Chapter Text
1.
It’s for you, ART said.
“That much is obvious,” I said. I poked the lump of fabric that just fell out of the recycler in my room.
It’s a weighted blanket, ART said. It’s four times heavier than the ones I typically give to my humans.
“Why?” I picked up the blanket, which was (admittedly) soft, and colored dark blue like ART’s crew uniforms.
Your internal structure is different than that of my humans, ART hummed, purposefully misunderstanding what I meant. An ordinary weighted blanket would be insufficient for your needs.
“No, I mean why did you make this for me?” I asked. I was feeling an emotion. ART must have used my schematics to design this specifically for me. It was… weird, thinking about that. The last time I’d had something designed specifically for me, it was the SecUnit standard armor. Well, that wasn’t specifically for me, it was for SecUnits in general...I wasn’t sure why my brain decided it needed to make distressing comparisons at this hour, but I’ll let you know the first time I ever understand something my brain does.
Weighted blankets help with stress, ART said. You need all the help you can get.
“Thanks,” I said dryly. I thought that might have been a little ruder than necessary (I wasn’t stressed. Not very stressed, anyway), but ART was an asshole, so it wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. I folded the blanket and put it on my media-watching chair.
Don’t you want to try it out? It’s a present. It’s supposed to create a pleasant emotional response, ART said, nervous. Oh, right. A few cycles ago, ART and I had a conversation about personal space, and I’d asked it to stop scanning my emotional responses every time we had a conversation. Apparently, ART was making an effort to stick to that. It was working hard, just to make me comfortable. I probably owed it at least an attempt to enjoy the results.
“Uh, sure,” I said. I unfolded the blanket and crawled under it. It was nice, I guess. ART put WorldHoppers in our shared feed workspace, so I settled down for just an episode or two.
2.
How many inputs can you handle? ART asked me, out of the blue.
“I’m not sure,” I said, startled. “Why—”
With no further warning, ART handed me ten different inputs at once, and I fumbled them immediately, trying to sort them out. ART tagged them as I went, helping me organize them.
“This is Preservation,” I said.
I know! ART hummed happily. I have remote access to their security system.
“I don’t even get regular access to their security system,” I grumbled. “Wait…you hacked them?”
Unlike you, I was not specifically asked not to do that, ART said.
I flipped through the new camera views. I had access to Mensah’s office, her home, and views of a few other areas the Preservation survey team commonly used.
“This seems like the kind of thing that’s going to get me in trouble,” I said.
You’ve dedicated increasing processing power to running simulations and threat analysis for Preservation Station over the past few cycles, ART said. You’re homesick. If you were a human, I’d tell you to call your parental unit—
“This is better,” I said, interrupting that particular train of thought. “But how did you even manage it?”
You don’t want to know, ART said, doing its supervillain voice thing.
“Are there audio inputs too?” I asked.
ART responded by turning on Mensah’s office audio, where I picked up her half of a feed conversation about station resource allocation, or some other boring thing that was part of her job. It did make me feel better to have concrete, actual proof that things were okay at Preservation without me. I watched Mensah for a little while longer. I should probably have sent her a message or something to warn her I had technically-illegal access and not to get mad, but I didn’t want her to tell me to stop using it.
Now you can save your processing power for missions, ART said. Your crew is expanding from just the Preservation Survey team to include my crew as well. I can help with this process.
“Yeah,” I said. Okay, “save your processing power for missions” was a weird way of telling me I could be doing my job better, but the feedback was useful. I kept scanning the new camera feeds.
As nice as it was, it was a little weird, though. It was kind of like before I saved Bharadwaj from the worm, when Preservation had gone a bunch of cycles mostly ignoring me while I watched them through the HubSys cameras and pretended to be a good SecUnit. But this was different, because I actually cared about them now, and I was only watching because I was homesick or whatever ART said, and I just wanted to be sure they were safe.
3.
It’s an accessibility and accommodation issue, ART said.
“That’s something humans need, ART. We’re not discussing this again,” I said.
“What’s going on? Are you two fighting?” Iris asked. I was distracted, and I hadn’t even seen her coming. That, and I was also down by eight drones after our last mission, leaving me with only two remaining, that I was currently using to watch Amena and the Argument Lounge, so with my back to the control room door, I didn’t see Iris come in.
“We’re not fighting,” I said, at the same time as ART said I’m winning.
“You’re not winning,” I glared at the ceiling.
Your performance reliability hasn’t been above 85% in multiple cycles. ART pulled a chart and shoved it into my feed to prove its point. This is due to your inadequate access to the tools you need to process your environment.
Well, not really. The performance issues were popping up before I lost more than half my drones, because the new camera views were starting to freak me out a little bit. I couldn’t stop obsessing about them, now that I had access. I had to stop myself from digging up company analysis code so I could mine the feeds for information without really having to watch Mensah all day, but that felt too much like being a company SecUnit again. So I pretty much had the Preservation camera inputs open all the time, and they were yet another distraction that I didn’t really need, but ART had gotten them for me as a gift, so I couldn’t just dump them. That, and I was starting to get worried that if something bad was going to happen, it would happen as soon as I dropped the camera inputs. I couldn’t even put them down to recharge. I was not going to explain this to ART.
I can prove it, ART said, and suddenly I got a feed notification that I was connected to a local HubSys.
“ What the fuck?!?” I almost jumped out of my skin. Iris looked at me with concern, or pity or something, so I collected myself and tried to stop having facial expressions.
A company HubSystem has specific integrated pathways that are designed to interface with SecUnit systems, ART explained. Though I can fulfill many of the functions that the company systems once gave you access to, you couldn’t interface with the data directly, and had to rely on me to annotate it for you.
“So?” I asked. I carefully poked the new HubSys connection. :HubSys.ART:online:connected:, came the response, and technically ART was right, the format was a little easier for me to read. I pulled ART’s camera inputs through the connection, and that pretty much solved the lack-of-drones issue, because now I could see all over the ship. Iris was watching me with a face I couldn’t figure out what it meant.
Try it out! ART said gleefully. I’ve been programming the interface for a while, now. It was more difficult than anticipated.
Sure, it was difficult. I almost rolled my eyes. Nothing was difficult for ART. It probably hadn’t spent more than two minutes on the program, but that was just the way it was. It would have taken me more than a month to code something like this (if I actually wanted to, which I didn’t). ART would have laughed at my slow processing speeds.
It felt like a real HubSys. All the connections were where I expected them to be, all of the various parts were online… I even had direct access to ART’s MedSys, which scanned Iris and told me she was running on severe lack of sleep.
“You should take a rest period,” I told Iris. “ART’s worried about you.”
“All right… but are you okay?” Iris asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked.
Iris left, and I watched her walk back to her room and lie down on her bunk. Now I really had too many camera inputs open, so I dug out the old company code as quietly as I could (quietly being the closest word to describe the way in which I did it so ART wouldn’t notice) and started running analysis on the open inputs, then I closed half of them and let out a deep breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
Your performance reliability is already on the rise, ART said happily. Oh, it was definitely proud of itself. Maybe it had spent a whole three minutes on the new HubSys.
“HubSys doesn’t— I mean, you don’t have direct access to my brain, right?” I asked. I almost called ART “HubSys” there, but it didn’t seem to notice.
No more than I usually do, ART said.
Fair point. It was just that HubSys was the thing that used to give my governor module orders. Even knowing my governor was inactive (and I threw up another wall around it, and double checked to make sure it was inactive) it was still weird to be connected to a HubSys again. But it wasn’t really a HubSys, it was still ART, just formatted differently so I could read it better. And I could read it better. Maybe ART was right, and this was just an ability accommodation, and I was making a big deal out of nothing. And ART had told me I was using too much processing power on non-mission tasks, so it was just trying to help me focus on my job. I could do that. I was great at doing my job.
4.
I have an intelligence update that will interest you, ART said.
“I seriously doubt it,” I said, mostly under my breath. I was printing new drones at the recycler, which ART took as the perfect opportunity to harass me, but then everything with ART was a new opportunity to harass me. Harass was the wrong word. It was doing its best, and it was giving me things. If I was perceiving it as harassment--
System system: acknowledge, ART said.
I didn’t respond.
Look, ART said. Some of my humans found an updated company manual.
It shoved the data packet at me. By “my humans,” ART meant someone else from its home university, probably someone working undercover at my ex-company. I opened the data packet, because ART was just going to bug me about it until I did.
It looked like the same manual I’d used to hack my governor module. It had basic information about all company equipment, ranging from drones, to SecUnits, to hauler bots. It was updated. Apparently, the governor modules had been modified since I’d been all over the news feed generally being a rogue SecUnit in public. I saved the codes to my long term storage, just in case.
Query: status? ART sent.
“You don’t have to talk like that,” I said. “I already know you’re not a SecUnit. And talking like that doesn’t make you more accessible. You’re fine the way you are.”
But you talk to Three like that, ART said, almost pouting.
“That’s different,” I said.
ART sent me a company ping that was so realistic it almost made me pop my gunports, worried there was another SecUnit on board. How is it different? ART asked.
“It just is,” I said. I felt jittery. I loaded all my ship camera inputs at once, scanning for SecUnit standard. There was nothing there. I knew there was nothing there.
Was my ping not realistic enough? ART asked.
“It was realistic,” I said. My mouth felt dry. It was hard to talk, like there was something stuck in my throat.
You’re just saying that. I will improve the formatting based on the new data packet, ART said.
I really hoped it wouldn’t. I wanted to say something that would make ART understand that it needed to stop giving me things. Something like “you’re turning me into a SecUnit again.” But that didn’t make sense, because I was already a SecUnit, and there was nothing either of us could do to change that. So I didn’t say anything.
This is a good thing, right? ART asked. Improving your environment and mental state increases your abilities to protect the crew. Don’t you think the changes I’ve implemented have been improvements?
“Improvements” wasn’t the word I’d use, but ART was trying so hard, and it really thought it was doing what was necessary to improve my performance. I made a note to work even harder to prove myself to it, and I said out loud “I like the gifts.” ART seemed satisfied with the lie.
5.
I woke up on ART’s MedSystem table.
That was stupid, ART blinked the ceiling lights at me in anger.
“It wasn’t stupid,” I said. “It got the job done.”
While escorting ART’s crew off of a CR station and back to the ship (while being pursued by hostiles, while the station was in lockdown, it wasn’t a big deal) I’d slammed my hand through a panel to open a manual release to the shuttle bay. It was something I’d done a million times before, it was a very common SecUnit move. Except, it was really supposed to be done in armor, and I’d shattered every individual bone in my hand, and definitely left tiny broken pieces of me behind in the manual release switch.
I’d already sustained more damage before that, anyway, so by that point the humans pretty much had to carry me onto ART. But it wasn’t an issue now, because ART had fixed the damage, and I was fine.
You can’t throw yourself into danger like that, ART said. You’re going to get yourself killed.
“SecUnits are designed to throw themselves into danger,” I said.
They’re designed to do that in armor, ART said, with a hopeful note in its feed voice.
My performance reliability dropped a few points. “Please tell me you didn’t get me another gift,” I said.
ART sent me a schematic. I opened it. It was company armor, but heavily modified. First of all, it was a size that would actually fit me now that I was two inches shorter, but it was also much stronger, tougher, and full of a lot more useful things (like more weapons and external access ports, even internal oxygen storage) than the company had ever given me. It looked like armor that a SecUnit should wear, instead of the cheap replaceable crap the company had always dished out. I didn’t want to wear it.
The recycler is printing it now, ART announced proudly.
It was going to hurt ART’s feelings if I outright refused to try it, and then ART would be confused and sad about why. And I would only have to wear it on missions, not around the ship. Unless ART decided it would be better for me to wear it all the time, for my own safety…
Do you want to try it on? ART asked.
HubSys doesn’t ever ask questions, it gives orders. ART was asking me a question, not giving me an order, I reminded myself. I can say no, I thought, as I stood and walked to the recycler and watched the armor fall delicately out of it. ART would be really disappointed if I said no, though. After it spent all that effort making me a gift. I put on the armor, and I felt the weight of it settle around my shoulders. Just to try it out, and see if it still felt as relaxing as I remembered, I set the faceplate to go opaque.
It wasn’t relaxing. Something funny happened in my organic bits--
Performance Reliability: 31%. Initiating memory core reboot.