Chapter Text
“It’s a series adapted from the books,” Iris said, adjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder as we walked. She waved to the bored guard who badged us into the high security docks, juggling her cup of hot liquid and her other bag. It seemed like too much stuff for a four-cycle trip, but what do I know, they don’t give murderbots education modules on what to bring on vacation.
(I could have carried something for her, but I’d stalled out earlier trying to decide if I wanted to or not. I used to have to carry human stuff all the time on contract. But being on contract meant something different now, and I could choose to not carry human stuff if I didn’t want to. So did I not want to because I used to have to, or did I not want to because I didn’t want to?)
(I felt bad watching her almost spill her hot liquid twice, but it was too late to offer without being really awkward now.)
“They’re classics, but they really hold up! Except the prequels, they came later. The first one was pretty good but the others were a total cash grab. We can watch those after if you want, but we have to have a channel open where I can complain the whole time or else I can’t do it.”
ART already complained the whole time we watched Wonderful Solicitor Jun. I told her, “I’m used to it.”
The hatch slid open and ART pinged me instantly. It was dry-docked in one of the university’s special repair bays, one of the few big enough to fit a ship as big as ART inside it. The bay had a ridiculous amount of shielding built into the walls; stepping inside was like stepping into a feed blackout zone, the buzzing activity of the station in the feed cutting out completely as the hatch closed behind us. The dead silence would have been unnerving, but ART filled it up. It felt a lot like being in a wormhole instead.
(That level of paranoid protection was probably overkill most of the time, but it was exactly the kind of thing you needed while verifying your giant asshole machine intelligence wasn’t going to spread alien contamination to all your other giant machine intelligences (asshole status = unknown). So I approved. Even though it meant I hadn’t gotten to talk to ART in almost ten cycles.)
(That had been hard. I’d gone a lot longer than ten cycles without talking to ART before, and that had been fine (aside from, you know, missing it the whole time) but somehow knowing it was on the same station without being able to talk to it was worse.)
You’re late, it said, like it wasn’t doing the feed equivalent of tugging on my arm with both hands.
Three needed help settling in. With all the new humans around, it had locked itself in its hotel room and refused to come out. I’d had to go to the station mall to get it a box of drones and set up a perimeter, and even then it took a lot of coaxing to get it to open the door. (Yes, it was familiar. No, I don’t want to talk about it.)
ART opened its lock for us and then I was back on board, and some of the tension in my shoulders finally relaxed. The station was fine, the university humans were fine (I wouldn’t have left Three here otherwise, even for just four cycles), but it wasn’t the same as being someplace I knew. That was a weird thought.
That I had places I knew. Places, plural.
Once we were inside, Iris dug around in one of her bags (I finally broke and took her cup of hot liquid) and pulled out a pair of the plastic glasses humans wear to shade their eyes. (You can use visual augments for the same effect, but Ratthi said they didn’t get style points.) The lenses were shaped like stars. She handed them to me, pulled a second pair out, and put them on. Then they were both staring at me expectantly, ART in the feed and Iris looking intently at my shoulder.
I held out for six seconds. Eight. Ten. ART leaned on me, hard, hard enough my human skin wanted to sweat.
I put the glasses on.
In a shockingly accurate imitation of the voice ART uses to talk to humans, Iris intoned, “The vacation protocol is now in effect.”
ART changed the name of our group feed channel to vacationFeed and sent a glyph of a Preservation party sparkler exploding. (It got that from Ratthi.)
I said, “What the fuck is the vacation protocol.”
Iris went to pat my arm, aborted the motion, and awkwardly patted the air near my arm instead. “Don’t worry,” she said in her normal voice. “There’s only two rules.”
—
My face was having an expression I couldn’t help. It must have been bad because Iris stressed, “Not literal guns,” at the same time ART said, Obviously the guns aren’t literal.
She said to ART, “Maybe we should’ve picked a different protocol. This feels obvious, in hindsight.”
It’s an aphorism, ART insisted. SecUnit is capable of handling aphorisms. Usually.
I said, “Obviously I can handle aphorisms, you asshole.” I wasn’t going to double check the definition of aphorism in ART’s archive while we were arguing, but I was pretty sure. “What the fuck does it mean if it’s not literally guns?”
“It’s just a joke,” Iris said firmly. “It’s not literal at all, you don’t have to do anything about it. This is a gun-free vacation. Except for the ones that are attached to you, which I forgot about when setting the protocol. Sorry. This is a mostly gun-free vacation.”
My armory was restocked if you’re feeling left out, Iris.
Oh yeah, just what I needed. I said, very normally and not even a little bit stressed, “No guns. For fuck’s sake.”
Iris changed the feed channel name to gunfreevacationFeed.
—
The rules didn’t make any sense, but neither did the entire idea of this vacation, so fine.
I’d never been on a vacation, obviously. But as a resident of the system and employee of the university (don’t ask me how any of that works) ART got vacations, and my contract with the university meant I got them too. So we were being paid to go on this trip that wouldn’t benefit the university at all, just because ART and Iris wanted to.
It was a short wormhole jump out to a neighboring system, which would be experiencing a “stellar flare event” by the time we arrived. ART was interested because it was a horrible nerd and wanted to capture the event on its own sensors, and Iris wanted to go because it turned out she was also a horrible nerd and somehow this would be fun for her. (Being exposed to ART too young had done that to her, probably.)
I wasn’t going as security, I was just…going. Tagging along. Even though the system was safe enough they probably didn’t need security and I wasn’t going to be able to see any of ART’s invisible star junk or help with the analysis. (Maybe I could help with the analysis, but I didn’t want to. It sounded really boring.) But ART wanted me to come anyway.
Sorting that out had been a whole unnecessary and embarrassing thing. ART couldn’t talk to me on the feed during its decontam lockdown, so it had dictated text-only messages to Iris and the other human techs working on it. Iris passed the messages to me once she left the feed blackout zone at the end of her work cycle and took my replies back in. Meaning, when I went on a whole stupid spiral about ART wanting to go off and leave me behind already when we’d only just gotten here, and yeah Amena had said we might want space from each other sometimes and that was okay, and it was okay I just didn’t think it would be so soon, and maybe it was not actually okay—Iris was in the middle, ferrying all of it back and forth with increasingly dead eyes. Mortifying.
After my barrage of definitely-not-upset messages, ART made Iris take down the entire exhaustive itinerary it had planned so she could relay it to me in detail, as proof ART actually wanted my deadweight on their nerd trip.
(It was still possible it hadn’t actually wanted me to come and was just covering for it because it hadn’t meant to hurt my feelings, but. It had budgeted a lot of media time, even for us. Including the movie nights Seth had outlawed on the trip here.)
(Also, the whole stupid episode could have been totally avoided if we’d been able to talk normally and not in once-a-cycle notes.)
“Movie night’s in an hour,” Iris said. “I’m going to shower and get changed, see you in a bit!” She waved and headed off toward the crew cabins. I went the other way. Not because I actually wanted to go that way. I also wanted to go to the crew cabins, but she’d already said goodbye and it would be awkward to walk together now.
ART’s silence in the feed was judgemental. I ignored it and took the long way around.
—
My cabin was almost exactly how I’d left it (so, absent any belongings or any of the things humans use to decorate their spaces), except the display surface on the wall was different. Bigger.
I paused, looking at it. ART watched me in the feed. It said, I took the opportunity to upgrade a number of features.
Sometimes one of my humans will do or say something that makes my insides melt. It’s hard to deal with, but it only happens every once in a while, maybe once every twelve cycles while in contact. (Except Mensah—she’s closer to once every five.) Since I’d agreed to come with it, ART was causing me to melt roughly every two and a half cycles, and it was absolutely miserable and not at all something I was maybe starting to get used to.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. ART was leaning in close on the feed, picking up whatever feelings I was leaking into our connection.
With enormous satisfaction, it said, I have also upgraded my recycler functionality. You will need appropriate attire for our vacation, and it dropped the expanded menu of its fancy new recycler into my feed with an unnecessary flourish.
That was easier to think about than melting, especially because there were tons of new options. I didn’t know where to start.
ART said, Allow me to make some suggestions, and sent me the results of some query it ran, name redacted. Weird. Almost everything was tagged pajamas, which I had to look up in ART’s archive. “I don’t need pajamas.”
Obviously, it said. Pajamas are for sleeping. This is loungewear. Comfortable, casual clothing for off-duty hours, or being at home. Or, for instance, wearing. In a lounge.
Movie night was happening in the argument lounge, and everything was tagged loungewear. It was still suspicious. I’d seen humans and augmented humans, including ours, in loose, light clothing similar to what it was suggesting. (And I had overheard Overse saying once that there was nothing better than taking off her bra after a long day. (I didn’t have the definition of “bra” in active memory. My log showed I had looked it up and quickly deleted it, probably to make space for more downloads, but from context clues it was probably some kind of work clothing, maybe a general term for all work clothes.)) I knew that humans wore different outfits for different tasks, like sleeping and exercise and meetings, but I wasn’t human. I didn’t have human tasks. The recycler cleaned my clothes while I showered, and you couldn’t wear more than one set at a time anyway.
But I used to have different clothes for different tasks. SecUnit tasks. I used to have a uniform, for patrolling inside habitats and human spaces, and armor, for patrolling outside. (I was still having complicated emotions about armor. No, I don’t want to talk about that either.) I’d never liked the uniform because it made it harder to pretend not to be a person, but the version ART had made for me was what I wore all the time now, and it wasn’t so bad. It was even sort of nice. ART had made it exactly to my tastes (high quality deflection material, lots of sealable pockets) and something about that made it different from the uniforms I’d worn before. I didn’t even mind that ART’s logo was on it.
The first (and only) time I had picked out my own clothes, I was under so much stress my performance reliability went up half a point just from hiding in the shop’s enclosed booth. But I had still liked the clothes. Enough to realize I liked things that weren’t media. And if I had liked it even then, it made sense that I would probably like getting to choose in my own time, without the threat of being identified and then disassembled for parts hanging over me. And I liked the idea that ART would make them for me.
I looked at ART’s suggestions again. It had tagged a bunch of styles and fabrics as suitable for loungewear and I paged through them slowly, looking at each one. Last time I’d eliminated anything that didn’t conceal as much of my inorganic parts as possible, but this time, only one human would even see me, and she already knew I was a SecUnit.
There wasn’t anything to hide. I could just pick whatever I wanted.
Maybe I could try something new.
—
Maybe I could throw myself out an airlock so I’d never have to choose anything ever again.
After forty-three excruciating minutes I had nothing selected and still no idea where to start. There were options for everything, multiple styles of hats, scarves, shirts, pants, skirts, robes, even socks and shoes. ART’s fancy new recycler had everything, in any color you could think of.
It was a lot. (I’ve been saying that a lot lately, and meaning it mostly in a weird but good way. This time I mean it in a definitely bad way.)
ART had left me alone the whole time, but at the forty-five minute mark, it sent a file to my feed. It was a snapshot of an old message I’d sent that said, I do not have difficulty making decisions, ART, you’re full of—
I made an obscene gesture at the nearest camera.
Four more minutes later I still hadn’t decided on anything, or even eliminated any options. How the fuck was I supposed to choose? I didn’t know what I liked or what I wanted. I almost never know what I want, that’s not new, but I didn’t know what I didn’t want, either. And that was new. And bad.
Maybe new was bad, and I should just put the uniform back on and stay in my cabin until they needed me to go shoot some corporates or whatever.
ART said, You’re spiraling. I have an idea. The thousands of possible permutations collapsed to just eighteen: just three choices of shirt and three choices of pants, in one light color and one dark. It also pulled up Sanctuary Moon in my feed.
It was stupid, stupid that I needed something like that, and I was stupidly grateful.
I took a minute to watch a bit of Sanctuary Moon, and then I looked at the narrowed selection.
None of the options were anything I’d worn before. Or, they sort of were, but there was something really different about them all.
All of the shirts were sleeveless. One was a soft hooded jacket like the one I picked myself, but the sleeves only barely covered the top of the shoulders and nothing else. The second one was a T-shirt, and the third had really thin straps. None of them would cover my gunports at all.
I opened my mouth to tell ART I wanted something with sleeves, but then I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t make myself say anything. I don’t know why. I wanted sleeves, right? Humans didn’t like seeing my energy weapons and being reminded that I was a terrifying murderbot.
ART had said I was the only one who thought of me that way.
Obviously that wasn’t true, the entire Corporation Rim thought of me that way, and so did anyone who watched any media with SecUnits in it. But I could admit, theoretically, that my humans didn’t think of me that way, and maybe ART’s humans didn’t either. And Iris was the only human here right now.
I was thinking about this too hard. I picked the T-shirt, in the light color.
Then I canceled the selection, watched ten seconds of Sanctuary Moon to keep from spiraling, picked the hooded jacket, and forced myself to go on.
There were actually four styles of pants, which was upsetting until I realized one was ART’s stupid idea of a joke and excluded it. (It was small shorts with DON’T LOOK AT ME embossed on the back in machine language. That was actually a little tempting, until I noticed they didn’t have pockets. Very funny, ART. Where am I supposed to keep my drones?)
The other ones all had pockets and no writing. None of the pockets were sealable, and there weren’t as many as I was used to, but I guessed the idea was you didn’t need them when you weren’t on duty.
I felt like I was already showing a lot of skin/inorganic parts with the sleeveless shirt, so I picked the stretchy pants that looked like they’d cover most of my legs. They looked sort of like the bottom half of a suitskin. Not that I was thinking about that or how familiar suitskins were at all.
I submitted the request and regretted it immediately. ART slapped down my abort command and had its recycler going almost before I even sent it, which wasn’t fucking fair, and then I had to just stand there like an idiot while it worked on the stupid clothes, which at this point I was sure I wasn’t even going to like and this had all been a mortifying waste of time.
Why did I think I would like this? It sucked. Decisions sucked. Self-determination sucked.
ART unpaused Sanctuary Moon in my feed. It didn’t help. (Okay, it did help, but I didn’t want it to.) I stood there and watched it until the clothes finally tumbled out of ART’s recycler. It was stupid (I was stupid), but I left them on the floor for another two minutes, until ART said, If you don’t like it, I can make you something else.
If ART had to make me something else it was going to want to pick, and this experience had been so miserable I would let it, and then I would end up wearing tiny shorts with no pockets.
I picked up the shirt first and paused. It was soft. Really soft.
ART said, I took the liberty of choosing the material. Do you like it?
I said, “Yes,” before I knew I was going to say anything at all. Then I yanked my shirt off and pulled the new one over my head quick to hide the expression my face was making.
It fit, except—“Run a diagnostic, your fancy recycler got the measurement wrong,” I said. The shirt wasn’t long enough, it didn’t even cover my abdomen all the way.
The fit is correct, ART said, offended. The style is called ‘cropped’ for a reason.
Is that what that tag meant? All three shirt styles had it, so I figured it indicated the lack of sleeves. I tugged at the hem of the shirt but it didn’t come down any farther.
“Why do humans make shirts that don’t fit?” I complained. “And why’d you only give me too-small shirts?”
ART said, It does fit. Put on the leggings.
I put on the stretchy pants. They were also very soft, in a different material and texture than the shirt, and I kept rubbing my fingers over it to feel it better. None of it restricted my movement at all, and the fabric felt a lot nicer on my skin than the cheap station recycler clothing or the deflection material of the uniform, which I was just realizing was maybe kind of scratchy.
It was…nice. To take off the stiffer, scratchier uniform and wear this softer thing instead. (If this was what Overse had meant, then maybe I would like taking off my bra after a long day, too.)
I checked how I looked in one of my drones and oh, that was weird. Maybe bad weird. Maybe very bad. The leggings came up higher than pants normally did, so you couldn’t actually see too much of my abdomen unless I raised my arms, but obviously my entire arms were exposed, and the leggings didn’t hide the obviously inorganic shape of my legs and feet. I couldn’t pass like this. I didn’t look even a little bit human.
That shouldn’t have felt bad. I didn’t like looking like a human. Who would? But it did feel bad, somehow. Uncomfortable. I didn’t like it.
In our last trauma treatment session, ART had taught me a breathing routine to help manage emotions in the moment. (Mostly I used Sanctuary Moon for that, but distracting myself didn’t always work, and sometimes actually made it worse.) I hadn’t wanted to try it because it sounded stupid, but I had recordings of Mensah doing something similar when she was stressed or upset, so maybe it wasn’t so stupid.
I tried it now, using a timer in the feed to pace my breaths in and out. I didn’t feel better, exactly, but the initial rush of shitty emotions cleared a little by the time I was done.
I looked at myself with my drone again. Yeah, I got it now.
I don’t like looking like a human. I really don’t. (What self-respecting bot or bot/human construct would want to?) But for a while my survival as a rogue depended on it, and sometimes it still did.
I don’t want to let go of that protection. Even though I also hated it.
I’d told myself I wasn’t masquerading as an augmented human on Preservation, because I’d listed my name in my public feed ID as SecUnit. Station Security had made me have a feed ID at all, but I could have picked anything. My local feed address. A human name, if I really wanted to keep hiding, or make it easier to feel like I was. I hadn’t done that.
I’d wanted them to know what I was. I’d wanted to shove it in their faces. Terrifying rogue construct let loose to keep their planetary leader safe and watch media, more news at the top of the hour. But I’d also kept my move-like-a-human code going, and I didn’t use more drones than most augmented humans could handle where people could notice, and I kept all my inorganic parts covered like I was still on the run.
Or on contract.
Maybe that was it. SecUnits on contract wear armor or uniforms, and SecUnits on the run wear whatever lets them pass for human.
I wasn’t either of those things right now.
I can’t tell what you’re thinking, ART admitted.
Yeah, me neither. I said, “I don’t look like a SecUnit. Or a human.”
We both thought about that for six seconds, and then ART asked, What does that leave?
I didn’t know. In these clothes, with my gunports on display and the inorganic parts of my legs and feet showing, I looked like...I don’t know. The organic parts made it obvious I wasn’t a human-form bot. My weapon ports made it obvious I wasn’t a ComfortUnit. But I didn’t think either of those was what ART meant. What does that leave?
Just a person, maybe. A construct person. (Oh, so that’s why this was so hard.)
ART said, Does a construct person want to come to movie night?
—
The argument lounge had been rearranged so that almost all of the chairs were pushed back away from the main display surface, except for a single couch positioned precisely in the center at the optimal distance for a human of Iris’s height. (Also, the main display surface was new. And big. Really big. Bigger than the one on TranRollinHyfa, even.)
ART’s ops drone sat in the middle. Most of its limbs were covered by a blanket, but one was holding a container of what looked like puffed vegetable matter. It lifted another limb and patted the open cushion on its left, the same gesture Rami had used to convey an invitation to sit down.
I stalled out in the hatchway and stared. “What is this.”
ART-drone didn’t have to turn to look at me, but it did just to make its disdain more obvious. What does it look like.
Coming in from the galley hatch carrying her extra bag, which turned out to be full of snacks, Iris said, “Hey, SecUnit. Oh, I like your pajamas! Getting in the vacation spirit!” She was also wearing a sleeveless shirt and a pair of the soft shorts from ART’s recycler. They were color coordinated with the star lenses pushed up onto her head, supported by her curly puff of hair. She looked thrilled.
“They’re not pajamas. I don’t sleep.”
“Okay. I like your…drip. Are you ready for movie night?”
ART-drone moved the snack container out of the way and she took the seat on its right side, and then both of them were staring at me expectantly. (ART was staring at me in the feed and with ART-drone, and Iris was looking at my shoulder again, but still. Why did they keep doing that.) ART-drone patted the couch cushion again.
Ugh, fine. I gave in and sat down. (It was still weird sitting down without the governor module command channel popping off, but it was getting a lot more normal really fast.)
(Twelve cycles ago I had sat down without thinking about it for the first time. I was thinking about that a lot since then, which kind of ruined it. ART said it still counts.)
ART-drone pulled the blanket up over all of our legs/limbs and started the movie. (It also changed the name of our group feed channel again, this time to triviaFeed+Professor Iris.) It was stupid, but I felt a little better with my feet covered. Iris wasn’t staring and her comment had been normal based on a quick query of humans verbally acknowledging the clothing of other humans in my archive, so it didn’t seem like she thought I was being weird.
I still felt weird.
I felt weird the whole time the movie played, and weird when Iris got up to use the bathroom before we started the next one, and weird halfway through the second movie when ART’s scheduled departure time arrived and we finally left the station.
By that point I’d felt weird for so long (they were long movies) that I was starting to forget about it. I relaxed when we entered the wormhole, and my shoulder bumped ART-drone. I didn’t move away.
The couch was comfortable. The blanket was soft and warm from body heat, and the fibers didn’t snag on the delicate joints of my feet. The movies were unrealistic in the right way, and Iris was keeping up a stream of commentary in the feed, all of her body language indicating a relaxed, content human performing a task she enjoyed.
And ART was leaning on me, in the feed and with its drone, some of its limbs draped over my lap where it left them after tucking us all in under the blanket again, its carapace against my bare shoulder pressing lightly back.
It felt like the kind of weird I could get used to.
—
Early into the second cycle, while Iris was still asleep, ART said, I had an ulterior motive for inviting you.
Oh, there it fucking is. I knew it. I knew it couldn’t want me along just to watch media with it. I was mad, or the precursor to being mad, and also weirdly relieved.
I said, “So movie night was just a way to soften me up for whatever else you want.”
Having an ulterior motive doesn’t invalidate my other motives. You may be incapable of having more than one thought at a time, but I am not.
“Fuck off,” I said. “You can just tell me when you want something.” I know, that’s rich coming from me. But we were doing this whole thing where we just told each other what we wanted with words instead of, you know, coding sensor baffles in secret or whatever, and that went both ways.
ART hesitated. In my research on similar situations, watching media together in an intimate setting is often customary. And it was something we would both enjoy, on its own merits. Was I wrong?
Obviously it wasn’t wrong. I liked Iris and her commentary on the movies had been interesting and even funny, and it’s not like I hadn’t noticed that ART had recreated the same seating arrangement from the Operation: Save the Colonists From Corporate Slavery getaway shuttle, ART-drone and all. I didn’t really think the whole thing had been a setup, it was too well-crafted for what ART wanted, not what I wanted. The whole vacation was like that, actually. Movie nights, interesting extragalactic phenomena, its favorite human along for the ride. A bunch of things ART wanted.
Which meant…whatever this “situation” was, it was something ART had come up with, while it was alone in decontam. (Why was it in decontam? The University team that came with Holism had cleared it before we even left the system. It hated Holism but it trusted the decontam team. I thought it trusted the decontam team.)
I had a sinking feeling that I was probably going to agree to whatever this was.
Ugh. Fine. “What did you have in mind?”
I’ve solved our processing overwhelm problem.
—
So I hadn’t been totally accurate when I said I couldn’t see the invisible star junk. My onboard sensory suite wasn’t equipped for the kind of sensing ART needed for its space research, but I could plug into ART’s sensors and experience it that way. It’s just that ART’s sensors require way more processing power than I’m built for, and the attempt would at best brick my brain and at worst kill me instantly.
(I knew that because I had recent direct experience. I’d told ART about The Gunship Incident, but instead of listening to me and going why yes we should exercise some caution, it got mad and sulky instead.
You know other gunships? ART had demanded.
“Don’t get mad at me,” I said, which never actually stops anyone from getting mad at me. “You know other SecUnits.”
I’m not offering to let Three run on my hardware. It had me there. Wait, no it didn’t.
“I wasn’t sightseeing, you asshole, we were under attack.”
I can acknowledge there were extenuating circumstances, it allowed, not graciously.)
We’d experimented with smaller datasets, simplified computing, ART feeding me its own experience through a filter, but none of it worked. ART told me in frustration once that the complexity was the point. It was key to the experience. Even through ART’s filter, my systems couldn’t function at the necessary level. I wasn’t built for it. (Not that I felt inadequate or anything.)
So I was surprised it wanted to try again, especially after what happened last time.
“Is this going to brick me again?” I said suspiciously.
That was one time, ART complained. Your insistence on weighting a single anomalous instance above the established record of safe interactions—
“It took you seventy hours to snap me out of it. That’s 30% of total logged experimentation time.”
Your rounding is generous. Then it changed the subject because it knew I was right. My new approach poses negligible risk to you. Take over one of my partitions. The increased capacity will allow you to process the real-time spatial data. The limits inherent to the partition will prevent kernel destabilization and memory failure for more than enough time.
It showed me its calculations: it estimated I could run in the partition for almost three cycles before the strain on my own systems became too much. During the gunship incident, I’d only had seconds.
It actually looked like it could work. Except— “How will you keep your systems from blocking the anomalous activity?”
ART was a giant complicated monster that could do a ridiculous (and unnecessary) number of tasks at once, but even it had systems that functioned mostly independently of its greater consciousness. Humans didn’t control their breathing unless they actively thought about it; ART’s security infrastructure ran basically the same way.
It was silent for almost half a second. Then it said, You won’t like it.
—
So that was the understatement of the fucking year.
The risk is negligible, ART repeated stubbornly.
“To me,” I said through gritted teeth. My jaw was grinding so hard I was getting alerts, and I was up off the couch, pacing furiously.
The risk to my own systems is statistically insignificant, it said.
My hands were making the hair-tearing gesture I’d seen Ratthi do. “You want to compromise your own walls. On purpose. And then you want me to exploit the vulnerability. Are you hearing yourself?”
Obviously. It’s not my grasp of the situation in question here.
Oh, fuck you. The exploit would make ART vulnerable to process injections, one of the most common types of malware, the entire time I was in its systems. It would have to hamstring its own defenses so I could get in at all. If even the crudest and most basic malware attack landed in that time—
We can try it during wormhole travel, where extra-ship communication is impossible, ART said, not patiently. The chance of malware taking advantage of the temporary vulnerability is statistically insignificant.
“You want me to be the malware!”
ART dropped the definition of malware into the feed, like it was a stupid human word I was using wrong. You don’t meet the criteria. You will not disrupt or harm my systems. You aren’t going to hurt me.
It couldn’t possibly know that. Just because I hadn’t hurt ART yet didn’t mean I never would. The more time we spent together, the more likely it was that I would, eventually. I wouldn’t even have to mean to do it. It wanted me to inject myself as a critical process and gain elevated privileges within its systems. I could do anything to it. I could hurt it just by mistake. For a machine intelligence with more processing power than the fucking sun, it wanted to be really fucking stupid.
I almost said that and started a fight, but I took two timed breaths instead. Then I said, “I’m scared of hurting you.”
But this time ART didn’t say I wouldn’t, which was impossible to know or even believe. Instead it said the worst possible fucking thing it could have, which was, I’ll forgive you if you do.
—
Obviously I fucking caved.
—
ART?
I’m here, ART answered. And then, weirdly, Do you know what you are?
I’m Murderbot, I said, and then I remembered. Oh, right. It was disorienting not being able to hear or see anything, and none of my inputs were receiving. It was like when I had uploaded myself to the company gunship’s systems to help the bot pilot during the sentient killware attack. Except that time it had been like the ship was my body, which I was sharing with a friendly bot pilot, and this time I was stuck in a storage cubby. Also, this time I was the sentient killware. Sort of. This is weird.
I’m dropping my wall now, ART said.
It didn’t drop all of its walls. It wasn’t like that .00001 of a second when we met, when it introduced itself by threatening to squash my brain like a lunatic. Instead the opaque wall between us softened, became translucent, paper-thin. Vulnerable.
ART shined through, brilliant and impossible to look at directly. Warmth bled through, the promise of scorching heat on the other side. When we’d tried this the other way, when ART ran on my hardware, it hadn’t felt like this. Or maybe it had, I was a little overwhelmed at the time. I wondered what it felt like to ART.
I was about to find out.
Do I have a go to proceed? I know, this wasn’t a hostage situation, but it kind of was if you thought about it. I was thinking about it. Once I was in, that was it. ART wouldn’t be able to roll this back.
(I’d told it to say Worldhoppers if it wanted to stop. It told me it didn’t need a safeword to take me sightseeing, but whatever, I know how important it is to have the option.)
Obviously, ART said.
Process injection is one of the most common types of malware attacks. It’s like my usual method of buddying up to SecSystems and using that to slip inside the rest of the way, plus a lot more lying. That kind of thing wouldn’t work on ART ordinarily, and it was unsettling that it worked now, even though we’d planned this in advance.
I didn’t like the idea that ART was vulnerable. Even to me. Maybe especially to me. We’d covered that already. Ugh, fine.
I made the connection, lied to parts of ART, didn’t get caught by the parts ART had disabled, and then…I was in.
Root access.
There were literally millions of inputs, individual threads in a huge complicated web, way more than I was capable of even sorting, even with the boost from ART’s borrowed processors. I didn’t try. Melting my brain wasn’t the point of all this. (Hopefully.)
ART tagged its interior sensors for my attention, the only test we were running. (I’d said we should run some tests just to be sure, ART suggested this one, I’d said we shouldn’t test in production, ART said the production environment at stake was its own brain and therefore I could shut up, I’d said my brain was also at stake so it could shut up—you get the picture.) I accepted the inputs and oh, shit. It was a lot.
Pressure, temperature, scan, visual, audio—ART had a lot of sensors and they all poured into me at once. It was orders of magnitude more data than I’ve ever processed simultaneously, but I was managing it. Holy shit, this was working. There was Iris, asleep in her cabin under the privacy shield. There was my body, lying on the couch in the lounge, eyes creepily open. I went to close them but ran into the partition wall.
Right. Unblinking stare it is.
You’re holding steady, ART said. I’m marking the test passed. External sensors now. Ready?
Yes.
I dropped all the interior sensory inputs and picked up the new ones. I’d been a gunship before, felt hard vacuum on my metal skin, so I thought I knew what to expect.
I was wrong.
I have onboard sensors like ART’s interior suite. They don’t function exactly the same way, some of ART’s are like getting a specific quantitative value from each nerve of your fingertips instead of your brain translating those signals into sensations like “soft” or “scratchy,” but I’m familiar with audio, visual, and scan, obviously, and the rest are more an issue of scale than incompatible file types. Also, ART doesn’t have nearly as many interior sensors as it does exterior. (So it was a good test to make sure running me in the partition worked as intended and didn’t melt my brain.)
Its exterior sensors are on another level entirely.
ART feels—it’s not really feeling, not like a human would use the word, but surprise, there aren’t human words for this—ART feels space around it.
So the wormhole felt liquid. Or—not liquid, it wasn’t wet—ugh, there aren’t human words for this.
This is probably the point where I should mention I don’t know how wormholes work. ART explained it to me once but I deleted that information to make room for more downloads.
What I do know is that wormholes compress spacetime. Somehow. Pin-Lee once described it as “fucky.” That’s as good as anything else I’ve got since I deleted whatever ART told me. Maybe if I hadn’t deleted all that I would’ve had better words for this.
Okay, trying again.
The walls of the wormhole pressed close like a suitskin, like something we were moving through, something that flowed shut behind us as we went through it, cosmic radiation and quantum foam plunging down in a cascade that carried us forward as much as it tried to drag us under. It all streaked by so fast I couldn’t catch more than glimpses.
I was sucked in immediately, every inch of ART’s borrowed processors churning through the ocean of data and converting it into a sensation like sparks, there and gone.
Not as interesting as normal space, ART said. I barely heard it. Almost everything I had was eaten up by the feeling. Like I’d pressed my face and my hands and my whole body up against it to feel it better. But I couldn’t do that, I had to pay attention so I didn’t hurt ART. I dragged a bit of my attention up out of the flood.
What the fuck is this, that part of me said.
I know you know what a wormhole is, ART said.
Obviously I know what a wormhole is. I mean, this is—I don’t have words for what this is.
You don’t have to. Just feel it.
I couldn’t help but feel it.
(Pin-Lee was onto something. It was kind of fucky.)
—
We’ll be coming out of the wormhole soon, ART said, later. I didn’t know how much later, I wasn’t tracking how much time was passing. That part of me I’d separated out from the rest thought ART sounded…regretful. I was regretful too. I didn’t want this to end. But we’d agreed—I’d made it agree—we could only try this in the wormhole. Too risky otherwise.
But.
Risk assessment hadn’t made it into the partition, and I couldn’t remember anything about the system except some kind of solar flare event, but I remembered that I hadn’t come on this trip as security. So ART didn’t need security. So it must have been safe.
I’d been scared before of hurting ART, but I’d had root access for hours (oh shit it was hours, Iris would be waking up soon) and I hadn’t hurt it yet. I hadn’t accidentally touched anything I wasn’t supposed to touch or turned off any critical systems like life support. Maybe I wasn’t going to hurt ART.
It was hard to think. Even with the partition and ART’s processors, I was straining to keep up. I couldn’t last forever like this. But I didn’t have to last forever. (And ART would tell me if my kernel started destabilizing.)
I said, We don’t have to stop.
—
We came out of the wormhole into normal space and it was like everything slowed down. I’d thought the wormhole was a lot, but it had nothing on this.
Humans think of space as mostly empty. Expanses of nothing stretching out between the things they can use.
To ART, it feels full.
In normal space, radiation glittered, visible on a spectrum I’d never had, in colors I couldn’t name. Cosmic rays whirled around us, swirls and eddies sliding by in shining waves, striking our hull and scattering in a spray of coruscating particles. I’ve been on planets during precipitation events, dust storms—once my clients left me outside in a sand storm on purpose. (The feed had gone down and I’d stood there for two planetary days watching the wind toss particles around, buffet my armor, until I felt like I was just one of those particles.) There was never anything about any of those experiences I’d wanted to keep, wanted to savor.
I was savoring this.
Every sensation was so richly textured, so complex and compelling. There was so much of it, all around, all those sparks I couldn’t catch before piled up in my hands instead. I sank into each one like ducking my head under a shower. It felt like I was draining every bit of power in my system all at once, over and over, but still bursting with it, overflowing, gulping from a tap that never ran out. All-consuming and all-consumed.
Shit, ART was right. It was endlessly fascinating. Fascinating without end. I was so glad we did this, glad we kept trying, glad we took the risk, and if I admitted any of that I was never going to hear the end of it.
Except ART knew already. I could feel it, the gleaming heat of its smugness passing through the membrane of the wall between us. Oh, it was more than smug, it was glad too, and—more than glad. Some feeling I didn’t know welled up, bright like a star.
It’s joy, ART said, and flagged a new input for me to take.
The capacity of my partition expanded to accommodate it, but I wasn’t sure I could. I was already stretched so thin, wound tight. I didn’t want to let go of even a bit of the spatial data churning through my processors. I didn’t know if I could add another input on top.
But ART said, You can take it. So I did.
Suddenly I wasn’t just picking up on ART’s emotions, I was feeling them, pouring into me straight from the source. Oh fuck, it was joy, ART was overjoyed to share this with me. I was fixed on the sensations, couldn’t look away, but I fumbled blindly for my own emotional processing and shoved it over.
I felt it connect, and then we were—caught in a loop, that good feeling passing between us, reflected back and shining, almost too bright to take in.
Here it comes, ART said, and the first solar flare broke over us like a wave, a flood of complex sensory information that knocked my processors for a loop. It was so much— I dropped half my inputs and had to scramble to pick them back up, sort through the flux of data, the same thing that had bricked me last time but this time was only embarrassing.
ART was laughing. I told you normal space was more interesting. I was going to tell it to fuck off, but in the lull between the first wave of radiation and the next, I saw ART’s wide-open comm catch a transmission.
Oh, shit.
All of ART’s walls dropped at once. We both scrambled, me to try to get its security suite to yank the walls back in place, ART to squash Attacker like a bug, only it couldn’t, because Attacker had—root fucking access, it was countermanding all of ART’s commands as fast as they came in, Attacker had come straight through the hole in ART’s defenses we’d carved for me —
And then ART was gone, fucking gone, a gaping hole, all of my inputs gone with it—
Memory archive failure.
Forced shutdown. No restart.