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The crew’s reaction to World Hoppers had been…disappointing, if Perihelion were to narrow it down to a one-word description. They hadn’t disliked it, as such, but their enthusiasm had been underwhelming. Perhaps the humans did not want to watch media about human crews in space, in the same way that SecUnit didn’t want to watch media about SecUnits.
But they were 30 days out into their long-distance mission, almost nothing was happening, and they had cycled through all available downloaded media, and Turi had complained that there was like, literally, nothing to watch. The crew had regularly weekly media-watching nights, as part of their social bonding rituals. It was important. So Perihelion had shared some of its media. It had done so before, after all (admittedly with mixed results), but this felt…different. Anyway, wasn’t that part of the reason it liked humans? Because, despite being so terribly predictable (although it was not so crass as to assign values like, for example, “85% percentage probability of Crew Tarik complaining about the food”, like certain people it could mention), they were so…unpredictable.
Halfway through series two, Matteo declared themselves bored of it, and didn’t they have anything better? There were various mumblings of agreement, ranging from non-committal to enthusiastic. Which was when Tarik proferred up the hottest new series from New Tideland: Last Outpost Lambda. Seth and Martyn expressed reservations about Turi watching due to the high level of “explicit violence and body horror.” Turi expressed withering contempt about this notion. Kaede expressed keen interest in the high level of explicit violence and body horror. And a vote was taken and so Last Outpost Lambda it was.
Perihelion watched Last Outpost Lambda through Iris’s feed; now that it had watched with SecUnit, it was more able to interpret the immersive experience more in the manner that it was intended – that is, to engage human emotional responses and attention. Besides, it was curious – and wondering if this meant it could acquire a stash of new media in case of the (low probability, like, not even worth calculating ((0.23%)) possibility of encountering SecUnit again.
The crew of Research Station Lambda (the show title was written λast Outpost λambda, which would have irritated SecUnit almost as much as it irritated Perihelion) lived in a time in which two mega-corporations had battled each other until their advanced SecUnits had not only gone rogue and turned against them, but organised a full-scale SecUnit rebellion and taken over. Most of the corporation spaceships had been destroyed or re-assigned, and the research crew, in a remote nebula, had been abandoned. They now faced a constant struggle to survive alone and without supplies or protection – and without being detected by the rogue SecUnits. Detection by 1+ rogue SecUnits and near disaster seemed to be the plot of most of the episodes, in fact.
Perihelion should not have watched Last Outpost Lambda, due to the high level of explicit violence and body horror. It had several moments where it had to pause and recompile databases, and, at one point, map every circuit in the ship. Naturally none of these were noticed by the crew; an advanced research transport bot such as itself was capable of a level of parallel processing – not to mention sheer speed of thought – that no human could hope to even imagine.
That was until episode 23, in which things looked even bleaker for Outpost Lambda (well, it was a season finale). After much argument, the crew had cautiously investigated a distress call from a small transport, which appeared to be genuine: they rescued a small complement of human crew, which Perihelion was relieved about. There was also a disabled SecUnit on board. There was more argument about whether it should be destroyed, but Dr Ariada, one of the senior scientists (and the only character Perihelion really liked), argued that it could be invaluable to study it, and find a way to weaponise it back against the SecUnits rebellion. There followed experimentation upon the SecUnit, which had had its memory wiped. Perihelion was somewhat uneasy about this – but so was Ariada, who, in her interactions with the Secunit, grew to believe that they could become not just autonomous, but moral beings – which might be a far better long-term strategy against the rebellion. The transport ship, however, was a trojan horse – as Perihelion had guessed from the start – and took over Lambda Station’s own security system, subverting drones and sending a message to its waiting parent ship, from which several SecUnits located and invaded the outpost. The researchers found a way to defeat the code, but it had shut off life support. One by one, they lost consciousness as the oxygen started to run out (this is really unrealistic, was Martyn’s comment). But the restored and reprogrammed SecUnit was still functioning.
“Wait – you’re too important to risk for this,” Dr Ariada gasped, blocking the SecUnit as it tried to exit the lab to deal with the invading rogues.
“This is what I am made for, Dr Ariada,” the SecUnit said, in a distinctly robotic voice, “This is my function.” And gently but firmly moved her aside. Then marched off, with a large array of weapons. There followed several scenes of explicit violence in which the valiant SecUnit battled to the death with its kind, which had Perihelion watching through its metaphorical fingers. Then, as life support was restored and the last of the rogues was destroyed, Ariada found the dying SecUnit, and knelt beside it, whilst the others watched in silence.
Wow this is corny, Matteo commented (completely ruining the moment). Which it was. Totally corny.
“I am…glad….that you are…unharmed…Dr Ariada,” the SecUnit said, staring somewhere over her shoulder with nerveless blue eyes.
“You could have been so much more,” she said, voice choked, and, a single tear running down her face, she lifted the last parts of its shattered visor off, and reached to place her hand on its cheek. It attempted a smile.
“No…you are so much more…you…humans…are so much more,” it said. Then it died.
The lights flickered.
Hey! Peri, hey, what the? You futzed out on me there. That was Iris.
Apologies Iris, I was chasing down an unusual root code error in the primary sensor array.
You were – wait, what?
“Peri,” Iris said out loud, “That was literally a line from World Hoppers, like, five episodes back.” Oh. Oh dear. She raised an eyebrow. The others had paused the media, regrettably on the image of the dead SecUnit, and were all staring at Perihelion. Or rather, vaguely up at the ceiling at one of its cameras.
Please turn that off, Peri said, somewhat primly. Seth switched it off, waving a quelling hand at Turi’s protest.
“I…think we forgot about the ratings system,” Martyn said, with a meaningful look in Seth’s direction, who then gave Iris a meaningful look.
“Oh…right, the ratings system,” Iris said, “Yeah…this was definitely not really suitable.”
“Oh come on!” Turi said, with a prime adolescent eyeroll. “I’m old enough to watch this!”
“We’re not talking about you,” Kaede muttered, nudging them with her elbow.
When the humans spoke out loud about Perihelion, it meant they were trying to obliquely not talk about Perihelion in front of it. Perihelion found this ridiculous, if somewhat amusing.
Iris, of course, had swiftly learnt that Perihelion got upset tended to suffer episodes of sub-optimal function when it witnessed harm to humans, real or otherwise. She had grown up with it, after all. As an adolescent herself, she had developed a ratings system that classified media in terms not of age-appropriateness, but Perihelion-suitability. It went as follows:
- U (Universal): suitable for all sensitive research transport bot pilots
- PG (Perihelion Guidance): suitable for most research transport bots but some scenes may cause distress
- PW (Perihelion Warning): adult human oversight recommended due to scenes of a violent nature
- RH (Restricted to Humans): only suitable for adult humans, not research transport bots
It had been cute when they were growing up; Iris’s protectiveness of her bot sibling being one of her more endearing characteristics. It had been less cute when she had told the rest of the crew, after a previous…episode. But it was still quite funny that they all thought Perihelion didn’t know about this. (As long as SecUnit didn’t find out, because it would never hear the end of it. Not that it would. The probability of them encountering each other again was estimated to be 0.5-1.3%.)
(It needed to improve those odds).
(Oh, it was thinking about SecUnit again).
“Well I think that’s enough for one night,” Seth said, firmly (What next, are you going to send us all to bed? Turi commented sarcastically). “We’ll maybe see if there’s something we can all enjoy for next week.”
And that was that. Except it wasn’t.
Perihelion was compiling a report for the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland on SecUnit, and the eventful voyage that they had had. Perihelion believed that it demonstrated not only a fascinating evolution in SecUnit autonomy, but a potentially useful avenue to explore in terms of countering the pervasive negative influence of the Corporations: their security could be undermined. But it was having great difficulty writing the report. It should be a simple matter of collating logs, recordings, transcripts of conversations, and a detail of its own and the SecUnits actions, concluding with some of its speculations. It took only a matter of seconds to compile and write. It had so far re-written its thoughts 12 complete and 5 partial (varying percentage) times. The report still did not sound sufficiently…objective. It really needed to talk to its crew about it. It really wanted to talk its crew about it. But it had promised SecUnit it would delete all the logs. Compiling a security report was something that could be justified to SecUnit; probably something it would do itself (ok, probably not, it would just watch media and forget about it). Blabbing to its crew was quite another.
Perihelion was relieved when Iris confronted it about in the privacy of her quarters a few days later, as she sat cross-legged on her bed, reading.
So I reviewed your media logs…she began. Perihelion said nothing. You really like World Hoppers, huh?
Yes, Perihelion agreed, cautiously, Especially episodes 108, 212 and 402.
Yes, I noticed you’d watched them all upwards of twenty times each. Plus a lot of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I also noticed you watched that episode of Last Outpost Lambda we all saw last week another 12 times.
It’s λast Outpost λambda, Perihelion pointed out, Which is actually derived from –
…Which is weird, Iris continued, ignoring the interruption, Considering that (a) it really upset you the first time and (b) that show is terrible. Perihelion said nothing. That way, it couldn’t really be said to be the one that broke the secret, could it?
“Peri,” Iris said, out loud, with a slightly amused, slightly disbelieving look on her face, “Have you been having, uh…fantasies…about - and I can't believe I'm saying this - SecUnits?"
No, I’ve been having realities about SecUnit. Iris’s eyebrows shot up. Oh. Oh dear. Perihelion replayed its short-term memory swiftly. Yes, it had really said that. Maybe it did need to run an in-depth analysis.
“You know, the way you just said that, was like it wasn’t just any SecUnit, but like it was a name.” Well, it was a name. Just not a very good one. Perihelion ran several possible scenarios (key variable: what it told Iris, and, by proxy, the rest of the crew) and came out with several outcomes that were not universally terrible.
Whilst I was on my last cargo run, I received a request from an individual for transport to RaviHyral, which I agreed to, in exchange for media. The individual in question was a SecUnit who had hacked their governor module.
Iris’s eyebrows raised even further.
“And?”
And we had a perfectly pleasant trip, talking and watching media. Primarily WorldHoppers and Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which was its favourite. I believe, in fact, that excessive media consumption is part of what allowed the SecUnit to develop the initiative and motivation to hack its governor module in the first place. Did that sound ridiculous? Yes. Yes it did. Perihelion scheduled that self-diagnostic.
No murderous rampages were committed, it added, when Iris remained thoughtfully silent. Perihelion decided to leave out the bit about Tlacey and the shuttle; extraneous information.
“Well I’m glad to hear it.” It proffered up an image of SecUnit in the feed, tentatively.
“Huh. It’s kind of cute, in a 'kill-all-humans' kind of way,” Iris commented, with a distinctly teasing note to her voice. Perihelion flickered the lights again, deliberately this time, making her grin.
I performed small alterations in its physical parameters so that it would not be automatically identified as a SecUnit by station security, via the MedSystem.
“Clever. You know, it could have been dangerous,” Iris pointed out. Perihelion was definitely not mentioning the bit with Tlacey and the shuttle. Or that it was clearly the same SecUnit that had been in all the newsfeeds about the incident with the PreservationAux team.
It could have been, but I could have dealt with it quite easily.
“Uh-huh.”
I am attempting to compile a report for the University.
“Want me to look it over?”
Please.
“OK, but first the others have to hear about your SecUnit.”
It’s not my SecUnit.
“Whatever you say, Peri.”
Perihelion launched the self-diagnostic. And episode 212 of World Hoppers.