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The transport crate had been delivered a few hours ago. I had watched the hauler bot (miniature sized for deliveries) arrive in one of ART's cargo bays. It was a little weird to watch it happen; I was usually stuck in a cubicle for this part. I kept a camera input open on the crate, even though we still had a couple of hours before we were due on the station. The hauler bot stuck around, since it would be needed to move the heavy, reinforced box to its destination, with me inside. I carefully avoided making any contact with it over the feed.
I was sitting in my room and reviewing the fine details of our infiltration and hacking plan with Seth and Iris over the feed, but the transport crate camera feed occupied more of my processing space than was really necessary for an inert box that didn't pose a security threat.
The humans started gathering in the cargo bay well before our scheduled meeting time. It was good that they were getting there early, instead of running around the ship performing last minute hygiene tasks and delaying our departure. I didn't want to be early and have to waste time making awkward conversation with ART's humans, so I walked over at the last possible moment.
The humans fell silent and pointedly avoided looking at me. (This felt different than the way they usually avoided looking at me). This was because humans were uncomfortable with putting people in boxes, and I was a person now. And the transport crate sitting in the middle of the cargo bay was for me.
Let's back up. ART's crew was running a reconnaissance mission for the university, in preparation for a larger operation to free some colony from their dubiously legal corporate owners. It was going to be pretty easy on my end. I would be doing all of the hacking work, and Seth and Iris would be traveling with me in order to give me an excuse to be inside the office's security barrier and access its feed. It was a security company called AlstarTec that rented out constructs, among other things, so Seth and Iris would be going inside with me in the transport crate under the pretense of purchasing upgraded weapons for me.
(SecUnits weren't allowed to walk around in AlstarTec's headquarters under their own power, because AlstarTec wasn't stupid.)
The plan was to stay inside the boundary long enough for me to hack into their records and pull information on who their clients were and what security and weaponry those clients had, and then Seth and Iris would get into an argument with the company representative and back out of the deal, and take me back to the ship with them. I wouldn't have to leave the transport crate the entire time.
It was only Seth, Iris, Kaede, and Martyn waiting for me, not all of ART's crew. Seth and Iris were the ones who would be doing the actual infiltration along with me, and Kaede and Martyn were heading the backup team that would mostly just be tracking our progress until we got inside the feed barrier.
They greeted me, but there wasn't really much to say. It was almost time for our appointment with the AlstarTec representative, which meant that it was time for me to go in the transport crate.
The problem was, I couldn't seem to make my legs move.
Seth cleared his throat. "SecUnit, is there anything else you need before we go?" he asked politely. ART loomed over me in the feed, stopping short of demanding a status report from me, but I could tell that it wanted to.
I took another step closer to the transport crate. Only eight more to go. "I'm fine," I said. "Give me a second." Another step. Seven more to go.
This was extremely embarrassing. I didn't know why I was having so much trouble moving my body. I liked transport crates. Some of my fondest memories from when I was on inventory were in transport crates, deep in the hold of a ship in a wormhole, watching and rewatching media for cycles on end, completely at peace. I wasn't in danger of humans looking at me when I was in a transport crate. I wasn't in danger of being shot at by humans, or having to shoot humans. Being in a transport crate sounded way better than standing in this room right now.
"It's okay," Seth said. "We have time, you can take as much time as you need."
He was lying. We were rapidly running out of time for me to get in the fucking crate so we could make our extremely important rendezvous with the AlstarTec representative. ART was still blanketing me in the feed, which I usually didn't mind too much, but right now it felt like it was suffocating me.
“You said before that you didn't mind being inside closed spaces,” ART said to me privately.
“I don't,” I told it, and managed the last few steps forward. I just had to climb inside now.
The transport crate wasn't much more than a cube made of two-inch thick steel. It didn't have any padding on the inside, and it didn't have any internal machinery like a cubicle did. What it did have were multiple mechanical locks on the outside, and just barely enough space on the inside to fit a SecUnit curled up as tight as it could be.
It had been a long time since I had been in a transport crate, or even a cubicle. The last time I had been in a cubicle had been at the end of my first survey with PreservationAux, when Ratthi had come to collect me after Dr. Mensah had bought me. I hadn't seen the inside of a transport crate since I had been delivered to that planet at the beginning of the survey.
A lot had happened since then. I hadn't really considered how long it had been.
"There aren't any air holes," Iris said. Her voice was quiet. "How will you breathe?"
"I don't need very much oxygen," I said. My voice sounded distant in my own ears. "There will be plenty for a trip this short."
I could feel everyone's eyes on my body like a physical touch.
“Can you make them stop looking at me?” I asked ART.
“You can tell them yourself,” it said. Then, a quarter second later, it said, “ Yes, I will ask them to stop.”
In unison, Seth, Iris, Martyn, and Kaede all turned in different directions to face toward the walls. Now ART's gaze was the only one weighing on me and making this harder.
The opening was at the top, so I stepped over the side. Both legs, and then I was standing inside. I crouched all the way down and sat, knees against my chest, hands under my knees, my head bowed down so it wouldn't stick out of the opening.
"I'm ready," I called out. One of the humans would have to close the lid and engage the locks.
I kept my head down and watched one of ART's cameras as Seth walked over. He was frowning, and he closed the lid much more carefully than humans typically did. Then I was in darkness.
I mean, not really, because I still had several camera inputs active, and external cameras are just as much a part of my sensory system as my eyes. I could still see the four humans in the room as they fiddled with the locks that AlstarTec required on transport crates carrying SecUnits. But the six walls of the crate were all pressed against my body, and the only part of me that I could move was my hands. Barely.
"Are you okay in there?" Seth asked, and I heard him more through the microphone of the drone hidden in his clothing for me than with my ears.
“I'm fine,” I sent into the general feed. “ Let's go.” I instinctively tried to backburner the rush of adrenaline that was flooding my organic parts, because my brain was too fuzzy to remember that that wasn't how organic chemicals worked. It wasn't flushing on its own, and I couldn't move or do anything about it, so it was just building up in my system and making me feel like I was on fire.
The hauler bot carrying my transport crate came to life, and then we were moving. Within 10 seconds I had been moved off of ART and onto the station dock, and instead of ART's cameras my only inputs were the two drones hidden in Seth and Iris's clothing.
I blacked out a little bit.
When my brain came back online I sucked in a breath that made my whole chest hurt. It didn't help. I was malfunctioning. I was malfunctioning, badly, and I was still potentially tens of cycles away from my destination and any humans that could notice that there was something wrong with me and put me in a cubicle to fix it, if they even cared to. If I survived that long. I was trapped here on my own, and fuck if I had any ideas for how to fix myself when I couldn't even move.
I sucked in another breath. I felt something crack.
I couldn't remember how long I had been in here. I thought it might have been a very long time.
Somebody would surely be opening the crate at any moment, right?
I pushed back harder against the crate.
Error alerts were cascading through my mind faster than I could parse them--memory integration failures, segmentation faults, storage violations--something was wrong, something was very wrong, and I couldn't do anything about it because I was stuck in this box and I was never getting out. It had been too long, I knew it, and I was going to spend the rest of my conscious existence in a corner of a warehouse—
"Murderbot!"
My body jerked involuntarily, and I would have slammed into the side of the crate if I hadn't already been pressed so solidly against it.
ART was in my head all of a sudden, this time not holding itself back from yanking a status report and kickstarting a diagnostic that I shut down immediately because "holy shit, ART, get the fuck out of my head."
ART was here. ART was here? ART—
"There is something wrong with you. We need to abort the mission," it said.
"We are not aborting the fucking mission," I fired back. I didn't remember what the mission was yet, but my backlog of failed memory retrieval requests had rapidly begun clearing when ART said my name and I was sure I would remember momentarily. " Stop freaking out. I used to do this all the time."
"Yes, and I am beginning to see that that may be causing problems with your ability to do it now."
I managed to retrieve my short-term memory access from where it had been dumped accidentally.
"Shut up," I told it. " This is the only way to get the information we need. And I like transport crates."
"Yes, of course you like transport crates. That's why you're having a panic attack right now."
ART was wrong, I wasn't having a panic attack right now. I had experienced this particular annoying combination of organic chemicals wrecking my body and brain before, and knew that I could shut them down enough to focus on the task at hand if I tried hard enough. It was just hard to focus enough to do that through the choking miasma of worry ART was leaking into the feed.
I shoved at it, hard. "I'll be fine, I've done this a million times. Just shut up and stop bothering me, you're making it worse."
Most of ART's weight lifted off of me then, but instead of making me feel better like it should have, an unexpected jolt of fear dropped my performance reliability by 5 percent. I reinforced my firewalls instinctively, feeling more vulnerable than I had in a long time.
We kept moving, until we were far enough away that I could no longer connect directly to ART via its own feed. Through the station feed, and with the newfound distance it was keeping from me, it felt like it was barely there.
I couldn't stop myself. “ Wait—” I said, reaching for it.
Its feed presence came flooding back, even more overwhelming than before. “ Please let me abort the mission,” it said, sounding more desperate than I had ever heard it.
“This is too important,” I said. “ We need to get those files from AlstarTec and I'm the only one who can get inside and hack their systems.”
“We can find another way to get those files. I cannot allow you to continue this mission when it is clearly affecting you so negatively.”
“It is not affecting me negatively,” I said forcefully. And besides, even if it was, this is my fucking job. I can do this.”
"You are in no state to be hacking heavily secured servers like this," ART said. " We should have considered your trauma from being treated like this when planning this mission." It wavered, then added, "This is my fault."
Fucking asshole. “ Fuck you,” I said, which was all that I could manage before the hauler bot came to a halt without warning, and another fresh wave of fear hit. I had drones out there, I needed to needed to needed to see if something bad was happening—
I fumbled for my drone inputs, accidentally disconnecting from them and then cycling through them unable to properly connect before ART leaned in and did it for me.
Seth and Iris were fine. We had stopped to let a large group of slow-moving, confused humans disembarking a passenger vessel get out of the way. We hadn't even exited the docks yet.
“I'm calling off the mission,” ART said. “ You can't do this. I'm explaining the situation to Seth and Iris now.”
"No!" I said out loud, too upset to remember to use the feed. I couldn't stop myself anymore; I managed to twist my body enough that I could push one arm against the seam where the lid opened and I scratched at it like I was fresh off the assembly line and this was my first time being shoved in a box. "Fuck!"
The crate was so small that every wall was crowding into me; I had to press my head into my knees to fit. I was used to spending tens of cycles being transported like this, like inert cargo, and I had liked it, I had liked having that much time to sink into my media and pretend like I didn't exist. Why couldn't I do this anymore. I needed to get out, I needed to run, I needed to be able to open my weapon ports.
I could not let ART ruin the mission because of my weakness.
Seth opened a private channel with me over the feed. “ SecUnit? Peri says you’re having some—issues—and it’s recommending that we regroup and come up with a different plan for gathering intel. Do you concur?”
“ART is a liar,” I sent back immediately. “ I'm fine. We need to keep going.”
I watched through Iris's camera as Seth gave the transport crate an inscrutable and completely pointless weird look. I could see him subvocalizing, no doubt still conferring with ART, the traitor.
“We still have time to go back and figure out a different way to do this,” Seth said to me. “ It would be better to call this off now than to try and back out once we're actually inside.”
“There's no need to call it off at all, I said I could do it and I can still do it, so KEEP MOVING.”
Seth did not keep moving, and there was another long pause while he probably listened to ART telling him more lies about my mental state. The crate I was in also did not keep moving, which somehow made me feel worse. My itching desire to move increased.
Another message from Seth, with an accompanying spike of bad neural chemicals even though I had been expecting it. “ SecUnit, I'm going to trust Peri's assessment of the situation and call it off. I wasn't very happy with this plan in the first place. We're turning around now.”
I sent a stream of expletives into Seth's feed that ART unhelpfully blocked from reaching him, so I started sending them directly to ART instead. ART started halfheartedly swearing back at me in what I could tell was a pitying way.
There wasn't actually anything I could do to stop Seth from turning around, seeing as I was still extremely locked inside a transport crate. So another five minutes later we were back inside ART's cargo bay, where the hauler bot dropped me back on the floor, not carefully.
I might have been damaged by the height of the drop if I had had any room at all to get knocked around inside the crate. The edge of the box clipped one of the hauler bot's supports on the way down, and I tumbled over sideways, landing with my entire body weight pressing down on one shoulder and the back of my neck. I don't think I have to explain just how uncomfortable this was.
Twenty-two agonizing seconds later, the lid of the crate was opened. I slid out onto the floor, and was up and marching out of the room before any of the humans could stop me.
Ten meters down the hallway I remembered that this is still an ongoing operation and that I maybe shouldn't abandon it like this. I was a little surprised ART wasn't saying anything to me, but if it had I might have screamed at it, so that was probably for the best. I turned and marched back into the cargo bay and planted myself in the corner like nothing weird had happened.
"What are we going to do now?" I said to nobody in particular. My voice was completely steady because SecUnit voices didn't shake like human voices did.
I watched through the cameras as the humans present all exchanged wary glances. They had set the empty transport crate upright again, and the hauler bot was just crossing the threshold back to the station with it in tow. I shut off my camera input that had a view of that corridor and my performance reliability rose three percentage points as soon as it was out of view. (I mean, it was still abysmal, but I'll take three percentage points where I can get them.)
Seth and Martyn looked at each other in a way that meant neither of them wanted to be the one who had to talk to me. Martyn lost whatever mental argument they had.
"We don't have to figure that out right now," he said. "I think we should focus our attention on the meetings we’re having with the colony’s leaders over the next few days and see where we get with that. It's entirely possible an alternative way to get the intel we need from AlstarTec will present itself."
This was a ridiculous cop-out and everyone here knew it. I'd fucked the mission.
No, I hadn't fucked the mission. ART had been the one who had insisted we stop. This was ART's fault.
I said, more loudly, "There was absolutely no need to turn around. I was fine."
ART spoke in the general feed. " Repeatedly insisting that you are fine does not make it true. You were very obviously not fine. Sending you to do delicate hacking work in your condition would have only resulted in all of you getting caught."
"I was not going to get caught, and this is important, it doesn't matter if I'm a little bit uncomfortable--"
“You were having one of the most severe panic attacks I have ever seen you experience. And that's saying something, because the number of panic attacks I have seen you experience is not small.”
"Okay!" Seth said loudly, before I could do something completely stupid like kick a hole in ART's nearest bulkhead. "We're going to try a different method, there's no need to argue about something that's already happened. SecUnit--" He turned to face me, visibly steeling himself. "SecUnit, is there anything we can do to support you right now?"
Holy fuck. "Absolutely not," I said, and then I fled the room as quickly as I could without running.
Shutting off myself off from the feed bought me two hours of peace from having to listen to ART harassing me. I laid on my bed, covered head to toe by my heaviest blanket, and stared into the dark fabric. I had tried to play an episode of Sanctuary Moon but instead of calming me down it had just made me more anxious.
Having nothing to do except stare into the darkness also made me anxious, but at least it wasn't an anxiety produced by watching my favorite serial, which would be intolerable.
When it finally got tired of watching me stew, ART spoke to me out loud through the console in my room. (I should have remembered to break that earlier. Oh well.)
It said, "I'm not going to apologize for pulling you out. I calculated a 76.9% chance that you would not remain undetected in the condition that you were in. If you had been caught, all three of you would have been in significant danger."
I groaned, exhausted and completely unwilling to deal with this right now. "I've hacked things when I was in much worse mental condition than I was today, and you know it. I'm good at it. I could have done it."
ART's voice over the speaker was neutral, unaffected by any of the emotional nuances its feed voice usually had. (I didn't like when it spoke out loud like this. Its voice was evenly modulated, serenely pleasant, and it didn't sound at all like itself.) "That brings me to my second point. Your physical and mental wellbeing are not factors that I or my crew are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve mission goals. You wouldn't expect any of my other crew members to work through a debilitating panic attack like that, would you?"
I reconnected to the feed so I wouldn't have to keep listening to ART keep saying things like that out loud.
"It's not the same and you know it. They're humans."
ART loomed pointedly. “ Just because you are a construct does not mean you should subject yourself to situations that are damaging to your mental health.”
“Every situation is damaging to my mental health,” I said.
I was joking, but ART remained silent .
"We're going to have to try this again," I said. "It's not going to be safe trying to extricate that colony without advance intel on what weapons bullshit their owners are going to pull on us when we piss them off."
"Believe it or not, my crew has successfully performed countless espionage operations without the assistance of a SecUnit. They are capable of doing this themselves.”
I pulled my blanket down a little bit so I could make a face at ART.
"That is not to say that your contributions are not valuable," it added hastily. "But what I am trying to say is that there is no need for you to sacrifice your well-being for us.”
ART let me sit in silence for several minutes after it said that. I felt too tired to think, but despite that I couldn’t seem to shut off my thoughts, which were ricocheting across my processors with painful speed.
I wasn’t used to my own personal well-being being taken into consideration like this. It surprised me every time, even though ART’s crew and my own humans had never treated me like an unfeeling piece of equipment. I wasn’t sure I would ever be used to it. It made me uncomfortable, sometimes, for reasons I didn’t understand.
It was still nice though. And maybe it meant that I didn’t have to keep torturing myself, if nobody else was going to torture me either.
“Okay,” I said finally. “We can figure something else out.”
My head hurt too much for me to even feel relieved by this admission. I pulled that blanket back over my face. I still felt stupid, and didn’t want to be visible to ART’s cameras right now.
ART settled closer to me, and pulled up the camera feed to the crew’s meeting room, where our crew was busy at work with the publicly available portion of AlstarTec’s data. Iris sent a greeting into the general feed when she noticed my presence there.
I sent back an acknowledging ping, and we got to work.