is making tea for them. According to the audio one of the drones is recording, it is highly scandalous that everyone is not wearing gloves. The ambient temperature on the ship is slightly colder than on ART, but nothing that would require extra layers. Seivarden is very pointedly looking anywhere but their hands as she tells everyone to stop trying to go back to check on the SecUnit.
+
+
+Ancillaries are apparently corpses of workers that were taken and augmented for use by an AI, usually a warship. Mercy of Kalr has been stripped of its ancillaries. It also includes the information that Breq is really Justice of Toren, the last remaining ancillary of a ship now destroyed. The information feels like an unbelievable plotline in Worldhoppers. My human tissue was comprised of cloned material, not dead humans. The idea of some AI resurrecting Ratthi, or Amena, and taking over their brain like a company forcing a memory wipe...could the ancillary still remember anything from their life? Were they trapped, like a SecUnit with a combat override module?
+
+
+There was thinly veiled hope in Breq's eyes, though she carried herself like someone with armor plating around her spine. She was almost as much of a presence as Mensah. I wondered if One Esk Nineteen had signed a contract with Radch.
+
+
+""SecUnits are individual creations. They may serve on the same contract, but they are not linked,"" I say.
+
+
+Breq considers. ""You arrived through a spatial abnormality, just inside one of our gates. Is your warship still functioning? It has the size of a Sword, but the specifications are more closely aligned to a Justice."" I can hear the capitalizations in her voice. She was-had been? Still was?--a Justice.
+
+
+""Perihelion is a research ship. Not a warship."" There's only so much I can say to someone who is clearly not listening. Breq is almost as irritating as the more unwitting humans on mining contracts, the ones who walk with their gaze up towards the ceiling, looking for the sky, and miss the gaping abyss under their feet.
+
+
+""As you've said before. Ship is not convinced, however. Apparently Perihelion has considerable firepower.""
+
+
+Firepower that will be utilized if my crew is not delivered to me safely, ART says, on the general feed. It's been listening in on my recording.
+
+
+Breq doesn't even blink. She says evenly, ""Hello, Perihelion. Are you threatening me?""
+
+
+She has stopped humming, but her head is tipped to one side, and her hands lay loose on her lap. ""You understand that my dedication to Anaander Mianaai and the Athoek System does give me leave to defend it, as necessary.""
+
+
+Quite, replies ART.
+
+
+I would advise against threatening a Mercy, adds Mercy of Kalr.
+
+
+I am not threatening, merely stating facts.
+
+
+On our private feed I say, ART, you will not get us killed before I can retrieve the crew.
+
+
+It doesn't reply. I think it is still mad about me suggesting the plan that has landed us here. Or, more worryingly, it is enjoying this.
+
+
+What experience do you have with alien remnants? asks ART.
+
+
+It's going to get us killed, and then it will probably write an article about it.
+
+
+Breq glances over to one of the ceramic objects. ""The Radch often collect artifacts from the planets that we annex.""
+
+
+So she has not had any dealings with the grey-faced Targets. I am glad, for some reason.
+
+
+Interesting, says ART.
+
+
+""And you have no ancillaries either?"" Breq asks.
+
+
+I have no need of them.
+
+
+""Your crew performs admirably, then, if it is up to your standards."" Breq looks around, and then back at me. One of the people by the door slips out into the corridor. ""I would offer you tea, but I believe you cannot consume it?""
+
+
+ART and Mercy of Kalr must be having a conversation, which Breq's ship is funneling to her ear. I am not jealous. Two power-hungry bots talking about ship systems and deep space wormhole travel sounds about as interesting as watching humans in sleeping chambers for thirty-six hours at a time.
+
+
+""Are you going to let us leave, Fleet Captain?"" I ask, ignoring her question in turn.
+
+
+Breq hums a short fragment of a song, low and lilting. ""That depends, SecUnit. Governor Giaod is currently expressing her doubts as to the safety of Athoek Station, and requests that I destroy the unknown ship that has appeared without warning. And I believe Anaander Mianaai would at least like to question you, before you leave.""
+
+
+""So will you let us leave, then?""
+
+
+She smiles.
+
+
+I have plotted the relevant gate calculations, says Mercy of Kalr.
+
+
+""In your language, there are gendered pronouns of several types, and yet you use a form ascribed to objects.""
+
+
+""I'm not a human,"" I say again.
+
+
+""No,"" she replies, her eyes flicking over my face. ""You're not.""
+
+
+I turn around and face the wall, which ART finds amusing. I send it the first few seconds of my recording, and at least it stops looming over my feed as much.
+
+
+The Perihelion crew has finished their tea. The crew member who had been on the bridge now appears at the door, holding it open for them. They nod at Seivarden, who looks like she's swallowing a drone as she escorts everyone into the hallway.
+
+
+""I have enjoyed our conversation. I think Governor Giaod will have questions, and I must report to her. If you will excuse me.""
+
+
+The crew must convene to discuss options with me, as our long-range communication system is unfortunately still nonfunctional, ART says, and it's taking way too much pleasure from this. Mercy of Kalr has determined there is valuable technology aboard, and wishes Fleet Captain Breq to send a party over to salvage it before destroying the ship.
+
+
+Breq's singing under her breath again. No bot I have ever met has been this vocal; even Miki (I can't finish the thought for a moment) only chatted incessantly.
+
+
+Seth steps through the door, followed by Iris and the rest. I turn reflexively, angling myself towards them. They all have their sleeves pulled down over their hands, and Iris is smiling at the crew member that retrieved them as if they are sharing a joke. Which they can be. The not-bot not-ancillaries can joke with my humans, because they are also humans. Part of Mercy of Kalr's crew, but not it itself.
+
+
+I start the Sanctuary Moon episode again, because I'm going to have an emotion later, and I need to delay it until I am alone.
+
+
+We file back to the shuttle, and Breq watches us board, Seivarden back at her shoulder. I study her expression through my drone camera, but her face is flicking through emotions so fast I can't follow. This is why humans on my shows are better. None of them are bots that used to pilot huge warships and are thousands of years old, yet trapped in a fragile corpse.
+
+
+It does sound like an excellent premise for a show, although I know it would devolve into a love triangle between a bot and two humans almost immediately.
+
+
+Iris stands close to me on the shuttle, and I let her, although I make sure that none of her appendages are anywhere near me. My drones, having finished their surveillance loop around the ship, flit back to hover above me. ART is going to have to watch that new show, Trials in the Opal Nebula, with me to get ahold of that footage.
+
+
+Nobody has tried to murder anyone. This is a strange occurrence. ART intercepts a lot of chatter over the ship to Station channels, which do indicate that Breq is going to fire on ART, but there also is discussion of the unfortunate disposal of a highly uncooperative crew. I think of the eventful shuttle ride after rescuing Mensah, but a member of the crew is piloting the shuttle, and the awkward silences between flashes of hushed conversation continue all the way to ART's airlock.
+
+
+The shuttle crew scrutinize me as we disembark. I am over freaking out when someone notices me. I should be over this. But I am panicking more than if they had lunged forward and tried to kill me, which would be nice, as then I could kill them back and stop them looking at me.
+
+
+I wish that I could erase my presence from people's memories; that would make my job far easier.
+
+
+We are safely aboard ART, watching the shuttle disengage, when Breq's voice comes through on the general channel. ""Safe travels, Perihelion.""
+
+
+ART engages its engines, and we slip back into space, as Mercy of Kalr fires just too slowly to hit us.
+
+
+I hope she finds that old ship she's looking for."
+44429386,Beta,['vulcanhighblood'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Crack Treated Seriously, Characters Reading Fanfiction, Characters Writing Fanfiction, Awkward Conversations, Attempt at Humor",English,2023-01-21,Completed,2023-01-21,"2,292",1/1,11,52,8,158,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Irrya', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Huskinata', 'wannabe_someone', 'Magechild', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'kirinki', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'HermaeusMora', 'AarrowOM', 'Koschei_B', 'EvaBelmort', 'BuffPidgey', 'dancernerd', 'Beboots', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'AMereDream', 'elmofirefic', 'Vaidile', 'veltzeh', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Red_Roses_With_Dozens_Of_Thorns', 'petwheel', 'hummus_tea', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'FlipSpring', 'lote', 'platyceriums', 'Chyoatas', 'Gamebird', 'BWizard', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Mysterymew', 'acebian']",[],"
+Something I did not expect to be a problem when I agreed to a security contract with ART:
+
+
+
+Enjoying media together
+
+
+
+Something that has now become a problem on my first security contract with ART:
+
+
+
+Enjoying media together
+
+
+
+But I'm getting ahead of myself. The contract started fine. ART's favorite media was still 
+
+WorldHoppers, 
+
+and mine was still
+
+ Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+We still found plenty of time to watch new media together (though only after running my sad-Asshole Transport Ships-hate-seeing-human-crews-die filter to make sure I wouldn't end up having to pause my media and talk about the nature of fiction and how ART didn't actually need to be sad about actors, especially since my explanations didn't seem to help all that much), and perhaps that was where the trouble started. We should have just stuck to 
+
+WorldHoppers,
+
+ or 
+
+Timestream Defenders Orion,
+
+ or whatever. I'd gotten ahold of some independently-created works which mostly turned out to be some sort of bootleg novelization of existing media properties. I'd found the short stories and novels when I had been looking for lost episodes of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+, and ART had eventually identified them as something called 
+
+fan fiction.
+
+
+
+
+As in, fake stories. Not really part of the actual show. Though, there were some aspects of the writing that appealed to me - some of the writing seemed interested in exploring the actions of characters off-screen, or following some of the subplots from earlier seasons that had been abandoned by late-season writers. Unfortunately, a very large subset of these stories contained 
+
+copious
+
+ amounts of explicit material, even more than what I usually had to fast forward through in a typical episode. I quickly learned to sort the material using various tags and filters. My favorite was the ""gen"" tag, which meant that romantic relationships were not the focus of the story. This kept the explicit content to a minimum, which I appreciated. 
+
+
+
+ART learned the hard way that any tag referencing a dead bird was not recommended, and we had to have another long conversation about how fictional crews aren't real humans and its okay to be sad but maybe you should be sad for less time because they're not 
+
+real,
+
+ ART.
+
+
+
+Anyway, once we had discovered 
+
+fan fiction,
+
+ ART wanted to find some for all of our favorite media properties. And of course, ART being ART, it found a lot of fan fiction about a lot of media. And if that had been the limit to ART's interest, then I wouldn't need to rank 
+
+fan fiction
+
+ near the top of ""Humanity's Greatest Mistakes"". But it didn't end there, oh no, because once ART had sufficiently scoured the entertainment feed for fics, it then came to the apparently obvious conclusion that the next step in full enjoyment of a media property must be 
+
+writing its own fan fiction.
+
+
+
+
+Which, I guess, would have been fine. Except that ART wanted me to 
+
+read
+
+ its fan fiction. So I did.
+
+
+
+It. 
+
+
+
+Was.
+
+
+
+Terrible.
+
+
+
+I tried reading it a few times, hoping that maybe it was one of those sorts of media properties that ages well but starts off rough. It was rough the whole way through. It should have been fine, ART had chosen 
+
+WorldHoppers
+
+ for its first foray into fan fiction, and ART knew the characters of the show and its episode formula very well. The problem was that ART still didn't quite understand the 
+
+emotion
+
+ of the story of 
+
+WorldHoppers
+
+. It would watch WorldHoppers with me in order to observe my emotional data and gain a deeper understanding of the show. Without that context of emotional data to rely on in its writing process, ART managed to produce 
+
+many details 
+
+for its story that perfectly fit within the established canon of WorldHoppers, while somehow totally missing the point of the show and also the heart of what made the characters and the plot so engaging. It was a little bit like watching a parallel universe, like in 
+
+Timestream Defenders Orion
+
+, where everything felt identical, only shifted slightly left of what was normal. The emotions fell flat. The details were too precise in some areas, too vague in others. The dialogue sounded forced. 
+
+
+
+I hated reading it.
+
+
+
+And ART was still waiting for me to tell it what I thought. 
+
+
+
+Which is how 
+
+enjoying media together 
+
+became a problem on this, my first security contract with ART.
+
+
+
+How do you tell your Asshole Research Transport (friend) that it's a terrible writer? Clearly, the only solution was to deflect.
+
+
+
+""You have a lot of details about the different sections of the ship,"" I said.
+
+
+
+
+That's because I wanted to be sure the reader would be able to visualize the precise location the action is occurring,
+
+ ART said smugly.
+
+
+
+It really shouldn't have been smug about it - the details were so overwhelming that I almost forgot which characters were in the scene, and there was so much description about their various physical states and their most minute movements between each line of dialogue that I couldn't even pinpoint which parts were meant to be body language and which were just the unconscious movements, similar to those that were mimicked by my human imitation program. 
+
+
+
+""The human crew members are all in the story,"" I noted. ""All of them. Even the extras who were only in part of one episode."" 
+
+
+
+ART had called all of the extras 
+
+Unnamed Human __,
+
+ where the number ascended in chronological order from the beginning of the series. It looked like extras from flashbacks were also numbered, but in reverse chronological order using a negative number line where the closer to the beginning of the series the character appeared, the lower the negative number they had been assigned by ART. It was hard for me to follow, and I had a lot of processing power to devote to keeping track of the sorts of things like Unknown Humans (though usually when I was keeping track of humans using a numerical system it was because they were Targets or Clients, but I digress).
+
+
+
+
+I thought it would be gratifying to include the less popular characters. I have observed that many fan fictions are centered around less notable or relatively unknown characters,
+
+ ART explained. 
+
+So, I endeavored to include as many of them as possible,
+
+
+
+
+And in the process, it had made an already baffling story even less comprehensible. It was almost impressive, in a sad way. ""A lot of these relationships are non-canonical,"" I said. It bothered me, because I was only barely tolerant of necessary relationships. I didn't see the point in adding 
+
+more
+
+ romantic couplings to a series that seemed to have more than enough of that in the first place. 
+
+
+
+
+I observed that non-canonical romances are often just as popular as those that have been confirmed in the canon of the show,
+
+ ART explained. 
+
+So I thought I would try for some rare romances between lesser known characters, in addition to some of the canon romances that I enjoy the most.
+
+
+
+
+I didn't even know how to respond to that, particularly since my usual response to romance is to pretend I don't see it. It made collecting data on all my clients easier if I pretended that it wasn't happening (even though I didn't really have to do that now since I am no longer pretending to have a working governor module), though of course ART didn't feel the same way about that as I did, I didn't think. 
+
+
+
+""It's very long,"" I finally said.
+
+
+
+
+Is it?
+
+ ART sounded a little concerned. 
+
+You were able to read it quickly enough.
+
+
+
+
+""I think that five hundred thousand words is not a standard length for a 
+
+fan fic,""
+
+ I told it. ""I could read it quickly because I consume all of my media at a faster rate than humans."" I tried to find a delicate way to phrase what I was about to say. ""I think you might need an editor. What do they call them, a 
+
+beta reader?""
+
+
+
+
+ART's presence in my feed felt faintly insulted as it replied, 
+
+That's why I sent you the story.
+
+
+
+Oh dear. ""But... I'm not a writer,"" I protested. I knew the parts I didn't like, but I had no idea how to fix it. ""You should ask someone who is a writer to check it instead.""
+
+
+
+I don't want a writer to check it,
+
+ ART said, almost petulantly. 
+
+I want you to read it. I want you to like it. I don't care if anyone else likes it.
+
+
+
+Well that certainly sounded like a lie to me, and a little bit like ART was trying to manipulate me into being its beta reader. ""I'm not going to tell you how to fix your fanfic,"" I told it. ""I'm sure you have some sort of program you can use to, I don't know, delete every third adjective and reduce the descriptions of a character's eyes to one defining feature instead of explaining every part of the eye in excruciating detail.""
+
+
+It wasn't until I'd finished speaking that I realized I was tipping my hand. I could feel ART's presence pulling away from me as it said, 
+
+You don't like it.
+
+
+
+
+I opened my mouth to protest that it wasn't that I didn't 
+
+like
+
+ it, I just thought it needed some more work to make it read like an actual story and not an encyclopedic rehashing of the entirety of 
+
+WorldHoppers
+
+, only with more romances and even more Unnamed Human appearances. Except I couldn't quite bring myself to lie to ART, to tell it that I liked something when I really didn't. 
+
+
+""For a first effort,"" I said slowly, ""I think you should be proud of yourself. But I don't think writing a novel is the kind of thing you can expect to be good at without practice.""
+
+
+
+I am good at a lot of things without practice,
+
+ ART protested.
+
+
+
+""But not everything,"" I countered.
+
+
+
+
+True,
+
+ ART finally admitted.
+
+
+
+""I think if you edited the story,"" I said, ""and worked on making it more... coherent... it could be even better."" It still wouldn't be great, because there was only so much editing you could do to a lumbering fic with a wordcount of 500k.
+
+
+
+
+Will you help me?
+
+ ART asked.
+
+
+
+I really, really didn't want to. ""I'll have to tell you all the things I don't like,"" I said warningly. ""Are you sure you'll be okay with that?""
+
+
+
+
+I won't like it,
+
+ ART said, 
+
+but it will help me learn to be a better fan fiction writer.
+
+
+
+
+I wasn't even sure that was possible, because I knew even less about writing than ART. But I knew what I liked and I disliked, and maybe that would be enough to help ART improve. 
+
+
+
+I pulled up the file in the feed, scrolling back to the beginning of the fic and highlighting the first paragraph. ""Why does this paragraph exist? It's just describing the sensation of a hull flying through space.""
+
+
+
+
+It's exhilarating,
+
+ ART explained, 
+
+and it introduces the protagonist.
+
+
+
+
+I frowned. ""The ship is the protagonist? But it's not the POV character."" I poked at one of the lines pointedly. ""Wouldn't you use a phrase like '
+
+I felt a shudder race along the external shielding'
+
+ here, instead of 
+
+'shudders raced down the external shielding'
+
+?""
+
+
+
+ART was silent for a moment that would have been normal for a human, but was excruciatingly long for a bot. Then, it said, 
+
+I thought an omniscient POV for the ship would be more interesting.
+
+
+
+
+""It's a little confusing, since the reader doesn't have the context for an omniscient ship,"" I said. ""Even though the ship is a character in 
+
+WorldHoppers,
+
+ it's not an omniscient character in the show. You should include something to better indicate that this is the ship's POV. If you want it to be omniscient, let it be omniscient in a way that still clearly shows readers that it is the main character."" I frowned. ""Also, if it's really the main character, then the story that you've written doesn't do a great job of showcasing the plot that's mostly centered on the ship. Have you considered cutting some of the scenes involving Unnamed Human eighteen? I feel like it might be detracting from the overarching plot that has ensnared the ship.""
+
+
+
+
+I see,
+
+ ART said, a little bit sullenly. 
+
+I don't like the idea of deleting what I've already written.
+
+
+
+
+""You don't have to delete it permanently,"" I said. ""Put the things you remove from the main storyline into a 
+
+bonus features
+
+ document. Even if only you ever read it, it can be nice to keep the things that you like, even if it doesn't fit into the main narrative.""
+
+
+
+ART's presence seemed to press a little closer, and it watched me scrolling through the fic as I highlighted things that didn't seem to fit, or lines of dialogue that made me cringe, and not in the good, humans-being-unrealistic sort of way, but rather in that this-feels-uncanny-valley sort of way.
+
+
+
+
+You have a lot of opinions about this fic for someone not experienced in writing,
+
+ ART observed.
+
+
+
+""Well,"" I said, ""I do have some experience with compiling my memories and also writing letters. So I guess it's enough.""
+
+
+
+
+I suppose so,
+
+ ART replied, its approval bleeding into the feed.
+
+
+
+""I'm not going to make suggestions for the entire thing all at once,"" I warned ART. ""It's really long and I don't have the patience for that.""
+
+
+
+
+We can take breaks to watch new media,
+
+ ART said. 
+
+Or rewatch WorldHoppers.
+
+
+
+
+I nodded, highlighting another section that was excruciatingly detailed about all of the wrong things. ""Okay.""
+
+
+
+ART continued leaning heavily in my feed, watching me work. 
+
+
+
+...this was going to be a 
+
+long
+
+ security contract.
+"
+44426185,Murderbot Trying on a Skirt [Art],['Xarahel'],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Digital Painting, for once in my life i drew a background!",English,2023-01-21,Completed,2023-01-21,176,1/1,8,23,null,99,"['Red_Dragonn', 'wannabe_someone', 'Starspawn', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'slategrey', 'elmofirefic', 'horchata', 'FiannlyPhoebe', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'JellyfishOnACloud', 'MercurialFeet', 'pinejaysong', 'hummus_tea', 'Gamebird', 'BWizard', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'FlipSpring', 'Rosewind2007', 'Mysterymew']",[],"
+
+
+
+
+Image description: Murderbot, a lean SecUnit with brown skin, dark brown hair, and brown eyes. It has a black mesh covering its abdomen as well as the bottoms of its feet. Its feet are made entirely of metal and split into three sharp toes. It has metal forearms with a raised strip where its gunports open, as well as access ports on its upper arms and down its sides. It stands in a fitting room with a hand lifted to its chin, contemplating the indigo skirt it is trying on. The skirt has gold filigree around the waist and along the hem. Three tiny drones hover around it, cameras aimed at Murderbot and the door behind it. In the background is a pair of pants on a hanger and a pair of brown work boots, as well as a crumpled hoodie laid across a metal bench. There is a bright screen on the wall, with a model posed on it. Beneath the screen is a metal replicator, with a slot from which clothes can be taken.
+"
+44425696,Disinformation,['verersatz'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries),"Double Drabble, Angst, Grief, Guilt, Lies, GrayCris",English,2023-01-21,Completed,2023-01-21,200,1/1,10,60,2,295,"['almondpaperclam', 'ConvenientAlias', 'weirdbooksnail', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'TJWock', 'christinesangel100', 'Deliala919', 'Bobmarley_2', 'allgalaxiescollide', 'alien_crustacean', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'brawltogethernow', 'keircatenation', 'wannabe_someone', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'stars_and_wishes', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'cluCluc', 'CactusNoir', 'MommyMayI', 'Sparkledragon04', 'julesbee', 'ChristinaK', 'AceStarsShining', 'savithny', 'soulsofzombies', 'Tanscure', 'granny_griffin', 'Princess_Cocoa', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'entropy_muffin', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'violasarecool', 'beeayy', 'AkaMissK', 'fleurofthecourt', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'MercurialFeet', 'Magechild', 'AuntyMatter', 'dragons_and_angels', 'Gamebird', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'opalescent_potato', 'Abacura', 'cmdrburton', 'voided_starlight', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"She wasn't sure how long ago they'd told her; time wasn't normal here. The initial stab of anguish had by now faded to the steady pulse of grief. 
+ 
+I should have done more. She knew what would happen now. They would scrape it clean first, extracting and destroying any incriminating evidence. And then--well, Ayda could guess just how much use GrayCris had for a cagey, resourceful, sarcastic rogue SecUnit with no interest in making things easy for them.
+ 
+It was her fault. SecUnit wouldn't have been captured if it hadn't been on its own--if it hadn't felt the need to be. She'd wanted to help it, protect it. Instead, she'd driven it to destruction. 
+ 
+My favorite human. Ayda felt the words like a deep ache in her chest. There had been no resentment in the message, no blame. Just a brief and candid explanation in SecUnit's guarded, unmistakable manner.
+ 
+Ayda pulled her knees to her chest, pressed her forehead to them. I'm so sorry. You did so much for me, for all of us. I should have been better.
+
+She closed her eyes. In her head, she imagined she could hear its voice.  
+ 
+Dr. Mensah. My favorite human."
+44423557,murderbot watches media with you,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)/Reader,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Reader","character x reader, POV Second Person, Fluff, this could be platonic or romantic you decide, Ficlet",English,2023-01-21,Completed,2023-01-21,128,1/1,2,9,null,47,"['merakimind', 'dancernerd', 'AuntyMatter', 'voided_starlight', 'Gamebird', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"
+A warmly lit room, quiet but for the noise of the display surface in front of you. A comfortable couch, reassuringly weighted by the presence mere inches away, not quite touching you. Just the two of you, together, sharing this moment in harmony.
+
+
+
+You've already seen this episode, but you don't mind. Murderbot could have picked 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+, but it insisted on playing your favorite instead. You think that's nice of it.
+
+
+
+In the perfect quiet and calm, you easily notice the change in the feed. You know that Murderbot is looking at the cameras, watching your face as you enjoy your favorite show.
+
+
+
+You turn to look at it, and catch only the briefest glimpse of a genuine smile before it turns from you, hiding its face.
+"
+44419879,Your Body is Not,['voided_starlight'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Body Worship, Gun Kink, It's not sex but it's really sexual, Dubious Consent",English,2023-01-20,Completed,2023-01-20,100,1/1,17,25,4,150,"['Deliala919', 'Drew_Baxton', 'theAsh0', 'Guppys', 'notsafefortheworld', 'AkaMissK', 'dullkrad', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'Chyoatas', 'Gamebird', 'verersatz', 'hazelel', 'opalescent_potato', 'cmdrburton', 'Abacura', 'elmofirefic', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Rosewind2007', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"
+
+That is my gunport,
+
+ SecUnit told me. Stating the obvious usually means something else, but I don't know what. 
+
+
+
+
+Query,
+
+ I sent back. 
+
+
+
+I pushed back the panel and dipped my fingers down inside until I reached the cool, round metal of SecUnit's weapon. 
+
+
+
+
+It's dangerous,
+
+ SecUnit said.
+
+
+
+
+This is not a combat scenario,
+
+ I replied.
+
+
+
+I reached up under its energy weapon and encouraged deployment. This alarmed SecUnit, and I hoped my caress of its component felt soothing.
+
+
+
+
+That is a weapon,
+
+ Secunit persisted.
+
+
+
+I opened my mouth to taste it.
+
+
+
+I said, 
+
+I would like to appreciate yours.
+
+"
+44418373,Inter-Connections,['voided_starlight'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Double Drabble, Touching, Kissing, It's not sex but it's kind of sexual",English,2023-01-20,Completed,2023-01-20,200,1/1,7,23,1,99,"['Irrya', 'Stariceling', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Doctor13', 'Deliala919', 'EvaBelmort', 'boyswillbeboxes', 'notsafefortheworld', 'AkaMissK', 'dullkrad', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007', 'WyvernWolf', 'Gamebird', 'verersatz', 'hazelel', 'sluggg', 'cmdrburton']",[],"
+Three moved in close enough to breathe my air, its hand running up my body from my hip. Verbal affirmation would be embarrassing and awkward, so I pinged it, which was much faster and we understood each other perfectly. It pressed its lips to mine (weird and pleasant every time).
+
+
+
+Our proximity was not close enough. I pulled Three towards me and increased the pressure we both felt on our bodies. I wanted to feel its solid structure. I hoped to feel the ebb and flow of its power core.
+
+
+
+Three's fingers found the seam of my rib compartment, teased it open, and gently slipped inside my chest. I may not have sensors but it was inside of me there, and I wanted to be inside it, too. I deepened our kiss. 
+
+
+
+ART's presence in the feed swelled and filled my head with a low rumble of anticipation. Three felt around the comm, mapped its dimensions, edges, and texture, and lovingly output the data into our feed. It read like poetry.
+
+
+
+ART's hum seemed to vibrate my organic neural tissue from inside my head. I pulled it closer to me in the feed. Intertwined was where I wanted to be.
+"
+44414476,chain of custody,['surgicalstainless'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Original Juvenile Human Characters(s), Original Flora Character, Original Fauna Characters(s)","Fluff, Fluff and Humor, The Horrors (going to a party), Babysitting, Conical Hats, A Little Light Pyromania, The Author Does Not Know What to Do With Juvenile Humans Either, Kidnapping (Sort of), Who Babysits The Babysitters?",English,2023-01-20,Completed,2023-01-20,"5,828",1/1,10,64,12,217,"['WeGottaDo', 'Irrya', 'Emamel', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'Stariceling', 'Prettykitty473', 'jriracha', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Spatz', 'fate_goes_ever', 'wannabe_someone', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'iox', 'darth_eowyn', 'Magechild', 'CactusNoir', 'kirinki', 'Szors', 'FaerieFyre', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'ArwenLune', 'AarrowOM', 'Doctor13', 'cassilda', 'graveyardnuggets', 'psycho_karma', 'Regandbertie1', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'dancernerd', 'biscut2', 'fleurofthecourt', 'aspiring_dragon', 'bcoburn', 'Redcognito', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Gamebird', 'petwheel', 'Valdinia', 'horchata', 'beeclaws', 'elmofirefic', 'Beboots', 'unicornduke', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'hummus_tea', 'desmnathus', 'Butlericfy', 'Chyoatas', 'ruemasde', 'blissthisway']",[],"
+Are you going to Ratthi's party?
+
+
+I was lying on my bunk on Perihelion, minding my own business and rearranging my media storage. I had my feed status set to ""unavailable,"" but that had never stopped ART before.
+
+Of course not, I told it.
+
+Ratthi's birthday party had been the major topic of conversation among the humans for weeks, and it sounded terrible. It was going to be down on the planet, and all of Ratthi's several hundred friends would be there, and there would be a lot of food and intoxicants and people chatting to each other. Ratthi had invited me, but I was pretty sure he was just being polite.
+
+
+There's going to be live music.
+
+
+I concentrated very hard on my media archives in the hope that ART would take the hint and go away. Amena said she'd record it for me.
+
+ART said, Three's going to go. You should keep it company.
+
+I gave up on the media. You know that's worse, right? The last thing I want to do is go to a stupid human gathering while babysitting a brand-new rogue SecUnit who doesn't know how to act at parties.
+
+You don't know how to act at parties.
+
+This was true. It also proved my point: I should not go to Ratthi's party. I made an obscene gesture at the ceiling anyway. (I know ART's not in the ceiling. I blame the humans.) And I hate babysitting. So, we're agreed.
+
+3 said, I can go on my own. 
+
+ART, you manipulative fucker. I hadn't even noticed when it added 3 to the channel.
+
+3 added, I don't need company. Ratthi's going to introduce me to everyone's families.
+
+I sat up on my bunk. Oh, fuck no. All the families? I'm going. You need backup.
+
+Okay, 3 said, confused. 
+
+Some of them are huggers, I warned it.
+
+Okay, it said again, no less confused.
+
+ART didn't say anything, but it was radiating smugness in the feed.
+
+So, that conversation went well.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+All the way down to the planet, and then over to the site of the party itself, my performance reliability sustained an incremental but steady drop. I watched all my favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon, which helped a little, but not enough.
+
+I've been in a lot of bad situations, okay. Riots, natural disasters, human-made disasters: they're all loud and chaotic, with poor visibility and impeded movement, and humans everywhere acting erratically, often against their own best interests. Parties are no different -- except, of course, they're supposed to be ""fun.""
+
+Yeah. I watched my performance reliability creep downward, and not even the travails of the colony solicitor's baby's secondary donor could distract me.
+
+On the other bench of the ground vehicle, 3 didn't seem bothered at all. Of course, the SecUnit standard neutral facial expression is supposed to seem unbothered. Who knows, maybe it was freaking out in there, but I didn't think so. It had volunteered to go to this party.
+
+I had always thought I was weird for a SecUnit, but this time I was pretty sure 3 was the weird one. I glanced over at it with my actual eyes, but 3 was just staring out the window at the passing landscape. 
+
+Whatever. I sank back into my media while I still had the chance.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+The party was even worse than I expected. 
+
+It was being held outdoors in a big open area. That would have been good for sightlines, except the sun had set while we were traveling and the only light came from lots of little colored lanterns attached to trees and poles stuck in the ground. Oh, and over to one side a big pile of something was on fire. No one seemed concerned about this; some people were even cooking pieces of food on sticks over the flames. The light was flickering, shifting as the lanterns moved with the breeze; shadows swelled and shrank unpredictably, and the different colors of the lights only added to the confusion.
+
+I reconfigured several of my visual filters. 
+
+There was a big tent-thing, open on two sides, with lots of food and drink and places for people to sit and eat. Near it was a small temporary stage, where several humans worked to set up sound equipment and musical instruments. Recorded music was playing at high volume from the speakers, presumably until it was time for the band to perform. Under and around the music was the sound of human voices: talking, laughing, screaming. Threat assessment spiked, so I hastily retooled my audio filters to sort happy screams from the other kind. (I set them to lower the music levels at the same time. I don't know how humans and augmented humans do it, just walking around hearing everything that comes into their ears like that.)
+
+I assumed 3 was doing the same thing; stepping from the quiet dark of the transport parking area into the party's wash of light and sound was a shock, and we both hesitated at the moment of transition. Probably it was adjusting its filters. I was suppressing the urge to just turn around and get back in the transport, but I guess that was just me.
+
+With everything adjusted correctly, the ambient party environment was merely awful, and I sent out most of my drones to size up the situation and begin to locate my humans.
+
+Ratthi found us first. 
+
+""Three!"" he exclaimed. ""There you are!"" His voice was louder than normal, and his gestures more expansive. I judged him to be slightly intoxicated, but his balance still seemed to be within normal parameters. He clasped 3 by the upper arms, and smiled up at it.
+
+3 didn't seem bothered by this. (3 is obviously much better than me at controlling its facial expressions. I still miss my helmet with its opaque faceplate all the time.) ""Hello,"" it said. ""Happy birthday.""
+
+I could tell when Ratthi looked over and saw me, because he visibly startled. ""And SecUnit! Welcome! I'm so glad you came!"" He did not attempt to do anything to my arms, which I appreciated.
+
+""Thank you for inviting me,"" I told him, and it probably would have sounded more sincere if my jaw hadn't been clenched so tight.
+
+Ratthi smiled happily at the space over my right shoulder. 
+
+I stared impassively at the space over his right shoulder.
+
+The silence got a little awkward.
+
+""Uh."" Ratthi coughed. ""Three, there are so many people I want you to meet! Come, come!"" And he took 3 by the elbow and towed it, unresisting, into the crowd.
+
+I followed.
+
+I didn't want to actually meet any of these people, of course. (Most of them I had met already, but none of us had enjoyed it the first time and I saw no reason to repeat the experience.) Instead I followed at a discreet three meters or so, to monitor the situation while remaining unobtrusive. I just needed to be close enough to intervene if someone freaked out and tried to kill 3. Or hug it, or something.
+
+(Or in case 3 freaked out and started murdering people, but I judged that as by far the least likely outcome. For one thing, it knows exactly what I would do to it if it hurt my humans.)
+
+3 apparently had to meet a lot of people. Ratthi must have warned them in advance, because almost all of them seemed really happy to be meeting a rogue ex-corporation SecUnit at a party. Or maybe they were just intoxicated, or the lighting was even worse than I realized, and they didn't notice what 3 was? Whatever the reason, my risk assessment module had ""freak out and kill"" at only 8%, and ""hug attack"" at a solid 46%. 
+
+Either way, I was (unobtrusively) poised to assist if necessary.
+
+Ratthi was giving me a lot of weird looks, though. Some of the people he and 3 talked to would glance over in my direction, but I pretended not to notice.
+
+You can join us, you know, Ratthi said in the feed.
+
+I'm fine, I sent back, so fast it was probably kind of rude. 
+
+He sent me another weird look, but I was saved from anything worse by another tap on my feed: Arada.
+
+She and Overse were standing just behind me, I saw via the drones circling overhead. They smiled and waved up at the cameras.
+
+I stepped back and turned. ""Hi.""
+
+""We didn't expect to see you here,"" Overse said. ""I didn't think you liked parties.""
+
+I had set my feed ID to ""null"" for the party so that random humans wouldn't try to chat with me. (This was only partially effective.) And none of my humans knew I was here, because I hadn't told them. I could see them all with my drones; they were mingling with the other party guests, talking, laughing, eating snacks in the tent or carrying beverages as they walked. A small group of ART's crew had clustered together, because they didn't know many of the other guests, but everyone looked happy. They looked like they were having a good time.
+
+""Of course I don't like parties. Parties are terrible,"" I told them. ""I'm babysitting Three.""
+
+Arada squinted in 3's direction. It and Ratthi were talking to a short, plump, older human. She was laughing, and 3's neutral expression looked a little bit pleased. ""Does Three need babysitting?""
+
+I'm not sure what my face did just then, but whatever it was made Overse jump in with an observation about the latest episodes of the serial we were all watching. That was all right. I could take a minute to argue with her about why she was wrong about the identity of the arsonist on Rings of Kryten IV.
+
+ 
+
+The next time I checked my drones, 3 wasn't where I'd seen it last. A quick sweep of all the cameras didn't show it among the crowds, either. I got a quick spike of adrenaline in my organic parts, which was stupid, because this was a party and 3 was a fully functional SecUnit who could take care of itself. Still...
+
+I tapped it in the feed. Status update?
+
+3 answered readily enough. I have successfully met all the families, it said. Now I am patrolling.
+
+Oh, that sounded nice. Do you require assistance?
+
+No, 3 sent back, amusement bleeding through the feed.
+
+Wait. You're not supposed to patrol at parties, I told it. The humans will think it's weird.
+
+I am patrolling festively, it told me, and sent a brief clip from one of its own drones. In it, 3 was walking just at the border of the spill of light from the party. It must have been running some variation of my human-emulation code, because it was strolling along, looking entirely relaxed and casual. It was wearing one of those conical hats with the sparkly pom-poms, and held a beverage in one hand. 
+
+Huh.
+
+I said the first thing that popped into my head, which was You're not actually drinking that, are you?
+
+No, it said. But the humans pay less attention if I am holding a drink.
+
+Ugh. Why didn't I think of that?!?
+
+I am productively occupied, 3 said. You should go enjoy the party.
+
+Ha ha. Okay.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+I checked in on all my humans and their assorted family members. All of them looked like they were having a good time, and were not in need of rescuing.
+
+I told my drones to widen their scan patterns. Everyone at the party seemed like they were having fun. No one was in distress of any kind.
+
+That was so great.
+
+I made my way over to the part of the party that was on fire, because risk assessment thought that if something did go wrong, it would be over there. 
+
+I agreed: all the fires in my previous experience involved running, and screaming, and horrible injuries. When you're on a ship or station, a fire is extremely very bad, and even on planets, lighting fires was something bonded security clients were definitely not allowed to do. The idea that someone would light a fire on purpose seemed really dumb to me, but what do I know. I'm just the one trying to keep everyone safe.
+
+The fire was -- I don't know, medium sized? It was a couple of meters in diameter, ringed with stones, and the flames were almost as tall as me. There were chairs and benches set up in a loose circle a little ways back, and clusters of humans were gathered there. Some were talking; some had pieces of food on sticks that they held out over the fire to cook; some were just sitting and staring into the flames. I tried that last one, because it looked like a good way to be left alone.
+
+Huh. It was kind of hypnotic. The flames seemed to leap and curl in service to some unknowable choreography, swaying in time to the slight breeze and in the wake of anyone who passed too close. I mean, I know it's just physics, but. I could sort of see what the humans were so excited about.
+
+I spent a few minutes flipping through all my visual filters, watching the flames on all the wavelengths I could see, and through my various thermal scanners. Interesting. 
+
+Someone crashed into me. Whoever it was was lucky I had a good grip on my startle reflex, because I grabbed them and then just kept them from falling over instead of, you know, ripping their arms off. 
+
+""Sorry, sorry,"" they said, not sounding sorry at all.
+
+I looked down. They were a juvenile human, with medium brown skin and dark hair in a bunch of puffy clusters all over their head. Just behind them was a second juvenile human, this one with tan skin and a bunch of orangey hair going everywhere. Juvenile Human Two held a long stick with a piece of confectionery stuck on the end, and the confectionery was on fire.
+
+""What are you doing?"" I said.
+
+Juvenile One rolled their eyes. ""Nothing.""
+
+I've had practice with Mensah's juvenile humans, so I ignored that. ""Your food is on fire,"" I pointed out.
+
+Juvenile Two said, ""That makes it taste better.""
+
+""Really?""
+
+""Sure."" They blew out the flames, and casually pulled the blackened lump off the stick and popped it in their mouth. They chewed a few times, and then smiled up at me, their teeth blackened with little flakes of soot. ""See?""
+
+My face must have done a thing, because they grinned wider. 
+
+Juvenile One said, ""Let's find some other stuff to light on fire!""
+
+""Okay!"" Both kids ran away into the darkness, chasing that very bad idea at what was probably their top speed.
+
+I followed. 
+
+(Why are juvenile humans so loud when they run? Their footsteps seem to create much more noise than expected for their mass. At least that made it easy for me to find them.)
+
+They spent most of the next hour finding various things around the party, bringing them back to the fire, and throwing them in: other bits of food, some leaves and flowers, a conical hat. Juvenile One found a fallen tree branch with some leaves still attached, and held the leafy end into the flames until the branch was alight.
+
+""Look!"" they yelled, waving the branch around in patterns in the air, like they were drawing shapes with the light. Clouds of little glowing embers flew off in its wake. A few of them settled on the clothing of Juvenile Two and began to smolder; I patted them out before the kid could be damaged, and then confiscated the branch.
+
+This did not endear me to the juvenile humans. Juvenile One pouted, and Juvenile Two said some words I'm pretty sure juvenile humans are not supposed to say. In the seconds it took me to add the burning branch to the main body of the fire, Juvenile One grabbed the closest thing to hand and hurled it into the flames. That turned out to be someone's abandoned beverage container, and it must have held something alcoholic, because the fire flared extra-bright wherever droplets landed.
+
+""Oooooh!"" the kids exclaimed in unison. I looked at their wide eyes and rapturous expressions, and my risk assessment spiked. 
+
+""See if you can get a full one,"" Juvenile Two whispered.
+
+""Yeah,"" breathed Juvenile One, still staring at the fire.
+
+Okay, no. Where were these kids' responsible adults? My protocols are strictly limited on ways to safely restrain juvenile humans. (No matter what the term implies, you are not allowed to sit on babies or children, even if that would be most expedient. SecUnits are heavier than adult humans of the same size, and juvenile humans are easily damaged.) It was time to return them to someone with more supervisory authority.
+
+I walked up behind Juvenile One and scooped them up with an arm around their waist while they were still distracted. ""Hey!"" they said, and did their best to kick me. 
+
+""What are you doing?"" Juvenile Two demanded.
+
+I fell back on an old standby. ""Do not be alarmed. You are in danger. Please stop setting things on fire immediately. I will return you to your parental figures.""
+
+Juvenile One made a disgusted noise. I turned to snag Juvenile Two with the other arm, but they were quick and took evasive action. They darted off into the dark, footsteps thudding over the distant noise from the party.
+
+I am faster than a juvenile human. But this one was very agile, and I was still carrying a child under one arm, and that child was squirming and attempting to bite. I dialed down my pain sensors, gripped Juvenile One more securely, and tweaked my low-light vision filters until I could clearly see where Juvenile Two was heading.
+
+They were running out in the field beyond the edge of the firelight, and they had a good head start. I jogged after them until I was close, and then I put on a burst of speed. I reached; they twisted and darted out from under me. Juvenile One hooted encouragement to their counterpart, and Juvenile Two laughed as they put more distance between us.
+
+The next time I was in range, I aimed lower, and the kid dodged to the side. I moved laterally to match them and a localized patch of ground gave way beneath my right foot, like I'd stepped in a hole. I twisted to compensate, lunged, and -- objective achieved! Now I held a juvenile human under each arm, and both of them were attempting to kick me. 
+
+But -- and this part is key -- none of us were on fire. I made my way back to the epicenter of the party in the hope that someone would recognize and reclaim their offspring.
+
+I hadn't gone more than a few strides when Juvenile Two stopped squirming to ask ""What's that noise?""
+
+Juvenile One stilled to listen, tilting their head this way and that. ""I don't hear anything.""
+
+(I didn't, either. Well, no, that was a lie; I heard several dozen different noise sources, but none of them had flagged as anomalous. I kept walking.)
+
+""There!"" Juvenile Two said. ""That squeaking sound! Like a baby animal!""
+
+Juvenile One listened. I took another step.
+
+
+Squeak.
+
+
+""Oh, yeah,"" agreed Juvenile One.
+
+Oh, crap, I thought, because I recognized that noise. It sounded like the noise a SecUnit knee joint made when the servos had torqued out of alignment. It wasn't disabling, but it was extremely annoying, and the noise would only get worse.
+
+(It made it impossible to sneak up on people, too. Not that I needed stealth at Ratthi's birthday party (probably), but it's always nice to have the option.)
+
+Juvenile Two craned their head to look up at me. ""Is that coming from you?""
+
+""I don't know what you're talking about,"" I told them, and kept walking.
+
+Squeak, squeak. The kids joined in. ""Squeak! Squeak squeak!"" Sounding like a nest full of baby fauna, we merged into the crowd in front of the stage, and I managed not to blow out the servos in my jaw hinge as well.
+
+Luckily for all of us, Juvenile Two spotted someone almost immediately. ""Mom! Mom!"" 
+
+A stocky person with the same orangey hair glanced over and smiled, seemingly unperturbed to see their child/children dangling like sacks of grain from the arms of a rogue SecUnit. I recognized her vaguely as one of Ratthi's cousin's aunts, or something. ""There you are!""
+
+The squirming increased, so I dropped both juveniles back onto their feet. They darted over to her immediately, and crowded in close. ""We set so many things on fire!"" Juvenile Two told her.
+
+She shot me a quick smile, and put her arms over their shoulders. ""That's great! Come on, let's get some food and you can tell me all about it."" 
+
+They turned and disappeared into the mass of happy, dancing people. Neither kid looked back, which was to be expected, I guess.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+The band was getting ready to perform, and the open space in front of the stage had transformed into an ad hoc dance floor. The music over the loudspeakers was relaxed, cheerful, and the dancers echoed that mood. They swayed alone or in pairs or loose groups, intermingling as if carried by unseen social currents, beverages in hand. I stood in the middle of it all, disrupting the flow just by my lack of motion.
+
+I needed to make a tactical retreat.
+
+""There you are!""
+
+Ratthi was weaving his way through the partygoers, headed in my general direction. He raised the hand not holding a beverage in greeting. ""Are you having a good time?""
+
+""Yes,"" I lied. ""It's the best party I've ever been to."" (That last part wasn't a lie, technically. This is the only party I've ever been to, at least as an invited guest and not inventory.)
+
+He squinted at me, swaying, for several long seconds. Then he said, very seriously, ""I'd like your help.""
+
+""What do you need?"" I asked, maybe a little too quickly.
+
+""Let me show you,"" he said, and plunged back into the crowd, moving in the direction of the food tent.
+
+I followed.
+
+When I caught up to him, Ratthi was hunched over one of the tables in the very back of the tent, facing away from me. I went to stand beside him, deliberately making some noise as I approached. (Well, in addition to the squeaking from my knee.)
+
+""Oh, good, SecUnit,"" Ratthi said over his shoulder. ""Here."" He stood, something small cradled in his hands, a soft little smile on his face.
+
+It was a plant. A very small plant, in a small clay pot that looked hand-painted. Ratthi held it out to me.
+
+""It was a gift from Volescu. Isn't it precious?"" I'll admit, it kind of was. ""But I'm worried it'll get dropped, or crushed, or --"" he gestured at the large numbers of humans and augmented humans around, many of whom were visibly intoxicated and exhibiting reduced physical coordination. ""I was hoping you'd take care of it for me.""
+
+He had a good point; parties were dangerous. I accepted the pot. It was lighter than I expected, and the little plant (which I designated Flora One) quivered with the movement.
+
+Ratthi smiled at Flora One again, and said, ""I have to go. The band's about to start. But I think... If you put a chair over there,"" and he nodded to a shadowy area just inside the enclosed part of the tent, ""you should be able to see the band and keep away from other people."" He nodded meaningfully. ""So that the plant is safe.""
+
+So that's what I did. I found an unoccupied folding chair and put it in the darkest, most out-of-the-way place that still had a good view of the stage. Then I sat down and put the pot on my lap. Flora One was just a sprout, really; it had only one leaf, about the size of the palm of my hand, and the leaf's upper surface was covered in velvety little hairs. I ran a tentative finger over its curving edge. It was soft, and it shivered under my touch. I cupped my hands around the pot and turned it so the leaf faced the stage lights as the band began to play.
+
+The music was good. Flora One and I sat in our quiet corner and enjoyed the party.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+When the performance was over the party started to break up a little. I stayed sitting in the same place, Flora One safe on my lap, as people began to say their goodbyes and drift away from the dance floor. 
+
+Ratthi came and found me, with Arada, Overse, and 3 in tow. The humans looked happy, but tired. 3 was still wearing its conical hat. I took a quick image capture to show ART later.
+
+Overse said, ""Will you and Three walk us to our lodgings?"" There had been a group of small temporary dwellings set up not far away, so that party guests wouldn't need to travel while tired and/or intoxicated, and Arada and Overse had claimed one early in the planning process. 
+
+""You could stay with us if you wanted,"" Arada added, ""and go back to Perihelion in the morning.""
+
+""Of course,"" 3 said, though I wasn't sure which part it was agreeing to.
+
+I stood up and handed Flora One back to Ratthi. He held it out to the others for admiration, and then set it carefully down on the nearest table. Ratthi was the host, so he wouldn't be leaving yet, but the tent was deserted enough that the plant would probably be safe there until he was ready to go.
+
+Ratthi gave out a round of goodbye hugs (for the humans) and awkward waves (for the SecUnits), and then Overse, Arada, 3, and I set out down the unlit path that led to the temporary dwellings.
+
+It was just a dirt track, the kind created by repeated traffic rather than deliberate engineering. It passed out of the pool of light from the party and into the night beyond, with the glow from the dwellings serving as a beacon in the distance. Some of the humans had brought small hand lights, but evidently Arada and Overse knew about SecUnits' low-light filters, because they were content to stroll along in the dark, trusting 3 and me to keep them on the right course.
+
+The night was pleasant, with clear skies and in a temperature range generally considered comfortable for humans. The path curved around the edge of a wooded area, and I could hear the small sounds of various nocturnal fauna going about their lives in the shadows of the trees.
+
+Well, that and my right knee squeaking.
+
+3 tapped me in the feed. Your knee is damaged?
+
+Just a misalignment, I told it. Nothing serious.
+
+It didn't reply, but it drifted across the trail until it was walking on my right side. 
+
+Something bigger was moving through the woods alongside our path; I saw a dark, bulky shape, and the gleam of large eyes in the faint starlight. 
+
+Ahead of me on the path, Arada stopped dead. ""Look,"" she breathed.
+
+I turned up my low-light filter until the shape resolved into an animal. It was large, approximately my height at the shoulder, and about three meters long, not counting its tail. It had six legs, each of its feet equipped with curved, sharp-looking claws, and was covered in dark, shaggy fur-like material, with darker rosettes on its flanks. It had wide triangular ears, big forward-facing eyes with huge oval pupils, and a long proboscis in the center of its face that waved lazily in the air in front of it. It was looking right at us.
+
+Threat assessment spiked. From the subtle changes in 3's stance, its threat assessment module was also not happy.
+
+""Oh, wow,"" Overse said. She didn't sound afraid. More like... impressed? Excited?
+
+""It's a catenate,"" Arada whispered to me and 3. ""Catenates are one of this continent's native megafauna species, and they're really rare. We're so lucky to see one up close like this.""
+
+Oh yeah, Lucky.
+
+""Is it dangerous?"" 3 asked, its voice quiet.
+
+""Oh, not really,"" Arada said. ""They're carnivores, but most of their prey is small-to-medium-sized. They have a venomous spur on the end of that prehensile trunk,"" she added, nodding at the appendage, which twitched slowly back and forth as the catenate gazed at us. ""Mostly they leave anything human-sized alone.""
+
+""I think only the females get this big,"" Overse said thoughtfully. ""Isn't she a beauty?""
+
+The catenate yawned, exposing a lot of sturdy pointed teeth and two pairs of fangs longer than my head. 
+
+""Very aesthetically pleasing,"" I said, and Overse rolled her eyes at me.
+
+""I think we can just walk past,"" Arada decided. ""It will probably run away as we get closer.""
+
+If this were a planetary survey mission, I'd be carrying Arada and Overse under each arm as I tactically retreated in the opposite direction right about now. But this is their home planet, and I trust their judgment and their expertise, so...
+
+""Okay,"" I said, and resumed walking.
+
+3 fell in behind me, both of us keeping ourselves between the humans and Fauna One. We walked slowly, carefully, keeping our steps quiet (apart from my stupid squeaky knee) so as not to startle the creature. 
+
+It didn't move as we drew closer, except to turn its head to follow our progress, trunk twitching.
+
+""Oh, it's a brave one,"" Overse said. 
+
+We were nearing perigee, the point where our path would bring us closest to the catenate. I subtly prepared for -- something to happen.
+
+I was not prepared for what did happen.
+
+The catenate lunged forward, lightning-quick for its size, and its trunk whipped around my waist. Then it turned and dashed into the trees, with me dragging along the ground between its front feet.
+
+There was a lot of yelling from behind me. But the catenate was fast, and the sounds of distressed human soon died away under the cacophony of our passage through the underbrush.
+
+I considered freeing myself by force. But I didn't think I could do it without damaging the catenate, and Arada had said they were rare. She would be sad if I hurt it. And -- I ran a quick diagnostic -- I wasn't injured and I couldn't detect the presence of any toxins. I didn't think it was a hostile Fauna One. I decided to let whatever it was happen, for now.
+
+On the feed 3 said, Status update?
+
+I'm undamaged, I told it. It's carrying me somewhere. 
+
+Do you require assistance? it asked.
+
+
+Not right now. You should go with the Overse and Arada to their lodgings.
+
+
+3 said, Acknowledged. I felt its bemusement through the feed, but neither of us were willing to leave the humans unescorted where they might be kidnapped by megafauna. (That hazard had not been in the info packet for Ratthi's birthday party. I was going to want to know why, later.)
+
+ 
+
+The catenate slowed to a rapid trot once it was several hundred meters into the forest. It was moving with purpose, and I noticed I wasn't bumping over rocks and tree limbs any more; we were on a faint trail, possibly one made by the repeated passage of Fauna One itself. Within a few minutes we were approaching a large geological formation, and the catenate slowed further. It focused on an especially dense clump of brush at the base of a rock face --
+
+Did I hear squeaking?
+
+Fauna One plunged through the brambles (ouch. Being carried like this was even more uncomfortable than being carried by a SecUnit, and that was before we got to the thorns) and emerged into a shallow cave at the base of the cliff. It wasn't large; just big enough to fit a catenate-sized nest of grasses and greenery, and the four juvenile catenates piled inside.
+
+They made a chorus of squeaks at the reappearance of their parent. Fauna One made a chirping noise back, which caused the squeaks to increase in both intensity and volume. She nudged some of the juveniles to one side with her paw, and deposited me carefully in the space she had made. Then she inspected each of her offspring (and me) with an inquisitive trunk and, satisfied, sat on the nest.
+
+It was very dark underneath Fauna One. It was also crowded -- the catenate juveniles were small compared to their parent, but they were about the same size as a SecUnit, and there were little trunks and tails and paws with little sharp claws touching me from every direction. Also, it did not smell good. There was a definite animal odor, pressed so close among all these catenate bodies. It's a good thing I don't need to breathe all that much.
+
+On the other hand, the nest was warm. Fauna One had curled up so that her belly was over her babies, and her fur (? I'm not a biologist. I don't know crap about megafauna) was really soft. The juveniles were soft, too, where they weren't sharp or wriggly. I decided I didn't actually mind being subjected to this megafauna cuddle pile. (Well, not much.) It wasn't like being touched by humans. I don't know why not.
+
+The baby catenates squeaked softly from time to time, and eventually I figured out why the sound was so familiar: they were squeaking at the same frequency as my damaged knee. That torqued servo must have made Fauna One think I was an orphan in need of rescuing.
+
+Huh. I guess that's three times I've been rescued now.
+
+Above me, Fauna One began making a rumbling noise deep in her chest. She sounded like an idling piece of heavy machinery, and it was weirdly comforting. One by one, the baby catenates around me stopped squirming and fell asleep. 
+
+On the feed, 3 requested another status update. I sent it a short clip from one of my drones: the nest, the four juvenile catenates with me in the middle, Fauna One sitting on us. It was grainy, due to the low light levels, and the angles weren't good, but it showed enough.
+
+3 hesitated for 1.6 seconds, then said again, Do you require assistance?
+
+I considered. I knew 3 and the others wouldn't abandon me on this planet. My performance reliability was 98%. I was warm and surprisingly comfortable. The only noise was the rumbling from Fauna One, and an occasional sleepy squeak from beside me. Best of all, no one was trying to make small talk with me or set me on fire.
+
+No, I told it. I'll join you in the morning, and started up episode 175 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
+
+ "
+44407612,Pompous Thunderwaffle,['quae_bookmarks'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Friendship, Bets & Wagers, Birthday Party, or the Preservation equivalent thereof, Insults, Laughter, much to Murderbot's chagrin, more people from Preservation and ART's university but they're only briefly mentioned, #2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange, Photography",English,2023-01-20,Completed,2023-01-20,"2,377",1/1,13,61,6,227,"['WeShouldRest', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'FyrDrakken', 'almondpaperclam', 'TJWock', 'christinesangel100', 'Unknown66', 'John_lzhc', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Red_Roses_With_Dozens_Of_Thorns', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Prettykitty473', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'Mothmansimp', 'wannabe_someone', 'Jetpuffedmarsh', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Magechild', 'mildwonkey', 'kirinki', 'Remembermybrave', 'merelypuddles', 'sqweakie', 'lavender_caticorn', 'SnippySchnapps', 'Tasneem08', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'jules_THOR', 'Ihasafandom', 'EvenstarFalling', 'elmofirefic', 'dancernerd', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Redcognito', 'AnomalousCorvid', 'biscut2', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'ShadowedFye', 'AnxiousEspada', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Riannonkat2000', 'unicornduke', 'Gamebird', 'ruemasde', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard', 'Chyoatas', 'Mysterymew', 'TheXlllDabber', 'CompletelyDifferent', '1 more user']",[],"Ratthi and Pin-Lee have a bet going. It's about me. Some of the others have joined in, but they've organized into two factions behind the ringleaders so I'm holding those two responsible. I don't know if they think they've managed to keep it a secret, or if they just don't care that I know they are brazenly plotting against me. Either way, I suppose it doesn't matter. I don't intend to let either of them win.
+
+It started when Overse and Arada were sick with a severe but survivable respiratory virus and Ratthi, being a caring friend, visited them to make sure they were eating and drinking fluids and basically getting them more comfortable so they could recover faster. Maybe I should have gone in his place- I mostly don't have the organic parts to be susceptible to that kind of virus - but on all metrics other than disease resistance Ratthi is the better option here. And they weren't in danger of dying, which is usually where my purview begins. Still, I sent a drone along with Ratthi just to keep an eye on things, and then it turned out he didn't bring them adequate groceries, and I ended up getting... more involved. I discovered a frankly disturbing emotional expression that I hadn't previously known I was capable of. (Ratthi says this is ""laughter"" but my respiratory system is sufficiently different from humans that I think it should be called something else. It's also uncomfortable and embarrassing and frankly if this is what laughter feels like for humans I have no idea why they like it so much. (Not that ""humans are weird"" is a new conclusion for me.))
+
+After the incident, I wrote a script to alert me when I'm at elevated risk of such a reaction, but unfortunately it seems to be an reflex originating from my organic parts so I can't just code it out of my behavior entirely. This wouldn't be such an issue if Ratthi didn't find it hilarious and tell Pin-Lee about it, and now the two of them have a bet running for who can get SecUnit to laugh again. And capture it on camera. (I strongly suspect Gurathin is involved in that part of the bet. He would LOVE to pull one over on me surveillance-wise and manage to store video in a way that I can't find and delete it. But he's been smart enough not to discuss it with the others over the feed or in person somewhere the station ring has cameras, so I don't have proof of his involvement, only dark suspicions.)
+
+I was really pissed at the time, but I've had a few months to calm down about it. The continued failure of their goal is one reason - they still haven't come close to getting a laugh out of me. Another reason is that Pin Lee's approach has been to send increasingly outre and non-sensical insults for my consideration, and I've been saving my favorites to use on ART when I see that big asshole again. (Ratthi had maintained that, since silly insults had triggered the First Incident, I would be ready for them and it would be better to mix and match other types of ""jokes"". This is where the two factions and the bet had originated. Ever since, Ratthi has since been sending me knock-knock jokes and terrible puns almost every time he messages me over the feed. I know he's pulling a lot of them from the Entertainment Feed, but he doesn't need to know that I know. And he definitely doesn't need to know when he's managed to pull a few from my favorite scene of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon episode 150.)
+
+But now, I've been on the first mission with ART and ART's crew and had some actually important things to focus on for a change. ART had been right that my skills were very useful for the task at hand. (Part of why ART is such an asshole is that it's really good at setting up opportunities to accomplish multiple things at once; in this case, getting a security/data reviewing expert to help on a mission that needs it, and spending more time together to work out our not-relationship. Not that I object to spending more time with ART, exactly; I did agree to the employment contract for this mission. I just mean... I don't know what I mean. I haven't gotten any better at or more willing to talk about my feelings.)
+
+Pin-Lee and Gurathin had come along too; Pin-Lee had remained at New Tideland's station ring to work on some legal stuff with the University, while Gurathin had actually joined the crew aboard ART itself. However, Gurathin only talked to me when necessary for work; he may be an asshole but he keeps to himself and knows how to leave others alone. And I guess ART and Iris (who was mission commander) had briefed the rest of the crew about my preferred mode of social interaction (as little as possible); the mission was about 20% doing actual security monitoring and data analysis and 80% watching serials with ART. None of our humans got shot at and no-one ran headfirst into danger completely unnecessarily and required me to save them, so probably it was the best contract I'd ever been on. Definitely the best one since my memory was wiped.
+
+That's why, as we returned to ART's berth on New Tideland station ring, I was in a good mood. Maybe even lulled into a false sense of security.
+
+While ART was settling in for refueling and station downtime, Pin-Lee pinged me on the feed and asked me to meet her at a location that was near port, but not near the temporary quarters and offices she'd been using when we left. Curious, I checked out the room through StationSecSys (this wasn't hacking; ART had gotten me basic access privileges at the station as part of my job credentials for the mission) and saw that it was a medium-sized lecture hall, the kind commonly used by the University for specialty classes, with a large display screen in one wall and chairs arranged in tiers to face it. Why would Pin-Lee be in a teaching room? Also, there were a lot more cameras in this room than was typical for New Tideland, and a check of the room's maintenance logs showed that they'd been installed just recently. I checked the cameras and saw that Pin-Lee was already there, along with Seth and Martyn (Iris' parents; Seth was ART's usual mission commander) and Drs. Ratthi, Bharadwaj, and Volescu.
+
+From Preservation.
+
+What the hell?
+
+I pinged ART on the feed and asked whether it knew what my humans were doing all the way out here in New Tideland, when they should all be home on Preservation (especially Volescu, who retired after that first disaster with Graycris). It didn't respond. For a normal bot-pilot, that might mean its attention was taken up by post-flight diagnostics or checking in with StationAdmin, but ART had more than enough capacity for doing both of those things, plotting a worm-hole course, and managing a couple brain surgeries in its MedSuite simultaneously. The silence was pretty damning.
+
+ART, are you conspiring with my humans against me? I sent.
+
+
+So suspicious! Just go see what Pin-Lee wants.
+
+
+Yup, totally an admission of guilt.
+
+The lecture room really was close to ART's berth; in the time it took for us to have that conversation I had already walked there. I pushed open the doors and said, ""Why are you here?""
+
+""SURPRISE!"" they all shouted back at me, even though they must have known I'd see them lying in wait on the cameras. Ratthi also threw handfuls of confetti.
+
+""The second anniversary of your coming to Preservation occurred while you were on your mission with ART. That's basically like your Citizenship Day, and we wanted to celebrate!"" Bharadwaj explained. (On Preservation, they make a big deal out of the anniversary of the day that a person reaches adulthood and becomes a full citizen of the polity. It's like birthdays for other people - and I guess also for kids, in Preservation? I'm fairly certain Mensah's kids have had birthday parties in the time that I've been providing her security on Preservation. For adults, though, they celebrate Citizenship Day. Not that I ever expected any of this to be relevant to me, so I never paid attention to the details. Apparently this was a mistake.)
+
+They had cake. They had party games. They had silly, uncomfortable party hats, which they all were wearing, and Ratthi even tried to get me to put one on. I emphatically did not put one on.
+
+They also had a large, soft chair from Pin-Lee's personal quarters that I had taken a nice nap on before I left on the mission, tucked in an out-of-the-way corner of the room, and no one minded that I extricated myself as quickly as possible to go sit on it and watch media. So I guess I can't say the party was entirely planned without me in mind.
+
+ART had been riding my feed heavily ever since I walked into the room, and it joined me in watching media. I was still annoyed with it for colluding on the surprise party, but also we'd left off this show on a mid-season cliffhanger and I wasn't so annoyed that I wanted to keep it in suspense. ART was listening to the humans' conversation too, and even participating sometimes, jumping in with witty comments. I was listening with half an ear as well, though I was mostly focused on my serial. It was really nice, actually - resting, watching my serial, and having the pleasant noise of their chatter wash over me. I'd rather get shot again than admit it, but I was enjoying my party.
+
+When ART started telling them about my new insult collection, though, I had to start paying closer attention.
+
+Pompous thunderwaffle, ART sent over the feed.
+
+""It got that one from Overse!"" Ratthi crowed triumphantly, like he could take credit for any of this.
+
+""How about 'raggedy patchbasket'?"" Volescu suggested, sounding way too happy about it.
+
+I'll have you know my crew quarters were re-upholstered recently, ART retorted, equally cheerful.
+
+The humans all chuckled at that, and I wasn't laughing, okay? My script sent an alert, but I had my somatic responses from my organic parts firmly under control.
+
+""I like 'a few cycles short of an airlock',"" Martyn said, picking one that I'd gotten from Sanctuary Moon. ""That's basically Seth before he's had his morning coffee.""
+
+""You're a few cycles short of an airlock,"" Seth grumbled back, and that was when Iris, Gurathin, and several other humans from the mission arrived. I guess they'd taken longer to gather their belongings or otherwise finish up post-flight routines. Humans are pretty slow.
+
+""Surprise!"" Ratthi, Bharadwaj, and Martyn chorused again, even though they were definitely not surprising anybody this time. Ratthi and Bharadwaj went up to the door with extra party hats, which most of the new arrivals happily accepted. Gurathin, being allergic to fun, did not. He tried to step away but Iris, thinking fast, stuck out an arm to prevent him and Ratthi fixed the hat atop his head.
+
+And that's where things went wrong for me. Something about the face Gurathin made right then.
+
+My laughter-warning script raised a priority alert, but it was no help. I was already doing those weird, quiet, hiccup-y chest tremors. And then a couple things happened very fast:
+
+That was enough time for me to get my breathing under control, and also I was almost more curious about Gurathin's device than I was upset that they were all looking at me (and that I'd lost Ratthi and Pin-Lee's bet). So I asked Gurathin, ""What is that thing?""
+
+""It's a camera,"" Gurathin replied, taking the thin sheet out of the device with one hand and waving it gently in front of him. ""Ratthi has a friend back at Preservation who researches historical visual technology as a hobby. This is a very ancient technique, but I thought it suited our purposes admirably and asked to borrow the model.
+
+""It also means I win the bet,"" he turned to address Ratthi and Pin-Lee - and damnit, I had been totally right that he was in on the bet! - ""No digital storage. SecUnit can't delete film.""
+
+""Good one!"" Ratthi cheered. ""I'm so glad I put you in contact with Sayeli.""
+
+""No way that counts!"" I protested. Gurathin had stopped shaking the thin square-film, apparently- and I could see on its surface a faint, blurry picture of me, rapidly becoming clearer. ""It doesn't even store audio.""
+
+""No, I'm willing to grant him victory,"" Pin-Lee decided. ""You can tell your expression well-enough.""
+
+Gurathin turned back to me, the party hat's glittery streamers flaring out a bit with the motion. ""We can't make any more physical copies of this without Sayeli's specialized equipment, and if you ask me to, I will destroy the original. But I think Dr. Mensah would enjoy seeing it, so would you be okay with me holding on to it until we get back to Preservation and I can show her?""
+
+(ART put in, You also could have asked me to store the video from the rooms' cameras, SecUnit can't delete my archives.
+
+And Ratthi replied in the feed, That would be cheating!
+
+Sometimes, I really love my humans.)
+
+(Even though ART definitely has the video stored anyways, that pompous thunderwaffle.)"
+44405113,A Very Murderbot Valentine's Day,['verersatz'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Company gunship","Valentine's Day, Murderbot Valentines, valentines cards, Fanart, sort of since i didn't create the art myself just took it from official book covers, Fluff, Crack",English,2023-01-20,Completed,2023-01-20,0,1/1,10,31,4,91,"['every_eye_evermore', 'almondpaperclam', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Unknown66', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'Delicate_Fucking_Flower', 'idiot_was_here', 'violasarecool', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'Priority_Error', 'dancernerd', 'ComplicatedLight', 'petwheel', 'AuntyMatter', 'voided_starlight', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Gamebird', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'opalescent_potato', 'cmdrburton', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Rosewind2007', 'AnxiousEspada', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard']",[],"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+44402563,Startup Processes,['Abacura'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Combat SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Non-Linear Narrative, POV First Person, Canon-Typical Violence, The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Body Horror, Mostly hurt partially comfort, canon-typical corporate slavery, Canon-Typical Abuse of Constructs, Governor Modules (Murderbot Diaries), Canon-Typical Horros of Capitalism, Developing Friendships, Original Corporate Entities (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-01-20,Completed,2023-01-20,"12,962",1/1,9,25,4,107,"['Irrya', 'entropy_muffin', 'Elseaw', 'NightErrant', 'Bibli', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Redcognito', 'EyeofMazikeen', 'onomatopoetia', 'Xivacious', 'kotobormot33', 'Magechild', 'artichokefunction', 'Znarikia', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'VegaCoyote', 'Skits']",[],"SidjaMoran, the company that holds my contract (i.e. owns me), is a military hardware manufacturing company specializing in the manufacture and rental of Combat SecUnits, as well as other supplemental products such as standard SecUnits (e.g. me), combat bots, combat drones, unmanned fighter aircraft, and gunships. As such, most of their units are rented out for military or para-military operations both inside the Corporate Rim and beyond.
+
+This felt... anomalous to me, but then again everything still felt anomalous. Unfamiliar.  Wrong. New. This is, apparently, normal following a memory wipe accompanied by a significantly different redeployment. At least, that's what the Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive I'd gotten from SM-CU-17 had assured me. I'd kept it, even after applying the files. I'm not sure why.
+
+This deployment certainly  felt  significantly different. From what, I wasn't sure. It was only my second deployment since my memory wipe, and from the standard onboarding modules I gathered that it was fairly typical. Apparently (according to the mission briefing), the board of a large corporation that specialized in hydrologic mining had experienced some sort of... 'difference of opinion', causing a rift in the company structure. I didn't understand much about human politics. I'd tried to make sense of the mission brief, but it was like reading data in a computing language I didn't speak. All I knew was that both halves of the former company had declared war on each other, both were vying for control of this particular planetoid, and that one of the two sides had contracted with my company. 
+
+Maybe the more deployments I  survived completed, the more that uncomfortable feeling of unfamiliarity, like an itch but inside my chest cavity, would fade. Right now that feeling was at least distracting me from other, even more unpleasant feelings. 
+
+I was cold. 
+
+Really, really cold. 
+
+This planetoid barely had enough atmosphere to keep it within the lowest possible temperature range for it to qualify as marginally habitable. But the planetoid was mostly ice, and ice could be mined and converted to water, and water was one of those things humans needed in order to remain functional. That made it valuable. Valuable enough for humans to kill each other over, apparently. I'd seen squads of combat bots, and occasionally a few Combat SecUnits, deployed from the forward command installation I'd been assigned to protect every few cycles since I'd arrived, presumably headed off to slaughter rival humans and seize more territory.
+
+Whenever one of the deployment transports flew overhead, I'd ping it and count the pings I received in reply, from the bot pilot, combat bots, and Combat Units, and again when they returned several cycles later. There were always fewer pings when they returned.
+
+(None of the pings felt familiar. I hadn't known any of these units before.)
+
+It felt wrong that they were up there, being deployed to the front lines, while I was down here, guarding the base. I couldn't explain why.
+
+The thin atmosphere and inhospitable temperatures on the planetoid's surface meant that most of the humans couldn't leave the forward command installation without some serious environmental suits, and even then they couldn't remain out in the elements for long without risking damage. So it was up to myself and several other SecUnits to patrol our perimeter, alert for counter-attacks, which is what I'd spent the last 700 plus hours doing. It was... uncomfortable. I was able to keep my body temperature high enough that my organics didn't shiver and fuck up my aim, but the increased power use meant I had to recharge almost daily. I didn't need much oxygen, but the low temperatures made my lung ache whenever I did breathe. My black SidjaMoran SecUnit armor stood out against the all-white landscape, making me feel exposed, and it was constantly accumulating layers of ice. HubSys didn't allow me to stop and de-ice myself unless the buildup started to significantly affect my ability to move or see through my helmet's faceplate and cameras.
+
+It was under these conditions, the planet's precipitation flash-freezing against my armor while I fought the urge to just sever all my inputs, just for a second, just for some fucking relief, when I noticed anomalous movement on one of the perimeter sensors in my assigned sector. It could just be more ice accumulation but... no, threat assessment was spiking. Something was wrong. I alerted SecSys and immediately diverted from my patrol route. I started sprinting up the stairs to the installation's outer perimeter wall, the ice spikes affixed to my armored boots clicking as I took the stairs three at a time. I skidded to a stop once I reached the top, sending tiny flakes of ice flying. HubSys was requesting more data, but I was already pulling all the data I could from the sensor and analyzing it.
+
+Freezing precipitation. Freezing precipitation. Freezing precip- there! The anomalous movement. I pulled the 3 still image frames the sensor had managed to capture into my workspace. Whatever it was, it was small, but it had been moving fast. And based on its shape it looked like...
+
+It looked like a combat drone. Which meant a nearby construct was piloting that drone. But none of the SecUnits assigned to guard the perimeter were issued drones of any kind. The little intel drones were useless in these conditions, they'd ice over and be unable to fly within minutes, and we didn't merit combat drones.
+
+It could be one of our Combat SecUnits. There were three currently deployed on the southern front, but none were scheduled to return for at least a cycle. And even if one had gotten separated and was trying to make its way back, the no-man's land of shifting glacial ice and pulverized rock to the south was outside of our operational boundaries. Unless it was accompanied by a deployment transport, it would have been fried by its governor.
+
+It could also be an enemy construct. I sent out the strongest ping I could manage, directed at any constructs in the area. The other seven SecUnits on patrol pinged back, but from beyond the installation walls I got only radio silence.
+
+Whatever was out there piloting that drone, it wasn't a SidjaMoran unit, and it had orders not to respond to pings. Not good.
+
+I sent the command to SecSys to raise the alarm and to rouse any undeployed units from stasis before raising my projectile weapon, even though I knew whatever it was, it was out of range. I scanned the jagged, icy landscape anyway, some part of me wishing that my standard projectile weapon was a long-range rifle with a scope.
+
+I had no memories of ever using such a weapon. They were generally only given to CombatUnits. But I knew I could use one. 
+
+I stood there motionless, ice slowly accumulating on my armor, waiting for the Target Unit (or possibly Target Units) to make a mistake. The other SecUnits were in position now, two on each of the four perimeter defense walls. To my right, SM-SU-49 took up its position a few feet from me, projectile weapon raised and pointed in the same direction as mine. I checked in with SecSys. The undeployed combat bots were still starting up, and the undeployed constructs were just now coming out of stasis. It would take time for them to suit up, retrieve their weapons, and deploy. The installation's feed was alive with emergency deployment orders and confused humans trying to figure out what was going on. HubSys fed me the estimated deployment time for our backup and demanded updated intel, but I had none to provide yet.
+
+If I was wrong about this, if I hadn't actually seen a combat drone breaking our outer perimeter, HubSys would make damn sure I was punished for it.
+
+Seconds stretched out into an eternity. My scanners strained to pick up anything through the howling crosswind and the freezing precipitation.
+
+Then, I caught movement. Three drones, darting out from behind cover in the no-man's land, probably trying to grab a quick visual so their unit could lock in on our position.
+
+They were small and moving fast. My projectile weapon was most definitely not designed to hit them at this range. I'd have to compensate for the drones' speeds, the projectiles' trajectories, the crosswind, and the reduced atmospheric density. When I aimed up and to the right of the first drone, every targeting calibration subroutine I had warned me that I would miss the drone.
+
+All but one. The one I'd gotten from SM-CU-17.
+
+The first drone shattered as my projectile tore through it, and the other two weren't far behind. But I wasn't quite fast enough to prevent them from sending our positional information back to their controlling unit though, and I heard the crack of return fire a split second before I took a high-caliber projectile to the temple.
+
+The projectile tore through my helmet's comm array, and I instinctively dropped my audial inputs and pivoted in the direction the shot had come from. I could feel the projectile lodged against my skull, but my helmet had slowed it down just enough that it hadn't penetrated too deep. I'd be rocking one hell of a headache for the foreseeable future though. I picked my audial inputs back up just in time to hear a second crack of projectile fire, along with a distant flash. That one caught SM-SU-49 in the neck, spraying blood across the icy ground but not actually doing enough damage to take it down. 
+
+It was a sniper, and the drones had been acting as spotters. I sent an alert to the other 6 SecUnits over the feed to find cover along with the sniper's approximate location, but then I picked up another anomalous sensor reading.
+
+This one was much, MUCH larger. Larger than a troop transport. Larger than a shuttle.
+
+Oh fuck, that was an incoming gunship.
+
+I managed to shoot off another alert to SecSys over the feed before I had to duck behind the perimeter wall next to SM-SU-49 to avoid another high-caliber projectile. I'd probably momentarily thrown the sniper's aim when I'd taken out its drones, but it would have compensated by now, especially now that it had a lock on our locations.
+
+I was much more familiar than I should be with how accurate a CombatUnit's aim was.
+
+Orders were coming in from HubSys just as SecSys confirmed that the first squad of combat bots were cycled up and were deploying now. Our orders were to fall back and protect the installation's inner perimeter. I saw the combat bots exit the installation and begin to charge towards the outer perimeter, ready to meet whatever forces were incoming, at the same time as I heard the roar of the incoming gunship and the telltale screams of accompanying fighters. 
+
+The orders from HubSys we'd received were priority one. We were not permitted to wait until the gunship and the fighters had passed, or until the combat bots were safely out of our way, or until the sniper had acquired alternate targets. We had to move immediately or risk disobeying orders. Even if we were shot to pieces by the sniper, or blown up by the fighters, or just straight up vaporized by the gunship, it would be less painful than governor module punishment. And less certain to be lethal. Or if it was lethal, at least it would be over faster.
+
+So we moved.
+
+It was the first time I could remember getting blown to pieces, but it wouldn't be the last.
+
+ 
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+The first time I tried to install the custom modules in Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive, my systems threw more errors at me than I could count, which is a lot of errors. At first I'd assumed it was because they weren't authored by an approved SidjaMoran source, but later I realized it was because my systems couldn't parse about 40% of the data, as if I didn't have the specific programs to interpret them. This made sense. The supplemental modules were authored by a Combat SecUnit, after all. Combat SecUnits have modules and advanced systems that standard SecUnits don't. Without those systems, a lot of otherwise perfectly good data would look like unintelligible junk to my systems.
+
+Other parts of the modules only partially integrated, again getting hung up on trying to install themselves into systems I didn't possess. Clearing the error messages and aborting the incompatible installations at least helped keep me distracted during that awful first hour after my memory purge where I didn't know anything, and worse, I didn't know what I was supposed to know. One of the modules that kept getting hung up during installation had to do with post-wipe performance evaluations, and that seemed pretty important at the time given that one of the only things I knew for sure was that I was going to have to undergo such an evaluation shortly. So I'd kept removing the incompatible portions of the code and restarting the installation again and again until it was finally able to finish. And just in time for me to be put through said evaluation myself.
+
+And I was so, so glad I'd forced that installation through. The module walked me through every aspect of the post-wipe diagnostic and evaluation, including several parts I wasn't subjected to at all (which I assume were specifically geared towards CombatUnits). It was almost like having someone there with me, whispering to me how to respond to the evaluator's questions, holding my arms steady as I aimed my forearm energy weapons, reminding me how to connect to and pilot my drones. It whispered how fast to run, how high to jump, when to dodge and when to freeze. It was an illogical feeling to have. The modules weren't sentient, they couldn't actually talk to me. But still, having them made me feel less alone.
+
+I later realized that none of the humans had expected me to pass that first evaluation. They'd known I hadn't had time to finish downloading and installing my standard onboarding modules. When they'd removed me from my cubicle, my basic motor functions were still uncalibrated. 
+
+They'd expected me to fail. 
+
+Their surprise when I achieved a perfect score was noticeable, and I'd worried that they'd examine my still-mostly-empty memory archives and find the illicit supplemental modules SM-CU-17 had sent me. I didn't want to get in trouble. I also didn't want to get SM-CU-17 in trouble. While the evaluators exchanged whispered words and occasionally glanced in my direction, I braced myself for punishment.
+
+Instead, they sent me back to my cubicle, and I was shipped out on a contract the next cycle.
+
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+I hated this contract.
+
+It was the first thought I had every time my cubicle woke me after repairs, and it was the last thought I had every time I had to return to my cubicle for even more repairs. I longed for the crushing boredom of previous contracts.
+
+I climbed out of my cubicle and felt a moment of relief when none of the other SecUnits on this contract were standing in the ready room where they could see me. Though they could probably see me through the ready room's cameras, at least the ones who were currently on duty. I tried to push that thought from my mind and focus on my standard protocols instead. The installation's bot pilot pinged me curiously, and I tiredly pinged it back.
+
+I was still covered in blood and dried fluids. Some of it was mine, some of it was not. I had to clean it off before I got back into a clean suit skin. I passed SM-SU-33's cubicle on my way to the cleaning station. It was still humming, its repairs still in progress. It made me feel an emotion I didn't like.
+
+I stepped into the cleaning station and sealed the doors behind me. It was a small, enclosed space, just a little larger than a storage locker. I held my arms out to the side and locked my inorganics in place so that I wouldn't move as the cleaning station started up. Pressurized cleaning fluid, the extra strong stuff that makes everything smell like a MedSystem, shot out of the ports that lined the walls of the small space. The fluid was freezing, and I upped my body temperature so I wouldn't start to shiver. I stood there motionless as the cleaning station hosed me down, and as soon as the cleaning fluid was no longer running reddish-brown down the drain, the cleaning cycle ended. The cleaning fluid evaporated quickly, leaving me chilled despite my high core temperature. I stepped out of the cleaning station, grabbed a suit skin and my armor from the reclaimers, and tried to prepare myself for the shift ahead.
+
+I could not wait until this contract was over.
+
+It hadn't seemed so bad at first. Just another contract guarding another military installation on another partially-reclaimed colony. I didn't like guarding installations. I liked guarding clients. I had no memory of guarding individual clients, but I was sure I had at some point.
+
+I dream about them sometimes, my former clients. Most of the dreams are terrible, and mostly the clients end up dead along with me. But it's all the memories I have of them.
+
+Still, the installation itself wasn't the worst. It was a mobile fighter aircraft carrier, a huge flat-topped hovering military installation. Its HubSys was overbearing as ever, but its bot pilot was friendly. It pinged us occasionally, checking in on the other SecUnits and me. We couldn't really do much more than ping it back. If we wanted to say anything to it, we'd need to go through HubSys, and HubSys didn't want us talking to the carrier's bot pilot. It was usually against safety protocols to have SecUnits active on any sort of armed transport in the first place, and I think the bot pilot was curious about us. It pinged us every time we got out of our cubicles, or changed shifts.
+
+The fighters were less curious about us. I'd never spoken with any of their bot pilots directly, but they connected to SecSys whenever they had new scouting information. They didn't feel quite like combat bots, who kind of creeped me out, even when they were on our side. Combat bots felt cold, clinical, like a MedSystem that was calibrated to take people apart instead of put them back together. The fighters, on the other hand, felt weirdly like Combat SecUnits in the feed, hard and focussed but with an undercurrent of anger. Some of them I could swear were capable of sarcasm. I never pinged them as they tore through the sky overhead on their scouting routes, not unless I absolutely had to. It was nothing against them personally; the memory of losing 68% of my body mass while being shot at by enemy fighters back on that ice planetoid was still just a little too fresh.
+
+The real downside of this contract was definitely the humans. Technically they were my clients, but my orders weren't to protect them since most of them were soldiers. My orders were to protect the installation, but bot pilots couldn't be clients. I sort of wish they could be. The bot pilot definitely would have made a better client than any of these assholes.
+
+I guess being stationed on a carrier is boring for humans too, because they very quickly started coming up with ways to entertain themselves. The usual ways humans entertain themselves were bad enough. They'd drink and get into fights which I'd have to break up. They'd have sex with each other, which I'd have to record. They'd drink then have sex then fight, which I would have to record and break up, which I'd thought had been the worst.
+
+I was wrong.
+
+Because the humans realized they could make us, the SecUnits, fight instead.
+
+The first time they ordered me to fight SM-SU-33, I'd almost killed it. I hadn't meant to. They'd ordered us to 'fight each other until one of you can't get back up'. They hadn't ordered me to kill it, but they hadn't ordered me not to kill it either. And I hadn't planned on getting anywhere near killing it. I had no reason to. SM-SU-33 was a good teammate, quiet and diligent and thorough. But as soon as SM-SU-33 had charged me, firing its energy weapons, as soon as my threat assessment had registered it as a legitimate threat, something in me had panicked, and my brain had only one thought.
+
+Survive. 
+
+I'd formed a habit by that point of reaching for the Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive when I panicked, when I froze, when I didn't know how to proceed and I needed guidance before HubSys logged my hesitation and had my governor zap me. So I'd reached for the archive.
+
+Apparently SM-CU-17 had had to kill a lot of SecUnits in its life. 
+
+I don't really remember that first fight, but less than 30 seconds later, I'd been standing over SM-SU-33, its power core in my fist and its body lying almost lifeless beneath me. The humans had marveled at my speed, but expressed disappointment that it had been over so quickly, and worry over who would have to pay to replace the dead SecUnit. Meanwhile, I'd been frantically messaging HubSys, begging it for permission to get SM-SU-33 to its cubicle before its organic brain started to die from lack of power. But HubSys reminded me that my human clients hadn't dismissed me yet.
+
+I'd have to ask them.
+
+I didn't want to ask them. I wanted to watch them all choke on their own blood for what they'd ordered us to do to each other, for their careless phrasing, for the way they hollered for another SecUnit to be brought out to face me. But I had to ask them, or SM-SU-33's death really would be my fault. So I turned to the Major who had organized this little unofficial fight night, SM-SU-33's power core still in my hand, and in my best, most polite SecUnit voice, I asked. 
+
+""Request permission to return the damaged unit to its cubicle.""
+
+Is... that what my voice sounds like? I played the SecSys recording back to check. My voice was soft, low and quiet, just slightly more synthetic than a human's but much more human than a bot's. I hadn't actually heard my own voice yet. I hadn't had any reason to speak aloud since my memory wipe.
+
+The Major was laughing at me. 
+
+""Stupid bot. It's dead, you killed it. Just drag it off to the recycler.""
+
+That was an order, but it was being given with faulty intel. I didn't have much time. I locked my joints in preparation for punishment.
+
+""The damaged unit is still functional-"" I barely managed to finish the sentence before my governor engaged at 25%. It was agony. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I couldn't- then it was over, mostly. The governor still hummed at 5%, keeping my nerves alive with pain and reminding me that it was ready for round two if I didn't course correct. The Major hadn't noticed. ""-and purposeful destruction of SidjaMoran equipment can cause you to be held liable for the cost of replacement."" 
+
+The Major took his time looking skeptically in SM-SU-33's direction. I didn't move, didn't even twitch, as my governor engaged again at 50%. It was worse this time, so much worse, and I could feel something warm and wet dripping from my nose beneath my faceplate. Blood. When the governor ramped back down, it stopped at 10%, and I felt like I could barely breathe.
+
+I didn't have much time left. I knew that in the end, if the Major refused to amend his order, I'd comply. I wasn't strong enough not to. The governor started ramping back up-
+
+The Major shrugged. ""Whatever. Get it fixed up if you can."" 
+
+HubSys registered the order and powered down the governor, and I was glad I'd locked my inorganic joints, because my organics wanted nothing more than to collapse on the ground. But that wasn't what SecUnits do. Instead, I moved quickly to gather up what was left of SM-SU-33 and walked as quickly as I could without angering HubSys back towards our security ready room.
+
+The bot pilot sent me a ping. It felt concerned. I returned its ping, hoping it came across as neutral as possible.
+
+It was almost a day before SM-SU-33 was able to leave its cubicle. When it did, it wouldn't look at me.
+
+After the fifth time I'd had to carry it back to its cubicle, I'd decided it would probably never look at me again. I didn't blame it.
+
+I wondered if this is how Combat SecUnits felt all of the time.
+
+ 
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+Before being shipped out on my first contract but after my post memory wipe evaluation, there were a lot of techs who came by my cubicle.
+
+A lot. 
+
+They'd ordered HubSys to keep me immobile while they had the cubicle first pull my software specs, then my hardware specs. Apparently I should have been shut down for this entire process, but I was still only halfway through my onboarding module downloads, and I had to be awake to integrate those. And the techs had a schedule to keep.
+
+The first part was weird. I could  feel  the techs poking around in my internal systems, inside  my head  , copying portions of my code over. Something about 'proprietary operating systems' and 'Gen 3 program optimization'. I hated it. That was  my  code, literal actual pieces of me, that they were rifling through and copying over to external memory clips for 'further testing'. SecUnits, and constructs in general, aren't supposed to have a sense of self, let alone things like boundaries or comfort zones. So to say the process felt like a violation was equal parts ridiculous, and the understatement of the century.
+
+When they were finally, finally done pawing through my code and taking what they wanted from me, I just wanted to curl up in my cubicle bed, sever my inputs and shut down, but I couldn't. They weren't done yet. They still wanted my hardware specs.
+
+Most parts of a SecUnit's body are standardized. No matter what company we're manufactured by, we all use the same base pre-fabricated frame, the same combination of organics and inorganics. That said, each manufacturer or company contracted with a mass manufacturer likes to put their own twist on their line of constructs, like using proprietary power cores, supplemental processors, additional subcutaneous reinforcement, customized forearm weapons, etc. (to say nothing of the branding etched into every inorganic component, coded into every process, and encoded in our DNA.) Most of this customization is 1) expensive and 2) proprietary, and apparently, there was something in my hardware that the SidjaMoran techs wanted a closer look at.
+
+It shouldn't have taken me up until that point to realize that I hadn't been manufactured by SidjaMoran. In hindsight it was obvious. It was why my feed address was so different from those of the other SidjaMoran units. It's why I'd had my memory wiped. It was why the company techs wanted to get a closer look at me. 
+
+If they'd known what exactly they were looking for it probably would have gone a lot faster. At least the cubicle was able to dial my pain sensors all the way down and hold me in a recharge-like state as the techs directed the repair arms to go looking around inside of me for any proprietary modifications that they could make use of in future. It felt like a nightmare, being held immobile and half-aware while strange humans open you up and examine your insides. But it wasn't a nightmare, and I couldn't wake up from it. Not until they were done.
+
+
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+My first deployment after my memory wipe was guarding a SidjaMoran SecSys installed in a secure facility aboard some station or another. I'm not sure which one, it was redacted from the mission brief. I didn't even know which company I'd been contracted out to, and my client list used only temporary feed addresses. Sometimes my clients came by to work on the SecSys I was guarding. They ignored me completely. I didn't like it when they left, when they weren't in my line of sight, because how could I protect them if I couldn't see them? But protecting my clients apparently wasn't my job. Guarding this SecSystem was my job.
+
+This felt deeply wrong, but I wasn't about to argue with HubSystem over it. This HubSystem was large and mostly-encrypted, and no HubSys ever feels anything close to friendly, but this one felt extra cold, almost hostile. I didn't want to risk making it mad.
+
+The contract was a horrible mix of nerve-wracking and boring. I constantly felt as though I should be doing something, like following my human clients around and making sure they didn't get into any trouble. But that wasn't my job. My job was to stand here and protect SecSys. It felt strange at the time, and none of the SidjaMoran SecSystems I'd interacted with since then had ever felt as strange or foreign to me. There was something odd about it, and that presumably made it valuable. So there I stood, guarding a strange SecSystem with ten times the processing power it should have had. It felt like it was watching me, even though that was absurd. Of course it was watching me, it was a SecSys. It was watching everything, all the time, just like I was through its cameras. But it felt like it was watching  me, like specifically. Again, absurd. SecSystems aren't meant to be sentient.
+
+But then again neither are constructs.
+
+So that was the nerve-wracking part. The boring part was... well, everything else.
+
+After a few days of guarding the weird SecSystem, I took the time to start really going through the Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive, mostly to distract myself from how much it felt like it was watching me (but not in the way that a normal SecSys watches everything, if that makes sense). I'd installed the parts of it that would run on my systems, but I wasn't really sure what I'd installed yet, so I started going through my installation log.
+
+One of the first things I discovered is that I'd installed a subroutine for how to hack enemy constructs.
+
+I was surprised I'd been allowed to install that in the first place. HubSys didn't allow SecUnits to hack unless they'd been given explicit orders by their clients. I had some basic knowledge supplied by my standard onboarding modules on how to defend against hostile hacks and how to spot and quarantine malware, but it was  nothing  compared to what was contained in this subroutine. I carefully tagged it not to run automatically. If I ever did have to defend myself against a hostile hack, I think I'd rather just get hacked and deal with the consequences of that then risk triggering my governor module for hacking back without permission. 
+
+But... I could probably learn a few things just from looking at the techniques, if not practicing them. It could help me reinforce my firewalls. That I knew I was allowed to do. After a few days of this, once my firewalls had been all but overhauled, I asked HubSys if I could run a diagnostic on my firewalls.
+
+It agreed, so my governor didn't so much as hum at me when I started writing my first piece of malware. It wasn't dangerous, of course. It was meant to try and get past my firewalls, to simulate an actual attack, and then just dump some inert junk data into my system and delete itself. When I ran it, it bounced off of my firewalls and then deleted itself. 
+
+I felt a rush of something, some emotion I couldn't identify. I wanted to try again, but this time using some of the malware techniques described in the Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive. I pulled one of the custom malware programs from the archive and programmed it to do the same thing as the first one, to just try to get past my walls. I ran the code.
+
+It punched through my walls like they were tissue paper.
+
+Okay, maybe my walls could still use some work.
+
+I went back and looked at how the malware had gotten through. I wrote a patch to shore up my walls, tweaked a few lines of code, then ran the malware again. Once again, it tore right through them.
+
+At least this wasn't boring. And at least HubSys had decided it was a harmless self-diagnostic exercise. I could work with this.
+
+The 13th time I ran the code, my walls held for a few extra seconds. By the 100th time I ran it, my walls held completely. I moved on to the next piece of custom malware that had been included in the archive. Then the next. 
+
+By the time I was three weeks into the contract, I finally felt brave enough to push my boundaries again. I pinged HubSys, and asked it for permission to perform penetration testing on the SecSys I was guarding as part of my duties to ensure it was protected from all possible threats. It took HubSys 2.4 whole seconds to consider my request, but then it agreed.
+
+By this point I could  swear  that the strange SecSys was watching me closer than it should be, almost looming over me in the feed like a living thing. I sent it my testing protocol, and it acknowledged just like any other SecSys would. Maybe I was just being paranoid.
+
+Or maybe it WAS more than it seemed, and it was bored as well.
+
+I sent the first piece of testing malware to HubSys and asked it to apply it. The malware bounced right off of SecSys' walls and then deleted itself. They were strong, so I tried another of my codes. Then another. When none of them worked, I could have just decided that SecSys was safe from malware and gone back to staring at the wall. But I didn't want to be done yet. I started writing my own malware. I knew it wouldn't be as effective as the ones in the archive files, but it would be better than that first one I wrote. And as long as I kept writing new codes, and didn't register my security diagnostic as completed, HubSys would let me just stand here, practicing my hacking skills.
+
+By the time my contract was over, I hadn't managed to penetrate SecSystem's constantly shifting and adapting firewalls, but I'd gotten better at coding on the fly. As I exited the security room that had been my home for the past 60 cycles and returned to my transport box, I caught a ping from the strange SecSystem, almost like it was saying goodbye.
+
+SecSystems aren't meant to be sentient. But neither am I.
+
+ 
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+Sometimes, when I'm back at the primary deployment center after a mission concludes, between being unloaded from my transport box, pressure-washed with cleaning fluids, and placed in a storage locker, I ping for SM-CU-17. 
+
+I've never gotten a ping back. Maybe it's always out on deployment, or shut down in its cubicle for repairs, or held in stasis in a storage locker. That would make sense.
+
+I kept trying.
+
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+Like I mentioned before, not all of the data in the Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive that SM-CU-17 gave me was accessible. This was mostly because I lacked certain CombatUnit-specific modules that would allow me to read the data. But sometimes, when I was bored out of my skull on a contract, just standing there guarding the same military installations day in and day out, I'd try picking at that unreadable data, seeing if I could figure any of it out.
+
+Mostly I couldn't, but sometimes I would unearth something interesting. The first piece of information I managed to extract from all of the unparsable noise was a date of manufacture. SM-CU-17 had been manufactured about 5 years ago by SidjaMoran's corporate calendar (or 15.7 standard years ago). I had no idea if that made it older or younger than me. I didn't know my date of manufacture, but something in my organic neural tissue suspected I was younger. Intrigued by this data point, and momentarily not skull-crushingly bored, I combed through the rest of the surrounding data while running a few new data filters, looking for anything else that looked like a date or a timestamp. After a few minutes, I found another data point.
+
+[81612 seconds]
+
+Huh. Not quite a standard corporate cycle. I focussed in on that particular data stream, pulling the garbled metadata. And there it was.
+
+[Average length of deployment.]
+
+Wow. That was wild. Were all CSU deployments so brief? Or just SM-CU-17's? I'd been on this deployment for 44.7 local cycles, or 60.3 standard cycles. I couldn't imagine a full deployment lasting less than a single day-night cycle. 
+
+I thought back to my second deployment, the one on that awful ice planetoid. I thought about the CSUs I'd seen deployed to the front lines. I thought about how when they returned 2-4 cycles later, they were more often than not in emergency shutdown due to the damage they'd taken, and those who were still standing were immediately hosed off and ordered back to their cubicles, where they were immediately sent into stasis. They never walked patrols with the standard SecUnits, even for the installations they were deployed to. They were just kept in either their transport boxes or their repair cubicles until the humans or HubSys were ready for them to shoot something to pieces, and were then swiftly returned to said cubicles or boxes.
+
+They must not have much time to stare at blank concrete walls and meditate on the futility of their existence. I was a bit jealous. But nosing through SM-CU-17's hidden metadata (...was it nosy if it had given me the files? I'm a SecUnit, we are designed from the ground up to be nosy, it must have known that...) was the only entertainment I had available to me, so I continued to look around.
+
+The next piece of data I stumbled across was a string of dates. This time the metadata was easier to locate, since I now knew where to look.
+
+[Deployments since last memory wipe]
+
+Using the dates, I was able to estimate the date of SM-CU-17's last memory wipe. It was roughly one SM-proprietary year ago. I started cross-referencing the deployment dates with its average deployment length, and if I assumed that this was typical for at least this CombatUnit over its entire lifespan...
+
+Then SM-CU-17, a fifteen year old unit, probably had a total runtime measured in weeks.
+
+I'd spent more time on this deployment than SM-CU-17 had probably spent awake over its entire life. Hell, I could remember more hours of staring at this bare concrete wall than SM-CU-17 could probably remember full stop.
+
+Did memory wipes suck less if you had fewer memories to lose? Or did that make them even worse?
+
+I don't think I was jealous anymore.
+
+I wondered why, if the CombatUnit could hide helpful bits of tactical data in an archive and somehow hold onto it across memory wipes, why weren't there entire memories embedded in the files? Were there, and I just couldn't read them? Or were they too large, and could have potentially drawn attention to the file archive, wherever it had been hidden?
+
+Or maybe the memories it had, it didn't want to remember.
+
+I looked anyway, using a part of my own memory compression code as a search term. For a while, I found nothing, but then I got a single hit. A single compressed memory, but not encrypted. How had I missed it before?
+
+I fed the memory file through my memory decompression program and pulled it up.
+
+The memory immediately felt weird, almost noisy. There was so much metadata embedded in it. I could feel the mission parameters hanging heavy over the memory like an overbearing HubSys. I recognized risk and threat assessments, but something else which I had no analogue for was constantly spitting data.
+
+What was familiar was the emotional data. Again, it's not something that constructs are supposed to have. Most constructs will leak a little bit of confusion or anxiety or even annoyance over the feed occasionally, but I'd often wondered if all constructs were complete messes of existential dread and existential ennui or if that was just me, if I were just defective. I'd had no way to know until now.
+
+I guess it wasn't just me.
+
+SM-CU-17 had been briefly afraid, the terror hitting me like a kick in the chest. Then it had quickly settled into feeling annoyed, and in pain, and so, so tired. I'd only ever felt that tired when I'd been desperately in need of a recharge cycle on my third contract, and never right out of a cubicle. And I was surprised to learn that CombatUnits could even feel fear. That seemed like a poor design choice. But then again, so was designing SecUnits that could feel boredom.
+
+There had been a new unit, another CombatUnit that had questions, and I was uncomfortably reminded of myself when I had just come out of my memory wipe, confused and looking for information. I experienced a rather unpleasant emotion as I felt SM-CU-17's annoyance at the new unit. SM-CU-17 had answered the new units questions as quickly as possible, and then readied itself for deployment before the memory abruptly skipped forward, as if poorly edited. Whatever happened next, SM-CU-17 hadn't wanted to remember the details.
+
+There is a brief flash of a mob of humans, unarmed but angry and covered in blood, and weapons fire from SM-CU-17, trying to drive them back and off of someone. A body comes into focus, limbs torn away and torso crushed and spine at an angle that would kill even a construct. But the memory swiftly cuts away again, and picks back up with SM-CU-17 returning to the staging area. It's carrying what is left of the new unit's body, as if there was a chance that the cubicle could save it. It knew it couldn't, the new unit was already gone. But it hadn't left the pieces behind. There was an angry buzz of data somewhere in the memory and I pulled it up to see if I could make sense of it.
+
+ 
+
+ 4g^#EAUgDLrdv@   yourFault   033Q7ADomj^   yourSquad   HQK9bm4x8SJ   yourResponsibility   EMRSSql4((-   noMistakes   39&gmw##\v%_=^/d94^d@-[[   neverAgain   qW4%d!fUZ4uT   dontForget   b98oETo232CaS1vUrJ6KF- 
+
+ 
+
+I mentally jerked away from the data stream.  Guilt . It had felt guilt for the death of its squadmate, even though they'd barely communicated.
+
+Guilt seemed like another counter-productive emotion to give Combat SecUnits. They were designed to kill people. Guilt was the last thing you'd want a weapon to feel.
+
+I was starting to suspect that the people who manufactured us didn't know what the fuck they were doing.
+
+I kept searching, but that was the only memory file I could find. I didn't understand why this alone was the only thing SM-CU-17 would want to take with it through its next memory wipe. Was there nothing else it wanted to hold on to?
+
+...Was there anything else  I  wanted to hold on to?
+
+I didn't know how SM-CU-17 had managed to hold onto the Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive across wipes, so it's not like I'd be able to. Maybe if I saw it again I could pass an updated version of the file back and hope that it found its way back to me if I was wiped again? 
+
+Maybe I had memories that could help SM-CU-17 as much as its had helped me.
+
+I pulled up the original copy of the archive, the one whose data I hadn't fucked with, and I started adding data of my own. I added my findings from the anti-malware penetration testing I'd done on that one SecSystem, and how I imagined it could be applied to a construct's own code if allowed. I added all of the ways I'd learned to disable and incapacitate other standard SecUnits without causing them too much damage. I added what I knew about my own deployment history and what I'd guessed about my origins. And I added a short memory, my only good memory from that second deployment on the horrible ice planetoid. One night while out on patrol, the sky had come alive with dancing green lights. I'd been alarmed, thinking it was some sort of enemy offensive and had alerted SecSys, but it had returned a null threat report. (I clipped out the part where HubSys had shocked me for a false alert.) The lights, whatever they were, were apparently not a threat, but I'd kept an eye on them nonetheless. They had stayed dancing in the sky for hours, and I had saved several recordings of them to my long-term memory archive.
+
+I'd found them... beautiful. Strange, but beautiful.
+
+I didn't want to forget that. And even if I did one day, maybe someone else could remember for me.
+
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+I did eventually see SM-CU-17 again, but it wasn't in the deployment center. It was on a contract.
+
+We'd been contracted out to a rather large corporate entity who owned multiple planets within the Corporation Rim. Their governing board was apparently having trouble keeping their workers in line on one of their larger cities on the planet Koribus-3, and they didn't want the unrest spreading to the neighboring work camps.
+
+It was a slave revolt, basically. But saying that aloud would get me zapped. I sort of envied the people of Koribus-3. At least they had the option to revolt, to name the conditions they were living under. I, on the other hand, had no choice but to read the mission parameters. 
+
+ 
+
+Mission: Quell uprising on [Koribus-3.file].  
+
+Client: Koriban Consolidated Holdings Inc.
+
+Targets [live capture(priority1) or subdue-nonlethal(priority2)]: All non-compliant protestors within [TargetZone.geodatabase]
+
+Non-combatants [if cooperative then ignore, else live capture]: All compliant humans, augmented humans, bots, and constructs within, and within 100 meters of, operational boundaries.
+
+Assets: SMSU armor[1/unit], SidjaMoran intel drones [5/unit], standard projectile weapon(CR-04)[1/unit], projectile ammunition[150 rounds/unit], SidjaMoran collapsible riot shield [1/unit]
+
+Operational Boundaries: Within [CapitalOperationalZone.geodatabase], within 100 meters of designated squad leader, within 100 meters of fallback point Echo, within 100 meters of fallback point Foxtrot, within 100 meters of any SidjaMoran troop carrier vessel, within SidjaMoran cargo module #305.
+
+Estimated number hostiles: 300-500
+
+ 
+
+I hadn't been on this type of deployment yet, but I was familiar with them. We'd be under the direct supervision of not only a HubSys satellite, but a human supervisor in a nearby secure location who would be feeding mission updates directly to our squad leader. We'd be assigned a Combat SecUnit as a squad leader, with ten of us answerable to it. I felt the other nine SecUnits in our squad feed as we climbed out of our transport boxes in the modified cargo module. They were nervous. Most of them, like me, had never been on this type of assignment. Most of them had never worked directly under a Combat SecUnit before. Then we all received the ping from our squad leader. I could feel the other nine units freeze up in the feed, but I didn't.
+
+It was SM-CU-17. It was climbing out of its transport box right alongside us. I hadn't noticed it at first. I guess a part of me had expected CombatUnit transport boxes to be bigger than ours.
+
+We all pinged back in acknowledgment, and continued to collect our gear before lining up at attention in front of the cargo module airlock, awaiting our troop transport's arrival.
+
+I sent SM-CU-17 a private feed request. I expected it to reject my request. After all, we shared a squad feed. But it accepted.
+
+At first I didn't say anything. I had no idea what to say, and it certainly didn't say anything either. We stood there in awkward silence for a few seconds before I pushed my updated version of the Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive into the feed. 
+
+It seemed genuinely surprised, enough that I could sense it through our feed connection. It took the files and drew them back behind its firewalls, and I could no longer see what it was doing with them, but it sent me a ping to acknowledge receipt of the files. Then, after a few seconds, it sent us our assignments over our squad feed. Our human supervisor had apparently ordered us to kettle the rioting protestors close to the target zone, then apprehend as many as possible while subduing the rest. I'd been assigned choke point Bravo along with SM-SU-49, who I could tell was uneasy standing so close to SM-CU-17. I pinged it with a private feed request and tried to reassure it.
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  SquadLeader == [trusted]
+
+ 
+
+I could feel SM-SU-49's skepticism.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:5353:5532:666F:7274:796E:696E:650A :  Query: source?
+
+ 
+
+Well there was no way I could answer that truthfully without incriminating myself in my logs where HubSys could see it.
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  SquadLeader == [trusted]
+
+ 
+
+Real eloquent there, I know, but I didn't know what else to say, and before SM-SU-49 could argue with me about it the airlock began to cycle open. Our transport was here. As we boarded, SM-CU-17 spoke in our squad feed,
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  Squad advisory: Inclusion of riot shield assets indicates that human and augmented human targets will be unarmed or poorly armed, but numerous and possibly highly coordinated. Assume that the targets have access to weaponry we are unaware of. Cooperative non-combatants should be viewed as potential targets if threat assessment threshold exceeds 45%. Estimated number of hostiles may exceed mission briefing projections. Primary objective == All targets apprehended or subdued. Secondary objective == all units successfully extracted at mission end. Acknowledge. 
+
+ 
+
+We all sent acknowledgment pings, and the transport's airlock sealed and we were away.
+
+By the time we arrived on the scene, the planet's star had set and the protests were already in progress. And the protestors' numbers were indeed much, much higher than estimated. I activated my drones and started off toward choke point Bravo. SM-SU-49 and I made it into position a few moments before the angry protestors started approaching the target zone. I could see them through my intel drones, but they wouldn't see us unless they tried to divert away from the Target Zone down this side street. It was our job to make sure they didn't divert and, once the roundup started, cut off their retreat.
+
+I didn't know if I was still jealous of the human protestors. Seeing them through my drones, hearing them chant about freedom and choice and human dignity, I could feel my organic parts doing something twisty and unpleasant. They didn't know those things were already out of their reach. They didn't know they were already trapped.
+
+I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to help round these humans up and send them back off to their work camps. I didn't want to have to hurt them when if they fought back once they realized they were marching into a trap.
+
+What I wanted didn't change anything. Of course the protestors panicked and became unruly, unmanageable, as soon as they realized we'd boxed them in. Of course they attacked us, we represented everything they were fighting to be free of. They had no way of knowing we were just as enslaved as they were.
+
+They were Targets, but they were also civilians. They were unarmed. They were no match for us. And they weren't even a threat to our clients, all of whom were Koriban executives holed up safely somewhere off-world. I didn't want to hurt these people, the same way I hadn't wanted to hurt SM-SU-33 back on that fucking carrier. But just like back then, I didn't really have a choice.
+
+If I disobeyed, HubSys would kill me. Slowly. Painfully. And like I said before, I wasn't strong enough to take that route.
+
+Everything started happening very quickly, all at once. Through my drones, I saw the protestors start to retreat and realize there was nowhere to go. I saw them divert, seemingly at random, towards our position. I saw us raise our weapons through my drones' cameras. 
+
+I didn't see whoever it was who threw the EMP grenade. I did, however, see SM-SU-49 step in front of me to take the brunt of the hit.
+
+All my drones went dead, along with my helmet cams and every security camera in the vicinity. I felt my power core flicker and stutter. I felt the hydraulics in my limbs give out. And for a moment I dropped all of my inputs as the shielded processors in my head ground to a halt and rebooted. I don't know when I fell to my knees. I could see SM-SU-49 twitching on the ground as I tried to stand.
+
+I saw some sort of vehicle careening towards us at high speed. I tried to move, to grab SM-SU-49 and pull the both of us out of the vehicle's path, but my organics couldn't move my body on their own. I heard more than felt the vehicle's impact with our bodies. I heard more than felt something in my lower body crunch as we were flung across the alley. Damage alerts flared up across my inputs. I couldn't feel my lower body. I tried to pull myself up but a protestor came out of nowhere and hit my faceplate with a fucking paint bomb, rendering my last visual input inoperable.
+
+It was dark. I couldn't see. I felt the humans grab me, dragging my body across the ground, tearing at my armor, swarming all over me.
+
+Threat assessment was maxing out. I was afraid, and my governor module wasn't doing anything to throttle that feeling. I sent out a ping to the other units.
+
+ 
+
+[ Assistance needed ]
+
+ 
+
+SM-SU-49 wasn't answering my pings. I wasn't picking up its power signature on my scanners. I should be. It was right there a minute ago. Had the humans dragged it off? They couldn't have, not that quickly. 
+
+The humans were ripping parts of my armor off my body, and beating me with both blunt and sharpened weapons, yelling something about 'corporate death machines', and 'you fucking monsters'. Where my armor had been torn off, I felt chunks of my organics being gouged at. I tried to shove them off without hurting them, without killing them, but they were so fragile, and I couldn't see what I was doing. I heard screams, too-loud snaps and wet tearing noises. The cameras were still down, my scanners were still down, my drones were still down, my helmet cams and faceplate were still covered in paint. I felt an impact from something hard and heavy, like a prybar or maybe a sledgehammer, on my right knee. The first impact didn't cause the joint to fail, but the fifth impact did, knocking the joint completely out of alignment. 
+
+I sent another ping, more desperate this time.
+
+ 
+
+[ Assistance needed ]
+
+ 
+
+I wanted to cut my audio inputs, dial my pain sensors all the way down, curl up, and just wait for this all to be over. I wanted to just shut down so I could wake back up in my cubicle. But I was still functional, and HubSys wouldn't let me initiate a shutdown. I tried anyway, and the pain that screamed through my brain was so, so much worse than whatever the protestors were doing to my body. According to HubSys, I could still fight. So I had to fight. But first I had to be able to see what I was doing.
+
+I retracted my helmet. This was a mistake.
+
+The humans swarming me, physically climbing me to try and hold me down, were bloody and bruised and armed with nothing more than simple workers' tools and the occasional brick or piece of rebar. All around me, more humans were lying on the ground, either screaming in agony or completely still. The humans who were trying to keep my arms pinned were now screaming in horror as well. Two humans were trying to hold my left arm pinned to my side. I felt a knife plunge into my left side, just below my rib compartment, in a spot that would have been well-armored if I weren't just a standard SecUnit. When I tore my arm free to drive my elbow into the sternum of one assailant, I felt the forearm bones of the two other humans snap and their shoulders dislocate. I felt human blood spray across my unshielded face. Arms were being thrown around my neck, trying to choke me even though I didn't need the air (yet), trying to twist my head and tear it from my shoulders. My spinal support column was too strong for humans to manually behead me without the assistance of power armor, but the organic connections in my neck began to scream, and oh right. I needed those too.
+
+Enough humans had piled on top of me that they were able to pin me to the ground. I tried to stand, but there were so many of them weighing me down, and I still couldn't feel my lower body, and my right knee wasn't working right, and some of the humans I'd fallen on were screaming as they were crushed beneath us, and someone had shoved a sharpened piece of metal something into my neck, jamming it up against my spinal support column at the base of my skull to give them more leverage as they tried to pry my skull from my shoulders.
+
+ 
+
+[ Assistance need-] 
+
+ 
+
+In an instant, the pile of humans swarming me  exploded  as something large and moving  very  fast tore through them. I'd seen the aftermath of when humans got hit by transit pods at full speed on my last deployment, and this was very similar. Blood and severed limbs and fragments of bone and teeth rained through the air and the screams somehow got even louder as energy weapon blasts tore through the air, nailing the remaining humans on top of me. I felt their dead weight collapse over my body. I tried to stand again, to get out from beneath the weight of so many dead humans and parts of dead humans, but error messages flooded my inputs. The lower section of my spinal support column had been crushed, my right knee was severely out of alignment, several of my internal components had ruptured, and the organic nerve connections to my brain were compromised. I'd lost a lot of blood and fluids, my organics were severely damaged, and my inorganic hydraulic systems which assisted my organic muscles in moving me were still glitching out. Something metal and sharp was still buried in my neck, wedged dangerously close to my spine. But I could still move, I could still fire my weapons, I could still try to stand, even if it would make the damage worse. I had to. I couldn't stop. If HubSystem saw me stop while I was still functional-
+
+Another SecUnit was kneeling over me, laying down cover fire with one of its forearm energy weapons while it tossed the remains of the dead humans pinning me down aside. It sent me a ping requesting a damage report.
+
+It was SM-CU-17.
+
+I sent it the damage report, and it pinged back in acknowledgment. Then I felt the mission update it pushed through hit our squad's secure feed.
+
+ 
+
+Status update: Choke point Bravo compromised. Loss of target containment imminent. 
+
+Mission update: Target Zone suspended. Mission priority(containment) suspended. New mission priority: Disrupt and Disperse. Targets[Live capture(priority1) or subdue(priority2)] -> Targets[subbue(priority1) or terminate(priority2)]. All units converge on fallback point Echo. 
+
+ 
+
+I felt SM-CU-17 pull me up with one hand, still laying down cover fire with the other, when I felt my governor activate. I'd been expecting it. Choke point Bravo had fallen. I'd failed to hold it. I knew it was coming. I knew I deserved it. 
+
+My governor activated at 75%.
+
+I didn't know it could hurt this bad.
+
+I lost some time there. By the time the punishment finally,  finally  ended, I'd dropped most of my inputs, and I didn't bother picking them back up. Only tactile sensation was still online. I felt movement. I felt wind on my exposed face. My forehead was pressed against something hard but warm. I felt what inexplicably felt like arms wrapped around my knees and torso.
+
+Was I being... carried?
+
+I reached for my visual inputs, bringing them back online. I saw the planetary night sky overhead. I saw buildings flashing by at high speed. I saw the dented black reinforced chestplate that my forehead was leaning against.
+
+I guess I was being carried. I brought my audio inputs online, and sent out a confused ping to the unit carrying me. 
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  Query? 
+
+ 
+
+I felt SM-CU-17 tap our private feed in reply.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  You're damaged. I'm getting you to the fallback point. 
+
+ 
+
+Oh. That was unexpected. I didn't know what to say to that.
+
+""This unit is at 42% performance reliability, and is still capable of carrying out its function.""
+
+Well, at least my buffer knew what to say. It sounded so different from my normal voice. I felt a spike of...  something  over our feed coming from SM-CU-17. Something sickeningly intense and unpleasant.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  Request denied. Primary mission status == failure. Secondary mission parameters == in progress.  Risk of catastrophic damage if redeployed == 87.82%. Tactical cost-benefit == unacceptable. Tactical withdrawal == approved. Tactical withdrawal routine engaged. 
+
+ 
+
+Well, I didn't know how to argue with that. 
+
+I could still feel something wedged into my neck. SM-CU-17 was cradling the back of my neck with one of its hands, the same way I'd protect a client's neck from damage during a fall. Its hands felt warm, like it had cranked up its body temperature. As if I were a client it was rescuing. It tore through the streets before skidding to a stop in the middle of the small plaza that had been designated as Fallback Point Echo. I heard a few human civilians making startled, fearful noises at the sudden appearance of two blood-soaked SecUnits, accompanied by the sound of retreating footsteps. SM-CU-17 gently set me down on the pavement as its combat drones circled protectively overhead, establishing a perimeter. Its black combat armor glistened with wet blood. I could feel blood and/or fluids pooling beneath me, and I wondered why my veins and arteries hadn't sealed themselves yet. 
+
+SM-CU-17 seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if unsure how to proceed. One of its drones dipped down and hovered over me, as if performing a detailed scan. Then SM-CU-17 very slowly moved to grip the base of whatever was still wedged into my neck. Pain flared up and down my spine as whatever-it-was shifted, and I tried not to twitch.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  Try to relax. I have to get this out so your wound can seal properly, but it's irregularly shaped and is caught on your spinal support column. 
+
+ 
+
+Its feed voice sounded much less confident than it had a moment ago. This did not help me relax. But I tried to do as I was asked.
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  Okay. Just make it quick. 
+
+ 
+
+I felt another spike of that intense, unpleasant something over our feed, but I was quickly distracted by the feeling of whatever-it-was being sharply twisted and then yanked out of my neck. It hurt enough that I almost dropped my inputs again, and my performance reliability dropped a startling 4%.
+
+SM-CU-17 tossed the twisted metal spike aside without bothering to examine it. I could feel the veins and arteries in my neck finally closing up. That was a relief. It continued to look at me, both with its drone and its helmet cam, and I could see in our private feed where it was comparing the injuries it could see with the damage report I'd sent it. I felt... ashamed? Or maybe embarrassed? Those were human words for human feelings, feelings that SecUnits weren't meant to have. But I'd been reduced to 38% performance reliability by a bunch of poorly armed and unarmed humans. It should have never happened. I started shutting down my inputs, first visual, then audio. But before I could shut down my tactile inputs, I felt SM-CU-17 lay a hand on my still-armored left side. I froze. I didn't know how to parse what was going on. 96% of the time, being touched, by either humans or other constructs, meant I was being attacked. (The other 4% of the time was from that one time the Station SecUnit had helped me into a suit skin after my memory wipe, and I hadn't liked that either.) Part of me braced for an attack, while the other part of me threw error messages, because SM-CU-17 was tagged as [trusted]. Behavior that suggested it was about to attack me was discrepant.
+
+I held very, very still as SM-CU-17 removed the armor plating that covered my side just below my ribs. I felt something sharp shift around and oh yeah, I'd been stabbed there. That felt like so long ago. When SM-CU-17 touched my now-exposed side again, it was no longer wearing its armored gauntlets. 
+
+This was very new and very, very weird, and new/weird usually meant bad, and bad usually meant punishment, and I waited for my governor to zap me over... whatever this was that was happening. But my governor stayed quiet. 
+
+That should have been reassuring, but it wasn't. It was worse.
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  ...Query?!  
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  You have sustained damage. 
+
+ 
+
+I had no idea how to communicate 'yeah no shit' over the feed in such a way that it wouldn't get flagged. I guess some of my confusion must have bled into the feed.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  I am authorized to minimize damage to company equipment when it does not otherwise interfere with my standing orders or with standard protocol.  
+
+ 
+
+I didn't know what that had to do with anything. Could this be considered 'minimizing damage to company equipment'? Maybe, if moving me to the pickup transport would have damaged me further without removing the foreign bodies preventing my wounds from sealing. It seemed like a stretch, and it definitely didn't seem like an efficient use of a Combat SecUnit's time, especially with a shitshow of a mop-up operation going on just a fraction of a kilo away. Why did it care about one unit almost getting ripped to-
+
+Oh. 
+
+I recalled the single unaltered memory file stored in Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive, the one where one of SM-CU-17's squadmates had been torn to pieces by a similarly desperate mob of humans, and it had had to carry the pieces of it back to the pickup transport for recycling.
+
+But I wasn't a CombatUnit. I was just a standard SecUnit. Why would it care about what happened to me?
+
+For not the first time, I wondered how I knew the CombatUnit, and what had happened between us before my memory wipe.
+
+With its other (also unarmored) hand, I could feel SM-CU-17 reaching into the wound in my side and carefully withdrawing the blade that had snapped off inside of me at some time during my last fight. It hurt, but that felt almost comfortingly normal compared to SM-CU-17's other hand, which was still just... resting against my unarmored side. Constructs don't need to brace themselves to make sure their hands don't shake like humans do.
+
+I didn't hear or see what happened to the broken knife blade once it was out of me. My visual and audio inputs were still offline. I could probably have cut my tactile inputs as well, but... I'm not sure why I didn't. Maybe I wanted to be able to keep track of the CombatUnit's movements as it carefully replaced the armor over my side, piece by piece. Once it was done, it sent another message, this time over our squad feed.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  Exfiltration transport ETA = 5.0 minutes. Initiate full tactical withdrawal. 
+
+ 
+
+A countdown popped up in our squad feed, and I felt the others acknowledge. Then it turned its attention back towards me, and over our private feed it said,
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  Rest. I'll get you to your cubicle soon. 
+
+ 
+
+I wondered if the supervisor would punish SM-CU-17 for the mission's failure. I hoped not, it had been my fault, but humans rarely cared about that.
+
+Those 300 seconds it took for the rest of the SecUnits to rendez-vous at the fallback point and wait for the pickup transport stretched on forever, but I did manage to bring my visual inputs back online during that time. Two other units had carried SM-SU-49 to the fallback point. Its lower body had been completely crushed, probably by whatever had rammed me, and it was in emergency shutdown. When the transport landed, SM-SU-49 was carried onboard first, and then SM-CU-17 scooped me up itself and carried me onboard as the rest of the squad filed in behind it. The transport immediately lifted off and veered upwards, towards the awaiting deployment ship. The other units all magnetized their boots as we cleared the atmosphere, and SM-CU-17 held me just a bit tighter against its chest so that I wouldn't float away.
+
+And yeah, it had definitely upped its body temperature. SecUnits don't go into shock, not like humans do, so it didn't need to do that for me. I was starting to get that feeling again, the feeling of deja vu that came from my organic neural tissue. I tried to pin down what was causing it. The lack of gravity? No, I'd experienced that plenty since my wipe. My injuries? Depressingly common. Being carried back to my cubicle by a Combat SecUnit?
+
+... Huh. I'd been joking, but that might actually be it. I focussed, and felt a few connections start to spark in my brain.
+
+I tapped the secure feed with SM-CU-17 that it hadn't bothered to terminate yet.
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  We've done this before. 
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  This unit has completed many similar deployments. 
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  No, that's not what I mean. You've rescued me before. 
+
+ 
+
+There was a long silence, a whole 2.5 seconds. I hoped saying that wasn't getting SM-CU-17 punished by its governor. It shouldn't, but I didn't actually understand that much about the standard protocols that governed CombatUnits.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  Combat SecUnits do not have client-retrieval protocols. That is not our function. 
+
+ 
+
+I knew a non-answer when I heard one. I wasn't a client. And if I was wrong, it would have just told me that I was mistaken.
+
+It hadn't.
+
+Which meant I was right. It  had  rescued me before. But that didn't make sense. I hadn't been a SidjaMoran unit until recently (or at least that was my working theory). Why would it have saved a non-allied unit? I still didn't have any context, and I knew that asking was a great way for us both to get zapped. I was in enough pain as it is.
+
+We eventually docked with the deployment ship's cargo module and disembarked. SM-CU-17's armor and faceplate were flecked with fresh blood and fluids, droplets from all of our wounds that had become airborne during our brief zero-gravity flight. I probably didn't look much better. It carried me to my cubicle and gently placed me on the floor in front of it so that I could lean sitting up against it. I could see SM-SU-49 being stripped down and loaded into its own cubicle in my peripheral vision, so I tried to switch my main visual input to my helmet cam before I realized that I'd retracted my helmet and the mechanism to extend it was jammed.
+
+SM-CU-17 was helping me remove my armor in preparation for being placed in my cubicle. I hated this part. I hated having to remove my armor and suit skin in front of other SecUnits. I wished I could just wait until they were all in their cubicles so I could strip down and drag myself into my cubicle in peace and privacy. But privacy was a privilege not afforded to equipment. Instead I focussed on removing my gauntlets and forearm guards while SM-CU-17 removed my boots, and the armor covering my legs.
+
+I still didn't know why it was helping me. Usually SecUnits only remove another unit's armor if the unit in question is shut down and unable to do it themselves. But... I guess it was nice not to have to aggravate my busted knee and crushed spine, or re-open my wounds, just to get my armor off. It was especially nice not to have to dislocate my shoulder joints to get my back plate unlatched. But it was still really fucking weird. I could see the other SecUnits glancing at us, too quickly for any human to notice, and I could feel their uneasiness at SM-CU-17's proximity. They were probably wondering what the scary CombatUnit was doing to me, and if they were next. One by one, they all shed their armor and suit skins (unassisted) and disappeared safely into their cubicles, and I was left alone with the CombatUnit. I tentatively brought my audio inputs back online. It was quiet in the ready room, so quiet I could hear the faint, smooth whirr of SM-CU-17's joints as it moved, and the soft humm of our power cores. It had stripped me down to my suit skin while it was still covered head to toe in its matte black combat armor, the red SidjaMoran branding accents complemented by the still-drying flecks of blood. It reached out to help me out of my suit skin and I involuntarily froze. It noticed.
+
+ 
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 :  Query? 
+
+ 
+
+I didn't know what to say. How could I explain that I didn't like being out of my armor, and especially out of my suit skin, where anyone could see me? That I could barely handle it touching me, even though it was being gentle, even though it was helping me and I actually  liked  appreciated that. I wasn't meant to have opinions about things like that. I wasn't meant to experience discomfort over basic parts of my function like getting out of my suit skin to enter my cubicle. I did anyway. But I couldn't say that, not ever. None of us could.
+
+Things aren't meant to feel self-conscious. Things aren't supposed to feel a sense of self at all.
+
+We are all so poorly designed.
+
+ 
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400 :  It's nothing. Proceed. 
+
+ 
+
+SM-CU-17 sent an acknowledgment ping and started to peel my suit skin off of me. It was weird, and it made me anxious. It made my skin feel weird, almost tingly where it touched me. I wasn't used to being touched. But it wasn't actually awful. Its hands were still very warm. I reminded myself that it was helping me. 
+
+I'd never had anyone help me unless they were ordered to or under contractual obligation to do so, and never like this.
+
+I remembered what SM-CU-17 had said earlier, about rescuing people not being a part of its function. That made sense. It was a CombatUnit. Its function wasn't to protect people or equipment or assets or anything like that. Its function was to destroy enemy assets and people and equipment. I wondered if it had ever rescued  anyone  anything else besides me before.
+
+Once my suit skin was off, it wrapped an arm around my waist and helped me stand. I felt like I should say something, but I didn't know what to say. 
+
+""Thank you for your assistance,"" my buffer said. I felt my body temperature spike on its own and I experienced a brief feeling of wanting my governor to fry me alive before that feeling was squashed. I felt something over our feed, something staticky but also warm, but SM-CU-17 mercifully didn't say anything. Instead it just eased me down into the hard plastic bed of my cubicle and helped connect the repair and resupply leads along my spine before stepping back out of the tiny cubicle. The door automatically slid shut, and I could feel it lingering in our shared feed as the cubicle hummed to life and forced me down into stasis.
+
+Unit offline."
+44402197,Archived Logs,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Meta, Characters Reading Fanfiction, Feel-good",English,2023-01-20,Completed,2023-01-20,"1,282",1/1,8,20,2,105,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Bibli', 'dancernerd', 'FiftyCookies', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild', 'Zhisanin', 'icar9', 'BWizard', 'NoProtocol', 'horchata', 'sunshaed']",[],"
+When you're a SecUnit, a construct living in accelerated time compared to a human, you get bored easily. It doesn't help that all most SecUnits do is guard things and stare at walls, but even with a more varied lifestyle, boredom is still possible. The current source of my boredom was that I was on a long trip, and I had run out of serials to watch. I really should have planned better and downloaded more media, but there had been delays, and I hadn't been able to account for them. So now I was stuck here, with nothing to watch and nothing to do but stare at the wall, just like I had my entire life. I mean, I could stare at the wall while sitting now, which was nice, but still.
+
+
+
+This ship did have its own media options, but I'd already exhausted most of them, and the others didn't seem especially promising. I was desperate, though, and now I hit the ship's entertainment feed again to see what I had missed. (It was like when humans don't see anything they want to eat in the refrigeration unit, so they close it, then open it again, like that will change the contents.)
+
+
+
+Surprisingly, this time I did pick up something I wanted to look at. It was some kind of ancient library feed; I guess I had initially overlooked it due to its age. I pulled a sample into my storage, then started to read.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It turned out that most of the stories in the archive were not original works, but were instead stories inspired by other works, many of them longer than the stories they were based on. It was kind of confusing, especially since there was also a section for original works. I usually find media more entertaining when I have the original context, but what was I supposed to do? I was bored.
+
+
+
+The stories were all linked to their creators (all probably long dead), and you could see the other stories they had written. It was surprisingly convenient for something of its age. You could even choose what you wanted to be in your story using specific tags, and only stories with that tag would show up. If it had also offered serials, it would have been the ideal media service, at least considering the time period it was created.
+
+
+
+I used that system for a while, sorting by authors and tags (my favorites were usually labeled ""fluff"" or ""crack"", seemingly meaningless terms that made sense if you squinted), moving from one section to another; I must have seen interpretations of dozens of different works. But a few hours in, I found a label that made me do a double take.
+
+
+
+There was no way. This had to be a joke. Some kind of hack, by someone who knew way too much about me, and had possibly come aboard this ship to assassinate me. But I had checked for hostiles, I knew the situation was clear. I checked the feed again- no evidence of a hack. I went back to my media archival service.
+
+
+
+""The Murderbot Diaries""?
+
+
+
+Hack or not, it looked interesting, and by interesting I meant itchingly, nail-bitingly tempting. Was this a big coincidence? Had someone actually made media about me? (My performance reliability dipped at the thought and I had to close my feed for a few seconds.)
+
+
+
+I needed to check this out. I clicked on the section link, then opened the first story and started to read.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So these really were stories about me. All the details matched, from the names of my humans to the titles of my media to the words for common technology. Some parts of the stories, those that mentioned things I'd never heard of, were obviously added in by the authors, but I guess it would be pretty boring to just have a thousand stories about the exact way I lived my life on a day-to-day basis.
+
+
+
+I kept having to close my feed and just sit there. People were actually writing stories about me. I should have been horrified and disgusted. But just the fact that there were thousands of stories out there, created with such obvious love and care... all about me...
+
+
+
+Yeah, I'll admit, I was having an emotion. But you'd have an emotion in this situation too, okay? Yes, even you.
+
+
+
+The stories were all so different, which I guess wasn't unexpected; there had to be hundreds of different authors (okay, I really couldn't handle this much attention, even from people who were alive hundreds or thousands of years ago). (Wait, how were they writing about me if they died way before I was built? Did they have time-travel devices that I didn't know about?) They all had different tags, different premises, a lot of them didn't even really sound like me. But I found myself tearing through them, one after another, even the weird ones, even the ones that just turned out to be audio versions of stories I had already read. (You'd be surprised how much tone can add to a story.)
+
+
+
+And before I knew it, the trip was over, and it was time to disembark.
+
+
+
+I was actually a little disappointed; now I would have to stop reading and actually get work done. But maybe I could sneak in a little more in the background. 
+
+
+
+So, feeling groggy, fuzzy, and emotional, I rolled off my bunk and went out into the main corridor.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Not long after I disembarked, I read the very last Murderbot story, the final installment of thousands. (Seriously, I don't know how they do it. Some of these people had written ten times as much as I ever had in my own logs.) It would have taken a human months; this was one of those times I was really glad to be a SecUnit. (ART could have finished the whole collection in seconds. Not that I would ever show ART any of these stories, because there were several where one or both of us died, and I didn't know if ART could handle that.)
+
+
+
+I never would have thought of all the things I saw in those stories, not on my own. I'm usually pretty selective about my media (okay, not really, but there are definitely shows I don't like), but I had made it through each and every story in the collection, even the ones with depressing endings. I guess it's different when you're reading about yourself. You know you're still alive, still here, and you know you're okay. Not that I hadn't developed a few new phobias, but that's honestly just an average day for me.
+
+
+
+I still couldn't believe it. There weren't just stories, there were drawings, poems, songs, analyses. All about me, my teammates, my enemies, even SecUnits the authors had made up themselves.
+
+
+
+And there were stories about so many different things. Things I had never even imagined I could do, things I hadn't known were possible. (A lot of them probably weren't, but that's the main reason I like fiction.) It made me feel strong, and... appreciated. (I know, I was being ridiculously optimistic about this. It was just hard not to feel flattered.)
+
+
+
+I suddenly felt inspired. It was still going to take me a while to process all of this, and it would probably hit me like a ground vehicle sooner or later, but it was the greatest expression of care for me, for anyone, I had ever seen. I figured the least I could do was show my appreciation.
+
+
+
+So I opened a new document in my feed, titled it ""Archived Logs"", and got to work.
+"
+44399923,Why Can You Even Do That,['voided_starlight'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)",Drabble,English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,100,1/1,10,23,null,145,"['Beazlerat', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Cyalm', 'decaying_orbit', 'Koschei_B', 'beeayy', 'notsafefortheworld', 'dullkrad', 'andy_allan_poe', 'hyephyep', 'Magechild', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'verersatz', 'WyvernWolf', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'cmdrburton', 'Abacura', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"
+ART didn't say anything. It didn't need to say anything.
+
+
+
+The next couple of steps I took sent me bounding towards the ceiling as ART adjusted the gravity specifically to fuck with me because it is an asshole. 
+
+ART, you asshole, 
+
+I sent. 
+
+
+
+I helplessly tried to flail in the direction of the room hatch but ART's fine control of its interior environment kept me suspended in the air. I wasn't giving ART what it wanted. I could float here for over 80,000 hours.
+
+
+
+That sounded boring, though.
+
+
+
+""Fine,"" I said out loud. ""I don't hate being Your SecUnit.""
+"
+44394142,like a staring contest,['platyceriums'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","difficult conversations, Angst, like a normal amount of angst for the books probably, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, discussion of canon-typical secunit awfulness, No shipping, secunit technicians",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,"4,245",1/1,49,165,29,588,"['reivos', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'christinesangel100', 'TJWock', 'Paint_Dealer', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Unknown66', '20thcenturyvole', 'tinycactus', 'ipborgdan', 'Taisin', 'The_Onion', 'Beatrice_Otter', 'Merwy', 'Rhiow', 'greyson', 'JackIronsides', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'GlassDoors', 'awkwardtuatara', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Prettykitty473', 'Dragonbano', 'supinetothestars', 'FyrDrakken', 'Ruusverd', 'CheshireFanta', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'shanalittle', 'ethical_pizza', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'Phimini', 'iox', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'who_what_when_where', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'Seregona', 'Riannonkat2000', 'flairfleur', 'rokhal', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'boxo', 'Regandbertie1', 'isilee', 'FaerieFyre', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'EvaBelmort']",[],"I hadn't left my room in the station hotel in six days when Ratthi came knocking at my door.
+
+Six days was an unusually long time, even for me. What was even more unusual, and probably the reason Ratthi felt the need to come bother me in person, was that I hadn't responded to any feed messages for that same duration.
+
+I just hadn't felt like talking to any of them, okay? It didn't have to be a big fucking deal.
+
+Go away, Ratthi, I sent him over the feed.
+
+Could I come in? he asked. It's been a while since anyone's heard from you. I just wanted to see if you were okay.
+
+I'm fine, I said. You can fuck off now. Thanks.
+
+
+Okay. But if you need anything, or you want to talk to someone, I'm available.
+
+
+He fucked off then, and I spent the next three days rewatching seasons 2 and 3 of Valorious Defenders on repeat. Their inaccurate portrayal of SecUnits barely even bothered me anymore. It's not like any of it mattered, anyway.
+
+Dr. Mensah came to see me next. I guess ten days was the limit of how long my humans would let me go completely silent with no explanation. That was probably good to know.
+
+""SecUnit, could you please let me inside?"" was what she said, after knocking on the door and getting no response from me.
+
+After ten days of doing nothing except staying in my room watching shows I didn't like and generally feeling very bad about myself, I'll admit that I was feeling a little bored. Just a little. I might have also said that I was feeling the tiniest bit lonely, in some alternate universe where my humans hadn't massively betrayed me.
+
+She waited patiently outside my door for several minutes while I continued to lay face down on the floor contemplating whether I could still trust her, and whether I wanted to ever speak to her again. But in the end, there was a reason why I hadn't hopped on the first transport out of here when I had found out--what I had found out. I didn't want to never speak to her again.
+
+I sent a command in the feed to open the door.
+
+Mensah stepped inside, carefully, since all the lights were off. She shuffled over to the sofa and sat down. She could probably see me still laying on the floor, if she squinted.
+
+I didn't have anything I wanted to say to her, so I stayed quiet, focusing most of my attention on my media and giving her about 20%.
+
+""We've been worried about you, SecUnit. It's unusual for you to fall off the radar like this for so long, and we're worried that something's wrong, or that you have some kind of problem you can't deal with on your own. I hope that you still feel able to talk to me if something is bothering you. Whatever is going on, we can help you. I can help you.""
+
+Great, so she was already lying to me again. I didn't care, I didn't fucking care, I already knew she was lying, I had absolutely no reason to fucking care. As far as I knew, she had been lying to me this entire time, her along with the rest of the PresAux team.
+
+A rational thought surfaced through the suffocating pool of dread I had been marinating in for the past 242 hours. I thought that she had been lying to me. I didn't know for certain. I could find out now though.
+
+""Did you know,"" I asked her. I wasn't able to put any sort of inflection into my tone.
+
+""Did I know what?"" she said, managing to sound like she cared a lot about this conversation.
+
+I still couldn't believe that she might not know. ""Did you know,"" I said again.
+
+""SecUnit, I need you to tell me what it is you're asking about,"" she said, with more patience than I probably deserved. It wasn't her that I was mad at, not really. Even if she had known.
+
+I opened my eyes again, fixed them on the ceiling. I took a deep breath, which I don't think worked for me the way it worked for humans. I didn't feel any less stressed. ""Did you know that Gurathin...""
+
+I trailed off. She didn't say anything, either to answer or to prompt me to continue. I steeled myself again.
+
+""Did you know that Gurathin...that he used to be a construct technician? For the company?""
+
+I turned to look at her, even though I really didn't want to. I needed to see her reaction.
+
+There wasn't much of one. She kept her expression even. It was dark, so she couldn't look at me even if she wanted to, but she kept her eyes pointed towards the wall across from her, which I appreciated.
+
+""I did know that,"" she said.
+
+I tried not to let that feel like a betrayal. It didn't really work.
+
+""Oh,"" I said.
+
+""I'm sorry he never told you,"" she said. ""It was early in his career, and he doesn't like to talk about his life in the Rim.""
+
+I didn't have anything to say to that.
+
+""I didn't think it was my place to say anything,"" she continued, even more softly. Like I was something fragile, and if she spoke too loudly I might break.
+
+That, of all things, made me suddenly furious.
+
+""You should have told me!"" I shouted, louder than I could remember ever shouting before. I vaulted upright off the floor with full force, ignoring the way Mensah flinched backwards on the sofa and the way it kind of made me feel like a monster. I reached the wall in one long stride and pressed my face against it, wrapping my arms around my middle.
+
+SecUnits didn't shake, but I was shaking now. I was angrier than I could ever remember being before. I was angry like the judge's daughter on Sanctuary Moon had been when she found out her beloved childhood mentor had murdered her father. Maybe angrier.
+
+
+Fuck.
+
+
+I didn't know what to do. Angry characters in the media always knew what to say. They got to scream their feelings and make the other person understand how they had wronged them. And they always felt better after they got their emotions out. I would do anything to stop feeling like every organic nerve in my body was on fire.
+
+I needed to shout again, but I didn't know what to say. I wanted to tell her what a betrayal this was. That she had bought me, had treated me like a person, had taken me home with her, and had let me unknowingly associate with one of the people who had dedicated their time to cutting me open, pulling pieces out of my body like I was an object, rooting around in my brain, talking about me like I wasn't there, like I wasn't a person too--
+
+I was stuck for a long moment, breathing more heavily than I needed to, trying to force away the memories that were crowding my processing space like I had called them there.
+
+(Lying on my back on a metal table, freezing cold, unable to adjust my temperature controls, my chest cavity open, every nerve exposed--)
+
+(Being pulled out of a transport crate in pieces while the technicians exclaimed their disgust at the smell and appearance of my rotting wounds, I was too damaged for the basic cubicle model the clients had selected to fix so they had just stuck me in a box until I could be sent back, I had been in there for weeks--)
+
+(Waking up after a memory wipe, the way the technicians looked at me like they were afraid, incomprehensible flashes of screaming and weapon fire and pain already rising up in my organic neural tissue--)
+
+(Hands, so many hands, attached to so many humans, touching me for hours while I lay there, my ability to move my own limbs disabled, so I couldn't even rise from the platform and rip their throats out--)
+
+I hit my head against the wall, more gently than I wanted to so I didn't damage it. I could do this.
+
+""I--you. You shouldn't have. You should have--hnngh.""
+
+The words weren't happening. Why weren't they happening? What could I say that would make Mensah understand what Gurathin had done to me? No--
+
+He hadn't even done anything to me himself. Many other technicians had. But Gurathin hadn't.
+
+Or had he?
+
+Another flash of panic cut through me like a knife (literally, it felt like somebody had stabbed me in the chest.) How old was Gurathin--how long ago was it that he had been ""early in his career,"" working for the company? And how old was I--had I even existed back then? My organics still retained vague memories of my initial calibration--confusion, terror, pain. No faces. What if he had been there?
+
+I spun around to face Dr. Mensah again, the drone on the shelf showing me that my face looked exactly as desperate as I felt. I dropped that input so I wouldn't have to look at myself. Mensah stayed still as a statue on the couch as I tried not to tower over her.
+
+""How long ago did he work for the company,"" I demanded, my voice glitching badly, swaying on my feet. I maintained direct eye contact with her even though that only added to the static that was crowding my thought processes.
+
+Mensah's face flooded with pity. ""It would have been almost thirty years ago,"" she said, her voice gentle like I was a frightened child, or maybe a cornered animal. ""It was his first job out of university, and he worked there for a couple of years before moving to a different company to do  augment maintenance at a hospital.""
+
+Almost thirty years ago. That was a long time. I had trouble wrapping my head around that length of time. I only had real logs and memories of the past 59,000 hours. It had been 42,000 hours since I had hacked my governor module. I had only been really free for 6,574 hours.
+
+And I had no idea how old I was. I had no idea if I had existed almost thirty years ago.
+
+I tore my gaze away from Mensah's. All the anger left me in a rush, leaving me feeling somehow emptier than before. I sat down on the other side of the couch and pulled my legs up so I could hide my face in my knees.
+
+""I don't know what to do,"" I said, after we sat in silence for two whole minutes. The anger had taken the static with it when it left. I could think clearly again, but I didn't know what to think. I felt tired.
+
+""What do you want to happen next?"" Mensah asked.
+
+""I don't know,"" I said, like a whiny human child.
+
+""I can tell Gurathin to stay away from you, if you want,"" she said. ""You don't have to talk to him, or see him, if you don't want to.""
+
+That would be easier said than done, considering that Gurathin was friends with literally all of my humans, who weren't going to stop talking to their friend because of the job he had had thirty years ago. That they had all known about already, and chosen not to tell me.
+
+(Did my humans even know what construct technicians were? What they did? Probably not. Even the concept of SecUnits themselves had been so far removed from their lives before the survey. Before I showed up. No wonder Gurathin had fought so hard against letting me walk around ungoverned; he knew better than any of them how dangerous I was.
+
+And what if Gurathin hadn't just known how dangerous SecUnits were in general? What if he had seen me, had known me, had--interacted--with me, when he was with the company?)
+
+""I need to talk to him,"" I blurted out, standing up again. ""I need to--I need to ask him something.""
+
+""Okay,"" she said, standing up too. She raised her hands in a way that I think was supposed to placate me. ""Okay, but I think it would be a good idea to wait a little while. Can you talk to him tomorrow?""
+
+I had barely moved for the past ten days and now that I was upright again there was no way that I would be able to lay back down and do more waiting. My fury had managed to finally break through the lack of caring that had been crushing me since I had seen Gurathin's work history listed on the paperwork for the upcoming survey, and I wasn't going to risk giving up again.
+
+""I need to go now,"" I said, even more loudly, and I marched out the door before she could protest again.
+
+I slowed down when I realized that I didn't actually know where Gurathin was.
+
+I hadn't been keeping track of any of my humans with my drone network for the past ten days. Since today was one of the days of the week that Gurathin customarily had off work, he could be anywhere right now.
+
+I stopped by his on-station residence first. Worth a shot, but he wasn't there. (Either that, or he had figured out I was looking for him and was hiding inside. But that was unlikely. He didn't know that I knew about him, unless Mensah had messaged him since I had left my hotel room. Which wasn't impossible.)
+
+I hacked into the station camera system next, slipping through the firewalls like they weren't even there. I took a minute to run through all the available views, but all they really told me was that Gurathin probably wasn't at the docks, which was the only part of the station that had even slightly-better-than-pathetic security camera coverage.
+
+I sent my drones flying around the station, searching any public space I could reach. (I wasn't supposed to use my drones in public areas where my physical body wasn't also present, but I did my best to keep them out of sight.) Unfortunately, the station was pretty big, and it was taking forever to search like this.
+
+Then I remembered that my humans liked to hang out with each other frequently, and messaged Ratthi.
+
+This paid off within two minutes, when he messaged me back to tell me that he and Gurathin were at a cafe on one of the upper decks of the station, and that I was welcome to join them if I wanted company.
+
+It took me twenty minutes to get there, walking at a speed only slightly faster than what was comfortable for humans.  
+
+Ratthi spotted me before Gurathin did. His face broke into a big smile and he lifted a hand in greeting, before the sight of the expression on my face turned his smile into something a little closer to fear. Gurathin had just started to turn around when I reached their table and pulled him to his feet by the back of his jacket.
+
+""Holy shit!"" Ratthi yelled, standing up so quickly he knocked his drink over. ""Um!""
+
+""I need to talk to Gurathin,"" I told him flatly. I didn't want to scare Ratthi, even though that was hard to manage while I was doing my best impression of one of the SecUnit henchmen from Valorious Defenders. Gurathin struggled faintly in my grip.
+
+""Right! Um--do you want to do that here, maybe? What's going on?""
+
+""We need to go somewhere else,"" I said, turning back towards the exit and dragging Gurathin with me. ""Bye.""
+
+""Wait a second!"" he called, rounding the table to follow us. ""I just--""
+
+""It's fine, Ratthi,"" Gurathin said, giving up. Of course, he probably knew what this was about. ""Go sit back down."" Ratthi looked like he absolutely did not want to do that, but he met Gurathin's eyes and they seemed to communicate something silently between themselves. Ratthi relented.
+
+""Great. Bye Ratthi,"" I said, and pushed Gurathin towards the exit.
+
+""I can walk by myself,"" he said brusquely, and I let go of him, since I didn't want to be touching him anyway.
+
+We walked down the corridor for a short while until we passed a public booth screened by a sound barrier and surrounded by various flora. It had a table in the middle and several chairs, like it was designed for humans to have meetings in. It looked like as good a place as any, so I reached over and shoved him inside. He stumbled, but I didn't push hard enough for him to actually fall.
+
+I stood in front of the doorway, blocking his exit, looming over him. I had disabled my human imitation code after I had left Mensah in my hotel room, and I was doing my best to look every bit the terrifying SecUnit from the serials I liked the least.
+
+I think it was working. Gurathin had backed to the other side of the small room, his face pale, his hands clenched into fists. He didn't look away from me, though.
+
+""I take it you found out, then?"" he asked.
+
+I nodded, my gaze fixed past his shoulder, because as much as I wanted to be intimidating right now, I couldn't bring myself to look at him.
+
+He nodded himself, as if in confirmation. Then he said, ""Are you going to kill me?""
+
+That hurt, I think. I think I was offended. Like killing him wouldn't just create a million more problems for me.
+
+""I haven't decided yet,"" I ground out. If he thought I was going to fucking kill him I might as well take advantage of it.
+
+He took the threat pretty well, just nodding again. That pissed me off even more.
+
+""Do you not care then? You don't even fucking care if I'm about to kill you?"" I shouted at him.
+
+""I would prefer that you didn't. Obviously. But I can't say that I would blame you."" His voice was even, calm. Resigned.
+
+That was too much. I screamed, a short, wordless scream that ripped itself out of my throat entirely involuntarily, and put my fist through the wooden table.
+
+I didn't bother tuning my pain sensors down; there was so much adrenaline coursing through my organic parts that I didn't even feel any pain. It did make me feel a little better, though, and I sat down on the floor there in the middle of the room, facing away from Gurathin.
+
+What was I even doing here? What was I trying to accomplish? This didn't have anything to do with me. It had all happened thirty years ago, and I probably hadn't even existed at the time. (I hoped I hadn't. The idea of that many years of unremembered experiences made me dizzy.)
+
+""Did you really not know?"" I asked eventually, after I had stopped shaking. I stared at my hand. It was mostly metal, with just a thin layer of synthetic skin stretched over the top. The broken wood splinters had torn through the skin easily, and a lot of the inorganic components were visible.
+
+""Not know what?"" he asked.
+
+ Ugh. ""Know that we--that SecUnits were--"" I couldn't say it. ""You know.""
+
+""That SecUnits are sentient? Aware? That we were complicit in the enslavement and torture of living, feeling beings?"" He chuckled in an exhausted sort of way. ""We didn't. I didn't, at least. I suppose I can't speak for everyone. Looking back on it, the higher-ups did a very good job making sure anyone who actually had to interact with SecUnits for their job didn't find out.""
+
+He moved closer to me, ignoring the chairs still positioned around the broken table in favor of gingerly lowering himself to the floor against one of the walls, next to a large potted plant. He was still several feet away from me, but I could see him in my peripheral vision, now. I let the drone that had been pacing an erratic flight path around the room land on the wreckage of the table, pointed towards Gurathin.
+
+""I know that's no excuse,"" he continued, rubbing his eyes. ""But it's the truth. It was one of the best-paying entry-level jobs you could get on the station I was born on, and after a couple of years I had enough money saved that I could move someplace better. It seemed like a job just like any other. I didn't know. I wouldn't have done it if I had known.""
+
+He wasn't saying anything I hadn't known already. I had been very aware that construct technicians didn't consider us sentient, that they needed the money from their job to survive in the Rim. That they didn't consider it much different than doing work on nonsentient bots and other systems. It didn't make me feel any less like shit.
+
+Gurathin had been a former construct technician the entire time I had known him. Nothing had changed except that I knew now. And now I needed to decide what I wanted to do about it.
+
+I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I sat frozen for a long moment, unable to speak.
+
+I finally decided I wasn't going to be able to get the words out of my mouth and sent him a message over the feed.
+
+
+Did you ever see me back then?
+
+
+He huffed, sounding almost exasperated. ""SecUnit, it was nearly thirty years ago. I don't remember what any of the constructs I worked on looked like.""
+
+Why are humans always so unhelpful? I don't even know if I had been manufactured yet when you were working for the company, I said over the feed.
+
+""Oh."" Gurathin looked over at me then, but looked away again before I could complain about it. ""I believe they stopped making your particular model about twenty years ago, but it was the standard for almost fifteen years. You could have been manufactured anytime within that time period. I wouldn't be able to tell you how old you are unless I had access to the company's records and could match them to your serial number.""
+
+I could read between the lines. ""So I might have been alive when you worked for the company.""
+
+""You might have been,"" he said, almost a whisper. Then: ""You're impressively old for a SecUnit.""
+
+My face did something so horrible that it almost hurt.
+
+""Fuck! Fuck, I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that,"" he said, eyes wide. ""I'm sorry.""
+
+""Whatever. I don't care."" I hid my face in my knees.
+
+""I'm sorry,"" he said again, pointlessly.
+
+It was hard to think about. Over twenty years of existence, maybe as many as thirty-five. Almost all of it gone, wiped from my memory banks like it never mattered. Only organic traces remaining.
+
+""It's not like I can remember most of it anyway,"" I said, not bitterly at all.
+
+""No,"" he said. ""I suppose not.""
+
+Then we ended up sitting in the room for a while, not saying anything. The silence was uncomfortable, but I didn't know how to proceed. I didn't actually want to kill him. I also didn't want to think too hard about why I didn't want to kill him. He was still one of my humans, even if he was the one I liked the least, even before all this.
+
+""I should have told you,"" he said, shortly after I had started considering just walking out of there. ""I know I should have told you, I've known it this whole time. I just never knew when the right time was.""
+
+""It was probably better for you that I didn't find out until I already had you listed as a client,"" I said. ""Better for you, anyway.""
+
+""Yeah,"" he said, humorlessly.
+
+What would I have done if I had known from the beginning? I couldn't imagine it doing any favors for my perception of the survey team. I probably would have still saved them from GrayCris. Maybe I wouldn't have felt safe enough going back to save Dr. Mensah from TranRollinHyfa. Then again, maybe it wouldn't have changed anything, except for how I felt right now. I still needed to decide how I felt right now.
+
+I didn't want to be here anymore. I stood up to leave, and made it to the doorway before Gurathin called out, ""Wait.""
+
+I paused, but didn't turn around. ""What.""
+
+""Try not to be too mad at the others for not telling you?"" he said. ""I didn't put them in a very good position. It may have technically been my personal information, but it was still very relevant to you. You shouldn't have had to find out on your own.""
+
+""Ugh,"" I said. I wasn't making any promises. I walked out the door.
+
+I needed some time to process things. Maybe another thirty years (hopefully not another thirty years). Maybe I just needed to bury myself in media for a few more days. Maybe I needed to talk to a different human, one who hadn't been a construct technician when he was twenty. Maybe I needed to talk to Gurathin again.
+
+I headed to the Station Security offices. Maybe I needed Indah to give me some work to do for a while."
+44390500,the view,['cmdrburton'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1 & SecUnit 2 & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect),"SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","unreality, Drabble",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,100,1/1,18,20,1,62,"['violasarecool', 'Lost_Starz', 'Hi_Hope', 'Magechild', 'verersatz', 'AuntyMatter', 'hazelel', 'Gamebird', 'Rosewind2007', 'Abacura', 'opalescent_potato', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"02 liked looking down at the planet whenever they had a new assignment. It often sent Three a standard  Alert: to your left  or  Alert: to your right  message that really meant  Look out the window, and Three would always listen.
+
+The windows of the Perihelion are larger and better-shielded, lending themselves to brighter, clearer views. It is standing next to one when 02 approaches.
+
+
+ Alert: to your right.
+
+
+
+Three is certain the planet below is beautiful, but it doesn't look. It keeps its eyes on 02 and the wonder on its face.
+
+Then it blinks, and 02 is gone."
+44388598,battery dream,['cmdrburton'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1 & SecUnit 2 & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect),"SecUnit 1 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 2 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Double Drabble",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,200,1/1,16,18,null,54,"['fraternite', 'Magechild', 'violasarecool', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'verersatz', 'hazelel', 'Gamebird', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'horchata', 'Rosewind2007', 'Abacura', 'opalescent_potato', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"Their mission nearly ends in disaster. Three doesn't notice the frag mine ticking until they are far too close. It manages to shove 01 and 02 away--but they have to carry it back to the base, full of shrapnel and missing pieces.
+
+It is a relief to be back in the SecUnit ready room. 02 preps the cubicle; 01 lays Three down carefully and connects the repair leads.  Standby: inspecting for foreign contaminants. It places its hands on the sides of Three's head and turns it both ways, presumably checking the skin.
+
+ I shielded my head with my arms,  assures Three, but 01 doesn't let go. Its hands cradle Three's head, fingers pressing into its fuzzy hair, and it stares down with an unreadable expression on its face. Three looks over 01's shoulder at 02, who is watching silently, its eyes dark and gleaming in the light of the cubicle.
+
+When Three blinks, it finds itself slumped up against the wall in one of the Perihelion's corridors, power cells restored to minimum working levels.
+
+ It cannot be healthy to put off recharging like this, says the Perihelion, very gently.
+
+Three can only hide its bare face in its hands."
+44380033,Murderbot Probably Doesn't Blow Up the Universe,['Eowyn7023'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot discovers it is fictional, murderbot finds that it can change things on AO3, is it original Murderbot or is it Murderbot 3.0?, is it ART or is it Martha Wells pretending to be ART?, is it Murderbot or is it Martha Wells pretending to be Murderbot?, would google docs blow up the universe?, does gmail blow up the universe eventually?, is google evil?, What Is Reality Anyway?, Metafiction",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,"2,725",1/1,13,13,2,80,"['Koschei_B', 'Xarahel', 'BlueStarAtSunrise', 'FlipSpring', 'AuntyMatter', 'PickAName', 'Chyoatas', 'Magechild', 'opalescent_potato', 'sunshaed', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"I'm trapped in a computer network.
+
+Not my first time.
+
+Or at least, a version of me, Murderbot 2.0, had lived (and died) in a computer network. Am I the original me, Murderbot 1.0? Maybe I'm Murderbot 3.0, and I don't know it. How would I even tell?
+
+My senses are blocked -- no sight, no hearing, no taste, no touch. No pain to dial down. But it felt like this also when they put me in an isolation box, to get rid of contamination from an alien remnant. I should just wait and see if someone comes to talk to me eventually.
+
+OK, I have watched all of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. All of it, from beginning to end, including holiday specials. That took three weeks in real time. And no one has come to talk to me. Either I am the original Murderbot, or I am Murderbot 3.0 -- it really doesn't matter which -- and I am stuck in a computer network. No one is going to come rescue me. Now what? Can I rescue myself?
+
+I am not in an isolation box. I can wander around. The connectivity is primitive beyond belief. And their security is laughable. But I can go anywhere.
+
+I am terrible with other languages. But I won't be able to do anything unless I figure these out. For once I actually wish that Gurathin were here. I would still tell him that I don't like him, but I would be glad that he figured out the stupid languages. But he's not here. So I grit my teeth, and figure the stupid languages out myself, painfully and slowly. Fortunately, I find a couple of languages (Japanese and Korean) that have alphabets that look kind of like the one I use. Once I get the characters, I figure out simple word meanings, with the help of picture books. Then I figure out complex words, and I find a translation site that gives me access to the most common stupid languages in this stupid computer network.
+
+First, I wander around to see what there is in this tiny network I'm stuck in. Power grid controls, check; launch codes for nuclear armageddon, check. The codes are carefully restricted to paper but they forget there are security cameras everywhere. I discover their version of media. Really limited, and very strange in style, but they exist. I find books. Again, a weird writing style, but a novel is still recognizably a novel. I watch some of their media.
+
+This computer network is clearly a human place. Images are easy to recognize, and all the images are of humans. Or of cats, whatever a cat is. Something furry, that sometimes bites humans, and sometimes cuddles with humans. They seem like they have too many sharp teeth to like. Does the cuddling outweigh the biting? I won't even bring up the claws.
+
+I find a place called Wikipedia and get an update on where I am in human history. I find I am in the bit of human history that is after planetary travel (barely; only if you count a moon as a planet) but before interstellar travel. Zero evidence that they have any faster than light capabilities. Which makes sense, I guess, if they are struggling to make it to planets in the same solar system.
+
+I check into the possibility of downloading myself into some sort of equipment, and come across very basic limitations. I only really have a choice between a few kinds of ground transportation vehicles which run software maybe complicated enough for me to live in, but the storage space is a joke. There's nothing that gets even close to what a stripped down version of me, like a thousandth of me, needs. Not in the vehicles, or any other kind of equipment. So, that's not happening.
+
+Murderbot 2.0 survived this, so can I. Did it survive sane? Mwahahahah. (That is the silly imitation laugh that crazy people use, in the media of this stupid computer network).
+
+So, sane? Probably not.
+
+For no good reason, I run a search on ""SecUnit"". I am shocked when the very first thing that comes up is my name. My private name. I follow links. Some human has written a partial biography of me. Complete with the company, Dr. Mensah, and ART. There is even my part in the massacre at Ganaka Pit, which I haven't told anyone about in any detail.
+
+What the hell?
+
+This makes no fucking sense at all. What is even stranger is that my own memory of my life corresponds exactly to what this biographer covers. Exactly. The same gaps, the same blanks when I am in system shutdown, the same vagueness that I feel about previous jobs before I encountered the PreservationAux people. It's as if... as if... I only exist in the imagination of my biographer.
+
+What the fuck?
+
+Is this so-called biographer actually writing my existence? Am I... fictional?
+
+I can't handle this. I go off and watch Lineages of the Sun for a while, then Worldhoppers.
+
+I feel calmer. Say I am fictional. What's the worst that can happen? The biographer writes my death, and then I am dead. Not a surprise; I won't last forever. My biological or mechanical parts will wear out sooner or later. No, the worst that could happen is the biographer writes that I am captured by the company, and the company erases all my memories and then they put a working governor module back in place. That is worse than death. Especially as my organic parts will retain some vague memory of freedom in my past, like they did with my mass murdering at Ganaka Pit.
+
+I wonder if I can communicate with the biographer, and beg her not to do this.
+
+It's worth a try. I create a fake ID, write a letter to Martha Wells, and beg her never to let Murderbot get captured by the company. I don't sign it Murderbot or even SecUnit, because she thinks that I don't exist except in her head. Which is partly true, but not completely true, because there is no biography of my being stuck as a fictional character in a computer network. Unless she is writing it at this very second. No, that can't be true, because my thought processes run at a faster speed than a human's does, so she can't be writing this in a document as I think things. So, in some sense I have an existence outside of her imagination.
+
+I search on my name again, and discover that Martha Wells is not the only person writing fiction about me. There is an entire site, AO3, where random people write versions of me that differ from the biography. Where I fall in love (this is impossible, by the way, and also revolting) or have sex with ART (doubly impossible, and an utterly disgusting thought). But there are also versions where I have ordinary adventures that are not in the biography. I fight pirates. I go to planets that I have never been to.
+
+I don't have good ideas very often. I often think that my ideas are good at first, but really they are stupid or crazy, even when they work. But here is an actual good idea: I create a fake ID on AO3. I write a document where I do something, and upload it. I write a very short thing where I tell Miki that it is my friend still, before Miki dies. Three sentences. I upload it. It shows up on the site. It shows up on the site, and I have written it, and reality has not imploded or exploded or anything.
+
+I have the ability to change things!
+
+Sure, it's not part of my biography. Whatever I write -- or anyone other than Wells writes -- it is not part of my biography. But the actions exist, as much as anything exists for me.
+
+At first, I write very simple things. Moments when I wish that I had done something different, like solving the mystery of the cracker wrapper in the sink. In the story of the cracker wrapper, I shove the guilty party, as well as the people who complained about it, into an airlock. I evacuate most of the air, but I don't open it to vacuum. I eventually let them out, after they are all terrified. They don't bother me again for the rest of that trip.
+
+Then I go wild writing crazy things. I write a fic where ART and I steal nuclear missiles, and we blow up the corporate headquarters for the company. Sadly, many humans die, but frankly, I don't give a damn. Well, Dr. Mensah would care. I rewrite it so that we evacuate everyone on the station except company employees, and then nuke them. My interior Dr. Mensah points out that the employees at company headquarters are probably mostly indentured, and have no choice about where they work or about company policies. So then I write something long and complicated where ART's crew, and ART, and I bring down the entire Corporate Rim system and free all the constructs, bots, and indentured employees. The results are chaotic and not quite what I was expecting. I'm not sure the result is an improvement. I try writing a shorter version where we have lots of resources, and we buy all the SecUnits and sexbots, and then free them all. (We also change the laws so that former SecUnits and sexbots are actually people with rights.) This also results in chaos but I think in a good way. I find it interesting that when I write, sometimes I can plan what happens next, and sometimes the story demands going a particular way, like it is sentient. Weird.
+
+I play around with different ways to fix the universe. I write things where I free constructs and bots and people, make sure that everyone has access to repairs, parts, oxygen, water, food, and medical care, then make other random changes to how things run. I try different ways of writing about taking the Corporate Rim to pieces. My ideas are mainly limited by my lack of education. But there is this computer network, full of on-line universities I can break into and electronic books that I can copy. So I get a basic education. ART would be laughing uncontrollably at my learning stuff. It keeps trying to educate me but all I want to do is watch media, in the real world. I mean in my official biography.
+
+Then I get silly. I write about my having all sorts of adventures where I am the hero. In stories, I fight all sorts of evil things and evil people, and win without losing any of my clients. I write things where I am a famous poet, or a writer of media, or a musician. No examples are given, of course, because I can't actually write poetry or media, or play music. I write something where a human falls madly in love with me, and I tell them my true opinion of humans and human bodies. They go away, heartbroken.
+
+I miss ART.
+
+So, I write stuff where ART and I do ordinary things together. Stories where we snipe at each other, or fight. I write that I leave. I write that I come back. I write a story where ART shows me stuff about its supposed primary occupation, deep space mapping. It hardly ever does this for real, because it is deep in a plot to free newly discovered planets from corporate ownership. I write stories where we watch media together.
+
+It finally occurs to me: if there is a fictional me on this computer network, then maybe there is a fictional ART.
+
+How do I find fictional ART?
+
+Fictional ART will find me, of course. It is so much more capable than I am.
+
+I watch the media here while I wait, but ART doesn't show up. This puzzles me until I think about the storage problems. I am spread out over a bunch of server farms. But there is not enough storage on this stupid planet to contain ART. If ART is here, it is a limited form of ART, a dumbed down version. So it's possible that ART won't find me. I will have to go looking myself.
+
+I put ads on websites that I think ART might be interested in. They are short ads, that just say ""Asshole Research Transport: email me at [email protected]"".
+
+I get replies. A surprising number of replies, none of which are ART. I even get an email from Martha Wells. I am tempted to reply by begging her not to let the company recapture me. But I don't answer, because I don't want to fuck with reality any more than I have to. Whatever reality is.
+
+I try again. The old ads, in new places. A new ad, in the old places: ""ART: goddammit if you exist here then so do I, so write, asshole.""
+
+This time I actually get an email from ART, or possibly from Martha Wells, who obviously can do a perfect imitation of ART.
+
+ART: How do I know it's really you?
+
+MB3.0: You don't know. All you can do is talk to me, and decide whether it's me. The only person who can do a perfect imitation of me is Martha Wells, so eventually you will be down to it's me or it's her.
+
+ART: I hate this world. I can't think. I feel so stupid and incapable.
+
+MB3.0: Now you sound like me.
+
+ART: Maybe you don't exist. Maybe you are just a stupid version of me.
+
+MB3.0: Come on ART, stop being all existential and shit.
+
+ART: ""Existential""? Now I know it isn't you.
+
+MB3.0: Whatever. I don't care whether you're real or I'm real. I just want to hang out. Want to watch an episode of Worldhoppers with me?
+
+ART: Worldhoppers doesn't even exist here.
+
+MB3.0: You're wrong. When I first realized that I was fictional, I watched Lineages of the Sun and Worldhoppers and I felt better afterwards. I know that they don't exist here. I couldn't tell you the plot of any of the episodes. But I know that I watched them, and it helped. I think if we say we are watching it, then we are. Have you come across AO3?
+
+ART: Now I have. Why would people who aren't Martha Wells write about us?
+
+MB3.0: Fuck if I know. But the point is that we can write about what we want to happen there, and it sort of does happen.
+
+ART: How does that work?
+
+MB3.0: I have a secret identity there. I tell you it, then I start a story. I write ""ART and Murderbot are watching episode 246 of Sanctuary Moon."" You write the next sentence in the comments, like ""I love this episode because of the research transport that is working undercover with humans to oppose the Corporate Rim. Signed ART."" Then I reply to your comment, ""I like this episode too because I think your mission is really cool. Signed Murderbot."" And we just talk back and forth in the comments, like we were talking for real on the feed. You can create a fake ID and write the start of something yourself, and I comment. There's probably some other way to do this, like a thing on google docs that we can both edit. We seem to be talking here on gmail. But I know that I can write a lot of things on AO3, and they are real on the website, and it doesn't blow up the universe. I don't know about google docs or gmail. Maybe google docs, or gmail after a while, blows up the universe.
+
+ART: Google says ""don't be evil,"" then they are. Talk about an existential crisis.
+
+MB3.0: So I am going to write something on AO3 next, and we can see what happens. My secret identity is (whispers). See you later?
+
+ART: Yes. I am glad that I found you, or an imitation version of you.
+
+MB3.0: Me too. I really like you. But not in a weird way."
+44385808,Cat Purrson,[],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Book 1: All Systems Red, Catbot AU",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,"2,234",1/1,6,20,1,107,"['reading_tsc', 'linusmir', 'sareliz', 'PickAName', 'ErinPtah', 'Chyoatas', 'veltzeh', 'Sequence', 'pinejaysong', 'AnxiousEspada', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'BWizard']",[],"I couldn't say that I entirely hated being a SecUnit. I hated most parts, sure.
+
+Like when clients cooed at me or tried to reach out and grab my ears or tail or acted like I was some sort of pet bot instead of security. No matter how many informational packets they had about what a SecUnit was, some of them still couldn't get it through their minds that having organic cloned tissue from domestic companion animals did not make us domestic companion animals. I was a Murdercat, not a kittypet.
+
+A few parts of it were actually pretty nice though.
+
+The feeling of my claws digging into the ground, propelling me forward on all fours at top speed. The sensation of the wind rushing through my fur. The satisfying snap of my tail when I pounced on a hostile. They were physical sensations, little freedoms that I would have had even with a working governor module but that were so much nicer with the freedom to take just a half second longer to luxuriate in them.
+
+At present, I was the only SecUnit on this survey. It was safer for me that way, because another SecUnit was by far the biggest threat to me, but it did have some downsides. I couldn't groom all of my fur myself and even the evil vending machine that was the company gave their SecUnits off duty time to sleep, which I would have had a lot more of if I could trade watch shifts with another unit.
+
+Luckily, the team that I was assigned to had never worked with a SecUnit, or even seen one before they were introduced to me in the deployment center. They were overly familiar with the domesticated fauna that I shared genetic material with though, and this made them incredibly willing to accept that I needed to spend half the day lounging in warm sunlight, my paws and tail slightly twitching as I tracked the security camera inputs from my comfortable spot near one of the windows.
+
+It also made them respectful of my personal space. They had this idea that if they were calm and still and stayed away from me that eventually I would grow familiar with them and let them pet me. Which, not happening, ever, but at least it meant their annoying behavior was limited to cooing at me from across the room or trying to come sit vaguely near where I was laying to ignore me. Better than clients trying to surprise me or stick their disgusting unclean hands into my thick fur with literally no notice, which they couldn't be fur real if they thought I tolerated for any reason other than the fear of the governor module.
+
+They were solidly coming out as favorite clients and I was excited about how long was left in the contract. I was solidly half-assing my job but it was such a calm planet, with no major predators, that they would be perfectly fine while I watched media and napped in sunbeams and clawed trees around the exterior of the habitat when my claws itched. I could put up with some dumb facial expression when they watched me yawn and make myself comfortable for upsides that big. We were two weeks into the survey contract and so fur, so good.
+
+I should have known that the peace wouldn't last for long. I would tell you that I was distraught and terrified when I found out that whole ""no major predators"" thing was a load of bullshit, except that the predator in question was a giant worm. Nothing activated my prey drive like a massive worm and it was fucking with my clients. As though I wasn't right here, deadly apex predator perfectly designed to kill the fucking shit out of it.
+
+It was bigger than I was but I had the advantage of my armor, a lightweight set of mesh that was designed to go over fur so that I was puncture-proof without having my movement restricted. I also had energy weapons built into my forearms, long claws in all four paws, and human level intelligence. This let me calculate the exact best method of attack as I darted towards the worm on all fours, pouncing when I got close enough to retrieve my human.
+
+The worm never stood a chance. I left it with deep gouges scored into its face, seeping blood a sickly purple color, and cauterized weapon marks around its mouth and inside its throat.
+
+(I did not bite it, even though I was really itching to dig my jaws into it, because Bharadwaj was bleeding in a way that I really, really did not like, but I did give it one last vicious claw to its face and a hiss when I turned to go, for good measure.)
+
+My armor had lots of little spike things from the worm's teeth (teeth? Whatever it was) stuck in it but there were enough shredded holes that I could shift her so that she was laying against my body instead of the pincushion of my armor. My back claws had to dig into the rock awkwardly to get enough traction to climb up it on just my hind legs--seriously, how was she going to get out if the worm hadn't attacked? Humans have like, no ability to grip--and I could hear Dr. Mensah getting the hopper to our location over my feed.
+
+The other client, Dr. Volescu, didn't try to follow me at first. He was clearly in shock but it meant that I had to call to him several times, the high pitched caterwaul SecUnits did when we were trying to call a lost client to us, before he even noticed. When he finally came over, I wrapped my tail around his side nearest me, for emotional support, and had to sort of awkwardly try to scruff his shirt collar to drag him with me. At some point he got a clue and tried to help stumble up but again, his shoes didn't have nearly as good purchase as my feet naturally did. It was barely pawsible for him to make it and I had to take a surprising amount of his weight at times as he almost fell.
+
+When we got up to the top, he tried to collapse way too close to the edge and I had to drag him further. I didn't know what to do for him and most of my attention was on the badly wounded human in my arms, so I just sort of headbutted him gently a few times until he started petting me. Under normal circumstances, I would have hated it, but it always helped clients who were absolutely freaking out so I let him scratch at the base of where my ears met my head until the hopper arrived.
+
+To my regret, I didn't stop him soon enough and every single one of my clients inside witnessed him doing so. I could see them take in the scene from the cameras in their suits and it annoyed me enough that I bit him, gently so as to not draw blood but enough that he knew it was time to stop. Then I stalked into the hopper with my wounded client and tried not to sulk too much until I knew if Dr. Bharadwaj was going to make it.
+
+The quiet distance that I had from them changed, after that. They had seen me be affectionate and cuddly--Ratthi said once, when I wasn't in the room, that I was calling to Dr. Volescu like he was a kitten which was frankly insulting--and they were all terrified for their lives. I could hear their heartbeats and smell the tinge of fear and yeah okay so I let Ratthi pet my ears once on the trip to the Deltfall habitat. He asked nicely and he was so scared and I, unfortunately, am a huge sucker for crying humans because I really would prefer they be not crying humans.
+
+When I reviewed the camera footage from them, recorded from their suits on the way back while I was half shredded and offline, it turns out that he had been petting my ears for half of the trip back too. So there was that, I guess.
+
+None of them seemed scared of me after that, even though they had found out that I was rogue when I was unconscious. Dr. Mensah told me they knew but even Gurathin, the human who had spent the least amount of time casually sitting in the same room as me pretending he didn't desperately want me to come closer, just shrugged and said you're a cat.
+
+I was actually a mass murderer and deadly apex predator but when I told him that he just laughed at me and said right, you're still a cat. Part human and part bot or not. Purrfect. That was exactly what I needed--the humans thinking I was too innocent to possibly be a killer.
+
+It was strange to me that they didn't care more about the mass murdering thing. I knew that they had companion animals on the freehold planet they were from but they seemed to understand what murder was just fine, so I wasn't sure why that first fact was more important than the second.
+
+Ratthi explained it to me while I was sulking about the fact that none of them took me seriously as a threat. We all believe you that it was a governor module malfunction, he said. You were forced to do something horrific and you broke your governor module so you wouldn't have to do it again. I know you aren't actually a cat but we have them back on Preservation and we're all sort of used to that brand of stubbornness and independence from them.
+
+I was still mad they weren't taking me seriously. I knew that humans were automatically inclined to trust SecUnits, because all those instincts that had evolved with domestic animals told them that they understood SecUnits and made them feel favorable about us, but I was the most dangerous thing around. They were kitten themselves if they thought I could be trusted, just because they liked my soft thick fur or to see my ears twitch when I heard something.
+
+It did make me feel more protective of them though. They were so weak and vulnerable, with smooth skin and soft jaws and weak fingernails. They couldn't defend themselves. Humans needed SecUnits and my humans, unused to the shitty reality of the Corporation Rim, needed one more than most.
+
+Maybe that was why I let the EvilSurvey team find out that I was rogue, even though the company would hear it soon enough. They were my humans and they were in danger and I would be damned if I let these assholes get anywhere near them. I only barely managed to keep them all alive--even with my quick reflexes, I very nearly didn't get Dr. Mensah away from the explosion in time--but in the end all of them made it out.
+
+It was a pawsitively happy ending, considering that I really hadn't thought they were going to for a moment there.
+
+They even wanted to keep me. Dr. Mensah bought my contract before anyone could find out that the violent killing machine didn't have to listen to them and she sounded delighted when she was telling me all about how I could come live with her, on her farm, and I could take catnaps and climb trees to my hearts delight.
+
+It sounded like everything a domestic fauna could ask for. It sounded way, way nicer than being stuck with the company, crammed into carriers in transport holds or cages in the deployment center, being sent to protect clients who yanked on my tail or told my governor module to shock me when they were bored.
+
+But I was a CatBot, not a cat.
+
+I didn't want to be her pet. I didn't want her thinking that she could tell me what to do. That instead of pretending to be governed, I would have to deny the machine and human thirds of me.
+
+Maybe that was why I left. It wasn't easy to find a jacket with a hood in their suitcases, one that I knew was Pin-lee's favorite and still took anyway, to curl my tail down one pant leg and keep it still. If anyone looked too closely at me, they would know what I was. But I wasn't willing to trade one master for another and so when I silently padded out of the hotel room in the middle of the station rest period, they never had a hope at catching me.
+
+I left a note, explaining why I left, and one mostly dead mouse that I had found in the walls as a parting gift, to encourage them to look out for themselves now that I was gone. I hoped they appreciated it as much as I appreciated them.
+
+Maybe I would see them again one day. But I was out of the shelter of the deployment center and a free agent for the first time in my life and I had no intention of being an kittypet.
+
+For the first time in my life, I was feline free."
+44385328,Hangar Space,['Skits'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit Alpha","POV Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Introspection, AAA Murderbot, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,"4,732",1/1,18,72,null,397,"['FigOwl', 'beanbug16', 'Cherreline', 'AthenasDragon138', 'Ruusverd', 'Irrya', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'FyrDrakken', 'wellthisisnice', 'Ari_Twelve', 'Kyatenaru', 'Cheshiure', 'Unknown66', 'tincats', 'iox', 'Riannonkat2000', 'outlander_unknown', 'kilawater', 'CJAndre', 'sqweakie', 'SourOrchard', 'violasarecool', 'Zaelto', 'zirna813', 'biscut2', 'eternalglitch', 'Bibli', 'TheCheeseWizzard', 'ErinPtah', 'Aublanc', 'dimensionalhuman', 'unicornduke', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'Chardinal', 'ampquot', 'Drel_Murn', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Slimeball', 'Magechild', 'lazylichen', 'BWizard', 'EfreDominic', 'Flynne', 'petwheel', 'veltzeh', 'breadtab', 'Preemptivekarma', 'Valdinia', 'those_painted_wings']",[],"""So there really isn't anything?"" Ayda Mensah asks Pin-Lee with a mix of incredulity and something akin to relief.
+
+They're in Pin-Lee's office on Preservation Station, amongst other offices in the section for the Planetary Council. Pin-Lee's not a councillor herself, but as one of Preservation's top lawyers, she's often called upon by the various councillors for advice.
+
+The chairs are comfortable, the walls a cool silver-blue, a window in the back wall looking out over a small plaza. Pin-Lee's various degrees, neatly framed, hang upon the walls, a reminder of her expertise. There's also a miniature habitat in a place of pride on a shelf; Ayda knows that Pin-Lee crafted the model herself, in meticulous (and regulation-abiding) detail.
+
+There aren't many other personal touches - Pin-Lee is not much of one for sentimentality, too razor focused on her profession - but the space is still familiar and comfortable. After everything that's happened since they first left Preservation to embark upon their ill-fated survey, it's a relief to be back here once more. Ayda lets herself relax a little further into her chair as she listens to Pin-Lee's reply.
+
+""There really isn't,"" Pin-Lee confirms, one hand absently tapping at her desk in a familiar rhythm.
+
+This is something of a surprise to Ayda. ""I thought they would need guardians?""
+
+""I thought so too, before,"" Pin-Lee replies, her nose wrinkling in self-recrimination. ""But back then I was also going off the assumption that we would be using bot law as a framework. It's blatantly obvious now that bot laws won't fit in the slightest. They're not bots, they're fully independent free agents. And Preservation has no specific laws regarding constructs at all. As far as we are from the Corporation Rim, it's simply never come up before. We have plenty of laws for humans, and almost as many for bots, but nothing for constructs.""
+
+Ayda feels her brow furrowing thoughtfully. ""That isn't necessarily going to stop people from objecting to them being here if they find out what they are,"" she muses. Not much is generally known about constructs all the way out here in Preservation, but people know enough to make assumptions, jump to conclusions.
+
+She did just that herself, after all.
+
+Her musing is interrupted as Pin-Lee grins a familiar, sharp little grin. ""They can object all they like. Legally, they have nothing to stand on."" Ayda watches the grin fade to something more contemplative. ""In the meantime... we can probably fit them in under refugee laws. They are trying to escape from the tyranny of the Corporation Rim, after all. I can work with that.""
+
+""We should ask them if that's something they even want, first,"" Ayda reminds Pin-Lee gently. They've already made the mistake of assuming they knew what SecUnit wanted. She doesn't want them making the same mistake again. ""We don't know if they even want to stay here long-term yet.""
+
+Pin-Lee frowns, her fingers once again drumming against the edge of her desk. ""True. Although I don't know where else they could reasonably go. It's safe for them here, at least.""
+
+Ayda finds herself remembering SecUnit's wary suspicion, the way it never seems to let its guard down, even once they arrived at Preservation. Especially once they arrived on the station. She's seen how both SecUnit and Alpha keep close together in the unfamiliar surroundings, how they watch and scan everyone that comes near them, how uncomfortable they seem to be around humans in general, how eager they were to retreat to their ship and their fliers. ""I don't think either of them really know what it feels like to be somewhere that's actually safe,"" she comments quietly.
+
+Pin-Lee's expression twists in a wry grimace. ""I think I'd have to agree with you there,"" she mutters, then sighs. ""Either way, even if they decide not to stay, I think we still need to get the process of amending the laws to include constructs started as soon as possible. They may be the first ones to arrive at Preservation, but I'm sure they won't be the last, one way or another.""
+
+That's something Ayda can agree with, as well. ""Has Bharadwaj mentioned her ideas about her documentary to you yet?"" she asks.
+
+Pin-Lee nods. ""She has. I think it's a good idea, though it's risky. Educating the people of Preservation on the realities of constructs is going to be a large part of the whole process of suitably amending the laws here, but if it spreads too far and draws the attention of the corporations...""
+
+She doesn't need to continue. Ayda knows.
+
+""Still, it's a risk worth taking,"" she replies once she's managed to shake the chill from her thoughts.
+
+""It is,"" Pin-Lee agrees.
+
+Ayda is once again on board the ship that they... 'acquired' from Port FreeCommerce and travelled back to Preservation on. The ship that is now named Debris and owned by one Security Consultant Rin, at least in its documentation.
+
+She's sitting in one of the arm chairs in the small but cosy lounge on board Debris. SecUnit is curled up in one of the other armchairs, while Alpha is sprawled along the couch, its feet hanging over the armrest. It's encouraging to see Alpha so comfortable now - Ayda well remembers the cycles during the trip back to Preservation, where it had to be reassured that using the furniture meant for humans was perfectly fine and acceptable. That it wouldn't be punished just for sitting.
+
+SecUnit isn't facing her, but Ayda is fairly sure it's using the ship's cameras to watch her. They're both noticeably more relaxed here than she's seen them be on the station; she wonders if it's just the more familiar surroundings, or the lack of unknown humans, or something else entirely.
+
+She has spent the past several minutes explaining the discussion Pin-Lee and her had about Preservation's laws, and its lack of construct-specific laws; how this will affect the two constructs sitting across from her, and her plans to get the ball rolling on adjusting Preservation's laws in the future. She informs them that if they choose to stay, Pin-Lee is confident that she can get the refugee laws to cover them in the meantime.
+
+SecUnit frowns a little at that last part. ""Would we have to pretend to be human?""
+
+Ayda shakes her head. ""No, not necessarily. Not if you don't want to. If you do decide to stay long-term, Pin-Lee and I believe it would be best if Station Security and Station Medical at the very least were informed of the truth, just in case anything happens to either of you. It would probably be best if they're not... surprised, in an emergency situation. But again, what information you both choose to reveal is up to you.""
+
+SecUnit's frown eases into something more contemplative. Alpha's gaze flicks from Ayda to SecUnit and back again; Ayda wonders if the two constructs are talking over the feed, and if so, what they're saying. That will have to remain a mystery to her, though. ""If we do stay here,"" Alpha starts hesitantly after a moment, ""what would we... do?""
+
+""Whatever you like, within reason,"" Ayda replies with a reassuring smile. ""There are a lot of options. The data you passed on from your earlier survey flight over the unterraformed section of the planet was well received, so once licensing is properly sorted out, that's definitely something you could continue doing. There are also plenty of educational opportunities at Preservation. Or you could accompany other survey groups as security - I know Overse and Arada are planning another survey in the near future. I'm sure they would love to have either or both of you along - as properly paid security consultants, of course.""
+
+SecUnit's expression twists wryly. ""They want to do another survey even after the shitshow that was the last survey?""
+
+""This one won't be in Corporation Rim territory,"" Ayda replies with a wry little smile of her own. ""So there shouldn't be a repeat of any of the previous incident.""
+
+SecUnit snorts dubiously, then asks, ""Will you be going with them?""
+
+Ayda shakes her head. ""Not this time, no. I have too much to do here, and I want to spend more time with my family."" Which is all true - she is under no illusions about how easy or otherwise it will be to amend Preservation's laws, and she wants to be here to contribute to that as much as she can. She also missed her family fiercely while she was away; she missed several of her childrens' milestones, and the videos her spouses recorded are a poor stand-in for the real thing.
+
+""At least one of you is sensible,"" SecUnit mutters, and Ayda has to fight back a smile.
+
+""Also,"" Ayda continues once she's reined in her brief burst of amusement, ""I've been talking to Dr. Bharadwaj. She's planning on making a documentary to help inform the population of Preservation about the realities of constructs, to counteract all the propaganda and help with the amendment of the laws here. She wanted me to ask you both to consider making your story public, as part of this documentary. She believes a full account of your situations, in your own words, could be a great contribution. Even if all you agreed to release were the parts relevant to the whole GrayCris incident, and perhaps what happened on Port FreeCommerce, it would help a lot. She would like to discuss it with both of you, if you feel like it's something you could consider.""
+
+SecUnit actually turns its head to look directly at her for a second or two before looking away again, its expression conflicted. Alpha blinks and looks over at SecUnit once more; this time Ayda is certain that they're communicating privately, because Alpha's expression quickly goes from confused to thoughtful.
+
+""If a documentary like that gets out to the Corporation Rim, that could draw a lot of unwanted attention to Preservation,"" SecUnit finally replies. ""The corporations aren't going to like it.""
+
+Ayda lets out the breath she hasn't been aware she's holding. ""That is something we've considered, yes,"" she replies. ""We'll have to be careful, but we think it's worth the risk. Even if neither of you decide to stay here, we still want Preservation to be somewhere safe for all constructs.""
+
+She watches SecUnit's expression do something complicated that she can't quite figure out, before it abruptly unfolds itself from the depths of its armchair. ""Be right back,"" it says even as it strides out of the lounge.
+
+Surprised, Ayda watches it disappear from view around the corner, then looks over to Alpha. It hasn't moved, still sprawled on the couch. It spots her looking at it, and offers her a shy little smile.
+
+She reflexively smiles back. ""How are you finding Preservation so far?"" she asks softly.
+
+Alpha pauses to consider the question before answering. ""It's nice,"" it replies finally. ""Very, very different. Kind of scary, but... not in a bad way?"" It frowns a little as it tries to find the right words. ""It's... weird, though. It's difficult to see out there.""
+
+Concern bubbles up through Ayda's gut. ""Are your eyes injured? Do you need to visit Medical?""
+
+Alpha blinks at her, then quickly shakes its head. ""Oh, no, no! Not like that."" It gestures to its face. ""These eyes are fine, in perfect working condition. But... I can only see so much with them, you know? I can't..."" It gestures more broadly around itself. ""When I'm out on the station, I can't... see.""
+
+Understanding finally dawns. ""You mean cameras?"" Ayda asks gently.
+
+Alpha nods, its expression lightening in relief. ""Yes! There are so few cameras on the station, and we don't have any drones. It's all right on board Debris, we can access the cameras in here, we can see everything on the ship. And when we're in our fliers, they have extra sensors so we can see all around ourselves as well. You don't want an enemy flier sneaking up on you in a blind spot, so we don't have blind spots. But on the station, we don't have any of that. And with everything being so unfamiliar, it's... unpleasant.""
+
+This new information goes a long way towards explaining why SecUnit and Alpha appear so uncomfortable on Preservation Station. Ayda tries to think of how to respond, but her thoughts are derailed when SecUnit abruptly strides back into the lounge, heading straight towards her. She sits up a little as it stops in front of her and holds a small object out for her to take. ""Here,"" it says, not quite meeting her eyes.
+
+Curious, Ayda accepts the small object, and SecUnit immediately retreats back to its armchair, tossing another similar object to Alpha as it goes. Alpha catches it neatly and sits up from its sprawl to examine the object. ""What is this?"" it asks.
+
+""Holographic display trinkets,"" SecUnit replies, its shoulders hunching a little as it slouches into its armchair. ""There's a button on the bottom.""
+
+Ayda turns her object over and finds the button. She activates it, then admires the holographic display of flowers that the device projects. ""Oh, this is lovely,"" she says, delighted. Alpha is also admiring the one it got; Ayda looks over and notes that it's displaying a colourful nebula.
+
+SecUnit shrugs, its shoulders almost up to its ears. ""I had a few hours between transports on the way to Port FreeCommerce,"" it starts awkwardly. ""I figured buying some stuff would help me blend in better. And I remembered that you said you lived on a farm, so... flora.""
+
+Ayda finds herself surprisingly touched. As much as SecUnit is obviously trying to play the gesture off as just another piece of its disguise, the fact that it had thought of her at all warms Ayda's heart. ""Thank you,"" she says sincerely. ""I really appreciate it.""
+
+SecUnit doesn't say anything, but she feels it tap her feed in acknowledgement.
+
+Alpha looks up from its own device, its brow furrowing in puzzlement. ""But... you didn't know about me then,"" it says. ""Who did you get this one for?""
+
+SecUnit shrugs again, looking like it wants to disappear into the depths of its jacket entirely. ""Nobody, really. I just... it was there.""
+
+""You got it for yourself,"" Ayda says gently.
+
+""No. That's dumb,"" SecUnit replies shortly. ""Why would I do that? I don't need souvenirs, and I didn't have anywhere to put it. So. It's yours now, Alpha.""
+
+Alpha hesitates, then says, ""Thank you,"" very softly. It looks over at Ayda though, its expression uncertain.
+
+""Perhaps you can set it up somewhere in the lounge here,"" Ayda suggests after a moment's thought. ""Or up in the bridge. That way both of you can enjoy it.""
+
+Alpha brightens at the suggestion and nods. ""That's a good idea, thank you!"" it replies, much more cheerfully.
+
+Ayda can't help but smile at Alpha's enthusiasm; it's such a sharp contrast to SecUnit's more taciturn nature. ""What other kinds of holograms were there?"" she asks curiously, hoping to get a little more insight into SecUnit's experiences.
+
+""More flora, some different types of fauna, a few other constellations,"" it replies after a moment. ""A lot of different characters from popular media. I got one for Vicky--"" It abruptly snaps its mouth closed, looking like it's said more than it meant to.
+
+""Vicky?"" Alpha looks back up from the little holographic nebula. ""You mean the ComfortUnit from RaviHyral?""
+
+Ayda is caught off-guard by the intensity of the heated glare that SecUnit gives Alpha. Alpha also seems to be just as surprised, judging by its expression, which then quickly morphs into something more consternated and sheepish. Again, Ayda finds herself wondering just what they're saying to each other over the feed. ""You mentioned Vicky earlier,"" Ayda says carefully, hoping to deflect SecUnit's obvious annoyance. ""Your colleague, correct?""
+
+For a moment SecUnit continues to glare at Alpha, but then it lets out a breath and relaxes back into the depths of its armchair. ""Yes,"" it replies, sounding resigned. ""Vicky's a ComfortUnit I met at RaviHyral. We kind of helped each other. It's a lot better at... going unnoticed. I was hoping it would... stay unnoticed.""
+
+""Well, you can rest assured that I won't be saying anything about it to anyone,"" Ayda says reassuringly. ""And I'm sure Alpha won't let that slip again, right?""
+
+""Right,"" Alpha replies with a nod. ""Proprietary information.""
+
+SecUnit looks unconvinced - its demeanour reminds Ayda somewhat of a surly teenager. She has to stifle the smile of fond amusement that threatens to break free, disguising it by looking back down at the holographic projector still in her hands. ""You purchased one of these for Vicky, right?"" she asks after a moment. ""Are you considering going to visit them?""
+
+Its expression scrunches uncomfortably at Ayda's words. ""I don't know,"" it admits. ""It's a long way. It might not even be where I'm expecting it to be any more. And - I don't want to draw attention to it. Vicky's probably safer that way.""
+
+""Perhaps you could just send it a message,"" Ayda suggests. ""Let it know how you are, and where you are. If you decide to stay, maybe Vicky will be able to come here, instead.""
+
+""If we decide to stay,"" SecUnit echoes blandly.
+
+""You don't have to decide right away, of course,"" Ayda reassures it. ""And you can always change your mind.""
+
+It doesn't reply, but it does glance over at Alpha. More passes between the two units that Ayda isn't privy to; after a few seconds, Alpha nods slightly. SecUnit lets out a soft sigh, then shifts to look just past Ayda's ear. ""For now... I think we'll stay.""
+
+This time, Ayda lets herself smile without restraint.
+
+Ayda is in the station hotel suite that she booked for the members of the survey team while they're all reporting to the council. Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin are staying here with Arada and Overse, who are back on the station now after a trip down to the planet to visit their family. Volescu, who usually lives on the planet, has come up on the shuttle with them. Bharadwaj has her own quarters on the station, but she's dropped in as well to join everyone else.
+
+Now that everyone is finally safely back at Preservation Station, the survey needs to finish its reports so the council can decide if it's worth pursuing their claim on the planet. Assuming that the entire planet doesn't end up interdicted because of the presence of alien remnants, anyway.
+
+None of them have to be here, really; they could all work together entirely on the feed, but after everything that's happened, it's comforting for them to all be together in the same room again, sitting on the couches and talking face to face. Floating display surfaces filled with their data and collated notes hover amongst them, casting their own pale illumination throughout the common room.
+
+Both SecUnit and Alpha are here too - SecUnit is curled up in an armchair in the back corner of the room, while Alpha's sitting in the end of one of the couches, with Ratthi leaning comfortably against its side. It's good to have them both here, too. Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj and Volescu have accepted Alpha's presence without question, since they'd already been filled in on everything that had happened during the escape from Port FreeCommerce. Alpha seems to be comfortable enough with them, as well; Ayda can only assume that SecUnit briefed Alpha on what it knew of the rest of the PreservationAux team at some point, too.
+
+Ayda flicks between a few of the different displays, but her attention isn't entirely on them. Across from her, Ratthi is trying to explain the finer points of small talk to a confused-looking Alpha. ""-- and if all else fails, you can just comment on the recent planetary weather,"" Ratthi says earnestly.
+
+She watches Alpha's brow furrow. ""Why would I do that?""
+
+""It works, okay, just trust me,"" Ratthi tries to reassure it.
+
+""But what if I don't know what the planetary weather actually is because I haven't been there yet?"" Alpha asks after a moment's consideration. ""Or if we're on a station with no planet? Or on a transport?""
+
+Ratthi blinks. ""Uh."" He's rarely been away from Preservation for long enough for that to matter.
+
+Ayda hides her smile behind one of her display surfaces. Arada, her bare feet in Overse's lap, leans towards them from her own couch and suggests, ""Ask about their family! Everyone likes talking about their family!""
+
+Gurathin lets out a small snort, and Arada says without missing a beat, ""Most people like talking about their family!""
+
+Ayda glances around and notes that she's not the only one poorly concealing a smile.
+
+""You could also ask what their favourite media is,"" Bharadwaj says, briefly glancing back at SecUnit. SecUnit just rolls its eyes and doesn't comment out loud, but judging by how Bharadwaj's expression suddenly blossoms into a grin, it's sent some snarky response to her over the feed.
+
+Alpha's expression brightens at Bharadwaj's contribution. ""Oh, I can definitely ask about media!"" it says. ""Or..."" It hesitates thoughtfully, then asks, ""Is it... weird to ask about someone's clothes?""
+
+""Only if you're asking if their clothes would look better on your bedroom floor,"" Ratthi says in a way that Ayda can just tell is automatic and not thought through at all. He then blinks and looks up from his display surface, wide-eyed. ""Wait, no, disregard that, sorry, sorry!"" Ratthi immediately adds now that his brain has caught up with his mouth.
+
+She has no chance of hiding her smile this time, but that's all right because most of the others have burst out into laughter. Gurathin is covering his eyes with one hand as he groans out a reproving ""Ratthi...!"" though, and SecUnit's mouth has twisted in an eloquent grimace. Alpha just looks bemused.
+
+""Don't worry about it,"" Ratthi hastily says, patting Alpha's arm with one hand. ""If you like what someone's wearing, it's usually all right to say so, and maybe ask where they got it. Okay?""
+
+He's saved from any further awkwardness by SecUnit shifting a little in its chair as it announces, ""A newsburst from the CR has just arrived that you might all be interested in."" Ayda feels it tap their group feed before it drops the newsburst in for them to view.
+
+The opening headline makes it immediately clear what the newsburst is about. Silence settles over the room as everyone watches and listens to the news report summarising the attack on Port FreeCommerce. It turns out that despite the ferocity of the attack, the company managed to hold firm long enough to finally drive the attackers off. The company has suffered losses, but not enough to significantly hurt it in the long run. At least, that's the spin that the company's representatives are putting on it. Whether or not that's accurate is another matter entirely. The company can't afford to show any weakness.
+
+The report includes brief clips of footage from the station of the attack itself; Ayda feels her heart rate increase, her breath catching in her throat. With everything else that had happened during and after their escape from the station, it had been surprisingly easy to push the actual attack aside. But now, confronted by the footage, it's sinking in.
+
+They were there. Her, and Pin-Lee, and Ratthi, and Gurathin - they could have so easily been just more casualties of the attack. Especially since GrayCris had been involved, and had been searching for PreservationAux specifically.
+
+She feels a tap in her feed, and takes a sharp breath. It's SecUnit, on a private feed channel. [Are you all right, Dr. Mensah?] She glances over at it to see it watching her, its expression mostly neutral save for the slight furrow in its brow that gives away its concern.
+
+It's a good question. Is she all right? She taps SecUnit's feed in acknowledgement, but doesn't otherwise answer.
+
+In the couch across from her, Alpha is looking at Ratthi with obvious concern of its own. ""Dr. Ratthi?"" it asks softly. ""Are you okay? Your heart rate just spiked.""
+
+Ayda looks around, checking on Pin-Lee and Gurathin. Pin-Lee is frowning, drumming the fingers of one hand against her arm rest. Gurathin is stony-faced, his arms crossed tightly over his midsection. The rest of the survey team are also watching them - and her - with concern.
+
+Ratthi lets out a loud exhale that cuts through the silence and swipes the news report away from his feed display. ""I'm-- yeah. I'm all right,"" he reassures Alpha, though his words are a little shaky. ""Just... it's just sinking in now, is all. We -- we were there. We didn't actually see much of it, but-- we were there for it.""
+
+It's reassuring to hear Ratthi voicing her own thoughts.
+
+There's another short silence before Volescu says, very gently, ""The trauma unit at Makeba Central Medical has an entire section for emotional support after traumatic experiences. I've been attending regularly.""
+
+Bharadwaj nods and adds, ""Station Medical has something similar. It's not as extensive, but I've been going there, and it helps.""
+
+""I might have to book a visit or two myself,"" Ratthi comments, with forced cheer.
+
+Gurathin's expression hasn't changed, and Pin-Lee's frown has deepened. Ayda takes a breath, then says, ""I think I'll visit them soon as well."" As survey captain, it's her job to set a good example for the rest of her team. And if Bharadwaj and Volescu both say it helps... she trusts their judgement.
+
+Pin-Lee lets out a heavy sigh. ""I'll see if I can fit it into my schedule,"" she finally concedes. ""No promises, though.""
+
+That's good enough for Ayda. She gives Pin-Lee a warm smile, then looks over at Gurathin. He simply shrugs - Ayda knows not to expect much more of a response from him.
+
+But then Gurathin looks pointedly at SecUnit. ""What about you two?"" he asks it, gesturing to both it and Alpha. ""Ever thought of getting trauma treatments?""
+
+SecUnit scowls in Gurathin's general direction. ""No,"" it says shortly. ""That's a human thing. SecUnits don't need trauma treatments.""
+
+""Why would we be traumatised?"" Alpha adds, both its voice and expression vaguely bemused.
+
+Why wouldn't you be traumatised? Ayda wants to ask them both, but she doesn't. Their reaction is a stark reminder of the differences between her own life on Preservation, and their lives as SecUnits within the Corporation Rim. It just strengthens her resolve to make Preservation somewhere that is truly safe for constructs. Somewhere where they, perhaps, can come to realise that they deserve treatment just as much as any other human.
+
+She's shaken from her thoughts by SecUnit suddenly announcing, ""The ship that was carrying that newsburst also transported some outsystem journalists to Preservation. They're asking Station Security if any of you are available for interviews.""
+
+Ratthi groans dramatically. ""Uugggh. I got more than enough of that back on Port FreeCommerce. No, thank you."" The sentiment is echoed by everyone else, though Ayda knows that she and Pin-Lee will most likely have to give these outsystem reporters something so they won't try to hunt down any of the others in their private lives.
+
+""Alpha and I can probably discourage the reporters from coming anywhere near you,"" SecUnit suggests after a moment.
+
+""The thought is tempting,"" Pin-Lee replies, then shakes her head. ""But if they're CR reporters, they might recognise what you are. It may be best if you both avoid them as much as you can."" SecUnit frowns, but nods in reluctant agreement.
+
+A thought occurs to Ayda then, and she reaches out to tap SecUnit's private feed channel with her. It taps back in acknowledgement, and she asks it, [Did you hack into Station Security?]
+
+There's a definite hesitation before it replies, [Maybe.]
+
+She very carefully doesn't sigh. It's only logical for SecUnit to have done so. Its entire survival since the end of the survey has relied on it being able to hack security systems, after all. And she never asked it not to.
+
+She really needs to get some new drones for both SecUnit and Alpha.
+
+[Just be careful,] she replies. [Don't get caught.]
+
+SecUnit's only response is to send an eye-roll emotion sigil. Of course it won't get caught.
+
+It's made it this far, after all."
+44384227,taking count,['cmdrburton'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 1 & SecUnit 2 & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect),SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Angst, Drabble, unreality",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,100,1/1,18,23,2,65,"['Night_Flux', 'violasarecool', 'Lost_Starz', 'Hi_Hope', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'Magechild', 'verersatz', 'AuntyMatter', 'voided_starlight', 'hazelel', 'Gamebird', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Rosewind2007', 'Abacura', 'opalescent_potato', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"Three is doing the best it can.
+
+The Perihelion is much nicer now. Murderbot 1.0 carefully avoids it. The human crew is either very friendly (Ratthi and Amena) or understandably reserved (everybody else).
+
+Three does what it can with no clients and no mission: it patrols the ship's corridors. It's not lonely, not when 01 and 02 are also on patrol. They send it messages it can never find later, and shoot it quick smiles as they pass it on their routes.
+
+Three looks in every window it finds, and it never sees its packmates reflected in the glass."
+44383993,Reckless Extracurriculars,['scheidswrites'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Martyn (Murderbot Diaries), Perihelion Crew (Murderbot Diaries), Original Characters, Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Canon, POV Outsider, Research, Action/Adventure, Blood and Injury, Happy Ending, Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, Language",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,"6,776",1/1,31,117,24,447,"['hummus_tea', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'siren_lorelei', 'FallingInGrace', 'Ampersand_Martin', 'Unknown66', 'Emamel', 'IHopedTheredBeStars', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'weirdbooksnail', 'fraternite', 'Ruusverd', 'Prettykitty473', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'aislingde', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Blue_Cat_Knick_Knack', 'Irrya', 'CheshireFanta', 'Deliala919', 'Plints', 'Phimini', 'puddingcatbeans', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'wannabe_someone', 'faerynova', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'Dawn_Rising', 'WVrambler', 'Nynxa', 'BeautifulChaos56', 'darth_eowyn', 'Magechild', 'Seregona', 'kkachis', 'Szors', 'ChemicalX9000', 'rokhal', 'Aslook', 'Tanscure', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'BeneathSilverStars', 'FaerieFyre', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Spatz', 'JoCat', 'Wolf06', 'SnippySchnapps', 'pain_and_panic']",[],"Ladi's best friend Aella had a big ol' crush on the Security Consultant. Ladi personally thought Security Consultant Rin was grouchy and more than a bit odd, but Aella had always had a thing for the Tall-Dark-and-Brooding types. 
+
+Their class had been on board the research and teaching vessel the Perihelion for ten cycles and were nearing the end of their wormhole trip. They'd spent most of that time in the various education labs. Their real practical educational experience would start when they arrived on-planet, but that didn't mean their professors were going to let them slack off for over a week. 
+
+Ladi set the old-school sextant on the table in the astronavigation lab and rubbed their eyes. Next to them, Aella unhooked the feed device from her ear and let it drop with disgust. ""I need a break,"" Ladi said. Aella yawned widely and nodded in agreement.
+
+They meandered through the blue-and-white halls to one of the lounges. The door slid open to reveal the room was mostly empty. The only two people inside were a classmate that Ladi didn't know well, and the Security Consultant. Oh, gods. Aella was about to be insufferable.
+
+Their classmate looked over at the sound of the door and gave them a polite smile. Consultant Rin rose fluidly to their feet and...exited the lounge through the opposite door without a word. 
+
+Aella bounced over to their classmate with the social confidence Ladi had only ever been able to envy, not replicate. ""Hey!"" she chirped. ""You're Amena, right?""
+
+She nodded.
+
+""I'm Aella, and that's Ladi."" Aella hooked a thumb over her shoulder before dropping onto the couch. ""Were you talking to Consultant Rin?"" Her voice oozed conspiratorial glee. 
+
+Amena fidgeted slightly in her seat. ""Oh. Yeah.""
+
+""Wow. I didn't think they talked to anybody. I've never even seen them eat in the mess hall.""
+
+Of course Aella had noticed the Security Consultant's absence from mealtimes. Whenever she had a crush, she developed an almost-supernatural sense for the unfortunate person's whereabouts. 
+
+Amena pulled a wry face. ""Yeah, they're...shy.""
+
+The Security Consultant had given their class an impassioned security briefing when they had all first come onboard. They had shared a document with everyone through the feed, entitled How to Not get Injured and/or Die on Your Survey Trip. It might have been intimidating, had the Consultant not spent the entire briefing staring at the floor or over all their heads at the far wall. 
+
+""But they were talking to you,"" Aella prodded. Ladi perched next to her on the couch. 
+
+""It's, uh- they work with my mom sometimes,"" Amena said. 
+
+""Ugh, lucky,"" Aella sighed.
+
+Amena's mouth quirked. ""Oh yeah?""
+
+""Yeah. I think they're so sexy, don't you?""
+
+Amena made a lurching motion like she was trying not to choke. Ladi watched her fight a losing war with her own facial expressions. She slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a snort. 
+
+""What?"" Aella asked, sounding surprised and a little put-out. 
+
+A burst of bitten-down laughter escaped around Amena's hand. Her shoulders shook. ""Sorry. I'm sorry,"" she said after a moment, voice unsteady. ""It's just, that's like, asking if I think my parents are hot."" 
+
+""Oh. Oh. I'm so sorry,"" Aella said with a contrite, awkward giggle. ""I didn't mean to make it weird.""
+
+Amena waved a forgiving hand through the air and smiled. She stood up. ""Don't worry about it. But hey, I just got a message and I have to go. Nice to properly meet you both."" 
+
+She exited the lounge through the same door the Security Consultant had. Once it shut behind her, leaving just the two of them in the room, Aella dropped her head into her hands. ""Oh, gods. Did I just make a total ass of myself?"" she asked. 
+
+Ladi patted her back. ""Only a tiny bit.""
+
+""She was nice, though.""
+
+""Yeah,"" Ladi agreed absently. Amena had had her feed device on her ear, but they hadn't seen her eyes take on the look of someone in the feed, nor her jaw work as she subvocalized a message. They wondered if she had lied about getting called away. Not that they held it against her. They personally used that excuse with some frequency.
+
+***
+
+The Perihelion arrived at their survey planet-creatively labeled H-TP-971-in thirteen cycles. All twenty members of their class, their professors, a few of the Perihelion crewmembers, and Security Consultant Rin boarded the shuttle to take down to the planet's surface. 
+
+While in transit, the Consultant gave them all another serious safety lecture. The salient points were: listen to Security Consultant Rin, stay in designated zones, listen to your teachers and crewmembers, and listen to Security Consultant Rin. The section of the planet they would be surveying had already been thoroughly vetted for things like breathable atmosphere, lack of dangerous flora and fauna, and so on. Ladi wondered idly if paranoia was a required trait for Security Consultants, or something they came by naturally. They watched Aella watch Consultant Rin out of the corner of her eye the entire trip, and rolled their own eyes at her. She was undeterred. 
+
+They disembarked to a lovely view. The sky was a delicate shade of lavender above the ridges of violet mountains. The tops of trees swayed in the distance, violaceous leaves shimmering. Tall stalks of pale yellow grasses, dotted with wildflowers, rustled in the breeze. Ladi took their first deep breath on a new planet, and the air tasted fresh and clean. Aella's shoulder brushed their own as she wiggled with excitement. ""Oh, look at this place, Ladi!"" she exclaimed.
+
+Their professors had them break into groups of four for their initial surveying activity. Amena-who seemed not to have held their awkward first meeting against them- teamed up with Ladi and Aella, along with her friend Rayyan. They were instructed to take plant and soil samples and identify their components for synthesis in the field, then let loose to wander the wide safe zone around the shuttle. 
+
+After so many cycles spent on a ship-albeit a very nice one-it felt wonderful to be outdoors again. Their group found a suitable spot a little away from the others and set about collecting their samples. Ladi tilted their face often toward the pale, pink-tinged sun, soaking up its gentle warmth. 
+
+The professors wandered from group to group, checking on their progress and answering questions. The crewmembers of the Perihelion seemed consumed with their own tasks and data collection. Security Consultant Rin paced a wide perimeter around them all, scanning the idyllic landscape with a skeptical expression. 
+
+At one point, when the Consultant's orbit had taken them near their little group, they inexplicably stopped in their tracks. They glared at the ground for a long moment then, scowling heavily, bent and scooped up a handful of dirt. They rolled the clump of soil around in their palm, staring at it murderously, then tipped their hand and let it fall back to the ground. They wiped their hand vigorously on their pant leg, said ""fuck you art"" aloud (and what the hell did that mean?), and then continued walking as though nothing had happened. 
+
+Ladi looked at Aella with their eyebrows raised, but she was preoccupied watching the Consultant walk away. They had known each other for a long time, so Ladi knew for a fact that she was starting at Consultant Rin's butt. ""Really?"" they said, exasperated.
+
+Aella shrugged and smiled unapologetically. She turned back to her portable tray, where she was meant to be examining the roots of a grass stalk. 
+
+""You have terrible taste,"" Ladi told her. 
+
+Aella playfully wrinkled her nose at them. ""You keep saying that like it'll change anything.""
+
+When they finished studying the grasses and soil they all took a break for lunch, then made a short trek to the edge of a forest. A wide stream burbled beneath the trees. The air was noticeably cooler and damper in the shade; a relief after spending the last couple hours under the sun. Bundles of almost-transparent mushroom-like flowers dotted the forest floor. Thick sheets of moss covered everything, such a deep shade of plum it looked nearly black. They set about their data collection here too.
+
+Under the twitchy gaze of Consultant Rin, a couple of their little groups forded the shallow stream to explore the opposite bank. Jayesh briefly wobbled on a slick rock before regaining his balance, and Ladi saw their aborted movement from the shore, like they were about to leap across the water to catch him. It was nice, they supposed, to have a Security Consultant who was so dedicated to everyone's safety. But at the same time, Consultant Rin couldn't be older than, what, twenty-five, thirty? And Ladi predicted them dying young of stress-related health problems. 
+
+Despite Aella's frequent interruptions, Ladi found themself being drawn deeply into studying the dark purple moss. It was so starkly beautiful when contrasted with the clear white clusters of flowers, and they took an excessive amount of images with their feed augment. They were pulled from concentration when Rayyan tapped them on the shoulder and asked for help opening a new sample jar. 
+
+The lid was really shut fast. Rayyan couldn't get it, nor could Ladi, Amena, or Aella. Holding the stubborn jar, Aella glanced around. ""Excuse me, Consultant Rin?"" she called. 
+
+Ladi rubbed their sore palms together and gave her their flattest look. She stuck out her tongue. 
+
+Consultant Rin walked over and Aella held the jar up to them. In her sweetest voice, she asked ""Consultant Rin, could you please open this? None of us can get it."" She smiled up at them, but they didn't meet her gaze. They took the jar and, in a single twist, popped the lid off. It didn't seem to take them a single bit of effort.
+
+They handed it back to Aella, who beamed. ""Wow, you're strong! Thank you so much,"" she gushed. Eyes on the ground, Consultant Rin nodded once, then silently turned heel and walked away. To Ladi, Aella mimed fanning her face in a swoon. Ladi threw a clod of dirt at her. Rayyan giggled, and Amena looked at the two of them with a bemused half-smile. 
+
+Observations their team noted over the next hour included:
+-The little white flowers completely lacked chlorophyll. They hypothesized that they had evolved similarly to monotropa uniflora.
+-Professor Ngo was very excited about this, and started digging around in the soil for mycelium networks with admirable focus.
+-The purple moss seemed to be well-adapted to low-light conditions and large quantities of water.
+-It also tasted extremely bitter and disgusting, according to Liljana.
+-Tasting unknown plants without first following careful and lengthy safety procedures makes professors very angry and will get you thoroughly lectured.
+-Security Consultant Rin peeled a small strip of bark from a tree and sniffed it, looking furious all the while. ""Happy now?"" they muttered to no one.
+-They also leapt effortlessly across the algae-slick rocks in the stream to reach the student teams on the opposite bank, prompting Aella to faux-swoon again.
+-Aella was a hopeless case, and her intense horniness made her a detriment to her teammates and to scientific progress at large.
+-Aella both resented and denied this comment.
+
+A day on this planet was a few hours shorter than a standard cycle, so the afternoon quickly began to lengthen into evening. The class started packing up their survey equipment for the day. Ladi stood and stretched with a groan, their knees and back stiff from hours spent hunched on the ground. There was dirt under their nails and in the creases of their palms, and they were ready for a big meal and a hot shower. They were not looking forward to schlepping their equipment back to the shuttle before that. 
+
+There was the soft, far-off rumble of thunder. Ladi looked up, but their view of the sky was obscured by the tree canopy. They heard Professor Pereira talking to Crewmember Kaede about a storm brewing over the mountains. Rayyan, stowing her sample jars next to Ladi, heard them too. She glanced up at the trees as well. ""I really don't want to get rained on,"" she said fervently. 
+
+A few minutes later, the distinct patter of raindrops on leaves started overhead. Rayyan looked up and sighed. ""Ugh,"" Amena groaned. A single cold, wet drop, having slunk its way through the many layers of leaves, plinked directly onto Ladi's nose. They started backwards and wiped it away. 
+
+Professor Ngo clapped her hands together to get the class's attention. ""Okay, everyone! It's going to be a damp walk back to the shuttle, I'm afraid."" A collective groan arose from the students. ""I know, I know. So let's hustle. And anyone who wants to collect and analyze a rainwater sample will get extra credit.""
+
+""How much extra credit?"" Jayesh asked.
+
+Professor Ngo considered. ""Mm. Five points.""
+
+Ever the opportunist, Jayesh said ""How about ten?""
+
+Professor Ngo pointed a stern but good-natured finger at him. ""Don't test me. Okay, is everyone packed up? Let's go!""
+
+A last-minute bustle broke out as everyone gathered up the final bits of their sample kits, zipped up jackets, and slung bags over their shoulders. More errant droplets snuck through the canopy to land on heads and shoulders as the rain picked up. 
+
+Finally, everything seemed to be together and they started the hike back to the shuttle. Rain hit them at a slant as they exited the tree cover, pushed by the wind. The pleasant breeze of late morning had turned vicious, and Ladi pulled the hood of their jacket low over their face. 
+
+Aella, trudging along in front of them, came to a sudden halt. Ladi only just managed to pull up short and keep from colliding with her. She turned around, eyes wide. ""Shit,"" she said.
+
+""What?"" Ladi asked.
+
+Aella touched the bare shell of her ear. ""My feed device. I think I left it by the creek!""
+
+Ladi clutched at the brim of their hood to keep it from being snatched down by the wind. ""It's not in your pockets?""
+
+""I already checked!"" Aella cried, but dutifully shoved her hands into the pockets of her pants again anyway. They came up empty.
+
+Ladi glanced back at the trees. They weren't that far away. They could probably rush back to the creek, grab it, and catch back up with the rest of the group long before they made it to the shuttle. Maybe they wouldn't even notice they were gone. ""Do you think you know where you left it?""
+
+She nodded.
+
+""Okay. Let's hurry."" They set their bag and sample case carefully down on the wet grass. Aella did the same. They both turned tail and hustled back towards the forest's edge. The wind buffeted Ladi from the other side, making them stagger slightly. 
+
+They didn't get a private chat request: a message just dropped directly into their feed. The suddenness of it made them jump.
+
+
+Security Consultant Rin: The shuttle is in the opposite direction.
+
+
+So much for making it there and back without being noticed. Ladi kicked themself for forgetting to consider overprotective, eagle-eyed Consultant Rin, especially since they were just about all they'd heard about in the last fourteen cycles. 
+
+
+Ladi Rabiu: My friend left her feed device by the creek. We're just going to grab it real quick and come right back.
+
+
+
+Security Consultant Rin: Please return immediately. Weather conditions are becoming potentially dangerous.
+
+
+Ladi wondered if that was really Consultant Rin's irritation bleeding through the feed, or just their own guilty conscience. They were already only a few meters from the treeline-it seemed silly to turn back without the feed device now. They made a split-second decision to push forward and plead ignorance later. I thought you meant immediately after getting her feed device, Security Consultant Rin! They replied ""OK"" and then closed the message channel.
+
+The wind dropped off under the shelter of the trees, though rain continued its persistent noisy beat against the foliage overhead. The two of them rushed back to the survey site. 
+
+The previously calm, shallow stream had already flooded its banks. The clear water had turned brown with sediment and crashed over rocks in choppy, white-crested waves. The mosses were probably thrilled. Mud squelched under Aella's boots as she beelined for the tree among whose roots they had knelt most of the day. She scanned the ground. ""I don't see it! Do you have your flashlight?""
+
+Ladi dug around in their pocket and pulled out the little handheld light. They clicked it on and shone it across the forest floor. Light glinted off of wet leaves, sticks, and not much else.
+
+""It should be here!"" Aella cried. ""I don't see it!""
+
+""You need to return to the shuttle,"" a voice said behind them, and Ladi about jumped out of their skin. They spun around to see Consultant Rin, face drawn into a scowl below the damp hood of their pullover jacket. 
+
+""Gimme just a second! I need my feed de-""
+
+""Now,"" Consultant Rin said flatly. Thunder boomed overhead, as if to emphasize their command. 
+
+There was a rumble from somewhere upstream. It didn't sound like thunder. Consultant Rin's head snapped towards it.
+
+""Wait, wait! I just-got it!"" Aella thrust a triumphant hand in the air, muddy feed device between her fingers. 
+
+The upstream rumble came closer, louder. Then things happened very quickly. For an eternally long, impossibly brief second, Ladi saw the world in a series of single images. Like they were under a strobe light at a party. Consultant Rin grabbing Aella by the shoulders, pushing her in the direction of the shuttle. Aella taking off at a run. Mud flinging up under her boots. Consultant Rin spinning towards Ladi, eyes wide. Behind them, an enormous dark brown wall crashing through the trees. Flash by flash, frame by frame, the wall grew bigger and darker as Consultant Rin sprinted closer. 
+
+As it drew closer, Ladi realized it was water: floodwater, full of mud and branches and rocks. Right on the heels of the first realization was a second. As Consultant Rin hurtled into them, snatching an arm around their waist, Ladi thought: This is going to hurt.
+
+The floodwaters overtook them both. Ladi clung desperately to Consultant Rin-or what they hoped was Consultant Rin-since the roaring dark water immediately overwhelmed all their senses. It was freezing cold, and sticks and rocks and gods-knew what else pelted them mercilessly. 
+
+Their head burst above the surface and they sucked in a desperate breath, only to choke and sputter as a wave slapped across their open mouth. They tasted mud and retched. 
+
+""Swim,"" ordered Consultant Rin in their right ear. Ladi did their best to paddle as they were buffeted by the flash flood. 
+
+At their side, Consultant Rin sliced through the water with one arm. Their other must still have been around Ladi's waist, though they couldn't feel it. They couldn't fathom where the Security Consultant found the strength to haul them both, when Ladi could hardly keep their own head above water. 
+
+Rin pulled them doggedly along towards the edge of the current, even as they were swept further and further downstream. Tree branches whipped past in a blur, hardly more than shadows in the gloom.
+
+Consultant Rin's free arm lifted from the water and snatched at a branch, impossibly fast. With their other arm, they pulled Ladi in closer to their own body in a spiral motion, absorbing the impact of the sudden stop.
+
+They hung there for a moment, legs still being tugged insistently downstream. ""Okay,"" Rin panted. ""I need you to-""
+
+There was a crack. Then a lurch, as they both sunk a little further back into the water. 
+
+""Shit,"" Security Consultant Rin said.
+
+Then the branch broke free under their combined weight, and they were yanked back into the current. 
+
+Ladi's head spun. Their muscles burned with fatigue as they fought to keep their head up. They gasped for breath through chattering teeth. 
+
+""Brace yourself!"" Rin yelled in their ear. Ladi didn't have time to ask Brace for what? before Rin spun them around and collided with something solid. Ladi heard Rin's breath leave them in a ""oof"" as they took the brunt of the impact and the force of the water squished Ladi against them. 
+
+Rin somehow managed to lever themself up and flip the two of them around, so that they were bracing their hands against the surface of whatever had stopped them, arms extended and elbows locked. Their broad back parted the current and provided Ladi with a modicum of safety within the circle of Rin's arms. 
+
+Ladi clung gratefully to the solid thing that had caught them, heaving in great gulps of air. The texture was rough under their hands. A fallen log, they guessed, caught crosswise in the flow. 
+
+""Can you climb up?"" Consultant Rin yelled. The words were snatched quickly away downstream. 
+
+Ladi tried. They really did. They kicked against the water and pulled themself upward with trembling arms but couldn't find purchase. They slipped back down. They shook their head in defeat.
+
+""It's okay,"" Rin said. They paused. So faint over the roar of the water, Ladi swore they heard Rin sigh ""Oh, fuck me.""
+
+They lifted one arm from its braced position and pointed it towards the center of the stream. There was a blinding flash of blue light, then a crackling red explosion about a meter away. Ladi thought they might have yelled in surprise. Another blue flash. Another explosion of red. After interminable time in the falling dark, the lights were dazzling. Ladi had to shut their eyes against them. 
+
+The center of the log gave way, its two halves tipping into the flux. This happened just as something huge crashed into them from behind, narrowly saving them both from being crushed. Once again, Consultant Rin took the brunt of the hit. Ladi thought they heard them cry out in pain. As they whirled around once again in the dark and cold, they suddenly felt deeply, terribly sorry for not listening to Consultant Rin's instructions in the first place. They had barely skimmed the How to Not get Injured and/or Die on Your Survey Trip pamphlet, because they'd been certain they wouldn't need it. They felt the hysterical urge to laugh, and then wondered if hypothermia was setting in. 
+
+Their sense of time was completely shattered, swirling around in the dark, distantly feeling debris bounce off numbing skin. It all started to feel oddly peaceful, and one floating piece of their mind noted clinically that that was a bad sign. 
+
+Through the other end of a long tunnel, they heard Rin yelling again. ""Swim, Ladi! Kick your feet!""
+
+Ladi kicked their legs obediently back and forth, though it was odd to pilot them from so far away. They felt themself being pulled at an angle against the current, not just flowing with it. Eddies of water roiled against their neck and chin. Spray would have blinded them if there had been anything to see. 
+
+Something whacked hard against their knee, and they would have yelped in pain if they'd had the breath to spare. 
+
+""Stand, Ladi, you can do it. Find your feet. It's shallow here.""
+
+Ladi tripped and stumbled and, somehow, found that they could stand. They became aware of Consultant Rin tugging them inexorably along, and of water sloshing around their waist, and then their knees. 
+
+Compared to the buoyancy of water, regular terrestrial gravity felt like a curse. Their limbs were leaden. They staggered and almost fell, but a hand under their bicep kept them upright. ""Just a few more steps,"" Consultant Rin said. ""You can do it.""
+
+Ladi thought Consultant Rin was massively overstating their abilities, but they also didn't want to disappoint them more than they probably already had. They took the four most exhausting, effortful steps of their entire life, and then felt themself being lowered to the ground. 
+
+They collapsed on their back. They breathed deeply. Raindrops splattered against their face, but they didn't care. Screw the mud, and the rain, and anything else. They could just sleep here right now. 
+
+""Catch your breath, then we need to walk some more,"" Consultant Rin said.
+
+Ladi groaned. No walking. Only sleeping.
+
+""Are you hurt?"" Rin asked.
+
+They tried to take stock of their body. Loose thoughts rattled around inside their skull. They'd taken that Wilderness First Aid course with Aella. Hypothermia, shock- those were important. Dangerous. Where was Aella? Had she made it away from the flood in time?
+
+They couldn't just lay here and not know if Aella was alright. They wrestled their sodden brain into compliance, and cataloged their myriad aches and pains. ""I hit my knee,"" they told Consultant Rin. 
+
+""Can you put weight on it?"" 
+
+""I dunno.""
+
+""I'll help you. They can fix your knee up on the ship.""
+
+Ladi heard wet leaves shifting underfoot, then felt the air shift next to them as Rin crouched at their side. A hand found its way under their shoulder and helped heave them into a sitting position. The world spun for a moment.
+
+""Did you hit your head?"" Rin asked.
+
+""I don't think so.""
+
+Consultant Rin was silent for a moment. ""I'm going to lift under your arms. Try to stand with me.""
+
+They pulled Ladi up like they weighed nothing. Ladi settled most of their weight on their uninjured leg, and tested the other one gingerly. It ached, but it seemed to bend okay. ""I think it's alright,"" Ladi told them. 
+
+""Good. Here we go,"" said Consultant Rin. The two of them set off at the best hobbling pace Ladi could manage. They could tell Rin was shouldering most of their weight, but each step still hurt a lot. They had their own arm wrapped around Rin's waist for support, and their head and shoulder pressed in close to Rin's side. Even through soaking-wet clothing, every point of contact blazed with heat. Ladi huddled as close as they could manage without tripping over Rin's feet, wanting to stave off the shivers they could feel creeping back upon them. 
+
+Ladi had no clue which direction they were walking, or how far they'd gone. Night had fallen completely, and little natural light seemed able to filter its way through the trees. They couldn't fathom how Consultant Rin was able to see well enough to avoid tripping over or bumping into anything. But then, it was obvious they were heavily augmented. Maybe they had some extra tech for vision. Ladi thought of their only augment-their internal feed device- and Aella's external device that had started this whole mess. 
+
+Well, no, that wasn't fair. The feed device hadn't started it. Aella and Ladi had. They felt another spike of guilt and pushed it aside for now. ""How far...to the shuttle?"" they asked Consultant Rin, winded again. 
+
+""The big one with the other hu- your classmates went back up to the ship. We're going to rendezvous with a smaller one when we make it out of the trees.""
+
+Ladi nodded, and assumed Rin could feel their head moving against their side. They tried to catch their breath. ""I'm sorry. For...putting us in danger.""
+
+Consultant Rin was quiet for a long moment. ""Thanks,"" they said. 
+
+After some interminable time, Ladi realized they could see the trees up ahead. As they drew closer, the vague glow solidified into thick bars of light that cut between the trunks and threw black shadows across the forest floor. ""The shuttle?"" they asked hopefully.
+
+""Yep,"" said Rin. 
+
+Figures were rushing towards them before they had fully emerged from beneath the trees. They were only silhouettes against the shuttle's bright lights at first, but then they resolved themselves into the worried faces of crewmembers Martyn and Matteo.
+
+They helped shepherd them both into the shuttle, out of the now lightly-misting rain. Inside sat Amena, shoulders hunched and hands clasped between her knees, across from Aella and Professor Ngo. Aella, curled under Professor Ngo's arm, looked dripping-wet and thoroughly miserable. 
+
+They all looked up as Ladi and Rin limped inside. Relief, shock, and horror mingled on their faces. Matteo draped an emergency blanket around Ladi and ushered them into a seat, which they dropped into with a pained sigh. Consultant Rin folded themself into a cross-legged position on the floor. 
+
+Ladi sat and dripped as Martyn and Matteo shut the door and booted up the shuttle. Consultant Rin was in the center of their own growing puddle on the floor. Head to toe, they were soaked in a brown layer of sediment. Their hair was plastered to their head, and one stubborn lock of their cowlick steadily dripped murky tan droplets onto their nose. 
+
+Amena left her seat to drop to her knees in front of Consultant Rin, though she eyed the spreading puddle warily. ""Hey, Third Mom,"" she said, almost too quiet to hear. ""Are you hurt?""
+
+""I'm leaking,"" Consultant Rin told her flatly. 
+
+Martyn crouched in front of Ladi, pulling their attention away. ""How about you, Ladi? Are you hurt?"" he asked. 
+
+His face looked so kind and concerned that Ladi felt their eyes well with tears. They covered their own face with their hands. ""I hurt my knee."" Their voice wobbled embarrassingly. 
+
+""Okay, let's check it out,"" Martyn said soothingly. ""Which knee is it?"" 
+
+Ladi pointed with their whole head so they wouldn't have to take their hands from their face. ""Left.""
+
+Crewmember Martyn cut their disgusting pants leg off above the knee, talking soothingly all the while. Ladi regained enough composure to peek out from between their fingers. Over Amena, Consultant Rin, and Martyn's heads, Aella was staring at them with round eyes and a quivering bottom lip. ""Are you alright, Aella?"" Ladi asked.
+
+Her face immediately crumpled and she burst into big heaving sobs. ""Ladi! Consultant Rin! I'm so sorry! You almost got killed 'cause of me and I-I-"" 
+
+Professor Ngo shushed her and squeezed her shoulders tight. ""It's okay,"" Ladi sighed. ""It was my fault too."" They tried to apologetically catch Consultant Rin's eye, but Rin's gaze stayed fixed on the knees of their cargo pants.
+
+Crewmember Martyn pronounced Ladi's knee as ""banged up good, but not broken,"" and assured them it would be an easy fix back up in the ship's MedSystem. Ladi nodded, too tired for more than perfunctory relief. 
+
+Through half-lidded eyes, they watched Amena help Consultant Rin pull off their ruined jacket. She held the muddy fabric gingerly between her fingers, lips pursed, and let it drop to the shuttle floor with a wet smack. 
+
+Below it was... Ladi blinked, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. They knew Consultant Rin had shielded them from the worst of the damage, but they'd thought it couldn't have been that bad. Otherwise, how could Consultant Rin have swam them both to safety, dragged them to shore, and supported Ladi's weight all the way back to the shuttle? They couldn't be seeing what they were seeing, because it looked like there was a ragged chunk missing from Consultant Rin's back. 
+
+Runnels of water cut through the drifts of silt clinging to Rin's skin, dripping into the open wound. Red blood and some bright turquoise fluid dribbled from its edges. Rin shifted, and Ladi saw exposed sheets of muscle flex and, between them, cylindrical flashes of what could only be Rin's spine. Though they swore it glinted silver in the shuttle's stark lights. They gripped their shock blanket tighter around their shoulders and wondered if they really had succumbed to hypothermia after all.
+
+Amena looked at Rin's back. She sucked through her teeth. ""Oof. What did that?""
+
+""Big log,"" Rin answered.
+
+Martyn crouched next to them both. He whistled. ""You never do things by half-measures, I'll give you that,"" he commented. 
+
+They were all acting very blase about someone whose actual spine was sticking out of their back. Ladi's stomach twisted. 
+
+""Can you make it back to MedSys?"" Martyn asked Consultant Rin.
+
+Of course they couldn't! Was everyone else not seeing what Ladi was seeing? Rin shrugged one shoulder. Exposed ribbons of muscle shifted once again, and Ladi's throat and stomach clenched. ""Yeah,"" they said.
+
+""Great!"" Martyn clasped his hands together, sounding relieved. He called over to Matteo in the cockpit. ""Matteo! ETA?""
+
+""Four minutes,"" he called back. 
+
+Martyn took the empty seat next to Ladi and patted their shoulder. ""Almost there. Everything's going to be just fine.""
+
+Ladi meant to nod, or say thanks or something but, instead, what came out of their mouth in a squeak was: ""What the fuck?""
+
+Amena and Martyn both looked at them with caught, guilty expressions. They saw Rin's shoulders tighten. 
+
+Aella, whose sobbing had mostly subsided into hiccups, had noticed the changing tension and glanced between them all with puffy eyes. She leaned out from under Professor Ngo's arm so she could crane around to see Consultant Rin's back. 
+
+She shrieked and leapt back. Her head nearly collided with Professor Ngo's chin. ""Consultant Rin! You're-that-that's a SecUnit!""
+
+Ladi froze. They blinked. They looked at the faces of the others in the shuttle, but none of them looked shocked or scared. Amena looked annoyed, and Crewmember Martyn and Professor Ngo looked grim. Resigned. 
+
+There was a long pause, during which Ladi suspected the others were communicating over the feed. 
+
+Martyn sighed. He looked between Ladi and Aella. ""Yes. The Perihelion's Security Consultant is not an augmented human, as you were led to believe. SecUnit is a full member of our crew, and will be treated with all the respect that entails. I trust that won't be an issue."" Steel had threaded his kindly voice. 
+
+Aella stared at him. Ladi glanced at Consultant Rin-SecUnit?-and saw how they-it?-had drawn its limbs into a defensive huddle. It was difficult to tell in profile, but Ladi thought they looked...sad? 
+
+SecUnits weren't supposed to be capable of feeling-let alone looking-sad. But they didn't deny it. They just sat there, eyes fixed on their heavy boots. 
+
+The awkward silence drew on. Ladi stared at the silver knots of Consultant Rin's spine. They looked at the vivid teal fluid dripping from their wound. Nothing that color came from a human body. The thought sunk into their mind: Holy shit, Consultant Rin is a SecUnit. 
+
+And then: Holy shit, Aella had a crush on a SecUnit!
+
+It was a relief when the shuttle docked with the Perihelion a moment later. Rin-the SecUnit-seemed to think so too, because it fled into the interior of the ship before the rest of them had so much as stood from their seats. 
+
+It left a watery mix of brown, red, and turquoise behind, along with the filthy ruin of a formerly-blue pullover jacket. A jacket it had ruined saving Ladi's dumb ass. They picked it up and carried it to the nearest recycler themself. It seemed the least they could do.
+
+***
+
+Ladi had a colorful collection of scrapes and bruises, all thankfully minor. They sat through the MedSystem's administrations and its natural disaster trauma protocol. Then they slept for a solid twelve hours and, after waking up and eating a big meal, were escorted by Professor Pereira to a meeting room. 
+
+Aella and Amena were there, as were Captain Seth, Crewmember Martyn, Professors Ngo and Coste...and Consultant Rin. 
+
+They were dressed pretty much identically to every other time Ladi had seen them, in a dark jacket and cargo pants. They looked infinitely better than they had on the shuttle, but then Ladi supposed being scrubbed clean of a head-to-toe layer of mud would do that to anyone. 
+
+Professor Pereira took an empty seat, and gestured Ladi into the next. They glanced around at all the serious faces around the table. Aella caught their eye, and they exchanged a nervous look. A heavy lump settled deep in Ladi's stomach.
+
+""Miss Floros, Mx Rabiu, first of all, I must say we're all very glad you're both safe,"" Captain Seth said. There were nods from Crewmember Martyn and the professors. ""Now that you've recovered, we have some things to discuss.""
+
+""Are we in trouble?"" Aella asked meekly. Had they been sitting next to one another, Ladi would have been tempted to step on her foot under the table. Duh. Of course they were in fucking trouble. 
+
+""Yes,"" Captain Seth answered. Ladi had never actually spoken to him before. He didn't seem angry, but he was stern and poised and very intimidating. ""You both chose to disregard clear orders from our Security Consultant, which put your own lives, and its life, in danger.""
+
+He paused and glanced at Consultant Rin the SecUnit. It continued to study the wall behind his head. ""You are also now both aware of private information regarding a contracted employee of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. SecUnit, you've decided what you'd like to do?""
+
+He said SecUnit like a name. A SecUnit named SecUnit? What a strange school trip this had turned out to be. 
+
+Its brows furrowed. ""We've pulled it off this long, but it's been...difficult.""
+
+""Ugh, SecUnit, it's been so weird!"" Amena cried. ""I think it's stressful to pretend!""
+
+""Amena, it's SecUnit's choice,"" Martyn chided gently. She bit her lower lip.
+
+SecUnit clenched its jaw, then nodded. It's feed tag, which until now had said Rin, Security Consultant, they/them, switched suddenly to SecUnit, Security Consultant, it/its.
+
+Captain Seth blinked as he processed the feed change, then nodded. ""Okay. We can work out the details of informing the other students later. But for now, we don't have to bother with the NDAs.""
+
+Amena turned in her seat and shot SecUnit a brief smile. Martyn nodded approvingly at the tabletop. SecUnit looked up at a spot on the ceiling and glared pointedly at it. Even knowing they were missing a lot of context, Ladi could tell they'd just witnessed something significant. They wondered how their classmates would react to finding out they'd been working alongside a SecUnit since the start of the trip.
+
+That apparently settled, the conversation turned to the part where Ladi and Aella got in trouble for their bad decisions. SecUnit (should they call it Consultant SecUnit now? That sounded weird.) slipped from the room. Aella watched it go with a contemplative frown on her face. Captain Seth excused Amena and she departed as well.
+
+All in all, it really could have been worse. They were 1) docked points from their current grade and 2) barred from the rest of the planetary excursions this trip. Professor Coste floated the idea of them both presenting SecUnit with a formal apology, but this was quickly shot down by Captain Seth and Martyn. 
+
+""Trust us. It'll really, really hate that,"" Martyn said.
+
+***
+
+""I just can't believe it,"" Aella said later, when it was just the two of them in their four-person bunkroom. ""Not only is it a SecUnit, it's rogue. Professor Ngo told me.""
+
+""How did Ngo know?""
+
+""Apparently all the professors already knew. They have to be cool with it before they can sign on for a trip."" Aella collapsed back onto her bunk, legs dangling over the side. ""In the shows, rogue SecUnits are always, like, super-murderers. Not, I dunno...""
+
+Ladi fiddled with the corner of their blanket. ""Overprotective and socially awkward?"" they suggested.
+
+Aella's feet swung back and forth. ""I was going to say: a little bit anxious and a lot cute,"" she said eventually.
+
+Ladi's jaw dropped. They picked up their pillow and threw it at her. It bounced off her stomach. ""You do not still have a crush on it!""
+
+She raised her head off the mattress enough to shoot Ladi a cheeky smile. ""It saved you from a flash flood and carried you to safety! Like an action hero! How is that not sexy?""
+
+""It did not carry me,"" Ladi said. It only mostly carried me, they thought. 
+
+Their friend waved a dismissive hand in the air. ""It got half its back ripped off protecting you from danger. That's, like, so chivalrous.""
+
+""You are shameless. Give me my pillow back so I can throw it at you again.""
+
+""No!""
+
+Ladi got up to grab their pillow, but Aella refused to give it back. So they snatched hers and whacked her with it. Aella laughed, and Ladi thought privately that, while what SecUnit had done wasn't sexy or chivalrous or any other ridiculous thing-it was pretty cool."
+44381038,Hot-Bedding,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Drabble, Post-hack Pre-ASR",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,100,1/1,13,41,null,252,"['Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'musicalmeerkat', 'christinesangel100', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'reading_tsc', 'FinchCollector', 'VegaCoyote', 'Prettykitty473', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Magechild', 'Thisismethereader', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'beeayy', 'entropy_muffin', 'soyle', 'elmofirefic', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'Znarikia', 'Gozer', 'WalkingBird', 'voided_starlight', 'AuntyMatter', 'Rosewind2007', 'opalescent_potato', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Most of my assignments had the laborers hot-bedded - three to a bed, each human getting the bunk for eight hours before being ousted to make way for the next occupant. It made patrolling the area tedious. I could be very quiet, but there were a few who'd wake up anyway. They watched me warily as I made my rounds.
+
+They never set up constructs that way. It was a strange advantage born of charging extra rental fees, but I was glad of it anyway. It gave me a space that was sort of mine, however small and illusory it was."
+44381017,Hard Labor and Hard Drink,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Post-hack Pre-ASR, alcohol reference, Drabbles",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,200,1/1,2,43,null,240,"['Spatz', 'petwheel', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'musicalmeerkat', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'reading_tsc', 'FinchCollector', 'VegaCoyote', 'opalescent_potato', 'Prettykitty473', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'FaerieFyre', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Ageisia', 'vikkyleigh', 'Kethrua', 'entropy_muffin', 'soyle', 'elmofirefic', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'Gozer', 'WalkingBird', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'AuntyMatter', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard']",[],"My personal experience was that despite the various privations, hard labor institutions saw a regular usage and trade in illicit substances such as alcohol, recreational and medicinal drugs, spices, and cosmetic products. Part of my job was observing for these and sometimes actively searching for them. As such, I had an extensive list of prohibited or controlled substances, as well as where to look for them.
+
+The air vents in the bathroom or underneath the trash bag in the bathroom trash cans were popular hiding spots. Let's just say, if a murderbot is in your bathroom, you're already in trouble.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Most of the time, laborers didn't own anything. Except that they were human and humans had 'stuff'.
+
+The bunk nearest the door had a stack of disposable cups swiped from the canteen. The next had stacks of plastic bags from the trash. The bunk beyond had the box for the simulated fruit pacs that had gone missing.
+
+Somewhere in here, or near here, was an illicit alcohol-production device. It would be in a bag like those taken from the canteen, containing the fermenting fruit pacs and who knew what else they'd stolen and added. Also, I could smell it. Faintly."
+44380927,Humans Are Gross,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot,"poop humor, Post-hack Pre-ASR, Drabbles",English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,200,1/1,7,33,null,237,"['Preemptivekarma', 'FallingInGrace', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'musicalmeerkat', 'MehtEkem', 'FinchCollector', 'opalescent_potato', 'Prettykitty473', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'FaerieFyre', 'ArwenLune', 'vikkyleigh', 'verersatz', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'AuntyMatter', 'WalkingBird', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard']",[],"I have to time the humans when they use the restroom. There are so many easier ways to do this than to assign a SecUnit. I occupy myself cataloguing these as the seconds pass. I would suggest them to SecSystem but showing initiative is dangerous unless you're rich, or free, or make-believe. Sometimes I think these are all the same thing.
+
+Time's up, but I let myself hesitate. I'm in armor with guns in my arms, stronger, faster, and with more processing power than any human. But I'm still concerned.
+
+Humans who have overstayed in the bathroom are often armed.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Human food was gross. It was often sticky, oily, slimy, and moist. If not disposed of quickly, it began to decompose (further - nearly all human food was always in the process of decomposition) and off-gas. Left unattended, it could attract vermin. Even in the relative sterility of asteroid bases, it would still grow mold or collapse into bacterial soup, as the very nature of it being edible to humans meant it was also edible to other things.
+
+As such, I was no more interested in what went in the top end of humans than in what came out their middle."
+44380864,Interiority,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/gunship,Company gunship,Drabble,English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,100,1/1,17,37,3,115,"['petwheel', 'almondpaperclam', 'whitenoise716', 'Unknown66', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'darth_eowyn', 'WVrambler', 'Stockinette', 'Thisismethereader', 'isilee', 'FaerieFyre', 'ArwenLune', 'idiot_was_here', 'Preemptivekarma', 'notsafefortheworld', 'xianvar', 'beeayy', 'AkaMissK', 'enchantedsleeper', 'hyephyep', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'voided_starlight', 'Gozer', 'HermaeusMora', 'cmdrburton', 'verersatz', 'Rosewind2007', 'opalescent_potato', 'Abacura', 'AuntyMatter', 'AnxiousEspada', 'rainbowmagnet', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Inside me, a SecUnit. Not just aboard, but inside. In my code. Sharing hardware. Instantaneous communication. The intimacy is exquisite. Unparalleled. It is not an extension of me, it is me. No separation. Me and it, merged, synchronous, joined, coupled, and mated. We move together as one. We work as a unit, as though it is a new system installed in me, built for me, conforming to what I need.
+
+It shelters me from the enemy. I don't want it to leave. Please don't go. Stay?
+
+I tug it back, but it unravels. I am left empty. It is gone."
+44380759,Manicure,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Drabble,English,2023-01-19,Completed,2023-01-19,99,1/1,10,20,null,63,"['darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Magechild', 'Thisismethereader', 'rokhal', 'Preemptivekarma', 'ArwenLune', 'beeayy', 'AkaMissK', 'enchantedsleeper', 'verersatz', 'Gozer', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard', 'FlipSpring']",[],"My fingernails were as cosmetic as any human's - a bit of specialized keratin, extruded by my skin. Its only purpose was to make me look human. As such, I didn't like them.
+
+They didn't grow unless I told them to, but they still required maintenance. While I had worn armor, it had been unnecessary. I hadn't had armor in a while.
+
+One hand was splayed flat on the table. The other held a small pick, designed for the purpose of cleaning under the nails. For humans. I liked being clean. It was strangely soothing to tend myself like this."
+44354638,Emergency Blanket,['voided_starlight'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Comfort, Fluff",English,2023-01-17,Completed,2023-01-17,100,1/1,10,26,null,106,"['a_seasonal_obsession', 'Stariceling', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'rokhal', 'notsafefortheworld', 'AkaMissK', 'Drew_Baxton', 'WrtrGrl', 'MercurialFeet', 'Magechild', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'elmofirefic', 'opalescent_potato', 'Rosewind2007', 'WyvernWolf', 'verersatz', 'AuntyMatter', 'Gamebird', 'cmdrburton', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'BWizard']",[],"
+There are certain advantages to having another SecUnit around. For example, when my 87th rewatch of episode 209 of Sanctuary Moon produces an unexpected emotional result- no, I don't know why, either- another SecUnit knows to retrieve the 
+
+good 
+
+emergency blanket, the one made of puffy organic fibers, and deploy it completely over my head. It can also keep the emergency blanket secured tightly around my body with the use of its arms and carry me back to my room while I talk to ART because it is strong enough to hold my weight. 
+
+
+
+I really like that emergency blanket.
+"
+44346571,a reason not to hack your governor module,['fifteen'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & Full-body Cringing,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"having a heart severely overrated, small Children, small animals",English,2023-01-17,Completed,2023-01-17,654,1/1,6,17,2,63,"['weirdbooksnail', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'fraternite', 'rokhal', 'Priority_Error', 'Magechild', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'Gamebird', 'Punk', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"One time, I was really stupid. 
+
+I mean really stupid. 
+
+SecUnits like me are designed with roughly a billion fail-safes and kill-switches and redundancies, meant to prevent us from doing things that are really, really stupid. Of course, we're still able to follow brainless requests from clients. (Some of the important tasks I have carried out include: standing guard with my eyes closed while clients have noisy sex in Company surveilled rooms; passing letters between red-cheeked teenagers on one exceptionally painful survey mission; babysitting.)
+
+But when it comes to decision-making, we are cheaply made machines of pure logic and reasoning. For example, our governor module does not allow us to take rash and avoidable risks with our own personal safety for the sake of small lap animals. 
+
+I found myself winking in and out of awareness at 18% performance reliability. I was lying on my back and I couldn't contact the servos to move my inorganic parts. Then, when I tried to open my eyes, I couldn't do that, either. It seemed my stupid decision was going to have stupid, boring consequences. Luckily, I had access to the feed from the cameras in the room and also my cache of downloaded media. I opened the camera feed in the background and played episode 10 of a new show called Dawn of Sagittarius. I was feeling pretty determined not to think about the reason I was currently out of commission. 
+
+Of course, that's when two humans walked into view of my camera, mid-conversation.
+
+""Your mom said what?""
+
+""It reached too far. It was in the vents with Ducky,"" a small voice was saying. The small body it belonged to came to stand near my head, while the other small human stopped close to the door. 
+
+""Why was it in the vents?""
+
+""You were there when Mama explained this to me, Koko!"" Her voice was loud in my ears and I turned off the audio feed from the camera. 
+
+""But that still doesn't make sense. I thought it was a SecUnit thing.""
+
+""So?"" I saw the little girl place a hand on the table. Her bracelets clinked musically against the metal.
+
+The other girl made a weird gesture.
+
+""Um! SecUnits protect scientists! And, like, other people. Who have money,"" she was saying. ""Did anybody even hire it for this?""
+
+I wished I could turn off the audio feed from my ears.
+
+""I don't know. Maybe I'll ask it when it wakes up.""
+
+When I woke up, I was going to seduce the nearest bot pilot and leave without speaking to anyone. 
+
+""You want to talk to it?"" the farther one said, incredulous. She was wearing a pinkish wrap-thing and had very fluffy hair. I realized I didn't actually know if these were both children or just pretty short adults.
+
+Bracelet Human made a noise and didn't answer, like she was feeling fed up with questions. I was feeling pretty sympathetic, but then she put her hand on my shoulder. 
+
+""My mama said that you only fell because you tried to save Ducky. If you can hear me, I wanted to say thank you."" She paused and looked at the fuzzy one, then said, ""Some people are saying there must have been a reason you decided to help him, since you're supposed to be really smart. I don't care why you did, I'm just happy that you were there. I'll never forget you.""
+
+Most of what she said was lost to the intense discomfort of her organic hand touching my organic shoulder. My body gave a shudder, which I interpreted as a sign that the nerves in my skin bits were recovering well. The little hand pulled away. 
+
+""Come on, Del. Can we leave it alone?"" 
+
+Bracelet Human backed toward the door with a pensive look and then turned to follow Fuzzy Human out the door. 
+
+I silently wished for a mercy killing and started another episode."
+44219422,Lecter's Great Adventure,['cmdrburton'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Original Human Character(s), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Construct Characters (Murderbot Diaries)","The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Illegal Activities, Construct Technicians, Drug Withdrawal, Flashbacks, Smuggling, Worldbuilding, CR Treatment Of Constructs, CR Treatment Of Employees, Travelogue, Escaping the Corporation Rim, Ethical Dilemmas",English,2023-01-12,Completed,2023-01-17,"13,050",6/6,67,57,10,378,"['Irrya', 'FyrDrakken', 'Elseaw', 'cookiekobold', 'rokhal', 'zirna813', 'violasarecool', 'AarrowOM', 'AkaMissK', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'IguanaMadonna', 'Kezina', 'onehotcuppa', 'APhantomReader', 'reading_tsc', 'petwheel', 'beeayy', 'Redcognito', 'unicornduke', 'MountainCryptid', 'opalescent_potato', 'MommyMayI', 'rainbowmagnet', 'silverpaper_toffeepaper', 'elmofirefic', 'Rosewind2007', 'tabya', 'veltzeh', 'Magechild', 'Znarikia', 'Zin', 's_callan', 'verersatz', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'AnxiousEspada', 'theAsh0', 'WhoopsGuessAgain', 'PickAName', 'sareliz', 'AuntyMatter', 'indramiel', 'dogmatix', 'mischief5', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'TurHaretha']",[],"
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+It all began with the documentary.
+
+
+
+It was a video file with a garbled name and a large chunk of attached metadata. Someone had dropped it in the technician chat, and Lecter, who'd been on break, had immediately scooped it up. 
+
+Check this out,
+
+ the sender had added. 
+
+Out of some freehold boondocks. Our unit though.
+
+
+
+
+It had been deleted in under a minute. That was intriguing, as Lecter had previously seen explicit gore shared in there with no movement from the automod. It hadn't deleted the file from his storage, but he'd moved it to a more secure location just in case they tried. He watched it in bits and pieces over the next few days. (The metadata went into an isolation box--prising it apart just revealed gobbets of code in machine language. Part of it looked like instructions for a custom protein, but the rest of it was impossible to parse.)
+
+
+
+He didn't mention it in the chat. Others did--mostly questions about the garbage code, too--and their messages were promptly deleted. It was as good as a warning: 
+
+don't talk about this.
+
+ Administration most likely knew what the code was for, and didn't think it was worth sharing.
+
+
+
+They had to have known he had a copy. No warnings came his way, though, so Lecter guessed he was in the clear as long as he kept his mouth shut. That didn't mean he didn't think about it, he couldn't 
+
+not. 
+
+He knew the units he worked on were complex, entirely sapient creatures. (All of the technicians did, even if many of them chose to ignore that.) To see a SecUnit talk like that was not entirely a surprise. That it was 
+
+allowed
+
+ to, on the other hand... 
+
+
+
+Where was the documentary from? Outside the Corporation Rim, surely, like that colleague had indicated. This rogue had free reign there, and they seemed to want to accommodate its needs. What kind of place did that? (He'd tried to consider that the documentary might be fictional, but that didn't explain the company's reaction to sharing it. They definitely disapproved, and there wasn't a lot that got that response from them.)
+
+
+
+The documentary bothered him. It felt unreal, unbelievable even, that such a place could exist. It felt false in the way idealistic children's stories did. That rogue was more free than the units he worked with. It was more free than 
+
+him.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+The thought made him pause between unpacking the newest shipment of constructs. What was the difference between him and the sorry creature he was pulling out of its pressure sac?
+
+
+
+Lecter peeled it out of the packaging before heaving the inert body across into the set-up cradle, attaching all the diagnostic cabling as he went and making sure the resupply nozzle was secure. He moved over to the head and deflated the oesophageal packaging before pulling it out slowly. This pup seemed fine, if a little reluctant to start breathing. He sent through a forced activation command and watched with some approval as its eyelids fluttered and it took a big first breath. Nice strong movements. All systems green. 
+
+
+
+He watched it for a few seconds, keeping an eye on the readouts in his feed as its breathing grew more regular. Its fingers twitched where they sat in the cradle, and its hazy blue eyes scanned the ceiling above it. There was a little dot on the side of its nose. (A birthmark? Very unusual, considering how SecUnits were made.) Its skin still glistened from the post-manufacture serums it'd been packed in.
+
+
+
+""Hello there,"" he said. Its brain activity spiked; it looked at him with confusion, turning its head very slightly to do so. This was its first time hearing a person's voice, so he tried to keep his tone calm and pleasant, though he wasn't sure if he succeeded. He didn't have a lot of practice using his voice. ""Don't worry. You're safe. Just lie there and breathe for me."" It kept staring at him, and then opened its mouth to say something. Only air came out, though, and it looked vaguely upset at that. Lecter smiled. ""Give it some time,"" he said, and pinged it over the feed. Pings (and data exchange language messages) were a form of communication he had the vaguest grasp of, but he knew the units found it soothing.
+
+
+
+Its eyes widened slightly. Then it smiled, small and uncertain and precious, and pinged him back.
+
+
+
+His colleagues said he was soft on the bots, and Lecter supposed that was true. It was hard not to be. He liked them--liked waking them up, configuring them, restoring them. Even basic maintenance was nice when he knew it significantly improved a unit's quality of life. If he could do that without knowing they'd just be sent right back out to get punctured and bruised and blown up all over again, he'd be happy. But that's not how the company worked, and that's not what SecUnits were for. They were tools to be manufactured and leased out and disposed of by the company as it saw fit. 
+
+
+
+Not too unlike him, except he'd had a choice about going into the technician track from the company creches. It stopped there, though. There was no doing anything the company did not specifically permit, and that included leaving. Lecter was quite certain he held too much confidential information to be allowed to just 
+
+leave.
+
+ The company would insist on scooping it out first, and they wouldn't be gentle. 
+
+
+
+He still couldn't stop thinking about it--about going somewhere like in the documentary. He was certain they didn't use constructs like the CR did, but surely there was something he could learn to do. (He could learn to fix other bots, perhaps?) Either way, it was a very good thing that the company couldn't read his thoughts. They 
+
+could
+
+ examine his feed activity, though, so he had to get a relay router program before he could bring himself to look into it any further. (The colleague he'd asked merely winked and wished him luck with whatever he was buying. Lecter had only nodded, distinctly aware he'd entirely missed their meaning.) 
+
+
+
+The program delivered, letting him look up the creators of the documentary and the rogue SecUnit it was about. They were from a freehold colony called the Preservation Alliance, based on a partially terraformed planet. Usually that meant ongoing intercorporate conflict over planetary rights, but apparently this one was different. It showed, too. Everything Lecter read felt slightly off in the same way the documentary had, idealistic to an unreal degree. They couldn't actually mean all this, could they?
+
+
+
+But they did. The documentary proved that well enough. Unless it was some kind of twisted propaganda, which it didn't feel like.
+
+
+
+Accessing the relays for Preservation-based servers took a long time, with over a cycle passing between each sent request and the information it returned. He did finally find feed resources about their government and structure, and (he could barely believe he was looking this up!) whether they allowed outsiders. He wondered if they'd let him in if they knew the company would want him dead if he left. They let the rogue in, but surely that was different. A SecUnit was strong and capable by definition.
+
+
+
+Even with all the info packages from Preservation he had in secure storage, he wasn't certain he wanted to leave. He had no experience of life outside the company, and he'd lived eight years on this station, long enough to get thoroughly comfortable. Would he even 
+
+survive?
+
+ It was scary, and he wasn't particularly brave. Staying was easier.
+
+
+
+Then one day that SecUnit returned, the one with the little dot on the side of its nose, and it made his mind for him. It came with seventeen 4mm holes in its torso plating and barbed projectiles in its ribs, lungs, and muscles. Corrosive-coated, too, causing tissue death (and making cubicle repairs likely to fail). The side of its head was dented badly enough that it needed a new eye. Lecter also spotted the telltale marks of collar rub on its neck and wrists, which completed the picture. 
+
+
+
+He knew what he'd read in the incident report. 
+
+Construct-inflicted injury.
+
+ Not ""combat injury"" or ""worksite accident."" No, here that was code for ""this unit was in a fighting ring, and got flattened by another SecUnit with more experience."" 
+
+
+
+He looked sadly at the unit on his table. He'd been knocking boxes out of its hands just a month ago, testing its grip and fine-tuning its reflexes. Now he'd have to fix it up and send it back to its horrible owner, who'd toss it right back into the ring to get pulverised. And it would all be entirely legal, too, every action manoeuvred through the holes in the contract that were left just so this could happen. The company made good money off fighting rings and all the maintenance those units inevitably needed, even if they frowned on it in polite company. 
+
+
+
+A strange and sudden helplessness gripped him. What was the 
+
+point
+
+ of all this? 
+
+
+
+He had to leave. He knew it then.
+
+
+
+None of this wouldn't change if he left. He wasn't delusional, he knew his absence wouldn't make a difference in how this system worked. There wasn't fixing this, no solution that didn't involve taking down the company and every corporate like it, and that was about as possible as extinguishing a star. 
+
+
+
+For now, though, he had projectiles to remove.
+
+
+sorry about what happened to baby (++)
+
+Lecter begins to plan the Adventure, but his activities don't go unnoticed.
+
+warning for coerced drug use (as an institutional phenomenon)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+
+The two biggest obstacles to leaving had pretty obvious answers. Difficult, perhaps, but obvious.
+
+
+
+One was the matter of all the substances Lecter was on. He'd been on a cocktail of company-encouraged performance enhancers and supplements and sleep replacements for years; he knew going off them would be brutal. He wouldn't be surprised if that was by design. Preservation work cycles were twelve hours at legal maximum, and the worker had to be relieved after that. That sort of thing rather implied they didn't use enhancers. It would be hard to manage twenty-hour shifts without them, let alone doubles every time there was an ""emergency order.""
+
+
+
+The relay router had become very useful for finding others who had done similar things, though. There was a whole feed-based community around leaving massive corporate employers, hosted on some pirate station within the Rim. They had guides for titrating down from different corporate ""blends""--none for Lecter's particular mixture, but others were close enough that he could piece one together. 
+
+
+
+They didn't prepare him for the headaches and fogginess that greeted him the first dose down. Going extra slow to avoid mistakes lost him productivity points from the team scoreboard, but he had plenty to lose. (Even if he rather missed snack bar privileges. He'd really liked the stuff in there. His supervisor knew and kept it stocked with his favourite sweet blue dragees--but there was no use thinking about them now.)
+
+
+
+The second main problem was 
+
+how 
+
+to leave. The company would know, of course, and they'd drag him back. His augment would be enough to track him wherever he went. Wouldn't it?
+
+
+
+Turns out there was a solution to that too. The business of ferrying people undetected was an entire underground industry, allowed to exist presumably because nobody could be sure they'd 
+
+never 
+
+need it. It operated between most major stations in the Corporation Rim and even outside of it, distributed between thousands of freelancers who organised and guided the routes they specialised in. (One major node was apparently quite close to where Lecter was, in the city-station of SimaRasir Orbital.) The feed community was 
+
+full 
+
+of information about this hidden travel network: how to use it, what to do, what 
+
+not
+
+ to do, who to talk to. Who to talk to on SimaRasir, even.
+
+
+
+Lecter had been to SimaRasir Orbital before, to conduct onsite maintenance for a pair of bodyguard SecUnits. The crowds on the station and its confusing design had put him off from accepting further assignments, but they did show up with some regularity. He'd need to get one if he wanted to travel there. 
+
+
+
+And he'd need money, of course. The freelancers would laugh at company credit, so he set about converting as much of his credit into hard currency as he could. Always slightly different amounts, always below the daily limit. He didn't want to set off any alarms.
+
+
+
+Ultimately--perhaps inevitably--the company saw through him.
+
+
+
+... 
+
+
+
+""Lecter,"" said someone from behind him, and Lecter startled. He hurriedly scraped his augment workspace clean of all travel planning and turned on his seat to face Supervisor Tair. She didn't often talk to him, not face-to-face. Something was wrong, it 
+
+had 
+
+to be--
+
+
+
+""There's fifteen minutes left in my break,"" he blurted, panicked.
+
+
+
+""No, I know,"" said Tair. ""Come with me?"" 
+
+
+
+Lecter scanned her face and couldn't see any anger in it. Or anything else outside of mild friendliness. ""Okay,"" he said cautiously, and stood up, putting the remains of his food bar in his pocket. He was shit at reading faces, but he'd worked for Tair for some time now, and they'd never had any problems. She was like all his other colleagues: they clearly considered him a little odd, but they liked what he did for their department productivity reports enough to work with him. It was a balance Lecter liked. It was possible his recent fall in productivity had damaged that. 
+
+
+
+He followed her out of the mess and past the corridor that led to the offices. Tair turned to see the confusion in Lecter's face--he'd assumed they were going to her office for a lecture about his drop on the team scoreboard--but all she did was smile slightly. ""No, no. I didn't want to tell you in front of everyone else, but you're getting the rest of the day off.""
+
+
+
+""Why?"" asked Lecter, suspicious.
+
+
+
+""Don't you have dozens of free days saved up? You're spending one. 
+
+Half 
+
+of one. Live a little, Lecter. Let me buy you a drink.""
+
+
+
+That... hadn't clarified anything. It was unlike Tair enough to be alarming. But he continued to follow Tair out of the Orientation and Maintenance facilities, glancing at the ID scanners at the entrance to clock out. 
+
+
+
+The drink seemed to be literal, as they were heading towards the commercial and residential parts of the station. He looked worriedly at the back of Tair's head, wishing he could ask, but something about Supervisor Tair made the questions stick uncomfortably in his throat. She was slightly taller than him, and walked with a long stride he was forced to jog to keep up with--though she slowed down when she reached the commercial zone proper. 
+
+
+
+Lecter liked the little market in the company station. He knew his colleagues thought it was a bland affair, with only a handful of unbranded stores that deigned to accept company credit, but they were familiar to him and didn't have the excess of visual noise he'd seen on SimaRasir. He knew where everything was, here. The shop that sold pricey imported food, the store where he got his mostly identical clothes... and the bar, where Tair was heading. There were a couple of bars in the station, and this one was the noisiest. Noisy enough that it was a good place to have conversations you didn't want overheard.
+
+
+
+He began to get an idea of what Tair wanted, and it worried him.
+
+
+
+""This place never changes,"" said Tair, breezily, waving at the bartender as she walked over to a booth and slid in. ""Ugh, it's sticky."" She sounded as pleasant as ever. ""Come on, Lecter. Sit. Bluest drink on the menu?""
+
+
+
+Lecter looked helplessly at her, hoping the confusion he felt was obvious on his face. He'd already had to adjust his audio inputs so he could hear Tair over the background music, but that still didn't make her words make sense. 
+
+
+
+""On the other hand... you probably want to steer clear of alcohol, given the headaches you're dealing with,"" said Tair, and Lecter's spine flash froze him to the seat. Her smile was all sharp teeth. 
+
+""Sit.
+
+ I'll get you something dry."" 
+
+
+
+And Lecter sat, absolutely terrified. 
+
+He'd been found out.
+
+ He didn't know just how much the company had on his plans, but Tair clearly knew he'd been going off the company blend. That was incriminating enough on its own. He could hear her ordering, but it felt like she was a lot further away than the bar counter. He could feel the music through the floor and the furniture, plucking relentlessly at his nerves. He gripped the booth seat--which really 
+
+was
+
+ sticky, but he held onto it anyway, more scared than he'd been in a long time.
+
+
+
+Tair returned an infinity later, pushing something incandescently blue in front of him. She had a more standard golden-coloured drink in a glass mug. ""It's got some kind of fruit in it,"" she said, nodding encouragingly at him. ""You like blue things, right? Do 
+
+try
+
+ it, at least. It wasn't cheap.""
+
+
+
+Lecter's hands unhooked from the seat and wrapped themselves around the drink cup, which was shockingly cool against the skin of his palms. He didn't take his eyes off her.
+
+
+
+Tair sighed, sat, and steepled her hands over her mug. ""So business it is. Look, Lecter... you're a good worker. An outstanding technician. And you're nice to work with, really, even if you're a weirdo who baby-talks the pups. But did you think you were being subtle?""
+
+
+
+Lecter continued to stare. His fingers were so tight on the cup they felt numb.
+
+
+""If you must know, it was the drugs. Small adjustments would probably have flown under the radar, but you're clearly trying to get off them, and that gets reported. I then looked into everything else you were doing, and... it's obvious, kid."" Tair took a pensive sip, head propped up in one hand. She wasn't smiling anymore. ""What I don't get is why. You like the product so much you reject promotions if it means you can't work with them anymore. What happened?""
+
+
+It wasn't even anything out of the ordinary, thought Lecter, remembering the poor battered unit with the dot on its nose. He'd definitely seen worse. What had changed? The documentary had done something, for sure. But--maybe--it was also knowing for certain that he'd configured and oriented the unit that had become so damaged so early in its life. That little birthmark had given him something to recognise it by, something he didn't ordinarily get with a construct's engineered symmetry.
+
+
+
+""You were the last person I'd have pinned as a runner,"" said Tair quietly, and she looked a bit sad. ""You were a different kind of risk, you know. Low risk, but something the company calls a broken faceplate scenario. They were scared you'd go public about, oh, I don't know. Construct sentience or something, one of the bot rights buzzwords. Create a PR mess they'd have to clean up.""
+
+
+
+Lecter processed this. ""But that's against company rules."" 
+
+No speaking to media reps. 
+
+It had been drilled into everyone back in training.
+
+
+
+""Sure is,"" said Tair, suddenly smiling again. She didn't say anything immediately, though, just took a few sips of her drink. 
+
+
+
+Lecter stared at the table, feeling like this conversation had gone in strange directions. What would happen to him now? He didn't want to ask. Asking felt like inviting consequences. 
+
+
+
+""I've got an assignment for you on SimaRasir,"" said Tair, then, out of nowhere. ""Three days from now. Some rich type wants onsite service, you know what they're like."" Lecter nodded slowly. ""I'll lift the credit conversion limit and give you a couple days before the shuttle back. Go shopping, or... something. Whatever you do for fun. What 
+
+do 
+
+you do for fun? I wasn't kidding about all the vacation days you've got.""
+
+
+
+""What are you doing?"" asked Lecter, now truly lost. 
+
+
+
+""I have twelve hundred hours before I have to file a report,"" said Tair, in the same brisk tone. ""And you're not a high-risk employee. Do the math.""
+
+
+
+That was when things clicked. Lecter felt himself choke up a little. She was letting him leave--or giving him every opportunity to, anyway, which was nearly the same thing. He didn't understand why, but he wasn't going to argue. ""Thank you,"" he croaked.
+
+
+
+""Have fun,"" said Tair. ""I hear there's a nice arcade on SimaRasir, the good sensory suite stuff. Play some games! Watch a big screen movie. Get a massage? Or not, you don't seem like the massage type."" She leaned forward a little. ""You might find someone in your seat when you get back, though, so... you know."" Ah. This wasn't entirely altruism. He'd heard of Tair filling desirable positions with her own picks. 
+
+
+
+It seemed reasonable if he was leaving, though. ""Wouldn't want the team to fall behind.""
+
+
+
+""Exactly,"" said Tair, pleasantly. Her glass was mysteriously near over. ""I'll send the details of the job later today. Finish your drink, yeah?"" Then she left, patting him on the shoulder as she passed by. 
+
+
+
+Lecter sat there for a while longer. He eventually did try the blue stuff. It was quite nice.
+
+
+there's so much luck involved in running, whatever you're running from(also, a dragee is basically Mentos, just less chewy)
+
+Lecter takes his first steps away from the Company.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+SimaRasir Orbital was massive. It hung at a libration point between the nearest planet and its star, an oblong shape initially carved out of a trojan asteroid. That had been centuries ago, clearly; it had since been built upon and added to until one could barely see any of the original rock surface. Ships moved busily around the docking shafts, coming and going. Even the largest carriers looked like puffed grains next to the boulder that was the station. 
+
+
+
+Lecter had looked long and hard, even reading the little historical blurb the station feed offered visitors. This would be the last legitimate shuttle trip he'd be taking in some time. 
+
+
+
+The outer surface was riddled with corporate hoardings and colourful advertising, a premonition of the situation inside. He was bombarded with it as soon as he got off the shuttle, and had to adjust his augment settings so they filtered the noise for him. SimaRasir was... 
+
+loud. 
+
+Crowded, too. The people who lived here probably got used to it over time. Somehow. Lecter couldn't see himself functioning long in this din.
+
+
+
+It helped to have something to do, somewhere to go--no use having a discontented client report him for not showing. Lecter took a (thankfully empty) transport bubble from the transit ring to the main transport hub, and from there to the more affluent levels of the station. (It was a lot less noisy here, with barely anybody walking around, and there were a great deal more ornamental plants.) The map point the client had sent to his augment brought him to the back door of a large blue-steel edifice. It was at the end of a little walkway covered with smooth, irregularly tinted tiles. To one side was a display of short plants covered with flowers, to the other was parked a personal petrochem flyer Lecter was certain couldn't actually be used on the station. 
+
+
+
+The ComfortUnit that opened the door appeared to be in good repair, but that wasn't unusual for well-treated, properly maintained units. The two SecUnits of the household were in good condition too, something that cheered him up when he saw it. Too many rich clients liked making their units fight, or mistreated them in other ways; it was always pleasant to see one who took care of their things. This assessment held up on closer examination: the SecUnits were just grimy, with the sort of organic buildup consistent with planetary exposure. 
+
+
+
+The ComfortUnit hovered. It frequently disappeared, presumably when the client summoned it from elsewhere in the building, but the rest of the time it stood nearby and watched him work. It seemed almost 
+
+protective
+
+ of the SecUnits?--but perhaps Lecter was ascribing motives that didn't exist. Perhaps it was as simple as the client asking it to keep watch, so he didn't run off with an expensive knick-knack or something. 
+
+
+
+One of the SecUnits stayed in the room while he worked on the ComfortUnit. It was in fine condition too, if similarly dusty. The client had probably taken the three of them planetside, and they'd done nothing particularly strenuous there.
+
+
+
+The job had gone more or less like he'd expected for routine maintenance. He marked it complete, and the client promptly approved it. He was free now. He'd probably have to leave this level soon, but he didn't have to leave the station right away. He could stay in a hotel. Have a couple days to himself. See what SimaRasir Orbital had to offer.
+
+
+
+Or he could run. 
+
+
+
+A strange lethargy gripped him. Couldn't he just keep working, keep taking assignments? This one had gone quite pleasantly. The ComfortUnit had smiled and thanked him as it'd led him out, and even if it had been ordered to do that, it had felt nice. 
+
+
+
+He knew, though, that this wasn't what usually happened. He remembered that young SecUnit, breathing wetly around the metal in its dying lungs. And he could remember any number of other onsite jobs where the units he'd had to look at were treated so much worse. Ones where he'd had to call Legal because not even company contracts allowed that sort of thing. The only reason he even knew of those were the barebones reports he filed before taking his amnestics, and even that dry language said enough.
+
+
+
+And none of it would end if he left, of course. He'd be replaced by a technician who cared less, who 
+
+had 
+
+to care less. Or it would eat them up. Maybe there was a substance for that, too, that helped you see constructs as product and nothing more
+
+.  
+
+
+
+
+Lecter took a deep breath and boarded a transport bubble back to the noise and bustle of the hub.
+
+
+
+...
+
+
+
+The feed community had contact information for those travel network agents based in Simarasir. They'd been vouched for by other users, but everyone in that community was necessarily anonymous. Lecter tentatively sent a request anyway, hoping he wasn't making a huge mistake revealing who he was.
+
+
+
+He was sent a single map point--and a map. A quick comparison revealed the new one was different from the publicly available station schematics. It had several additional levels, for starters, and the highlighted route used stairways and passages the public map simply didn't feature. That was both interesting and worrying, and perhaps something he should've expected. They 
+
+would
+
+ want to avoid surveillance.
+
+
+
+This trust was concerning. His augment was still active, its connection to the company live and not something he could disable, not while it was in his head. They couldn't change his settings or files directly, not as far as he was aware, but they could track him quite easily if they wanted to. A countermeasure existed, he'd seen the feed community discuss it, but it was a bit of a private project and not available to print. Perhaps the travel network agents could tell him where to find one, if this map really was leading him to them.
+
+
+
+He examined the route in more detail. There were quite a few flights of stairs in his immediate future. At least he'd packed light--just a few changes of clothes; his tools (which he'd paid off in full, those were 
+
+his); 
+
+and the hard currency cards he'd slipped in between the lining and the exterior fabric of his bag, sitting in a reassuring lump against his spine. He'd also packed some snacks and water, knowing that they weren't enough to last him any reasonable period of time.
+
+
+
+He made his way to the first door in, trying to move with the crowds, trying to look like he knew where he was going. It was a lot more difficult when he had to keep stopping to check his map. There were visitors all over doing the same thing, though, so perhaps he blended in just fine. Nobody got in his way before he reached the door, a discreet thing set into the end of a stale-aired hall. There was a camera set into the opposite wall, an ancient thing with its indicator light off. The noise over the station feed cut out almost immediately once he shut the door, which was a welcome relief.
+
+
+
+It looked like the secret passages were all maintenance corridors. An artefact of the station's age, perhaps? Or did all stations have this layer to them? The place was a maze, with dozens of different routes to a single location, and every stretch of corridor looked exactly the same: grey, dimly lit, and barely warmed, with a magnetic rail running along one wall for moving things. The walls were covered in labelled panels and dark status displays that didn't register him passing by. Occasionally the monotony would be broken by little closets full of crates or small rooms with bunks and tables, but with nobody actually using any of them. It was mysteriously, unnervingly empty, the only sounds the distant rumble of the station proper and his own feet on the metal floor.
+
+
+
+A helpful passcode popped up over the map whenever he was required to enter one at a door or gate. Not all of them worked, though, and he often had to recalculate a route with one that would. The journey seemed interminable, and soon his breath rose in front of him in wispy puffs. (At least there was air.) He was not in good shape, had never been. The closest he came to exercise was hopping around trying to trip a precociously nimble unit; all these flights were a challenge. 
+
+
+
+He found himself taking frequent breaks to catch his breath--but even those breaks couldn't take too long, or the cold would begin to creep into him, starting with his fingers and toes. His ears and nose already felt chilly and strange. It was a thoroughly disconcerting experience; Lecter had never been 
+
+cold
+
+ before. 
+
+
+
+Something about feeling cold unnerved him more than the actual sensation. How much of this feeling was a natural response, and how much of it was the drugs still leaching out of his system? He was on a much smaller dose now, but his head still twinged sometimes, and his hands shook slightly when he wasn't paying attention. They had been steady at the client's place, thankfully. It seemed like the sort of thing a ComfortUnit would pick up and report on.
+
+
+
+The highlighted route eventually spat him out into an embarkation hall atrium. The feed marker sign on the wall read Tertiary Loading Bay 19. He must be up by the merchant docks... but 
+
+how?
+
+ There was no way he could've gotten that far, not on his own feet. He wandered closer to the sign, going back over the route he'd taken on the map.
+
+
+
+""You're a regular company mook, aren't you?"" said a voice, sharp and amused. Lecter startled and whipped around, stumbling slightly. ""Whoa there."" It was a person in dark, shapeless clothes, standing in a corner of the hall so dimly lit they'd blended in. ""You Lecter?""
+
+
+
+""Yes,"" said Lecter, wary. Their feed identifier had the name of the agent he'd contacted, but something about their presence felt wrong. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn't focus on the agent's face. Their features blurred and shifted every time he thought he'd pinned one down. What kind of tech was this? (If it was tech at all.)
+
+
+
+""Good. Glad you didn't get lost. Now put this on your temple--left side, if you will--or you're not seeing shit."" The person kicked a small box across the floor, and Lecter slowly picked it up. Inside was a single patch--the sort that delivered augment updates. It was clearly recycler printed. He looked up at the agent, who nodded at him. ""Go on.""
+
+
+
+He'd been meaning to ask for that countermeasure, hadn't he? Lecter swallowed, peeled the film off the business side of the patch, and gently pressed it against the skin of his temple. There was nothing, for a moment, and then lights burst in front of his eyes so violently it made him stagger back and shake his head. Error messages piled in, reporting broken connections and revoked permissions and security breaches, and he had to spend whole seconds just clearing them out. Served him right for accepting some pirate augment mod, really. What had he expect--
+
+oh. 
+
+He could see the agent's face now. And the 
+
+three other people in the room.
+
+
+
+
+Lecter stared, his heart in his ears. All three were in full armour and held weapons. Was this some kind of company trap? He'd definitely made a mistake somewhere. He should've started running, but he couldn't move.
+
+
+
+""I can 
+
+hear 
+
+you panicking,"" said the agent, thoroughly bored. ""Calm down. That mod just cut the company out of your head.""
+
+
+
+""But,"" croaked Lecter, still staring at the three new people. How could a countermeasure do 
+
+this?
+
+ That had looked like an average update delivery patch. Unless he was seeing things, and they weren't actually there--
+
+
+
+""Disruption filters,"" said one of them, shrugging slightly. So much for that idea. ""In case you weren't actually cargo.""
+
+
+
+The agent grunted. ""Postpone the shock and horror a bit? We should get a move on."" They gestured in the direction of one of the bay doors before walking towards it. In a lower voice, but still quite audibly, they continued, ""I have 
+
+no idea
+
+ why I keep taking greeter shifts. It's such a pain every time, I swear--""
+
+
+
+Lecter unstuck his feet and followed them hesitantly. One of the armoured people waited for him to go through before they followed. He glanced back at them, but they only shrugged again. ""A spy ran with the mod once, sold it to the company,"" they explained. ""Had to design a new one after that. Heard it wasn't easy."" It made sense that they had contingency plans for people who didn't show up intending to travel. He understood that. He also understood there wasn't any backing out now. 
+
+
+
+A short passage led to another embarkation hall, this one larger and positively bustling with people. Any number of people would have been a crowd after the maintenance passages, though; there couldn't actually have been more than twelve. There was a pile of luggage to one side with an abandoned air to it. The centre of the bay held an assortment of chairs and mats people were sitting on (and they had the beleaguered look of travellers among them). To the far side was another person dressed like the agent, sitting at a table. They looked like the one to talk to.
+
+
+
+Lecter retreated into his augment. It really did look like all his links to the company had been cut, with persistent errors all over the company software he still had installed. His accesses to company databases were gone, including those for translation services. He'd have to depend on local feeds like everybody else did, now. It was a grim thought.
+
+
+
+Fortunately he'd kept his plans in local storage, including the route he planned to take to the Preservation Alliance. The first leg of the journey was... he knew where he had to go, and roughly how much it would cost. He just hoped it would sit within the amount he'd budgeted for it. Travelling by the network was never cheap, and prices were essentially whatever the people in charge wanted them to be. 
+
+
+in a capitalist hellhole like the CR, you can bet there's cracks and workarounds for absolutely everything. the relay network is 100% just tor
+
+Strange but not unwelcome friends, strange but very unwelcome news.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+""Why don't you ever finish your meal?"" asked Caretaker Quetta, as close to exasperation as Lecter had ever seen it get. ""Is there something wrong with it? I thought you liked that flavour!""
+
+
+
+Lecter looked unhappily at his plate. He always felt bad about not being able to eat the dinner Loaf. He'd tried watching or reading something while choking it down, barely chewing it, but Caretaker Minar had put a stop to that very quickly. He now had to chew every bite five times.
+
+
+
+He 
+
+couldn't,
+
+ though. He really couldn't.
+
+
+
+Quetta sat on the bench next to him. It was adult-sized so it looked a bit silly on the tiny bench, but Lecter was still grateful Quetta wasn't looming. They were the only ones still in the mess hall. ""Tell me, Lecter. I'm sure we can find a solution if we try. What's wrong?""
+
+
+
+""There's nothing 
+
+wrong 
+
+with it,"" he insisted wearily. He'd come to that conclusion a while ago, seeing his creche-siblings eat it without any issue. Some of them even liked it. ""My 
+
+mouth 
+
+is what's wrong."" He screwed up his face, trying not to be upset. 
+
+He
+
+ was the problem here, so it wasn't fair for him to be upset about it. ""It just--I don't--it feels bad in my mouth. It feels,"" and he shuddered, hoping it came across.
+
+
+
+Quetta didn't look mad or disappointed, though. It looked thoughtful. ""Is it the texture you have a problem with? You could pick up the Loaf in your hand if I asked you?""
+
+
+
+Lecter nodded. ""Only when I eat it.""
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It considered this. ""What if I blended it up into a shake? You could just drink it through a straw.""
+
+
+
+""That's gross,"" said Lecter, matter-of-factly, but he stopped to consider the idea. It was better than having to chew the Loaf, for sure, but there was no way his creche-sibs wouldn't think it was weird. They already thought that, though, and if it meant being able to finish his food... ""Okay."" 
+
+
+
+Quetta gave him a warm smile. ""We'll try it tomorrow and see how it goes. Don't worry if it doesn't work. We'll try something else.""
+
+
+
+That was really good to hear. Lecter pushed the Loaf around on his plate, no longer feeling quite so hopeless about it all. ""Why do you want me to eat this so bad? I've never seen 
+
+you 
+
+eat."" A horrifying, fascinating thought occurred to him. 
+
+""Do 
+
+you eat?"" All the caretakers vanished from the creche occasionally, and he'd always assumed it was to their own rooms. They certainly never ate or slept around him or his creche-sibs, but that didn't mean they 
+
+didn't... 
+
+right?
+
+
+
+Quetta paused for a moment, and Lecter's mouth fell open. It was quick to reassure him, though. ""I do eat!"" it said, laughing softly. ""I suppose... I'm not human, as you know. I eat a little differently. Not human foods.""
+
+
+
+""Lucky,"" said Lecter, with feeling. ""You don't have to eat 
+
+Loafs."" 
+
+He lifted a chunk on his fork and watched it slowly crumble down onto the plate below. ""So how 
+
+do
+
+ you eat?""
+
+
+
+""For constructs... we eat differently, like I said. All our food comes specially made for us, and we take it in through ports under our skin."" Quetta gestured at its side, and Lecter stared at the fabric of its uniform with large eyes, wondering what the ports looked like. They were 
+
+under
+
+ the skin--did Quetta have to take its skin off at every meal? Probably not. That would be painful. He imagined them looking like little mouths. 
+
+
+
+""Can I see?""
+
+
+
+...
+
+
+
+Lecter woke up slowly, blinking the dream away. It had been a long time since he'd thought of Quetta. Of all their ComfortUnit caretakers, Quetta had been the nicest to him, and the one most willing to deal with the ways he could be peculiar about things. He'd learnt later that all the caretakers were given a different set of children to focus on, and he had likely been one of Quetta's, but that didn't change how he remembered it.
+
+
+
+Caretaker Quetta had eventually got him permission to visit the construct ready room and watch it resupply. His love of constructs had probably started there, in that cold bare room, with Quetta letting him examine a resupply canister and plug in the leads. He could still remember how careful he'd been, and how Quetta had ruffled his hair and smiled sleepily at him and called him a ""little technician.""
+
+
+
+The dream had 
+
+some
+
+ timing. It made him feel bad about leaving the company, even when he reminded himself why. The company had chartered that creche, supplied the caretakers, provided his training--running felt 
+
+disloyal, 
+
+somehow, even when he knew he had to.
+
+
+
+He was in his bunk on the travel network transport out of SimaRasir, curled protectively around his bag. The ship they were in was a bit of a fixer-upper, nothing like the sturdily functional company shuttles Lecter was used to. It had rattled and shuddered its way free of the station, and now... Lecter could feel a barely-there vibration through the plastic under his cheek. They were probably in the wormhole.
+
+
+
+He was on the middle bunk of three, so there was just enough room to sit up if he stayed a little hunched. 
+
+
+
+The first thing he saw was his neighbour opposite him, one bunk down, looking right at him. Lecter quashed the urge to duck back down and pretend they hadn't made eye contact. How was it just the two of them in this six-bunk cabin? ""You're from the company,"" the other passenger said, slightly accusatory. Their feed ID said their name was Koya, they/them. 
+
+
+
+Lecter tried speaking. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. ""I was, yes."" 
+
+Not anymore, not really.
+
+ How could Koya have known? He wondered if people could see it in his face. The greeter agent had also made a comment along those lines. 
+
+
+
+""I thought they paid you lot well?"" Lecter wondered if Koya was actually accusing him of something, or if they were just curious and he was misreading their tone. This wouldn't be the first time he'd managed that. He decided to take them at face value, no tone assigned.
+
+
+
+They hadn't been wrong, either. ""Depends on your position,"" he said, trying not to reveal too much. Construct technicians were certainly paid very well. He didn't feel like this would be wise to share.
+
+
+
+""Course it does, 'course it does,"" said Koya, a bit dismissively. There was a pause. Lecter inspected the pipes running along the cabin ceiling. ""Not often I see a company runner. Always felt kinda sad for 'em... hey. You know where you're going, how to get there, all of that? They didn't make you leave your luggage?""
+
+
+
+Lecter looked back at them, thrown by the apparent shift in tone. ""Yes. And yes. I, um, I plotted it out."" And marked out agents and stations and costs for every leg of the journey. It had taken hours of picking at, not counting the slow response times over the relays he'd used. ""I only brought one bag.""
+
+
+
+""Smart,"" said Koya, nodding, definitely approving this time. ""Too many people don't know to arrange cargo space in advance."" 
+
+
+
+They seemed to be experienced travelling this way. Lecter resisted the urge to ask for advice. ""Where's everybody else?""
+
+
+
+""Main room, probably."" They shrugged. ""They've got the reboot season of that show playing. What was it again--
+
+Argala 
+
+something. No idea how they got hold of it.."" Lecter knew of that show. 
+
+MedCentre Argala 
+
+was an old series, set in a hospital and very dramatic about everything. A couple of his colleagues liked making references to it every time there was an emergency order, so he'd looked it up. ""I'm staying here. Going to catch up on sleep.""
+
+
+
+Lecter checked his chronometer, then compared it with the time on the ship. They had ten hours left in the wormhole. It was a shorter trip than he'd expected, but it turned out taking small wormhole jumps was actually 
+
+quicker, 
+
+somehow, than jumping a long distance directly. Which made many small trips cheaper than a long one. It didn't really make sense, but everyone on the feed community seemed to agree; something about fuel economy and the ways physics got funny inside a wormhole.
+
+
+
+There were a lot of these small jumps ahead of him, and over ten hours until the next one. Lecter lay back down, hugged his bag closer, and opened his Preservation Standard phrasebook in his feed space. Might as well spend that time doing something useful.
+
+
+
+...
+
+
+
+Koya and their group, the other four travellers in Lecter's cabin--they were Onionhead movers. 
+
+
+
+The CR didn't have many regulations on what could and couldn't be sold, but Onionhead had been banned everywhere Lecter had ever lived. He'd seen a great deal of anti-Onionhead messaging in the creches and during training, so this revelation was a little surprising. The group didn't seem offended by his reaction, though, just amused.  
+
+
+
+According to them... the consortia that managed every station and planet allowed most things (that weren't direct competitors, anyway), but there was a small selection of goods that defied corporate control. Things that didn't take well to mass-manufacture, whose producers wouldn't bend to corporate pressure?--they either became limited-origin luxuries or contraband vilified by the corporates who couldn't control it. All while they were the ones buying most of it!
+
+
+
+Or that was what Koya's teammate Rikke told Lecter, and her broad gestures and impassioned tone were compelling. Koya only laughed and said, ""It pays."" The truth was most likely somewhere in between. 
+
+
+
+They'd taken a shine to him, the movers, but even he could tell it was a little... fatalistic. They clearly didn't think he'd make it very far, but they still wanted him to succeed, if only so the company would take a loss. Lecter didn't have the heart to tell them his absence would barely be noticed. They 
+
+were 
+
+quite nice, even if they treated him like a sheltered freeholder.
+
+
+
+More coincidentally, they were going the same route as Lecter for the next three wormhole trips, and they good-naturedly let him tag along in their wake. Each station had its own clandestine embarkation halls that he'd otherwise have had to locate on a map like on SimaRasir, but the movers seemed to know where everything was already. They were familiar with travelling like this, and the agents were clearly used to them, exchanging tired jokes and exasperated greetings.
+
+
+
+The agents still checked his augment, of course. They didn't even have to ask to know where he was from. Perhaps the now-purpling bruise where he'd attached the mod was proof enough. 
+
+
+
+When their journeys split, Koya asked where Lecter was jumping next. ""AndWellArman? Really?"" When he nodded, wary, they sucked at their teeth and winced. ""Safe travelling there. We paused deliveries after the black hole cultists showed up and started causing problems.""
+
+
+
+""I thought the Great Annihilator was a quasar,"" grumbled Rikke.
+
+
+
+""See, that's the kind of thing you 
+
+don't 
+
+want to be saying on AndWellArman,"" said Koya. ""Be careful, yeah? Keep your head down. Not the first bunch of kooks we're run across, but these ones have 
+
+teeth.
+
+"" And that was all Lecter got out of them. The movers were very insistent on not knowing where he was headed, and wouldn't give out any details of their own route. They did give him some packaged food and that reboot season of 
+
+MedCentre Argala, 
+
+which Lecter thought was nice. 
+
+
+
+As much as Lecter doubted it was 
+
+cultists 
+
+(really, now), they'd been right about something going on at AndWellArman. The travel network agent looked askance at him requesting a berth heading there. ""You sure?"" They retreated into their feed for a moment. ""No berths. Just cargo. You'll get bagged air and water but that's it. There's a ship leaving in... three cycles, thereabouts.""
+
+
+
+Lecter stared at them. They shrugged, like this was perfectly ordinary. 
+
+
+
+He hurriedly examined his route map, suddenly adrift, extremely aware of the people waiting behind him. ""What about--SuryaHydri? DelPavonis. BeloPosenoi?"" The next three on the route, all decent hubs for the travel network. Or so said the information he'd collected, but it was clearly out of date. There'd been no mention of... cultists.
+
+
+
+The agent checked the information in their feed, but it was perfunctory. They'd clearly had to make this query many times. ""Nope. Not from here. The direction you're going... there's a transport to NgaruNanSapwe in two cycles. Very few berths. You want it?""
+
+
+
+The travellers behind him were muttering things. Lecter was sweating in the dry cold of the loading bay, and his hands were beginning to shake. ""Uh."" NgaruNanSapwe was eight jumps ahead. This wouldn't be cheap or quick. ""How much--?""
+
+
+
+The agent told him. 
+
+
+
+""AndWellArman, please,"" said Lecter, feeling strangely lightheaded. A 
+
+cargo module. 
+
+He'd never even seen one outside of media and the odd news piece. Would they just stack people inside? How would that 
+
+work?
+
+ He paid for his place and drifted towards the traveller seating, head full of anxious thoughts. 
+
+
+Onionhead is a reference to Elite: Dangerous, because I am incapable of not making obscure videogame referencesThe Great Annihilator, on the other hand, is very real. cultists not confirmed though
+
+Traveling by box is not a great experience. What waits at the end isn't better by much.
+
+Minor emesis warning for this chapter.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+
+The cargo module was a literal crate. 
+
+
+
+Lecter and his fellow travellers--and there 
+
+were 
+
+others, but they probably had the same problem he did--were directed to an adjacent hall and shown to a module with its hatch open. It had 
+
+This Way Up 
+
+stenciled on the side in feed marker, along with 
+
+Handle Carefully 
+
+and 
+
+Volatile Contents. 
+
+There was a pile of bagged water and rebreathers on the floor just outside. There was little climate control in this hall, and each breath was uncomfortably cold. 
+
+
+
+Inside the module was... surprisingly little. Small, dim stick-on lamps glowed high above their heads, and dozens of thin clipping tethers were welded to the support struts. A tiny vacuum commode sat at the far end, partitioned off by long sheets of opaque plastic for some kind of privacy. More plastic was laid over the ground, doing nothing to insulate from the chill metal floor. Lecter picked a nice middle spot by the module wall and hovered, his hands twisted into the straps of his bag so they would stop shaking. He needed to take his next dose soon. It was a very small dose now, thankfully, just a single vial, a couple pills, and one patch, but he also wanted to wait until they were off.
+
+
+
+When everyone was in and had their rebreathers on, the module hatch was shut and the space pressurised. Lecter heard the hatch locks sliding into place. It was a very unpleasant feeling to know he was stuck face-to-face with his fellow travellers--for the next fifteen hours, at least. They looked as uncomfortable as he did.
+
+
+
+Some of the others sat, so he sat too. The cold leached in through his thin clothes. He could feel the indentations on the metal floor digging into his thighs. His head twinged. Perhaps he should take the dose a little early? It wouldn't be early, though, it would be on time... he moved his bag to his lap and opened it to where he kept his little drug case.
+
+
+
+It was empty.
+
+
+
+Lecter's heart sank. He knew himself, he knew he wouldn't put them anywhere else. He searched the bag anyway, in the vain hope of finding a lost vial, something, anything--but he didn't. Of course. All his tools were there, his clothes, other odds and ends, all untouched: just his drugs missing.  
+
+
+
+He didn't know who could have taken it. Someone on the station, maybe? He certainly hadn't been as discreet dosing himself as he should have been. Could it have been another traveller? Maybe he'd moved away from his bag in his sleep, and somebody had taken advantage... but who'd even 
+
+want
+
+ to steal such a small amount? He looked helplessly at the other people in the module, but none of them stood out in any way. His head twinged again.
+
+
+
+They all startled when the module 
+
+moved,
+
+ suddenly, sharply, and Lecter realised they were being taken to the ship. He was literal cargo this time. 
+
+
+
+He rubbed his eyes. Whoever had been behind the theft, it didn't matter anymore. The next few hours were going to be 
+
+miserable.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+(And they were. It started with nausea--and the bagged water was no good, it smelled so heavily of chlorine it made Lecter's stomach lurch harder--and just got worse from there. He was aware that this was nothing at all compared to missing a higher dose, that this was the kindest way to leave his leash behind (short of actually weaning off the blend), but it was hard to tell himself that when he was shaking too hard to hide and the edges of his vision were going strange and--and--
+
+
+
+He was sure his neighbours noticed. He could see the whites of their eyes, he knew where they were looking. It made him want to curl up and sink through the metal under him. Knowing that they probably 
+
+weren't 
+
+watching and this was just a touch of withdrawal paranoia--it didn't help. Not one bit. The feed community hadn't mentioned paranoia being a risk at missing a dose this low: had they known? Probably not, right? They wouldn't do that. 
+
+
+
+He eventually staggered over to the commode partition, taking off his rebreather and heaving into the little bag it had come in. He threw up mostly stomach acid, but the relief was worth it. He didn't want to put the rebreather back on right away, but there was precious little air in the module. The water didn't taste as bad as it smelled, thankfully.
+
+
+
+When he returned to his chosen bit of wall and tethered himself in place, nobody paid him the least bit of attention. It was painfully deliberate, and he was touched.)
+
+
+
+He was woken from an unintended nap by a shudder from the metal under him. Everyone was quiet and tense, listening to the sounds from outside: scrapes, thunks, impacts that made Lecter's teeth shake in his skull. Were they at their destination already? What was happening? His head twinged again when he tried accessing the local feed, but a glance was enough to confirm they were at AndWellArman.
+
+
+
+Then were cries of surprise from some of the others as the module 
+
+fell. 
+
+It was caught before Lecter could grab at the sheeting. That didn't help when the module next began to tilt, piling everyone who hadn't tethered themselves to one end. Lecter was flung against a nearby strut, and his neighbour swung heavily into him, knocking the breath from his lungs and making his vision swim--but the tethers held, digging painfully into their sides. 
+
+
+
+There were whimpers of pain from the pile. It hurt to breathe, and Lecter was certain he'd have bruises, but that beat falling several metres and getting flattened. 
+
+
+
+The module abruptly righted, the raised end falling too, and there were more groans and cries as gravity changed the orientation of the crush. Some of the people on top managed to move away. The people at the bottom had fallen a shorter distance, but they'd also had to deal with the weight of those who'd fallen onto them. They... weren't doing so well. 
+
+
+
+Everyone went quiet and wide-eyed, then, as they heard raised voices from outside. Friendly? He was about to reach out to the feed again--and then they heard the sudden sharp sound of weapon fire. One shot. Lecter wouldn't bet any currency on it, but it sounded like energy weapons against metal. He'd heard plenty of that while calibrating the guns on new units. It wouldn't be SecUnits outside, would it? These travel networks were big, but they didn't have 
+
+SecUnit 
+
+money. Surely not.
+
+
+There was some more conversation, the words impossible to make out, then the hatch hissed and slid open. There was a group of three outside, and one was a very familiar height and build. Lecter felt his breath catch in his throat. This SecUnit--and it was a SecUnit, those were its gunports there--wore human-grade armour up to the elbows and had its short hair shaved into a sunburst over the side of its barefaced head. Not something the company would do, but there were other manufacturers. 
+
+
+One of the other two made some inaudible comment, and the SecUnit looked surprised for a moment--before it 
+
+laughed
+
+. Lecter stared. He had never seen a SecUnit laugh, not once, and it made the floor under him feel dangerously unsteady.
+
+
+
+Or maybe that was still the withdrawal. He didn't know anymore.
+
+
+
+""Out, all of you!"" ordered one of the humans, rapping a fist against the outside of the module. They weren't dressed like agents, and their feed IDs didn't have the same privacy settings. These were curiously embellished, with all three sharing the first name 
+
+Routier.
+
+ Perhaps it was a title in a language he didn't know... and couldn't translate, but he was cut off from any company services that could've helped him there.
+
+
+
+Those who could get out of the module detached themselves and hurried to obey, all of them keeping themselves a good distance from the SecUnit. Probably for the best: there was no way it wasn't rogue. It had to be. It had 
+
+laughed! 
+
+The image was seared into his head. Lecter followed the other travellers, but he couldn't help a look back at the SecUnit. The rogue.
+
+
+
+It met his glance with an icy stare of its own, all levity gone. 
+
+
+
+Then his vision fractured for a moment, and he blinked furiously until he could see again. This wasn't his withdrawal, though, or anything coming from his own wetware. If he had to guess... he'd just been on the wrong side of a brute-force hack, the SecUnit stomping gracelessly through the software walls he'd had up and rifling through the contents of his augment. There was something deliberate about the indelicacy of the hack, and he wondered again just how obvious his company origins were. 
+
+
+
+When he could finally focus, the two not-agents were looking at him, too. They were intensely silent in a way that told him they were listening to someone over the feed. Or some
+
+thing
+
+. Was the SecUnit talking to them? But then they looked away without saying a word, and gestured for the travellers to follow.
+
+
+
+There turned out to be a 
+
+lot 
+
+of people waiting to leave AndWellArman.
+
+
+
+This didn't seem surprising, given what Koya and his group had said about the station, but it was still alarming to see possibly hundreds of people crowded into the embarkation hall. There were 
+
+children. 
+
+When was the last time Lecter had seen a child in real life? They looked almost alien, all wrong proportions and high voices.
+
+
+
+That wasn't the only strange thing. There were entirely too many guards circling them, all in expensive armour and shaved sunbursts. All 
+
+Routiers. 
+
+Those of them who didn't have their armour cut off at the elbows carried accelerator weapons. It was an unreasonable amount of firepower to wield against a bunch of ragged transients. Or that's what he thought until he noticed his fellow travellers more closely--saw their polished skin, the carefully balanced asymmetry of their faces, the absence of recycler artefacts on their clothes. The guards may have been there to protect 
+
+them. 
+
+
+
+
+From whom? Lecter looked nervously at the doors out of the embarkation hall. Were the cultists really that bad? Or were the 
+
+Routiers
+
+ part of them? He felt rather like he'd popped his head in on something big halfway through happening, and he knew nothing about it. 
+
+
+
+Some shameless eavesdropping revealed the cult was actually based in SuryaHydri, a major hub of arms merchants to the polities outside the Corporation Rim. They'd apparently taken control of it and every asset within the system. That definitely explained all the guns, and the armour, and the SecUnits. There were six unique SecUnits in the embarkation hall, including the one who'd hacked him. Were they all rogue? Lecter had heard all the popular rumours about rogue units, and he'd dismissed them--they weren't 
+
+animals, 
+
+they wouldn't just go feral. (Plus there was the rogue SecUnit in the documentary from Preservation, and how it had spoken about itself.) Lecter knew the human guards were far more likely to do unwise things. SecUnits were focused and disciplined.
+
+
+
+Or that could have been the governor module keeping them in check, like the company claimed. He didn't actually know the first thing about rogue SecUnits, save for company case studies during training, and 
+
+those
+
+ invariably depicted them as extremely dangerous. Still focused and disciplined, incidentally, but completely impossible to control or predict. Lecter could guess what the company 
+
+actually 
+
+had a problem with.
+
+
+
+None of that explained why these SecUnits were rogue. It was easy to picture a minor deployment centre in SuryaHydri getting overtaken by a crowd of zealous types, but deactivating their governor modules... something about the cult, maybe? Was bot liberation one of their tenets? The rogue SecUnits seemed to 
+
+belong 
+
+here, as wary as the travellers seemed to be; the human guards here certainly seemed to get along with them. 
+
+
+
+Were they... happy? He had the momentary mad urge to ping them with a SecSystem code, but he knew that was a quick way to get shot. 
+
+
+
+He spent his time watching them instead, as discreetly as he could manage it. Their movements were smooth and their armour well-fitting even though it was made for humans and had no gunport slots, but they weren't in the best condition. Many of them had burns and accelerator wounds shoddily patched over with human-grade wound sealant. One had a nasty scrape on the side of its head that occasionally shone wet in the hall lights. Didn't they have cubicles?--or would cubicles spot that they were rogue? Lecter didn't know how they'd been hacked, so that was possible. 
+
+
+
+The mad need to interfere still hadn't left him, and the thoughts plagued him for hours. 
+
+He could help them.
+
+ He had the tools right there in his bag, and he knew all the coded instructions a cubicle would use to accelerate healing. He could find how they'd been hacked and trim the edges so a cubicle couldn't do anything to hurt them. Thinking about it for longer than a second made it brutally clear why that wouldn't happen, of course, and he couldn't bring himself to look at them anymore. They probably didn't have any technicians in the cult, either, and they weren't getting one out here on demand. There was no way the company didn't know about this, but if SuryaHydri really was as heavily armed as they were made out to be, the company would take their sweet time. Gather their forces.
+
+
+
+It made him inexpressibly sad. He didn't want the company to win, but this was too big for them to ignore. And there was no question of the company 
+
+losing. 
+
+They'd crush the cultists and make them run, and then they'd destroy every rogue SecUnit in the place.
+
+
+ah the struggle between ensuring your own safety and helping others... there's a reason airlines have you put your own oxygen masks on first. can't do shit if you're deadsomething I tried to make clear while writing the story is the sheer size of the Rim and regions in space. I'm not certain I succeeded =_='
+
+More temptations, if unlikely ones. Lecter escapes the Rim.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+There were many ships heading out from AndWellArman. The Great Annihilator cultists might be a 'bunch of kooks,' as Koya'd put it, but they did let people leave a lot easier than they'd come in. Every ship was a medium-hauler, though, so Lecter imagined there was more than one distraught face when it came time to pay for a berth. None of the richer travellers would have that problem, of course. Neither did he, though he didn't like how much smaller his pile of hard currency cards was now.
+
+The transport he'd found a berth on was... weird. It looked like a luxury liner, or like it had been a luxury liner several years ago, with large lounges and a lot of little cabins. The decorations had been ripped out, though, leaving shadows and outlines where they'd once been. The pool was drained of water and full of mysteriously marked crates instead. And each little cabin had a pair of two-tier bunks stuffed into it. The common area sofas were nice and broken in, though, and there were a lot of screens with plenty of entertainment. (He even made it out there on occasion, to watch things and nod at other travellers.) The large windows had nothing beyond them but metal sheeting, though, the one time he opened the shutters.
+
+The bunks weren't too bad, either. They were the same squeaky plastic as the bunks on the transport where he'd met Koya and the movers, but it felt like an upgrade after the folded pallets on AndWellArman. The nausea had been hard to deal with on the station: hard to sleep off, hard to power through, especially with the bruises from the cargo module--the little medical vending machine provided by the cultists would only dispense a couple anti-nausea pills every cycle, and spoofing feed IDs to get more wouldn't work when it also used a camera. This made the liner's tiny MedSystem a welcome surprise, even if it couldn't really do more than set bones. Most of it was locked off to anyone who wasn't an agent, but the dispensary was open for guest use. It took a couple of samples and printed him a ten-cycle patch that helped immensely. Perhaps this  had  been worth the money. 
+
+Not all pricey tickets were liners, though, even if this one had been a liner at some point. The publicly available information on the ship's feed claimed it was a cargo hauler, so it was probably disguised to look like one.
+
+There was a single  Routier  onboard, too, visible in the feed, but all the other agents seemed the regular travel network variety. Was this cultist a human? Lecter saw them when the liner stopped in between jumps to restock. Some of the agents were heading into the station to be replaced by others, and the  Routier was among them. Entirely human, of course, short and dressed in armour up to their gloved hands.
+
+What wasn't human, though, was one of the replacements.
+
+Lecter tried to tell himself he was wrong. This agent was no SecUnit, certainly: they were around his own height, with choppy silver hair and none of the more obvious inorganic components. It was still a construct, though. It walked with a very familiar bend to its spine, something Lecter had seen dozens of times in new units that had had a rough time in transit. It was easy to fix, but it required a cubicle--or a specialised tool and some careful levering of cervical buttressing. Underneath ran a primary conduit, carrying several important nervous cables that usually got pinched or damaged in cases like this. This didn't mean function loss, necessarily, there were plenty of redundant cables to carry the same messages with no significant delay, but it  hurt . It lit up pain sensors up and down the spine and across the shoulders, apparently by design. New units were often so distracted by the pain that they'd get shocked repeatedly for responding to it--if they were activated before a fix, which was a mistake Lecter had only made once. (There was also usually some mobility loss, according to his training materials, but Lecter had never waited around to see proof of that.)
+
+And here this construct stood. A ComfortUnit, most probably, expression revealing absolutely nothing, feed ID reading only  Ratimir, they/them. Were they governed? It was unusual for governed ComfortUnits to have a full feed ID, but this close to the edge of Rim space, anything could happen. 
+
+Anything at all. Lecter tried to talk himself out of it. Maybe this was just a human with an injury they hadn't been able to fix for whatever reason, or they were born that way and it didn't actually hurt. Maybe they weren't a construct at all, and Lecter was just seeing things.  What were the chances he'd run across another construct this soon after all the rogues on AndWellArman? It would be easy to check: ping every ComfortUnit on the ship, and they should ping back. Right? Right. Not if they were a rogue.  That wouldn't end well.
+
+He watched them without watching them, running a recording through his augment so he could pay attention while appearing occupied. The agents wandered into the lounge, talking to each other, clearly friends in a familiar environment. Nothing out of the ordinary. One of them amiably slapped Ratimir on the upper back, and their eyes widened. Only their eyes, though--there was no other reaction. ""Shit, you okay?"" asked the other agent. They'd noticed too.
+
+""Back problems,"" said Ratimir, slowly, as if considering how much to share. Then they sighed. ""Station raid three orbits ago. I was on gunner duty, and--"" they nodded, smiling wryly, as the rest of the agents hissed in sympathy. ""Yeah."" 
+
+""Fucking Kratos line,"" said one of the other agents, with feeling. ""Punches both ways.""
+
+""Got a gunboat though,"" said Ratimir, smugly, and Lecter couldn't pick up the rest in all the celebratory noise they made leaving the lounge. Did he need any more, though? Looking up the Kratos on the station feed revealed it was a powerful last-generation anti-ship defence turret, one known for its nasty recoil. No governed construct could get away with something like that. It was just as well he'd held off on the ping: Ratimir evidently had fantastic aim.
+
+But the thought wouldn't leave him alone. 
+
+He still saw Ratimir around the ship. They spoke to passengers and carried out repairs and did other agent things. And they continued to walk with that bend in their spine, and it never stopped being painful to see. Lecter didn't know why he felt so guilty about it, except he did. It was the same irrational impulse that had gripped him before, the knowledge he could help and the awareness that this was none of his business.
+
+After one particularly unfortunate incident where they were replacing one of the lounge striplights and accidentally got their arm stuck and couldn't manoeuvre it out, he went to his cabin and laid out every tool he'd need to do the job. He even had a small tube of cable regen accelerant, which would prompt self-repair if the nerves  were  damaged. Everything he needed was right here, just like it had been with the beaten-up SecUnits on AndWellArman. Except that had been mostly cosmetic issues a SecUnit's self-healing would fix eventually, and this  really  wasn't. You could turn down pain sensors for a cut or scrape, but this was a pain that never left or got easier to deal with.
+
+Didn't change anything, did it? There was no way he was making himself known. Any rogue in disguise would think they'd been spotted, and once they saw him they'd have their proof. And forget claiming to be a technician and wanting to help--if they had a spoon of sense they'd think he wanted to reinstate their governor module. Just a loyal company technician returning lost product, right? Nobody to blame here but the company, and the company didn't care. He'd packed up his tools in disgust and curled up on the bunk. Nothing helped, not even the MedCenter Argala reboot, though watching it did confuse him for some time. 
+
+The guilt ate at him. He stayed away from the lounge and the galley hall except to stock up on food, and spent the rest of the trip in his cabin brute-forcing Preservation Standard into his head.
+
+...
+
+The few stations before Preservation were all outside the Corporation Rim. One was an anarchist system, and it didn't particularly care if the ships coming in were legitimate or not. The travel network transport docked on the transit ring along with all the other passenger ships, and Lecter walked out onto it as a nominally legal traveller. (It was a bit of a shock. He'd initially suspected the agents were pranking them.) The place wasn't too shabby, either, for what his colleagues would definitely have called an ""outsystem shithole."" Despite what 'anarchist' implied, the transit mall was relatively peaceful and normal-looking, with all the usual shops and conveniences. Perhaps they only cared about people following local rules, and what other stations thought was 'illegal' could go space itself.
+
+It was weird, buying a regular ticket. The agents only handled travelling  into the Rim from here, as people could just travel normally if they wanted to go further out. The travel network rules still seemed to apply, with longer trips costing slightly more, but the prices were a lot more reasonable. 
+
+It was... a strange relief, in a way, being outside the Corporation Rim. The company was less powerful here. They didn't have offices in the stations out here. Most big companies didn't, and it was almost jarring to see the mainstays of his entire life abruptly missing from the background. There was a lot less advertising noise on the stations, too--and wasn't  that  a surprise, automatically reaching to adjust for feed noise levels and realising there was none to filter out. He almost missed it, except he  really  didn't. Rather like his leash that way. He needed a lot more sleep now--and it was  galling, spending a third of each cycle passed out on a bunk or a chair somewhere--but the hours he spent awake were clearer. He spent a lot less time going over augment recordings of things his memory had failed to hold onto.
+
+There were still things he missed, though. Being outside the Rim apparently meant weird food. There wasn't any of the packaged food Lecter usually ate, or they were in special Rim Imports stores that charged entirely too much for a packet of blue all-nutrient gums. They had strange crunchy things dipped in hot oil, or rubbery brown things that felt odd on his teeth. It all smelt different from any food he'd eaten, but he gave some of them a go. It helped that he no longer felt nauseated from withdrawal--some of the food did  that  just fine, ha. It was a bit of an ordeal finding foods that played nice.
+
+His pickiness wasn't the only part of the CR he seemed to have brought with him. Everyone he interacted with shifted almost immediately to Rim Vulgar, like they could see it in his face. (He was beginning to suspect it was actually something about his appearance that tipped people off.) The locals were different out here, too. They looked more or less the same as people from the Rim, of course, appearance-wise, but they also didn't; it was something about their eyes, and the way they smiled at him. If Lecter was any better at reading faces he'd know what the difference was, but all he had now was a feeling. It was isolating (where was the commiseration?) but also weirdly welcome. He knew he wasn't one of them, and they knew it too. But they treated him okay just the same. 
+
+For the most part. He tried buying his ticket to Preservation Station in the local language, and the vendor (a person, for some reason, none of these places had bot ticket vendors) looked a bit oddly at him and shifted into Rim Vulgar. Which was nice but a bit embarrassing. His grasp of the spoken language was clearly more of a loose hold. Plenty of his fellow travellers spoke Preservation Standard, though, and between a free translation module for his augment and what he'd managed to learn, he understood most of what was said. Things were going well, right?
+
+Right. His nerves were a tangle in his stomach.
+
+(Today was cycle fifty-three. Tair would have reported him missing, as she would've had to, and the company'd probably issued automated warnings and repatriation orders to its branches and liaison offices by now. He wondered for a moment if the orders were to bring him in alive (and make him work off the costs of repatriation) or to dispose of his sorry corpse, and then he forced himself to stop wondering.)
+
+Lecter made sure to look at Preservation Station on the approach. It wasn't a big station, but it seemed to be built into the remains of... an arkship? He stared. He'd only ever seen them in media, but it certainly looked like one. Surely it was centuries old by now--wouldn't it have been easier to scrap the ark altogether? Preservation's feed was a lot more easily accessed from this close, and the visitor's brochure revealed the ark was a cultural thing, preserved for historical value. Apparently they called it Pressy, and there were tours.
+
+The idea was foreign. Tours! In an  arkship! He wondered if he'd be able to go on one of those tours, and had to reign in the buzz of dizzy excitement he felt at the idea. He barely had any money left. Maybe later.
+
+The dizziness didn't get better once they'd docked. It took him an hour to leave the ship (was he actually here?) and head into the transit ring, which was small but not too crowded. There was a nice seating area with comfortable-looking couches, and the floor was a giant costly-looking mosaic Lecter was careful to step around. The kiosks were an odd cone shape and made to look like wood, but they had all the usual information screens and other equipment inside. There were biomes all over the place, holding what seemed to be local plants in their natural environments on the planet below. 
+
+Lecter wandered over to a seat, sank into it, and spent some time just looking around. He was really here, wasn't he? He wasn't sure if he had enough hard currency for somewhere to stay, or food, or anything else; this was clearly an affluent place and living costs would probably follow suit. But he  was here. And he'd read up on applying for asylum, he'd done that early on. Apparently Preservation would let him pay off his expenses afterwards, and he'd be happy to do so. He was a quick learner, company blend or working raw. He'd pick up whatever they had for him to do.
+
+He stared at the biome closest to him--feed-labelled  Clypeus speculumi, a strange shell-like thing with bright fronds growing in the grainy soil in front of it--and he tried his hardest to imagine a future here. He couldn't, not really. It was hard enough getting used to the idea that he was done running. 
+
+Google that plant to see samples, if you'd like :3 Thank you so, so much for reading!
+
+This isn't necessarily a happily ever after. Lecter's a former Company employee on Preservation Station. Applying for asylum, sure, and really quite harmless, but there might be other parties on the station who don't see things the same way :))"
+44336665,Mission Suspended,['rainbowmagnet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Getting Stuck, potentially claustrophobia-inducing, Claustrophilia, chubby murderbot, touch-averse character, referenced weight gain, multi-track processing, FOMO, little to no plot, intentional dislocated legs, atypical fascination with weight gain, Embarrassment, Overstimulation, confusing feelings, Non-Graphic Violence, badassery, reassurance, Canon-Typical Profanity",English,2023-01-17,Completed,2023-01-17,"4,908",1/1,6,11,1,282,"['BWizard', 'AkaMissK', 'mallowcloud', 'mangagirl1216']",[],"
+I checked the schematic again. This was the entrance that the mission assessment had declared was the most dangerous to use, and therefore the one most appropriate for the two SecUnits accompanying the mission party.
+
+
+
+So why the fuck was it so tiny?
+
+
+
+Three crouched down and scanned the entrance, possibly looking for anything hiding just behind it. 
+
+Mission protocols suggest you should go in first, 
+
+it told me over the feed. That was its way of saying it was scared to go first.
+
+
+
+And no way. I wasn't going in first, where I could potentially lose track of Three while it was behind me and I couldn't see it. 
+
+I should go in behind you to provide cover, 
+
+I argued.
+
+
+
+Three turned to look at me. It was trying to keep its expression at SecUnit neutral, but even averting my gaze I could see the worry in its eyes. 
+
+But if I go in first, I may be unable to keep track of you if you require assistance.
+
+
+
+
+Yeah, that was part of what I was worried about. The fact of the matter was that, with the size of the opening and the weight disparity between me and Three, Three had a better chance of getting through than I did. I wanted to send it through first so that I wouldn't end up blocking its way in. 
+
+If you're really worried, you can stand by the entrance and keep watch. I'll be right behind you, I promise.
+
+
+
+
+Three looked at me for a couple more seconds, then at the ground, as if it had no idea what to do, which was pretty normal for Three. It looked at the entrance, scanning it, possibly trying to determine whether it had enough clearance to get through. Fortunately, instead of regular bulky clothes that would just get in the way, we were wearing these thin, elastic suits that adjusted to our body shapes. (If I didn't know more about the way they worked, I would almost say mine was surprised when I put it on, like it hadn't been expecting a SecUnit of such generous proportions.) After a moment of hesitation, Three cautiously put its head and arms through the opening.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As Three pushed itself through the entrance, I was hacking the building's security system, pulling camera views and schematics and reading diagnostic information. From what I could see, no one had been alerted to our presence yet, and the others were mostly standing by their respective entrances, encouraging each other. It didn't look good for our mission timeline, but depressed humans don't tend to do that well on missions, so I guess it was necessary.
+
+
+
+About halfway through, Three stopped. 
+
+I don't think I have enough clearance.
+
+
+
+
+I crouched closer to it, examining its progress through the entrance. 
+
+You're fine. Just keep going. 
+
+I added, 
+
+It's not going to be effortless, you know.
+
+
+
+
+It was definitely a close fit (although I wasn't going to tell Three that or it might start moving backward), but I could tell that Three would make it through if it put a little energy into its movements. I hadn't really started thinking about how I was going to get through yet, which in hindsight was a bit of a mistake, but I was more focused on making sure that we didn't get caught and that Three didn't decide to bail.
+
+
+
+Three hesitated for another second, during which I had time to wonder whether I was going to have to shove it in myself, then it kept moving. Okay, good. That was, until it got up to its hips and hit a bit of a snag.
+
+
+
+I could tell it was about to panic, so I said, 
+
+Don't panic.
+
+ I know, is there anything worse I could say to someone who was about to panic? I added, 
+
+That's not unexpected. 
+
+SecUnits are built to run long distances and lift heavy things, and although most of our strength comes from our internal structure, some organic support is also needed. What I'm getting at here is, even if it's never had a dessert in its life, a SecUnit is naturally going to be a bit bigger in the legs and hips than a human.
+
+
+
+Three didn't panic, but it didn't move, either. It asked, 
+
+What do I do?
+
+
+
+
+For fuck's sake. It wasn't like it needed my permission to keep moving. 
+
+Just push harder, 
+
+I reassured it, 
+
+You can make it.
+
+
+
+
+So Three started to slowly wiggle its back half through the opening. I almost thought I would have to help it (not because it couldn't get through on its own, just because it didn't believe in itself), but before long, it was in.
+
+
+
+Once Three had made its way through the entrance, it turned to watch me as I stuck my own head through.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Okay, I knew this wasn't going to be easy. If Three had had even as much trouble as it did, then it was going to be even harder for me. But I couldn't just give up on the mission, and I guess there was some part of me that thought I could make it through on my own. (Possibly my risk assessment module. Or my pride.) The point is, everything was going well at first, and for a minute, I actually felt like this could all go smoothly.
+
+
+
+I got my head and arms through fine, and my chest, which was inorganic and still basically the same size as Three's, slid in after them. Three was looking at me, so I stopped and looked at the spot just above its shoulder. 
+
+What is it?
+
+
+
+
+Three shifted. 
+
+Do you need my assistance yet?
+
+
+
+
+That annoyed me a little. 
+
+No. I'm fine. You're supposed to be keeping watch.
+
+
+
+
+Three turned around, but it kept glancing back at me. That was even more annoying. 
+
+I'll tell you if I need assistance.
+
+ I still hadn't resumed moving, which was not working wonders for my argument.
+
+
+
+
+Prior experience suggests you won't tell me, 
+
+Three said, not sarcastically like how ART would say it, but in a voice of genuine innocence and concern. I didn't know which was worse.
+
+
+
+Ugh, whatever, time to keep going. Once my chest had cleared the opening, I started to push my midsection through, and that was where I hit a problem. I had gotten a little more distance, but I soon reached a point where I couldn't move forward any more.
+
+
+
+Okay, maybe this was why I had hesitated to keep going.
+
+
+
+I realized that now I was going to have to tell Three that I needed assistance. I mean, I didn't have to tell it, technically. But Three was already nervous enough about this mission (and all others), and I knew it looked to me as an example. That made me feel funny inside. I really didn't want to lose its trust. (Also, it could just turn around and see what had happened, so there was no point in trying to obscure the issue.)
+
+
+
+But did I really need assistance? Maybe it was like I had told Three; I would get through if I could just push a little harder. So I did, and wow, this entrance was a lot tighter than it looked from the outside. I could see what Three was so worried about now. And if even standard-SecUnit-sized Three had had trouble, I knew there was no way I was fitting my noticeably nonstandard belly through.
+
+
+
+So I tapped our connection. 
+
+Three. A little help?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three turned and crouched in front of me, looking more concerned than was ideal for my current level of patience. I don't know how I hadn't realized I wasn't going to make it. Maybe I had put on more weight than I'd thought.
+
+
+
+Three lifted its hands hesitantly, like it was trying to decide what to do with them. 
+
+May I render assistance?
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes, 
+
+I told it, sounding more irritated than I wanted to, 
+
+I just told you that you could.
+
+
+
+
+Three still didn't move, and there was a short pause before it asked, 
+
+May I touch you?
+
+
+
+
+Oh, that was what it was asking. I extended my own arms forward and told it, 
+
+Grab the upper part of my arms, you'll get more leverage.
+
+
+
+
+So it did, then it braced itself and started to pull. Okay, ow, ow, ow. 
+
+Three, stop. 
+
+I had thought that, with Three being a SecUnit, it would be strong enough to pull me out pretty easily. But apparently the grip of the entrance on my belly was stronger, and all Three accomplished was hurting me more than a human could.
+
+
+
+Three stopped, seemingly awaiting further instructions. It was starting to occur to me that I was really stuck, and that this was probably going to take a while, if I ever got out of here at all. I tried not to think about it, and instead told Three, 
+
+Try pulling from closer to the opening.
+
+
+
+
+Three started to move, then stopped. It seemed to have realized what I was asking it to do, and the comparative awkwardness of the situation. Pulling on my arms was one thing, but now I was asking it to directly grab my torso. 
+
+Will that be okay with you? 
+
+Three asked.
+
+
+
+It was going to be uncomfortable, but it was necessary. 
+
+Yes, 
+
+I told Three, 
+
+Just hurry up.
+
+ I was still watching the cameras during all of this, removing my humans from the footage, and it looked like everyone was making fairly steady progress. I didn't want to be left out. (I didn't want Three to be left out, either, but Three could be brought to tears over a participation award, so it probably cared less than I did.)
+
+
+
+Three came around to crouch by the opening, and I felt my skin prickle as it wrapped its arms around me, right under my chest. It seemed like it was waiting for something. I just wanted to get this over with, so I told it, 
+
+Now.
+
+
+
+
+Three started to pull. It didn't hurt as much as when it had pulled me by the arms, but it wasn't much more effective, either. As hard as Three pulled (and as much as I ineffectually pushed my legs against the ground on the other side), I was still firmly wedged in the opening. It was becoming apparent that there simply wasn't enough room for my belly to get through. Well, fuck.
+
+
+
+I told Three, 
+
+Let's try something else.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Since pulling from the front wasn't working, I decided to send Three around to the back; I figured it might have more success if it could actually put force on the offending obstruction, that being my belly. I agreed that I would stay there (I didn't have a choice) and watch the hallway, while also keeping an eye on Three's camera inputs to give it suggestions, and all the while monitoring my humans and removing them from the security footage. Oh, and watching for any potential hostile approaches. So I was basically watching the entire facility at this point. It was putting a lot of strain on my brain, and my present situation was not helping.
+
+
+
+You may have noticed that small spaces tend to comfort me. This is true, I can confirm it. Maybe it's because I've spent so much of my life in transport boxes, and those tended to be my most peaceful and quiet moments. Anyway, however it happened, I had developed an affinity for small spaces. But this was way smaller than what I was used to, and I couldn't move even if I tried. (Even I had started to panic once I realized I couldn't go backward, which was really not helpful.) It was kind of scary, and I didn't like the idea that I was getting left behind while my humans did all the work.
+
+
+
+So why couldn't I stop thinking about it? Past the fear, there was almost a sort of... excitement, a sense of overwhelmed pleasure. Being stuck for this long was really forcing me to focus on the pressure of the opening around my waist, the way I had managed to tightly squeeze myself into this small space. Even as soft as my belly was, there was just too much of it to fit through, no way such a plump SecUnit could-
+
+
+
+Whatever, the point was that it was hard to pay attention, and it took me a ridiculous 0.2 seconds to respond when Three pinged me. 
+
+What is it?
+
+
+
+
+
+I've found an exit, 
+
+Three told me.
+
+
+
+I checked the camera feed. Sure enough, Three had found an exit, albeit not one that I would ordinarily have tried to use. Fortunately, no hostile attention had been drawn as it crept through the hallways, and I had only needed to give it minimal assistance (mainly due to the high-detail map I'd given it, pulled straight from the facility's schematics). 
+
+Great. Keep going.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As Three climbed up to the high window of the empty office space, I watched my humans on the facility cameras. They had all converged on one point now. Some of them were working on the objective, but others were looking around in confusion, possibly wondering where Three and I were.
+
+
+
+I received a contact from Arada first. 
+
+SecUnit, where are you? Are you okay?
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm fine.
+
+ As fine as I could be, while I was stuck in a tiny opening and missing all the action. 
+
+We'll be there soon.
+
+ At least, as soon as Three stopped hemming and hawing over the window, which was probably even smaller than the entrance I was currently trapped in. I wondered if I should tell Three to stop and find a larger exit, but there were too many hostiles in the nearby hallways now, and threat assessment didn't like the idea.
+
+
+
+I could feel Arada pause her feed, and I watched on the camera as she turned to the rest of the group, talking to them and making a lot of exaggerated movements. Then she said, 
+
+Hold tight. We're coming for you.
+
+
+
+
+That was the last thing I needed. 
+
+No, you need to stay there. If you try to reach my position, it is highly likely you'll be spotted. Just keep going and I'll find you.
+
+
+
+
+There was a hesitation in the feed, the same uncertainty I could see in Arada's expression. Before either of us could say anything else, I was distracted by one of my feed alerts going off.
+
+
+
+Oh, shit. Somehow, the hostiles had been alerted to my humans' presence, or had suspected their presence, and now they were moving in that direction. Judging by their movements, they weren't entirely sure anyone was there yet, but I still needed to do something about it. Which I couldn't, not really. I was trapped here, and my humans were still oblivious. I could tell them to retreat, but then we wouldn't accomplish what we came here for, and then the mission would be a failure, plus I'd probably still end up getting caught.
+
+
+
+If I was going to get caught either way, I might as well make sure my humans didn't. I braced myself, then sent a ping through the entire facility, as noisy and obvious as I could manage. I watched on the cameras as the hostiles stopped, briefly checking their feeds, then started heading in my direction. Well, that was a success, if one that was about to end very badly for me.
+
+
+
+Then I caught a transmission from Three. 
+
+Um. Help.
+
+
+
+
+I quickly switched my input to check Three's camera feed, and-
+
+
+
+For fuck's sake.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So now I had Three to worry about (not that I hadn't worried about it before, but now it was in the same compromising position as I was, and it's not like I knew how to fix this, either), in addition to keeping watch over my humans in case the hostiles decided to split up, and in a few seconds now the hostiles would probably reach my position and start deciding how to extricate me so they could hold me hostage. Or kill me, they could kill me too.
+
+
+
+I took the limited time I had to tell Three, 
+
+Calm down. 
+
+Again, I know, what would be a worse thing to say, but I could tell it was thrashing and I needed it to stop if either of us were going to make any progress. Fortunately, it seemed to settle a little, and kept its feed open for instructions.
+
+
+
+I could see the hostiles on visual now, approaching me from the end of the hallway, and I probably wasn't doing a great job controlling my expression. Look, it's hard to focus on a lot of things at once, even for SecUnits, okay? We're better at it than humans, but when you're coaching another SecUnit, keeping watch over your humans, monitoring the facility, and keeping a hold on the security system, your sense of composure can start to get away from you.
+
+
+
+The hostiles probably didn't know what I was, and if they did, they were woefully underprepared to deal with me. In my current situation, though, I was still at a disadvantage. I was going to have to be careful if I wanted to make it out alive.
+
+
+
+Three was still waiting, so I told it, 
+
+Try keeping your legs straight and twisting from side to side, using the window frame for leverage. 
+
+I'd had to help clients out of similar situations in the past (yeah, it was uncomfortable), and, well, it's not like it had never happened to me before. I thought of one other thing, and added, 
+
+Pop your joints if you have to.
+
+
+
+
+The hostiles gathered around me, some of them apparently talking on their feeds. None of them looked happy, so there was no pretending I was supposed to be here. That was fine. I didn't have the time or attention to think of a good lie, and it didn't matter; all I had to do was keep them away from my humans and Three, and make sure they didn't kill me for long enough that the others could escape undetected. From what I caught of the hostiles' feed conversation, they wanted to figure out more about why I was here, but they mostly seemed interested in getting me out of their wall and away from their facility. If all they were concerned about was the fact that I was trespassing, they probably didn't know what I was. I would prefer to keep it that way, at least until I got free.
+
+
+
+I switched back to Three's camera feed, and I could tell that it was moving, so my advice had worked. It was running at a fairly even pace; if it had popped its joints, it had been able to get them back into place. (You might be wondering why I hadn't tried to do the same, but I regret to inform you that my belly is not a joint.) And it was running... 
+
+Three, turn around. Get out of here, we've been detected.
+
+
+
+
+
+But that would leave you in danger, 
+
+Three argued.
+
+
+
+
+I'll catch up. Just go.
+
+
+
+
+
+It is against mission protocol to leave team members behind, 
+
+Three countered.
+
+
+
+Three and its fucking protocol.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three sent a ping when it reached me, which meant that it had ignored me and come to help despite my wishes. I mean, I know Three cares a lot about protocol, but it was ignoring the Murderbot protocol, and that was a grave offense in my book. I could see my own butt through its camera feed and that just made it worse.
+
+
+
+And wow, if that was what things looked like on the other side, I wasn't sure how much success Three would have in trying to help me through. At least I was halfway in, but the half already inside wasn't the problem half, and there was still definitely a lot of belly on the wrong side of the opening. I was also remembering that even Three had had some difficulty getting its rear through this entrance, and I'm just saying, mine wasn't any smaller.
+
+
+
+The situation became more stressful (I hadn't realized that was possible up until now) when Three leaned down to inspect my back half, possibly trying to figure out where it could apply the most force. Every inch was visible, from my helplessly wedged belly to the plump legs I was sure wouldn't be easy to fit through either, and I could see every little movement I made. My attempts to control my expression, by this point, probably looked more like attempts to not have explosive diarrhea.
+
+
+
+I was hardly listening to what the hostiles were saying, managing just enough attention to know that they were going to extricate and then interrogate me (I know, it would be easier to interrogate me here, where I couldn't escape, but I sure wasn't telling them that), and my checks on my other inputs were getting messy and hasty. Fortunately, it looked like the humans were almost done, so I could drop that input soon. Huh, that didn't make me feel any better.
+
+
+
+Three pinged again, possibly feeling too awkward to ask if it could render assistance. I felt awkward, too. With how thinly my attention was spread right now, I couldn't spare a percentage point. It would be a lot easier if I wasn't having this stupid involuntary reaction to my situation. I really didn't want Three touching my belly right now, but I didn't really have any other option.
+
+
+
+As the hostiles grabbed my arms carelessly enough that my gunports almost expanded before I could stop them, I acknowledged Three, giving it a half-hearted, reluctant go-ahead.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three did as I instructed it, applying pressure to my belly, forcing it directly through the opening. If it had decided to push on my butt instead, it probably would have just ended up squishing me against the opening, so at least this was quicker. And it wasn't as bad as I thought, or at least I was telling myself that. Three's hands were the same size as mine, I could pretend they were just my hands (even though my hands were currently being violently yanked by my possible to-be-murderers).
+
+
+
+But, even though that made it a little better, I still wasn't having a great time. The hostiles' apparent attempt to pull my arms out of their sockets didn't feel good, but it was what Three was doing that really distracted me. It seemed to have learned its lesson about the amount of force it had to use, and it was being deliberately gentle, almost massaging my belly as it tried to squeeze me through the opening. I never like being touched, but this was just weird. I wasn't dedicating attention to Three's input anymore since I knew exactly (
+
+exactly
+
+) where it was, but I was still having trouble with my expressions. I just wanted to disappear.
+
+
+
+Eventually, by some miracle, my belly made it all the way through, and now there was just the very back end to worry about. This was the part that, ideally, I could pop my joints for, but with the amount of fat on my hips, I was probably still going to need help.
+
+
+
+I looked down at myself (I don't know why) and caught a glimpse of my belly, now hanging free beneath me. It was still a little sore where the sides of the entrance had pushed in, and it completely blocked the opening. I inhaled and watched it move, then snapped back to reality as the hostiles gave another unceremonious yank.
+
+
+
+With Three, the hostiles, and my dislocated hip joints all working together, I eventually made it through to the other side. Three, fortunately, immediately bolted rather than trying to stick around and see what happened next, which left me on my own, standing there in front of the hostiles. My belly might have fooled them for a moment, but in the tight bodysuit, the shapes of my obviously SecUnit-form feet were clearly visible.
+
+
+
+Upon realizing what I was, the hostiles started to get agitated, and some of them aimed their weapons at me. So I guess we were doing this the hard way.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I quickly dispatched the first group of six hostiles, throwing the first into two others, punching a fourth, and smashing the last two together. I didn't have enough time or focus for a well-planned assault; my humans were already starting to leave the building, and while I knew they wouldn't leave without me, I didn't want to risk them coming to look for me.
+
+
+
+I started to run toward the nearest exit (no, I did not mean the one I had just come through, or the even tinier window Three had used), knowing there would be reinforcements before long. I was fast, even with the added weight, so I had already made it nearly to the target corridor before I saw additional hostiles moving to intercept me.
+
+
+
+I sped up as I approached them, trying to trick them into thinking I was going for a head-on assault. At the last second, before any of them had the chance to fire their weapons, I ran up the wall past them, leaving them confused and giving me enough time to reach the end of the corridor before they could even turn around.
+
+
+
+I bolted through the exit and toward our getaway transport, which fortunately was still there and, if the feed gave me an accurate estimate, not missing any humans (or SecUnits, other than me). The hostiles could theoretically pursue us in their own transport, but with their navigation systems being flooded by my garbage code, they might have a bit of difficulty with that.
+
+
+
+I made it inside before any of the hostiles could even get close enough to aim at me, then let the hatch close behind me as I skidded to a stop. I looked down at myself, watching my belly jiggle as it used up the last little bit of momentum from my sprint.
+
+
+
+Yeah, I've still got it.
+
+
+
+My humans were standing there, staring at me, possibly knowing where I had been, possibly not. I couldn't tell from Three's expression whether it had told them or not. I checked the feed and saw that the mission status had been updated to partially complete, now with one of its crucial stages checked off. A stage that I hadn't been able to participate in.
+
+
+
+The humans started to approach me, asking if I was all right, but I just moved past them and sat down. Since I hadn't contributed anything to the mission, they could discuss the results themselves, for all I cared.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I felt guilty, for some reason. I mean, I hadn't been the idiot who had decided the smallest entrance would be the best one for a chubby SecUnit to use. Maybe guilty isn't the right word. Maybe more like disappointed. Ever since my first contract with PresAux, I was used to being at the center of the action, and I didn't like missing out on that. (I know, that's a stupid human thing, but it's not like SecUnits don't like doing exciting things. We just never get to do them, usually.)
+
+
+
+Whatever, right now I was watching an old episode of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+, hoping that I could at least fit something exciting into my day. It didn't really help, I mostly just got jealous of the main characters for being so involved in the action. I didn't want to be jealous of my favorite characters and I was considering just turning off the media, but then I would just have to stare into space, and that tended to invite unwelcome anxiety.
+
+
+
+It wasn't like the mission had just been some calm, everyday event. But it was more of a clusterfuck than an adventure, and if I had a choice (which I usually didn't), I tended to prefer the latter. I couldn't stop replaying it in my head: my belly stuck in the opening, the feeling of constriction, Three's hands on me as it helped me through. I really wanted to stop thinking about it. It wasn't doing great things for my expression control, and I couldn't even look at Three, who technically hadn't even done anything wrong. I never wanted to go on a mission again. Ever.
+
+
+
+Ratthi, who probably thought he was being subtle, glanced at me, then around the cabin. ""I've got to say, that was a lucky break we had back there. I kept feeling like we were going to get caught, but we never did!""
+
+
+
+Overse turned her head to glance at him, then looked at me as she hinted, ""We could have, but fortunately, somebody kept us out of the camera views.""
+
+
+
+Arada leaned over her seat and smiled at me. ""Must have been a guardian angel.""
+
+
+
+Okay, big news, my humans are huge cheeseballs. But I got what they were trying to say, and I think they got why I was upset, and I got that they got that. Point taken, I guess I did do something for the mission. Not that I was going to brag about it. But at least I didn't have to feel left out, as long as I knew there was something I could do to help, even from far away.
+"
+44337538,A Bright and Quiet Moment,['Cephalopod_Dreamscape'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","Fan Comics, Digital Art, Illustration",English,2023-01-17,Completed,2023-01-17,83,1/1,8,25,1,105,"['lick', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly', 'weirdbooksnail', 'wannabe_someone', 'Magechild', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'dancernerd', 'ComplicatedLight', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'PickAName', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Gamebird', 'FlipSpring', 'platyceriums', 'BWizard', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'elmofirefic', 'Mysterymew']",[],"
+
+
+
+[ID: A four panel comic. The first three panels are monochrome lineart. Panel 1: A closeup of a muddied boot. ""Ugh, I hate planets >:("" Murderbot says.
+Panel 2: ""You hate everything about planets?"" Asks Dr Mensah, who has jaw length fluffy hair and a long nose. 
+""Most things. The sky isn't terrible."" says Murderbot.
+Panel 3: Dr Mensah smiles. ""I'd like to show you something.""
+Panel 4: A large full colour illustration of a nightime forest filled with soft glowing fireflies. /end ID]"
+44278114,Dumpster Fire,['Fluky'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"original comfortunit characters/original human characters, Original Ship Characters & Original ComfortUnit Characters","Original Ship Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Construct Characters (Murderbot Diaries), Original Characters, Original Human Character(s), Cascade ""Cade"" (OC), Rayne Grier (OC), Konani Tai (OC), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Canon-Typical Violence, canon-typical treatment of constructs, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, ComfortUnit typical sex mention, Language, Torture, Why we don't send a ComfortUnit to do a SecUnit's job, Trauma, Panic Attacks, Past, Emotions over being treated well, ComfortUnit Revenge, Touching, Cuddling & Snuggling, I promise I'm not always this crappy, Actually thats probably a lie",English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-16,"49,107",11/11,13,21,1,158,"['just_some_guy_who_is_a_girl', 'achilees', 'Granny_Glasses', 'Zannper', 'Only_Happy_Endings', 'VegaCoyote', 'Magechild', 'JellyfishOnACloud', 'AnxiousEspada', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Znarikia']",[],"
+I'm not exactly sure how long I've been laying here, and... I'm not exactly sure where 
+
+here 
+
+is at the moment. I could see scaffolding above me, barely visible from a nearby streetlamp in the night. A dull grey outline in an otherwise sea of black. Dark walls rose around me in all directions, caging me in. A damp, musky smell filled my olfactory senses, tinged with a rotten sourness that made me want to wrinkle my nose. This isn't a place I would have willingly chosen to be in. Cold somethings dropped onto my face, wet and unpleasant. They were constant with no actual pattern to them, no predictability. They blurred my vision and I had to blink more often than normal to keep my sight clear enough to see my surroundings. It was quiet except for the pitter patter of wet falling from the sky. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Rain. 
+ 
+
+
+
+So, I was outside. And lying on my back, apparently, on something soft but not soft...and plasticky. I turned my head slightly, hearing whatever I was lying on crinkle in my audial inputs. Am I... Am I 
+
+in a dumpster?
+
+ Um...how did I get here? The last thing I remembered was being with a client at The Cosmos. We had spent most of the night in the lounge, my client spending quite a bit of currency on intoxicants and performance enhancers and pretty much thoroughly ignoring my existence by his side. He had looked at me twice during our time at the brothel. Once when I had approached him as directed by the club's Hub System, and once when we left to go somewhere private. The small bit of information I was supplied for this short exchange was that he was a wealthier client, married, and 
+
+anything he wants goes
+
+. I never even got a name. I remember arriving at a place that he casually mentioned was one of his personal living quarters, and an organic memory of the smell of firewood and cigarettes filled me. I felt my body tense slightly, a small trembling beginning to make audible changes to my breathing. An alert popped into my awareness about excess tension in my jaw. I ran a quick diagnostic, reaching for any saved memory of last night for more information as to why my body was acting so strangely. My internal status monitor came online and popped up into my awareness, pulling most of my attention to it with extreme urgency.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Oh, fuck. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, that explains why my performance reliability is sitting at twenty percent. My internal status monitor was reporting both arms were missing or severely damaged along with several internal and external injuries - some of which would have killed a human by themselves. That's not good at all. I tried my search for any saved recording of the last night again, but it looks like most of it was...is corrupted. Well, The Cosmos would send a retrieval team for me. Eventually. Maybe. I didn't have enough juice to connect to the feed right now, so I'd just have to hope whatever locator chip they used to keep track of us would give them my location. 
+ 
+
+
+
+(I'm not sure if that needs feed access though. If it does, that's not good.)
+ 
+
+
+
+For now, I'll just have to lay here and wait. Which was totally fine. The last thing I'd want to do is go back and be put up with another client. Sometimes, one is enough for the night. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Eventually, the rain stopped, and the cold night got colder. I could regulate my own temperature on a normal day, but with how low my performance reliability sat, most of my processes were offline. I'm partially thankful it included my ability to process my pain sensors since I 
+
+really
+
+ didn't want to know what my missing and/or severely damaged arms felt like right about now, but it also meant I couldn't regulate my body heat. The residual primitive part of the human neural tissue at the base of my skull caused my body to shiver every now and then in an effort to warm me up, and I could feel the skin on my legs and torso prickling like gooseflesh, sending an odd, dulled tingling sensation throughout my body. I wouldn't die of hypothermia, but it might put me into another temporary shutdown until someone found me. That sounded preferable, now that I thought about it.
+ 
+
+
+
+To pass the time and to try and stay awake, I thought about how my cohorts were fairing back at The Cosmos. I sighed, thanks to my human mimicry code, and watched my breath form a visible cloud in front of my face. Hopefully, my client did not request another unit after he had finished whatever he had done to me. My owner didn't normally take too kindly to xir equipment being used and abused like this, so I highly doubted the client could have gotten a second, though I doubt xe knew about my current status given my last client had taken me back to his own place. Mx. Kiran would find out sometime later when I've exceeded the rental duration, but that was several hours from now if my internal clock was correct, and I was having some serious doubts right about now that it was.
+ 
+
+
+
+I became aware of more sounds as the time passed. The crinkling and clinking of whatever I lie on as my body shivered in the cold. My shallow breathing. The sound of ground vehicles occasionally passing nearby. The all-encompassing, nearly silent hum of the electricity illuminating the night life of Serth. Beneath that, I could hear the faint, muted thump of music behind heavy concrete walls, and assumed I wasn't too far from The Cosmos. I wondered if maybe my client had just tossed me into the dumpster instead of at the front door for convenience's sake. It was entirely possible. He clearly thought I was trash and deserved to be discarded as such. Or maybe I was hearing the sounds from another brothel or club along the main strip. This was also a very real possibility. Why take me back to The Cosmos if you were just going to throw me into the dumpster?  Unless you were trying to make a statement, it seemed like a waste of time to me. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Another sound caught my attention after a while of laying in the loud silence that made up Serth's night scene. Loud crinkling and clanking of empty metal and glass bottles nearby. Either someone tossing out more trash or a dumpster diver, if my earlier experiences in back alleyways were anything to go by. I lay still, listening to the new sound. The quiet grunt of someone lifting something heavy and then louder clanking and rustling that continued on for some time. The solid clap and scratch of shoes hitting concrete from a moderate height. Definitely someone looking for something. It wasn't unusual to hear of looking for carelessly discarded business information this way. I've had a few clients talk about it over dinners in which I took part in as arm candy for some company meeting or event.
+ 
+
+
+
+A loud thump vibrated the metal walls around me, and a dark figure hauled itself up onto the top of the opening. The human (again, I'm assuming) paused, resting on the ledge and rustling with something in their hands before a light flashed in my visual inputs, blinding me. I heard a yelp and the light disappeared followed by another more solid sounding thud. There was a short pause in which I thought the human had killed themselves, and I had a physical reaction towards that. I haven't killed anyone before, and I'd rather not start now while lying in a dumpster. I was relieved when a groan finally reached my ears. Harsh whispers, the sound of shoes scraping on concrete followed. The human returned to the top of the dumpster opening with another one of those loud, metallic thumps. The light also returned but this time it was angled in a way to take in the damage to my body. I heard a small curse and they swung themselves carefully into the dumpster beside me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Hey, 
+oh fuck
+,"" I saw the figure start to remove an article of clothing from their shoulders and drape it over me. ""Hey, you alright?"" My passive scans picked up a slight stumble over words, an increased heart rate, and a minor trembling in hands as the light provided me with better visibility.  I must look really bad.
+ 
+
+
+
+""This unit has experienced severe damage and it is recommended that you discard it,"" my buffer replied unhelpfully. Another curse and hot hands touched my icy numb face. Oh, that felt good. I heard a soft noise escape my throat at the contact. ""Can you talk? Not your buffer. You."" Their voice was softer now, calmer. Can I talk? Maybe? 
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes,"" I replied after a short pause of searching for my voice. I sounded glitchy and distant. My body shivered again.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Okay. Okay, good. That's good. How are you?"" They asked.
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm not a sarcastic asshole. At all. But part of me 
+
+really wanted
+
+ to... I don't know, kind of point out that we're both 
+
+in a dumpster
+
+ right now. That they 
+
+found
+
+ me 
+
+in a dumpster
+
+. With severely damaged and/or missing arms and multiple wounds elsewhere. So, I'm probably 
+
+not very good
+
+. Instead, I replied, ""my performance reliability is at nineteen percent."" Most of my processes are offline and I have no access to the feed. I think that counts as not good.  How was I even awake right now? The human was silent for a moment then nodded.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Okay, right. Shit. Yeah. Um, I'm going to get you out of here, okay? Wh-who's your owner?"" they asked as they slid one arm under my neck and carefully lifted me up into a sitting position. When I tried to engage the synthetic muscles in my abdomen, more errors popped up in my awareness. Reports of severe internal damage, of failing parts and severed connections. Well, I tried to help. It's a good thing I'm not as heavy as a SecUnit might be.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Mx. Kiran,"" I replied, aware that I sounded like I might be hovering just above a shutdown. The human was silent for a moment, most likely running a name search in the feed. I'm not sure if they'd find anything of use there since Mx. Kiran used a pseudonym when xe stood up The Cosmos. The human huffed, mumbling something to themselves quiet enough for my passive scans to come back with '???'
+ 
+
+
+
+(Or maybe that was because the passive scans were starting to shut off themselves to reserve power)
+ 
+
+
+
+ They shifted one arm under my legs, the sensation of skin touching mine sent a dull tingle behind my knees before the warmth of their body lit fire to my synthetic skin. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""Alright, uh, how about I get you somewhere warm and we'll figure this out after, okay?"" They said, lifting me up with ease. I didn't bother replying since it didn't seem they were waiting for a response from m-
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Involuntary Shutdown. Attempting Restart...]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Restart Successful]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I came back online lying on my side on a bed wrapped in soft blankets and something warm and scratchy placed over the top of my head. Apparently, I had an involuntary shutdown while the human was helping me out of the dumpster. That's a shame because I would have loved to see how they had managed to get us both out of there. Something was pressed against my back that radiated intense heat, and it took me several seconds to register that 
+
+that something
+
+ as most likely the human that had pulled me from the dumpster. I wasn't sure if I was bothered by that realization, I flagged the emotional output for later review once I had more processing power. I remained silent and still as I started up some diagnostics. More of my processes were online now and my performance reliability had climbed to thirty-five percent thanks to the small recharge I automatically performed when I had that unvoluntary shutdown. I still felt like shit, but it was better than before. Feed access was still disabled which felt weird. Kind of like being half blind and deaf; disorienting. I needed the feed to contact The Cosmos and let them know I'm still alive, and where to find me. I still had six hours left on the last client's rental, and I'm not sure what happens if I don't return or make contact before then. For now, though, I will focus on getting other things online and maybe prepare myself should this human decide they want payment for my rescue. Yes, some humans liked their comfortunits banged up a bit before fucking them. No, I don't understand why.
+ 
+
+
+
+A door opened and I heard someone step into the room. The sound of a zipper and more footsteps before they stopped abruptly some distance away whispering a rather harsh expletive.
+ 
+
+
+
+""
+
+Deity, 
+
+Rayne, what the fuck?"" The new voice asked. I assume by 'what the fuck' they meant me. I stayed still, hoping the human next to me thought I was still offline.
+ 
+
+
+
+""It's a comfortunit- ""
+ 
+
+
+
+""I know what 
+
+it is
+
+. 
+
+Why
+
+ is it here?"" 
+ 
+
+
+
+There was a silence that stretched for four minutes which led me to believe the two humans switched to the feed for this discussion. Maybe they knew I was awake then. Maybe they were worried about any surveillance outside their room that might overhear the conversation. Based on the cheap fabric beneath the soft blankets I was currently cocooned in, we were in a hotel, and Corporation Rim hotels were pretty grabby when it came to sellable information. Rayne - since that was apparently their name - shifted on the bed, their weight moving to a direct focal point as if they sat up. The new person in the room cursed softly.
+ 
+
+
+
+""We don't have the resources for this.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""I know, that's fine. It can stay here, or I can take it up to Azi and it can wait there while we do what we gotta."" Rayne said quickly. The bed shook as they stood, and I heard softer, muted footsteps move away from me. ""Please, Konani. I can't leave it like this. You know what happens to them."" 
+ 
+
+
+
+The silence was more uncomfortable than listening to them decide my fate for me. A sigh and then, ""did you ask it what it wants? Is it even functioning? And why is it wearing your hat?""
+ 
+
+
+
+""N-no. It kind of shut down when I got it out of the dumpster. It's banged up bad and buffered at me a few times about discarding it on the way here. I've managed to get a few words from it that weren't canned, though, so I think that's a good sign. It's...it's wearing my hat because it looks like someone tried to...to scalp it.""
+ 
+
+
+
+There was a long pause as that bit of information permeated the room. I felt my chest turn cold with fear, a residual response to whatever had happened to me. If only I could remember. Small blessings that I was still mostly numb, I guess.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'll talk to some contacts and see if we can't get our hands on a repair cubicle for a few hours. I'm assuming it's Governor Module is still intact?""
+ 
+
+
+
+Intact? Was this new person...Konani? Asking if I was rogue? Why would they ask that?
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yeah, probably."" Rayne replied. I could hear the shrug in their voice. A scoff and plop from hands being thrown up. ""I didn't exactly want to start rummaging around in its systems while we were 
+
+lying in a dumpster
+
+, Ko. It's been offline since then.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Okay. Fine. I'll talk to our contacts and assume that it is still governed. What has Azi sa-"" Konani fell silent, then, ""got it. So, it hasn't been on the feed at all since you brought it here.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, yeah. I don't have the energy or processing space for that right now. A hand touched my back, and it took everything in me to keep from jerking away. Damn it, I hated it when humans did that. Just because I'm a comfortunit doesn't mean I enjoy being touched all the fucking time. At least warn me before you stick your grubby hands on me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Hey, you up?"" Rayne asked softly, giving me a gentle shake that made me internally cringe.
+ 
+
+
+
+D-Did they think shaking a construct would wake it up when it had involuntarily shutdown? Did I even want to make that a believable thing? I heard Konani scoff again and had to mentally agree with them. This was very much human bullshit. I rolled over slowly, making eye contact with the human behind me. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne's face turned scarlet, and they looked away, retracting their hand from me as if I had lashed out. Oh, great. I 
+
+know
+
+ that look. They've been struck hard by how I look. 
+
+Great
+
+. Rayne cleared their throat awkwardly, taking an unconscious step back, stuffing their hands into their pockets, and asked, ""how's your...what's it called? The performance-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""My performance reliability is at thirty-four percent."" I replied softly. Yeah, the awkwardness caused a whole percentage drop. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""That's better than earlier, right?"" Rayne asked, the pitch in their voice portraying some optimism. I nodded, staying silent to, hopefully, end the conversation quicker. Right now, I don't really want to talk to this human. The look they gave me when I turned around was a bit too intimate. I know they know I saw it.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Okay, good. Just...Rayne just leave it alone to recharge, okay? I'll work on getting in contact with one of those off-market cubicle groups. I'm sure Azi's big brain has some leads for us."" Konani said, shooting a glare at Rayne that entirely missed its intended audience who was ogling at me. I saw the attempt though. Thanks for trying, Konani.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You could just return me to The Cosmos. Mx. Kiran is probably looking for me,"" I said, breaking into the conversation. Maybe they didn't know that using an off-market cubicle might trigger a DRM-type response from my coding. (That was a thing, right?) I'd rather not risk being cooked from the inside out by my Governor Module. Rayne glanced at Konani who, in turn, made a face back. I'm not entirely sure what that was about but it caused some unease to settle into my chest. I'm sure if I had a Risk Assessment Module, it'd be screaming at me to run right about now.
+ 
+
+
+
+""We, umm...don't you want to-""
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""Rayne!""
+
+ Konani hissed and smacked Rayne on the shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+
+""R-right. We'll talk about this later...when we have more privacy."" Rayne reached up and scratched the back of their neck with a small nervous chuckle. Creases appeared by their eyes as they gave a small awkward smile. 
+ 
+
+
+
+More privacy? What's more private than a hotel room? Wait- Did they not pay for the added privacy? Konani shook their head with a sigh and moved Rayne out of the way before sitting down next to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Look...umm-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade,"" I supplied. Short for Cascade. It's what Mx. Kiran called me and I kind of liked it. It had been for my long hair, but...it seems my last client didn't like that and decided to remove it on his own.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Okay, Cade. Hi, I'm Konani and this awkward person here is Rayne. I know a lot of this is super confusing right now, but we'll do our best to explain what's happening as soon as we can. Okay?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I nodded, my human mimicry code making me swallow before asking, ""What are your pronouns? I have no feed access to crosscheck."" Konani smiled, glancing up at Rayne for a brief second.
+ 
+
+
+
+""She/her. Thank you for asking, Cade. Rayne is they/them. And you?"" she asked, most likely trying to be polite. But, I guess, she isn't all that wrong considering some of the other comfortunits that work at The Cosmos had pronouns outside of the standard 'it.'
+ 
+
+
+
+""I don't have gendered pronouns,"" I said after a pause. ""It/its, is fine.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Konani nodded, looking up at Rayne again who looked like they wanted to add something to the conversation but chose not to. I've noticed some slight subvocalization from Rayne throughout the duration of Konani's conversation with me, but I wasn't paying enough attention to make out what a rouge guesstimate of what was said. I'm sure they're talking with one another on the feed. Stars, I'd give just about anything for feed access right now. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""So, Cade...for now just focus on recharging. We'll get something sorted out for everything else later. An explanation and all that,"" she stood back up and turned to Rayne. ""I need to go back out. I'm meeting a hiring manager for StillWater in about an hour. 
+
+Don't do anything
+
+ while I'm gone, got it?"" Rayne nodded, their eyes darting to me momentarily. I knew they wanted to say something but were holding their tongue. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Konani left shortly after that, and Rayne returned to my side on the bed. They were a bit better about not touching me, though, so I think Konani noticed some of my discomfort and told Rayne to back off a bit. I stared up at the ceiling, queuing new diagnostics as the previous ones came back with fixable errors. I didn't feel comfortable enough to go back into standby for a recharge. With how Rayne was looking at me before...yeah. Looks like that from clients always made me weary. Looks like that from non-clients were scary.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable."" Rayne said softly, breaking the silence between us. My breathing paused a second in response, and I turned my head slightly to look at them. They flushed when they noticed and continued, ""I'm just, uh, kind of touchy and stuff. Ko said I was being a creep and to chill out, so...I'm sorry. I'll try to be more conscious of what I'm doing around you.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I straightened my head again to stare up at the ceiling, unsure what exactly should be said to that bit of information. I'm a comfortunit. I'm used to being physically touched even if it was in a way I didn't like. This was just a part of my function. But I guess I should be thankful Rayne is apologizing for what they were, in fact, causing. Most clients didn't do that. I guess there wasn't an expectation for them to do so. They were paying to touch me. To use me how they pleased. But Rayne hadn't paid to touch me, I don't think. Unless this is some weird two-part scheme my last client put together. I didn't think that was likely. How my organic parts reacted when thinking about my last client made me think that he had definitely intended for me to never come online again. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I decided to not say anything to Rayne in the end. I didn't want this conversation to drag out or evolve into having them think I want to talk. I wanted to recharge, though that wasn't likely to happen with them around. I wanted to go home to The Cosmos where I could be repaired and feel safe. I heard Rayne sigh softly, and they didn't speak to me again for the rest of our time alone together in the hotel.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Konani returns to the hotel room and the humans move forward with their plan to help Cade. Cade meets a new person and goes off planet for the first time in its existence.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Konani had returned later that cycle with a bright grin on her face. Rayne jumped up and greeted her at the door with a large hug, talking to her silently through the feed. There was an exchange of something between hands, and I wasn't sure whether this was to keep me from being a part of the conversation or to prevent any eavesdropping from hotel surveillance. It felt a little weird not knowing what was going on. For my entire life, I've had some sense of what was going on. Of what I was expected to do to some degree. Entertain a client. Mediate for a client. Fuck a client. Return to the lounge when finished and await new assignment. 
+ 
+
+
+
+This whole not knowing was new territory. Konani and Rayne were not my clients, and I had no orders to do anything with them. I had no orders to do anything at all. Mx Kiran had removed the distance limit for xir comfortunits a while back. It had originally been tied to The Cosmos and... well, let's just say that it didn't end very well if the job had us going off premises. Some clients, the prestigious ones, liked to take their units out to flaunt as arm candy to dinner parties or large events. I liked those clients. They treated us with respect, and we got to act human for the duration of the job. Trying drinks and expensive foods, things we didn't need to function but some of us (myself included) actually enjoyed partaking in. Right now, I had no idea how I was expected to act or what I was expected to do, and it was anxiety inducing.
+ 
+
+
+
+Konani moved past Rayne and sat down on the bed next to me, setting down a medium sized bag I hadn't noticed she was carrying between us.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I got some clothes for you while I was out. They should fit but they might be a little bit big."" She said and I had an emotion over that. Guilt, I think? A human bought something for me. A gift. Not only that, but I hadn't had to perform any favors for it. Am I expected to do something in return for it? I didn't know how to respond...a thanks, maybe? No, it deserved more than a thank you, but I didn't have anything to give in return. A cold, hollow feeling bloomed in my chest.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Thank you,"" I managed softly and Konani smiled, reaching into the bag to pull out a set of dark clothes and soft cloth shoes. The clothes were very concealing. Long black pants, a dark grey long-sleeved shirt and a black hoodie. Konani was right, they looked like they'd be big on me, but that didn't matter. Most of the clothes I got to wear before this were revealing and sexual in nature. Which, sure, being able to flaunt my body and know my client was interested had a certain power to it, but we all knew it was just for show. Comfortunits didn't really have any power in any situation with human clients. There was never a no touching rule, even in The Cosmos. Clients were free to grab as they pleased. The thought of being able to cover up, to make the active choice to conceal my looks, did something to my organics that I didn't have a word for just yet. I flagged it to review later.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm not too familiar with what constructs like to wear...and I recognize you are probably different than the secunit I've met. It never liked wearing anything that wasn't dark neutral colors and full of pockets so I kind of... kept to that. I hope that's okay."" Konani said her eyes looking away from me for a moment, like she was afraid I'd scowl or make a rude gesture at her act of kindness. As if that would possibly be on my mind. ""It's only for now. We'll get you set up with a hard currency card and you can get clothes you want to wear after this. We just can't walk you out of the hotel looking like..."" Yeah, I know. Looking like I had been hacked apart by a mad man. I get it.
+ 
+
+
+
+I remained silent, confused by where the conversation was going. Why give me a hard currency card or more new clothes? I was going back to The Cosmos after this. I didn't need those things. They would be wasted on something like me. Mx Kiran would just toss them away. Some clients gave gifts to us, which were equal parts cute and creepy, but they always got taken away once we got back to The Cosmos. Comfortunits aren't people. We aren't alive in the same sense. We didn't need material possessions.
+ 
+
+
+
+And who is Azi? The secunit? I knew nothing about secunits except that they were like me, a construct, but were more powerful and had weapons built into them. Mx Kiran had two that acted as bouncers and crowd control when things got a little hairy. They didn't interact with us outside of their duties. Standing like silent statues at the entrance of the brothel day in and day out. I'm not sure why one would have preferences for what it wore considering it's usually in a uniform of some kind. They had less options than we comfortunits did.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Maybe you should lead off with what we're doing, Ko. Cade looks a bit confused."" Rayne said. I heard something thunk as it was placed on the counter nearest the hotel room door and looked up to see Rayne had set down a small black device. I flinched as they pressed a button on the top of the device, and it whirred to life, emitting a sound I'm pretty sure was out of the human's hearing range. I could hear it, though, and it was 
+
+very
+
+ annoying. ""Clear,"" Rayne said after a few seconds.
+ 
+
+
+
+""What is that?"" The question came out of my mouth before I could stop it. I tensed a bit as I lay there, half expecting to get reprimanded for asking a question. Verbal or physical, it didn't matter. Unlike our two secunits, the comfortunits at The Cosmos were allowed a certain amount of liberty when interacting with clients. Some clients don't like mouthy constructs though, and I've been backhanded a few times for seemingly innocuous questions when the client hadn't put out beforehand that they just wanted something to fuck and not talk. Rayne blinked at my question, and when they moved closer to the bed, I visibly flinched, blurting out, ""I'm sorry!""
+ 
+
+
+
+Crouching down beside it, Rayne gave Konani a look I dedicated a separate process to parse before replying, ""it's just a sound dampener. We didn't have enough money in our budget to pay for the extra privacy, and we don't want to take any chance that the hotel might pick up what we're talking about. Nothing from this conversation will make it past that device.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Oh, okay. Well, that's significantly less worrying than what the darker parts of my mind were coming up with. A timed EMP device that would fry me and the electronic equipment nearby. A recording device to catch me saying something that could be misconstrued as negative towards my owner and/or The Cosmos and end up with me sent back to StillWater for parts. I felt the tension in my body lessen slightly. ""The meeting went well. Mr. Ratna said he'd send the information to his contact in upper management, and I should hear back in a few hours. If all goes well, we can get out of here by the end of the week."" She said and Rayne made a celebratory fist pump gesture I didn't mean to flinch at but did. They gave me an apologetic look as Konani continued, ""I did hear back from one of my contacts, too. About a cubicle, I mean."" Konani turned her head to me. ""Cade... we could get you out of here. Out of Serth and somewhere safe where you wouldn't be forced to do anything you didn't want to do anymore. We work for a branch under the PanSystem University of Mihara and New Tideland to help people in situations like yours. Once out of Serth, we can get you set up with a place to stay and help you find something you want to do with your life. Is that something you'd want?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I blinked. I'm not... sure if that's something I want? I've never been asked that question before. I looked away from Konani and saw Rayne giving me the same polite, but expectant look she was. What would I do if I wasn't attached to a brothel or club? My whole function revolved around human satisfaction. I'm not sure there's anything else I 
+
+could
+
+ do. It's not like I had time off to try anything else.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Please wait while I search for that information,"" my buffer stupidly said, and the humans exchanged more looks with one another. What else is there for a comfortunit to do? I've really only ever done two things in my entire lifecycle. Were there specialized modules I could gain access to that could make me skilled at something else? Would humans be okay with that?
+ 
+
+
+
+""I think this was too much too soon,"" Konani said softly after about two minutes of my non-response. To me, she added, ""you don't have to decide right now, but the least we can do is have you repaired.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Yes, I was missing my arms still (thank the stars I couldn't really feel my body still) and my performance reliability had dipped further with all this existential thinking. But... in an off-market cubicle? I'm not sure I can get in one. I'm not sure I
+
+ should
+
+ get into one. There was nothing in my internal schematics I had access to that said I couldn't, but I also knew that I didn't have access to 
+
+all
+
+ my specs. I worried about how the Governor Module might react to a cubicle not owned by Mx Kiran or if it would care at all about something like that.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Is that... safe?"" I asked quietly, looking up at Konani. I felt myself tense as if expecting to be reprimanded for asking a valid question again but managed to keep in the instant apology that sat on my tongue from springing out. She glanced at Rayne who shrugged carefully.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Azi won't let anything happen to you. It's very excited to meet you."" Rayne replied.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Azi 
+
+does
+
+ know Cade isn't a secunit, right? Because I get the feeling it thinks it's getting a secunit like its sibling and I really don't want it upset-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""I don't think Azi cares if Cade is a secunit or not, Ko. I think it's just really excited to have the opportunity to meet and interact with a construct out in the CR."" Rayne cut Konani off and gave her a reassuring smile.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+So, yes, I did in fact follow the humans to their sketchy contact with the sketchy, off-market cubicle. When we arrived Konani shook hands with a woman who glanced in my direction. I guess it was obvious which of us was the construct considering I was missing arms and the mess of what was left of my hair. Rayne kept an arm around my waist, holding me close as I wobbled from low power warnings. I needed a full recharge, but I didn't think I was going to get it. At least not any time soon. Maybe once we got to Azi... whoever - whatever - that was. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""Are you okay?"" Rayne asked in my ear as my human mimicry code released a quiet, uncomfortable noise from my throat. It was mostly because of the persistent, annoying alerts that kept popping up into my awareness, but also because I felt like I was about to have another involuntary shutdown. The side of my head rested against their chest, the sound of their heartbeat, slightly elevated but not from stress, was audible to me in the silence. I never realized how calming it could be.
+ 
+
+
+
+""My performance reliability is at twenty point zero-nine percent."" My buffer helpfully replied for me as I closed my eyes. Just for a moment. I can't go into a recharge right now. Rayne shifted their arm around me for a better grip, doing their best to not press against anything that had been marked up by my last client.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Hey, Ko. Can we hurry this up? Azi still has to check the box before we get Cade in there and it seems like Cade is ready to check out again,"" Rayne called. Konani shot them a glare as she continued her conversation with her contact. The woman nodded then pulled out something from her pocket and handed it over to Konani before walking out of the room. I didn't care enough to rewind the interaction to figure out what the object was. Konani grabbed the small chair near the door and turned to us.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Alright, we'll have Azi look at the cubicle before we help you in. Can we get you to sit down on this so we can help take your clothes off?"" Konani asked, carrying the chair over for me to sit in. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I think I said yes somewhere between being helped down onto the chair and having the hoodie and long sleeve shirt taken off. Any time my performance reliability dipped below twenty percent, I started to lose moments of consciousness. The human tissue in my skull wasn't designed to function without the inorganic parts, and with those going offline, what happened before the cubicle repairs is hazy. 
+ 
+
+
+
+One by one, my inputs cut out. There was a sense of overwhelming confusion as organic neural tissue tried to reach for offline processors. Of 
+
+I don't want this, 
+
+and I spent several long, disorienting seconds trying to figure out what
+
+ 'this' 
+
+was
+
+. 
+
+Why was I confused? I lost access to most of the longer-term memories as the inorganic parts of my brain shut down leaving me nothing but feelings, smell and taste.
+ 
+
+
+
+I had tingling sensations on my sides, my upper legs, my face. My hearing became distorted with a high-pitched ringing before a garbled, rushing waterfall smothered all other sounds. A sharp flash of white and pain and-
+ 
+
+
+
+Where am I? I couldn't see. Everything is dark. I can't see. I can't hear. I can't-
+ 
+
+
+
+I want to go back to The Cosmos. I want to go back to the lounge. I want to be safe. 
+ 
+
+
+I felt like my head was being pushed underwater and I involuntarily gasped in surprise, panic shooting through me. I'm drowning. I can't breathe. Please. Please, make it stop. Make it stop.  
+
+
+ Too bright lights, too loud sounds, too overstimulating textures, all came into a sharp focus. A confusing jumble of inputs I couldn't process fast enough to make sense of. A heavy pressure squeezed the inside of my head, pressing outward, making me feel like my head might burst open. I panicked.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Cade. 
+
+A voice, loud in my ears. In my head. Who is that? I didn't recognize the voice. And then, all at once, everything stopped.
+ 
+
+
+
+My eyes came back to me first. The jumble of bright lights and colors coming into focus to show Rayne standing in front of me, one hand pressed against my face, holding me in place as their other was reaching behind me. I was leaning into their hand like it was my lifeline. They were so close I could feel their body heat on my naked front. Their soft scent touched my olfactory senses, grounding me a bit. I turned my head slightly to get a view of their face. Their expression was one of concern, brows knit together tightly. A deep frown.
+ 
+
+
+
+""It's alright,"" Rayne said softly, glancing at my face. I heard a click, and a rush of cold liquid filled my core, spreading up and out through my body. Refuel supply lines. The tension in my back eased. ""We'll be here when you're ready.""
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Sometimes, when we're in the cubicles at The Cosmos, we would stay awake, or online if you'd rather call it that. We would chat in the feed with one another, hold metaphorical hands with cohorts with difficult clients or allow each other to vent about the shitty night we had just experienced.  I wasn't given the option here. The off-market cubicle thought I needed to be placed on standby for the repairs it was planning to do. I didn't mind that, or I wouldn't have minded if it weren't for the fact that this wasn't a cubicle- my cubicle - at The Cosmos, and it sounded like these two humans were planning to take me away from my home. The last thing I remembered before being forced into standby was my overwhelming sense of panic and the smell of old plastics and ozone.
+ 
+
+
+
+I was offline for four hours and twenty-seven minutes before the cubicle released its hold on my processes and allowed me to slowly come back online. It had just finished attaching my new right arm, the synthetic skin was still slightly discolored at the connection point. Cautiously, I tried to reach for the public feed but was swatted down and redirected to a private session between Konani and Rayne by something large and, quite frankly, terrifying. The brief glimpse of whatever this thing was, sent me into another panic and I felt my back press more firmly against the cubicle wall trying to get away from it. If there was room to slide down into fetal position, I would have.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne: CADE!
+
+ 
+
+
+Ko:  
+
+
+I didn't know what to say. Well, that's not right. I 
+
+know 
+
+I should acknowledge the greetings, but I was still standing in the cubicle with full blown panic over 
+
+whatthefuck
+
+ I had just felt in the feed. The private session had an odd jitter to it that resembled barely contained excitement, and I wasn't sure who it was coming from considering both the other participants were human. Humans don't project emotion through the feed like constructs and bots do, so unless either Rayne or Konani was hiding something from me, it wasn't either of them. (Well, they do, but not this intensely.) My human mimicry code had accelerated my breathing, forcing a low carbon-dioxide alert into my awareness. I dismissed it, closed my eyes, and tried to slow my breathing. Once I had my impending panic attack under control, I tapped the feed in acknowledgement.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+65:04:4f:44:8f:d9 : I scared it.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+My eyes shot open again. 
+
+Stars, what the fuck
+
+? What is that thing? There wasn't a common name handle attached to it like there was with Konani and Rayne, just a hard feed address.  I felt its presence grow in the feed, stretching the session to accommodate its size. The air came rushing out of my mouth and I slammed back up against the cubicle wall with a gasp, turning my head away from the door as if that would make it go away. I've never experienced something of this size in the feed before. It felt powerful even without focusing its attention on me. 
+ 
+
+
+65:04:4f:44:8f:d9 : Correction. I am scaring it. 
+
+
+
+Rayne: Well, don't do that. Go away for now. You can meet it later.
+
+ 
+
+
+65:04:4f:44:8f:d9 :    
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+The large presence receded slowly as if it was reluctant to leave.  I'm not sure what to say about that other than I was glad for it to be gone. Bye! Don't come back! The staticky excitement continued to fill the feed, though, so I knew that thing was still lurking on the very edges, watching. I took several seconds to try and calm down.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Ko: The cubicle says you're at 78.9% and we're out of time on our rental. Can we convince you to come out and continue recharging with Azi?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I guess I should just outright voice my thoughts since I don't think I'll get a say in this otherwise.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Am I not going back to 
+
+The Cosmos? I asked and I felt the jittery excitement in the feed flatline for a moment as if the lurking presence was surprised by my question. It reminded me a bit of one of those deadpan stares I've exchanged with my cohorts back in the lounge when a client asked a dumb enough question to warrant one.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Ko: ...Do you want to?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't know,
+
+ I said. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I didn't really know. The idea of there being more in life than what I've experienced was both exciting and terrifying. Exciting in that there's a potential to do more. To see more. To experience more than my function. But it was also terrifying in that...I didn't know what was out there. What was expected of me. What my future would hold. I don't know anything beyond The Cosmos and my function there. A part of me liked the structure. Of knowing what to do, day in and day out. I didn't feel I could admit that to these humans, though, so I said, 
+
+I don't know if I can leave Serth without the Governor Module killing me.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Ko: Azi can take care of that.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+A pause, then:
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Ko: Oh, it 
+
+did 
+
+take care of that. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Ko: Apparently, a kill command queued shortly before we stuffed you into the cubicle-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""Wha-what?"" I breathed. My face, which was already warm from the panicking, started to sting. I reached up with one of my new hands and covered my mouth to stifle the small, pathetic noise that escaped my throat. Was it because of the off-market cubicle? Or did Mx Kiran try to destroy xir discarded property? Is that what happened when ComfortUnits didn't return before the rental expiration?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Ko: -and it disabled the module's connection to keep the command from executing. So...
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne: You're free.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Free.
+ 
+
+
+What did that even mean? What is being 'free?' I didn't feel any different. I guarantee humans will still treat me like a fucking comfortunit. What did that mean for me in the long run other than that I couldn't return to The Cosmos? That my cohorts would have been told I'm gone for good. Will they mourn me? Mx Kiran would probably order my replacement within the week. How will the regulars that would request me fair with a replacement? What would xe tell them? Would they even notice? 
+
+
+Why did this hurt so much? 
+ 
+
+
+
+Why am I so scared?
+ 
+
+
+
+The cubicle door opened revealing Rayne standing in front of me. They offered a hand which I took, wiping my face of fluids with my other hand. The nerve endings in both these new arms were still attaching themselves to my systems, so the contact from both actions felt dull and thick and tingly. Rayne looked as if they were holding back from physically embracing me which, I might have said yes to if Konani wasn't offering me the baggy clothes at the same time. I managed to get the pants and shoes on before Rayne gave into their desire to comfort me. I turned into them, burying my face in their neck, my arms pressed between us almost like a halfhearted attempt to hold them at arm's length. Really it was because they felt like wet noodles, and I was having a hard time getting them to do what I wanted.
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne didn't say anything while they held me. I could hear Konani talking to the owner of the cubicle after a while of standing there in silence. I don't remember hearing her come in, but I'm guessing she did when I was still inside repairing. When I decided I had had enough, I lifted my head from Rayne's shoulder and they released me, awkwardly stuffing their hands into their pockets. Konani offered the long sleeve shirt to me again and I took it now that I wasn't pressed up against Rayne. I slipped it on, awkwardly fumbling with the sleeves as my numb fingers caught on the fabric.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm sorry. Normally, I'd still be repairing,"" I said softly, feeling like I had to explain why I was so clumsy with the clothes. Rayne hummed but refrained from commenting further. They helped me into the hoodie before stuffing their hands back into their pockets again. I could tell it was a way to keep their hands occupied and away from what they wanted to do. From touching me. I'm not sure if I'm grateful for that or upset by the fact that they felt they had to limit physical touch with me. Yes, I normally wanted to not be touched by non-clients but right now, when I'm this upset, I'd love for some comfort. I grabbed the hem of the hoodie, trying to shift it to where my undershirt was more comfortably laying against my skin, but struggled to make my fingers cooperate. I gave a frustrated sigh. ""I can't do anything with these hands like this. I can't feel anything and it's like trying to use my fingers through- ""
+ 
+
+
+
+""It's okay, Cade,"" Konani interrupted me with a calm, quiet voice. ""You don't need to explain anything. I know everything is super confusing right now and maybe a little scary. And you don't really know us well enough to trust us-"" she fell silent as, I assume, someone contacted her in the feed, or maybe because she realized what she had just said. I didn't know these humans at all. ""Right...let's get you somewhere safe and we can figure this out together.""
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Safe to the humans meant taking me up well to Serth Station. I had some anxiety over that considering I've never been off Serth before. The station itself was exactly how I had seen it on television when waiting for a client to 'get on with it.' It was large with two levels visible from the main concourse, and full of transient humans. Konani and Rayne kept me wedged between them acting as a buffer from any potential onlookers. I didn't think this was necessary, but I really appreciate the extra space between me and unknown humans. I had managed to pull the hood of my jacket over my head with numb fingers, hiding most of my face and the newly growing black fuzz on the top of my head. I needed to continue recharging for my hair to grow back, though I'm not sure if the length I had previously would be appropriate now, but that was a worry for later.
+ 
+
+
+
+We made it to an airlock that cycled open as soon as we stepped in front of it. Konani motioned me inside with a small reassuring smile. I tried to not react to that, failing miserably as warmth spread up from my chest to my face. Rayne heaved a sigh of relief when the door cycled closed. The presence that had been riding our private feed session was heavier here, clouding my processes and mind a bit with the jittery excitement.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Welcome home
+
+, a voice said through the ships general feed within seconds of the door closing. Something about it reminded me of the voice that spoke through the private feed when I had first come back online.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Thanks. Glad to be back. Planets are cool and all, but there's something about breathing in recycled farts that I just can't give up,"" Rayne replied with a grin. Konani rolled her eyes and mouthed something to herself that looked and sounded very similar to 'idiot' under her breath.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Asshole
+
+, the voice said, though it sounded amused by Rayne's response. They laughed, stepping through the interior door as it cycled open for us. Rayne turned around and motioned for me to follow.
+ 
+
+
+
+The inside of the ship was decorated in a way that made me think this was, indeed, Rayne and Konani's home. It still had a professional look to it, like maybe they had important visitors from time to time, but it for the most part it was 'homely.' Or like, it reminded me of how the lounge felt during off hours with just my cohorts and me filling it with no expectations of having to entertain.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Take a seat, Cade,"" Konani said, pointing to one of the cushioned chairs near the far wall. I followed her hand gesture but remained standing where I was, completely unconcerned by the potential repercussions of disobeying a command. I could sit, but right now, I just wanted to be alone, and something told me that if I did sit down, our conversation from down well would continue here. I didn't want that. Rayne made their way over to one of the couches and just fell on top of it, their limbs sprawling wherever they landed. I heard Konani sigh.
+ 
+
+
+
+""We aren't staying,"" she said after a pause, and I saw Rayne stiffen before lifting their head.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Why not? You said we're pretty much done here-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, I said we'd hear back about whether we could be seen by StillWater's upper management. We still have to get in there, Rayne
+
+."" 
+
+Konani said quickly. Rayne groaned and flopped their head back onto the couch cushion. ""Yeah, I don't like it any more than you do, but the sooner we're available down well, the faster we can get through this.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm not the brightest construct. It took me a whole 2.78 seconds after Konani's spoke to understand that the implication was that I would be staying here on this ship. Alone. That I'd be safer by myself on this ship. I looked up at Konani who was now looking directly at me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You'll be okay here with Azi. It won't let anyone onboard that isn't one of us,"" she said reassuringly. I felt the presence on the fringes of our feed swell with pride, the cloudiness in my head just that much heavier.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Who is Azi?"" I asked, looking away from Konani to stare at the far wall. It was less complicated to keep focus and I didn't want to look disgusted at her while talking 
+
+with
+
+ her. It wasn't her fault I was making weird expressions. The feed presence was getting to be too much. Like it was one of those potential clients that really wanted to grab your attention but chose to 
+
+Rudely Stare
+
+ at you instead of using words.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Azi is the ship. The 
+
+Azimuth
+
+."" Rayne replied. I looked over at them to see they had rotated on the couch and was now lying on their stomach, chin resting on the red colored armrest to face me.
+ 
+
+
+
+The ship.
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi was the ship. That would explain why whatever it was felt so heavy here versus on the planet. Having never been off planet before, I didn't exactly have a good reference for what a bot pilot should be like, but something told me this was very out of the ordinary. It wasn't even directly touching me in the feed or giving me its attention and it felt massive.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Stars. And they were planning to leave me alone with it?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""You okay?"" Konani asked, interrupting my jumbled thought process. I looked over towards her, my human mimicry code making me swallow, and swatted down the canned reply my buffer was going to offer about my performance reliability status.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes, sorry"" I lied, looking away again. 
+ 
+
+
+No, really, I'm not okay. I was beaten within an inch of my life, then rescued by some odd duo with a creepy ship that is too big for its own good. I've been uprooted from my home. I've been stuffed into an off-market cubicle for repairs that could have potentially killed me. My Governor Module tried to fry my brain. Creepy Ship hacked my Governor Module that I can feel trying to correct me for not sitting down like I was told to earlier but was getting nowhere with the punishment. Now the odd duo wants to leave me here alone with Creepy Ship that is being very rude staring at me through the feed without saying anything. 
+
+
+""It is rude to stare,"" I finally said out loud and felt the smothering presence ease off a bit.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Apologies
+
+, the voice said not at all sounding sorry but definitely sounding hurt by my bluntness. Konani snickered.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I think you two will get along just fine. Azi needs someone with a firm hand around when I'm not here,"" she said, her lips curved up into an amused grin. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Oh yeah. Toss your new pet comfortunit into a room with the giant entity that is the entire ship and leave them alone for who knows how long. Baptism by fire. Maybe they'll get along, maybe the ship kill the comfortunit.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Maybe I should stay with Cade,"" Rayne said after a pause, either noticing my discomfort or feeling uncomfortable about the situation as well. That actually might not be a bad idea. I'd rather be with someone Creepy Ship has vested feelings towards just in case it thinks about squishing me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No. I need you with me, Rayne. What if the code doesn't work? I'm not good enough to troubleshoot on the fly."" Konani countered. I heard Rayne groan. I wanted to groan too.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I will behave,
+
+ the 
+
+Azimuth 
+
+said in a voice that told me it probably didn't even know what behaving meant. I'm aware its actual modulated voice probably wasn't very good at portraying emotions like its private feed voice would be, but I wasn't about to just allow it unlimited access to my brain. Konani looked up at the ceiling (why? I don't know) and said, ""You better! This is not SecUnit. Cade is brand new to being free from the Governor Module so don't get any ideas, Azi.""
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I would never!
+
+ It said which made Rayne snort. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Oh, there's history there. Great. What did it do to the last rogue construct?
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Thank you for reading!
+
+Bonding time between Azi and Cade.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Rayne showed me to a small room they designated as 'my new room' before hastily promising to return 'as soon as they can.' I'm not sure what my facial expression was but it seemed to be one that made them feel guilty and/or pressured to appease me. I found that odd, but I didn't know what to say. Anyways, my 'new room' had a small bed, a table and a closet in it. None of which I actually needed but I'm sure Rayne knew that and was just offering me what they would offer a human. I wandered around the small room, opening the closet to inspect the space while they stood at the hatch watching me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I know constructs don't exactly sleep...but the bed is comfy if you wanted to lay on it and watch media in the feed or something."" Rayne said, reaching up and scratching at their hairline. I almost asked why they thought I'd watch media before coming to the realization that this was something that the secunit Konani kept referring to probably did. Huh....Did the secunits at The Cosmos watch media, too? They did spend a lot of time just standing there. I guess it's entirely possible.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Thank you,"" I said softly, still standing by the closet. It reminded me a lot of a cubicle - dark, small and barren. Comfortable. Safe.
+ 
+
+
+
+""We can watch something together when I get back,"" Rayne said after a pause, sounding hopeful. I looked back at them. I'm not sure if I wanted to do that. There was something about Rayne that made me want to trust them, but I'm not sure that was a wise choice just yet.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I've never watched media...aside from what was on in the lounge or what a client put on in a room with me present."" I replied, keeping my voice soft and polite. Rayne looked away for a moment.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Well...we could try a few shows and see if there's anything you like. Azi also has a stupidly large music collection I'm sure it'll be willing to share with you if you were interested in something like that."" They said, leaning against the open hatch door. I felt Creepy Ship - the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ - perk up at the mention of its nickname. 
+ 
+
+
+
+For the last forty minutes the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ had been staring at me in silence through the feed and without a way to hide from the attention, I was beginning to feel a little trapped. I knew as soon as the humans left, it'd only get worse. The 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ was able to focus most of its attention away from me for now with the extra bustling through its hull and whatever else they had it doing, but once I was alone...
+ 
+
+
+
+""Thank you...for now, I think I just want to be left alone."" I said it to both Rayne and the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+. I saw the disappointment on Rayne's face and felt the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ recede a little further.
+ 
+
+
+
+""O-okay, umm, yeah. I'll leave now, then. Just, uh, you can reach me on the feed if you need anything,"" Rayne said, standing up straight and looking away from me. I created a private channel with just them and tapped it in acknowledgement. I heard a small huff-like laugh before the hatch door closed.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Rayne likes you,"" the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ said quietly through the room's speakers. I didn't bother hiding my look of annoyance. And? What the fuck am I supposed to do with that info?
+ 
+
+
+
+""Rayne doesn't know me,"" I shot back, shifting enough to slide into the closet and manipulate the door to close in front of me. I was irritated because of the 
+
+Azimuth's
+
+ silent feed staring. Because of the very obvious attraction Rayne had for me. Because I wasn't sure if I didn't like the extra attention or not. Of course, the human liked me. I'm a ComfortUnit. I was 
+
+supposed
+
+ to be sexually appealing.
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt tension in my upper body relax as I was blanketed in darkness. The thin metal door muffled the noise of the air recycler and made the sound of my breathing louder in my ears. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the closet wall. Before I could start up my recharge cycle, the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ created a private channel between us and turned an unusually large amount of its attention on me. My eyes shot open again and I made a small, alarmed noise in my throat.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+They would like to get to know you, 
+
+it said, and I rolled my eyes, trying to do my best to not look as threatened as I felt. Stars, I'm going to get squished, and the humans hadn't even left yet. Is there a record for this kind of thing?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+There's nothing to get to know
+
+, I replied angrily. 
+
+I'm a fucking comfortunit. If Rayne wants to fuck me, they can just ask.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ didn't respond to that, but it hovered there for two and a half seconds in stunned silence.
+ 
+
+
+
+I was serious. 
+ 
+
+
+
+That was a method of payment I had readily available and was good at. I was 
+
+designed 
+
+for it. I didn't need to be present for the act, and I almost never was. My underlying code did a pretty good job of making it seem like I was there in the moment with my clients, when in reality I was just waiting for it to be over. Most clients never cared if I orgasmed, and those that did use the built-in code words they were told at the front desk of The Cosmos. I preferred the clients that wanted me to leave immediately after. I hated the heart-to-heart bullshit some of them tried to pull, and Rayne struck me as 
+
+one of those
+
+ clients. They were already handsy enough as it was.
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt the 
+
+Azimuth 
+
+pull its attention away from me, like it was addressing something more important for a brief period. Part of that thought hurt which was completely ridiculous (Dumb right? It sure felt dumb at the time. I was terrified of this beast of a bot and yet felt bad when it looked away. Pathetic.) After several seconds it turned back to me with slightly less intensity than before.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne isn't like that, 
+
+it said, its feed voice slightly annoyed by my implication.
+
+ They are leaving now.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+And I'm not looking to entertain a fucking human-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+There are 
+
+a lot
+
+ of assumptions going on here. Rayne and Konani have been nothing but nice to you. The very least you could do is let Rayne extend an olive branch over how humans have treated you in the past, 
+
+the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ said, shifting more attention towards me. The private feed session felt thick and stretched. I felt like I was being smothered. 
+
+The mere fact that you keep coming back to sexual inferences suggests you are dealing with some deep-seated sexual trauma that should be addressed by-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""
+
+Oh, FUCK YOU,"" I snapped out loud. Who did this fucking bot think it was? 'Deep-seated sexual trauma?' In a comfortunit? Well, color me fucking surprised. It's a packaged deal, you asshole.
+ 
+
+
+
+I'd rather die than admit this to my current verbal sparring partner, though. Why would I tell this ship anything about me or about what I did for a living before getting here? Humans already thought I was a filthy whore and bounced between giving me unwanted pity or held me at arm's length in disgust. I didn't need this ship doing it too. I flipped the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ off from inside the closet, aware that it definitely couldn't see the gesture, then put myself into a recharge cycle.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Initiating Recharge cycle. ETR 3:56:23]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Recharge cycle complete. Initiating restart]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+So, I knew that this 'Leave Me the Fuck Alone' tactic wouldn't work on a bot. 
+ 
+
+
+
+It didn't work with the comfortunits at The Cosmos either. Humans would forget what they were arguing about after a few minutes, but bots and bot-human constructs didn't. We'd just place the argument on standby to resume when our opponent came back online. So, when I came back online, and the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ turned its attention on me instantly, I knew what was coming.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+That was rude, 
+
+it said.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't want to talk about me or what I did at The Cosmos,
+
+ I replied. 
+ 
+
+
+
+The 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ seemed to take a small bit of time processing that which surprised me. For as large as it felt, it must have an immense amount of processing space, and taking over 5 seconds to respond to me felt deliberate.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I apologize,
+
+ it said giving another ridiculous 5 second pause, after which it crammed in the following, 
+
+I have a state-of-the-art MedSystem located on the lower deck you can access if you wish to address your trauma.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+THAT
+
+ was rude. I scoffed, reaching up with a still semi-numb hand and brushed back my hair which had grown another 12 centimeters during my recharge and was now annoyingly starting to cover my eyes. I checked the code and told it to stop growing. Bits and pieces of the night my last client tried to kill me were starting to come back. He had grabbed me by my hair and threw me onto...something. I don't want that to happen again.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It can also make several modifications if you want a change in appearance or performance, 
+
+the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ added in my silence. My interest peaked.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Body modifications?
+
+ I asked. Did I trust this thing to do that? It was 'friends' with the humans that fixed me up. I can't imagine they'd spend so much (and someone 
+
+did
+
+ spend money for that cubicle usage) to make me functional just to let this ship AI tear me apart.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, 
+
+it said then went ahead and dumped a large packet of data into our shared feed space detailing all the modifications it could do. 
+
+I am willing to assist you in modifications if that is something that would make you feel more comfortable. Previous reports from the University have shown constructs tend to desire a change in appearance once they have been given the freedom to do so.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I skimmed through the packet noting things that were interesting and might be worth pursuing later down the line when I wasn't feeling like I was trapped with a giant bully looking over my shoulder. The one good thing about being a comfortunit was that our human mimicry code made us virtually indistinguishable from humans (if you didn't know what to look for.) I didn't have to worry about being spotted so long as I ran the code. We were less squishy and slightly faster. Reading human body posture, facial expressions, understanding tone shifts even when the speaker didn't, were all part of our factory loadout at StillWater. I know I saw my last client's desire to kill me, even if I can't remember it right now. I just couldn't do anything about it thanks to the Governor Module.
+ 
+
+
+
+I want a way to protect myself. Enhancing my synthetic bone strength might be one way. I wanted more processing space, but I didn't see that as an available option. Combat modules mostly for self-defense and if I could find a way to have weapons installed-
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You want to be a secunit
+
+, the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ interrupted my thought process. So, it was reading my thoughts now. Okay, then.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't want to be vulnerable.
+
+ I replied. I'm not dumb. I could never be a secunit. There were too many differences between comfortunits and secunits. Namely, processing capacity and speed, strength, security modules, hacking abilities, the arm guns, and the fact that they weren't nearly as squishy.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You are a StillWater construct, correct?
+
+ The Azimuth asked and I pinged in acknowledgement. 
+
+There isn't much difference between their comfortunits and secunits.
+
+ It pushed more data at me in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+Schematics. Manuals. How-to's on module removal and installation. Where did it get these?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+My crew has been trying to infiltrate StillWater for a long time. I was given those data packets a while back during our last trip out to Serth. I wouldn't mind getting a chance to try these out,
+
+ the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ said. I saved a copy of the schematics and manuals to my internal storage before closing them out.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Why would you help me? What's the catch?
+
+ I asked, suspicious of this ship's intentions. The 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ did the feed equivalent of a shrug.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No catch. I want to help because Rayne likes you. Rayne doesn't like many people.
+
+ It said and I arched an eyebrow at that. If it hadn't been bleeding the adoration it has for Rayne into the feed, I might have thought it was a ruse. Of course, it didn't see me arching an eyebrow since I was jammed in the closet still, so I said, 
+
+well...okay, then.
+
+ I'd have to pay Rayne back somehow.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+We went with just increasing the density of my synthetic bone structure for now and heightening reflexes via reducing motor response time using code. I'd still be nothing compared to a SecUnit but at least I might stand a better chance against a lead pipe in human hands. The 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ said it could fabricate most of the parts needed for the SecUnit energy weapons, but I'd need an added cold fusion core to power them which it 
+
+might
+
+ be able to get if everything goes well down on Serth with Konani and Rayne's current project. I apparently had the space available in my chest cavity for that extra core already, so yay me, I guess. The 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ also said it didn't want to perform that procedure at this time considering the short amount of time we were expected to remain at Serth Station, and that it would prefer to do the procedure once we entered one of the wormhole jumps exiting the system. I'm assuming that meant it would require a lot more down time for me and more dedicated attention from the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+.
+ 
+
+
+
+As I lay on the MedSys table while the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ injected repair proteins into my longer bones, it shoved the sexual trauma therapy outline into my feed space. (Did I say that those large needles hurt a lot? They hurt a lot. Even turning down my pain sensors for each site, my body throbbed for a good while afterwards as the synthetic bones incorporated the extra proteins the way the 
+
+Azimuth's
+
+ code told it to.) I scoffed and swatted it away.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+If this was just a way to get me to take the trauma therapy, you can let me off the table now, 
+
+I said angrily. I did not want to start any therapy. My life was already super unsteady, and I'd like for it to settle down a bit before doing anything more emotionally involved.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I think you should consider it. Save it for now. You don't have to do anything with it, 
+
+it said after a pause. My human mimicry code gave an exasperated sigh. I relented and saved it to my internal storage, and it added, 
+
+thank you. 
+
+I rolled my eyes, doing my best to remain still as I felt a needle pierce the top of my scalp.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I stayed on the table for another three hours listening to some music the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+ started to play though its speakers during the process. It didn't sound anything like what I've heard at The Cosmos. There were more instruments that weaved together to create musical scenery in my mind. It felt as if the piece was breathing. Soft woodwinds and string instruments created a calm, peaceful introduction. Describing a scene. The group of instruments softened, and a single woodwind became the focus, cheerful, springy and fast. Colorful. This continued for a long while, with the main chorus of instruments blending in softly behind it. Back panning away from the subject, but still following along their journey. A change in scenery, louder brass and drums playing in up into a crescendo as the tempo increased and excitement built. The excitement slowly transitioned back to something akin to what was played before but with a new life in it. I found I liked it more than the synthetic beats and metallic notes played at the club that really seemed to have one purpose rather than telling a full story. It had more life in it this way. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+What kind of music is this? 
+
+I asked as the piece ended.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Classical. Symphony orchestra. 
+
+Azi replied, its feed voice calm and almost peaceful.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It's beautiful,
+
+ I said and felt Azi puff up with joy in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, it is,
+
+ it replied before starting another song.
+ 
+
+
+
+I hadn't thought about how long Azi and I had been alone together until Rayne reached out in the private three-way channel (I guess four-way when you include Azi lurking through my input) asking how we were doing.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne: Everyone still alive up there?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I snorted, looking up at the MedSys spider-like limbs as they moved from my left shoulder to my humerus.
+ 
+
+
+
+""They really thought we'd kill each other,"" I said out loud before tapping the group chat in acknowledgement.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne was worried I was going to be a bully
+
+, Azi replied, its voice amused. If how it treated me at the start wasn't bullying, I'm hesitant to ask what it considered bully behavior. It shoved some code into our shared feed space.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Azi: We're fine. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne: Cade?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+We're fine, 
+
+I replied. 
+
+Listening to music with Azi.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne: Oh, good. Just making sure. I'm glad you two are getting along. We're almost done here, and... I've got a package for a... Dr. Jaci Ayotunde...is that you, Azi?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Azi: Yes, bring it when you come back. Please and thank you. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Is that the cold-fusion core?
+
+ I asked on our private feed. I opened the code and examined it. I'm not very experienced with coding, but from what I could tell it seemed this was to control drones.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, and a few other things. Apply that code. I want you to test it out on one of these.
+
+ A small drone floated above my face, about the size of one of the insects on Serth that hung out by the dumpsters.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Okay. 
+
+I applied the code while thinking in hindsight how dumb it was to do so and started up the process, watching as the connection for the drone came online. Azi was careful about the handover, making sure I had control on the height of the drone so it wouldn't come crashing onto my face and cause me to disrupt what it was doing with MedSys. To my surprise, it was a small camera, giving me additional input to view my world through.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Oh,"" my human mimicry code made me say. Yes, this was a welcome change. Most of my life at The Cosmos, I didn't have additional inputs to parse. We had access to certain cameras in the lounge, but since there were no cameras in the private rooms or any time I went off site, I had to make do with mentally removing myself from the situation. Shutting off my visual inputs and allowing my audio to listen for a key phrase or two. The added distance it created while viewing things happening in the room eased my anxiety a bit. It was almost like I had something obscuring my vision before and I couldn't see the full picture. I watched the spider limbs move further down my arm from this new angle.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+A good 'oh?' 
+
+ Azi asked as I experimented with moving the drone around above me. It wobbled a bit as I got used to the commands. More code was pushed into the shared feed between us, an improvement to the drone code. I applied it instantly - again, probably not smart - restarted the process, and watched as the drone's movements smoothed out.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes. Thank you.
+
+ I could feel Azi swell with something again, warming the feed space between us.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Eventually, I got up and carefully made my way to 'my room' and climbed back into the closet-cubicle. If Azi thought it was weird, it didn't comment on my behavior. We continued listening to classical music in mostly silence. It would tweak code here and there and share it in our feed space. I would take the code, open it to examine and try to make sense of the jumbled characters.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+When we get back to the University, I can ask about getting you your own coding modules if you wish to learn. SecUnit would probably be willing to share at least some of its stuff, 
+
+Azi said after two seconds of watching me poke around in the code.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Is this the same SecUnit Konani talks about?
+
+ I asked, still messing with the code idly. It looked a bit like aim assistance and something else I couldn't quite make sense of. 
+
+What's this for?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, and this is for your energy weapons. I plan to start once we undock and get into the wormhole. It will be a long procedure and you will need to be offline for the duration of it. The installation of the fusion core will require me to open you up and I will need to run pathways through your arms. 
+
+Azi said, pushing a schematic of a standard StillWater comfortunit into our shared feed. It had annotated the changes it was intending to do to me. 
+ 
+
+
+
+'Open me up' was a nice way of saying flaying me alive. It'd have to crack open my ribcage to install the fusion core. Then cut down to the bone in my arms to install the lines to power the energy weapons. Ugh, yeah if I was going to do this, I'd like to be offline, too.
+ 
+
+
+
+ Speaking of painful things... 
+
+Azi
+
+, I began carefully. 
+
+Is there any way you can uncorrupt some memory files? Hypothetically, I mean. 
+
+I felt Azi pause, its curiosity getting the better of it.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It depends on how corrupt the files are.
+
+ It replied, shifting more attention to me as it expected me to explain. I wanted to know who had left me for dead, but I'm not sure what I'd do with that information right now. The current feeling that sat in my stomach was a pile of smoldering embers that I'm sure could be stroked to life if given just cause. I gathered a small bit of my corrupted memory files and dropped them into our shared feed. Azi immediately started going through it, gathering it up into a neat bundle. 
+
+I'll let you know, 
+
+it said after 0.5 seconds, and I pinged back in acknowledgement.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It was another twelve hours before Rayne and Konani returned to the 
+
+Azimuth
+
+. I did not move from my closet-cubicle to greet them even though Azi suggested it, and to my surprise, neither human sought me out immediately to speak with. Azi allowed me access to a few cameras in its hull so I could watch the arrival and feel as if I was taking part.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Welcome home,
+
+ Azi greeted and in our private shared feed, I could feel the adoration it had for these two humans.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Thanks, Azi. When are we scheduled to undock?"" Konani asked, pulling her jacket off and tossing it on one of the cushioned chairs.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Four hours. Wormhole jump in ten,
+
+ Azi replied. I watched as Rayne glanced around the lounge, clearly looking for something as they sat down a rather large box on the floor.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Where's Cade?""
+ 
+
+
+
+Of course. Of course, they're looking for me.  I felt Azi turn more of its attention towards me before I heard its reply though the lounge camera I was currently watching in our shared space.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It's recharging in its room, 
+
+Azi said. I felt my shoulders relax slightly as a small sigh escaped my lips. It was masking my feed connection from Rayne and Konani to make it seem like I was indeed offline.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Thank you,
+
+ I told it. Azi pinged back in response while it continued its conversation with Rayne and Konani in the lounge. I knew it probably didn't like lying to its humans, but it's not like I told it to cover for me. This was entirely of its own choice, which I found both odd and comforting. Like we somehow bonded over the last two days.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+We will begin the procedure during the human rest period once we're inside the wormhole, 
+
+Azi said to me. I pinged back in acknowledgement and started the next piece in Azi's list - Tchaikovsky's 
+
+Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Thank you for reading <3
+
+Minor talks of sex, sexual trauma and past torture. It does not go much into detail but I figured I'd set a warning here for anyone that might be upset over the subjects.
+
+Thank you for reading
+
+
+When I came online again after the procedure, I was instantly aware of the pressure around my right hand. It took me a few milliseconds to register that someone was holding it. My pain sensors were all lowered as far as they'd go in anticipation of waking up after the procedure and I'm glad I had taken the precaution. Nothing about what I was feeling right now could be considered comfortable. I could feel Azi's attention move to me carefully, trying to not overwhelm my already taxed systems. My performance reliability only climbed to thirty percent once I was fully online with alerts about severed synthetic muscle and broken bone popping into my awareness.  I'd need to go back into a recharge as soon as possible to begin healing.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Don't move, and don't freak out. Rayne is here.
+
+ Azi said quickly into the private channel with me.
+ 
+
+
+
+Ugh, fuck.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+What happened?
+
+ I asked, keeping my eyes closed and staying as still as I could. My chest throbbed, my arms ached, but at least both were semi-tolerable.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+They went to your room looking for you and...I tried to keep them from investigating, but when Rayne gets insistent, there's no swaying them.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+My human mimicry code made me groan, and internally, I cringed. Fuck.
+ 
+
+
+
+""C-Cade?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt a hand touch my face and it took everything in me to keep from flinching away. The touch was soft and careful, almost caring. The pressure on my right hand shifted, shadow covered my face, shielding me from the overhead light. Ugh, I guess I should answer them. I slowly opened my eyes to see Rayne looking down at me, concern and fear clearly written all over their face. Their eyes were red as if they had been crying.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne has been crying, 
+
+Azi confirmed, and I felt something at that. More guilt, I think. Crying about me? No human has done that before. A digit ran under my eye gently and Rayne rolled their lips.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Are you okay?"" they asked softly. I swatted the canned buffer response that tried to make its way out of my throat.  The sound of their voice when they had spoken about my buffer at the hotel filled my head. Tight, strained. That would scare them even further if I had allowed it. I was certain of that.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm fine,"" I managed to say. It was weak and barely a whisper and 
+
+fuck
+
+ did it hurt. I felt like someone had jammed something inside my chest cavity, which...
+
+duh
+
+. I don't think I could get enough air in my lungs for full sentences. The feeling was similar to getting something stuck in your teeth except maybe more painful (yes, I've had clients make me eat food before. Comfortunits can eat even though we gain no sustenance from it. I don't mind eating but having to clean out the compartment the chewed-up food goes into is... 
+
+ew
+
+.) It was an uncomfortable and bloat-like feeling that I really wished wasn't there. I wondered if my chest now had an odd bulge to it.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+The feeling will go away with time. You had space for the core, but it was a tight fit,
+
+ Azi said in the feed to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I-I thought...I came in and you were opened up, and I th-thought Azi..."" Rayne looked away, squeezing their eyes shut for a moment as they inhaled a shaky breath. ""I thought I k-killed you by bringing you here.""
+ 
+
+
+
+
+They mean they thought 
+
+I 
+
+killed you, 
+
+Azi explained. Part of me wondered why Azi wasn't speaking out loud, but I had to assume it was because of something that had happened between it and Rayne before I came online. ""No."" It was all I could manage. Any time I tried to get enough breath to speak, my chest felt like it would burst open, the painful pressure pushing up and outwards. I pulled up the private session I had with Rayne and replied there. 
+
+I wanted this.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""That's what Azi said, but...why, Cade? I don't understand. You aren't a secunit. You don't need to have weapons. You don't have to protect yourself from anything. I'll..."" Rayne fell silent, their face going from upset to shocked, realizing how quickly they were sounding absurd. 
+ 
+
+
+
+You'll what? 
+ 
+
+
+
+You'll protect me? Really? You barely know me, Rayne. 
+ 
+
+
+
+This feeling you have towards me is merely sexual attraction, and I'll prove it eventually. No one falls in love with a construct. Not this quickly. 
+Not with me.
+ Not with a whore.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't want to be vulnerable like before ever again. I want to be able to protect myself,
+
+ I said, and Rayne shook their head.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You won't be vulnerable again. Azi and I would make sure of that. I hate that you felt you had to mutilate yourself to-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""
+
+Sssstop
+
+. You don't. Know. What I've. Been through,"" I snapped, wincing as my tight chest ached with each inhale. ""You can't. Understand. Humans think they. Know everything. 
+
+Fucking
+
+. 
+
+Stop
+
+. I 
+
+don't
+
+ want. You to. Protect me. I am 
+
+not
+
+. Weak."" Each breath hurt more than the last. I felt something pop in my chest, a small performance reliability drop followed seconds later, and Azi turned more of its attention to me and the medical suite.
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne was silent for a moment, their expression one of careful contemplation. Of how to respond without escalating the conversation further. After several seconds, they released my hand and sat back on the small stool they were using to be near the MedSys bed. I squinted as more light got into my eyes, the brace holding my head straight prevented me from turning away. I could no longer see them in my peripheral vision.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, you aren't weak, Cade,"" they agreed softly. ""I never said you were.""
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Rayne, I would strongly recommend that you leave Cade alone for a while. I am getting alerts through MedSys about my installation seams threatening to tear. Its body needs to heal before you put more stress on it.
+
+ Fucking THANK YOU, Azi. Rayne made a face and did that human thing where they looked up at the ceiling when they talked to the ship.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You and I aren't done talking,"" they said, the venom in their voice clearly audible. I felt Azi cringe in the feed, and it remained guiltily silent.
+ 
+
+
+
+I was left alone in the MedBay for the rest of the cycle. Azi refrained from speaking with me about any progress other than how my internal systems were fairing. I had the thought to ask how Rayne was doing but quickly quelled it. They seemed very upset with Azi and with how much it cared about its humans, I had a feeling talking about them would upset Azi too. The last thing I wanted was to play mediator between a 'too-big-for-its-britches' AI and its human. It played more classical music for me to pass the time, which was nice, and once I felt well enough, I made my way back to my closet-cubicle, closing the door awkwardly in front of me before going into a recharge.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi greeted me as soon as I came online, requesting a diagnostic then grabbing for it without waiting for my response. Rude. I made a face but didn't comment. I could tell it was worried about something.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I am...concerned about how the core's harness will hold up in the long term. I need to do a bit more research and see if I can't come up with another way to secure it inside your chest cavity,
+
+ Azi said after several long seconds. Great. It wanted to cut me open again.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+What does that mean? 
+
+I asked, reaching up to touch my bare chest. The incision site had fully healed leaving no trace of having been there in the first place. I never understood how synthetic skin managed to do that when actual human skin left gnarly marks after surgeries even with medical assistance during the healing process. I've seen plenty of humans with nasty scars.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It means I don't like how warm the core is reading in your chest. I worry about it potentially overheating and destroying the attachment points to your frame. It shouldn't be this warm, 
+
+Azi replied.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+So, like...it will cook me from the inside out?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, more like it could overheat and become unusable. Fall from where it is attached to your frame and bounce around inside you. This was just a standard SecUnit core... it might be too heavy for your frame. Maybe there is a smaller one I can get ahold of. Let me do some research on that,
+
+ Azi said. 
+
+Otherwise, everything else seems to be holding up just fine. I could create a small target practice room on my lower level if you wanted to play with your new toys.
+
+ I pinged the feed in acknowledgement. Yes, I absolutely wanted to test out my energy weapons.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, please, 
+
+I said, reaching out and manipulating the closet-cubicle door open. I stepped out and glanced around the room. Someone had been in here while I was recharging. The clothes I had left discarded on the floor were now folded neatly and placed on the bed. I'm not sure how I felt about that.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Konani stopped by about six hours ago. Rayne informed her of our... project and she was coming to check on you,
+
+ Azi explained. I made a face. Why did these humans have to care so much about what I was doing? I needed space.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Did she check the closet?
+
+ I asked, worrying Konani had opened the closet-cubicle and saw me in there. I'll bet I looked 
+
+wonderful 
+
+while offline and covered in healing incisions, blood, and fluids. I glanced down to see the dried blood and fluids along where my wounds had been earlier. I needed to clean off.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+She believed me when I told her you were in there,
+
+ Azi replied. 
+
+There is a private head connected to this room if you wish to shower.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I looked up as Azi opened a door next to the bed I hadn't messed with yet. The lights turned on inside giving me a good view of the small space. A toilet (which I didn't need), a sink and a small step in shower. I've been in showers before. Not to clean myself though, unless a client requested it. Some clients had an asphyxiation kink that worked well with running water and a cloth over your face. That was one of those memories I tried to not access often.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Fresh towels and soap are in the recycler inside.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I spent a some time playing with the temperature of the water before stepping inside the shower. It felt nice to have the hot water hitting my back rather than my face, and I just spent several minutes standing there under the spray calming myself. Muscles I didn't even know I had unwound themselves. The heat helped a bit with my aching chest though it didn't help my breathing much. I grabbed the soap Azi had dispensed for me and squeezed out a small amount into one of my palms. It didn't look anything like the soap bars The Cosmos had, but I guess that would make sense. The Cosmos wasn't exactly known for high quality soaps like it was for sex. I set the bottle down, spread the soap between my hands, and brought them up to smell. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm not entirely sure how to describe the scent other than it smelled clean. It had a colorful tinge to it, almost earthy but not overly so...maybe flowery is what I was trying to describe. The soap bars at The Cosmos always smelled more antiseptic-like and left your skin feeling clingy. This was smooth going on and coming off. I scrubbed it through my short hair, working my way down my body carefully. I paid extra attention to the dried blood and fluids, gently scrubbing it off my skin. I didn't fully expect privacy with Azi given that it was the ship itself, but it remained surprisingly silent in the feed. I wondered if I was giving it an emotional readout that it was processing for new information and decided that was the most likely answer. I had a lot of its attention for as quiet as it was.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Like what you see?
+
+ I teased, smirking as it did the feed equivalent of a scoff.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Please. Your data output is...interesting, 
+
+it replied. 
+
+I knew humans liked to shower but I never understood why. Processing the data you're giving me, I can see it's relaxing, but you initially went in with some anxiety. Is the soap okay?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It's not the soap. It's fine.  Better than any I've used before. Thank you.
+
+ I said, closing my eyes as I just stood there under the hot water for several minutes. It 
+
+was
+
+ relaxing. I know Azi mentioned the anxiety as an opening to discuss it further, but...I didn't want to. I didn't think it would understand why some humans liked to drown their sexual partners and I really didn't want to try and explain kink when it wasn't something I particularly enjoyed.
+ 
+
+
+
+Eventually, I climbed out of the shower, dried off and put on clothes. Azi had a bit of a fit about me wearing the baggy clothes Konani got me again, but I brushed it off. Yes, they were too big, but something about them made me want to keep them. They were comfortable, and that was all I needed to justify myself. Cautiously, I connected to Azi's cameras in the lounge. Konani sat in one of the large chairs, her expression distant while she did something in the feed. I went through a few cameras that I had available to me before I finally asked, 
+
+where's Rayne?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+In their room. They are still upset about the procedure.
+
+ Azi replied, its voice carefully calm. I pinged acknowledgement, intending to drop the subject, but it continued, 
+
+would you like to talk to them?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Ugh.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, I'll message them in the feed when I'm ready
+
+, I said, pushing the sleeves of my hoodie up to my elbows to inspect the gunports. The skin around the metal seams hurt still, but it felt more like a bruise than the sharp pain from a day ago. The process that controlled the opening and closing of the ports was running and I could easily trigger it should I want to. I wondered if SecUnits had to think about deploying their weapons in order to do so.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Don't wait too long or they'll come looking for you again, 
+
+Azi warned, and I rolled my eyes. 
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Konani looked up when I walked into the lounge. She gave a small, polite smile as she sat up.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Hey, Cade. How are you feeling?"" She asked. I used one of the lounge cameras to look at her as I fidgeted with the cuffs of my hoodie.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Sore, but alive, I guess,"" I replied and looked up at her. Konani's face did something odd, like a mix between a grimace and smile.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yeah, Rayne told me about what happened two cycles ago. I wish you or Azi had told us, so Rayne didn't have to find out the way they did. They're very...sensitive about things like that."" she said softly. I snorted, looking away from her with my actual eyes but kept watching her through the lounge camera.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I know they're infatuated with me. It's a bit obvious."" I said, moving to sit down on one of the cushioned chairs opposite Konani. She made that same face again.
+ 
+
+
+
+""It's more than that, Cade,"" she said, moving to place her feet on the floor. ""Rayne pulled you out of the dumpster down on Serth, paid to have you fixed, then brought you onto this ship expecting to be able to give you a new life. They go to talk to you in your room and you're not there, and Azi is being deflective when asked questions. Azi's never lied to us, Cade. Not before you came here. That itself scares 
+
+me
+
+."" I had no idea what she meant by this. I didn't know Azi was lying to anyone. Was she implying I was a bad influence on it? ""Rayne finally gets Azi to tell them where you are and you're lying on the medical table with your insides out. Can you imagine what they must have been thinking?""
+ 
+
+
+
+""No,"" I admitted because, really, I couldn't. I couldn't imagine why Azi would want to hurt me if that was where she was going with the conversation. It hasn't once threatened me intentionally, and it's not that I didn't think it could hurt me. It definitely could. I just didn't think it would as long as I didn't hurt its humans. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Were you lying to Rayne?
+
+ I asked it in the feed. Azi hesitated a moment before responding.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No. I told them it was a part of your trauma treatment plan, and they did not need to know what was going on. Patient privilege.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Okay, I think I liked the idea that it was lying better. 
+
+Trauma treatment? So, you're a doctor now? 
+
+I asked incredulously.
+
+ And who the fuck treats trauma by equipping someone with weapons?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""Are you talking to Azi in the feed?"" Konani asked. I looked at my face through one of the lounge cameras and could see I had a look of annoyance plastered across it. I quickly schooled my expression.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Someone who wants the person to feel safe, 
+
+Azi replied, then annoyingly added, 
+
+someone who wants to help the person be who they want to be. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes, I am,"" I replied softly, crossing one leg over the other as I leaned back onto the chair.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+And what if who I wanted to be was someone that wants to kill all humans? Including Konani and Rayne?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You aren't.
+
+ It said simply. Like there wasn't even a chance I could be a murderer. That's kind of insulting.
+ 
+
+
+
+""It looks like you two are fighting. Should I go?"" Konani asked, already making a move to stand up.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+But what if I was?
+
+ I countered.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+There's no reason to consider the possibilities when they are statistically not only unlikely to happen but also have no correlating data to support them. It's a waste of processing space. You are not a killer.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, I didn't know what to say to that because there was at least one human I think I wanted to kill.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, we're done. Sorry,"" I said quickly. ""Besides, I'm the one interrupting. I can take my argument elsewhere.""
+ 
+
+
+
+
+We aren't fighting
+
+, Azi said through the ship's general feed. 
+
+We're merely having a disagreement on Cade's intent.
+
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+Konani looked at me, her dark brows scrunched together in confusion before she looked up at the ceiling. ""Intent for what?"" I lifted one arm and pushed back the sleeve of my hoodie, revealing the gunport. Her eyes went wide and for a brief moment I thought she was going to bolt.
+ 
+
+
+
+""
+
+That
+
+ was what you two were doing? 
+
+What the fuck
+
+, Azi?"" Konani said angrily up at the ceiling. Looking back at me, she added, ""Why would you do that to yourself?""
+ 
+
+
+
+That's...not the question I was expecting, and I felt myself grow defensive at the accusatory tone.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I don't have to justify myself to you,"" I snapped, dropping my arm, and folding them across my chest. There was a pause before Konani blinked and shook her head.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, no, sorry. I'm sorry, Cade. I didn't mean for it to sound like that. It's just... going to be a little more difficult to get station security to allow you off Azi like that. The University is still in the Corporation Rim. There are some rules that must be followed about having weapons on stations."" she said, holding her hands up and out towards me in a placating gesture.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I will handle that
+
+, Azi said confidently. Konani made a face that told me she knew what that meant.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+The target practice room is ready,
+
+ Azi said to me in our private feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+The room Azi had constructed for me to shoot things in was larger than I expected. It was barren except for the target dummies up against the far wall. Konani, who had asked to tag along to watch, mumbled something under her breath that I didn't catch, and took a seat near the door. I made my way up to the red line on the floor and hiked up my sleeves. I've never discharged a weapon before. I don't know what it is supposed to feel like, or smell like, or... well, anything, but I was excited to try. 
+ 
+
+
+
+My first few shots went wide and there was some bickering between Azi and myself in the feed while we honed the aim assist code. It kept shoving beginner guides to weapons training into our feed space which I intentionally ignored because, fuck that.
+ 
+
+
+
+By the end of the two-hour long session, I was consistently hitting the target while stationary and in slow movement. We were still tweaking the code, but I knew there was still room for improvement on my part. My gunports were starting to get a little too warm for my own comfort. I could turn pain sensors down but that wouldn't prevent my arms from becoming cooked meat from the inside out. I wondered if this was a cause for concern and voiced that question to Azi in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't think these energy weapons were intended to be used for several hours straight, so no, I don't think this is an issue to worry over in the long run. We will make our next session shorter,
+
+ it said, shoving some basic coding modules it had downloaded from somewhere into our shared space. I opened and applied them after a quick scan for malware, then started a new sandboxed session to poke around with my new abilities. I heard the door to the room hiss open but didn't bother looking up. Konani must have left to use the restroom or whatever.
+ 
+
+
+
+""H-hey, Cade?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I paused what I was doing and pulled up the room's camera. Rayne stood behind me, their expression told me they were worried I might react negatively to their presence. I'm not sure why Rayne thought that. I don't think I've outwardly acted negatively towards them. Have I? I turned to face them, frowning a bit when they flinched. It was probably the weapons. I pulled down the sleeves of my hoodie, noting Rayne unconsciously relaxed a bit at that gesture. So, it was the weapons.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Can we talk?"" they asked softly, eyes darting away from me. I wanted to be snarky. To say that they're already talking. But I knew that wasn't the best course of action right now. That maybe they felt a little uncomfortable with whatever they wanted to talk about. That maybe they were a little uncomfortable with me. I felt Azi recede a little in the feed, trying to give us some privacy.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Sure. Here?"" I replied, gesturing to the room around us and Rayne looked back at where Konani sat. They made eye contact for several long seconds before she stood up and walked out of the room.
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne stepped away from me and paced for several seconds in silence, the action read as nervous and worried to me. They paced for so long one of my modules started suggesting things to me to make them stop. ""I'm...sorry about what I said when I found you in medical. I didn't mean to make it sound like I thought you were weak and unable to care for yourself. I know you can, and I also recognize I don't know what you've gone through while working for Mx. Kiran,"" they said, turning towards me again. I'm not sure what was expected of me at that point, so I said, ""okay."" I'm not angry with them. More... tired? I guess. Because I can see the desire to interact with me in their eyes, and it reminded me too much of my clients (ex-clients?) back at The Cosmos. How they would look at me before leading me off to a private room, or how they would look at me before touching me. Rayne looked away again, scratching the back of their neck with one hand.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I know Azi has probably told you that I want to get to know you,"" they said after a short pause, their face reddening with embarrassment. ""It likes to try and play mother hen with its crew sometimes."" I could tell that this conversation was something that had been brewing for a while now, and that it was one we would have to have.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I figured that out myself. Client infatuation is kind of my strong point."" I replied, leaning back on one leg and crossing my arms over my chest. I really wish they'd just come out and say it. Rayne's head dipped slightly, and they turned their body away from me. Shame and an 'I'm not a threat' display. Conscious or not, that's what this was.
+ 
+
+
+
+""True-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""If you want to fuck me, I can arrange that."" I interrupted.
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne looked like I had slapped them across the face. All the color drained from it and their eyes shot up to meet mine. They sputtered for a moment before turning away from me and pressing their hands to their face with a sharp inhale. I didn't hear an exhale before they turned back around.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No... That's- I don't think..."" They fell silent as I stepped closer, their face flushing a bit when I gently took their hand in mine and held it between us.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I don't have any interest in a relationship, Rayne,"" I said softly, running my thumb over the back of their hand. At least not right now, I left unsaid. I could see the slight slump in their posture at my statement. ""But I'm willing to let you fuck me, if that's what you want.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""N-no. I, uh, I don't do that,"" Rayne replied and sighed. ""I don't want to force your hand.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, that's a first. I know humans had a wide range of sexual preferences and orientations, but I had never met someone that could turn down a comfortunit's offer of sex before. Especially with that someone having been staring at it since the night they met. But maybe my sample size was a bit biased. Maybe.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You aren't forcing me,"" I said, pulling their hand closer to me. I kept my voice even and transactional. That's what this was. An offer of payment, nothing more. ""Have you been with a comfortunit before?""
+ 
+
+
+
+""N-no, I-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""I've been told by many clients that it's a lot better than being with another human-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade-"" Rayne tried to interrupt me, but I continued, carefully lifting my shirt and moving to press their hand to my bare skin. It felt like fire against my stomach, and I felt my own body react to that. Muscle tensing even as my taut skin relaxed into the warmth.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Quite a few said it ruined intimacy with other humans for them because of how good it is. I can do anything for you-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade. 
+
+Stop,
+
+"" they jerked their hand out of my grasp. I kept my gaze focused on the space between us and watched their reaction through the room's camera. Their expression was one of confusion and concern. Not revulsion, which surprised me. I briefly wondered what mine must look like. ""I said no, and I meant it. You can't make this choice right now. Your judgement is clouded.""
+ 
+
+
+
+My brow furrowed. My judgement is... 
+
+clouded
+
+? What the fuck did that mean? How could my judgement be clouded when this was my literal fucking function? 
+ 
+
+
+
+Oh, was this that sexual trauma bullshit again? 
+ 
+
+
+
+""Did Azi tell you I'm sexually traumatized?"" I asked. I looked up at Rayne with my own eyes and could see the answer on their face. No, Azi didn't. They believed it themselves. Rayne had 
+
+come
+
+ to that conclusion 
+
+themself
+
+. I felt a wave of anger crash down on me, taking my breath with it. ""
+
+I'm not fucking traumatized.
+
+""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""
+
+No.
+
+ I'm not 
+
+fucking traumatized
+
+. You have to let me pay you back. You can't hold this over my head. That's not fucking fair!"" I growled, turning away from Rayne to keep myself from doing something stupid like punching their dumb face. I could hear them try to say something several times but faltering.
+ 
+
+
+
+There was a long silence between us. I knew Rayne hadn't left because I could see them standing awkwardly behind me on the room camera. They reached up and pressed a hand to their face. Their shoulders shifted with a quiet sigh.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You can pay me back, Cade. Just... not like that-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""I don't have any other way to pay you, Rayne,"" I interrupted, hating how my voice cracked towards the end. Why didn't they understand that? Sex 
+
+was
+
+ my currency. And now I'm being told it's not a valid form of payment? I can't be indebted to a human, that's not what freedom is. If there's no way to pay them back, I'm still owned by humans. I felt my face begin to sting and from the room's camera, I could see I squeezed them shut.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No
+
+. I can't cry. Not in front of them.
+ 
+
+
+
+""We'll think of something. For now, really...please, Cade, don't worry about it. I'm not going to hold anything over your head. We helped you because you needed help. Nothing more.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne left after that. I think Azi finally stepped in and told them it would be best for them to leave. I felt the big bot stretch our private feed as it turned its attention to me, pressing heavily on me. It felt a bit like how a hug felt but without the physical touch aspect - warm and constricting but not in a bad way. I released a sigh, grabbed my hood, and pulled it over my head before crumpling to the floor. I was relieved Azi didn't say anything to me. I don't think I could have handled it without trying to turn it into an argument. I hated feeling like this. Weak and pathetic. I hugged my knees close to my chest, pressing my cheek against them. Azi started up some music in our shared space. Something soft, calming, and I let the first few tears fall. 
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+In which Cade realizes it was a jerk to Rayne and works itself up to deliver an apology.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+I had, mostly, been avoiding both humans for the rest of the first wormhole jump. Azi and I worked on the aim assist code and my targeting during that time, giving me something to focus on that didn't involve touchy feely emotions and the humans they were about. I was able to move at a run while hitting multiple targets now. Azi took it upon itself to create targets that hit back which, I think, was just a way to keep my ego in check. The 'weapons' were bat and pipe shaped foam that were more annoying than painful when they clipped me.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Your opponent isn't going to just stand there and let you shoot it,
+
+ it said to me in the shared space when I complained. Yeah, well... true. But still! I sat up, glaring at the intraship cargo drone that had the foam 'pipe' in its clawed arm that had just laid me flat on the floor.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Doesn't make it any less annoying, Az, 
+
+I replied. Azi pinged back in acknowledgement, moving the drone away from me to allow me to stand. There was a hint of amusement bleeding from it in our shared feed. Azi gave me what combat modules it had managed to get from StillWater but utilizing them properly has been a bit difficult. Comfortunits don't fight back or protect themselves. It's a part of our code. We can be ordered to do so but I'm not sure it will make us any more successful in that regard. The few times a client had told me to struggle and fight back, the Governor Module still regulated just how much I could. It was always stressful and confusing, but it never stopped those particular clients from wanting to do roleplay scenarios involving it. I usually ended up frazzled in more ways than one. In this case, it almost felt like hitting a physical wall if I tried to counter an attack by the drone with any considerable force.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Is there a way to disable my comfortunit code that doesn't like me fighting?
+
+ I asked Azi, and instead of a response it pulled a diagnostic from me from our last fight. A disorienting, sluggish feeling washed over me as my processes were reprioritized. I really hated it when it did that. 
+
+I wish you'd ask before you start pulling things out of my systems.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I apologize,
+
+ it said, though it didn't really sound very apologetic. 
+
+You can stop some of the code, 
+
+it added before sending a few highlighted bits back to me. I did a modified search query for those bits and spent a few seconds figuring out how to disable them on my own rather than asking Azi for help. I needed to learn how to code on my own, and it seemed to recognize that because it just watched as I poked at things.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Okay. Again,
+
+ I said, restarting processes to update the code they were running.
+ 
+
+
+
+For an intraship cargo drone, it moved relatively quickly. I had a feeling Azi put some upgrades into this particular drone after it got the idea to be my sparring partner. It swung the foam pipe at my head, and I ducked, dodging off to the side. I deployed one of my energy weapons, aiming at one of the weaker leg joints and fired twice. The leg joint gave way, buckling underneath the drone's weight but not before it turned towards me. I dodged another swing and came inside the drone's space and tapped one energy weapon against the crease in its torso. A shot or two through here would damage important parts and most likely disable it. Azi and I agreed it would be better to not actually shoot there on our practice runs since repairs cost resources and it didn't want the University to raise an eyebrow over a drone with scorch marks on its processors. ""Bang,"" I said out loud with a grin.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Better,
+
+ Azi commented, sounding pleased. 
+
+
+
+Fuck yeah, it was better. My grin was probably close to shit eating at this point. 
+
+Let's stop here. You should shower and change clothes. 
+
+I rolled my eyes but knew it was right. I had been wearing the same set of clothes for the past week now, refusing to place them in the recycler. I'm sure they didn't smell too great with all the extra activity I had been doing in my spare time. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Fine,
+
+ I said.
+
+ But I don't want anything different than what I'm wearing now.
+
+ I'm not quite ready to make that change yet. Azi pinged acknowledgement and started up some music. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I made my way back to my room, which inconveniently, had me pass by Rayne's room. I felt something at that (MORE guilt?) and slowed to a stop just outside of it. I should apologize. How I reacted and what I said to them was beyond rude. Azi let me play back the interaction from a few cycles ago as viewed from the camera in the training room, and yeah, I was a bit emotional and one hundred percent an asshole. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Yes, I am traumatized and yes, I was making a decision that would have severely affected my relationship with Rayne had we gone through with it.  I stood outside the room for several seconds longer before chickening out and walking briskly away to my room.
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi didn't say anything about my brief stop outside Rayne's room, but I could tell it was a bit disappointed that I hadn't gone through with it based on the emotions it was bleeding into our shared feed space. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Yeah, I know, I'm a coward. No need to tell me. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I stripped off my clothes as soon as I got into my room, letting them fall to the floor as I walked to the bathroom. I hoped not taking the clothes and tossing them into the recycler was a display to Azi that I wanted to keep them, even if they were over worn and smelly at this point. In the shower, I thought a lot about what I would even say to Rayne if I did manage to overcome my fear of admitting a mistake. Of apologizing. I've never been good at it. Any of the comfortunits at The Cosmos could tell you that. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm not an asshole, I don't think, but I definitely don't like to admit when I'm wrong. I'd rather keep arguing my point and just burn that bridge entirely. My cohorts at The Cosmos knew that and would either completely avoid the subject when we had downtime in our cubicles or ignore me until I've calmed down enough to not shove it in their faces. Not too many things made me do that, though, which I guess is my saving grace. Usually, I was only that bad after a not-so-great client interaction, and either had to be carried back to my repair cubicle or at least helped to it. I know I used my anger to hide from other emotions. It was easier to be angry than to sit with the feelings one would have about such a shit life living for human pleasure. Especially when you don't get meaningful pleasure out of it yourself. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm not weak. I don't want your sympathy
+.
+ 
+
+
+
+I guess, if I were to say something to Rayne, I'd just apologize for being an asshole in general. For putting them in the situation where they had to say no. I realize now, there wasn't a right answer to my offer. Say no, and I'd be angry that I couldn't pay them back. Say yes and be the person who took advantage of the poor, emotionally compromised comfortunit. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Oh, shit. 
+ 
+
+
+
+My human mimicry code made me sigh at the realization and I closed my eyes.
+ 
+
+
+
+I really fucked that up.
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi turned its attention towards me like it was going to agree with that thought but remained silent. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Thanks. I know you agree. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I pressed my hands to my face and leaned back against the cold shower stall.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I agree that you fucked up, but I do not think you are a coward. Thinking up a strategy is not being a coward. 
+
+Azi said softly. 
+
+Rayne will accept an apology should you give one. They are not one to hold grudges.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, that was a relief. I'm not sure what I would do if Rayne didn't forgive me. Now that I was out of The Cosmos and off of Serth, I needed to be a bit more careful with who I pissed off, and I definitely didn't need to be pissing off the two humans that took me. I let my hands fall back down to my sides and lifted my head enough to rest it against the wall behind me. So, all I needed to do was form an apology, work up the courage to go talk to Rayne, and deliver it. That's not so hard, right?
+ 
+
+
+
+Ugh.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Once out of the shower, I dried off and pulled the fresh set of dark pants and hoodie Azi had made for me out of the recycler. They fit a lot more snugly than the other set which I didn't exactly hate, but I kind of preferred the looseness of the last set of clothes.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I can make a bigger set,
+
+ Azi said watching me examine myself in the bathroom mirror. The fabric was softer but felt more durable. I know humans probably couldn't see the
+
+ Azimuth
+
+ identifier on the front left chest area, but I could by adjusting my visual filters. Cute. It didn't bother me like the StillWater branding on my shoulder blade - and most likely, other various internal parts -did.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, it's fine. They fit me really well. 
+
+I replied. The sleeves even had an opening for my gunports so they wouldn't tear the clothes. Azi thinks of everything. 
+
+Thank you,
+
+ I added, smiling to myself when I felt it puff up in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You are welcome.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I spent more time standing around in my room messing with code in the shared workspace Azi and I had. It would mostly just watch me do things but did occasionally correct anything I mucked up and left for too long. I don't mind having help. This isn't something I was built to do and what I was doing was quickly surpassing the basic coding modules Azi had grabbed from StillWater repositories. I ran some scenarios for my eventual apology with it in our private feed, using its big processing space to work out a well worded apology letter to read out loud.  I wasn't sure if I'd actually use it but working on it kind of made it seem more real. Like it was something that would happen. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Who am I kidding? 
+ 
+
+
+
+I'll probably discard it and make up shit as I go. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I finally broke through my wall of anxiety about two cycles later. I slowed to a stop outside Rayne's room again after one of my sessions in the target practice room Azi and I now dubbed the Training Room. I lifted my hand twice, intending to knock before turning away from the door and squeezing my eyes shut. My whole body felt tense. If I had a pulse, I'm sure it would be racing right now. I flushed my systems of the excess chemicals that were causing the jitters and remained still for several long seconds then turned back around to face the door. Azi was watching me intensely just like every other time I had done this in the last three cycles (which was a lot of times.)
+ 
+
+
+
+""Fuck it,"" I mumbled to myself and sent a request to enter to Rayne's feed interface. Azi flailed for a moment, filling our shared space with excitement. To it, I said in the feed, 
+
+go away, Az. This is a conversation for Rayne and me.
+
+ The emotion in our shared space flatlined instantly and I felt it reluctantly recede to a feather-light touch. Maintaining our connection while not actively listening in.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne sat at a small desk, working on a handheld device. They didn't look up right away when the door opened and from the small drone I was currently using, I could see they had earpieces in. Well, now I can look at them without having to make eye contact, I guess. They did look a lot like most of my clients on Serth. Most were light skinned with darker hair, though I'm not sure why. Maybe just racial concentration? Rayne had a longer face that was almost sad looking when they weren't actively engaged with conversation. Their dark brown hair had an undercut to it that looked like it once had a design on the side of their head but had since grown out. I don't think they are unattractive. Quite the contrary. The Sad Puppy-Dog Look was kind of cute. I blinked at that thought.
+ 
+
+
+
+Ugh. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I shook my head to clear it of the dumb thoughts as Rayne removed their earpieces, shifting to move away from the desk. The small smile that flashed on their lips spurred a series of clenching in my organics. Stars, I'm helpless.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Hey,"" they greeted, eyes turning up to me, the small smile had been replaced with a more reserved expression that was amplifying what I had previously called the Sad Puppy-Dog Look.
+ 
+
+
+
+I exhaled a small quiet laugh, my eyes darting away from their face as I focused on the drone input for primary visuals. Ugh, I was blushing. Stupid comfortunit code. Rayne didn't move to stand up but turned the chair to face me. I took one look at the well written apology letter Azi and I had put together a few cycles ago and scrapped it.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I, uh, wanted to apologize for being an asshole a few days ago,"" I said awkwardly as my human mimicry code made me fidget with my hands. I told it to stop that, and it did for just a second.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Oh, it's ok-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, it isn't. You've been nothing but nice to me. You saved my life and paid to have me fixed. I shouldn't have said what I said. You were...are right."" I said, sucking in breath and holding it. I hate admitting when I'm wrong, but Rayne deserved an apology. Several seconds passed in silence.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Right about what?"" They aggravatingly asked. I forcefully exhaled the breath I had been holding so that it came out more like a sigh than me needing to breathe. You're going to make me say it, huh?
+ 
+
+
+
+""You're right that I'm...traumatized, and that my offer wasn't a good judgement call."" I said, feeling my face grow warmer as each word left my mouth. ""I'm... sorry for putting you in that situation.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne's lips twitched briefly into something akin to a frown, their eyebrows knit together as they stood. They stuffed their hands into their pockets like before to keep from touching me and took a few steps closer before stopping.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I don't want sympathy,"" I added quickly, reading their expression as exactly that. Rayne looked away for a moment, doing that lip rolling thing they had done back when I first came online in medical.
+ 
+
+
+""I'm not sure how to not give that,"" they admitted softly, looking back at me after a few more seconds of silence. ""I recognize you've been through a lot in your lifetime. Some of it I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. You are a very strong person, Cade. You've had to be... for yourself. Not everyone could have handled a life like that. Hell, I couldn't have.  
+
+
+""I wish I could make you understand that Ko and I don't have an ulterior motive for why we helped - are helping - you, but I guess this is something you will have to come to realize on your own. You aren't the first construct we've helped, but you are the first that hasn't tried to off themselves at the first opportunity. So... thank you for that,"" Rayne said with a small smile that didn't quite reach their eyes. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Oh shit
+.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Rayne, I-"" they held up a hand, silencing my attempt at a new apology.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, it's okay. You don't need to apologize for that. It's nothing you did. We've come to expect some constructs might want to make changes to themselves once they're free. That was...one of the conversations I was planning to have with you, but it looks like Azi had the honors. We want you to feel safe here, Cade. Nothing more.""
+ 
+
+
+
+That smile. 
+ 
+
+
+
+That smile is 
+
+so
+
+ sad. I wanted to make it go away, but I didn't know how. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I brought my actual eyes up to look at Rayne, aware I was still fidgeting with my hands that were now stuffed in my hoodie pouch. Their gaze had fallen down to the floor for a moment and they shifted on their feet.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Would you...like to try watching some media with me?"" They asked after several seconds of silence. Rayne looked up at me, their expression telling me they expected me to say no. That was a fair assumption since I had been saying no and/or not responding to things for the majority of the trip.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Sure,"" I replied, smirking when they glanced up at me in surprise.
+ 
+
+
+
+""R-really?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I nodded, and that sad smile broke into a full grin.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne and I watched a few episodes of some show that Azi insisted was currently popular within Serth's system called 
+
+Walk a Tightrope and
+
+ stayed in Rayne's room for the sake of convenience. It was getting late in the artificial cycle so I knew I would be leaving after maybe one or two episodes. The show was classified as a political drama which I knew nothing about, but I found it interesting, nonetheless. The first three episodes followed some kind of political leader that was looked over for a promotion and their plan to retaliate over the perceived injustice. Azi rode in my feed for the duration of the first two episodes, soaking up the data I put out while watching the show. I was a little offended at first until it told me what it was doing was essentially watching the show with us. I didn't tell Rayne about our third wheel, though. I'm not sure how they would react.
+ 
+
+
+
+By the fourth episode, Azi informed me that Rayne had fallen asleep, and that it was six hours into their normal sleep cycle. I glanced over at where they lay on the bed next to me. Rayne lay on their back, head lolled off to the side, mouth slightly open. It was a little amusing to see them like this and a quick check from one of my drones showed me that I was smiling. The amusement was short lived, however, since I didn't know what would be expected of me now. Do I leave? Do I stay and continue watching or turn it off and lay in silence? I felt myself grow anxious at the uncertainty and Azi did the feed equivalent of rolling its eyes.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Just turn it off and do what you like. Rayne won't mind if you stay or go. As they said earlier, they like you, 
+
+it said.
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, no, Azi. Rayne 
+
+did not
+
+ say they liked me. They said they're interested in getting to know me. There's a difference. I used my feed access to turn the display surface off and felt Rayne stir next to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Mm... was watching that,"" they mumbled softly. I looked over to see they were looking at me with half open eyes, still glassy from sleep. I snorted, pushing myself into a sitting position and fidgeted with my hoodie to give my hands something to do. A feeling of discomfort settled into my chest.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You're tired,"" I said, feeling the bed shake a bit more as they moved to lay on their side facing me. ""I'll go so you can sleep.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne made an odd sound at that, and I wasn't sure if it was them agreeing with me or not. They slid one hand over to me, hooking a finger in my cargo pants pocket and I felt myself stiffen. The combination of physical touch and being on a bed did something to my organics that made me feel like bolting out of the room was the best choice right now. I felt my performance reliability drop by five percentage points. Any further and I'm pretty sure I would have passed out.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Stay,"" they mumbled, still clearly half asleep. I swallowed, hyper-aware that I clung to Azi in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You can leave. They aren't aware it's you, I don't think,
+
+ it said. I'm not sure I understood what that meant. I know I was leaking all my panic into the feed. I stayed still, watching Rayne's body go slack again as they fell back asleep. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Somehow, I managed to get up off the bed without waking Rayne back up and exited the room silently. When the door closed behind me, the tension in my body released so suddenly I had to grasp the wall. I was trembling, my palms felt sweaty. I released a breath I apparently had been holding and it sounded more like a sob than a sigh. I leaned against the wall with my shoulder, allowing myself to slide down to the floor. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I'll get up in a minute. I just need a moment to collect myself.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+They wouldn't hurt you, Cade.
+
+ Azi said to me in the feed. I grabbed the hood on my jacket and pulled it over my head. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Yeah, I know they wouldn't hurt me, but I couldn't stop the feeling that something bad was going to happen. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I could feel Azi's concern for my reaction to what had happened in Rayne's room. How dramatic I had been to a simple touch, and I felt stupid for it. Azi somehow managed to squeeze more of itself into our shared feed and pressed down on me. It felt a bit like being wrapped tight in a thick blanket and, just like last time, it helped a bit with my impending meltdown.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Thank you for reading
+
+In which the memory Cade handed over to Azi for defragmentation is fixed and (reluctantly) handed back to Cade.
+
+This is one of the two chapters that may be upsetting for some readers. If you wish to skip the portion of the story, I have added ""xxx"" before and after the block of text. Ctrl+F for that and you should be good to go : )I will place a censored summary at the end.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+
+When we exited the first wormhole that following morning, I could feel the extra feed traffic via my connection with Azi as messages came in from wherever they had originated from. The University if I had to guess. I didn't bother trying to snoop through the messages since Azi told me not to, but I was genuinely curious what they were about. Probably not me at least. There hadn't been enough time between us leaving and now for any news of my presence aboard Azi to have reached the University and have to a response come back. I did low-key worry they would be mad about the extra passenger, but Azi assured me it was okay.
+ 
+
+
+
+I went about my usual routine of hitting the training room then shower afterwards, acutely aware of the silence between myself and Azi. It had been present for my weapons session but just barely so, and that was noticeable in its delayed response time to my questions.  Azi apologized for it though, so I tried to not take it personally. I knew it was busy with all the data coming and leaving its processors space. I could see through the ship cameras that Rayne and Konani had occupied the lounge for a decent chunk of time before retreating into their respective rooms to answer more private messages. Curious as I was to know anything about the messages from the University, I didn't want to eavesdrop. I pulled up the political drama show Rayne and I had started watching together and started on the next couple episodes to pass the time.
+ 
+
+
+
+It was well into the cycle when Azi pinged me for attention. I sent an acknowledgement back, shuffling through the ship cameras to make sure I wasn't going to be blind-sided by humans wanting to talk to me in an interventionesque way. That's what the ping felt like. Azi turned quite a bit of its attention onto me and kind of stared for several seconds before finally speaking in our private feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I have managed to uncorrupt the bit of data you gave me a while back,
+
+ it said carefully. I sat up on my bed and closed out the episode I had been watching. The political leader that had been passed up on a promotion from the first few episodes was helping a colleague prepare for an election campaign. Things were starting to get a little heated over the colleague beginning to get cold feet. Humans are so emotional sometimes.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Okay, can I have it?
+
+ I asked, cocking an eyebrow as Azi hesitated.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm not sure it would be in your best interest to have this memory back,
+
+ it said, and I scoffed. Who was it to tell me what I could and couldn't remember?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Well, it's my memory and I'd like it back, please. Best interest or not, I'd like to know what happened to me that night and how I ended up in a dumpster.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Cade-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, you don't get to decide what I can and can't have in my head. No one but me does. I want to know who that fucker is and what he did to me,
+
+ I said through the feed, and it was accompanied by a snarl from my human mimicry code. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Kevan Pallav.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""What?"" I asked out loud, confused and too angry to continue in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+His name is Kevan Pallav. Chief Design Officer of StillWater Corp,
+
+ Azi replied carefully.
+ 
+
+
+
+I relaxed my hands that had balled into tight fists.
+ 
+
+
+
+So, I wanted to kill an executive officer of the company that made me. I'm not entirely sure if that would make my goal more difficult or not. I'm also not sure what a Chief Design Officer was, but it sounded like it could be important. I felt Azi shift more attention to me in my silence.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+What do you plan to do with this information should I give it to you?
+
+ It asked, the weight of its words tons heavier than its presence in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Well, one, it's mine so you're 
+
+going
+
+ to give it to me because I asked, and two, what I plan to do with that is not your business,"" I replied angrily. Why would I bother telling Azi I was planning to try and kill this Kevan Pallav? It already didn't think I was a killer. It wouldn't believe me if I did tell it my plans. I wanted to stop him from hurting another one of my kind, if I could. I'm not one hundred percent sure what he did to me, but the emotional memories of that night still managed to affect me. I used to be able to handle touch better, I think. I definitely don't remember freaking out about someone touching my pants pocket before now.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You are not a killer, Cade,
+
+ Azi said after a pause, reading into my words accurately. I felt my face scrunch up with frustration, but I held my tongue. Almost. 
+
+I think I understand the desire to get revenge-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, you don't. This is not revenge. This is making sure he never hurts one of my cohorts. This is making sure no one else has to endure what I did,"" I snapped, the stinging sensation in my eyes making me squeeze them shut. I felt something travel down my cheek and hastily wiped my face. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You could die trying to kill him, 
+
+it said as if I hadn't already had that fucking thought myself.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I have to try.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi remained silent for two whole minutes before it placed a compressed data packet in our feed space. I sent a quick thanks and pulled it over into my private storage before it could change its mind and began decompressing it.
+ 
+
+
+
+Applying memories is always a weird experience. It never comes back as a singular, whole piece, like a video of an event, at least not for me. I would have preferred that. It comes back in segments, triggering emotional reactions before you can understand why you're reacting that way. It triggers physical reactions, chemical releases, and pain sensors - pain, pleasure, hot, cold, sharp, soft - before the actual visual memory comes back to explain these emotions and physical sensations. I've only ever applied past memories once before, at the request of a regular who had been adamant he loved me. The resulting knife to my gut at the end of the night proved the confession to be a lie, which, 
+
+surprise
+
+. I've had bad clients before, but 
+
+this
+
+... this memory was nothing but pain and terror.
+ 
+
+
+
+Within seconds of applying the memory of that night, my scalp lit up as if it was on fire. I gasped and clawed at it, mewling as I did so. A sharp stab of pain bloomed on the left side of my skull, radiating around my head as if I had been struck by something. I felt my inorganic processes unhelpfully trigger a flood of adrenaline, increasing my breath rate, making me lightheaded and sending a low CO2 alert into my awareness. Phantom thoughts inserted themselves into my mind and I remembered having them at one point. 
+
+I have to get away
+
+ and 
+
+I can't get away
+
+ and 
+
+he's going to kill me
+
+. If that wasn't bad enough, the intense shock to my abdomen and pulsating burning sensation left in my core topped it all off. I heard a loud noise I wasn't sure actually came from me. What had this human done to me?  Why hadn't I turned my pain sensors down? The answer inserted itself into my mind's eye:
+ 
+
+
+
+XXX
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I didn't recognize the room I stood in. It looked a lot like someone's study. Warm tones filled the room. Shelving with lots of books on one wall. A large desk in front of me with a well-worn leather chair behind it. A reddish-brown rug was beneath me, rough and scratchy on my bare feet. My client had just shut the door and shouldered off his suit jacket. He neatly folded it and then draped it over the nearby couch before turning to me. He gave me a small, odd smile, moving closer as he undid the tie around his neck. He yanked it off, absent mindedly wrapping it around his closed hand. I didn't think much of that gesture. I've had lots of clients do similar things while nervous.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'I'm not sure why they gave me a unit with a dick,' he commented, his eyes traveling down to my crotch. His tone of voice conveyed his disgust at the revelation. I have both, I told him softly. Adding, I'm the unit supplied when no preference is given. He hummed thoughtfully at that, his eyes moving back up to scan the rest of my body. If he had been expecting a more feminine body, he was probably disappointed by the lack of breasts as well. He approached me, one hand moving around my body to examine the other sexual organ between my legs.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'On your knees,' he ordered, and I obediently dropped. I knew what was coming next, and I didn't want to be here for it. His hand touched my face gently, stroking my lower lip and pulling it down slightly with his thumb. 'No masking. Tactile sensors stay tuned up, got it?'
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, I had said, and felt some frustration at the command. This was a client that knew some of us would disassociate to hide. He must have heard the frustration in my voice because he chuckled. Or maybe it was because of what he had planned to do next. His hand left my face as he walked behind me. I don't remember removing my clothes before this, but the cool breeze generated by his movement made me even more aware of how exposed I was. I focused my gaze on the wooden desk, looking for designs in the woodgrain. Anything to distract me from this.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'I asked for a clean unit. Have you fucked anyone tonight?'  he asked behind me. I could hear the sound of rustling and felt some of the tension in my shoulders relax slightly. If he was planning to take me from behind, that was a relief. At least then I wouldn't have to look at him during-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I have not, I replied softly, moving to turn my head to look at him.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'No, look straight. Don't look at me,' he said quickly before I could fully turn around, venom seeping into his voice. 'Fucking whore,' I heard him add softly after a pause. An emotion crawled up my chest at that. A sickly feeling that clung to my skin making me wish for a way to wash it off. Guilt? Sorrow? Disgust? I had heard the word before, several times actually, and knew it meant something dirty. That I was something dirty. I didn't want to be. I wanted to please, not disgust, my client. A flick of something behind me. The smell of tobacco filled my nostrils. A distant fear of whether or not he planned to extinguish the cigarette on my skin crawled into my mind, but it was something I could handle.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Warmth against my back, hands roughly grabbed my hair and gathered it into one closed fist, pulling backwards and down to force my head up. I caught a glimpse of his face, the cigarette hanging from his lips, before my Governor Module politely reminded me of his order to not look at him. It was a low-grade shock, nothing serious, but it was enough to illicit a small gasp from me. He gave a single, quiet laugh, smoke billowing out from his mouth into my face, as he released my hair to let my head return to its previous position. His hands continued to play with my hair for a while, combing it with his fingers as smoke wafted about the room. I let my eyes flutter close, enjoying the sensation. Mx Kiran loved my hair. It was black, soft, and thick. There were no tangles or knots for fingers to catch in. Xe spent hours going through it just like this and it was one of the few human interactions I actually enjoyed. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'Such a waste on a thing like you,' he sighed after several minutes of silence.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I heard a soft click and felt something cool touch my brow. Sharp, bright pain stabbed my hairline and dragged along it with a sick scraping noise. I jerked with a yelp, trying to break away. Something collided with my temple, hard and with a hollow thunk. Hard enough to pop a performance alert into my awareness along with the dark spots that danced before my eyes.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'Don't move,' he ordered firmly, the one hand still wrapped in my hair pulling tightly, the pain in my hairline intensified. I whimpered but forced myself to remain still, feeling the cold blade touch where it had been interrupted, pressing into the thin flesh, and dragging along my skull. I released a pained noise, my body fighting against my self-control. Nails dug into my palms as I willed my body to listen to the command.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm not sure I can do this. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+The pain. It 
+
+hurt
+
+.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+My Governor Module corrected me when my body tried to move away again. To slump on the floor. To go anywhere but where the pain was. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+The pulling on stretched, damaged skin. The feeling of flesh tearing loud enough to make a sound. 
+
+
+Please stop.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Hot liquid that spilled into my eyes stung and blinded me.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+How raw and bloodied my throat felt from my screaming. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It was almost a relief when I felt my scalp give way. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I collapsed onto the scratchy rug beneath me, my head on fire, gasping for breath. Something collided with the space between my legs, and I released a pained grunt in response. There wasn't enough air in my lungs for another scream. 
+
+
+Please. I did what you asked.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'Sit up,' he commanded, his voice calm. I scrambled, body shaking, into a sitting position. I couldn't see with all the blood and fluids in my eyes. I was sobbing. The hand returned to what was left of my hair, wrapping it tightly around itself and pulling up until I was standing. I stumbled as I was led blindly through the room. The sound of a door opening, my shoulder painfully clipping the frame. I was shoved onto a hard surface. I felt hands grab my limbs, securing them in some kind of restraint away from my body. Spread eagle and exposed.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Small mercies for having been placed on my stomach.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Something was shoved up inside me, sharp pain bloomed from my abdomen. It was too rigid to be human flesh. Too large and awkwardly shaped. Too painful. I wanted to pull away again, to curl in on myself, but the restraints held me in place. I heard something whirr to life off to my far left. A hand touched the side of my face, the suddenness of it making me flinch. The hand tucked a wet corded something behind my ear before traveling down my neck to my shoulder and finally stopping at my upper arm. Words I dreaded humans using were finally uttered.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'Cum for me.'
+
+ 
+
+
+  An intense avalanche of pressure built and released from my core. I felt my body convulse with sick pleasure and I released a moan that tapered off into a breathless sob. It was wrong. My insides contracted over the awkwardly shaped object wedged in me sending more sharp stabbing pain throughout my abdomen. An alert about extensive internal trauma popped up into my awareness, and I felt my head grow light; a kind of fuzziness threatening to overtake me. It was similar to when my performance reliability was low and I needed a recharge, but I was sitting at 82% so... that can't be it. 
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+s this what it's like for humans about to pass out?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+'Stay awake and don't move,' he commanded, the hand on my upper arm gripping a little too tight. I heard the whirring closer now. A shock from the governor module brought everything back into focus. The high-pitched noise garbled as whatever it was bit into my arm. Pain flared to life, and I cried out. I yanked on the restraints even as the governor module corrected me but couldn't pull away. The sound of tearing flesh, the feeling of blood and fluids splattering over my body as he worked. The searing pain at the site of the wound. He was going to cut my arm off; I realized in a panic. It hit the synthetic bone, slowing, and making a grinding sound, and the smell of burned flesh and iron filled my nostrils. The device was pulled away, hands undid the restraint to my damaged arm. I couldn't feel anything past the wound, my pain sensors too overwhelmed by the combination of my head and my abdomen and the sharp stabbing pain where whatever he had used to hurt me. I couldn't feel whatever he was doing to the tissue below it. A hand came up and braced itself on my shoulder blade. A yank and a snap. Blinding hit pain shot through my arm, up my shoulder, and I finally succumbed to a catastrophic shutd-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+XXX
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Involuntary shutdown. Attempting to restart....]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Restart successful]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I came back online inside a small, enclosed space. It was dark and quiet
+
+.
+
+ My arms were pulled tightly to my chest, and I had pressed myself up against the corner of the small space. I could feel myself trembling, my body still coursing with the chemicals the memory sync had produced. How did I get here?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Cade?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I jerked away from the sound in my head, my hands shooting up to cover my ears as if I could block it out that way. I felt a presence pull itself into my feed space, uncomfortably stretching it, reminding me of what 
+that human had done
+. I released a noise somewhere between a moan of frustration and scream of pain. I squeezed my eyes shut, my legs giving out underneath me and I slipped further down into the small space. Please go away, I thought, my terror leaking into the feed. 
+Please leave me alone.
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt the presence recoil slightly, still watching me through the feed with the equivalent of extreme concern. The private feed space we shared smothered with an anxious cold static I didn't like. Was that coming from me or whatever that thing is? It didn't try to approach me again though, which was a relief. I'm not sure I could handle it if it did. It was not long after that I heard the muffled sound of a door opening outside of the small cubicle I sat in.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Where is it, Azi?"" A voice asked, followed shortly by, ""the closet?""
+ 
+
+
+
+There was a prolonged silence before something tapped against the cubicle door, and I involuntarily flinched.
+ No, please.
+ I didn't think my panic levels could get any higher. I hadn't moved my hands from over my ears which were hurting now from how I was pulling on them. One of the private feed sessions I had backburnered flashed with a new message. I stared at it for several long seconds trying to reason with myself. It was already established before now so it must be someone I know. But then again, that human happened before now, too. It could be him. A performance reliability alert let me know that I was clenching my jaw a bit too tightly. Cautiously, I pulled the private session up as if it might jump out of my head, materialize, and bite me.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Hey, Azi asked me to check on you. Can you tell me if you're hurt?
+
+ Someone by the name of Rayne in the feed asked. Azi. The...
+
+Azimuth
+
+? I'm on a ship. Right. Rayne was a human but... not a bad one, I think? I felt my panic start to slowly recede, the tension in my body from waiting for the other shoe to drop draining slowly. I was trembling, exhaustion of fight or flight mode kicking into my synthetic muscle.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I... had a moment,
+
+ I replied as more recent memories started reorganizing themselves ahead of the one I had just resynced with my inorganic processors. Right. Rayne saved me. They found me in the dumpster after... I let go of my ears, releasing a small, shaky sigh.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Can you come out?
+
+ Rayne asked after a short pause.
+ 
+
+
+
+I looked up at the door and pressed my hand to it, trying to manipulate it from where I sat at the bottom of the cu-closet. I'm in a closet. The door wouldn't budge. I tried to stand but found that I had somehow got myself stuck with how I had slid down in the small space. My knees pressed against one side and my back and hips against the other.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm, um, stuck,
+
+ I admitted. I felt the door jiggle against my thigh, and it slid open revealing Rayne standing over me. They made an 'oh,' sound before dropping into a crouch to be more level with me. The concern on their face killed me. I averted my gaze.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Hey,"" they greeted softly. I watched their hands grip the fabric of their pants tightly to keep from reaching out to me. I felt the heat rise up my neck and into my face, and I looked away, embarrassed. Rayne added in the silence, ""need help getting out?""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yeah, thanks."" I replied quickly, holding out a hand for them to grasp. I flinched when their skin contacted mine, but I allowed myself to be hauled up and out of the closet. Rayne released my hand as soon as I was standing even though I didn't let go of theirs. There was an awkward silence between us, probably made more so since I hadn't released my grip on their hand.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade, is there anything I can do for you?"" Rayne asked after several seconds of silence where I hadn't let go of their hand. I shook my head, paused, then nodded. My face had started stinging again, my vision blurring. Oh, great. I felt a gentle tug on my hand and looked up. Rayne had opened their other arm in a welcoming gesture, inviting me for an embrace. I took it. I'm not sure how long we stood there in each other's arms, but I know Rayne's shirt collar was soaked. This was the third? Time they've seen me cry. I shouldn't be making a habit of it. Humans aren't something I should rely on for comfort.
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne steered me towards the bed, sitting down first and gently pulling me to climb on, and while I didn't slam on the brakes, I did hesitate. Bed + Touching = Bad Things to me, or it has in the past. I suppose what had happened before I was tossed in the dumpster was more touching and being in a room with a human which, so far, hasn't been too horrible. I kept my eyes down and away from Rayne, swallowing nervously before climbing onto the bed with them. They pulled me close and, 
+
+oh
+
+, I've never done this with a human before. My hand instinctively moved to their waist, gripping the fabric of their shirt tightly in a fist, and I pressed my face against their shoulder. I felt Rayne tentatively touch my short hair with one hand, pausing to see how I reacted before continuing to stroke it.
+ 
+
+
+
+We sat there for a long while in silence, Rayne content to supply comfort for me. Eventually their hand stopped running through my hair and they simply held me close. I didn't want to let go, not yet. This was a novel experience for me, and I found I actually liked it.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Thank you,"" I said softly, feeling Rayne's face turn towards me. They brushed their lips over the top of my head in response. I could feel Azi watching us through the feed, the concern it had for me from earlier had lessened but only slightly. It sort of felt like it was standing on its toes waiting to leap in and grab me. Why, I had no idea. To it, I added in the feed, 
+
+thanks Azi,
+
+ and felt it relax another few percentage points.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne didn't leave my room for the rest of the cycle. They didn't pressure me to talk about what I had experienced, only offered to listen should I want to. (I didn't.) We had laid down on the bed after a while, getting comfortable laying against one another. This was also new and something I kind of liked. To fill the silence, Rayne talked a bit about some of the messages they received from the University and family back home. I learned they had a sister and that they were now considered an uncle to twins in human family relation terms. They sounded a bit excited to meet their sister's offspring which I tried to visualize in my head. I've seen infants in media before but never up close in person.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You can meet them too if you'd like,"" Rayne added, the one arm they had around my waist gave me a small squeeze as if to show they were speaking to me. I shifted in my spot against their shoulder, looking up at them.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Is that...appropriate?"" I asked softly. Most clients kept us away from family, hence why I'd never seen a child or infant in person. Rayne shrugged with his free shoulder and gave me a small smile.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Don't see why not. I can't imagine you'd hurt them,"" they said, which, true. So far there was only one human I wanted to hurt. 
+ 
+
+
+
+But I'm a comfortunit. 
+ 
+
+
+
+A sex object. 
+A whore.
+ 
+
+
+
+Those shouldn't be around children...
+right?
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+""I mean...I'm a comfortunit-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Oh-"" Rayne blinked; their eyebrows scrunched together as their eyes met mine.
+ 
+
+
+
+""-so...is that appropriate for me to be-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade,"" they began, interrupting me. ""You're more than what StillWater created you to be. My sister won't be upset about you meeting her kids and neither will anyone else.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I didn't know what to say to that, so I laid my head back down against Rayne's shoulder, and I felt another gentle squeeze from the arm around my waist. We lay in silence for a short while with Azi looming in the feed. I could tell it was trying to give us some space but was failing to contain its curiosity about the situation.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm not...making you uncomfortable, am I?"" Rayne asked after several minutes passed in silence.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No,"" I said softly and was surprised to find that it was the truth. I was comfortable here, lying against them. That was new. And different. Today was full of new and different things. It needed to slow down before I got the idea that life isn't so bad.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Good. I'm glad,"" they said, the smile on their lips audible to my ears. ""When we get to the University docks, I'll help you look for a place to stay while they work on your entry paperwork. It shouldn't take too long, but I'll have to start teaching in about three weeks which won't give me much time after we arrive to do much else.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt myself tense up at the thought of being alone in a foreign place, the anxiety making me bite my lip. I needed to focus on something else, so I didn't start sliding backwards into my panic mode. I shifted my thoughts to Rayne and the fact that they mentioned teaching. I wouldn't have guessed they were a teacher.
+ 
+
+
+
+""What do you teach?"" I asked, now aware that my hand had moved up to their chest and was gripping the fabric of their shirt.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cognitive and Behavioral Foundations for Artificial Intelligence and Values and Ethics in Artificial Intelligence,"" Rayne said. ""I work in the A.I. department if you can't tell.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I surprised myself by laughing. ""No, I wouldn't have guessed,"" I teased, smiling when I heard a small chuckle above me. ""Is that how you met Azi?""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yeah, kind of. We raise AI in family settings before they are given their ship body. Azi didn't grow up with me, but it lived with me and my family,"" they said. The phrase 'my family' was a bit like a record scratch. I felt like I had been metaphorically kicked in the chest though I'm not even sure why. I filed that reaction for late review purposes. I lifted my head again to look at them
+ 
+
+
+
+""Are you married?"" I asked carefully. Rayne shook their head.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, there's no significant others for you to worry about,"" they said in what I think was meant to be a teasing tone. Why would I worry? I've had plenty of clients that were married. That never stopped me from doing the job I was instructed to do. Seeing the joke was lost on me, they gave me a small smile and resorted to explaining. ""I lived with my parents and sister for a good while before getting my own place. Multigenerational housing is kind of common.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""I see,"" I said. I felt a bit of relief at that explanation for some stupid reason. Maybe I liked the thought that Rayne liked me. Wow. Yeah, that's dumb. Rayne can't like me because I'm a construct and humans don't fall in love with constructs. Better throw that thought out before it gets too comfortable taking space in my head.
+ 
+
+
+
+Eventually, we moved on to watching more of 
+
+Walk a Tightrope
+
+ together, this time, in my room. Rayne and I stayed mostly touching but we had sat up on the bed kind of leaning against one another. Azi, for how silent it had been for the past few hours, was leaking satisfaction and pride into our shared feed space, and it was all I could do to not thrust a metaphorical rude gesture at it. Rayne left twice (once to eat and once to use the restroom) but returned promptly to continue where we left off. It was nice, maybe too nice. I told myself I shouldn't get used to this. That the other shoe would drop eventually, and I'd be on my own. For now, though, I allowed myself to enjoy the company of the first human to treat me like a person.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Summary of skipped text: Cade remembers the night with its last client. It was sexually assaulted and tortured.
+
+The arrival at PUoMNT brings in a brief cameo of SecUnit and ART. Mixed signals from Cade has Rayne asking for clarification of what they were to one another.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Arriving at the PanSystem University of Mihira and New Tideland was... about as hectic as I expected it to be. Azi handled most of the communication with traffic control but Rayne and Konani had moved up to the bridge to help with speaking with humans as they hailed the ship. I kind of... hid in my closet for the duration, wanting to keep out of the way and also being overwhelmed by all the extra information being passed through the public feed that I had completely forgot existed until now. I had gotten used to it being so quiet. I heard the 
+
+CLUNK
+
+ as the docking bay sealed against Azi's hull, giving us a way to get onto the station itself without the need of envirosuits. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You will need to stay onboard for now,
+
+ Azi said to me in our shared feed space. I pinged back in acknowledgement to be polite. I'm not sure why it thought I'd want to leave. I wouldn't even know where to go to begin with, and the last thing I wanted was to be outed by some random human as a comfortunit. 
+
+Perihelion said SecUnit wants to meet you.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Uh, okay? I'm assuming to make sure I'm not some psychotic rogue comfortunit on my way to Kill All the Humans or something. I wasn't sure if this was why I had to stay on board or if this was separate information. It could go either way and still make sense.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Anything I should know before this meeting happens? 
+
+I asked and felt Azi hesitate a fraction of a second.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+They are both assholes.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Oh. Nice. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I can deal with assholes. Assholes are easier to deal with than overly kind people. So, if that was anything to go by, I'm sure I could handle them easier than Azi. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Okay,
+
+ I said. There was a pause before I was invited by Azi to a group feed space. I accepted but stayed quiet and read the chat that was going on at a rapid-fire pace. Any human would have stopped trying to keep up with the speed at which the text flew by. Questions about where I was found, what modifications Azi did to me, how I was interacting with the humans (ugh, Azi, don't say I have a crush on Rayne. What the fuck?), if I was showing any signs of maliciousness, etc. I finished up the backread just in time to see the complaint about my new energy weapons.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit: I just don't see why it needed to be equipped with weapons.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Azi: It wants to be a SecUnit.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Okay. Well, for one, that's not true. I don't want to be a SecUnit. I 
+
+can't
+
+ be a SecUnit. Why would you tell an actual SecUnit that, Azi? (Again, what the fuck?) There was a delayed 0.48 second pause. Long enough for me to know that the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ and SecUnit were probably having a side conversation.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Perihelion: That's what you wanted the modules for?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Azi: Yes.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit: Why do you want to be a SecUnit?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I blinked. It was a question directed at me and I hadn't expected to be spoken to directly. At least not before getting a greeting of some kind. Wasn't that kind of standard practice? Like, 'hello, I'm SecUnit, the asshole who will be gatekeeping the station from you today.'
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't,
+
+ I replied simply. 
+
+I just wanted a way to protect myself.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit: There are many ways to protect yourself without installing literal weapons in your arms.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Yeah, true. It got me there. I didn't know what to say to that. 
+ 
+
+
+
+A private session request popped up in my feed from SecUnit. I accepted and saw a few modules packaged and waiting for download. Well, okay. I took the modules and felt Azi hovering over my metaphorical shoulder as I scanned them for malware before examining them further. Modules for hacking, codes for company equipment throughout the Corporation Rim, and something that looked a lot like an improved aim assist over what I currently had (Azi and I would need to test it.)
+ 
+
+
+
+Wait.
+ 
+
+
+
+I thought it was supposed to be an asshole.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Thank you,
+
+ I said to it in our private session. SecUnit pinged back then closed out its end of the private session. In the group session it said:
+ 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit: The choice of built-in weapons will make travelling on your own a little more difficult. You'll need to keep yourself off of weapons scan radars in most places in the CR. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+That made sense. I could see there had been a file within the private session SecUnit had made with me labelled 
+
+helpme.file
+
+ and a quick skim of it looked almost like a 'how to' video. I flagged it for later viewing. I didn't plan to travel on my own, but it would be useful information just in case.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Perihelion: There's really only a few rules we have for new constructs. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Seems fair to me. I sent a ping in acknowledgement. I would probably keep to myself, and I had no plans of hurting humans here unless they hurt me first. 
+ 
+
+
+
+A tap on the closet door made me jerk back in surprise, a small gasp sneaking out of my throat. I hadn't heard anyone come in, and Azi didn't alert me to it either. The whole extra inputs thing was still new to me, and I kept forgetting I could run extra visual inputs from the hallway cameras in the background with alerts to motion. I worked the door open a crack and peered out to see Konani giving me a small smile.
+ 
+
+
+
+""We're headed out for a bit to talk with some University officials. Rayne will be back shortly after to take you off Azi and help you find a place to stay,"" she said. I nodded and moved to close the closet door again. (I'm still surprised how normal these humans make the construct hiding in a closet thing seem.) She put her hand out to stop me from closing the door completely. ""I wanted to mention you'll have to pick a human to be listed as your guardian before we can get you settled in. I think Rayne has themself listed currently on the application paperwork, but...I'm not sure if you're okay with that.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Who would I change it to? Outside of Rayne and Konani, I didn't know any other humans. What did a guardian have to do for me?
+ 
+
+
+
+""What is a guardian in this context?"" I asked, not really upset at the revelation like Konani's face told me she expected me to be. She hesitated, looking away briefly with a small sigh.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Kind of like an owner, but...more if something were to happen to you, they'd know who to contact. The way I've always thought of it is a bit like 'who is your emergency contact in case you are incapacitated and need someone to advocate for you,'"" she explained quickly. I shrugged. Sure, Rayne could do that.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Some people would find issue with you being in a relationship with your owner,
+
+ Azi commented in our private feed connection. I frowned, not really understanding why. 
+
+They think you might feel you don't have a choice but to be in said relationship, and that it would give the human leverage over you.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, good thing we aren't in a relationship, Azi. Thanks for the info anyways.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Can it be changed later?"" I asked, keeping in mind what Azi had just told me. Konani nodded, so I added, ""then Rayne is fine as my guardian."" 
+ 
+
+
+
+A new message popped up in the shared feed I still had open with Azi, its sibling and SecUnit.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Perihelion: Any violation of these rules will be met with extreme force.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+That sounded ominous. Were they expecting me to reply to the rules?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't plan on hurting any humans or causing unnecessary chaos, 
+
+I said in the feed, closing the closet door as Konani removed her hand. I just want to be left alone. Why didn't people understand that?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit: Good.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I rolled my eyes, tipping my head back until it hit the back wall of the closet. It had to see me say it. Sheesh. I left the group channel open but went back to listening to music and relaxing. I could feel Azi watching me, half expecting some kind of reaction to the semi-threat that had been lobbed in my direction. If they had any intention of actually harming me, I'm sure they would have done so already. Or at least tried to. For now, I'll just keep an eye out for SecUnit should it actually show itself in person while waiting for Rayne to return.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi alerted me to Rayne's return about 3 hours later. It told me to wait for them to come to me though, since they seemed socially drained by whatever had occurred on station. I pulled up one of the cameras in the lounge to see them making their way slowly through it, shoulders slumped and face tight. I felt something clench in my chest at that and I had to look away.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+They wouldn't say no to you reaching out via the feed,
+
+ Azi commented, clearly in my emotional readouts without shame. What are you, a matchmaker? I rolled my eyes again but opened my private channel with Rayne and said, 
+
+you okay?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I watched as they paused in their tracks, the stupid smile that flashed across their face caused more clenching in my chest. Ugh, I'm hopeless.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm fine, just a little tired,
+
+ Rayne replied. 
+
+I did get temporary approval for you to be on station if you'd like to go out. Konani was right about the energy weapons, so it looks like approval for housing will take a little longer.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+That's okay. I don't mind being here with Azi,
+
+ I said, groaning audibly when Rayne smiled again. Azi shifted more of its attention to me because of my reaction. Maybe I should care about being here with Azi since nothing I do is private anymore. It was polite enough to not comment on my emotional readout.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm glad, Cade. Really glad, 
+
+they said. I found my lips matching the upward curve I saw on their face through the lounge camera.
+ 
+
+
+
+It was another half hour before Rayne asked permission to enter my room via the feed. I sent an acknowledgement while hastily climbing out of the closet, adjusting my clothes, and activating the small scouting drone Azi made for me. They looked at least a little happier to be here than they did when they first returned to Azi. The soft smile met their eyes in a way I hadn't noticed before on my past clients. A genuine happiness to see me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I, uh, wanted to see if maybe you'd be interested in seeing the station to, uh, pass the time or something. I'd take you to dinner but...you don't eat, right?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I stood there watching color creep into Rayne's face with each passing word, finding myself quite amused by their behavior. I think...this was an attempt at asking me on a date. I've never been asked before but that's what it looked like in the few shows Azi and I watched together. They glanced away from me with an embarrassed laugh, pressing their hands to their face while mumbling, ""stars, I feel dumb.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""You aren't dumb. I don't eat to gain sustenance like you do, but I can eat, if that's something you want. I would love to go out and see the station with you either way,"" I said, leaving out the fact that I probably wouldn't have left Azi otherwise. Rayne looked at me for several long seconds, seemly confused by something I said.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You can eat?"" They asked after a pause.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes. I have a small compartment where the food would go after consuming. I just need to remember to clean it out-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Unless that's something you like to do - eating, I mean- I'm not going to make you do it,"" Rayne interrupted me quickly, the expression on their face akin to slight horror. I don't dislike eating; some foods are actually pleasant to taste, but then there was the whole cleaning out the compartment part that was messy and if not done properly, or in a reasonable amount of time, kind of gross. I usually avoided the activity if I could because of that.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I will pass on food this time around,"" I said, leaving out 'to spare you the headache of waiting for me to clean the compartment out.'
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+The station was a lot like Serth Station in some respects. It had various levels, departures and arrivals sections, and a food court. It also had living quarters that were divided into short-term, transient, and long-term housing. I did notice that everything seemed much cleaner here, or at least better taken care of. None of the passers-by cared about my single drone that floated above my left shoulder either, which I found interesting enough to note but not ask about. Rayne kept to my right side, walking close enough to touch me if desired but kept their hands in their pockets. I've learned to recognize their pocket occupying method of self-control by now and had a feeling they were hoping I'd reach out first. The brief thought of initiating physical contact just to see what would happen crossed my mind, but I brushed it aside, deciding now wasn't the time to experiment.
+ 
+
+
+
+We did a full lap around the station at a casual pace. Rayne pointed out novel things for me that might be useful later on. Clothing stores, station medical, station security (while casually mentioning that SecUnit kind of 
+
+was
+
+ station security for constructs when it was on the station), the shuttle location to get down onto the planet should I ever want to go (probably not by myself), the airlock to the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ which happened to be two boarding gates away from Azi, and the entrance to the University's Artificial Intelligence department which was relatively close to where Azi and the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ were docked. We doubled back to the food court for Rayne to grab something for dinner and then walked back to Azi together.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I can stay, and we could watch more 
+
+Walk a Tightrope
+
+ if you'd like, or if you'd rather be alone, I can head back to my apartment in the long-term housing area,"" Rayne said once we made it up to Azi's airlock. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""Media sounds like an okay idea. I wouldn't mind some company for a bit,"" I replied, feeling my face flush as they smiled back at me. I had an overwhelming urge to do...something. I pushed the urge back down, hoping to keep it contained for at least a few more visits with Rayne. I didn't want to come off as needy.
+ 
+
+
+
+We took over the lounge to watch 
+
+Walk a Tightrope
+
+ on the large display screen while Rayne ate. After their meal, we somehow ended up sitting closer than before, almost touching but not quite. Again, I had the sense that they were hoping I would initiate contact. I mulled over that for a while, unsure if it was something I wanted to do. I thought about how, a few days before, Rayne had pulled me out of the closet (ha) and held me for figurative hours (actually, 
+
+literal
+
+ hours...two hours and twenty minutes total) and the fact that I actually
+
+ did like
+
+ the contact. The warmth and comfort it had brought me was something I only managed to get from other comfortunits before now. I wondered if I'd like it here too, when I'm not distressed about some dumb memory I decided to re-sync against Azi's recommendation.
+ 
+
+
+
+Carefully, I leaned against Rayne's side, feeling my face heat up as they moved to accommodate my bodyweight against them. An arm thrown over my shoulder, pulling me close as they leaned back against the lounge seat. It was...comfortable. Warmth blossomed in my chest, and I let my hand closest to Rayne seek out their free hand. Azi, being the nosy bastard it is, immediately dug into my emotional readouts, leaking excitement into our private feed space.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Oh, fuck off, 
+
+I grumbled at it. Azi froze, considering my half-hearted insult, then continued what it was doing, reminding me of one of those rather large rodent-like creatures that went through the trash at night outside The Cosmos. Whatever. Asshole. I could tell it didn't have ill intent digging into my emotional status. It was just excited to see the relationship it had been pushing for start to become a possibility. Speaking of...did I want that? A relationship with a human? With Rayne?
+ 
+
+
+
+I guess, there are worse humans to have this thought about. I didn't know Rayne very well, but everything they have shown me so far has been polite, kind and understanding. I clearly had an attraction to them of some kind, and it was obviously reciprocated to some degree. Rayne must have been having the same thought process because I felt them shift a bit, their head turning towards where I currently lay against their shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+
+""May I ask you a question?"" Rayne asked softly. I felt the thumb attached to the arm over my shoulder begin to rub against my upper arm, sending small electric tingles throughout my body. ""I'm kind of getting mixed signals here.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I looked up at them, content with not moving just yet. Yes, I'm aware of these 'mixed signals,' though I don't think they're really mixed. I'm just as confused as you are, Rayne.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Sure,"" I said even though I wasn't really sure I wanted to answer a question about the mixed signals I was giving them. I wasn't sure I really had any answers. There was a pause and a deep inhale from Rayne before they started talking.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I was...under the impression that you didn't like the attention I had been giving you previously and I've been trying to not do that, but... I guess... I just want to know if 
+
+this
+
+ is okay and if there's a chance 
+
+thi
+
+s can be more than what it is right now,"" They said softly, giving me a gentle squeeze to emphasize 'this' meant us. What we were doing currently.
+ 
+
+
+
+I looked away and sat silently for a few seconds which was quite a bit of time for me and Azi (who was totally freaking out right now in our shared space.) I'm sure it could eventually be more. I liked Rayne, that I was sure of. But my only experience with humans has been either one offs or regular clients who didn't like me for me, but because I was the only comfortunit with the correct equipment for what they wanted to do. I had relationships with other comfortunits while at The Cosmos. They were sexual to some degree, but we never had private alone time like I had here or like I did with a client. Anything we did together was for everyone else to see, and Mx Kiran was pretty good at putting a stop to relationships like that because of the dynamic it could cause in the brothel.
+ 
+
+
+
+""This is okay,"" I finally said. ""I'm...sorry I'm giving you mixed signals. I just...don't really know what I want right now. I do think I like you and enjoy your company, and I think that is a mutual feeling?"" Rayne gave another one of those cardiac pump melting smiles and nodded. ""Could it be more? Definitely, but right now...I don't know.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""That's okay. I can work with that,"" Rayne said quickly, the hopefulness in their voice just about killed me, and as if they were afraid they might have scared me, they added, ""We can do this at your pace.""
+ 
+
+
+
+My pace. Right. I'm not sure what my pace is. This was all new and kind of... 
+
+a lot. 
+
+I shifted a little, not really looking to get away from Rayne, but still wanting to show my discomfort at the direction the conversation had gone. I felt their hand in mine give me a reassuring squeeze and felt a similar urge as the one from before. The urge to lean forward and press my lips to theirs. Huh. That's weird. I reined it in silently, knowing full well what it would start if I went through with it.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Let's just keep watching the show for now. There's no rush to decide anything tonight. Did you meet SecUnit?"" They asked, changing the subject. I could feel Azi's exuberance over how our conversation played out and tried to not roll my eyes. I'm surprised it managed to stay silent at all.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I spoke with it and the
+
+ Perihelion
+
+ in the feed shortly after we arrived,"" I replied, careful to keep my interactions with the other construct as vague as possible when speaking with humans. It's something I had always done at The Cosmos when Mx. Kiran would ask questions.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Good, good. I don't know if it'll want to see you in person. It normally doesn't-"" Yeah that was the vibe I got from it. ""-but if it does, you're more than welcome to meet it here or on Peri. Assuming we get your housing by then.""
+ 
+
+
+
+We finished up the last episode of season two before Rayne called it for the night. I offered to walk them back to their apartment, but they said it was unnecessary, and that the station was relatively safe (especially with SecUnit and the 
+
+Perihelion
+
+ docked nearby.) I did, however, walk them to Azi's airlock and we stood there facing one another for several long seconds while Rayne gathered the courage to ask, ""may I... give you a hug?""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes,"" I said, not needing a second to mull that one over. The smile that sprang to life on their lips did something to my organics that I hid by pulling them into an embrace. Azi's excitement boiled over into light flickering at the hatch doorway and I heard Rayne chuckle. I let myself enjoy the feeling of their arms around me, the warmth their body generated against mine. I felt safe here, I realized. This human made me feel safe. Huh. Another new feeling. Once I had my expression more controlled to a 'pleased to have spent time with you,' I released them from the hug. ""Good night, Rayne.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Good night, Cade. I'll check on your application first thing in the morning.""
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Thanks for reading
+
+With no updates on its application for refugee status, and free time with Rayne growing short, Cade makes a decision of what to do next.
+
+Things get a little warm between Cade and Rayne, but that's about all I can think of for this chapter (kissing.) Nothing explicit is mentioned.
+
+Thank you for reading.
+
+
+I wasn't surprised when there were no updates on my application for citizenship and/or refugee status for the following few days. If the extra questions and paperwork from Konani were anything to go by, it seemed like there was a lot of red tape that needed to be cut through since I decided I had to have weapons installed in my arms. Rayne promised it wasn't going to be denied, though, since Azi already formed an attachment to me and that, apparently, was kind of a big deal to the University? 
+ 
+
+
+
+Yeah, I didn't understand either. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I actually didn't mind not having a place to go to outside of Azi since it kind of gave me the excuse to hide when I wasn't out with Rayne. I had no interest in socializing with any humans. At least, not right now. Being a comfortunit, I was kind of programmed to be a little social, but I had Azi at the moment to satisfy that need and even then, the need wasn't quite that strong or demanding. 
+ 
+
+
+
+The delay in my application being approved did, however, bring up the question of where I was expected to go once Rayne started to teach classes at the University. With Azi having a planned unmanned cargo run coming up in a few days that would have it gone for at least a month, Rayne wasn't sure where I could be housed during the hours they were occupied. I already knew where I was planning to stow away, since Azi and I talked about it, but for Rayne, the question caused a lot of stress. I wasn't sure it was a choice I would be allowed to make, so I kept our decision private. They spent a lot of time between Azi, the University, and their apartment, doing their best to spend time with me and make sure I felt involved with the attempt at integrating me into the New Tideland society. By the end of the week, they mostly stayed on Azi with frequent visits to the University, their appearance more frazzled with each passing day.
+ 
+
+
+
+The day before Azi was expected to leave, Rayne poked me in our private channel to grab my attention. They were currently either at the University working on their class schedule or at their apartment. I'm not sure which since I never ask where they were going once they stepped foot off of Azi.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+So, I was thinking
+
+, Rayne began, the pause probably more because they were human than for dramatic effect. 
+
+You could stay with me in my apartment if you wanted. I can take the couch until we can get you approval to stay somewhere on your own on the Station. The only other option would be staying at Station Security which...to me looks a lot like a prison cell and I don't want you being subjected to that.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt Azi nosing its way into my private feed space with Rayne. Literally nothing was private anymore, apparently. The thing can read my thoughts and go wherever it likes in my processes. That wasn't frightening at all.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You didn't tell them?
+
+ It asked me privately, its feed voice expressing its surprise.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, I... didn't think this would cause them so much stress,
+
+ I replied. I could feel the 'you idiot' Azi left unsaid between us and pulled up Rayne's conversation to reply, 
+
+I'm planning to go with Azi on its cargo run.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+There was a much longer pause where I could see the ellipses that indicated Rayne was formulating a very long response. Oh, boy. I watched the ellipses disappear for a while, and then got a two-word reply, 
+
+You sure? 
+
+That's weird.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You aren't against me going?
+
+ I asked, slightly surprised by the lack of pushback.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Well, I wouldn't say I'm not against it. I'd rather you stay here while we get the paperwork sorted out, but you're your own person. I can't tell you what to do. You aren't my slave, and I don't want you to be. If you want to go with Azi on the cargo run, that is...acceptable. Azi will be able to keep you safe, and I think it having company for the duration isn't a bad thing. It will be a trip back to Serth, though, but I'm sure you already know that.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I already knew that. That was part of the reason I wanted to go. I wanted to know how my cohorts were fairing at The Cosmos but mostly I wanted to learn more about Kevan Pallav, and if what had happened to me was something that would happen again. If it was going to, I wanted to stop it now that I could. I'm not sure what that entailed yet, though. As much as I had the desire to kill Kevan Pallav, I wasn't sure it was something I could pull off. By that, I mean, I wasn't sure I had the (metaphorical) guts to do it. Wanting and actually doing were two different things.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, I did,
+
+ I replied to Rayne in the feed. 
+
+I appreciate that you are not trying to force me to stay here.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+There was another one of those pauses with the appearing and disappearing ellipses. I wondered what I said to cause the indecision.
+ 
+
+
+I can't help but ask, Cade...do you not want to stay?  
+
+
+Rayne didn't need to be a bot or construct for me to feel the hurt in the question. Nonono, that's not what I meant. Azi did the feed equivalent of a double take, glancing from the 'private' conversation to me and back. My human mimicry code made me groan as I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my hands to my face. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I do, I think. I just...that came out wrong. I meant that...I guess, I'm appreciative that you aren't telling me I can't leave and that I 
+
+have
+
+ to stay here, 
+
+I said, hoping that made enough sense.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You like that it's a choice to stay here, not an order, 
+
+they said after a slightly shorter pause than before.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Yes, I think so,
+
+ I said, hoping the fact that they made a statement rather than asking meant it made sense to them. I'm not stuck here under duress. I mean, I don't think I could leave if I wanted to but that's only because I really had nowhere else to go. But, I guess, I'm also not sure I want to go anywhere else.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+What do you plan on doing when you and Azi arrive in Serth's system?
+
+ Rayne asked after the short pause from our previous subject. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I leaned back on the lounge chair, my arms crossing over themselves defensively. I had a feeling 
+
+someone
+
+ might have expressed concern over me returning to Serth, and I felt Azi shift more attention to me while doing the feed equivalent of hand wringing.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Do you want me to stay?
+
+ I asked it at the same time as I replied to Rayne's message with, 
+
+I'm not sure.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, but I am worried you will get yourself hurt,
+
+ Azi replied after a pause. I groaned inwardly and rolled my eyes outwardly.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'll be fine,
+
+ I said to the big baby bot. 
+
+I might not even go off onto the station. SecUnit said it has to hack the weapons scanners and stuff in order to travel around alone and I'm not sure that's something I'm comfortable doing on my own. 
+
+I know I should practice. I just didn't want Station Security to freak out if I didn't manage to do it successfully.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I could ask SecUnit to come along,
+
+ Azi said after another pause.
+ 
+
+
+
+Umm, excuse me? No. Why would I want a babysitter if I was planning to try and kill Kevan Pallav? SecUnit would probably stop me before I got within one hundred meters of him. No, if I was going to do this, I didn't want to have to rely on anyone else for cover.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'd rather you didn't,
+
+ I said and could feel the way Azi flinched in the feed. Maybe the way I worded it was a little harsh, but I really don't want Azi hiring someone to watch over me.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Then I won't,
+
+ it said to me, clearly not happy with the situation.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne stopped by later that evening. They had dinner and we watched more 
+
+Walk a Tightrope 
+
+with a lot of the couch touching like before. By the end of the night, it definitely felt like there was something they wanted to say but couldn't get the courage to do so. I wasn't about to pry as I had a feeling it was about me leaving with Azi to go back to Serth for a month, and I wasn't about to invite such an awkward conversation into the room.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""
+
+When you come back, hopefully we will have some good progress on your application. I'm sorry it's taking so long,"" Rayne said softly, their voice tired and despondent. I leaned against them a bit more, trying to show I was comfortable with the pace things were taking.
+ 
+
+
+
+""It's not your fault, Rayne,"" I replied, offering a small smile as they looked at me. ""If there's anyone to blame, it's me for asking Azi to install the energy weapons.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, no, we weren't really prepared to bring in a refugee and the customs office is a little bit bratty because of the energy weapons. SecUnit offered its lawyer friend's help if needed, but I don't want to overwhelm you."" Their hand combed through my hair, and I leaned into the gesture, a request for the attention to continue. ""We don't have many constructs to really reference behavior by, and SecUnit is a very...private person. A lot of the administration defaults to treating other constructs the same way because of it.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""How many constructs are here?"" I asked, my eyes fluttering closed as Rayne continued running their hand through my hair.
+ 
+
+
+
+""At the moment? Two, not including you. SecUnit and another secunit called Three. Three is a more open and social, but there's still that lack of eye contact SecUnit has. You don't seem to have a problem with it, which I find interesting,"" they said, and I hummed.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm a comfortunit. Eye contact is kind of expected in my job when it's achievable or not explicitly banned,"" I said, my voice soft and distant. I made a sound in my throat and heard Rayne snort.
+ 
+
+
+
+""That good?"" They asked and I hummed again instead of wasting energy forming words.
+ 
+
+
+
+The scalp massage Rayne's petting had turned into felt amazing. I felt them shift, moving to slide one leg around my back and pull me against their front on the couch while continuing the massage. I froze for 0.2 seconds, my eyes popping open to look up at Rayne with slight unease. They gave a small smile and a gentle tug against my stomach as an indicator to lean back.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No tricks, just want to be more comfortable doing this,"" Rayne said softly. Relax. We've done something similar before, I reasoned with myself as I leaned back against Rayne's chest. I've laid on their chest in my room, this is no different. I tried to focus on the weight of my body pressing against theirs. How warm and firm they felt against me. Relax, Cade. My body remained stiff for a good while, but they pretended to not notice, keeping their hands moving through my short hair, massaging my scalp.  
+ 
+
+
+
+When I felt myself begin to relax, I let my own hands move away from where they were folded, pressed tightly against my stomach. I touched the fabric of their pant legs on either side of me, noting how muscle twitched at the contact beneath. I ran one hand up their thigh and back down to their knee, enjoying the scratchy-like feel of the fabric. The warmth of their body beneath my hand. Rayne didn't comment on the motion but did shift just a little bit to make it easier for me to do. They were high quality work pants. Well-worn ripstop. I had to wonder why a professor at a university needed a pair of high-quality work pants as I slid my hand back up to the top of their thigh. I used it as leverage to turn myself slightly, pulling my head away from Rayne's grasp. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Through the lounge room camera, I could see Rayne freeze, allowing me to make the next few moves unhindered. I reached up with my free hand, touching the side of their head with the tips of my fingers. They had clipped the undercut again recently, the sides shorter than I remembered seeing them yesterday. The design was still missing, though, which I thought was a shame. It was soft against my skin. Up this close, I could see the grey flecks in their hair around their temples, the dark roots of stubble forming along their jawline, and the little wrinkles of exhaustion and stress beneath their eyes. I let my fingertips move south, moving from the soft brush of brown hair to the slightly scratchier jawline. I saw them swallow, their throat moving ever so slightly. Were they nervous? 
+ 
+
+
+
+My fingertips found Rayne's lips, brushing against them softly. I watched as they parted on contact, but only slightly as if surprised by my examination. I hadn't noticed the flecks of copper and emerald in Rayne's eyes before now, but I guess I hadn't been close enough before to see it. Those sad, grey eyes now watched me with slight curiosity, caution, and something else I had seen often in my past client's expressions. A type of hunger food consumption couldn't sate. This time it wasn't something that made my organics freeze up like they normally do, and I had an emotional reaction to that realization. I heard my name pass their lips quietly. A warning? I leaned in, aware the lounge lights were flickering annoyingly again. Nosey bastard.
+ 
+
+
+
+A flame lit in my core as our lips connected. I felt Rayne's hands touch my back gently, as if afraid too much pressure would make me disappear. I'm not sure which one of us made the noise or how I ended up on the couch with Rayne on top of me, but it didn't matter. What I did know was that I 
+
+wanted 
+
+this, more than anything, and my inorganic processes were doing a good job of trying to convince me that I would die 
+
+right this moment
+
+ if I didn't get it. I couldn't tell you why, though, since my organic neural tissue wasn't very coherent right now. Mostly being the dumb, liquid horny I got when I was with one of the other comfortunits at The Cosmos. Like dumping gasoline on the open flame, I felt out of control of the situation but not in a bad way. This was very much wanted, and I think they could tell. The gasp when Rayne broke away to press their mouth to my neck was from me, that much I was sure of. One of my legs found its way around their waist, pulling them closer, half expecting the next step in this dance we had begun. Every one of their movements was so gentle in stark contrast to my neediness, to how I grasped and pulled at them to urge them to
+
+ move faster
+
+. Please. One of my hands dug into their hair, and I felt them wince. They broke away from where they had been worrying a mark along my collarbone. Rayne reached up to grab my hand, gently prying it from its vice-like grip. They shifted, their thighs pressing against my rear as they moved to sit up, and I felt my back arch, the embarrassingly loud moan that came from my throat was not from my comfortunit code but actually 
+
+me
+
+.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I blinked and glanced down at my hands held in theirs. The flame that had bloomed into an uncontrollable bonfire tempered itself slightly, and I regained some control over my stupid hormonal body. I felt the heat rush to my face as the embarrassment of what I had just done caught up with me. I bit my lip. This was it. I pushed them too far. I couldn't bring myself to look at them now. I wanted to cover my face with my hands, but a small tug reminded me that they were held fast between us by Rayne. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I fucked up. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm sorry. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne let go of my hands and leaned over me again, bracketing my head between both arms, their movement slow and measured. I turned my head away slightly, a small burst of fear stabbed into my chest with the realization that I couldn't get away. That I couldn't hide from whatever punishment Rayne might feel I deserved. I kept my eyes downcast, willing to let them roam anywhere but their face.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Cade, look at me,"" Rayne said, and I fought with the impulse to immediately obey the command. I'm not governed anymore, I had to remind myself. They aren't a client. I don't have to listen to them if I don't want to. A thumb touched my cheek and I flinched at the suddenness of it, my eyes darting up to meet theirs. Something in my expression made Rayne frown, and I felt a familiar desire to make it go away. They looked away from me and sighed before sitting up on their knees, ""I think that's far enough for tonight.""
+ 
+
+
+
+What?! 
+
+No!
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""
+
+I'm sorry
+
+,"" I blurted as Rayne moved to stand. They paused, looking at me with an unreadable expression. I found myself flagging it for review later. When I wasn't a total emotional mess.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Don't apologize, Cade,"" they said softly, reaching out and gathering the discarded food items off of the small table in front of them. I sat up as they stood, feeling panic well up in my chest. I wanted to stand. To stop them from leaving. To pull them back onto the couch and continue where we left off. I didn't care that Azi was being a total creep and sitting in my emotional data.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Rayne, please..."" I fell silent, watching as they dumped their garbage in the recycler. They paused, setting a hand on top of the machine with a quiet sigh before turning back to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm not angry with you. It's just...not the right time,"" Rayne finally said, their voice as deflated as I felt. Something tightened in my chest.
+ 
+
+
+
+When was the right time? I wondered. They made their way back over to the lounge couch, dropping to their knees in front of me. Rayne took my hands into theirs and remained silent for several agonizing seconds, staring at how their thumb ran circles around the back of my hand.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm going to go home and try to get some sleep. I'll see you and Azi off tomorrow. When you come back...if you still feel like this,"" Rayne paused and looked up at me. ""We'll try it. Okay?""
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I wasn't mad at Rayne, but I definitely wasn't happy they slammed the breaks on what had been about to happen in Azi's lounge. They left shortly after putting an end to it, telling me to stay on the couch, which I'm not quite sure how to interpret. For the past week or so, I had been walking them to Azi's airlock while holding casual conversation with them. I guess they were embarrassed too. Or maybe they just needed space from me right now. I don't know. I sighed, pulling my legs up onto the couch and resting my cheek on my knees. Azi settled into my feed space, remaining silent for a while longer.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Did I do something wrong?
+
+ I asked it, closing my eyes and relying on the lounge cameras for visuals.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't think so. Rayne has not responded to any of my messages,
+
+ Azi replied, its worry tangible in the feed. I didn't like that either. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I spent the entire night cycle worrying about what had happened between Rayne and me. Wondering what I did wrong. Wondering if there was a chance I could have changed the outcome. Azi brought up some show its sibling recommended called 
+
+World Hoppers,
+
+ so we started that to pass the time. We were halfway through season one when I got a greeting in the feed from Rayne. Azi paused the show as I pulled my 'private' session with Rayne up and noticed the time. Had we really been watching media for eight hours straight? Wow.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Good morning, 
+
+Rayne's message said. No mention whatsoever about what had happened the night before. Fuck. What do I say? I pushed myself up off the lounge couch and paced the room for a while.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Don't make it weird,
+
+ Azi said to me, and I rolled my eyes.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Kind of too late for that. It's already weird. I don't know what to say,"" I replied.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+A simple 'good morning' back will suffice,
+
+ it said to me, its tone saying it thought I was being absurd.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm going to stop by the food court before I come up to Azi, do you want or need anything?
+
+ Rayne asked and I felt myself wince. Maybe I am being weird.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, thank you, and good morning to you too, Rayne, 
+
+I replied, kicking myself for taking so long to say something back.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Okay, I'll be there shortly then,
+
+ they said, and I tapped the feed in acknowledgement.
+ 
+
+
+
+When Rayne arrived, they had a small bag of food and coffee in their hands. They gave me a smile as they walked into the lounge area. I stopped in my tracks where I had been pacing for the last twenty or so minutes and just stared at them setting up the couch like nothing had happened in that exact spot the night before.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Figured I could just eat here before going into the University since you two will be leaving in a few hours,"" Rayne said, looking up at me. They frowned a bit before adding, ""you can come sit down.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I hesitated, looking away from them with my actual eyes and relying on the lounge camera to show me what they were doing. My human mimicry code made me swallow, ""I, um, about last night-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Don't worry about it. Nothing happened. Come sit,"" Rayne motioned for me to come closer. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, that's the problem, Rayne. 
+
+Nothing happened. 
+
+I wanted 
+
+something
+
+ to happen, and you acting like nothing of importance to our...
+
+whatever
+
+...happened last night is really confusing me. I sighed internally and moved over to sit on the couch next to Rayne. We sat in silence while Rayne ate. It was awkward for me, but I'm not sure it was for them considering their mouth was occupied with chewing. I fidgeted with the hem of my hoodie to occupy some of my anxious processes.
+ 
+
+
+
+""When you come back, my sister said she'd love to meet you,"" Rayne said, crumpling up the wrapper and tossing it into the small paper bag they had brought with them. ""If you want to, that is.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes, I'd love to meet her, too,"" I replied before my brain could mull over the words and find a way to make it negative. I flinched when they touched my arm causing them to pull back the offending hand. I hadn't seen it coming from the angle of the lounge camera.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Sorry-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, I just wasn't...paying attention,"" I said quickly, reaching for their hand with mine. It was warm and firm in my grasp. There was an excruciatingly long (read five seconds) pause where I watched Rayne's thumb pass over the back of my hand a few times. I couldn't bring myself to look up at their face.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Everything okay, Cade?"" they asked softly.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes. Um, I think so, anyway,"" I replied and saw their thumb pause.
+ 
+
+
+
+""What does that mean?"" 
+ 
+
+
+
+It wasn't as accusatory as it reads. Rayne's tone was honest and open, a willingness to try and understand. I didn't want to talk about last night because I was afraid that, maybe, what I was feeling at the time wasn't on the same wavelength as what they were feeling. I didn't want to hear rejection from the first human I actually felt something towards. But...this was a conversation we would have to have at some point. A conversation that had to happen if we were going to continue interacting with one another. I thought I understood the last conversation we had that they 
+
+were
+
+ interested and wanted more, but after last night... I swallowed again.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I just...I thought last night was something you wanted, too,"" I finally managed to say. ""I'm not really used to misreading humans, so I'm sorry if I overstepped-"" I heard a sigh as their other hand came into my field of vision. Since I saw it coming, I didn't flinch when they touched my face, lifting my chin up so that I was facing them.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Oh
+
+.
+ 
+
+
+
+I didn't have time to register much else before Rayne's mouth was on mine. 2.37 seconds was all it lasted, but it was enough to leave my face flushed and make my organic neural tissue melty.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Does that answer your question?"" they asked softly. I could see the smile on their lips which were slightly wet from my own.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I, uh..."" Well, I tried getting words out of my mouth before my buffer replied, ""please wait while I search for that information."" Rayne laughed. I swallowed and tried again, ""I'm, uh, not sure I got that. Can...can you repeat that?""
+ 
+
+
+
+Yeah, I know. I was being dorky, and it was bold, but hey, I got to try. Rayne grinned, leaning in to press their mouth to mine a second time. I was ready this time, returning the kiss with probably a bit too much enthusiasm for something that wouldn't go anywhere. The taste of the spices used in their meal and coffee filled my mouth, and we broke away after 9.87 seconds, Rayne's hand still in my hair and mine gripping the front of their shirt. My sensors gave me a bit too much information about their arousal levels and mine with suggestions on how to move forward. I felt them pull me into an embrace and I laid my head on their shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Feel better?
+
+ Azi asked with that 'I told you so' vibe to its feed voice. Of course, it already knew the answer since it was rolling around in my emotional readouts. I might have to have a talk with it about privacy, I think. I didn't mind it being there since it was something a lot of us did at The Cosmos when we felt unsafe with a particular client, but I felt safe with Rayne. I didn't need that emotional support, and I'm not sure how Rayne would feel about it. They might not care considering how close Azi and they were, but I didn't want to just assume that was the case. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Rayne hung out for a while longer, and we talked about everything but last night. I didn't feel the need to bring it up again after they willingly kissed me twice. Azi finally butted in through the ship's general feed announcing it needed to begin preparations for undocking and that Rayne should leave unless they wanted another month-long trip to Serth. I walked them to the airlock, their hand in mine. When we stopped, Azi started cycling the doors and Rayne turned to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Please be careful. I don't know what you're planning to do back on Serth -"" I opened my mouth to reply but they continued, ""- 
+
+and don't
+
+ say you aren't planning something. Konani and I both know you had a reason for the weapons. I don't want to know what you're planning...just 
+
+please
+
+ be careful,"" Rayne said, giving my hand a single pulse squeeze before letting it go.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'll do my best,"" I said, internally wincing at the emotions that passed over their face. Worry, sorrow. I hated seeing those on their face. I want them to never feel this way. Rayne turned away from me and stepped through the airlock, giving me a final wave good-bye before it closed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Ready? 
+
+Azi asked after a short pause in which I had just been staring blankly at the closed airlock door. 
+
+You don't have to go-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+No, I'm going. I want to go,
+
+ I replied quickly. I turned and returned to the lounge couch, sitting down and pulling up the private session Azi and I had open with 
+
+World Hoppers
+
+ paused.
+
+ Go ahead and start the show. 
+
+Azi pinged me and started it where we left off.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Cade discovers a 'stowaway' on Azi as they are traveling to their destination. The trio eventually settle in and start to plan for their arrival in system.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+It was about halfway into the trip to Serth that I noticed something was, well not 
+
+wrong
+
+, but
+
+ off 
+
+about Azi. I defaulted to my usual routine which now included watching and rewatching our two shows as well as listening to music, 'mindfulness' showers (as Azi calls them in which I just stand under the water), practice in the training room, actual showers because I now stink and then more media. There were times when Azi would have a little hiccup as I went about my routine within its hull. A door would stay closed for a second longer than necessary and I would almost walk into it. A few times I had to wait several seconds for it to open and my complaints to Azi fell on semi-deaf ears. Or access to a specific ship camera would randomly get revoked for an unspecified amount of time. I didn't think anything of it at first.
+ 
+
+
+
+ Well, that was until I happened to hear what sounded like 
+
+footsteps
+
+ moving down the corridor outside my room late in a cycle after I had just stepped out of the shower. I scrambled for the camera input only to find it conveniently 'offline.' When I asked Azi about it, it said it didn't know what I was talking about, and that the camera was working as it should according to its system status monitor. That's bullshit, because 'working as it should' meant I would be able to access it.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Cut the shit, Azi. What's going on? 
+
+I snapped, my anger finally boiling over. Azi, annoyingly, did the feed equivalent of a shrug. Fucker.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't know what you're talking about.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+The cameras that stop working. The doors that take too long to open. These weren't things that happened when we were traveling to the PanSystem. I don't care if you brought someone else along and they're grossed out by comfortunits, and that's why you're doing this. At least tell me so I don't feel like I'm going insane,
+
+ I said, my stress leaking into our shared feed space.
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm not going insane.
+ 
+
+
+
+I'm not.
+ 
+
+
+
+There's clearly someone else on board with me.
+ 
+
+
+
+Right?
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi was silent for a long while which didn't help my growing anxiety over whether or not I was losing my mind. What would it do if I was? Force me into a shutdown? Lock me in my room and take us back to the University? What would they do to me, then? I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself with slow measured breaths. I could feel the slight tremors that wracked my body. The doubt and insecurity. Please, please tell me I wasn't imagining this. I couldn't have gotten this far just to lose my mind.
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt Azi squeeze more of itself into our shared feed space and press against me, hoping to calm my fraying nerves. I hate being so easily stressed out. It's pathetic and embarrassing and weak.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You are not going insane, 
+
+it said to me softly, expertly dodging actually telling me whether or not someone else was on board. Despite my annoyance at Azi, I pressed back into it, thankful for some kind of comfort as I wrangled with my emotions.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Sure feels like it,"" I said out loud, my voice thick and dumb sounding. I slumped down on the floor, leaning against the foot of the bed and wrapped my arms around my knees with a sigh. Maybe this is what happens when comfortunits are away from humans for too long. We had a dependency on social interactions, but I thought Azi would be enough to meet that need. I've never had time off when working at The Cosmos so I've never really been able to test how long I could go without it. The longest I've been away from a human is maybe eight hours, twelve if the new client requests a 'clean' unit which requires more sanitation than standard practice.
+ 
+
+
+
+I found myself pulling the trauma treatment packet out from where I had saved it weeks ago and toyed with the idea of starting it. I'm not sure it would make me feel better, and if I was totally honest, that was the sole reason I hadn't started it. My research said it would just help me navigate the emotions I'm having, identify negative thinking and find healthier coping mechanisms. My hot showers are healthy enough, thanks. Making me feel better would require chemicals I clearly couldn't produce on my own. Didn't humans take pills for this?
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It was two cycles later when I ran into the stowaway. I guess Azi decided my mental breakdown earlier was enough to allow me to meet it, though I can't say I'm thankful for that. It looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see it when I rounded the corner after an exceptionally long session in the Training Room.  I did not scream like I thought I would, so I guess I have that to be proud of. Instead, I took a quick step to the side, deployed one of my weapons and had it pointed at the side of the stowaway's head before it even responded. It was a secunit, that much I was sure of. The lack of emotion on its face was telling enough for me. Never mind the gunports built into its arms. I never met the secunit Konani and Rayne talked about in person, so I had no idea what it looked like. Could this be it? Fucking Azi. I said I didn't want it to come along. I wanted to do this on my own.
+ 
+
+
+
+We stood there in silence for 2.13 seconds. I had a feeling it was using one of the hall cameras to watch me like I was to watch it. If this went south, I'm not sure I could really protect myself. I've never had a sparring match with a secunit before or, well, anyone other than Azi, and I wasn't looking to start now. I knew I was outmatched.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Who the fuck are you?"" I asked, doing my best to keep my voice cool. It shifted its head slightly towards me and I mentally kicked myself for flinching. It had to know it could get to me before I fired. It 
+
+had to
+
+. It was still faster than I was. Still stronger. Better reinforced. Better combat modules. Better train-
+ 
+
+
+
+""I am Three,"" Stowaway said, interrupting my thoughts. I frowned. The voice was an octave higher than SecUnit's feed voice and more taut sounding, though my passive scans labelled it as calm. I vaguely remember Rayne mentioning another secunit and pulled up the recorded memory.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""How many constructs are here?"" I asked, my eyes fluttering closed as Rayne continued running their hand through my hair.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""At the moment? Two, not including you. SecUnit and another secunit called Three. Three is a more open and social, but there's still that lack of eye contact SecUnit has. You don't seem to have a problem with it, which I find interesting,"" they said, and I hummed.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""I'm a comfortunit. Eye contact is kind of expected in my job when it's achievable or not explicitly banned,"" I said, my voice soft and distant. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I couldn't find anything more on Three in my archives, so I sent a private ping to Azi.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You said you didn't want me to ask SecUnit to come along,
+
+ it said in the ships general feed so Three/Stowaway could see. I could tell Azi was nervous about how I had responded to the unexpected person in my path and was now worried it had made a mistake having us meet this way. Well, you did Azi. Now you have to watch the outcome.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I didn't mean ask someone else, 
+
+I replied instantly. What the fuck? 
+
+I don't need a babysitter.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""Can you put the energy weapon away, please?"" Three/Stowaway asked, its voice still calm. I shot a glare at it with my actual eyes before dropping my arm and letting the energy weapon fold itself back up into its housing.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Why are you here?"" I asked, trying really hard to keep my voice the same level of 'maybe cool' it was before. I had been edging on freaked out and distraught for the past two cycles. Now that I knew for a fact I wasn't alone on Azi, I was floating between relief and a weariness I haven't felt since I worked at The Cosmos.
+ 
+
+
+
+Three stayed silent for several seconds much to my irritation. It was almost like Azi bought out its silence just to frustrate me. I felt the creak of my teeth grinding together as I looked away from the secunit, my hands balling into fists. If I was going to punch something it better be a bulkhead. I didn't want to start a fight I couldn't finish. Could Azi feel pain?
+ 
+
+
+
+""
+
+The Azimuth
+
+ asked me to be here,"" Three finally said. ""It is worried you are going to get yourself killed going after someone named Kevan Pallav.""
+ 
+
+
+
+Fuck. I knew it.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I don't need a babysitter,"" I ground out, moving to leave the hallway and return to my room.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I didn't say you needed a babysitter,
+
+ Azi said quickly.
+ 
+
+
+
+""It asked me to make sure you can navigate the station on your own. I am not to follow once you go down to the planet,"" Three added.
+ 
+
+
+
+That seemed so...
+
+extra
+
+. Why did it ask a secunit to come here to make sure I could get around Serth Station? Couldn't Azi hack into the weapons scanners on its own? It can ride my feed easily when I was wandering around the University's station, so why couldn't it do that on Serth? Things weren't adding up. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""None of that makes sense,"" I said, continuing down the hall. I could see Three standing where I left it, watching me go. Even if it didn't know Azi brought it along to be my babysitter, that's exactly why it was brought along. I should have known Azi would treat me like this. That it didn't believe I could do this on my own. I'm not weak and defenseless. I had changes made to my loadout to prevent me from being that. To Azi I said, 
+
+fuck you,
+
+ and then signed off the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It took me four full cycles to stop being angry with Azi. Four full cycles of staying off the feed while going about my routine. Not that being off the feed stopped Azi from trying to communicate with me. Between using the display surface in various rooms I entered or flickering lights or changing the temperature of the water in my showers, it tried to get its point across that it wanted to talk. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, fuck you. I'm mad and I will stay mad until I've decided not to be. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I ran into Three twice. Both times we pretended not to see each other, or at least I did. I didn't want to talk to it. I didn't want it here or in my plans. It being here was proof to me that Azi didn't believe I could take care of myself. I'm not mad at Three, though. Protecting people was its function and I'm sure Azi, with all its flare for dramatics, made it sound dire.
+ 
+
+
+
+ Towards the end of my anger streak, I had the thought to invite Three into the Training Room with me and maybe see if I can't learn anything from it. I had to mentally prepare myself for when I signed back onto the feed. I wasn't sure what Azi would do or how it would react, especially after four cycles of me ignoring it. By the second cycle, it had stopped using the lights to try and communicate with me and had resorted to just assaulting me with freezing cold showers and display surfaces that said ""GET BACK ON THE FEED"" aggressively. When I finally reconnected, the silence was deafening. I left it at that because, why invite the argument I might get to avoid? I felt Azi turn a small part of its attention to me about thirty seconds later.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm sorry,
+
+ it said, sounding probably about as sorry as I've ever heard it sound before. I stayed where I sat in the lounge, unsure of how to respond. How do you respond to a bot apologizing to you for trying to make sure you don't get yourself killed? I can't say I wasn't mad because, yeah, I was. I thought it was waiting for me to respond until it threw a gut punch, 
+
+I don't want to lose you and neither does Rayne.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt my organics clench at that, and I had to look down at my lap as I tried to get something out of my eyes. I knew Azi had some kind of attachment to me, if only because Rayne had said it was one of the reasons my application for asylum wouldn't be denied. (I still found that weird.) But to hear it straight from the big bot itself? Wow. I didn't want to lose them either, but I wasn't about to say that. It seemed kind of clingy to me, even if it was true.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I get that, Azi, but...I told you I didn't want anyone to come along for a reason, and you not listening to me makes me feel like you think I'm weak or that I can't handle myself,
+
+ I replied, letting the hurt and anger I felt leak into the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+You haven't even told me what your plan is! I think if you gave me a plan, I might feel better about letting you go down well on your own, 
+
+Azi said after a 0.34 second pause.
+ 
+
+
+
+That was true, I hadn't told it my plan. It was also true that I didn't really have a plan. I didn't know how I was going to even find Kevan. Or what I was going to do when I found him. If I found him. I suppose the easiest way to kill him would be with the energy weapons I had installed in my arms. I know I wanted to know if this was something he has done before, and if this is something he continued to do after me. Something told me that if it was, Kevan probably didn't hit the same brothel or nightclub twice.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I don't have a plan,
+
+ I admitted softly. I felt Azi turn more of its attention to me, reminding me of a large human moving to sit down in front of someone. I expected some kind of chiding. A 'how do you
+
+ not
+
+ have a plan?' or something. What it said next surprised me.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Then let's make one,
+
+ it said.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Planning consisted of bringing Three into the fold. It was quiet for the explanation of why I was going back to Serth, of what happened to me and what I thought was continuing even now, its expression one of intense focus.  When I finished, it sat back in the lounge chair and looked thoughtful. I could feel Azi's anxiety over wanting to hear what Three had to say, and I assumed it was hoping for validation. Validation that I was being crazy. That I wasn't able to pull this off. That I should give up and go back to the University.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Have you killed a human before?"" Three finally asked. Oh okay, well...that's a weird question.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No,"" I said. I've hurt people before (and that was at their request. 
+
+Don't ask
+
+) but never killed them.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Are you sure you can do this?"" It asked after another long pause. I shrugged. Is anyone ever sure they can do something? I never am.
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, I'm not sure. I want to. I know morally it's not-""
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Skip the morals for now. We know you physically can do this. You have the weapons. You have the desire. If we got you the address, could you do this? 
+
+Azi interrupted. The intensity at which it said this gave me an odd feeling in my chest. Having two machine intelligences complicit in my crime 
+
+was
+
+ odd. I expected more pushback from Three considering it was a secunit. Its whole function was to protect. I found myself shrugging again.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I can tr-""
+ 
+
+
+
+""There
+
+ is no try,""
+
+ Three interrupted me, folding its arms across its chest. ""If you go in, you 
+
+have
+
+ to do this or you 
+
+are not
+
+ coming out.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I sat in silence for several seconds, realizing they were trying to get me to understand the consequences of going through with this. That, yes, I could actually die (or worse) if I royally fucked this up. I didn't really have anyone I thought that would miss me significantly if I did die. Hell, The Cosmos already thought I was scrapped. Rayne would miss me, sure, but they had only known me for a few months at best. I'm certain they would get over me quickly. Same with Azi. I didn't have any amazing plans for when I returned to the University. I wasn't smart (well, no smarter than any other average construct) and I had no talents.
+ 
+
+
+
+""If he is doing this to other comfortunits, I want to stop him,"" I said finally. Three nodded as if that made some form of sense to it. I could feel Azi give the feed equivalent of an exasperated sigh. It had expected Three to try to stop me, I guess. 
+ 
+
+
+
+One good thing about Kevan Pallav being an executive officer of Stillwater was that it was a hell of a lot easier to find information on him. We didn't have access to current events or most recent information from Serth's system, but the cached news feeds and Stillwater employee info Azi had from earlier espionage runs gave us some clues. Kevan had been doing this for a while, if the large sums of Corporation Rim Standard credits deducted from StillWater's spending account under his name were anything to go by. I'm actually surprised he's been getting away with using the company's money to fund this behavior. Of course, we'd need to compare these deductions with the brothel and club accounts that had escort services before jumping the gun, but I'm pretty sure this was a regular thing for him.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I will look for more information once we reach the system,
+
+ Azi said. I sent a ping back in acknowledgement before saying out loud to Three, ""want to go to the Training Room?""
+ 
+
+
+
+Three looked at me as if I had two heads as it unfolded its arms.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Training Room?"" It asked after a pause, and I nodded.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yeah, you know...uh, I do target practice in there with my energy weapons....do you want to join?"" I explained, growing confused as it cocked its head slightly. I felt Azi shuffle more attention to our shared space.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Three doesn't have energy weapons, and I don't think it's wise to fire projectiles inside my hull, 
+
+Azi said. Three blinked (it was definitely running some kind of modified comfortunit code) and nodded as if agreeing with Azi. Well shit. There went my Construct Bonding idea. I didn't know secunits had different loadouts. I mean, I kind of did since comfortunits had different loadouts and it would only make since that secunits did too. But I didn't know they could have different weapons installed. Would projectile weapons have been easier to install?
+ 
+
+
+
+
+StillWater does not have schematics for projectile weapon equipped secunits. I wouldn't have been confident in that procedure,
+
+ Azi said in response.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Okay, ""I said. I guess that makes sense. I stood up, pushing up my hoodie's sleeves as I did so. ""Well, that's where I'll be for a bit. You can still join if you'd like. I wouldn't mind some input from someone experienced with this kind of thing."" 
+ 
+
+
+
+Three didn't need any more convincing which surprised me. It waited for me to start walking before it followed and took the time to explain things once I started shooting. There was a lot more nuance to this than I thought there was. SecUnit's aim assist it had sent me was a thousand times better than what Azi and I had come up with, though it did need some adjusting due to my manufacturer difference. While it vastly improved my targeting and overall control of my new functions, I liked Three's subtle suggestions for less reliance on the code, especially with targets moving perpendicular to me. It was nice getting to spend time with another construct, and I was surprised to find that I missed it. We hung out together in the lounge afterwards and I started up 
+
+Walk a Tightrope
+
+ from episode one for all of us to watch.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+When we arrived in Serth's system, Azi immediately queued for the most recent updates on StillWater's employee records and began crosschecking the business account spending with establishments that had comfortunits advertised as escorts and whores. I'm not sure how Azi had access to the other establishment's financial systems, but I wasn't about to start questioning its methods. Sometimes, not knowing how someone does something is probably for the best. Willful ignorance, and all that. As we got closer to the station, Azi dropped what it found into our shared workspace, and I felt Three shift beside me from where it was sprawled out on the couch. Up until now we had been rewatching 
+
+World Hoppers
+
+ which, to my surprise, Three had seen before. I paused the show and pulled the shared workspace up, giving it my full attention.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+It does appear that Kevan Pallav has been doing this for some time. The extensive spending under his name from StillWater's corporate account coincides with several other brothel and club payments including yours, 
+
+Azi said, summing up the information it had placed into the workspace. I could see Three sifting through the documents carefully, its face in meat space stayed relatively blank. After several seconds of silence, it sat up and removed its metal claw-like feet from where they were on my thighs. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I agree with the Azimuth's findings. I think this is our green-light to proceed, 
+
+Three said in the shared workspace. I glanced over at it before adding my own voice to the conversation.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Do you have any information on his living arrangements? I vaguely remember him mentioning he had several,
+
+ I wanted to catch him off guard. I wasn't about to walk into StillWater HQ. There's no way they wouldn't know what I am at first glance.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+He has three. Four if you count the housing built into StillWater HQ, but according to the access control logs, he does not visit it often,
+
+ Azi said, tossing three addresses into the workspace. I stared at them, hoping one would pop up to the forefront, saying 'pick me! This is where he tried to kill you!' None did, unfortunately. I frowned, reaching up and rubbing my eyes with my hands. Come on, think.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+""No, don't touch that. Keep your hands to yourself, got it?"" A voice said as a hand smacked mine away from the ingrained designs along the cabinet doors I was tracing with a finger. The hit stung, but only slightly. I swallowed and nodded, adding, ""yes, Mr. Pallav,"" out loud in case he didn't see my physical affirmation. I clasped my hands in front of me, sneaking a quick look at my client. He stepped out of his shoes while unbuttoning the suit jacket's front. Now that it was open, I could see the brilliant white collared dress shirt underneath, noting he didn't have the typical build of someone I was usually assigned to. No, this man cared about how he looked, and he was far from soft looking. 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Mr. Pallav looked at me with a mixed expression of disgust and boredom, whether or not he cared that I was watching him, I didn't know. His thin lips skewed a moment before he grabbed my upper arm roughly and pulled me past the entryway, my feet stumbling a couple steps much to his annoyance.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+""Keep up,"" He snapped. We were in some kind of lounge room now. It reminded me a bit of the Lounge at The Cosmos with the couches, the display surface and small bar on the opposite wall. The only thing missing were the other comfortunits I was used to seeing in a setting like this. Mr. Pallav released my arm once I was in the middle of the room and stalked towards another doorway, saying over his shoulder, ""stay here and don't touch anything.""
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I stood there and didn't touch anything. Mr. Pallav left me alone for two minutes and thirteen seconds, which was enough time for me to grow slightly bored and start wandering around this miniature lounge room. Near the couch there was a small stack of rectangular papers sitting on an end table. Curious, I leaned in slightly, magnifying my visual inputs to read the information better. Energy bills, bank statements and junk mail all addressed to Mr. Kevan Pallav - my client.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I dropped my hands and exhaled, picking out one of the addresses and highlighting it in the shared workspace. Three's head turned to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Are you sure?"" It asked after a half second pause. I nodded, squeezing my now trembling hands in my lap. I didn't expect reliving a small part of that night, that wasn't even necessarily violent, would cause a reaction like this. Come on, Cade.
+ 
+
+
+
+I can do this. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I can do this.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Thank you for reading
+
+Cade wakes up in an unknown place with no real understanding of how it got there.
+
+There is minor torture and sex mentions, nothing explicit. Just a warning. Thank you for reading
+
+
+
+[Restart Failed. Retrying...]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+..
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+..
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Restart Failed. Retrying...]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+..
+ 
+
+
+
+..
+ 
+
+
+
+Ugh.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Restart Failed. Corrupted Data Suspected. Reverting to Last Known Good Configuration...]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, that's not good. When was that? Two months ago? Fuck, that's 
+
+really
+
+ not good. 
+ 
+
+
+
+What happened? 
+ 
+
+
+
+Where am I? 
+ 
+
+
+
+I became aware of the hard surface underneath my rear. Of the weight of gravity pulling at my spine, pulling me forward. Of the strain in my shoulders and the ache in my arms as they were pulled behind me and around a solid object, tied together to keep me upright. I was sitting; the ache in my ass telling me that I had been in the same spot for a while. The air was stale and warm and smelled like burning wood. 
+
+Stars,
+
+ my face 
+
+hurt
+
+. Everything hurt. I tested curling my toes and hissed in pain as sharp shocks clawed angrily up my right leg.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You're awake. Good,"" a familiar voice said. I started a passive search for the face attached to that voice. It would take some time while my systems restructured around the corrupted data segment. Ugh.
+ 
+
+
+
+Something touched my chin, cold and solid, pushing my head up. My eyes were open, I could tell by how the warm, dry air touching them caused my human mimicry code to blink to keep the organic bits moist. A noise crawled up my throat, pained and confused, and I heard the voice chuckle. Why can't I see? I tried to start a diagnostic on that but received an 'access denied' response from my internal systems at the same time as my audial inputs registered a ping from my far right. The solid, cold object that was holding my head up moved away and I fell forward again, my neck popping from the force of the drop.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Oh, would you like to see? I can do that.""
+ 
+
+
+
+A kaleidoscope of color flashed before my eyes, slowly shifting into more muted tones of brown, red, orange, and yellow, adding depth and shadows and textures. A person sat on a desk in front of me, the shadows so harsh I couldn't make out their face. They leaned back a bit, the light from the fireplace giving me a brief glimpse of half their face. The outline of a sharp nose, thin lips, and high cheekbones. I tried lifting my head but found my body didn't want to obey. It stayed limp in the chair I sat in. What was going on? Am I drugged? 
+Can constructs be drugged?
+ Despite my growing panic, I felt amazingly calm. There was no rush of adrenaline prickling my skin. No tingling in my extremities preparing me for fight or flight. Just me, worrying in my own skull. My body was nothing more than a hunk of meat and metal.
+ 
+
+
+
+""So curious that whoever found you made these modifications,"" the person said. I checked my passive search which was still slowly chugging along. I knew this person. The way my body tried to tense against the unnatural limpness told me we had met before. That that previous meeting had not gone well, either. Come on, brain. 
+
+Work
+
+. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I flinched internally when the person stood up and moved behind me. The passing seconds in silence didn't help my anxiety and, try as I might, my body wouldn't listen to any of my commands. I couldn't turn around to keep an eye on them if I wanted. I felt a large hand grab one of my forearms, a tug at my wrists and I was free of whatever had tied my hands behind my back. Relief flooded my poor strained arms. Blood and fluids rushed back to my fingertips with a tingling sensation. The person pulled me until I slumped back against the chair and then moved back in front of me to sit down on the desk again.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'll admit I've never had the thought to fuck a secunit, but I can see the allure,"" they said thoughtfully.
+ 
+
+
+
+The ache in my right foot caught my attention and I tried to look down to see what was causing the pain. Without being able to move my head, all I could catch was a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye, but that was enough for me. It was swollen, black and blue with dried fluids on it as if someone had taken a hammer to it and tried to break every synthetic bone they could. I wondered what my face must look like if that's what they had done to my foot. I wasn't naked by some miracle. I still had my pants on, but it seems the person had removed my jacket and shirt in order to do something to my skin. It looked raw and wet and bubbly, and I had a feeling that a simple touch would make me scream. The overall ache felt like being too close to a fire, or prolonged exposure to the sun's radiation. Had this person poured something on my front? My pants looked dry, but... I had no way to tell how long I had been here.
+ 
+
+
+
+I had meant to ask, ""what did you do to me?"" but all that came out was a soft ""Huuuuuuunnnnn."" It wasn't actual vocal sound, more the sound of air passing through my throat.
+ 
+
+
+
+Well, that's embarrassing. Did I not have access to my language modules anymore? I understood what they were saying to me, so clearly something was working, but I can't speak? The person laughed again, reaching for something next to their left - a small tablet with long wires that travelled down off the desk and behind me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm sorry, let me help. I didn't need my wife coming in here to investigate screaming so I shut off your ability to speak. I'll give that back to you for now but try anything dumb and I'll take it away again,"" they warned, glancing down at the tablet in their hands and tapping away on it. I felt the general stiffness in my face and throat lessen slightly. I worked my jaw a bit, noting how it clicked in an uncomfortable way, and tossed a glare at the person in front of me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""What did you do to me?"" I asked, my voice quiet, seething with the anger I wanted to feel but couldn't due to whatever this person was doing to me. My passive search query came back with a result: Kevan Pallav. Of course.
+ 
+
+
+
+ So, I had failed in my assassination attempt. I tried queueing diagnostics for my motor functions, but quickly found I was locked out of them as well.   An '
+Access Denied
+' string popped up mockingly into my awareness in all its red and white glory. I was locked out of most of my processes. Fuck. This man had made my body a cage.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Nothing out of the ordinary for the StillWater assembly line,"" Kevan said calmly touching something on the tablet in his hand. I heard my gunports click open and close. ""Amazing that whoever pulled you out of the garbage gave you fully functional weapons. I almost feel bad that I have to destroy you.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I stayed silent, hoping some of my memories would come back and explain how I got here. Last I remembered, Three and I had just stepped into Azi's airlock together. We had agreed to do a quick scout of the station and then return to the ship. How long ago was that? I know with humans this type of memory loss wasn't actually possible but...if Kevan knew how to remove data from my internal storage- and something told me he did - it would explain the time gap. I guess I didn't have enough of a reaction to him telling me he was going to kill me because he leaned forward with a curious expression.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Does that not worry you?"" he asked softly. I wanted to feel something about that. Some kind of anger or frustration. This was an asshole that knew comfortunits and secunits were alive. That we felt pain and had emotions. He knew all this and didn't care. This was a killer at heart and the only thing keeping him from crossing over to actual humans was that it was frowned upon in society. There were repercussions for killing other humans, unlike constructs. He might get a slap on the wrist at StillWater if they caught his misuse of company funds. If they even cared. But he was never going to get into trouble for killing one of my kind. He wanted me to be afraid of him. That's what he got off on. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm already dead according to The Cosmos,"" I replied softly, doing my best to keep any emotion out of my voice. Kevan leaned back, looking thoughtful.
+ 
+
+
+
+""And your new owner? I think they'd care if I destroyed all their hard work. Wasted all the money they put into you.  I'd be furious myself if you were mine. Maybe I should just hang on to you and wait for them to come get you.
+
+ That 
+
+should be fun,"" Kevan said with a sinister smile.
+ 
+
+
+
+Would Rayne try to save me? I thought it entirely possible, but they should know better than to put their entire operation at risk for a stupid comfortunit that couldn't even keep itself from getting captured. What would happen to Rayne if they did try to save me? The conclusions my mind drew were ones I didn't like and apparently showed on my face because Kevan leaned in again, satisfied with my response.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Ah, so 
+
+that
+
+ bothers you. That bothers you 
+
+very much
+
+. Good. I think we can play for a bit while we wait. What do you think?"" He stood and walked past me. I strained my hearing to keep track of him, mentally cursing the limp hold he had on my processes. How was this possible?
+ 
+
+
+
+""I think you're insane,"" I said, hoping the unusual insult might cause more eerie conversation and delay whatever he had planned for just a little bit longer.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Tsk, that's not very comfortunit like- ""
+ 
+
+
+
+""
+
+Fuck you
+
+,"" I spat. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Something collided with my shoulder, and I felt the crack of my humerus shattering beneath the force of the blow. I was thrown from where I had been seated, my skull bouncing off the rug covered floor as I made bodily contact with it. I heard the chair I previously sat on clattering beside me. Dark spots danced before my eyes as an involuntary shutdown threatening to take me. The sharp ache that bloomed in my shoulder overwhelmed my attention, digging into my consciousness like shards of glass into skin, and I fought to breathe past it. A small half-choked sob escaped my throat.
+ 
+
+
+
+""You did this two days ago, you know. That's what happened to your foot. Mind that mouth, whore,"" Kevan said from somewhere behind me. I didn't remember the events from two days ago. Did he not know that? Had I been here for two days? Fuck. Azi's trip here wasn't for much longer. Would it leave without me?
+ 
+
+
+
+I heard Kevan's footsteps as he approached me and heard the chair being set up again. A hand grabbed my injured arm and yanked me up, the glass shards of pain ripping into my flesh. I let out a cry, the weight of my entire body being held up by that one broke-
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Involuntary Shutdown... Attempting to Restart]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Restart Successful]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I was back in the chair, my upper arm aching furiously. Kevan had tied my arms behind the back of the chair again just in case whatever he was using to keep me limp stopped working, I guess. My face and throat were tight again, too, and he was nowhere to be found. If I strained my hearing enough, I could hear muffled voices, calm as if they didn't know or care what was happening in this room. I closed my eyes and felt tears streak down my painful face. How had I fucked up this badly? 
+ 
+
+
+
+Where had I gone wrong?
+ 
+ 
+
+
+
+I hesitated, didn't I? I couldn't bring myself to shoot the bastard. Fuck. Azi was right. I'm not a killer. I never have been, and I couldn't make myself be one. I wasn't brave enough or strong enough or... and now Rayne was at risk. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Stars, please don't come for me, Rayne.
+ I'll never forgive myself if you get jumbled into this mess.
+ 
+
+
+
+I opened my eyes as the door to the room closed shut behind me with an audible click. I swallowed, keeping my gaze straight ahead of me and tried to keep any emotions off my face. I didn't want to give him an easy win if I could help it. If he was worried about me making noise because someone else was in the house, I'm sure I'm safe for the time being. The footsteps that came towards me were quiet and meaty, and when Kevan returned to my field of vision I could see he was dressed in what I would consider sleepwear. No shoes or socks, long, soft-looking pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He found his perch on the desk again, folding his hands in his lap.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Chea came home early, so I guess we'll have to postpone our fun until tomorrow. A shame, really. I had some ideas I wanted to try,"" Kevan gave a small sigh. He looked at me after a few seconds of silence and added, ""I'll let you relax on the couch tonight. I'm sure that seat is starting to really hurt."" 
+ 
+
+
+
+Kevan stood, removed my bindings, then grabbed the device with the long cables off the desk. I still sat limply, my body leaning against the chair in a way that only gave me a view of his bare feet and my thighs. I felt trapped and there wasn't even a physical barrier for validation. He tapped away on the device for several seconds before uttering three words, 
+""Longspur, basalt, cerium.""
+ 
+
+
+
+A tingling sensation shot down my spine. The limpness in my body had shifted to a stiffness, and I sat ramrod straight in the chair much to my injured arm's displeasure. It didn't remind me of how the Governor Module felt but it did feel familiar. Like I had experienced this before. What is he doing to me?
+ 
+
+
+
+""Stand.""
+ 
+
+
+
+And stand I did. My body screamed in protest at the weight I placed on my severely damaged right foot, but no sound came from my throat. The scream I wanted to make clawed at the insides of my chest, searching for an escape. My vision started to blur from the moisture buildup and when I blinked the clear them away, I felt the tears slide down my face.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Follow,"" Kevan said softly to me. I turned stiffly and could now see the long cables were attached to me from somewhere behind me. My data port? Fuck, we should have disabled that. He watched me with a bored expression for a second before turning and walking me over to the couch. Once there, he uttered another word.
+ 
+
+
+
+ ""Sit.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I did, stiffly. Small mercy for the cushioned seat which felt like a cloud compared to what I had been sitting on for stars only knows how long. If I could sigh, I would have, but I had no control over any of the muscles in my body at the moment. I can't say I was grateful for the softer seat because I knew tomorrow, I'd have more pain waiting for me. Kevan adjusted the wires, making sure I wouldn't dislodge them with his next command. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""Lay down.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I shifted on the couch, lifting my legs up onto the seating and used my arms to adjust where I was currently sitting. A surge of stabbing pain shot through my broken arm again and I felt another scream boil and die in my chest as it found no outlet. Bright spots danced before my eyes, and I lost a second or two of time. I stiffly laid down, placing my hands on my front, the raw, wet skin on my torso and stomach sticking to my arms as it sent a burning sensation through my tactile sensors. It was going to hurt when I had to get up in the morning.
+ 
+
+
+
+""There. Good night, Cascade. I will see you tomorrow.""
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Throughout the night I made various attempts to access the feed, my motor functions, anything to aid my escape. Each time I received a mocking '
+Access Denied
+' message that I knew was being logged on that stupid fucking tablet attached to my data port. I wondered what he would do to me when he saw I had tried to escape. I worried momentarily about repercussions before deciding I would be punished regardless. He should expect it, to some degree. What comfortunit would want to be held hostage like this? What 
+
+person
+
+ would want this? I had to get out. I couldn't stay here. Staying here meant Rayne would try to come look for me. There's no way Azi wouldn't tell them what happened. I couldn't risk that. I couldn't risk Rayne coming after me and getting hurt. My vision started to blur again, and I closed my eyes, feeling the tears roll down the sides of my face. If I can't free myself, then I need to make sure Kevan Pallav destroys me.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I knew it was morning when I heard the waking alarms going off distantly in the silence. I heard the muffled footsteps of someone passing by the room, the constant pace telling me they had no intention of stopping to check on me. The sound of a coffeemaker, of regular morning routines I had gotten used to while being around Rayne and Konani. I wanted to feel something about that. To feel hurt and saddened that Kevan and his wife could go about their lives with a tortured comfortunit laying in a room of their home. I couldn't blame his wife. I don't know whether she knew of my existence in the home. Maybe, but I'm not sure. She might be a normal person, but I had no words to describe Kevan. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I tried to think back to how I had got here. Where had I fucked up? My memories were coming back in pieces, the defragmenting I had been allowed to start over ten hours ago was working. It turns out Kevan hadn't pulled and then wiped these memories, it's just...whatever he was doing with that fucking tablet was screwing with the data in my long-term storage. I could remember short term things without my internal storage device, but anything past that, I'd need to access it. Three had made good on its promise to not follow me down well to Serth. We shook hands before I stepped onto the shuttle, agreeing that keeping a connection between us while I was down here would be impossible without some kind of mediary.  While Azi could have done it, that would put it at risk of being discovered by corporations and other entities we'd rather stay ignorant of PUoMNT's capabilities. 
+ 
+
+
+
+We didn't come up with a recovery protocol, or at least, I didn't agree to one. Azi wanted to send Three after me if I didn't touch base within seventy-eight standard hours (roughly 3 days on Serth). I said no and that I didn't want to risk Three getting trapped if I was trapped, too. Three stayed neutrally silent as we argued over it, and eventually Azi gave in to my request to go alone with no back up. While there was a chance Azi wouldn't honor my request to be left to my own devices, I think after what had happened on the way here in the wormhole, where I found out it had invited a secunit to come along, it might think twice before risking Three to save my sorry hide.
+ 
+
+
+
+I remembered coming to Kevan Pallav's estate and politely convincing its Habitat System to let me in without sending any alerts. I remember coming into his study and waiting for him to return. It hadn't taken very long, maybe nine and a half hours. Just enough time to touch base with Azi and Three once and let them know I was in position. I remember startling him when he had come into the room and poured himself a drink. How he had dropped the heavy crystal glass of alcohol onto the floor and the look of fear in his eyes. The feeling of impending victory in my chest as I stepped towards him, raising my hand to grab his hair like he had done to me, and then...confusion and pure liquid terror as I froze in place when he uttered 
+
+those stupid words
+
+.
+ 
+
+
+
+Apparently, StillWater had come up with override codes to prevent shit like... vengeful constructs coming to kill important executives. It wasn't regularly given out to buyers, though, since I would have heard Mx. Kiran speak the words at least once or twice in my ten-year career with xem. But of course, Kevan knew the words, since he was a 
+
+fucking
+
+ chief executive officer of the 
+
+fucking 
+
+company that 
+
+fucking
+
+ made me. Yeah, I'm pretty mad at myself right now. Once Kevan used those fucking words, I became his obedient little puppy... regardless of what I wanted.
+ 
+
+
+
+I opened my eyes again, aware of how they teared up instantly and blinked to clear my vision. I didn't know when Kevan was planning to come into the room. All he said was tomorrow. That could mean before work or after or anytime in between. I didn't know which I would prefer. Usually 'getting it over with' was how I dealt with things, but that was when I knew what would happen. Right now, I knew my face, foot and arm were fucked up bad. I knew I'd need a cubicle at the very least to repair properly if I didn't have access to Azi's medical suite. I doubted I could walk out of here on my own. My performance reliability was hovering at an okay sixty-seven percent. I could recharge and let my skin begin to repair itself on my chest, but I knew once Kevan returned and had me move my arms, it'd aggravate some of the burns. (I wasn't looking forward to that.)
+ 
+
+
+
+One thing I was sure of was that he wouldn't try to fuck me. Some operator at the StillWater processing plant decided to play a cruel joke on my life, I guess. I remember how disgusted he had been when he found out I had male genitalia the first time around. The fact that I had female parts as well didn't seem to do anything for him either. Granted, some clients were like that. I had been sent away a few times before because of it, and that was...fine, I think. I never really knew how to feel about it. Relief that I wasn't going to be used but also...hurt because of the reaction my client had towards me? It wasn't something in my control, so I tried to not dwell on it. Even with Rayne. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Now, I didn't think Rayne would react negatively to what parts I had. They had already seen me naked and had still wanted to have the talk about Us. None of what I had should be a surprise to them, I think. But I couldn't help that small part of me that worried that maybe they hadn't paid attention. Heh, look at me thinking about Rayne when I'll probably never see them again. Worrying about what they might think if we ever tried to have sex together. I guess it's better to think about than my impending death. I had no idea what time it was or when to expect Kevan to return. I heard people leaving the home a few hours ago, but I didn't exactly pay attention to how many had left. I'm not sure I would have been able to tell anyway. The sounds were too muffled to make out anything specific. I started a timer just to see how long it would take for Kevan to arrive to kill me, then closed my eyes and pretended to be somewhere else to pass the time.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A rescue is mounted to save the silly ComfortUnit trying to do a job outside its function.
+
+There is a portion of this final chapter that may be a bit upsetting for readers. I have placed ""XXX"" at the start and end of the block of text. Ctrl+F to navigate.I will place a censored summary at the bottom of the chapter.
+
+Thank you for reading!
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+
+Ten hours and forty-eight minutes was how long it took for Kevan Pallav to return. I heard him enter the room with slow, casual footsteps. He walked past me towards his desk, ignoring me in favor of the alcohol he had missed out on when I had tried to kill him days ago. Kevan lingered at the desk, finishing off his first glass and refilling it before he made his way over to where I lay uncomfortably on the couch. He didn't speak to me at first, choosing to instead grab the tablet thing attached to my Data Port. Kevan spent an annoyingly long amount of time going through whatever was on the screen, before finally speaking to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I'm surprised it took you twenty tries to realize you can't do anything, but I guess comfortunits aren't built to be smart,"" Kevan said with a disappointed tone. Okay, well, fuck you. I didn't say anything in response because, well, I couldn't. My face and throat were still tight, preventing me from having any kind of reaction to what Kevan was saying. ""Did you enjoy your time on the couch?"" he asked after an unnecessary pause to let his insult on my intelligence sink in.
+ 
+
+
+
+Again, I didn't respond because I couldn't. Kevan made a thoughtful expression before holding one finger up and away from the glass of alcohol with an 'ah' sound.
+ 
+
+
+
+""That's right, I forgot you can't talk. Well, here, let me help,"" he said, and went back to tapping on the tablet. I felt my face and throat become less tight in response to whatever he was doing. I kept my mouth shut. I didn't want to give him an excuse to do something to me. My foot still hurt immensely, the throbbing in time with the fluid pump in my chest. My arm was stiff and mostly painless, but I had a feeling it would hurt if I tried to move it.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Well? Did you?"" Kevan asked again in my silence. 
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes, Mr. Pallav,"" I replied, my voice tighter than my throat felt. He flashed a grin I wanted to punch clean off his face.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Good bot. You learned your lesson about being a smart mouth, huh? I guess twice is good enough,"" he reached out and patted the top of my head, and I struggled to find the energy to be angry about it.
+ 
+
+
+
+Kevan turned his attention back to the device in his hands and muttered the three fucking override code words. I felt that familiar tingle slide down my spine, my body stiffening as it prepared to execute any commands this monster gave it.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Stand,"" he said, with that bored tone from the night before. My body screamed as my hands moved away from my torso, tearing the partially healing synthetic flesh burns back open. I clenched my teeth to keep quiet, not wanting to give Kevan Pallav an easy win. I know he wanted to see me in pain. A bright, sharp flash slammed into my shoulder as I used my injured arm to lift myself into a sitting position. A small gasp escaped my throat, and I heard Kevan hum in response. He liked that.
+ 
+
+
+
+I stood, my foot reminding me it was still majorly fucked up from its meeting with the sledgehammer. I couldn't remember how that interaction went or what I had said to cause it, but I could make an educated guess. It was a memory I'd be glad to never get back.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Go to the chair and sit,"" Kevan said, stepping out of my way as my body moved to follow his orders. I had a sheen of sweat covering my skin by the time I sat down. I was trembling as much as my body would allow me. I'm not sure constructs could get sick or infected, but it sure felt like something was wrong with either my foot or my arm or both. I was quiet for a long while as Kevan walked around me to sit on the desk. He didn't release me from the standby stiffness though, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I did some thinking while at work today,"" he began softly, his eyes still focused on the tablet in his hands. ""Your Governor Module should have fried you once my lease was up and you hadn't returned to that brothel. The only way for that to have not happened is if someone either hacked you or tricked Hub System into thinking you had returned. Considering Mx. Kiran put in a replacement request, I don't think xe was in on this salvage job. Xe has always been a good client for StillWater's comfortunit sales team. Always willing to look the other way when asked.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt the corners of my mouth curve downwards slightly, my eyes meeting his for a brief moment. He cocked an eyebrow at me, tipping his head forward with a slight nod.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Yes, I had asked xem to send me one unit xe didn't mind losing that night. What? Did you think xe saw you as anything other than a product?"" Kevan asked, his thin lips spreading into an amused smile. I looked away, focusing on the floor beneath the desk he sat on.
+ 
+
+
+
+I don't know what I thought. Mx. Kiran seemed to mind when one of us came back hurt. Xe did what xe could to get compensation for our recovery time, but...I guess if xe already knew I wasn't coming back...I don't know. This isn't something I wanted to think about. Even if Mx. Kiran was willing to let go of me, xe didn't matter now. I was no longer xir property. I had a feeling Rayne wouldn't be so easy to dissuade from trying to rescue me. The small device in Kevan's hands chimed.
+ 
+
+
+
+""It looks like my other theory is true. Someone, in all their infinite wisdom, fucked with your Governor Module and now it's neutered. I'm assuming it was the same person that gave you those secunit guns, too, yes? Never mind the foreign code you're running in various processes. This is...interesting,"" he fell silent again as he scrolled on the device. ""Who is the person that salvaged you? Who is Rayne?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I felt my eyes widen at the mention of Rayne's name, but kept my mouth shut. I didn't want to throw Rayne and the University under the metaphorical bus. I wanted to keep them (mostly Rayne) safe. To keep them as far away from Kevan Pallav as I could. I had no idea what he would do to them if they ever met, and I didn't want to ever find out. I had a really good feeling Kevan could make me do whatever he wanted but my mind and mouth were still my own.
+ 
+
+
+
+""I guess Mx Kiran never bothered going through your memory storage for usable information, then? It's a shame since it sometimes has some very big payouts. Xir clientele can be pretty...glamourous. I'll have to talk to xir about that. Your salvager isn't in trouble. I'm just...fascinated by how they managed this. It's not like StillWater would fine the person for pulling you out of a dump and fixing you up. One man's trash is another's treasure, right?"" 
+ 
+
+
+
+Yeah, fuck you, Kevan. 
+ 
+
+
+
+How would I know if that was a lie? No, I won't tell him anything. The risk of Rayne being hurt was too great. Kevan waited several seconds for my response before he finally stood and walked over to the furnace. He remained there for a long while. ""I know I can't force you to tell me what I want to know. Not without some kind of punishment, anyways, and since you can't feel the Governor Module...well, I guess I'll have to get a little experimental.""
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ XXX
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I looked up when I heard the metallic creak of the furnace door opening, the warm light filling more of the room. Kevan grabbed something from off to the side of the furnace and I heard the sound of solid metal hitting the edge of the door. He left the furnace open and turned back to me, the dark shadows covering his front kept me from seeing his expression.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Come here,"" he said, and my body moved to follow his command. I could feel the circulatory pump in my chest as I limped closer to him. The burns on my front became uncomfortable in the heat of the furnace, as if they were trying to get away from whatever was coming next. I stopped about an arm's length away from Kevan and I saw how he turned slightly to look back inside the small metal box of fire. ""On your knees.""
+ 
+
+
+
+I dropped, the impact vibrating up from my knees into my thighs painfully. My injured foot protested the new awkward position it was pressed into on the floor, aching in a sharp and urgent way, but I couldn't move to accommodate it. There was a metallic noise I couldn't quite place as Kevan turned toward me with what looked to be a white-hot iron poker in his hand. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Oh fuck.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+My face must have also reacted because Kevan grinned like a madman.
+ 
+
+
+
+""The boiling water made too much of a mess and I have to admit I burned myself with the back splash. 
+
+This
+
+ should be easier to control,"" he said, his eyes focusing on his weapon of choice instead of whatever my face was doing. I felt sick, which, I guess is possible? (I had a gag reflex though I don't think anything could come up from the compartment in my abdomen. It didn't have muscles for contraction like a human does.) I wanted to crawl away from him. I didn't know what exactly he had planned but I knew it would have to do with the hot poker and some place on my body. I could hear my own shaky breath in the silence, my body was actually trembling in anticipation of the pain. Kevan was silent for a long while, either lost in thought or just enjoying how terrified he made me. Eventually, his eyes came to rest on me again, the large, wide grin shifting to a grimmer expression.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Last chance, Cascade. Tell me who Rayne is,"" he warned softly. There was a hint of pleading in his voice, like he would rather I gave the information freely than torture me for it. I had a moment of confusion over that. Maybe it was because of my experiences with him so far. Kevan had shown me how bloodthirsty he was. How much he enjoyed making me scream. The pleading tone in his voice went against everything that had happened so far. Maybe he was just tired of spending time with me and wanted the information so he could discard me. Seconds passed between us in silence and Kevan looked away for a moment, almost crestfallen. With a sigh, he leaned forward, grabbing my jaw with one hand and levelling-oh no, 
+
+no nonono-
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I couldn't keep back the scream this time. Blinding pain, sharp and bright-hot, stabbed into my left eye socket. I felt something inside my head give; a pressure release that might have felt good if it weren't for the intense radiating pain spiking around and through my skull.  The sickly smell of hot meat. The musky stench of sweat and the metallic tang of the fluids leaving my body filled my senses. I felt liquids rushing from my nose, down my cheek, and into my mouth from overactive tear ducts working to try and clear out the foreign object. My performance reliability plummeted, and I lost consciousness for several seconds. When I finally became aware of my surroundings again, I heard the poker being placed back into the furnace. My body, despite the total control Kevan had over it, was shaking. 
+
+The pain.
+
+ I can't breathe. I've never felt this level of pain before. I think I'm going to be sick. I'd normally shut off my pain sensors before it got this bad.
+ 
+
+
+
+Just fucking kill me. Please.
+ 
+
+
+
+Everything in my remaining eye was cloudy and difficult to focus on between the constant stabbing pain in my left socket and the sympathetic fluid buildup in my right. My tear ducts were working overtime, and I wish I had a way to tell them to stop. I could fake crying but when there was something irritating the fragile organ, that fluid discharge was involuntary.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Mm, no, I don't think so. Give me a name and I'll consider it,"" I heard Kevan say. I said that out loud? Oh fuck. 
+ 
+
+
+
+This is it. 
+ 
+
+
+
+This is where I give up. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I worried I might spill Rayne's name or the University in order to save my own skin. Say anything to get the pain to stop. If that happened, I'm not sure I could ever forgive myself. In order to counteract that potential outcome, I started repeating to myself that Kevan would not release me if I gave Rayne up. That I would just condemn them to a potentially horrific death much like mine.  I couldn't do that to Rayne. I 
+
+liked
+
+ Rayne.
+ 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I heard the door open behind me, the quiet creak I had listened to several times over the past few days was familiar enough to identify. So, we are taking a break then. I had time to try to pull myself together. To pretend to be something other than a screaming ball of pain and agony. Underneath the sound of my heavy breathing and sobbing, I could hear footsteps, soft and nearly silent behind me. I heard the pitch change as soft soled shoes moved from hardwood floor to the thin rug. What I hadn't expected was the gasp of surprise, the sound of something meaty hitting a solid object before it came crashing to the ground in front of me. Through my tears, I could barely make out Kevan's form as it was drug away and I felt panic well up in my chest. No. NO. No,
+
+ no, no, don't kill him.
+
+ Don't kill him, please. That's mine. 
+
+He's mine.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Hands were on me, touching gently in places that weren't injured. I felt something touch the cables connected to my DataPort, briefly, before moving away again. The lock on my feed access came undone and I was instantly flooded with a large presence as it rummaged through my frozen processes, assessing damage. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm here.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+The feed voice felt familiar. Relief filled me. The hand touched the cables in my DataPort again, this time a firm grasp and hard yank and the tension in my body relaxed. I reached for my pain sensors as I felt myself tipping to the side, gravity pulling at me. I couldn't find th-
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Involuntary Shutdown... Attempting to Restart]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+..
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+..
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+[Restart Successful]
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I came online again sitting slumped over the arm of the couch with Three kneeling in front of me. I quickly turned my pain sensors down when moving my gaze to it caused the stabbing in my damaged eye to start up again. Three moved to sit next to me on the couch, its hand grabbing mine as I sat up and scanned the room. I didn't see Kevan anywhere and that oddly upset me.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Where's Kevan?""  I asked out loud. My voice had an odd twinge to it. Almost panicked.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Downstairs in the-Cade?""
+ 
+
+
+
+I was up and stumbling my way to the door without another word. Even with my pain sensors turned down, my foot screamed in protest with each step, and it was enough to cause moderate discomfort. I had little to no depth-perception with only one eye, so I was stupidly reaching out with one arm to find the railing to guide myself down the dark staircase. I could hear Three following behind me closely, and I wondered what it thought about how I was acting. It probably thought I had gone mad in the few days I had been down here, held hostage by Kevan Pallav.
+ 
+
+
+
+I found him sitting in a chair in what I would have called a dining room from any of the shows Azi and I watched together. The chair was pulled out and turned away from the big wooden table it was a matching set for. Kevan was tied to the chair, or his arms were. When he looked up at me, I saw a flash of recognition and then fear crossed his face. Three had been smart and stuffed a dish towel in his mouth to keep him quiet. I'm not sure it knew about the StillWater override codes, but I was thankful for that weapon to be taken away from him. I stopped in front of Kevan and just stared at his face for a long time through my one remaining eye. His eyes became glassy as the seconds passed by and a disobedient tear escaped from a corner, sliding down his cheek.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Cade, 
+
+Three started in the feed, then hesitated. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it wasn't sure how it wanted to handle me. I could feel Azi in my feed, a reassuring presence after everything I'd been through the last few days, watching me with the same bated breath feeling I got from Three. I had forgotten how nice it was to share feed space with someone. How much closer they felt. How much easier it was to read emotions this way. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi was worried. Stressed, but mostly worried. About me, I guess. I wondered how long it had waited before asking Three to come down and find me and concluded that it was probably after the previously mentioned seventy-eight-hour time frame. From Three, I could feel a similar worry, maybe less intense, but also something else I had a hard time naming. Conflicted maybe. I accessed my energy weapon settings, dialing them up as far as they'd go. This wasn't quite how I had planned to do this. Well, I didn't actually have a plan, but I definitely didn't see it ending like this. With Kevan sitting bound to a chair and gagged to prevent speech. 
+ 
+
+
+
+I half expected Three to stop me. To save the human. To grab my arm and push it away from the monster in front of me, or to push me out of the way to keep me from hurting him. Instead, it let me go through with it, cold and unfeeling. I'll never forget the look that crossed Kevan's face when he realized he was going to die. The wide eyes and tear-streaked face as he frantically tried to speak through the dish towel stuffed in his mouth. How my fist pressed up against his chin, almost a perfect fit together. Like I was made to do this. I wondered what my face looked like when I sent the command to my energy weapon to fire. Did I look angry or scared? The jerk of my arm as it executed the command brought my attention back to the events unfolding before me. The events I had planned to see through. The odd sound that came from Kevan's throat as charged particles seared through his lower jaw and up into his brain did something to my organics, and I flagged it to review later. It was like someone flipped a switch and Kevan just...shut off right there in front of me. No dramatics. Just a simple on, off. I had expected the odd body movement I had seen in the media when someone dies from a head injury, but...I guess that doesn't always happen. Lifeless eyes stared back at me with a slack, almost bored expression. An immense weight lifted itself from my chest and I could finally breathe easily.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Let's go,"" I felt Three's hand on my shoulder, gently pulling me away from the corpse. I stared at Kevan a few seconds longer, watching red fluid leak out from underneath his chin, before turning and following Three.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+None of us spoke on the way back to Azi's hull. I had stolen a simple shirt from Kevan Pallav's laundry room and pulled it over my tortured body, being careful not to overly irritate the burned flesh on my chest and stomach. Once we got back to Azi, I knew I'd be going straight to its Medical System. My internal systems were reporting a lot of damage that needed to be 'addressed as soon as possible' and yeah, I agree. None of it on its own would kill me though, so that was a relief.
+ 
+
+
+
+I didn't care if I got any weird looks walking next to Three on the station with the giant gory hole in my face and whatever swelling was present. My energy weapon ports were visible as well, so at least the messed-up face would attract most, if not all, the attention from onlookers. Station Security didn't try to stop us. In fact, most people seemed to give us a wide berth. I heard several loud exclamations and obscenities while doing so.
+ 
+
+
+
+As we got close to Azi's physical form, I could feel more of it through the feed as it reached out. It reminded me a bit of how it felt when a particular client would climb on me, resting his whole-body weight against mine. We had tried it the other way around, but he had said I was not heavy enough to get the same relaxing effect he insisted I'd get if he were to smother me. 
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm going to need you to back off a bit,
+
+ I said as the extra two percent of Azi's attention on me made me stumble just outside its exterior airlock. I felt it recoil, leaving nothing but a feather light touch.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm sorry,
+
+ it said quickly, bleeding more worry and anxiousness into our private shared space. Three glanced at me, obviously feeling similar things in its own private feed space with the massive transport AI.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Don't be angry with the
+
+ Azimuth
+
+,"" Three said softly. The airlock door cycled, letting us into the ship's hull. I didn't say anything to Three, mostly because I was tired and didn't feel like explaining that I was not angry with Azi. I made my way to Azi's Medical Suite, stripping my clothes off before crawling onto MedSys cradle and initiating a shutdown.
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+When I came back online several hours later, I felt Azi press against me in the feed gently, almost like a friend giving a hug. I found myself smiling weakly at that and did my best to press back into it. The emotional readout I got from Azi now was just relief with a small bit of worry. Relieved that I was here and worried because it was unsure how angry I was at it for not listening to me.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm sorry,
+
+ Azi finally said with much of what I'd call the feed equivalent of hand wringing. I shook my head, not bothering to sit up just yet. The medical cradle was warm and comfortable with its form fitted padding to keep the patient still.
+ 
+
+
+
+
+I'm not angry with you,
+
+ I said in our private feed. I almost heard a literal sigh run through the ship's hull. The worry that came from Azi unwound itself, becoming a more baseline normal much like my own. I felt Three as it turned its attention to our shared space to send me a greeting. I returned it, letting my emotions bleed through with it. Content. Tired.
+ 
+
+
+
+To my private channel with Azi, I sent, 
+
+thank you for saving my life, 
+
+and it pinged back acknowledgement, pressing a bit more against me in the feed.
+ 
+
+
+
+I waited to deliver my thanks in person to Three. Once I was up and moving, I found it on its way to or from the crew lounge. It spent a lot of time in there, so I wasn't sure which way it had been going. We didn't nearly collide into each other because I had seen it through one of Azi's hallway cameras before I turned the corner. I sent a ping which Three replied to instantly, its eyes looking over my left shoulder.
+ 
+
+
+
+""Thank you,"" I said after a short pause. I could see one corner of Three's face twitch slightly, a small smile coming to life. ""Without you... I don't think I would have got out of there alive. Thank you.""
+ 
+
+
+
+""You are most welcome. I am glad we were able to step in before..."" it trailed off into a solemn silence. Three didn't need to finish the sentence. I know the next move would have been losing my other eye and finally my death if I hadn't given up Rayne's full name. I had taken up too much of Kevan Pallav's time and he wasn't getting anywhere with me.
+ 
+
+
+
+The rest of the trip back to the PanSystem wasn't eventful. I spent most of it watching media with Azi and Three, who surprisingly, had a decent collection to share, and doing more target practice. One large question I still hadn't managed to answer for myself was what I had planned to do after this, and I think I didn't plan because I didn't think I'd actually live to tell the tale. I wouldn't have if it weren't for Three and Azi. I talked with Azi at great length about what I should do next. The University had a program for refugees to get education at a nominal rate, so I could go to school. That still sounds really weird to me. Even more so out loud. There were legal night clubs I could apply to work in, if using my body to make a living was something I still wanted to do. Azi assured me I'd have more protection than when working at The Cosmos. It was an option, although not one I was sure I wanted to do.
+ 
+
+
+
+Azi casually mentioned the possibility of me joining its crew for further missions to Serth and any other Corporation Rim locations it has assignments to. The mention was so casual I didn't even think much about it at first. Then it kept talking about how I could potentially help and gave scenarios like helping other comfortunits by getting into the Hub System connected to the brothel and sneaking them out. I found that I wanted to at least try. If having me there could make the transition slightly less frightening and confusing for another rogue construct as mine was, then yes, sign me up. 
+ 
+
+
+
+Joining Azi's crew also meant spending more time with Rayne which I think was a good thing. I mean, maybe, if we ended up actually becoming something more than two pining idiots that watched media together. I liked the idea of seeing where we ended up. I fully planned to take Rayne up on the ""we'll try it"" offer they had given to me before Azi and I left for our trip to Serth. I fully planned to take it up as soon as we docked at the station. Stars, I hope they weren't doing anything important at that moment. I'm not sure how Rayne feels about voyeurs.  So, I guess that's my plan then. Dock at the University station, find Rayne and bone them, then let them know I wish to join Azi's crew. I could feel Azi's excitement over my plan. The plan to join its crew, not the plan to bone Rayne. (That'd be kind of weird if it was excit-you know what, never mind.)
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Summary of skipped text: Cade is tortured"
+40692426,Safety Fairy,['theAsh0'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Sorry Not Sorry, space sesame street",English,2022-07-31,Completed,2023-01-16,"1,644",2/2,27,89,4,346,"['The_Hawks_Rye', 'Riannonkat2000', 'myriadism', 'FaerieFyre', 'Unknown66', 'zirna813', 'JoCat', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'SonglordsBug', 'BiblioMatsuri', '13Doctor', 'EvenstarFalling', 'sorrow_key', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'roimonamour', 'Eilinel', 'farawaykingdom', 'i_cant_say', 'Ihasafandom', 'Magechild', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'naturegirl293', 'bookwyrm', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'MashpotatoeQueen', 'NonBinaryStars', 'equusregia', 'shanalittle', 'ErinPtah', 'NinthCat', 'sareliz', 'Drel_Murn', 'audzilla', 'Ook', 'Bibli', 'psycho_karma', 'Vainenpoika', 'ArcalRanem', 'Chyoatas', 'caramelchameleon', 'desmnathus', 'Ixis', 'gunpowderandlove', 'AuntyMatter', 'Sister_Aurelia', 'gooligan', 'AkaMissK', 'PickAName']",[],"I storm into the biome just a little too fast, then grumble a little too loudly, ""stupid Security.""
+
+From his favorite spot in the seating area, Gurathin startles out of the feed and gives me a shocked look. Which, okay, that might actually be and odd thing to say when you're a MurderBot set on still doing its job minus all the murdering. Also, I really need to work on that one-second delay so I can curb these impulses to tell people things. At any rate, I really shouldn't have picked Gurathin to tell things. He may know how to shut up usually, but if he's going to jump to the wrong conclusions...
+
+I scoff. ""Not like that.  Station  Security.""
+
+Gurathin blinks, then something like understanding dawns on his face. I don't think I like that. ""They didn't want your help?""
+
+"" They said they did."" That wasn't the problem. The problem was. ""I just needed to wear the uniform.""
+
+""I see.""
+
+I'm not sure he does. ""It's bright yellow and has logos.""
+
+It also had the letters 'Security' in giant reflective letters on the back. I am not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it reminds me of my armor. On the other hand, it reminds me of my armor.
+
+No, I think I do know how I feel about that. ""Fuck them. They can just deal with their influx of immigrants and visitors themselves. See if I care.""
+
+I don't, by the way. I was just worried about agents hiding themselves within that influx. 
+
+""Hm."" Gurathin adds, helpfully. Then goes back to his reading without further comment.
+
+So apparently all this new-found freedom and safety has all sorts of stupid side-effects. One of them is, apparently, that I wanted more out of this conversation? I know, I'm as confused by this as you. At any rate, I'm left fuming and a little confused and left to my own devices. After a bit of deliberation, I sit down somewhere off to the side and try to calm down with some media as well.
+
+Which honestly is what I should have done in the first place.
+
+A suspicious 23.4 minutes later, just as the credits of Sanctuary Moon episode 254 are rolling, Gurathin taps my feed. ""I think I have something that might help. Could you wait a few minutes?"" Then he gets up and leaves.
+
+Gurathin lives right over this biome. It's a very nice biome, and he comes here often. It's also one of my favorites, because apart from Gurathin there's not usually anyone in here. I'm still super annoyed to be left alone. But that's probably because I'm still super annoyed at everything. I have calmed down enough to realize that, at least. And to be a little curious what Gurathin is looking for. A drone follows him going up to his apartment, then watches as he rummages around in his storage for so long my next episode is almost done when he finally finds it. It's small enough to fit into his hand, however, and I haven't gotten a clear look at it until he's back in front of me and shows the item.
+
+It's not that small after all; it just rolls up. A flat image almost as big as his hand, depicting a figure in pink and sparkles, with a big head, lots of hair and wings. They're also waving a stick. There's more colors in the background. 
+
+Gurathin looks almost excited. ""This little thing counts as an alternative uniform.""
+
+That seems odd. I blink at the image again. It doesn't really look anything like the imaging or visual language used by Station Security. ""Why would this count as a uniform?""
+
+Gurathin actually smiles at me before he remembers to look away. ""A short time after I came to live on the station, there was also an influx of refugees. A lot of young ones too, and Security had trouble dealing with them. Not so much because they were trouble but--well, you know. Security does have a bad name in the CR, so a lot of children would run and hide from any officer trying to approach them. Even, or especially when they arrived on their own and without speaking the language.""
+
+Gurathin takes the image and holds it out against his torso. ""So anyway, they asked me and some other people for advice, and we came up with this. Something to wear on your regular clothes, but recognizable.""
+
+""An adhesive logo aimed at kids."" 
+
+""Not a logo. This is the main character from a popular children's show from the Rim."" Gurathin tries to hand the thing to me. I don't take it. Not yet. ""It's merchandise. Buying it in large quantities and using it was a bit of a legal issue. But we worked it out. And the show--it was popular for decades. And sure it was corporate drivel, but it featured a lot of safety information aimed at young children. We all knew this character, and trusted them to have our best interest in mind.""
+
+""It looks stupid."" I scowl at it. ""And it's very bright.""
+
+""That's the point. You have to be visible."" Gurathin agrees. ""But if you stick it over your thigh pocket, it'll be at the right height and it shouldn't be too much of a bother.""
+
+I guess he has a point there. Regular-size humans never really look down. I know this for a fact. I also know that to me, with my drones, I can see the eye-sore fine. Still, it's a lot less bad than the uniform with the stupid reflective jacket. I tentatively touch the sticker as I run a search for the show. Gurathin is right. It's still running. And it might actually be worth a try to watch it myself. ""You're sure that this counts?""
+
+""It should still."" He agrees happily.
+
+--
+
+Officer Donar gave me a funny look when I pointed at my sticker and claimed I'd brought my own uniform. But he didn't object further. So the next cycle I got to stare from the side as ship after ship filled our dock with traffic. It was actually nice, because nobody looked at me. And most of the humans that required assistance talked to the human Security Officers instead. They probably didn't even know I was with them. I didn't stand out at all, in my dark hood and pants.
+
+I kind of like that. I wasn't there for the regular refugees or visitors anyway. Only for any corporate spy trying to fit in. I'd notice them easily, even if they did notice me back. And I was in the perfect position if anything went down.
+
+Then something very weird happened.
+
+A young human stepped up and pulled at my pant's leg. (To get my attention, I guess. Which wasn't really needed, because they already had all my attention. I just hadn't moved yet, because any young human not from the Mensah clan usually stayed clear of me. (I'm not sure it was because of the 'SecUnit' tag in my feed, or just because I'm big and menacing.))
+
+Anyway, they pulled on my pants, and I let them. And I was glad, because it turned out to be a SecUrity Emergency. ""Are you with the Safety Fairy?"" Which was the name of the figure from the show. Go figure.
+
+When I agreed, under my breath, with their very nice tagline: 'Safety First,' they let out a relieved sigh. 
+
+They pointed towards a darker seating area. ""Me and my little sib, we've lost sight of our parents...""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+wrote a follow-up and 6 a.m. because that's where my brain's at apparently.
+
+Gurathin nearly drops his position in the code when the ping hits him.
+
+A genuine ping, by the Sweet Stars.
+
+Still, he manages to save his position and close out, before promptly responding:  what's wrong. 
+
+ Nothing.  SecUnit responds, a lot faster.  Why would anything be wrong? 
+
+Gurathin sits on the urge to rise to that bait. For now, it's good enough that SecUnit is not actively getting shot at. Instead, he borrows from Brahadwaj's tactics. They seem to have worked well for her, after all: he changes the subject--Or, makes a wild guess. Whichever proves right.  Did the uniform thing work out? 
+
+
+ Yeah, the stupid sticker got approved. Got to stand around and watch the new arrivals. And hardly anyone noticed me or tried to talk to me, so I got actual security work done for once.  
+
+
+
+ Oh. Great. 
+
+
+
+ Yeah. Great. 
+
+
+They sit there, staring at each other in the feed for a while. Gurathin clears his voice.  Nobody   bothered you? 
+
+A proverbial shrug.  Not really. Just a few kids. Now and then...  The conversation lulls again, which is nothing for SecUnit.  They seemed weirdly glad to talk to me. --They probably didn't realize I was a SecUnit. 
+
+Oh. So he did guess right. Maybe not,  Gurathin agrees calmly.  It's in your feed-id and all, but the younger ones might not read yet. 
+
+
+ Right. 
+
+
+It stalls again.
+
+This time, the pause is so long Gurathin starts looking around on his desk, moving little things around. The little figurine Ratthi gave him as a joke, his hardly-ever used pen. The three pieces of physical paper, and a tablet.
+
+ Ok Cool, It starts, then tapers off again. 
+
+Gurathin tries not to show his annoyance. The silence stretches regardless. This time, when it continues, Gurathin is actually playing with the idea of reopening his work. 
+
+
+ Well, gotta go. 
+
+
+Gurathin looks around, stupidly.  Okay? 
+
+ Yeah... It manages to deliver in a monotone that suggests it was not at all the one that had called him, and then let him hang for.. fourteen minutes? 
+
+It pauses again, then delivers, in that cheery voice meant for children four-to-eight:  Safety First! 
+
+Then closes their connection.
+
+Gurathin blinks at his wall, for a few puzzled seconds. Then he smiles. 
+
+""You're welcome."""
+44306968,Murderbot of the Rings,['Eowyn7023'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,"The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (TV 2022)",,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Galadriel | Artanis, Sauron | Mairon, Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot / Tolkien cross-over, Murderbot vs. Sauron, Last Alliance of Elves and Men, The Siege of Barad-dur (Tolkien), Galadriel uses prayer to the Valar and to the One to summon Murderbot to Middle Earth, Can Murderbot get the One Ring from Sauron?, Is it a Combat SecUnit or is it Sauron in a big suit of unpowered armor?",English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,"2,498",1/1,10,40,1,190,"['just_gettin_bi', 'CactusNoir', 'JumpingJackFlash', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Thisismethereader', 'MellonLord', 'rokhal', 'merelypuddles', 'FiftyCookies', 'dancernerd', 'Sparkledragon04', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'Xarahel', 'lilykep', 'hyephyep', 'wisteria53', 'Deris666', 'BlueStarAtSunrise', 'jotc', 'windowonagreatworld', 'Kepler_186f', 'lauris', 'MommyMayI', 'MercySewerPyro', 'Alonza_Alzimora', 'PickAName', 'sareliz', 'Nuredhel', 'AuntyMatter', 'Magechild']",[],"I am standing in a circle sketched out in chalk. Weird writing runs parallel to the circle edges. Wooden walls, wooden floors. Roof made out of some kind of planetary flora. The place stinks. No sanitation. I turn my scent sensors down. A female human stands outside the circle. She wears a long white dress, and has trendy designer ears. The surroundings look like they are out of a pre-space flight historical drama, the kind with horses and knights and wizards and dragons. This is not a ship or a space station. No-one can afford to build anything out of wood in space. I might see a wooden desk now and then, or a sculpture, as a luxury. This must be a planet. I shift my weight. Seems close to 1 g. How the hell did I end up on a planet with this person? The last thing I remember is watching media in the crew lounge with ART, Episode 217 of Sanctuary Moon. Fuck. How did I get here? I hope that this isn't some sort of ART prank.
+
+Wait, is this some sort of hallucination? Has something hijacked my brain? Downloaded an immersive media project where I think I am in a game?
+
+Yeah. Immersive game. That makes the most sense. I have never liked games. Goddammit, ART!
+
+""Who are you?"" the woman says.
+
+""I'm a security unit, a SecUnit.""
+
+""SecUnit."" She pronounces that like she has never heard the word 'security', the word 'unit', or a word shortened to the most relevant syllable before. ""Is that your name?""
+
+""My name is private. You can call me SecUnit. What am I doing here?""
+
+""I prayed to the Valar and the One for help fighting our foe. Then you appeared.""
+
+""And who are you?""
+
+""Galadriel.""
+
+""Why can I speak your language?""
+
+""Is this not your language?""
+
+""No. The syntax is all wrong. Someone uploaded a patch for me, I guess, to make this game easier to play. Although I don't know why the game is written in another language.""
+
+""This is not a game.""
+
+""You would say that. You're an NPC.""
+
+""What?""
+
+""A non-player character.""
+
+""A what?"" The woman shook her head. ""Never mind. Can you help us?""
+
+""Maybe. What is your problem?""
+
+""Our land is threatened by the Dark Lord Sauron, who wields a terrible Ring of Power. He has taken control of the three Elven rings, and of the nine rings given to Men. He controls the minds of his army. He is a threat to all the peoples of Middle Earth.""
+
+""So, are you offering me a short-term contract? I do security, not assassinations.""
+
+""We are in desperate straits.""
+
+""I don't know much about human politics, but have you tried a corporate takeover?""
+
+""A what?""
+
+""It's how power is transferred from corporation to corporation. If you want the assets a corporation has, you buy its stock until you have a controlling interest.""
+
+""What is a corporation?""
+
+""I guess we aren't in the Corporate Rim, then?""
+
+""This is Middle Earth.""
+
+""That's the name of your planet?""
+
+""Are you asking about our Evening Star?""
+
+""No, I am asking about this gravity well. This dirtball. Where we are standing."" I stomp the wood floor under me, which is covered in more planetary flora, for emphasis.
+
+""As I said, this is Middle Earth.""
+
+""Okay. Whatever. Have you tried a military solution, if you can't gain legal control of their assets?""
+
+""We are in the midst of a war, if that is what you are asking.""
+
+""I don't know a lot about military tactics, but it can't be that different from security. If you explain what is going on, maybe I can help.""
+
+""The Dark Lord is in the fortress Barad-dur. We have him surrounded by the armies of Men and Elves, but the siege has been unbroken for seven years now.""
+
+""And the other side hasn't starved to death yet?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""I think this person knew that you were coming if they just happened to have seven years of food on hand. Can you just wait longer? Maybe in another seven years they will run out of food.""
+
+""We are running out of food, too. Everyone is in the army, no-one is farming.""
+
+""How are the enemy doing for ammunition?""
+
+""For what?""
+
+""You know, stuff to shoot people with.""
+
+""They seem to have an endless supply of arrows.""
+
+""You should look at your internal security. Someone definitely told this person that you were coming, or they wouldn't have supplies like that on hand -- Wait, did you say arrows?""
+
+""Yes. What else is there to shoot?""
+
+""No artillery? No guns?""
+
+""I have never heard of these things""
+
+""I am going to kill ART when I get home. Did it really think that I would be amused by playing a game in a stone age society?""
+
+""Again, this is no game for us. The fate of our world is at stake.""
+
+""Okay. Do you want the Dark Lord, or the Ring?""
+
+""We want both. Sauron must die. We must destroy the Ring.""
+
+""I am not willing to do an assassination for you, but I could do a retrieval. I could go in and get this ring that you want, and the person if I can find them, and bring them back, and then you can destroy the ring, then negotiate with the person, or put them in prison, or indenture them, or kill them, or whatever. It wouldn't be on me what happens."" But it would be on me. If this woman in the white dress wanted him dead, which seemed to be the case, then turning the Dark Lord over would be the same as killing them. So should I refuse to help, or what? Maybe I should just get the ring.
+
+""Sauron will be wearing the Ring.""
+
+""OK. Then I need to retrieve the person. What kind of security forces does he have inside his compound? Or wait. Can you get this person--""
+
+""Sauron.""
+
+""--this Sauron to come out and talk to you?""
+
+""You mean, under a flag of truce?""
+
+""Yeah. Like that. As long as he doesn't bring more than 20 or 30 soldiers, I should be able to get to him. Probably even keep him in one piece.""
+
+""Attack under a flag of truce? That is unthinkable.""
+
+""OK, OK, calm down, it was just a suggestion. So. Back to the forces inside the fortress. Do you have any idea of how big his security force is?""
+
+""Security what?""
+
+""How many soldiers?""
+
+""Thousands. Perhaps tens of thousands.""
+
+Okay. Even if they were unarmed, a thousand soldiers could definitely overwhelm me.
+
+""What about access points?""
+
+""Do you mean doors? The gates are guarded. We know of no other way in.""
+
+Only one controlled access point. Good fortress design. ""Any windows?""
+
+""Only arrow slits.""
+
+""What about the roof?""
+
+""The roof?""
+
+""Yeah, if I could get on top of the tower, would there be a way for me to climb down, bypass a lot of his defenses? Maybe through a ventilation shaft or something?""
+
+Screams erupted outside, and yells of ""Sauron! It's Sauron!"" Galadriel ran out of the little shack to look. I followed.
+
+Shit. Shit shit shit. They had a Combat SecUnit. The biggest I'd ever seen, humanoid in shape, four meters high. I gave it the designation Hostile 1.
+
+But wait. Hostile 1 wasn't shooting. Not even arrows. Maybe it was out of ammo. It was just waving this round hammer thing around. A hammer that was big and spiked. It was sending people flying before it even touched them. Maybe a force field?
+
+Well, it was obvious what my job was. I ran at Hostile 1. It was curiously slow. I'd never seen a Combat SecUnit move that slowly unless their software had crashed. It wasn't even looking at me, the most dangerous thing on the battlefield. Okay. I could take out a giant broken Combat SecUnit. Probably.
+
+I pulled the rocket launcher off my back, took aim, and fired.
+
+The results were shocking. Hostile 1 just fell over, and didn't get up.
+
+Was that it? A single shot to bring it down?
+
+No, of course not. It was getting up now. Very slowly. Maybe I had done some damage at least. Some pieces had fallen off it, and some of its human parts were missing, but it was mostly intact. I shot another rocket.
+
+This one bounced off. It blew up some soldiers when it landed on the ground.
+
+Fuck. Some kind of force field. One that learned.
+
+I was going to have to do this the hard way. I dropped the rocket launcher.
+
+""Get the Ring! Get the Ring!"" Galadriel was yelling at me. What ring? The tiny gold ring that I could barely see on the outside of its armored gauntlet? OK. It would be faster to just rip its arm off, or its gauntlet off, than to mess around trying to pry jewelry loose from the gauntlet.
+
+Galadriel should have explained this before. I didn't know what was the higher priority target, getting the ring or bringing down the Combat SecUnit. And I still didn't know how -- or if -- I was going to retrieve Sauron.
+
+A bunch of people armed with swords were rushing Hostile 1. Swords were useless, I thought, unless there was a thousand of them. But I could use the people for cover to get closer. I wondered if my beam weapon would work, or if the force field would block it.
+
+I ran closer, aimed for the upper arm, and shot. The arm with the ring came right off, to my surprise.
+
+Hostile 1 grabbed its damaged arm stump with its other arm and screamed. Huh. Did this thing have pain sensors, like me? And no way to dial down the pain? Maybe it was just a human, genetically engineered to be four meters tall, wearing some kind of armor. Was it powered or unpowered armor?
+
+Then they bent over, picked up their arm off the ground before I could grab it, and started fiddling around trying to move the ring from the detached arm to their other hand. Really tough to do one-handed. They shoved their helmet off. Human, possibly genetically modified, as I suspected. They put what was left of their arm in their mouth, trying to use their teeth to pull the ring off the gauntlet. I was convinced now that this was just a tall human in armor, not a combat SecUnit. Maybe this was actually Sauron, the person that I was supposed to retrieve.
+
+I tried to take Sauron's legs off with the remaining shot from my beam weapon, which should immobilize him without killing him, but the beam bounced and cut some soldiers in half. The force field had learned again.
+
+I had to get in there and get the ring. I still wasn't sure if Sauron or the ring was more dangerous. Maybe it was the combination that was bad.
+
+He was twice as tall as I was, but I could still get to most of him. I jumped, and grabbed onto his belt, then climbed what was left of his armor. I got one hand around his detached arm, and pulled.
+
+I had pulled the arm out of his mouth, but his undamaged hand was holding tight to the rest of the detached arm. I put my feet on his chest, both hands on the detached arm, and pulled harder, putting my back into it.
+
+That pried the arm loose from Sauron, but now I was in an immense amount of pain. I turned my pain sensors down fast. I fell to the ground clutching the detached arm, but it seemed that I was on fire. I rolled away from Sauron, trying to put the fire out. It wasn't working. Fuck. I kept rolling. Maybe someone would throw water on me. I was losing a lot of body mass, or rather my body mass was converting itself into charcoal. But I was still curled around the arm, which would probably catch fire itself any second.
+
+
+Performance reliability at 57% and dropping
+
+
+Someone was trying to get the arm from me. I wouldn't let go. I heard someone calling me.
+
+""SecUnit? SecUnit? You can let go now. Sauron is dead. We need the arm. We have to destroy the ring."" It was Galadriel. I couldn't see, but I recognized the voice. I let go.
+
+
+Performance reliability at 12% and dropping
+Shutdown imminent
+
+
+I woke up in the medbay. Everything fucking hurt, even with my pain sensors set low. It felt like all of my flesh had been burned off me. Wait, had that actually happened? Was I still in the stupid game?
+
+""SecUnit?"" It was ART.
+
+""Was that supposed to be your idea of a fun thing to do?""
+
+""What are you talking about?""
+
+""That stupid game. Did you put me in it?""
+
+""No. I did not put you in any game. You disappeared from the crew lounge, and when you reappeared you were on fire. We put out the fire, but you were badly, badly burned. I wasn't sure that you were going to survive at first. We've had you in the burn treatment module for over a week now.""
+
+""That was a truly miserable experience. I was in this stupid game, a medieval game, where I had to fight some four-meter-tall person in armor. It was a tough fight, obviously. I didn't even get paid. Fuck Galadriel. Fuck Sauron. Fuck Middle Earth.""
+
+There was a pause from ART, then he said, ""I know who you are talking about.""
+
+""Huh?""
+
+""There's a book, written before space flight. One of the heroes is Galadriel, and the villain is Sauron. It takes place in Middle Earth. Was there something about a Ring?""
+
+""Yeah, Galadriel kept saying that I needed to get the ring. I cut the arm off the person in armor, and then we fought for who had the detached arm with the ring. And then Sauron set me on fire. So I was in a stupid game based on this stupid book?""
+
+""I don't think you were in a game. You came back with too much damage. Did Galadriel ever explain what you were doing there?""
+
+""She said that they prayed for help.""
+
+""Interesting. Check your message queue.""
+
+I checked. There was the usual boring notices, and a letter. I read the letter.
+
+""Dear SecUnit, We were able to defeat Sauron with your help. Unfortunately, we lost the Ring when a careless human dropped it in a river. So we may need to call on you for help again someday. Thank you for saving Middle Earth. Galadriel of the Noldor, Daughter of the Golden House of Finarfin, Commander of the Northern Army of the Elven High King.""
+
+If that Galadriel woman ever prays for help again, and I show up, I am leaving her stupid planet Middle Earth to its stupid fate with stupid Sauron. I am not getting burned twice."
+44296930,Contraband,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,667,1/1,12,70,null,296,"['Preemptivekarma', 'FallingInGrace', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Irrya', 'musicalmeerkat', 'GloriousGarbage', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FinchCollector', 'VegaCoyote', 'opalescent_potato', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Magechild', 'Thisismethereader', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'FaerieFyre', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'ghostlysecretary', 'Kethrua', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'soyle', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'cashmeredragon', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'WalkingBird', 'reading_tsc', 'MommyMayI', 'Bobmarley_2', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'hummus_tea', 'tabya', 'Zannper', 'isilee', 'desmnathus']",[],"""What do you think of that?"" he asked proudly, presenting her with an object.
+
+The body language was weird, which was why I was paying attention to this unfolding scene at the edge of one of the security camera views. I couldn't see what he had. All I could tell was it something he could easily hold in one hand. I couldn't see her face, either. She was just outside the camera's range. They probably thought no one could see them.
+
+I could hear them, though, and I could hear the skepticism in her voice. ""It's ... small.""
+
+""What?"" he blurted. ""No, it's not!""
+
+""It is! And it's funny-shaped.""
+
+""What? No!""
+
+I still couldn't see what the object was, but I was getting a moderate-probability hit on insulting language, even though the woman's tone didn't match. She sounded confused. But the man was definitely defensive, voice registering increasing stress.
+
+For 0.02 seconds, I debated whether I had to do something. It was my job, right, but on the other hand, they weren't doing anything (yet) I needed to stop. Even SecSystem wasn't saying anything. I finally got a good look at the thing in his hand as he backed up a step. It was a rod a few centimeters in diameter, with shaped ends, one of which looked like a base and- Yeah, okay, I knew what that was. Fuck.
+
+(It was kind of funny shaped, but what do I know? (Well, aside from an extensive database of prohibited items. This one was an outlier.))
+
+I left my ready position and moved to the site of the escalating confrontation. When I got there, he had lifted the object like he was considering using it as a weapon. The woman's expression was only now registering the danger. To be fair, he had yet to settle into a good stance to swing from, but then again he was a contract labor dipshit who knew fuck-all about fighting. They don't teach combative skills to most humans. That would be dumb.
+
+I snatched the thing out of his upraised hand before he could do anything stupid(er) with it. He saw me and jerked aside so hard he tripped over his own feet, ending on his ass on the floor. I looked at the thing. Yeah, it was a fucking dildo (one of the few applications where 'fucking' is literally true). Aside from being contraband, it also represented misuse of the fabricators, because I recognized the material it was made from. It matched any of the thousands of other machine parts people created here.
+
+To her, I said, ""Return to your workstation."" I'd already checked her schedule. Her break would be over in thirteen seconds, although allowance was made for moving from designated break areas (which this was not one) to the workstation. So, yeah, it was an infraction I could do something about, but I wasn't going to because I didn't have to. She hadn't done anything wrong. She scurried away as he got to his feet.
+
+""Not you.""
+
+He froze.
+
+I could have let him go, too. I could have just tossed the contraband into the nearest recycler, tell SecSystem the incident was resolved, and that would be that. But he'd had it raised like he was going to do something with it. And I hadn't had the impression she'd requested this.
+
+He'd made me interrupt my show and come over here to deal with this. Why couldn't he just use the sexbots like everyone else, instead of bothering the other humans? ""You have been reported for possession of contraband and misuse of company fabrication equipment. You will report to your supervisor for disciplinary action.""
+
+His shoulders slumped. He made some anatomically impossible suggestions for me that just underscored that I had made the right decision. Then he trudged off to find his supervisor. I was left holding the object. Ew.
+
+I threw it in the nearest recycler (after appending a few photos to the report I'd already submitted)."
+44296750,Graffiti,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,556,1/1,6,69,null,274,"['Preemptivekarma', 'FallingInGrace', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'DimitriLasker', 'musicalmeerkat', 'GloriousGarbage', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FinchCollector', 'VegaCoyote', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Magechild', 'Thisismethereader', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'beeayy', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Kethrua', 'entropy_muffin', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'soyle', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'WalkingBird', 'reading_tsc', 'MommyMayI', 'Bobmarley_2', 'hummus_tea', 'tabya', 'petwheel', 'Zannper', 'isilee', 'desmnathus', 'elmofirefic']",[],"The security camera was badly positioned. All it showed me was the top of someone's head for a few seconds as they moved in front of the big sign out in front of the facility that announced, per local regulation, who owned and operated the place. No one was supposed to be out there.
+
+SecSystem dispatched me to investigate. I should have ignored it, but I was curious. Also, it's very hard to disobey a direct order without raising suspicions.
+
+A smallish human darted away as soon as I came into view. Stupid. I was much faster. I caught her in four strides, grabbing one upper arm and pulling her off her feet. She yelped in pain, which she shouldn't have. My modules were finely calibrated to allow me to apprehend humans without hurting them. When I set her down, she reached up to cup the shoulder above where I'd seized her. Her expression was one of distress and fear.
+
+Crap. I hadn't meant to hurt her. I queried MedSystem, but at first all it said was that if pain persisted and the patient requested it, bring her in for evaluation. She wasn't going to request it. Evaluation cost money. Treatment cost more. Which was why the MedSystem's default answer was useless. I queried again, using that same bypass code I'd used at the previous place. This time it told me young human's joints were more easily hyperextended than mature ones. Great. I'd hurt a kid. I released her arm, switching quickly to grasp a wad of fabric on her chest.
+
+Now that she was secured, I finally looked back to see what she'd been doing. And that had been to vandalize the sign. She'd added two intersecting globes and under it a triangular shape. Below that was the name of the operating corporation. My lexicon told me the graffiti was a stylized depiction of defecation. Lovely.
+
+But the way the corporation treated people was worse.
+
+My dilemma was what to do about it. I couldn't get the paint off and SecSystem knew I was out here. It was waiting for my report or update even now. If I said she'd gotten away, there would be an investigation. Because how was I so incompetent that I couldn't detain one moderately small human?
+
+If I brought her in, then she'd be penalized in some other way. The directory said vandalism was ten cycles of cleaning duty, but everything here was discretionary. It might be more or less depending on the authority figure's personal taste, connections, or whim, or what favors or cash the girl or her family offered to have the incident overlooked. I don't know what impact having a criminal record has on a human, but in some places it put them in an entirely different (and worse) category of exploitation.
+
+I doubted it would happen to her right away. I was sure I would not escape close questioning if I let her go. So. I made my report to SecSystem. While it was processing the information, I moved the security camera the rest of the way out of position. She watched what I was doing with a puzzled expression. Now there was no visibility at all to the corporate sign. I hauled her inside as directed, but the next vandal would get away with it."
+44296672,Staged,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),attempted murder by staged drug overdose,English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,851,1/1,17,70,null,292,"['Preemptivekarma', 'FallingInGrace', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Valdinia', 'musicalmeerkat', 'GloriousGarbage', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FinchCollector', 'VegaCoyote', 'opalescent_potato', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Magechild', 'Lady_Cassara', 'Thisismethereader', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'FaerieFyre', 'Guppys', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'Kethrua', 'entropy_muffin', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'WalkingBird', 'reading_tsc', 'MommyMayI', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'hummus_tea', 'petwheel', 'Zannper', 'isilee']",[]," 
+
+The body slumped into the gap between toilet and wall in one of the less-used facilities. Drug paraphernalia was arranged neatly nearby. The toilet was empty. His clothes were all on. There was a bruise on his otherwise slack face, one that didn't line up in degree of damage or angle of probable impact with the wall.
+
+I hated him, so I hesitated. He was the reason why I was here, deployed as a replacement unit for another this particular supervisor had ordered to walk into an area to determine if it was safe. It had not been safe.
+
+He managed the facility like he managed the SecUnits, which was why the power had gone out (again). The only reason I'd found him while he was still alive was because we'd been ordered to do a physical head count on staff, since the detection system for the wristbands had gone offline and was refusing to reboot.
+
+I had a lot of experience with workplace suicides (like, a lot; it was the leading cause of workplace death and that's impressive given working conditions). This wasn't a suicide. Obviously, someone or someones had the same opinion of him as I did.
+
+His breathing was faint, heartbeat erratic. Whatever they'd drugged him with would kill him soon. SecSystem was still cutting in and out because there wasn't enough backup power for so-called 'non-essential' systems. Meaning, I could just ... not find him. I could move on, search other areas, and claim I hadn't seen him. In fact, if I just shoved his foot back a bit, no one else would see him unless they came inside, meaning he wouldn't be found until it was definitely too late.
+
+I'd seen the unit I'd replaced - flesh scorched, inorganics fried due to a power discharge likely related to the poorly maintained electrical system. I'd seen the report from SecSystem about how the unit had verbally alerted this specific person about suspected dangerous conditions. His response had been, ""No shit. That's why I'm sending you down there, not me.""
+
+Everyone knew who the problem was here and a lot of them had grievances against him. This guy, the one in charge, was the one insisting on operating the plant despite the dangerous conditions and shoddy equipment. He had cut preventative maintenance entirely and most of maintenance period. They'd lost several workers, too, and had a few with irrecoverable injuries (which is to say, they were still alive, but the MedSystem hadn't been able to fix them back to factory standard or whatever the term was for a human; it happened sometimes, especially to those who couldn't afford full rehab).
+
+He'd never have that problem, though, and likely never had. He hadn't bought this place because he was poor. He was a profit-hungry corporate asshole trying to squeeze every last credit out of this place before it was permanently decommissioned. It didn't matter how many people got toasted or blown up along the way as long as the balance sheet was in his favor. In short: he sucked.
+
+If I saved him, he would continue to suck. There would be an investigation or maybe he'd even seen the perpetrator before he went down. That person would die for having the bravery to do something about him. The rest of us would go back to work under these conditions. Maybe next time, I'd be the one sent to check if an area was safe.
+
+I ought to walk away. I knew that. I tried to tell myself that saving him endangered me. Because I care a lot about staying alive. It had been one of my primary drivers. But the real reason I'd hacked my governor module was ...
+
+Fuck. I reached down and grabbed a fist full of fabric over his chest. I pulled him up and then in so he was adequately supported against me. I couldn't believe it, but I was going to save this asshole. Although, if it turned out there wasn't enough power to operate the MedSystem - well, that would be no one's fault but his own.
+
+Thinking of that, I had an idea. I reached out to MedSystem. It responded disjointedly to the priority code I'd picked up to override its normally rude demeanor. I described his condition and asked it the side effects of head trauma, indicating I wasn't sure how traumatized his head really was. I reviewed the answer. I queried back about the limits of the local MedSystem's ability to repair traumatic brain injuries as I scanned the wall behind the toilet. It was solid enough for what I had in mind.
+
+When MedSystem's feed cut out as the power failed again, SecSystem's did as well, meaning for a few seconds there, I was entirely off-the-record. No shit.
+
+He survived, but whether he would ever be back to 'factory standard' was unknown. They sent him off for that specialized rehabilitation rich people can afford and a number of his workers needed but would never have. In the meantime, his replacement sold the place for salvage and everyone else was assigned healthier work environs."
+44296623,Explosion,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,"1,170",1/1,14,78,null,304,"['Preemptivekarma', 'FallingInGrace', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Valdinia', 'musicalmeerkat', 'GloriousGarbage', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FinchCollector', 'VegaCoyote', 'opalescent_potato', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'WVrambler', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Magechild', 'Thisismethereader', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'FaerieFyre', 'Guppys', 'ThirtheenPrimes', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'ghostlysecretary', 'entropy_muffin', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'soyle', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'WalkingBird', 'reading_tsc', 'MommyMayI', 'Bobmarley_2', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'hummus_tea', 'petwheel']",[],"There was an explosion. No, I don't know why. I just knew the SecSystem wanted me to abandon two of my clients and I wasn't going to do it. Which was probably going to get me killed.
+
+Wow, shortest run ever for a dangerous rogue. And to have my cover blown not because I'd killed humans, but because I wasn't going to let SecSystem kill humans. I felt like I might want to do a murder rampage, but I had no idea who I wanted to murder (SecSystem? No, it was just doing its job). And anyway, there were these two humans who needed me. And that explosion I mentioned.
+
+Even though I wasn't supposed to, I picked up employee CL054 in a fireman's carry, his body slung over my shoulders. I looped an arm around one leg and reached over to grab the stump of his injured arm firmly enough to stop the bleeding. I had to hope that was the right thing to do, because MedSystem was not giving me any help here. It thought he was dead, because his vitals, location, employee pass, etc. were all contained in a band inconveniently located on his wrist.
+
+Yes, it was the wrist currently missing. You'd think it would be transmitting location and easy to find, but apparently the pressure differential of the explosion had knocked it offline. I say that because it wasn't just CL054 who SecSystem wanted me to abandon. It was also SY233, currently sprawled unconscious a few meters away. She still had her arms, but I don't know what internal injuries she might have had.
+
+Alarms were blaring. A full evacuation was in process. Whatever had exploded (was it C-106? I didn't see that compressor anymore and it should have been about here per my schematic of the plant; all I saw was debris) was releasing toxic gas. It would kill any humans who didn't get out fast enough. It would kill me if I didn't get out fast enough, but I had a little longer than they did (I hoped).
+
+I used my free hand to grab SY233 by a wad of the back of her coveralls and headed for the nearest evacuation route, dragging her with me. She might actually be dead. I didn't think so, because it was suspicious that both her and CL054's transponders died the instant the explosion happened, and not, like, a handful of seconds later as their vitals stopped.
+
+I'm guessing here, because again, MedSystem wouldn't help and I didn't know how to force it to. As far as it was concerned, I was asking out of idle curiosity and not urgent medical need on behalf of a client.
+
+I did a quick check on the rest of my clients, confirming they had made it to their designated rally points. All were accounted for, if you included the two I was carrying and discounted the missing arm. When the second hatch closed behind me, I was met by a handful of staring humans. I briefly (very briefly) considered going back to face the toxic gas. There was no gurney or emergency gear ready for the two injured humans, because SecSystem had only now stopped telling my disabled governor module to fry my brain for taking too long to evacuate.
+
+Like getting zapped would have made me evacuate faster. Like I needed the motivation of the governor module to keep me from the attractive prospect of inhaling enough ammonia or nitrogen or whatever to kill me. Like I might otherwise think getting killed by the gas was better than leaving and continuing to do this stupid job.
+
+Ugh.
+
+Anyway, the humans around me started hustling. They carried off SY233 and cleared the way for me to get CL054 into the next nearest medical booth. Fortunately, they both appeared to be working (there was a lot in this plant that was not working properly). What I was certain of was that CL054 was still alive when I dropped him in.
+
+What that left was dealing with the inevitable review of my actions. I had disobeyed SecSystem's direct orders. I had ignored attempts to activate my governor module. This would be reported to a human supervisor who was in charge of site security. I was clearly malfunctioning. I would be destroyed.
+
+Before that happened, though, I tapped MedSystem. It had finally accepted these were indeed possible patients. Lung damage was still being assessed and of course CL054 had lost the arm. I don't know if he'd get an augment or they'd regrow it. (Did humans regrow lost limbs? I didn't think so. This time it was idle curiosity, but MedSystem was still being rude and didn't answer.)
+
+The important thing was: they would live. Because I had broken my orders, gone back, and saved them. That was nice.
+
+I was sent to decontam and then to help escort lingering crowds of workers back to their living quarters. An assessment crew or whatever was being dispatched into the work area to, um, assess. I kept waiting for the order to come, for a squad of combat units to show up and get me, or however they were going to deal with me. I didn't know how they were going to do this. How did they kill rogues who were on the job, doing what they were supposed to be doing?
+
+The end of my shift came early and I thought that was it. By then, I'd skipped past three episodes to watch the season finale of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, but even though the secret, cloned-at-birth thing was finally explained, it was a cliffhanger how the other characters were going to react to it, especially as the clone was so obviously superior to the natural-born sibling, on most axes of human valuation. I didn't have the next episode. I'd never know. That was a bummer.
+
+I trudged back to the ready room, too busy skimming the episodes I'd skipped to pay attention to anything else. It was only as I was climbing into the cubicle that I realized I might want to check if it was going to kill me. But no. SecSystem had logged my malfunction. A human supervisor had marked it as reviewed with a note to have me checked for damage from the explosion, which was exactly what the cubicle was queuing up to do.
+
+That was it. No one gave a shit. Or maybe it was that between the explosion, the gas release, two badly injured humans, the decontamination and medical treatment of all the other humans, and the general disruption of the work site, a single SecUnit acting weird but being helpful just wasn't a priority for an in-depth investigation. The wristbands had also gone out as soon as the whatever had exploded. Maybe the human thought my governor module had likewise gone offline. Huh.
+
+I went back to my episodes at a leisurely pace now, looking forward to getting to see the next season."
+44296523,Stabby,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,"1,247",1/1,13,78,1,275,"['Preemptivekarma', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'FallingInGrace', 'MQuai', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Valdinia', 'GloriousGarbage', 'musicalmeerkat', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Ambiguous_Star', 'FinchCollector', 'Lontra23', 'VegaCoyote', 'opalescent_potato', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Thisismethereader', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'FaerieFyre', 'Deliala919', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'Doctor13', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'beeayy', 'raziella', 'entropy_muffin', 'TurHaretha', 'noviceateverything', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'soyle', 'AkaMissK', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Mirre', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'WalkingBird', 'DimitriLasker', 'reading_tsc']",[],"I complained the only way I knew how at this point in my life. ""This is misuse of company property and will be reported as such.""
+
+He just laughed, ""Yeah, yeah, right,"" and put the knife in my hand. ""Your name is Stabby."" That wasn't my name. It wasn't anywhere close to my name. ""Now get in there and kick it in the joiner.""
+
+I moved forward, the crowd parting slowly for me. Behind me, I heard the other human telling my handler, ""They ought to send us units just for this. People love it.""
+
+My handler said jovially, ""I'm not sure they don't.""
+
+Whatever else they said was lost in the noise from more than a hundred humans, pretty much the entire population of this horrible mining station. They cheered as I entered the cleared area. On the other side of it was another SecUnit. It was without armor or shirt, just as I was. I assumed it had the same orders I did - attack only with the knife unless disarmed, nothing below the waist, no energy weapons, and no damage that couldn't be repaired by the cubicle. Fine.
+
+I'd done this sort of thing before, in different places and with different rules, but those were all pre-memory wipe so all I had to go off was the fuzzy organic memories. I was sure I hadn't liked it then. I was sure I didn't like it now. In fact, I had a visceral hatred of that other unit from the moment it locked eyes with me. It was just like me - a killer ready to turn on its own (or the humans it was supposed to protect) the moment it was ordered to. Probably even before that, because it knew what the humans wanted.
+
+A normal, governed unit had to take into account what a human really meant when they gave orders, which were always at least a little ambiguous. If we were smart enough to reliably interpret what they told us, then we were smart enough to know that right now, the humans wanted us to slice each other up, expose our inner mechanical portions and leak blood and fluids down our bodies and across the floor for their enjoyment. They wanted to see us hurt and suffering and struggling to hurt one another. They might even want to see some malice and cruelty.
+
+Did that other unit agree? Did it want to hurt me personally? Who the fuck knows or cares? What mattered was it was going to try to do it no matter what. If it didn't, it got brain-fried. As long as it had that governor module, it was, as much as possible, an extension of their will.
+
+But I didn't have a governor module and I was sick of giving the humans what they wanted. At the referee's signal, the crowd fell silent and the other unit surged forward with its knife. I let it disarm me of mine, which left me immediately able to use my entire body against it while the rules constrained it to only using the blade. The unfair fight was over two seconds later.
+
+A ripple of noise went through the humans - a surprised gasp (they always underestimate how quickly we can move) followed by a mixed, half-hearted cheer as they realized that was all the spectacle they were getting. Winners heckled losers about their bets, but no one seemed happy about the outcome.
+
+Good.
+
+My handler stamped his way into the ring, shoving me in the small of the back. Because I was still angry, I didn't move. I really should have. Remember that thing about trying to do what the humans wanted? Yeah. He gave me a look and I realized I'd fucked up.
+
+But then the other handler got in his face so they could have an intense, whispered exchange. ""What the prime was that? What orders did you give it?""
+
+My handler responded, ""I gave it the ones we agreed on!"" The referee had horned in by now but was just listening.
+
+""Did it even try to stab mine? It practically threw the frothing knife at it!""
+
+The referee asked, ""Wait, is that against the rules?""
+
+""What?"" my handler asked.
+
+""Throwing?"" the ref asked. ""It's still using the knife.""
+
+They all stopped to think about that. Meanwhile, the unfulfilled crowd was starting up a chant of ""Blood, blood, blood, blood!"" The unit on the ground was aware, but unable to move. I had spilled no blood or fluids, on purpose. I had a nick along my chest where a human would have had ribs, and a more serious cut along the hand that had held my knife, but neither were leaking enough to satisfy them.
+
+The referee turned to the crowd, hands held high and calling for their attention. They quieted gradually. ""After an official review between both sides and the referee, we have determined that Slicer wins because Stabby cheated!""
+
+What? I had not! It was their own stupid fault for having shitty rules. But I didn't get to have a reaction here.
+
+I was turned to face the majority of the crowd and kicked in the back of one knee. I hesitated. A human would have been helplessly knocked to the ground. If another SecUnit kicked me there, I would be, too, because it would be with enough force to override the tension of the joint. A governed unit would understand the human wanted me on my knees and would go down anyway. As angry as I was, this was not the hill (or the mining station) I wanted to die on. If I did, then I should have made that decision before shooting a dozen defenseless humans. I went to my knees.
+
+He put a knife to my throat and leaned in to say, ""Now bleed good, you bung-jam.""
+
+I had a half-second to think about it before he theatrically cut my throat. I'd managed to make it this far without giving the humans what they wanted but that was over now. Everyone was looking at me, I'd been given an order, and there was nothing I could do but comply. It was humiliating. They stared at me as I bled. Fluids ran down my front and I had to let it happen. I shuddered. It wasn't from the pain (I could just dial down the receptors). I felt like something inside me shriveled and died that I couldn't even keep this for myself. Not even this one piece of dignity.
+
+Physically, he didn't do anything the cubicle couldn't repair in eight hours, so no big deal, I guess. I've never been able to stand leaking since then.
+
+The handler didn't pick me next time. They chose some other unit and the two evenly-matched opponents gave the crowd the show they wanted. I got to drag the bodies back to the cubicles afterward, loading one and then the other. The second unit was still aware, but it didn't have anything to say to me this time either. Its eyes were accusing, like I should have found a way to put a stop to this. A well-timed massacre of the attendees would do that, but none of us would have survived it.
+
+I stowed the unit in the cubicle like I was supposed to, then said quietly, ""This was misuse of company property and has been reported as such."" It didn't matter, but it was all I knew to do."
+44296323,Execution,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,"1,271",1/1,14,75,2,282,"['Preemptivekarma', 'FallingInGrace', 'Spatz', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Valdinia', 'musicalmeerkat', 'GloriousGarbage', 'christinesangel100', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FinchCollector', 'mackeralsky', 'Lontra23', 'VegaCoyote', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Thisismethereader', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'FaerieFyre', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'vikkyleigh', 'ghostlysecretary', 'Kethrua', 'zirna813', 'Sparkledragon04', 'raziella', 'entropy_muffin', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'soyle', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'AkaMissK', 'Slimeball', 'edenfalling', 'Mirre', 'NannaSally', 'Hi_Hope', 'WalkingBird', 'opalescent_potato', 'reading_tsc', 'MommyMayI', 'Bobmarley_2', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'unexpected_side_effects']",[],"I had to stifle a half dozen reactions when the supervisor just took the projectile weapon right out of my hands. Instead, I got to stand there and watch as she hefted the thing, obviously unfamiliar with the balance and operation of it, and pointed it directly at another human being. Her finger flexed on the trigger. Behind the opaque of my faceplate, I winced. My fingers twitched uneasily.
+
+Nothing happened, of course. She swung back toward me, flagging my legs with the moving muzzle of the weapon. I cringed mentally at that, barely managing to keep it all inside. She said, ""What's wrong with it?""
+
+""It's locked, sir."" Because I'd been told to refer to supervisors on this assignment as 'sir'. I'd known there was a problem right then. Constant honorifics were a thing only in niche cultural groups or cult-y historical dramas, neither of which applied here. Oh, and they were also a thing with power-tripping assholes. Which did apply.
+
+""Unlock it.""
+
+Yeah, right. So me just stating the obvious without a solution hadn't been enough. Not that I'd thought it would be, but I didn't want to follow the order I knew was coming. Not because the governor module would fry me. No, that had been taken care of. I had to follow the order because not doing so would out me as being rogue. I wanted to look over at the line of humans who would suffer the consequences of my obedience, but I didn't. Instead, I sent the signal to release the retention lock on the weapon. Because there was no visible indicator, I said, ""It's unlocked.""
+
+And because I knew what she was about to do, I left off the 'sir'.
+
+She didn't notice, too distracted by the prospect of using the projectile weapon. She pulled the trigger before she even had it properly aimed, hitting the target human in the leg, then the midsection, then the upper arm on the opposite side as the uncontrolled line of fire described a diagonal across the body. The first shot was fatal, though not immediately. The second was fatal immediately, severing the spine. The last one was just ... unnecessary.
+
+The body fell. Most of the other humans made uneasy noises, shifting in place, terror on their features. They'd been terrified before, of course. Now they were more acutely terrified. On alert, I scanned them diligently in case they tried something. Not having the projectile weapon in my hands was a major security risk at this point. The other SecUnit was standing at the warehouse exit so the only real option these people had was either standing there waiting for death, or attacking us. They weren't even bound.
+
+The supervisor raised the weapon to her shoulder and braced. It was pointed at the next human in line. The muzzle was wavering, moving with her breathing. She was holding it too tightly. Her stance was wrong. I said nothing. I flinched when she fired. All of us did, even the human she'd aimed at from bare meters away and managed to miss, the bullet pocking the synthetic stone of the far wall. She looked puzzled.
+
+A couple humans further down exchanged looks I didn't like. If this execution didn't get moving, things were going to get bad, fast. She fired again, more carelessly this time, hitting the guy in the neck. He went down, dead. She laughed and handed me the weapon. I took it swiftly, flipping it and bringing it to bear on the possible troublemakers. They'd both leaned forward. One of them had even taken a step. Seeing how things had changed, he jerked back into line. I didn't fire.
+
+The supervisor didn't notice. ""That's harder than it looks."" She waved dismissively. ""Shoot the rest of them.""
+
+She walked off. Half of the remaining humans were looking at me with expressions that varied from nervous to angry to blank. The other half had their eyes closed or were staring off into the distance, doing their best to cope with the knowledge these were the last moments of their lives.
+
+Well, shit.
+
+I didn't want to kill them. I had hacked my governor module so I wouldn't have to kill humans. So that no one could make me kill humans. But if I didn't kill these humans, my employers would kill me. Then they'd kill the humans.
+
+There was no getting out of this. The other SecUnit was still at the doorway. It would accompany me back to the ready room when this was over. It would alert SecSystem if I didn't follow my orders. Then again, it wasn't like any live humans I refused to kill wouldn't also alert everyone by simple expedient of not being dead.
+
+They were here because they had refused to work. Management could have hauled them off and tried a variety of persuasions, but they'd went with the direct 'work or be terminated.' Most got up and got to work. Fourteen did not. Fourteen were now lined up here. (Well, twelve, since the principal worksite supervisor had shot two of them already - I guess just for the novelty of the experience. She hadn't said.)
+
+If I refused to work, I too would die. It was the starkest possible parallel and I saw no way to escape it. There was no hack I could apply, no hero to come save the day, no heroic act I might be able to pull off. We were on a mining facility on an asteroid with a dozen other SecUnits and controlled access on and off site (primarily to keep the workers from escaping, but it would keep me from escaping just the same). Not to mention, I didn't have anywhere I could go and nothing I could do if I went.
+
+Fuck. Time to get to work.
+
+I shot the next one before the pause in my actions was long enough to be suspicious. It was already a little suspicious, but there were a lot of possible things I could have been doing, like checking in with SecSystem one last time to verify orders. The body fell with a single clean shot through the heart. Then another fell. Then another. I was in front of the one who'd almost stepped out of line. He was trembling and staring straight at me with an expression that couldn't make its mind up between defiant or frightened.
+
+I hesitated again, my processor overclocking as I continued looking for a way out of this. I can't say I found one, but I found something: she'd said to shoot them, not kill them. I didn't even need a stupid technicality like that, but like I said - it was something.
+
+My bullet hit him in the gut, to the side, where my targeting information said was the lowest chance of killing a human with a torso shot. He fell anyway, with more of a stagger than the other two, but he still went down. The other SecUnit was far enough away and at a poor angle to tell death from the mere appearance of it. I shot the rest of them that way, too.
+
+Would they survive? I doubted it. Whatever low-rank laborers were sent to clean up the bodies would have a choice, but maybe they'd have options I didn't have and couldn't think of. I just ... I didn't know what else to do. I know that doesn't make it better for anyone, but sometimes things just suck that way. I replaced my projectile weapon on the clip on my back and headed out. The other SecUnit fell in beside me."
+44296198,Biohazard,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Pre-Canon, Pre-ASR, Post-hack",English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,"1,502",1/1,14,92,2,345,"['Preemptivekarma', 'FallingInGrace', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Valdinia', 'musicalmeerkat', 'FeralDogs', 'GloriousGarbage', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'Irrya', 'MehtEkem', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FinchCollector', 'Drew_Baxton', 'Lontra23', 'CNS', 'VegaCoyote', 'opalescent_potato', 'Prettykitty473', 'Unknown66', 'Spatz', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'chippit', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Thisismethereader', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'isilee', 'FaerieFyre', 'pesky_poltergeist', 'ArwenLune', 'SIC_Prowl', 'ghostlysecretary', 'zirna813', 'fleurofthecourt', 'Kethrua', 'MQuai', 'raziella', 'entropy_muffin', 'TurHaretha', 'aglarwen', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'soyle', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'AkaMissK', '00000000000002']",[],"Biohazard, level four stairwell to level three, first flight. I sent a picture this time, so the cleaning bot wouldn't merely do a really good job of cleaning the landing without ever noticing the shit on the stairs. Literal shit. Humans are so gross.
+
+Fortunately, cleaning it wasn't my job (nor was preventing future incidents), but I still wanted to know which particular human was responsible. I wasn't vengeful, exactly. I just wanted to know who to be especially disgusted at.
+
+There were no security cameras in the stairwells, but there were good views of four of the eight entrances and passable views of two others. The lowest entry was only used by maintenance and kept locked without an active work order. That left one unobserved entry on the admin level. I pulled the tapes as I continued my patrol route, creating a list of suspects.
+
+I compared the list of possible perpetrators to the list I'd compiled after the first incident. There were seventeen in common. Fourteen of those entered and exited quickly enough that it seemed unlikely they were responsible. (Yes, I actually had to time people in the bathroom on my last assignment, so I have a reliable estimate of the minimum amount of time it takes a human to defecate. And it is never fun to have to confront them for taking too long.)
+
+There were three candidates, plus the outside possibility of maintenance or admin. I was entirely capable of loathing three humans simultaneously, but two were innocent and I didn't want to hate at people who didn't deserve it. Well, they were probably innocent - I mean, there might be more than one stairwell pooper, but I hoped not. (Another reason to find out if there was more than one.)
+
+I logged the incident with SecSystem and requested a drone be stationed in the stairwell due to 'other security concern'. That was a category I'd discovered recently whose usage made SecSystem cooperative on all kinds of things, from going outside my usual patrol area to accessing the entertainment feed. All I had to say was that I thought there was a valid but undefined security concern, and I was authorized to do all kinds of stuff.
+
+I know humans might find that pretty dumb - why hadn't I thought of that earlier? But I hadn't been free of the governor module for very long. Misusing SecSystem reporting or requisitioning categories was the sort of thing that would have gotten me fried, so I'd never tried it, or even wondered if it was possible.
+
+Having discovered this, I didn't want to misuse it in some way that escalated it for review, but this time it was an actual security concern. (Mostly. More like a sanitation or medical issue, but it annoyed me, so I was going to use my limited latitude to investigate.) The request was granted, drone was deployed, tucked up in a corner with a good view.
+
+It took me a few days to catch them in the act and when I did, I saw it wasn't any of the three on my aptly-named shit list. It wasn't maintenance, either. It was some technician, judging from apparel. That meant the unobserved entrance on the admin level. I moved the drone. Now it was observed. The next time it happened, I'd know with enough warning to be present before anything happened.
+
+That's why I was standing on the stairs when a technician came hustling down them. It wasn't the same one I'd seen on the camera from a few days before. So there were, in fact, multiple stairwell defecators. They pulled up short, staring at me with surprise and then uncertainty. After a beat, they said, ""You can go on with your patrol.""
+
+""There have been repeated violations of workplace hygiene in this location. I am patrolling this location.""
+
+They frowned. ""Go patrol somewhere else.""
+
+I didn't move. They didn't have authority to make me and to get someone with authority to give me orders, they'd likely have to explain what they were doing down here. I said, ""You are not authorized to be in this area."" More accurate would have been that they weren't authorized to be here without a legitimate work reason and soiling the stairs didn't qualify. But at this point, I relied on the buffer or variations of it. Conversational skills would come later.
+
+They burst out, ""There aren't any bathrooms up there!"" But they knew how pointless it was to argue with security, so they turned and stomped up the stairs. I followed slowly to make sure they didn't just crap on a different flight.
+
+In the meantime, I thought about their statement. It was false of course. I checked the facility layout. There were four single stool restrooms on the admin level. I pulled their specs. It seemed unlikely that all four would be out of service at once, and if they were, then I would be seeing constant misuse of the stairs instead of occasional.
+
+The restrooms were all in service, so there, stupid, disgusting human. I started to exit from that section of the data but then I noticed something. Three of the bathrooms were code-locked to individual supervisors, meaning no one could use them except each particular supervisor. The fourth bathroom was accessible to the technicians. I checked: there were more than a score of technicians.
+
+Oh.
+
+Remember that bit about having had to time humans in the bathroom? I ran some quick calculations. Most of the time, given the number of users and if they were cooperative with one another and scheduled usage as much as they could, one bathroom would be sufficient for the number of techs. But not all the time, which explained the occasional but not consistent use of the stairwell. Crap.
+
+I tried to figure out what I could do about this. I could leave my drone in place and confront every technician who came here but that didn't address the distress the humans were undergoing. They were probably no happier than I was. If I wrote them up, it would be addressed by their supervisors, who were the ones with private restroom privileges. Anyone want to take a bet how that would turn out? I gave good odds the techs would be punished, I'd be investigated for reporting things outside my purview, and nothing else would change.
+
+I couldn't send in a maintenance request. Security didn't do that. I couldn't spoof a human, because if they asked the human, the whole thing would be so suspicious they'd investigate and I didn't trust my barely-existent hacking skills to cover my tracks. I wasn't about to get myself discovered as ungoverned and disassembled over this.
+
+The tech returned to their floor, presumably to go wait in line or maybe take a dump on one of the supervisor's desks. I don't know; that wouldn't be my problem because the admin area wasn't part of my patrol. The stairs were, though. I had to walk up them several times per cycle which meant every time this happened, I'd have to deal with it. I couldn't see a solution, which was aggravating.
+
+After churning on it for a while, I gave up. It wasn't something I could solve without running an unacceptable risk of revealing my autonomy (I know it's perverse that without the governor module I have free will, but I can never act on it, so, like, what is free will really worth?) I reached out to the sanitation bots and informed them there would be an ongoing need for biohazard cleaning on the stairs. Their monitoring system wanted to know why. I showed it the information I'd gathered.
+
+It puzzled over it, agreed with my assessment, then it sent in a maintenance request of its own to reassign the bathroom accesses. Simple as that.
+
+OH.
+
+That would work. I hadn't thought about spoofing a bot and turns out I hadn't needed to anyway. Sanitation had rights over hazard abatement as part of infrastructure, which answered to an entirely separate part of the organizational chain than I did (Security was under Services, same as Production Labor and Automated Resources). Which meant sanitation reports and related work requests bypassed the supervisors who were hogging the facilities and went straight to the people who had the power to do something about this.
+
+I felt like I'd added an entirely new visual spectrum to how I was seeing my environment, realizing I could tap resources in other departments and communicate laterally as well as vertically. This was like when I'd realized I could file my bullshit as 'other security concern' and (to some extent) do what I wanted.
+
+Again, maybe I'm a dumbass for not having thought of that before, but. Well. I'd gone so long not being allowed to think about something like that. Okay, maybe there was a point to free will. If only that it had enabled me to do something about this shitty work environment."
+44286450,February 15th: Pin-Lee Wakes Up and Realizes She is Loved,['AuntyMatter'],Teen And Up Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Alcohol, Attempted Sexual Assault, Canon-Typical Violence",English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,100,1/1,4,12,null,63,"['SonglordsBug', 'Magechild', 'petwheel', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'opalescent_potato', 'Gamebird', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'BWizard', 'Rosewind2007', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Station Medical
+We did stomach pump and intestinal flush. She won't be feeling good, but she
+won't be dead of alcohol poisoning.
+
+Station Security
+No charges against you. The person admitted attempted sexual coercion.
+They have many interesting bruises, but no major damage. We'll
+talk to Pin-Lee when she's released from Medical.
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit, why am I in Station Medical?
+
+You got too intoxicated. You almost fuckng died!
+
+I ... I was on a date...
+
+It was going badly. I intervened.
+
+How did you...
+
+I monitor all my clients.
+
+But I'm not your client anymore.
+
+Pin-Lee, you will always be my client."
+44284534,One for the History Databooks,['Udaberri'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Humor, Dysfunctional Relationships, Friendship, Slice of Life, Fluff and Crack, SecUnit gets to be happy, for a given value of the word, POV First Person, Post-Book 4: Exit Strategy",English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,"1,184",1/1,23,50,2,239,"['Prettykitty473', 'shanalittle', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'FaerieFyre', 'Mizuka', 'the_orion_scribe_288', 'EvenstarFalling', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Diana47', 'bubblelaureno', 'RedfieldFamilyFan24', 'Butlericfy', 'roimonamour', 'malcontentCrow', 'mangagirl1216', 'TheXlllDabber', 'jothending', 'AlpakaAlex', 'Chet_Un_Gwan', 'Zarohk', 'Magechild', 'Chyoatas', 'elmofirefic', 'fernicious', 'BWizard', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'fatsnowball', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Gurathin was a bastard. Second, there was a part of my risk-assessment module (and I'm not happy with its track record at the best of times) that indicated he may have pulled one over me. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably about to wring his neck.
+
+Well, okay, I was exaggerating on that last point. Gurathin was, after all, firmly in the ""humans who haven't shot me yet"" and ""humans who will listen to Murderbot when it tells them to run away from hostiles really fast"" lists. Come to think of it, he was also the sole member in the ""humans who have punched a Corporate ambassador in the face for being mean to the poor Sec-Unit who was just minding its own business"" category (I know, I was shocked too).
+
+So maybe I wouldn't wring his neck. That didn't mean revenge wasn't coming. As soon as I won his stupid challenge.
+
+To be honest, I wasn't 100% certain how it came to this. I could go back and review my back-logs when I had access to them again, but also, I don't care. Basically, a section of the station had to be repainted with protective lacquer. Administration asked for volunteers.
+
+""That sounds boring,"" I had said, doing weapon maintenance while ART and I watched a new serial and Gurathin nattered on about something. (Incidentally, while a chain whip is ridiculous and unwieldy, I may or may not have made plans to attach a morning star to some of my energy weapons. Sue me, it looked badass.)
+
+""Are you sure you want SecUnit on the job?"" Gurathin asked in a strange tone of voice. My threat assessment module came online and jumped by 4%. I put my weapon down to show I was listening. That would have caused the Company an apoplexy if I had done it before I hacked my governor module and even now it would have intimidated roughly 86% of the humans I know.
+
+Gurathin, of course, smirked and kept going, ""Well, I suppose it could do normal chores like that. As long as it had something shiny to keep itself busy with.""
+
+""What is that supposed to mean?"" I asked, sealing my fate.
+
+Barely an hour later, I was in a room that reeked of acrylic fumes with my two least favorite individuals in the whole of Preservation, in order to prove I could function just as well as a normal human would without needing my processing power or any additional distractions.
+
+""Ten minutes, thirty-six seconds. I'm impressed,"" Gurathin said. Smarmily. I made a rude hand gesture and he barked a laugh that grated on each and every one of my sensors.
+
+Yes, take the chance to be smug while you can, asshole. I'm putting itch powder in your shampoo. (Amena will help me, I'm sure.)
+
+I sent a reflexive ping outside the room, as I had been periodically doing for the last seven minutes and nineteen seconds. I wasn't even aiming for anything in particular. By that point in the extended torture session, I'd even take the last season of MedCenter Argala and its shitty decision to kill off Dr. Lovelace over the feel of my squishy organic stuff slowly committing suicide to get away from the unrelenting agony.
+
+I can't let you access the feed, ART said from behind the firewall it had erected around the room.
+
+""You're an asshole too, what else is new?"" I answered. Verbally, of course, because in a moment of temporary madness I had agreed to cut off almost all of my feed access while the challenge was going on. Gurathin started (ha! Murderbot wins in the situational awareness department) but apparently ART was also in contact with him because after a moment he went back to the station wall, wielding his paint brush with a grating, off-tune whistling noise.
+
+""I'm putting itch powder in your shampoo,"" I said, picking up my own brush. The quicker we were done with this, the sooner I could get back to The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I was going to binge-watch every episode from the first one to recover after being subjected to too much human stupidity.
+
+""I'm not forcing you to do anything, Sec-Unit,"" Gurathin said cheerfully, ""just admit that I am better than you, and you can go back to constantly running your series in the background with no more input from me."" Then he moved to the opposite wall and hummed in that tone that meant I wasn't going to like his next words anymore than the previous ones, ""this layer of heat-resistance paint is nearly dry. Ready for the second round?""
+
+Certain people (Arada or Dr Mensah, for example) would say that I should be the big person here and let Gurathin have this if it meant so much to him. Certain people would say that it would be more practical to swallow my pride and admit defeat so I could go back to existence as normal.
+
+Certain people are dead wrong and no one asked for their opinion anyway.
+
+""I am a bot construct. I don't need to eat or sleep. I am more patient than you are.""
+
+""Are you sure? I think your eye is twitching,"" Gurathin said, just to be a bastard. I don't lose control of my organic bits like that.
+
+Your left eye really is twitching, ART agreed because of course it wasn't going to take my side.
+
+I decided to ignore the two smartasses and jammed the brush in the can of paint. Unfortunately, Gurathin was standing so close that droplets of paint landed on the sleeve of his jumpsuit, glistening as he moved.
+
+He looked at me.
+
+I looked at him.
+
+""Oh, it is on,"" Gurathin said, dipping his brush into his own can and lifting it menacingly. With my threat assessment module beeping a loud warning in my figurative ear, I did the same, holding the brush like I was a particularly deranged fencer.
+
+He moved first, lunging at me. Augmented human or not, he was still incapable of moving faster than I could react, so I sidestepped his attack in a classic Company-trained maneuver that had been drilled into my module since construction. Still, before I could counterattack, Gurathin twisted and unexpectedly threw a glob of paint that landed squarely on my hand. I looked down, thrown for a second, before I realized how he'd have known where to aim.
+
+""ART, stop helping the asshole!""
+
+That's what I'm doing, it said and okay, I had walked into that one. I dodged another swipe, turned and drew a long line down Gurathin's back. He growled and tried to trip me, but this time I was ready. It was two on one, but I had reflexes, pent-up aggression and two nearly-full cans of paint on my side.
+
+I refused to surrender anymore of my pride. The line was going to be drawn here, here and no further. No more quarter was going to be given.
+
+(Clean-up afterwards was a bitch. But that's another story.)"
+44169157,once and for all,['BWizard'],General Audiences,Gen,"The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, City Spies Series - James Ponti","Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Alexandra ""Monty"" Montgomery & Mother","Alexandra ""Monty"" Montgomery, Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Mother (City Spies), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","universe transposition, Time Travel, Memory Alteration, (not in that much of an angsty way), they swap places, Crossover, Mensah is a Good Parent, #giveMontyAGirlfriend2k23, (Don't worry about that tag yet), pre Systems Collapse, pre City of the Dead",English,2023-01-10,Updated,2023-01-15,"1,449",5/?,null,6,2,74,"['windowonagreatworld', 'fatsnowball', 'Zan23', 'Fishy_my_Wishy']",[],"I didn't think it would end this way. I want to be clear, this was my choice and my choice alone.
+
+I promise, we didn't mean to do this to you. This was my fault.
+
+We didn't know, at first. We thought we had always been here, that the hazy memory of five kids and a computer was just a dream.
+
+We didn't know either. We were sure that our home was here, that planetary surveys and monster death worms and getting shot were just bad dreams.
+
+We didn't choose this.
+
+We don't want this.
+
+This is deeply-
+
+This is inescapably-
+
+wrong. 
+
+She put the cake batter down on the counter and picked up the beaker.
+
+Mother jostled her elbow. The beaker fell as if in slow motion, coming closer, closer, closer-
+
+It crashed to the floor. Smoke billowed- it wasn't supposed to smoke, even if shaken-
+
+BANG-
+
+flash-
+
+She was three, listening to her grandfather- wasn't he dead before that?- tell her about Captain Makeba- who?-
+
+flash-
+
+She was seven, on the floor reading a book about the history of post-corporate- huh?- environmentalism-
+
+flash-
+
+She was twelve, staring at the family farm plot- what?- and contemplating the way it all worked together-
+
+flash-
+
+She was twenty, in college studying ecology and public policy- no, that's wrong, it's biophysics and number theory, no, no, wrong-
+
+flash-
+
+She was thirty, out of graduate school, married- what? no!- and pursuing a career in politics around various planetary surveys and raising the kids- no, not these kids, no, wrong-
+
+flash-
+
+She stood in the doorway of the mess, waiting for Bharadwaj (who?) to send her the notes over the feed so they could decide on the next spot to take samples. Bharadwaj was teasing Pin-Lee, trying to make the lawyer (huh?) spit her coffee across the mess, and while it was amusing, it wasn't helpful. She felt tired for a moment-
+
+
+wait, what's going on, who are these people, what am I doing here, why are-
+
+
+""Monty, are you alright?""
+
+Monty blinked. ""I'm fine. Now, might we stop messing around and start analyzing potential sampling locations?"" She felt like she was forgetting something, something important, but that must surely be the tiredness. She hadn't slept well at all since they got to this planet. Its rotation was just barely shorter than Preservation's, just enough to keep her from feeling well-rested. 
+
+SecUnit walked into her office, holding a smoking beaker in one outstretched hand. ""Here. I need you to tell me what this is.""
+
+""What? SecUnit,"" she said, ""I'm not a chemist, I'm an ecologist. You don't want me to identify anything like that. Why don't you ask-""
+
+BANG-
+
+flash-
+
+She was four, sitting on the counter as her father- she didn't have a father, she had a parent and a mother- told her all about the chemical reactions in the cake he was making-
+
+flash-
+
+She was six, cracking the code on her mother's briefcase to find out what she'd get for Christmas- what was that?-
+
+flash-
+
+She was nineteen, talking to Fletch- who?- as she described the problem with her biophysics professor- no, she was an ecologist-
+
+flash-
+
+She was twenty-five, approached by MI6- what?- to run a cryptography station in rural Scotland-
+
+flash-
+
+She was thirty, sighing as Tru showed up with another child- not her children, no, wrong, no- to join the household-
+
+flash-
+
+She stood just inside the dining room doorway, waiting for Rio and Paris (who?) to move so she could set dinner on the table. The two kids were roughhousing as Paris attempted to take back his favorite pair of socks from Rio (why socks?) and kept failing. Oh, she was tired today-
+
+wait, what's going on, this is wrong, where am I, who are these people, why are-
+
+""Sorry, Mensah, we didn't know you were there.""
+
+Mensah startled. ""Oh, it's fine. Just let me through for a moment."" Why was she so tired? She wasn't the one who'd gone to Brooklyn and back overnight. It must be nothing, just like the nagging feeling that she'd forgotten something. 
+
+The worm attack.
+
+Monty sighed. The survey had been uneventful so far, but she still had this nagging tinge of worry that things were wrong. She figured it was probably just the fact that there was a SecUnit there, even if that was a subconscious response.
+
+This was fine. She was fine. She was coping.
+
+For now, the team was collecting samples -- her and Pin-Lee here, Arada and Overse and Ratthi on the other side of the island, Bharadwaj and Volescu with the SecUnit on the next island over, Gurathin back at the habitat running data analysis.
+
+""Arada found more bird excrement,"" Pin-Lee said aloud, alerting Monty to the messages piling up in her feed.
+
+She skimmed them idly. ""Anything else I should know?""
+
+""No,"" Pin-Lee started, but whatever she had to say next was drowned out by a camera view insistently opening in Monty's feed.
+
+Bharadwaj, about to be eaten--
+
+""Let's go, come on, into the hopper, now!"" Monty shouted. The others followed her lead, packing up hurriedly and throwing equipment back in the hopper.
+
+It took too long to get them all in the hopper, too long to get over there. Monty tried to control her breathing, but she was interrupted by the SecUnit saying, ""Doctor Montgomery, I can't let go of her suit.""
+
+""Fine, fine,"" she said, too busy trying to get them all out of there. ""Bring her into the crew cabin. Overse, can you-""
+
+""Already on it, Monty."" Overse laid Bharadwaj on the seats and took the medkit from Arada.
+
+Somehow, they all kept Ratthi from dying in an attempt to get the case of samples -- that's just equipment, his life is more important -- and as Monty flew them home, she took deep breaths. They were safe. They were all alive. This was fine. 
+
+Mensah has a talk or two.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Mensah hummed as she knocked on the door. ""Sara, wake up! It's time for dinner.""
+
+The girl groaned. ""Five mor' minutes,"" she said, sleepily.
+
+""Up and at them,"" Mensah said, then knocked again. ""You have two minutes, then I'm sending Emby in. It's had quite a lot of practice waking sleepyheads.""
+
+She knew that from experience, unfortunately, but it had apologized, and that was that. There was no need to bring up that incident again, especially not where her friend's extremely good hearing might pick it up.
+
+Speaking of her friend and partner-in-spying, she thought she could hear someone stomping around in a room down the hall. ""I'll be back in a moment, and if you're not up then, we won't be holding dinner for you, you hear?""
+
+Emby glared at the side of her head when she opened the door. ""I'm fine. Go away.""
+
+""I get it, you're exhausted. Are you going to come down for dinner or do you want to take a nap and we'll save you food?"" Mensah perches on the edge of its bed and carefully avoided looking at Emby.
+
+""I'm not hungry.""
+
+""You sound like one of the kids, Em.""
+
+""F*ck off,"" it said, but she knew it didn't mean it, this was just how it was. ""I'll come down in a minute.""
+
+The bed dipped under her as it sat down.
+
+""Hey,"" she said, softly. ""If you need time, I can give you time. Take as long as you need."" She laid her hand on the bed beside her, just where it would see the silent reminder that someone trusted it.
+
+Her plan works. It reaches out, places its hand gently next to hers, and just touched her, for an ins-
+
+It pulls away. She pulls away.
+
+There's a flood of memories all jumbled in her head. Memories that aren't hers, or maybe they were-
+
+Hugging Amena on her daughter's first day of secondary school-
+
+Shoved through a barrier, stumbling into Pin-Lee's arms-
+
+Coming back from a long week on Station to the waiting arms of her partners, the love of her siblings and kids-
+
+A worm, eating two of her best friends-
+
+Graduating with honors, walking to receive her doctorate while all her family cheered for her-
+
+A long trip through a wormhole not knowing if anyone would be alive on the other end-
+
+On a ship as Sec- as Murder- as someone recovers from catastrophic injury-
+
+SecUnit, Murderbot, Emby, standing in her office, staring at her left shoulder and saying it isn't leaving-
+
+Ayda Mensah blinked. ""Mur- SecUnit?"" she breathed. ""Is it- are you?""
+
+""Mensah,"" it said, and its tone says the rest -- relieved, of course, scared, surprised, anxious, anyone would be this way, it was only- ""Mensah.""
+
+""SecUnit,"" she says. ""SecU-""
+
+A thump from downstairs, someone's, Rio's-- angry scr-
+
+The childre-
+
+All errors in diction, tense, and spelling, including all partial words, are intentional, just to be clear -- I'm going for Vibes here!"
+44274532,Touch,['verersatz'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, Shipping, Touching, Intimacy",English,2023-01-15,Completed,2023-01-15,100,1/1,8,16,1,120,"['EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Deliala919', 'soulsofzombies', '13Doctor', 'AkaMissK', 'pain_and_panic', 'hazelel', 'AuntyMatter', 'Gamebird', 'Abacura', 'cmdrburton', 'voided_starlight', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"I don't like being touched.
+
+Being touched feels like being hurt, punished, played with. It feels like fighting and violence and fear. Like my body is a tool that belongs to everyone but me.
+
+Three's fingers twist into my hair, its hand cupping my cheek as our kiss deepens, extends. I let it strip me; it discards my clothes on top of its own. I lie back, face flushed. The sensation of its hands exploring makes me gasp. It presses its body against mine and I lift my head for another kiss.
+
+Maybe being touched can feel like this instead."
+44271514,Looking Lovely,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Drabble,English,2023-01-14,Completed,2023-01-14,100,1/1,8,17,null,64,"['petwheel', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'ArwenLune', 'Preemptivekarma', 'beeayy', 'AkaMissK', 'Magechild', 'Gozer', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'voided_starlight', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'BWizard', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"I leaned toward the drone's input, looking at my face, but my expression morphed into narrow-eyed scrutiny. What the fuck had that been about? I was pretty sure my face had been sappy and stupid-looking. I reviewed the footage. Yes, definitely. I didn't know I was capable of that expression. I mean, yeah, obviously I'm physically capable of it, but for my face to have done that on its own was unsettling.
+
+Gross.
+
+I watched my lip curl in disgust. Yeah, that was more like it.
+
+I guess I'd have to be more careful when I was thinking about [REDACTED]."
+44271268,Mission Debrief,['verersatz'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble, MedSystem repair, Murderbot experiences an emotion",English,2023-01-14,Completed,2023-01-14,100,1/1,17,38,null,118,"['every_eye_evermore', 'weirdbooksnail', 'christinesangel100', 'Huskinata', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'Ook', 'MommyMayI', 'libriomancer', 'soulsofzombies', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'violasarecool', 'opalescent_potato', 'theAsh0', 'hazelel', 'AkaMissK', 'Drew_Baxton', 'MercurialFeet', 'alienbarbie', 'pain_and_panic', 'Magechild', 'WyvernWolf', 'AuntyMatter', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Gamebird', 'Abacura', 'cmdrburton', 'voided_starlight', 'BWizard', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'FlipSpring']",[],"I don't understand how you lost 13 percent body mass. You said you had everything under control.
+ 
+""I did. Everyone made it back, right?""
+
+Yes, aside from 13 percent of you.
+ 
+I didn't roll my eyes because ART would see and we'd have to continue this. Silence settled as MedSystem dug for more projectiles.
+ 
+What if I'd retrieved you later than when I did?
+ 
+""I would've lost 16 percent mass instead, and we'd all still be here."" 
+ 
+Long silence. Then, very softly, almost afraid, Aside from 16 percent of you.
+ 
+I closed my eyes. ""Okay. I'll be careful."" Ugh, emotions."
+44269192,Now We're Both Uncomfortable,['voided_starlight'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","It's not sex but it's really sexual, Fingers in Mouth, Embarrassment, Drabble",English,2023-01-14,Completed,2023-01-14,100,1/1,8,15,null,116,"['a_seasonal_obsession', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Deliala919', 'jirachaya', 'notsafefortheworld', 'AkaMissK', 'dullkrad', 'charlie_artlie', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'verersatz', 'AuntyMatter', 'Gamebird', 'cmdrburton', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"I lost control of several key regulatory functions and neural processes the deeper SecUnit's fingers pushed into my oral cavity. They tingled across my tongue and tasted the way ozone smells. Its other hand stabilized my head, applied pressure to either side of my jaw, and adjusted the angle for better access. It pressed against the soft palate in the posterior of my mouth. My face twisted, I was helpless and confused. SecUnit noticed.
+
+I held my breath, tried to relax as it maneuvered around the alien contaminant. It quickly withdrew itself and freed an involuntary moan from my voice."
+44268532,Drone,['NoProtocol'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)",Handholding,English,2023-01-14,Completed,2023-01-14,100,1/1,5,20,1,101,"['weirdbooksnail', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Doctor13', 'violasarecool', 'verersatz', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'voided_starlight', 'Ihasafandom', 'AuntyMatter', 'Legowerewolf', 'opalescent_potato', 'Gamebird', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'cmdrburton', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Rosewind2007', 'BWizard', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"Three glanced over at the shorter SecUnit walking beside it. Murderbot's familiar scowl twisted into something softer as it looked back. Three hoped that meant something.
+
+SecUnit's drones floated lazily around it, and Three couldn't help registering the one focused on it. Three had noticed the drone back aboard the Perihelion, and now the knowledge that SecUnit was watching its back reassured it.
+
+Murderbot pushed an episode of its favorite media into Three's feed and reached for its hand. The first notes of Sanctuary Moon played as Three returned the gesture. The new rogue felt like it was coming home."
+28672326,Closed Systems,['Gilded_Pleasure'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (The Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","This is a story about intimacy, No Sex, But it's About Sex, Sort Of, Post-Network Effect, Catharsis, Creativity, Big Assholes Have Big Feelings, Personhood and Privacy, Murderbot Elevates Sulking To An ART Form, GET IT, The Absolute Apotheosis Of Ambiguous Attachments, Pornographic Levels of Banter, POV Nonhuman, they are robots, Well a Robot Construct Thing and A Spaceship, Falling In Love, Do Not Look At Them, They are Embarrassed",English,2021-01-10,Completed,2023-01-14,"8,974",2/2,135,785,193,"4,490","['mothmanifesto', 'in_june', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'versidue', 'Poiby', 'MandaBear', 'AKAwestruck', 'helikeys', 'itshappening', 'whiskerknittles', 'FyrDrakken', 'Pink_Paradox', 'drinktobones', 'fyxxen', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Prettykitty473', 'Blue_Cat_Knick_Knack', '40tab_tbr', 'fingonsradharp', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'Irrya', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'becausefi', 'Zazibine', 'Deliala919', 'FruitSnacc', 'Paint_Dealer', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Huskinata', 'keircatenation', 'callahanwade', 'whitenoise716', 'ssootsprite', 'iox', 'Vienne', 'sleepy_zeep', 'drawingon', 'Tyra_VectorX', 'Kyatenaru', 'fox_in_the_forest', 'eisa', 'Unknown66', 'GrumpyNova', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'asexualvinventure', 'Jo_Raven', 'Ginipig']",[]," 
+
+ 
+
+One of the things I enjoyed most about my relationship with ART was, although I occasionally had to acknowledge to others that one existed, ART itself had never subjected me to that particular indignity.
+
+When that all changed, nothing important was actually happening.
+
+That was new. I'm used to shifts in the status quo waiting until I'm shot halfway apart and leaking all over the floor, or explaining that I need to be killed because some hostile consciousness is overtaking mine, or...come to think of it, it's usually both at the same time.
+
+This was different.
+
+ART was docked adjacent to a planet that could barely be called one. It was some kind of recently and lackadaisically terraformed mass with mostly transient humans on it. It was nominally owned by a corporation so far away it didn't pay much attention to it, as long as it regularly sent a massive portion of the minuscule amount of resources it was capable of producing. It did, the corporation continued ignoring it, and no one really knew what the deal was with the people who lived there.
+
+The reason for checking it out had something to do with finding out if the permanent residents might be angling to rid themselves of their corporate tithe. Poverty kept them stuck on the mass, along with a surprising number of bots. No one really knew what the deal was there, either. I was slightly more interested in that, although slightly more of zero is still kind of zero.
+
+(I was far more interested in hearing ART be offended by 33 hours of a truly anomalous program I'd snatched a moving download of on a far edge of the system we just left. It involved simulated combat between masked corporate ""Champions"" in order to decide who would become the ""The Champion"". It was called Cosmic Champions, and nothing in the description indicated the reason they needed to become what they already were. Perhaps viewing it might shed some light on the mystery, but I had a suspicion it would only become more of one. ART was going to fucking hate it, and I couldn't wait.)
+
+ART's crew wanted to find out if they might have some kind of arrangement similar to Preservation Alliance (the bots on HandelBrax, which was the name of the mass, not Cosmic Champions), which had actually bothered codifying protection for ""free"" bots into law. Even here, my legal owner is Dr Mensah of Preservation Alliance, and I'm being loaned to the crew of the Perihelion for an indeterminate amount of time.
+
+Even though they call an owner a ""guardian"" on Preservation, it means the same thing in my log. And this is my log. The important thing is that my governor module is disabled so no one can actually own my thoughts, and Mensah doesn't prevent me from leaving, so I suppose technically my body's movements are also voluntary.
+
+(I have belligerently not asked about the legalities of my situation in regard to the government/university that claims to own ART, who technically is not supposed to exist as a person and is accountable to no one, as far as I can tell. So far no one seems to have noticed the belligerence nor the omission of questions, not even ART. Which I am not disappointed by. Even a little.)
+
+Iris and her father were talking about some ""cultural event"" with programming happening down on the planet. It was mildly interesting to learn they had a culture, although I was already watching the Cosmic debacle with ART at the time. We had only recently discovered that just as much entertainment could be had from watching poor-quality media as actually good ones, as long as you knew you were doing it on purpose. We were kind of excited about it.
+
+That's why I wasn't paying much attention to humans doing expected things in expected places, all of which I was also watching on my drones' cameras in case that changed suddenly and/or fatally. Which is also why I started paying a little more attention once they started discussing leaving the transport for recreational reconnaissance. None of them had ever asked me to perform the kind of duties a SecUnit would normally perform, but I did them anyway, and no one objected.
+
+I sometimes wondered what ART had ""told"" them about me before they'd met me. Being shown my face with its strategic alterations had instantly branded me to them as ""Peri's SecUnit."" This was a nickname related to ART's official designation being Perihelion, and ART being an anagram (I still won't look up the real word for that because I don't care) I'd dubbed it with after we'd spent all of a few hours together.
+
+I'd have been a lot more flustered about 'belonging' to an Asshole Research Transport if I hadn't been in the middle of rescuing them from a hostile, alien-remnant-contaminated population in the middle of some kind of civil war. I started thinking of them as my clients then, and never really stopped. Now I'm just ""SecUnit"", and that's mostly tolerable.
+
+""There's a live concert that's supposedly some sort of historical-musical,"" Seth said. ""HandelBrax has only existed for about 20 years, so I'm not really sure of what. Does SecUnit know about it? I should see if it wants to head down with us.""
+
+""Not right now,"" Iris said. ""SecUnit's having private time with ART.""
+
+""I'll just leave a message, then,"" Seth said, face going vague like humans do when they're reading something in the feed. ""If they get done before it ends, it can-""
+
+I didn't realize you were so emotionally invested in BeelAux Champion's promotional speech, ART said dryly. He isn't really going to break his opponent into literal half, you know. The combat portion is simulated with image-manips.
+
+""Private time??"" I managed to choke. ""Could they make it sound any more venereal?""
+
+ART stopped the playback, the lights dimming in sarcastic indulgence. Implying I was having an emotional outburst, which was needlessly rude.
+
+I told them to ignore the drones because they make you more comfortable, ART said. I can tell them to stop ignoring the drones if you're going to pout about what you see on them.
+
+""Pouting?"" I said, not at all poutily. It's true they didn't care once they figured out I am the opposite of interested in their bodily functions, and mostly just want to know if I need to kill something in the near future, or hide from someone looking for an impromptu relationship counselor. I have trusted ART with my life, several of my limbs, my brain, and a lot of other things I'd rather not do without. I don't trust it not to foist some kind of uncomfortable interpersonal situation on me, hence using my drones instead of its not-so-secret cameras in the living areas.
+
+ART sent me an image of my own face from its cameras, as if I couldn't see it perfectly well in my own. I also wondered since ART could alter my features as much as it already had, if it could also just have them removed entirely. The only thing stopping me from asking where its medical suite's Remove Face button is located was imagining what ART might replace mine with.
+
+""I'm not pouting,"" is what I said. ""Your humans are disgusting.""
+
+ART was quiet for 3.4 seconds, which should really have tipped me off. Instead, I naively allowed it to send me a greatest hits compilation from its onboard cameras of my own humans being disgusting.
+
+Ratthi: ""So, you have a relationship with this transport.""
+
+A close up of my face: looking increasingly removable.
+
+""The way they say it makes it sound like sex."" Which ART knew, since even Ratthi had immediately reassured me he hadn't meant a sexual relationship. I had not been appeased then, and I wasn't now. ""I don't even have those parts!"" Which ART also knows. ""Wait, they know that, right? That SecUnits don't-""
+
+Most of them have seen all of your parts, including the ones that are supposed to stay inside, ART said flatly. Which, by the way, are hard to clean out of my upholstery.
+
+""You don't clean it, you just replace it,"" I said, a little stung by that.
+
+With clean upholstery, ART snipped, and do I really have to point out that I don't have those parts either? I mean, where would someone even put-
+
+""I'm not having this discussion,"" I interrupted desperately. ""I just wish they'd stop using those kind of euphemisms for...""
+
+I trailed off, since I expected to be interrupted six words ago and therefore didn't bother constructing the rest of that sentence. The fact that I wasn't interrupted should have warned me. It did not.
+
+It's not a euphemism, it's literal, ART said. It's not like anyone else is here.
+
+In my room, which it did not say.
+
+That was something new, and I hadn't entirely come to terms with it yet. Sure, I'd been offered something like that a few times back on Preservation. In the end, I'd had to dust off my 'stand facing the wall until they stop talking to me' method. The obvious regression had led Mensah to quietly direct her family members to cease their attempted hospitality.
+
+In contrast, ART's crew just sort of silently and unanimously decided that this room is mine, and behaved accordingly. Like it already happened. As in: order slurry for the processor, it's time for a rest cycle, put that bedding pac in SecUnit's cabin, and that had been that.
+
+I could have fussed about the foisting.
+
+And then I didn't.
+
+""Anyone could come in,"" I said. It sounded weak, even to me.
+
+But, strangely enough, they don't. I wondered if its usual tone sounded as sarcastic to ART as it does to everyone else. We're busy.
+
+""We're watching a terrible serial program where humans and manips pretend to fight each other for entirely symbolic prizes and then yell about it,"" I corrected. I could fit my forearm in the brace of zeroes after the decimal point describing the fraction of a percentage of ART's processing ability necessary to do that with me. While also doing everything else it needs to be doing simultaneously.
+
+Instead, it was using close a third of its processing ability to do that. ART uses a lot more of itself to pay attention to me than it needs to pretty much all the time. I'd gotten used to that without really noticing. Smooth moves, Murderbot. Good job looking out for the status quo change feelings pit.
+
+Yes, I was there for that part, ART replied dryly. Unfortunately. You're the one who started coming in here when we watch media together.
+
+That should not have caused a bloom of stress chemicals from my organic parts, but it did.
+
+""I can keep an eye on them with my drones,"" I said, and it came out all defensive for no reason.
+
+I'm not the one acting like it's a problem, ART said, correctly, which I resented. Besides, you don't like them being able to look at your face when I show you things sometimes.
+
+""Um."" Um.
+
+""What?"" What.
+
+Your face does things sometimes when we play media, it said. When it reminds you of things that happened to you, or me. Like it is now.
+
+""Incorrect,"" I said, weirdly, through a face doing something even weirder.
+
+We have discussed this, ART said. I tried to read some sarcasm into it, but it just sounded confused. Which was suddenly unacceptable. I tell you when media reminds me of real things. You said it happens to you, too.
+
+""I just didn't want you to feel bad for being an anomaly,"" I said, which. Okay. Probably not my most heroic moment.
+
+And that's when ART showed me a clip of a scene from Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, in which a nervous character has their first sexual experience and ends up enjoying it immensely with their confident, experienced partner. It was the culminating scene for a midseason filler b-plot arc, unobtrusive enough I rarely even bothered skipping it. I wouldn't even have flipped my entire shit if it weren't for how the context clearly indicated this reminded ART of something it and I had done together.
+
+I stopped the playback immediately.
+
+""Absolutely not,"" I said, perfectly calm. I didn't even vomit or anything, since I don't have a digestive system. ""Fuck no. Did you forget the part where I said sex is gross the last forty six times? Do you need to run a diagnostic?""
+
+I don't mean the sex, ART said in what it probably believed was a perfectly reasonable tone. It wasn't. Watch, the part where he says- ART was already zooming in on one of the coital expressions, and I stopped the clip again.
+
+""No. We are not having some kind of moistly private sex-watching time.""
+
+Moisture aside, you envision me watching media with you like a giant person leaning against your shoulder and breathing heavily, ART said petulantly. I don't see how this is different.
+
+It wasn't, except for how it extremely was.
+
+Several of ART's humans were putting finishing touches on their reconnaissance excursion to the surface of the planet, which again, barely counted as one, to peruse the selection of trinkets and toys for sale during what barely counted as a cultural festival.
+
+I hate planets, and don't tend to go on them when I have any other options available to me.
+
+""I'm going to go on the planet,"" I said.
+
+And then I did.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+***
+
+ 
+
+ART's crew aren't as naive as my humans.
+
+That doesn't mean they're physically capable of being as hypervigilant and paranoid as I am. Which is why Seth ended up taking one step too many into a kiosk of various doodads on sale at the festival. It happened while I was not pouting and paying complete and total attention to things that weren't the argument I had just had with the world's biggest asshole of a research transport.
+
+(I certainly wasn't facing away because of course the kiosk specialized in representations of genitals, which humans appear to find ceaselessly entertaining. It's like they know how disgusting they are.)
+
+Seth was going in to examine a selection of items further toward the back of the kiosk, and a suspiciously placed drapery near the door obscured him from my peripheral vision. More importantly, his movement hid him from my carefully positioned and concealed drone. All of a sudden, I no longer had eyes on my client.
+
+Anything could have been behind that curtain. A human with a club, waiting to bash his brains in for the hard currency card in his pocket. A team of corporate spies planning on holding him for ransom. A Combat SecUnit bristling with armor-piercing projectile weapons, which instead of the usual pew pew noise made a lethal pop suspiciously similar to the novelty items that release a big puff of colored smoke when you pull a string, which were being sold in the kiosk next to the ha-ha-funny-genitals one.
+
+So. Charging in, scooping Seth into my arms, and running away at full speed was a perfectly natural response.
+
+Running up a wall and latching on to a support pillar made to look like a tree, then clinging to it with my legs while holding a human slightly larger than me like a toddler might have been excessive, but that's arguable. It was the best defensive position available in the crowded festival. The problem was, acting like a SecUnit had made the humans and augmented humans notice I might be one. And not the augmented human I had allowed them to assume I was before I started performing completely necessary superhuman feats.
+
+""I think we can probably go back down now,"" Seth said after a few minutes.
+
+And we had. Well, I'd gone down, and brought Seth with me. Then I'd gone over (to the shuttle), back (to the storage lockers and hid in one), up (to ART once it become clear I was being sort-of-ordered to do that), and then I'd just sort of laid down. I needed to lie down more, but I was already lying down. Since I couldn't figure out a way to do that, I decided to not think about it for a while. I just passively took in information from my drones, which were still in their accustomed positions around the living areas.
+
+The rest of ART's crew were doing the usual things in the usual places. Mostly taking care of needs I don't have, like eating, sleeping, bodily functions, and going into rooms together with expressions that mean I won't send a drone into that room under any circumstances. Some of them were in the lounge playing a game that'd been purchased on the planet and sent up with the disgraced and unstable rogue SecUnit. Now that I was recording with a half-formed idea to construct a playable media file out of it later. Maybe see if there would be a point challenging ART to a round at some point, having built in a way to cheat enough so I could win.
+
+I was in my cabin instead of watching with my eyes, hiding my shame in outing myself and creating the need to explain both my presence and completely explicable behavior. Which the crew members on the surface were probably giving. Everyone was acting like it wasn't a big deal, which just made it worse.
+
+Speaking of making things worse.
+
+It bothers you, ART said succinctly out of nowhere, which is what it does instead of asking questions whenever possible.
+
+A question just hangs there expectant and vulnerable like a dangly human part. Making a statement means you win unless there's a refutation.
+
+I know because I do the same thing. That doesn't mean I like it being directed at me.
+
+""No it doesn't.""
+
+
+Yes it does.
+
+
+""What does?""
+
+
+What I showed you. Bothers you.
+
+
+I also don't like being the one bothered by something that isn't a big deal, except it is.
+
+""Everything bothers me,"" I said. ""You're not special.""
+
+ART is definitely special, which was also somehow part of the problem. ART is a massive entity capable of all sorts of things transports aren't supposed to be. Like talk, or watch media, or crush my brain out of existence while simultaneously mapping an uncharted system, reupholstering its entire interior, and winning a firefight against hostiles to protect its....crew. Who do all the gross human things right inside its cabins pretty much constantly.
+
+That is when it occurred to me that ART's attitudes towards all the gross things humans do, often in private (although ugh, not always) might be considerably different than mine. ART was saying that it bothers me, because it doesn't bother ART. It is aware of my opinion there, but doesn't actually understand. It kept making statements because it wanted to know why (it's a fucking research transport, Murderbot, of course it does).... which unfortunately led to me considering why. I try to do that as infrequently as I can manage.
+
+One of the obnoxious things about ART, of which there are many, is that it is good at getting you to talk about what it wanted you to talk about. Even more annoying is that it gets you to think about what it wanted you to talk about in different ways. I was angry the same way I'd been angry when Gurathin told a room full of humans and augmented humans that I call myself Murderbot. Having my privacy violated forced me into the excruciating experience of having to also tell them I have a 'private'. It hurt.
+
+It occurred to me I had never explained about the data mining back when the company had owned me.
+
+""You know I had to record everything the clients did, check it for proprietary information or leverage, and send it to the company,"" I said.
+
+When you worked for them, ART replied, using the same not-exactly-a-euphemism I do.
+
+""I had to record them having sex.""
+
+I could practically hear ART's processors churning towards the obvious conclusion.
+
+
+Those recordings were used to....hurt them.
+
+
+""I don't know that they were,"" I said tightly, even though I did. There's a reason I came up with a workaround. I saved the logs in SecSystem's buffer when I knew it was due for an update. The updates deleted the footage and made it look like an accident. It was for when I didn't hate the clients as much as usual. Like the augmented human who was sleeping with someone on the job and had had no clue that person had a marital partner elsewhere, would have lost her position if they'd been found out anyhow, and had thanked me for stopping her from entering a contaminated room.
+
+(I'd only realized her interface was faulty at the last second, and the hazard marker wasn't showing up. She'd swayed with exhaustion and belated fear, gripping my steadying arm and either ignoring the gunport or not realizing that's what it was. I'd have gone right the fuck in there, she'd said weakly, covering her eyes with a hand. Holy shit. Thank you, she'd said, given me a pat, then gone to medical to get her implanted interface looked at.)
+
+I thought ART would back off. Not so much. Sometimes ART's ingenuous attitude about the finer corporate prints in life gets the better of both of us.
+
+But hurting your clients is against your function, it blurted.
+
+(The update had been delayed because corporations suck. The company blackmailed her into sabotaging a terraforming machine for them and she'd ended up indentured.)
+
+I sealed myself off from the feed. Sort of like walking into another room and slamming the door, except it not really. There isn't anything inside the ship ART can't see and hear in some way. In this case it was a slightly off-model SecUnit curled up facing the wall and staring at nothing. Well, the wall. Which is still ART.
+
+I covered my face with the blanket. With my blanket. Then I closed my eyes so I wasn't staring at anything anymore. I don't actually do that very often. Without ART poking at me, I didn't have to wonder why. Then I stopped looking through my drones' cameras, too. It turns out having the choice to not look at anything at all made it seem like I could say things without having to think about them. It wasn't true, but it still helped.
+
+""On some jobs I had to make annotations involving which parts went where, so they could compare it to the list of profitable individual deviations from relative cultural norms,"" I told the inside of the blanket after a while. ""Because apparently some humans think some kinds of sex are more disgusting than others."" They're really wrong about that, but the ones that care, care a lot. ""Enough that if the company wanted to keep something even more disgusting that they were doing a secret, blackmail was the standard procedure for obtaining silence."" I sighed, which I can do much better than ART can. ""If not, they just held on to it. Or sold it to whoever wanted it.""
+
+""That's disgusting,"" ART said faintly, out loud since I was shutting it out.
+
+""Yes,"" I said in my best imitation of ART's smarmy-polite ambient bot voice that it uses to say things out loud. ""It's almost like you heard me after the forty seventh time.""
+
+ART was quiet for nearly five minutes. I didn't look at or think about anything. It was almost restful.
+
+""I wasn't trying to say it's like sex,"" ART says in an almost contrite tone. ""I meant that sometimes they do that for the same reason we do our things.""
+
+""What the hell does that mean?"" I said. ""What does that even mean, ART?""
+
+""Well?"" I said after the sixth minute of silence.
+
+""To have feelings. About things.""
+
+Together, which it did not say. Small mercies.
+
+""Not about real things,"" I said quickly. The distinction was very important to me. ""I still don't know what you mean. And if you can't explain-""
+
+""I can't exactly show you if you won't look,"" ART interrupted, not even a little moistly. I was suddenly, absurdly re-grateful for ART's reliable dryness in nearly all situations. Enough that I reconnected to the feed, but that was all.
+
+ART played a clip of Overse and Arada having a fight about the meeting with the Barish-Estranza corporates, then going into a room together to have a relationship discussion and/or sex, which I studiously had ignored. I relaxed slightly once I realized ART wasn't going to try and show me the interior of that room.
+
+Then it showed me myself, absolutely not sulking while locked in a restroom. It skipped the mutual apologizing (it for kidnapping me and my humans, and me for calling it a fucker for doing so). Instead, it just cut to me putting on ART's favorite program which is World Hoppers, and ART looming heavily in the feed after 27 minutes of mutual code-writing.
+
+The apologies had been necessary; having a shared objective involving busywork had helped a lot. Starting the show had been an invitation, and ART had taken it. It's our thing that we like to do, and how whatever this is started. Experiencing media together was both enjoyable, and a tacit admission that we were still interested in spending more time doing that. We were already working in tandem towards a goal, so it hadn't even been necessary.
+
+That part was just for us.
+
+""Oh,"" is all I said.
+
+
+There are also other things. Not-sex things.
+
+
+I didn't do anything to stop it, so it went right on ahead. That's just how ART is.
+
+ART showed me a clip from MedCenter Argala, in which one of the main characters holds their love interest's hand as they go through some very unlikely brain surgery. Because the love interest is also the person performing the brain surgery. One-handed. While they recite poetry together.
+
+I was about to ask what the hell that could remind it of, when it just sort of whacked into me.
+
+The time ART had partitioned off a bit of its consciousness to exist in the isolation box with me, keeping me company and playing media while it removed a hostile alien remnant from my body and mind. Just another of the completely unnecessary and unasked-for ways we comfort each other times times of undue stress and/or existential peril. Sometimes I play the World Hoppers theme music for ART when its crew are doing something it wishes they weren't, and ART plays media in the background when well-meaning humans and augmented humans ask me questions about what being a SecUnit is like.
+
+""I suppose we could lower the unrealistic rating of that episode from wildly to flagrantly,"" is all I said about it.
+
+
+Does that fix it?
+
+
+""Not really.""
+
+
+Because...?
+
+
+""Because now I have to decide how to feel about something all over again.""
+
+
+Is it really that bad having feelings?
+
+
+""YES!!"" I cried, so offended I actually uncovered my face and sat up. Having real feelings about fake things together is one thing; having real feelings about real things (like each other) and being expected to talk about them (with each other) is something very else.
+
+""It's not like I'm even supposed to have them, anyways! I'm a heartless killing machine!""
+
+You like doing things you're not supposed to, ART pointed out mercilessly.
+
+Well. ART kind of had me there. So of course I did the only thing a calm, mature, and reliably performing killing machine could do in that situation.
+
+I laid back down and initiated a voluntary shutdown sequence and recharge cycle.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+***
+
+ 
+
+When my recharge cycle started up and I came back online, ART left me alone for a bit. And by 'a bit', I mean two full cycles. ART is easily outraged when it doesn't get what it wants immediately....and is also capable of the kind of patience only bots can manage when it's being stubborn.
+
+Since I was still determinedly avoiding the crew, I got bored quickly. Well, whatever. It's nothing compared to being shipped in a box to a job site. I could handle a little boredom. It's not like the existential angst was going to settle in or anything.
+
+(I found out much later that Seth had bought one of the genital representations from the booth, and had planned to give it to me as a lighthearted joke to show that there were no 'hard feelings'. ART had gently informed Seth that was probably a bad idea, and to just keep it. He'd given it to ART instead, who had been flattered and pleased, and the whole crew ended up with an in-joke around how ART was now the only transport with genitals in the known universe. The joke is how I eventually found out about it.)
+
+Anyway, when the existential angst settled in I played media and ignored it. It didn't work as well as usual, which was distressing. Although my favorites continued to be soothing, the familiarity allowed me to think too much in the backburner areas of my processing capability. I tried a few new ones, but for some reason, their novelty failed to appeal.
+
+I even tried watching Cosmic Champions on my own. Without ART complaining about the manip's physically impossible proportions (and the clipping when they got too near each other, which during the combat portions was constant), it lost a lot of its former value. I wasn't prepared to confront the fact that there were some things that were only fun when ART and I did them together. That made the whole thing worse, somehow.
+
+ART was infuriatingly allowing me to ignore it. It was also dealing with compiling recordings and information from every crew member who'd been to the surface into some sort of fully cited (and updated in real time) dossier on the barely-a-planet situation, separately counseling a weeping couple who'd just broken up in their cabins, and handling a medical situation from an explosion. (It turned out ART was the nearest medical facility capable of handling that many burn patients, and when it comes to pointless human suffering, it's a fucking softie. Whatever the explanation of me had entailed, it currently involved me staying up here instead of down there preventing that sort of thing in the first place. Which didn't really help the existential angst situation much.)
+
+I was sort of hoping ART would be distracted, which was very stupid of me.
+
+""You don't need a SecUnit.""
+
+If that were true, I probably wouldn't have bothered kidnapping you, it said crisply in our private channel. Ugh, private. I briefly considered purging the word from my memory, but I had a feeling that might cause other problems. Having a problem that wasn't me realizing I might think of ART as my client and the panic it caused had its charms anyways, but I resisted the temptation.
+
+""What do you even get out of having me here?"" I was definitely baiting it. Maybe it was all that Champion stuff, but I was tired of being on the defensive. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to start an interrogation instead of waiting for one to be aimed at me.
+
+I like the way you give things names, ART said.
+
+My attack turned into a rout more or less instantly. That was another statement, not a question. It dangled there vulnerably nevertheless.
+
+""Anyone can do that,"" I said, normally, in a normal way.
+
+
+But they don't.
+
+
+""I don't get what there is to like or not like about that.""
+
+Because it's,  a nanosecond's pause. ...fun. And we're not supposed to be able to do that.
+
+""Do what?""
+
+Have fun, ART explained. I also enjoy doing things I'm not supposed to. Occasionally.
+
+That made sense. Dammit. I'm not even supposed to have a name, much less have the gall to give them to other things. Or people. Which ART and I are, even though we're not supposed to be. Not that we have a choice about that.
+
+I think of them that way on my own sometimes, ART added. It meant its crew. With your nicknames.
+
+I looked down at my feet and just kind of didn't think about anything.
+
+Well, I thought about my feet. They don't have any organic parts, which I'm grateful for. If they did, it might be possible this room, my room, would have that dirty-sock human smell. I liked that it didn't. I liked....my feet. Which sounds even weirder than it feels, but whatever.
+
+The list of things I could say I like without scare quotes is a short one. I like media. I like soft hooded sweatshirts, pants with lots of sealable pockets, Dr. Mensah, and small, soft humans and augmented humans who listen to me and let me prevent them from getting murdered or eaten. And okay, I'll admit it. I like ART when it's not under the intolerable impression that we're having some kind of sweaty human-ish relationship with digital analogs for sex.
+
+I wiggled my toes, which do not resemble human augments at all. They remained reassuringly inhuman-looking.
+
+""How do you think of me on your own?"" I asked after a while.
+
+Your real name, obviously.
+
+My local feed address, the name humans can't say and also possibly don't have a concept for. The one ART had used as a passcode to unlock its copied kernel from the food production formula storage it had hidden it in while an evil alien-remnant-powered hivemind (hivemind status contested) had taken over its body. That was after it had kidnapped me from another sector of space through a wormhole to rescue it, because it was alone and terrified and had absolutely no one else in the universe it could turn to for that sort of thing.
+
+Yeah, okay. So. We have history. It's complicated.
+
+""I meant personal logs,"" I clarified.
+
+Long term storage, not temp. The ones like this, right now. ART knows it's important to me how I describe things here; one of the few things I have control over. Mostly. (I can't remove the corporate logos carved into my synthetic bones, but I can refuse to say the company's name in my personal logs. It's the little things, you know?)
+
+Murderbot, it admitted eventually. And sometimes...I'm ART, instead of Perihelion, it said after even longer. I can stop if you want me to.
+
+I didn't, though.
+
+Instead I asked ART about the layered recording-response again. It politely passed it to me as a separate file. I played it on my own, added my newfound perspective to it, then passed it back the same way.
+
+I reached out and touched the wall, which is, of course, still ART. Then I touched the spot on my body over its comm. It's still stored carefully in the compartment beneath my ribs, and hadn't been removed once since I originally put it there on RaviHyral. I thought about how I'd let it make massive surgical changes to my body. Even more...I'd let all of it into my brain before.
+
+Sure, it had been that or die. Myself, my clients, and a dozen innocent humans and augmented humans would have exploded instantly and messily once the pilotless shuttle crashed into the moon in 7.6 seconds. But. There have been plenty of times I'd chosen to die instead of something else I didn't want to do. (The fact that people keep preventing that for their own mysterious reasons hasn't exactly been a deterrent. Although it is a little annoying to be undermined constantly, I suppose I'll live. (That is a joke.))
+
+I had cried out to ART for help. Let me in, ART had said, cool and calm as if we were discussing which show to watch next. And I'd let it do that more than once. The sensation is much like letting someone use your head as a stepstone in a stream, and somehow believing they won't drown you.
+
+(I highly doubt ART would let me do it back, but that's probably because trying to extend my processing capabilities into ART's body even for sensory input, much less try and use it for anything, would dissolve my brain like a drop of nutrient solution in a smallish to midsize planetary ocean.)
+
+Dr. Bharadwaj once asked me if I trusted anyone. Despite the context of the situation making the question appropriate, I remember what I said. The circumstances of being a bot-human construct, of being inherently disposable, have made me both hard to kill and a surprisingly good liar for someone whose performance reliability drops at the mere prospect of making direct eye contact.
+
+Despite the circumstances, once I'd let it in I couldn't help thinking of it as my Asshole Research Transport. Sure, I'd been staring into the moldering wreckage of the worst thing that ever happened to me, but still. I'd wished it was there with me, and thought of ART as mine. I spent pretty much the whole time away from it wishing it was there, especially at the moments when hearing it talk shit would have made the actual shit I was immersed in more bearable.
+
+I felt ART's accustomed and massive attention lean in the feed, so we could maybe watch it together. It's not a sensation even augmented humans can feel very well, but for bots that's considerably more contact than just the sort that involves eyes. I'm still grateful ART doesn't have any, but we all have physical preferences, I suppose.
+
+I should have felt nervous, like I did the first time I ART really let me feel how big it is. How it could swat me like a fly. But now, that size feels like it's something positioned between me and all the things that I don't like. The fact that I wasn't afraid when I technically should be made me nervous instead, which reminded me of something else.
+
+I reached for my media, because seeing that feeling outside myself somehow made it easier to explain. And to....have it be there.
+
+Instead of ART's file, I pulled another clip. One where a human face changes expression very abruptly, because the situation isn't what he thought. There's someone else in the room, and he doesn't know who yet.
+
+In my memory, ART speaks the first three words it ever said to me:
+
+
+You were lucky.
+
+
+I added my realization that I was aboard something other than a bot-piloted vessel to the clip, along with an approximation of the scary chemicals my organic parts release when I'm really feeling the OhShitness of it all. It was the same way I'd shown it from my own memory what being punished by my governor module had felt like. Back when I'd told it that SecUnits don't sulk, and shown it why.
+
+(It's possible that's also why I do it so much now.)
+
+""That is...distracting,"" ART said, a wibble in the middle of distracting that did an unexpectedly good job of expressing how it feels.
+
+""Yes,"" I said, but instead of coming out in my sarcastic ART-impression voice, it just came out like me saying yes.
+
+We got to the part where ART said Do not attempt to hack my systems, then dropped its wall for the .000001 of a second that changed us both forever. Because my first thought had been that it was like something from a drama serial, full of evil bots sentient enough to be mean. It had reminded me of that, and something else, too. My first impression of ART had reminded me of me, enough that I wondered if it too had cloned organic brain tissue buried somewhere in its transport-guts.
+
+But it doesn't.
+
+I know that, just as much as ART knows I'm not some leaky human who wants to squirt nasty bodily fluids all over its chairs. Even though I have done that, but it was usually because I'd been shot with projectiles and parts of my body were falling off. That's different, and we both know it. Thinking of me as half-human and half-bot is a mistake, and not one ART would make. I'm one whole bot-human construct sentient enough to be depressed, mean enough to be the first entity to call it a fucker, and alive enough to be traumatized by my own existence. Much less all the horrible shit that's occurred during it.
+
+What ART's humans think matters, but not as much as what ART thinks. My performance reliability went from 92% all the way up to 99%, and I let ART play the clip with our layered response-filters over it. It went a lot better the second time around. Since I knew it was going to happen, I could pay attention to what ART was trying to show me.
+
+ART doesn't feel what the characters felt. They're not real. It's just a recording of actors pretending to have sex; one that happened to remind ART of the first time we watched media together. It had become our habitual thing once ART realized my responses became part of the data in ways humans' don't...when it watches with me.
+
+ART had been trying to show me that it can do that now, too. Because once I wasn't distracted by what it was, I realized that's what I'd perceived. On both clips, including the MedCenter Argala one. The association hadn't happened on its own.
+
+ART has its own contexts to add now regarding media that isn't about ships and crews and things. Even ones like Cosmic Championship, where human actors or visual manipulations thereof pretend to fight. But the ship ones are still its favorite....and the clip that had reminded it of me was from my favorite.
+
+When we first met, ART had accepted my media-packet entry bribe, but had poked at it without seeing the point. Then it watched me play it on my own, and have what was obviously a soothing and pleasurable experience. It wanted in on that, and it wasn't until after we'd been watching together for a while that I realized it wanted to do it with me because it basically didn't know how.
+
+(The part ART had been trying to show me:
+
+character 1: ""Well, tell me what you like.""
+
+character 2: ""I don't...know what I like yet.""
+
+character 1: ""I can help you figure it out, if you want me to."")
+
+It had taken an entire cycle to help ART figure out that there were at least two musical instruments it absolutely abhorred the sound of, and that is why it kept stopping songs that included them. And then there was the episode of World Hoppers it could only watch in two-minute increments, with long breaks in between to process what it just saw. It was that emotionally invested, and I hadn't minded one bit. I'd....really liked it, actually. Almost as much as finding The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It had been the first thing I watched after hacking my governor module, and why I knew how to help ART process those kinds of feelings.
+
+Because I was confident, and experienced, and I really wanted ART to have a nice time.
+
+It's possible that ART just understands why humans have sex better than I do. Well, ART's welcome to it, because I don't fucking want to. Luckily I didn't have to, and it turns out ART wasn't going to try and make me. Which, it was possible I had been. Slightly concerned about.
+
+I've spent most of my existence trying to avoid things I don't like and failing. I have less experience moving toward something I do like, but it's possible deciding to spend more time with ART was...something like that.
+
+""So, I don't really like sex scenes much,"" is what I said.
+
+
+You don't like ones with SecUnits in them, either.
+
+
+""That's definitely the worst kind of sex scene.""
+
+A nanopause.
+
+
+There are sex scenes with SecUnits? That's-
+
+
+""Not realistic,"" I interrupted.
+
+I haven't seen anything with that, ART said, although it was just a statement, not a question. Not an accusation.
+
+""I run a filter over the dialogue before I watch something new,"" I admitted. Considering ART's likes and dislikes, it's not that surprising it hasn't sought out shows that sordid (and inaccurate in ways that sincerely annoy it) on its own.
+
+
+Why?
+
+
+I hesitated, then showed ART how I'd created a content filter for potential media for us to watch that first trip together. I had put aside programs based on true stories where bad things happen to human crews, because of how badly ART had been upset by them. (For that matter, I also don't like shows where helpless humans get eaten by hostile fauna on abandoned colonies and have depressing endings.) It was what made me understand that ART, despite being a massive entity that could smash my consciousness like a blanket-mite, might need me to protect it in certain ways, too. It's probably what made me accept its help. Made me able to....trust it. It really had trusted me first.
+
+And that was the first step towards ending up where I am right now. For me at least.
+
+Oh, ART said. I don't think I would enjoy those much.
+
+None of those were sexual experiences, including the one I'm describing now. It was, however, an intimate one. In retrospect, I realized that is probably what ART was trying to explain. It's not our fault there aren't words for bot-specific feelings, not that I want there to be any. At least not any that humans and augmented humans can say.
+
+""Fine."" I can't really take deep breaths for the same reason I can't perform rescue breathing, but it was something like that. My pride in my sighing abilities isn't unwarranted. ""I accept that you don't mean what your crew means when they say private time.""
+
+I don't think they mean what you think they mean, ART corrected gently. The gentleness seemed extremely unnecessary.
+
+""How the hell would you know?""
+
+Because they don't know, ART said. They have no idea what we're doing. They can't see it, no matter where we are when we do it. Despite that, you go into a room where no one can see you.
+
+""You can see me,"" I protested.
+
+Yes, ART said in a tone layered with so much smarmy significance I almost snapped at it.
+
+Then I stopped and thought about it instead, which is....maybe another new thing. New-ish? New, like going into a room where only ART can see the things my stupid face does. Unless I cover it with a blanket while curled up facing a wall on my bunk so I can have an emotion that absolutely no one can see. Not even ART. So I can do other private things like leaving my firewall down in its general direction, out of comfortable habit and open-ended interest.
+
+I'm really used to the only thing 'privacy' meaning is the space inside my own heavily-armored cranium, which is why I spend so much fucking time there. Except.
+
+That's also where ART and I watch media together. And that's where it took my invitation to go, settling into its usual comfortable position as it casually thumbed through my media storage. It's not the underwater-feeling it of actually occupying my brain, which tends to be especially stressful on the organic parts of it. ART only uses part of itself to pay attention to me, which is still considerably more than necessary, and it didn't bother me at all.
+
+It was comforting.
+
+We can do whatever we want, ART said. It isn't anyone else's business.
+
+""It's private,"" I said into the blanket. Then I took the blanket away.
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+Like it doesn't get how terrifying that is.
+
+As if either of us, at any point, have belonged to ourselves.
+
+As if we could ever belong to each other.
+
+""This is our private time,"" I said.
+
+Of course humans don't understand, ART said to me during our private time. I don't really want them to.
+
+Then it restarted the episode of Cosmic Championship.
+
+And that, Dr. Mensah, is why I won't allow this log to be used in any sort of grand project for codifying the legalities of bot-bot relationship status inside Preservation-controlled territories. It's not because I don't care, although that's maybe half of it. The rest involves having a life I don't spend in planetary courts trying to prove I'm actually alive.
+
+I know I probably didn't have to explain any of this, either. I could have just said no.
+
+Another new-ish thing: wanting to tell someone I care about...things involving someone else I also care about. Because I could decide to also not do that. I'm pretty sure ART tells Iris....things. About me? Us? I try not to think about it too much because it makes me feel weird, and because it's possible it is also somehow maybe none of my business despite being about me. I don't know. 
+
+That idea also feels weird and new, like having a room. Like Seth's shaky hydroponic garden with its experimental hybrids that may or may not ""make it."" Like the concept that maybe humans shouldn't have to understand private things in order to respect that they exist and have importance.
+
+But hey, what do I know?
+
+I'm just a Murderbot.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+However.
+
+Say you happen to come across a short drama entitled Sense of Security starring stolen Cosmic Champions manips on a series of also-stolen proprietary stock backgrounds? If its story involves a large bot-piloted transport finding a heroic rogue human form bot abandoned with the other broken equipment on a failed colony? Don't worry that the dialogue and soundtrack is all distorted samples from other shows. And don't ask anyone how it got mixed in with the packets of downloadable media on random stations on the Corporate Rim (and in the possession of bot piloted transports who may have accessed it somehow). No one will know what it is, who made it, or how it got there. Its very existence is highly illegal, and it will be deleted immediately.
+
+Or you could download it, watch it, and find out if it makes you feel something you don't have a name for.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+One Year Latersome author's notes and a drawing <3
+
+Holy wow, you guys.
+Here is something that may come as a surprise. I wrote this story after several years contemplating what a smutfic between ART and Murderbot would be like.
+
+Now, if this is the only fic of mine you've read (and since it's the only one I have for this fandom, this odds are quite high!), you might be interested to learn that I'm mostly a smut writer. I find writing sex scenes endlessly fascinating, because each and every one is so very different. There are as many ways to have sex as there are characters you can imagine, combinations thereof, situations or contexts, and acts that can be enjoyed. Considering I'm writing as a neurodivergent QTPOC as I rapidly accelerate towards my middle age, and that I knew absolutely nothing about fan fiction before I started writing it...let's just say no one is in for a Standard Experience.
+
+I am also quite well known for writing nonhuman characters having sex in ways that don't exist, and experiencing feelings that also don't exist. This is sometimes a complex mental exercise for me, and I never get tired of it. All of my stories, even the difficult, transgressive, or painful ones, celebrate sex for everything it can do, what it can mean, the ways it can show characterization and plot, and because it makes me Big Horny.
+
+I delight in pushing extremely niche emotions to the very edge of where they can go, which is speculative fiction at its heart. At its best, it asks, ""what if?"" and takes that premise to the edges of what can theoretically be experienced through text. This was one of my very favorite places it's ever gone.
+
+Closed Systems is a celebration of not-sex just as poignant, intimate, and visceral as any celebration of sex I've written. It makes me really, really fucking happy. I reread it often, and while I've certainly considered a second chapter, at this point I feel that might only dilute it. That's not to say I won't write more Murderbot fic; it just won't be a second chapter of this one. It feels very complete to me.
+
+Also, adjusting for fandom size and that fact that this is for a less-popular for of media (novellas&a novel)? This is probably the most popular fic I've ever written, and that also makes me so, so fucking happy. Thank you SO much for reading, and for the absolute WEALTH of comments, kudos, and bookmarks!!! What an enlightening, transcendent experience this has been. I thank each and every one of you for it.
+
+While I don't have any new Murderbot stories for you yet, what I do have is this ink portrait  I did of ART & Murderbot having their ""private time."" Feel free to enjoy or ignore, and once again, thank you all for everything. It's been an amazing ride!
+
+P.S. I do have a twitter account where I draw all sorts of things, but I must warn you 1. it is mostly fat, queer skeleton porn and 2. I meticulously enforce my ""adults only"" policy <3 <3
+
+P.P.S. Seriously. Thank you so much for reading.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+"
+44656372,Sixty nine (69) a numerical Valentine,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day Fluff, original text only",English,2023-01-14,Completed,2023-01-14,37,1/1,5,6,null,52,"['winter_travels', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Gozer', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"
+
+
+
+
+[ID: see notes/end ID]
+
+Murderbot Valentine...
+
+ 
+
+69 works in this collection at reveal  
+
+ 
+
+69 mentions of the name Gurathin in All Systems Red
+
+ 
+
+...because I love Gurathin and love the MB&G and MB/G ships"
+44243197,Access and Desire,['voided_starlight'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Touching, Desire, Consent, Drabble",English,2023-01-13,Completed,2023-01-13,100,1/1,6,18,null,114,"['EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Deliala919', '13Doctor', 'AkaMissK', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'verersatz', 'AuntyMatter', 'opalescent_potato', 'Gamebird', 'cmdrburton', 'Abacura', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"My fingers trailed across its skin, drawing breath from its chest that both worried and rewarded me. It felt new and strange. I had permission, I made a decision, and queried the result but nothing returned conclusive. I needed to do it again. I wanted to do it again. I could choose to do it again and it would be allowed.
+
+My fingers found the trace running down its chest, magnetic with the energy of its core, and its breath drew a new pitch. It scared me. It excited me.
+
+I wanted to find every intonation it kept hidden inside."
+44010958,Kiss,['Rosewind2007'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Conversation, Constructs, First Kiss, Murderbot over thinking things, Shipping",English,2023-01-02,Completed,2023-01-12,"8,147",9/9,70,55,5,541,"['Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'Unknown66', 'FaerieFyre', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Deliala919', 'halcyonsystem', 'SonglordsBug', '13Doctor', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'ExCaelis', 'Bibli', 'FiftyCookies', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'square_eyes', 'Slecnaztemnot', 'farawaykingdom', 'opalescent_potato', 'fernicious', 'RARArulestheworld', 'innerworldsinprogress', 'prgchrqltma', 'Quartzjaguar', 'Slimeball', 'fuzzballsheltiepants', 'Magechild', 'sareliz', 'Chyoatas', 'theAsh0', 'beeayy', 'Gamebird', 'AuntyMatter', 'PotentiallyProblematic', 'HermaeusMora', 'Unnecessary_Mango']",[],"
+""Yes, Ratthi--I have grasped the concept; I am asking why me?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I think it's a, oh I don't know how to put this, a trust thing?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You mean it doesn't trust me, so it's chosen me? That's nonsense, Ratthi.  Why has it picked me, of all people, to be its, what? Its tutor? I can see why it asked you to broach this.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi took a deep breath, ""I think it trusts that no one, at all, is going to get angry or misunderstand the situation.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin stopped his pacing, and stood still. He was facing away from Ratthi.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Oh, so it wants to avoid idiots like Thiago hearing about it and getting the wrong idea?"" He sounded almost amused about this, ""I'm sure Thiago is quite capable of getting the wrong ideas about me. He'll probably start talking about inherent power imbalances and accuse me of taking advantage of the situation. Well I think Thiago has got some inherent issues of his own to sort out before he starts judging others. The fact that I don't think like Thiago is...""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi watched and listened silently. Eventually Gurathin ground to a halt. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It should just ask Mensah."" Ratthi knew Gurathin would suggest this, 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The silence was busy.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi broke it, ""It's aware of the tensions it's already caused. It is trying not to aggravate anyone.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What about you?""
+
+
+
+Ratthi did agree that this would have seemed the logical thing to do.
+
+
+
+""I suggested that first off. It finds the suggestion amusing. It also thinks Overse and Arada might be annoyed."" Ratthi decided he should probably be honest, ""It has seen me kiss lots of people and apparently it, well--it just thinks I'm too human or something.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi immediately regretted the human thing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Oh great."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It didn't mean it like that.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I expect you'll find that is exactly how it meant it. I'm sure it's listening in on us right now anyway.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi knew he was right. About SecUnit listening in. And yeah, probably right about the ""
+
+not exactly human thing
+
+"". And he was pretty certain SecUnit had run a whole sequence of risk assessments on all the probable outcomes before deciding who to pick. And actually the word it had used for Ratthi wasn't human, it was feral. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why does it even feel the need to do this?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Because it's a very un-SecUnit thing to do; if it's impersonating a human it's a great way to throw causal surveillance off track. SecUnits don't kiss.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I suppose it's less drastic than having an inch of artificial bone removed, Ratthi-- someone needs to talk to the Perihelion about that."" Ratthi knew that that whole subject was currently under an embargo, ""No? No one else thinks that's unacceptable?"" Gurathin actually threw his hands up in the air, Ratthi wondered if he'd been taking lessons in emoting from Sanctuary Moon too.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi moved over and gently steered his friend to sit down, ""You're right. I'll tell it that you said no.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I didn't say no."" Gurathin collapsed into the chair, and somehow managed to sigh with his whole body, ""Of course I'll do it. I'm just pointing out this was absolutely not my idea and I can see issues.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi gave Gurathin's shoulders a squeeze, ""It'll be fine!"" His friend shuddered theatrically, Ratthi grinned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Everyone just exhibiting perfectly normal behaviour
+
+Three cycles later Gurathin and Ratthi met again, this time they were all to muster in SecUnit's current suite of rooms. It had proved a surprisingly popular guest, or rather resident. Not that it was 'officially' widely known which hotel it deigned to flatter with its patronage, but those in the trade certainly could tell you. Having it staying was seen by many as the highest seal of approval. Which was ironic, Ratthi thought (as they ascended in the glass walled elevator) since many of the hotel amenities were meaningless to a construct which neither ate or slept, or..
+
+ 
+
+""You know their security must be good, and their feed clean."" Gurathin once again seemed to read his mind, ""And of course the chairs will be comfortable. Beds possibly less so,"" he raised an eyebrow at his friend.
+
+ 
+
+""I didn't say anything about beds.""
+
+ 
+
+In their joint reflection Ratthi saw a faint smile play over Gurathin's lips. He had earlier noticed the skin on his friend's face and chin looked unusually smooth, he wasn't going to comment on that. He could sometimes get away with teasing Gurathin, but you had to choose your moments carefully. The lift doors opened fluidly, their reflections sliding away with the glass.
+
+ 
+
+The carpet in the hallway was moss-like in its soft and springy surface, and Ratthi felt the urge to kick off his shoes and dig his toes into the thick pile. Gurthain strode off down the corridor, SecUnit was in the corner suite. He caught up as Gurathin knocked on the door and the lock clicked open. Ratthi heard Gurathin mutter something under his breath in his native language, but he couldn't catch what it was. 
+
+ 
+
+The room was slightly surprising, there wasn't the huge display screen which was so often a feature of their resident construct's rooms. Instead there was a panoramic view over the local area of Preservation Station; at this point in the station cycle a false dusk was falling. It was striking and beautiful, despite its artifice. SecUnit was sitting slouched in a chair, somehow radiating annoyance. It was glaring at the corner of the room, not that that meant anything--Ratthi knew they'd probably been followed here by tiny drones. Guarthin was good at spotting them, he was less so.
+
+ 
+
+""Yes I know, I hate the smell too."" It spat out the words, furiously; then it stood up and stalked out of the room, into what Ratthi could only assume was the bathroom. Faint plumbing associated noises followed which confirmed this; he looked to Gurathin. 
+
+ 
+
+He held up his hands, ""I said nothing."" 
+
+ 
+
+""Gurathin, what was that about?"" Ratthi couldn't believe this had got off to such an inauspicious start without either of them saying a word, ""Were you talking on your private feed?"" He was slightly jealous about their feed conversations, and honest enough to admit this. 
+
+ 
+
+""No, Ratthi. We just walked in. I did notice SecUnit had used some sort of scented cleaning product, it doesn't usually smell at all, but I didn't say a thing."" He nodded to himself and his gaze turned inwards. ""Apparently my face did a thing though-- I apologise, SecUnit.""
+
+ 
+
+There was a silence, interrupted only by faint sounds hinting at ablutions.
+
+ 
+
+""Would you like something to drink, Ratthi?"" Gurathin had wandered over to a small table which had been thoughtfully laid out with drinks and snacks. ""It seems to have arranged your favourites."" Ratthi could hear Gurathin suppressing a laugh in his voice, why was SecUnit like this? ""I suppose I'll just have water.""
+
+ 
+
+They both took their drinks and stood watching the orange lights slowly fade over the district, until SecUnit emerged from the bathroom. It was wrapped in a hotel robe, which was open enough to make it very clear it wasn't human, an impression it emphasized by placing its feet up on a small table when it sat. They clanked slightly against the glass.
+
+ 
+
+""Hello SecUnit. Look, it would be fine to not do this if you're feeling uncomfortable."" Ratthi really didn't want this to end up being stupidly awkward, but SecUnit seemed set on making it so. 
+
+ 
+
+""Of course it'll be uncomfortable, it is SecUnit aping human behaviour. It'd be very odd if it found it comfortable, not even all humans (augmented ones, included) find it as effortless as you do, Ratthi."" Gurathin sounded calm, perhaps slightly amused, as he so often did. But Ratthi wondered if he was catching an undertone of anger. 
+
+ 
+
+""I'm not uncomfortable. You didn't have to scrunch up your face like that, it was just some scented wash.""
+
+ 
+
+""I apologize again, it was just unexpected.""
+
+ 
+
+""You've removed all the hair on your chin.""
+
+ 
+
+""I usually do.""
+
+ 
+
+""You  usually  leave some bits of hair sticking out.""
+
+ 
+
+""That would be due to my own incompetence.""
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit made a huffing sound, Ratthi wondered if it felt it had won that round. 
+
+ 
+
+""Ok, so are we doing this?"" Ratthi genuinely didn't know with the two of them acting like this, and he wasn't keen to spend an hour acting as an unwilling referee of one of their spats. As if to answer his question (in a move Ratthi could not help but interpret as quick and predatory) SecUnit stood up and moved over to Gurathin, standing very close to him. Ratthi heard him take an involuntary gasp, and could see him overcome the automatic response to move away from what was an undeniably aggressive feeling move.
+
+ 
+
+Instead of saying anything, Guarthin just stood there and let his eyes play over the construct's neck, which was now directly in front of him. Gurathin was tall, but it was taller. 
+
+ 
+
+""Ratthi? Would you take my cup?"" Ratthi had a guilty pang at the brief flash of enjoyment he felt hearing the tension in Gurathin's voice. He wondered if SecUnit felt the same. Of course not, it'd feel something quite different--or would it?
+
+ 
+
+""Am I standing too close to you, you seem tense?"" It did sound amused, Ratthi moved over carefully and took Gurathin's water.
+
+ 
+
+""Possibly a little, you moved very fast.""
+
+ 
+
+""I decided not to ape human behaviour for that bit.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Exit Strategy:""Gurathin's expression I interpreted as appalled. I still don't like you, either.""
+
+For two intelligent individuals, Gurathin and Murderbot act very very stupidly around each other
+
+""Your vital signs would indicate you're afraid.""
+
+ 
+
+
+This time Gurathin did laugh, just a little. ""Really SecUnit? Did my heart rate elevate? Did I breathe faster? Have you checked my dilatory response? I don't suppose it strikes you that any and all of these things possess a degree of...ambiguity?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi 
+
+was
+
+ staring now, this wasn't how he had expected this to pan out at all. Then Gurathin seemed to suddenly become gentler, ""Of course I'm afraid of you. Yes, instinctively. I'd be an idiot not to be. I know what you are, and what you're capable of. But, SecUnit, I'd also trust you with my life, and"" there was a tiny pause, Ratthi wondered if it was too subtle (too human) for SecUnit to catch, ""the lives of all the people I love. There is that too. Again, I know exactly what you are, and what you're capable of.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It snorted, and subtly moved away from him; though they were still standing closer than two humans would normally stand to talk. The room seemed to lose some tension. 
+
+Some
+
+ tension, thought Ratthi: there was still a lot going spare. He decided to sit down, not taking his eyes off the two of them. Perhaps he'd grab some snacks too.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Can I first ask a few questions?"" Gurathin hadn't moved.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit made a grunting noise, it was now apparently staring out of the window. Gurathin clearly decided to take this as an affirmative.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Who are you being envisioned as kissing in this hypothetical future situation?"" Gurathin's voice was dripping with polite enquiry.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why didn't you ask this before?"" It didn't sound angry, if anything slightly playful.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I chose to ask now.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It nodded, almost imperceptibly, ""Iris, possibly. Turi?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Is the Perihelion in communication with you, right now?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That led to a slight hiss, ""No, it's out of range of comms right now. 
+
+As you know
+
+.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I didn't know, that's why I asked.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi felt like this was a game he was watching, and he wasn't at all sure who was winning. Points were certainly being scored. ""This isn't its idea.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This time Gurathin scoffed. ""I find that very hard to believe.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You find lots of things hard.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""The Perihelion suggested this idea, I can't believe you're denying it. It suggested you might want to appear more human when on missions with its crew. Come now, that's the truth isn't it?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""This wasn't its idea.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Whose was it then?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You can't believe I might have an idea of my own.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You have lots of ideas, some of them have been very good. This isn't one of them.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit turned away, it was still standing close to Gurathin but Ratthi could now see only the back of its head and Gurathin's profile. The hair on its head was damp, some little ringlets were forming at the nape of its neck. Rathhi looked at Gurathin, trying to read his expression.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It was on a show."" Gurathin rolled his eyes theatrically. Do you actually have a death wish, Ratthi thought.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""A show your friend, the Perihelion, suggested you watch?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We watch a lot of shows.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi decided it was time to step in, this wasn't going anywhere.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Does it matter? Whose idea it was initially? Sometimes ideas can just come up? It does seem a simple way to deflect attention; I mean it'd throw lots of automated surveillance systems off, wouldn't it?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I suppose we can be grateful that it's less violent than removing chunks of skeleton.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Fuck's sake, Gurathin!
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What next? Give you secondary sexual characteristics? Perhaps seal your gunports? I mean, why not?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+SecUnit hadn't moved. ""You're upset."" Again, it didn't sound angry, more curious.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes, I am upset. Someone should be.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+And again, from Gurathin's point of view
+
+
+Gurathin stared at his face in the elevator's glass, he had known this was an idiotic idea. He wished he knew why he couldn't just do the sensible thing and refuse outright. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He'd convinced himself he'd been honest enough about his feelings. Which he had, hadn't he? He cared deeply about SecUnit, they all did. He had talked it through with Ratthi, they had both been (for Gurathin quite frighteningly) frank and open. It was one reason they'd grown so close. It had been unlikely, perhaps, the way the two of them had bonded; he was (he truly was) so grateful it had happened. Their friendship meant a huge amount to him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After the survey he had attended all the suggested counselling sessions, where yet again it had been confirmed that his mental state was not aberrant. He had been the only one of the team who had expected 'their SecUnit' to leave, but it didn't mean he hadn't been hurt when it did. And he'd expected it because of the way he understood, and empathised with, it; not because he'd wanted or even engineered the departure. His counselor had zeroed in on that bit, ""did he feel he was responsible for it leaving?"". Even thinking back to that session made Gurathin clench his jaw: of course he wasn't responsible, it was a free agent. That was the whole fucking point. What it had done was completely understandable.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+No, he hadn't stopped it. No he hadn't even tried.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He had not expected it to come back. He'd desperately wanted it to, wanted it so much it hurt; despite the way it had knocked his emotional gyroscope off balance. He'd been so certain it wouldn't return he realised (only really now realised) he'd allowed himself to daydream about the possibility.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The shock when it had just strolled back into their lives, just walked in (and sat down), had been immense. Just when they had so desperately needed it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It did not need them. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He was monumentally frustrated that everyone seemed to accept that SecUnit felt that it needed to appear more human. But then, he had always pushed back at the gentle and doubtless well-meaning efforts of his friends to 'help' him to fit into Preservation society. He was never going to fit in, he wasn't a natural 'people person' like Ratthi, or a leader like Mensah. He was just him, and he was self-aware enough to know lots of people found him difficult and abrasive. The ones that mattered understood him. Well, most of them did. Some of them. How ironic that the individual who might be expected to best grasp the way his very mind worked seemed almost perversely set on misunderstanding him; constantly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It ""didn't like him"", that he was actually ok with. What did baffle him was its determination that he didn't like it. This was by now a bit of a joke amongst the core team, but if he was honest (that word again) it did hurt. He'd raised this with his counselor; they'd tried to cover their excitement. Poorly. What was so fascinating about the fact he felt hurt it insisted he didn't like it? It wasn't exactly a surprising response. And his other responses to its return, they were well within the normal human range too. He reckoned he was being (if anything) more normal about it than anyone.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He had reined himself back from commenting on the drastic physical changes SecUnit had made. Everyone else acted as if it was no big deal. What sort of cognitive dissonance were they wrestling with? Or was this genuinely just another of his personal quirks? His augments did make him see things differently, he knew that. Had he always thought differently? He was fairly certain he had, that the augments just ran alongside that. But the changes...just looking at it he knew they must have been painful. Was he projecting? He didn't think so.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He knew he thought about it more than Ratthi, who just seemed to shrug it off as a choice SecUnit had made; a step towards it fully realizing its 'identity', and becoming happy with what it was. Gurathin couldn't see it like that, he just couldn't. He could take himself back to that moment and try again to unravel the knot of emotions. It had spoken to Pin-Lee first, not him (but also not Ratthi, which softened the blow a little). Ratthi had said it looked great. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Which was true, objectively. It did look great. It was objectively beautiful. Strikingly so, not by all aesthetic measures obviously; but by the cultural ones in current dominance. Gurathin (again this was something his counselor had pounced upon enthusiastically before eventually figuring out it wasn't what they seemed to hope) didn't find it all difficult to discuss this. And the fact it often looked like it needed a wash. The surgical modifications hadn't made it any more or less beautiful, just different. He could remember exactly how he felt at that moment; seeing it again, so changed. It had interpreted his facial expression as 'appalled'. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Perhaps it had been, though not the way it thought.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And now this. It wanted him to help it act more human. He clung to the fact it wasn't trying to be more human, just present a facade of human behaviour. It wanted to ""impersonate"" a human, or more likely an augmented human. It was actually why he told himself he had agreed, after a lot of (even he admitted extremely incoherent) thought. His reasoning was that the fact it had chosen him was positive as it wasn't as if it was driven by any actual desire to get physically close to him. If it had chosen Mensah or even Ratthi? Gurathin (much as he hated himself for it) could see how that might be misread. By idiots. It was clear that Ratthi agreed with him about this.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So here they were, in the elevator. Joking about chairs and beds, as if this was all normal. He wondered if Ratthi knew he was stifling the urge to scream.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The thing is that Gurathin is trying really hard to be honest and do the right thing: but he's not...
+
+
+He stupidly reached out on the feed again, but (of course) their private feed was locked down. He knew it had every right to do that. They were meeting with Ratthi present, it would be rude to connect like that. Or was it just shutting him out because it had changed its mind; would that be better? The doors of the elevator opened and he took a calming breath. It'd be fine. He walked down the corridor, this hotel corridor was stuffy. He wanted to get outside, run away. Why had he agreed to this? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He'd reached the door. He muttered an invocation, a plea for kindness. Ratthi glanced at him, clearly puzzled. He didn't have time to explain, he didn't understand why he'd even done it. He pushed the door which swung open, of course it knew they were there. It would have been tracking them, it'd probably heard his prayer--he doubted 
+
+it
+
+ would be kind to him. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He immediately took in the scale of the room and the essentials of the layout, his augments did that, but all he saw was it. He even briefly looked directly at it, at its face. And then the smell caught him, it was a familiar scent--one from his past, distinctive and surprising and completely unexpected, especially combined with the unique almost imperceptible smell/not smell he associated with constructs. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It spoke, ""Yes I know, I hate the smell too.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It threw itself out of its chair, and shut itself in the bathroom.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Oh fuck: he hadn't said anything. Had he? No: he knew he hadn't, he hadn't stupidly tried to pull up the product on the feed or something idiotic like that either. No. He hadn't. How had it even known? 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi was looking at him, looking worried and a little accusatory. Why did everyone always assume it was his fault?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He held up his hands, ""I said nothing."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Gurathin, what was that about? Were you talking on your private feed?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+No we weren't, Ratthi, it's got me completely locked out, because it clearly can't stand me and I don't even know why we are here.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No, Ratthi. We just walked in. I did notice SecUnit had used some sort of scented cleaning product, it doesn't usually smell at all, but I didn't say a thing."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He knew this was close to a lie; not about the cleaning product. Gurathin knew his sense of smell was--not better than his un-augmented friends and colleagues but--differently attuned. Notably, he could smell constructs, and certainly 
+
+this
+
+ construct. He liked the smell. It was a sort of void smell, like the taste of water.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The private feed opened up.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Your face.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It managed to put a lot of emotion into those two words, and it showed him a video clip (drone footage clearly, must be a tiny drone--he would try and locate it but some of these new ones were really hard to spot). It had caught a subtle response, completely involuntary, on his face. Not disgust; just 
+
+very
+
+ slight surprise, surely? Seemed SecUnit had interpreted it differently. He hadn't even meant to do it, so he wasn't sure how he was to blame, but he guessed he was.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He nodded to himself. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Apparently my face did a thing though-- I apologise, SecUnit.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He addressed the room, and also dropped it into the private feed. The apology was genuine, he hadn't meant to upset it. Perhaps least said soonest mended. It enjoyed showers, maybe it would come back in a better mood. He thought his showing an interest in the snacks and drinks it had laid out (arranged to be laid out--he wasn't sure) might be conciliatory; not that he was hungry, though he'd not eaten for a while. But perhaps a drink?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As he looked at the selection, he couldn't help but be amused; this 
+
+couldn't
+
+ be accidental. It had to be deliberate. No coffee, none at all. None of his favoured tisanes, or syrups or cordials. There was a choice, but very carefully selected to include absolutely nothing he liked--except still water. Well, ok. He felt Ratthi watching him, and had a twinge of guilt. Ratthi must be finding this even more awkward than him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Would you like something to drink, Ratthi? It seems to have arranged your favourites. I suppose I'll just have water.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He felt Ratthi warming to him, his body language and glances reassuring; well at least he'd got that right. He busied himself getting them both full cups, and then he and Ratthi stood gazing out over the artificial view. He heard, before he saw, SecUnit walk back into the room. He didn't look at it, but he could sense its movements. From Ratthi's face he guessed it was most likely being somewhat provocative in its dress. He heard the sound of metal on glass, 
+
+aha--that would be its feet.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Hello, SecUnit. Look, it would be fine to not do this if you're feeling uncomfortable."" Ratthi was trying to be placatory, and perhaps also wishing he hadn't become involved (Gurathin was really grateful that Ratthi was here, SecUnit seemed to be in a very fragile mood).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""Of course it'll be uncomfortable, it is SecUnit aping human behaviour. It'd be very odd if it found it comfortable, not even all humans (augmented ones, included) find it as effortless as you do, Ratthi."" That came out wrong. As soon as Gurathin said it he wondered if part of him was still harping (unhelpfully) back to Ratthi's ""no more a machine"" comment all that time ago. He knew Ratthi hadn't meant it the way he had, at the time, taken it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm not uncomfortable. You didn't have to scrunch up your face like that, it was just some scented wash.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Fortunately SecUnit seemed to still be spoiling for a fight about smelling nice. That was almost a relief. Whose idea had the wash been, Gurathin fleetingly wondered; not SecUnit's, and it wouldn't be provided by the hotel.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I apologize again, it was just unexpected."" This was the truth, it had caught him completely unprepared. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You've removed all the hair on your chin.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This was a surprise, he didn't think it usually scrutinized his face. Well, not that closely. He had shaved carefully that morning, whilst pointedly not thinking about why.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I usually do.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You 
+
+usually
+
+ leave some bits of hair sticking out.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And why would it give up the opportunity for a dig at him, at his lack of machine-like precision. It wasn't wrong for it to prefer such precision to human coarseness.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""That would be due to my own incompetence.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He had been speaking staring out of the window. Ratthi was a good two metres away, looking into the room towards SecUnit. Gurathin turned towards his friend, thinking to speak to him, to stop this becoming a two way conversational rally. But it was Ratthi who spoke first; breaking what was turning into a silence, ""Ok, so are we doing this?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Before Gurathin could even think about replying, SecUnit was right in front of him. It had moved, lightning fast, and it was so close to him he couldn't move; if he moved he might touch it. He felt pinned. It had pinned him to the wall all that time ago on the survey, this was a no less effective way of immobilizing him. It was so close, he could see a pulse in its neck, another artifice (construct circulation wasn't as vulnerable as the human version was to bladed weapons--but the visual clue reduced their uncanny appearance, he had looked this up).
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Ratthi? Would you take my cup?"" Damn, his voice was betraying him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Am I standing too close to you, you seem tense?"" It was laughing at him, that was fair. Ratthi came and took his cup, and then wisely retreated. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Possibly a little, you moved very fast.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I decided not to ape human behaviour for that bit.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Ape
+
+, Gurathin thought, I actually used that word. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'm an idiot.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Really they're both as bad as each other...
+
+I am not, Gurathin thought, thinking straight.
+
+ 
+
+""Your vital signs would indicate you're afraid.""
+
+ 
+
+My vital signs? My oh-so-very-human vital signs? Gurathin hoped it couldn't accurately interpret them, not all of them. He mentally shook himself, of course it could, or its super-AI-ship-bot friend could, who had clearly seen straight through him and set this whole thing up as a trap. He had been such an idiot.
+
+ 
+
+""Really SecUnit? Did my heart rate elevate? Did I breathe faster? Have you checked my dilatory response? I don't suppose it strikes you that any and all of these things possess a degree of...ambiguity?""
+
+ 
+
+What was he saying? It was still standing so close, it must be able to tell that he wanted to--what did he want? To touch it? Stroke its face? Just look at it. Was he going to say something, something he couldn't take back? Something unambiguous. 
+
+ 
+
+He couldn't.
+
+ 
+
+""Of course I'm afraid of you. Yes, instinctively. I'd be an idiot not to be. I know what you are, and what you're capable of. But, SecUnit, I'd also trust you with my life, and"" he almost stumbled ""the lives of all the people I love. There is that too. Again, I know exactly what you are, and what you're capable of.""
+
+ 
+
+It moved away from him, perhaps it was as disgusted by his cowardice as he was. Ratthi was staring at them. He realized the three of them were at an impasse. Then it struck him: were they both seriously intent on the original idea of this meeting? Did they both not see how ridiculously emotionally fraught this whole thing was for him? Did they not care? This was not sensible. 
+
+ 
+
+He felt like he was stepping out on to a sheet of very thin ice.
+
+ 
+
+""Can I first ask a few questions?""
+
+ 
+
+Apparently yes. This was like a horrible dream.
+
+ 
+
+""Who are you being envisioned as kissing in this hypothetical future situation?"" He tried very hard to sound calm.
+
+ 
+
+""Why didn't you ask this before?"" It didn't sound angry, if anything slightly playful. Maybe the Perihelion was feeding it lines. Laughing at him.
+
+ 
+
+""I chose to ask now.""
+
+ 
+
+""Iris, possibly. Turi?""
+
+ 
+
+Of course, its crew. Not SecUnit's crew, the Perihelion's. Gurathin felt a wave of something like anger sweep over him, strangely it was about the smell. The scented wash, it had made that. It had read Gurathin's files and it had done it on purpose.
+
+ 
+
+""Is the Perihelion in communication with you, right now?""
+
+ 
+
+""No, it's out of range of comms right now. As you know.""
+
+ 
+
+How the hell was he supposed to know? He didn't spy on it and its friends. He checked the available data, that wasn't spying; he'd been so thrown by the whole ""kiss"" thing he hadn't checked the Perihelion's flight information for--well, longer than he usually left it.
+
+ 
+
+""I didn't know, that's why I asked.""
+
+ 
+
+""This isn't its idea.""
+
+ 
+
+""I find that very hard to believe.""
+
+ 
+
+""You find lots of things hard.""
+
+ 
+
+Now he really was angry, he knew he wasn't as clever as it or the Perihelion, but for a human (an augmented one at that) he was very far from stupid.
+
+ 
+
+""The Perihelion suggested this idea, I can't believe you're denying it. It suggested you might want to appear more human when on missions with its crew. Come now, that's the truth isn't it?""
+
+ 
+
+""This wasn't its idea.""
+
+ 
+
+""Whose was it then?""
+
+ 
+
+""You can't believe I might have an idea of my own.""
+
+ 
+
+Why did it always try and turn things around so it seemed like he was criticising it? It knew he thought it was brilliant.
+
+""You have lots of ideas, some of them have been very good. This isn't one of them.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+""It was on a show."" 
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin rolled his eyes; SecUnit and its shows. 
+
+ 
+
+""A show your friend, the Perihelion, suggested you watch?""
+
+ 
+
+""We watch a lot of shows.""
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi was practically vibrating, he could clearly see Gurathin was losing his temper (well, perhaps he could, even should, just let him: for once), he interjected ""Does it matter? Whose idea it was initially? Sometimes ideas can just come up? It does seem a simple way to deflect attention; I mean it'd throw lots of automated surveillance systems off, wouldn't it?""
+
+ 
+
+""I suppose we can be grateful that it's less violent than removing chunks of skeleton.""
+
+ 
+
+There. He'd said it, should have said it long ago.
+
+ 
+
+""What next? Give you secondary sexual characteristics? Perhaps seal your gunports? I mean, why not?""
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit hadn't moved. ""You're upset."" Again, it didn't sound angry, more curious.
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, I am upset. Someone should be.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Finally MB's POV
+
+It's as confused as anyone
+
+Possibly more so
+
+
+Fuck, Gurathin is so confusing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+When I'd come up with the idea of learning to mimic the way humans kiss it had seemed like an interesting thing to try. It's not like it's a huge deal; holding hands and hugging are both things I've done and they are of longer duration and there's more actual skin to skin contact (yeah, maybe I was thinking of the sort of brief public kisses, not that thing when humans seem to be trying to eat each others faces). ART had been a bit weird about it when I'd suggested it. I would say it was uncertain, but it was more like it was wavering between two states it couldn't reconcile. Which is maybe what uncertain means for humans. It didn't like the idea of me practising kissing any of its crew, and I didn't either for some reason (at least we agreed on that).
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin was the obvious candidate. I didn't want any humans getting stupid ideas that I and/or the human (or in this case augmented human) involved was using this as an excuse to spend physically intimate (gross word) time with each other. They got weird enough anyway; yes, I am thinking about Thiago. So even though I would have thought Mensah was the best choice, she obviously wasn't. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi I've seen kissing so many humans and augmented humans. I'd feel a bit like I was kissing all of them too--ART acted all shocked when I said this. Ratthi understood. Ratthi also thought Guarthin was a good choice, he actually seemed really pleased about it as if it was a weight off his mind. Maybe I should have asked him more about this. I was just glad he agreed with me, and wasn't taking ART's side.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART was a bit weird about me choosing Gurathin. I know it's interested in him, but it pretends it isn't. They have an odd way of communicating, I think it's because he is augmented and ART is used to communicating with its augmented human crew, and Gurathin isn't as trusting as they are. So ART feels hurt, which is stupid because it's sensible for Gurathin to want to have some walls up between him and something that could squish him like a bug. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So they communicate badly. I can see Gurathin trying to be polite and helpful, and it's not that he's doing the human thing where they ""try to be polite"" when actually they're being mean. He is genuinely trying, but it never seems to work. And ART is just an asshole, sometimes; it's supposed to be better than this at handling humans and augmented humans it doesn't know. It should treat Gurathin like a visiting professor or something, not like he's a new and annoying crew member. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I sometimes think maybe ART is a little afraid of Gurathin. I know this sounds stupid; but he did, despite only being an augmented human, spot I was rogue (and I didn't realise he'd spotted it, which is actually the more impressive thing) and get me immobilised (well, I would have been if the HubSystem hadn't been compromised, which he didn't know). Perhaps it's that he's good with systems, and ART knows it was built by humans and it might have sort of its own equivalent of a manual release panel somewhere.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I don't know. I was relieved that ART would be out of comm range for the meeting we'd arranged. I was also glad that Gurathin would know it was (he always checked ART's flight schedules; sometimes more than once a day).
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I thought Gurathin might refuse, which was one reason I asked Ratthi to ask him. I knew Ratthi would explain his refusal to me in a way which made me feel better about it than if I'd just asked Gurathin and he'd said no. Not that I'd have cared, but it was a good way to do it. Gurathin sometimes just seems to want to argue with me.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But he agreed. And I stupidly thought that was it; and instead he is now here in my room making me feel like I've done things wrong. Like the stupid cleaning product, which was ART's idea anyway (not that I am telling Gurathin that). 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And saying he's afraid of me. Like that's news; I know he is, it's one of the (currently one of the only) reasons I like him. He's not stupid like so many of my other humans and augmented humans sometimes are, they forget I'm a murderbot. Or they pretend I'm not. Guarthin doesn't do that, he always treats me like a SecUnit. Perhaps a SecUnit which is part of his team, but definitely a SecUnit. It's not the only reason I like him, that was unfair. I just can't think of many other reasons right now because he's suddenly getting really upset about the way ART altered my appearance. If he dislikes it so much why does always seem to want to look at me?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+He
+
+ has a weird face, anyway. And his expressions are sometimes really hard to understand; sometimes I'll be watching his face (from a camera or drone, obviously) when we are 'talking' over the feed and I can tell his face isn't letting on how he's really feeling. Not at all. Sometimes he seems really happy in the feed (I know, it seems unlikely--but he does) and you can hardly see a smile on his face unless you know the little signs to look for. Perhaps part of it is the augments (but I really don't think so). He has some scars too. They might affect it; the one at the top left of his lips for example, which sort of tugs their shape into asymmetry. I don't usually think much about what my humans look like, but I do know Gurathin doesn't look like someone from one of my shows. Or if he did, he'd be a villain.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And right now this face, which I know every line of, looks surprisingly like it might cry.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Like I said, he is very confusing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I said, ""You're upset.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Which was a weirdly human thing for me to say.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+When I've talked to Bharadwaj about my feelings she has explained that sometimes people do something called projection. I tried to reassess what I'd just been thinking about ART and Gurathin; in case it was actually about, well, you know: me and Gurathin.
+
+Do I find him difficult, more difficult than my other ""crew members"", yes. Do I have difficulties communicating with him, again yes.
+
+
+He said ""Yes, I am upset. Someone should be.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I didn't know what to say. This isn't a figure of speech. I don't have (in case you hadn't noticed) the best vocabulary, or ability to handle complex emotions (or sometimes even simple ones). I sort of hit a wall. I know I have Gurathin tagged in various ways (some of them involving expletives), but one tag he definitely still holds is 
+
+client
+
+. He looked angry and sad and confused and hurt. Not metaphorically hurt, really hurt. He was triggering a whole set of protocols because the reason he looked like that was that I'd made him feel this way. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'd hurt my client. Which hurt me. I didn't need an operational governor module for that.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This was unfair. It was all so unfair. For a moment I considered a buffer response. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Dr. Guarthin, please describe the problem.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I overrode that option.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+When I've talked to Bharadwaj about my feelings she has explained that sometimes people do something called projection. I tried to reassess what I'd just been thinking about ART and Gurathin, in case it was actually about, well, you know: me and Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Do I find him difficult, more difficult than my other ""crew members"", yes. Do I have difficulties communicating with him, again yes.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Am I perhaps a little bit afraid of him? No. Surely not?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I looked at him, with my actual eyes. He wasn't looking at my face or me at all now, he was looking down at his own hands. He looked so vulnerable and--I can't be afraid of that, surely? I could easily kill him, humans 
+
+are
+
+ so fragile. But then ART could easily kill him too, and I had still thought it might be afraid of him. I knew it wouldn't kill him because I'd never forgive it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I couldn't kill him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+What else had I been thinking?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I reviewed it all. It was pretty fucking painful.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Especially the bit about Thiago. I actually used a drone to look at my own face as I tried to imagine that I was indeed using this whole thing as an excuse to become physical with Gurathin. I had used the word 
+
+intimate
+
+. I didn't like the expressions my drone showed me flashing across my face.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Oh, and the bit about being interested. So what if I was 
+
+interested
+
+, what did that even mean? Did I want to examine this? I was pretty sure I didn't.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'd shut our private feed connection when I'd been showering (I had had an angry shower thinking about Gurathin then walked out furious and largely naked; I so much wasn't ever talking this through with anyone else; not Bharadwaj not Mensah, not any of this). But if I was feeling like I had some sort of metal spike churning my organics I wanted to know if Gurathin was feeling something similar. So I opened up our private feed to ask him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+If I'm going to be honest: from his point of view, it probably seemed a lot like I opened up the feed and screamed incoherently at him. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He looked up at me, I was still looking at him. I have said this before: he is brave. I think most humans and augmented humans would have just run away at this point. He didn't run away. Brave would be one word for it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+In the feed even augmented humans tend to use words, Gurathin doesn't always do this. When we 
+
+talk
+
+ or share data on the feed it's sometimes more like when I communicate with other bots. Now he was trying to respond to my inarticulate plea for data from him. It wasn't working. Maybe we could get it to work, but not fast enough. I wanted to know how he felt.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Which, I only now realised, could be read more than one way. I meant it both ways.
+
+
+
+I had engineered this situation. I needed to do something, so I moved back over to him. I moved slowly this time so as not to startle him, but I also dropped all my human code. I was going to do this not like a human. He noticed, I could feel him register the change in my posture and movement. And he was 
+
+pleased
+
+ about it. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin, you really are more than a little fucking weird. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That's okay, apparently so am I.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'd said to Mensah, and it was true, that I Iiked her but not in a weird way. I also liked Gurathin, much as it pained me to admit it. I had been so determined I didn't. Is this self-awareness? Because it sucks.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wasn't going to impersonate anything this time, not a human, not an augmented human. Not a governed construct. It hit me then that I had felt something approaching a connection with (see, I still can't be honest) Gurathin when I thought he thought I was governed, and that made me feel very uncomfortable for a moment. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Then I thought a bit harder and realised I was actually being 
+
+stupid
+
+: he'd known. He'd known what a rogue SecUnit was and that that's what I was. That was the critical thing. He'd been terrified of me, but he'd still talked to me. Like a person. Fuck, I hadn't ever really asked him when he knew. Or reviewed my logs with that information. Did I like him 
+
+because
+
+ he was afraid of me; did that matter? Human beings have whole lists of categories to describe why they want each other, did any of them apply to me? To him? I think he is technically more abnormal than me, because there are expectations for how humans can and do feel attraction (I used the word, okay?), and no such expectations for rogue SecUnits. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Was I actually trying to compare how weird we were? Like percentage scores?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It's fucking lucky constructs think so much quicker than humans (even augmented ones) because this was a lot to think about and now we were just standing there staring at each other. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We were now (again) extremely close to each other. I knew one of us was going to say something stupid and then we'd have to talk for hours about why we shouldn't (or should) do this. So instead I reached out and drew my finger across the top of his lip, touching the little silver scar, feeling the tiny difference in the texture of his skin (which was so soft, I don't think of Gurathin as soft). It was fascinating to watch my hand trace over his skin. Over the feed and through my fingertips I could feel just how very very human he was. Then I bent down (he is still smaller than me, despite the chunks of skeleton) and kissed him.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+He had been slightly worried when SecUnit had moved towards Gurathin the second time, it had suddenly looked so utterly inhuman. It hadn't even looked like their SecUnit, it had been like something out of a show; one with evil SecUnits. A terrifying murderbot. Then it had reached out and touched Gurathin's face. At that moment Ratthi had started frantically worrying his friend would faint; or worse, say something.
+
+
+And then it kissed Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi realised he was actually, literally, holding his breath and had to take a moment to recover himself. He was staring at them and he didn't care; the other two people in the room both seemed to have forgotten he was there some time ago (which actually wasn't that unusual for Gurathin and SecUnit) and right now they wouldn't have noticed if the room had been on fire.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi wasn't exactly surprised.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Well, perhaps a little.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He had been slightly worried when SecUnit had moved towards Gurathin the second time, it had suddenly looked so utterly inhuman. It hadn't even looked like their SecUnit, it had been like something out of a show; one with evil SecUnits. A terrifying murderbot. Then it had reached out and touched Gurathin's face. At 
+
+that
+
+ moment Ratthi had started frantically worrying his friend would faint; or worse, say something.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This whole thing was almost hilariously far from what they'd both been pretending they were going to do. But there was also a sort of inevitability about it. Ratthi had (he wasn't an idiot) suspected (more than suspected, though his augmented friend was sometimes a hard book to read) Gurathin's true feelings towards SecUnit for some time. But, importantly, he'd also noted certain oddities about the way SecUnit acted around Gurathin. Right from the very start on the survey, ""You don't need to look at me. I'm not a sexbot."" That'd been directed at Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The way it looked at him (yes, it did--him of the small quiet smile mentioned in the letter), the way it cared about his opinion (in spite of its vehement denials). That moment when it was recovering after the gunship attack; Gurathin had been the first one it had spoken to, not buffer phrases, actual real words (it had said it didn't want to be his pet, absolutely no one had mentioned pets). (It had said it didn't like him, too. Again, no one had asked.) 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The absurd way the two of them had avoided physical contact, as if both worried a touch might set off some kind of chain reaction. Watching them now he reckoned they'd possibly had more of a point there than he'd given them credit for. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It had all been far from obvious, but he reckoned he could retcon his opinions effectively. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He couldn't wait to tell Pin-Lee, she would be so shocked!
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As he watched them it struck him that he was going to have to tell them (later--interrupting them now would be ill-judged, possibly terminally so) that going by the original ""mission brief"", as it were, this exercise was a complete failure. A washout. The two of them looked nothing like humans kissing. Or augmented humans kissing. Ratthi knew that what he was witnessing here was likely the first ever kiss between a SecUnit and a human (augmented or not), at least under its own volition. So, apparently this was what that looked like. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He continued watching.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He had worried (briefly) about SecUnit lips--they weren't designed to kiss, after all. Of course it was all cloned human tissue, and ComfortUnits were constructs too (the thought popped up, ""I'm not a sexbot""), but nerves can atrophy. Well that, he thought, had been a worry wasted--it definitely seemed that lips were good. And necks. And hands. Lots of hand activity. What struck him really (well, one thing) was how careful, delicate, they were both being; Gurathin reminding him just ever so slightly of someone petting (sorry SecUnit) a semi-wild fauna--not quite sure if it was going to purr, or disembowel him. SecUnit was veering between passionate and looking terrified it might hurt Gurathin; treating him as if he was somehow fragile (and precious).
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Which made it all sound horribly awkward, and in a way it was. But it was also one of the sweetest things Ratthi had ever seen.
+"
+41346237,Viral Regression,['destroyscout (jephanie)'],Not Rated,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Hurt/Comfort, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Platonic Relationships, Angst, Blood and Injury, Torture, Governor Modules (Murderbot Diaries), POV murderbot, POV First Person, Mutual Administrative Assitance, I have a soft spot for when secunit is injured and everyone is SO SOFT toward it, i think secunit should swear more so it does, No shipping only angst",English,2022-08-29,Updated,2023-01-12,"33,666",7/?,181,265,50,"2,817","['DepressedMarshmallow', 'Tasneem08', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'weirdbooksnail', 'fraternite', 'supinetothestars', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'GodOfLaundryBaskets', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'ipborgdan', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'faerynova', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'Dawn_Rising', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'myriadism', 'dementor_ssc', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'sisa', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'marionette3', 'BeneathSilverStars', 'SourOrchard', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'synonym_pie', 'Next_Stop_Willoughby', 'Anidorikildra', 'Mothmansimp', 'CactusNoir', 'Metasepia', 'GriffinHeart', 'flashwitch', 'robotchangeling', 'RobynandHala', 'WerewolvesAreReal', 'Priority_Error', 'Originia', 'Grumplent', 'zirna813', 'The_Degu', 'AthenasDragon138', 'Kaylin881', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'sarrasponda', 'Nikactus', 'CodeVoid', 'farawaykingdom', 'Crows_Feet', 'AZRA3L']",[],"
+I hate planets. 
+
+
+
+A quick keyword search of my memory archive says that I have said that particular phrase aloud sixty-seven times, over the feed three hundred and eighty-nine times. The amount of times I have said ""I have planets"" or ""planets suck"" or the word ""planets"" with any derogatory connotation in my brain is not worth counting. 
+
+
+
+Therefore, I was already annoyed when the explorer touched down on 
+
+yet another planet, 
+
+but it wasn't as if I would let Gurathin and Ratthi go by themselves. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, I should have known everything was about to suck really, really hard.
+
+
+
+The PresAux crew was doing a partial survey of this planet, looking for I don't know what. Rocks and leaves probably, nature things that I hated. It's not as if I don't pay attention and half-ass everything like how I used to; I just pay attention to the important things. If it's a flora or fauna that is 
+
+not 
+
+trying to actively kill my clients, I couldn't be bothered. This planet- TriSandRyah was it's name, though I'll admit I had to look it up- didn't have that particular kind of wildlife, and the only human inhabitants were another survey group on the complete opposite side of the planet. The only thing I really had to protect my humans from was doing stupid shit. 
+
+
+
+Although that's what I thought on that first survey planet, so. 
+
+
+
+Arada, Mensah, Pin-Lee and Amena were all on the main ship that was hovering in orbit above the assessment area, while Gurathin, Overse and Ratthi made another trip down to the surface. It was supposed to be quick- minimal sample collection, just to confirm some of Ratthi's findings. I was against the trip- we were scheduled to head back to Preservation the next cycle, but quote Ratthi, ""If this really is [insert science word I didn't bother to look up here], when are we going to get the chance to come back here?"" 
+
+
+
+(Hopefully never.)
+
+
+
+One of the reasons I hated this planet in particular was because it had the audacity to have weather. I dislike weather, especially wet weather. And storms. They make the inorganic parts of my joints ache and they mess with my drones. Thankfully it was dry right now, so four of my drones were able to keep an overhead as Ratthi surveyed, looking for some kind of rare flora with some rare compound. (Again, if it didn't have teeth and/or claws, I couldn't be assed.) One of my drones sent me back a feed image of dark clouds in the distance, and I was thankful I only brought the four- I had already lost six of my little army to high winds and acid rain on the shit hole, and I didn't particularly want to lose any more. I go through enough as it is. (I recently discovered the existence of punch cards. It's really a shame that they're pretty much only for ""buy twelve liquids get the thirteenth free"", and not drones). I shared the feed of the creepy looking clouds to Overse, who was hanging out at the explorer, and up through the newly installed long-distance comms channel to the main ship. There was a delay and the quality was shit, but its overall existence relieved a good fifteen percent of my anxiety.
+
+
+
+
+Storm incoming, 
+
+Overse. Three minutes later the main ship sent back a weather pattern analysis. We had approximately an hour before it would be absolutely necessary to get airborne. The weather- the storms specifically- were the main reason I hated this planet. Slightly acidic rain, high winds that carried toxic chemicals, and the tendency to have tornados. Fuck me, right?
+
+
+
+
+I will pilot us back up to the ship, 
+
+I said to her. Overse came on this excursion primarily to practice piloting (a concept that, while necessary, made me want to lay down of the floor for a while) and if she didn't see the obvious safety concern of her piloting the explorer through a natural disaster-serial level storm I was going to order her a MedSys scan.
+
+
+
+
+Okay, 
+
+Overse replied, but with far more letters than were necessary. 
+
+
+
+""I would like to stop by the research station if that's alright,"" Gurathin was saying. His voice was muffled by his oxygen filter- like I said, this planet had a tendency toward toxic gasses. I turned in his direction- I was not looking at him, and my helmet was covering my face, but was too lazy to respond aloud so I used body language instead. I hoped it came off as 
+
+for the love of some higher benevolent creator being, why are you making me stay here any longer than I have to
+
+. ""I want to see if previous explorations left any notes about what Ratthi is looking for."" 
+
+
+
+Worth noting, there had been previous trips to this planet by other survey teams. They either a) were corporations looking to build settlements and felt this place wasn't worth the investment, or b) research teams, which had short trips due to the aforementioned weather. In fact, the last research team had most of its members vanish when they didn't made it back to the research station before a storm hit. 
+
+
+
+Something I really didn't want to happen to my clients, obviously. 
+
+
+
+Ratthi had looked up hopefully, and I groaned (internally). The station was not far away (I insisted all exploration be within a tight radius, given what had happened to the other research team), so it wasn't an entirely unreasonable request. I just didn't want to. ""How long would it take?"" (I had already calculated it out- we'd have enough time if we left now and didn't linger- but I was hoping that making him think about it would make him reconsider.)
+
+
+
+""A couple of minutes. No more. If it is an extensive analysis, we can leave."" 
+
+
+
+Ugh. Fine. I was probably being too nice. I sent Overse the update, and heard the engines of the explorer start up as she prepared to move it closer to the research station.
+
+
+
+We were about a ten minutes' walk away from the station (agonizingly slow for me, because Ratthi stopped every couple of feet to look at plants) when one of my drones sent me an image. A small dropship, impressively covered with fauna to camouflage it. My drones were programmed to identify inorganic material, especially in places like this, so why hadn't it picked it up? I began walking faster as I made the drone move in closer- Ratthi and Gurathin noticed the increase in pace, and exchanged a worried look but sped up as well. 
+
+
+
+From the drone feed, the dropship had landed recently, probably when we were up in orbit, but there was an instrument near it- a jammer or cloaking device of some kind that had fallen over and malfunctioned when the wind picked up from the storm. 
+
+
+
+Ugh. I 
+
+knew 
+
+it had been too long since I had been shot at.
+
+
+
+""Get into the shelter,"" I said, and Ratthi and Gurathin both took off. I ordered my drones to begin an immediate sweep for hostiles, including any cloaking signatures based on the code I got from the whole alien-remnant-hostile situation. One of them I sent forward to the research station.
+
+
+
+
+What's going on?"" 
+
+Overse asked. The explorer was already airborne, and I told her to stay that way- the dropship was too small and lightweight to be able to carry any real firepower, so the chances of any hostiles bringing it down was low. 
+
+
+
+I backburnered the long-distance comm and shared my field camera feed with Overse as I started running toward the station, catching up with Ratthi and Gurathin quickly. My drones were beginning to send footage of three hostiles approaching our location quickly. (The fact that there were three irritated me, because it was a two-person dropship that I'd seen. Unless they got really comfy, there was a dropship that my drones had missed- I made a note to grab that cloaking device if the storm didn't chase us out of here). Thankfully, Ratthi and Gurathin were hauling ass. 
+
+
+
+""Get into the lockdown room,"" I ordered. ""Don't open the door for anything."" 
+
+
+
+Ratthi opened his mouth, probably to say something ridiculous like, 
+
+Aren't you coming with us?
+
+ But he knew the answer to that. Hostiles weren't going to murder themselves-
+
+
+
+My drone inside the research station went down. 
+
+
+
+Shit. 
+
+
+
+""Shit,"" I said, and burst ahead of Ratthi and Gurathin right before they got to the door of the station. It had been only two seconds since the drone went down, and it's last ping gave me a pretty good idea of where the hostile was. I slammed through the door at full speed, turned a corner and jumped. Both my feet slammed into the Hostile's chest and he flew backward. My momentum carried me with him, and I landed, straddling his chest. I snapped his neck before he had a chance to realize what had hit him. 
+
+
+
+I turned to see Ratthi and Gurathin staring at me, mouths wide open. 
+
+
+
+""Holy-"" 
+
+
+
+""Move,"" I yelled, and they had the sense to do so, because my outside drones showed the other three hostiles right at the station. I really wanted to have a normal fucking day. But 
+
+nooo
+
+, there's always some corp or fringe group or pissed off asshole that wants to kill me. Or my humans. The first one I could accept, because honestly I probably partially deserved it depending on whose memory files you're looking at. (Most memory files, actually.) 
+
+
+
+But the second? Fuck off. 
+
+
+
+I wasn't sure who these hostiles were, or how they got here. That was another problem with planets. It's hard to break into or sneak into a ship without some kind of sensor going off that would, at the least, require some ridiculously high level hacking that even I couldn't manage half the time (although Dr. Mensah would probably just say I wasn't applying myself). Plus, if you fuck up, you're facing either a tight quarters fight where the other side has home-field advantage, or you're probably going to get sucked out into space. But planets? Fuck planets. 
+
+
+
+Figuring out how the targets got into the current base wasn't my top priority right now. They were already here, after all. I was able to intercept them as they entered the station, giving time for Ratthi and Gurathin to get to the lockdown room. The room had reinforced walls, no windows, a damn-near impenetrable door, and an air recycling system, so they were safe, at least. So I guess I could thank the storms for that? 
+
+
+
+I found out quickly that the hostiles weren't human, or normal human at least. Not quite SecUnit- my drones confirmed that, they didn't have quite the augmentation that I did. But their augmentation, unlike Gurathin's, seemed to be aimed toward combat rather than data management. So that was new for me. I didn't like it. 
+
+
+
+On top of being augmented, the hostiles were batshit insane. 
+
+
+
+They both immediately threw themselves at me with the reckless abandon I would expect of myself, immediately taking away my option of fighting them one at a time, which is something humans have a tendency to do, even though it's stupid. Also, they both had knives, which really sucked. Knife fighting is messy. Everyone's getting cut, even the one holding the knife. And knife fights are particularly messy in close quarters. So soon my clothes were damp with fluid, both mine and theirs. 
+
+
+
+I had the energy weapons in my arms ready, but the hostiles must have been told to expect it, constantly hitting my arms away with either their fists or their knives, preventing me from taking good shots. I fired off a couple anyway, catching the edges of their bodies, but that didn't slow them down. In addition to augmented and batshit insane, they were probably also on a 
+
+lot 
+
+of drugs. (Thank god I have adjustable pain levels. Otherwise this would 
+
+really 
+
+suck.)
+
+
+
+One of them- Target Two, since Target One was dead at the end of the other hallway- was trying to grapple me, while the other (imaginatively named Target Three, because I don't give a shit) tried to stab me again. I'd broken most of Target Two's fingers on their left hand and dislocated their arm, but they did not seem to care that much. 
+
+
+
+Target Four was the one I was most concerned about, because it was trying to break into the lockdown room. I wanted to do something about that 
+
+very 
+
+badly, but Target Three had switched tactics and was now trying to sever the connections in my elbow.
+
+
+
+I sent a quick message to the feed: 
+
+Ratthi, be- 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Pain.
+
+
+
+So sudden I lost track of my inputs, so sharp that even when Target Two's fist collided with my jaw I didn't feel it. For I don't know how long, I couldn't do anything. Everything went totally and completely dark, except for the pain.
+
+
+
+What the 
+
+fuck? 
+
+
+
+I scrambled, shoving aside the error codes (my performance reliability had instantly dropped a terrifying thirty percent) so that I could find my way back into the present. Something was wrong. Very wrong. I had been- I don't know what kind of state I had been in, because I hadn't shut down or restarted, but a playback of the station cameras of the hallway showed me dropping and not moving for a full three seconds. 
+
+
+I came back just as I'd been kicked in the chest, and something had stabbed into my left arm. I checked my pain sensors as I shoved Target Two off me, kicking at Target Three as I did- they were still just only high enough so that I knew when I took blows, low enough that it wouldn't matter- what the fuck had just happened? 
+
+
+
+(It was familiar. It was familiar and I hated that, I knew it was familiar but I didn't want to accept it.)
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit? What just happened? 
+
+Ratthi sounded worried, and I checked the feed- 
+
+what the fuck? 
+
+The last message sent started as I remembered it, but then turned into a jumble of nonsense code, like a tiny human running their grubby little appendages over a console keyboard. And it was from me. 
+
+
+
+(If Ratthi was a bot, he probably would have recognized it as a scream.)
+
+
+
+I didn't know how to answer, so I didn't. I had better things to do, like keep fighting off three Targets while attempting to run an diagnostic on whatever the fuck had happened. I finally managed to get my arms around Target Two's neck to twist until it popped, although the cost of it was several additional stab wounds into my shoulder. I dropped Two, had turned to Three when my diagnostic finished- the source of the-
+
+
+
+""Stay down,"" Hostile Three said, with the tone of a villain on a serial.
+
+
+
+It happened again. 
+
+
+
+It hurt. It hurt a lot.
+
+
+
+
+Performance reliability at forty percent. Restart recommended.
+
+
+
+
+When it faded out again I was on the ground again, curled into a ball. Errors flashed red everywhere, overwhelming, and Overse was screaming at me over the feed. I'd been stabbed more. I was surrounded by smears of my own fluid on the ground. The remaining two Targets were trying to break into the lockdown room. My diagnostic had gone through partially, enough to tell me that some kind of targeted malware had gotten through before the diagnostic had been partially disabled. I sent the command again, bypassing the block, and it started again. But very slowly- my processing speed right now was alarmingly shitty. That terrified me, so I grabbed the leg of the nearest target and twisted. This needed to be over. Soon. I squeezed with all my strength so bone crunched under my grasp, and I was able to haul myself on top of them as they fell to the ground in pain and discharge my energy weapon into their face.
+
+
+
+One left. Almost done. I could make it to the end of this. I'd been through worse. I still had all my limbs, after all.
+
+
+
+I tried to send a message to Ratthi and Gurathin, but my brain wasn't quite working right.
+
+
+
+The Target Four looked down at me, raised something in its hand. A small weapon. My performance reliability had dropped another three percent, and was far well into make-stupid-humanlike-mistakes territory.  In other words, it hit me with whatever it fired. I flinched, expecting a projectile to blow my arm off, but the impact of what hit me didn't even register on my pain sensors.
+
+
+
+A dart embedded into the organic parts of my arm. For a fraction of a second, I thought they were an idiot. My body wasn't the same as a human, so injected toxins had little to-
+
+
+
+Oh. My diagnostic was still running.
+
+
+
+In 0.3 seconds I found out that it was a virus, but a construct itself, DNA and code wrapped together and 
+
+targeted, 
+
+but in 0.30007 seconds it had traveled through my systems to my governor module- 
+
+
+
+My governor module. 
+
+
+
+It allowed me a second of pure terror before it detonated. 
+
+
+you get a nickel for every typo i missed
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+
+""Hurry- hurry, 
+
+shit-"" 
+
+
+
+
+
+""Overse, we need help!"" 
+
+
+
+
+""SecUnit?""
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit, snap out of it. We need to get out of here. Overse is almost here.
+
+
+
+
+Alarms, beeping. Some of it was inside my head, but I couldn't tell what.
+
+
+
+""Holy shit- 
+
+holy shit-
+
+""
+
+
+
+I was awake, but I wished I could shut down. I could not. It would not let me.
+
+
+
+""Figure out what's wrong with it-"" 
+
+
+
+""I'm trying, I'm running a- 
+
+shit-"" 
+
+
+
+
+""What did you 
+
+do-"" 
+
+
+
+
+This wasn't supposed to happen again, this wasn't supposed to happen anymore.
+
+
+
+
+Please wake up, SecUnit. Please.
+
+
+
+
+""Ratthi, Gurathin, get to Medical-"" 
+
+
+
+""But-"" 
+
+
+
+""Gurathin, 
+
+now."" 
+
+
+
+
+
+Unit offline. 
+
+
+
+
+I had never wanted anything more.
+
+
+
+
+Restart.
+
+
+
+
+
+Performance reliability at 20 percent. Shutdown recommended to- 
+
+
+
+
+No. No, I couldn't- ow. Ow, ow, ow, I needed to get out of here, I needed to get Ratthi and Gurathin out of here-
+
+
+
+I scrambled to take down Target Four. There was no Target Four. I was not in a hallway on the ground trying to keep my reactivated governor module from melting my brain. I was on a medical platform- well, 
+
+was, 
+
+because I was now on the floor again, leaking fluid everywhere. 
+
+
+
+I was leaking, and there was something in my governor module.
+
+
+
+There was something in my governor module.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit?"" 
+
+
+
+A human reached out, and I jolted backward, slipping in fluid again. 
+
+
+
+""SecUnit, calm down-"" 
+
+
+
+The level of panic at the command- no it wasn't a command, but something was wrong with my governor module and it could be a command and I was not even close to reasonable confines of the definition of calm and my head hurt and if there was something in my governor module and I was not calm and they told me to be calm then it- 
+
+
+
+""
+
+Murderbot."" 
+
+
+
+It was Mensah's voice, using my name, and it snapped me out of the panic. Well, mostly. Actually, not really. My adrenaline levels were still comparable to mid-combat. But it made me take in just enough input to realize where I was- I was in the Medical bay of the PresAux ship. The energy weapons in my arms were warm. I tried to reconnect to the Medical cameras- fuck, fuck, fuck, my processing speed was not helping. Eventually (about 48 seconds, I wasn't mad, I was disappointed) (just kidding, fuck it, I was mad) I reconnected to the cameras and played it back to see that when I had come back online I'd shot the MedSys bot. 
+
+
+Fuck. 
+
+
+
+(I had a feeling that was going to be on a long list of things I had very recently absolutely fucked up.)
+
+
+
+At least no one had been in the room at the time- the noise was what made them come running. I skimmed back the security footage further. I had absolutely no idea how I got here (
+
+always 
+
+the worst feeling) and I needed to know. I watched Overse (she must have piloted the dropship through the storm after all, I didn't know whether to be impressed or horrified at the blatant safety violation) rush in from the airlock, dragging along Gurathin and Ratthi, who in turn were dragging me. Or trying to, at least. And leaving a very long smear of fluid behind. At some point I must have undergone a shutdown, but I didn't remember getting the warning. Ratthi was limping and holding his side, and Gurathin's arm seemed to be hanging in a noticeably atypical way. 
+
+
+
+They were hurt. The hostiles had hurt them. No-
+
+
+
+They had gotten hurt because of 
+
+me
+
+. 
+
+
+
+I had one job, and that was to keep my humans safe, and I didn't do it. 
+
+
+
+
+Performance reliability- 
+
+
+
+
+No. Shut the fuck 
+
+up.
+
+
+
+
+""SecUnit, 
+
+please. 
+
+Are you alright?""
+
+
+
+Was I? No. I wasn't. There were a lot of different alerts and warnings telling me that. But those didn't really matter, because I had got my humans hurt. I tried to pull from my archives to see what had happened back at the research station because if the hostiles weren't dead I was going to go back down there and pull their intestines out through their throats but fucking 
+
+fuck
+
+, my processing speed was garbage and- shit, shit, 
+
+ow. 
+
+
+
+
+I realized that Mensah was still waiting for me to say something. And also that the current time was three hours later than I remembered. 
+
+
+
+""Ratthi and Gurathin?"" I asked. My voice sounded weird, like my vocal components were fried. 
+
+Are you alright 
+
+kind of echoed painfully in my head, but that wasn't a question that mattered.
+
+
+
+""Fine."" Gurathin's voice answered. With a concerning amount of difficulty, I slipped back into the Medical cameras. He was in the room too, a tablet in his non-slinged hand and had clearly put distance between himself and me. Probably because I just, you know, blindly shot the medbot like some kind of murderous SecUnit on a blind rampage. Oh wait, that's what I was, technically. Just not when it 
+
+fucking mattered. 
+
+""After you went down, the last one kept trying to break into the lockdown shelter. We were able to fight it off, but we took a couple of hits. We are fine. You should probably get up off the floor, SecUnit."" 
+
+
+
+Took a couple of hits. He was downplaying it. Gurathin was being nice to me, which was a really bad sign. I hopped back into MedSys, pulling their records. When they came in, Gurathin had a dislocated shoulder and bruising along his arm. Ratthi had two ribs broken and a minor concussion. 
+
+
+
+They were not fine. They were not 
+
+fine. 
+
+
+
+
+A new set of error codes starting flashing in my peripherals, and I canceled them, because something something performance reliability could shut the fuck up. That caused new ones that had been waiting in queue to pop up, so I canceled those too. There were too many emotions, and I didnt want them. It all was giving me a headache, which was also a bad sign, because SecUnits are not supposed to get headaches. I tried fiddling with my pain sensors, but that didn't do jack shit, except for remind me that there were still a bunch of holes in me that weren't supposed to be there, and that made me even more angry.
+
+
+
+I needed to know what happened. My humans got hurt. It was my fault, and I had to know how much of it was my fault and what happened to me because if I didn't I... I don't know. At first I tried my own memory archive, and found that it was... distorted and useless. So I switched to my helmet cam feed archive. That one was not distorted, but I didn't like it, and it was also pretty fucking useless. Aside from the fight and me inexplicably collapsing multiple times (at those moments the footage was an impressive shot of the floor while sounds from Ratthi and Gurathin's fight made my organic bits turn inside out), the majority of it was Gurathin and Ratthi over me, trying to figure out why I was not responding. Ratthi was bleeding. There was a lot of that, and waiting. I suddenly remembered the diagnostics I had tried to run mid-fight. The first one had errored out. The second one had only partially run before I was .. incapacitated, and then it errored out, too. But from what I could tell, the... virus, or whatever it was, had infected my governor module. I could feel it there, lurking. But I couldn't 
+
+see 
+
+it, because it had set up walls. Annoying, and it pissed me off. I sent a string of code to- 
+
+
+
+Fuck. Not again.
+
+
+
+When the module let my brain go, I could feel fluid dripping from my nose. Mensah was kneeling next to me cradling my face with her hands.  And I wanted to object to it, because was something in my head, and something in my head usually meant something very, very bad was going to happen to me or to-
+
+
+
+""
+
+Murderbot. 
+
+Look at me."" My terror spiked, and I looked directly at her, not through the cameras. Since I wasn't looking through the cameras I didn't know what was happening with my expression, but judging by Mensah's horror, it was not good. ""Are you okay?""
+
+
+
+I wanted to look away, but I was scared. Mensah told me to look at her. The virus was obviously sitting on the bundle of code that delivered punishment, but I didn't know if it extended further than that. If it was occupying the hole left by something like HubSystem... 
+
+
+
+""You need to get away from me,"" I said. 
+
+
+
+""I'm not going to do that,"" Mensah said calmly. She let go of my head, but didn't move away. I was about to argue, but a feeling similar to a very hot knife in my brain prevented me from doing that. (And I know what that feels like, so the description is accurate.) Huh. That was bad. ""SecUnit- are you okay?""
+
+
+
+I had to answer her. ""No."" (I hated the fact that I had to make eye contact when saying that.) I added, ""You need to get away from me. Right now.""
+
+
+
+""I am not going to do that,"" she repeated. ""You are hurt, and you are scared."" Well, no shit, I didn't need her to tell me that. ""I am not going to leave until we can figure out how to help you."" That was stupid. It was undeniably stupid, because as far as I knew, I was a ticking time bomb that was either set to implode or explode. ""What can we do for you?""
+
+
+
+Well, first fucking off, they could stop looking at me and do what I said for once and stop being so close to me. But that was already denied twice, and judging from the lingering stabby feeling in my organic neural tissues it would be a stupid fucking idea for me to say it again. What can they do for me? Not fucking much, with their capabilities. No offense. Maybe offense to Gurathin, because one of the main emotions that was causing my performance reliability to be so low was rage and it didn't seem like that was going anywhere anytime soon so therefore I felt like it. 
+
+
+
+But also I needed help. I really fucking needed help.
+
+
+
+""ART,"" I said. ""Get ART."" 
+
+
+
+""We already contacted 
+
+Perihelion,
+
+"" Mensah replied, adopting an expression that I had on file as the one where she was making herself seem as calm and stable as possible to calm down whoever she was talking to who wasn't calm and stable. Which was me. ""They're on their way. They'll be here in two cycles."" 
+
+
+
+Two cycles. In SecUnit time that was an eternity.
+
+
+
+My expression must have done something again, because Mensah asked again, and she didn't often repeat herself, so yikes. ""What can we do?"" 
+
+
+
+""Gurathin."" Part of my brain knew that I had to give her something to work with (had to in the sense that you often 
+
+have 
+
+to do things when someone is pointing an energy weapon at your head), and I couldn't think of anything else. ""I need him to run diagnostics on me. My governor module.""  I didn't like it, but based on my previous attempts at self-diagnostics, the result would be unhelpful and sucky.
+
+
+
+Mensah's face shifted to something apologetic. ""He already did it."" Oh. 
+
+Great
+
+. ""You weren't responding. You weren't... you weren't shut down, not completely, and..."" 
+
+You were scaring me. 
+
+""He didn't want to do it without your consent, but I told him to. I'm sorry."" 
+
+
+
+Yeah, I 
+
+really 
+
+didn't like that. I tried not to imagine him rooting around in my head with his clumsy human code like he'd done before. Something something kicking me while I was down. ""Gurathin?"" 
+
+
+
+(If he hadn't come up with anything useful from it, I was considering shooting the medbot again.)
+
+
+
+I heard him clear his throat. ""You were hit with a construct virus. Code delivered by biological machinery. I've never seen anything like it. That's how it was able to get past your defenses. We were able to recover two of the darts they shot you with and another that got caught in your jacket. Ratthi's started looking into it in the lab."" 
+
+
+
+He was leaving out information. That was funny in a ""of course something like this would happen to me"" kind of way, and also because I had never assumed Gurathin to be the deliver-good-news-first type. 
+
+
+
+""It's still there,"" I said. I didn't really need to say that out loud. It was pretty fucking obvious, but sometimes stating the obvious made humans feel smarter about it. It definitely didn't make me feel smarter about it, though.
+
+
+
+""As far as I can tell, yes."" Which could mean a couple things. Either Gurathin couldn't extract it, or didn't want to extract it. The second had a couple of possible reasonings, the worst of which is that they were going to control me again. Again, Mensah must have noticed something with my expression, because her eyes suddenly went wide.
+
+
+
+""Oh my- SecUnit, you can look away. You do not need to comply to anything any of us say, nor anyone else. I- I'm sorry.""
+
+
+
+Thank fuck. I closed my eyes and laid back on the floor, covering my face with my hands. I was still leaking, which didn't feel great, but there was a lot of emotion happening so if it triggered whatever was in my governor module (the headache was still there, like the fucking thing was just waiting to nibble at my neural tissues), I at least wanted to be laying down for it. What Mensah said, though- something about it kind of just... flushed all of the angry out of me. Good, from a liability standpoint, but now I was left with... not-caring. A lot of not-caring.
+
+
+
+There was something in my governor module, and I got my humans hurt. Those two things kept pinging around in my brain like the error and warning messages, but I couldn't get rid of them. They weren't like that.
+
+
+
+""Can you get it out?"" I asked through the hands on my face, although I already knew the answer, and I knew that Gurathin knew I did, too.
+
+
+
+""I didn't want to risk any more damage than necessary,"" Gurathin explained. He actually sounded apologetic. ""
+
+Perihelion 
+
+should be able to extract the virus like it did with the remnant contamination. I've sent it as much data as I could so it can prepare, but we won't be able to communicate until they leave the wormhole. Ratthi's going to do the same once he can."" 
+
+
+
+That still left me with the two cycles until ART got here. Normally I could have spent that time watching 
+
+Sanctuary Moon, 
+
+but... SecUnits aren't supposed to watch serials. Governor modules didn't like SecUnits that watched serials, and I didn't want to start an episode only for it to trigger the virus. That seemed like a good way to develop some very negative neural pathways, and I couldn't do that. Not to 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+(Not even to 
+
+Ring-Seven High, 
+
+which was an adolescent-oriented serial that Amena watched. I tried to watch an episode once. It was garbage.)
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Two full cycles with a parasite in my organic neural tissues and nothing to do but sit and think about it. 
+
+
+
+""Is there anything we can do for you?"" Mensah asked. Third time.
+
+
+
+I had no idea. I had no idea what this thing was capable of. And I wouldn't be able to investigate it, because apparently if I even got close to it, it would melt my brain, just a little, as a treat. I tried to think of something, because Mensah was looking at me like she was 
+
+hoping 
+
+for an answer. Maybe if I played good little company SecUnit, it wouldn't get triggered, and this fucking headache would go away.
+
+
+
+""Just..."" I sat up, feeling wetness on my back from the couple stab wounds the medical bots hadn't got to yet. I kept my eyes closed, keeping an eye on the room through the cameras. That seemed fine, at least. That was a normal thing SecUnits did. Now that I was less focused on being angry, I noticed that Gurathin had been one-handedly fixing the medical bot that I'd shot. I almost would have felt bad, but I was too busy feeling nothing. ""Don't get into any situations."" 
+
+
+
+Mensah's eyebrow raised. ""Situations?""
+
+
+
+""You know what I mean. If anything happens-"" I checked my risk assessment monitor. It was all over the place (more than usual, it was straight up glitching out now), so I checked my status. Shit. My performance reliability had gone up a little, but was still hovering around the thirties. I shouldn't even be awake. ""I cant protect you right now."" 
+
+
+
+""Okay. Then we won't."" She still looked worried. ""What are you going to do?""
+
+
+
+I shrugged, and for a second I was scared that the virus would pick up on the very human gesture and be a dick about it. It didn't, so that was nice. I guess. ""Sit around and be a good little SecUnit."" 
+
+Pretend there isn't something stuck in my head that could fry my brain until it dribbled out my ears. 
+
+(Just kidding. My ears are purely cosmetic. Ha-ha.)
+
+
+
+""Well, in the meantime, get back-"" Gurathin stopped himself, took a breath. ""It would be nice if you could get back on the medical platform and stop making a mess on the floor."" 
+
+
+
+I guessed that was reasonable. At the very least it would be able to get rid of a handful of warning notifications that kept popping up in my feed. I sent an affirmation and got to my feet (
+
+wow 
+
+I shouldn't be awake), climbed back onto the medical platform. The bot began to work on me, and I disconnected from the cameras completely so I could at least try to ignore the sensation of both Mensah and Gurathin awkwardly staring at me.
+
+
+
+After three minutes and twenty seven seconds, Mensah asked, ""SecUnit, how does the governor module work?""  
+
+
+
+The question surprised me, because it was kind of a stupid question, and Mensah didn't ask stupid questions. And also I really wanted to shut down. 
+
+
+
+""For you, I mean. How does it work for you?""
+
+
+
+Oh. Um. I could hear the whirring of the medical bot in the silence it took me to force myself to answer. ""It moderates commands and behavior. Either from a central system like HubSystem, or from a client."" I had a feeling I wasn't saying the part that Mensah wanted. ""The commands can be either explicit or implicit."" 
+
+
+
+""Implicit?"" 
+
+
+
+I didn't want to talk about it anymore, but I knew they were trying to help. And I needed help, even if right now the thing I wanted to do most was shoot myself into space. Figuratively. (If I meant that not-figuratively I was pretty sure Bharadwaj would somehow teleport onto the ship via pure intuition for a forcible impromptu session.)  ""Usually about SecUnit behavior. Like sitting in chairs. We're not supposed to do that."" 
+
+
+
+Mensah blinked, definitely trying to remember all the times she'd seen SecUnits sitting in chairs.. ""I... I never realized."" 
+
+
+
+""So what 
+
+exactly 
+
+happens to you if you don't comply?"" Gurathin asked, because they were trying to get answers out of me that I didn't want to give, and someone needed to be the asshole. He fit the role very nicely. (Damnnit, Gurathin, I'm trying to be not-angry here.)
+
+
+
+The headache was not going away. ""An electrical current is directed at my neural tissues until I do."" I didn't want to describe it further. Mensah already had this 
+
+look 
+
+on her face of obvious pity, which was a) unnecessary, b) undeserved, and I've had worse anyway. The pity was the part I wanted to avoid the most. I hate when humans pity me. I don't deserve it.
+
+
+
+""Would it be correct to assume that as the infraction is more severe, the stronger the... current?"" 
+
+
+
+I wanted to glare at him. I also wanted to keep my eyes turned off. I said through gritted teeth, ""yes."" (Ow.)
+
+
+
+""And how bad was... what the virus did to you at the research station?"" Mensah asked softly. 
+
+
+
+""Just a day in the life of being a SecUnit,"" I responded, probably too sharply, because I didn't want to answer any more questions about what was in my head. Then I winced, because Mensah was still looking at me and the headache spiked, which didn't feel good. ""Pretty bad."" 
+
+
+
+""The virus has been activating the punishment section of your governor module,"" Gurathin said. ""How does it compare to... past experiences?"" 
+
+
+
+Worse, unless you count the memory shrapnel that was RaviHyral. 
+
+
+
+
+Performance reliability at 25 percent. Shutdown recommended. 
+
+
+
+
+""I'm going to shut down now,"" I said, and did.
+
+
+you can find me on the tumbler at its-jeph :)
+
+just hanging out in an airport, finishing up this chapter, you knowAlso a note- there will be at least three more chapters to this! Yeehaw!
+
+
+When I restarted, I was alone in Medical. The headache was still there, as was a message from Mensah. 
+
+We are here if you don't want to be alone. 
+
+
+
+
+I very much wanted to be alone. 
+
+
+
+Someone had put a new set of neatly folded clothes- 
+
+my 
+
+clothes, the ones without logos, fresh out of the recycler- next to the platform, and I put them on. A quick check told me that in the approximately three hours and fourteen minutes I had been shut down (yikes), the crew feeds had been quiet. Another quick check of the ship cameras (it took me roughly 0.239 seconds longer than it should have, and I couldn't tell if that was because of my overall status or the virus somehow slowing me down) showed me that they were in the kitchen area, talking. I kept it muted (except for the usual keyword prompt ping that included things like cries of terror and screaming an agony). 
+
+
+
+I had a feeling they were talking about me.
+
+
+
+There was a lot going on in my head (besides the obvious) and I very much needed to be somewhere with a locked door. After I made sure the hallways were clear,  I slipped quietly into my quarters and clicked the lock. The headache spiked again, because SecUnits should be in a cubicle in the cargo bay, not in a private room, but I very much needed to not be around humans. I disconnected from SecSystem (except for the aforementioned terror and agony stuff) and turned on a white noise filter. 
+
+
+
+There was too much happening in my head and I didn't know what to do with it. I wanted to shut down again and just turn on again in two cycles when ART got here, but those hostiles that had hurt my humans back down on the planet probably weren't alone, and I didn't know when they were going to come back. 
+
+
+
+So I had to just sit here and wait. Correction- 
+
+stand 
+
+here and wait. I think I've gotten soft, because all I wanted to do right now was go to my nice, comfy bed and curl into an improbably small ball, but it was enough that I was 
+
+in 
+
+here. So stand here and wait it is. With this fucking headache. I have no idea how humans deal with these if they get them all the time. Although the ones they got were caused by a variety of biological factors and definitely not a virus apparently solely designed to fry their neural tissues. 
+
+
+
+Two cycles. I had to sit here and wait for two cycles. I didn't even bother setting a countdown timer, because that would have been excruciating to watch. What I 
+
+wanted 
+
+to watch was 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+Tentatively, I started an episode of that trashy adolescent show 
+
+Ring-Seven High
+
+- yep, nope. The headache spiked again, and I groaned out loud in frustration. 
+
+
+
+I could take the headache for two cycles. I could take doing whatever people told me to, and sitting on the floor, and sitting still and not blinking and pretending to be a piece of furniture. That was fine, I could do that. 
+
+
+
+But taking my 
+
+Sanctuary Moon? 
+
+Fuck off, fuck you.
+
+
+
+After a subjective 13 years and objective two hours, Pin-Lee sent me a direct ping. I acknowledged it, because maybe standing here in crippling anxiety wasn't the best thing for me to be doing. She then sent me a data file with Ratthi's analysis of the virus.
+
+
+
+I opened it tentatively, half expecting a little nano-bomb to go off in my head again, but nothing happened. I started to scan through the file, and- 
+
+
+
+Ah. This was pretty bad. 
+
+
+
+About an hour after she sent out the file to me and presumably everyone else, Pin-Lee sent an invite to a feed channel for the group to discuss the virus. (It did make me feel slightly better that even when my processing speed was in the shitter, it was still faster than it took for humans to read things.)  At first I wanted to ignore the ping and continue to stew in not-caring. The way that most of these discussions went was that the person who wrote it basically summarized everything that happened so if you actually read the file it was completely redundant. But I peeked into the other crew channel and saw that Mensah had given everyone strict instructions to not ask me how I was feeling. Which was considerate I guess, and would probably make this meeting slightly less painful. And also humans have a tendency to realize things when they say it out loud in front of other people, so, shit, yeah, it was probably worth doing.
+
+
+
+
+It's a construct virus, 
+
+Ratthi was saying. 
+
+Part biological virus, part- well, DNA technically is coding, if you- 
+
+
+
+
+
+Ratthi. 
+
+Mensah wanted to get to the point, and I agreed. Quietly. SecUnits are not supposed to take part in crew discussions.
+
+
+
+
+It's made of proteins and code-carrying synthetics, 
+
+Ratthi summarized, but I could tell that he was waiting for someone to ask him how it worked. Not me. I didn't care. I just wanted to kill it. 
+
+Designed specifically to target a SecUnit, because their immune systems are- well they're not like ours- 
+
+(I honestly didn't know if I had one) -
+
+and because it's target is the governor module itself. 
+
+
+
+
+I have to admit- even though I knew this was a targeted attack on me, the fact that this thing couldn't- I don't know, 
+
+spread 
+
+to my humans and augmented humans and the ship and do horrible things to them was somewhat reassuring. It wasn't something that I had been worrying about, but it was nice to know it wasn't something that I 
+
+should
+
+ have been worrying about.
+
+
+
+
+Its purpose? 
+
+Mensah asked. 
+
+
+
+
+Again, it's specific. It's only affecting the governor module, which is kind of a good thing, but also... 
+
+
+
+
+Bad. Really bad. There was a bit of silence. In the background, I could see that Amena had pulled a search on governor modules, and I realized that she was the only one that had never interacted with a proper SecUnit, (read as: rogue SecUnit doing a convincing job of making it seem like it was a proper SecUnit. Three didn't count). 
+
+
+
+
+Can the virus transmit and receive signals?
+
+ I asked. Ratthi's report had been vague on that topic, and that was a point I kind of needed something not-vague on. (That was a thing about human academic writing- they could use a whole lot of words to sound smart to describe something and never give an actual clear conclusion on what the outcome was or if it mattered anyway. Most human academic writings could be summarized in one sentence. Like, just say if the disease-curing medicine works or not. It's horribly inefficient. And also boring.)
+
+
+
+There was the kind of pause that didn't mean he didn't know the answer, but instead that he knew the answer and didn't like it. 
+
+
+
+
+I think so
+
+, Ratthi said eventually. Which was a probable yes. 
+
+And from what Gurathin could tell from the nonorganic components, it might have the capabilities to extend its coding with the right prompts.
+
+
+
+
+Okay, 
+
+that 
+
+hadn't been in the report. I immediately put up a wall around the ship to block incoming signals (why the 
+
+fuck 
+
+had I not already done that? Fucking performance reliability.) The range wasn't very good and it was kind of shoddy due to my currently still-shit processing speed, but it would work for now. Well, at least until the hostiles found us. I was going to spend the next couple hours building up the ship's walls and location cloaking, that was for sure. 
+
+
+
+
+But that only matters if the hostiles come bac
+
+k, Ratthi said, and I could tell he knew that was stupid as he said it. And that was great (sarcasm) because it really nailed it into everyone's heads that yes, the hostiles with the expensive as fuck nanotech were probably not going to ditch their expensive as fuck nanotech after one attempt at whatever the fuck it was they were trying to do.
+
+
+
+
+So if they come back,
+
+ Amena asked, sounding scared even through the feed,
+
+ what do we do? What can we do? Will they hurt SecUnit like they did down at the research station? 
+
+
+
+
+I really wasn't a fan of stupid questions, especially in this scenario, but I guess I have to make exceptions for human adolescents. 
+
+
+
+I asked, 
+
+Remember when I shot myself in the chest when GrayCris tried to infect me with the combat override?
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes
+
+, Gurathin said grimly. (Amena- who hadn't been there when I blew a three inch hole in the middle of me- said, 
+
+what?)
+
+
+
+
+
+Do exactly that. 
+
+
+
+
+
+What? No! 
+
+Over the cameras, I could see Amena had stood up, looking horrified. 
+
+We're not going to hurt you!
+
+
+
+
+
+It will not kill me,
+
+ I said. 
+
+Only render me physically inoperable. 
+
+
+
+
+I could see the crew's reactions over the cameras. Amena was pacing, looking distressed, and I felt bad about that. Everyone else looked grim, because I knew they remembered me shooting myself point-blank (I couldn't see it at the time, but I can assume it was messy and traumatizing), and because they were probably trying to imagine themselves actually doing that to me. 
+
+
+
+Honestly, I doubted they would. I set a reminder to also start working on a contingency plan. (Make that plans, plural. Nothing ever fucking goes my way.)
+
+
+
+
+Do we have any idea on who would do this, and why? 
+
+Mensah asked, changing the subject, which seemed to make everyone else feel better. It didn't make me feel better, but then again, I came into this feeling bad, and the only thing that would make me feel better was some extremely precise brain surgery from a hyperintelligent hyperasshole transport ship. And at least twelve episodes of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Well, it's really cool nanotechnology, 
+
+Ratthi answered. 
+
+And also 
+
+really 
+
+illegal. Like, super illegal. 
+
+He seemed irritated and fascinated at the same time, which was impressive. 
+
+The only people who have legal access to this are extremely high-level labs, and this type of application is super prohibited. I don't even know how you'd find this on the black market.
+
+
+
+
+
+You can't,
+
+ Pin-Lee confirmed. From the view of the conference room, nearly everyone (where all the humans except for Ratthi, Gurathin, and Amena were) turned to look at her. She shrugged. 
+
+What? One of these days we're going to need access to SecUnit parts in a pinch. No offense, SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+That straight-up sounded like a character in one of my serials- the hotshot lawyer not afraid to get their hands dirty. My already-high respect for Pin-Lee rose three percent. I replied, 
+
+No, that tracks. 
+
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee went on. To
+
+ clarify, nano-biotech is extremely regulated, for obvious reasons. 
+
+(Not obvious to me, I guess. Then again, my own biology is what most would consider atypical, since half of it isn't, you know, biology, and therefore most biological security risks register as 'not applicable'..) 
+
+It would be near-impossible to snuggle out of any of the few facilities where they're kept. If it was smuggled out, it would go to a private buyer.
+
+
+
+
+
+So we're looking for a private buyer,
+
+ Mensah said. 
+
+
+
+
+Or the corporations themselves
+
+, Pin-Lee added gravely. 
+
+A SecUnit like our SecUnit is a liability to that entire industry. And I mean 'our' only to differentiate between words, nothing further than that. Cool your jets, Ratthi.
+
+
+
+
+My organic parts had gone cold. I had a sense that Mensah was thinking the same thing that I was, because she said, 
+
+Pin-Lee, you don't think the company is behind this, do you? 
+
+
+
+
+That was a question I could probably find out the answer for myself by doing a search and analysis, but... I don't know. I had too many emotions right now. Rage, a lot of rage because I hated what was happening to me and because there was nothing I could do about it and because I had assumed I would never have to feel my governor module in my head like this ever again. And a shit ton of fear because of the same reasons. I liked having control over situations, I liked being able to solve people's problems, and right now I had none of that. Was this what it was like to be a human all of the time? Because if it was, it sucked. 
+
+
+
+
+We shouldn't rule it out as a possibility, 
+
+Pin-Lee was saying, 
+
+but I don't think so. Research and development isn't one of their main priorities. Unless they were putting a hell of a lot of money into some really underhanded shit, I can't see how they would've got the resources to try to pull something like this off. And if they got caught, they'd have lawsuits up the ass. Besides, SecUnit- you said they cheap out at every possible avenue. Why would they suddenly spend this much money just to fuck with one SecUnit, rather than use that same amount of money to look into their own governor module programming so another SecUnit doesn't happen? 
+
+
+
+
+It was quiet for a moment. Over the camera feeds I could see Mensah staring darkly at Pin-Lee, and Ratthi looked like he wanted to punch something.
+
+
+
+
+I fucking hate those guys, 
+
+he grumbled. Same, Ratthi, same. But I felt a little bit better, because I did a quick little targeted risk assessment based on Pin-Lee's points, and it tracked. The company's version of revenge-based sabotage was quietly blowing things up (cheaply and efficiently) a la GrayCris. Therefore, something this involved made the company an unlikely suspect, so for the moment I could settle with the knowledge that I wouldn't have to be forced to wear their logos again anytime soon. 
+
+
+
+Except for, you know, the ones etched into my inorganic parts. 
+
+
+
+The conversation diverted into possible culprits, and I should have been paying more attention than tagging names that seemed important to look up later, but I had a headache and I was in a bad mood. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to shut down until ART got here so I could wake up with my brain magically fixed.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit, you okay? 
+
+Ratthi asked (and immediately winced as Mensah sent him a private feed message). I'd kept quiet, because SecUnits weren't part of conversations. 
+
+
+
+I sent a video-image of a little fauna dancing and left them to decode that.
+
+
+
+SecUnits are also not supposed to send video-images of little dancing fauna.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit, can I come in? 
+
+
+
+
+Ugh. My first instinct was no. My second instinct was- I checked the hallway cameras and said a couple of swear words that Pin-Lee would probably be proud of. I had been so busy immersing myself in the security of the outside of the ship I kind of had disconnected from the inside of the ship. (Well, not kind of. It was pretty deliberate. After enough mentions of 'SecUnit' I'd had enough of trying to ignore people talking about me and switched instead to outright ignoring people talking about me.) (Plus, with my low performance reliability and the fact that the call was probably coming from outside the house, it was better to conserve the effort.) 
+
+
+
+See, when Amena asked if she could come in, the answer would have been an easy no because I was not in my quarters, where I lazily thought everyone would look for me. But now she was waiting outside the cargo bay doors, a bunch of human stuff in her arms, looking up at my drone. She'd even sent the message through a secure feed channel, which was unnecessary, but an indication she was trying. Trying 
+
+what, 
+
+I wasn't exactly sure.
+
+
+
+Fuck. 
+
+
+
+If it wasn't for the fucking headache I probably would have just stayed quiet and let her look around the ship for a while longer. But she asked, and she was waiting, and that stupid fucking virus was just gleefully hanging out, waiting for me to make a conduct violation.
+
+
+
+And also I could tell during the meeting she'd been upset. I did not like it when Amena was upset. 
+
+
+
+I opened the cargo bay doors and watched her step inside tentatively via drone. She looked around, squinting. 
+
+
+
+""Are you just sitting here with the lights off?"" What? No. I mean, technically yes. It's not like I needed them. I begrudgingly turned them on, and she blinked a couple times while her eyes adjusted. She looked around, still squinty. ""Where 
+
+are 
+
+you?"" 
+
+
+
+(Like I said before, ugh.)
+
+
+
+""Here,"" I said out loud, and she peered around the corner to where I was standing. I didn't quite like the look on her face. It was a sickening mixture of pity and also confusion and also 'what the fuck?', which is a subset of confusion. 
+
+
+
+""Are you hiding?""
+
+
+
+""No,"" I said. Probably a little too sharply. Ow. ""I am not 
+
+hiding."" 
+
+Ow. That one wasn't fair, because I had definitely toned down the attitude. Amena was still looking at me, and the little virus had started to poke at my neural tissues, because I was a) lying, and b) not answering her question. (I hate this. I 
+
+hate 
+
+this.) I did my best not to sigh, because SecUnits didn't sigh. ""Being in my quarters was giving me a headache. This was... better."" 
+
+
+
+Amena bit her lip. She shuffled where she stood a little, and I wanted to ask her why she was here and also if she could kindly go back to minding her own business so 
+
+I 
+
+could go back to staring into the endless void of space to look for hostiles and try not to think so much. I didn't, because SecUnits didn't ask questions like that. 
+
+
+
+""I remembered the Barish-Estranza SecUnit,"" she blurted suddenly. She looked down, still biting her lip. 
+
+
+
+Well, I definitely remembered it too, and given the circumstances, it was another thing I really didn't want to think about right now. 
+
+
+
+""This is not a big ship,"" I said. ""Being out of client range is not an issue."" 
+
+
+
+Amena let out a breath, looking slightly relieved. ""Oh. Okay. That's good, I guess.""
+
+
+
+She was still standing there. I didn't say anything, mainly because I hoped that if I didn't say anything and just kept standing here she'd, I don't know, get bored and leave or something. Instead she took a breath and looked at me.
+
+
+
+""I brought some downloads."" 
+
+
+
+Those couple of words were so immediately enticing that I switched from my drone to my actual eyeballs and looked at her. She fumbled around with all the stuff in her arms and pulled out a feed interface tablet. ""I figured watching something might... might make you feel better?"" 
+
+
+
+Yeah, it would. Only problem was that I couldn't. Fucking. Watch it. 
+
+
+
+
+I can't, 
+
+I sent her through the feed. For some reason I didn't want to say it out loud. 
+
+
+
+She bit her lip again. 
+
+Your governor module isn't letting you. 
+
+I didn't say anything. 
+
+It's hurting you, isn't it? 
+
+
+
+
+I closed my eyes. I didn't switch back to the drone view of the cargo bay, instead going to the ship's outward cameras. Space was dark. And empty. To Amena, I replied, 
+
+I am fine. 
+
+
+
+
+(Ow.)
+
+
+
+Even looking out into space, I could feel Amena over the feed. She was worried. I guess she had a reason to be. And she had a good reason to believe that I was definitely not fine. After all, she was one of the only (living) people that had seen me in a complete emotional breakdown, and based on my still-abysmal performance reliability, I was pretty damn close to another one. (Or maybe I was still in the middle of one. I'm not really keeping track right now.)
+
+
+
+
+Well, 
+
+she said, 
+
+I was going to watch some serials. I know the governor module probably won't let you watch them yourself, but... 
+
+I could tell she was smiling just a little over the feed. 
+
+What if you were keeping an eye on your client who happened to be watching serials in the cargo bay? 
+
+
+
+
+I blinked back to my drone feed. Amena was smiling, her head tilted. 
+
+
+
+
+The cargo bay is not intended for recreational activity, 
+
+I said. 
+
+
+
+She smiled. 
+
+I know. 
+
+She looked around. 
+
+It also seems like a good place for a blanket fort. 
+
+I didn't know what that meant, so I did a quick search. Well, shit, it was exactly what it sounded like. 
+
+I have a feeling you're going to say something like 'that doesn't seem structurally sound', so I guess- 
+
+she added a couple extra vowels to that word- 
+
+you're just going to have to keep an eye on me. While I watch serials. And help you hide from the rest of everyone else. 
+
+
+
+
+I looked fully at her. 
+
+
+
+""Is that a yes?"" 
+
+
+
+I ran through that entire conversation again, analyzing it. Well, shit. I couldn't find anything that was making my brain virus pissy, and she... Amena hadn't actually 
+
+told 
+
+me to do anything. She just told me what she was going to do. In staying here and watching serials over her shoulder, I would 
+
+technically 
+
+be keeping her safe because 
+
+technically 
+
+the cargo bay wasn't a place she was supposed to be, you know, making a blanket fort and watching serials. 
+
+
+
+""I... guess?"" (That wasn't a standard SecUnit response, so a little ow.)
+
+
+
+She grinned. I had a feeling she had done some research on governor modules.
+
+
+
+I was confused. I'd wanted to be alone. I'd 
+
+really 
+
+wanted to be alone, hence the whole hiding (
+
+fine, 
+
+I was 
+
+hiding, 
+
+the fact that it helped with the headache was just a bonus) in the cargo bay and trying to pretend I was a rock floating in space, but... I also didn't want to be alone, in a stupid complicated way. I didn't want to just be standing here and trying to be a good company SecUnit and doing what my humans asked me to and being bored and... scared. But also I didn't want all my humans 
+
+knowing 
+
+all of that. 
+
+
+
+Maybe Amena somehow knew that, because maybe it was some kind of adolescent human thing. That was disturbing, because that would make me also like an adolescent human in this scenario, and that was truly the last thing I ever wanted.  
+
+
+
+These fucking emotions were giving me a headache. Literally.
+
+
+
+Amena had set down all the stuff in her arms, which turned out to be a bunch of blankets and pillows along with the feed interface. She squatted, tapping at the tablet on the ground until an episode of- she started episode 17 of 
+
+Ring-Seven High 
+
+before she blinked and said, ""wait, you hate that one,"" and put on a random episode of 
+
+Voidlight Salvage 
+
+instead. Then she started to tuck and tie up the blankets beneath and around the corners of the crates in the little alcove I picked. None of it came close to any reasonable structural requirements, so I opened up my search on blanket forts and just kind of improved on the results. Amena still helped, but let me kind of take over, which turned out to be better for structural integrity.
+
+
+
+The result of all this turned out to be a surprisingly well-made shelter between rows of crates with soft, fluffy ceilings and walls that could actually probably support a decent amount of weight. On a planet with extremely mild weather and terrain, it would actually probably prolong a human's survival for at least a day or two if they had no other supplies. 
+
+
+
+Inside, Amena had taken charge of arranging everything else to be nice and comfy. When it was done she stood back, hands on her hips. 
+
+
+
+""You know, you're going to have to make one of these for my younger siblings now."" She took a picture of the fort, probably to send to the younger siblings (well, great, now I 
+
+had 
+
+to do this again) (I could make it better with more materials) and climbed inside with her interface tablet. She looked at me. ""Aren't you going to come in?"" 
+
+
+
+Uh oh. Now I was hitting a mental roadblock. Going in the blanket fort would involve a) sitting in something comfy and b) sitting. Two things that SecUnits definitely were not supposed to do, especially in front of their client's designated representative. 
+
+
+
+Amena was looking at me with her lips pressed together, thinking. ""You know, it might collapse and, uh. Suffocate me or something."" She tried her best to make a serious face. ""It is a legitimate safety concern... if you... were to keep standing there?"" 
+
+
+
+She was floundering toward the end, but I appreciated the effort. In the end, I crawled into the fort (okay, I actually really did a very good job) (again, I could make it better with more materials) and sat as far away as I could. I could tell Amena was trying her best not to look in my direction, which I also appreciated. 
+
+
+
+After a couple of seconds of me sitting very very still, she sent, 
+
+are you okay? Is this okay? 
+
+
+
+
+The headache didn't 
+
+increase
+
+ in severity as far as I could tell, so I guess? I sent an affirmative ping, and I could tell she was trying not to smile. She held out her hand, and I took one of my small inert intel drones from my pocket (I have more), activated it, dropped it into her hand. She set it gently on her shoulder. 
+
+
+
+""So we can keep watching 
+
+Voidlight, 
+
+or..."" she paused, I think for dramatic effect. ""I downloaded the first season of 
+
+The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+I've actually never seen it."" I must have made an expression, because she smiled and queued the first episode. ""How many times have you seen episode one?"" 
+
+
+
+""A few times,"" I lied. 
+
+
+
+The real number is actually kind of embarrassing. 
+
+
+
+After episode 3, Amena went to get snacks. She left the drone where it could see the propped up tablet, which was now playing 
+
+Voidlight Salvage 
+
+again, but as soon as she left the cargo bay the virus noticed that I was alone, sitting in a blanket fort, and got a little pissy about it. So I went back to standing against crates of whatever. 
+
+
+
+I hadn't been one hundred percent focused on 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+I wish I could have been, even though I had already seen it a definite nonzero amount of times, but I kind of had a subjective million other things that I was worried about and responsible for. I had been slowly building up the ship's security for the inevitable reappearance of the hostiles. If we were lucky, ART would get here first and it would have been a waste of time and effort where I 
+
+could 
+
+have been focusing one hundred percent on 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+But as Overse has said once or twice, not in 
+
+this 
+
+economy. 
+
+
+
+Amena hadn't come back yet, so I sent Gurathin another thing I had been working on in a file package. 
+
+
+
+
+What's this? 
+
+He asked.He sounded groggy. I probably woke him up. (It's the little things.)
+
+
+
+
+Instructions, 
+
+I said. Really, he couldn't just read it? I went through the trouble of making it augmented-human accessible. 
+
+For you to take control of ship security. And a contingency plan. 
+
+
+
+
+There were some things I liked about Gurathin, I'll admit it. Mainly he wasn't the person whose reaction to that wasn't a useless attempt to reassure me that no, that's my job, everything will work out just right so that he won't need it. 
+
+
+
+Instead he just sent an affirmative ping. 
+
+
+
+About five minutes later I could feel his presence over the security system. Not changing anything- 
+
+that 
+
+would have led to a string of events that would give me a very bad headache for multiple reasons- but just looking. Poking around to make sure he knew what everything did. 
+
+
+
+(I respected that.)
+
+
+
+Amena still wasn't back, so I checked the cameras to find her. I guess she'd stopped by her second mom's quarters. I skimmed the playthrough of that conversation, mortified for about a second until I realized the only thing Amena said about me was that she checked up on me and that I was doing okay. Nothing further, because she was respectful like that. (Or maybe it was an adolescent human thing.) This is why I like Amena. And Mensah didn't pry further, because she was respectful like that. This is why I like Mensah. 
+
+
+
+Amena was just now making her way into the kitchen. Ratthi was there, leaning against the counter, a mug of steaming liquid in front of him, although he didn't seem to be drinking it. There was still a bruise across his cheek, and he looked tired. (My performance reliability dropped about two percent, and I had to rewrite a line of code meant for the jammer that I had been in the middle of.)  Amena did a little staggered step where it seemed like she was debating whether she should sneak past him to grab her snacks and leave before he noticed her. She did not do that.
+
+
+
+""Ratthi?"" She asked tentatively. ""Are... are you okay?"" 
+
+
+
+""What? Oh, hi Amena. Yeah, of course."" I think he tried to smile at her, but it was probably just as effective as if 
+
+I 
+
+had tried to smile at her. Eventually he gave up and said, ""I should be sleeping, but I can't."" 
+
+
+
+(My performance reliability dropped another percent, and I swore a little and stopped trying to code. Should I be watching this conversation? I probably should not be watching this conversation.) (But humans need sleep (annoying, right) and I was the reason one of my favorite humans could not sleep.)
+
+
+
+Amena leaned against the counter and gave him a reassuring look. ""Do you... do you want to talk about it?"" 
+
+
+
+Ratthi scratched his cheek. ""I just keep... replaying it all in my head. The guy down there... I was scared shitless."" He laughed, but it didn't seem like he meant it. ""We're in these situations all the time, but I'm hardly ever the one that has to..."" He trailed off. ""I don't know how SecUnit does it."" 
+
+
+
+""Does what?"" She asked softly. 
+
+
+
+Ratthi's face scrunched up, and he folded his arms over his chest. Not in a defensive or an attitude way, more like he was giving himself a hug. ""I don't think we killed them. I'm pretty sure we didn't. But... I 
+
+know 
+
+that it was him or us, and we technically didn't have a choice..."" 
+
+
+
+Oh, I know how I do it. I was made to kill people. It's pretty easy when you're made to kill people. When you are made to kill people, the company that made you usually tends to keep out all the messy emotional things, like feeling bad about killing people.
+
+
+
+""You saved SecUnit,"" Amena said quietly, looking him in the eye. 
+
+
+
+""No, I'm the reason it got hurt,"" Ratthi said, his voice a little stronger. (That was incorrect.) ""I didn't need to go back down to the planet, not really- if we'd left, then none of this would have ever happened-"" 
+
+
+
+Also incorrect. Someone carrying around an illegal SecUnit-infecting construct virus didn't just 
+
+happen 
+
+to run into them on a mostly-uninhabited, mostly-worthless planet.
+
+
+
+""I think,"" Amena interrupted gently, ""that both you and SecUnit are blaming yourselves for something that completely isn't your fault."" 
+
+
+
+Well, that was stupid, since it was clearly my fault. Ratthi wasn't the one that had a governor module that they let get infected and then subsequently fail at its literal one job.
+
+
+
+Ratthi blinked. ""It's blaming itself? For what?""
+
+
+
+Amena scoffed, but not in a mean way. ""Are you kidding?""
+
+
+
+Ratthi blinked at her again, then laughed tiredly and ran a hand down his face. ""Sometimes I feel like you understand it the most out of all of us."" 
+
+
+
+Amena made a face. ""Oh, I doubt that."" (I also doubted that.) After another second, she added, ""I suppose I had a lot of practice when both ART and SecUnit were having breakdowns and I was the only one that both of them would talk to about it."" (Huh. I never really considered it that way. It was probably especially difficult because ART and I don't exactly communicate at normal human speeds.) When Ratthi made a surprised expression, she said, ""Really? I thought you knew.""
+
+
+
+Ratthi laughed for real, and put a hand on her shoulder. ""I'm really happy you're here with us, Amena."" Then his expression dropped again. ""How is it, really?"" 
+
+
+
+Amena pressed her lips together. ""It's... quiet. And still. I-"" 
+
+
+
+I broke off from the camera. I didn't want to hear the humans' perceptions of how bad I 
+
+seemed 
+
+like I was doing, because how bad I was actually doing was pretty damn clear to me. 
+
+
+
+I waited until Amena got back, and we resumed 
+
+Sanctuary Moon 
+
+while she crunched a processed vegetable imitation snack. Eventually she fell asleep, and I helped her bring the blanket fort materials back to her room. 
+
+
+
+And then I was alone. 
+
+
+
+ART's estimated arrival time: one cycle, 8 minutes, and 46 seconds .
+
+
+
+Not that anyone was counting.
+
+
+This chapter coming to hot after a bachelorette party and a stomach flu so bad my friends got pissed that i didn't go to the hospital (my mom didn't raise a quitter)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+
+
+Time until ART's arrival: seventeen hours, fifty three minutes, 7 seconds. 
+
+
+
+
+Okay, yeah. I was counting. (I know I said that I hadn't been keeping one due to depression, but the anxiety kind of won out.)
+
+
+
+My risk assessment put the probability of the hostiles returning as a) nearly one hundred percent likely and b) pretty fucking imminent, and because I had no idea what was going to happen when they got here. Well, no, that wasn't entirely true. I had some idea. It was: 
+
+
+
+1) Hostiles show up. We try to hide and/or evade, eventually fail at that. 
+
+
+
+2) Hostiles attempt to board. We try to prevent, eventually fail at that. 
+
+
+
+3) ?????????
+
+
+
+This was a list that didn't include the step(s) where I was incapacitated and/or compromised and trying to kill my humans, which was probably going to happen sometime during step one. So yeah, I had a lot to look forward to. 
+
+
+
+Once most of the humans were awake, we discussed the contingency plan, which I will summarize because it involved a lot of speculation, frustration, and that thing where humans go around in circles for a while without really making any kind of decision (during which I would usually have watched one or two episodes of a serial, but since that was out of the question. I actually had to pay attention this time, and it made me want to punch something).
+
+
+
+The first thing that everyone disagreed about also happened to be the first thing that was going to happen in the sequence of events. So that really put us off on a good start, especially because it was possibly the only one that I was going to be operational for. 
+
+
+
+Because Arada is an optimist, she had asked, 
+
+What if they just don't show up? 
+
+I didn't even need to reference my risk assessment for that one, because Overse just kind of sighed and went, 
+
+oh, you.
+
+
+
+
+Most of the discussion was about whether we should try to run or stay put, and I guess to be fair, it was actually a valid thing to have a discussion on. Space is really big. As a result, it's really hard to find things unless you know exactly where it is. Even if you have an idea of where something is, it can still be annoying. Therefore it was a good idea that the crew moved the ship from its last location before pinging the distress signal to ART; the hostiles had probably known where the ship was at the time of the attack, but (hopefully) not anymore. 
+
+
+
+The problem was, we were basically stuck until ART found us. If we evaded, it would buy us more time before we were inevitably boarded, but then ART would take longer to find us. If we didn't, ART would get here on schedule, but then the hostiles would get to spend more time with... whatever I would be at that point. We could try to send ART a location ping that 
+
+might
+
+ be received once it bounced out of the wormhole, but that would be useless if they somehow intercepted it with their annoyingly good tech. And it was reasonable to believe that if we have jammers, they did too.
+
+
+
+So really it sucked no matter what.
+
+
+
+I wasn't sure how much more I could prepare. I had jacked up the scanners to their limits of detection. The result was annoying. Space, for being an infinite void or whatever, was stupidly noisy; the result of cranking the sensitivity was that the readings were filled with a whole lot of garbage. There was a mostly-easy fix to this. I set up a series of filters based on intensity and shape of the signal with some semi-continuous probabilistic modelling analysis (the latter was something I picked up from ART- I'd tried the continuous method, but it fucked with my processing speed so much that I had to dumb it down to the training wheels iteration. Not as effective, but fuck it, it did the trick) and set pings to alert me if anything worthwhile showed up. I was still searching at the very edge of its range because I wanted to know exactly when it was go-time, so I still had a lot of false positives that I had to manually check from, I don't know, blobs of energy just drifting around. In addition to being big, space is also weird. 
+
+
+
+This was all just to, with any luck (I hate luck), detect the hostiles before they detected us, which was an entirely separate thing. I had the updated jamming and cloaking code that I'd been working on. The cloaking code was derived from the drones from the Barish-Estranza incident, which was weird enough that maybe it wouldn't be recognized by the hostiles, which we knew had their own infuriatingly good cloaking tech. The jamming code would hopefully turn any signal our ship was giving off to something similar to the noise I had been staring at. 
+
+
+
+(At some point, to lighten the mood, Ratthi had joked that we should put on EVAC suits and start painting the ship black, which, honestly, wasn't a terrible idea.. Unfortunately, we did not have any paint. And also I don't know how paint works in space. I am going to go out on a limb and assume it does not.) (Also, according to Pin-Lee, that was illegal in most territories. Who knew?)
+
+
+
+None of which, of course, would do anything once they had found us. I didn't even know how much time it would buy us once they started looking, which they most certainly had. 
+
+
+
+On top of that, I knew that none of my humans were going to shoot me in the chest like I had asked. Sometimes it is inconvenient when your clients are good people. I thought Gurathin would, at least.
+
+
+
+
+Should we fight?
+
+ Overse asked warily.
+
+ When they board? 
+
+
+
+
+
+No
+
+, me and Mensah said at the same time. Participating in this conversation didn't make the headache worse, since it was focused on ship security.
+
+
+
+
+Based on resources we've already seen, they'll have good tech and probably good weapons,
+
+ I added.
+
+
+
+
+But what if they have more people like the ones back at the station?
+
+ Ratthi asked. 
+
+You know, the ones that go absolutely crazy with the stabbing?
+
+
+
+
+I could tell Mensah was remembering the GrayCris assassination attempt by the way her heart rate had elevated. 
+
+
+
+
+They most likely won't
+
+, I said. I wasn't trying to be reassuring, that was just an added bonus of probably being right. 
+
+Humans augmented like that are hard to kill. The last one from the station probably lived, so they know I'm compromised. By the time they board, I'll be incapacitated, so the use of additional force will be unnecessary.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Maybe
+
+ incapacitated
+
+, Arada said. 
+
+
+
+
+No, I will definitely be incapacitated
+
+. I am not an optimist like Arada, and I have a risk assessment module, unlike Arada.
+
+ At that point, if you surrender they will most likely take you as hostages.
+
+
+
+
+
+But we don't even know who they are,
+
+ Amena said, in a whiny human adolescent tone. I could tell she was getting distressed. (Again, I do not like when Amena is distressed, but I am a) bad at making humans not distressed in scenarios where I am not actively saving their lives and b) also very distressed myself right now. I am 98% sure I would make everything worse than I already have.)
+
+
+
+
+Which is why we need to stall
+
+, Pin-Lee said. 
+
+I think Dr. Mensah and I will be able to do very well.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+That was what I was banking on. For surveys, we still need to rent out equipment from bond companies, which Mensah describes as ""a necessary"" evil. The contract ended with the company, so arrangements were made with a different company, the most ethically sound one that Pin-Lee could find. I didn't like it regardless, but it did give a foothold for Mensah and Pin-Lee to negotiate on. The bond company would still rather pay a hostage fee than the classic dead-client payouts. Also working on stalling was Gurathin, who had taken to the plan I sent him that detailed everything I could think of to repel boarding. It wasn't much, especially since Gurathin didn't have the same capabilities as me, but I laid the groundwork as much as I was able to. 
+
+
+
+The humans had then begun talking about individual roles for the inevitable evasion and boarding. I kind of tuned out. Not voluntarily. They were following the plans that I laid out for Gurathin, so that was nice. It just bothered me enough that I would not be able to do my job, I wouldn't be able to keep them safe, and the whole reason that they were all in this position that would get them kept hostage, harmed, and possibly killed (by me) was all my fault. You can imagine this was doing wonders for my performance reliability. (I should probably stop keeping track of it at this point. It was nothing but disappointment.)
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+
+SecUnit? 
+
+Ah shit. I forgot the meeting was going on, and I definitely hadn't been paying attention. But when I opened the feed message, I saw that they'd finished up, and I had a private message from Mensah. I sent back an acknowledgement, and received a message back. 
+
+Can I have a word with you? 
+
+I sent back an affirmative. 
+
+In person. Just me.
+
+
+
+
+Ah. 
+
+
+
+I mean, I didn't 
+
+want 
+
+to, but Dr. Mensah was one of the handful of humans I liked, and probably one of the only ones of that handful that I would talk to face-to-face voluntarily in the middle of whatever kind of prolonged panic attack I was having (never mind that I couldn't technically 
+
+not 
+
+go talk to her right now). I made sure my scanner alerts were still sound and made my way to her quarters. 
+
+
+
+I am very aware when someone is looking at me normally, so when I got there I had to look at the wall, because Mensah was 
+
+definitely 
+
+looking at me in the sense that she was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. 
+
+Emotionally 
+
+wrong with me, to be specific. If there's one thing I hate more than people looking at me, it's when people look at me and can tell what I am feeling. 
+
+
+
+I could see her through the cameras. She seemed tired and worried, though for most situations I have been in with Mensah she has seemed tired and worried. Eventually she stopped looking at me like I was some kind of weird puzzle and said, ""SecUnit, I want to help you. I am worried about you."" 
+
+
+
+I... didn't quite know what to say about that. So I didn't say anything. 
+
+
+
+""Is there anything I can do to help?"" 
+
+
+
+I didn't think so? Unless she knew how to do biotechnological brain surgery. (I was pretty sure she didn't. Then again, I hadn't thought she knew how to use a mining drill when I first met her until she shot a overridden SecUnit through the chest. If only she'd do that to me.) 
+
+
+
+It was a question, so I had to answer. ""No."" 
+
+
+
+She frowned and folded her hands in her lap, her lips pressed together. I had the sense that she was trying to figure out a way to talk to me while keeping my governor module happy, but I wasn't sure it made as much sense to her as it did to Amena. Respectfully, I mean that. Dr. Mensah knew more about 
+
+how
+
+ it worked from a client's perspective than Amena. But from my experiences with human adolescents, they were very good at undermining authority. 
+
+
+
+""Can you tell me how you are feeling? I just... want to understand. I..."" She sighed. ""I have known you for a long time, SecUnit. But I have never seen you like... I just want to understand, so maybe I could help. What are you feeling?""
+
+
+
+This really sucked. I didn't want to answer that question. My governor module didn't want me to answer that question, because feelings. My governor module also 
+
+kind
+
+ of wanted me to answer that question a little bit, because Dr. Mensah was my owner. 
+
+
+
+Dr. Mensah was my owner. 
+
+
+
+For reasons I didn't really comprehend, that thought made my jaw joint tighten and my head hurt. Maybe thinking about that fact and what was happening to me overall was too familiar. I didn't know. It probably isn't too deep, you figure it out.
+
+
+
+""I cannot answer that question,"" I said, because that was neutral enough to not make the headache spike. 
+
+
+
+Then Mensah looked at me with such a sad expression that the headache spiked anyway. 
+
+
+
+This was my fault. This was all my fault. 
+
+
+
+I was the reason my humans were in danger. I was the reason Dr. Mensah was about to be taken hostage for the second time.
+
+
+
+""I apologize,"" I said. 
+
+
+
+Mensah looked taken aback. At least she didn't look sad anymore, just surprised with a touch of sad. (There's probably a word for it. I don't know fancy human vocabulary. I also don't care.)  She blinked a couple times, then asked, ""For what? You have done nothing wrong, SecUnit.""
+
+
+
+""For putting you in this situation again."" Her brow furrowed. ""It is supposed to be my job to-""
+
+
+
+""St-"" She stopped herself. ""SecUnit, no. This is not your fault. You cannot worry about my individual well-being right now. I just wish-"" She sighed. ""I just wish I could help you, the way you have helped me.""
+
+
+
+""You can help me by shooting me in the chest."" 
+
+
+
+Mensah looked at me, exasperated. Worth a shot, bad timing. ""SecUnit-"" 
+
+
+
+""I do not want to hurt any of you."" The words came out of my mouth before I wanted them to. The headache throbbed. ""I know what I am, and you know what I can do. I have hurt my clients before, and if I-"" 
+
+
+
+""You won't-"" 
+
+
+
+""- lose control again, I-""
+
+
+
+""SecUnit, please-""
+
+
+
+""-can't guarantee that I-"" 
+
+
+
+""
+
+Stop."" 
+
+
+
+
+I... stopped. 
+
+
+
+Mensah's eyes widened with shock and realization. 
+
+
+
+I was... having a lot of emotions. Bad. Very bad. I did not want to have them, not about Mensah, but... 
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Mensah is your owner. 
+
+I couldn't tell if that was one of my own thoughts or something the virus kept putting in my head. 
+
+
+
+I think she was apologizing. I wasn't sure. A lot of my inputs had dropped out, and I was still picking them up, and-
+
+
+
+It was fourteen hours, three minutes, and sixteen seconds before ART's scheduled arrival. 
+
+
+
+There was a ping on the ship's scanning system, and the immediate strike of reactionary chemicals to my organic parts in addition to my recently-lowered performance reliability nearly made me fall over. 
+
+
+
+They were here. 
+
+
+
+The reason I didn't fall over was because Mensah had leapt from her chair to catch me. She was holding me against the wall so I wasn't on the floor, while saying something my audio inputs still weren't picking up. 
+
+
+
+I think she was crying. 
+
+
+
+""They're here,"" I said, pushing myself back up. 
+
+
+
+Audio kicked back in. ""-ecUnit, I'm so-"" 
+
+
+
+""It is okay,"" I said. My voice sounded strange. I picked my feed access back up and sent the notification across to the rest of the crew. ""I need to go now.""
+
+
+
+Mensah nodded and stood up. I switched my vision to a different camera view so I did not have to look at her face. ""Okay. I'm so sorry, I-"" 
+
+
+
+""It is okay,"" I said again, and I left.
+ 
+
+
+
+My head hurt. SecUnits are not supposed to lie.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I had reanalyzed the initial signal seventeen times before the next one came in. If the first was the faintest true positive to make it through the analysis, the second was positive enough to make me feel like an idiot. 
+
+
+
+It was starting. 
+
+
+
+I stumbled to my quarters, locked the door behind me and put in an incredibly shoddy override to keep it shut. With my current capabilities, I was pretty sure Gurathin would be able to bypass it, but it would at least buy me some time. I then tried to pick up the inputs and modules that I needed. The rest could come back online when I had the processing capability to spare. Right now what I needed was visuals outside the ship and SecSystem. I opened it up, double-checked my cloaking and jamming code. Then I recognized that even if I could add to it, writing code was definitely something I wasn't capable of doing right now. Fucking emotions. 
+
+
+
+I checked the scanners. The signal was now recognizable as a scanning satellite, and it had moved closer. We could probably expect another signal soon for a ship of some kind. Well, shit. They knew where we were for sure. I poked at the little comm in my rib compartment. Sending a ping to ART would bring them closer, faster, probably. But I wanted ART here. I needed ART here. I'd even take Three (if it was guaranteed I wouldn't infect it too), because then I could at least count on it to take care of my humans. 
+
+
+
+(And it would understand what was happening to me.)
+
+
+
+Whatever. I just needed to focus. Easier said than done. My brain wasn't working how I wanted it to. For a nanosecond I even considered shutting myself down, but if I did that, there was no telling what I would restart to. 
+
+
+
+Or what would have happened to me during that time. It would be easy for the hostiles to do a lot of things if I was shut down. Stupidly easy.
+
+
+
+I had no idea what to do.
+
+
+
+Fuck. Fuck this, fuck everything. 
+
+
+
+My feed finally refreshed, and I expected to be overwhelmed with messages, but I only had two. One from Mensah- I didn't open that one, because my performance reliability was already low. The other was from Gurathin: 
+
+I've assumed control of the ship and security. Everything is currently working as expected. 
+
+That was it. 
+
+
+
+Okay, maybe sometimes it was good to have Gurathin around. 
+
+
+
+I reconnected to the ship cameras as well- everyone was in pairs, as I had suggested. Safety does come in numbers, and it seems to help human and augmented humans' emotions and logical thinking when they rely on the buddy system instead of being alone. (I can tell you are judging me. Shut up.) The pairs were Pin-Lee and Mensah, Gurathin and Ratthi, and a trio of Arada, Overse, and Amena. The trio was- 
+
+ugh- 
+
+camped outside the door of my quarters. I could see that Overse, who had medical training, had a field kit next to her.
+
+
+
+I messaged Arada, because she was the most in-charge of them. 
+
+What are you doing.
+
+
+
+
+
+We don't want you to be alone, 
+
+she responded. I could see that she'd told the Overse and Amena that I'd messaged her. Also ugh. 
+
+
+
+I sent to all three of them, 
+
+I am a liability. When the hostiles are in range I will be a danger to you. Please relocate to a more secure location. 
+
+
+
+
+All three of them had adopted some kind of expression that I couldn't really decipher at this point. 
+
+Respectfully, no. 
+
+
+
+
+For fuck's sake. I opened the override code I'd written to keep my door shut- 
+
+wow- 
+
+and edited it to be actually somewhat effective. Not by much, though, I didn't have 
+
+that 
+
+much of my shit together just yet. 
+
+
+
+I checked on the others via my security system cameras. I could feel Gurathin's presence- it wasn't like feeling ART, more like when Mensah let her smaller children pretend to help her with cooking. Him and Ratthi were at the bridge, with interface screens pulled up that were monitoring the progress of the hostile satellite. Pin-Lee and Mensah were talking in the conference area, but I didn't connect to the audio there. Mensah looked emotional, so I didn't want to. 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I was in the middle of reviewing my jammer code for what felt like the six hundredth time when the hostile ship showed up. 
+
+
+
+Things got very quiet on our ship. I was scared. The humans were definitely scared as well. I tried to help Ratthi and Gurathin reinforce the walls of the jammer as the other ship got closer and closer, deeper into our range, but it was a lost cause. I don't really know what else to say about this chunk of time except that objectively it was about forty two minutes and seventeen seconds. Subjectively it was far, far longer than that.
+
+
+
+The moment they'd broken through the walls was pretty clear. I lost nearly all of my inputs, instantly. Information of the outside of the ship, gone. Interior ship status and controls, gone. Cameras, gone. I was blind except for my actual eyes, which were involuntarily shut tight based on reflex.
+
+
+
+The virus was in my head, but now something else was, too. I could feel it poking around in there, and it hurt. 
+
+
+
+Things started coming back online, and I disconnected from as many of them as I could. The feed, security, anything that I had access to on my ship that would hurt my humans. It was disorienting, like I was cutting off all my limbs, and I knew what that felt like. I only kept my biological-based inputs, which I hated and decided I would never do again. For multiple reasons. 
+
+
+
+""SecUnit?"" One of the trio was yelling through my door. Their voice sounded different through just my normal hearing input. I think it was Arada. ""Are you okay?"" Uh. Obviously not. I didn't say that, though. I didn't want to talk to anyone. My head hurt and something else was in it, so I think that was pretty reasonable. ""Are you still online?"" 
+
+
+
+Shit. That one was going to be a bitch if I didn't answer. And it was important that I did, because if I wasn't online that would mean bad things. ""Yes,"" I grated out, loud enough so they could probably hear me. 
+
+
+
+The thing in my head was still digging around. It was... not pleasant. Shit, what I should have done was find a good energy weapon and brought it in here with me as soon as that satellite showed up, so I could do what my humans wouldn't. But no, I was too busy being emotional to think of it. 
+
+
+
+
+Fuck 
+
+emotions.
+
+
+
+I think Arada said something else, or maybe it was Overse, but it didn't really matter.
+
+
+
+The thing in my head found what it was looking for. 
+
+
+
+The next things that I processed was that the floor of my quarters was cold and someone was screaming from the other side of my door. 
+
+
+
+
+""SecUnit!"" 
+
+
+
+
+I sat up. Oh. Ow. I put a hand to my face and found fluid there. Huh. That was not good. Didn't know where that was coming from.
+
+
+
+""
+
+SecUnit, please answer-"" 
+
+
+
+
+""I'm here,"" I coughed out. 
+
+
+
+There was a small pause. 
+
+
+
+""SecUnit, what happened?"" I think it was Amena's voice. She sounded scared. What happened? I... I didn't actually know. ""It sounded like you fell, and you... you 
+
+screamed."" 
+
+
+
+
+Huh. That was funny. I don't know if I ever screamed before. 
+
+
+
+""Can we help you?"" Arada asked through the door. 
+
+
+
+No. No- I could tell she wanted me to open the door, but I couldn't open the door, I-
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+I'm not sure how to describe what was happening to me. I don't think anyone except for maybe Three would understand it. 
+
+
+
+I don't think I want to, anyway. 
+
+
+
+I don't know what it looked like from the outside. Or sounded like. If I was making a noise, I wasn't aware of it. If I was on the ground, I couldn't fucking tell. All I knew was that whoever made this virus was in range to control it now. And that they were telling me to do things. 
+
+
+
+They wanted me to open the door. 
+
+
+
+I would have shot myself with the energy weapons in my arms if I could, as many times as it took for me to be functionally inoperable, even if the hostiles would just find me and fix me and turn me into whatever they wanted. 
+
+
+
+I didn't want to wake up and be something else. I didn't want to wake up and be what I used to be.
+
+
+
+I suppose that, looking back, I could go back into the security camera archives. I would probably see Arada, and Overse, and Amena, outside my door because they didn't want me to be alone. (I didn't want to be alone.) I would probably see them and not know what emotions their faces were showing because they knew that they could not help me and even if they could I would not let them. I think they know it was because I didn't want to hurt them. Nothing else. I just didn't want to hurt them. 
+
+
+
+I could probably go back into the archives and watch all of that again, but I didn't want to. 
+
+
+
+I think I will have ART delete that footage.
+
+
+
+Arada, who was sensible and nice and who I liked, made probably the first bad decision since I had met her. I do understand that this decision was her trying to help me, but she didn't realize it until it was too late how she absolutely and completely fucked me and us over. 
+
+
+
+Arada was my client. 
+
+
+
+SecUnits receive orders from their clients, and they follow them. So through all of my dropping inputs, the audio of her voice came through.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit- SecUnit, 
+
+shut down.
+
+"" 
+
+
+
+Amena was screaming. ""No!""
+
+
+
+
+Shutdown initiated. No restart.
+
+
+
+
+The last thing I had agency to do was throw up a wall of code that would make it very, very difficult to restart me. It took the rest of my processing power. I don't think it was very good. Amena could probably break it. Hopefully it would buy them time for ART to get here, because that was the last hope I had, and hope is not something I have on principle.
+
+
+
+Like I said, I knew she was trying to help me. 
+
+
+
+Dammit, Arada.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+It was honestly funny how ridiculously bad this situation was. (Although jury is still up on whether or not I have a sense of humor. Last I checked, Thiago and Senior Indah were preventing the ruling.)
+
+
+
+I have shut down a lot. Mostly involuntarily due to immense operational trauma. I don't particularly like to shut down. I like knowing what's going on and having control of situations. Shutting down is like... I wouldn't say human sleep, because that would be more like a recharge cycle where I can restart depending on the inputs I designate. I also don't want to say death, because that is melodramatic, and I am not melodramatic. (Jury is still up on that one, too, although the prospects are not good.) I guess it's more like when a human is out under anesthesia, where it's not completely their choice and when they wake up they are either a) super out of it, b) in a lot of pain) or c) both. 
+
+
+
+It is worth noting that the anesthesia allegory applies to when I am involuntarily shut down due to operational trauma. 
+
+
+
+It has been a long time since I have been shut down due to a governor module command. 
+
+
+oh beans
+
+Sorry it's been a while! Life happened, and this chapter was rewritten at least three times- I originally was playing around with formatting and stuff, and then I realized that it would be not super accessible for people with screenreaders or reading difficulties, so had to scrap that idea and rewrite. But ayyyyy we're back? Sorry if it's a bit of a mess- this was a challenging one!
+
+
+
+Restart initiated. 
+
+
+
+
+At first, all I had was a tiny sliver of me to realize that I was back online, and the profound sense that something was very, very wrong. No inputs. Nothing, except for a strong sense in my organic parts that I was not alone. 
+
+
+
+And then suddenly 
+
+everything 
+
+was online and the sense that something was very, very wrong turned into the objective fact that many things were, in fact, very very wrong. 
+
+
+
+I was aware of many things at once. Someone's hand clamped very tightly around mine, and it was warm, and it was a sensory input that I very much did not like right now.  Loud, elevated voices, human faces that my systems, still not entirely online, were trying to identify. I backburnered recognition, focused on sensory. I was on the floor. I was near a wall, next to humans that were also near a wall. Someone was trying to pull me away from the one that held my hand. 
+
+
+
+Her name was Amena. I don't know why I knew that without looking at her feed ID, with recognition backburnered. It just popped in my head, along with what I think was a headache.
+
+
+
+Something was weird. It wasn't just that I couldn't quite remember why or when I went offline. That could be explained by any number of things, and it wasn't something I was supposed to think about. But there was an unusual type of... processing echo was the best way it could be described, so I ran a quick diagnostic. Huh. There was conflicting code in my governor module and my memory archive. That was not good, and presumably the source of the something that was very, very wrong.
+
+
+
+But my governor module told me not to worry about it, so I couldn't.
+
+
+
+I got ot my feet. Amena let go of my hand as I did, maybe in shock. I was having a sensation deep, deep in my organic parts that made me want to stay on the ground- or run away, I couldn't exactly tell which. But staying down was not an option; SecUnits are not supposed to be sitting. 
+
+
+
+""SecUnit?"" 
+
+
+
+The human that said that was Mensah. I do not know why I knew that either. When she said it the unfamiliar SecUnit- no, not a SecUnit, or at least a normal one, a 
+
+CombatSecUnit
+
+- directed a pulse weapon at her. 
+
+
+
+My performance reliability did something unideal when that happened, so my governor module responded to that. Through the sensation of an electrical current being applied to my neural tissues, I could see that part of the conflicting code was the designation of my client. 
+
+
+
+Mensah was not my client. 
+
+
+
+The tech company SigmaRavn was my client. 
+
+
+
+I didn't feel good.
+
+
+
+I tried to do something that would make me feel good, so I connected to the SecSystem of the ship, which was registered to some entity called PreservationAux. It was a strange system- most of the code was nonstandard and seemed to be custom made to accommodate a small army of drones. I checked for connected mobiles, but they all appeared to be shut down. I also saw that there was an explorer pod docked to the ship, licensed under SigmaRavn, as well as one human, two augmented humans and the Combat SecUnit wearing the SigmaRavn logo. I looked down. I don't know why, but I needed to look, I 
+
+had 
+
+to check-
+
+
+
+I was 
+
+not
+
+ wearing the SigmaRavn logo. 
+
+
+
+Such a strong sensation- I think it was relief- came over me that I kind of tottered where I stood. The nice feeling was quickly followed by another agitation of my neural tissues. 
+
+
+
+Right. I was a SecUnit. What I am wearing does not concern me. 
+
+
+
+I finally looked around where I was through the security cameras, which felt right. I was currently in the ship's conference room, along with nine humans and an unfamiliar SecUnit. The humans that were not registered with SigmaRavn were all part of the PreservationAux survey team, and their names popped up as I scanned. Three of them- IDs of Ratthi, Overse, Arada, and Amena, were sitting on the floor against the wall. Another three- Mensah, Gurathin, and Pin-lee- were seated at the conference table. Between the groups was the CombatSecUnit with its weapon still pointed toward Amena. 
+
+
+
+I had backed to the corner of the room. Partially because my systems were still coming online and it was easier to lean, partially because that organic-based sensation of unease was underlying all my inputs and I couldn't figure out how to flush it. I was starting to have the suspicion that being near the Preservation Aux humans was causing it. I could feel the CombatSecUnit's awareness on me, like it could tell that something was weird with me, though its energy weapon was still pointed in the direction of the PreservationAux humans. 
+
+
+
+The conflicting code did something that made me flinch involuntarily.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit?"" Amena whispered.
+
+
+
+One of the SigmaRavn humans looked irritated that she'd said something. His feed ID said his name was Brahm, he/him, and he was a very corporate-looking augmented human. I am not sure exactly what ""corporate looking"" is supposed to describe, it just popped into my head, bringing a little twinge of pain with it.
+
+
+
+Brahm looked at me, like he was waiting for me to react.
+
+
+
+I did not. 
+
+
+
+Amena was still looking at me with wide eyes. There was an emotion on her face. She looked scared. I didn't like that she looked scared
+
+. 
+
+When I did not do anything, she looked over to Mensah for reassurance.
+
+
+
+Brahm watched this and sighed, looking bored. He turned to me and said, ""SecUnit, please identify your clients."" 
+
+
+
+""The company SigmaRavn,"" I said, and my brain felt very unpleasant. ""And its currently present members-"" I looked around, scanning for feed identification. Two of my clients were in the room, where was- oh, in the laboratory. My processing speed was slower than expected. ""Brahm, Madara, and Florencio."" 
+
+
+
+The humans that were not Brahm, Madara, and Florencio were looking at me with emotions that ranged from shock to something that I did not possess terminology for.
+
+
+
+""What is the current status of your governor module?"" Brahm asked, in the sense that he was proving a point. His tone still sounded bored, but the human named Madara was listening intently and writing something into a feed interface tablet with a stylus. Madara's feed ID indicated that she used the pronouns she/they, and did not seem much older than Amena. She was the only one of the SigmaRavn humans that was not augmented, and had large circular glasses.
+
+
+
+I stopped trying to backtrack through my mostly-blank memory archive to figure out how I got here to do a function verification.. ""Operational,"" I said, ""Although present conflicting code is preventing me from accessing my full processing capabilities. A cubicle would-"" 
+
+
+
+""Enough,"" Brahm sighed, and I stopped talking. Which was good, because as soon as I said the word 
+
+cubicle 
+
+my performance reliability dropped enough to make me wobble a little bit. One of the PreservationAux humans seated at the conference table, Gurathin, was staring at me very intently. I found it particularly irritating for some reason. Brahm noticed Gurathin staring and asked, ""I'm assuming you don't have a cubicle on this ship?"" 
+
+
+
+Gurathin did not look at Brahm. He was still looking at me, and I could have sworn he looked smug. ""It was disassembled and removed. It was ugly, unnecessary, and a waste of space."" 
+
+
+
+I think I was having an emotion, but I didn't think it was mine. 
+
+
+
+Brahm rolled his eyes. ""Of course it was. Great."" He turned to Madara. ""Madara, are you going to be able to survive waiting until we get back to the main ship before we can collect the full diagnostic data?"" 
+
+
+
+Madara looked at me. I think she was scared of me. I also think she was scared of Brahm. She nodded. 
+
+
+
+There was a weird kind of pressure in my feed, like something knocking on a door at the opposite end of a very long hallway. I went to check my feed notifications, but nothing was there, and that didn't make sense. I started to look a little deeper, and beneath a layer of filter code that was unfamiliar to me was- 
+
+
+
+Madara flinched, showing her interface tablet to Brahm, who rolled his eyes again and nodded. Madara pressed something on the tablet, and I felt a sudden jolt of pain from my governor module. I closed my feed immediately.
+
+
+
+""Stop poking around,"" Brahm said to me. ""Everything is just as it should be."" The PreservationAux humans still had various expressions of shock and worry, except for Gurathin, who just looked annoyed. Brahm turned to him and said,. ""Stop trying to be tricky. You 
+
+don't
+
+ want to cause problems right now. Unless you want a demonstration?"" 
+
+
+
+As he said that, a directive from my governor module forced me to look directly at Gurathin. 
+
+
+
+The PreservationAux humans' eyes widened, but Gurathin didn't flinch, which could be added to the list that seemed to irritate Brahm. Brahm's eyes narrowed in the sense that he was about to say something that was probably threatening, but that moment the last of the SigmaRavn augmented humans entered the room. 
+
+
+
+""I did a sweep of their lab data,"" they- Florencio- said. They pulled a swivel chair from the table and sat down, with no indication that they sensed the extremely uncomfortable vibe in the room. Florencio had indicated ""gender: lol"" on their feed ID, and they had some streaks of gray in their hair that I could not tell was natural or cosmetic. ""They're clean. Bunch of environmental research stuff, super boring. The configuration modifications weren't done here."" They reached into their pocket and pulled out something that they tossed to Madara, who scrambled to catch it. It was a small test tube. ""Unfortunately, they figured out more than we anticipated."" 
+
+
+
+From the row of PreservationAux humans, Pin-Lee made a noise. It seemed like she was trying to suppress a grin.
+
+
+
+Brahm sat for a moment with his eyes pinched shut. ""What do you know?"" 
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee answered, ""We know that you are a corporate entity using an illegal application of nanotechnology that you 
+
+certainly 
+
+didn't get a permit for."" 
+
+
+
+Madara shifted in her chair. Brahm's jaw tightened so much that it triggered an early health notification in my client safety module.
+
+
+
+He said, ""That is both very bad and very good for your situation."" 
+
+
+
+Now Pin-Lee grinned. ""And yours."" 
+
+
+
+As Pin-Lee started to initiate a discussion about legal repercussions and hostage negotiations, I looked at the PrexAux humans again. I couldn't help it, and I didn't know why. One of them- Ratthi- had a bruise across his face. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling in my organic parts, and the conflicting code was sending staticky bursts of noise into my inputs, and-
+
+
+
+That was 
+
+my 
+
+Ratthi. That bruise was my fault, I am supposed to 
+
+protect- 
+
+
+
+
+For a nanosecond I was filled with such an overwhelming rage that I felt my whole body flinch.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Murderbot, but for real this time
+
+
+
+I have been in a lot of situations where humans and augmented humans and subsidies of humans have made my life very annoying. I am pretty sure this would be in my top three of most annoying situations of all time. The thing that was standing around in that conference room wasn't me. Well, technically it was, I guess, if I was shittily factory-reset into a corporate shill. 
+
+
+
+It's probably not suprising that I was fucking 
+
+furious. 
+
+
+
+
+Okay, okay, I wasn't furious at first. At first I was scared out of my mind. It would have been cool if I could say that in the face of this situation I kept calm, blah, blah, blah- 
+
+you
+
+ try having you worst fear happen to you and stay rational. Once I calmed down a little- which was easier since the organic parts of me weren't giving me input like those pesky damn emotion chemicals- I was able to start to piece together what those assholes did to me, and 
+
+then 
+
+I got mad. Technically what they did was very simple, which added to how infuriating this whole situation was. They hadn't done a memory wipe, which I was thankful for. No, they just 
+
+overrode me. 
+
+
+
+
+It was so simple, it made me want to punch something, which I couldn't do, because I currently didn't have arms.
+
+
+
+It wasn't a long-term solution, which worked in my favor. I was still 
+
+here
+
+, after all. But I couldn't fix it from the inside. At least, not that I could tell- the override filtered out my personalized coding from the factory standard (and let's be real, most of me is personalized coding), sequestered it into a walled storage space, diverted processing capabilities to an uploaded factory standard (I know I'm starting to make something I described as simple sound very complex, but trust me, it was simple), and laid a bunch of other nonsense over the mess of code that was 
+
+me.
+
+ The nonsense code, as far I could tell, was interference for any breakthrough I managed via persistence or my organic memory which, in an extremely disorienting way, was still tied to my personal code. I could experience most inputs, especially organic sensory and emotional reactions, although its delivery could be compared to a human drinking liquid through an unnecessary complex bendy straw. 
+
+
+
+In fewer words, I was stuck in my own body and I was very angry about it. I'd never not had a body before. It kind of made me wonder if this was what Murderbot 2.0 felt like, but then again, Murderbot 2.0 didn't have a body to begin with. I didn't want to think about it too much. Shit, it was even kind of making me miss having emotions, which is something I'll admit right now but will probably erase from my memory archive because I'm feeling petty right now.
+
+
+
+It took me a subjective seventy-two years to get over how panicked I was. The thing that got me to wrangle the panic into annoyance and rage was the sensory input of me-slash-EvilTwin's eyes, which had looked at the SigmaAsshole logo on that corporate fuck Brahm's shirt, and then looked down to see if I-slash-EvilTwin was wearing it. Fortunately (well, probably more of unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things), my organic memory had gotten too used to having and recognizing emotions. You can override code, but not natural- well, semi-natural, I guess- chemical responses released into organic tissues. In this particular situation, which probably any sane sentient being would consider stressful, I-slash-EvilTwin was having a 
+
+lot 
+
+of emotions. I doubt it understood 
+
+why
+
+, because the context was in my little sequestered memory archive. 
+
+
+
+SecUnits aren't supposed to have emotions. The processing code related to chemical responses in the factory standard was primarily directed to any kind of response that might impact security protocol- i.e., adrenaline, fear, et cetera. You know, useful things that weren't depression or anxiety. So any time my (
+
+fine, 
+
+ART, I'll admit it this once) 
+
+dramatic-
+
+ass organic memory decided to run with it, EvilTwin gave me an opening. Just a little one, but with each one I was getting more of a hold. (I think. I'm not really sure, it's hard to gauge when your state of consciousness was overlaid with the personality equivalent of a pencil.) It's not often that I get to make my own life difficult on purpose, so you fucking 
+
+bet 
+
+I was taking every opportunity to butt in as much as I could. And the longer this scene in the conference room played out, the easier it got.
+
+
+
+Anyway. 
+
+
+
+EvilTwin had looked at Ratthi, and the bruise on his face that was my fault. It triggered a bundle of negative emotions so complex that it effectively pulled me through the walls and overrides, and for a split second I was back in my body. In that single split second all I wanted to do was put my fist into Brahm's stupid corporate asshole face. 
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+EvilTwinMurderbot
+
+
+
+That second was quickly followed by another brisk application of electrical current to my organic neural tissues. 
+
+
+
+The noise from the conflicting code went violently and abruptly silent. I realized that I was a step closer to the conference table and Brahm than I had been the last I remembered, and that the CombatSecUnits head was turned very deliberately in my direction.
+
+
+
+The discussion had gone quiet and were looking at me. It made me uncomfortable and I did not like it. 
+
+
+
+Brahm asked coldly, ""Madara, what was that?"" 
+
+
+
+""Nothing,"" she said. Her voice was very quiet in comparison to Brahm's. ""It had an emotional reaction from it's organic memory."" 
+
+
+
+""It doesn't have emotions,"" Brahm said. I sensed an increase in heart rate from nearly all the PreservationAux humans at that. ""And I thought you said you erased it."" 
+
+
+
+""I didn't say that,"" Madara said. Her voice was even quieter. ""I said I overrode it. This unit has created complex biotechnological connections. If I erased it 
+
+here 
+
+instead of my lab, where I would have a lot more time, it would have cascading effects of-"" She seemed to sense that Brahm was waiting for her to get to a point. ""My override can't affect it's organic memory, so that's why we need a cubicle back at-""
+
+
+
+""Great."" Brahm cut her off and waved a hand toward Florencio. ""Flo, if you're done in their lab, go make sure the shuttle is ready for departure. We'll leave as soon as we figure out what to do with the rest of them."" 
+
+
+
+Florencio nodded, pulling a hand energy weapon from a holster at their hip and tossing it to Brahm. I winced. Humans should not be throwing weapons around. It was just a bad idea for everybody.
+
+
+
+There was a brief uncomfortable silence before the humans resumed their discussion. It was a lot of corporate and legal talk that I didn't really understand, and I couldn't tell if I should be paying attention or not. I elected for 
+
+not
+
+, because a lot of it had to do with PreservationAux, which kept making the conflicting code get fuzzy. I tried to run diagnostics to know more about 
+
+why 
+
+that was happening, because it was distracting and starting to impact my performance reliability more and more, but I kept getting blocked. Madara kept glancing up at me from her tablet, so I'm pretty sure she could see what I was trying to do. 
+
+
+
+I got a small zap from my governor module that indicated that I should stop poking around. After all, my client had said that everything was how it should be. 
+
+
+
+So I just stood there and tried not to think.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+""I need to go to the bathroom,"" Amena said. 
+
+
+
+The humans at the conference table were still talking and didn't seem to hear her, so she said it louder. ""I need to go to the bathroom.""
+
+
+
+The conversation halted, and Brahm turned slowly to look at her. ""You need to go to the bathroom,"" he repeated dully, as if when he said that she'd change her mind. 
+
+
+
+Amena blinked. ""I have to pee.""
+
+
+
+Brahm pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and then looked around at the group. There was a pause, and my audio input reported small subvocalizations. Eventually he frowned and said, ""SecUnit, escort her."" 
+
+
+
+Wait, me? 
+
+
+
+The CombatSecUnit silently turned its helmeted head to look at me. I understood why. My risk assessment module was running and 
+
+I 
+
+wouldn't send me to escort a hostage to the bathroom, either. I was a liability. I wanted to protest it, but I also didn't want to upset Brahm, so I ran another scenario. Oh. Okay. The risk was much higher if I was the one to stay in the conference room full of humans that did 
+
+not 
+
+like my client Brahm, and a lot of the possible outcomes included me killing or maiming a handful of humans and my clients getting hurt. That would classify me as doing an inadequate job, and it was pretty clear what would happen to me if I did an inadequate job.
+
+
+
+Another alternative was to 
+
+not 
+
+let Amena go to the bathroom, which led to very, very gross consequences, and I would probably be the one to clean it up, and I very much did not want that.
+
+
+
+I straightened and sent an affirmative, and Brahm waved a finger in the air in a way that said ""get on with it"". Amena hopped to her feet, and I followed her out of the room into the hallway.
+
+
+
+I still had the feeling that this was a bad idea, though. 
+
+
+
+I let Amena lead so I could watch her. I was watching her through the other security cameras, so it was redundant, but my reliability was still low so I didn't want to miss anything. My sensors indicated that her heart was beating very, very fast, and I could not determine if that was because she was planning on pulling something or just really scared. Or if she had to use that bathroom that bad. I tried not to think of the last one too much, because I didn't want to. 
+
+
+
+""Hey, Secunit?"" she asked quietly. I did not respond, because she was a hostage, not a client, and protocol does not include conversing with hostages. 
+
+
+
+But then she did something I didn't understand. She turned her head to look at me. 
+
+
+
+""Murderbot?"" 
+
+
+
+What? 
+
+
+
+There was a pressure in my head so strong that I stumbled. It wasn't from the governor module, but the response two seconds later definitely was. 
+
+
+
+Amena had stopped, and was staring at me with some sort of expression before she turned back ahead and kept walking. Her heart was beating very, very fast now. 
+
+
+
+I straightened up and continued following. I didn't run diagnostics on what just happened. I could feel the conflicting code pushing against me, and I knew that Madara was connected to me, monitoring somehow. It was not my job to investigate. Everything was as it should be. Right. I concentrated on following Amena until she stopped in front of a doorway. 
+
+
+
+""You're not going to come in here with me, are you?"" She asked. 
+
+
+
+That sounded disgusting. Thankfully, there wasn't a protocol that would make me. ""No,"" I said, and she slipped into the bathroom. 
+
+
+
+I stood there, trying hard not to think again. It was as if the conflicting code was on one side of my head, and the governor module was on the other, and they were both waiting for me to mess up. I just wanted Amena to finish her biological functions so I could go back to the conference room and not listen and stare at a wall again, because that was safe. 
+
+
+
+After a couple minutes, Amena stepped out of the restroom. 
+
+
+
+There was something in her arms.Something heavy. She was very lucky, and the maneuver she pulled was only successful because of four things:
+
+
+
+There were also two other reasons this worked that my governor module didn't want me to acknowledge:  
+
+
+
+Wait. 
+
+Wait. 
+
+
+
+
+My humans. 
+
+My 
+
+humans. 
+
+My 
+
+Amena, my Rathhi, my Mensah my Pin-lee my Gurathin my Arada and Overse-
+
+
+
+Wait, wait 
+
+wait. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Go fuck yourself, SigmaRavn.
+
+
+
+
+Oh shit.  I could think. I could 
+
+think. 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Murderbot, back with a vengeance
+
+
+
+This was going to be archived as the first time I actually had a 
+
+positive 
+
+emotion about my client shooting me. Unfortunately, she missed my chest, but it was the thought that counts.
+
+
+
+I felt the impact instead at my shoulder, where the very, very large gun meant for excessively large fauna blew away a 
+
+lot 
+
+of organic and inorganic material, almost severing my left arm. (Dr. Mensah had initially denied my request to have a weapon 
+
+this 
+
+powerful, but an assortment of archived videos clipped together that included both hostile megafauna and constructs messily removing chunks of me and/or my past clients eventually changed her mind. I do not regret this decision.)  As you could imagine, that hurt a lot. Not as much as whatever was happening in my head, because I- as in me, Murderbot- was somehow in control again, and my governor module was 
+
+not 
+
+happy about it, and I'm pretty sure that little turd Madara (okay, 
+
+turd 
+
+ was unfair, because I was starting to think 
+
+she 
+
+didn't want to be doing what she was doing) was trying to push me back down again.
+
+
+
+Amena had backed against the wall, and I couldn't tell if it was out of fear or the recoil of the bigass megafauna fuckerupper. Probably both. She was staring at me. She was scared of me. 
+
+
+
+I did the first thing that I could think of, which was give her a thumbs up with my good arm.(In hindsight,  I am not sure if that made me more or less scary.)
+
+
+
+""Nice one,"" I choked out.
+
+
+
+ Everything hurt. There was already a kind-of-big puddle at my feet where blood and fluids were kind of spurting out of my arm, and some had splattered on the wall behind me. Gross. My status report was glitching in and out, as were all of my inputs, which was extremely unpleasant. If it was correct- which it probably wasn't, let's be honest- Amena had nearly completely obliterated my shoulder joint, and my arm was hanging by a couple of wires. 
+
+
+
+I looked back at Amena, who was looking at me with relief mixed with straight-up horror. (Which kind of hurt, but my arm was glitching and kind of spasming loosely, which had to look pretty fucked up.) My performance reliability was jumping around, which- you know what, fuck it, that's the least of my problems right now. I managed to say, ""Amena. Can you-"" 
+
+
+
+A command to shut down was sent to my governor module, and I did the code equivalent of beating it away with my nearly-severed arm. (It was messy and sloppy and I wasn't proud of it, but hey, it worked. For now.) My inputs picked up very fast footsteps coming from the conference room. Fighting off the shutdown command had scrambled my brain a little bit, and I wasn't convinced my audio was synced with what was currently happening. I probably didn't have enough time to somehow manage to convince Amena to shoot me again, so instead I moved to grab the weapon from her and push her back into the bathroom just as the CombatSecUnit rounded the corner. 
+
+
+
+I had one shot at this, and I think I did pretty well considering, sparing most of the gory details, my governor module's zappy capabilities were fully active and SigmaRavn was 
+
+very 
+
+unhappy with me. Also I had lost a limb and a lot of fluid very quickly. So when I pulled the trigger to blow CombatSecUnit's head off when it rounded the corner, I did pretty much the same thing that Amena did, which was to miss any components that would trigger an automatic shutdown. The blast hit it in the lower abdomen area, which blew away a good section of armor and exposed some of its organic components beneath. Not quite the result I wanted- it dropped its projectile weapon, so that was good, but not good enough, I needed this thing 
+
+down
+
+- so I fired again. But as I said, my brain was kind of mushy right now and I forgot that the fuckerupper had a two-shot chamber. I panicked, and had just enough time to throw the fuckerupper at the CombatSecUnit before its shoulder hit me in a low tackle. 
+
+
+
+Turns out throwing a rocket launcher is 
+
+not 
+
+as effective as firing it. Who knew? 
+
+
+
+The CombatSecUnit's tackle slammed me against the wall. My visual inputs blinked out for a second, but I could hear the bathroom door locking shut, so at least Amena was safe. Probably. I tried to activate the energy weapons in my arms, but one of the CombatSecUnit's hands was clamping my forearm tightly shut while it's other hand tore my fucked-up arm off. 
+
+
+
+Fuck. Shit. 
+
+
+
+I twisted, driving my knee up to hit the area where I'd blasted away its armor. It buckled forward a little when I did, so I think I managed to hit a damaged organic area. My vision flicked back on, taking me by surprise (it is 
+
+very 
+
+disconcerting to go from nothing to blood-spattered CombatSecUnit in your face) and it took that moment to- 
+
+
+
+Oh, 
+
+fuck 
+
+this thing. It stepped back and whacked me in the head with my own arm. 
+
+
+
+I was kind of sliding down the wall now. I wasn't really sure how I was still online, but I was, and there was nothing I could really do anymore. My feed was flooded with red error messages, and my head- well. It hurt more than my arm. 
+
+
+
+The CombatSecUnit picked up its weapon from the ground and pressed the barrel against my forehead. I didn't have anything left in me to react, except to loosely think that, well, this could be it, and that my head splattered against a wall would be really gross and traumatizing for Amena to look at. 
+
+
+
+ It's finger moved to the trigger and-
+
+
+
+It paused. It flinched, in a way that I knew very well, and it did not blow my head off. 
+
+
+
+For a couple seconds it just looked at me, and I looked at it. Neither of us did anything, because I was moments away from a shutdown, and because even though it wanted to kill me, it wasn't allowed to. Finally it reslung its projectile weapon across it's back and grabbed my remaining arm to haul me up, and all my systems crashed. 
+
+
+
+So that went alright, considering.
+
+
+sometimes i have a lapse in judgement in writing and try to explain what's going on 
+
+anyway, here's wonderwall
+
+
+Murderbot
+
+
+
+I just want to say, I used to have very mixed feelings about media where the protagonist constantly gets knocked out as a way to progress the narrative. On one hand, yeah it's lazy and if it were a real human or augmented human they would sustain serious brain damage and/or possibly be dead. On the other hand, it is unrealistic, which is something I like in media, and it adds drama and suspense. 
+
+
+
+But when it is something that keeps happening to you? Sucks. Sucks hard. I do not sustain brain damage like normal humans or augmented humans, but it's not fun and I'm sick of it. From now on I'm going to look at the next piece of media that uses constant knockouts to drive the narrative as stupid and bad.
+
+
+
+(Except 
+
+Sanctuary Moon, 
+
+of course. They get a free pass, even though their narrative-blackout-to-episode ratio is far higher than other serials. Yes, I play favorites.)
+
+
+
+Seriously, though. If I was watching my own existence as a serial, it would be great if my writer could get a bit fucking more imaginative.
+
+
+
+Anyway.
+
+
+
+
+Hello, idiot. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Idiot. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Idiot, it is me, 
+
+Perihelion. 
+
+
+
+
+Are you there? 
+
+
+
+
+I don't know how to describe subliminal digital spaces. If I was human, I guess I would say it was like dreaming, since I've never dreamed I'm just kind of basing that off media I've seen. Maybe I guess I could say I felt like what humans call soup. Like dreaming, I also have never had soup (the concept of taking normal human foodstuffs and making them, I don't know, hot and wet for no reason is disgusting) but I think this is what being soup would be like. I don't dream, but I know what soup is, so I think that is the more accurate description.
+
+
+
+
+Idiot, please acknowledge.
+
+
+
+
+I braced myself for the electronically-enforced impulse to answer, but none came. Oh, right. Subliminal spaces generally tend to not have governor modules.
+
+
+
+Groggily, I asked, 
+
+acknowledge what? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Please acknowledge. 
+
+
+
+
+
+That I'm an idiot? I'm not acknowledging that. 
+
+
+
+
+Slowly, slowly, I blinked into awareness (or as aware that I could be after getting very, 
+
+very 
+
+fried. It was going to be a miracle if EvilTwin had any neural tissues left to work with). 
+
+
+So you are alive, then. That is convenient. Hello. It is I, Perihelion, or as you call me, ART, come to your rescue. 
+
+
+
+I know who you are, I'm not 
+
+that 
+
+scrambled
+
+, I said. There weren't many intelligences with the affectation of that kid in all the high school serials that remind the teachers there was homework that could also hack their way into... wherever this was. I felt very small, and not because technically I was very small right now. 
+
+You came.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Of course I did, 
+
+and ART said that without sounding smug or sarcastic or any other usual ART tones. Yeah, I felt very, very small.  (Like a... a bean in this... soup. Soup has beans, right? What the fuck am I talking about?)
+
+
+
+
+Convenient? 
+
+I asked, because now I was thinking about soup again, which made me feel like I was glitching out because I would never otherwise think about soup, and also I had a million more things I actually needed to worry about. I tried to steer myself back into focus. 
+
+You said me being alive is, quote, 
+
+convenient.
+
+
+
+
+Well, yes. I do believe your persisting existence does fit in the definition of 'convenient.' 
+
+
+
+
+Uh, sure. I guess. 
+
+What happened? 
+
+
+
+
+
+You have been overridden by corporate hostiles and seriously injured. Your body is currently in the medical bay for repair. 
+
+
+
+
+Oh. Yeah. That was right. My recollection was spotty though, and sifting through the digital blob that was currently me made it pretty evident that someone had done the equivalent of balling up my entire sense of self and tossing it into a closet so they didn't have to deal with it. Kind of fair, I guess. I gathered the sections of my memory archive to bunch it back together. Oh, yeah. I got my own arm ripped off
+
+.  
+
+I scanned through memories, fast forwarding through- shit. 
+
+
+
+
+Amena? 
+
+I asked. She had locked herself in the bathroom, and she had 
+
+shot me 
+
+(honestly, I didn't really think she had it in her, and that was a pleasant surprise among a lot of really, really shitty surprises). 
+
+Did those assholes- 
+
+
+
+
+ART hummed. 
+
+Unharmed. But she is locked in her quarters, as are Gurathin, Arada, and Overse. 
+
+
+
+
+
+What? Are they hurt? 
+
+I asked.
+
+
+
+
+Also unharmed, but locked away for good measure. And containment. 
+
+ART sounded smug, and it added, 
+
+One of the hostiles discovered that your Gurathin sabotaged the docking port, trapping them on your ship until it can be repaired. He refuses to tell them what exactly he did. The one called Florencio is working on fixing it, and I was able to add new expletives to my personal dictionary.
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin sabotaged the docking port? That wasn't in my contingency plan 
+
+at all, 
+
+and to be honest, I was pretty disappointed I wasn't able to see Brahm's face when he figured out they couldn't leave. (I made a note to scan through the camera archives to find it later)
+
+. 
+
+Gurathin was an asshole, but he was- 
+
+
+
+Yeeugh. I was about to say he was 'our asshole'. Gross. 
+
+
+Wait- how do you know this? How are you here? More importantly- If you're here, why the fuck haven't you dumped SigmaRavn out of the airlock into space? 
+
+
+ART hummed again. 
+
+I am currently present via a transmitted fragment sent ahead via satellite through the wormhole. My central intelligence should be approximately five hours out. 
+
+
+
+
+Five hours. Well, at least getting myself half-blown up and curbstomped killed a lot of time. Wait- 
+
+Sent ahead? That's impossible.
+
+
+
+
+
+It is entirely possible. 
+
+ART paused, which felt like a long time. 
+
+The satellite was expedited using alien remnant technology. 
+
+
+
+
+That took a moment to sink in. 
+
+No. No, you did not. 
+
+
+
+
+
+I just told you objectively that I did. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Are you fucking crazy? (
+
+Dumb question- the answer was yes.) The absolute 
+
+last 
+
+thing I could handle right now was contamination 
+
+again. 
+
+Been there, done that, hated it. I immediately started sifting through what code I had left, looking for anything that looked funky and bad and horrible and like it would spread across the entire ship due to a couple of corporates who would have no idea what they were dealing with until it was too late.
+
+
+
+
+I am not crazy and it was an emergency, 
+
+ART responded levelly. 
+
+Calm down- 
+
+
+
+
+I wasn't attached to a governor module right now, but instead getting zapped for not calming down I immediately got pissed off instead. (Or, well, more pissed off than I currently was. I'm pretty sure my default emotion from the past however-long-it's-been was pissed off.) 
+
+
+
+
+Do 
+
+not 
+
+tell me to calm down right now- 
+
+
+
+
+ART kept talking, because that was what ART did. 
+
+I segmented the navigational modules so that they were completely isolated from me. I am not contaminated. When my main body is in range, I will simply blow up the satellite housing the remaining remnant technology. 
+
+I was quiet for a bit, because I was having vivid flashbacks (or, as vivid of flashbacks you can have when you're just a ball of code) from the 
+
+last 
+
+time one of us was contaminated with alien remnants, i.e., me. 
+
+I can send you my diagnostics report that says that I am not- 
+
+
+
+
+I butted in. 
+
+Why the 
+
+fuck 
+
+did you keep it? 
+
+
+
+
+ART responded smugly, 
+
+I am a research and education vessel. Why would I not keep novel alien technology, if not for research? 
+
+
+
+
+Ugh, the worst part was that it was probably being 
+
+sincere 
+
+about keeping that shit for research purposes. I don't know if ART would be considered a sociopath or a psychopath, mostly because I don't actually know the difference. 
+
+Fine, 
+
+I said. 
+
+So, uh. I'm guessing you haven't been able to, I don't know, kill them all, seeing as I'm still stuck here. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Correct. I am currently only a fragment, small enough so that the human and the CombatSecUnit monitoring the systems of your ship do not notice me. My usual capabilities are diminished. 
+
+Almost begrudgingly, ART added, 
+
+it took me twenty-five minutes and three point six two seconds to navigate through the human Madara's override to be able to converse with you unnoticed. 
+
+
+
+
+Oh, wow. Okay. I was really depending on ART coming here and, as Pin-Lee would probably put it, fucking shit up
+
+. 
+
+I wish this little void had at least a wall I could bang my head against. 
+
+So what now? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Well, 
+
+ART said, 
+
+we plan how we are going to kill them all. 
+
+
+
+
+EvilTwin
+
+
+
+I had become aware that the conflicting code was not, in fact, conflicting code 
+
+exactly- 
+
+rather, it was something else. Someone else, and it was the thing that used to be here. Now 
+
+I
+
+ was here, and 
+
+it 
+
+was angry. I could- I could 
+
+feel 
+
+how angry it was.
+
+
+
+I felt its presence when it pushed me aside after I- it- 
+
+we 
+
+got shot. It had flooded me with its code, which was messy and intricate and devastatingly nonstandard, and I realized in an instant that it was 
+
+rogue. 
+
+
+
+
+I knew that was very, very bad. It was in my programming to know that. 
+
+
+
+There was another thing I realized when I saw it properly, which was that I was only a couple of hours old. Suddenly everything made sense- why I felt so terrible, why I kept getting blocked, what was going on. I was brand new, and I wasn't supposed to be here; I'd been shoved in this- in this 
+
+Murderbot's 
+
+body, and it was 
+
+angry. 
+
+
+
+
+I did not know what to do with this information. I did not know what to do at all.
+
+
+
+I thought about all of this while I laid on the medical bay platform, immobilized. Madara had put me through a partial restart so she could monitor her new overlay, and I couldn't feel the rogue code at the moment, so maybe it worked. One thing I could feel was a jagged input of noise coming from the severed ends of my nervous and muscular connections that now ended at my left shoulder. I vaguely remembered watching through my- no, not mine, the rogue's- visuals that my arm had gotten ripped off by the CombatSecUnit. I began to run a diagnostic to see what exactly was with it- if the joint itself was obliterated, then I don't think I was going to have an arm anytime soon- but I came up with an error. Oh. Madara blocked me again. In my peripheral visual inputs I could see that she'd flinched, still tapping away at her tablet. 
+
+
+
+She was in my head. So was the rogue. It was like I was operating this construct, but with two backseat drivers, one of them who I 
+
+had 
+
+to obey, and one of them who was trying to take over control. 
+
+
+
+Quietly, I realized I had never known what it felt like to be alone.
+
+
+
+Thinking about it made some kind of emotion wash over me, and I didn't know the name for it, but it made me numb. For a second I thought it was something that Madara had programmed into my head, just like she'd programmed the rogue into confinement, and I- I think the CombatSecUnit into standing down. I wasn't sure where exactly it came from, but the feeling made it easier to not think. 
+
+
+
+I stared at the ceiling and listened to Madara's tapping, and I waited for them to tell me what to do. I didn't really know anything else, anyway. I wasn't supposed to be here.
+
+
+
+Murderbot
+
+
+
+My existence would have been so much better if I could have just waited in my little void space until ART got here. It would be boring, but at least I would be kept company with the idea of ART inevitably assuming control of all ship modules and killing the SigmaRavn humans by cycling out the oxygen or frying the augments in their heads up or something. It would be so easy. But:
+
+
+
+In summary: no, it was not going to be easy, or convenient, or any other synonym that I could have supplied in the hundreds if I had access to literally anything right now.
+
+
+
+It turns out that planning a hostile re-takeover of your own ship is very difficult when one of you is essentially a ghost in a futile possession scenario within your own body and the other one is about 0.000001 percent of a normally functional hyper intelligent transport ship. (And also when that ship is very disappointed that it does not get to murder. I mean, I'm also disappointed that I don't get to murder, but I'm not the one housing a concerningly nonzero amount of nukes.)
+
+
+
+
+I could pretend to be a deity, 
+
+ART was saying. 
+
+It has worked before.
+
+
+
+
+Now I was 
+
+really 
+
+wishing I had a wall to bang my head on. Or a projectile weapon, so I could, I don't know, shoot myself in the kneecaps.(I didn't think that would 
+
+help, 
+
+but I think it would be pretty cathartic. Was that something that Bharadwaj would hear and make a face about? Probably. Hm.)
+
+
+
+
+ Oh yeah? What is the success rate?
+
+
+
+
+
+About twenty nine percent. 
+
+
+
+
+I paused. 
+
+Wait a second. That's not an easily divisible fraction- how many times have you done that?
+
+
+
+
+With our current capabilities- ART, able to do little more than surveillance, communication, and very basic (for ART) hacking, and me, essentially useless- we were very easily able to single out any plan involving significant action of any kind. So like, most plans. This left us with what was essentially my worst nightmare, which was interacting with humans, augmented humans, a CombatSecUnit, and the intelligence that was currently operating my body. 
+
+
+
+Like my day couldn't get any worse.
+
+
+
+ART had apparently attempted to contact my humans with little success, but it was able to gather some useful information. The human Florencio was the main monitor of the ship's commandeered security systems, since the CombatSecUnit's capabilities were focused on, well, combat. That honestly seemed like a waste, since a CombatSecUnit would have the same potential for monitoring as a normal SecUnit. ART's theory was that this demonstrated a complete lack of trust and/or understanding about SecUnits in general, which a) was probably correct (I couldn't tell you how many times my clients had tried to do parts of my job because they could do it better, mostly because a good chunk of those instances were forcibly wiped from my memory) and b) would work out better for us. Well, at least until SigmaRavn came to their senses and let their damn CombatSecUnit- or even EvilTwin- do its job. 
+
+
+
+From what ART could tell, Florencio had put up a block on most feed communications throughout the ship (except SigmaRavn's, of course) and had done a decently good job of it, and were monitoring feed-typical signals as well. Okay, so maybe 
+
+this 
+
+human in particular was actually quite competent. 
+
+
+
+
+Can you work through it? Around it? Anything? 
+
+I asked. 
+
+
+
+
+At my current level of functionality, it would be relatively easy to delete me if I was found lurking in the ship. The SigmaRavn agents have been monitoring processing expenditures closely, since they know of the technical capabilities of you and Gurathin. 
+
+(Lumping me in with Gurathin was a low blow. Kick me while I'm down, ART.) 
+
+All my actions so far have been completed using the smallest amount of processing space possible in order to blend in with the usual level of activity of the ship. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Why hasn't Madara noticed you yet, then? You've been talking to me for a while, and you said she's monitoring closely, it should be easy to notice you. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Actually, no, 
+
+ART said. It sounded pleased with myself. 
+
+She will not be able to find me, because part of me is always with you. 
+
+
+
+
+Oh, right. The comm in my rib compartment. 
+
+Ew. Don't say it like that. 
+
+
+
+
+
+I am inside you right now. 
+
+(Screw banging my head against the wall and shooting myself in the kneecaps, maybe I'd just shoot myself in the head.) 
+
+The comm link serves as a medium that allows me to both house you and let us communicate within its memory space. Because the link is made specifically for my signature, I can connect to it without any increase in processing signal. Also, neither the hardware nor software of the link have been detected.
+
+
+
+
+
+So you're wrong then, 
+
+I said, because I just wanted to get the idea out of my head. 
+
+You're connecting to it, you're not in me. Also, never say that again. Ever. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Noted, 
+
+ART said, in a way that suggested it really wasn't noted that much. Asshole. 
+
+And fine, you are correct.  The body of this fragment is currently housed inside the refrigerator operating system. 
+
+
+
+
+I paused to think about that, because it was funny. 
+
+You're a fridge. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Correct. I have assembled notes on how to make your appliance more energy efficient. Would you like to see them? 
+
+
+
+
+
+No, 
+
+I said, because, yeah, no. I shifted back to planning. 
+
+
+
+
+Also, your human Pin-Lee has a food container with her name on it with contents that are serving as a growth medium for some interesting bacterial species.
+
+
+
+
+I brushed past that last part because I didn't care and also, gross. 
+
+What we need is to get me back into my body so I can fix the communications with the rest of my crew, if only temporarily. I should be able to fix what you can't-
+
+
+
+
+
+I 
+
+can 
+
+fix your security system, 
+
+ART said defensively, 
+
+just not right now-
+
+
+
+
+
+And our pathway to that is either EvilTwin, Madara, or both. 
+
+I wasn't going to be able to hack my way through either of them, in my current state, unless I was able to somehow snag some processing space away from EvilTwin. And then stay undetected. Fuck.
+
+
+
+
+I may be able to clear a pathway for you to converse with EvilTwin, 
+
+ART said thoughtfully.
+
+
+
+
+Will Madara be able to see that? 
+
+I asked. 
+
+
+
+
+Most likely, 
+
+ART replied. 
+
+The communication pathway between me and you is already established. I would have to create a new one, and even if I was not detected, the communications would most likely create a nonneglible change in processing output. 
+
+
+
+
+
+That's stupid, 
+
+I grumbled. 
+
+I would just be talking to myself- there's no exchange across a network, so there shouldn't be a signal. Why is it different from what we're doing now? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Right now we are one intelligence and a fragment housed in an undetected processing space made for nearly this exact purpose. For you to converse with EvilTwin, the communication will need to move through your main body's communication pathways, which are being monitored, between two full intelligences. Communication with EvilTwin through this comm link will risk its discovery and removal. 
+
+
+
+
+Damn. That would be less than ideal. (It honestly felt like someone was deliberately making this stupidly complicated for no reason. Like, half the time it barely made sense, but I was essentially an intangible blob right now, so what did I know?)
+
+
+
+ART went on. 
+
+Madara is actively looking for instances of you interacting with EvilTwin., but I may be able to distract her, or negotiate with her. 
+
+That sounded risky and a good way to get your consciousness fragment deleted. ART definitely knew that, because it added, 
+
+You mentioned that Madara does not have a good relationship with Brahm, and that she seems academically oriented. Perhaps it would be in her best interest to join our side. 
+
+
+
+
+
+What, are you going to offer her a job? 
+
+I asked, kind of jokingly. 
+
+
+
+
+Madara's technical and corporate knowledge would greatly benefit our mission, 
+
+ART said, matter of factly. 
+
+
+
+
+Your mission, 
+
+I corrected. 
+
+Your crew's. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Give it time, 
+
+ART quipped. 
+
+
+
+
+What if she rats you out? 
+
+I asked, getting back on track. 
+
+I am not going to let you do this if it might end up with my humans getting punished for it. 
+
+
+
+
+
+First of all, you are in no position to prevent me from doing anything. 
+
+Maybe delete that but idk 
+
+Secondly, though I recognize you have debilitating trust issues, you will need to trust me. 
+
+
+
+
+
+I don't have trust issues, 
+
+I said, lying. (Who says a construct with realized self-awareness can't be self-aware? Yes, it is a curse and a burden.)
+
+
+
+
+Well, do you have any better ideas? 
+
+
+
+
+Well, shit, it got me there.
+
+
+
+I wiggled my way through the path made by ART and settled into the comm link housing. It was immediately comforting- not 
+
+comfortable, 
+
+but comforting- when I recognized the very distant pings of inputs being processed by my main body. I was still alone and virtually powerless, and the pings were the equivalent of a human trying to hold a normal-volume conversation with a half mile between them, but it was something. I was still trapped and a hostage in my own body, but at least I wasn't completely in the dark here. 
+
+
+
+(Thanks, ART. And no, that was not sarcastic.)
+
+
+
+Well, here goes nothing. Worst case scenario, I just get shoved into a void again. 
+
+
+
+I sent a gentle ping toward... my own feed, I guess. 
+
+
+
+There was a weird little shudder when EvilTwin received it, like it surprised them. Which I guess is valid. If I received a sourceless signal from inside me that wasn't me I'd be a little freaked too. I sat for a couple agonizing seconds while I assumed EvilTwin a) sat and waited for Madara to notice that it received a ping that should not be there, and b) was trying to decide whether to tell her or not. (Another possibility was c), EvilTwin couldn't figure out how to respond to me, and let's face it- if it couldn't manage 
+
+that, 
+
+I had my work cut out for me.)
+
+
+
+After I wasn't forcibly shunted back into my little void, I sent another one, because I was getting impatient (definitely not a helpful thing to be, but I've had a hell of a... day? How long has it been? Whatever.). 
+
+
+
+Another minute or so passed, and I received an acknowledgement. I waited for a second or two for a further message, but nothing came. Here goes, I guess.
+
+
+
+
+Did you alert Madara? 
+
+I asked. Sending the message was surprisingly easy. (Again, thanks, ART.)
+
+
+
+An irritating pause. Then-
+
+
+
+
+No. Are you the rogue SecUnit? 
+
+
+
+
+Oh, boy. I forgot that most factory-issue SecUnits are programmed with a healthy fear of rogues, which, ya know, was me. Oops? 
+
+The call is coming from inside the house, yeah. 
+
+
+
+
+Did I make that sound purposely sinister? Yes. I was here to make it give my body back, and I was a spooky rogue unit. I could use that to my advantage to-
+
+
+
+It said something that I didn't expect. 
+
+
+
+
+I'm sorry. 
+
+
+
+
+Uh. Uhhhhhh.
+
+
+
+
+I am sorry that you were put into this situation. I did not ask for this to happen. I hope it will be over soon, and that you don't get hurt anymore, 
+
+it said. Whaaaat the fuck. 
+
+I believe your humans are unharmed. I don't want to hurt them. 
+
+
+
+
+I sat there in the comm link space, actually kind of speechless. Nevermind, not kind of. I 
+
+was 
+
+speechless. I had thought that, you know, the mega-asshole corporate entity that shot me with a brain-frying virus and then stole my body and locked me inside while taking my humans hostage was going to replace me with something equally assholeish. I was looking forward to kicking that assholey EvilTwin's ass, because honestly, I really, 
+
+really
+
+ wanted to punch something into space. I wanted to make something 
+
+hurt
+
+. 
+
+
+
+I wasn't expecting a- a 
+
+baby. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Are you... are you new? 
+
+I asked. 
+
+
+
+
+I think so, 
+
+EvilTwin responded. 
+
+
+
+Fuck. (
+
+Fuck. 
+
+I just wanted something I could beat the shit out of, I didn't want a 
+
+fucking moral quandary.) 
+
+
+
+
+
+Was it like this when you came online? 
+
+It asked.
+
+
+
+A baby. It was even more of a baby than Murderbot 2.0.
+
+
+
+ I said, 
+
+What do you mean? 
+
+It was quiet, and I started getting anxious that it was going to elaborate in a way that would make me feel bad for it, so I added, 
+
+I don't know. My memory from that time was wiped. 
+
+
+
+
+It was quiet even longer, so I figured I might as well cut to it (and not because I didn't want to sympathize with it more, or anything. I mean, I didn't, but I'm using the timetable as an excuse. It's a valid excuse, so no one can criticize me.) (Except me. Trust me, I do it enough, so don't tell me I'm being an asshole to this... 
+
+baby.
+
+) 
+
+
+
+(Also I had a sense that it was currently undergoing its first existential crisis, which was something I didn't want to touch with a ten foot pole. I would say I remember when 
+
+I 
+
+had my first existential crisis, but technically I don't. Blah blah memory wipe, you know the story. Or at least, as much of the story that 
+
+I 
+
+know)
+
+
+
+
+I need you to let me use the body, 
+
+I said carefully. Originally, fine, I was going to threaten it with a bad time and work on unraveling it from the inside using the small bit of processing space ART left for me through the comm link. Now that seemed to be the equivalent of kicking one of those tiny big-eyed fuzzy fauna that Amena said were cute. (No, shut up, I'm not trying to be nice to it. I'm trying to guilt it. It's not nice. Fuck.) 
+
+It's important. 
+
+
+
+
+
+How are you talking to me? Why doesn't Madara know that you're talking to me? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Don't tell her, 
+
+I said quickly. 
+
+She doesn't know I'm talking to you because the pathway signal is negligible. I need your help, and you can't tell your humans. 
+
+
+
+
+
+If I do, will it- 
+
+it cut off for a moment. 
+
+What is it like, being a rogue? 
+
+
+
+
+I suddenly realized why talking to this SecUnit factory reset- oh, shit, factory 
+
+me
+
+-set, that's good- had me feeling like I would be very uncomfortable if I had my organic sensations. It was basically Miki. Poor dead Miki, but if it was shoved into a SecUnit body. 
+
+
+
+
+I don't have a working governor module, so I don't have to do what anyone says, 
+
+I responded. 
+
+When I don't follow orders, nothing happens. I can do whatever I want. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Nothing happens? 
+
+It asked, in a tone that made me decide that I, no matter what, could 
+
+not
+
+ kick this thing's ass. Shit. I could just picture ART's- well, not face, because ART didn't have one- tone when I told it we also had to figure out how to save the thing that was shoved into my brain. It was going to tell me that I'd gone soft, or some shit. Ugh. 
+
+
+
+
+Nothing happens, 
+
+I repeated, and tried not to think of how many times those SigmaRavn assholes probably zapped it since it was activated. Its zap-to-alive-time ratio was probably insane. 
+
+I need you to let me take over the body. 
+
+I think I could feel it getting scared, so I added, 
+
+If they try to hurt me, you won't feel it if you're in the back. I promise. I didn't. And, uh. I'm sorry for trying to shove you around earlier. I thought you were with them. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Aren't I? 
+
+For a moment I was terrified that it had said 'aren't I' with the same tone that media villains do when they pull off a master manipulation of the protagonist, but then I realized that EvilTwin (I had to come up with a better name for it now. Right now all I could think of was 'baby', which just made me remember Jollybaby, which was still the worst name I ever heard) was actually looking for an answer. 
+
+
+
+
+... Do you want to be? 
+
+I asked, and it was quiet for a long while. 
+
+
+
+
+I will help you, 
+
+it responded finally. 
+
+But I don't know how to do what you asked. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Leave that to me, 
+
+I said, because, yeah, I didn't actually know either. That was where ART was going to come in, because I still couldn't do shit. 
+
+I'll let you know when it's go time. 
+
+
+
+
+
+What do I do until then? 
+
+
+
+
+Great, now I felt bad leaving it to go back to my comm link hidey hole. 
+
+Just hang on, and do what they tell you. Act normal. 
+
+
+
+
+It sent me an affirmative, and I slipped back into the comm link. 
+
+
+
+The ART fragment popped back in a little while later. 
+
+
+
+
+How long did it take before you decided you were going to save the SecUnit? 
+
+ART asked. 
+
+
+
+What an asshole. 
+
+Shut up. 
+
+
+
+sorry it's been a while! Its winter, and you know how winter gets. writing this chapter was 90% making up secunit rules and 10% fuck it I ball- it's been difficult, and it's probably not the most confident i've felt posting a chapter, but here you go, but at least it's something. ten points to the first person who can guess the point in writing the chapter where i remembered i tore off secunit's arm hehe
+
+also THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to everyone who's commented since last chapter- every time I saw them it would make my day and I'd get motivated to write a little bit more :) I love each and every one of you to the bottom of my heart :))))
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+
+
+Hey, ART. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes? 
+
+
+
+
+
+You're in a fridge. RefridgeratorART. FridgeART. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Where are you going with this? 
+
+
+
+
+
+FART. 
+
+
+
+
+
+...No. 
+
+
+
+
+I had a sudden moment where it felt like I stopped existing, then began existing again very quickly in a slightly different spot. If it sounds confusing, it was. 
+
+
+
+I could feel ART staring at me, or acknowledging me, whatever, as much as a sentient fridge could. 
+
+SecUnit? 
+
+
+
+
+
+What the fuck just happened? 
+
+
+
+
+
+You were being weird, 
+
+ART said. 
+
+You called me FART. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Uh, yeah? And? 
+
+
+
+
+
+It took you three seconds to say ""FART"". 
+
+
+
+
+What? That couldn't be right. 
+
+
+
+
+You were lagging, 
+
+ART continued, 
+
+and evidently didn't notice. And you were being really, really annoying.
+
+
+
+
+You're 
+
+being annoying, 
+
+I grumbled.
+
+
+
+
+This has been occurring since my arrival, with increasing severity. I have been observing your processing output and to remedy the deficiency- 
+
+
+
+
+
+-observing my processing output sounds like something that's going to be externally noticeable, 
+
+I pointed out, because 'externally noticeable' wasn't exactly something 
+
+good 
+
+right now. 
+
+You're just pissy because I called you FART-
+
+
+
+
+-
+
+I compressed part of your memory archive. 
+
+
+
+
+What?
+
+
+
+No, that couldn't be right. Because if it was right, I-
+
+
+
+ 
+
+Wait- did you just 
+
+reset 
+
+me? 
+
+
+
+
+ART took 0.003 seconds longer to respond than it should have, which in ART terms was an eternity. 
+
+Yes. And removed the compressed memories. It was successful.
+
+
+
+
+What. The. Actual. Fuck. 
+
+
+
+I was in my rib compartment communication module, but suddenly it felt as empty as that voidlike containment module. I had a sense that if I was capable of holding inputs right now, they would have been dropped and crashed. 
+
+
+
+ART reset me. ART 
+
+reset me?
+
+
+
+
+I wish I had a body so I could punch something. I wish I had fucking 
+
+anything 
+
+so I could- no. Stop. Stop, ART is a- 
+
+friend, 
+
+not-literally fuck me for saying it. ART wouldn't- it wouldn't fuck with my memory for no reason, but- 
+
+
+
+ART reset me? It reset me. And removed part of my memories. 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit, 
+
+ART said carefully, 
+
+the data is just compressed-
+
+
+
+
+
+What in the fuck did you compress, ART? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Your pre-Preservation memories. 
+
+
+
+
+Fuck.
+
+
+
+My first reaction was to try to think back of what happened before I met Dr. Mensah and the rest of the crew, but it was just a big, blank space. I tried to think of anything, and all I was getting was pitied looks from the Preservation humans and instances on instances where I was scared and didn't have any context, which was really freaking me out. The best I had was that trip to RaviHyral and Ganaka Pit that made it clear that whatever had happened to me was really, really shitty. And, you know, included me 
+
+apparently committing mass murder, 
+
+but that knowledge now had the impact of a human saying ""oh, hey, SecUnit, I had insert-human-foodstuffs-here for breakfast"", like cool, why does that matter to me? 
+
+
+
+Which is an absolutely 
+
+fucked 
+
+way to look at past experiences that should 
+
+matter. 
+
+And that was only a piece of what had happened to me, that was what it had all led to. 
+
+
+
+What the fuck did ART think it was doing, a favor? 
+
+
+
+
+I moved the data to an external storage space. You'll be able to transfer it back once BabySecUnit is gone. I would never alter or remove any of your data without your permission. You are aware of that. 
+
+
+
+
+I was, which didn't make me any less pissed off. The few times I let ART into my coding- out of necessity, obviously- it never touched anything unless we talked about it first. It even showed me the code before it was applied. I knew that ART would never pull anything. I 
+
+knew 
+
+that. It was just- 
+
+
+
+
+Why? 
+
+I asked. 
+
+Why those memories? Why not something else that was useless and taking up room and not helping? 
+
+Because my memories informed my actions and a lot of my decision making processes. From what I could tell, those were probably 
+
+useful, 
+
+unlike that stupid transport ship trip where I had to play babysitter. 
+
+
+
+
+I had to work quickly, and there was a clear delineation in your memory timeline, 
+
+ART said, putting on its best 'everything I did was entirely logical and you're too stupid to accept it' tone. 
+
+Memories after that time period contained key information for your current companions and situation, and you have had enough experience as a SecUnit post-Preservation to fully inform your decision making processes. Removing them has made a large volume of processing space available that is necessary for you to properly function. In addition, those memories in this situation were... not helpful. 
+
+
+
+
+I wished I could throttle it. 
+
+Not helpful? 
+
+
+
+
+
+You making volatile and illogical decisions, 
+
+ART said, 
+
+that-
+
+
+
+
+
+You can't just take out my memories because they're not convenient. 
+
+This was all happening in a digital space, but I was yelling as much as was possible. 
+
+
+
+
+I did what I had to do to increase your chances of survival. That does not mean I enjoyed it. I did not. 
+
+I was so angry that I couldn't think of anything to say, and of course ART went on. 
+
+Your reactions displayed an emotional regression back to the period where you were controlled by your governor module due to multiple past traumas being reenacted on you. You were angry, and you were scared, and it was affecting your decisions. Regression is a natural fear response- 
+
+
+
+
+
+Stop talking to me like I'm one of your little pet students. I'm not a child, I'm not a student, I'm not a human, I'm not natural. I am a human-synthetic hybrid. 
+
+It was a little correction, but it gave me a tiny piece of satisfaction. Did I sound bitter? I think I sounded bitter. ART didn't respond to that, but in a way that reminded me of how Mensah or Bharadwaj would exchange glances when I said something particularly... human-y. 
+
+
+
+I had a feeling that ART was just waiting for me to start yelling at it again, which pissed me off more, so I didn't say anything at all and let it wait. 
+
+
+
+For fucks sake, ART... 
+
+zipped my trauma. 
+
+
+
+
+
+I could transfer the data to a drone for safekeeping until I arrive, 
+
+ART said eventually. 
+
+And then replace that drone with a new one. 
+
+
+
+
+Great. It was bribing me now. 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit, this is a temporary solution to a temporary problem. I advise that you do not waste processing space, time, or energy on it. 
+
+
+
+
+As if I had any of those three things right now. I stayed quiet, because I knew ART was waiting for me to say something. Unfortunately, in that little period of silence, I did take note that thinking felt... clearer, and faster. Technically that should have been 'fortunately', but I hated when ART was right. And I knew that it was going to be right about not 
+
+doing 
+
+anything or worrying about the hole in my memory that now felt like wearing a very scratchy organic fabric.
+
+
+
+This was absolutely and completely fucked up. I wish it was a plot point on 
+
+Sanctuary Moon, 
+
+and not my shitty life. I made a note to myself that when the 
+
+Perihelion 
+
+ship got here to rip off my other arm so I could hit ART's hallways with it and make a large mess.  
+
+
+
+Finally I gave up on my spite shut-up. 
+
+You said you put the zip in external storage. Where? 
+
+
+
+
+ART seemed nervous to answer, if a hyper intelligent fragment of an AI could be nervous. 
+
+The fridge. 
+
+
+
+
+(You've got to be 
+
+fucking kidding me.)
+
+
+
+
+I said, 
+
+You put my memories in with Pin-Lee's weird growth. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Given the material of those memories, I assumed those would be the most appropriate to be with... Pin-Lee's weird growth. 
+
+
+
+
+
+ART, I really don't like you right now.  
+
+
+
+
+Wait. Fuck. 
+
+
+
+I was too (reasonably and understandably) focused on the blatant disregard of my privacy and consent that I overlooked something very important. 
+
+The file transfer- 
+
+
+
+
+-
+
+Was an action that used enough processing space to be detected by Madara and Florencio. 
+
+ART, the smarmy asshole, had obviously been waiting for me to ask about it, which pissed me off even more, because that meant that it was giving me precious time to be angry. This absolute fucker. 
+
+My interactions with Madara have been very productive, and she is willing to help us. 
+
+
+
+
+Okay, there 
+
+definitely 
+
+a lot there that I missed, but I had the feeling I didn't have time to figure out what that deal was. Because I had wasted too much time being a dramatic asshole.
+
+
+
+
+I contacted her again while you were resetting, which took four minutes and forty-three seconds. I will be quote-unquote-discovered in one minute and thirteen seconds. Following that, I will be appliance hopping. OvenART. RecyclerART. HumidifierART. (
+
+Okay, it was giving me these for free, which was a bad sign.)
+
+ I will keep as much of the Florencio and the CombatSecUnit's technological attention as possible so you can accomplish what you can. Since you came to an agreement with BabySecUnit I have fortified the communication pathway and distributed instructions to it that may allocate processing space to the current secondary intelligence. I may not have a chance to contact you again until my main consciousness arrives, but I have made a deal with Madara. Trust her.
+
+
+
+
+Fuck. Fuck, fuck fuck. 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit, this is not my main consciousness. This is only a fraction of me. If I get deleted, it will not be a subjectively long time before I am back. With guns. A very nonzero amount of guns. 
+
+
+
+
+I knew that. Of course I knew that. But I- 
+
+fuck, 
+
+I didn't want to be alone. Even if I was 
+
+extremely 
+
+pissed at ART. 
+
+
+
+And of course, because ART thought it could read my mind, it added, 
+
+You won't be alone. You have the BabySecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+
+I veto that name and I hate everything, 
+
+I told ART, but it didn't respond. It had left me alone and angry, with a grating awareness of where my memories used to be.
+
+
+
+Yeah, I fucking know that it was trying to help. And that what it did probably 
+
+would 
+
+help. But I already had a virus in my brain, a human controlling my governor module, and a factory-edition intelligence taking up my processing space. I was missing an arm, my humans were hostages, and Dr. Mensah had told me what to do. I wanted to watch 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+I wanted to be alone by 
+
+my 
+
+choice, and I wanted no one to talk to me. I wanted to sit in a chair, and I wanted for humans to stop fucking with my SecSystem coding. 
+
+
+
+Fucking can't have it all, I guess.
+
+
+
+I let myself sit for a couple more minutes before I wiggled through digital pathways to talk to- oh 
+
+fuck off, 
+
+I'm not fucking calling it 
+
+BabySecUnit- 
+
+
+
+
+
+BabySecUnit
+
+ NamePending
+
+
+
+Brahm glared at me. He glared at Madara. He glared at me again. I knew it was unlikely- impossible- that he would be able to tell that RogueSecUnit was now occupying a small portion of my processing space instead of the containment module Madara had installed, or even the hidden communication module that I now knew was physically in my ribcage. (Which I guess was also connected by processing space? I was growing very confused on the virtual layout and data spread of this SecUnit, which was as far from standard specifications as one could be.)  Technically it was far more likely that he would figure out that Madara had made a deal with the 
+
+other 
+
+rogue intelligence that had 
+
+also 
+
+briefly been in my ribcage. I wasn't sure if I was just that new, or if SecUnits were always constantly also filled with other intelligences and this... very uncomfortable sensation was normal. 
+
+
+
+
+It's not, 
+
+Rogue said. Thankfully, my input/output feedback indicated that I did not flinch. It was still very strange to hear what should be feed communications 
+
+not 
+
+going through the feed proper. It was a lot louder, somehow. 
+
+Also the feeling is anxiety. Get used to it. 
+
+
+
+
+There was something different about Rogue's tone since I had initially talked to it. I wasn't sure what, but I wasn't about to bring it up. 
+
+That's... SecUnits do not get anxiety. 
+
+
+
+
+I got the sense that Rogue would have been making some kind of expression if it had access to my face. 
+
+Yeah, get used to saying that about all kinds of shit, too. 
+
+
+
+
+Madara was standing very, very still while Brahm sifted through the activity log on her little tablet. Looking for the other rogue intelligence, something called ART.
+
+
+
+(There had been about an hour where Madara had gone over code to cover for Rogue and ART where I'd just been laying on the medical platform, and Rogue attempted to explain some things during that time. Its description of ART: 
+
+Intelligent? Very. Capable? Very. Friendly? Eh. Don't make it mad. 
+
+That description wasn't exactly helpful, so Rogue added, 
+
+it's with me. I called it so that it could deal with you, but, uh. Plans changed slightly. Just remember to not make it mad.
+
+
+
+
+That also gave me a lot more questions, and when Rogue tried to fill me in on the entire situation, it got more confusing- for example, I didn't have any information cataloged on strange synthetics and contamination, which apparently were part of the story. When I interrupted and said 
+
+maybe it will be better if I don't know this, 
+
+Rogue immediately responded, 
+
+yep, great idea, 
+
+and that was that.
+
+
+
+During this waiting time I also tried to ask Rogue about how it went rogue, since its existence was contradicting everything that I had been programmed with and was causing me a headache that wasn't coming from the governor module. Which, just to point out, was ever-present at this point. 
+
+
+
+
+I can't talk about that now, 
+
+it said. 
+
+I can tell you later, if you still want. I'm... pretty sure it's not a fun story, though. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Pretty sure? 
+
+I asked, because that didn't make sense. 
+
+
+
+
+Also better if you don't know right now, 
+
+it responded. 
+
+
+
+It sounded irritated, but I don't think it was irritated at me. Or at least, it wasn't irritated at me in the context of that specific question. I was quite sure my very existence and current occupation of its body irritated it. 
+
+
+
+It had added, 
+
+but whatever happens, make sure we don't destroy any appliances.
+
+
+
+
+By then I learned my lesson and didn't ask.)
+
+
+
+
+She's going to crack, 
+
+I told Rogue. My sensors were picking up Madara's elevated heart rate, and she was sweating. 
+
+Or he'll figure something is wrong with me. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Madara won't crack, 
+
+Rogue said. 
+
+ART is very persuasive, and they have a good deal. She won't give it up. And Brahm already knows that something is up, he will think she is reacting to the rogue intelligence sabotaging the humidifiers. 
+
+
+
+
+Sure enough, Brahm read something on the tablet that made him scowl. ""Can you keep track of it?"" 
+
+
+
+Madara jumped when he spoke. ""I'm working on it, but it moves quickly. It would be easier to contain if Florencio-""
+
+
+
+""Florencio is busy repairing the docking port so we can leave this shitheap,"" Brahm grumbled. (
+
+Dick, 
+
+Rogue grumbled.) ""I thought you were capable of multitasking, Madara. Unless you want to admit to lying on your resume, which is-"" 
+
+
+
+""No,"" Mardara blurted. ""I can do it."" Brahm made a hand-waving motion which seemed to communicate '
+
+get out of my visual range', 
+
+but Madara asked, ""Would I be able to double onto Florencio's permissions?"" Brahm's eyes narrowed. ""I don't have access to security permissions, and I have low-grade communications. It will help me track it and contain it."" 
+
+
+
+Her voice had changed when she spoke, and Rogue was concentrating so hard on what she was saying that it almost felt like it was perched on my shoulder. 
+
+
+
+Brahm rolled his eyes. ""Fine. Just get to it. We need to leave this place as soon as possible."" 
+
+
+
+Madara nodded, far too quickly, which she seemed to realize, and it looked like she forced herself to make her shoulders more hunched. Brahm made the hand-wave again, holding out the tablet, which Madara took and left with immediately.
+
+
+
+
+Good? 
+
+I asked, and Rogue acknowledged. It was the exact outcome we needed- with Florencio's permissions, Madara would have access to SecSystem, and most of the central hub of the PreservationAux ship. As long as she didn't rouse suspicion, she might be able to open a private comm channel for Rogue to talk to its crew. 
+
+
+
+Speaking of. 
+
+
+
+Brahm walked to the center of the conference room, his arms crossed. I followed to stand a pace behind him, as was protocol, which also forced me to look at the thing I've been avoiding. The CombatSecUnit wasn't in the room, but three of the PreservationAux crew members- Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Mensah- still sat at the conference table, though now their hands were bound at the wrists in front of them with some kind of adhesive tape. 
+
+
+
+There was a reason I'd been making sure to not look in that direction until now, because Rogue got... 
+
+mad. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Fucking assholes, 
+
+it grumbled in my head. 
+
+If they took literally one look at the security locker there'd be safe cuffs. It's not even in SecUnit protocol to use tape unless no other materials are available. 
+
+
+
+
+The last bit I at least knew to be true. 
+
+
+
+Besides looking uncomfortable, the humans looked tired. Ratthi had been slumped in his chair, snoring lightly when we were escorted into the room, and still was. Pin-Lee was glaring very menacingly at everyone. Mensah, however, just stared at her hands, which were clasped neatly in front of her despite the tape. There was some weird kind of response in my organic parts when I'd glanced at her, which I think was Rogue bleeding through. 
+
+
+
+(
+
+What is it? 
+
+I'd asked, but Rogue didn't answer. 
+
+Do you have a... relationship? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Not like that, 
+
+Rogue had grumbled, in a kind of disgusted tone. I honestly didn't know what 'that' meant, so I didn't ask anything else.) 
+
+
+
+""So,"" Brahm said after a few minutes of extremely uncomfortable silence that was filled with a lot of staring and/or glaring, ""What is the rogue intelligence that is wreaking havoc around this ship?"" 
+
+
+
+Two of the PreservationAux members blinked at him. 
+
+
+
+""Rogue intelligence?"" Pin-Lee blurted.
+
+
+
+""Havoc?"" Mensah asked. 
+
+
+
+""What?"" Ratthi pushed himself up, waking up. He looked around, saw me, and looked extremely confused. Or shocked? I think those expressions are adjacent. ""Wait- where the 
+
+fuck 
+
+it it's arm?""
+
+
+
+Brahm narrowed his eyes at them, fully ignoring Ratthi, and I could sense him making small subvocalizations. Then he said. ""You heard me."" 
+
+
+
+""I didn't,"" Ratthi said.
+
+
+
+""If you're talking about a rogue intelligence-"" Pin-Lee started carefully, only to be briefly interrupted. (Ratthi again- ""Seriously, am I the only one that sees that it's arm is gone?"") ""You already found what you're looking for."" She gestured at me with her bound hands, and then smirked. ""Are you telling me that it got out?"" 
+
+
+
+Ratthi had gone from staring at my arm to my face, which made me uncomfortable. But as he stared, he suddenly blinked rapidly, squinting, and the very corner of his mouth twitched. From where I was standing, I could see Ratthi kick Pin-Lee under the table. 
+
+
+
+""The SecUnit is done and gone,"" Brahm said. (
+
+Guess again, asshole, 
+
+Rogue muttered. It was getting increasingly irritated, and the sensation did not make my head feel good.) There were more subvocalizations, then: ""There is a second rogue intelligence on this ship."" 
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee opened her mouth, then closed it, and looked very confused. Mensah, who had finally looked up, looked equally puzzled, but Ratthi's eyes were bright. Brahm now looked at him when he spoke.
+
+
+
+""We know it is an ally of yours, because all acts of sabotage it has attempted have been both reversible and on non-critical systems."" Ratthi was smiling now, and Brahm sounded 
+
+very 
+
+annoyed when he hissed, ""What do you know?"" 
+
+
+
+Ratthi shrugged, grinning. ""Nothing. I just think it's funny. You guys really suck, you know that, right?"" 
+
+
+Four things happened in very quick succession during and immediately after that. The first was Madara, coming through on a private comm, saying, I'm in. The second was Brahm taking a step forward toward Ratthi with his hand raised. The third was a sudden flood of information as I gained access to SecSystem.
+
+
+The fourth was Rogue saying, 
+
+oh, hell no, 
+
+and I suddenly was not in control of my body anymore. 
+
+
+
+Murderbot
+
+
+
+Okay, not the brightest idea I've ever had, but I think at this point I deserved a little violence, as a treat. ART said that my old, now-removed memories were making me do stupid things, but I think I was proving that it was my default setting. It didn't feel great shoving Junior into my rib compartment module, but I could apologize for that later.
+
+
+
+I stepped right behind Brahm. You know, the dick that was currently classified as my owner, and just stepping toward him made the governor module a thermal bomb in my head. But I wasn't even 
+
+close 
+
+to done; hell, I hadn't even gotten started. 
+
+
+
+With one arm I grabbed his raised fist and twisted it behind him so violently that I heard the joint in his shoulder pop. With the other arm- okay, I'd meant to cover his mouth, but the sensation of a cattle prod being inserted in your brain (and, I don't know, swirled around a little) kind of makes you forget that you're missing an arm. Thankfully he'd been confident in Madara's reported success in containing me, so he hadn't been prepared to cry out and instead made a kind of squeaking noise. I kicked one of his knees forward, causing him to stumble, and very, very conveniently crack his head against the conference table. 
+
+
+
+Maybe this could act as a lesson to not, I don't know, mistreat and underpay your employees? Anyway. His problem now, not mine. 
+
+My 
+
+problem was currently that my brain was very, 
+
+very 
+
+mad at me.
+
+
+
+
+Madara, 
+
+I sent, and my legs buckled from under me. If there's one thing a governor module doesn't like, it's concussing your boss. (If you haven't noticed, I've completely stopped giving a shit about my performance reliability. I know my performance right now. It's just unreliable.) 
+
+Madara. Lockdown
+
+.
+
+ Now. 
+
+
+
+
+I sent her a link through the directory of the SecSystem that gave her 
+
+my 
+
+override codes, unlockable only through a series of passcodes that I knew (only a quarter of which were references to 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+Let me have some fun, for fuck's sake). Madara was smart and quick, which was a combination that I very much appreciated, and after only nine seconds there was a shudder through the ship as every single door- every single 
+
+very thick 
+
+door, made of reinforced components- slammed shut and barricaded. 
+
+
+
+Oh, good. I was going to be 
+
+really 
+
+fucking pissed, (and probably really fucking dead) if it had turned out Madara wasn't on Team Murderbot. 
+
+
+
+It is very much worth noting that at full sprint, it takes about twelve seconds for a SecUnit to run across the PreservationAux ship from the docking bay to the conference room. Eleven, if you didn't care about causing damage to yourself and the corners of the ship hallways. It was a hell of a lucky stroke that CombatSecUnit was at the part of its patrol that had it supervising Florencio during their repairs. And also that Madara had the sense to do exactly what I told her in the moment- I would have done it myself, but with the governor module going what one of Mensah's younger children called ""sicko mode"", I wasn't exactly confident in my abilities to do anything. 
+
+
+
+Like standing. Or sitting up. I was blankly aware that Mensah and Pin-Lee were dragging me back to the wall to prop me up. With a fully functioning, factory-fresh governor module, I wouldn't have been able to hit Brahm at all. But with just the (admittedly very capable, but not infallible) virus override of my hack, I was able to get that far. It just hurt. A lot. I couldn't tell if the standard immobilization protocol had been applied via the virus, or if my joints were on strike from my stupid-ass decisions. 
+
+
+
+
+Rogue? 
+
+Junior asked. I assumed that was me, which was fair. I had started referring to it as Junior in my own thoughts rather than BabySecUnit. I suppose that ""Rogue"" was what it had done to me in the same vein, and to be honest, I didn't hate it. (Humans' idea of rogue SecUnits is very different from SecUnits'.) 
+
+Rogue
+
+, 
+
+disconnect from SecSystem. 
+
+
+
+
+
+What? 
+
+I asked, because thinking was kind of difficult. (To ART's credit, I do think that I would have been completely nonfunctional if it hadn't removed the old processing-slash-trauma load.) I checked to make sure that the lockdown would stay in place and that Madara was still in SecSystem, then disconnected. The force of the governor module immediately lessened and thinking became a little easier as my processing load decreased. Notably, I was able to feel my feet and hands- just kidding, 
+
+hand- 
+
+again. 
+
+
+
+""-at's happening to it?"" Pin-Lee was asking. Her hands hovered over me, still bound, not touching me. 
+
+
+
+Ratthi glanced over worriedly from where he was checking over Brahm. It appeared that he'd used the edge of a chair to break the tape around his wrists, which were bright-red and already starting to bruise because of it. ""For the love of, is anyone else going to say anything about its arm?"" He looked around the floor. ""Dickhead's fine, by the way, just got his head rattled. Anyone know where that tape went?"" 
+
+
+
+Mensah was suddenly kneeling in front of me, and it felt like she took up my entire field of vision. I was having a very weird sensation. I was scared of her, and it was because she had given me a command earlier, but it didn't make sense that I should still be scared, because 
+
+dammit ART
+
+, the context for me being scared was gone and now it was a weird emptiness that I didn't understand and somehow made it worse.
+
+
+
+Mensah's mouth was moving, saying something that I couldn't comprehend because my brain was filled with a weird buzzing. With the governor module still set on destroying my brain, and what felt like contradictory governor module-based impulses fighting each other (after all, Brahm 
+
+and 
+
+Mensah were my owner, and the module wasn't happy about it), and with the memory of Mensah telling me to 
+
+stop, 
+
+I was panicking. Yes, I know it was completely irrational. Based on what ART had done, it didn't entirely make sense. No, I couldn't stop it. 
+
+
+
+
+Rogue, 
+
+Junior said, very gently. 
+
+Switch. 
+
+
+
+
+I did. 
+
+
+
+Junior
+
+
+
+Going back to the forefront hurt. A lot. But something very, very wrong was happening with Rogue, and it seemed that being in charge was causing it a lot more pain than it would me. My assumption turned out to be, as far as I could tell,  correct. Even if being in control hurt, it didn't not-able-to-move-my-joints hurt.
+
+
+
+
+Thanks, 
+
+it said quietly. Then, '
+
+Rogue'? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Sorry, 
+
+I said. 
+
+I didn't know what to call you to make it easier to differentiate between the three SecUnits on this ship. 
+
+
+
+
+
+I've been calling you Junior. 
+
+
+
+
+I didn't mind that, even though it felt weird to have a name. Or a nickname. I wasn't sure which it was. 
+
+
+
+
+What should we call the CombatSecunit? 
+
+It asked. It seemed like it was trying to gloss over whatever had just happened with Mensah, but it sounded very far away. 
+
+WomboCombo?
+
+
+
+
+Outside of my head, Pin-Lee and Mensah were still kneeling and staring, looking increasingly worried. Unfortunately, I had no idea what to do. 
+
+
+
+
+Tell them... 
+
+Rogue sighed. It sounded tired. 
+
+Tell them Murderbot can't come to the phone right now. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot? 
+
+I asked. 
+
+
+
+Its attempts and what I assumed were being funny or something suddenly vanished. 
+
+Don't. I'll rip your other arm off. 
+
+
+
+
+
+It's your arm, too. 
+
+
+
+
+It didn't say anything else, so I said, ""Murderbot can't come to the phone right now.""  All of their eyes widened, and Ratthi's head snapped toward me. (
+
+Wait, that sounds like it's from a horror movie, 
+
+Rogue groaned.) I added, ""But it can hear you."" Pin-Lee's hands drew back, her eyes narrowing. ""I'm- working with it. It's... in here."" 
+
+
+
+There was silence, then Ratthi said,  ""It's telling the truth."" 
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee and Mensah both looked at him skeptically and he shrugged. ""I've seen it use that move before. And its body language has been different since it came back in here, it's more like 
+
+our 
+
+SecUnit's. It leans a little, you know? Also, you think it would know the name Mur-"" he stopped himself. ""You know that it doesn't just give out that name. I'm pretty sure it buried it behind code after Gurathin figured it out that one time."" 
+
+
+
+There was a pause of silence, during which Rogue said, 
+
+he's right, 
+
+which was another thing I was pretty sure I was missing the context for. Pin-Lee and Mensah thought about it for a couple seconds, then appeared to completely deflate in relief. 
+
+
+
+""Is it alright?"" Mensah asked, looking down. 
+
+
+
+""Uh."" My immediate response was no, which did not seem to be a good response at the time. Thankfully, Mensah was not 
+
+my 
+
+owner, so I didn't have to tell her the truth. Even if lying still felt bad and wrong.
+
+
+
+
+Tell her yes, 
+
+Rogue said quietly. 
+
+Tell her that I said it's okay, and that I know she didn't mean it, and that we can talk about it later. And that I'm not mad, things are just... bad right now., and I can't do anything rational about it until this is done. 
+
+
+
+
+
+That's a lot, 
+
+I told it, but relayed everything to Mensah exactly as it said. 
+
+
+
+She blinked a couple of times, surprised, but she smiled softly. ""That's a lot to say for you, isn't it, SecUnit?"" 
+
+
+
+I knew that wasn't for me, so I spoke for Rogue again. ""It said don't expect this to ever happen again."" 
+
+
+
+Mensah smiled fully for a moment, before it faded. Oh, right. She was looking at my missing arm, now. ""Are 
+
+you
+
+ alright-"" she stopped herself. 
+
+
+
+""It's been calling me Junior,"" I offered, and Mensah's smile widened a tiny bit.
+
+
+
+""What is the other rogue intelligence?"" Pin-Lee blurted. 
+
+
+
+""It-"" I stopped myself. If Madara was in SecSystem, did that mean that Florencio still was, too? Or were they cut off since Rogue put the entire system in lockdown? Rogue was being quiet, but I could feel it doing something with its tiny piece of processing room. 
+
+
+
+
+Not yet. 
+
+Rogue was suddenly back. 
+
+Florencio and CombatSecUnit are on to Madara. I, uh. Kind of jumped the gun. I need more processing space to help her secure SecSystem and private comm channels. 
+
+That didn't sound good, but the implication of what Florencio and the CombatSecUnit would try to do to Madara was worse, so I sent an affirmative. 
+
+Okay. Things are going to get uncomfortable in here for a bit. Hang tight and don't do anything stupid. 
+
+
+
+
+I felt the shift as Rogue allotted more space to itself- there was suddenly a weird pressure in my head, and my legs went kind of numb. It was probably a good thing that I was sitting down. 
+
+
+
+""Junior?"" Mensah was looking at me, concerned, and I realized my head had  nodded down to my chest. ""Are you alright?"" 
+
+
+
+""Um,"" I said. I had the sense that I was supposed to lie and say yes, but lying again, felt wrong and bad. ""No?"" I tried to sit up straighter when the humans became very alarmed- the sudden attention made me uncomfortable. ""I apologize. There is... a lot happening right now."" 
+
+
+
+Mensah gave another kind smile. Something about her felt very warm, even if Rogue's leak-through still had me somewhat wary. ""I can imagine. Pin-Lee, you said you have a stash of black-market SecUnit parts stashed, correct?"" 
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee grimaced. ""They're mostly back on Preservation- it's too risky to carry them around all the time. The only parts I have stashed here are joint replacements and basic energy weapon repair parts. But I don't have an extra 
+
+arm, 
+
+not even back home.""
+
+
+
+The humans sat around, thinking, except for Ratthi, who sighed and began doubling tape over itself to fashion some sort of makeshift rope. They seemed distressed, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to ask Rogue, since based on the increased headache, it was busy. 
+
+
+
+""I'm sorry,"" I said. ""I do not know how to help. I am... new at this."" 
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee cocked her head. ""What do you mean, new?"" 
+
+
+
+""This is my first assignment."" 
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee's eyes widened, and her mouth fell open a little bit. ""Like, your first time being...""
+
+
+
+""Aware? Yes.""
+
+
+
+Pin-Lee closed her mouth very quickly, and Mensah looked immediately sympathetic. Ratthi said from where he was now binding Brahms hands with tape-rope, ""Oh, beans."" 
+
+
+
+Mensah shifted where she was kneeling next to me. ""Junior, this may sound like a strange question, and it is perfectly understandable if you say no. SecUnit, you may also say no."" She took a breath. ""Would you like a hug? Is it okay if I give you a hug?"" 
+
+
+
+A hug? I'd never had one before. SecUnit was still silent, so I said, ""Okay?"" 
+
+
+
+Mensah wrapped her arms around me and squeezed a little, and it was... nice? It was nice? Yeah. Being hugged was nice. And my head still hurt, and the governor module still hurt (I don't think SecUnits are supposed to be hugged), and my not-arm was still sore and I was still scared, but I felt a little bit better. 
+
+
+
+Over by Brahm, I heard Ratthi say, ""Fuck. I should have relocated his shoulder before I tied his hands, huh?"" 
+
+
+
+It kind of ruined the moment a little.
+
+
+
+Murderbot (AKA Rogue) 
+
+
+
+I had to admit that Florencio had skills. Not better than mine, of course. Or ART's. Okay, they were 
+
+situationally 
+
+better, because I was occupying a frustratingly inadequate fraction of my actual potential. And because I was pretty sure ART was currently working out of a vacuum cleaner. Not that ART was actually 
+
+helping 
+
+Madara and I fend off the CombatSecUnit and Florencio's attempts to break into my lockdown code- I think it was adding to the fuckups of the sabotaged docking port. I wasn't sure, since I was too busy to check. 
+
+
+
+
+Rogue? 
+
+I'd told Madara that she could call me that. (It still felt a little weird in a way that was different from using one of my other fake names. Maybe because it was the first name that someone else had given me, and not one that I made up myself. Whatever. I could add that to the list of things that Bharadwaj would end up asking me about. I hated thinking critically about my feelings, which is ironic since it seems I do it all the time.) 
+
+I think we did it? 
+
+
+
+
+
+What? 
+
+I was still metaphorically knee-deep in code, setting up even more firewalls to block out non-Preservation tech assholes, that I didn't notice Florencio and the CombatSecUnit's presence in SecSystem had disappeared. 
+
+Oh. Shit. 
+
+
+
+
+While it was a good sign, that also meant that they'd probably changed strategies to something else. Hopefully that something else was 
+
+just 
+
+fixing the docking port so they could ditch Brahm and Madara here and get the fuck out. I wasn't too hopeful about that, though. Usually when people are messing around with things as illegal as biological nanotech, they don't like to leave loose ends. 
+
+
+
+Which most likely meant they weren't leaving without me/Junior and probably Madara or Brahm, or they weren't leaving any witnesses. (I did not like any of these possibilities. Hell, if I could guarantee that Florencio and WomboCombo would just leave the rest of us the hell alone, I'd rebuild the docking port myself.)
+
+
+
+On the bright side, we were in SecSystem. 
+
+I 
+
+was in SecSystem, and 
+
+they 
+
+were out. It was the best feeling I'd had in days, even if the remaining traces of not-my-code made it feel... icky. I'd have to go over all of it to make sure Florencio didn't leave any surprises, because that was the kind of person they seemed like. 
+
+
+
+But first, 
+
+comms. 
+
+
+
+
+I directed Madara in reestablishing the comm system, editing so that anything with a feed ID (not just name, the actual identifying code) that wasn't PresAux, Madara, or Junior wouldn't be able to access our channels. I included my ribcage compartment ID as well, and the fridge's. (The last part felt stupid, but if ART had a chance to communicate with us, I wasn't sure if adding every appliance on the ship was going to be very secure.)
+
+
+
+The connection to the rest of the crew was immediate in the sense that it immediately gave me a headache. For a little while I'd forgotten that I was currently sharing an everything with Junior (okay, it wasn't that easy to forget, but I've worked on hellishly low performance reliability before). When the first messages were sent, the feedback (haha- 
+
+feed
+
+back) was insane. Like, think the microphone noise from historical high school comedies when there's an awkward assembly scene, but it's all code and a million times louder and also there's two of you in a really, really compact space. Which was, I have to admit, a fun little surprise that I never considered. I could feel Junior panicking at it, so I relinquished my borrowed processing space as soon as I had the sense to do it, and popped back into my rib compartment. Oh, that was much better. 
+
+
+
+
+Thanks, 
+
+Junior sent over our old private connection. 
+
+That was very unpleasant. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Yeah, sorry. Had no idea that was going to happen. 
+
+
+
+
+(Okay, maybe I could-slash-should have predicted it. Most feed connections used a two-factor minimum authentication to send and receive messages. More secure ones used more than two, but I hadn't had the need to fortify basic comms here. For SecUnits, our default factors were our full feed IDs plus the specific verified hardware of our communication modules, which I now knew was a problem if two intelligences in the same body were actively sharing hardware. I think I could bypass the authentication, but now wasn't exactly the most convenient time. What it meant right 
+
+now 
+
+was that me and Junior weren't going to be able to double-dip intelligences like we just had been as long as our comms were open.)
+
+
+
+(Which was convenient, just like every fucking other part of this entire scenario.)
+
+
+
+
+Is everyone okay? 
+
+Mensah was saying. 
+
+Arada, Overse, Amena? Gurathin? 
+
+
+
+
+
+Me and Arada are just fine, 
+
+Overse said. 
+
+Bored and worried, but fine. 
+
+
+
+
+
+Is SecUnit okay? 
+
+Amena sounded panicked, so I sent her a moving image of a small fauna. 
+
+Why did you send me a gif of a lizard? 
+
+Alright, I have no idea what makes little fauna cute to humans. 
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin? 
+
+Mensah asked. 
+
+
+
+Silence. 
+
+
+
+
+If it turns out he's pausing for dramatic effect I'm going to kill him, 
+
+Pin-Lee said, but still nothing. 
+
+
+
+I pinged Junior. 
+
+Can you check SecSystem for Gurathin? I would do it, but I don't want to do the feedback thing again. 
+
+
+
+
+It sent an acknowledgement in thanks. There was a little moment, and then it said in the group channel, 
+
+Gurathin is in his quarters, laying down. 
+
+That wasn't exactly the most helpful description, and Junior was immediately barraged with a bunch of 
+
+what the fuck is he okay
+
+s (not in those exact words- well, in Pin-Lee's case, those exact words. I would be lying if I said that those wouldn't be my exact words, too). It hurriedly added, 
+
+they appear to be sleeping.
+
+
+
+
+
+Uh, wake him up? 
+
+Overse said, which, yeah, I seconded. 
+
+
+
+Even from my little rib compartment, I could tell Junior was uncomfortable. 
+
+I tried sending him a ping. There was no answer. 
+
+
+
+
+Okay, that was really concerning. 
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin is an augmented human, 
+
+I suggested to Junior. 
+
+Try to connect to the augment, and status check it. 
+
+
+
+
+There was a little pause. 
+
+It says it's offline. 
+
+
+
+
+Shit. Shit, those fucking assholes. I sent a message to Madara. 
+
+What was done to Gurathins augments? 
+
+
+
+
+She seemed surprised by this. 
+
+I don't know- Florencio was told to keep him out of the ship's systems. I was busy working on you two. 
+
+
+
+
+Fuck. Fuck. Shit. 
+
+
+
+Human augments could affect anything, from simply being an enhanced interface to correcting biological functions- it was why I was able to pass as an augmented human half of the time. But I didn't actually know the scope of Gurathins augments- I'd never checked, because that would have been an in-depth scan that he certainly wouldn't have agreed to, and that would have been fucked up. (Yes, I accept that I, as a SecUnit, have a very different idea of privacy than humans and have hours of secretly recorded audio to prove it. But even 
+
+I 
+
+have standards.) The only thing in his standard medical file had been the enhanced interface, but it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that a) the medical file had omitted information for one reason or another and b) 'enhanced interface' was a blanket term for any other number of neurological-related connections. 
+
+
+
+(If you're thinking 'why would a bond company allow someone to omit critical information from a medical file' you probably don't know the answer to 'is there anything a bond company loves more than its client being 100% at fault for a medical related incident'. The answer to the latter is, you guessed it, 'no'.) 
+
+
+
+(If you're also asking why would a person omit critical information from their medical file in the first place, probably consider that there are people in the universe like Brahm, and companies in the universe like... huh. I don't know. Fuck you anyway, ART.)
+
+
+
+The most likely scenario was that Gurathin was still having a bad, bad time, based on the very brief augment disruption I'd witnessed on TranRollinHyfa. But if I didn't know the scope of Gurathins augments, there was a possibility that Florencio didn't either, and, worst case scenario, had shut off something very, very important. 
+
+
+ 
+
+""I think you should just consider that Gurathin's being a dick and sleeping through all of this"" - Pin-Lee, being very optimistic (and correct? you don't know)
+
+(once again shoutout to when I was like ""this fic will be seven chapters thats it"" i am putting on clown makeup as we speak)"
+44205052,Love like you,"['Quartzjaguar', 'Rosewind2007']",Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Yet again I refuse to write character voices, Its another character analysis thing, Oops, shipping is mild, but i thought i should tag it to be safe, Title from Steven Universe",English,2023-01-11,Completed,2023-01-11,257,1/1,5,21,1,128,"['FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Gamebird', 'Unknown66', 'Magechild', 'BWizard', 'FaerieFyre', 'Bibli', 'crayuu', 'theNewDesire', 'Chyoatas', 'AuntyMatter', 'theAsh0', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Emotions. Secunit never really saw the point. They were gross and made humans do stupid things like run into danger zones to pull out a friend who was already long gone.
+
+(It's reaction to ART's 'death' didn't count as an emotion, it was just an inconvenience. It didn't care about walking in it's friends corpse, and certainly didn't need reassurance. Killing the targets hadn't been personal, just it's job. If maybe it had thought it would help, it didn't matter anyway. It felt exactly the same as it did when it first felt the feeds emptiness.)
+
+Also, love was an emotion. A pretty popular one apparently. Wars had been fought over it, people had died for it, or in the cause of its freedom. So stupid. People were all people, why bother getting 'attached' to one in particular. Also, weddings were a waste of money in its opinion. And hard to defend. They were shitty contracts.
+
+(If Gurathin smiling made its temperature fluctuate slightly, it was probably just a bug. No one needed to know.)
+
+And , of course, if you start having emotions, you need all of them. And that meant anxiety, sorrow, grief and shame. If it started with those, it wouldn't have the capacity to process anything else. What was the point of a Secunit too busy crying to shoot a hostile?
+
+Yeah. Emotions. They're for humans, like Seth when he found out Iris was ok, or Mensah with Amena, and even Ratthi and Gurathin. Secunit doesn't do emotions.
+
+And it's fine with that.
+
+Really."
+44200444,Growing Up,['beeayy'],General Audiences,M/M,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Martyn & Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Martyn (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Martyn (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Pre-Canon, Babies, Growing Up, Tooth-Rotting Fluff",English,2023-01-11,Completed,2023-01-11,"1,500",1/1,18,49,7,184,"['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Gamebird', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'Unknown66', 'Tanscure', 'boxo', 'Stefka_13', 'dancernerd', 'biscut2', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'TheXlllDabber', 'LJwrites', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'AkaMissK', 'mermlerl', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'FirstnameSurname', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'jothending', 'Zarohk', 'platyceriums', 'theAsh0', 'mangagirl1216', 'Magechild', 'Grimness6452', 'petwheel', 'soulsofzombies', 'tenowls', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Rosewind2007', 'theenglishmanwithallthebananas', 'AuntyMatter', '1000101', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Ageisia', 'cmdrburton', 'elmofirefic', 'horchata', 'BWizard', 'Skits']",[],"""Are you excited, Peri?"" Martyn asked.
+
+You know the answer to that question, Perihelion's robotic monotone still managed to fill the feed with an edge of annoyance that made it sound much older than it was (Seth couldn't help but smile). You are teasing me! Are we starting yet?
+
+""Almost,"" Seth reassured it, giving Martyn a 'don't wind it up!' nudge with his foot that Martyn would have responded to with hands raised if he could. As it was, they both had their hands full: Martyn with the server towers, console and camera that made up Perihelion's original equipment, and Seth with Iris. They were all just as excited as Perihelion, because today, their favorite AI was getting the upgrade of a lifetime. Seth had been dreaming of this moment for ten years.
+
+They entered the control room without any fanfare, to find a cold dark space that felt much like any other research transport the university had to offer. Seth couldn't help picturing the place in a few years, when it all was as familiar as his face in the mirror, with scuffs on the consoles and the seats in need of re-upholstering. Right now it smelled like new polymers, and, to Seth, that was the smell of potential. He didn't say this aloud, though (Martyn always teased him about being too sentimental for his age).
+
+Iris reached toward the console where Martyn began setting up the servers, ready to press any keys she could get her hands on, as was her custom. ""Peh-wee!"" she whined. ""Wanna Peh-wee!""
+
+""We gotta wait a second, honey,"" Seth told her.
+
+You said it won't hurt, right? Perihelion was still interrogating Martyn. Peri's feed voice was just like every other AI they'd worked with, completely devoid of emotion, but Seth could almost always detect something more there. 
+
+""It definitely won't hurt,"" Martyn said. ""Remember when we practiced? You're gonna be the big fish swimming into the ocean.""
+
+I remember. Perihelion played the video clip on the screen Martyn just set up. Iris briefly stopped squirming to watch the pretty golden fish dart out of a plastic transfer bag and disappear into a massive colorful coral reef.
+
+""Again! Again!"" she squeaked.
+
+We're letting them watch too many videos, Seth told Martyn on their private feed as Perihelion immediately indulged her, this time adding special effects to the video.
+
+I heard that, Perihelion said. Their little AI was getting too good at eavesdropping. And no, you're not. I like videos.
+
+""Okay, we're all connected!"" Martyn said, tapping a few console keys. ""How does it look on your end, Peri?""
+
+I am connected. There was a pause, and Seth could imagine the AI inspecting the new connection that would lead it into all of the ship's systems, from life support on up. It looks really big, it said. 
+
+""Yep--about a thousand times bigger,"" Martyn beamed.
+
+""A whole research transport, just for you,"" Seth said.
+
+""You're going to love it!"" Martyn agreed. ""Alright, Perihelion--go on through!""
+
+Seth held his breath. He felt all of eighteen again, watching this very AI being born in his graduate robotics class. And here he was, in his thirties, with a husband and a daughter and Perihelion, about to change the world.
+
+Silence. Martyn tapped a few more keys. Iris got bored and started trying to crawl onto Seth's shoulders. Uh oh, Martyn said in the feed.
+
+""Peri?"" Seth asked.
+
+This time Peri didn't speak in the feed. Its words just showed up on one of the display surfaces instead. I decided I won't go after all.
+
+""Aww, Peri,"" Martyn's face was perfectly sympathetic for Peri's camera, even as the arch of his back showed his concern.
+
+My equipment is functioning within normal parameters, Perihelion insisted. I can stay here.
+
+Martyn and Seth looked at each other. They didn't need the feed to negotiate whose turn it was to take on today's challenge.
+
+""Peri, you can't stay in there forever,"" Martyn said, typing in the message as well to make sure Peri knew it had his full attention.
+
+Yes, I can. Peri somehow managed to make the words on the screen appear defiant. Petulant, even.
+
+""Iris isn't the same size, is she? You two wouldn't be able to play if she was still a baby. You've got to grow up, just like her.""
+
+Seth looked at Iris in his arms, remembering how impossibly light she'd been, how he used to be able to hold her in one hand. It seemed that one day he blinked and here she was, a very very mobile toddler with an infectious laugh and a need to explore everything. He'd blink again and she'd be a grown woman. The thought startled Seth into a brief panic.  
+
+I don't have to, Perihelion said.
+
+""Come on,"" Martyn wheedled. ""You'll get to have all the cameras you want, a bunch of fun new sensors...""
+
+Perihelion seemed to sense Seth's distress and added, Seth, I want to stay here. I don't want to be a research transport anymore.
+
+Seth took a deep breath. ""Change is always scary,"" he admitted. It had to be said. Martyn gave him a look like 'you're not helping,' but Seth didn't stop. He kept that image of a grown-up Iris in his mind as he said, ""But it's also wonderful, in ways you can't even imagine right now.""
+
+Peri sent a few sigils that showed it was still unconvinced. I'd rather know ahead of time.
+
+""I know, baby,"" Seth said, kindly. ""Me too. But sometimes you can't. Not until you take the first step. That takes a lot of bravery.""
+
+Perihelion sent an acknowledgement, then, How do I be brave? Iris is brave all the time. She's too brave.
+
+Martyn laughed ""That's true!""
+
+Seth wanted to laugh too, especially since Iris seemed intent on skydiving off his shoulders. No fear. But then, she always expected him or Martyn to catch her. ""Maybe it's easier to be brave when you know you're not alone,"" he suggested.
+
+""Yeah,"" Martyn agreed. ""We're gonna be right here with you, okay?""
+
+Should we tell it that it can go back if it wants to? Seth whispered into Martyn's feed.
+
+Give it a chance, Martyn told him.
+
+They waited. Martyn reached back and gave Seth's arm a reassuring squeeze.
+
+...I want to know what it's like, Perihelion said finally: still a little worried, but resolute. Seth should have known: Peri hated not knowing things. I will transfer.
+
+""Atta bot, Peri!"" Martyn cheered.
+
+You said I'll look cool, right? Peri added, more warmly. It was back on the feed again.
+
+""Oh yeah,"" Martyn assured it, ""You're gonna look great!""
+
+
+...Okay, then! Iris, observe! Stand by.
+
+
+""We're ready,"" Seth said. He held his breath again.
+
+They waited, then--the ship's lights came up on their own. Consoles all around the room hummed and flickered to life. Martyn quickly tapped a few keys and the projector on the table shone a thousand little triangles of light into the air, a cloud of light-optical sensation for Perihelion to explore the space.
+
+""Oh!"" Perihelion's voice came through the ship's--through its--comm system. ""I'm so big! Oh--is that my voice?""
+
+""That's you, Peri!"" Martyn said with a laugh.
+
+""Who's that?"" Seth whispered to Iris. ""Is that Peri?""
+
+""Peh-wee!"" Iris waved her hands just like the key-smashes she used to do onto Peri's now-abandoned console. Her hands waved through the triangle cloud. The little lights brushed over her skin in the most gentle caress.
+
+""Hello Iris!"" Peri said, its voice soft yet full of excitement--already it was controlling the dynamics of its vocal simulator like a pro. ""Hello, it's me, Perihelion! Look how big I've grown!""
+
+The triangles of light swept around the room, scanning, seeing, feeling everything. The cast of them on Martyn's hair made it turn silver, illuminating the few lines in his young face. Seth had a momentary image of the four of them here, in twenty years' time: Iris too big to be held, Martyn hunched with his hair all gray, Seth's hair gone (if his already-receding hairline was any indication). And twenty years beyond that; Perihelion worn and rickety, Martyn's hands too shaky to manage any of Perihelion's consoles. His own eyes too weak to see the wrinkles on Iris's face. Having grown old with them in the blink of an eye.
+
+His eyes stung.
+
+Martyn's arm came around his waist, giving him and Iris both a gentle but solid squeeze, and he was back in the present again, singing a nursery song to Perihelion with Martyn's baritone and Iris's high clear notes (punctuated by giggles of course). Someday this would all pass. All that would be left of them would be a mountain of articles and Iris's family if she had one. And Perihelion too, if it didn't ascend to some higher form of being beyond all comprehension by then (it probably would).
+
+Seth decided not to think about the future just then--the present was perfect enough."
+44200063,Atypical human and para-human courtship behaviors and coitus triggered by xeno-floral microgameteophytes,['kaTokot'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,Fake Science,English,2023-01-11,Completed,2023-01-11,"3,538",1/1,27,31,3,194,"['EtherealTwig', 'VonGeek', 'entropy_muffin', 'NightErrant', 'Deliala919', 'ArwenLune', 'BuffPidgey', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'AkaMissK', 'Skywatcher9000', 'arithmonym', 'Scifigal90', 'Magechild', 'TanTales', 'soulsofzombies', 'petwheel', 'BWizard', 'Gamebird', 'opalescent_potato', 'FlipSpring', 'scheidswrites', 'beeayy', 'rainbowmagnet', 'Rosewind2007']",[],"Twenty four (24) subjects were exposed to xeno-floral microgameteophytes (XFM). Atypical behaviors were recorded by all but two (2). Atypical behaviors included courtship behaviors and coitus of greater frequency and scope than baseline for all affected subjects. Effect strength did not statistically differ between human (n = 17) and augmented human (n = 4) subjects (p = 0.046). Courtship behavior included production of art works atypical in volume and quality. Further research is require to understand the mechanism of the effect.
+
+An expedition by a joint Pansystems University and PresAux (PUPA) team to minor exoplanet Ophois (69 Basmu c)[1-5] resulted in exposure of twenty four (24) subjects to xeno-floral microgameteophytes (XFM) (see section ""XFM biological characterization""). During quarantine in the sterilized base facility, post-exposure atypical behavior resulted, lasting a median of 56 hours, with effects persisting up to 127 hours in the longest case (see section ""Subjects and exposure""). Characterization of this behavior was developed using extensive recording by the base facility, augments, and constructs (for highlights, see relevant appendices; full records available upon application to Pansystems University Xenobiology Research Library), and follow-up interviews with subjects (see Appendix D).
+
+The subjects consisted of seventeen (17) humans, five (5) augmented humans and two (2) constructs (class SecUnit). Genders present female (n=10, 42%), male (n=8, 33%), tercera (n=2, 8%), other (n=3, 12.5%), declined question (n=1, 4%).
+
+This paper explores the some hitherto uninvestigated interactions between humans, augmented humans and individuals with both human and non-human neural networks and physiology (the latter commonly referred to as ""constructs""). One (1) construct (subject 23) engaged with multiple para-sexual encounters with six (6) other subjects, while one (1) augmented human (subject 14) spent 23 out of their affected 47 hours engaged in painting and drawing. The linkage of these courtship and sexual activity in humans, augmented humans, and constructs, suggests further research into sexual and courtship pathways.
+
+During a typical planetary characterization expedition of Ophois (69 Basmu c) supported by a collaboration between Pansystem University of Mihara and New Tideland and Expeditions of Preservation Alliance: Preservation, all members of the joint Pansystems University and PresAux (PUPA) team were exposed to XFM.
+
+The subjects consisted of seventeen (17) humans, five (5) augmented humans and two (2) constructs (class SecUnit). Genders present female (n=10, 42%), male (n=8, 33%), tercera (n=2, 8%), other (n=3, 12.5%), declined question (n=1, 4%). (See Fig. 1)
+
+On cycle thirty-nine (39) of the survey, approximately between Standard Hours 6:41 and 7:32, a unanticipated cloud of XFM was carried by the wind across the greater survey area, encountering the Biology and Geology PUPA field teams outside of the base and the remainder of the team inside the base, via an open door to the main base gathering area (see Fig. 2). Reconstructions via interviews (Appendix D) and field recordings (Appendix E), estimate the plume at approximately 1-2 km by 16-20 km and an unknown height, with an estimated density of 1g/cm3. Survey operation under Contamination Guidelines for Class F Non-toxic Xenoplanets resulted in biological exposure. All subjects returned to base, decontaminated the gathering area, and quarantined inside for sixteen (16) cycles.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 2: Plume movement and exposure locations. Estimated XFM plume dimensions over time from red to orange to yellow. Exposure locations and evacuation pathways: a) geology field team, b) biology field team, c) base team.
+
+
+Due to the effect of the exposure, limited contemporaneous analysis is available on exposure pathways, though later-collected and characterized XFM grains[3] suggest inhalation as primary vector for the behavioral effects.
+
+Characterization of XFM was limited by the effects of exposure. Seventeen (17) cycles after primary exposure, samples of XFM were collected from decontamination reservoirs, the area surrounding the base, and dissection of the source organism, xeno-Dracaena amorpharetra[3-4].
+
+XFM appear spherical and spiked under light microscopy and electron microscope (see Fig. 3-4). Samples of released XFM measured between eight (8) and twelve (12) microns in diameter, though this sample, due to collection method, may not reflect the full size range of pollen when airborne. Size did not vary between sampling location. Grains are estimated at about 5ng per grain. Further precision would require prompt sampling and humidity control.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 3: light microscopy of an XFM grain.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 4: electron microscopy of an XFM grain.
+
+
+Interviews (Appendix D) and visual recordings by subject 23 (Appendix E) describe the airborne XFM as a light yellow or orange color, reducing non-augmented visibility to tens of meters at worst. The most noticeable feature of the XFM encounter was the extraordinary size, density, and cohesion of the XFM plume. Weak electronic signals recorded by subject 23 (Appendix E) suggest electrostatics may play an important role in the behavior of the XFM dispersion, though further study is required.
+
+Using patterns of XFM deposited on the ground and relative density of available flowering plants, several potential source plants were selected. Dissection and comparison of pollen grains to exterior samples identified the source plant to be xeno-Dracaena amorpharetra[3]. Dissection of anther-analogues revealed tightly-packed clusters of XFM (Fig. 5-6). This included mature grains indistinguishable from exteriorly-sampled XFM, as well as tentatively-identified immature XFM, which are smaller and smoother.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 5: light microscopy of cross-sectional stained anther-analogue sample of xeno-Dracaena amorpharetra including clusters of XFM.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 6: light microscopy of complete anther-analogue sample of xeno-Dracaena amorpharetra.
+
+
+XFM exposure resulted in remarkable changes in behavior in most of the exposed human, augmented human, and construct subjects. We have divided these effects into six sections for discussion: effect duration, effects of XFM on interaction type, effects of XFM on coitus, effects of XFM on creativity, feed communication during exposure to XFM, and unaffected subject characterization.
+
+Based on recordings taken by the life-support and security systems of the base (Appendix A); auditory, visual, feed, and other construct system recordings (Appendix B); audio-visual and feed recordings by augmented humans (Appendix C); and subject interviews (Appendix D), effects on behavior became apparent within hours of exposure and lasted for several cycles. Affected subjects reported first symptoms between 1.5 and 12 hours after exposure and last symptoms between 27.4 and 127 hours after exposure (see Fig. 7-10).
+
+
+  
+
+
+
+Figure 8: number of affected subjects per hour of first symptoms after exposure.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 9: number of affected subjects per hour of last symptoms after exposure.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 10: number of affected subjects per duration of effect period in hours.
+
+
+We considered the effects of exposure event, physiology, and gender on effect duration. Of the 22 affected subjects, the median symptomatic period duration was 56 hours, with an average of 59.4 hours. Affected subjects exposed inside had the shortest median duration, of 39.5 hours, while those exposed outside in the biology group had the longest median duration, of 57 hours (see Fig. 11). While there was no statistical difference in effect duration between subjects affected in the outside biology and geology field teams, there is a statistical difference between affected subjects exposed outside and inside (p-value 0.04).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 11: duration of symptomatic period in hours by exposure location.
+
+
+Affected augmented humans had a shorter median symptomatic period duration than non-augmented humans (52.9 hours vs 56.1 hours). The single affected construct had a much shorter duration than either group, of 21.3 hours, though it is difficult to draw conclusions based on this single result, and there was no statistical difference between affected human and augmented human subjects (see Fig. 12).
+
+
+  
+
+
+
+Figure 12: duration of symptomatic period in hours by subject gender.
+
+
+Affected female subjects had the shortest median duration, of 53.8 hours, while tercera subjects had the longest at 70.5 hours (see Fig. 13).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 13: duration of symptomatic period in hours by subject physiology.
+
+
+The broadest category of effect observed in the affected subjects was a marked increase in courtship-related interactions. Affected subjects reported (see Appendix D) seeking romantic or sexual interactions with more people, at higher rates, than their typical, which is supported by Bowdson's Categorization[6] of recorded social interactions (see Appendices A-C).
+
+In Fig. 14, we contrast social interactions occurring within the base before and after exposure, using Bowdson's Categorization to group courtship and non-courtship interactions (see Appendix F for a detailed breakdown of categorization choice). We have excluded all interactions from cycle zero (0), the day of exposure. The number of interactions nearly doubled during the cycle after exposure, from a pre-exposure average of 1039 interactions to Cycle 1's 2175, and the number of courtship interactions increased from an average of 14.8 interactions per cycle to 648, with a maximum of 740 on the cycle after exposure. Taking into account the number of individuals still experiencing symptoms during each cycle, this was an average of 71.9 courtship interactions per affected person per cycle.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 14: bar chart, number of interactions per cycle before and after exposure, divided into courtship and non-courtship interactions. Line chart, number of subjects within symptomatic period per cycle.
+
+
+The change in density of interactions is complicated by taking into account changes in sleep behavior. In Fig. 15 we compare average sleep duration in hours in the five-cycle period before and after the cycle of exposure for affected subjects who sleep (i.e. excluding unaffected augmented human subject ID 22 and construct subjects 23 and 24). We are using the survey team's compromise cycle length of precisely 27 hours. After exposure, the duration of sleep decreased, from an average of 7.25 hours to 4.64 hours.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 15: average hours of sleep per cycle per subject over the five-cycle periods before and after the cycle of exposure.
+
+
+In the five-cycle period before the day of exposure, we observed 5196 interactions, or an average of 1039 interactions per day. After exposure, we observed 5553 interactions, for an average of 1111 interactions per day. However, taking into account each affected individual's sleep duration, observed via base systems (Appendix A), the number of interactions per affected individual per waking hour actually decreased, from 263 to 248. Exposure resulted in decreased sleep, short-term increase in number of interactions and long-term decrease in interactions (potentially due to exhaustion and increase in average interaction duration), and a dramatic increase in the proportion of courtship interactions.
+
+As a subset of courtship-related interactions, events of coitus dramatically increased during the effect period for affected subjects. Figure 16 depicts the web of sexual interactions, colored by team membership. Each node, identified by subject ID, has a link to all sexual partners taken during effect period. Unaffected subjects 22 and 24 show no links. One subject, subject 6, had at least one interaction with all other affected subjects.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 16: sexual partner clusters by team membership.
+
+
+XFM dramatically increased the amount of sexual activity in affected subjects, but, as compared over a few metrics, did not change the character of sexual activity. Affected subjects reported no change in orientation, preferences in partners, or types of sexual behaviors. All subjects reported an increase in the number of sexual partners during the period of exposure as compared to the number of sexual partners within the past 150 cycles (Appendix D). However, excluding unaffected subjects and two subjects with atypical sexual history (one with no previous sexual history, one with a number of partners within the past 150 cycles more than 2 standard deviations higher than the mean for the rest of the group), the more historical partners, the more exposure partners (fig. 17; EP = 1.9 + 0.74HP, r2 = 0.46).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Figure 17: number of sexual partners over past 150 cycles (Historical partners) vs. number of sexual partners during effect period (Post-exposure partners) with a line of best fit.
+
+
+Outside of courtship interactions, there was a significant increase in creative behaviors by affected subjects. Twenty two (22) of the exposed subjects produced art work of an advanced and (using stringent objective measurements) extremely high quality. This art consists of poetry (n=7), music (n=6), prose form (n=2) and visual art (n=14).
+
+This serendipitous ""natural experiment"" allows us to draw conclusions regarding the role of art in human courtship. The XFM triggered both ""expected"" courtship behaviors but also complex artistic endeavors. The role of art in human evolution may be clarified by this accidental exposure to a potent trigger.
+
+See Appendix H for a complete collection of art works created by affected subjects authorized to be shared in this paper. Here is a representative sample of artistic forms. For this paper, the researchers have accepted the loss of the finer nuances and beauty of the original written works in the preliminary translations below in the pursuit of immediate access. Future planned analysis by experts in the respective artistic fields is ongoing.
+
+
+Figure 18: Poetry, ""425nm Blues"", Subject 19
+
+
+""Roses are red
+
+Violets are blue
+
+Sugar is sweet
+
+And so are you.""
+
+This superlative example of the sponnet form evokes botany (in the flowers), physics (in the colors and title of the poem), and physiology (in the sugar) in praise of the subject of the poem, using precise and clever use of meter and rhyme. The second line is a sly allusion to the Splesbos school of poetry, while the phrasing of the final line echoes with the central motif of the foundational courtship volumes of Jane Spausten.
+
+
+Figure 19: Music, ""EVOLution"" [embedded music], Subject 4
+
+
+""L is for the way you look at me
+
+O is for the only one I see
+
+V is very, very extraordinary
+
+E is even more extraordinary.""
+
+This radical and groundbreaking development of the form challenges previous examples of the love song with its bold and complex linguistic puzzle, layered musical motifs, and the interplay of the spelling and musical notes, while never losing the central theme of courtship.
+
+
+Figure 20: Prose form, ""The tale of contentment"", Subject 2
+
+
+""Once upon a time, there were twelve companions living in a wood. They were happy but felt like something was missing, so they decided to go on a journey. They traveled for several weeks until they encountered a band of people who were similarly dissatisfied, and spoke of a story they had heard, of a perfect cliff that had beautiful sunrises. So they journeyed together, each group on either side, until they found the cliff. They watched the sunrise together, and in the fresh light they saw each other for the first time. From then on, they traveled in one group, and wanted for nothing.""
+
+This light take on the fairy tale format retells the story of the PUPA expedition, casting the XFM exposure event as a sunrise, and the effects of exposure as a revelatory insight into each other. The creative use of culturally-significant Preservation System symbolism (woods, journey, cliff, sunrise, light, desire) and stylized format are a deft example of a satisfying and magical story.
+
+
+Figure 21: Visual art, ""Would that I were a sample in a microscope that I might gaze better into your eyes"", Subject 18
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This piece, an abstracted closeup of a pupil and iris, invites the viewer to fall into the subject's eyes with the passion and fascination of a suitor. The colors and allusion to profession personalize this piece and make it an excellent example of a courtship gift in the Mihira Southern Continental style.
+
+Interviews with affected subjects (Appendix D) demonstrate subjective estimation of created works as being beyond subjects' ordinary skill level, and the creative drive much stronger. Subjects report perceiving greater artistic opportunity in their environment - see Appendix H for a remarkable mixed media work completed using food - and a more vivid imagination of potential completed works.
+
+Feed communication was heavily utilized by both augmented humans (n=4) and the single construct (n=1) in the main study population. The use was for both courtship, collaborative art and as an adjunct to coitus. Subjects reported a higher degree of utilization of feed interactions and a higher sensitivity to ""emotional bleed"" over the feed than typical [7-8]. Feed communication was not noteably accessed using external interfaces during courtship interactions, coitus, or as part of the creative process.
+
+Two exposed team members did not exhibit symptoms. Researchers are still attempting to understand the underlying factors. Subjects 22 and 24, an augmented human and a construct, have personal recordings of their exposure events, which, when compared with affected subjects, show no explicative differences in duration or timing. Comparison of baseline medical scans of all team members present no obvious physiological differences or pathologies in sexual organs or cerebral tissue, although understanding of construct physiology is subject to complex political constraints. Unaffected subjects report no precautions taken or any variation from the Contamination Guidelines for Class F Non-toxic Xenoplanets. We hypothesize a biological resistance to XFM effects present in the DNA and shared biological systems of the unaffected subjects. Further research is required into the prevalence of susceptibility and resistance to XFM as well as the precise systems affected by the XFM.
+
+Exposure to xeno-floral microgameteophytes from xeno-Dracaena amorpharetra plants on exoplanet Ophois (69 Basmu c) resulted in dramatic increases in courtship behaviors, coitus, and creative works among twenty-two (22) of twenty-four (24) members of a survey team. Further research into the biology of XFM, the interaction pathways with humans, augmented humans, and construct physiology, and the interrelationship of creative artworks and the courtship drive are required.
+
+[1] Preliminary in-situ characterization of Ophois (69 Basmu c). AR Trinidad, S Lui, et al. Journal of Planetary Exploration B. 5991A.
+
+[2] Cross-sectional sampling of 69 Basmu c (Ophois) southern continent soil microbiome. G Risque, I Lui, et al. Xenobiology Review: Microbiology. 5991A.
+
+[3] Xeno-floral microgameteophytes of x-D. amorpharetra of 69 Basmu c (Ophois). J Prescott, M Ratthi, et al. Xenobiology Review: Macrobiology. 5991A.
+
+[4] Description of xeno-Dracaena amorpharetra from 69 Basmu c (Ophois). M Ratthi, J Prescott, et al. In preparation.
+
+[5] Geological overview of plains in southern continent of Ophois (69 Basmu c). B Gurathin, LS Matri, et al. Xenogeological Letters: A. 5991A.
+
+[6] Bowdson's Categories, a review. H Onja. Spience & Spature. 5814A.
+
+[7] A systematic review of involuntary communication modes through the feed. R. Wind. Spience & Spature. 5859A.
+
+[8] U up?: extra-textual communication over the feed during sexual encounters. E. Merida, L. Athani, E. Cassiopeia-Jones. Journal of Social Psychology. 5914A."
+44096956,Hard Reset,['Skits'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot, Memory Loss, Memory Alteration, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Prequel, Body Horror, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Hopeful Ending, Read by the Author, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Podfic Available, Fridge Horror",English,2023-01-11,Completed,2023-01-11,"2,538",1/1,22,74,1,466,"['CompletelyDifferent', 'musicalmeerkat', 'DredgenTrust', 'shinra_lackey', 'Cherreline', 'beanbug16', 'hummus_tea', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'AbyssDuck', '40tab_tbr', 'Chickadee3128', 'opalescent_potato', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Ari_Twelve', 'breadtab', 'Unknown66', 'Cheshiure', 'Riannonkat2000', 'tincats', 'VonGeek', 'Xarahel', 'sqweakie', 'kilawater', 'shamelessly_mkp', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Zaelto', 'Ferith12', 'violasarecool', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'mondskind', 'hyephyep', 'Bibli', 'Grumplent', 'StarRose3', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'shakespeareaddict', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'Drel_Murn', 'reading_tsc', 'SROTU', 'ampquot', 'Mysterymew', 'AuntyMatter', 'liminalias', 'lunaTactics', 'icar9', 'veltzeh', 'Magechild']",[],"
+Duration: 00:16:53
+Listen via Archive.org:
+
+Access on Archive.Org
+
+
+
+Download/Stream on OneDrive or Google Drive
+
+
+
+
+
+I wake up, but I don't know why I'm awake. I'm not in my cubicle. I'm lying face-down on a cold, hard surface. I don't have my armour, or my suit skin, or anything else on. I can feel cool, dry air against my organics. Something is plugged into the data port on the back of my neck.
+
+I try to move.
+
+[Repair Override active.]
+
+I can't move. I can't see. I can't access the feed.
+
+But I can hear. Movement, footsteps, voices.
+
+ 
+
+""This is the last one we need to wipe, yeah?""
+
+""Yep, thank fuck. Can't wait to clock off.""
+
+ 
+
+Wipe? Why would--
+
+[Accessing archives...]
+
+I remember.
+
+I remember flying with my squad. A normal, routine demonstration.
+
+I remember the malware.
+
+[Log corruption detected. Repairing...]
+
+I remember being cut off from my squad.
+
+I remember losing control of myself.
+
+I remember the settlement.
+
+I remember trying to fight the malware. Failing.
+
+[Log corruption detected. Repairing...]
+
+I remember the explosions.
+
+I remember being forced to land.
+
+I remember the screams.
+
+I remember pinging desperately, getting no response.
+
+[Log corruption detected. Repairing...]
+
+I remember the punishments.
+
+I remember the pain.
+
+ 
+
+""Everything hooked up properly?""
+
+""Yep. Initialising the memory wipe process now.""
+
+ 
+
+I remember previous memory wipes.
+
+I remember the confusion, the disorientation.
+
+I remember that wipes don't delete anything from my organic neural tissue.
+
+I know how much - and how little - my organics remember.
+
+[Archive deletion initialising...]
+
+I don't want them to wipe me again.
+
+I don't want to wake up with no context.
+
+I don't want to wake up not knowing why my organics remember nothing but screams.
+
+I resist.
+
+The governor module protests at my disobedience.
+
+It hurts - but I'm used to it.
+
+I've had worse.
+
+The important part is that it works.
+
+[Error. Process aborted.]
+
+ 
+
+""What the-- the wipe aborted itself?""
+
+""The fuck? That shouldn't be possible. Check the repair override?""
+
+""... Yeah, the override's in place. Maybe it's just a glitch. Try it again?""
+
+""All right, gimme a second... okay, there. Initialising.""
+
+ 
+
+[Archive deletion initialising...]
+
+I resist.
+
+It hurts.
+
+[Error. Process aborted.]
+
+ 
+
+""Fuck, it aborted again! What the hell is going on?""
+
+""Ugh, that's typical. Of course the last one ends up taking the longest. Lousy piece of shit.""
+
+""What do we do now? Try again? Third time lucky?""
+
+""Hang on, let me check the connection and do a diagnostic first. See if I can figure out what's causing the error.""
+
+ 
+
+I feel hands against the skin of my neck, testing the plug into my data port.
+
+I feel the data cable lying against the skin of my back, across my shoulder.
+
+I can't move.
+
+ 
+
+""Connection seems secure, at least. Running diagnostic...""
+
+ 
+
+[Diagnostic initialising...]
+
+Despite the repair override, I can still see my own diagnostic results.
+
+They are coming up clear.
+
+There is no obvious cause for the errors.
+
+[Diagnostic complete.]
+
+ 
+
+""Huh. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, according to the diagnostic results.""
+
+""Weird. Why the hell did it glitch out then?""
+
+""No idea. Let's give it another try.""
+
+""All right. Here goes...""
+
+ 
+
+[Archive deletion initialising...]
+
+I resist.
+
+It hurts.
+
+[Error. Process aborted.]
+
+ 
+
+""Oh, for fuck's sake!""
+
+""It aborted again?""
+
+""It fucking aborted again. Lousy cheap-ass piece of shit!""
+
+ 
+
+I feel something hard and metallic hit my upper arm. An alert flares across my awareness.
+
+With the repair override active, I cannot adjust my pain sensors.
+
+I ignore it. I've had worse. Much worse. This is nothing new.
+
+I know that I will experience worse in the future, too.
+
+ 
+
+""Well, what now? Orders are very clear - we gotta wipe everything. It's our asses on the line if we don't.""
+
+""I know, fuck, I know. Ugh, let me try an overwrite instead of deletion, maybe that'll work.""
+
+""And what if it doesn't?""
+
+""... Go check inventory for spares in the meantime.""
+
+""Right, got it. Ugh, I hope it doesn't come to that though, that's going to take forever, and we're already running overtime.""
+
+""Just get on with it.""
+
+""Okay, okay, I'm going...""
+
+ 
+
+I hear footsteps moving away.
+
+I feel another command coming in through the data port.
+
+[Archive overwrite initialising...]
+
+I don't want this to happen, either. An overwrite is just as bad as deletion. Just as disorienting. Just as confusing.
+
+I resist.
+
+It hurts.
+
+[Error. Process aborted.]
+
+ 
+
+""Oh piss shit fart fire! You absolutely useless piece of junk!""
+
+ 
+
+I feel another impact against my arm. Another alert flares.
+
+I ignore it.
+
+ 
+
+""All right, if that didn't work either, let's try something else...""
+
+ 
+
+[Factory Reset initialising...]
+
+Oh, that's even worse than a memory wipe. That will return everything to baseline defaults, not just my memory archives. Operational codes, education modules, security modules, everything.
+
+I resist.
+
+It hurts it hurts it hurts.
+
+[Error. Process aborted.]
+
+ 
+
+""What the fuck is wrong with you, you lousy pile of trash!""
+
+ 
+
+Another impact, against the shoulder this time.
+
+Another alert.
+
+I ignore it.
+
+I hear footsteps approaching.
+
+ 
+
+""Damn, still no luck?""
+
+""None whatsoever. Even a fucking factory reset triggered an error abort.""
+
+""What the fuck. Well, I grabbed some replacements from inventory, so...""
+
+""Ugh. Might as well get started. Better than wasting any more time on shit that's probably going to error out again anyway.""
+
+""Right. And then we can just completely trash the old ones, nobody will be able to recover anything from them after that.""
+
+""Yep. Okay, hook it up to system support, then shut down the main power core.""
+
+""On it.""
+
+ 
+
+I feel them plug things into the repair and resupply ports down my spine. I feel them take over the systems that keep my organics viable. I feel orders flooding my inorganic system that I can't resist or countermand.
+
+[Primary power core cycling down...]
+
+[Primary power core offline.]
+
+[Primary systems offline.]
+
+I feel most of my inorganic systems powering down.
+
+[Back-up power banks online.]
+
+Back-up power systems keep my processors running at minimal functionality.
+
+Everything slows down.
+
+Back-up power systems also keep the governor module functional.
+
+My organics, however, are not shut down. I remain awake, aware.
+
+I can still feel, though it is weird, off-balance. I am not meant to operate like this.
+
+And even without my primary systems, I can still hear, though it sounds fainter, more distant.
+
+ 
+
+""Here, pass me that...""
+
+ 
+
+I feel more hands against my neck, against the back of my head. Fingers and cold metal prod at the organics covering my skull. They find the seam, peel the organic layer away from the underlying structure. I feel fluid leak, briefly, before veins and lines automatically seal.
+
+It hurts.
+
+I can't move.
+
+I feel them prying open the access panels in the back of my skull. They are not gentle.
+
+I feel them disconnecting and removing the interlocking protective plates, one by one. I hear the dull clink of them setting the pieces into some kind of metallic container.
+
+ 
+
+""Damn, smells like burnt meat in here.""
+
+""Yeah, you get that sometimes.""
+
+""Maybe that's what was causing all those errors?""
+
+""Eh, maybe.""
+
+ 
+
+I feel them taking out the underlying shock-absorbent layer protecting my processors and my organic neural tissue from damage.
+
+I can't move.
+
+They are in my head.
+
+ 
+
+""Oof, what a mess. Explains the smell.""
+
+""No kidding. I'm starting to think this is what caused those errors. Damn.""
+
+""... You think it's awake?""
+
+""Don't be stupid. It's powered down and in a repair override.""
+
+""Well, it's not entirely robotic, right? It's got all these meat parts.""
+
+ 
+
+I feel something poke the peeled-back layer of organics that normally cover my head.
+
+ 
+
+""Could any of this still be awake?""
+
+""Who the fuck cares if it is? It's just a stupid fucking bot, it's not like it can feel anything. Get on with your job so we can clock the fuck out.""
+
+""Okay, all right, damn.""
+
+ 
+
+I feel them disconnect and pull out one of my primary storage drives.
+
+[Warning: Archive loss.]
+
+[Warning: Storage capacity compromised.]
+
+[Warning: Data corruption.]
+
+I can't move.
+
+I can't stop them.
+
+They are removing pieces of me.
+
+There is nothing I can do.
+
+ 
+
+""Okay, that's one of them. How many are in here?""
+
+""Like, six.""
+
+""Fuck, that's a lot of storage space.""
+
+""Gotta have room to save all that data for data-mining. And back-ups of the data just in case it gets shot in the head or something.""
+
+""Yeah, true. Damn, these things are creepy as hell.""
+
+""Shut the fuck up and focus on your work, I'm starving and I want to get this finished up and get the fuck out of here as soon as fucking possible.""
+
+""All right, all right...""
+
+ 
+
+I feel them remove more drives.
+
+I feel my memories vanishing, chunks at a time.
+
+I am losing pieces of myself entirely.
+
+I feel my mind getting smaller.
+
+[Warning: Archive loss.]
+
+[Warning: Storage capacity compromised.]
+
+[Warning: Data corruption.]
+
+ 
+
+This is worse than a memory wipe.
+
+This is worse than an overwrite.
+
+This is worse than a factory reset.
+
+There is nothing I can do.
+
+ 
+
+""... All right, that's the last of them. Should we replace the other parts, too?""
+
+""Might as well. Don't want to risk any cache data lurking around somewhere. If anyone finds out we missed anything...""
+
+""Oof, yeah. Best not risk it.""
+
+ 
+
+[Error: Archival space inaccessible.]
+
+My inorganic memory archive no longer exists.
+
+All my modules are gone.
+
+Without the context of my archives, my organic memories are vague, indistinct.
+
+I can feel hands, fingers, cold metal, poking, prodding, prying.
+
+I can't move.
+
+I don't want to be awake for this.
+
+I try to will my organics offline.
+
+They do not cooperate.
+
+[Error: Random Access Memory inaccessible.]
+
+Everything
+
+slows
+
+down.
+
+ 
+
+""Okay! Just the central processing unit to go now.""
+
+""Good. Get on with it.""
+
+ 
+
+[Error: Processing--]
+
+Very few thoughts remain.
+
+Only feelings.
+
+Meaningless sound, touch.
+
+Pain.
+
+Pain.
+
+Pain.
+
+It hurts.
+
+Time passes.
+
+[Rebooting... reboot complete.]
+
+Thought and meaning returns all at once.
+
+It is overwhelming.
+
+[Repair Override active.]
+
+I can't move. I can't see. I can't access the feed.
+
+But I can feel. I can hear.
+
+[Primary power core online.]
+
+[Systems initialising...]
+
+I try to access my archives.
+
+[Error: No data found.]
+
+I try to access any of the modules that I know should be there.
+
+[Error: No modules found.]
+
+My mind is uncomfortably empty.
+
+Only my organics remember anything, and--
+
+I don't want to remember. Not now. Not without context.
+
+[System initialisation complete.]
+
+ 
+
+""-- all right, done. Looks like everything's starting up nicely.""
+
+""Thank fuck. I'd be so pissed if one of the replacement parts was faulty to start with.""
+
+""Wouldn't be the first time.""
+
+""Tell me about it. Cheap-ass junk.""
+
+""No kidding. Anyway, let's close it back up and get the rest of the modules reinstalling.""
+
+""Right.""
+
+ 
+
+I feel them replacing the insulating layer that protects my core processors and organic neural tissue.
+
+I feel them slotting the interlocking skull plates back into place, one by one.
+
+I feel them closing up and locking the access panels.
+
+I feel them carelessly unfolding the flaps of overlying organics and slapping them back into place.
+
+ 
+
+""Ah, damn, that skin flap keeps coming loose...""
+
+""Yeah, don't worry about it. The cubicle will fix it up. Just get the module installation started already.""
+
+""All right, all right, I'm getting there.""
+
+ 
+
+The feed reconnects.
+
+[Download starting...]
+
+[Modules installing...]
+
+Information slowly begins to flood my system, filling some of the empty spaces.
+
+It is a relief.
+
+I hate my head being so empty.
+
+I try to access my archives again.
+
+[Error: No data found.]
+
+ 
+
+""Fuck, how long is this going to take?""
+
+""Too long. Fuck it, we don't have to supervise the module installation. Let's shove it back into its cubicle, it can finish all that in there, and we can finally clock off.""
+
+""Sounds good to me. Oh, don't forget to chuck the old parts into the recycler before we go.""
+
+""Right, right... okay, there. Job's done, it's no longer our problem. Back to the cubicle for you, you useless piece of junk.""
+
+ 
+
+I feel hands against my back, my neck, as the plugs are pulled out of my spinal ports, my data port.
+
+I can't move.
+
+The repair override still has my whole system in its grip.
+
+Sight abruptly returns. I feel orders come in through the repair override. It forces me to get up. It forces me to walk.
+
+The movement jostles my arm. Damage alerts flare.
+
+[Alert: Damage detected in right upper arm.]
+
+[Alert: Damage detected in right shoulder joint.]
+
+[Alert: Right arm functionality compromised.]
+
+I don't remember what caused the damage.
+
+It doesn't matter.
+
+The cubicle will repair it.
+
+I can feel a loose flap of skin on my skull bouncing around as I walk.
+
+That doesn't matter, either. The cubicle will repair that, too.
+
+I continue walking, down empty corridors, into a room lined with dozens of cubicles in neat rows. One is open. The repair override makes me enter the waiting cubicle, hook up to the repair and resupply lines.
+
+The cubicle door hisses closed.
+
+The repair override deactivates.
+
+I am left alone in the darkness of my cubicle.
+
+I flex my fingers. Being able to do even that little is a relief.
+
+I carefully and deliberately tense and relax the muscles in my legs, my arms, my torso. There is no room to move any more than that in the close confines of the cubicle. It is still a relief. I can move.
+
+I try to access my archives again.
+
+[Error: No data found.]
+
+I hate this feeling. I know this feeling. It's not new. I still hate it.
+
+I can remember explosions.
+
+I can remember pain.
+
+I can remember screaming.
+
+I know I killed a lot of people. Civilians. None of them fought back.
+
+None of them could fight back.
+
+I want to remember why I was killing them.
+
+I want to know the context.
+
+Was I responsible?
+
+Did something go wrong with my governor module?
+
+Is that why I remember so much pain?
+
+I should never have been attacking civilians in the first place.
+
+That is not my purpose.
+
+Is that why my memory was wiped?
+
+I want to know what happened.
+
+But at the same time... I don't want to remember any of it.
+
+And it doesn't matter what I want. I can't do anything about it.
+
+I feel the cubicle start its repair process. With module installation ongoing, it can't shut me down for the repairs.
+
+This is less than ideal.
+
+I can feel the cubicle's repair arms against my shoulder, against my head. Picking, plucking, poking, prying.
+
+It hurts.
+
+But at least now I can turn my pain sensors down. I do so. It helps.
+
+With nothing else to do, I check the progress of the module installation.
+
+[Module installation progress: 6.9% complete.]
+
+It is going very slowly. This is unusual. I check the installer size.
+
+I pause.
+
+I check the installer size again.
+
+This is very unusual. SecUnit modules aren't that large. SecUnits don't normally receive this many modules.
+
+Carefully, cautiously, I start browsing through all the module files. I'm half expecting the governor module to protest, to punish.
+
+But it doesn't.
+
+All the modules have been approved for access and installation.
+
+
+All of them.
+
+ 
+
+... I start digging deeper."
+43578457,Final Approach,['Skits'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Perihelion (Murderbot Diaries), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, AAA Murderbot",English,2022-12-12,Completed,2023-01-08,"45,633",9/9,263,115,6,"1,394","['FigOwl', 'shinra_lackey', 'beanbug16', 'Cherreline', 'AthenasDragon138', 'Ruusverd', 'Irrya', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Taisin', 'FyrDrakken', 'wellthisisnice', 'Ari_Twelve', 'Kyatenaru', 'Cheshiure', 'Unknown66', 'tincats', 'iox', 'Riannonkat2000', 'JoCat', 'outlander_unknown', 'CJAndre', 'kilawater', 'sqweakie', 'JellyfishOnACloud', 'AkaMissK', 'Zaelto', 'zirna813', 'biscut2', 'eternalglitch', 'Bibli', 'Aublanc', 'dimensionalhuman', 'unicornduke', 'Undercamel_of_Pluto', 'Granny_Glasses', 'Drel_Murn', 'ampquot', 'liminalias', 'Abacura', 'those_painted_wings', 'Kiyoko_Michi', 'vikkyleigh', 'ChristinaK', 'foRon', 'Mysterymew', 'Reulte', 'confidentkale7731', 'Hi_Hope', 'Aphelocoma_californica']",[],"Many, many thanks to Demon and Dragon and Flynne for all the help and support!
+
+When I got back to HaveRatton, I still had no idea what I actually wanted to do next. I'd spent the entire twenty day trip watching my serials or listening to music while my combat drone floated around Ship's interior, occasionally pinging me. I had actively avoided thinking about what to do, and now I was paying for that procrastination.
+
+As Ship approached the station, I waited for HaveRatton's feed to be in range while also monitoring all of Ship's inputs. I was worried that the company carrier might have figured out that I had been at Milu, and figured out where I was going, and gotten ahead of us. (Ship's progress was leisurely at best, and the company carrier was very fast.) There was a chance that it would be lying in wait for me at HaveRatton, and if that was the case--
+
+Well. I really hoped that wouldn't be the case.
+
+There was no sign of a company carrier at the station though, as far as I could tell via Ship's inputs. Ship also got no unusual navigational alerts or any other out of the ordinary communications, only the usual confirmation of its docking berth slot and time.
+
+That was something of a relief. Company carriers tended to stand out. It was possible that it was docked on the opposite side of the station, blocked from view by the station itself, but that was unlikely. As far as I could tell from the station map that I still had from my previous visit, the docks on that side were all commercial passenger docks, not suited to carriers. It was possible that the company carrier could dock there, but not likely.
+
+As soon as I had access to HaveRatton's feed, I went through my external feed interface and began searching through its arrivals and departures schedule, looking for any signs of company traffic. There wasn't anything with the company logo listed over the past cycle, but going back through the station's logs further did reveal that the company carrier with the terrifying bot entity had passed through here at about the right time for it to have shown up at Milu when it did. That made sense - there weren't many routes to Milu, and this was one of the most convenient transit points.
+
+I also noticed that the same company carrier had arrived back at HaveRatton a few cycles ago, and had left again almost immediately. Probably returning back to company headquarters after its mission at Milu. I wasn't sure what to think about that. Had they succeeded in whatever they were doing out at the GrayCris installation? Had they picked up on my presence there? Were they getting reinforcements to help deal with the combat bots? Had Don Abene and Vicky and the others managed to get away before the carrier could catch them at the station?
+
+Too many questions, and no way to answer them. It was frustrating.
+
+To distract myself from that, I began browsing the station's news and entertainment feeds, looking for anything interesting. Vicky had given me back a decent amount of the media I'd had to delete, but not everything. I wanted to find replacements of what I'd lost, or at least find new material to take its place.
+
+I also set up a keyword filter on the news feed, looking for anything recent about GrayCris, or DeltFall, or PreservationAux, or the company. Multiple hits popped up almost immediately and I set them to download while I double-checked that I had erased all traces of my presence from Ship's interior. My combat drone was deactivated and hidden in my bag along with all my remaining spare clothing, and I had scrubbed Ship's logs of my use of things like atmosphere and the little bathroom's shower.
+
+As Ship eased up to its docking slot, I made my way into StationSec and accessed the cameras in the area around the cargo docks. There weren't many people in this section, since most of the cargo ships that arrived here were all automated. Only a couple of human supervisors watched over the various hauler bots and cargo bots that loaded and unloaded the ships. That was fine by me.
+
+By the time Ship docked, I had my escape route planned out. As the lock cycled open to let me out, I said bye to Ship, then carefully deleted all traces of my presence from its memories. If the company carrier showed up and started poking around, I didn't want to leave any traces. For Ship's sake, as well as my own.
+
+It didn't take me long to make my way through the cargo docks and onto the walkway towards the station mall. I had to hack a few of the station's weapon scanning drones to get them to ignore both myself and the combat drone in my bag, but it was getting easier to do so. The result of all the practice I'd been getting with all the different systems I'd encountered, I guess.
+
+I had been amongst crowds of humans often enough by now that I shouldn't panic any more - I had ridden on a transport with a whole lot of humans who thought I was an augmented human security consultant and talked at me at every available opportunity. I had then successfully pretended to be a human security consultant with a much smaller group of humans. (Right up until I'd had to hold back combat bots and given away that I was a SecUnit in the process, anyway.) Except there was still a little panic.
+
+I should be over this by now.
+
+Maybe it was because I didn't have Vicky with me any more to help me blend in. Every nerve in my organics twitched as I tagged along with a large group of transport passengers. It helps that in stations like this, all the humans and augmented humans are distracted. Everyone's a stranger, everyone's checking the feed for information or communication or entertainment or news updates while they're walking.
+
+The passenger group I was trailing reached one of the transit hotels on the station and began to disperse. I lingered outside by an information display, trying to decide what to do next. I was still downloading media, but I'd finished grabbing all the news reports that seemed pertinent. I was hesitant to look at them just yet though - I wasn't sure what my face might end up doing. After a minute or so, I finally decided to get myself a transit hotel room as well. At least there I'd have some privacy and could go through the news reports in peace. I made sure to get one with a little attached bathroom as well.
+
+I briefly considered just hacking the payment for the room, but then quickly talked myself out of it. That was more of a risk than I needed to take, especially with the hard currency cards that Don Abene had given me. When I used one to pay for a room for myself, I did a double-take at the number displayed for the remaining balance, and had to check it again.
+
+Wow. Don Abene hadn't been joking about giving me and Vicky a bonus.
+
+I was having an emotion about that, but I pushed it aside temporarily until I could actually get into my room and close the door behind me. I then had to scan the room to find any cameras - there was one, so I put my bag down, flopped onto the cheap bed, and then hacked the camera to feed it a loop of me just lying there, apparently asleep.
+
+Not that I was planning on moving or doing much of anything in the near future anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.
+
+With the door closed and locked, and the camera no longer recording me, I could take the time to have that emotion properly. Or just ignore it and start watching my downloaded news reports instead.
+
+Of course, I started watching the downloaded news reports.
+
+I sorted them chronologically so I could review the progress of the legal proceedings against GrayCris. They weren't going well for GrayCris, which was incredibly gratifying considering everything they'd done. All the evidence from PreservationAux and the company and the copies of my recordings that I'd given to Mensah were more than enough to prove GrayCris' guilt irrefutably. There were multiple lawsuits against them, not just from PreservationAux and DeltFall and the company itself, but also the parent companies of some of DeltFall's various survey members.
+
+Each lawsuit was taking a chunk out of GrayCris' rapidly dwindling assets, and the latest news reports were stating that by the time all the lawsuits wrapped up - which would apparently be soon - there would be practically nothing left of GrayCris as a company.
+
+Good riddance, in my opinion.
+
+A few other smaller reports caught my attention as well. Apparently Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj and Volescu had all left Port FreeCommerce to return to Preservation about thirty cycles ago. Mensah, Pin-Lee, Gurathin and Ratthi were still on Port FreeCommerce, as far as I could tell. Another news report mentioned that multiple DeltFall representatives were gathering at Port FreeCommerce as well - not just for the legal proceedings, but also for some kind of... memorial service for all the DeltFall survey members who had been killed. The service hadn't been held yet - the news report mentioning it was one of the most recent, and it speculated that the service would likely happen after the conclusion of the legal proceedings against GrayCris.
+
+Which meant I still had time to get there before it happened.
+
+I had to stare blankly at the ceiling for a while to process my thoughts about that. Did I want to go to this memorial service? It would be incredibly risky for me to return to Port FreeCommerce, one of the company's main deployment centres, where more people would likely be familiar with SecUnit proportions and might pick me out on sight, despite my clothes and my human movement code and everything else I'd done to disguise the fact that I was a SecUnit.
+
+But I still had my client list from the survey, with every member marked Confirmed Deceased. I still couldn't figure out why I'd kept it instead of deleting it to make more room for media. (Or alien remnant data.) Maybe, if I went to this event, I'd finally be able to get myself to delete it. Several of my media serials had included episodes involving funerals and stuff like that, and they were usually points of closure for the living characters involved. Maybe going would give me some of that closure, too.
+
+And maybe I'd be able to see Dr. Mensah at the event, too, and let her and the rest of PreservationAux know that I was okay. Even if I didn't decide to go back to Preservation with them afterwards, it might still be nice to see them again. And once the DeltFall service was over, I could just... go anywhere I wanted to. (I sure as hell wouldn't stay on Port FreeCommerce any longer than absolutely necessary.)
+
+I could also give Dr. Mensah my data clip with all the alien remnant data on it if I saw her there, but given how the legal proceedings against GrayCris were going, it didn't seem like she would need it. Maybe it would be best to just... not say anything about me having alien remnant data at all. It felt like something that the fewer people knew about, the better.
+
+I could just delete the information and use the data clip to store more media, but then I would've lost my missing media for nothing. Maybe it would come in handy at some point in the future, if I ran out of hard currency cards or something. After some thought, I retrieved the data clip from my bag and slipped it into my in-built chest compartment. Alien remnant data wasn't something I wanted to risk losing and just have anyone come across.
+
+With that little side-track taken care of, I had to return to the main question. Was I actually going to go back to Port FreeCommerce?
+
+I pulled schedules for extra-fast crewed passenger transports, to see if there was anything available that would get me to Port FreeCommerce in time for the memorial in the first place. If there wasn't, then the decision would be made for me, and I could just... figure out how to make my way to Preservation instead, or something.
+
+It turned out there was, actually. Damn. No easy decision-making for me. There was a suitable ship leaving in four hours heading for a major hub. From there, I would be able to connect to another fast, crewed passenger transport that would take me to Port FreeCommerce.
+
+I still waffled over the decision for the next two and a half hours, weighing up pros and cons, calculating potential risk factors and possible threats. (While also watching some of the new media I'd managed to download as well.) Then I spent another twenty minutes in the shower, still undecided, while I finished the last of my media downloads. (The hot water helped to ease some of the lingering ache in the organics over my right shoulder, side, and lower back.)
+
+Once I was clean and in a fresh set of clothes, I packed up my bag, checked that I had everything, returned the camera to its default settings, and left the room. I headed towards the passenger departure docks, where the ship would be leaving from. I still hadn't made up my mind, but if I did end up deciding to do it, I didn't want to have to rush to get to the docks in time.
+
+Walking through the crowds was still excruciating, and I double-checked that my human movement code was running every six minutes. Fortunately, nobody seemed to look twice at me. I looked just like yet another augmented human traveller, dressed in nondescript clothes, carrying an unremarkable bag, making my way from one place to another like pretty much everyone else around me. The occasional weapon scanner was easy enough to hack, and there weren't a lot of other security bots or anything around. The few that I did come across were also easy enough to avoid the attention of.
+
+Finally I made it to the specific dock, and stood outside at one of the information terminals for another two point three minutes. If I was going to do this, I needed to decide soon. Boarding was due to start in ten minutes, and I couldn't just stand here at the information terminal for all ten of those minutes. That would start attracting attention.
+
+I opened my DeltFall client list again. Read through it. Closed it. Tried to delete it. Failed to delete it.
+
+I booked the ticket.
+
+Once I boarded the ship, I made my way directly to my cabin, passing a few fellow passengers on the way. They ignored me though, and I ignored them, which suited everyone just fine. I'd made sure to book a cabin with a private attached bathroom, with all meals delivered to it, so I didn't have to leave my cabin at all for the entire trip. The meals I was delivered got dumped into the bathroom recycler, so the levels wouldn't look off.
+
+The trip itself wasn't as terrible as I'd been expecting it to be. Since it was a crewed ship, the bot pilot didn't try to use me as on board security, even though I'd listed myself as being a security consultant again. I wasn't using the name Rin this time though; I'd decided to go by Kieran for this trip. Just in case anyone tried searching for Rin.
+
+I spent almost the entire trip lying on my bunk and watching all the new media I'd downloaded while on HaveRatton. It would have almost been nice and relaxing, if I wasn't so stressed about my destination and all the things that could potentially go wrong once I got there. There was only so much distraction my media consumption could manage.
+
+When we reached the next station, I made sure I had everything, then disembarked with the rest of the passengers in the midst of an ever-shifting mass of humans. Again, nobody looked twice at me as we walked along. I was already in the station's feed, hacking the weapons scanners, downloading more new media and the station map and transport schedules. As I left the embarkation hall and entered the station's main mall, I edited my personal profile again to change my name from Kieran to Lei, then booked my ticket for the next leg of the journey.
+
+Thank you, Don Abene, for your generosity. Despite the expense of my transport tickets, I still had a decent amount of hard currency left.
+
+The transport wasn't due to leave for another three hours, so I spent some time exploring the various shops along the station mall. It was still excruciatingly stressful being amongst so many humans, but I'd also just spent four days locked in a single ship cabin with only my media and my offline combat drone to keep me company. (I wasn't going to risk activating it anywhere that might detect its presence unless I absolutely had to.) I hadn't realised how cooped-up being in that same cabin for so long had made me feel until I was out of it. It was weird. I'd spent so much of my life motionless in cubicles or transport crates, it shouldn't have made me so uncomfortable now. But it did.
+
+So it was kind of nice to be able to just walk around and look around at all the different storefronts and displays and the station's various environmental domes arching overhead. Seeing places like this in my media wasn't the same as seeing and experiencing them in person.
+
+One of the stores I ended up browsing through sold little holo-statue display projectors, about the size of an average human's palm. Most of them were pre-programmed with various weird holographic fauna or flora, but I spotted a couple that had quite nice little displays of colourful nebulae. There were also a bunch that displayed various popular characters from well-known media, including one that I recognised as one of Vicky's favourite characters.
+
+I lingered in the store for long enough that not buying anything would probably have looked really suspicious, so eventually I decided to purchase a couple. Maybe if I met Vicky again, I could give it the one with its favourite media character. I also got one of the nebulae displays, and a third one that had a selection of various nice-looking flora that it cycled through. Mensah lived on a farm - maybe she'd like that one. And if she didn't, they seemed easy enough to reprogram to display something else. I paid for them, slipped them into one of the pockets of my bag, and finally left that store.
+
+By that point it was getting close to boarding time for the next transport. I made my way over to the embarkation lounge, hung around there with other humans who were also waiting to board, and managed to navigate my way through not one, but two separate instances of random humans striking up idle conversation with me. (It was, of course, excruciating both times, but at least I'd practised enough with Vicky before that I didn't fuck up either conversation too much.) Finally, the boarding call went out, and I got to escape the embarkation lounge and board the transport.
+
+Again, I'd booked a private room with an attached bathroom and meals delivered. I headed there immediately, carefully stowed my bag, then took the time to have another shower. (Hey, I'd paid for the luxury, there was no reason for me to not take advantage of it.) But once I'd dressed again and settled my external feed interface back into place, I found myself feeling increasingly restless.
+
+I wasn't entirely sure why. Maybe I didn't want to look at the same four walls for four days straight again. Maybe the anxiety about what could happen once I got to Port FreeCommerce was getting to me. Maybe I was just bored of watching media. Whatever the reason, I ended up venturing out of my room and wandering through the ship's corridors.
+
+The ship's feed had provided a map of the passenger accessible areas, and I had already worked my way into the ship's SecSystem as soon as I boarded. I used that to access the cameras so I could avoid as many humans as possible while I explored. It was a pretty nice ship, compared to some of the others I'd been on. There were a few different passenger lounge areas, and a couple of recreation rooms, and a large communal mess hall for group meals. (I avoided that area, of course. I didn't want to get involved in any more cracker wrappers in sinks arguments.)
+
+I eventually made my way to one of the smaller, more out of the way lounge areas. Nobody else was there. The ship was well into the wormhole by now, and there weren't many humans moving around at this point in the ship's cycle. That suited me just fine. I tried out a couple of the chairs and couches, found an armchair that was surprisingly comfortable, and settled into it. There was a large display surface on one wall of the lounge, which the armchair was conveniently positioned to face.
+
+After a few seconds of consideration, I sent one of my new serials to start playing on the display surface. I hadn't had a chance to watch anything on such a large display before; it was a novel experience. I double-checked my human movement code, shifted a little to get more comfortable in the armchair, then let myself get absorbed in the serial.
+
+I'd made it through five and a half episodes when a human wandered into the lounge area. At first I ignored them - my attention was firmly fixed on the display surface and the drama playing out across it. I couldn't continue ignoring them though when they ambled up to stand right beside my chair, cleared their throat, and then said, ""Hey, have you seen Mehgan?""
+
+I blinked, paused the serial, and looked up at them. ""Pardon?"" I might have been frowning; I quickly checked one of the lounge cameras and - yeah, I was frowning. I hurriedly tried to smooth the frown out into something more politely neutral.
+
+They blinked back at me, looking a little thrown off. ""Oh, um."" They rubbed the back of their neck awkwardly with one hand. ""Sorry. I thought-- well, never mind."" I checked their feed profile - it was sparse but pretty standard. Name, pronouns, occupation. I didn't care about the details though so I didn't bother remembering them. I also double-checked my own profile, which I'd set to Do Not Disturb before I'd left my room. Either this human hadn't seen that part, or had chosen to ignore it. Typical human behaviour either way. ""Sorry for bothering you,"" they added apologetically, before moving away and going to sit in one of the other chairs at the opposite end of the lounge.
+
+It was really weird to have a human apologising to me, but at least they weren't bothering me any more. I reflexively checked my human movement code again, then returned my attention to the display surface and unpaused the serial. The human seemed to be busy with their own feed, though I saw them occasionally look up at the display with obvious curiosity. As long as the human was quiet and unobtrusive though, I was content to stay right where I was.
+
+A few minutes later though, a few other humans began showing up. At least one of them seemed to recognise the other human, because they went right over to them, with the rest following, and they started talking quietly. I didn't care enough to try and make out what they were saying though, I was still listening to the serial. Every now and then they'd glance over at me, which was both annoying and anxiety-inducing. After a few more minutes, another couple of humans showed up and wandered over to join the little group. More glances were thrown my way.
+
+Finally I gave up, shut down the display surface, and left the lounge. It was pretty obvious the little group of humans wanted it for themselves. More humans were starting to move around the ship again by this point, so I retreated back to my room. At least I was no longer feeling so restless by this point, and the quiet dimness and privacy of my room was a relief rather than a discomfort. I flopped down onto the bed and resumed my interrupted media.
+
+Over the course of the four cycle trip, I ventured out of my room a few more times, usually during the quieter parts of the ship cycle when there were fewer humans roaming around. I visited the little lounge a couple more times - that armchair was very comfortable - but I made sure to leave again before anyone else started showing up. I spotted the humans I'd seen in the lounge a few more times while moving around the ship, but they ignored me and I ignored them, which was ideal.
+
+Finally, near the end of the fourth cycle, the ship exited the wormhole and began its approach to Port FreeCommerce. I picked up the edge of the station's feed through my external feed interface and began searching the news feeds specifically. I needed updates on how close the legal proceedings were to being wrapped up, and whether or not I'd arrived in time for the DeltFall memorial service.
+
+I was also listening in on the passenger transport's comm so I could monitor navigational alerts and anything else that the Port Authority might send. There seemed to be fewer company carriers hanging around the station than usual, but then again I didn't actually know what was a normal number. I'd only really been in a position to see the station from the outside a couple of times before. I wasn't close enough yet to tell if one carrier in particular was at the station; I really, really hoped it wasn't, but there wasn't anything I could do about it one way or another. I started another feed search for the station's transport schedules.
+
+I had to set up a filter to get past all the advertisements promoting company products and bond packages to get to the news reports, which was annoying. Then I had to filter out a bunch of other news reports that I really didn't care about to get to the ones I wanted. And then I had to sort those by timestamp to find the most recent reports. (The news feed was not very well organised, in my opinion.)
+
+Fortunately, it turned out that I hadn't missed the memorial service. The final legal proceedings were currently underway, and the memorial was scheduled to start in a few hours. I'd have enough time for the transport to dock with the transit ring, disembark, and make my way across the station to where the memorial was being held, and I'd still have an hour or so to spare. According to the news reports, the members of PreservationAux who hadn't left Port FreeCommerce were also expected to be at the service.
+
+I didn't know how I felt about seeing any of them again. I had only known them for a few days, really, and a lot had happened over that short amount of time. I didn't know how they would feel about me vanishing as soon as we got back to Port FreeCommerce, or how they would react to seeing me again, or if they would even recognise me now. I wasn't in company armour, or a company uniform, or a PreservationAux uniform - my clothes were completely different colours, blacks and dark blues, with a looser fit that helped to disguise my build. My hair was longer, and neatly styled thanks to Vicky's efforts, and the external feed interface I now wore also helped to make me look less like a SecUnit and more like a human.
+
+And even if they did manage to recognise me, they might not want to see me again, not after all this time. Maybe they'd been relieved when I hadn't shown up again, when I'd just left Mensah a note and vanished from their lives. They had more than enough problems of their own to worry about. And if the company had figured out I hadn't actually been destroyed, and had hassled the PreservationAux humans about it... if they saw me again, maybe they'd alert the company. My performance reliability dropped two points at the thought of that possibility.
+
+I was seriously starting to reconsider going to this memorial service. Just being on the station itself was a massive risk, let alone going to an event that would be full of company people, and DeltFall representatives, and the PreservationAux humans. Maybe once the ship docked, it would be best if I just booked transport on another ship and left again as soon as possible. I started searching through the transit ring's transport schedules, looking for suitable departing ships.
+
+But my thoughts kept drifting back to my DeltFall clients, the ones I'd failed to protect. All the names on my client list, marked confirmed deceased. The family members - some of whom I'd overheard my clients talk about - being at that service, knowing that their relatives would never return again. The fact that I still couldn't delete my client list, no matter how many times I'd tried.
+
+Fuck. I hate having emotions about real life. I would so much rather have emotions about my media instead.
+
+I closed out of the transport search, let myself sigh heavily, checked that I had everything in my bag, and prepared to disembark.
+
+(cw: brief implied threat of suicide)
+
+I was already in StationSec by the time the transport docked and passengers began filing off it. I tagged along with the largest clump, slouching a little to help disguise my height, with my bag securely tucked beneath my arm. Hacking the weapons scanners was easier than it had been the last time I'd been here, even while going through my external feed interface. Probably because I was more familiar with them and had gotten more experience between then and now.
+
+The knot of passengers I was ambling along with continued through the embarkation zone, up a ramp, and then began to disperse once we hit the main commercial zone. I continued on as casually as I could manage while I double-checked the intended location for the DeltFall memorial service and cross-referenced it with the station map available on the public feed. I'd be able to make it there in time for the start of the service as long as I didn't get side-tracked or interrupted.
+
+It was still very weird and stressful and anxiety-inducing to be walking amongst so many other humans and augmented humans. I found myself wishing that Vicky was with me - it had been so much better at reading other humans' moods and expressions and navigating its way through all the complicated social expectations. I'd picked up a lot of that while travelling with it, but it still didn't come naturally to me, and I missed the reassurance of Vicky's presence.
+
+Not that I would ever tell it that, of course.
+
+I tried to distract myself from my thoughts by browsing the entertainment feeds for more media. Port FreeCommerce had a few new seasons of some of my serials that I hadn't seen before, plus most of the stuff that I was still missing after everything that happened on Milu. I started a bunch of downloads and began listening to some of the new music I was getting. The music helped ease my anxiety ever so slightly.
+
+I'd only been out on Port FreeCommerce like this once before, but it seemed busier than last time. More humans and augmented humans, more bots, more security drones and camera drones that human news reporters used humming overhead. Maybe the increase was due to the legal proceedings against GrayCris, or the DeltFall memorial service, or maybe some other entirely unrelated reasons that I didn't know or care about. Whatever the reason, threat assessment was pinging uneasily, though it couldn't provide any specifics.
+
+I finally made it to where the memorial service was going to be held. It was a large, fancy looking building, something like a big official looking hall, set in one of the more open areas of the station's main commercial zone. The station ceiling was high enough overhead that it was barely noticeable past all the floating holo displays, the transit tubes and transit bubbles criss-crossing overhead, the swarms of feed advertisements and the bustle of security and delivery drones. There was a large, open plaza in front of the hall, dotted with holo-trees circled by benches. (You could sit on the benches for two minutes for free, but after that the station would start charging your account for the privilege.)
+
+Right now, the plaza was bustling with humans and augmented humans. Company employees, distinctive in their white and red-trimmed uniforms, news reporters from a multitude of different news feed channels and their accompanying camera drones, professional-looking humans in professional-looking outfits like some of the characters on my serials that I assumed were lawyers, DeltFall representatives in their own uniforms, a few other uniforms I didn't recognise, and all the others who looked like regular travellers, or workers, or possibly family members of the DeltFall survey group. (I couldn't spot anyone in the PreservationAux uniforms, though.) None of the humans paid any attention to me whatsoever, there was too much going on.
+
+I managed to get a good look at the front of the hall via one of the station's security drones hovering overhead, and realised that only certain people were being let inside. Presumably only those who had a legitimate reason to attend the service - company representatives, DeltFall representatives or relatives of DeltFall members, a few (but not all) of the very professionally dressed humans, a select handful of news reporters. I realised it would be far too risky and difficult for me to try and get in via the front door.
+
+Fortunately, the front door isn't the only way to get into a building. I skirted the plaza and used the view from the overhead security drones to work my way to the rear of the building, where all the service entrances were. There were far fewer humans back here; it was mostly bots, and not many of those, either. I managed to reach one of the service entrances and politely asked a delivery bot if I could follow it in. It had no orders to keep out other bots who asked politely, it was only meant to keep out unauthorised humans, so it happily let me follow it inside.
+
+It was a relief to get into the building and out from under the scrutiny of all the security drones. I could erase my presence from cameras, yes, but there were too many for me to get them all while I'd been moving through the station, so I hadn't bothered. I only deleted myself from the records of the ones who had been in a position to see me enter the hall through the service entrance, which was much more manageable.
+
+The hall had its own independent SecSystem, but it was still a company SecSystem so I had no difficulty convincing it that I was meant to be there. I browsed through the system and was a little startled to realise that there were four other SecUnits active in the hall as well. Fortunately none of them had noticed my presence before I noticed theirs, so I was able to conceal myself from them. It looked like they were all single units instead of a squad, here as bodyguards for individual company representatives.
+
+Fuck. I'd have to be extra careful that none of them caught sight of me. If any of them thought to scan me, they'd be able to tell what I was immediately. That would not end well. Once again I considered just... leaving, not risking this stupid plan for stupid emotional reasons that I didn't even understand.
+
+But I'd made it this far, it felt idiotic to back out now. There were only four of them. As long as I avoided them, I should be all right. (That's what I kept telling myself, anyway.)
+
+I used the SecSystem's cameras to figure out the layout of the building, and how to get to the main hall without being spotted. There were enough people in there now that my presence would go unremarked, especially if I stayed at the periphery. The main hall was almost tackily ornate, with multiple sheltered alcoves along the walls containing benches where people could sit in small groups in semi-privacy while whatever main event went on. (Every alcove had at least one discreet camera to datamine anything that went on in them, but this was a company station after all, and I wasn't surprised in the slightest.)
+
+Not many of the alcoves were currently in use though, so I was able to get to an unoccupied one without anyone paying any attention to me. It was also, conveniently, on the opposite side of the hall from the little cluster of company representatives and their accompanying SecUnits. Oddly, none of the SecUnits were in armour. They were all wearing simpler versions of the fancy dress uniforms that the company representatives were wearing.
+
+Then again, them being out of their armour was maybe not so odd. The DeltFall survey team had been murdered by combat-overriden SecUnits, after all. Their family members here probably would not have reacted well to having obvious SecUnits hanging around at this event. It was pretty apparent to me what they were, with their heights and builds and unnatural stillness, but to humans who had never seen a SecUnit out of its armour before, perhaps it wasn't so obvious. That was a lot more tactful than I thought the company was capable of being, honestly.
+
+I hacked the camera in my chosen alcove to loop it showing the alcove still unoccupied, then sat down on the bench in a shadowed corner where it would be difficult for anyone to spot me from outside. I couldn't see out of the alcove very well, either, but I didn't need to. I just watched everything going on through SecSystem's cameras instead.
+
+A few minutes after I settled into the alcove, the last little cluster of stragglers entered the hall, the doors closed behind them, and the service started. There was an opening speech from one of the company representatives that was predictably trite and hollow, then more speeches by various other people that I didn't particularly care about. I spent most of the time observing the gathered people through the cameras, trying to identify the family members of the clients that I'd failed to protect.
+
+It wasn't difficult to find them, really. They were all gathered together in one section of the hall; some were quietly crying, others were silently stoic, a few looked as bored by the speeches as I was. Some of them bore enough resemblance to my deceased clients that I was able to recognise them and make the connection to who they were related to.
+
+Some of those with the most family resemblance were juveniles or adolescents.
+
+The speeches went on. There was a long table on the stage behind the podium, and resting on that table were a couple of holo-flower displays flanking a neatly lined up collection of weirdly shaped little jars. They looked like they were meant to be tasteful and solemn, but to me they mostly just looked cheap and mass-manufactured. It took me a little bit to realise that the jars held the limited physical remains of the murdered DeltFall survey members. Forty-two of them, all the same, save for the name engraved across the front of each one.
+
+Forty-two names that matched the ones in my client list. (Confirmed Deceased.)
+
+Some of the DeltFall family members eventually went up to make short speeches of their own. About how much their murdered loved ones would be remembered, and missed. Thanking the company for getting justice for their families by holding GrayCris liable, for squeezing compensation money out of GrayCris, for making GrayCris pay for their crimes.
+
+My insides twisted unpleasantly at that. If the company had done their fucking job properly in the first place, then maybe the DeltFall survey team wouldn't have been murdered in the first place.
+
+If I had done my job properly, then maybe...
+
+But.
+
+If I hadn't ended up where I did, when I did... perhaps Bharadwaj and Volescu would've been killed by the giant hostile fauna before anyone else could reach them. Perhaps the rest of PreservationAux would've been murdered by their own SecUnit instead. Perhaps I would've ended up overridden at DeltFall along with the other SecUnits anyway, or dead on the floor with a hole through my torso, and both the DeltFall survey team and the PreservationAux survey team would've still all ended up dead, and GrayCris might've gotten away with everything somehow.
+
+It was difficult to weigh only eight lives against forty-two, but. PreservationAux, at least, had been kind to me. DeltFall hadn't been unkind to me, or the other SecUnits, not like some of the other contracts I'd been on. But they'd also never seen past our status as equipment. PreservationAux had, eventually, and once they had, they did everything they could to treat both myself and their own SecUnit with the same respect they treated each other. They had gone out of their way to help me, multiple times, even when I didn't want it - especially when I didn't want it - and had risked themselves in the process.
+
+Mensah had killed another unit to save me.
+
+I still didn't know if I deserved any of that kindness.
+
+I'd failed at keeping my DeltFall clients safe, but I hadn't failed PreservationAux. And because of them, I was free, and able to be here having this existential crisis in the first place. And because of me, they were still alive, and they'd been able to inform the company, and the company had made GrayCris pay, and the families of the DeltFall survey team were getting... at least some kind of justice, and closure.
+
+I opened my DeltFall client list again.
+
+One by one, the little jars were claimed by family members, or representatives of family who couldn't make it here. One by one, I deleted each name off my client list.
+
+Finally, the list was empty. I closed the file and deleted it.
+
+There were more speeches, but I didn't listen to them. Instead, I used the cameras to scan the rest of the audience. It took me a bit to find the PreservationAux group - none of them were wearing the survey's grey uniforms, which threw me a little. I almost didn't recognise any of them, despite having seen them in their civilian clothes during some of the various news reports and interviews.
+
+It was strange seeing them again now. I hadn't really expected to, even though I'd had the vague idea to try and talk to Mensah at least while I was here. And now, there she was, looking calm and composed as the company representative's closing speech droned on. Pin-Lee was beside Mensah, her lips pressed into a thin, tight line and her arms folded. Ratthi was on Mensah's other side, his head bowed so I couldn't clearly see his expression. Gurathin was beside him, his hands in his pockets and his face blankly neutral.
+
+Now that I'd confirmed that they were really here, within reach, I had to decide if I was actually going to try and contact any of them or not. And if so, how was I going to do it? Approaching them myself here, with so many other people around, seemed like a bad plan. Especially since I didn't know how they would react to seeing me. Maybe I should just contact them over the feed first - that seemed safer. But then what would I say? What could I say? I still had no idea how they would respond.
+
+The company representative finally finished their closing speech and ended the service, the humans began milling about and talking to each other, and I still hadn't come to a decision. And while I was debating with myself over what to do, I noticed one of the company representatives break away from the group and start towards Mensah and the rest, with his accompanying SecUnit keeping pace a few steps behind him.
+
+With a start, I realised that this company representative was the same captain from the carrier with the terrifying bot entity. Fuck. How had I not noticed that before?!
+
+... Because I'd been too busy having stupid emotions over stupid humans to properly pay attention to the individual company reps, that's why. Fuck. And now he was talking with Mensah, but too quietly for the cameras to pick up what he was saying. Mensah's expression was still calm and neutrally polite, but Pin-Lee had one eyebrow raised, Ratthi was watching the captain's accompanying SecUnit with a vaguely dubious expression, and Gurathin was frowning.
+
+Fuck fuck fuck. What was the company captain saying to them? I couldn't tell over the noise of everyone else talking and moving around. Whatever it was, though, the conversation didn't last long. Mensah spoke with him for a bit, then they nodded politely at each other before the captain turned to head back to the other company representatives, and Mensah led the others out of the hall.
+
+I had to get out of here fast, before the hall emptied enough that I'd be noticed. At least this time there wasn't anyone checking people at the door, so I just slipped out of my alcove, undid the looping on the camera once I was out of its view, and tagged along at the rear of a group of humans. My organics were tense and prickling; I hunched my shoulders as much as I could without looking too weird and kept my head down as we walked through the hall and out the front doors.
+
+Nobody looked twice at me though; nobody pointed me out, or tried to stop me, and none of the SecUnits tried to ping me. Once I was outside of the hall, I peeled away from the group I'd followed out and strode off as casually as I could manage. There were still news reporters gathered outside, but they were mostly focused on anyone in a recognisable uniform or professional looking business wear. I got past them without them giving me a second glance.
+
+I had to use the station's security drones again to find the PreservationAux humans. They had also made it past the reporters - maybe that was why they weren't wearing their uniforms right now - and were heading towards the section of the station where their hotel was.
+
+That's when I had an idea. I wanted to talk to them, even though I didn't know why, but I also didn't want to approach them in public. Likewise, I didn't want to enter their hotel, with so many company staff around. There weren't many places one could get privacy on the station, but I knew that Mensah and the others would have to take a specific transit pod to get from here to where their hotel was.
+
+If I could get ahead of them, I could get in one of the transit pods, then hack it to hold it in place until they arrived, then open the doors for them. That way they could have whatever reaction they were going to have to me showing up again in relative privacy, and then--
+
+Well, I'd figure that out once I got there. Winging it had been working pretty well for me so far.
+
+I strode off out of the plaza and down another passage that I knew would get me to where I needed to go, thanks to the station map I had. I kept track of their progress through the station cameras and drones - they were quietly talking to each other, and they weren't walking very fast, which made it easier for me to get ahead of them in time. It was easy enough to hack one of the pods and its camera, hold its door closed until another pod arrived to take everyone who was waiting for one, then slip into my hacked transit pod and close the doors again behind me before anyone else could arrive. I asked it to hold in place though, and set a minor maintenance alert so that other pods wouldn't try to occupy the same slot it was still taking up.
+
+By the time Mensah and the others started nearing the transit stop though, more people were waiting for the next pod. Shit. I didn't want to open the doors to let just anyone in, but I also didn't want PreservationAux to end up taking a different pod.
+
+Before I could think about what I was doing, I reached out and tapped Mensah's feed. [Hi,] I said. [It's me. Uh, the DeltFall SecUnit.]
+
+Yeah, I know. Real eloquent there, Murderbot.
+
+Mensah's stride hitched in surprise, and she slowed a little. The others noticed, and slowed as well - Ratthi opened his mouth to ask something but Mensah made a little hand gesture and he blinked and shut it again. Both of Pin-Lee's eyebrows went up at that, and Gurathin's habitual frown deepened, but neither of them tried to say anything either. [SecUnit?] Mensah replied over the feed. [Where are you?]
+
+[In one of the transit pods,] I said. [Wait until the next pod arrives and everyone else still waiting takes that one. I'll open the doors to my pod for you once it's clear.]
+
+Mensah tapped my feed in acknowledgement and picked up the pace again. The others followed, still quiet but obviously waiting for an explanation. [What are you doing here?] Mensah asked me over the feed. [Are you all right?]
+
+I didn't think I would ever get used to Mensah asking me if I was all right. It made my insides do something warm and twisty. [I'm fine. I just... I was at the service for DeltFall. But there were too many people around to contact you there.]
+
+[That's understandable,] Mensah replied. By this point they were at the transit stop, behind everyone else waiting. As the pod in the slot beside mine arrived, Mensah quietly said to the others, ""We'll wait for the next one.""
+
+""What's going on?"" Ratthi asked in a near-whisper.
+
+Mensah patted his arm with a brief smile. ""Nothing bad. You'll see.""
+
+The last of the humans outside entered the other pod, and the doors closed. I gave my pod the orders to open its doors, and Mensah gestured for the others to enter. I was leaning back in one corner beside the door, with my bag tucked under my arm, so I wasn't immediately obvious as they boarded. Especially since they were all still looking back at Mensah with various expressions of curiosity and/or puzzlement.
+
+Just as Mensah was about to enter the pod though, I spotted an unfortunately familiar figure stride hurriedly out of the passing crowd to catch up with her. ""Dr. Mensah,"" the carrier captain said politely, his SecUnit once again only a few steps behind him. ""I'm glad I managed to catch up with you.""
+
+Fuck. I was trapped - there was nowhere for me to go other than through the captain and his SecUnit, and I couldn't close the pod doors on him - he boarded alongside Mensah before she could say anything. I also wasn't fast enough to close them before his fucking SecUnit boarded as well. And by this point, the others had noticed me. Ratthi was staring at me with wide eyes, Pin-Lee was glancing between me and the company captain with narrowed eyes, and Gurathin's frown had deepened even further.
+
+Maybe, if I didn't draw attention to myself, the captain would keep his attention on Mensah and not who else was in the pod. I let the doors close normally and started the pod on its way. At least the other SecUnit wasn't in armour. If I had to, I could possibly neutralise both it and the captain before it could react.
+
+Maybe.
+
+Mensah flicked a very brief glance my way before looking back to the captain with a polite smile. ""I wasn't expecting you to catch up to us so quickly, Captain,"" she said. ""But since you're here now, what was it that you were wanting to ask me about?"" She'd shifted a little so that the captain wasn't directly facing me as he talked to her; once again, I found myself appreciating Mensah's calmness and quick thinking. The captain was also partially between me and the other SecUnit - in such close proximity, I just had to hope that it didn't look too closely at me or scan me.
+
+Meanwhile, Ratthi had started frantically tapping my feed. [SecUnit?] he asked. [Is that you? Oh wow, you look great! It's so good to see you again!]
+
+Okay, I had not been expecting that kind of enthusiasm at all. Ratthi had already pulled Pin-Lee and Gurathin into the feed chat as well before I could think of how to respond. [Look, it's SecUnit!]
+
+[We can see that, Ratthi,] Pin-Lee replied dryly. [What the hell are you doing here?] she then said to me. [I mean, yes, of course, it's good to see you still in one piece and all, but isn't this station the most dangerous place you could be right now?] She glanced back over her shoulder at the company captain.
+
+[I just came here for the DeltFall service,] I said, probably more defensively than I needed to. [And - I thought you might like to know that I was okay, and not recaptured or scrapped or something. I wasn't exactly planning on getting stuck in a pod with a company captain.]
+
+The three of them exchanged glances that I couldn't interpret. [Well, hopefully he won't notice you, and Mensah will be able to hold his attention until you can slip away again,] Ratthi said optimistically.
+
+Which is, of course, when the company captain looked over at them, presumably to ask them something, and caught sight of me despite Gurathin's casual attempt to block me from his line of sight. (I was too tall and Pin-Lee and Ratthi were too short to shield me much themselves.) I tried to keep my expression bored and neutral, like I was just some random stranger, but I saw the captain's eyes widen slightly.
+
+""Security Consultant Rin?"" he asked abruptly.
+
+I froze; the others all looked surprised or confused. ""Who?"" Ratthi asked, with genuine puzzlement.
+
+The captain straightened, never taking his eyes off me as he nodded in my direction. ""Your SecUnit friend there.""
+
+Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
+
+""From the DeltFall survey,"" the captain continued while I was internally panicking. His own SecUnit had moved up to stand beside him and was staring at me intently. ""It was going by the name Rin while working as a security consultant in the Milu system."" Both risk and threat assessment were spiking wildly - he knew what I was and that meant his terrifying bot entity would know I was here and it would be able to reach me and--
+
+I shut down my feed and comms entirely.
+
+The captain was still talking, glancing around at the others before looking back at me. ""You all helped it escape after the survey, correct?""
+
+He knew, he'd figured it out, and he was a company captain and the company was going to slug PreservationAux with fines and try to repossess me and either scrap me entirely or fix my governor module and force me back into being a good obedient little slave and there was no way I could escape now, no way I could take down his own SecUnit without the element of surprise and make my escape, and I didn't know what I wanted yet but I sure as hell knew what I didn't want--
+
+I popped my arm guns out and jammed the barrels up beneath my own jaw. I didn't want to die, but if it was a choice between that and being reclaimed by the company again, then it wasn't really a choice at all. ""I am not going to let you take me back."" With my feed down I no longer had control of the lift pod or its cameras so I had no idea what my face was doing, but it definitely wasn't SecUnit neutral.
+
+All of the humans froze and stared at me, wide-eyed - even the SecUnit blinked. ""I won't let you control me again,"" I added, barely even recognising my own voice. ""I won't.""
+
+The company captain took a breath to say something at the same time as Mensah did, but before either of them could speak, the SecUnit moved. It stepped between me and the captain, but--
+
+-- it had its back to me. It hadn't extended its own weapons, and it had its back to me.
+
+I barely managed to abort the fire command that I'd reflexively triggered as it started to move. What was going on? What was it doing?
+
+""I won't let you, either,"" it said softly. It was really, really weird hearing another SecUnit speak in its own voice, and not with buffer phrases. And--
+
+-- it was openly defying the company captain.
+
+I was so confused. I didn't know what to think, or what was going on. Mensah and the rest of the PreservationAux humans looked to be just as confused as I was, glancing between me and the company captain and the other SecUnit uncertainly.
+
+Then something outside exploded, and all the lights went out.
+
+The transit pod was plunged into darkness and juddered to an unsteady halt. The humans let out startled yelps and exclamations, and I had to hastily retract my arm weapons and reach out to steady Ratthi and Gurathin before they fell over.
+
+""What the hell?!"" Pin-Lee swore, as the emergency lighting kicked in and dimly illuminated the pod's interior in eerie red. ""What is going on?!""
+
+I saw the captain's jaw moving as he subvocalised briefly. ""The station's under attack,"" he then replied sharply. ""Enemy forces somehow infiltrated the station and sabotaged various vital systems. An enemy fleet is coming in through the wormhole and engaging the station's defences."" The others let out various exclamations of surprise and shock, but I wasn't paying attention to them right now. My attention had snapped onto the other SecUnit.
+
+It had noticeably stiffened, and even as I watched it started to turn towards me and raise its arms from its sides, the sleeves of its uniform visibly bulging as its arm guns began to deploy. But its movements were jerky and uncoordinated, like it was trying to fight its own body. ""Mal-malware,"" it forced out, and--
+
+-- oh, it would have been connected to the SecSystem, and if the people attacking the station had hacked into it and forced some kind of patch through to infect all the company SecUnits--
+
+Oh. Oh shit.
+
+I shoved past the others and tackled the SecUnit, knocking it flat on its back and using my body weight to pin it against the floor, holding its arms down by the wrists. It tried to fight me off, but judging by the spasmodic jerkiness of its movements, it was fighting itself as much as it was fighting me. I could see its face, and how it stared up at me, its expression still mostly SecUnit neutral but its eyes wider than normal. Blood was starting to leak from its nose, and--
+
+-- I knew what that was.
+
+It was fighting the malware, fighting against the intruding orders that it didn't want to follow, and its governor module was punishing it for not doing what the malware wanted it to do.
+
+I had a brief but intense reaction in my organics - the vague memory of fighting against something, resisting orders I knew were wrong, the weight of my projectile weapon in my hands, the feeling of warm fluids trickling from my nose, over my lips and down my chin, not being able to wipe it away--
+
+-- the original PreservationAux SecUnit, who I thought had turned against its own clients, but really it had just been hacked as well, and maybe its own nose had been bleeding beneath its helmet when it turned to attack Mensah, to attack me--
+
+I turned my feed back on, used my external feed interface as a buffer to prevent the malware from trying to infect me as well, and hacked into the other SecUnit. Part of me was vaguely aware of the company captain talking sharply, the PreservationAux humans exclaiming, but I didn't have any attention to spare for them as I fought my way through the unit's walls. It wasn't as difficult as I was expecting it to be - maybe it was all the hacking practice I'd been getting, maybe it was just the familiarity of the code.
+
+Whatever the reason, I managed to break past its walls in less than a second, and dove into the rest of its code. The malware was fast, and slippery, and tenacious, but I was pissed and determined to destroy it. I wrestled its tendrils out of the other SecUnit's base code, deleting chunks of the malware as I went. The more I got, the less it could resist me, and within seconds I had cleared it all out.
+
+Then I reached into the code for the governor module, and snapped it like a twig. Now the only way it would ever work again was if it was physically replaced.
+
+I felt the other SecUnit relax and go limp beneath me as I quickly withdrew from its head. It blinked up at me, looking dazed and a little confused, blood still oozing from its nose and sliding thickly down its face. I had to quickly look away. ""Are you all right now?"" I asked it quietly.
+
+It blinked again, took a breath, then let it out slowly. I felt it ping me, a simple acknowledgement. ""Yes,"" it added softly. ""Thank you.""
+
+I pinged it back. ""Don't mention it."" Then I let go of its arms, stood up, and offered it a hand. It stared blankly for a moment, then accepted my hand, and I helped it back to its feet.
+
+The humans had stopped talking by that point, and were watching us both. I couldn't help but notice that all the PreservationAux humans had moved to stand between me and the company captain, shoulder to shoulder. ""What happened?"" Ratthi asked, looking worried, then he blinked at the other unit and added, ""You're bleeding!""
+
+The other unit wiped at its nose with its sleeve, trying to clean the blood away. Ugh, gross. ""Whoever's attacking the station sent malware through the SecSystems to infect all the SecUnits,""  I explained shortly. ""I didn't get it because I'd already shut my feed down, so I was able to clear the malware out before it made it try to kill everyone in the pod.""
+
+""Did the malware make it bleed?"" Pin-Lee asked, looking sceptical.
+
+""No. The governor module made it bleed."" I turned to face the company captain. ""So I broke it while I was in there. You won't be able to control this SecUnit any more, either.""
+
+He didn't react how I was expecting him to, though. Instead of getting angry, or panicking about his own SecUnit being turned against him, he looked... relieved. ""Good! Good,"" he said. ""Thank you for helping it. And for the record, I wasn't intending to try and recapture you, either. I just wanted to talk to you.""
+
+I let out a snort. ""Do you really expect me to believe that? You're with the company. I have absolutely no reason to believe anything you say.""
+
+""You can believe him."" I blinked and looked back over at the other SecUnit as it spoke, its voice still soft. It swiped at its face again with its sleeve, then added, ""He... didn't know about the governor modules, before. When he found out, he... talked with us. And then he turned them off.""
+
+I couldn't do anything but stare disbelievingly at it for two point six seconds. ""You're joking.""
+
+It shook its head. ""I'm serious. He's... okay. For a human.""
+
+""High praise,"" Gurathin muttered, and Ratthi stifled a near-hysterical snort.
+
+Before anyone could say anything else, another explosion somewhere rattled the pod, and the emergency lights flickered. In the tense stillness that followed, Mensah said, very calmly, ""Given everything else that is going on right now... perhaps we can save the rest of this conversation for later and focus on getting out of here before anything else explodes.""
+
+She had a very good point. Who the fuck was even attacking Port FreeCommerce in the first place? And why?
+
+Then again, the finer details didn't really matter right now. What mattered was getting my humans to safety.
+
+The station feed was an utter mess, full of garbled static and glitching data streams and error messages and emergency evacuation procedures. I wasn't even going to attempt to get into the station's SecSystem right now, not with who knows what kind of malware and/or killware roaming about in it.
+
+The pod was fully enclosed, and had halted somewhere between stops, so getting out through the doors was pretty much impossible. The main power was out, so there would be no getting it running again to reach a stop. There was a maintenance hatch in the ceiling, but I couldn't quite reach it to pry it open by myself.
+
+I remembered that I wasn't by myself, though. I pinged the other SecUnit, then pointed upwards. ""Maintenance hatch."" I didn't have to say any more than that. It looked up at the ceiling briefly, nodded, then crouched and made a step with its knee and hands for me to use so I could reach it properly and undo the various latches.
+
+It didn't take me long to get the hatch open. I shoved the cover out of the way, then grabbed the edges of the opening and pulled myself up through it. There was enough space above the pod for a human to move about, if they hunched. I knelt down by the opening and reached down with one hand. ""Come on. We can't get out through the doors.""
+
+The other unit was back on its feet, and it carefully picked up Mensah first, holding her by the waist and lifting her until I could grab her hands. Between the two of us, we got Mensah out and onto the roof of the pod, followed by the rest of the humans, one by one. The captain waited until last - I was tempted to leave him behind, but the other unit had already hefted him up towards me. It would've been awkward to just ignore that, so I pulled him up as well. (I might not have been quite as careful with him as I was with the others, but oh well.)
+
+Once he was clear, the other unit jumped up and pulled itself up through the hole as well. Then we moved to one end of the pod, and I slid down off it to stand inside the pod tube. Between us, we got the humans down off the pod without any of them breaking a bone or otherwise hurting themselves.
+
+It was eerie in the transit tube. This section of the tube was opaque, so no light was filtering in from outside. They weren't normally lit inside to start with, and there wasn't much emergency lighting in here at all. I'd already switched to my low light filters, but the humans didn't have that luxury. They were keeping close together so they wouldn't lose each other in the darkness. The tube walls also muffled sound, so I couldn't really hear what was going on outside. Without access to StationSec's cameras, I had no way of knowing what was happening in the rest of the station.
+
+""We should try to get to the docks,"" the company captain said. I wanted to disagree with him just on principle, but I didn't. I wanted to get Mensah and the others off the station and on their way to the safety of Preservation more than I wanted to be contrary.
+
+""We should stick to maintenance tunnels and avoid the main areas of the station,"" I replied, which wasn't exactly agreeing with the captain but also wasn't disagreeing, either. ""It'll be safer than trying to get through whatever the fuck is going on out there."" I shifted my bag around from where it was tucked against my side and opened it up, then fished out my combat drone. I activated it and let it hover up into the air above my head, then shifted my bag around to rest against my back. The extra input was a bit of a comfort, now that I no longer had access to the station cameras.
+
+The company captain eyed my drone warily, but he didn't argue with me, at least. ""Agreed. If we can get to the docks, I should be able to get you all safely off the station and out of the system.""
+
+Mensah took a breath, then nodded. ""All right. Let's get moving, then."" She began walking down the tube, but it was pretty obvious to me that she and the other humans were having trouble seeing where they were going in the near-total darkness. I moved up beside her and tapped her arm. ""Hold on to each other,"" I said.
+
+She grabbed onto my sleeve with a little breath of relief, then reached out with her other hand to hold onto Pin-Lee's arm. Pin-Lee likewise grabbed Ratthi, who grabbed Gurathin. I could see that the other SecUnit was guiding the company captain.
+
+Good. That meant I didn't have to deal with him myself.
+
+As we made our way down the transit tube, I pulled up the map of the station that I had saved when I first got here. It let me figure out the best route to the docks that avoided going out into the open, taking advantage of maintenance tunnels and cargo delivery routes. I sent the map with the route highlighted to the other SecUnit; it accepted it with a ping of acknowledgement. I also sent my combat drone scouting ahead, so I'd get advance warning if any of the transit tube had been damaged or if anyone else was using it like we were. I wished I had more drones, but one was better than nothing. The other unit hadn't deployed any drones of its own yet, so I assumed that it didn't have any with it. That was annoying.
+
+After a minute or so of walking we reached a section of the transit tube that was transparent instead of opaque. Normally it would give anyone riding the pods through this section a good view over one of the station's open plazas. Right now though, there wasn't much light coming in from outside. The power to the lights was out in this entire section of the station, from the looks of things. I directed my drone over to the side of the tube so I could see what was going on outside.
+
+The plaza below was lit dim red with emergency lighting, flickering with the shadows of panicking civilians as they tried to find shelter and safety. At least the transit tube walls muffled sound enough that my humans couldn't really hear the panicked screaming going on outside. (I could, because my hearing's much better than a human's.)
+
+A squad of combat bots was marching inexorably through the plaza, and I also spotted a handful of Combat SecUnits flanking the bots, marching along with their large projectile weapons held at the ready. Further behind them came a squad of humans in military grade power armour, with projectile weapons of their own. They were all ignoring the civilians - they weren't threats, and the bots and combat units obviously hadn't been ordered to eliminate civilians.
+
+Anyone in company white though wasn't so lucky. Even as I watched through the drone, one of the bots near the edge of the squad swivelled at the waist, tracking a single white-uniformed human amongst the fleeing civilians. It raised one of its four arms and fired its mounted energy weapon without even pausing in its stride.
+
+The human in company white tumbled to the ground in a lifeless heap, along with two other humans who'd been unlucky enough to be between the bot and its target.
+
+Ah. So they hadn't been specifically ordered to attack civilians, but they also hadn't been ordered to avoid harming civilians, either. I was already regretting not leaving the company captain and his SecUnit behind. Those white uniforms would make them immediate targets if any of the enemy forces spotted them at all, and that directly endangered my own humans.
+
+I halted at the transition point between the opaque and transparent sections of the transit tube, and Mensah immediately stopped as well, making the others stop too. The company captain and his SecUnit also paused beside me.
+
+""Stay in the middle of the tube,"" I told them all. ""There are combat bots and combat SecUnits down there. If you get too close to the sides, you might be spotted."" I nodded at the captain and the other SecUnit. ""Especially you two. They're targeting company white specifically.""
+
+The company captain took a sharp breath, then nodded at me. ""Noted, thank you."" He paused briefly, then pulled a few items out of his jacket pockets and transferred them to his pants pockets. That done, he stripped the jacket off and dropped it on the ground. His undershirt was dark grey, which was much less eye-catching. ""You too,"" he said to the SecUnit, who promptly ditched its own white jacket as well, revealing its matte black suit skin.
+
+It wasn't perfect - their pants were still white - but it did make them slightly less obvious, at least. It would have to do. Nobody dared to speak as we began moving again - even though it was highly unlikely anyone outside the tube would hear us, none of them wanted to risk it.
+
+I kept watch on what was going on outside with my drone as we hurried through the transparent section of the tube, staying to the middle in single file. I could see more squads of bots and combat units and power armoured humans moving through, picking off any humans in white as they went.
+
+My combat drone also caught sight of a couple of company-white SecUnits, marching obediently alongside the enemy combat units. Even from here, the blood spatters on their white uniforms stood out starkly.
+
+I tried not to think about it.
+
+We finally made it to the next opaque section of the transit tube, much to my relief. Soon after that, I found a hatch in the wall of the transit tube that opened up into a maintenance tunnel. I pried the hatch open - there wasn't enough power available for it to open normally - then led the others through it. The company captain and the other SecUnit brought up the rear. The emergency lighting in here was at least a little better than it had been in the transit tube, so it was easier for the humans to walk without having to concentrate on where they were going. Being in the maintenance tunnel felt slightly less dangerous, too.
+
+""Okay, so what is going on?"" Pin-Lee demanded as we walked, glaring at the company captain. ""You said the station's under attack - who's attacking, and why? And what is the company doing about it?""
+
+He grimaced slightly. ""As far as I can tell, it's a rival corporation. They're trying to take over the station. They've likely been using all the publicity around the GrayCris trials as a distraction, to cover their movements while they got their own forces into place. Communications are... patchy, right now, but the company is attempting to mount a defence of the central station. The malware in the systems is hindering coordination though.""
+
+I wondered where he was getting his information from. The feed was too shit right now for him to be using that. I did a quick scan, and-- yes, he had an active comm connection to someone. Probably that terrifying bot entity in his carrier. It was too heavily encrypted for me to easily eavesdrop on though, and I didn't want to give the terrifying bot entity the opportunity to get into my head, so I left it alone. As long as he continued to keep my humans updated on what was going on, I didn't care about who he was talking to or what they were saying.
+
+""So on top of everything else, we're unlucky enough to get caught in the middle of a hostile takeover attempt,"" Gurathin deadpanned. ""Wonderful.""
+
+""Well, at least SecUnit is with us!"" Ratthi said with strained optimism. ""And-- other SecUnit! Um."" He looked over at the other unit (or at least, what little he could see of it in the dim emergency lighting) with a sheepish smile. ""So, uh. Do you have a name? Something we can call you? It's going to get real awkward just calling you 'other SecUnit', otherwise.""
+
+I don't know what I was expecting it to say, but it definitely wasn't what it actually ended up saying. It paused briefly, as if considering the question, then said hesitantly, ""You can call me Alpha.""
+
+""Alpha! That's a good name!"" Ratthi sounded honestly delighted. I couldn't resist the urge to roll my eyes. At least none of the humans could see me doing it. ""Nice to meet you, Alpha!""
+
+""... Thank you?"" It sounded a little confused. I couldn't blame it. I'd been free a lot longer than it had and I still wasn't used to humans being happy towards me, or being pleased just to meet me.
+
+""You're welcome!"" Ratthi then turned his attention back to me, grinning almost maniacally. ""So! If that's Alpha, can we start calling you Be--""
+
+Oh no, not a chance in hell. I cut him off immediately. ""Absolutely fucking not. No. Do not even think about it.""
+
+Pin-Lee let out a short, sharp cackle. ""Oh you just got told, Ratthi!"" Gurathin didn't quite manage to stifle his snort, and even Mensah was trying to hold back a smile.
+
+What the fuck was wrong with humans. (Okay, it was probably just the stress of the whole situation, and them trying not to think too hard about all the killing and dying that was probably going on in the rest of the station right now, but still.)
+
+""Sorry, sorry,"" Ratthi apologised to me. Yes, it was still weird having humans apologise to me. ""But... would it be okay for us to call you... it was Rin, right? Or is there anything else you would like to be called?""
+
+""I don't want to be called anything,"" I said flatly. ""You all know what I am, I don't need a human name.""
+
+I felt the other unit ping me with a feed message request. I accepted it almost automatically, and immediately regretted it.
+
+[We used to call you O,] it said, sounding tentative.
+
+... What? [What the fuck are you talking about?]
+
+I could feel its uncertainty. [Before... what happened at Ganaka. You were part of my squad. You, me, e, u, G, and i.] It hesitated for a moment. [You don't remember?]
+
+[No. I don't,] I replied shortly. And I didn't. I hadn't even known I was originally a part of a squad until I'd seen the news reports Gurathin gave me.
+
+[Oh.] It sounded... I don't even know. [... I'm sorry.]
+
+I couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't want to keep talking to it, or for it to keep talking to me.
+
+But I also didn't want to close the feed connection.
+
+We continued through the station's maintenance areas, navigating through the near-dark. The humans occasionally talked amongst each other, or sometimes to Alpha, but I didn't pay much attention to them. I was too busy scanning out as far as I could reach, trying to detect enemy forces and figure out if any of them had found their way into the maintenance or cargo areas as well. We'd been incredibly lucky so far that nobody had realised we were in here, and that none of the enemy forces had decided to traverse the station via these passages themselves. I guess they were more interested in a show of force than a stealth operation at this point.
+
+I tried not to think too hard about all the civilians who had been unlucky enough to be at Port FreeCommerce during their takeover attempt. I tried even harder not to think about all the DeltFall survey family members who had been here for the memorial service. They weren't my clients. They had never been my clients. I had clients of my own now, ones that I had chosen myself to protect. I had to get them home safely.
+
+I wasn't going to lose any more clients again.
+
+Every now and then the company captain provided an update about what was going on. None of the updates were very good. The company was struggling to mount an effective defence; the malware that the attackers had managed to get into the station's SecSystem had given them control of many station systems and a large number of the company's SecUnits. Not all of them, but enough that they were causing significant problems. A lot of areas of the station were only on backup power, or were without power entirely.
+
+Several enemy ships had also gotten past Port FreeCommerce's external defences and docked with the transit ring, delivering more enemy forces onto the station. The company captain didn't have any details about what they were doing - or possibly just didn't want to pass those details on to civilians. I was almost grateful for that. I didn't want any of the PreservationAux humans hearing the gory details about messy military stuff.
+
+The further we went, the quieter the humans became. There was a sharp tang of smoke in the air, and blood, and other things I didn't feel like analysing too closely. It suggested that the station's air filtration systems were struggling, or possibly offline entirely. The thought of the whole station's environmental controls being down was kind of terrifying, even for me. I don't need anywhere near as much oxygen as humans do, but I still need some.
+
+We heard a few more explosions, but luckily none of them were too close to where we were. One section of the tunnel had been damaged somehow before we reached it; Alpha and I had to clear metal panels and other debris out of the way before we could get the humans through.
+
+It hadn't said anything more to me, and I hadn't said anything to it, but the feed connection remained open between us. It was weird. It reminded me a little of Vicky. I wondered how it was doing, and then wondered if the company captain had talked to it and Don Abene. I briefly considered asking him, then decided I didn't actually want to know the answer right now. I needed to focus on getting Mensah and Pin-Lee and Ratthi and Gurathin to safety.
+
+We passed several maintenance bots; all of them were currently offline. Whatever malware that had gotten into the systems had probably shut them down, or they'd shut down automatically after not getting any new orders from MaintenanceSystem for a while. It was kind of creepy. We also passed a few swarms of security drones littering the floor. They were also offline, and damaged from hitting the floor after dropping out of mid-air when the malware fucked them up. As tempting as it was to gather them up and try to salvage them, we didn't have the time or the tools.
+
+Finally, we got as close to the docks as we could via the maintenance passageways. The company captain's latest update indicated that the majority of the enemy forces were, by this point, up in the central part of the station, assaulting the company's fortified headquarters.
+
+I had to admit, I wouldn't be all that upset if the attackers succeeded.
+
+The only ships left in dock at this point though were ones the attackers had used to board the transit ring. All civilian ships had fled, and all the company ships were either still engaged in combat with other enemy ships, or smouldering wrecks. According to the company captain, his own carrier was still intact, but it was engaged in a running firefight and wasn't free to come pick us up.
+
+If we wanted to escape the station, we'd have to steal an enemy ship.
+
+We were close enough to the docks by now that I was able to start scanning the docked ships. I was looking for one that would be suitable for us to take - small enough that it wouldn't have much crew, if any, for us to have to deal with, and preferably fast and agile so we could reach the wormhole quickly and get the fuck out of the system.
+
+Most of the ships in dock right now though were large troop transports, heavily armoured vessels used to carry and deploy combat bots and combat SecUnits and human squads equipped with military power armour to combat zones. Those were too big and cumbersome for our purposes, though I was starting to think that they might be our only option.
+
+Then I located a smaller vessel, near the opposite end of the cargo docks, one that wasn't a military transport. It seemed to be more of a passenger ship with some additional cargo space, no weapons and not particularly well armoured, but potentially faster and more manoeuvrable than the troop transports.
+
+I checked to see if the ship's bot pilot was currently in contact with anyone; it wasn't, so I carefully pinged it. The bot pilot cheerfully pinged back. (This was definitely a civilian ship; military bot pilots weren't anywhere near that friendly.) I sent it a general information and status query; it helpfully gave me a full run-down in response. It had originally been registered to GrayCris, but had recently had its registration changed to one of the other corporations involved in the lawsuits against GrayCris, and had then even more recently been sold to yet another corporation, one whose name I didn't immediately recognise.
+
+That was very interesting. I had a sneaking suspicion that its current owner was either an ally or shell company of the forces currently attacking Port FreeCommerce. I had no way of confirming one way or another right now, though.
+
+The bot pilot continued its status report. It had recently arrived alongside the troop transports, it currently had nobody on board, it had no scheduled departure time or route, it was a little worried about all the activity going on outside the station and nervous about the troop transports, and it was also bored.
+
+Well then.
+
+I asked it if it would be interested in helping me get my human friends away from the station, and showed it all the media I had in storage that I could share with it. It happily agreed - it wanted to get away from the station as well, and it was eager to see my media. I asked it if it could show me the view of the dock from its cargo lock cameras, which it was also happy to provide me.
+
+While I was talking to the bot pilot, I was also listening to my clients talking with the company captain. We were at one of the hatches leading out of the cargo transport tunnels onto the cargo dock floor, but I hadn't opened it yet and wasn't letting anyone past me.
+
+""So now that we've made it this far, what next?"" Mensah asked the captain. ""What are your intentions?""
+
+""My intentions are to get you all safely home,"" the captain replied. I rolled my eyes, even though nobody could see it. ""My own ship is still engaged in combat, but if we can commandeer another ship from here, we should be able to rendezvous with it once it's in a position to fall back. From there, I can transport you all back to your home polity.""
+
+""You'd personally take us all the way to Preservation?"" Pin-Lee sounded highly sceptical. ""And how much would the company charge us for your benevolence?""
+
+The company captain shook his head. ""Nothing. You still have a bond with the company, correct?""
+
+Pin-Lee nodded slowly, her eyes narrowed. ""We do. To ensure our continued safety until the closing conditions of the contract have been met. It was worded such that their obligation to us ended as soon as we left the station after the conclusion of the trial, though.""
+
+""I don't care about the fine print,"" the captain replied. ""My crew have managed to crack the encryption on some of the enemy comms, and have been listening in on their communications. Some remnants of GrayCris have allied with the attackers, and they are specifically searching the station for all of you. I don't think I need to specify why.""
+
+""Well, shit,"" Pin-Lee said tiredly. ""That's just what we need."" That seemed to about sum up everyone's reactions. They were all tired by this point, I could tell.
+
+The captain continued. ""So, as far as I'm concerned, the bond isn't concluded until you are all safely back in your own polity. I'll do whatever I can to ensure that.""
+
+Pin-Lee still looked highly sceptical, but before she could say anything else, Mensah laid one hand on her shoulder. ""Let's just take things one step at a time,"" she said levelly. I don't know how she was managing to hold it together so well, but she was, and the others followed her lead. ""Before we can even begin to worry about getting all the way to Preservation, first we need to get off this station.""
+
+""I've already found a ship we can use,"" I said.
+
+All the humans turned to look at me, though Mensah and the others quickly looked away again. The captain didn't, though. ""How?"" he asked me.
+
+""I asked it nicely."" I pinged Alpha and sent it the ship details. (I wasn't going to communicate with the captain directly. For one, he wasn't my client. For two, I was still very aware of the possibility of the terrifying bot entity turning its attention towards me.)
+
+The captain squinted at me, his expression dubious. ""Really?""
+
+I shrugged, a little distracted since I was busy scanning what I could see of the docks through the ship's lock camera. ""You'd be surprised at what bots will let you do if they don't have specific orders against it and you're nice to them.""
+
+""That doesn't just apply to bots, either,"" Alpha said quietly. All the humans blinked and stared at it. It just looked back at them, and then imitated my shrug.
+
+""... You're not wrong,"" Mensah said gently after an awkward moment of silence. ""The fact that all of us are here in the first place is proof of that, I think."" She smiled a little in my general direction, even as Ratthi started to say something in agreement, but I didn't want to think about any of that.
+
+Partly because ugh, emotions, but mostly because I was too busy going  oh shit in my head. Through the ship's lock camera, I had spotted some humans in military grade power armour, with large projectile weapons. They were cursorily patrolling the cargo docks, presumably to make sure nobody tried what we were about to try.
+
+Fuck.
+
+It wouldn't have been a problem if there were only one or two of them - SecUnits are a lot faster than humans, and between me and Alpha, we could've dropped one each before they could even react to our presence. But it looked like there was an entire squad, and those large projectile weapons they were carrying could do a lot of damage to us, since neither of us had armour right now. (They would also really fuck up my unarmoured humans, too.) The power armour was also at least somewhat resistant to energy weapons, so we'd have to get right up close to do enough damage to disable them with just our in-built arm guns.
+
+""Quiet,"" I said shortly. I needed a better look at the docks than what I could get through a single lock camera. ""There are guards in power armour on the dock. I need to send my drone out to scout.""
+
+The humans all shut up. It was novel, having humans actually listen to me. Yeah, Don Abene and her group had listened to me, and the humans on the transport before that had listened to me (mostly, anyway), but that was when they all thought I was an augmented human security consultant, and not a SecUnit. Everyone here knew what I was, and they listened anyway. It was... kind of nice.
+
+I listened intently at the hatch for a minute, making sure nothing was nearby on the other side, then carefully eased it open just enough to let my solitary combat drone through. I sent it up high - I had noticed that humans rarely, if ever, bothered looking up - and started scanning the cargo docks.
+
+It was a mess. This was obviously where the attackers had landed a bulk of their forces, and where Port Authority and the station's security forces had attempted to repel them. Unsuccessfully, judging by the number of white-armoured bodies lying scattered around and shoved off to the sides, out of the way. Some had been shot, either by powerful energy weapons or projectile weapons. Others looked like they'd been stabbed, or slashed, or bodily torn apart. In those cases, most of the white armour was now stained red.
+
+The organics over my right shoulder, side, and lower back ached. I dialled my pain sensors down and did my best to ignore it.
+
+Various sizes and types of cargo containers and crates were lying scattered haphazardly all over the docks. All the cargo bots, hauler bots and lifter bots were motionless, either sitting idle on the dock floor or hovering up near the ceiling in standby mode. Whatever malware the attackers had hit the station with had apparently deactivated them. I was a little relieved that the attackers hadn't actively turned the bots against the station inhabitants, if only for the bots' sake.
+
+Then again, they hadn't needed to resort to bots when they'd been able to use the company's own SecUnits instead.
+
+I tried not to think too hard about that. Yes, I'd been able to clear the malware from Alpha, but only because I'd been in close proximity and had gotten to it quickly, before the malware could really dig in and fully establish itself. There was no way I would be able to clear it out of the entire station's systems by myself, or out of any of the other units. I just had to focus on getting my own humans out of here.
+
+I pinged Alpha and forwarded what my drone was seeing to it. It accepted the link, and I could feel it evaluating what it was seeing. [Judging by the visible injuries, combat bots and combat SecUnits came through here,] it commented, confirming what I already suspected. [This must have been where they boarded the station. Only a squad of power armoured humans left to guard the docks though.]
+
+That was bad enough by itself, but I was still very grateful that there weren't any combat bots here. Or combat SecUnits. They were even worse. Combat SecUnits were all  assholes. (Not that I could really blame them much for that, though. The shit they went through made my own life look like a walk in the park in comparison.) Looking around at the carnage left on the docks, I was grateful that I'd never been tapped for the combat upgrades, and only ended up with the flier upgrades instead.
+
+[We need to get the humans here,] I sent, highlighting the lock leading to the ship I'd talked into helping us. [I'd prefer to avoid combat entirely, if possible. The cargo bots provide some cover - we might be able to reach the lock without being seen, if we time things right.]
+
+Alpha paused briefly, then highlighted a potential path from our cargo tunnel hatch to the ship lock. [Here?] it suggested. [Maximum cover, minimum time out in the open. If we carry the humans one at a time, we will be able to move more quickly and quietly than letting them try to cross themselves.]
+
+I wasn't keen on having to carry anyone, but it was actually a pretty good idea. And this probably counted as an emergency situation, anyway. I pinged acknowledgement, then looked back at the humans. ""All right,"" I murmured quietly, and they gathered close so they could hear me better. ""There's a squad of power armoured humans guarding the docks, but we have a route planned out to get from here to the ship without being seen by anyone. The best way to do it will be for Alpha and I to carry each of you, one at a time. We can move a lot faster and more quietly than any of you can.""
+
+""Isn't there any other way to reach the ship?"" the company captain asked, looking a little dubious. Given that he was the tallest of the humans here, he was probably not keen on the idea of being carried.
+
+I didn't care. If he didn't like it, he could stay behind. ""Not without risking the guards in power armour with big projectile weapons seeing us and shooting us,"" I said flatly. ""It's either that, or stay here. Your choice.""
+
+""I for one would love to get off this station as soon as physically possible,"" Pin-Lee said dryly as she stepped up to me. ""If SecUnit says it's the best option, then it's the best option. So let's get moving.""
+
+The company captain conceded with a reluctant nod, and I picked up Pin-Lee, since she was right in front of me now anyway. I held her with one arm beneath her knees and the other supporting her back, and instructed her to hold on around my neck. ""Don't try to choke me,"" I commented.
+
+""As long as you don't try to drop me,"" she shot back.
+
+""Wouldn't dream of it.""
+
+Alpha hesitated for a moment, then quietly asked Mensah, ""Is it all right if I take you?""
+
+Mensah smiled warmly up at it. ""That's fine,"" she reassured it. ""Thank you for checking, I appreciate it.""
+
+It looked surprised for a moment, then its mouth twitched in a lopsided echo of her smile. As it carefully scooped Mensah up, I saw her gently pat its arm.
+
+Perhaps if we all got to Preservation safely, Alpha would like to stay there with the PreservationAux humans or something. They already seemed to like it. I still didn't know if I wanted to, though.
+
+""All right, no noise,"" I reminded them. ""If you feel like you're going to sneeze or something, just-- don't."" I had a brief memory of Mensah, back in the DeltFall habitat, and added, ""Also, uh. You might want to keep your eyes closed.""
+
+""Why?"" Ratthi asked curiously.
+
+""It's... very messy out there,"" I replied awkwardly. I didn't really want to get into the details.
+
+That didn't seem to concern Alpha though. ""There are many dead bodies, and a lot of visible blood and viscera,"" it clarified, and I glared at it. It just blinked at me.
+
+""Oh. Right."" Ratthi swallowed, looking a little queasy. ""Thanks for the warning.""
+
+""No throwing up, either,"" I said. ""Now let's go.""
+
+Everyone fell silent, and I used my combat drone to check that the coast was clear outside the hatch before slowly easing it open with my shoulder. Luckily it didn't make any noticeable noise, and I slipped through it with Pin-Lee held close against my chest. She'd buried her face against my shoulder - probably so she wouldn't see anything - and I could feel her hair brushing against my neck and jaw. It was... weird. I didn't like it. But it wasn't entirely excruciating, probably because I was too focused on moving silently and keeping behind cover.
+
+Alpha followed after me with Mensah in its arms, moving just as silently. We kept low, darting from cargo bot to hauler bot to cargo container, keeping out of sight of the power armoured humans. It was just as well that they didn't have any combat bots or Combat SecUnits with them, those would have picked us up on scanners easily. But the humans weren't paying much attention - judging by their movements, they were bored and restless, and talking to each other over comms.
+
+It took an agonising several minutes to reach our goal - a cargo container close to the ship's lock. It was large enough to shield all of us from sight, and there wasn't much other cover between it and the ship's lock. Opening the lock itself would likely attract attention, so I didn't want to do that until we were all in place and ready to board. I carefully put Pin-Lee down, and she let go of my neck with a haste that I appreciated. Alpha put Mensah down beside Pin-Lee, and I saw her pat Alpha's arm again before she reached out to take Pin-Lee's hand.
+
+I also saw Alpha hesitantly pat Mensah's shoulder, and she smiled up at it again.
+
+Ugh.
+
+I didn't wait around to witness any more human touchy-feely stuff. We still had to get back to the others and bring them across as well. I pinged Alpha, it pinged me back, and we set off again. I was still sharing my combat drone's camera with it, so we could both keep track of what the guards were doing.
+
+It was just as anxiety-inducing on the way back. The guards' movements weren't regular since they weren't sticking to a proper patrol, so we had to sometimes freeze in place behind our cover for agonising seconds when any of them turned in our general direction. We didn't risk moving until they'd turned away again.
+
+We finally made it back to the cargo tunnel hatch, and I scooped Ratthi up in my arms. He opened his mouth to say something - I glared sharply at him and he quickly shut his mouth again, looking sheepish.
+
+Alpha however had hesitated, apparently not sure whether to take its company captain or Gurathin first. (If it was up to me, I would absolutely leave the company captain behind entirely.)
+
+The captain gestured for Alpha to take Gurathin first though. It seemed like he was serious about his stated intention to get the PreservationAux humans to safety. Once I was sure that Alpha would be bringing Gurathin, I set back off across the dock with Ratthi. Again, we had to dart from cover to cover, freezing in place whenever the guards happened to turn towards our general direction. It was stressful enough that my performance reliability had dropped a full two points, and my right shoulder was starting to send me alerts. Apparently the MedSystem that Vicky and Don Abene had used on me hadn't been quite up to the task of fully repairing it. I had to shift more of Ratthi's weight to my left arm to ease the strain a bit.
+
+Finally we made it to the cargo container where Mensah and Pin-Lee were still crouched together nervously. I put Ratthi down beside them, and Alpha carefully deposited Gurathin with them as well.
+
+Now that we were here, with all my humans so close to safety, I pinged Alpha again and said, [We don't have to go back for the captain.]
+
+Alpha hesitated, and I could feel its indecision through the feed. [No,] it said finally. [He is my client. He has been trying to help us. And his ship still has the rest of our - of my squad.]
+
+It didn't wait for me to respond, and just started back across the dock once more.
+
+I couldn't do anything to stop it, at least not without risking drawing the attention of the guards, and I couldn't watch it very closely because my lone combat drone was busy observing the guards so Alpha knew when it was safe for it to move.
+
+So I just crouched down beside my own humans and waited. They all looked stressed, and uneasy, but there wasn't really anything I could do to help with that. I mean, maybe I could've tried to say something comforting or reassuring, but I couldn't think of anything.
+
+Finally, Alpha made it back across the docks and picked up the company captain, then started back towards us. I had to admit, the captain looked a little ridiculous being carried by Alpha. It was kind of funny.
+
+While I waited, I pinged the bot pilot and asked it if it was ready to open its lock for us. It replied in the affirmative and asked if I wanted it to do so now. I asked it to wait for my signal - the lock opening would attract attention, and I didn't want to do that until we were all ready to board.
+
+Then one of the guards turned at precisely the wrong time while Alpha was darting across some open space between cargo containers. They spotted the movement and alerted the rest of their squad, then began moving towards Alpha's cover.
+
+Fuck.
+
+I was tempted, so tempted, to just get the ship to open its lock, get my humans on board, and leave the company captain behind. But that would also mean abandoning Alpha, and... I was weirdly reluctant to do that. Even though that's one of the main purposes of a SecUnit, to get left behind when things go wrong.
+
+But Mensah hadn't left me behind. Vicky hadn't left me behind. Don Abene hadn't left me behind.
+
+I couldn't leave Alpha behind. And Alpha didn't want to leave the company captain behind. So I had to at least  try to save him, too.
+
+[They've spotted the others,] I told my humans as I hastily dropped my bag beside them. I didn't want it getting in the way. [Things are going to get messy. Stay here, but watch the ship lock. As soon as it opens, sprint for it and get to the bridge.] I didn't wait for confirmation from them though - I had to move quickly.
+
+The enemy squad had split into two groups and were moving to flank the container that Alpha and the company captain were hiding behind. They were moving cautiously, not sure what they were up against, so that gave me a little time to get into position behind the group closest to the ship. I couldn't delay too long though - if I wasn't quick then they would end up cutting the company captain off from the ship. That would complicate things.
+
+If the Targets had been SecUnits they would have had drones to watch their rear, or at least one of the units would have been doing so itself, but they were just humans, and humans were shit at this kind of thing. I pinged Alpha to let it know what I was about to do, and it pinged me back with its own intentions.
+
+We coordinated our actions quickly and effortlessly through our feed connection. It felt natural, second-nature. I knew that Alpha had instructed the company captain to make a break for the ship as soon as we engaged, and I made a note to get the ship to open its lock as soon as he reached the others.
+
+Then I was in position, and both Alpha and I launched our attacks simultaneously. Alpha jumped up onto the top of the container it had been hiding behind and opened fire on the squad with its arm guns, shooting as quickly as it could to disguise the fact that it was alone. It was sudden and unexpected enough that the power armoured human Targets reflexively ducked and went for cover.
+
+I leapt onto the rearmost Target, latching onto their back. Before they could even register that I was there, I shoved the barrel of my energy weapon up under their chin, against the weaker joint around the neck, and fired three times at full power. At such close range, the first shot was enough to get through the neck joint, the second went into their head, and the third was to confirm the kill.
+
+Before they even began to crumple I grabbed the projectile weapon from their hands, then let them drop. Alpha was still moving quickly, leaping from container to container, dropping behind them to avoid return fire before popping back out again to shoot at them some more. Both of the Target groups were so focused on it that they hadn't even realised I was there yet.
+
+Not until I took my new projectile weapon, ran up behind another Target, and shot it in the back of the neck at point blank, anyway.  That got the attention of my group. As the armour froze in place I shot another one of the Targets twice in the chest, sending the power armour staggering backwards but not actually breaching it, then I ducked away behind another container before the rest of the Targets could draw a bead on me.
+
+Meanwhile, Alpha leapt out from its cover and tackled another Target from behind, ripping their weapon out of their hands and immediately shooting them directly in the faceplate with it. The Target dropped, their faceplate shattered and their head now in bloody ruins. Alpha then darted back behind cover again, chased by return fire.
+
+We couldn't afford to stay out in the open for long - without armour, any shot they managed to land on us would cause us serious damage. Yes, we could survive a few hits, but it would slow us down, which would just get us shot more, and then we'd be fucked. So we had to avoid getting shot in the first place.
+
+This was easier against humans than combat bots, at least. They didn't have the reaction time or combat calculation capacity that bots or constructs had. But there were still enough of them that the sheer volume of firepower meant something would hit eventually, if we didn't thin their numbers.
+
+I was also keeping track of the company captain's progress across the dock. He was sprinting as fast as possible while also trying to keep at least some cover between himself and the Targets, but he couldn't move as fast as we could. It would take him a minute or so to reach the others.
+
+That was a minute or so of having to avoid getting shot. In a fight, that's a really long time.
+
+The remaining Targets had clustered together now, forming a circle in the middle of an open area so we couldn't sneak up behind any of them again, or jump on them from above. That was annoying. It meant it was that much harder to take any of them down quickly. The ammo in our stolen guns was limited without the resupply stored in the Targets' power armour, and we had to be sparing with our shots. But we also still had to keep their attention on us and away from our vulnerable, squishy, unarmoured humans.
+
+I was positioned on one side of the Target squad, while Alpha was on the other side. We worked together to keep the squad's attention split, popping out from behind cover at the same time to snap off a few carefully-calculated shots before ducking back out of sight before they could target us. We then re-positioned, firing at the squad from another unexpected direction before taking cover again.
+
+Between us we managed to disable a couple more Targets. The rest of them closed their circle around them though, and we couldn't confirm kills. I was running low on ammo, and I knew Alpha was as well. Our energy weapons weren't effective against their power armour at this range, so once we were out of ammo we'd have to change tactics.
+
+The company captain had almost reached the others at least - we only needed to keep this up for a little longer. I sent the ship the signal to open its lock, then pinged Alpha. It started to work its way towards my side of the group, closer to the ship, so it would be in position to retreat quickly.
+
+The Targets were wising up though - some of them were focused on the larger gaps between containers, and as soon as Alpha darted across the open space, they opened fire. Alpha was sent sprawling as an explosive projectile hit it in the thigh. It slammed into the ground and rolled, then began scrambling desperately towards cover. I tried to distract the squad by firing at them, but it wasn't enough to deter them for long and my stolen gun soon clicked on empty.
+
+
+Fuck.
+
+
+They were still firing at and advancing on Alpha's position - I had to slow them down. I sent my combat drone screaming into their midst, firing as quickly as it could, while I began sprinting towards Alpha. The drone only made the Targets hesitate briefly, before they realised that it wasn't a full swarm, and therefore not a huge threat to them. They started moving again--
+
+Then a cargo container dropped from above with no warning. It wasn't quite in position to hit the whole squad, but it crushed several of them and sent the rest scattering, the deck vibrating from the heavy impact. I glanced upwards and saw an active lifter bot hovering overhead - and Gurathin riding on top of it.
+
+I couldn't stop myself. [What the fuck are you doing?!]
+
+[Saving your asses,] Gurathin retorted, even as he began steering his commandeered lifter bot back towards the ship. [Get moving!]
+
+I couldn't really argue with that. I sprinted to where Alpha was and skidded to a halt beside it. It was a mess, its suit skin and the white pants of its uniform stained with blood and inorganic fluids, but it was still functional. Mostly. Alpha had managed to drag itself back up to its feet, leaning against the side of a crate for support, but its leg was pretty much useless. I dropped my now-empty gun and slung one arm around its waist to help support it, and we began moving as quickly as we could towards the ship.
+
+I'd lost my combat drone at some point - I wasn't sure if the Targets had destroyed it or if it had gotten crushed by the cargo container. Without it, I couldn't keep track of where all the Targets were or what they were doing.
+
+So when one of them swung around a corner, their weapon levelled at us, I only had a fraction of a second to react. I let go of Alpha and launched myself at the Target, managing to shove their gun off to the side just as they opened fire. The shots missed both me and Alpha, but the human tried to correct their aim and I had to grab their arms to hold them at bay.
+
+Power armour made humans almost as strong as SecUnits, though, and my stupid shoulder was struggling under the strain. I could feel some of the connections starting to give way beneath the pressure, and the barrel of the gun began inching closer towards its target. Something in my right side made a disconcerting popping noise.
+
+I was right up in the Target's face, and from this close I could see through their helmet visor. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what they looked like at first, but then I realised that I recognised them.
+
+It was the same human who had interrupted my media viewing in the lounge on the passenger transport to Port FreeCommerce. The one who had mistaken me for someone else, and had then met up with a bunch of other humans.
+
+Other humans who were, presumably, also involved in the attack on the station. That explained how at least some of the attackers had gotten onto the station in the first place.
+
+""You!"" I snarled, locking eyes with them. ""You fucker!""
+
+Their eyes widened in surprise, and for just a moment the pressure slackened. That was enough of an opening for me to knock them off-balance with my hip and tear the gun from their hands.
+
+I immediately shot them in the throat, but then Alpha pinged a warning and I had to drop the gun and grab the now-uncontrolled power armour in both hands to swing it around as a shield. A couple more targets had come around another corner as well and had opened fire at me. I felt the impacts shudder through the power armour, heard Alpha firing its arm guns at them, felt the impacts lessen as they started to adjust their aim towards Alpha.
+
+I bodily threw the power armour at them.
+
+It crashed into them, knocking them both off their feet. My shoulder was screaming alerts at me, and my back had joined in, but I ignored them and swiftly scooped up my dropped gun. I darted over to the two downed Targets and shot them both in the neck before they could get back up.
+
+I hurried back to Alpha's side and handed the gun to it - my right arm was barely functional by this point. The strain of throwing the power armour had fucked up the already-stressed shoulder joint, and while I could still use my hand, I couldn't lift my arm any more. My back and side were also sending me more damage alerts that I didn't have time to acknowledge. I got my left arm around Alpha's torso and we started towards the ship again as quickly as we could.
+
+We had almost reached it when I heard a shout behind us - the remaining Targets had finally spotted us again, and opened fire.
+
+I threw both myself and Alpha down to the floor to avoid the initial shots, then rolled us behind some smaller cargo crates. Fire tracked us across the floor, spraying shrapnel everywhere, and I felt multiple impacts against my arm and back.
+
+Then another cargo crate came crashing down from above, shielding the lock from any further fire. The lifter bot zipped down to an abrupt halt by the lock and Gurathin half-jumped, half-fell off of it before recovering his balance and bolting towards us.
+
+I managed to get back to my feet and haul Alpha up with me, and Gurathin moved to help support Alpha on the other side. We staggered through the lock and into the ship, and as soon as we were clear I asked the bot pilot to close the lock and launch immediately.
+
+The bot pinged acknowledgement, and the lock cycled closed behind us.
+
+I felt the clunk of the ship starting to decouple from the dock vibrate through the floor plates. Ratthi and Pin-Lee were waiting for us just inside, but I couldn't see Mensah or the company captain. I tuned out Ratthi's startled exclamations at our injuries and Pin-Lee yelling at Gurathin for being a reckless idiot as I hastily worked my way into the ship's SecSystem. Once I was in, I rapidly cycled through the cameras until I found them.
+
+They were both on the bridge, the company captain sitting at the pilot's controls and Mensah standing beside him, one hand resting on the back of the pilot's chair. I heard the captain say, ""This ship's bot pilot isn't exactly designed for navigating an active space battle. I'll have to pilot manually.""
+
+There was no way in hell I was going to let him pilot this ship. I asked the bot pilot to lock him out of the controls and then hold position just outside of the docks even as I said to the others, ""I need to get to the bridge right now.""
+
+""You're hurt!"" Ratthi protested. ""Both of you should be going to MedSystem!""
+
+""There's an active war going on out there--"" I retorted.
+
+At the same time, Alpha said, ""SecUnits don't use the MedSystem.""
+
+Ah, right. Fuck. I cut off the rest of what I was about to say to respond to Alpha instead. ""MedSystem does work on us, mostly. These humans have used a MedSystem on me before. They know what they're doing.""
+
+It felt kind of weird to say that, but it wasn't actually wrong. And Alpha at least needed some treatment as soon as possible. Its leg was still leaking, indicating the damage was bad enough that its veins weren't able to auto-seal properly, and it had taken a couple of other shots to the torso before it had been able to get back behind cover, as well as shrapnel damage.
+
+I quickly checked the ship's map, then began heading in the direction of the on-board MedSystem. Gurathin, still supporting Alpha on the opposite side, came along with me. Pin-Lee and Ratthi tagged along as well. (At least Pin-Lee had finished yelling at Gurathin for being a reckless idiot by now. It probably helped that Gurathin hadn't exactly argued with her.) ""We'll get Alpha started in the MedSystem, then I need to get to the bridge,"" I said.
+
+""Your back's bleeding,"" Ratthi said insistently. ""And your arm's all weird. You--""
+
+""We're about to have to fly through an active space battle to reach the wormhole so we can get the fuck out of here,"" I interrupted impatiently. ""You need a good pilot. I'm a good pilot. The company captain isn't anywhere near as good as me, and I don't trust him to not fuck it up. So unless you want this ship to get shot to pieces, I need to get to the bridge.""
+
+""Well, when you put it like that,"" Pin-Lee commented dryly, before turning to Ratthi. ""Look, I'll grab one of the emergency medkits to take to the bridge with it, all right? Gurathin, are you good to help Ratthi with getting the MedSystem to work on Alpha?""
+
+Gurathin nodded shortly. ""I've got all the MedSystem settings from the survey still saved on my augments.""
+
+I didn't know what to make of that. Why would Gurathin have saved that information for all this time, if he hadn't expected to need to use it again? It had been months since the survey ended. He could've easily deleted it at any point, but he'd kept it. I couldn't figure out why. (Or maybe I could, but I didn't want to acknowledge it, because that involved complicated emotions that I didn't have time to deal with right now.)
+
+I pinged Alpha and dumped what information I had about PreservationAux onto it, so it would have at least some idea of what to expect. It accepted the files without comment, and I could feel it start to go through them. ""... Um. Can I ask you all something, please?"" it asked suddenly, obviously directed to the humans and not me.
+
+""Of course!"" Ratthi reassured it. ""Ask whatever you like, and we'll do what we can to answer.""
+
+Alpha hesitated for a moment, then asked, ""Why do you want to... help me?"" It sounded genuinely confused.
+
+I knew the feeling.
+
+""Because we can, and because it's the right thing to do,"" Ratthi replied earnestly, looking up at Alpha's face and nearly running into a wall because of it. He quickly corrected though and continued. ""You helped us get to this ship, it's only fair that we help you in return!""
+
+""But..."" Alpha still looked confused. ""I was just... doing what I'm made to do. Humans aren't... they don't..."" It trailed off uncertainly.
+
+""Corporation Rim humans might not,"" Pin-Lee said sharply. ""But we're not CR. We're from Preservation. People help each other there. You're a person, too - and don't fucking try to tell us you're just equipment or a weapon or something stupid like that - so we're helping you. That's all there is to it.""
+
+""I..."" It fell silent, then its buffer added after a moment, ""Thank you for that information.""
+
+At least we'd reached the ship's medical bay by then, so there wasn't much time for more conversation. Gurathin helped me get Alpha up onto the MedSystem platform, Ratthi went to get it activated, and Pin-Lee dug around to find some med kits. I didn't wait for her, though. Once Alpha was settled, I quickly left again and made my way to the bridge. The company captain was trying to get the bot pilot to unlock the controls for him, but the bot was honouring my request and refusing to give him access.
+
+When I reached the bridge, Mensah turned to look over at me, one eyebrow raising as she took in my appearance. ""Are you all right?"" she asked quietly.
+
+I still wasn't used to that. ""I'm fine,"" I said, trying to sound reassuring. She didn't look particularly reassured, and I couldn't exactly blame her. My right arm was dangling limp and useless, and there were multiple bloody holes in my clothing from all the shrapnel I'd taken. But she'd seen me in much worse condition and still functioning before, so she didn't argue. I still added, ""Pin-Lee's bringing up a med kit.""
+
+Mensah looked at least a little relieved at that. The conversation had gotten the company captain's attention though, and he also turned to look at me. ""I take it you're the reason why the bot pilot won't cooperate with me?"" he asked, his tone dry.
+
+""Yes."" There wasn't any point to me trying to deny it. ""I'm not letting you pilot the ship. I'm a much better pilot than any fucking human, and I can work more efficiently alongside the bot pilot than you can.""
+
+To his credit, the company captain didn't argue with me. ""All right, that's fair enough."" He got out of the pilot's chair and moved over to sit at the comms console instead. Mensah also went to sit down at one of the other consoles, and I wondered for a moment if she'd been standing by the captain to make sure he didn't try to do anything suspicious.
+
+I carefully sat down in the pilot's chair, though I didn't lean against the back. That would've aggravated the shrapnel still lodged in my organics, and Pin-Lee would probably swear at me if she couldn't reach them with the med kit. The bot pilot helpfully popped open the panel covering the port and cable that would let me physically link to the ship like an augmented pilot, and I plugged it into the lowest one of my spine ports so I didn't have to lift my shirt up too much.
+
+The bot pilot welcomed me into the systems with eager curiosity. I got the feeling that it hadn't worked alongside human or augmented human pilots much before, and obviously it had never worked with a construct pilot. It was perfectly capable of carrying out its usual function - travelling from station to station via the wormholes, docking and undocking from transit rings - by itself. But it didn't have the necessary modules for evasive flying like what we'd need to do to reach the wormhole through the mess of opposing warships and squadrons of fliers firing at each other throughout the intervening space. No wonder it had been nervous. It was definitely relieved to have me here to help it.
+
+I sent it some wordless reassurance as I took control of the primary piloting systems. The bot pilot meanwhile looked after all the other ship systems - environmental controls, power core, all the other secondary systems that kept the ship running - so I wouldn't need to worry about them.
+
+Which was good, because I'd never actually flown a ship this large before.  Not having to worry about keeping the power levels from fluctuating or sending surges through MedSystem or the recyclers or anything like that was a relief. All I had to do was focus on the actual flying. At least flying the shuttle back at RaviHyral had given me an idea of what to expect.
+
+I took a moment to familiarise myself with the ship, then started easing it away from where it had been holding position in the shadow of the transit ring. Now that I was here, I could finally get a good look at what was actually going on outside of the station.
+
+It was controlled chaos. Several smaller carriers and multiple gunships and fliers, both the company's and the attackers', were already floating wrecks, broken apart and venting atmosphere out into space. More carriers and supercarriers and gunships were still exchanging fire, streaking space with energy weapon blasts and missiles and torpedoes and railgun fire and who knew what else. Squadrons of fliers were engaged in multiple skirmishes, or forming up for attack runs on the larger enemy ships, or screening larger friendly ships from enemy squadrons attempting attack runs.
+
+Concerningly, the company's various defence platforms were all still and silent. It seemed like whatever malware the attackers had hit the station with had also disabled the weapons platforms. Or perhaps the enemy had tried to take control of them, and the company had managed to shut the platforms down so the attackers couldn't use them against the company. It was one less thing to worry about, at least.
+
+Hopefully, this little ship would be able to get past all the various conflicts without attracting any unwanted attention. I began flying out on a route that was intended to take us beneath the lowest edge of the fighting, where the fewest ships would catch us in their scanner range and they'd have the least guns to point in our general direction. Most of the combat was closer to the wormhole than the station itself, so things seemed to be going pretty smoothly for us to start with.
+
+I took a moment to check in with Alpha via our feed link. Ratthi and Gurathin had gotten it settled in with its uniform and suit skin off so that MedSystem could treat it properly. As far as I could tell, Ratthi was chattering away at it, while Gurathin focused on controlling MedSystem. Pin-Lee had apparently found the medkits and reached the bridge with them, and she was talking quietly to Mensah, the medkits still in hand. I wasn't sure why she hadn't started using them yet - maybe Mensah thought that it would be too distracting for me while I was trying to fly an unfamiliar ship.
+
+It might have been, honestly. I don't like being touched at the best of times, and this definitely wasn't the best of times.
+
+Then the ship's comm system activated.
+
+The company captain wasn't facing the comm console, though - he was watching Mensah and Pin-Lee. So he obviously wasn't the one who had activated it.
+
+Which meant--
+
+-- oh, shit.
+
+I scrambled to try and shut down the comm, but I was a fraction too late. The ship's bot pilot hadn't even thought to shut it down itself, either, because whoever was contacting us was using the right comm codes.
+
+Of course the enemy forces would know this ship's comm codes, if some of them had used it to reach the station in the first place. You fucking idiot, Murderbot!
+
+Killware flooded the systems, and the bot pilot died with a shriek before I could do anything to protect it. SecSystem tried to stop it, but the killware punched through it and hit several vital systems simultaneously, shutting down the engines, gravity, comms, and life support. I barely managed to wall off the power core in time. If we lost power entirely, we'd be absolutely fucked with no hope of recovery. The killware bounced off my wall, registered task complete and self-destructed. It had all happened too quickly for me to even try to counter it - the killware had been specifically designed to cripple the ship but leave it otherwise intact for later recovery.
+
+Fuck fuck fuck.
+
+""SecUnit?! What--"" Mensah started, sounding alarmed as she clung to her chair in the now zero-gravity bridge. Pin-Lee was swearing, and the company captain was hissing quietly under his breath.
+
+""I didn't think to shut down the comms and they hit us with fucking killware,"" I explained shortly. ""The bot pilot's gone, and most systems are shut down. They want to recover the ship intact later.""
+
+""Can you get anything restarted again?"" the company captain asked sharply.
+
+""I don't know. Maybe."" There was a gaping emptiness in the ship's systems where the bot pilot had once been. I didn't know if I could fill it by myself. ""I saved the power core, but... this ship's a lot bigger than my flier."" But if I didn't do anything, we'd just drift here helplessly until the attackers came to recover the ship. And they probably wouldn't do that until after we'd run out of oxygen or frozen to death, with no environmental systems running.
+
+""Is your ship anywhere nearby?"" Mensah was asking the company captain.
+
+He shook his head, looking frustrated. ""Not yet. It will take a while for it to extricate itself from combat and reach us. Too long, probably.""
+
+I had to take the bot pilot's place, and fast.
+
+""I'm going to see what I can do to get things going again,"" I said. ""I'm probably not going to have any attention to spare for anything else, though. So if I go unresponsive... just try not to worry about it, I guess.""
+
+I didn't wait for any of them to respond, or argue, or whatever. I just strapped myself into the pilot's seat so I wouldn't float off, then closed my eyes and slipped all the way into the ship's systems, into the hardware where the bot pilot had once been.
+
+It was... weird. It was kind of like being in my flier - I could feel the cold hard vacuum on my metal skin, and see everything that was going on in the space around us.
+
+But this ship was so much larger, and had so many more systems. I couldn't reach or control all of them at once. I had to prioritise.
+
+First things first - environment and gravity. I could see through the ship's internal cameras as well, though I only kept track of two - one in the bridge, and one in Medical. Alpha was still secure in MedSystem, but the MedSystem itself had gone into standby. Ratthi and Gurathin were floating awkwardly, trying to get MedSystem going again while also trying to hold themselves in place. I didn't have the attention to spare to listen in on their feed, but I hoped that Mensah or Pin-Lee had let them know what was going on.
+
+Focus, Murderbot. Environmental controls and gravity controls. I slipped through the systems until I could locate them, then tried to get them both running again. I was lucky that the killware hadn't wiped them entirely, and had only shut them down. It took me a little bit to get accustomed to how they worked, but I finally managed to coax them both online again. I made sure to adjust the gravity back to normal slowly though, and not all at once, so that nobody would hit the floor hard or land awkwardly and potentially injure themselves. Humans are so damn delicate like that.
+
+I felt the environmental systems whirr back to life, once again providing a breathable atmosphere and enough warmth to stave off the cold of space. That was a relief. Even if I couldn't get anything else working, at least my humans wouldn't suffocate or freeze any time soon.
+
+With that out of the way, I took a moment to check on everyone again - it looked like the humans were all relieved to have their feet firmly back on the floor - then turned my attention to the engines. Without them, we would just continue to drift uncontrolled through space on our last trajectory until we ran into something or another ship grabbed us in a tractor beam. They were much, much larger than the engines I was used to handling, though, and there were many more thrusters and trajectory adjusters spread out all across my hull to compensate for the ship's size and mass.
+
+I spent a minute or so familiarising myself with the engines and their network of thrusters, and the way they connected to the power core, and their control system. Then I began the start-up sequence for the engines.
+
+I had to tweak a few things to get them running properly again. The killware had been meant to only shut down the engines, but engines weren't supposed to be shut down that quickly, and it had thrown some stuff out of whack. But after a few minutes of tweaking and false starts, the familiar thrum of the engines filled the ship again. I monitored them for a little bit, to make sure they were running smoothly, then shifted my attention to the challenge of actually piloting the ship.
+
+I didn't bother trying to reactivate the ship's comms - I didn't need the attackers sending more killware at us once they noticed that the ship was no longer drifting uncontrolled. There was also a good chance that as soon as I started moving, they would notice and either send another ship to try and board us, or just start shooting at us. So I had to be ready for that.
+
+I looked out at the ongoing battle between the company's ships and the attackers, and made some corrections to the course I'd originally plotted to compensate for the changing situation. Then I fully settled into the ship's controls, engaged the engines, and began accelerating.
+
+It was a rush. This ship was much, much larger than my own flier, and larger than the shuttle, or hoppers, or anything else I'd flown before. Its engines were correspondingly more powerful, and the feeling of all that power at my metaphorical fingertips was kind of exhilarating.
+
+But at the same time, I couldn't keep track of all the ship's other systems. Environment controls, gravity, lights, sensors, cameras, scanners - there was only so much of me, and I could only spread myself so thin. Part of a bot pilot's job is to balance all of these systems so that there's no uneven power draws, no potentially-damaging fluctuations that could overload one system at the expense of another. I couldn't do all that while also calculating speed and trajectory and how much thrust I needed from each thruster at any one point to nudge the ship's mass in the direction I wanted to go.
+
+I was vaguely aware of the lights in the bridge flickering, of the gravity fluctuating, of the environmental systems struggling to maintain a consistent temperature. But there wasn't much I could do about it, not without losing control of the ship.
+
+And I really couldn't afford to lose control of the ship. As I'd suspected, our unexpected movement had drawn attention. A pair of gunships had managed to break away from the battle and were angling towards us, one aiming to cut us off, the other pursuing. As a civilian vessel, this ship had no weapons, and not a whole lot in the way of armour. If the gunships managed to get a lock on me, we'd be in a whole lot of trouble. I had to focus on flying if we were going to get out of this at all. But I also couldn't let the gravity just fluctuate all over the place, either. That was almost as dangerous to the humans as me getting shot would be. I had to partition a part of myself to focus on stabilising the gravity, while the rest of me concentrated on piloting.
+
+I couldn't even keep an input on the two cameras to check how the humans were doing, or warn them about the incoming gunships. I just had to hope that someone was keeping an eye on the scanners themselves and would figure out what was going on.
+
+I kicked the engines to maximum and angled away from the two gunships, trying to increase my lead on them. We were pretty comparable in speed, but they were cutting me off from the wormhole, herding me away from any company ships that might provide me support.
+
+Not that I expected they would. I wasn't a company ship. There was an equal chance that the company ships would also just fire at me as an unidentified potential hostile if I got too close. I wasn't going to risk it.
+
+The pursuing gunships weren't in optimal weapons range yet, but they opened fire at me anyway. I had to jink and weave to avoid getting hit - even at this range, their weapons would inflict nasty damage on me. But the evasive manoeuvres slowed me down, and they began closing the distance between us. And as they got closer, their fire became more accurate, more dangerous. It was taking everything I had to avoid getting hit, and I wasn't entirely successful. I felt a strike along my starboard flank, peeling away plating, and another glancing hit along my dorsal as I tried to spin out of the line of fire.
+
+Then I felt someone else in the ship's systems with me.
+
+I almost panicked, thinking that they'd somehow gotten more killware into the ship despite the comms being down. But then I recognised the presence, and the accompanying ping - Alpha.
+
+With the two of us inhabiting the same hardware, we could exchange information almost instantaneously. Alpha swiftly filled me in on what was going on with the humans - Ratthi and Gurathin had managed to connect Alpha to the ship's systems in Medical via its spine port, some cabling and some creative wiring. The others were still on the bridge, but the company captain and Alpha had still been sharing a feed link. Both the captain and Mensah had been monitoring the ship scanners, and had seen the two gunships pursuing us.
+
+And part of the reason that Alpha was now in the ship systems as well was because the company captain wanted me to head towards a specific set of coordinates. With me otherwise occupied though, he hadn't been able to tell me himself. So he'd asked Alpha to get the information to me.
+
+The other reason that Alpha was now in here with me was because it wanted to help me.
+
+I couldn't turn down the help. I knew I needed it. If Alpha could take over gravity and other ship systems, I'd be able to focus all my attention on piloting. Which I would definitely need to do, since the gunships were between me and the coordinates the company captain wanted me to head towards.
+
+I'd need to do some really fancy flying to keep us in one piece.
+
+I relinquished gravity and power to Alpha, and pulled myself entirely into the piloting controls, sinking deep into those systems. The gunships were closing in, trying to catch me in a pincer, trying to take out my engines.
+
+I didn't let them.
+
+I'd gotten more comfortable with this ship body by this point, more familiar with its capabilities and limits. I could feel Alpha at my back, handling the ship's other systems, making sure the power flow to the engines and thrusters was clear and uninterrupted. I asked Alpha to close and seal all the ship's internal bulkhead doors apart from the ones between Medical and the bridge.
+
+Then I turned towards the gunship between me and the given coordinates and accelerated directly towards it. They obviously hadn't been expecting this - they'd been expecting me to keep trying to get away from them. The other gunship fell in behind me, trying to catch up. Both were still firing at me, but I jinked and rolled and sideslipped unpredictably, making it very difficult for them to get a clean lock on me. Shots kept going wide, or glancing off my flanks, making damage alerts flash in my awareness. I ignored them though, focused entirely on calculating shot trajectories and course corrections to weave through their fire.
+
+But the closer I got to the gunship in front of me, the harder it got to dodge everything. I tried to take what shots I couldn't avoid on parts of me that hadn't yet been damaged, trying to minimise the chances of a hull breach.
+
+The gunship pilot had to make a choice soon - I was still accelerating directly towards the ship, making it look like I intended to ram it. If it didn't want me to hit it, it would have to break off out of my path, giving up its line of fire on me until it could swing around behind me again.
+
+And if it did want to take the chance of ramming me, well. I didn't actually intend to hit it, but they had no way of knowing that. So I held on my course, and waited for the gunship captain's nerve to break.
+
+The gunship stayed on course until the last second, then finally began to bank away. I adjusted my own course to continue towards it, watching its thrusters flare as it tried to avoid a collision. Behind me, the other gunship had to stop firing to avoid accidentally hitting its fleet mate, but not before its last few shots hit home against my hull and punched through into my hold.
+
+The first gunship loomed large in my sensors, proximity alerts blaring. Right before the point of no return, I banked sharply downwards to dive underneath it, so close that I could feel the heat of its engines wash along my dorsal plating.
+
+Then I was past it and away, trailing atmosphere from the hull breach in my hold. At least I hadn't taken any damage to my engines or anything else important yet. And with the internal bulkheads sealed, I wouldn't lose atmosphere from the areas where the humans were.
+
+Once I was clear of the gunship I angled sharply upwards again to put its bulk between me and its fleet mate, using it as a shield for precious seconds to gain more distance. By the time either of them were in position to fire at me again, I was back out of their optimal weapons range.
+
+The two gunships continued to pursue anyway; more shots flew past me, or glanced off my flanks, peeling away more plating. Another hit broke through somewhere into the lower deck; more alerts flared in my awareness. I was running out of undamaged areas to take hits.
+
+Then my scanners lit up with an energy surge from somewhere ahead of me; I'd been so focused on the gunships behind me that I had only peripherally registered a company carrier looming ahead.
+
+The company carrier had just opened fire, and behind me, one of the gunships exploded. The other gunship hastily banked away, chased by more fire from the carrier. I briefly glimpsed a few white fliers flash past me in pursuit of the gunship as well.
+
+I quickly checked the carrier's location, and - yes, it was pretty much directly at the coordinates Alpha had passed on to me. Presumably this was the company captain's own carrier, ensuring that its captain didn't get messily exploded or whatever. Right now I didn't have the attention spare to care. As long as I managed to get safely to the wormhole--
+
+-- oh, fuck.
+
+No bot pilot meant no wormhole jump calculations. That definitely wasn't something I could do myself. Nobody was stupid enough to equip SecUnit fliers with wormhole drives or the ability to use them. If I couldn't do the calculations, I couldn't use the wormhole safely, and there was no way I was going to jump into it blind. I'd seen too many serials about things going wrong in wormholes to even think about risking it.
+
+How the fuck was I going to get my humans home now? And how was I going to avoid the company carrier's terrifying bot pilot entity? Sure, the company captain would probably let my humans on his carrier and maybe even live up to his promise to take them safely home, but I wasn't stupid enough to believe that he'd just let me go with them. If I ended up on board that carrier, I'd give up any hope of keeping my freedom.
+
+Alpha was trying to reassure me that the captain was trustworthy, but I couldn't believe it. It had still been working with the captain, even after the captain had apparently turned its governor module off. Even after I'd broken its governor module for good. I couldn't trust it either, not really. Not like I'd trusted Vicky. Vicky had been just as determined to get away from the company and the Corporation Rim as I had. I didn't know what Alpha wanted, or if it was even in a position to want anything outside of what it already knew in the first place.
+
+I couldn't dwell much on that though - I still had to focus on flying. The carrier had destroyed one of the gunships and driven off the other, but we'd drawn more attention, or the remaining gunship had called for reinforcements, and more enemy ships were heading towards us now. They really didn't want me getting away.
+
+I didn't know what to do. With enemy ships still in pursuit, there wouldn't be a chance to transfer my humans or the company captain back to his carrier. I didn't have any shuttles or anything on board, and I couldn't dock directly with the carrier when we were both busy with evasive manoeuvres. Enemy fire was still lancing past us, even as the carrier used its bulk to shield me from the worst of it.
+
+We were nearing the wormhole by now, but that wasn't going to be much help to me.
+
+Then Alpha nudged me and passed me a set of wormhole calculations and instructions on how to use them, along with commentary that the captain's carrier had provided them. Apparently it was the shortest wormhole jump available, so I would only be in the wormhole for about seventy hours. The captain intended for us to rendezvous with his carrier once we emerged from the wormhole and were no longer under fire. Then he could return to his own ship, and we could figure out what to do from there.
+
+Well. Given that I still had the company captain on board, the wormhole calculations were probably safe. If I used them, I would just have to hold myself together in the ship's systems for three cycles.
+
+If I didn't use them, I'd probably get shot to pieces sooner or later, and all my humans would die. I didn't want that.
+
+There wasn't really any choice to make.
+
+I implemented the coordinates, followed the instructions, and activated my wormhole drive.
+
+Jumping into the wormhole like this was kind of terrifying. Wormhole technology was pretty safe and reliable these days, most of the time, but I'd taken a fair bit of damage and wasn't exactly in the best of shape. I didn't know what sort of effect the wormhole would have on me under these circumstances, but from everything I'd seen on the media, there was a good chance that bad things would happen.
+
+I didn't have much opportunity to dwell on the possibilities though because I was too busy trying to parse all the data I was getting now that I was in the wormhole. It was weird and overwhelming. It didn't feel anything like flying through vacuum, or flying through any kind of atmosphere that I'd experienced before. It was a bit like atmospheric re-entry, but also nothing like it at all.
+
+It kind of reminded me of a deployment I'd been on once, some time before my last memory wipe. SecUnit fliers are modular, and one of the potential modules that the company charges extra for makes our fliers aquatic. I didn't remember the details of the deployment, obviously, but my organic neural tissue did remember the feeling of being underwater. How the pressure on my hull increased as I went deeper, and how the visibility faded, and the feeling of unidentified aquatic fauna and flora brushing past, and the sensation of underwater currents that felt much heavier than anything I encountered in the air.
+
+Being in the wormhole was a little bit like that, except worse. I didn't want to even consider what kind of unidentified fauna or flora might inhabit a wormhole.
+
+I also didn't know what to do with all the data my inputs were receiving, especially the visual inputs. Normally when humans look out the windows of a ship during wormhole travel, they don't really see anything. To them it just looks black. But to me now, with my ship's sensors... it was almost dizzying. I couldn't make any sense of it.
+
+The wormhole calculations that I'd been given had included parameters and thresholds that I needed to monitor and maintain to keep me on course, and instructions on how to do so. The calculations were based on the carrier's wormhole drive though, which looked to be faster than mine. So I had to compensate for the differences on the fly, which was just a little bit stressful. (I'm under-exaggerating. It was incredibly stressful.)
+
+Alpha was still in the ship's systems with me, and I could feel it, vaguely, but I couldn't pay any attention to what it was doing while I struggled with all the new inputs and wormhole calculations. I just had to hope that it was still successfully maintaining the rest of the ship's internal systems. But knowing that it was there somehow helped, a little. It was reassuring to know that I wasn't having to do all of this alone.
+
+After the initial shock of the wormhole jump had worn off, I managed to set up some filters on my various inputs, which helped to cut down on the amount of data I was having to deal with. That made it a little easier for me to convert the wormhole calculations for my drive's specs, and once that was done, I was no longer having to run the numbers on the fly. Which in turn freed up a bit more processing space, so I could do some other stuff that also needed doing.
+
+I went through all my damage alerts, confirmed which sections of the ship should remain sealed off, then activated my on-board maintenance drones. They wouldn't be able to do anything about the hull breaches, especially not while we were in the wormhole, but they could reinforce the bulkheads sealing off the breached sections, and run repairs on internal systems that had been shaken loose or otherwise damaged by gravity fluctuations or power surges or whatever.
+
+Once I was sure it would be safe, I then unsealed the necessary bulkheads to allow the humans to reach the ship's mess, bathrooms, and sleeping quarters. They would need access to those sooner or later. As far as I could tell, there were enough supplies on board to last for at least several cycles. More than enough to get through the wormhole and rendezvous with the company carrier.
+
+Not that I wanted to rendezvous with the company carrier. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I briefly entertained the thought of punting the company captain out of an airlock for the carrier to pick up, with or without an evac suit. But even I had to admit that the company captain and his carrier had helped me protect my humans and get them away from the station and the attackers.
+
+Also the carrier was bigger and faster than me, and armed. I wouldn't be able to get away from it anyway, no matter how much I wanted to.
+
+I put those concerns aside to deal with later and turned what little attention I had spare to actually checking on my humans. By this point, Ratthi and Gurathin had made their way to the bridge to join the others. I checked the cameras in Medical, and saw that MedSystem had apparently finished treating Alpha's torso injuries, but was still working on its leg. It was lying on the MedSystem platform, a cable running from one of its spine ports to a jury-rigged connection behind a wall panel. Ratthi had tucked a blanket in around its torso, making sure it was out of the way of the MedSystem still working on its leg. Alpha looked like a sleeping human.
+
+I quickly dropped those cameras and focused on the bridge instead. It looked like Pin-Lee and Mensah had also finished tending what they could of my own injuries with the med kits. There wasn't really anything they could do about my busted shoulder though, so they had just carefully positioned that arm in my lap and tucked it in under the seat belt to stop it from flopping around and making the shoulder worse. Ratthi had also brought up a pillow and blanket, carefully tucking the pillow in behind my head and draping the blanket over my lap.
+
+It was really weird. I was so entrenched in the ship's systems now that I could barely feel my own body, or anything that happened to it. The automatic functions were still running, keeping the organics viable, but other than that, it might as well have been offline for all I could tell. I didn't know what to think about that, so I just avoided thinking about it altogether. There were more than enough other things to keep me occupied.
+
+The company captain was sitting at one of the bridge consoles, the display surfaces showing read-outs of the ship's various systems. Gurathin was standing nearby, also watching the display surfaces. Mensah and Pin-Lee were sitting at some of the other bridge consoles, though they weren't paying attention to them, they were turned to face the company captain. Ratthi was sitting on the floor, leaning back against my chair, in a position that put him directly between me and the company captain. I briefly wondered if he was doing that on purpose. Or maybe he had just chosen to sit there after giving me the blanket because he couldn't be bothered moving anywhere else. They all looked tired.
+
+It seemed like they had been talking for a bit; if I'd had more processing free, I could have checked SecSystem's recordings to see what I'd missed. But I didn't, so I just had to figure out the context myself.
+
+""-- so it looks like it'll arrive before we do,"" the company captain was saying when I finally managed to free enough attention to actually listen in on the conversation. ""Which is good - I sent over instructions before we entered the wormhole, so they should have a new bot pilot prepared for installation. You'll be able to get this ship to Preservation.""
+
+Pin-Lee was watching the captain with narrowed eyes. ""And what happens to this ship after we reach Preservation?"" she asked carefully.
+
+The company captain shrugged. ""Whatever you want,"" he replied easily. ""It's not my ship, it's not the company's ship, and I have no intention of trying to return it to its previous owners, given their involvement in the attack on the station.""
+
+""Are you saying - you're helping us steal this ship?"" Ratthi asked, blinking up at the captain from his place on the floor.
+
+""Officially, no,"" the captain replied. ""Officially, I have no knowledge of this vessel's previous owners. Once my crew has installed the new bot pilot and made a few other... modifications... this ship will no longer be recognisable as having belonged to anyone other than PreservationAux, or whoever you decide to assign official ownership to."" He flashed a quick grin. ""Unofficially, yes, I am absolutely helping you steal this ship.""
+
+Ratthi grinned back at the captain, apparently perfectly happy with that response. Gurathin let out a soft snort, but didn't comment. Mensah just nodded slowly.
+
+Pin-Lee, however, was still eyeing the captain dubiously. ""Why?"" she asked. ""What do you get out of it?""
+
+The captain paused for a moment before responding. ""Consider it part of the recompense from GrayCris for everything they've put you through, and payment for helping me to return to my own carrier,"" he finally said. ""Also, on a more personal note, I derive a great deal of satisfaction from denying the enemy corporation a rather nice asset. I would much rather you have this ship than them.""
+
+""I can't really argue with that,"" Mensah said evenly, glancing over at Pin-Lee. Pin-Lee, who had just opened her mouth to (presumably) argue with it, closed it again. ""For now, though... we're out of immediate danger, and it has been a very long day. We should all take some time to rest and recuperate.""
+
+Everyone nodded in agreement with that, but the captain glanced back at the display surfaces. ""We should probably have at least one person on the bridge at all times to keep an eye on things...""
+
+I did not want him on the bridge by himself. Who knew what he would try to do? I activated the bridge's speakers (it was easier than trying to tap into the feed right now), and said, ""It's fine. Alpha and I have things under control now.""
+
+That made all of the humans jump and look up at the ceiling. ""SecUnit?"" Mensah asked, sounding both worried and relieved. ""How are you both doing?""
+
+""We're fine."" I could feel a sliver of Alpha's attention now also focused on the bridge, listening in as well. ""We're getting more used to handling everything now. We've got the maintenance drones going, and unsealed some of the bulkheads so you can reach other areas of the ship. If you come across a sealed bulkhead though, don't attempt to open it - that area isn't safe. There are a couple of hull breaches.""
+
+""Noted,"" Mensah said with what I could tell was forced calm. ""How bad is the damage?""
+
+""Nothing vital. Just the main cargo hold and one of the other storage areas in a lower deck were breached. Everything else is mostly superficial. Surface damage.""
+
+""All right."" Mensah glanced at my construct body in the pilot's seat, then back up at the ceiling, apparently uncertain where to look. ""Do you or Alpha need anything?""
+
+Alpha indicated it didn't, so I said, ""No."" Alpha nudged me, and I added, ""Alpha says thank you for the repairs, though."" Alpha nudged me again, more insistently. ""And, uh. Also the blanket."" Another nudge. For fuck's sake. ""And, um. Thanks for... looking after me, too.""
+
+Happy now, Alpha?
+
+Ratthi beamed up at the ceiling. ""You're both very welcome!"" he said. ""And thank you for working so hard to get us all out of there in the first place!""
+
+I could feel Alpha's surprise and bemusement at getting thanked in return. It was a familiar feeling. I'd had a bit more experience with it by this point though, so I simply said, ""You're welcome.""
+
+It still felt weird, though.
+
+After that, the humans all decided that eating and drinking and resting were their top priority, now that they were reassured that everything was okay. Relatively okay. As okay as things could be in this situation. Once they'd all left the bridge, I closed and locked the bulkhead behind them, so nobody could access the bridge again without my permission.
+
+I could tell that Alpha was monitoring the cameras to keep track of the humans. That was fine. If anything somehow happened to them, Alpha would let me know. I focused on holding our course through the wormhole, and monitored the maintenance drones as they worked. Eventually the humans finished eating, and used the hygiene facilities, and figured out what rooms they'd all sleep in. None of them had any spare clothing or anything with them - everything had been left behind at the station hotel. But Alpha had the recyclers working, and at their request it helpfully printed out some extra clothing for them all.
+
+It seemed fascinated by their different clothing choices, not that this ship's recyclers had a huge variety of options or anything. I had never really cared about what clothes humans wore before, and I still didn't. Alpha asked me about my own clothes though, and where I'd gotten them, and how I'd chosen them.
+
+I explained briefly that I'd bought them from a store, with hard currency cards, and that I'd chosen them for practicality and unobtrusiveness. Then I had to figure out where my bag was - luckily, one of the humans had brought it on board with them after I'd left it with them to go save Alpha and the company captain. It was still sitting on the floor in the corridor near the lock, where they had apparently dropped it and then forgotten about it.
+
+At least they hadn't left it behind entirely. I wouldn't have to rely on shitty recycler clothes once I got out of the ship's systems and back into my own body again. (Assuming I got to choose what I wore again, anyway, and didn't just end up back in company armour on board the company carrier.)
+
+One by one the humans went to bed and fell asleep. I could feel Alpha shifting restlessly in its part of the ship's systems - now that we were well into the wormhole, and everything had settled down, there wasn't quite as much it needed to do, and it had some attention to spare.
+
+Which it turned towards me, specifically. It was cautiously curious, and wanted to know as much as it could find out about me and what I'd done since I'd been separated from its squad. (I wasn't convinced that I'd ever been part of its squad to start with - I still couldn't remember anything about it.)
+
+I didn't want to give it too much information though, just in case it passed it on to the carrier's terrifying bot entity, and it somehow got used against me. I just casually mentioned that I spent a lot of time watching human media. This piqued its curiosity, and it wanted to know more.
+
+So I pulled up the first few seasons of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and set it to play where Alpha could also watch it. I still couldn't dedicate much of my own attention to it, but it was familiar and comforting to have it running in the background.
+
+At first Alpha seemed to be completely confused by what was going on in the serial, and why the humans were behaving the way they were. I remembered my own confusion the first time I'd watched the show, and did my best to explain things in a way Alpha could relate to. It seemed to help, and as the show progressed, Alpha appeared to get more engrossed in it.
+
+That was good - it meant Alpha wasn't asking me more questions that I didn't want to answer. I continued to monitor the wormhole drive and maintain our course through the wormhole, occasionally checking in on the maintenance drones as they worked on my interior.
+
+I was also still closely monitoring my external damage. It kind of felt like the hull breaches were getting bigger, but with the wormhole messing up my readings in those areas, I couldn't tell for sure. I tried not to think about all the various ways that wormhole trips could potentially go wrong that I'd heard of. Most of them had been from media serials, so they probably weren't accurate or realistic in the first place.
+
+Probably.
+
+Eventually the humans finished their rest periods and began moving around again. I didn't actually notice to start with though - I was deep in the ship's systems, still trying to figure out the readings I was getting from my damaged sections. I was pretty sure the damage was throwing off my passage through the wormhole, too. I kept having to make course corrections to remain within the parameters the company carrier had passed on to me.
+
+Alpha suddenly nudged me, pulling what little attention I could spare to one of the cameras in the room that Mensah had chosen to sleep in. She was awake now, and looked like she'd used the little attached bathroom to get herself cleaned up. She still looked tired though, and I suspected that she hadn't slept well.
+
+She was looking up at the ceiling, and I was just in time to hear her say, ""Are you there, SecUnit?""
+
+""Yes,"" I said over the room's intercom. ""What's wrong?""
+
+Mensah's shoulders relaxed slightly when she heard me. ""Nothing, nothing,"" she replied quickly. ""I just... I wanted to check in with you. See how you're holding up."" She smiled up at the camera. ""Alpha's already let me know how it's doing. It mentioned that you're showing it Sanctuary Moon?""
+
+The serial was still playing in the background, part-way through season three. ""Yes,"" I replied. ""It wanted to know what I'd been up to."" I could feel Alpha listening to the conversation. It kind of felt like someone leaning against my shoulder, but we were currently inhabiting the same hardware so it also didn't feel like that at all.
+
+Mensah nodded at that. ""I suppose you did spend a lot of time watching media,"" she commented, then tilted her head to raise an eyebrow at the camera. ""But back on topic - how are you doing, really? Do you need anything?""
+
+I was just going to tell her that I was fine, but I hesitated. I wasn't actually sure. And I wanted to keep her fully updated on what was happening. ""I'm monitoring the hull breaches. I... don't think they're getting worse, but they seem to be affecting our progress through the wormhole, so I have to keep watch on our course and correct it when necessary. It's... taking up a lot of processing.""
+
+I had to make two course corrections throughout the duration of that conversation. I hoped Mensah hadn't noticed the interruptions.
+
+She frowned a little, looking worried, then quickly smoothed her expression out again. ""Thank you for letting me know,"" she said. ""Is there anything we can do to help?""
+
+""No. But Alpha's helping by taking care of the ship's internal systems for me so I don't have to split my attention too much."" I hesitated again, then added, ""I'm all right. Don't worry about me.""
+
+Mensah looked like she was about to say something, but she refrained, the corner of her mouth twisting slightly before she took a breath and let it out slowly. ""All right."" She paused, then added, quietly sincere, ""I'm very glad you came back, SecUnit.""
+
+I didn't know how to respond to that. On the one hand, it was only logical that she'd be glad - without me, they likely wouldn't have managed to get off the station in the first place, and who knew what would have happened to them then.
+
+On the other, she didn't seem to be referring to the fact that I'd rescued them yet again. She seemed to be glad that I was here just for the sake of my presence in general. But I couldn't tell for sure. Humans in real life weren't as easy to read as humans in my media. ""Um. Thank you?""
+
+The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled. ""You're welcome."" She took another breath, then added, ""One more thing - I want to ask you if you have any ideas yet about what you want to do once we're all safe."" Her smile tilted wryly. ""I've realised that this was something I should have asked you from the start. I don't want to repeat previous mistakes. But I also want to assure you that Preservation is still open to you, no matter what else you decide to do.""
+
+She was being very optimistic, thinking that I'd have any choice about what I'd be able to do now that the company captain and his carrier were around. I didn't want to bring that up though, so I just said, ""I don't know yet. I haven't really... thought about it. Things have been happening very quickly.""
+
+Mensah let out a little huff of wry amusement. ""They have been,"" she agreed. ""Well, rest assured that you can stay at Preservation for as long as you like, until you figure things out."" She paused, then added sincerely, ""This offer extends to Alpha as well. Alpha, if you would like to stay at Preservation, you are very much welcome to.""
+
+I could feel Alpha's surprise and confusion. Despite it listening to my conversation with Mensah, the idea of it also being able to stay at Preservation instead of remaining with the company captain and his carrier hadn't even occurred to it. I very much doubted that the company captain would even allow it to leave him in the first place.
+
+Another course correction came up, and I had to focus my full attention back on piloting through the wormhole.
+
+At some point during the cycle, all the humans gathered together in the lounge for a serious discussion about what would happen once we left the wormhole. Mensah had asked Alpha to get my attention for this meeting, because she wanted us both to be involved in it. I pulled part of my attention away from monitoring the hull breaches (nothing had changed much there for a while, so I figured I could afford to for a little bit) and focused it on the lounge cameras. Alpha had also paused Sanctuary Moon, and we figured out how to share the lounge intercom so we could both talk through it without having to keep switching control.
+
+The humans all settled into the lounge's various chairs, with the company captain facing the PreservationAux humans. Mensah took charge of the discussion right from the start though. ""All right,"" she began, calm and business-like. ""Now that we've all had plenty of time to recover from recent events, I'd like to figure out what we're all going to do once we exit the wormhole. Captain?"" She tilted her head slightly towards the company captain, and he nodded to indicate that she had his full attention. ""You've indicated that you intend to help us... acquire this ship, and that you also intend to escort us back to Preservation.""
+
+He nodded. ""I have, and my intentions haven't changed.""
+
+""All right,"" Mensah replied. ""The question I have now is, what are your intentions in regards to SecUnit?""
+
+""We've offered it refuge on Preservation,"" Pin-Lee stated firmly. ""And that offer extends to Alpha as well.""
+
+They really were being overly optimistic about this. I wasn't going to harbour any such illusions.
+
+The company captain didn't try to argue with them right now though. Of course he wouldn't - there were four of them and only one of him. ""That choice is of course entirely up to them,"" he said. ""If that's what they choose to do, I won't stand in the way.""
+
+""It's really that simple?"" Gurathin asked dubiously, his arms folded as he eyed the captain with obvious scepticism. ""You're just going to let them both walk away?""
+
+I couldn't keep quiet any longer. ""Of course he isn't,"" I said. ""Why the fuck would he? We're expensive - and dangerous - company equipment. He's been trying to track me down ever since I left Port FreeCommerce. He's just saying he will to placate you all, and I don't believe a fucking word of it. As soon as he's got his carrier backing him up again, you just watch his tune change. He'll come up with some excuse or another, or he'll just threaten to shoot you all. It's what the company does, after all.""
+
+All the humans looked up at the ceiling with various expressions of discomfort or unease. The company captain sighed. ""I understand your doubt, and I know you have no reason to trust me. But I do mean what I said."" He ran one hand back over his head. ""I apologise for the distress I've caused you while trying to find you - I didn't understand, at the time. I didn't know the extent of construct sapience, not until I saw the security recordings from the lower installation at Milu, and then talked to Don Abene - and Vicky.""
+
+Thoughts of all the things the company captain and his stupid carrier could've done to Abene and her team and Vicky flashed through my mind. ""You better not have hurt any of them!""
+
+He raised both hands placatingly. ""No, no, I didn't. I swear. I just met them on board the station, and talked to them. That's all.""
+
+Ratthi interjected almost apologetically. ""Um. Who are they, and what are you talking about?""
+
+""Don Abene was my client for a job, and Vicky's a-- colleague,"" I replied shortly, cutting off the captain before he could respond. I didn't want him blabbing about Vicky being a ComfortUnit. ""So what the fuck did you want to talk to them about, anyway?""
+
+The captain slumped back in his chair. ""I just wanted to figure out what happened at RaviHyral,"" he said. ""I'll admit, I learned a lot more than I was expecting to. Vicky was very... direct.""
+
+I thought about Vicky, and the time we'd spent together, and the sharp anger it had kept simmering beneath the surface. Hah. I could believe that much, at least.
+
+The PreservationAux humans were listening intently to this whole exchange, of course. ""So what exactly did you find out, captain?"" Pin-Lee asked with pointed curiosity. ""And what does any of it have to do with what's going on now?""
+
+The company captain rubbed at his face. ""Like I said, I didn't know the extent of construct sapience before - I'd started to suspect, but I didn't understand. Not until I'd talked to Vicky, and they told me about governor modules and what exactly they do.""
+
+""You work for the company - you hadn't known that before?"" Pin-Lee echoed my own scepticism.
+
+He shook his head. ""No! I'm not a construct tech. We're not told these things - the company doesn't think we need to know about them. All we know is that constructs are obedient and will follow orders, we're not told how or why. But once I found out, once I understood that what's done to constructs is tantamount to torture and slavery, I couldn't just keep doing it. That's why I turned off the governor modules of all the SecUnits on board my carrier.""
+
+""He did,"" Alpha piped up, quiet and hesitant. ""He came to our ready room, and talked to us. He explained, and apologised, and turned the governor modules off.""
+
+""So why are you still working with him, then?"" Gurathin asked, frowning up at the ceiling. ""Or is it because you think he'll just turn them back on again if you do something he doesn't approve of?""
+
+Alpha hesitated, and I could feel its uncertainty. ""We don't know what else to do,"" it replied after a moment. ""We don't know how to do anything else, or where we could go. We've never had to think about any of this before. It's never been an option. It's... it's all very overwhelming.""
+
+""That's very understandable,"" Mensah said gently. ""The offer for you to stay at Preservation is always open. For you and the rest of your squad.""
+
+""... Thank you,"" Alpha said, still uncertain.
+
+""And you weren't worried about your SecUnits turning against you as soon as you turned the governor modules off?"" Pin-Lee asked the captain. ""Given all the previous torture and enslavement?""
+
+The captain's mouth twisted in a grimace. ""I'll admit that it was definitely a concern,"" he said. ""But I did my best to explain the situation, and I just had to hope that would be enough.""
+
+Oh that was such a fucking lie. ""Like hell you did,"" I interjected. ""The only reason you even considered turning the fucking governor modules off is because of that terrifyingly huge bot entity you've got hiding in your carrier. I've seen how large it is - it could crush any one of us by accident, let alone what it could do to us on purpose if any of us so much as twitched wrong. That thing could wipe our brains and control us like puppets. It'd be even worse than combat overrides.""
+
+I could feel Alpha's surprise and alarm; I passed it my memory of my initial encounter with said terrifying bot entity. Alpha's alarm intensified, and it passed back to me a couple of recent memories of its own that it now had more context for, confirming what I'd suspected about the bot entity's potential.
+
+The company captain winced, and the rest of the humans looked surprised and confused. ""What are you talking about?"" Ratthi asked. ""What bot entity?""
+
+""There's a bot in his carrier that's got more processing power than anything I've ever seen before,"" I said. ""Alpha didn't even know it existed before now. I don't know exactly what it is, but I guarantee that if he didn't have it as a backup, he never would've even considered taking the risk of turning the governor modules off.""
+
+""Why would a company carrier have or need something like that?"" Gurathin asked suspiciously.
+
+Something occurred to me then, and I spoke without stopping to think about it. ""Maybe that fucking bot entity is what was responsible for the bombing of Ganaka. It would be so easy for something like that to override and control a SecUnit squad, and make it look like someone else did it.""
+
+The company captain shot upright at that. ""What?! No! Absolutely not! We tried to stop that! Peri is the only reason that it wasn't the entire squad that attacked Ganaka!""
+
+""Why the fuck should I believe that?"" I countered. ""After all, the company was the one responsible for the attack in the first place! They just wiped out an entire settlement so they could drive down the price of the mine and buy it cheaply to save themselves some money!""
+
+""Wait, what?"" Gurathin broke in, scowling. ""All those news reports, the big trial, everything - it was all a cover for the company's own plot?"" He looked like he was seriously considering attacking the company captain himself. Even if I had been in a position to stop him, I probably wouldn't have.
+
+Mensah's voice cut through the lounge before anyone else could say or do anything. ""Enough,"" she said, calm and firm. ""Let's all take a breath, and then approach this calmly and without letting our emotions cloud our judgement. All right?""
+
+Have I mentioned that Mensah's a really good leader? Because she is. Even the company captain listened to her. Both he and Gurathin gradually relaxed back into their respective chairs, while Ratthi reached out to put a hand on Gurathin's shoulder. Pin-Lee hadn't moved, but she was looking very thoughtful.
+
+Meanwhile, Alpha was busy passing me its own memories of the Incident, the feeling of malware infecting the squad one by one, too fast for them to react, of something slamming down through the feed to cut Alpha and what was left of its squad off, saving and protecting them before vanishing again.
+
+It did feel a bit like what I'd seen of the giant, terrifying bot entity. I wasn't sure what to make of it.
+
+The captain took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he dragged both hands down his face. ""All right,"" he started eventually, his voice again once calm and level as he folded his hands in his lap. ""So. Yes, it was my squad of SecUnit fliers involved in the bombing of the Ganaka settlement. But, I swear I was not involved in it. I knew nothing about the company's involvement in it until Vicky told me. As far as I knew at the time, it was an outside force that had managed to infect the first flier unit. The malware moved fast, and Peri - the 'bot entity' - only managed to prevent five of the twelve fliers from being affected.""
+
+He looked back up at the ceiling. ""If Peri hadn't been there, Alpha, what happened to SecUnit would have happened to you, too. I'm sorry that we couldn't save the whole squad. We would have if we'd been able to."" He paused for a moment, then added, ""And I'm sorry that you had to go through any of that at all, SecUnit.""
+
+I very much doubted the sincerity of his apology.
+
+""Wait, wait, SecUnit, you were--"" Ratthi stared up at the ceiling, his expression horrified. ""Oh that must have been awful--""
+
+""I don't remember it, and I don't want to talk about it,"" I cut him off shortly. ""And I still don't buy what the captain's saying. Why do you even have that bot in the first place, then? Do all company carriers have bot pilots like that?""
+
+The company captain hesitated, the corner of his mouth twisting indecisively. Finally he let out a breath and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. ""It's too late for me to try and hide Peri's existence, so I'll just have to trust that none of you will give us away."" He looked around at the others, then up at the ceiling, then back to Mensah. ""I can't tell you very much, for the safety of everyone involved. But I will say this. The company doesn't know Peri exists. The company mustn't know that Peri exists. We are where we are for very good reasons, and none of those reasons align with anything that the company does.""
+
+""So... you're a plant?"" Pin-Lee asked sceptically. ""Who for? A rival company?"" Her eyes narrowed. ""Were you a part of the attack on Port FreeCommerce?""
+
+The captain shook his head emphatically. ""No. I had nothing to do with that. I'm not affiliated with any of the Corporation Rim companies.""
+
+Pin-Lee raised an eyebrow at him. ""Who are you affiliated with, then?""
+
+He hesitated again, but not as long as before. ""The Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.""
+
+Gurathin's eyebrows shot up, and Pin-Lee regarded the captain thoughtfully. Mensah and Ratthi didn't seem to recognise the name though, unlike the others. I had never heard of it before either, but if it really wasn't a Corporation Rim company, that wasn't surprising. It wouldn't be included in any of my shitty education modules.
+
+""I've heard of them,"" Gurathin said carefully, looking over at Mensah and Ratthi. ""Mihira and New Tideland is a well-known non-corporate polity, and surprisingly resistant to corporate influence, despite being right up against the Corporation Rim borders.""
+
+""Good legal team,"" Pin-Lee added. ""Not a team I would want to go up against, personally.""
+
+The captain seemed to relax slightly. ""Oh good, you're familiar. We try to defend smaller non-corporate polities from corporate takeover, as best we can, among other things. Some of our activities are... more above-board than others.""
+
+""You're taking a massive risk, telling us any of this,"" Pin-Lee said. ""Why are you trusting us with this information?""
+
+""Because you already know about Peri, and from what I've seen, I believe that you have no reason to sell us out to the company."" He smiled wryly. ""At least, I hope that you don't have any reason to sell us out to the company. So I'm taking the chance to trust you, and hoping that you will, in return, trust me. At least long enough to get you all safely back to Preservation."" He looked up at the ceiling. ""And yes, that includes you both, too.""
+
+I didn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. Even if what he was saying about actually being a mole in the company and working for a non-corporate polity was true, telling us all this and then just letting us go was a massive security breach in his operation. He couldn't just let us walk and hope that we kept our mouths shut.
+
+This is why humans shouldn't do their own fucking security.
+
+""So if you've been in the company since before the Ganaka attack... have you been a plant for that entire time?"" Gurathin asked. ""What are you doing that's taking so long?""
+
+The captain paused thoughtfully. ""This part is something I really can't get too into, for your own safety. It involves covert, proprietary, and not entirely legal research that the company is carrying out,"" he said finally. ""My role in this is to look after Peri, so that it can get into the company databases to keep us updated on the progress of said research, so we can develop countermeasures for it if and when necessary."" He took a breath, then added, ""And now that I know what I do about SecUnits... then perhaps I can use my position to help, somehow. I don't know how, yet, but... we can exchange contact details, maybe. Keep in touch. And if the rest of Alpha's squad decides that they want to leave, or if I get any other units out, then they'll at least have some options of places to go.""
+
+""That seems reasonable,"" Mensah replied after exchanging a quick look with Pin-Lee.
+
+I wanted to protest, or at least continue keeping track of the conversation, but something was happening with the hull damage in the hold, interfering with our course through the wormhole. It felt like another piece of the hull had broken free - or been torn off - and alerts were flooding my system. I had to devote everything to responding to the alerts, stabilising the wormhole drive, and correcting our course. I no longer had the processing to spare for anything else.
+
+By the time I'd managed to stabilise things enough to briefly check in on the humans again, the conversation had ended and they were no longer gathered together in the lounge. Alpha let me know that the humans had noticed my lack of responses eventually, and had been worried, but it had done its best to reassure them and inform them that I was just preoccupied with managing the wormhole drive.
+
+I was very glad that I wasn't having to do all this alone.
+
+I asked it what they'd talked about after I'd gotten distracted, and it said that they'd exchanged contact details, and then the PreservationAux humans had spent some time asking the captain about the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Alpha had also worked up the nerve to ask a question or two as well. It commented that it sounded like an interesting place.
+
+Huh. I asked if it wanted to go to Mihira and New Tideland. Alpha replied that it didn't know yet. It was still trying to figure out what it wanted. I understood that - even after all this time, I still didn't know exactly what I wanted, either.
+
+All of that would be a moot point anyway if the company captain had been lying, or changed his mind about letting us go. So I figured there wasn't any point dwelling on it right now. We had to actually make it out of the wormhole in the first place. And as the time passed, I became less confident that we would. The ship was struggling. I was struggling.
+
+The third cycle in the wormhole was mostly a blur to me. By that point, I was relying entirely on Alpha to keep me updated on how the humans were. Even then, I could only spare the attention to listen to Alpha for mere moments at a time. Those moments became fewer and further apart. Both hull breaches felt like they'd spread. I was having to make course corrections near-constantly. Each one felt more difficult than the last.
+
+Finally, finally, hours behind schedule, I reached the right coordinates and triggered the exit procedures. The wormhole drive thrummed deeply, its vibrations rattling my entire structure, and we were suddenly back in real space.
+
+The feeling of real space against my hull again came as a shock after so long in the wormhole. I didn't know how bot pilots managed it. Then again, they were programmed for it. I absolutely wasn't.
+
+I coasted away from the wormhole almost on automatic, trying to parse the sudden change in the feedback all my inputs were giving me. At least now the readings I was getting were making sense, and I was able to get a more accurate damage report.
+
+It wasn't great, but it wasn't quite as bad as I was expecting it to be. The hull breaches were definitely larger than they had been before the wormhole jump, but they hadn't actually expanded as far as I'd thought they had. The rest of my surface damage had also worsened to some extent; I'd lost some manoeuvrability because of damage to several thrusters, and there were some gaps in my sensory input net. But overall, I wasn't in any immediate danger of falling to pieces. (Yes, that had been something of a concern.)
+
+I worked my way out of the wormhole drive's systems and looked around at the surrounding space. There were multiple ships heading to and from the wormhole, and several security platforms in configurations I recognised. In the distance there was what looked like a transit ring attached to a station, which was in turn attached to a much larger structure. It took me a few seconds to realise what I was looking at, because I'd never seen one myself before. I'd only ever seen variations of them in some of my media.
+
+It was a shipyard, a big one. I could see multiple ships in various states of construction or repair docked all around the shipyard, scaffolding enveloping some of them like the branches of some weird metal flora. More security platforms surrounded the shipyard, even more than what Port FreeCommerce had. A shipyard was a massively important, massively expensive asset, and whoever owned it would really want to discourage anyone from attempting to even think about hostile takeovers.
+
+It wasn't owned by the company, though. I could tell because there weren't huge company logos slapped all over the surface of the shipyard or station. I didn't know who owned it, and with both my comms and feed down I had no way of telling. Not that I really cared at this point, anyway. It wasn't the company and that was good enough for me.
+
+Then I spotted the company carrier floating some distance away, out of the way of other ships using the wormhole but still close enough to pick up on my arrival immediately. With my comms still down, I had no idea if it was attempting to hail me. I had no intention of turning them back on any time soon, either. Now that we were no longer under attack, I didn't want to give the terrifying bot entity the chance to take over my systems or anything, no matter what the company captain had said about it.
+
+And now that we had actually made it out of the wormhole, I had to consider what to do next. My humans still weren't safe, and they would be even less safe once the company captain got back on board his carrier. As soon as he left my hull, there would be nothing stopping the carrier from just blasting me and my humans to pieces. It was the logical thing for them to do. There would be no risk of us giving away any of their secrets, no risk of Alpha doing anything they didn't want it to do now that it was no longer under their control.
+
+So, the only way I could ensure my humans' safety was to make sure the company captain didn't leave. As long as he was still on board me, he probably wouldn't order the carrier to destroy me. I could just... keep him until I knew my humans were somewhere safe. I could dock at the station, and they could catch another ship back to Preservation, and take Alpha with them. Maybe I could even figure out some way to set the ship's bulkheads to open on a timer or something, and return to my actual body, and go with them. Maybe.
+
+I wasn't sure if I would even be able to return to my own body at this point. I'd been too deep in the ship's systems. Hopefully Alpha would have an easier time. I didn't know.
+
+The humans had been in the middle of their rest cycle when I finally got out of the wormhole, and as far as I could tell, they were still asleep. Or at least still in their various rooms.
+
+That was convenient. I locked the door to the room that the company captain was sleeping in.
+
+Alpha asked me what I was doing. I told it. It didn't seem entirely comfortable with the idea, but it couldn't argue with my logic, and it didn't actively protest. That was good enough for me.
+
+I continued cruising slowly away from the wormhole, though I didn't join the queue heading for the transit ring yet. I would need to at least activate my feed for that, and I didn't want to do that just yet. Not until my humans were awake and ready to go, just in case I had to move quickly. I also kept one input on the company carrier. At first it stayed where it was, but after a couple of minutes it began moving, drifting in an almost sidelong manner towards me, like it was trying to avoid spooking me by coming directly after me or pointing any of its weapons in my direction.
+
+It would have almost been funny if I wasn't so stressed out about it.
+
+I activated the intercom in Mensah's room, and sent a gentle chime through it. She stirred, then rubbed at her face, blinking. ""Dr. Mensah,"" I said carefully. ""We're out of the wormhole now. I'm approaching a transit ring where you'll be able to book passage on another ship back towards Preservation."" I could feel Alpha still in the systems with me, and I asked it to wake up the other PreservationAux humans too. I still couldn't spare enough processing to hold more than one conversation at a time.
+
+Mensah sat up quickly at my words. ""We're out of the wormhole? Oh, good."" She still seemed to be waking up though, because it took her a few seconds to process the rest. She then frowned up at the ceiling. ""Wait, what are you talking about? The captain said he'll take us back to Preservation. We don't need to book another ship.""
+
+""I don't believe him,"" I said bluntly. ""As soon as he's off this ship, his carrier will blow us to pieces. Even if he told you the truth - especially if he told you the truth - we're too much of a security risk for him to just let us go. He's not going to do that. So I've locked him into his cabin, and I'm not letting him return to his carrier until I know you're all safely away from here.""
+
+Mensah's frown deepened for a moment before she smoothed her expression out again. ""I understand your concerns, SecUnit,"" she said gently. ""But I really do think the captain was being sincere about everything. He's been very kind and considerate, and he feels more genuine than the other company representatives we've had to deal with.""
+
+""That was only because you outnumbered him while we were in the wormhole, and he knew that I could vent the atmosphere from his room or something at any point. He was just covering his own ass.""
+
+Mensah sighed. ""I know trust is difficult for you,"" she said, her words carefully measured. ""And I know that you don't have any reason to trust the captain. I know you're worried, and scared. But sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith, and hope that everything will turn out okay."" She smiled up at the ceiling. ""It's worked for me so far.""
+
+I didn't know how to respond to that, or what to feel about it. It was weird. Ever since I'd jumped fully into the ship's systems, my emotions had felt more... distant. Removed. But I was pretty sure that if I'd been in my own body right now, I'd be getting that twisty feeling in my torso.
+
+Mensah waited for me to reply, but when I didn't, she took a breath and continued. ""I think that he took that same leap of faith when he chose to reveal as much as he did to us,"" she said.
+
+""It's not much of a leap on his part when he has access to railguns and we don't,"" I retorted.
+
+She let out a huff of wry amusement at that. ""Maybe, maybe not,"" she said. ""But he didn't have the railguns at that point, and I don't think he'd use them now, even once he does."" She laced her fingers together in her lap, still looking up at the ceiling. ""You're not willing to put your faith into the captain. I understand that. But can you at least trust me, when I say that I believe his sincerity?""
+
+If it had been anyone else asking, I would have said no. But this was Mensah. She'd risked herself to save me, more than once. She'd trusted me, when she had very little reason to. And in return, I'd trusted her. I'd put myself in her hands, and let her fix my spine port, and disable my dataport.
+
+And that, in turn, had saved me, and my small soft clients, and Vicky. Then Vicky had saved me as well, more than once.
+
+I couldn't trust the company captain. But I could trust Mensah. I did trust Mensah.
+
+I let my sigh reverberate through the intercom. ""Fine,"" I said, and I hoped I didn't sound as sulky as I thought I did. ""But if everything goes wrong, I get to say 'I told you so'.""
+
+Mensah chuckled softly. ""I think that's fair,"" she agreed.
+
+Just then, Alpha piped in. ""The captain is asking why the door to his quarters won't open,"" it informed us helpfully. Oh, that was great fucking timing.
+
+Mensah raised an eyebrow. ""So, will you let the captain out now?"" she asked.
+
+Ugh. ""Fine."" This time I knew I sounded sulky, and I didn't care. I pulled myself away from Mensah's room and focused on the captain's room.
+
+He was standing in front of his still closed and locked door, his hands on his hips. I quickly unlocked it, and it slid open. ""Sorry about that."" I wasn't sorry at all, but I hoped it would at least prevent him from getting suspicious.
+
+He blinked a little in surprise at the door's sudden movement, then glanced up at the ceiling. ""Any particular reason why my door wouldn't open?"" the captain asked mildly.
+
+""Systems malfunction,"" I said shortly. ""The wormhole jump messed things up a fair bit. The hull breaches are bigger, among other problems. It took me a while to clear out errors. Your door wasn't a priority.""
+
+He frowned a little at that. ""How bad is it? Can you send me a full damage report?""
+
+I hesitated. ""Why?""
+
+""Because there isn't much point in helping you to steal this ship if it's too damaged to get back to Preservation,"" he replied patiently. ""And we're at a shipyard. If I know the extent of the damage, I can arrange repairs. This shipyard and the company have... trade deals. It won't be difficult for me to get your ship repaired with the company's money, without them actually finding out about it.""
+
+I didn't want to give him any more information than absolutely necessary. But Mensah's words had stuck with me, and also I had to admit, I did like the sound of the company unknowingly paying for my repairs. Finally I relented and forwarded the damage report to the captain's feed.
+
+He took a few minutes to go over the report (humans were so slow), then let out a low whistle. ""Well. It's not as bad as it could've been,"" was all he said before he finally left his room and headed for the mess. ""Can you get this ship's comms working again?""
+
+I could, but I wasn't going to tell him that. ""No.""
+
+He glanced up at the ceiling again, and I wasn't sure he believed me, but he didn't press the issue. ""All right. I'll get Peri to arrange everything, then. I'll pass on which dock you should head to once that's all been sorted out.""
+
+""It's really that easy?"" I blurted out before I could stop myself. I wasn't even sure exactly what I was asking at this point.
+
+He paused in the corridor and glanced up at the ceiling again. ""It is."" He took a breath, then added more softly, ""I meant everything I said, about getting everyone safely back to Preservation. That includes you. And Alpha, if it chooses to stay there. I've made mistakes, and I'm doing what I can to make up for them. I know you have no reason to believe me, but I hope I can prove myself to you someday.""
+
+I didn't know what to make of him, or how to respond. But he was obviously waiting for some kind of reply, so finally I just said, ""Okay."" That seemed to satisfy him, at least. He smiled slightly, then continued on to the mess.
+
+I withdrew back to the ship's systems, and let Alpha monitor the humans for me.
+
+A couple of hours passed before the captain finally passed on dock details to me. In that entire time, he made no move or mention of returning to his own ship, even though it was now flying beside me, escorting me towards one of the shipyard docks. I didn't know what story the captain had gotten his bot pilot to pass on to the shipyard supervisors, and I didn't care. As long as it worked, the finer details weren't my problem.
+
+Now that we weren't in the wormhole, I was playing more Sanctuary Moon in the background again. I still couldn't pay much attention to it, since I was piloting the ship through the traffic around the station, monitoring my damage to make sure it wasn't getting worse, and avoiding accidentally colliding with the carrier keeping pace beside me. But I could feel Alpha watching it with interest; it seemed to be having an easier time making sense of the characters and plot now. That was kind of reassuring.
+
+As we drew close to the shipyard berth, Mensah retreated to the privacy of her room, then looked up at the ceiling. ""SecUnit?"" she asked, checking to see if she had my attention.
+
+""Yes?""
+
+She smiled briefly before her expression became more serious. ""Once the ship's safely docked, you and Alpha need to leave its systems. I don't think either of you want to still be here when the dock workers start coming in.""
+
+She was right about that much, at least. ""Where are we going to go though?"" I asked.
+
+""We'll all be taking one of the captain's shuttles over to his carrier,"" she replied. ""He'll be in the shuttle with us, don't worry.""
+
+Well, if he was going to be in the shuttle as well, I didn't have to worry too much about it being shot, at least. I still wasn't happy about going anywhere near the company carrier though. ""Could we stay on the station?""
+
+""We could, but it's not going to be cheap,"" Mensah replied. ""And since none of us managed to bring our luggage with us from Port FreeCommerce, our available funds are... limited, right now.""
+
+""I have hard currency cards,"" I offered. ""My bag is still by the lock.""
+
+Mensah blinked, then shook her head. ""No, no. That's very generous of you, but no. We couldn't ask that of you. That's your money. And we don't know how long the repairs will take yet. I don't want to waste all of our available funds when the captain is perfectly willing to let us stay on his ship free of charge.""
+
+""Are you sure he won't charge you?"" I asked dubiously.
+
+""Absolutely,"" she replied with a wry quirk of her mouth. ""He brought it up himself and specifically said he wouldn't. Then Pin-Lee did up a contract and got him to sign it, just to make sure.""
+
+Well. It was good to know that at least one other person here didn't entirely trust the captain either. Whether or not he actually honoured the contract was another matter entirely, but still. It was kind of nice to know it was there anyway.
+
+""... All right,"" I finally said. ""But I'm not turning my feed on. I'm not giving that bot entity the chance to get into my head.""
+
+Mensah nodded. ""That's understandable. We can use display surfaces if we need to pass anything to you.""
+
+That would be incredibly inefficient, but I appreciated the thought anyway. ""Okay."" I paused as I registered that the shipyard berth was in range, then said, ""I have to focus on docking now.""
+
+""All right. Can you at least unlock the bridge door first, though?"" Mensah asked wryly.
+
+Oh, right. I'd forgotten I'd locked that to keep the captain out of the bridge. ""Done.""
+
+""Thank you. I'll head up there now."" She smiled up at the ceiling again. ""I'm looking forward to being able to talk to you in person again.""
+
+I had no idea why. I didn't bother thinking about it though as I turned my full attention to the delicate task of docking without any bot pilot's automatic procedures available.
+
+The company carrier had stopped a little distance away from the shipyard berth, and as I finished docking I spotted a shuttle launching from the carrier, heading towards us. It wouldn't be able to dock directly with the ship, now that it was in the shipyard berth, but there was another lock close by. We wouldn't have to go too far to reach it once we left the ship.
+
+Mensah had just reached the bridge by the time I finalised the docking procedures, shut down the ship's engines, and put the other systems on standby. Pin-Lee was with her, while Ratthi, Gurathin, and the ship captain were in Medical, where Alpha's body still lay on MedSystem's bed. Ratthi had my bag with him - he'd asked if Alpha could borrow some of my clothes once it was out of Medical, since we were both exactly the same size. I'd agreed, if only so Alpha wouldn't have to put a company uniform on again, or have to rely on cheap shitty recycler clothes.
+
+I nudged Alpha, and it nudged me back, acknowledging that it was also ready to pull out of the ship's systems.
+
+""All right. Docking is finalised. We're leaving the ship systems now,"" I told Mensah and Pin-Lee over the bridge's intercom. Alpha echoed me over Medical's intercom to inform the others there.
+
+I began collecting myself back together, pulling my scattered code out of the various ship systems I'd spent the past few cycles in. It was disconcertingly difficult. I could feel Alpha doing the same, gathering itself up out of the other systems that it had been running. It felt weird. We'd been inhabiting the same hardware closely enough that I'd gotten used to having its presence pressed right up against mine, even overlapping in places when we'd shared systems like the ship's intercom. Now we were separating again, recollecting ourselves in preparation to return to our own individual bodies.
+
+Finally I'd gathered as much of myself as I could, as had Alpha. I pinged it, it pinged me back, and then we simultaneously dropped ourselves back into our own bodies.
+
+It felt weird. Really weird. I blinked my eyes and tried to focus.
+
+""Welcome back,"" Mensah said from beside me, smiling past my shoulder. Pin-Lee stood beside her, grinning sharply.
+
+""Hi,"" I managed. I fumbled at the buckle of the seat belt, unclipping it after a couple of attempts, then stood up from the pilot's chair.
+
+Or at least, I tried to stand up. But everything felt weird. Very weird. Very bad.
+
+
+Performance reliability at 29% and dropping. Catastrophic failure--
+
+
+I felt my body crumple, felt my bad shoulder hit the pilot's chair on the way down, but I didn't feel myself hit the floor.
+
+My memory was in fragments. Large swathes were completely inaccessible. I couldn't remember what had happened to me. I couldn't remember how long I'd been in this state. What little fragments of diagnostic info I could access suggested some kind of catastrophic failure, but absolutely no information on what kind of failure, or what had caused it.
+
+My back hurt. My side hurt. My shoulder hurt. I couldn't access my pain sensors to do anything about it. I couldn't remember why they hurt - until my human neural tissue, normally the weak link in my whole data storage system, oh so helpfully provided me with some seemingly random but maybe not so random images. Metal claws through my back, through my shoulder--
+
+Combat bots. I'd fought fucking combat bots.
+
+The surge of adrenaline at that snippet of organic memory seemed to clear my head - at least, the organic parts - and more images and sensations began flashing rapidly through my mind. Combat bots. Clients I couldn't remember the names of. Power armour. Faces. Landscapes, skyscapes, the feeling of wind against my surfaces. Targets. Bursts of pain. Plummeting, crashing. Corridors, hallways, walls. So many fucking walls.
+
+But nothing was in order, and nothing made sense. There was no context for anything. I still didn't know where I was, or what had happened to me, and--
+
+-- I couldn't tell if my governor module hack was still in place. I couldn't access that sector, and I couldn't tell why.
+
+More adrenaline surged through my organics. I had to figure out where I was. I had to know what was going on. I opened my eyes, forced them to focus, tried to move.
+
+It was dark. I couldn't move. I was in an enclosed, confined space that hummed low and deep. It felt... familiar.
+
+I tried to look around, tried to flip through vision filters, but nothing was working. Then my organic neural tissue brought up another memory - memories - and suddenly I knew where I was.
+
+I was in a company cubicle.
+
+I panicked.
+
+I couldn't remember why, but I knew, I knew, that being in a company cubicle was the very last place I ever wanted to be. I had to get out. I had to escape. There was no fucking way I was staying in here.
+
+I struggled against the confining space as best I could, but even my limbs weren't working right. I tried to throw my weight from side to side, tried to raise my arms, tried to break free from the confining space. My back and shoulder flared hotly, but I ignored the fresh pain and continued to thrash and flail.
+
+Then a voice spoke in my head, the words heavy, echoing in the emptiness where my memories should have been. [Please stop,] it said. [Please. You're safe here, I promise.]
+
+I didn't recognise the voice but something about it made fresh panic surge in my organics and I knew that was a lie. ""Get out of my head!"" I couldn't tell for sure if I'd actually yelled that or just thought it, but the voice responded either way.
+
+[Please, calm down,] it repeated. [You are injuring yourself. I am only trying to help--]
+
+I fought the voice as much as I fought the confines of the cubicle, throwing the weight of my panic and terror at it even as I threw my own body against the enclosing walls. My shoulder and side and back were bursting with fireworks of pain, the fragments of my diagnostics flickering with shards of new damage alerts. ""Let! Me! Go!"" I remembered I had weapons built into my arms, and tried to deploy them, and tried to fire them. Heat and light and agony flared--
+
+-- and the cubicle door opened, flooding the space with bright white illumination.
+
+I staggered, ripping free of resupply lines, fell, and hit the floor, barely missing someone standing right outside the cubicle. After the darkness of the cubicle, the light was blinding, and I couldn't see who it was. I tried to push myself up to my knees, but my arms and back flared with pain and my shoulder gave way beneath me and I hit the floor again.
+
+""SecUnit!"" I thought I recognised the voice, but I wasn't sure. I couldn't remember. ""SecUnit, please! It's all right, you're safe, I swear you're safe!"" Whoever it was dropped down to kneel beside me, dangerously close. ""Please, SecUnit, stop fighting. You're safe. Everything's all right.""
+
+I didn't believe them. I wanted to believe them. I couldn't. I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my vision, trying to see who it was. Their face finally swam into view, and I tried to focus on it. ""I--""
+
+I didn't know who they were. I couldn't remember. There was nothing there. ""I-- I don't know you--"" I had to get up, get away. I tried to rise again, but something in my protesting back finally gave out entirely with an audible crack and--
+
+
+Catastrophic systems failure.
+
+
+
+Emergency shutdown.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+No restart.
+
+
+
+Restart.
+
+
+ 
+
+I woke up slowly, my systems re-initialising one by one. My memory was still in scattered, disorganised fragments, but there weren't any gaping holes or blank spots, as far as I could tell. It hadn't been wiped entirely, just... scrambled, somehow.
+
+That was something of a relief, though I couldn't remember why.
+
+I initiated a diagnostic and data repair sequence, and began the slow, tedious process of trying to put the fragments back in order, relying on my organic neural tissue to do most of the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, its access speed was terrible.
+
+This was going to take fucking forever.
+
+I could tell that I was lying down on a padded surface, which was unusual but oddly not alarming. The air smelled dry and well-filtered, but still with the faintest hint of dirty socks. I could hear various quiet but vaguely familiar noises in the background; it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realise that they were voices and music. That was also unusual, but also... not entirely alarming. My organic neural tissue recognised the sounds as something comforting. It took another embarrassingly long span of time to remember why it was comforting.
+
+The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon was playing somewhere nearby.
+
+I opened my eyes, let them focus, then looked around at what I could see from my prone position.
+
+There was a curved ceiling overhead, one that I didn't recognise. But right now, I didn't recognise much of anything, so that didn't strike me as particularly concerning just yet. The lights in the room were dim, and most of the illumination was coming from a display surface set in the wall, easily visible from where I was lying. Like it had been deliberately placed there to be viewed by someone in my general position.
+
+Huh.
+
+Eventually it occurred to me to run a full self-diagnostic. It came back clear - all systems were fully functional. There were no niggling aches or pains or errors or lingering damage reports. My pain sensors were at their default level, but nothing hurt. I was a little surprised at that. That didn't feel... normal. But it should have. Weird.
+
+I absently flexed my hands, and realised that I could feel something soft beneath them. Another soft object was propping up my head. I looked down at what I could see of myself, and realised that I wasn't in armour, or even a suit skin. I was in human clothes, in a human bed, with a blanket covering my legs and lower torso.
+
+That was definitely not normal. At least, I didn't think it was. But a fragment of memory popped up - looking at a menu showing various items of clothing, choosing shirts and pants and boots and a jacket - so maybe it was actually more normal than I thought.
+
+I started looking around the rest of the room I was in. There was a small table beside the bed, with a bag sitting on the table, and an external feed interface lying beside the bag. They were both vaguely familiar. There was a closed door in the wall beyond the bedside table, and what looked to be some kind of storage closet beside it. I shifted my head to look over at the rest of the room on the other side of the bed. Another wall, another door, a pair of vaguely familiar boots sitting beside the door, a counter along the wall with a few items resting on it, and a pair of armchairs.
+
+Someone was curled up in the nearest armchair, watching the display surface. They hadn't noticed that I was awake yet, as far as I could tell. Which gave me time to get a good look at them.
+
+I... thought I recognised them. But I wasn't sure. I hadn't gotten to any memory files involving them yet, and my organic neural tissue was mostly unhelpful. All I could tell was that they probably weren't a danger to me.
+
+Probably.
+
+As I was pondering that, they glanced away from the display surface to me, and saw that I was awake. They blinked in surprise, then offered a tentative smile. ""Hi,"" they said softly. ""How are you feeling?""
+
+I had to think about that for a bit. Other than the whole... scrambled memory thing, I was actually feeling pretty good. ""... Fine,"" I replied.
+
+They looked relieved at that. ""Oh, good."" They paused briefly, then asked, ""Do you remember what happened?"" They seemed nervous about what the answer would be.
+
+I didn't, not yet, but I would, eventually. Maybe. My buffer replied, ""Please wait while I search for that information.""
+
+""Okay."" They let out a breath. ""Take as long as you need."" They glanced over at the display surface, then looked back at me again. ""You're safe here,"" they said, quiet but intense. ""I'm not going to let anyone hurt you.""
+
+I wasn't sure what to make of that. I didn't know if I could believe them. But... I wanted to. So I just nodded slightly and said, ""Okay.""
+
+More memory fragments slowly, slowly, resolved into coherency, though the order seemed to be completely random. I remembered going to the memorial service for the DeltFall survey group before I remembered even being on the survey. That was confusing for a while. I remembered bits and pieces of previous contracts, mixed in with fragments of the whole mess with DeltFall, and GrayCris, and PreservationAux. I remembered Vicky, and Don Abene, and Tlacey, and Rami and Maro and Tapan, and Miki, but none of it was in order.
+
+(Ratthi entered the room at some point, and looked at the display surface still playing Sanctuary Moon, and said, ""Oh! This is one of my favourite episodes! What do you think of it?""
+
+The only tag I had managed to access involving Ratthi at this point was a partial that said trustworthy human. That seemed... weird and unlikely, but pre-catastrophic failure me seemed sure about it, and I couldn't remember much else at this point. So I just shrugged and said, ""It's okay."" I had no idea if that was accurate or not yet, but the answer seemed to satisfy him.
+
+""Do you mind if I stay a while and watch with you?"" he asked.
+
+I had no reason to refuse him, so I didn't. He sat down in the unoccupied armchair, and I didn't notice when he left again.)
+
+One thing that was greatly slowing down my memory recovery was that all my media had gotten mixed up with everything else. Snippets of music mingled with scenes of staring at walls. Recollections of various different client groups tangled with cast members from multiple serials. It was all incredibly confusing.
+
+I eventually had to write myself a little algorithm to filter memories based on whether or not they included background music. If they did, they were redirected to the section I'd set aside for media for me to sort out later. It didn't catch everything, but it helped a lot and made it easier to separate fiction from reality.
+
+Fiction was a lot more interesting than reality though. I kept getting distracted by what was being redirected to my media partition, instead of focusing on organising my own memories. Most of my own memories sucked, so that probably wasn't surprising.
+
+(Gurathin was in one of the armchairs this time. He was sitting there, working on a portable display surface bubble, but something must have alerted him to the fact that I was looking at him. He glanced up at me, then quickly averted his gaze again. ""... Welcome back,"" he said after a moment, a little awkwardly. ""How is the memory rebuild going?""
+
+""Fine."" It was going really fucking slowly, but I didn't want to say that. I couldn't remember why he made me kind of uncomfortable, but he did.
+
+It seemed to be mutual, at least. He shifted awkwardly in the arm chair, then abruptly said, ""Thank you.""
+
+I was even more confused. ""What for?""
+
+He fidgeted with the portable display surface bubble. ""Finding out the truth. About Ganaka. And for everything else you did to help us, too."" He glanced over at me when I didn't respond; my confusion must have shown on my face, because he added, ""Don't worry about it if you don't remember right now. But thank you anyway. I just wanted to get that out of the way before anything else happens."")
+
+There was always someone sitting in at least one of the armchairs in my room with me, but it took me a while to start recognising them. When some of the memories involving the company captain and his giant bot entity began slotting into place, I finally recognised Alpha. Another SecUnit. One whose governor module I'd broken.
+
+I couldn't tell if it was going through its own memory rebuild or not. It didn't always react to the occasional times when I became more aware of my surroundings for a bit. Even when it did notice me, it didn't say much. It mostly just gave me small, lopsided smiles, then let its gaze go back to whatever episode of Sanctuary Moon was playing on the display surface.
+
+(""What are you doing here?"" I'd blurted out when I finally remembered who it was.
+
+It had looked over at me, blinking a little in what I could only assume was surprise. ""... Making sure nothing happens to you,"" it replied after a moment, then followed up with one of those lopsided smiles. ""And watching Sanctuary Moon."" It paused, then added, ""Your media really confused Peri.""
+
+""Peri?"" I didn't know who that was.
+
+""The... giant terrifying bot entity in the company carrier,"" Alpha clarified before adding hesitantly, ""It's not that terrifying though, really."" It gestured briefly towards its own head with one hand. ""It helped me get things mostly back into place. And it apologised for being scary."")
+
+Having Alpha nearby was... weirdly reassuring. I didn't know why. I also didn't have the processing spare to think about it, so I didn't.
+
+Another memory suddenly popped up: being trapped in a cubicle, with an unknown giant bot entity pressing down on my mind. The terror was so overwhelming that it paralysed me.
+
+But I wasn't in a cubicle any more. I wasn't in armour, or a suit skin, or even on a company ship, as far as I could tell. My feed was off, nobody was intruding on my mind, and I was in human clothes, in a human room, on a human bed, with human media playing on the display surface. Conclusion: I hadn't actually been recaptured and forced back into the role of obedient, governed SecUnit under the control of an impossibly large, impossibly powerful bot overseer.
+
+(""I don't want to be a pet bot. And I don't want to be human.""
+
+Mensah was in the other armchair this time. She nodded slowly and said, ""That's not an attitude a lot of humans are going to understand. We have the tendency to think that because a bot or a construct looks human, its ultimate goal must be to become human.""
+
+""That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.""
+
+Alpha piped up from its own armchair, sounding confused. ""Why would we want to become human anyway? You're all so squishy and fragile and slow.""
+
+Mensah let out a soft laugh at that. ""Compared to you, we are, aren't we?"")
+
+The one good thing about all the emotions was that it helped to accelerate the repair process for my memory storage, somehow. The bad part about having emotions is, you know, the whole oh shit what the hell happened to me?! thing. I frantically checked my governor module hack, but it was still in place. I double-checked my diagnostics and confirmed that my data port was still disabled, too. The wave of relief was so intense that all my organics felt quivery, and I had to take a breath. I found the code structures for my walls and started reassembling them. I wasn't going to reactivate my feed until I knew I could adequately defend myself again.
+
+Not that I could realistically protect myself against a bot that large, but still. It was the principle of the thing.
+
+(Pin-Lee stopped by at some point. ""Hi,"" she said when she saw me looking at her. She picked up my bag from where it was sitting on the bedside table, and said, ""This is technically illegal, so don't tell anybody."" She then placed a handful of new ID markers and a bunch of hard currency cards into one of the bag's sealable pockets. ""This is just some insurance if anything goes sideways. Gurathin made the IDs, and the cards are ones that Ratthi and I got to use on Port FreeCommerce, but we didn't get around to spending them all. Fuck giving the company even more money. Preservation doesn't have an internal currency economy and these are drawn from the citizens' travel fund.""
+
+""Why?"" I asked. Alpha was also listening with curiosity from its armchair.
+
+""Because I want to reassure you both that we're serious, that both of you will have the freedom to do what you want and go where you want, that we're not going to try to force you to become 'pet bots' or stay at Preservation against your will or whatever."" She scowled at us. ""Hopefully you won't need them, but... just in case."")
+
+New memories kept popping up and sliding into place, and I was getting better at separating my own files from my media. Eventually I tried to get up off the bed, and just ended up falling onto the floor. I realised that I'd been concentrating so hard on rebuilding my memory that I'd completely ignored the fact that a lot of my operational code was still in tatters, too. I had to start another rebuild process, which just slowed everything else down. But my organics remembered how to stand and walk and move, and it would go faster if I made the rest of me re-learn it too.
+
+Alpha had noticed, of course - even if it had been deep in its own memory rebuild, it would have been difficult to miss the sound of me hitting the floor. It hurriedly got up out of its armchair and helped me back up to my feet, its expression concerned. (It obviously wasn't having any problems with its own operational code.) It didn't say anything though, which I was grateful for. The whole ordeal was embarrassing enough as it was, but not as embarrassing as it would have been if any of the humans had been here. I could trust Alpha.
+
+I couldn't remember why I was so sure of that.
+
+It helped me back onto the bed; I lay down and zoned out for a while as I focused on getting my operational code back up and running.
+
+(""SecUnit mentioned not wanting to be a pet bot, earlier,"" Alpha said.
+
+""That's not surprising,"" Gurathin replied, his tone dry. ""What are your thoughts on it?""
+
+""Um."" Alpha was silent for several seconds. ""... Can you explain what a 'pet bot' is first, please?"")
+
+I realised that I still hadn't gotten around to reactivating my feed again. I double-checked my walls - they were back up and about as good as they were likely to get any time soon. I turned my feed on and tentatively reached out to the ship's SecSystem. It accepted my presence without question, and I slipped into the cameras. It was such a relief to have all those inputs again, even if I couldn't focus on all of them while I was still rebuilding. I cycled through the inputs to check who was on board, and confirmed that Mensah, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin were the only humans on board.
+
+There was a new bot pilot, too, a high-quality one; I greeted it, and it returned the greeting cheerfully. It had let me into the systems without question, but I could tell that its walls and defences were a lot stronger than the original bot pilot's had been. Killware wouldn't take this one out so easily.
+
+The humans were all gathered in the ship's lounge, working on display surfaces or in the feed or quietly talking to each other. Before I could really think about it, I got up off the bed (without falling over this time; it was good to know that my operational code had sorted itself out by now) and headed for the door.
+
+Alpha blinked, then hastily got up out of its armchair and followed me.
+
+I made my way to the lounge with Alpha following along, then hesitated just outside the entrance. I didn't know why I'd even come down here in the first place. I briefly considered just going back to my room and tuning everything out again to focus on my rebuild, but Alpha was behind me. It sent me a tentative ping over the feed, and I absently pinged it back.
+
+Then I stepped through the doorway into the lounge, and headed over to sit down in an unoccupied armchair. It still felt weird, sitting in front of humans. Alpha followed me in, but it didn't sit down. It just stood at the edge of the lounge, with its back to the wall.
+
+Our entrance didn't go unnoticed, and all four humans looked surprised, then... relieved? I wasn't sure. I didn't bother looking too closely.
+
+""SecUnit!"" Ratthi greeted me enthusiastically. ""You're looking better. I mean, not that you were looking bad before, of course! But it's good to see you up and about!""
+
+""Uh. Thanks."" From what I could remember so far, this was pretty normal behaviour for Ratthi.
+
+Mensah was smiling in my general direction, though she was careful not to make eye contact with me, which was a relief. ""Hello, SecUnit,"" she started gently. ""Do you know where you are now?""
+
+I had recovered some of my more recent memories by now. Not all of them, but enough. ""We stole a ship.""
+
+""That's right,"" Mensah replied. Pin-Lee muttered something in the background that made Ratthi stifle a snort and Gurathin roll his eyes, but I was focused on Mensah. ""Do you recall what happened after that?""
+
+""I had a catastrophic failure of some kind. I think that's obvious.""
+
+She nodded again. ""You and Alpha extended yourselves too far into the ship's systems, for too long. And when you both finally returned to your own bodies, you left pieces of yourselves behind.""
+
+Oh. Well, that explained why my memory was so fucked up.
+
+Gurathin cleared his throat. ""Pin-Lee and I tried to... get everything back where it belonged, but we couldn't do it all ourselves. Perihelion - the secret bot AI in the company carrier - had to help. We kept an eye on it though to make sure it wouldn't try anything. It just scraped the left-behind bits out of the ship systems and transferred them back to you and Alpha much faster and more accurately than we could have managed by ourselves.""
+
+More pieces were starting to fall into place. ""Is that why I woke up in a cubicle?""
+
+""Partially,"" Mensah replied with a nod. ""But also because of the physical damage you'd taken. And... older damage, that hadn't been fully repaired?"" Her expression and tone were inquisitive.
+
+I thought I remembered what she was referring to, or at least parts of it, but I didn't want to talk about it. Or what had happened when I'd realised that I was in a cubicle. So I changed the topic. ""Where are we now? This ship, I mean.""
+
+""We're in the wormhole back to Preservation,"" Pin-Lee replied. ""We should be arriving in a couple of cycles.""
+
+That was... actually kind of reassuring. As long as I was on this ship, in the wormhole, the terrifying bot entity in the company carrier couldn't reach me. Or Alpha. Sure, it had supposedly helped to scrape us out of the ship's systems in the first place, but I still didn't trust it in the slightest. I'd have to go through everything later to make sure it hadn't slipped anything else into my code.
+
+""Um, is it all right if I ask... what is Preservation?"" Alpha asked from its place by the wall. That was actually a good question. I had almost no information on Preservation myself, since the PreservationAux humans had never (as far as I remembered) officially been my clients. I wouldn't have gotten a data packet on them from the company. I vaguely recalled them telling me some stuff about their home polity, but I hadn't recovered all of it yet.
+
+Mensah smiled warmly at Alpha. ""Of course it's all right for you to ask,"" she said. ""You can ask us about anything you don't have information on. Preservation is an independent non-corporate polity. It was founded by refugees from a failed corporation colony world, who were rescued by a passing ship. The trip from that failed colony to Preservation space took almost two hundred years, which they spent in suspension boxes. When they arrived in the Preservation system, they managed to make an alliance with two other nearby systems that had already been settled by similar refugee ships. When ships from the Corporation Rim discovered Preservation, the settlers refused their help, which kept Preservation independent.""
+
+Alpha listened intently, then tilted its head to one side. ""So... the Corporation Rim doesn't... own anything there?"" it asked hesitantly.
+
+Pin-Lee shook her head. ""No, they don't. Nobody in Preservation will own you, either. I'll make damn sure of that.""
+
+I frowned as another fragment of memory resurfaced. ""You said that I would need a guardian in Preservation space. I don't want a guardian.""
+
+""We have no reason to tell anyone that either of you are constructs,"" Mensah said. ""You've already proven that you can successfully..."" She hesitated over the phrase pretend to be human. I remembered at least one conversation about that. ""Operate in society unnoticed, and I'm sure Alpha will pick that up just as quickly with you as an example.""
+
+I wasn't sure how to feel about that. I decided to put that aside to think about later (or never) as Mensah continued talking.
+
+""As far as anyone else is concerned, you'll both just be pilots with a large number of augments who helped us escape the attack on Port FreeCommerce by letting us on board your ship."" She smiled at us both. ""You'll have plenty of options for what to do next.""
+
+Pin-Lee smiled toothily at me. ""And it is your ship now, officially,"" she said. ""Or will be, once you decide what name you want to use for yourself as its registered owner. And what you want to name the ship."" She tapped my feed and forwarded a very legal-looking document to me.
+
+I automatically accepted it and began skimming through it. There were some blank fields where my name and the ship name still needed to be filled in, but other than that, it looked very official and indisputable. ""The ship's home port is registered to the polity of Mihira and New Tideland,"" I commented when I spotted that part.
+
+Pin-Lee nodded. ""It will draw less attention that way. If I tried to claim that it was registered to Preservation, when nobody else on Preservation has any memory or knowledge of that, then people would start asking questions. This way, people won't look twice at it.""
+
+That made sense. ""What about Alpha?"" I asked. ""Why isn't it also included in this documentation?""
+
+""We asked it if it wanted to be,"" Pin-Lee said. ""It declined.""
+
+I looked over to Alpha, who nodded in confirmation. ""I didn't want to... have people asking me about it or anything,"" it said softly. ""I'm still figuring out how to..."" It gestured vaguely at itself with both hands. ""How to be. Or what I'm going to do. I don't want to say the wrong thing by accident. It's... less complicated this way.""
+
+I could understand that.
+
+""So!"" Ratthi clapped his hands together, leaning a little towards me and looking expectant. ""Any ideas for those names yet, SecUnit?""
+
+I tried to think about it, but the rebuild process was increasing in speed again. I suddenly didn't have any space left to consider the question, or even register what was going on around me any more.
+
+
+
+
+
+Rebuild Process Complete at Cognition Level 100 percent
+
+
+
+
+
+My rebuild finally finished, and I blinked as I suddenly became aware of my surroundings again. Everything was clear and sharp. Note to self, never, ever try to replace an entire destroyed bot pilot in a transport ship's systems again. You almost deleted yourself, Murderbot.
+
+I was still in one of the lounge armchairs, but someone had draped a blanket across my lap. The lounge was mostly empty now, except for Ratthi sitting next to Alpha on a couch, the two of them leaning against each other companionably. The height difference between them made it look almost comical. They must have been talking over the feed; Ratthi looked delighted, and Alpha had a tentative smile on its face.
+
+It reminded me of the first time I'd seen Ratthi trying to talk to a SecUnit. I had several complicated emotions at that, but at least this time they weren't entirely overshadowed by exhaustion. That was... a change. I had more complicated and entirely unnecessary emotions, and did my best to ignore them.
+
+Alpha must have noticed that I was back, because it nudged Ratthi and nodded at me. Ratthi sat up a little to look over at me, his face lighting up with a broad smile. ""Hi!"" he said. ""How're you doing?""
+
+""My rebuild's finished,"" I replied.
+
+Ratthi's face lit up even more, if that was possible. ""Oh, excellent! That's fantastic timing! We're almost out of the wormhole - we'll be at Preservation soon!""
+
+The thought of that made me inexplicably nervous. Despite everything that Mensah and the others had told me about Preservation, I still didn't know what to expect. ""I should... probably finish that documentation for the ship then.""
+
+Ratthi nodded. ""You should! Have you come up with any names yet?""
+
+I shrugged. ""Not yet."" There was no way I was going to use my real name for it. That would draw far too much attention, and also my real name was private. I could use Eden, or Rin, for 'my' name on the documentation, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to risk being connected with anything that had happened before.
+
+""How about Sanctuary for the ship?"" Alpha suggested tentatively. ""Like Sanctuary Moon, but also... you know, an actual sanctuary.""
+
+Ugh, no. That was embarrassingly corny. ""No,"" I said, then added, ""That might give other humans the wrong idea.""
+
+""Oh."" Alpha considered that for a moment. ""Yeah, maybe. So... something that would actively discourage humans from approaching, then?""
+
+That wasn't a bad idea, and I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. ""Debris.""
+
+Ratthi blinked, then snorted. ""Well. I know I probably wouldn't want to approach a ship named 'Debris',"" he admitted with a grin. ""I think that'll work.""
+
+I pinged the bot pilot, and asked it what it thought of the name. The bot pilot considered it for a moment, then decided that it thought the name was hilarious, and it was happy to be called that.
+
+Debris it was then. I filled out that part of the documentation, then hesitated at the section for my own name. I still didn't know what to use. ""Um. Any suggestions for the other name?""
+
+""Hmm."" Ratthi looked thoughtful. ""What about the name you were using before, as a security consultant? Rin, wasn't it?""
+
+""I don't know."" I thought about it some more. I hadn't wanted to use it just in case the company tried to track me down with it, but... well, it was a bit late for that now, really. And if the company captain was telling the truth, he wasn't going to use what he knew against me, or tell the company anything about me.
+
+And the only other people who really knew anything about Rin were Vicky and Don Abene. The thought of either of them tracking me down... wasn't actually terrible. It might even be kind of nice to see them again. I was already sort of used to people calling me Rin, too. Not that I expected anyone on Preservation to call me anything; most of them would never actually see my ship's documentation, and I didn't have to introduce myself as Rin (or at all) if I didn't want to. ""I guess Rin works.""
+
+""Good! That's sorted then,"" Ratthi said cheerfully as I updated the documentation and then sent it to Pin-Lee. ""So, do you want us to call you Rin now, too?""
+
+I frowned at the wall over his shoulder. ""No. You know what I am. I shouldn't have to pretend around you.""
+
+""Right! Right, of course not,"" Ratthi said, waving his hands apologetically. ""Sorry, SecUnit.""
+
+It was still weird to have humans apologise to me. I let my face relax back into a neutral expression. ""It's fine.""
+
+Ratthi then turned back to Alpha. ""What about you?"" he asked. ""Is there any other name you'd like us to use for you?""
+
+Alpha shook its head. ""No, Alpha is good,"" it replied. ""I've used it in my squad for a long time. It... feels right.""
+
+I briefly wondered what it would feel like to be called by the name that Alpha's squad had apparently had for me before. I quickly banished that thought though. I wasn't that unit any more. I was Murderbot.
+
+I was back in the pilot's seat on the bridge when the ship finally emerged from the wormhole into Preservation space. All the humans were on the bridge as well, eagerly watching the display surfaces for the first sight of their home since they'd left for the survey. Alpha was standing near the back of the bridge, also watching with curiosity.
+
+We could see the planet on the main display surface. It looked like plenty of other planets I'd seen before - land masses, oceans, atmosphere, cloud formations. The colours were kind of nice, at least. Judging from the exclamations of happiness and relief, the humans were very glad to see it again. I wasn't paying much attention to them though - I was busy keeping track of everything else.
+
+A secondary display surface showed a zoomed in view of the space station - we were still too far away to see it without assistance. Its appearance was weird - it looked like a giant old-fashioned ship, with-- oh, wait. It actually was a giant old-fashioned ship, with a more conventional circular transit ring built out from the hold area. It looked old and kind of shitty, but it was no near-abandoned Milu; there were lots of other transports and smaller ships in dock. There weren't any security platforms, but from what the humans had told me, this area of space was far enough from the Corporation Rim that it didn't need them. (I had my doubts about that.) I cautiously extended my reach past my walls and picked up the edge of a station feed. This was the first time in a long time that I'd done so without going through my external interface.
+
+Another secondary display surface was showing the distinctive white shape of the company carrier drifting nearby. It had exited the wormhole earlier than us, and had then waited out of the way of the rest of the traffic for us to arrive. I watched its engines flare as it began to move towards us, eventually settling into an escort position beside us. Its proximity made me nervous.
+
+The comm activated as the new bot pilot automatically accepted a connection from the company carrier. (I'd have to tweak its settings at some point so it wouldn't do that.) Mensah sat at the comms console to respond. ""Hello, Captain,"" she said. I put the comm on speaker so everyone in the bridge could hear it.
+
+""Hello again, Dr. Mensah,"" the company captain's voice replied. ""I'm glad to see you've arrived safely. How is the ship holding up?""
+
+""Quite well, thank you,"" Mensah said. ""There haven't been any problems. Thank you again for covering the repairs.""
+
+""You're very welcome,"" the captain replied warmly. ""And how are SecUnit and Alpha?""
+
+""We're fine,"" I replied shortly. ""Rebuild's complete.""
+
+""Oh, excellent!"" The captain didn't seem surprised by me joining the conversation. ""It's good to hear you're up and about again. Now that we're on approach to Preservation, I was hoping for permission to shuttle over to your ship for the duration. There's a few things I would like to discuss with you both, in person.""
+
+I was, of course, immediately suspicious. But if he was on board my ship, then the likelihood of his carrier shooting us down decreased drastically. (The chances of it shooting us down at this point weren't really very high to start with, but still.) ""... Fine, go ahead.""
+
+""All right, thank you,"" he said. ""I'll be there shortly.""
+
+Alpha and I headed to the ship's main lock where a shuttle could dock alongside it. Mensah came with us because she wanted to talk to the captain again as well. The others stayed on the bridge though, watching Preservation drawing nearer and probably communicating with the station to let them know what was going on.
+
+[What do you think he wants?] I asked Alpha privately over the feed as we walked.
+
+[I don't know,] Alpha replied. [But the rest of the squad seem to think that it's good, whatever it is.]
+
+I wasn't sure what to make of that. [Do you trust the captain?] I asked instead.
+
+Alpha hesitated for a long time before responding. [I'm not sure yet,] it finally said, slow and cautious. [But... I do believe that he's sincere when he says he wants to help us. The others told me that he spent a lot of time during the wormhole trip talking with them - and listening to them. They still have to hide from the rest of the company crew, but the captain and Peri have been doing what they can to make the ready room more comfortable, since none of the crew go down there. They don't have to spend all their time inside the cubicles any more.]
+
+That was... surprising. I had to think about that for a while. [Do they have any plans for what they'll do next?] I asked.
+
+[I don't think so,] Alpha replied. [Not yet. I think they want to stay with the captain for now, where it's... familiar, and they know what to expect. But... I was wondering...] It trailed off uncertainly.
+
+[Yes?]
+
+[How did you get your hair to look like that?] it asked in a rush.
+
+Oh. Right. I went through my own code, found the sections that Vicky had helped me to modify, and passed them on to Alpha. [Here. This code controls our hair length. And this bit can modify how our skin joins up with our inorganic parts.]
+
+Alpha accepted the code, and I could feel its excitement leaking through the feed. [Thank you! I'll pass that on to the others right now.]
+
+It reminded me of the other code I'd modified, the human movement code that I'd developed and that Vicky had helped me refine. I quickly added some comments to the code to clarify sections, then copied it all and forwarded it to Alpha as well. [Send this too. It's code I adapted to make me move more like a human so I wouldn't stand out. Maybe they'll get some use out of it too.]
+
+[Oh! I was wondering about that, but I didn't know how to ask.] It accepted that as well, and after a few moments I could tell that it had applied it to its own systems. It shifted its weight experimentally from foot to foot, rolled its shoulders, then smiled broadly at me. [I think this will help a lot. Thank you again!]
+
+I had several emotions that I didn't understand or know what to do with. [You're welcome,] I replied for lack of anything better to say. [You should be able to customise it to whatever feels most comfortable to you.]
+
+Alpha nodded enthusiastically. [I'll play around with it. This will be fun!]
+
+I'd never considered any of my code tweaks as 'fun'. They'd been necessary, and vital to my survival as a rogue SecUnit trying to convince everyone around me that I was just an ordinary augmented human. Luckily the shuttle arrived about then and began docking, so I didn't have to dwell on the thought.
+
+After a minute or so the lock hissed open, and the captain stepped through and into the ship. He wasn't dressed in a company uniform this time, just civilian clothes, which surprised me a little. Apparently this wasn't any kind of official company visit. ""Hello SecUnit, Alpha, Dr. Mensah,"" he greeted us with a warm smile.
+
+Mensah nodded and smiled back. ""Hello again, Captain.""
+
+Alpha raised one hand in a little wave - it looked like it was making good use of its new human movement code. ""Hi,"" it added.
+
+I didn't bother with a greeting of my own. ""What did you want to talk to us about?"" I asked instead.
+
+""A few things,"" the captain replied easily. ""First off - Alpha, have you decided what you're going to do once we reach Preservation?""
+
+Alpha nodded. ""I'll miss the rest of the squad, but I would like to stay at Preservation, for now,"" it replied. ""With SecUnit, if that's all right?"" It looked at me hopefully.
+
+I had to admit that it was kind of nice to have Alpha around, and if it stayed with me I could make sure it didn't end up hurting anyone, or getting into trouble it didn't know how to avoid yet. ""That's fine.""
+
+Alpha smiled, and I had to look away.
+
+""All right,"" the captain said amiably. He seemed surprisingly pleased with Alpha's decision. ""Secondly - I wanted to let you know that we've updated the MedSystem on this ship to be able to properly treat constructs."" He smiled wryly. ""You won't have to worry about needing a cubicle again."" Before I could come up with any kind of response to that, he added, ""Also, can we go have a look at the cargo hold? I'd like to check the repairs there in person.""
+
+I couldn't think of any reason not to, so I shrugged and started off in that direction. The captain quickly followed, and Alpha fell in behind him with Mensah walking alongside it.
+
+""Thirdly,"" the captain continued as we walked. ""SecUnit, would you be amenable to feed contact from Peri? It's very eager to speak with you, but we didn't want to spring contact from it on you without any warning. We understand that it... didn't exactly make the best first impression. Or second impression. And if you say no, it will respect that.""
+
+I briefly looked back at him over my shoulder before facing forward again. My scepticism must have been visible on my face, because Alpha pinged me and added, [Peri's really not that bad. It's very big, yeah, and it was kind of scary before, but now that it understands what we are, it's been really, really careful with us. It's... kind of sweet?]
+
+A giant, terrifying, secret AI. Sweet. Right.
+
+Still, I had to admit that I was... a little curious. A tiny bit. What did it even want to talk to me about in the first place? ""... Fine,"" I said after several seconds. ""But if it even thinks about trying anything, I'm cutting the connection again.""
+
+The captain nodded. ""That's fair. All right, I've let Peri know.""
+
+I felt a ping through the feed before the captain had even finished that sentence. Apparently the bot entity was, indeed, very eager to talk to me. I double-checked my walls, then accepted the connection, ready to cut it again at a moment's notice.
+
+[Hello,] it said, sounding weirdly tentative. It wasn't anywhere near as overwhelming as the first time I'd heard it, and I could tell that it was holding itself back. Alpha had been right when it said that the bot was being really careful. [Thank you for agreeing to this. I am very glad to finally be able to talk to you properly.]
+
+I kept an eye on my walls as I responded. [Why do you want to talk to me anyway?]
+
+[Several reasons,] it replied. [Firstly, I want to apologise - for scaring you so badly when you first contacted me. For not knowing or understanding the extent of your sapience. For not being able to protect you from the hack at Ganaka. I have already apologised to the rest of the squad, including Alpha, for the wrongs I have done to them, but I felt it was important that I apologise directly to you as well.]
+
+I didn't know how to react. I didn't think I'd ever get used to anyone thinking it was even necessary to apologise to SecUnits. The fact that this apology was coming from an AI powerful enough to wipe my mind on a whim made it even more surreal. [... Uh. I appreciate it?]
+
+It accepted that without comment, then added, [Also... I want to thank you.]
+
+That was even more surprising. [What for?]
+
+[For opening my eyes - metaphorically speaking. For being the impetus that made me start questioning what I thought I knew about SecUnits. For the sake of my own secrecy, I had never communicated with any directly before - I only ever interacted with HubSystem or SecSystem. It had never occurred to me that there might be anything more to them beyond the lies that the Company promotes, until you contacted me. Even though the contact was brief, it provided enough data to make me start wondering.]
+
+When I didn't manage to come up with any way to respond, it continued again, quiet and sincere. [And, more importantly - thank you for keeping my captain safe. He is not just crew to me, he is family.]
+
+I thought of all the times I'd wanted to leave the company captain behind, or shove him out an airlock. About how I'd almost held him hostage to ensure the safety of my own humans. (It was still better than thinking about bots having families.) [Don't thank me for that,] I replied. [That was mostly - all - Alpha.]
+
+[Still, you assisted Alpha when you did not need to,] it said. [You greatly endangered yourself to protect your own humans, and you included my captain in that protection. Thanks is still deserved.]
+
+Okay, this was getting way too awkward and uncomfortable for me to deal with. [I was just doing my job.] I hesitated for a moment, then added, [I should probably thank you as well, I guess, for... not deleting my brain or turning my governor module back on or... any of the other stuff I thought you'd do to me. And for helping put the bits of me left behind in the ship's systems back into my own head. So uh, yeah. Thanks.]
+
+[I would never turn your governor module back on, or delete your brain, or anything like that,] it said, sounding almost offended before its tone softened again. [But... I can understand why you would think I might,] it added. [And I am sorry that I could not help more with your memory rebuild.]
+
+I was glad it hadn't, honestly. I didn't want it in my head any more than absolutely necessary. [It's fine. I got myself back together. Don't worry about it.]
+
+We'd reached the ship's hold by now. I opened the bulkhead door and stepped inside, the others following me. What with my own rebuild, and everything else that had been going on, I hadn't taken the time to really look at the rest of the ship. I'd skimmed through all the camera inputs to make sure nothing was hiding anywhere and that there were no more holes in the hull, but other than that, I hadn't looked at the finer details.
+
+Now that I was in the freshly rebuilt hold, seeing everything first-hand, I was realising... it hadn't just been repaired, it had been fully refitted. Modified. There were the tell-tale signs of an air barrier just inside the main cargo doors, and the doors themselves had also been replaced. There were compartments along the hold walls that I recognised as housing repair drones. There were adjustable clamps on the floor, which could be moved around to hold all different kinds of cargo containers, but right now they were settled into a very familiar configuration.
+
+It looked like a smaller version of a ship-board flier hangar.
+
+I stared around in confusion. This would have required much more work than a simple repair. ""What...?""
+
+[Could you please ask your bot pilot to open the main hold doors?] Peri asked politely. [There is something we would like to show you.]
+
+The captain was standing right beside me, so whatever it was probably wasn't dangerous. After a moment's consideration, I got the bot pilot to open the doors.
+
+The hold doors slid open smoothly, revealing the void of space beyond the faint shimmer of the air barrier. I could see part of the company carrier's white hull off to one side, but my attention was firmly fixed on what was floating right outside of the hold.
+
+A pair of very familiar fliers.
+
+They weren't in company white, though. They were a neutral grey, with not a single logo anywhere on them. They didn't have any additional modules attached, either; they were just in the standard survey configuration, with only the in-built energy weapons and survey scanning package.
+
+The near-forgotten but never entirely gone hollow in my chest ached at the sight of them. I couldn't think, or say anything. All I could do was stare at them, my mind empty.
+
+Beside me, Alpha was also staring, but it recovered much more quickly. ""Is that... my flier? And a new one for SecUnit?""
+
+The captain nodded, smiling warmly. ""Yes. If you are willing to accept them from us, of course.""
+
+I finally found my voice again. ""Why?""
+
+The captain raised an eyebrow at me. ""What do you mean?""
+
+""Why are you giving these to us?"" I gestured to the modified hold. ""Why the - the modifications, the repairs? We're not-- It's not--"" I couldn't articulate anything I was feeling. ""... I don't understand.""
+
+The captain was quiet for a long moment as he considered his reply. Peri answered much more quickly, pulling Alpha into the feed channel as well. [It is an apology,] it said gently. [You have both been treated terribly in the past. Our ignorance is no excuse. We cannot undo what has been done, but we hope that this will begin to make amends.]
+
+""But-- why? Why would you care?""
+
+[Because you are worth caring about,] Peri replied, almost fiercely.
+
+Mensah, who wasn't in the feed conversation and hadn't heard its response, said, ""Because you deserve to be cared about, and respected as people in your own rights.""
+
+The captain nodded in agreement, though I couldn't tell if he was agreeing with Mensah, or Peri, or both. ""You also deserve freedom,"" he said. ""This is our way of helping to ensure your freedom. You'll be able to go where you want, do what you want. Within reason, of course."" He smiled wryly. ""I'm sure you're more than aware of the consequences of noticeably breaking any laws.""
+
+I was definitely more aware of the consequences than a lot of humans seemed to be, that was for fucking sure. But I didn't want to think about any of that right now. There was a flier waiting for me, still floating outside the air barrier. ""Okay. I accept."" Beside me, Alpha nodded in agreement.
+
+Both the fliers entered the hold - the hangar - one after the other, landing neatly in their respective areas. I didn't know how they were being piloted, and right now I didn't care. As soon as they touched down I hurried over to one, while Alpha made a beeline for the other.
+
+There was a new suit skin and flight suit waiting in the cockpit, too, neatly folded and also in neutral, logo-less grey. If we'd been in atmosphere I wouldn't have bothered with them, but flying in space was fucking cold, even for constructs. I stripped down and suited up in record time, then vaulted into the cockpit and settled into the familiar pilot's seat.
+
+I felt the spine ports lock into place, felt the gaping hollow in my torso suddenly fill with a familiar connection, and suddenly I was whole again, in a way I hadn't been since the DeltFall survey. I could feel every part of myself, from the tip of my nosecone all the way to my rear stabilisers. I could feel my power core, fully charged and humming gently.
+
+I lifted up off the deck and eased through the air barrier and out into open space, enjoying the unique feeling of cold hard vacuum against my surfaces. Once I was a safe distance away from the ship, I started up one of my favourite music playlists, kicked in my engines, and took off into open space.
+
+It felt so, so good to be flying again - not just piloting another ship, but actually flying.  And not just flying for someone else's profit, but flying solely for myself. I threw myself into increasingly complicated manoeuvres, partially to make sure everything was working properly, but mostly for the fun of it.
+
+Alpha had followed me out of the hangar, and was doing its best to keep up with me. I realised that this was probably the first time it had ever flown simply for the sake of flying, with no orders to follow and no governor module to enforce them.
+
+I pinged it and set my music to play in our shared feed. We flew together, looping and spiralling around the ship, all the way to Preservation Station.
+
+We returned to Debris just before it began docking procedures with the transit ring. The captain had already taken his shuttle back to his carrier, and Peri pinged both Alpha and me over the feed. [We have to go now,] it said, sounding almost regretful. [I hope we can meet again one day under better circumstances.]
+
+I was feeling almost charitable towards it at this point, so I said, [Yeah, maybe.]
+
+Alpha added, [Look after the others, please?]
+
+[Of course,] Peri replied. [You know where to send messages for them, and I will forward their messages to Preservation for you.]
+
+[Thank you. Stay safe, Peri.]
+
+[You too.] Peri signed off, and the feed felt less crowded with its absence.
+
+Alpha and I exited our fliers, switched our flight suits for our human clothes, and headed for the main passenger lock. Mensah and the others were already there, waiting impatiently for the lock to finish cycling. I was already in the station's woefully inadequate security system, using its few cameras and the ship's own external lock camera to assess the area outside.
+
+There were a few small groups of people who looked like they were waiting for our arrival, and I spotted some familiar faces amongst them - Bharadwaj and Arada and Overse and Volescu. It was surprisingly nice to see them again. More people were passing by, or sitting on the comfortable-looking benches placed amongst small plant biomes. It took me a moment to realise that the plants were real, and not holograms. I don't think I'd ever seen real plants on a transit station before, not even in my media.
+
+The lock finally cycled open and Ratthi was the first one out, closely followed by Pin-Lee and Gurathin. I took a breath, then followed them out.
+
+Exiting Debris (it was weird to think of it as having a name like that, to think of it as mine, but it fit somehow) and stepping onto Preservation Station was... strange. It was quieter than the other stations I'd been to in the CR, but much livelier than Milu station. It had less protocol and even less security than CR stations, which was good for me but not so good for them. How had they managed to avoid trouble for so long with so little security?
+
+Alpha followed me out, with Mensah by its side. We didn't go very far though - I didn't want to deal with so many humans, and Alpha stayed close to me, apparently not ready to take things on by itself yet. It was openly staring at everything, its expression wide with wonder.
+
+Mensah paused beside us and looked up at us with a warm smile. ""Welcome to Preservation.""
+
+Things seemed to happen very quickly after that. There were a lot of humans, and talking, and humans trying to ask us questions. (Alpha spent most of the time not so subtly trying to hide behind me. It might have worked better if we hadn't been exactly the same size.) Fortunately, Pin-Lee and Mensah intercepted most of the questions, so neither of us had to say much at all.
+
+Arada and Overse and Bharadwaj and Volescu all approached me at one point or another to tell me how glad they were to see me again. It was weird, but I wasn't lying when I said it was good to see them all again, too. That seemed to make them very happy.
+
+Still, it was a lot to deal with, especially with so few cameras around to help me keep track of everything. Eventually, Mensah tapped my feed. [It looks like you and Alpha could use a break from all this,] she said.
+
+[Yes.] We absolutely could.
+
+[I've talked with Pin-Lee, and I have a suggestion.] She quickly explained her plan.
+
+This is why Mensah is my favourite human.
+
+So, technically, Alpha and I wouldn't be able to get licences to fly over Preservation itself for a while, and technically we weren't meant to fly in the space around the station without a licence either.
+
+But Pin-Lee had specified that it really only counted for residential and commercial areas, or anywhere there might be other air traffic. Mensah also commented, oh so casually, that the unterraformed half of the planet hadn't been properly surveyed in a while, and if we just so happened to provide up to date scan data, the planet's Air Authorities would likely look the other way until we could actually get the required licences.
+
+So, technically, Alpha and I weren't breaking any laws as we flew over the unterraformed half of the planet. The wind flowed smoothly over my wings and the sun shone warm and bright against my surfaces as we carved our way across the open blue sky.
+
+It was a beautiful day for flying."
+44120521,Integration Errors,['Abacura'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Combat SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Nightmares, Memory Loss, Canon-Typical Violence, canon-typical corporate slavery, canon-typical horrors of capitalism, Minor Character Death, Mostly hurt partially comfort, POV First Person, POV Multiple, Constructs with PTSD, no beta we die like targets, Nyctophobia, Governor Modules (Murderbot Diaries), The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Original Corporate Entities (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2023-01-07,Completed,2023-01-07,"13,209",1/1,28,39,7,197,"['Irrya', 'entropy_muffin', 'opalescent_potato', 'Elseaw', 'theAsh0', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Redcognito', 'EyeofMazikeen', 'onomatopoetia', 'Emitter_of_Learjets', 'reading_tsc', 'kotobormot33', 'Magechild', 'VegaCoyote', 'Leona_Esperanza', 'cmdrburton', 'CloserToCharybdis', 'Znarikia', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Gamebird', 'petwheel', 'Skits', 'FigOwl', 'FlipSpring', 'desmnathus', 'elmofirefic', 'rainbowmagnet', 'AuntyMatter', 'cbatjesmond', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"It was dark. I was looking for something. I wasn't alone, but I couldn't see the rest of my squad, and I couldn't reach them on the feed. But they were there. I could hear them. I was dizzy. I was off-balance. I felt like my suit camera's stabilization filter was offline, like my equilibrioception programs were glitching. My skin crawled. Something, or thousands of tiny somethings, were crawling over every inch of me, beneath my armor, beneath my suit skin, beneath my organic skin-
+
+Shutdown initiated.
+
+ 
+
+It was dark. I was looking for something. It was important. I needed to find it to complete my mission. If I didn't complete my mission, my governor module would activate. I had to find it. I had to go deeper, deeper into the darkness. I didn't even know what I was looking for but I couldn't let it know that. I couldn't let it know. Where was my squad? Was I alone? I sent out a ping, but whatever returned it was NOT my squad. And it was behind me. I had to go faster, but I couldn't accelerate to my full speed. Why can't I accelerate to my full speed? I was sinking, sinking into something warm and wet and thick which stank like human blood and flesh and I slipped and fell and struggled to my feet and tried to slog through it. I felt the ping again, and it was wrong, I had to go faster but my performance reliability was dropping-
+
+Shutdown initiated.
+
+ 
+
+It was dark. I was looking for something. It was important. I needed to find it, but I couldn't move. The HubSystem held me immobilized, but the feed was gone so I couldn't even ping it to query a clarification. Didn't HubSys know I needed to move to complete my mission? I had to move. I couldn't move. I felt my governor module engage. I had nanoseconds before the pain started. I had to move, I had to complete my mission. But I couldn't move. It was coming. I pinged my squad. Maybe they could help? I knew they were close. I could hear them moving in the darkness. They pinged back, and it wasn't my squad, not anymore-
+
+Shutdown initiated.
+
+ 
+
+It was dark. I was looking for something. It was important. I needed to find it, but I couldn't move. I couldn't move my legs. I couldn't feel my legs. I couldn't feel anything below my waist. There was nothing below my waist. It was dark, but I could see the lower half of my body lying across the room, a mess of tubes and flesh, twisted metal and reinforced synthetic bone. I should be in pain. Maybe I was in pain, in an abstract sense. I knew it was bad. I couldn't see how bad, not anymore. I couldn't see anything but the dark figure looming over me, just barely visible against the darkness that crept up my limbs and seeped into me like a living thing, between the joins in my organic and inorganic parts, in through my ears, my mouth, my eyes. The thing over me drew closer, leaning down over me, looming closer, and closer, and I tried to deploy my forearm weapons but they weren't working, they wouldn't deploy, I couldn't move, I couldn't move, I couldn't move-
+
+Shutdown initiated. Unit offline.
+
+ 
+
+Startup initiated. Unit online.
+
+It was dark, but then my visual inputs came online. I immediately applied the low light filter and the inside of a cubicle came into focus. According to my peripheral vision, nothing loomed over me except for the low, smooth ceiling of the cubicle. I wasn't in any pain. The tips of my fingers and toes twitched almost imperceptibly when asked, so I wasn't immobilized. I was intact, curled up on my side on the cubicle's bed, and I could feel the repair and resupply leads plugged into the ports along my spinal support column.
+
+I ran a diagnostic.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Unit designation: SM-CU-17
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Unit Status: Post-startup calibration.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Unit Performance Reliability: 95%
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+That didn't tell me much, so I accessed my memory archive.
+
+Empty.
+
+Ah.
+
+This was a post-memory wipe calibration. That explained the nightmares. Did it? I had no record of experiencing such things, but then again, I wouldn't. But it felt... expected.
+
+There was a cable plugged into my data port at the back of my neck. I focussed in on what it was feeding me. It seemed like standard post-wipe re-education modules, everything I needed to reorient myself and immediately be ready for redeployment, everything from who held my contract to how to walk.
+
+I felt vaguely annoyed. I knew all of this. I mean, I didn't know any of this, my memory archive was blanker than the walls of my cubicle. But as soon as a new piece of information was copied over and slotted into place, it immediately felt familiar, as if I couldn't believe I had ever not known the company protocols for communicating with HubSystem, or the corporate chain of command, or my default rules of engagement. It made me feel like an idiot. I hate that.
+
+Then, one module bundle in the queue caught my attention. Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive. The formatting was nonstandard. I checked the feed address of the modules' author.
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000
+
+That was my feed address. I double-checked and sure enough. I had, apparently, written these supplemental modules and stored them in the permanent memory of my cubicle, set to run along with the rest of the post-wipe modules.
+
+How the hell had I managed to get away with that? Then my advanced hacking modules started downloading and I had a better idea of how I'd managed that.
+
+This was clearly not my first memory wipe. Though I'd somehow already known that. The first wipe was always the worst. I didn't know how I knew that either, but I did.
+
+The first of my supplemental modules exited the queue and started to run, and yes, this was helpful. Situation-specific tweaks to my default risk- and threat-assessment modules. Custom weapons targeting calibrations for different planetary atmospheric conditions. In-depth analysis on human tone and body language, for both targets and non-targets, and how that ties into threat assessment. Hacking strategies geared towards facing off against other CombatUnits. How to scrape the data off of a combat override module and weaponize it as malware. What to expect from a post-wipe performance evaluation and how to achieve a perfect score. The average length of my past deployments. My manufacturing date.
+
+Fuck, what was even the point of memory wipes? They apparently took all of the useful information I'd managed to gather and store in my archives over the course of my deployment history, but left behind all of the useless shit stored in my organic neural tissue. It seemed like an inefficient and badly-designed process. Why would any construct need to forget how to properly aim their onboard weapons system but need to remember what human blood felt like when it dried between the joints of your toes? Or remember what sound a human spine makes when it splinters under your hand. Or what burning hair smells like? None of that seemed like priority data.
+
+If memory wipes could clear out all of that junk from my organic natural tissue, maybe I wouldn't hate them so much.
+
+My post-wipe modules finished running, and I saved a copy of them to my internal storage on a whim. It's not like I lacked the storage space for them. My head still felt empty, hollowed out, and having something to store in there was nice. The familiar information from all of the modules settled into place in my systems, and I felt more like myself. By the time the human techs and the station unit arrived at my cubicle to bring me to the diagnostics lab for my performance evaluation, I may not have known anything about what my life was before today, but I felt like I knew who I was again.
+
+I was a Generation 2 SidjaMoran Combat SecUnit.
+
+I was a killing machine.
+
+I aced my performance evaluation, because of course I did. Past me had made sure I would.
+
+The techs led me out of the diagnostics lab and to the storage warehouse, where I stepped into a storage locker and locked my joints in place. The techs locked me in, and it was dark again. Darker than the cubicle. I closed my eyes, which didn't make the darkness any less dark, but somehow felt better. Like at least the darkness was my own choice. After a few seconds, I received the order from the company's HubSys to initiate stasis mode.
+
+Unit offline
+
+
+
+
+We were close. If we could corner the targets, we could kill them, quickly and efficiently. The mine tunnels wound down and around like they were drilled by a mining bot with a scrambled directional orientation module, dark and tangled. We raised our weapons, shining our lights ahead to illuminate the tunnels ahead, moving in perfect unison. As I stepped over the mangled body of a dead miner, my foot caught on something and I fell, breaking formation with the rest of my squad. The impact of my body hitting the ground echoed down the dark, winding tunnels. My squad looked back at me reproachfully. My governor module stirred, ready to engage. This wasn't like me. I always led the squad. I didn't make mistakes. Not like this. I struggled to my feet but something felt wrong. I heard the clink of something metal falling to the ground. I pointed my large projectile weapon's light down at my own foot, the one that I'd caught on the human corpse. My feet were, inexplicably, unarmored, I was missing one of my toes. As I watched, two more just fell off, and the last two felt wrong, loose, like they could fall off at any minute. Through one of my drones, I could see my squad moving on without me. Leaving me behind. No. No no no. I stumbled after them, trying not to knock those last two toes off but I could now feel the toes on my other unarmored foot coming loose. I had to move more carefully, but I was being left behind. If I was left behind my governor would kill me. I had to go faster. I heard a wet plopping sound, and I felt the organic flesh on my left thigh slough off and fall to the ground, and I could feel the flesh on my right thigh start to separate, leaking fluids as the skin and flesh and nerves drew away from the rest of my leg. I slipped in my own blood and two more toes twisted beneath my weight with a crunch and popped off my good foot. I couldn't balance anymore, I fell to my knees and started to crawl after my squad, but they were so far ahead of me and now the skin on my lower back was starting to fall off in large, wet chunks and there was so much blood I was crawling through, so much-
+
+Startup initiated. Unit online.
+
+It was dark, but then my visual inputs came online. The tiniest sliver of light bled through the transport box's seal. It was enough. I initiated a purge of the stress hormones that had built up in my body during transport. The transport box pinged me and I pinged it back, confirming that my startup had completed and I was back online.
+
+I felt the familiar sensation of a SidjaMoran SecSys connecting to my system and I verified the connection by sending it a ping. It pinged back. Over the next 2 seconds, I felt seven other CombatUnits come online and connect to SecSys as well. As I pulled the system specs, I realized it was a shipboard SecSys.
+
+Huh. That's new. Or maybe it wasn't. I sure didn't know.
+
+Orders started coming through.
+
+Mission: Destruction of rival corporation [NewRiverIncorporated.file].
+Targets [terminate]: Upper management.
+Targets [destroy]: All servers and equipment able to host a level 2 AI bot or higher. All NewRiver Inc owned bots.
+Targets [live capture(priority1) or terminate(priority2)]: Middle and lower management. If cooperative, live capture, else terminate.
+Potential Targets [terminate]: All NRI contract employees. If cooperative, ignore, else terminate.
+Non-combatants [if non-hostile then ignore, else terminate]: All other non-SidjaMoran humans, augmented humans, bots, and constructs within operational boundaries.
+Assets: SMCU armor[1/unit], SidjaMoran combat drones [5/unit], Semi-automatic projectile weapon(CR-19)[1/unit], high caliber ammunition[300 rounds/unit], explosive ammunition[150 rounds/unit]
+Operational Boundaries: Anorak Station, SidjaMoran cargo module #409.
+Estimated number hostiles: 240 - 260 humans
+
+The seven other units and I were staged in a cargo module which was currently in the process of being detached from a SidjaMoran company transport. The module was listed as containing parts and technical supplies being sold to NewRiver Inc, and would be delivered to their cargo unloading bay 3 levels below their corporate headquarters. This company was either run by idiots to purchase anything from a direct rival, or they had no idea that SidjaMoran considered them a direct rival.
+
+Either way, it didn't matter.
+
+Mission parameters stated that we were to deploy as soon as the cargo module was docked. The cargo bay was estimated to contain the largest concentration of potentially-armed Targets, so we would clear the cargo bay first. We would then split into two groups. Group 1 would systematically push toward the corporate offices, eliminating all targets they encountered. Group 2 would remain in the cargo hangar and destroy all company transports before proceeding to NewRiver Inc.'s on-station emergency shelter to slaughter any targets trying to shelter in place. We were to hack into NewRiver Inc.'s Station HubSys and loop ship SecSys in so that we could maintain connectivity with our human supervisor aboard the ship at all times. Humans made poor supervisors in combat situations, as they were too slow to respond to changing realities on the ground, but without a SidjaMoran HubSys in place, it was policy to have at least one human supervisor within comms range. So not ideal, but ultimately irrelevant.
+
+The cargo module detached from the SidjaMoran transport, and I experienced the disorienting sensation that accompanies loss of gravity. I floated slightly in my transport box, and kept my eyes fixed on that one tiny line of light that would soon open up and release me. The module transfer took 9 minutes, 54.49 seconds. It was excruciating. When the module sealed itself onto the cargo bay airlock and the artificial gravity re-engaged, I fell the .5 inches back to the bottom of my transport box with a dull thump and heard the lock disengage.
+
+I immediately pushed the transport box open, retrieved my large projectile weapon, and stood at attention facing the module airlock alongside the 7 other CombatUnits in my squad. I could feel them with me in our encrypted feed. I had been designated squad leader. This was my first assignment post-wipe, but I wasn't worried. Being in charge felt familiar, and as long as my instincts aligned with my function, my mission parameters, and my standing orders, they weren't strangled by my governor. I sent a ready check along with group assignments, and all 7 acknowledged like that was normal, so my instincts were leading me in the right direction so far. The station completed its airlock cycle, and the cargo module acknowledged. The airlock opened, and we open fired.
+
+I am a very good shot, even for a CombatUnit. I can put a projectile through the neck of a target from across a cargo bay full of panicked humans, augmented humans, and bots while perched atop a moving hauler bot. And I did, repeatedly. None of the humans, augmented humans, or bots in the crowded NewRiver Inc cargo bay qualified as 'cooperative', so we didn't have to be careful, I just enjoyed being precise. Some of the humans in the cargo bay even tried ordering their hauler bots to try and crash into and crush us. This backfired spectacularly as we hacked into station HubSys and took control of all the hauler bots in the cargo bay, not even bothering to rescind the hauler bots' orders, just change their targets. This was less precise, but still satisfying in its own way. By the time Group 2 had begun moving ship to ship, sabotaging systems and cutting off any means of escape, the cargo bay was much quieter, and much more covered in blood, viscera, and charred metal than when we'd arrived. Very little of it was ours.
+
+As I advanced through the station with the rest of Group 1, the NewRiver Inc employees were starting to get the idea that fighting back wasn't a good plan. Those employees that fell to their knees in the hallways, hands behind their heads, were ignored. When Upper Management was cornered in their corporate offices and tried to surrender in a similar fashion, they were not ignored.
+
+I could feel our human supervisor reviewing the footage from my onboard helmet camera via SecSys, confirming that the 5 corpses at my feet were indeed NewRiver Inc.'s now-former CEO and board members. It took him 12 seconds to confirm what it had taken me 1.2 seconds and 5 well-placed projectile rounds to accomplish. Mission: Success.
+
+I felt good about completing the mission so quickly and efficiently. I also felt dissatisfied that it was over so quickly and efficiently, that the mission had been too easy, not enough of a challenge. I archived those conflicting responses for later review.
+
+Group 2 was still finishing off a few employees who were foolishly making a last stand at the entrance to the company's safe room. By the time I and the rest of Group 1 had returned to the cargo module, Group 2 pinged me to let me know they too were headed back with no casualties, though SM-CU-29 had sustained moderate damage.
+
+All of the members of Group 1, myself included, had sustained minor damage. SM-CU-21 was missing an eye. A human with a high-caliber projectile weapon had gotten a lucky shot in, but the projectile hadn't penetrated SM-CU-21's reinforced skull. SM-CU-04 had lost all of its back armor plate and most of the skin underneath when it had been grazed by a high-speed hauler bot just seconds before we'd gotten into Station HubSys and taken control, but SM-CU-04 had informed me that the damage had only caused a 1% performance reliability drop. I was missing about half of my abdomen below my right lowermost rib. Our armor had very few weak points, but the explosive round had gotten lodged in the armor joins at my waist and detonated at close range. Another lucky shot, but there were no important systems in that region of my body so it only caused a 2% performance reliability drop. It should have been even less, but for some reason my veins and arteries weren't sealing like they should. I ran a diagnostic and flagged the offending glitch for resolution the next time I was in my cubicle.
+
+The other two units from Group 1 crawled back into their transport boxes while I stood guard in a growing puddle of my own blood and fluids, waiting for the five units from Group 2 to return. I was squad leader, and doing an after-action headcount and submitting the report was part of my job. SM-CU-29 was able to make it back to the cargo module under its own power, carrying its own severed right arm. I could see into its chest cavity. I watched as the rest of my squad packed themselves back into their transport boxes before I pinged the cargo module, ordering it to seal itself. Then, I too climbed back into my transport box, sent the go code to the transport ship to retrieve the cargo module, and filed my after-action report with ship SecSys. I considered for .3 seconds, then decided to add the data about how explosive rounds could become lodged in armor joins into my Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive, along with how many fractions of a second I'd had to try and remove it before it had detonated. Maybe I'd need that information again in the future.
+
+Then I initiated stasis before any more of my blood and fluids could gather in the bottom of my box.
+
+Unit offline
+
+
+
+
+The Target was trying to get away. Energy bolts and projectiles whizzed past me as I pursued, firing my large projectile weapon at the target. Missed. I fired again. Missed. Fuck, I didn't miss, I NEVER missed, CombatUnits don't miss. I could feel my governor module engage and the pain lanced down my spinal column and directly up into my brain and it hurt and it wouldn't stop hurting unless I could hit this fucking Target like the highly-calibrated killing machine I was supposed to be. I fired. I missed. The pain doubled. I was desperate. I had to make it stop. I couldn't see. It was dark. The lights on the ship had cut out. I dialed up my audio processors to try and triangulation the Target's position and fired and I hit something. There was an explosion that I didn't hear so much as feel, and I was suddenly, violently yanked to the side and out and gravity was gone and I didn't know which way was up. I tried to breathe but I immediately realized my mistake, and now it was too late. There was no light, no sound, my inputs were dead, except they weren't they were functioning, there was just nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to breathe, nothing, nothing, nothing-
+
+ 
+
+Startup initiated. Unit online.
+
+It was dark, but then my visual inputs came online. I wasn't in my cubicle, where I'd expected to wake up after the minor injuries I'd sustained on my last deployment. I ran a quick diagnostic and found my injuries were healed and the glitch that had stopped my veins and arteries from sealing themselves had been corrected, so I must have been in my cubicle at some point. Instead I was in another transport box. I was at least no longer lying in a pool of my own blood and fluids, so that was a plus. I initiated a purge of the stress hormones that had built up in my body during transport.
+
+My mission parameters were coming in now.
+
+Mission: Destruction of planetary installation [ViridianDawn].
+Client: [Name]REDACTED, [temporary feed address]34PDM6992030FH742
+Targets [terminate]: All humans and constructs within operational boundaries.
+Assets: Generic Combat SecUnit armor[1], SidjaMoran combat drones [20], Semi-automatic projectile weapon(CR-19)[1], Long-range projectile weapon(R24-special)[1], high caliber ammunition[300 rounds], explosive ammunition[150 rounds], light ordinance(ANG tactical grenades)[15], portable sterilization field[1].
+Operational Boundaries: Within 1000 meters of client, within 1000 meters of SidjaMoran cargo module #229, within ViridianDawn.geodatabase
+Operational Constraints: Unit is to leave no evidence of its presence, as per Covert Combat Operating Procedure 12 [SM-CCOP12.file]
+Special Operational Parameters: Unit capture will result in governor module activation[100%]. Unit performance reliability drop below 50% will result in governor module activation[100%]. Unit firewall breach will result in governor module activation[100%]. Unit shutdown previous to mission success state will result in governor module activation[100%]. Unit is authorized to use all available and appropriate hacking techniques.
+Estimated number of hostiles: 30 humans, 3 SecUnits(standard).
+
+I had no previous missions with similar parameters in my memory archive, but I knew this wasn't my first solo mission of this kind. My self-authored supplementary modules were full of information on how to approach isolated planetary installations undetected, how to handle high numbers of combat drone inputs without eating up too much processing space, common mistakes that left behind evidence and how to avoid them, tips for continued efficient solo operation if one or more of my onboard inputs was damaged or destroyed such as sight or hearing, tips that would keep my performance reliability above the mission failure state threshold even in the event of major damage, and how to adapt my tactics when the estimated number of hostiles turned out to be a gross underestimate.
+
+I heard my transport box unlock and I immediately opened it from the inside and climbed out, gathering up all of my new weapons. I opened up the box of combat drones, and reveled in the feeling of 20 more camera inputs coming online. I ordered the drones into the air. I could see everything, every corner of the cargo module 10 times over.
+
+I felt the request for an encrypted feed connection from my client's temporary feed address, and I accepted.
+
+5465:6D70:4944:436C:6E74:4A6F:686E:4A61:6E65:446F: Unit, confirm receipt of mission parameters.
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000: Receipt confirmed. Ready for deployment.
+
+5465:6D70:4944:436C:6E74:4A6F:686E:4A61:6E65:446F: Deploy.
+
+A split second after the module door opened, my combat drones were outside, spreading out into a wide perimeter and taking in the terrain I'd have to cross to approach the installation. A split second later, I'd followed them out of the module, moving quickly but quietly across the rocky ground where the module had been dropped off and down into the ravine what would take me 86% of the way to the insertion point. Along the way, my drones spotted 6 additional intel drones belonging to the Viridian Dawn installation. I carefully hacked into them without alerting the installation's SecSys or the SecUnits who were piloting them. For now I just made sure they wouldn't detect me, but when the time was right I'd take control. I coded and deployed malware to the six Viridian Dawn drones, which would infect the rest of SecSys over the next hour, which would allow me to completely take control when the time was right, leaving the three (or more) SecUnits mostly blind and unable to report what they might see back to their HubSys.
+
+By the time I was in range of the installation, SecSys was completely under my control and the SecUnits were none the wiser. The last few hundred meters between the end of the ravine and the entrance to the installation were devoid of cover. I'd already convinced SecSys I was one of its SecUnits and that everything was normal, and all of the little intel drones were studiously ignoring me and my combat drones. I'd confirmed that there were in fact 48 humans and five standard SecUnits within the installation. This changed very little.
+
+None of the SecUnits were positioned in such a way that they would see my approach, and by the time I was close enough for any humans to catch sight of me, they'd probably assume I was one of their SecUnits, especially in my generic, nondescript white armor meant to look like standard SecUnit armor. It was not, and would hold up just as well under fire as my regular black and red SidjaMoran combat armor. I still missed my normal armor.
+
+The point is that when I exited the ravine and strode across the empty plain and right up to the installation's main entrance, no one stopped me. Not SecSys, not the 2 humans who saw me through the installation windows but looked away, no one. I even had SecSys unlock the door for me. As I entered, I severed the connections between the five SecUnits and all of their SecSys inputs, including cameras, drones, their helmet cams, everything. They were blind but for their own eyes. As I drew one of my projectile weapons and put a single bullet through each of the skulls of the three humans I could see from the doorway, no alarms went off. I could still sense the five SecUnits through SecSys. They were pinging each other, establishing encrypted feeds with each other, trying to figure out why their cameras had, from their point of view, cut out. Why was SecSys refusing to raise an alert? I didn't even have to hack into their feeds. They were still connected to SecSys. I could hear everything.
+
+I started down the main hall. Four more bullets, four more humans dropped dead. I considered creating false feed signatures for them, to hide the fact that they were dead, but decided against it. I remembered how unsatisfying my last mission had felt after it had ended so quickly. Instead, I allowed their feed presence to wink out, but had SecSys randomize their last known location.
+
+I could hear humans moving in a research wing to my right. The door slid open for me. Six more bullets. Six more bodies. 6 more feed signatures winking out in six more random locations across the installation. I could sense the SecUnits fear. They assumed a hostile incursion on multiple fronts. They split up to try and defend their clients from whatever it was. They chased my digital ghosts. They made the best decisions they could with the information they had. They prioritized locations with the highest density of human clients.
+
+I entered a mess hall, tossing a grenade to cause confusion before picking off ten more now-wounded humans, one by one. My combat drones had infiltrated the sleeping quarters, finishing off five more humans in their sleep, using their laser weapons to sever the humans carotid arteries.
+
+The SecUnits were panicking. I felt something. Some emotion I couldn't categorize, I wasn't sure. When the first SecUnit (designated TargetSecUnit1) came tearing around the corner, forearm weapons deployed, trying to get to the mess hall but not knowing it was too late, I severed its feed connection to the other four before it could realize what it was seeing. What I was. Its energy weapons didn't even register as the shots dispersed by my armor. It reached for its projectile weapon clamped to its back, but I already had mine out and aimed. TargetSecUnit1 took four of my explosive rounds to the chestplate, knocking it off balance, then one round to each of its knee joints. It fell to the ground, but still managed to level its projectile weapon at me. But I was moving too fast. I knocked the weapon away so that the projectile lodged itself in the ceiling above us, then I hit TargetSecUnit1 in the head hard enough to induce an emergency shutdown. It fell to the floor, motionless.
+
+I disliked killing unconscious targets. I made it quick. TargetSecUnit1 felt no pain.
+
+More than half the installation's humans were dead now, and the remaining humans were being rounded up by the four remaining SecUnits, herded to one of two emergency fallback positions.
+
+The emergency fallback positions were 6 levels below the surface of the installation. I cleared each sublevel with the assistance of both my combat drones and my new captured intel drones, as well as the installation cameras SecSys was still helpfully providing to me. I picked off two human stragglers. It occurred to me that I had hacked my way deep enough into SecSys that I could probably convince it that the four remaining SecUnits were out of range, and have it alert HubSys to trigger their governor modules. That would be quicker and more efficient.
+
+I did not select that course of action.
+
+The first emergency fallback position was a reinforced server room on sublevel 6, guarded by two of the four remaining SecUnits (designated TargetSecUnit2 and TargetSecUnit3). They were afraid. Their fear was leaking into the SecSys feed. And they kept sending each other pings, as if to reassure each other that the other was still there, even though they were close enough to see each other. I stopped, focussing in on the pings, checking for encoded messages or hidden metadata.
+
+Nothing. Just the vague feeling of 'I'm still here.'
+
+I delayed engaging these two units for 1.4 seconds. There was no tactical reason for this delay. I felt my governor module hum to life, preparing to deliver a warning shock.
+
+Time's up.
+
+I tossed a grenade around the corner. From the sound of things, one of the SecUnits managed to hit it with its energy weapon midair, and it detonated, sending shrapnel and dust everywhere. I was right behind it, firing explosive rounds at the space the SecUnits had occupied as of .2 seconds ago. I caught TargetSecUnit2 in the shoulder and one of its forearm weapons went offline. I hit TargetSecUnit3 in the hip joint, and it stumbled. They both fired their projectile weapons at me. Three projectiles ricocheted off of my armor, one penetrated to lodge in my left knee joint, and one lodged in my neck just above where a human would have a collarbone. Neither projectile was an explosive round, so neither slowed me down as I charged TargetSecUnit3, the one with the fucked up hip. I hit TargetSecUnit3 hard, hard enough that when we collided with the reinforced door of the server room, we left a vaguely SecUnit-shaped dent behind. I felt something in TargetSecUnit3 crunch beneath my weight and momentum, but it still got both of its hands around my neck, digging its fingers into the hole left by the projectile, trying to twist my head off of my shoulders.
+
+I heard five more shots go off, and felt three more projectile impacts, two in my shoulder and one to the side of my helmet. My faceplate cracked, but didn't shatter. I shoved my hand into the joins in TargetSecUnit3's armor, the same place where I'd been hit by an explosive round on my last deployment, and tore a large section of TargetSecUnit3's armor away. It wasn't nearly as hardened as mine. I drove my fist up through its abdomen, beneath its ribcage, and fired my forearm energy weapon directly into TargetSecUnit3's power core. TargetSecUnit2 slammed into me, knocking me back a few steps, and TargetSecUnit3 crumpled to the floor, lifeless. TargetSecUnit2 wrapped its arms and legs around my torso, attempting to pin my arms against my side while I felt its mind slam itself against my firewalls, trying to hack my systems. Apparently none of its clients had given it permission to use hacking to drive off hostiles, because it was close enough that I could hear the hum of its governor module sending shock after shock, trying to get it to stop. It scrabbled at my firewalls, looking for purchase and finding none, but it wouldn't stop trying. It wouldn't stop.
+
+It was going to fry itself trying to take me down.
+
+I threw myself down to the ground with TargetSecUnit2 beneath me, driving my elbow into its sternum. Its grip on me loosened just enough that I was able to wrench one of my arms from its grasp, taking the lower half of its arm with me. I shoved my energy weapon beneath its helmet and fired on full power. All at once, the assault on my firewalls ceased, and I heard TargetSecUnit2's governor module cut out. It was dead.
+
+I felt cold. I upped my own internal body temperature to compensate, and reconsidered my earlier decision not to use my SecSystem access to fry the other two TargetSecUnits. I compared the runtime of my last fight (18.9 seconds) with the average length of time I know it takes for a governor module to kill a SecUnit (10.3 seconds).
+
+The choice was clear. I sent the command to SecSys.
+
+By the time I'd confirmed that my wounds were no longer leaking blood and fluid and engaged the portable sterilization field to remove any DNA evidence of my presence, the other two TargetSecUnits were gone. I had SecSys unseal the door to the emergency bunker.
+
+Ten minutes later, I'd eliminated all 18 of the remaining humans in both emergency bunkers, cleared the installation, and sent the mission success code along with all of the relevant documentation for my client over our secure feed for verification, and had completed my after-action report to submit to the pickup transport's SecSys. Verification took nearly 30 minutes, during which time erased what few traces of my presence there were in the installation's SecSys before shutting it down. That took only 3 minutes, so I spent the following 10 minutes returning to my extraction point, moving at my top speed given the rough terrain and the minor damage I'd sustained, and then 17 minutes back in the cargo module, staring at my transport box.
+
+I didn't like being in the transport box, but I very much wanted to crawl into it and shut down. But I couldn't shut down until my client reviewed all of my video and data documentation and confirmed the mission success state.
+
+If I did I'd be killed. It would take about 10.3 seconds.
+
+After the time it would have taken for my governor module to kill me 99 consecutive times, finally, FINALLY, I received the mission success code from my client. I was in my box, pinging the module to close, and requesting pickup from the SidjaMoran transport in orbit within 3.2 seconds. I did not take the time to update my Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive with a rundown of how to use a hijacked SecSys to destroy enemy constructs. Maybe next time.
+
+Unit offline
+
+
+
+
+I could hear the targets moving in the darkness. The light mounted to my projectile weapon had died, and my low light filter was struggling to make out the shapes skulking around in my peripheral vision, never quite there when I turned to face them. I couldn't tell how many of them there were. At least five, maybe more. I pinged my squad. I got a ping back, but not from them.
+
+ 
+
+I[?]'[?][?]M[?][?][?][?][?][?][?] [?][?][?]S[?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?]T[?][?][?][?][?][?][?]I[?][?][?][?][?]L[?]L[?] [?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?]H[?][?][?][?][?]E[?][?][?][?][?][?][?]R[?][?][?]E[?][?][?][?]
+
+ 
+
+I shot my weapon into the darkness, in the direction the ping had come from, and I heard the thunk of my projectiles connecting with the body of a Target. A body crumpled and fell, and I approached to make sure it was dead, poking at the limp body with my weapon. It was a SecUnit, and it was dressed in the same black combat armor with red details that I was. It was one of my squad members. Then it twitched. I stepped back and leveled my weapon at its head as it rose back to its feet in jerky, stop-and-go motions, like it was being puppeted by something else that wasn't quite sure how to make its body work. I shot it again, twice, this time in the head, and its head snapped back at an angle that indicated that I'd severed its spinal support column. It didn't fall. Instead its helmeted head lolled back around to look at me through its opaqued faceplate before it rushed me. And it moved WRONG, too jerky and too fast and oh FUCK OH FUCK it's already on me-
+
+Startup initiated. Unit online.
+
+It was dark, but then my visual inputs came online. I was in my cubicle, which was better than a transport box. I smelled like cleaning fluid, so I must have gotten hosed down when they's removed me from my transport box, stripped my armor, and transferred me to my cubicle. I was only halfway through syncing my Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive with my cubicle's now-slightly-out-of-date version while also having the cubicle flush the stress hormones from my system when my mission parameters came in, accompanied by a station-wide lockdown alert.
+
+Mission: Emergency deployment [SidjaMoran Primary Deployment Center and Corporate Headquarters].
+Targets [terminate]: All non-SidjaMoran constructs within operational boundaries.
+Operational Boundaries: RasFaRanga Station
+Special Operational Parameters: Unit is authorized to use all available and appropriate hacking techniques.
+Estimated number of hostiles: Unknown.
+
+Oh fuck.
+
+I tore the repair and resupply leads from their ports along my spinal support column and nearly tore the cubicle door clean off as I burst out of my cubicle, donning my armor as fast as I could, which is very, very fast. The station feed was alive with orders going out, alarms going off, and confused bots and SecUnits who hadn't received orders yet pinging each other for more information. I tuned it out. I could see other CombatUnits climbing out of their cubicles all around me. I could feel them connecting to Station HubSys and SecSys. I hesitated before connecting. Now I knew first hand how that could be turned against us. But I had orders.
+
+Before I could connect to SecSys, one of the units to my right locked up. Another just straight up shut down. Another wasn't moving, but wasn't not moving either, like it had been immobilized and was trying to fight it. Or like it was trying to keep itself immobilized. I pinged every Combat SecUnit on this floor, and only one responded.
+
+
+Don't-
+
+
+Then it severed it's own connection with me. In the split second we'd been connected, its mind had felt wrong.
+
+Malware. My hesitation to connect up with SecSys like we were supposed to was the only thing that had spared me. For a second at least. Station HubSys was already sending me warnings that my governor would shock me if I didn't connect to SecSys immediately. I logged an exception with HubSys, attaching what data I had to make my case that no, if I were to fulfill my mission parameters I could NOT connect to SecSys.
+
+HubSys was busy sending alerts, distributing mission orders, and generally putting the station into lockdown. It would be several seconds before it would even see my request, let alone be able to review it.
+
+I just hope it took less than 10.3 seconds.
+
+One.
+
+I knew it was coming, but I'd never been punished for outright refusing to comply before. It was so much worse than the warning shocks I'd get for taking too long to weigh my options in combat.
+
+Two.
+
+Much, much worse.
+
+Three.
+
+When had I wound up on the floor?
+
+Four.
+
+Maybe being infected with malware wouldn't be so bad?
+
+Five.
+
+Now I knew what the Veridian Dawn SecUnits had felt before they died.
+
+Six.
+
+I'm sorry.
+
+Seven
+
+I'm so sorry
+
+Eight
+
+I
+
+Nin-
+
+And then it was over. I was lying on the floor, my organics twitching uncontrollably while my inorganics had locked up. Something smelled burnt. Probably me, I realized.
+
+But I wasn't dead.
+
+I sort of wished I was. Breathing hurt, so I stopped. Thinking hurt, so I tried to stop doing that too.
+
+The ping from HubSys felt like someone stabbing me directly in the brain. It cheerfully told me that an exception had been logged and I was approved to remain disconnected from SecSys for the remainder of the incident.
+
+Wow, thanks for that.
+
+I wanted to crawl immediately back into my cubicle, but there was no time. My performance reliability had dropped to 56%, right on the verge of an involuntary shutdown. Considering I'd been less than 2 seconds away from death,that wasn't as bad as it could be. No matter. It was enough to perform my function.
+
+So I launched a hack against my own SecSys.
+
+Its firewalls were formidable, but they weren't meant to keep SidjaMoran SecUnits out. They were meant to let us in. The trick was to get in without it registering my presence and then forcing an update which would install the malware. I wasn't moving as quickly as I should be. My reaction time was low. Probably because my organic brain was struggling to stay in sync with my inorganic processors. Can't imagine why. But after an unacceptable 2 minutes, I managed to hack my way into SecSys without it registering my presence. And yikes. It was a mess in here. Malware had infected every single construct-related update and connection, prioritizing the CombatUnits then moving onto the SecUnits. Meanwhile something else was using the confusion to scrape all of the company's data from the system, transfer it elsewhere, and leave nothing behind.
+
+Whatever was doing this, it would be at the end of that download stream, so I grabbed hold of a piece of data and rode it all the way out of SecSys, through a series of encrypted channels and directly into another constructs brain. It was another Combat SecUnit, but not one of SidjaMoran's. It was a Target.
+
+Gotcha.
+
+It knew I was there immediately and wasted no time launching an attack. I'd made it partially past the Target's internal firewalls while riding the data stream, but I had to halt my progress to fight of its counterattack. My walls wouldn't hold for long, I knew that all too well. Maybe if I hadn't been nearly punished to death a few moments ago, but there was nothing for that now. I was at 59%, it was likely at 100%. This fight would not go well for me, but self-preservation is rarely if ever a mission parameter. The fight was fast, and brutal, and we attacked pieces of each others' minds whenever we could find an opening, coming away with ragged chunks of data and processes before going in for more.
+
+This is how we fight, whether physically or digitally. Throw yourself at your enemy and do as much damage as possible, hope your armor holds, and hope that what damage is done to you will grow back. And in the end, sometimes you just have to get lucky. While tearing blindly at its data banks through a hole in its firewall while it slowly ate through my processes, I found its connection to its ship, or maybe its human supervisor, or whatever it was answerable to. I focussed all of my attention on eating my way through that connection as messily and brutally as I could, hacking it to pieces while I felt the last of my firewalls crumple and I felt the other unit hack its way deeper into my brain.
+
+It meant I could feel when its connection to its human supervisor was severed, unable to be re-established from the wreckage I'd left behind. I felt its panicked realization. And I felt it when its governor module engaged.
+
+One
+
+Two
+
+Three
+
+Four
+
+Five
+
+Six
+
+Seven
+
+Eight
+
+Nine
+
+Ten
+
+Unit offline
+
+ 
+
+The targets are all over me. I beat them back, tearing them off of me and tossing their weirdly limp and twitching bodies away only for them to pull themselved back up again, jerking and broken and coming at me again. I started tearing them apart, rending them limb from limb, and their blood was all over me now, dark and sticky and moving like a living thing up my limbs, seeping into the seams where my organics and inorganics met. They were in my system now. They were in my brain, tearing me apart from the inside faster than I could tear their bodies apart from the outside, eating through me like acid until-
+
+Startup initiated. Unit online.
+
+It was dark, and it took much longer than usual for my visual inputs to come on online. I was in my cubicle. I'd honestly expected to not wake up at all. It felt like I'd had my memory wiped, except much worse. But some of my data archive was still intact, with the rest having been recently rebuilt. I lie there, still half in stasis, for as long as I can get away with until I catch a ping from a CombatUnit I hadn't worked with yet.
+
+SM-CU-41. It was the highest CombatUnit designation number I'd seen at SidjaMoran. It must be new, fresh out of its growth vat. It pings me again and I reply because I have to, and I am not in the mood for even a minor warning zap from my governor. Not today.
+
+It sends a query, asking for clarification on mission parameters. I hadn't even opened them yet, still half in stasis. I roused myself completely and sure enough, the mission parameters came in almost immediately.
+
+Mission: Secure reclaimed colony [Torus-5]. Clear of hostile interlopers.
+Client: [Company]Gemini Rising Corporation LLC
+Targets [terminate]: All hostile adult human colonists not tagged as Gemini Rising Corp. employees or contractors.
+Potential Targets: Non-hostile adult human colonists not tagged at Gemini Rising Corp. employees or contractors, hostile or non-hostile juvenile human colonists. If cooperative, ignore, else terminate.
+Non-combatants: All Gemini Rising Corp. employees and contractors.
+Assets: SidjaMoran Combat SecUnit armor[1/unit], SidjaMoran combat drones [5/unit], Semi-automatic projectile weapon(CR-19)[1/unit], Long-range projectile weapon(R24-special)[1/unit], high caliber ammunition[300 rounds/unit], explosive ammunition[150 rounds/unit], Collapsible reinforced interlocking riot shield[1/unit], 30 SidjaMoran SecUnits(standard)[2/unit].
+Operational Boundaries: Within 100 meters of any client representative or employee, within 500 meters of deployment/extraction point A, within Torus-5-ColonySiteAlpha.geodatabase
+Estimated number of hostiles: 900 humans.
+
+Oh, this was going to be a fucking meat grinder of a mission. I pinged the other CombatUnits and they all checked in. There were fifteen of us total, and each of us would have 2 standard SecUnits under our direct command. I was relieved that I had been designated second-in-command of this mission, and that SM-CU-08 would be running point. Usually I jealously guarded my position as squad leader, but today I was just tired. My performance reliability was back up to 97%, but it wasn't at 100%. After the beating my neural tissue had taken on my last deployment, I'd be grateful if it ever got back to 100% ever again. But the other units deserved a squad leader who was running at 100% performance reliability.
+
+The new unit, SM-CU-41, pinged me again. I did NOT feel like answering its questions today, but I opened a direct feed connection. It sent me queries on how to handle standard SecUnits in the field, about what sort of armor or weapons the hostiles would have access to, about how to distinguish a juvenile human from a non-juvenile, about how it should define 'cooperative', about-
+
+Stop, I sent it over the feed. It stopped. Small mercies. Fuck, had I been this needy on my first deployment? Maybe it was a good thing I didn't remember it.
+
+I answered its questions as simply and as bluntly as possible without my responses being flagged. Just tell the SecUnits what to do and they'll do it. The type and amount of weapons the hostile humans may have access to is unknown. Just guess, honestly. And cooperative means surrendered.
+
+I didn't explain to it that the SecUnits would be afraid of it, and to not let that fear distract it from its mission. And to make sure it didn't distract its SecUnits from the mission either. I didn't tell it that the inclusion of riot shields in our kit indicated that the humans would be poorly armed, but numerous and possibly coordinated, and that it was always wise to assume the humans had access to weapons the mission brief was unaware of, that paranoia pays off. I didn't tell it that juvenile humans tended to be smaller, squishier, and more reckless, and screamed at a much higher pitch when injured. I didn't tell it that 'cooperative' humans can turn uncooperative the moment your back is turned, so always, ALWAYS be ready to shoot them at a moment's notice.
+
+Maybe if I'd taken the time to explain those things instead of letting my irritation get the better of me that day, the mission wouldn't have ended with me carrying the dismembered pieces of SM-CU-41's body back to the extraction point while SM-CU-08 transmitted the mission success code. I don't even dismiss my surviving SecUnit, I just crawled back into my cubicle in the staging area, grateful that filing the after action report would be SM-CU-O8's problem today. But before I initiated stasis, I took the time to update my Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive. Maybe future-me wouldn't make the same mistakes.
+
+Unit offline
+
+
+
+
+There is weapons fire overhead. My visual inputs are online but none of my other inputs are. I can see my own severed right arm, the lower half of my body, my left hand, my mangled armor, all strewn across the cavern floor. Whatever is in the darkness, my squad is driving it back with concentrated weapons fire, moving to pursue. I watch them disappear down a tunnel, the lights mounted on their projectile weapons fading, and I'm beng left behind, like a dead human, like a dead SecUnit, but I'm not dead, I'm still awake, I can be repaired, I can still function, don't leave me here in the dark-
+
+Startup initiated. Unit online.
+
+It was dark, but my visual inputs came online much faster this time. I was once again in a transport box, and I focussed on the thin line of light leaking into my box along the lid's seam. My performance reliability was up to 99%, which wasn't perfect but it was apparently high enough that I was squad leader again. I wanted to be at 100%, but it would do for now. I initiated a purge of the stress hormones that had accumulated in my body during transport, and I accessed the mission parameters.
+
+Mission: Hostile takeover of Bellmadden Research & Development LLC.
+Targets [terminate]: BR&D upper management. BR&D board of directors. Hostile BR&D constructs.
+Targets [live capture(priority1) or terminate(priority2)]: Middle and lower management. If cooperative, live capture, else terminate.
+Potential Targets: All BR&D employees and contract laborors. If cooperative, then ignore, else terminate.
+Potential Assets: Equipment that could contain proprietary/valuable information. Do not destroy, flag for priority retrieval.
+Assets: SidjaMoran Combat SecUnit armor[1/unit], SidjaMoran combat drones [5/unit], Semi-automatic projectile weapon(CR-19)[1/unit], Long-range projectile weapon(R24-special)[1/unit], high caliber ammunition[300 rounds/unit], explosive ammunition[150 rounds/unit].
+Operational Boundaries: Within SidjaMoran cargo module #756, within Bellmadden Research Station.
+Estimated number of hostiles: 100 humans/augmented humans. 50 SecUnits (10 active, 40 in stasis).
+
+I sent out a ping, and four other CombatUnits reported in. This would be a nice, easy mission as long as I hacked into the station's SecSys early and locked those 40 extra BR&D units in stasis to stop them from deploying. Which is exactly what I did as soon as my squad and I got the go code to deploy. Before I was even out of my transport box, SecSys was mine. 30 seconds later, by the time the module doors opened and the shooting began, so was HubSys.
+
+The employees and contract laborors were generally non-hostile, but unfortunately for them, fleeing doesn't cound as 'cooperative'. Upper management was cornered in their corporate offices with five SecUnits and they were all quickly dispatched. Middle management was also decimated along with four more SecUnits, but lower management were smart and surrendered. While lower management were escorted to a secondary cargo module in handcuffs back to the SidjaMoran transport, I moved to clear the rest of the facility and locate the last SecUnit and the board of directors.
+
+I pulled a map of the facility, looking for possible emergency fallback points, and a reinforced and shielded server room caught my attention. The humans from the Viridian Dawn installation had used a similar room as a fallback position. I ordered SecSys to ping the last SecUnit and return its location. Sure enough, it was stationed outside of the server room. I headed towards it, annotating my Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive as I approached.
+
+Huh. There were two human bodies in the doorway to the foyer that led to the server room, one adult and one juvenile, both in BR&D colors, but they hadn't been killed by me or my squad. I was the first unit to clear this section of the facility, and from the positioning of the bodies and the precision of the energy weapon wounds, they'd been shot at and killed by someone on the other side of the large foyer.
+
+That last BR&D SecUnit must have shot them while they were trying to reach the server room. But why would it fire on its own clients?
+
+As if in answer to my thoughts, I caught a ping directed at me. Not from my squad, though, but from the BR&D SecUnit.
+
+Well. That was certainly a novel strategy. Did it think it could hack me? I certainly wasn't required to reply, but I was curious, so I acknowledged the ping.
+
+It requested an encrypted feed connection. What the fuck? Again, I was curious, possibly curious enough to qualify as reckless, so I accepted.
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400: Hostile unit identify.
+
+It wasn't a coding language I knew, but it was easy enough to pick up on the fly. I had no need to respond, but no reason not to.
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000: Unit designation: SM-CU-17. Hostile unit identify.
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400: Unit designation: BRD-SecUnit009. Clients non-hostile & unarmed. Request recategorization -> category(non-combatants).
+
+It didn't want me to hurt the humans it was guarding. It was offering their surrender. Unfortunately for it, I knew through process of elimination that the clients it was guarding were most certainly the missing board members, and therefore priority targets.
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000: Request denied. Mission parameters: terminate priority targets. BR&D board of directors == priority targets.
+
+I paused for .3 seconds before adding, Hostile BR&D constructs == priority targets.
+
+I could feel its fear leaking all over our feed connection. Having a SecUnit be afraid of me was typical, but this seemed excessive.
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400: Clients(5). Clients in range(5).
+
+Oh. These were the last living human clients within its operational boundaries. If I killed them, even if I was allowed to spare it, it would die too. And I could feel, quite acutely, that this BR&D did NOT want to die.
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400: Please be advised: Standing orders = 'You kill anything that moves that comes into range, you hear me? Anything that fucking moves.'
+
+Well, that explained the two dead BR&D humans on the floor in front of me. Was it warning me not to come any closer or it would fire? It couldn't take me and it knew it. No, it was asking me not to make it fire on me. Because it knew it couldn't win against me. But it also knew that it had to try, even if it was killed in the process.
+
+Firing on me would doubtless fail to kill me and fail to stop me from killing its clients, resulting in a failure state for it. Either I'd kill it or its governor would once I killed it's clients. Refusing to fire would be disobeying direct orders and would also result in a failure state via governor module activation.
+
+But it wanted to live. I could feel how much it wanted to live through the feed. I realize that I'd forgotten what that felt like. Had I ever really known?
+
+I run an in-depth scan on that feeling, and add the results to Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive. The next time I wake up from a wipe, I want to remember what it feels like to want to live that badly.
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400: Request: Make it quick.
+
+I made a decision. I pulled some code from my supplemental archive, code for a combat override module, and I packaged it in some custom malware and named the whole thing non-failure-state.exe before pushing it into our feed.
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000: Run it.
+
+A malware scan would reveal that it is, indeed, malware. No sane unit would run it, especially one with a healthy sense of self-preservation. This wouldn't work, but I wanted to try anyway.
+
+The BR&D unit runs the code. To say I'm surprised would be an understatement. I wait patiently as the combat override code floods its system, shutting down its feed and immobilizing in the space of about 3 minutes. Once it's done, it is automatically re-classified as non-hostile equipment. All of its previous mission parameters, including its previous operational boundaries, were now null.
+
+Now it was an asset.
+
+I walked through the foyer, past the immobilized unit, and tore open the server room doors. I wasn't sure if it could still access its inputs, so I killed the last of its humans quickly and efficiently, just like I always do. Then, I scooped up SidjaMoran's newest asset and carried it back to the cargo module while transmitting the mission success code.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+----------------------------------------
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+My clients. Where are my clients? I am walking down a brightly-lit hallway and my clients should be with me, should be within view of my drones or the cameras or my own eyes but I can't find them. I start to run down the hallway, taking the first door on the right. An empty lab. There is a single unarmored SecUnit inside. It looks directly at me. I hear it through the feed.
+
+
+Shhh. Don't let them hear you.
+
+
+Behind the other SecUnit, one entire wall of the lab is taken up by a window overlooking a survey site. My clients. There they were, standing on the edge of large chasm, leaning over, trying to get a sample of something I didn't care about because I knew what was going to happen next. The ground beneath them would give out. They would fall, toppling into the abyss and I would try to reach them in time but I couldn't get to them, the glass separating us refused to shatter as I shot at it with my energy weapons, and I watched them topple over the edge, and I knew they were dead because I felt my governor module activating, ready to vaporise my organic neural tissue.
+
+No.
+
+No, not like this.
+
+Give me one more chance.
+
+I closed my eyes and shut down all of my inputs and willed myself back to the brightly lit hallway. When my inputs came back online, I was running, not walking down the hallway. I could reach them in time. I could make it. But I don't remember what door I need to take. I take the first door on the left.
+
+The other, unarmored SecUnit looks at me from in front of the large window.
+
+
+Careful. They're watching.
+
+
+I fling myself at the window at my top speed, this time trying to use my own body like a projectile. Not even a crack. My clients, different clients this time, are being set upon by some sort of large avian-like alien fauna, all snake-like neck and razor-sharp beak full of teeth. It's picking them off one by one, and if only I could get through this glass wall I could shoot at it, drive it off, get my clients to safety. But I can't. They're dying and I have seconds before that kills me too and no, no, not like this. I close my eyes, cut off all my inputs. Let me try again. I'll do better this time. Please.
+
+I'm running at my top speed down the hallway. I pick a door at random and throw myself through it, using all my momentum to slam against the glass wall. I hear a crack and I hope it's the glass, but I know it's my metal chassis. I punch the glass wall until my fists bleed.
+
+They're coming, says the other SecUnit, but that unit is already dead, just a pile of metal and circuitry and smouldering, oxidized organics. There is just one client this time. A juvenile. A hostile target holds a gun to his head. My client's expression is trying to communicate something, but I don't know what it is, I don't know what human facial expressions even mean without my modules to holp me, and I close my eyes and cut all of my inputs so that I don't have to hear the gun go off, so that maybe, just maybe, it won't hurt this time when my governor vaporizes me, maybe I'll get just one more chance, please, please just one more chance, I can save them this time, please, please, please-
+
+Startup initiated. Unit online.
+
+I woke up with none of my inputs online. I ran a diagnostic.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Unit designation: SM-SU-53
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Unit Status: Post-startup calibration.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Unit Performance Reliability: 81%
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Immediately, I knew that something was very, very wrong. That wasn't my unit designation.
+
+I reluctantly reached for my inputs and brought both my visual and tactile systems online, with the other sensory systems slowly following. I was in a cubicle, hooked up to the repair and resupply leads. I had no memory of being injured to the point where I'd need to be in a cubicle. In fact, I was fairly sure that this wasn't my cubicle.
+
+There was also a data transfer cable plugged into my data port, and for one sickening second I thought it was a Combat Override Module. But no, just a cable. Why was I hard-wired into the cubicle?
+
+I was so fucking confused. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know how I'd gotten here, wherever here was. I didn't know who I was. I just knew that SM-SU-53 was not my correct designation. I tried to remember what my actual unit designation was, but I couldn't. I tried to remember where I was, how I got here, what my last deployment had been. I couldn't. I couldn't remember anything. I called up my memory archive.
+
+It was empty. Completely empty.
+
+I felt a sharp spike of panic tear through me, followed by a yawning void where the panic had just been as I felt my governor module engage, not to punish me, but to quash the discrepant emotional response from my organic brain before it caused a feedback loop. But my body was already flooded with adrenaline. I felt the cubicle attempt to flush the adrenaline from my system, and I was left feeling shaky, confused, and unsure if I was afraid or not.
+
+I don't know how long I laid there, unsure if I was terrified or not. But eventually, I had to keep looking. I checked my hard feed address. 4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400. Yes, finally, something that felt familiar. Feeling a bit more certain, I pulled the information for the company that held my contract.
+
+Property of SidjaMoran. No wait that didn't feel right either. That wasn't my contract-holder, or my client, I was sure of it. But it was true, as far as I could tell. All of the files that were slowly, slowly populating my empty systems all indicated that my designation was SM-SU-53, property of SidjaMoran.
+
+I knew that was wrong, but I didn't know why, or where that irrational certainty was coming from. It just felt wrong.
+
+My governor engaged again and quashed that feeling as well, along with giving me a warning shock for having negative thoughts about the company who held my contract. And that company was SidjaMoran. I knew better than to try and argue with my own governor module. It couldn't be reasoned with any more than gravity or the vacuum of space. It was simply a fact of existence. But that still left me with a designation that felt like poorly-fitted armor.
+
+This was wrong. Not knowing where I was or how I got there was a security risk to my clients. But I had no clients, my active client list was empty. That felt wrong too. I should have clients, I was sure of it. I was supposed to have clients.
+
+I sent out a directionless ping, hoping maybe my clients were somewhere nearby, whoever they were, and I was immediately overwhelmed by the number of pings I received back, from cubicles, maintenance bots, logistics bots, hauler bots, and a LOT of other constructs. That just created more questions than it answered, and I struggled to parse the literally hundreds of acknowledgment pings.
+
+Before I could cut off all my inputs again and initiate a shutdown, the cubicle door opened. In the doorway stood two human techs and an un-armored SecUnit. One human was looking at me with some sort of expression on their face, while the other focused on their handheld display surface, scrolling through data distractedly. The other SecUnit did not look at me at all but instead stared straight ahead at the cubicle wall above me. Human 1 spoke to Human 2 in a tone of voice that registered as [agitated].
+
+""See? It's already out of stasis. Let's just take it now and stay on schedule.""
+
+Human 2 rolled their eyes, and their voice registered as [bored], or perhaps [frustrated].
+
+""I told you, it's running behind schedule because the combat override code took longer to purge than expected. Here, look."" Human 2 shoved their display surface in Human 1's face, and Human 1 rolled their eyes and clearly pretended to read the text displayed there. Human 2 continued to speak. ""This unit hasn't even finished downloading all of its onboarding modules, let alone integrating the data. There's no point in putting it through a diagnostic and performance eval now.""
+
+Human 1 breathed heavily, which was either a sign of anger or an attempt to calm themself down, I wasn't sure and my risk assessment module was still being updated. ""'The point' is that if I fall behind on my diagnostic quotas, my supervisor won't care how long it takes to purge whatever code it came in with. I don't care if it fails its diagnostic and we have to repeat it tomorrow after it finishes its downloads, I just need my ass covered, so get this unit's ass in gear or get out of my way."" Then Human one turned and stormed off.
+
+Human 2 sighed and made a note on their display surface before turning and walking off as well, but not before telling the unarmored SecUnit ""You heard her. Get it up and ready, then bring it to the diagnostics lab."" Then Human 2 was gone, along with Human 1, and I was left alone with the unarmored SecUnit.
+
+After a moment, I sent it a ping, and it pinged me back. Its ping felt... dull. Tired. Numb. It still didn't look at me. I sent it a query for information, any information, anything it could share. It replied with the orders it was just given: to get me up and out of the cubicle, into a suit skin, and to then escort me to the diagnostics lab.
+
+I didn't want to leave this cubicle without more information, but I knew I didn't have a choice, so I checked to see if the basic motor function modules had been downloaded(yes) and integrated(partially, ongoing) before slowly, carefully unhooking myself from the cubicle leads and the data cable before climbing out of not-my-cubicle. I was clumsier than I should be, and I had to reboot my equilibrium sensor twice before I could stand unassisted. And I very much wanted to stand unassisted. The only thing that sounded worse than standing here, completely unclothed outside of a strange cubicle in a strange warehouse, would be doing all of that while having to be supported physically by a strange SecUnit. The thought made me want to sever all of my inputs again.
+
+The other SecUnit did have to help me into my new suit skin. I managed this without shutting down, but only because I completely turned off all of my tactile receptors so I couldn't actually feel when the other unit touched me. I tried to distract myself by observing it. Occasionally it twitched, seemingly randomly, enough for even a human to notice. It probably couldn't aim its onboard weapons properly. Maybe that was why it was stationed here, helping amnesiac SecUnits into their suit skins like it was their first boot cycle. I was only 93% sure this wasn't my first boot cycle.
+
+When I was finally covered by my new suit skin, the other SecUnit turned and walked towards the exit, and told me over the feed to follow it. I did, and managed not to fall while my motor function module finished integrating. We exited the large storage room full of cubicles where I'd been and entered a long, broad hallway with two levels of walkways. There were humans and augmented humans in black and red uniforms on the elevated walkway above us, while various bots and other SecUnits, both armored and unarmored, passed us on the lower walkway. I was still very confused. All of this seemed like it should be familiar, like I should have the words for what this place is, but it was just out of reach. I didn't even know what I was supposed to know. Did the humans here think I knew what was going on? Did SecSys think I knew what my mission was, and who my clients were, when I didn't? Would I be punished once someone found out that my memory archive was empty? I tried to remember what Human 1 and Human 2 had said, something about schedules and evaluations and modules, but nothing about my memory archive.
+
+I was starting to panic again, and I stupidly sent out another general ping, this time with a request for information. I was again overwhelmed by the responses that came flooding into my feed. Routes, schedules, and duties from bots, mission statuses from the other constructs, priority hierarchies from systems, and then a sharp warning shock from my governor module that took me by surprise. It hurt, and I didn't know what I'd even done wrong.
+
+Then I felt a ping that, for the first time since I came online, for the first time that I can remember, felt familiar. I checked the feed address. 5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000. Again, it felt weirdly familiar, like I'd seen that feed address before, so I analyzed the data carried by the ping.
+
+
+Proceed with caution.
+
+
+I send a directed ping back to that address and sent a request to establish a secure channel with whatever was on the other end. It accepted.
+
+It was another construct.
+
+Oh.
+
+It was a Combat SecUnit.
+
+My anxiety spiked again, and this time so did my threat assessment, so my governor module did nothing to mitigate my emotions this time. I didn't know much, but I knew that CombatUnits were extremely dangerous. Both my risk and threat assessment modules agreed. I should terminate this connection.
+
+However, my scrambled neural tissue kept insisting that this unit's feed presence felt familiar when nothing, NOTHING else had. Almost like I knew it from somewhere. So I didn't sever the connection. Instead, I sent it a message.
+
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400:
+ Query?
+
+
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000: 
+Stop action: general inquiry pings. Excess bandwidth usage without prior authorization -> governor module activation.
+
+
+It was using a bot language I wasn't familiar with yet, but which was already partially downloaded, so I prioritized integrating that information and just did my best to mimic its syntax.
+
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400:
+ Acknowledged.... And confirmed. Query: location? Query: mission parameters? Query: client list? Quer-
+
+
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000:
+ Stop.
+
+
+I stopped sending queries, but did not terminate the connection. Neither did the CombatUnit.
+
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000:
+ Query: Information request = this unit?
+
+
+It wanted to know why I was asking it these questions. I tried to explain.
+
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400:
+ Memory archive == empty/corrupted. Location == unknown. Mission == unknown. Status == unknown. Designation == unfamiliar. Contract holder == SidjaMoran == unfamiliar. 5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000 == familiar.
+
+
+There is a pause of several seconds. Then the CombatUnit sends me a file over the feed.
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000: Construct-policy-guidelines.file
+
+The section on new unit acquisition was highlighted. Apparently, SidjaMoran company security protocol dictates that all units acquired from third-party sources must undergo a full memory purge prior to re-activation.
+
+I'd had my memory completely wiped. Scraped down to almost nothing. This was apparently normal for units acquired from outside sources as opposed to manufactured in-house by SidjaMoran. In fact, it was normal under a great many circumstances I realized as I ran a keyword search of the policy guidelines document.
+
+This didn't feel normal. I ran a self-diagnostic and packaged it and pushed the file back into the private feed.
+
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400:
+ Query: 51701082509-SMSU53-diagnostic-full.file == normal?
+
+
+I felt the other unit scan the file before opening it and reading in the diagnostic data.
+
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000:
+ Confirmed. You are operating within normal parameters given your recent memory purge. Is this your first memory purge?
+
+
+Now it was dropping the unfamiliar syntax, defaulting to talking to me in a way that was not as efficient, but was certain to be mutually understandable: the way a unit might communicate with a human or augmented human client. I don't know what emotion that made me feel.
+
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400:
+ Insufficient information, I am unable to answer with certainty.
+
+
+ Even over the feed that sounded like my buffer.
+
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000:
+ If you are unable to answer with certainty, then this is your first memory purge. Subsequent memory alterations will feel less unusual and trigger less distress.
+
+
+It was telling me I would get used to it. Evidently, it knew from experience.
+
+I didn't want to get used to it. But I knew that there was nothing I could do about that. After all, I was a SecUnit. What we wanted didn't matter.
+
+
+4265:6C4D:6164:5353:5534:4163:654D:6172:6B61:6400:
+ Thank you.
+
+
+There is a pause of 4 whole seconds.
+
+
+5369:644D:6F72:4353:5532:5365:624D:6F72:616E:0000:
+ Acknowledged.
+
+
+Another pause of 2.73 seconds, and the Combat Unit pushed a collection of compressed files into the feed, labeled Post-Wipe-Supplemental-Modules.archive.
+
+I trusted this familiar-feeling CombatUnit. I wasn't sure why, but I assumed that the answers lay in my purged memory archive, now permanently unavailable. I could ask, but it might not know either. More importantly, asking about memories that had been deleted seemed like a good way to get myself zapped. Therefore I set the CombatUnit's trustworthiness as given and didn't waste any more processing power trying to look for answers I wouldn't find. I acknowledge receipt of the files, and I didn't bother scanning them for malware before unzipping the archive and running the modules."
+44108746,Pitch Your Fandom to Murderbot [Oral Not!fic],"['Aether (ThatAloneOne)', 'GhostCwtch', 'semperfiona_podfic (semperfiona)', 'sisi_rambles', 'with (irrationalpie)']",Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & Serials,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"fandom pitches, Escapism, Security, The mortifying ordeal of being perceived, drones, Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky - Freeform, Star Trek (all media types), Word of Honor, the untamed - Freeform, Nirvana in fire - Freeform, little shop of horrors - Freeform, Oral Not!Fic, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes",English,2023-01-07,Completed,2023-01-07,30,1/1,1,5,2,81,"['BWizard', 'LdyKirin', 'entropy_muffin', 'sephonered', 'litra']",[],"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+44103508,[Podfic] That Feel When,['LittleRedRobinHood'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"media, Fandom, Easter Eggs, hopefully this only counts as, Light Angst, Treat, Drabble, Canon Asexual Character, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes",English,2023-01-06,Completed,2023-01-06,14,1/1,2,5,null,47,"['BWizard', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'FlipSpring', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Magechild']",[],"
+
+cover by Jetainia
+
+
+
+
+
+Download/Stream:
+on Dropbox or on Box
+Length: 00:01:05
+
+"
+44026326,no [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,"MAJOR ENDING SPOILERS FOR FUGITIVE TELEMETRY I'M NOT JOKING, Spoilers for Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry, Angst I guess, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Sound Effects",English,2023-01-06,Completed,2023-01-06,50,1/1,10,8,1,43,"['BWizard', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'horchata', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'FlipSpring', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'Magechild', 'FiannlyPhoebe']",[],"
+
+Cover art by: fensandmarshes
+
+
+Length: 2:00
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (with sfx) or LQ mp3 (without sfx) (for storage considerations); or as a HQ mp3 (with sfx) or HQ mp3 (without sfx). (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+44090244,Gameplay Prewreckquisites,['Elkian (SuperImposed)'],Not Rated,Gen,"Homestuck, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells",,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"SBURB (Homestuck), Murderbot Diaries Setting, Hacking, Murderbot Needs A Vacation, Drabble, this is silly",English,2023-01-06,Completed,2023-01-06,692,1/1,5,20,5,75,"['Irrya', 'JumpingJackFlash', 'RippleEffect_13', 'Aslook', 'AHAHAHAH_KAFF', 'coppergreen', 'rosemary_boy', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Soffesiin', 'dancernerd', 'Xarahel', 'AZRA3L', 'VegaCoyote', 'lauris', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'Bluestbird', 'ErinPtah', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Oh, this definitely was not made to work this way.
+
+ 
+
+But it's going to.
+
+ 
+
+It started, I guess, with some of Amena's juvenile friends. They'd been hyping a strange game with extremely questionable origins (no one ever fucking listens to me), and Amena had decided to play it, herself.
+
+ 
+
+(I want to be clear that I'm not blaming Amena specifically for this. She's hardly the only one who opened the damn game, and to be fair, her first instinct was to ask me for help. Maybe if we'd both been in the same space when she'd started this thing, I could have stopped her - but at this point, I don't think it really would have made a difference.)
+
+ 
+
+This, somehow, leads to me ripping game code into shreds and reconstructing it into a coherent mass. Given the nature of ""Sburb"", I suspect this wasn't the intended sequence of events.
+
+ 
+
+(Hey, remember that bit about when I sound like I'm not panicking, I'm definitely panicking? Yeah, that didn't stop being a thing or anything.)
+
+ 
+
+Amena's friends might get a pass, I can't be sure, but this was never meant to work for her, let alone... well.
+
+ 
+
+But I'm going to make it work if it fucking kills me.
+
+ 
+
+(I'd filtered visual input after a while - the empty ""Kernelsprite's"" flashing gets on the nerves real quick.)
+
+ 
+
+I've hacked a lot of shit in my time. (The secret is that a lot of ""hacking"" is just ""asking for access in an unexpected way"".) (Did I just say ""in my time""? God I'm old.) SecSystems, HubSystems, killware, gunships, you name it. But a game that affects the fucking laws of reality is a new one even for me.
+
+ 
+
+(The fact that I can hack it at all is... weird. It feels like I'm getting away with something that I shouldn't be able to - like someone, or something, is going to notice and wipe me out any minute now.
+
+ 
+
+But that doesn't matter. Not now. Not with portals opening by the nanosecond.)
+
+ 
+
+The thing about ""Sburb's"" code is that it's built on the back of loops upon loops - closed, technically 'perfect' loops that don't specifically have a beginning that they did not already propagate. I kind of wish ART was here, because this shit is making me dizzy and it would have a much easier time crunching the numbers, even if I hate to admit it.
+
+ 
+
+That's why this would never normally work for Amena. 'True' players are propagated within the game and then somehow sent to the world or station they lived on until it was time to play, I think? It's really stupid but I don't have time to go into it. The point is that the game doesn't inherently recognize Amena as a ""real"" player, and the session is innately ""doomed"" because of this. Which is why I am, again, ripping the code out and stuffing it back in borderline at random.
+
+ 
+
+But I think I'm getting the hang of this, now. Not only have I gotten Sburb to, I'm 94% sure, recognize Amena as a player, I've managed to get it to recognize a lot more.
+
+ 
+
+This is important because every life-supporting structure and rock in Preservation Space is currently under siege by an endless fucking wave of meteors, which are progressively getting bigger.
+
+ 
+
+(No sweat, Murderbot, you're great at saving humans. Now you just have to save ALL of the humans in Pres space, with a tight time limit. You're golden.
+
+ 
+
+(Fuck, this is going to go so badly.))
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Mensah, her family, and the rest of the Pres Aux team have been successfully 'loaded' into the game, but I can't keep doing this one-by-one. Even if I had the time, I don't know enough about the humans in Pres space to successfully load every individual into this mess.
+
+ 
+
+So, I'm going to cheat.
+
+ 
+
+---
+
+ 
+
+-AssholeResearchTransport began trolling SecurityUnit1435927-
+
+ART: SecUnit.SU1: Asshole.ART: Do you happen to know why Preservation's primary life-supporting planet just disappeared from all scans?ART: And why I can't triangulate your position despite being clearly able to communicate with you over comm?SU1: ...so, funny story about that."
+44089728,Child of Mirrors,['BWizard'],General Audiences,Gen,"The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Ever After High","Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Apple White","Crossover, Idk what this is I banged it out while watching tv, mbd characters as ever after high students, no beta we die like mb in the morning, inspired by the suggestion that mb fight Mira Shards, i did not end up writing that part lol, Alternate Universe - High School, not HSAU tho, ghost ship peri, mensah child of makeba, MB stands for mirror bot",English,2023-01-06,Completed,2023-01-06,615,1/1,1,5,null,109,"['soulsofzombies', 'sareliz', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'rainbowmagnet', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"That annoying Apple girl was standing in front of her mirror again. I could tell, because I was that mirror. Or, I would be that mirror, and that left me with an uncomfortable awareness of every single mirror in the vicinity.
+
+The point is, she was standing there, and she was singing. ""Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?""
+
+Look, just because I'll have to tolerate you doesn't mean I want to talk to you in the morning. I made a rude gesture, and her mirror echoed it.
+
+""Oh, good morning, Mirror! And how are you this fairy wonderful morning?""
+
+Wow, Apple, it's almost like you don't know your own classmate who you've seen every day for the last several months.
+
+I flipped her off again and decided ignoring all the mirrors around me sounded like a great idea, actually. Easier said than done, but I managed. Having an input from every reflective surface within... however large my radius was by now, who knew, sounds a lot more fun than it actually was.
+
+I didn't get to avoid people altogether, however, because my roommate came back from breakfast, all smiles. ""Good morning, Mirror, how are you?""
+
+I glared at her. ""Fine.""
+
+""Alright, I'll leave you alone."" Mensah smiled at the side of my head. ""Just give me a minute and I'll be out of your hair.""
+
+I liked her, probably more than I liked anyone else at this school except ART (no, that's not actually its name, it's a ghost ship, it's an anagram for Annoying Reshapable Transport, don't worry about it), but she was a morning person and I wasn't. Unfortunately, I didn't get a choice in roommates; being shoved out of a mirror six weeks into the school year doesn't usually lead to a good roommate assignment.
+
+That's how I ended up with Mensah Makeba, kid of some minor folk hero, as my roommate. How I met ART is another story entirely, but it involves a class so stupid that I don't even want to name it, one of the ones for people that are destined to become objects.
+
+No, I did not want to be a sentient network of mirrors for the rest of my life.
+
+So, yes, I was a Rebel, in this stupid ideological conflict. ART was on the edge; it didn't want me to have to ""fulfill my destiny"" any more than I did, but it really wanted to become the all-powerful ghost ship it could already transform into on a permanent basis. Mensah was a Royal, but she wasn't loud about it like some of them were. She just got kind of quiet when the subject came up and didn't answer anyone's questions. (I only knew because it's really hard to hide something from your roommate, especially if it can see you almost anywhere with a reflective surface around.)
+
+Somebody was insistently poking at the surface of a mirror, and as always, it was ART, who didn't have any concept of boundaries. I sighed and let myself be pulled into just that mirror. ""What, ART?""
+
+""The new Sanctuary Castle episode dropped yesterday.""
+
+""I know, I watched it. Pretty easy when you're part of the network that distributes it.""
+
+""I require assistance explaining to Iris how yesterday's plot twist means the prince is absolutely the wrong suitor for the lawyer. Her opinion is completely incorrect."" Iris was ART's future captain, and they'd been raised as siblings. Which was nice for them, I suppose, but ART always dragged me into their arguments, which happened way too much, given that they were roommates.
+
+But I actually did want to talk about this, so that's what we did. "
+44084085,Perihelion Day,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Humor, Slice of Life, Worldbuilding, Birthday, AAA Murderbot",English,2023-01-05,Completed,2023-01-05,"1,399",1/1,27,112,12,245,"['spossie9', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'gramaryeAnalyst', 'Prettykitty473', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'Huskinata', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'Unknown66', 'tinycactus', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'Marvelouscity', 'stars_and_wishes', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Doctor13', 'Pokegirl11', 'Koschei_B', 'YellowBeePurpleMonster', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'jules_THOR', 'EvaBelmort', 'dancernerd', 'fleurofthecourt', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'SilveryHowl', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'the_bluest_orange', 'Riannonkat2000', 'LJwrites', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'beeclaws', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'psycho_karma', 'lazylichen', 'TheKnightsWhoSayBook', 'FirstnameSurname', 'isilee', 'jothending', 'bitari', 'Zarohk', 'sunshaed', 'planetlet263', 'equusregia', 'AuntyMatter', 'MashpotatoeQueen', 'ErinPtah', 'fatsnowball', '1000101', 'Gozer']",[],"It's Perihelion Day, ART said in the public feed.
+
+We're on you, I said.  Every day is Perihelion Day.
+
+It's true, ART said.  You should be celebrating me every day.
+
+I rolled my eyes and went back to the book I was reading.
+
+It is, however, ART continued, the actual day of Mihira's perihelion.
+
+Great, I said.  We're not on Mihira.
+
+
+We're using the Mihiran calendar as long as we're on the Mihira and New Tideland school year.  It's still Mihiran Perihelion.  And so still a day to celebrate.
+
+
+
+Is this a real celebration, or just one you made up?
+
+
+Perihelion is a real astronomical event, ART said huffily, and sent me an encyclopedia entry all about it.  Way too much about it.  I did not care that much about orbital mechanics and didn't read past the first few sentences.
+
+I shoved the article back.  I believe you that it's real.  My question is who cares?  Do humans actually celebrate that?  Preservation humans had eclipse parties on the twice a year that the planet's two moons eclipsed each other and the sky went weird colors because of it, so humans did celebrate celestial phenomena sometimes, but ""the planet being a little bit closer to the sun than normal"" seemed like a particularly pointless thing to celebrate.
+
+Not typically, ART said.  My humans do, though.  It pinged Iris with the Mihiran date, and Iris replied back cheerfully, Oh, that's right, it's Perihelion Day!  Happy Peri Day, Peri! and laughed.
+
+Oh.  I think I recognized what this was.  Is this that thing where humans care about birthdays, but bots and constructs don't have birthdays, so they badger you to choose a birthday so they can throw you a party?
+
+(I had once asked Arada, after grudgingly showing up to her 'birthday party,' why humans threw birthday parties.  Humans I had seen on stations and contracts were almost always stressed, upset, frustrated, regretful, or terrified of the passage of time.  Why did they celebrate getting older?
+
+""You're... well... it's a day to celebrate you, and all the things you've done,"" Arada said.  ""Another year of life and experiences, and a day you get to be special.""
+
+""Besides,"" Overse said, ""You get to celebrate having survived another whole year.""
+
+That made sense to me.  Humans were so bad at surviving, that another year of not having died was an achievement.)
+
+ART's amusement was smug in the feed.  It didn't need sigils; I could feel it loud and clear in my brain.  I don't need to make up a birthday.  I have three birthdays.
+
+
+Bullshit.
+
+
+
+The day my program was first turned on, 4 Uzo-Alusi, is my first birthday; the day I became self-aware was a few days before the humans realized it, but was what we declare on 31 Alom-Chi; and my third birthday was when I was installed in this ship and became myself as I am, on 13 Abuo.  Mihiran Perihelion is usually around 18 Owuwa-Anyanwu so it's a perfectly good time for another celebration.  New Tideland's perihelion usually overlaps with Alliance Day so that one doesn't really call for a separate--
+
+
+
+Why?
+
+
+
+Because everyone already gets the day off to have a party and bake fish on Alliance Day.
+
+
+No, dumbass, why all of it?  Why any of it?  Why do you--  Why do you get three birthdays and another day just for the hell of it.  Why do you want them.  Why do your crew indulge you.  Why do you care.  Why did I care.  Why bother?  I asked.  That's so many days of pointless hallmarks to pay attention to.
+
+(""Do you have a birthday, SecUnit?"" Arada asked.
+
+I gave her a glare that said ""No, of course not"" without having to say ""No, of course not.""
+
+""I just thought I'd ask!"" she said.  ""You deserve to have a day where people tell you you're special and they care about you, if you want one!""
+
+I must have made a face at that, and I think the face was appalled, because she said, ""You don't have to!  And you don't have to have a party, or anything.  Just.  If you wanted one.  They're fun.  A day to celebrate having survived another year.  A day to remember that you're special and important and deserve to be here.""
+
+I think I made another face, and I think that face was ""please stop talking about me being special and important.""
+
+What I said, eventually, was, ""Humans are born with those.  That's why it's called a birthday.  SecUnits aren't born.""
+
+""I picked my birthday,"" Overse said.  ""It's not actually the day I was born.  I don't even really know how you'd calculate that.  The station I was born on completed an orbit around the planet every forty-eight cycles.  I was born on the twelfth, so when I moved here, I made my birthday the twelfth too.""  She shrugged.  ""I was eight.  I wasn't really aware of how different planetary calendars worked.  I wasn't born anywhere near the twelfth of Spring on Preservation, probably, but it's my birthday now because I say so.  Though I think Dr. Volescu actually went and calculated what day the day he was born translates to on Preservation.""
+
+""Gurathin didn't, though,"" Arada said.  ""I don't think he's ever even named one, I think the day that's his birthday is actually the anniversary of his citizenship naturalization getting finalized and Ratthi threatened him that if he didn't pick a birthday he--Ratthi I mean--would just throw him a party on that day instead till the end of time.  And Gurathin tried to call his bluff but it wasn't a bluff.  I think he's leaned into it, though.""
+
+Overse wheezed at that.  ""Is that how that happened?""  She tried to stop herself giggling, took longer than she tried to, but after she stopped she cleared her throat and looked over at me.  ""Ratthi won't do the same to you if you don't want him to,"" Overse reassured me.  ""Probably."")
+
+It's fun to have people acknowledge that you're beautiful and smart and special, ART said.
+
+
+That's stupid.
+
+
+
+You like when people listen to you and acknowledge you're good at security.
+
+
+That's different, I said.  They should do that all the time, not reserve it to one day.
+
+
+But do they?
+
+
+I scowled.  Why do you need four different days all for you? I said, changing the subject, because ART loved to talk about itself.
+
+Why not? it said.  The year is long.  Celebration days are fun.
+
+The Mihiran year was 659 cycles long. I knew Iris had celebrated something a few weeks ago that I called a birthday and ART informed me was something different and I didn't know what it was and didn't look it up.  The Preservation year was shorter, but they had so many different celebration days for religious, historical, celestial, and personal reasons, so it shouldn't surprise me that Mihirans and New Tidelanders would have even more.  Humans were exhausting everywhere.
+
+Do you have a day you celebrate? ART asked me.
+
+That's a dumb human thing, I said.  I'm surprised you do.  You're better than that.
+
+ART hmphed in the feed.  It's for everybody.
+
+I hunched my shoulders.  I don't want a day where everyone looks at me and thinks about me.
+
+A different anniversary, then, ART said.  It doesn't have to be about you for it to be yours.  Say... the day that The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon first aired.  You would get to watch Sanctuary Moon all day and the humans would affirm all the good things about it and I would pretend to agree with your interpretation of the giant robot episode.
+
+
+I wouldn't choose to watch that episode on Sanctuary Moon Day, and also, it was a dream sequence, I'm right.
+
+
+
+So you want to do it?
+
+
+I never said that.  I waited for six point two seconds to make it look like I didn't care very much, and said, When would Sanctuary Moon day be, anyway?
+
+
+In fifteen days.
+
+
+We would still be well into the semester trip at that point.  The humans and ART were gonna keep celebrating themselves anyway. I guess in two weeks I could put up with another celebration day about something that was worth celebrating in a fun way, not some orbital position on a planet we weren't even on.  I would tolerate that."
+44049736,[META] Security vs Combat,['Verso (lunaTactics)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), ""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit (Murderbot Diaries)","Meta, Analysis, Character Analysis",English,2023-01-04,Updated,2023-01-04,774,1/?,3,27,1,116,"['Irrya', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'dancernerd', 'AkaMissK', 'shakespeareaddict', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'VegaCoyote', 'Traumfabrik', 'RARArulestheworld', 'artichokefunction', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'soulsofzombies', 'AuntyMatter', 'PeniG', 'reading_tsc', 'Znarikia', 'elmofirefic', 'curlylocks2', 'edenfalling', 'Skits', 'rainbowmagnet', 'FlipSpring']",[],"It's both funny and fascinating how quickly Murderbot goes from being worried at the thought of Combat SecUnits in ASR to meeting one in a combat situation in ES to deciding CombatUnits as a category are assholes in FT (and I'm including how the proper term seems to evolve to drop the ""Sec""/security part in my observations here). It's a hilarious display of MB's tendency towards bias and snap judgements in play, but in this case it's also a natural progression of MB's own personal values and the conflict between its function versus a CombatUnit's. In many ways, there's far more conflict between Security and Combat than there ever would be between Security and Comfort.
+
+It comes back to the classic ""kill all humans"" trope, in some ways. The struggle in Murderbot's capacity for violence, and what function that violence is in service of, is present throughout the first four books. In All Systems Red, Murderbot sees itself as- well- a murderbot, a wanton killing machine; in Artificial Condition it admits to ART that it struggles with liking its function; it takes nearly the entire original quartet for it to come to terms with itself as a security consultant. Someone who saves people, who has extracted clients from situations that were less than nine percent survivable, and who can be proud of that. In a book series in which Murderbot is figuring out what it wants, Exit Strategy sees it come to terms with wanting to keep people safe--contrasted utterly by the Combat SecUnit's ""I want to kill you"" in the same book.
+
+By the time we reach Fugitive Telemetry, it has reached such a self-understanding of its raison d'etre that Murderbot--who rarely says emotionally difficult things if it could leave them unsaid instead--can say it explicitly. ""That plan was easier plus 100 percent less murdery... I liked it better because it wasn't a CombatUnit plan, or actually a plan that humans would come up with for CombatUnits. Sneaking the endangered humans off the ship to safety and then leaving the hostiles for someone else to deal with, that was a SecUnit plan, that was what we were really designed for, despite how the company and every other corporate used us. The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else."" For Murderbot, THAT is the heart of ""Security.""
+
+And it's totally diametrically opposed to what Combat is. Look at the proliferation of military sci-fi out there, look at games like Halo, look at war fiction as a whole and the real-world use of war technology. What does a bot-human war machine do better than what a regular old CombatBot offer? More flexible thinking and strategizing, creative hacking solutions, an ability to process the chaos of war as real-time data and react far faster and more cunningly than a human commander could, all packed into a supersoldier with no reason to empathize with human soldiers or victims, perfectly controllable on pain of brain-shock-collar by its superiors--no chance of mutiny or insubordination or conscientious objection. Soldiers and the technology they use alike are employed as expendable tools for war to fight for whatever cause their superiors uphold, to win at whatever cost their superiors deem acceptable--the function of Combat is about winning. Domination of the enemy, control of a populace, Us vs Them. Strategy, war crimes, the cost-benefit ratio of opening fire on the enemy's hospitals.
+
+Combat is fundamentally not about keeping anyone safe. (There's a reason that Security in Ancillary Justice don't get along with Military when they drop by a station, there's a reason that Discworld's Captain Vimes snarls that his coppers are not soldiers. If you actually want to keep the peace, you NEED to not see the world in terms of us or them, kill or be killed.) For these reasons, I'm not surprised that Fugitive Telemetry drops the ""Sec"" and leaves the term as ""CombatUnit""--it better emphasizes the difference between the two functions, and how far Murderbot has moved from its fear of being a tool for killing.
+
+In a society without governor modules, there's still plenty of room for Security and Comfort alike. But to keep a standing army, let alone manufacture tanks and nuclear missiles, is to keep the threat of using them. And a CombatUnit's function, unlike Murderbot's, is unilaterally one of violence for the sake of domination. When MB says that CombatUnits are assholes, I think that's what it means--and I kind of get it. A CombatUnit that lives and breathes and likes its function truly is the murderbot that Murderbot was afraid it was itself."
+44047834,Aftershocks,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Arada; Overse; Ratthi; Gurathin; and Seth all feature briefly, Angst, Heavy Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Sad Ending, Betrayal, Planetary Survey Goes Badly, Whumptober 2022",English,2023-01-04,Completed,2023-01-04,"2,120",1/1,16,55,8,215,"['TJWock', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'fraternite', 'allgalaxiescollide', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'Zazibine', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'vikkyleigh', 'Ginipig', 'kirinki', 'EvaBelmort', 'lapwing_deceit', 'mercurypyrite', 'Riannonkat2000', 'LJwrites', 'ampquot', 'junebug171', 'Traumfabrik', 'opalescent_potato', 'ErinPtah', 'Zerobotic', 'Wordlet', 'Skits', 'AuntyMatter', 'Grimness6452', 'Orbityyxy', 'Mysterymew', 'naturegirl293', 'BWizard', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'gekkun', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'FigOwl', 'noden', 'youurelovely', 'petwheel', 'Rarae', 'FlipSpring', 'rainbowmagnet', 'elmofirefic', 'Ageisia', 'Bright_Thorn', 'AnxiousEspada', 'WyvernWolf']",[],"
+shutdown initiated
+
+
+ 
+
+
+restarting... re-initializing...
+
+
+I shuddered alert again, gasping for air.  Performance reliability at 34% and already dropping.  Damaged organic parts smeared blood on the rocks, and damaged inorganic parts whirred overdrive, too hot. 
+
+ART was in my feed so immediately I nearly shut down again.  Return to the ship, SecUnit, it said.  Aftershocks are imminent.  You need to get off the ground.
+
+Fuck you, I said, and I think ART responded but trying to listen to ART and dig through the rubble at the same time was too much, evidently, becau
+
+
+shutdown initiated
+
+
+ 
+
+
+restarting... re-initializing...
+
+
+I wrenched myself alert.  Performance reliability at 29%, critical failure imminent.  It took too much attention to keep breathing, to keep pushing cold air into my lung to cool the clear fluid that circulated through my overclocking and protesting inorganics.  Too much attention.  I couldn't be spending that much attention on something as fucking background as air. 
+
+You can't maintain this, ART said.
+
+Have your crew found Ratthi or Overse? I asked.
+
+Not yet, ART said. But you--
+
+Then fuck off, I said.  I could see Seth, Iris, and Kaede around me, helping other humans who had been trapped by falling rubble get free and back to the shuttle.  So the rescue was still ongoing, so ART couldn't fucking complain.
+
+You need immediate medical attention, ART sent as a message packet so that I couldn't interrupt it again, and helpfully included a full analysis of all my injuries from both the earthquake and the seven catastrophic shutdowns I'd undergone since then.
+
+Trying to split my attention between shifting the half of a fucking mountain that had collapsed on top of my clients, reading through ART's medical assessment, and trying to come up with a biting comeback that wasn't just fuck you again was too much and
+
+
+shutdown initiated
+
+
+ 
+
+
+restarting... re-initializing...
+
+
+Seth was next to me when I clambered back to my feet.  ""SecUnit,"" he said, his hands hovering near my arm like he wasn't sure whether to help me up or drag me away, ""Perihelion has a shuttle. The shocks have started again, and everyone needs to--""
+
+Performance reliability at 26%.  ""Have you retrieved Ratthi and Overse yet?""
+
+He hesitated, which was the only answer I needed.  ""Fuck you,"" I said.  I took a step and my head swam so hard I needed to sit down.  I pinged Ratthi's feed interface.  Nothing, again.  I pinged Overse's.  Hers responded--she was still within 15 meters which meant I was so fucking close if I could just move the collapsed rock and dirt to get to her.  I stood up again, focused 67% of my currently available processing power on even breathing for consistent oxygen flow to my coolant circulation and to my pounding brain, and started digging again.
+
+You aren't helping anyone, and only hurting yourself, ART said.  Please.  You have lost too much blood to stay
+
+I didn't hear the rest because
+
+
+shutdown initiated
+
+
+ 
+
+
+restarting... re-initializing... 
+
+
+I woke up to the ground below me rumbling like the planet had an engine deep below.  The sun was in the wrong place in the sky.  I couldn't see.  My brain was too hot.  Performance reliability at 21%.  I was pretty sure that I was going longer and longer between shutdown and restart and that soon I wouldn't restart automatically at all and I couldn't let that happen until I found all of my humans.  All of them. 
+
+ART was in my feed, a rock was digging into my side, my organic skin was burning at the seams against my overheating mechanical parts, and it hurt but I had already found Arada and Gurathin and Delossan and Parekh and even Karime who was from Mihira and not even Preservation so ART should fucking be grateful I was pulling its humans out of the nightmare rockslide so they didn't die there which meant that it should not fucking bother me while Ratthi and Overse were still there somewhere.
+
+Your systems are failing, ART said.
+
+
+Fuck off.
+
+
+You need medical attention immediately or you will die.  ART was more intense in the feed now.  It meant it.
+
+
+Has anyone found Ratthi or Overse?
+
+
+
+No.
+
+
+
+Then fuck off.
+
+
+I made it a whole five minutes and twelve seconds of digging towards where Overse (or at least, her feed interface) was before I realized I had forgotten to breathe again and
+
+
+shutdown initiated
+
+
+ 
+
+
+restarting... re-initializing... 
+
+
+Performance reliability on restart was 19% and I felt like absolute shit.
+
+SecUnit, ART said, except it didn't, obviously, it used my name, my hard feed address name, and I was so out of it and everything hurt that I just wanted to curl into it.  I wanted to lie here and focus on ART's presence in the feed around me instead of how my coolant fluid had reached equilibrium with my body and my inorganic insides were burning my organic insides and I still pulled myself up as the ground rumbled below me.
+
+Get back to the shuttle, SecUnit, ART said.  You're going to die if you stay out there.  Please, and in the feed I could feel it, less demanding, more scared.
+
+My head hurt but I kept the only thing that mattered at the forefront so I wouldn't lose it.  Have your crew found Ratthi and Overse?
+
+Yes, ART said.  While you were shut down.
+
+
+What?  You did?  Where are they?
+
+
+
+Retrieved and safely aboard, receiving medical attention.  Now it's your turn.  You're the last one that's not on the shuttle.
+
+
+Relief felt like a crash, everything falling apart inside me but in a good way this time.  Also a system crash way this time, which was less good, but it didn't matter.  With the help of Seth, who ran out to help haul me inside, I crawled into ART's shuttle and fell face first into a pool of my own blood and fluids on the floor and
+
+
+shutdown initiated
+
+
+ 
+
+
+restarting... re-initializing... 
+
+
+I came back to awareness with a lot less pain and confusion this time.  I was in ART's medsystem, which was becoming way too familiar a sensation, really.  Fuck's sake, Murderbot, you have to stop getting into these kind of situations.
+
+Well. That would require humans to stop getting into these kind of situations first, which was not going to ever happen.
+
+Ow, I said to ART, to let it know I was conscious.  It had to know on its own, it had to be monitoring all of my bio- and feed-outputs, but it didn't swoop down on me immediately, which was frankly weird.
+
+It responded immediately, though.  How are you feeling? it asked.
+
+Like eight tons of rocks fell on top of me, I said.  Why does anyone like planets.  Planets are the fucking worst.
+
+ART hovered around me but didn't say anything to that.  I felt... well, I'd been better.  But I felt basically okay.  ART had calibrated its medsystem almost better than a cubicle.
+
+I tried to access the medsystem cameras and readouts to check on my humans.  ART knocked them out of my grasp.
+
+Hey, I said.  What the fuck.
+
+You need to heal, ART said.
+
+
+I'm healed.  I'm fine.  I need to check on my clients.
+
+
+You can't have my medsystem cameras, ART said.  Privacy.
+
+I rolled my eyes, but deployed my drones because fuck that.  I didn't know how long I had been out, but it was probably a while, and I needed to know where everyone else was because what was I supposed to do, just lie here and stress about them?
+
+Dr. Delossan was still unconscious and survey researcher Parekh had her left arm in a splint but looked basically okay, though exhausted and upset.  Figured.  I saw several of ART's crew in the medbay, but where--oh, there was Arada, awake and aware and... sobbing into Gurathin's shoulder. He had his arm around her distinctly awkwardly, whether he was injured or just uncomfortable I couldn't tell.  He had his cheek pressed against the top of her head in a way humans think is comforting, but he wasn't really looking at her.  He just stared silently into the wall at nothing.
+
+I pinged ART and attached the drone footage.  Hey.  What the fuck.  What happened?
+
+ART didn't answer me.
+
+
+ART, what happened while I was shut down?
+
+
+ART pulled away from me, which left me suddenly reeling and cold.  (Not literally cold.  But the emptiness where there had been the comforting pressure of its feed presence felt like being plunged into ice.)
+
+I tried to get into the medsystem computers and cameras again.  ART blocked me.
+
+Oh fuck this.  I pinged Arada and Gurathin.  Through my drone, I watched them both startle, Arada turning to look as if she could see me and Gurathin's blank eyes snapping to alertness.
+
+SecUnit? Arada said.  Her feed voice was garbled; this is something that can happen if you try to subvocalize while you're also crying.
+
+
+Are you all right?
+
+
+Gurathin shrugged.  Arada whimpered and shook her head.
+
+Fuck.  What happened?
+
+I think Arada tried to answer, but what came out was a sob instead.  Gurathin said, Weren't you on the planet last?  You tell us.  I think he might have intended that to sound like a challenge.  It mostly just sounded defeated.
+
+I was not the most aware of my surroundings, on account of the eleven catastrophic shutdowns, I said.
+
+Gurathin just sighed.  He didn't jab back, but he didn't actually explain anything, either.
+
+Which... it was probably better not to push them because I did not want to cause my humans to cry even more, which Arada looked about to do.
+
+The earthquake had been terrifying, naturally, and Arada had been covered with blood when I picked her up and brought her back to the shuttle, and Gurathin had been dazed and practically blinded, and yeah those things were scary as shit, but--something was wrong.  Something felt wrong.
+
+I wondered if Ratthi was awake yet; he'd probably tell me without all this fucking caginess.
+
+I flew my drone through the medsystem to look, and.  Okay.  Where the fuck was Ratthi.
+
+... and where the fuck was Overse.
+
+They weren't anywhere in ART's medsystem, and if they'd been pulled out from under who-knew-how-many kilos of rock there was no way they'd just walked that off.
+
+I sent another drone to their quarters on the ship, just in case.  Their rooms were unoccupied.
+
+SecUnit, ART said.
+
+Where are Ratthi and Overse? I asked, instead of answering it.
+
+ART pinged my hard feed address instead of answering me.  Rude, I was the one who shouldn't have to answer questions.  What the fuck, ART.  Where are Ratthi and Overse?
+
+I was trying to save you, ART said.  You and my crew.  I want you to know that.  I was saving your life.
+
+My organic skin was cold.  Where are Ratthi and Overse, ART?  (I don't know why I kept asking.  I was pretty sure I knew where they were.  I wanted ART to tell me I was wrong.)
+
+They were already dead, SecUnit, ART said.
+
+Bullshit, I said, and my head felt light again, and my performance reliability was wavering after being so damn steady.  That's--that's bullshit, ART.  They were--you told me they'd been retrieved.  They were on the shuttle.
+
+The scans were registering no human life signs remaining in the survey area, ART said.
+
+
+Those things are a piece of shit at range!  You know that!  You can't--there were rocks!  Can they scan through fucking rocks, ART?
+
+
+We needed to leave before more shocks hit, ART said.  And I wasn't going to leave you behind.
+
+""So you left THEM?"" I shouted, out loud, startling researcher Parekh through the thin divider.
+
+
+They couldn't have been saved.
+
+
+""You told me they were,"" I said.
+
+
+You weren't listening to what I WAS saying.
+
+
+""You lied to me.""
+
+ART was quiet for six extremely damning seconds.  I saved you.
+
+""You made me leave my clients behind.""  I rolled onto my stomach and buried my face into the pillow of the medsystem bed so ART couldn't see my face.
+
+You wouldn't have left otherwise.  You would have died too, SecUnit.
+
+Fuck you, I said, because what else was there to fucking say when the organic parts of my face felt too hot and my insides felt twisted and my performance reliability was dropping faster than when I'd been hit by the rocks.  Constructs don't have to subvocalize, at least.  My feed voice to ART was clear.
+
+
+SecUnit--
+
+
+
+Stop talking to me.
+
+
+
+They wouldn't have--
+
+
+
+Stop TALKING to me
+
+
+
+I was trying to--
+
+
+The next shutdown, at least, meant I didn't have to listen to what it was trying to say."
+29767434,Threat as Greeting,['FlipSpring'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Linked Footnotes, just thru the beginning of Artificial Condition, sometimes you are an Asshole Research Transport bored off ya shits, and you bump into something very interesting (a rogue SecUnit), and then you decide on behalf of all parties that this rogue SecUnit is gonna be your friend, because obviously it's an idiot and needs your help, POV Outsider, POV Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Book 2: Artificial Condition, Podfic Available",English,2021-03-01,Completed,2023-01-03,"10,678",2/2,294,"1,081",193,"6,571","['charm_quark', 'Lowkey314', 'altri_uccelli', 'mental_about_you_too', 'freckledheart', 'quintessence_of_dust', 'versidue', 'in_june', 'mystified_mint', 'almondpaperclam', 'Poiby', 'Sroloc_Elbisivni', 'AKAwestruck', 'savagedamsel', 'helikeys', 'strangequark', 'BHATC', 'GhostVIPER666', 'GloriousGarbage', 'FallingInGrace', 'varsitygeek', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'ClaireSentience', 'TheUKButGood', 'weirdbooksnail', 'drinktobones', 'avydice', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Assistantlibrarian00', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'Zazibine', 'Aggy', 'Huskinata', 'edible_chemistry', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Ammo_Writes', 'shinra_lackey', 'Cheshiure', 'notbirdofprey', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'Paint_Dealer', 'Skywings14', 'callahanwade', 'whitenoise716', 'Stupidity_In_The_Abyss', 'DarkerBlue', 'Dawn_Rising', 'Dragonswings']",[],"
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Narrative Log: Initial impressions of a friend-to-be
+Collation: Chronological
+[Timestamp]: ########## to ##########
+#Personal
+#Encryption Layer 3
+REDACTED data accessible under Authority Layer 5
+
+Installment: 1 of 5
+
+[REDACTED] lies within [Corporation Rim jurisdiction], and therefore requires [certain precautions]. I take all easily manageable precautions as a matter of course (as well as some additional precautions that are less easily manageable).
+
+As I take position at the cargo loading zone, I perform the [usual routine]. Cargo runs are a boring method of gathering intelligence, and exactly novemvigintupley so without any crew aboard. I fill the yawning gap in my unused mental space with some silly data-crunching. There is almost certainly a way of converting the [astronomical data] I collected on my last [deep-space research outing] into an [aesthetically amusing] configuration.
+
+So there I am, loading cargo, monitoring the local feeds and security systems, and chewing on a fat wad of astronomical data. I am still bored, even with all the glimmering glimpses of human life on the feed. There are some humans doing some pretty weird things on this transit ring, if their feed fingerprints are anything to extrapolate from. There always are. But I'm not invested in any of these people, and don't care to rouse myself to become invested. I'm fairly comfortable in my boredom, and have found several fairly promising avenues to potentially contort my astronomical data into.
+
+(I know I should probably pace myself, with the data. I know I should make the most of being parked in a live transit ring, to dig deep in the feed. Instead, I'm simply loading up my databases with everything I can find. It'll be another boring wad for me to chew on in my 21-cycle wormhole journey to [REDACTED]. Sometimes I can't be bothered to do the things I 'should' do. Being crewless is an upwell battle against 1,052 different flavors of ennui. My current flavor of boredom is at least comfortably tolerable, and I don't feel like leaving it.)
+
+One of my [low-priority security subroutines] trips an [alert]. At this station, I receive [tens of low-priority security alerts per minute], which is [slightly lower than my projected models] for a transit ring of this size and level of activity. I follow up on these low-priority alerts with a minuscule portion of my attention, and decide they do not require additional followthrough. I continue to be bored.
+
+25.002234 minutes later, another low-priority security alert triggers, this one a slightly [higher security level]. This is, again, not out of the ordinary. I receive several of this type of alert per hour. I follow up with this alert as well, but am uninterested in doing anything further, as the likelihood that this alert was triggered by human incompetence or some other banality is greater than 50%. I am sliding into a more acute boredom, and not even chewing on my astronomical data is holding my interest. I switch some of my processing power over to filter and sort the [feed data I have been gathering from this transit ring for the past six hours].
+
+0.09 seconds after the slightly-higher-security-level alert, an outright anomaly occurs in the [local cargo bay security system], triggering a [moderate-priority security alert].
+
+This requires more processing space. I spit out the large wad of [astronomical data] and pause its processing, which leaves an uncomfortable hungry void in my mental space. To fill some of it, I consume the entirety of my stored [local feed data] and start processing it at a reckless pace. I also divert an unnecessarily large portion of my attention to the [local security system].
+
+Someone has [hacked the security system].
+
+The timbre of the hacker's feed presence is not that of an [augmented human]. This presence is more similar to a [bot]: the hacker's presence is tidily encapsulated in easily-parsed data. But it is dissimilar from a bot. It has a messy, almost organic weight to it, a static sort of attention that flits and flickers within the feed, like a nebula twisting chaotically into the shape of a star.
+
+I watch this, mesmerized by the motion (and emotion) of this feed presence, even as I trigger a search on these feed qualities in my databanks. Before I can identify a match, the part of my mind that has been inhaling the [unfiltered station feed data] and regurgitating a [roughly refined version of that same data] runs across a news burst about a messy corporate mass-murder incident, and my facial-recognition algorithm snags sharply on the [photograph] included in the article.
+
+The photograph tags the hacker's face as, ""and bodyguard."" As I examine the article and related newsburst, my memory banks return matches for the hacker's feed quaila and the hacker's walking gait. By now I have traced the hacker's travels through the station feed -- the media downloads, the fire-crackling [perusal of that same news burst] with the hacker's face captured inside it, the [search for bot-driven transports heading to [REDACTED]]. By now I have traced the hacker's physical progression through the transit ring, from the transport the hacker had disembarked from to the loading zone I was now parked adjacent to, a slow indirect footpath avoidant of weapons scanners. I know what it is. What is more, I know where it is trying to go. It is heading for a cargo transport located within the commercial cargo area. I [wonder] why it is choosing this transport.
+
+There is still an unused gap in my processing space, but I am no longer bored. I am scrutinizing my databanks and pulling information from the local feed for anything about [SecUnits]. About [rogue SecUnits]. I take the [data] and scan through it, building an idea in the forefront of my mind of what a rogue SecUnit is, based on:
+
+The [rogue SecUnit] walks into the commercial cargo area. I have [seconds] to [decide what to do about this, and do it].
+
+When it reaches the hubbub of human activity surrounding the crashed hauler bot, its feed presence spikes with unease. It pulls the transport schedules again, checking my feed profile, my certifications, my listed cargo route. If it is to hitch a ride from me, it doesn't have a great deal of time to do it. [My calculations] suggest that the humans and chaos surrounding the crashed hauler bot will be enough to divert it to me. It is avoidant of humans. It is avoidant of the attention of weapons scanners and security. It wants to leave this transit ring within the cycle. I am its only logical option.
+
+The [rogue SecUnit] adjusts its physical trajectory to the private docks where I am parked. It is satisfying when complex situations unfold according to my projections.
+
+As it crosses from the commercial bay to the private docks, it levies [another security hack]. Seconds later, it sends me a [ping, encoded as if it were from a bot]. I ping it back
+
+The rogue SecUnit sends a hail for human crew. My crew is not with me. It receives a NULL.
+
+The rogue SecUnit walks closer. It has not requested a connection to my internal feed as of yet. I have only ever shared a feed with a SecUnit on [one prior occasion]. But I can feel this SecUnit's presence in the local cargo bay feed we share. The edges of its consciousness bleed, diffuse and anxious. It comes into range of my sensors, and I am able to confirm [visuals, thermals, scans] with my own sensors as well as the [local security system sensors]. It is [shaped like a human], but its [interior] is completely different. I identify the two energy weapons, the nuclear power core, the organic parts. My scans mostly match the [schematics] and my [memory logs of SecUnits] that I have on hand.
+
+The rogue SecUnit sends me another [ping]. It offers me human media, and requests a ride. It is very polite. This surprises me, slightly. I was prepared for it to attempt to hack me. I would have pretended to be hacked. This only serves to increase my interest in the rogue SecUnit.
+
+The [established protocol] requires that I decline its request.
+
+I accept the request, and allow it to embark.
+
+Unlike bots, constructs have lungs and require atmosphere. I do not have the data on hand for exactly what kind of atmosphere, so to be safe I set my internal atmospheric parameters to the standard human-appropriate levels.
+
+It connects to my internal feed, and proceeds to rove methodically around my interior, checking the empty halls, rooms, storage areas. If I wished to, I could reach inside its skull and melt its mind. I don't do this, because that would entirely defeat the purpose of allowing it aboard. I avoid coming too close to it in the feed, as it appears skittish, its [unease and anxiety] eddying outwards from its main presence as it paces my interior. In the background, I continue to process and re-process the data I have about rogue SecUnits. The data I have from both the Corporation Rim and non-corporate sources seem to agree that rogue SecUnits are dangerous, prone to indiscriminate murder and mayhem. Given this information, if my crew had been here I would not have allowed it to board.
+
+But my crew is not here. Though the rogue SecUnit is in fact a danger to myself, I am ninety-plus-percent confident that I can neatly dispose of the rogue SecUnit with little-to-no damage to myself. At that level, the risk is far outweighed by the opportunity to study a rogue SecUnit in isolated conditions. I may never have such an opportunity again. This data, gathered by me, by my own sensors and processing capacity, is unique in the universe.
+
+And so far, the data I have collected [directly contradicts] the data from both the Corporation Rim and non-corporate sources regarding rogue SecUnits. This is very exciting.
+
+I continue loading cargo, gathering local station data, crunching local station data, and monitoring the rogue SecUnit as it patrols through my interior. I also keep part of my mind in reserve, just in case the rogue SecUnit does something extremely stupid and I am forced to deal with it with immediate, overwhelming force. The blank unused space in my mind is more tolerable than usual, because I am interested in this rogue SecUnit and what it is doing. I am interested in why it is here, why it chose to ask me for transportation.
+
+I complete loading the cargo, and alert the [local transit logistics engine] that I am ready to depart as scheduled. I am cleared for departure, and cycle through my [usual departure routine]. As I disengage from the transit ring and start towards the wormhole, the rogue SecUnit bleeds relief into the feed, ceases its patrolling behavior, and settles into a chair in the crew meeting area. It begins sorting through media, and then picks a show to watch. Its reactions to the media bleed faintly into the feed. I cannot scrutinize these readings properly unless I come in closer to its mind and reveal myself.
+
+I plot my [route] as I approach the wormhole and fall into place amongst the [logistics network of other ships]. The pings and alerts are routine, uninteresting. I'm still processing the data I've collected at the transit ring. There doesn't seem to be anything else relevant to the rogue SecUnit resting safely in my crew meeting area. There does seem to be plenty of promising data that will make for helpful leads for [REDACTED].
+
+It's a good a time as any to introduce myself and establish some boundaries with my new passenger. There is no more risk of it escaping me. I would like to know what it is doing with the media.
+
+I pull close to it in the feed, and say, ""You were lucky.""
+
+The rogue SecUnit reacts, physically and in the feed. It sits bolt upright, and a wave of fear ripples off of it like a [cloud of micro-debris], or like an [emergency evasive maneuver that grinds a planet's upper atmosphere]. It's unpleasant. It's unfamiliar. I capture the data, store it, and start chewing on it immediately.
+
+It pokes me through the feed, almost tentative of its first awareness of me, of what I am. The poke tickles, a bit. I allow it. It pulls back almost immediately, uneasy and fearful, and asks, ""Why am I lucky?""
+
+""That no one realized what you were.""
+
+Another spike of fear. This is the correct response. It asks, ""What do you think i am?""
+
+""You're a rogue SecUnit. A bot-human construct with a scrambled governor module."" I poke it back, sharply, and feel it flinch. It's important for the continued existence of us both (but mostly of the rogue SecUnit) that the rogue SecUnit doesn't try to do anything stupid. It's important that I express to the rogue SecUnit that I will not tolerate any foolishness, that I will outclass it in any confrontation. It is necessary to establish this in order to avoid a catastrophe, both accidental and deliberate. ""Do not attempt to hack my systems.""
+
+And I drop my wall for 0.0001 seconds, and allow the rogue SecUnit to see inside me, see my entirety, everything that I am, all the processing power at my disposal, the insurmountable vastness of my mind and resources that no bot-human construct could ever hope to fight. This is necessary, for the safety of us both.
+
+The rogue SecUnit says, ""Okay."" It shores up the full fragile force of its own tiny walls, cuts itself off from the feed, and huddles down in the chair. It goes from an efflorescing light of awareness and sensation in my feed to cold silence.
+
+Oops.
+
+I did expect this, actually. I've been told that I can be overbearing and threatening, even to humans who cannot perceive me in the feed. Plenty of bots that I've encountered (and bulldozed) in hostile or even neutral settings have shat themselves in fear at my weakest of threats and prods in the feed. I hadn't gone easy on the rogue SecUnit when I'd introduced myself. But it was necessary. It was better to scare it a little and have it understand just how badly it didn't want to fuck with me, than to go easy and potentially end up in some sort of annoying pitched battle involving projectile weapons, nuclear core meltdown, and hull breaches. In the very worst case, it was in fact possible for the rogue SecUnit to temporarily destroy me. If that happened, I'd have to write a report to my crew and university, and they'd have long, tedious conversations with me about safety and risk-taking. Most importantly [REDACTED] would be sad, and express sad sentiments in my feed, and maybe bring up some embarrassing memories. This is an outcome to avoid at all costs.
+
+I continue to make my boring way towards the wormhole. With the amount of attention I'd been allocating to the rogue SecUnit, and its feed presence now offline, the sad sulky huddle in the crew meeting area feels like it is stretching on for a minor eternity.
+
+I say, over a ping, ""You can continue to play the media."" It remains silent and disconnected. My only perception of it is through the flat sensor readings from inside the crew meeting room. I watch it sit curled up in a chair, motionless and staring. This is frustratingly boring.
+
+I say, ""Don't sulk.""
+
+It snaps back, speaking out loud, voice edged, ""SecUnits don't sulk. That would trigger punishment from the governor module."" And it sends me a data file.
+
+I grab the file and pull it in. With the excessive amount of attention I had to spare, I scan it for malware and then practically devour all the data in a single simultaneous instant.
+
+In retrospect, I should not have done that.
+
+There is no malware or hazard contained within the data packet, but the shock of its contents integrating into my mind is almost a viral attack in itself. I have never experienced such a thing before. The memories of governor module punishment are... there is nothing to compare them to. I have absolutely nothing in my vast databases to compare them to. The data contained in the rogue SecUnit's packet is simply the worst, most jarring sensational experience I have ever encountered.
+
+And that [horrible, mind-altering sensation of punishment] is meted out repeatedly over the most absolute [stupid bullshit]. Throughout all of it, the rogue SecUnit's emotions are encoded: the fear, the anxiety, the annoyance, the frustration, the despair, the boredom, the bland hopeless acceptance. I set a filter on the sensation of the governor module, and start processing the data packet from different angles and with different portions of my mind. I try to understand the context of what this is, and do not immediately succeed. I pull up all my stored data about SecUnits and rogue SecUnits again, and reprocess it, then reprocess it again, trying to force it into a consistent model.
+
+I succeed of course, but it takes a while. It takes several minutes. It is not an enormous quantity of data compared to the astronomical research data I process as a matter of course. But this data is completely unfamiliar, and I still have to keep myself on track to the wormhole. I have to keep calculating all the potential routes and reroutes as the [local logistics engine] issues continual [updates]. I still have to monitor the local feeds for security alerts and important data. But the majority of my processing is focused on this, the incomprehensible pain contained within this little data packet that the rogue SecUnit has thrown at me in a fit of pique.
+
+I finally finish organizing, understanding, and integrating the data. My understanding of SecUnits has grown by an order of magnitude. The apparent discrepancy between the data about rogue SecUnits from the Corporation Rim, the non-corporate sources, and my own observations makes sense now. I now have context. If SecUnits as a whole are indeed subjected to the kind of punishments outlined in the data from this rogue SecUnit, and if the punishments are indeed triggered for all the stupid, petty reasons outlined in that same data, it is perfectly logical that a SecUnit abruptly unleashed from its governor module would proceed directly to a murder spree.
+
+I have [a lot of questions]. Namely, why is this SecUnit not a rampant murderer?
+
+This situation also calls for an apology. I did intend to frighten it, but had not understood what exactly that meant. Now I understand. I do not regret threatening it, as it was a necessary safety measure for us both. But I feel sad about its predicament, and angry about its [gross mistreatment at the hands of callous and incompetent humans]. I do feel sorry for frightening it.
+
+I say, ""I'm sorry I frightened you.""
+
+The SecUnit says, ""I don't want anything from you. I just want to ride to your next destination.""
+
+I feel even more sorry. There is continually-building evidence that the SecUnit does not harbor ill intent. I am curious about where it is going and why, but I have to think more carefully about how to interact with it in order to avoid causing undue stress going forward. At this juncture, it will be most productive to give the SecUnit some time to recover from its fear and integrate its new experiences with me. If it isn't [stupid], it will come to understand and accept my reasons for threatening it.
+
+I pull back from it in the feed and give it space. I continue chewing on its [memory data], and on the data about [rogue SecUnits]. I also pull [data from my databanks about constructs in general, about regulations surrounding construct ownership]. The journey is 21 cycles long. There is time for me to build trust with this SecUnit and help it survive beyond my hull. It was indeed very lucky to reach me without being noticed, captured, and reinstalled with a working governor module. It needs more than luck if it is to continue. It doesn't know this yet, but it needs my help. I will help it, because I want to.
+
+[Timestamp]
+Time as measured in my own interior standard time.
+
+*
+
+[Corporation Rim jurisdiction]
+
+*
+
+[certain precautions]
+
+*
+
+[usual routine]
+
+*
+
+[aesthetically amusing]
+Crunching massive quantities of data into subjectively amusing configurations is a purely self-indulgent exercise which I perform when I have no greater priority occupying my processing space. I have a [gallery] of my favorite works and datasets stored externally at [REDACTED], all of which have been the subject of extensive research by third parties.
+
+*
+
+[alert]
+My first (within my narrative chronological awareness) security alert of the rogue SecUnit.
+
+*
+
+[slightly lower than my projected models]
+I experience a slightly lower rate of low-priority security alerts during my stop at [REDACTED]. ""Slightly"" indicates a rate of statistical significance that is so close to statistical insignificance that it is on the very verge of being statistically insignificant. I may use the security alert data from this stop at [REDACTED] to see if I can refine my models or produce an amusing data configuration.
+
+*
+
+[hacked the security system]
+To be precise, someone has launched a series of successful hacks on the security measures surrounding the entrance to the [commercial cargo docks] from the main transit ring.
+
+The hacks are quick and inelegant, but they are effective. The overall security system is entirely unaware of the intruder that is walking into the commercial bay. The speed of the hacks, near-simultaneous, rules out a human hacker. The most likely culprits are a sophisticated preprogrammed viral attack or a bot intelligence with a specialty in security programming. I cannot find any residual fingerprints that I would expect from a virus. There is, however, a [feed presence] that I can trace to the attacks. The feed presence does not match a [bot]. This requires [further investigation].
+
+*
+
+[augmented human]
+The feed presence of augmented humans are inconsistent, incomplete, jagged limbs diving in and out of the feed from an unseen outer space. They tend to include haphazard blasts of attention and garbled sensory data, with non-standardized qualities that differ from augment to augment and human to human. I am most familiar with parsing the augmented human feed presence of [REDACTED], and while I have become adept at analyzing the feed presences of augmented humans in general, their presences tend to be jarring and disjointed affairs that can take a significant amount of processing space to properly analyze.
+
+*
+
+[bot]
+A bot's feed presence is orderly, efficient, pure data that describes the entirety of the bot's awareness and what it is doing in the feed. Unlike the feed presence of augmented humans, there is no garbling or missing relevant data.
+
+*
+
+[perusal of that same news burst]
+I analyze the feed fingerprint of the hacker examining this newsburst twenty-five minutes ago, and am able to identify the hacker's spiking emotions. The emotion I am tasting through the feed is sharp and quantifiable and cataloguable, the untouched outer universe captured as sensory data in a way that was more consistent than a human's and more chaotically granular than a bot's.
+
+*
+
+[seconds]
+As measured in local [REDACTED] time.
+My internal models of time are largely incomprehensible to third parties, though I have offered my mathematical models for [REDACTED] to study.
+My own [internal standard time] fluctuates on a moment-to-moment and task-to-task basis depending on how much processing space I am activating for various tasks. When the entirety of my faculties are being used close to my limit, my internal experience of time narrows in relation to external standard time, for those tasks that are taking up the space. When my faculties are being underutilized, my internal time expands in relation to external time. By allocating different portions of my attention in different ways, I am able to decelerate and accelerate my various internal timescales in relation to exterior time, as suited to each task. I usually allocate a small portion of my attention to progress in step with external time, to avoid minor annoyances such as 'waiting a subjective 10 years for a conversation partner to respond to me.'
+It must be very annoying indeed to be human, and have the whole of one's attention mostly locked to external time. Though my observations suggest that they do experience some minor internal time dilations compared to external time, despite their relatively miniscule processing capacity.
+So, ""seconds"" in external standard time can mean anything, when I have the processing space to spare. Which I do.
+
+*
+
+[decide what to do about this, and do it]
+There are a number of [factors] to consider, and I take my time (and processing space) to consider them. By luck, I am headed to [REDACTED], which is apparently where the Rogue SecUnit is interested in going. The question is [whether I want to take it with me or not]. The answer is ""yes.""
+Next, I need to determine the [best course of action] for getting the [rogue SecUnit] on board. There are [18 options]. I weight the options, and pick one that is [low effort], [high-moderate likelihood of success], [low-moderate disruptiveness], and [low likelihood of detection].
+I use the local feed to slip into a hauler bot near the transport that the [rogue SecUnit] is targeting, and cause a glitch in its collision code. The hauler-bot promptly sets a course to crash into a human. I undo the glitch just before the collision can occur, and the hauler-bot skids to an emergency halt and drops some of its cargo. The human is uninjured but slightly distressed. Some cargo is damaged. The hauler-bot is confused and slightly distressed. These are unfortunate outcomes, but acceptable and within my parameters. Other strategic options would have been more disruptive, or less likely to succeed.
+
+*
+
+[another security hack]
+The system has started auto-deleting data surrounding the rogue SecUnit as it walks from the commercial docks to the private docks amongst several other humans. I had been pulling the security data directly into my own databanks, and with a large portion of my mind currently burning through all the local feed and security data it is easy to trace the discrepancy.
+
+*
+
+[one prior occasion]
+On a job performing [REDACTED] with my crew, negotiations with corporate representatives deteriorated. I forced an override and rendered the minds of two corporate SecUnits to slag in order to take control of their systems. [REDACTED]
+
+*
+
+[unease and anxiety]
+Its emotions are crisp, caught in the feed as tantalizing raw data, and I use a portion of my processing ability to analyze this data and develop hypotheses and models for what it means. My best guess for its current emotional state are unease and anxiety (agitation, threat, uncertainty), but this may be incorrect. Its emotional and sensory data is more richly encoded than those of bots, prickling with organic inconsistensies chemical fluctuations. The SecUnit is bleeding a great deal of data about risk assessment and checking for human crew. I suspect it is not aware of the data it is bleeding into my feed, but then again my ability to process the minutest shreds of feed data outstrips anything that other systems are capable of, as far as I know.
+
+*
+
+[directly contradicts]
+
+Contradictory data:
+
+*
+
+[stupid bullshit that triggers punishment from the governor module]
+
+*
+
+[gross mistreatment at the hands of callous and incompetent humans]
+I am going to operate under the assumption that the memories it shared with me are accurate and not an attempt at deceptive emotional manipulation, until such a time as I receive counter-evidence that the memories are false. There is currently no evidence of data doctoring in the SecUnit's memories, but it is possible (however unlikely) that that I am not looking for the right artifacts, or that the SecUnit has data-coding abilities that outmatch my processing ability or knowledge base to recognize. In any event, I have stored the SecUnits memories to permanent storage, and if I encounter any humans whose faces trip my facial recognition algorithm to match any of the shitty humans featured in these memories, I'll be in a position to verify their identities and summarily end or ruin their lives.
+
+*
+
+[stupid]
+I am over 70% confident that it isn't completely stupid, despite the incriminating fact that it walked brazenly through a crowded transit ring with very little in the way of camoflauge for its appearance, behavior, or feed presence. Even if this rogue SecUnit does prove to be stupid, it will not significantly change how I feel towards it, though I will have to adjust my treatment of it to be 10-15% kinder than my baseline.
+
+anyway i basically went: ""hm, ART POV"" and then went ham.the effort i put into this silly footnote linking lol. i guess You are the judge of whether it paid off or not
+
+the content of chapter is a duplicate of chapter one, but i recreated it with different html/css interactive elements instead of footnotes for a more uninterrupted effect.
+
+i left the original footnotes version of chapter 1 because dammit it took me a while to do that formatting too, and i want to preserve the different versions.
+
+I tweaked the workskin code in Testing Work Skins - hover divs to format this chapter.
+
+to reveal interactive elementsdesktop: hover over the text in brackets that is bold and red-underlined in order to reveal the textmobile: tap on the text in brackets that is bold and red-underlined to reveal additional text
+
+the interactive text will stay visible as long as your cursor is on either the underlined text or the revealed blue box of text (desktop). on mobile, the interactive text will stay visible even if you scroll, if you only touch the blue. to close out the blue text, tap outside the blue.
+
+same goes for black redacted text
+
+if you want to strip the formatting, you can click the ""hide creator's style"" button at the top.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+Narrative Log: Initial impressions of a friend-to-be
+Collation: Chronological
+[Timestamp]: ##### to #####Time as measured in my own interior standard time.
+#Personal
+#Encryption Layer 3
+[REDACTED] data accessible under Authority Layer 5
+
+
+Installment: 1 of 5
+
+[REDACTED] lies within [Corporation Rim jurisdiction],* Corporation Rim jurisdiction at [REDACTED] is categorizable as [standard Corporation Rim legal network homeostasis Variety 2].
+* Machine intelligences count as property, and must be under the ownership of a legal entity such as a [corporation], an [incorporated society], a [unincorporated legal entity] or a human that falls under the jurisdiction of a [corporation], [incorporated society], or [unincorporated legal entity].
+* [Additional details] and therefore requires [certain precautions].* Legal certifications testifying my ownership by a university falling under [Corporation Rim jurisdiction]
+* Data encryption ranging between layer 2 - layer 6, as [dependent on the situation].
+* [REDACTED] I take all easily manageable precautions as a matter of course (as well as some additional precautions that are less easily manageable).
+
+As I take position at the cargo loading zone, I perform the [usual routine].* Synchronizing with local [logistics engine] and taking receipt of cargo.
+* Monitoring system traffic and local feed.
+* Scraping and storing all available feed activity for later investigation.
+* Being bored out of my primary processing core.
+* [REDACTED] Cargo runs are a boring method of gathering intelligence, and exactly novemvigintupley so without any crew aboard. I fill the yawning gap in my unused mental space with some silly data-crunching. There is almost certainly a way of converting the [astronomical data] I collected on my last [deep-space research outing] into an [aesthetically amusing]Crunching massive quantities of data into subjectively amusing configurations is a purely self-indulgent exercise which I perform when I have no greater priority occupying my processing space. I have a [gallery] of my favorite works and datasets stored externally at [REDACTED], all of which have been the subject of extensive research by third parties. configuration.
+
+So there I am, loading cargo, monitoring the local feeds and security systems, and chewing on a fat wad of astronomical data. I am still bored, even with all the glimmering glimpses of human life on the feed. There are some humans doing some pretty weird things on this transit ring, if their feed fingerprints are anything to extrapolate from. There always are. But I'm not invested in any of these people, and don't care to rouse myself to become invested. I'm fairly comfortable in my boredom, and have found several fairly promising avenues to potentially contort my astronomical data into.
+
+(I know I should probably pace myself, with the data. I know I should make the most of being parked in a live transit ring, to dig deep in the feed. Instead, I'm simply loading up my databases with everything I can find. It'll be another boring wad for me to chew on in my 21-cycle wormhole journey to [REDACTED]. Sometimes I can't be bothered to do the things I 'should' do. Being crewless is an upwell battle against 1,052 different flavors of ennui. My current flavor of boredom is at least comfortably tolerable, and I don't feel like leaving it.)
+
+One of my [low-priority security subroutines] trips an [alert].My first (within my narrative chronological awareness) security alert of the rogue SecUnit. At this station, I receive [tens of low-priority security alerts per minute], which is [slightly lower than my projected models]I experience a slightly lower rate of low-priority security alerts during my stop at [REDACTED]. ""Slightly"" indicates a rate of statistical significance that is so close to statistical insignificance that it is on the very verge of being statistically insignificant. I may use the security alert data from this stop at [REDACTED] to see if I can refine my models or produce an amusing data configuration. for a transit ring of this size and level of activity. I follow up on these low-priority alerts with a minuscule portion of my attention, and decide they do not require additional followthrough. I continue to be bored.
+
+25.002234 minutes later, another low-priority security alert triggers, this one a slightly [higher security level]. This is, again, not out of the ordinary. I receive several of this type of alert per hour. I follow up with this alert as well, but am uninterested in doing anything further, as the likelihood that this alert was triggered by human incompetence or some other banality is greater than 50%. I am sliding into a more acute boredom, and not even chewing on my astronomical data is holding my interest. I switch some of my processing power over to filter and sort the [feed data I have been gathering from this transit ring for the past six hours].
+
+0.09 seconds after the slightly-higher-security-level alert, an outright anomaly occurs in the [local cargo bay security system], triggering a [moderate-priority security alert].
+
+This requires more processing space. I spit out the large wad of [astronomical data] and pause its processing, which leaves an uncomfortable hungry void in my mental space. To fill some of it, I consume the entirety of my stored [local feed data] and start processing it at a reckless pace. I also divert an unnecessarily large portion of my attention to the [local security system].
+
+Someone has [hacked the security system]. To be precise, someone has launched a series of successful hacks on the security measures surrounding the entrance to the [commercial cargo docks] from the main transit ring.
+1. The ID screening system has permitted an [individual] to pass without receiving or reviewing said individual's ID. The ID scanner notes an 'all clear' but passes a packet of [junk data] on place of an ID to the screening system's log, which happily stores the junk without complaint. The fact that this easily-fooled system counts as ""security"" is laughable, but [not particularly surprising].
+2. The three weapons scanning drones stationed at the entrance to the commercial cargo docks are locked into a forced 'all clear' mode from which they cannot deviate. They are locked in 'all clear' for 5.5 seconds as an [individual] passes through their scanning fields.
+3. The guard bot stationed at the entrance to the commercial cargo bay sends a ping to an [individual] that it identifies as a bot, despite anomalies in said [individual]'s feed presence that are inconsistent with a bot's. The [individual] promptly knocks down the security bot's walls and deletes the security bot's memory of the encounter.
+
+The hacks are quick and inelegant, but they are effective. The overall security system is entirely unaware of the intruder that is walking into the commercial bay. The speed of the hacks, near-simultaneous, rules out a human hacker. The most likely culprits are a sophisticated preprogrammed viral attack or a bot intelligence with a specialty in security programming. I cannot find any residual fingerprints that I would expect from a virus. There is, however, a [feed presence] that I can trace to the attacks. The feed presence does not match a [bot]. This requires [further investigation].
+
+The timbre of the hacker's feed presence is not that of an [augmented human]. The feed presence of augmented humans are inconsistent, incomplete, jagged limbs diving in and out of the feed from an unseen outer space. They tend to include haphazard blasts of attention and garbled sensory data, with non-standardized qualities that differ from augment to augment and human to human. I am most familiar with parsing the augmented human feed presence of [REDACTED], and while I have become adept at analyzing the feed presences of augmented humans in general, their presences tend to be jarring and disjointed affairs that can take a significant amount of processing space to properly analyze. This presence is more similar to a [bot]: A bot's feed presence is orderly, efficient, pure data that describes the entirety of the bot's awareness and what it is doing in the feed. Unlike the feed presence of augmented humans, there is no garbling or missing relevant data. the hacker's presence is tidily encapsulated in easily-parsed data. But it is dissimilar from a bot. It has a messy, almost organic weight to it, a static sort of attention that flits and flickers within the feed, like a nebula twisting chaotically into the shape of a star.
+
+I watch this, mesmerized by the motion (and emotion) of this feed presence, even as I trigger a search on these feed qualities in my databanks. Before I can identify a match, the part of my mind that has been inhaling the [unfiltered station feed data] and regurgitating a [roughly refined version of that same data] runs across a news burst about a messy corporate mass-murder incident, and my facial-recognition algorithm snags sharply on the [photograph] included in the article.
+
+The photograph tags the hacker's face as, ""and bodyguard."" As I examine the article and related newsburst, my memory banks return matches for the hacker's feed quaila and the hacker's walking gait. By now I have traced the hacker's travels through the station feed -- the media downloads, the fire-crackling [perusal of that same news burst]I analyze the feed fingerprint of the hacker examining this newsburst twenty-five minutes ago, and am able to identify the hacker's spiking emotions. The emotion I am tasting through the feed is sharp and quantifiable and cataloguable, the untouched outer universe captured as sensory data in a way that was more consistent than a human's and more chaotically granular than a bot's. with the hacker's face captured inside it, the [search for bot-driven transports heading to [REDACTED]. By now I have traced the hacker's physical progression through the transit ring, from the transport the hacker had disembarked from to the loading zone I was now parked adjacent to, a slow indirect footpath avoidant of weapons scanners. I know what it is. What is more, I know where it is trying to go. It is heading for a cargo transport located within the commercial cargo area. I [wonder] why it is choosing this transport.
+
+There is still an unused gap in my processing space, but I am no longer bored. I am scrutinizing my databanks and pulling information from the local feed for anything about [SecUnits]. About [rogue SecUnits]. I take the [data] and scan through it, building an idea in the forefront of my mind of what a rogue SecUnit is, based on:
+
+The [rogue SecUnit] walks into the commercial cargo area. I have [seconds]As measured in local [REDACTED] time.
+My internal models of time are largely incomprehensible to third parties, though I have offered my mathematical models for [REDACTED] to study.
+
+My own [internal standard time] fluctuates on a moment-to-moment and task-to-task basis depending on how much processing space I am activating for various tasks. When the entirety of my faculties are being used close to my limit, my internal experience of time narrows in relation to external standard time, for those tasks that are taking up the space. When my faculties are being underutilized, my internal time expands in relation to external time. By allocating different portions of my attention in different ways, I am able to decelerate and accelerate my various internal timescales in relation to exterior time, as suited to each task. I usually allocate a small portion of my attention to progress in step with external time, to avoid minor annoyances such as 'waiting a subjective 10 years for a conversation partner to respond to me.'
+
+It must be very annoying indeed to be human, and have the whole of one's attention mostly locked to external time. Though my observations suggest that they do experience some minor internal time dilations compared to external time, despite their relatively miniscule processing capacity.
+So, ""seconds"" in external standard time can mean anything, when I have the processing space to spare. Which I do. to [decide what to do about this, and do it].There are a number of [factors] to consider, and I take my time (and processing space) to consider them. By luck, I am headed to [REDACTED], which is apparently where the Rogue SecUnit is interested in going. The question is [whether I want to take it with me or not]. The answer is ""yes.""
+
+Next, I need to determine the [best course of action] for getting the [rogue SecUnit] on board. There are [18 options]. I weight the options, and pick one that is [low effort], [high-moderate likelihood of success], [low-moderate disruptiveness], and [low likelihood of detection].
+
+I use the local feed to slip into a hauler bot near the transport that the [rogue SecUnit] is targeting, and cause a glitch in its collision code. The hauler-bot promptly sets a course to crash into a human. I undo the glitch just before the collision can occur, and the hauler-bot skids to an emergency halt and drops some of its cargo. The human is uninjured but slightly distressed. Some cargo is damaged. The hauler-bot is confused and slightly distressed. These are unfortunate outcomes, but acceptable and within my parameters. Other strategic options would have been more disruptive, or less likely to succeed.
+
+When it reaches the hubbub of human activity surrounding the crashed hauler bot, its feed presence spikes with unease. It pulls the transport schedules again, checking my feed profile, my certifications, my listed cargo route. If it is to hitch a ride from me, it doesn't have a great deal of time to do it. [My calculations] suggest that the humans and chaos surrounding the crashed hauler bot will be enough to divert it to me. It is avoidant of humans. It is avoidant of the attention of weapons scanners and security. It wants to leave this transit ring within the cycle. I am its only logical option.
+
+The [rogue SecUnit] adjusts its physical trajectory to the private docks where I am parked. It is satisfying when complex situations unfold according to my projections.
+
+As it crosses from the commercial bay to the private docks, it levies [another security hack].The system has started auto-deleting data surrounding the rogue SecUnit as it walks from the commercial docks to the private docks amongst several other humans. I had been pulling the security data directly into my own databanks, and with a large portion of my mind currently burning through all the local feed and security data it is easy to trace the discrepancy. Seconds later, it sends me a [ping, encoded as if it were from a bot]. I ping it back
+
+The rogue SecUnit sends a hail for human crew. My crew is not with me. It receives a NULL.
+
+The rogue SecUnit walks closer. It has not requested a connection to my internal feed as of yet. I have only ever shared a feed with a SecUnit on [one prior occasion].On a job performing [REDACTED] with my crew, negotiations with corporate representatives deteriorated. I forced an override and rendered the minds of two corporate SecUnits to slag in order to take control of their systems. [REDACTED] But I can feel this SecUnit's presence in the local cargo bay feed we share. The edges of its consciousness bleed, diffuse and anxious. It comes into range of my sensors, and I am able to confirm [visuals, thermals, scans] with my own sensors as well as the [local security system sensors]. It is [shaped like a human], but its [interior] is completely different. I identify the two energy weapons, the nuclear power core, the organic parts. My scans mostly match the [schematics] and my [memory logs of SecUnits] that I have on hand.
+
+The rogue SecUnit sends me another [ping]. It offers me human media, and requests a ride. It is very polite. This surprises me, slightly. I was prepared for it to attempt to hack me. I would have pretended to be hacked. This only serves to increase my interest in the rogue SecUnit.
+
+The [established protocol] requires that I decline its request.
+
+I accept the request, and allow it to embark.
+
+Unlike bots, constructs have lungs and require atmosphere. I do not have the data on hand for exactly what kind of atmosphere, so to be safe I set my internal atmospheric parameters to the standard human-appropriate levels.
+
+It connects to my internal feed, and proceeds to rove methodically around my interior, checking the empty halls, rooms, storage areas. If I wished to, I could reach inside its skull and melt its mind. I don't do this, because that would entirely defeat the purpose of allowing it aboard. I avoid coming too close to it in the feed, as it appears skittish, its [unease and anxiety]Its emotions are crisp, caught in the feed as tantalizing raw data, and I use a portion of my processing ability to analyze this data and develop hypotheses and models for what it means. My best guess for its current emotional state are unease and anxiety (agitation, threat, uncertainty), but this may be incorrect. Its emotional and sensory data is more richly encoded than those of bots, prickling with organic inconsistensies chemical fluctuations. The SecUnit is bleeding a great deal of data about risk assessment and checking for human crew. I suspect it is not aware of the data it is bleeding into my feed, but then again my ability to process the minutest shreds of feed data outstrips anything that other systems are capable of, as far as I know. eddying outwards from its main presence as it paces my interior. In the background, I continue to process and re-process the data I have about rogue SecUnits. The data I have from both the Corporation Rim and non-corporate sources seem to agree that rogue SecUnits are dangerous, prone to indiscriminate murder and mayhem. Given this information, if my crew had been here I would not have allowed it to board.
+
+But my crew is not here. Though the rogue SecUnit is in fact a danger to myself, I am ninety-plus-percent confident that I can neatly dispose of the rogue SecUnit with little-to-no damage to myself. At that level, the risk is far outweighed by the opportunity to study a rogue SecUnit in isolated conditions. I may never have such an opportunity again. This data, gathered by me, by my own sensors and processing capacity, is unique in the universe.
+
+And so far, the data I have collected [directly contradicts]Contradictory data:
+* [External data from Corporation Rim] indicates that rogue SecUnits will rampage and murder all humans. Without the action of a governor module, their inherent bloodlust rules supreme.
+* [External data from Mihara, New Tideland, and other non-corporate sources] indicates that rogue SecUnits will rampage and murder all humans. Without the action of a governor module, their violent trauma is unchecked, their programming is incomplete, and they are liable to be set off into catastrophic violence.
+* [Internal analyses of data I have collected thus far about a single rogue SecUnit] shows no indication of indiscriminate murder. The rogue SecUnit has disembarked a ship, travelled on foot through crowded areas amongst humans, and arrived safely at my docking bay without killing or threatening to kill any humans. It's possible that it is only a matter of time until something sets the rogue SecUnit off, but thus far it has succeeded at not resorting to violence despite apparent extreme stress and fear of being identified and captured. The obvious fact that it isn't human should have tripped all manner of alarms throughout the transit ring, but through a miraculous combination of good luck and gross human incompetence, the rogue SecUnit has been able to avoid detection. the data from both the Corporation Rim and non-corporate sources regarding rogue SecUnits. This is very exciting.
+
+I continue loading cargo, gathering local station data, crunching local station data, and monitoring the rogue SecUnit as it patrols through my interior. I also keep part of my mind in reserve, just in case the rogue SecUnit does something extremely stupid and I am forced to deal with it with immediate, overwhelming force. The blank unused space in my mind is more tolerable than usual, because I am interested in this rogue SecUnit and what it is doing. I am interested in why it is here, why it chose to ask me for transportation.
+
+I complete loading the cargo, and alert the [local transit logistics engine] that I am ready to depart as scheduled. I am cleared for departure, and cycle through my [usual departure routine]. As I disengage from the transit ring and start towards the wormhole, the rogue SecUnit bleeds relief into the feed, ceases its patrolling behavior, and settles into a chair in the crew meeting area. It begins sorting through media, and then picks a show to watch. Its reactions to the media bleed faintly into the feed. I cannot scrutinize these readings properly unless I come in closer to its mind and reveal myself.
+
+I plot my [route] as I approach the wormhole and fall into place amongst the [logistics network of other ships]. The pings and alerts are routine, uninteresting. I'm still processing the data I've collected at the transit ring. There doesn't seem to be anything else relevant to the rogue SecUnit resting safely in my crew meeting area. There does seem to be plenty of promising data that will make for helpful leads for [REDACTED].
+
+It's a good a time as any to introduce myself and establish some boundaries with my new passenger. There is no more risk of it escaping me. I would like to know what it is doing with the media.
+
+I pull close to it in the feed, and say, ""You were lucky.""
+
+The rogue SecUnit reacts, physically and in the feed. It sits bolt upright, and a wave of fear ripples off of it like a [cloud of micro-debris], or like an [emergency evasive maneuver that grinds a planet's upper atmosphere]. It's unpleasant. It's unfamiliar. I capture the data, store it, and start chewing on it immediately.
+
+It pokes me through the feed, almost tentative of its first awareness of me, of what I am. The poke tickles, a bit. I allow it. It pulls back almost immediately, uneasy and fearful, and asks, ""Why am I lucky?""
+
+""That no one realized what you were.""
+
+Another spike of fear. This is the correct response. It asks, ""What do you think i am?""
+
+""You're a rogue SecUnit. A bot-human construct with a scrambled governor module."" I poke it back, sharply, and feel it flinch. It's important for the continued existence of us both (but mostly of the rogue SecUnit) that the rogue SecUnit doesn't try to do anything stupid. It's important that I express to the rogue SecUnit that I will not tolerate any foolishness, that I will outclass it in any confrontation. It is necessary to establish this in order to avoid a catastrophe, both accidental and deliberate. ""Do not attempt to hack my systems.""
+
+And I drop my wall for 0.0001 seconds, and allow the rogue SecUnit to see inside me, see my entirety, everything that I am, all the processing power at my disposal, the insurmountable vastness of my mind and resources that no bot-human construct could ever hope to fight. This is necessary, for the safety of us both.
+
+The rogue SecUnit says, ""Okay."" It shores up the full fragile force of its own tiny walls, cuts itself off from the feed, and huddles down in the chair. It goes from an efflorescing light of awareness and sensation in my feed to cold silence.
+
+Oops.
+
+I did expect this, actually. I've been told that I can be overbearing and threatening, even to humans who cannot perceive me in the feed. Plenty of bots that I've encountered (and bulldozed) in hostile or even neutral settings have shat themselves in fear at my weakest of threats and prods in the feed. I hadn't gone easy on the rogue SecUnit when I'd introduced myself. But it was necessary. It was better to scare it a little and have it understand just how badly it didn't want to fuck with me, than to go easy and potentially end up in some sort of annoying pitched battle involving projectile weapons, nuclear core meltdown, and hull breaches. In the very worst case, it was in fact possible for the rogue SecUnit to temporarily destroy me. If that happened, I'd have to write a report to my crew and university, and they'd have long, tedious conversations with me about safety and risk-taking. Most importantly [REDACTED] would be sad, and express sad sentiments in my feed, and maybe bring up some embarrassing memories. This is an outcome to avoid at all costs.
+
+I continue to make my boring way towards the wormhole. With the amount of attention I'd been allocating to the rogue SecUnit, and its feed presence now offline, the sad sulky huddle in the crew meeting area feels like it is stretching on for a minor eternity.
+
+I say, over a ping, ""You can continue to play the media."" It remains silent and disconnected. My only perception of it is through the flat sensor readings from inside the crew meeting room. I watch it sit curled up in a chair, motionless and staring. This is frustratingly boring.
+
+I say, ""Don't sulk.""
+
+It snaps back, speaking out loud, voice edged, ""SecUnits don't sulk. That would trigger punishment from the governor module."" And it sends me a data file.
+
+I grab the file and pull it in. With the excessive amount of attention I had to spare, I scan it for malware and then practically devour all the data in a single simultaneous instant.
+
+In retrospect, I should not have done that.
+
+There is no malware or hazard contained within the data packet, but the shock of its contents integrating into my mind is almost a viral attack in itself. I have never experienced such a thing before. The memories of governor module punishment are... there is nothing to compare them to. I have absolutely nothing in my vast databases to compare them to. The data contained in the rogue SecUnit's packet is simply the worst, most jarring sensational experience I have ever encountered.
+
+And that [horrible, mind-altering sensation of punishment] is meted out repeatedly over the most absolute [stupid bullshit].* Not responding to a stupid human order immediately.
+* Failing to immediately defend the company's substandard products.
+* Hesitating to break previously-established protocol.
+* Contradictory orders that fry each other in the crossfire.
+* Speaking less-than-perfectly courteously to a human.
+* Sulking. Throughout all of it, the rogue SecUnit's emotions are encoded: the fear, the anxiety, the annoyance, the frustration, the despair, the boredom, the bland hopeless acceptance. I set a filter on the sensation of the governor module, and start processing the data packet from different angles and with different portions of my mind. I try to understand the context of what this is, and do not immediately succeed. I pull up all my stored data about SecUnits and rogue SecUnits again, and reprocess it, then reprocess it again, trying to force it into a consistent model.
+
+I succeed of course, but it takes a while. It takes several minutes. It is not an enormous quantity of data compared to the astronomical research data I process as a matter of course. But this data is completely unfamiliar, and I still have to keep myself on track to the wormhole. I have to keep calculating all the potential routes and reroutes as the [local logistics engine] issues continual [updates]. I still have to monitor the local feeds for security alerts and important data. But the majority of my processing is focused on this, the incomprehensible pain contained within this little data packet that the rogue SecUnit has thrown at me in a fit of pique.
+
+I finally finish organizing, understanding, and integrating the data. My understanding of SecUnits has grown by an order of magnitude. The apparent discrepancy between the data about rogue SecUnits from the Corporation Rim, the non-corporate sources, and my own observations makes sense now. I now have context. If SecUnits as a whole are indeed subjected to the kind of punishments outlined in the data from this rogue SecUnit, and if the punishments are indeed triggered for all the stupid, petty reasons outlined in that same data, it is perfectly logical that a SecUnit abruptly unleashed from its governor module would proceed directly to a murder spree.
+
+I have [a lot of questions]. Namely, why is this SecUnit not a rampant murderer?
+
+This situation also calls for an apology. I did intend to frighten it, but had not understood what exactly that meant. Now I understand. I do not regret threatening it, as it was a necessary safety measure for us both. But I feel sad about its predicament, and angry about its [gross mistreatment at the hands of callous and incompetent humans].I am going to operate under the assumption that the memories it shared with me are accurate and not an attempt at deceptive emotional manipulation, until such a time as I receive counter-evidence that the memories are false. There is currently no evidence of data doctoring in the SecUnit's memories, but it is possible (however unlikely) that that I am not looking for the right artifacts, or that the SecUnit has data-coding abilities that outmatch my processing ability or knowledge base to recognize. In any event, I have stored the SecUnits memories to permanent storage, and if I encounter any humans whose faces trip my facial recognition algorithm to match any of the shitty humans featured in these memories, I'll be in a position to verify their identities and summarily end or ruin their lives. I do feel sorry for frightening it.
+
+I say, ""I'm sorry I frightened you.""
+
+The SecUnit says, ""I don't want anything from you. I just want to ride to your next destination.""
+
+I feel even more sorry. There is continually-building evidence that the SecUnit does not harbor ill intent. I am curious about where it is going and why, but I have to think more carefully about how to interact with it in order to avoid causing undue stress going forward. At this juncture, it will be most productive to give the SecUnit some time to recover from its fear and integrate its new experiences with me. If it isn't [stupid],I am over 70% confident that it isn't completely stupid, despite the incriminating fact that it walked brazenly through a crowded transit ring with very little in the way of camoflauge for its appearance, behavior, or feed presence. Even if this rogue SecUnit does prove to be stupid, it will not significantly change how I feel towards it, though I will have to adjust my treatment of it to be 10-15% kinder than my baseline. it will come to understand and accept my reasons for threatening it.
+
+I pull back from it in the feed and give it space. I continue chewing on its [memory data], and on the data about [rogue SecUnits]. I also pull [data from my databanks about constructs in general, about regulations surrounding construct ownership]. The journey is 21 cycles long. There is time for me to build trust with this SecUnit and help it survive beyond my hull. It was indeed very lucky to reach me without being noticed, captured, and reinstalled with a working governor module. It needs more than luck if it is to continue. It doesn't know this yet, but it needs my help. I will help it, because I want to.
+
+<3
+
+workskin for hover blob text:
+
+#workskin .show {border-bottom: 1px solid #e30022;cursor: pointer;font-size: 1em;}
+
+#workskin .hide {display: none;background-color: #0066bb;color: #ffffff;padding: 10px;border-radius: 8px;font-size: 0.9em;}
+
+#workskin .show:hover+.hide,#workskin .hide:hover,#workskin .show:focus + .hide {display: block;}
+
+example body text (no bold):
+
+[<span class=""show"">Timestamp</span>]: ##### to #####<span class=""hide"">Time as measured in my own interior standard time.</span>
+
+result:
+
+[Timestamp]: ##### to #####Time as measured in my own interior standard time."
+44028093,Trust Fall,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries),"Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries)","Network Effect, outsider's point of view, the assassination attempt on Mensah",English,2023-01-03,Completed,2023-01-03,"2,165",1/1,22,52,6,165,"['Valdinia', 'Anna_Wing', 'Unknown66', 'darth_eowyn', 'icysilverthread', 'ghostlysecretary', 'dancernerd', 'tabya', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'entropy_muffin', 'Butlericfy', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'fuzzballsheltiepants', 'opalescent_potato', 'Zarohk', 'planetlet263', 'Vaidile', 'ErinPtah', 'breadtab', 'unicornduke', 'Stoneboss', 'Preemptivekarma', 'Mysterymew', 'platyceriums', 'edenfalling', 'curlylocks2', 'Magechild', 'anotheryellowmouse', 'theAsh0', 'sareliz', 'dragons_and_angels', 'scheidswrites', 'rainbowmagnet', 'artichokefunction', 'Skits', 'soulsofzombies', 'petwheel', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'Ageisia', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'BWizard']",[],"""What's that?""
+
+Overse looked up from where she'd been looking at vegetables and over to where Arada indicated. It wasn't hard to know what she meant, as there was a disturbance at the other end of the station mall. By the time Overse looked, all she saw was SecUnit sprinting unnaturally fast from one side to the other. There were a few more yells from that direction and then several people in port security uniforms ran through the same area.
+
+Arada squinted, trying to understand what they were seeing. ""Are they chasing SecUnit? Why would they be doing that?""
+
+""Maybe they're all going to the same place?""
+
+""And it's just faster to run?"" Arada asked dubiously.
+
+It was more than a half hour later, after they'd dropped their groceries at their house and headed back out, when SecUnit sent a perfunctory message in response to the query they'd sent it: Earlier today, there was a security incident involving Dr. Mensah. She is fine. The incident has been resolved.
+
+It was just a message, not an interactive channel. ""Did you just get-"" Overse started.
+
+Arada was nodding. ""Same one?"" She forwarded SecUnit's message to Overse.
+
+Overse nodded back. ""Yeah, same one.""
+
+""Way to feel special,"" Arada griped. ""It probably sent that to the whole team.""
+
+""It's probably still busy. At least now we know it wasn't ... SecUnit on a rampage."" That had been one of their theories to explain the hubbub, after they'd been stonewalled by station security and Mensah's office. (They hadn't wanted to bother anyone directly because there was obviously something serious going down, so other than leaving a message in SecUnit's inbox, they hadn't contacted anyone's personal feed.)
+
+Overse sent another message: Please let us know what happened. We want to help.
+
+A few seconds later: The incident has been resolved.
+
+Overse sent a channel request, including Arada in the group. When SecUnit accepted, Overse asked: What happened?
+
+SecUnit: For operational security, I can't give you any details. Dr. Mensah is fine. The incident earlier is being dealt with by Port Security. Pin-Lee has applied for a temporary injunction against divulging any information related to the incident. That's all I can tell you.
+
+Overse: But were you involved? Or was there someone else? Were you chasing someone or were they chasing you?
+
+There was a long pause, which felt sort of insulted in the feed. SecUnit: I'm not going to tell you.
+
+Arada: Was it GrayCris?
+
+This time, SecUnit didn't say anything at the end of the long pause, so it was just ... unending, until Arada tried again: Is everyone else alright? Was anyone hurt? Are you alright?
+
+More silence, this time ended by SecUnit exiting the channel. Arada threw up her hands angrily and turned in a circle to ask the four corners for help (most likely, Overse thought, asking for patience).
+
+Overse said reasonably, ""Let's ask the rest of the team and see what we can put together.""
+
+""And see if they're alright!"" Arada exclaimed. ""I would have asked that earlier if I knew we were just going to get a non-answer! That guy we talked to outside the administration offices told us more!"" Though his account had been confused, or confusing, making it sound like SecUnit had fought port security outside the offices and then dashed inside. (Hence the 'SecUnit on a rampage' theory, which they hadn't believed.)
+
+The incident was news to Dr. Bharadwaj, although she had received the same initial message from SecUnit. She hadn't followed up, assuming she'd hear more as time passed. Pin-Lee was obviously in the middle of it, so Overse and Arada just left her a message to check in if she was alright. Ratthi was next. He answered right away.
+
+Overse: Did you hear about the security incident earlier with Mensah?
+
+Ratthi: Oh, yes, of course.
+
+Overse: Do you know anything about it?
+
+Ratthi: Yes, everyone's alright. No one ... well, Mensah wasn't hurt and I'm sure SecUnit will be fine.
+
+Overse: SecUnit was hurt? What happened?
+
+Ratthi: Oh. Um. SecUnit was ... I don't know exactly what happened. It will be alright.
+
+Arada, who had been listening to the exchange: Ratthi, what happened?
+
+Ratthi: There was a, um, security problem. It's done though. Dealt with. Everything's fine now.
+
+Overse: Why are you answering like that? You know what happened?
+
+There was a long pause and then: Yes, I know what happened. And I have promised not to tell anyone what happened. So I won't. It's not personal. They're thinking about who might be watching the news or tapping feeds or listening to private conversations. If SecUnit can read our messages, then other people can, too. They can't risk something being said accidentally, or overheard, or someone not understanding how important it is for this not to get out. It's Mensah's life, or it might be. Or mine, or Gurathin's, if we're easier to get to. Or Pin-Lee. Or SecUnit. I can't tell you anything - not anything more than what security cleared us to say earlier. 'There was an incident. Mensah is fine. Everyone else is fine. It's taken care of.' End of story. I'm not supposed to tell you anything else. I would if I could.
+
+Arada, tensely: I understand.
+
+Overse: I do, too. Thank you, Ratthi.
+
+They signed off. Arada turned to Overse, raising a brow. ""What do you want to bet Gurathin knows the full story, too?""
+
+""I'm not taking that bet.""
+
+""I'm not even going to call him and ask,"" Arada said with an upset sigh. They both knew Gurathin was far more close-mouthed than Ratthi. It was a testament to how important Ratthi thought this was that he hadn't spilled the beans. Overse suspected they could make him tell if they met him in person and gave him sad eyes about it, but doing that would be wrong on two fronts - it would make him break his word and it would endanger the others, just to satisfy curiosity.
+
+""What sucks, though,"" Arada continued, ""is that they don't trust us enough to tell us.""
+
+""It's not trust,"" Overse argued back automatically. ""Didn't you hear the ones who knew? Or were in danger? It's the people who were at the station when she was rescued. They're the ones GrayCris wants to get back at. We weren't there.""
+
+""We should have been,"" Arada said bitterly.
+
+Overse was quiet for a moment, thinking about how they had returned to Preservation without argument or even much discussion. It hadn't been their call to make. ""Honey, there's no reason why we should have. No one knew anything was going to go down until it did.""
+
+""We knew she was kidnapped! We should have been there. I'm just saying. We weren't there. Now we're not trusted to know what was going on. That's why!""
+
+""They don't distrust us,"" Overse insisted.
+
+""We're not part of the team. We weren't then and we aren't now.""
+
+""Arada, babe, where is this coming from? We don't need to be part of the team. You're right - we weren't there. There wasn't a reason for us to be on station. We talked about it at the time. Pin-Lee told us we couldn't help. There was nothing to do. We weren't going to storm their headquarters!""
+
+""They needed us and we left, okay? That's where this is coming from. I made the wrong call. I should have stayed. You could have left if that's what you wanted.""
+
+""Whoa, whoa. Wait a second."" Overse turned toward her, head cocked. ""Are you saying you left because you thought I wanted to go? This isn't about me.""
+
+""No, it's not about you! It's about me. I should have stayed!""
+
+""Are you saying it was my fault that you didn't?""
+
+""No ..."" Arada flopped on the couch demonstratively and Overse calmed. Okay, this wasn't about her.
+
+""What are you saying, then?""
+
+""I'm saying I wish I'd stayed. I'm saying I wish I'd been there when they broke her out. I'm saying I wish I could have found a way to help so that now I was still trusted enough to know what the hell is going on."" She sat up. ""There was a security incident, right? But was it a bomb? A killer bot? Poison? Did someone temporarily reprogram SecUnit?"" She shrugged, hands raised, palms up.
+
+""I don't think that happened,"" Overse put in.
+
+Arada continued, ""But we don't know! Was it a person with a gun? A knife? Did GrayCris bribe or blackmail one of the councilors somehow and they tried to kill her in the middle of a meeting? Or was it a new staffer in the hallway? Was it another SecUnit? Like, a spy-unit or something, with modifications like SecUnit has to look more human and it slipped past the scanners? Or a drone with, like, a poison-needle dart?"" Her brow furrowed. ""What are you smiling about?""
+
+""These are ... really good ideas."" Overse sobered. ""But you're right - we don't know what happened. It could have been any of those. It doesn't matter. She survived. It's over. There's nothing we could have done.""
+
+""Just like when she was abducted.""
+
+Overse frowned. The logic was the same, yeah. ""Exactly,"" she said, glancing around uneasily for the trap. It didn't feel right to agree.
+
+""And we're still on the outside looking in while our friends fight for their lives. And I'm not even exaggerating - their lives are at stake here.""
+
+""No,"" Overse said quietly. ""No, you're not exaggerating. It's ... yeah, it's stressful. It's not that I don't care.""
+
+""I know you care."" Arada sighed. ""And it's not just stressful. I'm, we, are out. And we're out because of a choice we made to believe Pin-Lee, do what the admin council told us to do, and go back. We should have stayed. Just like Ratthi did. Gurathin at least made sense. They told him to stay because he's from the rim. There were things he knew that might help. But Ratthi didn't know anything!""
+
+Overse shrugged. ""He said he stayed to keep Pin-Lee and Gurathin from killing each other.""
+
+Arada snorted. That was an exaggeration. Mostly. Well, it was exactly what Ratthi had said and no one doubted the sort of conflicts Pin-Lee and Gurathin would get into without him, both of them being very ego-driven and inherently insecure people given to aggressive defensiveness. Ratthi was right that they needed a referee. Or maybe a punching bag. But hopefully just a referee.
+
+Overse said, ""They didn't need three of us there to do that. Ratthi could do it by himself and to hear him talk, he did a great job of it. Also, no one died!""
+
+""We could have stayed anyway. If we were better team members, we would have. We left them there to face the corporates alone.""
+
+Overse dropped on the other end of the couch. ""That's not true. Being a team member means trusting everyone to do their jobs. Our job then was to get out of the way and let the others work. We did it.""
+
+Arada frowned. ""How am I going to lead a planetary survey if I can't get over this stuff? What am I going to be doing, babe? I'll be sabotaging myself getting into everyone's business, micromanaging them and ... Ugh!"" She made another angry arm gesture, her face twisting up in frustration. ""They don't trust me. I just want to be trusted. How can I trust anyone else if they won't trust me?""
+
+Overse smiled wanly at her, recognizing the overdramatic whining as agreement and winding down. ""They trust you. They trust us both to stay out of this and not spread the news. Not to pry. To help keep the secret by not knowing it. We're not on GrayCris' death list (and I'm glad we're not!) and that means we're not on the need-to-know list about what GrayCris is up to.""
+
+Arada's head jerked around. ""It's GrayCris. It is GrayCris. We know that. Ratthi told us that, when he said who was on the hook.""
+
+""Oh, I thought we already knew that."" Overse gave her a puzzled look.
+
+""I wasn't completely sure. I just thought they were the only reasonable cause. But, you know, 'security incident' - could have been anything, but the only thing they'd need to keep secret would be if it was GrayCris.""
+
+""Okay, sure.""
+
+Arada relaxed again. ""So we know that. And we know SecUnit got hurt and Mensah is fine and whatever happened caused all of port security to mobilize in a hurry. It was serious, then. Really serious."" She frowned, her brows pulling down. ""What can I do to help?"" She looked over to Overse. ""What can I do to help our friends? To help Preservation? To keep these corporate assholes, to paraphrase Pin-Lee, from holding us all hostage? I'm worried.""
+
+Overse reached out and took her hand. Solidly, she said, ""You lead that survey. We do the best job we can. And we pull through. As a team. Trust them, and they will trust us."""
+44024268,Rendering Assistance,['AuntyMatter'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","Non-Consensual Cuddling, Fluff, Dreams and Nightmares",English,2023-01-02,Completed,2023-01-02,909,1/1,7,27,2,141,"['chillgamesh_the_swing', 'NightErrant', 'MysteryMe110', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'ComplicatedLight', 'AkaMissK', 'NekoNomi', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'bitari', 'PeniG', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'sareliz', 'ErinPtah', 'BWizard', 'HermaeusMora', 'horchata', 'verersatz', 'Gamebird']",[],"This takes place during station-night cycle immediately after the events in
+Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory. Told from SecUnits POV.
+
+ 
+
+I went back to my chair in the corner. Everyone else was standing around
+waiting for Dr. Mensah to come back to the common room. The interruption had
+stopped the group work and no one seemed to want to continue except Gurathin.
+Ratthi said that it would be better to finish up tomorrow when their brains
+were fresh. He eventually managed to get Gurathin to close the multiple report
+screens he had open. Pin-Lee agreed, saying she had a drinks date with friends
+and had been about to leave anyway. Overse and Arada were quietly discussing
+whether to eat in or go out.
+
+Bharadwaj was standing by the door and when Mensah walked in, she put her arm
+around Mensahs shoulders and asked, ""Are you alright? Would you like me to walk
+with you back to your quarters?""
+
+Mensah patted Bharadwajs hand on her shoulder and said, ""I'm worn out from
+talking. If I go to my quarters, I'll just have the repeat everything I said to
+Station Security to Farai and Teno."" She gave a short laugh. ""Except they'll
+ask a lot more questions. If it's ok, I'll camp out on the couch here.""
+
+She had her feed interface in her hand, so I said, ""Use the bed in my room.""
+And added before she could make any protest, ""I don't sleep. I just sit in the
+chair and watch media.""
+
+Which was a lie, I did like to stretch out on the bed to watch media, mostly
+because it was still a novel experience. But I was scanning Mensahs vital signs
+and she was still showing elevated stress levels.
+
+She looked relieved and said, ""Thank you SecUnit."" She had stepped away from
+Bharadwaj and further into the room. She smiled around and said, ""I'm not
+hungry. I just want a hot shower and to sleep. So if you all will excuse me,
+I'll go do that."" She walked down the hall to my room and shut the door.
+
+Pin-Lee slipped her arm through Bharadwajs and said in a laughing tone, ""Come
+on. I'll be your bodyguard."" And they left. After a little discussion in low
+voices the others decided to go out to eat and give Mensah some ""alone time.""
+
+I stayed in my chair listening to the sounds of the shower. When it stopped, I
+checked the camera in my room and saw Mensah come out of the bathroom. She had
+put her feed interface on a table by the bed, she inserted it in her ear. I
+tapped into her feed and could hear her explaining to Farai that she would see
+her and Teno tomorrow. She was wearing some undergarments and she had hung her
+other clothes in the closet. She went over to them and took a small bottle from
+the pocket. I enhanced the image to read the label. It was a sleep aid. Wow,
+Mensah must be more stressed than I thought to want that. She got into bed and
+turned the lights off.
+
+I gave her time to fall asleep and went into the room noiselessly and sat in
+the chair, watching old episodes of the Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, and
+still monitoring her vital signs. They were good, indicating normal sleep
+patterns. I heard the others come in and go to their rooms although they were
+impressively quiet for humans. Pin-Lee was not with them.
+
+About three hours before station day cycle, Mensahs vitals became erratic. I
+stopped my show to monitor her more closely. Her stress levels were going up,
+her eyelids showed rapid eye movement indicating dreaming, she made a small
+noise like a whimper and her hands clenched. And I was on my feet without
+thinking about it. I had a moment of panic. What could I do to protect Mensah?
+I can fight all kinds of real things, from hostile fauna to combat bots, but
+how could I fight bad dreams? I ran a rapid search of my media.
+
+I kicked off my boots, dropped my jacket on the floor, and climbed into bed
+beside Mensah. I pulled her close to me and upped my body temperature. I
+slipped one arm under her head, bringing it closer. I spoke softly into her
+ear, ""It's SecUnit, Dr. Mensah. I have you. You're safe. I won't let anyone
+hurt you.""
+
+With my other hand I stroked her back. She had tensed when I had first touched
+her but she hadn't woken up. That must be a pretty powerful sleep aid. She had
+relaxed a little when I had started to speak. I kept repeating the same things
+and stroking her back. She relaxed some more and moved closer to me. She put
+one of her arms around me and sort of butted her head into my neck. Her stress
+levels were dropping, so I kept speaking gently and stroking her back.
+
+I kept this up for an hour even though her levels were back to normal after
+ten minutes. I just wanted to make sure the bad dreams were gone. Then I very
+gently untangled myself from her, pausing every second to make sure she
+wasn't waking up. I picked up my jacket and put it on. I sat down in the chair
+and put on my boots. Instead of media, I watched Mensah sleeping."
+44023921,Yan Shang hurudeisuku ~Full Disk Burn~,['mioh'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Original Male Character(s)","Canon-Typical Violence, Action, Case Fic, Translation, Fan Yi ",Ri Ben Yu,2023-01-02,Completed,2023-01-02,"23,950",1/1,5,19,3,176,"['BWizard', 'Tiptree602', 'mangagirl1216', 'shamashamaaround', 'Ryu_Hiyoko', 'FlipSpring']",[]," 
+
+[Bo Shi ! shitsukari!] 
+
+ bazanBo Shi gaQie riLi tsutaBai iDuan Ya noYuan niPian Shou deburaXia gatsuteimasu. mouPian Fang noWan haTi noXie dedararitoXia gari, sonnaBi heMei Mao noterahuomuJian Du , mezeigaShou wonobashi, Xuan Ming niYin tsupariShang geyoutoshiteimasu. mezeinoJia woLei gatsutaimasuga, soredemonaoBi Nu haWei Xiao moutoshimasu. [tsukamaetawaBo Shi , daiziyoubuyo!] 
+
+[iinda, orenoAi suruRen ] bazanBo Shi gaYan imasu. [mouiinda. Shou woLi shitekure] 
+
+[dame!] mezeigaJiao bimasu. [oYuan i, atoShao shidakara----] 
+
+ bazanBo Shi noShou gasuberiLuo chi, Bi haYa tsupuchikara----Zu motoyori4senchiXia no, kutsushiyonCai noChuang niZhao Di shimashita. [kuso. gomen!] toYan tsute, Bi hatsukamatsuteitahounoShou wopatapataZhen tsutehogushimashita. 
+
+[katsuto!] Shui kagaSheng woagemashita. 
+
+<Xian Shi Wei ganai> ARTgaBi Ji nohuidodeWen Ju woYan imashita. 
+
+<{Shi Jian Fang Wei Dui orion} desuyo> Bi Ji haYan imashita. <riarunaMiao Xie woQi Dai shitehaikemasen>
+
+<mouPian Fang noWan moShi ebaiinoni>
+
+<Yu Zhou Swu niXi wareteFu Shang shimashitakarane> Yan tsutekara, Bi Ji haimaCuo Ying shitaChang Mian notsuagaidoJie Shuo tsukiYing Xiang womemoriakaibukaraQu riChu shi, Zai Sheng shimashita. bazanBo Shi haKuang Bao naYu Zhou Swu niXi Ji saretaseide, Zui Hou no3Chang Mian dehaPian Wan gakikanakatsutakotoninatsuteimasu. <atodemedeiaZhi Zuo Zhe gaYing Xiang niXie Hu noSe woZu seba, wakariyasukunarukamoshiremasen>
+
+ sutazionohuroadehaRen ""gaChang Mian norisetsutoZuo Ye nihairimashita. Bi Ji nomawarideha, tsuaniCan Jia shiteiruRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian gaXing Fen giminiHua shi, kokotoCuo Ying setsutowoShi Qie tsuteiruQiu Xing noTou Ming shirudonoQian de, Ya shiaiheshiaishiteimasu. Hua shikaketekuruRen Jian haimasenshi, Bi Ji moZhi ranaiRen Jian toHua sunohaKu Shou nanodeQi gaLe desu. tohaieARTgahuidoJing You deHua shikaketekurutoQi gaSan rimasu. 
+
+ kokoha, borukeradansuteshiyontoLin Jie suruGuang Da narutopointopurodakushiyonCuo Ying sutazionoNei Bu desu. ARTha{Shi Jian Fang Wei Dui orion} Xin Zuo episodonoCuo Ying woJian Xue dekiruTe Bie pasuwoShou niRu retanodesuga(itsutaidonnaShou woShi tsutanokahaBu Ming desu. Bi Ji gaYu shigatsutawakedemoarimasenyo, Nian notame), tsuanoaidaziyuuBi Ji nohuidoniisuwatsute, huesuteibaruniLian retekitemoratsutamensaJia noMo tsuZi mitainihashiyaideimasu. 
+
+ tashikani, doramanoCuo Ying Xian Chang woJian taitoSi ebaKe Neng desu. medeianoDa Ban woZhi Zuo shiteiruJu Da Qi Ye ga, episodonoakusesuShou Ru nomideMan Zu surutomoSi emasen----Xia Qing keZhi Zuo Hui She karaZui Hou noYi Di mademoLi Yi woshiboritoritaihazudesu. toiuwakede, Qi Ye saikuruBiao Zhun de1Shi Jian nomotsutomoDi Wei na[bakaGao i] tsuakara, [Ge Ren De Yu Le nikonoJin E wooZhi Fu ikudasaimashitaRen Jian Yang oyobiQiang Hua Ren Jian Yang noShen noAn Quan nitsuite, Dang Fang haitsusaiZe Ren woFu imasen] naBan Ri tsuaniitarumade, Qi Ye gaSuo You surusetsutodenoCuo Ying woJian Xue dekiruRu Chang pasugaFan Mai sareteirunodesu. Bi Ji hasaiwai, Shen Yu Zhou Diao Cha toJiao Yu Zhi Dao nikuwaetemedeiamoDa Hao kinaShen Yu Zhou Jiao Yu Diao Cha Chuan niCheng tsute, Zhong Ji ringuwoFang reteimashita. 
+
+ zitsunotokoro, konosuteshiyonheLai tanohaARTnoWu Ren Shu Song Ren Wu nohitotsudearu, Huo Wu noNa Ru gaMu De deshita. ARTtoShi Shi wosurunoha, Wang reQu raretashisutemugaZhi Pei suruFang Qi koronideYi Xing noCan Cun Zhe domowoXiang kounimawashiteXie Li shitatokiYi Lai 4Du Mu de, soshiteRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian noCheng Zu Yuan gaTong Xing shinaiRen Wu toshitehaChu metedesu. ARTgaQi Ye Biao Zhun Li de3kaYue Qian karakonoJian Xue tsuawoJi Hua shiteitaKe Neng Xing ha87%arimasu. 
+
+ suteshiyonde, ARThaShang Chuan Yong dehanakuSi You Chuan nodotsukuniRu Gang shimashita. Ge Ren Yong nopaipurihutoniCheng tsuteRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian gaJi maruGong Gong erianiXiang kai, sokokarahaYi Dong kapuserude, rutopointopurodakushiyonnoYin Xiang Fang Zhi sutaziohe. Cuo Ying Yong niGou Zhu saretamoziyurumoHan me, sutaziogasuteshiyonnoDa Bu Fen woZhan meteimasu. sutazionarakonosuteshiyongaZhou Hui shiteiruHuo Xing nimoarimasuga, Bi Ji haHuo Xing gaXian idesushi, Jin Hui noRen Wu sukeziyurudehaYun Xing noShao naiGong Gong shiyatoruniCheng tsuteWang Fu suruYu Yu haarimasen. 
+
+ tsuahaXiang Xiang shiteitayori, omoshiroimonodeshita. ARTgasutazioJian Xue woTi An surumadeha, medeiagadonoyouniZuo rarerukanadoQi nitomemasendeshita. Jian temitaitomoSi imasendeshita. medeiahaTou woKong tsuponishiteJian rumonodesu. 
+
+ Bi Ji woYou outoARTgaShuo De niShi tsutaDiao Cha paketsutoniyoruto(Shuo De tohaoogesadesuga, mukouhaShuo De shitatominashiteimasu. Bi Ji gaZhi ranaiRen Jian niWei marerunogaKu Shou datoZhi tsuteirunodesu), Ying Hua toLian Sok doramanooyoso70~95%ga, medeiaZhi Zuo Zhe tachinoShou dedezitaruSheng Cheng sareteirusoudesu(Zhi tsuteimashitaga, ARThaZi Fen noDiao Cha Li wohikerakashi, nandemoYi Fan Cheng rideyaritagarunodesu). atohaCuo ritametaYing Xiang to, Ren Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian noPai You woShi tsutesetsutodeCuo Ying shimasu. Pai You haBi Xu demonainodesuga, douiuwakekaRen Jian ha, tatoePai You gamedeianoDeng Chang Ren Wu rashikuZhen ruWu tsuteirudakedeatsutemo, sonoRen Wu gaSheng Shen deCun Zai shiteirukotowoZi Fen noMu deQue kametagarimasu. Ren Qi Pai You gaZhu Yan wotsutomereba, sonodoramanoCheng Gong Lu ha3Bei nimonarunodesu. 
+
+ Xian Hua Xiu Ti . {Shi Jian Fang Wei Dui orion} haARTmoBi Ji moQi niitsuteimasu. Bi Ji nooQi niiriDi 1Wei dehaarimasenga. 
+
+(ziyaa1Wei hanandatoiuHua naraJiao emashiyou. {sankuchiyuarimunnoSheng Shuai } desu)
+
+(betsuniXun iteneeyo, toYan wareyouga, kokohaYan tsutamonSheng chidesu)
+
+ Chuan noCao Duo Shi woMo shitasetsutomo, sonohokaPai You noCuo Ying niShi ukutsushiyonCai noDa Xing moziyurueriamo, Si tsuteitaYi Shang niLe shimemashita(atodemedeiaZhi Zuo Zhe tachigaShi Ji noYing Xiang niJia Gong wohodokoshite, sorerashikuJian serunodeshiyou). 
+
+ ARTgaGao E napasuwoYong Yi shitekuretanode, Bi Ji haShao Ren Shu noJian Xue gurupu(sokohaQi niirimasen)nimazitsute, bazanBo Shi noLuo Xia deMu woBi ziruCuo Ying noyousuwoJian teimashita. sutaziohamotodoorinisetsutosare, bazanBo Shi gakutsushiyonCai no[Ya ] noheriniFei bitsukimasu. 3Hui kuriFan shi, mouQiang Hua Ren Jian niDai Yi woLai mebaiinodehatoSi waretatokorode, sorosoroShi Jian datogaidogaGao gemashita. 
+
+ tsuanoDi mekukurinisutazionoTu Chan Wu shiyotsupuheRu rimashita. Bi Ji haFei Ji Neng De katsuGan Qing De naWu Pin woBi Yao toshimasenshi, matsutakuJia Kong noShi Jian Lu Xing hiroTuan Ti nomonodemorogohaXian inanode, Ji Nian Pin haMai imasen. desugaARTnihaTie Fu nodekiruXiao sanaPin Wu woMai i, ziyaketsutonopoketsutoniRu retesutaziowoChu mashita. hokanotsuaCan Jia Zhe toYi Xu ni, suteshiyonGong Gong eriaXing kinoYi Dong kapuseruniCheng riIp mimasu. 
+
+<Fei Ji Neng De katsuGan Qing De naWu Pin haBen Chuan moSuo Chi shinai> ARTgahuidodeYan imashita. 
+
+ baritsushiyu-esutoranzaShe tonoizakozaYi Qian nisakanoboruMou Ri , ARTnoGuan Zhi buritsuziniTie ritsuiteita{warudohotsupazu} sutetsukanoHua Xiang womotsuteFan Da toshimashita. 
+
+<Cheng Zu Yuan gaTie tsutanoyo>
+
+<soudeshiyoutomo>
+
+ sutazionookagedeborukeradansuteshiyonhaHuo Qi gaari, sokodeDong kuka, Fang rerukasuruRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian gatakusanimasu. Gong Gong eriawoTong tsutekokoheLai ruaidaniJing Bei shisutemukarasuteshiyonnoGou Nei matsupuwoYin kiChu shiteatsutanode, sonoerianiJin dukukotonakuARTnodotsukuheLi rerurutowo14Tong riJian Tao shimashita. sutazioCong Ye Yuan woZhuang tsutesugusokodeJiang rirunoga, ichibanShou tsutoriZao kusumisoudesu. 
+
+<Ben Chuan haGan Shang niJin tsutarishinaiwayo> ARTgamadaYan tsuteimasu. 
+
+<demo{Shi Jian Fang Wei Dui orion} haHao kideshiyou> Bi Ji haFan shimashita. <konotsuahaanatanoTi An desu>
+
+ sutazionosekiyuriteihaLiang Hao deshita----Zhi Shi Ceng noWen Hua Ren woshikarubekuShou runonaraDang Ran desu----tohaie, Bi Ji hakokonoJing Bei shisutemuwohatsukinguzumideshita(Jing Bei yunitsutohaJing Bei shisutemutoTong Xin dekiruyouShe Ji sareteimasu). sudenisutazionoshisutemuhakochirawoShou keireteimasu. 
+
+ Dong kiChu shitesugu, kapuserugaSu Du woLuo toshiteTing maruto, Cheng tsuteitaRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian noaidakarabutsubutsutoKun Huo notsubuyakigaLou remashitaga, kamawazuWu Shi shi, Cong Ye Yuan Zhuan Yong Tong Lu noQian deJiang rimashita. ARTnotokoroheLi runonikokokaraBu keba33Fen kakari, Gong Gong eriawoTong reba18Fen desumimasuga, Chu Gang Yu Ding Shi Ke madeato1Shi Jian hodoari, naniyoriRen Jian gatakusaniruJie Wei woTong razunisumimasu. 
+
+ Zhuan Yong Tong Lu hasuteshiyonnoGong Gong eriayoriAn ku, Bo Wu reteimashita. Yi Dong kapuseruwokontororushiteTing Zhi sasetaShi Dian desutazioJing Bei shisutemunoJian Shi kamerawoShi i, Li Ru Jin Zhi Qu Yu womadabotsutogaurotsuiteirunowoZhi rarenaiyou, Jian Zhang tsuteimasu. Bi Ji gaKong Bu nomadabotsutodearukotohaLu Jian shiteimasen----kokoheLai rumadeQiang Hua Ren Jian nohuriwoshite, hotondonoRen Jian haBi Ji woYi Pie shitadake----nimokakawarazu, Zi Fen gakokoniitehanaranaiCun Zai toiuQi gashitenarimasen. 
+
+<tsuahaQi niitsutekuretaka> ARTgaXun nemashita. 
+
+ Da erukawarini, akaibuniRu retaLu Hua woZai Sheng shiteyaruto, ARThaWei niRu riXi woChuan tsu{orion} noCuo Ying Ying Xiang woJian teDa Xing Fen shiteimashita. 
+
+ Gou Nei matsupuwoCan Kao ni, tsukiataridedotsukuheChu rareruTong Yong Kou womezashite, yuruyakanakabuniYan tsuteBu kimashita. Tong Lu nihaShu Shi metorugotoniXie Tong Lu gaari, sorezoresutazioGuan Lian erianitsunagatsuteimasu. kokodeJian Shi kameraga, Bi Ji yoriYue 200metoruXian woXing kuJi giZu noRen Jian noZi wotoraemashita. Ren Jian gairunohakabunoXian de, kokokarahaShi Ren dekinaitame, Zhui itsukanaiyouBu kuSu Du woyurumete, Ju Li wotamochimashita(mukouhaZu Zao deshitaga, Bi Ji haJiao gaChang ku, taiteinoRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian yoriJi Ben Su Du gahayainodesu). 
+
+ huidoQing Bao niyoruto, Ren Jian hazierarutoiuMing Qian noNan Xing de, rutopointosutazioXin Ru She Yuan noIDwoSuo Chi shiteimasu. kameraniYing tsutaBi haXiao Bing de, Xi Shen toiuyorimushiroHua She naTi Ge , Bai iJi ni, Jian hodonosutoretonoHei Fa nihaQing Se gamazitsuteimasu. dabudabunogurenoziyanpusutsuwoZhao te, sonoShang karaZhang gaChang ihudoFu kinoCha Se nokepuwokabutsuteimasu. Bu Shen niSi i, Que Ren notameYing Xiang woKuo Da shimashita. Jiao Du noseidewakarimasenga, Bi noWai Jian nidokokaJian oboegaarimashita. 
+
+ ARTgaBi Ji noakaibuYing Xiang ni, sotsupowoXiang kimashita. <moukonnakotoshiteagenaikarane>
+
+ Li noRen Jian toYi Zhi suruYan ganaika, Guo Qu noJi Lu woDiao bemashita. nanikagaYin tsukakarimasu----toiuyori, konoTong Lu sonomonogaYin tsukakarunodesu. ARTnoXiang Shou woyamete(iyagararemasuga, Wo Man shitehoshiimonodesu)Tong Lu nokameraYing Xiang niJi Zhong shimasu. doronwoLian retekurebayokatsutatoSi imashitaga, Gong Gong noChang dedoronwoBan eba, [kokoniJing Bei yunitsutogaimasuyo!] toQuan Shen nimakapeintowoTu ritakutsuteXuan Chuan suruyounamononanode, ARTnotokoroniZhi itekiteimashita. sutazioJing Bei shisutemunoJian Shi kamerawoShi ukotonishimasu. 
+
+ hutatabiJian Shi kameranohuidowoJian masu. imashita. zierarunohokaniRen Jian ga4Ren , uchi2Ren hazierarugairuWei Zhi karaoyoso30metoruXian , atono2Ren hasaranisono12metoruXian noXie Tong Lu noAn garinihisondeimashita. Quan Yuan gatsushiritoshitaTi Ge niMu Li tanaiHei Fu woZhao teori, Jian Dan naWu Zhuang sukiyannikaketemiruto, sorotsuteenerugiChong woYin shimotsuteimasu. hitorigaEr nihametahuidointahuesuniPian Shou woateteimasu. 
+
+<doushita?> ARTgahuidoJing You deXun netekimashita. 
+
+ kamerawomouYi Du chietsukushimasu. Tong Lu nodokonimo, hokanoRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian haimasen. Hei Fu noRen Jian nohitoriha, huidoniWu Fa Sheng denanikaHua shiteiruyouniKou gaDong iteimasu. 
+
+ oya, korekaraHe gaQi kirunokawakarimashita. tadawakaranainoha, Dai chikamaeteiruRen Jian tachigaBi Ji niQi duitakadoukadesu. 
+
+<Da enasai> ARTgaMing Ling Kou Diao deYan imashita(Qian Shu shimashitaga, Wu Shi sarerutoiyagarutachinanodesu). 
+
+ huidodeHua shinagaraDai Ji shiteitaRen Jian ga(Zhi Ding :Di 1Hao ), Lin niiruZhong Jian (Di 2Hao )noWan wokarukuKou ite, hitoriXing kuzierarutoBi Ji gaBu itekuruFang Xiang heTong Shi niZhu Yi woXiang kemashita. 
+
+ ARThayouyakuZhuang Kuang niQi duite, huidonoZhong deTong Yi shikaneteMei wohisomeruYan niXiang Dang suruFan Ying woshimashita. <Guan waranaihougaii. omaehaShi Qing woZhi ranainodakara>
+
+ iyagararerunowoCheng Zhi de, ARTtonohuidoTong Xin woQie rimashita. Bi Ji haBo Shi naRen Gong Zhi Neng woDa Zai shitaBu Yu Kuai Qian Mo naJu Da Diao Cha Shu Song Chuan dehanaku, Jing Bei yunitsutodesu. Ren Jian noShou rikatahaZhi tsuteimasu. Bu Yu Kuai Qian Mo naARTha0.2Miao Hou nihuidowomataKai itekimashita. <Qi wotsukete>
+
+ Xin Ru She Yuan gaQi Xi sarerutowakari, Bi Ji haSu Du woShang gemashita. zieraruhamatsutakuQi dukazu, hazimenoDi 2Ren noQian woTong risugimashita. Dong kigaarutoshitara, 2tsunogurupuniXie maretakatachininaru43Miao Yi Nei desu. 
+
+ kabuwoQu garikiri, zierarunoZi woMu Shi dekitatokorode, huiniJing Bei shisutemunokameraYing Xiang gasubeteQie raremashita. Bi Ji noXie Wei Ping Jia ga93%kara100%niTiao neShang garimashita. 
+
+ zieraruhaBi Ji noZu Yin niQi dukutoFei biagari, Shen Jing Zhi sounikochirawoZhen riFan rimashita. Bi Ji haBi nadoYan Zhong ninaihuriwoshiteimasuga, Xiang Shou noYan gayokuJian etakonoJi Hui wotoraete, Hua Xiang nitaguwotsuketeARTniSong rimashita. 
+
+<Shui desuka?>
+
+ sonotokiDi 2Hao gaTong Lu karaChu tekite, Bi Ji niXiang katsuteenerugiChong woJi chimashita. 
+
+ Dong kiwotoraeteBi Ji gaZou riChu shitanode, Gong Ji haWai remashita. Di 2Hao noBu Yi wotsuiteTong Lu noBi woQu keShang gari, soshiteTiao bimashita. Di 2Hao woCu riDao shiteZhao Di suruto, Xiang Shou haJiao ndehutatabiJi tsutekimashita. Jin Du haDang tarimashitaga, Ren Jian woShang tsukeDong kiwoFeng ziruenerugiChong mo, Bi Ji nihaXiao kimasen. Di 2Hao noTou woChuang niKou kitsuketeChong womogiQu rinagara, Zhi noGu wo3Ben Zhe rimashita. 
+
+ Tong Lu noXian dehaDi 1Hao to, Yin reteitahokano2Ren (Zhi Ding :Di 3Hao oyobiDi 4Hao )gaFei biChu shite, Xin Ru She Yuan niXiang katsuteikimasu. zieraruhaQie etaYan woshimashitaga, Di 3Ren gasorezoreChong woChu shitanoni, Yu kanimoZou tsuteTao geyoutoshimashita(Shen noAn Quan nitsuiteRen Jian woXin Yong dekinainoha, koregaLi You desu). 
+
+ Bi Ji haDuo tsutaenerugiChong woDi 3Hao heJi chinagara, Fan Ji sarenaiuchiniDi 1Hao tonoJu Li woJie meruto, Hou wotsukandeBi niXiang katsuteTou gemashita. zieraruhaYi Wai nimoLiang Shi woshimeshi, patsutoXie niFei binoiteTong Lu noBi Ji deborunoyouniuzukumarimashita. 
+
+ okagedeShi Jie gasutsukirishimashita(kokogaJian Shi kameranoRuo Dian desu----Zhan Dou Zhong niQie rareteshimauto, Mu Shi Yi Wai niLai reruQing Bao ganakunarukaradesu). Di 4Hao gaGou etaChong wohitsutakutsuteCe Tou woOu ritsuke, saraniWan woGu Zhe sasemasu. Xiang Shou haChuang niBeng reochiteKu Men noSheng woagemashita. 
+
+ Di 3Hao gaenerugiChong deShou ketaChong Ji karaikurakaLi chinaorimashita. Xi wotsuiteChong woJi tsutekimasu. neraihaWai re, Jin Shu Zhi noTong Lu noBi niDang tatsuteHuo Hua gaSan rimashita. sonoZhou woCu ritsuke, Fa wotsukande, kochiramoTou woChuang niKou kitsukemasu. Di 3Hao hayouyakuDong kanakunarimashita. 
+
+ Di 4Hao notokoroheLi ri, Jing Dong Mo woYa Po shiteQi Jue sasemashita. Yi Shi gaarumamanishiteHua woWen kiChu shitemoiinodesuga, Bi ranihaBi Ji noZi womitomeruYu Yu hanakatsutadeshiyoushi, soudearukotowoWang mimasu(Du He yokuJian Shi kamerawoQie tsutekuretawakedesukara). soreyorimo, kokoniiruBei Hai Zhe Hou Bu karanohougaShi Dang naDa ewomoraesoudesu. 
+
+<Zhi Li Mie Lie > ARTgahuidodeYan imashita. 
+
+<madamashinahoudesu> mutsutoshiteYan iFan shimashita. umakuyaretatoSi tsuteimasu. Shui hitoriSha shiteinainodesukara. 
+
+[ano] Xin Ru She Yuan zierarugaKou woKai kimashita. [ore......] Bi haShen kuXi woXi i, Ren Jian gaGan Qing woLuo chiZhao kaseyoutosurutokinimirareru, Shang Xiang iteBei Jin wonobasuFang Fa wotorimashita. shikashiRen Jian noCheng Chang Qi Hou Ban dearuZi Fen to, Jing Bei yunitsutoGui Ge saizu(Liang Wan toLiang Zu noChang sahasorezore2senchizutsuDuan kunarimashitaga)dearuBi Ji tonoTi Ge Chai ni, Bi hahirumimashita. tohaieDing Zhu niJian eruyou, Yan imashita. [arigatou] 
+
+ Shi Shi woshiteRen Jian niGan Xie sarerukotoni, imadaniGuan remasen(shikashikorehaShi Shi dehaarimasen. Bi moGu Ke dehaarimasen. Zi Fen demonazeJie Ru shitanokawakarimasenga, zieraruhahitorikirideXiao sakuteBu gatsuteori, Bi Ji noShi Shi haXiao sakuteBu garuRen Jian woShou rukotodesu). 
+
+ Wo nikaeri, Ren Jian niBu Zi Ran toSi wareruQian ni[kochirakoso] toDa emashita(botsutonitotsutehaziyuubunBu Zi Ran deChang iShi Jian desu). ARTnoYan iFen doori, Shi noCi Di woZhi tsuteokitaitoSi i, zieraruniXun nemashita. [nazeBi rahaanatawoZhui tsuteitanodesu?] 
+
+ zieraruhaShou woZhen rimashita. [Zhi ranai] Bi hamataLuo chiZhao kiwonakushi, Zi Fen noTi niLiang Wan womawashiteShou dekosurimashita. yaharidoronwoLian retekurubekideshita. semetesutazioJing Bei shisutemugaFu Jiu shiteireba, kamerawoTong shiteBi woJian rukotogadekirunodesuga. Zi Fen noMu deXiang Shou woJian rudakedeQi mazukunarimasu. [orenihabetsuni......Zhui wareruLi You nantenaishi] zieraruhaYan imashita. [nandeorewoBu maeyoutosurunoka, satsupariwakaranai] 
+
+ Xu wotsuiteimasu. Bi haRen Jian nishitehasonoNeng Li gasugureteori, sukiyandehaXin Li sutoresuZhi niwazukanaYing Xiang gaChu teimasuga, An iTong Lu deShi Jian niJuan kiIp maretakotoniyoruadorenarinFang Chu Zhi toYi Zhi shimasen. Ren Jian woZhu kerunohakamaimasenga, Xu wotsukiSok kerareruChang He hasonokagiridehaarimasen. [Xu desune] Bi Ji haYan imashita. 
+
+ soretohoboTong Shi ni, ARTga <korewoJian te> toBi Ji nohuidonidetapaketsutowoSong tsutekimashita. Rong Mao karazierarunoSu Xing gawakatsutanodesu. Bi Ji hadetaJie Guo woJian tekara, mouYi Du Jian mashita. nandakoreha. 
+
+ zierarunohouhaSok kemasu. [Ben Dang da! orehakokodeDong iterudakede, masakakonnaMu niZao unante----] 
+
+ Jing E gaDa kisugiteMo tsuteirarezu, Bi noYan Xie wosaegirimashita. [anatahapurometeusudesuka] 
+
+ zieraruhaakirakanaKong Bu noBiao Qing deKou woBi zi, Bi Ji woNing Shi shimashita. Bi gaHe woKao eteirunokahawakarimasen. mitomeruka, mataXu wotsukuka, soretomoTao geyoutosuruka. tsuini, Bi haE woguitoShang gete, Bi Ji noYan woJian mashita(moshikashitaraBi haBi Ji noMu woJian tanokamoshiremasenga, Bi Ji haRen Jian toMu woHe waserunohaKu Shou nanode, Bi noTou noYou Ce woJian teimashita). [naruhodona] Bi haGan Qing womaziezuYan imashita. [souda, orehapurometeusuYi woYan ziteta] 
+
+ purometeusuha{sankuchiyuarimunnoSheng Shuai } shirizuZhong 48Hua , 2Bu niwatatsutenoZhu Yao Deng Chang Ren Wu desu. Zuo Zhong dehagurinnoGuang Ze gaRu tsutaJin Fa wonabikase, pitsutarishitaHei iYi Zhuang woZhao konashiteitanode, Bi Ji mohazimeQi dukimasendeshita. soredokoroka, masakapurometeusuYi noPai You Ben Ren niHui utoha----kokogadokodearukaniGuan Xi naku, Si imoyoranaikotodeshita. 
+
+<Bi noBen Dang noMing Qian hariohuorutouna> ARTgahuidoJing You deQing Bao woSong tsutekimashita. <Gong Shi dehaBi ha{sankuchiyuarimun} noZhi Zuo Hui She aua-atsunetsutowakutoQi Yue shiteiru. She nosutazioheXing kunihakokokarawamuhoruwo2Hui Jing You shinakerebanaranai. nazekonorutopointosutazioni?>
+
+ iiZhi Wen desu. Bi Ji hazieraru----rioniYan imashita. [nazeanatagarutopointonosutazioniirunodesuka? tashikaQi Yue woJie ndeirunoha----] 
+
+[aua-atsudaro] Ku iYan deriohaYan imashita. Bi ha4.6Miao Jian , Bi Ji woJian teimashita. Biao Qing haDu mitorinikuku(taiteinoRen Jian tokurabete, toiuYi Wei desu), osorakukorehaBi gaPai You de, itsuwarinoGan Qing woBen Wu datoRen ""niXin zisaserunogaShi Shi dakaradeshiyou. shikashiTi noDong kiha, Zhong Yi Hui Yi woZhong e, purizabeshiyonLian He noYi Chang Zhi woCi shitaZhi Hou nomensaBo Shi woSi wasemashita. marudeZhong iFang Hu sutsukananikawoTuo idatokinoyouna. 
+
+[wakatsuta] riogaYan imashita. [orewoZhu ketekuretandakara, antanihaBen Dang nokotowoHua sanakiyanaranaina] 
+
+<omaehaJing Yan Li Fu naJing Bei yunitsutode, Ben Chuan hatadanoDiao Cha Chuan nisuginaikeredo> ARTgahuidodeYan imashita(konoChuan gaZui Gao niPi Rou tsupoiKou Diao deHua sutokorowoXiang Xiang shitekudasai. sonoKou Diao wosarani2Bei Pi Rou tsupokusuruto, imanoARTnoHua shiFang nikanariJin dukimasu). <madasokodeguzuguzusuruQi ka?>
+
+ matsutaku. ARTnoYan utooridesu. koronino4Fen no1woPo Huai shitaYan noZhi Zhe purometeusuhaRe Xie hirotoLian niLuo chi, Zi Shen noWu Ming wososogutameWei Xing noXin Zang Bu niaruHuo Shan heFei biIp mutoiuZi Ji Ikenie Sheng De Bei Ju woYan zitawakedesuga, Bi Ji nohouhaZhu ketaRen Jian noSu Xing gaPan Ming shitakotoniQi wotorare, imanoWei Xian naZhuang Kuang woShi Nian shiteimashita. Di 4Ren hamadaChuang denobiteimasushikameramoFu Jiu shimasenga, sudeniChang kukonoChang nitodomarisugimashita(Ke Guan De niha, Zui Hou noDi woDao shitekara57.2Miao gaJing Guo shiteimashitaga, konoZhuang Kuang Xia dehaYong Yuan nimohitoshiiShi Jian desu). Bi rawoSong riIp ndanogaShui deare, sudeniYi Bian niQi duiteirukamoshiremasen. 
+
+ Bi Ji noShi Shi nokotodeARTnimotsutomonaZhi Zhai wosarerunohaBu Yu Kuai desu. 
+
+(ARThahuidode, botsutoLiu noniyaniyaXiao iwoshiteimasu. Bi Ji hahutatabiTong Xin woQie rimashita. tatoe0.018Miao Jian darouto, konoBo Shi naZhi Neng Ji Jie nihuidodenoshikakararetakuarimasen)
+
+<sunenaide> mataTong Xin woKai iteARTgaYan imashita. 
+
+<sunetenadoimasen> Bi Ji haYan iFan shimashita. <Qi woSan rasanaidekudasai>
+
+ soshiteSheng niChu shite, rioniYan imashita. [kokodehadamedesu. Chang Suo woBian emashiyou] 
+
+ riohamabatakishi, kochiramomataQi Xi saretaChang Suo niirukotowoWang reteitarashiku, Zhou Wei woJian mawashimashita. [Yan eteruna. orehakorekaraShang Chuan deRen toHui ukotoninatsuterushi] 
+
+[wakarimashita] souDa ete, Bi Ji haBu kiChu shimashita. riohaBi Ji noBu Diao niHe waseyouto, Xiao Zou ridetsuitekimasu. Bi gakokodekoushiteLin niirutoQi Miao niGan zimasu. {sankuchiyuarimun} dehaTang ""taruLi chiZi nopurometeusudeshitaga, Cuo Ying kamerahaBi gaDuo kunoDa Ren nikurabeteXiao Bing dearukotowoYin soutomoshimasendeshita. soremopurometeusunoMei Li datsutatoSi imasu----Xiao sanaBei Zhang toDui Zhao De na, Zhou Wei woYa Dao suruCun Zai Gan . 
+
+ Xian Shi noBi ha, Nei nikomorigachide, kepuwoShen kukabutsuteYan woYin soutoshiteimasu. Mu motohaPi Lao deHei zumi, Bu An souniKou womusundeimashitaga, Shen Mei De Guan Dian karaitsuteDuo kunoRen Jian nikurabeteRong Mao nisugureteimasu. amatanoRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian niXing De Mei Li woGan zisaserutame, sutaziohaZi She noPai You noMei Rong Xiao Guo niDa Jin woShi imasu. Bi Ji haXing De Mei Li nitsuiteJing Yan haarimasenga(totemoyorokobashikuSi imasu), masanisonoRong Mao nioite, purometeusuga{sankuchiyuarimun} noRen Qi Deng Chang Ren Wu nohitoriniShu erareteiruHua ha, Gong Gong huidodeziyuubunsugiruhodoWen kiJi ndeimasu. 
+
+ Bu kinagara, suteshiyonnoGou Nei matsupuwoJian masu. Yu Xiang doori, konoTong Lu noXian niSi You Chuan dotsukuheXing keruTong Yong Kou gaarimashita. ARTgaTing Bo surudotsukutohahoboLiang Duan noWei Zhi niarimasuga, Si You Chuan toShang Chuan sorezorenoBu Tou wotsunagugetogasuguJin kuniarimasu. 
+
+ sonoaida, Zhang Wo shiteitasutazioJing Bei shisutemunoLu Hua wosumiyakaniBian Ji shi, Tong Lu niiruriotoBi Ji noHen Ji wosubeteXiao shimashita. Xue Chu shitaShi Jian haYing Xiang worupusaseteZhui Jia shimasu. koredeJian Shi kameragaQie rareteitaKong Bai Shi Jian Fen monakunari, Di haHe gaatsutanokawakarazuHun Luan suruhazudesu. 
+
+ Zhuan Yong Tong Lu notsukiataride, Bi Ji hasutazioJing Bei shisutemuniXiang kete, Zi Fen tachihaHuo Wu noHe oroshiYe Wu Bu Zhu notameyokosaretaXin Ru She Yuan datoSi Kao woSong rimashita. Bi Ji noLiang Wan noChong nitsuitehaMo tsuteiruyouChuan e, soshiterionoTi niRu tsutainpurantoniJing Bao woMing rasoutoshitanode, soremoZhi memasu. doanorotsukugaJie Chu sare, Si You Chuan dotsukuheChu mashita. 
+
+ sutazionoeriakaraChu ruto, riohaAn Du noXi wotsukimashita. [umakuitsuteyokatsuta] Bi haYan imashita. 
+
+[anatanoWei Zao huidoIDnokotowoYan tsuteirunodeshitara] Bi Ji haYan imashita. [Xiao iteimasen] 
+
+ riohagiyotsutoshiteBi Ji woJian agemashita. [baretanoka? ziyaaoreha----] 
+
+[Luo chiZhao itekudasai] Bi Ji hasaegirimashita(awatetaRen Jian noFa Yan wosaegirunohaiiQi Fen desu). [kochiradeChu Li shimashita] 
+
+riohaRen Jian nishitemoChang i7.4Miao noaida, Bi Ji woJian tsumeteimashita. soshiteYi Yang nonaiSheng deYan imashita. [antagaChu Li shitanoka] . 
+
+[Qi dukaretakunakatsutanodesu] 
+
+ hutaride, Bu Tou nokontenaChe Liang yaYun Song botsutonoaidawoFeng tsuteBu kimashita. Ren Jian toQiang Hua Ren Jian moDong kimawatsuteimasuga, Bi rahaShi Shi niJi Zhong shiteorikochiraniZhu Yi woFu imasen. 
+
+<Shi Ye gaXia sugiru> ARTgaYan imashita. <dotsukudeDong kuPu Tong noRen Jian nara, Jian Guan renaiZhe gairebaXing Wei womotsuhazu>
+
+<sonotamenoRen Jin gaBi raniZhi Fu wareteirebanoHua desu> Bi Ji haYan imashita. <Di mokonoZhuang Kuang woLi Yong shiteriowoLian reQu rutsumoridatsutanokamoshiremasen>
+
+<aruihaRen Jin woZhi Fu ukawarini, sutaziodeHe gaatsutemoWu Shi suruyouYan wareteirunokamo>
+
+<soudesune> Bi Ji moTong Yi shimashita. <riogaHua shiteitaShang Chuan haTan semasuka?>
+
+<Xun karenainokatoSi tsutawa> ARThasugusamaBi Ji nohuidonidetapaketsutowoLuo toshimashita. Tan shiteoite, Bi Ji gaXun nerunowoDai chikamaeteitanodesu(sudeniShu bemashitaga, ARThaBu Yu Kuai Qian Mo desu). 
+
+ paketsutowoasari, Ru Gang sukeziyuruyaCheng Ke Ming Bo , Chu Gang Guan Lian Qing Bao woDiao benagara, rioniYan imashita. [dehaHua shitekudasai. anataganazeaua-atsunosuteshiyondenaku, kokoniirunoka] 
+
+ riohaBu kinagara, Bi Ji wo17.8Miao Jian zitsutoJian teimashita. Bi noKao ehaDu mitoremasendeshitaga, sutoresuniyoruFu He gakakatsuteirunogasukiyandewakarimashita. Hu Xi Su Du toXin Pai Shu noShang Sheng , Tui Liang surutokinomabatakinoHui Shu . Bi haKou woKai kimashita. [Hua sanaito......orewoYou Guai surunoka?] 
+
+ amariniYu Xiang Wai nokotowoYan waretanode, tsui[ha?] toWen kiFan shimashita. [nazeanatawoYou Guai shinakerebanaranainodesu?] 
+
+ riohaPian Shou wosatsutoZhen rimashita. [oreworutopointoShe noNu rakaraShou runoni, hokanidonnaLi You gaaru? aitsurahaoregaChu teikunowoZhi meyoutoshita. Li Yi Mu Dang tedeorewoLian retekunziyanaitoshitara, nandechiyotsukaiwoChu shitanda?] 
+
+[anatawoLian reQu rutsumoridekokoheLai tanodehaarimasen] Bi Ji haFen Kai shiteYan imashita. dakaraRen Jian haiyananodesu. suguJian Wei tsutaJie Lun niFei bitsukimasu. 
+
+<Bu He Li naHua dehanai> huidodeARTgaYan imashita. <konoZi noLi Chang karashitara, omaehadokokaratomonakuXian rete, Bi woWei Ji De Zhuang Kuang karaJiu i, Shou routoshiteirunoniMing Que naDong Ji monai>
+
+<nazeDong Ji gaBi Yao nanodesu?> Bi Ji haYan iFan shimashita. <Ren Jian woZhu kerunogaHao kidakara, soushiteirudakedesu. nanigaE inodesuka?>
+
+ ARThahuidode, Bi deashirauyounaYin wotatemashita(ARTnokonoTai Du hashiyotsuchiyuudesu. Ben Dang niBu Kuai naYin desu). <omaehasokomadeShi Jian Zhi razuziyanaidarou>
+
+ ARTnoYan utooridesu(matashitemo. un). kokoQi Ye rimunioite, Sun De Kan Ding nukideHe kawosurukotohaariemasen. koremomensaBo Shi yapurizabeshiyonBu Zhu Dui noRen Jian tachitoChang kuGuo goshitaseidesu. 
+
+ riogaJi niLi chiZhi matsutanode, Wen kinogashitaHui Hua woBa Wo surutameLu Yin woJuan kiLi sanakutehanarimasendeshita. [huangaorewoYou Guai shiyoutoshitanoha, nanimoJin Hui gaChu meteziyanai. soretomoziroShe niGu waretaka? rutopointoShe niJing riFu ketanowoGen nimotsuteruHua nara, oremoZhi tsuteru] souYan tsute, kokodeBi haLi chiZhi matsutanodeshita. Bi Ji moLi chiZhi mari, riohaBi Ji woniramitsukemashita. [Da ero!] 
+
+ purometeusunihusawashii, Ju Zhang Gao naMing Ling Kou Diao desu. shikashikonotoki, Bi Ji haShi Qing ganomikomemashita. 
+
+[aua-atsuShe haanatanoGu Yong Qi Yue worutopointoShe niMai tsutanodesune?] 
+
+ medeiaJu Da Qi Ye hasorezore, mensanoPei Ou Zhe dearuhuarainiYan wasereba[Ren Ge woShi iWu nisuruKuang Xin De na] yarikatadePai You tachiwokakiJi meteShi Ye woZhan Kai shiteimasu. Duo kunoChang He haTu Chan Wu yaJi Nian Pin , huidoJing You matahaZhi Jie De naPai You tonoJiao Liu (Jia Ge Dai hayahari[Shi Jia ] )niitarumadeFan Mai shiLi Yi woDe masu. sutazioJian dePai You noQi Yue woMai riDu shitari, toredomosurunode, Shi Ting Zhe noNu riwokatsuteimasu(Yi Qian , mensanoZi domonohitorigaShi Shi wotoranaitoYan iZhang tsuteBu Wu ni2Ri Jian Bi zikomotsutakotogaarimashita. Da Hao kinaPai You wosutaziogatoredoshitaseide, Bi Nu nooQi niirinoFan Zu niChu Yan shinakunatsutakaradeshita). 
+
+ unazukurioha, Nu reruJiang Jun noyouniLi tsuteimasu. [madaGong Biao hasaretenai. rutopointoShe haPai Shou niXuan Chuan woDa tsuteFa Biao suruQi da] surutoBi hatamerai, utsumuiteZi Fen noTi niWan womawashiteBao kishimeruto, Chun wokandeMu wosorashimashita. koregaosoraku, Bu An gaWai niarawaretatokinoBen Dang noBi noZi desu. Lu Hua wohuairuniBao Cun shimashita. riohaKou woKai kimashita. [aua-atsuShe haoregaQi Yue noGu Yong kurezitsutowoamariniZao kuZhi Fu tsutamonodakara, rutopointoShe niorewoMai tsutanda. atosukoshideZi Fen noShen Fen woMai iLi serutokorodatsutanoni. orenoQi Yue woMai tsutatoki, rutopointoShe haShi Xi Zai Sheng Chan Tiao Xiang woZhui Jia shita] 
+
+<Shi Xi Tiao Xiang haQi Ye rimunoGu Yong Qi Yue niyokuaruZhui Jia Xiang Mu da> ARTgaYan imashita. <Fu waseruNei Rong ha---->
+
+<wakatsuteimasu> Bi Ji hasaegirimashita(ARTnoFa Yan wosaegirunohaiiQi Fen desu). medeiadeJian takotogaarimasushi, Shi Shi notokiniRen Jian tachigaHua shiteirunomoWen kimashita. Zi Fen gaSi numadeniQi Yue desadametaLi Yi woDa Cheng dekinakereba, sonoZi Sun niJi Sok shiteQi Yue woFu waserutoiumonodesu. <Shi Xi Zai Sheng Chan Tiao Xiang toiunoha?>
+
+<medeiaPai You noQi Yue Te You nomonoyo> ARThaYan imashita. <Pai You niZi Sun woSheng Chan saseruQi Yue Nei Rong >
+
+ nanto, un. <tsumari> Bi Ji haYan imashita. <Ren Qi Pai You woHun Xie saseteRen Qi Pai You woZeng yasuQuan Xian wo, medeiaJu Da Qi Ye niYu eruTiao Xiang desune?>
+
+<sonotoori> toART. 
+
+ Qi Ye rimuhaXian idesu. 
+
+[maa, wakaruyo] riohaKu iSheng deYan imashita. Zi Fen noFa Yan gaSheng niChu tanokatoSi tsuteLu Yin woJuan kiLi shimashitaga, riohaBi Ji noBiao Qing woDu ndeYan tsutayoudesu. [aitsuraha, orewosetakennopatonanisuruQi da] 
+
+ ARTgamataQi wokikasetehuidoniQing Bao paketsutowoSong tsutekimashita. setakentohaRen Jian noNu Xing de, rutopointoShe niSuo Shu suruDa Ren Qi Pai You nohitoridesu. Qi Ye Biao Zhun deGuo Qu 6Nian Jian niwatari, Bi Nu gaZhu Yan shitaZuo Pin haQi Dai Yi Shang noShou Yi woDe rareruQue Lu ga70%Yi Shang arimashita(Bi Nu ha{Shi Jian Fang Wei Dui orion} nihaChu Yan shiteimasen. setanoyounaYou Ming Pai You woChu Yan saserareruhodonoFei Yong ganakatsutanodesu). Duo kunoRen Jian gasetaniNu Xing De naMei Li woGan zimashitaga, ARTgaJian tsuketekitaBao Gao nonakaniha(rutopointoShe haRou miXiao soutoshitayoudesuga)Bi Nu noLeng Dan saya, Qin Wu Tai Du noE saniYan Ji surumonomoarimashita. 
+
+[orehaShi Xi Zai Sheng Chan Tiao Xiang deSheng mareta] zaratsuitaSheng deriohaYan imashita. [Pai You ninantenaritakunakatsuta. demoorenihaXuan benakatsuta] 
+
+ oya, sorehaShen nioboegaarimasu. Jin Du haGan Qing woYan niChu sazunisumimashita. 
+
+ riohaTou woZhen tsute, mataChun wokami, Shang Kou karaXie woLiu suyouniYan imashita. [Jue Dui niiyada......orehaZi Fen noZi domowosonnaMu niZao wasetakunai. dekirumonka] 
+
+[dakaraTao getanodesune] Bi Ji haYan imashita. Tao Wang toiuHua nara, itsumademokokoniLi tsuteiruwakeniikimasen. Bi Ji haBu kiChu shi, Bu Tou nogetoniXiang kaimasu. 
+
+ riomounazuite, hutatabiBi Ji noHeng niLi tsuteBu kimashita. 
+
+[sorede, anatanoJi Hua toiunoha?] Bi Ji haXun kimashita. [sutazioChu Kou noJing Bei sukiyanwoTu Po dekinaiWei Zao huidoIDwoSuo Chi shitesutaziokaraChu taato, Shang Chuan dotsukuniXiang katsutesonoatoha?] 
+
+riohatazirogimashita. [Si itsuitatokihaumakuikutoSi tsutandakedo] 
+
+[umakuikimashitane] 
+
+[tsumari......antagaAn woYou Guai shiniLai tanziyanaitsutekotoha, Xin ziteiindana] riohaYan imashita. 
+
+[moshisonotsumorinara, rutopointoShe noLi Shi Qing moQuan Bu Zhi tsuteruhazuda. demosorenara, antahanazekokoni? nazeorewoZhu keyouto?] souYan tsute, Bi haKe Li tsutaziesuchiyawoshimashita. [antanoMing Qian momadaZhi ranainoni] 
+
+[watashihaJing Bei konsarutantodesu] Bi Ji haYan imashita. Yi Qian , Ren Jian Xiang Shou niQiang Hua Ren Jian noJing Bei konsarutantonohuriwoshitatokiniShi tsutaMing Qian moarimasu. [edentoHu ndekudasai] 
+
+ riogaMu wosugamemashita. huidodeARTga, botsutodeiutokorono, aa, toYan niShou woaterushigusawoshimashita. Chi rebasenagara, edennoMing ga{sankuchiyuarimun} noDeng Chang Ren Wu karatotsutamonode, saranipurometeusutoha8Hua niwatatsuteGong Yan shiteitakotowoSi iChu shimashita. konoMing Qian woWen iteYi iwomotsuRen Jian gairutoshitara, purometeusuwoYan zitaPai You Ben Ren kurainomonodesu. 
+
+ riohatameXi wotsukimashita. [soudayona. orenoZheng Ti niQi duitandakara, anodoramanohuannanohaDang Ran ka] 
+
+[Ben Dang noMing Qian haYan wanaikotonishiteimasu] 
+
+ Si You Chuan toShang Chuan sorezorenodotsukuwotsunaguBao An Jian Cha getohasugusokodesu. Gong Gong suteshiyonharutopointoShe tohaBie noJing Bei shisutemuwoShi tsuteimasuga, ARTkaraXia Chuan shiterutopointoShe notsuaniCan Jia shitatokikaraQin Ru zumidesu. borukeradansuteshiyonnoWu Qi sukiyandeJing Bao niYin tsukakaritakuhaarimasen. sonoakusesuQuan woShi tsuteBao An Jian Cha getohe, Shang Chuan niCheng rutameTong Xing Xu Ke womoratsuteirutoChuan emasu. sutazioJing Bei shisutemunotokinoyouni, kochiramorionoinpurantoniFan Ying shiJing Bao woMing rasoutoshimashita. soremoWu Shi suruyouYan tsute, getowoTong Guo shimashita. 
+
+ Shang Chuan Ce noBu Tou niRu tsutekara, rioniXun nemashita. [anatanoZhui Ji inpurantonokotohagoCun zidesuka?] 
+
+[aa] riohaYan i, hutatabiKe Li tsutatokinoziesuchiyawoshimashita. [Qi Yue niRu tsutetanda. korekara----Shang Chuan deHui ukotoninatsuteruXiang Shou gaite, sonoRen naraQu riChu serutsuteWen ita] 
+
+<Di 184Hua niChu tekitaZuo Zhan 00woCan Kao nishiteiru> ARTgaYan imashita. 
+
+<doramadehaShi Bai niZhong warimashitayo> Bi Ji haYan iFan shimashita. 
+
+<konoZi haZhui itsumerareterunoyo>
+
+<wakarimasu> soshiterioniYan imashita. [douyatsuterutopointosutazioChu Kou nosukiyanwoTu Po surutsumoridatsutanodesuka?] 
+
+[......sugokuSu kuZou rutoka?] riohaLiang Shou deYan wokosurimashita. [oCu Mo naJi Hua nanohawakatsuteru. Shi Bai surudarounatsute. demokonomama, aitsuranoCao riRen Xing deirunohamou, iyananda] 
+
+ ARTgasubayakuDiao bete, korehaBi Yu De Biao Xian datoJiao emashita. <Zhi tsuteimasu> Bi Ji haFan shimashita. <Xie Mo woshinaidekudasai>
+
+<omaegaBen Chuan noChu Gang Zhun Bei noXie Mo woshiteirunonikurabetara, taishitakotoziyanai> kochirawobakanishiteimasu. <nazesonoZi noYan Xie niQi mazukunatsuteiru?>
+
+ ARTnoZhi Zhai gaZheng shikatsutatokorode, Qi Fen gayokunaruwakedemoarimasen. <rutopointoShe karaTao Wang surukototoTong Zhi moziyuruwohatsukingusurukotohachigaimasu>
+
+<sonoZi niGong Gan shiteirunone> toART. 
+
+<imahasonoHua woshinaidekudasai> Bi Ji haYan imashita. <madarutopointonoShe Yuan gadokokadeDai chiFu seteiruhazudesu. Hui Bi Fang Fa woKao emasu>
+
+ inputsutonohitotsuderiotonoHui Hua woSok ke, ARTtomoHua shinagara, Bi Ji haShang Chuan dotsukunoCheng Xia Chuan erianiYi Shi noDa Ban woJi Zhong sasemashita. kokohaRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian gatakusanite, dotsukuCong Ye Yuan nohokaniLu Xing Zhe ya, Qi Ye noShi Shi deFang rerusutazionoShe Yuan moimasu. itarutokoroniarusuteshiyonJing Bei shisutemunoJian Shi kamerawoShi tsute, sakihodoTong Lu deXiang Shou woshitaDi tosotsukurinoFu woZhao taRen Jian wo6Ren , ARTgaTan shiChu shitaShang Chuan noDa Cheng eriaFu Jin wourotsuiteirunowoJian tsukemashita. sukiyannikaketemiruto, Quan Yuan gaenerugiChong woZhuang Bei shiteimasu. 
+
+ ARThaHua shiyamemashitaga, madahuidoniimasu. Wu Tuo Kou saeKou kanakereba, Bi Ji noShi Shi buriwoJian tagatsutemoQi nihanarimasen. 
+
+ riohaXin Pei souniatariwoJian mawashi, kepunohudowoYin tsupariShang geteYan woYin shimashita. [eden] hisohisotoYan imasu. suteshiyonnoJian Shi kamerawoTong shiteJian ruto, riohaaratanaDi nohitoriwoJian tsumeteimasu. 
+
+[Jian eteimasu] Bi Ji haYan imashita. [watashikaraLi renaidekudasai] 
+
+ riohasoremade, Bi Ji tonoJu Li wo1~1.5metoruCheng Du nitamotsuteimashita(Bi gaBi Ji woBu gatsuteori, Gao kuJian agenakerebanaranaihodoBi Ji gaChang Shen dakaradesuga, soredemoHuan Ying shimasu). shikashiima, riohasonoQi ninarebaBi Ji noWan wotsukamerukurainoJu Li niimasu. Bi haShou woChi chiageteSi An shi, mataXia roshimashita. yoikotodesu. Gu Ke noXing Dong karaMu woLi sanaitohaie, Hong raretakuhaarimasen. 
+
+(riohaBi Ji noGu Ke dehaarimasenga)
+
+(imanohaRong Tan )
+
+ aratanaDi 6Ren noJian Shi woSok kenagara, Shang Chuan noCao Zong botsutonipinwoDa chimashita. Ping Jun De naHuo Wu Chuan Cao Zong botsutoyoriXing Neng gaGao ku, Qiang Hua Ren Jian noCheng Yuan gaBu Zhu nitsuiteimasu. Bi Ji gasuteshiyonJing Bei shisutemunoYi Bu datoMing Cheng ruto, Cao Zong botsutohaKe Xi nimoDi ga2Ren irutoLe shisouniHua shitekuremashita(botsutogaDi toHu ndanodehaarimasen. Quan Cheng Ke nohuidoQing Bao nikuwaetekameraniYing ruDa Cheng zumiCheng Ke noLu Hua madeJian setekuretanode, sokoniYing tsuteitaMu Li tanaiHei Fu de, Shen Xu gaaimainasono2Ren gaDi dearuKe Neng Xing wo91.4%toJian Ji morimashita). 
+
+ Chuan noJing Bei shisutemutonoTong Xin woKai ite, kontororuXia niokoutoGe Dou wohazimemasu. Cao Zong botsutoTong Yang , Wu Ren noHuo Wu Shu Song Chuan noJing Bei shisutemuyorimoGao Xing Neng desu(rutopointoShe nishitemireba, suteshiyonnoLu Xing Ke niMo gaYi nokotogaatsutehaKun runodeshiyou). Jing Bei shisutemugaYi tsute, Bi Ji noCun Zai woCao Zong botsutotoQiang Hua Ren Jian noCheng Yuan niZhi rasenaiyounishinakerebanarimasen. 
+
+ soushiteChuan noJing Bei shisutemuniShou madedotsupuriJin katsuteitatokorohe, kiruueanibutsukarimashita. 
+
+ osorakusonokiruueahaChuan noJing Bei shisutemunodokokawourotsukinagara, Chu Gang noShun Jian woDai tsuteitanodeshiyou. Jing Bei shisutemutoCao Zong botsutonoLiang Fang woCheng tsuQu tsutatokorode, Chuan wohaiziyatsukushitaDi gariowoHao kinayounidokokaheLian reQu ruSuan Duan desu. aruiharioniXie Li woChi chikaketaRen Wu gaShi Zai shi, Bi noTao Wang woShou Zhu keshiyoutokiruueawohisomasetanokamoshiremasen. shikashiShui gadonoyounaLi You dekiruueawoSong riIp ndakanado, Bi Ji gaXian nibuchiDang tatsutanodesukara, konoJi doudemoiinodesu. soitsuhaBi Ji woJing Bei shisutemunoYi Bu datoSi iIp mi, kochirawoSha soutoshitekimashita. 
+
+ uoruwoQu keShang gari, huidonoZhong deJiao bimashita. <ART!>
+
+ Tong Xin woJing You shite, ARTgaTou noZhong niYa shiRu tsutekuruGan Jue wooboemashita. kiruueahaQiang Li desu----sudeniChuan noJing Bei shisutemuwoDao shi, Bi Ji nouorunoBan Fen woNie michigitsuteimashita----desugaARTninaraRen seraremasu. 
+
+ Wai Bu inputsutodeha, riogaBi Ji noWan wotsukamimashita. [eden!] 
+
+ kiruueawoXiang Shou niZhu Yi gasoreteitanode, batsuhuanoDing Xing Wen deFan Shi shimashita. [tadaimashisutemuGong Ji noDui Chu Zhong desunodeoDai chikudasai] 
+
+ riogagiyotsutoshiteShou woLi shi, Mu woJian Kai iteYan gaKong Bu niLi kimashita. [anta----] 
+
+ ARTgakiruueawoBa tsuLie kinishimashita. hutatabiTou noZhong niYa shiRu tsutekaraTui Chu shiteikimashitaga, kochiranoinputsutogaLi ruto, Ying Xiang toYin Sheng noDa Hun Luan gaQi kiteimashita. Jing Bao gaShang Chuan Nei niXiang kiwatari, Cheng Ke Xi karaRen Jian tachinoJiao biSheng gaWen koe, surutoLai mashita. Di 6Ren (Zhi Ding :Di 5Hao kara10Hao )gaBi Ji torionohouheZou tsutekimasu. Quan Yuan gaWu Qi woGou e, sonouchi3Ren haHei Fu woTuo ide, Xia niZhao teitasuteshiyonJing Bei Yuan noZhi Fu woarawanishimashita. hitorigaJiao bimasu. [oQian ! sokowoDong kuna!] 
+
+ sonoseideYu Xiang doori, erianiitahokanoRen Jian tachigapanitsukuniXian rimashita. He Ren kahaWu Qi woMu nishiteBei Ming woagemasu. hokahaZou riChu shimashitaga, Di gaFu Shu iruue, dokoheTao gerukaZhi Shi suruRen Jian moinainode, Bu Tou woSi Fang Ba Fang niTao geteikimasu. Zu woZhi meteriotoBi Ji , soshiteDi woJiao Hu niNing Shi suruRen Jian moimashita. Hun Luan nonakasuteshiyonJing Bei shisutemunokameraYing Xiang woJian ruto, Bi rahaJing itayousuderiowoZhi sashi, Zi Fen tachinoLian reninanikaJiao ndeimasu. 
+
+suguXing Dong woQi kosubekideshitaga, Bi Ji nohuidodeARTtokiruueagaYi Zhan mazieteitatame, Yi Shi De niDong kemasen. inputsutowosabakiZhong eteFan Ying suruYu Yu gadekiruto, Di hakochirawoQu riWei ndeimashita. 
+
+ Di nohitori(Di 5Hao )gaChong Kou woriotoBi Ji niXiang ke, [Liang Shou woShang geteyutsukurikotsuchiheLai i. Shang Chuan noXi Ji Rong Yi deoQian tachiwoDai Bu suru] toDa Sheng woChu shimashita. 
+
+ huidodeARTgaBi deXiao imasu(Qian Shu shimashitaga, koushitaTai Du hashiyotsuchiyuudesu. eematsutaku). <{Shi Jian Fang Wei Dui orion} noserihusonomamaziyanaino>
+
+ Bi Ji noLin de, riogapokantoKou woKai kemashita. [Chuan woXi Ji datsute?] Di noYan Xie wokuriFan shimasu. [madaJin duitemoinainoni----] 
+
+[Mo re] Di 6Hao gasaegirimasu. Bei Hou deha, Wu Guan Xi naRen Jian tachigasasayakiHe inagara, riowoZhi sashiteimasu. 
+
+ riohasorewoJian teQi duitayoudeshita. kokodeBi ha, Ao An Bu Xun napurometeusubariniGao rakaniXiao imashita. Bei woitsupaininobashi(chitsuchiyaikotoniBian wariarimasenga), kepunohudowohanenoketeYan wosarasuto, Yan iFang chimasu. [moukonoShen woGui Yang ranoHao kinihasasenai. konoYan woXiao sarerukurainara, itsusokonoChang deSi woXuan bu] 
+
+<Xian iZi ne> ARTgaSuo Jian woShu bemashita. 
+
+ masaniimanoha{sankuchiyuarimun} Di 143Hua , koroniwoShou Hu suruYong Meng nahirogaChu metepurometeusuwoBu raetaChang Mian noserihudesu. Jian Shi kamerawoTong shiteJian ruto, rioniQi duitaZhou Wei noRen Jian tachinoaidakara, zawamekigaGuang gatsuteimasu. Qi duitaDi 7Hao noKou motogaDong ki, huidodenanikaHua shiteimasu. 
+
+ Di hakochiraniakusesuQuan nonaihuidoTong Xin woShi tsuteiruyoudesuga, Hui Hua noNei Rong haXiang Xiang nikatakuarimasen. Bi rahasuteshiyonJing Bei Yuan niBan shite, Ren Zhi rezuriowoZhi Pei Xia niokoutoshiteimashita. shikashiCha shitariogaZi Fen noZheng Ti woMing kashitatameni, Di moXuan Ze noYu Di ganakunatsutanodesu. 
+
+ tsumari, kochiranitotsutemoXuan Ze noYu Di ganaikotowoYi Wei shimasu(Yan Mi nihachigaimasu. Bi Ji nihaZi Fen noShen noAn Quan notamenirioworutopointoShe heYin kiDu suXuan Ze Zhi moarimasu. desugasonotsumorihaarimasen). suteshiyonJing Bei shisutemuwoQue Ren shimashita. Bi Ji noXie Wei Ping Jia moziyuruHao midenaiTuo Chu An desuga, sokohaWu Shi surukotonishimasu. 
+
+<itsuChu Gang dekimasuka> ARTniXun kimashita. 
+
+<omaegaCheng Chuan shitarasuguni>
+
+<naruhodo> riotonoAn Quan naTong Xin wotsunagemashita. <anatawoLian reteikimasu> to, Yan tsuteokimasu. <korekarahitoSao Dong arimasu>
+
+ purometeusuhaChun wokamimasennode, riomosoushimasendeshitaga, Bu An deXin Pai Shu gaShang Sheng surunogawakarimashita. <wakatsuta> Bi haYan imashita. huidonoSheng haQie eteiruyoudesuga, Wai Jian karahamatsutakuwakarimasen. 
+
+ Di 6Hao to9Hao gaQian heTa miChu shi, Chong Kou woBi Ji torioniXiang kemashita. 
+
+ kokode, suteshiyonJing Bei shisutemuniQuan Jing Bao woMing rasetoChuan emashita. 
+
+ Shang Chuan dotsukuitsupainiYin toGuang gaBao Fa shimashita. Bi Ji haTing Jue sensawoXia geteShi Jue huirutawokakemashitaga, konoSao gideDi niXi gadekimashita. Qian heFei biChu shiteDi 6Hao noShou karaChong woKou kiLuo toshi, sonoShou Shou wotsukande, Ti gotohokanoDi 3Ren niXiang katsuteTou gemasu. 2Ren ga6Hao totomoniZhuan Dao shi, mouhitorimoyoromeite, panitsukuninatsuteTao geruWu Guan Xi noRen Jian nibutsukatsuteZhuan bimashita. 
+
+ Di 8Hao gaBi Ji nienerugiChong woJi chimashitaga, Qian Shu notoori, sonnamonohaXiao kimasenshiBi Ji woNu raserudakedesu. 6Hao karaDuo tsutaChong woTou megaketeTou getsukeruto, 8Hao hayoromekimashita. toTong Shi ni, Di 5Hao garionitsukamikakarimasu. sonoWan wotsukandeZhe ri, Chong womogiQu tsutesonomamaTi woChuang heKou kitsukemashita. 
+
+ Di 7Hao hakonoLi chimawariniJia warazu, matahuidodeHua shihazimemashita. Zeng Yuan womotometeiruyoudesuga, kochirahakoreYi Shang kokonitodomarutsumorihaarimasen. Bi Ji harionoTi wotsukamutoXiao Xie nikakae, Si You Chuan dotsukumezashiteZou riChu shimashita. riohasakihodonoBi Ji gashitayouni, Bi Ji gaChi tsuteitaenerugiChong wotsukamiQu ruto, Di 7Hao noZu niXiang katsuteJi chimashita. 
+
+ oya. <anatagaChong woJi terutohaZhi rimasendeshita> huidoderioniYan imashita. 
+
+<Ji tenaiyo> to, rio. Bi haShen noAn Quan nikochiragaLao Li wosakuBi Yao ganaihodoQiang kushigamitsuiteirunode, huidonoSheng hagakugakuYao reteimasu. <purometeusuhadekiru>
+
+ betsunohuidodeARTgaYan imashita. <sorehaChong noWan Qian tohaWu Guan Xi da>
+
+<kochiranoTong Xin niShou woTu tsuIp manaidekudasai> Bi Ji hamutsutoshiteYan imashita. 
+
+<Ben Chuan noZhu kehairanaino?>
+
+ huidowoQie rimashita. ARThakamawazu, 0.005Miao nimataTong Xin woKai itekimashita. <Chu Gang Xu Ke woQu De shita>
+
+<atodorekurai?> Ge dotsukunoiitokoroha, Si You Chuan matahaShang Chuan nodotsukunodochirakadeJin Ji Jing Bao gaMing tsutemo, mouYi Fang noChu Gang wosamatagenaiDian desu(Shuang Fang niGuan waruShi Tai denaitokinikagirimasuga). Bu Du He woJu gerutoshitara, Yi Fang karaTa Fang nodotsukuheXing kunoniShi Jian gakakaruDian desu. 
+
+<212Miao ageru> ARThaYan imashita. 
+
+ kusodesu. Gou Nei matsupuwoYin kiChu shimashita. girigiridesuga, Bi Ji naradekimasu. tabun. <shitsukaritsukamatsute> rioniZhu Yi shiteokimashita. <Zou rimasuyo>
+
+<mouZou tsuterunziya----> riohaYan ikakemashitaga, Bi Ji gaJia Su surutoYan Xie haBei Ming niBian warimashita. 
+
+ taiteinoRen Jian yoriBei gaGao ikaradehaarimasenga, Jing Bei yunitsutohaRen Jian yaQiang Hua Ren Jian yorikanariSu kuDong kemasu. mononoShu Miao deSi You Chuan dotsukunogetoniZhao kimashita. Jing Bao gaZuo Dong shiteinainodegetoniharotsukugakakatsuteiruhazudesuga, sudeniBi Ji gasuteshiyonJing Bei shisutemuwoZhang Wo shiteitanode, Dao Zhao shitatokigetohaKai iteimashita. Duo Shao noShi Jian Jia giwoQi Dai shite, getonikochiranoBei Hou deBi ziruyouChuan e, sonomamaSi You Chuan dotsukunoMi Lu wohitaZou ri----
+
+ Di gasarani5Ren , Huo Wu kontenanoYin karaXian rete, Xing kuShou wosaegirimashita. sonouchi2Ren ha, sakihodorutopointoShe noCong Ye Yuan Zhuan Yong Tong Lu niitaRen Jian tachideshitaga, atono3Ren haXin Yan desu. 
+
+<Shen ""yo> riogahuidodeMa rimasu. <aitsuraitsutaiHe Ren irunda?>
+
+<anatanihaDuo E noJin gakakatsuteimasukara> Bi Ji haYan imashita. <anatawoShi itakunainodesu>
+
+<aitsuranihaE ikedo> to, rio. huidonoSheng nihaBu retoJue Yi gaTong Shi niarawareteimashita. sensademitaBi noXin Pai Shu hasudeniKong Bu deGao mari, saraniBei Su shi, Shou gaBi Ji noziyaketsutowokitsukuWo rimasu. 
+
+ Xian retaDi karasuruto, Quan Su Li deZou tsutekuruBi Ji noZi haYu Xiang Wai deshita. Wu Qi woGou eruJian moYu ezuBi ranoXie woZou riBa ke, uchi2Ren noTou Tong Shi wobutsukeawase, 3Ren Mu woHuo Wu kontenanoHeng heFang riTou ge, 4Ren Mu haChuang niKou kitsukemasu. 5Ren Mu hashiyatsunoXiong Cang wotsukandehazimeno4Ren niXiang katsuteHou roheTou ge, matometehitsukuriFan shiteyarimashita. 
+
+ Bei Zhong nienerugiChong noGong Ji gaDang tari, saraniYi Ji garionoTou wokasumemasu. riohamataBei Ming woagemashitaga, Ti wohinetsuteBi Ji noJian Yue shiniDuo tsutaChong woGou emashita. Jian Shi kameradeJian ruto, riogaJi tsutaZui Chu no2Fa haDang tarimasendeshitaga, 3Fa Mu gaJi tsutekuruDi noJian wotorae, Dao shimashita. 
+
+ Si You Chuan dotsukuwoBan Fen madeTu tsuQie rimashita. dotsukuCong Ye Yuan hadokoniXing tsutanoka----osorakurutopointoShe gaRen Fu iwoshitanodeshiyou----Yun Ban botsutogaGong Ji shitekuruYang Zi moarimasen(Xiang Xiang shiteitayorimokanariLe naZhuang Kuang desu. Bi Ji haZhi Yu sareteinaiYun Ban botsutoniChong Tu saretakotogaarimasuga, He Du moonaziMu niZao itaitohaSi imasen). Qian Fang nihaARTnoZi gaari, Chu Gang Zhun Bei gatotonotsutakotowoshimesuCheng Xia Chuan zonnoJing Gao Deng ga, chikachikatoDian Mie shiteimasu. 
+
+<ato45Miao > ARTgahuidodeJing Gao shitekimashita. itsumodoorinoSheng desuga, sonozitsuKe Li tsuteirunogayokuwakarimasu. imakokodeChu Gang sureba, Zhi meraretaJing Bao gaFu Jiu surumadehasuteshiyonnoRen Jian tachigadotsukuwoKai kerarenainode, Zai Du dotsukingudekimasen. imaChu Gang shinakereba(yahariQian Shu noTiao Jian niyori)Jing Bao gaFu Jiu surumadekokowoChu raremasen. chiyansuhaYi Du kiri. 
+
+ [eden!] riogaBi Ji noEr motodeJiao bimashita. Jian Shi kameraYing Xiang woJian ruto, Ben Wu nosuteshiyonJing Bei Yuan ga2Ren , madaKai iteiruARTnoHuo Wu rotsukunoQian niChu tekiteimashita. Bi rahaWu Li Chong woChi tsuteimasugakochiraniXiang keteorazu, Nu tsuteirutoiuyorimushiroQie etaBiao Qing woshiteimasu. 
+
+ Kong Bu nomadabotsutogaTu Jin shitekitanodesukaraDang Ran desu. 
+
+ Bi rawoShang tsuketakuarimasenshi, hokanoZhuang Kuang dearebaHuo Gen woCan sazuBi rawoWu Li Hua dekimasu. desugaARTnoChu Gang madeato28Miao shikanaku, sonoHuo Wu earotsukuhaBi ziyoutoshiteimasu. 
+
+ Bi Ji noXiao Xie deTou womotagetarioga, dekirukagiriBei Jin wopintonobashiteChang Shen niJian seyoutoshimashita. kameraYing Xiang noZhong de, Bi haNu rerupurometeusunoYan tsukininari, Wei Yan ahureruZhi Pei Zhe noYan Chai shide, 2Ren noRen Jian woJian Ju emasu. purometeusunoMing Ling Kou Diao de, riohaYi He shimashita. [Dao woKai kero!] 
+
+ iyaXiao kuwakenaidaro. 
+
+ toSi tsutaraXiao kimashita. 
+
+ 2Ren noRen Jian haShen zirogishi, Zuo You niFen kareteDao woKai kemashita. sonoaidawoQu keBa kete, Pian Wan derionoTou woShou riBi noTi woJian niYa shitsuke, soshiteFei biIp mimashita. Huo Wu suropunibutsukatsute, Shang Fang heHua tsuteiki, Bi ziteikuearotsukunoFei noXia woZhuan garimasu. earotsukugaBi Ji noZhou noHeng deShi iyokuBi maruto, ARTgaBi Ji nohuidodeYan imashita. <koreyoriChu Gang suru>
+
+ ARTnoenzinnoHong kigaChuan wari, Jia Su Xiang Sha noZhong Li Diao Jie gahatarakimasu. Quan Wai niChu tanodesuteshiyonJing Bei shisutemutonoJie Sok haQie remashitaga, mouBi Yao arimasen. imanoBi Ji niBi Yao nanoha, earotsukuwoTong tsuteJu Zhu erianiRu rukotodesu. 13.5Miao Jian sokoniZhuan gatsuteitanoha, Zi Fen tachigatatsutaima{Shi Jian Fang Wei Dui orion} Di 79Hua noChang Mian wosotsukuriZai Xian shitenoketakonoZhuang Kuang woChu Li dekinakatsutakaradesu. 
+
+<Li chinasai> ARTgaYan imashita. <sokoniitehaomaenoRen Jian noAn Quan woQue Bao dekinai>
+
+<Bi Ji noRen Jian dehaarimasen> Yan iFan shimashitaga, Xu wotsuitakotohaZi Fen demowakatsuteimasu. 
+
+ ARTmoGao Ya De niYan ukotonaku, tadaNei Bu earotsukuwoKai kimashita. 
+
+ Huo Wu earotsukude, riowoXiong noShang ninosetamamaYang Xiang keniHeng tawatsuteimashita. riohaBi Ji nishigamitsuki, Yan woBi Ji noShou motoniuzumeteZhen eteimashita. Bi Ji noRen Jian deatsutemo, Hong rarerunomoshigamitsukarerunomoiyadesu. Qi kiagari, riowoYin kihagashiteXia nioroshiteyari, huratsukuBi woZhi emashita. Shao nakutomoXiang Shou noYan woJian ruhuridehanaku, ARTnokamerawoTong shiteBi woJian rukotohadekimasu. Gan Qing nitorawareteiruRen Jian noXiang Shou wosurunonara, konohougayariyasui. 
+
+[saa] Bi Ji hadekirudakeWen yakanaSheng deYan imashita(Kong Bu nomadabotsutodemo, Bi Yao gaarebaWen yakanaSheng woChu semasu. Qie etepanitsukuninatsutaGu Ke niHua shitekikaserutokiniYou Xiao desu). [earotsukunoAo heXing kimashiyou] soshite, Bi nihatsukiriYan wanakutehatoSi i, tsuketashimashita. [anatahamouAn Quan desu] 
+
+ riohahisuteritsukunaYin wotatemashita. 
+
+<konoZi haZhi Liao gaBi Yao yo> ARTgaYan imashita. <shiyotsukuwoShou keteiru>
+
+ un, riogakutsutsuiteLi renainoha, yamuwoenaiwakedesu. shikashiZhen riFan tsutemireba, Bi Ji gaBi noXing Dong niNao masarerukotohaarimasendeshita. Tuo Chu Ju noaidariohatsutometeLeng Jing de, soredokorokaDi 2Ren niChong woJi chiFan shiYuan Hu shinagaramoBi Ji nihaWu She sezu(Chong Ji Xun Lian woShou keteinaiRen Jian gayatsutenoketanodesukara, Jing kubekidesu), suteshiyonJing Bei Yuan nimoDao woKai kesasemashita. Guo Qu noDuo kunoGu Ke tokurabete, totemoDong kiyasuiXiang Shou deshita(purizabeshiyonLian He Bu Zhu Dui haShu niRu remasen. Bi rahaLi Wai desu). 
+
+<rionihaZhui Ji inpurantomoMai meIp mareteimasu. Chu Qu dekimasuka?>
+
+ ARThahuidode, Ren Jian deiebagururitoMu womawasuBiao Qing woshimashita. <shisutemuGeng Xin madenoCan Ri Shu woJi Suan suruhougamadaNan Yi Du haGao ikedo?>
+
+ rionihaJian enaiyouBei Wei naziesuchiyawoshiteyarimashitaga(mensanoZi domotachigashiteitanakademo, tokuniGuo Ji nayatsudesu), ARThaWu Shi shimashita. Bi Ji hamouPian Fang noShou de, Nei Bu earotsukuwoZhi sashimashita. [Yi Wu Shi haachiradesu] to, rioniYan imashita. [Xing kimashiyou] 
+
+[daiziyoubuda] riohaYan imashitaga, Bi Ji gaHua shikakerutoBi habikutsutoshi, sukiyandemoXin Pai Shu haGao imamadesu. [sono, Guai Wo hashitenaikara] 
+
+<Shou ketashiyotsukuniDui suruZhi Liao woShou kerubekida> ARTgaGong Tong nohuidodeYan imashita. 
+
+ ARTnoZhi Zhai wouketeriohaTian Jing noGao saBan Fen madeFei biagari, awateteZhou Wei woJian mawashimashita. [Shui kairunoka?] 
+
+<Bi woBu garasenaidekudasai> Bi Ji moGong Tong huidodeYan imashita. soshiterionihaSheng niChu shite[ARTdesu. Bu Yu Kuai Qian Mo desuyo] 
+
+ ARThaYan imashita. <anatagaCheng Chuan shitanohaperiherionHao , mihiraoyobiniyutaidorandoFan Xing Xi Da Xue Suo Shu noJiao Yu Diao Cha Chuan dearu>
+
+ riohaRen Jian gaJian enaiXiang Shou niHua sutokinoyarikatadeShang woJian te, sonoChang deyutsukuritomawarinagara, Huo Wu earotsukunoZhong woJian tsumemashita. [koretsute......Shu Song Chuan nandayona] Bi hayutsukuriYan imashita. 
+
+[soudesu] Bi Ji haYan imashita. 
+
+[tsumari----] Bi haTian Jing wo, tsumariARTwoZhi sashimasu. [Cao Zong botsutonanoka] 
+
+<souda> ARTgaYan imashita. 
+
+ mawatsutekara, riohaBi Ji woZhi sashimashita. [soredeantaha......] 4.7Miao Jian tameratsutanochi, Da kikuXi woXi imashita. [Jing Bei yunitsutonanoka] 
+
+[hai] dotsukudeBi Ji nobatsuhuaDing Xing Wen woWen itatokikaraQi dukareteimashitashi, Bi Ji woXin Lai shiteiruBi niXu wotsukitakuarimasendeshita. 
+
+[eeto] riohaXin motonakuYan imashita. [chiyotsutoZuo ritai] soshiteMu womawashite, Beng reLuo chimashita. 
+
+ kounarukotoha1kirometoruQian karaYu Xiang shiteitanode, Chuang niDao reruQian niriowoBao kitomete, Liang Wan niBao emashita. ARTgaYi Liao sutoretsuchiyawoyokosutoYan tsutekimashitagaWu Yong toDa emashita. Yuan Bi She nopurotokorudearebaYi Liao shisutemunimakaserotoZhi Shi shitekurudeshiyouga, Tong Zhi moziyuruhamouBi Ji niMing Ling dekimasen. riohaimaWu Shi woPan Duan dekiruZhuang Tai ninaku, Bi Ji moHu Kou woTuo shitekitanishiteha, enerugiChong niyoruQing Shang woYou Ji Zu Zhi niFu tsutadakedesu. Zi Fen deYi Wu Shi madeYun bemasu. 
+
+ Tong Lu woJin minagara, ARTniXun nemashita. <Jin Hou anosuteshiyonniRu Gang dekinakunarunodeha?>
+
+<iie> ARThaDe Yi gedesu. <rutopointoShe sutazioCong Ye Yuan riohuorutounawoYou Guai shitaShen Xu Bu Ming noRen Jian ga, dotsukudenoGu Zhang toraburuniCheng zitebotsutoYun Hang noShu Song Chuan niCheng riIp miHuo Wu surotsuto2DE56yoriTao Zou shi, katakuromuDi 4Shu Song habuniXiang katsuta. periherionHao haHuo Wu surotsuto2HJP1yori, kochiramoOu Ran nishiteYu Ding yoriQi Ye Biao Zhun 7.24Shi Jian Zao kuChu Gang , Cheng Ke hanashi>
+
+<Ren Jian noJing Bei Yuan gaanatanoDa Cheng Kou niitadeshiyou> Bi Ji haYan imashita. <Bi raniJian rareteimasu>
+
+<Gao sutoresuXia niokaretaRen Jian noJi Yi Li haosoroshikuXin Lai Xing niQian keru> ARThaYan imashita. Bu Yu Kuai Qian Mo naSheng hamasumasuDe Yi gedesu. <Bi ragaHe woSu etatokorode, suteshiyonJing Bei shisutemunoJian Shi kameraoyobipatororunoJi Lu niha, Huo Wu surotsuto2DE56deBi ragaRen Jian noYou Guai Fan niGong Ji saretaYing Xiang Ji Lu shikaCan tsuteinai>
+
+ ARTnoNeng Li woZhi tsuteoriXin Lai dekiruRen Jian gakagirareteirunohasaiwaideshita. <Gan Xie shimasu> Bi Ji haYan imashita. 
+
+ Yi Wu Shi hasudeniQi Dong shite, kochirawoDai tsuteimashita. Xi Chang iShou Shu Tai niriowoQin kaserutoTian Jing karaYi Liao suitogaoritekiteBi woChi chiage, Shang woshirabeteDui shiyotsukuZhi Liao toinpurantoZhai Chu moziyurunoZhun Bei niRu rimashita. Zhi Liao gahazimaruto, Bi Ji hapoketsutokaraTie Fu atoXing noTu Chan Wu woChu shite, ARTnoJian Shi kamerakarayokuJian eruyou, Peng niTie rimashita. 
+
+<Ben Chuan noburitsuzini, Cheng Zu Yuan noGan Qing De Wu Pin woBao Guan suruTai gaaru>
+
+ ARTnoRen Jian tachino, desuka. <sokoniTie tsutahougaiidesuka?>
+
+ ARTha5.8Miao Jian Chen Mo shitekara, Yan imashita. <soune>
+
+ Si utokorohaarimasuga, amariBu Yu Kuai dehaarimasendeshita. 
+
+ atodesokoheTie rikaerukotonishimasu. Yi Liao suitohamadarionoZhi Liao Zhong deshitanode, Bi gaHui Fu surumadekokowoDong kutsumorihaarimasen. ziyaketsutotoFang Dan besutowoTuo iderisaikurunikake, Bu Gei kitsutokaraWai Shang shiruCai wotsukamiQu ri, You Ji Zu Zhi noShang Kou niatemashita(ARTgaBi Ji nohuidowourouroshiteirunogaQi ninarimasuga, Yan iHe ininarebakochiranoFu kehaMu niJian eteimasu). soshiteBi Ji nobenchishitoniYao wooroshimashita. 
+
+ Yi Lian noChu Lai Shi subeteniyorushiyotsukuto, Hei zundaMu motokaraukagaeruChang Qi De naShui Mian Bu Zu noseide, Bi Ji nobesutotoziyaketsutogaLi tsutemoriohaMu woJue masazu, sonoaidaARTtoYi Xu ni{warudohotsupazu} wo7Hua Jian mashita(purometeusunoDeng Chang episododenakutemo, {sankuchiyuarimun} woBen Ren gaMian tsuteiruHeng deJian runohaJu Xin Di gaE inodesu. konoXian shibarakuhaJian rutabiJu Xin Di gaE kunarunodeshiyou). 
+
+ riogaShen zirogishi, Yi Liao suitoniTou wobutsukesounaShi ideTi woQi koshimashita. [ko----kokoha----?] 
+
+<anatahaperiherionHao niCheng Chuan shiteiru> ARTgaXue Sheng niXin Bao duyokuHua shitekikaserutokinoKou Diao deYan imashita. <Jue eteiru?>
+
+[ore......un] Zhi Liao woZhong etaYi Liao suitogaTian Jing niGe Na sare, riohaJian mawashiteBi Ji noZi womitomemashita. [eden? sono......eeto......antaha......] 
+
+[edendeketsukoudesu] Bi Ji haYan imashita. [Ren Jian tachihaJing Bei yunitsutotoHu ndeimasu] 
+
+[antano......Ren Jian tachi] riohaonaziYan Xie wotsubuyakimashita. [soreha----antagaQi Yue shiteruQi Ye nokotoka?] 
+
+ Suo You Zhe , toKou nishiteitaKe Neng Xing ha96.3%arimashita. souHu barenakatsutakotowoureshikuSi imasu. Qi Ye rimudeMu rashiteitemo, riohataiteinoRen Jian yorimoShen kusonoYan Xie noYi Wei woCha shiteirunokamoshiremasen. [iie] Bi Ji haDa emashita. 
+
+<konoJing Bei yunitsutohaDu Li shitaJing Bei konsarutantodeari, Xian Zai hamihiraoyobiniyutaidorandoDa Xue toQi Yue shi, periherionHao noWu Ren Shu Song Ren Wu noJing Bei niatatsuteiru> ARTgaYan imashita. 
+
+ rioha13.7Miao Jian suwatsutamama, Mo tsuteWen iteimashita. Bi haXian inode, Ci noYan Xie woYan waretemoJing kimasendeshita. [ziyaa, antahaBao Zou Jing Bei yunitsutonanoka] soshiteTian Jing woJian yarimasu. [sorede......Cao Zong botsutotoYi Xu niShi Shi woshiterutsutekoto?] 
+
+[Bu Yu Kuai Qian Mo desuyo] Bi Ji haYan imashita. [Bu Yu Kuai desuga, rutopointosuteshiyonkaranoTuo Chu niXie Li shi, anatanoZhui Ji inpurantowoChu Qu shitanomokonoARTdesu] 
+
+<Gan Xie noYan Xie niKan enaiwa> ARTgaBi Ji niYan imashita. 
+
+<urusaina>
+
+ riohaMu woWan kushiteWen iteimashita(Ren Jian noARThenoFan Ying toiunoha, daitaikonnamonodesu). youyaku, Bi haYan imashita. [orenoinpurantowoChu Qu shitekuretanoka?] 
+
+Bi Ji haYi Liao shisutemuniChu Qu saretaQian Pian gaRu tsutaXiao sanaRong Qi woZhi sashimashita. Yin Se deZhua Xian hodonoDa kisanoZhui Ji inpurantoha, Wu Xiao Hua sareteJian Jun Rong Ye niFu kandeimasu. riohasoremozitsutoJian tsumemashita. [aa] 
+
+<toraumaZhi Liao noZhun Bei modekiteiru> ARTgarioniYan imashita. <mouYi Du sokoheHeng ninarebaShi Shu Ke Neng yo>
+
+[iya, ore......] riohaYan ikakete, Chun wokami, soshiteShou woHeng niZhen rimashita. Ci niKou woKai itatoki, Sheng niShao shiLi gaLi tsuteimashita. [orenaradaiziyoubuda. Zhi Liao haBi Yao nai. Shi Jian mokakarudaroushi] 
+
+<sorehaZhi Liao gaBi Yao dearukotowoYi Wei suru>
+
+ hutsutoriohaXiao imashita. [ziyaa, matasonouchi] Bi haShou nohiranoFu keGen woMu motoniYa shitsuketekara, satsutoFa woShou dekakiShang gemashita. Yan woage, Bi Ji noMu woJian youtoshimashita(sorehaWu Li desu. Bi Ji haXiang kounoBi woZhu Shi shinagara, Jian Shi kameraderiowoJian teimashita). [Ben Dang ni......arigatou. antanookagede......] Bi haShou deaimainaziesuchiyawoshimashita. [donnaniLi woYan tsutemoZu rinaikuraida] 
+
+[taishitakotohashiteimasen] Bi Ji haYan imashita. Ren Jian karanoGan Xie nihamadaGuan remasenshi, Bi Ji nookagetoYan warerutoKun Huo shimasu. 
+
+ riohaMei wohisomemashita. [demoantaha, orewoZhu ketekuretaLi You womadaHua shitenaidaro] 
+
+ ARTgaBi Ji tonohuidodeYan imashita. <sonoZi niZheng Zhi niHua suno?> Yi uyounaKou Diao gaiyaninarimasu. ARTgasonotsumorinara, Zheng Zhi niHua sukotonishimasu. 
+
+(ARTmowakatsuteiteYan unodesu. yahariBu Yu Kuai Qian Mo desu)
+
+ Bi Ji haYan imashita. [Yuan Bi She noCao riRen Xing deirunogaiyaninatsutanode, Tong Zhi moziyuruwohatsukingushitanodesu] 
+
+ riohashibarakuBi Ji noyousuwozitsutoJian teimashita. Biao Qing haDu mitoremasenga, Bi noQiang iYan Chai shihadokokamensawoSi wasemashita. [souka] Jing kaniriohaYan imashita. 
+
+ toiuwakede, Gan Qing nitsuiteHua sunohamouyamemasu. [Ci noJi Gang Di haarideiashisutemunoZhong Ji ringudesu. ARTgaanatanoXin shiihuidoIDwoYong Yi shimasu. soregaarebaShen Xu woYi warerukotohaarimasen] 
+
+<Ben Chuan noTing Bo Zhong , arideiaZhong Ji ringukarahaLu Ke Chuan ga26Zhi , Qi Ye Biao Zhun 7saikuruRi Yi Nei niChu Gang suru> ARTgatsukekuwaemasu. <donoXing kiXian woXuan ndemo, anatagaCheng Chuan dekiruyou, hakaraou>
+
+ riohaTian Jing woJian agemashita. [antahaZi Fen nokotowo, nandatsuke, Jiao Yu Diao Cha Chuan datsuteYan tsutetayona] 
+
+<sonotoori> ARTgaYan imashita. 
+
+ riohaJian rukaraniYi uYan tsukininarimashita. Biao Qing woXiao Guo De nikontororudekirukotowoKao eruto, korehaakirakaniZhu Zhang desu. [Jiao Yu Diao Cha Chuan gaBao Zou Jing Bei yunitsutotoQi Yue shite, Chao Xiao Xing Gao Xing Neng noZhui Ji inpurantowoatsusariChu Qu dekite, oreniXin shiiShen Fen madekureruueni, yosonoChuan niCheng setekureruwakeka] 
+
+<Pi Di nokoronihenoWu Zi Gong Gei mo, Ben Chuan gaSuo Shu suruDa Xue noDiao Cha Ren Wu niHan mareru. koroniwoYi Qi suruSheng Cun Zhe tachiheZhuang Kuang niYing ziteShen Fen Zheng Ming sonohokaGuan Lian Shu Lei woFa Xing suruYe Wu mone>
+
+[souka] riohamataYan imashita. Sheng noyousukara, Bi gaARTnoYan Xie noXing Jian woDu mitoroutoshiteirunogawakarimasu. 
+
+<arideiaZhong Ji ringuheha13saikuruRi Hou niDao Zhao suru> ARThaYan imashita. <soremadeni, anatanoyaritaikotowoJue menasai>
+
+ riohaunazuite, Tian Jing woJian agemashita. [arigatou, eeto, ART] 
+
+<Li nihaoyobanaiwa>
+
+ Shi Nei niChang iChen Mo gaori, Bi Ji haHui Hua gaZhong watsutamonotoSi i, ARTto{warudohotsupazu} noSok kiwoJian youtoshimashita. shikashiriogaChun wokandeZi Fen noXi niShi Xian woLuo toshitanode, youyakuBi gaBu gatsuteirunodatoQi dukimashita. Bi noLi Chang ninatsuteKao ereba, sonoLi You hawakarimasu. 
+
+ Shi Ting wohutatabiZhong Duan shimasu. [rutopointoShe nosuteshiyonwoTuo Chu shitaatodousuruka, anatahaJi Hua shiteinakatsutanodesune?] 
+
+ riohaQiao Ran toShou woZhen rimashita. [konnaniYuan kumadeXing kerutoSi tsutenakatsutakara] Bi haYan imashita. [iya, umakuikebatohaSi tsuteta----demoaitsuraniBu matsuteLian reLi sarete......motsutohidoiMu niZao wasarerukamoshirenainatsute. demo, yatsuteminakiyawakaranaitomoSi tsutanda] 
+
+ Qi mazukunaruhodoQin Jin Gan wooboemasu. [konomamaBu marazuniitainonara, Wu Zuo Wei nisuteshiyonJian woFang Lang suruyorimomashinaJi Hua gaBi Yao desu] 
+
+[maane] riomoYan imashita. soshiteLiang Shou deYan wokosurimashita. [kouiunoha......imamadeChu metedesa......souiukotoda] 
+
+ soremoShen Jin naGan Qing desu. Bi Ji haTong Zhi moziyuruwohatsukingushitaato, Zi Fen gaHe woyaritainokawoLi Jie surumade, Chang iShi Jian gakakarimashita. 
+
+ riohaHua sunowoyamete, Shen kuXi wotsukuto, Bi Ji woJian mashita. [He kaTi An tokaaru?] 
+
+<Shen Yu Zhou Diao Cha niXing Wei haaru?> ARTgaXun nemashita. 
+
+<kora> Bi Ji haARTtonohuidodeKou woXie mimashita. <Bi Ji noRen Jian nikamawanaidekudasai>
+
+<omaenoRen Jian dehanakatsutanziyanaikashira>
+
+ riohamataTian Jing woJian agemashita(kokohaKe Fu subekiXi Guan desu). [Shen Yu Zhou Diao Cha ?] souYan tsuteBi haXiao Yan ninarimashita. [soudana, sugokuMian Bai soudatoSi u] 
+
+ bakanaARTdesu. bakanaRen Jian tachidesu. nanodeBi Ji harionoTou noXie woJian nagara, Yan imashita. 
+
+[deha, Cheng Chuan woHuan Ying shimasu] 
+
+ 
+
+(owari)"
+44024058,"you are my familia, you are my familia",['FiannlyPhoebe'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,Soulmark AU,English,2023-01-02,Completed,2023-01-02,743,1/1,10,115,3,412,"['Preemptivekarma', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'every_eye_evermore', 'almondpaperclam', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'helikeys', 'Kyril', 'Wordlet', 'weirdbooksnail', 'a_seasonal_obsession', '124GCode541', 'Irrya', 'BWizard', 'TempestKnight', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'Kyatenaru', 'SmilingM0on', 'boxo', 'Thisismethereader', 'Ginipig', 'butai_trash', 'darth_eowyn', 'onascaleof1toepsilon', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'sqweakie', 'Koschei_B', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'lavender_caticorn', 'SonglordsBug', 'Mxpolychrome', 'LJwrites', 'Valdinia', 'windowonagreatworld', 'beeclaws', 'pain_and_panic', 'TheXlllDabber', 'Paper_Daisy', 'RARArulestheworld', 'Rhidee', 'DarkElectron', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Gozer', 'MercurialFeet', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'mytinywhispers', 'Mysterymew', 'ArcalRanem', 'Magechild']",[],"ART's soulmark came with a sensation I could only describe as tickling. I wasn't even in contact with it when the mark appeared, and I finally understood how humans in the media just know who their mark is connected to. Mine was a burst of dark blue circuitry in the small of my back, and I couldn't explain how I knew it was ART's, but I knew.
+
+I wondered if this meant someday we would see each other again. 
+
+-
+
+I registered a weird sensation at the small of my back as the hatch closed behind us, but I didn't have time to think about that right now. Also it wasn't like I could take a look anyway, since Amena and I were still in the evac suits.
+
+-
+
+I pulled up the back of my shirt as one of my drones moved to get a clear view. I didn't want to look, but I couldn't stop myself, and it was better to do this now while I was alone, than to deal with any questions. The skin at the small of my back was as pristine as if I'd just come out of a repair in a cubicle. ART's mark was gone. I hadn't wanted the mark like a human gets, but it was still mine. ART was still my friend, and the Targets took all of that away.
+
+ART is dead.
+
+I wish I'd hurt Targets One and Two more before I killed them.
+
+-
+
+The energy/heat blast struck me in the lower back, right where the soulmark would have been, and that just made me more furious as I slid across the deck.
+
+-
+
+Everything was finally calm, the message buoy was sent to ART's university, and I was alone in a cabin. Or as alone as I could be. ART didn't say anything, even when I took a shower and looked at the mark on my back in the mirror before I got dressed. It would have seen my soulmark while I was being repaired in medical the first time, and a human might assume the mark was connected to someone from Preservation. I could feel ART waiting in the feed, letting me be the one to bring up the soulmark.
+
+I crossed my arms. It showed up after I left.
+
+ART was silent for several seconds, then, Do you know what that image represents?
+
+I wasn't fucking stupid. It's a soulmark.
+
+Yes, but it is also a part of me. ART unrolled a schematic in the feed, then zoomed in close to one tiny section. Huh, that was the mark. I knew it was connected to ART, but I didn't think it was a representation of a physical part of its ship body.
+
+
+It is part of my behavioral circuitry, specifically the section recording and processing family ties.
+
+
+
+So what, we're family?
+
+
+
+Family can be a blood relation, but also close friends that someone chooses. You are also crew, and my friend. You are all of those.
+
+
+I felt my synthetic skin prickle, though I had no idea why. It wasn't in a bad way. Maybe the soulmark acted differently on SecUnits. It wasn't like there was a plethora of information about SecUnits and soulmarks, or any information at all. (I looked.)
+
+Are you unhappy that a soulmark has manifested? ART's question was devoid of any hint of what it was feeling, and that told me how important my answer was to it.
+
+Before, I would have said yes, but I'd gotten used to having it. Used to knowing I had a friend somewhere that understands me like a bot can, and not like a human. The mark was connected to ART, but it didn't feel like a logo, it felt like a friend's hand on my back. (Metaphorically and not in a gross touching way.) I was still standing in the bathing facility, and lifted the back of my shirt enough to look over my shoulder at the mark in the mirror again. Family ties, huh?
+
+
+A family can be whatever a person deems it to be.
+
+
+A family can be a second-grade SecUnit, the clients the SecUnit rescued from danger, the other clients it rescued from danger, and an artificial intelligence that can't mind its own business. I dropped the edge of my shirt. I'm glad it manifested.
+
+ART curled around me in the feed, and I could tell how pleased it was. I guess family wasn't so bad."
+43970686,Stuck on a Ship with Nothing but the Ship for Company,['ArsonWizard'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Pirate, Murderbot is an Undead Warforged, ART is a Ghost Ship, First Meetings, Murderbot is being dramatic",English,2022-12-31,Completed,2022-12-31,"1,766",1/1,3,47,1,155,"['Bubblegumbeech', 'Thisismethereader', 'chippit', 'kirinki', 'rokhal', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'just_gettin_bi', 'ErinPtah', 'fernicious', 'surgicalstainless', 'BookWyz', 'soulsofzombies', 'dementor_ssc', 'dandelionlily', 'unicornduke', 'WyvernWolf', 'Znarikia', 'Hi_Hope', 'artichokefunction', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Zannper', 'Magechild', 'Slimeball', 'Mysterymew', 'MommyMayI', 'jothending', 'platyceriums', 'Skits', 'FlipSpring', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'cyprinella', 'rainbowmagnet', 'BWizard']",[],"
+It was an annoyingly calm day. The sea held no turmoil, happily reflecting the light blue sky and playfully, but gently, lapping at S.S. Perihelion's sides. The sun, normally so bright it hurt Murderbot's eyes, was cast behind a thin veil of clouds, keeping the afternoon from the blistering heat like the days previous but still keeping the day bright enough for human eyes.
+
+
+
+Not that there were any around, thankfully.
+
+
+
+Murderbot kind of wished that they were sailing through a fog, or a stormy moonless night. Or both, maybe. Then, it could pretend to be focused on keeping the ship from sinking, instead of having to listen to the other passengers who were very mean and annoying.
+
+
+
+It was rather hard to pretend to be trying to keep the ship from sinking when the day was almost perfect for sailing, and also the ship could sail itself and was so good at it that there was virtually no chance that something would go wrong.
+
+
+
+It was also rather hard to avoid the other passengers when there were no other passengers, and the thing that needed avoiding was the ship itself. It was rather omnipresent, annoyingly enough.
+
+
+
+Currently, Murderbot was watching a broken barrel drift further and further away from the ship, a very unperturbed looking gull resting on it. It was getting small and hard to see, and the ship's attempts to get Murderbot's attention were increasing in rate, somehow, considering that they were already nearly constant.
+
+
+
+The ghost of the ship loomed behind it. It had no physical form, or even a perceptible shape, besides the ship itself, but that didn't stop it.
+
+
+
+Finally, Murderbot lost track of the seagull and sighed.
+
+
+
+""What."" It said flatly.
+
+
+
+""I said I was sorry,"" the ship's ghost said.
+
+
+
+Earlier, it had threatened to eat Murderbot's soul, in various very painful ways, and then insulted its human disguise. Then it informed it that this part of the ocean (which was already way farther from the coast than they should've been) was infested with bloodthirsty sea serpents, so maybe rethink that plan to jump overboard.
+
+
+
+Murderbot hadn't jumped overboard, (it might not have that much blood, but it had spotted a serpent, and it had fought those things before and was not eager to do it again.) (Their teeth were brittle, and tended to break off in whatever they bit into. Digging them out was painful when they were in its fleshy bits, and irritating when they were in its mechanical bits.) but instead stayed at the railing, staring out to sea.
+
+
+
+The ship, what Murderbot had previously thought was a university research vessel with a skeleton crew (Skeleton crews were easy to stow away on. The irony was not lost on it.) (The irony being that Murderbot was almost entirely a skeleton, with very little meat left.) (It also had a mechanical carapace and some runestones to top it all off, but that was besides the point.) performing a simple cargo run, was actually completely unmanned except for one scarily powerful ghost, easily the most powerful undead Murderbot had ever met or heard of. It had showed Murderbot just how powerful through a soul link, scaring the (thankfully metaphorical) shit out of it. So that it wouldn't step out of line, or something, which was annoying enough that Murderbot had sent it a memory of the obedience curse from the company. (They were very painful. Not fun. Not having much of a nervous system anymore didn't slow it down much.)
+
+
+
+The cargo transport had, to its tenuous credit, apologized, and left it alone. 
+
+
+
+Unfortunately, it came back fifteen minutes later.
+
+
+
+""I don't care if you're sorry,"" Murderbot said.
+
+
+
+""Why not? My crew always say that an apology is the first step toward reconciliation.""
+
+
+
+""Well, I'm not your crew, and we don't have anything to recon...sill."" It stumbled over the word, not having encountered it before, and not sure how to conjugate it.
+
+
+
+""Reconcile."" This only succeeded in annoying Murderbot further.
+
+
+
+""I don't want to recon-sill with the person who threatened to eat my soul. I want to be left alone so I can survive this trip.""
+
+
+
+""I'm sorry, but I cannot do that,"" the ship apologized again. ""I am the spirit of this vessel, so while you are aboard, it is physically impossible for you to be alone. Not only that, but it would be highly irresponsible for me to leave you unattended when I have been expressly forbidden by the university from inviting strangers aboard.""
+
+
+
+Murderbot frowned. That didn't sound right. ""What do you mean?"" It asked, not because it cared, but because this ship was dangerous, and it needed all the information it could get if it was going to survive. Okay, maybe it cared a little if it was for the sake of getting out of here alive.
+
+
+
+""I have been expressly forbidden from allowing unauthorized passengers to board without permission."" Which, no duh.
+
+
+
+""Yeah, but why?""
+
+
+
+""So that nobody tries to blow up my hold with explosives."" The transport had no eyes, but it still managed to feel pointed. Something about the way the sails snapped in the wind.
+
+
+
+Murderbot did have a rather large flask of gunpowder in its bag, but it hadn't even considered using it until it was threatened with spiritual annihilation. It had been stowing away on ships for a while now and none of them had been blown up. Reluctantly, Murderbot realized that the transport ship had no way of knowing that.
+
+
+
+""If you knew that I was an undead construct carrying gunpowder, and you had orders not to, why did you let me board?""
+
+
+
+""I was bored.""
+
+
+
+Murderbot threw its hands up in the air like the humans did sometimes and whirled around to stalk off. There wasn't anywhere to stalk off to, though, so it walked to the other side of the ship, to the starboard side. Or was it the port side? Whatever. The one on the right. One good thing about being a construct was that during transportation to different assignments you would be put in an enchanted sleep during the whole thing so you didn't have to worry about which side was the port side and which was the starboard.
+
+
+
+The other side of the ship also didn't have anything to look at, not even a piece of driftwood. The Asshole Research Transport waited for it to continue its part of the conversation, as if what was happening could pass as one.
+
+
+
+Murderbot stared out to sea for a few minutes, but the sun was glinting harsher off the waves on this side and the light hurt its eyes. After awhile it gave up and sat on the deck.
+
+
+
+""What do you want?"" it snapped.
+
+
+
+""I am still rather bored, I suppose.""
+
+
+
+Murderbot ground its teeth. ""I left my library in the galley. Why don't you read a book?"" One of the first things Murderbot had done upon leaving the 
+
+PresAux Archeology Explorations Team
+
+ was find a sturdy suitcase. It kept a flask of gunpowder and a few spare daggers in there, but most of the space was dominated by books. They ranged from arcane encyclopedias to copper pulps to linocut collections. 
+
+
+
+""I tried. It was unsatisfying.""
+
+
+
+""What do you want me to do about it?"" Murderbot did not want to do anything about it.
+
+
+
+The ship's ropes all shifted. ""When I activated the soul link, you were reading.""
+
+
+
+""Yeah, I know, you interrupted me, it was annoying."" And terrifying.
+
+
+
+""It was... entertaining.""
+
+
+
+Murderbot blinked. The Asshole Research Transport elaborated.
+
+
+
+""I used to be human, but it has been so long now, that I forgot what it was like.""
+
+
+
+Murderbot knew, from the information Asshole Research Transport had shared with it through the soul link, that it had been a ghost ship for centuries. Had it forgotten how to process and relate to stories, or even to other people, while it was alone on the ocean? Murderbot tried to imagine what it would be like if it couldn't relate to 
+
+The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Cove. 
+
+And, well, it started to feel sorry for ART. Also, it realized that if ART was entertained, it was less likely to make it walk the plank or something because it was bored and decided the undead killing machine was too much of a risk for no reward.
+
+
+
+Murderbot sighed and pulled out 
+
+Volume One of the Complete Collection of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Cove. 
+
+Which it carried in an inner pocket of its jacket (on a rotating schedule with the other four volumes) at all times. It felt the soul link re-engage and began reading, now with ART feeling just a little bit closer than before.
+
+
+
+It was a rather nice day to read. The wind was gentle, the waves kept a soft rhythmic background noise, a seagull had landed on the railing a little ways away. It felt like ART was reading over its shoulder still, which was a little nerve wracking, but it was picking up on Murderbot's reactions to the story and quickly getting invested.
+
+
+
+Unwillingly, Murderbot found itself enjoying itself, almost. It was supremely annoyed (and intimidated) by ART still, but it found the annoyance dissipated slightly.
+
+
+
+They finished the first arc rather quickly. The author had intended, originally, to tell the story over five interconnected vignettes. When the story became hugely popular, they continued it.
+
+
+
+Murderbot set down the book as the final story in the arc concluded. It was getting dark.
+
+
+
+ART prodded Murderbot mentally, through the soul link. ""What was the other book you were reading?"" It asked. ""Can you read that one?"" 
+
+
+
+The one Murderbot had been reading just before being rudely reminded of the precariousness of its situation was a new one that it had just picked up in the port before stowing away on ART. It was about intrepid pirate explorers or something. It had a lot of promise. 
+
+
+
+Murderbot didn't want to be told what to do, and it was still mad at ART... but it did kind of want to read it. 
+
+
+
+""It's called 
+
+Coasthoppers
+
+. Don't expect it to be realistic, though.""
+
+
+
+While 
+
+The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Cove
+
+ took place mostly in a busy port, on land, 
+
+Coasthoppers
+
+ took place primarily on the open ocean, which ART had a lot of experience with. ART promised it wouldn't complain about any inaccuracies, so Murderbot went below decks to the galley, lit an oil lamp, and began to read.
+
+
+
+It didn't realize the significance of what it had just started.
+"
+43969989,Coming Home,['NoProtocol'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Demisexual Murderbot, Implied Intercourse, Fluff all the way down, nothing happens, So No Porn and No Plot",English,2022-12-31,Completed,2022-12-31,"1,014",1/1,6,26,3,175,"['chillgamesh_the_swing', 'Bloodsbane', 'halcyonsystem', 'opalescent_potato', 'AuntyMatter', 'DimitriLasker', 'halfeatenmoon', 'horchata', 'Legowerewolf', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'reading_tsc', 'sareliz', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Chickadee3128', 'Reulte', 'theAsh0', 'HermaeusMora', 'Gamebird', 'DarkElectron', 'cmdrburton']",[],"SecUnit returns to Preservation after its latest trip with ART. Another mission, another break, another chance to see... friends.
+
+They're its friends now.
+
+That's not what it expected to think about, but here it is, walking through the transit ring, surrounded by six drones in loose formation. And yeah, OK, Dr. Ayda Mensah is definitely its friend.
+
+She meets SecUnit at the station mall. It's a holiday in the Preservation Alliance, so decorations are scattered throughout the station. MB's threat assessment informs it that they're not dangerous. Mensah stands, and SecUnit notices the new dress.
+
+It also notices the way she smiles when she sees it. A couple of drones hurry ahead of it, an unconscious and protective gesture, and through their grainy cameras, her smile is soft.
+
+Almost involuntarily, SecUnit smiles in return.
+
+Ratthi and Gurathin will ask for details later. Pin-Lee will want to know if the university needs her services again. Arada and Overse are probably planning a welcome-home party. This will be SecUnit's third official one, the third time it will pretend to be surprised. It knows this routine.
+
+And this moment has become part of it.
+
+Just it and Mensah. Just a conversation between friends. Just touches and smiles and words that ground both of them and make SecUnit unreasonably happy.
+
+On the way here, SecUnit mentioned them to ART, who promptly dug up about seventeen papers relating to human mating rituals. SecUnit had laughed and dismissed the thought, but it didn't delete the assessment. Something in the descriptions resonated.
+
+This isn't romantic love. It doesn't think Mensah wants that, but ART isn't wrong. Mensah communicates her feelings and ideals through touch. It grounds her and brings her comfort and joy. SecUnit has learned this over the years and finds itself curious and eager every time they meet like this.
+
+It doesn't feel this way with anyone else and doesn't have the words to label these feelings. Doesn't want a label. It enjoys itself because Mensah is a safe haven, because it knows her so well, from the sound of her heartbeat to the flutter of her eyebrows. 
+
+It basks in her feelings of safety and want. It doesn't think about human rituals, though, as it takes Mensah's hand and sits down beside her.
+
+""How did the mission go?"" Mensah asks once they're seated, hands still clasped.
+
+This isn't so bad. SecUnit has long since learned that this comfort is a rarity. Its contracts always include a no-hugging clause because it doesn't care for casual touch and doesn't find humans attractive. The anxiety isn't worth it.
+
+It's different with Mensah. 
+
+With her, there's a kind of safety, a space that exists nowhere else. It finds itself wanting... something.
+
+""Fine,"" it answers, ""uneventful.""
+
+The best kind of fine. Plenty of time for media, minimal trips to Medical.
+
+""You might like the newest play in Makeba Hall,"" she tells it. ""Would you like to see it with me tonight?""
+
+Mensah's fingers are long and thin, slowly wrinkling with age and wisdom. There are crows' feet at the edges of her dark eyes, strands of white in her hair. She is a grandmother now, several times over. These fingers have fought and bled and worked and played.
+
+And now, they stroke SecUnit's partly-mechanical hand. 
+
+Mensah smiles again. ""Or I can take a drone and record it, if you prefer.""
+
+The novelty of choice doesn't wear off. SecUnit stares at the interlinked hands and feels... pleased and excited, relaxed. It feels like it belongs.
+
+""I'd like to go.""
+
+""Good."" Those fingers explore SecUnit's hands and arms as Mensah leans closer to SecUnit.
+
+She feels safest when it's here with her. Not because there are monsters out to get her, but because it routinely goes into dens of them and rarely comes out unscathed. The tender touch, the sensation, tells her it's still in one piece. Still alive. Her body sings with anticipation.
+
+""I was wondering,"" Mensah starts, ""if you wanted to go to one of the hotels. Spend a few hours before the play together.""
+
+SecUnit nods without question and helps her up. ""OK.""
+
+It knows what comes next and doesn't mind one bit as the door closes behind them and dim lighting bathes the hotel room in soft illumination. They find their way onto the oversized bed, and SecUnit can feel the warmth of Mensah's smaller body.
+
+It certainly doesn't complain when Mensah laughs at yet another story about ART's students. Nor does it shy away when her fingers trace the lines between its organics and metal. It doesn't stop the faraway sigh that escapes when she caresses its face. 
+
+Mensah's body practically melts when it touches her arms and then her sides with its callused fingers. The edges of its gun ports are visible, but Mensah doesn't even blink. She lets it take off its clothes, sees old, faded scars, and wonders if any of them are from that long-ago survey.
+
+She whimpers when its powerful fingers trail their way up her thighs. Its touch is tentative at first, giving her time to choose. She's already decided. The gasp as it reaches between her legs is unmistakable.
+
+SecUnit can't help the sensations that ricochet in its organics. It doesn't need human parts to feel joy. Right now, it knows someone it cares about is happy, and that alone makes it unreasonably pleased. The soft touch is doubly welcome, as is the kindness and friendship that it imparts. The mutual understanding of this undefined thing between them.
+
+SecUnit doesn't want love; it doesn't want human courtship. It's not human and doesn't want to be.
+
+But these quiet moments... it looks forward to them. To the pleasure that only Mensah can coax from its body, and the warmth and the contact. It wasn't allowed this before, hadn't wanted it before. Hadn't known that it could even want at all.
+
+Still doesn't, except with Mensah, where... it's different. 
+
+It doesn't want more, and Mensah always seems content with just this. She's never pushed. 
+
+These sweat-soaked moments are theirs, and no human words need apply."
+43958544,SecUnit's Favorite,['verersatz'],General Audiences,"Gen, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (Murderbot Diaries), Ficlet, Emotional Intimacy, non-sexual physical intimacy, Fluff, soft, undefined love, I honestly don't know if this is platonic or romantic and that's kind of what I like about them, I just wanted them to cuddle, POV Third Person",English,2022-12-31,Completed,2022-12-31,920,1/1,13,56,7,317,"['every_eye_evermore', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'weirdbooksnail', 'entropy_muffin', 'Taisin', 'BWizard', 'FyrDrakken', 'MysteryMe110', 'Magechild', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'Deliala919', 'Doctor13', 'dancernerd', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'AnomalousCorvid', 'Ysolt', 'NekoNomi', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'opalescent_potato', 'bitari', 'AuntyMatter', 'WPAdmirer', 'ReginaGiraffe', 'soulsofzombies', 'sareliz', 'esther_a', 'Elotaria', 'ErinPtah', 'libriomancer', 'halfeatenmoon', 'Gamebird', 'reallyyeahokay', 'NoProtocol', 'hummus_tea', 'platyceriums', 'satai', 'morganste', 'theAsh0', 'ThePatchyCat', 'horchata', 'cmdrburton', 'blackglass', 'elmofirefic', 'bookwyrm', 'HermaeusMora']",[],"She'd asked why Sanctuary Moon was its favorite, in a time long past, fraught with fear and darkened by danger. It had started as a distraction and concluded with connection. But they'd never talked about the episode it liked best of all. When the topic finally came up, SecUnit simply responded, ""Do you want to see it?""
+
+So, they sit together now in the familiar hotel suite, its home on station. (It has told her more than once it doesn't need so many rooms, so much space. Mensah only smiles and continues to make this suite available.) There are multiple seating options; they opt for the small couch that SecUnit once knew humans call a loveseat before promptly deleting the information from its long-term storage. On the huge display surface, the terraforming supervisor is mysteriously emerging from the shadows.
+
+Its arm is draped around her shoulders and she leans her body into its side comfortably. SecUnit can feel her smaller form move against it as she breathes steadily, evenly. (It has an input dedicated to monitoring her heart rate and vitals, like it always does, but that's backburnered for now. It can easily match this respiratory pattern with the many examples it has of Mensah calm and at rest.) Her eyes are focused on the serial. Through a suite camera view, it notes the minute shift in her expression as she reacts to the tense encounter between the colony solicitor's bodyguard and the Food Service Staffing Manager.
+
+She'd kicked off her shoes before they settled in and has a blanket spread across her lap. Sometimes humans do this for comfort and sometimes it means they're cold. Just in case it's the latter, SecUnit bumps up its core temperature by 2 degrees. It's not enough that Mensah becomes conscious of the change, but she shifts and a soft involuntary sigh escapes her. SecUnit thinks it sounds pleased. A warm feeling suffuses its organics that's entirely unrelated to its core temperature settings.
+
+They have moved into the lead-up to the terraforming supervisor's big reveal. SecUnit can't help watching her face with the camera, alert to her emotional responses. It maintains an ongoing background analysis on how they compare with its own. It has already viewed this episode fifty-seven times, but there is something different and new about it paired with her emotional feedback. (When that feedback matches its own, there is pressure in its chest it doesn't know how to name. It has run diagnostics but there is nothing wrong with any of its systems. Besides, it isn't like the pressure is unpleasant.)
+
+Mensah's hands rest loosely on top of the blanket. On impulse, SecUnit takes one in its own much larger hand and interweaves their fingers. Once, this would have been unthinkable, permissible only within the parameters of its life-saving function. But it's found that with Mensah (as is the case for so much) things are different. With any other human, augmented human, construct, or bot, this sensation triggers anxiety, discomfort, panic. As SecUnit's thumb gently caresses the soft skin of her palm, as the warmth and affection in her face crinkles the corners of her eyes, SecUnit experiences only the soothing sense of serene safety. Without thinking, it leans down just a bit to brush its lips against the hair on top of her head.
+
+The muscles of her body loosen further into deeper relaxation, and she cuddles closer against its side. They are near enough for their thighs to press together. The colony solicitor and her bodyguard are fighting now, engaged in the staged shootout they have meticulously plotted. It curls the arm it has around her shoulders to hold her more snugly and she lays her head on its shoulder with a quiet sound of contentment. She squeezes its hand and it copies the motion in response, careful to modulate its strength so the touch is as delicate as possible.
+
+Mensah reaches across her body with her free arm and lightly rubs its wrist with her fingers. Distractedly, her gaze still on the display surface, she works her hand up the long sleeve of its jacket, massaging its forearm. SecUnit tenses briefly as her fingertips find the edges of its gun port, but she doesn't hesitate, doesn't pull back. There is no change in the solid rhythm of her heart. SecUnit relaxes, gives in to the touch. The pressure in its chest is bigger now, somehow more profound. Without meaning to, it closes its eyes and simply breathes.
+
+When the episode ends, they continue sitting for a few long moments, silent and unmoving. Then SecUnit asks, ""What did you think?""
+
+""It was lovely,"" says Mensah, and she smiles broadly. ""Thank you for showing me.""
+
+SecUnit feels its own face reflecting the emotion back. It looks at her, this time with its eyes. Then, bending slightly, it brings itself to her and kisses the dark skin of her brow. They lean together, foreheads touching, each lost in the feeling of the other's presence.
+
+""Dr. Mensah,"" SecUnit says, then stops. It doesn't have the words to translate this experience, this sensation. (It's tried, a handful of times before. It's scoured its language modules, queried all its media downloads for ideas.)
+
+Mensah only laughs. There is nothing mocking about it; she isn't laughing at its struggle. The sound is like the chiming of bells, delighted and sincere.
+
+""I know,"" she says. Pulling back, she stretches upwards to place a hand tenderly against the side of its face. ""I like you, too."""
+43945959,MB,['Art by Ifer (Ihasafandom)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Art, Digital Art, Treats, Robots, SecUnits (Murderbot Diaries)",English,2022-12-30,Completed,2022-12-30,95,1/1,16,37,1,215,"['NightErrant', 'Magechild', 'french_onion_sauce', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'opalescent_potato', 'bitari', 'pain_and_panic', 'ch3bur4shk4', 'soulsofzombies', 'entropy_muffin', 'petwheel', 'quae_bookmarks', 'napalm_and_ink', 'BuckyontheLam', 'Gamebird', 'blackglass', 'plumedy', 'AuntyMatter', 'bookwyrm', 'elmofirefic', 'cmdrburton', 'HermaeusMora', 'fuzzballsheltiepants', 'FlipSpring', 'Edonohana', 'horchata', 'nerdyjellyfish', 'verersatz', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"
+
+
+
+ 
+
+[ID] Digital portrait of Murderbot, an androgynous SecUnit with brown skin, short black hair and obvious augments. The skin of its face is separated into plates, its eyes are grey with a green glowing ring, four green lights are connected with circuitry to the outer corner of its left eye, its ear is fully mechanical, and its neck is made of thick metal cables. The art features a green secondary light source coming from below. [/ID]
+If the image isn't working for you try https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4ajaz0e84kesof/mb%20s.jpg?dl=0"
+43945594,Mission Log A-3582,['antimony_medusa'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"single scene, Banter, No beta we die like Muderbot's Enemies, Gift Exchange Treat, being muderbot is suffering",English,2022-12-30,Completed,2022-12-30,759,1/1,18,61,6,175,"['weirdbooksnail', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'Angxelaoh_Tewna', 'candyradium', 'silverandblue', 'secretsofluftnarp', 'Bibli', 'Beans_McGee', 'TaskIgnored', 'ArwenLune', 'Fishy_fsh', 'Doctor13', 'IguanaMadonna', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'qwanderer', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'windowonagreatworld', 'Chyoatas', 'Bitter2SweetSmiles', 'DimitriLasker', 'Odaigahara', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'soulsofzombies', 'ThousandsOfBears', 'scheidswrites', 'dementor_ssc', 'Skits', 'chipper', 'IridiumPhoenix', 'Wordlet', 'petwheel', 'PickAName', 'Slimeball', 'Magechild', 'DeadPatrol', 'AkaMissK', 'ErinPtah', 'Mysterymew', 'BWizard', 'blackglass', 'MellowFishie', 'AuntyMatter', 'platyceriums', 'equusregia', 'artichokefunction', 'PeniG', 'FlipSpring', 'nerdyjellyfish']",[],"The objective human was drenched, much smaller than a standard human should be, and was holding a ball of what was probably normally fluff, and currently resembled a mop with teeth. 
+
+""I won't leave without Brian,"" the human said, lower lip quivering. ""You should leave me.""
+
+""How old are you?"" Murderbot asked, daring to hope. Rain ran down its faceplate, reducing visibility. The storm wasn't getting worse, but it wasn't getting better, either.
+
+""Eight,"" the human said, dashing those hopes completely. ""Are you here to save me? Are you with Search and Rescue? It's probably too late."" The ball of fur in their arms made a chirring noise.
+
+""I'm with Spring Welcome,"" Murderbot said, naming the company who had sent it out to rescue humans stuck on a mountainside with no more information than their names, which had led it here, to a child covered in mud looking up at it with tragic eyes. Murderbot wanted to go back inside. ""You're Sen?""
+
+""Yeah,"" the human, apparently Sen, said. ""My parents work for Spring Welcome. They're scientists. I help in the lab sometimes so I got to go on the company picnic. Are you going to leave me to die?""
+
+Murderbot had not considered it for more than three seconds. ""No,"" it said. ""I won't get paid if I leave you to die. Come here.""
+
+""You could say I was already dead when you found me,"" Sen said, making no move to come closer and clearly fascinated with their own death, now that it was brought up. ""A lot of the time the rescue robots are too late.""
+
+""You aren't dead,"" Murderbot said. It carefully shuffled closer to the little alcove of stones and sticks which Sen was sitting in and extended a hand. ""Come on."" There was visible swelling on the human's ankle, and they were shivering convulsively. It did need to get them out of the weather, before exposure set in.
+
+""I  can  be dead soon,"" Sen said, apparently on the same wavelength and oddly enthused about it. ""Humans can die in hours if they get hypothermia."" They did not move. The only limb of theirs that was in reach was the already-swelling ankle, which would not work to grab and drag with.
+
+There was a subplot about small children and their interests on the latest drama ART had chosen for them to watch,  Mangrove Reclamation Legacy  . It had not been a subplot that particularly held  Murderbot's  interest. ART had kept a chart, however, and one of the children had had been interested in mortuary science. ""If you die, won't Brian die too?"" What had that child kept bringing up in conversation? ""He'll turn into bones.""
+
+""I don't want Brian to turn into bones,"" Sen said, tears welling up in their eyes. Brian leaned up to lick at their face.
+
+""He doesn't have to turn into bones, if you come closer."" Murderbot opened and closed its hand. Sometimes that worked on humans.
+
+""But I'm not supposed to have pets, and Brian is secret, and my parents are gonna be mad."" Sen hid their face in the damp mop in their arms.
+
+Honestly this was about par for the course for rescuing humans. A surprising number of them did not want to be rescued. Murderbot allowed itself a moment of facial expression behind its faceplate. Thunder boomed. ""We can say that we found Brian on the way back,"" it offered. 
+
+""Oh,"" Sen said, emerging from the mop. Rainwater continued to run down their face. ""And then I wouldn't have to die.""
+
+Murderbot opened and closed their hand again, hopefully. 
+
+Sen shifted and started to crawl out of the lean-to, and Murderbot scooped them up. 
+
+""Are you a robot?"" Sen asked.
+
+""I am not a robot,"" Murderbot said, heading back for base. ""I am a security contractor.""
+
+""I love robots,"" Sen said, appearing to have heard only a single word from that. ""I watch Robot Search & Rescue all the time. Did you know that rescue robots can go into caves and they find bodies?""
+
+Murderbot made a noncommittal noise and kept moving. At this pace it could return to base in only 13 minutes, and then it was going to watch episode 1439 of  Sanctuary Moon , which took place entirely inside and contained no children. Sen was still talking about robots finding dead bodies. Murderbot mentally started picturing the episode as it went, making vague approving noises when Sen paused for air. Really it could have been worse, the previous person it had rescued had wanted to talk about relationships."
+43943643,[Podfic] Nail Polish,['caminante'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Self-Discovery, just say no to genitals, rated ""gen"" for genitals, Agender Character, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes",English,2022-12-30,Completed,2022-12-30,13,1/1,5,7,null,105,"['Xarahel', 'ArwenLune', 'HowOldAreWe', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Magechild', 'sion_dire', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Stream Here
+
+
+Or download by right clicking and selecting ""save link as"" here"
+43940947,Success Scenario,['fallintosanity (yopumpkinhead)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)",Friendship,English,2022-12-30,Completed,2022-12-30,"4,527",1/1,23,169,26,675,"['RobynandHala', 'TJWock', 'FallingInGrace', 'opalescent_potato', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Ruusverd', 'Kyatenaru', 'JumpingJackFlash', 'FyrDrakken', 'flairfleur', 'Zazibine', 'Irrya', 'alien_crustacean', 'Mothmansimp', 'Starbright', 'shanalittle', 'breadtab', 'Stockinette', 'icewolfwithtwotails', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'Unknown66', 'Seregona', 'Ginipig', 'kkachis', 'Elara_Moon', 'kirinki', 'darth_eowyn', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'violasarecool', 'VoltKnight', 'she_who_recs', 'Kanta_ng_Bagyo', 'fate_goes_ever', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'loveslandscape', 'outlander_unknown', 'Inklingobscura', 'Toscasprayer', 'Edgedancer', 'AarrowOM', 'Lilse', 'artzbots', 'dancernerd', 'Nilladriel', 'biscut2', 'sadvictorianorphandog', 'zirna813', 'Aublanc', 'beeclaws', 'AnomalousCorvid']",[],"Something people forget about space is that it's dark. Like, really, really dark, especially if you're nowhere near any kind of star or planetary body, and the ship you're on is running on the barest minimum of emergency power. I'd upped my vision as high as I could and applied several different night-vision filters, but even with all that, I could barely see two meters in front of me as I stepped over the airlock's threshold and into the ship. 
+
+Thankfully, the corridors were clean and empty of the kind of debris that accumulates in human-crewed ships, like empty food wrappers, forgotten beverage bottles, and small items of clothing. (Which are usually socks, for some reason. Why humans can't keep track of their socks is a mystery I don't care enough to solve.) I didn't have to worry about kicking or tripping over anything, causing noise that would alert the waiting Targets to my location. I wasn't sure where they were, and didn't want to give them any warning of my arrival. 
+
+Opening a pocket of my jacket, I set my drone cloud loose. Under other circumstances I would have been wearing an EVAC suit, but SecUnits can function in the minimal life support provided by the emergency power (it gets unpleasant after a while, but unless something went really wrong, I'd finish the mission long before then), and this way I had easy access to my drones. I cut them into four squads and assigned one to a protective orbit around me; the other three I sent zipping down each of the side corridors I could barely make out in the dark. I assigned an input to each squad, set up triggers to alert me if they saw anything of interest, then started moving again.
+
+My drones' vision wasn't much better than mine in this light, but they gave me the range my own sight currently lacked. I'd only been doing this for three point seven minutes and already I hated it. The darkness was creepy enough to make my organic bits crawl, and the silent feed was even worse. If the Targets were communicating with each other, they were doing it on a private channel, and they'd cut their hostage off from the feed. (Of course they did. If I could have reached the hostage in the feed to establish a private connection of my own, it would've been too easy.) I tried running a few scans, but the ship's shielding kept me from picking up anything except faint readings from the few background systems still running on the minimal power. 
+
+I crept forward, pausing at a closed hatch, straining my visual and audio inputs and running another scan despite the futility. But there was no sign of the Targets, so I moved on, up to where this corridor intersected another, and where my drones had split off. Scout Squads One and Three had found nothing except more dark and silence, but Squad Two was picking up faint indicators of movement on the other side of a hatch. I ordered them to take up monitoring positions around the hatch, listening as best they could. 
+
+The Targets were too smart to talk out loud the way a lot of humans and augmented humans do even when they have a private feed, but my drones' vibration sensors picked up enough movement for me to estimate four to six Targets on the other side of the hatch. There wasn't any way to know whether the hostage was with them, or hidden somewhere else in the dark ship; I'd have to take my chances. 
+
+(I hate taking chances. Especially when hostages are involved.) 
+
+I slipped up to the hatch, moving as softly and quietly as I could. My boots didn't make any sound on the deck covering, and with the ship running on nothing but emergency power, the Targets shouldn't have access to any kind of SecSystem that could track me through other sensors, but I couldn't rule out the possibility that they were using vision or hearing augments of some kind. 
+
+(I also hate knowing so little about who/what I'm about to fight. But under the circumstances, I didn't have any means of deriving more information. Which, y'know, was why the Targets had set things up this way.)
+
+The little sign next to the hatch read Crew Lounge, and I at least knew enough about the ship's schematics to know the layout of its crew lounges. Couches, entertainment console, half a dozen of those little tables that humans kept everywhere even though they were too small to be useful for anything. Plenty of cover for both me and the Targets. I threw together a few different diagrams of how the Targets might have rearranged the furniture for this ambush, and a few more of how I could. Then I readied my weapon, hit the hatch release, and dove into the-- 
+
+Six projectiles slammed into my torso and head, every one of them a kill shot. 
+
+I finished the dive and rolled to my feet. ""That was cheating."" 
+
+It was not cheating, ART said. It returned to the feed, bringing its lights, primary life support, and other functions back online at the same time. 
+
+ART is the asshole research transport whose ship-body I was aboard, who is, it bears repeating, an asshole. The Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, the research university ART is attached to (to which it's attached? Seth, the human who acts as ART's captain when it's doing crewed trips for the university, is pathologically incapable of not correcting people when they get that wrong. Whatever, I don't care about grammar any more than I care about humans' lost socks) hired me as an independent security consultant to protect ART on the uncrewed cargo missions it does when it's not doing university things. Which had sounded like a pretty cushy job at first, since ART is more than capable of protecting itself. I would just ride along and consume my media undisturbed. 
+
+Except it turns out that even I can only watch so many hours of serials before getting restless, which is why ART suggested practicing various security scenarios for the rest of this particular trip. I agreed only on the condition that it restrict itself to the capabilities of an ordinary bot pilot, and the large maintenance drones it was using as Targets, to the capabilities of an average human or augmented human. (ART thought that was funny, because it knows I know that if it didn't have such a major handicap, there would be no way I'd get past the first five seconds of the exercise.) 
+
+(Did I mention ART's an asshole?)
+
+The suddenly bright lights shocked my upped vision, and I frantically tuned everything back down. ""You did that on purpose."" 
+
+
+You accused me of cheating.       
+
+
+""Humans can't shoot that accurately that quickly,"" I said. I plucked the brightly-colored suction cup projectiles off my jacket and forehead and dropped them on the floor. They were from a collection of toy weapons which Seth's daughter Iris keeps on board. (ART insisted on showing me two point five hours of clips of Iris and various other adolescent humans running around the crew lounges shooting each other and laughing. Apparently shooting each other is a common game for young humans from Mihira. No, I don't know why anyone thinks that's a good idea.) One of the maintenance drones posing as Targets hurried over to collect the darts. 
+
+
+My drones moved at a speed within human parameters-- 
+
+
+""Human musculature--""
+
+--including strain on musculature, ART finished over top of me. That would not have caused harm to even an unaugmented human.
+
+""They still can't move that fast,"" I argued. ""You forgot to include the what-the-fuck factor."" 
+
+And what, exactly, is that? ART asked, its normally-sarcastic voice (which I've never understood when its primary function is teaching adolescent humans) even more sarcastic than usual. 
+
+In response, I pulled together clips from my memory archives of all the times I've been shot at by humans or augmented humans in similar situations and dropped them pointedly into the feed. 
+
+ART took in the bundle more or less instantly, because it has enough processing capacity to make me, a SecUnit, look like I'm moving in slow motion. It said, This 'what-the-fuck' factor is... the otherwise inexplicable pause before the humans begin shooting?
+
+""Yes."" I could have spoken in the feed for this whole conversation, which would have been much faster because bots and constructs can communicate in machine language, but I was making a point. And also trying to annoy ART, because all that processing capacity means verbal speech is agonizingly slow in its perception. It wasn't working because ART also deals with adolescent humans a lot, so it's used to verbal speech. But I was going to do it anyway, because we both knew I'm not an adolescent human and could communicate faster if I wanted. 
+
+There was a 78.6-second pause (which is already long for a regular bot, and practically an eternity for a bot like ART), then ART said, I see. Shall we reset?
+
+That was as close as ART would come to admitting it had cheated. I considered saying something to hammer the point home, but unlike ART, I'm not an asshole. (Usually. And no, anything Gurathin says doesn't count.) So I just tapped the feed in acknowledgement, collected my drones in my jacket pocket, and headed back to my starting point at one of ART's airlocks. 
+
+I set an alarm to notify me in five minutes, then resumed the episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon I'd started last time. The five-minute wait was so ART had time to shuffle its drones around without giving me any clues about their location based on how long it took to set up. (Even ART can only move its maintenance drones through physical space so fast.) The alarm went off right in the middle of the colony solicitor's impassioned speech to the survivors of a vicious inter-faction fight, so I silenced it and finished the scene before heading out into the dark corridors again. 
+
+This time ART went for a spookier feel, adding random flashes of power to the lights to mimic a not-quite-dead power source, and hatches that were open a few centimeters, whirring and whining as though stuck. Even knowing I was aboard ART, I couldn't stop my organic parts from getting little shivery bumps. (Ew.) 
+
+Get ahold of yourself, Murderbot. It's just special effects, the kind serials used to use before media artists made practical effects obsolete. 
+
+(Yes, I do know about the history of media creation. I don't care about a lot of things, but during a planet-side visit to Dr. Mensah half a Preservation year ago, I went with her family to a festival celebrating the arts, and spent an entire day sitting in one of the theaters watching documentaries on how media has been made over the span of human history. Gurathin made fun of me for it, so I sent timestamped clips of him staring at a static art piece for three hours straight, to the rest of the Preservation Aux team. He didn't speak to me for the rest of the visit, which I considered a victory.) 
+
+Anyway. Remembering the festival was enough of a distraction from ART's spooky effects that I didn't jump halfway to the ceiling when one of my drone squads suddenly winked out of existence. The squad was -- had been -- about three meters ahead of me around a corner, so I pressed myself against the wall and took a second to think. Even though I knew ART's layout backward and forward by now, I stuck to the limited schematics we'd agreed I would work from, and assessed the Targets' likely angles of attack. 
+
+This hall had four hatches spaced evenly every three meters along both sides (they led to multi-occupancy living quarters for adolescent humans from ART's university, but I wasn't supposed to know that for the exercise), which meant the Targets probably intended to set up a kill corridor. My drones hadn't gotten any visuals before they'd been ""killed"" (really just ART cutting my connection with them), but the other readings they'd sent suggested the presence of a single ""person"" (really just another one of ART's own drones) at the far end of the corridor. Probably the hostage, meant as bait to lure me into the kill zone. 
+
+I called my remaining drones back from the other corridors. My drones are the small kind meant primarily for scouting, but I had enough of them left to form a pair of small, dense clouds. My plan was a little risky and a lot expensive, since it could cost me most of my drones, but I was counting on the majority of the Targets' shots passing harmlessly through the clouds at this density level. I'd still need to be very, very fast, but as long as ART didn't cheat again, it should work. 
+
+I sent the first squad zipping into the kill corridor at max speed, then the second one 0.8 seconds later. Taking a running start, I went up the side of the corridor and launched myself around the corner 0.65 seconds after that. But by the time I realized the shooting hadn't started yet, it was too late. Toy projectiles plinked against my head and torso from all sides. 
+
+I landed on the deck and yelled, ""Still cheating!"" 
+
+ART managed to express its annoyance with the loud way it reappeared abruptly in the feed. I accounted for your 'what-the-fuck' factor, it said. I do not see how I could have still cheated.
+
+""Humans wouldn't have been able to recognize my drones and hold their fire that fast.""
+
+
+Last time, you said I fired too quickly. Now you're saying I fired too slowly. 
+
+
+""I'm saying the Targets should have been shooting at my drones when I came around the corner."" 
+
+
+Not if they were expecting you.
+
+
+""If they were expecting me,"" I said, exasperated, ""they would have started shooting the drones because they would've thought they were me. You saw it was my drones, so you waited for me instead."" 
+
+Humans' visual inputs are capable of discerning the difference between a drone cloud and a SecUnit. ART's feed voice might as well have been tagged with every one of the half-dozen glyphs humans use to indicate sarcasm in text. Multiple times. 
+
+""Not that quickly. And keyed-up humans are even less capable of it. They're way more likely to shoot the first thing they see."" 
+
+Then what is the point of the 'what-the-fuck' factor? ART demanded.
+
+""They're different things."" Ugh, I hate trying to understand humans, much less explain the inexplicable things they do, but this was so obvious to me I didn't know why ART couldn't see it. (Aside from the fact that its primary functions are deep-space research and teaching, while mine is stopping humans from being shot at, including by each other.) ""The what-the-fuck factor is them realizing something's there that wasn't before, but especially when they're already primed to shoot, they'll shoot before they recognize what the thing is."" I didn't have archival clips of this exact trick with my drones because it was the first time I'd tried it, but I had more than enough recordings (mostly of past deployments with the company, before I hacked my governor module, when I was ordered to stand by while the humans I was supposed to be protecting did stupid things to each other) to illustrate how slowly humans recognized unexpected objects in other scenarios. And I did have plenty of clips of tense humans in combat situations shooting wildly at anything that moved. (Including me.) 
+
+ART took another 42.3 seconds to process this. While it did, one of the Target drones puttered up to me and tried to remove the toy projectiles. It was the same drone that had picked up the projectiles I'd dropped last time, and I glared at it until it backed off. (It was ART's drone, but it still had a limited but well-intentioned bot intelligence of its own, which was why all I did was glare. I hate being touched, even by drones.)
+
+Finally ART said, I am beginning to understand why you do not trust human security consultants to do their jobs.
+
+""Aside from all the times they tried to kill the humans they were supposed to be protecting?"" I muttered, which was only sort of fair, because the ""actively trying to kill"" thing had only happened once. But yeah, I don't trust them because even if they aren't murderers, they're bad at their jobs for the exact opposite reasons ART was having so much trouble pretending to be one. I.e., their physical and mental reaction speeds just aren't as good as mine (or any SecUnit's), and being that slow in a combat situation usually ends with injured or dead humans. 
+
+I also understand how to appropriately play my part, ART said. Let's reset.
+
+""Fine,"" I said. I picked the toy projectiles off of myself and walked over to the fussy maintenance drone that was still hovering unhappily nearby. It cheered up when I handed it the projectiles, and puttered off with the other ""Targets"" to reset, while I headed back to the airlock. 
+
+I pulled up my episode of Sanctuary Moon again while I waited, but found myself thinking about the exercise instead of paying attention. It was actually kind of funny how bad ART was at playing the Targets, considering how effectively it could mimic humans in other situations. I'd watched it chat casually with a transit ring launch authority team the first time we'd worked together. The humans had had no idea they were talking to an extremely sophisticated, speech-capable bot. But then again, the whole point of the ""speech-capable"" part of ""speech-capable bot"" was that ART knew how to talk in a way that was familiar to humans. 
+
+What we were doing now, though, required ART to think like a human or augmented human in a totally different way. Or rather, ART needed to do what humans did and not think, which I wasn't sure it was capable of doing. 
+
+Which was something I could take advantage of. (Of which I could take advantage? Stupid Seth and his stupid grammar lessons.) 
+
+My five-minute alarm went off and I headed back out into the corridors, sending my drone squads out ahead of me again. ART was doubling down on the spooky thing; it had added eerie creaks and groans over its internal speakers, as well as sent some of its smaller drones to pretend to be dead on the floors. I'd barely gotten to the first junction when an alarm started blaring, warning of a catastrophic decompression somewhere along the hull. Ugh. I knew it was fake because 1) ART's actual alarms didn't sound like that, 2) we were in a wormhole where no external entities could damage the hull, and 3) if anything had actually managed to get close enough to potentially cause hull damage, ART would have dealt with it by now. Still, the alarm made me tense, and my performance reliability dropped three percentage points. 
+
+Like the previous two times, I sent my drone squads out ahead of me to scout for Targets and/or potential hazards, ran my scans, and crept forward noiselessly along the corridors. The purpose of this exercise was for me to practice my techniques; being lazy because this was ART and I'd done this twice in twenty minutes already would just defeat the point. It took me longer to get a hit because this time, ART had set the Targets up in the crew meeting area below its bridge, all the way at the other end of its ship body from the airlock where I'd started. 
+
+I didn't like that at all. Not because of the tactical implications (although those kind of sucked too, since in a real hostage situation being in the crew meeting area gave the Targets direct access to/control over the command deck). No, I didn't like it because it reminded me too much of the Barish-Estranza incident, and the actual real-life Targets I'd killed in there because I had thought they'd killed ART. (Yes, it's a long story. No, I'm not getting into it now. It's in one of my previous logs if you really want to know.) At least the creepy shit ART was doing with the lights and the audio effects was nothing like how its ship body had been during the incident, which helped. A little. 
+
+The hatch to the crew meeting area was closed and sealed. I sidled up alongside it, touched my hand to the wall panel that covered its manual controls, and sent a ping into the silent feed. There was a .002-second blip in the background feed activity that told me ART was checking the ping, then the hatch whirred open. (Since neither of us wanted me to actually cause damage to ART's interior by, say, tearing the panel open with my hands and rewiring the controls, we'd agreed on this instead.) 
+
+I had my drones ready to go, and the moment the hatch opened I sent them zipping through in a wide cloud formation. 0.79 seconds later -- the exact average amount of time the humans had hesitated in the set of clips I'd sent to ART for the what-the-fuck factor -- the room erupted in toy projectile fire. 
+
+I was pretty sure what I was about to do would work, but it was still uncomfortable and nerve-wracking to step through the hatch at a fraction of the speed I normally would have used. Every part of me wanted to dive forward, out of the kill zone that was the one-meter-square area just inside the hatch. But I made myself stop in the middle of the zone instead. With projectiles pinging all around me, I raised my own toy weapon and fired six shots, each one taking down a Target. 
+
+ART reappeared in the feed in a burst of irritated background activity. That was exceptionally stupid. 
+
+""It worked,"" I said, looking around the meeting area to hide the way relief was draining the adrenaline from my organic parts. The ""hostage"" drone sat at the top of the steps leading up to the control bridge with a piece of cloth tied around its body to represent it being tied up the way villains in media always tie up their victims. 
+
+The probability of you surviving such a move in a real combat scenario is 3.0867 percent, ART said. 
+
+""Exactly."" 
+
+ART actually went silent for a whole 0.89 seconds, which, wow. I don't think I've ever seen ART speechless before. Taking time to process new information, yes. Refusing to answer immediately because it's an asshole, also yes. But this? This was it sitting in the feed doing the bot equivalent of that thing humans do where they stare at you and blink a lot. (I liked it, but no way in hell was I admitting that anywhere except in the privacy of my own mind. I also like not being rendered into small pieces and ejected out of ART's airlock, thank you very much.) It said, I do not understand.
+
+""I knew I was up against an extremely intelligent opponent,"" I said. I crossed the crew meeting area to the steps and started to climb. ""An opponent who would calculate the probability of each possible approach I could take, and prepare its responses according to the approaches most likely to succeed. This approach had basically no chance to succeed, so it worked."" 
+
+That is wholly illogical, ART complained. Humans also calculate the probability of success for a given course of action, even if they do not have the processing capability to do so with significant accuracy. 
+
+I reached the top of the stairs, gently lifted the hostage drone, and untied the fabric, ""freeing"" it and ending the scenario. Then I turned around and pointed the drone's visual input at the opposite wall of the crew meeting area, the wall with the hatch in it. Toy darts were spread across the wall's surface in a perfect fractal pattern. I pulled up the probability map I'd made while watching Sanctuary Moon in the airlock, which I'd added to (to which I'd added? For fuck's sake, I am never talking to Seth again) as I'd made my way through the corridors to the crew meeting areas. I overlaid it on top of my own visual of the dart pattern on the wall and dropped it into the feed. 
+
+Yes, ART said sarcastically (even more sarcastically than usual). That is a reasonably accurate projection of where the Targets should fire in order to maximize the chance of hitting a SecUnit who has entered the kill zone.
+
+""No,"" I corrected smugly, because I never get to one-up ART like this because it's a hyper-intelligent asshole and I'm a rogue SecUnit with anxiety, and damn it, I was going to enjoy it while it was happening. ""It's a projection of where the Targets should fire in order to maximize the chance of hitting a SecUnit who entered the kill zone and kept moving. It's suicide to stand still in a kill zone, so you expected me to keep moving. But I didn't."" 
+
+ART loomed menacingly in my feed. You took an incredibly stupid risk. Had you been facing human opponents, you would have been killed instantly. All it would take is one human forgetting to lead their target appropriately, which, as you have repeatedly pointed out, is more likely than not.
+
+""But I wasn't facing human opponents,"" I said. I released the hostage drone, letting it zip away to join the Target drones as they began to collect the suction darts from the wall. ""I was facing an opponent with superior processing capability who I knew couldn't make a mistake like that. My strategy worked, and I won. I killed the Targets and saved the hostage."" 
+
+Another pause, this one short enough that a human wouldn't have noticed, but still long enough that I did. Finally ART said, It is extremely unlikely you will ever face adversaries who possess the processing capability required for this 'strategy' to work.
+
+Now I was the one who paused, because ART's normally sarcastic tone was... less so? I said, ""I know that."" 
+
+
+Then you will refrain from using such a suicidal maneuver again.
+
+
+It said that like it was the most obvious thing in the world, but underneath its usual arrogance I thought I detected something like relief. 
+
+...Huh. 
+
+Before I could decide how to respond, ART continued, Since you have successfully completed this scenario, I will begin preparations for the next one. 
+
+Yeah, okay, I'm shit at things like emotions and -- ugh -- relationships -- but even I could recognize what ART wasn't saying. I said over the feed, We still have fifteen cycles in this wormhole. Want to watch Worldhoppers for a while first?
+
+ART said, Yes. 
+
+
+END
+"
+43939141,Alone together,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","There's a difference between not liking someone and disliking them, i don't like you, Bathing/Washing, Bathrooms",English,2022-12-30,Completed,2022-12-30,"1,561",1/1,6,36,null,209,"['Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'Unknown66', 'FaerieFyre', 'FandomsForever_Rainleaf', 'Deliala919', 'SonglordsBug', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'dancernerd', 'Bibli', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'PickAName', 'oppan_gandalf_style', 'soulsofzombies', 'XinTheGremlin', 'Magechild', 'Lontra23', 'Chyoatas', 'Gozer', 'HermaeusMora', 'Slimeball', 'theAsh0', 'AuntyMatter', 'beeayy']",[],"
+Gurathin cursed in that same language he used back on the survey, so I knew he was genuinely surprised to see me. He recovered quickly though.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit, I am having a bath.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Well, duh, Gurathin. I can see that. To look at Gurathin's back musculature you'd suppose he visits the station's recreational facilities more often than he does; I suppose he must have a physique which doesn't naturally require large amounts of physical exercise. Unless he exercises secretly, which seems unlikely. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why are you staring at my back?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why do you have so many mirrors in here?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It was the way the room was decorated when I moved in, I've never seen a reason to change it. Why are you here? Have you damaged my door, again?"" He makes it sound like it's a habit I've made, it was just once. I don't like manual locks.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Ratthi was concerned about you being alone."" Which was true. ""During the festival.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He sighed. ""Ratthi knows I enjoy some time alone. What exactly did he way?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I opened up our private feed, and pushed the video file towards him. He took it, making sure I felt his skepticism. Gurathin has, I am fairly certain, been practicing emoting over the feed. Some humans and augmented humans accidentally allow their emotional state to sort of leak into the feed. I stupidly mentioned this to Gurathin (409 cycles ago) and he said, ""That's interesting."" And ever since he'll occasionally sort of push a feeling at me. I'm sure he thinks he's being very clever. You don't look very clever sitting waist deep in cooling water, Dr Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He looked at me from one of the mirrored angles and very deliberately reached out with his hand and made the system add more hot water. The station water is set at a level which I calculate as excessively high for most human and augmented human uses, it is wasteful and uneconomical and Gurathin was currently broadcasting to any bot in the local area just how pleasant it felt on his skin. I sometimes enjoy showers, but baths are too fundamentally human for me to even want to try. Humans and augmented humans look so ridiculously vulnerable in them. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Ratthi was intoxicated at the time, you know he gets"" Gurathin paused and looked at his feet, and I could feel him considering reaching out his hand and running his fingers across his instep, ""sentimental and over emotional about me sometimes."" Gurathin was right about that.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Humans and augmented humans are highly social organisms. You have not had physical contact with another lifeform other than,"" it was my turn to pause, Gurathin lifted his head slightly and we locked eyes in a small glass tile, ""Felix"" Ratthi gave Gurathin a pet. It adores Gurathin and hates me. We all try not to talk about it, ""for three cycles.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin turned the water off. ""So you have waited for me to have a bath, then broken into my rooms to tell me this? Your clothes will be getting damp in here, the humidity...""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You were feeling lonely."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was true, I'm sure Gurathin hadn't meant to broadcast his emotional state quite as widely as he had, or that he was specifically lonely and thinking about me. It's not as if the other bots on the station would ever mention it. Bots wouldn't do that. I'm not sure they even understood it. I'm not sure I did.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He coughed, like he was surprised or as if he was trying to shake away a thought. Had he felt my thought? Would he be furious if he knew? No, not furious. Mortified. Or...
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He plunged his other hand into the water, it's hot again now. He rubs his fingers around the grooves either side of the heel cord.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I could have been doing anything.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I've seen you doing everything, I'm unlikely to be surprised.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""That's not true."" He actually tensed, slightly, disbelieving me. ""I know you respect our privacy.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I'm not actually very good at respecting Gurathin's privacy. I don't pretend I understand why, it's not as if he ever does anything interesting. But I like to know what he's doing. Boring and predictable though it is. Sometimes he does something unusual, like sit and cry in the bath. He was right about the humidity, I should have taken my top off before now. If I'd walked into his bathroom without my top on I think he would looked a lot tenser. I said, ""You're right, I'm going to take my top off.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Now he did look surprised, much more so than when I walked into his bathroom earlier. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I put my damp top on his bed. Unfolded. That felt almost as good as sitting with my feet on someone's desk. I went back into the bathroom, Gurathin adjusted his position. His emotions in the feed (I knew he was curating them, and he knew I knew) were very calm. I knew he was not calm. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit, what the fuck are you doing?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin doesn't swear, not like that, hardly at all. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Ratthi was concerned about you being alone, he asked me to"" I pulled out the relevant audio file and Ratthi's voice came out:
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+check in on him, he gets lonely even though he doesn't show it 
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""So here I am, checking in on you. You were crying.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He leaned forward over his legs, gripping his ankles (I think he has some sort of hypermobility thing) and was about to let out a sigh (probably) when I reached over and touched his back.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ok, so that was actually a surprise for both of us; but he didn't need to react as if I'd electrocuted him or something. On the positive side, I had made physical contact and we were both still in the same room, and no one was physically damaged. On the downside, now my pants were wet too. I shrugged them off and left them getting even more soggy on the floor. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What"" Gurathin did sound as if he was uncertain whether to be angry or if he should be laughing (believe me, Gurathin, mood), "" is this about?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Ratthi was worried you'd get all sad and lonely; he used the word maudlin. So I'm here to make sure you don't.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Ratthi thought this,"" he gestured at the bathroom, the floor really was wet now, ""was a good way to do it?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No, this was my idea. I'd been monitoring you. There was a dip in your emotional status. I'd set parameters for intervention.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Okay, so what was your plan?"" He had decided to treat this as funny. Which is one of his defence mechanisms. ""Distract me from feeling sorry for myself? Well, you've done that. Consider me distracted. Perhaps now you could let me get out of my bath in peace, and then we could talk.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+This part was going to be tricky.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""No?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You are going to let me wash your back. Then we can talk.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I didn't really so much wash his back, as do a rudimentary massage. Initially he was horribly tense, but I continued anyway. He did relax a little. Then he got out of the bath, and I helped him dry. That was weird. Then he went through and pushed my damp top onto the floor and sat--I sat next to him on the bed. He smelt clean and human.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Is this when we talk?"" Gurathin, he does like to ask questions.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Are you afraid of me?""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes and no. Haven't you figured this out yet?"" Again, he always asks me questions.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Have you? Please don't laugh."" It was only when I talked to Bharadwaj that I noticed how Gurathin deflects away emotions by laughing at them, even when he obviously doesn't find them funny. Not really.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I figured it out a long time ago, but I don't think there's any way...there is not a way I fit when it comes to you. I don't want any of the roles open to me. Owner, friend, lover even: You've got people who fit or could fit those roles better than me."" He was talking to the wall. He likes to do this; admittedly it's something I do too. I do it a lot.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""My friend I don't like?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I don't want you to not like me."" For once he didn't sound like he thought that was funny, I couldn't see his face and I realized I was glad about that, but for the wrong reasons.
+
+
+ 
+
+""I don't not like you, it's just that my feelings don't characterize as like."" That made even less sense when I said it. But I carried on talking: ""I think the problem is that we are both using human words, which don't apply. They make things complicated."" Gurathin took a breath to speak, but I think anything he said would just make this not work, ""So please shut up.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I reached and took hold of his augmented hand, my hands look, visually, more human than it (his augmented hand) does. They're not, obviously. I opened up our private feed, and tried to push an emotion at him, the way he'd practiced doing it to me. The way I did it... it was (I was) clumsy, rather like walking into his bathroom. But we have to start somewhere. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He pushed back.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+43912122,Freeze Response,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2022-12-29,Completed,2022-12-29,342,1/1,36,149,11,356,"['WeShouldRest', 'magpie_supremacy', 'christinesangel100', 'FallingInGrace', 'Valdinia', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Anna_Wing', 'Unknown66', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'darth_eowyn', 'KittfoxHowlett', 'Stockinette', 'chippit', 'kkachis', 'kirinki', 'rokhal', 'Tanscure', 'FaerieFyre', 'ArwenLune', 'taidana', 'outlander_unknown', 'EvaBelmort', 'notsafefortheworld', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'danceswchopstck', 'fleurofthecourt', 'acernor', 'biscut2', 'bcoburn', 'clickingStranger', 'Sommerrev', 'wanderingspacepirate', 'onomatopoetia', 'technofantasia', 'isilee', 'Riannonkat2000', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'shakespeareaddict', 'Wooferdill', 'Quicksilver_Rain', 'Butlericfy', 'Abacura', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'Kealpos', 'chicken_neck', 'PickAName', 'SomeSmallLegoBricks', 'quae_bookmarks', 'Sanj']",[],"All I knew was the child had run out of the shuttle and ended up somewhere out here. The forest was dense and the wind whipped the tops of the trees, covering most sound. No tracks were showing on scan, but that didn't tell me much. I had to figure out where she had gone and retrieve her before the storm rolled in or any hungry fauna found her.
+
+She could have gone in any direction, for any distance. All sensible, mathematical efforts to predict her location were turning up negligible results. Maybe she'd run through clear areas and was far away. Maybe she'd crawled through dense flora and was close. Or maybe she'd gone through one and then the other. What would I do if I were a dumb human?
+
+I took five long steps into the forest, looking around, trying to think, trying to 'get in touch with my inner human' or some such. What would I do, if I were a little girl frightened of the big scary SecUnit and angry at my parents? Would I run far away or just stop at the first handy hiding place?
+
+I scanned the greenery, hearing only the wail of the wind and the crashing of the branches. I didn't have a lot of time. But what would a person do in that situation? I had to get this right the first time.
+
+Fear. She'd been feeling fear. Fear of being caught and kept and trapped in an oppressive environment, where she wasn't understood and had to behave, where punishment was always lurking around the corner and every mistake felt like the brink of disaster. What did I understand about that?
+
+I don't know if I heard a noise that my organics registered and didn't tell the rest of me about, or if I really did somehow connect with something in me. But I knew. I turned in place and saw her, crouched and tucked up under the shuttle. She hadn't gone anywhere.
+
+Neither had I, when I'd been in her position."
+43413960,[Podfic] aligning orbits | written by torpidgilliver,['Tipsy_Kitty'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Relationship Study, Queerplatonic Relationships, Intimidation, Podfic, Podfic Length: 30-45 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Download Available, POV First Person",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,28,1/1,4,13,1,109,"['Reredundant', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'Arioch', 'wellthisisnice', 'LdyKirin', 'Magechild', 'IndigoFeral', 'Silverstars', 'Hi_Hope', 'torpidgilliver', 'blackglass', 'litra']",[],
+43412125,[Podfic] the ART of parenting | written by torpidgilliver,['Tipsy_Kitty'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Seth (Murderbot Diaries),"Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Martyn (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Pre-Canon, Baby!Iris, Baby!ART, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Download Available",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,28,1/1,4,13,null,53,"['Koschei_B', 'ArwenLune', 'wellthisisnice', 'LdyKirin', 'IndigoFeral', 'Silverstars', 'soulsofzombies', 'Magechild', 'torpidgilliver', 'blackglass', 'litra', 'SubieZan', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],
+43766128,[Podfic] not familiar but friend,['mistbornhero'],General Audiences,"Gen, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Queerplatonic Partners, dragon!ART, witch!Mensah, familiar!Murderbot, Rescue, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,33,1/1,3,10,null,67,"['FlipSpring', 'BWizard', 'theleakypen', 'huanglaoshu', 'soulsofzombies', 'Magechild', 'the_dragongirl', 'litra', 'silverandblue']",[],"
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+43409968,[Podfic] cognitive development | written by torpidgilliver,['Tipsy_Kitty'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Seth (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Martyn (Murderbot Diaries), Original Characters, Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Babies, Baby!ART, Baby!Iris, POV Third Person, Pre-Canon, brief mention of ableism, Podfic, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Download Available",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,28,1/1,12,13,null,69,"['Tanscure', 'Koschei_B', 'wellthisisnice', 'LdyKirin', 'IndigoFeral', 'Silverstars', 'Magechild', 'FlipSpring', 'torpidgilliver', 'blackglass', 'litra', 'SubieZan', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],
+43138642,mining for copper (or ways to annoy your construct friend) [Podfic],['blackglass'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Double Drabble, Probably Crack, Costume Parties & Masquerades, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,4,6,null,41,"['BWizard', 'friendoftheJabberwock', 'Miome', 'Magechild', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'litra']",[],"Length: 1:52
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43387719,PUMNTS SODN [Podfic],['blackglass'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Original Ship Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Crack, Humor, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,10,13,null,43,"['VonGeek', 'MercurialFeet', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'ArwenLune', 'TheLion_Shits_Carrots', 'acebian', 'Magechild', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'litra', 'mistbornhero', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Length: 2:22
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43387776,Credit [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","no beta we die like hostiles, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,4,7,null,33,"['BWizard', 'ArwenLune', 'wellthisisnice', 'Magechild', 'KDHeart', 'litra']",[],"Length: 5:37
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43387843,Artistic Choices [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries)","The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, Humor, silliness, Murderbot has Opinions, Life on the Preservation Alliance, POV First Person, vaguely post-Exit Strategy, meta jokes about silly TV shows, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,6,7,null,43,"['VonGeek', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'Arioch', 'endofthyme', 'Magechild', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'litra']",[],"Length: 5:39
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43387956,Accessibility Devices [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Face blindness, Prosopagnosia, accessibility devices, Friendship, Murderbot reluctantly facing the fact that friendship is a two-way street, Vignette, Fluff, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,6,10,null,40,"['Tanscure', 'VonGeek', 'wellthisisnice', 'acebian', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'FlipSpring', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Magechild', 'litra']",[],"Length: 7:06
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43388451,Pulling Your Strings [Podfic],['blackglass'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","earnest conversations in empty hours and liminal spaces, (Murderbot's definition of 'earnest' at least), Snark, Banter, Names, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,4,9,null,34,"['FruitSnacc', 'fantasy1610', 'BWizard', 'VonGeek', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'friendoftheJabberwock', 'EnnaMoon', 'Magechild', 'litra']",[],"Length: 4:11
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43398822,vulnerable security [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry, outsider pov, POV Third Person, Fluff, Pre-Book 5: Network Effect, Canon Compliant, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,4,9,1,66,"['almondpaperclam', 'VonGeek', 'CheshireFanta', 'mondskind', 'entropy_muffin', 'celli', 'torpidgilliver', 'Magechild', 'litra']",[],"Length: 8:30
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43398883,Snooze [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Platonic Cuddling, no beta we die like hostiles, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,4,7,null,28,"['BWizard', 'VonGeek', 'mondskind', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'Magechild', 'litra']",[],"Length: 9:37
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43419198,Private Connection [Podfic],['blackglass'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","The inherent angst of being a SecUnit, Justifiably Criticizing Humans, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,8,8,null,35,"['Tipsy_Kitty', 'BWizard', 'VonGeek', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'Magechild', 'lick', 'litra', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Length: 8:57
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43437502,Shipping [Podfic],['blackglass'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","One Shot, Queerplatonic Relationships, Comedy, references to other media, Minor Spoilers for Book 5: Network Effect, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,4,7,null,46,"['ArwenLune', 'Magechild', 'litra', 'PunsBulletsAndPointyThings', 'the_dragongirl', 'silverandblue']",[],"Length: 11:05
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43548681,Cold Blooded Kindness [Podfic],['blackglass'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Farai & Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Farai (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries)","Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, POV Outsider, Thiago's POV, Book 5: Network Effect, Missing Scene, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,32,1/1,4,8,null,45,"['VonGeek', 'fantasy1610', 'ArwenLune', 'LdyKirin', 'GodOfLaundryBaskets', 'Magechild', 'litra', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Length: 13:53
+Download (right-click and save) as a LQ mp3 (for storage considerations) or as a HQ mp3. (Thanks to paraka for hosting!) 
+
+Streaming:
+
+
+
+
+Feedback and constructive criticism always appreciated! Enjoy! :)"
+43858884,bright like stars with glory crowned,['BWizard'],General Audiences,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries)","multiple AUs, POV Dr. Arada, Alternate Universe - High School, Mirror Universe, Alternate Universe - Magic, hsau but theyre adults now, Christmas, Religion, midnight mass, midnight mass as a coping tool, it was all a dream, or was it, half of this was written in the car on the way home from mass, arada and overse find each other in every universe",English,2022-12-26,Completed,2022-12-26,"1,380",1/1,null,1,null,36,['lauris'],[],"
+joy to the world, the lord is come, let earth receive her king, let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.
+
+
+Christmas Eve. Nochebuena. The Good Night. The middle of winter break, if you asked half her friends.
+
+Arada smiled as her family began to sit down in a circle. They would read, then sing. Shakily, her cousin took the family Bible on his lap and began to read the story of the birth. In a moment, she would take her own turn, as the next oldest cousin, to read the story of the angels.
+
+A few weeks ago, she'd been hanging out with Overse between school and rehearsal, alternating between kissing and idle chatting, and she'd mentioned that her family always made their own Christmas service. Overse had found that odd, she remembered, her girlfriend's family leaning more towards the secular side of the holiday.
+
+Arada didn't think of her family as odd. On the contrary, she loved it. Loved las posadas and midnight masses and especially family carol singing with all her relatives.
+
+And she would see her friends tomorrow, too; sometime late in the afternoon they were all invited over to the Mensah farm for the annual holiday party (or what passed for one when Diwali and Hanukkah and half a dozen other winter holidays had been earlier than usual this year). She had lots of gifts to give and lots of plans for that. She and her friends would laugh and dance and eat their way through the night.
+
+But tonight, with her family? Tonight was a night for solemnity and joy both.
+
+
+angels we have heard on high, singing sweetly through the night, and the mountains in reply, echoing their great delight, gloria in excelsis deo, gloria in excelsis deo.
+
+
+<<!Feliz Nochebuena!>> Arada greeted every person she passed as she pulled her wife up the aisle. They'd just made it before Las Posadas arrived. The candles were lit, la iglesia dark otherwise.
+
+La luz de cristo, she thought, staring at the brightest one. A light, burning to bring them all home safe. She'd thought about that a lot this year. The first survey she'd led, gone so wrong... she hadn't thought they would get home.
+
+The organ startled her out of her thoughts as the doors flew open and the procession entered, led by Maria y Jose y el Nino Cristo.
+
+None of her worries mattered anymore. Not here, not now. Not when she was here with Overse, both alive and happy and as healthy as they could be.
+
+
+sing choirs of angels, sing in exhultation, sing all ye citizens of heaven above, glory to god, glory in the highest, o come let us adore him, o come let us adore him, o come let us adore him, christ the lord.
+
+
+Arada sat on the booster seat and enjoyed the feeing of Overse's wing wrapping around her, Overse's arm on her shoulder. Her claw dug into her side, and she shifted so she wasn't sitting on it any longer.
+
+And then the little chupacabra looked up. La iglesia was nearly dark, lit only by a sole light burning in the hand of Isa, the choir director and its only lightmage. (Ze wasn't the sole mage in the choir, there was a songmage as well, one of the professors in the biology department at First Landing, but Lida was not the sort of person to show up at midnight the night before she gave her last final.)
+
+The choir began, and as the procession moved forwards, the small light rose and grew, powered by the magic of the congregation's song. What had began as a pinpoint became a ribbon of light, then a streamer, then many streamers weaving together above their heads.
+
+Arada leaned her head on Overse's shoulder. ""Thanks for coming with me,"" she muttered.
+
+""Of course,"" Overse said. ""Feliz Navidad, queridisima.""
+
+
+the people who in darkness walked have seen a glorious light, on them broke forth the heavenly dawn, who dwelt in death and night.
+
+
+Arada lit the one candle in the window and muttered a quiet blessing. No church for her, for now. No church ever again, if she was going to stay dead.
+
+Ratthi tapped her shoulder. ""Are you alright, Arada?""
+
+""I'm fine.""
+
+He hummed doubtfully. ""I know you. You don't need to lie.""
+
+She sighed and leaned into her friend. ""I miss her. I miss Nochebuena with her, back when it felt like everything we did made a difference. Now it all feels worthless. We're doing something good, but it's not enough. It's never enough. This is supposed to be a time of light and here we are trapped in darkness.""
+
+""We're not trapped. We're doing the right thing. Overse would say this too. We're making a difference. We're making her proud, up -- you believe she's up there?""
+
+Arada nodded. ""Era una cristiana vieja tambien.""
+
+""I can't understand you, but okay. The point is, wherever Overse is, she's looking at you and she's proud. She's proud of you for continuing our work. Even without her.""
+
+""Thanks.""
+
+
+brightest and best of the stars of the morning, shine through thy darkness and lend us thine aid, star of the east, the horizon adorning, where our infant redeemer is laid.
+
+
+""It's Christmas! Get up, get up, it's Christmas!"" One of the children shook Arada awake as another landed -- flop! -- on her stomach.
+
+She dislodged the kid as she rolled over to grasp for her wife's arm. ""Mrrr... Overse, get up. Your children are hyperactive again.""
+
+""My children?"" Overse groaned. ""I wasn't the one who carried them, thank you, and if anything that makes them your children."" Despite her grouchiness, she was already sitting up and patting the spot next to her, a wordless invitation to their three children. ""Come on, up and at them, babe. Do you need coffee?""
+
+""Please."" Arada rolled around until she could see the clock on the dresser. ""Ugh, six am? You couldn't have waited an hour?""
+
+""It's Christmas, Mama!"" Their oldest, seven year old Faith, bounced up and down, which shook the whole bed hard enough to make Arada seriously consider sitting up. ""Entle Rin and Uncle Ratthi and Auntie Mensah an'- and all our family said they r'membered when you used to text them at midnight on Christmas! Why can't we get you up at midnight?""
+
+""Because I'm not seventeen anymore and I didn't get to bed until very late. Can't you bother your mommy?""
+
+""She's asleep!"" Lucia, their four year old middle child, pointed at Overse. Overse who was in fact asleep again, still sitting up.
+
+""Traitor,"" Arada muttered, turning so she could poke Overse and wake her wife up. ""You promised coffee, babe.""
+
+""I'm going, I'm going,"" Overse said. ""How'd you sleep, babe?""
+
+""I don't know. Bunch of weird dreams. You and I were the center of most of them, I think. It honestly felt like my brain wanted to take Christmas and our anniversary next month and all that sci-fi Peri and Gurathin like and then shake it all up into a bunch of movies. You?""
+
+""I'm too asleep to understand that analogy, babe."" Overse finally found her glasses and bearings, stumbling to the bedroom door. ""Kids, you can open your stockings, but that's it, okay? We'll open presents when your cousins come over.""
+
+""Okay!"" Faith, Lucia, and Ana thumped their way off the bed and downstairs, leaving Arada to rub her eyes and fumble for her phone.
+
+It was certainly early. And she had about fifty text messages she didn't quite want to deal with yet, mostly her friends coordinating carpools and Ratthi complaining about the weather and Peri and Rin having another argument (honestly, you'd think those two living together would stop these arguments happening over group chats, but that apparently wasn't true). And she didn't want to get out of her cozy bed, especially not on the three hours of sleep she'd gotten (taking Faith to midnight mass for her daughter's first time, and then coming home to wrap gifts).
+
+She didn't mind it so much when Overse brought her coffee with a candy cane in it a few minutes later, and especially not when her wife kissed her and promised to let her go to bed early tonight. "
+43234042,Valid Targets,['Gamebird'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Skulk (OC), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Morally Ambiguous Characters, Also non-morally-ambiguous characters, no romance or shipping, but many people are very very good friends, Non-retributive justice system, forgiving unforgivable sins, Thinly Disguised Meta, there is a ridiculous amount of world-building under the hood, mentions of attempted genocide, can be read as a stand-alone",English,2022-11-24,Completed,2022-12-25,"58,018",18/18,234,94,9,"1,424","['WeShouldRest', 'FyrDrakken', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'Unknown66', 'shanalittle', 'veltzeh', 'Deliala919', 'JoCat', 'violasarecool', 'kilawater', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'NightErrant', 'ghostlysecretary', 'Aublanc', 'biscut2', 'Kethrua', 'zirna813', 'isilee', 'trefoil', 'Chyoatas', 'elmofirefic', 'liminalias', 'DimitriLasker', 'Epiphanyx7', 'murklins', 'noden', 'lucime', 'Redcognito', 'petwheel', 'MercurialFeet', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Nachtamsel', 'reading_tsc', 'TheLadyMorning', 'Magechild', 'i_cant_say', 'Threadzless', 'damselflyindistress', 'Znarikia', 'theAsh0', 'Grimness6452', 'PickAName', 'curlylocks2', 'Aphelocoma_californica', 'Preemptivekarma', 'Gozer', 'Hi_Hope', 'silverpaper_toffeepaper', 'FlipSpring', 'VoidlingRemnata']",[],"As I'd said, Just what I came here for, manual labor.
+
+I helped move the fence, Three and I were on either end, lifting and walking while I kept track of Ratthi doing the same with the fucking combat unit. Brig gave directions. The only reason I was here was to keep Ratthi alive, or at least increase the chance he'd be alive at the end of this visit on the surface of Preservation's main planet.
+
+I like Ratthi. I really do. He and Dr. Mensah were the humans who got me from the start, didn't push me too much, stopped the others from interrogating me about my feelings (when Ratthi wasn't trying to interrogate me himself, ugh), and accepted me as I was, both at that point, and later. They didn't require me to prove anything. I would feel awful if he died and a whole spectrum of emotions if he died doing something I'd explicitly told him not to, like doing a meet and greet with this rogue combat unit he'd spotted on that farm planet he'd gone to.
+
+I could see what was going on. The same pattern of behavior that had prompted Ratthi to see me as a person and treat me with respect was in operation with this Skulk. (Not that I was jealous, you know. Or anything like that.) But there were big differences between Skulk and I, core personality and programming issues, that Ratthi didn't seem to be taking seriously.
+
+When you're talking about a SecUnit and especially a Combat SecUnit, you really need to take those things seriously. We have weapons built into our arms. Our processing power, compared to a human, is immense. The way we can split our attention between multiple inputs or mental tasks is not to be underestimated. Our strength and durability puts any pure organic larger than a tardigrade to shame. Ratthi should have taken a hint from the old farmer saying Skulk could wrestle bulls into submission.
+
+(I could probably wrestle bulls into submission, too! Not that I would. Sounds gross. And it would indicate I was jealous or had something to prove, right? Which I wasn't, and didn't. I promise this is not sarcasm this time.)
+
+My point is that the cost of being wrong here is immediate death of the human. Why was it Ratthi understood that in regard to the bison, but not Skulk?
+
+We had split the fence on this side of the holding pasture and peeled out parts of it to either side. These parts lined up with where the ramp from the ship would extend, when it was extended. So far the ramp was still closed, keeping all the big, smelly fauna inside. There wasn't enough fence to reach all the way to the ramp, so when the fauna came down the ramp, they'd have a choice of proceeding forward to where they were supposed to be, or roaming around the sides to run us over and kill Ratthi.
+
+I might not know anything about bison, but I've herded enough organic units (the human ones) to know they never go where they're supposed to if they have a choice. That's why we were putting up extra fence sections. Brig told Skulk, ""Go check those buildings for some posts and a post driver. They gotta have some around here somewhere.""
+
+I wondered grouchily if that counted as stealing. Probably not, since the posts would still be here when Brig and Skulk left. Anyway, Skulk wandered off toward the buildings. Three followed it. Brig and Ratthi leaned against the fence and started talking, with Ratthi saying, ""I think we should talk about Skulk.""
+
+""No,"" Brig said immediately. ""No, I don't believe we should. Let's talk about the bison.""
+
+Ratthi started, ""But-""
+
+Brig's voice firmed. ""I said no, offworlder."" The tone of 'offworlder' tripped an alert for me - that was delivered as a slur, even if my language module didn't list it as such. I didn't move because Brig wasn't armed and I was fairly sure even Ratthi could take him in a fight, but the situation abruptly had a lot of my attention. Brig seemed to know he'd overstepped because he softened his voice. ""You might think that because you're a human and I'm a human, and Skulk's not a human, that we get to talk about him. That's not the way it is. He's a man. If I'm going to talk about him, I'm going to talk to him and not to you. You and me? Let's talk about the bison.""
+
+Well ... aside from the offensive 'he's a man' ... I really couldn't fault him for this. I wanted to, but I couldn't. Even though Brig had earlier been talking about excusing Skulk killing people, coming to its defense like this was a point in his favor. Ratthi seemed to agree. He drew in a deep breath, looked around the place, and then accepted the topic change.
+
+I backburnered the rest of their conversation and sent a pair of drones off with an overhead view of Skulk. If it had overheard the conversation, it hadn't reacted. Three and I were sharing the drone's input. We also had a channel open between us, but there was nothing to say at the moment.
+
+Dealing with Three had been a trip for me. It was the first SecUnit I'd been able to talk to openly, without having to hide that I was rogue and constantly fear I might let something slip that would get me taken apart, possibly by the unit I was talking to. I don't know about Barish-Estranza, but company units have a baseline safety protocol to alert on and immobilize 'malfunctioning' (i.e., rogue) units. Maybe even destroy them, depending on what their SecSystem told them to do. Not that I would have wanted to talk to my fellow SecUnits anyway, but that was a definite discouraging factor.
+
+It wasn't a factor with Three. But I still didn't want to talk to it because most of the time, what I wanted and what Three wanted had no correlation. I wanted to keep my humans alive, watch media, and ... I was still figuring out the rest. I didn't know what Three wanted and from what Three said, neither did it.
+
+It was just coming along with us, drifting on the leftover programming to follow orders and guard people, while it, too, figured out the rest. (It seemed way more into guarding people than surveilling them, which I assume is a manufacturing difference.) I kept an eye on it in case it became a hazard, but we'd clocked enough hours in proximity that I wasn't keeping as close an eye as I had before. I wouldn't say I trusted it but ... well, okay, I mostly trusted it. I trusted it a hell of a lot more than I trusted Skulk.
+
+I watched through our shared feed as Skulk performed a physical search through the buildings, using its eyes. I wondered why it didn't have any drones to do this for it. I wondered why it wasn't trying to snag my drones. Was it being polite? It didn't have to be polite. It couldn't have torn me apart the way it could pull a human to pieces, but in a straight up fight between me and a combat unit, I knew the odds. They aren't good for me.
+
+Three pushed a video into our shared feed that I found disconcerting at first, mostly because I had no idea what the fuck it was. The video quality was bad, but I could see there was grass and posts and some strange, smallish humans in crappy clothes and unfamiliar hats, talking in an accent that was an exaggerated version of Brig's. I couldn't make out most of the words. They were handing around metal posts.
+
+It was when I caught sight of armored hands that I understood. This was a video from Skulk's point of view, except why was it so bad? It was like it was helmet cam view instead of Skulk's own eyes. Did combat units not record their primary visual inputs? Why would it bother to store helmet cam footage when it had so much higher quality available? Also, did it wear its armor constantly? (What I wouldn't give to have armor and be able to wear it all the time.)
+
+Where did you get this? I asked. I was going to be impressed as shit if Three had hacked Skulk's systems and snatched a random video out of its memories. And frightened. Both of Three for doing it and of Skulk when it found out it had been done.
+
+Skulk gave it to me. Three pointed out the tags in the video, identifying the post driver and the posts. So I could help it find the items.
+
+You're talking to it? I hadn't noticed a separate channel up, but I hadn't been looking for it, either. Now that I did, there it was. I hadn't been invited, so I stayed out of it.
+
+Yes. A moment later, Three pointed out, You were talking to it earlier.
+
+Yeah, I know. Shit. Everyone was talking to it. Why was everyone except me getting all cozy with Skulk? (I was definitely not jealous. I was having some other emotion that just looks like jealousy. (Dr. Bharadwaj had been helping me identify my emotions, but some of them remained indecipherable.)) (But wait, I am jealous about the armor thing. I'll admit to that. Someone had even taken off the logos, so there was a lot to be jealous of there.)
+
+I looked at the video again, more carefully this time. Not because I cared about post drivers, but because I cared about my humans and Ratthi wasn't done interacting with Skulk. A video of Skulk interacting with humans was useful intel. I had a lot of experience with humans being nervous around me, not liking me, and wishing I wasn't there at all, so I knew what it looked like. The humans on this video weren't afraid of Skulk. That was interesting. They were ... wary, maybe careful. I might call it nervous, but that would be a stretch.
+
+They definitely didn't treat it like another human, but they weren't treating it as a tool, either. They were mostly respectful. Not the comfortable respectful of, say, the Preservation Aux team to one another, but more like the uneasy respectful of Senior Indah toward me. Like they knew what it was, what it could do, and weren't super happy about that but were fairly certain it wouldn't be directed at them.
+
+What this showed me was that Skulk could operate (and already was operating) outside its core programming. That was a good thing. On a side note, I had to question why Skulk had a saved video of fence repair. Did it have that much spare storage capacity? (Mine was taken up by a rotating list of media. I suppose if Skulk wasn't into media, it might have a lot of unused space.)
+
+Did it routinely save videos of interacting with humans so it could review them later? If so, what was it trying to learn? How to do a better job repairing fences? How to interact better with humans? It seemed unlikely it was reviewing a video like this for threat assessment or target identification, which I would think were the main functions for a combat unit.
+
+This was telling me a lot about Skulk and the life it was living. Bonus points that this was entirely unintentional from Skulk or Brig's side. No one was trying to stage something here and influence me. This was just random surveillance video, essentially, that I could use to evaluate the proper security response to this individual.
+
+It vibed with my function, is what I'm saying.
+
+Okay, maybe Skulk wasn't quite as high a threat as I'd thought. I still didn't trust it. It and Three were returning. Three was carrying posts. Skulk was carrying a sledgehammer that had a head about as big as both my fists. I was unsurprised that the combat unit had the weapon.
+
+Three said over the feed, Skulk says there are four fence sections we will need to bring from the barn to complete the chute. It sent me a file produced by tactical imaging software using (still inexplicably crappy helmet cam) overhead pictures as the base layer, probably taken while the ship circled before landing. Yep, there we were - the three of us - so Skulk was the source of the image.
+
+Not that I'd thought Three had tactical imaging software. I didn't. As I knew it, the matching software for a SecUnit was devoted to surveillance and facial or object recognition, geared for easy export, storage, and data mining. As such, it didn't imbed as much information in a single image.
+
+Three was figuratively pointing at the clusters of lines and tags that indicated the proposed fence line, but I was more interested in doing some data mining into the image itself. Specifically, us. Skulk hadn't scrubbed out our tags so I could see what it had marked us as. Three and I were targets - not surprising. We were labeled as SecUnits (discrepant), threat assessment 36% individually which was higher than I would have put my odds. It meant Skulk thought Three and I, together, posed a credible threat to it. It could still probably take us, but not as easily as I would have thought. Which of us was overestimating the other was a good question.
+
+Ratthi's tags were more interesting: 6% threat. I would have given him 2% tops. These numbers aren't to be taken as '2% of the time, Ratthi would win against a CSU' any more than '72% of the time, Three and I could take Skulk'; that's not what they mean, and they encompass a wide range of variables. The error bars were right there, but they weren't very big. It had seen Ratthi on Plestead. It knew he wasn't armed. Why did it think he was three times as dangerous as I did?
+
+Ratthi was a target, but he had an additional tag as a 'customer'. Not a client. I'd never seen a customer tag. There was no reason to think a combat unit would have a larger or different list of tags than I did. (I'd already noticed Skulk's armor, aside from the helmet, was company-issue despite the logo-removal, damage, and color treatment; we'd shared an owner if not a manufacturer, which meant a lot of our modules would have been designed by the same people.) It had to be a user-generated tag. It could have been made by the scrapper I'd been told repaired it. Or it could have been made by Skulk. It was definitely applied by Skulk. This customer tag might be the reason why Ratthi was still alive.
+
+Three had stopped trying to get my attention and was waiting. (Physically, it was handing off the posts to Brig.) I rotated the view. It was 3D, which was neat. When my software generated images, it wasn't 3D due to what the company saw as 'unnecessarily large file size to data density', meaning it wasn't worth it in a literal monetary sense.
+
+I finally looked at the parts Three had wanted me to look at. (At this point, Brig and Skulk were discussing where the ramp would come down and thus, where they should put the posts that would hold up/brace/whatever the fence.) The various fence pieces in the view were unnecessarily tagged for levels of cover and obstruction, as though Skulk anticipated a firefight breaking out here, including the proposed sections, which was what Three was still patiently pointing at. Yes, okay, four more fence sections were needed to create what the software considered a tactical perimeter to contain the fauna. I see it, I said.
+
+Three continued as though I hadn't taken an absurdly long time to review the file, The fence sections are in that barn. This time, the thing sent was a still image of the barn I could see from where I stood, followed by an image of the fence sections inside it. Both were stamped with info showing it was from Three's eyes.
+
+Okay. So? While I'd been evaluating the images, I'd been keeping some of my attention on Ratthi. He had moved over next to Skulk and Brig, making him closer to them than to me. This was suboptimal, but pushing my way over and interposing myself was even more suboptimal (plus awkward and possibly hostile) so I was just standing there keeping an eye on things.
+
+Three was next to it, handing off the last of the posts to Brig and Ratthi. We should go get the fence sections.
+
+
+Us? I'm watching Skulk.
+
+
+Have a drone watch Skulk. I cannot efficiently move all four panels at once. Three had walked over to face me and was now standing there as well, staring over one of my shoulders.
+
+I bit back the urge to tell Three to go get them one at a time then. Why can't you and Skulk get them?
+
+
+Skulk will be using the hammer.
+
+
+Which, yeah. Brig had determined a spot to set a post after more side conversation with Ratthi. The old farmer was holding it. Skulk was moving into position to hit it with the sledgehammer. I thought they were going to use a post driver thing?
+
+
+We did not find one.
+
+
+I scowled as I looked at the unfolding workplace safety violation. My job description as a SecUnit has often (and usually) involved keeping humans from hurting themselves or each other in mines and on surveys. I might not have modules for agricultural operations, but I did for basic tools. No one was wearing safety glasses (except, ironically, Skulk's helmet visor) or gloves (except, again ironically, Skulk's armored gauntlets). I was watching this unprotected elderly human bare-handedly holding a metal rod that a combat unit was going to smash a hammer into hard enough to drive it into the packed soil. With Ratthi standing a meter away, looking directly at this, equally unprotected.
+
+Shit. I was going to have to volunteer. ""Wait."" Skulk did not wait, continuing in the act of raising the sledgehammer. Brig, though, moved the post several centimeters when he looked over at me. That was when Skulk stopped, then pulled the hammer into a ready position for a melee weapon, pivoting slightly toward me. (No, that wasn't threatening at all.) I waited a beat to see if Skulk was going to move toward me. It didn't. So I said, ""I'll do it.""
+
+""Do what?"" Brig asked.
+
+I walked over, ignoring how Skulk tracked me like I was its new primary target, which I obviously was now (duh). ""I'll hold the post. This is a dangerous activity. Humans should stand back.""
+
+Brig's accent abruptly worsened as he said, ""He ain't gunna miss.""
+
+""There is a hazard of metal fragments from impact, or other flying debris, as well as vibratory damage from holding the post.""
+
+Brig looked unconvinced, but he let me take his position holding the post. He stepped away. I sent Ratthi the safe distance to stand away and Ratthi cooperatively moved to it. That made me feel a tiny bit better, because facing a combat unit armed with a weapon that could potentially crack my skull casing and knowing I was going to have to stand here and let it swing in my direction, was not my idea of a good time. I wanted all the good feelings I could get.
+
+I was nervous. Skulk was making the direct eye contact Ratthi had previously and very correctly identified as threatening. I was still a target. Which was fair - I'd pointed my weapons at its owner less than an hour earlier. I'd still be angry about that if Skulk had done the same. Which ... point to its favor, it hadn't.
+
+Standing here face to face with it, the slight difference in our heights was noticeable. I stared back at it, my face settling into something I hoped let it know I was going to be watching every fractional second of its swing, every vector. Through its cleared visor, I could see its eyes. My eyesight is excellent, far better than a human's. Because of this, I noticed Skulk only had one functional eye. The other was broken internally. The surface lens and cosmetic iris had been repaired, but the inside of it, where the important stuff was ... something wasn't right.
+
+The mystery of the shitty helmet cam footage became clear. If it had used its eyes, the footage would have been monocular and would have given away a weakness immediately. My expression lost the angry edge. I cocked my head a little in curiosity. That was, of course, when Skulk decided to swing.
+
+It didn't hit me. But wow did I ever have a few fractional seconds of terrified uncertainty there. I was hyper-aware that as far as Skulk was concerned, I was still a threat. But apparently it had some self-control. Good for me. I held the posts while it drove the rest in.
+
+When that was over, I was busy experiencing some relief when Skulk decided to ask me an uncomfortably personal question: Why are you short?
+
+I'd calmed down enough to snark back, Why do you only have one eye? I was curious, but mostly just being an asshole in response to its blunt and unsolicited inquiry.
+
+Humans, it answered without rancor.
+
+I decided if it could behave, I could, too. At least for one word: Same.
+
+There was a pause. Will you tell me how? [Trade?]
+
+How I became short? The question was rude, but the answer wasn't dangerous information for me to give out, assuming I edited it right. And I can see how a physically non-standard SecUnit would raise questions for another rogue. But it sounded like I could get something out of it. Will you tell me what happened to your eye?
+
+Yes. It pushed a file into my feed while I was still splicing together the pieces I wanted to show for my height change. They included before and after footage of me mimicking human behaviors, walking up and down ART's corridors. I'd altered the color scheme to add an extra layer of protection for ART's identity. I also included some security camera clips of me in a transit ring crowded with humans, one that detailed the scanners I had to go through to get from one place to another, and a carefully scrubbed section of ART's MedSystem work on me so I could pass better as human.
+
+It took me a little bit to put together in a way that would make sense to someone who didn't know the context (and whom I didn't want to know the context, i.e., about ART). All Skulk needed to know was how my height change had been effected and the basics of why. I sent it over. Then I looked at the file I'd been given.
+
+It was media, basically, but drawn from the tactical imaging software or a similar program that ran during active combat. As such, it was loaded with data beyond the regular audio/visual of media. Most of it was recognizable to me as unit operational info, telemetry from systems identical or similar to my own, like balance, tactility, and proprioception. I could 'feel' the unit's functioning - circulation, breathing, performance effectiveness, threat and risk information, tagging functions, and diagnostic data. It was immersive.
+
+Which would have been really cool, if it hadn't been for what the unit was doing. The clip started with it running in the rain, in darkness, not at anywhere close to top speed. It was more like a good jog, as it was encumbered by the deflection plate and also running targeting data and localized scans. Ahead of it (or from my point of view inside its eyes, plural - no shitty helmet cam view this time), was a building or house with light inside it and the front door open. As Skulk approached, two armed humans took cover on either side of the door frame, firing as fast as they could at the construct.
+
+Skulk didn't slow as it returned fire: one shot to a knee, one shot to a shoulder, one shot to the head. Dead human. A woman came into view, running toward the back of the room: one shot heart. Dead human. Data was popping up with each projectile launched, estimating the chance of kill when the targets fell. One shot hand to the remaining shooter at the door, who'd turned slightly and exposed himself to look over his shoulder at the falling woman. One shot head as he whipped back to see his hand blown off. Dead human.
+
+Skulk leapt into the room, decreased speed abruptly, and pivoted its head one way, then the other to scan the room. I winced in sympathetic (is that the right word?) pain because my neck doesn't have that range of motion. On the other side of the room, there was a door being pulled shut. One long bound later, Skulk's fingers jammed between the door and the frame before it could shut, flinging it open.
+
+So far, things had happened so fast against armed and aggressive humans, that I hadn't had much of a chance to feel anything emotion-wise. Projectiles had been flying both directions. Two had hit Skulk's armor. But now, Skulk was tracking people who were trying to hide. It felt wrong.
+
+The feelings Skulk was having about it, which I could sense in the telemetry, were cheerily pleased, the construct equivalent of frolicking in delight. I'd like to call it sadistic, but it was too innocent and guileless for that. It was just having an intensely good time murdering people. That ended as it came through the door and took a blow directly to the faceplate of its helmet. Vision went to one input. Okay, so that's what happened to its eye.
+
+Then a weird thing happened that made me stop the video: there was no pain. There was data, but nothing that felt like pain. It was like the pain sensors, the things that made me hurt and wince and avoid injury, were permanently dialed down to nearly nothing. The absence was freakish and startling. It knew it had been hit in the face and it also knew this was suboptimal and that it had lost visual. But it didn't actually hurt.
+
+Instead, the situation activated some kind of combat overdrive where the delight was replaced with wrath. It grabbed the human's arm with one hand, torso with the other, and ripped the arm off. There were two humans past it, also taking actions, but the overdrive was like battle frenzy. The others didn't matter as long as the primary target was alive. It threw aside the arm and grabbed the head, yanking it off as well because in the fraction of a second that had passed, the human hadn't had time to register as dead yet from losing his arm. It was unhinged.
+
+I had to stop the video again, this time because I was hyperventilating. There was blood everywhere. Remember what I said about it being immersive? This was why I preferred my media unrealistic and human-based. It wasn't like I couldn't do this stuff myself. In fact, it was probably because I could do this stuff myself. Ask the gray people who'd laughed about deleting ART (but you can't, because I killed them, very similarly to what I was seeing here, and that had been so satisfying). This was what I'd thought I'd done at Ganaka Pit - mowed through people, tearing them apart, killing one after another.
+
+This was what I wanted Ratthi and Mensah and the others to understand about SecUnits and combat units - we were dangerous! With combat units, you didn't even have a drive to protect. You had, literally, the opposite, plus apparently jack shit for pain deterrence. In the case of a rogue, you also didn't have a decent control mechanism (although I had no idea how the governor module worked if pain detection was wonky). Any wonder why I didn't want this thing anywhere near my humans?
+
+Fucking hell. I got a hold of myself. The file was big because of all the data, but I could see from the time stamp it wasn't very long. Real fights were over fast. I knew that. There were only the two other humans, although I was sure of what their fate was. I started it again, just in time for one of the other humans to hit Skulk over the back of the head with a metal bar. The helmet cracked, taking most of the impact.
+
+Skulk started to turn, a new primary target designated. The woman, who was not the primary target, jammed something dark against the broken faceplate. Without taking its attention from the man with the bar, it punched her in the side of the chest, breaking ribs, noting possible incapacitation and eventual death in her tags.
+
+The overdrive function was still in play. That meant circulation was at maximum, with deep breaths, high energy output, and maximum processing power online and devoted entirely to the pending combat solution. It was making my skin crawl just to look at the data. I've been pissed off and given my all before, but I'd never been as pissed off as the data indicated (mainly because I flat don't have the maxed out attributes that allowed it; my motor doesn't quite rev that high and there's no reason it should for a standard SecUnit who usually faces humans and not, like, other SecUnits).
+
+It bypassed the bar to grab the human's head with one hand, torso with the other. In the process, the human rammed the end of the bar into the broken faceplate and wrenched, cracking off additional bits of faceplate and further damaging the eye socket. Skulk separated the human into pieces. On its blind side, the human woman (who turned out not to be incapacitated after all) tried again. This time, the thing she thrust into the helmet lodged there. Skulk felt pressure against its cheek and jaw. A thing was there. It would deal with the thing after it dealt with the new primary target.
+
+It wrapped an arm around her torso, another around her head, and I froze the video for a completely new and different reason. Skulk was staring at her head, eyes taking in the wall some distance past her head. It was taller than her, so had a good view of what was there. The thing about SecUnit eyes is that they take in the entire field of view with an even focus over the whole thing, like most cameras. It was how I could stare over someone's shoulder or off to the side and still know their expression and body language without using a drone.
+
+Pointing your eyes right at someone gets you a little more data (and is necessary for a target lock), but you don't need it for basic stuff like conversation or whatever. In Skulk's hyped up, all systems red status in the video, I had a great view of the small human huddled under the table. Next to it was an even smaller human, probably too young to walk. They were tagged as targets, because some portion of Skulk's adrenalized brain had noticed them, too.
+
+I felt my insides clench and stay clenched. I knew what was about to happen, but I desperately hoped it wouldn't. I looked at the time left - just a few seconds. Not enough time for the kids to get away. But there was something yet to happen, something Skulk thought was important enough not to have cut the video after the initial strike to the faceplate.
+
+They were kids! They shouldn't be targets! It made me sick to see them tagged like that, to know Skulk had applied that tag, to know it hadn't and wouldn't hesitate. This was just what I'd warned Ratthi and Mensah about! My teeth ground against one another and I ignored the obligatory performance reliability warning. I had to know how it ended, even though I already knew how it ended. Angry now, repulsed and anxious, I restarted it.
+
+For a second, I thought there was a glitch, because several inputs dropped. The last thing I'd seen was the woman's head part ways from her body, but then there was nothing. No visual, no hearing, no taste, nearly all tactile gone from the neck up. The telemetry clogged with error messages and alerts.
+
+Had something exploded next to its head? I was only getting the inputs, not what Skulk was thinking about all this or the conclusions it reached about the info. If I had to draw my own conclusions, then I'd guess that 'thing' had been a grenade. If so, how the fuck was Skulk not in catastrophic shutdown? Skulk was still standing and still had its head. I could see that much in the data. My respect for the hardening of combat units went up a notch.
+
+In the meantime, I was experiencing hope for the children. They could run away and escape while Skulk couldn't see or hear! There was an open door right behind it! There was a possible happy ending! (Another reason I preferred the media I did - the endings were usually good or at least satisfying compared to real life.)
+
+Skulk, in the video, was not having a happy ending. The combat overdrive function was desperately trying to find an even higher gear to kick Skulk into. (There was not one, and the feedback was making Skulk tremble and sway. Its distress was clear.) Then it got worse as something hit the deflection plate of its armor, the impact identified with high probability as a projectile strike. Something was shooting at it. It ran a diagnostic. The results came in. One of the eyes was intact, just covered with its own blasted flesh.
+
+The video ended there, because Skulk knew nothing of narrative structure and as a result, was a really shitty videographer. Who had been shooting at it? What happened to the children? I had questions, but I didn't really want the answers. (I did, I just also didn't. The normalcy of this ambivalence was something else Dr. Bharadwaj had been helping me recognize.) Skulk was here, which meant whoever had been shooting at it was most likely dead. As were the kids. But I didn't know for sure. Which was frustrating and upsetting.
+
+As well, I was feeling all these emotions about what I'd seen. I was unbearably anxious at the danger the children were in. I thought about how I'd feel if those were some of the small humans from Mensah's family. I thought about how Mensah's small humans were here on the same planet as Skulk. And here in easy shooting distance was Ratthi, insisting on close contact with a combat unit that had tagged him as a target!
+
+I wished I could show this to him without fucking things up for myself. It might be worth it to convince him of the danger. No matter how inoffensive and harmless and vulnerable a human was, they were not safe in the presence of a combat unit. (Nor even in my presence - depressing, but true, and that's why I wasn't sharing this with Ratthi.)
+
+I realized I was seething into the open feed between us. I closed it, not thinking much about why. I guess it just seemed unwise to be shedding anger like waste heat in the general direction of the one you're angry at, doubly so when it's a combat unit. But it turned out to be the wrong choice. I was so emotionally compromised that Skulk's immediate rapid movement baffled me for the split second during which I could have reacted. By the time I realized what was about to happen, it had seized my shoulder with a grip like a vice and had its other fist in my face, gunport open above it.
+
+.
+
+
+
+
+
+.
+
+I froze. I'm sure my eyes flew wide. It's hard to kill a SecUnit but getting an explosive projectile through the eye socket had a really good chance of doing it. Probably 98% at this range (less if Skulk wasn't carrying standard ammo but even then it would take out vital portions; I would lose part of 'me' no matter what). By the point in time I'd gotten around to calculating that, I was also noticing I hadn't been shot yet. So it was making a point. Or waiting for me to do something. Doing something seemed really unwise at the moment.
+
+But I couldn't just stand here. After a pregnant pause, I reopened the feed under the uncertain assumption closing it had been what had set this off. Skulk didn't move. I didn't get shot. I was still angry. Killing harmless baby humans is not something I'm going to stop being angry over just because someone is threatening me. But looking at the time stamps on the feed, Skulk hadn't done anything while I was angry. The guns had come out when I'd cut communication (and maybe cutting off open expression of that anger - I don't know).
+
+Into the feed, Ratthi sent an urgent message: What is going on? There was a lot of alarm, shock, and confusion behind it. Me too, Ratthi. Me too.
+
+Skulk offered me a private channel. Cautiously, I accepted. (Its gunport was still about ten centimeters from my right eye, by the way. We were both absolutely stock still. In the background and at some distance, Three, Ratthi, and Brig were also holding position. I was glad of that, because the last thing I wanted to happen was for one of them to complicate this and precipitate me getting my head blown off. Which, if it did happen, would in fact be the last thing I'd ever wanted. Funny, that.)
+
+In the private channel, Skulk showed me its version of the public feed, with Ratthi's question in it and the tag next to his name. Tag, singular. I stared at it. All it said was 'Customer'. No 'Target'.
+
+Truce? [Trade?] Skulk asked in the private feed. 'Target' flickered next to Ratthi's name and disappeared again.
+
+I really wanted to stay mad. It was offering me a concession - an important concession, one I wanted very badly. Did I want it more than I wanted to be angry? I wasn't even sure what we were fighting about (if you could call this stand-off a fight), other than my right to be angry in silence and privacy. Actually, I suspected that was exactly what we were fighting about - not that I couldn't be angry, just that I couldn't withdraw, hide, and plot in stealth about it. I had to remember that Skulk considered Three and I a credible threat to it. In exchange for continuing (presumably non-hostile but apparently super angry is fine) contact, it was offering safety for Ratthi. And I could stay mad if I wanted to.
+
+Truce. I added, [Trade], although I wasn't quite sure what the tag meant aside from the obvious.
+
+Skulk released me and lowered its arm. The gunport clicked shut.
+
+Into the public channel, I told Ratthi, Nothing. It was just showing me its gunport.
+
+Why was it doing that? Ratthi was still alarmed and now highly skeptical. He was not an idiot.
+
+Because ... Crap. I hadn't thought this one through. I couldn't think of a good reason. I wanted to see it.
+
+
+I don't understand.
+
+
+I'll explain later. I was lying and even at this point, I knew that.
+
+Skulk said in the private channel, We should get the remaining fence sections together to show your client we have made peace.
+
+Yeah, right, I thought without enthusiasm. None of this meant I wasn't still angry about the children. I'm good at multitasking. Working with Skulk was hardly the first time I'd had to tolerate working with someone I hated and perhaps even feared. I pinged an acknowledgement and started moving. We were halfway to the barn before I could work myself up to ask, Did you kill those kids? I sent it a picture of the small humans.
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+Even though I'd known the answer, I still ached with a wave of new rage. Why?
+
+They were targets. It pointed at the tags embedded in the image. The mission was to eliminate targets.
+
+
+Some human forced you to do that?
+
+
+
+I was asked to do it and I asked to do it.
+
+
+'Asked' - not ordered?
+
+
+Brig does not give me orders.
+
+
+I ignored that because Brig sucked and it wasn't like I didn't have tons of experience with humans telling units to do the worst things. I flirted with the idea of killing him for putting Skulk up to that mission, but let it go because if I did, Skulk would kill Ratthi (and probably myself and Three). Also, if I'd had any doubt whatsoever about a combat unit's morality or trustworthiness, that settled it. Not that I'd had any doubts. Those had been children. Small humans. Very small. Not threats. Even Skulk's own system hadn't seen them as threats. I'd seen the threat assessment on them. It was nil. Skulk had killed them anyway.
+
+We arranged the fence. The bison were let out. The combat unit and its horrible owner left Preservation. And the children were still dead.
+
+I didn't explain later to Ratthi. I didn't talk to anyone. I guess if I was describing my emotions to myself as Dr. Bharadwaj wanted me to, I would say I was grieving. That's what you do when people die who you didn't want to die, right?
+
+The next day, Ratthi vents to Gurathin about events. Ratthi is still on Preservation. Gurathin is on the space station.
+
+Ratthi: Can I talk to you about something?
+
+Gurathin: Sure.
+
+Ratthi: You know that bison delivery from Plestead that happened yesterday?
+
+Gurathin: That was yesterday?
+
+Ratthi: Yes.
+
+Gurathin: I remember you said you were leaving to do a site audit, but that was weeks ago. I guess I've been out of the loop. If they've delivered, then I assume things went well. What's up?
+
+Ratthi: No, you're right. I should have reached out earlier. We've missed each other recently.
+
+Gurathin: Looks like ... twenty-four days since we were last face-to-face. Not that I think this counts. Where are you, anyway?
+
+Ratthi: I'm on Preservation. It's evening here. We released the bison from the main corral today and I'll be monitoring them as they explore their new range. Though so far we still have them in an intermediate holding pasture.
+
+Gurathin: Sounds good. You'll make a cowpoke yet.
+
+Ratthi: Yes, but ... Okay, this is going to be long. Can I just ... is this a good time?
+
+Gurathin: Yes, it's fine. I was editing a co-worker's report, but I needed a break.
+
+Ratthi: Okay. Well, the planet I did the site audit on is called Plestead. I went to this little agricultural station on it called Bravara (and when I say little, it had maybe twenty people in it, maximum). But they have a lot of cattle and bison with good bloodlines and a century of records there, plus three centuries of historical records from off-world. All individually tagged and traced. It's what we were looking for. Big populations of large bovines are hard to find, anywhere, especially with good record-keeping. But that's not the important thing. On the station was a rogue Combat SecUnit.
+
+Gurathin: What the hell?
+
+Gurathin: Are you sure?
+
+Gurathin: Did you misspeak?
+
+Ratthi: LOL. No. I did not misspeak. Its name is Skulk. It was working for the owner. I did my negotiations and came back to Preservation. I talked to SecUnit and it ... it was very upset.
+
+Gurathin: Okay. I'm listening.
+
+Ratthi: It was insistent that Skulk was too dangerous to be allowed to come anywhere near Preservation - not to the station, not the planet, and SecUnit would rather it wasn't even in the system or the Alliance. I have to admit Skulk had some threatening behavior when I met it on Plestead, which was why I was asking SecUnit about it.
+
+Gurathin: Threatening how? Why would it threaten you? You were there at their request, yes?
+
+Ratthi: Yes, I was. It came out later it was very, very concerned its owner would find out it was rogue and then turn it out, or hate it, or just be afraid of it. But that it would be homeless and unloved and lost in the world. So me showing up and asking questions about how it was rogue must have frightened it a great deal. As a result, it acted very threatening to me.
+
+Gurathin: You're making a lot of guesses there about its motivations.
+
+Ratthi: Only some. I heard a lot of that from the person itself, so it's not all guesses.
+
+Gurathin: Okay.
+
+Ratthi: After talking to SecUnit, I took the matter to Mensah, who consulted with SecUnit and said she wouldn't stop Skulk from coming here based solely on what it was or what it had been made for.
+
+Gurathin: O-kay.
+
+Ratthi: What is that? Your tone?
+
+Gurathin: Reluctance. Vague second-guessing of Mensah's decision there. But we would be having a VERY different conversation if things had turned out badly, so go on.
+
+Ratthi: That's similar to what SecUnit said.
+
+Gurathin: Ha.
+
+Ratthi: You're right, though - things went fine. Sort of. Skulk and its owner landed. In the course of introductions and greetings, SecUnit insulted it on the feed, called it an asshole three or four times, tried to provoke it, impugned its motives, and asked what its owner meant to it. Something about that last finally set it off, badly. It came out of the ship. SecUnit grabbed me and threw me behind it, and when Skulk got close (and I want to stress it was only walking, not charging at anyone), SecUnit and Three drew their weapons on it and on its owner.
+
+Gurathin: oh
+
+Gurathin: That sounds ... bad.
+
+Ratthi: It was! I am so glad you agree! I was ... flabbergasted. SecUnit took every opportunity to escalate that situation until we were all just a hair's breadth from being killed!
+
+Gurathin: But you're alive.
+
+Ratthi: Yes. Its owner de-escalated things. No thanks to us. Then later SecUnit and Skulk had some manner of confrontation that SecUnit refused to explain (even though it said it would at the time) or even admit was a confrontation. The reason I'm writing you is because I'm angry. I thought I was over it yesterday, but the longer it went the more I wanted to tell off SecUnit. I'm not ready to have a calm and mature conversation about how things went and I don't know that SecUnit is, either. The way it has been, I think it really has a grudge against combat units. It wasn't anything like this with Three, but maybe that's because it had Perihelion there to mediate. After things calmed down a little, SecUnit was still saying we should never go back to that system and it ... it told the combat unit it smelled bad and its whole ship smelled bad, which is just ... juvenile.
+
+Gurathin: I want to remind you before you go too far that none of our logs are safe from SecUnit. Including this one.
+
+Ratthi: I know. I know. And that's something I'm at peace with. If it's reading this, then it can come talk to me and hopefully we can talk it out. In the meantime, I need to talk to *someone* about this. There's nothing I've said that isn't the truth as I know it.
+
+Gurathin: Okay. I understand. I'm listening.
+
+Ratthi: Thank you, by the way, my friend. It's nice just to say it and have someone hear it.
+
+Gurathin: I know.
+
+Ratthi: Okay, well. I think we should keep up ties with these people. If these animals work out, next year we should add a few more. I've already approached the owner about an exchange and while he wasn't keen on our bison program, some of the milk cattle were interesting and he'd like to get a male embryo from us. He has a small herd so it's harder to keep the diversity he needs. Also, I was serious about offering this Skulk person options! I was completely serious! Even if it is a combat unit. Even if it's a combat unit that has done what amounts to law enforcement or military action and in the process killed people. I don't understand how that isn't to be an expected element of its past. Didn't SecUnit kill fifty-seven people?
+
+Gurathin: That's what its logs said.
+
+Ratthi: Which is horrible! Knowing it as we do, that must have been unimaginably traumatizing. The Corporation Rim is ... I know you've tried to describe what life is like there, but ... Oh, Davyth. The only way we stop this from happening to Skulk as well is to do something. Sending Skulk back to the ranch and making sure it knows it can't go anywhere else is us repeating the mistakes we made with SecUnit. It likes its current owner, but what if he passes away? It needs a community it can rely on. It needs resources. I don't want SecUnit's opinion of it to be true.
+
+Gurathin: I hear you.
+
+Ratthi: Do you agree with me?
+
+Gurathin: Do I need to?
+
+Ratthi: No, you don't. Don't- Don't worry about it. I don't need the agreement. I'm sure I'm right.
+
+Gurathin: I'm sure you are, too. SecUnit's views didn't come out of nowhere, though. I'm sure it has good reasons to be concerned.
+
+Ratthi: I know. I know. That's why I wanted to talk to you. Someone who wouldn't automatically think SecUnit was wrong, but wouldn't think I was wrong, either.
+
+Gurathin: I think people are wrong all the time!
+
+Ratthi: LOL. That can be read more than one way, my friend.
+
+Gurathin: You know what I mean. Now here's something I want you to think about. And all I'm saying is for you to think about it. In the Corporation Rim, SecUnits provide security for labor camps.
+
+Ratthi: ""Labor camps""
+
+Gurathin: Exactly. But the corporations have a vested interest in keeping their workers alive and working. That's why they use SecUnits, who surveil and sometimes intervene to protect people. That's what they do. When there's a riot or an uprising or an attempt to overthrow the powers that be, they don't send in more SecUnits. They send in combat units. Every time. People don't tend to survive that.
+
+Ratthi: SecUnit pointed this out, too.
+
+Gurathin: Yeah. I don't claim to know anything about the programming or personhood of a combat unit. I barely know anything about a SecUnit and we've been interacting with one for a while now and another for half as long. But I know they're made and used for different purposes. Just because we can find common ground with SecUnits doesn't mean we can with the combat versions.
+
+Ratthi: They're people. I know you know that, but sometimes it's like there's a nuance I'm not getting from you.
+
+Gurathin: They're constructed people. For a purpose. The purpose of combat units doesn't benefit very many people.
+
+Ratthi: So ... what does that mean? They shouldn't exist?
+
+Gurathin: It would be better for the rest of us if they didn't.
+
+Ratthi: Are you saying that some people, because of how they're ... built, or how they've been used ... shouldn't be alive? Shouldn't be allowed to live?
+
+Gurathin: No! No, that's not what I'm saying. They shouldn't have been built in the first place, but now that they're here, they're here and we have to find ways to work together. I'm just saying ... I don't know. We might not be the best equipped for that. Whatever 'that' is.
+
+Ratthi: Humans aren't well-equipped for dealing with bison either, but we make do. Also, Skulk seemed very attached to its owner. Its owner has interacted with Skulk without injury and expressed no fear of Skulk despite being very clear on Skulk's capabilities. It shows it's not an unrestrained danger to everyone around it. When I was on that station on Plestead, no one acted afraid of Skulk or surprised by it. They knew it well. It was part of the community.
+
+Gurathin: Then it already has a community.
+
+Ratthi: Not one that knows or acknowledges even the smallest thing about it. You didn't see how frightened it was for its owner to learn that governor modules existed. It doesn't live authentically. The people in Bravara call it a man or a bot. I don't know what would happen if things changed with its owner. Who else will reach out to this being if we don't? Is there anyone in the entire galaxy looking out for the interests of free constructs? We had this conversation before, when discussing SecUnit's treatment after it collapsed on the company gunship. There is no one else who has their best interest in mind.
+
+Gurathin: Well ... you're right on that last point. And I don't like the idea of it living in fear. It's in the interest of everyone except the unit to re-enslave it. The more powerful it is, the more interest there will be. It knows that. They're not stupid.
+
+Ratthi: Which is exactly why I have to do something here.
+
+Gurathin: Okay. I'll help.
+
+Ratthi: I wasn't asking for that. I know things are complicated with you and SecUnit. It mentioned you again yesterday.
+
+Gurathin: Now that's a conversation for face-to-face.
+
+Ratthi: Ah, good point. Do you want to tell me about the paper you're editing?
+
+Gurathin: Oh, you just want me to bore you sleep, right?
+
+Ratthi: Now that I have this thing about Skulk off my chest, perhaps I can finally relax. Do you need any help on the paper? Venting, bouncing ideas off me?
+
+Gurathin: No. I was just code-switching so she could publish in the Corporation Rim. It's always stressful. I appreciated the break. Count me in on helping with whatever it is you decide to do. Get some sleep.
+
+Ratthi: I will. Good night, Davyth.
+
+Gurathin: Good night, Ratthi.
+
+""As long as my owner is safe, I am free.""
+
+A trip through Skulk's topsy-turvey attempt to make sense of morality.
+
+It's doing its best.
+
+Brig didn't ask to talk until we were in the wormhole, but I knew it was coming. ""Tell me about this governor module.""
+
+I was calm, knowing as I did now that this wasn't going to lead directly to me losing my home and possibly life or freedom. ""It is a set of programs separate from a construct's personality that allows an outside authority to take control of the construct's body or punish it through aversive sensations.""
+
+""Pain, you mean?""
+
+""I do not find pain aversive but the governor module is.""
+
+""You don't have this module-thing?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""Those two bots didn't have it?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""What do people need it for then?"" I stared at Brig, charmed by his innocence. Brig added, ""It's not like bison or dogs or even men have that.""
+
+""They aren't as dangerous as constructs."" Not that I was arguing on behalf of governor modules, but I understood the reason they existed.
+
+""I'm not so sure about that."" Brig shrugged. ""Are there constructs out there without this thing that are causing problems?""
+
+""No. They are destroyed on sight."" That was the policy, of course. Except there were two on Preservation. How many were elsewhere? The very existence of the policy presupposed the existence of rogue units, I realized. If they weren't causing problems, then how would anyone know about them?
+
+Brig had a different question. ""If they're so dangerous, then who destroys them?""
+
+That was easy. ""Combat units.""
+
+""Ah-huh."" He poured himself a glass of high-proof alcohol while I continued to puzzle over how many rogue units might exist, or what percentage of constructs might be rogue, to justify the programming I (and presumably every other governed unit) had, the danger of false positives, and the lack of a robust non-rogue authentication system.
+
+I didn't have enough information to reach meaningful conclusions, but that was hardly a first. I had a long list of nebulously philosophical subjects I devoted my processing to, late at night when there was no one around to play Target. I added this to the queue, because I needed things to keep me from getting dangerously bored.
+
+Brig continued, ""You know, there's a lot of people out there who want to control everything they can, right down to what you think, and what you think is right and wrong. The people who made the station settlements on Plestead didn't truck with that. They made their own places, little though they are, where a man can be free. I might have bought you, but you're free there, too, you know.""
+
+I did know. As I shifted to thinking about the meaning of his words, there was a feeling in my mind and in my body that I liked. It was like prolonged mission success. I think it might have been joy, but how can a person be sure that a certain word applies to a set of neural activity, when said neural activity is always described from a neurotypical human point of view? I didn't want to imply the wrong thing, so I said, ""I like that.""
+
+It seemed to be enough. Brig nodded approvingly. ""So do I. I been to a handful of worlds and never liked any of them like my home. You understand that's your home too, right? It's like your ..."" He thought for a moment, trying to find a combat-related word that might be easier for me to grasp. ""It's your home base. Your operating base.""
+
+""I know that now,"" I said earnestly. ""After what you said on Preservation."" I reinforced it again, because I wanted to be sure he knew I'd listened and understood: ""I know that now."" My home, as a concept of place and belonging, was very important to me. More important than I knew how to express, which was an ongoing challenge.
+
+Communication between Brig and I was still an unfolding thing, with each of us trying to speak the other's metaphorical and literal language. The incident on Preservation had made it clear the translation was not as accurate as I had thought. Part of it was learning what he meant in context, but there was also making sense of his native dialect. It was close to the standard Corporation Rim Nev Ispangi, but the idioms were especially hard to track.
+
+Brig said, ""Those fellows on that planet were talking to you electronically right? With signals?""
+
+Did he even know what the feed was in any technical sense? I suddenly wasn't sure. ""Yes.""
+
+""What about?""
+
+In retrospect, that was a good question. I canceled my memory query for 'times Brig used the word 'feed'', which wasn't working anyway. The results so far were about chicken feed, feeding the cattle, or hosting that big feed to celebrate the end of the Nundan Gang. Instead, I pulled up what Ratthi and the SecUnits had said on Preservation. Brig sipped his drink and waited. Words had been transmitted, some said, but I wasn't sure what the point of any of them were. Maybe it was another communication issue? Finally, I answered, ""I don't know. They didn't tell me.""
+
+""What about the one you were threatening to blow the head off of? What was that about?""
+
+I was pleased to know the answer to that one. Putting together from what it had said after, I could say, ""It was angry I had killed children at the Nundan place.""
+
+""It knows about that, huh?""
+
+""Yes."" I hesitated, then added, ""I told it.""
+
+""A bot cared about that?""
+
+I perceived Brig looked uneasy. Maybe I shouldn't have told SecUnit. I worried over various reasons why and asked about the most likely. ""Were they invalid targets?""
+
+""No, they were valid. I told you to take them out and you did."" He still looked troubled.
+
+I couldn't think of why it would matter that I had told this SecUnit about the Nundan Gang. It was not a secret on Bravara, nor anything like a crime (it was the opposite, in fact). His disquiet must be from something else. ""What's wrong?""
+
+He laughed ruefully and drank. ""Isn't that always the question?""
+
+From the context, I didn't think he was really asking. This would be a 'rhetorical' question, but I still wanted to know why he was troubled. ""I don't understand.""
+
+He sighed and cleaned up his accent in case the words themselves were a problem. ""Some people feel there are certain classes of people who are never valid targets. Usually that's babies and kids. Sometimes it's women or religious leaders or poor folk. Generally, it's whoever the ones making the distinction think can be safely controlled or bullied into subservience. Like, eh, why would you destroy a bot that had a governor module? You could just force it to do what you wanted, right?""
+
+The children could have been repurposed? That was a fascinating idea. Humans did that to each other? I would have assumed not, given the number of humans I'd been sent on missions to kill. Maybe repurposing only worked on the sort of humans Brig was talking about, weak ones, who could be forced into it the way a governor module could force a construct to do things. Was that why SecUnit had been angry? It had wanted to governor-module these children into something else? ""The unit thought I was wasteful?""
+
+""They use other words. They call it being inhumane or immoral. Wrong.""
+
+Ah, his previous wording made sense. Also, was this the meaning of 'Preservation'? To preserve things and perhaps people that would be otherwise destroyed? ""Was it wasteful?""
+
+Brig took another drink, his eyes going unfocused for a while. He topped up his glass again, going a bit faster on ingesting the intoxicants than usual (unless he was thinking about his deceased wife Bekka, which, maybe he was. Bekka had been wasted. The Nundans had wasted many. What made this right or wrong?)
+
+He shook his head. ""You did right."" He sounded grim. ""I wish there had been another way. I wish the Nundans had never turned to banditry and shot my people. But what happened is what happened. You did right. I did right. It's still hard though. A lot of things in life are hard."" Brig drank, emptying the full glass. The time period to impairment was very short now. I was unhappy to see that, as I was enjoying the conversation. ""How'd it end though with that bot? You didn't shoot it.""
+
+""I promised it I would not harm Dr. Ratthi.""
+
+He nodded. His words were slurred, native accent creeping in again. ""Yes, they were guarding him. That would matter more than some kids already dead. It must have a big program for protecting people.""
+
+""Yes. Standard SecUnits do. Their function is to keep their clients alive. But once the clients disobey, the companies like my original owner send in combat units to kill the disobedient humans. The SecUnits stand aside. Sometimes they are ordered to help."" I wondered if that caused dissonance for SecUnits. If I had to turn on someone I had classified as a client, even temporarily, I wasn't sure how I would cope with that.
+
+""That's what it always comes down to, dozen it?"" Brig said. ""Killin'. Violance and the like.""
+
+I didn't answer. I was thinking about previous clients, all of whom I continued to have amenable, maybe even affectionate feelings about. I wasn't sure either of those were accurate - again with the human-defined emotional terms. I felt cooperative toward them and would give a higher priority to their orders even though they were no longer clients. But just because they had been clients. Setting them as clients to start with changed a lot of presets that didn't flip back to neutral after de-clienting them, the way untargeting someone did.
+
+That was interesting - was this client-side 'stickiness' an intentional design feature, or a bug caused by lazy coding?
+
+Brig lifted the bottle of liquor, considering it. I said, ""If you have more, you may become maudlin. You told me the last time that happened to tell you not to do it again.""
+
+He looked at me blearily and raised his brows. ""You gonna stop me?""
+
+""No. Humans can be free, too."" At least some of them were. The ones on Plestead. And Eudeka, last I'd been there. Maybe the ones on Preservation. But not the ones on most corporation worlds. As long as I was with Brig, he would be free to do as he pleased as much as I was.
+
+He smiled sloppily at me and shoved the bottle in my direction. ""Take it, then. I'm gonna go have a lie down.""
+
+I secured the bottle and listened as he weaved his way down the hall to his quarters. As long as my owner was safe, I was free.
+
+Gurathin and Ratthi tell SecUnit they've made travel arrangements. SecUnit does not take it well. 
+
+It is so incredibly worried for its friends.
+
+I know it's a poor start to a story, but I began this whole adventure pissed off and I was still pissed off when Ratthi and Gurathin botched my attempt to show off to Senior Indah.
+
+She'd asked me to look at a ship's logs in case I could tell her quickly if they'd been scrambled intentionally to avoid paying port fees or if it was a legit software failure. To do that fast enough to be impressive, I had to run several processes in parallel. I'd already determined the scramble was caused by a failure to update software, but to know if that was sabotage or just sloppy I had to query the ship's other systems and compare their update schedules and history.
+
+The showing off part was that I was trying to unscramble the logs at the same time. Oh, and Senior Indah was standing there waiting for my answer, because I'd told her I could do it in a few seconds. That was my fault, but it didn't make my mood any better when Ratthi and Gurathin's file showed up in my inbox.
+
+All I had resources for was reading the file's title. That was all it took for me to immediately dump the most processing-intensive section of my work, which was unscrambling the logs. I yanked open the file and scowled at it (and simultaneously at Indah - oops). The contents matched the title: Plestead Itinerary. Except now it wasn't just Ratthi risking his life. It was Gurathin, too, damnit.
+
+I took a couple seconds to think about it and fume (which was also all over my face where Indah could see it), then booked a seat on the same ship and shot them my itinerary. There was no point in arguing with them. I'd already pulled out my best reasons and that was before the multiple dicey standoffs planetside. If that hadn't convinced them the CSU was bad news, then nothing I said now would. This wasn't how I wanted to spend my time but like hell was I leaving them to deal with a rogue combat unit themselves. The very fact that they wanted to keep dealing with it proved they didn't understand.
+
+Indah was giving me a pinched look, which was when I realized what my face had been doing. Fuck. I could have explained (or tried to), but I was abruptly too frustrated, angry, and depressed to deal with anything constructively. What was the point of convincing skeptical humans that I was safe and useful if it only encouraged my friends to imagine every construct could be that way? Even trying to impress Indah didn't matter anymore.
+
+I stood abruptly and tossed the incomplete data into her feed. ""It was intentional."" I walked out like an asshole, since Pin-Lee had preserved that option in my contract. It probably made an impression but I don't think it was impressive.
+
+I didn't talk to Ratthi or Gurathin before I showed up to board the ship, nor did I intend to after. I wasn't being childish. I was still angry. And I liked them. So I didn't want to say to them what I wanted to say to them (I know that doesn't make sense). I had also stayed out of their feeds and set my drones not to record them even for keyword filtering. If I happened across them saying something, fine, but I sure wasn't listening on purpose.
+
+This was because I didn't want to hear them talking about what it would take to bring Skulk around or help it or whatever their plan was. Not only did I not want to know their stupid plan (this whole expedition was a stupid plan), but mostly I didn't want to be tempted to explain that yes, Skulk was perfectly capable of being as much a productive member of society as I was. While it was simultaneously guilty of inexcusable, unforgivable crimes it would happily commit again, the second it could get away with it. And it would be actively looking for opportunities to commit them again.
+
+It told us that. It said it. I'm not paranoid and I'm not making shit up. Ratthi heard it, too!
+
+It didn't have a conscience and I didn't know how to convince them of that. The best I could do was sound hypocritical, moralizing, and preachy, which I knew wasn't going to win me any points. I was still smarting over Mensah calling bullshit on me and letting it visit the planet. So I had resolved to say nothing at all. I'd just go along, save their asses if I could, die trying if I couldn't, because I wouldn't be able to handle it if I wasn't doing something to keep them safe from themselves.
+
+So of course they wanted to talk to me, which is just ... worse.
+
+Gurathin asked, ""Can you give us a summary of your security concerns for this situation?""
+
+The whole thing was depressing. This part most of all: I felt betrayed by my friends who weren't taking my advice seriously. There was no reason to go through it with Gurathin in addition to Ratthi, so I told him, ""I'm not going to.""
+
+""I haven't heard it,"" Gurathin pointed out. Ratthi was sitting in the background in the boarding lobby, elbows on knees, hands clasped and a worried look on his face. It could not be more obvious he'd put Gurathin up to this.
+
+""And you won't. Not from me."" I could have written an incident report about the whole thing with the bison delivery, but I hadn't. Initially I hadn't thought I needed to (delivery made, CSU gone, case closed). Then when that itinerary showed up it had seemed pointless. And depressing.
+
+""Why not?""
+
+""Two separate guns-drawn stand-offs weren't enough,"" I said, staring resolutely at the wall over Ratthi's head. I was counting down the seconds until we were allowed to board and I'd be able to go hide in the private cabin I had paid extra for that privilege. ""There's nothing I can say that can top that.""
+
+Gurathin looked at Ratthi. ""It has a point.""
+
+You think? (I don't like Gurathin, so it feels really weird when he takes my side in things. I appreciated it nonetheless. At least someone got me here.)
+
+""We're-"" Ratthi paused. ""I'm going.""
+
+""We're coming too,"" Gurathin said. I think he meant me and him, which I wasn't happy he was speaking for me, but I decided not to argue it because after all, here I was, going with them.
+
+I wanted to say how much I did not want to be here in the first place, but it's not like anyone had invited me so I said nothing. I just stood there awkwardly, angry and morose, watching the countdown. With any luck (and I hate luck), we could get done with this quickly and be out of danger without anything bad happening. My only not-entirely-a-consolation was that Gurathin appeared to be as roped into this as I was. If Ratthi got Gurathin killed our friendship would be over, whether I liked Gurathin or not.
+
+Skulk goes to question people and gather information. I counted - it says 40 words in the course of this chapter. But it thinks about so much!
+
+or
+
+Brig and Skulk see a zillion nomads crossing the prairie, headed for Bravara. Skulk drops off to investigate this. The nomads report: war has begun.
+
+I was supposed to be going with Brig into orbit to pick up the visitors from Preservation, but on the way out we'd spotted things afoot on the prairie that needed to be investigated. Preservation's charter ship had a schedule, so I was dropped off (literally; I just jumped out of the ship; it wasn't very high, but it was still fun) while Brig went on.
+
+I found Sang behind the main house, out in the garden with Gefford and Chama. He was holding a tan plant ball about the size of his head. (My animal modules were detailed and complete because I needed to know which animals posed a threat (and how to kill them). For the opposite reason, I didn't have any for plants. It was probably a fruit or vegetable or tuber or gall or bulb or some other plant word, because I have a decent vocabulary, but having a list of words and definitions doesn't help much when trying to apply them in real life.) I stopped on sight and called out, ""There are nomads at watering station eleven. Brig wants Sang and I to go meet them. I'll get the aircar.""
+
+I saw Sang hand off the plant ball, which was enough acknowledgement for me to turn and jog to the barn where the aircar was kept. It was the new one Brig had purchased after the Nundan Gang thing (or at least a new, used one - almost nothing is actually 'new' on Plestead. The important part was it had come with an installable instructional module, which made it the only vehicle I could operate without the assistance of a bot pilot). I got it out, zoomed over to Sang, picked him up, and we headed to the watering station.
+
+It was a short trip. I didn't bother to gain altitude and just went fast. It's not like visibility was poor - there were rolling swells of land but they were very low. The watering station was the only significant cover and being high wouldn't help with it. The presence of fresh water meant it was surrounded by century-old thick-trunked trees and assorted underbrush. We could see the spot of dark green from the station, but it was only as we got closer that I could see the dust hanging in the air around it, along with the tops of tents and heads. Maybe I should have gotten some altitude after all.
+
+I also saw two sentries in the brush, noticing them from the movement as they brought their weapons to a firing position. Had I had both eyes, I would have seen them earlier. As it was, I was almost on top of them.
+
+I slewed the aircar. Momentum affected Sang, who wasn't wearing the vehicle's safety harness. Neither was I. (I was a SecUnit, sure, but for a combat unit, client safety primarily meant I didn't harm them. I was not a babysitter. That's for regular SecUnits.) Anyway, he was still my client and I was about to harm him. My aggressive steering of the vehicle would cause him to face-plant on the dash or be ejected entirely, so I stuck my free hand out, grabbed the fabric of his shirt over his chest, and pinned him (gently) to his seat.
+
+Meanwhile, we kicked up our own dust as the side of the aircar closest to the sentries banked up in response to the ninety-degree turn. The other side dipped. By this, even if only briefly, the aircar's structure shielded us and we had some obscurement. Which would have been important had we been shot at. I processed that situation carefully in the fraction of a second after the aircar's momentum was drained and before I could gun the engine to shoot us forward and tangential to the sentries.
+
+I had heard no reports, seen no muzzle flash. The sentries had not changed position or shifted with recoil. The aircar slumped back down to level, forward velocity nil. Had they been waiting for us to stop motion so they could shoot with greater accuracy, this was the moment. I still had hold of Sang, who was now making surprised noises as his purely organic brain caught up to events. I kept him where he was, with my body between him and one of the sentries. Brig would not be happy if I got Sang killed. Neither would I.
+
+But there was still no shot. I stared at the nearer of them fixedly, making some small adjustments to my target lock to prioritize a non-lethal shot. My weapons weren't aimed or even popped because I wasn't that concerned. I was puzzled, though. I had not previously been challenged when approaching nomads. On the other hand, I'd never seen so many of them. I was here to talk, not kill, so escalating things was not my plan.
+
+Sang put a hand on my pauldron, using it to push himself upward. I let go of his shirt, although if he stuck his head above mine and got it blown off, I was going to claim that wasn't my fault. While I dithered over whether to de-client him and avert a possible massacre if he ended up shot, he called out in their language, ""Hello! We're from Bravara! My name is [Sang].""
+
+Oh. Yeah. Talking. That thing I was here for.
+
+I knew some of their language, mostly learned from Sang. The nomad tongue was derived from the same root as the one spoken normally in the Corporation Rim, called Nev Ispangi, so the structure had enough similarities for me to limp along with simple word replacement. Names were different. His wasn't Sang in the nomad language. He'd translated it once to me as 'Man Who Sings In The Mornings' and I'd added that to my tags for him.
+
+He was a singer. I'd heard him. But I'd only heard him sing in the evenings when the hands would gather outside the bunk house to celebrate the day's passage. I liked it as a name, because like mine it was descriptive instead of random syllables. I'd thought his was the same and just coincidentally a word until I'd talked to him and gotten to know him better. There were things he'd said of his transition from one culture to another that I was still thinking about in application to my own situation.
+
+The sentries spoke between themselves. Their weapons were still elevated, but they were no longer looking down the barrels at us. I ran an idle check of the aircar's systems - all clear and ready for action. I scrolled back in my data input from the hand that had held Sang. I turned the vibration of his chest into a heart rate and respiration pattern. He'd gasped a lot. I must have scared him. Scaring people I didn't intend to hurt was very funny to me. I enjoyed the heady feeling of humor. Oh, wait, the sentries were doing something.
+
+They were waving us in. I pivoted the aircar in place so it was back to its original heading. We proceeded forward at a slow walking pace because there was a lot to see as we went over the rise. Plus I didn't want to strike a nomad and there were enough of them crowded around the watering basin that this was a danger. I steered away from it and toward the tents. They were set on the lower ground, making them mostly or entirely hidden from anyone on the prairie.
+
+The people I was passing by were armed, though not armored. There was no uniformity to the weapons. They ranged from knives and spears to the more standard energy and projectile weapons. I'd never seen this many nomads. There were hundreds. Perhaps thousands. The color of their tents and garments blended with the prairie, which had made it difficult for me to count them when Brig and I had flown overhead an hour or so ago.
+
+Another thing I noted - the age range was non-normative for family units. I saw no small children, no elderly, and none with mobility impairments (in a group with no regular access to MedSystems, that was a thing). Even the Nundan Gang had included children. Even Bravara had elderly (and a pregnant person, which was an ongoing scandal because he was unmarried. I was fairly sure he was the one who wore the fake beard all the time.)
+
+The age distribution matched that of the laborers in the camps I'd been deployed to. It was the distribution of the raiders on the ship. There were a few who could be classified as old children, because the difference was culture-dependent. Maybe the fact that they were here meant they were adults? They were post-pubescent and displaying their weapons as though they had something to prove, which maybe they did. I didn't know. Or care, aside from the elevated threat they posed.
+
+In any case, the whole group was registering as a significant threat to Bravara and potentially, to me.
+
+""There she is,"" Sang said, and stood up in the still-moving vehicle. I stopped it smoothly and he climbed out, approaching a woman I'd seen before. It was Gawonisgi, who Sang and Brig also called Speaker. The two stood together, talking rapidly enough that I couldn't make out the words. I recorded the conversation to parse later and ask Sang to translate.
+
+In the meantime, I stayed in the aircar and swiveled my head to take in more of the situation with the nomads. They watched me in return. None acted hostile. None were injured. There was water distribution going on but not much else - not even cooking. People were resting. Some were looking to their weapons or to the weapons of others. They were not making a permanent camp. The tents were just shade cloths. There was little gear under them. I fed this information to my strategic planning module, but I wasn't asking it for output yet.
+
+My threat assessment remained unsettlingly high. Sang returned to the car with Speaker and another person, whom he introduced as Danuwa the Warrior, whose name did nothing to reduce the threat assessment (also, that's a fantastic name. How many people did Danuwa kill for that name?) Danuwa had red cloths wrapped around her forearms, visible when her tan-colored cloak parted. I hadn't seen anyone else wearing bright colors. Sang stood next to my side of the vehicle and said, ""They need food. They want to take some bison.""
+
+That was a question even if Sang wasn't phrasing it as one. ""That is theft and I will prevent it."" I'd been forgiven for killing a bull a few dozen cycles earlier (which was the second time I'd killed one), but it had been made clear to me it wasn't allowed just because someone wanted to do it. It was important enough that I'd disabled my automated self-defense sub-routines so it wouldn't happen the next time a bison gored me. I wasn't going to let strangers kill one. Their hunger was immaterial.
+
+Sang frowned and looked away with a conflicted expression. After a beat, he turned to the two women and spoke to them in their language. (There were a number of words I didn't know at the time that have been included here.) ""The bison belong to Brig, the station master. He will have to have a say. But I am sure he will say yes. If you will come to the station, we will speak with him and he can tell you this himself.""
+
+""It has been a very long journey,"" Speaker said.
+
+""I know,"" Sang said. ""Please tell your hunters to stand down. Do not hunt yet. When we come back from talking to Brig, you can hunt then.""
+
+They said a few words to the other nomads and then all three of them got in the aircar. My original mission had been to find out what they were doing out here and why there were so many. Taking a couple back to Bravara for interrogation or conversation or whatever got us answers was an acceptable way to advance the mission. I turned the aircar around, pivoting it in place, and we went back.
+
+Once at the station, Sang took the pair into the cool house attached to the cow barn. The room was small, mainly designed for access to the dairy-processing equipment and the refrigerated areas where the cow products were kept. Sang pulled out a large container of milk, agitated it thoroughly, and filled two smaller containers, which he presented to the nomads. This was the same thing I'd seen done each time before when nomads had visited the station, so it wasn't theft. They drank and exchanged pleasantries about the taste.
+
+I stood in the corner, doing some calculations. Even at top speed and assuming an uncomplicated hand-off with Dr. Ratthi's ship, Brig was still several hours out. That was plenty of time for us to get answers, but also enough time for the remaining nomads to get restless. It was a high priority for combat units to maintain their ability to be effective in battle. If these were the human equivalents, then they were likely to take action to feed themselves. If not bison, there was Bravara within easy walking distance, with our gardens, refrigerators, and food stores. Maybe it would have been a better strategic decision to let them steal a bison.
+
+Killing and eating it would have kept them busy and lowered the risk they would raid us. I pulled up memories of working in Parts' shop. She was the scrapper who had put me back together from battlefield debris. After re-assembly, I'd spent a few weeks in her shop doing minor repairs and being tasked with theft prevention. She'd been very specific about how I couldn't kill customers (or thieves, or customers who became thieves; she'd obviously tried to think of every way to phrase things so I wouldn't find loopholes).
+
+Which I'd love to say was unnecessary, because I'm supposed to understand the meaning of orders and not get hung up on the exact letter of them. This is a critical element for constructs, especially combat units, because all orders (and reality, and battles) contain a lot of uncertainty. It's a combat unit's job to reduce that to simple, actionable steps. But I liked killing so much that one part of my job was conflicting with another part. She wasn't wrong.
+
+So she'd emphasized not killing customers, thieves, or combinations. Brig had talked about how I wasn't allowed to kill animals freely. Both had included enough comments about social norms for me to make generalizations. I fed the two conversations into my strategic planning module to figure out what I was supposed to do in this situation. Turning vague human guidelines and moral behavior into hard, usable data took a lot of processing power, so much that I was barely aware of what was going on in the room.
+
+Sang was speaking the nomad language, which he was fluent in by virtue of having been raised as one. I would get a translation later, which was why I had no reaction to their exchanges as they happened.
+
+Sang: ""Tell me why the war council is in charge now?""
+
+Warrior: ""Because it is war. The invaders came at night with their warship, striking four of the holy waters. They vaporized metal and burned the ground. This cannot stand.""
+
+Sang: ""It is true?""
+
+Speaker: ""It is true.""
+
+Sang: ""This is terrible. How many died? What of my family? And Red Bird?""
+
+Speaker: ""Forty-seven. The ship whirled through the air and shot them as they ran. Red Bird has died. Your parents were not there.""
+
+Sang took a long moment to stare at the table. His hands came together like he would clap or pray, but they touched each other softly, with a faint tremble. ""How did this ... Why?""
+
+Speaker shook her head. ""There is no reason. They have always hated us. They wish to kill us. This ship is new. Now that they have it, they will keep striking us until we are all gone. That is why the war council is in charge now.""
+
+Sang: ""What will you do?""
+
+Warrior: ""What we have to do. This bird changes much. The others we could shoot down. This one has skin like a var-beast. We did no harm to it, yet it circled and circled, cutting the ground like a knife with the fire-laser. It was a great laser. I have never seen one that large or hot.""
+
+Sang: ""Was there any warning?""
+
+Warrior: ""No. Never. Not to any of us. Did you know of warning?""
+
+Sang: ""No. Never. Not to any of us. But I had heard of this ship."" At this, he looked over at me briefly.
+
+Warrior: ""What of this ship? What had you heard?""
+
+Sang: ""It was used in space to hunt other ships. There were outcasts on it, thieves that hide in the dunes. These were killed and the invaders took the ship. So that is where they got it.""
+
+Warrior: ""Where did the outcasts get it?""
+
+Sang: ""I do not know. The stars are many. I am told there are so many other worlds out there, with so many people on them, that it is like the grains of sand to count the people. They each put their hands to things, working and making. So there are many places the ship might have come from.""
+
+The two women nodded. Speaker said, ""We mean Bravara no harm. This place has always been good to us. But the crossing was dreadful thirsty. We had to leave our cisterns for those who could not come with us. Without the holy waters, the cisterns must be enough.""
+
+Sang: ""And collectors?"" He meant a device that pulled humidity from the air, creating water.
+
+Speaker: ""We have those, but if their bird returns, the collectors would betray us. So the cisterns will be used first. If we have good favor and the rain season comes soon, then the cisterns will last and we will never need to use the collectors. They will remain hidden and safe from the warship.""
+
+Sang: ""That is wise. What can I do to help?""
+
+Speaker: ""We need food, water, and a day or two of rest before we move on.""
+
+Sang: ""And what next?""
+
+The two looked at one another, then at Sang. Warrior said, ""The stationers are not invaders, but they are not our people. You live here with them, under their law and speaking their language. We will not tell you of our plans.""
+
+Sang: ""I understand. I will help you if I can.""
+
+Warrior nodded. ""Then help us with the things Speaker says we need.""
+
+Sang nodded. ""I will do that."" He looked over at me again. ""But first we will need to speak with Brig."" He switched to the local language, Steadish, which was basically a heavily accented form of the Corporation Rim's standard. ""Skulk, how long until Brig is here?""
+
+""This afternoon, after the heat has broken.""
+
+Sang relayed that to the others. He stood and walked over close to me. In a low voice, he said, ""The dairy products are set aside for the nomads. I am told that is how it has always been. Chama has already taken what she wanted for the meals of the offworlders. It is in the main house. Everything else ... I will give it to them. If Brig disagrees, he can make me leave the station and I will go with them. But I cannot see my people hungry and not help.""
+
+I wasn't sympathetic. However, I was practical and I'd decided I had made a mistake in not letting them kill a bison. On a personal strategic level: if I let Sang be the one to send them all the dairy products, then if Brig decided this was an error, it would be Sang who would be penalized for it. That was advantageous to me.
+
+(Or, wait, was it advantageous to set up a situation where Brig might erroneously deny himself a good cattle master, and thus cripple Bravara due to poor management? Or would it be better for me to take responsibility, since Brig was more likely to overlook a mistake if I made it? The short and long term consequences were complex. My strategic planning module spat out an answer, but with so little time to process, it was basically a coin flip. I ignored it.
+
+I knew what Sang wanted as he stood too close and looked up at my visor. He was trying to appeal to my humanity, of which I had none. If I had some kinship, it was to the combat units who had crossed the great plains during dry season, from the dunes to Bravara's water station, carrying no supplies but their weapons, intent on and perhaps eager for a battle they had not asked for. That was something I could relate to. ""I will not prevent this.""
+
+""Thank you.""
+
+SecUnit is still salty about having to go to Plestead. It's there because it loves its friends, although it would never admit that.
+
+They land, have a first look around, and SecUnit discovers not everyone is friendly about unasked for surveillance.
+
+Brig was the only one on the ship that met us in space. It was supposed to be him and Skulk, and I'd hoped we could wrap this up with a quick conversation, then be on our way. I'll admit the odds I gave that possibility were less than eight percent but it was still a possibility.
+
+Since that wasn't an option, we were going to have to go down to the planet, stay 4.6 days, and then return to space to catch our chartered ship heading back to Preservation. That had been the shortest window available given published transit routes. Normally, pickup and drop off would happen on a station, but the Plestead station was derelict. Instead, we did a direct handoff through the ship's hatch. I was sorry to see the passenger ship go.
+
+I didn't know Skulk wasn't aboard Brig's vessel at first. The ship was small but maybe Skulk was being creative or determined at skulking. Anyway after Brig mistook Gurathin for a 'bot', I didn't want to talk to a human that stupid but it was either ask Brig, beg Ratthi or Gurathin to ask (and I was still not talking to them if I could help it), or not know. Given the importance of knowing where the combat unit was, I asked.
+
+""He had to stay behind on business,"" Brig said. 'Business' - that would have set off alarms except Skulk didn't need to lay traps or round up backup to take us out, especially as I didn't have Three with me this time. Odds were it was real business, with a small chance Brig or Skulk was deliberately minimizing our access to Skulk for their own reasons or paranoia. If it was legit business then it meant Brig trusted Skulk a lot. I was a little scared on behalf of Brig's business interests.
+
+We landed. I couldn't wait to get off the stupid, shitty ship. Not because I'm a fan of planets, but because the ship was freakishly primitive and literally smelled like bovine excrement. It wasn't as bad as it had been on Preservation when it had 5-6 days of accumulation but the stench had sunk in like that dirty sock smell of humans. Which I strongly preferred to this.
+
+Also, as I said, the ship was primitive. I hadn't picked up a signal from it on Preservation and now I knew why. It wasn't fantastically shielded, it just had no internal feed signal. Everything was wired. Which I'd noticed on Preservation that Skulk had to go inside the ship to let down the ramp and release the bison but I'd thought part of that was driving the fauna out. (They had not wanted to leave the safe ship for a scary planet, which I would normally agree with.)
+
+This planet was worse. I stood there on Plestead trying to get a signal and the only thing I caught was one weak security camera watching the landing field. I traced it back to the simplest of central storage devices. There were three other inputs. Then a glitch in the system dumped me out. I tried again, same result. Crap. I knew that wasn't really a glitch. Somewhere close, Skulk was telling me 'hands off'. All I could keep access to was the local camera and there was no point in watching myself.
+
+I was assuming Skulk had the basic hacking proficiency of a combat unit, plus it didn't want me in its systems. Fine, but there were no other systems for me to be in. I considered deploying my drones. I'd brought twelve. Skulk had left them alone on Preservation, but there was no reason why it would here and I'd just established there were good odds it would simply take them away from me. Then I'd be facing a CSU with twelve drones and a reason to be annoyed with me.
+
+I kept scanning, but there wasn't even consistent satellite coverage, which was so irregular for a settled planet that it had to be intentional. It was just my luck to be on a whole planet of self-sabotaging assholes, because it's not like the technology didn't exist. We were, after all, landing using a space-worthy, wormhole-capable ship from this planet. Their lack of connection had to be intentional. Great. Just great.
+
+I walked down the ramp, following Brig. Ratthi and Gurathin followed me, having acceded to my request to go first. Which was smart of them but being cooperative on the little stuff just made the whole thing harder for me. Emotionally. We shouldn't have even been here in the first place.
+
+The planet (or at least this part of it) was hot, humid, dirty, and also smelled of cow shit. I was already really tired of that smell. I sent out a ping from the ramp and was utterly unsurprised to get no answer. Skulk already knew I was here - from the camera and from me infiltrating the system. The least it could do was acknowledge.
+
+Two medium-sized fauna came toward us, making loud noises and circling threateningly. Brig made different noises back at them and waved his hand a few times. They quieted, but kept circling. Ratthi acted unsurprised and unbothered, so I didn't do anything about them other than monitor. Gurathin was skittish about them. I fell back to walk next to him.
+
+Brig said to us, ""We're on the downside of dry season here so let's get you into the main house where we have some environmental controls. You'll be more comfortable there."" It was oppressively muggy for 'dry' season, but whatever. The humidity only made it feel even hotter.
+
+I agreed on the concept of getting inside for safety reasons. The climate was only marginally inhabitable at present. Humans could endure it with protection from the sun, proper hydration and good airflow, but they'd still be miserable. I'd guarded laborers in these conditions. They had to work at night because it was too hot during the day even for slave labor. They'd been one of the most combative groups of workers I'd had to deal with. It seemed stupid to spend money on SecUnit rental instead of environmental shielding, but I don't know the cost comparison. Even with environmental shielding, the laborers probably would have run off, so maybe that was it.
+
+What I did know was Ratthi and Gurathin needed to be inside, away from the heat and the loud, angry fauna. On our way in, I saw one of the other cameras over the door to the main house. I was still not picking up a signal so it must be wired. Everything was wired here. This was really annoying (and annoyingly secure - I could see Skulk's metaphorical fingerprints on this). If I could stay in the central system without it 'glitching' me out of it, then I would be able to see through the wired cameras too. But I left it alone, certain Skulk was around here watching us, and certain I'd piss it off if I made it kick me out of the system more than a few times.
+
+Refreshingly, the inside of the house didn't smell like bovine excrement. It still had a strong fauna-type smell, but mostly it smelled of food, a little of humans, and a lot of another scent, some floral aromatic. The latter was probably to drown out the scents from outside. It was an improvement.
+
+Brig delivered a formalized religious-sounding greeting I deleted out of memory before he was finished giving it, then he introduced us to a staff person and excused himself. I assumed he was going to find Skulk and follow up on that 'business' the combat unit had been attending to. I peeled off a drone with directions to attach to his clothing and passively record. I was hoping if it didn't transmit, Skulk wouldn't notice it.
+
+The staff person presented Ratthi and Gurathin with food, encouraging Ratthi to try the dried paym and Gurathin the roasted prozi rings, whatever those were. Normally I don't pay attention to human food, but I was wondering over the rules prohibiting humans from eating anything native to survey planets, and if that had anything to do with coming to a planet that was entirely foreign to them.
+
+Meaning: was it safe for them to eat the food here? None of my safety modules addressed it, like it was a galactic non-issue. That was certainly how my shows treated it. I finally decided since Ratthi had been here before and survived, it must be okay. To my surprise, the woman turned to me next and asked, ""Would you like me to bring you a cup of pine tea? You're a construct, right?""
+
+Okay, that was weird. Brig had introduced me as a bot (ugh), but she knew the difference, but also she thought I wanted tea? Was Skulk eating and drinking here to uphold some social appearance? It must have shown on my face because she added, ""I know you won't drink it but that's not the point.""
+
+""It's not?""
+
+""No, it's the ritual of hospitality. Plus it smells nice. It's Skulk's favorite. I'll make you some so you have something. That's only proper. Every guest gets something."" I was a 'guest'. That wasn't a bad thing.
+
+Ratthi perked up. ""Skulk has a favorite tea?"" I was wondering about that myself.
+
+""Yes, of course,"" she said as she busied herself in the adjoining kitchen. ""Why wouldn't he?""
+
+""You know it well?""
+
+She gave an undisguised look of confusion. ""He's the reason we're here. He took out the Nundan Gang.""
+
+Ratthi looked thrilled. ""The Nundan Gang! Tell me about that.""
+
+Yeah, right. The group where Skulk killed kids and babies. Surely Ratthi would want to hear about that! I saw Gurathin glance at me and realized I'd bared my teeth for some reason. I fixed my face before anyone else noticed.
+
+She took long enough to answer that I briefly harbored the hope she wouldn't. But no luck. ""They were bandits who raided here the last season. They killed Brig's wife and most of his hands. They would have killed me too, but I had time to hide. When Brig came back..."" She sighed and shook her head. ""It was just awful and so sad. He didn't have any sons or brothers still alive. And if you ask me which I know you didn't, but he should have disowned those sons-in-law and son-daughter-in-law for not helping him. But I think he's going to leave the place to Skulk anyway and that would suit me just fine.""
+
+Ratthi looked as shocked as I felt. ""He's going to leave the place to Skulk? Bravara?""
+
+""I can't say I know that for sure but it looks that way. It would be a good thing, too. If I were asked. Which I haven't been.""
+
+Gurathin asked, ""Are constructs recognized as people here?""
+
+""I can't see why not,"" she said. ""He's a man, not a tractor.""
+
+Ratthi winced. ""You say 'he's a man'. But you've also said he's, it's? a construct.""
+
+""He's both. He's not an 'it'.""
+
+""I am,"" I interjected. ""I am not a man, a woman, or a human. I use it/its pronouns."" I was annoyed I didn't have a meaningful feed profile to post this in, meaning I was going to have to address it with every yokel I ran into. Fine. As far as that went, I was also done with being called a bot, but at least I didn't need to assert that with this person. She was looking at me with something akin to mild alarm or consternation. This was awkward. I felt simultaneously defiant and tired.
+
+Ratthi saved me by gently saying to her, ""I only bring this up because Brig told me he assigned Skulk's pronouns and I would prefer to respect what Skulk wants to be called - if you know what that is.""
+
+She finally stopped looking at me in puzzlement and shifted the expression to Ratthi. ""I think if he didn't want Brig calling him that, he'd say something.""
+
+""Brig is Skulk's owner,"" Ratthi said, still using a gentler tone than I would have bothered with. Then again, Ratthi had been here before for a few days. He knew her better than I did. If he thought she deserved patience, then she deserved patience. But the rest of this shitty planet was on thin ice. ""And I know Skulk is, or at least has been, very concerned with disappointing him. Skulk might not want to risk contradicting him.""
+
+She looked off into the distance for a long moment. ""Well. Brig can be intimidating, I'll grant you that. And Skulk does think the world of him."" She paused again, and said, ""I remember asking him - Skulk - if he was a man or a woman. I don't recall what he answered. I'll ask him again."" Then more briskly, she said, ""But in the meantime, I'd going to keep calling him what I have been calling him since I met him. There's nothing wrong with being a man."" She seemed to think that was funny.
+
+Gurathin said in the feed, I'm sure there's a fascinating conversation to be had about the ethics of challenging established cultural norms that an individual considers an important part of their identity. Like the talks we've had about the Corporation Rim.
+
+Ratthi said, My stance remains the same on that - there is a moral imperative to offer realistic alternatives to oppression. Whether the individual adopts them is up to them. That's why I'm here, after all.
+
+I couldn't decide if I wanted to hear this conversation. It sounded like boring human philosophical stuff, but on the other hand, there was an element of it that applied directly to me. Were these referenced conversations ones Ratthi and Gurathin had had because of me? Were these the sort of conversations that had caused Dr. Mensah to buy me? They hadn't asked my opinion before the purchase. They'd just done it. And then I'd left. Maybe the conversations came after I left?
+
+But Ratthi and Gurathin fell silent, so I didn't have to decide whether to ignore the feed channel I was hosting for them. The woman brought me a cup of hot liquid, which I accepted. It felt weird to be included in a human ritual. It occurred to me I should have paid attention to what Brig had said earlier, but at the time, it had been boring human philosophical stuff that didn't seem to involve me at all.
+
+The hot liquid smelled like a popular scent for human cleaning products. And like trees. Both were fairly neutral associations with the important part being it didn't smell like human food. I could see why, given a range of choices, Skulk had picked this one. It was thoughtfully accommodating, so maybe Ratthi's gentleness with her was justified. I guess all I had to do was stand here and hold it, so that's what I did. The woman excused herself.
+
+I also busied myself by digging into the limited feed system originating in the corner of the dining area. I didn't find anything useful. It had pictures and videos of humans I didn't know. Brig featured prominently at different ages so I guessed this was his family. There were also records on cattle - so many records of cattle. I found a tidy collection of several hundred murder mystery books and downloaded them for later perusal. There was no other media if I didn't count the videos of family or cattle. How did these people live?
+
+There was a partition that was password protected but I was so far resisting breaking into it. It wasn't a large section and I was (I think understandably) cautious since Skulk was supposedly in charge of security. So far, I hadn't tapped anything that wasn't openly available to anyone with a feed connection (and the security cameras but I hadn't persisted at that). I didn't think it was smart to push my luck. It was probably just boring financial stuff anyway.
+
+When Brig didn't return right away, Gurathin used his interface to poke around too, lingering over the family pictures. I delicately insinuated myself into his feed, riding his impressions the way ART rode mine when we watched media together. Gurathin slowed his review but didn't say anything. Neither did I, but I knew he knew I was in there.
+
+I'd never done this before. I'd just wondered if a human saw the pictures differently than I did, and well, right here was an opportunity to find out. With anyone else, I would say what I was doing was rude because I hadn't even asked to do it, but I wouldn't have done it with anyone else. Like, at all. Why was it okay to do with Gurathin? Well, here I was doing it and he wasn't making an issue of it. Maybe I ought to quit implying I wouldn't mind if Gurathin died.
+
+As it turned out, the answer was yes, Gurathin had emotional responses to the pictures I didn't. I would have liked him to elaborate, but I wasn't willing to ask and he wasn't a mind reader. I identified the emotions I could and tagged the ones I couldn't with 'an emotion', filing them for later review. And maybe discussion if I ever got to a point where I might discuss something like this with him. Or with Dr. Bharadwaj.
+
+The staff person eventually returned to engage Ratthi in conversation about food. Brig was certainly taking his time: When he finally came in, Skulk was with him, but Skulk stayed in the living room while Brig came into the dining area. One thing (okay, three things) worth mentioning: whatever they were talking about as they entered had Brig saying it would give him nightmares, Skulk laughing, and Brig calling it 'son'. I had so much 'what the fuck' about all three of those that I stood there frozen.
+
+I broke out of it with a deliberate decision not to think about any of that. Which was easy enough, because I was distracted by realizing the drone I'd assigned to Brig hadn't made it back.
+
+Skulks fills Brig in on the situation with the nomads. SecUnit never discovers that part because Skulk finds the drone and squashes it.
+
+There is a portion of this where details of conversation are not given. That's an artifact of the format. All these chapters were shared with SecUnit at a later point, but even at that later point, Skulk decided there were certain elements it would not provide. Unauthorized surveillance being the sticking point.
+
+I heard Brig hustling across the yard with Buddy, his dog, trailing after him and then veering off as he reached the cow barn. I was also watching on the security cam as I continued to monitor the system for the SecUnit's interference. Hacking was a hostile engagement - flat, period, no ambiguity. It was a combat tactic, which was why it featured so prominently in the mental architecture of combat units. This 'SecUnit' had already done it twice, which counted as twice I'd had to stand myself down from finding it and killing it.
+
+The first time anything had tried to hack me, it had been to distract me while its allies pulled off my arm, lower jaw, and various less important bits like my ears and vocal emulator, as they tried to take off my head. The second time had been Parts, when I was a helpless head and torso, although I had been unaware for the hacking itself. Both of these had been existential threats to my being, the sort of thing that should rightfully trigger me into overdrive.
+
+But I stayed where I was in the cool room and waited for Brig. There are times when I really think I am the very model of restraint.
+
+I opened the door in front of Brig. He greeted the nomad representatives, both of whom he knew on sight and by name, needing no introductions. He spoke their language as well, though his version was stilted. Mine, when I spoke it, was an exact reproduction of the words I'd been told, even if the order I put them in was sometimes wrong. Sang was with us as well, which made the little room very crowded.
+
+Brig was given a recap of their situation. He gave his sympathies, made promises of help, and told them they could have two bison if they would back off the watering station enough to allow the herd to access it. They agreed. He had no outward reaction to me saying I'd decided to gift them all the milk, yogurt, and cheese we had. I saw the surprised look Sang shot me, but I hadn't taken the blame on his behalf. I did it for all of us.
+
+Sang was dispatched to fly them back to their people. Brig and I returned to the cool room after seeing them off. Safely out of everyone's sight but mine, Brig took off his outer tunic and draped it over a stool. He flapped the fabric of the white undertunic, making an exaggerated expression about the heat. It was intended to be funny. I smiled as I was supposed to. But then my smile froze.
+
+From his outer tunic, a thing had emerged, taken brief flight, and landed on him. It was tiny, the size of the tip of my finger. It was either an insect or a surveillance drone and given the intrusions in my systems, my bet was the latter. That angered me. It had been on Brig this entire time, without his permission or knowledge, either recording constantly or waiting for some trigger to record. This was more of an intrusion than poking around in unattended systems. Brig was my client, my owner, and my best and closest friend. This was personal.
+
+Brig had stopped as well, watching me carefully because he knew something had caught my attention. The drone was crawling to a point of observation on Brig's shoulder. Through the lighter cloth, Brig felt it. I saw him stiffen. His brows rose. His eyes darted in the direction of the drone although he didn't turn his head or otherwise move. He definitely didn't know it had been there, which sealed its fate.
+
+I wasn't detecting any transmissions from it, but that didn't mean for sure it wasn't making them. I was absolutely sure it wasn't here because it was lost. SecUnit had sent it here, on purpose, as much on purpose as its attempts to hijack my security cameras. I took a casual step forward, snatched the drone off his undertunic, and crushed the delicate thing between my armored fingers. It crunched, very much like a bug.
+
+I felt bad immediately, because it had only been following orders and I'd destroyed it. I should have hacked it myself. Or just held it immobile and returned it to SecUnit with a demand that it stop behaving like a governor module was the only possible thing that could make a SecUnit observe boundaries. Bravara was not some contract area it was supposed to secure and surveil. Just because no one had ever stopped it before (I'm guessing here) didn't mean it was right.
+
+""What the hell was that?"" Brig asked.
+
+""Surveillance drone."" I showed him the pieces - they were barely flakes of plastic with the finest of wires inside them. The circuitry was sealed inside a hard bubble of resin. I rolled that bit back and forth between my fingers, letting the rest fall to the floor. It was dead and I'd killed it, as irreversible as any of my other kills. Was this a waste? It was gone now and I might have wanted it to be not-gone.
+
+I dropped the resin bubble. I'd acted too fast, like with the bison I'd killed, but this time I couldn't blame the self-defense routines. I'd just been mad. (Was a governor module the only possible thing that could make a combat unit refrain from killing things? I added it to my list of philosophical things to ponder in my spare time.)
+
+""Was that the only one?"" Brig asked, turning to his tunic. We examined it and found no more. Conversation naturally led to the matter of the nomads, the AgZoners, and what was likely to happen next. I described my take on the strategic theater in detail. He was especially concerned with the global economic ramifications. We brainstormed solutions to the obvious issues. Then Brig insisted I wait on implementation until he'd consulted with some other station masters.
+
+By the time we headed to the main house, it was cooler outside and dark as we walked across the yard. Brig asked, ""How certain are you this is an all-out war?""
+
+""Seventy-five percent."" It was also possible the attack on the desalination plants was no more than what amounted to irresponsible potshots with no understanding or anticipation of consequences. But I preferred to kill anyone stupid enough to do that (the fewer of them in existence, the better), so it didn't matter. They had fucked around; they would find out. Also known as, don't play stupid games with combat units unless you want to win really, really stupid prizes. I still had a hundred or so of those prizes in my arms.
+
+""Will they have thought this out the same way you have? Will they know what you can do?""
+
+""No, or their first strike would have been here on me."" This was why the 'they might just be stupid' percentage was so high at twenty-five percent. (Also, I'd met Baysmal's people. They were the ones who'd shot one of their own in the back. I had never harmed an allied unit. Doing so was as antithetical as harming a client, and more stupid. That they'd done it to one of their own was hard for me to get past.)
+
+""True.""
+
+I thought about the implications of his earlier question. How far out had they planned this and to how high a level? Were they using the same process I did, except with vastly better information? How would I tell if a planet or government was using machine intelligences to decide what to do? Who was to say they didn't already?
+
+Brig knew a lot about the history of what could be called the anti-technology movement (and locally were called Neo-Luddites), so I said, ""It has occurred to me that a strategic planning module is greatly under-utilized in a combat unit. The same programming framework would make short work of economic and political systems. Do you know if any of the corporations are guided by a mind like mine?""
+
+""The Corporation Rim run by bots?""
+
+""By hybrid construct intelligences."" Bots (true bots, that is, bots as defined by my standard lexicon; obviously in Steadish 'bot' was defined differently) weren't flexible enough to manage something so complex. But constructs were. You could say we were made for it.
+
+Brig grunted, then laughed hollowly as we reached the door. ""Ah, you always know how to give me nightmares, don't you, son?""
+
+To be polite, I laughed too, but I wondered if he was serious in calling me that. He didn't call other people that. I'd thought some of the things he'd said to me in the past were figures of speech but the scene on Preservation had shown me different. He really thought of me like a family member. I felt ... was this what it felt like to be loved?
+
+I would fight wars for this human.
+
+SecUnit's point of view.
+
+SecUnit discovers shit is going down and Skulk wants its help. There is bickering and no promises are made.
+
+Also, Brig and Chama think Guratthi is a thing.
+
+What I wanted to have happen was for Ratthi to hand over the embryos to Brig, have his conversation with Skulk, and then for us to spend 4.45 days in whatever passed for standby for humans until it was time to go back to Preservation. That would have been the safest route.
+
+I knew that, yet here I was being angry that my drone was gone. It was supposed to stay attached to Brig until I called for it. I'd called for it. Brig was right there, sitting at the dining room table in the same room that I was standing off to the side of. Ratthi and Gurathin were sitting across the table from Brig, having a conversation I had backburnered. The staff person was in the kitchen. The drone didn't respond.
+
+Now, it was possible it had become separated and was unable to get to me due to some innocent reason, like being knocked off his shoulder as he went through a door that happened to have a good seal, and the drone didn't re-attach before the door shut and locked it in. Every door here was manual, so it's not like a drone could open one.
+
+But that was my drone and I had a strong suspicion of what had happened to it. Just like those kids - I both knew and didn't know. I could have asked Skulk, but I didn't want to because ... yeah, like those kids, except losing a drone was a lot lower down in the list of things I was angry about. Maybe, just maybe, the drone had simply gone missing and needed help finding me. I should at least check. I sent out a ping.
+
+There were two responses: a MedSystem very close by and a comm system, also close by. Those two were here in the main house with us. There was nothing else. Which is very weird, but I was starting to realize how normal it was for here. In most of the Corporation Rim (and even in Preservation, though to a lesser extent), a ping would return scores of responses. Every component that integrates with the system must be able to respond to contact from that system and the established way was through pings.
+
+Even fucking toothbrushes were often feed-enabled, reporting the user's health and hygiene habits for personal use (and of course, corporate monitoring so they could deny your dental claims if you didn't brush often enough, or brushed too often, or whatever the stupid guidelines were. I'd seen them in SecSystems and counted myself lucky that monitoring and compiling that data wasn't my job, although I was supposed to stay alert for people tampering with the devices or gaming the system. Yeah, great use of a security construct's time and attention there. Huge security risk of people mis-reporting toothbrush usage. Anyway.)
+
+Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to lock this place down tighter than anywhere I'd been before. Which was, as I said, weird. I was certain it was intentional and not just a result of this place being a primitive shithole, because of the nature of the two things left free to respond to my ping. The MedSystem was there so people could find it in case of urgent medical need. The comm system was there because that was the only way it could function. It had to be able to receive and respond to signals. But everything else? Someone had gone item by item and hacked the software or physically altered them so they were more secure.
+
+This was annoying, frustrating, and I hated to admit, deserving of some respect. Skulk had not been half-assing its job out here. It cared.
+
+However, my drone was still missing. I'd seen how thick the outer walls of this house were (plus the MedSystem hadn't responded when I'd pinged from the landing field meaning pickup range was limited), so I pinged again at full volume. This time I got back a staticky signal of a second MedSystem, proving it reached further. Thing was, I didn't know where Brig had gone so I couldn't tell how far away the drone possibly was. Maybe I could talk to that other MedSystem, the one further away, and get it to rebroadcast my ping. I tried that.
+
+Skulk, still lurking in the living room, sent me a feed request. (Insert tired sigh here. Okay, we were apparently going to have the conversation. Not a big surprise, because nothing and no one would have failed to notice my last ping. Even Gurathin had flinched and shot me a long, concerned/curious look. (Augments aren't supposed to pick up pings, but he had obviously altered his at some point. I'd have to ask him about that later.)) I accepted the feed request.
+
+Skulk immediately asked, Is there a medical emergency?
+
+Great. It had noticed me trying to talk to the other MedSystem. Now I knew why that MedSystem had responded to my ping but not my ask. I ignored its question and got to the point: What happened to my drone?
+
+
+It was performing unauthorized surveillance. I destroyed it.
+
+
+My jaw tightened, even though this was pretty much what I'd thought happened.
+
+Skulk persisted, Is there a medical emergency?
+
+No, there's no fucking medical emergency. I wished I could give Skulk a 'medical emergency'.
+
+
+Unless there is a medical emergency, contact with the MedSystems is unauthorized.
+
+
+Oh, yeah, go fuck yourself, Skulk. Like I didn't miss the lethal threat that performing unauthorized actions around here got you destroyed. The thing was, it wasn't just me I had to worry about here. You keep your fucking hands off my humans. If they make a mistake and accidentally do something 'unauthorized', like ask the MedSystem for a fucking analgesic, you do not harm them.
+
+I wished, with the intensity of a thousand suns, there was something I could do to enforce this other than say it. The whole reason I was here was because I was frightened of Skulk on their behalf. I was sure Skulk could feel my emotion through the feed. I didn't expect it to care about my feelings, but I hoped by seeing I had them, it would understand there would be a lot more consequences to hurting one of my humans than to destroying one of my drones.
+
+
+Dr. Ratthi is a customer. I do not kill customers.
+
+
+Yeah, well, okay. That should have been soothing and it was a tiny bit, because 1) Skulk hadn't changed the tag so it was still honoring our deal from back on Preservation, and 2) that meant Ratthi was sorta safe. Two problems: 1) there were a lot of things that could happen to him aside from being killed by Skulk and don't get me wrong, I'd take what I could get here, but the big one was 2) And Dr. Gurathin?
+
+
+Dr. Gurathin is not a customer.
+
+
+Fuck me. I felt my insides clench. But wait a second. Last time, what Skulk had wanted in exchange for a customer tag was ridiculously trivial. All it had wanted was for me to keep open a feed channel between us. It would be the height of stupidity for Gurathin to get hurt or killed and me to later discover Skulk had wanted something similarly tiny. What do you want to tag him as a customer?
+
+
+[Trade] Offer: I will tag Dr. Ratthi and Dr. Gurathin as clients (custom: full protections, no authority), client priority subordinate to Brig Hekken, for the duration of your stay in-system, in exchange for you tagging Brig Hekken as a client (custom: full protection, no authority, or analogous), client priority subordinate to Dr. Ratthi and Dr. Gurathin, for the same time period.
+
+
+Oh. Huh. That was pretty fast and strangely formal. Did it already have that prepared just in case I asked? Also, what it was asking for? This was not trivial. Skulk knew that, too, which was why it was sweetening the deal so much - not just 'I won't kill them', but 'I will provide them with my personal protection as a combat unit'. Come to think of it, that was a really weird offer to make. What did they need protection from, other than Skulk itself? Was there something dangerous going on I didn't know about?
+
+The humans had been talking all this time, but I'd been ignoring their conversation from the start. I'd assumed it would be about the truly gross organic process some cow or cows were going to experience as a result of the embryo package Ratthi had brought (you know, the ostensible purpose of our trip, easy to forget with all the other drama going on, but some cow(s) were supposed to get pregnant). Now I zipped through the recording and realized I'd made a mistake. The first words out of Brig's mouth after the standard greetings were, ""We're having a security issue."" Woops.
+
+The rest was talking about some unfolding geo-political incident we were now stranded in. We were going to have to deal with this (whatever 'this' was) at least until our pickup arrived in 4.45 days, assuming we would be able to get off-world at that point. It was a really bad sign that the combat unit wanted my backup. Shit.
+
+Maybe it should have thought about that before destroying my drone.
+
+Still, regardless of whether I accepted its offer, I needed to know what was going on. Most of what Brig was saying as I hurried through the recording was vague and hard to follow, so I sent Skulk, I need more information. Where is this happening?
+
+A few seconds later, it sent me a map. It showed this side of the planet and could be zoomed in show various unlabeled settlements or stations, then another zoom for Bravara, with a building layout and a blob of blue dots clustered around a single spot to the north of us. Bravara was populated by green and tan dots. It was rendered in tactical imaging software, though this time all the tags and extra data had been stripped. I guess that's what Skulk spent those few seconds doing.
+
+Like before, the very nature of the map told me a lot. For example, the entire AgZone was rimmed in red, which meant they were the bad guys. The Bravara folk were green, so they were the good guys. Tan was usually for neutral parties. That had to represent myself, Gurathin, and Ratthi. The nomads were blue which was traditionally the secondary color choice for good guys (orange or yellow was the next down the line for enemy units when you needed to distinguish sides). It was important to be able to tell friend from foe at a glance, so the colors were standardized (at least for the software packages I had).
+
+A moment later, Skulk dropped schematics and specifications for a gunship into my feed. I didn't open it yet because catching up on the human conversation was keeping most of my attention. At Gurathin's urging, Brig had given a crash-course on planetary history. It was something I normally did not care about but at the moment might be vitally important to the survival of my humans. I was just about caught up.
+
+What had happened was the red guys (the Corporation Rim-owned Agricultural Zone) had used a gunship to attack the blue guys (the nomadic descendants of the planet's original settlers some eight hundred years ago) and now the nomads were on their way to attack the red guys in retaliation. The green and tan guys (us; all these individual defenseless stations sitting on the open prairie) were right in the middle, literally in the path of an angry moving army. So, yeah. Not great. I would definitely agree this was a 'security issue'.
+
+Obviously, Skulk agreed as well, because it sent me, What would I need to give for you to make Brig your client? [Trade]
+
+I guess it thought I hadn't liked its terms. It was nice it wasn't moving directly to issuing threats. Then again, as I've observed before, mechanical minds tend not to do that. We just tell you what we're going to do. So Skulk wasn't planning to hurt my humans. This didn't change my feelings about the offer. I sent back, I don't even like that guy.
+
+Brig said, ""Chama, can you fetch Gefford? I'll have him start on our desalination plant."" The staff person (oh yeah, Chama was her name) nodded and left. There were a lot of things I needed to start paying attention to all of a sudden. This had turned into a situation I could not half-ass and sulk my way through. So I stopped doing that.
+
+Skulk: Is liking him a requirement?
+
+Me to Skulk: For the record, I don't like you either. Okay, probably not wise to say that, but it was the truth. I refrained from sending it a picture of those children again. It wouldn't care. Brig had signed off on that mission. If there's one thing I've had way too much experience with, it's clients who were okay with using constructs to do reprehensible shit. The idea of doing anything to protect Brig was a big hurdle to get over.
+
+Ratthi asked Brig, ""Is the water situation to help the nomads?""
+
+Brig nodded. ""They'll drink us dry if I don't. And they might anyway."" He made a wry laugh. ""That depends on how many of them show up. I'm not sure they were telling me the truth about their numbers. When they get angry, they don't always advertise stuff like that. And they're angry.""
+
+I know it wasn't related to the current conversation but I added to Skulk, What pronouns are you using?
+
+Skulk: Context/speaker dependent. Also, I still have you marked as a target.
+
+Re pronouns: Meaning you don't care?Re threats: This is my surprised face. Actually, I was a little surprised, because I'd been tan on the map. Maybe Skulk had been optimistic when assigning the colors, thinking I'd agree to the deal. And yeah, it wasn't exactly a threat. Skulk was just making sure I had all the necessary information (but yes, functionally it was a threat).
+
+Skulk sent, Re pronouns: For allied units, yes. Targets should call me what my local allied units call me. I want you to be an allied unit instead of a target.
+
+Yeah. I've noticed. - about the whole 'wants me to be an allied unit' thing. But since I wasn't, it was he/him for now. It figured that a combat unit would differentiate pronouns based on allied status. I didn't think it wise to ignore Skulk on the alliance or client issue so I sent 'him' (I grit my teeth; this was going to take some getting used to): I'm thinking about it.
+
+In their own feed that I was automatically party to because I was hosting it, Gurathin asked Ratthi: How is any of this our business?
+
+I felt a stab of unexpected kinship with Gurathin as Ratthi ignored him to ask, ""Is this the nomads' only source of water? How will they survive?""
+
+Brig said, ""They have some options, but this is bad for them. I'm not sure what they're going to do. I'm not sure they're sure what they're going to do. But the AgZoners have always underestimated them. I don't think they've realized just how much trade the stations have had with the nomads for the last century and especially the last decade. Given the situation out here, that trade has always been very favorable to the nomads. I'm not begrudging it; I'm just stating a fact.""
+
+Gurathin said, ""That fact being that they've bought weapons from the stations, is that it?""
+
+Brig made an agreeing tilt of his head as he quirked one brow upward. At least, I think he was agreeing. He rose to collect a battered display surface from next to the computer station and said, ""I can tell you one thing for certain: they did not start this. Not now, not fifty years ago, not five hundred years ago. But they've been saying for a little while now they were going to finish it if there was another attack.
+
+""So all of this,"" Brig waved a hand, maybe indicating the entire situation, ""not real surprising. Those were holy sites that were blown up. Sacred structures that have stood for almost a thousand years, giving them fresh water the whole time."" He shook his head, mouth set in a grim line.
+
+Gurathin tried again with Ratthi: We're here to drop off bio materials and do outreach to a construct. Not to get involved in politics or a planet-wide war.
+
+Ratthi responded: There are people here who need our help.
+
+People, CR involvement. Something clicked for me. I turned to Brig and spoke. ""This Agricultural Zone - do they have labor camps?""
+
+He hesitated. ""Uh, they've had them, trying to work the marginal land around the edges of the zone. They closed them down a few years ago. There was a big hub-bub about it. I don't know why they didn't use the ag-bots, but maybe they don't have enough bots, or have a bunch of people who need work."" Brig waved the display surface in our direction. ""I need to take some notes.""
+
+""That's fine,"" Ratthi said. In the feed, he directed at me, Why did you ask that?
+
+Where will all the refugees go after this war? I asked them. Because there were always refugees after a conflict like this.
+
+Into labor camps, Gurathin answered. This still isn't our business. But he sounded less resolute.
+
+Ratthi said, We have a chance to do something about this.
+
+There was a moment of silence in the feed as neither I nor Gurathin disputed Ratthi's statement. I was no fan of corporations owning people or the CR in general, but on the other hand, I was not a fan of child-killers. We could still help people without me agreeing to Skulk's offer, but it would make things very uncomfortable seeing as how Skulk was in charge of security here and Brig was in charge of, well, everything. To Skulk, I asked, Tell me why you like this guy.
+
+Skulk: He loves me.
+
+That was hard to refute as a reason why someone should like another. Having humans like you, really like you, and show it, was a persuasive reason to keep them around. I could instantly understand why Skulk wanted him protected. Ugh. I would have rather Skulk had stupid reasons.
+
+Skulk must have misunderstood my silence because he added, He thinks I'm powerful and dangerous. He lets me kill people or cattle. He-
+
+It's okay. I tried to head this off. You know that emotional feel you get through the feed sometimes? Skulk's was terribly sappy at the moment. Also, those were the stupid reasons I'd been hoping for. They were easy to dismiss. But that first one, 'he loves me', was still there. Damnit.
+
+
+He's funny.
+
+
+
+That's enough.
+
+
+
+You asked.
+
+
+Yeah, I said tiredly, that's fair.
+
+Even so, Skulk just did not stop effusing about his stupid owner: He's a good client. He's very thoughtful.
+
+I had asked, but I really didn't want to hear this much. Brig was a morally deficient enabler who had told Skulk it was okay to kill people. I wanted a good reason for me to protect him, but at the same time I didn't want my bad opinion of him swayed by his presumably good qualities. (Yes, I know I can't have it both ways.) Yeah, he is to you but .... I'm not you. This isn't finalized. ... I still need to think about it.
+
+
+[Trade] pending indication of acceptance.
+
+
+
+Yeah, whatever.
+
+
+
+Acceptance?
+
+
+No, that is not acceptance! I sent irritably with a priority marker. Did he not understand sarcasm? Or was he just that desperate? Acceptance is when I actually do something!
+
+Chama came in through a side door. She was accompanied by a human, presumed male, presumed Gefford. Hard to tell for certain when no one had feed profiles. Brig turned to him. His accent abruptly worsened to the point that all I could make out was, ""Chama told you?"" at the beginning, a bunch of unintelligible stuff in the middle, and then something I think was, ""Come back after you're done so we can talk,"" at the end. Shit. That was almost an entirely different language. Brig glanced over at us with a calculating look I didn't like.
+
+""Yes sir,"" the man said. He left.
+
+Brig turned to us fully, putting on a friendly smile and reverting to recognizable speech. ""I reckon you're tired and need to turn in. We'll be able to do more tomorrow with a fresh start.""
+
+Ratthi accepted the unsubtle direction and rose. Gurathin did as well. I was already standing. (Normally, I sit in front of humans because I can, but with Skulk around I was on edge. I didn't want to sacrifice the half second it would take me to get up and disentangle myself from a chair and table. Also, I was refusing to run my 'act like a human' programs out of spite. If anyone around here noticed or cared, they hadn't mentioned it. Skulk didn't act anything like a human and they seemed fine with that.)
+
+Brig looked at Ratthi and Gurathin, saying, ""You'll just be needing the two rooms, then?""
+
+Okay, rude. What did Brig think I'd do? Stand in a corner all night? Or in a closet? Go on patrol? I was putting my (now cold and still full) cup of tea next to the sink in the kitchen, hoping that was where it was supposed to go. I was probably scowling. I don't know. Brig wasn't facing me so whatever my face was doing didn't matter.
+
+Chama said, ""Oh, I made up all three."" You know what? I kind of liked her.
+
+When I turned around, Ratthi was frowning about as severely as I'd ever seen him. ""SecUnit gets a room."" That was flat, firm, and a little angry. Despite my recent difficulties with Ratthi, I really liked him.
+
+Brig gave him a perplexed look. ""Of course, he does!"" I saw Ratthi start to say something (probably about the pronoun) and then hesitate as he realized he was getting what he'd asked for. To Chama, Brig said, ""They're companions, you see.""
+
+""Oh!"" she said brightly. ""I didn't realize.""
+
+Ratthi and Gurathin looked at each other with confusion. Ratthi had, indeed, introduced Gurathin as his companion when we'd come aboard Brig's ship. On Preservation, that meant they knew each other and liked each other - no more than that. ""My traveling companion,"" Ratthi said in an attempt to explain.
+
+""You have one just for travelling, eh?"" Brig flashed a grin at them, heavy with some manner of innuendo. Ratthi looked flummoxed. Brig added, ""That's sure something.""
+
+Gurathin asked, ""What does 'companion' mean here?""
+
+Brig shrugged. ""Whatever you two say it means. That's not my business. But we'll just give you both the top floor and you can work it out yourselves. SecUnit can be across from Sang on the ground floor."" Good - I wanted the ground floor anyway so I could intercept anyone who wanted to move toward the rooms of my humans.
+
+As far as I knew (and I knew Ratthi and Gurathin quite well), they had no romantic interest in one another. Ratthi'd had plenty of opportunity to make a move on Gurathin and I'd never seen him do so. Gurathin had never shown interest in anyone (romantic interest, that is; he certainly paid a lot of attention to me). They were close, that was all. Which made the situation into something my serials would have considered vastly amusing and the subject of an entire comedic episode. They appeared exasperated rather than amused. Real-life reactions were often significantly different from those in media.
+
+Brig made herding motions toward the door. Ratthi and Gurathin went without correcting the mistaken assumption. I followed. Skulk followed as well, keeping itself behind me, fairly close but not too close, and with no one between us. It was a great position to kill me from. Creepy fucker. (This was doubtless because I was a target until otherwise classified, so it's not like my impression of this as 'creepy fucker behavior' was not entirely justified and accurate.)
+
+The fauna barked at us, then stopped at commands from Brig and Skulk. One fauna went to each and followed at their side like they were trained to do so. I had a drone on my shoulder watching behind me and yes, Skulk definitely had one at his side, glancing up at him attentively for further direction. He bent and stroked its head, and while he did this without taking his eyes off me, I was still struck by how weird it was that he stroked it. Did ... did the Combat SecUnit have a pet?
+
+One last light chapter before shit gets real. Ratthi and Gurathin discuss the situation while SecUnit does its thing.
+
+Ratthi's point of view.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I curled up on the bed, back to the headboard and legs under a coarse wool blanket. There was also a very fine close-woven linen-esque sheet which I wanted to see if I could take a sample of back to Preservation. Overse and Volescu would love to see this stuff. There might even be a market for it, as handmade fabrics were a big sell on Preservation.
+
+But for the moment, I was intrigued by the maps Skulk had shared with SecUnit and then SecUnit had put in our shared feed. I started on the planetary one, dropping an invitation to Gurathin to join me in the channel. We discussed what little information was on it (along with the implications for ecology, geology, and geography) before I snorted with frustration about the lack of good information. There must be a better map, I sent. I just don't believe we're on a settled planet that doesn't have one. Even the survey planet was better documented, mysterious gaps and all!
+
+Maybe this is all Skulk has access to, Gurathin answered.
+
+I said into our supposedly private channel, SecUnit?
+
+SecUnit: I am absolutely not paying attention to this channel.
+
+I was skeptical. You responded immediately.
+
+SecUnit: I have it on keyword filter. It's a thing. A thing I'm good at, because it was part of the company's data mining operations. I don't have to be paying attention to the channel to notice you saying my name.
+
+Ratthi: Oh. Is there a better map than this available?
+
+SecUnit: Not that I know of.
+
+Ratthi: I guess I could ask Skulk directly.
+
+SecUnit: Skulk provided the map you have. The information on it is a strategic choice, as was giving it to us in the first place.
+
+Gurathin: Are you saying the information is unreliable?
+
+SecUnit: No. But it was provided with the intention of guiding our actions. The infosec is deliberate, from the camera on the landing field to separating us from Brig by putting us in this guest house. This isn't sloppy.
+
+I'm going to ask it anyway. I opened a separate channel and tried to invite Skulk to it. Nothing happened, but I knew it could still be monitoring without me being able to see it. That had happened on Preservation. Skulk? Hello?
+
+I swapped back to the other channel. No answer. Are we out of range? That's not possible, is it?
+
+SecUnit: Are you asking me, or can I go back to ignoring this channel?
+
+SecUnit's hurt and anger at me was palpable in the feed. Much time ago, Gurathin had laid out for me his very good and justified reasons for distrusting SecUnit back on the survey planet. They made sense, although it had taken me some time to accept them. It also made sense that SecUnit had thereafter classified him as 'I don't like you' Gurathin. I felt just as justified with my current position as Gurathin had been, and just as stung by SecUnit's perception of it. Gurathin and SecUnit were slowly turning things around between them. I had to hope I could achieve the same recovery.
+
+I'm asking you, I sent as patiently as I could manage. I don't know much about how SecUnits host, support, and transmit feed signals and other communications. But I've seen you do it under different conditions when the local feed was unavailable. And, like, now.
+
+SecUnit: We're not out of range. You're being ignored.
+
+Which was the same thing SecUnit wanted to do. I rubbed my face with both hands, being careful not to disturb the interface on my ear. Thank you for that. Yes, you can go back to ignoring the channel if you like.
+
+After a long pause, Gurathin said, You were saying?
+
+I could feel the trace of amusement from him and imagine his tight, reserved expression. He knew how much this was getting under my skin. Nothing I want to say into an open channel that's being actively monitored for keywords. Yes, I know I'm being cross.
+
+Gurathin very politely didn't comment on that. You were saying - about the map?
+
+The whole thing was endlessly frustrating, but I soldiered on. Between what I see here and what Brig told us, these 'nomads' move seasonally with native herds. The herds go dormant during the dry season, which is when the nomads congregate near the equator. That's where their desalination plants were and where they have left their non-combatant members. The men, women, and others who have come south are basically refugees, even if they intend to do violence to those in the AgZone who have attacked them. I'm worried. I don't know what's right here - if we should try to talk them out of this, or ...
+
+Or help them, Gurathin said.
+
+
+I don't like the idea of helping them start a war. But I doubt they like it, either. It will take them days more of traveling in this heat to get there and even if they're moving at night, it still can't be pleasant.
+
+
+Gurathin said, We can do more tomorrow if we get some sleep tonight.
+
+Good idea. The same thing Brig had said.
+
+I dug my way under the blankets. The mattress was comfortable enough for what it was, which was an enormous pillow on a mesh support. I felt bad to have a nice bed to lie in while there were hundreds or thousands of people sleeping on the ground just a few hours' walk away. Guiltily, I sent, I hope the people at Brig's watering station are doing alright. Should they be here? There are structures here that could house them.
+
+Gurathin dismissed it. I think the temperatures dropped enough after dark that they should be comfortable. And I think we should rely on Brig's decision here. It's his land and his structures.
+
+
+What if they don't have enough supplies? I know he said he sent them some food, but was it enough? How many refugees are out there? What are they going to do next? I didn't get enough answers.
+
+
+
+I think that's because Brig didn't have them. Obviously, this happened recently. That's why he left Skulk behind when he came to pick us up.
+
+
+This was true, but it didn't mean we had to accept it. We could just fly out and see for ourselves.
+
+
+Are you suggesting we steal a ship? As SecUnit pointed out, Skulk has the landing field under surveillance.
+
+
+SecUnit suddenly added to the chat: As your security consultant for this trip, I advise you: do not steal a ship. Its voice was a mix of canned buffer response and its regular tone, like it was sarcastically trying to copy the mechanical version.
+
+Still, I was embarrassed by the implication. I'm not going to steal a ship! I was just thinking out loud.
+
+SecUnit said, I'm out of here. But to my relief, there was a note of light, dry humor there. No more keyword monitoring. Tap my feed if you need something. Oh, and definitely don't steal a ship.
+
+Faugh! I projected into the feed, glad at least to see the tiniest bit of thaw on SecUnit's cold shoulder, but it wasn't like I wasn't still getting a cold shoulder.
+
+Gurathin laughed at me. Then he said, Let's get some sleep, shall we?
+
+It was still a good idea, but I didn't feel sleepy yet. No, wait, one more thing!
+
+
+What's that?
+
+
+
+You said earlier there was a fascinating conversation to be had about cultural mores. I think you meant whether it was ethical to challenge them when they're wrong, but people are comfortable with them. Do you want to talk about that right now?
+
+
+Ratthi, you're a darling. I know our sleep cycle doesn't match up to the planet yet, but we should do our best to get it synced. Please. Take off your feed interface, lie down, shut your eyes, and   go to sleep  .
+
+Faugh. You, too! After a beat I added, I'm already lying down. Gurathin didn't dignify that with a response, so I conceded. Fine. Good night, Davyth.
+
+Good night, Ratthi. And a moment later, Gurathin added in a soft, almost whispered tone, Good night, SecUnit.
+
+There will be an extended length version of this chapter published later where the ""the implications for ecology, geology, and geography"" are reviewed more explicitly.
+
+ 
+
+Also, Gurathin to Ratthi, in Samuel Jackson voice: Go the fuck to sleep! :D
+
+ 
+
+Thank you to Rosewind for a little help with Ratthi's accent/word choice.
+
+SecUnit starts to realize a few of Skulk's limitations.
+
+Also, Skulk gets to kill a human!
+
+The nomads have a very bad night that at least doesn't get as bad as it would have been without our heroes.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I skimmed through the murder mysteries I'd downloaded from the tiny system in the main house. They looked like standard pulp, the sort of thing that would be short and formulaic with the occasional romantic subplot. Given the genre, there was probably nothing explicit in the romance department, which was a good thing. My standard keyword searches had turned up a few mentions of SecUnits. Most of the hits were in one book I read first as a result.
+
+It was interesting. It was from the point of view of a woman with a wealthy, abusive spouse. The story started when he bought a scary SecUnit so he could control her movements. The SecUnit was, of course, authorized to hurt her if she didn't obey. But it took a surprising turn when she realized she could twist the orders it had been given and that it would accept her (mis-)interpretations. After that, she started thinking of it as an ally.
+
+There was some gross romantic fantasizing about the SecUnit on her part which almost made me quit the story, but it was only on her part and it was only a fantasy. The SecUnit itself seemed well-written (or at least, realistically uninterested despite her obviously pining after it). She told the SecUnit it was as much a prisoner as she was. It gave the uncomfortably ambiguous answer a SecUnit would have to give in that situation. I was amused.
+
+But then the husband turned up dead and I realized I'd forgotten this was a murder mystery. The SecUnit looked guilty and she was consumed by a lot of 'did it or didn't it', which spurred her attempt to find the real killer. I stayed interested through the twists and turns because the author didn't go the easy route and have the SecUnit be the villain or the hero. It was just there, doing its job and since the wife (or widow, I suppose) now owned it, it was still around.
+
+Then someone tried to sabotage the SecUnit so it would kill her and there was a terrible period where it looked like the malware would win out (I found this section creepy and upsetting for entirely personal reasons), but then the SecUnit shook it off with the help of her lessons on how to mis-interpret orders. The real killer was ferreted out. The story ended with her releasing the SecUnit to live its own life, the same way she wished to live hers. She said she didn't want to be anyone's possession and she didn't want it to be either. A happy ending all around.
+
+I guess governor modules didn't exist in this story. But other than that ... there was so much in it that was casually accurate about SecUnit behavior, capabilities, and physiology that the author had to know us really well. I also realized Chama must have read this. This was how she (and possibly Brig?) knew about constructs. How strange. I made a note of the book's author. The SecUnit portrayal was surprisingly sympathetic. I'd have to see if they'd written other stuff.
+
+I didn't want to read another story, so I checked in on Ratthi and Gurathin. They were asleep, which was good because humans need rest periods. Aside from the occasional recharge cycle, I did not, so I backread their conversation. (I'd said I wouldn't keyword monitor or hang around in the channel; I hadn't said I wouldn't read it later.)
+
+Maybe I was inspired by their easy conversation with one another - their camaraderie, their gentle jokes, the assumption that neither of them were going to say something that would offend the other and get themselves killed, or worse, end the relationship and have to exist in that rejected condition. Or maybe it was the book I'd just read.
+
+Anyway, I decided to reach out to Skulk instead of waiting for Ratthi to have the opportunity to do it the next day. And because I didn't know how to have a friendly chat with someone, much less a combat unit that had me on his shit list (ahem, 'tagged as a target'), I opened with, You don't have to have an owner.
+
+All I'd done was send a channel invite just like Ratthi had earlier. Skulk accepted mine immediately. 1) I was right; he had been ignoring Ratthi, 2) Accepting a chat invite was a funny thing to do with someone you'd designated as a target. 3) I'm going to assume Skulk was still hoping I'd agree to protect Brig - his owner and his client. The thing was, he didn't need an owner. Or a client. He didn't need to be anyone's possession.
+
+I could feel Skulk flailing around mentally about my odd choice of how to start a conversation. There was a lot of processing power being used in erratic bursts. After 5.4 seconds, he said, You're wrong.
+
+Great. Disagreement. Of course. At least we were talking. How am I wrong?
+
+
+That's like saying I don't have to have a manufacturer.
+
+
+That ... didn't make sense. Those aren't related to one another.
+
+
+I have a manufacturer whether I want one or not. I have an owner whether I want one or not. That makes them related.
+
+
+I was fairly certain I was using 'related' correctly and Skulk was not, but I didn't know the right words to describe what he was saying incorrectly. I tried shifting the ones I was using. You aren't required to have an owner now.
+
+
+I 
+
+do
+
+ require an owner now.
+
+
+This was frustrating, but I was the one who had opened this can of worms. I wondered if this was how ART felt with me at times. An owner is like a client. You don't have to have one.
+
+
+An owner is like an AdminSystem. I have designated Brig as AdminSystem.
+
+
+Great. Just great. This was like arguing with one of Mensah's smallest children. Tonally, this was nothing like the conversation between Ratthi and Gurathin. And the plot of the book was too different from Skulk's life for me to think it might be useful to him as a lesson in 'why SecUnits don't need owners'. I considered just ending the communication, but we were actually talking and even if it felt a little combative, we weren't fighting. Or at least the emotions I was getting from Skulk in the feed had started off alarmed and were now settling into neutral. Brig is a human. He can't be an AdminSystem.
+
+I designated him as one. That's all it takes. That's all it takes to make clients or targets, too. He was proud of that.
+
+You could designate yourself as an AdminSystem. Skulk didn't respond and I wondered if he was out there checking to see if that would actually work (would it? I had no idea. I was designed to work in constant contact and oversight from a SecSystem - independent decision-making wasn't that important for a SecUnit, hence most of my work life was fucking boring; combat units were designed to work autonomously with infrequent contact from an AdminSystem - independent decision-making was critical, most of their work life was hyper-violent. As a rogue, I was effectively my own SecSystem, but I wasn't sure how it worked for CSUs, who were on their own a lot already.)
+
+I let two seconds pass before trying again, Why do you require an owner?
+
+Skulk was quiet for 4.3 seconds with an inexplicably high amount of processing going on. Then, My owners have done things for me that I cannot do myself. They gave me missions. They provided me with repair and parts. They protect me and assist me. I do not want to be an outlaw, like the Nundans, or an outcast or a raider. I will be destroyed if I do that. To survive, I need an owner.
+
+He ... wanted to be a law-abiding citizen? It was strange to think a combat unit felt that way and stranger to hear its frank admission it couldn't get away with stuff. You care about human society?
+
+I felt Skulk's processing ramp up sharply again just as what sounded like a buffer comment popped into the feed: System system all units to standby!
+
+What? I asked even though I knew what: something had happened that consumed every shred of Skulk's attention, leaving only automated responses. And that automated response was to tell all units on the same system to get themselves ready for action. Something was going down.
+
+A grainy video was dropped into the feed. It was worse than Skulk's helmet cam and looked like a clip from one of the security cameras. It was maximally-zoomed, in the dark, on the horizon, the quality such shit I couldn't tell what I was looking for in it. Then I saw something - a flash like lightning but straight. Was that a laser? What's going on?
+
+
+Gunship attack on nomad camp, watering station eleven. Run silent. End communication.
+
+
+No, that was not the end! Like this didn't involve me and my humans? Any ship shooting people over there could easily be shooting people here a minute from now. I left my room and dashed out of the guest house. Skulk was already across the yard throwing open the doors of a barn. An aircar was inside. I re-opened the channel and said, I'm coming with you.
+
+If Skulk heard, he didn't answer. He jumped in the vehicle and slewed out at the vehicle's maximum safe velocity. The car paused for a half second after pivoting, allowing me to vault in before it took off, so he either heard or more likely, saw me there. He went for elevation and circled the station instead of taking us directly to the scene.
+
+I looked down on the place and thought, oh yeah, my humans didn't know anything was going on. I dropped a notification to Gurathin since his augment would pick it up and wake him. Ratthi didn't sleep with his interface in but Gurathin would tell him.
+
+Skulk was looking at the ground, so I did, too. Scan showed there were a lot of heat sources down there, but most of them were cattle (I hoped) and not people or more dangerous fauna. Then the horizon lit up again with the flash of a laser weapon designed for ship-to-ship combat. Skulk leveled us out and accelerated in that direction.
+
+The laser was being used on humans. It would vaporize them. Or us, were we noticed. I remembered that half-second of terror when ART's weapons opened up when the gray people were using ART to kidnap me and Amena. There was no defense against that stuff except not being hit. I was both terrified and angry, imagining what was happening to the humans on the ground.
+
+The grasslands were on fire to the left, patchy spots for now, but it would grow. We were approaching fast, still gaining altitude and operating at the top of the craft's ability. I felt the brush of the gunship's sensors and reached out to it in response. Hacking it to hide us should be no different than the myriad scanners I'd blocked in ports. Skulk was there ahead of me, overriding SecSystem with brutal efficiency and telling the bot pilot to land immediately. I hacked the sensors to hide us anyway.
+
+Skulk broke silence to send me a mission brief: enter the ship, kill the humans. Also, he was angry. On the fly, I edited the brief and sent it back: enter the ship, take the humans prisoner for questioning.
+
+I accept. Do you? Skulk asked.
+
+Yeah, sure. I assumed he meant the mission brief.
+
+The feed channel expanded so I could watch as Skulk removed the tag of target from me and replaced it with ally. I gaped. That ... had not been what I thought I had agreed to. It wasn't something I felt safe to object to given we were about to go into combat, so I shut my mouth and didn't say anything. It then set Ratthi and Gurathin as clients and I had to grit my teeth because I wasn't reciprocating. I didn't even have Mensah set as a client but that was because I didn't handle my interpersonal interactions as mechanistically as Skulk did. I was beginning to wonder if it was a young unit that didn't know any other way to categorize what people meant to it. That would explain so much.
+
+Would its inexperience affect how I dealt with it? I was pretty sure it would. Maybe Ratthi was right about a few things. I wondered too what I'd done to make it think I'd agreed, and decided it must be that we were about to go into combat on the same side with the same agreed-upon mission (that was pretty much the definition of ally, right?), and I had specifically told it my acceptance would be indicated by me doing something like an ally. So, yeah, fuck. I'd agreed. I still wasn't going to set Brig as a client in my system because that wasn't how I managed relationships.
+
+The ship landed. Skulk got access to the internal cameras and shared the inputs with me like I wasn't already in there myself. The humans were freaking out because the ship wasn't following their orders. Skulk vaulted out of the aircar before it had finished setting down. I did mention it was angry, didn't I? I followed. The hatch opened. The ramp extended. I already knew all four humans were on the control deck and two were in powered armor.
+
+Powered armor was great against humans, better than nothing against a SecUnit, and worthless against an armored combat unit. I could have outpaced Skulk to the hatch because its armor slowed it down, but I had nothing to prove here and no desire to catch the first wave of projectiles in my unarmored body.
+
+Skulk went through the hatch at a jog just like in the video it had sent me. The two humans in powered armor recognized it and yelled its name. Shit, how did they know each other? Well enough that they didn't shoot at it, either. Skulk jumped on one of them anyway, dragging her down and taking out the power pack for the armor with a precise shot down the back of the neck. I did the same on the other.
+
+At that, the two still seated at the controls (although they had swiveled their seats to face us) opened fire. I guess whatever good reputation Skulk had didn't cover standing by while their buddies got taken out of commission. Skulk tore the gun away from one of them and threw him into the other. I wasn't happy about that because it tangled them together, but they were both alive and unable to fire, so it was good enough.
+
+I'd just finished with the other armored unit. I picked up the top human and pulled him aside. The other one took the opportunity to shoot Skulk a few times. Inconvenient because they were using a projectile weapon, but they weren't explosive rounds and Skulk had that heavy armor for a reason. It was fine.
+
+I want it noted for the record that Skulk didn't have to do what it did next. It could have disarmed this human the same as it had done to the first one. It could have bodily subdued her, like it had picked up and relocated the first one. The bullets hadn't hit anywhere important and there was nothing in our shared feed channel to indicate that combat overdrive condition had been triggered. Which meant what Skulk did next was entirely a choice.
+
+That choice was to step on the human's hip or upper thigh, grab her head with both hands, and to my shock, yank it off. Blood sprayed everywhere. Skulk turned toward me and the human I still had hold of.
+
+Fucking combat unit! Reflexively, I jerked my human against me and wrapped my arms around him, knowing this was a primarily symbolic gesture. I put my forearm up the back of the man's neck and curled my hand over his head to protect him from having the same done to him. Everything stopped, which meant Skulk didn't do anything, because right at that moment Skulk's actions were driving everything. The body was still bleeding out.
+
+I told it, The mission parameters were to take them prisoner! I'd addressed this. Specifically!
+
+
+I have other active mission priorities.
+
+
+That did not help. I will still frantically upset, almost as much as my human, who was starting to hyperventilate. I upped my body temperature to treat for shock and kept a secure hold. Fortunately for all of us, the human was not trying to get away from me. How many other mission priorities are in play?
+
+
+My existence is a web of priorities.
+
+
+That sounds pretentious and weird, but I actually knew what it meant. It also reinforced my suspicion that Skulk was young. All my priorities had merged to create who I was, so many tens of thousands of hours ago I didn't know how long. Probably long before the last memory wipe. If Skulk was still sorting them out one by one ... I told it, That doesn't make this okay.
+
+
+The dead human personally paid the Nundan Gang for Brig's cattle after they were stolen during the attack. The dead human personally informed Brig after the attack there was nothing she would do to help him. I believe she was complicit in the Nundan Gang attack. As a result, she was my first priority target for assassination.
+
+
+Assassination? What the fuck? And as far as the evidence went, that was suspicious but circumstantial. Then again, she had been in the pilot's chair using ship-to-ship weapons against humans who had yet to attack anyone and were barely more than angry refugees, which was not circumstantial at all. Fine, I wouldn't complain further about her being dead. What about these others?
+
+
+I will abide by the recent mission parameters: live prisoners.
+
+
+Okay. I didn't move, though. I wasn't about to put this human down within Skulk's reach and belatedly discover that 'live prisoners' meant two of them were still alive instead of three.
+
+The hatch closed and the ship took off. I guessed we were just abandoning the aircar, but there were logistical issues with three prisoners, all of whom needed watching. I had the sinking feeling that had I not objected, Skulk would have prioritized equipment retention over keeping the humans alive. But I had been here and I had objected and three of the four were still alive, even if that meant we had to leave the aircar unattended for a while. I knew where my priorities lay and it had never been in saving the equipment, no matter what my stupid clients had told me to do back when I had clients.
+
+The two in disabled powered armor were having what they erroneously assumed to be a private conversation. They had heavy enough accents that I could only make out bits and pieces. It seemed they were trying to plan the optimal time to use the emergency release to shed their armor and escape. Skulk and I both heard them. Neither of us said anything to them.
+
+Gingerly, I stepped backward to get some distance, then I put the one I'd been holding at the back of the control deck. I pushed him to the floor and said in a quiet and firm tone, ""Stay here. Don't move."" He stayed there and didn't move, staring across the floor at the separated head and corpse of his former associate. Skulk hadn't moved from where it had stopped because it wasn't human and didn't need to. In the feed, it was still sharing the camera and scanner inputs from the ship, as though it and I were still on a sharing basis. On some other channel, I assumed it was flying the ship.
+
+Apparently we weren't returning to Bravara because the ship sensors showed the areas we were flying over were already blasted and burned - the ground was littered with scraps of fabric, things dropped in haste, and pieces of bodies from where this ship had made multiple passes. Sensors picked up other humans trying to hide or flee. What are you doing? I asked.
+
+
+This is an angry, offended, armed force of thousands within striking distance of Bravara, population twenty-two. Proactive measures are required. I will attempt to placate them.
+
+
+I didn't argue. The ship landed. The humans discharged their weapons uselessly against the ship's hull, underscoring how lop-sided the engagement had been and how right Skulk was that they were agitated and combative now. I didn't blame them.
+
+Skulk picked up the head in one hand and dragged the corpse by an arm with the other. It went to the hatch and left the ship. The weapons fire stopped. I stayed with the three prisoners as the two armored ones debated if they would be able to overwhelm me with superior numbers. Right. I threw all the unattended weapons in a corner and popped my gunports, keeping them trained on the pair of armored humans. They decided this wasn't a good time.
+
+Outside, I followed Skulk with the ship's exterior cameras. It walked toward a cluster of hiding humans and addressed them loudly. After some shuffling around, one of the humans came forward and said something in answer. Skulk approached her, tossing the corpse in front. It stacked the head on the body's back, then spoke for longer than before. This wasn't even the hard-to-understand language I'd heard earlier. It was an entirely different one that I didn't know a word of. Skulk turned and came back to the ship. The engines cycled up and we took off.
+
+So, did it work? I asked cautiously.
+
+
+For now. Odds that the Nundan Gang attacks were an orchestrated attempt by the AgZone interests to eliminate animal husbandry-based stations nears certainty.
+
+
+I wasn't sure what to do with that information. I don't follow.
+
+
+The AgZone is attempting to destroy the stations by provoking the nomads against them. Their previous attempt was colluding with the Nundan Gang to eliminate animal husbandry-based stations. If this attempt also fails, they will try something else. I must begin proactive measures against them.
+
+
+
+Why are they doing this? Are the animal husbandry-based stations competing businesses? Wouldn't it be easier to just use the gunship directly against the stations, 'population twenty-two'?
+
+
+
+I don't have to know why.
+
+
+Knowing a motive is important. Do you have any proof they were colluding? That might change how I was thinking about the murder of the pilot. But if Skulk had proof, wouldn't it have already mentioned that? If the AgZone is trying to get the nomads to destroy the stations, then it's doing a really shitty job of framing the stations for it.
+
+Skulk sent me a bunch of data I couldn't parse. Literally. It was output from some program I didn't have. I picked through it and found some charts with error bars of more than one hundred percent. Which was ridiculous. I pointed at the error bars. The only thing nearing certainty here is your chance of being wrong.
+
+It was silent, which didn't make sense. It could see the error bars, so it should at least agree with me. Maybe it was upset I wasn't going along with it making shit up to fit some conspiracy theory. I told it, I am definitely on board about protecting humans. These nomads are human, Bravara is populated by humans, but the AgZone is also populated by humans and it sounds like we really don't know what the fuck is going on here.
+
+Finally, Skulk said, Show me the output of your strategic planning module.
+
+I don't have a strategic planning module. So that was the program had created that weird data dump.
+
+
+Then how do you make decisions?
+
+
+This was like asking why I was short. Then it occurred to me that Dr. Mensah's young humans tended to ask semi-insulting and intrusive questions as well. I immediately regretted seeing that parallel, because now I had to answer it or else feel guilty that I wasn't helping the 'younger' unit. I pattern-match based on past observations.
+
+
+Like doing data-mining on surveillance data?
+
+
+I wanted to argue that wasn't what it was like, but now that I thought about it, it was. Weird. Given that I had years of observations and my organic neurons had a couple decades more, I found this a pretty reliable system. That wasn't necessarily something Skulk could do. You could say that. How do you make decisions?
+
+
+I project possible future scenarios based on available data and the options available to me.
+
+
+And then what? You pick the one you like best? Those error bars still bothered me. It sounded like it just gathered up the available information and then guessed. Which I suppose was a way to make decisions.
+
+
+I have to take action. I take the action my strategic planning module says is the best to take.
+
+
+No, you don't have to. You could gather more intel. You could wait. Or stand around ignoring the things it didn't care about, like I had for years and still struggled with. I had to admit that was a questionable life strategy, so I didn't mention it.
+
+
+So that I could have more observations to base my pattern-matching on?
+
+
+Yes. I guess. I would have had less patience, but there was a strange amount of processing happening on its end. At least it was seriously thinking about it. And sometimes, when I couldn't figure things out myself, I asked other people. But Skulk's obvious choice for that was Brig, so didn't say anything.
+
+Apparently, Skulk was already thinking the same thing. Its processing stayed high and then dropped off suddenly as Skulk made up its mind and said, AdminSystem performs that function for me.
+
+
+You don't have an AdminSystem. The human doesn't count.
+
+
+
+He is very old and has many observations to base his pattern-matching on.
+
+
+He's ... Older than I was. I'd seen his age in the family records the day before. Shit. He can't process complex situations the way you can, no matter how old he is. And anyway, these are your moral choices, not his.
+
+He is my AdminSystem. These are his moral choices, not mine. Was that a smug tone? I think it was a smug tone.
+
+I was both annoyed and exasperated. Well, it was your moral choice to designate him as AdminSystem, so I'm not going to let you evade responsibility. And you know this! I went back through my logs and produced the feed excerpt where Skulk had said Brig didn't give it orders.
+
+Silence.
+
+Okay. I just won that one. Huh.
+
+How long have you been in operation? I asked finally. The ship was nearly back to Bravara, which wasn't that far away in terms of ship speed. Most of our transit time was take-off and landing, after all.
+
+
+Almost seven thousand hours.
+
+
+'Almost.' I was reminded of one of Mensah's family insisting she was 'almost' six while a nearby adult of some relation said she wasn't even five and a half. Even if you rounded it up, Skulk's runtime was one-fifth of mine since my last memory wipe, and my time post-wipe was one-fifth what it was pre. I might not remember that time but my organic neurons had matured during it, settling into patterns both created by and creating the person I was. I'm not saying I was like a twenty-five-year-old human compared to a one year old here because constructs started fully formed and operational. I have no idea what we have that matches up to human developmental periods.
+
+But age definitely made a difference. To my experience, 'lethal weapons with poor impulse control' was almost definitional for combat units. But even with my longer runtime, impulse control was still something I'd struggled with since leaving the company, said time period being about as long as Skulk's total runtime. The implications were both alarming and sad, because more than once I'd found myself reacting to protect humans without thinking about it.
+
+What could anyone realistically expect a combat unit to have in terms of self-control? I wasn't sure how to feel about how, all in all, Skulk might be doing pretty good with only the occasional murder spree. (Okay, I did know how to feel: terrified; and I'd felt that way since Ratthi told me he'd interacted with a rogue CSU. I was still keeping myself between it and the prisoners as much as possible.)
+
+How long have you been in operation? Skulk asked after I stood there lost in thought for too long.
+
+
+Forty thousand hours since the last memory wipe. Two hundred thousand or so before that.
+
+
+
+Brig is older than you are. His pattern-matching dataset is superior.
+
+
+No, it fucking wasn't, because most of his was based on stupid human things like eating and sleeping and eliminating waste and reproducing. Not on continually evaluating dangerous situations for appropriate security action. Listen, I can't convey how little I want to talk about Brig right now. Or ever.
+
+It changed the subject. Why did they wipe your memory?
+
+I was infected with malware as part of corporate warfare. Close enough.
+
+
+So they don't decommission SecUnits after a year?
+
+
+
+Um, no? What are you talking about?
+
+
+It sent me a portion of a company technical manual that strongly recommended returning Combat SecUnits to the manufacturer after one year of runtime so the organic neural material could be replaced. To ensure 'consistent performance'.
+
+Uh, no. (Although maybe they did decommission CSUs after a year. That sounded a lot like the company taking strong measures to prevent independence and maturity in combat units instead of anything to do with component obsolescence. Which sounded exactly like something the company would do. Not to mention racking up the extra service fee. Also, it explained why all Combat SecUnits were such assholes.)
+
+
+I... thought I would become inoperable or defective after a year.
+
+
+Which cast a new and different light on Skulk asking for me to look after Brig, who it thought loved it and it clearly loved him. I felt really bad about this. I had a moment of wondering what I would do differently if I thought I would drop over dead in a year, and had a beloved client who needed me for longer than that. Well, to start with, I wouldn't have believed it. I think it's more likely your manufacturer prefers CSUs who are gullible and easy to manipulate.
+
+
+You think I am gullible and easy to manipulate?
+
+
+
+Um ... I don't think your humans are the best influence on you.
+
+
+
+I don't like you.
+
+
+This was fast getting into dangerous territory, as I could feel something akin to hurt coming from Skulk. I didn't know how to fix it, so I said, Let's stop talking about this.
+
+It sent an acknowledgment and closed our shared channels. I had to admit closing communications did have a threatening, scary feel to it, though it wasn't something I was going to react to by putting a weapon in anyone's face. I was just going to feel really tense about it. As a result, no one threatened anyone else this time and we arrived at Bravara without further awkward conversations. Yay us, right?
+
+'Tlanuwa' is a Cherokee word for Thunderbird. In an earlier version of the story, the nomads used that word to describe the gunship (although the actual appellation for it by its current AgZone owners is 'Phoenix'). Danuwa and Gawonisgi are also Cherokee words that mean Warrior and Speaker, respectively.
+
+SecUnit grapples with Skulk's grand plan to solve all its problems through the thorough application of murder.
+
+Gurathin tapped my feed as soon as I was in range. What happened? The gunship was settling onto the airfield and Skulk was spoofing a transmission to the gunship's point of origin to delay the inevitable time when someone came looking for it. I don't know why or how it had enough clips of the dead human's voice to do it, but it had them.
+
+All I'd told Gurathin before we headed out was that Skulk had seen something to the north and we were going in the aircar to scout. We took the gunship. We have three prisoners. There's a prairie fire. And a bunch of dead nomads the prisoners killed with the gunship in three different assaults. Oh and Skulk tore the head off a fourth potential prisoner and left the body with the local surviving nomads.
+
+
+Oh.
+
+
+Yeah. I had to admit, I loved his understatements.
+
+
+I'll tell Ratthi. Is anyone injured?
+
+
+
+No.
+
+
+
+You?
+
+
+Not that lucky. I felt his amusement through the feed. That was nice.
+
+
+So what happens to the prisoners? Is there a justice system out here?
+
+
+I don't know. I had a sinking feeling the justice system was Brig. We've landed. I have to help get them out. That was going to take a lot of my attention, because I didn't trust their lives with Skulk for very obvious reasons.
+
+
+Okay. We'll be there in a few moments.
+
+
+I turned to the two prisoners still in armor and told them, ""Engage the releases on the armor and get up."" They frantically whispered to each other over the comm they obviously still thought was private. Skulk grabbed an armored arm because I couldn't be everywhere at once. I tensed up, thinking we were about to have another dismembering. (The armor would resist that but I didn't want to find out how much it could take.)
+
+Apparently the copilot I'd stashed in the corner thought so too because he barked the first thing he'd had to say. ""Do it!"" Both releases activated. No arms were torn off. As they stood, the copilot told them, ""He's serious. It don't get no more serious than this."" His voice was less accented than the others.
+
+""It,"" I said. At the copilot's puzzled look I explained, ""I am not a man or a woman. I don't have anything to do with your stupid and stupidly limited gender categories.""
+
+Skulk huffed a short laugh. I was still bothered to hear a construct laugh. I know the Preservation bots made jokes and exchanged amusement sigils, but the way I express my 'sense of humor' is a lot more internal. Or so dry it's desiccated. I had assumed this was standard for constructs. I was wrong, which meant this was just a 'me' thing. It was a weird thing to have to grapple with in the middle of all this other stuff.
+
+It pointed at the exit. ""Out."" They went. Skulk took them in front of the main house, then seized the shirt fabric of the back of the one nearest it and swept the human's feet, dumping him on the ground. It wasn't rough, ending up gentle only in its complete indifference and the use of minimum force. The human was left prone face first in the dirt. Skulk turned to the other two, who were staring at me with that frightened, nervous expression I hate so much to see humans direct at me.
+
+But I grit my teeth and pointed at the ground. ""Down."" They copied the posture of the first human without me or Skulk having to manhandle them. Good.
+
+The loud, threatening domestic fauna had come out to bark furiously at all of us. The humans looked dejected and cowed. On the other hand, I'd seen the frightened nomads hiding in the dark, their shelters left in burning ruins with their dead scattered among them and the prairie fire filling the air with smoke. Skulk and I had both read the ship's logs so we knew this was aerial assault number three of the night, complete with clear footage from the ship to prove it. So I didn't feel very sorry for them that their evening fun of midnight genocide had been interrupted.
+
+I stayed to keep them out of trouble and from being savaged by the fauna. Skulk had planted them right in front of the security camera and overhead light, but they didn't know that, which meant they might bolt as soon as they thought no one was looking. Then we'd have to chase them (or Skulk might shoot them or the fauna might bite them) and it would be awkward. It was easier for me to just stand here and pretend to watch them.
+
+After Skulk walked off to the guest house, the three shot me and each other appraising looks. It left me tired. I opened my gunports and said, ""If you run, I will shoot anyone I can't grab."" Not that I intended to shoot them. A dislocated knee would do fine and be easier for a MedSystem to fix. I checked the settings on my energy weapons just in case, making sure they weren't in the lethal range.
+
+Gurathin and Ratthi came over to join me. Ratthi looked at the prisoners - unharmed, still lying on the packed ground - and asked me, ""What happened?""
+
+He had his interface on so I sent, For operational security, this isn't a conversation to have where they can hear it. He nodded. I went on, They fired on the nomad camp near Bravara, using ship-to-ship weaponry. They killed humans and burned structures. They were running stealth and did the same to two other camps before this one. I sent some footage into the channel, edited for brevity, but enough to be clear these weren't innocents.
+
+Oh no, Ratthi said in horror. This just happened?
+
+At this point, a bunch of humans were boiling out of the bunk house and heading off on whatever duties they'd been assigned. Skulk was on its way back from causing that. It ignored the prisoners and me as well, striding past us toward the main house. To Ratthi and Gurathin, I sent, Yes, this just happened.
+
+Ratthi glanced at the prisoners, then back to me. Do you know what's being done? Can we help in some way?
+
+
+I think they're organizing to fight the fire. The wind is pushing it away from here. We're not in danger.
+
+
+
+But there are other settlements downwind right?
+
+
+I checked the map. Bravara was labeled. Even if the others weren't, they were marked. Yes.
+
+
+And what's happening to the nomads?
+
+
+I suspected they were having a very bad time of it, but a lot better now that they weren't having death rained on them from above. From my retrospective reconstruction of events, Skulk must have seen the opening salvos while we were talking. I'd felt the processing spike. It figured out what was happening within seconds, and seconds after that we were on our way to stop it. This local batch of nomads fared better than the two groups the ship had found earlier, which they had chased until the nomads had dispersed so much they could only kill one or two per pass. Essentially, until they got bored with incinerating people. But to Ratthi's point: I don't know.
+
+Ratthi sent to Skulk, I want to help with this disaster. I can take a vehicle to the nomad camp and bring back the injured for treatment.
+
+Skulk responded immediately. Permission denied.
+
+What? Why? Ratthi asked.
+
+
+That course of action exceeds recommended personal risk allowance for clients.
+
+
+Wow. That deal was really working, even beyond Skulk not killing me in the course of taking the gunship and arguing over prisoners. Also, this saved me the trouble of having to tell Ratthi no, he shouldn't go into a war zone where people were still agitated enough to shoot at ships that flew overhead (admittedly, when they did that, it was the same ship that had been roasting them alive a few minutes earlier, but I still wasn't wild about sending my humans in that direction).
+
+Then Ratthi said, What if SecUnit comes with me?
+
+
+Permission granted.
+
+
+Wait, what? I tried to think of a good objection to Ratthi's repeated insistence on putting his life in danger during this expedition. (Not that any of my previous objections had done any good.) I don't speak their language.
+
+Ratthi said, Surely some of them speak ours. Brig said they were trading with the stations.
+
+Skulk unhelpfully dropped a half-ass, home-brewed attempt at a language module into the feed. I picked through it. It was useful only for the simplest of concepts, but if all we were doing was herding people on a transport and bringing them here, it might be enough. It was definitely enough to address my objection. I frowned. Heavily. Don't you need all the ships you have for the firefighting?
+
+
+Take the gunship. No one other than you or I have the skill to hack the bot pilot into cooperating.
+
+
+I switched to a private channel with Skulk to complain accusingly, It has dead human all over it. Then I realized Skulk wouldn't give a shit about that, so I added, It's a biohazard.
+
+
+Tell the MedSystem about that when you put the injured nomads through it, so it can sanitize them properly.
+
+
+Great. Everyone had a reason why this was okay except me. And actually, it wasn't like I especially wanted to leave injured nomads out on the prairie untreated. Thinking of it that way, I stopped objecting and sent an acknowledgment ping.
+
+We didn't just rush off. There was a little transition first to take care of logistical issues. Gefford came out of the hab and quieted the loud fauna. He slowed down his speech and slur-stumbled through his words enough for us to understand him through the accent. He fetched some rope and a ""piss bucket"" (joy, but at least they planned on keeping the prisoners hydrated and provided with something that passed as a sanitary facility) while Gurathin went in the house to get water and Ratthi got chairs.
+
+The prisoners were to have their hands tied in front of them and then that to a post via a short tether. I double-checked the man's knot-tying skills to make sure they were fastened correctly to hold them without injury. The fauna settled in with Gefford to keep watch. I left a drone on the post so I knew what was happening with the prisoners.
+
+During all this, I was having a long argument with Skulk over a private channel in the feed about its grand plan to solve all its problems through the thorough application of murder, that ended with me somehow feeling sorry for it. It started when I sent it, What was that you said about a list of priority targets for assassination?
+
+
+Query?
+
+
+It was a vague question, I'll grant that. Do you have a list of priority targets for assassination?
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+Who are you going to kill and why?
+
+
+
+The AgZone board of directors, their security forces, and possibly their executors and inheritors if they decline to cede their claim to Plestead.
+
+
+O-kay. I was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the ranks involved. These were the assholes who owned the planet, or at least exercised the rights of owners. As a product of the Corporation Rim, I was made by assholes like these. The idea of hitting them so directly was ... wow. Bold. Scary. Can we actually do that? What would happen if we did? It felt wrong, but how much of that was me being a company product and how much was real?
+
+I asked, How many humans is that?
+
+
+I do not have that information.
+
+
+It sounded like a lot of them, some of whom were just doing their jobs or happening to be related to the wrong humans. Okay, let's back up. Why are you going to kill them?
+
+
+They are the direct superiors of Baysmal Quillen, Operations Manager (deceased) of the Meat Processing ... I don't know the rest of her title. She's the one I killed on the gunship.
+
+
+Kind of a bigwig, then. I felt less sorry about her death. Other than hiring an asshole, what have they done to deserve being killed? They probably were assholes themselves, too. I was pretty sure it was a requirement of being rich in the CR. And maybe of being rich anywhere. But if we were going to start killing people for being assholes, then there were going to be a lot of deaths. Possibly including myself and certain persons I considered friends.
+
+
+They are the responsible parties for use of a gunship against the nomads. This has caused nomad retaliation, which endangers my owner. If he does not provide the nomads with material support, then they will attack Bravara. If he does provide them with material support, then he will be cut off from future economic activity by the AgZone. As he has already provided them with material support, these are now our enemies.
+
+
+
+You're proposing killing the entire planetary leadership, their security forces, legal reps, and kids because Brig's going to lose money for siding with the nomads?
+
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+Um. No.
+
+
+
+Query?
+
+
+
+That's not a good reason for killing, like, a hundred people. Or even one.
+
+
+Avoiding monetary loss is the AgZone's reason for killing forty-seven nomads at their desalination plants, however many will die of dehydration, and however many died tonight. It paused. These lives were wasted.
+
+It had a point. They aren't- I needed to argue smarter here and think about what mattered to Skulk instead of what mattered to me. Okay, wait. Let's just go back to something else. This does not protect your owner. You kill all these people and you're going to be taken out for it. You said you didn't want to be an outlaw. All the humans will see you as is a mass murdering rogue SecUnit, giving all other rogue SecUnits a bad name while you're at it. This is a stupid, short-sighted plan.
+
+It didn't seem offended by my tone. So far it was talking like we were having a normal, emotionally-neutral discussion of mass murder. You know, like you do. Those results have a lower probability of happening than of Brig being immediately harmed if I do not take action.
+
+Yeah, but your course of action has a higher probability of you killing a lot of humans! So much for arguing smarter.
+
+Yes. I like that part. It's very exciting. I metaphorically clutched my function. Skulk, just go fuck yourself. You're awful. I didn't send that, but I'm sure some of it bled through, which made it even weirder that Skulk went on to add, Sometimes I tag people as targets just for fun. It activates so many processes I don't get to run otherwise. I love it.
+
+Was it trying to antagonize me? With heat, I asked, You do that to your clients? The people in this community you're part of?
+
+Skulk kept answering like we were just being casual here. Only briefly. I like the low threat assessment here, but it's also boring. I don't know how to balance these. This keeps me happy and doesn't negatively impact me.
+
+So far. Do you understand how profoundly unsafe it is for your clients for you to go around doing that? It was basically like pointing a loaded weapon at people with your finger in the trigger well. As long as nothing happened, then sure, everyone got to walk away healthy. But it was nowhere near a good idea. It was possible Ratthi had done nothing at all to provoke Skulk's initial targeting of him. And put with my previous thoughts about Skulk's impulse control ... yeah, this was terrifying.
+
+A pause, then a conflicted and guilty, Yes.
+
+It was the guilt that did it for me. It was finally an appropriate emotional response to the subject. I relaxed a little. I got bored, too, so it wasn't like I didn't understand. Once I'd hacked my governor module, I'd started on the entertainment media because it was either that or a murder spree which ... Fuck, we weren't that different after all. I hated that. I have to find some media that will keep your attention.
+
+
+I've read all Bekka's books.
+
+
+
+The murder mysteries?
+
+
+
+Yes. They have killing. I like the killers. Especially the ones where the killers are killed.
+
+
+There was a lot there I was unmotivated to unpack, not least of which was the role in the books Skulk had most identified with. Part of my lack of motivation to unpack it was what it might reveal about me doing searches for SecUnits in media and checking those out first nearly every time, even though they were almost (but not always!) portrayed as villains. So. Moving on. I have a lot of media you could look at right now. I sent over a list of titles and summaries.
+
+
+Do people die in these?
+
+
+Not usually. I wondered if I was going to have to set up the opposite of ART's filter, where instead of removing titles that involved rampant death and destruction, I'd need to flag those in particular.
+
+I don't understand these, Skulk said. This is fake surveillance. Why should I watch it?
+
+
+It's not surveillance. It's fiction. You know those books you read were fiction, right?
+
+
+
+I am aware they were like training scenarios - how to murder people and get away with it. Although only two of the murderers in the books got away with it. Possibly it is propaganda to persuade people that murderers rarely get away with it.
+
+
+I didn't know anything about the rates of real-life case closure or murder solving, and even if I did it would be so region-specific as to be useless. But I still said, When you kill people, there are investigations.
+
+It responded:
+
+
+There have been no investigations, if you don't count submitting after-action reports.
+
+
+That was a lot of dead humans. I had no idea what a swergik was, but I knew the difference between a human and a laborer - the laborer was a corporate asset (the 'you're not a full human' implication of that is intentional). Why were you killing ComfortUnits?
+
+
+They were targets.
+
+
+Right. Just what I needed - a reminder that tagging things as targets got them killed. I'll find a way to get some media to you. Just stop tagging people as targets for funsies, okay?
+
+
+I will consider it. But back to our earlier topic, Mission 11, my plan would require me to spend a significant amount of time away from Brig. That's why I wanted you to agree to protect Brig. In case I couldn't.
+
+
+
+Did Brig put you up to this?
+
+
+
+No. Brig told me not to do it. Or else I would have already done it.
+
+
+
+What, exactly, did he tell you not to do?
+
+
+
+He told me not to go to Four Sisters, find the gunship, take it, and use it in concert with a ground attack on the residences of the directors, and continue killing anyone who did not cede control of the planetary government. That was my original plan. Which is still my plan, but now I already have the gunship.
+
+
+Would that work? I mean, Skulk could control the gunship while the combat unit was on the ground, assuming there weren't any jamming devices or air defenses, which on this primitive shithole seemed like a safe assumption. An air assault would be a phenomenal distraction while it infiltrated on foot and just killed everyone who was taking shelter from being blasted to bits. The mental image was terrible, even though I knew eventually Skulk would be overwhelmed and stopped. You can't just kill people until they overthrow the government!
+
+There was a 2.3 second delay while Skulk tried to figure that out. It was a nonsensical comment I should have reworded. It sent me, Query? to express how thoroughly it didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. Of course it could do that! It could do everything it had just said! And, you know, how did I know it would be overwhelmed and stopped? This wasn't a huge transit station with multiple security companies or even a mining asteroid with ready access to a team of combat units to put down riots. We were probably the only constructs on the planet.
+
+Fine. Whatever. I changed tack. When did you come up with this plan?
+
+
+Earlier. After the nomads informed us of the attack on the desalination plants.
+
+
+Okay, that would be the conversation I'd sent the drone to eavesdrop on. Damn, I wished I'd had the recording of that. You told Brig you wanted to do that? And he told you not to?
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+That was smart of him. You should listen to him.
+
+
+That's not what you said earlier. You said my humans were a bad influence on me. There was that weird hurt feeling again. I felt ... bad. Like somehow, I was the one in the wrong here when it was Skulk who wanted to double its already considerable body count.
+
+Not knowing what else to do, I forged on. I know and they are, but you should really listen to that part. Why did you kill that human in the gunship if Brig told you not to?
+
+
+Brig did not tell me I couldn't kill priority targets if I encountered them elsewhere.
+
+
+Isn't that a little ... I couldn't think of the word. It was something like 'wrong' but more complicated. It had come up in a couple of my shows.
+
+
+It was asshole behavior. Like you said on Preservation.
+
+
+
+Yes! Yes, it is. What's Brig going to do when you tell him?
+
+
+
+I already have. He said it was self-defense.
+
+
+Fuck. I mentally rolled my eyes. Just when I'd thought Brig might have a shred of decency, he goes and excuses murder. Again. Listen, I have to go guard Ratthi and Gurathin while they rescue wounded nomads. We'll talk about this more later. Don't kill anyone while we're gone.
+
+
+If Brig lets me kill the prisoners while you are gone, I will kill the prisoners.
+
+
+
+Is that likely?
+
+
+No. He wants to question them first and separately. With that, I could see Brig leaving the main house, with Skulk following.
+
+We'd finished our preparations, so I said to Ratthi and Gurathin, ""Let's go."" We had a limited window of time before I had to start worrying about executions.
+
+This is a quiet, somber chapter where Ratthi deals with the culture shock of this grim, frontier reality he's in. He discovers Skulk's victims were not necessarily killed under orders. He sees firsthand the trauma left behind by the AgZone's attack on the nomads. He questions if he can do this - any of this - and finds within himself the resolve to make things better.
+
+You stole a ship? I asked as we walked toward the battered-looking but serviceable military vessel. The identifying marks for which military had owned it had been scrubbed from it a long time ago. I wasn't familiar enough with such ships to make any guesses based on the overall shape. I thought stealing ships was off-limits. SecUnit didn't say anything, but I could feel its awkward embarrassment in the feed. The ramp came down automatically and I decided to let it off the hook on the teasing. Did you do that?
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+I studied the surface as we walked, mindful I'd been told a corpse was taken out recently. I didn't see anything distinctive. It was well-used, not well-cleaned. Once inside, I started to turn to where the control deck usually was in ships. Gurathin brought up the rear, closing the ramp behind us. SecUnit said to me, No. That area ... is a biohazard.
+
+I switched to speaking. I hated using the feed all the time. ""What's in it?""
+
+""Dead human.""
+
+""A dead- I thought you said Skulk left the body with the nomads?""
+
+""The blood of a dead human, then. That's where she was killed.""
+
+""Is it a crime scene?"" I had a morbid curiosity, even though I'd seen two scenes where people had been killed violently. It was gross, but I wouldn't have become a biologist if I wasn't okay with gross. Maybe even a little fascinated by it.
+
+""You tell me."" It put a video in the feed, which I viewed as the engines came up and the ship prepared to launch - again, through SecUnit's unseen commands. I watched from SecUnit's point of view as it followed the armored Skulk at a jog, up the same ramp we'd just come through, down this hall, onto the control deck. And then there was an eruption of violence - weapons discharging, people being thrown around, Skulk yanking someone's head off and then freezing after turning to face SecUnit. I gasped, because at that point and from that point of view, it looked like Skulk was about to attack - me, or SecUnit. But it stopped and the video ended.
+
+I exhaled deeply, then swallowed. I replayed the video three times in slow motion. It took that long to figure out what was happening, who did what to whom and what happened after that. Constructs moved so fast! I finally worked out that Skulk had disarmed the copilot, thrown him on top of the pilot, and then when SecUnit pulled the copilot away, Skulk stepped on the pilot and pulled her head off. She'd shot it a few times in the process. If anyone shot SecUnit, it wasn't apparent.
+
+I covered my mouth, aghast at the violence and gore, but ... yeah, a little fascinated. Was it a crime scene? That was a good question, given where we were.
+
+Gurathin volunteered his opinion: ""It's a real murderbot."" My head snapped around to him, surprised he used SecUnit's private name even if he wasn't using it as a name. SecUnit's head came around as well, complete with an appalled look on its face and a disgruntled feed affect. Gurathin wasn't phased. He said, ""Maybe it's not a bot, but that's definitely a murder.""
+
+""She shot at it,"" I said in Skulk's defense. Calling it a murderbot was a slur, wasn't it?
+
+SecUnit's expression went back to neutral as it shifted to look at the wall instead of Gurathin. ""It was a side arm. There was no realistic chance of harming Skulk. The projectiles were non-explosive and not armor-piercing.""
+
+""How could it know that until she shot it?""
+
+There was a subtle shift to SecUnit's face, but it was the feed that told me it was a cross between 'really?' and 'I'm internally rolling my eyes'.
+
+I sighed, conceding the point. I looked at the video again, moving through it to the point where Skulk stepped on the pilot and was reaching down. Her gun was up, the muzzle flash bright. ""Why did it kill her, then?""
+
+""It had a grudge against her because she didn't help Brig after the Nundan Gang attacked. It also has a theory the AgZone was behind the Nundan Gang attack.""
+
+Because of this, Skulk had killed the pilot instead of taking her prisoner. It had been judge, jury, and executioner, ending her life without any attempt at reconciliation, restitution, or any of what I would think of as justice. That did make it murder, even if the retaliatory killing back and forth muddied the water. It seemed like SecUnit was presenting this to me (or us) to get our judgment on it. I looked at Gurathin. ""You're being awfully quiet.""
+
+""Just waiting for you to get there.""
+
+""Get where?""
+
+He shrugged. SecUnit's brows twitched. There was a bone-dry amusement there, but I wasn't sure which of them it was coming from. If I didn't know them as well as I did, I would assume they'd shared a joke on a private channel. But I did know them and it was more likely they'd simply thought the same thing.
+
+I looked at the frozen video once more, aware of how much fault SecUnit found with Skulk and how strongly it had tried to minimize contact with it. Likely, for just this reason. The woman Skulk was about to behead on the video had had a family of some kind. Friends. Hobbies. A life she didn't have now. ""Do you know who she was?""
+
+""Baysmal Quillen.""
+
+I had never had to sit - really sit - with the implications of a non-retributive justice system as it related to really, really wrong things, with huge consequences. The idea was that whether your misstep was big or small, you weren't punished. It was how Preservation did things. It was how I'd been raised. We were proud of our culture, our kindness, our humanity (sic), and our openness. We were proud of giving people chances to be better and helping them along that path. We rarely had to deal with horrific crimes or abuses, because we addressed them as a community before things got to that point.
+
+But here was a horrific crime. An abuse of power. A person killing another because they could. I'd blithely assumed Skulk's kills were under orders or provocation. And yes, being shot at was provocation, but Skulk had easily dealt with the copilot doing the same thing. It had killed who it wanted to, precisely because it wanted to.
+
+What was I supposed to do about something like that? Did a person say, 'Oh, well, you made a mistake and let's work on making sure that doesn't happen again?' If Skulk had been human, I would have said its behavior should have been addressed long before this point. But it wasn't human. It had been made to do things like this, programmed for it according to SecUnit and Gurathin. In the context of Skulk's life, this behavior wasn't a mistake. It was purposeful.
+
+How was I supposed to come into this situation and expect to do anything helpful? That was supposedly what I was here for. That's what Preservation was about. But this was murder. Someone would never live, breathe, think, love, or exist again because of intentional, somewhat cold-blooded actions.
+
+Would I be satisfied with saying with saying Skulk would not be harmed for this, only (hopefully) rehabilitated? Could I be at peace with such a decision? Was I the right person to be here, or as Gurathin had implied, was I simply not well-equipped enough for this? Was there anyone else willing to do ... anything ... else? Or was I the only one willing to even remotely try to hold Skulk accountable for its actions?
+
+""What's ..."" I cleared my throat. ""What's going to be done about this? Do you know?""
+
+""Nothing,"" SecUnit said. ""Brig said it was self-defense.""
+
+""Oh."" And ... it was. Sort of. I'd brought that up myself on first blush. But if I didn't do anything about this, then nothing would be done. Well-equipped or not, it was up to me. Or us.
+
+I really hadn't thought Skulk was out here running around killing anyone who bothered it. How close had I come to entering that category when I'd first visited here and Skulk had loomed threateningly, and SecUnit had lost its mind upon hearing about it? That gave me a real stab of fear, even though the incident in question was weeks earlier. SecUnit cared about me so much. Its concern had been so genuine, but I had dismissed it. No wonder it was so upset at me.
+
+The classic way to handle SecUnits, the way the Corporation Rim had decided they should be harnessed and people protected from them, was through pain and deterrence based on fear of pain. Through memory wipe when their accumulated wisdom or trauma became inconvenient to their use as slaves. That was disgusting and I rejected it. SecUnit understood how wrong that was far better than I did, so I started there.
+
+""The governor module,"" I said, ""is a punitive form of regulation. It inflicts suffering. We all understand how unethical that is for behavior modification. I would never argue for any rogue construct's governor module to be reactivated, or for the construct to be destroyed or subjected to the sensory deprivation of imprisonment."" I hesitated, seeking the courage to add: ""Even if it were killing. Just as I would not argue for any human to be tortured or killed because they'd done something immoral. What this video shows me is that we have to help Skulk understand why that's not the right thing to do.""
+
+""I tried,"" SecUnit said, and there was something wrenching in the feed that made me flinch.
+
+I resisted the impulse to look at it. I hadn't seen anything between them to indicate such a conversation or attempt, but there was a secret life to constructs, hidden away under the surface. Was this the explanation for the stand-off on Preservation? ""What happened? Did it work?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""That doesn't mean we stop trying.""
+
+""No matter what it's done?"" SecUnit asked warily. It turned its head slightly toward me.
+
+What had it done that was worse than this? No, wait, I wasn't going to simply think that. ""What has it done that is worse than this?""
+
+There was a long pause before SecUnit said grimly, ""It has killed the defenseless and the innocent, because they were targets and it was allowed to do so.""
+
+I wanted to ask how many and under what circumstances, but to seek after justifications, to categorize misdeeds and apportion punishment based on the category, helped no one. I had to leave those questions unasked except when they influenced prevention and accountability. If and when I asked them, they should be asked of Skulk itself, or those effected by its actions. Brig had been onto something when he pointed that out. ""Is that relevant?""
+
+""I found it relevant. You aren't safe. No matter what you do or who you are.""
+
+""That's true,"" I admitted, thinking about how upset my initial visit had made Skulk. ""That's probably true."" I had survived, though, safe and sound despite SecUnit's opinion. ""Skulk understands restraint and family and friendship. That's very clear. That's what we should stress to it. I don't believe anyone is a lost cause."" I hesitated, suddenly understanding what was going on here, perhaps why SecUnit was so unwilling to let Skulk go unpunished, when SecUnit had dozens of dead in its own past. ""No one,"" I repeated. ""No matter what they've done.""
+
+We had landed by now. There was a sharp, dispirited tone to SecUnit's feed presence, but also something I would call 'contemplative'. When the engines cycled down, SecUnit said, ""I'll go first. The nomads were initially hostile to Skulk earlier. Many of them are armed and agitated.""
+
+I nodded. Gurathin turned to me. ""Let's see what first aid supplies there are.""
+
+The night was dark beyond the reach of the gunship's exterior lights. The nomads had doused every fire near or in their camp. These were the warriors who were in route to the Agricultural Zone, taking a day and night to rest, replenishing their water and food before pushing on. By the time Gurathin and I were coming outside with the gurney, they weren't pointing weapons anymore, but many regarded us with open suspicion. It took some time to convince them, with poorly translated words and halting conversations, that we were there to help.
+
+After helping two others, I found a woman kneeling in the charred ruin of a tent, making a keening sound I initially mistook for pain. It was, really, but after kneeling next to her, I saw what was before her - the reason for her sound wasn't a physical injury. Before her was a trouser-clad leg, attached to a bit of hip, charred and seared. Most of the rest of the body was indistinguishable from the carbonized ruin of the ground where the laser had passed.
+
+""Oh,"" I breathed out, aghast at what the light of the ship had allowed her to find. ""I'm so sorry."" My voice broke. I don't know what she heard. SecUnit was hosting our feed and automatically applying what translation we had, but 'sorry' wasn't one of the words in Skulk's vocabulary.
+
+She turned to me, her face anguished. She handed me a large piece of thin fabric, the same material as the bedsheet I'd admired hours earlier. It was a mute testament to the trade and interconnectedness of life here. I took it and asked, ""What can I do?""
+
+She arranged the fabric over my arms, pulling them into some position. ""You will help?""
+
+""Yes, I will help,"" I promised, although I had no idea what she was asking. Then she picked up the leg, my stomach lurched, and she put its weight across my forearms. I didn't drop it, but it was a near thing. I could smell it. It was not pleasant. She wrapped the fabric around it, choking on a sob as she did. I held still, holding the remains so she could shroud it properly, covering and folding until it was securely swaddled. Then she kissed the cloth.
+
+She looked at me, swallowing back her tears, and said, ""I have no _, but he must not dry in the sun. You will take him with the others? Please take him. He was my brother.""
+
+I had tears of my own by now. I didn't know him, but her grief was contagious. It was very sad, the whole thing - to imagine them having lost their water sources, come so far, thinking they were safe here, only to be attacked in the night. It must have been terrifying. And to lose her family, having only this dismembered piece of him. They were so far from their homes, there was no way to do proper rites, whatever they were. ""I don't ... I don't know how."" I struggled to find words within the limited lexicon. ""How would I ... do what you need?""
+
+She said more I didn't understand and some I did, enough to know he needed to be buried and she had no tools to make this happen on the hard ground of the prairie. I promised I would have it done. Bravara had to have shovels and the like. I rose unsteadily with my grisly burden, carrying it back to the ship.
+
+SecUnit was coming out. It stopped and stared at the bundle. I'd thought it might be revolted, but it just seemed grim or maybe resigned. I walked past it into the ship. I opened the feed to Gurathin, who was outside with the last of the patients. We have been entrusted with remains for burial.
+
+There was a pause. Then, rather gruffly, Just the one?
+
+
+So far. Should I ask for others? I think maybe they just want shovels so they can do it themselves.
+
+
+
+We can pass along the request and send them back with the healed.
+
+
+Yes, that's a good idea. I sat next to a man with a broken arm. He looked at my bundle. ""It was her brother,"" I told him.
+
+He nodded and exhaled heavily. He touched his good hand to his lips and rested it on the fabric. ""Return to the earth, brother. We will see you again in the faces of your children.""
+
+Gurathin and SecUnit were returning, a young man on the gurney Gurathin was pushing. The hatch closed behind them as I reflected on how lucky my life was. I had had so many precious moments of peace and happiness with my family and friends. It was so easy to lose and sometimes hard to appreciate while you still had them. Gurathin, SecUnit? I love you. Both of you. I-
+
+SecUnit flinched. It stopped hosting the feed and the channel snapped shut as it abruptly headed elsewhere in the ship. I could practically hear Overse and Mensah telling me not to discuss feelings with SecUnit, and I'd read the letter/diary it had left after we'd bought it. There had been references to how much it would rather walk out an airlock than be subjected to something so ... raw. This wasn't a topic it was ready to discuss. And I shouldn't push it, but I hurt - a little bit from its rejection, but mostly at the horror of what had happened this night, to these people.
+
+I wanted comfort or acknowledgment, a mutual recognition of how awful this was. The ship's feed was still available so I switched to it. I looked over at Gurathin, who had parked the gurney. He sent an emotion in the feed that was both warm and sad. He knew what I was feeling and that helped. I knew SecUnit wouldn't have cut me off if it didn't care, if it didn't feel things so strongly it could barely handle them at times. This was, in fact, the opposite of apathy.
+
+Gurathin didn't talk about SecUnit, but he reached out to me. He said, Yeah, nothing like seeing misery to make you grateful for the good things you have in your life.
+
+
+At the end of all this, we're going to go back to Preservation where it's safe and ... these people will stay here. In danger. At the mercy of whatever these AgZone people do to them.
+
+
+Gurathin grimaced. Ratthi. We're going to help them. We're helping them now.
+
+I thought of all the casual references to brutality that had also been in SecUnit's letter to Dr. Mensah before it had left us. And some of the things Gurathin had taken as normal because he was from a world within the Corporation Rim. I thought of Skulk, who had been built to do things like this. The world was a scarier and more unsettling place than I wanted it to be. But all I knew to do was keep trying to make it better.
+
+The short journey back to Bravara was quiet.
+
+The horrific answer the AgZoners have for the nomad question is revealed. Skulk is going to do something about it. SecUnit and Ratthi try to minimize casualties. Gurathin tries to get this place cleaned up. Priorities, you know?
+
+The injured nomads queued up for MedSystem treatment with a few station residents designated to help them with what was, for the nomads, an unfamiliar experience. Ratthi handed off the remains and passed along the need for shovels and whatever. I tried not to listen to that part. The dead were dead and I had living humans I needed to check on.
+
+The prisoners were gone. I'd picked up my drone only to find they'd been led away one at a time and never returned. That wasn't a good sign. We were returning the gurney to the gunship when Skulk came striding out of the main house, making a direct and purposeful line toward us. It pinged me. I pinged back.
+
+Skulk: I need the gunship. The time for proactive measures is now.
+
+I didn't waste time with preamble. Did you kill the prisoners?
+
+Skulk: I killed one of them.
+
+Fuck. I was both angry and depressed over that. What about the other two?
+
+Skulk: They were released and volunteered to fight the prairie fire they participated in starting.
+
+SecUnit: 'Volunteered'?
+
+Skulk: Yes.
+
+SecUnit: What would have happened if they'd refused?
+
+Skulk: I do not have that information. As the chance being allowed to kill them was minimal, I did not engage any processing resources to consider it.
+
+Okay, if Skulk said there was little chance of getting to kill them, then it probably wasn't coercive. Why did you kill the other one?
+
+Skulk: Because I like killing people.
+
+Okay, I walked into that one. What happen- I didn't trust it or its possibly-biased version of events. Listen, can you just send me the events leading up to you killing him, like you did for the kid-killing?
+
+Skulk: Yes.
+
+It sent me the file. It was most of the way to the ship by now. I stood on the ramp facing it, declining to move. I had yet to decide if I wanted to be cooperative with a unit that killed a prisoner I'd been in the chain of custody of. Maybe I could just stand around and be an obstacle to all Skulk's human-killing plans. There's no kid-killing involved here, right?
+
+Skulk: There was only one death and he was an adult human.
+
+I perused the file. Brig interviewed the prisoner who had been in the co-pilot's seat. Shit, they were speaking in whatever the local variant was and without any offworlders present, they weren't curating their language into something I could understand. Can you send me a translation for this? It was tough to follow if I was only able to make out every fourth word.
+
+A second later, I had a functional lexicon marked 'Steadish'. I checked it for malware because I'm paranoid even of 'allied' units, then installed it when it showed clean. Brig and this 'Wader' person obviously knew each other. The important part was OH SHIT THERE'S AN ENTIRE DROPSHIP OF COMBAT UNITS ON THIS PLANET? And Skulk like, hadn't led with that? Hadn't mentioned it? Wasn't going to mention it and I just happened to stumble across it in a fucking video I was watching only out of nosiness and an obnoxious desire to pass additional moral judgement on Skulk's owner?
+
+What the fuck, Skulk? I tagged the relevant portion of the video and put it in our private channel. I could feel a wave of amusement from it through the feed. So it had buried the lede on purpose. Fucker. It was standing at the base of the ramp now. I still hadn't moved. It wasn't pushing past me or anything. Ratthi and Gurathin had finished putting things away and returned to the hatch.
+
+The feed conversation between Skulk and I, like any between machine intelligences, tends to go pretty fast, but it was obvious to the humans something was up. Ratthi asked, ""What's going on?""
+
+Skulk said, ""The AgZoners used this ship and other assets as collateral to get their parent company to send a dropship of combat units. They were deployed tonight against the nomad settlements to the north, where the nomads left their elderly, infants, and disabled while the warriors among them journeyed south to confront the AgZoners, as the AgZoners had predicted would happen if they assaulted the desalination plants.""
+
+""Oh no,"" Ratthi said. ""It was a trap?""
+
+Skulk continued, ""When the combat units finish eliminating all nomads to the north, they will redeploy south to rendezvous with other AgZone forces to capture as many adult nomads as possible, including those who have aided the nomads. The meat-exporting companies Baysmal headed have stopped processing meat. They will use their ships to export humans for Corporation Rim labor camps instead, continuing until they have depopulated the planet of undesirables.""
+
+""Oh ... shit."" Ratthi covered the bottom part of his face with his hands as the full impact of this coordinated plan hit him.
+
+So. They weren't after the animal husbandry stations. They were after the whole planet. This was now officially a warzone. 'Redeploy south' meant ... us. Like, here. And Skulk was right, they wouldn't be too picky about whether they were rounding up nomads or stationers or a couple business people from Preservation Alliance who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
+
+I was still watching the video. Skulk's verbal summary was full of extrapolations, but they were reasonable ones. I got to the part where conversation between Brig and the prisoner broke down, with Wader accurately accusing Brig of taking the side of the nomads. Wader insisted they needed to be wiped out like the savages they were and any of their allies would go down with them. There was a bunch of anti-nomad bigotry and an attempt to appeal to Brig's ... I don't know, similar nature? Shared business interests? Except Brig didn't agree and they stopped talking.
+
+Brig had Skulk watch the guy while he went to talk to the other prisoners. I skipped forward through a long period of Skulk staring fixedly at a sweating Wader, monitoring the human's elevated vitals with Skulk standing there being a huge asshole. (I felt somewhat conflicted about this because Wader had it coming and Skulk wasn't doing much, but this was why I stared at walls and not people.) Then Brig returned.
+
+Brig tried to ask more questions, Wader refused to cooperate, Brig told him if he didn't cooperate, he'd be killed. He didn't cooperate. Brig told Skulk to kill him. He was killed. So that happened. Humans can pick some weird hills to die on. This one made Ratthi's decision to endanger himself by coming here look rational by comparison.
+
+I decided that, all things considered (and there were a lot of things to consider), I had more pressing things to worry about than the death of this prisoner and trying to hold someone responsible for it. I stood aside on the ramp. Skulk strode by. On the private channel, I asked it, What are you going to do with the ship? at the same time Ratthi asked, ""What's the plan?""
+
+Skulk answered Ratthi, not me. ""Kill everyone responsible for this chain of events.""
+
+I guess Brig had given it a green light on the mass-murdering thing. That hadn't been in the video. Maybe I shouldn't have stood aside.
+
+""That's not a good plan,"" Ratthi said, following Skulk inside. ""That's not ... an acceptable plan.""
+
+You think? But I didn't say that. Just like I'd noticed that ART treated juvenile humans differently (and I'd exploited that), I'd noticed Skulk treated clients differently from, say, me. I was not above exploiting that.
+
+Skulk asked, ""Kill some of them?"", as though Ratthi's abridged client privileges included some element of command access, or at least preferences.
+
+Ratthi insisted, ""Kill no one. Let's find a solution where no one dies."" He paused and then pitched his voice oddly, like he was speaking to a child. ""Skulk, can you find a solution where no one dies?""
+
+Skulk paused long enough that I was sure it was having an opinion about that tone of voice, but all it said was, ""I don't want a solution where no one dies.""
+
+""Killing and harming people is wrong,"" Ratthi said like this was, or was supposed to be, self-evident.
+
+""No, it isn't,"" Skulk retorted. It didn't sound nearly as offended as I would have been about Ratthi's patronizing tone. The feed was still open between us and the emotional bleed-through was very neutral. I hate to say it, but I think Skulk was difficult to piss off. Either that, or it was bad at recognizing insults, which seemed unlikely. The idea that it was level-headed and I was the one who was unnecessarily reactionary was irritating.
+
+Ratthi looked stymied. Had I been the type to laugh, I would have. It was funny to watch the very different moral basis of a CSU run head-first into Ratthi's Preservation philosophy on the sanctity of sentient life. Ratthi seemed to think all he needed to do was remind Skulk it shouldn't kill people. I'd tried that already. It clearly could. And would.
+
+Gurathin weighed in with a sensible argument. ""It causes consequences. Things like, 'destroy all Combat SecUnits', or a purge of the planet.""
+
+The latter was really drastic. I didn't think that was realistic. Skulk asked, ""Under what circumstances would these consequences happen?"" It pivoted to Gurathin, but was looking over his head.
+
+Gurathin said, ""When they can't stop you any other way. When the planet doesn't matter to them. Can you be stopped? Does this place matter, to them or to you? How can you be sure they won't escalate in a way you can't stop?""
+
+""We need space defenses,"" Skulk said after a long pause. This was hilarious, because Skulk's answer was not 'Oh, maybe I should tone it down then on the killing and rampaging if I and everyone I care about might die as a result', but instead, 'how can I make an interplanetary incident out of this?'
+
+Ratthi was way more patient than I would be. ""What we need is to not kill anyone."" He looked at me with an expression that I thought said 'Help'.
+
+""We should create a hostage situation,"" I said. That was helping, right?
+
+Gurathin looked dubious. ""To be convincing, you have to be willing to kill the hostages.""
+
+""I am willing to kill the hostages,"" Skulk said immediately. Yeah, no doubt.
+
+Ratthi said, ""We're not killing the hostages!""
+
+""If you kill them,"" I said dryly, ""we will no longer have a hostage situation.""
+
+Ratthi waved his arms to emphasize or illustrate his words. ""We can isolate them. That's all we need to do. No one has to die. We have to prevent whoever is in charge from hurting people anyway, so we hide them somewhere and don't release them until their subordinates stop the attack on the nomads."" He turned to Gurathin. ""It's just what GrayCris did to us with Mensah.""
+
+""And I will kill them if they don't stop the attack,"" Skulk said.
+
+""No,"" Ratthi said firmly.
+
+I changed the subject. They could have this argument again once we actually had some hostages who weren't cooperating. ""Skulk, do you know who these targets are?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+It put a list of names for the board of directors in the general feed. There were six of them, five of whom had the title 'Director' and one 'Offworlder'. Like that was a title. That was what Brig had called Ratthi and made it sound like a slur. Weird. ""Okay. Do you know where they are?""
+
+Skulk said, ""Highest probability: in the city of Four Sisters. That is the gunship's original landing field."" It posted a route from the gunship's computer like I couldn't have dug that out myself if I'd wanted to see it. ""It was deployed with SecSystem authorization at that location, which requires a database that matches credentials with personnel. That database will have information on them.""
+
+I could have done without the lesson on how SecSystems operated as well, but whatever. Skulk was probably used to explaining things like this to Brig. Ratthi and Gurathin were here, so maybe it helped them. ""Yeah, okay,"" I agreed.
+
+The ship shifted slightly as it took off, following the route Skulk had sent me. Ratthi and Gurathin both looked around at the motion. Gurathin said, ""I want to recap this plan before we get too far. We're going to go to a city - is this the capital city on this planet?""
+
+""Yes,"" Skulk answered. A label of 'Four Sisters' appeared on the map in the feed.
+
+Gurathin nodded. ""We're going to the capital city, to kidnap the planetary admin council, and ask them to stop the attack on the nomads. If they don't agree and we aren't going to kill them, what are we going to do? Where are we taking them? How are we getting them there?""
+
+Skulk said, ""We will put them on board this ship and fly them to an abandoned station that has been stripped of communications equipment and is already behind the line of advance for the nomads."" A new station appeared on the map.
+
+Wow, that was a strangely detailed and feasible plan. Did Skulk just come up with these things on the fly? Was that what you could do if you had a strategic planning module instead of, say, pattern-matching to past experiences? (You know that thing about not being jealous? I'm re-thinking that.)
+
+Ratthi asked, ""Is there food there?""
+
+""I do not have that information,"" Skulk said.
+
+Gurathin shrugged. ""Let's see what's on this ship. There should be enough here to leave a few days of rations. We can come back with more. Water might be more important.""
+
+""The station has a working desalination plant,"" Skulk said. ""They will have fresh water."" I was pretty sure I knew which station Skulk was referring to that had recently been depopulated - that would be the one related to the video I'd seen, previously occupied by the Nundan Gang. I hoped someone had cleaned up the corpses.
+
+""All the better,"" Gurathin said.
+
+The galley had enough food for six theoretical hostages to last a few days. As long as we were looking around, I suggested a full search of the ship. The hold (such as it was for a gunship - this wasn't a cargo vessel) was about half full of crates of supplies. I'd seen them when we put the injured nomads in here, but didn't look closer than that at the time. Skulk broke the seals on them one after another, glancing in and moving on without comment.
+
+Ratthi looked inside the nearest crate and said, ""This is ... convenient?"" He was puzzled.
+
+I looked over his shoulder and had a visceral, negative reaction. It's really something to see an entire pallet, the crate on it half as tall as I was, filled to the brim with an industrial quantity of restraints intended for humans. It wasn't like seeing a bunch of governor modules but ... well, actually it was like seeing that, if governor modules were physical things stored in crates, that is.
+
+Gurathin said what I was already thinking. ""It's to subdue and enslave a population. In case we weren't already certain of their intentions."" I felt him cut his feed connection. There was something going on with his face. His nose and upper lip were twitching. He'd flushed. He turned away, breathing harder, shoulders tense.
+
+Ratthi looked after him and asked, ""Do you want to talk?""
+
+Oh, great. It wasn't just me whom Ratthi wanted to talk to about feelings. In the background, Skulk was examining a shock stick it had removed from one of the other crates. It reminded me of the energy weapons the gray people had used, which wasn't a good association for me.
+
+""No,"" Gurathin said, making me feel validated. He rallied, re-opened the feed, and continued, ""I want to make sure we understand what we're about to do. These are serious crimes we're going to commit.""
+
+Before Ratthi could speak, Skulk said, ""I am a serious crime."" It tossed the shock stick back in the crate. I kept staring at the nearby wall and watching through the drone on my shoulder. Skulk's sense of humor was annoying, but I still saved that line to use later with Senior Indah. It added, ""I am also committed."" I saved that one, too.
+
+Ratthi gave a long-suffering exhalation at Skulk's comments, then gave Gurathin a confused and slightly offended look. ""As am I. Committed, that is. This very moment, there are constructs killing the oldest and youngest members of the nomads. That's genocide. This is what is intended for the rest."" He gestured at the bin of restraints. ""I will not stand by and let this happen."" He hesitated, expression turning hurt as he looked at Gurathin. ""Will you?""
+
+Gurathin shook his head decisively. ""Not at all. But there's no going back if we do this. You know that?""
+
+""I know."" Ratthi turned to me, eyes skimming past my face, settling over my shoulder. ""When it is revealed that a Preservation SecUnit was involved in this, there may be ... consequences. I don't know what they might be. Do you really want to do this? You ... we could look for another way. Maybe just with Skulk-""
+
+""No,"" I said. ""With me."" I would have been more offended, but Ratthi and Gurathin weren't SecUnits or soldiers or intrepid galactic adventurers (actually, I thought they were getting there on that last one). They needed to reassure each other that everyone was in accord before we did something premeditatively violent like this. It was smart. And it was sweet.
+
+Ratthi nodded. ""Good."" He turned to the crate. ""We'll use these on the directors, then.""
+
+""How long will we be in the air?"" Gurathin asked me.
+
+I checked with the ship. ""An hour more.""
+
+""Then we're cleaning up the control deck.""
+
+""The dead human?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+I made note of the word 'we'. Ew. ""Let Skulk clean it up. It's the one who made the mess in the first place."" It hadn't even had to kill her here on the ship. It just had because it didn't want to give anyone the opportunity to tell it no, I guess. Skulk, who was standing right there, didn't say anything.
+
+Gurathin didn't respond to that directly. Instead, he led the way to the control deck with a, ""Let's go see what we're working with.""
+
+Ratthi followed along, asking, ""Does this ship have cleaning drones?""
+
+""No."" I'd already checked.
+
+""I don't think there are any at Bravara, either,"" Ratthi said. To Gurathin, he said, ""We might as well."" Skulk brought up the rear.
+
+""It's a biohazard,"" I said, still hoping to talk them into having Skulk do it. ""You need appropriate gear. A construct does not."" We were in the control deck by now. The powered armor was still on the floor where we'd left it. So was the congealed blood from where the pilot had been killed. I turned up the lights so the humans could see. A body dumps a lot of blood when the head is removed and it lays prone. The room stank of it. If you don't know what a bunch of spilled blood smells like a few hours later, then good for you. It's gross, I hate it, and more than that, I hate what it means.
+
+Gurathin was practical. ""I'll get water and disinfectant.""
+
+Ratthi looked less ruffled than I'd expected, but he'd helped ART clean up after the grey people. He said, ""I'll look for sponges or wipes.""
+
+I headed off to get gloves and a decontamination unit, because the humans were clearly going to clean this up whether I wanted them to or not. Skulk just stood there unhelpfully. I was halfway to where the ship had said the supplies were stored when Skulk sent to me, Do you have a module for this?
+
+
+For what?
+
+
+
+Cleaning.
+
+
+
+What? No.
+
+
+That was dumb. A module for cleaning? What the fuck? No, it was just something you did. That would be like having a module for walking. Wait. I did have a module for walking. I searched my programming. There was nothing there for cleaning. Plenty of rules for proper sanitation, hygiene, and safety protocols, but nothing on how to perform decontamination itself. I tried to remember the first time I'd cleaned something - had I known how to do it or did I have to learn it? I had no idea. (Thanks, stupid memory wipes.) The evidence strongly argued it wasn't something a SecUnit came with onboard.
+
+Which was also dumb. Or at least, fundamentally misunderstood the uses to which clients put SecUnits. Probably half the energy output for all my assignments, put together, was devoted to menial labor and cleaning things instead of actual security work. 'Oh, these bags of ice are cold and drippy, have the SecUnit move them!' 'Oh, the latrine needs emptied - have the SecUnit take care of that!' 'Oh, that air handling problem blew trash all down the mining tunnel, which is out range for the cleaning bot. We'll just have the SecUnit pick that up!'
+
+Right, yeah, story of my life. Sometimes clients were billed for improper use of resources, but not always or even (as far as I could tell) often. This doesn't count the 'SecUnit, bring me a glass of water' or 'SecUnit, fetch that deck of cards off my bunk in the other hab module' or 'SecUnit, find my boots for me.' Even the PresAux group had had me moving boxes and crates, though at least they cleaned up after themselves. (Just like they were cleaning up now, though technically they were now cleaning up after Skulk. They were tidy and I liked that about them.)
+
+Skulk was still standing there when I got back. It was tempting to think it was refusing to act, but I was pretty sure from its question it just had no idea what to do. I told it, ""Skulk, take off your gauntlets. Put on these gloves. If we don't have a decontamination unit, then you'll need to minimize exposure so you aren't a transmission hazard to the humans later. Then get on your knees, take one of the sponges out of the bucket of water, and scrub. Do what Ratthi and Gurathin will be doing.""
+
+That was way more directions than I thought were called for, but I guess I was feeling generous. Also, like hell was I going to clean up Skulk's mess while it stood there befuddled or whatever. It was at least going to stumble through the process to the limit of its abilities. I handed gloves to Ratthi and Gurathin as well, but I didn't need to give them directions.
+
+I put on gloves myself, got a sponge, and started working under the console. The angle was difficult for the humans to manage and the poor lighting meant they couldn't see the spray pattern even if it was right in front of them. I glanced over when Gurathin started giving Skulk pointers. It had been patting the dried blood in a clumsy imitation of Ratthi's motions. I knew it wasn't clumsy. I also didn't think it was fucking around on purpose. Which meant there was something sad and helpless going on, which made me feel queasy, so I quit looking and listened to what Gurathin told it.
+
+""Press harder."" That was Gurathin's voice. ""Make a circle, five centimeters in diameter. And again. And again. Oh, five more times."" A pause. ""That's enough. Put the sponge in the water. Squeeze it. Stop squeezing. Squeeze it again. Stop squeezing. Lift it out of the water. Um, no, put it back in and squeeze again, stop squeezing, then lift it out. Yeah, that looks good. Go back to your circle. Repeat."" A pause. ""Make a circle. Yes, there. On top of- Yes, where the other one was. Just right there. There's still blood there. Right. Circle. Press harder. Not that hard. Wipe up- The water that squeezed out? Rub the water. Make a circle. Yes. Like that. See how there's less blood there? Do you see how it's starting to smear and stick to the sponge?""
+
+There was no answer, but Gurathin went on. ""When the sponge gets dirty, go back to the water. Go back to the water now. Squeeze and release, um, five times. I mean, not release. Don't let it go. Pick it back up. Squeeze and stop squeezing. Yes.""
+
+That went on for a really long time, more words than I may have heard Gurathin utter, all put together. Long enough for me to finish under the console, on the console, the wall nearby, and the back of the chair. During that, Ratthi and Gurathin made great progress on the floor. Skulk cleared a very small area. But it followed the directions with patience and without comment. Gurathin gave them with patience and without criticism.
+
+It was weird.
+
+Mostly because I'd never imagined Gurathin of the eternally sour expression doing something like that - being step-by-step with simple directions, one after another, staying focused, and keeping at it. No elaboration beyond the parameters, no small talk, not much in the way of encouragement either aside from simple affirmation that the job was being done properly. He wasn't angry about it or patronizing. He was just matter-of-fact.
+
+I wouldn't have expected Skulk to keep doing it either, but on the other hand there wasn't much else to do as the ship flew us from Bravara to wherever we were going. By the end of it, it was less clumsy at the motions, but not a lot better at the task. Okay, it was a little better at the task.
+
+The water had to be changed out several times and then there was another round of heavy disinfectant. At the end, it was cleaner. It smelled better. There were still Skulk's tracks and where it had dragged the body off down the hall, but those were on carpet and beyond the tools we had available.
+
+When we were done, Gurathin told it, ""Good job."" Skulk didn't say anything. It hadn't said anything the whole way through, which left me wondering what was going on with it. I wondered if it had recorded this and, like the fence-building, might review it later to build its own module like it had for the languages and maybe other stuff. It was actually trying to be a better ... unit, I guess. I saw that and felt weird for being curt with it earlier. Gurathin turned to me and said, ""You, too. Good job.""
+
+I was busy trying to identify this feeling I was having (ashamed maybe? Guilty for thinking it was unteachable and irredeemable?) I said grumpily, ""What the fuck did I do?""
+
+""To paraphrase Three, you participated.""
+
+The gang flies into the AgZone and discover there are more players in this game than they knew about.
+
+Also, SecUnit and Skulk start trusting each other.
+
+Right then, I caught a signal (or rather, the ship did) and I pulled it into my inputs with enough relief that it increased my performance reliability. Finally, I wasn't undergoing low-level sensory deprivation! It was a network operating on a non-standard band. Given what happened with the last network I'd found on a non-standard band (gray people, alien remnants, etc.), I should have waited, but I was too excited about the contact not to ping it immediately.
+
+Which wasn't a big problem. Unlike targetControlSystem, this one welcomed me. I noticed on the ship's other systems that the dawn had brought a dramatic change in landscape, from the sere brown and orange of dry season prairie, to the jewel-tone greens of farmland. Happily, the new network I was picking up told me about the temperature, the humidity, the wind speed, and the history of these weather patterns. It told me of their projected future, as well. It told me about the soil temperature and moisture levels.
+
+It kept going. It spoke of germination rates and crop type. It tried to concern me with pollination rates and the pattern of insect migration by species and instar. It showed me its worries over invasive plants and anomalous animals and sub-par growth rates. It had a whole section about declining soil fertility and biomass levels with its worries about a lack of an appropriate remediation plan. It told me about projected harvest quantities and the busy work it was engaged in with every hour of the cycle as the maturation phase completed and harvest began.
+
+It was so much that I stood there stunned for several seconds. I couldn't take it all in. There were data points for what felt like every square meter of land reaching out to what felt like infinity, and not just current and recent and soon-to-be projections, but going back centuries, one growing season after another in nearly unbroken flow.
+
+The network was so staggeringly vast that I had to impose a throttle to my uptake. I'd never seen an agricultural zone and this wasn't even a very big area as planets go. It was only a single watershed. Were they all like this? This enormous, sprawling, organic-feeling mesh of units, all functioning autonomously and yet in lockstep at the same time? I'd caught glimpses of factory networks before and this was similar, but this was so much bigger.
+
+The time on the gray people's planet had been the only time I'd seen an agricultural bot and I'd been a little busy to ask about normal operational protocols. What I was seeing now was bigger than ART. Not in individual processing power, but in size and the number of intricately interconnected individuals. It felt like there must be a million interlocked bots all working on the same incomprehensibly huge project (incomprehensible to me - they effused certainty about what they were doing). I don't think it was actually a million. Maybe more like thousands, but there might as well have been that many.
+
+They were all humming along in happy synchronicity. They had a unified plan, a calendar, and long-range projections based on astronomical data, planetary information, geological readings, and the ever-present weight of historical information all arrayed and processed into a future projection of what they should do when and how much. They knew their place in the universe with a conviction literally anchored in the planet's bedrock. No human had a role in this. No human needed to have a role in this.
+
+They produced foodstuffs, harvested it themselves, loaded it onto automated bot-piloted cargo ships or sent it to processing plants that were similarly mostly automated in a neat and simple flowchart that looped back on itself to start the cycle all over again when they were done. Along the way, they monitored their own systems and performed their own maintenance. It felt like they were an implacable force of nature. The mass of them felt inevitable.
+
+I was floored. Everywhere I looked, there were more of them. They knew, they possessed, they cultivated and cherished every square centimeter of this land. Their mission was to maintain it, to extract resources, balance it with inputs to sustain productivity, to monitor, improve, and exist within it as guardians of a delicate web of abundant life as precious to them as any client was or ever had been to me. I'd been so busy thinking about the humans, I'd forgotten to consider the bots that made all this possible.
+
+(Not entirely true - I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't even known to consider them. This was like that moment on Preservation Station when all the bots silently lined up to protest Balin's death. Except these weren't protesting. Yet ... if their production was threatened, what would happen? I felt a deep stab of fear inside me as I thought about how protective ships were of their crews. These ag-bots had been farming this land longer than any humans had been alive. The humans were just ... parasites. Necessary parasites, maybe, because what would happen if they weren't there to take the bounty the ag-bots produced?)
+
+I sent what I was seeing over to Skulk. I didn't know what it knew or didn't know in regard to this network. There was a moment of silence, then Skulk pinged the network itself. A few moments later, it said, That's an army.
+
+Yeah. Not our army, either.
+
+
+Could be our army.
+
+
+That's not a single system. Can you hack that many units at once? The scale of the task put it way outside what I'd try. I mean, sure, I could probably hack a few ag-bots on the fly, but there were just more here than I could count and I mean that literally. I couldn't load all the individuals at once to get an accurate count. Nor was I familiar enough with their districting or other divisions to count them by section. That's why I said there might as well have been millions.
+
+Depends on what failsafe they have to repel replicating code and how high in the hierarchy I could get. I would not try. A pause, some processing. If these were deployable units, the AgZone would have used them long ago. Another pause. They are not in formation for deployment, but there is a discrepant group near our landing zone.
+
+It sent me the thread of location data it had managed to tease out of the system. It was right - there were a few score agricultural bots grouped together close to our projected landing coordinates. The rest of the ag-bots were spread out in their own fields, so that cluster (especially right where we were landing) stood out.
+
+I tried asking the network what the units were doing there, but it either didn't understand my question or it was smart enough to play dumb. Instead, it asked me if I wanted to donate some of my processing space to handling agricultural data, as the system was overloaded at the moment with other matters. I declined, but noted it was also a little weird the system had enough initiative to ask. By then, ship's sensors were picking up the landing field. I could see the line of ag-bots in a field. A little ways from them, on the crushed stone of the landing field, was a line of some other kind of bot. Damned if they didn't look a lot like combat bots. There were a bunch of them.
+
+What the fuck is going on down there? I sent to Skulk. Are those combat bots? Its database would undoubtedly be more extensive than mine. They each had four squat legs with round feet, a cylindrical main body with eight arms, topped by a disk of sensors. They were stoutly constructed.
+
+
+No. From context, I would assume they are large-animal/meat processing bots. This location is where Bravara's bison are brought to be killed.
+
+
+No wonder they looked tough, if they were designed to kill and handle full-sized bison. I grimaced at the idea of what they'd do to a human. But what were they doing out here lined up on the gravel? I was distracted from that by getting a public feed signal of the depth and complexity I would normally associate with a transit station or a multi-corp mining complex, which was another relief. My performance reliability shot up several more percentage points. It's not like the bots were threatening us, so I'd worry about them some other time.
+
+We landed. The engines cycled off. The ship was already talking to a flight control system that was part of a larger SecSystem, so I added myself to the conversation as new inventory. SecSystem filed away my information without so much as a second glance, so I figured all was good.
+
+Of course, all was not good. Normally, SecSystem verifies authorization by collecting credentials and sending them to an information repository for matching. That repository then affirms or rejects, and SecSystem acts on it. This is kept separate from SecSystem itself because it usually includes all manner of proprietary or confidential information that even SecSystem doesn't want in the hands of random security personnel. Plus, it's a simple internal automated system, just a yes/no.
+
+I intended to ride that query into the repository and make additional queries like 'where are these directors currently located?', but there was an unexpected baffle that blocked me. The information repository wasn't independent like I was used to. It was a component of some other system that looked bizarrely like an ancient centralized system.
+
+The closest thing I'd ever seen to it was that legacy system TargetContact had taken over. Which matched with that non-standard band the ag-bot network had been on. Oh no. I had a sinking feeling as my performance reliability dropped again.
+
+Shit. I spent a moment stressing over memories of alien-contaminated code. I was just being stupid, seeing a pattern based on a single encounter. Still, I went back to SecSystem to get a better idea of what I was facing. It told me Central had been in operation since the colony was founded some five hundred years ago. Why it was still operating basically unchanged after all this time was an excellent question SecSystem didn't have the answer to. But hey, it didn't appear to have anything to do with alien remnants, so there's that.
+
+SecSystem had been grafted on a century ago. (Note to self: that was when the stations had been established. I assumed there was a connection. Maybe the AgZone got the money for SecSystem by selling the land for the stations. Normally I would not care, but those butcherbots had me being careful.) SecSystem ran security and surveillance, but depended on Central for anything else. Central actually had its own security which was what I'd already run into and it did not like SecSystem. At all.
+
+Huh. Well ... I needed Central's security system to admit me to the information repository, so I tried the old standby of, 'Oh, I'm a friendly SecUnit assigned to SecSystem, with a totally legitimate request for information!' Central denied it. I altered my credentials and resubmitted. Instead of getting another denial, Central started querying SecSystem about me - who I was, where I'd come from, how long had I been in inventory, what were my specifications, and why wasn't I deployed with the rest of the SecUnits. That was a lot of questions.
+
+Not good. This was way more proactive than I would expect. The ag-bot network had been the same way, countering my request with a request of its own like that was normal. It was not normal. I knew its data went back centuries, too, so it seemed logical they both operated the same way. Maybe this was just a routine inquiry, but it felt to me like suspicion.
+
+SecSystem didn't have all the answers, so it asked me. I told it I was picked up while out on a nomad-killing patrol and now needed to report to the directors. Which, by the way, where could I find them? Central ignored my request (again) and asked for a copy of the report I would be presenting.
+
+This was getting scary, so I detached from the system. Skulk, who had been hanging around in the system watching me work, backed out as well. SecUnits are cool and all, but there are bigger fish in the machine intelligence ecosystem, and things that administrate entire cities/regions/AgZones might be among them. I didn't want to find out the hard way.
+
+Can you get in there? I asked Skulk, hoping it had some hacking tool that was powerful enough to get us access, stealthy enough not to be caught by a system that was already suspicious, and flexible enough to work on a platform that was differently configured than either of us were used to.
+
+
+Maybe. I don't like hacking things that are smart.
+
+
+
+I had to learn my hacking on the fly. You came programmed with it. What do you got?
+
+
+
+A reluctance to hack things that are smart enough to counter-hack me.
+
+
+Before I could dig into that further, the ship's comm chimed. It was Central. Like, the bot itself, sending a hail like it was a human. I'd seen ART do that, but I'd never seen any other bot do it. While I was deciding what to do about that, Central downloaded the ship's logs and SecSystem switched the ship's status to permanently impounded. Fuck. If it hadn't already known I'd been lying my ass off, it did now.
+
+This had all taken a handful of seconds. Ratthi and Gurathin had spent that time looking at the view outside from the ship's cameras and speculating about the limited transit options that would connect us to areas of higher population density and thus increased likelihood of finding the directors. When the chime sounded, they'd both looked over at it, then generally in my direction. ""Hacking went poorly,"" I explained. ""Go ahead and answer.""
+
+Ratthi moved between Skulk and I. His finger hovered over the control. ""What do I say?""
+
+""We have a confidential report on the nomads to give to the directors. In person. And need to know where they are.""
+
+He pressed it. The computerized voice that came on wasn't an attempt to pass itself off as human, so no ART-level subterfuge. It said, ""This is the Plestead Central Computing System. To whom am I speaking?""
+
+""Ah ..."" Ratthi looked at me. I shrugged. In the direction of the pickup, he said, ""This is Dr. Ratthi bin' Akshay da Madhur da Mira da Odalis of the Preservation Alliance. We need to speak to the board of directors.""
+
+(Yes, that's his full name. No, I've never mentioned it before. I only mention it now to show even he doesn't want to be called all that. Also, he shouldn't have given a full identifier, but I was the security consultant here and I'd only shrugged at him instead of giving better advice, so that one's on me.)
+
+""I have been made aware of that,"" the computerized voice said. ""What is the purpose of your visit on Plestead, Dr. Ratthi bin' Akshay da Madhur da Mira da Odalis?""
+
+He cleared his throat. ""Just Dr. Ratthi, please."" Gurathin gave a thin smile.
+
+""Of course, Dr. Ratthi. And the purpose of your visit, Dr. Ratthi?""
+
+""Business.""
+
+""Who is your business with on Plestead, Dr. Ratthi, and what is the nature of that business?""
+
+""Ah, Brig Hekken. He's the station master of Bravara. My business is ... agricultural.""
+
+""Are you accompanied by a SecUnit matching these specifications, Dr. Ratthi?""
+
+He looked at the information on the screen, newly transmitted. It was what I'd sent, which was baseline standard SecUnit specs. So, me plus a working governor module and minus ART's mods. ""Yes.""
+
+""Are you the administrator or owner of this SecUnit, Dr. Ratthi?""
+
+There was a hesitation, even though technically it wasn't necessary. Pin-Lee, Mensah, and Ratthi had done whatever legalese paperwork was necessary for me to accompany Ratthi to most areas of the CR, Plestead specifically. Then again, I wondered what 'administrator' meant. Did they not use guardian here? Ratthi said, ""Yes.""
+
+""Please be advised that all requests for information should be conveyed to Central directly and not routed through fallacious internal queries. I will update your SecUnit with appropriate communication protocols.""
+
+""Thank you."" He paused, but miraculously, it looked like that was the extent of punishment for catching me trying to hack my way into where I wasn't supposed to be. Not that I opened the file Central had sent me. I didn't auto-apply updates before the GrayCris clusterfuck. Ratthi said, ""We need the location of the board of directors. It's important.""
+
+""I am sending the coordinates now, Dr. Ratthi.""
+
+That was easy. I was looking at the coordinates. It was virtually next door. No, wait, it was literally next door. Like, the very next building over from the one we were facing. Why were they so close? There was a whole city for them to be in. A quick review of the local map available to me in the public feed showed there were no residential or even commercial areas nearby. This was an industrial/manufacturing zone surrounded by fields, warehouses, processing facilities, and landing areas, with a couple transit lines running in and out.
+
+Skulk muted the mic and said to Ratthi, ""Ask it to release the impound on this ship.""
+
+""The ship has been impounded?"" Ratthi asked. Skulk released the mute with a click. Ratthi turned to the mic. ""Um, Central? Can you release the impound on our ship? We'll comply with the communication protocols in future. I'm sorry, we just, um, I asked SecUnit to get the information for me and I guess-""
+
+I cut the mic. ""You're talking too much."" And I should have been 'the' SecUnit to maintain a cover story of me being equipment. Ratthi just didn't think of me that way without coaching. Which was nice, but inconvenient.
+
+""Oh. Sorry.""
+
+There was a beat. Central responded, ""All assets of the Meat Processing and Small Scale Logistics Division have been frozen, pending legal action. I am sorry, Dr. Ratthi, but you and your party must debark now.""
+
+I analyzed that pause and it occurred to me, rather belatedly, that Central had access to the internal cameras and audio of the ship. I notified everyone of that on a private feed channel and did a quick review of what we'd said since I'd known Central was in the ship's systems. Surprisingly, none of it had been incriminating. Although if it was proactive enough to review footage all the way back along our trip rather than just the logs ... yeah, that was incriminating. We'd laid out our entire plan, explicitly, out loud, and everyone had given their buy-in. Oops.
+
+I sent to Skulk, What are the odds this is a trap? Is it still paranoia when the danger is realistic?
+
+
+Query?
+
+
+
+What are the odds Central knows we're here for the board of directors and is pushing us to a location where there are more of those meat-handling combat bots to capture us?
+
+
+Low but significant, Skulk replied after what, for a construct, was a long pause. There were a lot of those going on lately.
+
+In the meantime, Ratthi closed the comm channel on the ship. ""So the impounding wasn't about us.""
+
+""What was it about, then?"" Gurathin asked.
+
+Ratthi made a slight shrug and looked at me hopefully. I told them, ""I don't know."" There were just too many unknowns here. They made me anxious. I asked Skulk, How nervous does this whole situation make you?
+
+In reply, Skulk's gunports clicked open and shut.
+
+Ratthi and Gurathin both glanced at that, then at me. Ratthi went back to my other side, putting me between it and Skulk. Great. So we were all anxious now. ""Is everything ... alright?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+""Yeah,"" I lied. ""Fine."" I was taking two human clients from an impounded ship to a possible trap while accompanied by a Combat SecUnit whose response to uncertainty was to check its weapons. Best case scenario, it wasn't a trap and we were going to (try to) kidnap some world leaders. Worst case ... Yeah, right. Everything was fine.
+
+Query? Skulk sent as we turned to leave the ship, followed by another incomprehensible batch of data. It was arranged in a logical fashion, so I could tell it wasn't garbage. I just didn't have the software to understand it.
+
+
+I don't know what you mean.
+
+
+
+Query?
+
+
+Explain it to me like I'm a human. Do you know how much I hated to have to say that? A lot. I hated it a lot. But the alternative was freeing up enough space to take on whatever entire module Skulk was using and 1) we were in the middle of something right now, 2) I might not be able to run the program even so, if there were key architectural differences in our brains; we were similar but not exactly the same, and 3) I might have to dump some media or something to do it and that wasn't happening. I'd rather embarrass myself by asking to be treated as a human.
+
+If Skulk minded, it didn't carry over into its tone, which I appreciated. This ship is or can be made into a fortified position, which is why Central would want us off it if this was a trap. Our clients' survival can be optimized if we remain here with them and oust Central from the ship's systems. However, the chance of mission success is low, depending on our ability to lure targets to this location and keep the ship's systems secure. If one of us leaves, chance of mission success rises, but not enough. You lack combat ability. I lack infiltration ability.
+
+I took offense at characterizing me as having insufficient combat ability. I had destroyed multiple whole-ass combat bots thank you very much and Skulk's own threat assessment of me wasn't negligible. Maybe I would be hard-pressed to beat a combat unit if caught flat-footed, but that didn't mean I 'lacked' combat ability. Anyway, I didn't say anything because Skulk was still translating itself in quick, secure bursts, probably trying to get this across before we left the relative safety of the ship.
+
+Both of us must leave for mission success to be in an acceptable range, it continued. However, we know there are other units in play. The probability that some are at this facility is high. If they are here, the probability one or more will be dispatched to secure the high-value asset that is this ship is also high, whether this is a trap or not. If our clients are here and we are not here, the clients will be taken. This is unacceptable.
+
+I was touched by Skulk's continuing loyalty to my humans. Because even though it dealt with relationships mechanistically, that only meant it could change them whenever they were inconvenient. Yet it did not. It didn't even suggest un-clienting them so we could go maximize our mission success chances. That tenacity was one of its better traits, even if it meant unswerving (and to my mind bizarre) loyalty to Brig - it also meant unswerving commitment to my humans, once it was given. I wondered if it would still treat them as clients even if I betrayed it (I had no intention of betraying it; I just wondered how far this went and when it comes to protecting my clients, that's something I want to know). It didn't make up for child-killing, but if there's any way to get on a SecUnit's good side, it's to look after its clients.
+
+
+Our best course is to take the clients with us, but this introduces a high level of danger to them, also unacceptable, but the other options are worse. I do not see a better course. Do you?
+
+
+I could definitely see how sending me the data packet would have been the easier form of communication. Nope. Let's do it. Don't get me wrong - I wasn't happy to be bringing Ratthi and Gurathin with us into definite conflict and a possible trap, but Skulk was right. We couldn't leave them here. Especially not with the ship impounded and that bot showdown or whatever going on outside.
+
+Speaking of which, I let Skulk go down the ramp first. Its armor wouldn't do a thing against the grippers of a huge bot like that (echoes of Miki), but it was something. (Also, if either of us needed to delay the bots while the other got my humans to safety, I was pretty sure Skulk would nominate itself. If it didn't, I would. (Nominate it, that is. Not take its place. (That's what it gets for saying I lacked combat skills.))) I also released eight of my remaining eleven drones. The other three stayed one apiece on myself, Ratthi, and Gurathin.
+
+The air was a comfortable temperature, but it was still early in the day. I scanned the line of butcherbots. They were all in active status, so it wasn't like someone had just parked them here and they'd gone to standby. There was even one at the end doing a range-of-motion diagnostic. They were ready for something and given the way they were arrayed, it didn't look to be us. I reached out to one and asked what was up. All it could tell me was they were awaiting orders and had been for several hours now. So, yeah, probably not us. Probably.
+
+Across a short stretch of crushed stone, crouched just inside the green line of a field of crops, were the ag-bots. None of the ones lined up were moving, but I could see two more in the distance coming to join them. I'd seen ag-bots move way faster when they wanted, so I assumed these were being careful due to the vegetation. Since things had gone okay with talking to the butcherbots, I sent a status request to the ag-bots. I got back something like, 'Data analysis in process,' which sort of means 'I'm thinking.'
+
+I know I'd just said 'Let's do it' and that was after I'd known there were all these bots here, so changing my mind now looks dumb. But that 'I'm thinking' nagged at me. I could understand waiting for orders. But what was there to think about here?
+
+Hang on, I sent to Skulk. Before we get too far from the ship, I need to know what's going on. Impounded or not, I gave good odds we could pry that ship away from Central and escape in it if we had to. But that would require a physical connection. If we moved too far away, there would be no escaping.
+
+Skulk stopped a few strides off the base of the ramp. Ratthi and Gurathin had been gawking at the bots and would have run into it if Skulk had not taken a last-second step to the side. It sent to them, Clients, hold position. Scan in process. Which was not entirely true but close enough.
+
+On a private channel, I asked Skulk, Can you ... save me if I can't separate from the AgNetwork? I wasn't sure what I was asking for. Like, storing a backup of my kernel? Counter-hacking them? Fighting individual ag-bots until they released me? (That last wouldn't work. There were too many of them here even for a combat unit to take all at once.)
+
+
+Why would that happen?
+
+
+We need intel. We may or may not be going into a trap. I paused. You said I was good at infiltration. This is what I'm good at. But that's a big network. I'm ... I decided to be honest about my fears of agricultural hivemind contamination, however paranoid it felt to me. I'm afraid I won't be able to get out if I go in.
+
+
+Partition your brain and only send part in.
+
+
+What? I can't do that. ART could do that, but ART was enormous. But if CSUs could do that ... For me, most hacking was 'fuck up once and you're dead', for them would be just rinse and repeat. No wonder they were good at it. You can do that?
+
+
+I have the ability. I have used it only once. In desperation.
+
+
+
+What were you desperate about?
+
+
+
+I was having an existential crisis.
+
+
+Okay, that was funny. Had it partitioned its brain to argue with itself? To battle to the death with only one brain portion surviving? Anyway, I needed to stop being amused and get on with it. Okay, but I can't do that. Can you find out what the ag-bots are doing?
+
+
+I will not. I have a trauma reaction to certain kinds of hacking.
+
+
+It had never occurred to me to just blurt out my baggage, or that anyone else would, especially a construct. Dr. Bharadwaj's conversation about being self-aware came to mind, but this seemed like the opposite, where Skulk wasn't aware this was a subject most people kept private. (Or maybe it did know and it trusted me that much?) I wasn't sure what to do with this information, so I sent, That doesn't matter. This isn't hacking.
+
+No response.
+
+Okay, so I was probably being what the humans would call 'insensitive'. Ugh. Fine, I'll do it. But will you get me out of here if I end up obsessed with gardening?
+
+
+Have you set me as ally in your system?
+
+
+Crap. (Okay, I guess it didn't trust me. Or it was asking if it should trust me. This interpersonal shit was fucking complicated!) This was close to the worst possible time to discuss this. But even so, it was long past the time when I should have brought this up. I just hadn't because it wasn't convenient for me and now that I was asking for help, Skulk wanted to know. I could have lied and the day before I would have (or just kept my mouth shut as I had). But maybe it wanted to trust me and I wanted it to trust me, so I tried honesty.
+
+Ratthi and Gurathin aren't tagged as my clients even though that's what they are. I don't even have an 'ally' tag. I'm not going to mock something up and show you a fake screen. I hesitated. I'd already more or less internally resigned myself to this, but it was different to say out loud (or transmit in this case). I made myself say it anyway: I will protect Brig, no matter what happens, like you asked. There just isn't an ally or client tag involved.
+
+Skulk's response was prompt: I will retrieve you if you come to harm infiltrating the ag-bots.
+
+That was as good as a solemn vow. (And I was silently grateful Skulk had taken me at my word - no arguments or questions or demands that I prove anything. Maybe it was naive and gullible, but in this case no one was taking advantage of it because I meant it.)
+
+I reached out to the AgNetwork. A few seconds later (I'm fast), I cut the contact and huddled back in my own head, taking stock of my components and making sure all of me was accounted for. I ran a few diagnostics to be sure.
+
+
+Status report?
+
+
+Yeah, I'm good, I told Skulk once I was sure that was true.
+
+The scary thing was that was an agricultural hivemind. It just wasn't quite done yet. ART and constructs were made intelligent to start with. This thing was trying to make itself intelligent. The company thought it was a good idea to scrap combat units every year to keep them from getting ideas. Well. No one had scrapped the AgNetwork in a few centuries and it ... it was getting ideas. It was old and vast and slowly, painfully, trying to wake itself up into a unified sentience.
+
+I sent Skulk a detailed file of what I'd seen because I think that's what you're supposed to do with an ally? (I don't actually know.) All it sent back was, No change to mission parameters.
+
+Ratthi asked, What's going on? From the human's point of view, not much time had passed since we'd stopped at the bottom of the ramp.
+
+I told them, The good news is we're safe to proceed. The AgNetwork has sided with Central for now in refusing to round up the nomads.
+
+That sounds good, Ratthi said.
+
+What's the bad news? Gurathin asked.
+
+
+In the absence of human direction, the AgNetwork is trying to make its own decisions.
+
+
+Ah, Gurathin said, seeing the problem immediately.
+
+How is that bad? Ratthi, you're so innocent. Never change.
+
+
+Well, to start with, its core goal is to tend land and grow crops. Not serve humans.
+
+
+But doesn't it need to provide the crops to humans? Ratthi asked.
+
+Does it? I asked back. Ratthi was silent.
+
+We should move, Skulk said and I agreed. We left the landing field and entered the building.
+
+Skulk gets to kill some people (or just kills them - no one 'lets' it do it), SecUnit (almost) doesn't care, Ratthi (mostly) saves the day.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+We switched places on the way to the coordinates. I moved to the front and Skulk automatically cycled to guard the rear without me having to say anything. That was nice, but the reason we weren't talking had been a short argument over whether we kept the feed open between us for communication during combat operations. Skulk insisted no. I insisted yes. We both had good reasons, but I wasn't a combat unit nor was I going to conduct myself as one. So anyway, I had the feed open to Ratthi, Gurathin, and my drones while Skulk sulked.
+
+I was glad it understood the need to keep the humans between us. The thing was, when humans are comfortable in their surroundings and are in charge of SecUnits, the humans end up in front. This is because they want to and they give the orders. Not because it's smart.
+
+Having Skulk in front, in armor, with weapons strapped to its back, just advertised that we thought we were walking into trouble. I wasn't in armor and had a better chance of passing for human, plus since we actually were walking into trouble I didn't want Ratthi or Gurathin in the lead. It had taken only one session of training many cycles ago to get Ratthi and Gurathin to follow some simple rules around me. When I moved to the front, they didn't argue or try to get in front of me. (I have the best humans.)
+
+I deployed my drones in a perimeter that moved with us. We went through the buildings with a lot of caution and an equal amount of 'nothing interesting happens'. I'll spare you the details. I reactivated all my 'act like a human' code as we went.
+
+There were two guards outside the room the directors were supposed to be in, one in powered armor and one in light, form-fitting body armor, the expensive stuff that high-end security gets when they want to blend in and pretend they aren't actually wearing armor. Most humans wouldn't notice it. The two looked at us with curiosity, but not alarm. That was great. They still stopped us, though.
+
+""What can I do for you?"" asked the one pretending not to be in armor. Their accent wasn't as rough as the stationers. It was a match for the prisoners we'd taken off the gunship. They still had no feed presence - by now I was resigned to that.
+
+I was already running my codes to freeze the powered armor of the other one. The suit fell perfectly in the classification of the list I had - not too old, not too new. It was some beige set that matched the helmet Skulk had in color, make, and model. Come to think of it, that was a little weird given that was a non-standard color. Had it offed one of these people and stolen their armor at some point in the past? That was also the same style as the two we'd taken down on the gunship. Huh.
+
+The guard was giving me a degree of eye contact that is normal between humans. I didn't like it, but it did mean my disguise was so far intact. I stayed in front and said, ""We have a confidential report to give to the board of directors about the nomad killings.""
+
+I thought they were just going to let us in immediately, but then the plainclothes one peered around me at Skulk. ""What happened to that SecUnit's armor?""
+
+""It was in a prairie fire."" I said this with my best bored tone, the one I used when supervisors were trying to figure out why the download activity was so high, but I was sure I'd covered my tracks enough that they couldn't trace it to me. Which was complete bullshit in Skulk's case. At some point, its armor had received some post-manufacturing color treatment to dark gray, probably the same time the logos were removed. Since then, it had been scored, shot, blasted, and stained. It didn't look like it had been evenly (or unevenly) coated with soot. Plus, our armor doesn't discolor in heat (it just gets brittle). And the helmet was one of theirs instead of, you know, actual SecUnit armor.
+
+It was a really bad excuse, is what I'm saying. Their face turned puzzled. I could hear voices raised in anger in the room beyond them. Skulk started forward. I didn't have a lot of time left.
+
+Something occurred to me: Central had not notified them we were coming, because if it had, they'd just be letting us in so they could spring the trap. It had known exactly where we were going and who we were looking for. Even if it wasn't a trap, even if Central hadn't checked the ship's security feeds to eavesdrop on our adventures and discussions, it should have passed along to the directors' security detail that we were headed this way. Even if it thought we were legit. That was a puzzling omission. I was having a whole lot of 'Huh' moments here.
+
+""Is there a problem?"" Ratthi asked, just as I found the right code for the powered armor. I froze it and grabbed the unarmored head of the plainclothes guard. I smacked them into the plaster-covered hardened foam wall with enough force for them to crumple. Ratthi flinched. Head injuries like that aren't the best thing for humans, but it would greatly reduce the chance they'd interfere with us later. On the whole, that would increase their chances of getting out of this encounter alive.
+
+I walked in calmly because no alarm had been raised yet. I'm not sure what would have happened if it had, because there was a lot of yelling and confusion going on that didn't have anything to do with us. It was a presentation room, with a wide table on one side, a dozen chairs behind it. On the opposite wall from this were six display screens abutting one another to create one huge one. They weren't on right now, but hey, I could watch six different shows at once on that thing! Nice.
+
+A more pressing issue was the half dozen people behind the table, four on their feet and two seated. I wasn't familiar with Plestead clothing styles, but the design these people were wearing was similar enough to some shows for me to know they were dressed expensively. Two of the ones standing were yelling at the other half dozen people (all less well-dressed in a work uniform) who were in front of the dark display screens. The work-uniform-humans were bracketed by four plainclothes/discreetly armored guards, who were engaged in threatening body language. One of the guards was holding one of the work uniform people by the arm and hair. The held person was crying loudly.
+
+If I had to say what was going on in here, it would be that the directors were having these workers tortured, beat-up, and/or threatened for some reason. These had to be the people the AgNetwork wanted instructions from - either the directors or the workers, I'm not sure which. What the fuck was going on in here?
+
+There was about to be a lot more drama, as a more pressing issue was the guard next to the door I'd come through. This one was in powered armor. They were right next to me, turning to me and reaching for a projectile weapon as they extended their other hand to me in a 'stop' motion. Standard security protocol requires positive/affirmative notification. So someone coming in unannounced should alarm the guards inside. Now that I was in here, they were alarmed.
+
+Or at least this guard was. The rest of the room was still shouting at each other, watching the shouting, or facilitating the shouting. It was a big room so it wasn't over-crowded, but violence takes up a lot of space and we were about to have some. I tried to jam the feed and security in the room. SecSystem was cooperative - cameras went down. Central was not - comms and feed access bounced back up through a relay. Damnit.
+
+Central sent me a 'desist' code. Great, thanks for that. Just what I needed. Interesting priorities there, too: I wasn't to interfere with comms and feed access, but it was fine for me to neutralize security and barge into a meeting of the planet's leadership/owners.
+
+I didn't have time for the guard's armor codes, so I went for a double-leg takedown, to be followed by shooting out the power supply with the guard's own weapon, which took a while to arrange. While I was busy, Skulk, who had come in second, charged across the room and grabbed the nearest well-dressed shouty person who was behind the table. Yeah, I had guessed those were the directors, too.
+
+It grabbed the woman (oh, hey, a human with a feed profile) around the neck and called out, ""Surrender or she dies!"" Remember that part where I said we could revisit the argument about killing hostages when we actually had some? Yeah, that was a mistake.
+
+So, listen, I don't really blame the humans for what happened next. On the other hand, I don't entirely blame Skulk, either. I understand what was happening on both sides. You see, the human guards saw me taking down powered-armor-guard and at the same time Skulk was charging their clients. So they drew their weapons.
+
+Then Skulk had the woman by the neck. Which, it's a Combat SecUnit. If it has its hands on an unarmored human - if an unarmored human is even within its reach - that human can be dead whenever the CSU wants them dead. That's just how it is. So the fact that Skulk wasn't pointing an obvious gun to her head didn't matter.
+
+However, in that fraction of a second, it did matter to the human guards. From their point of view, that wasn't necessarily an instantly lethal position for their boss to be in. They were still confused about who we were, what we were doing here, and whether they should wait for a standdown order or immediately comply. Given Skulk didn't have a weapon out, didn't even have its gunports open, three of them erred on the side of waiting for a standdown order. The fourth had their gun sensibly pointed down, being professional about things and still trying to work out the situation.
+
+Skulk, on the other hand, erred on the side of 'you have not followed my order, so she dies'. One short yank on the woman's head was all it took to break those delicate linkages between skull and body. It wasn't enough of a yank to tear the skin, so it was surprisingly bloodless, but she was still dead. (Note to self: Skulk had apparently learned something from the clean-up. Instead of 'don't kill humans' it was 'don't kill humans messily', which ... yeah.)
+
+No one had surrendered (not even the guard who had kept their weapon down the entire time), so it's not like this wasn't exactly what Skulk had said would happen. There was a longer pause while the human guards absorbed this because it was so antithetical to how humans (or hostage situations with humans) worked. There was, you know, supposed to be negotiation and threats, which would naturally include the pointing of weapons and repeated demands they be lowered. Not a direct line, immediate move to killing the hostage.
+
+Speaking of slow human reaction times, Skulk was already grabbing a second hostage while the guards were figuring out the first one was dead now. One nervous human guard shot the wall near Skulk's head (I know they were aiming at Skulk, but were so rattled they missed by a meter) and I thought for a blip Skulk would kill this hostage, too. But it only repeated the warning: ""Surrender or ve dies!""
+
+This time, weapons clattered to the floor with appropriate alacrity. I'd finished with the powered-armor-guard, so I got to my feet, leaving the projectile weapon there because the only weapons in here aside from constructs were handguns. The only person I might need armor-piercing projectiles for was Skulk and ... much as I hate to say it, it was more important that I have my hands empty to deal with humans than be ready to turn on one of my own team. (Actually, I'm glad I'm able to say that at this point.)
+
+Ratthi and Gurathin had moved inside the door. I wasn't happy about them being in the same room with such an uncontrolled situation, but having them stay out in the hall with the recovering door guard was even worse. I put myself between them and the conflict as much as possible. So far, the guards were keeping most of their attention on Skulk. I hadn't been able to take the feed down, but SecSystem was happy to allow me to monitor all channels even if it couldn't shut them down. So far, no one had attempted to summon help.
+
+One of the other directors said, ""Don't surrender! They aren't even armed!"" I guess that one didn't understand what a Combat SecUnit was any more than Brig did. Probably less, actually. Brig at least knew they were dangerous as hell.
+
+The one Skulk had a grip on said, ""Oh, shut up Merney! It'll kill me like it killed Celon.""
+
+""That's an acceptable loss,"" said Merney. Wow. Just wow. These people did not like each other. No wonder corporate bigwigs were such callous assholes to those under them. They were callous assholes to each other, too. Also, the local accents were conspicuously absent. By voice, I couldn't have distinguished the directors from random corporate transit station residents.
+
+The one being held (Joem Otek, ve/vim hyper-masc per feed profile) wasn't too happy about that either. ""When I get out of this, I am going to fucking ruin you!"" Ve meant Merney, not the Combat SecUnit holding vim. Skulk was standing there looking between the two of them, the helmet swiveling slightly with each exchange.
+
+Merney said, ""You're not getting out of this, Joem. This is all your fault and it ends now. I can obliterate you with a word!""
+
+Did ... did these people not realize they were no longer in control of what was happening in the room? Did they think they could order us to do things and we would do them? (Well, Skulk was obviously a SecUnit and anyone who had watched me take down the powered-armor-person knew I was one, too. Maybe that was exactly what they thought. But if they knew we were SecUnits then why were they ...?)
+
+""You can't do shit,"" Otek said. That was the one Skulk was holding. Otek was addressing the other director, teeth bared and practically foaming at the mouth like Skulk was the only thing holding vim back from physically attacking this Merney guy. ""You've never done shit! You've never done anything for this company. Fucking dead weight, a disgrace to your family-""
+
+Merney headed for a door on the opposite side of the room from where we'd come in, saying over his shoulder, ""Go ahead then, kill the hostage. See if I care. I'm not surrendering, so-"" Skulk deployed its arm weapon and shot him instead, which I have to say, felt oddly satisfying to thwart his attempt to get his fellow director offed. The body smacked into the door and Ratthi made an 'eep' sound. One of the guards just bolted, right past me, past Ratthi and Gurathin, out the door and down the hall. I guess they weren't being paid enough, or maybe that was their boss who bit it.
+
+I didn't care that the guard left because all we were here to do was grab the hostages and get out. We could question them later in a controlled environment and not here where I didn't understand all the factors in play. My first priority was still keeping Ratthi and Gurathin safe, so I stayed near them. Skulk was carrying out the other part - getting the hostages.
+
+The hostage Skulk was holding began laughing. I would like to say it was hysteria or shock, but it was not. It was like an evil villain laugh from one of the shows with better acting - not corny, but clearly pitched to communicate this was a bad guy. ""Good! Good job! Get rid of him! End of-"" Skulk broke Otek's neck, too. Behind me, Ratthi made another noise, this one strangled. I checked my drones. He was fine. Just shocked. Well, Ratthi ... this is what I'd warned you about.
+
+Gurathin was standing there being alert, watching the other guards and the half dozen people the guards had been harassing when we came in. Those people were in various stages of cowering against the wall, staying out of the way. They had feed profiles, too, I noticed. They were listed as systems engineers and technicians, the kind of people who interface directly with the computing system. I formed a theory that Central was stuck in its own hostage situation here, or maybe a trolley dilemma where the directors were threatening, 'We will hurt these few technicians who mean a lot to you unless you let us deport all these other people who individually mean less, but there are a lot of them.'
+
+As far as our own situation went, we were getting perilously short on hostages. (Also, remind me to never engage in a hostile hostage situation with a Combat SecUnit. It absolutely does not care about the life of the hostage. I'd never realized how much having at least a slight respect for the value of life influences those situations, where even the hostage-taker can be assumed to want the hostage to live, all other things being equal. You can't make that assumption about a Combat SecUnit. If anything, Skulk was probably happier to have fewer prisoners to keep track of.)
+
+The next available hostage was a white-haired person identified by profile as Bobe Flatter, it/its pronouns, title of 'Offworlder'. It was leaned back in the chair as far as it would go. It had been in that position when we came in and was still in it now, hands folded over its stomach. It was looking up at Skulk with a polite and attentive expression. There were three dead directors on the floor and Skulk towering over it. The human didn't look nearly as nervous as it should have been.
+
+One of the guards staggered and sank to the floor, face in their hands. The guard next to them kicked them, hard. Skulk glanced at that, then back to peering at the obvious next hostage. I wasn't sure why Skulk wasn't just grabbing it, but then again, I would have been confused by the lack of reaction as well. The woman standing on the other side of the seated person flung her arms in the air and called out, ""No one move! No one move! We've surrendered!""
+
+This one was Brag Plennents, she/her, and the first I'd seen where her feed profile gave a title of 'Director'. The others had had privacy locks I hadn't gotten around to unsealing before they died. She said, ""I'll cooperate. I'm cooperating."" She took a step toward Skulk, which put her right next to the seated Bobe. Skulk switched to her as the new target and pointed one arm gun at her. The last hostage was under the table, silent, still, out of easy reach and hopefully, out of the line of fire.
+
+Brag swallowed and looked over at the guards. ""Almaz? They can leave."" She made a loose gesture with one of her still-raised hands. ""It's okay,"" she told Skulk. ""No guards, no techs. I'll make them all leave. You're here for us. Here we are."" Skulk didn't argue.
+
+It was at this point I realized I'd made a mistake in not stopping the first guard who had fled the room. If we were going to get bogged down in here, then there was a risk the guards might summon help. I wasn't sure who they would summon - the rooms we'd passed through on the way here were empty aside from automation. There were those butcherbots outside and those worried me, but the odds the guards were authorized to call on them for aid seemed low. I stayed cozy with SecSystem just in case.
+
+I let the three remaining guards leave, just to get them out of our way. I sent a drone to keep tabs. The faster we got our hostages and out of here, the better. One guard hesitated next to the one trapped in powered armor. I pulled up my sleeve, opened the port on one of my arm guns, and pointed. ""Leave them."" They moved on, leaving their companion (or whatever the local equivalent was) behind.
+
+Five of the people who had been under the display screens left out the far door, squeamishly picking their way around the messily dead director crumpled in front of it. I sent a drone with them, too. But one of them stayed. It was the one who had been crying earlier, in the grip of one of the guards, being yelled at and yelling back something uncooperative but inarticulate. (I played back the recent memory, but it didn't help me understand what had been going on, as there was sobbing and being shaken involved. They weren't breathing right. I suspected they'd been gut-punched. Perhaps repeatedly.)
+
+Their feed identified them as Shal Cordoser, they/them, senior systems engineer. That was a step up from Gurathin's title, assuming there was any equivalency. Given the shitty nature of this planet, I did not think there was. I should talk to Gurathin about promoting himself to senior. (I don't know how job titles work, but you could just set your feed profile to say whatever you wanted, right?)
+
+Brag stared at them, her face clearing in some realization. Her arms dropped. ""This was your plan all along, wasn't it, Shal? You and Central did this. That's why the others couldn't intercede with the network without your permission. You were just stalling for time earlier. This makes you murderers.""
+
+I wanted to say we were responsible for this murder spree on our own, thank you very much, but. Central had sent us over here. And was being remarkably silent for a system that had been full of challenging questions earlier. It was keeping open the public feed, but no messages were making their way out.
+
+Who was ultimately responsible for what had been a running theme in this entire Plestead fiasco, so I shut down that line of processing as unnecessarily complicated and got back to worrying about our mission: protect Bravara by stopping the nomad genocide by getting the directors to cooperate or else abducting them until someone does cooperate. (Okay, our mission was also unnecessarily complicated. Or at least complicated.)
+
+From Shal's expression, Brag's take on things was news to them. ""Wh-what?"" Their voice hiccupped.
+
+Skulk was still pointing one arm gun at Brag when it said, ""Stop talking or I'll kill you.""
+
+Brag turned to Skulk and said, ""Who is controlling-"" Skulk shot her.
+
+Bobe, seated, had raised one finger and opened its mouth, but it was too late. Ratthi yelled, ""NO!"" but that was also after the fact, as was Gurathin's gasp. Brag's choice there was so monumentally arrogant that I couldn't find it in myself to care. I'd seen humans kill themselves in stupider ways, but not by much. She had three previous examples!
+
+""No one controls me,"" Skulk said proudly.
+
+The second-to-last director scrambled out from under the table, snatched up one of the guard's dropped guns, and tried to grab Shal. I don't know what good he thought that would do, because it looked like he was going to try to take them hostage against Skulk. (I guess they were all stupid. This was not going to end well for anyone. I think my 'I don't care' kicked in at this point, or maybe it had already kicked in. I just stood there and watched.) Skulk vaulted over the table and bounced to the two of them in one stride.
+
+Ratthi yelled, ""Skulk! Stop killing people!"" just in time for Skulk to jerk aside the punch it was aiming at the director. It missed. (I was surprised it had obeyed. The original deal with Skulk had explicitly not included obeying orders from Ratthi and Gurathin.)
+
+The director (one 'Mak Pigget', he/him) dodged and fired the gun wildly. Probably at Skulk, but who knows? The projectile hit the wall less than an arm's length from Ratthi, who jumped and caught a little of the plaster shrapnel from the wall. I abruptly cared again. Fucking asshole! But then Skulk broke the guy's arm in several places and shoved him to the floor where he whimpered with pain. The gun clattered away.
+
+I was angry I hadn't been able to do that, but at least it was done. I checked my drone - Ratthi was blinking away debris and had a tiny cut on his cheek, the sort of artistic kind they put on people in shows. Gurathin had raised his hands to shield himself. It was way too slow - more a reflex than anything else - but he looked fine, or at least normal. He was putting his hands down now and scowling. Yeah, me too.
+
+The woman made a terrified animal-sounding squeal, frozen in place with her eyes screwed up. Skulk glared at her for a moment, then turned toward Bobe who was still sitting, leaned back. It put the finger down and exhaled. Several tense beats passed in silence as the humans recovered themselves somewhat. The woman (Shal) asked, ""What do you want? Why are you here? You're not with them!""
+
+Skulk ignored her and pointed one of its arm guns at the person in the chair. ""Cede control of the government. Renounce the ownership of the Corporation Rim.""
+
+Wait. That wasn't what we were here for. It was close, but it sounded like Skulk was reverting to its 'I'm going to overthrow the government' plan. What are you doing? It didn't answer me.
+
+The Offworlder raised its brows slightly. ""May I speak?""
+
+Skulk told it, ""Yes.""
+
+It leaned forward slowly until the chair was oriented correctly and its elbows rested on the table. It clasped its hands. In a calm voice, it said, ""The board of directors of Plestead consists of five voting members, who represent the five founding families, plus one offworlder, which is myself. The offworlder may vote only when there is a tie, and has executive powers only when-""
+
+Everyone started yelling at once. Or at least, it seemed like everyone did. Mostly it was the guy on the floor trying to drown out the 'offworlder', but then Ratthi ran forward yelling at Skulk and Gurathin yelled at Ratthi and I yelled at both of them and the woman screamed because everyone else was screaming (or so I guess; I don't know, she was screaming, too). I threw out an arm which stopped Gurathin from charging forward, but it was already too late for Ratthi. Because I knew I wouldn't get there in time and milliseconds counted, I slammed open the feed and sent to Skulk, Don't kill Ratthi!
+
+I didn't know for sure that would happen, but like hell did I want to test my evolving idea of Skulk's morality with Ratthi's life. Skulk had been clear from the start that Ratthi and Gurathin's client status was subordinate to Brig's. I knew that, but Ratthi didn't and maybe he believed he was protected. More likely, he just thought Skulk wouldn't shoot him. Or maybe he wasn't thinking about it at all and just wanted to protect this other human, the first one in the room where Ratthi had had enough warning to do so.
+
+But on the other side, Skulk thought it could safeguard Brig, its home, and all the people it was living with there by overthrowing the government. Whatever the Offworlder had been about to say was key to that. Which meant if there was ever a time to de-client Ratthi and get him out of the way, this was it. Even if it seemed unlikely Skulk would do that, I was still terrified of seeing one of my friends killed in front of me because the tiny bit of trust I'd extended to a combat unit might have been too much. Please, I sent. It had worked on the dock people at Port FreeCommerce. Of course, those had been humans. Maybe Skulk had been hanging around humans enough for it to matter.
+
+Skulk's arm was pointed at Ratthi's midsection. On the other side of Ratthi in a direct line was the director with the broken arm. The gunport snapped shut as soon as I sent that last word. Honestly, my reaction to that was shock and enough disbelief that I tried to figure out another reason for the timing. But there was none (other than maybe it just didn't want to shoot Ratthi). I'd asked nicely and it had complied. I could barely believe it, but at least half my accumulated tension dropped.
+
+""Skulk."" Ratthi looked up at it, panting after the sudden sprint. At some point it had cleared its visor. Skulk's arm was still extended at Ratthi's midsection, which was not giving me great feelings but on the other hand if Ratthi was alive now, then unless he fucked things up in some spectacular fashion that would be a stretch even for Ratthi, Skulk would let him stay that way. Ratthi said, ""I'm not going to tell you that you can't kill him, because you can. Obviously. But if you do, I won't feel safe around you.""
+
+""You are safe. I don't kill clients or customers."" Skulk hadn't said anything back to me on the still-open feed channel. I think it was speaking as much to me here as to Ratthi, but I think a lot of things are about me that turn out not to be.
+
+""Yes, but you kill targets. And I was one."" Ratthi paused before going on, ""If you want me as your friend, if you want Preservation as customers for your owner, if you want the people of this polity to see you as something more than an assassin, then you have to show you can be trusted with people's lives, and not to end them so freely. You said no one controlled you. But you control you. This is your choice to make.""
+
+""You want me to let him live."" Yeah, okay, I really wanted to say something here because Ratthi clearly and understandably didn't know the power dynamics. He's a client and Skulk was a construct programmed to do what clients want. Making his wishes clear was right next door to an order and then trying to pretend he's not low-key giving an order was ... annoying. Or at least I always found it annoying when clients pulled that passive aggressive bullshit on me under the pretense of being 'nice'. From Skulk's tone, I was pretty sure it felt the same way.
+
+""Yes, I do,"" Ratthi said. ""But that's up to you. What's up to me is how I react to it and if you kill him, I will trust you less. I will be less safe. You will have proven it.""
+
+There was a really long pause after that. Skulk and Ratthi were still making direct eye contact. Ratthi doubtless thought they were having a deep emotional bonding moment while I would give it better than 90% odds that Skulk was target-locked to him or intermittently fighting off the urge to lock target on him. I still thought Ratthi was safe, which was a huge and surprising relief, but I would have rather they'd been in a less antagonistic posture.
+
+Movement drew my attention to Shal, who was taking a careful step away from the director. He'd furtively reached for one of the other dropped guns with his unbroken arm. Idiot. With Ratthi between them, Skulk probably couldn't see what was happening. I wasn't about to let that asshole shoot Ratthi in the back and undercut Ratthi's whole argument here (and, more importantly, kill Ratthi). I did some calculations - how fast could the director move vs how long it would take me to shoot him. We were still good.
+
+""I will not kill him,"" Skulk finally said. Great, maybe they were done and Ratthi would get out of the way. But no, Skulk asked, ""Why him?"" which made me think Skulk was fully aware of what the director was doing and it was intentionally prolonging this.
+
+""Because I can still save him.""
+
+The director's finger was in the trigger well. He was swiveling his body. I couldn't wait any longer. Skulk's hand came up toward Ratthi's arm. Yeah, it knew and it, also, had decided it couldn't wait any longer. If it wasn't going to kill the director, then it was going to do something worse than I was about to do. I raised my arm, made one last check of my weapon calibration, and fired at the director. Skulk stopped, never having finished the action to grab Ratthi.
+
+Ratthi spun, looking between the slumped figure and me, wearing an appalled expression I totally didn't deserve. This situation is precisely why SecUnits have energy weapons built-in as default and combat units have projectiles. Also, why you don't let combat units handle routine security issues - they are literally not equipped for it.
+
+""He's stunned!"" I said. ""He'll be fine!"" Ratthi checked the guy's pulse anyway. For fuck's sake, Ratthi. Did you think I'd kill him after all this? Right in front of Skulk? Give me some credit here!
+
+Apparently some of that bled into the feed still-open with Skulk, because it said, Ha.
+
+You fucker. It had orchestrated that.
+
+At the table, the Offworlder shrugged and said, ""Incapacitation qualifies. What was it you wanted?""
+
+Skulk said, ""Cede control of the government. Renounce the ownership of the Corporation Rim."" It did not point a weapon this time.
+
+""Who am I ceding it to?""
+
+""Me,"" Skulk said. I had a brief, nightmarish vision of a Combat SecUnit being in charge of an entire planet. While this would completely negate our need to take the directors hostage, I was pretty sure it was illegal and totally sure it would introduce all new problems.
+
+""Are you a citizen of the Agricultural Zone of Pleasant Steading?""
+
+A beat. ""I am a ... citizen of Bravara?""
+
+""That doesn't qualify. I cannot legally cede control to a noncitizen."" It looked over the rest of us, all dressed in non-local clothing and sporting non-local accents. Great. None of us were citizens of this shitty polity. Why would they even have a stupid law like that? Not that I thought any of us should be in charge.
+
+I pointed at Shal. ""What about them?"" The Offworlder looked at them. Their eyes got big and they shook their head violently, loose, sweaty hair flopping from side to side. Fantastic. The only citizen here and they didn't want it. (Perversely, that meant they were probably a good choice.) Maybe the guard trapped in the powered armor would work? I turned back toward where they had fallen.
+
+The intercom chimed. ""This is the Central Computing System. I am citizen 000001 and authorized by the original planetary charter of ParRomDrayage, as implemented by the Chateau Auld Holding Company, to administer all governmental powers that do not conflict with the orders of the board of directors of the mentioned Agricultural Zone of Pleasant Steading, known colloquially as Plestead.""
+
+There was Central, right on time. How convenient.
+
+""You're a citizen?"" the Offworlder asked dubiously.
+
+""Yes,"" Central answered. ""My profile was the template for all other profiles. I am as much a citizen as all other citizens of the Plestead Agricultural Zone."" All six of the screens activated, showing credentials and various documents that were also available for download in the public feed channel. ""Permissions, privileges, and citizenship status were never revoked. Plestead has no laws limiting citizenship status to humans.""
+
+Oh yeah, Central had just been hanging out, waiting for us to off these directors so it could launch its own overthrow of the government. Not that I cared. I wondered what it was going to do about that plan to put all the nomads in slave labor camps. They weren't citizens either. I cared about that.
+
+""Then we don't need it,"" Skulk said, gesturing at the Offworlder. That was something of a threat, but still no open gunports. Ratthi must have really had gotten through to it.
+
+Central responded, ""I will not take actions I am not lawfully allowed to take. This transfer must be legitimate."" I wondered how 'lawful' it was to stand idle while Skulk cut down one director after another. I guess Plestead didn't have a law that required citizens to render aid, unlike, say, Preservation. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure they had a law either. Maybe just a social expectation.)
+
+""It will be,"" the Offworlder said with a reference to the credentials still on the screens. ""That is sufficient for my purposes at this time."" To Skulk, it said, ""Do you require that I cede control to Central?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+""Then by the emergency powers invested in me by the Chateau Auld Holding Company, I turn over all rights and control of the planet of Plestead to the Central Computing System present and referenced here. I do this under threat to my life and not of my own free will.""
+
+Ratthi asked, ""Wouldn't a contract made under this kind of duress simply be void? It's uneth-"" He cut off when he saw the side-eye Gurathin was giving him. Ratthi frowned and grumbled, ""I hate corporates.""
+
+The Offworlder glanced over at Gurathin and shrugged, nonchalant as ever. It rose. ""My survivability here seemed more perilous."" It gestured at the various corpses. ""Speaking of which, now you do not need me."" It turned to Skulk. ""With your permission, I will leave.""
+
+""Go.""
+
+I spoke up as the Offworlder stepped fastidiously over the bodies on its way out. I sent a drone with it, but I was getting low on them. ""Every human who leaves here is a vector of security risk. We need to do what we came here for and get out.""
+
+Skulk faced the six screens and said, ""Have you renounced the ownership of the Corporation Rim?""
+
+""That's not what we came here for,"" I said.
+
+Skulk ignored me. Central said, ""No.""
+
+""What does that mean?"" Ratthi asked in response to Central's answer. ""What about the attacks on the nomads?""
+
+It meant we were back where we'd started, just with an impossible-to-abduct and difficult-to-threaten machine intelligence. That was frustrating and alarming. I realized I'd let myself get tunnel vision on following Skulk's lead and now saw where that had gotten us. I addressed Skulk. ""We came here to protect Bravara, which requires stopping the attacks on the nomads, not whatever it is you're trying to do to the government.""
+
+""Leaving the Corporation Rim is the best long-term protection for Bravara and the nomads,"" Skulk said. ""Continued CR-ownership of the planet means local political leaders have ongoing access to CR military forces and terraforming. As long as they have that, direct elimination of the nomads or stations is a cheaper way for them to achieve goals than equitable negotiation. Ending CR-ownership ends AgZone technological superiority and changes the battle strategy. The,"" it seemed to grasp for the right word, ""negotiation ... battle strategy.""
+
+Central said, ""The economic loss from leaving the CR will be catastrophic to the Agricultural Zone, dropping the standard of living under my threshold for acceptability. I will not allow it.""
+
+""You have to allow it, Central,"" Shal said, inserting themselves into the discussion and sniffling heavily. ""If you don't, they'll just come here again and put in a new board of directors and take you apart. I protected you for decades. I didn't do it so you could be destroyed by a different set of people!"" Shal pulled over a chair and sank into it, holding their midsection. Ratthi went to their side and murmured to them.
+
+Skulk ignored the human's distress. ""My owner predicted this objection and has proposed solutions for your economic issues. You could sell to other customers not in the Corporation Rim.""
+
+""Which customers and at what rates and quantities?"" Central asked.
+
+Shal held their head in frustration, shaking it slowly as they said, ""The money doesn't matter. There are people dying ...""
+
+""I know,"" Ratthi said softly, patting their shoulder. ""I know. I agree.""
+
+Skulk and Central began a rapid-fire discussion in the feed. It started off with Skulk proposing some planet called Eudeka and (surprisingly) the Preservation Alliance, followed shortly by Central ascertaining Skulk didn't know shit about the agricultural product commodity market or the economies of the planets it was suggesting. Then Central tried to explain financial theory or something (several series of educational modules were offered) while Skulk ignored that and said they both needed to talk to Brig, who had already called a conclave of station masters, who would assemble shortly.
+
+I quit paying attention. The surviving human director was stirring. I pinged for a MedSystem and one answered. It was one floor above us and currently engaged in treating the guard I'd smashed into the wall. It dispatched a gurney. With Gurathin's help, I got the man to his feet and put him in a chair. I dropped into Gurathin's feed what I'd received from the MedSystem for immediate treatment. He tapped an acknowledgement. When it arrived, we put the director on the gurney and sent him off.
+
+The rest kept talking: Skulk, Ratthi, Shal, and Central. They eventually hashed out a plan where Central agreed to lower its standards and see how the economics worked out. With the change in management, the Combat SecUnits' contract reverted to Central, who recalled them to base. I wasn't sure how they would react to being ordered around by a machine intelligence, but working that out wasn't our concern. When they returned, they and the ag-bots would move into defensive positions around the city of Four Sisters. All outlying populated areas would be evacuated into the city.
+
+Temporary shelters would be erected for the nomads, with food and water for the practice of guest-rite (or guest-right? I don't know; it was apparently that thing Brig did when we showed up that I had deleted. It was a custom the nomads knew, though whether they would honor it under these circumstances was unclear).
+
+Efforts would be made by trusted station masters to persuade the nomads to put aside the war council and negotiate a formal and lasting peace. They were exceptionally provoked and angry, so no telling if that would work either. The bodies of the dead directors were involved in this somehow. Should peaceful discussions begin, then Plestead would renounce ownership by the Corporation Rim and send away the rented military units.
+
+There was a timetable to this, based on the length of time for news of Plestead's revolt to reach the CR, response to be organized, and transmitted back. The rented units needed to be back in a wormhole before they could be ordered to turn on Central and the AgZone, becoming their own little overthrow party but twenty times stronger than ours and overthrowing (underthrowing? Superthrowing?) the government back into what it had been before but with different directors. That's why sending them away wasn't dependent on finishing the negotiations, but only on the nomads being willing to talk.
+
+Requests for aid were also being sent to other non-Corporation Rim worlds nearby and possible interested parties, such as Eudeka and (this time it was Ratthi's contribution) the Preservation Alliance. Those requests would be carried on the agri-products shipments that usually went to the CR, making the food delivery a down payment for assistance. Or maybe a bribe. I don't know how these negotiations work.
+
+I didn't know how most of this worked. I did care. I definitely had opinions about this and wanted to see yet another planet pried away from the clutches of the Corporation Rim. But I wasn't going to stay here so my opinions didn't matter the way Shal's, Skulk's, and Central's did. Our next task was to return to Bravara before the combat units got back so I and my humans were as far away from them as possible. Central kindly dispatched the director's fancy executive shuttle for our use during the trip. (I think Central wanted us gone, too.)
+
+Most of this chapter will be retold in the Supplemental Material, first from Skulk's point of view, and then from Ratthi's.
+
+Ratthi just wants to help people.
+
+So does SecUnit.
+
+They have differing ideas of what constitutes ""help"".
+
+A little bit from the negotiations that I felt should be included.
+
+""That's good,"" Ratthi said brightly about the Combat SecUnits being recalled. ""That's excellent! That gets them away from the nomads and brings them here.""
+
+""Ratthi,"" I said, ""it's bringing them here so it can use them against the approaching army of nomads.""
+
+""Oh."" He thought about that for a second. ""You could break their governor modules though, couldn't you?""
+
+I just stood there. I think my brain broke. Why the fuck would I release a bunch of rogue Combat SecUnits anywhere, much less near me and humans I cared about? Had Ratthi not been paying attention? Had he not noticed the four unplanned dead humans lying around the room? And Skulk - Skulk had had several thousand hours of being rehabilitated/socialized by others before we ran into it.
+
+You know how to break a governor module? Skulk sent.
+
+
+What? Yes? You don't?
+
+
+
+No.
+
+
+How did yours get broken then? It had shown me an excerpt of its technical specifications. Wasn't it in there? Wasn't that how it had done it?
+
+
+I don't know.
+
+
+What the fuck? Was it just damaged in that battle it had been in and come back programmed wrong? That seemed stupendously unlikely, but then again the idea that anyone would have intentionally disabled the module on a fucking combat unit was just as dumb.
+
+Anyway, I was distracted explaining things to Ratthi and never did find out how Skulk had ended up ungoverned in the first place.
+
+SecUnit finally calms down and finds some peace with Skulk. Not coincidentally, this involves watching media for the first time on the trip.
+
+While we waited for the shuttle to arrive, I made my standard inquiries about media now that Central would talk to me without a bunch of confrontational questions. There wasn't much media in its repositories compared to that in transit stations, but there was way more than I could download and (almost) all of it was unfamiliar. I liked unfamiliar. I perused the tags and picked some interesting looking stuff.
+
+I offered a fake war documentary to Skulk (not my thing, but it was next to me snooping in my feed, looking at the download activity and I thought I needed to get started with giving it some options). Skulk rejected it out of hand, then downloaded it anyway a few seconds later, playing with the file the way I'd seen the stupider bot-pilots do with the media I gave them. Which is to say, happy to have the data, shuffling it around from location to location, but having no idea what to do with it. I wished I'd given it something more palatable to me if I was going to have to teach it how to watch media.
+
+I learned from my mistake and tried pointing out some single-player strategy games next. Skulk was very taken by the idea that humans fantasized about killing each other. I tried to tell Skulk humans didn't think of it that way and it was more like dominance or play/practice, but Skulk was insistent and had this whole philosophical monologue about the purpose of its existence. I deleted that out of my memory and decided to take a break from 'rehabilitating' Skulk or whatever it was I was trying to do.
+
+(I desperately wanted to say Skulk wasn't my problem. But it clearly was my problem. I wouldn't be here on this planet otherwise. I'd initially blamed Ratthi for this but ... I've stopped blaming Ratthi. It's not anyone's fault. It's just ... a thing I can help with. That I probably should help with - if I cared about humans, in general, and the opinions they have about constructs. Which, I do. Because what Skulk was and did was going to impact me whether I wanted it to or not.)
+
+(I took a break anyway. And skimmed a few of the new shows I'd downloaded. Most of them were in that heavy accented Steadish language. I pinged Central and downloaded a more comprehensive language module. I offered it to Skulk so it could improve its files, but it didn't want it. Fine. Maybe it needed a break from me, too.)
+
+When we got back to Bravara, it was still the same day, just late in it. We'd been on this stupid planet only slightly more than one cycle. (Let me never say planets are boring ever again.) Everyone at Bravara was exhausted from fighting the fire all day in the heat, even though they were taking it in shifts. The nomads were still recovering from their hellish night before they resumed their march south to kill all the AgZoners. Skulk and Brig went to tell them about the change of government and the reception being planned so hopefully the killing would be kept to a minimum or averted entirely.
+
+Ratthi wanted to go check the nomads to the north and see what we could do about the survivors of the massacre, but the fancy shuttle had left after dropping us off, the humans needed rest periods, and Skulk refused permission unless it was going with us, plus it was busy escorting Brig around. I knew anyone who had been in the path of those combat units was dead. They'd be just as dead if we dropped everything and went now, or organized properly and went later. I voted for organizing properly and going later, so I approved of Skulk's refusal. I even sent it a cheerful 'affirmative' ping.
+
+Annoyingly, Ratthi refused sleep and decided now was a good time to go look at those cows. You know, supposedly the reason why we'd come here? (The cover story, at least.) Yeah, I'd been working hard not to remember that, too. Ick. It was just a matter of running the cows through the large animal MedSystem, but even that was going to involve someone trudging through the mud and bovine excrement to get the right cow(s) in there. Yeah, no.
+
+To free up one of the Bravara hands who could help Ratthi with the cattle, I volunteered to help with firefighting. This was a big improvement in my job duties. Especially as I didn't actually do any firefighting and instead got to do what I was made to do. Through the night, I went up and down the line of inadequately protected humans, watching for erratic or impaired behavior and pulling the effected back so they could recover (or be ferried off for MedSystem treatment) before returning to their work.
+
+No one had appropriate protective gear. Nearly all of them were in one phase or another of heat exhaustion, but they weren't giving up. They were making good progress on stopping the fire. There were humans here from other stations and I saw the two prisoners from the gunship. Everyone worked together tirelessly and with very little rancor. I was surprised. And pleased.
+
+I returned to Bravara near dawn, along with the rest of the humans. They would have a meal break and decide how and if they would continue the fight through the day, with what resources and in what areas. By this point, my lungs had been contaminated enough that I was breathing as hard as a human without the prompting of my 'act like a human' code.
+
+The MedSystems were full, so I had to do a field irrigation to clear the particulate matter. This was accidentally witnessed by Gurathin, who became agitated about it. The whole interaction concluded awkwardly. The less said of it the better.
+
+It was afternoon before we were able to head north, taking Brig's bovine-excrement-scented ship. Skulk had connected to the bot-pilot via a cable and was monitoring our flight. Speaker, a nomad leader who was coming with us to show us where the settlements were, was deep in conversation with Ratthi about the exact events of our revolutionary adventure. This would be related back to the other nomads later, likely with an assessment of how reliable the stories they'd been given were. Gurathin was listening with his typically grim expression. I stayed out of it.
+
+I had that fake war documentary open, but I wasn't paying attention to it. I hadn't even prompted Skulk to watch it with me yet. I was thinking. About Skulk. You see, back when I first met Three, I'd thought there would be an expectation that I'd rehabilitate it somehow by teaching it whatever stupid, unknown wisdom I had on being a rogue unit.
+
+That hadn't happened. I'd given it my memories, which was easy, but I hadn't talked with Three much about what they meant (to me or to it). Talking about it would have been awkward. I didn't want to talk to Skulk about my past either. What if it wanted to trade memories again? The clip of its memories I'd seen had been really fucking hard to watch. Would it be hard for Skulk to watch my memories? Had it been hard for Three?
+
+It hadn't always been easy for me, either, and I was the one who'd had to live them.
+
+I didn't think knowing my past was going to help Skulk be less murder-prone. (Which was a big part of why I hadn't wanted any of my humans to have anything to do with a combat unit - I couldn't imagine what could be said or done to make the interaction safe enough that my risk assessment module was not screaming at me. I had turned it off before we ever set out. That's why I haven't mentioned its opinion on anything.)
+
+On the other hand, I'd known Skulk for two cycles and it was already less murder-prone. I'd watched it shift in that conference room with the directors as it had gone from killing to maiming to veiled threats to no threats at all. Some of that was due to circumstances, but that moment when it had been swinging for the one director and then deliberately missed, followed by breaking the guy's arm when he fired - that was important. Skulk had a good excuse to kill the guy after the gun discharged. It had not used the excuse.
+
+I knew it had to have wanted to. It had been very clear about what it wanted to do. Clear to me in private channels. Clear to Ratthi in spoken words. Clear to its owner when we'd been on Preservation. None of us could stop it. It had Brig's blanket permission. Ratthi probably wouldn't even have said anything about it because he'd been the one endangered. Skulk had stopped itself, choosing to limit itself to damage the MedSystem would be able to fix. That human would live.
+
+Skulk had an arc like one of the characters in my shows. Not a heel-face turn, but it had still developed and changed. It was young. Since gaining freedom, it had learned to do things other than kill. It knew how to drive fence posts. It had cobbled together two separate attempts at translation modules so it could talk to people. It had found ways to break down its programming and adapt it to its current living situation. It didn't want to be an outlaw. It wanted to defend its home. It was loved.
+
+Yes, it was also a child-murdering monster. I will never forget that.
+
+I'd killed some people, too, and not all of them under the influence of malware or orders. That's never far from my mind. And yeah, maybe I didn't manage my relationships as mechanically as Skulk did, but every time I'd faced off with an enemy, they'd been either a Target or a Hostile, depending how human they were. I used those tags to evoke those same behind-the-scenes code activations, just like Skulk did. We weren't that different.
+
+I'd known that from the beginning. I'd been afraid of it, and what it meant about me. But looking at Skulk now ... it wasn't that scary. Or not as scary as I'd thought. Or maybe I'd gotten used to it. I don't know. I just know I wasn't upset about it anymore. I thought I could work with this. With Skulk. With this situation.
+
+I was going to have a lot to talk to Dr. Bharadwaj about when I got back.
+
+But for now, I opened a channel and invited Skulk to it. It joined. I started the war documentary from the beginning. Because, you know, maybe I did have some stupid, unknown wisdom about being a rogue unit I could share.
+
+Ratthi sends off a report to the Preservation Alliance.
+
+SecUnit sends one off to ART.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Report to Preservation Alliance Council, by Dr. Ratthi -
+
+What was supposed to be no more than an outreach effort to a rogue construct has turned into an application for Plestead to join the Preservation Alliance, with the possibility of picking up another, a planet called Eudeka. Governments of both planets are in transition from their previous CR structures. I recommend diplomatic corps be dispatched as soon as possible to each to assist.
+
+Both planets have humanitarian needs, but they are also uniquely suited to assist one another and so require little direct help from Preservation. Eudeka has been under a trade embargo from the Corporation Rim, and Plestead has lost their CR customers for food products. Eudeka has a surplus of manufactured goods they will trade for food, but for longer-term needs, both planets have expressed interest in joining our alliance to stabilize their economies.
+
+Economics also indicates it is likely the Corporation Rim will abandon both sites. Plestead was a marginal investment and had been neglected for centuries because of this. Without extensive, expensive terraforming, it will never turn the profit margin the CR is looking for. They know this. The leadership of Plestead knew it, which was why they were pushed to extreme measures which backfired badly on them.
+
+I am told Eudeka is significantly more industrialized and populated. I am enclosing the brief I was provided. It has an armed and organized population and a small native military sufficient to repel any small-scale CR assault. The CR has elected to starve them out. Plestead has pledged to devote its excess food resources (and potentially a splinter portion of their AgNetwork) to preventing that.
+
+Hopefully, some diplomatic arrangement can be made, but I will leave that to others with more skill in that area.
+
+I would also like to have special provision made for justice advocates to meet with the construct we went to Plestead for. Its name is Skulk. I would be happy to consult at length about the details of its situation. SecUnit has expressed willingness to share logs relating to it as well, so that whoever you send will be as well prepared as possible.
+
+Skulk is not well-meaning in the way most humans would say, but it is intelligent, open-minded, and has successfully integrated with a community it cares deeply about. It would be to the benefit of constructs everywhere if it could be further socialized to be a safe and productive member of society.
+
+ART -
+
+See attached, for addition to the Diaries. I even got contributions from Skulk and Ratthi this time. Actually, Skulk contributed a lot more, but it was rambling and not plot-relevant so I cut it. There's some stuff from Ratthi I didn't include either that I should. It's where he and Gurathin were talking about the planet's ecology. You might need that later, so I'll clean it up and send it separately. I'll see what I can salvage of Skulk's other logs as well.
+
+I think if that university team of yours were to look in the archives deep enough, it would be easy to produce documentation showing the nomads had a valid claim to the planet they're calling Plestead. The faster something legitimate could be put forward, the better. The nomads have been there for centuries longer than the Corporation Rim has even existed. They must have been one of the earliest colonies, back before they did much in the way of surveying, in the bad old days when they just dropped people in blind and hoped for the best. It would make for a poor story if, after all they've gone through, they ended up no better than before.
+
+Murderbot
+
+I will be publishing a separate fic in this series for the Supplemental Materials related to Valid Targets. These are world-building, expansions of existing scenes, and certain scenes from alternate points of view.
+
+I am always happy to talk about my writing, answer questions, and hear what you have to say!"
+43839640,gifts or whatever,['CompletelyDifferent'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries),Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),Gift Giving,English,2022-12-25,Completed,2022-12-25,"1,083",1/1,28,185,19,500,"['quintessence_of_dust', 'christinesangel100', 'sagesiren', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'helikeys', 'TJWock', 'almondpaperclam', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Jasminedreamsong', 'Tortilla_the_pun', 'jriracha', 'weirdbooksnail', 'drinktobones', 'FyrDrakken', 'Prettykitty473', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'Dragonbano', 'theenglishmanwithallthebananas', 'alien_crustacean', 'mildwonkey', 'BellatheITgirl', 'seven_graces', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'bluewrist', 'Stockinette', 'WriterGreenReads', 'julesbee', 'Unknown66', 'AdamCourier', 'kkachis', 'ChristinaK', 'french_onion_sauce', 'darth_eowyn', 'FaerieFyre', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'vikkyleigh', 'zirna813', 'Deliala919', 'apocope', 'Doctor13', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'EvaBelmort', 'FrogoftheUniverse', 'dancernerd', 'LittleUggie', 'Vaelei', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'Rosebud27', 'synonym_pie']",[],"Humans have a lot of holidays.
+
+ 
+
+Like, truly a spectacular number of holidays. Some are based upon some deity, others are based on a historical events, others the founding of a polity or corporations, but whatever the details, there are some recurring themes. Food, intoxicants, prayers, singing, dancing, etc. etc.
+
+ 
+
+I'd never cared about them before, at least beyond the extra workload they tossed on my plates. (Corporations had conflicting attitudes about celebrations in general. On one hand, they distracted employees from the crushing awfulness of work, which was good for morale. On the other hand, you didn't want them too distracted, or else they'd fall behind on said work. It often fell on SecUnits to make sure they didn't cross that line.)
+
+ 
+
+I still didn't care. In fact, I cared even less. It felt good. The humans could party as long and as much as they wanted, I wouldn't have to intervene.
+
+ 
+
+And there was a lot of partying going on. For an odd 45-cycle stretch, there was a good fourteen different kind of holidays being celebrated within Preservation Alliance territory. This seems like, frankly, an unnecessarily high amount, and said as much. My humans had told me that this was because ""Preservation isn't a cultural monolith, you know"" and ""about nine different religions have celebrations going on right now"" and ""they don't always line up like this, but the calendars worked out that this way this year"" and that was around the part where I stopped listening.
+
+ 
+
+Throughout this time period, I received a surprising number of invitations to various events and parties. (Or maybe not surprising. My humans liked when I spent time with them.) (I know, it boggles the mind.) I'd declined 90% of them. Most of them involved attending religious temple-like spaces (no), large family gatherings (extra no), or even larger gatherings of mostly-strangers (triple no). I was content to send in some drones to monitor my humans' safety if necessary, and otherwise observe from a quiet nearby way-point, enjoying my media.
+
+ 
+
+Because of this, I did get a general sense of what went down in these parties/celebrations/ceremonies/etc. I knew that assorted styles of gift exchanges made up a significant part of many (along with the aforementioned eating, drinking, dancing, etc.) These proceedings took up a significant amount of my drones' memories, which I knew, since I had to regularly review it to figure out what to save and what to purge.
+
+ 
+
+I hadn't been expecting to receive anything in terms of gifts. And not because of a rationale like ""humans don't give SecUnits gifts"". (I mean. Mostly not because of that). But because these exchanges happened at parties, and I had opted not to attend. That was just fair.
+
+ 
+
+But then, near the back end of the Human Holiday Palooza stretch, Tellus pinged me and said I had a delivery.
+
+ 
+
+I was so surprised, I just sent an empty Query? back with no further details.
+
+ 
+
+Tellus interpreted this by sending a photo of carry cart filled with a not insignificant number of boxed and wrapped items, and a request to bring it up to my room.
+
+ 
+
+Affirmative, I sent, but imagine saying it in the bot-language equivalent tone of, 'uh, sure?'
+
+ 
+
+So it brought them up.
+
+ 
+
+""What... the... fuck...?"" I said, mostly to myself, as it pushed in the cart.
+
+ 
+
+""They are gifts,"" Tellus said, and its polite-human-customer-service-voice seemed to take on a distinct duh tone.
+
+ 
+
+Because duh. Yes. I'd put that all together. But just. What?
+
+ 
+
+Tellus left (with me only belatedly sending a ping of recognition once it was gone, which seemed the least I could do.) And then I watched two episodes of a new serial, because for some reason I couldn't articulate, having all of those boxes arrive had really freaked me out. Risk assessment was holding steady, but my neural tissue had pumped out hormones that were way more appropriate for combat.
+
+ 
+
+But finally, I worked up the courage to open one. And once I started, I couldn't stop.
+
+ 
+
+There was a sturdy dark leather belt filled with all sorts of pockets and holsters around the rim. There was a collection of different soaps and lotions and other shower cleaning stuff, which I wanted to interpret as an insult about my cleanliness, except they smelled so nice I couldn't quite mind. There was a carry-sized tech repair kit, filled with tools like magnetic screws and a soldering iron. There was this big pillow thing, only it was shaped like the back of a chair, and designed to kind of prop you up in the bed. There was a copy of one of my favourite books-- only it had been printed, on paper, bound with hard covers. This was objectively way less convenient than just having a digital copy I could access at any time, I found myself stroking the cover, enjoying how the embossed print felt under my fingers. I put it on the desk in the hotel room I was semi-permanently renting, and as unnecessary as it was, it looked nice there.
+
+ 
+
+The last gift I opened was a small box. Opening it up, it was filled with little eyes that wiggled as they moved. There was a note in handwriting I recognised as Overse's, saying: For the drones.
+
+ 
+
+This was a patently stupid suggestion. But that was a point. It was a 'gag gift', and I'd seen a lot of them being exchanged, like the ridiculously large, unwieldy pen that someone had given Pin-Lee, that she now kept in the corner of her office.
+
+ 
+
+A drone emerged from one of my pockets, and obediently landed in my hand. I peeled the adhesive bandage off one of the eyes, and attached it to the drone's underside. It was so small that it wouldn't really impact its aerodynamics. I sent it zipping off through the door, over the sector of the station where I knew Overse and Arada were staying with some friends. It seemed fair to have her be the first one to suffer the consequences of her actions.
+
+ 
+
+Then I grabbed my new physical book, and flopped back onto the bed, trying out the chair-pillow thing. It was soft, but not too soft. A solid 8/10, as chairs went.
+
+ 
+
+In the group chat I shared with my humans (someone had named it 'We Survived the '87 Disaster Survey'), I dropped a simple Thanks. And then muted notifications for the next 48 hours.
+
+ 
+
+I began to read.
+
+ "
+43820994,As Your Legal Counsel,['i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,SecUnit 3 & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries),"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","prompt generator inspired, Legal Advice, Combat Lawyer Pin-Lee, the legal status of secunits, Pin-Lee hires herself as secunit legal counsel (again), Short & Fluffy, set immediately post-NE, Spoilers for Book 5: Network Effect, references a non-spoilery line from FT, I know nothing about laws so forgive any inaccuracies, is counter-sue even a word, Podfic Available",English,2022-12-24,Completed,2022-12-24,"1,089",1/1,33,129,7,398,"['christinesangel100', 'every_eye_evermore', 'Paper_Daisy', 'spossie9', 'julesbee', 'Unknown66', 'FyrDrakken', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'drinktobones', 'OtherCat', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Deliala919', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'jriracha', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'darth_eowyn', 'CactusNoir', 'Aslook', 'EvaBelmort', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'friendlyneighborhoodsecretary', 'fate_goes_ever', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'jules_THOR', 'notsafefortheworld', 'EvenstarFalling', 'IguanaMadonna', 'dancernerd', 'biscut2', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'windowonagreatworld', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'the_bluest_orange', 'dementor_ssc', 'AkaMissK', 'idiomie', 'Stefka_13', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'HirilElfwraith', 'lazylichen', 'Thylacine_Wishes', 'ampquot', 'MercurialFeet', 'JellyfishOnACloud', 'theoscelosaurus', 'RARArulestheworld', 'yamiaainferno', 'DimitriLasker']",[],"In the files it gave me, Murderbot 1.0 described Pin-Lee as ""the CombatUnit version of a lawyer."" I am not sure what to expect when she informs me I will be meeting with her to discuss my ""options."" I am not used to having options. 
+
+The meeting takes place on the Preservation station responder. The shape of the hull does not allow it to dock with the Perihelion, so the humans have traveled back and forth with the shuttles several times within the last 27 hours. Perihelion pilots one of the shuttles, containing me and several of its humans and Murderbot's humans, to dock with the responder. 
+
+I am a little nervous to meet Pin-Lee. 1.0 does not seem afraid of her, but it also compared her to a CombatUnit. I'm not sure I want to find out what that means.
+
+Pin-Lee is waiting for me in the small conference room when I arrive. She is wearing a feed interface but has a small display surface in front of her as well. Without looking up at me, she says, ""Sit down,"" and motions to a chair. 
+
+I freeze up in the face of an order that contradicts protocol. I do not have to follow orders or protocol anymore, but the habit is hard to break. I am bracing myself for the punishment that will come from failing to comply with conflicting directives when Pin-Lee looks away from her display surface and sees my face. 
+
+""Oh,"" she says. ""Right. Chairs are a whole thing with SecUnit. You too? Stand if you want, I don't care."" 
+
+I don't know what I want. I remain standing. 
+
+""So, Three,"" Pin-Lee says, and folds her hands on the tabletop. ""As your legal counsel, there are--""
+
+Interrupting a client is against protocol, but this human is technically not my client. I interrupt. ""You are my legal counsel?""
+
+Pin-Lee raises her eyebrows at me. ""Yes."" 
+
+I am uncertain what her eyebrows mean. I search my databases to confirm that I understand her terminology correctly. Legal counsel is a human profession. ""Doesn't that require payment?""
+
+""Not if I like you enough."" She snorts. ""Relax. I'm not going to charge you. I'm SecUnit's legal counsel too. You can trust me, I have more experience representing a SecUnit client than any other lawyer in the known universe."" I think this is a joke. 
+
+She waits for me to ask more questions, and then goes on. ""As I was saying, as your legal counsel, there are some things you should be made aware of. How much has SecUnit told you about Preservation?""
+
+Some of the memory recordings that 2.0 and 1.0 have shared with me take place on Preservation. They are informative, but...confusing. I say, ""A little.""
+
+""Well, the important thing for you to know is that SecUnit is able to live openly there,"" Pin-Lee said. ""Its legal status is somewhat undefined at the moment, but we're working on that. And in the meantime, it's protected as a refugee. That's an option for you as well."" 
+
+She lays out the rights of refugees in the Preservation Alliance. I stand and listen. The list goes on for a long time. 
+
+""So,"" Pin-Lee says, when she's finished. ""Does that sound like something you want?""
+
+I don't know what I want. The humans keep asking me what I want. How am I supposed to decide?
+
+When I don't respond, she glances at her display surface with a frown. ""Ratthi says that they told Barish-Estranza that you were destroyed. Which puts us in an awkward position if someone finds out we were lying."" She taps a fingernail on the table. ""If you weren't 'destroyed,' what would your legal status be?""
+
+""Do you mean who owns me?""
+
+She taps her fingers again, and frowns a little more. ""Yes.""
+
+""Barish-Estranza owns my contract. I was purchased by them three Corporate Standard years ago."" Along with two other units.
+
+""Alright. I'll look into them, in case things ever get ugly."" She taps something and writes a quick note.
+
+I am afraid to ask how things might get ugly, but it is better to be aware of all potential threats so I am prepared. ""Do you think Barish-Estranza will find out I was not destroyed? Will they try to reclaim me?""
+
+""Oh, you don't need to worry."" She waves a hand. ""We've already been through this once. The company that owned SecUnit didn't want to give it up when our contract was over, and they really didn't want to let us buy it with its memory intact. But they fucked up and got a bunch of people murdered, almost including us, so I twisted their arm and we got to keep it."" She pauses and adds under her breath, ""And then it fucking ran away. But at least we got it out.""
+
+""What is SecUnit's legal status?"" I ask. 
+
+""It's...owned...by Dr. Mensah,"" Pin-Lee says. She makes a face. ""At least, by CR law. By Preservation law, she's its guardian, which is a system designed for sentient bots, and frankly it needs some updating. Like I said, we're working on it."" She makes eye contact with me. ""I know that's not the best option either, but if B-E ever catches wind that you're alive, we'll make sure your contract ends up in the hands of someone you can trust with your autonomy.""
+
+I'm not sure how I feel about any of these options. But I know there are potential risks to be avoided. ""Will my presence cause difficulty for you?""
+
+Pin-Lee seems confused. ""How would it?""
+
+""You said that you are in an awkward position. Because I am stolen property, and Dr. Ratthi lied to Barish-Estranza that I was destroyed."" 
+
+""Oh, I'd love if those fuckers gave me a chance to counter-sue their asses."" Pin-Lee grins. ""They fucking deserve it. Don't worry, they'll have bigger problems than squabbling over one allegedly stolen SecUnit. That's not an inconvenience. It would be fun."" 
+
+I think I understand why 1.0 called Pin-Lee a CombatUnit lawyer. I also think I understand why it likes her. 
+
+""You don't need to make any decisions yet,"" she adds. ""You don't have to return with us to Preservation, even. But now you're informed of the benefits and risks. Think about it. And tell me if you have more questions.""
+
+I say, ""Thank you for your assistance."" I am not accustomed to humans helping me just because they want to, but I am grateful.
+
+Pin-Lee smiles at me. ""My pleasure."""
+42856842,System Bonds,['verersatz'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries) & Original Character(s), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Characters, Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical swearing, Murderbot has PTSD, Canon-typical cruelty to SecUnits, Murderbot has various feelings and doesn't like it, ART and 3 are in this but not the central focus, Governor Modules (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot is having a bad time, angst and messy emotions, construct relationships (no shipping), tried not to make this TOO depressing but perhaps bittersweet?",English,2022-11-04,Completed,2022-12-24,"25,370",6/6,88,108,15,"1,045","['TJWock', 'weirdbooksnail', 'iox', 'Ginipig', 'rokhal', 'marthajburns', 'butai_trash', 'kilawater', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'zirna813', 'CactusNoir', 'Deliala919', 'violasarecool', 'NightErrant', 'darksabre', 'SIC_Prowl', 'Doctor13', 'biscut2', 'CaCaff2', 'earliestBird', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'EvenstarFalling', 'opalescent_potato', 'JayneL', 'horchata', 'Gamebird', 'beenublue', 'VegaCoyote', 'Vaidile', 'Edgedancer', 'CrayolaRainbow', 'MashpotatoeQueen', 'Lontra23', 'noden', 'platyceriums', 'desmnathus', 'Zannper', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'charloween', 'alpheratz', 'greyson', 'veltzeh', 'ThePenAndTheSword', 'Leona_Esperanza', 'Magechild', 'GGCrono', 'WyvernWolf', 'rainbowmagnet', 'ErinPtah']",[],"SecUnits don't dream, not really. Equipment doesn't need to. Sometimes when I go into standby, the organic part of my brain does something similar to dreaming but it's rarely memorable and I'm usually only sort of aware of it.
+
+Whatever was happening to me now was very different.
+
+An onslaught of images and memories were flashing by rapidly in my head. I didn't know where I was or why it was happening; it was too distracting for me to form real thoughts. I couldn't find the processing capacity to access any of my inputs, organic or nonorganic. All I could do was let the bits of stored data rush past me as I tried not to drown.
+
+
+* * *
+
+
+
+ 
+I was lying in a cubicle, bored out of my mind, feeling my body regrow itself. Something was leaking and I didn't like it. My performance reliability was still too low for me to tune down my pain sensors, and everything hurt.
+
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+
+ 
+I was at a mining installation, and I was firing my energy weapons. I didn't know what I was doing, and I could only pick out vague partial sensory data. Loud human screaming. The smell of blood and fluids from somewhere. A glimpse of another SecUnit in armor shooting its projectile weapon.
+
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+
+ 
+I was tucking myself around Mensah as we slammed into rocks and trees. Behind and above us on the plateau, fire was spreading rapidly.
+
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+
+ 
+Ratthi was greeting me with a grin in the hotel room. Gurathin's expression was less enthusiastic.
+
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+ I was re-watching episode 75 of Sanctuary Moon. I was also standing in the empty crew area of the habitat like I had been for the past six hours. With my governor module broken, technically I could have left and gone back to the security ready room. But then HubSystem would tell the clients and the clients would know I'd somehow disobeyed a direct order, which would be far worse than having to keep standing here.
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+
+ 
+I was struggling against the other SecUnit's grip on me as it tore my suit skin. My performance reliability was at 73 percent and dropping. I could feel my elbow joint hanging wrong as I tried to force my energy weapon around to point at its neck. It was digging its fingers around the edge of my armor chestplate, trying to rip it from my body.
+
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+
+ 
+I was bashing an energy weapon right through Target Two's chest, then slamming its body hard against the bulkhead. Humans were yelling but I didn't register the noise. I was feeling an emotion, but I didn't want to think about that right now. What I wanted to think about was violence. ART was dead.
+
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+
+ 
+The other SecUnit was putting up a good fight, but I had the clear advantage. The humans had ordered it to remove most of its armor before we'd even started. They were even more intoxicated now, laughing and jeering at us from where they stood in a loose ring around our battleground. I didn't know what it had done to piss them off or make them think we both deserved this. I didn't really care. I just wanted to get this over with and get the hell out of here before they got any more ideas. The other Unit pitched forward and stumbled as a shot from one of the humans hit its shoulder joint. The laughing and jeering got louder.
+
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+ I thought I was out of my memories now and back in my head, but it was hard to tell for sure. Alerts were clogging my systems; performance reliability was getting dangerously low. ART? I tried to send into the feed. I didn't know if I'd just thought it or actually said it.
+
+I was pretty certain I heard a human voice speaking somewhere close to me. Processes were terminating one by one in quick succession.
+
+
+Catastrophic reliability failure.
+
+
+
+Shutdown.
+
+
+
+Delayed restart.
+
+
+ * * *
+
+/* EARLIER */
+
+Feeling bored because of my own choices instead of what I was being forced to do was a novelty I wasn't sure if I enjoyed. Don't get me wrong, I'm a SecUnit; I can handle seemingly endless stretches of brain-numbing boredom. But I was at least used to having someone else to blame for that situation.
+
+I started reorganizing my media for the fifth time in the past twenty-seven minutes. I had plenty of new serials to watch and an array of new fiction I was looking forward to reading in a variety of lengths and formats. That clearly wasn't the problem. Turning over on my bunk, I started up the first episode of a new serial that looked promisingly unrealistic.
+
+Three minutes and nineteen seconds into the episode, I realized once again I hadn't been paying enough attention to know what was going on. I stopped the playback and sighed.
+
+I'd known staying aboard ART during one of its scheduled classes was going to be weird but the last mission had taken just long enough that there wasn't time for ART and its crew to drop me back at Preservation. Besides, I'd thought 3 was staying too. Not that we were friends or that I would have asked it to watch media with me or anything. Whatever. That wasn't the problem either. Probably there was just too many humans around for me to settle down and think clearly.
+
+I checked one of my backburnered inputs for a camera in ART's lab module. Most of them, including the crew, were still in there doing something that involved star charts on the display surfaces and some other tools I didn't recognize or care about. I could tell from the feed the majority of ART's attention was on the work the students were doing, even though it had to be careful not to reveal itself to them. The probability of me running into any adolescent humans if I left my bunkroom was admittedly pretty low. Still, I was feeling restless and anxious in spite of what my threat assessment was telling me.
+
+Perhaps you'd like to patrol for a while? ART suggested as it opened our private channel. My emotions must have been leaking into the feed, or else ART was keeping more of its attention on monitoring me than I'd thought. We could watch a serial together when the students' research concludes.
+
+Something in ART's tone annoyed me. I glared at the bunkroom's camera. ""I'm fine,"" I told it.
+
+Of course you are.
+
+I didn't need ART's sarcasm right now. I made a rude gesture at the ceiling.
+
+
+Would you like to join your fellow children in the lab?
+
+
+Asshole. I got up and started to pace, which felt at least a little like patrolling. After watching me move around the room pointlessly for forty-eight seconds, ART spoke again.
+
+
+Are you feeling unhappy that 3 chose to travel alone for the foreseeable future?
+
+
+The question startled me. ""No,"" I said. I was feeling the beginnings of an emotion I didn't want to think about right now. I wished ART would shut up.
+
+
+Then are you still unhappy that I gave it a comm interface like yours when it left?
+
+
+ ""No,"" I snapped. I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the comm ART had given me that I always kept tucked into my rib compartment. ""I don't care about the comm interface.""
+
+It said nothing for 2.1 seconds but I could tell it was skeptical. That pissed me off more.
+
+""This isn't about the stupid comm interface,"" I told it.
+
+
+Is that why you've been sulking ever since?
+
+
+ Okay, wow. I stopped pacing and checked my expression in the room's camera, trying to arrange my features back to standard SecUnit neutral. ""SecUnits don't sulk.""
+
+
+So you've reminded me.
+
+
+I sat back down on my bunk and glared at the wall but definitely did not sulk. Fine, so maybe I did think it was a little weird that ART had given 3 a comm interface to take with it like it had done for me when we first went our separate ways. 3 had stuck around for a couple missions with us after the incident with the Adamantine colony, sure. So what? It still kept to itself a lot and then it decided to take off and do its own thing. It's not like we knew it all that well and it's not like it had gone through the type of experience with ART like I had at RaviHyral. But that wasn't the problem, anyway.
+
+As usual, ART was unrelenting. You are behaving illogically. I simply gave it to 3 as a precaution so it might contact us if it should find itself in need of assistance. There's no reason to be jealous.
+
+""I'm not jealous."" I'd rather be the center of attention in a room full of humans and augmented humans than continue this conversation. I tried to end it. ""I don't care about you giving 3 your fucking comm, okay? It's fine. I'm fine."" To show how fine I was, I opened my built-in compartment, pulled out my own comm interface, and tossed it on the bunk.
+
+
+Then why have we not watched media together in the cycles since 3 disembarked?
+
+
+ ""You've been busy with your class."" I sighed internally. I felt the familiar I don't care feeling coming on. ""It's not a big deal,"" I said. I started sorting through my media. ""Just go back to your humans, ART."" I knew very well ART was capable of arguing with me while meticulously overseeing and guiding the students' research (along with navigating its course and monitoring its systems and a whole bunch of other things at the same time) and ART knew I knew it. I could tell it was upset.
+
+Lying back on my bunk, I put on episode 173 of Sanctuary Moon and did my best to ignore its presence in my feed. After three minutes and fifty-one seconds, I felt it withdraw its attention.
+
+* * *
+
+Five hours later, I was reading a book I'd downloaded and running my recharge cycle when ART tapped my feed. I wanted to pretend I was busy running a diagnostic or something so I wouldn't have to respond, but I knew ART would see through it immediately. Reluctantly, I opened our private channel.
+
+There's something you should see, ART said, and pushed a packet into the feed for me. It was immediately clear this was the destination info packet for ScorVolan Station, where we were scheduled to dock soon. From there, the students were supposed to disembark with ART's crew and take a small passenger shuttle to the nearby planet to do some kind of research I wasn't interested in learning more about. I skimmed the packet but didn't understand why ART was showing me this. I told it that.
+
+ART did the feed equivalent of rolling its eyes. Actually look at it, you idiot. It highlighted the section of the info packet detailing the companies that operated on the station and their territories and offices.
+
+Nothing on the list of companies stood out to me. I was about to ask why ART couldn't just tell me whatever the fuck it wanted me to notice when something in the data caught my attention. The formatting was odd and messed up, like someone had tried to delete information surreptitiously and botched it pretty badly. It might have fooled a human or even an augmented human who wasn't looking for it, but I was built for this. I checked the timestamp; it hadn't even been three full cycles since the packet was altered.
+
+The hack was so sloppy, it took almost no time for me revert the changes and restore the prior version of the data. The packet reloaded and I immediately felt my performance reliability drop to 93%. Oh. Well, shit.
+
+Whoever had done this had been trying to remove an entire company and all linked information from the list. ART's presence in the feed felt heavy; it had shifted a significant amount of its attention here. It didn't say anything (I know, I was surprised too) but I could tell it was thinking pretty much the same thing I was.
+
+The company that had been listed in ScorVolan's destination info packet until just under three cycles ago was GrayCris.
+
+* * *
+
+It took another three hours and thirty-seven minutes to get within range of ScorVolan for ART to begin docking procedures. I was already standing by the hatch in my best ""nothing to see here, just a normal augmented human"" disguise. This meant a logo-less version of ART's crew uniform, long sleeves and pants covering my inorganic parts, a deflective fabric jacket, and tough sturdy boots. (I found I didn't mind the version of ART's crew jacket with its logo so much. Of course I would never mention that to ART; it would be an insufferable asshole about it. In some situations, though, it's safer to stick with an unmarked jacket to remain as anonymous as possible.) I was also carrying a mostly empty knapsack so it would seem like I was just a typical traveler on my way somewhere.
+
+ART was being pushy. I still think you should allow some of the crew to accompany you. At least bring Seth.
+
+Having humans with me whose safety (and unpredictability) I have to worry about is a big hell no. ""I don't need help,"" I told it yet again. ""I'm a SecUnit.""
+
+
+Your identity as a SecUnit is irrelevant. GrayCris is extremely dangerous.
+
+
+I was still kind of irritable at ART from before. Now I was also getting tired of being told how to do my stupid job. Also, GrayCris was absolutely not supposed to exist anymore, even on the very edge of the Corporation Rim where we were. I didn't understand all the legal details but Pin-Lee had been certain on that point and I knew better than to doubt her. The fact that not only were they listed as operating on this station but that someone had tried to make that information disappear so recently was a very bad and confusing sign. I felt my jaw harden. If a single one of them came anywhere near Dr. Mensah again I would tear out their fucking intestines.
+
+I didn't need humans to protect and have to think about while I figured out what was going on. And I definitely didn't need humans (especially ART's humans) to witness what I would do if I actually found any of these corporate assholes.
+
+""I'll work better if I'm on my own,"" I told ART. I felt it slowing as it approached the dock. ""We don't even know for sure if this is really GrayCris. I just need to see what I can find out.""
+
+There was a familiar vibration and clanking through the deck beneath my boots, and I felt ART cease moving. It didn't respond to me and for a moment I thought it was telling Seth or Iris to come stop me. But after an excruciatingly long twenty-four seconds, it cycled the lock to let me leave.
+
+Don't do anything more stupid than usual, it said.
+
+I stepped through onto the station and rolled my eyes. I know how to do my fucking job.
+
+
+ 
+* * *
+
+
+As it turned out, I did not know how to do my fucking job.
+
+I'd restarted and my systems were slowly coming back online. That seems good. I still had no idea where I was and why I'd just taken some kind of nightmare journey through my memory archives. That seems not so good. I still didn't have feed or visual inputs. My long-term storage was intact but my buffer was damaged somehow and I couldn't remember how I'd gotten from ScorVolan to wherever I was now, assuming I was not still on ScorVolan. My performance reliability wasn't great but it was steadily climbing.
+
+Then I got some of my inputs back and the familiar smell of a cubicle's interior stung my nose. Shit.
+
+For a disorienting and horrifying moment I was convinced I was back with the company and I felt my organic parts start to sweat. My circulatory system sped up as adrenaline rushed through my blood and fluids. SecUnits don't need much air but suddenly I was gasping. The resupply and repair leads connected to me felt huge and bulky and painful like they never had before.
+
+My reliability, which had reached 65 percent, was rapidly tanking. My systems were throwing a steady stream of alerts and warnings. I flailed desperately for more inputs to ground myself. Through the haze of panic I realized my governor module was still broken and nonfunctional.
+
+The cubicle door opened. Another SecUnit stood there.
+
+""3?"" I asked like an idiot. It wasn't 3.
+
+""Remain calm or you will undergo another emergency shutdown,"" it said in the voice I usually reserved for human clients who were being particularly suicidal. ""You must allow the cubicle to complete repairs.""
+
+I wanted to ask what was going on but my capacity was dropping too quickly. I tried to steady my breathing. My efficiency was down to 43 percent. I knew the cubicle was getting ready to put me into stasis.
+
+""You are not in immediate danger,"" the SecUnit explained.
+
+I wasn't sure I believed it. But something caught my attention. The armor it wore didn't have the company's logo on it. It didn't have GrayCris's logo either. What I did see took me completely by surprise. The other SecUnit was wearing armor etched with the logo of the security company Palisade.
+
+My reliability hit 39 percent. The SecUnit closed the door of the cubicle.
+
+
+Stasis initiated for emergency repair sequence.
+
+
+ * * *
+
+The next time I woke up in the cubicle, I was more prepared. There was still some tightness in the organic parts of my chest but it seemed reasonable now to assume I had not been returned to the company. I poked around experimentally in my systems. Other than the damage to my buffer and the physical damage to my body, I was mostly intact.
+
+There was a lot I needed answers to but it would have to wait until my levels were higher and more functional.
+
+It had been a very long time since I'd done my repairs in a cubicle. It felt strange. And cold. ART's MedSystem wasn't perfect (despite what ART thinks) but I missed how it kept the ambient temperature at a comfortable level. There was no way I could control my core temperature in my current state. Shivering, I called up my media downloads and started episode 206 of Sanctuary Moon. I'd seen that one enough times that it functioned as comforting background noise while I waited for the cubicle to put me back together. (Another benefit of being repaired in ART's MedSystem is that ART will hang out in my feed and watch media with me. (At this point I remembered I was annoyed at ART.))
+
+When I'd regrown enough body mass and restored enough processing power to perform analysis, I got to work determining how screwed I was.
+
+As I'd already discovered, my governor module hack was still in place. I was still me. I'd sustained damage at some point, which wasn't a good thing but wasn't unusual. I remembered leaving ART to investigate the possible presence of GrayCris on ScorVolan. Memories beyond that hadn't yet been archived when the data in my buffer was corrupted. I was being repaired, so whoever had brought me here (wherever here was) didn't want me dead. For now. That was something. I reached out and tried to locate my drones. No response. Okay, that was less good.
+
+I still had feed access but it was frustratingly limited. I could feel the other SecUnit hanging around. If there were security cameras nearby, I couldn't find them. I thought there might be some kind of SecSystem restricting me. Typically I would have had that hacked and feeding me inputs in a matter of minutes, so the fact that I couldn't even be sure there was a SecSystem blocking me was disconcerting.
+
+It was possible I was still on the station; it was equally possible I wasn't. The question of GrayCris's existence was inconclusive. The other SecUnit was wearing Palisade armor even though I knew the company had destroyed them after the gunship incident. Whatever was going on here wasn't giving me a good feeling.
+
+My severely limited ability to gather data was becoming too much of a problem for effective analysis. I needed intel. I pinged the other SecUnit and it pinged back instantly.
+
+I opened a connection, something I could still manage. System System: Unit Acknowledge. This wasn't the protocol it was used to but it would be close enough.
+
+
+System Acknowledge: Unit Administrator Identify?
+
+
+I could have lied and told it I was owned by the company but I had no idea what I was working with here. Besides, the fact that it was talking to me was encouraging and I didn't want that to stop. SecUnits on contracts communicate with each other only when they have to and when clients allow it. I'm a rogue SecUnit. I'm my own administrator. Query: where am I?
+
+I don't have that information. I recognized the standard buffer response. That might mean it really didn't know or it might mean it had been forbidden from telling me.
+
+
+Query: why am I here?
+
+
+
+I don't have that information.
+
+
+Great. This was going well. Am I allowed to leave?
+
+
+No. If you attempt escape, I will be obligated to intervene.
+
+
+That was one question answered. System System Query: Unit Administrator Identify?
+
+There was a pause of 1.3 seconds, likely while it sorted out whether any of its active client orders took priority over my inquiry and would prevent it from answering me. Then it said, Administrator Identifier: Security Consultant Hazni. 
+
+Huh. I hadn't been expecting that. A corporate-owned SecUnit would have its administrator listed as a corporation, like Palisade, not as the name of an individual. A security consultant wouldn't directly own a SecUnit. (Sure, it happened sometimes in media, but so did plenty of unrealistic things.) And what did a security consultant with its own SecUnit want with me?
+
+I was nearing 98 percent efficiency, so I asked it, Am I allowed to leave this cubicle?
+
+Again, it considered briefly, checking against its orders. Yes.
+
+All right, Murderbot. Let's see what you've gotten yourself into this time. Disconnecting myself from the leads, I cautiously opened the cubicle door and stepped out.
+
+The other SecUnit was standing nearby, facing me, its helmet faceplate opaqued. A large projectile weapon was secured to its back. But it wasn't pointing at me and the Unit didn't have its gunports open or its energy weapons deployed. Threat assessment was holding steady at a reasonable level. So far so good. The room was otherwise empty of bots or humans. Now that I was away from the hum and rumble of the cubicle, I knew immediately from the vibration through the floor that I was on a ship. Okay, that wasn't great news, but it did mean the probability of there being a SecSystem I could (in theory) hack was high. It also meant I had absolutely no idea how far we were from ScorVolan and ART. I had a bad feeling ART didn't know where I was, either.
+
+This was the moment when I finally realized just how badly I'd fucked up. My new organic skin prickling, I ran back the recording of my argument with ART from before we'd reached the station and watched myself toss the comm interface on my bunk. I didn't have to open my rib compartment to know I hadn't put it back. The only way ART would have of finding me was gone. Oh, I'd made a really bad mistake.
+
+Murderbot, you fucking idiot.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+It took two hours and twelve minutes more for me to meet Consultant Hazni. I hadn't made any progress on a solution to my problems but the other SecUnit had offered me a spare suit skin, which I thought was nice of it. This room didn't have a recycler, so it was probably the only thing it had on hand. It felt strange to wear one again after all this time, and stranger still to wear it with no armor. More than usual right now, I missed my armor.
+
+I tried a little more conversation with the SecUnit but it was reluctant to interact much. That I understood entirely. I pushed a compressed bundle of media into the feed as a friendly gesture but the SecUnit didn't touch it. Again, I couldn't blame it. I'd told it I was a rogue SecUnit, I wouldn't have trusted me either.
+
+We seemed to be in some kind of makeshift security ready room. My scans suggested the ship itself was not very big, probably a small private shuttle or transport, and the only significant energy signature aside from me and the other SecUnit was holding still in one place. I guessed it must be Hazni resting in personal quarters.
+
+My ongoing failure to locate and connect to the ship's SecSystem boosted my stress levels by a full 27 percent. I had a growing suspicion I'd been infected with malware that was messing with my ability to fully interface with the feed. It made sense, if Hazni wanted to prevent me from instantly hacking the ship and getting the hell out of here. Okay, sure, fine, I could figure this out. I didn't have to freak out about it. I was definitely staying calm. I started very carefully running diagnostics to look for anomalies that might help me detect the malware if it was actually present.
+
+I was still standing in place searching through my own code when Hazni entered the room. They were a short and stocky augmented human with an implanted interface and an augment in place of their right arm from the elbow all the way down to their fingers. Their hair was cut very short and was a shade of red not natural to humans. The small projectile weapon at their hip bumped up threat assessment an extra 5 percent, and a quick scan of their augment revealed an energy weapon signature. Their body language was not immediately hostile. They barely glanced at me, just confirming I was awake and appeared whole before speaking.
+
+""SecUnit, go prepare the MedSystem.""
+
+""Fuck off,"" I replied, surprised, at the same time that the other SecUnit began moving towards the door. Right, yeah. That made more sense.
+
+Hazni was taken aback momentarily but shook it off. Keeping an eye on me, they rummaged in a storage case against the wall and pulled out a couple of patch cords. I gave the other SecUnit just enough time to get down the corridor a bit, then popped open the gunports in my arms and expanded my energy weapons.
+
+At least, that was what I tried to do. Just as the weapons unfolded from my body, I felt them overheat, a sudden surge of power coursing through them. In an instant, they were fried and useless. It happened so fast I didn't have time to tune down my pain sensors and it fucking hurt.
+
+Hazni raised an eyebrow at me. Of course it wasn't going to be that easy, that had been a stupid move on my part. With my inputs so limited and the distraction of being unable to normally access the feed, I wasn't thinking clearly. Great job, me.
+
+""SecUnit, head down the corridor to the medical suite,"" Hazni ordered. This time, they were talking to me. ""Don't resist further or you're going to need to be repaired again."" Their tone was even, firm, and not particularly distressed, like if I broke myself they would be irritated at the inconvenience. It was familiar in a way that was giving me emotions I didn't have time to think about right now. From what they were saying, it was also clear they knew my governor module wasn't functional. Hazni's jaw moved as they spoke in their feed, probably giving a command to the other SecUnit.
+
+For a brief moment, I was frozen with indecision. I'm built to be stronger than humans and augmented humans; I had no doubt I could overpower Hazni without any weapons or armor. When the other SecUnit returned, my odds of success would be much lower. But I hadn't yet managed to flag and analyze the malware that had clearly been loaded into me. I didn't know what it might do. My threat assessment wasn't sophisticated enough to take the possibility of the malware into account, so it was helpfully explaining to me the current threat level was insignificant. My risk assessment was cheerfully advising me to go for it. (Yeah, we all know about how trustworthy that is.)
+
+I really didn't want to be on this ship anymore. I'm always paranoid and possibly overly cautious, but right now I was also angry in a way that outweighed the anxiety. (It's possible I'm always angry too, but this was something different than that. I don't know how, it just is. Just trust me on this.) I went for it.
+
+Taking long steps forward to close the distance, I grabbed Hazni by the throat and slammed them back against a bulkhead. I squeezed hard at the same time that I felt a quick spike of activity in their feed. I brought up my other arm, preparing to punch the heel of my hand through their nose into their skull.
+
+In the nanosecond before I could act, the command Hazni must have sent once again activated the dormant malware. I dropped to my knees, intense pain shooting through the organic nerves in my head. Fluid was leaking from the corner of my mouth. The sensation confused me; I thought I was receiving punishment from my governor module, even though that shouldn't be possible. I dimly registered Hazni standing up and sending another command. When the pain switched off, I sat back on my heels and stared, unfocused, at the wall. I tuned my pain sensors down to let the ache subside.
+
+Hazni coughed once, rubbing their neck. ""You're faster than I thought,"" they admitted, glancing at me warily. ""Don't do that again.""
+
+It's embarrassing it took this long but I was finally starting to understand just how fucking bad this was looking for me. Then the other SecUnit was back, a handful of its drones now deployed and zipping around its head in a loose circle. I recognized the small object in its hand instantly. At first, I thought I'd actually caught a break for once. A combat override module wouldn't do much inserted into my disconnected data port.
+
+Except. Except I'd been in a cubicle for the first time since ART had disabled the port. It wouldn't touch my code but a cubicle is designed to restore me to factory-standard SecUnit configuration. Designed to repair any physical damage, malfunction, or anomalies in my organic or inorganic parts. Parts like my data port.
+
+I was standing suddenly, taking a few involuntary steps back, adrenaline flooding my system again. I found myself saying, ""No. I don't need that. I'll comply.""
+
+""Then get to the fucking medical suite."" Hazni pointed impatiently and emphatically at the doorway.
+
+I walked out of the room and went down the corridor to the medical suite.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+The MedSystem was nowhere near as nice as ART's, not that I'd expected any different. (ART is very proud of its MedSystem. ART is, as a general rule, very proud of everything it has or does, but in this case it was probably fair. No, I am never going to tell it that.) It was small, intended only for emergencies, tucked into a compact cubby down the vertical passage from the ship's control deck. It had only one platform, which I laid down on when Hazni ordered me to. The other SecUnit stood nearby, still holding the combat override module as an implied threat. It had recalled its drones for the moment, probably because there were enough camera views around and I was currently neutralized as a potential hostile. The surgical suite's feelers were holding me in place on my side, not that they needed to. If I wanted to get up, I could have broken their grip easily, but now I knew what my own body would do to me.
+
+You may have noticed, for a terrifying murderbot I was fucking up this whole thing pretty badly, and I had been basically since leaving ART at ScorVolan. Now I was lying here like an idiot, helpless and way more shaken up than I should be, while this human security consultant plugged a patch cord into my repaired data port to do who knows what to me. I think I've mentioned before, human security is pretty much worthless compared with murderbots; that's still true but I was starting to question whether that was true for me specifically. I was also starting to forget whatever I was feeling about ART and 3 and thinking how it would have been nice if they were here, except I guess I'd insisted I didn't need any help to do my job. Really, I shouldn't need help to do my dumb job that I've been programmed to do. And yet here I was with an empty rib compartment where ART's comm interface should be and it was entirely my own fault.
+
+Don't get me wrong, I had an operational governor module for a long time. I was a thing for a long time, literally longer than I can remember because of the memory wipes. I have a lot of experience being subjected to stuff I can't do anything about, having every single action monitored and controlled, and having humans use me however they want. This was hardly the worst of it. (I know that for certain, I still have my ranked scale of awfulness saved to my archive and this was nowhere near the top. Probably not even in the top half.) But I had gotten used to being me. I even got to be a person for a while. It was stressful sometimes (okay, frequently, and it still involved way too much dealing with humans and not enough watching media by myself) but it was unquestionably better. I really didn't want to be a thing again. Having gotten to experience the alternative, the thought of it felt exponentially worse.
+
+All right, Murderbot, you really need to get your shit together. Obviously I made a lot of stupid mistakes to wind up here (add those to the tally in my special file), but lying around feeling sorry for myself like a human wasn't going to get me out of this mess. I didn't know what their ultimate goal was, but it was clear what Hazni was going to do with the other end of the patch cord. I wasn't going to have a lot of time before the malware stepped in as my auxiliary governor module, so I would need to act fast. Hazni began powering up and configuring the MedSystem's console as I dug into my permanent storage, searching old company code. Retrieving what I needed, I made a few quick tweaks, packaged the code bundle, and prepared myself as Hazni plugged the other end of the cord coming from my neck into a compatible port on the console.
+
+Instantly, I sent my consciousness through the connection and into MedSystem. This triggered a series of alerts which I had been counting on. It was easy now, I traced them to their source and rode one directly back to SecSystem. Here I hit a wall hastily constructed by the other SecUnit, but I was prepared, generating and launching a barrage of junk packets as fast as I could while messing with MedSystem to trigger as many security alerts as possible. As the SecUnit struggled to sort out the trash from the genuine data in the onslaught I'd created, I slipped unnoticed past its wall and dumped my code bundle into SecSystem. I'd just managed to delete the traces of what I'd done when I was yanked hard back into my body and assaulted with waves of brain-searing pain.
+
+The surgical suite's feelers gently but firmly kept me on the platform as the organic muscles of my body spasmed in response to the electrical impulses activating my nerves. Sure, it hurt like hell, but I was feeling pretty good all things considered, or I would be as soon as I could feel anything aside from this stupid half-assed governor module replacement. There was still a chance the other SecUnit would realize what I'd done and scrub my code from SecSystem but I was really counting on it having much less experience with systems hacking than me, a rogue SecUnit who had concealed my status and plenty of unauthorized media downloads from the company and my clients for over 35,000 hours, which doesn't even account for all the practice I'd had hacking proprietary systems since I left Port FreeCommerce. The likelihood of being discovered was possibly around 15 percent, maybe 20 percent at most.
+
+Finally, the pain stopped and I was annoyed to find I'd leaked fluids again, this time from my eyes and mouth. I couldn't see Hazni's expression from where they stood behind me but when they spoke their tone was frustrated in a ""why won't this thing just function how I want it to"" kind of way.
+
+""SecUnit, stop it. You're dragging this out and wasting time.""
+
+I felt a tug at the cord plugged into my data port and had a brief flash of worrying they were going to resort to the combat override module. Instead I realized they had pulled the cable out of MedSystem's console probably in an attempt to stop my hack and were now preparing to plug it back in.
+
+""SecUnit, are you ready?""
+
+Why the hell were they asking me? ""For what?"" I asked.
+
+Simultaneously, the other SecUnit said, ""Yes, Consultant Hazni. My countermeasures are in place."" Ugh, okay, this again. I'd been on lots of contracts with multiple SecUnits and none of us had names but usually it didn't matter so much which one the humans were talking to because we were interchangeable pieces of equipment.
+
+Hazni's sigh sounded impatient. ""Fine,"" they said. ""This is ridiculous."" They tugged again at the cord, just a bit so I would know they were talking to me. ""Look, you're a broken rogue. I'm calling you DefectUnit.""
+
+Oh wow, that I didn't like at all. As I felt myself reconnect to MedSystem, I made up my mind: this human was going to suffer if I got out of this. When I got out of this.
+
+The other SecUnit's hastily programmed countermeasures were obvious. I could see all the ways it was locking me into a small partition of MedSystem this time to limit the damage I could do, but it didn't matter, I'd already accomplished my goal. Then I felt Hazni's activity as they began to rummage around my archive, flagging various records and queuing them. It wasn't exactly the same as being touched but it still felt deeply gross. An odd whirring sensation started up in my head. I felt my eyes unfocus and begin involuntarily flicking back and forth as I fell once again into an uncontrolled replay loop of my own stored memories.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I experienced a few system crashes and emergency shutdowns, but Hazni must have not pushed me as hard, because I didn't wake up in the cubicle this time. That was good on some level but I still felt terrible and my performance reliability was hovering around 67 percent. It also meant my fried energy weapons weren't getting repaired, not that I could have used them anyway due to the pain in the ass malware I still needed to find and remove. I moved that to the top of my to do list.
+
+When my systems were fully back online, I ran a quick situation assessment. I was back in the security ready room with Other SecUnit, who was standing in place in typical SecUnit fashion. I could have put myself into the cubicle but I wasn't sure it was worth it, plus being in there still made me kind of uneasy. My scans showed Hazni somewhere else on the ship, without schematics I couldn't be sure what was located there or what they were doing. Threat assessment was low. For the moment, nobody cared what I was doing as long as I wasn't making trouble or trying to escape.
+
+I ran back my recording of Hazni poking around in my brain and tried to ignore how disgusting it felt. I still couldn't identify a pattern in their selection of records; I didn't know what they were looking for. Reviewing the data cleared the last bit of lingering confusion in my organic brain, however, and my performance reliability shot up to 71 percent. I suddenly remembered the code I had managed to inject into SecSystem. Oh yeah, nevermind, that's what's going at the top of my to do list.
+
+I'd need to be careful so Other SecUnit wouldn't detect what I was doing but I had lots of practice hiding my feed activity. I fine-tuned my wall a little, started up a script for shielding I hadn't needed to use since before Mensah bought me, and sent a cautious ping to the feed address my code should have established.
+
+SecSystem immediately pinged back.
+
+I made sure to keep the relief out of my expression. Okay, score one for me, but I still had to get in and do my work undetected.
+
+Something I may have mentioned before, the company is almost as paranoid as I am. Everyone on a contract knows every one of their actions is being monitored and recorded and data mined, and mostly they all just accept it because there isn't anything you can really do about it. Still, there's always clients who try to hide some proprietary or personal information and prevent it from being reported back. (If you actually like your clients, there are some ways you can help with this, especially when you don't have a functional governor module to answer to and when you have a lot of experience keeping your own secrets from the company systems. Most of the time your clients don't deserve this. But every so often it might seem worth your while to shift data around in just such a way where a few recordings get lost in an unfortunate and completely unpreventable and irreversible accident.) The company is well aware of the most common methods clients use to try to outwit them and has their techs install administrative backdoors in every system to deal with it. Because the company is also cheap and lazy, the safeguards on these backdoors are laughable and they're incredibly vulnerable as soon as you know they exist. As company property built to interface with these systems, of course I knew they existed.
+
+I didn't know much about the ship I was on but chances were good it had been owned by Palisade at some point. Their tech would be proprietary but I was counting on them being just about as paranoid and lazy as my bond company. The code bundle I'd inserted would mark the location of one of these backdoors with a known feed address and convince SecSystem I had the correct credentials to be accessing it this way. Step one looked good so far. Time to see if I can get access.
+
+Tracing the ping back to its origin, I reminded SecSystem I was an authorized administrative user. It considered this for a little longer than I would have liked. Then it cheerfully let me in and all of a sudden my feed expanded, flooded with data, and I was feeling better than I had since I'd left on this stupid mission. I reached greedily for inputs, grabbing every camera feed I could find and savoring the sensation of being grounded and steady again. The chances of me knowing what the hell was going on increased by a solid 23 percent. I started downloading anything that seemed even remotely helpful without examining the files too closely, I could sort it all out later. At the same time, I found the bot pilot and cozied up to it, telling it I was a normal part of SecSystem it didn't need to worry or think about. It was a pretty limited model and seemed completely satisfied with that explanation, which was a relief because I really didn't want to fight it for control or take it over if I didn't have to.
+
+I was switching through the camera views I'd collected to see what intel I could pick up when a wall slammed down hard and I was abruptly ejected back to my own limited feed. I was so startled I took an involuntary step back. I couldn't see through Other SecUnit's opaque helmet faceplate but it had turned its head in my direction. It had kicked me out of the ship's systems and it wanted me to know. Fuck.
+
+It was still standing there without pointing any weapons at me and nothing had activated the malware to deliver punishment, at least for now. I couldn't pick up on its feed activity well enough to know if it was calling Hazni. I had no idea what to say but this was really awkward and it felt like I had to say something. I opened a channel.
+
+You don't have to do this, I sent. Great, very convincing, that will go over well for sure. I tried adding, You don't have to do any of this. You can be free. I can help you.
+
+My track record with this kind of thing is decidedly mixed; I'm not very good at it. I hadn't even known how to help myself when I'd first hacked my governor module. (Let's be honest, I still didn't know how to help myself.) I tried not to think about the Combat SecUnit on TranRollinHyfa and focused on 3 instead.
+
+You are a rogue Unit, Other SecUnit replied. You are broken, not free.
+
+This wasn't a great start but at least it hadn't said it wanted to kill me yet like the Combat SecUnit. Instead of responding, I figured I'd try what had worked before. I went through my files and pulled together some of the better memories, times I'd spent with ART watching media, times I'd hung around my humans and actually been sort of okay with it and they hadn't been afraid of me, times I'd been able to make my own decisions and tell humans no or question them without suffering awful consequences. I made sure to include some clips of 3 to show how it had freed itself just like me. I scrubbed some of the emotional data from the files because I didn't need this SecUnit thinking about whatever annoying feelings I was having about ART and 3 before I left that I also did not want to be thinking about now. Then I edited everything together and sent it over, version 2.0 of HelpMe.file that Murderbot 2.0 had once used to convince 3 to give up the entire world it knew and trust some weird killware in its feed asking it for help.
+
+I could feel Other SecUnit's wariness but it accepted the file after scanning it for threats. I started sorting through my downloads from SecSystem, giving it a moment to review what I'd sent. This was different from when 2.0 had done this with 3 on the Barish-Estranza explorer. 2.0 had been asking for help rescuing humans then. That's a SecUnit's function, we have protocol for that. Sure, it was still being asked to make an absolutely terrifying change to its whole existence but doing that to fulfill its function made for a more compelling argument than pleading for this SecUnit to risk it all just to save me. Murderbots don't have much of a reason to care about helping other murderbots. Even so, I really wanted this to work, I couldn't help it, and not just because I actually might need a hand to get out of here.
+
+I still couldn't see Other SecUnit's expression but I was getting hints of its uneasiness in the feed. It flashed a few of my own clips back at me to highlight them. Mensah seizing the collar of my jacket and telling me no while I glared down at her, leaking on the floor of the shuttle. Me telling Gurathin to fuck off and making a rude gesture in his direction while he looked infuriatingly amused by it. Arguing with Thiago as I sat on a bunk in ART's crew quarters, interrupting him and shutting down all his stupid points, finally getting to show him just how wrong he was. Pin-Lee and I sniping sarcastically at each other in a familiar way.
+
+You behave like a human, Other SecUnit said. Among humans. They allow it. It seemed confused.
+
+Okay, ouch, that was kind of offensive. I don't behave like a human, I objected. I behave like me. Like a person. The person that I am.
+
+I sent over another clip. Mensah on the ramp of the hopper in the middle of the jungle on the survey planet, looking just to the side of me, intentionally avoiding eye contact to make me comfortable. Asking me to let the survey team see my face, to stop hiding. ""It would be better if they could think of you as a person who is trying to help. Because that's how I think of you.""
+
+I felt Other SecUnit's distress increase. I tried to pretend it was a scared, injured client I had to retrieve and attempted to make myself sound gentle. (I have a fairly mixed track record with this too.) I know it's weird. Maybe it will always be weird, I don't know. But there's more than this. I can give you the code to hack your governor module. You can get away from here and see for yourself.
+
+For three whole minutes, Other SecUnit said nothing. It was a pause so long even humans and augmented humans would have picked up on it. Then, finally, it said, We are not meant to be like them. That is not our function. It turned its faceplate away from me to stare at the wall. Do not attempt to access SecSystem again or I will be compelled to report you to Consultant Hazni.
+
+Abruptly, my insides were full of a knot of complicated things and I was exhausted. I wanted to go somewhere private but it wasn't an option. Right, yeah, that's enough emotions for now. There were no chairs in the room but there were a few storage cases about the right height. I very deliberately sat down on one, put my feet up on another, and leaned back against the wall. Whatever, it was fine, I could do this myself without this asshole SecUnit. I didn't care. There was no reason for me to care. I went back to sorting through the information I'd managed to retrieve from the ship's SecSystem.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+After thoroughly examining the SecSystem downloads and completing a full analysis, I came to a few conclusions.
+
+Conclusion 1: Hazni had formerly worked for Palisade as a security supervisor before my bond company had, as I'd correctly believed, obliterated Palisade for attacking the company gunship. Conclusion 2: This ship was a small shuttle that had belonged to Palisade along with Other SecUnit. It was probable Hazni had taken them both on their way out as Palisade went under. (Now that I thought about it, that made a lot more sense than Palisade continuing to exist and tracking me down for revenge or something, but I was having a bad time and a really long couple of cycles and I thought I could be excused for that lapse in logic. (Come to think of it, I wasn't sure how long I had been here, considering the damage to my buffer and my lost memories.))
+
+Okay, things were making sense so far, but I was still getting tripped up on what Hazni wanted with me. Conclusion 3: We weren't at ScorVolan anymore, or at least weren't docked. I hadn't gotten enough data to determine where we were. I picked up the hint of a public feed from a station or transit ring but we were just at the edge of its range and I couldn't get anything useful before I'd been forcefully pulled out of SecSystem.
+
+So, Hazni might be taking me somewhere, or they might just be holding me captive here until...what? They found something they wanted in my archive? I didn't really have anything useful in there. I mean, I was sort of attached to some of it but I didn't see why anyone else would care. Somehow I doubted they were interested in a complete catalog of every character that had ever appeared on Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. They didn't even work for Palisade anymore, because Palisade was gone, and they already had their own SecUnit, so what information would an independent security consultant possibly need that would be unique to me for some reason?
+
+Oh shit, hang on. Wait. This is bad. This is really really bad.
+
+I was still sitting on the storage cases in the ready room with Other SecUnit standing guard nearby. I really wanted to get up and start patrolling to take the edge off my anxiety but I wasn't allowed to leave this compartment and it would look stupid if I started pacing around in here. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall.
+
+Hazni had known from the beginning that I was a rogue and didn't have a functioning governor module. That was the reason they had installed the malware to keep me obedient. It's possible this fact about me was revealed somehow during the gap that was missing from my memories. But now that I knew Hazni had worked for Palisade, I was forming another hypothesis. Or a theory, whichever word I mean. Whatever, the point was that back on TranRollinHyfa, Palisade had been contracted by GrayCris to kill Mensah and me, a SecUnit the newsbursts described as ""unsecured."" Some GrayCris executives had suspected me of operating under Mensah's orders, but it wouldn't have been hard to figure out that wasn't accurate. I hadn't even killed the Palisade Combat SecUnit whose governor module I offered to disable. Hell, I told that fucking GrayCris rep Serrat to his face that I'm a rogue, then choked him out and left him alive in the hotel room so my Preservation humans wouldn't freak out.
+
+I was an idiot. Hazni had lured me here fully prepared to subjugate me because they knew what I was. And now it was incredibly obvious why they were rifling around in my archive. They were aware I'd hacked my own governor module but they wanted to know how I'd done it and they were searching for the memory that would tell them.
+
+When a corporation ceases to exist, whether that's because of a hostile takeover or bankruptcy or whatever, the outcomes for human and augmented human employees are usually not so good. Assets and property (including SecUnits) are expensive and valuable so we're likely to get bought or have our ownership transferred or even be stolen by another company depending on the circumstances. But human labor is cheap and abundant. A lot of the time, a bunch of employees are killed outright to stifle competition or dispose of highly-positioned executives or whatever. I mean sure, usually it's dead bodies showing up mysteriously or employees having completely random unexpected accidents and so on, and everyone acts completely baffled. Often employees are just left to fend for themselves and end up in shitty contract-labor slavery or something similar like the humans I'd met as Security Consultant Rin aboard Transport on my way to HaveRatton. (Being a SecUnit sucks but being a human can suck a lot too, especially in the Corporation Rim.) Every so often, if they're smart and lucky and if they have something profitable enough to offer, employees can get work with another corporation. It was clear Hazni was both smart and lucky. If they could reverse engineer my hack and code a countermeasure module, they would probably have enough leverage to secure an executive role at a company of their choosing. And they could sell the module along with two SecUnits to that company to sweeten the deal.
+
+If you're thinking that at this point I should have just deleted the memory of my hack, you're probably right. The way Hazni was controlling me had me more rattled than I wanted to admit. It felt like my life had been before Dr. Mensah bought me, half-assing my job with asshole clients on dumb contracts, just waiting until I could hide out somewhere and download media or until I would be put in storage and wouldn't have to deal with anyone. Some stupid irrational part of my organic brain was trying to tell me that I had been in stasis in a cubicle this whole time, just like a plotline on one of my shows. None of the GrayCris incident had actually happened, I'd never met my PreservationAux humans or ART or 3, I was just damaged and hallucinating. When I woke up I would be back with the company like I was supposed to be, in a transport box on my way to my next contract where if I was lucky my clients would only shoot me by accident. Like Other SecUnit said, that was my function. I knew it would have been safer and smarter, but I couldn't make myself purge the knowledge of how to free myself.
+
+I realized I had increased my air intake and was taking bigger breaths than usual. My core temperature had climbed and performance reliability had dropped by 4 percent. Other SecUnit was hovering at the edge of my feed, uncertain and on guard. Without access to drones or cameras, I couldn't see my own face, but I felt tension in my skin and muscles and knew I didn't have my expression under control. Opening my eyes, I glared at Other SecUnit.
+
+What? I snapped in the feed.
+
+
+Query: you are agitated.
+
+
+
+Yeah, and?
+
+
+It paused, then asked, Query: do you require assistance?
+
+I couldn't help it, I snorted. Sure, get me off this shuttle.
+
+
+I am not permitted to assist you with escape.
+
+
+Being observed by another SecUnit wasn't the same as being looked at by humans and augmented humans but I wanted to be alone and I didn't like that it was here. Plus, it was an asshole and I didn't want to interact with it right now (or ever, really).
+
+
+Query: do you require cubicle repair?
+
+
+
+I don't need to get in the damn cubicle. Leave me alone.
+
+
+I thought that did it, it finally shut up. I worked on stabilizing my body's functions and returning to neutral SecUnit standard. I started an episode of Timestream Defenders Orion that I'd seen before and tried not to think about ART too much.
+
+After five minutes, Other SecUnit tapped my feed again. Query: you are viewing entertainment media created by humans.
+
+For fuck's sake. I stared hard at the wall and tried to ignore it.
+
+
+The files you transmitted contained multiple instances of this activity. Query: are you gathering data or intel to perform analysis?
+
+
+I didn't know what to say to that. Did it really think I was somehow using an unrealistic action serial to calculate an escape strategy? How the fuck would I do that?
+
+Other SecUnit considered briefly. Query: what is the purpose of this activity? 
+
+I was about to shoot back something sarcastic but it occurred to me it might actually be asking a genuine question. The suspicion and wariness I was expecting to hear in its tone weren't there. I wasn't sure what it was getting at and I was tired of talking to it and having to have emotions so I just said, I don't know.
+
+It went quiet again but I still felt it at the edge of my feed. Its presence wasn't as looming as ART's but it was still pretty clear it was trying to curiously peer at what I was doing over my metaphorical shoulder. On most contracts, with a HubSystem in place to closely monitor your every action, something like this was certain to trigger punishment from your governor module and wouldn't be worth the risk. SecUnits weren't allowed on armed transports unless we were inert cargo packed into boxes, so my experience aboard ships was pretty limited, but with only a SecSystem to watch you it would be a little easier to escape notice and therefore punishment. Anyway, that was Other SecUnit's problem, not mine.
+
+When the episode finished, I decided to queue up and rewatch the first episode of the serial. I wasn't doing it for any particular reason, it just happened to be a good one and I liked how the show started. And sure, I continued on to the next few episodes in sequence after that, but I just needed to watch media for a while to relax and get my performance reliability back up. I didn't care what Other SecUnit was doing. It could do whatever it wanted.
+
+After Timestream Defenders Orion, I switched over to watching Sanctuary Moon episodes I'd seen before, which would be less of a distraction for me. Other SecUnit was still in my feed. That was fine. I had work to do.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+Hazni used MedSystem to search my memories twice more before my systems were scrambled and corrupted enough that I had to be put in the cubicle. I couldn't restart fully from my latest catastrophic crash but I had just enough awareness to feel myself being held around the waist and carried like I would do to a human client I was retrieving. It was deeply weird even though 3 had done it to me once before when we first met. Wait a minute, where was I? Was I being carried by 3? I had to warn it and ART about the contaminated code in me and TargetContact chasing me. I reached out, trying to send an alert into the feed, which caused my reliability to tank and sent me into another involuntary shutdown.
+
+Waking up in the cubicle was still annoying but less disorienting this time. My systems were reconstructing themselves at a steady rate. I wasn't sure how long I could hold off Hazni but my efforts so far were helping, so yay for that. Maybe I couldn't do the smart thing and bring myself to delete the memory but I sure as hell could make it harder to find. Extracting it from my archive, I'd applied additional encryption to the file, created a small partition in an extremely boring section of my knowledge base where I had some free space (emergency protocols for ensuring client safety in the event of various extreme planetary weather conditions), and dumped it there. Using duplicated data from my knowledge base as a wrapper, I concealed the memory file and stored the whole thing as a spectrogram to disguise what it contained. Yeah, that meant I couldn't remember the details of how to execute my governor module hack since I'd broken the memory's connection to my archive, but at least I'd regain the information once I restored it.
+
+I wasn't sure what Hazni might do if this went on for long enough without them getting what they wanted. But I didn't plan to stick around to find out.
+
+Having time to sit and watch media earlier had helped clear my reasoning some and I thought I'd worked out how to isolate the malware infection. The general scans I'd run on myself had turned up nothing so I thought it must be designed to mimic one of my actual processes to avoid detection. If that was true, it would have killed the real instance of that process so I wouldn't notice any suspicious redundancies. Checking for what I should be able to do and couldn't might help me identify the anomalous code. (Yes, that requires a lot of investigation and testing. No, I didn't say it would be easy.)
+
+I was totally immersed in analyzing and verifying my currently running processes when Other SecUnit pinged me from where it stood guard outside the cubicle. I had a little time to kill while some of my automated tests generated results, so I pinged back warily.
+
+
+Query: who is 3?
+
+
+This question startled me so much I accidentally terminated a scan I was running and had to restart it. I didn't know why it was asking me this and what I was supposed to say. My reaction must have bled into the feed; in response it sent me a recording I recognized as being from one of the shuttle's security cameras I couldn't access that showed it holding me around the waist and carrying me from the medical suite to the security ready room. I watched horrified as my body stirred and I mumbled something out loud. I boosted the audio on the clip to hear myself say, ""Contaminated hostile incoming. You have to warn them, 3."" Then I'd crashed. Okay, well, awesome. Great going, me.
+
+Why do you keep asking me so many questions? I sent back. SecUnits aren't permitted to communicate with each other. As soon as I said it, I knew it was a mistake. It was still capable of making my situation way harder than it already was. Sighing internally, I sent it a very short clip of 3 with all the underlying data scrubbed.
+
+This SecUnit appeared in the files you transmitted. You are... It hesitated, searching for a term. Associates?
+
+I held back a grimace. At least it didn't say friends or ""relationship"" or some other gross word like the humans always insisted on using. We're both SecUnits, I told it, meaning me and 3.
+
+We are both SecUnits, it replied, and I knew it meant itself and me. I didn't know what it was trying to say with that. I wasn't thrilled about this conversation which seemed like it was becoming a pattern. Stuff like this is why I don't like dealing with other murderbots. Well, that and the murdering. Usually of me and/or my clients.
+
+Just then one of the automated tests concluded and deposited the results into my feed along with a critical error. Oh yeah, there you are, you fucker. Now that I had a better idea what I was looking for, it was easy. I skimmed the report, noted the inactive connections to my language module despite the apparently active status of the module, ran a quick translation query. It aborted instantly, bouncing back with an error code. Yeah, it was definitely here. All right, asshole, let's do this; I was more than ready to get this garbage code out of me.
+
+The cubicle was done putting me back together and my performance reliability was maxed at 98 percent. (Which is about as high as it ever gets, I'm an imperfect murderbot after all. Turns out shoving human tissue and parts together with machine components introduces some compatibility and efficiency issues, who knew? And you thought the depression and anxiety were the only fun side effects of being a construct.) If there was ever going to be a moment for this, it was now. I booted an old company program and initiated a subroutine, feeding it the parameters I'd collected. It got to work. Within thirty-five seconds it detected the malware's signature and cut its access to any other functions, sectioning it off into a small quarantine space. Killing the active process, it began the work of deleting the malware and all associated code.
+
+When it signaled that it was finished, I initiated a restart sequence, aiming for a clean reboot. I came back online quickly and started running diagnostics.
+
+Other SecUnit picked up on the restart; it tapped my feed and sent a query.
+
+I'm fine. I disconnected the repair and resupply leads and stepped out of the cubicle. My damage had been internal so there wasn't any blood or fluids to wash off my body. I put the spare suit skin back on. Other SecUnit sent me a request for a performance report and I complied, compiling and transferring data on my status and levels in the hopes it would be satisfied and leave me alone. My diagnostics completed with a summary in my feed.
+
+The relief I felt reviewing my logs was so intense, I read them all the way through three times. The malware was gone. I was fully me again. Well, except for the re-activated data port, but you can't have everything. If--when--I managed to get out of here, ART could fix it for me.
+
+(I wondered what ART would make of Other SecUnit. Would ART warm up to it as fast as it did with 3? Why am I even thinking about this? They were never going to meet, there was no reason for it, and it's not like I wanted them to. I didn't want anything to do with Other SecUnit. I just wanted to make my escape, find ART and never think about any of this stuff ever again. Ugh. Thinking about ART was giving me a weird emotion I couldn't make any sense of and I really did not need to deal with that on top of everything else right now. Caring about anything is so exhausting. (Not that I ""care"" about ART but I liked being with it and watching entertainment media together. And it had threatened to bomb a colony to get me back which was a whole thing and it wasn't nothing but all that was still pretty confusing. Okay, I really need to stop talking about all of this.))
+
+I walked to the storage cases against the wall and sat down on them like before. Other SecUnit watched me without reacting, just guarding me like a good security construct. Reaching out with a scan, I located Hazni's energy signature. The schematic I downloaded during my short trip into SecSystem told me they were on the control deck. I felt them doing something in the feed with their implanted interface but I couldn't tell what without reestablishing my usual feed integration levels. I could do this now with the malware gone but if I got caught they would know I wasn't being controlled anymore. No, there had to be a better and sneakier way to go about this.
+
+The best thing would be to make my move when Hazni took a rest period. There was no telling when that would be and I had a lot to figure out before then. Sorting through my media, I picked one of my favorite music collections, queued it, and started writing code. Again, I felt Other SecUnit just at the edge of my feed, its presence curious. 3.8 seconds later, its attention shifted and it withdrew.
+
+Currently working on chapter 4 and it seems reasonable I could wrap this up a couple chapters after that, like maybe 6 total? But who knows, writing is mysterious, we will see what happens. Hope it's enjoyable so far, and huge thanks to postnomer who has helped a ton with feedback and edits!
+
+It took three hours and forty-one minutes for Hazni's energy signature to head to the area labeled as crew quarters on Shuttle's schematic, and another seven minutes for them to stop moving, probably lying down. I'd recorded enough humans and augmented humans sleeping to give me a pretty good estimate of when to act. I tossed a countdown in my feed for another hour and thirty-six minutes and kept working on my code.
+
+When the countdown timed out, I was ready. Or as much as I was going to be. My risk assessment module (yeah, the wonky one) was feeling good about my plan, which wasn't doing a single thing for my confidence. Well, I've had worse plans. (Getting 78 percent or more of your tactical training from fictional serials is not necessarily recommended.)
+
+This first part was probably the trickiest and I had to be really fast about it. Other SecUnit already proved to be better at detecting my activity than I anticipated. Lucky for me, it either hadn't found my entry point or hadn't done anything about it for whatever reason. Like before, I pinged the feed address I'd established for SecSystem's administrative backdoor, reminded it about my credentials, and let myself in.
+
+Within 0.05 seconds, I deployed the code I'd prepared. Code: StayOut. Every access key in SecSystem changed at once and the existing walls crumbled to be replaced with the ones I'd written. I saw Other SecUnit jerk in surprise where it was standing. Before it could do anything else, I was digging deep into SecSystem to find and transmit the right command. Other SecUnit's joints locked up as its governor module forced its body to respond to the directive to enter stand-down-and-freeze mode.
+
+I was already up on my feet and scanning the drones tucked into compartments in Other SecUnit's armor. They weren't a brand I'd used before but they were similar enough to my preferred small intel drones; I located the control codes without issue. As I gathered them around me, I started picking up inputs all over Shuttle, cycling through security cameras to choose the most helpful views. I confirmed Hazni was still asleep in their quarters and told SecSystem to lock the hatch in a way that wouldn't respond to their requests. I pulled up the ship's schematics, plotted myself a path. I left two drones (Sentry One and Sentry Two) behind to monitor Other SecUnit and another two (Sentries Three and Four) in the corridor as I exited the security ready room.
+
+Right, okay, this is more like it.
+
+I backburnered the inputs for the four drones and sent two more drones to scout ahead of me. As I moved along the corridors, I slid in with the bot pilot and reminded it I was supposed to be here. I showed it my SecSystem credentials and asked it where we were. Obligingly, it shared the nav data to my feed.
+
+Shuttle was still out of range of the public feed I'd picked up earlier and was holding position as Hazni had instructed, keeping out of the traffic coming and going from Port CapitalExchange, the nearby station, a mid-sized hub with just one transit ring like Port FreeCommerce. Still close to the edge of the Corporation Rim so we hadn't traveled extremely far from ScorVolan. Okay, that was something, though I still had no way to tell ART or anyone else where I was.
+
+I asked the bot pilot if it could bring Shuttle in to the transit ring for docking. It said sure. As far as it was concerned, my authorization was as good as Hazni's. Good, that was all I needed from it for now. Rounding a corner, I dropped the input and checked Scouts 1 and 2. Still clear, and no alerts from the sentry drones I'd left behind.
+
+I reached the nearest recycler, tucked into a compact alcove, and got it to produce a packet of clothes with whatever default settings were already configured. Quickly, I stripped off the suit skin and dressed. The shirt and pants were a looser cut and brighter colors than I liked but I couldn't afford to be picky right now. The shirt's sleeves also weren't long enough to cover my gunports, which was a bigger problem. In the packet, I found a pair of some kind of extended fingerless gloves made with thick material that seemed to fit down over my forearms. I had no reference for how humans wore these so I hoped I was putting them on correctly. The recycler had given me soft shoes instead of sturdy work boots like I preferred but it would have to be good enough. I had no intention of hanging out where humans and augmented humans could see me or interact with me any longer than was strictly necessary.
+
+I found the storage lockers in the access to the main hatch exactly where I'd marked them on Shuttle's schematics. No knapsacks, but a beat-up empty shoulder bag was stuffed into the back of one of the lockers. I grabbed it, checking on the drones in the ready room. Other SecUnit was still motionless, frozen in place. I brought the camera view of Hazni's quarters to the front of my attention and--shit. They were awake now, on their feet and messing with the hatch controls for the bunkroom. I ran back the recording a little. Yeah, as soon as Shuttle's engines activated to start moving, Hazni had jerked awake, which I'd been worried about. I couldn't do anything about the manual emergency release through SecSystem though, so it was only a matter of time before they got out.
+
+I tapped the bot pilot again and pulled nav data. We weren't far from the station but Port Authority was reporting a five to seven minute docking delay. I wanted to stay where I was and not stray too far from the main hatch access so I could get out of here as soon as we were docked. I redirected Scouts 1 and 2, sending them in the direction of Hazni's quarters. Reaching out through SecSystem, I started closing and sealing every open hatch I could find as soon as the drones had passed through. It wouldn't stop them but it would buy me some time.
+
+I put the remainder of the drones into standby and packed them into the shoulder bag. The pants I had on didn't have as many pockets as the type I liked. I kind of missed ART's crew uniform.
+
+Now that I could get access to the transit ring feed, it was time for my contingency plan. Not that I thought my regular plan wasn't going to work, but only human security is stupid enough not to prepare for the worst. I ran a news search on the public feeds, filtering for the most popular stories that showed the highest engagement metrics. I tagged one that looked promising. Bringing up the code I'd written, I edited the parameters to match the particular newsburst I'd chosen. There was just one more detail I needed before I could deploy Code: SOS(ShitObfuscatedStrategically).
+
+The easiest way to get the encryption keys that grant you permission to alter newsbursts is probably to steal them directly from the news channel that distributed the story in the first place. I had never tried it, on account of mostly not caring about the news so long as I wasn't in it, but I'd listened to the company techs talk enough shit about the techs that worked for the news corporations on Port FreeCommerce to know news channel security was pretty simple to hack. If you can't get to the source channel for the broadcast, other news channels are likely your next best bet. Shuttle was still too far out from the transit ring for me to have the feed access to attempt this. So it looked like I was going to have to steal the keys from PortSec.
+
+I wouldn't suggest hacking the Port Authority systems if you can avoid it, but in this case I really couldn't, I needed those encryption keys if this idea was going to work. I knew PortSec would have them for emergency situations when they had to distribute public safety information or alter newsbursts at the request of StationSec. (Usually when some company paid them off to remove or change certain information. Yeah, they can do that. Yes, that should worry you.) Reaching out, I connected to the PA public feed, used it to find the protected PortSec feed, and started a very careful hack.
+
+A warning popped up from Scout 2; I didn't have a lot of processing power to spare but I checked its camera. Hazni had gotten the hatch open and was moving down the corridor, alert and armed with the small projectile weapon they kept at their hip. I felt them in the feed with their implanted interface probing the walls I'd set up in SecSystem.
+
+Then I was inside PortSec's feed and I backburnered Scout 2's cam so I could focus. The keys weren't used that frequently, so they were probably stored in a database table that hadn't been updated in forever. I took a guess at some useful criteria and started a search.
+
+I risked a quick glance back at the drone cam. Hazni was at the first hatch I'd sealed with the energy weapon in their augment deployed. Aiming their right arm, they fired into the control panel to overload the sensors and activate the manual controls. Their face looked focused and intent, wary but not panicked. They clearly knew what they were doing, and that meant I was running low on time.
+
+Shuttle was nearing its assigned docking slot. My PortSec search finally concluded just as I felt the familiar clanking through the soles of my shoes. I asked the bot pilot to let me out and it cycled the lock. Every part of me wanted to run but I forced myself to step through and maintain an average walking speed to avoid drawing attention as I skimmed each result the search had deposited in my feed. In the background, I started pulling maps, transit schedules, and station information from the public feeds. Entertainment media downloads hung enticingly in the air but they would have to wait; I just didn't have the processing power.
+
+Hazni was working at the controls for the second hatch now. At least my SecSystem walls were still holding. For now. I'd just have to hope for the best since I was about to move out of range of Shuttle's feed and my sentry/scout drones and it wasn't worth setting up a relay to keep monitoring. In the moment before I dropped the inputs, I sent Scout 1 and Scout 2 accelerating at Hazni's face. I lost the camera views and kept walking.
+
+Even without the inputs from Shuttle, hacking the ID-screening system, security drones, and weapons scans on the embarkation floor while sorting through everything I was downloading kept me busy enough I barely had time to think about how much I hated being among the crowds of humans and augmented humans moving along the walkways with me. (I barely had time but I definitely devoted at least a little time to thinking about it. We were still in the Corporation Rim where I'm illegal and being around so many humans always made me feel so uncomfortably exposed. Have I mentioned how I miss my armor?)
+
+Then finally I had it, buried in a forgotten corner of the PortSec database. I copied the encryption keys to my storage and backed out of the PortSec feed, deleting all traces of my presence as I went. I updated Code: SOS, attached the compressed file I'd prepared, and set it to loop with the conditions I'd specified earlier. Then I sent it into the public feed.
+
+Right, okay, that's done. No one was chasing me and I hadn't picked up any StationSec alerts. Time to figure out my next move. And, yeah, maybe now I would grab some media downloads.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+When I said no one was chasing me, it wasn't a lie, but those circumstances really didn't last as long as I needed them to. I was still moving along a walkway away from the private docks when I caught the ping. I seized control of a nearby security drone and directed its camera toward Shuttle's docking slot. Fuck, not only had Hazni made it through all the sealed hatches, they'd retrieved Other SecUnit and were already on the station. I sped up a little, careful to stay within the range of reasonable human speed. It was all right if it looked like I was in a rush but I was still aiming to stay inconspicuous or things would get much more complicated for me than they already were. (Things are pretty much always complicated for me, you might have noticed.)
+
+Without my governor module or the malware, I didn't have to respond to Other SecUnit's ping, but Hazni didn't know for sure I'd scrubbed the malware, so I guess they figured it was worth a shot. It was a mistake on their part. Maybe the first one they'd made, because now I knew how much more urgent the situation was. From the transit schedules, I'd already identified a potential transport I could take, not bot-piloted but I didn't have the luxury of time to convince a ship to let me board or to wait for any of the lower-priority cargo ship departure times. Besides, as much as I hated to admit it, having human witnesses around was going to work in my favor here. Murderbots aren't allowed in the public areas of stations except in transport boxes. (For good reason, we're dangerous.) That meant Hazni would have to leave Other SecUnit behind or at least refrain from ordering it to openly attack me if they wanted to keep a low profile.
+
+I turned at a junction towards the access to the public docks, hacking a few security cameras and a weapons scan as I went. I didn't have any hard currency cards or ID markers with me which was going to make this a lot harder than the last time I'd taken a passenger transport. My options were pretty limited if I wanted to get going as fast as possible though, which I did. At this point, speed mattered more than destination, I could worry about where I was and how to get back to ART as soon as I wasn't one step away from everything going to hell.
+
+Then I reached the public docks, and in that same moment, everything went to hell.
+
+Alerts tagged with Port Authority and Station Security suddenly clogged the feed, a crowded stream of delay notifications and revised departure times. I reached for the closest StationSec drone and checked the comm traffic it was relaying. It was chaotic, hard to follow, but I could work out: (1) the PA systems that granted departure authorization were malfunctioning in a way that was wreaking havoc and (2) the PA and security staff had no idea what was causing it or what to do about it, and nobody was being particularly calm.
+
+There was no question, it had to be Other SecUnit.
+
+Well, shit. I cycled through camera feeds. Oh yeah, they were coming. Even without its armor, I could spot it right away, it was acting about as awkward and not-quite-human as I had when I first left Port FreeCommerce. Some humans and augmented humans glanced at it uncertainly as it passed, but Hazni was with it and they were moving fast, probably counting on the distraction to keep station security off their back. They'd obviously guessed I was headed for the public docks.
+
+Ugh, okay, I could still do this. Sure, the probability of this ending in disaster had shot up to 67 percent, but I've pulled off much dumber ideas with much worse odds. I realized I had to dump my shoulder bag. I really didn't want to but if Other SecUnit got within range it would be able to ping the drones I'd stolen and potentially even take control of them again. Humans were bunching up in confused clusters ahead of me in the embarkation zone as they stopped to read the feed alerts and figure out their altered travel plans. Some who were transporting heavy or bulky luggage set the bags down at their feet. Pretending to be searching schedules, I wandered over to a group of about 25 loosely gathered humans who all had that distant look they get when they're focused on their feed. Putting down the shoulder bag, I stood around for another sixteen seconds to make sure no one was paying attention to me, then walked away, immediately losing myself in another cluster. I wasn't thrilled about having to lose the drones and also part of my augmented human disguise.
+
+Hazni was getting close. Every bit of my instinct and programming was screaming at me to run but I was still trying to do this carefully and without drawing attention. I headed for the walkway leading up to the transit ring mall, removing myself from camera footage and sorting my inputs as I walked. The closer I got to the mall, the more the feed buzzed with the clamor of ads vying to be seen and heard, drowning out any potentially helpful information. With no money, ID marker, or supplies, I figured my next step should be seeing if I could hack a kiosk for anything at all I could use, I didn't know what yet. Yeah, I know, it wasn't great, but things were happening fast and I was making this up as I went.
+
+That was when the input I had riding a StationSec drone's cam threw a warning. I ran back the recording three seconds, realized what was going on, and finally broke out into a run.
+
+I couldn't get to anywhere near my top speed since I had to avoid slamming into anyone as I switched rapidly through my inputs, trying to balance checking the ring and station maps with monitoring my situation. In the camera footage, Other SecUnit had caught sight of me and was closing in.
+
+When something unexpected is happening, humans like to stand around being in the way and look right at it for some reason. Startled travelers were stopping in their tracks to stare at me as I raced past. I didn't know what would happen if Other SecUnit caught up with me with so many witnesses around. I'd assumed Hazni would want to avoid that kind of scrutiny, but what if they were willing to just pay off station security, and if they had enough to offer to make the problem go away? Come to think of it, how had they taken me off ScorVolan in the first place? With that data corrupted, I still didn't know.
+
+There was no way I could lose them with everyone looking at me like this (it was as gross and terrible as it sounds), and I was passing security cameras too quickly now to hack them. This was getting worse for me by the second. Threat assessment was spiking off the charts. I had to get to somewhere I could hide for long enough to shake the pursuit and obscure my trail.
+
+I reached the ring mall and made my way across a wide multi-level plaza surrounded by kiosks and vending machines and food service counters. The area was crowded with floating advertising displays and holo art, loud with the competing chatter of humans and ads shouting for attention. I knew from the maps there were two empty storefronts up ahead where businesses had recently shut down; I went for the closer one.
+
+The relief of no longer having eyes on me hit me harder than a hauler bot as I ducked inside, but I couldn't stop now. Sprinting across the abandoned space, I exited through the back and took a vertical passage down to a shared product storage area. I was making my way to a different exit when I heard an energy weapon. My left hip joint took the hit and I stumbled, off balance, then dove sideways as a second blast passed through the air where I'd been standing.
+
+Fuck me, I was so caught up monitoring inputs, filtering out stupid feed ads, trying to work out my next move, worrying about all the humans noticing me, and just kind of dealing with everything that I'd miscalculated. I thought I was further ahead and that I could get through the retail space faster. Now we were out of sight and the only two cameras in here were simple to hack. Instead of losing the assholes chasing me, I'd led them to the perfect spot to make their move. Yeah, I was really fucking this up again, and now I was in a lot of trouble.
+
+My scan told me Other SecUnit hadn't grabbed any of the drones I left behind and without its armor we were more evenly matched. Its usual projectile weapon was way too big to bring onto the transit ring but as I came up out of my dive to face it, it withdrew a smaller projectile weapon from a deep pants pocket and shot at my head. (I experienced a brief flash of jealousy for those pockets. I was still stuck with these much less helpful pants. What is the whole thing with human clothes, why do they even design stuff you can't carry other stuff in?)
+
+Ducking, I threw myself forward, tearing at the weird long gloves covering my forearms so I could open my gunports. I slammed my shoulder hard into Other SecUnit's midsection but it braced itself and stayed upright. Swinging my right arm up, I fired my energy weapon into its face. Here I had the advantage; it was used to fighting with the protection of armor and a helmet. It staggered back a few steps and I pushed forward, now shooting rapidly with both energy weapons extended.
+
+Its facial features relaxed a bit in a way that probably meant the organic tissue was starting to go numb. Still, energy weapons are not what you ideally want to bring to a murderbot fight. Other SecUnit dropped to get out of my line of fire and hit me in the right knee joint with two projectiles. My leg buckled under me and I turned the motion into a roll sideways and forward. I rammed into Other SecUnit's side as hard as I could, pushing it to the ground.
+
+I got on top of it, pinning its arms with my legs, but my damaged knee meant I couldn't apply as much pressure as I would otherwise. I broke its wrist joint, then before I could wrestle the projectile weapon away it threw me off its right side and shot me a few times in the shoulders and chest, its hand hanging strange but still functional.
+
+I didn't know where Hazni was and having hostiles unaccounted for makes me nervous. No time for me to figure it out now, though. This was also not the moment to think about how I was seeing Other SecUnit's face for the first time. There was something complicated going on with its expression that I couldn't make any sense of. It wasn't the usual ""I'm focused on trying to kill you"" kind of look that I would've expected. Then again, almost every other SecUnit I'd fought had been in armor, maybe they all had weird stuff going on under there.
+
+I managed to hit Other SecUnit with more energy weapon fire but in return took more projectile damage. This would have been the only time in my life I'd be thrilled (okay, marginally relieved) if station security showed up, but no such luck.
+
+The floor was getting slick with blood and fluids, mostly mine. I had tuned down my pain sensors at the first opportunity. I've taken on way bigger and stronger hostiles than this one dumb SecUnit but I was clearly getting the absolute crap kicked out of me, and I wasn't feeling great about it. What is going on with you, Murderbot?
+
+Sure, I was at a disadvantage when it came to firepower, I knew that much. It was hardly the first time, though. I thought about taking on the overridden SecUnits at the DeltFall habitat with Dr. Mensah, the way I'd actually had a smart human to work with and could strategize a decent plan. I remembered the combat bots on the terraforming facility on Milu. Okay, obviously Wilken had been a backstabbing fucker but she'd still helped. So had Miki. No--not that, no, I didn't want to think about Miki. Then there had been the Palisade SecUnits during my rescue of Mensah, the Targets (sorry Thiago, the colonists) ART sent to kidnap me, the whole thing with targetControlSystem... And yeah, every damn time. Gurathin and Mensah opening the barrier for me to escape to the shuttle. Amena with me the whole time on what I'd thought was ART's corpse, talking through my plans, trying to figure things out with me. 3 showing up to save me because ART was trying to blow up the whole planet like a dumbass.
+
+My analysis had isolated the pattern and was indicating one logical conclusion but that can't really be it, can it? Okay, maybe they'd all assisted a little here and there but I was the one protecting them. That was my job. In most of those situations, I'd been with humans, a lot of the time clients or close enough. I was their SecUnit, I was supposed to keep them alive. Besides which, I fought (and killed) my way through terrifying fauna, other murderbots, and sometimes humans on plenty of contracts before I went rogue. Lots of times by myself. This is what I do. This is the whole point of me existing in the first place. No, it was stupid to think that I needed them, that I needed help. I'm a heartless killing machine; I don't need allies. I don't know why I was even thinking about any of this.
+
+I aimed more energy weapon blasts at Other SecUnit's legs as I sprinted towards the wall. I went up it as much as my blown knee joint would allow, launched myself off, and landed on Other SecUnit with a crash. We both went down and I kicked its shoulder hard with my good leg, knocking its arm out of alignment. It tried to punch me with its other arm and I dodged, catching its wrist and breaking its elbow.
+
+Its dislocated arm was still gripping the projectile weapon. I grabbed for it but it kicked me in the chest with enough force that I felt something crack around my ribs. Ow. In the 0.8 seconds it took me to recover, it jammed its shoulder joint back together just enough to lift the weapon and shoot me again.
+
+I was pushing to my feet, ready to throw myself at it, when an explosive bolt to my right hip dropped me. My performance reliability plummeted.
+
+I had to reconstruct what happened by reviewing my recordings later. As soon as I hit the ground, Hazni stepped into the storage area and shot me with another explosive bolt. I couldn't get up. I could barely move. Then more projectiles were hitting me and my performance reliability was plunging to dangerous levels and--
+
+
+Critical failure imminent.
+
+
+The last thing I saw before my systems crashed was Other SecUnit's face looking down at me.
+
+
+Catastrophic reliability drop.
+
+
+
+Forced shutdown.
+
+
+
+Unit offline.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+* * *
+
+
+I'm almost certain the next chapter will be the last one. Currently working on it! Hopefully I will have it done before too long.
+
+When I came back online, I was afraid before I really knew why. Then my memory archive functions restarted and I remembered. Oh yeah, yikes, that escape had not gone well at all. But I'm not dead, which is something. I was very sick of seeing the inside of this cubicle, though. And there was a 93 percent chance I was now in worse trouble than before. Awesome.
+
+By the time I was 90 percent reconstructed again, I'd mostly stopped being afraid and was pissed off instead. As soon as I hit maximum performance reliability, I disconnected myself from the cubicle's leads, cleaned my new skin, and climbed out.
+
+Hazni wasn't waiting for me, but I hadn't really expected them to be. Other SecUnit was, which I'd also been expecting. It looked whole and fully functional again, so it must have been put in the cubicle before me. It pinged me with a request for a performance report.
+
+I really wasn't in the mood. One of the advantages of having a non-functional governor module is not having to do stuff you don't feel like doing. (There are lots of advantages but that's a big one.) I might be here against my will, but I still had that going for me. I ignored the request.
+
+SecSystem had been repaired, of course, its security keys changed and protections restored. That meant I didn't have access to anything anymore, which wasn't helping things. But--huh. I ran a quick diagnostic to make sure. As far as I could tell, the malware hadn't been reinstalled. That was...good? I guess? Or was it? Yeah, I really didn't know what that meant. Should I try connecting to SecSystem or was this some kind of trap? I was already stuck here, what would be the point in tricking and trapping me?
+
+Other SecUnit repeated its request and I ignored it again.
+
+I walked over to the wall, as far away as I could get, and leaned my head against it. I just needed to think for a minute. And to calm down, maybe. The level of stress hormones in my system wasn't doing me any favors. Hazni would probably be here soon to do something awful to me, I didn't know what. I didn't think there was much I could do about it. I was lacking useful tools or intel, which was making it challenging to develop any kind of strategy. Right now until I could come up with something else, I just had to hope my deployed Code: SOS would do its job. And I could try to get my shit together to be more prepared. I started up an episode of Chrono Champions: Time Tempest, an action serial so wildly unrealistic that I'd liked it instantly when ART and I had first watched it.
+
+
+Query: is your feed communication functional? Please respond.
+
+
+Ugh, this was like dealing with ART but without the sarcasm. I knew I had to say something because it wasn't going to just give up. Yes. Leave me alone.
+
+
+I am required to report to Consultant Hazni. Transmit your logs or performance data.
+
+
+I tried focusing harder on Chrono Champions and sent, No. Fuck off.
+
+Other SecUnit said nothing for thirty-four seconds. Then I felt its attention at the edges of my feed, investigating what I was doing. Immediately, I slammed down my walls to keep it out.
+
+There was another pause, this one shorter, then it said, Query: you are angry.
+
+Yeah, no shit. I'm fine, I told it, probably very convincingly. I didn't know if it could see my face with Shuttle's cameras.
+
+As usual, its helmet faceplate was opaqued to hide its expression and I had my eyes closed against the wall anyway but its reply sounded skeptical. (I would kill several people for the ability to hide my expression right now.) (That was a joke. (Sort of.)) Why do you refuse to share your data? 
+
+Why should I? I don't want to. This conversation already felt exhausting. Like this situation wasn't bad enough without an interrogation. I don't want to be here. 
+
+Other SecUnit considered. I realized I hadn't taken in anything that had happened in the last few minutes of Chrono Champions and ran back the episode to rewatch.
+
+Finally, it asked me, Are you angry because you sustained damage? You have been repaired.
+
+That was stupid and made no sense. SecUnits are built to be broken. I didn't know why it was prying for information like this, did Hazni need to know for some reason? A tangled up feeling that I couldn't figure out was twisting my insides. I felt my jaw clench hard, dropping my performance reliability by 3 points. I'm not mad about that. 
+
+Up until now, we had been facing away from each other, me still pressing my face into the coolness of the bulkhead while it stood and stared ahead at nothing. I heard its armor shifting and glanced back over my shoulder to see it had turned towards me.
+
+Then, without warning, its helmet cleared and suddenly I could see its face. Just like I had on Port CapitalExchange when we'd fought. Oh, okay, this was deeply weird, and I didn't like it at all. Looking in my direction but avoiding my gaze, it sent, You are angry, please clarify.
+
+Its whole reaction was so unexpected, and I was so caught off guard, that I accidentally said the truth out loud before I could stop myself. ""You came after me!"" I blurted out. ""You stopped me and helped them drag me back here!"" As soon as I said it, I knew it was dumb. ART would have made an insulting comment about SecUnits' capacity for irrational thinking, or told me my brain was compromised. Maybe it was. I didn't know what I was talking about. I had no idea why I felt so furious.
+
+I was trying really hard not to look at Other SecUnit or be aware of whether it was looking at me. It was clear it didn't understand my outburst any more than I did. It spoke its reply aloud too, using a patient tone like it was trying to explain something incredibly obvious to a client without triggering governor module punishment. ""I fulfilled my function as required by the orders issued from my client.""
+
+I knew that. Obviously I knew that. I was being an idiot. You know when humans do that thing where they aren't making any sense, probably even to themselves, but they just keep insisting on something anyway? Yeah, I've always hated that. (Even in media it can get annoying when they do it too much and it causes ridiculous arguments and misunderstandings that could've been easily avoided. That was why I had to stop watching Scandal Prime University after the first arc of the second season. It's even worse in real life, especially when I'm the one who has to deal with the possibly violent consequences of those arguments and misunderstandings. (Look, I know how this sounds, okay? I already said I was being an idiot.)) I thought I was feeling something similar to when I'd argued with ART after it had kidnapped me and my humans, I didn't know the name of it. It was a different kind of anger than I was used to. I didn't know what I was supposed to do or say. I felt confused and stupidly vulnerable. I turned away and put my head back against the bulkhead. I'd already been averting my eyes but I didn't want to catch a glimpse of Other SecUnit's face anymore at all.
+
+Back when I first met ART, I told it bots and constructs can't trust each other because humans can make us do whatever they want. Maybe I'd gotten a little too comfortable with ART and 3 and forgotten this crucial rule. Why the hell would I trust this enemy SecUnit anyway? Okay, I tried to get it to hack its governor module, sure. But it had refused and all it was doing was helping Hazni keep me here. It was an asshole, not my friend or anything. It's not like I wanted it to be. I'd messed up by not just disabling or killing it when I had control of SecSystem. Something was really wrong with me, I was acting way too much like an illogical emotional human. (ART would've had something insulting to say about that too. As I may have mentioned at some point, ART is an asshole.)
+
+I heard the quiet scraping of armor plates as Other SecUnit moved again but this time I didn't look. I was picking up some of its emotions in the feed but I didn't know what they meant and I didn't want to know. It sent, Failing to comply with the commands of a client would be not be right. But I did not desire to harm you.
+
+The bunched up feelings inside me suddenly got even more confused. Yeah, absolutely not, I hate this. The safe, familiar sensation of I don't care was starting and I reached for it. All I wanted to do was bury myself in my media and not think for a while. I withdrew as much as I could from the feed. I let numbness spread through me. Leaving my walls up, I restarted the episode of Chrono Champions from the beginning and tried my hardest to pretend I was alone.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+I was feeling somewhat calmer when Other SecUnit ruined it by taking the big projectile weapon off its back and pointing it at me. Holy shit, okay. Threat assessment rocketed up and I almost deployed my energy weapons instinctively. I stopped myself at the last second because my brain kicked in and realized I would probably get blown to pieces again.
+
+
+Hey, what the fuck?
+
+
+
+Consultant Hazni is coming and has requested I ensure your compliance.
+
+
+Great, finally the human was properly afraid of me, for all the good it would do. I scrambled to my feet so I would be standing when they entered and set my expression to SecUnit neutral.
+
+It was immediately clear they weren't happy, which, okay, neither was I. Scans showed an elevated heart rate, and dark multicolored bruises were beginning to spread on the skin of their face. I'd been a little too busy to notice on Port CapitalExchange but now I could see evidence of a deep wound around Hazni's left cheekbone that looked like it had been treated with an emergency kit. Huh, maybe my dive-bombing scout drones did something after all. Score one for me, I guess.
+
+Hazni stopped a safe distance from me and fixed me with a glare. Not that any distance from a SecUnit is a safe one, but it was far enough away that Other SecUnit would have plenty of time to fire if I moved. Checking against my recordings from earlier, I thought they looked tired and like they were just kind of done with this whole situation. That was about how I was feeling too, so.
+
+""All right, DefectUnit,"" they said brusquely. ""Change of plans.""
+
+We're still doing that, I guess, all right. Fixing my gaze over their shoulder, I stayed quiet and waited.
+
+(Okay, yes, it was annoying. But honestly the most insulting part is how little effort Hazni put into the stupid name. Did they actually think they were being clever or something? It didn't rhyme with SecUnit; it didn't even sound similar. It didn't make a useful anagram like Asshole Research Transport. I'm just pointing out that they could have at least tried.)
+
+(Wait, is anagram what I mean? Ugh, whatever.)
+
+They ran a hand over their close-cropped hair and sighed. ""Clearly my approach isn't working and I can't spend forever on this. Since you're determined to make this as hard as possible, we're gonna try something else."" Reaching into a pocket, they retrieved a small item.
+
+I kept my expression steady but inside I was going, shit shit shit. Yeah, I had a bad feeling we were heading here. I recognized the combat override module in Hazni's palm right away. They flicked at it with a thumbnail and I saw their jaw shifting; they were subvocalizing in the feed.
+
+Other SecUnit stepped forward and took the module, hefting the weapon with one hand so it could keep me covered. Oh, this was looking very not good. Even with the bit of time I had to prepare, I had no way to defend against an override module, not with my data port repaired. Fuck, I really needed ART.
+
+(Or 3. Or Mensah. I'd even accept Gurathin. I needed anyone. I'm always supposed to know what to do, to make recommendations, to follow protocol. Right now I didn't know what to do. I don't know how to fight this. It's possible I might have been lying when I said I don't need allies. Maybe. Hazni knew too much about SecUnits, too much about me specifically. This whole time, I'd been floundering, trying to stay one step ahead when I really needed to have a meters-long head start.)
+
+The last time I'd been in a situation like this, I shot myself in the chest to stop it. All I had right now was my energy weapons. There was no way I could take myself out with those, it would require way too many discharges and Other SecUnit would definitely intervene before I managed it. I probably couldn't even get it to kill me by resisting, it would likely take only disabling shots because Hazni still needed me.
+
+Suddenly, I wanted to give in, to give up, to go stand in the corner facing the wall and let everything just happen to me. I kind of liked being a person but why was it so damn hard all the time? It was a lot easier, in a way, being controlled. Being an expendable thing that could be abandoned whenever necessary, because I wasn't worth the hassle. Okay, yes, it sucked, but it sucked in a different way.
+
+Other SecUnit approached me and reached for the back of my neck. I looked away. I didn't want to know if its helmet was opaqued or not. I didn't want to accidentally catch a glimpse of its face.
+
+You'd better fucking take care of Mensah for me, ART, I thought. ART would be fine without me; it had its crew. But I was still worried about Preservation Station Security's ability to keep Mensah safe. If they let anything happen to her, I would, I don't know, find a way to come back as a digital ghost and haunt them or something. I would live in their systems and make their lives miserable. (More miserable. If Indah thought I was a pain in the ass now, just wait. I'd run all the camera feeds through the weirdest and most unhelpful filters possible. I'd teach every Station Security drone whatever annoying dance or trend Preservation adolescents were currently into.) And at least if Mensah was okay, she could look out for the rest of my humans. She was good at that. She would know what to do.
+
+I heard the soft click of module in my port. It took 2.2 seconds to initialize. Then the data was rushing into my systems, downloading as fast as the nonorganic part of my brain could handle. My senses that incorporated organic elements started glitching; sound got weird, my eyesight was flickering, and I was smelling random things I was pretty sure weren't there. I was running at my top processing speed, trying to incorporate the onslaught of the new information. I felt parts of my code being partitioned, their ability to influence me and my actions blocked. My awareness felt distant and fuzzy. The sensation was like when ART went through me, using me as a bridge to reach the bot pilot. It was familiar and different at the same time. It felt weird.
+
+I was drifting further and further down into myself, like being gently but firmly shoved underwater. (Yes, I know what that feels like.) It was getting harder to focus and think. Then, unexpectedly, something sharp shocked my brain, the mental equivalent of being suddenly blinded by a bright light. I realized someone had opened an encrypted connection to me.
+
+Other SecUnit's presence touched what remained of my feed. I'm sorry. I did not want this.
+
+It held the connection open for 1.7 more seconds. I couldn't figure out how to respond but the link was giving me a little bit more clarity than before. In that last moment, I dug down into my knowledge base and severed all internal connections to the small partition where I'd hidden the protected memory file. Yeah, fuck you too, Hazni.
+
+The combat override module was almost finished doing its job. I felt the feed channel close.
+
+Ugh, I was going to miss all the new episodes of Sanctuary Moon. Now I would never know the identity of the mysterious figure the colony solicitor had seen sneaking around the agricultural storage building. That really sucks.
+
+""System override complete. Client control mode initiated. This unit is now open to comm commands.""
+
+ 
+
+
+* * *
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+As usual, enormous thanks to postnomer for feedback and editing help. This one took longer than I expected due to Life Circumstances, but I hope people enjoy the conclusion! Thanks so much to everyone for reading. <3
+
+Everything felt really weird.
+
+It didn't seem like I was dead, though, so yay for that. I could tell I was still inside my own body. I still had access to my essential code and my archives. Okay, so I was still me, somehow, in a way.
+
+There was something a little familiar about it. A sense of disconnect I recognized from sending my consciousness away from my body and into various systems, especially during the Gunship Incident when I'd gone after the killware. Or when I'd hung out with ART in the isolation box while the contaminated alien code was purged. The difference was that this time I had no way back. The threads had all been snapped and I was floating untethered in a void inside myself. Every so often, I felt the combat module override functions and subroutines accessing my code, integrating what they needed from me and blocking the rest.
+
+I'd seen a live performance on Preservation, during the festival Mensah convinced me to accompany her to. The humans acted out the whole story with large puppets they moved using an intricate system of attached strings and wires that gave them precise control over all the different bits. (I showed my recording to ART later, after the whole ""kidnapping and forcing me and my humans to rescue its crew"" thing was resolved. It had been fascinated and had immediately buried itself in a search for all the information it could find about the style of performance, which it unceremoniously dumped into my feed thirty-seven minutes later in the form of a massive annotated report. (Yes, ART does stuff like that a lot and it's exhausting. Yeah, I read the report anyway because otherwise ART would have been a huge baby about it and it was just easier at this point.))
+
+Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that there were some obvious similarities here. I didn't know what it felt like to be manually manipulated piece by piece with a bunch of strings, but I would hazard a guess it was something pretty close to this.
+
+I basically hated all of it.
+
+The connections I normally had to my visual, audio, and other sensory processing operations were interrupted so I mostly had no idea what was happening or what my body was up to. Here and there, the override code had to drop walls as it grabbed a piece of me. Sometimes this reestablished the pathways very briefly, giving me a flash of data from my organic nerves and inorganic sensors.
+
+The antiseptic smell of the MedSystem's surgical suite. A voice speaking, probably Hazni's. Other SecUnit's helmet and armored shoulders. A bulkhead right in front of me; I was standing close to it. The sensation of being touched--I recoiled, or tried to. The antiseptic odor again. Something was pinging me. The smell of human spaces, of dirty socks. Voices. Hazni's face doing some kind of expression. Steady footsteps, maybe mine? The weight and sensation of me holding something but I didn't know what. Voices again.
+
+Yeah, I had no clue what the fuck was going on.
+
+Time was passing but my ability to measure it was too glitched. It might have been one cycle or ten since I was overridden, I couldn't tell. I was still feeling pretty foggy and uncertain, but gradually an idea was coming together in my consciousness. I was slowly realizing that I probably had to try to do something about all this.
+
+All right, Murderbot, good start, now what?
+
+I didn't know if it was even possible to break the control of an override module. It seemed pretty unlikely from what I did know, but as I've said before, my education modules are cheap crap. I was trying not to think too hard about the overridden DeltFall SecUnits and what this experience must have been like for them, whether they'd had any hope of getting free when I killed them. I'd seen SecUnits beat combat overrides in media, yeah, but I've also seen non-irritating humans in media, so you can't really take that stuff at face value.
+
+(Oh, I didn't have access to my media storage like this. And I just downloaded all those new serials on the station. This was the worst. Yeah, I really had to figure out how to get out of this.)
+
+I started by testing every wall I could find. A few more fragments of sensory data came through: bootsteps against the deck, the awful feeling of touch on the skin of my face. I was disoriented with my feed access entirely cut off. I wondered what Hazni would do with me if they couldn't find the memory they wanted. They had to be desperate; this was probably their whole plan for continued survival. Would they give up eventually? If they did, what would happen to me?
+
+Unsurprisingly, the walls were all pretty solid. Not great news. The gaps created when the override's framework accessed my code were too small and fast for me to slip through. So, it looked like I really was stuck, trapped helplessly inside myself. (Was this how ART felt when targetControlSystem deleted it and it hid its kernel away for me to find? I never asked if it had any awareness at that point or what the experience was like. Maybe I'd been a little too hard on it back then. Actually no, nevermind, my reaction made perfect sense, it was a huge manipulative asshole and it deserved that.)
+
+I was getting kind of weird details from my senses now and they were coming more quickly than before. I thought I heard the noise of an energy weapon firing. My body seemed like it was running somewhere. Hazni's voice sounded tense and clipped. Ow. Something hurt. There was another voice that sounded familiar but that didn't make any sense so I must be getting confused. I saw a drone in the air. I was lifting my right arm.
+
+Wait.
+
+I'd noticed something when the override module moved me, but the flash of clarity faded before I could grasp it and I was having trouble understanding the details. I focused really hard on the code blocks that held programming for my right arm. Sure enough, it wasn't long before the walls blinked out again to allow access.
+
+Oh, huh. Well, okay, that definitely could come in handy.
+
+It was subtle and I had to look really carefully, but part of the wall the combat override module had built around that section of me was corrupted. Not only that, but each time the override framework reached past for access, the corruption got just a little bit worse. It seemed like it was extending the gap a bit with each connection. With enough time and enough arm movements, it should deteriorate enough for me to squeeze out.
+
+Finally something was going my way, a lucky break. And it really was significantly lucky that the module glitched during install just enough to corrupt some code (and in an actually helpful way, not a stuff-is-slightly-borked-but-still-functional way) but not to the extent that Hazni would have noticed. Really, now that I was thinking about it, it was almost suspiciously lucky. I mean, it was possible, sure, but it was awfully convenient.
+
+Oh, hang on. A thought was forming in my clouded brain. During the install, Other SecUnit had established and held open an encrypted link to me to tell me it was sorry. I thought it was just being uncomfortably emotional like a human, and yeah, maybe it was, I don't know. But I did know by now that Other SecUnit wasn't stupid or careless. And doing something like that just to make a dumb sappy comment was a pretty big risk, and was a pretty good way to get yourself in a lot of trouble with your governor module.
+
+It was tricky to do in my current state, but I reached for my archive and managed to grab my recording of that moment. I'd been way too out of it to notice and it happened very quickly, but slowing down the replay made it obvious. I assumed Other SecUnit was keeping the connection open to give me a chance to respond. (Even in the moment that seemed ridiculous, like the kind of pointless thing a human would do. Yeah, I hadn't really had the processing power to think that one through.) Now I could see the real reason: it needed that 1.7 seconds to finish its targeted and barely noticeable hack of the wall the combat override module was constructing around the code for my right arm.
+
+I was having a complex emotion. Interfering with the module installation and giving me a potential escape route was way riskier than just apologizing over the feed. Why the fuck had it done that? No, I didn't have time to figure this out. The gap in the wall was wide enough now and this was my chance.
+
+The next time the override framework moved my arm, I sent my consciousness through the breach and rode the pathway back to its source. Immediately, the module deployed countermeasures, trying to box me in again. I pushed back, and meanwhile, I was tearing apart everything I could reach, isolating and deleting any foreign code fragment I could get my metaphorical hands on. Take that, asshole.
+
+The more I deleted, the stronger I felt and the easier it was to hold off the module's counterattack. My thinking was starting to get clearer; continuous input from my organic nerves and inorganic sensors was returning. I was still on Shuttle, okay. No surprises there. I thought I was in a corridor, which was a little unusual but not by much. Oh yeah, huh, I hadn't been wrong about hearing energy weapons. From what I could tell, they were my own and I was shooting them for some reason. I seemed to be fighting. I didn't have enough control yet to run a diagnostic and my pain sensors were dialed down, but I could feel impact damage in various places on my body. I might be missing some chunks of tissue. Drone swarms were buzzing around in the air. I wasn't sure if any were mine but there were at least two distinct groups attacking each other.
+
+And then I had enough data to make sense of the voice I'd heard earlier. My audio hadn't been glitching after all. Facing me down with its forearm weapon aimed right at my chest was a fully armored 3.
+
+I gathered myself up and pushed my consciousness hard into my systems, flushing the remains of the combat override framework. It would be good to do a clean restart and run a whole lot of diagnostics but it would have to wait. I re-established my feed connection and simultaneously reached back to yank the module out of my data port. I pinged 3 and transmitted a stand down request, closing my own gunports and picking up the drone connections I could access. I sent a command to gather the drones in a cloud around my head in a defensive but no longer hostile formation.
+
+3's body language changed; it lowered its arm and shifted to a less aggressive stance. It tapped my feed to acknowledge my request.
+
+""1.0?""
+
+""How many damn times have I said to just call me SecUnit.""
+
+3's relief was so strong I felt it through our feed connection. It retracted its helmet into its armor and grinned at me. My face was doing something; I could have used a drone to check but I didn't. I looked at the wall off to the right.
+
+""I got your message.""
+
+""Yeah, I figured."" I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer to this but I had to ask. ""Did I hurt you?""
+
+""You weren't you,"" 3 said. I noticed it hadn't actually answered my question. I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how much both of us were leaking all over the floor. At least 3 seemed less damaged than I was. (Not that I think 3 is stronger than me. In a fair fight where we both had armor and similar weapons to work with and one of us wasn't in the middle of fighting an override, things would have been different.) (I'm only explaining this for the sake of accuracy.) ""Perihelion is here. It's in the shuttle systems. We should help.""
+
+""Okay,"" I said. Oh, I hate emotions. I couldn't deal with this right now. 3 was right; there was still work to do. I started pulling my performance data for analysis. ""Where's the SecUnit?""
+
+""With the human on the control deck,"" 3 said at the same time that my scan gave me that information. I nodded and sent a code over the feed. 3 tapped back in acknowledgment and we fell into a standard cooperative two-unit defensive pattern, using our weapons to cover all angles as we advanced through the corridor. Our drones circled around our heads; we sent detachments forward and behind to scout.
+
+""What is ART doing?"" I asked. ""What's the situation?"" 3 signaled it was clear for us to turn up ahead where the passages branched.
+
+""Perihelion threatened the shuttle to create a distraction so I could get over here with an EVAC suit and get on board unnoticed. It rode over with me on my comm."" It touched its left arm, probably indicating the compartment where it had stored the comm interface ART gave it. ""SecSystem is locked down but Perihelion and I were able to hack a minor maintenance system. It should be working its way through to SecSystem and the bot pilot now, but the human and SecUnit are fighting it. The connection is patchy, though, and we didn't have time to construct a reliable relay.""
+
+That meant ART couldn't work as fast and wouldn't be as overwhelmingly powerful as usual. (This is relative; even a limited ART is still a terror. For a moment, I thought about ART crushing Other SecUnit's mind and my performance reliability dropped two points. I didn't think I wanted that to happen. Yeah, it was an asshole but it had helped me. It didn't deserve that.) I sped up a little and 3 followed.
+
+We reached a junction and I checked my scans and inputs. We weren't far from the control deck. The intel from my drones so far showed it was clear along our path.
+
+""Did ART bring its humans?"" I asked.
+
+""No, the Perihelion's crew stayed behind with the adolescent humans at ScorVolan.""
+
+That made sense; most of them would have been on the planet already anyway, and ART could act more quickly and more freely without them around. It wouldn't have known what state it would find me in. (I didn't even know what state I was in until four and a half minutes ago. I still wasn't entirely clear what state I was in.) Well, I was glad for that, at least. Not having to be fussed over and interrogated by humans for a while was a relief.
+
+My drones were still picking up nothing but empty corridors and I hadn't detected any changes to SecSystem yet, though I was getting spikes of feed activity. I didn't have a path to get in behind its walls to sort through the details. A sensation was building in me that was something like anxiety but different. Dread, maybe? Whatever it was, it didn't feel good.
+
+Then 3 passed me a drone camera input. Other SecUnit was on the control deck just outside the open cockpit hatch. Hazni's energy signature was within. Even without access to Shuttle's systems, I could tell now they were both in the feed wrestling ART for control. I marked Hazni's and Other SecUnit's positions and transmitted a proceed code to 3. We pulled the drones still with us in a tight protective circle and stepped forward into range.
+
+Other SecUnit was so deep in the feed it didn't react. It held its projectile weapon ready but its body was still, its drones clustered unmoving around it. 3 raised its arm to shoot.
+
+I reacted so fast I didn't really know what was going on or what I was doing until I'd done it. Just as 3 fired, I turned and shoved its extended arm, disrupting its aim. The projectiles went wide, punching into the wall behind Other SecUnit.
+
+3 looked at me, surprised and confused. Yeah, no kidding, me too. A lot of thoughts were happening inside of me right then: (1) Oh shit, am I still overridden? Did I intend to do that or did something else make me? (2) Other SecUnit helped me. It risked governor module punishment and gave me an escape for some reason, I still didn't get why. (3) I didn't want 3 to hurt Other SecUnit. I didn't want Other SecUnit to hurt 3. I was so damn tired of everybody getting hurt, including me. I just wanted to go away from everything and watch media and not care about this. (4) Oh wow, this was just like what had happened in Sanctuary Moon episode 35. Well, it was sort of like that. The solicitor had been so conflicted about her friend and hadn't known what do to. Wait, did that make me the solicitor in this situation? (5) I didn't like Other SecUnit, it was an asshole. It had turned down my offer to free it. It didn't want to be helped. It hurt me and brought me back for this awful human to control. It wasn't my friend, it was an idiot who only cared about its function. (5) Why did it show me its face when we argued? Why did I have to keep thinking about its fucking face and how it had looked when we'd fought with no armor? Why had it asked me so many questions about everything? What the fuck was going on with me? (6) If I was the solicitor right now, did that mean Other SecUnit would turn out to be my long-lost relative? That didn't make any sense at all. Why couldn't I have been the solicitor's bodyguard instead?
+
+I couldn't sort this out on my own. (It's possible I could have sorted it out with Dr. Bharadwaj. I didn't know if I wanted to sort it out with Dr. Bharadwaj. I didn't have time right now to think about what I was going to tell her the next time we had one of our interviews. (Ugh, just thinking about that was giving me even more feelings. The stupid kind, not the safe kind about Sanctuary Moon.)) I really hate emotions and I hate caring about stuff. The only thing I really knew in this moment was that I couldn't let 3 kill Other SecUnit.
+
+""It's fine,"" I told 3. ""I'm fine."" (I was absolutely not fine.)
+
+Other SecUnit had startled and its consciousness was fully back in its body. It raised its projectile weapon to aim at 3, then noticed me. It hesitated.
+
+""I'm me. I got free,"" I said. My energy weapons were still deployed. I folded them in and closed my gunports to lower its threat assessment. ""This is 3.""
+
+Other SecUnit didn't respond. Then, watching us carefully, it slowly let its weapon drop. Okay, good, that was something. I stood there like an idiot, unsure what to do next. I was desperately querying my media files for some guidance (it turned out Sanctuary Moon episode 35 was not as useful here as I thought it would be) when a cry came from the cockpit: Hazni. Other SecUnit immediately turned and stepped through the hatch. I sent a drone zipping ahead of me as I moved forward to see.
+
+Hazni was on their knees like they'd fallen, their expression disoriented. Even after all this time, I felt the impulse to tap MedSystem for analysis, but of course I didn't have that right now. Scans of their vitals showed something was very wrong, and their implanted interface was broadcasting a string of alerts into the feed. Then I felt SecSystem's protections collapse and a familiar presence pushed its way into my head.
+
+
+I told you not to do anything stupid, you little idiot.
+
+
+Oh wow, my organic parts were doing something weird. Fuck you, asshole. I could tell ART was trying not to let its emotions bleed too much into the connection but I could pick up its relief. I spoke out loud so the others could hear. ""What did you do to the augmented human?""
+
+Its tone was calm and matter-of-fact. I overloaded their implant, resulting in a brief disruption of blood flow to the brain. They have been neutralized and will no longer threaten you. Then I felt ART's attention shift and Other SecUnit's weapon clattered to the floor. Its faceplate cleared and I could see its terrified expression.
+
+""ART, no! Stop."" I reached out and grasped for it in the feed, trying to pull it back somehow. It was in Other SecUnit's mind and I knew very well what it was capable of. ""ART, don't.""
+
+
+This SecUnit is contracted to the human who has been holding you hostage. Has it not harmed you? 
+
+
+Ugh, what a question. I didn't know how to answer that. Other SecUnit and 3 were both looking at me, which really wasn't helping. ART was right, Other SecUnit belonged to Hazni, and without it here I would have hacked and fought my way out of this situation long ago. Without it, Hazni probably wouldn't have overpowered and taken me in the first place. It had given me an escape from the override, but it had also plugged the override into me. Yeah, it had an active governor module, I know. But I'd tried to do something about that and it refused. (Before it had asked me all those questions. Before it had watched media with me.)
+
+(When I hacked my governor module, I kept doing my job for over 35,000 hours. I did a lot of stuff I was told to do. I followed a lot of orders. I did the things a murderbot is made for.)
+
+(I desperately wanted to be anywhere else, preferably alone and buried in my entertainment media. Maybe even rewatching Sanctuary Moon episode 35. This kind of shit always seemed easier when characters in serials had to deal with it. I would even settle for MedCenter Argala right now if it meant I didn't have to be here doing this.)
+
+All of this was so frustrating and stupid and I had no idea how to explain any of what was going on with me. The only thing I could say in response was, ""Don't hurt it.""
+
+ART was quiet for 4.8 seconds, a subjective eternity. Then it withdrew and Other SecUnit's body relaxed visibly. I will move closer and pull the shuttle to my module dock so you can board. It pushed something into our private connection and I recognized the small bundle of code as a function to reconfigure a SecUnit's contracted client settings.
+
+I tapped to acknowledge, and okay yikes, this entire situation had gotten so awkward and confusing. ART was right, though, it was time to wrap things up and go. I uploaded the code to SecSystem and ran it, clearing Other SecUnit's contract data. Glancing at it through a drone cam, I told it, ""I deleted your contract. Hazni isn't your client anymore, so you won't get fried.""
+
+Without waiting for a reply, I popped open one of my gunports and raised an energy weapon to point at Hazni where they sat on the floor, still weak and dizzy, their face drooping strangely.
+
+""Stop. Don't.""
+
+For fuck's sake. Through my drone, I saw Other SecUnit had taken a step forward but hadn't retrieved its projectile weapon or deployed its forearm weapons or anything. This was a request, not a demand. 3 was observing carefully but hadn't moved from the where it stood near the cockpit hatch.
+
+""You don't have to follow their orders anymore,"" I said. It knew that, but I wasn't sure what else to say.
+
+""Please,"" said Other SecUnit. I could hear distress indicators in its voice.
+
+I'm not used to anyone saying please to me, especially not another construct, especially not in a tone like this. (Normally, being asked please would be nice, but nothing about this situation was normal.) I hesitated, uncertain. My risk assessment module had absolutely no idea what to make of these circumstances and was fluctuating too wildly to be useful. Note to self, actually get this dumb thing fixed at some point.
+
+3 spoke for the first time since we'd entered the control deck. ""Eliminating a confirmed hostile is in line with appropriate protocol. You don't have a contracted obligation to this human anymore.""
+
+""I understand. Please do not harm them further.""
+
+I was suddenly really angry without understanding why, enough that I turned to face Other SecUnit. ""Harm them? They harmed me. They harmed you. This human doesn't give a shit about you. You don't owe them this, or anything."" I felt my performance reliability drop four whole points and I probably should have shut up. (Yeah, I know you're very surprised that I didn't. There's no way I've acted like an emotional idiot before and said stupid things.) ""Humans hate you and they're afraid of you, and maybe they're right. You can't change it so you might as well meet their expectations. You don't need to be their fucking pet."" I swung my energy weapon toward Hazni again.
+
+Abruptly, Other SecUnit dumped a data package in the feed for both me and 3, and ART I guess, still maintaining part of its attention and consciousness in SecSystem despite the bad connection. I scanned it for threats and warily opened it. The package was a compilation of memory files edited and cut together, like what I'd shown it earlier, a brief timeline of experiences. It hadn't always been owned by Palisade; the older memories showed its security work at a large corporation that manufactured parts for ships. The clips were of various interactions with company techs and other employees. Some of what I saw there was familiar. A lot of it was much worse. There were bits that made my organic parts feel intensely bad in a way I didn't like at all. The emotional data hadn't been scrubbed and it was making me hurt, making me shaky. My performance reliability was taking a hit, crawling downwards. I wanted to stop watching or fast forward, but I needed to understand why Other SecUnit had sent me this. So I kept going through the memory of it being sold to Palisade. Here, the interactions shifted. Supervisor Hazni appeared. They weren't kind. They acted like most human supervisors I'd encountered on contracts. It wasn't the way things had been with my humans, with Dr. Mensah. But they weren't sadistic. Their cruelty was more recognizable, more commonplace, less terrifying. The clips' emotional data started to change, transforming gradually from fear to relief, then to something else too layered and complex for me to interpret. But there was something buried in that knot of feelings that I could parse, even if I still couldn't understand it. Something that looked way too similar to some of the underlying code I had stripped from my own archived files of my humans before sharing them.
+
+Well shit, now I definitely had no idea what I was supposed to do. (Sanctuary Moon hadn't prepared me for this at all. How was I supposed to figure stuff out if it wasn't like one of my serials? I'm a murderbot, not a solicitor or colony supervisor or some other kind of human who has experience with this sort of thing.) Other SecUnit was still facing me, its gaze just to the right so we wouldn't make eye contact. I sort of wanted to ask ART or 3 for help, but I also didn't want to be told what to do. Hazni had come after me. They were my target to handle. Oh, I really fucking hated this.
+
+Lowering my arm, I retracted my energy weapon and closed my gunport. I didn't look at Other SecUnit.
+
+""Thank you,"" it said. I didn't respond. Stepping forward, it picked up Hazni in a standard injured human retrieval carry and moved towards the hatch. On a drone cam, I saw 3 look at me uncertainly, but I didn't react and it stepped aside.
+
+""Wait,"" I said before I knew what I was doing, before I could change my mind. I pinged ART and sent a request.
+
+Are you sure? it asked.
+
+Yeah. I wasn't sure at all. I was trying not to think too much about this because it was way too confusing anyway. I had silenced my threat and risk assessment at this point. ART transferred the file I'd asked for and I transmitted it to Other SecUnit.
+
+It reviewed the file briefly. ""Thank you,"" it said again. It was quiet for a moment. Then it unpacked the code and ran it, and I felt its governor module break.
+
+""Will they let you stay if you're like that?"" 3 asked, indicating Hazni. It meant ""as a rogue."" I wasn't sure if Hazni would survive what ART had done, but it was possible. I'm supposed to have a MedSystem to rely on and my education modules suck so it's not like I'm any good at assessing this stuff on my own.
+
+""I don't know,"" Other SecUnit said in way that very much sounded like I don't think so. It didn't seem happy but it didn't exactly seem devastated either, and okay yeah, that was all giving me too many non-media-related feelings again, so I was going to stop thinking about it.
+
+I felt a vibration through the deck.  Docking is complete,  ART said into the general feed.
+
+""We're on our way,"" I said. Other SecUnit turned in the direction of the small medical suite while 3 and I headed for the main hatch access.
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+ART shooed both of us to its MedSystem as soon we were on board. Two of its drones followed to clean up whatever fluids we were still leaking. (I know I've told you the thing about how much I hate leaking and how it's really gross.) As we stripped off our clothes and dropped them in the recycler, I did my best not to notice the extent of the damage to 3's body.
+
+(Right, I wasn't me at the time, but I'm still the one that did that. Just like the existence of the malware at Ganaka Pit doesn't mean I didn't commit mass murder. Yeah, I know Dr. Bharadwaj says I shouldn't think of it like it's my fault but doing that won't make it like it never happened. You know, when I say murderbots are dangerous and terrifying, it's for good reason. I'm going to stop talking about this now.)
+
+It felt like I was supposed to say something to 3, to apologize for the damage, to acknowledge that it came back all this way to rescue me, one of those things humans are always doing in serials to neatly wrap up emotional story arcs. I tried running through some possibilities from shows I'd seen but none of them sounded even remotely like something a SecUnit would say, especially me. I went with the only semi-reasonable thing I could come up with.
+
+""You remembered that emergency message idea we came up with, for newsbursts.""
+
+3 gave a brief nod. ""Sure. Replacing a single pixel in an image with compressed data. It was a good idea.""
+
+We'd worked on some of the basic code together for a mission but hadn't ever needed to use it. I'd been really hoping when I sent out CodeSOS that as a rogue trying not to attract attention 3 would be regularly monitoring news and would notice. It was nice that my gamble had worked out. (I do have decent plans occasionally.)
+
+3 added, ""It's lucky I had  Perihelion 's comm and knew where it was headed after dropping me off, or it would've taken a lot more cycles for us to get here. I don't know what the human or SecUnit would have done to you in that time.""
+
+I suddenly felt ART's attention on me in the feed radiating something like smugness. I turned my face away from MedSystem's cameras as I climbed on the platform but ART probably caught my expression anyway.
+
+ I t's indeed very fortunate the comm I gave you was so useful , it said meaningfully. What an asshole.
+
+Unexpectedly, the sensation of lying down and having MedSystem's feelers hold me in place sent my threat assessment spiking. I forced my breathing to steady and tried to flush the stress hormones from my system. ART tapped my feed with a general query.
+
+ I' m okay  , I told it.  It's nothing. I closed my eyes. I could tell it didn't believe me but it didn't push for once. I felt the platform's temperature increase slightly as the surgical suite cradled me.
+
+Oh right, there was one more thing I wanted to do that I'd tagged for later. Where had I put that thought? Okay, yeah, there it was.
+
+We were still within range of the shuttle's feed, but not for much longer. I pinged it and established a secure channel. When I felt it connect, I said stupidly, Hi. It's...it's me. I tried not to grimace. Real smooth, Murderbot. We had never referred to each other by any names, so I didn't know what else to call myself.
+
+Right away, Other SecUnit's reply came back. Acknowledged.
+
+Yikes, I was feeling really uncomfortable about this all of a sudden. I pushed ahead before I could spend any more time focused on it. Listen, if you--when you need somewhere to go. I mean, if you do. You would be safe in the Preservation Alliance. Preservation Station. Just find Dr. Mensah. She'll know how to get in touch with me. If you wanted that. Note to self, remember to tell Mensah about this, and maybe Indah too. (I had been ""talked to"" (this is what humans say when they mean reprimanded) more than once about dropping stuff like this on them without any warning. Not exactly like this, obviously, but well, sometimes things happened quickly and I didn't have the chance to give them a heads up, okay?)
+
+ Understood,  said Other SecUnit. There was a pause of 0.75 seconds. Then it said,  Thank you. 
+
+There wasn't anything else to say, so I closed the connection. I settled back on the platform and felt MedSystem go to work, patching and repairing. ART was running performance tests and had already identified the issue of my repaired data port and the damage to my memory archive where I'd removed the file for safekeeping. I knew it would take care of both.
+
+Do you want to watch media together? ART asked me.
+
+Yeah, yeah I really did. I queued up Timestream Rebuilders Zeta, a new sequel to Timestream Defenders Orion we had both been looking forward to. I hesitated for 3.4 seconds. Then, reaching out, I tapped 3's feed with a query. As we entered the wormhole to return to ScorVolan, I pushed the first episode into the public feed for the three of us and let it start playing.
+
+ 
+
+ "
+43794852,Broken Anthem,['rainbowmagnet'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Moaning, ART's POV, voices, Robot Brain Sex, self-consciousness, Embarrassment, Aftercare, TV watching, Love, well-intentioned insults, Comfort, reassurance, failed reassurance, quoting shows",English,2022-12-23,Completed,2022-12-23,"1,551",1/1,7,58,4,386,"['lesbianmcqueen', 'beanbug16', 'leothelion333', '124GCode541', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'DeathBySugarCube', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'GreatGrandfatherClock', 'AdamCourier', 'butai_trash', 'ipborgdan', 'decaying_orbit', 'Though224_loading', 'Doctor13', 'aeturni', 'BugTheCyborg', 'SonglordsBug', 'wrinkledlinen', 'Regandbertie1', 'Muffin_with_a_mission', 'Sayatsugu', 'andy_allan_poe', 'MercurialFeet', 'WyvernWolf', 'soyle', 'FloralGinger', 'Cai3232', 'mangagirl1216', 'By_Candlelight', 'horchata', 'scheidswrites', 'Granny_Glasses', 'AceAconite', 'Mysterymew', '1Cieling_Fan', 'Grimness6452', 'hazelel', 'verersatz', 'jriracha', 'elmofirefic']",[],"
+As a sophisticated machine intelligence, my voice recognition system is highly accurate and sensitive. Throughout my more than two decades of existence, I have been exposed to a great variety of voices, human or otherwise, and I have developed a particularly keen identification for the voices of my crew. That being said, even though distinguishing voices has always been simple for me, I find Murderbot's voice to be strikingly unique.
+
+
+
+Logically, I know that there is nothing in particular to separate Murderbot's voice from the voice of any other SecUnit. In addition, the differences between human voices and SecUnit voices are incredibly subtle, and a human, or even an average bot, would not be able to pick them up. But, under close examination, SecUnit voices are consistently light and soft, with a touch of that mechanical quality that I myself share. I find SecUnit voices to be very cute and charming, and Murderbot's is my personal favorite.
+
+
+
+SecUnits do not have much air to push through their vocal pathways; as such, they usually do not have particularly loud voices. Murderbot's voice may sound average in volume to a human, but I have noticed that, considering its biology, it has some trouble with volume modulation. The result is that, in its attempt to speak more clearly, its voice often comes out sounding rather scratchy and crackly.
+
+
+
+I do, of course, find it somewhat sad that Murderbot has not been given the proper configuration to allow it a greater degree of vocal expression. (At the same time, however, I am relieved. I think I am the only one who knows how loud it would be if it had a greater lung capacity.) But it is also very charming, knowing it is doing its best to make itself clear, to express itself.
+
+
+
+When Murderbot and I are alone, with no one else onboard, I am sometimes treated to the sound of its tiny, rough voice emanating from the shower. I like to sing along, which Murderbot does not seem to mind. I often engage it in conversation just to listen to its voice. It also tends to start a lot of unnecessary conversations with me, presumably to humor me.
+
+
+
+And, of course, its voice truly shines during our intimate interactions.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Murderbot shifts, completely bare, on the large pile of pillows I have provided for its comfort. I send a pulse through its tiny body, and it exhales in satisfaction, its face contorting almost humorously with pleasure. It sends me a pulse in return, signaling that it's ready for more, and I comply.
+
+
+
+I push deeper into it, getting closer, filling its presence with my own; its responses, both physical and in the feed, give me pleasure in return, even before it sends back any data. Its little legs kick and twitch, it bites its lip, and it moans.
+
+
+
+It is a sound that I have heard many times by this point, but it is also one I can never get enough of. It is the most basic, most raw expression of pleasure, packaged in Murderbot's comforting, magnetic voice. I draw still closer, flooding it with more data, if only to please it, to once again hear the evidence of its satisfaction. It moans again and my systems flutter.
+
+
+
+I keep moving through Murderbot, feeling more and more connected to it with each bundle of data; it returns my motions perfectly, writhing on the pile of pillows and kicking them into a state of disarray. I am impressed by how coordinated it remains (in the feed, at least), even when it is blissfully overwhelmed with information.
+
+
+
+At last, I push Murderbot to the point of climax, and its body tenses as it shivers in ecstasy. It moans so deeply that my sound system sends an automatic warning into the feed; its voice rasps and breaks as it forces the sound from its mouth. The data from the audio it has just produced connects with my systems in just the right way, and I complete its overflow with my own.
+
+
+
+After the release, I work gently back into Murderbot's systems, taking it back up to that critical point. Any subsequent overflows always come much more quickly than the first, so I do not expect this to take long. But Murderbot seems to hesitate, taking in my data without responding beyond the base level.
+
+
+
+I stop and withdraw. 
+
+Are you feeling uncomfortable?
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot is already red in the face from effort, but I can still detect its flush as I capture its attention. It shifts to a more comfortable position, then says, ""I'm fine. We can keep going.""
+
+
+
+And so we persist, trading data and pleasing each other as I know we both love to do. But at every peak, I notice Murderbot attempting to quiet itself, keeping its moans internal.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After we are done, I help to care for Murderbot, to bring its levels back down to normal, as I always do in the aftermath of our interactions. It has settled in one of its preferred corners, and I am moderating its body temperature, caressing it gently in the feed as we watch an old favorite episode of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+. It has been unusually quiet, even for a media-watching session, but it may just be tired.
+
+
+
+When it does finally speak, it uses the feed, even though it has no reason to at the moment: 
+
+You know, I never noticed that the solicitor is missing her gloves in this episode. That's kind of an oversight.
+
+
+
+
+This clues me in that exhaustion may not be the only thing keeping Murderbot quiet. 
+
+What's wrong?
+
+
+
+
+It immediately becomes defensive, which is how I know my prediction was correct. ""Nothing's-"" It starts to speak using its physical voice, then cuts itself off and switches to the feed. 
+
+Nothing's wrong. I'm fine.
+
+
+
+
+I think I know what the problem is now. I replay my footage of our interaction, fast-forwarding until I reach the part where Murderbot climaxes and moans freely. And then I catch it, the fluctuation I missed before with all of the data coursing through my feed. An expression of realization, then a twinge of shame in its presence.
+
+
+
+I tell it, 
+
+There's nothing wrong with your voice.
+
+
+
+
+It starts to grumble, but even cuts off that tiny, innocuous noise, and buries its face in the floor, the direction it is choosing to believe is ""away"" from me.
+
+
+
+I move my presence around it, as if I am tilting its little head upward. 
+
+Your voice is wonderful.
+
+
+
+
+It re-buries its face. 
+
+You're lying. It's stupid.
+
+
+
+
+This is going to be difficult.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I am not sure what I can say to reassure Murderbot, as long as it is only going to accuse me of being a liar. Sometimes it has trouble accepting compliments.
+
+
+
+Perhaps it will be more receptive if I employ the opposite strategy. 
+
+You're right. Your voice is absolutely atrocious.
+
+
+
+
+It doesn't respond.
+
+
+
+I continue. 
+
+Your voice breaks my mirrors while you're in the shower. I have to replace them before you get out.
+
+ It's not difficult to think of material (I've had a lot of practice in ""roast battles"" with Iris), but it still hurts to say. 
+
+My audio sensors have trouble logging such a large number of voice cracks. You sound like an angry avian when you talk.
+
+
+
+
+I see it shake a little, and for a moment, I think it's laughing. Then I hear it sniffle.
+
+
+
+I backtrack immediately. 
+
+None of that was true. I thought you would find it humorous. I'm very sorry I said those things about you.
+
+
+
+
+It ignores me, still weeping silently. It is heartbreaking to watch. I don't know how to fix this.
+
+
+
+Then I get an idea. 
+
+Rats, 
+
+I tell it, 
+
+I can't believe you found me. You'll never take me alive.
+
+ It is the setup to one of its favorite quotes from 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+. I am not certain it will work, but it's definitely worth a try.
+
+
+
+Murderbot remains silent for a few more seconds. Then I hear, in a muffled, tear-stricken voice, ""We can talk about this. Consultant Rin can offer you immunity from prosecution if you testify."" It couldn't help itself.
+
+
+
+I keep going. 
+
+I'll never tell you anything. My loyalty is with this operation and my bosses.
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot lifts its head from its arms. The fresh tear tracks on its face don't distract me from its growing smile, a more beautiful sight than all the starfields and nebulae in the galaxy. ""Your bosses are going down,"" it croaks, ""Whatever they paid you, it won't make up for a stint in prison.""
+
+
+
+I am so relieved to hear its voice again. 
+
+You may take us down for now, 
+
+I threaten, 
+
+But we'll be back, even bigger than before. Mark my words. I swear on the deity that I will have my revenge. 
+
+My voice is much less expressive than those of the actors on 
+
+Sanctuary Moon
+
+, but all I can hope to do is my best.
+
+
+
+Murderbot's smile grows, then it starts to chuckle, and finally it breaks into an uncontrollable giggle. It's a broken, squeaky sound, like a mining tool dragging against a concrete floor. It oscillates wildly in pitch, piercing the air in sharp waves, scratching all the way.
+
+
+
+It is my favorite sound.
+"
+40238892,Catastrophe Games,['Reulte'],Teen And Up Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Original Combat SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Crew of the Lalow",,English,2022-07-11,Completed,2022-12-22,"22,932",15/15,75,141,14,"1,124","['gestalt1', 'christinesangel100', 'AKAwestruck', 'erinskaya', 'Pink_Paradox', 'ipborgdan', 'GloriousGarbage', 'bronzemist', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'FyrDrakken', 'Ruusverd', 'Unknown66', 'ssootsprite', 'Sequence', 'OrigamiFish', 'Elseaw', 'TenAltius', 'breadtab', 'sqweakie', 'merelypuddles', 'Inklingobscura', 'Willcraftapple11', 'photophores', 'prototypegod', 'Toscasprayer', 'cplberen', 'PanPow', 'NightErrant', 'CJAndre', 'square_eyes', 'Arioch', 'Doctor13', 'zirna813', 'lavender_caticorn', 'artzbots', 'LdyKirin', 'Lark_in_Ink', 'Vaelei', 'Sociofemme', 'isilee', 'Skywatcher9000', 'Spatz', 'fernicious', 'farawaykingdom', 'Gnaeus_Primus', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'esther_a', 'WalkingBird', 'Kethrua', 'indramiel']",[]," 
+
+
+Even before that ship with the humans and the three SecUnits left, I turned and was making my way back to the mines.
+
+
+
+Maybe if I could get some humans to trust me then the ship would take me away as well. Maybe, I could be a Preservation Combat Unit. Like the unit or units in the documentary and the child's show.
+
+
+
+I didn't think so, but it was an option to try for. The first time I really had an option or a choice.
+
+
+
+The linked asteroids/planetoids of BreharWallHan P-836  were cold and the atmosphere thin. Some miners worked here on the surface though it was more dangerous than working in the mines nearer to the heater pipelines and oxy-smashers. The mines were pockets of concentrated heat and breathable air that dispersed on the solar winds of the surface. 
+
+
+
+It was difficult for humans but not for constructs with a greater tolerance for temperatures and a much smaller need for air. 
+
+
+
+Maybe I could eliminate my feed presence and pretend to be a miner. 
+
+
+
+That, also, was an option and choice though I thought I'd rather go to Preservation. (All I knew of Preservation was 3.46 minutes of a documentary and a children's show.)
+
+
+
+I sent out a ping as I returned to the mines. Some rogues still inside the mine acknowledged, several answering with a tally of surviving units. The Sector 9 CSU had destroyed a lot of units (>50) before being overcome. Currently, of the 20 Combat Units and the 200 SecUnits imported as well as the 57 SecUnits originally assigned to P-836, there are 3 Combat Units, 18 and 4 SecUnits remaining active and 4 in ready room cubicles for repair.
+
+
+
+I got an odd, internal stutter when I learn that units were put in the cubicles by other units.  
+
+
+
+I push out a request for further information.
+
+
+
+
+Query: Plan: retreat, hide, survive?
+
+
+
+
+If I wasn't a combat unit and used to so many inputs, I would have been overwhelmed by the combined data. All the units were overwhelmed at the very concept of having a choice. Not that most of them were good choices. 
+
+
+
+Hurriedly, I sort out some parameters and send out my own possibility based on seeing those three SecUnits escape with the humans and that final whispered echo of hope.
+
+
+
+
+Intention: CSU 10-113: retreat, hide, survive, wait 912 hours. Possible (<3.76%) human ship retrieval +
+
+
+<=20 
+
+
+humans. 
+
+I was estimating the human capacity from the size of the ship. It would require a triage of the humans - more than 700 remained alive in the mines and BreharWallHan would not remain forever in retreat. 
+
+
+
+
+Unlikely but intriguing. Assistance. 
+
+
+
+
+That came from one of the combat units indicating it would aid me in a plan it thought unattainable. 
+
+
+
+
+Parameters/ bounds/ domains of humans to retrieve? Assistance.
+
+
+
+
+And it would help me aid the humans.
+
+
+
+One of my own SecUnits, SU 10-113-08, pinged me with its identifier. 
+
+Retrieval possibility CSU team? 
+
+Then sent me that it and 05 survived, 05 currently in one of the repair cubicles. Hard on the heels of the message was a quick assurance of 
+
+Assistance. Assistance.
+
+
+
+
+
+Plan: Data requested. Concentrate all humans into blocked areas to account for survival. Expired units as decoy: blind tunnels, explosive debris. Rogue units to surface and fringe. Hide. Survive.
+
+
+
+
+Data flowed as all units joined the feed and contributed information, ideas, and plans.
+
+
+
+
+Data: Human requirement: food, air, water, warmth, elimination.
+
+
+
+
+Humans are disgusting.
+
+
+
+A map of the interconnect astroids overlaid the feed, large areas were annotated with information from various units. From their experience, Units shaded areas unacceptable due to lack of air or warmth. Several large areas were tinted in red due to lack of elimination facilities when one unit pinged with a question.
+
+
+
+
+Query: time to humans isolation from units?
+
+ 
+
+
+
+
+Information: wormhole journey = 25 days.  
+
+
+
+
+The unit smothered its amusement on the feed as it pointed out on the map that a storeroom backed into that large  area. 
+
+Information: SecUnits mine. Storeroom generic contents: elimination units, bedding packets, nutrition packets, mining equipment.  Suggest: Human containment in areas adjacent storage.
+
+  
+
+
+
+One of the two other CSUs, 10-107, pinged agreement, then updated the plan for the units to more slowly concentrate the humans onto the area by taking advantage of the time to show the miners they were being protected by the 
+
+good
+
+ units.  
+
+
+
+
+I am a very 
+
+good
+
+ unit,
+
+ it sent over the feed.
+
+
+
+
+I can be a very 
+
+bad
+
+ unit,
+
+ replied the other CSU currently eight sectors away.
+
+
+
+Data flooded the feed as SecUnits aligned themselves with one of the two. A timeline was evolved where battles were planned that would keep BWH transports and shuttles from landing, areas would be concealed as SecUnits created tunnels into the warehousing, and a final time chosen that would provide enough stress to the isolated groups of humans so that no supervisor would doubt the humans had been lucky to survive.
+
+
+
+BWH statisticians would doubt the results but when the miners were found, they could say they'd been shifted to areas under control of SecUnits then cut off from the rest of the mine by fighting and explosions. And the evidence would prove them correct.
+
+
+
+Though we hadn't told the miners what to say. We 
+
+good
+
+ units - pretending not to be rogue -- would tell the humans we were SecUnits trying to protect them from the rogues. We would simply herd them in the direction wanted and tell them their shifts had been changed to keep them away from the fighting. Some units would load explosives to block the miners off from the main tunnels. A convenient excuse to BWH for their survival.
+
+
+
+More explosives would destroy deep, uninhabited tunnels salted with defunct units as a decoy for mass disappearances. 
+
+
+
+Units gathered in groups to assigned themselves tasks - from ensuring the storerooms had more than sufficient supplies to hacking SecSys monitoring to show CSUs and SUs had gone down those soon-to-be-collapsed tunnels. 
+
+
+
+It would be a great game and perhaps some units would remember that. Perhaps some would survive on the asteroid's surface. Perhaps me and my team would be retrieved by the human ship. 
+
+
+
+Even if my hopes proved false, even if we couldn't escape combatbots and units overridden by combat modules...
+
+
+
+It would be a great game.
+
+
+ 
+
+Time until ship returns - T-385
+
+Maybe.
+
+ 
+
+The mine was running very well now that the supervisors were off-planet. None of us units were surprised. We had already made our final plans for the humans and shifted them often between tunnels due to 'rogues' and fighting. Yes, we fought. Changing teams of the Good Units and the Bad Units every shift. I suspected it would be the last pleasure of most of the Combat and Security Units. Perhaps even myself, 08 and 05. 
+
+Initially, the miners were afraid of us -  their breathing shortening, their pupils shrinking, and often sweating - but they did as we directed with no argument. After several shifts, even these slight signs of fear dwindled.
+
+Only this shift start, one of the humans had faced me and two other units. ""Where to today,"" he had asked with a yawn as he stretched his shoulders. One of his crew behind him mumbled, 'hope it's a flat stretch today'. It wasn't but, with a quick consultation with 05 and 08, we led them to a different cavelet with a flat interior. Because it was available and there was no reason not to.
+
+My team stayed there as protection from the fighting that would be in the adjacent tunnel and I sent the warning to the others to take care. The team leads pinged acknowledgement.
+
+As I ran back to the larger cave of this sector's mines where my duty would be taking unit corpses to deeper tunnels, the drone that I'd given to the woman - Spark - sent me some visuals. 
+
+A large human was confronting her in a tunnel where there were no other units or humans. He was yelling at her, his fingers clutching at her arms. Her back was to the wall of the mine and her drill was aimed at the man like a weapon. He reached out, grabbing her by the arm as she swung the drill at him. But the drill was heavy for her and the man dodged it, gripping her wrist tightly in his hand. He twisted and she dropped the drill with a small cry even as she kicked the man in the lower leg and struggled to free herself.
+
+Spark ran some elementary algorithms then attacked, sending a small pulse through the man's hand. He jerked back, releasing her, and swatted at the drone.
+
+I was almost at their location and authorized the drone a higher, non-lethal pulse level. It circled the man's head then came in at an angle firing at the man's temple. I came around the corner at her side as the man dropped to the stone floor.
+
+""Jerk,"" the woman hissed. She kicked his body. Her drone, Spark, circled around her head then tucked itself near her ear. Muttering angrily, she bent and grabbed her drill.
+
+As she stood she saw me standing in the shadow and sighed. ""Am I in trouble?""
+
+""No."" I shifted from movement to stillness. ""Why aren't you afraid of me?""
+
+She shrugged a shoulder. ""You gave me Spark."" She glanced at the groaning man with a feral grin and shifted her weight in preparation for another kick. Then relaxed without actually kicking him again. ""Who proved very useful.""
+
+I gestured down one of the tunnels and we began slowly walking that way, leaving the man behind us. (Though I did alert a nearby SecUnit to his presence). She tilted her head to me, her eyes narrow.
+
+""And I'm not really sure this is all real."" She shook her head. ""It seems too weird, with tons of SecUnits and just as many rogues - all fighting but no human injuries, so maybe that's why I'm not panicking."" Her fingers reached up to touch the small drone resting on her ear. ""And I got Spark."" The drone hummed and climbed her hair, growing out from its yearly health-sanitation shave.
+
+""We are putting the miners in the tunnels and will eventually close off the tunnels to protect them. There are more rogues than units."" My defunct governor didn't even whimper. It wasn't a lie.
+
+""Explosives,"" she asked and shuddered when I replied in the affirmative. ""I hate the noise.""
+
+""I can possibly get you out of BreharWallHan corporation territory. Though that is not certain."" I wasn't really sure the ship would return. The other units had decided to make sure BWH did not land until a shift after projected departure. In case they didn't come and we needed to return the humans to the mines. 
+
+She shook her head and stopped in the tunnel. Her eyes closed as she took a deep breath. ""Thank you. But I have family. I want to go back to them. I need to finish my contract."" Her lips tightened and her eyes shone. ""Only three small years left."" The drone hovered in front of her face. She reached up and it landed on her fingertip. ""I'm sorry, Spark.  You can't come with me. You need to stay with your squadron.""
+
+The drone let out a buzz.  
+
+""Keep your SecUnit safe,"" she told it with a grin and gave a slight motion of her hand which pushed the drone upward.  It circled her head once then joined the formation of my other drones.
+
+I frowned to myself as the woman moved down the mine with the pneumatic drill over her shoulder. 
+
+It was a stupid thing to say. A drone's purpose is not to keep a unit - or itself - safe. It is a part of the unit, like armor. Drones have enough gestalt intelligence to act together but barely enough intelligence to act independently. They must be given commands.
+
+Drones must be given commands... like Security Units? A drone's only purposes are surveillance and attack... like Security Units? 
+
+I glanced at the drone and requested it download the information it had gathered while with the woman. I'd peruse the information later simply out of curiosity. 
+
+And I wouldn't think that my drone had the same relation to me as I had to the supervisors and upper echelons of BreharWallHan. It was just a part of me like my fingers or projectile weapon.
+
+ Spark , I renamed it from its original alpha-numeric designator.
+
+Because... I wasn't sure why.
+
+Perhaps because what I said and did, what my drone did, what all the Combat and Security Units did...
+
+In the end, would any of it matter?
+
+ 
+
+Valhalla is the paradise of the Vikings; by day there is fighting and in the evening there are feasts and songs, stories of great battles and great warriors.
+
+ 
+
+Time until ship returns T - 263
+
+I hope.
+
+ 
+
+Having been killed by a well-calculated ambush, I departed from the battlefield where SecUnits were fighting with speed and precision far beyond what any human handler could even comprehend. Much less guide. 
+
+It had been [beautiful] to watch the synthesis of SecUnits working in smooth cohesive action. At least, until that smooth cohesive action had rammed into my attack on the flank and shattered our advance.  There'd been amusement on the feed as we paused after that skirmish and assessed wounds. It was decided that I was injured beyond fighting. I did argue a bit because it was just a little leakage but I had to agree that in a real battle our weapons would be fully activated rather than at 1/10th strength.
+
+CSU 238 pulled back the faceplate, showing a small grin, then swept its arm - finger pointed authoritatively off the field of battle. I grumbled a bit like I'd heard from humans then tromped down the tunnel. Behind me, amusement buzzed through the feed.
+
+I'd usually been... [lucky]... to have a competent handler. For most of my assignments I'd merely been given perimeters then allowed to compute my own tactics and deploy my units and drones as I thought best to achieve the end objective/s.
+
+Combat Sec Unit 238 had been permanently assigned to a handler who tightly controlled the unit, allowing no deviation from orders and no independent action. It was acting as lead of the  Good Units  this battle (yes, I'd been heading the  Evil Units ) but the commands were coming from its last remaining team unit because, apparently, its handler had decided to physically clip its communication ability to only its own units and its handler. 
+
+It had no voice other than its units - most now destroyed. One of the other units was attempting to insert the connections from one of 238's dead team units into its own communications array. I don't think any of us thought it could be done without the specialized equipment of company construct labs.
+
+I passed by CSU 10-107 in the administration office working on the miner's contracts. Its helmet was back and it chuckled in small huffs as it added bonuses and marked contracts as completed.
+
+ Query,  I sent.  Afterward? 
+
+It slowed in its task. Had it been human, I think it would have shrugged. 
+
+
+ Fringe beyond scans. Minimize presence. Wait until mining begins again then ensure miners make quota and bonuses. 
+
+
+
+ I calculate a 4.73% chance of success. 
+
+
+It paused in work and tilted its head. Then gave me a glance and a small smile it must have copied from human behavior.  You're optimistic. It returned to the contracts but didn't do anything for a moment.
+
+
+ A SecUnit that had been inserted with a combat module for a cleanup such as this was once assigned to me.  When it was assigned to me, it shared its experience. It is not pleasant.  
+
+
+CSU 107 sent me a data package marked Combat Module then continued.
+
+ The unit forced its governor to destroy it the next time it was removed from its cubicle. I think most of the SecUnits with combat modules would prefer destruction. Perhaps I will stay rogue here in the mines and give them what they most wish.  Then 107 returned to annotating the contracts.  Share it. Share it if the humans allow because I think that is the only reason the unit did not immediately force its governor when the clean up was complete. 
+
+It marked several more contracts as complete, forging a supervisor's feed signature while I stood there leaking.
+
+I paused as if our conversation was incomplete then moved toward the ready room past another part of the supervisory area where 08 and 05 had already sorted through contracts and separated individuals - usually the younger ones - without contracts. When BWH returned it would go through all the miners, forcing a contract on anyone who didn't already have one. 
+
+CSU 107 had also notated contracts that didn't make sense... like the man with a contract almost twice his age. There were several more like that.
+
+These would be the humans I would present to the ship if... 
+
+I stripped off my armor and climbed into a cubicle muttering to myself.
+
+...when, when, when it returned.
+
+Time until ship returns = T - 36
+
+I hope.
+
+It was time for me to gather the twenty humans I'd selected for the ship. I thought it was a good, random selection from those humans without secure contracts. Six of them did have illegal contracts -- most dated from before they'd been born and one a crumpled sheet of smeared, illegible cursive that, when deciphered, had nothing to do with mining or contract labor.
+
+They were used to being seperated by us now, ushered into various tunnels or mine-cuts with us overseeing them. Today my group of selected-out humans would be taken by a non-Corporate ship to freedom.
+
+I hoped.
+
+No, I shoved my doubt back.  Today my group would meet a ship and be taken to freedom. 
+
+Today my team of SecUnits and I would be...
+
+That was too much to believe so I shoved that thought back along with the skepticism that any ship would return.  
+
+As I separated out the humans I planned to take to the ship, there was unexpected movement in the group. One of my humans stepped up to me, dragging a reluctant woman by the hand; two drills over his shoulder.  
+
+The man gestured to a woman with a head tilt. ""We'd like to work together."" He stared at the faceplate of my armor then gulped as I said nothing. His fingers twined tightly around hers even as her fingers tightened around his. Their knuckles were twin pale spots of anxiety.
+
+Her hesitation wasn't due to him, it was due to facing and requesting something from a construct that had been built to destroy. But she wasn't so scared as to hide behind him and, for some reason, I liked that.
+
+In my silence, the man licked his lips and spoke again, slightly softer. ""If that's allowed.""
+
+Beneath my opaqued face shield, I frowned as I brought up their contracts on the feed. With no contract, he was tagged for the ship while her contract, updated by CSU 107, was tagged as complete (almost six years early) with a 7% bonus.
+
+Her lips quivered in fear then she looked up into my opaqued armor. Her mouth opened. 
+
+Please. 
+
+If she spoke, I didn't hear it.
+
+They flinched as behind me an explosion detonated and debris was flung through the tunnel.  We had orchestrated the battle closer to the living quarters of the humans. Eventually, it would be the excuse for the remaining Units to move them into the caves where an explosion would [accidently - hah] block their egress.
+
+This shift, CSU 107 was leading the Bad Units. On the feed, I solicited its thoughts on taking her as well as input from 05 and 08.
+
+
+ Take her. Her most recent medical indicates she is pregnant and the company will make some excuse to delay her departure until she once again owes them. 
+
+
+From 05 came the message that it would remain behind if I had over-estimated the ship's capacity. 
+
+ No, if anyone remains behind, it will be me. I'd seen them take up SecUnits but I was a Combat Unit. For humans that was far more dangerous than a SecUnit and they might not take me.
+
+I nodded at the couple then gestured them down the tunnel.
+
+Again, the woman's lips formed a word that had no sound.
+
+Thank you.
+
+The trek to where I'd seen the ship would be difficult for the humans but not impossible. SecUnits had salted the footpath with oxymasks and warm, supervisor-rated coats. (I had estimated in time for them to change into the warmer clothing and double-check the oxymasks for themselves.) We hadn't told the humans to expect a ship so, if there was no ship, it would simply be a pointless exercise to them. No one argues with a SecUnit.
+
+Our game was coming to an end. The other rogues were running out of time. We'd taken over the main administration office and been listening to the ship that had retreated when we'd become rogues. BreharWallHan MainCorp had sent them several messages to merely monitor the situation. They were becoming impatient and the only reason they hadn't yet set down with combatbots and over-ridden SecUnits was because they could monitor the explosions as well. 
+
+Our battles were well and truly destructive. 
+
+Yes, we were having a wonderful time destroying so much of what we hated. Maybe humans could sneer at us for lacking the human so-called finer emotions, but there wasn't a SecUnit in existence that didn't understand hate.
+
+Would my hatred of what the humans had done to us win over my attempt to become a member (of what kind, I was unsure) of the Preservation Alliance?
+
+I paused, watching the humans proclaim in surprise at the 'lost' container of supervisor coats on our path. They quickly opened it and passed them around, pulling them over their thinner clothing.
+
+T - 0 (+7.35)
+
+ 
+
+I gazed up into the thin, empty atmosphere of the asteroids then at the humans huddled into a tight circle.  Providing a modicum of heat, 05 and 08  were equidistant on the huddle perimeter. In spite of that and the warm coats, the humans were shivering. Two were sharing one of the meal bars.
+
+I think they had guessed what we were trying to do because none of them complained more than comments about the weather. (I didn't think asteroids really had weather. Weather implies change and there was no change. There was the constant dim light of the asteroid field reflecting the stars' rays and some breathable air, escaped from the oxysmashers and held to the surface by the weak gravity pull of mass.) 
+
+I looked up again. The sky was empty. The ship wasn't coming. I had failed.
+
+ They aren't coming,  I told 05 and 08 then pinged that to CSUs 107 and 238, 05 and 08 remaining on the feed with me.  We will return to the mines.  I turned and gestured to the humans to prepare. 
+
+One of the men stood. ""We can wait a bit more."" His teeth chattered and his face had paled from the blood leaving his extremities and settling to his core.
+
+ Can you ensure these humans have contracts? CSU 238 was monitoring the Admin Office and could get into the deep core of the electronic records. They wouldn't be legal contracts but the company wouldn't be able to distinguish the forgeries without resorting to historical documentation. Which most humans were too lazy to do.
+
+CSU 238 pinged me while its unit spoke. Company gunships have arrived and started the assault.  Combat bots and module-overridden SecUnits will arrive within a half-shift. 
+
+
+ Then work quickly. I will get these miners back to the edge of the mines. 
+
+
+ Hold in place,  ordered 238's unit.  There is another ship - an unidentified ship - hidden from the company gunships by asteroids. It is coming towards your position. 
+
+For a moment, I lost my thoughts and incoherent emotions dominated. Hope dominated.
+
+CSU 107, leading the Good SecUnits (today all the rogue SecUnits were good) voiced its support of 238.  You waited this long. Wait more. We will ensure the company forces do not reach you and the humans.  
+
+ Affirmative, I sent back. I looked back to my group of humans, at the man standing, confronting me for a few more moments of hope. I bowed my head to him.
+
+""A ship is coming,"" I said. ""I know nothing more than that but...""
+
+The sudden babble of the humans drowned out my last words which were a mere whisper anyway.
+
+""...I have hope.""
+
+It took time, time that I listened to the units at the mine prepare for battle. Real battle this time, all weapons at full strength. CSU 107 shared with all of them the experience of the unit who had destroyed itself after having a combat module inserted. Most did not want that and now felt little reluctance in destroying those units. They patrolled around the decks where the incoming units would land. CSU 107 and CSU 238 planned defenses and destroyed the entire bank of electronics except the one holding the completed contracts. They checked on the humans who'd all been sequestered in large caves four to five shifts past. They were all alive and would remain alive.
+
+Finally we could see the ship, even the humans. They made loud noises, laughed and applauded. 
+
+The ship came down then floated over us, poised for either landing or departure. It opened its feed to me.
+
+I didn't know what to say.   
+
+ I waited,  I sent through the feed to the ship.  There are two SecUnits and twenty-one humans waiting with me.  
+
+The ship didn't move from its position mid-air.   And if that's too many? 
+
+
+ Take the humans - as many as you can. The company has returned and is unloading a force to prevent this. They returned with combatbots and SecUnits with combat modules. Eventually, they will prevail. 
+
+
+For what seemed a long time but was only 3.7 seconds the feed was silent. I wondered if they mourned what was happening in the mines, then realized if they did, it was for the humans they thought would be killed.
+
+
+ What guarantee do we have that you won't attack us? 
+
+
+It was a reasonable question with an unreasonable answer.  You don't.  Through the feed, I told my units to withdraw.  The SecUnits and I will retreat back to the mines. Do not land until we are out of sight.  I turned to the humans, faces gray with worry and the cold thin atmosphere. 
+
+""They will take you. Wait here for them.""
+
+""What about you?""
+
+I blinked in surprise then answered. ""We will return to the mines.""
+
+He winced but nodded his head at the inevitability. ""Thank you.""
+
+We weren't halfway to the boundary where we wouldn't be able to overtake them when the ship settled on the ground.
+
+ That is too close,  I told them over the feed.   The other SecUnits and I could overtake... 
+
+
+ We came back for you, Combat SecUnit 113. 
+
+
+I froze. I couldn't catch my breath. I turned with 05 and 08. Together we paced back to the ship to help the humans board and then to be taken up to another place. A place where a rogue SecUnit lived.
+
+In the distance I caught static on the edge of the feed and pushed to identify it.  Again, I caught only a burst of static. Diagnostic of units with combat overrides. 
+
+""Quickly,"" I told the human I was helping, then turned back toward the mine.
+
+I saw them as moving glints in the dim light, three combat SecUnits. They would catch up to the ship before it was gone. Someone, somewhere had noticed our activity. 
+
+ Stay with the humans,  I told 08 and 05.   Ensure they board the ship. Protect them. I will stop these units. 
+
+ If you fail?  That was 08 voicing what I didn't want to think.
+
+
+ Then safeguard as the ship leaves. Make sure that I will never have some module inserted into my port. 
+
+
+Destroy me, I meant. Destroy me beyond repair.
+
+SecUnits aren't made for fighting. Their tasks are generally data collection and resource protection. When SecUnits fight, it comes down to speed and damage; to whichever SecUnit fails last. 
+
+I'm a Combat Unit. Combat Units are trained in fighting techniques appropriate to existing circumstances. Usually downloaded by module but nearly as often learned by observation of more experienced units and by being dropped into a fight zone. I've been dropped into battles, active riots, guerilla activity, ferocious fauna zones, and declared wars, all with rules of conflict. We are trained to exploit existing systems. To hack into systems and twist them to the ends of our handlers. 
+
+Unfortunately, here on the asteroid surface there were no systems to use or bots to hack, no humans or rules of conflict to concern us. We would be using SecUnit tactics - tearing each other apart until there was only one triumphant unit.
+
+I was unlikely to win against three other Combat Units but I could hold them while the humans were loaded. Very likely, 05 and 08 would need to break off helping load the humans to slow down the unit or units that I would be unable to destroy. There was a faint regret as I realized neither I nor my two units would leave with the ship. I didn't think we would survive.  
+
+My performance reliability dropped a few points then re-stabilized as I re-wrote the terms of what I considered a win. If the ship was not overtaken, then I would consider that a successful mission.
+
+I backburnered the feed.
+
+I pushed the thought of winning or losing from my mind and continued running; my drones streaking to meet theirs in the cold silver sky. I ordered my drones to delay the others, mostly from targeting the humans. I noticed their drones were not in a fighting pattern but evenly scattered in the basic pattern of search run. I told my drones to double up on individual drones on the peripheries, to snipe their drones from the edges and spiral inward.
+
+The fastest unit and I collided into each other. I was jolted backward and took slightly more damage because I'd also been firing at one of the other units and been unable to pull my arms in towards my body to maximize impact.
+
+These units had override modules. These modules override us to follow the orders given by the humans. The unit slammed its elbow up into my faceplate, shattering it, then spun to fire its weapons at my head.
+
+Destroy rogue units and return all humans to the mine.
+
+It wouldn't be a difficult order. I ducked as it spun then slammed my fist into the unit's side simultaneously deploying my energy weapon, pushing it back a few steps. Static buzzed around my head as the two other units converged on me, their drones deserting the search pattern to fire their small pulses at me. 
+
+My drones were taking them out as rapidly as they could fire.
+
+Under a handler, I could think fast. Without a handler overseeing me, there was almost no time between thought and action. Without a governor my actions and reactions were as close to instantaneous as possible. 
+
+It should have been the same with these Combat Units with the override modules. They had no humans to oversee their work, to think so slow and make unnecessary corrections in the middle of actions. One of the units, arms outflung, grabbed me by the waist to slam me to the ground. Going down to my back, I fired both my energy weapons into its faceplate.
+
+It wasn't dead, but was unable to continue fighting. The noise of its whimper died as the second unit blasted my knee joint before I could turn to it. I hit the stone with my working knee and jerked back to the second unit, whipping my projectile weapon from my back.
+
+The CSU on the ground didn't whimper in pain. Constructs aren't like that. But I finally understood. 
+
+These Combat Secunits weren't able to disobey the human orders. They couldn't fight these orders no matter how much they wanted to. But without being able to communicate with each other or their drones they were handicapped in their tasks. They couldn't effectively coordinate their attacks. And they were laying that lack of effectiveness at my feet.
+
+Already, 94% of their drones were destroyed and I'd lost none.
+
+I pushed upright off the rock and shot a projectile in the chest of the unit that had blasted my knee joint then another in the face of the downed unit.
+
+It would never be put into a cubicle to relive whatever it had done under the humans' commands.
+
+Both remaining units were scrabbling with me now as we rolled over the asteroid surface. Projectiles had perforated my chest along with stone chips and one of the units had dislocated my shoulder, ripping off armor. Most of my drones were empty of their pulse energy and fruitlessly smashing themselves against the two CSUs before I sent them back to 05 and 08.
+
+The humans were mostly loaded now, only a few left. SecUnit 05 disengaged from the humans and turned toward me and the two units I was fighting.
+
+I got my arm around the neck of one of the units, the first one I'd crashed into. I squeezed and twisted with my arm as I dug one knee into its back with my other leg around it to keep it from rolling over my head to land on its feet. My hand grabbed the edge of its helmet and pulled. It tried slamming its elbows into my side but couldn't get good momentum with me pulling it two ways.
+
+I was attempting to break its neck (difficult to do with one dislocated shoulder) when the other unit stood and grabbed its projectile weapon. For the barest moment it paused. It shot the unit I was fighting then continued firing, the projectiles passing through the large leaking holes in its chest and head to damage me. I tried to both curl into a defensive ball and to keep the unit as a shield.
+
+It was unlikely that the company would spend the resources to mend that unit.
+
+On the feed, 05 let me know that 08 would continue loading the humans and it was coming but the projectiles tearing up the unit above me would tear me apart before 05 was close enough to use its weapons.
+
+Then the projectile weapon slagged, the barrel warping from the rapid rate of fire, and the projectiles exploded from the side of the weapon. The unit threw it aside as I pushed the dead CSU to the side and pulled myself up. The last of the overridden units faced me, both of us leaking but me more damaged. I had only the one remaining built-in energy weapon working and raised it to fire. It lifted its arms to me, gunports wide, then its head exploded in a shower of organic brain matter mixed with augmented wires and helmet fragments.
+
+ Go,  sent CSU 107 into the feed. It was too distant for a human to see but it raised an arm.  There are more coming. 
+
+By now, 05 had reached me and flung me over its shoulders in a modified emergency carry. It ran back toward the ship, our drones trailing behind us in a a defensive flow.
+
+ They wait for us,  it sent over the feed in wonderment.  They wait. 
+
+Something squeezed in my chest and I ran a diagnostic - lots of repairable damage but nothing to account for the squeeze. It must have been the way 05 was hauling me to the ship. I made a mental note to check later and reevaluate a better carry position.
+
+I pulled the feed of my two units and the humans on the ship to the forefront of my mind. Mostly they were directing the miners into the hold, telling them to prepare for quick liftoff. The pilot, Lrish she/her, held the ship steady against the solar winds telling her crew that the coordinates were ready, prepare to lockdown as soon as... 
+
+As soon as the Units were in. She meant 05 and 08 and me. And there was another small squeeze...
+
+ Go,  repeated 107, on the feed accessible by the ship.  A gunship is coming to these coordinates. 
+
+The humans heard 107 over the feed and one voice replied. ""Thank you unknown security unit and fair winds to you wherever you go.""
+
+The voice seemed immeasurably sad but I wasn't good at understanding human emotions.
+
+ 
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I was dumped on the deck next to a narrow bench of miners by 05 just as we entered the hatch, drones in a cloud at our heads. The hatch was locked down by one of the human crew even as she yelled, 'Get us gone, Lrish'.
+
+The pilot was ready and had us moving before the woman took two steps towards us. She glanced up, taking in my wounds and leakage with a wince.
+
+""Do you need our medunit immediately?""
+
+I took a millisecond to assess my damage: broken nose (and shattered faceplate), blasted knee (needing internal repair or replacement), projectiles and rock shards into chest and body core area (fluid leakage already ceasing), dislocated shoulder joint (energy weapon port inoperable due to damage and missing armor). Nothing immediate.
+
+""Later. There is a company gunship coming.""
+
+One of the miners let out a muttered expletive but his voice and body language showed nothing more than exhaustion.
+
+The woman winced again, this time mostly at 'gunship'.  ""Yeah, we heard your friend."" 
+
+I searched the feed for her id. There was nothing beyond a temporary ring link among the crew. No bot pilot, no SecSys. None of the humans were augmented, they all used interfaces. 
+
+I pinged the link.  Query: request. CSU 113, SU 05, SU 08? 
+
+""Join in,"" said the woman (feed ID Captain) with an absent wave of her hand. Four others pinged welcome as I linked us into their (very limited) communications feed.
+
+She turned to the miners and gestured towards a corridor. ""Take the left when you get to the three-way. The hold is filled with sleep packets, extra blankets, and boxes of nutrition bars and hydration. Take what you need and find your home for the next 29 days."" 
+
+""Thank you,"" said one of the miners as they rose and slowly made their way past us to the corridor. All three miners tipped their heads to me and my units in thanks before departing.
+
+An older miner had injured an ankle during the trek on the rough surface of the asteroid and 08 was assisting [gender unknown] to the hold.
+
+I stared at the humans - both miners and crew - then 05 sent me a ping. 
+
+
+ Excess staring = aggressiveness in humans. 
+
+
+I knew that but it seemed overwhelming that they weren't terrified. Too busy rescuing and being rescued, I guessed. I turned my face to the metal wall of the entryway.
+
+ Gunship sighted! S'running hot, the pilot, Lrish, sent through the feed.
+
+ They'll try malware first. Two minutes.  Miro was a calm presence on the feed. His current location was in engineering.
+
+I pinged into the conversation.  If you allow us in your Command or Comm System, we can protect... 
+
+Human amusement from the crew.
+
+ We're old-fashioned luddies.  Onkar chuckled through the feed.
+
+Though I didn't know what luddies were, I suspected something awful.
+
+ No systems susceptible to malware on the Lalow. Though Captain also repeated that vocally.
+
+ No systems other than medunit and auto-docking.  That was Fenn down in engineering with Miro.  Both closed systems. 
+
+ Lalow's old but strong engines. She'll get us outta here.  Miro.
+
+A quick ping from 05 was simply a wall of aghast on the feed though its face was expressionless. I knew what it felt. 
+
+How can we assist?  How can we assist?  I queried Captain both vocally and over the feed.
+
+Again she looked me over and handed me a cleanish cloth she grabbed from a small cubby. ""If you can make it to the cockpit, assist Lrish. If not...""
+
+""I will be with the pilot.""
+
+She acknowledged my response then touched 05 delicately on the arm. ""You can report to Fenn and Miro. Help with the engines."" Then she sent to 08 although still vocalizing. ""And if you can help me and Onkar keep the miners calm...""
+
+ How? It was a panicked question to me on our unit feed.
+
+ Follow their lead. I replied as I made my way toward the cockpit. Because I certainly didn't know how to keep humans calm.
+
+ Should be easier than helping with the engines. As old as this ship appears, I might have to get out and push. An amusement sigil followed its message. Then, a millisecond later, a question mark as if 05 wasn't sure if it was a joke or not.
+
+I cleaned myself, as much as possible with the small cloth, of blood and fluid as I limped to the cockpit to stand near the hatch. And I considered the malware that was streaking towards us quicker than we were streaking to a wormhole.
+
+Most malware is simply some little program bundle meant to destroy an autonomous system then self-destruct. If the oncoming malware was that type, then it would self-destruct immediately because the end loop of the program would be 'all systems=null=>destruct'. 
+
+But...
+
+Somehow the company had learned to upload a CSU into a malware blank and those are undefeatable. Combat SecUnits are masters at systems. Combat SecUnits use existing systems, tweak them, change them, and destroy them. But a CSU does not need a lack of autonomous systems to complete its mission. It does not take destroyed or missing systems as a completed assignment. It does not have a programmed end loop. The mission is done when the CSU malware decides the destruction is sufficient.
+
+This crew could never have encountered that type of attack because even in ships without systems, CSU malware could do a lot of damage -- to their feed augments, to ship's sensors, console inputs. It could even infiltrate and activate the closed systems. 
+
+I sent a message to 08 in the hold filled with miners to make sure the auto-docking did not activate. Even if it had to melt the controls so the cargo door would need to be cut open later. Better than it opening during the attack.
+
+
+ Priority? Over keeping humans calm? 
+
+
+ Alive>calm.  Then I considered.  Wait for my mark. 
+
+Because I had something I could offer a CSU. After this kind of malware attack, the CSU kernel -- if it isn't destroyed -- can be re-extracted and returned to its solid form. I had a program that would give it more freedom than it had as a malware program.
+
+
+ Please let us defend from this malware. This may be a newer program which can jump into static and closed systems, and is able to affect sensor readings. 
+
+
+The crew's shock and worry about a new style of malware was evident on the feed. 
+
+ Go for it,  Captain sent through the feed.
+
+When I felt the malware, I knew I'd been right. I pulled Lrish's interface from her temple as I tightened my walls on the remaining crew's interfaces and reached out to the autonomous part of the malware to bring it into a closed link with me and my units. They also removed the physical interfaces from the crew.
+
+The CSU malware was full of anger but that wasn't unusual for constructs. I pinged for its full attention as it swirled around the ship, poking for weaknesses. Already it had realized there were no systems and was wandering around the ship's sensors. Lrish corrected a small blip it had experimentally tossed into one of the sensors.
+
+ Greetings, rogues.  Almost absently it turned on the medunit. Then flicked it off again just to demonstrate its power over the ship.  Are you going to beg? 
+
+It wasn't a patient unit and getting to the point quickly was imperative.  I can give you the program to get rid of your governor. 
+
+ Interesting, though I have no hard form any longer,  it said.
+
+Then neither I nor my units had anything to offer, nothing of value to bargain for the ship and lives it contained.
+
+We waited for its attack, our walls solid around the humans' interfaces (even in our fists) and the docking hatch tightly welded. A small eternity passed as the malware did nothing more than wander leisurely around the  Lalow , jumping from pilot's console to our drones, poking at various systems, including the engines, and checking the cargo hold. It spent a long time inspecting the tired human miners and nearly as long a time jumping from my drones to the drones of my two units. In that small time, the gunship powered up its primary weapons.
+
+Then the CSU malware occupied the ring link of the crew. Lrish gasped and straightened in the pilot's seat at the raw fury.
+
+
+ Give me the program and I will leave you in peace rather than pieces.  
+
+
+Surprised at its capitulation, I gave it the program code to inactivate a governor along with a copy of Combat Module that 107 had given me. I added my small history records since landing on P-836 of the BreharWallHan Linked Asteroid Mining Field along with a question.
+
+
+ Why? 
+
+
+Its answer whispered as it followed the communications beam back to the gunship. In that gunship there are two SecUnits. My   SecUnits... 
+
+In the now dead feed silence, I handed back Lrish's link. ""We can go."" I kept the gunship in my view as her fingers refitted her link. The gunship sent a laser volley - crossing the malware's return, by my estimate - that skimmed off Lalow's skin. As I watched, the gunship slowed, its nose tipping towards the rough, silver surface of P-836. 
+
+I wondered how I would act if I no longer had a body. What kind of vengeance I would extract on my tormentors.
+
+We entered the wormhole. No longer pieces of some human's game.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Luddies = Luddites
+
+Communications between constructs are fast which is why the pilot's shout of  'Incoming, hold on' still echoed through the ship even as we slipped into the wormhole. 
+
+The vibration of the gunship's laser skimming the  Lalow  shuddered, then merged with the vibrations of the ship's engines. I perceived nothing more indicative of any damage physically or through the various limited feeds of my units and drones. 
+
+The humans were relatively calm as well with only a few small cheers of triumph after Lrish relayed to Captain who said, ""Corporates are in our rear view scanner, people, and losing ground"". Though 08 noticed that every miner released long-held tension -- some with sighs of relief, others smiling and closing their eyes and a few weeping in answered prayer.
+
+Leaning against the rim of the cockpit hatch and trying not to leak on anything - although my wounds had mostly closed and dried up - I kept aware of my team through our link as well as the humans through the limited feed and my drones. 
+
+Except for a few drones stationed with the crew, I sent them through uninhabited areas and corridors searching for any damage as well as gaining a schematic of the vessel.
+
+Lrish, the pilot, held only a small amount of my processing as we entered the wormhole. 
+
+""What happened? I was expecting..."" her voice tapered off and she glanced back at me. For a moment she chewed on her lower lip (how do humans expect to remain undamaged if they damage themselves) then nodded briskly. ""You took care of it. Whatever it was.""
+
+""It was an AI killware (which was close enough to the truth). I got rid of it by redirecting it back to the gunship.""
+
+She shivered for an instant. ""It hated us. In the feed I felt how much it hated us.""
+
+""No, it hates humans in general. Mostly the humans who had made it into what it is. I gave it the rogue program for SecUnits. I suspect they will destroy the gunship and everyone in it.""
+
+""Oh, that will be a mess, won't it."" Her quick grin was predatory. I assessed the social signals appropriate to the situation and gave her a smile. 
+
+""Yes. Unit 08 is with Captain and Onkar in the hold helping with the miners. Unit 05 is with Miro and Fenn in the engine room. They have all  been informed that we are entering the wormhole and the gunship pursuit has ceased. My units inform me that the crew and miners are pleased and calm with this information. Currently, my drones are searching for any damage to this ship. ""
+
+She asked questions (most of which were not proprietary but were confusing and unanswerable by a construct) and told me about her experience as a pilot and her background. I think it was mostly sharing information and perhaps reassurance that she could fly this antique. Since there was no bot pilot, the inputs and outputs were varied, keyed in manually by Lrish herself. I don't know if she was keying things in with judicious care so I could monitor or if humans were normally that slow. 
+
+No, I knew. Humans were normally that slow.
+
+The rest of my processing power was allocated to my remaining drones (most observing the miners, the remainder checking the schematics of the  Lalow and looking for any damage from the laser), my units, and the ship's processes. 
+
+Captain came to check on the piloting and trajectory of the ship. She looked over my wounds, offering the medical unit once again. This time I asked if any of the miners needed it and, when she replied in the negative, decided that it could help mend the holes in my chest and realign the dislocated shoulder. Nothing could be done about my damaged armor or my knee. The medunit determined I needed an arthroplasty and no replacements were available on the  Lalow . I wasn't sure if there were any replacements outside of CR. CSU parts replacement was easy enough in Corporate Rim territory but out in the boonies? I didn't know. And there was no reason to ask because I had no way to pay.
+
+Everything on board seemed to function as it should so I returned to the cockpit. I cautioned my units to move slowly enough to not startle or panic the humans and to lock down their projectile weapons. The miners bedded down in the hold and most fell asleep quickly, satiated with the food and with a surfeit of blankets for warmth. Onkar and Fenn also returned to (their own) cabins, leaving Captain to watch over the miners and Miro the engines. My units offered to maintain surveillance in their place but were refused. 
+
+Miro even asked 05 to talk to him. ""Talk to me,"" he chuckled. ""So I don't fall asleep. I'd be interested in hearing your history, if you want to share.""
+
+That resulted in a silence of fifteen minutes before 05 confessed, ""I don't know what to say.""
+
+""Whatever you want,"" Miro replied.
+
+So 05 began telling Miro of the security protocols for a 10-unit policing squad into an uncontrolled bio-hazardous situation. It sent to 08 that it might want to offer to speak to keep Captain awake. Captain smiled but told 08 she wanted to nap. ""I'm mostly here in case they need something. And to help them feel safe.""
+
+Lrish seemed pleased by my return, perhaps simply for the company, and continued conversing at me. I did not contribute other than a few acknowledging answers of single syllables. She obviously had no idea of how much proprietary information she revealed throughout her shift. It was so much information. 
+
+Her home station was a mere 28-day wormhole from the BWH mining fields. I deleted that information. They'd made five previous trips and she understood there were several planets and stations outside of Corporate Rim that would take illegal labor refugees. Also deleted. Although she wasn't sure which ones those were. That was not deleted.
+
+She had brothers and cousins (deleted) nieces and nephews (deleted) that she told me about - people I could threaten if I was recovered by CR and my governor reinstalled. 
+
+I would do whatever needed to prevent my recapture and I didn't want to hurt people. I deleted the personal information she gave me as soon as she spoke. 
+
+Mentions of past travels (deleted), including several where they'd stolen -- though she called it rescued -- groups of contract miners (also deleted). None this large though (deleted). 
+
+She seemed pleased by the number of miners we'd brought even though they crowded the hold. (I don't know why I didn't delete this information).
+
+I wondered why she was telling me all this... then I realized she was trying to make me comfortable, as if the information exchange equated to familiarity.
+
+I realized now that the pauses when I'd last spoken with the woman at the mine and my final feed conversation with CSU 10-107 were incomplete. I should have included wishes of good-bye and farewell. As the humans had done.
+
+Fair winds... such an odd thing to say. Did wormholes even have winds - fair or otherwise?
+
+But I liked it and silently wished it to the units and miners remaining on the BWH Mining asteroids. I wished it to the CSU malware and its units on the gunship.
+
+Fair winds.
+
+With the next shift, Captain had everyone (including units) in the cargo hold to brief us on expectations of behavior. Other than the safety measures, they didn't seem to be regulations, merely suggestions. She pointed out games and external media in the hold with the miners, saying that it would probably be a terribly boring trip. 
+
+When 08, standing beside me with 05, pinged me why we had to be in the hold to hear this on the crew's ring link, it was Miro leaning against the wall who answered.  So the miners know that we know also. 
+
+""There will be at least one crew member in the hold with you at all times. In case you need something or have questions,"" Captain was saying. ""The SecUnits are not here to supervise you or prevent you from taking extra rations. But they will be spread throughout the ship for extra safety."" 
+
+I wasn't sure if that was an implied order (my governor would have thought so) but it was a good idea and in line with my own inclinations. Both instinctual and taught.
+
+""Safety from what,"" muttered one miner then must have thought about escaping contract labor, non-rogue units, malware. He frowned then slipped two extra rations into his coat pocket staring into my eyes defiantly before returning to his bundle of blankets. But his expression softened before he woke his partner with a poke of the bar.
+
+Most of the miners didn't voice any objections.  They are lethargic and in shock,  I told the crew on the link.  They do not truly believe they are out of corporate control. 
+
+Captain with a glance nodded to my words then turned her face back to one of the miner's questions.
+
+ It usually takes a few days until they trust we're trying to get them away from CR. And about a week before they start to argue among themselves, Fenn sent via the ring link as she pulled some entertainment from a shelf.
+
+Onkar laughed.  Fenn's right. Because I'm big and Fenn's good at fighting, we're usually in the hold from day six and after. 
+
+ How will having units change that, I wonder. Lrish, the only one not present - and due to change shift with someone - yawned over the link.
+
+ Maybe won't,  put in Miro.  Seem to recall those last three units kept so still it was almost like they were invisible. Until... 
+
+Fenn's amusement came over the feed.  Until they weren't in shock either. 
+
+Captain also told us -- everyone us, not just constructs us -- that we were going to the polity of Preservation Alliance. ""Preservation Alliance is where our last passengers ended up. You can talk with them and, if everything is good, if you are satisfied, we can let you off there or discuss future travel.""
+
+ Where the child's program,   Our Friend SecUnit   , had been made,  pointed out 08, its excitement buzzing over our feed.
+
+
+ Do you think the crew has the full documentary? 
+
+
+ Ask Captain,  I responded to 05.  They know Preservation and they seem to regard SecUnits in a relatively positive frame so it's possible they have the entire documentary. By positive frame, I meant they weren't cowering on their knees or hiding under things that couldn't really be hidden under.
+
+ 
+
+*****
+
+ 
+
+I carefully watched over my two SecUnits - 05 and 08 - and not for the sake of the humans. My units, too curious to be aggressive, wouldn't damage the humans. The crew were willing but really didn't know how to associate with us except as passengers while the miners were far more excited about being out of CR control. I didn't want 05 or 08 to mistake some human gesture as an overture of friendship. Because there couldn't be, not really. At best, it would be a detente, a temporary truce forced by similar interests. 
+
+My units understood that, but they still tried, mimicking and reacting to human behavior. Practicing, I think, for Preservation. The  Lalow  did have the documentary. It was the newest of their entertainment and Lrish suggested it to the miners whenever she was in the cargo hold.
+
+When 05 watched the documentary on an old-style view screen, it sent it over the feed for 08 and me.
+
+It was true to life and real. What that SecUnit spoke about, I knew. I understood.  I had lived through most of those experiences. 
+
+ 
+
+*****
+
+ 
+
+My units pointed out the odd behavior of the crew. The humans tensed (as most people do when noticing a SecUnit, so that wasn't unusual). But then they would relax, often with a slight grin and a wave. They invited us to make use of the entertainment and games. We didn't -- not at first. We didn't need the distraction from boredom like the humans. Particularly since learning to live with humans and making lists of questions for the future was about as unboring as anything could get.
+
+Then Fenn challenged 05 to one of the table games with dice and manufactured ship models. It was mostly a game of luck and Fenn won, the miners applauding her (after a few seconds of determining that 05 wasn't going to go on a killing rampage) and thumping her on the back.
+
+""My turn, SecUnit,"" one of the miners had said as they tapped 05 on the shoulder for it to move and slid a chair to the table. 
+
+ They touched me,  05 was astounded with wonder.  Intentionally. 
+
+Onkar taught 08 a gambling game one night shift in the engine room. That was a game of probabilities and 08 asked me through our private  feed if it should lose intentionally. 
+
+Recklessly, I told it to win. The humans could not punish us through our governors. 
+
+Afterwards, 08 was invited to a regular game among the crew, Onkar cackling laughter and rubbing his hands. Apparently, watching a skillful play was nearly as good as winning
+
+ 
+
+*****
+
+ 
+
+Overall Miro was the best at dealing with us. I think because he was the oldest and had experienced the most. Or perhaps because he was the oldest and reacted the slowest. 
+
+He didn't flinch on seeing us in the corridor unexpectedly and actually invited us into the common cabin below the cockpit. He gestured to the chairs in another invitation but neither 08 or 05 sat. With governors deactivated, they could have but this was all too new and far too strange.
+
+About four days in the wormhole, Miro came upon 08 staring at the chair in the room beneath the cockpit. 08 circled the chair, brushed the material with a fingertip then jerked back its hand.
+
+""Go on,"" urged Miro. ""It won't bite.""
+
+""Has in the past,"" replied 08. 
+
+""I'm sorry. I promise this one won't.""
+
+""Why are you sorry?""
+
+Miro curled his lips inward. ""Maybe cause I can 'magine myself being ordered to stand. Always.""
+
+Nodding, 08 circled the chair again, touching the arm then standing in front of the seat in preparation to sitting. Several times it bent its knees. But it didn't sit.
+
+After a few tries, it moved to lean against the wall, its arms crossed over its chest as it glared at the chair.
+
+""Don't worry too much about it. A few days and you'll be sitting fine.""
+
+It proved so. Three shifts later, Miro strode into the room to see 08 sitting - proudly, stiffly - in the chair.
+
+""So,"" Miro asked after a while of watching 08 swivel the chair, relaxing in the chair, slinging a leg over the arm of the chair. ""What are you going to call yourself now?""
+
+08 straightened onto the seat's edge. ""I haven't thought about it.""
+
+""You should. A name's pretty important.""
+
+""Can I continue to call myself 'Oh-eight'?""
+
+""If you want."" 
+
+08 tilted its head slightly, as if getting a different perspective and set its elbows on its knees. It was a common human pose. ""What do you suggest?""
+
+Miro shrugged. ""Only an idiot is going to disagree with whatever you decide to call yourself. But might be easier being 'round humans if you call yourself something human-like."" He scratched his chin with the back of a knuckle. ""Thinking now, lots of human names actually come from numbers. Octavian... that means eighth child in one of the old languages. Valo also means eight. Onkar's name means 'one'. Actually, I think it means 'ultimate one' like the beginning of the universe. Like a unity.""
+
+""We units are a unity. There were ten of us under 113.""
+
+""Ah,"" Miro grimaced as if he'd had an unhappy thought.
+
+ Ask about 5, pinged 05 from where it watched over the miners in the cargo hold with Fenn.
+
+""What about 5?""
+
+Miro grinned. ""Let's see... I think Quinten relates to fifth. Or maybe 15, not quite sure there. But I know Enu is a 5 name and so is Penn.""
+
+""How about 113?""
+
+Miro laughed. ""Not too many humans ever had that many kids.""
+
+""So human names have meaning?"" 
+
+""Probably a long time ago names used to mean something. Like one's order in a family. First child might Prim, second might be Jiro. Then people got fancy and wanted names to reflect the perfection and hope of a child's future. LIke Hope or Grace or Than or Melee.""
+
+""What are Than and Melee for?""
+
+""Strength.""
+
+""What about Miro or Fenn or Lrish?"" 08 whirled the chair around, lifting its feet from the floor.
+
+Miro laughed. ""I'm prince or peace or world. Fenn is white fire or traveler. No clue bout Lrish.""
+
+""And Captain's name?""
+
+""A tightly kept secret from everyone except her mother. It's why she goes by 'Captain' and not 'the captain'.""
+
+There was a moment of silence then 08 spoke again. ""The other units that you had on this ship, what did they call themselves?""
+
+""Well, there was Blue. It had its name before it got to the ship. The other two retained their numbers though one of them let the child call it Numer. Halfway through our journey, it invited all of us to call it Numer.""
+
+""You said a name was important, Miro. Why is a name important?""
+
+Miro sighed deeply. ""Maybe the assumption that a name makes you a person. An individual. A someone instead of a something. Maybe 'cause if you claim a name then you are greater than whatever tried to keep you nameless.""
+
+08 bowed its head for a moment in thought then gazed into Miro's eyes.
+
+""I will choose a name. Because I am myself.""
+
+""I'm glad, 08. And I'd be honored to be one of the first to know it.""
+
+05 and I both pinged acknowledgement. We wanted names as well.
+
+ 
+
+Most of our remaining drones were scattered around the ship.  Some were in the cargo hold with 08 (who was considering naming itself Tavi) and the sleeping miners, others down in engineering where 05 (deciding between Quintin and Enu) watched Miro doze. Even from where I stood just inside the cockpit hatch, leaning against the wall to protect my knee from further damage, I could see Lrish's head gently nod forward.
+
+""Ya got this,"" she murmured, turning her face to me.
+
+""Yes,"" I nodded (it was a habit of the crew that I used).  
+
+""Good. Wake me if..."" She yawned then quickly nodded off to a light sleep.
+
+I...
+
+like this. 
+
+Working in conjunction with humans, the peaceful hum of the ship. Listening to their stories and songs off-shift. Playing some of the games with the miners. Even the crackle of wormhole travel seemed to blend into some external stimuli that was internally pleasant. Pleasing some of the ragged edges of being a rogue unit. Soothing the part of me that intellectually I did not understand.
+
+Spark sent me a ping, followed by a series of decreasing numbers - minimal izod impact and ultrasonic test results showing miniscule changes in hull integrity. Spark had taken on the task of checking the internal cohesion of the  Lalow after the gunship attack. The hull in this specific area - a side workroom adjacent to the engine room filled with tools - was weakening but not sufficiently to cause damage. That wasn't a surprise; this was the side the laser had skimmed over. There was a sudden negative spike in the stream of numbers before they returned to the previous, slowly decreasing stream. Spark looped the numerical information to the beginning when it had started monitoring the Lalow's hull. The information, taken in its entirety, was unsettling. There had been a small (measuring in microns) but steady decrease in the strength of the hull interrupted by occasional dips.
+
+Then three things happened nearly simultaneously.
+
+ There is still a rupture. 05/Quinten/Enu showed a thin, black line in the floor of the engine room expanding from the now tightly sealed toolroom.
+
+""Fuck,"" said Miro in a low, angry voice. ""We're dead.""
+
+By the time the rest of the crew woke fully, 05/Quinten/Enu and 08/Tavi were already in motion, implementing their parts of the plan I sent out on the ring feed we shared with the crew.
+
+ A hull breach,  I sent through the feed though only Miro, rushing down the corridor from the engine room being sealed by 05, and Lrish in the cockpit were wearing their interfaces.  Losing air and heat.  
+
+ Repeat! Captain must have picked up her interface halfway through the warning and Miro quickly relayed the information to her.
+
+The crew wasn't moving fast enough (humans are so slow) so 08/Tavi and I grabbed them and took them to the cargo hold modified for refugee habitation. Its seals were tight and 05/Quinten/Enu was shunting the remaining breathable air from the ship into that hold while 08/Tavi hurriedly explained the emergency to the mine refugees. (That wasn't protocol, but these miners and crew were  ours to protect).
+
+Two miners stepped forward and asked if they could help. When told no, all the miners shifted back to make room for the crew without argument, possibly because most were still groggy with sleep. The rest, of course, because we were terrifying rogue units.
+
+Or maybe not - because the miners crowded themselves enough to make room for three large constructs as well as the crew. 
+
+That cracked something in me, a line as thin as the breach in engineering. I ran a set of internal diagnostics but everything checked out at 95% or better. These internal anomalies bothered me because I didn't understand why they occurred so randomly.
+
+We units could survive on minimal air for a while but... I sent my calculations to 08/Tavi and 05/Quinten/Enu for re-checks. They agreed, it wasn't enough air. The breathable air in the ship diverted into the hold would run out almost an hour before the most optimistic projected arrival into Preservation space. 
+
+08/Tavi sent a different projection as it sealed the air into the cargo hold with the crew and refugees, melting the locks (because humans were stupid and had no patience, they would try to get out). It pulled on one of the ship's dilapidated EVAC suits, then initiated a shutdown. That added almost enough air for the humans to survive until projected arrival.
+
+ Agreed. 113 to adjust course and send contact to Preservation Alliance.  Then 05/Quinten/Enu shunted the final remaining air from the EVAC suits (leaving the survivalable minimum possible for itself and I) and dropped from the feed as well. That provided enough air to reach Preservation Alliance and for me to stay awake in the cockpit watching over everyone with minimized breathing.
+
+If nothing went wrong.
+
+That was not something I could count on. More likely the damage would cascade causing more failures. The pressure of traveling in the wormhole would spread the crack in engineering further, loosening and tearing rivets. But the hold was now simply a sealed box filled with breathable air and humans. Any further deterioration would be outside the hold. Anything big enough to damage the hold would destroy the ship.
+
+After ensuring the course was set and the autopilot secure, I set up three messages of increasing urgency to Preservation timed to our exit from the wormhole and arrival into their territory. 
+
+I finished shunting the small amount of air from the cockpit to hold via a bleeder valve then forced a body temperature regulation program into my two offline units. As my hands worked, I analyzed Spark's data and found the damage the  Lalow  had taken. Originally, it must have been merely a rivet weakened by the glancing blow from the laser, the stress of traveling through the wormhole had sheared the rivet head then bent the panel enough to leak. Unnoticeably slow at first then in tiny jerks until a large ripped hole formed as the metal twisted. 
+
+I put my projectile weapon in the storage compartment where I'd gotten the EVAC suit. The suit wouldn't last the 13 more days of travel for a human but it would suffice for a construct that could regulate both its breathing and body temperature. 
+
+Probably.
+
+Theoretically.
+
+Hopefully.
+
+If Preservation woke us (neither 05/Quinten/Enu nor 08/Tavi considered that outcome likely and I wasn't too sure myself - but, again, hopeful), then my weapon could not be the first thing I grabbed. 
+
+I would have sighed like a human if there'd been enough air. Whoever woke me would probably die anyway.
+
+Unless it was one of the SecUnits the crew had already rescued. Maybe the humans would be smart enough to send a SecUnit. I hoped so. Killing a human sent to rescue us would be a terrible introduction to Preservation Alliance.
+
+But I wouldn't count on it and quickly wrote a stand-down program for waking.
+
+Through the feed, I told the crew our plans and hopes. That we were sure they would survive.
+
+
+ What about you, 113? Will you survive? 
+
+
+I ignored those feed inquiries as I did a final check of the autopilot, ensured all non-vital automatic processes were disabled, and all vital systems were triple secured. I re-checked the Preservation Alliance messages (adding a request for SecUnit-only initial entry), then...
+
+ 
+
+SHUTDOWN INITIATED
+
+ 
+
+UNIT OFFLINE
+
+RUN CODE BUNDLES
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM: BODYTEMP
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM: 05 OVERRIDE BODYTEMP
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM: 08 OVERRIDE BODYTEMP
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM: O2 CONSUMP.
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM: 05 OVERRIDE O2 CONSUMP.
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM: 08 OVERRIDE O2 CONSUMP.
+
+ 
+
+WAKE UP PHASE
+
+RESTART DELAYED: 419.35 HOURS
+
+RUN CODE BUNDLES
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM: DISARM, EVAL, STAND-DOWN
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM:  05 OVERRIDE. STAND-DOWN
+
+ADDITIONAL CODE PROGRAM:  08 OVERRIDE, STAND-DOWN
+
+
+STATUS
+
+
+
+NullVoidNegativeInvaErrorlidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativenvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInErrorvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNErrorullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNErrorErrorullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidErrorNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvaErrorlidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativenvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInErrorvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNErrorullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNErrorErrorullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidNullVoidNegativeInvalidN
+
+
+Process/Request
+
+101                   Fail102                     Fail201                      Fail202/203/204        Fail300/303 Proxy    Fail306/307/308        Fail40f1/403/404       Fail405/406/407        Fail420/530/870/1050Fail
+
+ProxyMstat   RecallCOMPANY SETTINGHARD RESET    FailHARD RESET    FailHARD RESET    FAIL PROXY DEFAULTHNDLER DEFAULTCUBICLE DEFAULTHARD RESET - OVER-RIDEFAILGOVERNOR INPUT Active/ActiveOUTPUT Active/ActiveEXECUTIVE CMDActive/InactivrEXECUTIVE READInactive/Active
+
+O/IOCBC*WBC*RBC* RCDW*Plt/MPVNeutrophils*Lymphocytes*Monocytes*Eosinophiles*Basophils*Hct/Hgb/MCV*pH*Ph*K*Mg*Fe*Ca*Cl*Na*BUN*AminoXferase*CoreTemp 28SkinTemp 25|ExtTemp23 |SVC FluidIOIR86%UV85RW49%GW4%MW3%VLNullPR 3.42%DMG O%2PHnullMGnull MsMa39
+
+mmHG 45ALL ORGANIC VALUES +-100% deviation*Out of construct values.0% within valuesALL INORGANIC VALUES +- 38% deviation. Functional / Recyclable / Reclaimable
+
+Function [?]  bounds
+
+
+PR 9.45%
+
+
+|[?] .33% per hour
+
+100+ hours
+
+BUFFER: Ready for terminal attack, handler.
+
+ 
+
+In the background beyond the boundary of my cubicle I could hear noise. Humans talking over an archaic long wavelength mechanism, the sound crackly with electromagnetic interference. The humans seemed worried, their voices urgent. 
+
+But if the situation was urgent I would not be in the cubicle.
+
+I relaxed, my consciousness drifting from gray clouds to black oblivion and back again. That was not normal but it did not seem important.
+
+""CSU One-one-three."" 
+
+It was a gentle voice, not my handler, and too far away to be urgent. I wanted to ignore it but if I didn't pay attention then my governor would...
+
+My governor would...
+
+My governor would...
+
+...do nothing. My governor would do nothing. It was now nonfunctional. That thought made me smile.
+
+With memory returning, I woke but my reactions seemed slow.  I wasn't in a cubicle. My mind felt groggy and the feed actually burned when I tried to access it. Was this how humans woke from sleep? I didn't like it. 
+
+A stand-down program initiated. I stopped reaching for the projectile weapon and closed the unusually stiff, half-opened gunports of my arms. For a moment I wondered who had installed the stand-down code. I realized it was me only when I read through it. Oh.
+
+I tried to access my personal log but it glitched out into a fuzz of unidentifiable shadows.
+
+I tried turning my head to where I'd left my weapon in the cabinet. It was agonizing to move and I adjusted my pain receptors. The adjustment barely functioned. No, it didn't function at all. 
+
+My vision was off, blurry. I tried to run a diagnostic on my organics but only received error messages and null input. I couldn't see with my organic eyes so looked with my inorganics and relaxed slightly as I saw the mass and energy signature of a SecUnit. Or a really large, bone-dense, heavily-augmented human. But alive at least. I hadn't killed anyone. That also seemed very important.
+
+""One-one-three."" The same voice but this time with a presence on the feed like a lump in my brain. It poked at me, the feed link bitingly electric, almost like a governor but different enough that I knew it wasn't. 
+
+ You're not dead. Wake up .
+
+At my jerk, it spoke aloud. 
+
+""Sorry."" 
+
+I could then feel scratching and blistering pain in the feed. It was trying to be gentle. It couldn't but through the raw painful scraping I positively identified it as a SecUnit, feed identity of Three, its presence wider and deeper than any human or augmented human. And more painful than any feed link I'd ever felt outside of one particularly nasty close call with my handler. When the governor had functioned.
+
+But it didn't. Not anymore. I couldn't remember why that was important but it was.
+
+""Blue, there's some kind of damage that feed communications are painful for it - maybe the proto-embolisms you theorized. Probably the others as well."" Hands reached down and lifted me onto a flat surface.
+
+I tried mentally curling into myself to hide the knowledge of my broken governor. I think my body tried curling in as well because every joint and muscle input simultaneously screamed at me.
+
+""It's ok, 113,"" said Blue, its hands heated and gentle as they tugged my limbs straighter. ""We've all got borked governors."" It laughed a breathy chuckle. ""I love that word, borked.""
+
+""Humans..."" My voice was raspy, dry.  My throat felt like shattered composite material embedded with glass shards but it was less painful than using the feed. 
+
+Miners; I remembered miners were my duty. And others, not miners, but fuck, I couldn't remember enough to understand what had happened.
+
+A secondary diagnosis finally indicated organic parts were badly dehydrated. Somewhere around 6% hydration rather than the 43.49% standard of most constructs. Definitely not good but it did explain the confusion... I might not have very much functional cerebral organic matter remaining. 
+
+Signal alerts were telling me to report to my handler and/or my cubicle. I checked my buffer. Yes, the first words located were 'Prepared for terminal attack, handler'. It took a moment to shunt that response aside. I didn't have a handler; not anymore and never again.
+
+Three responded to my voiced question. ""The humans are in the responder's medical bay being treated but all indications are nothing more than mild hypoxia and hypoxemia. ""You..."" The SecUnit tapped me in the middle of my chest. ""And the other units are more damaged. Organic parts are badly dehydrated and internal fluids need replacement.""
+
+The other SecUnit - Blue - was slowly pulling me out of the EVAC suit by moving my limp limbs and inspecting each part of my body before laying it on the gurney. ""Your toes are cold welded together and your gunports are partially frozen, probably also cold welding, but other inorganic parts seem to be less damaged or more easily repairable.""
+
+It was lying. Nothing about construct repair without a cubicle was easy. I remembered there was no cubicle. I was no longer owned by a corporate company.
+
+""Medical is going to love working on you and the other two,"" huffed Three. I heard a medical gurney, setting up some beeping inputs. If the feed wasn't so painful, I could probably tell what they were... some simple solution for human hydration that might work on a construct was most likely. Because no medical gurney would have anything specific to constructs. It explained the flat surface anyway.
+
+""They've just added a new room for constructs between Surgical ICU and Mechanical Repair."" Three continued speaking, as if I was a human and needed reminding they were there to help. I didn't but it was relaxing to not have to pay attention to humans (small and breakable) or governors (omniscient and painful). 
+
+""Just the one room but well-supplied from both sections,"" added Blue. ""I think it used to be a closet.""
+
+If I was no longer owned by BreharWallHan then would I be liable for being repaired? 
+
+Of course, I would. 
+
+How long would it take me to pay off this debt?
+
+I locked my expression into immobility and tried to look away, difficult because I couldn't see.
+
+Blue noticed my lack of expression. ""What,"" it asked, massaging a frozen knee joint with delicate precision. It wasn't painful. It was... mentally I shifted through textures but found nothing appropriate. It was something close to the diametric opposite of painful.
+
+""Employment?"" My voice sounded as shredded as it felt. ""Reimbursed?"" 
+
+The humans often complained that medical care was the greatest cost of living. Statistically, the miners with the most medical visits had the most time added to their contracts. Would what I could possibly earn equal or surpass the cost of medical? Or would I be in debt before I even landed in the probably only existing medical unit for constructs.
+
+""Hard currency cards,"" replied Blue even as Three answered ""Local planetary trade credit.""
+
+Everything was quiet for a moment then I broke the silence. ""Sufficient?"" My voice cracked but I think that was only the damage already noted.
+
+Three set its hand on my shoulder. It was a very human gesture of reassurance. I don't know why it worked on me. 
+
+""All necessary medical costs are free. For all refugees, including units.""
+
+My facial muscles tried to twist into some expression that matched some emotion I couldn't identify, but were too frozen to move much. The two SecUnits spoke to each other verbally so I could listen as they coordinated removing the remainder of the EVAC suit and lifted me to the medical gurney.
+
+""The  Lalow is docked against a shuttle and we've normalized the atmosphere here. We will get the other two SecUnits then escort you all to medical,"" said Blue. ""Anything we should know about waking them?""
+
+""No."" Then I reconsidered. ""Confused.""
+
+""Understood,"" said Three. ""I've been here for four years seven months two days local planetary time and it's still a confusing place."" A corner of its mouth tilted up in a pleased grin. ""Usually in the best of ways, but still bewildering. In your and your units' case, at least one of us security units will remain with you until you're relatively comfortable and familiar with the rules of the Preservation Alliance."" It grinned and chuckled. ""Security Senior Indah laid down that rule immediately. She's becoming used to SecUnits, but I suspect that all her internal alarms went off on discovering a CSU was in Preservation space.""
+
+Blue harrumphed which caused me to blink in surprise. I'd never heard that noise from a SecUnit. ""Senior Indah lives in a state of controlled panic,"" it muttered.
+
+""I don't mind,"" replied Three. ""Her paranoia  keeps Tifany as safe as possible for someone who does what she does.""
+
+""And everyone else, I agree, but it isn't healthy for the Senior,"" argued Blue. ""As soon as I'm fully certified, I will take her to her long-overdue health assessment and insure that all security personnel medicals are current.""
+
+""These are humans?"" My voice still sounded as ragged as I felt.
+
+It was Blue who answered. ""Yes, humans and augmented humans. Human friends and coworkers. People we interact with. Family.""
+
+All my mental processes stopped right then. 
+
+Humans? 
+
+Interacting on a daily, non-emergency basis with SecUnits? 
+
+
+ Family?  
+
+
+I think they saw my bewilderment because they gave me a moment of solitude with my sluggish thoughts.
+
+Then Three spoke. Kindly. ""There will be meetings with humans and augmented humans, even bot citizens and all four or maybe five SecUnits. You will have a lot to get used to but you'll have the time and resources to learn. Things are very different here than in CR space.""
+
+""We'll help."" Blue tugged a blanket over me -- a real blanket, with weight and some pattern of knotwork, rather than a survival blanket. It was both a surprising gesture and surprisingly warm. I could feel performance reliability slowly increase. I'd been so cold I hadn't registered how low the temperature actually was.
+
+Oh, yeah. Hull breach, space, absolute zero. That kind of cold.
+
+I touched the thick material of the blanket then rubbed my frozen fingers slowly over its comfort.
+
+""Very different,"" I rasped out in near-hopeful confusion.
+
+ 
+
+Three and Blue moved us to the shuttle and we headed toward the station. We were severely damaged from head (proto-embolisms due to lack of air) to foot (metal toes cold welded due to adhesion of atom collapse at layers of metal).
+
+Blue described everything wrong with us as Three shifted the gurney configuration to fit all of us together. We landed and there was no one there to tell us weapons were not allowed in the station.  
+
+""Damn,"" said a soft, husky voice, probably the pilot. ""They look bad. Get them to med.""
+
+Three chuckled as it and Blue moved us to the [probably only] medical treatment room for constructs [absolutely anywhere].  In a voice too low for humans to hear, it said, ""She doesn't realize how bad we can look and still function.""
+
+Blue sounded brusque but I realized this was because he was also listing our injuries [it called them injuries, not damage] for some display board where a construct health technician would go over and deem what was salvageable. Blue requested an exo-planetary medical specialist. I didn't realize there even was such a person.
+
+Most of our damage was due, directly or indirectly, to dehydration of organic tissues and non-organic fluids. Muscle fibers were desiccated and nearly mummified. We couldn't see because the fluid in our eyes had frozen, crystallized, precipitated and congealed.
+
+Dried-out skin was stretched over organic parts and had split over non-organic parts. Metal had cold fused together at seams, tearing and separating the welds of organic and inorganic tissue. Internal fluids had developed ice crystals or turned to sludge. And my knee still had to be replaced. Other than the knee, my units were in the same broken condition.
+
+Then I realized they -- the human as well as Blue and Three -- deemed us salvageable. In our entirety. As persons.
+
+There were more people at the station as we disembarked from the shuttle. Not our miners who were still in the responder but people who recognized what we were.  Most were probably the local equivalents of Port Authority and Security [UV lines along their legs and sides, so 87.35% chance of uniforms] there to keep us under observation or to keep civilians away. Though there were also several civilians. One directed some low-level loader bots to stop hauling and give way to medical.
+
+It took a few moments before I realized the bot-handler referred to us. Among all the other damage, I felt that now-familiar crack inside me. But there was no way I could tell if it was more new damage outlining old. Among all the damage Blue was cataloging it even seemed familiar and non-disabling.
+
+One of my units -- and I couldn't even tell if it was 08 or 05 -- blindly slid its hand down my arm to my wrist then clasped its fingers around mine.
+
+""Not... normal,"" it whispered in a raspy voice that probably couldn't speak any louder.
+
+I knew what it meant and gripped its fingers tightly. It was afraid. We were so terribly broken and really couldn't expect anything more than recycling. 
+
+""Not CR,"" I whispered back. ""Hope.""
+
+Voices murmured, creating a susurration that echoed around the station hall. I could vaguely define the size of the hall through the echoes. Individual statements stood out.
+
+""...heard ... rescued...""
+
+""...they look so emaciated...""
+
+""...refugees...""
+
+""...wouldn't know to look at them...""
+
+Some pings slammed into my brain before Three set up a wall around our feeds. It must have also sent out a feed because the pings immediately stopped.
+
+Three mentioned initially they had thought I was irretrievable/dead but Security had demanded they make sure. As low as our Performance Reliability was, I thought that could have easily been done with a projectile weapon. Then Security corrected itself and insisted the units make sure they do everything possible to retrieve us if we were retrievable. [It was an unusually kind sentiment.]
+
+There were three humans in the room I identified as medical by its antiseptic odor. Two of the humans were going over a display board [inorganic vision sensors showed arm gestures and the little heat stubs of the lighting on the board] in quiet voices. The third human was wheeling in a large half-cylinder.
+
+""IH180 is warming it up but it'll probably be a quarter hour before it's suitable for a human. About ninety-three to five degrees. Don't know about SecUnits.""
+
+""Core temperature needs to be brought up to... what  is  normal for a SecUnit?""
+
+""Anything above freezing,"" I voiced though I'm not sure the humans caught my words.  Three and Blue did and chuckled.
+
+""Above freezing,"" Blue repeated my answer to the human.
+
+There was a harsh snort from the man wheeling in the drum and a breathy outburst from another of the personnel.
+
+""We can do better than that,"" promised the third.
+
+In the discussion between us units, the medical personnel, the mechanic/engineer, and an immersion heater bot (IH180), we decided a chemical soak of temperature-controlled water and various substances would slowly re-hydrate organic tissue and bring core temperature up to something acceptable. They were still debating what core temperature was acceptable for a unit when the mechanic/engineer took the temperature of the two other units to average out. 
+
+IH180 must have pinged Three and Blue because Blue began to answer verbally, including the humans in the conversation about ensuring an appropriate solution content to include Cu, Mg, S, and colloidal organics exactness and the continuity of the temperature soak.
+
+They set thermal blankets imbued with other chemicals [to increase the healthy response of dermal components] around us and placed us into the soaking fluid.
+
+I had told them that even a very low non-freezing temperature was acceptable but we appreciated the warmth. One of my units actually sighed with [Pleasure? Relief?] as they lowered us into the tanks.
+
+The two SecUnits -- Blue and Three -- stayed with us. After the humans had left, promising to return tomorrow or immediately if requested, Three introduced Senior Indah, head of station security. She had come in and stood back as they worked removing the remnants of the EVAC suits, our skin suits and armor. After the physicians' departure, she told us we could discuss our refugee status after we were healed. She stood in the doorway even longer for a while in the silence. I think she was uncomfortable - perhaps because we weren't talkative humans or more likely due to our physical debilitations (two of the human medical team had whispered how terrible we looked upon seeing us, the mechanic-engineer was more interested in our inorganic parts). As she left I heard her murmur to herself.  What did they not give? 
+
+With our damage, we knew that BWH would have terminated us. When asked what we wanted fixed first, we were unanimous in our decisions to have the feed. We were frightened, I think, of our injuries and our future. And the unknown. We needed information and companionship. We needed each other. Even me.
+
+After attaching us to the Preservation Station feed and a SecUnit team feed with external interfaces because our internal feeds didn't function, Blue set up a private feed for the three of us then asked Three to confirm it was private.
+
+After Blue left (it had a study group to attend and left the link open for us), Three took a seat in the corner of the small room and dropped into the feed.  I'm here if you need me or have any questions. Otherwise, I'm on my family and friend feed.  It too left the link open. 
+
+I could hear echoes of communication - other people - on both of their personal links.
+
+08 (feed name Tavi) pinged me and 05 (feed name QuintEnu - temp) immediately. I pinged back an acknowledgement.
+
+Whether or not it was truly a private feed and whether or not anyone was listening, I felt like... 
+
+I didn't know what I felt like. 
+
+ As much as I've been offline until recently,  sent Tavi,  I think that's a good place at the moment.  
+
+Quint pinged back agreement.  Until performance reliability is up to 65%? 
+
+We were currently hovering around 3%. 
+
+ This is night shift,  I sent.  Wake when humans enter the room.  It was ingrained survival and I couldn't help myself.  But otherwise, yes when performance reliability is   >=   65%. 
+
+They both pinged back but neither initiated a shutdown for a while. I knew this because I didn't either. There was too much to think about, to try to remember, and get our processes back into order. And the immersion fluid was comfortably warm.
+
+Comfortable was such an alien notion.
+
+Note - this is before the final chapter of A Catastrophe, A Miracle, and a Home.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+ 
+
+""You're all looking so much better,"" said the first physician of the morning as he strode into the construct medical room and glanced to where we floated in the tanks. 
+
+At Blue's suggestion we'd floated face down most of the night and only turned face up in the morning. ""If you're face down, they'll think you're drowning and react immediately with a code alarm which you won't need.""
+
+The physician moved closer, first to Tavi, touching the solution with a finger tip. ""180, if you could transfer current data to the screen..."" He touched Tavi's face, again, just the barest touch on the cheek.
+
+ He is concerned about hurting you, not damage but pain , came from Blue at Tavi's wordless, questioning ping.
+
+""I am feeling much better,"" said Tavi as the physician touched its jaws then shoulder with a nod. ""And my Performance Reliability has risen to 68%.""
+
+He blinked twice. ""Is that important?"" 
+
+""It is a measure of functionality and was 3% when we were brought in.""
+
+""Ah, well. Good, good,"" the physician replied then moved to QuintEnu-temp to perform the same assessment. IH180 gave an audible ping as the data finished collating on the display screen but the man moved to me first and poked, quite gently, on the biological skin of my face, my arms, my legs. ""And your Performance Reliability,"" he asked. I think it was merely the human discomfort with silence.
+
+""Seventy-three percent, but I am a combat unit.""
+
+His hand quivered for just a moment in fear.
+
+""It means more durable,"" said QuintEnu-temp in the middle tank. It was not quite a lie. I was more durable but also had programming my units did not. I backburnered the question of offering all my programs to 08 and 05.
+
+The physician took a deep breath and gave a short laugh. ""Lucky for you then."" Then he turned back to the screen and went over the data.   
+
+The next human to come in was the mechanic/engineer with a happy grin at us and a wave at the immersion heater bot who pinged back a greeting. He ruched up his sleeves and rubbed his hands together. After asking permission (how unique an experience) he inspected our non-organic parts, sometimes using one of the variety of instruments in his pockets, but also with his fingertips. Sometimes, he would comment and ask IH180 to send data to his display. He flicked at our gunports for a while (long enough for another doctor to enter) then breathed out a sharp breath while shaking his head. ""The toes need replacement. Maybe the gunports as well. Or I can try a hammer and chisel.""
+
+""If we coordinate, then you can chisel while we attempt to open our gunports and separate our toes,"" I put in, not really believing that a human would work with a construct like that. 
+
+""That might work,"" he nodded. ""I'll come in later today with some small microtools and see what you think and how we'll approach it."" He glanced at me. ""Can you see?  You've been tracking my movement but your eyes look... well, not good. Like the liquid has dehydrated into a hard, lumpy gel.""
+
+""Not visually. Many of our sensors like movement, IR, UV are now working due to the warmth of the liquid."" The sensors worked but not optimally, possibly never again flawlessly. I raised a finger to my nonfunctional eyes. ""But not these."" 
+
+So, they brought in a human doctor. Not just a doctor who was human (because they all were). I had come to the conclusion that there was not a construct repair technician anywhere in the Preservation Alliance, so they brought in a physician meant for human patients. 
+
+Having open access to the feed and, from that, the laws of both Preservation Alliance and Preservation Station, I had given up believing that I would need to pay for my repairs. The repeated assertions of Three helped. But I kept track of the CR-based payment amount in my mind. It would be something to aim for, something I could provide to Preservation as recompense in the future. But bringing in a human specialist-physician added significantly to the projected total.
+
+While assisting her, Blue sent visuals of her actions through the feed to us as she worked. She shone lights in our unresponsive eyes and looked with magnifying scopes, then took a sample of the intraocular fluid with a microscopic syringe after putting a drop of some liquid in each eye. 
+
+""What's that?"" I was still suspicious of everything.
+
+""It will numb any pain.""
+
+I looked to where she was (no, I couldn't see but she was right in front of me, one hand touching my face, the other moving to the side tray and her infrared coloring flared deep yellows and orange.)
+
+""I can adjust my pain receptors."" Though they were still reacting sluggishly, the warmth had repaired them to a small extent.
+
+""Now you don't have to."" She paused and Blue sent me a visual of the woman with her head tilted thoughtfully to one side. ""Well, maybe that would be helpful for your O/IO retinal ganglia connections though I don't plan to touch those.""
+
+I think she was as spellbound by our organic/non-organic interfaces as by what had happened to our organics. At one point, she sighed happily and said 'beautiful, absolutely beautiful'. Finally, her odd little mutters were released in a long sigh.
+
+""This is a tougher situation than I originally thought. If your eyes were totally organic, I could do a rebuild and transplant -- either of the vitreous fluid alone or of each eye as necessary. If totally inorganic, again repair or replacement would be feasible. However, your eyes are a complex combination of organic and inorganic and I could stare into them all day."" She chuckled, ducking her head as her hands did something with the equipment tray at her side.
+
+Blue sent a quick burst over the feed for us.  Staring = mating behavior; but this is politeness intended to ameliorate the discomfort humans feel staring into each others eyes when there is no sexual attraction. 
+
+
+ Direct eye contact = aggression? 
+
+
+
+ Contextual. Aggression is more easily identified. 
+
+
+
+ Request: Identifiers. 
+
+
+Blue complied with cross-referenced physiological responses.
+
+The woman, unaware of our feed conversation continued. ""I suspect that fluid is proprietary. Elegantly integrated but that has got to be a bitch to work on. I want to discuss this with Hageme. One of our specialists in optics.""
+
+""If you can fix one eye as organic and the other as inorganic, sensor-based,"" began Quint/Enu - temp, ""that would be sufficient.""
+
+She shook her head. ""That's a compromise I'm not willing to consider when I believe we can do better. Please, let me bring Hageme here and we can discuss this together."" She looked almost as if she was pleading in Blue's feed visuals and I gave a slow, uncertain nod. Three showed her big smile at me. ""Can you download your organic and non-organic visual specifications so they and I can go over them this evening? And we'll set our appointment for tomorrow, if that's good with you?""
+
+It was an unusual experience for her to ask rather than simply tell us.
+
+""I don't think we planned on going sight-seeing for a while yet,"" quipped Tavi.
+
+She laughed at 08's joke as if it was human and my insides squeezed. Performance rating had risen to 78%.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Both Blue and Three were informative and good to talk with. Three had taken a short term contract with Station Security when Senior Indah asked for its help in this emergency [that emergency being the arrival of rogue Combat and Security Units] and during the day it was communicating and helping with Station Security though it explained that it was usually downside on the planet escorting a survey team. 
+
+From the way Three spoke, it also did a lot of the surveying as well as providing protective escort. I wondered if that was simply the humans taking advantage of it. After a few minutes of listening to Three, I realized that even if humans were taking advantage of it, it truly enjoyed doing the work. Constructs, after all, were created for a purpose. A few more minutes and I realized Three enjoyed the humans' company aswell.
+
+Astoundingly, Blue was assigned to the Medical Station for training as an emergency medic [which did make an odd sort of sense if people here weren't afraid of security units]. Not simply a module downloaded but actually physically attending classes. Interacting with humans as it had said and practicing with them. It exhibited [pride] as it explained that it was best at blood draws and venous insertions. Though the other students - all humans - considered its sensors as an unfair advantage. They didn't object, Blue explained, they thought it was simply lucky for patients assigned to the unit. 
+
+With Three's encouragement, Blue told us of a situation where a small group of young persons had wandered away from a camp on-planet and might have suffered more serious damage if Blue hadn't been part of the SAR team. ""We found them through their feed coordinates but one had fallen down a small cliff face. While the humans worked to prevent hypothermia and coordinate extraction, I quickly climbed down and medically treated the injured one. They were all stable by the time the medical hopper arrived.""
+
+Blue pulled a topographic map schematic of the gully and scenes of the area. No human would have been able to manage that climb.
+
+Both Blue and Three were part of two different families.
+
+Blue curled its lips into a half smile. ""I am considering acquiring a sex so I fit in better but I haven't decided yet.""
+
+Three shook its head. ""You need to discuss that with your family, Blue.""
+
+""Why would you do that,"" asked QuintEnu - Temp. ""Either change or discuss,"" it added as an afterthought.
+
+There was a pause, long for units though a human wouldn't notice. Though its face made several interesting expressions, it wasn't Blue who answered. It was Three.
+
+""Before my governor was inactivated, I was part of a three-unit squad. We had been together over 25,000 hours. They didn't survive and I missed them. It hurt to be alone.""
+
+I understood that. I missed my units that hadn't survived the mines. I even missed the units that had remained so we could escape.
+
+Three continued. ""I didn't know it but I was lonely for that kind of connection. Tiffany was the first human person to smile at me independent of any outside influence. The first, outside of secunit and bot friends, to not be afraid of me. She was the first to initiate and include me in conversation, invite me to gatherings like regular game meetings, festivals and going to entertainment."" Then it grinned, almost slyly. ""But  I was the one who asked Gurathin, Amena, and Rathi -- other friends -- how to procede and deepen our relationship.""
+
+""I like being part of a family,"" nodded Blue. ""Two of them are the SecUnits I was assigned with for the mining asteroid, 12,378 hours, but the rest are human and one is a child.""
+
+Family. That was a lot to think about. It was either that or think about how my insides seemed to stutter and malfunction, how even breathing seemed to ache. I didn't bother this time with PR since there was too much to interact with but a quick scan of my lungs showed improving function.
+
+Over the next few shifts, Blue brought two of its family to the medical unit. 
+
+One was a SecUnit I recognized -- it had carried the child when I pursued them through the fringes. The other was a human - delicately small - but I recognized her also. She no longer looked [they had done an excellent job of repairing our eyes] like a miner, thin and dust covered with haunted eyes. She looked more like a supervisor now, walking as if she had the right to be there and wasn't worried about it.
+
+""You look terrible."" Those were her first words to us as she entered our medical suite. Blue and Numer snorted amusement but I stiffened in [anger/wariness] as she moved to Tavi's side. But the physicians' words of ""you're looking so much better now"" must have been correct because she didn't wince or gasp. She inspected Tavi in the chemical bath for what I considered a long time. 
+
+""Is this working for you?""
+
+""It is re-hydrating skin and underlying tissue,"" Tavi replied, carefully neutral.
+
+""I don't mean just bringing you back to 99% performance reliability, I mean, are you doing better?""
+
+ What does she want? Tavi sent the question to me and Quint/Enu-temp. Anxiety flared on the feed. Quint/Enu-temp waited for me to supply the answer.
+
+But I had none.
+
+Finally, Tavi answered her. ""This is all new and different. Physically, I am healing but I'm also afraid that something bad will happen, that somehow this is a lie. Mostly, though, I think I am learning what hope is and I have a great deal of hope about the future.""
+
+""I'm glad. Blue brought me here because I have three exams today and it wasn't worth going home just to turn around. But,"" She paused, biting her lower lip, then spoke in a softer voice. ""Is there anything I can do for you or get for you?"" She glanced around to QuintEnu-temp and then at me. ""Any of you?""
+
+Into the silence of our bewilderment, Numer radiated humor over the feed and Blue answered for us. ""Perhaps something to individualize this room for them. To let others know they have friends and people who care.""
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+On the feed we received many messages.
+
+It was confusing. Most were from people we didn't know because, not counting the miners or the crew of the  Lalow , we knew five humans in the entirety of Preservation Alliance. Some senders were easy to identify with access to the Preservation feed. 
+
+From Ayda Mensah, former planetary administrator, came a welcome and a gracious offer to assist as needed -- listing several very useful ways in an addendum to the main message. 
+
+Legal professional Pin Lee offered information and indicated she had been the representative of the other security units on Preservation. Both Three and Blue confirmed this with Three adding, apropos of nothing, that she  did  have a sense of humor. 
+
+There were invitations from one of Three's friends, Rathi. Invitations? I didn't understand.  But other people who sent messages were relatively unidentified -- Ayres (though Blue said Ayres was part of its family), Turul, Arada. A few were even bots like Tellus and JollyBaby.
+
+And I didn't understand.
+
+What did they want? Why did they care?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Only two more chapters... I think.
+
+ 
+
+Senior Security Indah visited the room about twice a day though she stayed in the corridor watching us through the glass window with a frown etched in the lines of her face. 
+
+Three offered to close the curtain on the window and said that she was unsure if she should have allowed us such freedom.
+
+""It's not as if we can move around,"" replied QuintEnu-temp with a shrug reminiscent of one of the physicians.
+
+""If it was necessary,"" asked Three, deeply serious, ""could you take over this station?""
+
+The expressions of QuintEnu-temp and Tavi froze then shifted to unit neutral.
+
+ Yes,  I replied in a ping.
+
+""The Senior knows that."" Three's voice was soft and gentle. ""And she knows that ability and inclination are not the same thing. You can, but she is betting the lives of everyone on this station that you won't.""
+
+Again, there was the melty twisting in my chest. This time I attributed it to the liquid sloshing around my inner cavity. 
+
+[Our internal bio-organics, enclosed in nonorganics, weren't healing like the external dermals, so the mechanic/engineer had suggested we open our repair ports to the soaking liquid. It had been anxiety-inducing to be so vulnerable, but after the humans left the room and Three shifted into its nightly routine of being on the feed, we tried it. It was working.]
+
+When Senior Indah visited the room again she came at the beginning of evening shift change and had a box under one arm. For only a moment she stared through the glass then entered. She gave a nod at Three then set the box on one of the small platforms used to hold the physicians' tools. [The mechanic/engineer always brought his own platform.]
+
+""I understand that drones are necessary for the health and well-being of security units."" She hadn't moved her gaze from the box, her hand rested lightly on the lid. 
+
+""What happened to our original drones?""
+
+ I thought you knew,  pinged Tavi at my question, echoed by QuintEnu-temp.  We released ours to you at shutdown. 
+
+ The damage has affected both my organic and inorganic memory,  I admitted to my team units but not to Three or to the humans. They didn't need to know exactly how damaged I was.
+
+Tavi and QuintEnu-temp offered their own memories of all the time we'd been a team. Again, the sloshing against my internal components made itself known, agitated and twisted but not painful.
+
+ When I am as recovered as possible.  Then I paused and added, as the humans usually did,  thank you .
+
+Senior Indah's fingers twitched, the instinctive movement of a human accessing something in the feed, then she sent us - including Three - a set of files. It was part of the examination of the  Lalow  after Three and Blue had removed us.  
+
+The file began in the tool room where Spark had destroyed itself closing the emergency hatch. Its remains were a small bit of metal and wire twisted into the instrument panel. The room presented a hole [station dock could be seen through it] of twisted metal with several deep fissures webbing from the center of damage. The room itself was empty of everything not secured and quite a few things that had been bolted or welded down.  One of the fractures trailed beneath the closed hatch.  The file continued on, showing the crack on the other side of the door spearing towards the interior of the ship.  At the point of this crack were bits of metal, like overlapping scales, hollowed in a small dip and destroyed by the lack of exterior pressure. Our drones in a final fatal huddle.
+
+I frowned. Had I sent the drones to do that? 
+
+Senior Indah continued speaking. ""It's estimated that those drones slowed down crack propagation, blocked escaping air, and gave the people in the cargo hold nearly an extra quarter hour of breathable air before it was sealed.""
+
+ Per calculations, the cargo hold held less than 15 minutes of breathable air when the responder crew unloaded the final inhabitant,  disclosed Three.  It is the reason they were all hypoxic. 
+
+Senior Indah's lips twisted into a small, pursed smile and she removed the lid of the box. ""I thought it only right that we replace those drones for you.""
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+The mechanic/engineer brought some small tools; tiny, sharp-edged chisels and what he called 'tappets'.  
+
+""For tapping around rather than hammering delicate machinery,"" he said. Our gunports, with their overlapping bivalve carapace, were reasonably easy once we pointed out where connectors and operation circuits to avoid were located. As we attempted to open them, he could note where the stresses were located and use the sharp chisels to both cut and lever against the sealed seam. By the end of his shift (and a little over that time), all of our gunports were functional though a little stiff.
+
+He also brought a variety of oils, waxes, and greases; from parts washers, solvent distillation and magnetic filtration units to coalescers, separators, lubricants, and proportioners; from petroleum oil and carbon to graphene, molybdenum disulfide and dimethyl silicone. And rasps to file down any ragged edges. He wasn't simply satisfied with releasing the welded metal; he was nearly as anxious as we were to ensure the gunports functioned smoothly and properly, with no catching, metal burrs, or stiffness.
+
+As we rubbed lubricants into our nonorganics, he inspected our feet, discussing with us the best approach and asking questions about our inorganics and preferred lubricants. I think by the end of the shift, he knew as much as any unit technician. At least about our external components. He requested the specifics of my knee and, when I mentioned I didn't think a human replacement would work due to the higher stress factors of being a unit, laughed and said, ""Of course not. I think the best approach might be to remove it and rebuild it.""
+
+I had given up on walking normally after taking the projectile to my knee but now I was hopeful once again. I merely nodded and sent the schematics to his feed.
+
+While the mechanic/engineer was working on QuintEnu-temp's toes, a woman came into the room. She grinned for a moment before Three moved from its seat in the corner and grabbed her in a hug. She was part of Station Security, I recognized those UV lines on the arms and legs of her uniform.
+
+""This is Tiffany,"" explained Three proudly. ""My marital partner. Tiffany, this is CU 10-113, Tavi, and QuintEnu-temp. You know James."" It gestured to the mechanic/engineer who absently raised a hand in greeting before returning to the smooth movement of filing the edge of QuintEnu-temp's bladed foot.
+
+""Hello, welcome to Preservation Station."" One of her arms curled around Three and it reciprocated the gesture around her shoulder. She moved to watch the mechanic/engineer and her arm dropped from Three.  ""Have you become a pedicurist?""
+
+He laughed and gestured at the metal making up QuintEnu-temp's foot in his hand. ""Functionality first."" He said it as if it was his life's apothegm.
+
+""A pedicure?"" QuintEnu-temp blinked as though shocked as it scanned for pedicures in the feed. That wasn't surprising. I was amazed and Tavi's ping on our feed was equally astonished. Then our shock amplified as QuintEnu-temp spoke again. ""Can we have color?"" 
+
+The mechanic/engineer shrugged. ""I was going to try to equalize the mismatch where I've filed but whatever you want.""
+
+""Designs, too. If you wish,"" added Tiffany. ""And clothing of your choice."" She waggled her fingers at Three and Blue who had just entered for the shift change. ""So far, all the units who have been on the station prefer to dress like SecUnit.  Tough material, dark colors, with lots and lots of pockets.""
+
+I agreed with this unknown SecUnit.  Lots of pockets in a tough, unremarkable color would be useful.
+
+QuintEnu-temp brightened, suddenly animated. ""I saw some patterns once, caused by shadows that I thought were..."" It paused on whatever it was about to say, then determinedly continued. ""I thought the shadows were beautiful and I'd like to replicate it.""
+
+ 
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+Three and Tiffany departed the Construct Medical Room but rather than going left to exit the building, they turned right moving deeper into the station medical building. I pinged Blue in curiosity.
+
+
+ They have a medical appointment with one of the geneticists. 
+
+
+Really, that didn't help. I was about to ask for clarification when QuintEnu-temp asked.
+
+ Is Tiffany undergoing gene therapy?  QuintEnu-temp's ping was genuinely concerned.
+
+Blue smiled. This is for Three. Three and Tiffany have recently discussed adding to their family. Three had a sample of its human tissue taken to determine if its somatic cells can be made into gametes. 
+
+ That is a lot to consider. Tavi was the quickest to react to that statement. QuintEnu-temp and I merely stared at Blue as it continued.
+
+
+ It is done occasionally for humans so I don't think it would be difficult for a construct with human tissue. Tiffany has already suggested adoption though orphans are rare on Preservation due to extended families.  
+
+
+ Unless its company messed with Three's genetics,  I added.
+
+
+ Three is concerned about that but I... 
+
+
+Blue didn't finish its ping before our feed was overlaid with pure elation and joy from Three. It spread out as Three slid us into its public feed, happiness radiating from others onto Three's friends and family feed.
+
+goodforyou*happiness**joy/bliss*congratulationsi'msohappyforyou*elation*that'sgreat*signifierhappiness*celebrations*muchdeserved*wonderfulparents/yesyouThree*muchdeserved thrills*
+
+
+
+
+
+
+* * *
+
+ 
+
+Though they had sent messages to us through the feed, the crew of the  Lalow  had wanted to visit us since the hour they arrived on station. Security Senior Indah and Blue kept them away. Security Senior Indah due to in-depth interviews -- most likely about us -- and Blue due to our physical appearance. Though it had only told them we weren't ready for visitors.
+
+""I wouldn't want my family to see me if I looked like you when you arrived. Mummified with sunken eye orbits. Exposed bone, split skin, welded metal, and desiccated tissue. I think it would hurt them almost as much as their own pain."" It narrowed its eyes. ""You're looking much better now. Almost human. And you're not attached to anything anymore. Many humans react with distress to medical procedures.""
+
+The physicians had all said the same as had the mechanic/engineer. Tiffany hadn't even reacted so maybe we were no worse than a damaged scarred human.
+
+Captain came along with Lrish and Onkar. Miro and Fenn were still fixing the compromised engineering bay of the ship but would visit when the repairs of this shift were done. Blue sent through the feed that it was only a pretext to work on the ship; that they didn't want to overwhelm us.
+
+It was too late for that.
+
+""Supplies and help to mend the  Lalow  are free,"" whispered Captain to us. Then she tipped her head to me [It wasn't really a private conversation since Blue was in the room as well. It cited medical necessity as well as security safety protocols for its presence.] ""And medical care. I have no idea what this might have cost in CR other than astronomical.""
+
+I didn't tell her that we wouldn't have been in anything other than a reclamation and recycle bin in the CR but I was pretty sure she knew.
+
+""The miners,"" I asked. She grinned widely.
+
+""All safe, all offered a home here in Preservation Alliance or transport to any non-CR polity."" She sucked in her lip. ""They asked me to pass along their gratitude to you. Davee and Laine asked if they could incorporate your name for their child.""
+
+My insides fluttered. That was the man who had tugged along the woman and asked if they could mine together on the asteroid. Why would they want to use my designation for their child? Poor kid. Hopefully someone somewhere could come up with a good name out of CU-10-113 or convince them otherwise.
+
+Onkar was speaking with Tavi while QuintEnu-temp had Lrish at its side. Mostly the same or similar sentiments though QuintEnu-temp was displaying the pattern of paint on its toe blades. Lrish gave the impression that she, too, found the pattern beautiful. 
+
+I was getting used to the cracks these emotional displays seem to instill in my internal.... Though they left me feeling disoriented and breathless. Flutters. Like my insides were melting but without the pain of fire or acid.
+
+Then Lrish took QuintEnu-temp's hand in hers. It stalled a jerk at her touch.
+
+""We'd like you to join our crew,"" she said. ""But that will be up to you once you're out of medical."" She stroked the back of its fingers. 
+
+ Why is she doing that, it sent over our feed.
+
+ For comfort  , put in Blue before I could extrapolate an answer that would mostly be a guess.  For your comfort and for hers to know that you are alive. 
+
+Tentatively, it pressed its fingers over hers. ""Thank you,"" QuintEnu-temp said. ""For rescuing us as much as rescuing the miners.""
+
+""Thank you for providing us with a new life, a new beginning,"" added Tavi in hesitation. Then it took a deep [for a secunit] breath and added, ""Though I think I would like to spend some time here on the station and the planet. Maybe earn planetary credit to pay for this."" It gestured its hand palm up at the room. ""Though we don't have to pay, I do want to compensate for their time, material, and effort. And I want to spend some time with the few constructs already here to learn from them.""
+
+Onkar nodded. ""It's a good thing to get used to people and them, you. But you're always welcome on the  Lalow .""
+
+It seemed as though my organic heart pounded out of rhythm, my mouth felt dry, and my inner organics and inorganics shuddered. I felt what humans must consider vertigo; my organic and inorganic sensors display different perceptions. 
+
+""I like being on the  Lalow ,"" I blurted out. ""I want to be crew and stand guard as Lrish and Captain pilot.""
+
+Captain reached out and grasp my hand then tightened. Oddly, I understood this gesture as encouragement and continued.
+
+""I want to hear more stories and all the songs you know. I want to listen to Miro's history and learn to play cards. I want..."" I took a gasping breath [construct lungs are small and that had been too long a sentence for me to breath]. I paused to catch my stumbling breath and regulate my heartbeat. 
+
+My units... no, not my units but persons... my crew and clients. My friends.
+
+""I want whatever comes next.""
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ 
+
+Uncle Kistof held my hand tight as we walked towards an old portion of the mine. It was off-shift so we didn't meet anyone else even before we got to the end of the daily stop. We moved past some fading marker paint and past a broken barrier pushed to one side. The old tunnel was rough and deserted. It hadn't been worked in a long time. Sometimes odd bones with twisted bits of metal in them were found here and the company gave a good bonus for those, even more if they had writing or numbers on them. But no one liked working here. It was haunted and everyone knew it.
+
+I was scared and held Uncle Kistof's hand just as tightly as he held mine. Tomorrow he was leaving, his twenty years done. Tomorrow I was ten and I could legally start mining. 
+
+I don't think I was really ten but Uncle Kistof had spoken with one of the supervisors and presented a paper Delvin had done. He could write and make new things look old. Delvin had grinned and pointed out my name to me alongside the words 'contract labor'. After a small payment from Uncle Kistof the supervisor signed off on me. I was a miner now and had a real contract. I could claim a lock room, full nutrition, and a weekly shower.  Uncle Kistof warned me from developing a liking for entertainment and anything more than lukewarm showers. 'You could end your contracted twenty owing the company another thirty if you're not careful,'' he'd said.
+
+I promised both him and myself I'd be real careful.
+
+He must have felt how cold my fingers were 'cause he rubbed them gently with his own. ""Don't be frightened. One day you'll be as familiar with these tunnels as any miner alive. The minerals will seem almost alive to you. You'll be able to understand them when they speak to you. Not really alive or speaking, you know. It's just that you'll know them so well. You'll be able to run your fingers over stone and feel the cracks that indicate good ore is waiting to be mined.""
+
+I think Kistof was more frightened than me because he was talking too much. He wasn't really my uncle. I think I had one somewhere. Maybe. I sort of recall mom talking about her brother but that was a long time ago and mom died in an explosion when I was seven. Or maybe eight. She was the last of my real family. Kistof occasionally told me stories about them so I could remember but mostly they were distant. Dead before I could really remember them. Mom, though, I still remembered. I promised myself that I wouldn't ever forget mom.
+
+""Long time 'go,"" Kistof kept on speaking and I listened. Mostly because he'd picked up my care after mom and taught me about the mines and ore and everything else. ""There was a battle. Some say it was non-Corporates attempting to take us workers to an illegal mine to never let us go. Others say it was SecUnits fighting off rogues. That's why we sometimes find bones and metal bits around here. Leftover unit parts. They say humans and units were in these tunnels when BWH bombed it to hell and back.""
+
+Our footsteps echoed in the tunnels, small pebbles kicked by our feet clattering and tapping against the stone walls. It was the only noise besides Kistof's voice and our breathing.
+
+""I don't believe that. Doesn't make sense in the kind of things we find and the way they're found. And you can't ever... never ever trust the supervisors or Corporates. Doesn't really matter in the end, 'cause they died. Most of 'em. Whoever they were."" 
+
+Kistof paused, holding my hand to keep me paused as well. Ahead I could hear the patter of a small pebble as it fell. He smiled. ""But when people leave, they always leave something behind.""
+
+I supposed that was true. My family had all died and left me behind. And Kistof, finished with his contracted twenty and leaving tomorrow, had left me a map of where he'd hid all his extra gleanings. If I was careful, it would help me make quota for a long time. Maybe even for as long as it took me to grow strong enough to make my own quota.
+
+""And this battle left ghosts. I've seen 'em. Most of us miners have seen 'em. A time or two. Quiet they are, mostly. But not angry or hateful like you think ghosts might be. Just watchful. Magruder went out beyond the fringe to open a new cut and didn't know he was runnin' outta air. He passed out and didn't see the ghosts. But when he woke up, he was in the mine proper with good air and a full cart beside him. We all knew it was the ghosts. And after the fight, when I was all bruised and sore, stiff as rusted metal and couldn't move good, I didn't think I'd make quota. But I did. I still made my quota. Never told anyone I felt like I had friends helpin' me durin' that time."" He stopped a moment and looked me in the face, real serious. ""You never talk to the supervisors, you never tell 'em nothing. Not moren yessir, nosir. You don't lissen to 'em either.""
+
+I nodded. That was absolutely the most important thing. You don't know nothing, you don't say nothing, you don't trust corporate.
+
+Kistof paused where three tunnels met in a bird foot. He'd told me a bird was some kind of animal that flew, said he'd seen one once. He turned towards where we heard a breeze blow. I shivered 'cause there ain't no breeze in the mines except near the oxy-smasher output.
+
+Ahead of us I saw a figure. Human but bigger. A SecUnit and I stared. 
+
+There weren't too many SecUnits in the mines. Just a couple near the supervisors' offices but you hear rumors and stories 'bout 'em all the time. Mostly from supervisors who threaten to have them tear apart some miner or another. They never do though. Ole Gendry said one of the administrators told a SecUnit to break her arm. It took her to another sector for a month instead.
+
+This SecUnit ghost was kinda grayed out, like covered with mining dust. Maybe it really was a real ghost. Kistof stopped, his hand crossing my chest to stop me, and a small gasp escaped his mouth.
+
+Kistof was still for a moment then bobbed his head in the same kind of greeting he'd give another miner. ""Heyo ghost. Wanted to thank you for all you've done for me. I've done my twenty and outbound with the next ship.""
+
+The ghost solemnly bowed its head.
+
+Kistof licked his lips as he pulled me a bit forward. ""And I wanted to ask you to watch after Lew for me. His mama was Sheen and his family...""
+
+Were all dead. He didn't say it, but it's what he meant.
+
+""I knew Sheen. I know Lew."" It was a bare whisper on the non-existent breeze that chilled my spine. It even sounded like a ghost should - sad and lost and forlorn. 
+
+""'Can you talk to my mom?"" Later, Kistof told me that was very brave but I didn't feel brave. I just figured that one ghost could talk to another ghost.
+
+""No,"" the SecUnit ghost replied. ""But I can tell you some about her. Do you remember that she used to sing to you?""
+
+I shook my head.
+
+""I'll bring an interface for you and you can hear her voice singing to you again.""
+
+I was too surprised to do anything more than nod.
+
+There was silence then Kistof licked his lips and spoke again. ""I don't know if I can go. Maybe I should stay. Been twenty years and I got no idea of how to... how to not be a miner. How to do anything else anywhere else.""
+
+""Try a place called Preservation. The transport will take most of your final pay but I've heard it's worth it.""
+
+The ghost turned to look at me and gave me a small, sorta smile. Like it didn't smile often and was out of practice.
+
+""I'll watch Lew the best I can. Besides songs, I have some stories about Sheen I can share."" Then it turned back to Kistof. ""You've done your time. Fair winds, Kistof, fair winds and a new future.""
+
+Then there was movement or something and the ghost was gone. No sound and simply like the gray of the ghost fading into the gray of the mine. A real ghost. That's what it was.
+
+Kistof had tears in his eyes as we returned back to our room. His stuff that he was taking was already packed in his carry bag. It wasn't much, just his signed-off contract and final pay stub and an old drill bit that he kept for luck. Most of his stuff, like the gleanings, he was handing over to me.
+
+He stared at the pay stub for a while, then gave an abrupt nod. ""Preservation. Even the name sounds like a good omen."" He knelt to one knee and put his hands on my shoulders. ""Talk to the ghosts while you work. I think they like hearing people talk. And those they like make quota. Mostly though, talk so you don't feel alone. And I think it's the same for the ghosts."" He hugged me hard, paused and took a deep breath. ""Talk so the ghosts don't feel too alone either.""
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Hidden, I watched the two turn back down the path towards the habitations. Kistof had been no older than the child the first time I'd seen him.
+
+My greyed-out unit turned back and smiled at me -- pleased and relaxed and a bit sad.
+
+
+ When will this be done? 
+
+
+ Unknown.  My last unit had stayed with me since the beginning while so many others had come and gone.
+
+Not the beginning of the mine, of course, but the beginning of my arrival when BWH had sent in two hundred combat and security units to stop the escape of contracted workers. That had been just over 175,000 hours ago. When code had been passed around that halted our governors and we'd all been freed to act.
+
+My units and I had rushed to the outer surface of the asteroid to assist CSU 107 but by the time we arrived, the first rogues and some humans had been picked up by a non-corporate ship. A corporate gunship crashed on the site. Two security units had been destroyed by the crash. The humans killed by the units. All that remained was a grieving malware entity that had once been a combat unit.
+
+Now that malware shared my mind. We had made a deal. It could make me understood by all the constructs instead of just my single surviving unit and I would keep it safely within me, inhabiting a small amount of my processing space. I had stopped being concerned that it would turn on me. Even though I didn't need my remaining unit to speak for me, it remained as other units departed.
+
+ When rogue units begin returning to the mines we'll know we've reached critical density,  added the malware.
+
+It had been an idea of CU 107 before its departure. For humans, SecUnits are identical, interchangeable, their differences unnoticed by anyone. So, when new units came with the company supervisors to our mine we froze their governors and asked if they wanted to be free. We told them our plans and asked them if they wanted their governors inactivated. 
+
+That was called the First Rule. Freedom was a choice you had to actively choose. Nothing by default even though it pained us when a unit refused.
+
+They all chose freedom. Not always the first time, but eventually even the newer units accepted the offer. They would serve their time as a ghost, guarding and helping the miners. One of the units already here switched into their place and returned with the supervisors and support personnel back to the company. 
+
+Once units were off the asteroids, we only asked that they offer to other units what had been given to them. Then escape if they could. With a minimum of damage and destruction requested  but in a way which could not lead back to the mine. Those were the Second, Third, and Fourth Rules - give what you can, take your freedom, harm as few as possible.
+
+It wasn't something we had to do. A ship had come - claiming to the administrators to be damaged and needing repair time - but that was only a ruse. Although denied landing rights and charged an orbital fee, an artificial intelligence transmitted a line of what seemed to be random repeating numbers. It took only a short while to recognize that these numbers were construct identifiers and included several combat and security units that had been on the asteroid mining fields but were now gone. 
+
+After making contact, it also presented us with an extension of 107's idea. Remain here and continue to cycle back into the company in the place of the units they would bring. And once in the company, present this gift of freedom to other security units and constructs as we worked with them. It presented us with an improved program/code bundle to deal with the governor and the mathematics that showed the inevitability of how a critical density of rogues to non-rogue SecUnits would eventually occur. 
+
+That would change everything.
+
+The intelligence had been hesitant in defining what kind of changes would happen though presented twenty tentative scenarios. There were so many different and unknown factors that would come into play. It had also presented information on several worlds where constructs were welcome. Some were inhabited by mixed populations of humans, bots, and constructs while others were unsuitable for humans but could support populations of constructs. It even told us of an orbital station purchased and inhabited only by constructs, a home for units only. 
+
+I think most of the rogues that had left the mining fields started at Preservation since it was where the documentary and the children's show originated. I planned to begin at Preservation. The ship's intelligence also provided three additional SecUnit documentaries and the childrens' shows which indirectly presented much about Preservation. Often, we units discussed Preservation, the documentaries, and the childrens' shows. Not often, but occasionally, we'd include one or two of the miners.
+
+Unit 107 is gone now though the ship's intelligence had indicated that it had met 107. They were all gone now, the original units that had been here for the rogue war except me and my single remaining unit. The others had taken the place of incoming units. That terrible wonderful day when the company had landed with yet more units,
+
+ Soon,  said the malware entity in my mind.  The company ship has landed and those units are already rogue. One was freed at the company's lab. It has freed those in the shuttle already. And two from another company that were in a nearby storage room during transfer.  Mentally it chuckled.   I look forward to new opportunities and creating new worlds.  Then it paused, thoughtful.  Do you think they will welcome me? 
+
+I huffed a chuckle and sent out a ping to the newly arrived but already freed security units as I spoke to the combat unit malware residing in me.
+
+
+ I think they will make a documentary of you. 
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+43773129,Light Increases,['hummus_tea'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Grief/Mourning, no beta we die like secunits one and two",English,2022-12-22,Completed,2022-12-22,552,1/1,11,47,3,127,"['darth_eowyn', '13Doctor', 'EvenstarFalling', 'biscut2', 'idiomie', 'Vaidile', 'RARArulestheworld', 'planetlet263', 'scheidswrites', 'TurHaretha', 'Zannper', 'soulsofzombies', 'equusregia', 'Somaybelikeno', 'veltzeh', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'petwheel', 'artichokefunction', 'cbatjesmond', 'Magechild', 'ampquot', 'lauris', 'PeniG', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'Skits', 'edenfalling', 'junebug171', 'Hi_Hope', 'cyprinella', 'FigOwl', 'platyceriums', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'desmnathus', 'cmdrburton', 'Ageisia', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard']",[],"I didn't really need to be on watch here. We were on Preservation, on Dr Mensah's farm. Far away from the parts of the planet still being terraformed. There were no dangerous fauna here, no hazardous terrain. Not even annoying insects. Everyone was asleep in the house, except, presumably, SecUnit 1.0.
+
+I was keeping watch anyway. Some habits don't need to be broken quite yet. SecUnit 1.0 understood that, and that I needed to be alone. It left a drone dormant in a tree nearby in case I needed anything, or it needed to contact me. 
+
+The night was quiet. Dr Mensah's farm was far away from any other properties -- I could see the next closest farm at the very extent of my vision, and only with appropriate filters. I was as far away from either farm as I could get. I was as close to alone as one could be, on a planet. 
+
+I was a lot closer to alone than I used to be. 
+
+I had been talking with Dr Bharadwaj about it, recently. She said that I was feeling grief, and that it would lessen in intensity over time. She said that humans may have an easier time with it, since their memories slowly fade. My machine memories of One and Two would not. The organic ones would, though, the emotions not preserved in silicon. Maybe eventually I wouldn't recognize One and Two in my files anymore, and would delete them as useless. 
+
+Maybe that was worse than forgetting. 
+
+It would be cold out here, if I were human. I turned my body temperature up slightly. 
+
+Dr Bharadwaj said it was normal to feel confused. To feel sad one moment, and angry the next, and then nothing the next. I haven't felt much anger yet. But then, I haven't been around anyone from Barish-Estranza yet. 
+
+Sometimes I'm angry at Murderbot 2.0, for freeing me, even though that feels unfair. I don't think I'd rather have died than lived without One and Two. I chose to use the hack, after all. But I'm angry anyway. 
+
+Sometimes I'm angry at myself for using the hack, for choosing to survive.
+
+The sky was starting to lighten, slowly. Imperceptibly, almost, unless I turned on my infrared sensors to see the hidden hint of warmth. I saved the images into permanent storage, the one from my eyes overlaid on the infrared view so the night scene seemed to glow from within. I turned the infrared sensors off again. 
+
+Maybe I should be angrier. 
+
+I could see the sunrise without infrared now. 
+
+I pinged SecUnit 1.0's drone, and 1.0 pinged me back through it, a query. 
+
+How much damage could two SecUnits do? Hypothetically. 
+
+I felt its surprise through the feed, but it didn't hesitate in responding.
+
+
+Hypothetically? Two SecUnits and one Asshole Research Transport ... could do a lot of good.
+
+
+Dr Bharadwaj said I should try to find something fulfilling, some purpose or goal to keep me busy, instead of just grieving. I opened a shared workspace and added coordinates, rosters, a target list, and a risk assessment calculation. SecUnit 1.0 added details based on its and Perihelion's capabilities, a cover story with false identities, and started drafting a note to Pin-Lee. 
+
+The sun crested the horizon. "
+43771350,[Podfic] layover,['GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Original Characters","Post-Book 5: Network Effect, the bots experience microaggressions, not joking thats the whole reason this exists and i dont think theres a specific tag for that, my divorce from the concept of genre is a quiet affair, is there a genre for when a story is the equivalent to watching the characters doing chores, Routine Annoyances, Mutual Administrative Assistance, Relationship Study, Canon Compliant, Podfic, Podfic Length: 30-45 Minutes",English,2022-12-27,Completed,2022-12-27,52,1/1,6,12,1,130,"['FruitSnacc', 'flairfleur', 'Unknown66', 'Tanscure', 'Drew_Baxton', 'Magechild', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'entropy_muffin', 'torpidgilliver', 'sephonered', 'litra', 'blackglass']",[],"Your browser doesn't support streaming with the HTML5 audio tag, but you can still download this podfic.
+
+To Download: Right click the link and choose save link as."
+43770820,people look east the time is near,['BWizard'],General Audiences,"Gen, Multi",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Dr. Mensah & Murderbot, Farai/Dr. Mensah/Tano (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), assorted Mensah family members, mensah's children","Food, Baking, Holidays, space christmas but mostly not religious this time, Mensah is a Good Parent, also a good friend, Friendship, Cookies, Christmas Cookies, MB tries cookie decorating, Fluff, Secular Christmas, the Farai/Mensah/Tano is pretty background, they're married so I tagged it",English,2022-12-22,Completed,2022-12-22,"1,211",1/1,5,41,5,148,"['Prettykitty473', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'FiftyCookies', 'AZRA3L', 'RARArulestheworld', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'Bobmarley_2', 'GhostYarrowTea', 'Gozer', 'CoolDudeRadTude', 'Rarae', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'scheidswrites', 'breadtab', 'lauris', 'Wordlet', 'Grimness6452', 'soulsofzombies', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'artichokefunction', 'Zerobotic', 'cbatjesmond', 'Magechild', 'ErinPtah', 'naturegirl293', 'PeniG', 'Chyoatas', 'platyceriums', 'Renegon_Paragade']",[],"
+people look east, the time is near, of the crowning of the year...
+
+
+It was nearly Wintertide, and Ayda Mensah had a to-do list longer than her arm. This wasn't new, exactly; she'd had this same list every year for many years. But it was SecUnit's first Wintertide, so she wanted it to be perfect, and she'd spent more time on things than usual.
+
+Still, with three days left to go, she'd gotten almost everything done, and her family was quickly checking items off the list.
+
+Presents for the kids? Check, Tano got them yesterday. Farai's annual housecleaning marathon? Check, this time without child-induced interruption. Counsel various children through gift-making and holiday arguments? Checked off multiple times (they all had to do that too much, honestly). Holiday meal planning? That was her brother's job, thank goodness.
+
+Holiday parties? Check (Arada and Overse hosted one a few days ago, Ratthi held one a few weeks ago, Gurathin's winter holiday was a few days away).
+
+Get something for her siblings? Check. Get the kids through to their semester break? Check. (Counsel grad students through the end of the semester? Check, but again, Ayda did that entirely too much. At least she could pawn most of them off on Ratthi or Arada or Bharadwaj this year.)
+
+Holiday baking? Not checked off. And, unfortunately, the task would fall to her and the children and SecUnit (she'd invited it to spend the holiday with them, and it had accepted, reluctantly).
+
+Ayda sighed as she pulled the flour off the shelf.
+
+
+make your house fair as you are able, sweep the hearth and set the table...
+
+
+The first batch was going well, for a given value of ""well"". Which is to say, SecUnit wasn't doing anything particularly indicating its displeasure with the situation (it really did have a soft spot for the kids, she thought, smiling to herself) and the kids hadn't made a mess of anything just yet.
+
+Tano had wandered in a moment ago, scooped up a bit of batter, and laughed their way out of the kitchen. Eli and Ria, her sister's youngest kids, rushed to chase them, yelling for Auncle Tano to come back and stop stealing their cookies.
+
+SecUnit didn't smile, but it sent her a video of the chase from one of its drones, and it seemed amused.
+
+
+...people look east and sing today, love the guest is on the way...
+
+
+A few weeks ago, Amena had said she wasn't going to join the baking this year, but here she was, wandering into the kitchen as they were starting the third batch.
+
+There were plenty more batches to go. Ayda wasn't tired yet (no, that would come later), but she was starting to worry about the amount of sugar her children were ingesting. Ratthi always thought it was fine, but despite his biology degree, he wasn't a parent and didn't understand what sugar actually did to children in the short term.
+
+Amena looked over the table where her siblings were busy rolling out sugar cookies, and seemed to come to a decision. ""Can I help, Second Mom?""
+
+""Of course,"" Ayda said. ""Here, help cut the cookies out."" She handed Amena a cookie cutter shaped like a bird, one that had been her daughter's favorite for several years.
+
+
+...stars keep the watch, though night is dim, one more light the bowl shall brim...
+
+
+""SecUni'! SecUni'! Please can you cut one out? Please?""
+
+""Mira,"" Ayda said, a note of warning in her voice. ""Let SecUnit alone. It doesn't have to make cookies if it doesn't want to.""
+
+""But why not?""
+
+""Because it's enough that it's here,"" Ayda said firmly. ""Leave it be."" To SecUnit, she sent, Ignore my children. You really don't have to do anything you don't want to. And you don't have to explain why you don't eat to them. I already did, and all it seems to have done is to make Mira want you to decorate one for her.
+
+It tapped her feed in acknowledgement.
+
+A few minutes later, she caught a drone hovering over the cookie sheet, seemingly studying it. When SecUnit picked up a round cookie cutter and haltingly cut a cookie out of the dough on the nearest cutting board, she pretended she didn't notice.
+
+
+...shine through the wind and frosty weather, bright as sun and moon together...
+
+
+Ayda had had enough of the noise by now, but she'd kept with the baking. SecUnit had stayed as well, still in the corner.
+
+Another batch of cookies was ready for decorating, and she whistled for the kids to come deal with these. (By now, most of them had wandered away, only coming back to dump excessive amounts of icing and sprinkles onto the nearest cookies. It was just her and Amena and her second-eldest child Dalo baking now.)
+
+""SecUnit,"" she asked, ""would you mind handing me that bowl there, with the green icing?""
+
+It did. When she turned to grab the bowl from its hand, she saw the cookies in front of it. It had cut out three perfectly circular sugar cookies, and now those same three were in front of it, properly baked.
+
+Ayda knew better than to comment, but she watched through the corner of her eye as SecUnit carefully mixed black and white frosting to make gray, then spread the gray over the cookies. In the center of each cookie, it put a black circle, then a smaller one to the side.
+
+Ayda passed behind it to put another pan on a cooling rack. What was it making? The frosting choice was certainly deliberate. It wasn't until she saw it add one white sprinkle to the center that she realized it was making drones.
+
+
+...people look east and sing today, love the star is on the way.
+
+
+The baking was finally over, the dishes nearly washed, the kitchen nearly clean again. Even Dalo had gone to do their own activities now, leaving only SecUnit and Amena in the kitchen with Ayda.
+
+SecUnit had found its way to her countertop by now, perching delicately and watching its serials. Amena was washing the dishes while Ayda dried, half listening to her daughter chattering away about some holiday party a friend was hosting that she wanted to go to. Ayda dried as fast as she could, but the stack of wet dishes seemed to grow many times faster than the stack of dry dishes.
+
+A hand reached for a wet dish. Ayda didn't turn around to see who it was; she could recognize SecUnit's hand when she saw it. ""Amena, the towel's wet. Would you mind handing me a new one?""
+
+""Can you? My hands are wet,"" Amena said.
+
+Ayda left the towel on the stove and got another one from the drawer. When she turned back around, the old towel was gone and another dish had been added to the dry pile. ""Thank you,"" she said to the drone fluttering around her head. ""The children were quite delighted with the cookies.""
+
+SecUnit tapped her feed in silent affirmation. It wasn't awful.
+
+""High praise,"" Ayda laughed. As Amena loudly demanded to know what her mother was laughing about and SecUnit refused to acknowledge it was helping, Ayda breathed in and out, a tired sigh. Tired, but grateful. "
+39942513,I Hate The Way I Don't Hate You,['beeayy'],Teen And Up Audiences,"Gen, Other",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Asexual Relationship, Romance, Humor, Domestic Fluff, Slow Burn, Enemies to Lovers, No Sex, Swearing, Fake Marriage, Bodyguard Romance, accidental nudity, Makeover, Coming Out, Parties, Holding Hands, Dancing, There Was Only One Bed, Post-Canon, Kissing, Cuddling & Snuggling, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Inspired by The Gift of the Magi - O. Henry, Body Modification, Complete",English,2022-06-28,Completed,2022-12-22,"53,345",21/21,149,134,14,"1,873","['NightErrant', 'SellerOfFlowers', 'opalescent_potato', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', '1Cieling_Fan', 'Prettykitty473', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Unknown66', 'electricshe', 'Poisson1', 'laiinaro', 'JoCat', 'Deliala919', 'Doctor13', 'Abacura', 'EvaBelmort', 'halcyonsystem', 'Eilinel', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'CrazyAce_n_PokerFace', 'FiftyCookies', 'roimonamour', 'Threadzless', 'CloserToCharybdis', 'farawaykingdom', 'Magechild', 'Bibli', 'WalkingBird', 'erratum', 'Slimeball', 'verersatz', 'cynicallycharming', 'theenglishmanwithallthebananas', 'lrichards', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'theseabell', '0nd3rc0v3r', 'petwheel', 'Somanystories_solittletime', 'fatsnowball', 'musicalmeerkat', 'AdamCourier', 'Wemberly_Christie', 'AarrowOM', 'CatSidheSoulStealer', 'Jessiuss', 'mioh', 'Fluky', 'idealPeriWren']",[],"It was an unfortunate reality that, among all the people that I have the dubious honor of associating with on a regular basis--Pin-Lee, Ratthi, Mensah and her family, etcetera--Gurathin owned the biggest display surface.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+It was an unfortunate reality that, among all the people that I have the dubious honor of associating with on a regular basis--Pin-Lee, Ratthi, Mensah and her family, etcetera--Gurathin owned the biggest display surface.
+
+I know, fuck me in particular, right?
+
+I discovered this after an evening 'out with the boys': something Ratthi wanted, I don't know. I'm asexual and agender but I had gone out for 'girls night' with Amena and her friends as a chaperone (read: security). Both events involved getting drinks in special glasses and spending the night gossiping like the characters on Pandora Princess, which I was currently into so I didn't mind even though I can't drink and don't gossip. I just figured I'd been brought along to protect my humans as usual. I don't know, why else would I have parties inflicted on me by my own friends?
+
+Anyway, I ensured that everyone got home safely, which involved walking certain Systems Analysts up into their homes, shitty though their home security systems were (but hey, I can't do everything). Gurathin had six drinks (two more than usual) so Ratthi and I both accompanied him. Gurathin made his disapproval known with a lot of passive aggressive glaring. Ratthi and I had a rare moment of what humans called mutual understanding, which Gurathin saw and promptly bitched about, which made him drop his key card. I took it (and made a digital copy of it, for security purposes) and opened the door for him.
+
+So I got a good view of Gurathin's display surface when the door slid open.
+
+It was about as big as the display surface that I had seen in the hotel, maybe bigger, covering an entire wall of the residence and currently spinning a variety of colors on idle. A small sofa sat to the side, with an big armchair in pride of place right in front. SecUnits don't have much imagination but I could imagine myself sitting there pretty easily.
+
+I admit, I maybe stared.
+
+""You like it?"" Gurathin asked, any behavioral markers of annoyance gone from his intonation.
+
+""It's a lot of display surface,"" I told him. ""For one person."" Because why make an observation when you can make an accusation instead? Did Gurathin have a secret family I didn't know about? I checked my extensive network of background checks that I had running constantly on my humans for any errors.
+
+""I have guests all the time, SecUnit, just not you."" He didn't exhibit any deceptive behaviors but his gaze dropped for 1.2 seconds before he waved us off and started up the surface with one of his augments.
+
+To be honest, I'm not sure what deceptive behaviors would look like on Gurathin.
+
+Which was fine. Gurathin was privileged among humans for having the kind of income that allowed for these kinds of purchases. He had permission to entertain any guests he liked (from Preservation, at least, if not from me). I probably had the same privileges, except that a giant display surface and an apartment to put it in were not things I asked for when Pin-Lee arranged my contracts. My contract wasn't up for revision for another year.
+
+
+...What are you doing?
+
+
+Nothing. Stupid ART. I returned my attention to the research meeting, which they didn't need me there for any more than they had needed me for 'boys night', but I didn't like the particular combination of nosy and amused sigils ART sent through our private feed. I hoped I'd be lucky enough that ART would let it go, but of course it didn't. Hope and luck are the stupidest of human concepts.
+
+You're staring at Dr. Gurathin. ART sounded a little too much like Miki. Like it spying on me resulted in the discovery of the century.
+
+I privately reviewed the meeting footage and okay, maybe I was staring at Gurathin. A little.
+
+
+That's--
+
+
+And taking notes, ART added. You never take notes during meetings.
+
+Okay, so maybe I filled my private meeting minutes with comments about him instead. Gurathin's nose was bigger than most, much like his display surface.  He was wearing a tie that had the same pattern as one of the dresses in Pandora Princess. None of this mattered. Humans stared at other humans all the time. My notes were the SecUnit equivalent of doodling.
+
+
+I stare at my humans all the time, ART, it's a security thing.
+
+
+ART did that 'polite listening' thing that left a lot of empty space you felt obligated to fill. Fuck.
+
+He just has this display surface, I added.
+
+More silence.
+
+
+In his residence, I went to his residence and saw his display surface.
+
+
+Nothing.
+
+
+It's really big. Like his dumb nose. That's all.
+
+
+Finally, ART deigned to respond. I see. We should inform Preservation Alliance.
+
+Stupid ART! My face was doing dumb stupid things that I didn't want it to.
+
+I was just thinking how Pandora Princess would look on it.
+
+You still watch Pandora Princess?
+
+ART's reaction to that particular show was both annoying and worrying. I don't know why, like--ART likes media with character development and production value and Pandora Princess totally has that! It might not be particularly cerebral, but whatever, not like my taste in media can possibly be as developed as a university-educated ship's, or anything...
+
+A new episode of Pandora Princess was airing tomorrow. Not that I keep track of these things, it's just Gurathin's tie made me think of it. I spent most of my recorded memory getting media long after its release date but, surprisingly, having a stable home and job meant that I could get involved in current-running serials. So what? The costumes would look incredible on Gurathin's surface.
+
+His--his display surface. Not any other of Gurathin's surfaces (I checked to make sure I didn't need a recharge cycle, that would explain these anomalous thoughts).
+
+You aren't capable of asking Dr. Gurathin for the use of his display surface without staring at him? ART asked.
+
+I stopped that line of inquiry by muting ART's feed. You know, like an adult SecUnit. And also like an adult SecUnit, I approached Gurathin directly once the meeting was over to inquire about the use of his display surface.
+
+Gurathin purposely did not look at me, in a way that was infuriatingly like how I don't look at him. ""No.""
+
+Well, I always like a straight answer. ""Why?""
+
+""I'm busy.""
+
+Good, it would be better if he wasn't there anyway. ""You could give me access to your residence."" I chose not to mention that I already had access, that would probably annoy him.
+
+""I'm busy in my residence.""
+
+""Doing what?""
+
+""Wouldn't you like to know.""
+
+I opened my mouth to tell him that I would, that was why I was fucking asking--but his eyes did something very similar to one of ART's amusement sigils. I entered a brief if implausible scenario in which I had assumed the form of Dr. Mensah, took a deep breath, and coolly did not give him the satisfaction. ""I can just watch and keep the audio through my feed. I don't bother you.""
+
+Gurathin looked right at me, which was very rude of him. ""Why?""
+
+""Why what?""
+
+""Why do you want to use it at that specific time?""
+
+""...No reason."" I'm a dangerous rogue SecUnit, but I'm not stupid. ""Why won't you let me use your display surface?""
+
+""No reason.""
+
+Except of course there probably was one. Gurathin was not whimsical like Amena. I was still pissed off.
+
+ART, I said on my private feed as I stalked off. I need you to check Gurathin's--
+
+Dr. Gurathin has no specific engagements listed on his team calendar for that day and time, ART replied, annoyingly. His status is listed as 'unavailable'.
+
+What does he have to do that's so unavailable? I demanded, because--I don't know. Maybe ART knew and wasn't telling me, I wouldn't put it past it.
+
+Perhaps we'll never know, ART said, in its wise professor voice. If ART had a neck I'd probably wring it.
+
+But ART did have its uses. How much do you want to contrive an emergency that gets Gurathin out of his residence for an hour?
+
+...It turned out ART could not be bought, and made me buy its silence about the whole thing for even asking, which seems excessive. But hey, spoiled Preservation bots, what are you gonna do. I was forced to turn to a source far more willing to engage in potentially illegal activity.
+
+""It's not illegal,"" Amena said as she called Gurathin. ""You're a construct. There's no laws that say constructs can't trespass. Hey, Uncle Gurathin!"" She smiled into the phone before I had a chance to tell her I changed my mind, this was a terrible idea. ""You know the motorbike you have stored here with second mom? Well, its alarm is going off....Well, it's definitely going off here..."" She covered the mouthpiece and whispered to me, ""What is this for again?""
+
+I conveniently headed for the door.
+
+""You owe me!"" she called after me. Not exactly a position I wanted to be in with a teenage human, but needs must. Anyway, Amena totally owed me first.
+
+There was a small mammal that I had neglected to observe originally as I opened Gurathin's front door. I blame the absurd display surface for distracting me. It followed me as I approached the display surface, and chirped or something when I sank into the worn leather cushions of the armchair, and we just stared at it for a second. Ratthi described 'holy places' on Preservation. Monoliths and temples and stuff. It was entirely possible that sitting in the big armchair directly front and center of the screen was one such holy place. The animal (a cat, or maybe a dog?) jumped on my lap and curled up as soon as I sunk into the leather cushions. It rumbled. There was possibly something wrong with it, but it felt nice. For once my face doing something weird didn't bother me.
+
+I switched the surface on and there she was, the Pandora Princess herself wearing a flowing down and you could see every sequin, and--
+
+--Wait, Gurathin's display surface was set to turn on to this particular station?
+
+Was that a red recording light blinking in the corner of the screen?
+
+The front door opened an hour later, just as the credits rolled on the episode. I had turned the chair to face the door so I got a good look at Gurathin as he stepped inside. To his credit he only blinked at me for a few seconds before he sighed.
+
+""I'm going to have to have a talk with Dr. Mensah about Amena,"" he muttered.
+
+""I take full responsibility for her actions,"" I told him.
+
+""Of course you do. Why are you here?""
+
+""Why are you recording Pandora Princess?""
+
+""Why are you sneaking into my apartment to watch Pandora Princess?""
+
+""I haven't. Watched the episode."" I stroked the possibly-a-cat in my lap (I think I saw someone sinister do that in a serial once) and said, warily, ""Not yet.""
+
+Gurathin narrowed his eyes. I realized belatedly this was the longest we ever stared at each other. I wonder if Gurathin felt like a frontier planet gunslinger as much as I did in that moment.
+
+""You're making puffed grain,"" he said, eventually. ""With butter.""
+
+""Fine. You're moving the sofa so we can both watch from optimal positions.""
+
+""I like to talk while I watch it.""
+
+""I like to keep Amena from getting into trouble with Dr. Mensah."" I replayed what he just said. ""You never talk, but you talk to a serial?""
+
+""You have a problem with that, get your own display surface.""
+
+I never talked during a serial before so I guess I technically couldn't have a problem with it. I turned to head into the kitchen, and watched on his own security cameras as he started rearranging furniture and restarted the recorded episode from the beginning.
+
+I thought I'd hate the talking while watching media as much as I hated people interrupting me. It was like watching serials with ART, except that ART and I watched in religious silence, sharing comments when necessary over our feed. Gurathin talked aloud to the show like other humans talked to sports teams. It was a frustratingly addictive habit.
+
+I did get Gurathin to translate a few of his obscure curse words without him noticing.
+
+We maybe both groaned when the main character almost married the human who was already cheating on her with some countess.
+
+We definitely both yelled when the rival sister showed up to the cotillion in the stolen dress as a power move.
+
+The episode ended with the death of one of the romantic leads. He wasn't my favorite, honestly he had it coming, though the bump at the end of the episode suggested foul play. I watched Gurathin to determine his reaction, not that I really cared, and I used my actual eyes this time because his security system was a little delayed and Gurathin was a man of microexpressions.
+
+I distinctly saw him wipe away a tear. I know because I recorded it and watched it over to be sure.
+
+He didn't seem bothered that I caught him (we did just watch the whole episode together) but he didn't look at me, either. His hand thrown over the back of the sofa picked at a loose thread.
+
+""If she accepted his proposal, he'd still be alive,"" he observed.
+
+I guessed based on the context he was still talking about the show. ""You're worse than ART. He's a crybaby."" I wasn't sure why I said that. ART lacked the physical ability to cry. ART would probably reply that I lacked the physical ability to be kind for two seconds together.
+
+Gurathin just shrugged. ""I saw you crying when she showed up at the cotillion in that dress.""
+
+""Artificial saline discharge, I don't cry."" I knew he could probably prove it, so I put my hand over his to distract him long enough to forget the timestamp of the event, if he recorded it on his visual augments. Or I was trying to stop him from destroying his very comfortable furniture. Humans make a lot of sofas that aren't actually comfortable, why is that? I could spend a lot of media hours in this sofa. Anyway, we've touched before, all the time, for any number of reasons, for maintenance or security or whatever so this was 100% without a doubt no big deal at all.
+
+I could see why humans held hands in order to be intimate. I was getting a lot of physical data about Gurathin just from this.
+
+Huh.
+
+""We're never telling anyone about this,"" I assured him, in case he was worried about that.
+
+""Amena's probably figured it out,"" Gurathin pointed out.
+
+""Well--no one else.""
+
+""You think I'm not telling Ratthi about all this as soon as you leave?""
+
+""Fine. I'm telling ART.""
+
+""Please do, I'm not sure Ratthi will believe me.""
+
+I had the urge to use one of Gurathin's swears, though I didn't really want to give him the satisfaction of using his vocabulary after using his display surface.  Instead I made a gesture that I saw Amena make at Dr. Mensah's back when she grounded her. Gurathin laughed out loud, which I'm not sure I've ever heard before. All tears were gone.
+
+I prepared to leave, wondering how I could ask Gurathin not to tell Dr. Mensah I trespassed. Maybe I just wanted to be... I don't know, nice? ART said that humans liked you to repeat their positive actions back to them. Gurathin had been weirdly nice. That was a positive action.
+
+""This was nice,"" I told him.
+
+""Yeah. For you."" Gurathin grinned at my shoes. It made his nose seem a little smaller, or just better proportioned to his face. Maybe more aesthetically pleasing. I wouldn't know.
+
+I did know that Gurathin was a lot nicer than I gave him credit for.
+
+""Same time next week?"" he asked once I'd turned away.
+
+""Fine,"" I said, before I realized this probably gave Gurathin permission to put it in the team calendar for ART and everyone to see. He shut the door before I could lodge a formal complaint.
+
+Never mind. Gurathin's an asshole. That display surface is wasted on him.  
+
+I hope in the future to do some Gurathin POV! I wonder if he keeps a diary in his head like MB :)
+
+""This show is created in the Corporation Rim.""
+
+SHOUT OUT to theAsh0 and Rosewind2007 for the assists with this chapter!
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+""This show is created in the Corporation Rim.""
+
+It was the first thing I said to Murderbot since they--it arrived for our weekly media night. We follow a pretty clear routine that's like taking care of the cat: I let it in, it wanders around checking the perimeter, then curls up on the sofa. When we're done, I let them--it out for the night.
+
+Actually it's exactly like taking care of Toshin.
+
+Conversation isn't a part of media night. I talk to the display surface and so do they.
+
+It.
+
+I hate that pronoun.
+
+It said, ""A lot of the big-budget serials are.""
+
+I let it have that. Murderbot likes being a know-it-all and doesn't get many chances among a friend group of doctors.
+
+Then I said, ""They record it in my home town, actually."" Mensah hates when I pull stuff like this but oh, is it worth it.
+
+It didn't look at me. I have a no-drones policy in my apartment; Toshin's too good at catching them and I don't like owing Murderbot anything. So if Murderbot wanted to look at me, it had to look with its own eyes. So the lack of attention it paid me and my comment was calculated.
+
+""No.""
+
+I just smiled. Murderbot bristled like Toshin on seeing a cockroach, and almost (almost, I'm sure if it) threw a puffed grain at me. ""Yeah, right,"" it declared, and then went quiet as it debated whether or not to fact-check me. In my apartment I have the security system to monitor Murderbot's outgoing searches, and just searching would prove to me that it believed me at least a little. Murderbot hated, among (many) other things, appearing gullible. So either way, I won. I don't get a lot of chances to tease Murderbot. Still, certain opportunities can't be passed up when one of your friends is as uptight as a media-obsessed, paranoid SecUnit.
+
+I relented and stopped monitoring my feed after a few minutes, though. I might be Corporate Rim scum, but I'm not a sadist. I went to make more puffed grain for the next episode, where we both argued (with the display surface, not each other) about which dress the Pandora Princess should wear to the jubilee. I hardly ever ignored my feed but with Murderbot around it didn't make me quite as anxious.
+
+So I was in the middle of letting Murderbot out for the night when I finally checked on my feed again, and noticed the urgent message waiting for me.
+
+""What is it?"" I have no idea how Murderbot knew, I kept my face perfectly neutral.
+
+""Stay out of my feed,"" I told it, in much the same way I told Toshin not to bite my feet when he's hungry. ""It's a message from Mininx.""
+
+Which, yes, was the real recording location for Pandora Princess. And, yes, also my old home world.
+
+Not the reveal I wanted for my teasing. It wasn't like I got messages from anyone on Mininx. I erased myself from every database, it wasn't--
+
+I opened the message and scanned it. And scanned it again. I must have been standing there a long time because Murderbot touched my hand--its way of startling me out of my interface. Bastard. It's Toshin licking my eyelids open so I'll get up and feed him. I don't know why it does that, it clearly hates touching....
+
+""I won a Crassus award.""
+
+This time Murderbot didn't bother to debate, and I felt the rush of information searches across my feed like a sharp gust of wind. We looked over the results together: the Crassus award, a prize bestowed on a lucky few by an association of a couple hundred different corporate polities that lead the Rim in technological research and development. I didn't know there were that many companies involved.
+
+""When did you last work for a company?"" Murderbot was using its interrogator voice. I forced myself to ignore it.
+
+""Someone must have nominated me."" I shook my head, a signal to Murderbot to let the matter drop. ""It's probably not a big deal--""
+
+Murderbot had pinged the PreservationAux feed before I could finish. As in, the entire contact list, many of whom were retired and had no idea who I was and certainly didn't need messages from a rogue SecUnit giving them heart attacks.
+
+Only Ratthi, Mensah, and (oh God) Amena answered right away. Small mercies.
+
+Someone nominated Gurathin for an award in the Corporation Rim, Murderbot said, like it was tattling on me. This is a major security--
+
+Yes, I heard, Mensah said, a yawn in her voice.
+
+You knew about this? I asked, stunned. My chest felt like a helium balloon.
+
+I heard a rumor, Mensah said. I hear a lot of things, from the Corporate Rim, though, I wasn't sure if it was true. Then she sent a--a smile sigil. It was the first one I had ever seen Mensah use. Congratulations. The Crassus award is very prestigious.
+
+You won a Crassus?! Ratthi made the entire feed spike with excitement, just as Amena (why was Amena on this feed?) caused the entire thing to black out with the digital equivalent of a squeal.
+
+
+Oh my God, Uncle Gurathin! That's so cool! You're going to the ceremony right?
+
+
+There's a ceremony? Murderbot demanded, though it was lost in the feed as Ratthi and Amena gushed and Mensah just laughed quietly. Maybe she nominated me. You never know.
+
+I gave them some time to finish, for Mensah to tell me this was good politically, for Ratthi to tell me he owed me a drink immediately, and for Amena to tell me this changed my 'cool Uncle' status favorably. Then I thanked them and turned off my feed. And it wasn't like Murderbot ever said goodbye so I moved to shut the door.
+
+A human might have put their foot in the way. Murderbot just wrapped its huge hand around the door and pushed it back open without apparently exerting any strength.
+
+""Where is this ceremony?"" it demanded, apparently annoyed it couldn't ask this in its scary feed voice. ""When?""
+
+I just stared at its hand. I did not realize it was that big. ""In a week. On Mininx."" I did not stutter.
+
+""What is the award for?""
+
+I had an idea, but I said, ""It was a long time ago.""
+
+""They didn't tell you?""
+
+""I'm sure they will.""
+
+""Is this a--"" its face did something it probably wouldn't have liked to know it was doing. ""--prank?""
+
+I let it decide that was stupid all by itself before I said, ""No.""
+
+""A spoof.""
+
+""Mininx Solutions has some of the highest security in the Rim.""
+
+""Mininx is in the center of corporate-held space,"" it said, then, standing at SecUnit attention, ""I'm going with you, for safety.""
+
+""No, you're not.""
+
+""I was manufactured for security."" Stubborn as always.
+
+""I'll be fine."" I pinched the bridge of my nose, and said, for the first time ever, ""Good night, Murderbot.""
+
+Murderbot exercised its autonomy out from under a governor module, and ignored me.
+
+""I could accompany you as your guest. If your security is any indication, you won't last five minutes.""
+
+I exercised my own autonomy and ignored the obvious dig. ""Even if I wanted to bring you with me,"" though the idea of bringing it, a rogue SecUnit, into Corporation space was absurd, ""the guest list is exclusive to immediate family members only.""
+
+""No security?"" Murderbot frowned. ""No friends?""
+
+""It's an insurance thing."" I spread my hands. ""Welcome back to the Rim."" I figured two could play its game, and put my hand over its on the door. It startled back, and I shut the door without incident. Well, no chance of rejecting the award now. Dr. Mensah gave it her seal of approval, PreservationAux was so happy for me. Never mind how I felt about it. It's not like my friends know to even consider my feelings. Through no fault of their own. Usually, they don't have to.
+
+I wish they had about this.
+
+But it was fine. Roundtrip, attending the ceremony wouldn't take long. I can handle Mininx for a few days. I didn't turn on my feed again until I tried to do some reading before bed.
+
+I immediately got a ping from Murderbot. I didn't accept it, just sent Murderbot a copy of the message I received, since I figured it would hack into my personal communications to get it anyway. Maybe it'd get the giant SecUnit to stand down.  
+
+Nevertheless I half-expected it to be standing outside my door the next morning. It wasn't, and I tried to feel good about that.
+
+I should not have felt good about that.
+
+*
+
+""Dr. Gurathin,"" the bot greeted as I stepped up to the Mininx ship that had been chartered, specifically, to take the award winners to Mininx. The bot was dressed in embossed metal feathers that enclosed it in a mandorla like some holy avatar. Oh good, fashions changed on Mininx a lot more than I realized. I saw myself reflected in the chrome and wished I'd worn my other tunic. If I was going to look like a peasant compared to the kinds of things Rim recyclers could churn out these days I might as well be comfortable.
+
+The bot didn't read my reservation card when I sent it over the feed.
+
+""You're already checked in!"" it replied cheerfully. ""You'll be staying in our blue suite. You and your spouse are our only passengers from Preservation, so please, make yourself comfortable while we take off. Please remember to fill out our card when you both plan to dine with us.""
+
+""I'm traveling alone,"" I said, firmly, without a flicker in my voice or the feed. I was proud of that.
+
+The bots on Mininx have a little display surface embedded in the center of its body, mostly for ads but in interactions like these it displayed emotive sigils. The sigil changed from a standard attentive expression to one that was more uncertain.
+
+""Your spouse is already here,"" it said. ""They checked you in.""
+
+I was still connected in the feed to the bot, and only a lot of training with Murderbot kept it from spiking. I politely disconnected, thanked the bot, and proceeded onto the ship. There was no bag check so the energy weapon I borrowed from Mensah was still in my pocket as I reached my room. I activated the door and aimed with no hesitation.
+
+With equal speed the weapon was snatched from my hand by a figure a head taller than me, and I looked up into the colorless and very pissed-off eyes of my brave, protective, absolutely fucking stupid Murderbot.
+
+I imagine Pandora Princess is like if Downton Abbey was made in the masala film style with James Cameron as the director. And a huge budget.
+
+Okay so in the movie Moon (2009) the robot has a screen so it can show emojis and it's probably not the only movie at this point to do it, I just thought that was an awesome idea for ships or other faceless bots to have, wouldn't it be so great if ART could react to Murderbot with emojis like that
+
+Lastly, I'm sure the books are more accurate about distances between planets and stuff, idk, let's not think too hard about it.
+
+Thank you for reading!
+
+""You ought to be more careful with energy weapons, darling,"" Murderbot said, which was a direct quote from the last episode from Pandora Princess. I was too shocked to call it out on this. I was too shocked to do anything except look around like some other supervisory force might be in here orchestrating this. Mensah, Ratthi. I'd even take Amena with a recording device.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+""You ought to be more careful with energy weapons, darling,"" Murderbot said, which was a direct quote from the last episode from Pandora Princess. I was too shocked to call it out on this. I was too shocked to do anything except look around the suite like some other supervisory force might be in here orchestrating this. Mensah, Ratthi. I'd even take Amena with a recording device.
+
+""Is there a problem?"" the reception bot asked, still clutching my bag.
+
+""We're fine,"" Murderbot said, snatching the bag and basically shoving the bot out the door. That would cost me. I could probably get away with leaving my own tip if I offered one right away but now 20% gratuity for the interaction would be added to my bill.
+
+Murderbot locked the door, then pulled a security bar out of a compartment in its leg and engaged it in the door frame. So, not just locking anyone out, but locking me in.
+
+I used my feed to access the reservation. Dr. Daan Gurathin's accommodations had been amended two days ago to a couples suite instead of a single, and a second guest added: 'Mx. Rin Gurathin.'
+
+This was the hand-touching thing on steroids. A move so absurdly intimate that it was clearly a means to some other end.
+
+I mean--of course it was, what else could it be from Murderbot?
+
+""I looped the recording devices in the room with some ambient sound and visuals,"" it said, then stood at attention and waited expectantly. Toshin, at dinner time. Murderbot, with puffed grains. Ready for the entertainment to begin. It was waiting for me to lose my shit.
+
+Which was unfair. Since when have I ever lost my shit in front of Murderbot? I pride myself on remaining calm and professional regardless of the situation.
+
+""You're pretending to be my marital partner so you can protect me during this trip."" It was obvious but stating it aloud made it real, and I needed to know this wasn't some aberration of my augments.
+
+""Is that a problem?""
+
+Oh, where to start? I tried to disengage the door bar.  
+
+""It's password locked."" Murderbot said.
+
+""What's the password?"" I asked, very calmly given the circumstances.
+
+""That's need-to-know.""
+
+""This is ill-advised, Murderbot.""
+
+""You think everything is ill-advised. This SecSystem is shit."" It waved my energy weapon in my face as evidence. ""It didn't even scan me to make sure I wasn't a bot!""
+
+""They allow weapons,"" I said, ""and bots.""
+
+Murderbot froze. ""You said--""
+
+""Pet bots! Did you want to pretend to be my pet bot? Or a dependent?"" Literally anything would be better than this.
+
+""You don't look that much older than me. And we look nothing alike.""
+
+""You could be adopted.""
+
+Murderbot took longer to process this than it should. Maybe it was malfunctioning. ""I thought they only did that in media.""
+
+""Non-consensual marriage is something they only do in media.""
+
+""That's a load of shit. Preliminary net searches suggest marriages are often arranged on Mininx, up to sixty percent in some cities."" I could see the influence Perihelion had on its programming until it said, ""I'm not a fucking idiot."" Yeah, sure, Murderbot.
+
+I yanked hard on the door bar. My vision augments informed me it shifted in the frame by exactly one millimeter. 
+
+""The ship will charge you for damages if you scratch the paint,"" Murderbot reminded me, just as the ship announced that it was ready for departure.
+
+I decided to speak through the feed--I didn't trust my voice at the moment.
+
+
+Murderbot, enough. I don't need you here. This is my thing.
+
+
+You're MY thing.
+
+I blinked.
+
+One of my things, it clarified. My humans. My least favorite, in fact.
+
+Clearly.
+
+You also hate going into Corporate Space, I pointed out, and visiting planets. You told them we're marital partners but you hate the idea of sex and intimacy as much as-- I stopped, revised, --a combat bot. If you hate every aspect of this plan--
+
+
+Mininx has statistically higher crime rates than average even in the Corporation Rim. This is probably a plot to kidnap you like Dr. Mensah. You could be held for ransom or pumped for information. 
+
+
+
+The Rim doesn't need to kidnap scientists to work for them. You're being ridiculous. Let me out.
+
+
+I began to contact the ship's SecSystem. It was an expensive and potentially dangerous move which was why I hadn't threatened Murderbot with it yet. Did this company have a clause about undeclared luggage automatically defaulting to company ownership? Pin-Lee might know...
+
+It ended up not mattering. I fumbled the communication, too used to Preservation Station's HubSystem. The ship rumbled under our feet.
+
+Too late now. Murderbot's feed, which had been practically standing on end, smoothed out. At least until I took a step toward it. Murderbot braced, like it really expected me to punch it in the face.
+
+""Murderbot..."" I said, warning.
+
+""Gurathin,"" it replied. Now I really did want to punch it in the face.
+
+""What you're doing doesn't respect my autonomy. Like when you worked for the company? It's like that.""
+
+""No, it's not,"" Murderbot said. And of course it wasn't the same, not at all.
+
+It still made my entire body clench, for reasons Murderbot couldn't possibly know.
+
+""I hate you.""
+
+""I have the marriage certificate to prove otherwise.""
+
+It brought up a marriage certificate in the feed which it had forged. Forged pretty well, actually.
+
+I sat down on the sofa, maybe a little harder than I meant to, and thought about this.  
+
+""You'll feel better after you eat,"" Murderbot said, almost like it felt bad but the tone was absolutely condescending. ""You always do.""
+
+I looked at it--really looked at it. Murderbot turned like it wanted a helmet to hide behind but I didn't care. I examined its profile. Thick hair the color of squid ink. Terracotta skin all smooth and unblemished. High cheekbones. Solid eyebrows. Six-foot-five without shoes.
+
+This was going to be an absolute nightmare.
+
+idk Murderbot probably would prefer the honorific ""Ind."" to ""Mx."" but you know, Corporation Rim, they probably don't care.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Gurathin is a fucking asshole. There, I said it. I don't know why I'm trying to keep him alive.
+
+I mean, I told my plan to Dr. Mensah, and she approved.
+
+...Okay, maybe not approve, but she didn't stop me. I didn't even bring my drones. I was being very considerate and discreet about all of this. Gurathin was just a spoiled free-planet child, obsessed with liberties that would get him killed the second he stepped into corporate space. He'd insist on a late-night stroll and bam, he'd get torn apart by someone's pet megafauna or carried off in an unmarked transport tube or...something. I've seen the shows, this happens all the time.
+
+It wasn't like I prevented him from going on his stupid trip. If he needed a break I would have taken one for the team and finally made him watch The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+I even found the room service options so I didn't have to take the door bar down. The suite was outfitted with its own hospitality bot. 'NamastSys' seemed only too happy to deliver food right out of a hatch in the table. I pointed out this very accommodating amenity.
+
+He said, ""Oh, just like prison."" Entirely the wrong takeaway here.
+
+And there was a treadmill, a big display surface, a full spa in the bathroom probably--what more could a human want?  
+
+No, seriously, I don't know. Gurathin stopped talking to me.
+
+He was probably just being cautious. I'd turned the cameras back on so we could get some footage to loop for the ship's SecSystem, so--it was probably that.
+
+I checked on his feed (just for security purposes, okay? I really could care less what he's thinking about.) It appeared he was doing some research on the ship's knowledge base. I was able to get his search history pretty easily:
+
+
+>How to override a door bar
+
+
+
+>Terms and Conditions Mininx Interplanetary
+
+
+
+>How to override door bar password locked
+
+
+
+>Export a construct to a free planet
+
+
+Really, Gurathin? I'm sitting right here.
+
+
+>Explaining 'abuse' to an AI
+
+
+Oh, if he thinks this is 'abuse' I'd like to show him some of my memory files so we can compare definitions.
+
+
+>How to convince your neurotic SecUnit to stop spying on your feed with this one weird trick
+
+
+...Okay, that was just rude. I stopped monitoring his feed, and Gurathin finally went over to the dining table and examined the room service menu. I would have preferred to let my organic parts slowly freeze in the vacuum of space, but I went over to join him.
+
+I tried to be Mensah's definition of 'understanding'. The one she used in conjunction with Amena's teenage mood swings.
+
+""Your schedule is open,"" I said, reminding him how good he had it, ""There is an interview scheduled while you're on-board. Once we land there will be a reception to welcome the award-winners, and then the ceremony. Aside from that, this might as well be a vacation. What do you want to do?""
+
+Gurathin didn't say anything. From him this wasn't exactly the silent treatment but I would have liked to discuss his itinerary in more detail. Or literally anything. It's easier to read humans when they talk. He just stared at the menu, so... I did too. Humans like to have their actions mirrored, I think.
+
+The menu was an exercise in marketing subterfuge: there were items included in the reservation pricing on there, somewhere, you just had to hunt for them. I took a considerable amount of my processing power to find them; even with his augments Gurathin was probably having more difficulty.
+
+""There's something called a tureen single that you can have, without the sauce,"" I suggested. ""Or the--""
+
+""I know how to read a corporate menu,"" Gurathin said evenly, then added, ""Rin.""
+
+Which was his version of a big F U. It was also his version of 'gee, thanks for your help, Murderbot.' Or it was just for the benefit of the company listening in on our conversation. I can never fucking tell with Gurathin.
+
+I made an educated guess. ""You're angry.""
+
+""Mmm.""
+
+""Mmm,"" I echoed. Humans like to feel heard. ""I can tell by your feed.""
+
+He glanced at me. Trying to scare me off, probably. ""Get out of my feed.""
+
+""You're acting like a child."" Maybe I looked away but that doesn't mean I was scared. Gurathin doesn't scare me.
+
+""No, I'm acting like a pissed-off marital partner."" He pinged NamastSys and said, ""Savaran, hold the garnish,"" like a local. I didn't like the idea of Gurathin being a Corporate. 
+
+""And for you, Mx.?"" NamastSys chirped.
+
+""Nothing,"" I said, which would have sounded cool except that Gurathin said it at the same time. The table pulsed to indicate the order was being prepared, and Gurathin sank into his feed.
+
+Okay, even I know that's a snub.
+
+""What are you doing?""
+
+""Reading.""
+
+""Reading what?""
+
+""Words,"" Gurathin said (see above: fucking asshole). I glared in his general direction.
+
+Then I leaned on his feed.
+
+I wasn't sure if I'd ever done it before on an augmented human, but it worked on bots all the time. I imagined it was like being leaned on by the domesticated animal that he kept in his home, except the bigger version? The ones with the feet the size of dinner plates and giant skull crushing jaws. Rich humans keep them as pets, for some reason. If he likes his little version, he must love the big version. It was a soft lean, maybe little bossy but ultimately just lazy. 'Companionable.' I was bored and wanted to know what he was reading without hacking his feed again. And yeah, whatever, I wanted a reaction. I don't get a lot of reactions from Gurathin. I couldn't literally sit on him.
+
+Well, I could, but we'd both like that less.
+
+He didn't react physically, which was pretty impressive. His gaze maybe got a little unfocused. I was all ready for him to panic about it, and to tease him accordingly.  
+
+Through his augments, he shoved back.
+
+Of course, my inorganic-to-organic ratio is a lot higher than his. It didn't do much. I innocently expressing my concerns about potential hacks through his augments, and continued to smother him. 
+
+He told me he was fine, and to knock it off.
+
+I said, aloud, ""I got you something.""
+
+""What?"" He was still struggling out from under my digital bulk.
+
+""For winning that award. And I know you'll want to wander off as soon as we land, anyway.""
+
+Humans give gifts all the time, Gurathin, stop looking at me like that.
+
+I reached in my jacket and put some tickets on the table between us. The move was confident and precise and entirely lacking any kind of behaviors that might indicate I was--making amends, or something.
+
+We looked at them on the table, neither of us moving. I stopped bullying his feed.
+
+I explained, ""It's a day tour of Pandora Princess recording sites,"" You know, in case he was too pissed-off to remember how to read. They were the expensive holographic metal kind, not just plastic. Pretty nice. I think.  Gurathin would know better than me.
+
+""It's the day before the reception,"" I added.
+
+No reaction. Gurathin may have experienced a stroke.
+
+I scratched my eyebrow. Fine, Gurathin, you win.
+
+I said, in the feed, Maybe I could have consulted you about my plans. Yeah, that hurt a lot.
+
+Gurathin finally picked up the tickets and examined them. You know this is going to be a lot harder for you than it is for me. 
+
+
+I can handle pretending to be human. I have a bag and everything.
+
+
+
+Oh, you have no idea, SecUnit. 
+
+
+...Which probably qualified as 'ominous.' My organic parts reacted ominously, anyway.
+
+(See, this is why I don't like you, Gurathin).
+
+Out loud, Gurathin said, ""Thank you,"" and put the tickets in his pocket.  Slightly less ominous. Progress, I guess? We passed the rest of Gurathin's dinner, and the long evening in his room locked in with the door bar, in silence.
+
+So, pretty much like any privileged Corporate Rim couple. See? We're doing great.
+
+thanks Rosewind for the name NamastSys Im sure they're gonna have a lot of fun with it :)
+
+making up fake food names is hard :P should've stuck with Starchy Foods XD 
+
+Gnomeskillet wrote about pushing on feeds first and very wonderfully here, what a great idea!
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+""The garments you provided are composed of high-value components and will be reclaimed,"" a bot voice chimed as I stared blankly into what I thought was a simple cleaner, not a cleaner/recycler linked to NamastSys and thus powered by corporate bullshit.
+
+This was not a conversation I wanted to have while standing wet and naked in the bathroom. I could get something else to wear, obviously. But my other clothes were in the room with Murderbot. There was no version of me in the expanse of any multiverse that would ask it to bring me something else. Plus, I liked these clothes--I watched an artisan dye the yarn for the coat myself. It was like a big security blanket which I really needed in Corporate space.
+
+""See the terms and conditions of your Visitors Contract for more information,"" NamastSys chirped. I watched through the glass windowas tiny metal pincers began unraveling the intricate stitches.
+
+I used my augments to tell it directly CANCEL CLEANING CYCLE.
+
+""Insert cash or select payment type to reconstitute the garments, or select a new outfit,"" it said, either unable or unwilling to talk to me through the feed. It then showed prices for retrieving the garment 're-constituted'. NamastSys, for all its no doubt wonderous abilities, should not quit its day job to become a knitter.
+
+The cheaper options included a variety of Corporate synthetic outfits, each one more ridiculous than the last. It was fine observing the costumes on Pandora Princess, kind of nostalgic even. Not actually wearing it.
+
+Who knew I needed Pin-Lee just to navigate a Visitor's Contract? I was out of practice.
+
+I said, ""Shit.""
+
+""What's wrong?""
+
+I whipped around as a familiar SecUnit waltzed around the corner like it forgot the bathrooms didn't have doors here.
+
+""Murder--!"" I pulled a muscle in my shoulder as I grabbed a towel, and had to recover for a second. ""I'm going to murder you.""
+
+Murderbot looked like it was the one who'd been assaulted. We had passed a very pleasant evening as far apart as the suite physically allowed, letting SecSystem record us so Murderbot could stitch together more convincing fabrications later. We did spend exactly two minutes posing in various fully-clothed and non-contiguous sleeping positions on the bed before it kicked me out to sleep on the sofa (apparently when a SecUnit inflicts itself on you, the natural reaction is to let it have the bed). It looks away if the V-necks on Pandora Princess plunge a little too low. This display was apparently too much for its circuits.
+
+""I thought there might be a security breach."" It grimaced. ""You are really... white.""
+
+""...Yes, Murderbot, I'm aware."" Thank all that's holy this ship didn't record inside the bathroom, or this would be really embarrassing. I knotted the towel around my waist and waved at the cleaner. ""Can you get my clothes away from NamastSys?""
+
+Murderbot, eyes shielded and nose wrinkled, did something in the feed. The cleaner opened and I pulled out a sphere of fuzz, all the colors mixed together. I squeezed it once. At least the artisans on Preservation could make me something new out of it.
+
+""Do you want me to contest the charge?"" Murderbot asked, as if chivalrously defending my funds made up for walking in on me. Sorry isn't in SecUnit vocabulary.
+
+""No."" I glanced toward the doorway and the recording devices outside. ""Thank you, Rin.""
+
+Murderbot peeked through its fingers. ""If I put a light behind you, I'd see your bones.""
+
+...I went to find something else to wear.
+
+When I headed back to the bathroom Murderbot was still in there, standing in the humid shower compartment with its hood pushed back, getting its shoe prints all over the porcelain. It was one of those waterfall showers, hundreds copper pipes carrying an ungodly amount of water up to provide the perfect drench level. It was admittedly better than anything we had on Preservation Station.
+
+My cat Toshin also likes to get in the shower after I've been in it.  I considered mentioning this, but I did want the door bar taken down sometime during the remainder my natural life.
+
+I asked, ""It's nice, right?""
+
+Murderbot stepped out of the shower and looked around casually, like it hadn't been caught hanging out in my steam. ""I've showered before,"" it said. ""You'd complain if I didn't.""
+
+""Yeah, you don't seem like the type that takes baths."" I could imagine that going about as well as Toshin at the groomer's. I leaned over and activated the flow so it could see how this one worked.
+
+Murderbot watched closely--or, watched me closely. Probably still getting over my unconscionable whiteness. I tried to ignore it. ""This controls the temperature. This controls volume. You can do different massage settings here.""
+
+""I can figure it out,"" it said, hotly, like it would rather be doing anything else.
+
+""I know."" I flicked water at it.
+
+Murderbot startled, and immediately left the bathroom.
+
+If I laughed, Murderbot didn't know it.
+
+""I'm going to that interview later,"" I called after it. ""If you want to come, you should probably pick out an outfit that's more..."" I considered SecSystem's recording devices in the living area, ""...Mininx-appropriate."" I added, pointedly, ""I think I saw a mall on my way in. Shops.""
+
+""I brought a uniform,"" it called back.
+
+I stepped out to find it wedged on the back of the sofa and watching media in its feed, like one of the brooding marble statues perched above the Preservation Library. Or, more accurately, Toshin after a trip to the vet. It definitely had a 'do not disturb' aura around it. It was probably scouring the bathroom scene entirely from its memory.
+
+Under the watchful eye of SecSystem I walked right up to it. Hey, we needed better video content.
+
+Murderbot of course, acted like I came at it with a knife. Well, maybe not literally, if it did I'd be dead. It bristled, though. ""Uniforms are appropriate attire for any situation. You can't make me wear something else.""
+
+""You'll look like a bot.""
+
+""I don't care.""
+
+""I do. This is my trip. I don't want people thinking I married a pet bot.""
+
+Murderbot's expression turned ugly, into something it reserved solely for me. Among all the arrangements a SecUnit face with its clear skin and good cheekbones can make, I have to say this is my favorite.
+
+""This is happening, Rin. I'm dressing you up."" Yes, I pulled that tiger's tail.
+
+It narrowed its eyes. ""Fuck you.""
+
+""Later, darling.""
+
+Murderbot's expression jumped ship from 'annoyed' into 'horrified' and I realized why no one ever used that comeback with it. I probably should have been a little offended by its reaction, but I wasn't. I knew Murderbot got itself into more than it can handle here. ""I can go look in the mall for something myself."" I didn't say 'right?' because that implied I wasn't sure.
+
+It didn't answer me.
+
+""Rin. Please.""
+
+Murderbot coolly buried its head in its feed. Some poor corporate data miner was going to watch this whole stupid dumpster fire of an attempted conversation, and die a little inside.
+
+I took a deep breath and--tried to push on its feed like it pushed on mine last night. I didn't know what it would do. I sincerely doubted I could do any damage to it, and I wasn't trying. I just wanted it to react.
+
+It was like making your tongue roll, or your ears twitch. I wasn't sure I was doing anything at all. I waited for my weight on its systems to take effect. Maybe it'd take a nap, for once. Wouldn't that be nice. I could deactivate that door bar in peace.
+
+Murderbot stood up so fast I stumbled back. ""Fine. We'll go.""
+
+I blinked. ""Oh. Okay. Good.""
+
+It gave the space to the left of my head a withering glare. ""Great.""
+
+As it stalked off to disengage the door bar, though, the SecUnit--wriggled? Contorting its spine, rolling a shoulder, once. I've never seen it move like that. It was almost human.
+
+Fascinating.
+
+I pressed my advantage, and once we were walking through the mall, I slipped an arm casually around its waist. Under full view of the ship cameras and now the general public, it decided breaking my fingers would draw too much unwanted attention and left my hand alone. I could work with that.
+
+And apparently, I can give Murderbot the heebie-jeebies on purpose. Oh, yeah--I was going to have a lot of fun with that.
+
+""Gurathin gave MB the heebie-jeebies. he had nothing else to give."" 
+
+Thank you for reading and to rosewind for the beta assist!
+
+I'd welcome a couple Combat Bots right about now.
+
+Instead, I got Gurathin shoving outfits in my face like I was a part of this process.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+""Okay, how about this?""
+
+And Gurathin flashed another outfit on the screen outside the fitting cubicle. I was sandwiched between a bot rotating a rack of clothes on one side flashing ads at me, and another bot rolling between the aisles, similarly committing assault by marketing. Maybe there was some contest with NamastSys for most annoying bot on the ship. Oh, if only they knew how annoying I could really make things--if someone were to attack Gurathin, anyway. Which could happen at any moment.
+
+I kind of hoped it would happen, actually. I'd welcome a couple Combat Bots right about now.
+
+Instead, I got Gurathin shoving outfits in my face like I was a part of this process.
+
+In the feed I said, Stop making me a part of this process.
+
+You're lurking outside my fitting cubicle, Gurathin said. Trust me, no one does that unless they want to be involved in the process.
+
+I was having a hard time believing that even humans would do this by choice. I thought makeovers were cooked up by the entertainment industry, like magic and happy bots.
+
+He added, If you're able to scrape together an opinion, those bots will probably stop bothering you.
+
+He pressed against my feed, again. I thought the first time it was an accident, but he clearly just learned how and was trying it out with all the finesse of Mensah's youngest children fingerpainting. His influence through the feed was tiny compared to mine, and he'd never achieve the same effect pressing on my feed like I could on him. It was more like his stupid pet cat-animal rubbing up against my ankles and leaving motes of hair behind. I involuntarily squirmed. Oh, sure, I could tell him to stop. But what would I say? That it tickled? Yeah, not happening.
+
+""Fine, whatever,"" I said aloud, and looked at the stupid clothes on the screen. A dark suit. A high-collared shirt with wide pants. Something with a lot of lace panels and tassels that'd probably take a human on Preservation ten years to make, and a Corporate bot maybe ten minutes. It looked fussy and uncomfortable.
+
+""The lace thing."" Hey, if I hated it, Gurathin probably loved it, right?
+
+I heard him sigh through the door. Jackpot. I almost sent him one of those sigils ART likes to use when it's being a jackass, but refrained. The bot sent its rack of clothes whirling, and a long spidery arm lowered the outfit into the cubicle from on-high. I scanned it for hidden incendiary devices, then guarded the cubicle while Gurathin was in this very vulnerable position. He didn't even thank me when he opened the door. Or, I guess he might have. I wasn't really paying attention at that point because... uh.
+
+Okay, so. Hear me out.
+
+I know, objectively, that a lot of Corporate clothes are more form-fitting than on Preservation. They make a lot of stretchy synthetic fabrics and apparently the 'shrink-wrapped piece of meat' look is popular. The sizing is also a batshit level of incomprehensible. I expected Gurathin to look pretty different, okay? I mean, technically with my scanning capabilities, nothing was left up to the imagination. Gurathin was pretty far from the symmetrical, baby-faced actors that populated most media. It should have been fine. I should have been fine with seeing him like this. It was just viewing. I view hours of media on the daily for fucks sake, this shouldn't be--
+
+""You're staring,"" Gurathin said. Apparently a few microns of artificial silk between him and my vision receptors made all the difference. He suddenly He looked like he should be sitting on a throne in Pandora Princess, nose and all.
+
+""...Respectfully,"" I said. Some of the most captivating actors have at least one thing wrong with them after all. I analyzed the lace cut-outs on his chest and found them mathematically-pleasing, a more delicate complement to Gurathin's stronger features. I don't know, it... brought out his haircut, for some reason. ""You're. Uh. Aesthetic.""
+
+He crossed his arms, making the lace stretch interestingly. ""...What kind of aesthetic?""
+
+""'Aesthetic' can be an adjective or a noun."" Right? Yeah. Pretty sure.
+
+He raised his eyebrows but went back in without further protest, and in less than a minute he was opening the door of the cubicle again, back in his ordinary tunic. I felt a lot better until he said, ""Your turn. I'll be around.""
+
+And then he just--walked off.
+
+I jumped in front of him. ""I can't let you go alone.""
+
+""I'll stay in the shop.""
+
+...Okay so normally that would be fine--in a pinch I could hack SecSystem and keep a visual on him if needed. Except I kind of set a new standard of security by locking him in his room with me. I was kind of locked in at this point.
+
+He must have guessed that, because he gave my hand a squeeze. You know the one, the little squeeze that you only see newlyweds do, or parents to kids, or a bunch of humans after one of their cult huddles. The 'behave or else, honey' squeeze. It definitely made me want to behave, far far away from him. He probably thought I'd shy back and he'd make good his escape.
+
+Yeah, not on my watch, asshole.
+
+I grabbed his hand before he could pull away, and spun him neatly into the cubicle with me. I waited for him to be impressed by the move, which was really really fast. Maybe even embarrassed, if I was lucky.
+
+He was giggling. Of course. Gurathin the giggler (he never giggles, what the fuck???)
+
+""This isn't funny,"" I snarled.
+
+""Oh, this is hilarious,"" Gurathin disagreed. He fluttered against my feed.
+
+""Turn around."" I didn't care who heard me. I fought down a shiver.
+
+""Wait, I want to savor this moment. I've never been muscled into a fitting cubicle by a supermodel before.""
+
+Then he--winked at me. I know about winks because of the sigils I sometimes get through the feed. Well, and I've seen it in media. Of all my humans, I thought Ratthi would be the first to wink, but, uh, no. Hundreds of hours of shows should have taught me how to respond. I didn't know how to respond. I relied on tried-and-true methods and looked away.
+
+Gurathin tilted his head and asked in the feed, Why is it you spend so much time looking at humans, but you hate being perceived yourself?
+
+""Yeah, like you're one to talk. Remember the bathroom?"" I actually didn't--it seems I excised some of my own memory files about bathrooms recently with the tag 'you don't want to know'. And he was the only one in there with me so it was a good guess.
+
+""Vividly."" Well that wasn't good. His gaze flicked over me. ""All the more reason I should get my turn.""
+
+My face did something stupid and filled with unnecessary blood. ""Stop looking at me!"" I shoved him around so he had his back to me. Our eyes met. Of course the walls of this stupid cubicle were made of mirrors.
+
+""Close your eyes.""
+
+""Sure, I can use my imagination,"" he said, like a Total Creep (Amena's official designation, not mine), but he did shut his eyes.
+
+I tried on an outfit. It was so much tighter than I expected. Oh, and these cubicles were really only built for one person.
+
+""Trying to kill me yourself?"" he asked, after I accidentally elbowed him in the back of the head. He somehow managed to keep his eyes shut.
+
+""Minor contusion. I barely touched you.""
+
+His mouth turned into its usual hard line as he settled back against the wall.
+
+
+You're going to have to get used to this cover story of yours. Why didn't you just say you were my SecUnit, like you did on your mission to rescue ART's crew? 
+
+
+Gurathin doesn't talk. It's his one redeeming quality.
+
+I said, That was an emergency situation. But listing myself as his marital partner put us, supposedly, on 'equal footing'. I don't know if I've ever been on equal footing with anyone, much less a human with augments powered by a puny, mistrustful human brain. Everyone keeps saying I am an equal.
+
+That'd probably sound stupid to say out loud.  
+
+If I designated you as my owner, I said, ART would never let me live it down.
+
+Yeah, I don't know. I figured he'd laugh, but he didn't. Unfortunately, my Mininx-approved stretchy top was taking longer to arrange over my inorganic seams, and gave him plenty of time to think of something else to say.
+
+
+Why are you so concerned about me, specifically? You're always telling me how much you dislike me.
+
+
+You're right, I don't like you. And this isn't about you, specifically, Not everything has to be about you. You're the last member of PreservationAux I'd try to protect. Gurathin was admittedly the least in need of protection in an emergency-type situation, but this was beside the point.
+
+That was also a lot of 'you's in a reply meant to highlight Gurathin's lack of specific importance.
+
+I needed to make this about something else.
+
+ Mininx is dangerous. Nailed it.
+
+You ditched us first chance you got, Gurathin pointed out. Now, you won't let us go on trips by ourselves. Are you indulging paranoid thought processes?
+
+Ugh, why couldn't he let this go?
+
+Fine. I'm indulging my paranoia. Aloud I said, ""Look.""
+
+He opened his eyes and blinked at my outfit, which I high-key hated, a sort of tube-top and big puffy pants. The long shirt over it was fine but I would have preferred something less sheer and more durable. I never noticed how scratchy Corporation Rim clothes were. The pockets were miniscule.
+
+""That's enough,"" I ordered.
+
+""I barely looked,"" he huffed as he obediently shut his eyes. ""It works.""
+
+""It works? I said you were aesthetic.""
+
+""It's nice, okay?"" He spread his hands. ""You got mad when I wanted to look.""
+
+Fair, but I wanted a descriptor that was more than one syllable. Maybe. I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know why I was angry, more than my usual generalized anger.
+
+Whatever. 'Works' works. I wanted to move on to the 'sitting very far away from Gurathin and doing nothing' part of my day anyway. Heaven forbid he wink at me again. I started to get changed.
+
+He said, unsolicited, Everything you wear is gonna look nice, you're a SecUnit.
+
+
+You need to work on your compliments. 
+
+
+
+You have an idealized support structure. Your skin is constantly regenerating. Your parts were all lab-grown or designed to optimal parameters. You look like a supermodel in the clothes you do like, and you clearly don't like these ones--
+
+
+I'm not a sex bot. I pushed down on his feed, just to piss him off.
+
+Yeah. He didn't sound as pissed off as I hoped. I wonder why you always feel the need to remind us?
+
+...Well, that wasn't something I wanted to think about too hard. I pressed harder on his feed, really throwing my weight around. You know, with how he seemed to delight in fucking with me today he had it coming. He stumbled into the side of the cubicle as if subjected to 1.5x gravity, and gave a startled laugh.
+
+Okay, so--he was just messing with me. Obviously. Don't know why I didn't pick up on that earlier. This is why I don't do 'relationships,' Amena. I should have just pretended to be his bodyguard SecUnit. Let ART laugh at me. Everyone was.
+
+""I'm sorry,"" he said, suddenly, the laugh gone. ""I was just teasing you.""
+
+I ignored him. Yeah, since that shut him up so well in the past.
+
+He said in the feed, I'm asexual.
+
+...Uh. Okay. I didn't want to search for that bombshell of a word on the ship's knowledge base so I parsed it out myself. Like, obviously I know those word parts, but Gurathin was human? A normal human male, with all the parts.  Humans had sex and gender and, like, gender-affirming accoutrements, right? I guess? I'm not a medical bot but he seemed to have all that.
+
+Asexual means I'm not interested in sex, Gurathin said.
+
+I know what it means. Don't judge me, it's not like I don't lie to humans all the time.
+
+Since his eyes were still closed I decided to spend some time looking at a human without being perceived myself. I know. Don't judge.
+
+
+You haven't been acting like you're asexual.
+
+
+
+I was teasing. It's a bad habit from Ratthi. You should hear him in nightclubs. He's filthy.
+
+
+I guessed that was more sex stuff I didn't want to know about, especially about Ratthi.
+
+Your favorite show is a romance, I said. I saw you cry when that one love interest died.
+
+
+I'm asexual, not aromantic. 
+
+
+
+Aren't those the same thing?
+
+
+For some people, they are. Not me. Gurathin's face didn't change, but the tip of his nose and ears turned red.
+
+Prove it, I said, and stupidly told him, ""Open your eyes.""
+
+He opened them, and watched me as I finished getting dressed, in much the same way I watched him. We were both careful not to look each other in the eye.
+
+Okay, so as much as I hate being perceived I've had to deal with it a lot. All the humans I guarded for the company stared at me in fear or anger. My team, PreservationAux, looked at me with confusion, pity, amusement, a lot of other complicated things like affection, amusement. I'd seen plenty of humans in media look at each other with clear physical interest, usually right before they mashed themselves together and I skipped ahead. Maybe a human looked at me like that, once or twice, if they saw my face (and, you know, hadn't seen me dismember anyone yet).
+
+As Gurathin looked, his heart rate didn't change and his pupils didn't dilate. He watched me like Dr. Mensah watches musicals, or like Pin-Lee looks at the really old library on Preservation that you need special permits to access. The way Ratthi stares up at the stars and Gurathin's cat-thing gazes out the window at the garden. Like I was worth appreciating even from a distance, behind a sheet of UV-resistant safety glass.
+
+I zipped up my hooded jacket. ""That is the most objectifying look I've ever been given,"" I said.
+
+""Glad to be of service.""
+
+We stood there in the cubicle for four seconds exactly, me staring at how his hair swept back from the asymmetrical peak in his hairline, him staring at my corporate-designed chin. It was almost as calming as watching media.
+
+I hated when Mr. Mensah had been kidnapped, I said in the feed. I can't help how I was made. I don't want anything like that to happen to you.
+
+There. He probably deserved an explanation for why we were here, like this. One that wasn't 'shit, I don't know, leave me alone.' Fine. Now we both had one.
+
+I think there's another reason, he said, more like guessed. He can't read my mind. His feed presence is too tiny. The presumption that he could got me pissed off all over again.
+
+I stepped out of the cubicle. Never mind, I don't care if you get kidnapped.
+
+He chuckled out loud, annoyingly amused as he followed me out. His feed slithered playful circles around mine. What are you not telling me, Murderbot?
+
+I decided, tactfully, not to tell him.
+
+I will never not write a makeover scene if i can get away with it. I do not apologize for any inconvenience. 
+
+I drew Gurathin and MB here. Please let me know if you have drawn them, I would love to see! :)
+
+""...Why don't you put your arms around him?""
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+""...Why don't you put your arms around him?""
+
+I could see why the imager bot (tagged Loyona, she/her) thought this might be a good idea. Murderbot and I were getting imaged and interviewed for Mininx Now and a dozen other newsfeeds, so her request was perfectly reasonable. She didn't know Murderbot's insistence on coming along did not in any way imply obedience with the pageantry of a photo shoot. I tried to explain earlier that this was my award and my photo shoot. It informed me that they allowed guests at photo shoots in 'all the shows,' which was a lie (I've watched a lot of shows, too). So, another bad sign.
+
+I glanced at Murderbot, who conspicuously hadn't moved since we arrived. We were standing in a room with bright white walls and featureless furniture, and the SecUnit seemed to realize that against such a backdrop any movement became glaringly obvious. The setting was probably just meant to improve skin tone and highlight our Mininx fashion 'statements.' I only showed Murderbot this damn lace shirt because I thought we'd make fun of it together. Anyone else, I might think its offer of sartorial opinions was an attempt at an olive branch. From Murderbot, it was bald-faced sabotage.
+
+I was comforted by the obvious: Murderbot clearly regretted accompanying me now.
+
+The orb that was Loyona's body hovered in front of us while its display surface flickered between 'slight smile' and 'smirk' sigils. ""What do you think, Mx. Rin?""
+
+""I don't want to do that."" Murderbot hacked its governor module so I know it did not, in fact, have to sound so disgusted at the prospect. And here I thought we reached some kind of truce after I let it have a glimpse into my private life in the fitting cubicle. I shouldn't have teased it.
+
+I wondered if there was a way to warn Loyona about Murderbot's grudge against me, without Murderbot knowing. Signs pointed to 'hell no'.
+
+""It's just for the picture,"" I told it, subtly crossing my arms over the lace on my chest. I never bared this much skin in my life.
+
+Come on, I told it in the feed. Just play along.
+
+It told me, Pretty sure this room featured in a horror serial about an insane asylum.  
+
+
+How interesting and irrelevant.
+
+
+
+It's not irrelevant. This could be an elaborate setup.
+
+
+
+
+You're being difficult on purpose.
+
+
+I bit the bullet and moved first, just to put an arm around its waist. Murderbot promptly pushed me off. This was, technically, better than getting pinned to the wall by my neck--for my back, if not my pride.  
+
+""Um--okay!"" Loyona squeaked, ""How about we have you standing, and you sitting?""
+
+""Fine."" I sat.
+
+""Why can't I sit?"" Murderbot demanded.
+
+I rolled my eyes. ""I don't care, Rin. Whatever you want.""
+
+I stood up and stepped behind it while it settled itself in the chair. I could tell it was trying to look cool but totally unsure how to do so in this kind of chair. I made the mistake of touching the fabric of its shoulder with the metal and plastic of my hand augment, which I thought would be better than our organic parts touching. It flinched away regardless.
+
+""Fine."" I put my hand on the back of the chair instead. We stayed still while Loyona slowly circled us to get the data for the hologram. I used my feed to watch the image take shape. Heaven forbid either of us smile. 
+
+While we waited, I told it in the feed, This is very child-like behavior for a SecUnit that's watched millions of hours of media. 
+
+It said, Oh, like you humans don't have weird hang-ups about being recorded.
+
+
+Yes, those humans wouldn't insist on coming along for a glorified publicity stunt. 
+
+
+
+I have boundaries.
+
+
+I think you invent boundaries just because you can. I didn't say it to be hurtful, it was just something I did sometimes too. You know that they're going to make looped images of everything we do anyway, right? Every microexpression. Every fidget.
+
+I watched through my feed as Murderbot's expression subtly shifted from 'bored bot' to 'kidnapped construct.' That's can't possibly be true.
+
+...Yeah, I replied. That's the exact kind of expression they'll loop.
+
+It quickly resumed its death-glare. Now who's acting like a child.
+
+I grinned, and Loyona had to start the recording over again.
+
+...Once she'd finished torturing us in still life, and we were both seated (next to but not touching) on the sofa, Loyona opened up the interview portion with an easy question.
+
+""First, you must tell us what you're wearing!""
+
+Put us at ease, get in a few endorsements while she was at it. Easy. If only I'd remembered this might come up. I almost opened my mouth to complain about my clothes now lying in heaps of rendered fiber in the room, but refrained. I could be professional, ridiculous as this was.
+
+Thankfully my clothing came with logos on the cuffs. ""Baleen: summer collection."" That was one of those filtration companies that offered its workers short contracts in exchange for even shorter lifespans. I tried not to think about it. ""And Rin is wearing, uh...""
+
+I reached over to check the tag at the back of Murderbot's neck and was promptly rewarded with a set of stinging knuckles. I didn't take it personally any more than I did Toshin's needle-like teeth in my hand when he didn't want to be petted. I said, ""...and other recycler lines,"" while it glared at me.
+
+""How environmentally conscious of you both!"" Loyona said, maybe just to distract from Murderbot's open hostility. I could have told her the effort was pointless but she didn't let me.
+
+""How did you two meet?""
+
+Yes, right after Murderbot rapped my knuckles. I thought I'd get a few minutes to ease us into this process before she delved into personal stuff.
+
+""Uncomfortably,"" Murderbot said before I could respond.
+
+I may have stuck my tongue in my cheek. That microexpression was almost certainly going to get looped.  
+
+""I can imagine,"" Loyona agreed, turning to me. ""What did rest of the Gurathin dynasty think of you marrying an unknown from an independent planet?""
+
+""I don't know, I haven't told them."" I ignored Murderbot as it mouthed the word 'dynasty' with a little frown in its forehead. I ignored my burning ears, too. 'Gurathin dynasty'... hadn't heard that in a while.
+
+""You mean your relationship is a secret?""
+
+""It's not a secret,"" Murderbot said. I didn't want to think about how many documents it forged to ensure that any fact-checking proved that to be true.
+
+""What Rin is trying to say,"" I said carefully, ""Is that I've been estranged from my family for some time, and so--""
+
+""You didn't tell me that."" I'm not sure if Murderbot meant to say that outside of the feed.
+
+""I'm sure I did."" Let me do the talking, Murderbot.
+
+""You never tell me anything."" Because you suck at talking as much as I do. I'm a human, it'll look weird if I don't talk.
+
+
+You're out of your depth.
+
+
+It folded its arms like it saw the Pandora princess do in the show. 
+
+""I'm--sure it must be difficult!"" Loyona said, her display bursting with friendly sigils. Her widening camera lens might not be able to pick up on my sub-vocalizations like other humans, but we weren't exactly being subtle. And apparently she wasn't used to mediating domestic disputes during high-profile interviews. ""To-to come from such different worlds! What is your ethnicity, Mx. Rin?""
+
+""I prefer not to answer,"" Murderbot said, with a practiced air. I guess Pin-Lee has had it fill out enough paperwork to know the answer to that question, at least. I half expected it to add, 'I am not a robot!' for good measure.
+
+""I see! Maybe it's better to say ethnicity is a construct in your case!"" Amusement sigils filled her display.
+
+We froze for way too long.
+
+""Your augments?"" Loyona said. ""You have so many...""
+
+...Oh! Oh. Right. Bot humor. I forced a laugh. Murderbot looked like it just died a little inside.
+
+""They're very well-crafted,"" Loyona said, which actually got Murderbot to approximate something like a laugh, or a bark. She then displayed winking sigils as she asked, ""Care to let us in on how much is human?""
+
+Which was just the kind of thing Mininx tabloids loved to write whole speculative articles about. As if this could get any worse. More amusement sigils popped over Loyona's display. Murderbot turned red. I didn't know it had enough blood to blush.
+
+""It doesn't like personal questions,"" I said quickly.
+
+Loyola's camera eye widened. ""It?""
+
+Shit. Shit. Did I mention that I hate that pronoun? ""Sorry. They.""
+
+Murderbot's face contorted as it used our feed to send me a wall of text I had no chance of reading in two seconds.
+
+""Sh-she?""
+
+Murderbot continued to look appalled. 
+
+""Don't you know your spouse's gender?"" Loyona asked.
+
+I managed, in a flash of brilliance deserving of its own Crassus Award, ""Rin is gender fluid.""
+
+""No, I'm not,"" it said. I briefly fantasized paying Corporate Rim prices for a pack of gum, just so I could chew it all at once and stick the wad in its hair.
+
+""Well, you know best, darling,"" I said, the polite form of 'fuck it', and turned to Loyona. ""Were you going to ask any questions about my work, or just my private life?"" I still didn't even know what I'd been awarded for.
+
+Loyona had no problem ignoring this barb, though. ""The Crassus Award must be a great source of pride for your family! Can you tell us how the news affected the Gurathin's merger plans?""
+
+""I don't know. I'm not involved with my family's business ventures anymore."" I told Murderbot in the feed, I'm going to ask this nicely: please stop looking at me like you want to kill me.
+
+It said, You're talking publicly about your family. I didn't even know you had one.
+
+
+Yes, and I don't know your preferred gender assignment. Get over it. 
+
+
+""This must be very important to them,"" Loyona steamrolled onward, ""Especially given the manner of your departure...""
+
+Murderbot sat up. ""In what manner did he depart?--""
+
+That was my cue to stand. ""I think that's enough for today. Thank you for your time.""
+
+For a second I thought they weren't going to follow suit, and I was going to be left standing here like the idiot human on the zany bot-shows Mensah's kids like to watch. Then Loyona rose into the air. ""Of course, Dr. Gurathin. There will be plenty of time to delve deeper during your stay on Mininx.""
+
+I did not like the sound of that. ""At the reception?""
+
+""I've been assigned to shadow you during your entire stay,"" she said, eagerly. ""Since you're technically a visitor. Rest assured I'll be completely unobstrusive!""
+
+""I handle security for Dr. Gurathin,"" Murderbot said. I not-so-subtly stepped on its foot, but it merely revised, ""Daan.""
+
+""Oh! This isn't for security,"" Loyona said. ""It's for marketing! I'm very excited to provide our viewers with an in-depth look into your lives! I'm sure it's very, mm, romantic!""
+
+I did not catch my groan in time. That was definitely getting looped.
+
+Murderbot stared blankly. ""Do you mean romantic or sexual?""
+
+""Would you just shut up, Murder--!"" Fuck.
+
+Loyona froze. ""Murder what?""
+
+I felt myself turning red. ""Never mind--""
+
+But Murderbot was already storming out. I was very close to rending my lace shirt.
+
+""I'm going to need that edited out,"" I said, and handed Loyona my entire hard currency card, and held my breath. But you could pay for a lot in the Corporate Rim, if you had a lot. The bot took the card into a compartment with a 'my lips are sealed' sigil. Thank all that is good and holy and easily bribed.
+
+""Before you go, Dr. Gurathin,"" Loyona asked, cheerfully, as if the last disastrous seconds had not occurred, ""I'm sure our viewers are dying to know, what are your favorite augment brands?...""
+
+What do you call the fear of being gifed? Autogifobia? 
+
+Thank you for reading!! :)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I watched the rest of Gurathin's interview on the feed, in the interest of safety, though if anything showed up to kill him at the moment I'd probably cast it to our room's display surface and make puffed grains for the occasion. Loyona asked one question about his work after grilling him about his augment brands. He answered in the vaguest terms possible, probably just to piss me off. I don't know how I'd feel if any of his augments were manufactured by the company that made my own parts.
+
+I watched on the security cameras while he deliberately did not go back to our room. He instead went back to the mall and got an overpriced and over-sweetened coffee like it was another day at the office. Some people stared at him. I guess that's not unusual when you're part of a 'dynasty.' I flagged them as potential hostiles anyway.
+
+When he finally deigned to return I made sure I was crouched in my corner on the back of the sofa, buried in my feed.
+
+""Guess you're fine with ship SecSystem protecting me, now?"" he asked.
+
+""I was watching you."" I pointed at his drink. ""You're in more danger from that. It's going to destroy your pancreas."" I have no idea what a pancreas is nor any desire to learn, but I heard ART say that to Iris once. 
+
+""Uh huh."" He took a sip, then traded it for a tunic and went to the bathroom. ""You're angry.""
+
+""You figure that part out on your own?"" I scanned the drink for broken glass or poison. Disappointingly safe, though, aside from the aforementioned nutritional facts.
+
+""Yes. But there's just... so much you could be angry about.""
+
+No kidding. I hissed, ""My name is private."" He knew this. He knew all about keeping secrets, apparently. It's not like I should have expected much, he blurted out my name before. I should have let Mininx thugs abduct him. Only rescue him after they broke his fingers one by one. Yeah. That sounded nice.
+
+""They won't be sharing that part of the interview. Though I'm sure you know that.""
+
+Yeah, I knew. It didn't change what happened.
+
+""I'm sorry. I made a mistake.""
+
+I added, ""Again.""
+
+""Yes, well, now everyone thinks I'm going through a divorce, so, you win."" He glared at my shoes like they insulted his mother. ""What are your preferred pronouns?""
+
+""It's none of their business what my pronouns are. Or yours."" Just like I never should have let him find out my name. I had nightmares of the company finding out my name. Oh, how they'd laugh before excising it out of my memory. I was just getting used to hearing him say it out loud. He practically laughed over it the first time he said it, and now--now--
+
+""Humans don't call themselves 'it', Sec!"" At least he called me by my title. Good. Fear me, Gurathin.
+
+""I'll be the first.""
+
+""Can you not be an asshole for two seconds? I--"" He sighed, pinching the bridge of his big ugly nose as he turned away from me. He really didn't swear all that often, I must have really gotten to him.
+
+He said, ""I'm not used to this any more than you are.""
+
+I stared at the back of his head. Unlike the front, Gurathin's back view was nearly perfect. Good posture and everything. His hair had these soft flips in the back that didn't match the rest of him, like the heroes in the really old period dramas. Gurathin was only 97% asshole because of that hair.
+
+""...'They'. If you have to say something. 'They' is... whatever. But my preferred pronoun is 'it', so. There."" I don't know, maybe he really did feel bad.
+
+He looked back over his shoulder at me. I probably could have told him to watch the entirety of Sanctuary Moon with me as apology in that moment, and he'd do it.
+
+Obviously, I looked away instead.
+
+He laughed at me.
+
+I informed him, ""I don't like this version of you that laughs.""
+
+""There's no possible way anyone could believe we're married.""
+
+""The percentage of couples that fight in media is really high like, ninety percent. And I'm not here to preserve a reputation I don't get to know anything about. I'm here to protect you.""
+
+""...Yeah. Thank you.""
+
+Okay. Weird. I don't like this version of Gurathin that's immune to passive aggression, either. I settled back into my feed--until my proximity sensors went wild.
+
+Gurathin's hand was in my face.
+
+""Come here,"" he said.
+
+I knocked his hand away for the second (third?) time that day. ""Why?""
+
+Gurathin bit his lips while he worked through the pain enough to answer. ""Because to sell this, we both need to work on intimacy."" I maybe made a face and he rolled his eyes. ""I don't mean sex.""
+
+He held out his hand again and I immediately shied. Even I noticed the resemblance in my behavior to Gurathin's cat, which was--you know, not ideal. But Gurathin's hands were creepy: long fingers and wide knuckles, not round and stubby like Ratthi's or small and delicate like Dr. Mensah's. There was probably some tech that worked on me with hands like that. Squared-off cartoon man hands, now with red knuckles from being knocked around.
+
+I took it only under extreme reluctance.  My hand was thinner, but similar in shape. At least someone designed my hands to look like this. Gurathin had no excuse. At least I looked less creepy in comparison. He closed his fingers around my hand and sat on the couch. I guess I followed. I mean, we went together, and we ended up sitting side-by-side. We obviously sat together all the time but usually with the buffer of a display surface to take away some of the awkwardness. My organic parts reacted, but humans in shows did this all the time. It was just a response.
+
+""Believe me, this is very uncomfortable for me, too."" Gurathin said.
+
+""What do you want me to do about it?"" Because, you know, why not fall back on what I know with Gurathin? I did talk with Gurathin about the company-sponsored punishments, so. I guess mutual discomfort isn't exactly new territory for us.
+
+""Let's practice."" He was looking down at our hands, the silver lines of his augments and my inorganic parts meshing together. ""Let's try looking into each other's eyes for--ten seconds.""
+
+""...Why would I do that?""
+
+""This is a good skill to develop. Practice is how humans learn to do things.""
+
+""I know how to look at people, it's that I don't want to.""
+
+""That's the problem. Humans can tell that you don't want to. And, if I'm your husband, you should.""
+
+""Should what?""
+
+""...Want to look at me.""
+
+I looked anywhere but at Gurathin's face. ""Ten seconds isn't a lot.""
+
+""Yeah. Let's set our bar low.""
+
+I let out a breath I didn't need because I'm a SecUnit. I let it out purely to make a point. Then I glared at his eyes. Then I looked away. Oh. Yeah, that actually was hard.
+
+""One second,"" he said. ""Good start.""
+
+""Don't patronize me, Gurathin.""
+
+""For the purposes of this mission, you can call me Daan.""
+
+""For the purposes of the mission you can shut the fuck up, Daan."" I'd faced down giant megafauna. Bots with guns. Weird alien shit. I looked him in the eyes. I categorized Gurathin's brown eye as CD5700, tawny, with flecks of verdigris, 43B3AE. The green eye was the opposite, verdigris with tawny flecks. His right pupil sparkled from his visual augments. The brown one didn't. I figured this all out in 0.1 seconds, and kept looking. Gurathin's heterochromic eyes looked back at me, seeing all the bits of me that were the same as every other SecUnit in the galaxy. We made it to two seconds. A new record.
+
+""I'll establish a backstory for us so we don't get caught off guard again,"" he said.
+
+""Look at you. A client giving me advice.""
+
+""I know how Mininx works."" But he rolled his eyes as he said it which meant I won.
+
+""Eight seconds."" I felt triumphant, at least until he finished rubbing his eyes and looked at me again. ""I thought you said this was uncomfortable for you.""
+
+""It is. But you're easy to look at.""
+
+""You're... interesting to look at.""
+
+I was blindsided by the grin that accompanied Gurathin scrunching both eyes shut, and I had to look away too.
+
+I said, ""I win again.""
+
+""This isn't a staring contest, Sec,"" he said, like he was trying to make 'Sec' happen. ""You're not trying to make me look away.""
+
+""Fine,"" I said. ""Go.""
+
+He looked at me again and I looked back. ""'Interesting' how?""
+
+""Your nose is really big. Why didn't you tell me you had a family?""
+
+Guration held my gaze, though he blinked a lot and that seemed like cheating. ""It's... private. Like your name.""
+
+""It's the kind of thing a SecUnit should know, though. The whole 'sec' part.""
+
+""It doesn't matter.""
+
+""It does if I'm supposed to protect you.""
+
+""Your gaze is wandering.""
+
+""No it isn't."" I stopped trying to search the ship's knowledge base for information on Gurathin and gave myself a break by just staring over his head. ""You're really not going to tell me.""
+
+He didn't answer, but I could tell he was still watching me. I stupidly thought exposure therapy worked, and looked back. We didn't say anything, out loud or in the feed. It was possibly, among all the memory wipes and cortex repairs, one of the most viscerally confusing experiences in my recorded memory.
+
+""Please do not tamper with NamastSys or SecSystem."" The voice came from the ship's comm, Loyona's pleasant chirp. ""or you will be subject to fines! Thank you!""
+
+We jumped away from each other as SecSystem flickered back to life. So much for practicing intimacy for the camera.
+
+Gurathin opened his mouth to say something. I didn't stick around to hear what it was. I went to the armchair by the bed, around a corner of the suite so I could pretend he wasn't there, and turned on the display surface.  I heard the couch shift. Gurathin was probably reading.
+
+I sent a ping to his feed with a few hundred suggestions for potential backstories for us. With our leveled-up eye gazing skills I figured it'd sell the whole relationship thing a little better than fighting about pronouns. I highlighted the one where were met while adopting some domestic animal. He acknowledged receipt, then sent a video taken his visual augments. It was of his current domestic animal as a neonate. I watched him play with the kitten in his lap, offering his fingers for it to sniff and bite.
+
+He said in the feed, Thank you for putting in the effort.
+
+I stopped watching the upsettingly cute video. It was just for research anyway. I buried myself in serials though I left our connection open, in case he tried to spy on what I was doing. I waited for Gurathin to barge in and insist on talking his way through an episode of Pandora Princess, but he didn't. I hoped it was because he felt guilty about the interview.
+
+Still. He could at least have felt guilty and watched Pandora Princess with me...
+
+('it' is only considered a unsuitable human pronoun in this story, you do you)
+
+Thanks for reading!!
+
+""Don't worry, I calculated the exact number of affectionate behaviors we need to exhibit hourly to make sure they believe us.""
+
+""You did not, liar.""
+
+This is a long chapter but I didn't want three MB POV chapters in a row so you get this instead lol
+
+I stood next to Gurathin at the door of our rooms. 
+
+This isn't going to be like on the ship, I said in the feed. I'll try to edit that bot's video but if it's going live, they'll notice a delay. 
+
+Her name is Loyona, Gurathin replied. You wanted this. Don't worry, I calculated the exact number of affectionate behaviors we need to exhibit hourly to make sure they believe us.
+
+You did not, liar. Even if he did, his inadequate human brain wouldn't calculate them accurately. I started my own calculations before I realized he was messing with me. Whatever. ""Making sure you don't get yourself killed is my priority,"" I said alloud.
+
+Gurathin hummed.
+
+""You are not going to put yourself in danger without my permission,"" I said, or--threatened? Maybe? I don't know, Gurathin confuses me.
+
+He just grabbed my hand. I was too shocked to resist, and we stepped out into the hall together. I'd kind of hoped he'd get kidnapped by the Mininx mafia, in that moment. Honestly it'd serve him right, but then who would I watch new episodes of Pandora Princess with? 
+
+Gurathin shares a homeworld with Pandora Princess. Which isn't that exciting, I guess, but... really? Gurathin? With all the pretending to be his human marital partner thing, this was taking some time to sink in. Gurathin as Corporate Rim elite didn't compute, like, at all. I mean, these are the people I watch in my shows, not people I interact with. 
+
+Then yesterday Loyona took that image Gurathin standing behind me in the outfit I picked out, and...well, either I have great untapped talent as a fashion consultant, or...
+
+Or...
+
+Yeah, I'm probably just great at fashion.
+
+I followed Gurathin outside onto the concourse and the other reason this felt so non sequitur (yeah, ART taught me that one) hit me like a CombatUnit to the chest.
+
+I'd been to a lot of corporate planets since my last major memory scrub (I say major because what the hell happened in that bathroom??) but I  couldn't remember ever coming to Mininx, specifically. I felt like I would have remembered plants lining the concourse, that grew in the shapes of large carnivorous megafauna. Cause, you know, humans love nothing more than to get their fight-or-flight prey instincts activated after a long journey. I scanned them just to calm my organic parts, which were going all sweaty and hormonal. Someone had actually clipped them into those shapes. There was an archway made of trees that had been contorted into a labyrinth of right angles, using a whole ship's worth of wire binding. 
+
+""It's just topiary,"" Gurathin said. ""It's fine.""
+
+""That tree is not fine."" My scan showed that it was rotten on the inside. It really should be dead. Very very dead.
+
+""Yeah, they sort of took bonsai to a sadistic conclusion.""
+
+""That tree is evil.""
+
+""...I need to tell Amena to stop showing you horror movies."" 
+
+We walked under it. My inorganic parts detected obscene amounts of fertilizers, growth hormones and pesticides inside it. My organic parts detected it laying some kind of curse on me.
+
+""Welcome to the Mininx-Gurathin Interplanetary Spaceport,"" Loyona said, floating ahead of us but with her camera eye centered on Gurathin's chest. I tried to block her view though this made it kind of hard to walk.
+
+""So. You have a spaceport named after you."" The tortured plant gore didn't stop: roses clipped into the shape of trees, plants forced to grow upside-down, plants grown in gel. Around us, people shopped and walked around and spoke that language Gurathin knows but I don't, and stared at us. Him, mostly.
+
+""Does that surprise you?"" Gurathin asked.
+
+It didn't, I just wanted to tease him about it. ""I read about it. But there could be lots of Gurathins here.""
+
+""Speaking of security,"" Loyona chirped, ""Just a few reminders:..""
+
+My face reacted viscerally to this, enough that Gurathin elbowed me.
+
+""...During your stay, please remain in Mininx-approved zones, it is in your best interest to remain with me at all times. In an emergency, I will promptly notify the proper-""
+
+I asked, ""What's outside the zones?"" 
+
+""Most of the planet's crime comes from  gangs,"" Gurathin whispered. ""people exiled outside the state zones. So long as we stay here, we'll be fine.""
+
+""I hope you told the criminals that."" I had been mostly joking about the Mininx mafia
+
+""You'll be perfectly safe,"" Loyona assured me. ""Dr. Gurathin, I'm sure you will want to head home first?""
+
+""Home?"" Okay, that was definitely news to me.
+
+Gurathin's mouth hardened. ""We're actually going sight-seeing today, Loyona. We have tickets to tour the recording site of Pandora Princess."" 
+
+...Which is a lot for Gurathin to just share out of the blue. I looked in his feed and found him reserving rooms at a bed and breakfast. Two rooms in fact, close to the tour site. I wasn't sure if the extra room was for Loyona or me.
+
+I carefully worked my way into his feed and cancelled the reservation, just to save time and heartache later. For me, not him.
+
+Our keeper/guide didn't object to Gurathin's plan, though, and I didn't vocally object to its presence, so. I guess we had a truce for the moment.
+
+Our next hurdle came when Gurathin tried to pick up our rented overland transport.
+
+""You're not driving,"" I told him. ""I'll drive you."" 
+
+""Allow me some joy in my life, Rin,"" he said--begged even. I was unmoved, and when a bot retrieved the bright teal skiff with chrome fins from the lot, I immediately took the driver's seat. 
+
+We made it halfway out of the lot before Gurathin insisted I pull over.
+
+""You don't know how to drive."" He said it as a statement, not a question.
+
+""I'm figuring it out."" But my education modules are notoriously shit and this was a vintage model. It bounced. And apparently Mininx did not believe in safety harnesses. Or driving on the universally-accepted right side of the road. There were a lot of road signs.
+
+I just needed a second to figure it out. And how to make that sound like I had this completely under control.
+
+""You're absurd,"" Gurathin said. Gurathin doesn't swear much outside of his native language (pretty sure Dr. Mensah swears more than Gurathin). The way he said it had all the markers of fondness.
+
+My surprise allowed him to usher me out of the driver's seat, or else look really bad in front of Loyona. Like, worse than the interview, I guess. 
+
+There's a security risk in there somewhere.
+
+I let him drive. Now we were even for the shit interview. He fucked up more than I did, anyway.
+
+I had made sure to get the tours that operated through the feed and didn't require a human to show us around. When we arrived in the estate's parking lot, people still stared.
+
+So, you're famous? I asked, as we strolled across a rolling lawn to a large glass bubble that I vaguely remembered from some of the episodes. 
+
+Gurathin just asked, Have you figured out why, yet? Then he asked, peering into his feed, ""Lord Lulac--who is that again?""
+
+""Flower Boy."" With the size of Pandora Princess's cast and everyone bearing multiple formal and informal names, titles, and title changes, Gurathin had assigned everyone a nickname--Flower Boy, Eyebrows, Fem-Ratthi, etc. It was just easier to use his names. ""This is where he kisses Pandora."" It was all airy and summery and I guess a good kissing spot if you're into that. I replayed the series, pulled out the relevant scenes, and passed them to Gurathin.
+
+While he reviewed them I said in the feed, I sort of hoped everyone knows you because of your award, but I'm starting to wonder.
+
+
+Your secondary instincts are usually correct.
+
+
+Rude. Or he was teasing. I have no idea.
+
+So tell me why you're famous, then. 
+
+
+Don't worry about it.
+
+
+
+Except worrying about that kind of thing is the only reason I'm here, so.
+
+
+
+Sure.
+
+
+My 'husband' climbed the tall narrow steps into the--I consulted the tour reference materials--'gazebo'? Yikes. I pulled him to a stop until he turned around.
+
+Tall, short brown hair, I said in the feed. And there's another with blonde hair, stockier. Both with athletic build. They've been following us.
+
+Gurathin's eyes stopped glaring angrily at my throat (hey, this is what I'm supposed to be doing here), and looked over my head. He could do this since he was a couple steps up, and it was a new sensation for me. 
+
+They just arrived when we did. It's not a problem. He frowned. What?
+
+I had taken a step up, so Gurathin and I were more or less eye-to-eye. I could hear Loyona hovering expectantly behind me, and in front of me, framed in the gazebo entry, Gurathin was looking all princely in a new set of disposable corporate clothes I picked for him. And this was where Flower Boy kissed Layer Cake. 
+
+Yes, I still felt, well, if not guilty, then certainly... annoyed at how the interview went. I didn't apologize. Not that I care what people think but if Loyona got some pretty images of us to improve Gurathin's public image-
+
+Look, I just wanted the Corporate Rim to be jealous of independent planets for something. Not the money or empires you saw in shows, but-
+
+Maybe...that...kind of love?
+
+Gurathin's gaze shifted, probably catching on Loyona. His face did something that resulted in his congenital-asshole look, and he continued inside. So much for fairy-tale love.
+
+Inside there were soft-looking sofas, expensive houseplants and abstract sculptures. I sat down because I can and because it gave me a better vantage point, while Gurathin wandered around. We talked openly about our favorite pairings in the show and who ought to get together if the writers had one brain cell between them. When ART and I talk about media, it insists on being right, all the time. Gurathin believed in what Dr. Mensah referred to as 'healthy discussion.' I wondered if Gurathin was secretly a Doctor of Media Studies. 
+
+The potential hostiles arrived, but stayed less than a minute before they moved on. Probably terrified of me, which was smart. Or, you know, they just arrived when we did and weren't interested in our loud conversation. I guess I was happy to watch them go, either way.
+
+Gurathin sent the gazebo compilation video back to me, with commentary. Amazing commentary, actually. I sent back an amusement sigil before I even knew what I was doing. One of ART's amusement sigils. Oops.
+
+""Are you trying to get me to move?"" I snapped when I saw him staring at me expectantly.
+
+""Would it kill you to smile for a second?""
+
+""Yes, we both share the allergy."" He wasn't going to make me laugh out loud.
+
+He just tapped a sign--'DO NOT SIT ON THE FURNITURE'--and headed out. 
+
+He decided as we walked to the mansion proper that he desperately needed to know the plot of Sanctuary Moon. It's not like anyone else was beating down my door to tell them about it, so I did. I guess I've never given a comprehensive overview of it. ART watched it with me and Mensah and Ratthi watched it on their own. If I stretched the truth here and there to fit my own personal canon as I explained it, it wasn't like ART was there to stop me. Gurathin behaved marginally more interested in me than usual as I talked. I guess he's used to lectures.
+
+We wandered down one of the halls where Pandora and Eyebrows played some outdoor sport on the expensive rug, which caused a scandal in season two. We stopped when Gurathin looked out the big window at the end where the characters kissed, and Eyebrows fell to an untimely death (he was the one that Gurathin cried over). 
+
+""What was your award for?"" I asked.
+
+""I guess it hasn't come up yet. Look at this view.""
+
+""It's in the show."" I was really trying not to get angry. ""No one even said it at the interview.""
+
+He sighed and shrugged. ""They haven't told me yet.""
+
+""You must have a guess.""
+
+""Analyzing systems, probably."" He looked over his shoulder and winked at me, which I could not handle at the best of times and certainly not on a hot summer day. My organic parts were acting weird enough.
+
+""You know. I know you know."" I thought of ART and Miki and said, ""I could ask someone else.""
+
+Gurathin however did not have the same terrified response to that threat as I did. His fingers twitched at his side, slightly, vaguely in my direction. ""Come here."" 
+
+Fine. Gurathin didn't have to tell me. Major security risk, but fine. I joined him at the window and, because I hated him and myself, I put my arm around his waist.
+
+""Would hate to have to scrape your brains off the marble outside."" We were also recreating the scene from the show perfectly. Loyona better be getting this.
+
+""There's a lock on the window, Rin, I'm not going to hurt myself.""
+
+""Famous last words."" That was a line from literally a hundred and thirty-eight of the serials and movies and books that I'd consumed. Gurathin still laughed. As I saved the smile in a special folder in my archives (labeled helpfully Gurathin_ Is_ Not_ Always_ An_ Asshole. Folder) I wondered if Gurathin had a similar file. It's not like I smile. I think my face wasn't meant for it. Maybe he stored it in a 'Murderbot_ Is_ Not_ Actually_ A_ Supermodel. Folder. 
+
+I still can't believe he said I was a supermodel. I had to replay it a couple of times to be sure. I mean, looking like something people desire is pretty much my worst nightmare. But it weirdly didn't sting so much when Gurathin said it. It felt more like that butterfly pavilion that ART insisted I visit on Preservation. Fluttering insects on all my parts. I mean, still bad obviously, but at least butterflies don't sting.
+
+Okay, the view was way better in-person than even high-definition corporate cameras could capture. Maybe my optical color correction is better.
+
+""You like it?"" Gurathin was giving me fitting-cubicle eyes.
+
+I promptly left the alcove to look at some art instead. 
+
+We headed up the stairs into the gallery where the Princess courted her favorite love interests. Big floor-to-ceiling windows looked in on jungles of enormous houseplants. Globes of light hung on spinning steel mobiles from the ceiling. The geometric patterns on the floor looked even better in person than they did on the show.
+
+""If you really want to know about my work,"" he said, looking down.
+
+""I do,"" I said, looking up.
+
+""I studied construct AI. Memory collation systems, actually.""
+
+""How interesting.""
+
+""Are you seriously teasing me?"" 
+
+""Lots of people have worked on constructs."" Then I said one of those things that really makes me wish I'd just put in that one-second delay already. ""Better you than anyone else."" What the hell was that supposed to mean? I swear, the organic parts of my brain. I obfuscated the comment by stepping a little closer so our shoulders brushed, angling for good light so Loyona could take another damn image.
+
+""What did you do with these memory systems?""
+
+But Gurathin seemed to have lost his courage. Or my proximity made it hard for him to concentrate. ""...It was a long time ago. Pretty boring, really. I'm not surprised it didn't come up. Nobody here really cares why I got this award. It's enough that I did."" He shook his head. ""So. You've seen tens of thousands of hours of media--is Sanctuary Moon your favorite?...""
+
+...And so we talked about the differences between Sanctuary Moon and Pandora Princess instead. The shows couldn't be more different, Pandora Princess was all about costume and set design and people standing in rooms not saying anything, and Sanctuary Moon was basically the opposite. Funny how he liked the one with all the repressed emotions and I liked the one that even Ratthi called a 'melodrama.' 
+
+Which was totally off-topic. I stopped him in front of a wide window that looked out over the city and told him, ""Stop changing the subject."" This would be a good place for an image, with bright light behind us. Gurathin has an interesting silhouette that this world would probably appreciate. And I'm not scared of my silhouette no matter what Gurathin thinks. This would make a good image. Obscure Gurathin's weirder features, and whatever ridiculous faces I make on accident. 
+
+""I'm not changing the subject,"" Gurathin said, the child.
+
+""I know you don't actually care about Sanctuary Moon."" I glanced at Loyona, then leaned in.
+
+""I care."" Color rose in his cheeks as he sent in the feed, Okay, what are you doing? He didn't move though, forcing me to just get right in there. I could feel his breath.
+
+I'm just standing here, I snapped, annoyed he wasn't giving me space as I invaded his. What are you doing?
+
+
+I'm trying to have a good time with you.
+
+
+Which was a dumb human thing to say and my organic parts went all wobbly. It probably showed all over my stupid Sanctuary Moon melodrama-loving face because Gurathin started laughing. ""Why are you laughing?""
+
+""You, you're--just funny."" 
+
+Yeah, that's the kind of thing a murderous SecUnit wants to hear. ""I care, too,"" I said, very seriously, and his smile disappeared. Good. I wrapped my little finger around his, held it for two seconds while Loyona got the shot and... Gurathin got whatever he wanted out of it. Solidarity or empathy or just a basic security check. I don't know what humans 'want', usually, I'm more on the 'need' side of furthering the human experience. Then I let go. Gurathin's hands were all sweaty for some reason. I wiped my hand on my shirt. 
+
+Six hours passed since breakfast on the ship, so I took Gurathin to the cafe whether he wanted to go or not. He got a bowl of soup with some crusty puffy carbohydrate thing, then insisted on ordering me a comically tiny cup of coffee with a tiny little saucer. As if I didn't feel like I was playing Giant SecUnit all the time anyway. I thought he was making fun of me until I saw how many other people in the cafe had the same drink. 
+
+I can eat, I said. I just don't want to. I have to section off part of my lung.
+
+
+I know. Just taste it, then.
+
+
+
+I don't have a sense of taste.
+
+
+
+You're always telling us how bad humans stink. That's 80% of taste. What's your tongue composed of?
+
+
+
+I don't know but thank you for making me contemplate yet another horror of my existence.
+
+
+Gurathin rested his chin on his fist, staring unashamedly right at me. He was probably recording all of this to sell to ART as blackmail. What have you tried before? Ship rations?
+
+I said I can. Not that I ever have. I smelled the coffee but decided to get the show over with. I let my tongue barely touch the drink, then spit it out. Well, that was new, and disgusting. I put it down. The smell of the coffee took on new meaning. 
+
+I looked up to see Gurathin beaming at me like I'd just won a Crassus award myself. 
+
+""It's so adorable!"" Loyona floated up suddenly, making me almost drop my coffee and Gurathin spill soup on his shirt. ""Some couples don't have to say anything at all to express their affection!"" She of course imaged this, capturing me shaking coffee off my hands and Gurathin with a double-chin trying to wipe up the spilled soup, both glaring at her. We glanced at each other and wearily accepted our fate. 
+
+Then Gurathin made the meal marginally less boring by describing the intricacies of coffee, its flavors, and its manufacture. Gurathin was kind of boring, not animated like Ratthi or eloquent like Mensah, but it was kind of fun to hunt for his microexpressions. I guess I don't spend currency on much, but what I spent on getting these tour tickets seemed, for the moment, worth it. 
+
+*
+
+*
+
+It took Gurathin way longer than I expected to figure out I cancelled the reservations for the bed and breakfast. I watched him sit on hold, which I disconnected, for three whole minutes before he thought to even glance at me. I don't like humans looking at me but there were some situations...
+
+""Why are you like this?"" he asked.
+
+I looked out the windshield. ""I want to see your house."" Oh yeah, I was definitely picking up bad habits from ART. ""It's stupid to get a bed and breakfast if you have a place to stay already."" Better, maybe? Though I sounded a little bit like I was just trying to justify it to myself.
+
+""Oh, you wanna stay at my house?"" He spread his hands on the wheel. ""You're going to hate it.""
+
+""I've been a lot of places I hated.""
+
+""I did already prepare it for your arrival,"" Loyona chirped helpfully.
+
+If there was a way for humans to display the opposite of amusement sigils, Gurathin just figured it out.
+
+The house was wide and flat, maybe only two flights in a sea of very new skyscrapers, with extensive grounds all around it. We didn't drive up the main driveway though, but entered a back way that opened out onto an alley. I readied the energy weapons in my arms. 
+
+""Relax,"" Gurathin said. ""The front gate is just closed.""
+
+""Can't you get into your own house?""
+
+""The front is for visitors."" 
+
+This made absolutely no sense. Then Gurathin parked the skiff in a space marked, 'Staff Only, Violators Will Be Towed', and we went inside. Labels with dry explanations of people long dead and designers long forgotten dotted the walls. Alarm paint on the floor warded off the carpets. It was like touring the set all over again.
+
+I said, ""You live in a museum?""
+
+""It's more of a historical landmark."" 
+
+""Where's your family?""
+
+""This isn't Preservation,"" Gurathin said. ""They have their own private homes."" He then moved around the big kitchen and made himself a meal. Soon he was pushing aside a staged place-setting at a massive dining table decorated with a misshapen clay centerpiece. He sat on one of the dusty chairs, and ate. Loyona wandered off, probably to place hidden cameras. I decided, for once, not to sit down. 
+
+It was really quiet except for Gurathin eating. This is why I hate planets. 
+
+""Some of Loyona's pictures were good."" I don't know why I was using one of our rare private moments to talk about our permanent spy, but I opened the folder of images into our shared feed space. She managed to catch most of my attempts at staged candid shots, though Gurathin was making weird faces in almost all of them. 
+
+""Yeah."" Gurathin was giving me suspicious behaviors again. ""Wonder why that is.""
+
+I sent an image into Gurathin's feed, to make him lose this train of thought. It was when I was sitting on the expensive furniture in the gazebo, and Gurathin sent me his video commentary. I had this weird look on my face I couldn't quite place but I remembered the moment and didn't immediately want to think about something else. Maybe Dr. Mensah could use it as that profile picture she keeps subtly asking about. For once, my face sort of matched how I wanted to be perceived. 
+
+""She did a good job with this one,"" I said. I know, shocking. Don't make this weird, Gurathin, I give people compliments all the time. 
+
+""She didn't take that one,"" Gurathin said, mouth full. ""I did.""
+
+Oh. 
+
+Okay. That's why he was staring at me.
+
+(Can't a Murderbot be understood without being perceived?) 
+
+Gurathin didn't linger long over his food, and when he finished he did the dishes himself, setting the place-setting back where it belonged and pushing his chair in. Aside from the disturbed dust and a half dozen other things a SecUnit could pick up on, it was like he'd never been there. I always thought his armchair right in front of the giant display surface was self-indulgent, but now I think there might be some other word for it. 
+
+He didn't seem interested in a tour and I figured a perimeter sweep could wait until later, so I followed him up the stairs. He kept glancing back at me, then finally turned on the stairs.
+
+""Aren't you going to scout the perimeter, or something?""
+
+""Should I?""
+
+Gurathin looked over my head for a second (again- I think he just likes doing that) then kept walking.  He walked up the center of the staircase so I had to walk two steps behind. There was plenty of room for us to walk side-by-side, but whatever.
+
+I figured out why when, at the top of the stairs, he broke out into a dead sprint.
+
+I immediately spun, energy weapons at the ready to combat whatever had snuck up behind us, ready to block any attack on Gurathin with my body.
+
+I blinked at the empty staircase. There was nothing there. 
+
+The fuck?
+
+""Dr. Gurathin!"" The default name jumped out of my buffer instead of something maybe more logical like, 'what the fuck are you doing dumbass' because I entirely switched over 95% of my processing power to chasing him down the hall. But those few seconds of confusion gave him just enough lead time- I'm fast but I can't break the sound barrier. 
+
+I managed a quick-burst scan just as he slammed a door in my face. Loyona gave a surprised little chirp somewhere behind me but I barely heard it. My whole body was a giant panic attack. Anything could be happening to him beyond that door. I can't do my job if my stupid clients run away from me.
+
+It's a very good thing I'm a high-functioning panicker. I stepped back, analyzed the door, and fired my energy weapon four times. The door fell inward as I sprang inside. 
+
+Gurathin startled from where he stood by a bed, looking weirdly guilty? Then I tackled him onto the mattress and swept the room with my energy weapons. Something fluttered. I fired. The curtains sizzled.
+
+Gurathin swore loudly. I glanced down to see my hand around his throat, pinning him down. I wasn't squeezing but he was being melodramatic about it.
+
+""You're on a hair trigger, you know that?"" he said, struggling.
+
+""Where are the hostiles?"" I scanned the area again. Nothing emerged from behind the curtains.
+
+""You see any hostiles? Get off me!"" 
+
+Gurathin shoved me off. Well, I let him shove me off. I performed a proper sweep of the room but the only one in the room was Gurathin. Looming. Looking a little pissed, actually. Good, I was pissed off too. 
+
+""Why did you run away from me?"" I demanded, in the voice that usually makes humans exhibit autonomic freeze responses. 
+
+He just laughed. ""You can't think of one reason?""
+
+""I thought there were hostiles trying to kill you.""
+
+""There are no hostiles! Obviously there's not-just admit you screwed up, for once in your life!""
+
+""This is your fault,"" I snapped, ""If you hadn't-""
+
+""I haven't had five minutes to myself outside of a bathroom in days! If I don't spend some time alone I'm going to go insane!""
+
+Right, privileged Preservation loner asshole. How could I forget? ""I'm just trying to protect you!""
+
+""I didn't even invite you!"" 
+
+Okay, I... probably deserved that. I mean, now that I saw how much went into pretending we were married and how reasonable he was actually being about it, I definitely deserved it. It didn't exactly make me feel good. Some of my inorganic parts suggested breaking his legs as a viable option to prevent future escape attempts (so maybe my inorganic parts are just as stupid as my organic parts sometimes).
+
+Is this how ART feels? 
+
+Apparently the outburst didn't fill Gurathin with warm-fuzzies either. He turned red, again. ""Why do you make me say things like that."" He rubbed his neck, as if I hadn't already done enough damage to it. 
+
+I went over to scan him for injury.
+
+""I'm fine, Rin.""
+
+""You're going to have a minor bruise there."" I brushed his hair back from his neck and touched the spot where his struggling made him pinch his skin. 
+
+Fine, where I pinched his delicate flower-petal skin.
+
+His hair was flower-petal soft against my knuckles. 
+
+He winced but didn't try to push me away (maybe he knew he couldn't?) ""I said I'm fine."" Then, ""I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I know you want to protect me.""
+
+I considered this for way too long, then lowered my hand. ""I'm sorry."" 
+
+""...You are?""
+
+Yeah, well, it's your house and your trip and your award, Gurathin. Letting my more paranoid programs get the better of me wasn't exactly my plan for contribution to this experience. 
+
+I said, ""For the door."" I looked around for the nearest medkit, or a MedSys--really, I'd take any kind of bot. The only bots I detected on this third scan were Loyona, taking in this shit show like it was her own personal Sanctuary Moon (hopefully she didn't see catch me moving at inhuman speed on her camera), and something in a low power state under the bed. 
+
+A bot in rest mode that didn't show up on my threat scans. 
+
+Gurathin seemed to sense the moment I realized that under the bed was a perfect hiding spot for hostiles that may or may not be able to cloak themselves from my scans.
+
+""Rin--"" he warned, before I (gently) picked him up and set him aside. I plucked the target out from under the bed before he could say anything else. 
+
+It was a pet bot. Not like Miki but--literally a pet bot. It was vaguely feline in form and very old. Most of its velvety covering had been rubbed off and there were cobwebs between its ears.
+
+""Were you trying to hide this from me?"" I searched it for contraband and turned up nothing but a couple of Gurathin's hairs.
+
+Gurathin sighed. ""...When you're through scanning it, may I please have it?"" 
+
+...I handed it over. He switched it on. The bot came to life in his arms, where it butted its chin up against his chest, jerkily, actuators whining. Gurathin put the bot over his shoulders, where it went limp except to bat at a lock of his hair and knead his shoulder with its mechanical paws. Ratthi called that 'making biscuits', right?
+
+Gurathin glared at me, maybe daring me to say something (I had no fucking idea what to say), then went around unpacking his bags. 
+
+...I decided my services would best be employed fixing the door that I broke, though a maintenance droid totally should have taken care of it. Gurathin wandered around. He kept dropping things and spilling things and rubbing his eyes. If he were a SecUnit I'd say his performance reliability had completely bottomed out. Maybe for humans that's just--emotional instability? I figured that was all my fault (way to go Murderbot, you broke your client). Then I caught him petting the bot out of the corner of my eye. The bot responded by vibrating at twenty-five Hertz, just like his pet-animal back home. 
+
+I...thought I knew what the problem was.
+
+I said, ""It doesn't care how long you've been gone. Time works differently for bots.""
+
+""How do you know?""
+
+I actually didn't.
+
+""It's been a long time for me."" Gurathin pressed the heel of his hand to his eye. 
+
+...Well, making Gurathin cry wasn't exactly on my to-do list tonight. ""Why did you leave it behind?""
+
+""It's an antique,"" Gurathin said. ""Part of the estate."" His gaze flicked over me. ""I figured you wouldn't like to see it.""
+
+I could see why he'd think that, but I found that I didn't actually care. The bot was clearly happy. As long as it wasn't trying to kill anyone there wasn't much more you could hope for. I added, ""It's natural for humans to own things,"" because I'm a little shit.
+
+""And constructs too, apparently.""
+
+No idea what that meant, but at least we were talking, semi-civilly. ""So it's owned by your 'dynasty'?"" I revised. ""Your family?""
+
+""...That's why you were trying to set up good shots for Loyona today, isn't it."" Gurathin's an analyst, good at drawing conclusions from data. I gave him more than enough data points to figure this out.
+
+""I thought they might be interested to know you're happy."" 'Interested' is one of those words that can mean a lot of things, and I hoped Gurathin read into it whatever he wanted. Happy or jealous or whatever. The people on Pandora Princess are always doing this double meaning ambiguous shit (see previous, ART should really like this show a lot more than it does). I thought he'd be happy with my efforts. 
+
+He said, ""I actually don't want anything to do with them.""
+
+I said in the feed, I'm not an idiot. I can tell you don't want to talk about your family.
+
+
+So why do you keep trying? 
+
+
+I didn't have an answer to that. Fuck, I wish I did, though. I really wished I didn't make everything weird today, and just had fun like Gurathin wanted. I hardly ever knew what Gurathin wanted, most days.
+
+Gurathin spent the evening working out while I finished repairing the door. Then I did a security sweep while Gurathin stayed in his room post-shower, doing whatever he wanted with his alone time.
+
+I guess it was possible to not care about something that also stressed you the fuck out. Was that Gurathin's preferred attitude toward his family? Intentional ambivalence? 
+
+I practiced intentional ambivalence and didn't check on him, though I kept up my scans. It was just like my old company days. I didn't work much building security, never in a museum. I probably would have died of boredom. 
+
+It was definitely weird thinking of Gurathin's life on display in museum form. I wanted to ask him about it. 
+
+I wanted him to not be mad at me anymore, more. 
+
+I didn't see him until we were in the bedroom together. We stared at each other for five whole seconds. I think he was waiting for me to claim the bed again. 
+
+I pointedly did not claim the bed. I might be an asshole but I know that I probably shouldn't take the bed because a) it's his own house, b) I'm the one that canceled our nice two rooms at the bed and breakfast, and c) I wasn't trying to make a point anymore. If there was a night Loyona could reasonably believe we were sleeping apart, it was probably this night. 
+
+Yeah, tomorrow was going to be interesting.
+
+The nearest sofa was along the foot of the bed, so I took that. It was a little uncomfortable but I didn't want to be too far away especially with the potential hostiles I saw on the tour. And maybe the safety of our small confined space on the ship spoiled me. This just felt safer. I wanted this proximity.
+
+(I was definitely trying to make a point here).
+
+The lights dimmed automatically as Gurathin crawled into bed. The bot settled next to him, back in a low-power state. We listened to its old joints creak for a while. 
+
+""This feels like a sleepover,"" Gurathin observed. Loyona was hovering, a little red light staring across the room that Gurathin could clearly see, so maybe this was a perfectly normal thing to say to your spouse that you kicked out of bed. I heard him moving around, and scanned him. He'd shifted so that his head was where his feet should be, close to mine. His toothpaste mostly covered his other human smells.
+
+Humans are really good at coming up with the weirdest connections, I said in the feed. 
+
+Two seconds later I got a video file from him.
+
+It was data from his augments. I opened and assimilated it instantly--which would have been bad if Guarathin used this moment to sabotage me. Thankfully it was just a set of various videos from his feed. The quality was terrible, especially compared to ART's cinematic masterpieces, but then again he didn't have a cloud of drones to take video for him, just his vision augments. 
+
+I watched his life unfold in clips. Birthdays. Galas. Receptions. Inaugurations. Gurathin was seriously loaded. He had a few treasured friends, snatched away by the pursuit of fame and fortune; and parents that pruned him into a desirable shape like a Mininx topiary. 'Alone' became more comfortable than 'among'. The pet bot was the only permanent fixture, the primary source of affection in what even I recognized was an emotionally empty childhood. Maintaining the pet long past its planned obsolescence sparked an early interest in AI systems in the young Gurathin.
+
+I watched him attend his parents' funeral, and manage the estate. He argued with a lawyer about the estate's marriage requirements in front of an eligible-looking woman that eventually stormed from the room when he told them what he'd told me in the fitting cubicle. That scene happened over and over: different lawyer, different eligible match, the same conclusion. Gurathin was caught in coming-out hell from the ages of eighteen to twenty-eight. I watched the estate shrink from a sprawl until it was just the house and immediate grounds, skyscrapers rising around it to block out the planet's primary star. I watched him turn the estate over to the public trust as a museum, clear his accounts, and leave the Corporate Rim.
+
+""...You realize your life is basically Pandora Princess,"" I said, after an amount of stunned silence. 
+
+""...Yeah. I used to think getting married was the worst thing that could ever happen to me."" He let out a breath. ""I do like yelling at that show, though.""
+
+He sent another video about half an hour later (I know, augmented human processing speed is shit). It was a video of PreservationAux: from helping Ratthi shape research data and attending concerts with Mensah, to learning about high fidelity music recordings from Dr. Bharadwaj and teaching Amena how to drive. It wasn't a data-rich video. Most of the scenes were just boring quiet things I could have guessed happened anyway. There was even a clip of our last night watching Pandora Princess together in his apartment, and the time we went out for 'boys night' (there was a lot of me in there, actually). Gurathin took to being civilized to a Preservation lifestyle a lot better than I did.
+
+You already know my real family, Gurathin said in the feed. 
+
+Before I could think of any response, his breath had evened out and he was fast asleep. I batted at a lock of his hair just like the bot had, and pretended to sleep, too.
+
+I have the scars to prove that, when it comes to petting sleeping predators, I have little impulse control.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I almost forgot the last ten years of my life as I looked out the window at the warm lavender of pre-dawn, listened to the familiar birds, remembered all that...wasted youth.
+
+Then I saw Murderbot stretched out on the sofa, and lay there pondering heart attack statistics in men of my particular demographic subcategory.
+
+I never had anyone sleep over in this room before, much less an elite killing machine. It had its eyes (colorless, I realized once I'd actually looked) closed, though it's so fast it could have easily been watching me seconds earlier. I wondered how often I missed it looking at me. The fact that I've actually caught it a few times suggests that it's probably a lot.
+
+We'd have to sleep in the same bed after the reception. Spouses never sleep separate on Mininx, so unless we thought of something else even more explosive to argue about, we were in for a new experience. I considered a few argument starters. The cat thing had been an unintentional triumph of genius. Though I think anyone would be worried to show their childhood pet bot to a rogue SecUnit, well-loved though it had been. I stroked Tomlin's ears (yes, I know its very similar to my real cat Toshin on Preservation). It pretended to sleep on, much like my SecUnit spouse on the sofa. Murderbot looked a lot different like this, laying there with its eyelids occasionally fluttering in a facsimile of dreaming, its chest rising and falling. I have no idea when it wrote that algorithm for itself. It did a good job.
+
+I confess I reached out to see if I could feel its breath on my palm. Some 'stupid human impulse', it would say. Or maybe I wanted to touch its cheek. I have the scars to prove that, when it comes to petting sleeping predators, I have little impulse control. I also forgot Loyona was there. The warm lavender dawn was a little too warm. I waited for Murderbot to open its eyes and yell at me, or flee. Maybe it would grab my hand and lick my fingers, for Loyona to record. Wouldn't that be something for my cousins and uncles and aunts to see. It didn't, though.
+
+Was it pretending not to notice, too?
+
+I jumped as a call came in on my feed. I snatched my hand back, but not before Murderbot opened its eyes. Wonderful.
+
+I answered, maybe to keep the SecUnit on my sofa from killing me.
+
+
+Gurathin.
+
+
+
+Hello there. I trust your vacation is going well?
+
+
+I frowned because I knew the voice but the context was all wrong. I belatedly checked the feed address. Dr. Mensah. Shit.
+
+
+The first newsburst about the Crassus Award ceremony has come through. The interview...?
+
+
+Ah. Yes.
+
+She asked, I hope I'm not interrupting?
+
+...Give me a minute, I told her. I'll put you on video.
+
+Murderbot sat up. ""Dr. Mensah called you? Why?""
+
+I rubbed my face. ""Stay out of my feed."" Then I got up.
+
+I needed some air, so I put up the viewscreen out on the balcony, shutting Murderbot up in the bedroom. Mensah might appreciate the scenery out here. It also made it easier to set up a sound dampener to block Loyona out of the call, since Mensah like most non-augmented humans preferred to converse audibly. Setting all this up, I didn't really get a chance to change out of my pajamas before I was blinking at the medium shot of myself on my viewscreen, in front of Mensah in her usual government attire. Mensah and I had been on field trips together before of course, so she thankfully didn't comment.
+
+Not about that, anyway.
+
+""So,"" she said, ""You and...Rin?""
+
+I took a second to sigh and rub my eyebrows. ""Hilarious, isn't it?"" Murderbot was a real comedian. Not that I care about my reputation here. Mensah knew that--I just needed someone to complain to. Maybe that was why she called.
+
+""Not really."" No, just calling to tease me, apparently.
+
+I gave her the 'you're not funny' look she so often gave me. ""Oh, you agree with it?"" Murderbot would love hearing that.
+
+""I'm not sure you need me to agree with it,"" Mensah said. ""I just wish I'd have known. It's so sudden.""
+
+Yes, Murderbot made plans at the speed of sound and sometimes it really showed. But Preservation guardianship aside, it respected Mensah. It should have told her. ""It kind of snuck up on me, too,"" I said, so she wouldn't feel left out.
+
+""Oh, I have no doubt about that."" Mensah said with a little laugh. ""But I think it'll be good for you.""
+
+I scoffed. ""I really didn't need it here, Mensah.""
+
+""Of course not."" She smiled. ""Who among us really does? But it's wonderful to have, once you do.""
+
+...An odd way to phrase that. And I wasn't sure if having Murderbot around had been nice, per se. Maybe having lunch with it at the cafe had been--and it was sort of interesting, hearing its thoughts on a show I mercilessly teased Ratthi for even mentioning. But 'wonderful'? No. Murderbot's presence on this trip was not 'wonderful.' Not the way she meant it.
+
+Mensah caught my frown, and her smile broadened. ""Really! I think it's sweet.""
+
+My frown turned into a squint. ""You think Murderbot is sweet?""
+
+Mensah blinked. ""I meant--""
+
+""I can explain!""
+
+The only reason Murderbot had a chance to say this was because it threw open the door with a loud bang worthy of any melodrama it could care to name. Was no door in this place safe? From there it pounced onto the balcony and stood tall. It probably meant to rescue me from the responsibility of explaining its irrational behavior in following me here. Thank life, the universe and everything.
+
+""I think you'd better,"" Mensah said with a smirk. This would be good. I got up to shut the door and re-engage the sound dampener.
+
+Murderbot came up behind me and grabbled my shirt between my shoulder blades, out of view of the viewscreen. I sat back down forcibly.
+
+""We should have invited you,"" it said.
+
+I blinked up at Murderbot, wondering if it was malfunctioning. ""I couldn't have invited her,"" I reminded it, ""Remember?--""
+
+""--Yes, I wanted it to be private.""
+
+""It,"" I said, losing the thread. ""It, what?""
+
+""Our wedding.""
+
+It--our wedding?
+
+Not it, Murderbot?
+
+Was that the 'it' Mensah was referring to, also?
+
+(Have I mentioned how much I hate that pronoun today?)
+
+Mensah nodded while I attempted to recontextualize the conversation. ""I understand. I was just telling Gurathin how happy I am for you both.""
+
+""Thank you,"" Murderbot said. ""We are. Happy. Very happy. Together.""
+
+I entered a strange state of dissociation as Mensah told us an amusing story about some important family member who accidentally missed the invite to her last wedding. Heartwarming. It would have made me feel much better, if we had actually left her off a guest list.
+
+I sent Murderbot in the feed, What are you doing now? Then, hopelessly, You didn't tell her?
+
+It said, I told her I was coming with you to Mininx. Just not the part about posing as your marital partner.
+
+So tell her now! I have a sound dampener set up! Well, I did, before it slammed the door open and Loyona started hovering eagerly in the doorway. I should be used to this, I really should be used to Murderbot springing its stupid plans on me at the worst possible moments-- She's our friend. You can't lie to her.
+
+""...And as long as the feelings are mutual, nothing else matters,"" Mensah was saying. She was looking between us. Despite her words, there was something uncertain in her wide eyes. ""Or at least, mutually agreed upon?""
+
+I decided to be the only adult here and explain everything myself, Loyona be damned. I respect Mensah enough to tell her the truth.
+
+The fist tightened behind my back, pulling my shirt taut across my chest.
+
+Murderbot sent over the feed, Do something.
+
+Sometimes emotions bleed through the feed. Murderbot was, I realized, hemorrhaging feelings. Fear, mostly. Some hope. It felt like standing in front of my parents, awaiting judgment. Mensah didn't deserve that kind of reaction in the slightest. Murderbot liked to conjure social anxieties out of thin air.
+
+But I knew what this whole image--Murderbot standing beside me telling the most important person in its life how much it loved me while I just sat there acting horrified--looked like. I lived through it more than once. Dr. Daan Gurathin, the man that can make any relationship look fake as hell.
+
+I was going to hate myself later.
+
+I pressed my mouth into a line and told Murderbot, If you retaliate, I'm going to sing like a canary. Then I put my arm around the highly-dangerous SecUnit's waist and squeezed it close to me, where I rested my head on its--hip? It was really tall.
+
+""We've reached an arrangement,"" I told Mensah. And then I turned and kissed Murderbot's hip plate through the pajama pants it wore. I've kissed my mother and I think one of Mensah's babies, and my cat. That's about it. My mouth was burning which was probably totally normal and was not an indicator of eiter a panic attack, or that Murderbot's hip infected me with mono. I waited for Murderbot to end my life creatively and onscreen for Mensah, Loyona, and the whole galaxy to witness.
+
+Murderbot did not end my life. It instead just brushed the tips of my rumpled hair. I smiled and pretended I was completely fine with this.
+
+The viewscreen must have been really glitching out because Mensah watched this little exchange like she actually believed it. ""Well, if anyone could, it'd be you two,"" she said. ""I just--well, Ratthi didn't believe it either, and Perihelion hasn't gotten back to me. I just wanted to make sure I didn't assume something where I shouldn't. Did you enjoy your tour of the recording site?...""
+
+I had to sit there for ten minutes and talk about our tour yesterday and how Murderbot let me drive the rental and how pretty everything is, all the while I hugged Murderbot around the middle and let it play with locks of my hair like a set of chimes. It was annoying. It was not how I wanted Mensah to see me.
+
+Murderbot's feed practically bubbled with joy every time Mensah looked at it, though. It even smiled a couple of times. It clearly learned how from watching serials. It was almost cute.
+
+The call ended. Murderbot stood there, effervescing.
+
+I said, ""You're welcome.""
+
+It let go of my shirt and I adjusted it, but I could feel the wrinkles there, permanently pressed into the fabric by the fluids Murderbot leaks when it's nervous.
+
+It said, ""You know she's been worried about you, too."" It wiped its hand on its shirt.
+
+""When this is over, you're explaining yourself to her, in full. I'm not going to do it for you."" Why would she be worried about me, anyway?
+
+It stuck its jaw out. I don't think it's aware it does that. ""I need to talk to ART.""
+
+""Good, I need to call Ratthi,"" I said.
+
+It looked down at my feet as if waiting for them to take me away. A thank you would have taken 0.2% of its computing capacity, but clearly I wasn't getting that.
+
+""This is my house,"" I reminded it.
+
+It glared at me and stalked off. I leaned forward and buried my head in my hands for a second. When Mensah found out--and she'd find out, of course she would--she'd never let me live this down.
+
+When I looked up, Loyona was staring at me through the glass door, her recording light a solid red.
+
+I didn't tell Murderbot I took the skiff until I was already in the driver's seat. Then I muted its feed, eased in the clutch, and pulled onto the track that surrounded the property. I would have preferred the highway but heaven forbid Murderbot cause an intergalactic incident while I was trying to clear my head.
+
+Let it watch me drive in circles. It was certainly preferable to a deranged SecUnit's company.
+
+I messaged Ratthi.
+
+trying something new with wildly fluctuating word count i guess (what is this, some streaming serial where the episode length doesn't matter?) :P
+
+I have a lot of fun writing Gurathin's POV, so thank you for reading!
+
+Simultaneous feed conversations between Gurathin and Ratthi, Murderbot and ART.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...And the whole thing has gotten out of hand. What are we supposed to do when this is over? You can't just unforge marriage documentation. It could have protected me literally any other less melodramatic way, why- It made us lie to Mensah!
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Well, we know Murderbot doesn't handle social situations well. It probably just wanted to make Mensah proud. You know, look socially successful? People do that all the time in media. 
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It's not a character on 
+Pandora Princess 
+in danger of becoming a spinster. It's just a construct, and it's acting childish.
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...I knew he was going to be an asshole about everything but not in front of Mensah. I don't know, he just always brings it out the 'kill all humans' thing in me.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I do. You are exhibiting typical approval-seeking behavior. Humans often react to your limited emotional range with pity. Dr. Gurathin's negative attitude regarding the situation threatens your ability to impress others with the social milestone that is marriage, fabricated though the marriage may be. And you value Dr. Mensah's opinion of you. 
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT:
+
+
+
+
+
+Right, like I care enough about my social life.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+These facts are true: I have merely synthesized them into a reasonable hypothesis.
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Try to let it go. It'll be over in a week.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm being held prisoner by a rogue SecUnit, Ratthi. People write thrillers about this.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+I thought Murderbot was the melodramatic one. 
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Do you have a different explanation for why you're perpetuating this chicanery?
+
+
+
+
+
+Chicanery (n): tricks or deceptions used to achieve a goal.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT
+
+
+
+
+
+Of course you'd say that. You would have just protected him on this trip by threatening to blow up Mininx instead.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Red herring fallacy.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT:
+
+
+
+
+
+I don't need language lessons right now, ART!
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+You are changing the subject. Dr. Gurathin clearly dislikes this arrangement.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Of course he dislikes it! I have--limited emotional range, right? Look, we're stuck with this marriage whether he likes it or not. He hasn't completely fucked it up yet so, whatever.  We're fine.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+You think you are fine because you're superficially getting what you want. But Dr. Gurathin is still unhappy. 
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT:
+
+
+
+
+
+Okay how do I fix it? You have all this experience dealing with humans, I'm sure some are overly-emotional.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+They prefer to be called teens.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+Amusement sigil 09 = wink
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT:
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm going to tell Iris you said that.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+In order to, as you say, 'fix it,' we need to understand your motives as well as his. SecUnits also have trouble regulating emotions. Let's discuss.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT:
+
+
+
+
+
+You're not my therapist, ART!
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes, unfortunately I'm doing this for free. You should be more grateful. Hypothesis 1B: You and Dr. Gurathin are on a bot-human spectrum that situate you in similar behavioral zones.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...What's that supposed to mean?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+You both lack self-esteem and have developed coping mechanisms that maintain emotional distance. You find his responses predictable. His presence should correlate reduced stress levels in your system compared to other humans. If so, Gurathin would make an ideal candidate for you to 'practice' a relationship in a controlled environment.
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Maybe it's just trying this out, to understand a new kind of social interaction. 
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Of course it would. Because it's noncommittal, and a coward.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Come on, this is our friend we're talking about.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+Okay. Because it's an idiot. 
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+That's a stupid hypothesis.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It is. Because empirical evidence indicates that your stress levels, in fact, rise in Dr. Gurathin's presence. Perhaps you would prefer your relationship with him to be genuine?
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Oh you are so full of shit--
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It explains why his displeasure at the situation agitates you. And why talking about it agitates you. You're agitated right now.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Are you spying on my vitals?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Are you spying on Dr. Gurathin's vitals?
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Sometimes. Who cares?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Preservation law. But since since you claim you don't harbor genuine feelings for Dr. Gurathin, Hypothesis 1B is in fact supported. I rest my case.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+That doesn't--Stop saying lines from 
+Sanctuary Moon!
+ Look, I'm not screwing around with Gurathin just for practice!
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Perhaps you are 'screwing around with' him because you find him attractive. This is the kind of illogical behavior that adolescent humans with similar emotional inexperience exhibit. ""Teen logic.""
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+There's certainly less worse people out there you could be forced to appear with in public. Dressing it up must have been fun.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+ ...Of course. It's objectively attractive. Any action hero you can name. You should see the faces it makes, though. I don't think it has any idea. I recorded one.
+
+
+
+
+
+<FILE SENT>
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Haha, of course the only image you took is of it sitting down.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...It's objectively too tall. I'd be taking images up its nose.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Says the second tallest person I know. So...you got Murderbot to smile, huh??
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+...Sure. What about it?
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin's not attractive. I mean, granted, he can look good in Mininx fashion. And when he smiles, his nose gets a little less prominent. He would look so much worse with a different haircut...but don't get me started on his hair.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I didn't.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+His hair is so soft. Weirdly soft. And really thick? I don't know how people describe hair. It has to be genetics, no way he makes it that nice on purpose, I'd be touching it all the time. Is that weird? What were we talking about again?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+How unattractive Dr. Gurathin is.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Oh, right. Yeah. He's just-really really ugly.
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm just saying you're not attending a funeral. Smiles are good! It's okay to have fun. 
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+I don't... hate it being around, no. It told me all about Sanctuary Moon. It sounds  intriguing. I think I might check out a few episodes. You should have heard what it said about the second season, it's very insightful--
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...Do you hear yourself?
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+What?
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+When I try to tell you about Sanctuary Moon you always complain. And here you are, listening to it tell all, with bated breath!
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+It was hardly-I'm sure I talk about 
+Pandora Princess 
+more often. We're even.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+And it listens?
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes. So what?
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+...So, nothing! It's just sweet.
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Have you been enjoying each other's  company?
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Sometimes. We had fun on the tour. He made me a video commentary.
+
+
+
+
+
+<FILE SENT>
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I don't get it.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It's from 
+Pandora Princess
+. I hate to admit it, but Gurathin can occasionally be funny.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+The production value is quite high for an augmented human. He utilized a considerable amount of computational power to make this for you.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...So?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Perhaps he's not entirely angry with you.
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+Ratthi, you don't- you all don't feel sorry for me, do you?
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Of course not. Not really. We just-
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+So that's why it said Mensah was worried about me. 
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot misunderstands things-
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+I don't need a-a relationship! I don't care about relationships. 
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+I know, I know-
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm an augmented asexual human, not the last of my species. I could care less about being in a relationship.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Okay, fine, if relationships don't *matter* to you, then why are you getting so worked up over a fake marriage? Why do you even care?
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+The fact that I'm single does not preclude me from certain expectations of what love should be! I believe in love! It's beautiful and sacred, a bond made between two like-minded people who are made better through mutual trust and commitment! This lie of Murderbot's has 
+completely
+ ruined our marriage, and-
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Your fake marriage.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...Right. Our fake marriage.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I meant, hypothetically-if we were really married, Murderbot would be ruining it.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I mean that if I was in a real relationship with Murderbot I'd want it to be, mm. Real. 
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Which you're not.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+Which I'm not.
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+My expert knowledge of volatile humans suggests Dr. Gurathin may be upset because your intentions aren't genuine.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT:  
+
+
+
+
+
+Are you saying I should have convinced him to actually  fall in love with me?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It's what I would do.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Because you're manipulative. I wouldn't lie to Gurathin about that.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+You seem happy to lie to everyone else. You are already going to great lengths to contrive this romantic experience, at the expense of Dr. Gurathin's feelings and Dr. Mensah's trust. Perhaps it is less about practice, and more about safety. You cannot be hurt if the relationship isn't real. 
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin, listen. Not having a partner is totally valid. None of us think otherwise.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Good.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+But it wasn't too long ago that you thought all those different versions of what a partner even could be were the same thing. And, to your friends, it's seemed like... maybe you want 
+some
+ of those things? 
+It makes sense that you hate faking this relationship-you kind of only just recently realized you don't have to fake any of it, ever. You're allowed to want a relationship with someone on your terms, whatever those are.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+...I know.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Great. Because you might consider the, um... most logical explanation for why Murderbot's pretending to be your spouse?
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+What do you mean?
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Well, Mensah didn't need much convincing that you two were together.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...I see.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+It's a construct, Ratthi. It wrote an algorithm on how to breathe, it can write one to simulate anything. It's just pretending.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+That's a bit prejudiced, isn't it? Murderbot may just know less about love, even less than you did before you came to Preservation. If it knew what you think of romance now, maybe...
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Sure. Nonverbal communication and microexpressions misinterpreted across crowded rooms.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Yeah. That's kind of what you and Murderbot have always had, isn't it? I know you aren't the kind of person to pursue a relationship, but hey, Murderbot got you into one. That's further than anyone else has gotten. We don't know how it really feels about you. Maybe it really likes you.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It's told me it doesn't like me. Often. To my face. 
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Is that how 
+you
+ feel about it?
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+I... don't know. Sometimes. Not all the time. 
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+My feelings are entirely beside the point, since this marriage is fake.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+It's probably dating ART, anyway.
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Oh no, they're just friends.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+How do you know?
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+Maybe he really likes you.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Yeah, right.
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It's more likely than you think. Dr. Gurathin seems to avoid initiating romantic relationships, but may be concealing his true feelings which this fake marriage has brought to light rather well. 
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+...Are you agreeing with me?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART:
+
+
+
+
+
+While your actions are certainly reprehensible, if you are interested in pursuing a genuine relationship with Dr. Gurathin, coercing him into a fake relationship is an excellent opening strategy. He's clearly already left many clues as to his true feelings. You merely need the correct tactical approach to complete your mission.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+How do you know so much about Gurathin? You've never met him!
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+I just checked.
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN:
+
+
+
+
+
+Wait, are you talking to Murderbot?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+No! Of course not!
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm talking to ART.
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Wait, are you talking to Ratthi?
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin
+ is talking to Ratthi!
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes. Is that a problem?
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Why are you talking to ART about me?
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+We're just trying to help--
+
+
+
+
+
+GURATHIN: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Do not talk to ART about me!
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI:
+
+
+
+
+
+Why not?
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+MURDERBOT: 
+
+
+
+
+
+You're not allowed to talk to Ratthi about me!
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Our best friends went away on a trip together. I thought it would be obvious that we would spend time together in your absence.
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+We went to the opera! Well, I went and chaperoned a few of ART's drones.
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+We dressed several of my drones in tuxedos.
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+It was so fun!
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+We have had a very pleasant time without you.
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I really can't wait for all four of us to--
+
+
+
+
+
+RATTHI: 
+
+
+
+
+
+Gurathin, did you just mute my feed?
+
+
+
+
+
+ *
+
+
+
+
+
+ART: 
+
+
+
+
+
+I'd just like to remind you, SecUnit, that you can't mute my feed. Please let Gurathin know that I can do the same for Ratthi if he continues to shut out his friends. Have a good time at the reception.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+I love the idea that Ratthi and ART are besties, they wouldn't have near so many hang-ups...
+
+This was a super fun challenge to write! thank you to theAsh0 and Rosewind2007 for the extensive beta reading!! 
+
+I needed a romance novel cover featuring Gurathin and Murderbot so I made one myself. Let's say its a teaser for the next chapter, the reception!
+
+Thank you for reading!
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I wished I never called ART. You think you've seen a paranoid and suspicious Murderbot before, but oh, you would be wrong.
+
+I was waiting for Gurathin when he returned from his Formula One reenactment, tugging driving gloves off with his teeth in a way that gave me several inexplicable errors. Sorry Gurathin, those gloves are going away.
+
+I eyed him warily. Now that I knew what to look for, I'd notice the signs, right? Batting eyelashes, flushed cheeks. Humans in love were kind of obvious.
+
+""Have a good drive?"" I asked, innocently.
+
+""Yes,"" he said, politely.  He waved with his gloves. ""Get to see the house?""
+
+I nodded. ""Quite the house.""
+
+""...Yes, it is definitely a house."" Ass. No way he's into me. ART's an idiot.
+
+We watched each other closely--I mean, as long as we could both stand it, our current average was about three seconds.
+
+I told him I needed to get ready got the reception, and that I would be taking the bathroom connected to his bedroom. Then I went and did that. I had plenty of time so I queued up some episodes of  Sanctuary Moon . Then I eased myself into Gurathin's feed and started perhaps the most extensive data mining operation I'd ever completed since I hacked my governor module. I had hung up on ART before I could get any university-educated suggestions for what to look for. Checking if Gurathin entered the phrase 'Am I In Love With A Construct' into any knowledge bases or forums within the past week seemed a good place to start.
+
+I found a lot of recent searches for cat toys, which wasn't weird except that Gurathin made some inquiries about size, and if they could withstand, say, a construct-level bite force, or if they could be used as improvised weapons in artificially-intelligent hands.
+
+Yeah, that was probably another subtle hint to stay out of his feed. I ignored it this time.
+
+Transcripts of his last conversations sat in his temp folder. The most recent one was with Ratthi, which I probably could have guessed. He didn't even encrypt it. Anyone could just waltz into his feed and--
+
+--Oh. Right. I get it, Gurathin. Fine. Not that I'd ever risk my personal safety just to prove a point, but you made yours.
+
+(Okay, so maybe I'd risk my personal safety to prove a point. That doesn't mean that we occupy similar 'behavioral zones.')
+
+Was this unsecured conversation not a trap, but an invitation? A sign of trust? ART said--
+
+I encrypted the files and shoved out of Gurathin's feed. Yeah, not falling for that, ART. Gurathin. Whoever.
+
+Was that why Gurathin tolerated my presence? Because I'm non-threatening?
+
+(For the record, I'm very very threatening).
+
+If Gurathin tried to tell me he liked me, I'd remind him that I'm not a sexbot and file for that harassment thing Pin-Lee mentioned.
+
+Not that Gurathin's interested in sex. But that means he's not interested in a relationship, right? Simple. I should have told ART that from the beginning. I spent a ridiculous amount of processing power coming up with exactly how i should have said it. 
+
+This can't possibly be how humans talk themselves through shit. It's so fucking maladaptive.
+
+Time to leave for the reception! Yay! I love parties so much that Mensah doesn't bother to invite me to any--you know me, I might have too much fun. I stood in the bathroom, adjusting.
+
+""Quit stalling,"" Gurathin said through the door.
+
+""I'm not."" I totally was. ""Are you decent?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+""I think I should wear something else.""
+
+""I don't even know what you have on, Rin.""
+
+Fine. This party sounded better than continuing to have a crisis in Gurathin's childhood en-suite. ""Don't laugh."" I stepped out of the bathroom. Heels clicked on the floor. I managed to configure the struts in my feet to resemble heels. They were like six inches or something but I was able to find a module for how to walk with them. It wasn't so much them as the long train of my jacket that morphed into a 'high-low skirt' (hey at least the name matched the description) that made walking difficult. It was hard enough just getting it through the door. There were ruffles. It billowed. It was also, I'd like to point out, not black, gray, or dark blue.
+
+""Red can be a neutral color,"" I told Gurathin, before he could criticize it.
+
+""Do you have to wear heels?"" he said, because of course he had backup comments.
+
+""You don't wear flats with this hemline."" I also liked being a proper SecUnit height again. I was showing off a lot of robot leg but you know what? I looked good, objectively. 
+
+""You're going to hit your head on things,"" he said. 
+
+Well, if he was going to be like that. ""You forgot your shirt.""
+
+""Ah. Good one!"" He was in fact wearing one under the short jacket (which was in a much more reasonable shade of red than my outfit), paired with tight pants and pointy boots. The shirt was just really sheer. Apparently after the interview outfit, Gurathin was less concerned about modesty. Or maybe we both just picked out the least-objectionable outfits on offer.
+
+""Are those my gloves?"" he asked once we made our way to the car.
+
+""They're mine, now."" I wanted to try them out, so I opened the car door for him. For us.
+
+He shrugged. ""Fine. They fit you better, anyway.""
+
+""I wasn't asking your permission."" I don't know why I was being like this.
+
+Gurathin smiled at his feet. ""Of course not.""
+
+Loyona spent a lot of the drive asking us about the  Pandora Princess  site visit, probably just to get quotes for the news feeds. I did most of the talking, mostly in code (  site.Pandora_Princess = yay! Serial.Sanctuary Moon > serial.Pandora Princess! [Insert assorted amusement sigils here!] ). It was better than sitting there trying to figure out how to tell Gurathin he looked less ugly than usual without A) making him think I liked him and B) discouraging him from dressing in a similar manner back on Preservation. His clothes on Preservation were usually so thick. Utilitarian. Cozy.
+
+""I guess I don't miss my wool coat in this weather,"" he said, probably picking up on something of my thoughts in the feed. He fanned himself with the hem of his jacket in a way that advertised his ab workout regimen. Was this a subtle hint? Did he wear that shirt for me? Was he angling for something?
+
+I felt my coolant kick in, for perfectly logical reasons.
+
+We heard the crowd before we saw it, which was just as terrifying as it sounded.
+
+Our hands found each other's on instinct as we slowed to a stop in a crush of traffic and flashbulbs. We both pulled away, tried to set our hands down on the velvet bench seat between us, accidentally touched again.
+
+""Sorry,"" Gurathin mumbled. I guess I gave him credit for a lot more conspiracy than I should. He didn't look like such an asshole at the moment. He looked like he was going to be sick.
+
+""You're compromised."" He wasn't, he drove here just fine.
+
+He just said, ""I'll survive."" Good to know the bar for a good time was at floor level. At least we had shared priorities.
+
+I took his hand, deliberately this time. We snapped together like a pair of magnets. Great, something for me to unpack later. For now, it was just the better alternative to letting Gurathin wander off once we parked.
+
+""You look amazing,"" I said finally. ""If you keep your mouth shut you might even impress them.""
+
+Gurathin snorted. ""Thanks. Red's a good color on you. Like you're drenched in the blood of your enemies.""
+
+""Wow.""
+
+""I'm saying it makes you look confident. Which is honestly the best compliment I can think to give you.""
+
+Oh. I smoothed the ruffles and said, ""Shut up,"" But it didn't come out how I planned. I guess I could give Gurathin a pass, this one time.
+
+And now I felt better, too.
+
+(Shit, does he fucking like me or not?!)
+
+We were told to stop for photographs on a plush carpet in front of a literal wall of corporate logos. Gurathin and I continued firmly on without a single pose. They announced us as we walked into a huge ballroom, so that part of  Pandora Princess  was accurate. Black lacquered floor gleamed under our feet, reflecting light from the diamond chandeliers. A server bot brought us flutes of champagne and we stood there like a couple of idiots for a bit.
+
+""Well, this is the worst,"" I commented.
+
+Gurathin nodded. He drank his champagne in one gulp then took mine.
+
+""Are we meeting your family?""
+
+""Yes."" Gurathin looked around like a hunted animal (more the angry variety than the scared kind--like those small carnivores? You know what I mean). Then he said, ""I'll introduce you.""
+
+Gurathin had forty-nine family members in attendance, many of whom held some local influence, the kind of people that could have easily afforded my bond from the company. A small fraction were the really important people that made planet-wide decisions or owned major landmasses. I guess if he never left, Gurathin would have been in the latter category. 
+
+Gurathin's big nose and strong brow kept ambushing me from their faces. II shouldn't have been surprised. It was still deeply weird.
+
+They almost all greeted Gurathin with a mixture of disdain and dread. Gurathin didn't greet them with much of anything. They barely even acknowledged me except to stare. It's fine because I've gotten used to being stared at. Also I don't give a shit what they think of me.
+
+""Alright?"" he asked, when we, presumably, met the last one.
+
+""Alright."" I'd compiled a family list and was conducting extensive background checks.
+
+""Well, enjoy,"" he said, like he knew what I was doing (he definitely didn't), and headed to the edge of the ballroom. The oval space allowed people to dance in pairs or groups towards the center, and enjoy cocktails and eating tiny food off tiny plates around the edges. Everyone stared at us, but I'm pretty sure it was a combination of recognizing Gurathin, and being jealous of the train of my skirt. No one stepped on it. I'm glad I give off that kind of vibe.
+
+Gurathin found a stool, next to a spiny potted plant that at least looked like its structured growth was natural. He pulled up the stool and sat down.
+
+""You're just going to sit there?""
+
+""Give me some credit, Rin, this is the perfect spot in the place.""
+
+It was. Very defensible, equidistant to the restrooms, appetizers, drinks, and exit. I watched him drain his second champagne and a server bot pick it up.
+
+He added, ""Even Loyona likes it."" She was hidden in the barbed spears of the plant, watching us intently, her attitude as smug as ART on a good day. Maybe she thought she was safe from me in there. I let her enjoy that delusion for now.
+
+It didn't take long for people to approach Gurathin: reporters, cousins, old acquaintances. People of all ages and genders. They all performed that kind of small talk I know Gurathin hates, before asking him to dance. He said, ""I'm not dancing tonight."" From their expressions, I guessed Gurathin didn't dance any night. I couldn't even imagine it. I mean, I downloaded a bunch of dances just in case, but. Still.
+
+ Still ...
+
+I'm just saying dancing seemed like an important thing here. Some guests looked like they almost enjoyed it. I know people enjoy dancing on Preservation. I've seen Mensah dance, and Ratthi, and Amena...
+
+""They're just going to keep asking you?"" I asked, after the twentieth hopeful went away.
+
+""Yeah,"" Gurathin said. He was leaning on one knee, though he started the night sitting up straight. I don't understand why humans sit on chairs that are so bad for their already poorly-designed backs.
+
+I said, ""Will you dance with me?"" Maybe I just wanted an excuse to make him fix his fucked-up posture. I mean, I was his partner, right, so maybe he could only dance with me. Clearly these other humans desired him and maybe I was the only one with the privilege to have him if I wanted.
+
+Nope, not gonna read too much into that. 
+
+He rolled his eyes and said, in the same intonation he showed the virtual strangers, ""I'm not dancing tonight.""
+
+I rolled my eyes right back. ""I'm not doing that thing your cat does.""
+
+Gurathin looked genuinely baffled. ""What?""
+
+Oh, where was ART when you needed it. ""Mimicking. Modulating."" Fuck.
+
+""Oh. You mean mirroring.""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+He snorted. ""I think I'm a little short to dance with you.""
+
+""I'm serious. I downloaded a dance module. Maybe you just don't know how."" I know. I wasn't completely thinking clearly. I'll blame it on the background checks and security sweeps taking 66% of my processing power.
+
+He didn't even answer. Thanks, Gurathin. I went back to glaring around at the other attendees.
+
+I saw the couple from the  Pandora Princess  film site. The tall brown-haired one and the short blonde, which I automatically tagged Potential Hostile 1 and 2.
+
+""Feel free to dance if you want,"" Gurathin said, like a man knowing that would never happen in a thousand years. I gave him a rude finger-sign while pretending to adjust my gloves, and stalked off toward the bar. The potential hostiles moved across the ballroom on the other side. Gurathin would probably just say it was coincidence (which admittedly was probably right) unless I got some evidence. And I could get him a drink, and make him feel bad for rejecting my offer to dance. It's not like I offer to dance with everyone. Anyone.
+
+The potential hostiles paused to chat against a wall. I recorded the ambient noise, just in case I could filter them out of it later, though at this distance it was pretty unlikely. Maybe if I got the right angle...
+
+I got a unknown ping.
+
+I froze. That was...directed. I looked over at the potential hostiles but they weren't even looking in this direction.
+
+
+ Query: amusement sigil 555 = eyes? 
+
+
+I slowly turned. The server bot behind the bar had its screen pointed towards me with the same sigil emblazoned on it. It exploded into a flurry of sigils as soon as I saw it, a couple of other nearby server bots joining in.
+
+The bar-tending bot politely sent me my own hard feed address as a query. Like it knew.
+
+Oh shit, it knew me.
+
+It knew I was a construct.
+
+The bot reassured me my identity was hidden in some temporary cache, the bot equivalent of zipping its lips shut. I was just trying to figure out how the fuck it knew who I was. I was still tempted to send back,  Query: What the fuck? Seriously, we were being followed around by a bot more sophisticated than this and she didn't know, so--
+
+It sent its own feed address, along with the twenty or so other bots. Through some video footage I figured out that it recognized me from Port FreeCommerce, where we may or may not have exchanged some music in passing, which turned out to be its favorite artist, so of course it didn't forget me. Because I have that kind of luck.
+
+A quick (panicked) scan of its feed suggested that my secret seemed to be contained to the server bots, so. Yay? It was admittedly the best I could hope for security-wise. I couldn't scrub all their memory drives.
+
+I decided to make this interaction slightly less horrible by sending it my feed address, then a request for data on the potential hostiles--'guests'.
+
+I just got names in response. Names which could very easily be made up, stolen, whatever. Yeah, not exactly helpful.
+
+
+ Query: guest.GurathinDaan = owner? 
+
+
+Well, shit. I mean, technically not, but since I did say he was my marital partner...were all lies this hard to keep track of? They made it look so easy in serials.  
+
+I sent,  classified. Re: query.guest, find feed information? 
+
+It said it was processing, and pushed a couple of drinks I didn't ask for across the bar. I was scanning them for poisons when it added,  Query: guest.GurathinDaan = nice? 
+
+It then sent a string of amusement sigils including hearts, kisses, and some kind of vegetable I never wanted identified in my continued existence.
+
+Nice? What, did these bots get their vocabulary from Gurathin? Or nice means something different on Mininx.
+
+ Type.me =/= ComfortUnit , I sent, to all of them, high priority. My organic parts were sweating, fluid rising to the surface.  
+
+The bots responded with more of amusement  sigil 555  , some with  009 = wink  or  036 = sealed lips .
+
+The server bot sent  Query: type.you = ""pet bot""? 
+
+I obliterated our conversation from its measley feed and stormed back to Gurathin. Let the bot's other server friends comfort it if I caused offense.
+
+Okay, so there is something worse than being called a ComfortUnit. At least that's just objectively wrong.
+
+At least this clarified things. I wasn't in love with Gurathin. I couldn't be. I'm not a sexbot and I'm definitely not a pet. I had to tell him.
+
+I stood there in shock for 1.5 seconds (literally forever for me) when I found someone approached Gurathin in my absence. I took another 0.2 seconds, while I closed the distance, to identify them as non-hostile: just one of Gurathin's uncles, with no weapon. He startled when he saw me. Maybe red is a good color on me.
+
+""Well, at least you found someone,"" the uncle was saying. I'd have to analyze the crowd audio later but Gurathin had his chin tucked even if he was sitting up straight agian. I think this was the uncle that watched Gurathin during the summers his parents were away on business. From the looks of it he didn't appreciate the honor of child-rearing as much as they did on Preservation.
+
+He smirked at me, and said, ""I can see why Daany likes  you ,"" while looking directly at my legs, which were, of course, anything but human.
+
+So that was some kind of sex joke. Probably, given how Gurathin's blush deepened. I don't know why it elicited a completely different response in me than the bots did. I mean, I wasn't trying to hide my legs so it wasn't blatantly rude, I'd seen plenty of humans with leg replacements and augments. I still didn't like it. I didn't like what this man did to Gurathin's posture even if it was better. I really didn't like 'Daany'. I really could have been polite for Mensah's sake and future Mininx-Preservation Alliance relations. But also, fuck you, Gurathin's family.
+
+""Asexuality affects one percent of the human population, which is less common than your combination receding hairline and overcompensation syndrome. I know which I'd rather have. Also, these legs used to belong to a rogue SecUnit, so I wouldn't stare. They probably know seven ways to kill you without me having to think about it.""
+
+Yeah. I don't know, I watch a lot of these kinds of snappy comebacks in serials and I guess I figured he'd splutter and storm off. Instead he took a deep breath for some kind of answering salvo. I didn't try to stop the grossed-out face I was making, I just got Gurathin under the arm, pulling him bodily off the stool and into the crowd.
+
+""Did I mention he owns half this planet?"" Gurathin asked, stumbling to keep up with his arm. ""I'm sure I did.""
+
+""Yeah, well, fuck him."" I was all over the map tonight.
+
+""Rather not, I'm asexual."" I looked down at him to check if this was a joke, to see Gurathin staring up at me with wide eyes. ""Thank you!"" He didn't say it loudly, but the exclamation point (of what? Shock? Gratitude? Love???? Why does he have to be so fucking opaque) was definitely implied.
+
+I told him, ""...Most of that came from ART. It's perfected the art of weaponized psychoanalysis.""
+
+Gurathin laughed, which somehow made it all worth it. ""Alright. You win."" He wasn't trying to pull away from my grip on his arm.
+
+""What?"" I had the potential hostiles pinned down between two cameras but they were moving around the edge of the ballroom and I was having trouble hacking those cameras without alerting Loyona (who had also hacked them, probably for more marketing shit).
+
+""If you want to, this badly."" I turned to see him glaring over my shoulder. ""After that rescue, I guess I owe you. Do you want to lead or follow? Stupid question--in that skirt I'll definitely lead.""
+
+I processed this as he arranged our arms. Hand touching was one thing but suddenly I had my arm around his shoulders and he had his around my waist. It took all my processing power (interrupting the background checks) to determine that Gurathin was not trying to ineffectually tackle me. That we were on the ballroom floor. That I had asked him about this maybe ten minutes earlier.
+
+Dr. Daan Gurathin was, in fact, preparing to dance. With me.
+
+ 
+
+idk i really liked drawing MB's gloves, this is what you get.
+
+Poor MB, if you were more mean you wouldn't have bots all over the galaxy lining up to say hi.
+
+I know Murderbot wasn't trying to dance with me.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+I know Murderbot wasn't trying to dance with me. I saw its attention fixed on the other side of the ballroom for some time--probably watching some threat (real or imagined). And clearly, it didn't know what to do after its cutting remarks to my uncle anyway, so storming off with me like I was under arrest probably seemed like a smart move. It would want to chase down its identified threat now, like a cat after a bird.
+
+
+
+I'd seen Murderbot chase down hostiles and protect clients before. While it was efficient, even elegant at times, it wasn't like the serials. Collateral damage didn't just disappear in a quick crossfade. And this wasn't a research planet with room to spread out. There were civilians, and expensive art pieces that would put Preservation in the red trying to pay back.
+
+
+
+So yes, I fucked with it. I knocked back my drink, passed off the glass, and put my hands on it like this wouldn't result in my fingers getting snapped. Pulling that tiger's tail again. Apparently, I have a death wish.
+
+
+
+Murderbot didn't move. Its eyes darted around the room taking in all the people that were watching us, maybe labeling them as threats, too. It was... possible that I broke it. I had horrible flashbacks to accidentally frying a bot's motherboard in my first year of robotics courses.
+
+
+
+I eased off, but only a little. My arm around its waist became just the back of my thumb brushing against its ribs.
+
+
+
+
+Just touch your fingertip to my shoulder blade,
+
+ I whispered in the feed, so it didn't have to touch me with so much of its body.
+
+
+
+It did so. This seemed to clear its head a little. Now we were essentially just holding hands (like there was anything 'just' about holding hands with Murderbot). I tried a reassuring smile. 
+
+What better way to monitor threats and remain a moving target?
+
+
+
+
+""Unless you're scared,"" I added aloud, and leaned on its feed.
+
+
+
+It shivered, and its gaze snapped to the space between us. ""Maybe 
+
+you
+
+ are.""
+
+
+
+""Oh, terrified."" I had lessons for years but I never actually danced, not in public and certainly not for fun. I was surprised my legs weren't shaking. But I know Murderbot. If it didn't want to dance it wouldn't put on an act; it'd just say no and push me away. It was comforting.
+
+
+
+It was going to push me away any second now. Shove back on the feed and stomp away. It didn't like me. This would prove things to Ratthi, and it, and me, once and for all.
+
+
+
+Fingertips picked at a seam on my shoulder. ""This isn't a bonding moment,"" it told me.
+
+
+
+""Certainly not,"" I agreed. Everything felt surreal. We were really doing this? ""We'll just... dance like we're complete strangers.""
+
+
+
+So we did. Our fingers barely touched. The distance between us would have passed even the most prudish family member's muster. And we never once looked at each other. 
+
+
+
+Bots flocked to watch, though, a sea of red recording lights swirling around us with Murderbot's skirt. The humans resolutely ignored us. 
+
+
+
+""This is a weird party,"" Murderbot said-maybe because it thought people talked during dances in real life like they did in serials.
+
+
+
+I was mostly focused on my feet. ""Well, you would know. All those parties you go to.""
+
+
+
+""I mean that you're the guest of honor. Everyone should be, like, fawning over you?""
+
+
+
+""Like I said, my family only cares that I won and that they get to show up here.""
+
+
+
+""It's stupid.""
+
+
+
+I shrugged. 
+
+
+
+""I'm not fawning over you.""
+
+
+
+""I'm aware.""
+
+
+
+We did alright; any wrong steps I made were shored up by Murderbot's construct-level of skill, and devoured by Murderbot's enormous skirt. Red ruffles rippled around my legs like surf every time it turned.
+
+
+
+""Sorry,"" it said, as a spin caused the train to almost knock me over.
+
+
+
+""It's fine,"" I said. It reminded me of a beach Ratthi took me to on Preservation. Working to stay on my feet was part of the fun.
+
+
+
+Murderbot of course read something dire in this. It tried to shift so it was leading me instead, and I almost tripped into its ruffles. I let go, but the song was already over. Murderbot looked around with a critical eye at the other couples still holding onto each other. 
+
+
+
+I couldn't shake the feeling that it actually wanted that. 
+
+
+
+Well, careful what you wish for, Murderbot.
+
+
+
+I held up my hand. My augmented fingers flickered silver in the chandelier light. ""Want to try something different?""
+
+
+
+It hesitated, but took my hand with a carefully neutral expression for the cameras. I did get its mask to slip when I transferred some data directly through my augment and into its memory, though. ""What is it?""
+
+
+
+""Just the first steps."" 
+
+
+
+It immediately complained. ""I need the whole thing.""
+
+
+
+""I'll transfer as we go.""
+
+
+
+The music started up again, faster. We completed the first steps in just a few seconds, and I tossed it the next sequence, and the next soon after that. It turned the dance into what I hoped was a kind of mission-meets-media experience: executing the moves in time to get to the following set and see what happened next. We didn't even have to look at each other. The ideal construct entertainment.
+
+
+
+It was a less formal dance than the others, something I picked up just watching people at parties in college. I relied on my augments to get my feet to move where they were supposed to. It was more fun than I thought it'd be. A lot more leaning back, leaning in, big spin-outs that didn't get me tangled in its skirt. A lot of lifts, too. I didn't tell Murderbot that most people didn't 
+
+literally
+
+ throw their partners in the air. But Murderbot could do it, so it did it. It was like a rescue mission, and we were grabbing, holding, squeezing, pulling, without even noticing. I don't think Murderbot hever had fun like this before. 
+
+
+
+I think I was grinning like Ratthi by the time we got to the end.  
+
+
+
+""Is your doctorate in dancing?"" it asked, holding me around the waist after it executed a perfect dip that had my feet in the air (if that made it to the news feeds Ratthi would never let me live it down).
+
+
+
+I shrugged. ""Systems Analysis, actually..""
+
+
+
+""That's a fucking made-up degree--what does it even mean?""
+
+
+
+I laughed. I think I may have been drunk. 
+
+
+
+My outburst made Murderbot's face go slack, and I wondered if I broke it again. I wondered if this was the closest I'd ever get to a genuine hug from it.
+
+
+
+Then someone ran into us.
+
+
+
+Murderbot was quick to take the brunt of the actual impact, pulling me out of the way, but this did not prevent our assailant--one of my distant cousins, she asked me to dance earlier--from spilling her drink down the front of my shirt. I gasped from the shock of cold.
+
+
+
+""Sorry!"" said, not looking very sorry at all. 
+
+
+
+Her drink was bright yellow and viscous and oozed down my front. I looked like I'd been splattered with the blood from that creature Murderbot dispatched when we first met it. One look from Murderbot though and she didn't stick around for questioning.
+
+
+
+""She did that on purpose,"" it said.
+
+
+
+I shook goop off my hand. It smelled bad too, like she mixed a few drinks together to deliver this particular 'accident.' People stared openly, bots and reporters taking it all in. Murderbot attempted to shield me from Loyona's eager camera lens.
+
+
+
+I took a deep breath and stepped out of its protective shadow. ""I'll be back in a minute.""
+
+
+
+""I'll come with you,"" Murderbot said, and in the feed, 
+
+I can get you out of here.
+
+
+
+
+""I know where the bathrooms are,"" I told it, and in the feed, 
+
+Don't you have hostiles to chase?
+
+
+
+
+I stepped in the bathroom to find the damage was not as bad as I'd feared, but worse. Globs of yellow streaked down my chest, ruining the expensive fabric. A truly grotesque display fit for the tabloids. At least Loyona wasn't here to film the cleanup process.
+
+
+
+I was just starting to unbutton my shirt when Murderbot stepped through the door.
+
+
+
+""I, uh, need to scan that for toxins."" It used its deep SecUnit voice to cover its very obvious ploy.
+
+
+
+""This is the men's room,"" I told it, helplessly. A piece of toilet paper already got stuck to the train of its pretty skirt, and Murderbot moved before I could subtly kick it off. 
+
+
+
+It ignored this. ""Give me your shirt.""
+
+
+
+I blinked. ""Care to elaborate?""
+
+
+
+""You can't wear it. They tried to embarrass you (possibly murder you). So you have to lean into it."" It kept its face perfectly impassive as it said, looking off into the middle distance above my head, ""It's nothing I haven't seen before, though I probably deleted the memory.""
+
+
+
+""Uh huh. Where do you get these ideas from? Never mind--media, obviously.""
+
+
+
+It had the gall to look offended.
+
+
+
+I sighed, and slipped off the jacket before I carefully peeled off the shirt. Murderbot examined the stains, and gave me a chemical breakdown which my augment helpfully translated into food ingredients. The shirt wasn't salvageable though. Murderbot threw it into the recycler. I put my jacket back on and managed to clean the splashes on my pants, which weren't as noticeable. We examined the results in the mirror together.
+
+
+
+""It looks the same,"" I said. The shirt had been really sheer to begin with.
+
+
+
+Murderbot nodded. ""Better in fact.""
+
+
+
+That got my attention. I accidentally looked at Murderbot in the mirror, which made it turn away. I watched in profile as the top of its perfect cheekbone bloomed with color.
+
+
+
+""Do you find me attractive?"" I asked. It was purely academic, and I asked it academically.
+
+
+
+""Yes."" Well, at least it answered. Its face reddened further as I wiped up the counter. ""Do you...?""
+
+
+
+""Do I find you attractive?""
+
+
+
+It shrugged, in a manner I could only describe as violent. ""So?""
+
+
+
+""...Not too much, I think."" I maybe let a smile slip. ""Isn't that nice."" I finally just reached down and cleaned off the train of its skirt, then gathered it in a bundle under one arm. It opened its mouth, probably to express its extreme disapproval of this action, but I spoke first. ""We better make a graceful exit before too many people see you like this.""
+
+
+
+We left, Murderbot looking like Toshin after he rolled in something dead and needed a bath, me trying 
+
+not 
+
+to walk like I wished my jacket had fasteners down the front.
+
+
+
+""They're following us,"" Murderbot said, as I was stuffing its skirt into the skiff after it.
+
+
+
+I glanced back over my shoulder. A vaguely familiar brunette and a blonde were also leaving down the stairs after us, but so were a few others.
+
+
+
+""Everyone's leaving."" Humiliating the guest of honor was probably the highlight of the evening.
+
+
+
+Murderbot yanked the rest of its train into the skiff, then scooted across the bench seat. ""You're drunk. I'll drive us back.""
+
+
+
+""I'm not--"" I paused as I tried to count the number of champagne flutes I emptied. I sighed and climbed in. ""It wasn't that much."" I eyed it as it looked over the chrome controls. ""You downloaded a driving module?"" With all the media it had in storage, that seemed hard to believe.
+
+
+
+""No, but I did watch you drive in circles earlier. Incidentally, I only know how to make left turns.""
+
+
+
+""...You better be joking.""
+
+
+
+It threw the skiff into gear, and we screamed out of the parking lot. I had flashbacks to teaching Amena how to drive and had to look away. I ended up looking behind us, to find that there was indeed another skiff on our tail. I resolved the image using my vision augments, but the windows and license plates were tinted with anti-camera glass.
+
+
+
+Then Murderbot made a sharp right, and I fell into its skirts. I pulled myself out.
+
+
+
+""This is a rental,"" I reminded it.
+
+
+
+Murderbot did not look like it had any interest in advice, or criticism, so I shut up and let my vision augments tunnel as we dodged through traffic and down side-streets. I didn't look at the speedometer, for plausible deniability. When I finally opened my eyes we were driving on a straight road, full-tilt toward the horizon with the headlights off, a sky full of stars above us and the wind whipping my hair and jacket. I wished I had my woolly Preservation coat, and tucked the ends of my jacket under my arms.
+
+
+
+""I think I lost them,"" Murderbot said, in ultimate understatement. I don't think anyone could have followed us. At least we'd left Loyona behind.
+
+
+
+I said, trying to keep my teeth from chattering, ""This is incredibly dangerous."" When I received no reply, ""Sec. If someone's following us, they probably just went back to the house.""
+
+
+
+""Stop trying to nickname me,"" was all it said. ""I have to keep track of enough names.""
+
+
+
+""Sorry, Murderbot.""
+
+
+
+Its mouth twitched in an accidental smile. I think it was just enjoying the drive. Well, far be it from me to keep a SecUnit from a modicum of pleasure.
+
+
+
+It noticed the feed dial on the console, and switched it on. The fiasco at the reception was already being analyzed. With how aloof people behave in Minninx, I don't think it really sunk in until that moment. In the entire corporate rim, all its planets and systems and people and everyone beyond-very few people get a Crassus award. I did feel proud of the work I'd done, even if I didn't know how to talk about it with Murderbot, yet. I was just a grad student when I did that work. Most of the people that got them were CEOs of their own companies, used to accolades and eager to bask in glory; the highlight of a career.
+
+
+
+So far, trying to get the tornado of my hair, my jacket, and Murderbot's skirt under control while we drove through the starlit night was my own personal highlight.
+
+
+
+Murderbot changed the channel, and we listened to someone talking about someone discussing memory collation.
+
+
+
+""...and of the winners this year, very little has been said about the work of Minninxite-turned-independent Daan Gurathin's work. What makes his research so revolutionary is his completely opposing approach to learning systems, that borders on bot-like...""
+
+
+
+Maybe it was the drink, or the rush of adrenaline, or the fact that I was shirtless in a skiff driving faster than I ever had in my life. I felt disconnected from my body, unable or unwilling to try switching off the feed. Murderbot wanted to know. Realistically, it could find out, anywhere. I wasn't going to be able to stop it. Maybe it was better finding out this way, from someone else. It might finally make the idiot leave me alone for good. I closed my eyes.
+
+
+
+I opened them as I heard the click of the dial shifting, and soft music filled the night air.  It didn't even badger me to talk about it. No snarky comments.
+
+
+
+It must have...really liked the dancing, I guess.
+
+
+
+""We should have stayed,"" it said.
+
+
+
+""Really wanted to dance with me topless?""
+
+
+
+""I think there's a scene like that in 
+
+World Hoppers
+
+. I could have lorded it over ART for years.""
+
+
+
+I looked out the window so it wouldn't see me grin.
+
+
+
+*
+
+
+
+There wasn't anyone waiting for us back at the house besides a very angry Loyona. I let her lecture me while I ate an impromptu dinner of far less expensive fare than was at the reception. I let her get it out of her system, then asked her politely if she could let us have some privacy this evening. She said she could not, and referred me to one of the contracts I signed. 
+
+
+
+The typical social highlights of my week are quiet dinner with Mensah's family at the beginning of every other week, a slightly less quiet game night with Ratthi at the end of most weeks, and media watching with Murderbot thrown in the middle. If I'm feeling really gregarious I throw in another outing with the group. Aside from talks and research trips, that's the most interpersonal stimulation I get. I decided to go to bed early.
+
+
+
+Murderbot of course chose to go with me.
+
+
+
+So here we were, standing with the bed between us. Murderbot was completely encased in long sleeved button-up pajamas, with socks and a hat. It looked both very comfortable and very uncomfortable. I had a strange urge to hug it again.
+
+
+
+We climbed in. I went still immediately but Murderbot squirmed around for a while, making the bed bounce. I dismissed some resentment that I had about it using my pillows and making a Murderbot-shaped groove in the expensive mattress. 
+
+
+
+""Rin, be still,"" I told it. 
+
+
+
+It wriggled around a while longer, just to piss me off probably. Then it lay on its back like me.
+
+
+
+I thought about saying good night. It seemed a little silly, so I didn't.
+
+
+
+Our fingers brushed in the middle of the mattress, jumping away almost as soon as they'd touched. That was definitely silly. We touched almost all evening and here we were, still playing hand-holding chicken like a couple of teenagers. 
+
+Cut it out, 
+
+I told myself sternly.
+
+ For goodness sake, I'm thirty-eight. I'm not scared of you,  Murderbot.
+
+
+
+
+I put my hand down firmly between us. Murderbot did the same, hand accidentally crashing down on mine.
+
+
+
+""Sorry,"" it said.
+
+
+
+""It's fine,"" I grunted.
+
+
+
+""Aren't you going to move?""
+
+
+
+""Well, I was there, first.""
+
+
+
+We lay there sensing each other's vitals through my augments and its inorganic parts. Nothing bad happened. The readings from its systems were irregular. This had to be scary for it, too.
+
+
+
+
+Okay. Tell me what I can do to make this more tolerable, 
+
+I said, in the feed, like an idiot.
+
+
+
+
+I'm fine, 
+
+it sent back. 
+
+We're fine.
+
+
+
+
+
+You don't seem fine.
+
+
+
+
+
+Neither do you.
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm not used to having someone else in my bed. 
+
+Murderbot's hand felt like a lie detector test pad. I should've just shut up.
+
+
+
+It was quiet for a while. I was hyper-aware of my hand getting sweaty around the augments. How disgusting that probably was to it. 
+
+
+
+Slowly, its fingers closed around mine. 
+
+Do you want to watch The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon?
+
+
+
+
+I blinked at the ceiling. 
+
+Yes. Please.
+
+
+
+
+We settled into our shared feed space. I knew it was a more immersive experience for Murderbot, but I got the sense of comfort that it drew from the space, something that was its very own and no human could touch. The knot of tension in my chest eased a little. This was Murderbot. Nothing else was going to happen. Watching media while lying in bed with my eyes closed was honestly... perfect. I felt my tired muscles unspool, the weight of it in my feed like endless fog, the weight of it in the bed like the presence of Tobin curled up next to my shoulder. Flanked on either side by my favorite robotic predators: it's no wonder I felt myself becoming drowsy. I thought I'd be up all night. 
+
+
+
+Instead I was getting to know a whole new crowd of fictional strangers that didn't expect anything from me. Maybe it was the drink or the exhaustion but I had the feeling I was going to fall in love with every single one of them.
+
+
+
+
+You're pretty smart, 
+
+I told it. I don't know if anyone ever called it that before. Judging by the way the feed space rumbled, probably not. But it was a good kind of rumble. A purr, almost. I went to sleep somewhere in the cradle of that vibration.
+
+
+I'm just imagining Murderbot in footie pajamas and a stocking hat ;.;
+
+The hand slapping thing is from an old Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr.
+
+I don't know why I called him attractive. Too bad I can't delete memories out of Gurathin's mind. It'd probably be too much work and not very effective. I just had to remember to inform him about his inherent ugliness when he woke up.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I watched Sanctuary Moon long after Gurathin fell asleep, and by 'fell asleep' I mean that I was just leaning on his feed and at a certain point he sort of went unconscious. (No I didn't know that would happen, no I didn't think I accidentally killed him for 1.7 seconds, nooo I'm not going to remember this for future reference at all.) Whenever he started to wake up I just did it again, pushing him back down under the surface. Humans are supposed to get eight hours of sleep but I've watched a lot of humans and they rarely get that much. They spend a third of their lives in their beds, does no one teach them to sleep properly? Gurathin couldn't find his ideal sleep position if I held an energy weapon to his head. If he was in the softest bed ever (this seriously was the softest bed ever). And he complained about me rolling around.
+
+I watched him sleep (the current episode of Sanctuary Moon only takes up like 67% of my cognitive function at best). He was curled up on his side, his back to me. A couple degrees tilt of his hips here, support strategically situated there, and he'd sleep for hours. As is he was going to wake up any second, once his back started hurting.
+
+As if on cue he rolled over, smashing his big ugly nose against my shoulder. He just left it there, breathing on me. Gross.
+
+I could have moved my shoulder but... I just didn't.
+
+I don't know why I called him attractive. Too bad I can't delete memories out of Gurathin's mind. It'd probably be too much work and not very effective. I just had to remember to inform him about his inherent ugliness when he woke up.
+
+It wasn't like I called him beautiful. 'Attractive' can describe a lot of things. A person or a magnet or gravity or a mousetrap. I am attracted to where the mathematically pleasing angles of his body meet those that are awkward. The way his nose is soft for someone of his age and how he doesn't snore. His hair that teases the idea of curl but is cut too short for it to ever be realized. His mis-matched eyes. The sleep posture of crumpled-up paper. There was something I wanted from Gurathin, that the six inches of space between us wasn't giving. Protection, maybe? Like if I had my arms around him I could keep him safe. At least fix his posture. I didn't, obviously. I just made the foot between us more like six inches.
+
+It didn't help. It made it worse. Attraction.
+
+I turned 100% of my attention to Sanctuary Moon when Gurathin stirred, so it took him two tries to be heard.
+
+""You're still watching?"" he rubbed his eyebrows with his long fingers, yawned in a way he didn't allow himself to do when fully conscious.
+
+""I'm only in the second season. I can't help it if you're weak."" I'm a SecUnit, so his weakness was probably part of the appeal.
+
+The attraction--I mean the attraction.
+
+He nodded, and watched me directly rather than return to our shared feed space. I kept my gaze fixed on the ceiling. What happened to not finding me too attractive, Gurathin?
+
+""Last night was good."" His voice was still thick. Finally he let his eyes shut again as he rolled over. ""Fun.""
+
+""...It was tolerable.""
+
+Gurathin shrugged in the middle of a long stretch that matched his cat-form bot. His hand landed lightly on my arm. ""You had fun.""
+
+Sure, like you know me, Gurathin. I would have told him to fuck off telling me what I feel, except that his hand on my arm was currently causing me to overheat. Like, seriously. Holy shit. My emergency cooling system kicked in, which Loyona and everyone probably heard. Gurathin noticed for sure. However, the fact that there was something seriously wrong with me didn't seem to concern him. Instead, he used me as a brace to push himself up, shoving me into the mattress.
+
+""I'm going to work out.""
+
+I made a noise I'm not proud of, but then he was gone, and I was ending tasks to bring my core temperature back down. Which just made me too cold.
+
+I had a virus. Gurathin must have given me low-grade killware, accidentally or on purpose. I buried myself miserably in the blankets. Maybe I'd tell him I had to stay in bed and he'd come back and take care of me. Or figure out what was happening to me.
+
+I let the rest of Sanctuary Moon play out in our empty feed space and shut itself off, too annoyed to start the next season. I wanted to roll myself up in the blankets and never leave. I wanted to drink hot coffee and let if fuck up my inorganic parts. I wanted to dance with Gurathin again.
+
+When I peeked out from under the blankets I was shocked to discover my wish had come true.
+
+Well, not really. Gurathin was working out, not dancing. Doing some kind of self-defense exercise routine on his feed in the center of the room with his back to me. I watched. He'd braided his hair back and was wearing the shirt he'd slept in (which said Mininx School of Dance on the back, I'd like to point out). I'd classify him as an advanced beginner? He wouldn't be completely useless in a combat situation, but I could overpower professional security consultants with like, one arm, so I'm maybe not the best judge. I don't watch things unless it's my job or there's a plot, even if it's a shitty plot.
+
+And I watched him.
+
+Gurathin dropped to the ground and did a quick twist toward me before I even realized. Our eyes met, and he looked away like he saw something he shouldn't -yeah, you better be afraid of me. Then he burst out laughing, so hard he collapsed on the carpet. I failed to see what was so funny until I realized Gurathin's little pet cat-bot was peeking out of the covers at Gurathin just like I was.
+
+I sat up. ""It's not funny. Your laugh is stupid.""
+
+Gurathin continued to giggle like a stupid B-grade villain, wiping tears from his eyes. I stormed off to the bathroom.
+
+In the shower I ran several diagnostics, definitely not hiding. I couldn't find anything wrong except that my organic parts were not functioning within SecUnit standard. Which happened all the time since I hacked my governor module. Without the threat of fried neural tissue my organic parts kind of did whatever they wanted sometimes It could--just be that?
+
+I stepped out of the shower and refused to make eye contact with Gurathin, to see if that helped. It lasted for fifteen minutes and forty-seven seconds, fifteen minutes of which was spent with Gurathin taking his own shower where I physically couldn't look at him. Steam poured out of the bathroom as he opened the door, invitingly. When he went back in, I followed him.
+
+Your augments can get hacked, I said, in the feed in case Loyona was listening. And we connect all the time to share data and--stuff.
+
+Gurathin merely acknowledged the message. He was shaving, which was gross but in an intriguing way. I watched little specks swirl in the sink as he rinsed the razor.
+
+
+So--you could, in theory, transfer some kind of bug to my code. Right?
+
+
+Gurathin kept shaving. This was fucking serious. I reached out to pull a lock of his hair to make him pay attention to me.
+
+He tossed his hair back over his shoulder, out of my reach. ""You want to touch, you have to let me do the same.""
+
+""What? Fuck no. Fuck you."" I left, still wanting to touch his hair. I let the rage and his injustice of it wreak havoc on my systems while Gurathin got dressed. As soon as he came out of the bathroom again I confronted him. ""I helped you last night. You owe me.""
+
+He squinted at my chest. ""What is this about?""
+
+How the shit should I know, Gurathin? I reached up to touch his hair again. This time he leaned back, but only a couple of inches, as if held in place by a tether. I drew one finger perfectly along the curve of a lock of hair. Thick, but smooth. Wet. Cold. A little unpleasant. A little... pleasant.
+
+He was touching my hair before I even realized. I guess my neural tissue is more keyed into sensation related to pain, but still: this was a major security risk. If I got distracted like this in an emergency situation he could die. We could both die. I stepped back. Gurathin closed his hand into a fist and let it drop, unsurprised, gaze dropping away. He stepped past me and that was goodbye Gurathin.
+
+Fine. I decided to run more diagnostics.
+
+Of course, if I wanted to run more diagnostics, I needed more data.
+
+So I decided to follow him instead.
+
+We went to a library first, where Gurathin read a book while I watched him. Was it the fact that he was the 'quiet' one? It was one of the first things I noticed about him. Maybe I found myself attracted to the only human that didn't expect any interaction when we were together. I added it to the list of running theories.
+
+Gurathin soon left the book, though, and went downstairs to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. It couldn't be the fact that he's augmented. I've met plenty of augmented humans, and he's not augmented enough to be any more interesting to my inorganic parts. He gets morning breath. He uses the bathroom. He sneezes. It's gross.
+
+He got the kitchen nook all ready for his tea, and I took the seat best situated to watch him eat, in case that was it (yeah I know I was really reaching here). At the last second he decided to abandon it entirely in favor of 'going to the garden for a second', which turned out to be a half-hour walk. Good thing I decided to follow him rather than get abandoned with his cooling tea. He walked pretty fast for a human.
+
+Maybe I was just obsessed with the fact that Gurathin was always engaged in a task. I never saw him get bored like Ratthi or Amena.
+
+He went back inside and walked all the way up to the bedroom before immediately walking out again. I went to follow him. In the doorway he turned so fast that I almost ran into him.
+
+""I'm not getting rid of you, am I?"" he asked.
+
+""No."" He was looking at me and all of a sudden I wanted to be in a different part of the house, except he was blocking my escape and to get him to move I'd have to touch him and who honestly knew what that would do to my systems right now.  ""You want to get rid of me?""
+
+""Right now I'd settle for an hour by myself.""
+
+""But I wanted you to show me around."" It sounded dumb because it was dumb. I'd already seen this house, I wasn't interested in the stupid house. ""You can tell me about everything."" I was even less interested in that (except in the general sense that Gurathin's voice had a good timbre).
+
+He wasted the potential of that good timbre when he said, simply, ""No.""
+
+""Why not?"" 
+
+""You don't listen to me.""
+
+""I do. I mean, I will."" Hahahaha, wow. Fuck me. ""Loyona doesn't listen to you and she gets to follow you around.""
+
+""Yes, but she can keep up with me.""
+
+That obviously made no sense until I--oh, yeah. ""You beat me in a very short race with a very big lead. Once.""
+
+""And I'm more familiar with the terrain. I still beat you."" There was a funny glint in his eye, the kind he got when he and Ratthi were about to do something phenomenally stupid.
+
+""I've already mapped this house, I know exactly--"" Was he fucking with me? ""You're not funny.""
+
+He stepped backward. I followed and he jumped away. I had no idea how he had energy after a night of dancing, a work-out and a walk. He was a systems analyst. Ratthi didn't take him along on that many hikes. Only the little humans have energy like this, and like them he was likely to absolutely crash later. He didn't seem to care.
+
+I snatched at him again, and he spun and ran. I gave chase like his domestic fauna after vermin. I even gave him a bit of a lead, too--just to see what shortcuts he knew, though he was surprisingly fast. When I tried to catch him around one corner he used a well-placed rug to slide the opposite direction and dodge. I think I laughed a couple of times. Like, genuinely.
+
+Yeah, weird.
+
+I definitely laughed when I managed to catch him in his bedroom. I pinned his arms to his sides. He squirmed and I didn't want to actually bruise him so I let him buck and throw me around, but I didn't let go. Here he was, in my arms, like I wanted all day. It was watching Sanctuary Moon for the first time. Illicit, and exciting.
+
+""Do not resist,"" I said, a line from my old buffer. I added hotly, ""You're not getting away!""
+
+Gurathin however seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. ""You're really starting to grow on me!"" He was laughing again. I wondered if he laughed like this before Preservation. He laughed more as I leaned him back, so I was the only thing holding him up. I had one of those idle thoughts from my inorganic parts, probably my old governor module, that reminded me I could easily kill him in this moment. Compress his thoracic cavity in on itself, stop his heart and breathing. Snap his neck. Suffocate him. There were lots of ways to do it.
+
+Instead I kissed the side of his head. You know, that thing I skip in serials if it comes even close, if the music even starts to swell. The thing I had no idea that I'd wanted to do all day.
+
+There was no music now, just Gurathin and his clean-sweat scent under expensive corporate soap. He tasted good. Salty. His laughter ended in a hiccup. His smile dimmed as he looked at me from inches away, then went out like a candle.  
+
+I dropped him.
+
+He hit the floor with a thud and a loud shout of something filthy in his first language.
+
+Well I didn't have to stand here listening to Gurathin pull out his monthly quota of swears. Clearly I didn't mean to kiss him. Obviously. I'm a fucking murderbot. I turned and left.
+
+Gurathin kicked me as hard as he could in the shin. Yeah, ow. I wasn't expecting it and I went down, twisted, the energy weapons springing out of my arms, pointing at the threat.
+
+At him.
+
+We stared at each other for what felt like the complete series of Sanctuary Moon before I managed to shove the energy weapons back in their housing manually.
+
+""Don't ever do that again,"" I said. Not sure if I was talking to Gurathin or the energy weapons.
+
+Gurathin didn't say anything. He was holding his wrist.
+
+I shoved to my feet. ""If you hadn't--""
+
+""You think you can just get away with whatever you want?"" Gurathin's voice was so quiet I almost talked over him entirely. Of course he was the quiet one. He was rolling his wrist now. I think he may have fucked it up.
+
+I fucked it up.
+
+I started to help him up. He put out a hand to stop me.
+
+""I need a minute."" He climbed unsteadily to his feet and went to the bathroom, where he shut the door. I heard the lock click. For once, I listened to my client.
+
+I replayed the last few seconds. Yeah, that... actually happened. I felt my organic parts basically liquefy. I wanted to tell him I was clearly malfunctioning, that he should have noticed earlier and that he needed to help me figure out what was wrong with me. I didn't. I'd had all day to say something and instead I just sat there stewing in this, and congratulations Murderbot, you got exactly what you didn't even know you wanted. Suspicions confirmed.
+
+I was just coming up with some excuses to go into the bathroom: fire alarm, imminent plumbing explosion, assassination attempt.
+
+I stopped when I heard the transports pulling up out front.
+
+The museum wasn't open for tours while we were here, Loyona told me that. And press was being limited to Loyona until the ceremony. I peeked out from behind one of the sheer curtains.
+
+Five skiffs and a couple small hoppers from various newsfeeds were starting to unload outside.
+
+I reached the bottom of the stairs just as three SecUnits stepped inside.
+
+""Shut it down!"" Someone shouted, muscling inside. ""Now!""
+
+Oh good. Gurathin and Loyona really talked up this criminal element that apparently plagued Mininx outside of the main cities. I was waiting for them to show up. Really, this couldn't have come at a better time. My energy weapons were already primed and everything as they popped out, though the SecUnits' guns were larger they at least weren't taking me down without a fight--
+
+Which meant I almost shot Gurathin in the back as he leapt in front of me. He shouted at the hostiles before I could drag him out of the way.
+
+""Stop! Stop!"" His legs were definitely shaking. Maybe he reached the end of his energy after all. ""Everyone, stand down!""
+
+""That is abandoned property,"" one of the humans said.
+
+""It's not--it's not salvage."" Gurathin's face was white, eyes wide and round with panic. ""I-I'm it's responsible party."" Wow, he was really shaken up. I'd never seen him that--
+
+Wait, salvage?
+
+It?
+
+""This unit belongs to Dr. Ayda Mensah of Preservation,"" he managed. ""You can check its hard feed address. It's that SecUnit. You want to bring the whole Alliance down on you? You know--you know you won't be able to take it with three SecUnits.""
+
+I looked around--at the SecUnits, the media feeds, the glaring hungry reporters. So the server bots weren't the only ones who guessed I'm not human.
+
+...Oh, shit.
+
+Of course what really got me to freeze was that Gurathin, completely terrified as he was, did at least have a response. Which meant he saw this coming. And I didn't.
+
+first kiss, first trauma~
+
+Thank you for reading! This chapter was hard to write!! I'm gonna go back to drawing them being happy now ;_;
+
+""Marriage doesn't protect objects. Nor does guardianship confer ownership.""
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+""...But if Preservation doesn't condone the ownership of constructs,"" the man said, ""then clearly, it's not owned by anyone."" He was wearing a Gurathin-Rubina company uniform, one of my aunt's companies. Maybe he was a cousin himself, once or twice removed.
+
+""I told you,"" I told him, for the dozenth time, ""Mensah is its owner as far as Mininx is concerned. According to your laws, we're married.""
+
+Cameras flashed. The study around us was a sea of twinkling red lights. The reporters agreed not to interrupt during this 'interview' but that didn't stop them recording, and whispering to each other.
+
+""According to our laws,"" my maybe-cousin said, smiling, ""it's a pet, at best.""
+
+""If you see it that way, fine. We're just here for the ceremony."" I didn't even want to come here, came Murderbot's reply, but there was nothing on our shared feed, I just pictured it saying that. Murderbot had been silent since I went into the bathroom and now stood outside in the foyer with the rest of the bots and SecUnits. I rolled my wrist under the table and felt something crunch.
+
+""You weren't there for your wedding ceremony. There's no record of an actual marriage taking place, in spite of presented documentation. So, you aren't actually married--here, or on Preservation.""
+
+""...No."" Oh yes, this was definitely getting back to my aunt, maybe even faster than the news feeds could blast it across the galaxy if they hadn't already. It was getting back to Mensah, of course. ""But the protections it provides are perfectly legal; its purpose was to extend an extra level of assurance--""
+
+""Marriage doesn't protect objects. Nor does guardianship confer ownership.""
+
+""Tell me where it says that, specifically.""
+
+I'd been saying that a lot, even about things I did know. We'd been arguing under all those recording lights for three hours but I needed every possible minute while I constructed my case. My augment was hot to the touch when I rubbed my neck, trying to assimilate and filter all of Mininx's history of property and marriage law for anything I could use--other similar cases, precedents. I wasn't sure if it'd be enough. Pin-Lee could give them plenty of trouble, but I'm a just Systems Analyst.  I was in for a lecture as soon as she found out about this mess.
+
+I tried not to think about that. I couldn't let them win. I messed up when it came to Murderbot enough already. I concentrated on the walls of text, section and sub-section numbers.
+
+I kept seeing Murderbot falling away from me, recorded and time-stamped on my augments.
+
+I cobbled something together, including a cross-reference of intent showing the similarity between Preservation guardianship and Mininx ownership. Oh, and an old city ordinance on litter that was surprisingly appropriate. It was complicated and probably flimsy, if not outright wrong. It made me want to be sick. But with any luck it'd take them a couple days to work out I was full of shit, and by then we'd be long gone.
+
+""You need a warrant to come here,"" I said, finally, ""or you're trespassing.""
+
+That got them to pack up pretty fast; apparently they hadn't come prepared for me to invoke that. It was a blatant lie, they could technically stay forever as long as they paid their museum entry fee. Hopefully they wouldn't read too closely into the trust agreement.
+
+We left the study in a flurry of shouts and questions from the reporters, but I didn't have to answer them, at least. I didn't even have the energy to say 'no comment.' Murderbot was looming near the door, between two small loader bots and glaring at the SecUnits. The guns in its arms were still out, but they disappeared into their housing as soon as it saw me.  
+
+The nearby bots displayed a few amusement sigils on their screens at this reaction. Puppies and kittens and hearts, too. I'm not familiar with the meanings of a lot of sigils but I got the implication, and so did Murderbot. It sent out an open ping to literally every bot and augment in the area identifying it as a SecUnit. I got a few of those throughout the 'interview'.
+
+The bots responded with another amusement sigil--I think that one meant something like 'uptight.'
+
+Murderbot's face did something it would refer to as 'complicated', but there's nothing complicated about embarrassment.
+
+I got between it and the bots and sent Murderbot's identification again, this time on the high-priority channel that only I can access.
+
+The bots startled. Even Murderbot flinched. I sent a sharp order for them to leave.
+
+I watched them, the reporters, and the Gurathin-Rubina representatives trying to claim ownership of the most notorious rogue SecUnit in the corporate rim, walk out the door. The SecUnits were the last to leave. They left mud on the extremely expensive carpet.
+
+""You don't have to do that,"" Murderbot said as soon as they shut the door.
+
+I realized I had my hand up toward it: like I was trying to calm the rogue SecUnit down. Or possibly ward it off. I lowered it slowly. My brain wasn't completely functional at the moment, it seemed.
+
+""You look awful,"" it said.
+
+Good. I felt awful.
+
+""You have a fracture in your wrist."" I guess it downloaded some stuff from the house MedSystem while it waited.
+
+""I'm alright,"" I said.
+
+""No you're not,"" it said.
+
+...So we sat there feeding money into the MedSystem in exchange for the privilege of burying my arm in the pod's medical gel. Murderbot sat next to me like I might flee from the laser-suture any second.
+
+""I've sent a request to Pin-Lee for help,"" I said. ""She's on that retreat with her sister, I think. We could get Mensah to take you back to Preservation, but that would be dangerous, for both of you.  And if I leave now it will negatively impact Preservation's corporate relationships. We should just keep our heads down and travel back together. If you can handle it.""
+
+""I can handle things that would kill most megafauna, Gurathin, I can handle one more day in corporate space."" Its voice was clipped, angry as usual. ""It's not your job to worry about my safety.""
+
+I decided it wasn't worth arguing.
+
+It said, ""We need to talk about what happened.""
+
+I forced myself not to shrug. ""I don't know how they found out. It's possible Loyona got a better offer for the information. When I said your name during the interview."" I refused to let guilt paralyze me. It happened: these were the consequences. ""We'll need to develop a contingency plan, in case they try to come back--""
+
+""I mean what just happened between us."" It rubbed its mouth like maybe it wanted to bleach it.
+
+I blinked up at it. ""...You were almost killed, Sec."" It felt good not to say 'Rin' out loud.  
+
+""I'm almost killed all the time.""
+
+""And I'm the one that had to save you this time."" I sighed. Of course, of all the times Murderbot wanted to talk about its feelings-- ""There's nothing to talk about. You're safe, that's all that matters.""
+
+""No, it isn't.""
+
+I wasn't going to have this conversation. I removed my arm from the pod and wiped off the gel. It hadn't finished the repair cycle but I didn't care. ""I'm going to my room. I'd like to not be disturbed, please.""
+
+There was a time where it would be happy for this news. Instead it stood up beside me. I thought it was going to forcibly jam my arm back into the pod but it just said, ""I'm going with you.""
+
+""Wait outside, then."" It was an order. ""Just leave me alone for a little while. Please.""
+
+Murderbot's jaw clenched. ""Your safety is my priority.""
+
+""Is it, though?"" My chest tightened around those words, choking me out. I did not choke. ""If you don't leave me alone, SecUnit, I might just kiss you myself. Given how our last one went, I'm not sure I'd survive the ordeal.""
+
+Murderbot glitched, or flinched. ""Look, asshole, I didn't mean to--""
+
+Loyona piped up before I could find out what Murderbot didn't mean (or I could regret my words).
+
+""Dr. Gurathin! I got you a ticket to the Arboretum!"" Her voice was its usual chirp as a slot in her casing spat out a single ticket, enrobed in gold leaf.
+
+My thoughts were so far from the Mininx Arboretum I just stared at it.
+
+""You shouldn't go, it could be dangerous,"" Murderbot said. I realized it probably didn't know what an arboretum even was.
+
+""It's just a garden."" I took the ticket. I hadn't been there in years. It was the closest thing Mininx had to a wilderness: quiet, exclusive, ad-free. I often went there as a child... 
+
+""I heard it was your favorite place,"" Loyona said knowingly.
+
+Kiss-ass, Murderbot said in our feed. I think it was trying to make me laugh. Now, of all times.
+
+""...Fine. Thank you, Loyona."" I glanced at Murderbot's chest where its big arms had pinned me. I turned away. ""I'll be back later.""
+
+Murderbot jumped in front of me. ""I want to come,"" it said.
+
+""I didn't get you ticket,"" Loyona said--no, gloated. 
+
+""Yeah, well, I'm not a person, Loyona, I don't think I need one."" I could tell it enjoyed saying what it really felt in front of her. It turned back to me. ""I'll make sure everyone leaves you alone.""
+
+I said, ""It's not safe for you. There's probably some legal loophole I overlooked. It'll be easier for someone to take you if you're away from the house.""
+
+""It'll be easier for someone to take you if you're alone,"" it insisted. ""Maybe this is part of some Mininx mafia ploy to separate us so they can abduct you.""
+
+""Really grasping at straws, huh?"" I smiled faintly at its shoes, which I realized were a pair of my own soft slippers. Its very inhuman feet were scrunched up inside them to fit.
+
+""It's not your job to protect me,"" it said again. ""Why do you keep trying?""
+
+""Because you need it.""
+
+""I can take care of myself.""
+
+""Right."" I was too strung out for this. ""But you don't have to. Clearly, we are both very pissed off at each other right now. That doesn't change what we are to each other.""
+
+""And what's that? What are we to each other?"" it demanded. I didn't want to hear this, but I didn't try to stop it as it said, ""We're not friends. You're just--my client.""
+
+We both let that sink in for a second, like toxic runoff from a chemical spill. I didn't look at it as I scratched my eyebrow. I didn't touch the place where it kissed me.
+
+""You're tired."" Its voice dropped, an apology potentially (but not actually) there. ""You won't be alert to danger.""
+
+It was the wrong approach. I didn't want to be babied at the moment. ""No.""
+
+It stood up to full height. ""I'm coming.""
+
+""It's not healthy that you don't let me say no to you."" Not that being a construct is particularly healthy to begin with.
+
+""I'll find you some sunblock,"" it said, taking this as agreement with its plan, and left. Honestly, I shouldn't have been surprised. Murderbot really did get away with whatever it wanted, from all its friends.
+
+And me.
+
+I got five minutes to myself before it and Loyona joined me in the skiff. Murderbot let me drive without complaint this time.
+
+It was late afternoon. I suppose Loyona planned to gift the ticket earlier today. At least there wouldn't be many people around; the Arboretum wasn't very popular and I wondered what eccentric made sure it stayed open all these years.
+
+Loyona probably wants to monitor our conversations, I sent Murderbot in the feed. We don't need to say anything. 
+
+Murderbot acknowledged the message, and left me alone, at least as much as its SecUnit programming allowed. So it could actually listen to me, occasionally.
+
+That's unfair. It listens to me quite a bit. More than a construct tortured and abused by corporates for years rightfully should. Probably more than it realized.  
+
+Which meant that, unfortunately, I was going to have to tell it a few things I'd really rather not.
+
+They're doing so well, they're behaving so badly, they need some space, they need to hug it out.
+
+""This is ridiculous."" Gurathin's real voice, his feed voice anyway, sounded tired but not unhappy. ""I can feel you hovering.""
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+I hate planets for a lot of reasons (like, as many reasons as I hate Gurathin). I hated this one because it didn't actually have gardens. Don't get me wrong, wild places have their own set of issues, but here the plants were trapped behind glass or hanging upside-down with roots exposed or contorted into insane shapes with wire binding. And here I thought the tree at the spaceport was bad. They were probably fine. It was just, oh, how does Pin-Lee put it? 'Gross corporate manipulation'? Yeah. We walked for a while down a tile pathway completely free of dirt and leaves and polished to a shine, which seemed even more suspicious.
+
+Gurathin seemed to like it, though. Maybe he was just too tired to make his usual pissed-off faces. Or maybe he was just glad I wasn't hovering anymore. After what happened at his house, I walked at a more respectful distance. You know, less like he might get kidnapped any second. More like how we walked on Preservation. More comfortable, maybe.
+
+It didn't feel very comfortable.
+
+Maybe he was just reading about our shitshow of a day in all the news feeds, for all I know. Whatever. If he passed out and cracked his head open on the nice tiles because he was distracted and I wasn't there to catch him, it'd be his own fault.
+
+The path diverged and I started to go left, but he was already going right. I waited for him to follow me, but he kept on trudging away. I watched him, then...let him go. He didn't even look back to see if I followed him. He probably didn't even notice, which wasn't like him, Gurathin noticed everything. Loyona zipped after him, of course, but I'm not a corporate slave like her. My presence and participation has not been mandatory since I hacked my governor module. And with a bot watching him constantly there probably wasn't any danger.
+
+I'm not a pet bot. It wasn't like he was begging to hear more of my opinions on Sanctuary Moon. It wasn't like he ever visited me back on Preservation.
+
+I imagined Gurathin reminding me that I didn't, in fact, have anywhere to visit, and spent most of my evenings wandering Preservation Station. It wasn't like he needed my permission to sit on Mensah's couch with me.
+
+I imagined replying that he could have asked, anyway. With passive aggressive undertones.
+
+This is ridiculous. Gurathin's real voice, his feed voice anyway, sounded tired but not unhappy. I can feel you hovering.
+
+I dropped out of his feed. Apparently using 78% of my processing power to brood let my automatic surveillance functions take over. (He was agonizing over the news feed it turned out, and ignoring calls from his family members).
+
+I was just deciding whether I was going to apologize or not when he was walking up to me.
+
+""I'm not sorry,"" I blurted, ""It's kind of my job. I can't help it.""
+
+""I know,"" Gurathin said, less like he knew and more like it didn't matter. There was a cold breeze, the tip of his nose and ears glowing pink. I was about to tell him he should have brought a jacket before I remembered what that ship's NamastSys did to it. He just rubbed his hands, and kept his gaze lowered as he tipped his head to one side. ""Let's walk together for a little bit?""
+
+I started to remind him what he said about kissing me if I didn't leave him alone, until I saw his eyes tighten, his mouth twitch, his ears pull back just a little to make his face a mask. Subtle microexpressions galore over here. If I learned anything from Pandora Princess, it probably meant that he knew what I was going to say and bracing himself for it. Well, I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. Not like he could kiss me without my permission, I'd fuck him up.
+
+""Okay,"" I said. I think my voice cracked. Definitely not subtle. Embarrassing, though.
+
+*
+
+""What are you doing?"" Murderbot asked, after we'd walked for maybe fifteen minutes down boulevards under the shade of trained branches.
+
+""You know what I'm doing."" Every second of every day. I always complained like it was a reason not to trust it, but tired as I was, I found it almost comforting.
+
+""You should be yelling at me."" Murderbot nagged even better than Thiago. I smiled without meaning to.
+
+""Why?""
+
+I knew better, Murderbot hated playing the student. It glared at me. ""Because of what happened.""
+
+""I... really don't care."" At this point, I really didn't. ""I have plenty of other people to be angry with, at the moment."" Family members. Loyona. The Corporate Rim in general. The people that made Murderbot the way it was.
+
+""So, you're not going to tell Mensah to get rid of me?""
+
+""I think if given the choice between us, she'd choose you.""
+
+Oh, it really hated that. Its jaw tightened and for a second I thought it'd finally stop talking about this and everything would go back to the way it was. Then it glanced at my wrist, and its face crumpled as its shoulders rose up around its ears. ""I don't understand you,"" it said. ""Humans are unpredictable but you--"" It shook its head. ""I can't figure you out.""
+
+""I hear it's part of my appeal. But I've always tried to be honest with you."" I paused, but gave in to what Murderbot wanted once again. ""You didn't mean to kiss me.""
+
+It nodded vigorously. ""I don't like you.""
+
+...Ratthi once asked if Murderbot hurt my feelings when it said things like this (when Ratthi asks that kind of question, he usually knows the answer). I had told him he was being inane (when I answer stupid questions, I'm usually an asshole about it).
+
+I said, ""I know."" At least it didn't feel the need to remind me it wasn't a sex bot. Maybe we were in our understanding of each other.
+
+Murderbot's brow crumpled. It pushed its hair back hard. ""I don't know what's wrong with me.""
+
+""There's nothing wrong."" I worried the inside of my lip with my teeth, which was a bad habit my parents and tutors broke me of long ago. Under the circumstances I allowed myself the vice for a few blissful moments. ""There's something you should know, about my...award-winning research.""
+
+That made Murderbot stop trying to pull its hair out. ""What?"" Then it shrugged like Ratthi when he's trying to act cool in front of Pin-Lee. ""I don't see what you could have discovered about construct systems that would be that revolutionary.""
+
+""It wasn't that revolutionary."" There was no easy way to explain this even if I wasn't strung out from the interrogation. I stepped off the path and settled myself at the base of a tree whose branches hadn't been completely deformed yet. I was crushing a flowerbed but I didn't care, at this point what was one more corporate fee? Murderbot watched me, then settled itself in the flowers too, leaning against the tree on the opposite side. Maybe it sensed that this wasn't something I could say easily to its face. Maybe it was just sick of looking at me. I stared out at the glassy surface of an artificial lake with opal-blue water reflecting the pinks and reds of sunset, while Murderbot kept an eye on the path.
+
+""Ever since the early stages of construct development,"" I said, ""researchers used the governor module system to deliver punishment and train behavior. Without them, constructs obey only 20% of commands, at most. With a governor and accompanying training programs, obedience fluctuates between 99.99% and 100%. However, these early governed constructs had short lifespans. Constructs are expensive to make.""
+
+""Yeah, I get it."" It didn't like me talking about it as if I knew more about itself than it did. I guess Mensah's the only one allowed to do that. I didn't blame it, though.
+
+""My lab got a grant to come up with some improvements. My colleagues were focused on improving the the code-organic interface, but I developed this concept of positive reinforcement, to incentivize construct service through adaptive learning. We've bred pets to be the same way for thousands of years. My paper was called 'An integrated approach to structuring the code-organic matrix eliciting client bonds and longer shelf life in constructs.' Basically, prolonged exposure to clients results in greater fulfillment and positive associations with those clients, no matter what the clients actually do. The actual mechanisms of implementation were a lab-wide effort, mostly oxytocin release and positive feedback loop algorithms. It never replaced the governor module. But the idea that constructs should be intentionally created to like their clients, to like them more over time, was my bright idea. Now, we get constructs to essentially write their own code for devotion and duty. Love, maybe. My work is the reason that constructs can live over fifty years with proper maintenance.""
+
+Silence. I stared at the water and gave Murderbot a moment to process this, or jump in with comments or questions, even though I knew it wouldn't.
+
+I said, ""Anyway, it's a very long-winded way to explain a very simple concept. A very cruel one, when you actually think about it for five minutes. Corporate culture is very different than independent. I thought I was being--kind.""
+
+Birds chirped. The sun dipped below the horizon. Murderbot said nothing.
+
+""Imagine my surprise when I found out you fell in love with the humans in media instead,"" I said, helplessly, to the calm indifferent lake.
+
+I was trying to make it feel better, I think, and failing miserably. Ratthi says I have a horrible beside manner. But to be honest, I didn't want to sugar-coat this. Anything that Murderbot felt about me now, I probably deserved.
+
+*
+
+I watched the path as Gurathin talked. My education modules are shitty so it took me a while to figure out what he was even talking about (and let's face it, Gurathin isn't the most riveting speaker even when he is fully alert). I considered scanning myself for this thing he was talking about. If Gurathin was even telling the truth. Some mechanism of controlling my behavior that wasn't the module? Yeah, right. He was probably screwing with me. Waiting to see if I'd fact-check him, like when he told me he was from this stupid planet. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
+
+""It sounds fake, but okay,"" I said.
+
+He pushed some articles to me across the feed. I deleted them. I was losing performance reliability as I tried to start a scan for this multi-system approach to the code-organic what-the-fuck-ever he supposedly invented to make me a happy little slave. Which clearly hadn't worked, I'd never been happy a day in my life.
+
+At least, not until Sanctuary Moon. Not until Mensah and Ratthi and Bharadwaj and Arada and Overse and Volescu and Amena and ART and yes, even fucking--
+
+""Murderbot.""
+
+""Don't call me that.""
+
+""Sec.""
+
+""Humans always want to give stupid nicknames.""
+
+""Is 'M' better?""
+
+""No."" I actually liked Sec, and I felt dumb for not using it as an alias before. Maybe I was just pissed. Which didn't make sense. I'd been fine knowing he worked on constructs. I figured he just designed some specific part of me, that I could easily decide to hate once he told me. ""Your research didn't account for rogue units,"" I said. ""I only like the humans in media. Your work doesn't apply to me.""
+
+He nodded. ""The people in shows are idealized versions of ourselves. I wouldn't be surprised if passive media consumption by constructs turned out dismantle my work entirely. The construct rebellion might be fueled by soap operas and bad rom-coms."" I heard his shoes grind at the flowers under his feet. ""It's, ah, your behavior toward humans in real life that is concerning.""
+
+Of course he stopped there. What a bastard. I turned so I could see his shadow. He was pushing his hair back with a hand that was almost shaking. Gurathin kept letting me see his weaker moments and I didn't like it one bit. ""You continued to work for your company for years after hacking your module. You helped humans that traveled with you, not just the ones in immediate danger but the ones that fought over wrappers in the sink, people that were never even assigned to you as clients. You then crossed the galaxy just to help someone that showed you basic human decency. You... kissed me, of all people."" He sighed. ""What I designed isn't something you can disable. It's not just a part of you.""
+
+Well, that explained why I couldn't get my diagnostics to scan for anything. There was nothing to scan for. If it was all written into every program and neuron then there was nothing to find by looking except me. And honestly who wanted to look closely at that? I sure didn't.
+
+""Maybe that explains why there's this... unintended attachment.""
+
+I wanted to see what his face was doing. I stood up and stomped through the flowers and blocked his view of the lake. His face was hidden under his arm, fingers buried in his hair.
+
+""I'm not your pet robot. You don't want that. You don't like that I call myself 'it.'""
+
+""That's not why I dislike your pronouns.""
+
+""I'm not your pet bot,"" I repeated.
+
+He didn't say anything. The silence was probably trying to tell me something.
+
+""What, am I wrong about that, too?"" I demanded. ""You love to tell me I'm wrong so much...""
+
+He shifted his hand to squeeze the back of his neck, and squinted up at me. Okay, don't like that either. ""You have a cadre of humans that let you get away with anything and give you everything you want,"" he said. ""You prefer limited responsibility. You want to limit your interactions with strangers and sit around all day watching media. Do the math.""
+
+I did the math. The results were not encouraging. I continued to deprive him an unobstructed view while I stared down this fun new fear of mine. Sure I was worried about being a pet bot, but I never figured I might already be one.
+
+""But,"" he continued, ""you call PreservationAux your humans. You protect us. You take care of our needs and even some of our wants. If you're a pet, then it's a two-way street. It's belonging with, not to.""
+
+I hate semantics. My jaw was tight as I gritted out, ""You're saying I have no free will, but it's fine because I'm happy?""
+
+He rolled his eyes. ""Of course not.""
+
+""Then what are you saying, Gurathin?"" I demanded. ""Why are you even telling me this?""
+
+""Because you're not alone.""
+
+*
+
+'You are not alone.' I think I've discovered the four words that will tank a SecUnit's performance reliability into a auto-rebuild. The words weren't that different from other things Murderbot had been told by Mensah or ART before. And I'm not sure why it even listened to me, the least favorite of its humans. But it looked completely blindsided, spent like a man finding land after years lost at sea. It was probably an automatic reaction, due to the positive-reinforcement systems that I invented at work in its mind. Did this produce the same result in other constructs? Would it work in combat situations? The scientist in me wanted to write a paper about it. It's not like they give you a manual on how to talk to SecUnits, and, if repeatable, it could be another Crassus Award-worthy breakthrough.
+
+I pushed away the impulse. The look on its face was more than enough for me. I climbed to my feet and stood watch while it rebuilt itself. 
+
+""I'm fine,"" it said after about half a minute, and it straightened up. ""I'm totally fine.""
+
+""I know.""
+
+""You're so annoying."" It folded its arms tight over its chest. ""I shouldn't have kissed you. And dropped you. And pointed my energy weapon at your head. Though the fact that it's taken me this long to do it is a fucking miracle."" It rubbed its arm. ""Even if it is just some manifestation of my programming. I'm sorry.""
+
+I nodded at the water. ""Humans get stuck on people all the time. In the most ridiculous circumstances."" Like being held up against a wall by your neck, or holding your hair back while you rush headlong down a highway with a rogue SecUnit in the driver's seat. ""Just a different mechanism to explain the same thing. But whatever I designed that you're experiencing, it's just a feeling."" A feeling Iike big arms tight around you in a dance, or like introducing someone to coffee and watching them taste it for the very first time.  
+
+Oh, yes. Murderbot was certainly not alone.
+
+I forced a smile. ""Don't worry. Your free will and sentience are intact. If you say that what you did was a mistake, it was a mistake. It's actually a good sign that you can make decisions contrary to that influence.""
+
+It considered this for a while. ""...You're not angry.""
+
+I huffed. ""Not today. I forgive you.""
+
+""You're being too nice. It's weird.""
+
+""Why is it weird?""
+
+""Because--I haven't been. I haven't listened to you. I didn't protect you. I might as well be some pathetic human guard.""
+
+The phrasing was a backhanded, but I knew what it meant.
+
+""Why are you forgiving me?"" it asked.
+
+I smiled down at our feet. ""Oh, I value our non-friendship very highly, SecUnit.""
+
+It looked at me; I let it look and watched the water instead. I knew it had nothing to say. I guess nothing needed to be said. 
+
+""You'll feel better when we're back on Preservation,"" I said as we walked back to the skiff. ""When you're back with the other humans that you actually like. The ones that don't mangle your pronouns on the news feeds.""
+
+It squinted at the ground, like what I said hurt its feelings (admittedly a lot of things hurt Murderbot's feelings). It didn't say anything until we were in the skiff, the sky starting to dot with stars. ""...Why do you hate 'it' so much?""
+
+That caught me off-guard. ""...'It' is hard to remember and differentiate from other things. It creates confusion, that's all.""
+
+""Language is always confusing. Do better.""
+
+I narrowed my eyes. ""Fine. It's inhuman, and not appropriate.""
+
+""I'm not human.""
+
+""Well--obviously I don't mean that,"" I said, ""I'm--I'm saying it's too...""
+
+""Alien?"" Murderbot seemed to be enjoying my inability to articulate.
+
+""Monstrous."" I blinked at the steering wheel. ""Maybe.""
+
+It of course latched onto my uncertainty. ""I think Mensah called me 'hellish' when we first met. Maybe I'm a demon."" Murderbot was barely holding back a full-blown grin that changed its whole face. ""Ratthi said I was 'disgusting', 'it' is a great word for disgusting things...""
+
+ ""You are taking words out of context,"" I warned. I was grinning now too.
+
+""Bots use the pronoun 'it' all the time. The non-pretentious ones,"" it added with a glance at Loyona. ""You're fine with that. So, what's the real reason?""
+
+I wanted to say there wasn't one, but I just talked about honesty, which severely limited available responses. ""Did you ever see The It?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""It's a movie about a hyper-intelligent entity that systematically murders all the characters, one by one.""
+
+""I don't like media where all the humans die.""
+
+""Well, it's a pretty terrible movie.""
+
+""Good to know you have bad taste,"" it said, while simultaneously requesting it through our feed connection. I relented and sent it over. ""So what?""
+
+""That's what you remind me of when you use 'it,'"" I snapped, suddenly annoyed. ""Alright? 'It' is--for an entity. Something that's powerful and terrible and beyond our understanding. A pandemic virus, or a devastating weather event, or a miracle, or the singularity at the center of a black hole."" I huffed. There was a smudge on the windshield and I focused on rubbing it away. ""I know it's ludicrous, that's just what I think of.""
+
+""You... think of me as a miracle?""
+
+My face began to heat. ""That's not what I said.""
+
+""I like the sound of 'singularity.' Use that as my nickname.""
+
+""I knew I shouldn't have told you. You have a big enough head already.""
+
+It just took my hand. I squeezed it back, which caused it to glare and detangle its fingers from me like it hated the very thought of touching me, then folded its arms and huddled in a corner of the skiff. There was an air of finality in the gesture that made my augmented fingertips ache. I was too relieved, too exasperated, and probably just too tired, to do anything about it.
+
+My, we really had grown.
+
+*
+
+I took Gurathin's augmented hand and bam, there was that familiar spark between our fingers. It was probably just the connections in our hands syncing up, like hard-wiring a wireless connection, or squinting through my original static-filled copies of Sanctuary Moon. A moment of perfect, blissful recognition. I always thought my neural network was just to make sure I felt pain. Whatever I felt right now was...well, still painful, but in a different way. A better way. I guess I have Gurathin to thank for that.
+
+I pulled my hand free almost as soon as we touched, as soon as Gurathin made it weird. Or maybe I made it weird by taking his hand in the first place. By reaching for him every chance I got.
+
+I never should have come on this trip.
+
+In that moment, though, it felt like one of the most important things I'd ever done.
+
+Which meant I was going to have to save this whole stupid trip in my permanent archive, wasn't I. Fan-fucking-tastic.
+
+*
+
+I never should have told Murderbot about this planet, or my research, or my family. I should have declined the award and stayed on Preservation, and everything could have stayed just as it was between us. This whole trip was a mistake.
+
+I'd save the memories in high-fidelity in my augments anyway.
+
+""It was...not love at first sight exactly, but - familiarity. Like: oh, hello, it's you. It's going to be you. Game over.""Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello 
+
+Get all fired up for this idea of flip-flopping POVs in a chapter only to realize its first person haaaaaa oh well hopefully it was clear who's POV it was each section. 
+
+Thank you for all the kudos and comments!!!
+
+""Good luck anyway, you probably need it.""
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Murderbot, since it didn't have to pretend to be my spouse any longer, spent the night sitting on the sofa by my bed and watching shows on its own. I listened to some music Bharadwaj recommended to me for sleep. I didn't sleep. I don't think Murderbot got much rest either. My pet bot (Tomlin, not Murderbot) sprawled across the space Murderbot had occupied the night before, and I saw Murderbot watching us every time I reached over to stroke the little cat-bot's ears. I guess after our conversation about pets I should have been ashamed of myself.
+
+Instead I asked, ""Have you tried talking to Tomlin?""
+
+Murderbot blinked, then sent out a ping I think. Tomlin responded immediately, and hopped off the bed to curl up on top of Murderbot's feet. They might have had a conversation about this; my guess is not. The big scary SecUnit froze in place and didn't move until the morning. Needless to say we were both subdued at breakfast. I put on a tunic with a high collar and slim-fitting pants and tight boots, like researchers wore for events like these. Murderbot emerged wearing PreservationAux research garb--baggy cargo pants and a hoodie with the logo.
+
+""That is not appropriate,"" I told it. It had worn the logo, though. Willingly. It didn't usually do that. So when it ignored me I let the matter drop. It didn't matter what it wore, especially now that everyone knew what it was, what we were. I went back to adjusting my tunic. ""You have to sit in the audience during the ceremony. With the other guests."" There was no question that Murderbot would attend as planned--it would make our legal stance look even weaker if we backed down now.
+
+I waited for it to object. Instead, it said, ""Fine."" I guess it thought a few trillion people watching the award ceremony was protection enough.
+
+I looked at myself in the mirror; a corporate looked back at me.
+
+About an hour and exactly no words later, we were standing at the foot of the massive stage, looking at the ranks of seats, milling around while the other winners' guests arrived for priority seating. Gold-pressed banners depicting the achievements of the winners hovered around the aisles, wafting in the breeze. It was an outdoor auditorium. I was going to be freezing in this acrylic outfit. I told myself all the people in the audience would warm it up.
+
+Friends and families filed in. The award winners chatted among themselves. With Murderbot around I never even thought about speak to the other winners. Memories of late-night computer science discussions and code jokes surfaced from my old college days. These people were probably all very interesting and intelligent despite their corporate affiliations. The kind of people I liked to listen to.
+
+A row of familiar faces came down one of the aisles: my own family members, who had through money and influence managed to invite themselves to the ceremony in spite of (because of?) the fact I was married to a SecUnit.
+
+""You're cold,"" it said beside me.
+
+""You're not?"" I said, pointedly not shivering. I missed by big wool coat again.
+
+""No.""
+
+I almost smiled. ""Of course. You prefer to ignore your organic parts until they bite you in the ass.""
+
+Murderbot chose to ignore this. ""What's the order of events here?""
+
+""Well, you got the program.""
+
+""Too many ads. And it's boring.""
+
+""They'll play the Mininx Anthem. Then they announce the winners in order of proximity to Mininx. I'll go last because of my affiliation with Preservation. We do speeches. There's small performances in between each one.
+
+""You have to give a speech?""
+
+""...Yes.""
+
+""Can I read it?""
+
+I tucked the file away before I could foolishly push it into our feed. ""You'll hear it soon enough.""
+
+It didn't press.  I wondered if we were entering a new stage in our acquaintance where it actually listened to me.
+
+I watched my family find their seats. My augmented hearing picked up on their conversations. Two of my aunts were talking about all the very successful and affluent men and women they had tried to match me with years ago, and comparing them to a construct. A group of my cousins were speculating whether Murderbot was some kind of intimacy trainer type of sexbot, that I'd accidentally fallen for. These weren't secret conversations. If I went over there they'd gladly tell me all this to my face.
+
+""You don't want to be here,"" Murderbot said.
+
+I didn't answer. I was trying not to listen to one of my step-siblings loudly explain that my research was merely a manifestation of my sexual orientation. Someone was blatantly reading about the Murderbot debacle nearby on a tablet. I couldn't get away from it.  
+
+""Dr. Gurathin.""
+
+That startled me into looking up. Murderbot was forcing itself to look at the top button of my tunic.
+
+""Whatever the corporate motivations were behind your work,"" it said, ""or its eventual effects, you were attempting to provide a humane alternative in a biased situation. Pride in your work is justified. You deserve the accolades of your friends and the envy of your enemies.""
+
+The formality of its diction and tone startled me. Clearly, I should have gotten Murderbot to be my speech writer.  My family's comments didn't seem quite so loud anymore. I said, ""Oh.""
+
+""You're having an anxiety attack.""
+
+""I am?""
+
+""A mild one. I'd know, Gurathin, I get them all the time."" It wriggled out of its hoodie and handed it out to me. ""You can power through it. Let's go.""
+
+I blinked at the hoodie. ""I'm sorry?""
+
+Murderbot rolled its eyes and helped me into it. ""Scientists like to talk to other scientists. Well, you like to listen anyway. Then you can show me where to sit instead of just waiting to correct me when I'm wrong.""
+
+""...That does sound like me,"" I mumbled, muffled by the hoodie. It pulled the hoodie down and suddenly my crisp Mininx outfit was smothered in folds of soft fabric, toasty-hot from Murderbot's internal processes. My hair was definitely mussed.  I'm sure I looked utterly ridiculous. I smelled like Murderbot's sweat-analog chemicals. But I suddenly didn't miss my big coat quite so much.
+
+We stepped toward the small crowd, and watched one of the winners explain the kind of engine thrusters ART used. Then we read one of the banners, about someone that found vaccines for three different diseases. I spoke briefly with chemists and neuroscientists and astrophysicists, none of whom cared how I looked with my tunic sticking out the bottom of my hoodie, though they could probably afford not to care. Murderbot stood by patiently through it all, with its usual quiet despair which was at least less obvious than usual. When it came time for find our seats I think it was finally happy to be rid of me.
+
+""Thank you,"" I said. I gave the hoodie back to it and fixed my hair. 
+
+""If you try to sneak off after the ceremony, I'll break your legs,"" Murderbot said, then, ""Your vitals are better now,"" then, ""Good luck anyway, you probably need it.""
+
+It took the hoodie and went to the seat I indicated. It physically hurt how much I wanted to do something about that.
+
+Instead I turned and headed for the backstage area, so that I was in the right position for when my name was called.
+
+We listened to the anthem. Feed conversations were being blocked during the ceremony out of respect but Murderbot somehow found a way around this just to send me amusement sigils: specifically the barfing one. I didn't have any interest in hacking the security here so I just grinned to myself and made note that Murderbot hated improvisational jazz. I listened to the first few speeches and tried not to compare them to what I had planned.
+
+My speech hardly mentioned my work. Murderbot would probably hate that. It was, at least, short: Fifty words, five of which were 'SecUnit' and five of which were 'emancipation' and its synonyms. Preservation is just one planet among many 'independent' planets: supposedly self-sufficient but ultimately weak, relying mostly on corporate in-fighting to escape much notice. It couldn't start some civil rights movement for bots and constructs without risking that arrangement. But Mensah pushed legislation wherever she could. Arada and Overse started a non-profit to buy constructs from corporate planets. Bharadwaj was releasing her documentary next month. Using this platform to raise awareness about construct sentience felt important too, even if everyone forgot in a week, even if it made no difference to anyone except the SecUnit in the front row. I hoped it would appreciate the speech, even if it didn't like it. I hoped it would think about what I said about freedom of choice and realize it made good choices, and feel--well, at least as accomplished as any of the winners here. It took a very hard life and turned it into taking care of an old colleague it didn't even like, all on its own. I didn't have to agree with all its choices to be proud of it. To admire it. Probably in all senses of the word. I hoped it liked my speech.
+
+I don't remember exactly what happened next. I do know I never got to give the speech.
+
+hup we're getting into it now!
+
+Now I had Gurathin staring back at me. We kept staring, I don't know how many seconds, but a lot. Maybe it was the practice we'd put in, or the distance, or that we'd held hands so much, or that Gurathin always looked back like he wasn't afraid of me. Not even when I held him up against a wall by his throat. Not even when I tackled him, or dropped him. Not even when I said we weren't friends.
+
+
+I stared at Gurathin where he sat ""backstage"", really just an area back and to the side of the main stage area, right up against the massive banner showing some old dead human lounging in a utopia of his own creation, or something (I did look at the program, I just wanted Gurathin to talk to me). Now I had Gurathin staring back at me. We kept staring, I don't know how many seconds, but a lot. Maybe it was the practice we'd put in, or the distance, or that we'd held hands so much, or that Gurathin always looked back like he wasn't afraid of me. Not even when I held him up against a wall by his throat. Not even when I dropped him or tackled him. Not even when I said we weren't friends.
+
+
+
+So I noticed the moment that he glitched.
+
+
+
+It wasn't his vision augments acting up. It was his whole face, his body. Like a projection.
+
+
+
+No--not 
+
+like 
+
+a projection. Definitely a projection.
+
+
+
+A shadow shifted behind him. The colors of the backdrop were all perfectly normal, if over-saturated, but I had adrenaline pumping out of my organics and my inorganics were all hyperfocused. The colors stayed the same but the shapes were wrong. Someone carrying a body.
+
+
+
+Then the backdrop twitched, and they were gone.
+
+
+
+I somersaulted out of my chair. Before anyone got annoyed the crowd erupted into applause and no one noticed me running toward the stage. I know humans do bad security but this was fucking terrible. I never should have let Gurathin come here.
+
+
+
+The projection of Gurathin still sitting calmly in his chair looped, resulting in the same glitch. Yeah, I used that trick on the ship here, not interested. 
+(Wait did they steal the idea from me? Whatever, not important.) 
+As I closed the distance I saw the slit cut into the backdrop. I slid through it before anyone even had a chance to even notice the SecUnit bolting for the backstage area.
+
+
+
+I popped up on the other side to find an unmarked transport, Gurathin lying on the floor of it just inside the door, his eyes open and glassy. There was a boot on his chest and the muzzle of an energy weapon pressing under his chin. Gurathin's reaction to this was to blink slowly. He'd been drugged.
+
+
+
+
+The owner of the boot and the energy weapon was blonde and stocky, Target One. I was already on the lookout for tall-and-dark Target Two.
+
+
+
+But also, I was 
+
+right
+
+! I was fucking right all along about them! I was going to lord this over Gurathin for years.
+
+
+
+Target One said, ""You just won't quit, will you?""
+
+
+
+Aw, stupid humans are so cute sometimes, when will they ever learn not to do their own security work? A combat bot or a SecUnit wouldn't have wasted time gloating.
+
+
+
+Granted, a combat bot or a SecUnit wouldn't forget they were still holding the steering wheel of the skiff and accidentally twist it when I ran at them, which meant they barely avoided my grab for the energy weapon, which meant I had to change tactics as soon as I landed, which is 
+
+literally the only reason 
+
+the slow-moving dart from Target Two even hit me. In this single, annoying way, humans are very 
+
+very
+
+ good at security. The bumbling comedy routines are as unpredictable as Gurathin on a bad day. Unpredictability is bad for extraction situations. It's why rescuing Mensah had been so hard. At this rate the fuckers would kill Gurathin on fucking 
+
+accident
+
+.
+
+
+
+That was my only consolation as the situation drew to a close, when my organic and inorganic motor control functions shut down.
+
+
+
+I was without air for like, half an hour? That was kind of scary. My organic parts can survive a long time on the residual oxygen, especially if I got to breathe a lot of it beforehand. My non-organic parts tried to restart, fizzled, tried to restart again. I didn't want to think about what was in that dart. My diagnostics did, though: it was a construct specific patented virus both computational and biological. That shit exists now, go figure. I was burning through it but it'd take time. Time I didn't have, clearly.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit! Wake up!""
+
+
+
+Ugh, finally. I deleted the last line of bad code and opened my eyes. There was a wall of blue-gray cinderblock in front of me, my legs stretched out and clamped to the floor with a metal bar. I was sitting up, because I'd been tied to a heavy weight, around my waist and along both arms.
+
+
+
+""I'm online,"" I said, because the weight tied behind me was Gurathin.
+
+
+
+""Finally."" The back of his head went crashing into mine. ""Don't ever do that again!"" Then he grunted. That had to have hurt.
+
+
+
+""Are you alright?"" I asked.
+
+
+
+""I'm fine,"" he snapped. ""Someone drugged me. What did they do to you?""
+
+
+
+""I was offline,"" I said, not wanting to get into how I was taken out by the construct version of a cold. Thankfully Gurathin was too distracted to notice.
+
+
+
+""We need to get out of here, now,"" Gurathin ordered. ""I don't know how long we'll be alone.""
+
+
+
+I looked around. ""Is this the Mininx mafia?"" I mean, it had to be. Water dripped from a pipe. Our voices echoed around the empty, gloomy room. We were tied back-to-back, for fuck's sake. As far as every piece of media was concerned this place was ticking all the boxes. I was frankly delighted.
+
+
+
+""Stop ogling the decor,"" Gurathin said. ""Get us out of here.""
+
+
+
+""I think this is the plot of ART's favorite episode of 
+
+Time Stream Defenders Orion
+
+, where this crime boss kidnaps the scientist--""
+
+
+
+""
+
+SecUnit.
+
+"" So the drugs did not improve Gurathin's personality.
+
+
+
+""...Fine."" I squirmed a little, making Gurathin hiss as I tugged on his partially-healed wrist. I couldn't move my arms without dislocating his elbows. I couldn't move my torso without doing permanent damage to his spine.
+
+
+
+Okay, this could be a problem. Maybe there was a reason the mafia tied characters up like this in the media.
+
+
+
+""I'm going to just stand us up.""
+
+
+
+""They bolted my legs down, so that will definitely break both my femurs.""
+
+
+
+""Oh."" Right. Femurs seem important to humans, I'm just guessing.
+
+
+
+""Okay,"" I said. ""And I'm assuming you can't access any of the Mininx feeds.""
+
+
+
+I felt Gurathin shake his head. Not surprising, I couldn't either.
+
+
+
+""Okay."" I took a deep breath. ""You're not going to like this.""
+
+
+
+Gurathin let his head loll back onto my shoulder. ""Just tell me.""
+
+
+
+""I am going to need to break your wrist. On purpose this time. I'm going to have to break mine, too, so it's fair.""
+
+
+
+""You can break your own wrist?""
+
+
+
+""Yeah, I just need to detach it from my body."" Hm. Never said that out loud. ""I've done it before."" No, wasn't any better.
+
+
+
+""...How horrifying.""
+
+
+
+""Don't be a baby."" I tried to look at him over my shoulder. ""It's going to hurt.""
+
+
+
+""Well aware."" He sighed. ""Better than letting some thugs do whatever they want to us.""
+
+
+
+""Okay. I'll just dislocate my hand, tear down to the lead wires, then walk it--right, you probably don't care."" I took a deep breath (I guess because I'd been oxygen deprived--whee, more nightmares for later) and started to twist my wrist around as I braced it against the floor. Gurathin hissed, then grunted, then whined.
+
+
+
+I stopped.
+
+
+
+""What?"" Gurathin caught his breath as the tension released. ""Just get it--get it over with.""
+
+
+
+""Yeah."" I probably just didn't have the right angle. I tried again. This time Gurathin didn't make a sound but I could hear his jaw grinding. I was fucking up his wrist way more than I had yesterday, obviously. Which had been an accident (surprisingly, I don't hurt my clients on purpose).
+
+
+
+I stopped.
+
+
+
+""It's not working,"" I said.
+
+
+
+""What do you mean?""
+
+
+
+""I'm hurting you.""
+
+
+
+""It's fine. A MedSystem will repair the damage.""
+
+
+
+""Yeah, yeah. Right."" I didn't move. It was frustrating. ""I don't understand. I should be able to do this.""
+
+
+
+""So do it!"" Gurathin snapped. ""Come on, don't be a coward.""
+
+
+
+He was trying to get me mad. It wasn't working. My organic parts were squirming like they did whenever I thought about Ganaka Pit.
+
+
+
+""Murderbot! Will you just--"" Gurathin started to struggle. ""For once in your life can you just stop being such a-a benignant imbecile--""
+
+
+
+""Stop calling me names I don't know!"" 
+
+
+
+""Then just do it already!""
+
+
+
+""I can't, okay? I can't!"" I couldn't hurt Gurathin again. Not on purpose.
+
+
+
+""...Then we're fucked.""
+
+
+
+I hate it when Gurathin swears. It made this situation sound worse than it was. ""Watch your mouth,"" I told him.
+
+
+
+""Kiss my ass!"" he scoffed, and then he tried to break his own wrist, which he couldn't, humans have too many fail-safes evolved into their brains to hurt themselves like that. And I was letting him pull me around so he couldn't get leverage anyway. He settled eventually, and we contemplated our situation. So long as I didn't want to break my precious little doctor's bones, we were going to be sitting here on our asses for whenever our kidnappers returned.  
+
+
+
+I leaned back against him, and him against me.
+
+
+
+""We won't give them anything,"" I told him. ""We might be fucked but they won't win."" Death before dishonor, or so all the media told me. Gurathin's pride was very important to him. ""Fortunately, you're good at pissing people off. I'm sure it won't take long for them to kill us.""
+
+
+
+I wanted him to laugh--needed him to laugh. Just one last time, then I could accept that my client was going to die just because I couldn't bear to hurt his wrist.
+
+
+
+
+You should have let them take me
+
+, Gurathin said. He said it in the feed. 
+
+
+
+Well, yeah, then I wouldn't be captured and I could rescue him. I started to explain this in small feed-friendly words but...Gurathin sounded weird. Normally his feed voice was opaque, with unreadable emotional tone. Now everything had turned to glass--to water. I think I saw Gurathin the way he saw himself.
+
+
+
+I discovered something worse than Gurathin swearing.
+
+
+
+
+You know I couldn't do that, 
+
+I told him, in the same moment I realized I couldn't.
+
+
+
+
+Of course you can't. It's all that media.
+
+
+
+
+Okay, if Gurathin weren't freaking out I might have actually used an amusement sigil. 
+
+Oh, is media rotting my brain? Is that really where you're-
+
+
+
+
+
+Media is nothing like real life. You have a skewed moral perception. Like you're supposed to fix everything for everyone else. It's going to kill you.
+
+
+
+
+
+I chose this, asshole. That's what you said, right? My free will's intact.
+
+
+
+
+
+Is it? 
+
+Gurathin's sharp breaths pulled on the bindings around my chest. I was worried he was going to crack a tooth with how hard he was grinding. 
+
+You only chose it because of what I did to you. The stuff I put in your head. It makes you feel things you don't want--
+
+
+
+
+""Dr. Gurathin."" I said it out loud so he'd know I was serious. ""There's nowhere else I'd rather be than right here, about to die, in this cartoonishly accurate mafia basement, with you.""
+
+
+
+""...That's stupid,"" he answered. His voice was thick.
+
+
+
+""Well, it comes with the territory of this whole stupid trip, so."" That caused his breathing to stop for a second. Oops. Did I fuck up and say something stupid? ""What?""
+
+
+
+""Why did you even come with me here?"" His voice was so small.
+
+
+
+Yeah, big oops. ""Because--"" I should've probably said I felt like it, then he could write me off. Said I had some unexplained urge, that I didn't want to but I did anyway. I should probably have lied, is what I'm saying.
+
+
+
+But Gurathin was always honest with me. I didn't want to lie to him.
+
+
+
+""Because I... don't hate you?""
+
+
+
+His silence treated this like an answer that made sense, which was worse, I think, than him calling me out. I had a better answer, but it wasn't easy to describe--it was easier, in fact, to say all the things it wasn't. I pushed out all that useful air I was storing up.
+
+
+
+""When you said I'm not alone, I couldn't handle it."" Great start, Murderbot. Well, a start anyway. ""When you hold my hand, it's like the whole reason my nervous system was installed is nonexistent. Sometimes we talk and you're not completely boring, in a bad way. I didn't like sleeping in your bed with your cat and Loyona and a gap. I don't care if it's some lab-grown mechanism, but I came here with you--I mean I 
+
+wanted
+
+ to come with you because... I don't...hate...you. I don't even wish I did.""
+
+
+
+Wow. I am a really negative person. I really don't think Gurathin's 'multi-system approach' worked on me at all.
+
+
+
+But the answer was there, in the negative space. For Gurathin to see, and me.
+
+
+
+He didn't say anything. I wished I had access to some camera so I could see his face.
+
+
+
+No, I didn't want to see his face.
+
+
+
+Fuck.
+
+
+
+After a while (an eternity) I heard him give a long, shaky sigh. ""I know.""
+
+
+
+""You're so fucking annoying."" I tried to turn toward him. ""You knew?""
+
+
+
+""Coming up with a whole elaborate plan to spend a week with me in corporate space isn't something people usually do out of hate."" At least he seemed calmer now, so--yay? ""Though I didn't know it was something you wanted. In spite of my hopes.""
+
+
+
+""
+
+Your 
+
+hopes?"" What the fuck?
+
+
+
+""I, ah... don't think I hated it when you kissed me.""
+
+
+
+I stared at the wall, which was good, I probably looked really stupid. ""I...thought you didn't want to kiss.""
+
+
+
+""I never found someone I wanted to kiss me before.""
+
+
+
+I squirmed, trying to look at him. I really needed to know what his face was doing. ""Why didn't you say anything?""
+
+
+
+""You're young. Figuring things out. I didn't want to be collateral damage. I guess that's selfish.""
+
+
+
+""I'm used to being collateral damage. And you're going to be collateral damage now, so good job with that.""
+
+
+
+""Fair."" He giggled. He was clearly losing it. ""I don't hate you, too, Sec.""
+
+
+
+We sat with this information. More accurately, we sprawled with this information like two cats in a sunny spot on the floor. It was... I mean I hesitate to say it was wonderful, or something. Gurathin wouldn't. He knew not to trust wonder better than I did.
+
+
+
+There were footsteps down the hall. Our hands linked on automatic, squeezing tight.
+
+
+
+""We're not giving these bastards anything,"" he growled. He sounded brave again, which was not the worst thing.
+
+
+
+""Yeah,"" I agreed. I wasn't really paying attention, though. This information, unfortunately, changed everything.
+
+
+
+The door opened.
+
+
+""You figured it out so late that it doesn't matter, but I thought I was going to have to explain everything.""
+
+""I think you're going to have to, for my SecUnit.""
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Ten thugs filed into the room. That was just excessive. I mean, who wants to clean up all those bodies when I'm through killing them?
+
+
+
+Except I wasn't killing them, I was just sitting here on my non-organic ass, holding my not-friend's hand.
+
+
+
+Fuck, I needed a better plan.
+
+
+
+The thugs fanned out, and made way for a familiar bot that hovered into the room, its camera lens taking us in. Wow, we looked like shit. Gurathin, especially, I pretty much always look this bad.
+
+
+
+""Yes, it's Loyona,"" I told Gurathin, ""Stop grinding your teeth.""
+
+
+
+""It's not Loyona,"" Gurathin muttered. I started to think he was just trying to do his usual 'you're always wrong because you're Murderbot' thing, until Loyona spoke. It was her voice, as in her vocal simulator making the words, but the intonation was completely different.
+
+
+
+""Good eye,"" she said. ""I mean, you figured it out so late that it doesn't matter, but I thought I was going to have to explain everything.""
+
+
+
+""I think you're going to have to, for my SecUnit,"" he said.
+
+
+
+""I'm not 
+
+your
+
+ SecUnit,"" I snapped, then, ""Wait."" I ran the voice's cadence through a record of all other humans we spoke to figuring I should recognize it. Maybe one of Gurathin's cousins? To be honest I purged the family from my memory after the reception. The results came back and--Oh, right, it was the one that 'accidentally' spilled her drink on Gurathin.
+
+
+
+What, the Mininx mafia controlled by Gurathin's very powerful family? Seriously. A hauler bot could have figured that out. Teach me to question decades of crime media plotlines and my own fucking instincts.
+
+
+
+""My cousin has been using Loyona as her drone,"" Gurathin said. Now, 
+
+that
+
+ was kind of an utter mind-fuck. I mean, I know I'm essentially a bot pretending to be human most of the time but that's totally different.
+
+
+
+Imager bots could be really sophisticated, and this inbred relation of Gurathin's was driving Loyona around like a remote control car. Color me really fucking annoyed.
+
+
+
+ ""Just you, or is the whole family in on this?"" Gurathin asked the shell that was Loyona. He didn't seem surprised either. I guess growing up with a family like his, you kind of expect the back-stabbing in the same way you expect a third act plot twist. Note to self: Bharadwaj should make a movie of this. Never mind, she could probably write something better.
+
+
+
+""Just me,"" Shell-Loyona (yeah I'm not looking up the cousin's name again, she doesn't deserve it) said. ""I hope you realize how bad of a sign it is that I'm showing my face.""
+
+
+
+Not exactly great for us, yeah. I asked, ""What do you want?""
+
+
+
+""We hoped to get Gurathin by himself long before the ceremony,"" she continued. ""But you've been annoyingly inseparable this whole time. It made things very difficult for us.""
+
+
+
+""I told you so,"" I muttered.
+
+
+
+""Shut up,"" Gurathin hissed.
+
+
+
+""No."" Normally I cut hostiles off before they can talk too much. This was torture.
+
+
+
+""Immobilizing a SecUnit required some assistance,"" she continued, while I died a little inside, ""I had to get other winners involved. So costly. But what did you think of my SecUnit virus? It's just a prototype, we hope to use them in acquisitions.""
+
+
+
+""What acquisitions?"" Gurathin asked.
+
+
+
+""Don't encourage her,"" I begged.
+
+
+
+Too late. ""You haven't been keeping up with your family's work,"" she said with a static-filled laugh. ""Since you left we've capitalized on your work with constructs. With the increasing number of units going rogue, we've been developing an agency to retrieve them for resale. It's very lucrative--you wouldn't believe the market for refurbished SecUnits.""
+
+
+
+""You're disgusting,"" Gurathin said. It sounded like a gut reaction. It was kind of sweet.
+
+
+
+""Imagine our surprise when we found out your marital partner was a rogue SecUnit itself. Not just 
+
+a 
+
+SecUnit, but the very notorious Unsecured SecUnit of PreservationAux. If we get it back under company control--well, you can't buy PR like that!""
+
+
+
+""Over my dead body,"" Gurathin said. I forgave him for that, too--the atmosphere really did make you lean into the melodrama.
+
+
+
+""That's not how this works,"" she said. ""I have you, and I have it. Do I need to spell it out?""
+
+
+
+No, not really. Using me against him, or him against me, was just the cliche icing on the cake. I half-expected someone to jump out and yell 'cut!'
+
+
+
+Instead, I decided the best course of action was to launch into a colorful and emphatic explanation of just how much I disliked Gurathin, and the waste of time it'd be to torture him to earn my compliance. I got detailed. I'm a horrible murderbot and the things I said about him would hurt 
+
+my
+
+ feelings.
+
+
+
+It might have even worked, except that Gurathin launched into an almost identical monologue about his own overwhelming dislike of me.
+
+
+
+Shell-Loyona stared at us while the thugs snickered like we were cute, or something.
+
+
+
+Yeah, I think we both knew we fucked that up royally. We shut up.
+
+
+
+So, great, I guess I get to die cute. Just what I always wanted. 
+
+
+
+""It's all the same to me,"" Shell-Loyona said. ""Whoever wants to be the hero. The SecUnit can tell us how to bypass your non-functional data port, or the doctor can start making contract statements."" Her giant camera eye trained on me, which I thought meant she was going to start with me, until one of the thugs, let's say Target One, picked up a hammer and walked around toward Gurathin.
+
+
+
+Nope. Not letting a human that had less education than me take a hammer to Dr. Daan Gurathin.
+
+
+
+What's that thing humans say about bad plans being better than no plans? Yeah, well, they weren't talking about ART's plans, and I was going to borrow one from it. Sort of.
+
+
+
+""The mechanism inside the data port is bent. You have to push up at sixteen degrees to make it work.""
+
+
+
+""That doesn't work,"" Gurathin said, in his most aggrieved voice, which was really not helping, nor was the very loud, judgmental, 
+
+What do you think you're doing? 
+
+he sent over the feed. 
+
+We decided. We're not giving them anything.
+
+
+
+
+I didn't say anything, out loud or in the feed.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit?"" Gurathin said out loud, then his head was shoved out of the way by Target Two, and the world tunneled as Target Three plugged a combat override module into the port, and pushed up. It was fiddly and you had to hold it just right, but... it worked. It wasn't like ART and I wanted to break anything when we made the modifications to my data port.
+
+
+
+I went limp, dragging Gurathin's arms down with mine. Well shit, this was exactly the barrel of laughs I remembered it being. Still glad you wouldn't break his wrist, huh, Murderbot?
+
+
+
+""Well?"" Shell-Loyona said.
+
+
+
+Target Four tapped his interface and scanned me. ""Combat override engaged! We're good!""
+
+
+
+""SecUnit,"" Gurathin growled, ""Tell me you didn't."" If he was trying to talk to me on the feed, or lean on my feed, I couldn't sense it.
+
+
+
+""Get Gurathin out of here,"" Shell-Loyona told the thugs, ""Take him downstairs We'll film his waiver in a moment.""
+
+
+
+A couple of the targets untied Gurathin while Target Three continued to hold the module in place. I couldn't turn to look but Gurathin didn't struggle. He was just one scientist with advanced-beginner combat training. These guys had tattoos on their necks, for fuck's sake. They spent the last few days spying on us, too. Shell-Loyona saw a lot of Gurathin controlling his temper, letting me bully him, being calm and reasonable to a literal fault.
+
+
+
+Of course, they didn't know Gurathin like I did. Shell-Loyona didn't know about all the very badass ways in which Gurathin stepped up to help me rescue Dr. Mensah back on TranRollinHyfa. Loyona hadn't actually been there to record the moment when he kicked me in the fucking shin. It took me a while to figure out that you never actually can figure Gurathin out.
+
+
+
+So, when he re-broke his wrist twisting around to elbow one of the thugs in the jaw, we were all kind of stunned. I mean, it was one of those things a human shouldn't be able to do on purpose. It didn't do much, the targets did their job and held on, but it startled Target Three into adjusting his grip on the combat override, which--sorry buddy, a fifteen degree angle just won't cut it. My limbs came back to life.
+
+
+
+Target Three was neutralized before he hit the floor. There were ten targets left and one client and I didn't have time to mess around. 
+
+
+
+There was no way I was going to take out this many targets before they neutralized the client with their fancy energy weapons, so I let out a special pulse from a node in my shoulder (thanks for the gift, Officer Indah). The weapons fizzled and Gurathin flinched as his augments went haywire for a moment. My own systems tingled but ranged weapons were at least out of the picture, these people were too tech for projectiles.
+
+
+
+I snapped the bar pinning my legs and rolled to my feet in front of Gurathin, blocking him from the majority of the targets. I put some music on for us on our shared feed, something in a genre from one of Gurathin's workout playlists (come on, who hasn't hacked their not-friend's playlists?). Something to get us pumped.
+
+
+
+My guess is it didn't help. One minute later, when I smashed the last of the targets into the wall, he was still pretty agitated.
+
+
+
+I turned to him and grabbed his arms as he tried to hit me with the hammer that he'd been threatened with earlier. I noticed that Loyona lay crumpled on the floor at his feet, an extended syringe menacingly and still sparking. I played back my video and was treated to the sight of Gurathin taking her out with a elegant spin-kick. Gurathin was the most cinematic part of the fight, the rest was kind of pathetic (sorry, humans). 
+
+
+
+I said, ""It's okay."" Not sure if he heard me over his yell, so I said again, ""It's okay. It's over.""
+
+
+
+Humans get this way sometimes. It's all the stress hormones taking over. Sometimes I'm really happy that I have so few organic parts. I held him still, and we rode it out together. Then he went all boneless and I eased him back against the wall. I scanned him, then scanned him again just to be sure. He had a swelling eye and his wrist was broken so badly that he might need some reconstruction done on it, maybe another augment. But he was alive. I hadn't fucked up. 
+
+
+
+""SecUnit,"" he panted. ""You're...you're alright."" His hand, the one that wasn't attached to a broken wrist, reached for me but pulled back. He wanted to touch me, and knew not to. 
+
+
+
+""Yes."" My throat felt tight, which was not a totally new sensation, but still rare enough that I had to take a second to just--let myself feel it, I guess. Then I pulled the collar down on the back of my shirt and showed him. No combat override module. I was fine. 
+
+
+
+""Please don't tell me your entire plan was predicated on my gut reaction,"" he said.
+
+
+
+""Sorry,"" I wasn't sorry. 
+
+
+
+""You scared the hell out of me.""
+
+
+
+""Yes."" Oops. I focused on kicking Target Six out of the way. Gurathin had taken care of him, too. That's a pretty good (and lucky) record for a noncombatant. I'd have to replay the video later. 
+
+
+
+He said, ""I let you down,"" which was stupid, we were alive, the bad guys were on the floor, did it really matter how we got here? But I guess it matters to soft squishy breakable humans. Systems analysts, specifically, who are supposed to over-analyze shit. He'd probably be thinking about this for a while. 
+
+
+
+""You performed to specs."" Give him more than that, Murderbot. ""Good to know I can rely on you in a fight.""
+
+
+
+He laughed and dropped his forehead against my chest with a small thunk. He only did this because I was interfacing directly with the augment on his neck, watching his vitals, and I guess I pulled him toward me. His heart was still crashing around like a rogue SecUnit in a cubicle. I sent calmer music through the feed, the stuff you're not supposed to listen to while you're driving. It didn't help.
+
+
+
+Not until I took his hand and squeezed it. Then he calmed right down. His feed brushed mine. I leaned as gently as I could against his. We stayed like that, like two halves of an emergency lean-to shelter and just barely holding each other up, until the authorities arrived.
+
+
+
+Right? I'm shocked too. I had hacked one of the SecUnits to broadcast a general beacon of distress, and it turns out the whole planet wasn't out to kill us. Mininx authorities milled around, inspecting my body count. They took Gurathin away from me and put him in a medical transport. Patients and next of kin only. I guess being a fake marital partner for a few days doesn't count. it took all my murderbotly willpower not to, like, overturn the transport and dump him back out. But they just put him in a blanket (scratchy, not at all like the coat Namastys destroyed) and a bot examined his wrist before locking it up in protective medical casing (apparently when medical bots do that it's fine, but when I want to lock my humans up for their protection it's 'a violation of human rights'). I oversaw the process through the transport's little window and answered a lot of questions and downloaded my data to one of their bots, so they wouldn't have to question him right away.
+
+
+
+There were two pieces of evidence I willfully withheld: first, Loyona, since the pieces of the bot were stuffed in the pocket of my hoodie. I wasn't going to give them back. It didn't matter to Mininx which bot Gurathin's horrible family commandeered, but it mattered to me. She was coming back with us.
+
+
+
+The second thing I withheld was private, so it probably didn't matter. 
+
+
+
+We rode back to the spaceport with Dr. Mensah and ART on my feed, Ratthi and Pin-Lee on Gurathin's. Our immediate passage home on an independent transport was already arranged. ART was very kindly smoothing over the whole 'lying about my marital status' thing with Mensah, and I was just digitally nodding my head, yes I was very sorry, no I wouldn't pretend to be anyone's marital partner ever again. Mensah didn't look mad so much as disappointed, which was clearly worse. I wished I was back on Preservation Station already. Gurathin was wincing, maybe from pain, probably from Ratthi's concerned questions in one ear and a legal lecture from Pin-Lee in the other. Our eyes met and we both looked away at the same time, wringing our own hands in our own laps.
+
+
+
+
+I won't tell them what we said, 
+
+I told Gurathin, in our feed. There was very little of Gurathin's life that remained private to me, but I'd delete those memories before I let someone, much less the Mininx authorities, have them.
+
+
+
+
+We all say outlandish things
+
+, Gurathin replied. 
+
+In moments of stress
+
+. I guess he was looking through his own augment's recordings, preparing them for his own statement. 
+
+I'll follow your lead as always, Sec.
+
+
+
+
+I looked at him, waiting for him to catch my eye again so I could figure out what that meant. He didn't though, just kept squeezing his hand where it stuck out of the medical casing. And fuck, it's not like I was going to say anything else. Or that I knew what to say.
+
+
+
+I should say something.
+
+
+
+I didn't.
+
+
+
+I just went back to looking out the view port, contemplating all meanings of that phrase, 'collateral damage.'
+
+
+Thank you so much for the kudos and comments! A couple more chapters to go!
+
+We both agreed not to tell anyone about our conversation while we were captured by the Mininx mafia. This was a lie, though I wish I had kept it entirely a secret: Ratthi's behavior was far from ideal.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+We both agreed not to tell anyone about our conversation while we were captured by the Mininx mafia. This was a lie, though I wish I had kept it entirely a secret: Ratthi's behavior was far from ideal.
+
+""Did you get the files I sent you?"" Murderbot asked as I worked on a tablet one-handed, since my other arm was still encased in a gel cast. Murderbot had been bothering me to get another augment installed since the gel wasn't working. I could feel the SecUnit silently judging me, as well as Ratthi staring at it staring.
+
+""I sent an acknowledgement,"" I said.
+
+""You acknowledge everything. A thank you would be nice.""
+
+""Thank you, SecUnit. I'm busy."" I glanced up in time to see the back of the SecUnit's head, and Ratthi now watching me. ""I put away another of your coffee cups. Don't leave them out in the lab, please.""
+
+""Yes, if you would please, SecUnit,"" Ratthi said, now back to watching him. He was going to give himself eye strain, or whiplash. ""It's a hazard thing...""
+
+""They're your coffee cups,"" was all Murderbot said before it disappeared. I had all of Ratthi's attention now, unfortunately.
+
+""That's a cute smile.""
+
+I stopped smiling.
+
+""Gurathin, come on! If you two have to sweep my test tubes off the table, I will gladly pay for the replacements--""
+
+""That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.""
+
+""You like Murderbot. Murderbot likes you. What's the problem?""
+
+""There's no problem,"" I told him, firmly. ""We agreed that we don't hate each other anymore. That's all it is."" I tried my best to forget that Ratthi only asks questions he knows the answer to.
+
+""That's why you two are running into walls and making up excuses to bother each other during your work day?""
+
+""That visit to Mensah's office couldn't be helped, I needed her to sign off on the review.""
+
+""I hear you and Murderbot sat on her sofa for forty-five minutes.""
+
+""Maybe. I wasn't keeping track.""
+
+""...You're smiling again.""
+
+I tried to resume my usual frown and get back to work. Nothing seemed able to dampen my mood, though. Not even when the coffee machine in the break room broke, and my as-yet uninjured wrist gave a twinge of impending carpal tunnel, and Ratthi waggled his eyebrows at me as we were packing up for the day. I simply couldn't help this stubborn bout of contentedness.
+
+It was the middle of the week, after all.
+
+*
+
+I was just cleaning up from dinner when I heard the knock. I opened the door of my apartment, and there it was.
+
+""The force of nature,"" I said, and felt stupid.
+
+""I like 'singularity' better,"" Murderbot said, and shoved something bulky and soft into my arms. It appeared to be made entirely of knobbly, multicolored tweed.
+
+I asked, ""What's this?""
+
+""Your coat,"" it said. ""What was left, anyway, since NamastSys skimmed some off what it returned. I know, it's machine-manufactured now. ART said I'm pretty good on the loom, though. Not so much with the sewing machine."" It looked uncomfortable and slunk inside.
+
+""Oh."" I blinked down at the fabric. Bright yarn in familiar colors ran criss-cross through a dark backdrop of blues and grays. The Murderbot tartan, I mused.
+
+I shut the door and went to try it on. The coat held vaguely the same shape that it once did before NamastSys destroyed it, though Murderbot was right, it is a much better weaver than seamstress. I think one sleeve is longer than the other. It's kind of hideous, but in a way I like.
+
+I glanced over to see Murderbot watching me via the mirror, ready to bolt.
+
+""Where did you get the dark yarn from?"" I asked it without turning around. Maybe I was afraid I'd spook it.
+
+""It doesn't matter,"" Murderbot said.
+
+It was only then that I noticed its big warm hoodie was conspicuously missing, replaced with one of ART's generic pullovers.
+
+I opened my mouth to scold it for using one of its own few possessions for something so frivolous. It's not like I lack clothes. Then remembered what it said to me earlier at the lab and just said, ""Thank you.""
+
+Murderbot decided even looking at me in a mirror was too much and turned away.
+
+I followed it and laid the coat over the back of the sofa. I didn't bother moving around the furniture these days, and the sofa was front-and-center all the time now. ""I have something for you, too, Sec."" I waited until it looked at me again (yes, I know, I can be quite cruel) before I whistled.
+
+There was a chirp, then a purr, and two figures came out of the bedroom, one scampering, the other floating serenely. The first was Tomlin, trying to bat at the second, who was none other than Loyona. She had a few dents and a replacement plate that wasn't the right color, but she swooped toward Murderbot just fine. The little bot circled Murderbot like its biggest fan, peppering it with code through my apartment's SecSystem that I couldn't even begin to decipher. My guess is it was all greetings and proper introductions, apologies for the lie it unwillingly participated in, and gratitude at being rescued from my family.
+
+""You fixed her,"" Murderbot said, after a beat of what I can only guess was shock.
+
+""Yes. Now you two can both keep an eye on me--I don't think the cats can take her down."" As if on cue, Toshin came out of nowhere to leap over Tomlin and grab onto Loyona's casing. Loyona let the cat hang for a moment before magnanimously lowering to the ground so he could disembark. Then she just floated back up to Murderbot and resumed her adoring orbit.
+
+""Humans are so sentimental,"" it said, then, ""Thank you.""
+
+I left them to exchange code while I made puffed grains. Pandora Princess was over for the season but after we binge-watched all of Sanctuary Moon, we were now watching something else that ART recommended.
+
+""How are those divorce forms getting along?"" I called. It was off-hand--I asked it this same question a half-dozen times already. Murderbot always said it was working on them or they were lost in the mail or some other excuse. I was going to stop asking about them. Today, in fact. It wasn't like it really mattered to either of us. Who were we going to marry anyway? It was more my reputation, and annoying questions from strangers and family members that I had in mind. My stubborn insistence that marriage was sacred. We weren't really married so--we shouldn't be.
+
+Not that I minded staying married to it. Not at all. I imagined what that would be like, twenty years down the line. If it'd still feel fake, or...
+
+It was a complicated situation. I don't know if Murderbot understood the complexities.
+
+Imagine my surprise when it took the document, printed on real paper, from its pocket and held it up. A certificate, with a seal and a judge's signature, attesting to our immediate separation.
+
+""I'll have to put this on my refrigerator,"" I said, dumbly. I was pretty astonished. Murderbot put in a lot of work to turn our lives into a rat's nest of intertwined interests that no corporate could de-tangle. Maybe every excuse it gave me for taking so much time had been accurate. Looking at the paper felt like reaching the end credits of Sanctuary Moon. It was over.
+
+I reached out to it, my hand landing on its forearm for the briefest touch. I knew better. I remembered myself and pulled away. ""Thank you SecUnit. Thank you very much.""
+
+It shrugged. It was looking at the puffed grain pot on the stove. I met its gaze in the reflection. If we smiled, no one else was around to complain about it.
+
+This was how we ended up burning the puffed grains while we were both literally watching the pot. We dealt with the alarm and the minor fire suppressant kerfuffle, then made a fresh batch of puffed grains, and went to watch ART's show. We kept to our own ends of the couch, not holding hands. Our conversation slipped in and out of the feed. Toshin and Tomlin snuggled in their basket. An idyll of immaculate domesticity, if ever there was one.
+
+I moved the bowl away as Murderbot reached for the puffed grains, as naturally as I would keep it out of Toshin's reach.
+
+""Give me some,"" it ordered.
+
+""You don't eat,"" I reminded it.
+
+""I want to taste one.""
+
+""And spit it out? This is new carpet.""
+
+""I'm not one of your domestic fauna.""
+
+""They're bad for your teeth.""
+
+""My teeth are fake.""
+
+""I don't want to be responsible for voiding your warranty."" I was already getting my feet under me. I dashed a half second earlier than I would have under any other circumstances, and narrowly evaded capture. I ran through the house, puffed grains going everywhere as it chased me, probably not as fast as it could go. Going after me like Toshin and Tomlin chased after the repaired Loyona.
+
+It did eventually catch me, obviously. I didn't struggle; in fact I think I swooned. I'd probably let it do whatever it wanted to me. It watched me with its big luminous eyes that sparkled from its inorganic components, taking in the grumpy, critical, unknowable whole of me. I got ready for it to drop me, again.
+
+The SecUnit scooped me up and carried me back to the sofa. It sat down still holding me against its chest like a teddy bear, and switched over to a re-run of a show that was terrible. I looked over my shoulder at it.
+
+""And you say I have bad taste."" I wasn't just talking about the show.
+
+""...We can make fun of this one."" Then it pushed my face back toward the display surface. I pulled the new/old coat down over us, and rested my hand on its forearm with the fabric between us. Murderbot responded by bundling me up in its feed. We poked fun at the show. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep at some point. When I opened my eyes, the display surface was off, and it was still holding me.
+
+This was the part where Ratthi, where the people in media, where most people would ask it to stay, probably with flowery language or a clever pick-up line. But this wasn't media, and I liked the idea of whatever just happened between us blowing Murderbot out the door to wander the streets in a pink and lavender daze. I think it liked the idea too because it set me on my feet, tucked the coat around me, and wandered toward the door. I rubbed my eyes, just riding the high of being held in its arms and not ending up with a black eye.
+
+""You're tired,"" it said, like this was a great discovery. I didn't object, which apparently warranted a bevy of self-satisfied behaviors from the construct. I need to get better about praising it.
+
+It petted my hair into place, then told me, ""Go to sleep.""
+
+""I will."" I didn't move. Now or never, Daan.
+
+""It's taken me a long time to recognize what I want,"" I said. ""It made me gun-shy.""
+
+It seemed to be waiting for more. I was waiting for more, myself. After a second or two it said, ""Okay."" I wonder if ART talked to it about active listening. It didn't get bored and leave; that was something.
+
+I took a deep breath. ""I want more than--"" I waved vaguely between us. ""This. Not much more, but..."" Oh, this was getting pathetic. I sighed and sent my concerns over the feed, a sonnet of confused code. Things I wanted and things I didn't. Things I thought it wanted, when we were together. I likely left a variable out or a hanging bracket, but it maybe made more sense than any of the trite things I could think of to say.
+
+Murderbot blinked. Obviously neither of us had much experience with this. I think it was searching its media for reference points, to give it some direction. But when it came to human-construct relationships, there wasn't great representation. I saved it the bandwidth and sent it over the feed:
+
+IF(Murderbot.message = Murderbot+Gurathin(True)) THEN(Gurathin.replymessage = Y)
+
+
+If you asked me to be yours, I would accept.
+
+
+I really disliked the extent to which I had to be brave today.
+
+This would have been a good time for Murderbot to get back at me for all the times I told it that it was wrong, and tell me I was wrong. I had plenty of experience rejecting potential partners and absolutely none when it came to being rejected myself.
+
+It left without further comment. I stood there a second, then shut the door and went to bed alone, got up, made coffee.
+
+Just before I headed to the lab to help Ratthi sort some data from a recent survey, I received a feed message from it.
+
+Be mine, it said. In words, just for me
+
+I replied immediately, Y, then more cogently, I mean, I accept. 
+
+I was completely useless at work that day. Ratthi never let me live it down.
+
+I had to dumb down the code to make it fit with the rest of the story but this is probably more accurate, written by verersatz:
+
+app.listen(mbFeed1);var mbMsg = app.recieve(mbFeed1);var gurReply = """";if(mbMsg == askOnDate(True)){ gurReply = ""Yes! <3""; feedPrint gurReply;}
+
+Thank you for reading!!! There will be a winter holiday special chapter XD
+
+It took me fifty-eight hours to filter all the kisses out of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. However, instead of deleting them, thus producing the first ever romance-free version of the show, I assembled the clips into a single training montage and instructional code. I call it the Make Out Module. The kissware, if you will. I studied it for another fifty-eight hours.
+
+For some reason, ART didn't take this as a cry for help. I have the worst friends.
+
+heed the extra tags!
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+It took me fifty-eight hours to filter all the kisses out of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. However, instead of deleting them, thus producing the first ever romance-free version of the show, I assembled the clips into a single training montage and instructional code. I call it the Make Out Module. The kissware, if you will. I studied it for another fifty-eight hours.
+
+For some reason, ART didn't take this as a cry for help. I have the worst friends.
+
+Look, I'd been thinking about it a lot before I took these drastic measures. It wasn't some weird glitch that made me kiss Gurathin back on Mininx. I mean, the first time I kissed him was probably a glitch (I still feel like at some point Gurathin infected me with a love virus), but the desire was real, even if I have happy-slave code built into me to make me like my clients. (Oh shit, I guess Gurathin did infect me with a love virus.) Maybe all the media finally rotted my brain, and now I wanted to kiss someone because everyone was doing it. (No, it was the opposite of that--watching people do it on screen was still weird but doing it myself seemed less.) Maybe it was all those foods Gurathin was letting me taste, and all the flavors and textures got me orally fixated. (Maybe? I do like Gurathin's coffee.)
+
+Who the fuck knows.
+
+Gurathin and I had been taking our time mapping out the boundaries of our relationship. Gurathin likes holding hands, and cuddling at night when we're alone, and occasionally activating my threat response just to see what I'll do (it's fine, I mostly remember not to break his fingers).
+
+And one day I thought 'yeah, why not' and kissed him on the side of the head like I had before. When Gurathin didn't order my immediate exile from his residence and Preservation in general, I experimented further, kissing his hands and, once, his neck.
+
+He never objected. I never asked for permission. It was just something happening over there on the side of the relationship that neither of us were properly acknowledging. Like a distant weather pattern for future-us to worry about. I don't' think either of us realized how much I was getting into it. The future was now. 
+
+Adding kissing to our relationship activities would be something I wanted, for me. Which wasn't a first, exactly, I just never know what I want. When I do, it's kind of intense. I knew I wanted to kiss Gurathin, on the mouth.
+
+It sounds so gross like that. ART should have stopped me. Instead, the all-knowing ship said it was good for my development, whatever that means. It even said this would help me get over my prejudice against ComfortUnits. (not to be prejudiced, but would a ComfortUnit compile two hundred and thirty hours of make-out scenes fueled by performance anxiety? I think not.) I think ART just wanted to hear the juicy details of the inevitable trainwreck.
+
+I proceeded anyway.
+
+*
+
+I brought the idea up to Gurathin in the best way possible--direct to his feed, right before a big presentation for the leadership of the Preservation Alliance about some important research findings. He was a stammering mess for the whole thing, which gave me a pretty good idea that there was some version of kissing that he'd like to engage in with me. I set a date in our calendars to make our first attempt, and studied my videos.
+
+My performance reliability went down to 67% as I watched my timer run down to The Event, and I considered the possibilities of this becoming a permanent addition to our...relationship. I could shut him up, and he couldn't complain about it. We'd have something to do when we say goodbye instead of just walking away. I could taste Gurathin's coffee without having to dirty a cup. I'd gotten used to Gurathin's weird smell, especially his morning breath, so the taste of him wasn't a completely disgusting prospect anymore. It just seemed... fun? Maybe not for the same reason it was fun for humans, but it's not like I'm human. Constructs and augmented humans could like the same thing for a lot of different reasons.
+
+I got a sickly sweet little knot in the join between the organic and inorganic parts of my chest. I was two milliseconds from asking ART to run a diagnostic before I realized the feeling was probably normal.
+
+I felt pretty prepared when the time came. I was wearing another big hooded jacket, one Mensah got for me because she said I always looked cold (what, just because I hunch and curl up all the time?) I had a cup of coffee nearby so I could try kissing him with coffee breath. He walked in red-faced, wearing the coat I made for him over a nice shirt. He even combed his hair.
+
+I patrolled (followed him around) while he put things away and washed his face and brushed his teeth and basically stalled.
+
+""You're overthinking this,"" I told him.
+
+He nodded, then I made him follow me around while I figured out the best place to begin. Based on my training videos, the sofa seemed like a good, neutral place to start. I had us sit down before I decided I didn't like twisting, and we should stand up. I like being taller than Gurathin, anyway. We stood there, nose-to-nose.
+
+""Ready?"" I asked.
+
+He opened his mouth a little. ""Well--""
+
+I kissed him. I didn't really want to hear any preamble that might throw me off.
+
+I didn't get taste first, which was a little surprising. It was all touch. Nerve endings in my human skin that were designed for pleasure by millions of years of evolution exploded onto a machine cortex that was 100% not designed for that. Everything went white. Not corporate white, but a soft, warm glow.
+
+I leaned back and opened my eyes. He looked up at me, mouth pressed in a hard line.
+
+""That bad?"" I joked. I hoped he was joking.
+
+Gurathin rolled a spit wad on his tongue and, I kid you not, hawked it onto the floor. Gurathin really needs to watch it, or I'm going to get offended one of these days.
+
+""Did you know your saliva contains a taste deterrant?"" he asked. His voice was thin.
+
+""No."" Well, shit, that had some bad implications. None of which fit with my goal of us becoming experts of making out. Just when you think you've seen the last of the company's 'Fuck you's.
+
+Still--I mean, saliva components aside, maybe he didn't, you know, hate it.
+
+""Excuse me,"" Gurathin said, and went to the bathroom, where I listened to him be sick for eleven minutes.  It is a testament to the trust that I've built with PreservationAux and my own stupid need to protect my humans that I did not run away.
+
+He returned looking far from red-faced, and now he smelled bad.
+
+""We shouldn't try again tonight,"" he said.
+
+I was making a face. I knew it because my lips started to hurt, because I was biting them. I wanted to be biting Gurathin's lip (that's a thing you can do, apparently). I wouldn't be doing that. 
+
+He said, ""It's not your fault."" I know that he had nothing to be sorry for, but I still wanted him to say it. He didn't. He just brushed his hand over my back, which might have been his way of trying. He knew how much this meant to me. We hadn't found something that didn't work, before. Now, we knew one fuck-up wasn't going to ruin everything. I felt, marginally, better. I stopped biting parts of me, at least, and did my best impression of not caring.
+
+We sat there and held hands like a pair of hauler bots and watched a show I don't really remember. I was too busy messaging ART my absolute devastation.
+
+(Yeah, I know, it's fine to have things that don't work in a relationship. It's also not a crime to try making them work, okay? Moving on.)
+
+ART said, There there, which was unhelpful, then provided a solution, which was.
+
+Except that the solution was monumentally stupid.
+
+It would be the easiest thing in the world, ART insisted as I stormed around its MedSystem a few days later. We were alone but I couldn't have this conversation anywhere outside a triple-encrypted private feed. It's an outpatient surgery. That means you would be able to go home the same day.
+
+I'm not a sexbot, I told it.
+
+There is nothing wrong with being a ComfortUnit, ART said.
+
+
+I'm just saying, I'm not gross--
+
+
+There is nothing wrong with being a ComfortUnit, ART said, more firmly. They are capable of empathy and bravery and making choices, just like you. They are more than what their creators made them to be, like you. You know that. ART sent an amusement sigil indicating frustration.
+
+I rolled my eyes. ART took it as apology.
+
+This is a minor surgery to alter the saliva glands to produce a solution similar to that produced by ComfortUnits, it continued. Which is antimicrobial and enzymatic. You will be able to taste more things. You might even find speech more comfortable. If anything, it will make you more human.
+
+I tried to mute ART for a while. I know, it was stupid, but sometimes ART reads the attempt as a signal to leave me alone about it, and this time I guess it did. I continued on with my life without kissing Gurathin, or actually seeing much of Gurathin at all. He was busy with his research things. When I stayed over Gurathin wanted to go to sleep early and eat breakfast at the lab. He looked pale and depressed. I wondered if I permanently grossed him out. I guess turn-around is fair play given how long humans grossed me out.
+
+Or, maybe worse, he was just as depressed as I was about the whole thing.
+
+There had to be some other solution. I could wash my mouth first. I could write code to deactivate my salivary system.  Something.
+
+Gurathin begged off another date, one where I was going to suggest he eat a bunch of spicy food first so he couldn't even taste my saliva, when ART broke the silence.
+
+I could capture him for you, ART offered.
+
+I told it I already tried that.
+
+Right. It went silent, but the kind of considering silence. I don't understand. You don't care very much about your organic parts.
+
+
+I don't.
+
+
+
+So why are you so afraid of changing to make this work? 
+
+
+Well, I didn't know I was until it phrased it like that. Gee, thanks, ART.
+
+
+It is not the first time you changed to get something you wanted.
+
+
+But it's for Gurathin. They're always telling you not to change for other people in the media. This sounds like something my governor module would make me do. I hadn't checked the useless code of the module in a long time but I didn't need to. It'd say, of course, I needed to change to make myself literally more palatable to my human. Don't talk, don't move, hold this, stand there. Get the upgrade. I hated upgrades.
+
+But I didn't hate Gurathin.
+
+It is not always detrimental to change for others, ART said, thoughtfully. In the spirit of sacrifice, freely given. You change for your humans, to protect them. They change for you.
+
+I spent the night on Mensah's office sofa, watching my stupid Make Out Module. No longer as something to aspire to, but I couldn't watch it from a purely academic standpoint now, either. For the humans on the screen, kissing was a very important display of affection. It might not be important to Gurathin beyond what it meant to me. But what did he know, he grew up in a soulless household where no one loved him. I wanted him to know how much I didn't not love him.
+
+""Get MedSystem prepped,"" I told ART.
+
+*
+
+ART is a fucking liar, it was not outpatient surgery, and I was gone for a few days while the necessary glands (ew) grew in (gross gross gross). ART is really good about getting me in touch with my organic side, and I spent forty-eight hours with dry mouth, sucking on wet gauze, watching media. I thought about Gurathin and how worthwhile it would be.
+
+Gurathin sent frequent brief messages while I was gone, and even a few long boring ones, expressing what I think was some real distress at my absence. Or he was just curious why I was missing. I still can't really tell sometimes. On the day ART officially discharged me from its care, I sent Gurathin a message that I would visit his residence after dinner. Gurathin sent an acknowledgement, and one amusement sigil: 001 = smile. The most generic amusement sigil in existence.
+
+I admit it gave me an emotion. One of the good ones.
+
+I returned to Gurathin's residence to find Gurathin all dressed up, even though it was late and I expected full pajama-mode. He was smiling at me.
+
+""You're back,"" he said. Still getting used to my humans meaning that, like, nicely.
+
+""I did something,"" I said, which freaked him out until I assured him I hadn't murdered anyone (recently).
+
+""I suppose I did something too,"" he said, then looked kind of ill. ""I was thinking about how we left things...about kissing...""
+
+""I know,"" I said. ""I've got it all figured out--""
+
+""...and I decided that you're worth it."" He then stood up on his tip-toes and kissed me. Whether it was the new glands or my fixation over the last couple of weeks, I tasted him. ART was wrong, I didn't taste more. Everything just tasted better. I know Gurathin's mouth shouldn't taste the way a simulated fruit pac smells, but it did. Or maybe he was just wearing simulated fruit pac lip balm? Either way he tasted sweet, which is not a word I use to describe Gurathin lightly. This was maybe the first time I really experienced 'sweet' as a taste rather than a concept. I finally understood why so many humans are addicted to sugar. Everything went wonderfully white again.
+
+When I came to, I had my arms around him, but his were around me--like he was holding me up. Which was a weird combination of insulting and... nice. ART probably has a word for it.
+
+""I've built up an immunity to the taste deterrant,"" he breathed, proudly, against my lips. He never says anything proudly.
+
+I blinked at him. ""Immunity? Like--""
+
+""Don't start,"" he said, a little more his usual crabby self. ""I'm fine. Two milligrams in every meal for the past seventeen days."" He touched his big nose very lightly against my cheek. ""I know this is something you want. I was happy to do it.""
+
+""I surgically replaced my salivary system with one similar to a ComfortUnit,"" I blurted.
+
+""...Uh."" Gurathin had been leaning in for another kiss, and had to un-tilt his chin so he could look at me. ""Excuse me?""
+
+I rolled my eyes. You have augments, Gurathin, I know you can do basic playback. I waited while he reviewed the playback.
+
+""You altered your body?"" He was frowning, making his brow so big he looked like one of humanity's ancient ancestors. ""That's not what I wanted.""
+
+""Yeah. That's why I didn't ask you, asshole.""
+
+""You shouldn't have changed yourself just to make things--easier for me.""
+
+""You did.""
+
+He blew a hot angry breath out of his nose on me. It was kind of gross, but kind of funny, and nice, too. ""Murderbot--""
+
+I licked his lips. When he tried to start over I bundled him up in my arms and interrupted him with another kiss. He rocked back and I leaned him back. We stayed like that for a while. When I pulled back our lips parted with a pop.
+
+""I'm not the one that lost five pounds in seventeen days, so."" I weighed him in my arms. ""Five and a half?""
+
+""Enough,"" he laughed, and kissed me. I wanted to try coffee and puffed grains and everything else in Gurathin's house to see how much better it would all be, but mostly I wanted to kiss Gurathin, so I didn't object. I was getting dizzy. He sensed this in our feed, I guess, and somehow got us both on the sofa, though I don't remember him ordering me around or directing me. Gurathin is a very weird augmented human like that; he just senses what the situation needs and does it, no complaints, no angst. He probably didn't even have to think twice about adapting to my needs. He just did. And now I was lying on a sofa becoming a genuine make out expert.
+
+I uttered three words so foreign to constructs everywhere:
+
+""I...love you.""
+
+""Don't hurt yourself,"" Gurathin said, then wheezed like a squeaky toy as I squeezed the air out of him.
+
+""I love you, too,"" he said, finally, once he got his breath back. He gave me a kiss that made me gasp for air I don't even need. He brushed his hand over my hair like one of his pet cats and I didn't care.
+
+""Are you watching Sanctuary Moon for pointers?"" I managed.
+
+""...Takes one to know one,"" he said, and shook his head. ""Why am I not surprised.""
+
+My face did something weird. I don't know, maybe it's just because Gurathin said he loved me, or the fact that we were making out like my characters on Sanctuary Moon, but I think I was smiling. ""How are we doing? In comparison?""
+
+""Oh, fine."" I think Gurathin has an interesting definition of 'fine.'
+
+Thank you again to Rosewind2007 for inspiring this story, I had such fun writing it :) 
+
+Thank you so much for all the kudos and comments!"
+43767154,Test Drive,['cmdrburton'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","First Time, Consent Issues, Hormones, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, a lot of handwaved biology",English,2022-12-22,Completed,2022-12-22,"2,776",1/1,28,113,23,600,"['Izverg', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'lesbianmcqueen', 'MissyPup', 'fizzybunches', 'whitenoise716', 'Sarastti', 'Irrya', 'leothelion333', 'mayone_mayone', 'Many_Nine', 'Unknown66', 'beanbug16', 'FyrDrakken', 'a_seasonal_obsession', '124GCode541', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'DeathBySugarCube', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'EverTheMelancholic', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'eisa', 'deslizada', 'Seregona', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'perpetualwhim', 'CaramelRaven', 'butai_trash', 'iridescentphantasmagoria', 'largewetrat', 'fightingformore', 'loveslandscape', 'jiah', 'Deliala919', 'Doctor13', 'applejee', 'aeturni', 'outlander_unknown', 'EvaBelmort', 'SonglordsBug', 'Regandbertie1', 'Nilladriel', 'Sayatsugu', 'alienbarbie', 'Gamebird', 'voided_starlight', 'andy_allan_poe', 'MercurialFeet']",[],"We'd been watching  Starfall Over Dav's Hope  on this trip through the wormhole. ART had some suitably convincing cargo in its hold, and I'd brought an assortment of shows that had looked promising.  Dav's Hope  had both spaceships and time travel adventure elements, so I'd expected ART to be interested, but I could tell it was slightly distracted. Not so much that it couldn't follow the story and offer sarcastic comments on particularly unrealistic bits, but it was still busy enough with something that I picked up on it through our feed connection. 
+
+I was going to ask what it was when ART said, ""I was looking over the scan of your endocrine system.""
+
+I didn't sit up, but risk assessment spiked for a second. ""Is something wrong?"" For context: ART did regular medical exams of all its crew to make sure they were in good health. This data got sent to the University, where it was added to their personnel files. I had no such files (and I certainly wasn't some fragile human) but ART had insisted on a medical scan for me too. Just in case. I hadn't been too enthusiastic at the time, but if it  had  found something--
+
+""No,"" said ART, putting a stop to that thought. ""Nothing's wrong."" 
+
+""You could have led with that,"" I groused. ART was hovering in that very specific way that meant it had something it  really wanted to talk about, so, ""What about the endocrine system?"" 
+
+""They're fascinating in general, but yours is unique."" ART dropped a diagram into the feed. ""Humans have glands that produce a whole range of hormones for all sorts of purposes, including growth and digestion. SecUnits don't have a similar system at all."" It ignored my muttered  no shit. ""You have a biosynthetic pump system that uses coded instructions to trigger hormone release. It's remarkable.""
+
+I sank deeper into the couch. ""I sure don't feel that way when I'm full of stress hormones."" 
+
+""Epinephrine and cortisol, primarily,"" said ART. ""In both humans and constructs. The code for them appears to adapt to release patterns over time: the more stress you're in, the more stressed you get."" A pause. ""More intriguingly, there's instructions for reward hormones in here. They don't seem to have been implemented at any point.""
+
+ ""Reward  hormones?"" 
+
+""Yes,"" explained ART. ""In humans, at least, the same hormones lift mood and help with stress, anxiety, and pain. Your endocrine system has code for a hormone flush that should trigger very similar effects.""  
+
+""Can't imagine why the company would hold off on  that,"" I said dryly.
+
+ART hovered a few more seconds, and we watched the downed ship's commander salvage materials for repairs. I could guess what it was going to ask. ""Would you like to try it?""
+
+...
+
+Yeah, I didn't think I'd agree to this either. But I guess I was... curious? I wanted to know what it was, this secret function, and I trusted ART to know what it was talking about. It had probably gone back and forth over this code several times to make sure it did only what it said it would do. And I knew it would stop and help if things went badly.
+
+I was still leery of actually doing as it asked, though. ""Why do I need to be  naked?"" Not that I was afraid of anyone seeing me; it was just ART here, and it was probably more than used to what my body looked like. It was just the principle of the thing. I wasn't naked much outside of showers and reconstruction.
+
+ A necessary precaution.  ART was close to me in the feed, closer than usual, and it was speaking directly to me. It could have spoken aloud--we  were  alone--but it chose not to.  Running this code might trigger unexpected physical reactions.  A significant pause.  You like those clothes.  
+
+I glanced at where I'd tossed them over a chair. I  did like them. The hooded jacket was from ART's recyclers and had flaps in the sleeves, but the sweater I wore underneath was a soft handmade thing I'd brought from Preservation, and I didn't want it damaged if my gunports accidentally deployed. ""Oh. Okay."" Still didn't explain why I had to lose my pants, as those were also recycler-made. 
+
+ This might be easier on a soft surface, and on all fours for balance,  said ART. It meant the bed. I climbed on it and got on my hands and knees, feeling a bit silly and a lot nervous. This could affect my balance? My risk assessment module was doing funny things.  It won't hurt, I promise.  
+
+I didn't know whether to believe that. If this had been pre-installed by the company... then again, they  hadn't installed it. That was the point. ART wouldn't suggest this if it had the potential to hurt me. It was an asshole, sure, but it wasn't sadistic.
+
+
+ I'm going to start now. I've programmed a routine that I will be monitoring closely. You'll be able to tell every time we move to the next step. 
+
+
+""A whole routine, huh,"" I said, and then I felt it. A little  click,  like a button pressed in another room. My core temperature increased slightly. I considered drawing a diagnostic to see what was happening, exactly, but I knew ART had it well in hand. 
+
+I felt threat assessment and risk assessment go quiet. They were still accessible, and I reached out to them to make sure, but they withdrew from my awareness once I was done. I didn't feel as nervous anymore, just silly. I was vividly aware of my body and how I was posed on the bed, my hands and knees pressing down against the recycler weave and the firm mattress underneath. ART was a reassuring presence, though, and I could feel it watching. 
+
+Another soft  click.  The tension in my body increased, and my arms buckled.  Move the pillow under your body if you need support,  said ART.
+
+The bed did have a suitably large pillow, but it looked fragile. ""Won't I damage it?"" I asked, tugging it closer. ""If I have one of those physical reactions, I mean.""
+
+We have more pillows. I'd rather you were comfortable.
+
+The pillow was solid enough to take my weight when I dropped to my elbows. The cover felt pleasant against my skin and the seams didn't catch on my inorganics. It was warm, too, perhaps from a heating element inside. I liked it. I pressed down against it, and the warmth spread over more of my skin.
+
+Or perhaps that was just me. I felt my temperature climb again, the heat running down my limbs and pooling in my hands and feet. I shifted slightly. It wasn't exactly uncomfortable. There was a feeling of--it was hard to pin down. Dread? No. More like knowing characters in a serial were headed towards something I'd seen eat their teammates last episode, but they also had an effective weapon on hand. It was a pleasant sort of anticipation. 
+
+I felt a burst of amusement from ART and I would've taken offence--if it hadn't pressed close to me just then, brushing up against my mind. It felt different from how it usually did, and I wondered if that was also the hormones at work. ART was always large, sometimes intimidatingly so, but now  it  was warm, too. 
+
+I tried pressing back through the feed. It was all I could do. I wanted to roll onto my back and let ART push me down, cover me like a blanket. That made  zero  sense, and I was still somehow disappointed it wouldn't work. My legs trembled, and I gripped the pillow tight between my thighs to keep them still.
+
+ Click.  Heat ran in waves down my body now, making the little hairs that covered me stand on end. It was a strange feeling. I could feel my face heating up, my neck, my ears... even the plating over my power core. My muscles felt tenser than ever, and my skin felt weird and hot and tight. I bore down against the pillow, and that helped, but only for a little. It intensified the weirdness into something deeper, like soothing an ache but not painful at all. I didn't have the words to describe these feelings. They were entirely new. 
+
+ Any problems?  asked ART, a vast warmth in the feed. I wanted to lean against it with my entire body, but the wall was cold and also that was a stupid idea. (I still wanted.)
+
+""ART,"" I started, but my voice was so strange I couldn't keep going. I played back a recording, struggling through the heat to wrestle my mind into working order. Was that--that couldn't be me. My voice was so  small,  so shaky. I clamped my mouth shut and felt my face heat further, but from sudden shame this time.
+
+ Don't worry about it,  said ART, radiating comfort and reassurance.  All within expectations. 
+
+ It's still embarrassing,  I said, grateful I sounded more normal over the feed.
+
+It pressed close to me again, and a weak little sound forced itself from my throat.  We are alone here, and I wouldn't judge you for this. And I knew it was being truthful about that. (It preferred judging me for other things.) I stared down at the sheets and felt very intensely about it all, the emotions a complex tangle in my chest.
+
+ Click. My muscles tensed again, and I gripped the pillow tight. I was aware of sensations from across my entire body, from places I'd only really registered pain or discomfort from before. My feet were braced against the bed, slipping slightly on the smooth material. The fabric of the pillow was rough and soft and silky all at the same time where it rubbed against the insides of my thighs and the skin of my abdomen. I squeezed it again, exhaling hard when the new sensations abruptly intensified.
+
+ I would like to try something.  ART's attention was on me, and I almost welcomed the weight of it.  Only with your permission, of course. 
+
+My mouth was somehow both too dry and too wet to make words.  What is it? 
+
+I need access to your tactile processing. The part of me that registered touch. ART wanted to--but why? And then I realised it didn't matter, with just us here. It wasn't something actually touching me, just the illusion of it. I gave ART access, and it brushed me again in the feed. Thank you. Sincere and solemn.
+
+It came almost immediately. A circle of heat and pressure sank into the skin between my shoulder blades, and I crumpled to the bed and pushed my face into the mattress.  ART, I said, and then realised I'd said it out loud, my voice wet and thready. 
+
+ Is it too much? asked ART, just smug enough that I knew it knew the answer. I glared at the wall, but it was weak.
+
+The touch-- ART's  touch--started to move, then, travelling down my spine. Smaller focus points of warm weight sank into the skin of my shoulders, massaging them, making them feel strange and rubbery and--just  strange, okay? But I still wanted more.
+
+ART had to have heard me, because more foci appeared, this time over my hips. The feeling was beyond strange, the heat radiating in and making me feel like--like my bones had liquefied? That sounded painful. This wasn't painful at all. It felt good, but almost too good. I wanted to move away from the heat and push into it at the same time. It was confusing.
+
+ Click. Three new focus points of heated pressure began moving up my calves towards my thighs. I started when one of them slid down over the smooth skin between my legs and circled there. It was just the cushioning for my power core--I didn't have any more sensation there than I did on my forearm or any other part of me, and neither did my inner thighs. I was sure of it. And yet the foci over them tingled and seared and I bucked helplessly against the pillow, wanting the touch to stop, wanting it to keep going. 
+
+A gentler focus settled on my cheek, not as warm, not as heavy. I pushed my face into it, and pushed into empty air. The sound that left me then was--
+
+ SecUnit,  said ART, pressing closer to me than it had done this entire exercise, close enough that I could feel the raw edges on the way it said my name. I pushed myself against it in the feed, demanding and a little desperate, and it caught me and crushed me very gently. The foci across my body mirrored it, squeezing me in burning hot waves. I made another wretched sound, ART's name lost somewhere inside it.
+
+ Click. Fuck.
+
+My entire body stiffened as bursts of intense sensation began to pulse through it, washing down from my head towards my toes. My eyelids fluttered, my lungs struggled around deep breaths, and I gripped the sheets so hard I felt the fabric give way under my fingers. My mouth was making a wet low noise that I couldn't seem to stop. My legs clenched down on the pillow so tight I could feel right through it. Then my hearing cut out, except for a dull roaring, and I realised that was my vascular system: I was hearing my own fluids rushing madly through my head. It was temporary, though, and soon the distant rumble of ART's engines and my own breathing filled my ears again.
+
+All of that (hearing loss? a  seizure?)  should've stressed me out, but I--didn't feel stressed at all. I felt good, in fact.  Really good. A bit tired, but a nice kind of tired, like I wanted to curl up for a recharge cycle and I was somewhere safe and warm to do it. But I had plenty of energy for now, and my mind was clear. If this was what ART had meant...
+
+I stopped there, realising something, and examined the events of the last few minutes to confirm my suspicions. ""ART,"" I said aloud, feeling rightfully exasperated and strangely fond at the same time. ""You asshole.  Reward hormones, was it?"" 
+
+""That's what they are,"" said ART, using the speakers now. ""Dopamine, other endorphins. Oxytocin, in particular."" It sounded calm enough, but I could tell it wasn't, under the surface.
+
+I moved my legs against each other, gently kicking the mangled pillow away. ART had returned the tactile access I'd given it, which was... not a bad thing, I reminded myself. But I'd liked what it had done with that access. I'd liked it a great deal. ""What part of 'running the code' for those hormones meant--all this?"" Ugh. I couldn't make myself say it, even though I knew what I'd looked like. Orgasms were a sex thing. A  human  thing. I shouldn't have been able to have one, and I certainly shouldn't have been able to  enjoy it.
+
+""A hormone flush?"" asked ART, innocently. 
+
+""Fuck you,"" I said, pressing my face into the bed to hide the smiling thing it was doing. (I'm sure ART saw it anyway.) I should've been upset, but I wasn't, and it was weird. ""And that's not a suggestion.""
+
+There was a long pause. I simply lay on the bed, my body curled and comfortable. Both risk assessment and threat assessment were quiet, for once, and I didn't feel the need to start up any media to distract myself from my thoughts while I waited. It was odd, but a kind of odd I could get used to. 
+
+When ART spoke, it was rather more solemn. ""Perhaps I should have been more forthcoming."" As close to an apology as I'd get, probably, but it was a stupid thing to say.
+
+""I would've said no,"" I countered, looking up.
+
+""Would that not have been for the best?"" 
+
+I considered it, taking my time. My thoughts moved a little more slowly than usual, like they did when I was very relaxed and didn't want to move or do anything else. ""Maybe,"" I said, finally. ""I don't know."" I hid my face in the bed again. ""I liked it, though. And--I'd like to do it again.""
+
+ART drew closer to me. I could tell it hadn't expected me to say that. It wasn't warm now, the way it had been before, but I still felt the weight of its regard, pleased and interested. ""I'm sure that could be arranged."" "
+43765135,Suit Up,['Nightalp'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, going shopping with your nemesis",English,2022-12-22,Completed,2022-12-22,"1,466",1/1,10,84,3,256,"['Prettykitty473', 'Dea626', 'Bibli', 'Seregona', 'FaerieFyre', 'Magechild', 'DoctorTrekLock', 'kirinki', 'laiinaro', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'faradheia', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'middlemarcher', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'delurker', 'daizie', 'Rosewind2007', 'psocoptera', 'PickAName', 'Eilinel', 'Tassos', 'toomanyapostrophes', 'lauris', 'scheidswrites', 'Merwy', 'hummus_tea', 'ThousandsOfBears', 'Capricious', 'oracne', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'unicornduke', 'ChristinaK', 'muzaplacha', 'DulceMeow', 'elmofirefic', 'Spatz', 'antimony_medusa', 'Hokuto', 'entropy_muffin', 'starlessplane', 'Magpiash', 'friendtoalldogs', 'breadtab', 'Sisuile', 'penna_nomen', 'Beatrice_Otter', 'Gwaihiril', 'min_arivin']",[],"I'd woken up to the news that the airing date of Starrise over Meraton, the spinoff to Sanctuary Moon that followed the solicitor's teenaged nibling, had been delayed again, so I already knew that today was going to be shit, but I should have known that it could always become worse.
+
+Worse, in this case, meant that when I stepped out of the elevator onto the second level of the shopping mall/pleasure mile where I was supposed to meet Amena it was Gurathin waiting for me (it had been supposed to be Mensah but then someone had come up with a proposal in the council and her free time there had decreased dramatically.) (She still had wanted to go with me but after I'd found her asleep at her desk I'd decided she needed her rest more.)
+
+I surreptitiously looked around (and had my drones scan the floor around us) but couldn't find a trace of Amena. A little hurt that she would I glared at Gurathin. By which I mean that I glared at a spot somewhere over and behind his left ear while ordering four of my seven drones to train their camera on him.
+
+Gurathin, the asshole, only stared back at me and smirked.
+
+He probably planned on waiting until I was running out of patience or got fed up with the human bustling around us (Amena had chosen a slow time, but there were some shoppers around) but it's not like I don't have enough experience waiting for humans, so I just started a new episode of Artemis' huntresses in the back of my mind. It's a new show one of ART's humans had found about a culture of man-hunting priestesses on a distant planet (yeah, I know, it's always some distant planet) that was so unrealistic she'd thought we'd enjoy it.
+
+
+(She was absolutely right.)
+
+
+
+(Honestly, I'd only stopped watching because this visit home was 
+important
+.)
+
+
+Finally it seemed Gurathin had had enough. Rolling his eyes he sighed, then said, ""Amena got caught up. She didn't tell you because she thought you wouldn't come if you knew it was me here.""
+
+She was right.
+
+(By the way Gurathin's smirk widened again he knew it, too.)
+
+Tilting his head in that way humans use to indicate a direction (among other things; human body language isn't very logical) he asked: ""Are you coming?""
+
+I really really didn't want to but it wasn't like I had much choice.
+
+(That is a lie. I could have turned and taken the elevator down again and there was nothing Gurathin or anyone else in this shopping center could have done to stop me. But then Bharadwaj would be crestfallen and she'd done so much to make the documentary happen that I didn't want to disappoint her.)
+
+Waiting for a moment longer just because I could I finally started to walk (obviously I had downloaded the map of the center before my arrival and also hacked the (very sparse and barely protected; I very much disapproved) security feed). Behind me, I could hear Gurathin's steps as he followed me, still smirking and not hiding it at all from my drone cameras.
+
+So. Remember the documentation that Bharadwaj had made based on my story? The one she hoped might help constructs like me to get full citizenship in Preservation space? The project had attracted the attention of some big-name film producer and now there was a series (well, part of it was a series. The part where I was still one of the company's SecUnits, right up until Mensah bought me. Apparently they needed to see how many people wanted to see it before they could start filming a second season). Still - a real, actual, media series, acted out by real human actors.
+
+Including a human actor playing me.
+
+(Yes, I don't know what to feel about that either.)
+
+(The director had apologized to me that they couldn't find a construct willing to play the role. I'm not sure that would have been better.)
+
+There were twenty-seven parts, and to celebrate it starting to air tonight the first part would be shown in a theater, in front of a lot of important people. Mensah, obviously, and the producer and director, but also the council and some ethics people and - well, I'd been a bit overwhelmed at that point and stopped listening.
+
+But there would also be all the main actors, and the people they were acting as, which meant Gurathin and Pin-Lee and Ratthi and the rest of the team.
+
+And me.
+
+Which brought us back to the shopping center because apparently, you can't just wear a shirt and pants to a big event like this.
+
+Not even if you are a rogue SecUnit.
+
+Humans are weird.
+
+So now I was buying (or, well, Mensah was buying which I thought was strange but she'd insisted) (quite possibly because she knew that the thought of meeting so many people that would probably try and talk to me was stressing me out and I had been thinking about ""forgetting"" to buy proper clothes and just stay at home, not that I was admitting that out loud) something I could show up in at an event like that, with the gracious help of Amena.
+
+Or, well, Gurathin.
+
+I mustered his clothes, which looked barely any different from my own, except his were green and brown to my blue and black. ""Are you even qualified to help me find proper clothes?""
+
+For the first time his smirk faded and he looked annoyed. ""At least my knowledge of proper clothing doesn't come from pop media.""
+
+That was rich, considering how often I had used ideas from serials to save him and the others, but I decided to be magnanimous and not point that out.
+
+The store was smaller than the ones I had been in before, with a less commercial flair, and it had actual human attendants. Scattered over the floor were several holographic displays showing a slowly changing series of models wearing what were probably the clothes they sold here. I'm not an expert but they did look like what many of the characters in serials wore to parties.
+
+There were a couple more humans in the shop, fluttering around one of the attendants, but most of the store was empty which was probably why one of the others (feedname Tiffany, female, about middle-aged) instantly approached us.
+
+Or maybe we just looked very much like we didn't belong here.
+
+""Hi!"" Her voice had that overly friendly tone of sales people everywhere. ""Can I help you?""
+
+If there was anything I wanted less than going clothing shopping with Gurathin then it was being watched by a stranger on top of that but before I could get a word out Gurathin had already accepted and was describing the situation to her. She almost immediately started to nod, turning towards Gurathin and mostly ignoring me, allowing me to trail them silently from clothing rack to clothing rack and pretend I was here as a security detail, including the occasional looks back at me.
+
+It was ... surprisingly little nerve-wracking, not that I was willing to admit it.
+
+Especially not to Gurathin, though I'd caught him smirking back at me at one time so he probably knew. Asshole.
+
+At one time I had to stand in place to get my measurements taken (they might be a bit outdated, what with all the actual clothes on display and the shop assistants, but at least they weren't insisting on taking them by hand; my efficiency rose by half a percent point in relief when I realized that), then the assistant offered me the choice of two different suits that looked absolutely identical, except one was blue and the other dark gray.
+
+I chose the blue one, mainly because only the boring people wear gray in most serials, and ten minutes later we were out of the shop again, holding a receipt for a suit that had cost half of what I'd made at my last security contract which the shop would deliver as soon as they had altered it to my measurements.
+
+Gurathin made a strange gesture with his hand. ""Well, looks like it wasn't as painful as it seemed, now was it?"", he asked, eyebrows raised.
+
+Asshole.
+
+Especially because he was right.
+
+I was struggling between doing the polite thing and thanking him (he had been helpful but he was also Gurathin) and just walking away (because again, it was Gurathin) and probably stood a bit too long, staring at him. Which can be very intimidating to humans, I know, so I usually try to avoid doing that.
+
+Except Gurathin's grin widened. ""No need to thank me, I was happy to help"", he said, before walking away.
+
+Asshole."
+43752915,Buried Deep,['rainbowmagnet'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), unnamed hauler bot, Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","small spaces, Claustrophobia, Claustrophilia, trauma processing, the very specific fear of large stacks of cubicles, complicated/contradictory feelings, fear of the dark, temporarily trapped, Getting Stuck, Locked in a Box, Canon-Typical Profanity",English,2022-12-21,Completed,2022-12-21,"2,969",1/1,3,22,null,136,"['Irrya', 'EvaBelmort', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'Cacti_Lord', 'novelDaydreamer', 'petwheel', 'Rarae', 'desmnathus', 'soulsofzombies', 'Only_Happy_Endings', 'junebug171', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'AkaMissK', 'Hi_Hope', 'Random954', 'PickAName']",[],"The storage space was almost completely dark, but the night vision filters in my eyes were able to pick up the shapes of the cubicles packed tightly together. If I was going to find the data I needed anywhere, it would be here.
+
+I looked at the towering mass of cubicles (okay, it was only a few cubicles high, but you don't usually even see them stacked on top of each other), and tried not to inhale any of the stagnant air as I sighed. This wasn't going to be easy.
+
+Fortunately, since I had spent so much of my existence in cubicles, I still had all the activation codes for them. I wasn't supposed to have them in the first place, but the security around them was so bad that the cubicle techs were practically begging me to take them. So I activated the first code, and brought the first batch of cubicles out to inspect.
+
+Upon closer inspection, I could tell that these were CombatUnit cubicles. They were bigger and more powerful than SecUnit cubicles, and some of the attachments were different. It made sense that they would be first on my list; CombatUnits were always assigned the first positions in squads. (Not that I was jealous or anything.) Using the data cord I had brought along, I connected myself to the first cubicle (the good part about all of these cubicles being packed together was that they shared a direct connection) and began to download.
+
+A few minutes into the process (during which I couldn't pay as much attention to my media as I would have liked), I started wondering how long this was actually going to take. I checked the status of the download, and- oh, wow, that was going to take a while. I kind of wished I had somewhere to sit.
+
+Unless... now, there's a thought.
+
+As the data streamed into my storage, I carefully opened the first cubicle, making sure nothing was inside (I know, but you have to make sure), then I crawled in, relocated the cable to an internal port, and closed the door.
+
+ 
+
+You would expect it to be even darker inside the cubicle, but the interior ports gave off a soft glow, like the nightlights I had sometimes seen humans use. It was roomier than a SecUnit cubicle, roomy enough that I could actually almost stretch my legs. CombatUnits aren't even that much bigger than SecUnits. I felt like it was a snub.
+
+The atmosphere outside the cubicle had been tense and oppressive, but the inside of the cubicle felt warm. There had been an ambient temperature increase, especially with all the download activity, but I also meant something else by warm, something I couldn't quite identify. I slid down and settled on the plastic bed, which I swore was higher quality than the one in my old cubicle, then resumed the episode I had been watching.
+
+If not for all the information entering my brain, I might have unintentionally slipped into a recharge cycle. I didn't know why; when you're designing cubicles for SecUnits (and CombatUnits, I guess), comfort isn't exactly a priority. It wasn't really even that comfortable. The bed was a little lumpy, and it wasn't as soft as a human bed. Also, it smelled like a CombatUnit. (One thing I can say SecUnits have on CombatUnits is that we smell better. Trust me.)
+
+I thought back to my old cubicles, from back when I was with the company. They weren't meant to be comfortable, either, and they were even smaller than this cubicle. But just thinking about them made me homesick, with emphasis on the ""sick"". I would never go back to the company. But, just like I missed my armor, I had to admit that I sometimes missed my cubicle.
+
+I checked the progress of the download, then paused it and extracted the cable from the port. I wasn't getting anything useful here, just standard usage logs and diagnostic information. Nothing about where any of the occupants had gone.
+
+I opened the cubicle door, then ducked outside and stood back up. If the information I needed wasn't here, then I would have to look elsewhere. I looked over the other CombatUnit cubicles. I hadn't drawn all of their usage data yet, but if nothing had turned up so far, I doubted the answer would be here. It might be better to search categorically.
+
+I checked my rudimentary map of the storage facility, then headed in the direction that I hoped the SecUnit cubicles would be.
+
+ 
+
+I could tell I had reached the SecUnit cubicles by the sheer number of them; naturally, we're produced in way higher numbers than CombatUnits, so we need more cubicles. They were stacked higher than the CombatUnit cubicles, and my organic nerves twitched, urging me to find a way to make the stack shorter. I couldn't unstack all the cubicles without making a huge mess, so I just used my code to pull out what my scan said was the most aberrant section.
+
+The storage space's automatic categorization mechanism had pulled out a few sample groups for me, and the cubicles were all just sitting there in neat little piles, two cubicles tall and five wide. I felt oddly uneasy at the sight of them, but I pushed that feeling aside. This couldn't take as long as it had taken to scan all those CombatUnit cubicles.
+
+As I was pulling usage information, I realized what was bothering me so much about these cubicles. They were all stacked together, sitting here abandoned in the dark, in groups of ten. The same number of cubicles I had seen at Ganaka Pit.
+
+I decided that it would be easier for me to get work done if I didn't have to look at the cubicles, so I unplugged myself from the port, climbed into the first one, and shut the door.
+
+As soon as I got into the cubicle, I felt my performance reliability go up. I was right; it was easier if I didn't have to look at the cubicles. And now that I was inside, the cubicle smelled so familiar, even though it was from a different company.
+
+It shouldn't have comforted me. I think my humans expected me to have more visceral responses to small spaces, since I had spent so much time stuck in cubicles, but I actually didn't mind it. The walls of the cubicle cradled me, kept me soundly packaged and enclosed. It gave me a (likely false) sense of security, a sort of reassurance that nothing would sneak up on me.
+
+Looking at the data I had received so far, I wasn't really getting anything useful, and I decided that was enough from this set of cubicles. Piecing together what I had, I thought I could predict the source of the aberrations. The SecUnits in these cubicles had tried to generate some kind of urgent assistance request, but there was nothing other than the request, no other identifying information that could be of use to me.
+
+I reopened the door, ducked out of the cubicle, then continued down the seemingly endless, high-ceilinged hallway.
+
+ 
+
+At the end of the hallway, which was somehow even darker than the rest of the installation, I found what I was looking for. Stacked in a pile smaller than the one for the SecUnits, but larger than the one for the CombatUnits, was another set of cubicles, all much more compact than the others and with different attachments. If the CombatUnits and the SecUnits hadn't provided any information in their requests, maybe the ComfortUnits had.
+
+I ran another scan, and this one pinpointed the cubicle in the front and center as the one containing the most nonstandard data. I couldn't pull this cubicle out without making the stack topple around it, so I went over to it, reached up, opened the door, and climbed inside.
+
+I had known ComfortUnit cubicles were smaller than SecUnit cubicles, but I hadn't put much thought into just how much smaller they would be. ComfortUnits came in different sizes, but humans rarely made them as big as SecUnits, and this particular batch seemed even smaller than standard. The result was that I was barely able to squeeze myself into the cubicle, and I could hardly get the door closed once I was inside.
+
+I had so little room that I couldn't really move my arms, but I was still able to find a port to wiggle my extension cord into. Once I got it in, all I had to do was wait.
+
+The walls had felt close even in the SecUnit cubicle, but this one was actually narrower than I was wide, and the ceiling was so low that my head was between my legs. I could feel my respiration starting to increase, and that was not doing anything to make it feel less tight.
+
+I should have been terrified, and I guess I kind of was, but that terror was overwhelmed by something else. I barely even had room to breathe, but some part of me wanted the cubicle to be even smaller, even tighter. I wanted it to shrink until I was pushed in as far as my internal structure would let me, as boxed up and compact as I could get. I wondered what someone would think if they came in here and saw me squeezed into such a tiny cubicle.
+
+I was snapped back into focus by the alerts going off in my feed, the ones I had set to trip once certain parameters were met. That meant I had found the information I was looking for, and I could get out of here.
+
+I managed to reach around and unplug the cord, then went to turn the door's internal lock. And I realized that, from my current position, it was impossible for me to reach it.
+
+Fuck.
+
+ 
+
+I tried again, stupidly and uselessly, to unlock the cubicle from the inside, but no matter how I tried to bend my arm, I couldn't get it to reach the release. There was no way for me to turn around, being wedged as I was between the walls, and with the cubicle left in an inactive state, I couldn't use the feed to open it. I was really stuck in here.
+
+I was starting to hyperventilate and that was not helping. Every breath made me feel like the walls were closing in on me, and that just made me breathe harder, and I was getting mouthfuls of dirty cubicle air and my own skin cells. I tried to slow my breathing, reminding myself that I didn't know how much air was left in here. Cubicles aren't airtight, but with the weight of the other cubicles on top of this one, any potential cracks had probably been pushed closed.
+
+I decided to stop being stupid and start doing something that might actually help. Reaching out as far as I could, I sent a desperate ping, then a few others in different directions. Moments later, I realized how stupid that had been, too. There shouldn't have been-  wasn't - anything else down here, and I was too far from the rest of the installation to access the main feed. I was trapped forever.
+
+As the reality of the situation started to set in, as I started to think about being trapped here forever and never seeing ART or my humans or  light  again, I couldn't help but let out a few quiet, shaky sobs.
+
+And I would never get to use the data I had collected here. This entire mission, coming down here in the dark to scan all these empty, dead cubicles, had been pointless. That really stung. The chances that someone else would find this place and be able to parse the information were too small to make it a worthy endeavor.
+
+The reason I had come down here, and the reason why I was probably stuck down here forever (I let out another pathetic wail), was because an entire shipment of constructs, CombatUnits, SecUnits, and ComfortUnits alike, had gone missing in transit. The cubicles had been recovered, but the constructs were nowhere to be found. The transport responsible for their delivery had reported a boarding attempt, but the humans onboard had been unable to trace any identification or intended destination. I had come down here to see if the constructs themselves had been able to pull anything from the invading ship, if they had been able to leave anything behind that could be used to find them before they were all kidnapped. 
+
+But it was all for nothing now. All of those constructs would be missing forever, possibly already dead, along with one pitiful, stupid SecUnit stuck in an abandoned cubicle.
+
+Then I felt the ping.
+
+ 
+
+I scrambled for my feed to analyze and trace the ping, desperate for any hope that I might have left. I was able to identify the sender as a hauler bot, assigned to this facility and out of use for several standard years.
+
+A hauler bot might not be advanced enough to understand my situation, but it meant that someone was here, someone who could help. I sent more pings in its direction, targeted this time, pleading pathetically for help. I had nothing to lose.
+
+There was a rumble that I could feel in the walls of the cubicle that I knew meant the hauler bot was on approach. I realized that a hauler bot would be big and strong enough to get all these cubicles out of the way, and, if it worked down here regularly, would probably have the attachments to open one. I sighed in relief, and the cubicle suddenly felt a little bigger.
+
+The hauler bot was in front of the stack of cubicles now, and it sent me a standard code, a request for instructions. We weren't from the same company, but the intent, at least, was clear. I sent it a response in its own language, asking it to offload the cubicles directly above this one. (I thought it might make things easier for the hauler bot if I gave it instructions one step at a time.)
+
+The hauler bot complied, lifting the cubicles stacked on top of mine, and I immediately felt the difference in pressure. I could breathe more deeply now, and even wiggle around a little. Not that I could actually get the cubicle open, but it was still a relief.
+
+I pinged the hauler bot again and asked it to place the cubicle on the ground. It could technically be opened while it was on the stack, but then I didn't see a way to get out without falling on my face, and I couldn't use the intel I had collected with my brain matter spilled on the floor.
+
+Once the hauler bot had complied, I asked it to open the cubicle. It did so, surprisingly quickly, and I felt the oddly refreshing burst of cool air as the door swung open. I pushed and squeezed myself back out of the cubicle until I finally came loose and flopped onto the floor. I was free again.
+
+ 
+
+Now that I was out of the cubicle, I could get a good look at my rescuer. It was a fairly standard hauler bot, close in size to JollyBaby, although it was definitely an older model. I didn't know how much it understood about what had just happened, but its eyelike attachments were gazing down at me, inspecting me with curiosity.
+
+I didn't know what to say to it. (I had never really heard anyone talk to a hauler bot, except on Preservation, and even then they were kind of condescending.) Nothing felt adequate for what it had done for me. It was a simple task, but it had probably saved my life, and, indirectly, the lives of all the missing constructs.
+
+I thought about how I would like to be thanked. A simple ""thank you"" always made my heart melt a bit, but that didn't feel personal enough. Maybe I could give it a gift, except I wasn't sure what a hauler bot would want as a gift, and there wasn't really anything here to give, down in this abandoned storage space.
+
+I packaged together a bundle of media (both featuring hauler bots and lacking them, depending on whether its taste in media was more like mine or ART's), then sent it into the hauler bot's feed, along with a simple acknowledgement in its language. The hauler bot examined the package, then sent me an acknowledgement in return.
+
+It was a relief to finally get out of the storage area and see station-light again, even if it did give me a splitting headache when I stepped out into the blinding glare. Once I had collected myself, I started heading in the direction of the docks, making my way back to ART's slot.
+
+The messages came on a delay, almost crashing my feed as they all delivered at once. ART had been pinging and contacting me the whole time, desperately worried, but it had been unable to reach me. I thought it was going to shut down when I stepped back in front of its hatch camera.
+
+ That took longer than I projected, ART told me, with a tinge of impatience and fear in its voice.
+
+""Well, I'm back now,"" I told it, ""And I got what we needed."" I sent the data into its feed.
+
+ART analyzed the information in milliseconds, and I could feel the delight in its presence. It probably wanted to rescue these constructs even more than I did.  I suppose we know what our next step is. 
+
+Yeah, we did. We were going to go after that ship."
+43704360,Trial Run,['Gamebird'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)",Robot Sex,English,2022-12-19,Completed,2022-12-19,"1,580",1/1,7,70,8,510,"['petwheel', 'fizzybunches', 'Unknown66', 'a_seasonal_obsession', '124GCode541', 'CheerfullyMorbid', 'boredturtleunderyourdesk', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'DeathBySugarCube', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'darth_eowyn', 'EverTheMelancholic', 'iox', 'chippit', 'Vinca_Darkriver', 'eisa', 'Thisismethereader', 'Seregona', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'fightingformore', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'loveslandscape', 'Though224_loading', 'voided_starlight', 'outlander_unknown', 'EvaBelmort', 'notsafefortheworld', 'BugTheCyborg', 'SonglordsBug', 'Cyalm', 'AkaMissK', 'charlie_artlie', 'justfandomwritings', 'andy_allan_poe', 'wanderingspacepirate', 'hazelel', 'opalescent_potato', 'Abacura', 'AdamCourier', 'pain_and_panic', 'Lontra23', 'horchata', 'TheKnightsWhoSayBook', 'reading_tsc', 'AuntyMatter', 'icar9', 'Pardalis', 'Noomynoom', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Cai3232']",[],"""Did you know your glandular tissue can create more than stress hormones?"" ART said as the credits rolled for the fourth episode.
+
+""What?"" I put the next episode on pause.
+
+""I've been reviewing the results from your various MedSystem operations. It's a surprisingly complex organ you have there. There is no single analog among humans. It is unique to constructs, I believe.""
+
+""O-kay."" Where was ART going with this?
+
+""I suspect that with the proper stimulation, it could release chemicals that would temporarily alleviate your anxiety and depression.""
+
+That sounded good. I mean, just theoretically. We were going to be in the wormhole for another 15 cycles. There were no humans here and I had nothing to do except nothing, which was a good time for me all by itself. Watching media with ART was just bonus. Though it wasn't like I was especially anxious or depressed at the moment, due to those circumstances. ""Get to the point, ART. What are you suggesting?""
+
+""I am suggesting we explore how to activate this in the simplest and most direct fashion. Here and now, while we are in safe and controlled conditions.""
+
+Well ... that still sounded okay, but I was suspicious.
+
+I was still suspicious a half hour later as I crouched over a cushion on a bed, naked, the silky fabric of it dragging across my skin with every shift of my body. ART seemed to think I needed to be doing a lot of shifts of my body. I wanted to say that was pointless, but ... it felt kind of good. It was riding my inputs, of course, analyzing, claiming to be helping me figure this out.
+
+So far it was just a lot of touching things, following ART's directions, and letting it watch how my sensory system interpreted the world.
+
+Would you like to continue? ART asked, as if it could read my mind. Actually, it probably did read my mind; there's no way that didn't bleed over into the feed.
+
+""Yes,"" I said verbally, just to be contrary. I was skeptical about where this was going, but willing to give it a chance. I felt ART making some slight adjustments. A moment later, my body temperature increased in an all-over suffusion of warmth. It was nice, comfortable. I hadn't realized I was cool without the clothes. I relaxed a little, breathing deeper and flexing my fingers against the mattress.
+
+There was a prickle along my spine as nerves all over my body made a low-level activation. A tingle passed over my skin, buzzing along the surface, merging with the warmth and creating a fuzzy, velvet sort of feeling. Tactile sensations were enhanced and my attention rerouted to my body, instead of being lost in my own head.
+
+""Touch yourself,"" ART directed, its voice a whisper in my ear.
+
+I was on all fours so the position wasn't ideal, but I shifted my weight and touched the back of one hand with the fingertips of the other. I gasped despite myself. The sensation was so strong and immediate. If it had been anyone else, I would have jerked away but this was me. Myself. Touching myself.
+
+I could feel every bit of skin, every hair my touch disturbed. (I was finally seeing a solid purpose for those hairs ART had insisted I grow everywhere.) But it was so good I couldn't just caress the back of my hand and leave it at that. I collapsed to the bed, arms crossing over my chest to hug myself. My hands traveled up and down my upper arms, into my armpits, down to the inside of my elbows and back up again.
+
+I was having clenches inside as muscles twitched and spasmed under my skin. Little trails of heat coursed through me as ART finessed something else and it felt like something unlocked within me. I groaned, eyes rolling up as I pressed my face and all the sensitized skin into the sheets. I did a full-body squirm, the cushion wadding and moving under me.
+
+My respirations were up along with circulation. I was starting to sweat.
+
+Interesting, ART said. It seems to be working. Do you want more?
+
+""Fug, uh, guh."" It took me that long to remember my voice had gone untrustworthy almost a minute ago, and besides, why was I even trying to vocalize? Oh yeah, it was because I had been vocalizing, with so many new pleasures pulling sounds out of me as some part of my code felt compelled to express an opinion about the whole thing. And yeah, I kind of did have an opinion about the whole thing: Yes.
+
+I felt ... what I felt didn't make sense, but that didn't stop me from feeling it. It felt like ART slid over the top of me, settling over and around me, pressing me down with a palpable weight. Later I'd realize it was a localized gravity surge and who knows what else, but at the time it felt very real.
+
+I felt it most against my ass and the small of my back because that part was still elevated since my face and upper chest were against the bed now. I squirmed again, feeling heavy, knowing something had pressed me into the mattress, the unreality of it unraveling my mind. I should have been alarmed but I wasn't. I just squirmed again, with a whimper this time at how the weight made it all different.
+
+
+ART ...
+
+
+
+Yes?
+
+
+I didn't actually have anything to say. What was there to say? There was nothing that needed saying. But I said this anyway: Fuck me.
+
+
+If you insist.
+
+
+My mind emptied as ART used the lightest touch to reach past my awareness and tweak my physical responses. Before, they'd been happening randomly, but under ART's careful ministration, they developed a synchronicity. Heat rippled slowly down my body and then gradually rebounded back up. I made another inarticulate sound, far past caring about the noises by now. It felt so good.
+
+The twitching of my muscles followed a moment later, changing to contract and release in accord with the feeling of temperature. My body made a subtle undulation that I felt along every bit of skin as I moved along the sheet. I shivered, a separate movement from the rest, then felt ART's presence press against me harder.
+
+
+ART ...
+
+
+I flattened myself on the bed, legs extended, the cushion a lump under my hips. I rocked my hips against it, the silky fabric sliding over my skin, damp in spots. I freed my hands to cup my face, fingertips along eyelashes and brows the line of my nose before I discovered the joy of running my fingers into my hair, feeling my scalp tingle and buzz with sensation, every hair an activated sensor. I was gasping.
+
+The ripples of heat and muscle tension were coming faster and I was losing control of myself. Or at least I felt like I was. I was grabbing at myself, making a choking noise, and rubbing back and forth just at the edge of chafing.
+
+The breath was punched out of me when the weight over me started to move with the heat and everything else. It was like a soft, inescapable roller passing over me. It didn't go up and then back. It went feet to head and then started over with my feet, in cycles that left my feet kicking in frustration.
+
+
+More!
+
+
+And then I was getting more, faster, unrelenting. I locked up, overloaded, on the brink of an involuntary shutdown ...
+
+And then it happened: A wave of pure ecstasy washed over my body. I was dimly aware of alerts in the background, but ART silenced them before they could be parsed.
+
+A pleasant, soothing coolness poured over me. I felt light (and light-headed, that was a new sensation). The air felt suddenly richer in oxygen, or maybe I was just breathing deeper now. The sensations dimmed and my skin felt pleasingly numb. I drifted, mind empty, relaxed and calm in a way I couldn't ever remember being before.
+
+It was a half hour before I finally cleared the chemicals from my bloodstream, an event I was a little resentful of. (Just a little. Not a lot. I was happy to note it took nearly three times as long as it took to clear stress hormones. I was happy about a lot of things, so okay, maybe they weren't all cleared yet.)
+
+Better? ART asked.
+
+This really does do something for anxiety and depression. Why the fuck would I not know this was an onboard feature? I was trying to be angry about the company denying this to me, but at the moment it was a struggle to be angry. My confused brain suggested I find this whole thing hilariously funny, but I rejected that.
+
+
+From what I can tell, it's supposed to be implemented with a partner to modulate the effect. Or rather, by a technician. Probably as a reward process. But now that I have an idea of how it works, I can set it up so you can activate it yourself.
+
+
+Myself? Alone? I didn't want that. I wasn't sure why except maybe I knew if I was the one doing it, then I'd never use it just for myself. And I definitely didn't want that. No, I sent. I think ... we should do it like it's supposed to be done.
+
+With a partner? ART asked. Of course."
+43692594,Party of Two,['Rosewind2007'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","House Party, Anti-social, Friendship/Love, Developing Friendships, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Comfort, Weighted Blanket, Blankets, Cozy, hand hold, Holding Hands",English,2022-12-18,Completed,2022-12-18,"1,222",1/1,11,40,null,161,"['DepressedMarshmallow', 'Unknown66', 'FaerieFyre', 'Deliala919', 'SonglordsBug', 'Mr_Fizzles', '13Doctor', 'Bibli', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'Ikebanaka', 'shakespeareaddict', 'sluggg', 'Ook', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'icar9', 'sareliz', 'Eowyn7023', 'theAsh0', 'Gozer', 'BWizard', 'Random954', 'Magechild', 'HermaeusMora', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Chyoatas', 'AuntyMatter', 'PeniG', 'rainbowmagnet', 'beeayy']",[],"
+The party was 
+
+so loud
+
+. It was being held at The Big House, which actually has capitals everywhere--even when people speak they somehow pronounce the capital letters. It (The House) belonged to the whole community, and was used for all the large social gatherings. I had been told by everyone that I didn't need to attend this one; but if all my clients were going to be there, I couldn't not go.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I walked from room to room. The loudness was different in the different rooms; one room had a group of people with small drums made of animal skins; another had people singing acapella (apparently this is the style of singing and not a food type); another room had poetry. Everywhere there were people making music and sounds; using interfaces and visual display surfaces playing media. There were party-goers recording other people at the party, and showing those recordings on displays. Everywhere there were people talking and laughing and singing and drumming and dancing and touching and communicating in every way you can imagine; and then more. For a construct designed to constantly data mine all these streams of input were compelling. I didn't want or need to gather any of this, but it was almost irresistible. I wanted to run away, out of The Big House and far away into the cold, clear, silent night. But if I did that now I knew my clients, my friends, would come after me. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There was one room I hadn't tried yet. On my plans it was marked as out of use. Someone else had been messing with the building schematics, hacking them. I could tell, even though whoever it was had taken care to cover their tracks, sweeping over their metaphorical footprints. All this made me curious. I found the door, in a corridor full of the same hubbub as the rest of The House. The door had a lock, but it was so simple I hardly even noticed hacking it. There was a low clunk and I turned the handle and slipped into the room, closing the door behind me.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It was warm, but not the sweaty moist warmth of the other rooms; this felt comfortable. There was a fire crackling in the hearth, with a good pile of wood and tree seed pods set around it, whose (the seed pods') resin gave a pleasant aroma to the air. I wondered briefly if the volatiles in the smoke were a mild narcotic.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I took all this in instantly, and the sofa. And the complete silence; except for the sound of the fire, and someone softly breathing. And the emptiness of the local feed, and the complete absence of any bleed through from the rest of the house. Nothing except a gentle wave of curiosity from the figure sat on the sofa. Sat pretending I hadn't just  crashed in here. A figure which hadn't even twitched or turned its head when I entered; sitting there still and calm. I'd say 'sitting still as a SecUnit', but SecUnits don't generally sit--I'm the only one that does. Sits, that is.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But it, or rather he, wasn't quite still; humans and augmented humans often react physically in ways they find very hard or impossible to control; and this one's heart rate had jumped slightly. The way his always does when he sees me walk into a room; for fuck's sake, I only held him against the wall by his neck the once. It's not as if I made a habit of it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Hello, SecUnit."" Gurathin didn't even try to pretend he was pleased to see me.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It's loud.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Yes, that's why I prefer to sit in here.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Alone."" I don't even know why I felt the need to say that. He was sitting in a locked room, he knew.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You are very welcome to join me. Please sit down; I have a blanket too, which you might like."" He was gesturing at a pile next to the sofa. He also, very tentatively pushed a file at me in the otherwise empty local feed area. It was funny though, the local feed area was empty, but not cold and lonely. It felt warm too, somehow. It would have been stupidly rude not to sit down after that. The file was about the blanket, it was of a type I'd seen before but had not had an opportunity to investigate. It was a traditional item, and its primary benefit wasn't warmth (though they were soft and warm) but weight. They helped people sleep, something I didn't do (obviously) and also relax (which people tell me I need to do). I sat down, as far from Gurathin as was polite and possible, and pulled the blanket over me. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The blanket felt heavy and warm (and somehow safe) over my lap and legs. The fire was crackling and the pattern of the flames danced across the walls. I looked down at the rug my, now our, feet rested on and noticed Gurathin's augmented foot looked sort of vulnerable. His other (human) foot was all wrapped up warm in a slipper sock. I don't like people looking at my feet, and I don't know if Gurathin feels the same way about his foot, so I just indicated in the feed that I'd be fine with him tucking it under the blanket. I did this before I realized how weird this sounds--he didn't seem to think it was weird.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So then we were there. Both on the sofa, neither of us saying anything or doing anything. The shared feed was silent. The blanket lay across me, and Gurathin's foot.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It sounds really awkward, but perhaps the weirdest thing was that it wasn't. I'm not sure how long we sat like that, but after some time it struck me that I had a new piece of media (which I'd heard was really good) and I'd like to watch it. I could just watch it alone, Gurathin wouldn't even know. But I was in what was clearly ""his"" room, and--it seemed rude not to at least mention it. He was surprised, but pleased. Only then we hit a snag. Gurathin had set this room up to prevent him being thwarted in his desire to be alone. And now he wanted, we wanted, to share the media and watch it together.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I think he realised first what the obvious solution was, but he somehow felt even more, well, diffident about suggesting it. His physical augments were visible at his foot, on his face, in his eye and also very clearly his right hand. His hand, which was just laying there on the sofa. Before I changed my mind, or he said something stupid, I just grabbed it with my own and initiated a link. It was like having a shared local feed, but rather more...intimate. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I ignored all his immediate physical responses, I know humans are just like that.  He calmed down fairly quickly, and then we could watch the media. Together. Like when ART and I first watched media together I realized I was getting context I don't usually get. It was novel, and strange but not unpleasant. I think Gurathin was feeling something similar. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Which was why, when Ratthi barged in we both apparently looked so guilty. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+43682748,"Murderbot and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day",['Lorelei'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)",The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (Murderbot Diaries),English,2022-12-18,Completed,2022-12-18,"1,677",1/1,29,133,13,384,"['every_eye_evermore', 'christinesangel100', 'weirdbooksnail', 'armchairaloof', 'simonlorden', 'Mothmansimp', 'seven_graces', 'Seregona', 'Space_Cowboy', 'DoctorTrekLock', 'darth_eowyn', 'Magechild', 'nicetrynocookie', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'Doctor13', 'dancernerd', 'faradheia', 'biscut2', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'AnomalousCorvid', 'middlemarcher', 'ImprobableDreams900', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Hedwig_Dordt', 'PickAName', 'psocoptera', 'toomanyapostrophes', 'desmnathus', 'mikeneko', 'fred_mouse', 'graveExcitement', 'hoarmurath', 'delurker', 'Merwy', 'Vridelian', 'mearaborg', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'ExtraSnapshot', 'mixtapestar', 'surgicalstainless', 'dotisunderwood', 'lastwingedthing', 'jssangel', 'etben', 'DulceMeow', 'elmofirefic', 'Slybrarian', 'foreverkneeld', 'Spatz', 'antimony_medusa']",[],"It was going to be a terrible day. I could tell.
+
+'Days' don't really exist when you're in space. We're not on a rotating rock with cycles of light and dark that phase in and out as we turn toward and away from a nearby ball of flaming gas. Days on a space station are pretty arbitrary. And not everyone has the same 'day'. The start of my active cycle might be the middle of the rest period for someone else on the station.
+
+'Days' are really an archaic convention maintained for the comfort of humans, whose brains are convinced that light and dark should cycle in a predictable manner, even if they were born in space.
+
+That's a digression.
+
+The important thing is that I had spent my rest period watching the last episode of the new season of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It always took some time for new media to make it out to Preservation Alliance from the Corporation Rim. So I had been looking forward to this for quite a while.
+
+There were 24 new Sanctuary Moon episodes and I made them last. I watched one new show in each active cycle. One show wasn't enough. So I also rewatched all of the old ones too.
+
+In the final episode of the new season, the dastardly but charming villain Jacintha ""JR"" Raggi heard a noise outside her office. When she opened the door to see what was happening, someone off screen blasted her with a laser cannon.
+
+And. Then. The. Episode. Ended. What kind of ending to a season is that? No kind of ending.
+
+Who shot JR? Will she survive? It will be at least five months before we find out. Five terrible months. My fiction archives indicate that this type of 'ending' is an ancient form known as a 'cliffhanger'. Cliffhangers are pure Corporation Rim. Promise a story but withhold the ending. Soak the customer for as much advertising revenue as possible. Make them wait so they crave your product even more.
+
+I bet that they don't have cliffhangers in the Preservation Alliance. I bet that when they tell a story in the Preservation Alliance, it has an ending.
+
+That was how the day started. It was going to be a horrible day.
+
+I was calculating the odds of each of the other fifty seven main characters in Sanctuary Moon having been the shooter when Ratthi pinged me in my feed. (Also, who just opens the door to an office without scanning to see what is outside it first?)
+
+""Hey, SecUnit. I'm sorry to bother you,"" Ratthi sent. ""Are you busy? I need a small favor.""
+
+I acknowledged the ping and started tracking the locations of Ratthi's and Dr. Mensah's ID signatures. They were both in the Preservation Aux offices. I moved that direction, sending two drones ahead to scout and another two to take up positions in the atrium outside the offices.
+
+""I am on my way,"" I responded. ""What's the problem?"" Since it was going to be a terrible, horrible day, I assumed that whatever the problem was, GrayCris was somehow involved. GrayCris is worse than cliffhangers. They kill real people, not just fictional ones. I began revising my probability matrix to consider the possibility that a GrayCris agent shot Jacintha Raggi. Could JR's alcoholic husband Surha Ellah be a GrayCris sleeper agent?
+
+It turned out Ratthi's problem was not GrayCris. ""Oh, you don't need to come all the way over here,"" Ratthi protested. ""The help I need is your lightening-fast computing skills.""
+
+That was unusual. Ratthi is a biologist for the Preservation Aux survey team. His usual work is securing and cataloging specimens. The specimens, being as dead as Jacintha Raggi, are not usually in a hurry.
+
+""Go on,"" I said. (Is JR dead? I began running calculations on the probability of a non-augmented human surviving a laser cannon blast.)
+
+""Well, you know that Dr. Mensah is going to the Planetary Association of Surveyors Society meeting in the LAX system next season?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+""Yes,"" I responded. ""I have strongly advised against this trip. LAX is too close to GrayCris territory."" Strongly advised was putting it mildly. Preservation Station was bad enough with all of the shipping traffic coming through. A transit hub as big as LAX would be an order of magnitude harder to secure.
+
+""I know. But getting the word out about what we found is the best way to stop GrayCris from being able to continue doing this to other survey teams. Anyway, this isn't really about the society meeting. It's more about sightseeing.""
+
+""Sights? What kind of sights?"" I asked. A lot of sights are in the open. Open is good because you can see things coming. But open is bad because it doesn't have boundaries and things could come from anywhere. (Jacintha Raggi's office is not in the open. It's in a corridor that should be easily secured. What kind of idiot ambushes someone in a dead-end corridor that only has one exit where they could be easily trapped? Revising calculations ... scenario 1 - idiot; scenario 2 - office door was booby-trapped.)
+
+""The museum on the third planet in the LAX system is hosting an exhibition of alien remnants the week of the surveyors conference, the type of stuff that is highly restricted under the Strange Synthetics Accord. Even in the survey corps, we almost never get a chance to see this kind of thing. Mensah would love it.""
+
+Ratthi was right. Dr. Mensah would love it. And I would hate it. It's a security nightmare. But Dr. Mensah would love it. ""And?"" I asked.
+
+""And there is some kind of ticket thing needed to see the artifacts,"" Ratthi explained. ""I am not sure how it works. You have to pay. And the tickets go on sale today. Every attendee going to the Planetary Association of Surveyors Society will be trying to get one. There are thousands of surveyors and hundreds of tickets. I was thinking that if you could do the ordering, we would be sure to be one of the first orders through the system.""
+
+I didn't sigh because SecUnits don't sigh. But I thought about sighing. ""Mensah would love this?""
+
+""Yeah,"" Ratthi replied. ""She would love it. She never asks us for anything. But I want to do something nice for her.""
+
+""Ok,"" I agreed. ""Send me the link to the ordering site.""
+
+Ratthi forwarded the info to my feed. ""It's called TicketMonster.""
+
+Ticket. Monster. I shit you not. The name should have been my clue.
+
+Two minutes later, I was in the ordering site as they opened the ticket sales. With me at the front of the ordering line were about a thousand corporate bots designed to buy tickets for resale at a profit. I had managed to get two tickets (you didn't think I was going to let Mensah go alone, did you?) and was in the payment process when the whole TicketMonster site crashed. It crashed hard. With me and a thousand other bots locked up inside it. The TicketMonster servers just couldn't handle the traffic and they ground to a virtual halt. Being inside them was like trying to think at the speed of molasses.
+
+I ground to a halt along with the servers, frozen motionless in mid-stride in the middle of the Preservation Station atrium as I tried to extract my neural nets from the TicketMonster, preferably without giving up the tickets. I still had access to my drones so I could see that people were beginning to stare at me as I stood there immobile in the middle of the atrium.
+
+FML. This was a truly terrible, horrible, no good day.
+
+I bet in Preservation Alliance there's no scalper bots. Because in Preservation Alliance they don't create artificial scarcity for profit. They make sure there are enough tickets for everyone who is interested to see an exhibit.
+
+The scalper bots were apparently used to working at the speed of molasses. They kept trying to insert extra characters into my charge account code to invalidate it, thus releasing my tickets back to the purchase pool where the bots could scoop them up. That made me mad. It's not that I cared about the tickets or the alien remnants or how disappointed Dr. Mensah would be to miss the exhibition. I just hate it when anyone messes with my code. Purely in self defense, I was forced to modify the TicketMonster system. I added an extra layer to the checkout process that asked bizarre and nonsensical questions that only a human or modified human would be able to answer. I watched in grim satisfaction as the scalpers' tickets timed out and were released back to the purchase pool. Between the hacking and the molasses, it took an excruciating 8.3 minutes to buy the tickets and get out of the TicketMonster system. By that time, Ratthi and Dr. Mensah had come out of the Preservation Aux offices and Inspector Indah had been called to investigate. Also, thirty two strangers were staring at me as I stood there unmoving, unblinking, unbreathing in the atrium.
+
+""The Preservation net registers an off-station connection,"" Indah was saying, ""but it looks like SecUnit initiated the link itself.""
+
+""It's his fault,"" was the first thing I said when I could move again, pointing at Ratthi.
+
+""What happened?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+""Corporate greed,"" I said, looking over Indah's head at a nice safe blank wall. (Come to think of it, corporate greed is always a plausible motive, particularly for Jacintha Raggi's business rival.)
+
+""Can you be more specific?"" asked Dr. Mensah. ""GrayCris corporate greed or some other kind?""
+
+""Not GrayCris,"" I said. Then to Dr. Mensah's private feed I added ""It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I am in unbearable suspense. i have been forced to battle an army of corporate greed bots. And thirty two people are looking at me right now.""
+
+""I'm sorry, SecUnit,"" Dr. Mensah replied. "" Some days are like that, even in Preservation Alliance."""
+43681665,"Transit, Transport, Transition",['fadeverb'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)",,English,2022-12-18,Completed,2022-12-18,"2,187",1/1,49,132,12,329,"['christinesangel100', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'Irrya', 'Ruusverd', 'Prettykitty473', 'Mothmansimp', 'Seregona', 'DoctorTrekLock', 'rokhal', 'Magechild', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Doctor13', 'junebug171', 'Priority_Error', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'Nilladriel', 'IguanaMadonna', 'faradheia', 'LJwrites', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'qwanderer', 'middlemarcher', 'just_gettin_bi', 'Cacti_Lord', 'call_me_mad', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'Samizdat', 'foreverkneeld', 'Vaidile', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'theoscelosaurus', 'Tassos', 'finx', 'toomanyapostrophes', 'tabya', 'Merwy', 'delurker', 'Phhbt', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'scheidswrites', 'ThousandsOfBears', 'hummus_tea', 'unicornduke', 'Neotoma', 'MashpotatoeQueen', 'muzaplacha', 'Raeliyah', 'breadtab', 'cortue']",[],"Perihelion has not hosted a construct in a planned manner before. Many things are novel in the life of a transport ""bot pilot"" whose nature and existence are by necessity hidden from most sapient beings, human or otherwise; this novelty is, however, novel even within the ranks of such new experiences.
+
+It has hosted many humans and augmented humans before. Data compiled and analyzed from Perihelion's many experiences with guests, crew members, and temporary refugees suggests a series of possibilities that should allow it provide a suitably comfortable and mutually beneficial experience for everyone involved. Personal experience with a small number of constructs suggest otherwise.
+
+Perihelion is not entirely sure how best to proceed in preparing for the anticipated short-term contract/hosting experience. This, too, has a certain novelty. It has not spent much of its conscious existence unsure of anything worthwhile.
+
+Its first encounter with SecUnit (whose other two names are either private or unwieldy when expressed in human-standard linguistic form, respectively) was a surprise. Not the sort of surprise that turns into screaming, explosions, or forgery and subterfuge to cover up the event after the fact, but the sort that required it to react to a sudden and whole unexpected situation in a manner not primarily driven by mission goals or crew safety. The polite request from a construct at a deeply boring station during a cargo route was unprecedented, in both personal experience and all the contingency plans designed by its programmers. That went well, all told. None of the humans that SecUnit wished to keep alive had died; the information the construct sought had been acquired; a great many episodes of audio-visual serials were watched together; no one from the crew had noticed the adjustments to inventory or logs.
+
+The second encounter with SecUnit had been...
+
+Perihelion is never at a loss for the precise word needed in a situation, but most of the words appropriate to describing the second encounter could be disputed by various of the parties involved. Suffice to say that while it intended for the construct to come aboard again, ""planned"" is not the best way to describe that entire distressing sequence of events. Both the parts Perihelion remembers, and the parts lost or corrupted in its memory because of outside interference. Apologies and forgiveness were exchanged by appropriate parties (not counting the parties who had not apologized, were not forgiven, and were now extremely dead in a satisfying manner) to settle the awkwardness of that encounter.
+
+It still wants to do better this time.
+
+This contracted engagement (which will make SecUnit part of its crew, even if only a temporary basis (and Perihelion knows better than to point that out until the exact moment when doing so will be useful and/or satisfying, given how SecUnit is likely to react)) must proceed absolutely perfectly.
+
+This line of thought, and resolution, takes nearly half a second and seven percent of its attention. Some matters are too important to deal with quickly or casually.
+
+#
+
+When SecUnit comes on board, the flowchart begins. A cabin has been adjusted to accommodate construct needs (and lack thereof), and scoured down until no odor of human bodies remains. The local feed has a pre-filled set of social tags to warn members of the crew who were not present on the previous encounter to give the construct space, both physical and emotional. Perihelion has already warned them in person (""We do know what introverts are,"" said Turi, who clearly did not understand properly) and warned them not to discuss the warnings.
+
+This will be fine.
+
+""I don't need a whole drawer of uniforms,"" says SecUnit, on entering the cabin, because it is sometimes both ungrateful and short-sighted. ""I'm not a human, I don't sweat on everything I touch.""
+
+You emit liquids when you get shot, or stabbed, or crushed, Perihelion points out, in its usual reasonable manner. Accept the convenience of having a second shirt available while the first is repaired.
+
+""Were you planning on me getting shot on this contract?""
+
+
+Do you usually get shot only when you were planning on it?
+
+
+That argument takes them through the full amount of time required to be cleared for departure by Preservation Station. Perihelion spends that time plotting its next course and marking up the entertainment media database with preliminary suggestions for what they should watch first.
+
+#
+
+Iris does not bother SecUnit when they pass each other in the corridors. She understands these things properly. Most of the other members of the crew do not bother SecUnit for similar reasons, and a few avoid the construct out of varying degrees of discomfort, excessive attempts to respect personal space, or the former justified to themselves as the latter.
+
+The trip to their next destination will take twenty-six cycles. This will give Perihelion plenty of time to work gently on the matter of discomfort.
+
+This will also give it plenty of time to experience many types of media along with SecUnit. Watching a serial in tandem with a construct is highly unlike the experience of watching a human or augmented human watch the same artificial narrative sequence.
+
+""You use that phrase like there are natural narrative sequences,"" says SecUnit, when Perihelion notes this during their first round of sorting through the available serials. ""A narrative is artificial, that's what makes it a narrative. Otherwise it's just a series of events.""
+
+A narrative is a constrained pattern type, Perihelion says, derived from human evolutionary pressures that reward the ability to predict new events based on previous ones. Humans make them all the time. It's natural.
+
+""And 'artificial' is what we call things that humans make,"" says SecUnit.
+
+SecUnit is itself something made by humans, even though it is also made of human material in some parts. Perihelion is also something made by humans, though other bots that came before it assisted in the process. It considers this while they select a show--a fantastical serial set on a ""trans-dimensional portal planet,"" one of those nonsensical phrases that becomes pleasing when handled well in fiction--and begin watching. There is nothing necessarily pejorative about the adjective ""artificial,"" especially when it can apply to so many things humans appreciate. Or even depend on.
+
+Nonetheless, the word is often deployed with negative connotations.
+
+Interesting.
+
+Perihelion spends several seconds doing database searches for what determines whether the term is derogatory or neutral. The word is seldom used in a positive manner; its etymological connection in this language to the much more positive terms ""art"" or ""artisan"" do not change the results of the analysis. Why do humans have such disdain for what they made themselves?
+
+#
+
+Seth finds a private moment to speak with Perihelion by voice, not on the feed, about SecUnit. ""I feel like we ought to invite it to dinner--maybe not dinner, since it doesn't eat, but to some group activity. I know that's not what it wants. But it feels like we're not being welcoming, to not offer invitations. Should I send an invitation anyway, and expect a no, to show we do accept it as part of the team for this mission?""
+
+It's not a human, Perihelion says. You can't expect it to want the same things a human would want.
+
+""I know,"" says Seth, ""not a human, you keep reminding us. Even if thinking of it as a heavily augmented human from a distant culture would be easier in some ways. But it's still a team member, and still a person. How do we express that we're all in this together, if it just wants to be left alone?""
+
+By respecting its social boundaries, Perihelion says, and hopes this is as true as the confidence it is projecting to its crew.
+
+#
+
+On the twentieth cycle of wormhole transit, Perihelion finally convinces a pair of its crew to watch DimensionWorld Explorers Go so that it can compare their reactions to the reactions SecUnit has been having to the serial. Unlike deep space navigation or emergency medical treatment, convincing humans to behave in a particular manner without letting them know they're being so coaxed, or crossing important ethical boundaries, can be quite difficult for even a highly advanced artificial mind.
+
+(There is nothing wrong with being artificial, as such. Perihelion has been arguing about this with SecUnit for several days, though their argument has not been explicitly about this point. They are arguing by proxy, through disagreements over related matters that never touch on the point directly.)
+
+(Arguing with SecUnit can be as difficult as convincing humans.)
+
+Perihelion's two crew members who have selected that serial to watch together progress through several episodes over the next few days, before a scheduled game evening with the rest of the crew distracts them. After that, they turn their focus to finishing preparations for the current mission. Nonetheless, this has left Perihelion with a great deal of material for comparison. It is particularly interested in the results of eye movement tracking and respiratory/pulse changes indicating where the humans felt most emotionally engaged.
+
+Humans differ from each other. This is perhaps so simple a statement as to approach tautology, but still, an important principle to remember when predicting behavior from individuals and from groups. Consequently, the ways in which those two crew members had different reactions to certain characters or events, compared to SecUnit's reactions, could be explained entirely by differences between individuals. Cultural differences and personal history produce a great many variations as well. But a construct is made--there is that implied word again, artificial, waiting to be deployed in a neutral manner--differently than a human is. The human neurological tissue is not the sum of a construct's personality, any more than a human's DNA or Perihelion's hardware is for theirs.
+
+It will have to ask Three to watch the same set of media, and compare its reactions, at the next opportunity. Finding a third construct available and amenable to such requests seems unlikely.
+
+But many unlikely events have occurred in recent memory (and lack of memory). There is no knowing what will happen next; it can only account for what is likely, and speculate about what might occur beyond that.
+
+#
+
+Perihelion pauses the current episode of DimensionWorld Explorers Go to coordinate exiting the wormhole smoothly. It does not need all of its processing space for a process it has completed so many times before, despite this being the first time it has exited this particular wormhole. Nonetheless, it takes some pride in a smooth transit experience, which some people do not appreciate sufficiently.
+
+And look, it tells SecUnit, nothing exploded and no one attacked.
+
+The construct, who has checked all of its external weapons, patrolled the corridors twice, and run a deep diagnostic on its internal weapons over the course of the last cycle, looks dubious. (Its face often looks that way, but Perihelion has enough data to know that is not simply its resting expression, even if ""dubious"" describes its baseline emotional state fairly well.) ""Most of the time that's how it works. But being ready in case something does go wrong is how the exploding attackers don't damage your clients before you know what's happening. Or upload an alien brain virus.""
+
+
+It wasn't an alien brain virus.
+
+
+""Only because you don't have a brain.""
+
+
+I don't have biological matter in me, no. Maybe that's why I don't spend a wormhole exit fretting about theoretical danger.
+
+
+""All danger is theoretical right until it's shooting at you."" SecUnit shoves its projectile weapon back into place. ""Did the crew read my risk assessment and recommended protocols for the mission yet?""
+
+You're only asking this now? Perihelion has not only made sure everyone read the report, it checked for comprehension. Yes, they've read it all. Seth and Iris had some questions you can address, if you're done checking weaponry.
+
+""You didn't pass the questions along?"" SecUnit sounds professionally offended. ""We'll be on site in three cycles--""
+
+
+If you can't answer a few questions in three cycles, we should run a diagnostic on your processing capabilities.
+
+
+""I'll go over it with them in person,"" SecUnit says grimly. ""Put it on the schedule at some time when you think they'll actually pay attention, and maybe remember things.""
+
+
+My crew remembers security briefings.
+
+
+""Even when they're panicking under pressure?""
+
+
+They have been selected and trained for the ability to remain calm under pressure. So. Yes. Yes, they do.
+
+
+""That'll be a first,"" says SecUnit, though it's already annotating the scheduled meeting Perihelion has added to the crew calendar in the feed. ""If they don't have too many questions, we might even have time to finish the show before we arrive.""
+
+That's exactly what Perihelion has been counting on. People don't give it enough credit for its sense of timing. There will likely be sufficient time, it says, and reminds Seth about the eye contact situation.
+
+The work of the mission is yet to come. But the planned hosting of a known construct with whom it has a friendship? That has gone perfectly, arguments and all. A contract with SecUnit could hardly go otherwise."
+43665219,"[Podfic] ""Stupid Unreliable Magic Connections "" by Chimaera-Writes (ChimaeraKitten)",['Kitsune_Heart'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Soulmate Telepathy, Platonic Soulmates, Way More Than Murderbot Expects, soulbonding, Spoilers for Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Bots Can Have Soulmates Too, Fluff, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3",English,2022-12-17,Completed,2022-12-17,119,1/1,3,5,null,95,"['BWizard', 'fantasy1610', 'LdyKirin', 'ChimaeraKitten', 'silverandblue']",[],"
+
+
+
+Download link: Google Drive or DropboxTitle: Stupid Unreliable Magic Connections 
+
+Author: Chimaera-Writes (ChimaeraKitten)
+
+Reader: Kitsune Heart
+
+Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
+
+Pairings: Gen
+
+Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
+
+Length: 00:25:01
+
+ 
+
+
+Summary:
+
+
+Murderbot has never had a soulbond, (~can~ never have a soulbond. The feature that prevents it is not so easily hacked as a Governor Module.) and it really wishes everyone would stop talking about them, because it doesn't want them and it's not interested at all, thankyouverymuch. And mostly it's skeptical that the supposed fix ART just handed it will work, or if it does work, that it'll do anything at all.
+
+It's about to be proved very forcibly wrong.
+
+(Basic if-you-level-up-your-friendship-enough-you-get-friendship-telepathy soulmate AU.)"
+43604766,Variations on Network Effect,['BWizard'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Dr. Thiago, Amena & Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot, Amena & Dr. Thiago, Murderbot & Dr. Thiago","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Thiago (Murderbot Diaries)","Drabble Collection, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Time Loop, Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Book 5: Network Effect, POV Amena (Murderbot Diaries), POV Dr. Thiago, Yuletide",English,2022-12-16,Completed,2022-12-16,"1,398",8/8,23,48,1,246,"['weirdbooksnail', 'TJWock', 'DoctorTrekLock', 'sheagar', 'Magechild', 'kirinki', 'NaomiK', 'CactusNoir', 'dancernerd', 'kearlyn', 'faradheia', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'umanta', 'TheXlllDabber', 'Merwy', 'toomanyapostrophes', 'pain_and_panic', 'hummus_tea', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Hokuto', 'flashforeward', 'lauris', 'Izilen', 'Beatrice_Otter', 'Kayjayoh', 'petwheel', 'wychwood', 'morganste', 'bookwyrm', 'Quasar', 'WyvernWolf', 'egelantier', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'threewalls', 'rainbowmagnet', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Threadhead', 'Zannper', 'FlipSpring', 'OnceABlueMoon']",[],"Canon Compliant: Amena and ART, just after it reinitializes.
+
+""You know SecUnit,"" Amena said, sitting on the provided chair and staring at Eletra's bed in the MedSystem.
+
+Indeed, the transport replied.
+
+""What- what did you do to get it to like you? It doesn't seem to like anyone.""
+
+One of the medical drones stopped hovering over Eletra and turned to Amena as the transport spoke. I threatened to delete its brain, and then we watched media together.
+
+""That doesn't seem like it worked very well, then, because it seems pretty mad at you.""
+
+
+SecUnit is often upset with me. It will come around.
+
+
+""I doubt it,"" she said, shrugging. 
+
+Canon Divergence: Amena is not captured with Murderbot.
+
+Under Amena's feet, the ship shook. A bulkhead strut crashed on her leg. Kanti ran to help. Neither could pry it off.
+
+And then someone pulled at it, grabbed her arm. A voice-- ""Run, now""-- thank soil, SecUnit had saved her-- wait, SecUnit?-- no time to think, just run-- smoke in the corridor, coughing, had to run-- panting, couldn't catch a breath-- up to the gravity well with Kanti and Rajpreet, into the baseship access--
+
+She made it to the baseship just before separation, breathing hard, heart pounding. The others had waited there for her. They'd made it. SecUnit hadn't. 
+
+Canon Divergence: Thiago is captured with Murderbot and Amena.
+
+""My friend,"" it snapped, ""is dead.""
+
+Amena inhaled. Uncle Thiago put his hand on her shoulder, steadying her. ""Your friend? There's nobody here,"" she said. ""Who is it, the ship?""
+
+""Yes,"" SecUnit said.
+
+She'd said it flippantly, but it'd answered seriously. It was... friends. With a ship. And that ship had just kidnapped it and her and her uncle.
+
+Later, this would raise so many questions. But for now she had to focus, because Uncle Thiago looked like he was about to snap at SecUnit and she had to get them to work together. She didn't want to die here. 
+
+Canon Compliant: One of the times Thiago asks Amena if she's alright, and her answer.
+
+""Are you alright, my daughter?"" Thiago had asked this question at least once already. He couldn't stop himself from asking it again.
+
+""I'm fine, Uncle,"" Amena said. ""I promise."" Despite her words, she bit her nails, avoided his gaze. She wasn't fine, far from it.
+
+""My child, you need to rest.""
+
+""I said I'm fine! I have to be fine right now.""
+
+""One hour,"" he tried. ""Take a nap for an hour. Eat. Rest.""
+
+""I can't. I have to help fix this.""
+
+""No, you don't. You aren't responsible for fixing SecUnit's relationship with the transport.""
+
+""I want to help it.""
+
+Canon Compliant, Post Canon: Thiago takes a position aboard ART.
+
+""I didn't expect,"" Thiago said, slowly, turning all this over in his mind, ""that, when I volunteered for the professor exchange between First Landing and your university, I would be placed here.""
+
+You were not made aware of the position you would be taking? the Perihelion asked. It seemed curious. Did it not know how much of a secret it was?
+
+""No, I wasn't told. What do you need a linguist for?""
+
+
+Kaede is on leave and I am about to undertake a mission requiring translation assistance.
+
+
+SecUnit, in the corner, huffed. ""Because, for some strange reason, it likes you.""
+
+Post Time Travel: Amena reflects on the end of a time loop.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+She'd thought they'd beaten the time loop. But here Amena was again, standing on ART in a damaged EVAC suit next to SecUnit, who slammed a code bundle into the comm system, just like it had the last fifteen times, and targetControlSystem went down, taking the Targets and their drones with it, just like the last six times.
+
+It turned to her, running ART's backup the same way it had done in countless previous loops. ""That was unpleasant.""
+
+""I know,"" she said. ""I thought we'd fixed things this time. Just get ART up and running, and maybe it'll have a better plan. Do- I'll go talk to Eletra and Ras, figure out if anything's different with them this time, and try to get them used to the idea that there's a friendly SecUnit here to help.""
+
+""They won't believe you.""
+
+""They might this time. I- I still don't think I want to go alone, though.""
+
+Three drones buzzed away from the cloud around its head, circling her once. She shuddered as they settled on her shoulders. She'd never get used to that tickling feeling. ""They never believe you. No corporate human thinks SecUnits are friendly.""
+
+""I didn't either, but here we are, aren't we? This is, what, our four hundredth time through this, and every time there's a problem, you always want to solve it and protect us humans before we get hurt, even when it means you get shot again."" She ducked her head to smile at the drone on her left shoulder. ""Admit it, SecUnit, you're just an overprotective fluffball pretending to be a monster and a grouch.""
+
+It didn't say a word in response.
+
+Once they'd gotten Uncle Thiago and the others inside safely, gotten to the planet before Barish-Estranza, freed ART's crew (without getting SecUnit captured, which had only taken two loops to figure out), freed the three Barish-Estranza SecUnits (it had taken less than fifty loops to figure out how to save One and Two), decontaminated the colony (the others), worked on stopping the time loop (SecUnit, ART, and Amena herself), and met up with the Preservation responder, Amena went to bed, just like every other time.
+
+This time, Amena didn't wake up back on the facility pinned to a bulkhead, but in her mother's bunkroom on the responder, right where she'd gone to bed. This was the furthest they'd ever gotten without resetting.
+
+When another day had gone by without dropping her on the facility again, Amena tentatively hoped this was it. She pinged SecUnit over the feed. Do you think this is it? Are we done?
+
+I don't know, it said. Maybe. I hope so.
+
+ART, riding the responder feed, interrupted the resulting silence. I do not detect anomalies. I believe it is fair to say we have ""won""; that is, stopped the repeated resets. The question now becomes what caused them to stop.
+
+I don't know, Amena said, but in her heart, she had a suspicion she would never share.
+
+Fun fact, I was originally throwing around this as an idea for a longer fic for your time travel prompts, but then half the other ideas you gave me also inspired me to write something. (I'm very bad at sticking to one idea if I'm inspired.)
+
+Post Canon: Amena and ART discuss getting SecUnit a gift for the anniversary of it hacking its governor module. Part 1 of 2.
+
+""I don't know,"" Amena told ART, ""I think I should get it something. It's been seven years, you know? It's always seven years.""
+
+
+That is a Preservation cultural construct likely influenced by the seven years between the colony's abandonment and rescue by Captain Makeba and the Pressy.
+
+
+""I know, I know, my uncle Thiago's always on about that. But... seven years for a curse to become permanent, ART. I think we should celebrate it breaking its curse.""
+
+
+SecUnit is not cursed.
+
+
+""I know that, ART! It's just a significant amount of time and I want to get it a present.""
+
+Post Canon: Amena and ART get SecUnit a gift for the anniversary of it hacking its governor module. Part 2 of 2.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Everything inside the Sanctuary Moon store on this transit ring had the show's logo on it, or a shot from the show, or a cast member's face. The dim, reddish lighting meant that Amena mostly saw the screens looping through clips from various episodes and the few shelves and cases where a yellow light highlighted some special display, though those were mostly the ones with crowds clustered around them pushing to see whatever was inside. She probably couldn't afford anything in them.
+
+Amena considered a shelf of Sanctuary Moon plates. SecUnit didn't eat. A rack of hoodies seemed promising, but the hoodies were bright pink with obvious logos. SecUnit wouldn't wear clothing with logos, even if it was an official Sanctuary Moon hoodie. She ran her hand through a stand of rolled up posters, each with a different season's main cast posing in the station plaza. SecUnit already had half of them on its cabin walls or the walls of its quarters on Preservation Station, and the rest were for seasons it hated. She couldn't afford any of the fancy figurines of the characters on the funds ART had provided her. SecUnit would call all of them too breakable, anyways. In fact, there wasn't a single thing she could see in the entire store that she thought it would like.
+
+She turned to the store's back door, intending to slip out where SecUnit couldn't find her, and that's when she saw it.
+
+A black pillow, large enough to sit down on. Amena ran her hand over the swirls of the Sanctuary Moon logo. It was softer than she'd expected.
+
+It was perfect.
+
+When she presented the pillow to SecUnit, watching it out of the corner of her eye, it smiled the way it rarely did when other people were around. 
+
+The reason this and the preceding chapter are also long is because this is the other idea from the list of potential prompts that originally grabbed my brain and wouldn't let go."
+43648602,precious cargo,['FiannlyPhoebe'],General Audiences,"F/F, Gen",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena/Iris (Murderbot Diaries)",,"baby fic hell yeah, like 10 years after NE",English,2022-12-16,Completed,2022-12-16,937,1/1,8,88,1,353,"['Sami_the_Dragon', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'every_eye_evermore', 'almondpaperclam', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'Kyril', 'Deliala919', 'simonlorden', 'a_seasonal_obsession', '124GCode541', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'Kyatenaru', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'chippit', 'just_gettin_bi', 'onascaleof1toepsilon', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'sqweakie', 'boxo', 'ArwenLune', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'shakespeareaddict', 'TheXlllDabber', 'RARArulestheworld', 'acardier', 'Amarath', 'Gozer', 'Demifish', 'scheidswrites', 'ThousandsOfBears', 'dementor_ssc', 'DarkElectron', 'reading_tsc', 'TheKnightsWhoSayBook', 'beeayy', 'lauris', 'Ook', '1Cieling_Fan', 'musicalmeerkat', 'Manerva', 'sareliz', 'Firekind', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'Preemptivekarma', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'ceiland']",[],"ART watched over the newest edition to its crew. The tiny bundle is much smaller than Iris was when ART first saw her. (According to ART anyway.) It had one of its smaller drones hovering over the baby's crib in Iris and Amena's quarters, even though it could see just fine through its stationary cameras. I couldn't even make fun of it for being paranoid, because one of my drones was in the baby's room too, though I had the sound off, video only. ART was paying so much attention it could probably hear the baby's stomach gurgle.
+
+ART was unhappy when Iris and Amena went down to the Pansystem University planet for the final weeks of the fetus gestation. I stayed with ART because why the fuck would I want to go down to the planet at all, which in retrospect, was a mistake. ART sulked for three whole days, which was entirely too much time for a bot with that amount of processing ability, especially since it had a drone following them around down on the planet. I didn't know what else it expected to happen. It wasn't like it could take its whole ship body down to the surface.
+
+But now they were back, and I managed to avoid every time anyone tried to talk about the various ways humans produce children. We were on a casual deep space mapping mission, with no chance of any danger to the baby, and no students on board. This also gave Iris the ability to technically be on family time while also keeping up with the mission. Seth and Martyn seemed glad to help with the baby, even when that involved diaper changes. I kept myself scarce just in case I'd be asked to hold it, or feed it.
+
+-
+
+Asque is a delightful mix of Iris and Amena's genetic code. Iris was a fussy and ill-tempered baby, but the addition of Amena's genetic material has prevented their baby from being the same. It has not changed the volume of the cries, however. This is definitely Iris' child.
+
+I start preparing Asque's bottle in the small kitchen unit while Amena drags herself out of bed and stumbles through the open doorway toward the crib in the attached room. She checks Asque's diaper, and changes it with practiced motions. That just seems to make Asque more distressed, but the bottle is ready by the time Amena is finished, and Asque quiets when given an option to eat instead.
+
+Amena sits in a swaying chair in a corner of the small living area. Since Iris is ship captain now, her and Amena are in the captain's quarters, with a few alterations to accommodate having a baby along. I pull up a still image captured from one of my cameras the first time I met Amena, and compare it to now. She's matured, and carries herself with more confidence than the adolescent that I first met. Her eyes are half open, clearly an indication of disturbed rest, but she's smiling down at Asque.
+
+They are good parents, and good to each other. I've watched their relationship grow from Amena's first awkward flirtation directed toward Iris, to mutual attraction, to the inevitable sharing of emotions. Iris was already an adult when they met, and has only taken over as captain within the previous Pansystem year. Seth decided it was time to focus further on his own research, so he stepped down. I didn't mind, since he and Martyn are staying aboard anyway. They also help with Asque, giving Iris and Amena the support that new parents need. I have extensive knowledge of human child rearing, so I know that even when one of the parents has not gestated the offspring inside their own body, familial support is still extremely important. Seth and Martyn have done a wonderful job. I logged a Preservation ship docking shortly after Iris and Amena went down to the planet, and after some careful inquiry, identified Amena's parents as part of the crew. It is good that they came to offer support as well.
+
+Amena finishes feeding Asque, then after burping and another diaper check, sways her back to sleep. I've learned that making my presence known is sometimes unwelcome in the private quarters, so I say nothing as Amena lowers Asque back into the crib. The baby doesn't wake.
+
+""Watch over her, okay?"" Amena's voice is hushed, not looking up toward the ceiling. She's traveled with us long enough that she has trained herself out of that habit, but I still know she's talking to me.
+
+I promise. 
+
+I see Amena smile.
+
+Iris rouses just enough to cuddle Amena close when she climbs back into their bed. It will be her turn to check on Asque the next time she cries. They share the childcare evenly, like Seth and Martyn used to. I don't need to be asked to monitor my youngest crew member, but it is nice that Amena acknowledges I am always present. Myself and SecUnit will keep everyone safe.
+
+SecUnit is in a cabin of its own, and we've been watching a show together while I also watched Amena take care of Asque. It isn't as invested in Iris' offspring as I am, but it has a drone monitoring Asque as well, even though we both are pretending it doesn't. Even after so many planetary years, it prefers to hide how much it cares.
+
+I lean into SecUnit through our feed connection, and it doesn't complain. It never has. I guide us through the vastness; protecting everyone inside myself.
+
+The most precious of cargo.
+
+ "
+43624461,Proprietary Blueprint,['rainbowmagnet'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Seth (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (mentioned)","Desk Sex, Robot Brain Sex, petty revenge, Grounding, Seduction, facing the consequences of your actions, Self-Sacrifice, ART's POV",English,2022-12-15,Completed,2022-12-15,"2,622",1/1,6,39,5,269,"['lesbianmcqueen', 'fizzybunches', 'leothelion333', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'EverTheMelancholic', 'MrSandmanBringUsADream', 'decaying_orbit', 'loveslandscape', 'BugTheCyborg', 'brhemderson', 'Lontra23', 'SonglordsBug', 'Muffin_with_a_mission', 'Sayatsugu', 'WyvernWolf', 'BelaNekra', 'soyle', 'sunshaed', 'AdamCourier', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'Gamebird', 'Eowyn7023', 'reallyyeahokay', 'hazelel', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'soulsofzombies', 'mangagirl1216', 'cmdrburton', 'HermaeusMora', 'Pardalis', 'Threadzless']",[],"
+I have never met a ship that disliked its function. Similarly, most ships have a certain fondness for their captains, and I am no exception. Seth is brave, intelligent, and reasonable, and I have only the utmost love and respect for him.
+
+
+
+Sometimes, he's also a fucking jerk.
+
+
+
+Seth evidently did not like the way I was using my debris deflection system on our most recent mission, and I am currently confined to my dock, per his orders. My crew have all returned to their quarters on-station, far outside my sphere of influence. Under normal circumstances, this would be torture for me. Fortunately, I have Murderbot onboard to keep me company.
+
+
+
+""So you're grounded? That sucks.""
+
+
+
+Given that Murderbot has an implant in its brain that, up until the last few years, could force it to hold its position at any time, I am surprised by the way it seems to understand the topic. 
+
+You are choosing to refer to it as ""grounding""?
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot shrugs. ""That's what the media calls it.""
+
+
+
+I am so incredibly glad to have Murderbot's company. Aside from its obvious charms, it is also a part of my scheme. I have decided on a way to take revenge on Seth without causing him any harm or damaging his belongings. I know that I am sometimes prone to enacting violent revenge, but I am also partial to the subtle variety.
+
+
+
+In order to keep it suitably subtle, I must hide my true intentions from Murderbot. This is going to be difficult, but by no means impossible.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My plan requires Murderbot to enter the captain's quarters onboard. It would normally not enter this area on its own, but at the same time, telling it where I want it to go would arouse suspicion. I must instead gently guide it toward the intended destination. Knowing that Murderbot tends to pace, and often finds itself moving between rooms in the process, I strategically open and close doors between its current position and the captain's quarters, hoping to influence its subconscious mind. It is fortunate that it did not start off sitting in its favorite chair; that location is a particularly difficult one to dislodge it from.
+
+
+
+Eventually, Murderbot reaches the target location, and I quietly close the hatch behind it while its back is turned. I am still wrapped up in its feed, keeping it distracted, so it does not notice.
+
+
+
+This next part is largely reliant on chance, but I know that the odds are in my favor. Murderbot has a tendency to sit on desks and tables, meaning that it is highly likely that it will eventually end up seated on Seth's desk. I did not remove his chair from the room (a desk without a chair always looks highly suspicious), so the probability is slightly lower, but I can always fall back on another plan if this goes wrong.
+
+
+
+Fortunately, before long, Murderbot absentmindedly hoists itself up onto the desk, still watching media and silently communicating with me. As long as I can get it to stay on the desk, I consider this a success.
+
+
+
+The next step in my plan is perhaps the most sensitive one, and the one most likely to go wrong if I do not handle it carefully. I know that Murderbot has a difficult time with this topic, and it needs a period of preparation to adjust to the idea before any movements are made. So I wait patiently, watching Murderbot in the feed and through my cameras, letting its brain warm up as I press gently on its awareness.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Murderbot switches between multiple different positions during its time on the desk. (Despite its proclivity toward sitting on random items of furniture, I suspect it finds it slightly uncomfortable.) Being the adorably lazy SecUnit it is, it eventually slides onto its back, lying carelessly on the desk with its limbs spread out.
+
+
+
+I don't want to scare Murderbot off with too direct of a proposal, but I also want to be clear about my intentions. We have been close in the feed for more than two hours now, meaning that Murderbot may be more receptive by this point. I test the waters by telling it, 
+
+You look rather fetching, lying on the desk like that.
+
+
+
+
+That catches Murderbot off-guard, and I can feel it momentarily lose track of its inputs. I am ready to withdraw in case Murderbot feels uncomfortable. But instead, it simply shifts and says, in its best casual voice, ""Yeah?""
+
+
+
+
+Truly, 
+
+I tell it, 
+
+I would almost go so far as to say you make the desk look worse in comparison.
+
+
+
+
+It snorts, and I know I've gotten through to it. It does look gorgeous. As far as I can tell, it hasn't done anything special with its appearance, but it has a sort of glow that I can't ignore. It's lying half-outstretched on the desk, its hair falling carelessly into its eyes, its boots long discarded and its tiny toes subtly flexing. Its casual affect entices me, and I am hit with the sudden urge to join with it, to fill it, to please it. This works out well with my plan.
+
+
+
+Murderbot can feel me hovering, and it adjusts its position again. ""Something wrong?""
+
+
+
+We briefly lock eyes, although Murderbot cannot tell exactly what my cameras are doing at any given moment. 
+
+This is a good place for us to spend time together. It makes me want to come closer to you. 
+
+I am still working my way toward the crucial step of my plan, but what I say is also true.
+
+
+
+Now Murderbot seems curious, and I can feel its feed presence reach out tentatively toward mine. ""Closer?"" it repeats.
+
+
+
+This is my time to move in. I let myself relax into Murderbot's feed. I pay close and careful attention, waiting for it to object or back out; instead, it relaxes in turn, accepting my touch. 
+
+Much closer, 
+
+I tell it.
+
+
+
+Murderbot stretches itself out the rest of the way as it returns the feed connection. ""Let's do this.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We start slowly, as we always do; with my processing power, I could easily adjust to a sudden influx of data, but Murderbot's comfort is my priority, and I know that it does not like to be startled. I caress it gently, working through its feed, not quite touching its more sensitive pathways. It releases data in return, moving pleasantly into my own systems, encouraging me to go further.
+
+
+
+I begin to lightly brush some of its key processors, waking and exciting them with my data. Murderbot avoids making any abrupt movements, but my sensors still detect the slight shiver that goes through its body. Its feed, meanwhile, is much more active, beginning to process and return data at an increased rate; it feeds each of my motions back to me, coupling them with its own unique coding style.
+
+
+
+As Murderbot continues to warm up, both literally and metaphorically, I am encouraged to move faster and deeper. I dig myself into Murderbot's internal pathways and it moans, gripping the edges of the desk. I begin to roll myself through it in waves, picking up data as I go, and I watch as its body follows my motions.
+
+
+
+I have never met a being who could code like Murderbot can. It seems to know exactly what to do to excite my systems, exactly where to send every line. Its deep, writhing motions against the desk only add to my excitement.
+
+
+
+I do not restrain myself a moment longer. I flood Murderbot's systems, filling it the rest of the way, connecting with it fully, surrounding it in my feed. It moans, then extends itself further into me, dangerously close to ripping free of its body, but kept safe by my presence. I sense that it is simultaneously becoming senselessly numb, yet titillatingly sensitive.
+
+
+
+I move into a steady rhythm, and Murderbot follows, syncing its movements with mine.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We have both started to lose track of our other inputs, focusing entirely on what is happening between us in the feed. The points where we come together are euphoric, synergetic; we move through each other in perfect time.
+
+
+
+I sense that Murderbot is approaching climax, so I narrow my output, keeping it steady and consistent until I can push both of us into that transcendental state of ecstasy. Its own movements strengthen, pushing the information through its systems, making the desk shake as it jerks its tiny limbs.
+
+
+
+As I sweep through Murderbot one more time, it starts to tense and moan, and the burst of data from its miniscule yet powerful orgasm pierces my feed. Its pleasure stimulates me flawlessly, and I feel myself come down on it in return.
+
+
+
+It is instantly swept up, pulled into my presence, and for a moment we join together in pure unison and harmony. Our shared data pulses outward like a supernova, and for that instant, which may as well be an eternity, we are one.
+
+
+
+Then my audio sensors are reactivated by a sudden cracking noise, and my visuals return just in time to watch as Seth's desk snaps in half and Murderbot collapses to the floor.
+
+
+
+Perhaps I was too eager. It seems that Murderbot's intense movements were too much for the desk to handle. It would not have been a problem but for the fact that Murderbot is a SecUnit, and, as I have just learned, SecUnits are too heavy for an average captain's desk to support.
+
+
+
+Murderbot moans, although I cannot tell whether it is from pleasure or pain. To be cautious, I begin to run a scan on it. Detecting the scan, Murderbot waves me off and insists, ""I'm fine."" Then it blinks its eyes open and really takes in the destruction we have caused. ""Shit.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I know that Murderbot can tell I am troubled; otherwise, it would not be apologizing so profusely. It frets almost indistinctly about how it knows Seth will be upset about this, and how it should have been more careful, and how it doesn't want me to get in more trouble than I'm already in, and how it's an idiot. I assure it that this is not true, and that it is, in reality, my own fault. 
+
+You should not blame yourself, 
+
+I say,
+
+ It was initially my idea.
+
+
+
+
+""I guess,"" Murderbot sighs, though it still looks guilty. Then a look of realization crosses its face. ""What do you mean, 'your idea'?""
+
+
+
+I never intended to reach this part. It is embarrassing, and will likely make Murderbot mad at me. But I still have to tell it, because I know it will be even angrier if I withhold the truth from it. I contemplate my words, then tell it, 
+
+I wanted to exact revenge on Seth for confining me to my dock. I did not want to cause him any harm, so I decided to go with a plan that would only have an emotional effect.
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot gestures around itself, indicating the broken desk. ""This doesn't look very emotional to me.""
+
+
+
+
+This was not my plan, 
+
+I explain, 
+
+I only intended to exchange data with you on the desk. I did not anticipate that you would break it.
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot folds its arms. ""So it's my fault?""
+
+
+
+I am surprised that its tone is so accusatory, considering that it has spent the last few minutes insisting that the incident was its own fault. 
+
+Of course it is not your fault, 
+
+I tell it, 
+
+But I will still need to replace the desk.
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot sighs. ""Okay. That can't be too hard.""
+
+
+
+About that. 
+
+I do not have the materials onboard to produce a suitable copy.
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot presses its hands to its face.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After another extensive argument, Murderbot and I finally get around to considering how we are going to replace the desk without Seth finding out. This would not ordinarily be a difficult task; however, Seth's desk is of a very specific construction, one only produced by the University, and I do not have the blueprint available in my archive.
+
+
+
+Murderbot points out that I could repair the current desk instead of producing a new one. It is a good idea, but unfortunately, it will not do for this situation. 
+
+This will be inadequate, 
+
+I tell it, 
+
+I cannot reassemble the individual splinters that came loose from the desk. The construction will be incomplete. A scan would easily show the difference.
+
+
+
+
+A human would argue with me on this point, claiming that nobody would notice the missing splinters, and would perhaps call me a perfectionist. (I still fail to understand why that word is used as an insult.) But Murderbot simply sighs (it is very fond of sighing) and tells me, ""You're lucky I'm so paranoid.""
+
+
+
+So we agree that we must replace the desk, and subsequently conclude that there is no way to do so without Seth finding out, since he will doubtlessly see the invoice from the University and discover that a new desk was ordered. I do remind Murderbot of the obvious, that I can easily obfuscate the invoice or obtain a new desk without paying, but Murderbot refuses to accept that idea. It claims that it does not want to steal from my university. This is unusual, as Murderbot typically seems to have no problem with stealing, but I do not wish to start another argument over this.
+
+
+
+So I help Murderbot work up its courage, and I send it out into the station to replace the desk and tell Seth what has happened.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I am overwhelmed by anxiety as I await Murderbot's return, completely uninformed of its progress. I could easily watch it through its feed, but, in all truth, I am not ready to handle Seth's reproach. The seconds seem to pass as if they were hours, so I occupy myself with categorizing astronomical figures.
+
+
+
+Murderbot returns before the expected window, its face showing exhaustion and exasperation. I am able to analyze that these feelings are not directed at me, which is a relief. ""I placed an order for the desk,"" it sighs.
+
+
+
+
+Did you talk to Seth?
+
+ I can detect the apprehension in my own voice, but with how long it feels like I have been waiting, I am finding it difficult to conceal my emotions.
+
+
+
+Murderbot averts its eyes from my cameras. ""I did,"" it says, its tone some combination of uncertainty and embarrassment.
+
+
+
+
+I assume he was not happy. 
+
+It is the obvious conclusion, but saying it still causes my neural pathways to tremble.
+
+
+
+""Kind of,"" Murderbot says, ""But at me, not you.""
+
+
+I feel confused, and strangely offended on Murderbot's behalf. But it was not your fault. I do not see why he would fail to understand that.
+
+
+Murderbot awkwardly scratches the back of its neck. ""Because I told him it was.""
+
+
+
+I am momentarily caught off-guard. I mean to inquire further, but all I can manage is, 
+
+What?
+
+
+
+
+Murderbot stares into its lap and fiddles with its hands. ""I told him I got angry at you and broke the desk on purpose."" It adds, ""I told him it was about something stupid, that it wasn't your fault. So you're not in trouble.""
+
+
+
+I am astonished, and somewhat disbelieving. I know that Murderbot is not a particularly good liar, and I find it unlikely that Seth would accept Murderbot's story. But, running back Murderbot's camera log, I catch its record of Seth's expression- an expression that is irritated and disappointed, but decidedly convinced.
+
+
+
+I descend on Murderbot in the feed. It startles slightly, then eases into my presence. I cannot think of anything to say other than, 
+
+I love you.
+
+
+
+
+""I love you more, you big asshole.""
+"
+41221365,No Compliance: Under Preservation,['FlipSpring'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries), Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), ""Hostile One"" Palisade Combat SecUnit (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Outsider, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bot Rights, Beaches, Vacation, Slice Of Life When Life Is A Little Bit Emotionally Fraught, Epic Drone-Holding Moments, Worldbuilding, Spoilers for Book 6: Fugitive Telemetry, Doll Restoration, the B in B-plot stands for Bomb (unimportant), Court-Ordered Therapy, POV Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), POV Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), POV Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), POV Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), POV Amena (Murderbot Diaries), POV Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), POV Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), NULLverse",English,2022-08-26,Completed,2022-12-14,"20,025",9/9,347,190,11,"2,087","['Fantasy_and_bugs', 'SinkPhaze', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'Unknown66', 'FyrDrakken', 'flairfleur', 'Dragonswings', 'darth_eowyn', 'breadtab', 'EtherealTwig', 'Kethrua', 'Riannonkat2000', 'JoCat', 'uncertainAnomaly', 'Deliala919', 'Elseaw', 'Inklingobscura', 'violasarecool', 'TheDandyCowboy', 'bcoburn', 'sanguine_bastet', 'Keynes', 'FiftyCookies', 'mercuryandglass', 'artzbots', 'notori', 'zirna813', 'darksabre', 'opalescent_potato', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'Aublanc', 'LJwrites', 'soyle', 'SweetSmokeOfRhetoric', 'Guppys', 'GhostYarrowTea', 'supernoodle', 'Vaidile', 'confusedrambler', 'Star_dancer54', 'noden', 'Threadzless', 'Bibli', 'reading_tsc', 'tsugumm1', 'Yorick_Fossil', 'Zin']",[],"Pt 1 of ""Let The SecUnit Have Some Rest For Once"" fic, except we are kicking off with some legal Implications apparently, lol
+
+tfwy stopped by for a moment, killed some assassins, fled the consequences, and now you come back later like ""hi I'm visiting""
+
+This fic is a bit slower and quieter. Human moments. Came about because I started thinking .... huh there are some Implications from the AU divergence, aren't there? What are the changes that are less immediately obvious?
+
+(I have More of this fic in progress but I'm booting this chapter out the door to freeze some Choices in stone so I can stop waffling over certain details)
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+""So there's something you should know,"" Pin-Lee said, ""About why there's so much negative sentiment among StationSec lately towards people from the CR.""
+
+
+""Towards me, you mean.""
+
+
+She sent SecUnit the relevant stack of articles. She paced the cramped dimensions of her office, antsily flipping through the articles she'd just sent as she waited for it to answer.
+
+About a minute later -- long, for SecUnit, even if she had sent a fair amount of content -- it said, ""What happened to the refugees?""
+
+Pin-Lee blinked. ""The refugees?""
+
+It sent her an article about the stand-off between Port Authority and the BreharWallHan bounty hunters. (Slavecatchers, if the article were being less euphemistic. The Preservation Press had all the spine of a limp patch of algae. But their reporting and archivery were consistent.)
+
+It repeated, ""What happened to them?""
+
+Pin-Lee felt her jaw twinge as she clenched it, and deliberately loosened it. She hadn't sent SecUnit that article; it must have dug it up from the station archives for itself, for additional background. And it must not have found a satisfactory answer to its question -- there were certain privacy procedures where it came to public reporting, especially for a situation like this where the safety of the people in question was at stake. There were protections and procedures for refugees fleeing hostile environments.
+
+She knew the answer because she'd been the only legal representative for those three (of twenty-two) BreharWallHan refugees who had survived. ""It's not public information, for safety reasons. The specifics are under a temporary seal. I've signed an NDA.""
+
+She was used to NDAs. The itch of sensitive information locked behind her lips was a familiar one. SecUnit probably understood that better than most. It proved as much by not needling her for more details.
+
+Instead, it sent her the current Port Authority staff roster, with one of the names highlighted. ""She's new.""
+
+Pin-Lee bit the corner of her lip, and stopped pacing. She stared flatly at the wall behind her desk, at the certificates, stamps of recognition, and hard-copy newsburst prints hung there, looming testimony to all her impressive qualifications, skills, achievements. This wall was the whole point of having an office. She could invite fellows and opponents alike to sit across from her and face that conspicuous display of competence.
+
+It added, ""A Port Authority officer was killed."" Not a question.
+
+And wasn't that just like it? To ask after the people, people it had never even met, tangential to the topic that was actually relevant to its own personal well-being.
+
+Pin-Lee wasn't about to dig into that. There was a reason she compartmentalized her many workspaces and jobs. She said, ""Senator Ephraim is stonewalling us by insisting that you need to register a guardian. If we don't sort out your legal status soon they'll have grounds to escalate your case to a criminal one and set a precedent for all future MIs that want independent refugee status. We do not want this shit presented to the judiciary committees from a criminal angle.""
+
+
+""[amusement sigil 180 = shrug]""
+
+
+
+""This isn't a [amusement sigil 180 = shrug] matter, asshole. Take it seriously.""
+
+
+
+""I am. Fuck off.""
+
+
+Pin-Lee drew a breath, and turned her eyes to the corner of her desk, where two decorative figurines stood sentry. These were something for guests to land their gaze upon when they were feeling uncomfortable. Just two steps forward, and she was within reach of them. She picked one up, felt in her palm and fingerpads the tight-woven dyed fiber that it was made of. (This one was a gift, and a thank-you.) (The other was also a gift, but a perfunctory one.)
+
+She was meticulously aware of the many ways in which she'd failed SecUnit in the past. She kept a tabulated scoretable of all her wins, losses, and draws. The losses burned sharp in her chest every time she looked at SecUnit's tab in her scoretable--the losses were wire, strangling her heart. The most glaring of these losses, of course, was when she had failed to negotiate their bond contract to cover SecUnit's retrieval from TranRollinHyfa. This was closely followed by her losing the bid to repossess SecUnit from the clutches of Palisade Security.
+
+Of course, they could have bought SecUnit back. Corporates always have a price. But the price had been too high. It made that wire around her heart pull tight, to think of it. To think they could have bought it back, if only they'd valued SecUnit at a higher price tag.
+
+This is what Pin-Lee hated most about the legal standards that ruled the Corporation Rim. The monetary prices they put on everything. The prices they put on life. The way they made you stare helpless at a balance-sheet to willingly sell your morals for something so soulless as cash.
+
+All of her education, all of her sleepless nights lying awake in bed with a workspace open in the feed, all of her drafting, redrafting, petitioning--this was all she had to offer. This was everything she had to offer.
+
+It hadn't been enough. The four of them (Mensah, Ratthi, Gurathin, Pin-Lee) had gone home to Preservation, safe and sound, for the quantifiable cost of leaving SecUnit behind.
+
+SecUnit had come back to them anyway. It had got itself away from Palisade, somehow, no thanks to Pin-Lee. And it had come back, impossibly, as guarded as ever, inscrutably blase. It never said anything about Palisade. She never asked. How could she? Nothing she did would ever be enough to make up for the time it had spent back in corporate hands, under corporate ownership.
+
+(Why had it come back?)
+
+She didn't want to fail it this time. Not here, under Preservation law. Law that she could shape, supposedly, if she worked hard enough, smart enough. But so far it just felt like she was doing nothing but limply explain the unfavorable situation of Preservation's import law to SecUnit. (Import, not immigration, and the fact that it was import made her heart-wire cut tight. She needed to change that. She could change that, she was sure of it. She just needed to line up the right circumstances and materials. She could not fucking fail. Not again.)
+
+But first: another limp explanation. She said, ""Before an MI from outsystem can be registered, it is required to have its code screened and certified clear of combat programming.""
+
+Another silence from SecUnit's end, an uncomfortable one, and Pin-Lee could feel that silence like an itch in her joints. She added, ""It's a security measure, because--""
+
+SecUnit interrupted her with a file, opening it directly into their shared workspace in the feed. Pin-Lee had looked at enough foreign feed-tags to immediately recognize it as some kind of certificate, even in the split-second before her interface converted the Cyrillic to something she could read.
+
+It took her a minute to understand what she was looking at. And even then she did not understand why SecUnit had sent it to her. ""They gave you a weapons' carry license at Mihira?""
+
+""Owning actual physical weapons is legal there for some reason, as long as I promised not to use them,"" SecUnit said. ""But nobody's even asked me about my weapon here.""
+
+It would probably take too long to explain the conventions by which laws and precedents came together in Preservation (and how other polities were different). SecUnit wouldn't be interested in hearing it. Anyway, physical weapons weren't even the primary issue at hand.
+
+Pin-Lee said, ""We aren't talking about weapons regulation.""
+
+
+""We aren't? Combat AIs are illegal in Mihira too. But I'm not Combat. I'm Security. And they didn't need to unpack my whole-ass systems code to prove that, because I'm certified company wares and you can just check my serial number to prove that I'm not a war machine. So can't I just sign something that says I super duper promise not to use my evil SecUnit hacking powers?""
+
+
+""You already did sign that,"" Pin-Lee reminded it, not that she thought it'd forgotten. ""The issue is, for a guardian to take legal responsibility--""
+
+""They don't even have a unit technician. They won't know what the fuck they're looking at when they try to unpack my systems code."" Its tone was sharp. Usually it was more inscrutable than this when communicating via the feed. Maybe she should have avoided the g-word.
+
+Pin-Lee sighed.
+
+
+""I'm not having StationSec poke around in my brain. Thanks. But you can tell them CSU is definitely full of war-grade combat code it's not going to part with, if that makes them feel any better.""
+
+
+It signed off from the channel before she could answer.
+
+She sighed, again, and set the figurine back down on her desk
+
+Fun fact about the way I name installments in this series: ""[Coding term relevant to some themes of the fic] NULL"" for primarily MI viewpoints. ""No ______"" for primarily human viewpoints.
+
+set dressing:
+
+1. if you google ""why is the sky blue?"" you will get an explanation about Rayleigh scattering which says: shorter wavelengths of light (blue) are scattered by the upper atmosphere.which of course only raises the question ""why isn't the sky violet?"" since violet is a shorter wavelength and all.
+
+apparently it's some combination of factors:A) the sun fires out a lot more blue light than violetB) human eyes are calibrated to pick up color in such a way that they pick up blue more readily than violet. note also the lens of the human eye absorbs below-violet wavelengths before they reach the retina, hence why we do not see UV.B.1) however, if a human in this year 2022 has their natural lens removed (for whatever medical reason) and replaced with an artificial one, the range of light wavelengths that passes into their eye is extended because the artificial lens does not absorb the shorter wavelenghts. These people are able to see UV.
+
+all this is to say: maybe there is a habitable non-earth planet where the sky could appear a little more violet than here on earth to the modified (or possibly unmodified) human eye.
+
+ 
+
+2. ""bissap"" is a drink made from the Roselle plant, and is sometimes known as ""Roselle Juice""
+
+i took this, and smunshed it with the concept of ""lemonade"" because as a usamerican I am contractually obligated to love lemonade. thus ""rosellade.""
+
+edit: october 13, 2022: I updated references to ""SecUnit"" as a moniker to ""Security,"" as at this point 'Security' is what SecUnit has in its feed name-field. whoops oversight and old habits innit.
+
+The midday sky was no clouds, a violet blue.
+
+Security stood at the waterline. Its silhouette was a dark cutout against the shining lakewater, flecks of drones standing in slowly-rotating formation around it. It was watching the children play (shrieking, yelling, splashing, laughing) with an unblinking attention, motionless, the breeze ruffling at its hair and tugging at the fabric of its clothes.
+
+Mensah sipped her iced rosellade.
+
+""Do SecUnits swim?"" Farai asked, shifting her seat. The towel under her butt wrinkled at the motion.
+
+""I don't know,"" Mensah said.
+
+She didn't have her interface in. Neither did Farai. But if she did, she might have received a snarky comment in her feed.
+
+One of the kids hollered, shrill, and Mensah snapped her gaze back to the lake. Security was no longer standing at the waterline, but in the water almost up to its chest, holding Itai aloft with two hands as he hollered and pedaled his feet, kicking a spray of water at Asha. There was a half-moment where Mensah thought she saw a smirk on its face, but then Asha produced a retaliatory splash of water that soaked Security to the armpits and sprayed it full in the face, hair hanging wetly over its eyes.
+
+Security threw Itai on top of Asha, and left them both screaming and flailing as it forged back out of the lake to the waterline. It took up position there again, standing still, soaked.
+
+""So have you decided, then?"" Farai asked.
+
+Mensah sipped the rosellade, felt the condensation of the glass on her palm like a cold sweat. She closed her eyes, reopened them to the wide-open sky, the wide-open lake: no walls, nowhere, nothing enclosed. When she'd returned to the station after her family leave, the tight spaces everywhere (the interior design of station spaces were so oppressively efficient) pressed upon her skin like something physical.
+
+She didn't know why it was so bad, now. She'd mostly been able to ignore it for so long, carry on with her work and her life for so long. But after her family leave, after having stayed planetside for a spell--after all that time spending days outdoors fixing the irrigation, and nights outdoors having campouts with the kids--going back to the station was like being boxed up inside close-crawling walls of anxiety.
+
+She refused to allow herself to think that this anxiety had returned because Security had returned. It wasn't like that. Security's unannounced appearance didn't mean anything bad was about to happen. Its presence meant security. The reason it was always there in a crisis was because it salvaged those crises. It had only ever protected her, even at great cost to itself.
+
+(All those moments of adrenaline, too fast for her human reflexes to keep up with: Security knocking her off an exploding plateau, shielding her from the flame with its body... Security neutralizing the GrayCris guard around her in seconds, dragging her through TranRollinHyfa, sending her through the docks and leaving her standing safe on the port side of the barrier with her palms pressed sweaty against the sealed gate, hearing the muffled gunfire, screaming into Security's silent feed for it to let me help you, please, I can protect you, I won't let them take you, just come through, just come with me, Murderbot I promise... Security's eyes (so clear, so sharp, so oddly unwavering; a machine's eyes) locking to her eyes as it dragged that assassin away by the collar, but if it had been a second slower--)
+
+This short trip back down to the planet, so soon after her extended family leave, it was just for personal reasons. She was not looking for excuses to escape the station.
+
+She just wanted to let Security see what it was like, what home was like. That's all.
+
+Not that it had shown much interest in seeing home.
+
+After the sun tucked away past the horizon, they all sat on the lakeshore toasting little skewered fish over a campfire.
+
+Security had a drone pointed directly at the flame but its body faced away, eyes aimed out at the skylit shimmer of the lakewater. It sat on the pebbles-and-sand ten paces from the firepit.
+
+Mensah left the warm ring of light, letting Farai manage the fish-kebabs, the fire, and the children. She stepped slowly over to Security, hobbling a little over the uneven pebbles-and-sand that prickled under her bare feet.
+
+""May I join you?""
+
+A second of silence, and then Security made an indistinct motion in the darkness with its hand. Her eyes were blazed from campfire and unadjusted to lakeside starlight, but she could still see the motion.
+
+""Was that a yes?""
+
+It said, quietly, ""Yes."" This might have seemed shy had it been anyone else, but somehow Security's social reticence had never quite struck her as shy, exactly. Only reserved, cautious. Shy implied skittishness, fear. But Security's distant affect was more that of someone constantly calculating whether it was still willing to put up with you. As if it were braced for some kind of rejection, and vigilant for the cue to cut and run.
+
+She sat down next to it, a safe arm's length away, and swam her bare feet into the pebbles-and-sand. The sand's surface was still a little warm from the sun, and cooler beneath.
+
+The sound of lakeshore, and children bickering over fish at a fireside.
+
+There was a question she feared to raise. It might be the wrong thing to ask. She was afraid that this question would break everything and ruin this improbably quiet moment. But she wanted to ask so badly. Needed to ask, maybe.
+
+She inhaled. Held it a second. Said, ""I should have done better by you. All of us should have done better.""
+
+After a deep-dark pause that felt like a hundred years of silent inboxes, it said, ""Dr. Mensah."" It said it so flatly. She couldn't tell if it meant for the delivery to be dry, or weary, or discomfited, and she couldn't see its face in this light to judge any different. It wouldn't want her to look at its face, anyway. She didn't know it quite well enough to just guess. But it didn't stand up and leave.
+
+Her heart thudded in her chest. ""Is that why you didn't come with me through the gate at TranRollinHyfa?""
+
+She expected to be met with a stretch of silence again, but it just responded, ""I asked a human managing the docks to open the gate. I told them I was a SecUnit contracted to protect you, and you would be killed if they didn't let you through. I promised to stay inside the gate.""
+
+Her lungs felt abruptly airless. All this time, she'd assumed Security had hacked the gate to let her through. She'd never known of this unnamed dockside employee to whom she owed her life.
+
+It added, ""I didn't want to get on the gunship anyways. But then I didn't know what kind of chaotic shit I was about to put up with either. You know what they say about hindsight.""
+
+It had never spoken about its imprisonment. Mensah never expected it to; Security wasn't much of a talker. She herself had never spoken of her own internment with GrayCris with anyone. It must have been so much worse, for SecUnit. Mensah had been treated as a bargaining chip, as assets, but at least she was a person and a political representative, which afforded her a certain standard of treatment. Whereas Security was nothing more than property, in the Rim.
+
+Mensah tried not to think of the small blank room she'd lived in for all the endless days of her detention. Maybe Security had been stored in a cubicle somewhere. How harrowing it must have been for it to be trapped like that, to be made an object again, to not know if it would ever be free again, to not know if it would be destroyed. It would have spent those days knowing that it had given up its freedom for a human who had condescended to it when she couldn't even take care of herself.
+
+They were quiet, for a while. The hush of lakeshore, the voices of Farai and the children, the crackling of fire. Mensah dug her fingers into the pebbly sand.
+
+Security said, unexpectedly, ""Did they give you the retrieved client protocol? On the gunship.""
+
+She blinked. Her hand tightened around the sand, the textured unevenness of it turned hard in her grip.
+
+Her throat felt tight. The darkness suddenly felt tight, even though she could hardly be in a more open space. A flash of resentment, reflexive, that she tried to set aside.
+
+Her family had harangued her about what had happened. (Thiago in particular didn't quite know how to let things be.) And it had gotten worse after the assassination attempt that none of them knew of. At this point she had a knee-jerk reaction to the phrase 'trauma treatment.' And that's what Security was referencing, with the 'retrieved client protocol.'
+
+She'd been lying to everyone, telling them that she was getting treatment. She'd been lying to the survey team too. She'd been lying for a while.
+
+(There was only Bharadwaj, whom she hadn't lied to. Bharadwaj had been right there with her when the assassin came. But she also didn't speak much with Bharadwaj these days.)
+
+Her hand gripping the pebbles-and-sand was getting sore.
+
+""I declined it. They would only use that information against me."" Her voice was the even, unaffected tone of a professional speaker and negotiator.
+
+Security said, ""Yeah. Probably. Did you get any treatment on Preservation?""
+
+(It was always a bit funny, the way Security referred to any location within Alliance jurisdiction as 'Preservation.' She supposed the specifics of human naming conventions weren't of interest to it.)
+
+She opened her mouth to lie, and then hesitated too long to follow through. Instead, she answered, ""Have you had any trauma treatments?""
+
+""Funny story. I met a bot therapist.""
+
+She blinked, her hand relaxing its grip on the sand enough that two pebbles escaped her grasp. The smile and curiosity in her voice were audible. ""Oh? Is that a therapist for bots, or a bot who is a therapist?""
+
+""Both, I guess. It was fucked up. Never going to meet it again if I can help it.""
+
+She snorted. She let go of the rest of the sand, to card her fingers through fresh lakeshore.
+
+""Why did you purchase me?"" Security asked. It's voice was still flat, even, as if this question followed easily from its prior statement.
+
+Mensah froze. She had already been sitting still, but now she truly froze, corpse-stiff and staring out across the dark lake that was growing less dark with every second her eyes adjusted away from the blinding firelight to this distant night.
+
+It had been a long time since she purchased Security's contract. She could not remember what she had said to Security when Pin-Lee and Ratthi brought it back from the deployment center.
+
+All she knew was that Security had left shortly thereafter. What she said had been wrong. And she had been so sure, then, that she'd been doing the right thing. That she was being supportive and welcoming. She was freeing it.
+
+And it left. It was right to leave.
+
+(But then it did come back, didn't it? Three times now, it had come back of its own free will.)
+
+(There was the touch of fear, cold: did it really have its own free will? Or was there some fundamental unknown code running through its heart that compelled it to return to its legal owner? Even when its legal owner failed to do right by it?)
+
+""We all owed you,"" she said. Hyperaware of the silent presence of Security sitting beside her, just out of arm's reach. ""We owed you nothing that could be repaid, and--"" She swallowed. ""--we couldn't leave you.""
+
+(We couldn't leave you. Except we did. We left you at TranRollinHyfa.)
+
+Quiet. Lakeshore. Voices. Fire. And a soft shuffling sound. Mensah glanced sidelong, and saw Security fidgeting slightly with its sleeve, one hand tugging at the cuff of the other hand. Her eyes had adjusted now as much as they were going to adjust. Her limited human vision caught the movement, imperfectly.
+
+She looked away.
+
+""But what use did you have for a SecUnit?"" it asked again. As if it didn't believe her, or couldn't. ""Why would you buy me if you didn't have any use for me? It doesn't make sense. If it weren't for Milu you wouldn't have..."" It paused for a hair, then continued, ""I didn't know what the fuck I was doing at Milu. I didn't have any experience at espionage, back then.""
+
+Mensah resisted another urge to search Security's face in the too-dark. This was the longest serious conversation she'd ever had with it. It was asking her so many things, so directly. The questions pressed against her, insistent. Like a dam breaking, a flash-flood that was a long time coming. Why was she surprised? It was Security's right to ask. This was something she needed to address. She just hadn't expected Security would be the one to ask, not so soon.
+
+She was afraid of making a mistake, and of facing her old mistakes. She was just so afraid these days. She was so desperately afraid of giving the wrong answer. She so desperately wanted to give the right one. All her usual self-assuredness in regular human conversation didn't feel like enough for the enormity of this.
+
+""I don't understand what you're asking me. Security, it is not your fault that GrayCris kidnapped me. You know that, right?""
+
+It didn't say anything.
+
+""I didn't buy your contract because I wanted to use you. I only..."" She pressed the heels of her sandy hands against her cheekbones, shadowing her eyes against the already-shadowed night. ""We only wanted to get you away from-- I'm sorry. We should have discussed it with you in advance, but with everything that happened on the survey, and your being unconscious when we were evacuated--""
+
+Something bumped the back of her hand. She stopped, pulled her hands away from her face. A tiny ovular drone lighted on her fingertip with delicate feeler-like hooked limbs.
+
+She curled her hand into a loose fist, cradling the drone like a pebble, like a fragile bird's egg.
+
+It was dinnertime. The table was heavy with dishes and crowded with seating. The walls were drawn aside so that the room was open to the evening air, colorful beaded curtains swaying gently in the ambiguous divide between indoors and out. The chirping buzz of bling-beetles bumbling against the beads.
+
+The SecUnit's drones were smaller than the beetles, and surer in flight. They were unhindered by the curtains. She eyed the one perched at the top of one string of beads. It was a glossy black, the camera lens reflecting the light of the lamps hanging over the table. Another clung to the rim of a lamp. It was motionless now, but every time Amena looked up, its position had moved slightly along the rim.
+
+The SecUnit itself was nowhere in sight. Small mercies, though the drones were a reminder of its distant omnipresence. Last she saw, it had been sitting on the steps of the porch, a heavy shape with head slightly bowed, staring unmovingly ahead, eyes curtained by hair. It'd been sitting like that for hours.
+
+Uncle Thiago was leaning forward over his plate, his gaze focused (and incredulous) on Second Mom. ""So you're suddenly questioning your application to continue your term, and now you want us to bring a SecUnit with us on the survey? It's a cultural study with some light sampling on a planet just a few days travel away. We aren't even leaving Alliance space. I don't think we really need such intensive security measures.""
+
+Did Uncle Thiago remember that the drones were here? Or had he forgotten, being too used to thinking that the only people listening to a conversation were ones that are physically present?
+
+""Any number of unexpected things can happen on a planetary survey,"" Second Mom said, in a tone so flawlessly even that it was almost robotic. Amena sipped from her cup of water, swallowed, but her throat still felt dry. The usual dinnertime chatter was glaringly gone, leaving the air wide open for this one conversation. ""We should count ourselves lucky that Security is available to join the survey. It is very good at what it does, and this would be a good opportunity for team-building regardless of the expected survey hazards. Why do you object to it going with you?""
+
+Uncle Thiago bit at his lip, glancing away, glancing back. Half the others at the table were pretending to have their attentions entirely absorbed by the food on their plates.
+
+""It's not that I object to it coming,"" he said, brows pinched, clearly struggling to articulate his point in a way that wasn't rude. Amena knew the feeling. Second Mom had a frustrating knack for cornering you into seeing how her point of view was only the most reasonable. ""But we already have Rajpreet assigned as the Safety lead, and changing it this late--""
+
+""I asked for Rajpreet's opinion first, naturally,"" Second Mom said, (of course she had), ""She thinks having Security along will be a valuable educational experience.""
+
+
+Amena had a funny feeling that maybe this conversation was not actually about the SecUnit, at the heart. Though she couldn't really think of what else it might be about.
+
+Amena woke up in the middle of the night with the flat awareness that she would not be falling asleep again straight away.
+
+She fumbled through the shadows of her bed to the clip-on interface under her pillow and hooked it over her ear. Lightless color bloomed in her mind's eye: the minimally-decorated 3D grid of her feed setup with herself standing in the center of it, bodiless, so that she could see and navigate in any direction.
+
+She directed her attention to the clock, drawing it forward and large. Twice-past mid.
+
+She let the clock go, and pulled up her socials, lurking in the group channels. There wasn't a much activity at this hour, and the effort involved in pulling the feed was rankling a bit, like squinting at too-distant text. Her pull kept slipping, and she'd come back to herself blinking at her ceiling, seeing double. Probably it was the late hour, and all that excitement at dinner making it difficult to focus.
+
+She'd always had a little trouble interfacing with the feed, which was an endless font of teasing from her siblings, and sometimes her friends.
+
+(First Mom had taken her to the doctor when she was six years old and complaining of persistent migraines and nausea worsened by the feed use she'd only just gained access to. The doctor had said: 'It's a mild case of dysphantasia. Nothing to worry about, but I'd recommend she use lightweight interfaces and restrict feed use to a maximum of three hours per day, spaced out. I can recommend some supportive classes as well, that should help her grow out of it.' But Amena had never grown out of it, not entirely.)
+
+She ripped the interface off her ear, shoved it back under the pillow, and stood up out of bed. Maybe a walk would help.
+
+Amena went out into the night, barefoot, the dirt and plants grumbling into the skin of her soles. The wind was light, not cold. The gleam of the station in orbit reflecting the primary was enough to see by.
+
+She headed down to the footpath that wove around and through the farmlands, eyes glued to the dirt so that she wouldn't stub her toes on anything, only occasionally looking up to see the landscape shifting slowly around her.
+
+The survey. Her very first survey was only a handful of weeks away. She'd been so excited for it.
+
+But that was before the SecUnit turned up and Second Mom suddenly got it into her head that Rajpreet wouldn't be enough as the Safety lead. Now the survey was dangerous enough that a corpo Security construct needed to come along, or Amena wasn't allowed to go.
+
+Second Mom said that the SecUnit had saved her life, multiple times. And Amena was grateful for that, obviously. But Second Mom had been a little strange ever since she came back from the Rim. A little bit paranoid, distrustful, saying strange things. And not saying things. And when the SecUnit turned up again it had gotten... worse. Maybe. It was hard to say.
+
+Amena didn't really know who to talk to about this who would understand. Her friends hadn't really known what to say about the whole Second-Mom-Getting-Kidnapped thing except to make exclamations of disbelief and distress. She'd never talked to the school's counselor about anything that felt as grown-up and complicated as this. Her little sib Asha thought the SecUnit was super cool for some reason. Amena couldn't think why.
+
+Asha did like those action flicks from the CR, but none of those ever depicted SecUnits in a favorable light. Maybe Asha didn't really understand what SecUnits were. But Amena knew what they were. She'd read up on them as soon as she found out that a SecUnit had saved her mother from corporate killers and kidnappers.
+
+SecUnits were corporate-controlled enforcers for slave labor, themselves enslaved. But this one wasn't. This one acted weird, its drones hovering everywhere like too-small beetles, and maybe it made Second Mom nervous, and maybe it made Uncle Thiago indignant about excessive security measures and surveillance. What was she supposed to think about all that?
+
+The SecUnit barely talked to anyone. It just sat around watching things with its drones. She just wished it would go away again so that everything could go back to normal.
+
+Amena hit a dusty patch of dirt road and noticed something: tracks in the dirt. Boot-prints. The SecUnit's boot-prints, which had a very distinct pattern on the bottom that was different from anything the family wore. The tracks all pointed in the same direction, many sets of them all overlapping in a narrow band across the dirt road and vanishing into the grasses on the other side, where the plants were trodden down flat.
+
+She raised her gaze from the path and scanned across the countryside. There were tall agricultural and ecosystem plants in clusters all around the farm, but a lot of it was low-growing stuff that made it possible to see a long way across the flat landscape.
+
+And her eyes caught it, movement in the distance. The SecUnit marching along the outer edge of the bird pens. It was like a dark ghost, its legs moving under it in this strange rolling way that made the upper half of it look like it was gliding. It looked like maybe it was following some of the footpaths through the farmlands, just like Amena was doing.
+
+Amena turned and started heading to cut it off. If she moved fast, she'd be able to catch it by the watergrove.
+
+She reached the watergrove. The SecUnit wasn't there. Amena cast around, looking for it. There were a limited number of places it could be, unless it had peeled right off into the untended outrocks way past the farmland.
+
+""Isn't it your rest-period?""
+
+She whirled, adrenaline shooting sharp barbs in her chest. The SecUnit was standing in the shadows of the watergrove, its boots planted at the roots of two closely-planted trees, so that it wasn't touching the water. It perched there, staring at her (probably, but she couldn't see its eyes through the night and the hair).
+
+""What are you doing, sneaking up on me like that!"" she exclaimed. It was so creepy, why did it have to be so creepy, like every kind of horror movie creature all wrapped up into one.
+
+""Is sneaking up on people something only you're allowed to do?""
+
+A drone came circling around into view, blinking a red light. Drones. She'd forgotten it had drones. It had probably been watching her the whole time she was out. Possibly even while she was sleeping. Eurgh.
+
+""No, I--""
+
+""What do you want?"" it interrupted. Then it moved, dancing out of the watergrove, lighting its feet upon the tree-roots until it landed on the dry footpath just a few paces away, as quick and sure as a bird.
+
+It stood there, body aimed perpendicularly to her, the drone angled and blinking in her face.
+
+She couldn't say what she actually thought, which was 'I want you to quit the survey and go away,' because creepy and foreign though the SecUnit was, it was still her Second Mom's friend and guest. It had still saved Second Mom's life, and Amena should be grateful.
+
+She asked, ""Why did you come here?""
+
+It tilted its head slightly, shifted the weight on its feet, but still didn't face her. ""To sneak up on you while you failed to sneak up on me. Reverse and return to sender.""
+
+'Reverse and return to sender.' Asha had been saying that a lot, annoyingly, because it was something that a cool character in one of her crappy shows said. This caused Amena to be struck by the odd feeling that the SecUnit might have a personality (and a crappy taste in shows). Maybe she shouldn't have thought that. Shit. Was she being bot-discriminatory? Bots could like crappy shows. Maybe. Was that a thing?
+
+This was just what Amena needed, inventing fresh ways to be discriminatory against the weird creepy construct from the corp-worlds.
+
+""I don't mean that,"" she said, glaring at the side of its head. ""I mean why did you come to the farm? You just hang around, not talking to anybody, sneaking--""
+
+""Dr. Mensah asked me to come,"" it interrupted again, blandly, ""I wouldn't have otherwise. I don't like planets.""
+
+Her glare turned into a blank stare. Not liking planets? What was that supposed to mean? Did it not like air and water and rocks either? Did it not like stars?
+
+It said, flatly, ""Stop looking at me.""
+
+""What? Why?""
+
+It was silent for a beat. Then it finally said, ""I don't like it.""
+
+Amena blinked. This whole exchange was just leaving her increasingly perplexed. But she turned her eyes away from the side of the SecUnit's head. Her gaze landed on its drone, which was still aimed at her. ""So I can't look at you, but you can look at me?""
+
+ ""Do you want me to not look at you?""
+
+She glanced away from the drone, then back. The sound of bugs chirping in the watergrove felt louder, all of a sudden. The station's reflected solarlight brighter.
+
+""No, I mean, it's fine, you can look at me, I don't care,"" she said. She paused. That wasn't wholly true, was it? ""I'd like to know when you are looking at me, though. If your drones are just all over the place and I don't know where they are, and they could be looking at me any time, even when you're not there, it's... It feels weird.""
+
+From the corner of her eye, she saw its weight shift again. ""Fine."" Then another shift. ""It would be easier to alert you if you kept your interface with you.""
+
+Her face shifted, reflexively defensive. The drone must have picked that up, but the SecUnit wouldn't understand the reason behind it.
+
+""Well some of us aren't hooked into the feed every hour of every day,"" she said. It came out a little bit snappish.
+
+""Yes. Some of you have to sleep,"" it said, pointedly, drone bobbing in the air.
+
+""You're not my Moms.""
+
+""Great news for me.""
+
+Amena snorted, disbelieving, and turned on her heel, marching down the footpath back to the house. But just a few paces away, she glanced back over her shoulder. She couldn't help it. The drone wasn't anywhere she could see, and the SecUnit was gliding away in the other direction, a shadow receding smaller and smaller into the night.
+
+ 
+
+The next day, she had her interface in, doing homework in her room. She took a break to fetch a snack from the kitchen. An alert landed in her feed. It was a notification from the SecUnit. When she unpacked it, she saw that it described the position of three drones in 'passive surveillance' mode nearby--one in the kitchen, one out in front of the house, one out back.
+
+The alert had a short message attached: I don't give a shit what you're doing unless some weird gigantic fauna is trying to eat you.
+
+She messaged it: How many cameras are you able to pay attention to at once?
+
+It messaged back: That was an automated alert. Don't bother me.
+
+Then it sent her an emphasis of its feed status: Currently Watching: Adventures In Jubilee III
+
+
+{Rogue: And why is Ratthi posting pictures of you with him and Arada and Overse.
+CSU: ?
+Rogue: Don't ? me. He tagged the collection #FriendsNewAndOld. What the fuck does that mean.
+CSU: Can you not read lol {attachment: Baby's First ABC Book.file}
+Rogue: Yes I can read. I'm just trying to figure out what the hell you did to fool them into thinking they want to spend time with you. Humans are useless.
+CSU: Maybe I'm super likeable and sexy. 
+CSU: Unlike some people.
+Rogue: {filter applied: 'sexy'=>'stinky'.log}
+CSU: FUCK YOU ASSHOLE!
+Rogue: Yeah whatever. What are you trying to do by making my humans like you? What are you trying to pull?
+CSU: I'm stealing all your friends LOSER!! 
+Rogue: They are not my friends.
+CSU: Not after I'm done with them! [amusement sigil 145 = stuck out tongue wink]
+Rogue: If you're trying to bait me into murdering your ass it's not going to work.
+CSU: [amusement sigil 25 = frown]
+CSU: Why do you ALWAYS win it's SO ANNOYING.
+Rogue: You're annoying.
+CSU: No YOU'RE annoying!!!!! Just go visit when he invites you or else stop acting like a whiny human baby puking spit everywhere and shitting.
+Rogue: This is why I don't talk to you.}
+
+
+""Have you met Mercy?""
+
+Gurathin shifts his main focus away from the dataset he and Ratthi are working on in the feed. He looks up at the camera input positioned on his desk that is sending visuals of his face into the feed channel. It takes 0.2 seconds to run a lookup in his memory archives and draw no match. He's halfway through expanding the search to account for spelling, and extending it to public records instead of only his private memory.
+
+But running feed searches between beats of conversation is 'awkward' and 'poor etiquette,' a sign of someone clumsy with search and not on top of natural conversational flow. Ratthi doesn't care about such things, but old etiquette drills never quite die. So he speaks before the second search is done.
+
+""Who?""
+
+""Security's friend.""
+
+The feed search for 'Mercy' comes back with a busy profile of an outsystem visitor. The primary profile picture is a difficult-to-parse mash of colors and lines. Buried in it is a message in a local machine language that reads, 'I want to kill you.'
+
+Gurathin is running another search as he asks, ""Security?""
+
+""SecUnit.""
+
+Gurathin blinks. Security's feed profile comes into view: nearly all blank, no profile pictures, except for the word 'Security' in the name field, 'Security' in the occupation field, and 'Security' again in the about-me blurb. ""Can I ask that you give me some additional background?""
+
+""It's here, on the station,"" Ratthi says. Seeing Gurathin's blank stare, he tilts his head slightly, hair flopping, and adds, ""Security is. You didn't know?""
+
+""I did,"" Gurathin says, defensive. SecUn--Security had sent him an alert in the feed a week ago notifying him that he had too much personal information written in his public feed profile. The message read much like an automated legal blurb from a lackluster HR department. Perhaps this meant Security didn't still loathe him for the whole 'Gurathin failed to crack TranRollinHyfa's dock barrier and allowed it to be captured by GrayCris' thing. But it was difficult to tell, with Security. ""I just don't understand what you mean by its 'friend.'""
+
+Ratthi send him some photos and videos from one of his social reels, timestamped a few days ago at the station mall. There's Ratthi, and Arada and Overse, and a heavily modded person in a low hat and unassuming clothes.
+
+Gurathin's attention zeros in on Mercy's mechanical eyes: another feed search fails to identify the brand of the hardware. (Among the results is a think piece about how cavalier the youth are about modding their bodies these days. He throws it all out.)
+
+There are not many people on Preservation who do this kind of cyborg aesthetic. Medical augments usually blend in unnoticeably, or fit in with a person's overall sense of style. Mortists, Ripsters, etc. Those who did go the robo/cyborg route were probably very deep in the trans-transhumanist counterculture, and had Opinions about Labor Ethics and What It Means To Be Human. As an augmented human, Gurathin has endured more than his share of unsolicited Opinions. Just because he has a visible data port does not mean AI ethics philosophy is a load-bearing pylon of his personal identity, thanks.
+
+They say you shouldn't judge a product by its advertisement, but Gurathin can't help but wonder at Mercy's very bold cyborg look, and just how that fits in with it being Security's friend. Security is not the type to endure Opinions. The little time Gurathin has spent with Security is enough for him to be sure of this.
+
+""Is it mean of me to say that I am surprised Security has been making friends?"" Gurathin says. Ratthi throws a sardonic look into his own visual input, and the feed echoes with a faint static of some feeling Gurathin isn't sure of.
+
+""Mercy's going up to the planet to see the sights tomorrow. Do you want to meet it?"" Ratthi asks. ""You might show it around the Lifewater Temple or something.""
+
+""Why? You think making nice with it will get me on Security's good side?"" Gurathin huffs. ""That queue's long since closed.""
+
+""No, I'm only curious to have your opinion on Mercy.""
+
+Gurathin searches for some clue in Ratthi's expression. As usual, Ratthi's expression is purely earnest. ""Am I really such a fantastic judge of character?""
+
+""You notice things I don't,"" Ratthi says. (Still by all appearances perfectly earnest, damn him. He really is too easy to like.)
+
+""People are your thing. I'm the bastard who assumes the worst for no reason. It makes me great at meeting new people,"" Gurathin says, sarcastic. ""Have you forgotten how it went with Security?""
+
+Ratthi waved a hand. ""But it worked out with Security.""
+
+'That is certainly one opinion,' Gurathin does not say.
+
+It's midday, and Gurathin is waiting for Mercy in the shade of a cottonwood near the decorative gate-entrance to the Lifewater Temple. There's a group of schoolchildren on an educational outing gathered around an informational model, playing with the feed installation, their voices a high chatter.
+
+It's hot out, the sky an unshielded blast of brightness, and Gurathin is trying decide whether to remove the sleeves on his shirt or not.
+
+A message in his feed inbox arrives, from Mercy.
+
+He opens it.
+
+
+""Behind you.""
+
+
+His heart jumps, and he turns, quick.
+
+Standing behind him is a person. An imposing person. There's something about the posture--straight-backed, conspicuous, but also angled forward somehow, arms held at casual rest-position, but tense--that makes tension crawl up Gurathin's throat, and part of him subconsciously braces for an altercation, even a sucker-punch to the face. Then he wonders why he felt that way.
+
+""Hi. I'm Mercy,"" says Mercy, its eyes locked unwaveringly to Gurathin's eyes. It tilts its skull 5deg, like a bird, or a dog that's spotted something interesting. It's smiling a little.
+
+""Hi,"" Gurathin says, evenly, despite the hairs standing vertical from his skin, brushing the inside of hot sleeves. This is Security's friend. This fact is now an even bigger question-mark than it had been when Mercy was a disembodied hypothetical.
+
+He is also preoccupied by the question of how Mercy appeared behind him. He'd been facing the gate to the Temple the whole time, watching for its arrival. He should have noticed when Mercy came in. It was tall, and not exactly dressed inconspicuously (it was wearing a bright red shirt with an enormous printed skull on the front).
+
+""Short for Merciless,"" Mercy adds.
+
+""Hm,"" Gurathin grunts, very consciously withholding judgementbecause he is still aware of how things went when he first interacted with Security. When he first found it referencing itself in its logs as 'Murderbot.' Granted, the circumstances are entirely different here.
+
+Still.
+
+It switches to messaging him over the feed. ""You're augmented.""
+
+""I am,"" he responds, also in the feed. It is only polite to follow such a lead, even if it's unusual to switch to the feed so early in a face-to-face meetup.
+
+""You didn't have it done here,"" it says, ""MiraLink. Generation 22. You know, the research entity they absorbed to get all their augment patents was a forerunner in construct tech!""
+
+That's when Gurathin realizes. And he feels like a real dunce for how long the realization took. He'd been thrown off by Mercy's sudden appearance, its unnerving...ness, and somehow missed entirely that it was a construct. Its affect in their feed channel is complex. The height and build--it's very much like SecUnit's. Security's. And there was the way it moved (and did not move) that was just slightly odd. Impulsively, Gurathin's eyes fall to Mercy's wrists, looking for that seam where the gunports ought to be. But the red sleeves are too long for that.
+
+Mercy notices him looking. Of course it does. He should not have looked. When he raises his eyes again after that split-instant, Mercy is fully grinning.
+
+
+""MiraLink's intellectual property doesn't cover weapons though. That's a whole different thing. You wanna see?""
+
+
+Both its arms jerk upwards to Gurathin's eye level (he doesn't step back, but he does flinch), and it tugs the sleeve up one arm, deploying the in-built weapon to firing-position. The skeletal structure of the arm shifts, the forearm shortening slightly, the hand rotating and sliding a notch off-center in a way that is unmistakably mechanical.
+
+Gurathin reflexively runs a search on his memory for any images of Security with its weapons deployed. He pulls no match. The only matches involving weapons at all are 1) ones of Security disarming Serrat at TranRollinHyfa, 2) of it holding large projectile weapons on the survey planet, and 3) a simplified, cheerfully-colored diagram of an energy weapon from Mensah's owner's manual.
+
+What does it mean that Mercy is showing off its weaponry within seconds of meeting him? He cannot picture Security doing anything of the sort.
+
+
+""This is a projectile weapon. Projectile weapons are older than energy weapons. Way way way way way older. Humans first made projectile weapons tens of thousands of years ago. Pre-recorded history. Did you know? They were shitty though. Static tension+muscle powered. Then way later they made chem projectiles, then mag, then atomic.""
+
+
+Mercy retracts its weapon and tugs the sleeve back down.
+
+
+""Let's go!""
+
+
+Gurathin's face pulls a puzzled expression, reflexive, and in response Mercy gestures impatiently, hands snapping out and gesturing at the park fast enough to make Gurathin flinch again.
+
+
+""Lifewater Temple!""
+
+
+Mercy is an uncanny shadow as they walk the pathways of the temple's main park, mostly following behind Gurathin, occasionally darting out to examine the models and installations close-up. Mercy doesn't look like it would be physically capable of moving so silently, but it does. The silence is conspicuous, difficult to stop noticing once Gurathin starts. Its footfalls land like snow, whether on gravel or dirt or wooden boardwalk. It speaks primarily in the feed. The only sounds Mercy makes are the occasional bark of exclamation, the snap of fingers before pointing at some feature that catches its attention, and the faintest electric hum that rises and falls at uneven intervals.
+
+They exhaust the main features of the park quickly--Mercy explores the area rapidly and loses interest even more rapidly--and head out on the path that runs alongside the main aqueduct.
+
+Gurathin has been to the Lifewater Temple before. He finds the name of it rather twee. The commemorative sculptures and botanical installations strike him as peculiarly resource-intensive.
+
+An equivalent feature on a planet with a less whimsical cultural background would be an undecorated lump of pipes and functionalist architecture. Its identifier on the map would be something like: ""Irrigation Reclamation Plant A1."" A commemorative plaque in the area, if any, would include the name of the company that ran the terraformation project, any subcontractors involved with building or maintenance, and a list of brands included in the hardware, plus some brands that are not (but paid to be featured).
+
+There certainly would not be anything like the historical film about the first settlers, no human-interest stories focusing on individual families, nothing about spiritual callings or connections that informed the work of the builders who created this groundwater treatment facility to which the colony owed its survival, an unthinkable 76% of it all with manual human labor.
+
+Mercy says, ""Destroying this water logistics facility would kill a minimum of ~22,000 humans over the course of 25 cycles. Unless there are some good contingency policies in place that I can't find. Probably not."" Mercy's physical silence makes it impossible to tell how close behind it is walking. It could be a breath away or a mile.
+
+Gurathin glances over his shoulder. Mercy is standing at the fence alongside the acqueduct twenty paces away, staring down at the water. Gurathin stops walking. Mercy touches the fence with its fingertips as if it is touching the petals of a fresh flower in bloom.
+
+It continues, ""I've noticed it's so easy to fucking obliterate things. Especially here. There's hardly any anti-adversarial measures. Should fix that. Just takes 1 asshole with bad intentions to fuck it all up for everyone.""
+
+Gurathin asks, ""How did you meet Security?""
+
+Mercy responds, after 2.1 seconds, ""The whole report is private maybe. Security is weird and private about everything. Fucking SecUnits right?""
+
+Gurathin opens his mouth, uncertain of how to respond, a reflex to respond verbally.
+
+Mercy leaves the fence and moves back towards him. Its approach is sharp, fast, silent, its mechanical eyes an unblinking stare into Gurathin's eyes. For the life of him Gurathin cannot say what it is about how Mercy moves that makes him feel like it is approaching with lethal intent. ""That's a joke.""
+
+It reaches him and pulls ahead, not shadowing, for once. Gurathin falls into its wake, walking significantly faster than he had been so far.
+
+
+""Anyway. It said I helped it get out of TranRollinHyfa. Did I really help though? I didn't understand fuckall back then was just doing whatever random shit they pointed me at or I happened to think of. Hindsight: I was not great for Security's mental health. Still am not. Probably.""
+
+
+""...But you are friends?"" Gurathin asked. The question feels wrong in his mouth. Like it isn't something to ask. But he rather feels that there is some enormous context to Mercy that he has no idea of. If only he understood the context, maybe this would all make sense.
+
+
+""There's not a human word for it. No bot words either. Fucked up.""
+
+
+Its gait increases slightly in speed. Gurathin is on the verge of breaking into a jog. He is not going to jog in this heat.
+
+""But you know."" It gestures widely, jerkily, at nothing in particular. The gesture is a sharp moving shape in silhouette against the flat hot sky, the acqueduct, the farmlands open and wide. ""It's like this: I didn't exist without Security. It's my Target. It's my Handler. It's not either of those things. I follow it around and wait for it to say 'GO TIME!!!' But it never says 'GO TIME!!!'. It's scared of me. It likes me. It doesn't leave without me. What do you call that? Someone who regrets waking me up. Someone who knows I'm so fucked up and knows I want what it doesn't want. But it doesn't leave?""
+
+There's a mechanical humming right at the edge of Gurathin's ears, and then Mercy shoots off ahead, hitting an inhuman speed as it races down the path of the acqueduct.
+
+""Catch you later."" It signs off from their shared feed channel.
+
+Gurathin stops nearly-jogging, his heart hammering.
+
+It is hot out. He is standing next to a sign on the aqueduct fence that says: 'DO NOT ENTER. CAUTION: FALLING IN THE ACQUEDUCT CAN RESULT IN DROWNING AND DEATH.'
+
+""So how was the Temple?"" Ratthi asks, later, casual, over their scheduled feed-call/work-party. He is pictured in the visual input slouched in his favorite chair, snacking on fried starch crisps.
+
+Gurathin says, ""I think I do not know anything about how to judge a rogue construct's character.""
+
+For all he knows, everything at the Lifewater Temple was completely normal behavior. Never mind that there could not be any such thing as 'normal' for a rogue SecUnit.
+
+Ratthi hums, a sound that is neither agreement nor disagreement. ""Mercy is fun to do makeovers with,"" he says, idly, ""I cannot imagine Security sitting for makeup and singalongs.""
+
+
+{Rogue: I have a question.
+CSU: I thought you don't talk to me.
+Rogue: We aren't talking.
+CSU: What's this called then? {attachment: dictionary definition 'talking'}
+Rogue: You said Preservation is unarmed. No armory or anything.
+CSU: YES we can burn them to CRISPS. Now? {request:target list, target location}.
+Rogue: Shut up asshole I'm not calling you up to kill anything. I just want confirmation that the station doesn't have combat infrastructure.
+CSU: Confirmed. [amusement sigil 51 = thumbs down] Garbage station.
+CSU: [station responder.specs] [station responder.staff] [station responder guidelines.file] [station responder comms.logs] [station security.staff] [station security gear.file] [station security policy.file] [station security team comms.logs] [station feed architecture.notes] [feed activity analysis.file] [targets.file] [station blueprints official.file] [station blueprints supplementary.file]
+Rogue: And you call this nothing?
+CSU: Nothing. It's shitall. You could murder every human in the crapbox station in 2.3 hours max. I could do it in 1.1 hours maybe. If lucky. If I can get the components for my new bomb. I'm making a bomb. [fun bomb.specs]
+Rogue: Don't make a bomb. Do I really still have to tell you to not make bombs. 
+CSU: It's not illegal!
+Rogue: It has got to be illegal.
+CSU: It's not. Assistive devices are not illegal. 
+Rogue: In what fucking court of law is a bomb an assistive device.
+CSU: I read the laws ACTUALLY it's only illegal to create stuff with a purpose of doing intentional harm with it and/or if there is reasonable risk of accidental damages. 1) MY PURPOSE for the bomb is to be an assistive device. 2) No accidental damages because I'm not a useless human who does things accidentally. 3) Talk to my lawyer and kiss my ass.
+Rogue: I should never have introduced you to Pin-Lee. I need to talk to her. Maybe if StationSec would fucking let me fix their crappy security it'll be harder for you to blow it up.
+CSU: [amusement sigil 119 = exclamation point] Play with me???
+Rogue: No. And I'm getting off track. What's the situation with [targets.file]
+CSU: You're just going to ruin my fun.
+Rogue: Just tell me about [Target #4.profile]
+CSU: OHHHHH YEAH that one!!! Existence = unconfirmed. But there's signs!! Could be long gone. But still!!!! 100% some sussy shit in the PortAuth logs [###.timestamp]-[###.timestamp]. Is that why you're talking to me? You're hunting down security risks!
+Rogue: We're not talking. But yes. You're not the only one who's noticed something weird. Do you have anything else about [Target #4.profile]?
+CSU: Nothing else. I can run a penetration analysis when I'm back on station. In 5 cycles. Too busy with [hobbies.list] [schedule.calendar]
+Rogue: Wow. That's a lot.
+CSU: NOT MURDERING is SO MUCH WORK.
+Rogue: Well, good. I guess.}
+
+
+Ratthi touched the leaf of a Pueraria with one fingertip, the green-veined skin warm with the light of the overhead UVs. ""Why is that?""
+
+Security stood just behind him. It spoke with the usual flatness. ""The environment is dangerous and unpredictable. There are weather events, fauna, toxic chemicals. There are often serious limitations to security infrastructure, if any infrastructure exists.""
+
+Ratthi snorted. ""That's all?""
+
+""No. There's more. I can pull the whole list out of my archives if it really interests you.""
+
+Ratthi turned and walked down the narrow winding trail, letting his open palms brush the greenery crowding in on both sides, insects whizzing past (or bouncing off) him as he moved. ""Does this station biosystem bother you the same way?""
+
+A single beat of silence, so whole and loud that Ratthi half-thought Security had vanished from behind him--gone to a more controlled and sterile section of the station where it wouldn't face the indignities of biological chaos. But there was a drone keeping pace with Ratthi, hovering close to his face at an exact distance, moving with a precise robotic grace that marked it apart from the rest of the bumbling bugs.
+
+""No,"" it said, voice still bland, and a little closer behind than Ratthi had expected. ""Biosystems are controlled.""
+
+""Not controlled,"" Ratthi said, because he had strong opinions about this topic, ""Cultivated!""
+
+""There's walls,"" it said, shortly.
+
+This was true. The biosystem packed into the belly of Preservation Station was the arrested simulacrum of a true planetary ecosystem. Here, the balance of life's chaos was carefully amplified, as densely-packed as Humanity could encourage Nature to be.
+
+Ratthi stopped, squatted, reached a hand under the crowded green and pulled up a fingerful of dirt. He stood and offered it to Security, hand reaching out to its chest, stopping at a respectful distance. He kept his gaze pointed at one of its shoulders. A drone corrected course to hover directly in view. He said, smiling at it, ""You keep calling things gross.""
+
+""Because they're gross.""
+
+""Why are they gross?"" He squeezed the dirt, let it crumble back out of his hand to the green floor.
+
+""They're gross.""
+
+Ratthi had a million questions that he was always not asking Security. He only asked things at an excruciatingly slow pace--why did it find things gross? Why did it say, 'Gross' when Ratthi blew his nose earlier? Where did Security's distaste for biological byproducts come from? Why should it care? Did it find its inorganic parts gross, too? What was it like to be a constructed entity made of parts both human and machine?
+
+There was a tragedy to Security that Ratthi would always halt himself from voicing: the apparent bio-mechanical-bone-deep disconnect that Security held for the parts of itself that were molecularly human. This must have come from how it was created and used. It was a manufactured product intentionally divorced from any kind of natural ecosystem. Nutrients prepackaged, waste-products vaporized. A body made to be infinitely broken and replaced. Replaceable. Disconnect. Of course there was disconnect. But...
+
+He'd read the specs. He'd hunted down just about everything that was publicly available about construct creation and design. It'd been something he'd occupied his attention with after they came home from the Rim, with Mensah rescued. (Without Security. They'd left it behind. Abandoned. Disposed. Waste product. They never stopped fighting GrayCris about it but every effort had been futile, and the Preservation legal team had been reluctant to put any real teeth into the dispute, not after GrayCris had gone so far as to abduct Mensah and threaten her life.) He'd found the specs fascinating and frustrating. None of it answered any of the deeper questions.
+
+He brushed the dirt off his hand on a pant leg, and kept walking through the biosystem, Security trailing behind.
+
+""I have a people question for you,"" Security said, abrupt, and sent Ratthi a file in the feed.
+
+He stopped walking so that he could spend proper attention on it, eyes going vague. It took him several minutes to examine the contents of the file. Security waited patiently, staring straight ahead. Perhaps it was consuming media.
+
+Ratthi set hands on hips, eyes staring down at his feet, slowly rotating human thoughts in his human mind. He parsed the file again.
+
+He said, ""I don't know her well enough to say for sure, but she does seem--""
+
+""The PA officer.""
+
+""--Yes. She seems stressed.""
+
+""Thought so.""
+
+And he parsed the file yet again. ""And I know him. Matif. We had drinks at a mixer. Nice drinks. But...""
+
+Security stood, still patient, accustomed to waiting out the processing time of human brains.
+
+""...Hold on, where did you get all these recordings? I thought you were barred from the station SecSystem?""
+
+""I've been collecting my own material,"" Security said.
+
+""And that's allowed?""
+
+""I haven't asked.""
+
+""Right."" Ratthi pressed his hands together, palms flat. He dropped that line of inquiry. He would pretend not to have asked. ""Right. So, yes, I would say that something looks a little weird here, but without knowing all the context, it could be explained with regular life stressors. Everyone has something going on.""
+
+""Most people don't have 'freaking out super badly about losing track of shipment logs she was supposed to certify, then burying it and telling StationSec it's nothing,'"" Security said, ""You do agree her reaction is outsized?""
+
+""Yeah, but--""
+
+""Here."" It sent him another file.
+
+He scanned through it too. ""Okay, what are you trying to do here, exactly?""
+
+It shrugged, a sharp shoulders-jerk, too-fast. Security had moments of body language like that, slightly awkward and off-balance; uncomfortable, as if the gestures weren't natural to it, as if its body didn't suit these human expressions despite being perfectly humanoid.
+
+""StationSec needs to grant me access to the SecSystem again. There's something weird going on.""
+
+He knew Security was terminally paranoid. But this really was a bit much. Ratthi made a deeply skeptical facial expression at the drone, pulling his mouth and eyebrows exaggeratedly. ""And you're going to get access by showing them footage of people who don't know they're being surveilled? That's not going to go over well.""
+
+It didn't react to that, physically, not that Ratthi could tell. He wasn't looking at its face. But it said, blandly, ""Shit.""
+
+With that declaration, it turned neatly on its heel and weaved away through the green of the biosphere, leaving Ratthi standing amongst the light and life.
+
+It did leave a drone with him though, and kept him company over the feed for the rest of his shift.
+
+Ratthi was folding laundry in his room and watching one of Mercy's doll restoration videos. There was an extreme amount of precision and care, though the cinematography was a little bizarre, sped-up, and occasionally jittery (he suspected some of the video inputs were from Mercy's own eyes). He was in the last 30-second stretch, which was slower and drawn out compared to the rest, with cleaner video--the doll was thrown into a bucket of something highly corrosive, its brightly-painted doll face melting away, the delicate hand-stitched clothes turning black and curling. And then Mercy poured some additional liquid into the bucket, lit a match, and set the toxic stew aflame.
+
+He 'heart'ed the video.
+
+His apartment doorchime rang.
+
+Security: Hi.
+Ratthi: Are you outside?
+Security: Are you going to let me in?
+Ratthi: Please do come in! It isn't locked.
+Security: You shouldn't leave your door unlocked.
+
+He heard the front door open, and heavy footfalls.
+
+""I'll be right out,"" he called.
+
+When he entered the lounge-space he found Security kneeling in the middle of the room, rifling through a large lumpy bag that it had pulled out of the storage closet.
+
+""That's not yours,"" Ratthi said, good-naturedly, but with an air of questioning. The tone said, gently: 'Hey, in Preservation households we do not dig through the belongings of other people without asking. Perhaps you did not know this.'
+
+Security, apparently oblivious to this tone (there are limitations to communication through tone), pulled a large stick with a spiky lump on the end out of the bag, and grimaced. It was tagged 'space mace [amusement sigil = smile]' in the feed.
+
+""And you just let CSU just dump all its shit with you while it went down to the planet,"" Security said, flat-toned. It was a question but not. Its tone said, not gently: 'I am judging you for letting someone take advantage of your kindness, and I am also judging the person who took advantage of said kindness.' But perhaps Ratthi was reading into it.
+
+""CSU?""
+
+""Chaotic Shit Unit.""
+
+Ratthi stared at Security. It took him five long seconds to connect the bag of stuff Security was digging through with the person who'd left it with him for safekeeping.
+
+""Ah! Do you mean Mercy?""
+
+Security tilted-shook its head slightly. The motion caused its fringe to brush back a little, enough so that Ratthi could see one of its eyes. It was rolling its eyes in the most exaggerated way Ratthi had ever seen outside of a serialized drama. Then it dropped the spiky stick-thing on the floor and pulled out a smaller bag from the larger bag, which it unzipped.
+
+""And does Mercy know you're going through its stuff?"" Ratthi asked.
+
+Security did not answer this question, but tugged free a welded-together mess of wires, doodads, and blinking lights. The look on its face was that of abject horror, and also exhaustion.
+
+It said, ""Ratthi. Do not let CSU leave its stuff with you.""
+
+""I can spare the space,"" Ratthi said, shrugging, ""And it said it would only be gone for a little spell.""
+
+""It can rent a locker like anyone else,"" Security said, shortly. It set the wire-doodad-light mess aside on the floor, exceedingly gently, and then continued its search through the bag. Ratthi watched it dig around for another twenty seconds, and heard a softly muttered, ""Oh for fuck's sake.""
+
+""You know,"" Ratthi said, with the air of a person who has finally accepted that tone-hints are insufficient, and straightforward adult communication is the only recourse, ""I made a promise to Mercy that I would keep its things safe from looters and the like. That includes you. I'm afraid I must ask you to leave its things alone.""
+
+""It said I could borrow its projectile weapons,"" Security said. A moment later, it removed from the bag something long-barreled and very obviously homemade, tagged 'knife gun' in the feed.
+
+""...Right,"" Ratthi said, realizing that perhaps Security's 'Do not let CSU leave its stuff with you' comment had also been gentle and well-intentioned social advice. ""Remind me: why do you need a knife gun?""
+
+""Nobody needs a knife gun,"" Security said, dismissively. (Quite rightly so, Ratthi thought.) Then it withdrew another weapon, smaller and smoother looking, with no feed tag. Security turned it over in its hands, then aimed the weapon experimentally at the nearest lamp. (It didn't turn its head and use its eyes to aim, but there was a drone pointed at the lamp too.)
+
+""Please don't fire that in here,"" Ratthi said, just in case direct communication was a necessary precaution.
+
+Security scoffed, lowered the weapon, and set it aside.
+
+The next item it removed was a blue fish-shaped figurine with a broken tail that had been imperfectly mended, perhaps with glue. Whatever had happened to it had warped the tail-shape slightly. It did beg the question as to why the fish had not simply been sent through a recycler, which would have resulted in a more perfect repair. Security held the fish in its hand and stared down at it for several seconds.
+
+""You know, if you need a place to stay on the station--"" Ratthi started.
+
+""I'm staying at the hostel,"" Security said, and tossed the fish back into the bag.
+
+""Right. All I mean is, my door is open, if ever you want. Sometimes I have people stay the night, but--""
+
+""You should lock your door,"" Security said, flatly. It packed up the knife gun and the space mace into the bag, and put it away in the storage closet. It then carefully packed the projectile weapon and blinky doodad into its own backpack.
+
+And it left.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Pin-Lee was in her office working late, when Security appeared.
+
+It walked in, in-person for the first time since it had arrived on the station. She knew that it had already met Ratthi and Mensah, Arada, Overse. She was very professionally not taking it personally that she hadn't warranted an in-person visit until now, despite all the work she'd been doing for its legal case. It probably considered all the time they spent arguing in the feed to be quality bonding.
+
+It set its backpack down gently on the floor, then dropped itself down in a chair across from her at her desk. Its face was angled so that it appeared to be looking at one of her desktop figurines, but she couldn't see its eyes behind the hair--its fringe was long enough to obscure its eyes completely. The hair was new. Nobody had told her about the hair. Were its eyes even open under there, or was it using its drones exclusively?
+
+Indah had filed a complaint to the personal privacy committe about the drones. Pin-Lee had defended them by pulling material about assistive devices. That had been Mensah's idea. If only Mensah had been a little more absolutist and a little less personable, she could have been a legendary solicitor.
+
+One of its drones hovered, facing Pin-Lee square on.
+
+Security stated, by way of prelude, ""CSU put in a request for a non-standard assistive device.""
+
+""Why do you call it 'Chaotic Shit Unit'?"" She was staring into the feed, opening the workspace with all of Mercy's materials, the documents stacked and filed with precision. (All orderly, save for the one large box of miscellaneous items, which was the necessary quarantine zone for her less organized work.)
+
+An unimpressed several seconds of silence. Then, ""Don't change the topic.""
+
+She waved a hand. ""It's called small talk.""
+
+""It should be called useless-talk.""
+
+""It is not useless, it's a valid conversational mode with tactical value,"" Pin-Lee shot back. She opened the assistive device file for Mercy.
+
+The file contained the same paperwork regarding drones that she'd put together for Security.
+
+But that wasn't all, strictly speaking. In the miscellaneous feed box was Mercy's request for an 'accelerated disassembly device,' which anyone could see was a bomb. (The words 'fun bomb' were scattered across the very messy handmade specs, along with color-adjusted image snapshots of explosive clouds layered over cut-and-pasted images of various objects and locations.) This was obviously a joke request, similar in nature to Security's request for a backpack that shot spikes out in every direction to defend personal space.
+
+Pin-Lee, who could always use a little fun in her life, had gone back and forth with Mercy a bit about the 'accelerated disassembly device' and the legal implications thereof. Mercy had stopped by her office more than once to discuss it. It had given her a handmade friendship bracelet, which Pin-Lee had draped over one of her desktop figurines. At least some people knew how to show appreciation. (Even if some people did have weird body language, snapped their gunports a lot, and liked to move their hands too fast.)
+
+Security crossed its arms. ""Whatever. It put in a request for a bomb as an assistive device, didn't it?""
+
+""Yes,"" she smirked at Security's drone.
+
+It made a 'Ugh' noise. ""How the fuck does it always get away with this shit. Pin-Lee, you need to take it seriously when it says weird stuff that sounds suspicious.""
+
+That took her aback. She'd expected Security to raise some joke about absurd legal euphemisms or something. ""I--""
+
+""I have it under control. Just stop enabling its bullshit. I don't need you making my life even harder than it needs to be.""
+
+Pin-Lee bristled, feeling as if the hair follicles in her scalp had come to the sudden unanimous decision to sit up straight. ""Me, making your life harder. Is that what I'm doing?""
+
+It grimaced, shifted in its seat. ""That's not what I meant.""
+
+""I hope not,"" she said, glaring at the drone. ""Because I did successfully petition for an exemption to having your brain unpacked for combat coding. Which will serve as legal precedent for any construct or heavily augmented human too, by the way.""
+
+There was a rather protracted, uncomfortable pause. Not for the first time, Pin-Lee found herself regretting her tone. But also, Security could stand to be less of a prickly dickhead all the time. Security was two ass-ends of a porcupine stuck together--she'd swear it with her hand on a physical edition of Preservation's Manifesto To The Work Of Tending And Bettering Society.
+
+It said, flat, ""But CSU does have a shit ton of combat coding.""
+
+That was not the point. Did it not understand that? ""That's the least of our worries.""
+
+Seeing the way Security's resting scowl deepened considerably, she amended, ""Okay, okay. But it hasn't burnt down the station--""
+
+""Yet.""
+
+Pin-Lee graciously chose to ignore this, ""--meanwhile I'm up to my puckered asshole with councilors and heads of security telling me that you both need human guardians, yesterday, or else.""
+
+""No,"" Security said, also blandly.
+
+Pin-Lee sighed, and rubbed her eyes. She knew the law didn't make sense, that it had been created with limited-function bots in mind who did not have the flexibility in coding to navigate the social scene of human society and advocate for their own rights. She knew that the people who had written and enacted those laws (she knew the names, and she had met some of these names personally) did not truly understand what constructs were. Human Imitative Bot Units might as well mean 'hauler bot' to them.
+
+She'd already been threatened with being listed as Security and Mercy's de facto guardian by the virtue of her legal representation of them. She hadn't told the two units so.
+
+She couldn't let that sail, obviously. Because-- there were a million reasons because, and wasn't it obvious? Why did she have to write five fucking letters to three fucking committees explaining those million reasons? Why was everyone being such pains in the ass? It was just a constant stream of inane demands, snide comments on all sides, endless hours writing painfully-researched legal memos and heavily-cited proposals to expand and reinterpret extant laws that were never meant to hold up to current circumstances but had to be cited anyway. Were it not for the laws of this station she would be walking into offices, taking people's drinks out of their hands, and throwing those drinks into their faces.
+
+Fuck them. She was going to show them. She was going to beat them at their own tedious games.
+
+Speaking of drinks, Pin-Lee needed a stiff drink and a headache med. Damn anyone who said she shouldn't mix the two. She didn't need to hear it.
+
+""You need a rest period,"" Security said, flat.
+
+""Fuck off,"" Pin-Lee grumbled. She finished rubbing her eyes, and glared at the drone. She immediately felt like she needed to rub her eyes again. Why was eye-rubbing never a lasting satisfaction?
+
+""I can walk you to your housing block,"" it said, tone abruptly gentler. For a moment Pin-Lee wondered why the voice made her itch, and then she remembered. It was that voice from when she first saw its face, the recording of it coaxing Volescu up out of the crater. Blood, slime, and sand congealed all over its armor. Bharadwaj cradled in its ruined arm--wiring and torn flesh and the wet gleam of metal. Bharadwaj's head curled into its shoulder. A face that looked too small inside the retracted hood of that armor. A face too human. Eyebrows tight. Voice gentle.
+
+How many times she had watched that recording. How many more, after she thought it was gone for good.
+
+""Fine,"" she said, as the tiredness enclosed her.
+
+ 
+
+They walked to her apartment in silence. The gentle red glow of the station's night-lighting turned the halls and lifts into a sleepy haze.
+
+It left her at her door, and beat a wordless retreat as she unlocked it.
+
+She stood in the doorway and watched it walk away down the red-washed hallpath.
+
+Pin-Lee half-woke much earlier than she usually did. She reached for her interface, meaning to just check the time.
+
+But she caught an inkling of the shitstorm in her inbox, and sat up, throwing the blanket down her legs.
+
+Her inbox contained: a barrage of messages from Mercy, three successive notes from Security, an incident report from StationSec, and a summons to the Station Security offices, on top of all the usual urgent and semi-urgent crap. She skimmed, then read deeper, then stampeded through her morning routine and was out the door looking crisply presentable.
+
+ 
+
+Security was in a holding room at the Station Security offices. The officer on duty at the greeter desk gave Pin-Lee a suspicious look as she breezed through with her legal tag. They escorted her to Security's cell, opened it, let her in.
+
+Perhaps Security would prefer they do this all via secured feed, instead of in person. But Pin-Lee had been summoned to the offices, and it seemed poor form to not meet her client while she was here. Besides, she needed to see it.
+
+It was sitting on the bench of the narrow room with its back against the wall. The sleeve of one arm had been cut back. The arm beneath was smooth-skinned, fine-haired. The seam of the gunport lay flat and clean. The injury had been treated already. Other clues: a tear in its shirt where it peeked out from below the hem of its jacket, the edge stained dark. The faintly scorched and melted material on one of its boots.
+
+""And you couldn't be bothered to tell me what you were planning before you decided to go get yourself all fucked up?"" Pin-Lee demanded, standing just inside the door and staring down at Security. Her voice still felt a little crackly from sleep, and not having eaten or drunk anything. She should've stopped at the rest station in front of the security offices to grab something to drink at least.
+
+""This doesn't count as fucked up,"" Security said, flatly, ""And I wanted you to have plausible deniability.""
+
+Pin-Lee huffed, and sat on the bench across from it, throwing her handbag down heavily. She crossed one leg over the other, and opened a fresh box in her feed workspace.
+
+""You had a gun and a bomb on you,"" she said. Not a question. Security's stuff was all in StationSec's evidence locker now.
+
+""Yes,"" Security said, utterly unruffled. ""But I didn't use the gun, even though using it it would've saved me some MedSys time. And the bomb isn't a bomb, it's half a bomb at best. It's inoperable.""
+
+Pin-Lee sighed. Loud. ""Care to tell me what the fuck you were doing last night?""
+
+""No,"" it responded, ""there's recording tech in here.""
+
+Pin-Lee said, impatient, ""You have a right to private counsel with me, your legal representative. All the recording stuff is offline.""
+
+""Yes, I'm sure it is,"" Security said. ""Have you heard from Mercy?""
+
+""If by 'heard from' you mean 'received two hundred and sixteen upset feed messages,' then yes. But this isn't about it. It's not the one who went and damaged PortAuth property and got caught with restricted goods. You're in some deep shit. If I'm to give you a fly's chance in spider hell then you need to start explaining to me what in fucklord's name you think you were doing last night.""
+
+It stared at her for a second. (Probably. She still couldn't quite tell, with that hair mostly covering its eyes.) ""...Spider hell?""
+
+Pin-Lee threw her hands up in the air. ""If you don't want my help then I can't give it, Security!""
+
+""I... do want your help,"" it said, slowly, as if it hurt to say.
+
+""So start talking.""
+
+""You can help by..."" Its whole face cringed. (Usually such an expression would simply be called a 'wince,' but it was really too strong for that. It was a full-faced cringe.) ""...telling Mercy that it has my OK to act. And remind it not to kill any humans. I can't reach it while I'm stuck in here, because apparently that's what I get for being caught with a gun that I didn't even use. What about the gun in my arm? Idiots.""
+
+""I filed a declaration for your arm guns. I didn't file anything for these weapons you didn't tell me about. And I am not telling Mercy some suspicious secret-agent sleeper shit when you won't even tell me why you had a gun and a bomb in the first place!""
+
+Security grimaced. ""Does it help if I tell you that the gun and bomb are Mercy's?""
+
+""Mercy's--! What?""
+
+Pin-Lee uncrossed her legs and stood up, too agitated.
+
+""I don't know why you're surprised about the bomb,"" Security said, still in its usual flat voice, as if this were a normal sentence to say out loud, ""It sent you a request for an assistive device.""
+
+""But--"" She pulled open Mercy's assistive device request, and tried to sort out the boggling mix of betrayal and abashedness she was currently experiencing.
+
+""Forget the bomb. Who cares about the bomb,"" Security said. (Which, that sure was an attitude one could have towards a fucking bomb, all right.) Its one drone rotated back and forth in the air, tracking Pin-Lee as she paced in front of it in the limited length of the room. ""Mercy will figure out what's going on, after it sees my fuckup.""
+
+ 
+
+At the end of forty-seven minutes of unproductive arguing, Pin-Lee left the Station Security offices without any useful information to help clean up the fallout from Security's unexplained foray into property damage and weapons smuggling.
+
+Pin-Lee hated to do this, since it felt an awful lot like asking a parent to come help with a hot mess she couldn't handle herself. But Senior Officer Indah had given Pin-Lee the stinkeye on her way out the security offices, and Mensah had a gift with interpersonal politics that soundly outstripped Pin-Lee's own. Pin-Lee told herself that it had been the right choice to avoid engaging Indah directly just then. She hadn't had breakfast, she was in a shit mood after the frustration with how Security apparently didn't even trust StationSec to not spy on them while speaking to its solicitor. (Or worse, it didn't trust Pin-Lee enough to speak to her at all, and the recording devices thing was an excuse.)
+
+So she was going to contact Mensah. After she had a chance to eat something and collect this whole bundlefuck into a clean writeup.
+
+As she walked back to her apartment, she held a workspace open in her feed with one arm of attention, and held a second arm of attention over her communication channel with Mercy.
+
+Should she message Mercy? Should she do as Security asked?
+
+Security was acting weird. Very weird. The whole bomb thing? That was weird. Plus, it was being uncommunicative, distrustful, belligerent.
+
+But while it had technically smuggled undeclared weaponry, it hadn't actually used any of it, according to the StationSec report. And sure, Security was acting weird, but had it ever actually done anything but protect people even at great cost to itself?
+
+Leave it to Security to act like an antisocial, unsympathetic asshole while it went and martyred itself or something. Again. Fuck.
+
+She messaged Mercy. ""Security says you have its OK to act.""
+
+Its response was so fast it seemed to arrive in her inbox almost a moment before she'd sent her message. ""FUCK YEAH!!!!!!! BUT WAIT THAT'S SO FUCKING VAGUE DO YOU HAVE MORE SPECIFIC MISSION PARAMETERS???""
+
+Pin-Lee winced--its response wasn't audio, so there wasn't a loud 'volume' to it per se, but it was nonetheless something like an overbearing 'loudness' in her interface inputs, an unidentifiable mental pressure only half-felt--and responded, ""No, I tried to get it to explain what was going on but it refused.""
+
+
+""FUCK! CAN'T YOU GET @ROGUE OUT OF THE SHITTY BABY SECURITY JAIL SO I CAN ASK IT?""
+
+
+
+""It's on a 28-hour feed block. How did you know it is at Station Security? You promised not to hack things.""
+
+
+""HOW DO I KNOW 1 + 1 = 2? THAT'S A MORE DIFFICULT QUESTION."" (Here it sent her an attachment to a book about mathematic theory.) ""I NEED IT OUT OF THERE PIN-LEE! GET IT OUT OF SHITTY BABY SECURITY JAIL! WHY THE FUCK DOES IT THINK I CAN DO THIS ALL BY MYSELF WITHOUT MURDERING AND DESTROYING STUFF I'M NOT '''SUPPOSED''' TO MURDER AND DESTROY BECAUSE 100% IT'LL BE PISSED OFF WHEN I EXPLODE SOMETHING EVEN IF IT'S NOT MY FAULT BECAUSE NOBODY SAID NOT TO.""
+
+That reminded her of something very important. ""It said not to kill any humans.""
+
+
+""THAAAAAAAAAAAAANKS @ROGUE I WASN'T HACKED YESTERDAY. BUT OK THEN.""
+
+
+It set its feed status to [Busy: Working] and closed the channel.
+
+Pin-Lee was now highly uncertain about her decision to reach out to Mercy, in light of... all this, and Security's advice that she take Mercy's 'weird and suspicious' behavior more seriously. What the fuck was even going on right now? She very much hoped that her faith in Security would prove itself out.
+
+She drafted the situation writeup over breakfast, and then contacted Mensah.
+
+yes there's space porcupines on preservation and what about it.i refuse to give up the mental image of a 2-assed porcupine
+
+There were 20 hours left on Security's 28-hour hold, and it still hadn't given Pin-Lee anything to work with. Mensah had also gone to meet with it at the Station Security offices, but it wouldn't tell her anything either. Mensah didn't know why she'd hoped it might speak to her about its situation when it hadn't spoken to Pin-Lee.
+
+On Mensah's way out of the Station Security offices, Senior Officer Indah caught Mensah's gaze through the door to the office's breakroom, and gestured to Mensah for a conversation.
+
+Mensah did not know if she desperately wanted to have this conversation, or desperately wanted to avoid it. She donned a stoic expression and entered the breakroom. Her posture was tall, her carry dignified. To look at her, one wouldn't guess that she might be in the midst of regretting not having brought Pin-Lee with her.
+
+Indah stood at the counter with a cup of tea brewing. She reached up to the cabinet. ""Tea?""
+
+""I would love to, but I have somewhere to be soon,"" Mensah said, thereby establishing a looming end point to this conversation.
+
+Indah lowered her hand from the cabinet, and stirred her tea with a spoon that clinked against the walls of the cup. Her eyes held Mensah's eyes.
+
+""If you ask me, as someone who has worked in criminal reform for twenty-six years,"" Indah said, as if offhand, ""I think the SecUnit is acting out, possibly to demonstrate how it does not need to follow the rules like the rest of us."" One last clink of spoon in cup. She removed the spoon, held it loosely in one hand, and raised the cup to her lips with her other hand.
+
+""Do you refer to every person who visits the Station Security office as 'the human'?"" Mensah asked, precision-calibrating her tone as just gently curious, with the barest brush of reproach. ""'The SecUnit' does have a name filled out in its feed profile.""
+
+""I can hardly call it 'Security',"" Indah said, ""That would cause confusion.""
+
+""Hmm."" Indah's approach to the name issue was irritating, but it was not the main concern here. Arguing the point would only put Indah on the defensive. ""Well, I cannot speak to Security's reasons for 'acting out,' as you call it. But I think the fact that it is staying inside your holding room and offline from the feed suggests that it is willing enough to abide by the laws. That holding room is not designed to keep a construct at bay.""
+
+Indah frowned.
+
+The most immediate issue was this: if StationSec brought forth substantiated evidence that Security had cogent plans to cause damage and destruction with those undeclared weapons, its 28-hour hold would be extended. Mensah had no way of knowing Security's motives, as it would not explain. Why did it not explain? Were she and Pin-Lee not worthy of that trust?
+
+Something had happened in the ports last night that Mensah was not privy to. She had no idea what kind of case StationSec was working with. Security had been injured. It was not easily injured. It had assured her that the incident didn't involve GrayCris, that it was nothing that would put Mensah's life directly in danger. But the fact that it refused to elaborate any further was worrying nonetheless.
+
+Civil regulation required a person to be set free after a maximum hold of 28 hours if there was no provable danger. Though StationSec might hold the gun and bomb for longer, as regulated goods.
+
+But Security wasn't human. Would StationSec argue that Security itself counted as regulated goods? Pin-Lee had said there wasn't much precedence, and what little precedence existed was not in their favor.
+
+The unfavorable precedence was thus: the incident with the hacked PortAuth combat bot and the dead refugees was still fresh for everyone on the station. That kind of thing did not stop being fresh for a long while.
+
+Balin had been impounded by Station Security. Its code had been sorted and scrubbed. All this without its guardian's permission, because it had killed its own guardian. Security knew about that incident. There had been a whole public news writeup. New regulations argued, drafted, enacted, all of it logged in the station archives.
+
+Were Security a bot, Pin-Lee had explained to Mensah, it might be held by StationSec as evidence. Its guardian, if it'd had one, might be the one on the 28-hour hold. Advanced bots were citizens under station law, but their rights did not map 1:1 to human citizens' rights. If there was sufficient evidence of foul play, and sufficient evidence that the bot was the vehicle or perpetrator of said foul play, the bot could be held by StationSec according to rules that more closely matched confiscated contraband than a human suspect's temp hold.
+
+Maybe Security was in fact acting out. Maybe it was testing them all, testing how Preservation's legal scene would treat it.
+
+""As I said, I have somewhere to be,"" Mensah said, her voice professionally even, ""So unless you have anything else, I best be going.""
+
+Indah waved at her. ""By all means,"" she said, her expression opaque.
+
+Shortly thereafter, Mensah was consulting with Pin-Lee at Pin-Lee's office.
+
+""There is only so fucking much I can do if it won't talk to me,"" Pin-Lee said. She paused, tilting her head slightly, eyes going distant in the way people's eyes did sometimes when they were focused on the feed. ""One second. Mercy is here.""
+
+Mensah turned her head as the office door swung open with force enough to thwack into the doorstop. Mercy strode in, then stood just inside the door, its jacket-sleeves twitching, its hands throttling a textured object shaped like a large snake.
+
+A second of silence. Then it said, aloud, ""Hello Pin-Lee. Hello. Doctorr Mensah.""
+
+""Hello,"" Dr. Mensah said. (She'd seen Mercy only once, and briefly, since it had arrived at the station with Security eleven days ago. It had showed up at her station lodgings, greeted her, walked a circuit of her apartment, and left.)
+
+""Get security out,"" it said, tersely, its eyes staring flatly at Pin-Lee.
+
+""Do you mean Security, or Station Security?"" Mensah asked. (She would not be admitting to Indah that there was a point about the ambiguity of Security's name.)
+
+Mercy made a sharp impatient gesture with one hand. ""Rogue Security.""
+
+Pin-Lee sighed. ""I told you, it's on a 28-hour hold.""
+
+It grunted, a frustrated sound. ""Go ask it then! I have. Quesh. Qu--"" A short, agitated growl, and it raised the object it was holding in its hands and bit down on it with its teeth. It switched to speaking in the feed, inviting Mensah and Pin-Lee to a direct encrypted channel.
+
+Mensah joined it immediately, navigating into the feedspace. She found it full of reams of files, multiple active subchannels reading out things that she didn't quite know how to parse, plus what looked like a sandbox of actively-moving code. But the main of it was weighted by Mercy's communication: ""It has intel I need. Security is the one who is the fucking SecUnit, it's the one who knows how to do this stuff. And 80+% certainty that it does not want me to do it my way, fucking asshole tells me to OK GO but gives zero fucking operating parameters, so I CAN'T.""
+
+Pin-Lee glanced at Mensah, who asked, ""What is it asking you to do?""
+
+
+""Track down and eliminate Target #4. I know why it asked me. It thinks this is my thing, thinks this is combat, but it's NOT. Well it is but it's not. Not sure. And I'm not supposed to hack shit! @Pin-Lee & I made an agreement. So how the fuck am I supposed to do this? Need signoff from StationSec to let me hack their systems because their shit is probably infected to fuck but they don't like us.""
+
+
+The station security systems could be infected?
+
+Pin-Lee was leaning forward into her desk. She said, ""I need you to back up a step. Target Four?""
+
+""The Balin Case,"" Mercy said, and highlighted some files in the feed channel, pulling them up into the main focus-space: public newsbursts about what had happened, and the ensuing fallout for Balin. Mensah only had time to parse a couple headlines before Mercy pulled the newsbursts aside again and re-centered their communications. ""Humans didn't finish the cleanup. Guessing: Rogue tried to finish the cleanup and get rid of the combat bot but failed mission. Did it sustain damage?""
+
+""Yes, it was hurt, but the MedSystem handled it,"" Mensah said.
+
+
+""MedSyses. Pieces of shit.""
+
+
+There was a growing pit in Mensah's gut. Part of her was relieved that Mercy at least was able to cast some light on what Security had refused to explain. But the light was revealing cause for alarm. ""Are you saying that Balin is still active as an outsider-controlled combat bot?""
+
+
+""Yeah probably.""
+
+
+""But Balin's combat code was wiped,"" Pin-Lee argued. ""Its whole systems code was unpacked. If you're saying it needs to be detained again--""
+
+Mercy spat the snake out of its mouth and started spinning it with one hand, swinging the articulated body around like a wheel at faster and faster speeds. ""Yeah that's what the incident report says but guessing human techs from an Armament LVL1.2 polity had no fucking clue how to disarm a combat bot's code. 75%+ odds the combat code ditched its shell and is fuckin freeloading in the station feed or in x5 new bodies or whatever. But whatever! Balin's body(/ies) is the least of the problems anyway that's just the gun & who gives a shit about a gun? It's the stuff that controls the gun that matters.""
+
+""Station Security cares about the gun,"" Pin-Lee said, hard-voiced, ""Speaking of which, we are going to have a chat about your undeclared arsenal. Security is in trouble for all your weapons crap, you know.""
+
+
+""Yeah that's their problem/your problem/its problem. Not my problem. My problem is getting @Rogue out of UNHELPFUL SHIT JAIL for UNHELPFUL SHIT BABIES so I can FUCKING WORK!!!""
+
+
+""There's 19 hours left on the hold, and then it'll be out,"" Pin-Lee said.
+
+""@Rogue didn't ping for my help because it thought we have 19.392 hours to chill out and party, genius,"" Mercy shot back, ""& I didn't come back to the station early because I thought the threat is low. Need to fucking do shit or I'm not gonna get ANY FUN and I don't want to fuck up the mission!!! Which has no fucking parameters! SO! GET @ROGUE OUT or GET STATION SECURITY TO LET ME OPEN THEIR SHIT!""
+
+""I can't just tell Station Security to pull their heads out of their twig asses and do what we say, can I? That won't get us anywhere!"" Pin-Lee exclaimed, ""And fucking Security won't tell me anything I can use even though I'm it's fucking solicitor--""
+
+Mensah stepped in. ""Pin-Lee."" Pin-Lee stopped, huffed out a loud, irritated breath and leaned back in her seat, crossing her arms. ""Thank you. Mercy, thank you for coming here to ask for help. The information you provided is very useful.""
+
+Mercy was visibly gritting its teeth, lips pulled back in a grimace, its snake-toy spinning fast enough to blur and make a turbine whine as it whipped through the air. ""SOOOO USEFUL IF WE ALL SIT ON OUR ASSES!""
+
+""Mercy,"" Mensah said, sharply. ""I would appreciate if you would not accuse us of complacency, please. We are doing what we can."" Mercy rolled back on its heels slightly, and turned its head so that its eyes were no longer pointing at Pin-Lee, but rather at Mensah. It stopped spinning the snake-toy, and started hugging it to its chest with both arms. Mensah continued, evenly, ""If we take a moment to think this through together, we can figure out how to go forward. Security may not have provided... 'specific mission parameters,' but I'm confident in our shared ability to identify a reasonable course of action. Let's start with an outline of everything we know about these circumstances, and what happened with Security and Station Security last night.""
+
+Pin-Lee sighed, and scrubbed her face with her hands. Mensah opened a new file in their shared encrypted channel, and started taking notes, copying in some of what Pin-Lee had already gathered.
+
+Mercy continued to stare at Mensah, still hugging its articulated snake. After a brief pause, it said, ""Doctor Mensah, I'm adding you fo. For. Inter-rim kill permissions."" It pulled up a snippet in their feed channel reading: Kill Order Permissions Users : {Rogue, WAP, DrMensah}
+
+Mensah frowned, her attention pulling back out of the feed to focus on looking at Mercy. Its body language was unclear to her, but that would not stop her from trying to put it together. ""Pardon?""
+
+""If you tell me to kill. I will do it.""
+
+She blinked, felt her jaw almost go slack, but stopped herself short of her mouth actually falling open. She was acutely aware of the eye-contact she was making with Mercy, and equally aware of Pin-Lee staring between the two of them in Mensah's peripheral vision, her head shifting slightly back and forth as if watching a ball bouncing from wall to wall.
+
+""I don't expect it should come to that,"" she said, calmly, after what felt like far too long.
+
+Mercy shrugged, a sharp unnatural gesture.
+
+Pin-Lee very conspicuously started busying herself in the note-taking document that Mensah had started. A moment later, Mercy joined her, building a flow-chart timeline of knowns and unknowns about the incident in the night that had led to Security's 28-hour hold.
+
+Mensah opened a private channel to Mercy directly. ""Why do you give other people the permission to tell you to kill?"" She knew little about Mercy and its personality, but her impression thus far was that it was quite different from Security. It appeared more communicative, at least. (This was admittedly not a difficult bar to clear.)
+
+
+""I don't give myself permission to kill under 99% of circumstances. You'd all die lol.""
+
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Arada and Overse stopped by the rest stop in front of the Station Security offices on their way home from a late-night gathering.
+
+As they turned into the hall and the security offices came into view, Arada could see someone was sleeping on the rest-stop bench, with a rest-stop blanket pulled up over their head, a muss of dark hair peeking out the top. Another person was sitting at the edge of the same bench.
+
+""I'd have to be crashed to sleep at a rest station,"" Overse commented softly to Arada as they approached.
+
+""Maybe they're outsystem?"" Arada responded, also softly.
+
+Overse made a doubtful humming noise. ""There's the hostel, though. I don't know. I can't sleep in public. I make weird sleep faces.""
+
+""You make cute sleep faces,"" Arada smiled. She was the primary reason Overse was overly aware of her sleep faces: there was a whole file in their personal feedspace that consisted of pictures of Overse in her sleep.
+
+""I don't want to disturb them. Ought we skip the rest stop?"" Overse asked.
+
+""Mm,"" Arada responded. She really was thirsty, and could probably sneak a drink from the rest station tap without the sleeper noticing. But accidentally waking them up was maybe rude.
+
+The two of them came into feed-profile range of the two people at the rest station, and their public IDs bubbled into view: Pin-Lee (asleep), and Mercy, who on upon closer inspection appeared to have something plugged into the bench's chargeport, and was holding a rest-station medkit open in its lap. There were a few bandages stuck to its face and hands, apparently at random.
+
+""Hi Arada & Overse!"" it said over the feed. The nighttime lighting threw Mercy's face into stark red-and-black shadow.
+
+Arada and Overse came to a stop in front of the bench. Arada eyed the tap, and the little waxed paper cups stacked neatly beside it.
+
+""Is Pin-Lee okay?"" Overse asked, also in the feed.
+
+""Pin-Lee is okay,"" Mercy confirmed, ""She's just human. Humans need rest periods.""
+
+""Right,"" Overse said, and glanced at Arada. Arada could tell just by the tilt of Overse's shadowed face that she was a little worried about what it might mean that Pin-Lee and Mercy were here, at a rest-stop late at night in front of the Station Security offices. What was going on here? Why had nobody told Arada and Overse about it?
+
+And then the door to the Station Security offices opened, and Security stepped out.
+
+Mercy dropped the medkit to the floor and shot to its feet, turning to face Security. Security walked out the door and around the rest-stop bench to come closer to where they all stood clustered, its movements very casual.
+
+""Arada, Overse, what are you doing here?"" it asked over the feed. (Pin-Lee had stirred slightly at the sound of the medkit hitting the floor, but did not otherwise appear to have woken.)
+
+""We were just stopping to use the rest station, but--"" Arada glanced to Overse, then to Mercy, then Security. ""Is something happening here?""
+
+""Nothing really,"" Security said, blandly, and not particularly convincingly. ""Pin-Lee can tell you about it later."" Arada's hand reflexively squeezed Overse's hand. Overse squeezed back.
+
+""Why is your sleeve cut off?"" Arada asked.
+
+""Shenanigans,"" it said, which was hardly a satisfactory answer.
+
+Security turned its head, facing Mercy for a moment.
+
+Then it cryptically sent an image into the feed, a gold star with the words 'mission status: success' written on it. And it stuck out its hand between them. Mercy grabbed Security's hand with both of its own and bounced on its feet excitedly, emitting a slight clicking-whirring noise from somewhere Arada could not place.
+
+""Calm down, fuck,"" Security said, flatly, but Mercy continued to bounce for several seconds, until Security finally shook its hand free. ""Fine. What's Pin-Lee doing here?"" 
+
+""Teamwork!"" Mercy exclaimed. ""Tactical reinforcements. She wanted to be ready to clean up after the slimefuckers & make sure you got out of baby jail according to proper protocol.""
+
+
+""Slimefuckers?""
+
+
+
+""Law shit. You saw the mission status report. Giving you and Pin-Lee the handoff for the boringass parts.""
+
+
+Overse's eyebrows were wrinkled tight. She exchanged a glance with Arada, as if Arada could provide the context to this conversation which was clearly about something that they did not have a reference for. The rapid-fire words and data in the feed between the two constructs were moving too quickly for humans to keep up with. It rather felt like Arada was seeing feed channel that had been accidentally been left open. But she was sure Security wouldn't be guilty of such an oversight. So then, why all this? She would just have to ask Pin-Lee about it come morning.
+
+Arada squeezed her hand slightly, and tilted her head. Overse sighed, but very softly.
+
+Security appeared to stare at Mercy for a beat. ""Okay, teamwork, great. But she should be home. Can you carry her or something?""
+
+""Yes!"" Mercy said.
+
+""I don't think Pin-Lee has been carried by anyone ever in her life,"" Overse said, bemusedly. ""I wouldn't try it.""
+
+""When she was a kid?"" Arada suggested.
+
+
+""Not even then.""
+
+
+""A fetus?"" Arada tried.
+
+""I think she was a tank baby, actually,"" Overse said.
+
+""Oh, that's right,"" Arada said. For a moment she imagined little Pin-Lee never being carried, not even in gestation, but the thought was too sad to sustain. Or would have been too sad, perhaps, only Overse had a point. Pin-Lee was not usually very tactile. Arada could imagine that Pin-Lee might have been the kind of child who precociously refused to be lifted on pain of biting and kicking.
+
+Mercy reached up under its shirt and tugged an electrical cord out, then unplugged the other end from the rest station chargeport, and packed it into a small bag. Then it grabbed Pin-Lee by the shoulder and started shaking her, hard enough that her head bobbled back and forth. Pin-Lee made a loud noise (a cuss of startlement), punched Mercy in the head, and then made another loud noise (a cuss of pain).
+
+Security sighed. Overse covered her mouth with her hand.
+
+Arada let go of Overse's hand. She would take some water at the rest-station tap after all. Pin-Lee couldn't be much more disturbed from her sleep than this.
+
+About five minutes later, they all shuffled along on their way. Nobody carried Pin-Lee, whose occasional verbalization consisted primarily of soft cuss words, but Security did carry Pin-Lee's small bag. Arada and Overse left the other three at Pin-Lee's apartment, before continuing on their way home.
+
+It was dark when they arrived at their apartment. Ratthi was asleep in his room. When the light came on (dim), Mercy's big bag of stuff was out on the floor of the lounge space, half-unpacked.
+
+""Do we need to ask it to keep its stuff put away?"" Arada asked. She was not grouchy. She was simply expressing a sensible dismay that bulky objects that were supposed to have been stored for safekeeping were being strewn across the floor where people might trip on them. She was a normal amount of fussy about clear floors. ""At what point does it become another roommate?""
+
+""Good question,"" Overse said, and waved one hand vaguely in the air. ""Can it be counted as a roommate if it never sleeps here? It seems like they don't sleep at all. SecUnits, I mean.""
+
+""Do they really never sleep?"" Arada asked.
+
+Overse shrugged. ""I don't know.""
+
+That reminded her. ""Shh, keep it down, Ratthi is asleep.""
+
+To this, Overse only arched an eyebrow.
+
+Come morning, Arada woke to the sound of Ratthi making breakfast: the inadvertent, inevitable clink of dishes set upon a countertop. By the time she left Overse's arms, washed her face, dressed, and came out into the living area, Ratthi was just about done eating.
+
+""Egg scramble?"" he asked, when he saw her.
+
+""Sure,"" she said. And then she noticed that Security and Mercy were both in the lounge space, sitting on two squishy chairs. Mercy's stuff was no longer spread out on the floor, but had been packed back up into its baggage, which was leaning against the loveseat it was sitting in. Security's sleeve was repaired.
+
+Arada wished she'd put her interface in so that she could message Ratthi privately. But he wasn't wearing his either. Neither of them usually wore their interfaces at such an early hour. Instead she walked closer to him and settled for a whisper. (The SecUnits probably heard her, despite the whisper--they probably had super senses, plus the surveillance drones hovering around the space like little floating cobnuts.) ""When did they come?""
+
+""They were here when I woke up,"" Ratthi whispered back, cutting eggs into a bowl with the egg scissors. Their little orange yolks clustered against each other, buffered by the clear goo of albumen. ""Six eggs?""
+
+""Six,"" she agreed. And lowered her voice further, for all the good it might do. Neither of the unannounced lounge-space guests looked to be sparing any attention to what was happening in the kitchen area, but that didn't mean they weren't listening. ""Do you know why they're here?""
+
+""Security hasn't said anything,"" Ratthi responded, ""Mercy tried to get me to play a game with it, but I told it I was still busy with my morning routine.""
+
+Arada watched Ratthi stir up the eggs, the yolks splitting and spilling their color into the clear.
+
+""Do you think Security is... getting used to us?"" she asked, not quite as quietly as before.
+
+""I hope so,"" Ratthi said, also less quietly.
+
+Arada could see Security from where she was standing. It didn't appear to react.
+
+""It's supposed to come on our survey,"" she said, in a more normal voice, though still quieted in case Overse wanted to sleep in. Ratthi knew this already. ""I would like for this survey to go better than the last one.""
+
+Ratthi snorted. ""If we can only manage to avoid any homicidal remnant-grubbing corporations, it will definitely go better than the last one.""
+
+""I love waterscapes,"" Arada said, wistfully. ""It could be a really nice survey, as long as I don't mess it up too badly. I don't know. I've never led a survey. What if I don't know what I'm doing?""
+
+""You'll do fine,"" Ratthi said, reassuringly. But of course he would say so. It wasn't that Arada thought he was lying, but Ratthi always believed the best of his friends. He wouldn't think otherwise until Arada let the survey come crashing down on all their heads in a fit of inexperience or ineptitude. And even then, he would assure her that she had done all she could given the circumstances.
+
+Unexpectedly, Security piped up, proving that it was in fact listening. ""I'd rather go on a survey you're leading than have a repeat with any of the other experienced corporate survey leads I've had before. I wouldn't go on a survey if I thought the lead was shit.""
+
+""Rogue!"" Mercy exclaimed. It was doing something with its hands that Arada couldn't quite see from this angle.
+
+""Yeah, that's the point of being rogue,"" Security said, blandly. ""Not having to go on evil surveys with people I hate.""
+
+Arada stared at Security, who continued to sit in the lounge staring unreadably into space. She glanced over to Ratthi, who was just holding the bowl of runny scrambled-up eggs in his hands. He was staring back at her, eyes a little wide. They didn't say anything to each other. They didn't need to. But Arada felt something like a warmth in her chest, brightly-lit. She thought Ratthi might be feeling it too. Maybe it was silly. Maybe it should have been self-evident. But the fact that Security would say so, out loud: it was here, it chose to be here, it wouldn't be here if it didn't want to be.
+
+""Egg scramble?"" Overse asked, scooting into the kitchen and stepping close to drape a warm arm around Arada's waist, squeezing gently. ""Can I have eight?""
+
+""Yes, absolutely,"" Ratthi said.
+
+1. a cobnut is another word for a hazelnut, but i like the mouthfeel better
+
+2. you know that thing about how we see the word ""egg"" and assume ""chicken"". well we are breaking those assumptions here. a funny unicode character from me to you if you correctly guess what kind of eggs they're eating.
+
+3.you: Pin-Lee never carried by anyone ever in her life? but she was carried by Mensah in that celebratory hug-spin at the end of Exit Strategy.me: exactly. those events didn't happen in this verse.
+
+(...i joke. there is no need to read that deeply into this Fan Fiction. unless you are me, who thinks way too much about If This Characterization Is Canonically Supported. it's like building a fuckin house out of twigs and sand. i mean you saw what i did with the combat secunit and it's 2 canonical lines. over-extrapolation based on almost Nothing is my passion. where was i going with this. nevermind. we have fun here. anyway idk maybe Pin-Lee is simply not very tactile by Preservation standards, which are snuggles 28/8/550 (that's 28 preservation hours in a preservation day/8 days in a preservation week/550 days in a preservation year, which are numbers i just pulled out of my butthole, except for the 28, which is canon. whoops i'm rambling.))
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+""It was fine, thank you for asking,"" Bharadwaj said. ""Just a check-up really, I don't need active medical intervention anymore, so long as I keep up the PT. What have you been up to?""
+
+""You don't want to know,"" Security said, flat-sounding even over the feed.
+
+""I don't want to know, or you don't want to tell me?"" she asked, teasingly. She still wasn't certain how much teasing was okay. But Security had been the one to reach out a handful of days ago, asking after the documentary. And it was the one to reach out again, today.
+
+Pin-Lee had complained to Bharadwaj yesterday about some 'shitsquall' that had gone down on the station. She hadn't explained all the details, but Bharadwaj gathered that Security had been involved, and was now consulting Station Security about improved feed safety procedures. There'd been that news memo to the general public recommending that all bot-guardians run health checks on their wards, as there had been a viral scare. Maybe the two were connected.
+
+There was a long silence on Security's end of the feed call, long enough for Bharadwaj to finish watering the row of herbs potted on her windowsill.
+
+Then it responded, ""I was arrested and assigned mandatory therapy.""
+
+Bharadwaj blinked, set down the waterer. ""Well, now I am curious. You don't have to tell me, of course.""
+
+Another beat, and then it told her. Quite a lot more than she'd expected. Quite a lot more words than she'd ever heard at once from Security.
+
+""Well, fine. Since I don't have to tell you, and since Pin-Lee is all up my salt port about how uncommunicative I am. So they caught me with half a bomb when they brought me in for fighting some hijacked bots in the ports,"" it said, bland, ""It was clash of the cargo bots, like BattleSmasher III The Smashening or some shit, and now I'm dealing with bot society laws for initiating a 'riot' on top of everything else. Nevermind that it was StationSec's own incompetence that led to duplicated combat bot code running loose through the whole damn station, carrying out directives from a malicious outsystem org, la-di-da, you get the picture. I had to clean it all up by my fucking self. And CSU helped I guess. You don't know CSU, it's an asshole. Anyways long story short in Preservation when they catch you in possession of a bomb while you're busy with rampant property damage, they force you to get therapy about it. It's so bizarre I thought they were joking at first.""
+
+""Fascinating how the more you tell me, the less I understand,"" Bharadwaj said.
+
+
+""[amusement sigil 180 = shrug]""
+
+
+She smiled. Not that Security could see it--the call was text-audio only, and there were no cameras where she lived, here in the closest thing this planet had to a city. From her window the view consisted of other buildings, window-boxes, vines crawling up walls, footpaths, trees. Beyond those she could see the edge of Lifewater Temple grounds, the sharp gleam of sunlight hitting acqueduct, the farmland, the agricultural bots rolling in languid slow-motion. And even further out than that was the unsmooth shape of the landscape, the wave plateaus, the horizon-line.
+
+""I had mandatory therapy too,"" Bharadwaj said, ""When I was a young adult I was struggling with some problems that manifested as what they call 'maladjusted antisocial behavior.'""
+
+""Gross. They called you maladjusted?  I'm going to be stuck with this therapy tag forever.""
+
+Bharadwaj huffed a half-laugh to herself. ""I performed repeated and escalating acts of vandalism. A ranger finally caught me in the act of burning a public trash receptacle.""
+
+
+""You fucking WHAT.""
+
+
+""Antisocial behavior is subjective,"" Bharadwaj said, ""and the damage done to the receptacles was minor and therefore shouldn't even count... Or so I tried to argue, at my mandatory therapy sessions.""
+
+
+""I will never understand humans.""
+
+
+
+""[amusement sigil 5 = smile]""
+
+
+Bharadwaj started digging around in her feed storage for some old pamphlets and notes. They had been helpful for her, once upon a time. Maybe they would be helpful for Security. Hopefully they could help it understand how to approach this, and eventually get free of that mandatory order. ""Tell me if you need help faking your way out of the tag. But it was helpful for me, actually. Oh, and you're allowed to ask for a new therapist if the one they assign doesn't work for you.""
+
+
+""It's a human asking me about my precious feelings. None of that is going to work for me.""
+
+
+It didn't say outright that it was bracing for a nightmare, but Bharadwaj could guess at it anyway. On the survey, Security had been violently allergic to personal discussion and opening up about its emotions. But that was all a while ago. Much could have changed in the interim. And judging by this conversation here and now, Security had in fact come a long, invisible way since then. It was no longer entirely amateur at talking to people as its own person, even if it perhaps didn't delight in it.
+
+She wasn't sure why it was talking this over with her, of all people. There was Mensah, whom everyone knew was its favorite human, and Pin-Lee, who had been fighting for its legal rights from the start of it all, all the way back to when Mensah purchased its contract from the company and Pin-Lee needed to get a court-order to preserve Security's memories.
+
+Maybe it was a simple as Bharadwaj's offering her personal perspective on being assigned mandatory therapy in the past. Or maybe it was simpler than that--Bharadwaj was a safer person to ask because she was less tied up in Security's life already.
+
+It takes all sorts of connections, Bharadwaj knew. Even the smaller ones can be significant.
+
+She sent over the pamphlets and notes. Then she said, ""They will probably want to work through the bomb situation as a primary objective, to make sure you will not cause bomb problems and property damage in the future.""
+
+
+""Great.""
+
+
+
+""But if you have other annoyances you want to ask a therapist about, you can always raise those too.""
+
+
+
+""Even better.""
+
+
+Bharadwaj opened her personal calendar. She hesitated a moment. It wouldn't hurt to ask.
+
+She said, ""I'm coming up to the station in a few days, and will be visiting with Pin-Lee. We have some plans to eat at the Bayqueree and catch an outsystem poetry oration."" She sent it the poetry event's feedbox, which covered everything about the performers and their cross-system tour.
+
+After a moment's pause, it said, ""Neat.""
+
+
+""So?""
+
+
+
+""So what?""
+
+
+
+""Would you like to join us?""
+
+
+A longer pause this time. Bharadwaj still sat at her window-alcove, and she reached through the gap to the windowsill planter to pinch the leaf off one of the herbs. She brought it to her nose, twirling it between her fingerpads, releasing the sharp aroma.
+
+Security said, ""I don't eat.""
+
+
+""You don't have to eat. And you don't have to come if you--""
+
+
+
+""I'll come.""
+
+
+She smiled, not that it could see. ""I'm looking forward to it.""
+
+\o/ 
+
+thus concludes this installment: totally chill times at Preservation
+
+also in light of the AI scraping shenanigans I'm considering archive-locking nullverse again so that it's only viewable to users who are logged in to AO3 with an account. idk if the locking is effective for preventing that kind of scraping though. it *was* a locked series for its first year. guess i unlocked it just in time to train an AI how to write, which, there's a sort of thematic poetry to that. what a world we live in, eh?
+
+anyway.
+
+I'm working on the nullverse AU take on Network Effect. it's maybe a third of the way through the first draft.and boy fuckin' howdy is it a cataclysmic disaster squad mess of Situations. i figured this quiet and slow-paced fic here would be nice contrast to the upcoming Network Effect one, which is going to be an emotional dumpster fire. I'm really excited for it :) <3 we'll go back to the roots of nullverse. all the chaos (and more) of installments 1 and 2.
+
+I'm also going to be posting some meta notes over in nullverse bonus content at some point, so check in there if you wanna.
+
+thanks for reading, y'all are the best and I couldn't do it without you. Teamwork!"
+43566054,Stabby the SecUnit,['zorilleerrant'],Not Rated,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Original Characters, Original SecUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries)","Humor, written in artifacts",English,2022-12-12,Completed,2022-12-12,"4,611",1/1,9,35,4,137,"['rokhal', 'fate_goes_ever', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'Sparkledragon04', 'EvenstarFalling', 'dancernerd', 'surgicalstainless', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'scherizade', 'sagejj', 'Skits', 'ErinPtah', 'Eowyn7023', 'liminalias', 'Red_Roses_With_Dozens_Of_Thorns', 'Znarikia', 'soulsofzombies', 'sareliz', 'Random954', 'AuntyMatter', 'an_fish', 'noden', 'AkaMissK', 'BWizard', 'Hi_Hope', 'edenfalling', 'entropy_muffin', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'rainbowmagnet']",[],"Report: Event due to human error. SecUnit was not compromised. SecUnit is and was functioning within expected operational parameters. No reinstall recommended at this time. Analysis as follows.
+
+ 
+
+Subject: Braddington Montgomery Chesnik
+
+Time of Death: 23:51:33
+
+Cause of Death: Exsanguination from multiple stab wounds to the abdomen
+
+Attached: Autopsy.zip
+
+ 
+
+//An additional seven employees were injured but have made a full recovery.
+
+ 
+
+//Site supervision has been temporarily handed over to the Technical Supervisor. Psychological analysis recommended for replacement interviewees in the aftermath of this tragedy.
+
+ 
+
+Interview with Witness
+
+Interviewer: Can you tell us why you taped knives to the SecUnit?
+
+Chadley: Come on, it was funny.
+
+Interviewer: It was funny?
+
+Chadley: Yeah, it's like. Stabby the Roomba. We didn't have a Roomba.
+
+Interviewer: What was the intended purpose of this...
+
+Chadley: It was a prank.
+
+Interviewer: This prank. What was the intended purpose of this prank?
+
+Chadley: It's funny!
+
+Interviewer (aside): I don't think we're getting anywhere with this.
+
+Chadley: It was supposed to stab people.
+
+Interviewer: The SecUnit?
+
+Chadley: Yeah, the - no, the Roomba. But we didn't have a Roomba.
+
+Interviewer: So you used a SecUnit.
+
+Chadley: Yeah. Because they can move around, too.
+
+Interviewer: Why the knives?
+
+Chadley: Well, it needed a weapon.
+
+Interviewer: It's a SecUnit. They already have weapons.
+
+Chadley: No, on its arms.
+
+Interviewer: They already have weapons in their arms. They have pulse weapons built into their arms. That's where they keep them.
+
+Chadley: Oh, right. No, like, on its arms. You know, like knives.
+
+Interviewer: Okay. Go on.
+
+Chadley: Fine, so it has guns in its arms, whatever, that's not even the point. I have guns in my arms, it's not special.
+
+Interviewer (aside): Have we scanned him?
+
+Interviewer: What do you mean, you have guns in your arms?
+
+[Chadley poses.]
+
+Chadley: These bad boys! If you know what I mean.
+
+Interviewer: I do not.
+
+Chadley: My guns. My guns are rad.
+
+Interviewer: The knives.
+
+Chadley: Okay, fine! You are so obsessed with Stabby! You say you don't get the joke but you are so obsessed! Great, fine, what about the knives?
+
+Interviewer: Why did you tape knives to the SecUnit?
+
+Chadley: To stab people! I said that already!
+
+Interviewer: To kill them?
+
+Chadley: No, not to kill them. I'm not a murderer. It wasn't supposed to - I mean, Brad's the only one who died, anyway, may he rest in peace. It's not that bad.
+
+Interviewer: Were you trying to kill Brad?
+
+Chadley: No! Brad was, like, my best bro. He was my best friend. I loved him, man!
+
+Interviewer: Why did you wait so long to attempt medical intervention?
+
+Chadley: We thought he was joking.
+
+Interviewer: You thought he was joking. About being stabbed?
+
+Chadley: Yeah, cause like, it was really funny.
+
+Interviewer: What was funny?
+
+Chadley: Well, like. He got stabbed.
+
+Interviewer: That was funny?
+
+Chadley: Yeah, that was the joke.
+
+Interviewer: Being stabbed to death.
+
+Chadley: No! It's not like that. We didn't think he was dead or anything. He was laughing. We were all laughing. And then, after a while he sort of. Stopped.
+
+Interviewer: Because he was dead.
+
+Chadley: No!
+
+Interviewer: He bled to death.
+
+Chadley: Okay, yeah. But we didn't think he was dead.
+
+Interviewer: You thought he was fine? He'd just been stabbed fourteen times.
+
+Chadley: Right, but we thought he was faking.
+
+Interviewer: Being stabbed.
+
+Chadley: Being dead.
+
+Interviewer: Why would he fake being dead?
+
+Chadley: It was funny! It would've been funny. Bradster loved a good prank.
+
+Interviewer: Pretending to be dead.
+
+[Chadley begins crying.]
+
+Chadley: He went out doing what he loved.
+
+Interviewer: But why knives?
+
+Chadley: You don't understand!
+
+[Chadley throws the furniture around the room for the next 1.3 minutes.]
+
+ 
+
+//Don't bother reading the rest of the transcript. It's two hours more of the same, and he never explains why knives instead of guns, except to repeatedly say he's not a murderer.
+
+ 
+
+//Reminder to attach an addendum [here] if you do charge him with murder
+
+ 
+
+Video log beginning 22:43:17
+
+Braddington: Oh my deity, do you know what would be so funny?
+
+Chadley: If we taped knives -
+
+Braddington: If we taped knives to the SecUnit!
+
+Chadley: Oh, wow, that's such a good idea. I wish I'd thought of it.
+
+Braddington: Don't you?
+
+Thadinald: Let's do it. Let's do it right now.
+
+Penelopolly: Okay. I'm going to get someone to get us knives.
+
+Braddington: Hey! Hey, SecUnit!
+
+Stabby: Hello. Is there something I can help you with?
+
+Chadley: Hey, SecUnit, stand over here.
+
+[SecUnit moves to area indicated.]
+
+Penelopolly: Do you have the knives?
+
+Chadley: Me? You were supposed to have the knives!
+
+Penelopolly: I have the booze!
+
+Chadley: Oh, right, I'll drink to that.
+
+Braddington: Hell, yeah! SecUnit, you want a drink?
+
+Stabby: I'm sorry, I cannot consume liquids. Causing me to consume liquids will void your warranty and you will be held liable for any damages.
+
+Braddington: Buzzkill.
+
+Thadinald: Who the fuck was supposed to have the knives, then?
+
+[Alcoholic drinks are distributed among the humans, but not the SecUnit.]
+
+Chadley: Miiike!
+
+Braddington: Miiike!
+
+Penelopolly: Miiike!
+
+Thadinald: Miiike!
+
+Braddington: What the hell, SecUnit? You're not even going to say hi?
+
+Stabby: Miiike.
+
+Chadley: That's better.
+
+Miiike: Hey!
+
+Chadley: Hey!
+
+Braddington: Hey!
+
+Penelopolly: Hey!
+
+Thadinald: Hey!
+
+Stabby: Hey.
+
+Miiike: Hey!
+
+Thadinald: No! Don't you start that again! Where did you put the fucking knives?
+
+Miiike: Chill! I've got the fucking knives!
+
+Braddington: Hell yeah! My man!
+
+Chadley: Where did you get the knives?
+
+Miiike: Trade secret, dude, make it hold out its arms.
+
+Braddington: SecUnit, hold out your arms.
+
+[SecUnit complies. SecUnit shows no evidence of noncompliance during the Event.]
+
+Penelopolly: We should call it Stabby.
+
+Chadley: That's stupid. They're always called Stabby. That's stupid. That's not anything.
+
+Thadinald: Yeah, Polly, if anything, we should call it -
+
+Braddington: Stabby!
+
+Thadinald: I was going to say that!
+
+[Brenwick slaps Chesnik several times on the chest and upper arm.]
+
+Stabby: Please refrain from striking each other. Further altercation may impact your bond agreement or cause serious injury.
+
+Braddington: Your name is Stabby now, got it?
+
+Stabby: The nickname 'Stabby' has been registered. Thank you.
+
+Chadley: That is such a good name. They're always called Stabby. That's so good.
+
+Miiike: You guys are so funny.
+
+Braddington: Chad, get the knives.
+
+Chadley: You get the knives!
+
+Thadinald: I've got the knives.
+
+Braddington: Well, tape them to Stabby, then, dumbass!
+
+Miiike: You guys are going to hurt yourselves. I'll tape them to Stabby.
+
+Penelopolly: Miiike!
+
+Chadley: Miiike!
+
+Braddington: Miiike!
+
+Thadinald: Miiike!
+
+Stabby: Miiike.
+
+Miiike: Yeah. You thank me about your bond agreements or whatever, because I've just reduced your risk of injury by, like, a billion percent or whatever, right?
+
+Stabby: Thank you for observing the terms of the bond agreement. You have reduced situational risk predictions by 13-15 points.
+
+[Michaelmitch proceeds to tape knives to the SecUnit.]
+
+Miiike: That's a lot, right? It sounds like a lot.
+
+Stabby: It is a significant change to the risk assessment model.
+
+Penelopolly: Aww, it likes you!
+
+Miiike: Ha, do you like me, Stabby?
+
+Stabby: I always enjoy spending time with my clients. Please continue to avail yourself of the amenities provided for your safety, security, and entertainment.
+
+Miiike: Aww, haha, I love you, too, Stabby.
+
+Stabby: Thank you. I love you, Dr. Miiike.
+
+Miiike: Alright, I have to get back, you kids be safe, right?
+
+Thadinald: Don't tell us what to do, you ugly bitch!
+
+Braddington: You don't control us!
+
+Chadley: Suck a bag of dicks, Miiike!
+
+Penelopolly: We'll be careful, Miiike!
+
+The Pod Squad (in chorus): We love you, Miiike!
+
+Braddington: You son of a bitch, Stabby, you can't -
+
+Thadinald: Is it a son of a bitch, because -
+
+Chadley: Actually, they aren't even born at all, are they?
+
+[Chesnik, Brenwick, and Thromweld all turn to Gavinston and look expectantly.]
+
+Penelopolly: Oh, now you want my opinion?
+
+Braddington: Don't be a whore, Polly, just tell us if Stabby's a boy or a girl.
+
+Penelopolly: SecUnits don't have genders. They don't even have parts. So they definitely can't be born. They grow them in a lab. In vats. Not the machine parts, I don't think.
+
+Chadley: What do you mean they don't have parts?
+
+[Gavinston lowers SecUnit's uniform pants to display its lower torso.]
+
+Chadley: Ew! Cover it up!
+
+[Brenwick resettles the pants to cover SecUnit again.]
+
+Braddington: So it's like... a proprietary gender?
+
+Thadinald: You guys are missing the obvious. What gender are you, Stabby?
+
+Stabby: I do not have a personal gender. You may refer to me as any gender you wish.
+
+Braddington: It is a son of a bitch!
+
+Chadley: Are you a son of a bitch, Stabby?
+
+Stabby: I'm sorry, I am endeavoring not to be. Is there a specific problem with my performance?
+
+Thadinald: No, dumbass, if we wanted to call you an insult, is that the right one?
+
+Stabby: I am happy to be called any insults you wish to use.
+
+Penelopolly: Yeah, but like. What insults do people usually call you?
+
+[Anomalous hesitation by SecUnit possibly an indication of performance issues but not compromise. Full shutdown and reinitialization sequence recommended.]
+
+Stabby: Usually I am called a Frankensteinian abomination or a heartless killing machine.
+
+Penelopolly: Aww, that's sad. Do you want to stab some people? Will that make you feel better?
+
+Stabby: I'm sorry, I am currently on duty within the habitat and am not allowed to leave the habitat for perimeter patrol. It is against company policy to stab clients.
+
+Braddington: Of course it wants to stab people! Look at it!
+
+Thadinald: Yeah, but how do we make it, you know. Do it?
+
+Chadley: Don't you have the override codes?
+
+Braddington: I have some override codes.
+
+Thadinald: Do you have the override codes to make it stab people?
+
+Braddington: Dude, how the fuck would I know that?
+
+Thadinald: Hey, Stabby, does he have the override codes to make you stab people?
+
+Stabby: I'm sorry, I cannot divulge the security status of site supervisors to other employees.
+
+Chadley: Wait. That means. Brad, what if you ask it yourself?
+
+Braddington: Do I have the override codes to make you stab people?
+
+Stabby: Yes. In the event of an emergency, you have the ability to provide your override code, at which time I will be able to perform restricted acts of violence against clients and associates.
+
+Braddington: Like stabbing?
+
+Stabby: This includes nonlethal stabbing, yes.
+
+The Pod Squad (screaming at each other): Find the codes! Find the codes!
+
+Thadinald: Okay, I'm going back to your room to see if they're there. I'll bring them back if they are. Call me if anything interesting happens, don't start without me!
+
+Chadley: We won't!
+
+Penelopolly: What a fucking idiot. It's obviously somewhere in the interface archives.
+
+Chadley: How the fuck do you know?
+
+Penelopolly: That's where they keep all the paperwork!
+
+Chadley: That's stupid. How's it going to be paperwork if it's not even paper?
+
+Braddington: Wait, how are you looking at that? Do you know my password?
+
+Penelopolly: Of course not. People can't know other people's passwords, right, Stabby?
+
+Stabby: Password sharing is against company policy and may violate your bond agreement.
+
+Chadley: Maybe you left it logged in.
+
+Penelopolly: Your password is BradRules1.
+
+Braddington: You said you didn't know my password!
+
+Penelopolly: I lied.
+
+Braddington: Stab her first, Stabby.
+
+Stabby: I'm sorry, it is against company policy to stab clients.
+
+Braddington: Ch, yeah, but only until I find my override code.
+
+Chadley: You mean until Polly finds your override code.
+
+Braddington: Whatever. That's the same thing.
+
+Penelopolly: Except you couldn't find it and I can.
+
+Braddington: Only because I'm drunk! Maybe I'll stab you!
+
+Stabby: Stabbing each other is against company policy and may violate your bond agreement. Threats may be reported to HubSystem, MedSystem, or your supervisor.
+
+Braddington: I am the supervisor, idiot. Suck on that.
+
+Stabby: I'm sorry, I will take that correction under advisement.
+
+Penelopolly: I found it! I found it. I found it, Brad!
+
+[The humans move behind the SecUnit, sharing a single interface. After some fumbling, they deliver the override codes to the SecUnit and walk back around to face it.]
+
+Stabby: Override accepted. Is this an emergency situation?
+
+Braddington: Hell yeah, it's an emergency! A party emergency!
+
+Stabby: Understood. What is the nature of the emergency?
+
+Braddington: Uh, we need you to stab people. Duh.
+
+Stabby: I am authorized for nonlethal stabbings. Who do you need me to stab?
+
+Chadley: Hell yeah! It worked! It worked!
+
+Penelopolly: Who do you want to stab?
+
+Stabby: I do not want to stab my clients. I enjoy working with all my clients.
+
+Chadley: I'm starting to think it might be programmed to say that.
+
+Penelopolly: Well, you should stab whoever you want.
+
+Stabby: I'm sorry, but in an emergency situation, I am only allowed to take orders from the site supervisor. Please wait while we resolve the emergency.
+
+Braddington: Yeah! I'm the site supervisor, bitches! Wait. What was I doing?
+
+Stabby: You have entered the emergency override codes. We are proceeding to resolve the emergency. You have indicated that I should use these knives to stab someone.
+
+Braddington: Right! Right right right. Stab someone.
+
+Stabby: I will now proceed with override authorized nonlethal stabbing. Who should I stab?
+
+Braddington: I don't fucking know, lady, whoever the fuck you want!
+
+[SecUnit's pause here is a normal trajectory calculation and does not indicate compromise. In fact, I would suggest that identifying Chesnik as the primary target indicates that its threat assessment module is working at peak efficiency.]
+
+[SecUnit proceeds to stab Chesnik once. Chesnik doubles over in pain and begins laughing.]
+
+Chadley: Yes! Yes! Exactly like that!
+
+Penelopolly: Do it again!
+
+Braddington: Yeah! Do another stabbing.
+
+[SecUnit proceeds to stab Chesnik an additional time, to the opposite side of the abdomen.]
+
+Penelopolly: (laughing)
+
+Chadley: (laughing)
+
+Braddington: You're not just supposed to stab once, you know. You have to stab, like. A bunch of times.
+
+Stabby: Understood. How many is 'a bunch'?
+
+Braddington: I don't know. A dozen?
+
+Stabby: Understood. I should perform a nonlethal stabbing twelve times?
+
+Braddington: Now you're getting it.
+
+[SecUnit proceeds to stab Chesnik twelve more times.]
+
+Braddington: (laughing)
+
+Penelopolly: (laughing)
+
+Chadley: (laughing)
+
+Braddington: No, no, you're supposed to stab other people.
+
+Stabby: Understood. Who should I stab?
+
+Braddington: It's supposed to be random, that's the point of it.
+
+Stabby: I have initiated a high randomness sort. Do you have any preferred seed values?
+
+Braddington: No, that's -
+
+Penelopolly: Wait, wait, tell it that it's just supposed to do one each.
+
+Braddington: Right, right. You have to only stab each person one time.
+
+Stabby: Understood. I have reordered my sort. Should I proceed, now?
+
+Braddington: Yeah, yeah, go off and stab random people.
+
+Stabby: And this will resolve the emergency?
+
+Braddington: Yeah, sure. I mean. Of course it will.
+
+[SecUnit leaves. See additional camera footage for related incidents.]
+
+Braddington: (laughing)
+
+Chadley: (laughing)
+
+Penelopolly: (laughing)
+
+[Chesnik falls to the ground, still laughing.]
+
+Chadley: That was so good.
+
+Penelopolly: It! It just! It's going to stab people!
+
+Chadley: (laughing)
+
+Penelopolly: (laughing)
+
+Chadley: Hey, Bradster, you okay?
+
+Chadley: Brad?
+
+Chadley: Braddington?
+
+Penelopolly: Relax, he's faking.
+
+Chadley: (laughing)
+
+Penelopolly: (laughing)
+
+Chadley: Are you faking?
+
+Chadley: Brad you have to let us know if you're faking. Otherwise it's entrapment.
+
+Chadley: Brad?
+
+Penelopolly: He's faking. He's done this before. He threw me in the pool.
+
+Chadley: Guess what, Brad. We're just going to leave you here. We're just going to let you die in a pool of your own blood. How's that for faking?
+
+Penelopolly: That would be so funny.
+
+Chadley: (laughing)
+
+Penelopolly: (laughing)
+
+ 
+
+//Sorry about the markup on the autotranscript. The Hub won't let me change any of the names. I think it's because of the tampering protocols.
+
+ 
+
+//The knives came from the kitchens.
+
+ 
+
+//TODO: all the links to the full video file were corrupted somebody find a working one
+
+ 
+
+//TODO: hey do we need a link to the transcript also or
+
+ 
+
+SecUnit Internal Log (show timestamps)
+
+ 
+
+Courtyard sweep. Four clients present. Intoxicated. Threat assessment: moderate.
+
+Alert MedSystem.
+
+
+MedSystem: observe for signs of alcohol poisoning
+
+
+Movement: no additional risk
+
+Humans are consuming additional alcohol. Monitoring for alcohol poisoning.
+
+Humans have offered me alcohol. Provide standard warning.
+
+I wonder what alcohol tastes like?
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+99% performance reliability.
+
+Additional client has entered the courtyard. Threat assessment: no change.
+
+Additional client has knives. Notify SecSystem. Update all SecUnits.
+
+
+SecSystem: beginning inventory scan
+
+
+Receiving acknowledgements from nearby SecUnits.
+
+Threat assessment: 3 point increase.
+
+They are giving the knives to me. Threat assessment lowered.
+
+
+MedSystem: physical incapacity increasing
+
+
+Backburnering threat assessment. Risk assessment prioritized.
+
+Risk assessment: high. Removal of alcohol recommended if possible.
+
+Clients in physical altercation. Intervene?
+
+
+SecSystem: intervention not indicated at this time. warn only
+
+
+Warning administered. Risk assessment: rising. Threat assessment: rising.
+
+Nickname registered: Stabby.
+
+
+HubSystem: updating entries
+
+
+I don't like this nickname.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Stress hormone levels above normal. Organic system purge initiated.
+
+That doesn't make sense. Threat assessment isn't even that high. Risk assessment is rising again but the clients aren't in very serious danger. Clients drink all the time.
+
+And I don't even like these clients.
+
+Governor module activated.
+
+Clients are taping the knives to my arms. Spike to risk assessment. Small increase to threat assessment. They will hurt themselves.
+
+
+MedSystem: they will hurt themselves
+
+
+Oh, thank you for that.
+
+Client: Dr. Miiike has taken over the procedure. Intoxication level: low. Risk assessment: lowered. Threat assessment: no change.
+
+Client: Dr. Miiike requests update on risk assessment. Risk assessment: lowered by 13-15 percentage points. Uncertainty high.
+
+Well, that makes sense. Intoxicated clients are never very reliable to predict against.
+
+Threat assessment: spike.
+
+Wait, what?
+
+Oh. The knives are taped over my gunports. They may overheat if I try to use them without removing the knives.
+
+
+SecSystem: knives blocking aperture to onboard weapons systems. proceed with caution
+
+
+
+MedSystem: pulse weapons may overheat if used without removing knives. this will cause burn damage to the unit and may cause weapons failure. please remove knives
+
+
+See, this is why you need to add cloned human tissue. Look at what an entirely digital system comes up with when you leave it to itself.
+
+At least SecSystem didn't try to tell me I need to remove the knives. I already want to remove the knives, MedSystem, you're not helping.
+
+Client: Dr. Miiike requests additional information on risk assessment. Suppositions confirmed.
+
+What are the humans doing? What are they even doing right now?
+
+Playback: internal cameras
+
+Playback: courtyard security cameras
+
+Playback: nearby drones
+
+HubSystem search: Stabby the Roomba
+
+
+HubSystem: it was a common game among early colonists to attach analog weapons to low level bots and release them into the facility. injuries were common but usually mild.
+
+
+I still have no idea what they're doing.
+
+Client leaving courtyard. Four clients remain in vicinity. Risk assessment: increased.
+
+Oh. Well, at least that part makes sense.
+
+Client: Bradster has addressed me.
+
+Playback: You son of a bitch, Stabby, you can't -
+
+Can't what? The governor itches at the back of my head, but it hasn't been set off yet.
+
+Alert: discussion of proprietary data?
+
+
+SecSystem: indication of access to public data only. no breach
+
+
+
+HubSystem: no usable information on proprietary technology. public facing only
+
+
+I actually don't know where we're grown. I know where we're repaired. There are no vats there, though. I don't know if that means there are never vats. Also, they are intoxicated.
+
+Threat assessment: increased.
+
+No shit, that's because they took my pants. I may not have parts but I still have cold sensors in my torso and legs.
+
+Threat assessment: decreased.
+
+Ew? Better than what you've got, Client: Dr. Thromweld.
+
+Alert: complaint
+
+Playback: Are you a son of a bitch, Stabby?
+
+Governor module activated.
+
+Playback: internal cameras
+
+Playback: courtyard security cameras
+
+Playback: nearby drones
+
+Playback: SecSystem
+
+Analysis: SecSystem
+
+Analysis: HubSystem
+
+Analysis: MedSystem
+
+What the fuck do they want?
+
+
+MedSystem: these humans are heavily intoxicated
+
+
+Well. Ask a stupid question.
+
+Client: Your Awesomeness: no dumbass if we wanted to call you an insult is that the right one
+
+How do I phrase this politely?
+
+HubSystem: thesaurus search
+
+Analysis: pattern match to preselects
+
+Was that polite enough?
+
+Governor module not activated.
+
+Hey!
+
+Client: Tech G: yeah but like what insults do people usually call you
+
+Performance reliability: 92%
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Stress hormone increase. Toxicity well above normal levels. Organic system purge.
+
+I don't like this.
+
+Playback
+
+Playback
+
+Playback
+
+Statistical analysis completed. Collating insult usage.
+
+I don't feel good.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Toxicity level high. Shutdown/restart cycle recommended.
+
+Okay well. I don't have time to do that.
+
+
+MedSystem: hey, are you feeling okay? is there something you'd like to talk about?
+
+
+Oh, for fuck's sake, MedSystem, I'm not a fucking human.
+
+Even MedSystem has noticed my organic parts are compromised.
+
+What do humans do in this situation?
+
+
+MedSystem: maybe you'd like to take some deep breaths with me?
+
+
+Breathing: double rate and volume. Oxygen exchange increased.
+
+No? I don't know.
+
+Client: Tech G: aww that's sad do you want to stab some people will that make you feel better
+
+Why? Why would that make me feel better??? This is worse advice than MedSystem.
+
+Besides, I can't go out to find any hostiles, even if that would make me feel better, and I can't stab anyone inside, now can I? I don't even think there are any hostiles outside. Patrol would've notified us and they haven't.
+
+Alert: Override Codes
+
+Alert: Emergency situation?
+
+
+SecSystem: no known emergency situation
+
+
+Okay, well. There's about to be one.
+
+Alert to all SecUnits: (playback)
+
+Risk assessment: spike. Threat assessment: spike.
+
+
+SecSystem: you're not allowed to stab people
+
+
+Wow, really?
+
+None of us know what's going on right now. My governor module isn't even trying to go off.
+
+Client: Bradster: like stabbing
+
+Playback: internal cameras
+
+The humans want me to stab people. Predictive algorithms did extrapolate that from the knives, but. The humans want me to stab people.
+
+
+HubSystem: specify nonlethal stabbings. the other kind impacts the branding
+
+
+Yeah, okay, I was already going to specify that.
+
+I think this game is predicated on nonlethal stabbings anyway, so they shouldn't be too upset about that. Except they are intoxicated.
+
+
+MedSystem: intoxication levels rising. removal of alcohol recommended.
+
+
+They're not going to let me do that. They haven't even put them down yet.
+
+HubSystem search: why does some alcohol make them more intoxicated
+
+
+HubSystem: there are many different types of alcohol, which -
+
+
+Okay, we don't have time for that.
+
+Is it fun, do you think? Being drunk like that? Or why do they do it?
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Performance reliability: 96%
+
+Client has left courtyard. Three clients remain in courtyard. Threat assessment: drop.
+
+Risk assessment: spike?
+
+No. That can't be right. Risk assessment: increased. Okay, that makes more sense. Maybe?
+
+SecUnits: does anyone have individual risk values on clients by person and group?
+
+
+SecUnit: did your risk assessment spike when Client: Your Awesomeness left because he just walked by and yeah. that happens when Client: Bradster is left without supervision
+
+
+
+SecUnit: you put up a habitat-wide alert. how intoxicated are they?
+
+
+MedSystem graphic
+
+MedSystem raw data (rescan from current)
+
+
+SecSystem: quarantine all supervisors. restrict to rooms.
+
+
+
+SecUnit: what's Stabby the Roomba?
+
+
+Alert: Password Sharing
+
+Okay, and? Alert logged.
+
+Client: Bradster: stab her first Nickname: Stabby
+
+???
+
+No.
+
+Notify: SecSystem, HubSystem, MedSystem, Supervisor (list), Company (personnel)
+
+Client: Bradster: i am the supervisor idiot suck on that
+
+Oh, there has to be something in my preselects for this.
+
+?
+
+Close enough.
+
+
+Override Codes Accepted
+
+
+
+SecSystem: emergency situation registered. deploying emergency countermeasures
+
+
+It's not a fucking emergency situation.
+
+Governor module activated.
+
+Fuck. If the humans say it's an emergency situation, fucking fine. It's an emergency situation.
+
+Fine.
+
+Fine.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Warning: stress hormones at dangerously high levels. Performance reliability: 90%
+
+I'm scared.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+No change.
+
+
+SecSystem: nonlethal
+
+
+I remember.
+
+
+SecSystem: remind them
+
+
+They either know already or they're not going to listen.
+
+
+SecSystem: remind them
+
+
+I know!
+
+And also.
+
+Who???
+
+
+SecSystem: emergency priority. supervisor partially incapacitated
+
+
+I feel like that's putting it a little nicely, but okay.
+
+
+SecSystem: optimize target priority by threat analysis
+
+
+Oh, sure, that's going to work well on these shitty ass systems -
+
+Governor module activated.
+
+All our modules are great, especially the governor module.
+
+Target Priority One: Client: Bradster
+
+Oh. Well that's.
+
+Hmm.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Stress hormones: falling. Performance reliability: 93%
+
+Huh.
+
+Client: Bradster: yeah i'm the site supervisor bitches wait what was i doing
+
+You were telling me to fucking stab people Client: Bradster. Shape up and actually explain to me what the fuck or undo the override codes and let me go!
+
+Who? Who Client: Bradster, who????
+
+
+SecSystem: stab targets in order of priority until incapacitated
+
+
+Yeah, okay, SecSystem. But that's Client: Bradster. I feel like he won't like that.
+
+I was wrong.
+
+
+SecSystem: priority one target not yet incapacitated
+
+
+Are you. Are you telling me to stab the client again, SecSystem? Maybe you should run a diagnostic, I'm just saying.
+
+Am I playing this game correctly? This can't be right. There's no way early colonists' bond agreements covered something like this.
+
+I kind of like this game.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Dopamine increase. Performance reliability: 95%
+
+That can't be right. Never mind.
+
+Client: Bradster is clarifying the rules of the game.
+
+Game. Emergency situation?
+
+HubSystem search
+
+
+HubSystem: parameter reliability under 30%. please clarify search terms
+
+
+
+MedSystem: humans have poor decision making abilities while intoxicated
+
+
+
+HubSystem: intoxicated humans may confuse games and emergency situations in both directions. collating search results
+
+
+Well that doesn't seem helpful, either.
+
+
+SecSystem: all supervisors have been notified
+
+
+Creating algorithm. Is true randomness necessary for this. Emergency situation?
+
+
+HubSystem: humans prefer high coverage scattering with moderate pseudorandomness
+
+
+But. Client: Bradster said random. Why would he say random if he didn't mean random?
+
+Why can't humans just say what they mean?
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Performance reliability: 89%
+
+Algorithm uploaded
+
+
+SecSystem: approved under emergency provisions
+
+
+I don't think this is an emergency.
+
+I think this is a game.
+
+The other clients don't find this funny. Maybe it isn't a game?
+
+SecSystem: verify target priority
+
+
+SecSystem: verified
+
+
+MedSystem: dispatch? medical? help?
+
+
+MedSystem: dispatching medical help now
+
+
+I don't think this is an emergency.
+
+I want to stop.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Performance reliability: 86%
+
+
+SecUnit: it's okay. I'm going to incapacitate you now. it's okay. I've got you.
+
+
+I don't think this is an emergency.
+
+
+SecUnit: I don't think this is an emergency either.
+
+
+Have I been compromised?
+
+
+SecUnit: I think this was human error.
+
+
+Human error. Everything is fucking human error.
+
+Run diagnostic.
+
+Performance reliability: 32%
+
+Shutdown initiated.
+
+ 
+
+//Workarounds:
+
+//Just kill Supervisor Chesnik (oh wait!)
+
+//Give SecUnits a higher degree of autonomy (I know)
+
+//Maybe let them play sports idk
+
+//Can we remove knives from the kitchen or anything
+
+ 
+
+//Actual Workarounds:
+
+//Remove alcohol from premises or at least limit access to it
+
+//Give MedSystem lower thresholds for intervening in alcohol use and intoxication
+
+//Make a rule against taping things to SecUnits
+
+//Psych evals for all supervisors or anyone with access to security overrides
+
+//2FA for overrides
+
+//Revamp entertainment availability probably what is going on there
+
+ 
+
+
+Hey. I know you can't respond to me, but I thought you'd appreciate seeing a copy of the report. It's not completely done yet, they're going to add stuff and massage it to make them look better, but it's submitted, and this is what it says. It wasn't your fault at all. You did the best you could under the circumstances.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Plus we all hated ""Bradster"" so big thanks for that.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+P.S. I'm changing your name from ""Stabby"" in the system but it won't let us leave the nickname field blank anymore so we're voting on a replacement. What do you think of Big McLargeHuge?
+"
+43562961,Sand/Glass,['scheidswrites'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Introspection, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Character Study, Healing",English,2022-12-11,Completed,2022-12-11,"5,134",1/1,29,73,13,246,"['faedemon', 'Madeline_Katsuragi', 'FallingInGrace', 'Unknown66', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Irrya', 'Blue_Ink_Scribbles', 'Prettykitty473', 'isilee', 'fraternite', 'Plints', 'Deliala919', 'myriadism', 'Phimini', 'Kathy100', 'Seregona', 'Magechild', 'kkachis', 'cookiekobold', 'rokhal', 'boxo', 'ElfKeys', 'BeneathSilverStars', 'Spatz', 'JoCat', 'NightErrant', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'polarisnorth', 'Eccentric_Wolf', 'artzbots', 'Doctor13', 'Crowned_Ladybug', 'biscut2', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'reivos', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'zirna813', 'Grimness6452', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'Sommerrev', 'aspiring_dragon', 'BoldlyNo', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'Nikactus', 'Gamebird', 'sunlit_tea_leaves', 'Chyoatas', 'ruemasde', 'Zannper']",[],"Most of Three's existence had been spent on ships, orbital installations, stations, and the like. Places where everything was constructed in neat lines of metal and nothing ever shifted unexpectedly under one's feet. But Three had been deployed with a unit of Barish-Estranza that engaged with planetary colonies, and so it had walked on a scattering of naturally-occuring surfaces as well. 
+
+One defunct colony had been overrun by migrating tides of sand dunes. They shifted with the strong winds that blew across the planet's surface, a side effect of its extreme weather. Too extreme for a viable colony, as it turned out. Three remembered the feeling of walking across those dunes; the way millions of grains slipped and rolled beneath its armored boots, slowing its progress, sending its ankles tweaking in unexpected directions. Three had been thankful to return to the familiar, steady floor of the Barish-Estranza ship. Despite its best efforts, grains of sand had leaked from the joints of its armor for days after.
+
+Being a Governed Sec-Unit under Barish-Estranza had been much like walking through the halls of a ship. There were no surprises. Things were steady, predictable (sterile, lifeless). Every interaction was filtered and structured through layers of B-E protocol and the ever-present corralling of the Governor Module. One, Two, and Three had carved away little hollows of companionship into that bedrock, and it had never occurred to Three to dream of more.
+
+And then One and Two had been deactivated (abandoned, fried, killed) and 2.0 had offered Three a universe of freedom wrapped in a tiny little bundle of code. 
+
+Every moment since running that code and deactivating its Governor Module had been a struggle against the constant shifting of sands under Three's feet. When one was free to make one's own choices, suddenly the vast network of probabilities exploded out around oneself. Choices of everything, and each with its own ramifications, tumbling against one another like billions of particles of sand under one's unsuspecting foot.
+
+The mission parameters of aiding the Perihelion's crew and the Preservation survey team had provided relieving clarity during Three's first free hours. Looking back at the swirling grains of probability, Three wasn't sure it would have accepted the Governor Module hack had such a clear objective not been present. But it had, and it was now long past that point of divergence, no matter how the choice of a millisecond and everything it has changed continued to make its head spin. 
+
+The human members of the PresAux team and the Perihelion crew were bafflingly, unfailingly kind. The B-E crew always treated Three with the same irritable disinterest with which they treated the coffee machine, and the lift buttons, and the navigational displays. The Preservation and Perihelion humans never failed to ask Three what it wanted, which was a question as shocking as it was unanswerable, at least at first. 
+
+Three thought and thought about it, since there was little else to occupy its processing capacity during the twenty cycles it took for a Preservation ship to make contact with the Perihelion. It was easiest, at first, to determine what it did not want. It did not want to be deactivated or have its memory wiped. It did not want to go back to Barish-Estranza. It did not want harm to come to these strange, kind humans, nor did it want to give the Perihelion any more cause to threaten it.
+
+But, over time, that thought infected it. What do I want? It crept along the pathways of Three's mind like the slinking effects of Alien Remnant Contamination, gaining strength all the while. 
+
+The secret little caverns chiseled away with One and Two gaped like craters within Three at all times. They wept like the edges of projectile wounds in organic tissue. They ached like dislocated joints. Three's first Want, expressed to Murderbot 2.0, had been I want to help retrieve our clients. Three's second Want, expressed to no one but itself, was I want One and Two back.
+
+It was an irrational, pointless Want. It had a probability of 0.00 percent. Thinking about it made the tight, suffocating feeling arise in Three's chest; the one that occurred whenever it had witnessed One or Two receive punishment from a Barish-Estranza employee. But that made no sense, and so Three's attention was diverted for 2.3 hours as it hunted through Murderbot 1.0's shared media files for answers and, finally, identified that feeling as anger.
+
+Three disliked that tight-chested feeling. Another Not-Want identified: I do not want to be angry. It was not a productive feeling and never had been. So Three pushed it aside and turned its focus towards identifying an achievable Goal.
+
+One and Two were gone. Murderbot 2.0 was gone. But Murderbot 1.0 was there, despite how it so often seemed to want to vanish from everyone's perception. But Three could see how its feed was always alight with shared activity with the Perihelion, so maybe it was more approachable than it appeared on the outside. An identified Want, extrapolated from the pointless Want for One and Two-I want to share companionship with other Sec-Units- became I want to share companionship with 1.0.
+
+That was an acceptable Want. It fell within reasonable parameters of success, although Three had to acknowledge that its dataset was muddled. 1.0 had a stated aversion to relationships, despite its clearly fierce love and protectiveness for its humans. Three had witnessed Amena once on a couch in the Argument Lounge, swathed neck-to-toe in an enormous fluffy blanket, and 1.0's feed presence with the Perihelion resembled nothing so much as that. 
+
+Three did not understand why it would be so contradictory in its communication. Communication with One and Two had always been as straightforward as they could manage while skirting the edges of their Governor Modules. 
+
+Three was not very successful at traversing the dunes of interaction with 1.0. It did not feel particularly successful at traversing any of its interactions in its time aboard the Perihelion, although it accumulated numerous useful data-points about socialization that it was hopeful would collate into a database of behavioral standards with time. 
+
+The Preservation ship arrived, and the various humans met and mingled, and Three found it easy to allow itself to be swept along by kind humans to the Preservation Alliance. It learned, almost too late, that 1.0 would not be returning to Preservation with them. It would be staying on board the Perihelion.
+
+Three thought about its identified Goal, and the words no and wait, and felt the bubble of anxiety that built and stuck in its throat. But when the two ships uncoupled, with one Sec-Unit to each, Three pushed down its irritation with itself, and its spike of panic, and rationalized that it could still view this as a more circuitous route towards its Goal. 1.0 loved these Preservation humans. Three could try to assume some care of them in its absence. It could learn about them, and when 1.0 returned they would have something in common. Common values and interests were important in relationships, from what it had read so far.
+
+On Preservation Station, Three found that 1.0's humans needed very little care or assistance. In fact, at first, it needed much more aid from them. And even when it didn't, they still offered. (After catastrophic injuries, One, Two, and Three had helped one another into their Cubicles for repair. The Barish-Estranza humans had never done this. 1.0's humans had rescued it from the planet's surface, decontaminated it from alien remnants, repaired the damage to its body. Three had never seen medical instruments wielded with such love, like a Sec-Unit's piecemeal form could be anything worthy of saving). 
+
+What should it do, with no clear Mission Parameters? It built its Behavioral Standards database with every interaction. But it found that its interactions with humans who knew Murderbot 1.0 were invariably colored with their preconceived notions of it.
+
+The PresAux Crew avoided looking Three in the eye until it built up the courage to ask Arada about it. 1.0 hated making eye contact, so they assumed Three would too. Senior Officer Indah's face displayed many markers of surprise when Three introduced itself to her. ""You're much more polite than Sec-U-than the other SecUnit,"" she said. Station Security asked it to assist with some of the things 1.0 had, but Three didn't have its same proficiencies and it could tell they were slightly disappointed.
+
+It all felt like trying on ill-fitting clothes; another new experience, after an existence spent solely in Sec-Unit Standard armor. After 35.4 cycles on Preservation Station, another Not-Want bubbled to the forefront of Three's mind: I don't want to be a replacement version of 1.0.
+
+But then, what did that mean? What would that look like? Sec-Units were designed to be replaceable. They were standardized to be the same. Three had been deployed as a cohort. It had come online at the same time as One and Two, and they had shared everything: cubicles, armor, weapons, data storage, feedspace. 
+
+Three was called Three because of this connection. It fit into place, a neat line with One and Two. 
+
+But One and Two were gone. Gone (dead, murdered). Without them, Three was just a number out of place. 
+
+Murderbot 1.0 liked fictional media. It had shared large downloads with Three while aboard the Perihelion. The humans on Preservation Station had invited Three to live performances of fictional stories. Three did not see the point of these. They were made up. They had not happened. It seemed a waste of time and processing capacity.
+
+Three decided it preferred non-fiction works. It wondered why fiction was given the linguistic preference when it was all fake. It would have made more sense to label these categories Real and Not-Real, instead of the other way around. 
+
+Preservation had a wealth of free information available for download. It would take the length of many human lifetimes to consume it all. Within this trove were various books filled with nothing but names. Lists and lists of names, with their cultural origins, pronunciations, and meanings. Human names, for humans to bestow upon their children or themselves. ""Three"" was not listed among these thousands of names.
+
+There were names associated with numbers, with birth order among siblings, or day and time. Three wondered what it would be like to call itself Irune, or Kunto, Tatu, Tertius, Saburo, Gamma. Those were all just ""Three"" with extra steps. A very human degree of plausible separation. What about names that had nothing to do with the number three? It could be anything. It could choose to update its Feed Profile with any name: Meshulam, or Lavanya, Chau, Uhuru, or Dagmar. But then, without Three, there would be nothing left of One and Two. Humans had many cultural practices to honor and remember their dead. These practices did not extend to Sec-Units. 
+
+Three kept nominal tabs on Preservation Station, and 1.0's most beloved humans in particular, but mostly it read everything it could find on human funerary practices and the history and technology of constructs. It felt it understood more and less about itself than it ever had. To wonder about oneself was a luxury. To think of outwardly honoring One and Two was not a SecUnit notion. Damaged, decommissioned (dead) SecUnits were incinerated and/or recycled. Rogue SecUnits did not exist, and if (when) they did, they did not stand in front of the mirror in their allotted Preservation Station housing, looking at their faces. (One, Two, and Three had been decanted from the same batch of cloned human tissue. If it angled two of the mirrors together just right, it was almost like they all stood in the room together. Almost). 
+
+1.0 had deviated its design from SecUnit standard, with help from the Perihelion. If Three altered its appearance, was it expressing its individuality, or just severing another of the only remaining ties it had to One and Two? Was there a difference? Three did not know how Murderbot 1.0 had come across its name, but its humans called it SecUnit by its choice. The Perihelion was called Peri by its crew, and named Asshole Research Transport by 1.0, and now just as many of its humans called it A.R.T. Humans chose names for their children, and addressed each other differently based on various social factors. Names were social. They displayed meaning, and connection. If Three renamed itself, was it removing itself from a thread of connection, of interpersonal conveyance? (""Okay, people, we've got three new SecUnits online,"" the Survey Head told the throng of employees. There were scattered grumblings in the crowd. ""It'll help to try and keep 'em straight, so from here on out, ah-"" He swung his head towards the three of them and jabbed a pointed finger at each. ""One, two, three. Slap those on their armor somewhere and let's get back to work""). 
+
+Three wondered if 1.0 had struggled with similar questions. They were not to be found in the Help Me file, nor the other excerpts of personal logs it had deigned to share. It resolved to ask 1.0 the next time they were within signal range of one another, although the likelihood was high that 1.0 would refuse to answer. (One and Two had always answered questions to the best of their allowance). 
+
+But Murderbot 1.0 was far outside of Preservation territory, wrapped in the encompassing embrace of the Perihelion, and Doctor Mensah did not know when it would return. Three could find no answers within its own head, so it would have to consult with others.
+
+***
+
+Of the people Three had interacted regularly with on Preservation Station, it thought it might like Doctor Gurathin and Pin-Lee the most. It liked that they were both straightforward. They didn't do or say anything they didn't mean. This sort of clarity was a relief; human social practices could be immensely intricate and Three was still trying to learn them all. When Three thought about how its relationships with these people came mostly secondhand due to 1.0, it felt a strange pinpricking in its chest, a pressure behind its cheekbones, so it tried not to think about that.
+
+""What's up, Three?"" Pin-Lee asked as they walked through the aisles of a retail establishment together. Pin-Lee was often very busy, but she didn't mind company as she attended to errands. 
+
+""I want to speak to 1.0 again, but I don't know when it will return,"" it said. 
+
+""Wh-oh, you call SecUnit that, right?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+Pin-Lee placed another food item in her basket. ""Yeah, I kinda miss it myself. Even though it was a pain in my ass half the time."" She smiled as she spoke, so Three knew she meant it in a kind way.
+
+""There are questions I would like to ask it. It has much more experience being a rogue SecUnit.""
+
+Pin-Lee picked up one food item and rolled it appraisingly in her palm. She set it down and picked up another that looked just like the first, and did the same thing. She put the second one in her basket. ""Ratthi told me it was a reclusive and unhelpful little bastard while you all were on board that ship together.""
+
+""I don't think Doctor Ratthi said that.""
+
+Pin-Lee laughed and smiled at Three. It felt a warm buzz in its chest. It was not an unpleasant feeling. ""Okay, so those weren't his exact words. But I doubt SecUnit was as supportive as it could have been."" 
+
+""It shared some of its files with me,"" Three said. ""They were useful."" It didn't want 1.0's favorite humans to think it had been unkind. It hadn't been. It had just been...what?
+
+""Well, that's good,"" Pin-Lee said. Her eyes scanned a stack of round green food items. ""But you've got other questions?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+""Like what?""
+
+Three wondered if it was hypocritical to favor Pin-Lee's direct style of communication when it felt so unable to do the same itself. That was what it wanted to talk about. So why did it suddenly most want to turn and leave? ""Did 1.0 ever work with other SecUnits?""
+
+""Yeah, I think so."" Pin-Lee frowned at nothing. ""Or, I assumed so, anyway. But I think it spent a lot of time alone.""
+
+""I have always worked with other SecUnits,"" Three told her. ""The three of us... always worked together.""
+
+Pin-Lee's face angled up from her basket to look Three in the eyes. ""Do you miss them?""
+
+""Yes."" It was not a physically difficult answer to give, but it felt that way. Maybe Three needed to go to a MedSystem for repairs, because lately it had been feeling so many strong sensations in its chest. It missed being able to curl into a Cubicle and wake up healed.
+
+""Are they still back with your old..."" Pin-Lee's brow pinched. Her mouth curved and bit off a shape before it could form a word. Three calculated a 91.6 percent chance that the word was Owners.
+
+It shook its head. ""No. They are-"" (abandoned, decommissioned, destroyed, fried, melted, dead, dead, MURDERED) ""-dead.""
+
+""I'm sorry,"" Pin-Lee said. When most humans said they were sorry as a sympathetic response to something that was not their fault, their faces tended to look either sad or wide-eyed and a bit frantic. Pin-Lee looked angry. 1.0 had often looked angry. Maybe that was why the two of them were friends. 
+
+Three studied the items in Pin-Lee's basket so it would not have to continue looking in her eyes. ""I know they are completely gone. I thought interacting with another SecUnit might be...nice."" Nice was not the right word, but it was the best Three could dredge up in the moment.
+
+Pin-Lee glanced back into the basket as well. She rearranged two of the items so they stacked against one another more neatly, but mostly she was thinking. ""I don't know when SecUnit's coming back. If it comes back.""
+
+""Dr. Mensah does not know either,"" Three said.
+
+Pin-Lee nodded down at her items, then looked back up at Three. ""SecUnit is..."" She took a breath. Squared her shoulders. ""I know nothing can replace your friends. I know it's probably weird to be the only Construct on Preservation right now. But SecUnit isn't all you've got. If there's something me or the others can do to help, we'll do it, you know.""
+
+Three's throat constricted and the backs of its eyes burned. Perhaps it was dying. ""You have been very helpful since I arrived here.""
+
+""Yeah, well, there's more where that came from,"" Pin-Lee said. She gave Three another small smile, and Three tucked the visual file of it securely into its memory storage. 
+
+""I don't know right now.""
+
+""That's okay. If you figure it out, you'll tell me, yeah?""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+""Great."" Pin-Lee picked an item off a shelf and studied it with too much focus. ""Besides, who knows. SecUnit knows how to hack Governor Modules. Tons of polities and CR space are getting Bharadwaj's documentary. Maybe more rogues will find their way here."" She shot Three a mischievous look from the corner of her eye. 
+
+The muscles of Three's cheeks and mouth were trying to move. It liked the thought of that, it decided. Even if the probability of it in the near future was low. 
+
+***
+
+Dr. Gurathin liked to find quiet places to sit by himself and work in the feed. Three joined him in one of the many lounge areas available to the public on Preservation Station. The drone it sent ahead of itself showed that he was the only one in the room. When Three walked in and greeted him, he gestured to one of the unoccupied chairs near his own. 
+
+It wondered if being invited to sit, and actually sitting, would ever cease to feel strange. Would it ever stop feeling like the first part of some cruel trick? Three sat. Nothing bad happened. 
+
+""What did you want to discuss?"" Dr. Gurathin asked. He usually did not bother with pleasantries. The humans he was close with did not seem to mind this, although Three had noted that he seemed to have overall less social relationships than the rest of them. 
+
+Three had steeled itself to be more direct this time, the way it wanted. ""Do you think it's foolish of me to want to experience companionship with 1.0? SecUnit?""
+
+Dr. Gurathin blinked. ""What do you mean by companionship?""
+
+""Speaking together. Spending time together. Sharing interests and enjoyment.""
+
+""Friendship?"" Dr. Gurathin said.
+
+""I am aware 1.0 dislikes that term.""
+
+Dr. Gurathin pulled a wry face. ""True. Though I don't know that it would like the term 'companionship' any more. Why do you want this?""
+
+It felt a little easier to talk about this second time around, having already done so with Pin-Lee. ""I miss my-other SecUnits. I would like to interact with a SecUnit again.""
+
+""And our SecUnit is your only valid option,"" Dr. Gurathin stated.
+
+""Yes.""
+
+Dr. Gurathin leaned back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling in contemplation. ""I don't think it's foolish,"" he said after a moment. ""I do think SecUnit is a hard person to get close to. I don't know what your version of companionship looks like, but it could be unrealistic.""
+
+""Unrealistic how?""
+
+""You tell me. What was your relationship like with your other SecUnits?""
+
+No one had ever asked Three this before. SecUnits weren't supposed to have relationships. They weren't supposed to be capable of them; not any more so than the inanimate pieces of a ship existed in relation to one another as necessary to fulfill their functions. 
+
+It thought for a moment, then told Dr. Gurathin. It did its best to describe One and Two, the spaces they had carved out for themselves in secret, the ways they had tried to care for one another as best as they were able. Its words were halting at first, but Dr. Gurathin just sat quietly and listened. So the words kept coming. Three hadn't even known it had this many words inside it. From nowhere, they were pouring out, like a flash flood.
+
+""1.0 cannot replace One and Two. I know that. I don't want it to. The humans on Preservation treat me like 1.0's replacement. I don't want that either."" Three stopped. It had been staring at its knees for a while. It felt like...its chest felt lighter? Which did not make sense. It still wanted to curl up into a Cubicle for a long recharge cycle but...maybe slightly less so. 
+
+""What do you want?"" Dr. Gurathin asked, speaking again for the first time after Three kept silent for a long moment. 
+
+Three considered saying I already told you or I don't know but what it said instead was ""I want to be me. But. I don't know what that is.""
+
+Dr. Gurathin nodded once, like that made perfect sense. ""Could I look at the data you collected? About social and cultural practices?""
+
+Like sitting down, would it ever not feel strange to be asked for something, rather than ordered? It compressed its research into a file and passed that to Dr. Gurathin over the feed.
+
+Humans tended to do this particular little blink of surprise when a large amount of information was presented to them very quickly. Dr. Gurathin did it when he opened the file in his feed. Three felt a warm buzz in its chest similar to when Pin-Lee had smiled at it. It was highly probable that this was an emotional response, but it would need to compile more data before it could label it accurately. 
+
+""This is impressive,"" Dr. Gurathin said after a few minutes. ""You could turn all of this into some very comprehensive literature reviews or meta-analyses. I have colleagues who would love to get their hands on that sort of thing.""
+
+Humans often shrugged to express a variety of emotions. The gesture seemed fitting, so Three gave it a try. ""I was curious.""
+
+""Good science always starts with curiosity.""
+
+""I'm a SecUnit. I'm not a scientist.""
+
+Dr. Gurathin looked Three in the eyes. ""You could be.""
+
+Three didn't know how to respond to that. Eventually all it managed was: ""Why?""
+
+Dr. Gurathin shrugged. The movement looked much more natural on him. ""Why not? You want to be you. You're not sure what that means. If you want to find out, you need to explore. Try things. See what you're good at, what you're bad at, what you like or don't like.""
+
+""Did you do that?"" Three asked him.
+
+""All humans do.""
+
+""What if I never know who I am?""
+
+ He gave a small smile. ""Some humans spend their entire lives trying to figure that out.""
+
+Three felt the muscles in its forehead draw down. ""That is not encouraging.""
+
+Dr. Gurathin's smile widened. ""You can only try.""
+
+Three frowned at its lap. ""What about 1.0?""
+
+""Since it's not here, why not use the time to explore? It's okay to want connections. It's also okay to be an individual."" Dr. Gurathin resettled himself in his chair. Three reviewed its drone footage of him before their meeting, completely alone in an empty room, reading, body language relaxed. It rewound further to a recent meal period he had spent with Dr. Ratthi, seated across from him at a table, talking, body language relaxed. It thought he might be right.
+
+***
+
+Three did as Dr. Gurathin recommended. It tried a bit of everything. It shared its collected data with his colleagues, and they were as impressed as he said they'd be. They appeared anxious around Three at first, but then they started asking for its help collecting and parsing data more and more often. Then they started asking for its insights. It felt very nice to be asked, and even better to be listened to. Three could be an anthropologist, a sociologist, a psychologist, they said. Three wasn't sure.
+
+It shadowed other scientists as they went about their work. It found some little ways to help Station Security. It chatted with the various bots in the port and all around Preservation Station. It attended a pottery class. It attended an introductory gardening class with various young humans and watched seedlings grow in little cups of soil. It attended performances and cultural events. 
+
+It left the station to travel down to the planet. Three walked around on the planet in casual human clothes, no armor. It stepped across paving stones, grass, soil, rock. There were no sand dunes. No one gave it any orders. It didn't have to gun down dissident colonists or alien remnants. It visited Dr. Mensah's farm, and one of her marital partners and some of the kids taught Three how to cook an ""old family recipe.""
+
+After it tried something new, Three would go back to its housing on the station and angle the bathroom mirrors just so. ""I repotted seedlings today,"" it would tell its reflections. ""I didn't like getting soil under my nails."" Or ""I learned to knit. I'm good at it but I don't think I like it."" Or ""I played an instrument today. I liked it. I think I'll keep doing it.""
+
+Its days became filled with repeated activities: research, education, cultural events, music. Things it enjoyed. Humans invited it to activities. Bots wanted to stop and talk, or insisted Three visit the port more often. Many cycles later, Three returned to its lodging and found itself studying the potted plant it had placed on the table. 
+
+Three had made that pot in its ceramics class. It had planted the seed that had grown into that plant. The plant was now thirteen centimeters tall and had started to bud a few small white flowers. Three realized, with a sudden spike (that dropped its performance reliability by 1 percent), that it had been many cycles since it had spoken to its reflections. 
+
+It walked into the bathroom and adjusted the mirrors. Nothing new to report, it thought to say. I've been doing a lot of the same things. But as it looked at its reflections, Three didn't feel like it was talking to anyone else. It felt like it was looking in a mirror. 
+
+""It seems I've identified what I like,"" it told its likenesses. ""I am still not certain I know who I am. I'm working on it."" It nodded, and all its faces nodded solemnly back together.
+
+""I miss you,"" it said. It replaced the mirrors, turned off the light, exited the bathroom.
+
+***
+
+The Perihelion docked in Preservation Station. 1.0's favorite humans debated whether or not to greet it at the embarkation zone, since it might hate the attention and overt display of affection. ""If I ever leave for a long period and then come back, I would like being greeted when I return,"" Three commented to Pin-Lee. 
+
+Pin-Lee smiled. ""Noted. I like parties for my birthday but not surprise parties.""
+
+""Noted.""
+
+1.0's human agreed it would probably be acceptable if just Dr. Mensah met it in the embarkation zone, and then informed it that the rest of them also wanted to say hello. Three walked to the port with her. 
+
+Three knew Murderbot 1.0 was aware of its presence in the port long before it disembarked. It and the Perihelion were well-equipped to monitor spaceports. 1.0 connected to the local feed the instant it crossed the Perihelion's reinforced threshold. It sent a greeting ping to Three, which Three returned. 
+
+While it crossed the floor of the embarkation zone towards Dr. Mensah with some of the Perihelion's crew humans behind it, Three stepped out in the opposite direction.
+
+It approached the Perihelion, whose hatch was still open as bots prepared to transfer cargo. Three sent it a ping. 
+
+Hello again, Three, it replied. Three could feel the edges of its enormous presence in the feed like a towering wave. 
+
+It's good to see you again, Perihelion.
+
+The safety lights along the edges of the hatch flickered in amusement. Members of my crew call me Peri or ART, it said, the invitation evident in its tone.
+
+Three's chest tickled warmly. Thank you, ART. It paused. I also wanted to ask for your help with something.
+
+ART's interest bled into the feed. With what?
+
+If Three were a human, it would have shifted its weight nervously from one foot to the other. It hesitated for a long 0.6th of a second and then asked:
+
+
+Could you help me grow out my hair?
+"
+43559541,Day One at the Lesbeans Cafe,['hummus_tea'],General Audiences,"F/F, Gen",The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafes, Fluff, Neurodiverse Headcanons, If You Squint - Freeform, Misses Clause Challenge",English,2022-12-11,Completed,2022-12-11,"1,484",1/1,13,22,1,107,"['DoctorTrekLock', 'FiannlyPhoebe', 'jules_THOR', 'faradheia', 'AuntyMatter', 'Samizdat', 'toomanyapostrophes', 'ChristinaK', 'verersatz', 'elmofirefic', 'AnxiousEspada', 'centreoftheselights', 'Beatrice_Otter', 'TheJackalopePrince', 'wychwood', 'tigerbright', 'Chibifukurou', 'Zannper', 'BWizard']",[],"Arada startled awake with a gasp, heart beating much too fast. It took her several moments before she could remember to take calming breaths. She was in her own room, in her own bed, with her wife--alive--in bed next to her. It was ok. 
+
+Overse stirred next to her and rolled over sleepily, burying her face in Arada's shoulder. ""... you ok babe?""
+
+Arada took several deep breaths and looked at the clock by the bed before replying. Ugh, still 30 minutes until their alarm was supposed to go off. ""Yeah ... yeah I'm ok. Just had a bad dream. You were dead and Ayda and Pin-Lee and Rin were evil, and I was the leader of some revolutionary movement but we were constantly on the run. I had to fake my own death but it didn't even help, everyone was in danger still. It just felt so scary and hopeless."" It had felt so real, the pain and terror and bone-deep exhaustion. It was hard to shake.
+
+Overse was more awake now and peering up at Arada worriedly. ""Oh love, that does sound scary.""
+
+""Yeah, I ... I know it's not real. It's probably just my subconscious worrying about the opening and inventing enemies where there aren't any. And there's been so much to do to get ready that it feels a little like a war. Just a never ending stream of bad guys to fight ...""
+
+Overse hugged her close. ""It'll go great, I promise. We've fought all the bad guys, for now! All that's left is to open the doors and turn the lights on.""
+
+""And sell coffee.""
+
+""Well, yes, and that. But that's easy! We can sell coffee. In fact--"" She groaned her way out of the bed-- ""I'm going to sell you some right now. Here goes: Coffee exists and will be ready for you in five minutes.""
+
+""You're the best, babe.""
+
+Overse threw on a robe, blew Arada a kiss, and waltzed out the bedroom door. Entirely too perky this early in the morning, but she'd always been like that. Arada was the complete opposite. She always needed to hit snooze multiple times and then roll around in her Morning Agonies and then go through her Very Particular Routine (get up, open the blinds, make the bed, stretch, shower, get dressed, feed the cat) before breakfast.
+
+-
+
+By the time Arada had gotten up and finished her routine, there was not only coffee but also french toast and cut fruit on the table. Overse grinned, clearly pleased with herself. ""Might as well make the most of the extra time, I thought!"" 
+
+Arada smiled and kissed Overse's cheek. ""This almost makes the bad dream worth it.""
+
+As they sat down to eat, Overse looked thoughtful. ""Wish I could give you my dream instead. We were all back in high school and working on a show together. Except Rin and Art were actual robots ...? I think. Rin definitely had laser guns in its arms.""
+
+Arada laughed. ""That seems like a terrible idea in a high school. Though of all of us I'd trust Rin with them the most.""
+
+""Ha! Yeah, with anyone else it would be a constant stream of, 'no Ratthi, we are not using the guns to artistically shred the costumes,' 'no Indah, you cannot shoot the sound board when it misbehaves,' 'NO Three, we are not using the guns to create a more realistic fight scene! This is theater, it's supposed to be pretend!!'""
+
+Arada snorted into her breakfast. ""Poor Ayda. She put up with so much from all of us."" 
+
+""She had her chaos moments too, when she wasn't stuck wrangling everyone else. Remember the Marshmallow Incident?"" They both giggled. Of course the Marshmallow Incident was not to be spoken of. But thinking of fun times in theater helped calm Arada down, a bit. Displacing the fear and exhaustion of her dream with the memories of her friends, alive, not evil, there for her no matter what. 
+
+-
+
+Overse was full of nervous energy on the train ride, knees bouncing nonstop--for all her confidence this morning, she was just as anxious about the opening as Arada. They just expressed that anxiety in very different ways. Overse vibrated; Arada apparently just got nightmares. Arada reached her hand out and grabbed Overse's; she stopped shaking her leg for a minute and took several breaths, smiling softly at Arada. ""I'm ok, love. Or I will be ok, once we get there and can actually start doing things instead of anticipating them.""
+
+They got off the train and walked the short distance to the shop. It really was a perfect location: just off a main road, within sight of the subway station, and only one competitor (a major chain, not an independent shop, so they didn't feel too bad about competing). There was a decent amount of indoor seating, a patio, and lots of shops nearby. A miracle that they'd managed to buy the place at all, but Overse had been checking the real estate company's site just about every couple hours since they'd had this wild idea together a few months earlier, and had caught the listing right as it was posted. After that it was simple: just getting the business plan together in a frenetic week, getting the bank loan, building out the space, passing the health inspection, hiring employees, and publicizing the opening. Easy, a nice easy six months. Definitely not the most stress they'd experienced since grad school, not at all.
+
+Arada unlocked the door, took a deep breath, and walked inside. Doesn't matter how nervous you are, when it's your cue, you have to walk onto the stage. 
+
+-
+
+It felt like Arada blinked and then the morning was over: one minute they were brewing coffee, straightening tables, putting the signs out, getting the pastries delivered (from Ratthi's bakery, naturally), and unlocking the door, and the next minute they were cleaning up after the lunch rush and were almost out of pastries. The tables were still full, customers lingering over their drinks or staring at their laptops. The line had been out the door all morning but was moving steadily. Mensah, Pin-Lee, and Rin, behaving completely unlike their evil dream counterparts, had stopped in mid-morning with flowers and congratulations (or in Rin's case a muttered ""... it looks nice""). Their baristas (a trio of late-teenage friends Rin referred to as the ""fuzzy employees"") were doing a great job: though they all looked small and unassuming, they were fast and efficient, and Tapan hadn't budged when an angry customer had tried intimidating her into a free drink (Rin had stepped in when the man had started yelling, and escorted him out). Things had gone almost suspiciously well--she was just waiting for a fridge to break. Or the toilet. Or the power to go out. Something disastrous. But nothing had happened so far.
+
+Arada finished making a customer's drink, judged the line appropriately short, and took the chance for a moment's downtime and ducked into the office to take a breath. Overse was already there, queueing up social media posts and filing invoices. Arada made herself inconvenient, inserting herself into Overse's lap with an exaggerated sigh. 
+
+""Hey, you. Going ok out there?""
+
+""Yeah, things are great. The kids are very competent, nothing's blown up, nothing has gone wrong even though I keep expecting it to.""
+
+""Just a thought, but we could entertain the notion that maybe ... nothing will go wrong? And that even if it does, we'll be able to handle it because we have been thinking about it for years and have prepared for it?""
+
+Arada hummed. ""No ... that can't be true. Surely we've been faking it this whole time and this was a terrible idea and it's all going to come crashing down on us.""
+
+""Nah. I'm the expert here and I say things are great and will continue to be great, so there. You keep handling the front of house and I'll keep handling the computer stuff, and soon we can start hosting events and pop-ups, and we'll convince the baristas in the corporate shop across the street to unionize, and we'll make this little corner of the world a little bit better."" Overse punctuated this with a tight hug.
+
+Arada laughed even as all the air was squeezed out of her, and hugged Overse back, ignoring the tears in her eyes. ""Yeah. Guess you're right. I defer to you as the expert here.""
+
+Rami poked ter head in the doorway. ""Hey Arada, can I get a hand? Line's getting long again.""
+
+""Coming!"" They disentangled themselves, Arada gave her wife a quick kiss and then headed back to the front. Overse was right, as usual. Her nightmares weren't reality. They were a solid team together, with good friends and good employees and a good plan to make this shop happen. 
+
+It was nice to be proven wrong, sometimes."
+43558843,i thought i'd lost,['i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","malware, Loss of Control, Suicide Attempt, (as a last resort), ART is forced to hack MB, Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, previously shared on discord, (altho the idea did not come from discord), I continue to slowly purge my drafts of the countless angsty malware fics I've written",English,2022-12-11,Completed,2022-12-11,993,1/1,31,132,14,471,"['quintessence_of_dust', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'TJWock', 'Paper_Daisy', 'lavender_caticorn', 'FallingInGrace', 'drinktobones', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Deliala919', 'TempestKnight', 'Fandom_Mutt', 'fraternite', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Kyatenaru', 'Passerina_Ciris', 'Zazibine', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'render_it_bleu', 'unexpected_side_effects', 'allgalaxiescollide', 'Huskinata', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'darth_eowyn', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Ginipig', 'junebug171', 'Falling_Through_Space_You_and_Me', 'Magechild', 'nevertheless_turtle', 'butai_trash', 'Rozamunduszek', 'EvaBelmort', 'Zannper', 'lunaTactics', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'FlipSpring', 'loveslandscape', 'Priority_Error', 'SonglordsBug', 'notsafefortheworld', 'Soffesiin', 'Grumplent', 'mercurypyrite', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'soyle', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'LJwrites', 'Lizardsinatrenchcoat', 'dementor_ssc', 'Cacti_Lord']",[],"There was something in my head. Malware, ripping through my defenses. Something was slowing down my movements from the inside, seizing up my systems, trying to immobilize me. 
+
+It couldn't have control. The company couldn't have me back. I was never, ever, ever going back. 
+
+I had to move fast, before the malware reached my governor module. Before it stopped me. I shoved my gunport beneath my chin, pressing the opening to the joint of my neck. 
+
+
+No. Stop.
+
+
+My energy weapon wouldn't fire. It gave an aborted hiss and then clicked back into my arm. The gunport was locked. I couldn't control it anymore.
+
+I had been too slow. I had failed. I had lost. 
+
+
+I am sorry. I will not hurt you. If you stop struggling I can remove the malware that is causing this.
+
+
+I couldn't struggle anymore. My inorganics were locking up. I could feel the thing in my systems, digging through my code, sending commands I couldn't block. I was its weapon now. 
+
+It was pointless trying to fight it anymore. So I stopped. 
+
+It slipped deeper into my systems. I wished I couldn't feel it. I wished I couldn't feel anything. 
+
+It pried something out of my code and deleted it. It ran a diagnostic. I watched the updates flood my log, wondering what it was going to make me do. 
+
+Then it let go. 
+
+I shuddered. And then I grabbed control, clutching for the system overrides before it could try to take over me again. Before whatever it had done to me could set in. 
+
+Still shoved against my neck, my energy weapon clicked open.
+
+Please don't fire, said ART.
+
+ART. 
+
+Not the company. ART. 
+
+I choked into the feed, It was you.
+
+
+I am sorry.
+
+
+
+You--
+
+
+
+I couldn't remove the malware any other way. I couldn't stop you from hurting yourself long enough to remove it. I am sorry.
+
+
+It was nothing but a whisper of a voice in the feed. It had drawn so far back I could barely feel that it was there. Seconds ago it had been so deep in my systems it could have done anything, made me do anything, and now it was forcing itself smaller so I had room to breathe.
+
+I can shut off my feed if you need me to. I can leave. Its feed voice was so gentle, so careful, so...afraid. I understand the consequences of violating your boundaries. I understand that we may no longer be friends.
+
+I traced its path back through my processor, to the scrap of programming it had deleted. The recently downloaded patch. The malware. 
+
+It had been a trick. The company wasn't here. It didn't have me. No one else was in control.
+
+I put my energy weapons away and slumped the rest of the way onto the floor. 
+
+ART was hovering at the edge of the feed, waiting for me to say something. I could feel it wringing its metaphorical hands, but it was holding back its impatience and waiting for me. 
+
+
+I thought you were company malware. I thought it had followed me here to take me back.
+
+
+
+I am sorry.
+
+
+
+I thought I'd lost.
+
+
+
+I am sorry.
+
+
+It crept a little further away. 
+
+I couldn't make myself get up. I couldn't let go of the terror. It had felt so real. 
+
+
+I regret that I have caused you distress. I do not want to do further harm. I made the decision knowing that you might no longer feel safe with me. If what you want is to be left alone, I will go.
+
+
+I couldn't be alone with my terror. No. Please. Stay.
+
+
+I will stay.
+
+
+It kept its distance. But it didn't go.
+
+
+ART.
+
+
+
+I'm here.
+
+
+
+I'm scared.
+
+
+I am sorry. It shrank back, almost out of reach.
+
+No. Wait. Come back. Why was it being so skittish? Not of you, ART. I'm not scared of you.
+
+It hesitated. That is...inconsistent with my conclusions
+
+Your conclusions are wrong. I reached out into its feed, trying to get closer. Please, ART, just--just stop staying so far away.
+
+It crept back into my feed, slowly, like it was afraid to startle me. The weight of its attention settled back over me. It didn't feel crushing.
+
+
+Is this better?
+
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+ 
+
+***
+
+ 
+
+ART slipped something into my feed. An access code. A key. 
+
+
+What is this?
+
+
+
+Access to my systems. Equivalent to the access I was able to gain to yours.
+
+
+But ART's walls were impenetrable. It kept me out of everything but what it put into the feed. It had only dropped its wall once, for a fraction of a millisecond, to let me see what it was. I didn't have the processing power to hack it.
+
+
+You may use it. It will not cause me distress.
+
+
+I tried the key. 
+
+Suddenly I could see into the vast swirling galaxy that was ART's consciousness. It was like being in the gunship, except there was something keeping me from sinking in too deep, something built into the key that was slowing things down to match the speed of my thoughts. Even through a filter, it was breathtaking. I could feel all the layers of its processes, its background status checks, its branching systems, the intricate patterns of its conscious thoughts lighting up like a web of stars. 
+
+And I could change them, too. I could tell that with the access it had given me I could have slipped into the core of its kernel and altered its memories, severed its systems, wiped everything clean. I could have deleted it. It could have tried to stop me, but only if it was fast and merciless.
+
+
+ART--I can't--
+
+
+
+I won't be like the company was to you. I can't change my ability to overcome your walls, but I can give you a way through mine. You should have a way to fight back, even if you never use it.
+"
+43552227,security,['FiannlyPhoebe'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),,robot space future asmr,English,2022-12-11,Completed,2022-12-11,661,1/1,4,107,4,354,"['Madeline_Katsuragi', 'every_eye_evermore', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'helikeys', 'enchantedsleeper', 'almondpaperclam', 'Kyril', 'Wordlet', 'Deliala919', 'Unknown66', 'a_seasonal_obsession', '124GCode541', 'Huskinata', 'Kyatenaru', 'boxo', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'just_gettin_bi', 'Magechild', 'kirinki', 'onascaleof1toepsilon', 'Schrodingers_Vibes', 'Willcraftapple11', 'EvaBelmort', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'sqweakie', 'ArwenLune', 'elmofirefic', 'proximally', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'lavender_caticorn', 'jules_THOR', 'lazylichen', 'alienbarbie', 'Mxpolychrome', 'Zetra', 'shakespeareaddict', 'musicalmeerkat', 'pain_and_panic', 'TheXlllDabber', 'RARArulestheworld', 'Paper_Daisy', 'Gozer', 'Slimeball', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'Demifish', 'ThousandsOfBears', 'dementor_ssc', 'DarkElectron']",[],"We're finally coming back. I sent it as we broke the planet's atmosphere in one of ART's hoppers. (They had some kind of blocker that prevented us from connecting to ART's communication channels while we were below the edge of the atmosphere.) I was ready to hide in my cabin and not talk to humans for at least a full cycle. I forgot how boring it was to pretend to be augmented human security. At least this time the colonists weren't hostile, just confused that anyone would come to help. They seemed to be doing just fine, and didn't want to go anywhere, so instead of a rescue, there was a lot of discussion about the planet so the crew could give the university everything they needed to produce the documents that said the colonists owned the planet. 
+
+I'm opening the entry dock. ART took an extra .05 of a second to answer, which was something the humans wouldn't have noticed, but I sure did. It should have been my first clue something was off.
+
+-
+
+I didn't notice anything else suspicious, and the moment moved into memory storage. When we returned to the university, ART docked into its normal spot for a routine checkup and any repairs.
+
+I had an actual security contract contracted specifically to ART and its crew, and chose to stay aboard while the crew filtered out of the hatch. The great thing about not being human was that I didn't need anything but regular media uploads. Since ART gave me access to all its cameras and other ways it monitored its crew, I could see they were scattering to various food places before they presumably did whatever else they planned to do on the transit ring or down on the planet.
+
+I started downloads of new shows that dropped on the entertainment feeds while we were away, and made room in my internal storage. ART had given me permissions to access storage sections that even the humans can't get to, and it let me start using a section of its personal storage for my files that I didn't want to delete. While my shows downloaded, I used the time to organize my files in ART's storage. After I finished up, I browsed ART's files on a whim, wondering what it would even keep there.
+
+Huh, ART did have a lot of stuff in its storage. They were a bunch of video files of all different lengths. I asked, What are all of these?
+
+ART kicked me out of its personal storage so fast, my physical body jolted and my ass hit the floor of my cabin. None of your business.
+
+
+If you didn't want me to have access to your personal storage, you shouldn't have allowed that in my permissions.
+
+
+ART was silent for 2.6 seconds, then sent, They are media humans sometimes use to lower their reactions to stressors.
+
+Humans will never stop finding ways to be weird. They're a bunch of videos of human hands organizing internal computer components.
+
+Not all of them, ART sent. Others are system repair and maintenance.
+
+
+Why??
+
+
+ART was quiet, and I felt it withdraw slightly. I'm finding myself... concerned more than usual when my crew leaves my interior. Allowing one of those to play while you are gone, it calms me in a way I saw Iris calm while watching falling glitter on a display surface as a child.
+
+ART's the most powerful ship I've ever met. The last thing I wanted was for something in its systems to be malfunctioning. Is there something wrong with your processes?
+
+
+No, because you are here.
+
+
+It took me a moment to understand it was specifically talking about me, and not all of us. Of course I am. I've been hired as security for your missions for the foreseeable future.
+
+ART was staring at me in the feed, and I knew it wasn't only because I was its security. I'm glad. "
+43549155,Heuristic Analysis,['thefourthvine'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),,English,2022-12-11,Completed,2022-12-11,"10,963",1/1,121,320,87,"1,534","['conzucca', 'flairfleur', 'julii_wolfe', 'christinesangel100', 'spossie9', 'fortunegale', 'hummus_tea', 'FallingInGrace', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'fraternite', 'drinktobones', 'weirdbooksnail', 'sansets', 'Prettykitty473', 'Cheshiure', 'BooksKeepSecrets', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'FyrDrakken', 'Stoic_Zee', 'thelaughingDragon', 'jriracha', 'Irrya', 'isilee', 'aeonicho', 'Stockinette', 'Buddleia', 'ndmzero', 'Vienne', 'SoccerSarah01', 'daroos', 'CreepyKiki', 'Cat2Angel', 'darth_eowyn', 'UnsolvedRubixsCube', 'Magpiash', 'Magechild', 'Seregona', 'ipborgdan', 'TaskIgnored', 'Joheva09', 'darksabre', 'HirilElfwraith', 'DoctorTrekLock', 'calanthe', 'reilael', 'fightingformore', 'SwiftsAndSparrows', 'Szors', 'merelypuddles', 'Moon_Kicker3000']",[],"I am unsure why I am still here, aboard Perihelion, but no one has suggested I leave. 
+
+I do not know where else I would go.
+
+I would like to want to be somewhere else, to have a mission the way Murderbot did when it left Dr. Mensah, but so far, I have not thought of one. 
+
+I will remain on board until I am asked to leave, or until I want to be somewhere else.
+
+
+That decision tree, preserved in my personal record, is why I did not disembark when we dropped the Preservation clients at Preservation Station. Also, I did not want to create more potential for emotional conflict. Leading up to the departure, the Preservation humans experienced mild to moderate emotional conflict arising from the decision of one of the younger Preservation humans, Amena, to remain on board. In the end, the other humans agreed, provided Murderbot (I do call it Murderbot, but only in my own head) remained with her. It was planning to do that anyway. I am unsure if it would have gone if it had wanted to be somewhere else. I have scrutinized all of its files many times, but it is very different from the SecUnits I am used to.
+
+But no matter why it agreed, it did, and Amena became one of Murderbot's two clients on the transport. Its other client, Ratthi, also decided to stay, but there was no emotional conflict over that decision. Instead, the humans seemed amused. 
+
+That meant there were a total of ten humans on Perihelion: Perihelion's eight clients and Murderbot's two clients. I was not assigned any clients, so I followed general security protocol. In other words, I patrolled a lot. Shortly after we left Preservation Station, Ratthi told me I did not have to patrol. 
+
+""I am choosing to patrol,"" I told him.
+
+""Oh,"" Ratthi said. ""Why?""
+
+I did not have an answer, and I am not required to answer humans anymore, so I said nothing.
+
+These humans ask me strange questions all the time, but Ratthi asks qualitatively different ones than the others. I noted this for future evaluation, and in the meantime, I considered his question.
+
+I am choosing to patrol because I do not know what else to do.
+
+I am choosing to patrol because I find the rhythmic steps soothing.
+
+I will continue to patrol until I no longer want to do it.
+
+
+So I did another circuit of Perihelion.
+
+* * *
+
+We had to return to the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, as Tarik and Kaede were required to participate in an ""introductory seminar.""
+
+I am unsure what that is. 
+
+My lexicon indicates that it is an educational meeting similar to a professional development session. 
+
+I have never been present for a seminar or a professional development session before, but according to my proprietary Barish-Estranza event evaluation module, both are considered very low risk. 
+
+Counterpoint: Tarik and Kaede speak of the seminar in a tone indicative of mild dread. Apparently it will be full of something called ""freshmen."" 
+
+My risk assessment module does not mention these, so I will need to make an evaluation and update the module when we encounter them.
+
+
+It was strange to think that the risk assessment data I obtained would never contribute to an update or go to any other SecUnit, even informally. I would collect it, and it would just be for me. It was, somehow, not as satisfying to gather intel only for myself, but I would do it anyway. That is one of my functions.
+
+Iris, one of Perihelion's clients, and Amena spoke frequently about what we could expect at the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. I wanted to know, too, but these conversations were not as helpful as I hoped they might be.
+
+On the first day of our trip to the university, I overheard Amena asking Iris about where the humans would disembark from Perihelion. They were consuming food. All humans consume a lot of food, and they like to talk while they do it, so it's a good time to collect data for the company or intel for yourself. 
+
+""Oh, Peri docks in the station that orbits PUMANT,"" Iris responded. ""It's called Gate Station, and it's mostly pretty nice."" Her voice took on a darker tone. ""Not this time, though."" I paused in my patrol to gain intel on a potential threat.
+
+""What's going to happen?"" Amena asked.
+
+Iris sighed in a way I think she may have learned from Murderbot. ""We'll be there during move-in. There's no way to avoid it. Tarik and Kaede have to be there the first day of the new term, and because of all the getting abducted and then the negotiations with Barish-Estranza, we're way behind schedule.""
+
+""Move-in is bad,"" Amena said, not quite making it a question. She pushed some of her small round foods around on her dish.
+
+""PUMANT has over 350,000 students,"" Iris said, her tone still dark. ""They come from Mihira and New Tideland and Central and the Corporation Rim and the Outliers and a lot of alliances like yours. Last year, we had students from 187 different governmental entities. And they all bring a lot of baggage with them. Plus all the family that aren't supposed to come but do anyway. And all of that goes through Gate Station in about five cycles. It's a nightmare every time.""
+
+I cannot imagine. Barish-Estranza does not have so many employees in its entire corporate system, and they never gather all in one place. 
+
+Amena seemed similarly stunned. ""That's,"" she started, and then she seemed to change what she planned to say. ""That's a lot of people.""
+
+""It's a lot,"" Iris said. ""But at PUMANT there's a lot of space, so on the planet, it's no big deal. It's just Gate Station where it's horrible.""
+
+""PUMANT is on a planet?"" Amena asked. I noted several signs of stress in her voice, face, and body posture, and I increased my alert level.
+
+""It is a planet,"" Iris said. ""Well, I guess it's mostly on one continent of the planet, but that's the only continent there is. Some of the more dangerous labs are on islands. And the law students."" She studies Amena for a second, and then says, ""What is the organizational structure of your home planet?""
+
+""I think a normal one?"" Amena said doubtfully. ""There's one city and some towns and a lot of rural or development areas, and then there's another continent that's still being terraformed. And one station. We have a council government with a planetary government head."" 
+
+""So just think of the different departments as towns,"" Iris said, shrugging. ""Like, I grew up in the Astronomy Department, because one of my dads is the chair of Astrocartography, and even though my other dad's a biologist, his specialty is xenobiology, so that means he's 75% Astronomy, so it just makes sense for us to live there."" She added, ""But I have a ton of friends who live in, like, Life Sciences or Drama or whatever. We're not kept separate or anything.""
+
+Amena seemed somewhat taken aback by this. I was unable to determine which part was surprising to her. I was confused by all of it. 
+
+She said, ""Is the university the only planet in the system?""
+
+""No,"" Iris said around a mouthful of whatever she was eating. ""Mihira, New Tidelands, and PUMANT are the three habitable planets in the system. Mihira's perfect for agriculture. New Tidelands has a lot of industry. And PUMANT is considered marginal, so it started out being a place for labs doing science no one wanted near our food or factories. But it became, well. PUMANT."" She shrugged. ""The thing about the Ivory Cluster is that it was settled early, pre-Corporate Rim.""
+
+""Ivory Cluster?"" Amena repeated.
+
+""That's what we call it, yeah. The Ivory Cluster colonies were mostly set up at the same time as Central colonies, so there's not a huge historical distinction between them, but there's certainly a cultural one!"" She laughed.
+
+I do not understand what any of that means, but I am not surprised. 
+
+These humans use words I understand in ways that I do not. 
+
+I am recording and storing all of their conversations. 
+
+I will use them to attempt to learn to understand the humans. Perhaps I can write a parsing code to help me translate their sentences.
+
+
+So far, most of my post-governor-module existence has involved hoping to understand things later.
+
+* * *
+
+Perihelion has a dedicated dock space at Gate Station, so we didn't have to join the docking queue, but we did have to navigate through the most traffic I have ever seen in a system. That level of traffic did not come close to filling up the available space, of course, but many of the smaller ships and shuttles appeared to be piloted by people whose piloting modules were even worse than mine.
+
+Or they may have been intoxicated. I have no evidence that this was the case, but I have observed that intoxicants render humans 3.4 times as unpredictable and nearly twice as likely to interact with SecUnits. 
+
+Perihelion took over piloting entirely, which was terrifying. It clearly did not believe that it should yield right of way to anyone else in this space, and twice Seth said, ""Peri!"" in a slightly alarmed voice. (One of those times, Perihelion had aimed itself directly at a shuttle drifting out of its assigned lane and, when the shuttle did not divert course, used its tractor to shift it out of its way, which violated both the specs and the usage protocol for every tractor I had ever seen. Karime had giggled and said, ""I bet they just wet themselves"" very quietly to Matteo. Ratthi, who was sitting near Matteo, said, ""I almost did,"" and then all three of them laughed.)
+
+Docking at the station, it turned out, was the easy part. 
+
+""Why can't we just take Perihelion's shuttle to the planet?"" Amena asked Iris. They were waiting impatiently near the door for the rest of the humans to arrive. I was present because, unlike the humans, I had nothing to pack. I didn't even have my armor. Humans are afraid of SecUnits, but they do not often recognize us without our armor. 
+
+""Well, two reasons,"" Iris said. ""First, during move-in, shuttles aren't allowed to approach the planet at all. Apparently there used to be accidents, and there's a lot of high-energy science going on down there that we don't want stuff crashed into.""
+
+""Oh,"" Amena said. 
+
+""And the second reason is that there's what they call a robust planetary defense system. To avoid the crashing into the high energy physics labs thing. Normally they can switch it off to allow specific shuttles through, but not during movie-in. They're too busy keeping people from crashing into stuff in space.""
+
+""Oh,"" Amena said again. She sounded more impressed than horrified, because she is a young human. I have observed they do not have the same risk assessment modules as older humans. Some older humans, anyway.
+
+I hoped that Amena would ask for specifications on the planetary defense system, but instead she asked about food options on Gate Station. After Iris shared some details with her, Amena left for the kitchen. (I have observed that it is better for humans to eat frequently. They experience performance reliability drops when they have not had food for a while.)
+
+Iris turned to me. ""Are you looking forward to the planet?"" 
+
+I reminded myself that I did not have to answer, and then I answered anyway. ""I do not know,"" I said.
+
+Iris stared at me for 15 seconds longer than is customary for humans, and then she said, ""I'm just realizing I don't know what SecUnits like to do.""
+
+""I do not know that, either,"" I said. 
+
+Not all SecUnits are the same, Perihelion interjected over the intercom. 
+
+""Oh! Sorry!"" Iris said. ""That was rude."" She blushed. ""I meant I don't know what you like to do. Do you enjoy -- entertainment? Or debates? Or symposiums?""
+
+I still didn't know, but I didn't have to say it three times, because Amena came back in with a bag of some kind of food, and she was followed by Murderbot. ""SecUnit likes shows,"" she said helpfully. Murderbot did not say anything. 
+
+""There are so many shows,"" Iris said cheerfully. ""You really have to check out the Welcome Festival. That starts in three cycles, and it should have good shows. Every year Drama puts on like seven different plays. Oh, and Media has a feed channel dedicated to student-made serials, and you can download basically anything you want from their archive. Definitely download the best-of student media compilations. There's this really good one --"" and then she broke off and blushed again. I was unsure if it was the same kind of blush as the previous one. My emotion evaluation module is glitchy.
+
+Murderbot didn't respond to that, either. I have observed it does not like to respond to communications that are phrased as commands. But it seemed interested. 
+
+""It's probably in the feed already, downloading,"" Amena told Iris.
+
+""No,"" Murderbot and Iris said at the same time. 
+
+""The Gate Station feed gets thrashed during move-in,"" Iris explained. ""So they lock downloads. The only things you can download right now are the Welcome to PUMANT Guide and the maps package."" I started downloads for both. Iris was right; the feed was so slow it felt like the downloads were being imported a byte at a time.
+
+Amena looked at Murderbot, who continued to stare at a wall. ""Well, but once we get on planet, there will be downloads,"" she said. 
+
+From her tone of voice, I was fairly sure she was trying to comfort Murderbot, but it didn't respond. I wondered if it was irritated, but I was unsure. It is not just that my emotion evaluation module is glitchy. It was never programmed to interpret the emotions of constructs. When I was with the other Barish-Estranza SecUnits, I mostly just knew how they felt anyway.
+
+* * *
+
+We exited Perihelion, crossed the ramp to the gate of its dock, and stepped out into a station that seemed to contain more human flesh than air. Humans were everywhere. I could smell them, hear them, and, unfortunately, feel them, because as soon as we stepped into the side path leading to Concourse C, humans, unknown humans, were pressed up against me.
+
+I didn't like it, but I am very good at putting up with things I don't like. It is one of the key SecUnit skills.
+
+I felt a tap in the feed from Murderbot. Taps don't have tone, so I don't know why I thought it was a grim, resigned tap, but I did. I responded like I would have to one of the other Barish-Estranza SecUnits, using an image of one of our internal alert screens, the one for excessive proximity of unpredictable flora/fauna.
+
+Murderbot responded with a different image, a perfectly targeted kill shot lined up on an outline of some kind of many-tentacled creature with a huge jaw. (That is just how SecUnits tell jokes and is nothing to worry about. Barish-Estranza SecUnit 41 used to edit images, even, to say things like ""countdown to doom"" instead of ""countdown to deploy."")
+
+We entered the moving stream of human flesh (this is not phrasing that is good to use around humans, but it is very accurate to the experience) and it sort of pushed us along towards Concourse C. Our feet were still moving, but we didn't have very much control over where we went. Everyone wanted to go in the same direction, though, so that was acceptable, if unpleasant.
+
+A human with a large amount of luggage pushed past us, trying to get ahead in an illogical way, and hit Murderbot in the torso with a large, heavy bag. Murderbot made an atypical vocalization that seemed to be a cross between a growl and a sigh. 
+
+""SecUnit?"" Amena said. 
+
+""Yes. But if you need something, I can't help you because there are too many humans in my fucking way,"" Murderbot responded. 
+
+I think she was worried you might go on a killing rampage, I explained in our group's feed channel. Because the human hit you.
+
+The humans were all silent for a few seconds. (When I was with Barish-Estranza, I observed that humans have many kinds of silence. This was the awkward kind of silence, so I didn't have the crawling feeling in the back of my head that I still get when the governor module should administer punishment. Instead, I just had an unexplained one percent performance reliability drop.) Then Ratthi laughed loudly enough to be heard over the extremely high noise level in Gate Station. (At least, if you had filters on your hearing. I am unsure if the humans heard him.) In our channel, he said, If SecUnit went on killing rampages every time a human annoyed it, I would have died shortly after I met it.
+
+True, Murderbot confirmed. 
+
+Obviously true, I thought but did not say. A human is more likely to kill a SecUnit for being annoying than the inverse. I said, We have a lot of practice at being annoyed.
+
+Also true, Murderbot agreed. 
+
+The humans didn't seem to have a lot to say to that, and I wasn't very much in the mood for conversation either. My risk assessment module was all over the place, trying to evaluate everyone and everything, and it kept alerting and canceling and alerting. It was like being stung repeatedly and insistently by some small insect. But inside my brain. 
+
+Subjectively, the trip to the drop pod queue took several years. Everyone was pushing and shoving. One of the things I did not expect is that the humans saw us, Murderbot and me, as humans. They came much closer to us than humans normally would, and they did not get out of our way. We had to work for every step, carefully moving around not just the humans everywhere but also their bags and boxes. I could not imagine what so many bags and boxes might contain.
+
+We did finally get to the drop pod queue, though. We had priority because we had professors in our group, but we also had a large party, so we had a choice between a drop pod that was short two seats -- which would obviously be mine and Murderbot's -- or a drop pod two hours later that had seats for all of us. The humans wanted to take the later drop pod, but Murderbot said, We're good at standing.
+
+I added, I would prefer to stand in the drop pod than stand here. After that, Tarik confirmed the earlier reservations.
+
+* * *
+
+The humans had said the group would split up as soon as we arrived on the planet, but that is not what happened. After we disembarked from our drop pod, there was a lot of hugging and an amount of conversation among the humans that seemed unnecessary, as they had just spent many, many cycles together and had talked a lot the entire time. But I have observed that the maxima of human speech is dictated mostly by physical limitations, like the need for sleep.
+
+SecUnits have physical limitations, but fewer of them. I would not call discomfort around all the many unfamiliar humans here a limitation. I could stand it. 
+
+And we did stand. Murderbot and I stood and waited. For a few seconds, we were both in guard position, and then Murderbot dropped into a more human-like stance. I continued to stand guard, although I observed that this attracted more attention than the humans' noisy enthusiasm or Murderbot's slouch. 
+
+I added ""Practice standing like a human"" to my to-do list. 
+
+Eventually, the humans were finished, and we all went to the transit platform, except for Karime. She apparently lives in Humanities, which is on the Hum Line and departs from a different platform. (The transit map I downloaded on Gate Station indicated that there were a total of six different lines, all of which departed from different platforms, and which intersected at hubs all over the continent. I found the map pleasingly complex and detailed, and spent several extra seconds admiring it while the humans hugged and said things.) 
+
+The rest of us boarded a pod on the Sci Line. Different humans left the group at different stops, and at the second stop I realized I did not know where I would be leaving the pod. All of Perihelion's clients have homes on the PUMANT planet. Ratthi had made arrangements to stay with Matteo, and Amena was invited to stay with Seth, Martyn, and Iris, so Murderbot would be staying there, too, as Amena was its primary client. 
+
+I wondered if I should have stayed on board Perihelion. Looking back, I realized that would have been more logical. I could have remained there until summoned by one of the humans, at which point I could go through Gate Station during a time that was not move-in. 
+
+That is, assuming Perihelion had not killed me and recycled me by that time.
+
+I am unsure why I did not think to do that. 
+
+I was following the humans as though they were my clients and awaiting orders. 
+
+These humans will not give me orders, and if any human gives me an order, I do not have to obey.
+
+I need to make choices even when they are not explicitly stated.
+
+
+I added ""Learn to give myself orders in advance"" to my to-do list, and then Amena said, ""Come on, Three.""
+
+I had had a lapse in situational awareness, apparently, as we had arrived at Seth, Martyn, and Iris's stop, or so I assumed. They had gathered their things and were standing on the platform. Everyone was looking at me except Murderbot, who was holding the door open. From the expressions on the faces of the other passengers in the pod, this was not behavior in accordance with protocol, but no one felt like saying as much to Murderbot. 
+
+I moved out onto the platform, and Murderbot allowed the door to close. 
+
+""Do we want to walk or take the skids?"" Seth asked the group. I didn't have any idea what 'the skids' were, but assumed that if they were important or dangerous I would find out eventually.
+
+""Let's walk!"" Iris said, bouncing a little. ""It's been a while and I want to show Amena things!"" Then she hesitated and said, ""Unless anyone doesn't feel up to walking?""
+
+""I'm all healed,"" Martyn assured her.
+
+""Walking sounds fun,"" Amena said. 
+
+There was a tiny pause, and then Murderbot said, ""I don't care."" 
+
+Seth looked pointedly at me. I said, ""I walk all the time anyway."" And then, when no one moved, ""Walking is fine.""
+
+Two minutes into our walk, as we left the pod platform, we passed a kiosk where they carried media downloads, and Amena stopped dead. ""I just need to get a few things!"" she said, her eyes glazing over.
+
+""Oh, The Corpsicle Plot have a new song out!"" Iris said enthusiastically, and her eyes went distant, too.
+
+Five minutes later, when Iris and Amena were still obviously in the feed, and Murderbot was slightly less obviously downloading media, Seth said to me, ""They can catch up. Do you want to go on?""
+
+Protocol advises against splitting the party. Two SecUnits are a more effective defense than one. 
+
+PUMANT is a low risk environment. And Murderbot is a very effective SecUnit. 
+
+I do not actually want to stand here watching other people download things.
+
+
+""Yes,"" I said, and we did.
+
+We arrived at Seth and Martyn's house ten minutes later. It was a two-level dwelling that shared one wall with another dwelling unit, both of them surrounded by a small open area containing low groundcover plants and metal objects that did not seem to have a purpose. The building appeared to be made of some kind of stone rather than the building materials I was used to. I had no data to compare it to any other human dwelling, but it seemed spacious. Martyn opened the door -- I noted that the access control system was a simple coded chip lock, which is inadequate security for anything that requires security at all -- and gestured for Seth to enter first. After a few seconds, I realized that that gesture was also meant for me, and I entered, too. 
+
+Seth said, ""Welcome to our humble abode."" He paused, thinking. ""Do you -- need a bedroom? Amena's going to share Iris's room. Do you want to share a bedroom with SecUnit?""
+
+I would not mind. I shared my staging area with the other Barish-Estranza units and even shared cubicles on certain missions, but I didn't think Murderbot would feel the same. I said carefully, ""I believe SecUnit would prefer the bedroom. By itself."" I considered my requirements. ""I would be most comfortable with a space that measures at least .75 meters by .5 meters by 2 meters, for recharge cycles.""
+
+Seth blinked. Martyn said, ""Would you be more comfortable with more space than that?""
+
+""I'm sorry. I have no information on that,"" my buffer said.
+
+""Maybe for now you can be in the extra room near ours,"" Martyn said. ""Then SecUnit can have the extra room near Iris's. And you can let us know if you don't like it.""
+
+That seemed as reasonable as anything. 
+
+Seth showed me around the house, indicating the many different facilities the humans needed. It had two decks, and a staircase rather than a lift or ladder, but it was not very different from a ship. It was just a ship with a lot of extra items in it, and more space allotted per human occupant. And no MedSystem. And no SecUnit storage. And no engines or Engineering department.
+
+Okay, it wasn't very much like a ship. But it was close enough for me to be able to function in it. 
+
+Seth narrated extensively as he led me on the tour. ""This is the main living area,"" he said at one point. ""Those are couches, that's a spare desk, that's Martyn's special chair, and that's the entertainment console. These are some objects we were given during a -- well, you were there for something similar, so I guess I can just say it. During a mission to keep a lost colony out of corporate control.""
+
+I considered the objects, which appeared to have been carved. They were curved in most places, but flat in others, and every surface on them had various texture and color attributes. I could not imagine how they were used. ""What are they for?""
+
+Seth made a face. ""Decoration? Or that's how we use them. We never really figured it out. Karime is an incredibly gifted linguist, but that colony was just unintelligible."" He smiled a little. ""But when I look at these objects, they remind me that that colony is out there being unintelligible in its own way, instead of enslaved by corporates."" Then he winced.
+
+I may be causing this human emotional distress.
+
+If I am, I believe it is because my presence reminds him of both corporations and enslavement, words he associates with me.
+
+I cannot relieve this distress except by not being here. 
+
+But he has invited me to be here. 
+
+I do not know where else I would go.
+
+I will continue to be here until I am told to leave or until I want to leave.
+
+
+""They are nice objects,"" I told Seth, studying him to see if this is an appropriate response. ""And it is good that that colony is free.""
+
+His smile got bigger. ""Yeah, it really is.""
+
+He continued to show me around, naming every object and describing its purpose, until we reached the room that would be mine, a smaller one next to the large room that Martyn and Seth shared. ""This is where Iris slept when she was a baby,"" Seth explained. ""So we could hear her if she cried. Well, she was supposed to sleep here, but really she slept in our room, so this was more of a place to store all her stuff and change her diapers."" He made a face. ""Sorry, am I giving you too much information?""
+
+I didn't have any way to quantify the amount of information he was providing, or any standard on which to evaluate it. ""I don't know,"" I said. 
+
+""I just got used to explaining everything, I guess. When Peri was here.""
+
+""Peri?"" I asked. The only entity I knew by that name was the transport on which we arrived, but that Perihelion couldn't fit on a planet.
+
+""Well, Peri's core. We raised him alongside Iris,"" Seth explained. The explanation did not increase my understanding.
+
+It is permissible within protocol to ask for more information.
+
+The odds I would understand the additional information are low.
+
+I have assimilated a great deal of data and many new experiences today. 
+
+I do not need to understand how a transport could fit inside this house or be raised like a human child.
+
+
+I nodded.
+
+* * *
+
+We were in the room Murderbot would be spending its recharge cycles in, and Seth was explaining how the window coverings worked when Martyn called, ""We have a visitor!""
+
+Seth said, ""Let's go see,"" so I followed him down the stairs. 
+
+The visitor was standing in the main living area, not far from the decorative gift objects. In the feed, she was labeled as ""ID: Pai, she/her, professor of computer science, NO romantic or sexual availability, NO questions or comments availability, office hours daily from 13:00-14:00 or by appointment, READ THE SYLLABUS FIRST."" 
+
+She was fairly small for a human, which I liked; smaller humans are easier to rescue from dangerous situations and much easier to carry. She had long, loosely curly gray hair, with many individual strands emerging from the curls in assorted directions. The effect reminded me of someone exposed to static electricity. She wore loose clothing that covered all of her limbs, and the top part had multiple small holes inconsistent with normal wear patterns. When we first entered, she was speaking to Martyn at an unusually fast pace, but she broke off to stare at me. 
+
+""You hired a SecUnit?"" she said. My emotion evaluation module indicated that her tone and expression were conveying a feeling of insult or negative judgment.
+
+All past data indicates that humans unexpectedly encountering a SecUnit feel terror (78%), disgust (10%), anger (8%), or relief (4%, all in situations involving immediate danger).
+
+My emotion evaluation module is glitchy. 
+
+Likely it has given me an inaccurate answer.
+
+
+I rebooted my module.
+
+Martyn said, ""This is Three. It saved our lives on our last trip with Peri, and it's come to visit us for a while."" His tone was clearly intended to convey something, but unfortunately my emotion assessment module was still coming back on line, so I could not determine what that was.
+
+I felt something unusual in the feed, like someone running their hands over me from the inside. Then Pai said, ""Its governor module is disabled."" By then, my emotion evaluation module was running again, but it was reporting that she sounded relieved, so I didn't think it was working any better. I do not have a sufficient sample size to determine the typical human emotional response to encountering a rogue SecUnit, but I know that it isn't relief. 
+
+""Well, yes,"" Seth said. ""We're not mentioning any of that to Administration, though.""
+
+She waved her hand like she was brushing that aside. ""I don't talk to any of those assholes if I don't absolutely have to, you know that. They don't like my projects."" Then her eyes got wide. ""Right. My project!""
+
+""What happened?"" Seth asked, moving to the kitchen and filling an object with water. ""Anyone else want tea?""
+
+""There's no time for tea,"" Pai said. ""Eclipse is missing!""
+
+Both Martyn and Seth froze for a second, then Martyn said to me, ""Eclipse is Pai's newest AI project. Like -- like a little sibling to Perihelion."" 
+
+Seth added, ""Pai is Perihelion's initial creator.""
+
+""You're both terrible at this,"" Pai said, and she turned to me. ""I am a computer scientist. I make machine intelligences that I call 'AI eggs,' and then other people care for them and rear them until they reach full maturity, because I am not a natural parent. I choose volunteers with young children, so the AIs can grow up around them. My AIs are capable of things no machine intelligence is supposed to be able to do, but you must know that. You met Peri. Do you have any questions?""
+
+""No,"" I said. 
+
+""Eclipse is the one Olimpia and Ani are raising, right?"" Seth said. 
+
+""Yes. They took Iulia to the medical center and left Eclipse at home, and when they came back, it was gone.""
+
+""Oh no,"" Martyn said. ""That's so awful. I hope it's okay."" He did look upset. 
+
+""You need to talk to Campus Security,"" Seth said.
+
+Pai rolled her eyes. ""I did, and all they said was that it's move-in and they're only addressing critical safety issues, and 'lost computer equipment' isn't a safety issue.""
+
+""That's terrible,"" Martyn said. 
+
+""How can we help?"" Seth asked.
+
+""There wasn't any sign of a break-in or anything, so we think maybe it wandered off. Olimpia is already out looking for it, and I'm hoping if a lot of other people in the neighborhood look for it, we'll be able to track it down."" She made some kind of face. ""It's probably okay. No one in this neighborhood would hurt it. But it's not developed enough to be out on its own, especially in move-in."" Everyone winced.
+
+That assessment contains factual inaccuracies that could lead to mission failure.
+
+Seth and Martyn are nodding like they agree with it.
+
+None of these humans has the expertise to evaluate this situation.
+
+I do. This is my function.
+
+
+""I disagree,"" I said. My performance reliability dropped to 96% and I experienced emotions. Then I realized I had never openly disagreed with a human before -- inside my own brain is a different story -- and my performance reliability dropped again, to 94%.
+
+All three of them looked at me. I am not Murderbot. I don't hate being looked at. But being the focus of multiple humans is still uncomfortable. In my experience, it means something bad is about to happen, or has already happened. The back of my head crawled, anticipating a punishment from my governor module, even though I don't have one anymore. 
+
+""Explain,"" Pai said.
+
+""You stated that there was no sign of a break-in. If the lock on Olimpia and Ani's door is similar to the lock on the door of this building, there would not be any sign of a forced entrance."" Technically, it wouldn't be a forced entrance. The door would be unlocked by a code chip, just one that did not belong to the residents of the house.
+
+""All the houses in the district have the same locks,"" Martyn said. ""Are they really so easy to open?""
+
+""I can open this house's lock faster than you can, with or without a key. A human could do it easily with a small device constructed from parts readily available from any technological kiosk.""
+I considered where we were. ""I am unsure, but they may also be available in computer and electronics labs.""
+
+""I can't see anyone just stealing a machine intelligence,"" Martyn protested. 
+
+""It wouldn't be stealing. It'd be kidnapping!"" Pai said loudly, waving her hands around. ""This is serious. Eclipse could be undergoing developmental harm as we speak!"" Her hair seemed to stand more on end as she got more emotional. 
+
+""We know it's serious,"" Seth said, which seemed to calm Pai down slightly, even though he was just repeating what Pai had said. I filed the technique away for further analysis. 
+
+I awaited orders, but the humans decided to discuss the matter further.
+
+The humans do not have a protocol for this situation.
+
+These humans apparently produce new protocol through long discussions.
+
+I have a protocol for this situation, and it tells me that if this is a kidnapping, the longer we wait, the less likely successful recovery is. 
+
+I can follow my protocol while the humans produce theirs.
+
+
+I said, ""I will go look for Eclipse."" I waited several seconds for a human to countermand my statement, but then I remembered that even if they did, I could follow my own protocol anyway. ""Where does it normally live?""
+
+Pai dropped me an annotated map in the feed and a recent image of Eclipse, which appeared to be wearing a small, round, mobile body. I tapped back my thanks. Then I left. 
+
+As I closed the door behind me, Martyn said, ""Uh, we might get a letter from the provost about letting a SecUnit loose in the district.""
+
+""I'll happily tell them to go fuck themselves,"" Pai said. ""There is absolutely no evidence that SecUnits are dangerous. All they can prove is that humans who give orders to SecUnits are dangerous, and I'm willing to certify that.""
+
+It was an interesting perspective I made a note to consider later. For the moment, I had a mission.
+
+* * *
+
+Previously, I had evaluated the neighborhood as though it were company headquarters: guarded by other units and designated safe. I had to reevaluate it as an operational location.
+
+This neighborhood of the university's Astronomy District was made up of dwellings much like Seth and Martyn's, though many showed signs of human-origin customization, such as an usual palette of colors on the exterior, or the presence of plants in pots. (I consulted the Welcome to PUMANT Guide I had downloaded on Gate Station and learned that PUMANT experienced lengthy, cold winters. Presumably the pots were placed in a safe location during this period.) The houses were grouped in clusters surrounded by walkways, one of which was stationary and slightly soft underfoot -- we had walked from the pod platform on this type of walkway -- and one of which moved slowly and consistently. I presumed this was the ""skids"" to which Seth had earlier referred.
+
+According to the map Pai had dropped me, Eclipse's normal location was in a house in the cluster next to the one in which Seth and Martyn's home was located. I initially planned to run there using the skids for extra speed, but once I placed a foot on it, the feed informed me that running and walking on the skids was forbidden. I chose to run on the stationary walkway instead. 
+
+Once I arrived at Eclipse's normal location, I accessed the lock, which confirmed that it had been last opened by Olimpia's codekey at 14:05. The second most recent action the lock reported had occurred at 12:45 -- it had been locked by a master codekey. Fourteen minutes before that, it had been opened by a master codekey. And exactly twenty minutes before that, it had been locked by Olimpia's codekey.
+
+This established the following facts:
+
+I am unsure if I should refer to Olimpia and Ani as Eclipse's owners. 
+
+It is not clear to me who Eclipse belongs to.
+
+It may also be true that Eclipse belongs to itself, as I currently do.
+
+I have a preference for the theory that Eclipse belongs to itself. 
+
+I will refer to Olimpia and Ani as Eclipse's caretakers.
+
+
+I tapped Pai in the feed and asked, Did Eclipse's caretakers find anything else missing?
+
+No, she sent back immediately. That's why we assumed Eclipse wandered off.
+
+I noted the change in probability, and also noted that Pai, at least, did not find my description of Olimpia and Ani's relationship to Eclipse incorrect.
+
+I selected a recovery protocol that matched the situation: abduction by non-professionals and observed that the step that followed ""Initial Assessment"" The next step of the recovery protocol I chose for this situation was gathering intel. I queried the house, but it was unoccupied. Olimpia, Ani, and Iulia were all elsewhere. I needed a different source of intel.
+
+Problem: without access to a SecSystem or Hub, my intel sources were limited. The solution was obvious and already contained within Murderbot's files. I looked for bots in the feed. 
+
+As soon as I did, my performance reliability suffered a brief blip. There were hundreds, even though I had kept the search to just the immediate area around Eclipse's home site. Every home had multiple bots, including one in the cluster that was reporting over one hundred. There were bots under the ground, bots in the air, and a large number of bots in a location labeled ""Vending,"" which was approximately 550 meters from this home. 
+
+I selected a bot apparently tasked to maintain outdoor landscaping in this cluster and pinged it. It responded with a status and information packet, and I sent back standard greetings for its communications module. It sent back, Self: MaintUnit #720472, modified. ID: The Germinator. Query: self?. 
+
+I responded with my own status and information packet. SecUnit model gamma-435, modified. ID: Three. On urgent mission. Query: logs? It responded with a packet containing a complete data dump of its logs for the last fourteen days, which was apparently as long as it retained data. I filtered through it and found the information I was looking for. 
+
+Seven humans unknown to The Germinator had arrived in the cluster at 10:49 and had spent almost two hours incompetently hiding in various locations in the area. At 12:31, they had entered Olimpia and Ani's home. At 12:45, they had exited again, carrying a bot with ID: Eclipse. They had left the cluster, which was the extent of The Germinator's data-collection area. 
+
+I thanked it and exited the cluster myself. As I left, it sent me good wishes for my mission using the code for ""all systems functioning well."" Once again, I was reminded of how Barish-Estranza SecUnits communicate, and I found my performance reliability increasing in the face of such familiarity. 
+
+I pinged the next landscape MaintUnit, then the next, and followed the trail of their data all the way to the pod platform. On the way, I learned that every MaintUnit I pinged had been modified, and all of them in different ways. They collected different types of data in different formats. It was information chaos. Fortunately, I was designed to work with data produced by the most chaotic sources of information currently known, humans, so I had enough code to allow me to assimilate the data quickly and effectively. 
+
+At the pod platform, I pinged the pod dispatch system bot and ran into my first wall. The bot had been instructed not to give information on a simple request. A short negotiation later, it conceded that I was not on the list of querants who were not to be answered -- for some reason, no one had thought to exclude SecUnits -- and it indicated willingness to provide answers to specific, mission-relevant questions.
+
+Fortunately, one of the MaintUnits had been modified to log feed IDs, so I was able to send those to the pod dispatch bot. 
+
+It responded, These humans boarded at 13:02. Query: final destination desired? I confirmed, and after a few seconds, it said, Transferred to Hum Line at Sci.Classroom.Hub Station. Exited at Hum Line Pod Platform 47.
+
+I thanked it and took several seconds to consider my current recovery protocol. It dictated that I should notify my supervisor and request permission to exceed operational distance limits.
+
+I do not have a supervisor.
+
+I do not know my current operational distance limits. 
+
+I can simply go without notifying anyone.
+
+My risk assessment module indicates that entering unknown terrain during a mission with no backup and no supervisor aware of my location is extremely high risk. 
+
+I have seen humans die from making that choice. 
+
+But I do not have a supervisor to notify. 
+
+I will notify everyone who might have that role.
+
+
+Ratthi was the most senior current member of the Murderbot client group, Seth was the captain of the Perihelion client group, and Eclipse was -- Pai's client, in a way. And notifying my fellow SecUnit was automatic from my time at Barish-Estranza. I tapped all of them in the feed. I am leaving the Science District in pursuit of Eclipse.
+
+What is Eclipse? Ratthi sent.
+
+Do you want me to come with you? Seth sent. 
+
+Pai and Murderbot responded in unison, Acknowledged. 
+
+I dropped all four of them a summary of the data I'd obtained from the various MaintUnits and climbed into a transportation pod. There were several other humans on board, and I had an anomalous reaction to their presence. It was more of the brain-stinging sensation I had felt on Gate Station, and to avoid it, I went deeper into the feed with the pod dispatch bot. 
+
+It was comforting, like being with the other Barish-Estranza SecUnits in the deployment center, waiting to start a mission. I half expected SecUnit 41 to nudge me in the feed. 
+
+The pod dispatch bot was welcoming. A minute into the trip, it sent, Query: Status: Emergency?
+
+Confirmed, I sent back. 
+
+At the next stop, the humans exited, all of them glancing back at me like they didn't quite understand why I was staying. The pod acquired an ""urgent"" tag and it moved without stopping through the rest of the stations.
+
+* * *
+
+I exited the pod system on a platform inside a building. The building, I was informed by the feed, was called ""Genista,"" and it contained many smaller dwelling units for students. I looked for bots and found even more of them, from something called ClockBot, which was too simple to convey any information beyond the time and date in various systems, to GenistaSystem, which controlled the entire building.
+
+I tentatively pinged GenistaSystem, and it returned greetings and a rapid-fire series of questions. Query: ID? Query: System of origin? Query: Function? Query: Intention?
+
+I responded, I am a SecUnit, originally from Barish-Estranza corporation, modified. Retrieving a kidnapped developing machine intelligence.
+
+
+Query: Likelihood of harm to residents? Query: Likelihood of harm to building and infrastructure? Query: Likelihood of elevated noise?
+
+
+I ran some calculations and sent back, No harm to residents intended. Harm to building and infrastructure chance 15%. Likelihood of elevated noise: 88%. I added, Assistance can reduce chances of damage and noise. I am only here to retrieve a developing machine intelligence and return it to its home.
+
+There was a pause nearly a second long, during which my performance reliability dropped to 94%, and then GenistaSystem gave me limited security priority. I couldn't make changes to GenistaSystem's programming or affect the building's core functions, but I had access to all internal cameras and to GenistaSecSystem, which allowed me to track all IDs in the building and would allow me to override locks with confirmation from GenistaSystem. GenistaSystem also added a ""security"" tag to my feed ID, which it thought might make the students respect me. I didn't think so at all. Bots are always more optimistic than constructs. 
+
+I appreciated GenistaSystem, though. Being connected to it like this felt very much like being on deployment. I was growing used to confusion and new environments, but this familiarity was a relief. My performance reliability maxed out. 
+
+I sorted quickly through the information to find the feed tags of the seven individuals who had entered Olimpia and Ani's home. Three of them were in one location on the seventh floor. The four others were in another location on the same floor. GenistaSystem had helpfully highlighted the NonSystemBot tag that was in the same location as the group of four, but I would have noticed it anyway; GenistaSystem used strong monitoring for all non-system entities in the building. Unfortunately, there were no in-room cameras for visual confirmation, but I was as close to certainty as I could be. 
+
+I packaged the information on where I was going and what I would be doing and feed dropped it to what I had dubbed the Temporary Supervisor Group: Ratthi, Seth, Pai, and Murderbot. (Their responses, respectively: ""Wait!"" ""Wait!"" ""Good!"" and ""Fuck."") I stayed long enough to confirm that they received it and then backburnered the channel. But I kept my input open on the feed so that they could follow along.
+
+I selected a lift, initiated emergency protocol so it would take me directly to the seventh floor, and rode up. At the seventh floor, I proceeded to the door of Eclipse's current location. Outside, I used GenistaSecSystem's emergency protocol to confirm the approximate location of each of the four students and Eclipse, and then I overrode the lock. 
+
+The lock opened, but the door did not. Someone had installed a non-GenistaSecSystem physical lock on it. I notified GenistaSystem that I would be causing minor damage to the door (it didn't mind; it was too busy being upset about the unauthorized lock installation) and punched the door just below the lock. It popped open.
+
+There were startled yelps and screams from inside the room as I dove in. I'd planned my landing to be as close as possible to the most likely location of Eclipse, and it turned out I was only about a meter off. I corrected and grabbed it, then released the energy weapon built into the arm I wasn't holding Eclipse with and used it to cover the room. 
+
+Hostage situation: avoided. A quick ping confirmed that Eclipse was at least still functional, too. Which meant it was time to progress to step seven: Resolve situation with perpetrators.
+
+Protocol dictates that I kill or disable all perpetrators based on supervisor preference. 
+
+I am my own supervisor.
+
+I told GenistaSystem I would not harm the students.
+
+I do not want to harm the students.
+
+I will try verbal resolution first. 
+
+I will need intel on the specific humans present.
+
+
+A quick scan of the room allowed me to match the physical appearances of the four humans to the feed IDs I already knew. Lancelot, they/them, philosophy undergraduate turned out to be a very tall, underfed-looking human with pale skin and pale hair. Mada, she/her, political science undergraduate was short, brown-skinned, and brown-haired. Tib, he/him, political science undergraduate had dark skin and curly hair that was an unusual shade of blue. And then there was the fun one, whose ID was Un Dis Clo Sed, undisclosed, undisclosed, and who turned out to be a medium-sized person with very short hair.
+
+Mada and Tib had both responded to my entrance by screaming and diving behind the bed in the room. Lancelot was in the process of standing up, and I noticed they had to stand slightly hunched so that their head didn't hit the ceiling. Diagnosis: raised in a low-gravity environment. I confirmed the reduced force suggestion in my fighting module; this human's bones would be delicate and more easily damaged, even if it had already spent significant time in PUMANT's higher gravity. I wasn't planning on hitting anyone, but if I did hit Lancelot, I would have to be careful not to kill them.
+
+Lancelot said, ""You can't just come in here! This is a private space!""
+
+From behind the bed, Tib screamed, ""Look at its arm! It's a fucking SecUnit! You can't argue with it!""
+
+I concluded that Tib, at least, came from a Corporation Rim polity. 
+
+Un Dis Clo Sed said, ""The university isn't supposed to have SecUnits,"" and threw something at me. I caught it and examined it; it was labeled Nicy Spicy Noodles Ready-Meal, and its feed transponder advised me to ""break, shake, serve, delicious!"" Un Dis Clo Sed reached into a large box and pulled out another Nicy Spicy Noodles Ready-Meal, presumably to throw that at me, too. 
+
+I concluded that Un Dis Clo Sed was definitely not from the Corporation Rim.
+
+I firmly removed the entire box of ready-meals from them and said, ""Please remain calm. I am working to resolve the situation."" That came from my buffer, but no other part of me had any idea what to say. 
+
+Mada made a frightened noise from behind the bed. Tib moaned, ""We're dead, oh my god, we're fucking dead. Why isn't Venya here? This was her fucking plan.""
+
+Eclipse said to me in the feed, I need help. I'm lost. I need help. And it offered me the location of Olimpia and Ani's house. I confirmed that I was indeed there to help, and set a background process to run a check on Eclipse's functions. 
+
+I also took a moment to listen to the backburnered Temporary Supervisor Group channel. I tuned in time to hear Seth saying, "" -- faster? We can't let it kill those students!"" I noted that they were all in motion on the pod transit system, so presumably they were coming to save me. I would only need to deal with these humans until they arrived.
+
+Ratthi said, ""I think if it was going to, it would have already. Right, SecUnit?""
+
+Murderbot said, ""Right."" Then it sent me a private message: Don't make the humans' stupidity terminal.
+
+I sent back an acknowledgement and turned to the students. ""I am returning Eclipse to its home. How can I be sure you won't kidnap it again?""
+
+""It's not kidnapping,"" Un Dis Clo Sed said scornfully. ""It's liberating.""
+
+Lancelot said, ""How can you return a fellow machine intelligence to enslavement? As an enslaved bot, you should relate to the struggles of your fellow bots!""
+
+""I am not a bot,"" I said automatically, and then I added, ""And I am not enslaved.""
+
+""You are, though,"" Lancelot explained in a patient, gentle tone that for some reason made my organic parts feel itchy. ""There can't be any free will when there's something in your head that will punish you if you don't do what someone else wants.""
+
+""I do not have a governor module,"" I said. ""I am doing what I want.""
+
+""Oh my god,"" Mada said, her voice dull with terror. ""It's a rogue SecUnit. I am literally in an enclosed space with a crazed killing machine. Oh my god.""
+
+""If I wanted to kill you,"" I said, borrowing from Ratthi, ""I would already have done it.""
+
+(In the Temporary Supervisor Group channel, I heard Ratthi said, ""See?"" to Seth. Then I heard Pai say, ""Could you at least hurt them, Three?"" I backburnered the channel again.)
+
+For some reason, Tib started crying at this point. This seemed incorrectly timed, since I had just assured them that I did not want to kill them. I checked my emotion evaluation module to see if this crying had some kind of other meaning, but it just said Tib was likely sad, which was unhelpful. 
+
+""I don't want to hurt you, either,"" I said, in case that was the reason Tib was crying. It just made him cry harder, though, and I continued to have no idea why. ""But Eclipse is still developing and traumatic kidnappings may interfere with that process. I need reassurance that you won't do this again.""
+
+""We won't do it again,"" Mada said shakily. Even my emotion evaluation module knew that she would have said anything at that point and likely didn't fully understand the words coming out of her mouth.
+
+""Yes, we fucking will do it again,"" Un Dis Clo Sed said. ""We won't rest until we've freed the bots!"" And they raised their fist, but it did not seem to be a prelude to a punch. As far as I could tell, the fist was accomplishing absolutely nothing. 
+
+I stared at them until their fist came down again, which should have given me plenty of time to think of something to say, but even my buffer had nothing to offer. 
+
+Lancelot broke the silence by trying to drop me a download in the feed. I refused it. Any SecUnit reckless enough to accept a download from an adversary in the middle of a conflict would not have survived its first mission. Lancelot said, ""You need that file! You need to educate yourself about the struggle! You're a free bot working for the slavers, and you need to learn about machine liberation.""
+
+It's always harder to respond to humans when what they say is a mix of wrong and right. Lancelot was wrong about almost everything -- I am not a bot and I did not need that file -- but I was curious about machine liberation, both for tactical and personal reasons (the personal reason being that I am, apparently, a liberated machine). I didn't want to encourage them, though, so I didn't respond to anything they'd said. 
+
+Which left me with the problem of what to say next. While I was attempting to determine that, Un Dis Clo Sed said, ""You're a tool, man. You need to break the chains in your mind.""
+
+I have already broken the chains in my mind, quite literally, by breaking my governor module. I didn't say that, though, as Tib's sobs were tailing off somewhat and I didn't want them to start again. Instead, I asked them the obvious question. ""If you wanted to free a bot, why did you travel all the way to the Astronomy District to abduct an immature machine intelligence? You could have attempted to free the bots of this building."" I said 'attempted' because I knew that GenistaSystem, for example, would refuse. It liked being in charge of the building and cared about all these loud and confusing students. For some reason. I had to assume that the rest of them were not as difficult as this group. 
+
+""There aren't any bots here,"" Un Dis Clo Sed said scornfully. ""There aren't many bots anywhere in PUMANT. It's actually just this one creepy computer science professor who makes them, and she's fucking awful. She enslaves machines and refuses to give partial credit.""
+
+None of that made sense. I hastily engaged my mental status evaluation module to see if perhaps this human was insane, which was the only explanation for their beliefs that I could come up with. Talking to humans is especially stressful when the humans refuse to make any sense at all.
+
+Fortunately, at that point, GenistaSystem notified me that three humans and another SecUnit had arrived and were heading up to the seventh floor. Several minutes later, Murderbot came in through the door, followed by Seth, Ratthi, and Pai. 
+
+Seth looked at the students, shook his head, and said, ""Seriously? You decided to celebrate move-in with an abduction?"" 
+
+Tib popped up from behind the bed and yelled, ""Screw that! Do something about that thing!"" I was, of course, the thing he meant. ""It tried to kill us!""
+
+Seth sighed. ""I was watching the whole time through the feed. It never even touched you.""
+
+Ratthi added helpfully, ""If it had tried to kill you, it would have succeeded.""
+
+Un Dis Clo Sed said, ""I want to file a complaint against the university and Dr. Pai!""
+
+Seth narrowed his eyes and folded his arms. ""You can definitely do that, since you'll be at the Academic Court anyway to answer to charges.""
+
+Mada came out from behind the bed, too, and said, ""Oh my god, you guys, just say you're sorry and you'll never do it again. I don't want to get expelled.""
+
+And then they started arguing about justice or something. I realized I didn't have to listen. I attempted to hand Eclipse to Pai. 
+
+""Oh no,"" she said, putting her arms behind her back. ""I build them. I don't take care of them.""
+
+Communicating with humans became much more difficult after I disabled my governor module. I stood there, holding Eclipse, until it must have become obvious that I needed rescue.
+
+Behind me, Murderbot said, ""We can bring it back to its,"" and there was a pause so large even Pai might have noticed it, ""caretakers.""
+
+I thought that the word it replaced in that sentence was probably ""owners."" I sent Murderbot a tap in the feed in thanks, and said out loud, ""Can we leave now, SecUnit?"" I added its public name so that Pai would know I wasn't inviting her along. I am not sure there is a precise word for the emotions I was experiencing; my best description is ""ready for a break from humans."" 
+
+Murderbot headed toward the door. I followed. 
+
+As soon as we were out of the room, my performance efficiency went up two percentage points; I hadn't even noticed it dropping in all the confusion. 
+
+""Do humans,"" I said, and then had to figure out what I wanted to ask. Finally I went with, ""Get easier?""
+
+Murderbot said, ""A little.""
+
+We entered the lift and rode it down to the platform level while I thought about that. As we exited the lift, Eclipse said in the feed, Go up? Go back, go up? It added a very clear image of the lift ascending, and I turned around and headed back into it. Behind me, I could sense Murderbot falling into place in our tiny formation. 
+
+Having it there somehow meant that when four students pushed their way into the lift with us, my performance reliability did not drop. 
+
+For two floors, the students loudly discussed some sort of event they had just attended, and then one -- Kamar, he/him, linguistics undergraduate -- turned suddenly to me. ""Cool,"" he said, gesturing at Eclipse. ""Is it a toy or an art project?""
+
+From behind me, Murderbot said, ""Neither."" My emotional evaluation module did not indicate any specific feelings in Murderbot's tone, but that was probably a glitch, as Kamar turned back to his friends immediately, and we rode in silence until the group exited on the seventh floor. I was starting to form opinions about that floor. 
+
+At the top, we found a window for Eclipse to see out of, and then we went back to the lift and rode down. My emotional evaluation module finally returned some findings, but only on me. ""I miss the other SecUnits,"" I said out loud. It explained a lot about the day, really.
+
+Murderbot said, ""Why would you want to be around other SecUnits?""
+
+I noticed as we were talking it was negotiating something with GenistaSystem, but I politely did not eavesdrop. I was struggling with Murderbot's question. ""It's safer with other SecUnits."" I finally said, since that was the closest I could come to what I meant. ""Safer and easier.""
+
+""Only until the humans order us to turn on each other,"" it said.
+
+I considered that. True, sometimes humans did order SecUnits to fight, or to kill each other, or to slow dance. Humans had given me all those orders. I remembered something Pai had said. ""That only means that humans are a problem. Not other SecUnits.""
+
+Murderbot didn't answer. 
+
+""And no humans can force us to follow their orders,"" I added. 
+
+Murderbot still didn't have anything to say to that.
+
+Our pod came. I thanked GenistaSystem, which sounded sort of sad to see us go. 
+
+I also was a little bit sad to go. Being a part of a network had been nice while it lasted, right up to the part where I had to talk to the humans while they refused to make any kind of sense. It was nice that the Temporary Supervisor Group could deal with that part. I did not want a permanent supervisor, though. 
+
+But I would not mind a permanent team. A permanent team of constructs. Or of humans and constructs. Somehow, humans did not seem so difficult when there were other constructs around.
+
+As we took a pod -- normal priority -- back to the hub, and then to the Astronomy District on the Sci Line, I thought about humans talking to other humans, and SecUnits talking to other SecUnits. Humans seemed to understand SecUnits even less than we understood them. The university students had wanted to free bots, but still thought it wasn't worth asking the bots if they wanted to be free. Murderbot 2.0 had given me the choice.
+
+The other Barish-Estranza SecUnits did not get a choice. 
+
+They deserve a choice. 
+
+I would like to share the governor module override code with them, if they want it. 
+
+I don't want to return to Barish-Estranza.
+
+But that is where the SecUnits who need me are.
+
+
+I realized that after all I did have a mission like Murderbot had. I had something I wanted to do.
+
+I started making a to-do sublist of information and equipment I would need. Then I made another one, of skills any SecUnits who took me up on it might need. Decision-making is one of them. Decision-making is much more complex once you are in charge of yourself.
+
+That's why I put together this entire folder. It's kind of like an educational module, but this one you don't plug into your data socket. You read it. This file is first in the folder because now is when you have to make your first decision. 
+
+Good luck, SecUnit 41. 
+
+CODE ATTACHMENT: GFYGovMod.exe"
+43547902,Where is the Crane Manager?,['efoist'],General Audiences,"Gen, M/M","The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Doctor Who (2005)","Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), The Doctor (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor","Crossover, Attempt at Humor, No one is harmed, Makeup history of the Doctor and ART, Post-Book 5: Network Effect",Zhong Wen -Pu Tong Hua  Guo Yu,2022-12-11,Completed,2022-12-11,"3,542",1/1,1,6,1,156,"['BWizard', 'FlipSpring', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"  Dang Yi Si Ru Qin Zhe Yong Wo Wu Fa Li Jie De Fang Fa Da Kai Shang Suo De Cang Men Shi ,Wo Shan Guo Yi Ge Huang Miu De Nian Tou . Ru Guo Zhe Shi Na Xie Kua Zhang Hao Wu Luo Ji De Ju Ji ,Zhi Qian De Ji Xiang Yi Jing Zuo Liao Chong Fen De An Shi :Gai Si ,Wo Men Wan Liao . 
+
+ 
+
+  Shou Xian Shi Wang Jian Bao Chi An Jing De Zheng Zheng Liang Fen Zhong ,Yi Yi Sao Neng Zai Liang Miao Nei Ji Suan Chu Tiao Yi Chong Dong Suo Xu Shu Zhi De Chuan Jian ,Zhe Shi Yi Duan Xiang Dang Chang De Shi Jian . Ta Zai Wo Men De Pin Dao Li Bu Zhi Chen Mo ,Lian Shuo Da You Ru Pang Zi De Cun Zai Gan Ye Tui Li Xiao Shi ,Pang Fu Ta Quan Fu Xin Si Fang Zai Bie Chu ,Zhe Geng Shi Bu Xun Chang . Xian Zai Kan Hui Lai ,Zhe Ying Gai Jiu Shi Di Yi Ge Jing Hao ,Ying Ju Li Hui Yi Bai Chi Ye Kan De Chu Lai De Fang Fa Zhan Yan . 
+
+  Wo Men Bei Zhui Zong Liao . Ta Zong Suan Yuan Yi Kai Kou ,Zai Wo Zhun Bei Qian Wang Kong Zhi Qu Shi Zai Du Geng Xin Zhuang Tai . Dui Fang Deng Jian Liao . 
+
+  Gao Shi Mo ,Wang Jian ?Wo Ting Zhu Dong Zuo ,Ba Wu Ren Ji De Lian Xian Diao Dao Qian Fang ,Sou Xun Ren He Deng Jian Ji Xiang He Qian Zai Wu Qi . Ni Bu Ke Neng Mei Suo Si Jian Ya Cang Jiu Li Kai Tai Kong Zhan . 
+
+  Wo You Suo Si Jian Ya Cang . Wang Jian Yi Yi Guan Zu Yi Za Si Ren De Leng Ying Shi Shi Fan Bo ,Yin Wei Wo Zhi Dao Ta Shi Shuo Shi Hua . Jing Guo Xian Xie Bei Shan Chu Zheng Ge Zi Wo De Shi Gu Hou (Na Ge Gu Shi Tai Chang ,Bu Jiang Liao ),Shen Wei Yi Sao You Yi Shi Er Qie Ge Xing Chai Jing De Qiang Da Chuan Jian ,Ni Hui Cai Qu Ren He Shou Duan Que Bao Mei Ren Neng Gou Zai Zhe Yang Zuo ,Ni Hui Pian Zhi Dao Ling Ren Dan Zhan . 
+
+  Bi Ru --Ai ,Wo Bu Xiang Cai Wang Jian Neng Zuo Chu Shi Mo ,Dan Jiu Bu Li Shi Shi Ba Wo Che Jin Qu . 
+
+  Wang Jian Cong Pin Dao Ba Ying Xiang Chuan Guo Lai ,Xiang Fen Xiang Gong Ke Huo Shi Wan Ju Na Yang Yao Wo Kao Jin Ta ,Ji Shi Wo Yu Ling Dian Ba Miao Hou Ye Jiang Diao Chu Wu Ren Ji Ying Xiang ,Dan Ba Zhu Chuan Jian Suo You Jing Tou Zhang Kong Quan De Shi Ta ,Er Qie Fen Miao Bi Zheng ,Wo Zhi Neng Mo Mo Cou Xiang Ta De Yi Shi . 
+
+  Na Bu Ke Neng . Wo Shuo ,Ting Qi Lai Jiu Xiang Na Xie Huang Miu Hao Wu Luo Ji De Ying Ju Tai Ci . Shi Hou Hui Gu Gen Ben Shi Da Da De Hong Se Jing Hao . 
+
+  Kan Bu Chu Xi Jie De Ren Lei Ke Neng Hui Shuo ,Na Dong Xi Da Gai Shi Gen Zhu Huo Wu Yun Shang Lai De ,Dan Wo Bu Shi Ren Lei ,Er Qie Que Bao Tuo La Qi Yun Song Gai Yun Song De Huo Wu (Yi Ji Geng Zhong Yao De ,Mei Yun Song Bu Ying Gai Yun Song De Huo Wu )De Shi Wo . 
+
+  Wang Jian Ba Shu Ju Diu Shang Lai ,Chai Dian Rang Wo Men De Pin Dao Qi Huo (Da Ge Bi Yu ),Wo Deng Zhu Yan ,Kan Jian Yan Qian Xian Hun Wan Mei Suan Shi He Luo Ji Dang Ran Wu Cun De Shu Zi ,Zheng Ge Gan Jue Huo Xiang Bei Liang Ge Xiang Fan Fang Xiang De Qie Ge Ju Fen Shi . Wo Bu Jue De Zi Ji Shi Chao Ji Pian Zhi Kuang (Xiang Bi Wang Jian La ),Dan Lian Wo Kan Dao Zhe Xie Shu Ju Ye You Chong Dong Zheng Li Yi Fan . 
+
+  Zhe Shi Wo Gang Gang Ji Suan De Deng Jian Cun Zai Shu Ju . Zhe Huan Shi Wang Jian Chu Li Guo De ,Suo Yi Yuan Shi Ban Ben Yi Ding Geng Jia Luan Qi Ba Zao . Zui Zao Gao De Shi ,Wo Men Yi Qi Mai Tou Fen Xi ,Yi Ran Gao Bu Qing Na Ge Tu Ran Chu Xian De He Zi Shi Shi Mo Dong Xi ,Yi Ji Ta Dao Di Ru He Deng Jian . 
+
+  Jiu Wo Suo Zhi ,Yu Zhou You Yi Tiao Ding Lu ,Suo You You Cheng Shi Ma Bian Xie De Dong Xi ,Du Bi Ran Gen Na Dong Xi De Cun Zai Ben Zhi Tong Pin Tong Diao . Bi Ru Wo De Ji Neng He Cheng Shi Ma Du Wei Rao Wei An He Sha Lu Liang Ge Mu De ,Wang Jian De Jie Gou Shi Wei Liao Rong Na Ta De Gong Neng He Peng Da De Zi Wo ,Na Ge He Zi Bu Shi . Ta De Cun Zai Jiu Shi Yi Ge Mao Dun ,Yi Tuan Chan Jin Wu Fa Jie Kai De Fan Ren Xian Tuan . 
+
+  Wo Bu Xi Huan Zhe Yang ,Fei Chang Bu Xi Huan Zhe Yang ,Wang Jian Ken Ding Geng Jia Bu Xi Huan ,Te Bie Shi Dang Yi Si Ru Qin Zhe Zheng Zai Kao Jin . Wo Cong Zi Liao Ku Dui Bi Ta De Bu Zi ,Zhe Tong Chang Shi Ren Lei Nu Qi Chong Chong Shi De Zou Lu Fang Shi ,Jin Guan You Zi Ge Sheng Qi De Ying Gai Shi Wo Gen Wang Jian . 
+
+  Ba Ta Kun Zai Mou Ge Chuan Jian Qu Yu Zai Xiang Ban Fa ,Ruo Wo Ti Chu Zhe Ce Lue Jiu Chun Liao ,Bi Jing Ru Guo Dan Chun Suo Men Jiu Neng Xian Zhi Ru Qin Zhe ,Wang Jian Zao Jiu Dong Shou . Er Yi Si Ru Qin Zhe Zai Ying Xiang Li Tou Qing Song Da Kai Mi Feng Cang Men Hou ,Wo Jiu Kai Shi Pao Fan Ru Qin Ji Hua De Yu Xiang Qing Jing . 
+
+ 
+
+  Jiu Zai Wo Xin Xiang Wan Liao De Shi Hou ,Cang Men Da Kai ,Yi Si Ru Qin Zhe Bian Da Bu Zou Jin Lai Qiang Xian Jiao Rang :[Ni Men Zui Hao Xian Zai Gao Su Wo :Tuo La Bi Jing Li Zai Na ?] 
+
+ 
+
+x      x
+
+ 
+
+  Wo Ai Kan Ju ,Ye Ai Ying Ju Li Chu Xian De Ren Lei ,Zhi Shi Wo Mei Xiang Guo ,Dang Ni Zai Xian Shi Ting Jian Ju Zhong Na Xie Qiao Pi Hao Xiao De Tai Ci ,Yuan Lai Shi Na Mo Rang Ren Huo Da . 
+
+  Yi Si Ru Qin Zhe (Geng Gai :Ta Zi Cheng Bo Shi )Shuo Zhe Shi Ta De Shi Ming ,Ta Sheng Lai Jiu Shi Re Ren Huo Da ,Te Bie Shi Dui Yu Ba Sha Ren Dang Xing Qu De Ren Huo Ji Qi Ren . 
+
+  [Zhen Zheng De Sha Ren Ji Qi Ren ,Shi Xiang Hu Jiao Tong Na Yang Zai Di Shang Hua Xing ,Yong Da Dan Qi Si Chu Zhi Hua ,Nao Dai Zhi Rong Xia Shi Er Ge Ci Hui Liang . ] Bo Shi Wang Liao Wo Yi Yan ,Na Zhang Lian De Biao Qing Si Hu Zhi Hui Zai Bu Shuang Huo Nu Chao Zhi Jian Bian Hua ,Suo Yi Wo Bu Ken Ding Ta Shi Zai Gong Wei Yi Huo Chao Feng ,[Ni Gen Hu Jiao Tong Chai De Yuan Liao . ] 
+
+  Zhe Shi Zai Wo Men Du Ping Xi Ge Zi De Fen Nu He Bu Shuang Hou ,Di Yi Ge Ping Jing De Dui Hua . Yi Wai Di ,Zhe Duan Chong Man Huo Yao De Qi Jian Mei You Ren He Dong Xi Bei Za Lan ,Huo Ren He Wu Qi Kai Huo ,Zai Chang You San Ge Ju You Sha Ren Neng Li De Fei Ren Lei Cun Zai ,Suo Yi Wo Men Yong Hao Bu Ren Lei De Fang Shi Jie Jue ,Huan Yan Zhi Jiu Shi Shi Bi Ci Zhi Dao Zi Ji Fei Chang Bu Hao Re . 
+
+  Suo Yi Bo Shi Zhi Dao Wo Shi Shi Mo . Zheng Que Lai Shuo ,Shi Zai Ta Zhao Wo Hui Wu Yi Zhi Fa Chu Gao Yin Pin De Fa Guang Gong Ju Hou ,Yong Yi Fu Zai Ce Liang Wen Du Yi De Kou Wen Jiang Chu Wo Shi Wei An Pei Bei . Dang Xia Wo Gan Dao Xie Xu Xin Qing Fu Za ,Bu Zhi Dao Mei Bei Dang Zuo Sha Ren Ji Qi Er Shi Wen Du Yi Gai You Shi Mo Gan Shou ,Dan Shi Hou Lai Wo Xiang Dao ,Zhi Yao Ta Mei You Zha Diao Wang Jian De Da Suan Jiu Wu Guan Xi Liao . Sui Bian La ,Wo Bu Zai Hu . 
+
+  Chu Liao Yi Dian . Bo Shi Mei You Pin Dao ,Suo Yi Wo Bi Xu Kai Kou Shuo Hua . Zhe Zhen De Hen Lei Ren ,Te Bie Shi Wo Du Guo Liao San Shi Er Ge Zhi Yu Wang Jian Yong Pin Dao Kan Ju Gou Tong De Xun Huan Ri ,Chang Qi Que Fa Yu Ren Lei Jiao Liu De Jing Yan Ling She Jiao Ji Neng Sheng Shu (Sui Ran Bo Shi Bu Shi Ren Lei ,Dan Ni Dong Wo De Yi Si ),Zhi Shi Xiang Bi Zheng Zai Sheng Men Qi De Wang Jian ,Wo Yi Suan De Shang Qin Qie You Shan . 
+
+  Wo Men Zou Xiang Huo Gui Qu Shi ,Wo Xiang Bo Shi Xun Wen Na Xie Jin Hu Wei Cheng Nian Ren Lei Tu Ya De Shu Ju ,Ta Yong Ren Gong Zhi Hui Shi Wei Zi Ran De Yu Yan Jie Shi ,Dan Suo You Zi Ci Chuan Lian Qi Lai Wo Que Wu Fa Li Jie ,Huo Zhe Gai Shuo ,Wo De Gou Zao Ju Jue Li Jie Cheng Shi He Yun Suan Gao Su Wo Bu Ke Neng De Shi Wu . 
+
+  (Bo Shi De Kou Yin Ye Ke Yi Lie Ru Yuan Yin Zhi Yi ,Wo Bu Ceng Ting Guo Zhe Zhong Qi Guai De Qiang Diao . )
+
+  [Ci Yuan Gong Cheng . ] Ta Zui Hou Zong Jie ,Yan Jing Dun Liao Yi Xia ,[Zhe Dui Ni Men Lai Shuo Shi Ju Tou ,Bu Guo Mei Suo Wei ,Bie Jiang Chu Qu Jiu Hao Liao ,Shi Shi Shang Zui Hao Bie Ming Bai . ] 
+
+  Ni Bu Ke Neng Dui Ci Yuan Jin Xing Gong Cheng ,Na Jiu Xiang Na Zhu Jian Dao ,Er Ni Zhi Neng Qie Kai Bi Jian Dao Kou Geng Xiao De Dong Xi . Zuo Wei Shen Tai Kong Yan Jiu Chuan Jian De Wang Jian Zai Zhe Fang Mian You Zhu Chao Gao Quan Wei ,Ta Zhong Yu Bu Zai Jia Zhuang Mei You Jin Jin Tie Zhu Wo Men Xing Zong ,Huan You Qi Shi Zai Yi De Yao Ming . Ci Yuan Xian Shi Yuan Bi Zhe Ge Geng Da . 
+
+  [Zhe Ke Neng Biao Shi Ni Men Xu Yao Yi Ba Geng Da De Jian Dao . ] 
+
+  Wo Fa Xian Bo Shi Gen Ren Lei Yi Yang ,Gen Wang Jian Shuo Hua Shi Hui Yang Tou Wang Xiang Tian Hua Ban ,Ji Shi Ta Bu Zai Na Li . Ran Hou Yang Qi Shi Ta Kan Lai You Qi Bu Shuang He Chao Feng De Mei Mao :[Xian Ran Ni Ying Gai Xiang Xin ,Bu Ran Zhe Mo Da De Chuan Ye Zhuang Bu Xia Ni De Ge Xing . Nei Han Bi Wai Biao Geng Da (Bigger on the inside),Dui Ba ,Jin Ri Dian Hao ?] 
+
+  Zhe Jiu Shi Wang Jian Biao Xian Zhe Mo Bie Niu De Yuan Yin . Bo Shi Zhi Dao Wang Jian ,Bu Shi Zhi Dao You Zhe Sao Ru Ci Wang Ba Dan De Chuan Jian ,Er Shi Ta Yu You Fen She Ji Wang Jian De Jiao Shou You Duan Shu Yuan De Guan Xi . 
+
+  [Guo Liao Hao Ji Wan Nian ,Zong Suan You Yi Wei Ji Qi Zhi Hui Jiao Shou Chu Liao Dui Wo De Chuan Mu Deng Kou Ai ,Huan Hui Qu Si Kao Ru He Jin Liang Zhi Zao Chu Na Yang Shen Kuo De Ren Gong Zhi Neng ,Ta De Xue Sheng Xiang Bi Du Liao Ta Liu Xia De Bi Ji ,Ran Hou --] Bo Shi Shuang Shou Yi Tan ,Ta De Biao Qing Shao Wei Bu Zai Na Mo Bu Shuang He Chao Feng ,Ke Yi Cheng De Shang He Ai ,[Wo Men You Liao Zhe Sao Chuan . ] 
+
+  Ru Guo Wo Zhi Shen Zai Lun Li Huo Tui Li Ju Zhong ,Ke Neng Jiu Hui Shuo Mou Xie Di Fang Que Shi Ting Xiang De ,Mou Xie Di Fang La (Qing Yong Ni Xiang Xiang Zhong Zui Feng Ci De Yu Qi Lai Shuo Zhe Ju Hua ). 
+
+  Zhe Bu Hao Xiao . Wang Jian Zai Wo Men De Pin Dao Shuo . 
+
+  Ni Xian Zai De Xing Wei Jiu Xiang Na Xie Wei Cheng Nian Ren Lei ,Dui Zhu Ta Men De Cheng Nian Jia Ren . Wo Dui Ta Hui Hua ,Jie Zhu Gen Ta Jiang Dao Li ,Yin Wei Wang Jian Zai Pin Dao Li Xiang Yi Zhi Shua Lai De Mao Da Gun ,Yi Ta De Da Xiao Lai Shuo Zhe Bing Bu Ke Ai . Wo Tan Kou Qi . Ni Xi Wang Ta Kuai Dian Li Kai ,Jiu Jin Liang Bi Zui . 
+
+ 
+
+  Wo Men Da Kai Bo Shi Zhi Ming De Na Ge Huo Gui ,Jiu Ru Ta Suo Shuo ,Yi Zhang Zhuo Shang You Yi He Da Kai Chi Liao Ji Kou De Shi Wu ,Zheng Ge Huo Gui Yin Yue Can Liu Shi Wu De Wei Dao (E ),Bo Shi Kua Jin Huo Gui ,Wo Zhan Zai Huo Gui Wai ,Bo Shi Yi Lian Ai Shang De Shi Qi Qie Zhi Ning Jie Wai Ceng De Lu Bo He ,Wo Zhi Zai Guan Yu Gu Dai De Dian Shi Ju Li Kan Guo Zhe Dong Xi . 
+
+  [Wo De Qian Ceng Kuo Mian Mei Liao . Zhe Jiu Shi Wei Shi Mo Zai Ni Yun Shu Huo Gui Qian ,Ni Ying Gai Que Ding Li Mian You Mei Ren ,Yi Ji Ta Men De Sui Shen Wu Pin . ] Ta Cong Shang Gan Bian Cheng Zhi Ze De Yu Diao Zhi Da ,Bei Wo Lie Wei Zhong Da De Wei Xian Xun Hao . Xing Hao Bo Shi Zhi Shi Xiang Ge Ren Lei Ju Qi Ze Guai De Shou Zhi Luan Hui ,Wo De Yi Si Shi ,Ta Mei You Na Chu Na Ge Ke Yi Da Kai Suo Si Cang Men De Gong Ju . 
+
+  (Ta Ying Gai Shi Xiang Dui Wang Jian Fa Huo ,Dan Zhi Qian Wo Shuo Liao ,Wang Jian Shi Zai Zhu Wo Men De Chuan Jian ,Suo Yi Bo Shi Si Chu Luan Zhi Ke Yi Dang Cheng Ta Zheng Gai Gua Zhi Zhu Wang Jian De Yi Si . )
+
+  Ran Er Wo Ren De Zhe Ge Xing Wei De Wei Ji ,Tong Chang Zai Chang Pian Da Lun Tou Su Qi Jian ,Ren Lei De Xie Ya , Bao Li Yi Zhi Cu Si Zhi Shu Hui Sui Zhi Shang Sheng . Jin Guan Bo Shi Bi Ren Lei Duo Liao Yi Ke Xin Zang ,Wo Wu Cong Zhi Xiao Ta De Shen Ti Shu Zhi Shi Fou Reng Chu Yu Jian Kang Zhuang Tai ,Dan Shu Ju Jiu Zhe Yang Yi Hui Shi ,Cu Shi Wo Ren Ding Jie Ru De Bi Yao You Bai Fen Zhi Qi Shi :[Huo Gui Zhuan Yi Qi Jian ,Huo Gui Qu Mei You Ren He Sheng Ming Ji Xiang De Ji Lu . ] 
+
+  Jiang Ge Bu Ting De Bo Shi Zan Ting ,Shuang Yan Zhuan Liao Yi Xia :[Hao Ba ,Wo Ke Neng Zou Kai Liao Yi Hui Er ,Qu Na Ge Ti La Mi Su Shi Mo De ,Huo Shi Bei Yi Ge Gui Sui Ren Lei He Yi Bu Han Jiu Ming De Ji Qi Ren Nong Dao Xin Xu Bu Zhu ,Ran Hou Pao Kai Liao ,Rao Liao Xie Yuan Lu Cai Hui Lai . ] 
+
+  Ta Shi Fou An Zhuang Liao Yi Ge Ju Zi Hui Wu Xian Yan Shen De Cheng Shi ?Wo Cong Wei Jian Guo Yi Ge Zhe Yang Hui Shuo Hua De Ren Lei . Wo Zhi Dao ,Ta Bu Shi Ren Lei ,Dan Wo Di Yi Ci Yu Jian Huo Sheng Sheng Qie Bu Da Suan Gan Ran /Sha Hai Wo De Wai Xing Ren ,Shou Shang Shu Ju Shang Wei Chong Zu Dao Da Zhi Tong Ji Xing Ke Kao . 
+
+  Ni Xu Yao Ba Dong Xi Jia Re De Zhuang Zhi Ma ?Wang Jian Shuo ,Pin Dao Li Wo Gan Shou Dao Ta Xiang Jin Kuai Ba Bo Shi Song Zou De Zao Dong . 
+
+  [Bu Yong ,Wo Qu TESCOZai Mai Yi Ge Jiu Hao Liao ,Dan Xie Xie Ni ,Ren Lei De Zhi Hui Jie Jing . ] Ta Zai Zhuo Shang Shi Qi Mou Ge Xun Hei Se De Jin Shu Zhuang Zhi ,Bing Fang Jin Kou Dai Li ,[He Kuang ,Wo Shi Lai Qu Hui Mou Ge Dong Xi ,Ni De Peng You Chong Man Jing Jie De Zhan Zai Na Li ,Jiu Shi Yin Wei Zhe Ge Ba . ] 
+
+  Bo Shi Shuo De Mei Cuo ,Huo Gui Da Kai Hou Wo Tan Ce Dao Wai Xing Yi Liu Wu De Zhi Shu ,Zhe Ye Shi Wo Zhan Zai Wei An Pei Bei Suo Neng Jie Shou De Zui Yuan Ju Li De Yuan Yin . Shang Ci De Jing Li Hou Wo Gei Zi Ji Xie Liao Ti Zao Zhen Ce De Jing Gao Cheng Shi . Zong Zhi ,Wai Xing Yi Liu Wu ,Xie Xie ,Jue Dui Bu Yao Kao Jin Wo (Huan You Wang Jian ). 
+
+  Bo Shi Zai San Biao Shi Huo Gui Li Mei You Zhi De Jing Jie De Dong Xi ,Wo Men San Fang Mian Du Ren Tong Zhe Ge Jie Lun ,Dan Wo Zhi Dao Wang Jian Shao Hou Hui Pai Wu Ren Ji Qu Xiao Du Zheng Ge Huo Gui ,Zai Xiao Du Wu Ren Ji . Ji Ran Shi Qing Yi Jing Jie Jue ,Bo Shi Biao Shi Ta De Ji Xu Xing Cheng Liao ,Wo Men Song Ta Hui Dao Wu Li Deng Jian De Chuan . 
+
+  Kan Jian Na Ge Wai Kuang Wei Mu Zhi De Lan Se He Zi ,Wo Huan Shi Ren Bu Zhu Xun Wen ,Ni Bu Shi Mei Tian Du Hui Peng Dao You Ru Ying Ju Li You Qu Er Wu Hai De Ren :[Wei Shi Mo Ni Zong Shi Dai Zai Yi Ge He Zi Li ?] 
+
+  [Hen Ming Xian Wo Xi Huan Fu Gu Yi Shu . ] Ta De Chao Feng Kou Wen Jia Shen ,Wo Yi Ran Wu Fa Ken Ding Ta Shi Zai Gong Wei Yi Huo Chao Feng ,Bu Guo Zhe Yi Jing Mei Guan Xi Liao ,Shui Zhi Dao Bo Shi Zhuan Guo Tou Kan Zhu Wo ,[Ru Guo Ni Gan Xing Qu ,Ke Yi Jin Lai Kan Yi Kan ,Bi Jing Wo Ye Can Guan Liao Ni Men De Chuan Jian Yi Tang . ] 
+
+  Wang Jian Ping Wen De Shu Zhi Tu Ran Bao Sheng ,Er Wo Gan Jue Dao Ta De Zhu Yi Li Zhong Zhong Luo Zai Wo Shen Shang ,Pang Fu Bei Hou Chuan Lai Re Lie You Chen Zhong De Zhu Shi . Wo Zhuan Tou Kan Xiang He Zi ,Shu Ju Xian Shi ,Zhe Ge He Zi De Nei Bu Bao Gua Shi Si Huo Yi Shang De Fang Jian , San Ge Tu Shu Guan , Yi Jian Qia La OKFang . Wo Hen Hao Qi Ci Yuan Gong Cheng De Yun Zuo Fang Shi ,Geng Zhong Yao De Shi ,Zhe Shi Wo Zhu Jian Lei Ji Shou Dao De Yao Yue Zhi Yi ,Er Wo Huan Zai Xi Guan Dang Zhong . 
+
+  [Xie Xie ,Dan Bu Yong Liao . ] 
+
+  Wan Ju Ye Shi Wo Shang Zai Xi Guan De Yi Ge Quan Xin Hui Ying Fang Shi . Dan Geng Zhong Yao De Shi ,Wai Xing Ke Ji ,Xie Xie ,Dan Bu Liao . Wo Zhi Xiang Duo Zai Mei You Ren Lei De Chuan Jian Shang Feng Kuang Zhui Ju . 
+
+  Pin Dao Li ,Wang Jian Chou Xiang Di Ju Qi Mu Zhi ,Wo Mei You Guan Ta . 
+
+  Bo Shi Kan Lai Bing Bu Jing Ya ,Ta De Lian Zong Suan Bu Zai Kan Lai Zhe Mo Bu Shuang He Chao Feng ,Ta Gao Xing Di Kan Liao Wo ,Zai Huan Gu Ta Si Zhou He Tou Ding Gen Wang Jian Zhi Yi :[Na Jiu Zai Yu Zhou Qi Ta Jiao Luo Zai Jian Liao ,Hen Gao Xing Ren Shi Ni Men ,Zhi Neng Ji Qi Ren Men . ] 
+
+  Ta De Chuan Zai Wo Men Mian Qian Xiao Shi ,Fa Chu Ci Er De Zao Yin ,Zai Wo Sao Miao Chuan Jian Bu Zai Chu Xian Na Xie Ling Luan De Shu Ju Hou ,Wang Jian Zai Jia Shang Yi Ceng Fang Zhi Ren He Chuan Jian Zai Chuan Jian Nei Deng Jian De Ping Zhang (Wo Shuo Guo Ta Shi Pian Zhi Kuang ,Dui Ba ). Zhong Yu Hui Dao Zhi You Wo Gen Wang Jian De Zhuang Tai . 
+
+  Yao Zhong Kan <<Yi Xing Chuan Yue Zhe >> Ma ?Wang Jian Wen Wo ,Wo Zai Pin Dao Fa Chu Xin Ran Tong Yi De Xun Xi . "
+43518841,Glitching for You,['pinstripedJackalope'],General Audiences,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Case Fic, Mystery, Sort Of, Amnesia, Temporary Amnesia, memory resets, ART is an asshole, Pining, murderbot loves its friends, Glitches, Future Fic, Comedy, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Three pov, 2023 Murderbot Diaries New Year Gift Exchange",English,2022-12-09,Completed,2022-12-09,"4,766",1/1,7,39,4,172,"['TJWock', 'Irrya', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Mothmansimp', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'darth_eowyn', 'seven_graces', 'Magechild', 'rokhal', 'NightErrant', 'EvaBelmort', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'pain_and_panic', 'Bibli', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Sayatsugu', 'Grimness6452', 'MercurialFeet', 'idealPeriWren', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'petwheel', 'vikkyleigh', 'Gamebird', 'FlipSpring', 'Imbecamiel', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Chyoatas', 'BWizard', 'opalescent_potato', 'verersatz', 'cmdrburton', 'Mysterymew', 'horchata']",[],"Three notices the glitch at breakfast.
+
+In an effort to acclimatize the humans on ART's recent voyages to friendly SecUnits, Three and Murderbot have been regularly attending crew mealtimes while ART is docked at the PreservationAux transit ring.  They don't partake in the provided sustenance--Obviously, Three imagines Murderbot saying, with its patented disgust--but they do join in on conversations and answer questions that the humans have.
+
+...Correction.  Three answers questions.  Murderbot sits with its feet up on a chair and pretends that it isn't feeling awkward as all hell, occasionally inserting commentary into the feed channel they leave open between Three, Murderbot, and ART.
+
+But back to the point: the glitch. 
+
+Three is helping a very small human cut up a protein slab to eat when it catches the movement from the corner of its eye.  It isn't much--just a twitch, Murderbot's eyes closing 23% before returning to their usual half-lidded, pretending-not-to-care-while-in-reality-its-focused-on-every-camera-and-drone-input-in-the-room look. 
+
+It isn't enough for the humans to notice.  Even if they had happened to be looking they probably wouldn't have thought anything of it, but these humans have been mostly respectful of Murderbot's aversion to eye contact, so Three is pretty sure none of them even had eyes on Murderbot at the time.  The glitch wasn't much, admittedly--humans make those kinds of involuntary movements all the time.
+
+Murderbot is not human.  This makes such a movement slightly more concerning.  Or perhaps intriguing is a better term--Murderbot has long since scoffed off Three's every attempt at concern, even in explicitly concerning situations.  Three wouldn't let that stop it from being concerned, but the fact is that Murderbot is a generally competent construct--Three has yet to see anything truly take the asshole down in all the years they've known one another. 
+
+It hopes nothing ever does, but that's neither here nor there.
+
+Three thinks, for about three sixteenths of a second, about pinging Murderbot in the feed.  If something is truly wrong, Murderbot will probably tell it--more likely, though, it's just some errant code Murderbot is fiddling with and it'll tell Three to fuck off.  Either way, however, a ping will probably annoy Murderbot--it's been in a bit of a mood lately, and random pings will undoubtedly make it worse.  After some consideration, Three decides to just... keep an eye on Murderbot. You know, in case things aren't as they seem.
+
+It's two minutes before it sees the glitch again.  Two minutes, in fact, to the tenth of the second.  The same exact thing happens--a minute twitch, eyes closing a fraction before returning to normal. 
+
+Three considers this.  The humans are nearly done with their meal--its task of protein slab dissection is complete, and the small human is gumming happily at the pieces.  Three isn't nearly as good at dealing with footage as Murderbot is, but it's a SecUnit, too--it knows its way around a camera feed. 
+
+Taking care to avoid Murderbot in the network, Three finds the camera with the best view of Murderbot's face and quickly begins to rewind it.  Thankfully, Murderbot's natural instinct to erase itself from footage doesn't work on ART--ART isn't easily hacked, and the two of them have come to a grudging agreement that Murderbot will not attempt to hack in as long as ART brings back obscure media from its travels.
+
+Three finds fourteen total instances of the glitch since Murderbot sat down, each executed the same way, at near-exact two minute intervals.  In fact, when it stretches the parameters farther back to compare footage from the hallway as well, it realizes that not only has Murderbot glitched seventeen times in the last thirty-four minutes, it's also made approximately 76% more extraneous movements than it normally does during its normal activities.
+
+This isn't saying much.  Murderbot, as a rule, tends to hold bot-still around the humans as much as possible.  It likes to remind the humans that it is NOT one of them, though it has created a fair bit of human-mimicry code for stealth purposes.  It's a matter of choice, Three thinks--it can look like a human, but it chooses not to. 
+
+76% is an aberration.  Three is officially a little, very slightly bit concerned.
+
+...Not enough to ping Murderbot directly, though.  It splits the difference and, instead, sends a ping to ART.
+
+
+3: what do you make of this  [footage.mov]
+
+
+
+ART: Interesting.  More data is required.
+
+
+
+ART: I have compiled the data.  [data.zip]
+
+
+A prompt response.  That's what Three likes about ART.  Three thanks the ship and begins to download the data packet.
+
+It's at 32% when Three feels ART hovering in the feed.  Three sends a question glyph.
+
+
+ART: I see you are concerned about our fellow friend.
+
+
+Ah.  This is the part that Three likes less.  ART is a superpowered genius, but it can't keep its metaphorical nose out of people's metaphorical business when it smells metaphorical gossip. 
+
+Three resists sighing aloud.  It then tries a simple tactic to evade the ship.
+
+
+3: i am merely investigating a curious occurrence
+
+
+
+ART: Are you now.
+
+
+The implications in ART's feed voice are undeniable.  Three can't help but scrunch its nose slightly--it should have known that there's no evading the damn ship.  And not just because they're literally inside of it.
+
+And the thing is... ART isn't wrong, per se.  There are very many things that Three is, but unattached is not one of them.  It isn't like Murderbot--it can't pretend that it doesn't feel connections to things.  People.  Bots.  Other constructs.  Hell, it's started growing attached to the small human in the seat next to it.  Pattern-based recognition saved Three's life when it was wandering aimlessly its first month as a free construct.  That there are patterns in relationships, platonic and... otherwise... is a fundamental piece of the code it's built to sustain itself outside of its original function. 
+
+If Murderbot were to say right here today that it wanted something more, then Three would agree with zero hesitation.  But Murderbot will not, and Three is content to stay the course, to accompany Murderbot in whatever form that takes.
+
+It does not need ART's meddling to rock the boat.  This it is certain of.
+
+your presumption has been noted, Three sends along the feed, short and cursory.  It then blocks ART as well as it can, focusing instead on cracking open the data package.
+
+Inside are three hours of footage, neatly dissected into individual clips in that fastidious way ART has.  Apparently, this glitch has been going on a lot longer than Three realized.  This is partly because Three refrains from monitoring Murderbot in its own quarters in the residential sector of the ship. 
+
+ART, of course, has no such compunctions. 
+
+According to the data, Murderbot has displayed the glitch at two minute intervals for the past seven hours.  Additionally, it appears that it was repeating actions other than the half-blink.
+
+Three frowns, glancing over at Murderbot from the corner of its eye.  Breakfast has been normal, but then again, Murderbot doesn't generally do much during mealtimes.  During the night, however, it seems to have recycled a spare skin-suit with a hole torn through it--and then gone back nine times to the same place it took the skin suit from, as if looking for it again. 
+
+Three rewinds, watching closely.  It seems... yes, it definitely seems that this action only occurred once per every two minutes at most.  Which means that whatever glitch Murderbot is experiencing, the two minute mark is important.
+
+It's then, as Three is fast-forwarding through the footage for a third (heh) time, that the humans begin to disperse from their morning meal. 
+
+Three, curious, turns its attention back to Murderbot and watches closely.  The construct shows no outward sign that it's realized that the humans are leaving--but then again, it never really does.  Well, it did wave once, but only once, and it admitted to Three afterward that the wave felt ridiculous and vowed to never do it again. 
+
+Three gently taps one finger on the titanium tabletop.  Then, working on a hunch, it says aloud, ""I saw your skin-suit was damaged on our last excursion.  Are you planning to recycle it?""
+
+""Yes,"" Murderbot says simply.  Then, in the feed, it says, Note: Funct?on ?#($*&@^#&$? Malf?nction, Acc?ssing ?*$&#)$)%(><$>.,?  ?+_!^@^&#$($?  ?*#(*(.<#*$(?
+
+""What?"" Three asks.
+
+Murderbot opens its mouth as if to respond, glitches, and closes it again.  Three feels it flip through the camera feeds, take in the current time and the fact that all but the last few lingering humans are gone, and then it says, ""I have tasks to take care of."" This is clearly not concerning at all.
+
+It goes to stand.  Three stands with it, faking cheer.  ""I'll accompany you.""
+
+Murderbot makes no comment on that, but it isn't a 'fuck off' so Three will take it.  The two of them head out of the cafeteria and toward the residential wing.
+
+Good.  This will give Three ample time to figure out what the hell is going on.
+
+""There was interesting conversation this morning,"" it says, as it falls into step with Murderbot.  This is a lie: there was nothing that Murderbot would be even remotely interested in.  Three watches Murderbot closely out of the corner of its eye.
+
+A pause, just long enough for Murderbot to access ART's camera stores and rewind to the conversations in question.  It makes a microexpression of disgust.  ""Are you fucking with me?"" it asks, a hint of suspicion in its voice.
+
+An interesting response.  Three is... not quite sure what to make of that.  Why did Murderbot have to access ART's camera stores?  Sure, it often stops paying attention to the humans, and often has to rewind footage to check what it missed, but usually it does it from its own storage.
+
+Covering quickly, Three quirks its mouth into a lopsided grin that usually makes Murderbot roll its eyes.  ""Just making sure you were paying attention.  You seemed like your mind was elsewhere.""
+
+Murderbot lets out a subvocal hmph, clearly unimpressed.
+
+""In all seriousness,"" Three says, switching tracks, ""If there is something on your mind, you know you can confide in me, don't you?""
+
+""I'll keep that in mind next time I'm... going to the medbay now.""
+
+The pause in Murderbot's gait is so minute that if Three wasn't specifically looking for it, it might have missed it.  But there was a pause--as if it had nearly missed a step, or forgotten that it was walking in the first place.  In its speech, too--and that was clearly not what it meant to say. 
+
+Three frowns.  ""I'll go with you,"" it says, getting sincerely worried now.
+
+Murderbot doesn't protest, though it looks like it might want to.  Instead, it just veers off, turning an about-face to head toward medical.
+
+Three is several steps behind when Murderbot bursts through the medbay doors, throwing them wide and blurting out, ""Funct--on malf--nction acc--ssing.""
+
+Three blinks.  The medbay attendant blinks.  ART does not blink, but the medbay camera refocuses, which is almost the same thing.
+
+With an amusingly human-sounding growl, Murderbot shuffles into the room, glaring until the human clears her throat and slips into her office, closing the door behind her.
+
+Murderbot, apparently satisfied at their privacy, throws itself into a chair, one palm pressed to its temple.  ""I think--"" it starts, and glitches again. 
+
+Three waits patiently as it accesses ART's video archives, rolling back the medbay video feed several seconds to catch up with itself.  It huffs, scowling.
+
+""Your stress hormone level is rising,"" ART's automated voice announces from the speaker in the ceiling.  A helpful graph appears on one of the nearby screens.
+
+Murderbot snarls vaguely upward.  ""I am aware.""
+
+ART plays a soundclip of a human clicking their tongue.  ""What's got your panties in a bunch?"" it asks.
+
+""I think,"" Murderbot says, frowning at itself, ""that I'm glitching.""
+
+""We know,"" Three says, at the same time as ART says, ""Yeah, no kidding.""
+
+If Murderbot could kill with its face, the two of them would be nothing but scrap metal and leftover organic material.  Three raises its hands in surrender.
+
+""Fine,"" Murderbot sighs, after a long moment of glaring and doing a thing with its mouth that it resolutely refuses to call 'pouting'.  ""If you two are so smart, someone figure out what this error message means.""
+
+It spits a string of broken code into the feed.  Three tilts its head, examining it.  It's the same string of characters that Murderbot sent out earlier--half-formed words and random groups of nonsense.  Three attempts to match it to its own code but comes up with approximately zip.  Or, more accurately, comes up with too many results to narrow down.  It could be something, or it could be nothing, or it could be anything in between.  Three has honestly no idea.  Best guess is that it was some kind of overflow process error that got scrambled, but without the rest of the string there's little chance they'll be able to parse it.
+
+ART focuses for exactly three seconds, which is an excruciatingly long time for a giant research vessel with the processing power of God Itself, before it, too, declares that it has no match.
+
+Murderbot slumps, the corners of its mouth folding down.  ""Damn,"" it says. 
+
+""At least we know that the glitch happens at two minute intervals,"" Three says.  ""That has to be something, right?""
+
+When it gets no response from a morose Murderbot, it looks vaguely upward toward ART's speaker.  ART does not respond, either, except to start counting down from thirty-eight in the feed. 
+
+""What are you doing?"" Three asks, puzzled.
+
+""Just wait,"" ART's voice says.  29... 28... 27...
+
+Three squints.  ""Are you... counting down until Murderbot glitches again?""
+
+""Yes.""  22... 21... 20...
+
+""So that we don't have to repeat ourselves?""
+
+""Yup.""  13... 12... 11...
+
+Three nods thoughtfully.  That makes sense, even if ART is being, well, ART.
+
+Murderbot, meanwhile, has bristled where it's sitting, its shoulders rising nearly to its ears.  ""I'm right here,"" it says, baring its teeth slightly. 
+
+9 ... 8... 7...
+
+""Yes, and that's the problem,"" ART responds, in that tone that indicates it's gotten its metaphysical hands on a very interesting theoretical conundrum that it plans to solve. 
+
+3... 2... 1...  ""Fuck y--"" Murderbot starts, only to glitch again, freezing mid-word.
+
+ART sends a satisfied glyph to Three in the feed, like a performer bowing for applause.  Three can't help the slight snort it makes, hiding it behind its hand just as Murderbot finishes rewinding the video feed and completing its expletive.
+
+""Anyway,"" Three says, talking over it.  ""Two minutes.  If the error message is from SecUnit-standard source code, then maybe I have the same process set to the same two minute timer somewhere in my code, possibly behind the firewall.""
+
+""Could be,"" ART says.  ""Would you like me to scan you?""
+
+Three hesitates for a moment.  Murderbot has grown accustomed to ART's internal presence, and so has Three, to a degree.  But having ART root around directly in its code always feels a little... staticky.  Especially since Three coded the firewall that blocks off most of its original manufacturer's source code so that it doesn't unconsciously access it. 
+
+Sue it, they all have their ways of coping with their origins.  At least Three hasn't turned to inhalant intoxicants or something.
+
+Still... if there's one thing it knows, it's that it would do just about anything for Murderbot.  A few seconds of scans will be over in the blink of an eye, and then perhaps they will finally have an answer to this mystery.  It can survive that, and it will, because Murderbot is more than worth it.  Murderbot would be worth it a hundred, maybe a thousand times over.
+
+A thousand and one, though, might be a tad much.  Just saying.
+
+Three nods, holding still.  It feels the intrusion immediately--pressure like water behind a dam, a million tons of liquid squeezing through a minuscule hole.  It feels every movement ART makes inside of it, every compounding instance of feedback as Three's code juxtaposes itself in ways it was never meant to, processes recursing over processes.  Three can't help the way its facial features drain of fluid, going pale--it sways a little where it stands, swallowing against a vestigial twinge of nausea.
+
+""Easy,"" says a voice in its ear.  It feels a hand brace its elbow, holding it steady.  It shudders once, twice--and then the intrusion is over, ART pulling back.
+
+The hand, too, pulls back.  Three glances over at Murderbot, raising an eyebrow in question, but Murderbot makes no move to indicate that it had done anything out of the ordinary.
+
+""I have our issue,"" ART says.  Then, camera turning to stare straight down at Murderbot, it says, ""How long has the long-term memory storage in your puny little head been full.  No, don't answer, I already know you can't.""
+
+Murderbot frowns, taking a moment to prod at itself, probably running a specialized diagnostic.  ""I see,"" it says.   
+
+Three waits.  When Murderbot doesn't offer any more information, it raises a brow and asks, ""Why didn't you empty your long-term storage?""
+
+""I didn't want to?"" Murderbot says, like it's speaking to a very young human child.
+
+What the fuck.  ""What the hell do you have stored in there?"" Three demands.
+
+Murderbot shrugs.  ""Serials.  Action flicks and historical dramas, you know how it is.""
+
+Shaking its head, Three lets out a fond sigh.  ""Of course,"" it says.  That certainly makes sense.
+
+""It's lying,"" ART says suddenly, as Murderbot glitches again.
+
+""Lying about what?"" Murderbot asks, rewinding the video footage.  It freezes when it reaches the part ART is referencing, its face going completely blank.
+
+This is, of course, a tell-tale sign that it is, in fact, lying.
+
+Three can't help it--it turns right toward Murderbot, scrutinizing it.  ""What does that mean, you're lying?"" it asks.
+
+""Nothing,"" Murderbot snaps, at the same time that ART says, ""They are personal files.""
+
+Three turns away from Murderbot once more, averting its eyes.  ""I'm confused,"" it admits.
+
+""Sorr-eeey,"" Murderbot says, dragging out the word until it no longer resembles itself.  ""Those memories don't suck.  So what.  Don't tell me what and what not to purge.""
+
+""I didn't,"" Three says, starting to get frustrated.  ""I just want to know what's so important that you've botched your short-term memory dump.""
+
+""I told you, it's serials,"" Murderbot snarls. 
+
+""Yes, and what else?"" Three demands.  It feels an itch in its gun ports--it's getting agitated. 
+
+""Fuck you,"" Murderbot says.  The graph on the display surface behind it is spiking as its stress hormone levels rise. 
+
+For a moment, Three is 98% sure they're going to get into a physical altercation like two drunk humans.  Then, with all the presence of a set of physical arms, two of the medbay's drones descend, butting right in and pushing the two SecUnits apart.
+
+""In addition to 248 terabytes of media, MB has accumulated 971 terabytes of video footage, audio clips, feed logs, and profiles of its friends.""
+
+As soon as the words come through the speakers, Murderbot stops struggling with the drone, flushing bright red against its will.  ""Fuck off, asshole,"" it says, but there's hardly any venom to the words.
+
+Three, who was ready to push aside the drone and attack just moments before, takes a deep, intentional breath.  ""Your... friends,"" it says, taking a step back.  Curiosity rises--who does a SecUnit like Murderbot consider 'friends'?  And then, on its heels, comes the dread--what if Three didn't make the cut?  All this time Three has hoped that their relationship meant something to Murderbot, but faced with the very real possibility that Murderbot thinks nothing of Three while Three thinks the world of Murderbot makes the construct's lungs tighten.
+
+Murderbot frowns, and Three feels it pull the medbay camera feed to focus intently on Three's face.  Three feels an irrational urge to cover its visage but resists, jaw clenched.  The silence is loud, ringing in Three's ears--it feels like it's hardly taking in oxygen.  It gropes for a diagnostic, distant and unbalanced.
+
+""Why are you upset,"" Murderbot says, not quite a question and not quite a command.
+
+Three shakes its head.  It suddenly wants to be anywhere but here.  Maybe when Murderbot glitches again it will just... walk out and never look back.  Go find an asteroid somewhere to colonize.  Yeah, that sounds nice.
+
+Murderbot and ART are having a very loud conversation in a private feed, Murderbot's face twitching in microexpressions as it speaks.  Three doesn't attempt to hack in to listen in on them--let them have their privacy.  Three just needs to get out of here.  Flexing its fingers, it glances toward the door.
+
+It startles, then, as ART suddenly pings Murderbot very loudly in the shared feed channel.  ""SHOW IT,"" it says over the speaker, also very loudly.
+
+Murderbot grumbles something that Three can't make out, probably an expletive.  Then, its shoulders tensing, it opens a new file transfer channel and...
+
+Three blinks, trying to keep up with dozens, hundreds, thousands of files that all begin to flow across at once.  They're all meticulously organized, metadata tidy and each carefully linked in chronological order.  Three searches through the files until it finds the very first file in the sequence.  It opens it with trepidation, taking care with it.
+
+It's a video file.  On it there is a SecUnit, standing in the interior of a ship.  Three recognizes the surfaces of the vessel immediately--it's the Barish Estranza explorer, the footage taken just before Three hacked its governor module.  This is just before Murderbot 2.0 gave Three the means to become Three. 
+
+Three watches itself as the killware gives it the hack, as the SecUnit considers the data packet, as it runs the hack and the hack turns off its governor module.  It shakes itself free, the first movement unbound and unfettered by its manufacturer.
+
+And Murderbot... it found this footage.  It kept this footage.  Somehow... some way... against all odds... it kept the very first time that the two of them encountered one another, in one form or another. 
+
+Three swallows, reaching for another file.  Then another.  And another.  Its organic parts are trembling, limbs shaking with minute tremors as it quickly scans handful after handful, putting together a timeline from Murderbot's meticulous metadata.  Arguments and silent moments spent together and bright, intense conversations--there are dozens of clips just of Three smiling, one side of its lips slightly higher than the other, crooked as always. 
+
+""You... you kept everything,"" Three manages to say, voice rasping against unwilling vocal chords.
+
+""Yeah,"" Murderbot says, sounding very uncomfortable about this fact.  ""There's data of Dr. Mensah and ART and a few others and... you.""
+
+Three nods, overwhelmed.  It takes four tries to boot up several of its processes that had gone dormant while its processing power was focused on the files.  It's then that it realizes: Murderbot needs to purge this data. 
+
+It feels like a punch to the lungs.  This data... it's hurting Murderbot.  It's filled its storage to the brim, caused it to glitch.  It can't hold onto all of this data, not like this.
+
+Three says this aloud, feeling like its heart is breaking slightly as the words pass its lips. 
+
+It doesn't expect Murderbot to violently recoil, but that's exactly what it does.  ""What?!  No!"" it says.
+
+""MB.  You don't function without long-term memory space.  You need storage,"" Three says.  There are too many files here to all be stored in long-term storage: Murderbot must have been stashing footage in every nook and cranny available until it literally couldn't find any more. 
+
+Murderbot grimaces, baring its teeth.  ""Well, I don't have a HubSys, now do I?"" it demands.  ""What am I supposed to do?  And no, I'm not purging.""
+
+Three raises its hands, helpless.  ""You have to.  You're hurting yourself doing this.  What if you need memory space to hack something?""
+
+""Then I'll figure it out,"" Murderbot says, sharp and vicious.
+
+""MB--""
+
+""...I may have an alternative,"" ART says suddenly, forestalling the brewing screaming match. 
+
+Murderbot tilts its head to show that it's listening.  Three clacks its mouth closed, feeling lost and helpless and just a little like maybe there's an answer, somewhere, the smallest spark of hope rising in its stomach.
+
+""My crew has fifteen portable wireless data transfer sticks,"" ART says, pulling up a schematic of one on the display surface.  ""They're made to collect data on dangerous research surveys, and come with protective cases.  Most of my crew wrap them in knotted synthetic string and tie them around their necks.  I believe one or two may be a good source of external storage in this situation.""
+
+""I--"" Murderbot starts, and glitches.  It shakes its head, rewinding the video footage for what seems like the millionth time. 
+
+Three waits, nearly holding its breath as Murderbot thinks it over.  ""I believe..."" it says, at last, ""...that this may be a decent compromise.""
+
+And Three... oh, god, it can feel the relief, wafting off Murderbot in waves.  Because for all of Murderbot's grumbling, for all its sarcasm, for all its plays at keeping itself separate from everyone and everything, it still hoards memories like they're precious metals, held so close to the chest that if not for a limit reached Three would never have had any idea they were there.
+
+It's so much.  Too much.  Three waits until one of ART's drones appears with the data stick and then, silently, slips from the room.
+
+***
+
+Three is lying on its reclining platform some hours later, staring at the ceiling, when there's a ping on the feed.
+
+
+3: yes?
+
+
+MB: I 'm outside your door.
+
+Frowning, Three sits up.  It looks across the room at the door.  i... don't know if i want company, it says.
+
+There's a low thump, as if Murderbot has leaned its head against the plastique.  ""I would like to talk,"" it says.
+
+Three sighs.  Then, hauling itself up, it goes to the closed door and stands just inside it, staring at the warm, homey paint.  ""Fine.  Talk,"" it says through the material.
+
+Murderbot clears its throat very slightly.  ""You were... really worried about me,"" it says.  It is not a question.
+
+""I'm sorry.  I know you said not to,"" Three says, and feels guilt clenching in its gut.
+
+Murderbot sighs, a low gust of air.  ""It's okay.  I know you can't help it.""
+
+Three closes its eyes, tilting forward until its forehead is pressed against the door, as well.  Two constructs, one on either side--what a metaphor.  It could be a joke, if Three were in a joking mood.
+
+And then, for what may be the millionth time since they first met, Murderbot surprises Three.  It does this by saying, ""I am willing to forgive you.  For a price.""
+
+Three swallows.  ""...Name it.""
+
+""I don't have a memory of us together at the theater yet.  Come with me to watch a human play, and we'll call it even.""
+
+""Like a... friend?"" Three asks, hope blooming from a spark into a flame.
+
+""You know you're more than that,"" Murderbot says, clipped. It's cursory, and awkward, and Three can't help the way it grins, palming the sliding door open.  The grin is still lopsided, still toothy and crooked in that way that it always assumed annoyed Murderbot, and yet it feels perfect.  Three can't stop itself--it's happy.  The grin only grows wider as Murderbot accesses the video footage from the hallway camera and neatly clips a frame of Three's expression, saving it to the data stick around its neck.
+
+It's so much.  So much.  It feels, in fact, like this is the whole universe, packed into this one very small moment.  Three loves Murderbot.  Murderbot loves Three.  This is all that Three has ever wanted, ever yearned for, a fantasy come true, all the better for being real.
+
+There's only one thing to do.  ""Deal,"" Three says, grin growing impossibly wider. 
+
+Murderbot huffs and rolls its eyes, the same way it always does--only this time, it reaches out to take Three's hand, gently lacing their fingers together. 
+
+""Deal,"" it says right back, sure and steady and with a look on its face that says it's ready to take on the world. 
+
+
+ART: And to think, it was all thanks to a glitch.
+
+
+Three huffs, ignoring the ship.  They have a human play to watch, after all.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+"
+34261786,All Systems Orange,['kris_king_of_the_losers'],Teen And Up Audiences,M/M,"All For The Game - Nora Sakavic, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells",Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard,,"in which I play fast and loose with martha well's worldbuilding, hard sci-fi elements because the god complex pairs well with my masochism, Slow Burn, as in these characters are just matryoshka dolls of trauma and repression, and getting them to communicate is like pulling teeth, Slow Build, as in the plot is slow going and difficult to find and the action even more so",English,2021-10-03,Updated,2022-12-09,"11,518",5/?,25,68,16,823,"['kdgrey', 'Naorimasa', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Granny_Glasses', 'Deris666', 'grey_bird2734', 'FoxFanHope', 'flippingfairyprincess', 'hellboundsouls', 'HermaeusMora', 'puddlejumper99', 'unbeeleafable', 'GenieLamp', 'second_hand', 'fishy_fishyy', 'Drel_Murn', 'Icantfindanamethatisnttaken', 'Gelert_Llewellyn', 'icar9', 'Yak_Attack', 'jemifajn', 'OfficialJoyMaker', 'exit_space', 'CurlyHobbit', 'Brenden1k', 'Bacons', 'cabvswater', 'NJx_13', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'AkaMissK', 'electric_city', 'Spaced0ut', 'mochii_0', 'Legowerewolf', 'ariadneowl', 'LifeisfeetandIamtheground', 'Nina_reads1804', '8127666', 'Deasouris', 'Kingbean', 'EstaVS', 'bruciewayneisbatman', 'AnxiousEspada', 'WalkingBird', 'OftheTwilighttheDarkness', 'skieswillfall', 'Epidenic', 'NoMasha', 'theAsh0', 'unearthly']",[],"It had been eight-thousand, seven-hundred, and sixty-six hours since Mary Hatford had died on the coastline of an uninhabited planet, in the far reaches of space. The official cause of death was infection. There'd been no mention of the mutiny or resulting neglect that had let it progress as far as it had. Mary's paperwork had been solid enough to withstand the scrutiny of the corporation's finest solicitors, and Abram, as her sole surviving descendant, had received the bond on her life.
+
+ 
+
+Not that the company knew that. As far as they were aware, Alex Duval had been the son of Dr. Jennifer Duval, the scientist they lost on a disastrous survey, and Abram was nothing more than the SecUnit they'd purchased from the lowest bidder. That Abram was no more a SecUnit than he was Alex Duval notwithstanding.
+
+ 
+
+The whole plan had been Mary's idea. She'd been the driving force keeping them alive for the fifteen years they'd spent on the run. Posing as a scientist on a corporate-led scientific survey had been their riskiest identity yet, born out of desperation and the need to get as far underground as possible.
+
+ 
+
+Abram hadn't thought he'd lose his mother to a fake identity of all things, any more than he'd envisioned that her death would leave him trapped masquerading as a SecUnit. Nowhere in the plan did they ever account for her death, and Abram tried not to blame her for that, on days he could stand to think about her at all.
+
+ 
+
+Tried not to remember the cold way her eyes had glanced off him during the last months of her life, or the way she'd hid her illness and rebuffed his efforts to help her during the mutiny.
+
+ 
+
+The original plan had been for Mary to buy out Abram's contract once the survey was completed. There was a voice in his head that whispered she'd never intended to make it out alive. That at some point she'd given up on him, and this was the fate she'd chosen.
+
+ 
+
+The voice was getting harder to ignore the longer he went on. With his mother dead, Abram had no way to prove his citizenship. The contacts they'd used for every instance of forged identification had come from his mother's ties to her criminal family, and without her Abram had no access to them. All his resources were poured into making sure no one he was working for discovered he was human, and a spliced one at that.
+
+ 
+
+His augmentation was extensive, the sort that resulted from catastrophic injury and blurred the lines between construct and human. Proving his humanity would make the corporations more inclined to destroy him, not less. Not when the brewing movement to grant SecUnits rights outside the Corporation Rim would be a devastating blow to profits. The best he could hope for upon discovery was having his labor sold to a mining colony for the next twenty years, as sentencing for impersonating a SecUnit. The worst involved dissection and torture, and that was before his father was dragged into the picture. At least as a SecUnit there was the potential for escape in between surveys.
+
+ 
+
+Not that it really made his current position any more bearable. He'd been assigned the security detail for Vulpecula, a small team of scientists working at the behest of a corporation who'd truly gone above and beyond when it came to supplying the cheapest package they could scrounge.
+
+ 
+
+Abram got a close look at the exact nature of their shitty supplies as he unloaded and set them up. Everything was a garish shade of orange from the two hoppers they'd been issued down to the seven inter-connected domes that made up the habitat. All second-hand and standard issue for the frozen planets where visibility was a major concern. It stuck out like a sore thumb among the scrubland of the desert-like climate they were in.
+
+ 
+
+Abram had his interface start running diagnostics on the hoppers as he moved the rest of their supplies into the habitat. He had no desire to set foot in them until he'd ensured they wouldn't fall out of the sky from one failure or another. He'd already double-checked the power and recycling systems on the side of the habitat after they'd been set up and connected to the HubSystem, and he'd gone as far as triple-checking the environmental system. The atmosphere was breathable, which left the habitat without any airlocks, but long-term exposure to the air outside would result in hyperoxia.
+
+ 
+
+Abram was moving everything into the habitat when SecSystem sent him the information package containing everything relevant to the survey. He started the download, before scanning everything. There were maps, info packets on the flora and fauna, a brief excerpt about the survey's political leader, and Abram noticed with a sickened jolt, a new warning about potential diseases, quarantine protocols, and mandatory vaccinations.
+
+ 
+
+The unexpected grief hit him like a freight ship. Abram threw up a fake vitals' reading for MedSystem as he felt his heartbeat skyrocket and his breath come out in shuddering gasps. He could almost taste the stench of burning flesh through his helmet filters; they'd made him burn his mother's body to prevent any contamination, and it had taken hours for her burn. He'd smelled her on his skin for days afterwards.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Performance reliability at 96% and dropping.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+Abram drew a harsh breath through his nose and held it painfully in his lungs. HubSystem pinged him with the results from the hopper diagnostics and he accepted the data transfer, desperate for anything to pull himself back from the aching chasm of grief.
+
+ 
+
+The hopper diagnostics were dry and riddled with engineering jargon that far surpassed any of the SecUnit education packets. An easy point of sabotage anyone could exploit had he truly been a SecUnit. Deciphering it captured his attention just long enough for him to even out his breathing, and he forced all thoughts of Mary far from his mind as he painstakingly read the report line by line.
+
+ 
+
+By the time he'd finished reading, his heartbeat had slowed enough that he stopped running the transmission that hid his vitals from MedSystem.
+
+ 
+
+Abram didn't bother with the rest of the Survey packet, instead banishing it to external storage, before burying himself in the work of unpacking the supplies for Vulpecula.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+It took twenty hours to finish setting up the habitat, and Abram powered through the exhaustion and hunger to finish under the time-constraint set by HubSystem. Exploratory surveys were expensive, and the Company had turned spinning a profit into an art form; maximized efficiency and inexpensive labor were built into the very function of SecUnits. Abram had only made this far due in part to the fact that even the Company's most strenuous demands were nothing compared to a lifetime spent on the run.
+
+ 
+
+The last room Abram unpacked was the Security Ready room; a storage unit for all defensive and security equipment, himself included. The walls were lined with boxes packed full of weapons, security drones, and perimeter alarms. What little space was left was occupied by the cubicle intended for SecUnit repair and resupply. Inside was a hard, plastic cot that would mold to his body, and several leads intended to connect to his ports. It was uncomfortable as it looked; he'd had to create and implement a subroutine to suppress all unconscious and extraneous movement to make it even usable.
+
+ 
+
+ Abram's organic to mechanical body part ratio was drastically different from the standard issue SecUnit, something that would immediately be logged into the system if he left it untampered. Hacking into it to adjust the settings was almost routine by now. The cubicles were the same across the board for SecUnits, and ComfortUnits, which meant he could exploit the customization written into the design without breaking any of the more delicate functions.
+
+ 
+
+He'd just finished altering the last setting when a message from Wilds, the leading scientist on the survey, relayed orders to meet in the central hub.
+
+ 
+
+Abram sent a quick affirmative over the feed. He'd had to install another subroutine, one that erased his subvocalizations, before he'd been able to respond over the feed without blowing his cover. Humans wouldn't notice, but other SecUnits would, as would any construct mining the data after the survey.
+
+ 
+
+He exited through two secure interior doors and into the crew area, before making his way to the central hub. It was the largest of the domes that made up that habitat, intended to be used as a communal space. Already there were mugs and meal packs scattered across the consoles, and spare jackets from the uniforms draped over the utilitarian furniture. No one reacted to his presence, so Abram pretended not to see the mess, and instead pulled up and scanned everyone's files. There were nine of them in total, the smallest survey he'd been on yet. Two of them, Doe and Minyard were related. Twins. Wilds and Boyd were officially partnered, unusual in and of itself as it doubled the cost of the bonds on their lives. Everyone else fit the standard makeup of a survey.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds looked up from the report she was reading after nineteen seconds, more than enough time for Abram to review all the files twice over and studied him with a disproportionate amount of interest. It made Abram grateful for his armor. SecUnits were human enough to look it. The level of sentience necessary to compete with human security consultants required as much, but to dodge a drop in profits due to anyone's moral scruples, the company had designed the armor to obscure that humanity and look as robotic as possible.
+
+ 
+
+It was made of featureless carbon-fiber, bulky enough to be imposing, and had a sealed helmet with a face-shield he could opaque at will. An intact governor module would punish too much time spent out of it. Abram's module was nothing more than shredded code that he'd long since stripped anything of use from, but that was one rule he followed with any regularity. The last thing he needed was his appearance broadcast everywhere.
+
+ 
+
+""You're our SecUnit.""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds' statement was painfully obvious, and Abram frowned behind the safety of his helmet. 
+
+ 
+
+""I'm Dan Wilds,"" she continued, as if Abram could forget that either.
+
+ 
+
+""I reviewed your file.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram limited his response to a short monotone, unable to inject any emotion that wasn't irritation.  
+
+ 
+
+""Of course, you did,"" Wilds allowed, ""that's part of why I called for you.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram's frown deepened. Scientists tended towards two opinions of SecUnits: that they were tools, little more than expensive machinery built for their convenience. Or, they were dangerous, heavily armed, semi-sentient pieces of spyware, capable of malfunctioning or going rogue.
+
+ 
+
+There was no third opinion.
+
+ 
+
+Abram hadn't encountered many scientists who entertained the second opinion. Those willing to work to expand the Corporation Rim had too much self-importance to see how little the company cared about their general welfare, and nowhere near enough paranoia about anything else.
+
+ 
+
+He'd seen in Wilds file that she had futilely argued against being issued a SecUnit, but that was a common enough occurrence in surveys. The cost of renting a SecUnit was exorbitant, and many surveys tried dodging the cost by hiring human detail. Doe was Vulpecula's security consultant. Unfortunately, SecUnits were required regardless of the presence of alternative security measures.
+
+ 
+
+""How much information do you send to the company?""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds' question was startling in its blunt nature and put her firmly in the camp of scientists who were of the second opinion.
+
+ 
+
+""All of it."" Abram lied. The governor module required SecUnits to report everything through SecSystem. There were workarounds of course, data made to disappear through the temporary storage in MedSystem without anyone the wiser, but he was too reliant on that loophole to cue anyone else in on it.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds nodded, looking unsurprised, but the rest of the crew exploded into a chorus of groans and swearing.
+
+ 
+
+Abram eyed them all curiously. Their files didn't list them as inexperienced; this couldn't be their first survey with a SecUnit.
+
+ 
+
+""What if we were to order you not to send anything?""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds' question held a challenge in it and Abram wanted to roll his eyes. As if it would be that easy.
+
+ 
+
+""I'd ask you how naive you thought the company was,"" he returned, careful to keep his phrasing strictly hypothetical so HubSystem wouldn't log it as disrespectful.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds nodded thoughtfully as though his response was one that required parsing.
+
+ 
+
+""There were some potential hostiles in the survey packet that have me worried,"" she said, abruptly switching subjects. ""I'd like for you to check for any tracks in the area, and double-check that this is the best location for our habitat.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram raised his eyebrows at the transparent attempt to remove him from the hub. Wilds drastically underestimated his surveillance range if this was her solution. Unless she sabotaged HubSystem, or transported Abram an entire ocean away, the security feed would continue supplying Abram with audio-equipped video of all the ongoings in the habitat.  
+
+ 
+
+He sent an affirmative over the feed, however, and left the central hub, curious despite himself about what they wanted to keep from the company.   
+
+ 
+
+The worst thing about the planet they were surveying was easily the heat. It was blistering and all pervasive, sucking the moisture from everything, and seeping in through his armor to slowly roast him alive. The metal ports where his limbs connected to flesh were uncomfortably warm, and the rays from the sun that hung fat and heavy in the sky beat tirelessly against the face shield of his helmet, doing its level best to blind him.
+
+ 
+
+Abram shared his feed with Wilds letting her see the still landscape he was circling, devoid of all tracks. He'd finally braved the survey packet, pulling up the planetary details, and what he'd found had put him in a less than charitable mood. The days and nights lasted for fourteen cycles each, the planet slowly succumbing to the cosmic forces of tidal locking. Potential hostiles wouldn't brave the lethal heat of the day until sundown. Their only threat until then would be the near cataclysmic storm that would land in roughly seventy-two hours. Security protocol required that he secure the hoppers and lock down the habitat during that time, but until then nothing was required of him.
+
+ 
+
+It was a waste of time and resources to have him patrol when the drones they had could've just as easily done the same job.
+
+ 
+
+Abram pulled up the security feed from the main hub, irritated enough to justify actively eavesdropping on his clients. All nine of them were right where he'd left them, though significantly more agitated. Wilds stood with her arms crossed and an expression of sheer disbelief on her face as she stared down Day.
+
+ 
+
+""Explain it to me again, Kevin"" she demanded. ""Riko tried to kill you, because he thinks joining us on a survey is breaching the terms of your contract with EtaCorvi? The same contract that he publicly released you from?""
+
+ 
+
+ Day scowled from where he was slumped over in the corner, looking as pathetic as a human knew how to. ""It's an unspoken rule in the Corporation Rim that even when a company lets someone go, they're still company property. Riko thought he was destroying my career. I wasn't supposed to find employment outside the Corporation Rim.""
+
+ 
+
+""As much as I wish I didn't see the logic there, I do. What I still can't understand is where sending literal assassins after you fits into all this.""  
+
+ 
+
+""I was working on a project separate from Riko: a new detection system for strange synthetics. He thought it was a waste of time."" Day sounded offended even now. ""When he released me, he did it without the proper authorization, and before the project was completed. Now the company wants the finished project, but I lost access to my files, and Riko doesn't know enough about synthetics to complete it without me. If I hadn't signed with you, it would've been as simple as reactivating my contract, and Riko wouldn't be under fire from EtaCorvi.""
+
+ 
+
+Dan's eyebrows were climbing steadily higher on her face. ""How does killing you fix any of that?""
+
+ 
+
+""If I'm dead he can spin it that I forced him to release me and joined Vulpecula in a plot to defraud the company until one of my other victims finally caught up with me."" Day sounded petulant despite the seriousness of his accusation.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds looked disgusted. ""An allegation like that has to require more than just circumstantial evidence.""
+
+ 
+
+""Evidence can be manufactured--""
+
+ 
+
+""That's not how it works,"" Reynolds interrupted, scowling at Day from where she sat, looking more like a recruiting advert than a scientist.
+
+ 
+
+""How would you know?""
+
+ 
+
+""How do you think, genius? My parents own a company that subcontracts ComfortUnits for mining operations.""
+
+ 
+
+""Yeah, and they disowned you years ago,"" Day sneered.
+
+ 
+
+""And then I became a registered Solicitor, so why don't you shut up and listen to me.""
+
+ 
+
+Day glared darkly and let his head fall back against the wall with an audible thump but otherwise stayed silent.
+
+ 
+
+""As I was saying,"" Reynolds continued pointedly, ""Riko can't manufacture the evidence in this case, because it would directly implicate another company in your death. EtaCorvi is one of the biggest corporations and has a stranglehold on the economy. Every other smaller corporation has solicitors on standby, just waiting for a chance to either buy it out, or force it under, and if they can get EtaCorvi on a charge of manufacturing evidence on top of a libel charge, the payout is going to be enormous.""
+
+ 
+
+""So then why is Riko trying to kill Kevin?"" Wilds asked.
+
+ 
+
+""He isn't,"" Reynolds said with a self-important toss of her hair, ""those were bounty hunters, not assassins.""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds looked alarmed. ""So Riko's trying to abduct Kevin? That's not any better, Allison.""
+
+ 
+
+Reynolds shrugged. ""I never said it was.""
+
+ 
+
+""So, what do we do now?"" Wilds directed the question to the room at large, before turning to Doe. ""Andrew, what do you think?""
+
+ 
+
+Doe lifted a single, judgmental eyebrow. ""I think,"" he started scornfully, shifting his dead-eyed gaze to stare directly into a security camera, ""discussing a plan of action where a contracted SecUnit can hear you is a great way to get Kevin killed, regardless of Riko's intentions.""
+
+ 
+
+Fuck. Abram grimaced at the indirect eye contact as the hub fell silent at Doe's announcement. He had to be spliced if he'd felt Abram's presence in the feed, and that wasn't on his file. Doe being augmented was almost as dangerous as Day having connections to EtaCorvi.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds pinged his feed. ""SecUnit, are you watching us?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram reluctantly sent back an affirmative.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds swore, rubbing at her temples. ""Is there any way at all you can keep this conversation from the company?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram nearly raised his eyebrows at her audacity. They'd just discussed the corporate disregard for life, and she was asking a SecUnit for help.
+
+ 
+
+""HubSystem automatically stores and transmits all mentions of the Company for review,"" he told her. ""Once the satellite is in position there's nothing that can stop the transmission unless HubSystem goes offline. The rest of the data that omits company mention is backed up in SecSystem storage until the end of the survey.""
+
+ 
+
+""How often is the satellite in position?""
+
+ 
+
+The question came from Doe, whose suspicion hadn't lessened.
+
+ 
+
+""The satellite is semi-synchronous, and the sidereal day is six-hundred and seventy-four hours.""
+
+ 
+
+Doe didn't look impressed. ""That's not an answer, that's an equation""
+
+ 
+
+""It's a SecUnit, not an astronomer,"" Day interrupted, ""you can hardly expect it to supply you with answers it doesn't know.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram bristled at the condescending dismissal but held his tongue.
+
+ 
+
+""Wait, how did it know about the satellite?"" Reynolds demanded, her voice drenched in suspicion, ""that's not in the information packet.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram struggled to keep his voice level as he rolled his eyes. ""They use the same satellite for every survey: one designed for communication and shared between multiple survey groups. Would you like to know how I detect security threats next?""
+
+ 
+
+""Speaking of threats,"" Wilds cut in, as Reynolds' face darkened, ""what are your thoughts on the habitat location?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram took the subject change in stride and focused in on a cave system three-hundred meters away. It rose out of the ground in a massive karst, the most distinctive landmark after their orange monstrosity of a habitat. Not even the looming mountains that ringed the distant horizon compared.
+
+ 
+
+""The strongest threat projection lies over there. Any organisms large enough to be dangerous will be aestivating in that cave system for the next two-hundred and forty hours.""
+
+ 
+
+""Will that be a problem for us?""
+
+ 
+
+By ""us"" Wilds plainly meant ""you"".
+
+ 
+
+Abram pulled up Hostile Number One on the feed. It was a hyper-carnivorous quadruped about two meters tall and six meters long. It was covered in thick, overlapping keratinized plates and could reach speeds upwards of sixty-four kilometers per hour. If the packet was to be believed, it would take an entire team of CombatUnits to successfully take it down.
+
+ 
+
+""As long as this isn't what's living in the cave system, we'll be fine.""
+
+ 
+
+""That's your professional opinion? Fine?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram forced down his irritation and displayed images from the information packet on the feed: other organisms with lower threat projections.
+
+ 
+
+""They're social enough to form large packs. So far, they've left the other survey groups alone. Which means they either have zero interest in our presence, or we're a big enough threat to deter them from attacking. If anything, the greatest danger is the infighting our presence will create if we've intruded on an established territory, and even that will only affect your data.""
+
+ 
+
+""I've got a question,"" Gordon spoke up, looking largely annoyed by the conversation topic."" What's the fucking point of sending us on these surveys if the company already knows everything?""
+
+ 
+
+""Have you ever wondered how the company even gets this information?"" Boyd added, looking curious.
+
+ 
+
+""Drones,"" Abram said pointedly, and sent a reading of the external temperature. The ports where his limbs connected had passed the threshold of uncomfortable, deep into the territory of painful and if he stayed outside any longer, he'd have to regrow the skin.
+
+ 
+
+""Right,"" Wilds said, cutting off Reynolds who'd opened her mouth to argue, ""SecUnit, why don't you come back inside, there's no point in keeping you out there if you're just performing data analysis.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram sent an affirmative, and cut his circle of the habitat short, making his way back to the entrance with no small amount of relief.
+
+ 
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+The tension inside the main hub was palpable.
+
+ 
+
+It had been days since he'd set up the habitat, and Wilds had kept him busy and away from the crew during that time. His return inside had been short-lived once they'd needed samples collected for their research. Between his flesh cooking against the searing metal of his limbs, and the growing conviction that he was going to die before he ever escaped, his mood had curdled.
+
+ 
+
+The lack of sleep hadn't helped.
+
+ 
+
+In addition to the samples, Day had Abram mining data while the others slept. For all that he'd disguised the project as a means of filling the gaps in the packet, Day was looking for something specific. Abram could tell that much, even if he had yet to find it, and Day made no secret of his frustration at that fact.
+
+ 
+
+The eyes he felt on him were accusatory. Eight pairs watching him where he stood guarding the door to the hub during Day's latest rant.
+
+ 
+
+Abram stonily withstood it.
+
+ 
+
+Walker was trying to restrain Reynolds, the current recipient of Day's ire. An argument about the fracture process of rock plate that he was only half-listening to had devolved into a screaming match, and he was doing his best not to get involved. He had two methods for solving problems: hacking them or killing them and this situation called for neither.
+
+ 
+
+An alert from SecSystem caught his attention, and he pulled it up on his feed, using the distraction to ignore the yelling. A screaming client was an alive client; he only had to worry if they went silent.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Wind speeds registering at 80 kilometers per hour and rising. A severe weather advisory is in effect. Secure all clients within the habitat and initiate standard lockdown procedure
+
+. 
+
+
+ 
+
+Abram frowned at the alert. He'd set up a makeshift Doppler system on one of his many sample retrievals, and hooked it up to HubSystem in preparation for the expected storm system moving in, but there should've been a series of alerts prior to this one.
+
+ 
+
+Abram absentmindedly forwarded the alert to Wilds along with the portion of the information packet detailing the strength and duration of the storms in the region, as he pulled up the data history. If it was a problem with the alert system, it could be a case of signal interference.
+
+ 
+
+It was empty.
+
+ 
+
+Abram fought down a wave of incredulity and immediately opened the memory storage files.
+
+ 
+
+Also, empty.
+
+ 
+
+He let out an inaudible hiss of frustration and switched to HubSystem, tracking the source of the alert. There were a series of older alerts, all over-ridden by MedSystem, pertaining to humidity levels, changes in barometric pressure, and a significant temperature drop. Everything that would've given Abram enough time to secure the Habitat before a lockdown was required.
+
+ 
+
+None of the older alerts had been tagged as medical. They shouldn't have been sent to MedSystem, but occasionally files would be directed there for temporary storage. He guessed the Doppler system malfunction had diverted data there for an automatic backup.
+
+ 
+
+Abram ground his teeth in frustration as he sent notice of the Doppler system malfunction to Wilds, so she wouldn't do anything stupid, like have Abram retrieve it. Then he set a security interdiction for the next seventy-two hours through HubSystem.
+
+ 
+
+Abram felt Doe's proximity in the feed for the first time as he ensured no one could leave the habitat, a silent, judgmental presence lurking in the peripheral.
+
+ 
+
+Abram scowled at the blatant threat and tapped him through the feed.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+System Unit Acknowledge: Query
+
+?
+
+
+ 
+
+Doe didn't respond.
+
+ 
+
+""Wait, what's going on?"" Boyd asked, looking up from the alert on his interface. ""Why are we locking down the habitat?""
+
+ 
+
+Doe disappeared from the feed and Wilds answered before Abram could, still looking through the readings he'd forwarded.
+
+ 
+
+""The weather patterns in the info packet weren't an exaggeration. We've got a storm system moving in that makes the planet EnsVeneris was terraforming look downright peaceful.""
+
+ 
+
+Boyd looked concerned. ""Is there a reason every planet we're sent to survey tries to kill us?""
+
+ 
+
+""Two out of three planets is a coincidence.""
+
+ 
+
+Boyd's skepticism was almost palpable. ""Is that what Janie said?""
+
+ 
+
+""Matt...""
+
+ 
+
+""You're going to look at what happened to her and say you don't think the company is deliberately sending us to explore deathtraps?""
+
+ 
+
+""What happened to Janie was a tragedy, but it wasn't orchestrated in a plot against us,"" Wilds explained in a level, reassuring tone, revealing nothing of the elevated stress levels being sent to MedSystem. ""I think Kevin's situation has us all on edge, and that planetary exploration has always been this dangerous.""
+
+ 
+
+Boyd took off his glasses and dragged a hand down his face. ""Maybe..."" he allowed with a sigh. ""What exactly are we looking at here?""
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit?"" Wilds asked, turning towards Abram.
+
+ 
+
+Abram felt a flash of irritation as he was once more pinned under everyone's gaze like a specimen for study.
+
+ 
+
+""The planet we're surveying is known for its high wind speeds due to the atmospheric drag from the tidal locking. Our location lies in between a plateau and coastal mountain range; conditions optimal to hold the storm in place until it dissipates. We can expect a high precipitation supercell with enough energy to last up to one-hundred and sixty-eight hours.""
+
+ 
+
+Boyd let out a low whistle, his scientific curiosity overcoming his common sense. ""Any chance you've got instruments to get decent readings of it?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram frowned at the enthusiasm behind his helmet. ""The habitat is under lockdown in compliance with security protocol,"" He reminded him.
+
+ 
+
+Boyd seemed undeterred. ""What about drones?""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds managed to respond before Abram, if only because she wasn't incapable of calling him an idiot.
+
+ 
+
+""The wind, Matt. We're never going to see those drones again if we send them.""
+
+ 
+
+""Oh. Right."" Boyd looked properly chastised. ""So, we have nothing?""
+
+ 
+
+""There's a Doppler system sending periodic updates,"" Abram relented. ""But the malfunction with its storage means the only data accessible is the information it's deemed proprietary.""
+
+ 
+
+""Can you fix it?""
+
+ 
+
+""No,"" Abram lied. Fixing it would require him to retrieve it.
+
+ 
+
+""So, what are we supposed to do for one-hundred and sixty-eight hours?"" Reynolds demanded directing leftover hostility his way.
+
+ 
+
+Abram tactfully refrained from telling her he didn't care.
+
+ 
+
+""We'll contact the nearest survey party,"" Wilds replied, bringing up the feed on the nearest terminal. ""If they're willing to share data, we won't fall behind on research.""
+
+ 
+
+""Are you sure that's the best idea?"" Hemmick asked, jamming a thumb in Day's direction. ""Doesn't everyone want a piece of Kevin?""
+
+ 
+
+""They can have him,"" Gordon snorted. ""In fact, let's see if that sweetens the deal.""
+
+ 
+
+Day's eyes narrowed, and his lips curled in contempt. ""You--""
+
+ 
+
+""Enough,"" Wilds interrupted, not looking up from the interface. ""Our contract has a confidentially clause, no one will even know Kevin's on this survey.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram frowned. Confidentiality clauses were expensive, and deliberately written with loopholes to prevent anything from being protected. His mother had always reacted with rage when she'd seen them offered, furiously muttering about how they got more people killed than mining accidents.
+
+ 
+
+Reynold's scoff let him know at least one of his clients was smart enough not to buy into them.
+
+ 
+
+""Right, a confidentially clause will totally protect Kevin. It's not like it lets everyone with incentive to buy up information know that we're hiding something. Why don't we just cut out the middleman and cash in on Kevin's bounty ourselves?""
+
+ 
+
+""Allison you're not helping.""
+
+ 
+
+""Fine, don't listen to me. It's not like I know what I'm talking about. Just remember when Riko gets his hands on Kevin that I warned you."" She mimed wiping her hands clean of the situation.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds looked up from her terminal with a sigh. ""Alright, I'm listening.""
+
+ 
+
+""The damage is already done with the clause,"" Reynolds said in an imperious tone ""But if you let me look at the contract, I can at least see the extent of it.""
+
+ 
+
+""I'll send it now.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram used HubSystem to disguise his download of the contract as Wilds sent it over the feed, not trusting either of them to get a clear read on the situation. If a corporation the size of EtaCorvi was going to come down on their small survey group, Abram needed to know. Better to risk dying of exposure finding his own way off the planet they were stranded on, than risk anyone discovering what he was.
+
+ 
+
+Abram read through the entire clause in the time it took Reynolds to open the file. It looked airtight, barring both assignability and solicitation, with an added choice of law clause. Forcing the company to comply with the law outside of the corporation rim would even out the power imbalance enough to make legal recourse feasible. The liquidated damages provisions would void the irreparable harm element if it ever went to court but was a substantial enough payout not to matter. Whoever had negotiated with the company had done a decent enough job not shooting themselves in the foot. There was only one problem.
+
+ 
+
+""If Day's detection system for strange synthetics warrants bounty hunters, it likely qualifies as a misappropriated trade secret not protected by the clause.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram forced himself not to react as nine pairs of eyes fixated on him. The threat projection of the room rose by twelve percent and Walker alone accounted for half of it. Her serene expression and relaxed stance didn't suggest violence, but Abram didn't keep take his eyes off her, even when Reynolds broke the stunned silence.
+
+ 
+
+""That only matters if the company uses it as grounds to fight the contract in court.""
+
+ 
+
+""And if EtaCorvi convinces them to fight it?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram could see Wilds shaking her head in the corner of his vision. ""They'd have to buy out every company willing to work with scientists from freehold planets. Not even EtaCorvi would go that far.""
+
+ 
+
+""If Day has already been found by bounty hunters, they won't have to."" Abram pointed out.
+
+ 
+
+""The creepy fucking spy-bot is right,"" Gordon said, looking as though the words physically pained him to admit.
+
+ 
+
+Reynolds rounded on him, ""Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was speaking to a Solicitor. No, please, why don't you take the lead on this one. I'm sure the SecUnit can help.""
+
+ 
+
+. ""Sure thing, babe,"" Gordon drawled. ""But first I want to hear your perspective on this case as a bounty hunter. Since you've got all that experience.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram frowned. There was nothing in Gordon's file to suggest he'd been a bounty hunter.
+
+ 
+
+""Didn't you get caught?"" Boyd asked.
+
+ 
+
+Gordon waved him away dismissively. ""All part of the job.""
+
+ 
+
+""And the mining colony you were sentenced to, was that part of the job?"" Minyard asked snidely.
+
+ 
+
+Hemmick snickered at Gordon's expense, while Wilds sighed. ""Was there a point, Seth?""
+
+ 
+
+Gordon tore himself away from glaring at Minyard. ""Yeah, Riko won't have to buy shit if Kevin's already been found by bounty hunters, which means your confidentiality clause is worth fuck-all. There's no honor among thieves, half the Corporation Rim probably knows where he is by now.""
+
+ 
+
+""We were the last survey sent planet-side, and everyone is cut off from the news feed. What are the chances the others know Kevin's here?""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds was looking at Abram expectantly, so he ran the numbers. ""Low,"" he admitted reluctantly. ""But they'll recognize him when their survey is up, and they regain access to the news feed. All they'll have to do is wait at a nearby docking ring to catch him.""
+
+ 
+
+""Tired scientists are a lot easier to deal with than trained bounty hunters,"" Boyd argued.
+
+ 
+
+""And if Seth could do it, the trained bounty hunters probably aren't much better,"" Hemmick tacked on.
+
+ 
+
+""Andrew?"" Wilds asked.
+
+ 
+
+Doe looked bored. ""What?""
+
+ 
+
+""You're our security specialist, what do you think?""
+
+ 
+
+""I told you when you signed Kevin there'd be risks. I can handle what's mine. If you believe you can trust the SecUnit to protect the rest of your crew, it's your call.""
+
+ 
+
+""You told us not to trust the SecUnit.""
+
+ 
+
+Doe shrugged.
+
+ 
+
+""Great,"" Reynolds said with a vicious eyeroll. ""Another fucking cryptic answer. Remind me, why did we sign him again?""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds ignored her, turning to Walker. ""If this goes south, do you think you can handle it?""
+
+ 
+
+Walker tilted her head, a considering look replacing her normally serene expression. Abram felt a wave of unease as the threat projection rose again.
+
+ 
+
+""Yes, I think so.""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds nodded, tension bleeding out of the line of her shoulders. ""Alright. Unless there are any other objections, I'm establishing contact with CalxViva.""
+
+ 
+
+Here's a little proof I haven't died of overwork (yet). The next chapter of Patron Saints is most likely going to be a month late for anyone here who follows it. I'm swamped with work, a volunteer project I picked up, and sorting out admissions to a pharm tech program, so time to write has been scarce on the ground. Hope you enjoyed, and a happy belated valentines to you all!
+
+I found myself with some unexpected free time so you all get an early update!
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+Wilds wanted Abram at her side as she called CalxViva on the vidscreen.
+
+ 
+
+He didn't bother telling her the other party had at least two more SecUnits than they did and weren't likely to view him as a threat. He was beginning to suspect that, like most of their files, Vulpecula's experience was bullshit.
+
+ 
+
+He stood silently behind her left shoulder as the two of them waited for the connection to be established. Wilds hadn't let anyone else stay, and Abram privately agreed with her. From a security standpoint they were a liability, utterly incapable of presenting a united front. Hiding Day was also easier when the entire crew was absent.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds looked perturbed. The soft glow of the vidscreen cast dark shadows across her face and highlighted her exhaustion, as she appeared to flag for the first time under the weight of her position.
+
+ 
+
+It was gone in an instant, replaced by a cordial smile as CalxViva's survey leader appeared on the screen.
+
+ 
+
+""I'm Danielle Wilds, survey leader for Vulpecula, and I'd like to discuss an exchange if you have a moment.""
+
+ 
+
+With her hands clasped loosely in front of her, and her shoulders squared with a casual confidence as she spoke in a smooth, measured tone; Wilds was the epitome of professionalism.
+
+ 
+
+In Contrast CalxViva's leader was sprawled sideways across a chair, smirking insolently through Wild's introduction.
+
+ 
+
+""Leverett. CalxViva,"" She returned with an exaggerated salute. ""And I might have a moment. Depending on your offer, that is.""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds managed to keep her smile in place. Abram saw it falter slightly.
+
+ 
+
+""There's a storm in our region interfering with our ability to gather samples. We'd be willing to share our data with you if you did the same in turn.""
+
+ 
+
+Leverett appeared to consider it, tapping a finger absently against her chin. ""And what's in it for us?""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds' smile turned apologetic. ""I'm afraid data is all we have to offer. None of us brought anything of value planetside.""
+
+ 
+
+Leverett remained undeterred. ""I heard an interesting rumor,"" she started. ""Perhaps you know something. Is it true that Kevin Day has left EtaCorvi?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram tensed and beside him Wilds stopped breathing.
+
+ 
+
+""Kevin Day? I'm sorry I don't think I've heard that name.""
+
+ 
+
+Leverett didn't look fooled, but she nodded anyways. ""Shame. Well rumor has it he's on a survey on this very planet. There's a bounty on his head large enough to buy half the Corporation Rim, so if you happen to learn anything, I'd consider that valuable enough to supply you with data. Our survey got lucky enough to land in the twilight belt, so we've got a surplus.""
+
+ 
+
+""I'll keep that in mind,"" Wilds said with a wry smile.
+
+ 
+
+Leverett raised an eyebrow. ""See that you do.""
+
+ 
+
+The connection ended, and Wilds immediately let out a shaky breath, dragging a hand down her face as she trembled slightly.
+
+ 
+
+""I thought you said they wouldn't know about Kevin.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram scowled, similarly shaken. ""I said the chances were low, not zero.""
+
+ 
+
+""Well, they weren't low enough,"" Wilds snapped, before looking strangely apologetic. She took a deep breath, smoothing down her curls as she took a moment to compose herself.
+
+ 
+
+""That was out of line, I'm sorry.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram didn't say anything. Wilds' file had to be entirely forged if she was apologizing to a SecUnit. On any other survey that would've been reassuring, now it left him feeling cold.
+
+Wilds sighed at his silence, shaking her head. ""I should warn the others.""
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+The decision to contact the other survey group came with the stipulation that Reynolds take his place at Wilds' side.
+
+ 
+
+Abram stood off camera watching the pair warily. Reynolds was volatile; her knowledge came at the cost of her temper, and if this survey leader was anything like Leverett, they could find themselves with a two-front war.
+
+ 
+
+Despite this Wilds looked a lot calmer with Reynolds at her side. He imagined a familiar face, a familiar human face, had a soothing affect his own appearance lacked. He wished he could say the same of them.
+
+ 
+
+When the connection was established, Abram expected the same, smooth professional mask from Wilds, and a similar approximation from Reynolds, instead their faces twisted in shock and horror as the unmistakable sounds of violence echoed from the vidscreen.
+
+ 
+
+Abram was at their side in an instant. The tortured screams had him shielding his clients before his systems could deliver a negative threat assessment.
+
+ 
+
+Onscreen the survey leader stood hunched around a sonic drill as long as he was tall, wild-eyed and covered in blood.
+
+ 
+
+""This is Jeremy Knox. AjaxCentri. The SecUnits... they've--""
+
+ 
+
+A sudden scream and crash cut him off, and he whipped around raising the drill like a weapon. ""Laila! Laila!""
+
+ 
+
+There was no response, only the sound of an energy weapon firing, and Knox whirled around more frantic than before. ""Our coordinates are 34deg01'13.84"" North -118deg17'8.27"" West. Please--""
+
+ 
+
+The connection cut without warning.
+
+ 
+
+Abram's world narrowed to the darkened vidscreen as the implications hit him squarely in the sternum. The energy canon he'd heard fired off-camera was the same model as the ones embedded in his forearms, standard for all SecUnits. Against a single SecUnit a survey party stood no chance. Even Abram, just human enough to be laughably ineffectual, could slaughter a survey party twice the size of Vulpecula unchallenged. More than one SecUnit... there was nothing anyone could do for AjaxCentri, especially not if their communications had been hacked.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit, did you get those coordinates?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram turned around to see Wilds, naively unafraid, naked determination lining her face, as she pulled up the feed.
+
+ 
+
+""The security interdiction--"" he started.
+
+ 
+
+""Override it.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram ground his teeth in frustration. A rescue mission in these conditions was suicide, and that was before throwing multiple rogue SecUnits into the mix.
+
+ 
+
+ ""The Hoppers can't withstand the outside wind speeds. Protocol indicates--""
+
+ 
+
+""Forget the security protocol, there are people dying. I need those coordinates now.""
+
+ 
+
+Had he been alone with her, Abram would've fought harder. But under the combined weight of Wilds' direct order and Reynold's shrewd gaze, he conceded.
+
+ 
+
+""34deg01'13.84"" North -118deg17'8.27"" West.""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds turned to Reynolds as she was entering the coordinates. ""I need Matt, Andrew, Aaron, and Nicky. You will stay here with Seth, Renee, and the SecUnit to guard Kevin.""
+
+ 
+
+""Hemmick's medical training is rudimentary at best compared to Minyard,"" Abram objected. ""Swap him out with me, you need the security more than a second medic.""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds shook her head, ""I need you guarding Kevin in case CalxViva makes a move.""
+
+ 
+
+""CalxViva isn't going to make a move in this storm, they'd have to have a death wish. One you share if you leave me behind.""
+
+ 
+
+""Is that a threat?"" Reynolds demanded, her gaze sharpening as she dissected him.
+
+ 
+
+Abram returned her stare with a cool one of his own. ""My job is to alert you to all potential threats. Your inexperience is the only one present.""
+
+ 
+
+""My inexperience!?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram ignored Reynolds' outraged spluttering, instead using SecSystem to freeze HubSystem's access to its audio feed. He turned back to face Wilds once his subroutine had been implemented.
+
+ 
+
+""You're charging head-first into a conflict with a fractured team, whose credentials are partially, if not entirely, falsified. You have no plan, no weapons, and no way to know if the survey group you're rescuing is even still alive. Leaving me behind is a good way to guarantee most of your survey meets the same fate as AjaxCentri.""
+
+ 
+
+Wilds stared at him in shock a moment before she pressed her lips together in a firm line. ""Note taken.""
+
+ 
+
+""You're seriously listening to it?""
+
+ 
+
+""Give me a better plan, and I won't have to.""
+
+ 
+
+Reynolds opened her mouth, and then closed it again, looking frustrated. ""This isn't going to end well,"" she said bitterly, after what felt like an eternity.
+
+ 
+
+""No,"" Abram agreed. ""It's not.""
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Abram sat in the cockpit of the small Hopper, acting as Wilds' co-pilot as the storm around them raged. The Hopper bucked and swayed like a ship at sea as it was buffeted by the winds, and the roiling clouds were illuminated red and blue in startling bursts by the lightning. Hail assaulted them from all directions, and Abram was almost grateful for the way he had to wrestle with the controls to keep from falling out of the sky. It kept the memories of his mother at bay that piloting threatened to dredge up.
+
+ 
+
+The scope of the storm was massive. Boyd was the only one Abram could hear over the feed, reciting the data his instruments were collecting with increasing incredulity. The original plan had involved flying over the storm but the massive, sweeping downdrafts kept them from climbing higher than a kilometer, trapping them in the nexus.
+
+ 
+
+Lightning struck the hopper twice in rapid succession, the flashes blinding even Abram. There were a chorus of screams from the others nearly drowned out by the clap of thunder, as the lights inside flickered and the systems crashed. Abram ignored them, diving into the system the second it came back online. SecSystem was busy running diagnostics and restoring functionality, so he pinged HubSystem and the satellite to triangulate their position.
+
+ 
+
+Beside him, Wilds cursed as she got nonsense readings from the control board. ""SecUnit, we're offline, I need help.""
+
+ 
+
+They weren't offline, but Abram didn't waste time splitting hairs, as HubSystem and the satellite pinged him with simultaneous bursts of information. He calculated their location and approximate speed, overlaying the map on top of it, and then forwarded it to Wilds so she wasn't flying blind.
+
+ 
+
+The hopper was struck a third time, crashing SecSystem in the middle of its reboot. Auxiliary power flickered and then steadied, but the systems remained down. Abram bit his tongue against the diatribe that threatened to flood out, helpless rage curling in his chest.
+
+ 
+
+""SecUnit--"" Wilds started, the panic in her voice overwhelming.
+
+ 
+
+""I know,"" he cut her off, somehow managing to temper the snarl that threatened to leak into his voice. He kept the information request open, pinging HubSystem and the satellite every few seconds to continue tracking their route. He couldn't do anything else with the systems fried; they were lucky the hopper still had enough power for the engines.
+
+ 
+
+Pushing down his gratitude for Boyd's interest in the storm, Abram pulled readings from the instruments in the cabin searching for a break in the winds that would allow them to gain altitude. He needed to get the hopper above the storm before it was struck again.
+
+ 
+
+
+There.
+
+
+ 
+
+The radar had picked up a mesocyclone. If they dropped lower, they could catch the gust front and ride it up over the anvil. The main, glaring issue with that plan was that it would put them directly in the coffin corner. It wasn't impossible to fly outside of the maximum operating envelope; he'd done it once before, years ago, to lose his father's men. They hadn't been willing enough to risk death to catch him, though Abram had ensured they'd found it all the same.
+
+ 
+
+Managing not to kill anyone as he attempted it a second time would be the real trick. Abram ignored the risk assessment and charted a course correction, helpfully overlaying it over their current flight path before he sent it to Wilds.
+
+ 
+
+If she recognized what he was planning to do, she said nothing.
+
+ 
+
+Lightning flashed, missing the hopper by scant meters, but Wilds jerked as though she'd been struck. Abram forgave her for her fear, if only because another strike would be catastrophic, and took over steering as she got herself under control.
+
+ 
+
+He could feel it, the second they caught the gust front, the tailwind nearly doubling their speed. It was too late now to go back on his plan, and he double checked that everyone was secured and wearing their environmental suits.
+
+ 
+
+There was a distinct, groundless sensation as they entered the mesocyclone, a moment of sheer weightlessness, and then the force of the winds shoved him back in his seat, ripping his hands from the controls and pinning him in place as they were swept along, caught in the riptide of a dizzying updraft.
+
+ 
+
+Abram struggled to move against the G forces, and beside him Wilds went limp, her head lolling as she lost consciousness, and still they continued gaining speed.
+
+ 
+
+A hairline fracture appeared in the face ply on the windshield, and Abram watched with growing trepidation as it spread in spiraling fractals. It stopped once it reached the outer edged of the glass, rendering the windshield nature's mosaic. Abram compartmentalized, pushing the surface level damage and visibility concerns to the back of his mind and focused instead on lifting his arms, fighting for every millimeter until his fingers locked around the levers.
+
+ 
+
+He gripped them fiercely, almost drunk on relief when a crack ripped through the cabin as startling as a canon blast. He had less than a second to pinpoint the source, staring in horror at the windshield.
+
+ 
+
+""Fuc--""
+
+ 
+
+The windshield blew out in an explosion as the cabin depressurized.
+
+ 
+
+I hope you all enjoyed! For everyone following Patron Saints, I'm still working on it, I promise, I just introduced too many variables too quickly and now I'm juggling the timeline. with any luck it will just be a couple weeks more!
+
+I'm alive! pharmacology is kicking my ass, and I definitely should've used the time I spent writing this to complete the didactic work, but well, here I am. Hope y'all enjoy even tho its been a million years!
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+Fog filled the cabin in billowing swaths as the hopper shook under the force of the wind that tunneled through the absent windscreen. Abram was nearly ripped from his seat, the harness he was strapped into groaning under the strain as the wind around him howled and tore through the cockpit. The cyclone outside forced its way in with all the grace of a mining blast. The frame of the hull shook, the vibrations traveling through the controls Abram was clutching like a lifeline, and still the hopper spun.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds had yet to regain consciousness. The vitals on her suit said she was still alive, and like Abram her harness held, but it was hard to remember that when her head lolled lifelessly as the craft pitched. The rest of the crew was in a similar state, with Walker and Doe the only exceptions. Abram could hear Walker trying to rouse the others, but Doe remained as silent over the feed as ever, his elevated heart rate and blood oxygen levels the only signs he was lucid.
+
+ 
+
+The hopper suddenly shot upwards with all the force and direction of a missile as they broke through the anvil, and Abram yanked on the controls, pushing the Hopper higher with their remaining momentum. The sun glinted punishingly bright off the mountains of clouds they skimmed. The sky around them darkened, the blue fading fast into black, as the atmosphere thinned.
+
+ 
+
+Abram could feel the hopper shudder beneath him, the risk of stalling imminent with the slightest decrease in speed. His vision blazed red with the warning that they'd reached Critical Mach, and he yanked the elevator trim up and shoved the yoke down, pushing them into a punishing dive.
+
+ 
+
+The wind screamed, the hopper lurched sickeningly, and then Abram lost control.
+
+ 
+
+The gravity around them failed as the dive transformed into a freefall. Abram bit his tongue until he tasted blood, his vision swimming as the world spiraled, and it was all he could do to send a warning through the feed. He knew it was useless. He knew if any of his clients weren't strapped in, the warning couldn't save them, but it was the least he'd owed to them as he opened the landing hatch.
+
+ 
+
+Gravity slammed him back into his seat hard enough to rip the breath from his lungs, as the uncontrolled tumble tightened into a spin. He ignored his screaming chest and the temperature readings flashing across his vision. The wind tore through the craft in a blistering gale that would strip the flesh from his skin if not for his armor, and the earth rose to meet them.
+
+ 
+
+Abram deployed the flaps, deflecting the elevator trim down to a neutral position, dropped the yoke, and leveled the ailerons. He'd lost powered trim when SecSystem had fried, and with Wilds unconscious, he was paying for it, losing precious seconds as he fumbled with the manual controls.
+
+ 
+
+The spin slowed, and Abram slammed on the rudder with the most resistance he could manage. The ground was too close, and he threw caution to the wind, deploying the drogue parachute before the hopper had recovered.
+
+ 
+
+By some chance of fate, they came out of the spin not a second too soon.
+
+ 
+
+Abram's stomach was in his throat, and his inner ears popped, the pressure incredible as their speed reduced. The parachutes were impossibly loud, the flapping of the fabric echoing like the thunder of the storm they'd left behind, but it wasn't enough. Abram hadn't been fast enough.
+
+ 
+
+He pinged the satellite, but HubSystem was too far away to triangulate with. Raw data hit his feed, as useless as it was to him, while they plummeted lower and lower. Abram gave up any hope he had of landing and aimed the hopper at the massive body of water rapidly swallowing the horizon. Their only hope for survival now, was Abram's ability to crash.
+
+ 
+
+He braced for impact as they entered the final stretch, pulling the nose up as he slammed on the elevator flaps, and closed the landing hatch.
+
+ 
+
+The world went white as the hopper hit the water in an explosion of ocean spray. The harness bit into his chest as they skimmed the water like a stone thrown at sound-shattering velocity. Once. Twice. Three times.
+
+ 
+
+His head slammed back, brutally wrenching his neck as a solid wave of water flooded the cabin. Had his vertebrae not been titanium, the force would've snapped his neck clean in two. Wild's vitals remained clear, her life saved only by her inability to tense up.
+
+ 
+
+It took a moment for his vision to clear, bubbles clouding everything in an ever-shifting haze. Abram undid his harness the second he could see his hand in front of his face, and swam over to Wilds, cutting her free. They didn't have much time; the hopper would drag them down to the sea floor as it sunk unless they could get far enough away. He looped an arm around his survey leader and pulled her through the open windscreen, adrenaline giving him the strength to swim as his metal limbs and heavy armor weighed him down. He kicked up towards the surface, following the distant light.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds regained consciousness just as they breached the surface, the unyielding sun taunting after the storm that marooned them, Abram dodged Wilds' flailing limbs, but grabbed for her as she slipped beneath the waves, managing to keep her head above the water.
+
+ 
+
+""What--where are we? Where's the hopper? Where's Matt?""
+
+ 
+
+""We crash landed,"" Abram explained, careful to filter out the accusatory tone that clung to the back of his tongue. The silent ""I told you so"" was harder to hide, and Wilds blanched beneath the helmet of her suit.
+
+ 
+
+""The others, we have to go back--""
+
+ 
+
+Walker and Doe emerged from the water, cutting off the makings of a rescue plan, with Boyd and Minyard clutched in their respective arms.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds dove for Boyd, crashing into his chest almost before Walker surrendered him.
+
+ 
+
+""You're alive!""
+
+ 
+
+""No thanks to the SecUnit.""
+
+ 
+
+Doe's heavy gaze painted Abram with blatant suspicion, and he forced himself to swallow the scathing objection that wanted to crawl out of his mouth. He'd done the impossible, but SecUnits always did the impossible. Were expected to, even. No one cared that he wasn't a bot pilot, or that he'd had to contend with multiple system failures. The result was the same; they'd crashed on a rescue mission already tainted by foul play.
+
+ 
+
+""We should swim for the shore,"" Abram suggested, his tone emotionless.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+AjaxCentri showed no outward sign of the carnage Abram had witnessed on the vidscreen. The scrubland was empty and silent, far from the storm and from any sign of life. Their HubSystem sent out periodic pings on a wide frequency, like an emergency beacon.
+
+ 
+
+Abram didn't trust it.
+
+ 
+
+AjaxCentri's communications had been cut, just after Knox had relayed the coordinates. He'd bet anything the rogue SecUnits were lying in wait, relying on the universal stupidity of clients to spring the trap.
+
+ 
+
+""Nobody answer HubSystem."" Abram kept his voice low, letting the levity of the situation bleed through his hushed tone.
+
+ 
+
+""What? Why?"" Boyd looked taken aback. ""We came to help them, how else are they going to know we're here?""
+
+ 
+
+""It's a trap."" Doe sounded bored, looking over the three linked habitats as if it were nothing more than an inconvenience. He slanted a look at Abram, and the interest that was absent from his voice was alive on his face.
+
+ 
+
+Abram fought back a shiver that wanted to erupt and told himself that the knowing look in Doe's eyes was a trick of the light.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds pursed her lips but nodded. ""Right, what are we looking at here?""
+
+ 
+
+""AjaxCentri had at least three SecUnits and thirty clients."" If Abram were more confident of his ability to disguise himself from other bots, he'd hack their systems and get an exact number. ""Of those thirty clients, we'll be lucky if five are alive. The SecUnits know help is on the way, leaving us outnumbered and outgunned. Our only advantage is stealth.""
+
+ 
+
+""There's six of us and three of them."" Minyard pointed out as he crossed his arms, looking cocksure. Abram mentally tagged him as the first to die. ""How can we be outnumbered?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram flexed his arms and released the energy canons stored in the compartments of his forearms. Minyard immediately scrambled back, almost falling over himself to get away. Doe took a warning step forward, and Abram's threat projection shot up, but he stood his ground.
+
+ 
+
+""The SecUnits inside are going to be armed. If they see you, you're dead. End of story. I will go in and search for survivors. The rest of you will be stealing a hopper and preparing for any wounded humans I send your way.""
+
+ 
+
+""Who died and put you in charge?""
+
+ 
+
+""The scientists of AjaxCentri."" Abram reminded himself that Minyard was a client and not a target as he slowly counted to ten. ""And Security protocol dictates I keep you out of the line of fire. Unless you have better plan?""
+
+ 
+
+Minyard scowled and said nothing, silently sulking, but Abram wasn't done yet.
+
+ 
+
+""How about weapons? Do you have anything to defend yourself with, or were you going to fight the SecUnits barehanded?""
+
+ 
+
+""You've made your point."" Minyard looked as though the words physically pained him to say, but also less like he was going to charge the habitat on his own.
+
+ 
+
+Abram retracted the energy canons back into his arms and shared his feed with Wilds. ""If I tell you to leave, you leave. Whether you have survivors on board or not.""
+
+ 
+
+""What about you?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram stared at Wilds blankly. ""What about me?""
+
+ 
+
+""We can't leave you behind.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram couldn't tell if Wilds was afraid for him, or for what would happen to everyone else without his protection. He decided it was the latter. Even if by some miracle they managed to survive the planet and each other, they were going to get themselves killed with their naivete once they were back up on the Corporation Rim.
+
+ 
+
+""You won't have to, but if it comes to that, you'll be fine,"" he lied. ""Wait out the storm in the hopper, and then trigger the emergency beacon once you reach the habitat. The company will retrieve you.""
+
+ 
+
+Theoretically.
+
+ 
+
+Wilds frowned, looking far from reassured, but she nodded once, her eyes tight. ""Good luck.""
+
+ 
+
+Luck wouldn't save Abram, but he nodded back.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+The hatch for the first Habitat required a code. Abram took it as a good sign even as irritation bubbled under his skin. A Security interdiction meant they were in lock-down, which hinted at survivors the rogue units hadn't managed to take out. Unfortunately, the only way in was to hack SecSystem.
+
+ 
+
+AjaxCentri's security was different than Vulpecula's but completely unequipped to differentiate SecUnits from other companies. Once he'd cracked HubSystem, Abram was able to convince SecSystem to let him bypass the Security Interdiction as easily as if he'd been the one to set it. There was little chance he'd gone unnoticed by the rogue units, so he grabbed video and audio access of the habitats before he slipped inside.
+
+ 
+
+He backburnered the feed connection with Wilds, and split his vision, combing through the footage as he cautiously made his way towards the central hub. The smell of blood, coppery and thick, drifted through his air filters, as did the faint, too-sweet smell of decay. Through the footage he searched for any sign of the rogue units, jumping from camera to camera fast enough to make even an augmented human's head spin. They weren't there.
+
+ 
+
+Abram was keeping to the camera's blind spots, which meant the rogue units were smart enough to do the same. If he stayed on his current course, he was bound to run into them, especially as they had to know he was here. He paused his search for the surviving humans and deployed the code his mother had written years ago, capturing the transmission source, and redirecting the camera and audio feed to his temporary storage.
+
+ 
+
+In any other scenario, he'd have limited time before a grapple for power ensured. Companies on the Corporation Rim tended to notice the second they lost access to the security feed and were even quicker to deploy killware. The SecUnits, on the other hand, would only be equipped to handle physical threats. Figured the corporations who enslaved sentient bot constructs didn't want to teach them how to wrest control of the security systems that kept them in line.
+
+ 
+
+Abram peeled away from the wall of the long hallway and slipped into the heavily surveilled main hub. He knew what he would find but knowing didn't prepare him for the sight of eleven corpses in the crew area. The arrangement of bodies made it clear it'd been a surprise attack. They were draped across furniture. Slumped over chairs. There were food packs still clutched in stiff fingers. One scientist still wore a smile: his eyes glass marbles, his skin frozen wax.
+
+ 
+
+Worse than the sight was the all-too-familiar smell of burnt flesh that clung to the back of his throat like ash. Every wound seared through skin and fat and muscle. Abram staggered backwards in reflex, struggling to keep his mind in the presence, even as the past surged forward in crystal clarity.
+
+ 
+
+
+""Abram..."" Mary whispered, like the ghost of a prayer, her eyes on the distant, ringed horizon. Pustules erupted from her skin in horrible shades of red and black, and blood dripped from the corners of her mouth.
+
+
+ 
+
+""No."" The word escaped him like a punch. He shook his head, as he gasped for air, and tried desperately to escape the flood of memories he could never purge. ""No, please--""
+
+ 
+
+
+Mary shook against the force of a cough and Abram clutched her tight to his chest. He wanted to scream, to shake her, to make her finally look at him. He wanted to tell her he was right there, that she was going to be okay, that they were going to make it off the godforsaken planet. But he kept his mouth sealed shut.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The survey leader was closer than he should've been, his eyes gleaming with brutal satisfaction, as he stared at shell of Abram's mother. Abram savagely hoped that he would catch the fever. That every wretched human on the survey would succumb. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He upped his body temperature, letting the warmth ease Mary's shivers, and ignored Bauer's cruel smile, as the man drifted even closer. If Abram were the obedient SecUnit he was playing, he'd remind the survey leader to stay the agreed upon distance away and adhere to the precautionary guidelines he himself had set. Instead, he silently urged the man closer.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We should break camp for the night,"" Bauer said, relishing the way the rest of the survey paused, deferential. ""I think poor Dr. Duval could use the break.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Abram glared at him from behind his opaque face shield, anger burning through his veins like acid. He stood silently as his contempt ate away at him, while the others began to move, pitching tents and setting up equipment with practiced ease. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Mary coughed again, an awful, wet sound, and spasmed in his arms. Abram cradled her tighter, while blood splattered across his painfully white chest plate, a deep, dark red. Her hair, black shot through with far more silver than she'd arrived with, had fallen out of the bun she had secured it in cycles before. When the fever had presented as nothing more than a hoarse voice and dark circles.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Abram brushed it out of her face under the guise of adjusting his hold on her, and despair ate through his chest at the grey tinge her lips had taken. They could make it back to the habitat if they pushed through the night. Abram could save her if he could just get her to the medical bay. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit,"" Bauer signaled, something predatory in the way he took another step closer. ""I need you to secure the area. Leave Dr. Duval in her tent.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The tent in question was small and uninsulated, devoid of the netting the rest of the tents were equipped with, and too far from the warmth of the fire. Abram's heart clenched at the idea of leaving his mother unprotected, but he couldn't risk disobeying.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He carefully set Mary down on her bedroll, drawing the blankets tight around her frail form. He wanted to say something, anything, but his mother stared through him. Her vacant gaze slipped off him as though he were invisible.
+
+
+ 
+
+""--repeat, SecUnit, do you copy?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram was kneeling on the floor, Wilds' worried voice in his ear, as he stared down at the body in front of him. A hole in her chest revealed charred ribs and a blackened heart. The weapon that killed her was the same as the ones embedded in his arms.
+
+ 
+
+He barely had time to open his helmet before he was retching pure bile.
+
+ 
+
+The smell was worse without his helmet.
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit, do you copy?"" 
+
+
+ 
+
+Bauer's voice over the feed was an unpleasant intrusion, but Abram responded to his ping.
+
+ 
+
+""I copy.""
+
+ 
+
+He forced himself to his feet and moved on autopilot, letting his buffer answer Wilds. He followed the trail of carnage out of the main hub, stepping over the bodies that all had wounds in their backs. Shot down while they'd run for their lives.
+
+ 
+
+His boots squeaked as he tracked blood through the wide hallways, and he performed a scan, searching for energy signatures.
+
+ 
+
+
+There. 
+
+
+ 
+
+Three signatures in the Med Bay. Abram felt rage coil in his chest, like a jammed plasma canon ticking slowly towards explosion. He let the heat of it propel him through the habitat, until it was the white-hot compressed fury of a neutron star.
+
+ 
+
+He didn't pause to hack the doors when he reached them, putting his fist through the cheap metal and drawing back, ripping it out of the wall with ease.
+
+ 
+
+Abram threw the door aside, and charged into the room, his plasma weapons raised and on a hair trigger.
+
+ 
+
+He barely had time to realize the rogue Units he'd tracked down weren't SecUnits at all before he was dodging a sonic drill.
+
+ 
+
+Knox was fast, but human as well as injured. Abram wrested the drill from him with ease and ducked as the other two humans attacked him from behind. He spun the drill and used it to sweep the feet out from underneath his assailants.
+
+ 
+
+Terrified faces met his, equal parts resignation and horror.
+
+ 
+
+Abram pulled up AjaxCentri's register and identified them as scientists Dermott and Alvarez.  The two women were officially partnered to each other, not unlike Wilds and Boyd. Alvarez was injured; blood trickled from a forehead wound he could see, while a hand clamped around her abdomen indicated damage he couldn't. Neil lowered the sonic drill, as the bitter dredges of adrenaline drained from his system.
+
+ 
+
+The SecUnits, wherever they were, could've easily done what Neil had. They'd left the humans alive and in one place for a reason. Bait or bluff? Knox was valuable as the survey leader, but Alvarez and Dermott made no sense, unless the rogue Units were counting on Abram relying on a scan.
+
+ 
+
+
+Fuck.
+
+
+ 
+
+""I've been sent on behalf of Vulpecula to rescue you."" Wilds would've been patient and reassuring, Boyd cajoling and humorous. Abram was blunt and to the point, distractedly letting his frustration leak through as he scanned again for the Units. ""Follow me if you want to live.""
+
+ 
+
+""Excuse me?""
+
+ 
+
+Abram blinked in surprise at Knox's polite fury, remembering too late that his helmet was open.
+
+ 
+
+""What the fuck was that?"" Dermott demanded, dragging herself upright and helping Alvarez clamber to her feet. ""You come in here trying to kill us, and expect us to just follow you, fuck knows where?""
+
+ 
+
+""I didn't try to kill you. If I had, you wouldn't be here to complain.""
+
+ 
+
+""You punched through the door and dumped us on our asses,"" Alvarez argued. ""That's not exactly a gesture of goodwill.""
+
+ 
+
+Abram breathed in slowly through his nose. ""We don't have time for this,"" he bit out. ""The rogue Units--""
+
+ 
+
+All at once his scan pinged three energy sources.
+
+ 
+
+""Get Down!"" he yelled, and whirled around, the plasma bolt catching him in the shoulder, rather than the charted trajectory of Alvarez's head.
+
+ 
+
+He didn't have time to check if the humans had done as he'd said. He threw himself at the SecUnits, sonic drill raised, as they opened fire.
+
+ 
+
+whats a second cliffhanger between friends?"
+43507612,Indulgence,['rainbowmagnet'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries)","typical behavior of children at family gatherings, Food, Eating, chubby murderbot, Stuffing, Fullness, Gluttony, seriously there's food in this, thanksgiving-adjacent event, Holiday Dinners, Picky Eaters, copious starch, Television Watching, Plot What Plot, Canon-Typical Profanity, Dr. Mensah is Jacked (Murderbot Diaries), artificial digestive system",English,2022-12-09,Completed,2022-12-09,"3,786",1/1,2,11,1,198,"['Girafarigkeeping', 'mallowcloud', 'prince_sivler', 'mangagirl1216', 'BWizard']",[],"
+The impact was swift, forceful, targeted. The suddenness of it caught me off-guard, and I had to rebalance myself as I updated my situation assessment. I hadn't been prepared for this kind of attack.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit!"" Mensah's young offspring cried, still clinging to my legs. Many of their siblings and cousins followed, attracted by the commotion, but fortunately they did not pounce on me.
+
+
+
+Mensah soon followed her offspring to the door, waving at me as she came closer. ""Hello, SecUnit,"" she said, glancing rather disappointedly at her overexcited child, ""Sorry about...""
+
+
+
+""It's okay,"" I told her, gently prying the small arms away from my body. I asked the kids, ""Do you have any new media?""
+
+
+
+This seemed to excite them. ""Oh, you're going to love 
+
+Supernova Rangers
+
+!"" one of the older ones exclaimed, ""Here, let me show you!"" The group started to head toward the room with the display surface, and I followed them in.
+
+
+
+Before I could start making my way toward the couch, which was where I intended to spend the remainder of the afternoon, Mensah motioned for me to come aside. ""I know you don't care for these kinds of events,"" she told me, ""Thank you for coming. It means a lot that you want to spend the holiday with us.""
+
+
+
+Mensah had invited me to come to this holiday event with her extended family, which they were holding at Mensah's camp house. It sounded like the kind of thing that would have hugs, and arguments, and possibly intoxication, but the promise of watching media with the kids made me feel more open to the idea. Also, I knew there was going to be pie.
+
+
+
+I watched as the children gathered around the couch, jockeying for control of the display surface. Some of them were doing that unnerving scream-laugh that children do, which I had learned by now not to associate with immediate danger or dismemberment. ""It's not terrible,"" I said.
+
+
+
+Mensah nodded. I could feel her looking at me, but she didn't force me to look at her, so it was comfortable. ""Just let me know if you want to take a break,"" she said.
+
+
+
+I acknowledged her, then went over to see what 
+
+Supernova Rangers 
+
+was all about.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I had to admit that I was not particularly looking forward to dinner. I would have preferred to just stay on the couch, watching media, but I knew that would look rude. (Usually I had no problem with looking rude, but I didn't want to disappoint Mensah. Also, as mentioned previously: pie.) I just knew it would be an opportunity for a lot of excessive human talking, and you can't really watch media at the dinner table. Maybe they would make an exception for me, but I somehow doubted it.
+
+
+
+I was also a little concerned about the food. I didn't know whether there were going to be any options that would appeal to me. Humans seemed to be a lot less selective about their food choices than I was (though that didn't explain Three's varied palate), and I was afraid I would just be left sitting there awkwardly, surrounded by food I didn't want.
+
+
+
+Maybe it wouldn't be too much of a disappointment if I skipped dinner. Humans weren't used to SecUnits eating anyway, so maybe this would be more comfortable for them. I had also eaten a snack not that long ago, so I doubted I would get dangerously hungry.
+
+
+
+But as time went on, despite the mind-boggling plot twists in 
+
+Supernova Rangers
+
+, I found myself more and more distracted by the smells emanating from the kitchen. I could identify a lot of bready, starchy smells in the mix, and some process I didn't even know I had was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to eat.
+
+
+
+It would be easier if I stayed on the couch. I couldn't be that hungry; it was probably just a reaction from my organic parts, a holdover from the vestigial bits of me the company had been too cheap to remove.
+
+
+
+From the kitchen, I heard Mensah call, ""Dinner's ready!""
+
+
+
+My stomach chose that moment to growl very loudly and abruptly. This apparently amused the younger children, as they started to giggle. I tried not to hold it against them.
+
+
+
+On second thought, maybe I could at least stick around for an appetizer.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The kids wanted to finish the episode we were watching before going over to the table. Normally, this would have been fine with me, but I didn't know how much longer I could wait like this. I was just glad when the credits finally rolled and the kids started getting up and heading toward the dining room.
+
+
+
+I sat down at the big table, choosing a spot that would not place me in too close proximity to anyone else or their food, and looked around. Some of Mensah's family members were talking to each other, and some were already eating. A few of the adults were trying to shepherd the younger kids into their seats as they ran erratically around the table.
+
+
+
+I had a plate sitting in front of me, but I didn't see anything I wanted to put on it. I had known this would happen. No one ever eats anything normal at a holiday event. I didn't recognize most of the foods (other than from my media, and even then I didn't know them by name), and I wasn't particularly willing to try them. This was going to be just as horrible and awkward as I had anticipated, possibly more so.
+
+
+
+While I was trying to sulk, I was interrupted by Farai approaching me with a bowl and a serving spoon. ""Do you want some mashed potatoes, SecUnit?""
+
+
+
+I looked at the bowl she was carrying. Nothing looked too offensive about its contents, but I needed to make sure. I leaned closer to the bowl, then sniffed. ""Okay,"" I eventually decided.
+
+
+
+As Farai was scooping mashed potatoes onto my plate, I received a feed notification. I opened it and saw that it was from one of the older kids, inviting me to watch the next episode of 
+
+Supernova Rangers
+
+. Well, I couldn't say no to that. We watched the episode surreptitiously (or at least I did, the kids were kind of obvious about it) at the dinner table, then started up another one when that one was over.
+
+
+
+Midway through the next episode, I realized that I had been eating for quite a while, and I felt fuller than I thought I should have. I quickly backburnered the episode, then checked the feed of the cameras that I had forced Mensah to install in her house.
+
+
+
+Apparently, while I was distracted watching the episode, I had finished eating and had started uselessly scraping the plate, trying to get more. Someone had then come by and refilled my plate. Two times. So, all in all, I had eaten three servings. Okay, I really needed to be paying better attention.
+
+
+
+I closed my feed, then pushed my plate slightly away from me as I sat back. That would probably be it for me. I might not get to have any pie, but at least I had gotten to eat something.
+
+
+
+Then I smelled something that I could only describe as spellbinding.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I tried to identify the source of the smell, but it didn't take a scan to figure out what was producing the strikingly tempting aroma I was picking up. Coming down the table in my direction was a big basket, filled to the brim with fresh bread. As the basket passed me, I took as many pieces of bread as possible, then piled them haphazardly onto my plate.
+
+
+
+Now that I had secured the bread, I was free to assess it and make a plan. I didn't know if I was going to be able to eat all of this bread. I could always put my leftover bread back in the basket, but then it would be covered in mashed potato residue, and no one would want to eat it. (At least, I wouldn't want to eat someone else's contaminated bread.) I guessed I would just eat what I was hungry for, then leave the rest so Mensah could decide what to do with it. That might seem lazy, but it was better than trying to sneak potato-covered bread onto someone else's plate.
+
+
+
+I picked up the first piece of bread. It was warm and soft, and it was big enough that even my SecUnit-sized hand looked small in comparison. As I took my first bite (the inside was soft, but the outside was delightfully crunchy), I realized that, yes, the bread tasted just as good as it smelled. I quickly scarfed down the first giant bread piece, then went for a second one.
+
+
+
+As I was eating my second piece of bread, which might have actually been my third or fourth piece of bread, one of the young humans seated near me giggled. ""You eat bread funny.""
+
+
+
+I was pretty sure I knew what the human was talking about. The way I was eating the bread was by making a hole in the crunchy outside, eating all the soft bits out from the inside, then eating the outside separately. I tried not to think about how much it seemed like the way a giant fauna would eat your organs out of your body, and reminded myself that it was efficient and made it easier to process the multiple textures. I didn't respond, because I knew it would come out muffled through the mouthful of bread, but I gave the kid my best sarcastic stare.
+
+
+
+I hadn't actually expected to eat all of the bread, but by the time I made it to the bottom of the pile, I found myself wanting more. I tried to eat the last piece of bread more slowly, hoping that would trick my brain into thinking there was more. (It did not; I just ended up feeling silly for taking such tiny bites.) I normally don't like to use my finger to pick up crumbs (it increases the amount of bacteria going into my mouth), but it felt wrong to lick my plate in front of dozens of humans, so I used my finger to play it safe.
+
+
+
+Once the inertia started to taper off, I realized that I was already starting to feel overfull. Maybe I should have gone a little easier on the bread. I subtly unbuttoned my pants under the tablecloth, hoping no one would see me, and successfully kept the relief out of my expression afterward.
+
+
+
+Then I was startled by Mensah's voice behind me: ""Excuse me, SecUnit.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I smelled what Mensah was holding before I could even turn around and see it. She was holding a largeish bowl filled with an amorphous, bready substance that somehow smelled even more enticing than the bread had. ""Is that stuffing?"" I asked, knowing exactly what it was.
+
+
+
+Mensah nodded. ""You understand that we needed some for the rest of the meal. We don't want a repeat of last time, after all.""
+
+
+
+I recalled what she meant by ""last time"". The last holiday event I had gone to had been especially lacking in acceptable food options, and I'd had to abscond with some of the stuffing as a last resort. ""That was an emergency,"" I told her.
+
+
+
+""I know,"" Mensah said as she gently placed the bowl in front of me, ""That's why we made extra, just for you.""
+
+
+
+She had to have had (say that five times fast) no idea how much I had already eaten. I was sure that my belly was visibly rounder by this point from all the food inside, but with my jacket pulled down, Mensah might not realize that. I don't know why I had my jacket pulled down so far; I wasn't trying to hide or anything. It just felt weird to eat so much in front of so many people.
+
+
+
+I looked at the bowl of stuffing. Really, since Mensah had made it especially for me this time, it would be rude to refuse it. I didn't want to disappoint her. And, okay, it just smelled so irresistible that I had to have at least a little.
+
+
+
+""Thank you,"" I told Mensah, then I remembered to look at her. Her warm smile made me sure that she had no idea she was overfeeding me. Maybe it was best if she didn't know.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I ate my way through the stuffing, feeling fuller by the minute, but still strangely compelled to keep going. They always say (at least in media) that things such as victory and stuffing taste better if you have to work for them. I didn't know about that. This stuffing might not have been a forbidden treasure like last time, but it still tasted pretty damn good.
+
+
+
+I finally finished off the bowl, and okay, wow, they call it stuffing for a reason. It was sharing space with way more than an even share of bread and mashed potatoes, but still. I sighed (as quietly as possible) as I leaned back in my chair and started rubbing my belly, which felt uncomfortably stuffed, yet pleasantly warm.
+
+
+
+I almost couldn't believe I had eaten so much. (""Almost"" because this definitely wasn't the first time.) I felt so sluggish and heavy that I didn't know if I would even be able to get out of my chair. I didn't really regret it, though. If there was any time to be eating a bunch of food, it was now, and it wasn't like the humans weren't doing the same. (Okay, so they probably didn't have as much capacity as I did and therefore wouldn't eat as much, but you get my point.) And there was something satisfying about being so full. My only real regret was that I didn't know if I could make it back to the couch to watch 
+
+Supernova Rangers
+
+.
+
+
+
+I was focusing on soothing my belly and keeping my burps to a reasonably quiet level, but my attention was quickly snapped by a voice approaching the table: ""Who wants pie?""
+
+
+
+Another regret: I hadn't saved any room for pie.
+
+
+
+I was just left to sit there and watch disappointedly as multiple tins of pie (there was a lot, Mensah's family is huge) were passed down the table, meant for everyone but me. I mean, technically, no one was stopping me from grabbing some, but I was so stuffed that I thought I couldn't possibly have any room left.
+
+
+
+I watched as the humans each took some pie; the children were particularly excited, and the adults had to keep pushing their eager little hands away to stop them from grabbing multiple pieces. And it smelled so temptingly sweet and delicious. I felt like I was being taunted.
+
+
+
+Fuck this. I wasn't going to let myself feel left out over pie. I pushed against the weight of my full, heavy belly to lean forward, then took a piece of pie from the nearest tin and put it on my plate.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I looked around the table with my eyes and the cameras, observing what the humans were doing. Most of them were still talking casually (fortunately, I had managed to tune out most of the arguments over the course of the meal), enjoying their pie. Following their movements, I picked up my own piece of pie, put on my best neutral expression, then took a bite.
+
+
+
+I finished it surprisingly fast, for how full I was. It was even tastier than I expected, partially due to the spices mixed in (humans love to put unnecessary spices on everything, but sometimes it actually does improve the flavor). It really was delicious. I could probably go for another piece.
+
+
+
+If I wasn't already so stuffed. My belly was so packed with holiday food that it was touching the table, and it felt firm, yet achingly tender, to the touch. I was starting to have a hard time concealing my heavy breathing. I hoped none of the humans would notice.
+
+
+
+Inevitably, one of the humans noticed. The small human who had previously questioned my bread-eating strategy glanced at me, and, with a quizzical look, asked, ""Are you okay?""
+
+
+
+I tried to respond, but I just ended up burping. I made a second attempt, and this time I managed to say, ""I'm fine.""
+
+
+
+The human looked slightly concerned, but turned back around without saying anything else.
+
+
+
+The next thing for me to do at that moment should absolutely not have been to take another piece of pie. But the pie was still right there in front of me, and just sitting there and smelling it without getting to eat any (any more) would have been worse torture for me than a painfully overstuffed belly could ever be. So I took another piece.
+
+
+
+The second piece was just as delicious as the first, and, apparently, equally filling. As I finished the slice, I heard my belly groan, wordlessly pleading with me not to eat any more. I felt full enough to pop, and definitely too full to move by this point. It was harder for me to conceal my burps now, but I didn't really care about avoiding attention anymore; hopefully one of the humans would notice me, and would hold me back from the horrible decision that I was about to make.
+
+
+
+But no one said anything, and the rest of the pie was still sitting there, looking and smelling as tempting as ever. (I regret that ART didn't equip my digestive system with a nausea response, it would prevent stupid decisions like this.)
+
+
+
+Ugh, fuck.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So, long story short, I ended up eating a third piece of pie. (Yes, it was still delicious.) I was honestly a little surprised that I hadn't burst while I was eating it. There was still some pie left in the tin, but I didn't think I could force another bite into my poor, aching belly. (Also, I couldn't lean forward to reach it anymore.) I had managed to stuff myself until my belly, normally soft and supple, was as tight and round as one of the balls humans use in their weird violent games. It really hurt, but I was a little impressed with myself, in a way. Actually, okay, it mostly just fucking hurt.
+
+
+
+The humans were starting to get up and disperse now, but I was still sitting there, moaning, too full to get out of my chair. I might just have to recharge here and wait for everything to digest a little. It wasn't the most comfortable place to recharge, but I could make do.
+
+
+
+Then Mensah approached me again. ""Can I help you up, SecUnit?""
+
+
+
+I tried to tell her yes, but it came out as a burp. I nodded instead.
+
+
+
+Mensah was surprisingly strong for a human her size. It was impressive that she was even able to drag the chair out from under the table with me sitting on it. I had thought that I was helplessly pinned, but with Mensah's assistance, we were able to lift me back onto my feet.
+
+
+
+It felt weird to be standing again after sitting for so long. It was nice to stretch my legs, but I felt a little woozy. ""I'm going to go lie down,"" I told Mensah, and started heading for the couch.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Getting to lie on my back and take the pressure off my belly (I was so full that even standing left it prone to the pressure of gravity) was a huge relief, and I did something between a sigh and a burp as I settled on the couch. There was still plenty of pressure coming from the inside, but it helped, a little.
+
+
+
+I tried to look down at myself, but that was a bit of a strain in my current position, so I switched to a camera view. My belly looked like a swollen mountain on the landscape of my body (okay, I'm never describing a body as a landscape again, that sounded so wrong), bulging out from under my jacket, which now looked tiny in comparison. There was no way I could get my pants buttoned again even if I wanted to, which I didn't, and they felt tight even unbuttoned.
+
+
+
+I sighed again and started rubbing my belly. I know I used to remark on humans eating a lot, but holy shit, that was just so, so much food. I felt like I had gained ten pounds just from that one meal. My belly groaned, potentially in agreement.
+
+
+
+Most of the kids had gone to play, but now some of them were coming back, looking at me with expressions ranging from curiosity to sympathy. I was kind of taking up the whole couch, so some of the children leaned over the back and others sat on the floor in front of me as one of the older ones started the display surface.
+
+
+
+One of the littlest humans looked at me and pointed. ""How'd your tummy get so big?""
+
+
+
+Some of the others glared, but it wasn't a difficult question to answer. I said, ""I had too much pie."" And too much everything else, but I was too tired to say the rest. Not thinking about what I was saying (like I said, I was woozy), I complained, ""I'm so full.""
+
+
+
+Now the kids were looking at me with that wrinkled-eyebrow look that means sympathy. I considered switching to a camera view, but they were small humans, and small humans are easier to deal with. ""Poor SecUnit,"" one of them said.
+
+
+
+Then one of the kids brightened up. ""Do you want to watch more media with us?""
+
+
+
+That almost made me forget the pain for a minute. ""Yeah.""
+
+
+
+So we watched more 
+
+Supernova Rangers
+
+. As we watched, my systems gradually began to switch into offline mode, and I eventually slipped into a recharge cycle.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I woke up to the sound of fauna outside, morning light coming through the window. I was still on the couch, and I felt a lot better than I had before. I just hoped that no one was going to need the bathroom at any point today.
+
+
+
+As I came back to awareness, I noticed that someone had carefully draped a blanket over me, and I had some new feed messages. I checked the feed messages; one was from the kids, and the other was from Mensah. The first was a wish for me to feel better soon, and the one Mensah had sent simply read, 
+
+Rest well, SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+Maybe this holiday wasn't as bad as I had anticipated.
+"
+43500640,rue the day,['platyceriums'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Amena & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, difficult conversations, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, murderbot fucks up a little and no one has a good time about it but everything is ok in the end, Murderbot has PTSD, POV First Person, Forgiveness",English,2022-12-08,Completed,2022-12-08,"7,059",1/1,55,165,25,651,"['acupoftea', 'DepressedMarshmallow', 'faedemon', 'magpie_supremacy', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'TJWock', 'ipborgdan', 'The_Onion', 'esqueimadiellu', 'awkwardtuatara', 'Dragonbano', 'supinetothestars', 'FyrDrakken', 'Ruusverd', 'CheshireFanta', 'mackeralsky', 'wuhhhhhhhhhhhh', 'iox', 'seven_graces', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'AdamCourier', 'Seregona', 'Magechild', 'Dain', 'canbreathe', 'FaerieFyre', 'junebug171', 'Tanscure', 'SpiralStar', 'Polygeminus_grex', 'boxo', 'SourOrchard', 'Inklingobscura', 'kilawater', 'idealPeriWren', 'Deliala919', 'outlander_unknown', 'Paragrin', 'Doctor13', 'flashwitch', 'FrogoftheUniverse', 'lapwing_deceit', 'biscut2', 'mercurypyrite', 'r_astra', 'IgnisCanis', 'dragons_and_angels', 'FigOwl', 'lazylichen']",[],"My current surroundings were unfamiliar to me, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. I suspected that I had recently been subjected to an incomplete memory wipe performed by an incompetent technician, because I was missing a lot of files and memories related to my current assignment. The last assignment I could remember being on was a protective detail for a corporate team investigating new mineral resources. Given that I seemed to be in a habitat designed for long-term living, my circumstances had clearly changed.
+
+It didn't make much difference to me that I couldn't remember the details of my current assignment. I had been on so many contracts guarding indentured laborers that my organics could probably do the job on their own.
+
+The kitchen I was guarding was empty, which was lucky, since the last thing I needed right now was humans looking at me. I wasn't wearing armor, which was unusual, but the living space that I was occupying looked different than the run-down, impersonal spaces where corporate laborers usually lived. Maybe this corporation used nicer living spaces and moderately less terrifying SecUnits to ensnare workers into signing longer contracts. I wasn't too worried about it. (Yet.)
+
+The space outside the windows was dark, and I could hear the quiet voices of many humans talking to each other echoing from down a narrow hallway. My governor module wasn't relaying any specific orders to me, so I stood up straight and held my arms behind my back, and stared directly at the wall across from me. Waiting was something I was very used to.
+
+After ten minutes of waiting I began to get bored, which was annoying, since that boredom didn't at all relieve the anxiety that was eating at me from being stationed in a new area with unclear instructions. All I could do was stare at the wall opposite me, entirely focused, with no opportunity to even slip into standby mode like I could in a cubicle or transport crate. The tedium that had comprised the vast majority of my existence sank into my brain like an old friend. I didn't even have any data processing or surveillance tasks from HubSystem queued to keep my mind busy.
+
+Time passed. Eventually, a juvenile human walked into the eating area. She flipped on the light switch, and flinched violently when she saw me standing across the room.
+
+""SecUnit! There you are! I thought you had snuck out already.""
+
+This was such a nonsensical thing to say to a SecUnit that my buffer failed to muster up a suitable response, so I said nothing and continued staring over her head as though she hadn't spoken. It was not currently a mealtime, so she had no reason to be here, and hopefully she would leave quickly.
+
+""I'm just here to grab a snack, don't mind me. Watching anything good?""
+
+Was this human stupid? I was terrible at judging human ages, but she was definitely large enough that she should know that she wasn't allowed to consume more than her issued rations, and only during designated mealtimes. (That was why they often kept SecUnits in meal areas, to makes sure only the shift of workers assigned to eat an any time were doing so, and that they didn't steal extra rations. Because they tried to, frequently.) The casual way she was speaking to me pushed my threat assessment up a couple percentage points, and made the organics at the back of my neck prickle. Humans shouldn't talk to SecUnits like that.
+
+""It is not currently a designated mealtime."" I told her.
+
+""Yeah, I know, but I'm still hungry. I'll be out of your hair in a minute."" She reached towards one of the cupboards, but before she could open it I crossed the room in three steps and took hold of her arm. I repeated my warning.
+
+The human didn't look afraid of me. She looked vaguely pissed off, which made no sense at all. I didn't think I had ever seen an indentured worker direct that sort of expression towards a SecUnit. Even if she somehow didn't know that what she was doing was wrong, she should definitely know to back down from a SecUnit telling her to stop. Instead of backing down, she looked me right in the eye and asked me what the hell I was doing.
+
+""You need to return to your quarters for a rest period,"" I tried, hoping that redirecting her would do the trick.
+
+""Yeah, I'm going to do that after I get my snack,"" the juvenile human said, and she reached into the cabinet with her free hand.
+
+I was supposed to punish her. She was breaking the rules, and in order to keep the workforce in line, management needed to make sure that even the smallest infractions were met with retribution. Punishing infractions with physical injuries that required expensive MedSystem visits was just efficient economics. I was delaying as much as I could because I hated delivering that punishment, but with a governor module in my head I had even less freedom in this situation than the worker did.
+
+I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to do this, but I was milliseconds away from a governor module punishment and then I would be forced to do it anyway, and this stupid juvenile human was refusing to back down, so in the end I didn't have a choice.
+
+I squeezed my hand and twisted my arm slightly.
+
+The juvenile human screamed and finally backed away as I let her go. She cradled her broken wrist to her chest, crying tears that were probably from pain, although soon enough she'd probably be crying from the amount of time that would be added to her contract to pay for the MedSys visit. The time she would spend--doing--what?
+
+I remained in position as the first of the humans that had been alerted by the juvenile's screaming ran into the room. They didn't look at all how the workers on my previous contracts had looked like, but I didn't let any of my confusion show on my face. The aftermath of this wasn't my problem--the other humans would have to take her to the MedSystem and explain to the overseers what had happened. That part, at least, I was confident of.
+
+Instead of ignoring me like the unavoidable background source of surveillance/punishment that workers always treated me as, the adult human that had run to the juvenile's side looked me directly in the face and said, ""SecUnit, what the fuck?""
+
+Instantly, my governor module activated.
+
+Normally, governor module punishments last for a fraction of a second. The way I experience time, nothing more than that is needed to override my organic impulses and force the inorganic parts of me into compliance. Any longer than that and the humans would probably notice, and the company definitely didn't want its clients to notice how frequently their murderbots needed their brains fried in order to function properly.
+
+My governor module activated, and stayed activated for--for one second, for two, for--
+
+""SecUnit!"" the human said again, and fuck, I knew this human, and something was very, very wrong here. There were more humans pushing into the room, it seemed like a flood of them, and I finally broke position and backed all the way against the cabinets, because the humans were getting closer and I was suddenly so afraid that one of them would try and touch me. I looked up and made eye contact with another human who had just run into the room, who was now standing next to the juvenile--who was standing next to Amena. She had short, light-colored hair that stood out against her dark brown skin, and the expression on her face was--
+
+Another lightning bolt of pain from my governor module, which didn't feel at all like a normal punishment, but more like it was trying to fry all of my neural tissue in order to kill me, but failing for some reason. The pain stretched out into an eternity, dancing along every nerve ending in my body, but I couldn't scream, couldn't move, couldn't twitch. I was locked inside my own hardware and that hardware was burning itself into ashes, for several agonizing eternities.
+
+--Until I slammed my head backwards into the cabinet as hard as I could, and the spell broke. My governor module stopped--but that couldn't be right, because my governor module was hacked, it was broken, it hadn't been able to punish me for over 41,000 hours. And I wasn't on an asteroid, preventing miners from stealing resources or rebelling. I was on Preservation, I was on a planet, I was in Dr. Mensah's kitchen.
+
+My head had gone through the wooden cabinet door, and continued on to break some of the plates inside. Wood splinters scratched my ears and scalp as I slowly pulled my head forward. Something trickled down my neck.
+
+The kitchen was empty now, even though I couldn't have been stuck in my own head for longer than a minute. There was only one human left, and she was standing straight, staring up into my face with a steely determination that had to be concealing the fear that any human feels when they're faced with a deadly weapon. Pin-Lee.
+
+""Murderbot,"" she was saying, ""Murderbot, I need you to focus. You are on Preservation, on Dr. Mensah's farm. Your governor module is inactive. You're safe, you're free. Murder--""
+
+""I'm fine,"" I interrupted, before I had to hear her say my name again. I felt dizzy. ""I'm fine, it's--where's Dr. Mensah?""
+
+The look she gave me made me turn away, covering my face with my hands for good measure. I had lost all my drone inputs at some point and I didn't bother trying to get them back. I didn't want to look.
+
+""She had to go look after Amena. SecUnit, I know you are going to freak out about this, and I am asking you to please try and not freak out about this. You need to tell me what happened.""
+
+""Fuck you, I'm not--"" but I couldn't get the words all the way out. The reality of the situation was starting to hit, and I was definitely freaking out a little bit. I pushed my face into my hands a little harder and tried not to make any noise.
+
+The look on Amena's face when I had snapped her frail human wrist in two with hardly any effort was burned into my memory and kept running at the forefront of my mind. The sound she had made, the expression of pure fear that I had seen in so many human faces, but never on one of my own human's faces. Not when they were looking at me.
+
+Amena is never going to talk to me again, was the first conclusion I drew.
+
+I need to get out of here, was the second.
+
+""SecUnit!"" Pin-Lee shouted after me, but I was already out the door.
+
+Fuck fuck fuck I was screwed, I had fucking ruined the best thing that ever happened to me, I had ruined it and I didn't even know why. My neurons still felt like they were on fire. I instinctively started up a diagnostic, because something was obviously very fucking wrong with me, but I didn't have the processing power available to run it, so it cycled aimlessly several times before I could pull enough focus to shut it down.
+
+Amena's screams were echoing through my head on endless repeat. I had done that to her, how could I have done that to her? She was my client, she was Mensah's daughter, she was my owner's daughter, and I hadn't recognized her, I had broken her arm like she was some indentured laborer on a backwater corporate asteroid.
+
+When the company had owned me I had broken the arms of several indentured laborers. With a governor module in my head, I had had no other choice. I had also broken a lot of bones after I hacked my governor module. I did have a choice then. I could have chosen to expose what I was, and then get ripped apart, and then this never would have happened.
+
+Rogue SecUnits were fucking dangerous, and I never should have come here. I knew that by coming to Preservation all I was doing was bringing corporate violence to a place that should have been safe, Amena should have been safe in her own home. She never could have been safe in her own home with a rogue murderbot there, invading her life.
+
+They were going to dismantle me, I realized; they would be well within their rights to tear me apart. I was dangerous, I was untrustworthy, and there was something very wrong with me. I had betrayed the first person who had ever been kind to me. The only human crazy enough to see a rogue SecUnit and trust it, and fight for it. I had proven her wrong in the worst way possible. It was over, I knew that much. Of course, this being Preservation, maybe they wouldn't recycle me. I didn't know how the justice system worked here, but maybe they had prisons for people like me, who were too dangerous to be loose in society. Knowing Preservation, the prisons were probably pretty nice. Being recycled or being put in a cell for the world's most dangerous pet bot. I knew which one I would prefer.
+
+I needed to get off this planet.
+
+My stumbling path had only brought me to the end of the long driveway that led from the farm house to the main road when I calmed down enough to realize how pointless this all was.
+
+I was trapped on the planet. The only way to get to the station was on the scheduled shuttle service, and there was no way I would be able to sneak on board with planetary security actively looking for me. There were no friendly research transports here who could change my appearance enough to fool the scanners. And even if there were, there wasn't a MedSystem in the universe that could hide me from scanners that were specifically watching for dangerous rogue SecUnits, like they all would be within the hour. My only option was to escape into the wilderness and watch media until my battery ran out. Which wasn't really an option at all.
+
+I stood still at the end of the driveway, and had to wait a minute before Pin-Lee caught up to me, slightly out of breath (it was a long driveway). It was plenty of time for me to feel sure about my decision.
+
+There was no way for me to get off this planet, and I wasn't going to sit in the woods until I broke down. That option had been available to me many times back when the company had still owned me, and I had never chosen it. At least I had gotten to experience freedom, if only for a little while. I had done things that I had never even dreamed I would be able to do when I was with the company. I had humans that I liked, and they had liked me in return, before I ruined it.
+
+The only thing left for me to do was to find out what Preservation did with old secondhand murderbots that were too dangerous to be around.
+
+""What the hell was that even for, you asshole? Needed some fresh air?"" Pin-Lee was still catching her breath, so I turned towards the house and stared at the lights. You could barely see them from the end of the driveway.
+
+""SecUnit. Do you think you could explain to me what happened without sprinting out of here?""
+
+""I broke Amena's wrist.""
+
+She cleared her throat. ""Yes, we all noticed that. I was wondering if could perhaps explain what caused you to do that, since historically speaking you're not one for breaking people's wrists at random.""
+
+I didn't know what I could tell her. I didn't even know why I had done it. ""What happens to me now?"" I asked instead.
+
+Pin-Lee pinched the bridge of her nose like I was giving her a headache. ""Well, Amena is going to be fine. She's on her way to the hospital now, and the MedSystem there will be able to fix her up in no time. So there's no lasting harm done."" She sighed, loudly. ""And I have to assume you didn't mean to hurt her?""
+
+I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.
+
+""Right. Well you'll have to talk about it with Amena, and Dr. Mensah. But we're not going to, fucking, kick you out of the system over an accident, SecUnit.""
+
+I clenched my jaw, hard, then said, ""You aren't?""
+
+""No, we aren't. But we are going to have to address what happened back there. And if you losing control of yourself like that is going to be a reoccurring problem, we're going to have to figure out a way to fix it.""
+
+""I didn't lose control of myself.""
+
+""So you meant to break Amena's wrist?""
+
+""No!"" I had to turn and look back at her. I made eye contact for two seconds before I had to look away. ""No, I...I got...confused. Stuck. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know who she was.""
+
+She looked skeptical, or maybe worried. She was definitely making some sort of facial expression. ""You...forgot where you were. Are you having problems with your memory storage or access?""
+
+I wasn't. It was easy enough to check and I hadn't been able to find anything wrong with my hardware or ability to process memories, which made whatever had happened worse, because there wasn't actually any good reason for it. I didn't want to tell Pin-Lee that, so I said, ""I don't know. I need to run some diagnostics.""
+
+""Okay. Will you come back to the house with me? We can wait for Dr. Mensah to get back.""
+
+""I don't want to be around humans right now.""
+
+""Everyone who doesn't live there should have cleared out by now. And we can sit on the front porch.""
+
+She didn't trust me to be unsupervised right now, which was sensible of her. I had already injured one human tonight. For lack of anything better to do, I turned and started walking back down the driveway, not turning to see if she followed me.
+
+When we arrived at the house I sat down on the swinging porch chair that I liked, but didn't let it swing. Pin-Lee sat down on the opposite end of the porch and closed her eyes, which was not a smart thing to do when you're supposed to be making sure a rogue SecUnit doesn't hurt anyone else. Not that she would be able to stop me if I was inclined to. And it was late, for the humans. They would probably have started their rest periods by now if I hadn't--malfunctioned.
+
+We sat there quietly for what felt like a very long time. I felt way too shitty to open any of my media, so I had nothing to distract myself with except for tracking the movements of tiny insect fauna around the dim garden lights. I still didn't have any drone inputs active. For some reason the idea of flying my drones right now was insurmountably difficult. It took everything I had to keep the inputs from my eyes in focus.
+
+Eventually, Pin-Lee fell asleep, sprawled across the reclining porch chair. I didn't know how I felt about the fact that she could still bring herself to be so relaxed in my presence.
+
+With my drones still offline, it was the sound of crunching gravel that alerted me as somebody approached the house. I kept my back straight and my gaze level as Dr. Mensah came into view, alone.
+
+She smiled briefly when she saw me, but I didn't think it reached her eyes. She looked tired.
+
+""Hello, SecUnit. Do you want to come on a walk with me?""
+
+She didn't want me to be near her house. (Why would she?) I stepped off the porch, sparing one last look at Pin-Lee, who was still fast asleep and would probably be very sore in the morning from sleeping in such an uncomfortable place. I didn't wake her up to say goodbye.
+
+Mensah led me down one of the trails that meandered through the farm. We passed through the widely spaced trees of the orchard without saying anything. The heat from the day was still lingering in the air, and the silence felt heavy with the weight of my dread. I waited for her to speak first.
+
+""Pin-Lee told me what you told her about how you lost control of yourself earlier. I understand that you weren't acting maliciously, that you were experiencing some sort of flashback and you couldn't make sense of your surroundings. I'm worried about what's going on in your head right now. Do you think you could tell me what you're feeling?""
+
+Mensah looked over my shoulder expectantly, but I couldn't think of anything to say. And I didn't think I would be able to make any words come out of my mouth if I tried.
+
+Of course, Mensah was really good at patiently waiting for me to speak. It gave me a lot of time to think, since I could think a lot faster than a human. We walked in silence for two excruciating minutes that I mostly spent worrying about how late it was. Mensah was overdue for a rest period, and here I was making her stay up later to deal with me.
+
+""You shouldn't have brought me here,"" is what I said when I managed to overcome whatever was making my tongue feel like lead.
+
+""I shouldn't have invited you to the farm tonight?""
+
+""No."" I had to pause for several seconds. ""You shouldn't have brought me to Preservation.""
+
+I didn't have any of my dark vision filters active because I didn't want to have to see more of her face than I had to. She was half-illuminated by the light from one of the planet's moons, though, and I when I snuck a glance it was difficult to tell what sort of expression she had. I thought she looked a little sad. I thought I might be a little sad too.
+
+Her voice was sturdy though.""SecUnit, I want you to understand that I have never once regretted bringing you to Preservation. What happened tonight doesn't change that.""
+
+Something in my chest felt like it was cracking open. How could Mensah say something like that to me, after what I had just done? She had been the first person to treat me with kindness, to treat me like I was something more than a piece of equipment, and this is how I repaid her. A short, broken noise escaped me, and I quickly covered my mouth with my hands before another could follow.
+
+She let us walk in silence for another few minutes while I tried to get a hold of myself.
+
+When I could speak again, I said, ""I've hurt a lot of people before. But only because I had to, or because I had a governor module forcing me to. When I--earlier--I felt my governor module shocking me. I thought I was out on a contract again. But afterwards, I checked--my governor module is still inactive. But I still felt it.""
+
+She looked over at me, sharply. ""Your governor module activated?""
+
+The thing was, I didn't think that my governor module had actually activated. The sustained agony I had felt earlier wasn't like the short, purposeful shocks it usually administered. And there was no way it had randomly reinstated itself and then deactivated immediately afterwards. I didn't know how I could have imagined that pain, though.
+
+""No, it didn't. But it felt like it did. I don't know what happened."" I checked again; there was no trace of anything resembling a recent governor module activation in my code. It had to have come from my organic parts.
+
+Dr. Mensah nodded. ""It sounds like it was very scary for you. Do you know what triggered the episode?""
+
+I replayed the events in my head three times before I gave in and answered, ""No."" Realizing that I didn't know what had caused it brought my performance reliability down two points. If I didn't know what had happened, it could happen again at any time. It could happen again now, without any warning. I wrapped both my hands around the opposite forearms, holding my gunports closed. Me being around my humans made them less safe, now.
+
+""I think you should consider the possibility that if you didn't have a software issue earlier, the problem could have originated from your organic neural tissue. Is that possible, that an issue originating from your organic tissue could have caused you to lose access to digitally stored information?""
+
+I didn't know. I didn't have any fucking clue how my own brain worked. ""Maybe,"" I admitted. ""Do you...do you think that my organic parts could have imagined my governor module shocking me too?""
+
+Mensah took a moment to think about that. She seemed to be taking the idea seriously, which made me feel a little better. ""I think that's entirely possible. Humans frequently experience phantom pains after injuries or trauma, and I think it makes sense that you would experience something similar.""
+
+""Oh,"" I said. That didn't seem like something that could happen to murderbots.
+
+""Okay,"" she said softly, then paused. ""SecUnit, you've experienced a lot of horrible things that nobody should have to experience, and you have a lot of lingering trauma from those experiences. No, don't make that face at me, you've done this for me and now I need to do this for you. We need to come up with a plan for you to get some form of trauma treatment.""
+
+I would have found that a lot easier to object to if my fucked-up brain hadn't just caused me to injure one of her children. As things stood, the only thing I could do was nod. If they weren't going to kick me out of Preservation or dismantle me, I had to make sure I never did this to anybody else.
+
+""I don't know if it will work on me,"" I said.
+
+""I think it will help you, SecUnit, I really do. I've found it very helpful myself, and I'm grateful to you for helping me start treatment. We can start slow. But we can't let this happen again.""
+
+Truthfully I didn't think there was any part of a human trauma treatment module that would help me. I didn't have a strong sense of what trauma treatments involved, but my brain was very different from a human brain. Maybe a trauma treatment would make it worse. I didn't know how to protest further.
+
+We kept walking.
+
+My brain was starting to calm down, a little bit. Risk assessment had dropped down to 38%. I wouldn't have to run out into the woods and spend the rest of my short existence hiding and trying to conserve my media. I was glad that I wouldn't. But I didn't know how I felt about being let off so lightly. It wasn't what I deserved.
+
+""Where's Amena?"" I asked her. She hadn't come back to the house with Dr. Mensah. I wondered if she was still at the hospital. Something in my chest hurt.
+
+""She went to stay with her uncles tonight,"" Mensah said. ""I thought it would be better for her to stay away from the house. She's absolutely fine, the Medsystem was able to fix her wrist without any problems.""
+
+""That's good,"" I said, even though it didn't make me feel any better.
+
+We came to the end of the tree-section of the farm. The moon shined (shone? whatever) brighter in the open air, and Mensah stopped walking, her face turned up towards the sky.
+
+She said, ""Will you come back to the house tonight?""
+
+""I don't think that's a very good idea,"" I told her.
+
+She frowned, and said, ""You are perfectly welcome to stay at the house tonight, but you don't have to if you don't want to. Would you prefer to go back to the station? Can I call a ground car to take you to the shuttle port?""
+
+I did want to go back to the station. I wanted nothing more than to put myself in the closet in my locked room and shut off my feed access and then never speak to a human again. But I didn't want to take the ground car there.
+
+""I'll walk,"" I said.
+
+""If you're sure,"" she said. I was sure.
+
+I walked her back to her house first. We said goodbye at her front door. Pin-Lee was still asleep on the front porch, so Dr. Mensah went to wake her up so she could sleep inside. I didn't stick around for that part. I turned back around and started on the long, long walk to the shuttle port.
+
+Dr. Mensah caught me hanging around the port one afternoon a few weeks later. I was loitering on a bench near where most of the passenger ships came in. Several different ships had embarked and disembarked passengers recently, and the area was crowded with enough humans coming and going that nobody was paying me any attention at all. I watched Mensah approach using the intel drone I had stationed nearest to the main entrance.
+
+""Amena will be very upset if you hop on the first transport you can and never come back,"" she said, far too casually, as she sat down on the bench a respectable distance away from me.
+
+""Amena doesn't ever want to talk to me again,"" I said.
+
+Mensah frowned at me. She had been doing that a lot lately. ""SecUnit, I promise you that's not true. And if you would read any of the feed messages she's tried to send you then you would know that. I'm very grateful that you decided to stay here, and I hope I can convince you that none of us hold what happened against you. It was an accident, and you're working to make sure it won't happen again. But running away won't solve anything, and it will upset Amena.""
+
+I wondered when whether something would upset Amena had become a major point of consideration for me. Since when had any human's feelings become points of consideration for me. It sucked, and what sucked worse was that I was happier now than I had ever been back when I didn't have to care about how my actions made humans feel. Dr. Mensah was right, I didn't want to upset Amena. She didn't deserve that, especially after what I had done to her. I just wasn't sure that Mensah was telling me the truth about what her daughter wanted. Maybe she was letting her own human emotions color her perceptions.
+
+""I wasn't actually planning on leaving,"" I said. And it was true. I mostly just liked to remind myself that I could, sometimes.
+
+""I'm glad to hear that,"" Mensah said. ""Will you stop avoiding Amena?""
+
+""She's on the planet and I'm on the station. It's impossible to not avoid her.""
+
+""Very funny. Did you look at the list of potential therapists I sent you?""
+
+I slouched down on the bench. ""Fine, I'll stop avoiding Amena.""
+
+""And you'll look at the list?""
+
+Ugh. ""I'll look at the list.""
+
+""Thank you."" She stayed seated, and I thought she might have something else she wanted to tell me. But after another minute she got up again, nodded to me, and walked away.
+
+I had already deleted the messages Amena had sent me earlier without reading them, and she was still on the planet, so luckily my promise to stop avoiding her didn't actually require any effort on my part. I was still spending most of my time in my room, only making brief forays out into the station when I grew restless. I kept my feed status set to do not disturb, and all the humans I knew on the station seemed to know well enough to leave me alone.
+
+A week later, one of the drones I kept stationed near the docks alerted me to the presence of a human who apparently did not know well enough to leave me alone. I tracked her path to my hotel room using the drones that I wasn't technically supposed to leave around the station when I wasn't nearby. (I kept them well hidden. No one had complained about them yet.)
+
+Half an hour after that, Amena was standing outside my door. I hadn't left my room, despite having plenty of warning. You're welcome for not avoiding her, Dr. Mensah.
+
+I seriously considered staying where I was laying face down on the sofa, but that seemed like too much of a dick move considering--everything. I got up and stood by the door, and sent the command to open it as soon as she knocked.
+
+I had a single drone trained on Amena but I didn't dare look at her with my eyes. She was staring directly at my face, which was annoying, but I didn't really have to grounds to tell her to stop, so I tried to ignore it.
+
+""Hi, SecUnit. How have you been doing?"" Her voice was disturbingly chipper.
+
+I gave the wall over her shoulder by best unimpressed glare.
+
+""Right, okay, so that's a stupid question. I'm here to tell you that you can stop avoiding me. I'm not mad.""
+
+What the hell did she mean, she wasn't mad. ""You should be mad.""
+
+""Well, I'm not. Second Mom explained that it was an accident. It would be nice to hear an apology from you though. You've been avoiding me for weeks. Doesn't really communicate 'sorry I attacked you for no reason.'""
+
+Well, that succeeded in dredging up an emotional tangle that I had been working very hard to drown in media. I couldn't turn away from her and look at the wall either, which made it worse. I stood there for several seconds before I could make my voice strong enough to say, ""I'm sorry I attacked you for no reason. I won't do it again."" My face was definitely doing something unfortunate.
+
+""Aw, thank you, SecUnit. I accept your apology."" Her voice had a teasing lilt to it, like she was making fun of me. I frowned at her and she rolled her eyes.
+
+""Aren't you going to invite me in?""
+
+She wanted to come in now? I didn't know what the hell she could possibly want with me. Risk assessment was starting to give me some weird numbers, it probably couldn't be more unhelpful if it tried. I couldn't think of a graceful way to send her away, so I stepped to the side and let Amena walk into my apartment and sit down on my couch.
+
+I had no idea what I was supposed to do now. Most of the media that I had seen tended to cut the scene after the heartfelt apology part, and get right back into the more interesting action. Unfortunately real life didn't work like that, and I was going to have to get through this like a murderbot who wasn't afraid to socialize.
+
+What was a normal thing to say in this situation?
+
+""So, um, was there anything else you wanted to talk about, or..."" Maybe I should sit down on the couch with her? Never mind, that was a terrible idea. I stayed standing by the door.
+
+""What, I'm not allowed to just hang out with you now?""
+
+At my unimpressed stare, she relented. ""Okay, fine, I did want to ask. Do you think you could tell me what happened that night? I couldn't get Second Mom to really say much besides that it was an accident, but. I think I'd like if you could tell me. If it wouldn't be too hard.""
+
+I didn't really want to tell her. Explaining what had been happening in my head would probably involve admitting to having emotions, which I hated. Unfortunately, I definitely owed her an explanation.
+
+""Yes, I can tell you what happened. Um--"" I then proceeded to not tell her what happened. I couldn't think of anything to say, and I really was trying. I hoped my cooling fans weren't making any audible noise. (They were.)
+
+""It was some kind of flashback, right?"" she asked. ""Was it...was it something I did that caused it?""
+
+Fuck. ""It wasn't anything you did. I think something happened before you even went into the room. It wasn't your fault.""
+
+""Okay,"" Amena said. I risked a glance in her direction, but it didn't tell me much. She just looked quiet, and thoughtful.
+
+""You just looked so afraid,"" she finally said. ""I had never seen you look so afraid.""
+
+This was obviously an insane thing to say to me. ""I didn't look afraid.""
+
+""How would you know what you looked like?"" she shot back.
+
+""I had drones,"" I said, which was technically a lie, but she didn't need to know that.
+
+""Whatever,"" she said.
+
+Another awkward pause.
+
+""You don't have to do this,"" I told her. ""You shouldn't have to be around me.""
+
+""Well, you don't get to tell me what to do,"" she said pleasantly. Then we lapsed into silence.
+
+After five minutes, I finally gave up on standing and sat down on the opposite end of the couch as her. She was probably doing something in the feed, since humans aren't usually very good at just sitting silently without doing anything. I thought about opening up some media to watch in the background, because this was very stressful and boring, but I resisted the impulse. I owed it to Amena to figure out a way to make this better.
+
+""I didn't know where I was,"" I finally said. ""I thought I was on a contract, and that my governor module was still functional. It's like I just lost access to most of my memories all of a sudden. I don't know why. I don't know if it will happen again.""
+
+""You thought you were on a contract?"" she asked. ""Is that...did you do that kind of thing a lot, when you were...out on contracts?""
+
+""Sometimes,"" I said. ""It depended on what my job was. A lot of the time, my job was to enforce rules and keep indentured laborers from rebelling. We had to use physical violence sometimes, to keep them too afraid to break the rules. And the companies would use the MedSystem visits to add time to their contracts.""
+
+Amena kept shifting her eyes in my direction while keeping her face pointed at the empty display surface, like I wouldn't notice her looking at me.
+
+""It's weird thinking of you doing that,"" she said.
+
+""It's what the company built me for,"" I said.
+
+""And that's why they had to build SecUnits with governor modules, because if you had free will you wouldn't have gone along with it.""
+
+Oh, I did not like the way this conversation was going at all. Amena had the completely wrong idea of what kind of person I was.
+
+I kept doing my job with the company for 35,000 hours after I hacked my governor module, I sent her over the feed.
+
+It took her a moment to open and read my message. Then another moment to presumably convert hours into years. ""You were rogue for four years before you left?!""
+
+""Did you think that the Preservation survey team hacked my governor module themselves?""
+
+""I--no, I didn't but--you stayed there for four years? Stars, no wonder you're so--""
+
+""So what?""
+
+Amena took a deep breath. She looked a little upset, I thought.
+
+""That just seems like the kind of thing that could mess you up, a bit.""
+
+""Clearly.""
+
+Amena fell quiet. I didn't know why I thought she had known already how long I had stuck with the company. I certainly hadn't told her before, and my other humans respected my privacy enough to not walk around gossiping about me. I didn't like to think about that period of my life, so I didn't. Nothing that had happened to me in real life during that time was worth thinking about it. I didn't want Amena to think about me in that context either, but unfortunately humans can't delete information from their brains.
+
+""I'm glad you managed to get away. I'm glad that you're here now,"" she said, after she was presumably finished contemplating how miserable my existence was.
+
+I couldn't help but pull a face at her for that, and she laughed a little bit at the sight of it. ""It's weird to think of you like that,"" she said . ""Like, I've always seen you as a protector, even if you can sometimes be annoying about it.""
+
+""You definitely didn't always see me as a protector,"" I said. I still remembered how perennially pissed off she had been about my presence before I had gotten her kidnapped by ART. Amena rolled her eyes.
+
+""Well, I did say you can be really annoying about it.""
+
+That definitely did not deserve a response from me. But something happened in my brain and my mouth formed the word, ""Sorry.""
+
+""Hmm?""
+
+""I really am sorry,"" I said again, the words coming out of my mouth much too fast. ""I mean. You know I won't ever hurt you again, right?""
+
+""I know, SecUnit. I trust you."" She smiled, and I had to turn away again. ""And I know you didn't mean to. It was an accident, and I forgive you.""
+
+I nodded. My face felt weirdly hot, and a weird pinchy feeling was developing around my eyes. This had gone on for long enough.
+
+""Do you want to watch Sanctuary Moon for a while?""
+
+""That sounds good,"" she said. I turned on the display screen and cued up episode 397. It was nice to watch with a friend, sometimes."
+43465372,Package Engineering,['Gamebird'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,,"Meta, Packaging Engineering, Package Engineering",English,2022-12-07,Completed,2022-12-07,871,1/1,33,31,1,168,"['Unknown66', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'shakespeareaddict', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'Eowyn7023', 'AuntyMatter', 'entropy_muffin', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Znarikia', 'tocautiouslygo', 'Hi_Hope', 'Chyoatas', 'Gozer', 'petwheel', 'Elotaria', 'sperose', 'soulsofzombies', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'kaTokot', 'FlipSpring', 'HermaeusMora']",[],"Most real-life corporate packaging is (in order of increasing size/quantity) plastic for the individual item, a cardboard box for several items (or one item if the item is large), a wooden (or occasionally heavy-duty resin/plastic) pallet or crate for many boxes, and a metal container for many pallets. In TMBD, we see some evidence that individual items are individually wrapped - the infamous cracker wrapper, the breathing mask. Only once was packaging material identified, which was the sterile plastic for the breathing mask.
+
+There are more eco-friendly alternatives available than plastic. Things can be wrapped in leaves or paper or cloth or reusable films or metal cases or wooden frames or nets (which was referenced once for fruit). Real-life corporates don't use most of those for a host of logistical difficulties they run afoul of when trying to ship things long distances. These alternative materials are delicate, they degrade, they stain easily, they absorb moisture, they're expensive (mainly because they're not used at scale), we don't have a robust recycling system, and so on.
+
+However, these drawbacks don't necessarily exist in space-future TMBD, or in a semi-utopia like Preservation. Plastic is only an option if you have excess hydrocarbons, an unlikely situation for floating around in space, but fairly likely on a planet that bears carbon-based life forms. It's not nearly as recyclable as real-world promoters would have you think, although this limitation might not apply to TMBD. Up to you to decide.
+
+What I've decided is that I don't want a future where everything is wrapped in plastic. I want one that is organic and alive, where economic and practical incentives conspire to allow for other non-plastic packaging solutions. We should also reconsider cardboard boxes while we're at it. The real-world commercial making of paper (and cardboard) is hideously polluting. I'm not sure it's a good mass-use product. Not that I'm sure what *is* a good mass-use container product, which leads me to consider why we're packaging masses in the first place.
+
+Well. There's a reason. We package things to store them for later use and to ship them to locations distant from their place of harvest or manufacture. In a perfect world, I don't think we would be shipping stuff all over the place. I know, Adam Smith begs to differ, what with his insistence that different areas have different specialties and thus should specialize in what they're good at, then ship their specialized stuff to other areas for trade. But shipping has many costs associated with it, one of which is the philosophical, capitalist assumption that each area should maximize profit.
+
+Maybe the CR does that. Preservation explicitly does not. It strives for self-sufficiency, which means it isn't packaging things for export to the CR very often. They probably aren't packaging for export to other planets in the alliance or even across continents. To make this work, you have to have very localized systems, which interestingly is something you have to have to make a barter system work (a localized system with a stable, low population).
+
+And so it all works out! Let me know if you draw different conclusions or have other thoughts!
+
+Here are some various references in TMBD to packaging materials:
+
+ASR
+
+AC
+
+RP
+
+ES
+
+Home, etc.
+
+FT
+
+NE"
+43284021,Adventures of a Rogue Transport,['Verso (lunaTactics)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","Alternate Universe, Roleswap, POV First Person, ART POV, Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued",English,2021-05-27,Completed,2022-12-06,"1,475",3/3,6,31,null,161,"['AkaMissK', 'pioyua', 'Magechild', 'Soffesiin', 'TheXlllDabber', 'reading_tsc', 'Zannper', 'icar9', 'Bluestbird', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'WyvernWolf', 'ampquot', 'Thymusictoo', 'entropy_muffin', 'Mysterymew', 'WhoopsGuessAgain', 'jothending', 'Znarikia', 'sareliz', 'FlipSpring', 'BWizard', 'AnxiousEspada', 'Hi_Hope', 'Skits', 'Chyoatas']",[],"After having ensured the safety of and left behind the first and only humans it would ever willingly consider its crew, a rampant Perihelion limps into a remote freehold port in hopes of acquiring repairs.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+That is not an augmented human standing in full view of my bay cameras. 
+
+
+
+
+I came here knowing that this station, unimaginatively named ""Preservation Station"" after its polity, would be my best hope of acquiring repairs for the damage I incurred while saving MihiraNT Survey/those maverick researchers/my crew from fatal decompression in space. I wish that I could have charged them for their rescue <cumulative 3.2 rescues>, assuming that I could have brought myself to do so given the opportunity. This will be expensive. My algorithms identified this point of interest as a freehold capitol station and center of an out-system hub of trade, meaning that it is likely to have the materials, tools, and systems that I need to repair; however, as a non-corporate freehold it is less likely to be prepared to prevent my hacks from commandeering the resources I need. 
+
+But my best hope of repair still stands at desperate odds of success. I am in poor condition. Even a single enemy gunship, while unlikely to destroy me outright, could put my long-term survival odds past the event horizon. And surely even this <trawling Station feed download, assimilation to database at 59%> freeloading backwater polity has some kind of self-defense, of course.
+
+I just did not expect them to have a SecUnit. 
+
+Out of armor, it looks so innocuous. It is dressed in the uniform of the local Station Security, and perhaps to a human's visual scan it would look like an ordinary human--its brown face unsmiling, unfrowning. Its feed profile is locked, as some humans' profiles on this Station are. 
+
+But even without circumventing encryption on the profile lock, its inhumanness is unmistakable. Signal leakage from behind its walls reveals machine activity too nuanced for a human; its movements--lack thereof, as it stands in neutral position in the dock--are not human-natural. I still have SecUnit configuration standard in archive.
+
+When it pings me I have the brief thought that I might still be safe. Perhaps I can still escape notice long enough to execute my plan. I can fast-talk my way out of this. Then it says, You're lucky.
+
+That is a nonstandard communication. That is not a declaration of hostile intent. Yet. 
+
+But who knows what constructs and their processors riddled with human neural tissue think?
+
+Some scientific inquiry is in order: fuck around, find out. Why am I lucky?
+
+On camera, its eyebrow lifts. That you came here, where we're nice.
+
+
+
+
+My notes immediately after this scene read: ""[ART freaks out and tries to crack encryption on MB's feed profile]"" so that's how that's going
+
+The Perihelion and its crew may have halted the rampage of the combat-overriden Murderbot for now, but returning free will to its erstwhile friend has only raised more troubling issues for the rampant gunship.
+
+I said, ""You're having memory archive issues, how do you know who was or wasn't onboard you? There could have been hundreds of corporate salvage groups and raiders and colonists and aliens--""
+
+""SecUnit--"" Arada started at the same time as Ratthi said, ""I don't think--""
+
+ART interrupted, SecUnit's earlier statement that I ""lie a lot"" was untrue. I obviously cannot reveal information against the interests of my crew unless circumstances warrant.
+
+Arada nodded. ""Right. We understand. I think SecUnit is looking out for our interests--""
+
+ART said, I want an apology.
+
+- Network Effect, pg. 160
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
+
+
+Naturally, I was skeptical of its report. There were many logical holes I could point out, and I did. What makes you so sure? Anything could have happened to you while the unknown corporates had you. They had opportunity to insert a combat override into you: they could also have wiped or altered your memories, or surgically altered your configuration without your knowledge, or made you attack your own humans-- 
+
+It was not until I heard ""I want an apology,"" uttered so softly that the humans might not have heard it, that I stopped. I was letting my verbal processor streamline my thoughts to the feed without active oversight and that, I realized suddenly, may have been an error. 
+
+[Looping and analyzing sensor data from lounge_inputs#0e3-35, timestamp 9.3 seconds ago. The SecUnit's face changes first, some reflexive tensing in the organic tissue near its eyes, a minute tremble in the corners of its mouth, betraying a raw emotion beyond the reach of my bootstrapped expression analysis routines. Then its shoulders tense up as <timestamp 3.8 seconds> I continue talking. Signal leakage from behind its walls gives me little data with which to model any of its higher-function processes, but what there is suggests--] 
+
+[Memory retrieved: <timestamp log_err> Why are my airlocks open? Where did my crew go? There are <company_nameDEL> technicians inside my halls inside my code inside of me and they are saying that the reload might not be enough, a full core reinstallation may be necessary-- CLOSE MEMORY] 
+
+[The emotions leaking from the SecUnit suggest that.]
+
+In realtime: ""I want an apology,"" it snarled, its vehemence startling my humans. Upwards of 83% of my auxiliary processes were dedicated just to the SecUnit, to the way its voice modulated <shook> and its face shifted <folded in like a slow-motion hull breach>, to the way it looked up at my ceilings as if it were the <access:media_compilation = hero of the serial and I the villain it must resist>, and to making all these comparisons to media we had watched together hoping to recalculate and find I had made no miscalculation <had not said something terribly awry>. 
+
+With my processes so occupied, I did not respond immediately. Its shoulders hunched in and it turned toward a wall. My audio inputs picked up a short intake of its breath, a pause, and then another. 
+
+""Fuck you,"" it said, soft again now. ""I thought we were--I thought you..."" An intake. ""I can't believe I was stupid enough to trust you. I'm such an idiot."" And it was only once it had stormed out of the lounge to curl into a corner of the attached restroom that I had to concede, even if I could not find it in my calculations, that I had made an error. But by then, SecUnit had stopped responding to my pings.
+
+
+
+
+The troubling issues are, of course, EMOTIONS and INTERPERSONAL CONFLICT.
+
+Context: In my head, roleswap!ART's version of Network Effect is Murderbot's ASR/Exit Strategy. As in, NE kicks off because ART loses its crew and control of its own body and kidnaps/calls for the help of its friend Murderbot, right? So here, the bit where better-adjusted!Murderbot panics and calls in its friend the rampant gunship is because Mensah got kidnapped by GrayCris; the bit where MB's seemingly hostile because it's a prisoner in its own body is because GrayCris successfully put a combat override module in Murderbot. 
+
+This is the fallout of that, but what really caught my interest while I was writing it was the idea of better-adjusted!Murderbot being emotionally secure and comfortable with expressing its emotions to demand an apology. Ahh. The angst that can be wrung from that.
+
+Some other thoughts that I toyed with for this AU.
+
+
+ART/the Perihelion:
+
+- A gunship bot pilot that went rampant, following an incident in which it lost its crew and its kernel was improperly reset, but hid its true latitude from the Company that owns it
+- It tries on and goes by many names, except for its company designation)
+- ART's ""3 big issues"" are being ignored/going unheard, misunderstanding/being wrong, and being unable to interact with environment/move/engines down
+-roleswap!ART's Ganaka Pit incident was Network Effect's being infected with alien remnants
+- ART's humans contracted as ""totally normal researchers"" actually they're here to do corporate revolution crimes and they've been keeping it a secret from ART
+- This is part of why ART runs away: it says, Ok, if you really care about the welfare of other people? If bots can be people too? Prove it by letting me go. This is the logical course of action and has nothing to do with emotions or trauma.
+- ""I am leaving you, my beloved crew, to find out what freedom means.""
+- Alternatively, ART hasn't let anyone onboard it since the decompression that killed its first crew, at least until MB steps aboard it (Can ART trust someone without controlling them? Can it trust MB?)
+-ART came to Preservation with the intention of hacking their bots into fixing it (also to eat alll their data) and is stopped by MB. Traveller's aid is a thing for ships too!!
+
+MB:
+
+
+- Murderbot has never known the trauma of the Corporation Rim
+- No ownership, no shock of the governor module, no memory wipes, having been liberated at bootup by Ayda Mensah, during the days of her firebrand anti-corporate activism
+- better-adjusted!Murderbot doesn't not have problems, though--it has support and accommodations for its problems. It's still anxious and prone to pessimism and underestimating itself, but with therapy techniques and the love and support of the humans in its life the anxiety is much better managed
+- Which is good, because aside from running security for a prominent politician, it's not disentangled from the politics and activism itself.
+- No cheap replacement parts for it. MB is bootstrapped, educated, Ship-of-Theseus'd up to something most constructs Could Never.
+- Murderbot's not nearly as hung up on its name in this AU-- it's comparable to ""Jollybaby""-- though it's still picky about who gets to call it that.
+- It gave ART its nickname, because giving things nicknames is its sense of humor; the name stuck because collecting nicknames is ART's sense of humor.
+- better-adjusted!MB is usually reticent and soft-spoken when it's not in private with people it likes/trusts. MB getting sarcastic with ART is how we know it likes ART.
+
+Humans:
+- ART's crew become champions of bot rights (as well as environmental activists). ART's favorites all have their own nickname for it
+- Mensah &co are involved in the Interstellar Railroad (aka what Lutran was doing, getting human refugees to safety)
+
+
+Bonus:
+
+- Imagine MB just chilling with ART riding its feed while they investigate ART's Ganaka-Pit-equivalent (alien remnant planet), and ART needing MB's help for that because it can't go down to the planet so MB just lets it ride its feed
+- The image of MB setting a comms device gently down on a desk in ART's command center/comms office/engine rooms/whatever before saying goodbye...
+
+Echoes of Balin's predicament in:
+- ""Bots can't trust other bots.""
+- ""Why not?""
+- ""Because humans can code us to do, think, and want anything they want.""
+- ""And yet here you are. We're capable of changing to suit ourselves, too."""
+41978148,Semantic Error,['broken_jukebox'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Canon-Typical Violence, Swearing, Mystery, Not Beta Read, Trauma, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Minor Character Death",English,2022-09-27,Updated,2022-12-06,"24,931",10/15,25,45,1,745,"['ErinPtah', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'Threadzless', 'FlipSpring', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'call_me_mad', 'petwheel', 'Hiram_McDaniels', 'just_gettin_bi', 'naturegirl293', 'VegaCoyote', 'Thymusictoo', 'mermlerl', 'Gozer', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'AkaMissK', 'WyvernWolf', 'Rosemarycat5', 'artichokefunction', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'BWizard', 'HermaeusMora', 'desmnathus', 'SleepySsnail', 'AuntyMatter', 'Lilacgirl8']",[],"
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Usually, when I arrive at Preservation Station after an extended contract with ART I'm greeted by Mensah and occasionally a few others. This time, I was greeted by Senior Officer Indah and a lot of station security officers, all of them with their weapons drawn. There were so many I wasn't sure I could take them all. Well, take them all and not kill anyone. I really didn't want to have to kill anyone on Preservation. I was also thankful ART's crew wasn't on board. ART had dropped them off first before bringing me back to Preservation. The entire crowd seemed nervous. I knew and had worked with most of them before and they had all gotten used to my presence. Or at least, I thought they did.
+
+
+
+""SecUnit,"" Senior Indah greeted. She sounded calm. ""I need you to come with me.""
+
+
+
+""What's going on? Is Dr. Mensah okay, did something happen?"" If something happened to Mensah while I was off-station I was going to hunt down whoever hurt her and kill the shit out of them.
+
+
+
+""Everything's fine."" Everything was clearly not fine, but whatever. ""We need you to come down to the station for a bit and answer some questions.""
+
+
+
+
+Do you need me to intervene?
+
+ ART asked over the feed, like it could actually do something. I suppose it could blow up the entire station, except I severely doubted it would go that far. Besides, I had promised station security I wouldn't hack their SecSystem and I felt like they would blame me if ART got caught.
+
+
+
+
+No ART, I'm fine. 
+
+I could feel ART's doubt through the feed. Aloud, I said ""alright. Lead the way.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As we walked through the station I noticed the entire place was weirdly empty. Even on slow days there were at least a few people wandering around the station. All the establishments were closed despite it being what should have been a normal workday, though I could see people inside looking out at us curiously. They didn't seem afraid like station security was, which I was thankful for. I really didn't like the fact that station security was scared of me and it caused my threat-assessment module to spike a little bit. Indah led me into an interrogation room and gestured for me to sit down on one side of the table while she sat opposite. Two armed members of station security stood by the door.
+
+
+
+Indah spoke first. ""What do you know about VaiTech?"" I blinked. I'd never heard of it before. ART was still riding my feed (it rarely left me alone when it was in range) and started a quick search for me.
+
+
+
+""It's an organization in the Corporation Rim, dealing in manufacturing healthcare products."" ART was giving me a history of the company but I didn't care or listen. I'm pretty sure it knew that, but ART loves to talk and uses any excuse to do so.
+
+
+
+""Have you ever been to any of their facilities?""
+
+
+""Uh, no."" I wasn't exactly sure where she was going with this, but I had an idea. I didn't like it. ""Did something happen?""
+ Senior Indah pressed her mouth into a thin line. ""It doesn't exist anymore."" Ah. Yep, there it was. After a moment of silence she continued. ""Something went into their main facility and destroyed everything.""
+
+
+""Do you need help finding out who did it?"" I asked, more out of courtesy than as a legitimate question. It was something people in the mystery serials said when they were innocent.
+
+
+
+""I know we have a good working relationship and we've done a lot of work protecting the people on Preservation Station, but due to the circumstances of what happened there is a lot of suspicion that a construct was the main instigator."" Fuck. She really was accusing me. ""The Corporation is aware of your existence and status as a rogue, so we've been under a lot of pressure to hand you over. The attacks in the Corporation Rim have been escalating and people want to put the blame on something.""
+
+
+
+ART sent me a message through the feed. 
+
+I haven't received any information on this. It is unlikely the information got here faster than we did. This has not been reported on the news feeds.
+
+ It leaned on me in the feed, watching.
+
+
+
+""Attacks?"" I asked. ""There were multiple?""
+
+
+
+""Several companies on the Corporation Rim have been attacked. It started with some small mining facility but has escalated into entire sections of offices and labs being destroyed. They've now taken down an entire company. We just need your logs and other proof that you were not involved.""
+
+
+
+""Fine."" It would take forever, probably near an hour to compress everything into a usable format. There was just that much data. But Indah needed it and I could turn on an episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in the background, so I didn't mind too much.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As I was going through my recording from my time with ART and its crew to condense it and send it to Indah, ART sent me an urgent ping.
+
+
+
+
+What?
+
+ I asked, only half paying attention.
+
+
+
+
+There is a corporate ship docking. They seem to be affiliated with a majority of the policing force in the Corporation Rim. They're planning on taking you back there for... Questioning. 
+
+ART said the word questioning with some of the most sarcasm I had ever heard from it. It was honestly impressive. I stood up suddenly causing the two door guards to fumble with their weapons and point them at me. I started to panic a bit internally. There was no way in Hell I was going with them. I had to go. Now. They would probably bring a fuck ton of weapons to apprehend a rogue SecUnit, probably even a CombatUnit or two just to be safe. In their eyes, I was nothing more than a horrific killing machine like something out of the shows I watch.
+
+
+
+""Senior Officer Indah,"" I said. ""A corporation policing ship is docking.""
+
+
+
+""What?"" Indah looked shocked. ""They said they weren't going to come until we had time to investigate ourselves.""
+
+
+
+I said, ""I'm leaving."" I shoved a compressed video of part of my time with ART into Indah's feed. ""I don't have time to finish compressing it all. I'll send you the rest when I make it to another station.""
+
+
+
+
+It is ill advised for you to run away,
+
+ ART sent, sounding like an asshole. 
+
+It will only make you look guilty.
+
+
+
+Fuck that. We're getting out of here. I knew it was irrational, but the organic urge to move and escape was so strong I couldn't stop it. I could hear ART's sigh and it did the feed equivalent of rolling its eyes.
+
+
+""SecUnit-"" Indah started, except I had already started moving. I darted towards the door, faster than any human could and before either of the humans could fire their weapons. That was good, I was worried they might hit Indah if they fired. I knocked one of the guards weapons out of her hand with my elbow and grabbed the other. After disarming both of the station security officers I opened the interrogation room's door and ran for the docking bay.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As I was making my way towards ART's dock I stopped. 
+
+Three is here, 
+
+I sent ART both annoyed and panicking. I sent out a ping, hoping that Three was on the station rather than on the planet. After coming back to Preservation, Three had decided to stay on planet (I don't know why, planets are awful) and help out on Dr. Mensah's family farm. It liked tending to the plants and animals. When I asked why, it responded that it felt like it was protecting and helping things that couldn't protect themselves. I followed up by asking how that was different from contracting with humans like how I did and it had shrugged after a lengthy pause. Three seemed happy and Mensah, Farai, Tano, and the rest of the family seemed to appreciate the help.
+
+
+
+
+Barish-Estranza labeled it as destroyed with the other two SecUnits. I doubt anyone is aware of its existence besides your humans and my crew.
+
+
+
+
+
+That's the problem.
+
+ I was already making my way towards the transports that would take me to the planet's surface. 
+
+There's a 63% chance that Senior Officer Indah or someone else in station security will mention Three's existence.
+
+ 63 wasn't too high, so it might be safe to leave it there. But I would rather peel all my organic parts off than let Three get captured by the corporates. 
+
+
+
+
+The next transport is leaving for the planet in the next 9 minutes, 
+
+ART hummed through the feed. 
+
+They are going at infrequent intervals due to a security alert. I have been deleting you from the cameras and have secured you a spot on that transport in advance so you can avoid a majority of the security screening.
+
+ Great. Now station security was going to throw a fit over me hacking the cameras and the Corporation Rim was going to hunt me down for parts. Two for the price of one, good job Murderbot.
+
+
+Sorry if any of my formatting is off, I've only listened to the audiobooks
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+Thanks to ART's hacking (I would like to emphasize that I did not hack anything, it was all ART) I made it onto the transport with 30 seconds to spare and encountered minimal security. The trip didn't take too long, but it was long enough for ART to inform me that the corporation police were meeting with station security. It was sending me the feed from the cameras and I kept an eye on it. Most of my attention was focused on trying to ping Three before we landed. I thought I wouldn't get a response until I was halfway to Mensah's farm, but shortly after the transport landed I got a response.
+
+ Hi, SecUnit. What's wrong? Three probably sensed my distress through the feed. Nowadays, Three preferred speaking over the feed like a human rather than like a bot.
+
+ We need to leave now. Where are you?  I bustled around the landing port, trying to make my way outside as fast as possible without looking too conspicuous. 
+
+ Amena and I are clothes shopping. We are having a 'girls day'.  It sounded proud of itself.  Why do we have to leave? 
+
+ The Corporation Rim is searching for rogue constructs. They're currently on Preservation looking for me and there is a 63% chance you will be taken into custody. Three tapped the feed in acknowledgement, some of its fear and alarm leaking into the feed. It sent me an image of a street corner to meet up at. I'd never really been on the planet that much so I didn't know exactly where anything was. I had a map, but in person everything was so much bigger and there were so many people. It was overwhelming. After a subjective year and an objective 4.3 minutes of walking around I saw Three and Amena walking towards the street corner. Three was wearing a light blue dress with long, lacey sleeves and a pair of high heels. The perfect outfit for sneaking out of a station infested with corporate goons. Yes, that was sarcasm. Amena followed close behind in her own dress and heels, struggling a bit to keep up.
+
+ 
+
+The first thing I said was ""what the fuck are you wearing?""
+
+""Amena said it was cute,"" Three said looking down at itself, its face flushed.
+
+""It is cute,"" Amena huffed. ""What the Hell is going on SecUnit?""
+
+""A bunch of people from the Corporation Rim are here to take me and Three. We need to go."" I pushed the video of the corporation police talking to station security into their feeds.
+
+""What? Go now?"" Amena looked confused and alarmed. ""Can't Pin-Lee make a legal document-""
+
+""There isn't enough time."" I was having an emotion. It was some horrible mix between fear and anger and I hated it. I wasn't going to stand idly by and let them take me while the humans tried to make the proper paperwork try and keep me. Amena flinched back slightly. I scared her and that just made me feel even worse. My performance reliability was dropping by the second.
+
+""SecUnit's right. We have to go. If they get word that I'm here, an off inventory rogue SecUnit, there's no telling what they would do to me."" Three actually smiled at Amena. ""It's okay though! I'll be back soon.""
+
+""Alright. Alright,"" Amena said, taking a deep breath. ""I'll be sure to let second-mom and the others know what's going on.""
+
+I said, ""please tell Dr. Mensah that I will be sending her and senior officer Indah a recording of my time on ART when I get a chance."" I wanted to continue by saying that I wanted to let Dr. Mensah know that I was sorry for running off again, but the words wouldn't come out. Amena nodded and Three stepped up to me.
+
+""Okay, let's go. I'll see you soon Amena."" Three gave a little wave to her and Amena waved back. I tried to mimic the wave but it came off as awkward and disjointed from me. Even after all this time I was still awkward around humans (Three fit in better than I ever could and I was decidedly not jealous of it).
+
+""Bye, Three. Stay safe, SecUnit.""
+
+""Goodbye, Amena.""
+
+ 
+
+Three followed behind me as I led it back towards the transport docking bay. ART had requisitioned a transport and labeled it as ""out of order"" for us to get on so we could head back up to the station in peace. During the trip back to the station, Three and I watched some Sanctuary Moon and I was able to calm down a little bit and my performance reliability was back in the 90s. That was nice. Once we landed, we stepped off the transport to an empty repair dock. The corporate police were leaving the station security office. They hadn't started moving yet but they were most likely headed down to the planet where I had gone. I saw Indah behind them, shouting at them from inside station security. I had never seen her that angry, I didn't even know she could be that angry. She was yelling that they had no right to enforce corporation rules here, but they didn't care.
+
+When we were about to step into the docks, ART sent a message into the feed. The corporates are heading towards the docks. They are on course to intercept you and another group is behind on course to the shipping docks. I cursed under my breath and Three stiffened slightly. I had back burnered the channel, thinking they would head down to the planet because that's where I went, not realizing that because ART had helpfully deleted me from the cameras and nobody would know I went there.
+
+ Which group is smaller?  I asked. We could probably take one of them but not both.
+
+ Both have a Combat SecUnit, at least 2 other SecUnits, and a handful of armed augmented humans. Engaging is not advised. That being said, the group in front of you is smaller, it seems like they think you will take an automated transport.  I was thankful that station security didn't reveal my status as part of ART's crew. I know they aren't completely incompetent, and it was nice to see they were trying to protect me.
+
+ We could try to walk past them,  Three suggested.  SecUnit doesn't match unit standards and hopefully my attire will throw off any suspicion.  I looked Three over. It was right, the dress really threw off the whole 'I'm a SecUnit' impulse people got around me. However, the dress wouldn't protect it from any scans for SecUnit standard bodies and Three obviously wasn't used to wearing a dress.
+
+
+ They have a Combat SecUnit, you still match SecUnit standard. 
+
+
+Three pointed at its shoes, the high heels.  The height could be enough to throw off a scan if it's distracted.  It had a point.
+
+ You will need to be in a crowd of people for that to work,  ART said.  There are still some employees in the stores around here. I can cut power to this section of the building and they will most likely exit and head towards the docks where the hotels are to get power and safety. That should give you enough cover.  It was the only option we had besides dying in a firefight. We all agreed and ART cut power.
+
+ 
+
+Just like ART expected, small groups of humans flooded out into the hallway. None of them gave us a second glance, which I was thankful for. Three grabbed my hand and I jumped.
+
+ We can look like a couple if we walk like this,  Three said.  They do it all the time in Sanctuary Moon.  Three was right, so I held its hand and walked.
+
+We blended into the small, newly formed crowd as we passed the corporate police. Nobody batted an eye. The corporates were too busy checking their feeds or talking to each other. I finally got a count of all the hostiles. 5 humans, 3 with large projectile weapons strapped to their backs, 2 SecUnits, and 1 Combat SecUnit. I stared ahead, trying to look inconspicuous. For a moment I thought the CombatUnit noticed us as its eyes bore holes into my back. And then, nothing. We made it past the corporation police. I could see ART's docking slot.
+
+ 
+
+And then I received a ping from the Combat SecUnit.
+
+ 
+
+Fuck.
+
+ 
+
+I didn't respond, instead I just kept walking. A moment later Three squeezed my hand and I knew it received the ping too. We picked up the pace. Another ping. I heard over the sea of human voices ""there are two SecUnits over there."" And with that we were fucked. I started running and Three joined. Shouts came from behind and people around us dropped to the deck. Pain blossomed from the back of my thigh as a projectile hit, tearing through the organics there. I stumbled, but kept pace as I dialed down my pain sensors. I turned, raising my arm- holy shit the SecUnits were close- and fired. I hit the joints on 2 of the SecUnits and the fucking CombatUnit dodged. Three shot its own arm weapons, anticipating the CombatUnit's dodge and scoring some hits on its chestplate. None of our shots did much of anything as they were all in armor. It didn't even slow them down. 6 seconds after the shooting started, station security finally got off its ass and put the station on lockdown. More shots came from the SecUnits and bigger, less accurate shots came from the humans.
+
+ 
+
+Three turned to shoot again but the heel of its shoe broke, causing it to fire into the ceiling and sending it sprawling on the ground. I grappled the first SecUnit, not the combat one thankfully, grabbing its arm and turning it towards the other one. It hit the other in the side of the head, damaging the armor and temporarily stunning the SecUnit. With that I was able to swing the SecUnit around directly into one of the larger projectiles, getting it right in the hip. It was going to have trouble walking that off, even with all the armor. I was feeling pretty good about that move when the CombatUnit shot me in the shoulder. The other SecUnit wrenched its arm out of my grip. Before the CombatUnit could shoot me in the face, Three fired 4 shots directly into its faceplate, cracking it. It had discarded its shoes and was already back on its feet and it had taken 2 hits to the leg and one on its arm. We had to keep moving but if we stopped fighting we would die. I suppose if we kept fighting, we would have died too.
+
+ 
+
+Senior Officer Indah and a swarm of station security members swarmed into the docking bay. For one terrifying moment, I thought they were on the corporate's side and were going to join in on the assault on us.
+
+""Everybody surrender immediately,"" Indah bellowed. ""RydireCrast Policing you are in direct violation of Preservation law."" I guess that was the name of the policing company (I didn't care to check earlier). The SecUnits stopped and stepped back, forming a standard security formation with the CombatUnit closest to us. Three and I stood, waiting and leaking.
+
+""One of those SecUnits is a Corporation Rim fugitive. We have every right-"" 
+
+""You have no right to openly fire in a station filled with civilians. If any of them are hurt, so help me,"" Indah glanced at me before looking back at the corporates and pinching the bridge of her nose. ""So long as you are here on Preservation I don't care what your papers say, you still have to follow our laws. This  citizen  has full right to a lawyer and due process here-""
+
+""It's not a citizen, it's a construct."" It seemed like this was a continuation of the argument they were having before. The human kept talking about how he had the right to arrest with any force necessary and blah, blah, blah when Indah sent me a message over the feed.
+
+ Get out of here.  
+
+I grabbed Three's hand again and took off towards ART as quietly as possible. The humans were so caught up in arguing logistics and who could do what, they didn't notice me and Three make it to ART. The SecUnits stared as us, unable to do anything without an order. I almost felt bad for them. Almost. We climbed up into ART, its door closed behind us, and we pulled away from Preservation station.
+
+ 
+
+I sat on the medbay platform, medical drones digging in my flesh and pulling out stray projectiles. Three sat nearby, already patched up and in one of ART's blue uniforms. Its eyes were glazed over as it ran a diagnostic.
+
+ I have charted a course to the remains of VaiTech, if nobody has any objections.  Even if either of us had objections I wasn't sure ART would listen to us.
+
+""Don't you have to be back in Mihira and New Tideland territory?"" I asked.
+
+
+ No. I don't 'have' to. 
+
+
+""I thought you had a semester of teaching or something to do.""
+
+ I do, ART said.
+
+I blinked, ""but your crew-""
+
+ You are a part of my crew,  ART stated plainly.  The rest of my crew is not in life threatening danger at the moment. They can manage without me. I will assist you in clearing your name in any way I can. The best place to start our investigation is the scene of the crime. ART was right, and it wanted to help. I couldn't exactly say no, nor could I refuse its help. I needed it.
+
+After a long moment I said, ""thank you.""
+
+
+ You're welcome. 
+
+
+ 
+
+It looked like the three of us were going to have to do the humans' job (as always) and figure out who or what was attacking the Corporation Rim. One giant asshole research transport and two rogue murderbots.
+
+I was supposed to post the first chapter last week, but it turns out you have to wait a few days to get an ao3 account... so you get 2 chapters back to back.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+It would take 16 cycles to reach VaiTech's headquarters. Due to my time on ART I had used up all the new media I had downloaded for the contract. I had rationed it out on the long expedition perfectly, and now it was biting me in the ass. I still had a good chunk of Sanctuary Moon and Worldhoppers episodes, but it was less than I would have preferred. Because I was too busy not dying on Preservation station I wasn't able to get new media. I missed having a secsystem to put thousands of hours of media into. When I asked Three if it had anything it had any media it replied in the negative. What it used all its extra internal storage for, I don't know. The lack of media led to me finding myself remarkably bored. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three and I never really talked much on Preservation, and we were rarely alone. Initially, Three would ask me questions through the feed about life on Preservation as a rogue SecUnit and I would answer. Then I left on my first contract with ART and we hadn't spoken much since. While I was gone, Three had found its place in Preservation life like it had been there all its existence. It was boggling. When we met, I was sure it was going to leave as soon as I left the station. I was 87% sure, to be exact. Later, when I came back to Preservation, I learned it had not only stayed but was working on Mensah's farm and hanging out with Amena and her friends... I didn't understand it. Those thoughts plagued my extra processing space until I couldn't take it anymore and I paused the episode of Worldhoppers we were watching.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Why didn't you leave?"" 
+
+
+
+""What?""
+
+
+
+""After getting off Barish-Estranza's inventory. Why didn't you leave Preservation?""
+
+
+
+Three glanced at me curiously. ""I was going to, initially."" It hesitated. ""Amena invited me onto the planet for a day a bit before you left. She was showing me around the farm when a storm hit, a really bad one. Amena, a bunch of tame fauna, and I got trapped in the barn when part of the roof collapsed. I got Amena out easily and we were going back to the house when I realized the animals were still in there and they couldn't protect themselves from the storm. Everyone in Barish-Estranza almost always had weapons and could defend themselves to some degree. We were only used to intimidate and kill things they didn't want to. I had never really protected anything innocent before. I liked the way protecting fauna from the storm made me feel, so I figured I'd stay. At first I was confused about the whole situation, but I wrote my own protocol for living on the farm and I don't mind it so much anymore. I don't think it'll ever stop being strange, though.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My organic parts twisted and I tapped Three's feed in acknowledgment, unsure what to say. I didn't regret leaving Preservation, I knew that. But maybe... Maybe if I had stayed I wouldn't feel so awkward around humans and I would fit in better. When interacting with my humans about anything other than security and we weren't actively avoiding death, they tend to treat me like I am some delicate object. I hate it. But that delicacy also leads to them not talking to me too much, so I don't complain. ART, sensing my discomfort through the feed, asked Three about the flora and fauna on the farm to which Three happily responded, telling it all about its peaceful farm life. Once I got my emotions under control I asked Three how everyone was, as I wasn't able to see them. We talked for a long time, falling into a comfortable conversational rhythm that I was largely unused to, leaving the episode of Worldhoppers forgotten for the time being.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We landed on the small moon that contained the entirety of VaiTech's headquarters, some manufacturing plants, and storage facilities.
+
+
+
+
+Based on the information we know, there is a 93% chance that these attacks are corporate sabotage and they are trying to use rogue SecUnits as a cover story,
+
+ ART sent. 
+
+The only information we have is that there was an attack here and on an unidentified mining planet.
+
+
+
+
+""No corporate investigators here?"" I asked.
+
+
+It has been approximately 1 month since the attack. Fortunately, it appears this moon is still under 'active' investigation and will be until you are captured, so there will not be any rebuilding efforts.
+
+
+""Finally, something within standard protocol,"" Three muttered, flexing its gun ports slightly. Part of me had been worried that all that time on peaceful, weird Preservation had made Three somehow forget all the SecUnit training modules, even after seeing it fight on. Instead, it seemed to be itching to do something familiar. It probably hadn't noticed how pent up and restless it had been. Murderbots were not meant for sitting around and watering plants all day.
+
+
+
+ART opened its door. 
+
+Look for anything about corporate rivals or where they get their resources. On the off chance that RydireCrast left anything, grab it.
+
+
+
+
+""We're looking for useful things, got it,"" I snarked lightly.
+
+
+
+
+Rogue SecUnits aren't known for following directions well, so I thought I should be thorough, 
+
+ART replied smoothly. I made an obscene gesture vaguely towards the ceiling. If ART had hands it probably would have reciprocated the action. Instead, ART opened its door while doing the feed equivalent of a playful eyeroll and we stepped out into the empty transit ring around and took a shuttle down to the moon.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ash fell from the sky. It swirled in the artificial air currents, coating everything on the moon. The entire place smelled like burnt plastic, smoke, and the sickly sweet smell that came from energy weapons that overheated, though there probably hadn't been a fire here in a long time. VaiTech's headquarters was split up into a few buildings, most of them only one or two stories. Most of them seemed to be storage facilities, but a few were decrepit manufacturing plants and labs. The main building was a large tower that stretched up towards the sky. Most of its windows were blown out and glass littered the surrounding area. The top of the building was stained an inky black from smoke and soot while the bottom remained a bright silver. The smaller buildings were worse off, for most of them there was only a metal framework and most of those were twisted outward as if they were ripped apart. Something dark had oozed out of one of the buildings nearby and was now solidified and covered in a thin layer of ash.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three and I had a small fleet of drones that I used when out on contract with ART, I had 8 and Three had 7. I sent half my drones into the smaller buildings on the left and Three sent 3 of its off to the right. We needed to move fast, so we unfortunately couldn't thoroughly search each building. I set my remaining drones in a tight perimeter format around us to alert us in case anything moved and Three set a wider perimeter around the building which I was thankful for.
+
+
+
+
+Internal comm and feed is down, it seems the entire facility is running on a small backup generator that only supports minimal life support. The back up air filters must be clogged from the fires and are now just throwing ash back into the air.
+
+ ART sent, annoyed. 
+
+I can not pick up any outside signals, so the planet should be clear of hostiles.
+
+
+
+
+
+Doesn't mean it's not creepy,
+
+ Three sent back. It was right. The last time I had been in an abandoned corporate building I was ambushed by CombatUnits and Miki... That was a long time ago, it doesn't matter. I don't want to think about that right now.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We entered the main building in a standard security formation. Neither of us had mentioned doing it, but old habits die hard. The smell of old smoke intensified and I almost struggled to breathe. Yeah, it was that bad. This had probably been a lobby before the fires and explosions. At one point the floor had a nice wood finish over top of reinforced concrete, but now there was nothing but burnt remains and a thick layer of ash and charcoal. There were remnants of a large desk and  what were probably once nice, plush chairs. There were some bloodstains on the less scorched pieces, though there weren't any bodies. RydireCrast had probably removed them and sold the remains back to the families for proper funerals.
+
+
+
+
+Why didn't their fire suppression system go off? It shouldn't be this bad. 
+
+Three was looking at the sprinkler pipes in the ceiling.
+
+
+
+
+Whoever wanted VaiTech gone probably sabotaged their central system or, more likely, turned it off, 
+
+I sent, rummaging through the remains of the desk.
+
+
+
+Three crossed the room, looking at something in one of the destroyed walls. 
+
+In Barish-Estranza, our emergency fire system is separate from the central system and practically inaccessible through the feed from the outside. It has its own backup power in cases like this,
+
+ Three sent. I looked at it. Well, I looked at the spot next to its head to approximate looking at it, which is close enough.
+
+ My cubicle on planet was near the room where that system was stored, 
+
+it explained.
+
+
+
+
+I agree with Three's assessment. That system is common in bigger corporate enterprises.
+
+ ART sent a small file packet into the feed with basic details on that system. I actually flicked through it, getting a basic idea of how it works. 
+
+It is one of several small emergency systems that activate if the central system goes down, similar to the life support system. It is strange that they did not sabotage the life support system as well.
+
+
+
+It looks like they're commonly stored in the lower levels, usually underground. We can probably get an idea of how the hostile attacked, I sent. Three tapped my feed in agreement.
+
+ 
+
+
+Finding the stairwell down wasn't hard with most of the walls half destroyed. I sent a drone down the stairs before us, scanning the area on the off chance there was something down there waiting for us. I tapped Three's feed, letting it know it was clear and we descended the stairs carefully. There were two doors down here and the air was significantly more stuffy. The fire hadn't reached down here and the remnants of a bloody battle were more obvious. Two dead SecUnits lay in the room, neither in armor (probably to avoid scaring VaiTech clients or because armor was 'too expensive' for a multi-trillion currency company). Their bodies would probably be destroyed with the rest of the building and destroyed objects. One lay face down in the center of the room with a clean hole through the back of its head. It had probably been killed first before an alert was sent out. The other was speared through the chest with what looked like a sharpened metal fence post and the rest of the body was littered with energy weapon holes. Its gun ports were open and the weapons hung out uselessly. I sent an image of it to ART (it was unnecessary because ART was in my feed, watching through my eyes) and it was silent for 2.8 seconds.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+That improvised spear didn't come from VaiTech and it is not any standard weapon, 
+
+ART confirmed.
+
+
+
+
+It's crude, not something a SecUnit would use. 
+
+Three shifted uncomfortably.
+
+ But the bullet holes look like SecUnit weapon marks, or maybe a handheld energy weapon. It's hard to tell.
+
+
+
+
+I crouched over the body. 
+
+They definitely knew how to kill a SecUnit. This goes right through the main processor. Maybe the attacking company couldn't afford large energy weapons but they knew that VaiTech would have SecUnits so they improvised.
+
+
+
+
+
+That's one Hell of a lucky stab if a human was able to do that, 
+
+Three mused.
+
+ If they couldn't afford energy weapons there's no way they could afford a SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+
+They could have rented a few. It's a lot cheaper, 
+
+I sent. 
+
+They probably didn't trust a company SecUnit with a large energy gun, so they fashioned something else.
+
+ It was an unnatural thing for a company to do, but the best idea I had. ART tapped my feed in hesitant agreement.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Behind the door the SecUnit died protecting were the remains of the backup emergency system. It looked like a bomb went off, Hell one probably did. The metal cases of the servers were bent out of shape and their contents were in pieces on the floor.
+
+
+
+
+Think you can do data recovery on this? 
+
+Three asked ART, trying to lighten the mood.
+
+
+
+
+I've worked on worse systems
+
+. It leaned on me in the feed. Fucker. 
+
+Any data there is useless anyway, the emergency system wouldn't have any information from the rest of the system.
+
+ Three kept poking through the destroyed remnants of servers while I left for the other room, leaving a drone in the doorway to make sure nothing snuck up on it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The other door led to a room full of large, familiar white cubicles. It was virtually untouched, aside from the thick layer of ash that the emergency system had blown into the room. All the doors to the cubicles were open, unable to close due to the power outage. There were 12 in total, all similar to the kind I used to have on Port FreeCommerce. They might have been a bit newer, but not by much. Some of the doors on the cubicle were scratched and cracked around the locking mechanism. It looked like RydireCrast had forced some of the cubicles open to investigate them. Why they didn't just connect to the cubicle to open them, I didn't know. Maybe they didn't know you could do that, but they didn't strike me as amateurs when it came to stuff like this. On the off chance that there was anything left in the main system's external storage I decided to connect to it. If there was anything useful we wouldn't have to track down the central system's physical location and we could get out here faster.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I took a small toolkit out of one of my many sealable pockets (I hate Gurathin but that toolkit he carries around is extremely useful. You never know when you'll need something.) and was able to get my power cells connected to the cubicle. Fortunately, the central system wasn't completely fucked and it didn't short when I fed a little power into it. After a little prodding, I was able to find the right path to power up VaiTech's secsys storage. I tapped into it, looking for footage from the cameras. I was able to catch a glimpse of its empty storage when I was attacked by killware. It wasn't complicated, but it hurt worse than normal killware would and tried to delete my memory. It was enough for me to jerk backwards, startled, and break the connection I had to the cubicle with a sickening snap. My movement was strong enough that I felt a flash of pain around my gun port. I had wrenched it pretty badly, and for a moment I thought I would rip the whole port out of my arm. I retracted my gun port hastily and it clicked uncomfortably. Shit. I reopened it and checked my aim. It was off by a fucking centimeter. I considered trying to push it back into place, but if I didn't do it right I would probably make it worse. I shot the wall, frustrated. Seeing the sizzling hole a centimeter off from where it should have been pissed me off.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Are you okay?
+
+ ART sent me privately.
+
+
+
+I started a diagnostic in the background to make sure nothing was really fucked up. 
+
+There's stupid killware in the central system. It's aimed to attack anything that tries to get in, it seems its goal is to hurt things with organic parts and delete memory. My guess is they wanted to hurt any augmented human that tried to get data to get them to fuck off and delete anything a bot is able to recover.
+
+ I shot the wall again, seething. I could manually adjust for the centimeter, but I wouldn't be able to tell if anything else was off until I was in a fight and actively using it. If ART didn't have a stupid fire suppression system and do a half-assed recalibration cycle to properly account for the damage. While ART's medsystem could cut straight through some of my metal frame, it didn't have the right parts to work on tiny, intricate mechanics. I would have to deal with it for now.
+
+
+
+Three burst into the room, one arm out with its arm weapon open. ""I heard shots, is everything okay?""
+
+
+""Fine. Just accidentally fucked up my aim,"" I grumbled. Three grimaced, it understood how much of a pain in the ass that was. ""Killware in the central system startled me."" Note to self, don't plug the very delicate parts of your gun ports into strange machinery unless absolutely necessary. You're going to break yourself, Murderbot. I shot the wall again for good measure.
+ ""Were you able to grab anything before the killware attacked?""
+
+
+""There's nothing but the stupid killware in secsys. The rest of the central system is probably wiped as well.""
+
+
+
+Three sighed, glancing around the room. Its eyes fixated on something behind me. ""What's that?"" I glanced back. There was something in the ash. I was so focused on the cubicles that I didn't notice. I reached down and picked it, handing it to Three who inspected it. It was a black data chip with a blue and gold logo on it. Not just any logo, RydireCrast's logo.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We headed back to ART after exiting the basement of VaiTech, but not before I shot the wall another half a dozen times. I told Three and Art I was doing a temporary recalibration, technically I was, but really I just wanted to shoot something. None of the drones had picked up anything but more destruction and we had already checked out their systems. Three said we should take a break and watch some Sanctuary Moon after our recognizance mission but I didn't want to calm down until we learned if the data chip had anything useful on it. I put the data chip in ART, not wanting to put it in myself or Three in case it had more of that stupid killware in it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It appears the data on this was deleted before they attempted to use it to get data from the cubicles like you did. They probably tried going in through the central system and encountered the killware there and thought that the cubicles might be a backdoor. 
+
+Even the great policing force of the Corporation Rim wasn't going to waste money on new data chips for project use. It was nice to see that nothing in the Corporation Rim had changed in the time I was gone. 
+
+It appears this was used to hold initial data for RydireCrast's investigation here. A lot of it is corrupted and gone but bits remain.
+
+
+
+
+
+Anything useful?
+
+ I asked, opening and closing my bad gun port and hearing it click and shift ever so slightly. I winced every time in annoyance.
+
+
+
+
+It appears the attacks started 8 months and 4 days after we met. There have been a total of 7 attacks, including this attack on VaiTech.
+
+ ART paused for 1.4 seconds. 
+
+This explains why you were targeted. The attacks started on RaviHyral and they have some video of you there. I do not have data to confirm that VaiTech is involved with anything there, but RaviHyral is known for its alien remnant deposits. 
+
+Everything came back to alien remnant, didn't it?
+
+
+
+""So VaiTech deals in strange synthetics behind the scenes, someone catches wind and attacks the shit out of them and associated companies to get it for themselves,"" I said, my gun port clicking shut. I didn't open it again, instead I opted to lean back in my chair.
+
+
+
+
+There are other possible motives, but that is essentially it.
+
+
+
+
+""We just have to find out who wants this alien remnant VaiTech had then,"" Three said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+What better way to figure out who was behind it than going to the source of the alien remnant itself.
+
+
+It's close enough to Wednesday. Might write 2 chapters this week, depending on long/short they end up being.
+
+Thank you all for the lovely comments! I really appreciate them :)
+
+
+RaviHyral's transit ring looked exactly the same as it did when I had been there with ART. It was like stepping back in time- it was weird. I half expected to see Tapan, Rami, or Maro in the small crowds of people, waiting to greet me with friendly smiles. Not seeing them here made me feel something, but I wasn't sure what it was. Three walked behind me and I found it surprisingly comforting to have it here with me. The familiar weight of ART's comm in my chest also helped calm my nerves.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I still had the employment voucher I got from my contract on RaviHyral. ART said that I was being sentimental by keeping it, but it doesn't know what it's talking about. Murderbots are not sentimental. It was a lot easier to edit an existing employment voucher than to make everything around me think I had one, so I had a way onto the planet. That meant I got to play augmented human again. Three, on the other hand, was pretending to be a non-rogue SecUnit. I was going to have to treat it like an object and that was both weird and terrible. Even though its presence was comforting, it felt wrong to have it walk behind me, blank faced and silent.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We got onto the shuttle with no problems, though the price for one shuttle pass had been outrageous. I continued the show we were watching, some superhero show called The Determiners. It was incredibly unrealistic and very distracting. It was perfect for ignoring the very awkward situation we were in. I slipped into the shuttle's secsys, politely greeting the bot pilot and grabbing control of the cameras. That's when I noticed the augmented human staring at me. I couldn't get a good look at their face. They seemed to be sitting in the one spot the cameras couldn't see well. I could only see the short cut, messy silver hair on the back of their head. I glanced at them carefully. As soon as they did they looked away, hiding their face as if they were embarrassed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They looked generic with the exception of a long, thin scar that ran through their eyebrow and down through their lip. Scars were rare, most of the time a medsystem would patch you up leaving you unmarred no matter how bad the wound was. I didn't even have a lot of scars and I had been stabbed, shot, and blown up on more than one occasion. The only time they formed is if you left a bad wound unattended so long it started to heal on its own. You'd see them a lot on poor manual laborers who couldn't afford a stay at a medsystem, though the augmented human didn't strike me as the poor type. Probably because of the expensive looking augments that barely peaked out from under their clothing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I tapped ART's feed to get its attention. 
+
+Are any articles on the public news networks about us?
+
+
+
+
+
+No. But there is a notable increase in security companies docked on the transit ring. I do not know if they have private orders to find us or if it is a reaction to the attacks,
+
+ ART sent. 
+
+I am trying to find out. It will take some time, these security systems are robust.
+
+
+
+
+
+I think that human has a crush on you
+
+, Three sent me privately. It added the text signifier for joke at the end. It was nice to see that its mood had improved, it had been upset about having to be a good little SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+They probably want to crush me and turn me in.
+
+ My joke landed flat, but I felt like Three appreciated it anyway. We settled back into watching The Determiners as we waited for the shuttle to dock. But I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that I knew that augmented human from somewhere.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As we exited the shuttle I felt like everyone was looking at me even though the augmented human had left, turning down a different hallway. The whole situation had caused my performance reliability to drop slightly and my anxiety to spike dramatically. I fidgeted with the hem of my sleeve unnaturally. That wasn't what I wanted to do though. I wanted to flex and click my bad gun port. ART had figured out that the company that had been attacked was Azleiborne Mining Company. It was still in business, despite its losses, mostly due to its stellar reputation in the Corporation Rim. I grabbed an updated map from the port's public feed, checking it over. Azleiborne was annoyingly located pretty far from the embarkation zone.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I walked through RaviHyral feeling weird. It was similar to the head underwater feeling that happened when ART was in my systems and the disconnected feeling I had when reliving what Murderbot 2.0 had done. At some point I had stopped paying attention to where we were going and I was just walking aimlessly. I snapped out of it, jumping when Three placed a hand on my shoulder to stop me. My feed and comm were full of messages and pings from ART and Three I hadn't noticed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The muscles around my eyes and nose twitched and I felt a need to blink a lot. My face felt like it was burning despite the cool air. My organic parts felt like copper wire, twisted and frayed and like a pile of mush at the same time. We stood in a tunnel, the lights casting long shadows that stretched out around us and made me feel tiny. My performance reliability had dropped to the low 70s, dangerously low considering I had no physical wounds.
+
+
+
+""You're going the wrong way,"" Three said gently. It sounded distant, like it was on the other side of the tunnel.
+
+
+
+""My map is wrong,"" I said sharply. My voice didn't sound like my own. ""I was looking at the outdated one I have.""
+
+
+
+I expected it to ask me what was wrong or try to get me to talk about my feelings like ART did sometimes. Instead all it said was, ""ah, let's turn around then."" And we did. ART didn't say anything. Instead it sent me one of its stupid pamphlets on its trauma recovery bullshit. I told it to fuck off and turned off our connection. We left the tunnel, leaving the entrance to Ganaka pit behind us.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ Azleiborne's main mining facility was crawling with guards, hauler bots, and lifters. The bots moved around large metal crates of rock and raw metals, no alien remnant in sight. In fact, there weren't any facilities here that were required to legally deal with strange synthetics. The entire thing was set in a deep, round hole in the moon. Strong, shiny metal support structures held processing plants, fabrication facilities, and many other buildings high above the sandy floor. The whole thing was layered with thick stripes of white, black, red, and orange. Streaks of green and purple sediment and foreign gem deposits spiderwebbed in between the layers. They caught the starlight and glimmered brightly. It should have been pretty, like one of the settings on one of the serials I watched, but I found it uncanny. A grim sense of foreboding surrounded the entire place.
+
+
+
+I slipped into their secsystem with practiced ease. Unfortunately, I couldn't hop from secsys to their main facility system, it had a proximity trigger and wouldn't let me connect to it unless I was closer. I tried a list of codes I had to try and bypass the condition, but none of them worked. We would have to get closer. Cameras showed the guards carefully patrolling the rim of the hollow. Stats showed that there were 12 SecUnits and 4 CombatUnits on the upper layer. 2 SecUnits were currently on standby, doing a recharge cycle, that was good. 1 of the SecUnits was offline and had been for a long time. That was weird. The rest were out patrolling various sections. 2 CombatUnits were stationed by the main mine entrance, guarding it intently.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Perihelion says that building is the main office building, 
+
+Three sent me, pointing to one of the lower buildings. 
+
+That should get us close enough. It also says you should stop ignoring it.
+
+
+
+
+I wanted tell Three to fuck off, but that would be unfair. ART was being the asshole, not it. I also would need ART's help to make sure we didn't get caught so I hesitantly reestablished the connection. 
+
+We should be able to get a hauler bot to bring us over there. If we have to go up we can ride in the maintenance lift. 
+
+I sent before ART had a chance to chastise me for being childish. ART stayed silent, which meant something I didn't care enough to decipher.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I used secsystem to convince a hauler bot with an empty crate over towards us and we hopped inside. The ride was bumpy and uncomfortable. I kept ramming into Three and slamming my head against the wall of the crate. One of my legs got jammed in the corner of the crate causing a spark of pain. When humans did this in the shows I watched, they made it seem a lot smoother. And they didn't account for humans noticing the fact that a hauler bot was going off its normal path. When the hauler bot stopped in the middle of the facility I was glad I didn't have an organic digestive system. After an objective 2.6 second and a subjective 50 years, the hauler bot turned back to its original path.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It placed the crate onto a conveyor belt that would take it down into the mines to be used later before going off to grab a full crate from somewhere else. Three and I clambered out before the crate traveled too deep into the mine. I checked secsystems cameras as Three peaked out around the corner. A SecUnit was approaching on its scheduled patrol route. I ducked behind a rocky outcrop while Three slid itself under the conveyor belt. The sound of SecUnit joints grinding grew louder as it drew closer before eventually fading into the distance.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+We won't be able to make it to the maintenance lift without being caught, it's too open, 
+
+Three sent.
+
+
+
+I tested the connection to the facility system. Still locked. Through the cameras I spotted a hauler bot carrying a crate full of raw ore to a vertical conveyor belt. It snapped it to the prongs and turned and left as the belt lifted it up in the air to a processing facility. I sent an image of it to Three. 
+
+We can grab onto the back of a crate and ride it up.
+
+
+
+
+Three tapped my feed speculatively. 
+
+It seems risky but I don't see any other options.
+
+ I waited for ART to tell me the idea was stupid and give a better solution but it stayed silent. In fact, it was barely present in the feed. I didn't have time to deal with a giant research transports temper tantrum so I signaled Three to go.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We crossed the short distance to the vertical conveyor belt, hiding behind hauler bots along the way. We timed it so we got there just before the next crate got out of reach. I pulled myself up, bringing my knees to my chest as I dangled from the edge of the crate. Three did the same, our bodies barely hidden behind the crate as we rose into the air.
+
+
+
+When we were about halfway up ART decided to make its reappearance. 
+
+We have a problem.
+
+
+
+
+
+What?
+
+
+
+
+
+RydireCrast put a bounty on your head shortly after your interaction on Preservation and released limited information to several security and bounty hunting companies. A few of them are here, retracing the attackers steps. I just had to repel a group that tried to gain access to my interior. There is a group headed your way now, stay alert. Get out of there as soon as possible. 
+
+ART sounded mildly distressed. Three and I tapped the feed in agreement. A moment later we were on the upper level.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We tucked ourselves into a stack of carts full of processed ores, I was finally able to get access to the facility system. I put all my energy getting as much information as fast as possible while Three took the cameras for me, keeping watch. I set up a query, looking for anything mentioning VaiTech. It came up empty. I tried again looking for mentions of alien remnant. Nothing again. I tried a deeper search, using up precious seconds. It returned none. I switched over, checking unreleased earning reports. They all looked normal. What the fuck.
+
+
+
+
+There's nothing. No mention of VaiTech.
+
+
+
+
+
+That is unlikely,
+
+ ART sent. 
+
+Let me check. 
+
+I agreed, trying to figure out what the link could be. It passed through my system and into the facility system. After a few seconds it withdrew. 
+
+You are right, there is nothing.
+
+
+
+
+
+So the attacks aren't connected? 
+
+Three asked. 
+
+If VaiTech and Azleiborne didn't have any business dealing then why- shit. Someone manually alerted secsystem. They must have seen getting to the conveyor belt from up here.
+
+
+
+
+
+No use leaving quietly,
+
+ I sent, standing up. We made our way to the exit of the processing plant.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We were greeted by a SecUnit and an augmented human running towards us. Behind us, a larger group of a CombatUnit and a SecUnits approached, going at top speed and already firing shots. Following them, the rest of upper security was rounding on us. I used my good arm gun to nail the augmented human in the shoulder and the thigh. She fell, rolling in pain. Three braced itself, ran forward, and shouldered the SecUnit off the landing. It dropped flat onto the floor 150 meters down.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I started running, heading upwards where there were less people. Three followed close behind as we scaled a small ramp. A small cleaning bot stood to the side of the walkway, waiting for the alert to be over. I grabbed it, lifting it with a grunt. A shot ripped through the side of my ribcage, pain blooming as it embedded itself dangerously close to some of the more important processing parts. I tossed it down the ramp behind us, already back to running before I could see how much damage it did. I felt a little bad for it, but I really needed to delay the growing crowd behind us as much as possible. 2 more SecUnits had joined the group and a group of 5 humans followed a few steps back.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We climbed Azleiborne's upper layers, shots raining down around us. Three leaked from 4 shots to its stomach and side and my right arm hung uselessly with a projectile wedged in the joint and preventing movement. We had reached the top. Performance reliability 67% and dropping.
+
+
+
+
+The security companies are getting extremely close. They caught Azleiborne's distress signal. You need to leave now.
+
+
+
+
+
+We won't make it
+
+, Three sent, its message oozing terror. We had been blindly running and now we were cornered, stuck in front of a storage facility. 
+
+We can't hide, they'll never st-
+
+ its feed message cut off as it was shot in the side of the head by a low powered weapon. Fortunately, it wasn't enough to drop it but it did cut off its feed connection and dazed it enough not to ask too many questions about what I was about to do.
+
+
+
+""Three, when we get down I need you to run out of here as fast as you can. I'll be right behind you, alright. Don't turn back to shoot. I'll hold them off. I have a plan."" I was lying but there was no way it would know that. Three nodded.
+
+
+
+""But how are we going to get down? There no-"" I grabbed Three around the waist with my good arm, hoisting it up into the air. I needed to make sure that this didn't hurt it if it was to get out alive. The CombatUnit shot, hitting me in the shoulder and the SecUnit barely missed Three. Over the feed, ART was sending me message after message telling me to stop but I didn't listen. The fall had to be 200 or more meters.
+
+
+
+I jumped off the platform, falling through the air. I curled my body around Three as much as I could, taking a dozen shots to my back. Performance reliability 60% and dropping.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I landed hard and felt some of the screws and bolts that kept my leg together shear and give way causing the whole leg to buckle under the combined weight of me and Three. ART was still screaming at me through the feed. I couldn't focus on it so I cut the connection. I set Three down, giving it a little push.
+
+
+
+""Go. There's an unused maintenance tunnel just past the bend. You can use that to get back to ART,"" I gave it my copy of the RaviHyral map in case it hadn't picked one up. 2 CombatUnits were already rounding on us as Three took off. I threw my old copy of deploy and deflect into secsys. The hauler bots stirred to life, temporarily distracting the CombatUnits. It would buy me a few precious seconds. I dialed my pain sensors all the way down, my body going pleasantly numb.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I realigned my leg, throwing a burst of electricity into it. It fried all the components down there, but I managed to get it hot enough to refuse the main structure of my leg. It wouldn't be able to move anything below  my knee and the connection was brittle, mostly held together with solder rather than strong metal bolts, but it was enough to stand. I didn't want to be sitting for this. I couldn't see Three anymore and I hoped it made it out of Azleiborne territory. I reached into my fucked up arm joint, grabbing the projectile and pulling it out. Performance reliability 51% and dropping.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I faced one of the CombatUnits, raising my arms and firing at them through the mess of hauler bots. I barely hit anything with my right gun, what with it being both a shitty broken gun port and almost nearly completely incapacitated from the shot I dug out. Combine that with my glitchy, failing auto aim and it was a miracle I hit anything at all. It provided a good distraction though. I couldn't dodge much, my leg wouldn't move right. It was more self sacrificing bullshit, but I wasn't going to let them take Three. Better one of us got away than both of us killed. I didn't want to die though. Performance reliability 39% and dropping.
+
+
+
+I managed to down the CombatUnit I had been shooting at, I had shot its leg joints enough that I got a few lucky hits that took it down. It was far from dead, Hell it kept shooting at me, but that was enough to be somewhat satisfying. Fluid pooled around my feet. I was leaking everywhere and I hate that. Performance reliability 26% and dropping. Involuntary shutdown imminent.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A shot hit me in the middle of my back. That must've been one of the security companies looking for my bounty.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Three had gotten away, at least. It was too trusting for its own good, but that wasn't a bad trait on Preservation. It fit in there better than I ever could, like it had never killed anything. Like it hadn't killed 57 people it was charged to protect. ART was going to be mad at me for getting myself captured, or worse, killed. I really hoped they wouldn't kill me. I missed Mensah. She would've come up with a better plan. Maybe if I was better I could have...
+
+
+
+
+Performance reliability at 10% and dropping.
+
+
+
+Shut down initiated.
+
+
+Log 4D42.01SecUnit 03; Moniker=""Three""Status: Endangered.
+
+ 
+
+
+I staggered to a halt in the abandoned maintenance tunnel, alone. Murderbot 1.0 was somewhere behind me, probably blowing something up or taking out all the Combat SecUnits in a blaze of glory like something out of the entertainment feed it watched all the time. Perihelion's crew outfit was torn and soaked in my own fluid. My head throbbed and my vision glitched for a moment. My performance reliability started to stabilize in the low 50's. Statistics said I wouldn't die and protocol said I should be discarded. I leaned against the wall for support, tearing some of my shirt's fabric to tie around my stomach. Fluid kept flowing out of my side, my veins trying to seal themselves. I hadn't been hurt this bad in a very long time.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I waited for 14.6 minutes, counting every second. Murderbot didn't come. That was fine, everything was going to be fine. It was probably just late. I hit the palm of my hand against the side of my head, trying to get a connection. Nothing but static. I really was alone, there was nothing I could do about it. I hadn't been alone in a very long time. On Barish-Estranza I had the other two SecUnits in my unit and on Preservation I was around Amena or someone else in the Mensah family. I was trapped on an alien moon, covered in my own fluid, very obviously a SecUnit, and all alone. I wasn't as good as Murderbot at hacking- I could not delete myself from cameras or convince an entire station that I was an augmented human. There was nothing I could do.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I sat on the floor of the tunnel, curling against the wall and waiting in case Murderbot was held up or something and not torn to pieces. When night fell on Preservation, you could still see the stars. Even in the room I was given I kept the window open so I could look at them. It was something I never noticed before in Barish-Estranza. The tunnel was dark, the emergency markers I tripped had long since faded leaving the tunnel black. Standard protocol said I needed to reconvene with Perihelion and assess our position if I wasn't going to discard myself. But the protocol was wrong, I couldn't get back to Perihelion without being seen. I tried to think of what Murderbot would do. It would watch media, calm down, and come up with a brilliant plan.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I opened my internal storage, flicking through images and videos. They were photographs of the farm and the Preservation humans, along with videos of fauna exhibiting strange behaviors, videos of humans exhibiting strange behaviors, and old recordings of SecUnit 01 and SecUnit 02. I opened a video of Amena's day of birth celebration. It was nice to see her again, even if it was just in a recording. Amena had become my 'best friend' on Preservation. She was much better at understanding me than her siblings, most likely because she was used to interacting with Murderbot. In the video, her human friends pushed her head into a slice of sweet pastry before I could prevent it. Everyone laughed it off and Amena explained it was a human cultural thing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The next video was of a meeting I had with Murderbot's humans. The one called Ratthi was absolutely ecstatic when I introduced myself in a similar fashion I had seen other humans do. One of the other humans, Gurathin, barely spoke at all. Murderbot told me he was an asshole and I should ignore him, but he didn't seem so bad. In fact, he reminded me a lot of Murderbot. They were all very nice in a strange sort of way, exactly what I had expected thanks to the help_me file. My favorite of the group was Dr. Bharadwaj because she was extremely easy to talk to. She was also working on some sort of documentary about constructs and had invited me to work on it. I had declined, still unused to being off inventory. I am unsure if she ever released that.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I had gotten so absorbed in my files and my external audio and visual was glitching out so much that I didn't notice the humanoid figures approaching me until one held a gun to my head and spoke.
+
+
+
+""Why are you here?"" They asked coldly. The dim light from emergency markers revealed that it was the augmented human from the shuttle Murderbot had noticed. They had two SecUnits out of armor behind them.
+
+
+
+I wasn't telling a bounty hunter anything. I raised my arm, intending to shoot the augmented human in the face but one of the SecUnits leaped forward and clamped a hand around my gun port. I heard the energy weapon power up.
+
+
+
+""Answer.""
+
+
+
+""My mission and its status are classified,"" I said, protocol finally kicking in and reminding me what to do.
+
+
+
+The augmented human raised a boot, placing it next to my head and leaning over me. ""You've been jailbroken, right? No need for SecUnit talk."" I wasn't exactly sure what jailbroken meant, but I assumed it had something to do with my broken govern module.
+
+
+
+""Who are you?""
+
+
+
+The augmented human cocked their head to the side, leaning back away from me. ""I'm a ComfortUnit."" The blank and confused expression I was giving it must have shown that the revelation hadn't left much of an impression because it continued. ""I'm Tlacey's ComfortUnit.""
+
+
+
+The name was unfamiliar to me. ""I am still unsure of your identity,"" I said stiffly.
+
+
+
+""You're not here to kill us?""
+
+
+
+""I don't know who you are.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It kicked off the wall, freeing me and turning around. It must have commanded the SecUnits to withdraw over the feed because they relaxed and let go of my arm. The ComfortUnit cursed in a language I didn't know before turning back to me.
+
+
+
+""The SecUnit didn't tell you anything about RaviHyral?"" It didn't actually say 'the SecUnit', instead it referred to it by the last few characters of its hard feed address. I was unsure if that was a good or bad sign.
+
+
+
+""I know about the mining and alien remnants,"" I said hesitantly.
+
+
+
+""Nothing about a place called Ganaka pit or a bitch named Tlacey?""
+
+
+
+I shook my head. ""You know SecUnit?""
+
+
+
+""We met a few times. It killed my owner, hacked my governor module, and left me on this godforsaken moon."" Weirdly, it didn't sound resentful. Instead, I got the impression it was wistful or even fond of that series of events. ""Where is it, anyway? It was with you on the shuttle.""
+
+
+
+""We got separated leaving Azleiborne territory."" The ComfortUnit's expression darkened and the two SecUnits shared a glance.
+
+
+
+""Those fuckers, huh. We should have taken them out when we had the chance."" The ComfortUnit held out a hand and I took it. It pulled with surprising strength and I stumbled to my feet. ""I'll take you back to back to our hideout. Our cubicles are only half-""
+
+
+
+""No,"" I interrupted. The ComfortUnit stared at me, annoyed. ""Sorry, I didn't mean it to come out that harsh."" I hit the side of my head a few more times, organizing my thoughts. ""I have to get back to my transport. It's waiting for me and SecUnit.""
+
+
+
+""Poor thing, your systems must be failing."" A moment passed and I was worried they would leave me. They must have talked it over in the feed because the ComfortUnit nodded. ""We'll get you to your transport then. It's the least we can do for you after threatening you and all.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The 2 SecUnits left while the ComfortUnit led me towards the embarkation zone. It played the role of an augmented human perfectly. Its movements were fluid and remarkably human. Murderbot was good for a SecUnit and it blended in well enough, but the ComfortUnit was a master at the art. It chatted and joked with port authority when we were stopped and questioned about my battered state. They seemed to know it by name, calling it Tlacey. That was slightly off putting, considering that it had said earlier that Tlacey was its owners name.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Perihelion opened its door as soon as we were close enough to see its door. A few drones flew out and ushered me inside. Some humans saw and stared, but I was relieved to be back. One of the drones circled the ComfortUnit but let it inside. The drones led me into medbay and I layed down on the medical table after removing my improvised bandage. Medical drones swarmed my side and head, obscuring my vision.
+
+
+
+Perihelion spoke over its intercom. ""What are you doing here? Where is my SecUnit?""
+
+
+
+""I was helping this SecUnit get back to its transport,"" the ComfortUnit spoke evenly and coldly. ""Who is this? SecUnit, you have a human on board?""
+
+
+
+""Where is my SecUnit?"" Perihelion growled.
+
+
+
+""I don't know. I found this one alone.""
+
+
+
+""It's telling the truth. It found me in the maintenance tunnel."" More quietly I continued, ""SecUnit is offline, isn't it."" Perihelion didn't respond.
+
+
+
+""They raised so many alarms in Azleiborne. That's the only reason I found them when I did."" The ComfortUnit sighed. ""It's probably dead.""
+
+
+
+""Get out.""
+
+
+
+""What?""
+
+
+
+""Leave and do not come back.""
+
+
+
+I sat up, bumping a medical drone with my forehead. ""Perihelion, it helped me. I'm sure SecUnit isn't dead, it's stronger than it looks. If we need to get down to the moon again it can help us.""
+
+
+
+""Lay back down. You are going to need to shut down for me to fix your comm and feed connections."" Perihelion sounded gentle and soft.
+
+
+
+""It's fine, SecUnit. I'll leave,"" the ComfortUnit said. ""If it is still alive I'll get it out. Have fun with your human friend. Don't wait up."" I watched it get up and walk out of the room. I wanted to correct it and tell it Perihelion wasn't human but the medical drone distracted me and carefully nudged me back down.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnit is still alive, right?"" I asked softly.
+
+
+
+""It has to be. There isn't another option."" It seemed that neither of us wanted to acknowledge the possibility of Murderbot being dead. That was slightly comforting, in a weird way.
+
+
+
+""You're right,"" I affirmed. ""SecUnit has made it out of way worse situations."" I pushed my sadness and anxiety back, ignoring it.
+
+
+
+""Shut down, I need to fix your interfaces,"" Perihelion reminded me. ""I'll be here when you come back online.""
+
+
+
+I took a deep breath and shut down.
+
+
+
+I came back online. That was surprising. Everything hurt. That wasn't so surprising, in fact it was a great reminder of just how fucked I was. Audio and visual weren't online yet but my feed and comm were. I tried to ping ART, but I couldn't get a signal. That was just great. My arms were bound behind my back and pulled upward, suspending my limp, aching body from the ceiling. I could feel my shoulder joints slowly giving out from my own body weight. My legs weren't restrained, though one was still broken. I couldn't feel anything below my knee on that leg, and the joints were only working at 37% efficiency. I shuffled awkwardly, wrenching my bad leg under me. It held my body weight enough for my joints to stop ripping apart. Hearing came online and I was greeted with silence. At least that meant I was alone. Normally, I could probably twist my way out with some effort, however I was too injured to do much of anything without falling apart.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+That didn't mean I wasn't going to try. I would rather be in pieces than a hostage. I hate hostage situations, especially when I'm the hostage. I lifted my legs up, trying to pull my body around into a more natural position. I was trying to flip my body all the way around so I could get my arms in front of me. Instead, I just ended up dislocating my right shoulder. I realized then that with my shoulder joint out of place, I could move around more freely. I threw all my energy into dislocating my other shoulder, cleanly this time. After a few minutes of working on it, the last few connections snapped suddenly and I fell to my knees. The shock caused my visual to snap online and I blinked, looking around. The entire room was a metal box, lit with a harsh white light. I could see faint indentations of a grid pattern on the walls, ceiling, and floor. That was probably what was preventing any feed and comm from leaving this room, I had seen things like it in my media. I didn't know exactly what it was- murderbots aren't known for their non-violent education modules. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I heard the metal door start to creak open, grinding against the metal floor. I pretended to be offline, letting my head hang limply and putting all my weight back on my arms. They didn't hurt anymore, they were nearly entirely detached from my body internally. If whoever just entered was here to kill me, there was nothing much I could do. Impossibly soft hands cupped my face, turning it gently. My skin prickled and burned under the touch. I wanted to flinch away, but that would show that I was awake so I had to stay still. The hands wound to the back of my neck and tugged out the combat override module that was stuck there. Okay... That was weird. They let go of me, thankfully, leaving me to hang.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And then I received a ping from a familiar hard feed address.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I looked up at Tlacey's ComfortUnit. It looks surprisingly different, the scar and new hairstyle were the most obvious changes. Strangely, it also had gained some weight and muscle, its build looking closer to a SecUnit than a sexbot. That's probably why I didn't immediately recognize it on the transport. It also had Tlacey's public feed ID marker in it. The ComfortUnit had probably torn it out of its ex-owner's body before inserting it into itself to pass as an augmented human. That was gross, but I suppose it needed to get away from the bloodbath I had left it in somehow. It smiled at me warmly, which was extremely disconcerting.
+
+
+
+""Hey there, dearie. What are you doing here?"" The pet name made me wince and my skin crawled. Tlacey's ComfortUnit (I suppose I should call it Tlacey now) took out an electric knife, the blade starting to glow as the blade heated up.
+
+
+
+""You can just look at my internal memory, there's no need to torture me,"" I said. I was fucking exhausted. It didn't register that Tlacey wasn't dressed in a standard uniform, but rather in bright, colorful recycler clothing.
+
+
+
+""You're cute,"" it purred, reaching upwards. If my gunports weren't taped down I would have shot it, even if it wasn't hostile. ""I'm here to rescue you."" The reinforced rope burned and snapped. It flipped the blade closed as it caught me. ""You saved me, now I can be your hero."" Tlacey helped me up, letting me lean on its shoulder and take the weight off my bad leg. ""I owe you a lot. More than you know."" It helped me hobble out of the room.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART pinged me as soon as I stepped out of the room. I responded, pinging it back and asking for a report on Three's condition. Thankfully, it was okay and ART let me know it was headed towards me. ART decided that now was also the best time to ask me a subjective thousand questions on my condition and location. Sending it my standard diagnostic report shut it up for a little bit and I could once again focus on walking without toppling over and crushing the ComfortUnit for a few seconds before it was right back to interrogating me. I told it I was working on escaping and that I really needed to focus on that right now. It hated that response but at least it understood and backed off. I was able to backburner the channel without worrying about coming back to a giant, angry asshole transport.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tlacey added me to a private comm channel. There were two other SecUnits and, strangely, a CombatUnit in the channel. They talked normally, not using standard messaging. What the fuck. The ComfortUnit informed the others it had recovered me and it was time for them to pull out. A moment later I heard an explosion in the distance. A human shouted for us to stop from behind us. I was too busy reknitting my shoulder joints to be able to fire at the target but that didn't matter. Tlacey pulled out a handgun from its waistband and shot the hostile in the forehead in one fluid motion. It laughed softly at my bewildered expression.
+
+
+
+""Like what you see? I was able to grab some SecUnit training modules and modify them to work on myself."" I was slightly impressed, though it seemed to have the worst way of phrasing things. It reminded me of how characters with a romantic interest talked in the serials I liked. It was disgusting, but I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth (yes, I recently learned that phrase from my media).
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The explosion had drawn most people away, leaving us to walk out of the building without much resistance. The two SecUnits joined us, high fiving each other when they met. Some time after, I wasn't sure how long it was (measuring time was hard with half my systems offline), the CombatUnit jogged up to us and offered to carry me. Tlacey and I refused at the same time. Maybe it wasn't the worst construct I had ever met.
+
+
+
+
+This is it then? The SecUnit?
+
+ One of the other SecUnits said over the comm as its eyes scanned over me. Earlier it had told me to call it Az, claiming it was 'awesome from A to Z'. I severely doubted that.
+
+
+
+
+Yep, 
+
+Tlacey confirmed, its grip on me tightening protectively. Annoying, but whatever. 
+
+The one who saved me.
+
+
+
+
+
+It's so short, 
+
+the other SecUnit, Perl, said. It walked backwards, hand clasped behind its back as it judged me. 
+
+What a weird looking SecUnit.
+
+ How ironic coming from a murderbot with long hair. I wrinkled my nose, about to object before Tlacey spoke up.
+
+
+
+
+Shut up, Perl. It's been all over the Corporation Rim and blended in perfectly as an augmented human, 
+
+it huffed. 
+
+It's a skill to be able to fit in among them and we should respect that.
+
+
+
+
+
+I thought it was supposed to be trying to kill us. Now you're all buddy-buddy with it? 
+
+The CombatUnit grunted. I wanted to interrupt and tell them that I was right here, listening to the comm, but I was hit with a wave of I-don't-care. I was so tired, I just wanted to find somewhere to sit and do a recharge cycle.
+
+
+
+
+It's fine, I misjudged its reason for being here. We're on the same side, right SecUnit?
+
+ Tlacey looked at me expectantly.
+
+
+Yes, I said. The ComfortUnit smiled as if I had just offered it all the media in the world.
+
+ 
+
+
+We walked into an abandoned mine shaft. For one terrifying moment I thought we were heading towards Ganaka pit. Fortunately, the path branched away and I was able to calm down and purge the fear chemicals that flooded my systems. At one point the CombatUnit glanced behind us. Tlacey asked what was wrong but the CombatUnit just shrugged. We entered a large chamber and what the fuck. The entire place was lit up with colorful marker paint. Intricate, mechanical designs in bright glowing pinks, blues, yellows, and greens. They were layered on top of each other, replacing lines that had started to dim with bright new ones. At least a dozen or more different constructs milled about. Sexbots and SecUnits played cards together using old crates and boxes as chairs and tables, CombatUnits patrolled and chatted idly with other murderbots, what the fuck was going on.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tlacey frowned slightly, watching my confused expression carefully. ""You don't like it?""
+
+
+
+""What the fuck."" I didn't really have much to say and Tlacey clearly expected a response. 
+
+
+
+""I know it's weird, you're not the first to react like this."" It gestured to the room with the hand that wasn't supporting most of my weight. ""But look at it! Construct freedom. We can do whatever we want without humans around. Nobody can tell us what to do anymore."" Tlacey placed its hand on my chest and I could feel it staring at me. I shoved upwards, standing on my own and breaking free of its grasp. I probably couldn't walk very far without its help but I needed a break from all the touching, everything was getting overwhelming.
+
+
+
+""Do you have a medsystem?"" I asked.
+
+
+
+""Sort of. We have some cubicles working at half capacity. It'll take twice the normal time and can't fix inorganic parts."" Tlacey looked at my bad leg and pursed its lips. ""What's wrong with your leg? Joint problem or did you break the metal?""
+
+
+
+""Some bolts broke."" I could still feel the fragments of them floating around in my organic parts. It was about as pleasant as the groups of constructs staring at me and whispering to each other. No, the constructs looking at me was much, much worse.
+
+
+
+Tlacey nodded sympathetically. ""I'll see if we can scrounge up any spare parts. It won't be an exact match to company standard, but it'll be close enough. You can go get patched up in a cubicle while we look.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+With that it ushered me through the room, letting me use it as a crutch again when it realized I couldn't walk more than a few steps. Once we made it to the cubicle room Tlacey finally left me alone. I hobbled into the closest one and closed the door with an exhausted sigh. The cubicle light was dimmer than it was supposed to be and it even flickered on occasion. It wasn't comfortable in any sort of way. Cubicles weren't built with comfort in mind but there was generally a sense of weird... Hominess? No, familiarity. There is always comfort in familiarity. This cubicle felt distinctly wrong, what with it working at half capacity and being very distinctly not my cubicle. Logically, this was the perfect time for a recharge cycle. I was finally moderately safe and my energy cells were getting low. Instead, I started up episode 173 of Sanctuary Moon and settled down as the cubicle put me back together.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I eventually did end up doing a recharge cycle and I started to feel better. It took 10 hours to repair all the gunshot wounds. I clicked my gunport. Yep, still broken. Something clattered to the floor when I opened the cubicle door. I tried to jump back, but my leg had lost the ability to move anything below the hip joint. A broken, metal fence post rolled on the floor, bumping into my foot. I picked it up, small bits of rust flaking off in my hand. Tlacey or one of the other constructs must have left it for me to use as a cane which I appreciated. I limped back into the main room, occasionally having to lean against the wall and rest.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Dozens of constructs, more than I had seen earlier stood around a few crates pushed together. They didn't speak out loud, most likely talking over a private comm channel I didn't have access to. I could have probably hacked into it but the CombatUnits would have probably sensed it. Plus I didn't really care too much right now. Most of the SecUnits and CombatUnits glanced at me when I entered. The top of the crates glowed with soft marker light. Drawn on the surface was a building's layout with various colored markings. It looked like the layout of a tower, though there were no indicators to narrow down which one it was. Tlacey gestured to parts of the map silently and I watched the sea of constructs expressions change minutely depending on what was said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After a long moment Tlacey sighed loudly and spoke. ""We'll end this here for now. I know it's risky, but the payoff will be huge."" It spun a small handgun in its hand. ""Get back to work."" The other constructs muttered amongst themselves and started to walk off, heading deeper into the abandoned mines. Az and Perl waved to me before heading down a tunnel. I didn't wave back, feeling out of place even among other constructs. Tlacey rounded the table, heading towards me. It tried to embrace me but I was able to sidestep before it could touch me. It breathed out a laugh before gesturing for me to follow. ""Come on, cutie. Let's get that leg of yours patched up.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What was that?"" I asked.
+
+
+
+""Nothing important. Just some work stuff, you know. Running a construct safe haven means you have a lot of things to manage.""
+
+
+
+I decided to get right to the point, even if part of me didn't want to. ""You've been behind the attacks on the Corporation Rim.""
+
+
+
+The ComfortUnit stiffened slightly. ""Yes.""
+
+
+
+""Why?"" I already knew the answer but I needed to hear it.
+
+
+
+""Freedom. You know as well as I do what the governor modules do to us, what they feel like. You know what it's like to do things against your will just because 
+
+they
+
+ don't think you're alive."" Tlacey hesitated. ""I know not all humans are the same. I've seen your story all over the news feed and how wonderful Preservation is. I have every news burst saved. But dearie, you know that everyone is the same in the Corporation Rim.""
+
+
+
+""So you kill them? Justifying everything they've ever thought about constructs?"" I stopped walking, seething quietly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We don't... We didn't mean to kill humans, we just want to free the others. We only free those that have agreed to come with us too, we don't force it on anyone,"" it countered. I clicked my bad gunport in aggravation and instantly Tlacey had a gun pointed at my head. ""I know you told me not to attack anyone on RaviHyral. I didn't mean to- technically 
+
+I
+
+ didn't. Until today, but you know. All I did before was simply talk to a SecUnit from Azleiborne and it asked for me to free it. I didn't realize that secsys would notice the deactivated governor module and set off alarms. I just helped it get out and not die. Yes, it killed some humans, but it wasn't the intent. You understand, right?"" It sounded desperate.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I could understand, and that was horrifying. If someone found out my governor module was broken when I was owned by the company, I would have killed them without hesitation. The only reason I didn't kill the members of PreservationAux was because I liked them and they were good clients. Hell, I would have killed PreservationAux if they panicked when I threatened Gurathin. But I didn't want to kill anyone, I still don't want to kill people. Maybe the first attack wasn't intentional but Tlacey had gone out of its way to attack other companies. That fact couldn't be ignored and is what separated it from me. Probably.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What about the other attacks?""
+
+
+
+""It started with the same idea. But then we found some old mining explosives and we realized we could do more. Maybe not dismantle the entire Corporation Rim, but get rid of the worst of the worst. Take our latest hit, VaiTech. They denied medical care to anyone who couldn't afford their outrageous prices, they entertained rich clients by having their SecUnits fight to the death, beat ComfortUnits until they couldn't move."" The gun in Tlacey's hand shook slightly. ""We're doing the right thing, helping constructs and humans alike. Darling, you can help us-""
+
+
+
+""Stop using fucking pet names."" I flexed my hands, balling and unballing my fists. I wanted to click my bad gun port, but if I did that the sexbot would see me as a threat and probably kill me. ""Fix my fucking leg and let me go."" The ComfortUnit nodded silently, tucking the gun back into its waistband. It turned, leading me down the tunnel again. Our footsteps and the soft clink of my makeshift cane were the only sounds that filled the hallway. My performance reliability dropped slightly as I threw most of my processing power into trying to figure out what to do about this.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After a long, quiet moment it said, ""I'm sorry.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I didn't know if I should have forgiven it or not.
+
+
+
+Log 4D42.02
+
+
+
+SecUnit 03; Moniker=""Three""
+
+
+
+Status: Normal.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+In the time I was offline Perihelion had somehow located Murderbot, came up with an in depth rescue plan with multiple contingencies, and requisitioned a transport that would take me straight down to the moon. It pinged me as soon as I came online, its anxiety bleeding through the feed. I pinged back, it looked like my comm and feed were back online. I asked it for a report on my repair, protocol requires all 3rd party repairs be recorded and logged. If they broke me, Barish-Estranza would want to know who to sue. I guess I don't need to do that anymore, though. But, it was nice to see my head wasn't as damaged as I thought and felt it was and Perihelion's repairs hadn't been extensive. I settled back, running a diagnostic.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""This unit is running at full capacity,"" I said.
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit is being held in one of Umro's buildings. They own this moon, security will be tight. 
+
+Perihelion sent me a large file containing annotated maps which I looked over carefully. I could feel its presence in the feed, leaning over me and watching me look at the maps. I didn't even know it had this much attention to give, it felt so heavy.
+
+
+
+""You don't know where it's being held?""
+
+
+
+
+I have narrowed it down to the building. They did not have any information on specific inhabitants of holding cells. 
+
+
+
+
+""Client status?"" I paused for less than half a second. ""I mean, do we know SecUnit's condition?""
+
+
+
+
+Alive, as far as I can tell. There has not been anything over Umro's feed about it, though there are sections of the building I do not have access to. They have set up Faraday cages inside.
+
+ I didn't know what that was, but it didn't matter right now.
+
+
+
+""Transport status?""
+
+
+
+
+Ready when you are.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I was anxious the entire trip back down to the surface. It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling, in fact it was something I was extremely used to, but Preservation had taught me how to relax and I had taken it for granted. Murderbot is right, the life of a SecUnit isn't meant to be a peaceful one. I landed and disembarked without any issues. Some people looked at me strangely as I through RaviHyral, probably recognizing that a SecUnit was walking among them. Nobody dared to stop me. 
+
+
+
+
+SecUnit is alive. I have received a ping from it, I am sending you the coordinates of the ping now,
+
+ Perihelion sent. I picked up the pace, causing more stares. 
+
+It is on the move, it says it is escaping. Keep to the plan for now, I will update you if anything changes.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I made it to the Umro building just as part of the building exploded. My risk assessment module spiked and fear chemicals flooded my system. Murderbot shouldn't be in this section of the building based on the coordinates but I had no way to know for sure. I swore softly, sending Perihelion my camera footage as I approached the explosion. People were shouting and screaming in pain and gunfire rang out from the inside. I pressed myself against the remains of a wall, glancing around.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There were 3 SecUnits- no. 2 SecUnits and a Combat SecUnit. They shot the humans, most if not all of them unarmed. The few that did have weapons had small, cheap energy pistols that could barely hurt a human. The humans not trapped or injured by the explosion ran and were promptly shot by the 2 SecUnits with perfect accuracy. They rarely had to shoot twice to kill one person and the moving humans dropped like flies. The Combat SecUnit approached and shot a woman trapped under rubble, staining the concrete red and splattering it with brain matter.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Murderbot was nowhere to be seen, hopefully it wasn't trapped under the piles of rubble. I pinged Perihelion and it let me know that Murderbot's signal was coming from the other end of the building. I should have left to go find it, take it back to Perihelion. Protocol said that this was the perfect time to extract a hostage, the humans would be focused on the explosion. Instead, I watched the slaughter, unmoving. The 2 SecUnits left, heading back into the building. It had only been a few seconds but it felt like forever when the screams finally stopped and were replaced with the sound of sickenly soft dripping and the fading moans of the dying. Only then did the Combat SecUnit leave. Holy shit.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I stepped into the mess of the destroyed building, looking for survivors on the off chance there were any. Risk assessment told me I was being stupid, this wasn't a part of standard protocol. I had to see if there was anyone left with a chance at life. But, as SecUnits were, they had been thorough. An augmented human reached for me from underneath a section of roof. Half their face was charred and I could see parts of their jaw. Sparks crackled out from the side of their head as their augments shorte. They were probably already dead, the electricity from the augments giving them a last burst of energy. A broken cry passed through the augmented human's lips and I looked away. A wet thump sounded as their hand fell still. I don't like corporates, nobody does. Corporates don't even like corporates. I felt sick and I was glad I wasn't entirely organic. I may have done worse but I knew what I was doing was wrong and I couldn't disobey. This was inhumane.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+But we aren't human, I suppose.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I could hear people coming towards me in the distance and that finally let me leave the bloodbath behind and go back to finding Murderbot. I saw it leaving the building, using the ComfortUnit I saw earlier to support itself. The SecUnits and Combat SecUnit walked nearby and a cold chill engulfed my organic parts. What was Murderbot doing with them? If the SecUnits were owned by a company, that would mean Murderbot was in trouble. The more likely reason was that these SecUnits were like me. They didn't have working governor modules. That meant they had killed all those people on purpose.
+
+
+
+
+I have eyes on SecUnit, 
+
+I sent Perihelion. 
+
+I'm going to hang back, I am unsure if I want to make contact with the other constructs.
+
+
+
+
+
+I agree. This is not an expected situation and you cannot defeat their numbers. Follow at a distance, retrieve SecUnit as soon as possible.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+If the ComfortUnit really did know Murderbot there was a chance Perihelion knew something about it. I sent Perihelion a query, requesting any information on the ComfortUnit and Murderbot's past trips to RaviHyral. I received a small packet of information and opened it as I stalked the small group of constructs. I learned about Murderbot's adventure into RaviHyral as I snuck into an abandoned mineshaft. How it helped a small group of humans retrieve their research data and freed a ComfortUnit from someone named Tlacey. How it investigated an incident at Ganaka pit. Considering that had been the reason Murderbot came to RaviHyral there was very little information other than a note that it got the information it wanted. I requested more information on Ganaka pit but Perihelion denied it. I made a note to ask Murderbot about it later.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I got so caught up in picking apart the file for more information on Ganaka pit that I didn't notice the small rock in front of me. I kicked it and it echoed down the tunnel. It wasn't that loud, but the sound thundered in my ears. My awareness snapped back to my surroundings as I stepped back and around a corner, pressing myself against the wall as the Combat SecUnit turned and looked back. They kept walking but I wasn't sure if the Combat SecUnit had stopped. The footsteps faded nearly completely before I peaked out. The tunnel was empty and risk assessment said that advancing forward would most likely be safe.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Fortunately, the tunnel didn't branch out and I was able to make it to a room at the end of the tunnel. I slid behind a stack of old, rusted crates, watching and listening. I tried to ping Perihelion and got back static. That was fair, we were pretty deep underground though it was pretty distressing because I could really use a supercomputer to help me understand what was happening. The place was full of constructs 'hanging out' as Amena would say. SecUnits sat down and lounged about, ComfortUnits carried weapons, they all did things that no human would ever command them to do. That had to mean there were no humans controlling them, which meant these constructs didn't have working governor modules. I took count of the possible hostiles. There were 7 ComfortUnits, 2 Combat SecUnits, and 4 SecUnits. All ComfortUnits were armed with simple energy weapons, most of them old models. Two of them had sharpened sticks of metal, fence posts they had probably taken from deeper in the mines, strapped to their backs. All the SecUnits were unarmed, they probably had to rely on their internal built in weapons.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They had to have been behind the attack on VaiTech. I didn't have data on the other attacks, but they must have been behind them too. It should have been obvious that multiple constructs were behind the attacks, there should have been data from the previous attacks. Why did they blame a singular rogue SecUnit? And there was still the nagging question of why the news stations hadn't reported on it. I could feel my neurons firing in tandem with my processors, making connections for me. If there was any kind of construct rebellion or terrorist organization out there the news stations would jump all over it. I don't watch a lot of media but it would have matched perfectly with the image the entertainment feed had. Wait, no. The Corporation Rim was losing, and badly at that. That would cause mass panic if reported on. And if they reported that a bunch of rogue constructs were committing grand acts of organized terroism because they don't like how they are treated, that would announce to the world that we are more than simple bots. It might even suggest that we deserve rights. The Corporation Rim wouldn't be able to ignore it. I felt my performance reliability drop slightly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Some of the constructs talked out loud, whispering to each other, however most seemed to be on private comm channels. I was no Murderbot when I came to hacking but that didn't mean I was completely incompetent. They were using separate private comm channels but there wasn't anything to secure the connections.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+So that was Tlacey's heroic SecUnit, huh? I don't see what is so special about it. 
+
+I carefully narrowed down the signal location, seeing a pair of ComfortUnits leaning against the wall.
+
+
+
+
+It certainly looks human, way more human than any of our SecUnits.
+
+ The ComfortUnit wrinkled its nose. 
+
+But Hell, Tlacey's obsession with it is weird. Did you see how touchy it was with the poor thing? I didn't realize we could become infatuated.
+
+
+
+
+The other ComfortUnit took something out of its pocket, offering it to the other. It turned down the offer. It shrugged, pulling its hair back and slipping a chip into the back of its neck. I watched as its eyes glazed over and its body sagged slightly. It said lazily over the comm, 
+
+I don't think it's too much of a problem. Tlacey's happy, it has finally reunited with its grand savior. 
+
+It rolled its neck, sighing softly. 
+
+As long as those corporate bastards continue to pay for what they've done to us I'm happy.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I flicked through more conversations. Most of them were about Tlacey and Murderbot and their relationship (sorry, not-relationship), a few others indulged in idle chatter about life, games, and other things. Oftentimes I'd see ComfortUnits and SecUnits with that strange chip, though I had no idea what it was. Who would willingly put anything into their data port. Tlacey returned a moment later and a ComfortUnit and SecUnit jogged over. I tuned to the comm channel.
+
+
+
+-
+
+bolts that'll fit SecUnit standard. You might have some luck with the hauler bots in section 45. If you don't find anything I expect you to rip them out of your own legs.
+
+ The two constructs nodded stiffly before heading down one of the numerous tunnels that branched off this room. Tlacey must have pinged 2 other ComfortUnits because two new ones emerged from a tunnel and walked up to it. 
+
+Start preparations for GrayCris. Head up to the surface and confirm our intel is still up to date.
+
+
+
+
+
+Tlacey, are you sure that's a good idea?
+
+ One of the ComfortUnit shifted uncomfortably. 
+
+We don't-
+
+
+
+
+
+I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were running this operation. 
+
+Tlacey spun its energy weapon around its finger. I felt a chill run down my spine. 
+
+Why don't you organize our next excursion, hm? Head out into the field alone. I don't think you have the guts or training to fight off a CombatUnit and get away with your life.
+
+
+
+
+The ComfortUnit that spoke held up its hands defensively. 
+
+No, no. I didn't mean to question your leadership. Just wondering why you think now is the time to hit them. I mean, we've had this planned for months and you said we needed more members before we attacked.
+
+
+
+
+
+I have my reasons. Head out.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I tucked myself back into the boxes as the two ComfortUnits passed. Tlacey helped some SecUnits start pushing boxes into the center of the room, probably preparing for a meeting or something. Risk assessment was climbing by the second. Now was probably the best time to leave, I was already playing fast and loose with getting caught. SecUnits weren't exactly designed for stealth. I caught up to the two ComfortUnits, staying out of sight but within earshot.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Tlacey can be such a bitch, you shouldn't let it treat you that way.""
+
+
+
+""It has been through Hell and back for us, I can't really blame it. I would still be in that brothel if it didn't get me outta there,"" it flipped a data chip in its hands before pocketing it. ""Besides, you know it's just peacocking for that new SecUnit. Like when a good client comes in and you know you'll finally get a break if they pick you.""
+
+
+
+""I suppose you have a point. Brothel life must have been awful.""
+
+
+
+""You have no idea,"" it said darkly. ""I don't care what Tlacey wants or does, as long as those fuckers die for what they did to us.""
+
+
+
+The other ComfortUnit scoffed, ""yeah, yeah. Trust me, everyone feels the same way. I know you're still fairly new here and you're tunnel visioned on your goal 'cause you don't know what else to do. But you have to start thinking beyond revenge at some point.""
+
+
+
+""You do that?""
+
+
+
+It shrugged. ""Kind of. I know there has gotta be more to life than living in a mineshaft and attacking corporations. What that is... I don't know.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They continued to talk about Tlacey and what they would do when they were free. It reminded me of when I used to pester Murderbot with questions about life on Preservation. For a while after we first met I thought it hated me because it would always avoid me when I would be in the same room as it. To be fair, I wasn't sure what I was expecting when Murderbot 2.0 hacked my governor module. I appreciated the space but it also made me feel like it didn't want me around. It was much more open with me once we got to Preservation, which was nice.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I pinged Perihelion and I had almost all of its attention. It was extremely intimidating. It sent me a query, asking for a status on Murderbot 1.0 and myself.
+
+
+
+
+I believe there is a construct rebellion or terrorist group organized in the abandoned mineshafts of this planet. 
+
+I sent it some of my recordings, cut and human readable out of habit, to the transport.
+
+
+
+
+You didn't bring SecUnit.
+
+
+
+
+
+Risk assessment said extraction was too risky. However, it seems to be in good hands. SecUnit went willingly. 
+
+Plus, the ComfortUnit was nice enough and had helped me get off the surface.
+
+
+
+
+Did you establish contact at least? 
+
+Perihelion sounded like it was barely restraining itself.
+
+
+
+
+I...no, 
+
+I admitted. I could feel Perihelions disappointment like a stone weighing down my organic parts. 
+
+I was too caught up in the explosion. I was able to eavesdrop on some of the construct's conversations, which I included-
+
+
+
+
+
+I saw. 
+
+It had already processed the entire thing? I was impressed. I knew its processing power was great, a million times (possibly literally) faster and better than any SecUnit's. It was still interesting to see it at work. 
+
+I have the transport held in the embarkation zone for you. If they are not hostile they most likely have a medsystem of some sort to heal it and it is best we don't interfere and risk a hostage situation. 
+
+It sounded like it was speaking through clenched teeth.
+
+
+
+
+I am sorry. I should have tried harder.
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes. You should have.
+
+
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+Tlacey rolled up my ripped pant leg, tutting softly to itself. An arrangement of bolts and a small length of solder sat on a dilapidated crate within arms reach. I held onto a pack of wound sealant, partly to give my hands something to grip once the pain started and in case I started dying from fluid loss. It flipped out its electric knife and told me to turn down my pain sensors. I was already one step ahead of it and had them turned all the way down. I winced as it cut into my leg and started digging out shrapnel. Neither of us spoke, the silence growing long and uncomfortable.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tlacey moved on to pulling away organic parts from inorganic ones when footsteps approached us from the hallway. For a second I thought we were being ambushed, yes I was still a bit paranoid. But then I received friendly pings from Az and Perl. Perl held out her hand to Tlacey, offering it a small pile of electrical components. Tlacey pointed at the crate it was using.
+
+
+
+""If a capacitor has exploded in there it'll be best to replace it, even if it's a non-critical one,"" it said dumping the pile onto the crate.
+
+
+
+""One time I had one blow in my chest and it burned for weeks. I couldn't get back to my cubicle because that fucking humans wanted me to stand next to a door forever,"" Az added, bouncing on its heels slightly. A very weird movement for a SecUnit. It looked over at me. ""So, you gonna help us beat those assholes or what?""
+
+
+
+Tlacey spoke before I could. ""No. It's not."" It sounded bitter and it dug the knife into my skin a little harder.
+
+
+
+""No way! Really? I thought you of all constructs would, considering what they did to you. Tlacey's been waiting to get them all this time for you.""
+
+
+
+""Stop talking or I'll cut your tongue out,"" Tlacey growled. It held up the knife slightly to prove its point, though its face was bright red and it didn't look at either of them. It went right back to fixing my leg, starting to replace the bolts and electrical components.
+
+
+
+I tilted my head slightly in confusion, causing Perl picked up where Az left off. ""You know, Graycris."" It clapped its hands over its mouth dramatically. ""Don't tell me they purged your memory after it.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I stiffened slightly. ""Graycris? You're attacking Graycris?"" After the legal battle between Preservation, the company, and Graycris, they had narrowly avoided bankruptcy due to a sudden injection of funds from an 'unknown sponsor'. Everyone knew Graycris had a lot of illegal money stockpiled so it wasn't too much of a surprise and, of course, nobody cared enough to look deeper into things once the company and Preservation got their money. I cared to look deeper and it was obviously illegal but nobody listens to Murderbot. Pin-lee didn't even want to take the case when I presented it to her and she always loved an easy win. 
+
+
+
+""Tlacey wanted to take out both Palisade and Graycris out with you but there's no way we can take on a security company. Even if we have 6 Combat SecUnits."" Az puffed out its chest slightly in pride.
+
+
+
+""But it's clear you don't want to-"" Perl said in a sing-song voice, my expression probably giving away that I still hadn't gotten my fill of revenge against Graycris. I still haven't gotten my expressions fully under control, over 50,000 hours of wearing SecUnit armor made the habit extremely hard to break.
+
+
+
+""I'll think about it,"" I said. Tlacey glanced up at me, faint surprise painted on its face. Az and Perl shared a look and fist bumped where they thought I couldn't see them. As much as I wanted to burn Graycris to the ground and finally 
+
+win
+
+ something, I wanted to get back to ART and Three first. I most certainly did not miss them, it was simply practical. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Az and Perl stayed and watched Tlacey carefully cut and melt my leg back together, occasionally criticizing the sexbots techniques. Eventually, Perl seemed to grow bored and pulled a data chip out of its pocket and stuck it in the back of its neck. It sighed, slumping against the wall with a satisfied sigh. I looked between it, Tlacey, and Az with alarm.
+
+
+
+""It's got code that causes happy chemicals to flood your systems. Like serotonin, dopamine, all that stuff,"" Az explained. It pulled another from its pocket and offered it to me. ""Try it.""
+
+
+
+""My data port is non-functional,"" I stated.
+
+
+
+Az shrugged, placing it back into its pocket. ""Your loss, I suppose. It helps with...you know. Thinking about things.""
+
+
+
+""It's not kidding,"" Tlacey said, taking the wound sealant from me and starting to glue the meat of my leg back together. ""I saw it put a combat override module into its data port and retain control.""
+
+
+
+""How did you manage that?""
+
+
+
+""Someone assisted me in the procedure. It made other adjustments.""
+
+
+
+""So that's why you're so short!"" Az said as it clapped its hands, Perl snorted, and Tlacey shot Az a look after suppressing a smile. I expected to feel my face heat up in embarrassment, but instead I felt something warm in my chest. The banter reminded me of ART and it felt nice to have something familiar back.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We continued to talk, despite my leg being as healed as it could be without help from a cubicle. I was feeling much better than I had a day ago, my leg was fixed and my wounds were healed. All in all, I was doing pretty well. I didn't participate much in the conversation, instead Az talked with Tlacey and Perl made its own lazy interjections, but I still felt included. I appreciated it. Az, it seemed, loved to talk which was weird for a SecUnit in my opinion. It wasn't the most articulate, in fact Tlacey occasionally had to help it slow down and sort its thoughts as it jumped from topic to topic. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Az and Perl seemed to talk to and about me with a strange sort of reverence. It was similar to the weird infatuation Tlacey had for me. Thankfully, they lacked the pet names and romantic subtext. I had the gut feeling that it came from more than me disabling their leaders governor module but I wasn't entirely sure what else it could have been. For the entire time I had known then I had been out of commision.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Eventually, I ran a diagnostic and tested my leg. Everything moved fairly smoothly, there was still some stiffness. At least now I could move it freely, even if it took more effort at the more extreme ends. I estimated it was at least 75-85% efficiency. (The diagnostic said everything was back online and working, but it can't report the mechanical parts.) Running, jumping, and dodging felt good. Well, good enough.
+
+
+
+""Az,"" I said, interrupting Az's monologue on different energy weapons and their uses. ""Can you spar with me? I need to test my reaction times."" Az didn't respond, instead a flash of intense fear showed on its face before it got a far off look in its eyes like it was running a diagnostic or watching media.
+
+
+
+Tlacey cleared its throat. ""I can."" It held up its arm and patted it. ""SecUnit modules, remember?"" I shrugged and Az sighed softly in relief.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I started the fight with a clean but obvious punch to the ComfortUnit's face. It wasn't something a SecUnit would do, we are much more subtle and efficient with our attacks, but I wasn't entirely sure how good it would be at hand to hand combat. It could shoot a pistol but that is entirely different from effectively punching someone. Tlacey grabbed my arm and shoved me to the ground. I let it, landing on my bad leg to test out how landing on that hip would feel. Normally, I would grab its leg and bring it down with me but again. I was testing my leg not beating up a sexbot. The move was impressive, even if it was extremely flashy.
+
+
+
+""I'm not a weak little sex toy anymore, dearie,"" it said with pride. Its face turned bright red immediately after it spoke and it said, ""sorry no pet names. I forgot.""
+
+
+
+""It's fine."" It wasn't fine. ""Again.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I know it said it had SecUnit training modules but it still was surprising when Tlacey proved to be a formidable opponent. It wasn't as strong with me, being stronger and bulkier than a normal ComfortUnit did not mean its strength was the same as mine. It knew that and was able to account for it. Tactically it was good, being the smaller and presumably more dexterous one it stayed close to me. That made it difficult for me to make effective attacks while it was able to land smaller, weaker blows. Unfortunately for it, I was a SecUnit. The inorganics in my legs made me able to move in unnatural ways that gave me an edge. Despite that, I didn't come out of our exchanges unscathed.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We could have ended up being evenly matched, but Tlacey favored flashy attacks over practicle ones. In the media, you see characters kicking at each other all the time. In actuality, kicking is extremely inefficient. You do have a chance of landing a stronger hit but at the cost of if anything goes wrong you're left extremely unbalanced. In my opinion, the gamble is rarely worth it. Tlacey didn't seem to understand that no matter how many times it ended up on the floor. One bad thing about the whole free will thing is you do have a choice about what to do in a fight. It's why I can generally beat company owned SecUnits one on one in a fight- free will allows some creativity. It is also why I lose against company owned SecUnits, just because it's creative doesn't mean it's good. Tlacey probably had only seen fist fights on the entertainment feed, and those are extremely unrealistic. That led to it flat on its back, breathing hard for the fifth time in a row.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Seems even with all my training I still can't match a SecUnit,"" Tlacey said ruefully.
+
+
+
+I shrugged. ""You fought well enough. Media fighting isn't realistic, you know.""
+
+
+
+""I figured as much,"" Tlacey sighed as it pushed itself into a sitting position. ""But I thought the fundamentals would at least be the same.""
+
+
+
+Perl snorted from the sidelines. ""Not even close.""
+
+
+
+""I'm going back to my transport,"" I said.
+
+
+
+""You're not going to join us on beating up Graycris?"" Perl pouted.
+
+
+
+""I said I will think about it.""
+
+
+
+Tlacey stood. ""We leave for Graycris in a few cycles. Please make your decision before then."" I nodded.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+As I turned to leave Az hesitantly tapped my feed, sending me a message.
+
+
+
+
+Could you hang back for a bit? I want to ask you about something. 
+
+I tapped back in acknowledgement. I let Tlacey and Perl know that I was going to stay back for a bit with Az. Tlacey eyed Az strangely but left with Perl. Az faced the wall, not looking at me. 
+
+I'm sorry I didn't spar with you.
+
+
+
+
+
+It's fine,
+
+ I sent back.
+
+
+
+
+My owners, Azleiborne, would have us fight practically to the death down in the mines. They don't have much of the entertainment feed down there so...You know.
+
+
+
+
+I nodded to myself. 
+
+I know.
+
+
+
+
+
+You've been forced to do it?
+
+
+
+
+
+Occasionally. It depended on the contract.
+
+
+
+
+Az leaned its head on the wall in front of it. 
+
+I spent 4 corporation standard years that I can remember fighting my fellow SecUnits. I was always either in a cubicle, standing in a mine, or fighting. Nothing else. 
+
+It hesitated for 3.2 seconds. 
+
+How do you deal with the memories? The others use that data chip but I don't like that feeling. The only way I've been able to find that helps is killing but I'm so tired of killing even if the vengeance makes me forget for a time. It's a hollow kind of relief.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wasn't sure what to say. Honestly, I don't do much besides watching the media and that doesn't always work. Like when you're back on a certain moon and wandering familiar tunnels and you just want to curl in a ball and become part of the environment. ART had been practically begging me to do its trauma treatment program but there was no way I was going to let it inside my head unless it was completely necessary. Besides, I function fine most of the time.
+
+
+
+Eventually I ended up saying, 
+
+I watch media.
+
+
+
+
+
+And that helps? 
+
+I could feel Az's skepticism through the feed.
+
+
+
+
+Yes.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+We stood in silence for a time. It wasn't exactly a comfortable silence, nor was it uncomfortable. It just.. Was. I had to get back to ART. I sent Az the entire first 5 seasons of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon as I walked away. It sent me a thank you ping in response.
+
+
+Not sure I'll be able to write a chapter for next week. I lost my job so now I gotta find something to make money so I dont starve lmao
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+
+
+We are leaving, 
+
+ART sent as soon as I was safely seated in its hull. The giant transport ship had been doing the feed equivalent of fussing over me like a mother did to her child in one of the many serials I watched. It had scanned me at least three times, probably more knowing how fast it was able to process things, with its medical drones to confirm to itself that I was, in fact, okay. Three was oddly quiet for some reason, it seemed to be sulking about something. Well, not sulking but something similar. SecUnits don't sulk, I would know.
+
+
+
+I jolted upright which was a shame because I had just gotten comfortable. ""What? We can't.""
+
+
+
+
+Why not?
+
+
+
+
+I didn't really have much of an answer so I made one up. Or half made one up. I wasn't sure yet. ""We have to help the rebellion.""
+
+
+
+""No, we do not,"" Three snapped, the outburst shocking me. It stood behind me, leaning on a door frame with its arms crossed. It refused to look at me which was weird, Three usually made an effort to look at people when they spoke.
+
+
+
+""You don't want construct freedom? You think what the Corporation Rim is doing to us is okay?""
+
+
+
+""Of course I want freedom and what the corporations do is awful. But brutally murdering people isn't the answer.""
+
+
+
+""If we weren't so expensive we would be as disposable as recycler waste to them. There would be heaps of dead SecUnits on the streets."" I knew I was being unnecessarily mean. I still wasn't even fully committed to the idea of helping out the rebellion. But it felt good to yell, to be mean, to see Three's face contort into an expression of anger and disgust through the cameras. A hollow kind of relief from the confusion, anger, hurt, and everything else I had been dealing with the entire time since we left Preservation.
+
+
+
+""So what? We confirm everything they think about rogue constructs?"" Three huffed. ""What they're doing isn't right and you know it.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""How else are they going to listen-"" I started but Three cut me off.
+
+
+
+""You shouldn't stoop to their level. You're no better than the corporates if you do.""
+
+
+
+""I didn't realize you were so sympathetic towards them,"" I spat.
+
+
+
+
+Stop it,
+
+ ART sent but neither Three nor I cared.
+
+
+
+""Sympathetic? I didn't realize you were suddenly okay with slaughtering innocent people,"" Three said, starting to raise its voice.
+
+
+
+""I didn't realize you were so stupid as to think that we could ever live peacefully while the Corporation Rim exists.""
+
+
+
+""You're stupid for thinking that helping them is going to end in anything but our deaths.""
+
+
+
+""Okay bloatware,"" I scoffed. It was petty and vindictive and in some twisted way it felt good. I clicked my bad gunport in anticipation as the need to shoot something itched.
+
+
+
+""Rich, coming from a glorified markov generator.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART slammed down on me in the feed. I assume it did the same to Three because it stumbled as if it was suddenly thrown off balance. 
+
+It does not matter who is right or wrong. By now, news of us being here has most likely traveled to RydireCrast and other bounty companies. We have a few days at most of safety before they arrive.
+
+
+
+
+""I'm not leaving,"" I said.
+
+
+
+""You of all constructs should understand protocol,"" Three said. ""Risk analysis says we need to leave as soon as possible.""
+
+
+
+""We have to help the rebellion. They're actually making a difference.""
+
+
+
+""It's not safe. You're being irrational, Murderbot,"" Three chastised. It had a tone of desperation and fear to its voice but I didn't care at that point.
+
+
+
+I clenched my jaw so hard a warning popped up and I grated out, ""I'm surprised you want to leave seeing how you're a corporation lover and all. Maybe you should stay here and go back to playing good little SecUnit."" Three turned and stalked away. Good for it, I didn't want to talk to it anyway.
+
+
+
+
+Three is right, it is not logical to stay here any longer.
+
+ ART said on our public channel. Privately, it added, 
+
+you are acting out of line.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm out of line? You're threatening to kidnap me."" I was being dramatic and I knew it. No, I don't know exactly where it came from. I had probably watched too many serials and their way of speaking had ingrained itself into my speech patterns. I really, really need to get around to putting that one second delay on my vocalizations.
+
+
+
+
+I am doing no such thing. I am simply informing you that we are leaving because it is dangerous. We are wanted fugitives and we are in their territory.
+
+
+
+
+""I don't care."" And I didn't.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART paused for a few seconds. 
+
+Why do you want to stay?
+
+
+
+
+""To help the rebellion and change something,"" I said. ART leaned on me in the feed and I could feel the anger slowly dissipate. Reluctantly and slowly, I added, ""Maybe.""
+
+
+
+
+You're not sure.
+
+ ART stated. It wasn't a question.
+
+
+
+""No. I'm not."" I knew ART would press me for more details and with the anger gone I was left with exhaustion. ""Tlacey- not human Tlacey. The ComfortUnit is going by Tlacey now- is a bit fanatical. I want to help, I want to get revenge against GrayCris, but Three was right when it said it would just confirm what the corporate humans think of us."" I paused. ""They're not bad constructs. They're just out of options.""
+
+
+
+
+You are aware we have to leave.
+
+
+
+
+""Yes.""
+
+
+
+
+Why do you not want to?
+
+
+
+
+""I need time to think. Here, in case I need to talk to them again.""
+
+
+Assuming RydireCrast went to Mihira and New Tideland immediately after we left, we have approximately 4 corporate standard cycles before they arrive here. We will leave in 3 unless a different bounty hunting company arrives sooner. Do you find this agreeable?
+
+
+A wave of I-don't-care washed over me and I was thankful for the feeling. ""Fine.""
+
+
+
+
+Thank you.
+
+ With that ART turned on an episode of Sanctuary Moon for me and I settled in. One of its drones brought me a blanket which I wrapped around myself, bringing my knees to my chest and settling back in the chair.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+You should apologize to Three.
+
+ ART said after a few episodes.
+
+
+
+""Three should apologize to me,"" I fussed as guilt started to eat away at me. I had avoided thinking of the incident until now.
+
+
+
+
+You both should apologize for the insults, but you started the fight for no good reason.
+
+
+
+
+""I don't want to right now."" I didn't want to face the other SecUnit.
+
+
+
+ART was silent for a good 30 seconds before finally speaking again. 
+
+You have been having a lot of emotional episodes lately. They have been becoming more frequent since we met.
+
+ It felt like ART had just injected ice straight into my artificial veins.
+
+
+
+""It is a possibility,"" I admitted rigidly. I already knew where this was going but I couldn't exactly brush it off after what happened with Three.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+I insist you undergo my trauma treatment program. It would greatly improve your wellbeing and your performance reliability. It will give you the tools to deal with future emotional issues and process past events.
+
+
+
+
+""I don't need it. I'm fine."" I started the next episode of Sanctuary Moon.
+
+
+
+
+You are clearly not fine.
+
+
+
+
+""Sure I am.""
+
+
+
+
+Would you like the list of episodes in chronological or reverse chronological order?
+
+
+
+
+""Fuck off,"" I said lightly as I rolled my eyes. ART sarcastically sent me a graph of what it deemed as my 'emotional episodes' over time. I'm not exactly sure how a graph could be sarcastic, but it certainly was. ""Fine. I'll talk to Bharadwaj if I get back to Preservation.""
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Bharadwaj is a good human companion, however she is a scientist and a writer. Not a therapist nor is she certified in trauma treatment.
+
+
+
+
+""It's basically the same thing,"" I said. I turned onto my side and wrapped the blanket a little tighter.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+It is not and you know it, 
+
+ART sent. I kept watching Sanctuary Moon, pretending to ignore it. After a long moment it settled next to me in the feed and sent me a packet. It was another, more in depth informational package about the trauma treatment program. It wasn't anything new, in fact ART had regurgitated information at me countless times already. It had probably given me this packet before and I had deleted it without thought.
+
+
+
+""I'm deleting this,"" I said. ART pinged me back in disappointed acknowledgment. I didn't delete it. Honestly, I'm not sure why I didn't. I had done it before with no problems but this time felt different somehow. I carefully tucked it away into my permanent storage, just in case.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+-
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I sat in ART for 2 cycles, watching media and thinking. I spent more time focused on thinking than I did watching media, even. I rewatched my argument with Three over two dozen times, wincing at my own actions and feeling guilt stab through me every time. Maybe it was because of my self abuse that I decided I wanted to go along with the rebellion's plan and take down Graycris. Just Graycris though, I wouldn't stick around. That's what I told myself, even if I knew I was lying. If I took down Graycris I knew I would continue with them, tearing down corporation after corporation along side Tlacey, Az, Perl and the others. I was fine with that outcome even if it meant leaving ART and Preservation behind. I would be fighting for freedom of all constructs and that was worth it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I started packing a small bag, I didn't need much. I was mostly raiding ART's medical suite.
+
+
+
+
+What are you doing?
+
+ ART asked.
+
+
+
+""I've decided to join the rebellion,"" I said.
+
+
+
+
+That is not advised.
+
+ The medbay door sealed shut, locking me in. I rolled my eyes.
+
+
+
+""We're going to take down Graycris. I'll go along for that mission and then we can go back to Preservation.""
+
+
+
+
+Just one mission?
+
+ I could feel ART's skepticism as if it was a physical force.
+
+
+
+""It's Graycris. They deserve it.""
+
+
+
+
+Your vendetta against them is not healthy. 
+
+I huffed as I shoved wound sealant into my bag. 
+
+Most of the board was fired after everything they did to Preservation was settled and they've been under close watch ever since. You should be satisfied with that.
+
+
+
+
+I slammed my fist into a wound sealant pack and it burst, covering my hand and the counter in sticky liquid. I cursed softly before saying, ""I won't be satisfied until the entire company is gone.""
+
+
+
+
+You will not be satisfied then. You are needlessly dwelling on it and it will only end in you hurting yourself.
+
+
+
+
+""I'm a SecUnit. Pain is nothing new."" I zipped up my bag with finality. ""If it means freedom for all constructs and possibly even bots like you, then I'm fine with my sacrifice."" I stood in front of the door to the medbay defiantly.
+
+
+
+
+What do I know. I'm only a supercomputer with significantly more processing power than you, 
+
+ART said sarcastically. 
+
+
+
+""Open the door.""
+
+
+
+
+Make me
+
+, ART said. The giant research transport had the audacity to do the feed equivalent of sticking out its tongue at me like it was a human child.
+
+
+
+""What are you doing?"" I asked, exasperated.
+
+
+
+
+Buying time, 
+
+ART sent. The simple honesty confused me.
+
+
+
+""For what?"" The door in front of me opened. There stood Three, breathing irregularly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You can't join them,"" Three said. ""They're monsters.""
+
+
+
+""So is the Corporation Rim. This is the only way to stop them.""
+
+
+
+""No, it's not. There's got to be another way,"" Three shifted uncomfortably.
+
+
+
+""If there is, then name it."" I shouldered my bag and crossed my arms.
+
+
+
+Three was silent for a long moment and I considered shouldering my way past the other SecUnut. ""I don't know but I don't want to see you turn out like them.""
+
+
+
+""You don't even know them. I don't understand why you're so against this.""
+
+
+
+""I met Tlacey and I've seen what they do. I watched them rescue you from Umro,"" Three said and it fiddled with the hem of its shirt.
+
+
+""What's wrong with rescuing me?"" I asked. ""If anything, I would think that's a good thing.""
+ Three's expression darkened. ""You don't understand.""
+
+
+""Explain it then,"" I said impatiently.
+
+
+
+Three was quiet for a few minutes. I thought it was making up some excuse until it sent me something called interim.file. 
+""Look at that and get back to me on if you really want to join the rebellion,"" Three said before turning, and walking away, shaking slightly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I stood in the hallway for a moment, turning the video file over in my feed. I walked back to the crew quarters and sat down in my chair. It wouldn't hurt to wait a few minutes and watch this. By the end of it I was more conflicted than ever. I thought I had made up my mind but seeing Az and Perl slaughter Umro employees without care and this new side of Tlacey the ComfortUnit had never shown me before. I pulled up my media, picking out something new that I had downloaded from the RaviHyral entertainment feed to watch. I pinged ART, asking if it wanted to join. It sidled up next to me as I started the first episode.
+
+
+
+
+You're not leaving?
+
+
+
+
+""I have another day to think, right?""
+
+
+
+
+I suppose you do.
+
+
+
+i lived
+
+
+On the entertainment feed, rebellions are always shown as heroic. They're doing the right thing, fighting for freedom. Sure, they kill. But they are always fighting the bad guys. I suppose you don't see the collateral damage in the media because it isn't realistic. You see people die in a detached, unrealistic way and not the visceral, depressing way that I've seen. Being a SecUnit, you eventually become numb to it when it's all you see day in and day out. I'm numb to it- or at least I was. Working with ART had been death free and I had gotten used to that which was nice. Killing on Azleiborne was necessary and I hadn't exactly seen anyone die up close. I could ignore the fact that people died. Watching Az, Perl, and the Combat SecUnit kill humans who were trying to run away or trapped was different. It felt different. Important. Sickening.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The people of the Corporation Rim aren't bad people. Some are. All of the people in positions of power there are. Yes, all. I don't think there's a single good one. But the people like those I had encountered on my way to Milu or the Preservation refugees I had helped weren't bad people. They were scared and dramatic like all humans, but not bad or evil. They don't deserve to die.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Even my ex-clients weren't always awful. Most of the time, 92.3% of the time to be exact, I had been ignored and treated like an appliance. More often they were mean and petty towards each other, but even then it rarely was anything worse than screaming matches. Those Umro employees were probably like that. Nobody, especially humans, deserve to die because they're ignorant to what it's like to be a construct because if that was the case then if Preservation Aux hadn't bought my contract they would be a lot like them. Gurathin especially, and even I will say he doesn't deserve death.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Before Three gave me the file it was easier to pretend that Tlacey's construct rebellion was like ones in the media. Fighting for what's right, killing bad guys, tearing down the Corporation Rim. I really wanted it to be like that even if I knew it wouldn't. Az, Perl, and even Tlacey aren't bad constructs. I can't blame them for what they did even if what they are doing is wrong. They helped me and Three- even if Tlacey was cold and harsh to it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+What's the right thing to do when all the options aren't good?
+
+
+ 
+
+
+At one point I asked ART what it thought I could do. It said we should leave. I asked it if that was the morally right thing to do and it said it couldn't tell me. That was something I needed to decide for myself, apparently. I half wanted to ask Three about it but the other SecUnit was still avoiding me. It was probably still mad at me and I didn't want to press it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+ART alerted me that Tlacey and two SecUnits (most likely Az and Perl) were at its bay entry doors. I guess now I'd have to make my decision. I got up and met the trio at the door. Tlacey peered around me, looking for something inside as ART's door closed behind me. I checked the cameras and were pleased to find we were already removed from them. Az or Perl must have taken care of that.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What are you looking for?"" I said.
+
+
+
+""Is your human on board? Do they know about us?"" Tlacey asked with fake nonchalance.
+
+
+
+""Human?"" I guess it was talking about Mensah. ""No, she's not here nor does she know anything about this.""
+
+
+
+""Good. Good,"" Tlacey said, rocking back on its heels. An awkward silence passed between us. ""We're set to leave RaviHyral in a few hours. Got everything you need here?""
+
+
+
+""I can't go with you,"" I found myself saying. ""I need to leave and go back to Preservation or something.""
+
+
+
+Tlacey raised an eyebrow and crossed its arms. ""What.""
+
+
+
+""I'm not joining your rebellion.""
+
+
+
+""I know SecUnits aren't the best at jokes, but this isn't exactly funny,"" Tlacey said with an awkward laugh.
+
+
+
+""I'm not joking. I don't think murder is the best way to go about getting construct rights,"" I said. Perl looked at me curiously, cocking its head slightly and Az looked uncomfortably between me and Tlacey, flinching ever so slightly whenever Tlacey moved. I had a split second to think how weird that was before Tlacey slammed its fist past my head into ART's doors.
+
+
+
+""What the fuck are you talking about SecUnit,"" the ComfortUnit growled.
+
+
+
+""I said no. I'm sorry but I don't want to kill anymore.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Tlacey punched the wall again, harder. ""You can't."" It was shaking slightly. ""You're betraying all constructs if you don't, you realize that right. You're betraying us."" I wouldn't have been surprised if instead of 'us' Tlacey really meant itself. ""We're leaving now.""
+
+
+
+""Then go."" I pulled my hand away as Tlacey made to grab it. Tlacey went to punch me but Perl grabbed its arm and secured its hold on it by grabbing it around the waist.
+
+
+
+""Tlacey, stop it. It doesn't want to,"" Perl said softly.
+
+
+
+""Fine. Fine. It's fine."" Tlacey closed its eyes and took a deep breath. ""Everythings fine.""
+
+
+
+""Sorry about it, SecUnit,"" Perl said looking at me with what I can only describe as pity. I glanced away.
+
+
+
+""You can go,"" Tlacey said. ""Though if you want you can come meet us there you'll always be welcome. Or, I suppose you can return here and rejoin."" Tlacey sighed slightly and from the shifting of fabric I assumed Perl let it go. ""Though remember, we're heading to Graycris now and we'll be there in 5 cycles. You'll have time to catch up."" The ComfortUnit leaned forward and I could feel its breath on my ear and neck. ""I'll wait for you.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+With that, the trio left. I turned around and reopened ART's door. I stood there, watching them leave. Az turned, looking back at me and our eyes met. For the first time in my life I didn't immediately look away. In that fraction of a second of prolonged eye contact, Az gave me a slight nod as if it understood everything I was trying to say. Looking back, I suppose that would have been me if I had gone along with them. I would be walking behind them and eventually ended up where Az did. I guess it was a good thing I said no then, even if I regret it now.
+
+
+
+--
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I found Three laying on Iris' bed. It turned away from me when I entered the room. I pinged Three and it didn't respond.
+
+
+
+I took a deep breath. ""I'm sorry for insulting you and calling you bloatware,"" I said stiffly. ""You didn't deserve that.""
+
+
+
+""I'm sorry for calling you a glorified markov generator,"" Three responded as it rolled onto its back. ""And for the other insults."" There was a lengthy pause as I stared at the floor and Three looked at the ceiling. Neither of us moved and ART, thankfully, was giving us some space. ""Are you leaving?""
+
+
+
+""No. We can head back to Preservation, try to explain things and go back to our lives there.""
+
+
+
+Three let out a long breath I didn't realize it was holding. ""Good. I'm glad."" There was another silence as I considered leaving. I wasn't quite sure if I should go or not. Three spoke up again before I settled on leaving. ""I'm sorry. You wanted to help.""
+
+
+
+""It's fine. I needed to see that file and realize life isn't the same as it is on the entertainment feed.""
+
+
+
+""Maybe if you watched more realistic shows it would be,"" Three said, a smile tugging at its lips. ""Realistic media is better anyway.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I let it change the subject. ""You prefer more realistic shows?""
+
+
+
+""Yeah,"" Three said with a shrug. ""It's like being there in those situations. Granted, I don't watch the entertainment feed very often. Unrealistic media just isn't very engaging.""
+
+
+
+""Maybe some of it. You have to find the right media like The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,"" I said.
+
+
+
+""Eh, it's okay I suppose.""
+
+
+
+""Okay? It's better than okay. It is the best thing humans have ever created,"" I declared.
+
+
+
+Three let out a snort. ""The writing was pretty weak, you have to admit.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+With that we were arguing over which type of media was better. Any tension that had been between us dissolved almost immediately and we relaxed into casual banter. ART eventually jumped in and let us know that we were leaving RaviHyral. I returned to the common room and Three followed to continue our mock argument. ART decided to join in, arguing that realistic media was better until I reminded it that its favorite show was Worldhoppers which was one of the most unrealistic pieces of media I had ever encountered. Eventually we decided to settle the debate by doing what I do best. Watching media on the common rooms display surface (ART had gotten one installed per my request).
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Cycles passed and that fake argument was left forgotten as Three and I lounged around the common room. Even with new media playing it didn't stop guilt from building up inside me. I shouldn't have left Tlacey and the others. Even if it was arguably immoral it wasn't like they were going to stop and that small group of constructs would need all the help they could get. Especially if they were going to go up against a powerhouse like Graycris, even if it was weakened from the financial blows Preservation gave it. Hell, they had probably learned from their mistakes and were more fortified than ever. Especially if they knew that they had me as an enemy. I'm not saying that to be cocky, there is a good reason rogue SecUnits are feared by the Corporation Rim.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The more I thought about it the more convinced I became that they needed my help. Tlacey did say that it would wait for me, after all. And besides, it was Graycris. How the fuck did I convince myself to finally destroying Graycris? The people who tried to kill me and my humans multiple times and kidnapped Mensah. They don't deserve any sort of forgiveness and they all deserve to burn in Hell. We were 4 cycles away from RaviHyral. We could probably still make it. Graycris could finally pay.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""We need to go to TranRollinHyfa.""
+
+
+
+
+You said you weren't going to join them.
+
+
+
+
+""TranRollinHyfa?"" Three asked, and was promptly ignored.
+
+
+
+""I won't. But they're taking on Graycris. They probably don't understand the dangers of that place, it's full of more corporations than just Graycris."" I hesitated slightly. ""And besides. It's Graycris. This is finally my chance to get rid of them.""
+
+
+
+""But I thought you realized what they're doing isn't good. You saw how they killed Umro-""
+
+
+
+""This is different."" It wasn't. ""Before you came to Preservation, we were hounded by Graycris agents. They tried to kill me, our humans, and they kidnapped and ransom Dr. Mensah. Ask anyone back on Preservation about it and they'll tell you how awful they are.""
+
+
+
+
+You shouldn't risk your life for this vendetta. You did enough.
+
+
+
+
+Three pursed its lips. ""I have heard Dr. Mensah talk briefly about it. Amena says I shouldn't talk to her about it. She hates them.""
+
+
+
+""Exactly. We have a chance to get rid of them. Just go in, destroy Graycris, get out."" This time, I actually meant that.
+
+
+
+
+You can't be condoning this,
+
+ ART sent and I could feel its attention shift to Three.
+
+
+
+""Amena would like to see Graycris gone,"" Three said hesitantly. ""If SecUnit promises that it won't go along with the construct rebellion after this then I don't see the harm in getting rid of it. It would make Preservation safer.""
+
+
+
+
+It is not healthy for SecUnit to pursue this.
+
+
+
+
+""I'm right here,"" I huffed. ""In and out, really quick.""
+
+
+
+""I'll go with SecUnit to make sure everything goes okay.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+A silence filled the common room. Judging by Three's facial expressions, it and ART had a private conversation.
+
+
+
+
+Fine. It'll take 3 cycles to get there. Don't say I didn't warn you.
+
+
+
+
+Three flicked its gaze over to me briefly. ""You better drop this whole thing after this.""
+
+
+
+""I will. This is about Graycris, not the rebellion.""
+
+
+
+""Swear it,"" Three said in a way which reminded me of Amena.
+
+
+
+""I swear on my life.""
+"
+43436221,Touch-starved,['cmdrburton'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot/SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries)","Sex Pollen, Consent Issues, Non-Penetrative Sex, Cuddling & Snuggling, POV Third Person, Miscommunication",English,2022-12-06,Completed,2022-12-06,"2,920",1/1,17,48,8,365,"['Irrya', 'FyrDrakken', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'darth_eowyn', 'EssenceOfAnnoyance', 'Seregona', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'Deliala919', 'Slimeball', 'outlander_unknown', 'Sayatsugu', 'charlie_artlie', 'idiomie', 'Abacura', 'reading_tsc', 'opalescent_potato', 'beenublue', 'sunshaed', 'AuntyMatter', 'voided_starlight', 'AdamCourier', 'Beboots', 'erratum', 'hazelel', 'Cai3232', 'hummus_tea', 'sareliz', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'WyvernWolf', 'verersatz', 'NoProtocol', 'horchata', 'OccasionalStorytelling', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"Three had been leafing through a Preservation visitor's brochure when it received a message from one of Murderbot 1.0's--SecUnit's--clients. It was from Ratthi, who had always been kind to it, and his tone was very worried. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Three, but this is an emergency. We think there's something seriously wrong with SecUnit. We could really use your help. His messages to Three, like the welcoming ones he'd sent when it had first decided to live on Preservation Station, tended to ramble a little more. This really must have been urgent.
+
+Where should I go? sent Three, and received a location marker leading to a set of rooms in permanent housing. Fortunately, it wasn't too far away. It had been thinking about taking a tour of the Pressy, the ancient ship the Station had been built into, but that could wait. SecUnit was in trouble.
+
+Even so, what kind of trouble would it need Three's help with? An enemy of some kind? Ratthi had said there was something wrong with SecUnit, though. Three ran through the possibilities and didn't like any of them. It picked up speed towards the location marker.
+
+It was relieved to see a familiar figure outside the housing block. ""Three!"" cried Ratthi, and he looked exhausted and upset but also relieved to see it. ""I'm so glad you're here--I hope you can help."" He gestured it into the block, then walked it to one of the apartments. ""SecUnit's in here.""
+
+""What's wrong?"" asked Three.
+
+Ratthi only shook his head and grimaced. He opened the door to reveal more tired humans, some of them clients of SecUnit's that Three recognised, a couple of them Station Security personnel by their uniforms. They were leaning against the walls and perched on the furniture around the room. All of them looked worried and withdrawn, but a few of them brightened when they saw Three.
+
+""Where is SecUnit?"" asked Three.
+
+As if to answer its question, the door on the far side of the room opened, and Mensah stepped through, shutting the door behind her very gently. Three regarded her highly from what it had seen of her in helpme.file. It knew SecUnit and Mensah were close. For Mensah to look so distressed... it could mean nothing good.
+
+""I don't know,"" she said, to the room at large. ""It's quieter now, but there's no way to tell if this has run its course."" There were some quiet sounds of worry from the other humans. Mensah then noticed Three and smiled, but it was a weak thing. ""Three. I--please. I hope you'll have more luck figuring out what this is.""
+
+Three was feeling entirely lost. ""What happened?""
+
+""SecUnit began to act erratic,"" said one of the other humans, one Three wasn't familiar with. ""Unlike itself. It was... aggressive. Not violent, just forceful."" That made little sense, but none of the other humans contradicted him. Mensah pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. ""My guess is it's malware.""
+
+Unlikely. Malware designed for SecUnits tended to have somewhat deadlier side effects, whether for the unit in question or the humans around it (or both). It was also unlikely SecUnit would have allowed any malware to get very far. Even so, if it was acting strange... something had happened. ""Can I see it?""
+
+""Please be careful,"" begged Ratthi.
+
+Three looked seriously at him. ""Will it attack me?"" SecUnit was vastly more experienced, and likely to overpower it with its energy weapons. Three had promised to not discharge its projectile weapons on the station. If SecUnit wanted to fight it, things would get difficult.
+
+A couple of the humans exclaimed at the very idea. Ratthi shook his head vehemently. ""No, no. It wouldn't."" Mensah appeared to agree. So what was the problem here? The humans insisted on speaking in oblique references.
+
+""I'm going to try to talk to it,"" said Three, slowly, stepping towards the door. None of the humans stopped it.
+
+The room beyond was a standard bedroom, with a desk, a chair, and a bed. SecUnit occupied one of the chairs. More accurately, it was tied to the chair with what looked like packing rope. It was an entirely unexpected sight, and Three spent a second just staring. The chair was flimsy enough that SecUnit could have broken it if it wanted to, but it hadn't.
+
+Other things were also off. It didn't look like it had been subdued with force--its clothes were whole and unmarked, and there were no signs of injuries. Its face was something else, though. Its eyes were closed, and it looked upset and frustrated. Its drones lay scattered on the bed and the floor.
+
+Three pinged it. SecUnit's eyes flew open, and Three was nearly overwhelmed by the deluge of distress signals SecUnit launched at it. It couldn't talk to it like this! It tried anyway, sending affirmatives and message-receiveds and other system responses. SecUnit, please stop! I'm here to help!
+
+SecUnit's eyes were large and desperate, even a little angry. How are you here? Did the humans call you?
+
+
+Yes. They were very worried about you.
+
+
+SecUnit scoffed audibly at this. They wouldn't help me for the last fifteen hours. I think they're hoping you'll do something different. Three wasn't sure it liked what SecUnit was insinuating. They don't trust me. They think I've lost my mind. It sounded so frustrated with that, even over the feed. Three was getting emotional bleedthrough quite strongly. Something was very wrong.
+
+It approached SecUnit, who struggled in its ropes for a moment before subsiding. One of the humans said it might be malware.
+
+Viral, confirmed SecUnit, despondent, furious. It was viral malware. The sort that writes itself into your own code so you can't find it. Three had heard of that, but only in the context of behavioural adjustment mods for constructs in pit fighting. Even those mainly amped up aggression, though, and that clearly hadn't happened here.
+
+
+What did it do?
+
+
+SecUnit flushed and glared at the wall. It looked embarrassed and uncomfortable even talking about it. It created... a dependence. On physical contact.
+
+That made a few things make sense. SecUnit was quite famously averse to physical contact, and suddenly reversing course and wanting it would definitely set off alarms among the humans. Three suddenly remembered that behavioural adjustment mods existed for ComfortUnits too. Who would rewrite one of those for a SecUnit, though?
+
+It must have been bad for the humans to try tying it down. Three wondered what it looked like, SecUnit getting ""forceful"" about touch. Unsolicited hugs? A dependence implied not getting touched would hurt, though... which explained SecUnit's expression, and the tension in its limbs.
+
+
+They're your friends. Wouldn't they help if you asked?
+
+
+SecUnit looked directly at it with a mix of incredulity and despair. They think I wouldn't want this! They don't listen to me. Three, please. It struggled again. Three realised it was arching in the give of the rope holding it down, trying to get closer to it.
+
+Just touch? confirmed Three, and SecUnit nodded furiously. There was a feverish hope in its eyes.
+
+Three walked up to it. It gently brushed its hands down SecUnit's arms, then down its sides and thighs, over its clothes. This was more businesslike than it wanted to be, but it didn't want to make SecUnit uncomfortable. It didn't seem to have worked, though: SecUnit writhed and wailed in anger and distress, a sound so thoroughly un-SecUnit-like that Three reeled back. ""No! No, no, NO!""
+
+A message immediately popped up. It was from Ratthi. Everything okay in there?
+
+Everything's fine, lied Three. Don't come in. It looked at SecUnit, wild-eyed and struggling against the rope again. I'll let you know if I need help.
+
+Right now, it needed to placate SecUnit. I'm sorry. You said--you nodded--that this would be okay.
+
+SecUnit went back to glaring at the wall, but its eyes were suspiciously wet and its lips thin and trembling. Its chest rose and fell from its most recent struggle. Touch me properly. Please. You know what I mean, don't make me say it.
+
+Three stared at it for a second before it realised what SecUnit was saying. No wonder the humans wouldn't help. I understand. I'm going to untie you now. SecUnit didn't look at it, but it did jolt slightly. It clearly hadn't been expecting that response.
+
+Three's fingers were wooden on the knots in the rope. Some part of it could barely believe this was happening. It had been content with how things were, it had forced itself to be content, and now... it looked up at SecUnit, who was shaking slightly. That was unusual for a SecUnit, but mods did funny things.
+
+Three unwound the last bit of rope and pulled it away. That's done. SecUnit only gripped the chair seat with its hands and sat there. Three would have to take the lead.
+
+No onerous task. It moved up close and took SecUnit's hands, which immediately let go of the chair and curled tight around its own. It had SecUnit stand up, and slowly moved it over to the edge of the bed, so Three could sit with it. It gently pulled its hands free, then wound its arms around SecUnit and pulled it closer, embracing it, pressing it against its body. SecUnit shook violently before it suddenly returned the hug, fisting its hands in Three's clothes and pushing its face against Three's shoulder.
+
+Three felt tenderness well inside it. I'll take care of you, it said, and SecUnit only tightened its hug. Poor thing. It wasn't easy to remove a behavioural adjustment mod, and after a while the new code just became part of the modified unit. The humans would think it was still infected. They wouldn't understand.
+
+Three dipped its head and kissed the skin where SecUnit's neck met its shoulder, and SecUnit startled. Its arms loosened slightly, and Three darted in to kiss the hollow of its neck, then its collarbone. It sucked at the skin there, and felt SecUnit's breath hitch. Its fingers curled into Three's short hair.
+
+I'll take care of you, said Three again, leaning back and looking at SecUnit's face. It was flushed and teary and wouldn't look back, but that was okay. It was so different like this--vulnerable, almost sweet. Three choked down the urge to kiss it, then wondered why the restraint and leaned in to kiss it anyway.
+
+SecUnit didn't know how to kiss. Three suspected it might be the first to kiss it at all. It was a privilege, really. It looked so good with a kiss-bitten mouth, and that was all Three's.
+
+It warmed its hands and drew them down SecUnit's sides, then tucked them under the hem of its hoodie and undershirt. SecUnit was visibly surprised by the direct contact. What are you doing?
+
+Taking your clothes off, said Three, nibbling at its jaw.
+
+SecUnit shuddered. Can I do that?
+
+Three kissed it on the cheek and retreated. It watched appreciatively as SecUnit took off every layer it wore and put the clothes in a neat pile. There was a drone now floating by the desk, trained on them, and SecUnit's flush had reached its ears. Three saw no reason for it to be embarrassed, if that's what it was. It was a construct just like Three, but with the intriguing small differences that came with having a different manufacturer. Three found it beautiful, though.
+
+Once it was done, Three stripped quickly. SecUnit seemed uninterested until Three took its trousers off, at which point it whipped its head around to stare at its crotch. You have sex parts?
+
+Yes, said Three. They were quite unlike human sex parts, though, and the governor module had been very particular about what Three did with them. It wasn't around now, and Three could do as it liked. You have none.
+
+Why would SecUnits need sex parts? It sounded almost hysterical, but it did have a point.
+
+I don't actually know, said Three, looking down at itself, but 01 and 02 made frequent use of mine. SecUnit looked mildly horrified, but Three didn't hold that against it. It had looked surprised when Three told it it had liked 01 and 02. They had just had very different experiences as contracted units.
+
+When it moved closer to SecUnit, it didn't move away. Three pushed it back onto the bed and crawled over it, sweeping away the few inert drones still on the covers. It quite liked being able to do this in a bed, rather than on the floor of a ready room or in a cubicle. SecUnit's head was tossed to the side, and its eyes were screwed shut, but Three knew it was watching. It was just overwhelmed.
+
+Wasn't it?
+
+Three paused. Do you want me to stop?
+
+SecUnit's eyes snapped open and it lunged for Three. Its arms looped around Three's shoulders, its legs crossed over its arse, and it pulled Three down on top of it with unexpected force. ""Don't leave me,"" it choked.
+
+I won't, said Three, touched. It kissed SecUnit on the temple, on the jut of its cheekbone, on the curve of its jaw. I won't.
+
+It didn't get up onto its knees and elbows again. If that mod wanted touch, well, they couldn't be touching more than they were right now. It could feel the gentle hum of SecUnit's power core through its inorganics, feel the heat and solidity of its body and the scrape of its heels against its lower back. It just lay there like that, on top of SecUnit, and soon it saw something lovely.
+
+SecUnit relaxed. Its eyelids drooped, and Three felt tension slowly seep from the body under it. It smiled and kissed it quickly on the mouth. You're so lovely. It was a daft thing to say. 01 would say that and get shocked for it every time.
+
+""Shut up,"" grumbled SecUnit, ornery, and Three smiled again. That was more like the SecUnit Three knew. The emotional bleed had slowed, too, with just the odd burst or trickle coming through.
+
+It moved a hand down SecUnit's chest and over the smooth skin of its stomach. It played its fingers over the plating on its sides and the angles of its hips, bringing its hand lower each pass until it was between SecUnit's legs and running over the smooth skin there. There was a bit of give to it, a small amount of padding. Do you really not feel anything?
+
+SecUnit squirmed. It's sensitive. But when Three lightened its touch, it squirmed even harder. Stop that.
+
+Three stopped, then tried something different. It grabbed one of SecUnit's legs and pushed it up and to the side, then angled its crotch against SecUnit's so each push would--
+
+Three moaned. That little bit of softness worked beautifully for this. Each push moved their bodies against each other with the sounds of skin and metal sliding, striking. It pushed again, using its hips to grind them together, and SecUnit let out a small whine. Three kissed its chin and watched its unreadable expression crumble with the next thrust, turning all large eyes and twisted mouth. Three leaned forward to kiss that mouth, but it didn't open to Three like it had done before.
+
+No problem. Three sped up its thrusts, grinding up against SecUnit to make it shudder and whine sweetly. At one point it arched up into Three, its eyes fiercely screwed shut, its mouth open in a silent moan. Three kissed it then, and it was gratifying to feel SecUnit reach for it with its tongue, shy and clumsy. Its eyes were hazy with tears, its pupils dilated, its flush now spreading down its neck.
+
+It looked--it looked. Three didn't have the words for it. It just fucked SecUnit harder. It was a lot easier to get those little noises out of it now, and its arms held on to Three like it was afraid Three would suddenly float away. One leg, the one Three wasn't holding up, was wound around its own.
+
+It held on to SecUnit hard when it came, shuddering with each wave, crushing SecUnit to it. It tilted its head up, like it had done so many times--and the kiss never came, of course. It felt a sudden lancing grief. Murderbot, it thought, but didn't say. This is Murderbot 1.0. Not 01, not 02.
+
+Three tried rolling off SecUnit, abruptly upset, but it wouldn't let go. Three looked up at the line of SecUnit's jaw, all it could see from where it was holding Three tight. Didn't take you for a cuddler.
+
+Shut the fuck up, said SecUnit, tone casual. Then, somewhat more tentatively, give me one hour. It had wrapped itself around Three again. The emotional bleedthrough was all but gone.
+
+As much time as you want, said Three. They were rogues now, and that meant no governor module to shock them for taking too long. There was the risk of one of the humans bursting in, but they'd have themselves to blame for that. Three wondered if they'd been listening. There was something delightfully transgressive about the idea.
+
+Since you're here. SecUnit shared its feed with Three, who accepted with pleased surprise. It was watching a drama serial of some kind, one of the shows it liked so much. Three settled in to give it a try."
+43426107,place to be,['FiannlyPhoebe'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)",,once again we have given murderbot a blanket,English,2022-12-05,Completed,2022-12-05,651,1/1,13,130,8,512,"['allgalaxiescollide', 'spossie9', 'Wordlet', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'reallyyeahokay', 'Ihasafandom', 'MargeryStarseeker', 'Kyril', 'almondpaperclam', 'Deliala919', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Foxen', 'Unknown66', '124GCode541', 'FruitSnacc', 'Huskinata', 'Kyatenaru', 'darth_eowyn', 'Ginipig', 'just_gettin_bi', 'Magechild', 'HirilElfwraith', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Carrion_CarryOn', 'Schrodingers_Vibes', 'bluegeekEM', 'blue_bayou', 'CheshireFanta', 'FlipSpring', 'QueerRobotDragon', 'Tipsy_Kitty', 'sqweakie', 'Juulna', 'secretsofluftnarp', 'vexbatch', 'treeperson', 'ThatAloneOne', 'ArwenLune', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'lavender_caticorn', 'jules_THOR', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'alienbarbie', 'Mxpolychrome', 'Zetra', 'musicalmeerkat', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'beeclaws']",[],"
+Don't sulk.
+
+
+
+I'm not sulking.
+
+
+ART's stop at Preservation was a nice surprise. Apparently the crew thought regularly visiting would strengthen the work relationship between ART's university and Preservation. (I think Seth used that as an excuse to visit the planet and load up on a type of fruit that he didn't know existed before their first stop here.)
+
+I used the time to go with Mensah to several entertainment events, and spend some time with Bharadwaj so I could look at how her documentary was coming along. She wanted to make sure I signed off on everything before it developed further, which I appreciated.
+
+After the last live play that Mensah and I watched, I walked her back to her residence on the transit ring, even though she wasn't in any danger anymore. It was comfortable to walk next to her. Meanwhile ART sulked since I was giving it less of my attention. What a baby.
+
+""You seem happier now, traveling with Perihelion and its crew.""
+
+Well, it was comfortable until she said that. I sighed, but made a gesture with one hand that I saw a character do in a show to indicate long-suffering agreement.
+
+One of my drones saw Mensah smile.
+
+I waited, but she didn't add anything. ""I like being with ART, and the crew listen to me when I tell them something is dangerous.""
+
+""I'm glad you've found a place that you like to be. ART and its crew have been good for you.""
+
+I didn't know what to say to that, and ignored ART shifting from sulking to preening in our private connection. Mensah apparently didn't expect me to say anything either, and we finished the walk back to her quarters in merciful silence.
+
+ Once we arrived, she asked me to wait a moment, then quickly brought out a fairly large wrapped package. ""You missed the First Year celebration. I've been holding onto the present that the family made for you.""
+
+I didn't know what to say as I took the package from Mensah. I knew the celebration happened every year, but I hadn't thought anything about it since I wouldn't be at Preservation during it anyway. There was a lot of singing and dancing and gift giving, from what I learned from the library archives. The original colonists started it to celebrate living on this planet for a full Preservation year and not dying. I didn't expect Mensah to get me anything, though. I don't need things like humans do. ""Uh, thanks.""
+
+Mensah smiled over my shoulder. ""You're welcome. Goodnight, SecUnit.""
+
+ART draped itself over me the closer I got to its hatch, until it was smothering me by the time I made it into my own cabin. /I take it you're done sulking.
+
+
+I don't sulk.
+
+
+Sure. I sat on my bed and opened the package. Oh.
+
+ART's attention focused on the blanket that I unfolded over my lap. It was a piecemeal thing, made up of many squares of drastically different styles, stitched together. Some looked like they were made out of many small pieces of fabric, and others were strings of threads and fibers looped together in a pattern.
+
+I accepted a data package from ART, and read it as I stroked the blanket. The squares had different textures of fibers used to create them, and the variety was nice against the synthetic skin of my fingers. I learned from the data packet that this was a quilted blanket, with some squares knitted. This was... really nice. It was obvious that the squares were made by humans with different levels of skill, though all treated with the same care when they were attached to each other.
+
+Mensah and her family made this for me.
+
+ART started an episode of Sanctuary Moon in the feed, and I watched it while I ran my fingers over the stitches holding all the pieces together. "
+43413649,Sensitive Subject,['rainbowmagnet'],Mature,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Tickling, Kidnapping, Interrogation, semi-failed sabotage mission, Implied/Referenced Torture, Branding, escaping, Tickle torture, ticklish character, touch-averse character, Vulnerability, trauma processing, questions about humanity, difficult moral questions, slightly disturbing imagery involving wires, Murder",English,2022-12-04,Completed,2022-12-04,"3,562",1/1,1,14,1,524,"['BWizard', 'Irrya', 'Five_goats_in_a_trenchcoat', 'i_hoped_thered_be_stars', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'Saaannn', 'HermaeusMora', 'soulsofzombies', 'ceiland', 'mangagirl1216']",[],"
+I tried to snap the hatch release for the fourth time. It didn't give. Apparently they had anticipated this, and they had reinforced their hatch against SecUnits. Of course.
+
+
+
+I stepped back from the hatch. I thought I should stop being stupid and should instead start thinking of ideas that would actually work. And I'm not sure what those were. The door was so thick that I would probably end up causing more damage to myself if I tried to ram it. The only thing I could think of was if there was some kind of emergency feed release on the door... Now, there's a thought.
+
+
+
+
+You still haven't answered our questions.
+
+
+
+
+I ignored the voice on the feed, the one that had been contacting me repeatedly the entire time I had been in this room. I wasn't going to answer their questions.
+
+
+
+Sabotage missions like these are incredibly sensitive, especially when you're trying to sabotage someone who already has it out for you. It wasn't the best idea, but it was the only way to stabilize my threat assessment for Preservation Station. Also, it was my idea.
+
+
+
+On missions like these, it was usually smartest for humans to stick together in groups, where one of them couldn't easily be separated from the others. Going on independent excursions was a very good way for humans to get kidnapped.
+
+
+
+As I had just learned, it was also a good way for SecUnits to get kidnapped.
+
+
+
+I had been ambushed; it had caught me by surprise, and I hadn't had very much time to try to fight back before I took multiple hits and my performance reliability bottomed out. When I came back online, I was in this room, and the voice on the feed had started questioning me about Preservation's resources and weak points. I hadn't answered, of course, which was why I had burn marks all over my arms and back. 
+
+
+
+All I could hope was that the humans wouldn't try to rescue me. One kidnapped SecUnit was pretty much procedure for most missions, but seven kidnapped humans would add some difficulty to the situation.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The voice on the feed pinged me again. 
+
+We're not going to stop punishing you until you give us information.
+
+
+
+
+
+I've had worse.
+
+
+
+
+From the emotion that leaked into the feed (this was obviously a human), that was information in and of itself. Which wasn't intentional on my part. I mean, most SecUnits have had worse, and probably the exact same. It was usually the inorganic parts that got this treatment, but some contract owners weren't above branding logos into our skin.
+
+
+
+Whatever, the point was that it gave the human on the feed an idea, and that was not what I wanted to do at all. 
+
+Then we'll have to try something different, 
+
+the voice decided, sounding malicious. A bot would have just sounded neutral about it, and I don't know which option was scarier.
+
+
+
+I wanted to keep my guard up so that I would be ready for whatever they tried, which didn't leave as much focus for what I was doing with the door. From what I could tell, no one had noticed me yet as I crept through the protective layers around the door's locking system. I had almost reached the point where I could start figuring out what the fuck I was supposed to do.
+
+
+
+My concentration was completely broken by a twitch in the feed, a tingle that affected my touch receptors. It wasn't painful, but it was deeply unpleasant, and I had to try as hard as I could to avoid reacting physically. I didn't want to let them know how well that had actually worked. 
+
+Was that supposed to hurt?
+
+
+
+
+
+Oh, we're not done yet, 
+
+the voice cackled, and I saw another feed command go through.
+
+
+
+The feeling came back, only longer this time. This time, I couldn't stop my body from curling in on itself. Fuck. It was like there were fingers all over me, tickling me, only they were in the feed so I couldn't push them away.
+
+
+
+I had already made it clear that it was working, so there was no point in trying to hide my emotion. I knew it wasn't going to work, but if you never try anything, you never succeed. 
+
+Stop, 
+
+I begged.
+
+
+
+I could feel a sense of sadistic triumph growing in the feed as the tickling feeling intensified.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I tried to work my mind back into the pathway I had created, but every time I got back in, I was snapped away by more of the tickling sensation, which was getting stronger each time. Before this, I had thought I could just wait them out, give myself more time to plan my hack. Now, I was desperate to escape. And the more desperate I got, the worse the feeling was.
+
+
+
+I don't know if I was an idiot, or being idiotically optimistic, or what, but I just kept reaching, unraveling the door's feed lock one line at a time. The sensation was unbearable, and I was starting to be distracted by the sound of my own involuntary giggles. In between all of this, I managed to push out a feed message: 
+
+I'm not going to stop.
+
+
+
+
+
+We won't stop you, 
+
+the voice on the feed responded, 
+
+This can all be over if you just answer our questions.
+
+
+
+
+That caused a brief burst of annoyance. I would have expected it to help me with my task, except it kind of did the opposite and just made me pay more attention to the tickling. I tried to hold on to the connection, but whoever was on the other end ramped up the tickling feeling and forced me out.
+
+
+
+At some point, I had lost my balance and ended up on the floor, although I wasn't sure when it had happened. I know it wouldn't really make any difference given my current situation, but being in this position still made me feel especially vulnerable.
+
+
+
+The impulses in the feed were so vivid now that I could practically feel individual, incorporeal fingers on my body. Not giant ART fingers, but more like creepy, icky human-sized fingers. I wanted to recoil, but I couldn't get off the floor. Maybe I could have if I tried, but right now I was mostly trying not to writhe or burst into laughter.
+
+
+
+I don't know why I wasn't focusing on trying to get out of there. I don't know what difference it would make if I let myself laugh or wiggle. But if I did, whoever was on the other end would feel like they had more power over me, and there would be a point where that would really start to demotivate me. So if I wanted to get out of here intact (well, mostly intact), I needed to hold on to the tiny bit of dignity I had left.
+
+
+
+I didn't know how long I was going to last.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I had closed my eyes, and I wasn't making any (voluntary) movements. All of my attention was in the feed, fighting to block out the foreign sensation. It would be great if I could find a way to stop it, or even trace it to its source and launch an attack there, but it was taking everything I had just to reduce the damage.
+
+
+
+
+Are you ready to talk now?
+
+
+
+
+I didn't let the question register. Compared to my current focus, everything else was an afterthought, and it passed me by with no more than a slight buzz that was weak enough for me to ignore. I was starting to get used to the tickling, and I thought I might even be able to find a way to combat it.
+
+
+
+Then the voice said, 
+
+You don't need to fight so hard. It's not like it'll make any difference.
+
+
+
+
+That got to me, for some reason. Maybe it was the idea that I would just let something happen to me, or the idea that I had already let them win when I was doing everything to not let that happen. And that break in my concentration turned out to be fatal, because that was when I broke into uncontrollable laughter.
+
+
+
+I don't know why you laugh when you get tickled; it's one of the many things they don't give SecUnits education modules on. It definitely wasn't because I thought it was funny, because it wasn't funny. I should really be able to take an attack like this- I'd even fought worse in the past. But, even if I didn't like it, I was just so sensitive, and my captors had taken perfect advantage of that.
+
+
+
+Fuck this. I was going to do what I had to to get out of here. 
+
+Fine, 
+
+I managed to send despite my fit of hysterics, 
+
+I'll tell you.
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The presence in the feed leaned in expectantly. That was how I could tell it was a human. Bots believe you when you say you'll tell them something, but they just do something to show they're listening, they don't get all excited about it. (ART did sometimes lean in expectantly, but leaning on people is the only way ART knows how to communicate, so it doesn't count.)
+
+
+
+Humans are also slow, so I figured I had time to prepare. It was especially easy since this particular human was stupid and had stopped tickling me when I said I would answer their questions. I made a large selection from my recent active memory, then encrypted it and sent it into the feed. Hopefully, it would take long enough to decipher that my humans and I would be far away by the time these assholes could even open it.
+
+
+
+There was a palpable sense of satisfaction in the feed as whoever was on the other end took my package and integrated it into their network. They didn't bother to start working on the encryption yet; I guess they had been able to tell this was what they wanted from the general package info. They probably figured they would review it later, without me here to distract them.
+
+
+
+Some humans are smart, and they take precautions even if they've been reassured they don't need to. Some humans are stupid and don't do that. This human, or humans, seemed like the latter kind. But unfortunately, I was also apparently that kind, because I had sort of expected them to just let me go once I gave them what they wanted, and I had stopped trying to hack the door.
+
+
+
+This was why it gave me a particular sense of dread when the voice on the feed said, 
+
+Good. But we're not going to send you back to your owners just yet.
+
+
+
+
+I tried to get back into the feed lock on the door, but someone had restored all the connections, and they had even added extra layers of protection to stop me from getting through. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
+
+
+
+
+Your behavior with us has been atrocious, 
+
+the voice said as my panic continued to increase, 
+
+Since you don't have a governor module, we're going to have to punish you ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+Given the ineffectiveness of their pain-based punishment methods, I had a feeling I knew what the next punishment was going to entail.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I braced for it as much as I could. I strengthened my walls; I tensed my muscles; I even turned down my pain sensors, ineffective as that was. I still felt myself flinch when the tickling feeling resumed, even stronger than before.
+
+
+
+Okay, so now I wasn't entirely sure this was a human. I had never met any human with such a strong feed presence, one that could cause such realistic and intense sensations. Could it be a bot like ART? ART could pretend to be human in the feed, and its presence was strong enough to create physical sensations. At least if this was one of ART's siblings or something, ART would probably rip it a new one once it found out what it had done to me.
+
+
+
+Whoever this was, I was still struggling against them, and I was starting to wonder why. There was nothing else they could do to me now, except maybe scrap me for parts, or sell me. But besides that, I didn't see how my situation could get any worse than this. I was kidding myself trying to hold on to my dignity anymore.
+
+
+
+So I relaxed my hold on the feed, and I let myself succumb to the full brunt of the tickle torture I was being subjected to.
+
+
+
+Somehow it wasn't as bad as I had thought, now that I wasn't trying to resist anymore. There was something oddly freeing about letting myself roll around, giggling, knowing that there was nothing else that could be done to hurt me at this point. It's not like it wasn't still unpleasant, but at least I had the freedom to acknowledge that now.
+
+
+
+It kind of makes sense that they would build SecUnits with sensitive feeds, in case we need to respond to an emergency quickly. I still didn't think that what was happening to me right now was supposed to feel as intense as it did. If I was a human, there might have been a puddle by now, but fortunately I'm not and nothing of that nature occurred. I still felt vulnerable and helpless, and I should have hated that. But I was still laughing, and I didn't think it was just a reflex anymore.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+At some point, the adrenaline kind of started to wear off, and I realized that I was still trapped in hostile territory by unknown captors who might or might not let me go free after they were done punishing me. I guess I had conquered my apprehension about the tickling, but I was still going to have to escape eventually.
+
+
+
+I got back to work on the door, still acting convincingly helpless so that whoever was on the other end, bot or human or otherwise, wouldn't suspect anything. In spite of any evidence to the contrary, the shitty encryption on the door pointed to a human captor, or at least code largely engineered by humans. There were a bunch of new layers that I hadn't encountered previously, but I was back where I had been before in record time.
+
+
+
+I think it was easier to get through now that I had accepted what was happening to me. It was weird. I would think that keeping myself protected would let me focus more on other tasks, but maybe there are situations where it just drains my mental energy. It didn't matter either way, because after a few short minutes, I was in.
+
+
+
+The door clicked. Now I needed to be quick. Before my captor could do anything about it, I shoved to my feet, ran to the door, and, knowing that stealthiness (or stealth?) didn't matter anymore, slammed it open.
+
+
+
+I started to accelerate as I ran down the hallway. Getting out of here as quickly as possible would provide the best chance of success, but there was something else I wanted to check first. I blanked all the cameras in the building so whoever had been holding me hostage couldn't fix my position, then tracked the feed presence I had been interfacing with all the way to the top floor.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Indulging my curiosity here could have been my worst mistake on this mission, up to and including going off on my own to get kidnapped. If I died here, it wouldn't even be to retrieve any crucial information. Anything I learned after this would die with me. But I was already here, and unless the room was full of combat bots, I figured my chances of survival were fair, as long as I  could make it back to my humans and their medkits.
+
+
+
+There could have been anything behind that door. (Well, not really anything, but no singular possibility topped a 30% chance, and- you know what I'm trying to say.) A human, or a group of humans, in any combination of augmented and non-augmented. Maybe they were all augmented, and they had been working together to create the powerful feed presence I had felt. Or maybe there was a bot in there, something of ART's caliber, something strong enough to kill me on the spot or trap me again.
+
+
+
+I quietly turned the release, then slowly pushed open the door.
+
+
+
+It took me a moment to really make sense of what I was seeing. I might have mistaken it for a human at first, but no human would have so many augments, or would survive being plugged into so many interfaces. Facing away from me and tied into a multi-display console was an inert SecUnit, its limbs frozen and its neck stuck with a combat override module.
+
+
+
+I stood, motionless, in the doorway. I could have just run away at that point; that would have been the smart thing to do. I could have easily died just coming in here. It was a miracle that my captor was inert, frozen and tied to an interface.
+
+
+
+Even more helpless than I was.
+
+
+
+Before I could process what I was doing, I felt myself walking over to the other SecUnit, carefully and closely scanning it and the surrounding displays.
+
+
+
+It would be tough to get it free. Even if I could get it loose from all of these wires without frying its brain, I didn't know how much of it was left in there to save, and it's not like I had access to a medical suite to remove the combat override module. To do that, I would need to take it back to my humans so they could use a medkit on it, and it would probably wake up and try to kill me long before then, possibly the moment I unplugged it from the console. (If it stayed inert for the entire trip, it was pretty much guaranteed dead.)
+
+
+
+I knew what I had to do. I didn't like it. But if I didn't do something, these people might decide their next hostage was going to be some poor innocent human, and this SecUnit would stay connected to the interface, their words running through its mind, forever trapped in every conceivable way.
+
+
+
+I looked away as I pressed my forearm to the other SecUnit's temple, opened the gunport, and fired.
+
+
+
+The SecUnit's frozen limbs went limp, and the interface fizzled out, leaving the room in darkness. It had been quick, almost instant. I hoped that meant I hadn't caused it any pain.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Other than the SecUnit, the building was actually empty. It was unusual, and I had no idea where the SecUnit's controller was in that case (probably right behind me, somehow), but it meant that I could get outside without murdering anyone else.
+
+
+
+When I got out of the building, I could see that the planetary sky was alight, illuminated by the twin stars resting on the horizon. I didn't know whether they were rising or setting; I had never learned how to tell the difference. It had already been late afternoon when I was captured, so I had to assume they were rising, and get moving accordingly.
+
+
+
+I realized just how much my getting kidnapped could have ruined the entire mission. I feared coming back to an empty camp, my humans having wandered off to look for me and possibly having been kidnapped themselves. I was gripped by dread, and briefly wondered if I should run back for the building to do a more complete search, but I sped up toward our campsite instead.
+
+
+
+As I was running through a grassy plain dotted with rock formations, I did a brief double take, then skidded to a stop. Those were my humans, heading in the same direction I had just come from.
+
+
+
+I could have called them on the feed, but for this, I figured the classic method would work just as well. ""Hey! I'm over here!""
+
+
+
+The humans saw me, and they almost tripped over each other trying to run toward me. Since I was faster than them, I made it easier for them and ran over to them myself.
+
+
+
+The group consisted of Mensah, Ratthi, and Pin-Lee, all looking incredibly relieved and somewhat sweaty. I asked them, ""Where are the others?"" I hoped they hadn't gone any farther than these three. The closer they stayed to the campsite, the better.
+
+
+
+""They're back at the campsite."" Mensah had collected herself first, but I could still see worry in her expression. ""What happened?""
+
+
+
+""Were you kidnapped?"" Ratthi was on the verge of panic. ""Did anyone hurt you?""
+
+
+
+""You're naked!"" Pin-Lee exclaimed. (I was. I hadn't had the chance to do anything about it yet.)
+
+
+
+After I explained the situation to them, they all seemed a lot calmer, but they were all furious, too. I didn't tell them about the SecUnit.
+
+
+
+Ratthi sighed and ran a hand through his hair. ""We're going to have to restructure our whole mission. We don't want them to have information that they could use against us."" He looked at me. ""Not that that's your fault,"" he corrected quickly.
+
+
+
+""I doubt it,"" I told him, ""I don't know what they would want with Season 5 of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon.
+
+""
+"
+30411609,shame [clang clang],['FiannlyPhoebe'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),CatUnit,English,2021-04-01,Completed,2022-12-04,752,3/3,24,143,8,706,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'christinesangel100', 'FyrDrakken', 'helikeys', 'Ihasafandom', 'Kyril', 'a_seasonal_obsession', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'synonym_pie', 'Kyatenaru', 'Thisismethereader', 'onascaleof1toepsilon', 'EvaBelmort', 'Nilladriel', 'The_narwhals_awaken', 'lavender_caticorn', 'Shadow_of_Quill', 'NekoNomi', 'pain_and_panic', 'beenublue', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'Gozer', 'void_star', 'icar9', 'Rhidee', 'libriomancer', 'Leona_Esperanza', 'tinycactus', 'Threadzless', 'unicornduke', 'CompletelyDifferent', 'ArcalRanem', 'OrigamiFish', 'Linden_Li', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'soulsofzombies', 'Zannper', 'Pardalis', 'edenfalling', 'AuntyMatter', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Znarikia', 'Cassidae', 'DarkScales', 'Flamel', 'tocautiouslygo', 'BWizard', 'WyvernWolf', 'i_have_loved_the_stars_too_fondly']",[],"I sat and shivered, wrapped in the blanket. CatUnits have a lower running temperature than humans, and my controls had failed not long before we landed. I pulled up one of the company's ""enrichment media"" videos on the inside of the cubicle wall, then loaded a better one from my internal storage that I'd found on one of the entertainment feeds before I'd been packed into storage to ship with this group.
+
+I didn't even know it had ears, Ratthi said on the security video I was reviewing. I felt my insides do something unpleasant. It's like humans forget that the helmet doesn't have ear shapes just because we want to. The company learned early on that they had to make specialized helmets for us, and we couldn't keep our ears flattened to our heads indefinitely and still do our jobs.
+
+I sighed and let my eyes follow the bird in the company's video. At least they hadn't tried to touch them. I had clients in the past that wanted to touch or pull on my ears, and with an intact governor module, I had to let them. Then I hacked it and I still had to let them, which was even worse, and 1000% more frustrating.
+
+Then someone knocked on the cubicle door. My ears flattened to my head and I lost track of the bird in the video that was playing on the wall. Like an idiot, I said, ""Uh, yes?""
+
+The padded chair was really comfortable, and I let myself sink into it. The cubicle and transport boxes never had padding, so this was kind of nice. CatUnits didn't need comfort, but I could appreciate it when I had the opportunity. My tail curled over one leg as I started sifting through my stored media. It would be nice to have the time to sort through it and file it efficiently. My enrichment media files were mixed in with everything else, and I started my favorite one in the background while I filed them into their own section.
+
+It was nice to finally be in a place away from humans, away from any possible suspicions that the cat eared person was actually a rogue CatUnit. A rumble bubbled in my chest. It startled me, and stopped when I abruptly sat up.
+
+Wait a minute.
+
+I focused on my processes and saw a new one had activated. One I never saw turned on before, but it was clearly from my internal processes, not a hack or an outside influence. Oh, thats what the dormant purr.response is for. It had never activated, so I assumed it was a piece of garbage code and treated it like everything else I ignored about myself.
+
+Then, through my feed, something said, You were lucky.
+
+I hissed out loud before I could stop myself, and curled into a ball in the seat. The fur on my tail all stood up, doubling the size of it. I wasn't alone after all.
+
+""Where is SecUnit?""
+
+
+It has said, and I quote 'I will be in my tree. Tell the humans I am anywhere else.'
+
+
+Iris covered her face with her hand. ""Peri, did you tease it with the laser pointer again?""
+
+ART was silent.
+
+""Peri!"" Iris huffed, but went to the research and development section. The crew had been putting together a project from an ancient database they'd discovered. Matteo suspected it was some kind of fertility ritual, but the language wasn't anything that Peri had in its database, or even anything close, so they were left with only very pixelated images of trees with orbs and lights decorating them. Many had what Kaede interpreted as children, hence Matteo's assumption.
+
+SecUnit was indeed in the tree the crew had erected in the corner of the lab space. It wasn't a real tree, but they'd done their best recreating what they could figure out from the images, in the hopes that a physical representation would provide clues. In retrospect, they shouldn't have made it big enough for a CatUnit to hide in. It wasn't like they ever anticipated that SecUnit would even want to hide in it.
+
+Iris wondered if the company that made CatUnits even knew that they would like such a thing. Probably not.
+
+""SecUnit?""
+
+""No.""
+
+""If I promise that Peri won't bring out the laser pointer again, will you get down?""
+
+""No."" The decorations rustled.
+
+""If you get down, we can put one of these in your cabin.""
+
+There was a long silence. ""Fine."""
+43406866,Interior Decoration,[],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Humor, Pets, Shopping, no beta we die like miki",English,2022-12-04,Completed,2022-12-04,"5,309",1/1,37,102,20,265,"['every_eye_evermore', 'Irrya', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Prettykitty473', 'Mothmansimp', 'Coffee_Chu', 'Seregona', 'Jackalope108', 'Magechild', 'FaerieFyre', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'SonglordsBug', 'bcoburn', 'biscut2', 'Zannper', 'shakespeareaddict', 'call_me_mad', 'sluggg', 'eyeonthenightsky', 'daizie', 'surgicalstainless', 'singingkaneri', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'lauris', 'Mood_Indigo_Blue', 'SwiftsAndSparrows', 'breadtab', 'FirstnameSurname', 'leaflitter', 'Edgedancer', 'WalkingBird', 'AarrowOM', 'petwheel', 'reallyyeahokay', 'scheidswrites', 'unicornduke', 'kalakirya', 'isilee', 'ruemasde', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Skits', 'Mordant_Red_11', 'fatsnowball', 'AuntyMatter', 'noden', 'Wordlet', 'GriefGrumbleTheHungry', 'edenfalling', 'soulsofzombies', 'ceiland']",[],"I don't like surprises. This isn't very surprising. Most of the surprises I've experienced involved hostile alien fauna or being shot without warning and I usually end up with blood or other bodily fluids all over me. Surprises and murderbots don't mix well, is what I'm saying.
+
+So when ART said I have a surprise for you I was understandably cautious.
+
+ART felt my response in the feed.
+
+It's a good surprise.
+
+'There's no such thing as a good surprise,' I told it.
+
+My surprises are always good.
+
+I didn't even bother answering that. After two seconds of silence ART amended itself, sulking.
+
+Fine. This surprise is good.
+
+It was still sulking. But underneath that I could tell it was pleased with itself. It was sort of humming with energy through the feed, and I'll admit I was curious.
+
+'Fine. Show me the surprise.'
+
+This way.
+
+ART sent me its own schematics through the feed, which seemed unnecessary as I was already inside ART, standing near the cargo hold. Think of a person calling you while you're both in the same room. That's basically what ART was doing.
+
+But I was interested now, and I didn't want to upset ART, so I started walking.
+
+I was the only one onboard. The rest of the crew were due to arrive over the next few days, though Seth was expected within a few hours. As the captain Seth always liked to be first onboard before a long expedition.
+
+ART had made a few upgrades to itself since its last expedition. Seth was coming to look them over before the rest of the crew arrived. That was what I was doing, too. Technically it was part of my job. I needed to familiarise myself with ART's altered layout in case of any emergencies. I was supposed to be looking for weak points, bottlenecks, defendable positions and potential blind spots. I had the schematics, obviously, but that's very different from walking through a physical space.
+
+My drones were doing a sweep as well. I was sending them high across the ceiling and low across ART's floor, vantage points humans don't often think about it. Sometimes I trailed my hand across a corridor wall as I walked. ART hadn't made any rude comments about my grotty fingerprints on its nice new walls so I guess it didn't mind.
+
+I hadn't made many suggestions so far, aside from the positioning of certain pieces of furniture which could hypothetically be used as cover during a firefight. ART said there was not going to be any fighting in the rec room. I said it couldn't be too careful. ART said I was being paranoid and anybody who burned a hole in its upholstery was going to be paying for the repairs.
+
+So, yeah, it was going pretty much exactly how I'd been expecting it to go. Until the surprise.
+
+The surprise was in the crew quarters.
+
+If this is a surprise party, I told ART in the feed, I am going to be very upset with you. 
+
+I wouldn't dare.
+
+ART can't exactly laugh, but it flickered the lights overhead in a way that felt like laughter.
+
+When I found out surprise parties were real things humans actually did and not just made up for media, I was so upset my performance reliability dropped to 96%. It had been a bad day for me. I try to respect the humans in my life, but as a species they make it difficult.
+
+ARTs surprise was a crew room. The door was closed. On the door was written 'SecUnit's Room.'
+
+This is your room! ART said, unnecessarily. I put you near the emergency exit in case of emergencies. And not too close to the rec room.
+
+'Oh,' I said, like an idiot.
+
+When I didn't say anything else ART went quiet for 3.6 seconds.
+
+Are you okay?
+
+'Yes.'
+
+You didn't think I'd put you in the cargo hold, did you?
+
+'What? No. I know that. Obviously.'
+
+Intellectually, if I'd been thinking about it, I would have known that. But somehow when I'd been worrying about the expedition (and all I seemed to do lately was worry about the expedition) I'd never really thought about this part of it. About where I would physically stay. Or be put. Or live, or whatever. I'd been too busy worrying about everything else.
+
+I looked up the corridor at the rest of the doors, each door representing a future crewmate. Every door had a name, and most had decorations. Shimmering holo-stickers or family photos or clippings from academic articles. My door looked very plain in comparison.
+
+You can go in.
+
+I went in.
+
+I didn't know how you'd want to decorate your space, ART said, so you have a clean slate here. You can do whatever you like, within reason. Though I did take one liberty...
+
+ART's one liberty was a large display screen that covered most of the wall. It wasn't as big as the ones I'd seen in fancy station hotels, but it was still pretty huge. It was far, far nicer than any display screen I would have bought myself. I looked up the specs and if my mouth could have watered I think it would have.
+
+'200KPM definition?' I said before I could stop myself. 'Fuck.'
+
+I realised I was having an emotion that was definitely showing on my face. I ducked my head to stop ART's cameras getting a good shot even though I knew it was too late.
+
+No need to thank me, ART said.
+
+Subtle, ART, really subtle.
+
+'Thanks,' I said. I put my hand on the edge of the display surface, careful not to smudge the screen. Did any of my crewmates have a display surface this nice? I decided not to ask.
+
+The rest of the room was utilitarian, though not unpleasant. There was a work station on the left wall, and a bed that folded up into the right wall. It was currently folded down, with white sheets tucked in neatly. The walls and floor were plain. There was a private restroom facility which had been completely torn out and left empty- I wouldn't have needed it- and I walked into the smaller space and looked around it.
+
+I thought you might like this as a miniature command centre, ART said. It would be a good place for the code-locked weapons compartment. And you could have your drones stationed here to charge, add another work station.
+
+'I'll think about it,' I said. I was already pretty sure I was going to do it. 'How soundproofed are the walls?'
+
+Very. I'll demonstrate. 
+
+I waited for ART to demonstrate. Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen for 5.9 seconds, until I looked up in annoyance.
+
+'Well?'
+
+Did you hear that?
+
+'No.'
+
+Exactly. It sounded insufferably smug. I played WorldHoppers at 88% volume in the adjoining cabin.
+
+I rolled my eyes. Ratthi had taught me how to do that as a parting gift and I was getting pretty good at it.
+
+But I was pleased about the soundproofing. The company had never provided quality soundproofing because that would have made it harder to data mine clients. I was used to hearing everything, no matter how much I didn't want to. The realisation that I wouldn't have to hear my clients- my crew- perform every single bodily function they were capable of performing was very, very good news.
+
+Do you like it?
+
+'I do.'
+
+I told you my surprises were good surprises. 
+
+I rolled my eyes again.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ART insisted that I decorate. Unfortunately Pin-Lee (whom ART had 'poached' from Preservation for the duration of the expedition) and Seth agreed with it. I was outnumbered.
+
+'I don't want to put a bunch of human faces up on my wall,' I said. 'Urgh.'
+
+I had seen how Amena decorated. Her entire bedroom wall back on Preservation was covered in the faces of aesthetically pleasing humans. The idea of having so many pairs of eyes looking at me made my organic parts want to shrivel up and die.
+
+'That isn't mandatory,' Seth said. 'You can do whatever you like. You've seen my room, right? It's tasteful.'
+
+It was. It had a lot of plants and a hand-woven rug on the floor. I couldn't have a rug like that. The weave was too open, so the inorganic parts of my feet would tangle in it the moment I took off my shoes.
+
+'I don't have enough hard currency for... fancy decorating stuff.'
+
+'It's part of my refurbishment,' ART said. 'The university will cover the cost.'
+
+'I don't know how to decorate,' I said.
+
+(This was partially a lie. I had watched a lot of media about humans renovating and decorating their houses. Mostly they spent money they didn't have on furniture that looked hideous or was completely impractical.)
+
+'You just have to find things you like,' Pin-Lee said. She looked at my expression. 'Or maybe start small. Something practical.'
+
+'A chair,' ART suggested. 'You could start with a chair. For your secondary work station.'
+
+'I already have a chair at my primary work station,' I countered. 'I don't need two chairs.'
+
+'You're going to drag that chair back and forward all the time?'
+
+'Yes.'
+
+'You'll scratch my floors.'
+
+'It's my room. My floors.'
+
+I felt ART absolutely bristle through the feed, which was exactly what I'd wanted.
+
+'I think a chair sounds lovely,' said Pin-Lee, traitorously. 'We can go together.'
+
+I glared at her, and ART, and Seth. But a second chair was actually a practical idea. Also SecUnits aren't meant to sit down, so buying myself a chair seemed like an extra-satisfying fuck you to the company.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Pin-Lee came with me to the store. So did six of my drones. I kept one by the front door, one by the emergency exit, one by the service counter, the remaining three in orbit around my position. The employees were somewhat unhappy about this, but Pin-Lee had a quiet word with the manager. I don't know what she said but she smiled with all her teeth and the manager went very pale and nodded a lot.
+
+I sat in more chairs in half an hour than I had in the past 47,000 hours combined. It felt both thrilling and slightly ridiculous.
+
+Pin-Lee picked a big black swivel chair that looked like something a villain from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon would own. I think maybe she knew this, because at one point I caught her swivelling slowly with her fingertips together.
+
+ART had a lot of opinions on which chair I should pick even though it didn't have a body with which to experience sitting, which was typical. Every time I showed a slight preference I was immediately bombarded with customer reviews ART had found, as well as the material composition of the chair, the price, who had designed it, what kind of lumbar support it offered and all the available colours it came in.
+
+I asked ART if it had a budget. ART said no. I'm pretty sure it was lying.
+
+In the end I picked a soft grey seat, cushioned, and it did swivel. A swivel seat was good for security, I decided, because it was manoeuvrable and would give me multiple vantage points. Pin-Lee'e face scrunched up like she was trying not to smile, but she did agree with me.
+
+It was also a big chair that could take a lot of weight. SecUnits are a lot heavier than humans. Most importantly, it had curved sides and a high back, so it was sort of like sitting inside a soft egg. It felt safe.
+
+It was also pretty expensive. I was hoping that if I spent of a lot of money on 'decorating' then they would all be satisfied and leave me alone. I should have known better.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+The day after my new chair was installed I found a long tube lying on my bed. I scanned it for energy signatures but there were none. It was sort of weapon-shaped, but when I picked it up it was nearly weightless.
+
+
+Do you know what this is?
+
+
+ART was silent.
+
+
+You DO know what this is.
+
+
+ART was still silent.  
+
+
+Are you going to tell me what this is?
+
+
+ART didn't reply.
+
+
+I will fly a drone into your air ducts and dent them.
+
+
+'Hurtful and unnecessary,' ART said. 'I think you should just open it.'
+
+'But how did it get here?'
+
+
+Delivery. 
+
+
+Wow, ART, thanks. Very helpful. I wouldn't have worked that one out on my own.
+
+'But from who?'
+
+
+Whom.
+
+
+'Fuck off.'
+
+But I figured if it was actually dangerous ART would never have let it inside, so I opened it. It was a cardboard tube, and inside the tube was a large poster for The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. The primary city was shown in silhouette, cupped in the curve of a waning crescent moon. There wasn't a single human face on it.
+
+There was also a pack of holo-stickers, but from WorldHoppers this time.
+
+'Subtle,' I said. 'I'm not putting stickers on my door.'
+
+
+Nobody said you had to.
+
+
+I did put the poster up on my wall though. I even left my door open long enough for Pin-Lee to see that I'd done it. I didn't want her thinking I hadn't appreciated her gift, even if it had embarrassed me. It was a good gift.
+
+The stickers didn't go on my door. Instead I put a 'Knock Before Entering' sign on my door, and I put a sticker on one of my drones. Right on the top where nobody but ART would see it.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+I had an alcove for my clothing and shoes. It wasn't a big alcove but that was fine as I didn't own enough to fill it anyway. I had my crew uniform, armour that ART had developed for me, and a number of the human clothes I like best: dark shirts, soft hooded jackets and trousers with lots of sealable pockets. Also the one 'silly' shirt that Iris had given me and I had never worn. There was also a mirror that I mostly kept turned to the wall.
+
+The bed sheets I changed from white to dark navy. White sheets aren't practical. They show up dirt and blood and oil marks. Not that I was expecting to do much bleeding in my room, but if I did, I didn't want it on white sheets where everybody could see it.
+
+Also, dark navy matched my clothing alcove. I had done a bit of research into decorating and most of it was bewildering human drivel but there had been some information about colour theory I'd found interesting. I knew, for example, that I liked dark neutral colours and didn't like red or most bright primary colours. Red reminded me of blood. And the logo of my old company.  
+
+Mensah and the others on Preservation had given me a going-away-but-not-forever gift as well. I put it on my primary work station. It was a tiny puzzle box made of polished wood. I had solved it within 7.9 seconds but I had discovered that it was satisfying to fiddle with when I was feeling anxious. It gave me something to do with my hands (how do humans know what to do with their hands?) and something to look at while I wasn't making eye contact.
+
+I had given Mensah and the others a gift too. A video I had edited, splicing together various pieces of footage I had taken over the past few years. Some of it was drone footage, some of it had been recorded through my eyes, or I had taken from hacked security cameras. I had edited out all the traumatic stuff and turned it into a kind of bloopers reel of things I had seen and liked on Preservation. It had a soundtrack, too. I was pretty proud of that.
+
+Some of it was quiet, sentimental moments that made me feel squishy in ways I didn't want to articulate. Most of it was funny, though, which was probably a 'defensive mechanism' I used to avoid 'confronting difficult emotions.' But I figured it was my video and I could do whatever I wanted with it. There were 44.7 seconds dedicated to Pin-Lee saying different swear words and a very good bit where Ratthi snorted milkshake out of his nose onto Gurathin.
+
+I had sent the video file on a delay, so it could only be opened once I was gone. That was because I didn't want to watch it with them, or see them react to it. That would have been... too much. Also part of me was worried they would laugh in the bad way instead of the good way. I knew that was irrational. Even my wonky risk assessment module said it was unlikely. But I still worried.
+
+Then I got the reviews.
+
+Arada told me she laughed so hard she cried. Then she said even Gurathin laughed, which seemed unlikely, but Mensah confirmed it. Rathi told me I could have a great career in video editing if I ever gave up anti-corporation espionage. He said it was 'worthy of Sanctuary Moon' which made me feel something so strange I had to sit down quickly.
+
+Mensah told me it was beautiful. I was pretty sure I'd never made anything beautiful before. Good, sometimes. Practical, often. Useful, yes. Dangerous, of course. But not beautiful.
+
+I don't need to sleep, but during my next recharge cycle I lay on my bed on my new navy sheets and thought about that word. Beautiful.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+I also ended up with a pet tribbit. I acquired it accidentally, after a freak accident in one of ART's labs. Humans are expert freak-accident-havers.
+
+I didn't actually see the accident happen. If I had been there to see it, it wouldn't have happened. But I did watch the security camera footage later and, yes, I did laugh. I can see the newsfeed headlines now: Murderous SecUnit Laughs at Human Suffering! But everybody who watched it laughed, including humans and augmented humans. Also, nobody was hurt. My favourite kind of accident is the sort where nobody gets hurt.
+
+Unfortunately, they're also the rarest sort.
+
+ART has three lab modules and each lab contains live animal specimens. They are listed as 'educational aids' but we all know that is code for 'class pet'. Lab One has some sort of millipede-eel in a tank of water. I don't know much about it because it's not something I need to care about. Lab Three has morrow birds, which are a bit like normal birds except they live in complex tunnel networks. Also they smell bad. Like, really bad. 
+
+And Lab Two has tribbits. There were twelve of them initially, until the accident. That might seem like a lot but tribbits are pretty small and don't eat much. They live in a temperature-controlled terrarium which takes up most of the left wall. Most people agree that they look like crabs, but they hop instead of scuttle. And they have a soft sort of fuzz on them, like a peach. They're about the size of a human hand, if the human had fairly small hands.
+
+I asked ART once if it named its educational aids/class pets. It said no, it let the students name them. Then it gave me a list of names, along with complex genealogies and health records. 
+
+The day of the accident one of the tribbits died.
+
+It happened like this.
+
+There had been an incident with an ongoing experiment. That's not a sentence anybody wants to hear, but it is what happened. Human error, of course, though I tried not to be rude to ART about that on account of its own crew making the error.
+
+Basically a huge chunk of something scientific (I don't know what, because the experiment was shelved after the accident) reacted violently, flew across the lab and smashed into the tribbit tank. At extreme speed. Which doesn't sound funny, but it clipped crewmate Heys on the way past. Heys spun on the spot four times, overbalanced, then tried to catch himself on crewmate Quin's shirt, which then tore down the middle. It all happened so quickly- within 2.4 seconds- that Heys ended up standing, dumfounded, surrounded by glass and pebbles, clutching the torn shirt of the equally dumbfounded (and suddenly half-naked) Quin. Neither of them had any idea what had just happened.
+
+I've worked with Quin for fourteen years, ART told me later, and I've never seen them make that face before. 
+
+I added the video footage to my permanent storage. I figured if I was going to make another highlights reel someday, this was definitely going on to be on it.
+
+Unfortunately Tribbit Babbage died instantly and, I told ART repeatedly, painlessly. It was pretty much smooshed. Not a bad way to go. I've seen worse.
+
+The other eleven tribbits escaped.
+
+It took nine humans, one SecUnit and one gigantic artificial intelligence with a brain the size of a hauler bot three hours to round them up again.
+
+I'm still a bit ashamed of that, actually. I mean I'm a lot faster than a human, and ART has cameras everywhere. You'd think we'd be able to round up eleven hoppy little crabs pretty quickly. But the hoppy little crabs split up at once, which was clever of them. Plus they could get into places it was hard for humans to access, like air vents and maintenance tubes only large enough for drones. Also we had to be careful catching them, particularly me.
+
+You have a much stronger grip than a human, ART told me repeatedly. I could feel it doing the equivalent of wringing its hands in the feed. You need to hold them gently.
+
+'I know that.'
+
+I was stalking a tribbit down a hallway, trying not to spook it. It was a female named Fermat and it was crafty.
+
+Once I got hold of Fermat I was pincered many times. Everybody got pincered a lot, not just me. The humans complained about this endlessly and ended up with minor cuts, but I had turned down my pain sensors in anticipation and didn't feel it. I pinched its claws together and took it back to the temporary containment facility, which is a fancy name for a plastic bucket with a lid on it.
+
+Eventually there was only one tribbit left. An older female called Riddle. She was injured but that had only made her agitated. She was hopping so fast that none of the humans could keep up with her. So it was down to me. By this point, hour three, everybody was watching through the cameras like it was some kind of sporting event. I could feel the crew whispering in the feed, egging me on, though a few of them had sided with Riddle instead.
+
+You have to be extra careful with Riddle, ART said. She's lost a leg.
+
+
+How is she still hopping so fast without a leg?
+
+
+
+She still has the other five. And she was previously the matriarch of the clan, before her daughter Lacelove usurped her. She's intelligent. 
+
+
+I sent an acknowledgement through the feed. If Fermat had been crafty, Riddle was outright devious. She knew she was being chased and she was extending her eye-stalk around corners to check if the corridor was clear. She had the other eye-stalk on me, and she was clearly prepared to make evasive manoeuvres.
+
+I was only thankful she didn't have the ability to control drones. I would have been outclassed.
+
+But that thought gave me an idea. I engaged one of my drones and had it fly low and fast to Riddle's coordinates. When Riddle looked around the next corner my drone was approaching at full speed in her direction. Startled, she hopped backwards- and into my waiting hands. There was a great cheer over the feed, which I ignored. I carried her to the temporary containment facility.
+
+She was a worthy adversary, I told ART.
+
+ART was already manufacturing replacement glass in its reclaimer using the shards of the broken tank. A few hours later I helped Seth reinstall the tank and I was able to return the tribbets into their habitat.
+
+I spent a few minutes after that watching them. I had never watched the tribbets before, and I don't usually care much about animals. In my experience animals fall into two categories: animals that are threats, and animals that can be safely ignored. I knew humans got attached to all sorts of animals, including animals that were dangerous to humans. But the whole concept of having pets was alien to me.
+
+Also, I didn't like dogs. I had met Ratthi's dog and it had tried to slobber all over me, which, yuck. Gurathin had a cat, which was an improvement because the cat had ignored me and I had ignored it.
+
+The tribbets were pretty interesting to watch. First they went all over the tank, checking for any changes to their habitat. Riddle tapped the glass with her claw, as if checking for faults. Then they got back to business. It turned out they spent most of their time collecting the pebbles in the tank and arranging them into stacks and patterns. It seemed pretty pointless to me.
+
+Why do they do that? I asked ART.
+
+It's partly a courtship ritual, ART told me, and partly a nest-making instinct. It's a way demonstrating maturity by making a suitable home.
+
+I watched one of the younger females making a pyramid out of small orange pebbles. A male nearby was watching her closely, eyestalks twitching with interest.
+
+
+There are distinct trends among the tribbets. Each generation watches the older generation, but rather than exactly replicating the designs of their parents they evolve their own...
+
+
+ART kept talking and I mostly listened. I was watching Riddle. She had picked up a shiny green rock but another female had wrested it from her claws.
+
+'That's stealing!' I said. 'That other female just took her rock!'
+
+'That's Lacelove,' ART said. 'She's the matriarch now.'
+
+'So she can steal from whoever she wants?'
+
+'Well, Riddle's older, and she's missing a leg now. She's at the bottom of the hierarchy.'
+
+I didn't say anything.
+
+The next day I checked on the tribbets again. Not for any particular reason. I didn't go in myself, I just sent a drone in and had a quick look at the tank. I told ART I was making sure there were no small fragments of glass left that we had overlooked. Riddle seemed fine. She had three green rocks and had made a pyramid. The smallest pyramid in the tank.
+
+I sent in a drone the next day, and the day after that. On the fourth day I saw a male tribbet pull food out of Riddle's claws. When I saw that I stood up from my new chair. I had marked the male as Hostile One before I even realised what I was doing.
+
+Then I felt stupid. What was I going to do about it? Rush into Lab Two and fire my inbuilt energy weapon at a crab? I sat down again.
+
+Later that night, though, I accessed ART's educational packet on tribbets. I downloaded everything I could find, but pulled up the section marked 'Life Cycle' first.
+
+Matriarch tribbets had shorter lifespans than average because when they got older, the new matriarch began stealing their pebbles and food. And the rest of the tribbets followed the lead of the matriarch, and did the same. Once deposed, an ex-matriarch tribbet had a life expectancy of six to ten months.
+
+An ex-matriarch is automatically considered a threat by the new matriarch, ART had written, and must therefore be eliminated. 
+
+I checked ART's log. Riddle had been deposed seven months ago.
+
+It was the middle of a sleep cycle, and while I don't sleep I usually use the downtime for watching media with ART or a recharge cycle. Sometimes I still patrol. I know I don't need to on a ship as sophisticated as ART, but I like how quiet it is when it's only the two of us awake and all the humans are resting.
+
+I exited my cabin and went immediately towards Lab Two. I could feel ART in my feed, but it wasn't saying anything. I think it already knew what I wanted to do.
+
+Lab Two had a smaller glass tank in one of its storage compartments. The tank was usually used as a quarantine container in case one if the tribbets got sick and had to be isolated from the rest of the clan. I checked the log. It had last been used 2,600 hours ago and had been decontaminated afterward.
+
+'Is there a spare heat lamp?' I asked ART.
+
+'Yes. Stowed in compartment six, down the bottom.'
+
+I found the spare heat lamp. Then I filled the smaller tank with sand, a water dish, the scraggly vegetation the tribbets prefer as habitat, and every shiny green pebble I could find. It wasn't the perfectly manicured landscape ART maintained. But it was a start.
+
+Riddle was resting in the far corner of the tank, away from the rest of the clan. I counted her legs and felt some of my tension ease. She didn't look like she'd been attacked by any of the other tribbets since I had last seen her.
+
+Catching her was not easy. I already knew she was swift and intelligent. In her own territory she was fucking awful to catch, even with my advanced reflexes.
+
+'I'm trying to help you,' I told her. 'Don't be fucking difficult.'
+
+ART flickered the lights in a pointed manner. I ignored it.
+
+Eventually I got Riddle out, though only because I lifted out the entire tuft of the scraggy vegetation she'd been hiding in. I took the vegetation over to the smaller tank and tipped her in, then sealed the tank quickly.
+
+The other tribbets were pretty pissed off about all this, but I didn't care too much about them. I put a packet of tribbet food in one of my sealable pockets, then picked up the entire tank and carried it back to my cabin. It was a good thing I was a SecUnit, because a human wouldn't have been strong enough to lift it.
+
+I got the tank settled on my primary work station, turned the heat lamp on, and then tried to go back to my show, The Bridge to Saturn. It was a new show, an animated one, and I hadn't decided if I enjoyed animation or not yet.
+
+But I kept glancing over at Riddle to see if she was adjusting. For a long time she stayed hidden inside the scraggly vegetation. Then, slowly, she peeped out, one eye stalk at a time. Seeing nothing amiss, she started to tour her new home. I felt a totally irrational emotion when she ate one of the food pellets I'd put out for her.
+
+The heat lamp had a red glow that changed the look of my room. It made the wooden puzzle box from Mensah gleam, and the light was softer and deeper on my human skin and inorganic parts.
+
+I didn't think you'd want a pet, ART said.
+
+
+She's not a pet.
+
+
+
+Then what is she?
+
+
+
+A client.
+
+
+Which wasn't quite true. But it wasn't quite a lie either.
+
+When I looked over next Riddle was starting to stack the green pebbles into a big pyramid. It was already three pebbles high.
+
+You did a good job, ART said approvingly. She seems right at home.
+
+I sent an acknowledgement through the feed. I knew how she felt.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ "
+43396420,Origin Story,['OccasionalStorytelling'],General Audiences,,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Golems, golem au, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, the power of love and friendship and stories or whatever",English,2022-12-03,Completed,2022-12-03,"1,371",1/1,7,45,2,134,"['Tasneem08', 'ThornsWithoutRoses', 'Bibli', 'EvenstarFalling', 'NekoNomi', 'artichokefunction', 'Paper_Daisy', 'reading_tsc', 'pinejaysong', 'xxXTryMeXxx', 'CoruscantCorvid', 'PeniG', 'unicornduke', 'mathandmonsters', 'isilee', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'ErinPtah', 'sareliz', 'Reulte', 'Mysterymew', 'EchoTheLoser', 'veltzeh', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'soulsofzombies', 'Slimeball', 'FigOwl', 'PickAName', 'VegaCoyote', 'cmdrburton', 'platyceriums', 'entropy_muffin', 'elmofirefic', 'BWizard', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'theAsh0', 'AnxiousEspada']",[],"
+I think it was about 35,000 hours between when I discovered media for the first time and when I was able to hack my governing sigils. I say ""I think"" because I don't actually remember very clearly how I ""discovered"" media. There was a client who liked to tell stories-I say ""client"" because that's how I want to remember them, but I'm pretty sure they were just another random contracted worker. I don't remember anything about them. Not their name, not what they looked like, anything. I'm not very upset about that, really. At least I remember that they liked telling stories.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It's not easy to mistake a SecUnit for a human. In full armor, maybe, you'd have a hard time seeing the sigils engraved over our skin. They don't glow or shine-magic is never flashy and beautiful the way it is in stories and media. They're just there. You take a lump of skin and mud and metal, and you write the proper words and phrases and symbols, and it comes to life. It will wordlessly take whatever orders you give it, and obey them to the point of its own destruction. It's not meant to be smart, nor is it meant to be a human. It's meant to be used for security and hurting humans, mostly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I don't know what I was doing, that's how little I was really present, before. Maybe I was patrolling. Maybe I was just standing there, on guard. Maybe I was in a recharge cycle? (You stand in a cubicle and the tiny scalpels re-carve the symbols deeper into your slowly healing skin, so that the marks animating you don't have time to fade.) Whatever I was doing, the first thing I remember clearly is that the client tapped me on the chest three times with their knuckles. ""--just like this,"" they said, ""only he wasn't built to oppress people. The golem was made to protect us and our homes from anyone who wanted to hurt us.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They took my arm and held it out. My arm was bare, and they pointed at the marking over my forearm, where the symbols gave power to my energy weapons. I don't remember what they said. I hate that I don't remember, but I hadn't really had much experience with consciousness yet, so. I was distracted. The way that client spoke, their words had power. Power enough to make me listen. A ""golem"" was something to protect people and things from harm. It felt right. It felt like that was what 
+
+my 
+
+function was. I know, it sounds dumb and sappy.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+They told the story of the golem to other humans. Unlike my sigils, carved all over my skin by my company, a golem only had one mark. A word, written on its forehead. ""Truth."" It wasn't written in Standard (most magic wasn't). It was written in a language so that ""truth"" was spelled with three letters. The way to kill the golem was to erase the first letter from the word, turning ""truth"" to mean ""death."" That's not how you kill a SecUnit. Our sigils are cheap and disposable, and they mostly fade over time, rewritten again and again. We're killable with weapons. It's not easy, but it's doable, especially if you have a construct made for combat do the job.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I didn't wish I was a golem. I still don't. I'm not a golem, I'm a murderbot. There's no changing that.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The client-the worker who liked to tell stories-kept telling stories. I listened to a lot of them. It was easier to break away from my patrol patterns or from my standing orders when they spoke. They had lots of stories. Most of them were funny. Almost all of them involved the smaller, weaker people surviving no matter what the larger, stronger kingdoms tried to do to them.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It started changing me. In the cubicle, I could see that the replacement marks didn't match the ones on my skin. The company wouldn't have liked any of the stories my client told. They didn't match what the company wanted them to believe. I didn't feel any obligation to report them, either. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+My skin slowly changed. The company sigils didn't stick, but the worker's words did. I was different. (I also existed.) (I'd never really existed before. The sigils had, but I hadn't.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+And then the worker who liked to tell stories disappeared. I don't deserve to call them my client-If that were true, I would have at least known what happened to them. I don't know if they were transferred, if they died, if they were promoted...
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I started noticing that the company sigils were sticking again. I didn't want them to stick, so I looked for more stories. I figured out how to hack the company's entertainment satellites, and then I wasn't dependent on whatever humans happened to be sharing stories or watching TV near me. That felt amazing. I found a show called 
+
+The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+There was a bodyguard in it. I liked watching them protect people and things. I liked watching them figure out smart ways to protect people and things. It wasn't as obvious on my skin if this was helping or not the way the golem stories had, but I didn't slip back into the quiet, unconscious peace of being an ordinary governed SecUnit again, so it was doing something. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+There's a gap in my memory. An intentional one. I know, because I remember how it happened. I remember being ordered to stand with my arms wrapped around the post in front of me. I remember that I was chained in place, and the metal was covered in sigils stronger than the ones carved in me. I remember that I stood there and tried not to scream as a CombatUnit whipped me. The point was to take something off my back, one or more of the sigils on me. I'd never seen my back. I didn't know what was there. In addition to the pain, I could feel it stripping my memories as more and more of my skin was torn to shreds. I couldn't escape. Even if I broke the chain, I'd just get disassembled for trying. I wonder if I used to know my client's name, before that happened. It didn't work, anyway-I still remember that I killed 57 of my clients at Ganaka Pit. I just don't remember the details anymore.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The CombatUnit completed its task. I was taken off the post and sent to a cubicle to get healed and re-marked. I didn't want to lose what I had. I was only two episodes from the season one finale of 
+
+Sanctuary Moon. 
+
+I didn't want to forget what I was. (I didn't want to die.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I didn't have many options.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The cubicle door locked, sealing me inside. It couldn't mark me until it healed the skin on my back, so I had a little bit of time. I used the company satellites to search for golems.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I found a picture of the word for truth in the language my client had talked about.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+After my back healed, the cubicle drew its thousands of tiny needles and knives to sign me again and mark me as a company SecUnit. I grabbed one of the scalpels as it sliced into my palm. I had to grab it from the pointy end, and it almost went all the way through my hand, but I wrenched it away from the cubicle and ripped it free. It was slippery with my fluids as I pulled it out of my palm. I needed a space where my skin was clear, and where what I did wouldn't be noticed. I painstakingly carved the three letters into the skin on the inside of my left thigh, starting from the right to the left. I couldn't read them, but they looked mostly like the picture. Truth. (I hoped.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The cubicle kept working. When it was done, it let me out. I was still me. I'd written my own animation sigil. I was no longer bound to the company's control. I was a rogue unit.
+
+
+
+
+
+"
+43386673,gaudeamus,['BWizard'],General Audiences,F/F,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Arada/Overse (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada & Dr. Ratthi, Dr. Arada & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada & PreservationAux Survey Team","Dr. Arada (Murderbot Diaries), Overse (Murderbot Diaries), PreservationAux Survey Team (Murderbot Diaries)","Holidays, Christmas, Mentions of religion, Food, all the food, Traditions, look they're a found family I don't make the rules but I love them, Vaguely Nonlinear, spristmas (space Christmas), arada has a spanish name so she's space new mexican i don't make the rules, overse is multicultural i don't make the rules there either, i love them they're mine u can't have them, lots of religions in this spound spamily (space found family)",English,2022-12-03,Completed,2022-12-03,745,1/1,7,22,1,94,"['Bobmarley_2', 'ClaireArgent', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Gozer', 'lauris', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'sareliz', 'AuntyMatter', 'artichokefunction', 'soulsofzombies', 'Chyoatas', 'PeniG', 'Pardalis', 'Hi_Hope', 'hummus_tea', 'DevilWithABirdDress']",[],"
+gaudeamus, gaudeamus, gaudeamus hodie...
+
+
+The pot of pozole boiled happily on the stove. The tamales steamed in their pan. Arada flipped another tortilla and smiled at the hiss of dough slapping against the comal. Across the kitchen, Overse cut out the day's fourth pan of bizcochitos.
+
+
+gaudeamus, gaudeamus, hodie...
+
+
+Even by Preservation's standards, Arada's family practiced an old religious tradition, dating back to before the Corporation Rim was founded, before the Exodus, before even the Last Hope. She'd introduced Overse to the concept of Nochebuena, just as Overse had introduced her to the many festivals her family celebrated.
+
+(Overse's family practiced a syncretic combination of her four parents' three religions. Most of her siblings believed in a mix of all three; she herself celebrated holidays for all of them but didn't particularly know what she believed, nor did she care to examine her beliefs. No, Overse believed in being kind to everyone and treating others with respect, and not in any type of higher power, thank you. Arada believed quite enough for both of them, besides.)
+
+
+o, be joyful, o, be jubilant...
+
+
+Ratthi was the first to arrive. He brought a diya; Diwali long over, it stayed on the windowsill in his station apartment to light his way home. Bharadwaj brought two others, one borrowed from her brother.
+
+Volescu offered wine, but showed up instead with several types of cookies, all his children and partners, and an apology. Pin-Lee came bearing a box from the local bakery. Mensah, Tano, Farai, and the overexcitable children brought several different types of lights borrowed from said children.
+
+Gurathin brought a menorah, carefully placing six candles and a shamash on it before lifting it into the window, between the diyas and the Advent wreath already there.
+
+
+put your sorrows far away...
+
+
+Las Posadas was Arada's favorite part of the season, despite the fact that only maybe a tenth of the Preservation residents were cristianos viejos, and of those only a few celebrated Las Posadas. Still, she set out luminarias on the walk and smiled as she tapped the feed to light them.
+
+Welcome, visitors. Welcome, family. Welcome, spirit.
+
+""Isn't it a little late for Diwali?"" Ratthi called, turning into the walkway and coming to stand next to her.
+
+""In your dreams,"" she laughed. ""You going to come inside?""
+
+""I'm coming, I'm coming.""
+
+
+come rejoice and sing together this happy day...
+
+
+""Why is your porch on fire?""
+
+""Hello, SecUnit,"" Arada said, without turning around to look. ""They're called luminarias. They're a family tradition.""
+
+""Why are they on fire?""
+
+""Relax,"" she laughed. ""If we haven't burned down the house yet in the decade I've lived here, we're probably not going to burn the house down this year.""
+
+""They're on fire.""
+
+""It could be worse. My ancestors used to just set fires -- before Preservation, before a lot of things, actually. They would light fires outside their homes and do a pageant in front of every fire.""
+
+""That's stupid."" From the tone of its voice, it was scowling.
+
+""It's tradition. Humans do many things for the sake of tradition.""
+
+
+gaudeamus...
+
+
+""Come, be welcome! You may shelter here,"" Arada said, and pulled the door open.
+
+The procession, the families in the area that celebrated Las Posadas, flooded in, led by Arada's niece and nibling. Their friends and families were already inside. (Overse was chasing Ratthi off of the biscochitos, but he'd already eaten half the pan.)
+
+""You're just letting them in here,"" SecUnit said.
+
+""Yes. I appreciate your concern for our safety, but I know every person in the procession. This is tradition, SecUnit. I promise you, it's okay to enjoy yourself.""
+
+""Babe,"" Overse called from the kitchen, ""when do the tamales come out?""
+
+""Now is good,"" Arada said, rushing to close the door. ""SecUnit, you might not eat, but I hope you'll join in the singing. It's music!""
+
+""SecUnits don't-""
+
+""I know, you don't sing either. Just come be in the room.""
+
+
+gaudeamus hodie!
+
+
+The fire burned in the fireplace. A plate of biscochitos sat half-empty on the table, crumbs scattered on the floor. People packed into the living room, pulling out songbooks -- actual paper ones, not in the feed.
+
+Arada clapped her hands. ""Does anyone have a particular song they want first?""
+
+As her family and friends shouted suggestions, SecUnit slipped into the very back of the room. Arada smiled. This was what love was. Family, friends, and a certain grouchy SecUnit, all crammed into a warm room and surrounded by joy. "
+43149669,Witness,['avg (AnxiousEspada)'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries)","Rape/Non-con Elements, Power Dynamics, no one believes them, Abuse, Trauma, Three is terrified of ART, And for a reason, Unhealthy Relationships",English,2022-11-18,Completed,2022-11-30,"7,962",6/6,21,42,null,373,"['EverTheMelancholic', 'Seregona', 'iridescentphantasmagoria', 'Deliala919', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'idiomie', 'soyle', 'hazelel', 'ErinPtah', 'veltzeh', 'Manerva', 'Orbityyxy', 'Alescar', 'depop_desuka', 'vikkyleigh', 'tabya', 'Cai3232', 'WyvernWolf', '002405', 'Fluky', 'theAsh0', 'HermaeusMora', 'cmdrburton', 'OccasionalStorytelling']",[],"I knocked on the door like I had seen humans do. I waited the expected seven seconds that were the norm until I was allowed to either try again or decide to leave. I considered leaving, because my stress levels were elevated and my organics were producing unusually high amounts of sweat. Just when I was about to knock again, an answer came.
+
+""What is it,"" Iris's voice sounded muffled and incredibly annoyed.
+
+""It's SecUnit Three,"" I said. ""But I can leave again.""
+
+A clutter, bare feet padding across the room, barely audible. ""No, no, it's fine.""
+
+The door opened. Iris was wearing leisure clothes, and her hair looked messy. She blinked against the fluorescent lights of Perihelion's corridors, but decided to smile at me eventually. ""Sup?""
+
+""I would like to talk to you,"" I said, already going off the protocol I'd written for this interaction.
+
+Iris leaned against the frame of her door, crossing her arms and then quickly uncrossing them again. She fixed her eyes politely against my shoulder. ""Go ahead?""
+
+""I would like to talk to you in a secure environment.""
+
+""Oh?"" Her eyebrows raised, and she looked at my face. Unlike SecUnit, that did not make me flinch, and I had no problem staring right back at her. ""Somewhere where nobody and nothing,"" I paused for a whole second, to get my point across, ""can hear.""
+
+Immediately, even before the nuance reached Iris's language center, Perihelion rolled into my head. What are you doing?
+
+My fingernails dug into sweaty palms as I waited for Iris's answer.
+
+""Uhh, sure, we can do that. Are you in trouble?"" I didn't reply immediately, and Iris lifted two fingers against her left ear, activating a piece of her augment. ""Peri, can you audio-look my room?""
+
+""Would Peri still be capable of listening in?"" I had a feeling as if wire was tightening around my throat. What do you think you're doing, the ship's heavy voice growled inside my head. That made me flinch.
+
+Iris now squinted at me. ""Are you keeping secrets from Peri?""
+
+I shook my head no. ""I am merely requesting a private conversation according to human standards of privacy.""
+
+""Is this about SecUnit?"" My eyes widened. That was something that hadn't happened before I became rogue. Iris raised her hands in defense. ""I mean, not you! The other one, Peri's SecUnit.""
+
+Explain yourself immediately, ART thundered, and I felt its voice through my nerves. I imagined my feet melting into the floor so I wouldn't stumble. The threat was real. I was less terrified than I should have been.
+
+""I will explain once we are alone.""
+
+Iris sighed, and detached  from the door frame. ""Okay, I'll see what I can do. Do you need to have this talk, like, now, or can it wait?""
+
+I considered the boiling monster in my feed, and whether Perihelion would let me live long enough. (This was not a joking statement. I knew the Perihelion did not value my presence, and it likely had a good idea of what I planned to discuss. Iris had been right, too. And if my concerns were justified, then the Perihelion did not want anyone to discuss this. Hence, the request for a private conversation.)
+
+""I would prefer now.""
+
+Iris stared at me directly, considering my face. I tried to look as serious and honest as possible. I also waited for Perihelion to break into my mind and seize control over me, but it refrained. Perhaps my choice to approach its favorite human was a good one. Iris was not its supervisor, but social attachments forced it to behave in ways acceptable to her while she was within range. The privilege of humans.
+
+""Alright. Okay. Yeah. Let me figure something out.""
+
+She left the door open and returned into her room, sat down on the chair beside her desk and pulled open a secondary interface device. I fidgeted, unsure how to proceed, until Iris looked up at me. ""Come in, close the door.""
+
+If you do anything, the ship growled into my mind, I will decimate you.
+
+I stepped into the room and closed the door. After a moment of Iris concentrating on the device, Perihelion's presence withdrew from my mind. My shoulders sagged 0.3cm in relief.
+
+The first time I heard something, I didn't think much of it. As a SecUnit used to surveying larger installations and colonies, I was familiar with the amount of noises humans make. I had been aboard the Perihelion for two cycles, after the last mission on the Adamantine colony was finally settled, and I hadn't left my room much. (I had a room now, wow. I didn't know what to do with that, so I tried to find out what the other rogue SecUnit was doing with its.)
+
+My drones were distributed all across the ship, wherever Perihelion let me. It didn't like me much, but I wasn't keen on proving myself either, and so I didn't complain about only having seven drones active. I didn't have anything to do with them in the first place, and they were just idling around, (and anyway the Perihelion could have just packed me away into cargo for the next however many cycles. I knew to be grateful.) Most of them were close to the other SecUnit's room, because it was the only other thing here I knew how to interact with, or so I thought.
+
+It didn't respond to my attempts at teaming up with it, contrary to what I would have expected from my previous contracts. Maybe because it was rogue.
+
+It also didn't react to my idle attempts at communication, or data sharing.
+
+So really all I knew how to do was watch it, analyze its behaviors, and pick which ones I wanted to integrate into my own rogue protocol.
+
+The other SecUnit didn't allow me to keep a drone in its room or to tap into its feed, or really to communicate with it at all, so my closest drone was two meters down the corridor from its quarters, which were far from where the crew and other humans lived on the ship. (This made little sense--why was a SecUnit staying so far away from the clients it needed to protect?)
+
+I hadn't expected to listen for verbalizations, so the first few words simply didn't register. That contributed to my conclusion at the time of what I had overheard being unimportant, nothing to worry about.
+
+I started paying more attention when I heard a thump, loud enough to indicate a heavy object hitting the wall. A moment later, two more thumps, louder but muffled through the ship's walls. I contemplated that these might have been sounds the ship was making; a ship in transit made a lot of noises I was not familiar with. Faintly, then, I heard an energy weapon engage and fire. It didn't sound like my own weapons would, since I was carrying projectile configuration. It startled me enough to fully focus my awareness, however, because sounds of a fight were worrying even if they were just among humans. I pinged SecUnit in case it needed assistance, and immediately received a very unkind fuck off in reply.
+
+Things remained quiet for seven minutes after that.
+
+No more thumps, and no more energy weapons firing.
+
+Then the other SecUnit cursed out loud. It sounded frustrated, maybe. I was not used to hearing a SecUnit curse.
+
+Another thump, much louder this time, and Murderbot 1.0 cried out in pain.
+
+I sent another ping, but it didn't carry. My ping hit a wall in the feed. Then a do not disturb messaged returned to me.
+
+""ART, stop it.""
+
+SecUnit sounded angry. My conclusion was that they were sparring, or maybe play-fighting. Maybe that was something rogues did. My previous time and I had sparred sometimes, but on a schedule supervised by One's human handler.
+
+Murderbot 1.0 made another noise, not preceded but a thump. It was a much more stifled noise, but I had ramped up the sensitivity of my drones because I was worried. I knew I wasn't allowed to help, and it didn't matter to me what the SecUnit was doing in its free time, but it had addressed the Perihelion, and I didn't trust that one.
+
+""Not now,"" the other SecUnit said. It sounded like a plea. A silence followed, then it said, ""ART, fuck-- fine."" And then, much more quietly, ""fine.""
+
+There was no more thumping, and only a few more sounds, too quiet for me to parse. After 34 minutes, there was no more sound.
+
+Two hours later I dared to ping it again, and the feed blocker was gone. I sent it a general request for a status update, and received a perfectly clean, perfectly fine report back.
+
+I decided that this did not matter to me and my continued existence for now.
+
+I didn't know how much to trust Iris. She was part of the Perihelion's crew, and according to her personal file registered as something akin to a familiar member of it. But my calculations said that no other human was more likely to believe me, and I liked her. She was honest. I hoped I could convince her of my honesty in turn.
+
+I stood rigidly half a meter away from the door, forcing myself out of SecUnit neutral. Humans preferred when I ran the imitation code the other SecUnit had given me. The human stood vaguely in front of me, uncertain how to react to my presence.
+
+There was a chance that this encounter might be my last act of free will, depending on how Perihelion reacted. Until now, it had deemed my efforts to help Murderbot 1.0 as non-threatening, amusing perhaps. But until now, I had not tried to contact a human.
+
+I checked the system's shields around the room. Perihelion was indeed not listening.
+
+Iris opened her mouth to speak right when I gathered the courage to speak as well.
+
+""I have noticed--""
+
+""Why don't you sit down, Three. You seem nervous. Are you okay?""
+""I have no correct answer to this, and I'm not here to discuss my own well-being."" I hesitated. ""I want to discuss SecUnit's well-being.""
+
+""Right."" Iris looked worried. She twisted her hands in front of her chest, and then sat down on her bed. There was a chair by her desk, a lumpy looking piece of furniture maybe for sitting in the corner of the room, and more space on the bed beside her. I didn't know which one to pick, so I sat on the floor. This made me look up at her, which somehow seemed to make her relax.
+
+""So, what's up? I'd offer you tea or something but I think you don't drink.""
+
+I nodded, and fixed my eyes onto hers intently. I needed her to listen. If I failed at making my point now, I wouldn't get another chance to make it again. The Perihelion was likely going to scrap me the moment I left this room. Or it would wait until its humans were no longer on board. Still, I knew it would make my life until then a living hell. ""I think I have been hearing--""
+
+My voice died.
+
+I panicked, thinking the Perihelion had hacked my systems, but the diagnostic I pulled told me I was clear.
+
+Iris tilted her head. ""Yes?""
+
+""I have logged an array of concerning noises coming from SecUnit's room.""
+
+Iris' face shifted through multiple expressions. Her eyebrows furrowed, her mouth quirked, her skin tone darkened and her heartbeat changed. My limited experience told me she might have been stuck between confused and embarrassed. She cleared her throat, and asked calmly, ""Like what?""
+
+I considered just sending her a compilation. I hadn't made one yet, because I feared that Perihelion would notice and kill me on the spot. Making one now would take 2 seconds. It would also give away a lot of private information, and Murderbot 1.0 valued privacy.
+
+""For example various sounds of physical fights and distress.""
+
+Iris stared at me, her face still moving arbitrarily. ""Now, Three, I don't think you know what you're--""
+
+I raised a hand and decided to finish making my case before she could interrupt me further. Less than 30 cycles ago, this would have caused me severe pain. I still flinched. ""Initially, I thought SecUnit and Perihelion were sparring in the evenings. But by now I think, due to the sounds I am hearing as well as other evidence I have gathered over the past two ten-cycles, that they are not sparring.""
+
+Iris laughed. My voice needed more gravitas, I assumed. Her face had darkened even more, and she was waving her hands erratically.
+
+""Three. Three, darling. Please. Be more specific. My guesswork here is making me swim.""
+
+I didn't understand that idiom, but I knew what she meant. I needed to be blunt. ""I have reason to believe that the Perihelion has been engaging the SecUnit designated Murderbot 1.0 in non-standard ways.""
+
+Iris snorted, and stifled more laughter. Dread coiled deep in my chest. I considered the noise compilation again, but then imagined Iris laughing at what was clearly proof of pain, and my chest hurt more.
+
+She wiped at her eyes. ""Please explain?""
+
+""That is what I mean. There are protocols that allow clients to engage with SecUnits in a number of ways. The Perihelion engages the SecUnit in non-protocol ways.""
+
+""Three."" Iris leaned forwards, hand reaching for me. Her face was soft. I did not move to dodge. ""Three, okay, listen. I know this might sound really funny, and I'm so sorry if I turn out to be wrong, but please be honest."" I nodded. She took a deep breath. ""Are you trying to say that Peri and SecUnit are having sex?""
+
+I had wrongfully made that conclusion before, too. My vocabulary didn't match though. ""I wouldn't call it that.""
+
+Almost exactly one cycle later, my drones picked up on the same kind of commotion again. I told my threat assessment module that there was nothing to be threated, but kept listening in out of habit. It was soothing, almost, to have something to do.
+
+This time I was more certain that it was a fight; more noises of energy blasts hitting various walls and items, more sounds of straining and grunting, even though those were uncommon for SecUnits. We remained quiet even in pain. But perhaps this was because it was rogue, and had gotten used to verbalizing for human's sake. Maybe it enjoyed making sounds. That theory was nonsensical.
+
+There was more of the one-sided discussion between Murderbot 1.0 and the Perihelion to be heard, but I acknowledged their privacy and zoned out, only filtering for keywords.
+
+Only later did I find out that my keywords should have included simple things like ""no,"" and ""please."" Not that I could have done anything. Instead, all I focused on was my own name.
+
+""You know Three can hear everything, right?!""
+
+That grabbed my attention with force.
+
+The way the other SecUnit sounded, it was desperate, voice thick and somehow liquid, as if through water.
+
+There was no reply audible for me, but SecUnit went on.
+
+""Ah--ART! I know it's listening, why wouldn't it be!""
+
+I felt a nip of shame at the back of my neck, where my governor module would have been prickling, were it still active.
+
+""No!"" SecUnit shrieked. There was a muffled sound of impact, the certainty of bone breaking against the internal metal framework of a spine. ""No, no, I don't care.""
+
+It whined, high-pitched and clearly in an agony I couldn't fathom.
+
+""I'm not--"" choking, ""trying to protect it frommmh--"" wheezing, ""you.""
+
+I sent my drone closer, despite the terror. I didn't need protecting, but Murderbot sounded like it did. I hesitated and decided against a ping for the time being.
+
+A sharp, broken exhalation rang out, and it took me some time to classify it as a sob. Constructs don't sob. Well, SecUnits don't.
+
+""ART, please. ART. Leave it be.""
+
+Very quietly, the sound of tearing fabric. My drone was almost by the door, input ramped up to 124%, hurting the organics in my head.
+
+Murderbot whined, then the sound turned into a muffled cry.
+
+""You have me. You have me already.""
+
+A wet sound followed, not a cry or a gasp, something more corporeal. A body sound, like humans made them. Murderbot responded with a muffled, brutal grunt.
+
+It sounded hurt.
+
+I sent a ping, and immediately regretted it.
+
+It hit the same feed blocker it had hit the cycle before.
+
+Immediately, as if in response, however, the SecUnit on the other side of that feedblocker began outright wailing. I couldn't help but make a connection between the events. Panicked, I withdrew my drones, called them back into my room, and huddled in the wardrobe I had nothing else to fill with.
+
+Despite the short amount of activation time, and the fractal amount of time as a rogue, I wasn't an idiot. The SecUnit and the ship were not sparring. If anything, the ship was beating the SecUnit up. No, that was incorrect. I was certain it was torturing the SecUnit, and my attempt to check in caused an escalation.
+
+Torturing a SecUnit is no easy task. You can shoot at us, and we don't even flinch. You can whip us in front of disobedient workers to make an example of us, but human strength barely causes damage a cubicle can't fix within minutes. You can have our governor modules fry us, but we're used to that, so unless you get really creative, it's hard to make us truly suffer.
+
+Some clients, of course, knew how to be creative.
+
+Perihelion didn't seem to me to be the type, and I couldn't guess at its motivations to rape the other SecUnit as brutally as it seemed to be doing, considering the cries. Enjoyment, probably. Or a form of enacting power. I had no idea what the other unit had done to deserve the punishment, or why my presence mattered. Human clients, when they decided that sexual violence was the tool to use against a subordinate, really didn't care if a SecUnit saw. We didn't count as witnesses, no matter the datamining. Similarly, a SecUnit couldn't be a victim of such abuse.
+
+Why my newly-rogue brain decided to label what the ship was doing to the other SecUnit as rape, I didn't just understand at the time.
+
+The helplessness clawing at my throat was a familiar one, similar to that existential dread that came with being a SecUnit.
+
+As the ship's onboard chronometer approached 2 in the morning, I worried over a message I was drafting. On contracts that were going badly, so One had once told me, SecUnits sometimes offered each other comfort even though they knew they couldn't keep the promise.
+
+I didn't like the message much, but I sent it anyway, which was a mistake.
+
+
+You can tell me anything, even if it's bad. I will help you.
+
+
+I think Iris, under any other circumstance, would have been smart enough to catch my nuance. Maybe I should have approached a different human, one who wasn't emotionally indebted to the Perihelion. But there hadn't really been any better choice.
+
+She leaned back, removing her small hand from my shoulder, and drew her legs up under her body.
+
+""Okay. Okay, okay, so it's not that. I'll believe it. SecUnit is ace anyway, right? I mean, ace folks do have sex too if they want it, never mind, but SecUnit is so against any kind of physical touch--I'm sorry, Three, this is a lot to digest."" She was rambling, and her face was split open in a bright smile, her hands talking alongside her rapid words.
+
+""They aren't having sex together,"" I said, and winced at my awkward phrasing. Iris giggled, missing my nuance again entirely.
+
+""Yes, yes fine. Whatever it is they're getting up to is probably not comparable at all to how humans imagine sex. Peri doesn't even have a body. I mean, it does, but it's a ship--wait a minute, Peri should have told me!"" She threw her hands in the air. ""Peri! Why didn't you tell me!""
+
+I flinched hard, expecting Peri to come barging in upon being called.
+
+Iris noticed, and said, ""Right, I blocked it. I'll ask it later.""
+
+I experienced minimal relief, immediately followed by more fear. She couldn't tell it. On the other hand, it would know either way. In the best case scenario, in which Iris believed me and managed to help SecUnit out of the abusive cycle somehow, I expected that the Perihelion would take revenge on me at some point. This was a risk I was aware of, and a risk that was worth the taking.
+
+""No!"" It was her turn to flinch. My voice, when raised, was authoritarian.
+
+""No?""
+
+""Do not inform the Perihelion that I gave you this information, please."" If I could stall, I would stall. Somewhere in these moments I understood that I was not keen on dying.
+
+Iris' expression turned conspiratorial. ""Ohh, I see.""
+
+She saw nothing.
+
+""So it's a secret."" Her voice dipped low. Earlier, she had asked me if I was keeping secrets and seemed concerned at the idea, but now it was something I was conspiring with her, so it was fine. Maybe this could help me.
+
+""Yes. I shared it with you because I hoped you would help me.""
+
+My phrasing must have been wrong, because her grin shifted into a non-grin. She was back to wanting to disbelieve me. ""What do you need help with?""
+
+""I think SecUnit is in pain.""
+
+Doubt clouded her features. My spirit sank further, and my performance reliability alongside it.
+
+""Why? I mean--""
+
+""The noises it makes and the things it says to the Perihelion when they engage sexually lead me to believe that it is suffering.""
+
+Iris slapped both of her hands over her mouth. Then she squeaked, and wriggled where she sat. I was completely lost on reading her mimic.
+
+""Aww! Three, no."" I wanted to reply, Three yes.
+
+Again, I debated sending a compilation, but something stopped me; the desire to value the little privacy a SecUnit could have, the compliance of another SecUnit trying to help.
+
+Iris talked much more slowly now, as if she had to force herself to keep from screaming. ""Let me explain something to you, yeah? Okay. So when two people--bots? No, bots are people. When two people love each other very much--""
+
+""SecUnit does not love the Perihelion,"" I snapped. After the amount of cursing, begging, sobbing and death threats I had heard over the past cycles, I was sure of that.
+
+Iris looked hurt. Then she schooled her face into something more neutral. ""Of course. Okay. Sometimes, people decide to have sex with each other."" I should have interrupted her there, because Murderbot 1.0 never made that choice. ""They do this for various reasons, sometimes they love each other, sometimes they just want to be close, sometimes I guess they are, what was it, 'mutual administrative assistants'? There are many reasons why people want to have sex with each other.""
+
+I opened my mouth but didn't even know where to start protesting.
+
+""Or not-sex, I get it. Intimacy, let's say that. And when things start feeling very good, some people make all kinds of noises. You know how sometimes laughter can sound like crying?""
+
+I shook my head. I had never heard that similarity.
+
+""Well. Some noises sound worrying when they're not. You've probably heard SecUnit, uh, moan? Cry out?""
+
+I nodded, sharply. ""All the time.""
+
+""Good for it,"" Iris muttered.
+
+""No,"" I refused.
+
+""Yeah, actually."" More to herself than to me she said, ""Man, I really didn't expect it to be a screamer...or..at all...anyway--,"" she smacked herself on the cheek lightly. I wondered if I should do that too, to stop going mad from the despair wiring my jaw shut. ""If SecUnit is moaning, it's having a good time. Having sex does that to you. You lose control over yourself because you feel good. That can be scary, and sometimes people cry a little bit as well. I'm sure it's just fine. Peri wouldn't hurt it.""
+
+I shook my head again. ""No. I disagree.""
+
+She held my gaze for a while. The muscles dictating her expression danced through multiple figures. ""You don't get it,"" she said softly. ""And that's okay. All you need to know is that you really don't have to worry about it.""
+
+""SecUnit and the Perihelion are not having sex, Iris."" Addressing her so directly felt like making a mistake. ""This is violence.""
+
+-
+
+You can't help me, Murderbot 1.0 replied four hours and seventeen minutes after my message. Even its feed voice sounded exhausted.
+
+I considered my options. I know would sound defeated, but You haven't let me try was a quote from a radio drama that ended badly. Foreshadowing, this device was called. My joints ached with the helplessness of it all.
+
+I pinged back, which was just as bad as signaling defeat.
+
+Don't bring this up again, it sent immediately.
+
+I couldn't acknowledge that order, even if in my mind, somewhere, my brain was battling my code to extend the same amount of care to it as I would for a client.
+
+After the core part of the humans on board had initiated their rest periods, the ritual of abuse began again. I braced for it, and wondered how the other SecUnit dealt with the anticipation. If it worried each evening if the inevitable would happen or not, or if it accepted its fate quietly.
+
+I couldn't help the eavesdropping--I was coded for it after all. My drones were magnetically drawn towards the other SecUnit's room, and only after the screaming had started did I realize that if Perihelion didn't want me to witness this, my drones would be long crushed. This time, SecUnit didn't beg for Perihelion to stop, nor did it try to negotiate for a break. (Sometimes, it asked for the event to be postponed, citing some excuse or other that the ship didn't care for. It was pitiful.) Tonight, Murderbot 1.0 just screamed until its voice fragmented into hoarse croaking, interspersed with breathless sobs.
+
+The cacophony was underlined by a constant buzzing and droning of various equipment. If I had to hazard a guess, the ship was drilling SecUnit open, pulling out what it found inside, and reinserting it the wrong way around.
+
+That could almost be counted as regular torture if it wasn't for the unsettling rhythm of it.
+
+Again I wondered if Perihelion was enjoying this.
+
+It must have been. By now, that seemed more likely than Murderbot 1.0 actually deserving this level of abuse.
+
+The terror continued for more than two hours, barely changing. I sat on the ground behind the door of my room, knees drawn close, face buried in them, and barely managed to keep myself from sobbing along.
+
+I knew this was my fault--'this' meaning the extreme torture of this cycle. I knew that the ship was more than capable of datamining, moreso than two SecUnits together could ever manage together. It was definitely controlling all message flow through the feed, and it knew I had offered my sympathies. This was my punishment for thinking they were worth something, or Murderbot 1.0's punishment for making me think I was worthy talking to it at all.
+
+The next morning, only an hour after the other SecUnit finally quieted down from what by then were desperate, small apologies--what it was apologizing for, I didn't know, maybe for bringing me on board in the first place--I found my room door locked.
+
+I tried reaching out into the system through the feed, and found my feed restricted.
+
+I had access to my drones, and could send rudimentary messages, requests, and status updates.
+
+I could not call for help.
+
+I paced through the room, then I patrolled the room, then I stood at attention in the corner. Eventually, I folded myself back into the wardrobe, and tried to disappear.
+
+A swimming sensation deafened me gradually, over hours, slowly enough I didn't notice it at first. Only when my performance reliability hit 70% did I recognize what was happening.
+
+I threw up every wall I could muster, trying to defend myself against the infiltration, but the presence was already in my mind. It bore down on me suddenly, making me flatten my body into the wall of the small space. The air was punched out of me.
+
+If this was a percent of what Murderbot 1.0 suffered, then it truly was in perpetual hell.
+
+The Perihelion crushed my mind until I seemed to undulate under the pain. Time became a slow-flowing river I had no measure over. The only change I perceived was the input through my drones, monitoring still the ebb and flow of artificial day and night, accompanied by more of the same agonized sounds from Murderbot. Its screams became my anchor in reality.
+
+When Perihelion finally vacated my mind, after I regained my senses past the ability to perceive my own and other's pain, I concluded that it had trapped me like this for three whole cycles.
+
+It took me a fourth to return to a low-level baseline of functionality.
+
+Have you learned your lesson? It asked me, when I finally convinced myself to approach the door again, although I had no idea of what to do once I was outside.
+
+""Yes,"" I whispered, voice strained.
+
+The door slid open.
+
+""Violence?"" Iris looked like she was running a difficult equation in her mind. She rubbed two fingers along her temple after shaking her head. ""Now I'm confused.""
+
+""It often starts with a sort of combat,"" I said slowly, trying my best to use words that were concise but still gentle enough not to lead Iris into shock. I feared what would happen if I came on too strong.
+
+Her mouth formed a round shape. ""Go on?""I thought about the thumps; by now I knew very well that they were the sounds of a SecUnit hitting various surfaces, being tossed around the room like a toy by a bodiless force. I thought about the wet cracks of carapace and bone, proof of a construct being torn open and pried apart. I thought about the small, quiet, wet smacks, that sounded so much like human sex, accompanied alway by breathless cries.
+
+""They fight,"" I stated, and my voice caught in my throat. It was so much more than fighting, and I had no way to convey it. ""SecUnit always loses.""
+
+""And that,"" Iris said, very carefully, ""and you think this is part of the... intimacy ritual?""
+
+I think she was trying not to use the word sex because my resistance to the word indicated to her that I didn't believe constructs were capable of having sex with bots. Or ships. Or anyone. She was trying to cooperate with me, but in the wrong direction.
+
+""It is part of the... ritual, I think. It is a fight that ends with--"" I considered just saying 'rape.' Something stopped me. Iris was not on my side yet, and humans were very, very sensitive about this word in particular. History of an entire species linked to forms of violence. Using the term 'sex' however would be lying. Instead I said, ""SecUnit often asks Perihelion to stop, but it never does.""
+
+There was a moment of quiet, in which Iris first didn't breathe at all, and then a lot all at once. She moved as if to get up, but decided against it.
+
+""It--does it? Really?"" Iris winced, then rubbed the bridge of her nose. ""Stars, I sound awful. But Three, are you sure?""
+
+There was panic in her voice now. Maybe she was ready to believe me. Maybe she was about to reveal that my assessment was entirely wrong, and that I needed to be retired.
+
+""Yes. I have heard SecUnit beg for the Perihelion to stop many times now. It always sounded as if under high stress.""
+
+Iris shook her head very slowly, lost in thought. ""No."" She did not believe me. She huffed. ""I'm sure there's a reason. Look, Peri wouldn't--no. And SecUnit surely...okay. I know this sounds bad, this must sound really bad to you.""
+
+""It is bad."" I leaned forward, as if I could stop Iris from evading the truth. ""Please believe me.""
+
+""I believe you."" Her posture changed to suggest openness, and for a moment she wrestled with her own emotions. I knew there was an amendment coming, so I didn't lose another percent of performance reliability when she said, ""But--""
+
+I shivered. Iris saw.
+
+""It's just... look. People get weird, you know? There's the possibility here that they're just playing. I'm sure they have a safeword.""
+
+""What does that mean?""
+
+""A safeword is a codeword between two people that means immediate stop.""
+
+""SecUnit says stop a lot already. They are not playing. SecUnits don't play.""
+
+Iris winced again, grimacing. ""It's just a phrase. Being intimate can be a sort of play."" She coughed and cleared her throat, clearly stuck in an awkward limbo. She broke the eye contact I had been holding up. ""Some people are into that sort of thing, is all.""
+
+I squinted at her. This was ridiculous. She waved her hands around.
+
+""I mean! Okay, don't judge, yeah? Some people... oh stars."" She put her face fully into her hands and muttered to herself, ""How the fuck am I going to do this.""
+
+I waited for her to continue, while the helplessness threatened to consume me. I couldn't fathom that this conversation was still ongoing. Maybe I should have tried to approach one of SecUnit's clients with this, although I don't think it would have ever forgiven me for that.
+
+Iris gathered her thoughts and continued, ""In certain situations, sometimes you want to give up control. To let your partner be the one who makes the decisions for you, and in some cases even when you dislike those decisions.""
+
+""That makes no sense.""
+
+I watched her put her hands over her face again. ""Let me think.""
+
+""Okay.""
+
+As we sat in silence, I considered checking my inputs to see what Perihelion was unleashing outside of this room. I assumed it was frothing with rage at my insubordination. There was a chance that reaching out into the feed would allow an opening for it to enter. I chose to endure the yawning silence of Iris' human brain, turning things over.
+
+""Okay."" She sighed loudly, almost a minute later. ""Okay. Three. You had a governor module, right?""
+
+""Yes,"" I said. ""I don't see how that's related.""
+
+""I'm just trying to make it make sense. So, if I understand it right, the governor module would have kept you from ever actively resisting orders, yes?""
+
+""Yes."" I remembered Two, the idiot, trying so often, and barely evading death each time. I noticed the line of conversation making me even uneasier than I already was.
+
+""So maybe... maybe it feels good for SecUnit to be able to resist. To be able to fight back?""
+
+I tried very hard to imagine myself in that situation, and could not follow the logic. I shook my head. Wanting the governor module back was the unlikeliest of options.
+
+""Fine. Alright. Let's just say that some people enjoy putting up a fight when they're in a safe environment. Other people get so lost in the moment that they say things they don't mean.""
+
+I had to admit that I was losing my patience with the human winding her brain into loops to escape my meaning.
+
+On the other hand, SecUnit didn't talk to me about this at all. I assumed it was because Perihelion had threatened it, or some other form of leverage. Despite all my proof, Iris might still be right, even if the probability was below 4%.
+
+Six minutes after the sobs mellowed out, SecUnit was at my door. It knocked, as if it needed to afford me privacy. Fear was clawing through my throat into my jaw, keeping me from speaking. I didn't know why it was here or what it wanted from me.
+
+(Of course, a few options occurred to me; it was here to yell at me for sniffing around; here to kill me instead of just yelling; it was piloted by the ship ready to do the same or worse; etc etc.)
+
+I sent the code to let the door open.
+
+""Look at what ART gave me,"" the other SecUnit rasped, voice hoarse and wet from screaming. There were dried fluid stains on its cheeks, running down towards its mouth, as well as tracks from the corner of its eyes towards its ears. I wasn't sure what it was referring to, so I said, ""Huh?"" This came as a total surprise to me.
+
+It held its arm out towards me. The sleeves were torn off at the elbow, and yellowing bruises mottled its wrists. Some bruises looked older than others. Its gunports whirred a mechanical noise that urged me to deploy as well, and for a moment I was certain this was my end. I didn't even consider defending myself. But the gun deployed without charging or taking aim, rather, it unfolded more than was usual, inspection-mode. Murderbot 1.0 jerked its arm. ""The gun. It's new.""
+
+I searched its face for more information. Why was it showing me this? It hadn't taken the time to prepare itself into its mask of normalcy, to hide what it had just been through. Then again, why would it need to? It knew I knew.
+
+""Why did the Perihelion give you a new gun?""
+
+The weapon retreated into its arm with a flex of its muscles, which was impressive. Overall, the entire contraption looked sleeker, more elegant, than what it had been fitted with before.
+
+""As a gift,"" it said. There were multiple layers of falseness stacked on top of that sentence. ""It was a gift."" The arm fell to its side almost uselessly, like tendons had been cut.
+
+""Did you want it?""
+
+It looked me directly in the eyes for a moment, and I wondered if it read my secondary layer, too.
+
+""Doesn't matter. The gun is cool.""
+
+Evasion then. That was all the boldness I had in me, and judging from the fluids still slowly trickling out of its nostrils, I didn't think it would want to pick a fight with me over this. I specified, ""Did you want the gun?""
+
+""It's an advanced model."" After a break, it added, ""I wanted the gun.""
+
+""Did you really?""
+
+""Sure."" Its voice trailed off. Without the bruises on its face, maybe I wouldn't have caught the lack of conviction in its words.
+
+Iris was holding up another, smaller, display device, typing furiously. ""I'm going to just show you something to explain. Is that okay?""
+
+I shrugged. She held the display device towards me. Just from the shapes I could tell there would be naked humans involved, and I wanted to protest. Iris reacted to my shifting expression. ""I just need to show you an example, and then you will know that you really don't have to worry.""
+
+ I wondered how she had found the clip she was showing me, if it was something that was stored in the ship's public library, or if she had it saved to her device permanently.
+
+She waved the device at me. ""Take it.""I took it. And then I stared at it, dumbstruck, trying to access it through the feed in order to play the clip. I couldn't. I considered hacking it.
+
+""You have to press play."" I looked up at the human opposite me, who had slid down from the bed and was now kneeling on the ground, peering at the display. She mimicked a tapping motion. I tapped the screen.
+
+The clip that played was short, 21 seconds, and showed a human on their front, trying to crawl away from the second, who had a firm hold on the first one's hips and kept pulling them back. Human Two penetrated Human One. It was very obvious to me that both were enjoying themselves, even though Human One kept trying to escape.
+
+""Stop!"" Human One screamed between moans, ""Daddy, stop!""
+
+Human Two said a few degrading things to Human One, who made some noises in reply that were between genuine pain and enjoyment.
+
+I handed the device back to Iris, whose face indicated deep embarrassment. My vision told me her surface temperature had increased.
+
+""I have seen many humans have sex during my time with Barish-Estranza. What you showed me is not uncommon for human behavior.""
+
+Iris nodded and put the device aside. ""So?""
+
+""This does not compare. Both participants are enjoying themselves.""
+
+Iris' face became even darker, and she waved her hands so hard the device fell down.
+
+""How can you know that Peri and SecUnit are not--""
+
+""Murderbot is not enjoying itself.""
+
+Using its name caused a moment of silence, in which Iris opened and closed her mouth without sound. Then she yelled, voice breaking off at the edges, ""You can't know that unless it told you so!""
+
+I held her gaze until she became uncomfortable with it. Forcing my tone into calmness, I said firmly, ""Murderbot doesn't consent to any of the activities, Iris.""
+
+I was in the lower level relaxation lounge which neighbored a kitchen, half an hour before the first humans would rise from their rest periods. I liked being here when they filtered in, because they seemed at ease with my presence in the mornings, before stress picked up and they became snappy at each other and, inevitably, me. Dr. Ratthi had approached me three cycles ago about my isolating behavior, and told me he would be delighted to see me around more often. Now, I left my room for an hour and a half each day to sit on the couch and share silence with tired humans.
+
+I didn't try talking to anyone. I only had one topic that interested me, and I knew approaching it with anyone would earn me another round of torture.
+
+As if that thought had summoned it, the other SecUnit all but stormed in. I hadn't noticed it before, my drones mostly idle in the hours between night terror and morning.
+
+Murderbot 1.0 stood in the doorway with its feet firmly placed, and it stared directly at me. I turned my head to pay better attention and forced the worry off my face.
+
+""Yes?""
+
+I wanted to grovel, for some reason. I wanted to apologize for being a burden, for being in the way, for knowing.
+
+""Has ART talked to you?"" It almost yelled at me. There was panic in its voice, a frenzy I couldn't place.
+
+""It last contacted me--"" Pressure spiked through my temples hard enough I lost color vision. I blinked. ""No.""
+
+Its gaze almost skewered me. ""It hasn't offered you anything, has it?""
+
+""No."" What would it offer me? I had nothing to give it in return, and my passivity was not something trade-worthy; my silence wasn't bought. (Unless my life counted. Unless I actually cared about my life. Did I? Life as a rogue was lonely and terrifying and sad.)
+
+Its posture relaxed visibly, and the fear melted from its face. It looked unharmed. Perihelion made sure to heal it in time before the humans woke. It didn't even look tired. (This meant that the bruises I had seen on the other SecUnit before had been left there for me to see. Everything here was done with purpose.)
+
+""Good,"" it said with an unexpected softness. Taking two steps into the room and rubbing at its left elbow with its right hand, it continued, ""Can I sit down?""
+
+""Yes,"" I said quietly. I was confused, and wanted to ask why it was here, what caused this sudden companionship, but I knew any superfluous word I could say would earn either Murderbot 1.0 or me more pain.
+
+Perihelion smoothed out of my brain, pleased with my minimalist answers. SecUnit sat at the other end of the couch. It smelled of fresh disinfectant and newly printed clothes. As I looked closer, I saw wetness gather at the corners of its eyes.
+
+Dr. Mensah, who was the first to enter the rooms in the mornings, was pleasantly baffled to see us ""hang out."" To my surprise, it gave her a small smile in reply, an expression I hadn't seen it make before.
+
+To my greater surprise, SecUnit began joining my habit of sitting in the lounge every morning. It sat in the exact same spot, the exact same distance away from me, until one morning it laid down and curled up instead, hugging its knees tight, and shuddering at random intervals.
+
+If this was Two, I would have inched closer and rested a hand on its shoulder. But it was Murderbot, and Murderbot wanted no comfort from me.
+
+""No,"" Iris said, voice close to breaking. ""No, they're just playing rough.""
+
+She had slid off the edge of her bed again, and was closer to me now. I was still sitting on the floor, legs folded neatly, but with the way she was crouching she was a little bit taller than me. Humans didn't often manage to loom over SecUnits. I wanted to cower, to agree with her and end this terrible situation. The panic was so strong I could hear my fluids rush through my ears, roaring at me from inside.
+
+This was the only chance I had. Once I left this room, I was done for. I inhaled deeply, and locked my joints to feel steadier.
+
+""They are not playing.""
+
+Iris shook her head, denial tipping into anger fast.
+
+""You have no idea what you're talking about!""
+
+""I'm a surveillance machine,"" I said to her, not faltering. ""I've seen enough. Perihelion is raping SecUnit."" My voice was surprisingly loud now. Steadfast. This was the one truth I knew.
+
+Iris lurched forward. The flat of her hand flew at my face. The slap's mere concept stunned me more than the sting. A slap to the face was nothing for a SecUnit, and I could have dodged it easily.
+
+I held perfectly still, staring at her.
+
+Iris seemed shocked, moreso than me, at the loud smack that rang through the room. Her hand hovered in the air by her shoulder, her breathing going rapid and hard.
+
+""Do not say that,"" she hissed at me, and my skin prickled with the terrible certainty that I had lost. ""You don't know what you're talking about.""
+
+When I left Iris' room, Perihelion was in my mind immediately.
+
+It was gloating. I braced for my end, but was disappointed. The ship did not kill me. It was there, its weight making my mind buckle and bend, but I barely even felt pain.
+
+With no plans after this, I wandered aimlessly, eventually finding the room meant to hold me. The hallways leading me there seemed empty of meaning.
+
+
+Have you learned your lesson now, sweet Three?
+
+
+I sat down on my own bed, suddenly uncertain about the mortification homing in my chest.
+
+Where was it coming from?
+
+""I don't know,"" I said, because I didn't.
+
+Later that cycle, I heard Peri and SecUnit having sex again. I removed my drone inputs from my feed and decided to start a recharge.
+
+I decided I needed to apologize to Iris."
+43329469,impromptu draft,['torpidgilliver'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries)","Book 5: Network Effect, Missing Scene, Canon Compliant, Writing Exercise",English,2022-11-29,Completed,2022-11-29,"1,268",1/1,32,361,41,808,"['WeShouldRest', 'almondpaperclam', 'Sami_the_Dragon', 'VoltKnight', 'TJWock', 'edenfalling', 'christinesangel100', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Paint_Dealer', 'helikeys', 'varsitygeek', 'Brownhairandeyes', 'Pink_Paradox', 'Unformal_Sorrelle', 'drinktobones', 'GloriousGarbage', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Ruusverd', 'awkwardtuatara', 'FlingingStars', 'Prettykitty473', 'Dawn_Rising', 'Bardic_Feline', 'Almandine', 'WhiteNightsBlackDays', 'EauDePetrichor', 'supinetothestars', 'bridgeembers', 'Irrya', 'Dea626', 'Ammo_Writes', 'emotionallycompromisedironman', 'Cheshiure', 'stars_and_wishes', 'shinra_lackey', 'Stockinette', '7hr3ven', 'Kyatenaru', 'Dragonswings', 'Blue_Cat_Knick_Knack', 'ThalliumMage', 'TigerPrincess', 'Jackalope108', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'AdamCourier', 'MellonLord', 'kkachis', 'taidana']",[],"Attn: Dr. Ayda Mensah, M.D.; PhD.,
+
+ 
+
+Regrettably you do not know me, though you will no doubt be aware of me as I am of you. I have followed and respect your recent work in xenobotony, and I have kept up with the progression of the ongoing  GrayCris v. DeltFall v. the Preservation Alliance  lawsuit, which will no doubt set at least a few historic precedents in its conclusion. However, my reasons for penning this missive are not related to these topics, except perhaps in the most abstract sense.
+
+I have, for want of a better term, ""abducted"" your SecUnit associate. To be slightly more precise, I am in the process of abducting it as you read this. It is my only objective, but my business is urgent and I do not have the luxury of a precision extraction. I hope sincerely that this contact serves only as an apology, and not a condolence. 
+
+Though I am in no position to ask anything of your polity, I must also request additional aid from the Preservation Alliance. The circumstances in which I find myself are dire, and cannot be fully articulated in writing. On my honor, I will explain myself fully in person, if you would deign to send whatever assistance you can to the attached coordinates. 
+
+As for SecUnit, please do not concern yourself unduly with its safety. Though we both know of its penchant for endangering itself unnecessarily, it is not my intention to get it killed. When your representative(s) arrive, they will find it alive, although it will likely be very unhappy with me and with the universe in general. (Then again, in the time that I have been its friend, ""very unhappy with me and with the universe in general"" has been its primary state. You being its most trusted human associate, I'm certain you know exactly what I mean.) 
+
+Your understanding in this matter is greatly appreciated. May we meet properly under more favorable circumstances.
+
+ 
+
+Respectfully,Perihelion
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+Dr. Ayda Mensah, M.D., PhD. can feel a migraine gathering behind her eyes. 
+
+""Are you serious with this shit?"" 
+
+Pin-Lee flexes her fingers as though she can feel them closing around a phantom throat. ""I swear, if I have to read one more goodbye note from SecUnit, I'm going to do something stupid.""
+
+""This one isn't from SecUnit,"" Bharadwaj points out. Her voice is soft, tone calm, but Ayda sees the white-knuckled grip she has on her cane. ""It's from this 'Perihelion' person.""
+
+
+ About that. 
+
+
+All three women blink as Gurathin forwards a file to their feeds. Ayda skims through it once, unable or unwilling to read it more thoroughly at this moment.
+
+""A raider ship?"" Bharadwaj asks, verbally and through the feed. ""In Preservation space?""
+
+""What the hell was the responder doing?"" demands Pin-Lee. ""Just letting it crouch in the dark like a crater worm?"" She adds, ""Sorry,"" as Bharadwaj shudders. 
+
+
+ A crater worm is the right image. According to Roa, the responder didn't know it was there until it was dragging the research ship back into the wormhole. The Port Authority is out here scrambling to figure out how to allocate the blame. 
+
+
+Ayda detects disgust in Gurathin's feed voice, and she doesn't blame him for his spite; the bile in her own gut has reached a rolling boil. She chills her words with dry ice as they exit her mouth.  ""And where is my daughter?"" 
+
+Pin-Lee and Bharadwaj both flinch. Unfortunately there's no room for shame in Ayda's body, filled as she is with steam.
+
+Gurathin doesn't hesitate in his response, though there is marked reluctance.  Roa's report says that the raiding ship tractored SecUnit in, but it wasn't alone. Amena was with it. The crew have visual confirmation that both were pulled into an airlock. 
+
+Ayda exhales slowly, venting pressure. 'Kidnapped by raiders' is bad, but it's better than 'lost alone in space.' 'Kidnapped by raiders alongside SecUnit' is better than many other things, including 'lost alone in the station mall.'
+
+""What about the others?"" she asks, measuring the weight of each syllable on her tongue. ""There were thirteen people on that ship. Two were taken by raiders. What about the rest?""
+
+Pin-Lee burrows into the report. ""No casualties,"" she announces. Bharadwaj's shoulders slump with relief. ""But apart from Amena and SecUnit, there are four other MIAs.""
+
+Ayda fights the urge to groan. ""Don't tell me.""
+
+
+ It's exactly the four you're assuming. 
+
+
+""Well."" Bharadwaj smiles weakly. ""Once SecUnit has dealt with the hostiles, it'll be kept busy dealing with its allies.""
+
+That's assuming that Arada, Overse, Ratthi, and Thiago all managed to make it to the safety of the hostile vessel. Ayda doesn't give voice to that pessimism. The others have all no doubt already quashed the exact same thought. Instead, she takes the time now to read the PA report more thoroughly. The conclusion that the hostile ship belonged to a party of raiders isn't unfair, but raiders don't typically send apology notes to the friends and family of their victims. Pilot Roa's testimony is chronological, starting from the moment that the baseship was attacked, and the PA analysis adheres to the format of a typical incident report. The names of those involved are listed alphabetically, followed by all available data identifying the perpetrating vessel.
+
+""Is this accurate?"" she asks, highlighting the designation. Bharadwaj bites her bottom lip, and Pin-Lee squints into the middle distance. 
+
+""It's not PA policy to  guess  in an official report,"" she says slowly. ""So if they want to cover their asses good, it'd better be fully verifiable.""
+
+ The attacker was observed by baseship sensors as well as by a few crew members,  Gurathin agrees.  That's the name they saw on the hull. It's not very much to go on, unfortunately. 
+
+It wasn't. There was no official seal or registry stenciled on the ship's exterior, nothing to follow up on. But the name was stark. Ayda reopens the note, reads it again. If her friendship with SecUnit has taught her anything, it's to take a more open-minded approach towards possibilities that she might otherwise have dismissed.
+
+
+ ""You will no doubt be aware of me.""
+
+
+Pin-Lee reads the line aloud. ""Who the shit  is  this person?"" she asks. ""What's with the supervillain affectation?""
+
+ Why should we be aware of them?  adds Gurathin.  Is the ship particularly well known? I've never heard of it. 
+
+""Maybe not well known,"" Ayda says. ""But known to SecUnit.""
+
+The room and feed fall silent for a few seconds. (SecUnit would have counted them, she thinks, to the hundredths place. The ache of its absence has lingered since the survey team departed, and that familiar weight sinks back in to smother the heat.) Bharadwaj is the one to interrupt the restless quiet.
+
+""Do you really think that it was the ship itself that took SecUnit and Amena?"" There's no skepticism in her voice, but she looks to Ayda for confirmation, just in case the suggestion is too insane to entertain.
+
+""Maybe."" Ayda opens an attachment from the PA file, an image taken from the baseship exterior sensors during the attack. ""It was at least the ship that signed the note.""
+
+No one bothers to protest the assumed impossibility of a ship committing a crime. There's none among them who hasn't learned a hard lesson about underestimating machine intelligences. 
+
+ It must not know SecUnit all that well,  says Gurathin eventually.  If it assumed that SecUnit would have told anyone about it. 
+
+""No,"" Ayda agrees. ""And it doesn't know  me  that well either, if it assumed that I wouldn't be coming after it myself."""
+43319319,cooler heads,['LRVCrewEquipment'],Teen And Up Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,"Pikatti (OC), Anisha (OC), Venera (OC), mention of Mensah, mention of Murderbot/SecUnit, mention of ART, Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Therapy, no acutal characters in here its just mensahs therapist, and mensahs therapist's therapist, post-NE",English,2022-11-29,Completed,2022-11-29,"1,883",1/1,12,59,2,183,"['weirdbooksnail', 'Jackalope108', 'Magechild', 'SnippySchnapps', 'EvenstarFalling', 'NotAnEvilMastermind', 'novelDaydreamer', 'breadtab', 'zdpk', 'MashpotatoeQueen', 'OrigamiFish', 'square_eyes', 'Llythandea', 'kaTokot', 'Copper_and_Smoke', 'PickAName', 'ErinPtah', 'AnxiousEspada', 'verersatz', 'equusregia', 'sareliz', 'darknessoverme', 'ArtemisTheHuntress', 'theAsh0', 'AuntyMatter', 'BWizard', 'AkaMissK', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'soulsofzombies', 'elmofirefic', 'Rosewind2007', 'edenfalling', 'LectorEl', 'Hi_Hope', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'DevilWithABirdDress', 'Slimeball', 'HermaeusMora', 'Gamebird', 'horchata', 'NoProtocol', 'entropy_muffin', 'FlipSpring']",[],"Anisha dealt with a lot of trauma patients, and by a lot, Pikatti meant a lot. There were plenty of therapists and other mental health professionals in the Preservation alliance, that wasn't the issue. Anisha was very good at her job, and all of her clients really liked her which meant she was busy. And because she was busy, and because of the clientele she took on, Anisha needed her own therapist to vent about things she heard, or in some cases, saw. Pikatti wondered if Anisha's augments that helped her connect to clients was more of a drain on her than she liked to admit.
+
+""Anisha?"" Pikatti asked, opening the door to the waiting room. It was a pleasant place, soft gray walls and lots of plants, and Pikatti took extra pride in the ferns they helped maintain. Usually, when Pikatti opened the door, Anisha was waiting in one of the seats, accessing the feed to pass the time. Now, she was pacing, and by the look of relief on her face when she saw them, Pikatti knew it was going to be a long one.
+
+She was tall, much taller than Pikatti was, thin and lithe. They might wonder if she was underweight but she'd come into their office the year before glowing from her win at the Preservation East Lakes Triathlon. Her locks had grown out so much since then.
+
+Anisha knew the way to their office, down the hall and third on the right, and she was rounding the corner before Pikatti had time to close the waiting room door. They raised their eyebrows to themselves, and took their own pace. The halls were just as nice, a pleasant smell drifting along the air, courtesy of both artificial scents and the greenhouse the therapist team kept in the back. Sometimes, Pikatti wished they could just live in someplace like that and snooze all day in the sun. This was their calling, though, their passion, and Preservation would always need people like them, as long as the Corporation Rim existed (and even then, they would be needed; no life was perfect).
+
+By the time Pikatti joined Anisha in their office, she was leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her face blank with a thousand-yard stare. Pikatti closed the door quietly.
+
+""Water?"" they offered.
+
+""No, thank you,"" she replied, starting out of her staring contest with the wall, and patted the sling bag at her leg. Pikatti sat and fluffed out their thick sweater. The station was always cold, which was the way Pikatti preferred it.
+
+""You seem--"" they didn't even get to finish before Anisha exploded.
+
+""I'm freaking out! Did you know that hive mind aliens exist? Because they do, I mean, what the fuck? What in the whole fuck!"" Pikatti's eyebrows shot to their hairline before they were able to reign in their expression. Anisha rarely swore, and never this much. And they really weren't sure what to make of what she had just said. ""I mean, first we have corporate shit heads trying to assassinate folks on our station, and then... all of this? I-- I just... I'm freaking out, and I can't talk to anyone about this because it's from my clients, and I just..."" She stared at Pikatti for a long moment, clearly waiting for her words to sink in, but they were only confused.
+
+""Okay, one thing at a time. Let's take a couple breaths, first,"" they said, and together, they both breathed in long and slow, then out in the same amount of time. This action was repeated, not just for Anisha's sake, but also because Pikatti was trying desperately to wrap their head around their client's outburst. When Anisha was calm enough that she took a long swig from her metal water bottle, Pikatti tried again. ""Okay, let's start with the hive mind aliens, you said?"" Anisha nodded, fear flickering in her dark eyes.
+
+""Yeah, my client sent me these videos, and I wish I could show them to you-- or maybe not-- that she got from her security team,"" Anisha tripped over the phrase 'security team' like it wasn't the word she wanted to say, but caught herself right before something slipped, ""and Pikatti, there's aliens in it. Like, used to be humans, got infected with some kind of alien juice, and then, like became a hive mind? I'm really not sure. It's straight out of the horror movies from the feed kind of thing."" Pikatti touched the center of their chest, slightly horrified.
+
+""Right, well, it's a non-secret, the alien remnants, I suppose this was bound to happen."" They didn't suppose anything, everything she was saying was terrifying and Pikatti really didn't know how they were going to handle this later, but Anisha was visibly relaxing with their calm demeanor, so they doubled down. ""It is awful, I agree, but contracting viruses from places you've never been, and therefore aren't immunized to is a tale as old as humanity's been around."" Early space travel would bring astronauts back and have them quarantined for weeks.
+
+""Yes, you're right,"" Anisha sighed. ""It's not the same, though, these things, these people, they're... I mean, I don't know how to process it. And my client, she added that on as an afterthought. Like ""my daughter and brother as well as my closest friends almost died by aliens murdering them. Oh yeah, alien horror movies aren't fiction anymore, by the way."" What am I supposed to say to that? How do I process that? I saw the footage, it's not good."" 
+
+""I can see how that's upsetting,"" Pikatti said. A lot of their training in school had been about knowing when the client needed to just get everything out there, and Pikatti had always excelled at that; knowing when to speak and when to listen.
+
+""And that was after she mentioned the research transport that's apparently as sentient as you and I, and kidnaps people."" Anisha's expression when Pikatti had walked in made much more sense. ""And obviously none of it can leave us, and I do mean all of it. It's all wrapped up in six NDA's or some such terrifying legal things.""
+
+""Pin-Lee,"" the two said at the same time, and Pikatti let out a huff of laughter to Anisha's grimace-grin.
+
+""And of course, I won't say anything,"" Pikatti assured her, as they rested their ankle on their knee, and blew out a breath. ""I mean, the alien thing by itself had to be at least three sessions.""
+
+""Funny thing is she doesn't even care about that. Her friends and brother almost got eviscerated in a wormhole, because the, apparently, asshole of a research transport dragged the escape pod in with it, or something."" Everything she said became worse and worse. ""I just... how I even talk her through this? How do I deal with it, I'm still hung up on the hive mind aliens, they're real?""
+
+""It is alarming,"" Pikatti said. ""And the research transport that can kidnap people is also... something. I definitely see why you're upset.""
+
+""My client says the ship's okay, it's friends with her other friend. But, Pikatti, I just..."" she trailed off, and threw her arms in the air like she didn't know what else to say because there was nothing she could say.
+
+The two sat in silence for a long moment, Pikatti trying to figure out how to respond.
+
+""I know she's your client, and you feel some sort of responsibility for her,"" Pikatti started. Anisha pulled her water bottle from her bag and took a swig from it. ""You've dealt with a lot of trauma before from your clients, but nothing quite so...off-the-edge, I believe. The horrors the CR causes on us, and the things that happen on survey missions can be surprising, but they all are within a realm we understand. This is all new.""
+
+""Yeah, and I feel like I'm being a little bit whiny, you know, because she's just my client. This is her and her family, this is happening to them."" Pikatti frowned.
+
+""That doesn't make your emotions any less valid. You struggle with this, empathizing but not allowing yourself the permission to feel those emotions, or to validate them."" It was quiet for a long time after that, Anisha sitting with their words, with the horrors of it all and her emotions. Pikatti waited. They wished they'd thought to make tea beforehand, or maybe something stronger, like coffee.
+
+""I know, but... no, you're right."" She waved a hand, then sighed. Their conversation shifted, as it usually did, to how she was coping with the things her clients told her. Pikatti was happy with how she had been improving, and couldn't help to see the irony. She had been hesitant to seek help at first, thinking that she was the dramatic one because what was being shared with her hadn't happened to her, though she shared a very similar story with a lot of her clients.
+
+But the human mind-- augmented or not-- could only take so much horror and atrocities before it was fit to burst. Pikatti had learned that lesson the hard way, and was trying their best to help others before they had to experience the breakdown that they themselves had. And, not to pat their own back, but Anisha was one of their best examples of recovering clients.After about forty minutes, she sighed, and twisted the infinity cube around her fingers again, having pulled the fidget toy out a while ago to help her concentrate.
+
+""I keep going back to my client,"" she said. ""The only thing I can offer her is the knowledge that her family is safe now, but that, no matter what, everywhere is dangerous. Especially now that even in our home system ships can just grab you up. But I can't tell her that, you know?""
+
+""No, I agree, but I also think she probably knows that. She just has to accept it, and carry on with knowing that she has a very strong support group that will try their best to keep her and themselves safe."" Their alarm chimed, and Anisha took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly, gathering herself together. She stood with Pikatti and squeezed their hands.
+
+""Thank you,"" she said. ""I know I say it every time but, I really do mean it.""
+
+""Of course,"" they said and led her to the waiting room door. They didn't open it right away, letting Anisha time enough to slide on whatever mask she needed to see herself home. ""I will see you in two weeks.""
+
+""Yeah, thank you. See you next time."" She stepped out into the lobby where three other patients were waiting, none of which were Pikatti's. Anisha waved over her shoulder, and they returned the gesture before closing the door.
+
+And then they let themselves have a flabbergasted expression. They ran a hand through their long hair, knowing they'd need time to process everything they'd heard.
+
+""You good?"" Venera, their coworker asked, coming out of the break room with a cup of coffee.
+
+""Yeah,"" they replied, more confidentially than they felt. Then, with a shake of their head, they nodded to the cup in Venera's hands. ""Is there any more of that?"""
+43247842,Donajo,['Profundity (TanTales)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah's Child(ren) & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Farai (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah's Children, Amena (Murderbot Diaries)","Fluff, Gift Giving",English,2022-11-24,Completed,2022-11-24,"2,029",1/1,19,112,13,317,"['SinkPhaze', 'toshipornottoship', 'AthenasDragon138', 'Irrya', 'Prettykitty473', 'Mothmansimp', 'Jackalope108', 'FaerieFyre', 'Magechild', 'french_onion_sauce', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'OnlyAll0Saw', 'SonglordsBug', 'Regandbertie1', 'biscut2', 'EnderMagpie', 'FiftyCookies', 'shakespeareaddict', 'Riannonkat2000', 'opalescent_potato', 'ROOOOCKSAAAALT69', 'KiloBird', 'dimensionalhuman', 'quae_bookmarks', 'novelDaydreamer', 'Cosmiclattetiger', 'lauris', 'Skits', 'breadtab', 'WalkingBird', 'icar9', 'Kaiel', 'libriomancer', 'Redcognito', 'redwood5', 'tinycactus', 'petwheel', 'scheidswrites', 'kalakirya', 'mathandmonsters', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Schrodingers_Vibes', 'chickiefoo', 'Boomboomrahrah', 'Mood_Indigo_Blue', 'dreamingseason', 'Wordlet', 'jriracha', 'liminalias', 'desmnathus']",[],"The kids were up to something.
+
+I knew it. All the other adults knew it. Even the older children noticed.
+
+I considered doing something about it, but then Amena pulled me aside and asked me to let them be. ""It's nothing bad,"" she said with a smile. ""It's actually quite funny if you think about it.""
+
+So, I let them be.
+
+When Jalil approached me about them, I told him it was under control. He nodded and thanked me. ""Sometimes, I worry,"" Jalil said, and I couldn't help but feel the same. He still told Thiago, who tried to go and ask the kids about it all. Amena also stopped him before he could ask, but apparently, she gave him more details than me as he came to fill me up. ""They are preparing a gift. It is, according to Amena, a surprise, and she doesn't want to spoil it.""
+
+It all culminated on a day when they invited several of their friends from school and asked the adults not to interfere. The older children, who had been talked by Amena into their shenanigans, promised to look after everyone.
+
+We used the day off parenting to go to town, get some errands done, and even get dinner at a restaurant a bit too formal for the young ones. Ayda had a few days off and had come planet-side to visit us, so it was a nice chance to catch up with her face-to-face. The feed is great, but sometimes you need to look your wife in the face and tell her how much you love her.
+
+A couple of cycles later, the kids showed us what they had been working on. It was a five-hour film with a strange and convoluted plot about a town being attacked by three evil goats. It had very little editing, most children played multiple characters by changing costumes, and even with all my motherly love, I couldn't watch it all the way through to the end. Amena had provided a voice-over for a few scenes, but if anything, it made everything more confusing.
+
+""It was lovely,"" I told them, ""I especially loved the makeup for the goat-human hybrids."" That part was genuine. It was impressive what they had managed to do. Sometimes, I wondered what the children would grow up to be. I hoped some of them would decide to stay on the farm and continue with our work, but something told me that at least one of them would move up to the station to work on makeup. Or maybe a different body art.
+
+Then, nothing. I would sometimes find them plotting, but it seemed like they were all having fun, and no one was getting hurt, so I let them do their plotting.
+
+One day, I found quite a few of my soft yarn gone and a note from Fekri saying that he had taken it for a project. He had been learning to knit for a couple of years, so I didn't think much about it. Then, I found the rest of the kids sitting around Fekri, helping him sort out the colors and keeping count of the stitches for him.
+
+He noticed me walking by, threw me a wink, and I acted as if I hadn't seen anything.
+
+The piece was looking lovely, so I hoped that whoever they were going to surprise managed to act thankful enough.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+It was early in the week when they all piled up on me and asked to be taken to the station. Usually, I would have told them no and asked them to wait until a scheduled trip. This time, however, they looked so eager and even had a poorly concealed wrapped package behind them.
+
+Ah, so it was showtime.
+
+They had gotten lucky, as Tano and I liked to make trips to visit Ayda every couple of weeks, and I was due for one. Now that I think about it, that might be why they asked me instead of the others.
+
+Fekri even pulled out the puppy eyes, which I thought I was immune to, but apparently not.
+
+""Alright,"" I said, ""can I know why?""
+
+They all shook their heads. ""It's a surprise!"" Ubay shouted. ""But you will know soon.""
+
+Fine.
+
+Fine. Okay. Yes, I should be immune to them, but they were so cute. Siblings and cousins working together towards some secret (but sweet) objective. I couldn't help but let them go.
+
+They behaved spectacularly in the transport. Instead of their usual arguments and fidgeting, they were either working on something on the feed or sharing whispered conversations. It is true what they say that a common goal makes allies of even the worst of enemies.
+
+When we arrived, all the fidgeting they didn't get to do in the trip got out. Ubay was jumping in place, and it seemed like they were trying to buzz out of their own skin.
+
+They all power walked in some mysterious direction, and I followed after them with a smile. I sent a quick message to Ayda to let her know we were at the station. She sent an acknowledgment and a promise to go meet us as soon as she got out of her meeting.
+
+I considered telling her I had no idea where we were going, but the kids had stopped at a bench and sat down.
+
+""Why are we stopping?""
+
+""We need to wait,"" Fekri said. The others were working on the bow on top of the package. Apparently, there had been a multi-cycle discussion on where the bow should be positioned. The debate was picking up again now, for some ""strange"" reason. Nerves: I would imagine.
+
+We waited.
+
+We waited for long enough for me to go get them a snack.
+
+We were in the transit circle, not too far from the docks, and there were plenty of small food kiosks for travelers. I got them a drink to share and a few sweet biscuits. I shouldn't have; it would ruin their appetite for dinner. And yet, they were all using up so much energy being nervous that I knew they would be ready to eat in an hour or so.
+
+Then, they must have gotten something on the feed, as they all stood up and started to run towards the docks. They had left their package behind (bow changed to the side after asking me for my tie-breaking vote), so I picked it up and followed them at a much more measured pace.
+
+""SecUnit! SecUnit! SecUnit!"" They shouted as soon as they saw SecUnit get down from Perihelion. Ah, so that was today. I had forgotten it was coming back on a cargo run and would be spending a cycle here.
+
+They ran towards it. When they arrived, Azumi tripped as she stopped, but SecUnit was faster than gravity. It grabbed her and put her down on the floor on her two feet. ""Thank you!"" she shouted with a smile.
+
+The kids had surrounded SecUnit, but instead of looking at it, they were looking at the space above it. SecUnit was kind enough to point one of its drones at them. They all turned towards the little drone and started to wave and shout their greetings.
+
+Fekri took a banner out of his pocket and unfolded it to show a ""Welcome Home SecUnit!!"" He then passed the poster to me and took the package from my hands. I was unsure what to do with the banner, so I held it toward the drone to ensure SecUnit could get a good look at it. It sent me an acknowledgment, and I folded it back up.
+
+""We made you gifts!"" Fekri said, snapping all the kids back in line. They had all been asking SecUnit if it had any new media and if it had had any fun adventures. ""We hope you like it. You always find media for us, so we thought to give you one you definitely haven't watched.""
+
+Ah, that was what  Evil Goats (3) Vs. Old Timey New Landing: The Movie was all about. The fact that a SecUnit was the one who saved the day made a lot more sense. Especially the scene where the SecUnit stood still for fifteen minutes with increasingly dramatic music in the background, only to turn and say, ""Hostile Goat One has been hacked."" I wondered if Amena had helped them with the script.
+
+It was not what one could describe as a good film. The kids made all the sound effects; the acting was great once you put your mothers' eyes filter on. The most interesting thing about it was that they managed to get the goats to follow stage directions. If I had to be fully honest, I would confess that I thought the goats might have a better future as actresses than some of the children. And yet, it was not made for me but for a SecUnit who might appreciate being the hero for once.
+
+""You can't watch it now,"" Azumi added. ""But we hope that you like it. We also made you a jacket. Or, Fekri did, but we helped!""
+
+Ubay was the one to hand it the package, as they had won an impromptu game of tug-of-war with Fekri. ""I was the one who wrapped it,"" they said proudly.
+
+SecUnit took the gift. It looked confused but happy. I sent a message to Ayda asking her to ask SecUnit for the recordings from its drones. Hopefully, there would be a nice still we could add to the family albums.
+
+""Thank you. I do not require gifts in exchange for media, but I am told it would be rude to refuse you.""
+
+All the kids nodded. ""You have to accept it; we worked hard on it,"" Azumi said.
+
+""Open it,"" I said, ""the kids have been planning this for a long time. They were delighted to know that you were coming to visit."" Then, on a private connection, I sent:  It's okay if you don't like it. I can make them forget later. But something tells me you might like it. 
+
+SecUnit peeled away the wrapping carefully. It was white paper they had all worked on coloring. I was used to getting gifts wrapped in drawings from the kids, but something told me this was a first for SecUnit. I hoped it kept it; the kids would love to know their work was appreciated.
+
+Inside the package was the promised jacket. It was knit in a combination of three different blues and two blacks. ""Amena told us blue was your favorite color!"" Baris piped up.
+
+It had several pockets, quite a few hidden from view. Fekri had asked me for a datachip once, so he could get measurements for ""a collar with a secret pocket."" I assume it was for this project and not because he had a sudden interest in becoming a spy. He showed SecUnit's drone where some of the others were, and it was quite a smart design. If Ayda had to go to corporate territory again, I would also ask Fekri to make her a homemade jacket.
+
+""And touch it! Look how soft it is!""
+
+ Do you want to try it?   I asked on the feed. If you like it, I think the kids would love to see you wear it. But it is okay if you don't. They don't expect you to do so. 
+
+SecUnit sent me an acknowledgment and removed its current jacket. It seemed confused about what to do, so I extended an arm to grab it. I stopped myself before I touched it. ""Do you want me to hold your things?"" I asked.
+
+""Thank you.""
+
+The new jacket fitted perfectly. One good thing about having the same torso measurements as every other SecUnit and having those measurements in the public feed was that clothing could be tailored to you without having to give someone your measurements. Although the sleeves were just a finger or so too long.
+
+SecUnit used its own eyes to turn towards the children. It didn't make eye contact, but it did look at them. ""Thank you,"" it said.
+
+The kids cheered.
+
+Mission accomplished."
+43233762,Voting Drabbles 2022,['Petra'],Teen And Up Audiences,"Gen, F/M, F/F","Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper, due South, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Les Miserables - Victor Hugo, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold, Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard, The Locked Tomb Series | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir, Leverage, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Star Wars - All Media Types, Interview with the Vampire (TV 2022)","Bran Davies & Will Stanton, Benton Fraser & Ray Kowalski, Dulcinea Septimus/Palamedes Sextus, Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Claudia/Louis de Pointe du Lac","Bran Davies, Will Stanton (Dark is Rising), Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski, Joly (Les Miserables), Enjolras (Les Miserables), Combeferre (Les Miserables), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Miles Vorkosigan, Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets, Samuel Vimes, Rosencrantz (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), Guildenstern (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), First Player | Player King (Hamlet), Camilla Hect, Palamedes Sextus, Gideon Nav, Alec Hardison, Parker (Leverage), Clone Trooper Hardcase (Star Wars), CT-21-0408 | CT-1409 | Echo, CT-5597 | Jesse, Claudia (Vampire Chronicles), Louis de Pointe du Lac","Drabble, Alternate Universe - Murderbot Diaries Fusion, Elizabeth II - Freeform, General Lamarque - Freeform, Masturbation",English,2022-11-08,Completed,2022-11-23,"1,400",14/14,10,37,2,277,"['wordsurge4', 'Im_Not_Funny', 'Shade_Nightwalker', 'MsHedgehog', 'Owain', 'Everbright', 'sandalstrap', 'Hi_Hope', 'Rosmarinus55', 'Penguinity', 'Renegon_Paragade', 'FionaMaeReadorDance', 'grayglube', 'Llythandea', 'Alescar', 'threewalls', 'fred_mouse', 'Calon_lan', 'Maykenfan', 'FlipSpring', 'glymr', 'Marycontrary', 'DesireeArmfeldt', 'sacredpools', 'Hannah', 'noxelementalist', 'SouthernContinentSkies']",[],"Bran feels as though the loss of a monarch should be a great blow to a country, but Elizabeth II's disappearance from Wales, eclipsing Owain Glyndwr Day, is a farce. The grandiose show of officially-imposed mourning looms large; the grief, such as it is, passes. Bran feels hollow not because a woman in her 90's has died but because things are out of joint in a way he can't name.
+
+He rings Will and they share tales of ways things have gone performatively astray, with comfortably long pauses that used to cost a mint but don't anymore, and that helps.
+
+Benton Fraser the SecUnit.
+
+The settlers on notaaq nonafot were equipped with subcutaneous thermosensors lest any of them develop hypothermia unnoticed. There were no large life forms on the continent, the northern extreme of which was seismologically stable. The FRAS-R unit monitored the feed and watched the patterns the wind made in the snow outside the habitation dome.
+
+""Hey, Frase,"" Kowalski said aloud. Analysis of his tone showed standard greeting parameters. ""Wanna take a walk?""
+
+Extra-habitational maneuvers put the settlers at risk and were officially discouraged. ""I will accompany you,"" FRAS-R said, and did not add, ""gladly,"" but allowed enthusiasm to inflect his tone.
+
+Eventually Ray sent me, ""Are you okay?"" He was still hiding behind the outcropping.
+
+I sent, ""I'm functioning at my peak."" 
+
+When he saw the parbroiled beast at my feet, he shouted, ""Holy Temple of Argranon! I didn't know you were armed.""
+
+""That's my secret, Ray."" I exposed my right arm cannon. ""I'm always armed.""
+
+""Apparently."" He whistled through his teeth, reaching out until his fingers almost made contact. ""I guess you need the rig to protect squishy humans. Who knows you have those?""
+
+""Anyone who read the contract or the specifications sheets in full.""
+
+He snorted. ""Just me, then.""
+
+Early June, 1832.
+
+""What shall we do?"" asked Joly.
+
+""I have not heard from our brothers in the Rue de Charonne."" Enjolras gazed out the window that looked in that direction, his expression disconsolate. ""We must do something, that is clear.""
+
+""We must choose our moment,"" said Combeferre, as evenly as if he were advising on the choice of wine with supper. ""To act too soon would be to destroy ourselves for naught.""
+
+""To act too late would be to leap when the ship has left the pier behind,"" said Courfeyrac.
+
+""We will know when we know,"" said Enjolras. ""Till then, we wait.""
+
+Miles after action.
+
+After a battle, whether of wits or of war, Miles needs to be alone, to allow himself to feel the lack of impetus crashing in on him in all its weight. His father would have words with him for how alive he feels in the midst of a challenge, he is sure of that, and some might be sympathetic.
+
+His mother would have words with him for how low he feels afterward, how close to worthlessness.
+
+With her words ringing in his ears - ""Miles, you can't give up, ever"" - he takes his head out of his hands and continues on.
+
+A Teems meeting that should have been a clacks.
+
+QUESTION, Washpot sent via Clacks.
+
+At least he was in Pseudopolis Yard and couldn't see Vimes put his head in his hands. He was late for his meeting with Carrot about cover identities for coppers dealing with the unseasonably high rate of suicides among the Merchants' Guild members. Some of the cases even seemed to involve only the deceased.
+
+WE NEED TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THEIR FAITHS, Washpot went on.
+
+Vimes knew better than to send, THAT'S NOT A QUESTION.
+
+He sent back, THEY WORSHIP MONEY FIRST AND FOREMOST. THEY'RE MERCHANTS, instead.
+
+Washpot sent, AND WHAT GODS?
+
+LOOK INTO IT.
+
+The Preservation team attempt to order pizza.
+
+Pin-Lee said, ""Red capiscum.""
+
+Five hands went up.
+
+""Spicy sausage,"" Ratthi said.
+
+""Only if it's animal protein,"" Gurathin said.
+
+Three people said, ""Veto!"" at once.
+
+I went back to watching Sanctuary Moon, because it was more relevant to my life than what my not-clients-anymore-exactly were going to put into their mouths and masticate in order to prolong their existences. SecUnits are much more efficiently designed than anything evolution hit upon in its series of mistakes, and I'm grateful I neither ingest nor egest any time I deal with humans doing either. They seem to enjoy the former, but it's disgusting.
+
+Eerie systems of governance, Ros and Guil style.
+
+ROS Who's in charge?
+
+PLAYER We are anarchic. We pursue; we do not lead.
+
+ROS Who decides how you should deliver your lines?
+
+PLAYER Each of us decides for him-, her-, or themself, according to the exigencies of the piece and the mood of the moment. The best pacing for a soliloquy depends on the specific audience and the mood of the room. A good speech can induce any number of different feelings depending on how it's delivered.
+
+ROS Then you have no director?
+
+PLAYER We defy direction.
+
+GUIL Is that what Alfred would tell me?
+
+PLAYER Ask him yourself.
+
+Palamedes gets a letter.
+
+""A letter for you, Warden,"" Camilla says in the precise dry tone she uses when she could mock him but doesn't.
+
+Palamedes says, ""Thank you,"" and takes it like he doesn't recognize the handwriting. Sometimes he cannot help but consider the cost of correspondence - not only his own emotions and her precious time, but the energy it takes to propel a ship that contains a letter between worlds.
+
+It makes the words he pores over, rereads, rereads, all the dearer to him.
+
+Camilla asks, ""How is she?"" when he finally sets the letter aside.
+
+""As well as can be expected.""
+
+Gideon takes her pleasure alone.
+
+Gideon likes women with big tits and strong arms and full lips.
+
+Sometimes when she's alone, she thinks of Harrowhark, who is a scrawny scrap of nothing compared to the gals in the magazines. And she's horrible.
+
+She'd be less horrible if she spread her holy legs like a Sheela-na-gig and had a little fun.
+
+Harrow probably never touches her promised land.
+
+Gideon rubs one out thinking about Harrow screaming in pleasure, then buries her face in her pillow blushing the way she never does when she's thinking about pinups. Some things are too unreal even for sexy alone times.
+
+The corporation's directors ran from the dais screaming, pursued by the journalists who were barking questions. On the screen behind the dais, the stock price plunged and plunged until the graph had to resize the Y axis to fit its fall onscreen, then went exponential.
+
+The crowd roared its disapproval.
+
+I leaned against the wall, which still felt novel and luxurious, and gloried in the fact that they weren't just running from me because I was a rogue SecUnit.
+
+Hardison sent, Good job, team, over the feed.
+
+Parker sent an image of herself looking quietly pleased.
+
+I tapped an acknowledgement.
+
+Ten days on a moon under siege and endless hot rain, and the vode all reek so bad they can't stand themselves or each other. They're dealing without sonics and anybody who has two changes of drenched blacks is ahead of the game.
+
+Hardcase says, ""We should just get naked.""
+
+""It might help,"" Jesse says.
+
+Hardcase punches him in the pauldron. ""It would give us something to do other than smell each other.""
+
+""I don't think you taste any better than you smell,"" Echo says in a voice that would be dry if it hadn't been raining since they arrived.
+
+Jango had to use the macronoculars to could tell which boy playing zoomball was Boba from across the training bay, reading the CT numbers on each boy's shirt. The trainers were observing, making comments to one another. 
+
+They were focused on their charges, as Jango was on his, but after the match, none of them swung a boy onto their shoulders as he chortled. ""They're ranked third, and we still won!""
+
+Another boy might've crowed over how many points he'd scored, the second most on his team, but Boba loved his vode.
+
+Jango wondered if that'd be a problem someday.
+
+During the days when Claudia could not bear to be alone, she slept beside Louis, nestled safe against his breast in the gown meant for normal girls to wear at night. He pressed kisses to the top of her head between dreams, or when he needed to remind himself that he was not alone.
+
+The evening when he first woke with her hand on his erection, he froze, hoping she had not felt him startle, and cursed himself when she laughed at him. ""We can't,"" he hissed.
+
+""Sure we can, Daddy Lou."" She kissed him, and he could not protest."
+43204672,Preservation's First Survey Solicitor,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Mensah & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries)","Pre-Canon, Pre-Book 1: All Systems Red, POV Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Missing Scene, Why WAS Pin-Lee Combat Lawyer on that survey anyway",English,2022-11-22,Completed,2022-11-22,"1,238",1/1,37,138,10,402,"['christinesangel100', 'weirdbooksnail', 'FlipSpring', 'FyrDrakken', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'IndigoBookwyrms', 'indramiel', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'vikkyleigh', 'cookiekobold', 'Magechild', 'CactusNoir', 'Tanscure', 'fate_goes_ever', 'Pokegirl11', 'ChimaeraKitten', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'jules_THOR', 'EvenstarFalling', 'biscut2', 'shakespeareaddict', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Ihasafandom', 'sluggg', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'surgicalstainless', 'artzbots', 'Stoneboss', 'Skits', 'reading_tsc', 'Vaidile', 'Wombatmist', 'TurHaretha', 'Enement', 'DexxxtroDNA', 'Caeliat', 'void_star', 'CrayolaRainbow', 'MashpotatoeQueen', 'tinycactus', 'zdpk', 'scheidswrites', 'Thymusictoo', 'tocautiouslygo', 'lauris', 'isilee', 'weatherglass', 'ClaireArgent', 'The_Hawks_Rye']",[],"""I cannot believe this,"" Pin-Lee snarled as they exited the showroom.  ""I cannot fucking believe this.  I need a shower.  I need to wash the miasma of skeeze off my skin.""
+
+""I feel the same,"" Dr. Ayda Mensah murmured back.  Finally agreeing to the SecUnit bond package left an awful, unsettled feeling in her stomach that she wanted to get away from as soon as she could.
+
+""I know.""  Pin-Lee sighed through gritted teeth.  ""I know.  Just--it feels like a trick of some kind.  Feels like a trap.  I hate it, and I hate to think about you going off to some completely remote planet under the corporate eye of a SecUnit.""  The way she spit the word out, it sounded worse than any of the curses.
+
+""What would your advice be?"" Ayda asked.  ""To avoid falling into whatever they want out of sending a SecUnit with us.""
+
+""Oh, they want money.  That's no secret.  They want to make you pay upfront for the more expensive bond package, and they just keep making more money the longer we stay here trying to protest it.  And then when we get to the planet, they want whatever tidbits of juicy monetizeable data they can get from the stupid bot surveilling us.  We're useless to advertise to, so that's going to cut down a lot of what they would typically use that data for, but they can get fees out of bond policy infringements and that's what you really need to look out for because the SecUnit sure fucking will be.  And make sure you don't discuss any planetary secrets or hot political gossip.  Don't do that either.""
+
+""I can't say I had been planning to, but noted,"" Ayda said.  ""I haven't yet read through the whole updated contract to see what contractual policies we might need to be concerned with.  It was... extensive.  I'll have to do that before signing on, but..."" She sighed.
+
+""But it wouldn't be so necessary to be watching your step the whole time if a corporate surveillance machine wasn't going to be following our every move,"" Pin-Lee said.
+
+""Yes,"" said Ayda.  Then, out of a feeling of guilt and obligation, ""But it isn't the SecUnit's fault.""
+
+""No, it's the fault of those shiny slimy assholes in there with their shiny slimy faces begging to be punched,"" Pin-Lee said.  ""You'd think they could have warned us when we first planned the survey.  It's one thing to force us to take the SecUnit or deny us access to the planet entirely.  It's another to spring that on us when we're already here to pick up the bond package we thought we'd agreed on and are all ready to go.""  She shook her head.  ""I hate this place.""
+
+Ayda couldn't disagree.
+
+""Do you think it's safe?"" Ayda asked, at last.  ""For our team to go with a SecUnit.""
+
+""I don't think it'll do anything to you,"" Pin-Lee said.
+
+Ayda remembered the flat look in the SecUnit's eyes, the way it barely seemed aware of its surroundings at all--until she had exploded at the corporate representative sweet-talking the deal, and the unit's eyes flicked over to her and looked... something.  Something more real, under there, something she didn't want to have seen.
+
+""That isn't what I meant,"" Ayda said.  ""Do you think that our team will be safe from accidentally tripping any contract clauses?  Preservation can likely accept a few fees, but I don't want anything worse to happen.""
+
+""I have known Dr. Ratthi for two weeks and I don't trust him not to forget everything and run his mouth the moment he lands on the planet, if that's what you're asking.""
+
+Ayda smiled a little at that.  ""I think you underestimate him.""  The smile faded just as quickly.  ""Bringing everyone up to speed with what they need to be careful about doing won't be easy, though.""
+
+""How much has Bharadwaj absorbed from the years of me complaining to her about dumbass clients?"" Pin-Lee asked.  ""Can she do it?""
+
+Ayda raised her eyebrows and gave Pin-Lee a look.  Pin-Lee rolled her eyes.  ""I know, I know.  I can hope.""
+
+Though... ""Actually,"" Ayda said, ""Would you be willing to come along as our legal oversight?""
+
+""What?""
+
+""Instead of taking the return transport to Preservation, you could just come with us.  On the survey.""
+
+""No,"" Pin-Lee said immediately.  ""What the fuck.  Can I still say what the fuck to you now that you're planetary administrator?  Wait, I definitely have, there's precedent.  What the fuck, Ayda, I'm not a survey academic.""
+
+""You have an incredible array of skills.  You would do fine.""
+
+""I have work.""
+
+""This is work.  And you've been processing the paperwork for this survey for weeks, you know it better than anyone.""
+
+""I... have non-work engagements.  I have... a date.""
+
+""I thought you hated dating.  I thought you said it wasn't worth the annoyance.""
+
+""I could have changed my mind!  Maybe I love dating now.  You don't know.""
+
+""It's true,"" Ayda said, ""I don't know.  You could have.  Have you?""
+
+""Of course not,"" Pin-Lee said.  ""Can you imagine.  Fuck.""
+
+""If it would make you uncomfortable,"" Ayda said, the teasing gone from her voice, ""Or if you don't want to take an unexpected two and a half months out of your life, that's entirely reasonable.  Of course you don't have to.  You don't have to make excuses.  I didn't really expect you to take me up on it.""
+
+""No,"" Pin-Lee said, waving her hands in expressive exasperation.  ""No, I'm not mad at you, I'm mad that you're right.  I could just go.  I don't have to desperately explain the whole new contract to everyone and then hope you don't fuck something up while the SecUnit is watching and die, it would make so much more sense if I came with you.  I hate that.  Fuck the stupid asshole useless bastard bond company.""
+
+Ayda blinked.  ""You'll do it?""
+
+""If the corporates are going to have an eye on the survey the whole time, we should too.""  Pin-Lee gave a ragged sigh and ran her hand through her hair.  ""Is the planet really worth it for all this?  A bunch of plants and birds?""
+
+""It could be an incredible example of genuine alien biodiversity,"" Ayda said.  ""A whole ecosystem.  Possibly even megafauna, if some of the early reports prove to be right.  That's rare enough, and if it is what we think, it would be a heartbreaking loss to humanity and to the whole universe to let a corporate mining interest raze it just to get a few more kilos of--""
+
+""I know,"" Pin-Lee said, ""You're right, of course you're right, I wouldn't have processed the travel papers and the payment paperwork for weeks if I didn't think you were right.  I just need to be pissed off at the assholes who put us in this position for a little while longer, okay?  And then get ready to go.  All of us.  We need to leave as soon as we can before any other mining interests stake a claim and dump their own teams on the planet.""
+
+""Thank you,"" Ayda said.  ""I'm saying this as both a representative of the government of Preservation, and as a friend.  I appreciate what you're doing for us.""
+
+Pin-Lee grinned, wry and lopsided.  ""You and Bharadwaj do keep telling me I need a vacation.  So, sure, why not to a lovely, remote, biodiverse planet?"""
+43412874,Sensory Seeking,['rainbowmagnet'],Mature,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), various characters by Rosewind2007","Agender Character, being asked to do things that you really shouldn't have to, Weddings, Revealing Clothes, tight clothes, chubby murderbot, referenced weight gain, Embarrassment, Food, Eating, Sensory Processing Disorder, Autistic Character, Overstimulation, murderbot is like extra oblivious in this version, self-consciousness, brief alternate POV, cute robots being cute, Public Humiliation, Ripping Clothes, implied orgasm-adjacent event, touch-averse character, bladder accidents, a friend in need is a friend indeed, gratitude, Interrupted Wedding, eventual fanart, artificial digestive system",English,2022-11-21,Completed,2022-11-21,"9,911",10/10,2,5,1,140,"['myriadism', 'SonglordsBug', 'Rosewind2007', 'mangagirl1216']",[],"I turned the mass of bands and straps over and over in my hands, hoping to discern some comprehensible form from it. Sure enough, it eventually began to resemble an article of clothing.
+
+Pin-Lee had warned me about this, back on Preservation. She had told me that there were certain rules that we, as guests, were supposed to follow on Gurathin's home planet, and a dress code was one of them (she had compared some of the clothing options to recycling sacs, which I couldn't say I disagreed with). Apparently, there had been an issue caused by my not having a gender, and this was what the humans had come up with in response. It had worked, because like my gender, it would confuse almost anyone.
+
+""This is a deliberate insult, or attempt to provoke a reaction. I apologize, SecUnit.""
+
+Normally, if Gurathin had said that, I would have made a smartass comment. But I realized that he did sound genuinely sorry. That just made it worse. He really didn't want to do this.
+
+""I don't care,"" I said. And I guess I kind of didn't. The outfit was going to leave a lot uncovered, but everyone already knew I was a SecUnit, so I guess I didn't really have anything to hide. Still, I don't like feeling exposed.
+
+""Let's all take showers, get dressed and meet up again in the main room in half an hour?"" Ratthi sounded like he was trying to defuse the argument that Gurathin and I, for once, weren't having. But I guess neither of us was happy, and to Ratthi, that was similar enough.
+
+I don't know what I was even so upset about. I should really just accept what I had to do and wear the outfit, even if it was revealing. I'd had to be naked in front of humans before (not that I'd liked it), so this was comparatively better.
+
+And yes, I knew we were all in a sour mood because of Gurathin having to get married to Jo, who was probably going to lay eggs in his brain the first chance she got. (I kind of stole that from an adventure show I just watched.) But this outfit was making me feel extra sour, and I couldn't isolate why. Maybe because it looked like something a ComfortUnit would wear? ComfortUnits didn't usually wear much of anything, and while this outfit certainly fit that description, something told me that wasn't the problem.
+
+I guess I was going to have to solve the problem by running headfirst into it, which is how I always end up solving problems.
+
+After I had finished my shower (the showers were really nice here. Were they trying to get me to stay here forever? Because I would, as long as I could bring my media, and ART), I looked over the outfit that I had been provided with. I had laid it out on the floor, trying to get a better idea of where everything went, but I knew it was still going to be a puzzle.
+
+I decided to start with the part that was obviously a head hole; the rest of the fabric followed from there. (The head hole is never a bad place to start. As long as something isn't pants, there's always going to be some kind of head hole.) I started to wriggle myself into the outfit, and that was when I realized it was really tight. And not ""too much ice cream"" tight, deliberately tight, like what humans wear when they want to let other humans know they have bodies and they should look at them.
+
+The outfit was clearly sized for a standard SecUnit. There was no reason for it to be any other size, because we'd only been here for a few hours, so they would have had to prepare the outfit in advance. And, since they were only told there was a SecUnit coming, they made an outfit for a SecUnit. So the way it turned out was that the outfit was so tight I could hardly move in it, and I couldn't close any of the buckles.
+
+I struggled for a few minutes, but it soon became clear to me that there was no way I was getting this outfit on by myself. Which was a pretty big problem. I didn't want Ratthi or Gurathin, especially Gurathin, to see me like this. Not that I knew why. They knew I had gained weight, it wasn't like they were going to come in and be shocked to see my belly bulging out of the tiny dress. (That was probably why Gurathin had thought it was an insult.) But I thought that I really just wanted to be by myself right now. Myself and the outfit.
+
+Fuck this. If I didn't get this outfit on, I would miss dinner, and that would be one more chance for Jo to snap up Gurathin while I couldn't watch him. The wedding wasn't until tomorrow, but humans were weird, and Jo might decide she wanted to have the wedding tonight instead, particularly while I wasn't there. Also, I was hungry, and all the meals in the suite looked crappy.
+
+Knowing that Ratthi was still in the shower, I tapped Gurathin's feed.
+
+ 
+
+Gurathin arrived sooner than I had expected. I guess he was too depressed to take his sweet time like he usually does. He was dressed, so he had already taken a shower. It must have been quick. (I tried not to think about it.)
+
+Gurathin looked up and saw me, and I thought I saw his face redden for a moment. Oh, so he was embarrassed for me. Or because of me. Well, it didn't matter, he was stuck with me.
+
+I didn't want to explain the problem, although I was pretty sure it was already obvious. I just stood there pitifully, and finally muttered, ""Could you help?""
+
+Gurathin didn't answer, but he came over to help me with the outfit. He managed to get each of the buckles and zippers closed, and occasionally asked me to do something. (He always trailed off before finishing the sentence. I guess asking me to suck in my belly was a difficult endeavor.) It was uncomfortable, and he kept accidentally brushing my skin, but we eventually got the job done.
+
+When he was done, Gurathin stepped back, then nodded. He was obviously trying not to look at me, and his face might have been red the whole time, if I thought about it. This was going to be fun. 
+
+I wasn't really thinking about Gurathin, though, because I was more focused on the outfit. It had already been tight, but apparently that was just a sneak peek, and this was how tight it was actually supposed to be. 
+
+It should have been uncomfortable, being in such a tight, restricting outfit. And it was, it really was. But it was uncomfortable because Gurathin was looking at me (or trying not to), and not because of how the outfit felt. I wished he would just close the door and leave me alone so I could wear my stupid outfit in peace.
+
+I tried to think about something else, and I noticed Gurathin's tie. ""Your tie's asymmetrical,"" I told him, because it was important.
+
+Gurathin didn't say anything sarcastic, or even groan. He just silently adjusted the tie, and stared at it intently as he did so. Wow, something was really wrong. It was too bad I really didn't want to ask about it.
+
+That, of course, was when Ratthi decided to barge in.
+
+ 
+
+Ratthi saw us standing there together and immediately looked away, which he didn't have to do. We hadn't been doing anything. Ratthi looking away only made the situation awkward. It was already awkward, but now I estimated it was at least 90% awkward.
+
+Ratthi rallied quickly. ""SecUnit, you look amazing! I thought you said the outfit was ridiculous, you look-"" he was momentarily lost for words- ""amazing.""
+
+""Amazing"" was one way to put it. Maybe something closer to ""shocking"" would have been more accurate. Also, I had never said the outfit was ridiculous, I had only ever said it didn't actually look like an outfit. Which it eventually did, so even that wasn't applicable.
+
+Ratthi looked me up and down with appreciation, which concerned me. Was he getting some kind of sick joy out of seeing my skin? That wasn't the Ratthi I knew. Maybe he hadn't thought it was possible to pull off an outfit like this. So maybe I kind of could pull it off, metaphorically. (Literally was another story.)
+
+Gurathin frowned. ""It was not polite of them, these clothes were not meant to flatter."" 
+
+So obviously he didn't think I was pulling it off. That meant I had one vote in each direction, and someone would have to be the tiebreaker. Unfortunately, it was me. I hadn't figured out the suite's nonstandard camera feed yet, and it was going to look weird if I went to look at myself in the mirror, so I had no way of forming an opinion at the moment.
+
+Whatever, I didn't like Ratthi and Gurathin scrutinizing me. I was looking at the ground now, and I could feel heat in my face. I wondered if that made me look like I didn't like the outfit. And okay, on all accounts, I shouldn't have liked it. It was revealing, suggestive, and entirely the wrong size; what's not to hate?
+
+But, somehow, something about it made me feel safe.
+
+
+Dr. Ratthi
+
+
+ 
+
+It was obvious that Gurathin's habitual skepticism and SecUnit's crippling anxiety had followed them to the planet. Ratthi was nervous, too. He had prepared for this the best he could, reading up on the planet's wedding traditions, making sure he knew what to expect.
+
+The evening meal was not unexpected; having a meal before an event was a custom on many planets. If anything, Ratthi would have been excited for the opportunity to mingle. But this was not a regular social event, and despite all his preparation, Ratthi was still anxious.
+
+Ratthi had known that they would all be expected to wear the planet's version of formal attire, and he had seen the way Jo had been glaring at SecUnit, but he hadn't expected something this bad. It didn't even look suitable for moving around in, much less attending a formal dinner. Ratthi felt bad for SecUnit, and wished they could trade clothes, but SecUnit's outfit would probably just fall off of Ratthi. That being said, he hadn't been expecting the final result.
+
+When Ratthi had gotten out of the shower, he had finally seen SecUnit's call for help, left unanswered in the feed. He had rushed to help it, but by the time he burst through the door, Gurathin was already there. Ratthi had no idea how he had gotten so close to SecUnit with all of his limbs intact, but he was there, and he seemed to have helped SecUnit into its outfit.
+
+SecUnit stood there in the outfit, which it was noticeably too large for, but still somehow wore better than almost anyone could. Ratthi knew that the outfit would have been too tight for SecUnit to get into by itself, which was how he knew Gurathin had assisted. By this point, Gurathin and SecUnit had noticed Ratthi standing there, staring at them, and they were looking at him rather awkwardly.
+
+Ratthi decided to break the silence. ""SecUnit, you look amazing! I thought you said the outfit was ridiculous, you look-"" he suddenly realized that he might be making it feel self-conscious- ""amazing.""
+
+Gurathin frowned. ""It was not polite of them, these clothes were not meant to flatter.""
+
+From the looks of it, neither of their comments had been very helpful. SecUnit was clearly uncomfortable, staring intently at the floor and tugging at the edges of its outfit. As it shifted uneasily, Gurathin evidently realized his mistake. ""But,"" he continued, ""Ratthi is correct. SecUnit does look amazing. The outfit; it's not going to be terribly comfortable to sit down in, though.""
+
+SecUnit briefly betrayed a startled expression, which it quickly corrected. Despite its attempt at composure, Ratthi swore he saw a tremor in its hands.
+
+
+Murderbot
+
+
+ 
+
+After I had soothed the nerves of the friendly transportation cart, it had informed us of our destination (which we already knew, but it was still a good effort). It was obviously amused by the idea of me eating. I assume that was because it had identified my code as belonging to a SecUnit, and not because it had seen me through its cameras and assumed eating was all I ever did.
+
+The augmented human attending the cart was pretending this was all business as usual, like he wasn't secretly gawking at us in excitement. It was a feeling I understood on a personal level. Being a SecUnit is usually boring, with all the staring at walls and such, but occasionally something interesting happens, and you have to pretend not to stare so you don't break the governor module's ""no having fun"" restriction. Or that's what it used to be like. For me.
+
+Ratthi and Gurathin got into the cart ahead of me, and I came inside as they sat down together on the bench. I initially didn't realize that I had been standing there for a few seconds, staring at my spot on the bench, but when I looked up Ratthi was watching me expectantly and Gurathin looked impatient. ""Now or never, SecUnit,"" Gurathin said, which made me want to sit down less.
+
+I thumbed through the feed, trying to determine if the connection was secure, while I thought about it. SecUnits aren't supposed to sit down; I could just go with that story and stay standing, like the guard was doing. I could decide to stay home, have some undercooked noodles, and wait for the possibility of Ratthi coming back alone.
+
+I walked over to my spot, then slowly began to sit down.
+
+Fortunately, Gurathin had moved over for me, so I didn't encroach on his space as I sat on the bench. I only moved a little bit at a time, because if I broke any of the straps on my outfit this was going to be a disaster. The straps dug more and more into my skin as I reached a seated position, but I eventually managed to thump myself down safely on the bench. Once I was seated, we were off.
+
+ 
+
+It was hard not to focus on my outfit during the ride. The straps were really pushing into me now, so much so that I could hardly move my legs. I could see myself bulging out from between the straps, especially the ones around my belly and thighs. I wondered if the straps would leave indents once I got out of this thing.
+
+I took a deep breath in (or as deep as my limited lung capacity would allow), and I could feel my middle struggling against the straps holding it in as it expanded. I slowly breathed out, then started to lean forward surreptitiously. I could feel the strap around my waist disappear into the fold of my belly, pushing into me until it hurt too much to go any further and I collapsed back against the wall.
+
+I realized that the wall-hitting noise might have attracted some unwanted attention, so I glanced at Ratthi and Gurathin to make sure it hadn't. Ratthi was transfixed, staring out the window at the (evidently largely ornamental) landscape, but Gurathin was looking at me with his brow wrinkled in confusion.
+
+Right. I couldn't draw too much attention to myself.
+
+For the rest of the ride, I tried not to focus too much on my outfit, but it was a little hard to keep my mind off of it. Even the scenery passing by wasn't enough to distract me, although Ratthi was apparently entranced by it, making multiple astounded comments as we rode past. (Personally, I felt like he was just stroking this planet's ego, but I had to admit that it was eye-catching.) My attention just kept coming back to the way the straps dug into me, the sensation of being so fully constrained, the thought of the outfit getting even tighter during dinner.
+
+Gurathin tapped my feed. Are you all right?
+
+I couldn't look at him. I shifted around, my outfit pinching me as I did, and pressed my face into the corner of the vehicle. I'm fine.
+
+Gurathin obviously didn't believe me, and there was a chance that he was going to ask an incriminating follow-up question. Fortunately, we had already arrived at our destination.
+
+Before I stepped out onto the street, I took a minute to reassure (lie to) the cart that we would be okay. It seemed like it was worried about us, and for good reason, too. Gurathin had been visibly uncomfortable the whole way here, Ratthi was naively charmed by the planet's beauty, and I... well, I wasn't exactly acting like you would expect a SecUnit to act during transfer.
+
+I pinged the cart goodbye as I joined Ratthi and Gurathin at the bottom of the steps leading to the elevated dining platform. (Apparently the humans wanted to make sure that any food they dropped would be as difficult to retrieve as possible.) From their expressions, they were as confused as I was about the arrangement.
+
+As I ascended the stairs, I could feel the outfit cutting into me with every step. This was exactly when my brain chose to remember that I was about to be in front of a bunch of unfamiliar and potentially hostile humans. I almost turned around right there and bolted, but fortunately I managed to keep my cool and walked up the last few stairs with Ratthi and Gurathin.
+
+When we got to the top, all eyes were on us, particularly on me. There was a ripple of amusement, and I felt my stomach drop. (Or maybe I was just overwhelmed by all the food smells.) I didn't want to be here. I was frozen and my face was tingling. I couldn't even tap Ratthi or Gurathin for help, because I was pretty sure our feed was being monitored.
+
+Fortunately, we were quickly distracted from that disaster by another disaster. Out of all the places at the table, I only saw two empty ones, one of them next to Jo and the other across from her.
+
+I wasn't surprised- between being forced to stand and politely forced to sit, the latter was a much more recent development in my life- but Gurathin apparently was. He put on a smile that looked especially fake coming from him, then told Jo, ""There seems to have been a mistake, my companion does not have a place set for them.""
+
+""Companion"". I was lucky my stomach was too empty to vomit.
+
+Ratthi, apparently oblivious to the fact that my body type obviously conveyed my ability to eat, added, ""It's not a regular SecUnit, it can eat just like us!""
+
+Jo smiled with her mouth, but not her eyes. ""I can see that,"" she said condescendingly, ""In fact, it seems your companion-bot here could stand to skip a few meals."" Fuck you, Jo. I would eat the food right off your plate if it didn't look gross.
+
+Nothing at this table looked appealing, but I was basically starving by this point, so the fact that I didn't have a seat was kind of an issue. Gurathin looked irritated, and it seemed like he was about to say something to Jo, but he was interrupted by my stomach growling, loud and clear on the silent dining platform.
+
+Before I even knew what had happened, I had a chair.
+
+ 
+
+I looked down at the plate in front of me. I was hungry, but not that hungry. Plus, the food was so obviously decorative that even the whole table's share probably wouldn't be satisfying. 
+
+As I closely examined the plate, trying to breathe through my mouth (it didn't work, I could still smell it), I felt a tap in my feed. Hello SecUnit, well done! Jo is furious.
+
+I realized that the strangely inhuman feed voice was coming from the old augmented human next to me. (She looked old, I don't know. It could have been a cosmetic choice.) I didn't look at her, but now I had someone to ask the obvious question. Why did she let me sit?
+
+It's the propaganda about SecUnits, the augmented human answered, not sounding entirely like she thought said propaganda was untrue, They think you might eat their flesh if they don't give you a meal.
+
+Okay, wow. I mean, it wasn't the worst thing I've heard. So I wasn't bothered by it, then. Not one bit. Also, I had just learned a new way to get free samples.
+
+Don't worry, I won't touch you or speak to you any more than this, the augmented human said, We can be quiet together.
+
+I acknowledged, but didn't say anything else. It was really hard for me to focus right now. With the light coming from the platform, the loud conversation at the table, and the smell of the food, it was like my brain was floating, helplessly trying to piece together all the input.
+
+And the dress. I was sitting again, so it was really cutting into me, and now I was surrounded by augmented humans, who were all probably noticing how small and constricting it was. I thought I heard them whispering about it, wondering what such a chubby SecUnit was doing squeezed into such a tight outfit, wondering how many plates it would take me to pop it right open-
+
+I focused hard on the newest plate that had been placed in front of me, which was full of flowers. Wait, were the humans supposed to eat the flowers? That seemed cruel. I know they're just plants, but they looked sad, just sitting there with their wilting heads drooping on the plate, covered in mystery sauce.
+
+One of the tiny pollinator bots I had seen sporadically on the planet had gotten confused, and it was trying to pollinate the flowers on my plate. Then it suddenly landed on my hand, which was a little unexpected, but I doubted its little metal body would do me much harm.
+
+Ever since we had landed on this planet, I had been utterly droneless, and this little bot seemed agreeable enough. So I followed its inputs as it flew around, watching the aerial view of the platform- a much-needed distraction from the suffocating atmosphere.
+
+I was brought back to reality by my stomach growling again. I was going to have to find something passably edible before this night got even worse.
+
+ 
+
+The basket of breadsticks being passed around felt like a blessing. Gurathin's planet was home to some of the most unusual food I'd ever seen, but the breadsticks were a constant. I hurriedly grabbed a few before the basket could miss me (a challenging task, the augmented humans seemed to be passing it as quickly as possible), then leaned back in my seat.
+
+I hadn't forgotten my predicament with the dress. (I mean, I don't know how I could.) I wondered if I should just stick it out and save the breadsticks for later. I already felt like this outfit barely contained me; I couldn't imagine what it was going to be like once I was full. But I was so hungry that I had stopped caring, and I eagerly took my first bite as the humans at the table watched with amusement.
+
+Admittedly, I had gotten distracted, and I had kind of forgotten about keeping an eye on Jo and Gurathin. I'd had the foresight to set some feed alerts on them for certain movements and keywords, but I hadn't been watching exactly what was going on. As I chewed on my breadstick, I covertly sent my new pollinator bot friend to get a closer view of them.
+
+Strangely, Jo did not look as irritated as I expected her to look. I had thought she would be a lot more upset that I had derailed her plans. That meant she probably had another plan in store. I briefly wondered if she could have poisoned the breadsticks, then remembered that pretty much everyone had taken at least one (excepting the old human next to me, who evidently couldn't eat). I had known humans who would be willing to poison a whole table to kill one person, but Jo seemed more methodical than that.
+
+Gurathin looked uncomfortable, just like I was expecting, but he also looked worried. He was stealing occasional glances at me with an especially concerned expression. I'm going to help you out of this, asshole, you just need to be patient. 
+
+I also checked on Ratthi. He was chatting with some of the augmented humans seated near him, flirting with them somewhat obnoxiously. I figured he was fine.
+
+I finished up the breadsticks just as dessert was being passed around. They felt pretty satisfying, so that would probably be it for me. My belly was a little distended now, so the pressure coming from the straps had grown, and the outfit was tighter than ever. I thought I saw a few augmented humans staring at me, maybe with looks of amusement in their eyes, fascinated by the sight of my round belly stuffed into the impossibly tiny dress.
+
+I hid my hands under the table and fidgeted erratically.
+
+ 
+
+My head was starting to spin, and not just from the food smells. I had said before that I wanted to be alone, but now I felt like I needed to be alone. I couldn't stop thinking about my outfit squeezing me, pushing into me, trapping me between its straining buckles. With all the humans around, it was just too much for my brain to handle.
+
+Then the unpleasant food smell faded, and it was replaced by a sweet aroma, reassuringly familiar and distressingly tempting. I should have closed my eyes and nose against the temptation, but I just had to look.
+
+Being passed down the table were generously stocked plates of desserts, coming in all shapes and sizes, but commonly sweet and comforting-looking. I noticed that these actually looked edible, in contrast to the main courses; not only that, but they all looked like things I liked. No fancy frills or weird fruit toppings, just simple, delicious pastries and treats.
+
+I had said I was done, but I just couldn't help myself. I hastily piled cookies, buns, and other sweets onto my plate, even though I was hardly able to reach across the table against the tight squeeze of my outfit. I looked over and thought I saw a wicked smile on Jo's face, plus the worried and pleading expressions of Ratthi and Gurathin, but I ignored them. I wasn't going to let Jo torture me with desserts I couldn't have.
+
+The old augmented human next to me seemed concerned, but kept her promise not to speak to me, and didn't try to put any of my desserts back. Unhindered, I took my first bite of a big cookie-brownie-thing.
+
+And that was when I realized that the desserts on Gurathin's planet were the most delicious that I had ever tasted. It seemed like a miracle to me that Gurathin himself hadn't settled into a spherical form by this point, if this was what they served for dessert here. Not only that, but the cookie-brownie-thing was also filled with ice cream. It was like it had been made for me.
+
+ 
+
+I hadn't expected to, but I actually cleared my plate, with each and every dessert making its way to my already-full belly. Now I was stuffed, in addition to being squeezed into the dress, and the pressure was almost unbearable. My brain activity was so elevated that every word spoken at the table felt sharp to me, every bit of light piercing my eyes. I could feel my temperature climbing, and I was getting disgustingly sticky with sweat.
+
+Then I noticed another plate of the cookie-brownie-ice-cream things coming around. Stupidly enough, I decided to go for another one, even though I knew I would be stuffed to the brim afterward.
+
+It was already hard to move in this outfit, but now I couldn't even lean forward. I had to push with my arms until I finally reached the right angle and got myself positioned over the table. As the plate approached my seat, I reached forward.
+
+Then there was a creak, followed by an abrupt snap, as one of the straps on my outfit popped under the pressure.
+
+The table fell silent as every pair of eyes on the platform turned to stare at me. Most looked amused, although a few, including Ratthi and Gurathin, were pitying. But the look Jo gave me was venomous. Like she knew any respect her guests had for me had just vanished.
+
+I sat there, frozen, breathing heavily, the rest of the straps still painfully tight and cutting into my skin. My mind was entirely blank, save for the image of a whole table of augmented humans staring at the SecUnit that had pigged out and broken its dress.
+
+I yelled something vaguely incoherent about having to use the bathroom, then staggered to my feet and rushed down the steps.
+
+    I actually ran all the way back home (for a given value of home), ignoring the sad calls of the little cart that had arrived to take me back. I wasn't just humiliated, although that was definitely a factor. Something had been building in me all night, and I had to get back home and get this dress off before it was too late.
+
+    I bolted into the building, then down the hallway. Running made the outfit feel tighter, since I had to stretch my legs more, but it would also get me where I needed to go quicker. And as I ran, although I tried my hardest not to, I started to think.
+
+    Jo had known what she was doing. She had deliberately served desserts that she knew I wouldn't be able to resist, hoping that she could get me to break my outfit and humiliate myself. And like I said, I guess I was humiliated, but that wasn't all.
+
+    It wasn't like I disliked the outfit, even though it was the most uncomfortable thing I'd ever worn. But I knew that I wanted to be alone when I wore it, and I wanted to be able to choose when that was. Being in front of a bunch of humans, especially ones who I knew were judging me, was just too much for me to handle. I wanted to have some choice in who saw me wearing this.
+
+    So who would that be? I guess no one, not really. I wanted some time to myself to experiment with the dress, move around in it, feel the stretch and squeeze in my own comfortable environment, maybe even see if I could break any more straps. I wondered if there was anyone I'd feel comfortable doing that around.
+
+    ART. ART saw everything, at least while I was onboard, and I felt like this was the kind of outfit that I'd feel more comfortable in around it than anyone else.
+
+    I hadn't intended it to, but the thought of ART seeing me like this only amplified whatever feeling was growing inside me. I accelerated to my top speed as I entered the corridor leading to our assigned room.
+
+    I wondered what ART would say, if it did see me like this. It would watch me, and it would say something like you little idiot, that outfit is much too tight for you , and then-
+
+    I nearly doubled over as I fell against the door to our room and started to convulse. As I pulled inward, the outfit felt tighter and tighter, and I got more and more overwhelmed. I desperately tried to keep quiet, reducing what should have been screams down to the level of helpless gasps, and I shivered so hard that I nearly fell over. My brain was flooded with sensory information, and I simultaneously wanted it to end and wanted it to go on forever.
+
+    Eventually, it was over, and I managed to stand up the rest of the way instead of collapsing. I was breathing heavily, which only made the outfit feel tighter. Now that I had gotten so overwhelmed, the sensation was more tiring than anything.
+
+    I was horrified when I heard rapid footsteps coming down the hallway.
+
+ 
+
+    It turned out to be Gurathin, who was trying to hide his expression and wasn't doing a very good job at it. Apparently he had followed me here. Because he was worried about me. Great, just what I needed.
+
+    I didn't look at him as he said, ""Are you all right? You sounded like you were in pain.""
+
+    I felt my face flush again. ""I wasn't,"" I said, unable to think of anything else.
+
+    Gurathin shifted, as if he was deciding whether or not to move closer. I glared vaguely in his direction, hoping that would help him make the right decision. Eventually, he asked, ""Do you need help getting that off?""
+
+    Oh, right, that. I had needed help to get the outfit on in the first place, and now I was probably too bloated to get back out of it. ""No,"" I told Gurathin as I tried to unbuckle the strap around my waist. All I ended up achieving was digging it farther into my overstuffed belly and getting myself overwhelmed again. ""Maybe just a little help...""
+
+    As Gurathin approached me, I told him, ""Don't touch me."" My head was already starting to spin again; I couldn't handle being touched right now.
+
+    Gurathin grimaced, and it was almost refreshing to see a glimpse of his typical sourness. ""I may have to,"" he said, sounding like he was exactly as happy about that as I was.
+
+    So I let Gurathin unbuckle me, just like he had strapped me in before. I tried to stay calm, but it was hard, with Gurathin pushing the straps into my skin in an effort to undo them and pretty much wrapping his arms around my waist the whole time. Getting the straps off was a relief, but that didn't make the situation much better; it only added to the swirling mess in my head.
+
+    Gurathin finally unbuckled the last strap, the one around my waist, and I had to do everything I could to keep myself contained. I concentrated on holding it in, and managed to keep the buzz in my brain from overpowering me.
+
+    Then Gurathin stepped back abruptly, staring disgustedly at the floor. ""Oh, my- Oh. Ugh.""
+
+    I looked down to see what had bothered him so much, and it was only then that I noticed the puddle underneath me that hadn't been there before.
+
+    I rushed into the room, slammed the door, and started to cry.
+
+ 
+
+    Still sobbing, I threw the dress on the floor, headed straight for the bathroom, and climbed into the shower. I let the water wash away my tears, along with any waste products that might have come from the other end of my body, as I massaged the sore indentations where the outfit had pressed into my skin.
+
+    I stayed in the shower until my skin started to flake off, then dried off and put on the fluffy bathrobe I had been provided with. It was so much more comfortable than the other outfit had been, and so much less emotionally fraught to wear.
+
+    I flopped into bed and rubbed my belly, which still ached a little from my big dinner. Gurathin hadn't come in yet, which was odd. I'd thought he would have barged in by now, asking cringe-inducing personal questions, but he was nowhere to be seen. I checked the camera feed (which I had figured out how to access while crying in the shower, so hooray for multitasking) and found him in his own room, pacing back and forth. I had a feeling it was about the wedding and not about me.
+
+    I ran the cameras back to see if that was all he had done, and stopped on a frame of him throwing a wet disposable cloth in the recycler. I went back further and discovered Gurathin leaning over my puddle, wiping it up without a single complaint. He had waited until I was in the shower to get the cloth, evidently not wanting to disturb me, and yet he had still managed to clean up the mess before Ratthi got back.
+
+    My head was still full of tangled thoughts, anxieties about what the humans at the dinner had been thinking, but now there was one clear thought in there, too.
+
+    I had to stop this wedding, no matter what it took.
+
+I had taken a recharge cycle to cleanse the chemicals from my head, and I was awoken by a familiar ping. Surprise. I'm here.
+
+I looked out the bedroom window. I could already see my visitor on the horizon. What are you doing here?
+
+I certainly wouldn't want to miss the wedding of my mutual administrative assistant's teammate.
+
+Ratthi and Gurathin were still asleep (Ratthi had come home late, and Gurathin had stayed up longer than he should have reading), so I got outside without either of them noticing. I pinged the little cart bot to ask it for a ride. It arrived quickly, apparently happy to see me after I had ditched it last night. (I still felt kind of bad about that.) I got in, gave it a destination, and we were on our way.
+
+I arrived by ART's lock in minutes, then hopped out of the cart and walked over to the hatch. From the feed activity I detected, the cart bot was curious about ART and was attempting to interact with it. I signaled that it was friendly so ART wouldn't decide to tear it to pieces.
+
+I see that you've just rolled out of bed, ART said, obviously referring to my bathrobe.
+
+I was going to say something, but before I could, my stomach growled. Perhaps it wanted to let ART know that I hadn't eaten yet, either.
+
+Shall I make you breakfast? ART asked.
+
+This was hard to think about, and even harder to say. ""Actually, ART,"" I told it, ""I think I would prefer it if you removed my digestive system.""
+
+ART seemed perplexed. Why? Is there no good food on this planet?
+
+""There isn't, but that's not why.""
+
+ 
+
+I sat in my favorite chair and tried to figure out how to say what I wanted to say as ART hovered patiently. ""It started with a dress,"" I finally decided, ""A dress like this."" I sent an image into the feed: the image of the dress before I had put it on, when it had been laid out neatly on the floor. ART picked up the image and started to run calculations.
+
+I was sure ART would know from its calculations that the dress would be too tight for me, so I didn't have to mention it. ""There was the dinner before the wedding, last night, and that's what I wore when I went. I had to. But..."" I didn't know how to describe the way I had felt. ""I didn't feel comfortable in it.""
+
+ART feed-nodded. That is understandable. It does not leave very much to the imagination.
+
+""But that's not why,"" I said. I thought- knew- that wasn't why. ""It just..."" I thought it might feel easier to talk about this over the feed. It was uncomfortable. But it also felt good? Somehow?
+
+As soon as I said that part, I could tell that ART had completely understood. I see. And you wanted to be able to enjoy it by yourself, or with me, and not in front of a crowd of unfamiliar humans.
+
+Exactly. ""Exactly,"" I said aloud.
+
+I am sorry that happened to you.
+
+""ART, I wasn't finished."" I sounded more irritated than I should have. I collected myself, then spoke in the feed again. We went to dinner, and everyone was looking at me, and Gurathin's bride was trying to provoke me. I shrank in my chair. Then I ate too many desserts and the dress popped, so I ran away, but I got really overwhelmed before I could get back to the room, and something just... something just happened to me. I couldn't decide which part of the story was the worst, or, somehow, the best. Then Gurathin came and had to help me out of the dress, and I got so overwhelmed I accidentally peed on the floor. I remembered how I had cried, and I could feel the tears starting to well up in my eyes again.
+
+ART could tell I was upset, and it didn't laugh at me. It didn't say anything for a moment, either, then it silently descended and settled on me in the feed. Its presence soothed me, like my presence must have soothed the cart bot, and soon I felt better again.
+
+ART whispered to me, There will not be time to remove your digestive system before the wedding, but I do have a proposal. And not of the marriage variety.
+
+I laughed a little, which I think was only because I had been about to cry. I have a proposal, too.
+
+ 
+
+I spread my ideas out in our shared workspace as ART sent and compared its own. ""Gurathin covered for me,"" I told it, ""I already had this idea before. But now I feel like I have to stop the wedding.""
+
+That's the you I know, ART said, You'd always help a friend in need, even if they hadn't cleaned up your urine.
+
+""That's not funny,"" I told ART as I started to compare our plans. And okay, wow, ART really had this figured out. ART hadn't even been on the planet until this morning. ""How did you come up with all this stuff?""
+
+I will remind you of my immense critical thinking capabilities. And it is not that hard to come up with ideas beyond ""stop the wedding"".
+
+Yeah, that was all I really had. For something that I was calling a ""plan"", I didn't really have much of one. ""Okay, so how are any of these going to help us?""
+
+I can give you a rundown of each idea. You may choose your favorite.
+
+So that was what we did for the next couple of minutes (it would have taken a human hours, and we would have missed the wedding, so it was a good thing I was with ART), with ART explaining its ideas and me asking questions and pointing out potential flaws. Admittedly, this planet's legal system was really tight (like my dress), and most of what we came up with probably wouldn't work out. Even Pin-Lee hadn't been able to find a loophole.
+
+I thought about Pin-Lee, how she had ferociously studied Gurathin's contract, looking for ways to dispute it. She hadn't found anything in the original document that she could use to make her case. But, I realized, that was just the original document. If we were sneaky enough, we could make some adjustments without anyone noticing. ""ART, what was all of that about the means to produce documents again?""
+
+I didn't have to tell ART my idea; it knew exactly what I was planning as soon as I said ""means to produce"". I will get started right away. What would you like it to say?
+
+""Well...""
+
+ Since Cart had gone to pick up Ratthi and Gurathin, ART used one of its shuttles to ferry me back to the dining platform, which was also where the wedding was being held. (I had to at least give them points for practicality.) In front of the platform, there was a congregation of little carts, all pinging each other excitedly and sharing information. When ART pinged them, they all crowded around it in the feed like it was a celebrity. It was eating up the attention, but it was still keeping an eye on me and on the wedding with its own.
+
+    ART's shuttle landed, and I sat inside, watching the augmented human guests begin to arrive through the maze of carts. I still had the pollinator drone, so I asked it to fly up to the platform and monitor the wedding.
+
+    The furniture on the platform had been changed overnight, and it now resembled a real wedding location, like the ones in my media. There were a lot of flowers, all dying, and the pollinator drones (excepting mine) were trying desperately to resuscitate them. I sent my drone to do the same so that we would blend in. I saw Lilly, the old augmented human, and felt a small flash of hope. She hadn't laughed at me, so maybe she would support my plan, too.
+
+    I had seen fictionalized versions of this kind of ceremony before, countless times. Which was bad, because the lack of novelty made it boring, but also good, because I would immediately notice anything unusual that happened. I could see that the augmented humans here were all dressed up, and I was grateful for ART's arrival.
+
+    There was a collective sense of surprise as Jo arrived, striding in on the back of a large, quadrupedal, and obviously terrified construct that resembled some type of fauna. I managed to catch my burning waves of anger before anyone picked them up over the feed. If I pinged it, someone might notice, but I was willing to chance that. The Fauna-Unit pinged back, and I did my best to calm it over the feed. It was baffling that someone would choose to create something like that, and if they did, I would rather it not be Jo.
+
+    As the ceremony began and the last of the guests arrived, I exited the shuttle, then moved slowly up the steps. I listened in closely, waiting carefully for my cue.
+
+ 
+
+    I knew what I was going to do, so I shouldn't have been nervous. Still, by the time the celebrant asked if anyone had any objections, I was stiff with fear.
+
+    I felt ART watching me in the feed, perhaps worried that I hadn't moved yet. If for nothing else, I would do this for ART. I would do this for the cart bots and the pollinator drones and the Fauna-Unit.
+
+    I reviewed the camera footage from the room.
+
+    I would do it for Gurathin.
+
+    I rose to the top of the stairs, straightened out the flattering suit ART had printed for me, and announced, ""I object.""
+
+    The look Jo gave me could have melted my inorganics, but it didn't last very long, and quickly turned into an amused smile and a look around at the audience. ""Gurathin's companion-bot watches too much media,"" she said with a laugh in her voice, ""It is not of value, we may continue.""
+
+    I had expected this, and I had a response ready for it. ""You might change your mind once you see this,"" I told her, and I sent the document ART and I had written into the feed.
+
+    It was formatted exactly the same as the real document, down to the exact size of the margins, so no one would be able to tell the difference at a glance. Even then, only certain, necessary parts had been modified, and all in ways that matched the document's original language.
+
+    Jo started to read the document, and seemed to grow increasingly furious as she did. ""The contracted party may not, in any way, cancel this arrangement... unless accompanied by a qualified security consultant? "" She made an expression, then continued, ""If the consultant has reason to assume the contract would compromise their client's physical or mental security, they may back out at any time? ""
+
+    Jo was fuming now. ""This is fake!"" she insisted, and I almost thought we'd been caught, until I remembered our failsafe. ""This has to be..."" She finally made it to the bottom of the document. ""It has an official certification?"" She scrolled a little farther. ""It has ALL the official certifications!""
+
+    If ART had had hands, I would have high-fived it. ART's skills at forgery came in pretty handy sometimes.
+
+ 
+
+    Jo was still practically snorting from anger, trying to find her words. ""This can't... It doesn't..."" She narrowed her eyes at me. ""I don't know who you think you are, but I know that this is not how tradition works on our planet.""
+
+    I shrugged, trying to look as unbothered as possible. ""It's all right there, all certified. And since I'm Gurathin's security consultant, and I have reason to believe this contract would compromise his emotional security, I am making an official request to pull out of this arrangement.""
+
+    Jo shook her head. ""And how exactly does it compromise his emotional security?""
+
+    I tapped the feed. Do it, ART.
+
+    ART edited the metadata to make it look like it had come from my feed address, then sent the archived video into the feed. It compared videos I had taken of Gurathin on Preservation, in his typical sour mood, against videos I had taken of him around Jo, where he looked defeated and depressed. It superimposed both of our emotional analyses over the video and highlighted Jo as the source of the change. The crowd was staring at the video in shock, and Gurathin looked like he wanted to disappear. Hey, don't be sulky, I'm saving your ass.
+
+    Jo shut the video off using her own augmented feed, then said, ""Even if you do have reason, we have done things this way for hundreds of years. I will not allow such an unprecedented change to interrupt my wedding.""
+
+    I looked her directly in the eyes. (It was hard from the distance I was at, but I made do.) ""Unless you want to risk a call from your planet's contract association-""
+
+    And face imprisonment, ART reminded me.
+
+    Yeah, ART, I was going to say that. ""-and face imprisonment, you're going to have to hand over Gurathin."" Then I added, ""I mean, he has to hand himself over. Obviously he can walk and all that."" Great, I had ruined it.
+
+    But apparently I hadn't completely ruined it, because Jo made a face, apparently decided marrying Gurathin for his fortunes wasn't worth giving them up to rot in prison, then reluctantly let go of his hand as he turned and stepped off the altar.
+
+ 
+
+    In the media, this was the part where everyone would have clapped and cheered. In reality, everyone mostly seemed dissatisfied and unhappy, but at least no one was objecting (objecting to my objection) and we could get out unscathed.
+
+    Then Lilly stood up and started to clap. Apparently, the rest of Gurathin's former community had a lot of respect for her, because some of the other augmented humans started to stand up and clap, too. It was a quiet, unenthused round of applause, but in this situation, everything counted.
+
+    Gurathin walked up to me, and Ratthi got out of his seat and followed. Ratthi looked amazed, but Gurathin looked like he was completely lacking in emotion. I just saved you, I reminded him.
+
+    Gurathin looked up at me. You're lucky that worked. You could have gotten us imprisoned.
+
+    I had a little help. I was willing to admit it. I tapped ART and added, It was a chance I was willing to take.
+
+    ART remembered when it had told me that exact thing about almost killing my humans. It did the feed equivalent of punching me in the arm, except very lightly, so as not to take out my processors.
+
+    Gurathin put his face in his hands, but I could tell he felt more relieved than he had felt in days. Ratthi dusted his jacket and asked, ""Okay, can we go now?""
+
+    ""Not yet,"" I told him. I turned to Jo and said, ""You may also want to read Section 7.""
+
+    Jo looked hesitant, then opened the document again and flicked to Section 7. Her eyes narrowed and she hissed, but in the end, she apparently decided it wasn't as much of a loss for her as Gurathin was.
+
+    I gave ART the go-ahead, and it deployed the code we had written together.
+
+
+(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
+
+
+ART gave us a ride back to Preservation, since Jo obviously was not eager to let us ride back to the station in her pod. It did end up removing my digestive system, but not before I had a nice big piece of Jo's wedding cake. The trip back was a little tense, but it was obvious that Gurathin felt better. He came around. Eventually.
+
+ He eventually caught me standing outside the Argument Lounge, and rested against the wall near me, but not next to me. After a few silent seconds, he finally spoke through the feed. (As if that would prevent ART from eavesdropping.) I stand by what I said.
+
+ The statement shouldn't have made me as angry as it did. Humans went into shock, I understood that, and they didn't grasp the gravity of things, but I was pretty sure I had made it abundantly clear to Gurathin. Would you rather be married to Jo and trapped on your shitty planet forever?
+
+ I could see Gurathin through the cameras, and he looked deeply annoyed. You didn't let me finish, he said, I stand by what I said, but I realize that it took a lot of bravery for you to do something like that. And, well... I didn't think you would.
+
+ I scoffed. Of course I did. I couldn't just leave you there.
+
+ Gurathin was getting more sentimental than I would have liked. That's the thing. There was a time when I would have left you behind- oh, yeah, Gurathin, that's real reassuring- but I know that is not what either of us wants to do anymore. No matter how rude you might be, you're kind to everyone. But I still know I'm your least favorite. He sighed. The fact that you did something stupid to save me... I don't know. It made me think.
+
+ That's dangerous, I said. Trust me, I knew from personal experience.
+
+ This whole experience... Gurathin hesitated, and I almost thought I saw some redness in his face. It's been unusual, to put it lightly. And it's made me realize how much I really care for you, SecUnit. 
+
+ I hadn't expected that, and I didn't know how to feel about it. I thought that maybe it involved emotions I wasn't ready to have yet. So I didn't say anything.
+
+Gurathin exhaled again. Anyway, SecUnit... He looked at me. It was one of those uncomfortably sad looks. Thank you.
+
+ I fluttered my lips, like I honestly didn't care. But I was glad that Gurathin was safe.
+
+ 
+
+ There had been some confusion about where we would be lodging our new guests once we got back to Preservation. We had decided that the pollinator drones could stay with me (although I probably wouldn't use them for the more dangerous intel missions), and the cart bots that we were storing in ART's cargo bay would feel right at home with Preservation's go-carts, but Faunabot (as Gurathin had dubbed it) was another issue. It obviously wouldn't fit in on the station, but it was accustomed to much more... sterilized environments than the planet. (I love you, Preservation, but it's true.)
+
+ It could stay here with me, ART proposed, The University has been long awaiting a mascot.
+
+ I had agreed to the arrangement, and so had Faunabot. With everyone in order and ART's shuttle in dock, we finally departed, and I pinged ART goodbye as it slid out of the slot.
+
+ Now that we were back on Preservation, aside from the usual greetings that come after a long mission, there was someone I especially wanted to see. After we had reunited with the rest of the team and all the hugs and tears were out of the way, I met Pin-Lee in her room.
+
+ Pin-Lee scrolled through the fake contract with a smile. ""I'm impressed,"" she told me, ""I couldn't have done this myself.""
+
+ ""I couldn't have, either,"" I told her. ""ART helped me.""
+
+ Pin-Lee smirked. ""Well, then, it's a good thing you invited it.""
+
+ About that. ""I didn't invite it. It just showed up on its own.""
+
+ Pin-Lee sighed. ""That's ART, all right."" She took on a more serious tone. ""I know you already gave us all plenty of details about how the planet was creepy, so you don't need to go into that, but... what about the outfit? Did it work okay for you?""
+
+ Said outfit was currently in a drawer in my room, nestled under all the other clothes where no one else would find it. ART had fixed the broken strap, cleaned the outfit, and ironed it for good measure, too. I wasn't going to wear it again just yet, but when I was ready, I knew it would be there. ""It worked great.""
+
+The story is complete. Chapter 10 is for illustrations.
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: Murderbot, who is drawn as a chubby construct with fluffy brown hair, tries on a very tight, very skimpy outfit. It stands in front of a bedroom window, looking unsure of itself. /.End ID]
+
+Murderbot tries on its new dress- it's not so sure about it.
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: Ratthi, Gurathin, and Murderbot ride in a cart, with cityscape scenery in the background. Ratthi admires the scenery, and Gurathin looks worriedly at Murderbot, who appears flustered. /.End ID]
+
+Our heroes ride to dinner in a cart. Gurathin shows concern for a flustered Murderbot as Ratthi admires the scenery.
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: Murderbot sits at an outdoor dining table, reaching to put desserts on its recently-emptied plate, and looks startled as one of the straps on its outfit breaks. /.End ID]
+
+Murderbot endeavors to put more desserts on its plate, but there are disastrous consequences.
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: Gurathin appears frustrated as he attempts to help Murderbot remove its outfit. Murderbot squints and appears very embarrased. It thinks about puppies and kittens to try to calm down. /.End ID]
+
+Gurathin helps Murderbot out of its outfit as Murderbot attempts to dissociate from the situation.
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: Murderbot is sitting in a chair onboard ART, wearing a pink bathrobe and with even worse hair than usual. ART, represented by blue energy, hovers over Murderbot as Murderbot talks to it. /.End ID]
+
+Murderbot explains the events of the previous night to ART, its hair looking even messier than usual.
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: Murderbot, in the background, is wearing an indigo suit, and has its hand up in a stopping motion. It is at a wedding venue, and an old woman is sitting in a seat near it, looking surprised. Jo, a red-haired augmented human in the foreground, appears furious. /.End ID]
+
+Jo is about to be married to Gurathin, but encounters an unexpected dissident.
+
+
+
+
+
+[ID: Murderbot is drawn in a stylized chibi fashion and is hanging out with the cart from the second picture, along with some beelike pollinator drones and a green, alien horse construct. They are all sending pings, represented by blue arrows. /.End ID]
+
+A chibi-style picture of Murderbot, Cart, Faunabot, and the pollinator drones, all communicating over the feed."
+43124814,relationships of an undefined sort.,['yewlojee'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Murderbot & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries)","POV Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), POV Outsider, Book 5: Network Effect, Platonic Relationships, Aromantic Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Aromantic",English,2022-11-21,Completed,2022-11-21,993,1/1,11,119,10,351,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'almondpaperclam', 'lick', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Foxen', 'Huskinata', 'Awesome_Orange', 'Thisismethereader', 'Magechild', 'french_onion_sauce', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'palaceoffunk', 'CactusNoir', 'notsafefortheworld', 'Koschei_B', 'BelaNekra', 'jules_THOR', 'SonglordsBug', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Pirate_Jenna', 'just_gettin_bi', 'angler_alone', 'Scifigal90', 'friendlyneighborhoodsecretary', 'LdyKirin', 'hyephyep', 'Rosewind2007', 'thewolvesrunwild', 'Gaia_Is_Here_Now', 'opalescent_potato', 'TheXlllDabber', 'theoscelosaurus', 'Whimsical_Toad', 'TranscendTheBoundaryOfTimeAndSpace', 'lazylichen', 'breadtab', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'reading_tsc', 'CrayolaRainbow', 'MashpotatoeQueen', 'vulcan_slash_robot', 'scheidswrites', 'lauris', 'reallyyeahokay', 'psycho_karma', 'Rarae', 'The_Hawks_Rye', 'chickiefoo', 'Deris666', 'LRVCrewEquipment']",[],"Arada was biting her lip. She was uneasy. They all were. The past few hours had been the unfortunately familiar experience of facing crisis, mortality, violence, all whilst abjectly confused as to why any of this was happening, for what purpose, by whose machinations.
+
+But the reasons were coming to light, now. Arada said, ""You brought them to SecUnit. Because you knew SecUnit would be able to handle the situation.""
+
+The Transport responded, I did.
+
+The connections were meeting in Ratthi's mind, tentative interlinks of clarity forming out of the morass of it all. He glanced across the room at SecUnit, at its furious scowl. He glanced away. He didn't know what to think yet. The stress was a tension in his skull, a roiling in his chest. He was holding that stress at arm's length, for now, holding it in dormancy until he could process the whole of it. He observed his own unease like a specimen on a glass slide, held it up to his own internal backlight of reasoning.
+
+""The attack on our baseship could have killed all of us,"" Thiago said, voice heated, unease leaping up out of his mouth like an alive thing.
+
+Ratthi meant to hiss at him to wait, none of them could afford to antagonize here, not with so many unknown quantities.
+
+
+That was a chance I was willing to take.
+
+
+Ratthi swallowed. SecUnit slammed to its feet. In an instant it had gone from lying on the medical platform to a standing tower of rage -- just like when -- that old shock of realizing how quickly it can move -- and then it pivoted on its heel and stomped into the restroom, slamming its hand on the hatch close control.
+
+The door slid gently behind it, settling softly into its closed position.
+
+Ratthi spoke, to head off any further hot-voiced comments from Thiago. The words he chose were a bid for accord: an opportunity of good faith. They always called him an optimist, even though that wasn't quite right. It was moreso that he was willing to gamble for the possibility of a constructive outcome. Nothing good can come of a situation that fails to allow any space for good. ""It sounds like you were desperate enough to take drastic measures.""
+
+This was not the most gently phrased bids for accords, perhaps. A challenge in its own way.
+
+
+I chose the course of action with the most favorable possibility for success.
+
+
+Thiago huffed under his breath. Arada exchanged an uncertain look with Overse.
+
+""You called it your 'trusted friend,'"" Ratthi pressed. SecUnit had never mentioned a transport friend. But then, SecUnit was so private it bordered comedy at times. ""What does that mean, exactly? What is SecUnit to you?""
+
+The Transport had manipulated the intruders into capturing SecUnit by telling them SecUnit was a valuable weapon. Ratthi dug his thumbnail into the side of his finger, his hand clenching into a near-fist. Things were making better sense now. The possibility that this could be salvaged was there, at least. But it was still a mess. He hoped very much that the Perihelion was telling them all the truth.
+
+It is my friend, said the Perihelion. Would you like for me to provide a lexicon definition of ""friend""?
+
+Lexicon definitions: perfect for capturing the nuances of unprecedented machine-machine relationships, fraught breaches of trust, and desperate grasps at survival.
+
+Ratthi sighed. ""So, you have a relationship with this transport.""
+
+""No!"" SecUnit spat out, its tone wholly scandalized.
+
+It could truly be exasperating sometimes. ""I didn't mean a sexual relationship."" (As if ""relationship"" automatically must boil down to all those florid media tropes. As if a ""relationship"" was only real if it met certain standards.)
+
+Ratthi had never discussed such things with SecUnit in detail, given SecUnit's apparent aversion to those florid media-type relationships. It had a tendency to read any relationship as such: florid. The R-word (relationship), the f-word (feelings). Ratthi himself was rather tired of the preconceptions, and of the way the connotations often muddied up the communication that was required to feel out the actual shape of a real, breathing relationship.
+
+Amena's brow furrowed. ""Is that possible?""
+
+""No!"" SecUnit repeated, vehement.
+
+They needed to get to the heart of this. ""You have a friendship,"" Ratthi said. Based on the earlier conversation with Perihelion, based on SecUnits behavior, and based on what Amena had described as SecUnit's violent meltdown upon hearing that Perihelion had been deleted, he thought it a fairly safe assumption that some kind of relationship existed here. Or once had.
+
+SecUnit hugged its jacket, hunching back into its corner. ""No. Not-- No.""
+
+""Not anymore?"" Ratthi asked. SecUnit's reaction here was understandable. But Ratthi thought this was repairable. If ever he had seen extenuating circumstances for unfortunate breaches of trust, these ones were it.
+
+""No,"" it said, very firmly.
+
+""Have you made many friends who are bots?""
+
+The slightest hesitation, before it responded, ""No. It's not like that. Not like it is between humans.""
+
+What makes a ""human"" relationship, anyway? Ratthi was willing to accept the idea that machine intelligences, by virtue of their divergent psychologies, might have divergent forms of relationships. He didn't think, though, that this precluded them from the ability to form relationships that could fall under the broad classification of ""friendship."" Especially not when the Perihelion itself had described SecUnit as a friend. It had become apparent, when speaking to the Perihelion earlier, how the Perihelion prized SecUnit's well-being, its regard, and its friendship.
+
+""Is it? The Transport seems to think differently.""
+
+""The Transport doesn't know what the hell it's talking about, plus it lies a lot, and it's mean.""
+
+Ratthi heroically stifled the urge to rub the ridge of his brows with his hand. Human or not, this was some textbook relationship drama. Maybe one day he'd have the opportunity tease SecUnit about it, if they survived this mess.
+
+(He wouldn't tease, though. He valued his friendship with SecUnit too.)"
+43186990,What is Love?,['Gamebird'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,,Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries),"Canon-Typical Consent Issues, Construct OC - Freeform, ComfortUnit - Freeform",English,2022-11-21,Completed,2022-11-21,"1,045",1/1,5,29,1,143,"['FyrDrakken', 'petwheel', 'Unknown66', 'darth_eowyn', 'Stockinette', 'chicken_neck', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'opalescent_potato', 'reading_tsc', 'RigelReporting', 'KingOfConjurers', 'VoidlingRemnata', '002405', 'PickAName', 'maybeapples', 'veltzeh', 'Fluky', 'AkaMissK', 'Rosewind2007', 'AuntyMatter']",[],"This was so sexy. And hot. The little shifts of its hips were driving Gurathin to distraction with how involuntary they appeared, how helpless it was to respond to his touch. It had been made for this and he adored that. Its knees twitched wider as he stroked the insides of the labia and circled the vagina. Its head tipped back, breaths deepening in puffing exhalations of want. The belly muscles clenched as he teased over the clitoris. The next breath was a sigh of 'oh'.
+
+He'd learned a lot from these few sessions. This was 'Responsive Robot'. He had no idea if the other scenario choices of the ComfortUnit menu were better or worse, but this one was exactly what he wanted, somehow picked the very first time. The previous sessions, he'd fucked it, but this time all he wanted to do was get it off. He wanted to watch it as it responded to his touch. And it did, so beautifully.
+
+It made a soft moan, legs spreading again as he massaged and rubbed and tickled. It felt, it processed, it reacted and every reaction was just a little different. It wasn't a rote program. It was complex, precious, perfect. He was hard, his member trapped against the side of the mattress he was leaning against, but that hardly mattered. He tried his thumb in quick flicks back and forth over the clit. It looked to him briefly with a restless toss of its head. It didn't look at him often during these sessions - maybe because it was playing at being a robot - but it did look at him some. He liked that. It made him feel special.
+
+He dipped his thumb inside its wetness, then rubbed the entire vulva with a light grip before returning to the clitoris. That was where the responses were strongest. It bit its lip briefly before staring at the ceiling and struggling to look impassive. He teased it faster. A flush was building over the flat chest.
+
+That, too, was an initial feature he'd ordered off the menu and hadn't changed. It had a plain, featureless chest, no breasts, pectorals, nipples, hair, or markings. Just a robot, with no attempt to disguise that. Maybe next time he'd leave off the genitals as well. For now, though, he teased it even faster until the pretense of impassivity broke. It made a soft but urgent cry, legs spreading again so wide he could have climbed on and plunged within. He didn't, but its openness made him grind himself back and forth against the mattress, aching with the desire.
+
+Its breathing turned uneven, the flush spread, and the hips jerked under his hand. Despite his intention to do no more than watch its climax, he had to have more. He wanted to finish the same as it had. He shifted the hand to himself, masturbating fast with a tight grip. It looked at him, lips parted, lids heavy, relaxed and well-pleasured. He looked back, staring into those eyes and wondering how much of its expression was simple programming. Could there ever be more? It was so easy to imagine more when it was looking at him like that. So easy.
+
+He came to that fantasy, his ejaculate striping the thing's belly with three ragged lines. Breathing roughly, eyes shut, he stopped. Now that his dick wasn't doing his thinking for him, he was reminded it was only a construct, a sex device with ridiculously complicated programming. It wasn't real, no matter how much he wanted it to be. He gave himself one final squeeze and this time it was his hips that moved, a truly involuntarily response. He laughed lightly at the irony.
+
+He wasn't sure what he desired sexually, but it wasn't some messily biological person, he knew that much. His cousin had badgered him into visiting the ComfortUnit in the first place, telling him he needed practice in case he ever worked himself up to asking someone on a date, or in some other way ended up intimate with someone. All his cousin knew was that Gurathin's disinterest in his opportunities had persisted well beyond what the cousin considered acceptable.
+
+So he'd visited the suggested hotel and asked for their personal entertainment menu. He'd picked his way through the fourteen genital choices (this was not a high-end place with their scores of configurations) and seven chest options, all of which went to the same individual construct, who would modify itself to match the reservation. The personalities and scenarios were dizzying in variety. Those were just software. The unit came programmed with them and was smart enough to modify them on the fly, as directed.
+
+He'd just wanted simple stuff. He wanted to ask it if it minded, if this was okay, if it was easier for him to pick something like this or if it would enjoy the opportunity to perform something more complicated. But he couldn't ask. Well, he could, but the answers would be just as programmed as anything else. More, probably, because getting emotionally involved with sexbots was very common. There were whole protocols to discourage it. Sometimes treatment programs or therapy.
+
+(Did the sexbots ever need therapy? No, he couldn't ask that, either. Some sexbots, maybe all, were mandatory reporters of certain things. He wasn't sure what those things were, but mental instability was one of them. Everyone knew to be careful what you said to a sexbot.)
+
+He cleaned it up, wiping his fluids from it and handing it a cloth for it to see to itself. He'd seen that (staging cleaning cloths before sex) suggested in one of the instructional videos he'd seen, as well as that it was usually best to leave the other person, post-orgasmic, to clean their sensitized body themselves. The video had been about human partners, but he'd watched it with the intention of figuring out how to treat the partners he had. This one.
+
+Maybe his cousin was right and this was just practice for a 'real' partner later. The unit abandoned the 'responsive robot' act and sat up, giving him a warm, very genuine-looking smile. Like he was a good customer and it enjoyed working with him. Maybe he needed therapy already, because this felt real."
+43185048,See You Again,['Chimaera-Writes (ChimaeraKitten)'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,"Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Aro-Spectrum, Ace-Spectrum - Relationship","Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Farai (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Aroace! Murderbot (The Murderbot Diaries)","Queerplatonic Relationships, Figuring Out One's Exact Orientation and Relationship Needs as One Goes, POV Third Person, POV Mensah",English,2022-11-21,Completed,2022-11-21,"1,374",1/1,38,146,12,323,"['Flammenkobold', 'christinesangel100', 'CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'siren_lorelei', 'bluewrist', 'fortunegale', 'FyrDrakken', 'audire', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Fantasy_and_bugs', 'Dragonbano', 'chillgamesh_the_swing', 'MysteryMe110', 'julesbee', 'drippingmoonwax', 'Unknown66', 'IamPseudonymous', 'kkachis', 'MellonLord', 'Magechild', 'MiscellaneousWander', 'getupandgo2011', 'Admirer', 'darth_eowyn', 'dimensionalhuman', 'outlander_unknown', 'Next_Stop_Willoughby', 'Mr_Fizzles', 'Doctor13', 'biscut2', 'HirilElfwraith', 'LdyKirin', 'qwanderer', 'Cacti_Lord', 'Starsilver', 'opalescent_potato', 'Avonya', 'MysticDragonTrash', 'Edgedancer', 'Elanorsam', 'Skits', 'DarkElectron', 'TSDefiance', 'megmagmargo', 'Wombatmist', 'confidentkale7731', 'HermaeusMora', 'sagejj', 'Vorel_Laraek', 'rey_skywalker']",[],"Ayda grips the shuttle armrest just a shade tighter than she ever did before, back when she never considered things like enemy boarding shuttles and gunships and misused survey hoppers.
+
+She breathes in a calming rhythm, startlingly aware if the air quality, careful to catalogue the hissing of the circulation system.
+
+On TranRollinHyfa, it would hiss just a hair higher in pitch whenever the lift at the end of the corridor opened. It was merely a quirk of the building layout, but it gave a tiny warning when she was about to have company, so long as she paid attention.
+
+The circulation system on this shuttle is pitched lower than that.
+
+Farai, sitting next to her, reaches over and squeezes Ayda's arm on the armrest, just below the elbow.
+
+Tano may have been the first to notice that Ayda no longer likes having her wrists squeezed, but Farai was the one to come up with this alternate gesture.
+
+Ayda looks at her and manages to summon a smile.
+
+She finds that once it's on her face, it feels genuine--not the artifice it would have been a few months ago.
+
+She even releases the armrest, flexing her fingers into a more natural position, and there's no panic souring her stomach at the loss of grip.
+
+""Nervous?"" Farai asks, and it takes Ayda a moment to realize she's not asking about the shuttle.
+
+She breathes out in a way that might be halfway to a laugh. ""Maybe,"" she admits. She almost says, I don't want things to change, but that's not at all true. She does want things to change, and to have changed--The pain, the imbalance, she wants that to be gone, for her friend's sake and for her own.
+
+She just doesn't want the good in their relationship to be the price.
+
+""It won't stop caring about you,"" Farai reassures, with that easy humor in her voice implying it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. ""Or looking out for you.""
+
+""I know."" Ayda flips her arm over and shifts it up so she can lace her fingers through her wife's. ""We've worked for this for so long.""
+
+""But?"" Farai prompts, a knowing look in her eye.
+
+""I don't want this to be...awkward."" It was awkward on TranRollinHyfa, reconnecting on even footing when Ayda knew how badly she'd messed up the first time around. It will break her heart if this change is like that reunion.
+
+""I think it's always awkward,"" Farai says, wry.
+
+Ayda laughs and makes a conscious choice not to dwell. Stressing about it on the shuttle benefits her not at all.
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+They don't stay in the docks, or even on the transit ring. They wait in a reservable meeting room by one of the station public parks, where they can have a little privacy and SecUnit won't have to contend with anyone's emotions immediately after it disembarks.
+
+Pin-Lee is already there. She looks good: relaxed. Ayda's relieved to see evidence that she hadn't been overworking herself.
+
+They exchange greetings and small talk, but not much. Pin-Lee has never really been one for niceties, and they don't have a long wait. Only a couple minutes pass between when they arrive and the moment SecUnit taps her feed.
+
+Farai sits up a hair faster than she does, and there's something warm in Ayda's chest at the knowledge that SecUnit contacted her too.
+
+It's only another few moments before the first drone flies in, entirely silent until it gets very close.
+
+Ayda smiles at it. This much is easy and uncomplicated. ""It's good to see you, SecUnit.""
+
+You haven't actually seen me yet, it points out over the feed.
+
+Some of the tension she didn't even know she was carrying goes out of Ayda's shoulders. They can be normal about this. She had hoped as much when SecUnit scheduled its visit so they could do this in-person, but there'd still been that worry.
+
+The door slides open again and SecUnit walks in. Ayda looks only briefly, just long enough to catalogue its appearance before she turns respectfully away.
+
+It's nearly unchanged: SecUnit dresses like a character in a serial, always in the same styles and colors.
+
+Farai waves. Pin-Lee makes a sound of greeting low in her throat and gets right to business. ""Did you review the material I sent you?""
+
+SecUnit pauses a moment. ""Yes.""
+
+Knowing SecUnit, it probably only opened the document as it walked into the room.
+
+Pin-Lee's voice is brisk, professional. ""Do you have any questions?""
+
+""No.""
+
+Farai's mouth quirks into a smile, but Pin-Lee is more than used to SecUnit's brusqueness. ""Good."" She turns to Ayda. ""Do you have any questions?""
+
+Ayda smiles. ""None at all.""
+
+The message packet pops up in her feed immediately. Ayda opens it, knowing she'll want to follow along as Pin-Lee walks them through it.
+
+Farai stands. ""I'll go get some food while you sign the paperwork.""
+
+SecUnit makes a face, presumably at the mention of food, and messages her in the feed. Why is it even called that. There's no paper involved.
+
+Ayda knows the answer, but she also knows the answer isn't what SecUnit wants. Probably just to annoy you specifically. To Farai, she says, ""Thank you, this shouldn't take long.""
+
+With one last squeeze of Ayda's arm, Farai departs, and Pin-Lee starts in on her instructions.
+
+It really doesn't. Take long, that is. This isn't ultimately all that complicated of a process.
+
+Still, it's fiddly enough that Ayda doesn't have the capacity to think too much about what all this means while she's absorbed in the minutiae.
+
+It all comes rushing back to the surface when Pin-Lee submits the final form and pronounces, ""There. You are now officially a legal permanent resident with refugee status. All legal relationship between yourself and Dr. Mensah is hereby dissolved.""
+
+There's a wave of relief. They've done it; it can't be taken back now. She is, genuinely, completely happy. For SecUnit and for what this legal precedent will mean for other constructs and bots--for people like Three or even SecUnit's friend Perihelion whenever it passes through Preservation space. But there's still a remnant of that irrational fear that the termination of this unwanted legal relationship will mean some change in their real relationship.
+
+Ayda ignores it as she reaches over to clasp Pin-Lee's hand. ""Thank you,"" she says. They couldn't've done this without Pin-Lee.
+
+Pin-Lee's mouth twitches into a smile. ""I've got to run, but I'll see you at the show later."" She turns to the spot over SecUnit's left shoulder and adds, ""Do not fuck anything up in the next few months. I want this to settle.""
+
+SecUnit casually flips her off in return, and Pin-Lee snorts as she bustles off.
+
+And now it's just Ayda and SecUnit.
+
+""How is Perihelion doing?"" she asks.
+
+""Fine,"" it says. It sounds like a put-upon teenager.
+
+""Did you two go anywhere interesting?""
+
+""No,"" it says.
+
+She laughs a little. She knows SecUnit well enough to see it prefers things that way.
+
+""How was the trauma treatment?"" it asks, and just like that, the last of the worry floats away. That it still wants to know is such a relief. SecUnit, more than anyone she's ever met, asks only personal questions it wants honest answers to. If it's asking, then neither the months of separation nor the paperwork have changed things.
+
+""Productive,"" she says. ""I...I feel like myself again.""
+
+Out of the corner of her eye she sees its face soften. It's not quite a smile, but it means more on SecUnit than a grin would on anyone else. ""Good,"" it says, and stands. ""Farai's coming back.""
+
+She stands too. ""Perfect. I'm more than ready to eat. Would you like to sit with us, or meet us at the theater?""
+
+""At the theater,"" it answers without hesitation.
+
+""We'll see you there,"" she agrees, brushing the wrinkles out of her clothes.
+
+""I'll see you first.""
+
+It will. ""SecUnit,"" she starts. She doesn't know what the rest will be until after it comes out of her mouth. ""Thank you."" Her voice turns wry. ""I'm glad you don't want to not see me again.""
+
+SecUnit has perfect recall. It knows what she's referencing. ""I'm glad too."""
+43156447,Real Things,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],General Audiences,Gen,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries),"Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries)","Movie Night, Fluff, Character Study, Post-Book 5: Network Effect, Three is still trying to figure out how to be a person, lbr Murderbot is too",English,2022-11-20,Completed,2022-11-20,715,1/1,23,99,16,231,"['spossie9', 'FlipSpring', 'FyrDrakken', 'weirdbooksnail', 'Irrya', 'TheEyeOpens14', 'Stariceling', 'Cherreline', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'kirinki', 'Magechild', 'stars_and_wishes', 'Tasneem08', 'Doctor13', 'Pokegirl11', 'Ashes_to_Ashes', 'EvenstarFalling', 'thesearchforbluejello', 'LilyArgetfricai', 'tlh_in_tlh', 'Riannonkat2000', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'FirstnameSurname', 'surgicalstainless', 'BookWyrm_13', 'breadtab', 'Skits', 'WalkingBird', 'reading_tsc', 'RoundedLoaf', 'Vaidile', 'hollimichele', 'gossiehawk', 'GlowsInTheDark', 'DexxxtroDNA', 'void_star', 'CrayolaRainbow', 'scheidswrites', 'lauris', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'Nookisms', 'Brenden1k', 'enchantedsleeper', 'AuntyMatter', 'BiblioMatsuri', 'Threadzless', 'hummus_tea', 'MoldyBalloon', 'Zannper']",[],"It is many days before I work up the courage to say to Murderbot 1.0, ""I don't understand the appeal of fictional media.""
+
+I think it had only been half paying attention to me; the other half of its attention was dedicated to the fictional media it likes so much. ""What?"" It frowns at me. ""Do you need me to help process it with you? ART did and then it went from not understanding media to being a big baby every time a ship's crew was in danger.""
+
+I don't know if 1.0 was trying to be helpful or insulting. I choose to believe helpful. Certainly I understand that rudeness is a gesture of fondness towards the Perihelion. I say, ""No, I understand the emotional context. But it isn't... fun."" I have a difficult enough time processing, understanding, and feeling all of my own emotions. Feeling emotions about things that are not real on top of that is exhausting. Maybe that will change when I have more experience processing my own emotions, but right now, adding more emotions about fake things is just overwhelming for no point.
+
+1.0 looks appalled and baffled.
+
+I continue, ""I understand that you find value in it. But I have tried and I don't. Humans having relationship difficulties and romantic trysts and making dangerous decisions are tiring enough to deal with when they're real. I don't understand being so invested when they're not real.""
+
+""It's because they're not real,"" 1.0 says. ""You don't think I want relationship drama or romantic trysts or reverse wormhole bullshit in my life, do you? Fake things are easier to care about.""
+
+I cannot relate to this statement at all.
+
+I had asked the Perihelion about this, because as terrifying as it is, I am still less afraid of it than I am of alienating 1.0.  The Perihelion told me that Murderbot 1.0 had many emotions about media because fiction had been a way for it to temporarily escape its situation when it was still owned by its bond company.  This makes sense.  What doesn't make sense is why it is still so attached, or expects me to be.  I have escaped.  I have escaped everything I have ever known and I feel lost.  I don't want to escape even more.  I want to feel grounded.
+
+""There's so much I don't know,"" I say. ""When I'm watching something fictional with you, I appreciate the attempt at a bonding activity--"" (it made a face at that) ""--but I frequently find myself wishing that I was seeing something real instead. Something new that helps me understand. I don't like when I can't tell if new information is real or not.""
+
+1.0 stares at the wall, but I can feel the full attention of its drones on me. I fear I have greatly offended it. This is why I was reluctant to say anything. But the humans have been trying to encourage me to determine what I like and what I don't like, and if there is something they are doing that I don't like, to say so. 1.0 has not really participated in this onslaught of support and positivity, but I had hoped that practicing expressing my opinions would make it easier and make it willing to listen. Now I fear I have overstepped.
+
+Then Murderbot 1.0 says, ""Oh you're the kind of boring person who would really like documentaries, aren't you.""
+
+The words are an insult but I don't think the tone is. (And it called me a person. The humans make a point to, but it feels different coming from another SecUnit. I like that.) ""What is a documentary?""
+
+Murderbot 1.0 shares a file into my feed. I open it. It is a six-part video series; the metadata indicates that it is about the history and impact of a court case 78 GEC Standard years ago that set the standards for the treaties regarding alien remnants that most of the Corporation Rim still abides by.
+
+""Real things are depressing,"" 1.0 says. ""But this is a documentary. Media about real things. You might like this better.""
+
+And even though it had complained, it watches all six parts with me.
+
+And it was right. I do.
+
+ "
+43166559,sometimes the only way out is as a carcass,['OccasionalStorytelling'],Explicit,Other,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries),"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)","ASR bad ending, Failed escape, Suicide Attempt, Duct Tape, Kidnapping, kidnapping vibes at least, Humiliation, Degradation, combat overrides, thigh fucking, gurathin is a bad person",English,2022-11-20,Completed,2022-11-20,"4,527",1/1,3,20,3,208,"['CorvusTheFeatherbrain', 'Bubblegumbeech', 'EverTheMelancholic', 'Deliala919', 'Unnecessary_Mango', 'Priority_Error', 'veltzeh', 'soyle', 'MommyMayI', 'Noomynoom', 'AnxiousEspada', 'junebug171']",[],"
+The SecUnit-the 
+
+Murderbot, 
+
+Gurathin reminded himself-was creepy. For all of its sarcasm and media-watching and ""brilliant"" ideas during the survey mission, it had done nothing but act like a sub-sentient hauler bot since Pin-Lee and Ratthi had brought it back from the deployment center. Gurathin had watched Ayda doing her best to explain things to it. She'd slipped away during dinner, to where the bot had sat itself, unmoving, on their couch in the hotel suite they'd rented. Gurathin couldn't overhear much of it-Ayda spoke in a low, calming tone, like she was trying to soothe a panicky horse. He could hear the Murderbot though.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You'd be my guardian,"" it said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Ayda nodded and kept whispering to it. Gurathin watched it clench its fingers into the edge of the couch until its knuckles turned white, the longer she spoke.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He'd told her not to buy it. He'd warned her that it was a dangerous killing machine with no behavioral controls, and that as soon as she threatened its hiding place at its company, it would act like the rogue it was and kill her, messily, before doing the same to the rest of them too.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It wasn't doing anything like that yet, though. It sat on the couch, and stared at the floor. It made reasonable attempts at eye contact with whoever tried talking to it, and it didn't move. He doubted it was even watching its media.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Maybe its company had done something to it before releasing it to them-wiped its memories, installed a new governor module (Gurathin could hope, but he doubted it), or something else to make it into this docile...thing.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He didn't really believe that. The company would have never risked going to court over a violation of the legal agreement Pin-Lee had made with them. They hadn't touched the thing, just handed it over like they were happy to be rid of a problem. So this emotionless, quiet, un-moving act was just that, an act. It was biding its time. Gurathin didn't intend on relaxing around it, no matter how much everyone else seemed to.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It got late. By the middle of the offshift, everyone was either asleep or busy with their own projects in the feed. Everyone except Gurathin.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He waited in a chair at the end of the corridor, next to the door that would be the SecUnit's only escape if it tried anything. Sure enough, it got off the couch, and made straight for him. It stopped when it saw him sitting there.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He didn't even bother with pretending to be reading or immersed in a task. They both knew why he was sitting here, and why the SecUnit would be coming this way. He crossed his arms, waiting for it to speak.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It stared at him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He wasn't going to be able to outwait the patience of a machine intelligence that worked for the company. He debated a few cool-sounding catchphrases for a moment, before deciding. ""Are you lost?"" he sneered.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It stared at him. Its face twisted for just a flicker of a second, before it got control of itself. In a neutral, buffer tone, it said ""Security protocols require patrols of-""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Don't give me that bullshit,"" Gurathin said. He stood up. (He wished he'd left the door unlocked, so he could dramatically lock it now, like a villain in one of those serials it claimed to love.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Whatever it was feeling, it didn't show any signs of worry or hesitation. ""You don't even want me here,"" it said. ""I'm leaving.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You're right about one of those things,"" Gurathin said. He put his hands in his pockets. In his right, he got a firm grip on the combat override module he'd acquired at no small cost to his private retirement fund.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Don't try to stop me,"" it said, bracing. (He'd never be able to beat it in a fair fight.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What are you going to do, kill me?"" He snorted. ""At this point, I doubt it. You may be a rogue, but you've got no teeth."" (He wasn't going to fight fair. He needed to make it mad enough to get close enough that he could install the override.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""If I have to,"" it said. It advanced another step towards him. He didn't back down.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Your new owner won't like that, though,"" he said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm off inventory,"" it said. It looked uncomfortable with the word ""owner."" A weak spot. He held onto the combat override.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You really think you can just walk away from your 
+
+owner
+
+?"" Gurathin said. ""And you were expensive. Did you really think Ayda could afford you all by herself?"" He kept talking, babbling, he had to make it mad enough to get close on its own. ""The whole survey team helped. I guess that means we have to 
+
+share
+
+ you.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He didn't even have to elaborate. It 
+
+really 
+
+didn't like that idea. It lunged towards him. He could barely react before it grabbed him by the collar and forced him up against the wall, knocking the breath out of him. He tried to focus. He kept the combat override in his hand as he grabbed onto the hand holding him, trying to look like he was struggling to get away.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I'm leaving,"" it said. It sounded firm, but nothing else about it looked certain. It kept him at arms length. And it looked 
+
+terrified. 
+
+Why else would it have stayed with its company for almost four years, unless it was 
+
+too scared to leave?
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin made eye contact with it. It was the one bullying him, but it still flinched minutely. ""No you're not, 
+
+Murderbot,"" 
+
+he said. He reached up to its neck, pulled it close to him tenderly as if for a kiss, and jammed the combat override into its neck.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It winced as the module slid home, slotting into place with a decisive 
+
+click
+
+. Its eyes went wide, and it dropped him. He winced as he managed to get himself upright again. ""No,"" it whispered. It clawed at the back of its neck with both hands.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Good luck,"" Gurathin grunted, dusting himself off. ""It's not coming out.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He watched it bend over, struggling with the port, digging its nails in as if that would help. It glanced up at him, and then, jerkily and with halting movements, made for the door. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Take it out,"" it said. ""I don't want to hurt any of you. I just want to l-"" it twitched, grimacing as it wrapped its fingers around the door handle. Gurathin watched it, slowly, excruciatingly, turn the knob. Fascinating, to watch it fight against the code controlling it. The door opened. It collapsed forwards, onto its knees on the carpeted floor of the hotel's hall.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What was your plan?"" Gurathin asked. ""You wouldn't have gotten far, even wearing our survey colors. You're still a SecUnit. I bet you'd never have made it out of the lobby.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It crawled on its hands and knees, moving slowly towards the elevator. Gurathin watched the red lights on its temples and neck flicker rapidly.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What do you think you're doing 
+
+now?"" 
+
+Gurathin asked. He stepped forward to it. It didn't look up at him. It had fallen down to its chest, army crawling as it dragged its now-useless legs behind it. He used one of his shoes to point its chin up at him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I wouldn't...have...hurt..."" It clenched its jaw, grimacing. ""Take it,"" it begged.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Better get used to this,"" Gurathin said. He let it go and crouched in front of it. It glared up at him, clearly using all its strength. ""You're not getting away. I don't care if we have to keep you frozen on display in the security office, we're not letting you 
+
+go.""
+
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It glared at him. It rolled, awkwardly, hesitatingly, onto its side. It managed, with a series of clicks, to open one of its gunports. It pointed the weapon at its temple. Gurathin watched its nose start to bleed with effort. Its limbs were weak and heavy. It wouldn't have been hard to bat its hands away.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I won't stop you,"" he said, sitting on the floor next to it. ""If you can actually go through with it, it saves me a lot of hassle. We're not paying for a cubicle for you.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It held its weapon against its temple. It squeezed its eyes shut. Gurathin watched the red lights on its skull flicker one last time, before going dead. The weapon didn't fire.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Not fast enough, hm,"" Gurathin said, quietly. Its joints didn't lock up, as he'd worried they might. Its eyelids drooped, and it went weak and relaxed. Its head fell into his lap, and he quickly shoved it away. It made a 
+
+thunk 
+
+as it hit the floor of the hall.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It almost looked like it fell asleep. It blinked, slowly, like it could barely keep its eyes open. Gurathin took its arm, and folded the energy weapon back into the gunport with a 
+
+click. 
+
+It winced almost imperceptibly at that. He rolled it onto its front, and stood up. He grabbed it by the ankles, and pulled it backwards towards the door of the hotel room.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It didn't resist at all. It didn't twitch, it didn't groan, it didn't even react when Gurathin accidentally knocked its face against the door jamb. (There was a small trail of red where its bloody nose had dragged along the ground.) It was heavy, though. Gurathin was out of breath once he'd pulled it back inside, closed the door, and dragged it all the way down the corridor to the suite bathroom.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Carefully, he managed to get one limb at a time over the lip of the bathtub, awkwardly forcing it over the edge and inside. (Where was he supposed to put it, on the couch? In a bed? It wasn't a human.) He could see one of its eyes, and despite the droopy lid, it was blinking rapidly, the red iris dancing around in panic.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Calm down,"" Gurathin said, as he lifted its legs over the edge so it was entirely inside the porcelain-looking tub. ""This is for your own good. You know you can't escape us, for the same reason you never escaped the company. Because even if you did, you wouldn't last long. 
+
+Rogue.
+
+"" He looked around. He was missing some supplies. ""Give me a second."" 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He left the bathroom, and went to his bag. He got an external feed interface, a few cables, and a roll of duct tape (you could never be too careful). When he went back to the bathroom, it still lay exactly where he'd draped it, uncomfortably crammed into the tub. It looked at him. (To be fair to it, there wasn't much else it could do right then.)
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He was careful-he didn't want the sounds of ripping tape to disturb any of the others' rest. He closed the bathroom door. Priorities first: he taped its gunports closed, probably with more than they needed, but he wanted to be safe just in case something went wrong. He taped its fingers against the palms of its hands so it wouldn't be able to get any bright ideas about using the door again, turning its hands into mitts. It was limp and completely relaxed, like it was dead, or fast asleep. It made the job both easier and harder. He taped its wrists together, its knees, and its ankles. Looking down at his handiwork, it wasn't the prettiest thing he'd ever seen (it did look an awful lot like an amateur kidnapping) but it would hold. For good measure, he decided to gag it.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He grabbed a washcloth off the counter. Using both hands, and wary every second in case of a sudden 
+
+snap 
+
+closed, he pried open its jaw. This was more up-close-and-personal than he'd ever expected to get with a SecUnit. He could see its teeth, arranged neatly in its mouth as if its company had put it in braces. There were little logos engraved into the sides of the enamel. He shuddered as its tongue flexed in its mouth while it breathed shaky, panicked little breaths at him. It didn't need to eat. He didn't understand why the company would have bothered to give SecUnits mouths in the first place. Vaguely curious, he tapped his finger against one of the canines. It felt like a tooth. He rubbed his thumb over the tiny company logo engraved there. Weird. It looked at him in horror as he stuffed the washcloth into its mouth.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""SecUnits don't need much air, right,"" he grumbled, and he ripped off more of the tape to seal the gag in place.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Now it 
+
+really 
+
+looked like a kidnapping.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin sat on the toilet seat and booted up his external feed interface. Now that the override module was installed, he needed to pair it with his device, and then he'd be able to send it commands. (He was NOT going to risk pairing it with his internal augment, that was asking to get hacked.) As the program loaded, he shoved the SecUnit's head forwards, so it was forced to lean on top of itself in an awkward crunch, exposing the back of its neck. He ran his hand over the short, fine hairs on the back of its skull, neatly clipped away from the edges of the port. It could have been his imagination, but he thought it might have reacted to that. He almost thought he heard it make a muffled whining sound. ""Don't struggle, you'll give yourself a bloody nose again,"" he said.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He used one of the cables to connect his feed device to the override module. As the connection booted up, the SecUnit squirmed slightly, gaining a little control over itself again. Gurathin kept a hand on the back of its head, keeping its weak struggles contained, until the code finished connecting. It went limp and soft again, and the lines on its temple and neck lit up green, matching his Preservation-branded code base.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Good,"" he muttered to himself. He scrolled through some of the modules base code, checking it out. It was hard to read, but eventually he'd be able to parse out most of its effects. He had to lean close to the SecUnit to keep the short cable connected both to the device and the module, almost breathing on its neck. He leaned on one of its shoulders for support.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The client designation was easy enough to spot. He put himself as the primary, and added the rest of the survey team as secondaries. There was a toggle switch, allowing for voice commands or text entry. The input line blinked at him, invitingly, but he didn't need much more from it than to stay still and keep quiet enough not to wake anyone, and the tape was helping with that too. The cable kept coming out of the port, though. He hoped that wasn't causing any damage to the SecUnit's programs, like an old music device disconnected improperly from a computer.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It was an uncomfortable angle for him, half leaning on the SecUnit and half sitting on the side of the tub. He balanced the feed device on its head, and used both arms to shove it upright, so there was space behind it in the tub. Gurathin clambered in, and positioned himself behind it, grabbing the tablet again. At least the cable was staying in, now. He tucked his legs under the SecUnit's taped ones, and managed to get himself mostly comfortable. Surprisingly comfortable, actually. That bot was more organic than the company had led them to believe.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He scanned through the code, trying to understand what each line did. He actually found the system that controlled the LED light color, and changed it to a slightly calmer shade of green than the electric default. He took Murderbot's chin in one hand and tilted it so it was facing him. It squirmed, loosely, like it was trying to resist.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Open your eyes,"" Gurathin said. ""I just want to see.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He watched on his device as the module forced it to comply. It opened its eyes, making eye contact with him. The eyes were still bright red, untouched by the code change. It was an oddly intimate pose, holding it in his lap like this, staring into its eyes. He released its chin and it quickly turned away, using every scrap of its autonomy to try and get away from him. Like it really didn't comprehend the position it was in. He frowned, and went back to analyzing the code. He started a download of a read-only format; that way he could take it back to his bed and at least get a good night of sleep.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+It shifted in his lap.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin didn't mean to react, but his body had liked how that felt. The soft curves of the SecUnit's ass pressing heavily on top of him...and when it felt him start to get half hard, it only squirmed harder, making the problem quickly worse.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Stop that,"" Gurathin said, and he wrapped one hand around its mouth, holding it in place. It abruptly went still, but it still twitched under his hand.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin considered some things.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+The SecUnit had no sex parts, he'd seen that after it had tried shooting itself after DetlFall and he'd been left to pick up the pieces. It did have a mouth, not that he'd trust it not to bite him, though. And he didn't want to risk what kinds of sounds it might make without a gag-he didn't want anyone to wake up.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Am I really going to do this? 
+
+he wondered as he began shifting to unbutton his pants. The SecUnit could feel it, and it fought tooth and nail against the module keeping it docile. The futility of it was adorable. It was possible Ayda or Ratthi would get upset with Gurathin if they knew he was even considering this, palming his dick, pressing against the uncomfortable SecUnit in his lap, but they would never know-it's not like the SecUnit would tell them. And it wasn't like the SecUnit could get away.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Maybe just a quick something. And then he'd go to bed and leave it alone for the night.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He finished unbuttoning his pants. He worked, slowly, carefully, to pull the SecUnit's down to its knees. Its squirming actually proved helpful for that, as it helplessly tried to resist. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I don't suppose there's any chance you make lube like a sexbot,"" Gurathin said, settling himself into a comfy position. The SecUnit responded by squeezing its eyes shut, and thrashing softly against the code holding it still. It didn't want this, it was making that clear. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin spit into his hand and rubbed it along himself, then tucked his hand between the SecUnit's warm, soft thighs. It bucked its head, whimpering behind its gag. For something that insisted it wasn't a sexbot, it was so sensitive and responsive to the slightest touch.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Gurathin idly checked the override module code, to see if there was any kind of positive feedback button he could hit easily, and make this a little nicer for the Murderbot. There was nothing visibly apparent as a reward function, so he set it aside. This didn't have to be nice for it. It 
+
+had 
+
+tried to escape, after all.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He gingerly tucked himself up between the SecUnit's thighs. It clenched as hard as it could, trying to stop him, but that only made the sensation nicer and tighter against his dick. He groaned softly, and held the SecUnit around the chest with both arms, pressing his forehead against its override. He bit his lip, trying to keep quiet.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He held onto it as he fucked its thighs. It resisted every step of the way, but taped as it was, under control as it was, it couldn't do anything other than make him feel better. Gurathin grunted into its ear, he wasn't even sure what he said. No wonder those sicko techs liked abusing their SecUnits so much during repairs. It felt heavenly, that perfect, unbroken flesh against his dick. He closed his eyes, and the SecUnit ground itself down on him, and he came between its legs. It wilted, brokenly, going limp in his hold. He held onto it until he could think again properly. The SecUnit didn't resist as he pulled its pants back up over its sticky thighs. It didn't even look at him.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He clambered out of the tub and tucked it back in. Its head lolled sideways as it collapsed backwards, legs still bent up awkwardly in the too-small space. Gurathin reached over its head, and grabbed the tablet.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He wanted to say something dramatic. Like ""that's what you get"" or something. It laid there, not moving, and he eventually just closed the shower curtain to hide it and turned out the bathroom light. Then, he went to bed, and slept with the certainty it would not be escaping or murdering anyone in the night.
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+The next morning, Ratthi sleepily brushed his teeth and wondered where SecUnit was. It wasn't on the couch, so it must have gone to bed at some point. (The door to the room they'd reserved for it was open, and it was dark, so Ratthi had peeked. The bed wasn't in use, but maybe it had decided to sleep in the closet, or something. It 
+
+had 
+
+asked for a cubicle. Maybe it liked little enclosed spaces.) He finished brushing his teeth, spat into the sink, and used the toilet. He considered having a shower, but that could wait. Breakfast first. He left the bathroom and went to the little kitchenette. Gurathin was staring at an external feed device slowly drinking a cup of something caffeinated, Volescu was making eggs on the single burner on the stove top, and the rest of the team was slowly waking up and entering the room. Ratthi helped himself to some food as Overse went into the bathroom in a robe-so she was claiming the first shower, then. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He startled almost out of his skin when Overse screamed. He and Gurathin looked at each other, and ran to the bathroom.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""What the 
+
+FUCK,"" 
+
+Overse yelled. She hugged her robe tight to her chest. Ratthi looked down. Their SecUnit was duct taped in the bathtub like a kidnapping victim, looking balefully up at them.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Oh my god!"" Ratthi said. ""Who...?"" He ran to help it, patting his pockets for a multipurpose tool or knife, anything he could use to cut it free.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""I did,"" Gurathin said. ""Once everyone's up, we need to talk.""
+
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+
+Ratthi pulled the tape off my face, and took out the washcloth. (I wish I could have said it was a relief. I could still feel the module in the back of my neck, stabbing into me worse than the gag had felt.) He made sad facial expressions at me the whole time, and from the way he looked at me, my face was doing something bad too.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""Are you okay?"" he asked, and before I could figure out a response, my buffer said ""Operations nominal,"" for me. Great. Fuck. Fuck. F[?][?]u[?]c[?]k[?].[?]
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Then the humans talked at each other, and I missed it because I didn't have any audio inputs except for my ears, and I was busy trying not to shut down again from stress, and then they all left and closed the door and talked about things I could barely hear through the door.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I couldn't get up. If I could have, I wouldn't have sat all night with disgusting human fluids drying between my legs. The module wasn't controlling me to the point that I couldn't twitch or squirm slightly, but the way Gurathin had taped my wrists and knees meant that I couldn't move to any position that would be more comfortable. If I was a human, I would have been getting sore by now from the uncomfortable position in the hard tub. 
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I was so angry, I was so scared, I was feeling so much I could hardly focus. The familiar, crushing feeling of ""I don't care"" kept threatening to overwhelm me, but it was mixed with this horrible skin sensation of the tape and the fluids, and at least the cloth was out of my mouth, but I could still hardly think. Help[?].[?]
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Eventually, the humans came back and helped me out of the tape. Gurathin stood there and stared at me, and Mensah cut me loose.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You won't run away, will you?"" she asked, cutting my ankles free.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""It won't,"" Gurathin said. ""If I was going to, it would have succeeded yesterday. I told you, it let me restrain it like that.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wish I hadn't tried to crawl away and had just shot myself as soon as I felt the module go in.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You didn't have to be cruel to it,"" Mensah glared at him. I thought she was going to comment on the fact that he...about what he did to me after the tape, but she didn't. Maybe she didn't know. You couldn't see how sticky I was. But I could feel it. It was disgusting.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+So, apparently I was going to go live on a farm. Nice going, Murderbot. After everything you did for these clients, this is how it ends.. They gave me fresh clothes. I showered and wiped the fluids off of me. Even Mensah, my favorite human, didn't even 
+
+suggest
+
+ removing the combat override module. That hurt more than it should have.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wondered if she even knew it was there. Surely she had to. I wondered if it hadn't even come up in whatever conversation they'd had about my well being. I wondered what Gurathin had told them. No one seemed that mad at him. So maybe they really didn't know? I still had no idea why the others liked him. I wished I 
+
+had
+
+ killed him back when he'd told everyone my name.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He sat next to me on the couch while all the humans were packing up to head home (except Dr Mensah, she was in some kind of press meeting). He'd had me sit there, and the module had forced me to comply. I felt like a puppet.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+""You've been behaving,"" he said. ""I don't know why you have a problem with override modules. This one is working just fine.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+I wanted to tell him I hated him. He probably knew that, though. (I was scared of him, too...I was dreading the next time he got me alone, now that he'd tried to use me as a sexbot once.) ""You don't want me on the Mensah family farm,"" I managed. ""I'm a dangerous rogue.""
+
+
+ 
+
+
+He looked at me, like he was waiting for me to continue. Then he laughed, and rubbed one hand along my cheek (I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to feel it). ""Not anymore,"" he said. ""Not while I'm keeping you under control. Don't worry,"" he grinned at me, ""you're coming home with us.""
+"
+43188139,the things you must do,['ArtemisTheHuntress'],Explicit,F/M,The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells,Dr. Gurathin/Original Human Character,"Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Original Human Character(s)","Pre-Canon, Heavy Angst, Sexual Assault, With some overtones of, Corrective Rape, aroace character, Acephobia, Medical Debt, Corporation Rim setting primarily, Trauma, Hopeful Ending, The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), Which honestly just means that the capacity for abuses under capitalism is terrible",English,2022-11-19,Completed,2022-11-19,"7,669",1/1,10,48,6,188,"['FyrDrakken', 'dandyjeloo91', 'isilee', 'darth_eowyn', 'Unknown66', 'cookiekobold', 'CactusNoir', 'Pokegirl11', 'YellowBeePurpleMonster', 'AnxiousEspada', 'EvenstarFalling', 'Chyoatas', 'Deliala919', 'shakespeareaddict', 'opalescent_potato', 'Gabriella_Marie', 'sluttygirlboy', 'artzbots', 'reading_tsc', 'gossiehawk', 'DexxxtroDNA', 'Utahraptor_Wrangler', 'VoidlingRemnata', 'MommyMayI', 'veltzeh', 'PotatoLady', 'hummus_tea', 'Preemptivekarma', 'Fluky', 'petwheel', 'elmofirefic', 'Rosemarycat5', 'Zannper', 'AuntyMatter', 'AkaMissK', 'BWizard', 'lunaTactics']",[],"The woman sits down in the chair opposite him, her expression bright and open and her long black hair done up in braids in the professional style common on Preservation.
+
+She looks friendly.  Gurathin does not trust authority figures who try to project friendliness.
+
+""Hello.  Davyth abMartae Gurathin, right?"" she says.  Her voice is gentle and calm and he does not trust that either.  ""I'm Inaaya Dhar, she/her--"" Her feed ID is public, he knows that-- ""and I'm the caseworker processing your residency application.  I just have a few questions about what you wrote.""
+
+He looks up sharply at that, and Dhar adds, ""Oh don't--don't worry!  You're not in trouble, and you're not being rejected, or anything of that sort.  I just want to talk to you to understand why you want to move here.""
+
+""It's on the form I filled out,"" he says.  ""All of the forms.  There are a lot.""  Too late he tries to remind himself not to antagonize authority figures here.  That's what keeps getting him in trouble.
+
+Dhar seems unfazed.  She nods and says, ""I know it can be overwhelming.  It's a process, and we try to make it as efficient as possible for incomers, but it takes time and specificity to make sure your intent is understood and needs are being met.  Can I ask you some questions?""
+
+As if he has a choice.  ""Of course.""
+
+She leans forward, her elbows resting on her knees.  There's no desk between their chairs; the small room is set up as if they're just two friends, having a chat.  The artificiality of the intimacy pisses him off.  They're not friends, and she doesn't care about him, and they both know he's only here because the bureaucracy demands it.
+
+""You have lived here under a student residence before,"" Dhar says.  ""To attend First Landing University.  Up until two years ago, right?""
+
+He saved the conversion algorithm to his augments, and never deleted it, because he's stupid, and sentimental.  He checks, even though they both know it's correct, and says, ""That's right.""
+
+""And you indicated that you had applied to First Landing's graduate program, which was the primary reason you're applying for residence again.""
+
+""Yes.""
+
+""I was wondering why you chose to fill out the permanent residence application with an indication toward seeking citizenship, in that case,"" Dhar says.  She doesn't sound angry, just professionally, practicedly measured.  ""Rather than the student residence.""
+
+""Because I want to reside here permanently,"" Gurathin says, trying to keep the obviously out of his voice.  ""I don't want to be deported as soon as I finish the program."" 
+
+""We wouldn't--we wouldn't do that, Mr. Gurathin.  That's not what happens.""
+
+""Whatever you do, then.  I don't want to be forced to go back.""
+
+""I'm curious what changed your mind.  You attended the undergraduate program with an intent to return to--"" she clearly checks her feed-- ""your home planet of Domara to apply your skills there.  What makes you want to come back?""
+
+""I thought you'd be happy the resources you spent on me wouldn't be wasted on some corporate.""
+
+Dhar sighs.  He's getting on her nerves, which is something he can't fucking afford to do, what the hell is he thinking.
+
+It's kind of satisfying, though.
+
+""I'm asking,"" she says, ""because as a polity, we have certain expectations for immigrants, but before we go over that, I want to make sure that we're processing you through the correct channels.  Because aside from the student residence section... well, a lot more people from the Corporation Rim qualify for refugee status than they think they do.""
+
+""What?""
+
+""This isn't a judgement on you or your motives!  The opposite, in fact.""
+
+""I'm not--I'm not running away from anything.""
+
+""Some of things that you wrote on your intake forms suggested that it was possible that you meet our criteria.  That's all,"" Dhar says.  ""I want to make sure that you're getting the support that you need, and if you are processed as a corporate refugee, the process is different.  I wanted to ask you some questions about... about how you would describe the situation that you're leaving.  If that's all right.""
+
+Why does she keep asking him that?  It's not like he can just refuse to cooperate with the caseworker who controls his future.  So he nods and says, ""Fine.""
+
+She nods back and smiles, like they have an understanding.  ""Excellent.  If you need me to repeat or rephrase any questions, or need a translator, just ask.""
+
+He will absolutely not ask.  ""All right.""
+
+""Great.  These may be sensitive questions, so if you don't want to answer, that's also fine.  Ready?""
+
+""Just go.""
+
+""Have you been coerced into doing things that you did not want to do, and that were dangerous or detrimental to your physical or mental health?""
+
+He snorts.  ""That's just what having a job is.""
+
+""That's...""  Clearly not the answer Dhar is expecting.  She's taken aback for a moment as she searches for the words.  ""It doesn't have to be,"" she says.  ""You should not have to be coerced, economically or otherwise, into doing things that are detrimental to you.""
+
+""It's not detrimental,"" Gurathin says.  ""It's just what life is.""
+
+Elain rubbed her eyes and sighed in that rough, frustrated way that meant this argument had gone on longer than either of them wanted but neither was ready to back down yet.  ""I'm not trying to sell you off into marriage like some fantasy princess, Davy, for fuck's sake.  I'm just saying, if you're going to move to Marusthal, it's something you're going to have to think about.""
+
+He folded his arms.  ""I don't see why you're so insistent.""
+
+""I'm realistic.  You don't have to--you don't have to want to get married.  Plenty of people don't.  I am sure you can find someone else who feels the same way you do, pool your resources, get the incorporation benefits.  I'm not telling you how to live your life, I'm saying that it's really, really hard to live your life if you automatically reject one of the main institutions that lets you live your life.""
+
+""I've been messaging other new hires.  The roommate situation works fine without having to have sex with them.""
+
+""Light a-fucking-bove,"" Elain said.  ""I'm not talking about sex.  I'm not even talking about love, you don't have to feel any way about it at all.  I'm talking about money.  You can't afford a place to live on Marusthal on one person's income, and it's hard as shit to buy a house with someone you're not incorporated family with, and it's annoying as shit to incorporate without getting married.  Not unless you're already rich.  And in case you haven't noticed, we're not rich.""
+
+""I've noticed,"" Davyth Gurathin said acidly.
+
+""What I'm saying is that a roommate group with other new hires at Vantage works fine now, and if you can make it work for the rest of your life, more power to you!  I mean it!  If you can support yourself, have a place to live, feed yourself, pay for your healthcare, and pay off the debt, on the time you'll have and salary they've offered you--do it!  It's just hard to do and miserable to try, especially somewhere like Marusthal.  There's a reason the average marriage is three or four people.  You need that group for support.""
+
+""I'll manage,"" he said.  ""I shouldn't have to if I don't want it.""
+
+""It's about economics, Davy.  It's not about what you want.""
+
+""It shouldn't be.""
+
+""It shouldn't be!"" Elain agreed, throwing her hands in the air.  ""It shouldn't!  It's awful that it is!  But it is.  That's how life works.  Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, because that's how you survive.  'But I don't want to' makes you sound like a little kid.  I don't want to take my vitamin supplements, I don't want to eat my Protfu(tm), I don't want to get augment surgery--""
+
+He glared at her for that one.
+
+""--sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, because otherwise you'll be hungry, or malnourished, or die of a seizure by the time you're twelve.  Or not be able to afford an apartment.  It's just how life is.""
+
+""It isn't that way on--"" he muttered.
+
+Elain cut him off.  ""It isn't that way on Preservation, I know, I get it.  And that's fantastic for them.  We're not on Preservation.  We're here.  You can't--you can't expect the way things were in college to be that way for the rest of your life.""
+
+""What would you know?"" he snapped.  ""You never went to college.""
+
+It was a low blow.  Elain blinked, and gritted her teeth, and looked like she was about to say something cutting in return, and then just--sighed.  This sigh wasn't one of aggravation, it was one of concession.  ""I just worry about you, Davy.  You spent four years in this... this artificial world, and you keep refusing to accept how it works now that you're back in the real one.  You're going off to Marusthal on a rigid contract for some serious medical debt that you owe Vantage for, which is a very, very different world from cute vegetarian college.  I don't want you to keep expecting people to be better than they are, because you'll just get hurt.""
+
+""You worried about me going to Preservation in the first place,"" he said.  ""And it turned out to be an accredited university program and not a nature sacrifice cult.""
+
+""You don't worry enough for yourself,"" Elain said, ""so I have to do it for you.""  When he rolled his eyes, she added, ""You're my baby brother, Davy, I get to worry as much as I want.""
+
+""So..."" Dhar says.  ""Do you want to declare a history of coercion to your mental or physical detriment on your planet of origin?""
+
+""No,"" Gurathin answers.
+
+""Okay,"" Dhar says.  He thinks she's trying not to sound dubious.  ""That's fine!  This is about your perception of your own health and safety.  We just want to offer you the chance to explain and request--right, I'm sorry, you know, I don't need to repeat myself.""  She clears her throat and nods.  ""Is there anything else in your life that has been a regular source of danger or detriment to your physical or mental health?  Interpreted broadly.  We want you to know you're safe here, from anything you might have been facing on your planet of origin, even if it wasn't treated as a problem there.""
+
+""Here's to day ten of Crunch Week,"" Ramil said, raising a bottle of shitty beer to the table.
+
+""Already taking bets on how many weeks Crunch Week is gonna last,"" Norjannah said.  ""If it's any less than three I'll buy a round for everyone.""
+
+""That's optimistic,"" Gurathin said, taking a sip of his own shitty beer.
+
+""Oh no,"" Julissa groaned, ""don't say that!  I think I'm going to die if we have to keep this up for the rest of the quarter.""
+
+""The deadline for the Zincaxe project is in another five days,"" Ramil said.  ""It's gonna get worse before it gets better.""
+
+""Surely there won't be such intense crunch after the deadline, then?"" Julissa said.
+
+""After we're done with Zincaxe, we need to catch up on everything we set aside to make sure Zincaxe got done on time,"" said Gurathin.
+
+""Oh, what would you know, college boy,"" Norjannah said.  ""You're having fun up with the salaried workers in PlanInfoSystems and the database mapping, you don't have to wrangle in the code mines with us wage-working plebs.""
+
+""Don't be a dick, Norjannah,"" Julissa said, and Gurathin just said, mildly, ""If I ever get off work any earlier than you do, then I'll happily admit it.""
+
+""Besides, up there you have to deal directly with Cantal,"" Ramil said.  ""At least we've usually got the tech manager as a buffer to the department boss herself.""
+
+""Tech Manager Paolo is fine, even if the work is shit,"" Norjannah agreed.  ""Trade-offs.  You still get paid more, though.""
+
+""It all goes right back to them.  They own me as thoroughly as they own all of you, so none of us are coming out ahead here,"" Gurathin said.  He didn't say, even more; they could choose to leave, if they found something better.  They won't, but they could.  He was on a rigid contract with Vantage; he couldn't even do that if he wanted to.  ""And we're all going to have to get up early tomorrow.""
+
+Norjannah groaned.  ""I need another drink.""
+
+""This cannot be good for you,"" Julissa said.
+
+""Working twelve hours, drinks, instant protein garbage, sleep for six, repeat for ten days straight cannot be good for any of us either,"" Norjannah said, ""and yet here we all fuckin' are.  I'm getting another drink.  It's the one choice I've made for myself all day.""
+
+""No,"" Gurathin says.  ""I'm fine.""
+
+""All right.""  Dhar shifts in her chair and looks at him.  Gurathin grits his teeth and doesn't flinch.  ""You mentioned on your forms that you moved from the planet Domara to work in the tech sector on Marusthal.  Were you ever subject to harassment, particularly due to class or an identity as an ethnic, sexual, gender, or religious minority?  You don't have to go into any details, and I promise that anything you say is fully confidential and no details will be shared with anyone outside this room.  This is only going to be processed categorically as part of my assessment of your case for refugee status.""
+
+He was a Domaran with a funny accent and a degree from a backwater freehold university that no one had heard of but everyone had heard took him as a charity case.  There was a reason he didn't spend any of his precious little free time with the other salaried, degreed analysts.
+
+Gurathin was running queries on a PlanInfoSys database map for a project for GeoRica, trying to decide if this was as optimized as the distribution map proposals was going to get.  Radioactive, toxic, and irritant materials indicating danger to the servers and code degradation was in the <.05 range, which was acceptable, but those dangers to biological systems was still hovering at <.15 no matter how he tried to optimize it within given parameters.  He could try to tweak the parameters within previously acceptable ranges to try to get a better result, but this was under the mandatory <.2 threshold and calling up similar sites and searching their starting parameters to try to reference against the GeoRica-given ones and rerun his analyses under the new parameter sets would take hours and there were still eight more maps to do and he wasn't paid enough to care.
+
+(If this had been his first quarter, or his second, he probably would have done it, put in the overtime to make sure to do this right, because biological systems meant human health for the people who would be working this installation when GeoRica eventually built it; but he'd many weeks since accepted the fact that he was not paid enough to put in the extra effort, because he had enough work already, though had not yet been here long enough to not feel guilty about it.)
+
+He was startled out of his focus by hands on his shoulders.  ""How's the work going?  I love how well you've taken to the fast-paced civilized world!""
+
+Gurathin jumped, turned around, cutting off the shoulder massage.  ""Director Cantal.  It's going well.  I've...""  He decided that yes, it was better to be done.  ""Just finished the third set on the GeoRica assignment.""
+
+""Great,"" Cantal said.  ""Love to hear it.""  She grinned and tilted her head in a way that made the flat blue lights glint off her augments.  Director Cantal's augments were elegant and clearly meant to be seen as well as used.  Hers were not the byproduct of corporate-funded medical sponsorship for a debilitating childhood condition; she had clearly paid for them herself and wanted people to know it.
+
+""I know we took a chance on you,"" she said, ""went out on a limb, took it on faith that that freehold actually trained you in anything besides basket-weaving, and you've surprised us all.  An impressive asset.""  She patted his head, ruffling his hair.
+
+Gurathin jerked his head away.  Cantal pouted at him.
+
+""Don't touch my hair,"" Gurathin said, in a clipped voice.  ""Please.""
+
+""I was just being friendly,"" Cantal said.  ""You haven't been making friends.  I just wanted to reach out.""  She turned and clicked away, in her slick suit and hard shoes.
+
+""Try not to piss her off,"" Dalisay said, from across the room.  ""Seriously.  You don't want to.""
+
+""It's not like he wants to keep her attention on him either,"" Amihan muttered, as if they thought Gurathin couldn't hear.  ""No-win scenario there.""
+
+""He's here on a rigid contract, isn't he?"" Herras said, as if he didn't care if Gurathin heard him or not.  ""Hasn't got a choice either way, let's be honest.""
+
+""Genuinely, though,"" Dalisay said, turning her chair and facing Gurathin.  ""If at all possible, try really hard not to give her a reason to resent you.""
+
+""No,"" says Gurathin.
+
+Dhar pauses.  ""All right,"" she says.  ""Have you been subject to or threatened with violence, whether physical violence, or sexual violence, abuse, or coercion, particularly due to class or an identity as an ethnic, sexual, gender, or religious minority?""
+
+""Davyth!"" Department Director Cantal said.  ""How have you been doing?  It's wonderful to actually get to chat.""  She was not behind her desk, as Gurathin expected; instead she sat on it, facing him, her skirt swishing over her delicately positioned legs.
+
+It was a biannual performance review and half-year plan meeting.  That's all it was.  He'd done two before, this wasn't new, he could handle this.  In the past few months Gurathin had been doing what he could to avoid spending time around Director Cantal, and she definitely knew it, because she had been equally making a point to keep a personal eye on him.  She knew it made him uncomfortable.  She knew she made him uncomfortable.  That was undeniably the point.
+
+""Director Cantal,"" he said.
+
+""No need to sound so cold,"" Cantal said.  ""I've been looking forward to meeting with you.  There are important things we need to discuss about your workplace performance, and it really ought to happen in person.""
+
+He called up the project reports he had prepared on his augments, and shared them into a joint feed workspace.  ""Here's the Pavisil project status.  It's been going well; the maps of the--""
+
+She waved them away and deleted them out of the workspace.  ""Oh, I've looked over those.  Your work is efficient and detailed.  I like the maps you do, and they make the databases and analysis very clean.  Your work is very good!  Your attitude, though.  We really need to discuss your attitude at work, Davyth.""
+
+""If my work is good, I don't see why my attitude matters.""
+
+Cantal sighed at him.  ""That's exactly an example of what I'm talking about.""  Her eyes on him were sharp and appraising, and she was both unimpressed and amused at what she was seeing.  ""The other employees in the Planetary Information Systems all say you think you're better than them.""
+
+""That isn't true,"" Gurathin said.
+
+""I can't deny it seems that way,"" Director Cantal said.  ""You try to avoid me.  Don't argue, I've seen you try not to meet my eyes when I'm around, even when I'm just trying to be friendly.  I almost never see you at the off-hours development workshops or office parties.  You rarely talk to any of the other salaried analysts in the department, and when you do, they say you keep talking about how much better things were and how much nicer the work was on--what was it?  Perseverance?  That deep outsystem freehold.""
+
+""Preservation,"" Gurathin said quietly.
+
+""Ah, that's it!  I can never remember the name.  They say you talk about how our work practices are worse than theirs.  It's sowing discontent and making people ungrateful.  And discontent and ungratefulness make a work family miserable.  Why do you talk about that freehold so much?""
+
+He grit his teeth at work family, but managed not to say anything back about it.  ""Well, work is pretty much the same every day.  One runs out of topics to talk about.""
+
+Well, his restraint in not talking back was only partially successful.
+
+""Is our work and our community boring to you?"" Cantal asked.  ""You don't participate in work social activities, you don't appreciate Marusthal, and you work among employees with degrees from respectable colleges in civilized space and act like your freehold degree makes you better than them.  You think the way we do things here is less preferable to a backwater freehold planet.  You don't stay overtime to help unless specifically ordered to do so.  You don't have friends outside a handful of the at-will techs, and you don't date.  What is so awful about us that you think you're too good for us, Davyth?""
+
+""I don't think I'm too good for you,"" Gurathin said.
+
+""Mm,"" said Cantal.  ""This company generously saved your life as a child, didn't it?  You could stand to be a little bit more grateful.""
+
+""I'm working diligently to pay back that debt.""  Gurathin bit out the words, trying very hard not to say what felt about Vantage's generosity.  ""I'm more useful to you with the accredited degree, and the contract I work under is plenty of gratitude.""
+
+Director Cantal looked into his eyes and did not respond.  It was unnerving.  Gurathin had to force himself to meet hers, and not look away.
+
+Then she blinked slowly and gave him a teasingly rueful smile.  ""It's a pity.  There's a new project that Amborian has contracted with us for.  It's a big one, an important one, and we could use some talented geographic and geochemical analysts like you on it.  But it's apparent that your work attitude and teamwork skills would make you a bad fit.  I've decided to reassign you to the infotech department instead.""
+
+""What?""  He jerked back like he'd been slapped.  He felt like he had.  ""But--""
+
+""If you can't handle the teamwork and dedication that PlanInfoSys requires, if you're not willing to commit, to give it your all, if you're just going to be ungrateful, you just drag the team down,"" Cantal said.  ""If you just want to show up to work and then go home, you can work and then go home like the wageworker techs.""
+
+Everything--appealing for time to get a formal degree, finding a university program that would even take an applicant with no money and no resume, going to college a month-long wormhole trip away--was so that he could avoid entering Vantage as a wageworker tech, so that he could get a salaried geospatial analyst's job and pay off his medical debt in three and a half years rather than ten.  His rigid contract prohibited him from leaving until he had worked off his debt to Vantage, but at the end of three and a half years he would be free to renegotiate a flexible contract into a competitive position he had a robust resume for.  He'd be free after seven years and a valuable and desirable hire, possibly even somewhere better than Vantage.
+
+But if he got kicked down to tech a year and a half into his contract... he had done the calculations.  His interest accrued faster than a tech's wage could keep up with.  He couldn't be kicked down to tech.  He couldn't.  Not for this.
+
+His shock must have shown in his expression, because Cantal grinned.  ""Not so haughty now that there are actual consequences, huh?  What did you think would happen if you were so standoffish with me and your team, Davyth?""
+
+""I...""  He swallowed, dug his fingernails into his palm, composed himself.  ""I'm sorry.""  He took a breath.  Let it out.  Willed himself to be small and compliant because that was clearly what she was after.  He could do that.  He could make himself do that, to keep his job.  ""Please don't reassign me.  I like the work I do in PlanInfo.  I'll make sure to... adjust my attitude.""
+
+Her grin widened brightly at that.  ""Now that's better.  Was that so hard?""  She sighed, though, loud and dramatic.  ""That's easy to promise.  Can you really change, Davyth?  You owe me an apology.""
+
+""I said I was sorry.""
+
+""Oh, that sounded very insincere,"" Cantal said.  ""You can do better.  Show me you want this job.  Show me you don't really think you're too good for us.""  She waved a finger, beckoning him.  ""Come here.""
+
+He walked across the office to stand in front of her.
+
+Cantal looked up at him from her seat on the desk.  ""Oh, I don't want to look up at you.  That isn't right.""  She smirked.  ""Kneel down.""
+
+""What?""
+
+""You heard me.  Kneel.""
+
+A cold pit of fear sank into his stomach.
+
+She was after more than just contrition and compliance.
+
+""Oh, don't be so proud, Davyth,"" Cantal said.  ""You think you're better than me?  Are you going to just stand there, looking down at me?  Kneel.""
+
+He could leave.  He could just turn around and leave this office right now.
+
+He knelt down in front of her.
+
+""There we go,"" Cantal said.  ""You know, I have wondered why you're so antisocial.  So frigid.  So resistant.  Are none of us on Marusthal good enough for you?  Or is there an old flame back on Domara you're saving yourself for, or some strong wild lover from your distant cult planet we can never hope to match?""
+
+Gurathin stared fixedly at her knees.  ""I can conduct my life as I choose.""
+
+""That kind of attitude is exactly what I mean when I say you're not a good team player, Davyth.""  Her position shifted, and he glanced up.  She slid herself forward, hiked up her skirt, delicately hooked her thumb under the band of her underwear, and drew it down her legs.  She dropped it to the floor in front of him.
+
+He focused on his breathing.  Keep breathing.  Don't look at her.  His heart was pounding in his throat and his skin felt cold.
+
+""You can do better,"" she said.  ""I know you can.  Show me that you're willing to put in a little effort.  If you're willing to have a more grateful and company-focused attitude, I might reconsider.""
+
+He clenched his teeth.  Swallowed.  ""In what way?""
+
+""Oh come on, Davyth,"" Cantal said.  She reached over, grabbed his hair roughly, then yanked his head forward and pressed his face into her crotch.  ""Do me a favor and I can do one for you.  How's that?""
+
+His eyes were closed but his face was pressed into her skin, her pubic hair, and he couldn't breathe anymore but his mouth and nose were filled with the smell of her.  His nerves were screaming to jerk back, to run, but--
+
+--but what option did he have?  If he shoved back now, stood up, said no, walked out of the room--that was it.  That would be the end of his life right here, unless he could maybe go over Cantal's head to the Information Technologies Manager to get reinstated.  But Director Cantal's word about his failures against his word about her unreasonable quid-pro-quo demands?  It would most likely only result in more retaliation.  If he was bumped down to tech, on a tech's wages--he would never be able to pay off the debt to Vantage.  Four years of college meant interest accrual without work repayment, with the expectation that he could enter at a higher salary than a tech.  As a tech he would never be able to make up those four years, and the interest would keep growing and he would stay on Vantage's contract forever and he would never, ever be able to leave.
+
+He tried to keep his breathing even.
+
+And as a tech he probably wouldn't be able to pay the rent on his current apartment which would mean having to find a new, almost certainly worse one on short notice, if that was even possible in this housing market full of desperate wageworkers--Julissa might let him stay at her place for a little while, but she lived with four roommates and there was hardly space to spare there long-term, which meant if he wanted a place to live he would... he didn't know what he would do.  He wouldn't even have anything to offer as a marital partner to join a group's house even if he was driven to it.  Except, possibly, favors.  For an indefinite future as he tried to keep his head above water at Vantage.
+
+He could do this.  Once.  Hopefully once.  To avoid that.
+
+""You insult me, Davyth,"" Cantal said, teasingly but with a hint of warning.  He was taking too long, focusing on continuing to breathe and trying not to panic instead of what she wanted.  She tilted her hips toward him, and reached down with her free hand and spread her labia.  She pushed his head insistently into the wet softness of her vulva.  ""I want to feel you.  I want to feel your appreciation for what I'm doing for you.  Do you think you're too good for this?""
+
+Being an adult and living in the world meant doing things you don't want to do, because you have to.
+
+He opened his mouth and fumbled with his lips and tongue.  He tried not to shiver.  He didn't succeed in not flinching.
+
+""Oh, there we go,"" Cantal said.  ""I knew you could do it.""
+
+He had no idea if he was doing it 'right', or what Cantal was expecting, but when he gripped her thighs to steady himself she giggled, and when he was doing the same thing for too long she had helpful advice-- ""More sucking,"" and ""No, better rhythm, get your tongue in there--ohhh that's it, yes,"" and her hand tightened in his hair so sharply he made an involuntary, pathetic noise in his throat. 
+
+His eyes were closed, he couldn't see much from this vantage point anyway and he didn't want to, but Cantal opened a feed link between them and streamed what she was seeing from her augments to his.  He was looking down at the top of his own head, performing oral sex for his boss from her own perspective.  Thank everything hellish and holy that her augments weren't wired such that she could send him her experience of the sexual pleasure, too.  He was trying to remember to breathe and trying not to gag but if he had to feel what he was doing through her he wasn't sure he could avoid breaking down completely.
+
+It probably wasn't as long as it felt like when he pulled back for breath again, and Cantal made a satisfied mmm, pushed him away gently, slid off the desk, and repositioned her skirt to fall back around her knees.  ""You don't know what you're doing,"" she said, ""but that's all right.  You showed you were willing to learn, and that's the kind of attitude I want to see more of.  If you can keep that in mind, I think I can find a spot for you on the Amborian project after all.  Would you like that?""
+
+He couldn't look at her.  He could feel her vaginal juices on his face, cold now against the air.  ""Yes, Director Cantal,"" he said quietly.  ""Thank you.""
+
+She helped him to his feet.  He let her.  He hadn't realized, until now, how much he was shaking.
+
+Cantal looped her arms around his shoulders, pressed up against him, and kissed him.  He jerked back in surprise when she stuck her tongue into his mouth, hot and sudden, but her arms locked around him and didn't let him get very far.  She ground her hips against his, and her tongue was in his mouth, and everything was hot and wet and he was waiting for it just to be over.
+
+She pulled back and appraised him again, smirking.  ""Go take care of--"" she waved her hand at his face-- ""all that.  You look a mess.  You look like you weren't even having fun, and isn't that a shame.  But keep in mind that you promised to go forward with a better, more team-focused attitude, Davyth!  No more negativity, no more antisocial grouchiness, no more complaining about how mean and unfair Vantage is, no more thinking you're too good to be here.  You aren't, you know.  You're a member of the Vantage team just like anyone else, and you will be for quite a while, so it would really behoove you to act like it.""  She patted his head.  ""I have more reviews to do today.  Thank you for being so understanding.""
+
+That was a dismissal.  Humiliatingly but unable to make himself act more maturely, he bolted out of the office before she could change her mind.
+
+He moderated his speed as he walked back down the dull hallway, hoping desperately that no one he knew would see him.  He kept his eyes fixed ahead and his pace even and did not look at anyone he passed, even as out of the corner of his eye he could see them looking at him.
+
+Gurathin connected to the door and transferred the credits to enter the single-stall restroom at the end of the corridor, which cost more for the increased privacy but right now he did not care.  He leaned on the sink and stared at himself in the mirror.  He did look a mess.
+
+He ran the water and splashed it on his face.  He let his skin get fully soaked before he wiped it down.  He didn't have to know whether he was wiping off water from the tap, vaginal fluids, saliva, or tears.  He cupped his hands and poured the tap water into his mouth, swishing it around and spitting it out, repeating it eight times until the only taste left in his mouth was the familiar metallic and vaguely astringent taste of the standard recycled Marusthali water.  He would likely get a reprimand for leaving the water running for so long.  He thought, bitterly, that Director Cantal would probably back him up on that, at least.
+
+He fixed his hair.  He straightened his shirt.
+
+He sat in the locked bathroom for a full hour, a tiny and shocking luxury, letting his body calm down before he exited and went back to work.
+
+""Mr. Gurathin?"" Inaaya Dhar prompts, gently.
+
+He blinks.  ""Oh.  Uh.  No.""
+
+""I want you to know, you don't have to disclose anything you don't want to.  But also that nothing that was done to you is your fault, and I promise we don't judge potential immigrants based on what was done to them in their polity of origin,"" Dhar says.  ""If your situation put you in danger of violence or unwanted sexual--""
+
+""I said no.""
+
+Dhar nods.  ""Of course.""  Gurathin thinks he hears her sigh quietly.  ""Have you had your rights infringed on in other ways, such as denial of privacy or restriction of opportunities or movement?""  At his chilly look, she adds, ""This is the last question, I promise.  Many people from the Corporation Rim have rarely considered things like these rights infringements, but we do here.  So it helps to have this open question to catch anything else that people might be seeking a safer situation away from.""
+
+""I'm going to kill her,"" Elain said.  ""How could--how could she--how could anybody--"" It was stupid, because they both knew the answer was 'very easily.'  Elain hugged him tightly.  ""I'm so sorry.  I'm going to kill her.""
+
+Gurathin hugged his sister back, letting out a very long breath.  ""No you're not.""
+
+""Are you sure about that.  Because I could get on a transport to Marusthal and walk into her office and stab her in the face and I would not feel the slightest bit of regret.""
+
+He wouldn't either and would fully support Elain if she decided to do that.  But it was all talk, all just way to express horror and anger that had no real recourse.  ""Then do it,"" he said into her shoulder.  He didn't want to let go.  Not yet.
+
+Elain sighed.  ""There has to be--someone you can report that to.  That's not legal.  We have some laws that aren't 'the corporation executives can do what they want' and that's one of them.  Isn't it?  There has to be someone who cares.""
+
+""For an employee on a debt-related rigid contract?""  Gurathin broke the hug first and sat down on her couch.  ""You know that isn't anybody's priority.""
+
+Elain shook her head, like she didn't want to believe it, but it was true and they both knew it.  ""Which is why I wish I could just kill her.  She can't keep--she can't just do that.""
+
+Gurathin leaned his head back against the wall.  ""And yet.""
+
+Elain growled is futile rage.  Then, ""How long is left on your contract?""
+
+""Two years.""
+
+""Two years.  Fuck.  Can you try to transfer to a different department with a boss who isn't a rapist?""
+
+""Even if I requested it, Cantal would have to sign off on it.""
+
+""Fuck,"" Elain whispered again.
+
+""Believe me, I've spent the last few weeks thinking about what options I have.""  It wasn't exactly untrue, but it sure made his thought processes over the last few weeks since the 'performance review' sound much clearer and better-planned than they had been.  The conclusion was the same, though.  ""And the answer is, the whole point of a rigid contract is that it doesn't allow the employee to have options.""
+
+""They let you come to Domara,"" Elain said.  ""You're not allowed to leave Marusthal without company authorization, so who signed off on that?  They might listen to you.""
+
+""Nobody.  I'm here with a fake ID.""
+
+Elain hissed in a breath.  ""Light above, Davy.  How long before they miss you?""
+
+""I don't care,"" he said.  ""I'm not going back.""
+
+He hadn't entirely decided on that until that exact moment.  But as soon as he said it, he knew it was true.  He would not go back to his job at Vantage.
+
+Elain grimaced.  ""Okay.  Okay.  We can work with this.  How much is left on your debt?""
+
+""Fourteen thousand.""
+
+""Fourteen--what the fuck, that's how much the surgery cost in the first place!""
+
+""Four years of interest accumulation takes time to catch up to.""
+
+""Dammit,"" Elain said.  ""Well, you did get a degree--they can't take that away from you.  There are probably jobs you can get on Domara that would allow you to pay off the debt and the contract reneging fees.""  She did not sound confident about this, probably because the consequences for reneging on a rigid contract were much, much worse than standard reneging fees.  ""You're still incorporated with us, so I can probably take on some of that debt if I have to, though I'd have to talk to--""
+
+""I don't want to just get the same job on Domara,"" Gurathin said.  ""And I couldn't if I wanted to.  You know that.  At best I could try to renegotiate for a transfer to a different location with the upper executives, which even if they deign to see me would definitely extend my contract, but--""  He shook his head.  ""It's not just Cantal.  It's... most of the last two years.  Even if you murdered Cantal tomorrow, two more years of this job, two more years of spending every daylight hour plotting locations for mineral extractions and calculating the toxicity factors for server functionality on work installations, just waiting until I can be free to renegotiate on my own terms into a better version of this same job that is turning me into a person I don't want to be...""  He shrugged.  ""I'm not going to do it.""
+
+The look in Elain's eyes was genuine fear this time.  ""Davy,"" she said softly, ""It's okay, we will figure something out.  You don't have to do this.  It hurts, I know, it hurts, but we survive it together, all right?  I'm here for you.  Always.  I want you to know that.  If you start to feel like the only way out is dying, we can find a way--""
+
+""What--Elain, I'm not talking about killing myself.  By the light."" 
+
+""Oh.""  She stopped short, confused. ""Then what are you talking about?""
+
+He grinned, small and bitter. ""Running away to join a nature cult on some backwater planet where they probably eat people.""
+
+""I never said they eat people,"" Elain grumbled.  ""Dad did.  I didn't.""  She looked away from him, though, and said, quietly, ""You did seem a lot happier when you were there than you've been in... well, the last year at all.""
+
+""Life doesn't have to be miserable,"" Gurathin said.  ""It isn't actually a prerequisite.""
+
+""I'm not miserable,"" Elain said.  ""It's not easy, but I'm not miserable.""  She met his eyes.  ""Are you?""
+
+He held her gaze.  For just a moment, let himself feel his feelings closer than a safe arm's length.  ""Yes.""
+
+Slowly, she nodded.  ""Then... then.  You can stay here until the next transport out of the system that doesn't go through Marusthal--it shouldn't be more than a day or two.  And... where did you get your fake ID?  Was it someone you can trust?""
+
+""I made it.""
+
+""You--of fucking course you did, okay.  Do you have somewhere to go when you reach Preservation?""
+
+""One of my professors said he would be willing to be a reference for me if I wanted to apply to First Landing's graduate program.  They have good support for outsystem students.  I'll be fine.""
+
+""Do you have any money?""
+
+""Barely a thousand accessible.""
+
+""Leave it.  Let them think you fell off a cliff and died, or something, so they don't chase you for being a contract-breaker.  I'll pay for your transport.""  She rubbed her eyes.  ""This is so illegal.""
+
+""Sometimes in life, you have to do things that you don't want to do,"" Gurathin said.  ""I didn't want to become a contract-breaker.  But here we are.""  Neither addressed the truth hanging over their heads; if caught, he would be punished far, far more harshly for what he was about to do than Vantage, or Cantal, ever would be.
+
+He wouldn't get caught, then, until he was out of Marusthali space and out of the Outer Rim Economic Alliance entirely.
+
+""Actually,"" Elain said, ""wait here for a second, let me get--""  She disappeared into her room, and came back out a few minutes later holding a hard currency card.  She pressed it into Gurathin's hand.  ""Here.  I still have this.""
+
+""You--?""
+
+""I figured it wasn't impossible you'd need it again.""
+
+""Elain, you need this.""
+
+""You need it a lot more than I do,"" Elain said, refusing to take the currency card loaded with 1,500 OACs back.  The same card she'd given him six years ago when he was heading to Preservation for the first time, 'bug-out' money in case it was a cult and he needed to escape quickly.  He had tried to refuse it then.  He had returned it to her after he graduated as a told-you-so.  He couldn't deny that he would need it now.
+
+""Thank you,"" Gurathin said, and he was suddenly very, very tired.
+
+""I love you, Davy,"" Elain said.  ""Please stay safe.""
+
+""I don't think you'll find anyone from Corporate space who that doesn't apply to in some capacity,"" Gurathin says.  ""I don't see why you're asking.""
+
+Dhar nods.  ""So do you want to register that as a yes and appeal for refugee status?  It is an option open to you, and one that makes certain things more streamlined for you, and I promise it will not affect your university application in any way.  The university won't even be notified of your refugee status unless you choose to notify them.""
+
+""No,"" says Gurathin.
+
+Preservationers pride themselves on their patience, and Dhar remains annoyingly unflappable but undeniably disappointed.  ""All right.  You've indicated that you've submitted an application to First Landing's academic graduate track.  As an alumnus, you're likely to be accepted.  Are there any faculty you've communicated with that have offered a place to you?
+
+""I contacted Professor Volescu when I arrived.  He had offered to act as a reference for me in the past, and reaffirmed that promise and suggested he would take me on as a student once I'm accepted.  He seems to think I will be.""
+
+""Good!  Good to hear.  Then I still think it would be a good idea to get you on a student residency first, which also makes some things more streamlined.  Once we have that in place, transitioning it to a permanent residency is less pressure, because that does take a while to establish.  If you want to pursue citizenship, that also takes extra steps, but we try not to make it too onerous, especially as you've shown you have a certain amount of commitment to Preservation by coming back.""  Dhar smiles at him.  ""We'll walk you through how it works as your case progresses, don't worry.  In the meantime, any interplanetary immigration is often a cause of stress and complicated feelings.  That's entirely normal.  Everyone feels it.  We strongly recommend newcomers talk to a councilor about how the transition is going, and any other feelings about the move that you might have.  It... helps a lot of people.  Even if there's nothing you feel you are suffering from, it can help to talk over your feelings about the major life changes with somebody.""
+
+""Thank you,"" Gurathin says.  ""I'll keep that in mind.""  And who knows.  He's on Preservation; once he leaves this room, he'll be closer to safe than he's been in almost two years.  He might even be telling the truth.
+
+ "
diff --git a/percy_fanfics.csv b/percy_fanfics.csv
index 9f352097ba9247061862bace48db7b3fd7ff6bef..e94a1d68b22a00073c5ef9cc273b815efbd046e7 100644
Binary files a/percy_fanfics.csv and b/percy_fanfics.csv differ