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Wholesome, feel-good, found family, slice of life. They weren’t the usual tags I looked through when searching for media; I liked long running dramatic serials, full of adventure and hope. But ART had insisted, and it wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I decided to give it a shot. It was a newly released series, animated and only a dozen episodes so far.
Honestly, I should have known that something was up by the way ART had coerced me into watching it, but I didn’t figure it out until I was in a lounge chair and it was draped around me in the feed like a blanket.
“ART,” I said as the title screen began to play, “What the fuck is this.”
ART smirked at me. I know, I know, it doesn’t have a face, but if you’re a bot or construct or an augmented human, you can feel these things via the feed. And it was definitely smirking. “It is The Secret Lives of Secunits. Was that not obvious?”
“Yes, but why are we watching it,” I gritted out.
“Because I like watching media with you,” ART said, and it was such a surprising display of affection from my asshole affiliate that I just shut up and went with it.
The opening sequence began to play, introducing a cast of five secunits, each with names and unique appearances. There was Red, who had bright ginger hair and was showed interacting with what I assumed to be the representation of the feed, and then a very pale secunit that I recognized as albino from the media. Albinos were normally evil or unnaturally skilled in media, but then again, so were secunits. This one’s name was Elric, which sounded vaguely familiar.
The third secunit had a snaggletooth grin and three consecutive sevens in its identification number, and was nicknamed Lucky. Then there was Patch, who had very dark skin with pale blotches for some reason.
“Does it have a rash?” I asked.
“No. That is a skin condition known as vitiligo. It is harmless and solely cosmetic,” ART informed me, as if I should already know that. Well, pardon me for not having training modules on human skin diseases that weren’t an immediate threat to life. Also, I didn’t really care about that kind of thing.
The last secunit had freckles and an unusually short stature, like something was wrong with its structure to make it hunch over. Overall, despite containing variations that the company didn’t much like, these were the closest thing I’d seen to myself represented onscreen. I know I said it would be realistic if secunits in media just liked to sit in their cubicles and watch media all day, but honestly, I was shocked to just see ones that looked like me. Lucky even had a similar nose and dark hair as me, although my skin was a few shades darker than it.
The secunits had unlined faces and tired eyes, for the most part, which was accurate. Half-moon had wide eyes with long lashes that gave it a perpetually concerned expression, and Red’s brow was usually furrowed in concern. They were all slightly too tall, too broad in the hips and the proportions were off in other minuscule ways, but their anatomy was very similar to my own. They had weapon ports in their arms, data ports in the backs of their necks.
I was starting to feel strange about this, and I didn’t know why. The opening credits began to play, and I tried to figure out what kind of show this was. None of the human clients’ faces were revealed, and the secunits were helping each other down a flight of stairs. Helping each other. As if they were friends. Each was scraped and bleeding through their armor, like they had been walking through thorns, but they seemed more annoyed than anything.
I like watching imaginary people onscreen. Realistic things get to me, though, and this was starting to feel too close to reality.
“ART?” I said again, then stopped. I didn’t know what I wanted to ask it.
“That is the acronym you assigned to me, yes.”
“Anagram.” I pushed away its dictionary entry for anagram without reading it. “Why are we watching this?”
“Do you dislike it?” ART asked.
Damnit, I hate this kind of conversation. “I don’t know yet.”
“Then we will keep watching,” it said.
I waited to see what sort of work the secunits were doing. Survey work, maybe? The camera faded to black, then opened on an empty concrete room. It was bare, except for the cubicles I recognized. They weren’t exactly like the ones I used to—
Patch staggered down the stairs, missing an arm and leaking fluid, looking very put out about the entire ordeal. I couldn’t see what had happened to it, but it looked like a clean amputation, except the floppy remnants of his sleeve conveniently covered it. Patch wrote “healing, brb” on the door to its cubicle with a finger dipped in its own blood, stepped in, and tossed its armor out through a crack in the door.
My performance reliability dropped by 3%.
The secunits were conversing with each other— actually conversing. They gossiped about humans together, and I felt a strange twinge in my organic parts that I now identified as jealousy. This wasn’t like the human soap operas. This wasn’t a comforting veneer of fiction to take the edge off reality. And yet it felt good in a way, like when you finally pull out all of those pesky projectiles from your back and bits of you stop leaking and falling off.
Ugh, I was having an emotion again. I hate that.
I let out a breath when the governor module came onto screen, though. It was represented by a hologram, just as the feed was, and there was one governor for all five units. It was pale, slender, faceless, and let out a low hum of static whenever a unit got too close to breaking the rules. It matched up with a lot of horror media tropes, but it wasn’t very accurate to my personal horror, which was…good, I think. It was good.
The episode introduced Half-moon, a new secunit who had something called scoliosis that allowed it to be bought at a discounted price. Half-moon was shown around the place, and then Lucky, Red, and Elric sat around and listened to music from an old radiowave transmitter. It…reminded me of ART and I, watching media together.
I felt seen, maybe not perfectly, but I was seen. Bharadwaj might like this for her documentary, I decided. I’d have to talk to her sometime and try to figure out the pesky emotions I was feeling.
The white static returned, and all of the secunits looked up in horror. The governer module was summoning two secunits, and didn’t care which ones. Lucky volunteered instantly, and Red checked its feed inputs at a blinding speed before saying that Half-moon should stay behind. Elric nodded, and said it would go, and there was a shot of both secunits heading up the stairs, having donned their armor again.
The screen faded to black, and only returned for a brief stinger of Lucky— unmoving, covered in blood, being carried into the room by Elric as Half-moon screamed in horror.
And then it was over.
"What did you think?" ART asked. It sounded less sarcastic than usual, and more like it was prodding the conversation in the direction it wanted to go.
The joke was on it, though. I didn't even know where this conversation was going. My organic parts were a confused mess, and I needed time to analyze the data from the first episode.
"It was unrealistic," is what came out of my buffer.
"You like unrealistic shows," ART replied, and helpfully pulled up video footage of me saying exactly that to deposit into the feed.
"Yes."
"Do you like this show?" it prodded.
I paused for 5.7 seconds before I said, "Let's watch the next episode. I want to see if Lucky's going to be okay after that."
"Half-moon's reaction was disconcerting. I am also concerned for it," ART agreed, and the opening theme for episode two began to play.