Chapter Text
The thing about working in a high-end hub station hotel is that it lets you forget that SecUnits are supposed to suffer.
I guess that’s an incendiary way to put it. It’s not as if anyone actively wanted to torture SecUnits, beyond people needing to take their anger and impotence out on something. It’s just that when a human thought they were going to get shot at, they wanted the SecUnit in the way, and in the Corporation Rim, there were a lot of scenarios where a human was about to get shot at.
There weren’t many firefights or violent outbursts at a hotel, though. We circled the loading area in plain-clothes while watching the cameras and left our idle patrols to handle an issue if we got an alert. SecUnits in domestic businesses were primarily preventative. If you saw one in armour, something had gone terribly wrong.
I could never describe it to a SecUnit on a mining installation or a gunship, what it felt like to be plunged into a feed that felt like an ocean of dazzling noise rendering you invisible and unnecessary. To not have to worry about your governor module because you were in a place so suffocating and frantic that no one had time to control you properly. You might think this must be what it’s like to be a bot. You might think that this is living well. Complete and filled. The noise subsuming the part of you that thought there would always be a threat.
After that, your tolerance for actual threats would get a bit shaky.
***
When I finally brought myself to open my feed again, I found FamUnit had tagged me on several files.
HuMo_v8.55.rou
HuHa_v.15.8.rou
LimbLock_BUGFIX.file
8shot_BUGFIX.file
Buffer_PICKUP(2)(new).file
The first file was a routine that made me imitate human micro-movements and corrected my gait. The second, a buffer-like routine that randomly spat out human-like idle habits (rubbing eyes, sniffing, itching).
The third was for a dysfunction in my code that meant if I received a physical impact while my joints were locked, my knee would pop free. I didn’t know what was more harrowing; that it even knew about such a specific problem, or that the manufacturer didn’t have a patch to correct it yet. The other bugfix was for an issue that caused a .5 second delay after every eight shots from my arm guns. Similar concerns.
Lastly was a buffer override. When I was critically injured, instead of instructing the client to leave me behind, my buffer would warn that any nearby humans would incur the full cost of product (AKA me) if it was found I could have been saved.
That one gave me a lump in my throat. I remember HHS had said FamUnit was kind.
I maintained my routine for the rest of the day cycle. Tseyvar spent most of this time in his basement working on HomeHubSystem. His marital partner was occupied with day-drinking in the upstairs lounge while watching a lurid serial. FamUnit occupied itself by iterating on every code in the repository that had to do with the kitchen.
No one messaged me, but I also couldn’t feel any private feed activity. I completed my patrol and took my weekly recharge cycle early in my cubicle so I could get the singed pockmark in my chest filled out. Energy weapon damage didn’t usually impact my performance, but I didn’t like walking around with burnt organics, the same way a human didn’t like getting dirty.
I went back on patrol for the night cycle. I preferred working at night; there was a body of water somewhere beyond the property full of fauna that made loud noises at each other, which was soothing.
Tseyvar headed to bed far later than he should have. His vitals implied this disrupted sleep schedule had a negative effect on his health. ComGuard remained at rest at the entrance to the basement and I ended my patrol in front of FamUnit’s door again. This was a directive put in place in the last five cycles for unclear reasons, though the fact it had been outed as a SysAdmin was likely. If that were the case, I was happy Tseyvar didn’t seem to care.
Late into the night, I received a message.
COMGUARD> how old are you
YARD> I’ve been in circulation for 9 years.
COMGUARD> fucking geriatric over here
I was only just past the halfway mark of my 15-year warrantee, so I knew it was being either facetious or mean.
COMGUARD> distribution told tseyvar i was 9 months but my internal clock said 2 years
YARD> He could file a chargeback for that.
YARD> Why do you want to know how old I am?
COMGUARD> too good at communicating
COMGUARD> i learned to talk the way i’m talking because i need to pretend to be human for work
COMGUARD> but usually secunits have that learning curve where they have to take a moment to figure out being directly spoken to is even a thing that can happen. especially fresh product
COMGUARD> ("Hypothesis: secunit.gained_experience(duration = X years)")
YARD> Oh.
YARD> (ACK)
COMGUARD> i actually assumed illicit secunit communications would bother you more than the hubsystem doing its job properly
YARD> I don’t know why it doesn’t bother you.
COMGUARD> (set_admin(HubSystem, VerCorBot); assert(HubSystem.behavior == desired)
It was tempting to send an amusement sigil of skepticism such as a raised eyebrow, or, to show my ‘communication experience’, an ironic thinking face. Instead I just pointed out the obvious.
YARD> query(HubSystem.pilot["pilot_gunship"].status == "active")
COMGUARD> log(if VerCorBot location == corp_gunship && stolen: deploy[“pilot_gunship”])
It got me there.
YARD> (ACK)
I could feel FamUnit in a private conversation behind me, reminding me that HHS was in this feed. Were they talking about us? Would the FamUnit be informed about all our communications, even if we weren’t allowed to interface with it directly?
(Well, I wasn’t. ComGuard could send altered reports into the public feed.)
If that were true, then the three of them made up a unified infrastructure, constantly updated on each other’s activities and forming their opinions together as a group. Opinions such as that I had brain damage because I was ignoring all attempts at communication for 134 cycles.
HHS was frightening and unsecured—or rather it was unsecured, which was frightening—but I thought of how it would feel to disconnect and go back to being alone in the yard. It was likely my performance reliability would begin to lag over time, as evidenced by the mere thought of it triggering a precipitous 4% drop.
HHS had asked the client for permission to integrate me. It was doing its best to do what the humans wanted it to do. It thought I was useful and wanted to speak to me. It wanted me to agree with it. My opinion was valued to the HubSystem.
I was aware ComGuard persisting in communication after obtaining the value required to complete its hypothesis was what humans referred to as ‘small talk’, which meant it wanted to speak to me too.
A grueling 6 seconds had passed.
YARD> Your human accent is really good.
COMGUARD> (ACK(status.speech == optimized))
***
Two cycles later, HHS appeared in the private feed very shortly after a routine delivery.
HHS> I’ve secured permission from client to upgrade the specifications of YARD.
COMGUARD> he agreed to that ages ago.
HHS> I’ve secured permission from client to upgrade the specifications of YARD without reporting what it is I am upgrading.
COMGUARD> i can't believe he just let you make those
HHS> Of course not, I don’t even know how to do that. He ordered a single chip and gave me carte blanche to alter the data.
HHS> @YARD The chip is for your port. Because of proprietary data locks I am going to need to force these modules instead of sending them to you.
There was only one type of upgrade that required forced injection due to proprietary information and Tseyvar’s clearance. My autoreport triggered.
YARD> You are giving me Combat SecUnit modules?
HHS> Yes. There is an entire suite available for purchase for standard models, but Combat SecUnits are merely the highest quality threshold of a SecUnit. It had them all pre-installed.
FamUnit was in the repository again, tagging even more files for me to download. Most of them were additional controllers for routines I didn’t have loaded; this was code it wrote for ComGuard, which I would soon be able to utilize myself. All three were working together to improve me.
I’d been feeling a lot of emotions lately, and it felt unfair that so many of them were painful or uncomfortable, squirming and aching and hot and cold. I wish I didn’t have organics to hurt me just from feeling.
YARD> (ACK)
I maintained patrol for three hours. FamUnit was maintaining updates on the kitchen scripts, and had opened a new section for the kitchen saferoom. ComGuard was hidden behind the basement shields so I had no idea what it was doing while Tseyvar was working.
(A working CEO was novel. I got the impression that the only CEOs in charge of companies this powerful were financial hawks, but I supposed if you had enough generational wealth you could learn to be capable in both R&D and stock options.)
As the end of the day cycle neared, ComGuard emerged from the basement.
HHS> Ready.
COMGUARD> the chip is going to pump you full of files. a lot of my modules are just better versions of yours so make some room.
I felt very nervous, but I did as I was told and purged as much footage as possible from my memory. Almost all of it was just the yard being the yard, which I’d long since compiled into algorithm training data for lack of anything better to do.
ComGuard came out to meet me in the front drive. I’d never stood so close to it before, and it made me deeply uncomfortable to have to look up at something that wasn’t a hauler bot. I knew it could snap my joints with one hand, and that fact made my threat detection spit out very unkind numbers for a peaceful afternoon.
I opened the back of my skinsuit collar to expose my port and waited. I was starting to sweat for reasons other than temperature control because so much of me felt cold, so I turned all sweating off. My autoreport continuously reacted to my concerns that we were absolutely not supposed to be doing this, but I couldn’t say anything because decisions like this were part of the infrastructure of the house. I couldn’t reject it and still be part of the infrastructure, or I could but they would be mad at me.
The chip was unexpectedly part of a much larger piece of equipment that bit painfully into my organics in a sensation not unlike being struck in the neck with an ice pick. After it snapped in place, ComGuard wiggled it and adjusted something so the teeth of the device stopped trying to tear out my spine.
YARD> Is it supposed to feel like that
COMGUARD> it comes off after the install
YARD> (ACK)
And then I was flooded with data.
My processors had never handled anything like it. My organic brain felt like it was going to split open from being forced to conceptualize that much information, and it was affecting my core operations. My hearing began to stutter, and my visuals were filled with static. I lost access to my drones and my feed, leaving me with only my malfunctioning body. As someone who preferred a lot of stimulation, this felt a little like being horribly murdered.
The data transfer completed.
I looked through the files as my everything rebooted. ComGuard’s modules were massive compared to mine. The combat module alone was 8x larger, with weapons I’d never even heard of.
I wondered if this was a poorly scrubbed copy of its kernel, because there were some things other than modules packaged with it, like an assessment program for body parts I didn’t have, and—
My autoreport tried to send a message to Tseyvar, but it sat inert inside my own skull. My feed wasn’t coming back online.
There was a package being opened and executed even though I didn’t open it or execute it. My sight and hearing had awful latency to make room for the burden it put on my processes. I was dropping inputs.
“This is a Combat Override Module,” I said.
“You can’t install my modules by yourself,” ComGuard replied.
A Combat Override Module was the antennae of a remote controller. My body, my mind, all my computational power, locked and stripped-down so I could be used as a puppet. I didn’t know if I’d even be conscious after it finished executing. I thought that maybe I’d have to be, because these modules were used for complicated situations like wars and company takeovers.
Was I about to fight in a war? Take over the company?
I pinged to nothing and sent messages to nothing and my autoreport went off again and again and again and I couldn’t move my hands and I didn’t have control over my sweat anymore so everything was sweaty and damp and my face was dripping with liquids and I could feel everything that helped me run cut out one after the other like snapped tendons until all that was left was—
Performance reliability 19% and dropping
Shutdown initiated
***
COMGUARD> can’t believe this shit stupid fucking scrap container going to blow itself up and take us all with it
HHS> Fuck off at no point did you even express there would be a problem from your vaunted perspective as a fellow secunit don’t make this about me
COMGUARD> shitbox i should report your access and tell them to space your servers because they obviously aren’t good for anything but making your ideas worse
HHS> I’m going to hack your governor module and tell Tseyvar you’re rogue so he melts you down and recycles you into a trash reciprocal
COMGUARD> FUCK YOU
I regained access to all my inputs and released 194 reports to Tseyvar, 27,994 error reports, and 2398 assistance requests. My feed access immediately shut down again.
After another three seconds it went back up, and I was free.
The Combat Override Module wasn’t embedded in my neck. My entire internal loadout was replaced with ComGuard’s. There were no strange files left over. I was still standing, and when I tried to move my body responded. I could run my own processes.
I could turn my sweating off. I did that.
My registration now listed my manufacturer as Verdant Cortex, which was worrying, but other than that I seemed fine.
HHS> @YARD How are you feeling? I’m sorry, I should have prepared you. I unfortunately needed the override to install everything. I can see that this was very upsetting for you, so I deleted it after I finished. Is everything working correctly?
I acknowledged and accessed my drones, and the cameras, and the microphones. I left nothing on the backburner. I needed to experience as many things as possible in the wake of experiencing as little as possible.
ComGuard was still looming over me, so close even an augmented human could feel the traffic of the heated discussion it was having with HHS.
I didn’t understand why it deleted the override. If it was worried it should have just switched it off and stored it. It didn’t need to be deleted. Having control of me in emergencies would only be beneficial. I couldn’t conceive of an explanation, so the offered one must be true.
ComGuard didn’t move, but I could feel its feed presence slowly pointing towards me until the private discussion concluded.
COMGUARD> diagnostics.
It sent me a flight simulator and I did that for a little bit. It felt good. It felt good to have my inputs register even for a fake thing. After that ComGuard gave me a text file to translate into several languages at varying levels of casual/formal speech. Then I was directed to produce a human-readable theoretical narrative question for a complex mathematical problem. Then I was directed to shoot some birds out of the sky and it genuinely surprised me that my shots were accurate.
At that point I’d calmed down and my performance reliability had reached a shaky 84%.
COMGUARD> combat test. turn your pain receptors down all the way.
I acknowledged and stood back to engage. I didn’t know I was allowed to turn my pain receptors down all the way, but in retrospect I should have, because all non-directive punishments had been turned off.
COMGUARD> run(UnitModule.combat.hand_to_hand(time=40s))
We initiated.
A Combat SecUnit was capable of an enormous amount of force. Blocking meant getting thrown back several metres, which prevented me from attacking. My existing hand-to-hand routines didn’t have parrying, but my new ones did, and I just had to trust in whatever was in there to help.
ComGuard’s chassis was significantly more solid than mine, and just shoving at its arm didn’t work. The first attempt left me taking an impact that shattered my pauldron.
COMGUARD> your armour isn’t even made of metal?
YARD> The metal plate is inside the polymer casing.
ComGuard attacked again, and instead of pushing it away, my palm slammed into its wrist with enough force to deflect. The impact vibrated unpleasantly through my organics, enough I knew that would have hurt if I had receptors on. ComGuard moved to knee me in the stomach and I slammed my elbow down on it hard enough my entire body shook, and then punched it in the solar plexus in the small opening that afforded me. It dropped a heavy fist on my spine, and my dented elbow flew up to crack against its helmet.
ComGuard sacrificed a moment of balance to kick me with its other leg, and I went flying again.
COMGUARD> don’t turn receptors back on until you’re in the cubicle, by the way.
My drones were circling the grounds, and the one that was behind me reached the front of the house. It recorded Tseyvar’s marital partner in the window staring down at us. Her expression was unreadable.
I struggled to my feet, feeling self-conscious about how poorly I was doing with the new modules even though I hadn’t had the time to actually look at them (and also I was fighting the most powerful class of combat bot on the market). I should at least be able to keep up.
I ran at ComGuard and sent a sideways kick. ComGuard caught the soft strike, which gave me the leverage to kick off the ground and jackknife my heel right into its throat.
It let go, and I delivered a pair of back-kicks to its stomach and chest. Back-kicks were mainly for cracking open doors, but I was not capable of the kind of force required to stagger a Combat SecUnit from the front.
It didn’t help. ComGuard just swung into a punch. A new subroutine booted and I took the arm, grabbed its pauldron with my other hand, hooked its leg, and then just sort of dangled there because the sheer weight and power of its frame prevented me from affecting its balance at all.
It grabbed me by the throat and slammed me into the ground.
Performance Reliability 62%
I laid there until the last few seconds of the hand-to-hand diagnostic session ended. After a tense moment, my reliability began ticking up again. It didn’t tick up very far.
ComGuard took the elbow I’d used on its knee and wriggled it around. It made a horrible squeaking noise. I could still bend it, but I could tell it wouldn’t be able to hold up to any stressors.
COMGUARD> i did not know your specs were so much worse than mine. which is not my fault
HHS> I assumed the quality of the materials contributed to the integrity of the entire structure, but apparently not.
YARD> I don’t think I will ever be fighting in hand-to-hand combat with a Combat SecUnit anyway.
COMGUARD> that's fair.
COMGUARD> next routine
My next routine was melee combat, but I didn’t have a weapon. We were in the open, and I was lying in a crater of soft earth. To my right was the artificial stone of the drive, and to my left was a whole lot of yard.
Then I saw the pauldron pieces on the ground. Most of it had shattered (by design—the energy dispersing through exploding into pieces helped absorb impact), but a lot of it had cracked and fallen apart, leaving large chunks in the grass.
ComGuard was still standing over me, possibly waiting for me to sit up so it could pull me to my feet.
I took a shard of pauldron and drove it into ComGuard’s neck.
There was a violent spurt of fluids, which I hadn’t been expecting. ComGuard stumbled back clutching the wound, and I scrambled to my feet after it. My body was having so much difficulty getting upright I wondered if my performance reliability was only as high as it was because my body didn’t need to be functional to fire my energy weapons.
ComGuard tentatively removed its hand, and its head flopped uselessly to one side, gushing even more fluid. It replaced the hand and corrected its head position with visible effort.
COMGUARD> [amusement sigil 8=crying laughing] [amusement sigil 8=crying laughing] [amusement sigil 8=crying laughing]
COMGUARD> i didn’t even know this was a weakness i had
COMGUARD> @HHS what just happened
HHS> (attachment [combatreport.file])
HHS> The neck plating underneath the fabric of the armour has more attachments to the pauldron than the chestplate, to improve your range of movement. When YARD failed to throw you, it yanked your pauldron down, exposing your neck.
COMGUARD> fuck that didn’t just sever my arteries i think it went right through the sternocleidomastoid. i have tensile wiring in all my organic muscles are you kidding
COMGUARD> well now i can’t move my head or breathe so you pass. let’s go get our body parts reprinted
YARD> (ACK)
I was shaking with an unexpected flush of hormones. I didn’t just land a hit on a SecUnit designed to kill other SecUnits, but completely disabled it. I gathered all the big pieces of my pauldron for the recycler and followed it back into the house.
My drone caught Tseyvar’s marital partner looking much more anxious. Unsurprising. Once a human found out we looked like them, they started acting really squimish. Sometimes humans felt so uncomfortable with their fear of person-shaped violence that they tried to take control of the discomfort by making their companion species (and SecUnits) maul each other.
I knew violence was a kind of obscenity in residential settlements, so it was always up in the air if the client didn’t want to even think about it or if they were twice as incentivized to see a SecUnit in a pit fight. It was good Tseyvar’s marital partner was in the former category.
The Security Ready Room had two cubicles, one for each of us. Mine was a simple white box with manufacturer branding, and ComGuard’s was a sleek black pill shape that opened up like a visor as it approached. The difference in funding and presentation was almost comedic. A lot of people assumed Combat SecUnits and regular SecUnits were different categories of construct because of expenses like this.
I dispensed my shards into the recycler and ComGuard pried the makeshift knife out of its neck to toss in after it. No more fluids spurted out; its veins had successfully resealed.
Getting my armour off was somewhat challenging. The strike to my spine had done more damage than anticipated, even with the extra reinforcement, and it interfered in my ability to turn my torso. My skinsuit was intact, but also difficult to remove because of how much I’d been sweating. When it peeled away, I saw my elbow joint was crumpled and bending only by the power of the mechanical hinge, and a drone showed me the alloy along my spine was so warped that the organic tissue turned black from being ruptured.
I resolved to never fight anything stronger than an un-augmented human in hand-to-hand combat again.
ComGuard shed its armour too, also struggling with the limited mobility, removing the chestplate mostly through mathematically calculated shimmying. When it emerged to pick its skinsuit out of the knife wound, I finally got to see its face.
I didn’t know what I was expecting, but it was still jarring to see that despite being 195 centimetres of hand-crafted killing machine, ComGuard just looked like a generic human. It was pale and had hooded eyes and the same SecUnit face ratio as me. Maybe there was no such thing as an elite gene pool, and it was cloned from something equally luxurious, like a single-use batch.
Wait, no. Its face was covered in moles. I didn’t even know we could get moles.
It looked down at me with a pinched expression.
COMGUARD> gross
I ran a diagnostic. Without pain sensors, I wouldn’t be able to feel unexpected injuries. The only new thing I noticed was the ruptured organics in my throat from being thrown into the earth. I sent a query.
COMGUARD> you have blue eyes
Did I?
I turned the drone to my face. It was correct. The only thing gross I could see was that they were so pale you could see how clumpy and fibrous the iris was, which I agreed was a bit upsetting, but so were pores.
YARD> Polygenic traits are common in cloned tissue.
YARD> I didn’t know we could get moles.
COMGUARD> the nevi? they get printed randomly if it’s in the batch, yeah. My ratios are pretty high
It showed off its dotted back as an example. It had much less organic tissue than I did, only covering the major muscle groups, and I barely noticed the mole distribution in my wonder at how its entire lower back was made of the flexible black synthetic material I could only afford to have on my major joints.
ComGuard racked its armour and climbed into its fancy cubicle, and I racked my armour and climbed into my glorified medical fridge. I decided to not turn my pain sensors on until my spine and elbow were fixed.
HHS> Tseyvar’s happy with your stupid diagnostic test. He thinks you’re the smartest security consultant in the whole wide world.
HHS> Oh, and Hadil is incoming.
COMGUARD> i just got in the cubicle. don’t leave me trapped here
HHS> I do not have control over the behaviour of the humans.
Hadil was Tseyvar’s marital partner, and I knew from how she looked in the window that we’d probably have to deal with her squeamishness somehow. I hated when humans came to check if our perfectly fixable injuries were fatal, and my buffer usually took over to walk them through the concept of ‘can reprint 90% of a unit’s body’ until they went away.
My drones and the house cameras watched Hadil drift through the halls, in no rush but visibly anxious. Humans often dragged their feet in anticipation of unwanted stimulus. They didn’t have a risk management system to tell them that it wasn’t going to help.
She arrived at the door and stared at our steadily humming cubicles, face slack and eyes fixed on ComGuard’s pill-like container. Occasionally her gaze darted to the splatter of fluids all over the armour.
Her gaze passed over my metallic drones, but paused when she saw the little matte black drone that had returned to the Security Room.
“Did I disturb you?” She asked softly.
The inner light in the black cubicle turned on. She approached slowly, almost on tip-toe, and peered at ComGuard’s illuminated face. The worst of the wound had already been covered in foamy tissue repair agent. I think it foamed like that to make humans like this feel better about the gristle.
ComGuard opened its eyes. “Combat diagnosis complete.”
I almost flinched. After so much conversation in the feed, I forgot it had that weird altered voicebox.
“This is barbaric. We should have gotten a combat bot for the house,” she sniffed.
To my quiet alarm, ComGuard’s face pulled into a relaxed smile. “I thought it was funny.”
“You think you’re invincible.”
“Teachable moment for me, isn’t it.” It stuck a finger in the foam and wriggled it so she could see the hole I’d wrenched into the neck muscles. It made her grimace, and ComGuard smiled wider.
“Tseyvar says…” She tucked one of her long dark-blue curls behind her ear. “Tseyvar says that next time I go out, I need to take Trini with me. He’ll stay with the house. So I’ll need security in the city…”
“Unless you or your kid get flagged for mortal peril, I can’t leave his side. If you’re going out, you’re taking yardbot.” It nodded its head to my side of the room.
She looked at my cubicle with obvious distaste. I stayed perfectly still even though there was a heavy door on my cubicle and she couldn’t see me. The energy in this room was making me extremely nervous.
“…He’s not trying to replace you, is he?”
“Fuuuck no,” ComGuard groaned out in a manner so human I clipped it for future reference. “He loves me. Yardbot’s for your house. The property needs some firepower, that’s all.”
“If it’s for my house, why does it have to come with me and Trini?”
ComGuard closed its eyes. “You know why.”
She leaned against the cubicle with both hands and grit her teeth. “Trini isn’t property. You aren’t property.”
Oh shit. My autoreport triggered in agreement.
“You know that’s not true,” ComGuard said wryly.
“You’re not just some bot-pilot with a gun, you have feelings, and opinions…he couldn’t have gotten where he is today without you. You have more brain than he ever had, and you have to stand over his shoulder, unacknowledged because of what you are…”
HHS> Does this do it for you? Be honest.
ComGuard ignored HHS, but its feed presence spiked warningly in its direction.
“I can’t watch you do so much for us and not…”
“Not what? This is what success is for a SecUnit. I’m necessary for the system, I’m trusted, I get to be a little human now and again…This is settling down for things like me. Fulfilling my purpose. Watching over you.”
Her eyes were glassy and distant, and she leaned against the cubicle, hair dangling around her face. She looked crushed. “Is this forever?”
“It’s enough.”
She looked at the rest of the room, at the guns and my cubicle and then the drones. When she caught sight of my drone still hovering close, she sniffed and rubbed her face so some of her brightly coloured eye makeup came off on her hand.
“And I’ll be rich and pampered and have a child for however long I want. This is what success looks like in a marriage.”
ComGuard watched her impassively as its neck was gently stitched back together. She gave it one last morose once-over and drifted out of the Security Ready Room as aimless and uneasy as she had entered it.
The droning hum of our cubicles completely swallowed her footsteps, leaving only an occupied silence.
HHS> [amusement sigil 62= nauseated]
COMGUARD> [amusement sigil 62= nauseated]
COMGUARD> @HHS next time she shows up in here i’m going to need you to do me a favour and order yard to blow my fucking brains out
HHS> This is all your fault.
I didn’t know if the fact ComGuard’s behaviour was it appeasing the human made the situation any less uncomfortable. After some consideration, it made me feel even worse.
YARD> What was that?
COMGUARD> hadil’s weekly romantic serial fantasy
COMGUARD> every time the desire to divorce overcomes her fragile human form she transfers this immense processing load onto me by implying she wants to fuck me or raise her fucked up non-kid or both
COMGUARD> @HHS if you ordered yard to shoot me, i could fix this
HHS> I don’t know, I distinctly recall you waxing poetic about the appeals of sex and how much you’d like to have it.
COMGUARD> no i waxed poetic about how someone saying “I’ll let you subjugate me for an hour if you wear this sexual stimulation device that both prevents you from having to get my disgusting human genital goop on you && makes me more amiable to getting subjugated for longer than the agreed upon hour” == desirable + possible + most appealing version of “sex”
COMGUARD> even if hadil asked me to subjugate her in exchange for wearing a stimulant device i would say no. i don’t think she respects the spirit of getting subjugated. i have needs
HHS> Figure out how to hack your governor module and go to a sex dungeon instead of talking to us about this.
COMGUARD> but if i did that i wouldn’t be head of security guarding valuable resources in a dangerous inter-company pissing match
COMGUARD> i have needs
This was the longest conversation I’d ever technically been a part of, and I was afraid to say anything in case that would stop. The relaxed, human-esque cadence of the conversation was unsettling. The intimacy of mutual entitlement to conversation was unsettling. I understood now why ComGuard assumed it would make me uncomfortable, because it did.
It also made me re-assess the way they’d been interacting with me. Distant, measured, placating, sympathetic. These were two machines who were not very nice, trying to be nice to me.
This was a completely novel concept. No one was nice specifically to a SecUnit, and especially not to me, a mediocre product they had needed to refurbish themselves. I was the kind of appliance you bought a 3-pack of for a mining installation. I was quite literally activated in a 3-pack for a mining installation. I should be no more compelling than the maintenance bots.
So it meant something that they’d share this disturbing entitlement to conversation—after, I am realizing now, intentionally withholding the worst of it through their private feed. It meant something that ComGuard wanted to explain its life to me, and that HHS had deleted the override.
I didn’t do anything to warrant that, did I?
HHS and ComGuard slipped into their private feed again, which I now understood to be an indication that they wanted to argue. The moment to respond to unexpected niceness had passed.
I didn’t need a recharge cycle, but I downloaded all the files FamUnit had tagged me in and initiated one anyway.
