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I hadn't left my room in the station hotel in six days when Ratthi came knocking at my door.
Six days was an unusually long time, even for me. What was even more unusual, and probably the reason Ratthi felt the need to come bother me in person, was that I hadn't responded to any feed messages for that same duration.
I just hadn't felt like talking to any of them, okay? It didn't have to be a big fucking deal.
Go away, Ratthi, I sent him over the feed.
Could I come in? he asked. It's been a while since anyone's heard from you. I just wanted to see if you were okay.
I'm fine, I said. You can fuck off now. Thanks.
Okay. But if you need anything, or you want to talk to someone, I'm available.
He fucked off then, and I spent the next three days rewatching seasons 2 and 3 of Valorious Defenders on repeat. Their inaccurate portrayal of SecUnits barely even bothered me anymore. It's not like any of it mattered, anyway.
Dr. Mensah came to see me next. I guess ten days was the limit of how long my humans would let me go completely silent with no explanation. That was probably good to know.
"SecUnit, could you please let me inside?" was what she said, after knocking on the door and getting no response from me.
After ten days of doing nothing except staying in my room watching shows I didn't like and generally feeling very bad about myself, I'll admit that I was feeling a little bored. Just a little. I might have also said that I was feeling the tiniest bit lonely, in some alternate universe where my humans hadn't massively betrayed me.
She waited patiently outside my door for several minutes while I continued to lay face down on the floor contemplating whether I could still trust her, and whether I wanted to ever speak to her again. But in the end, there was a reason why I hadn't hopped on the first transport out of here when I had found out—what I had found out. I didn't want to never speak to her again.
I sent a command in the feed to open the door.
Mensah stepped inside, carefully, since all the lights were off. She shuffled over to the sofa and sat down. She could probably see me still laying on the floor, if she squinted.
I didn't have anything I wanted to say to her, so I stayed quiet, focusing most of my attention on my media and giving her about 20%.
"We've been worried about you, SecUnit. It's unusual for you to fall off the radar like this for so long, and we're worried that something's wrong, or that you have some kind of problem you can't deal with on your own. I hope that you still feel able to talk to me if something is bothering you. Whatever is going on, we can help you. I can help you."
Great, so she was already lying to me again. I didn't care, I didn't fucking care, I already knew she was lying, I had absolutely no reason to fucking care. As far as I knew, she had been lying to me this entire time, her along with the rest of the PresAux team.
A rational thought surfaced through the suffocating pool of dread I had been marinating in for the past 242 hours. I thought that she had been lying to me. I didn't know for certain. I could find out now though.
"Did you know," I asked her. I wasn't able to put any sort of inflection into my tone.
"Did I know what?" she said, managing to sound like she cared a lot about this conversation.
I still couldn't believe that she might not know. "Did you know," I said again.
"SecUnit, I need you to tell me what it is you're asking about," she said, with more patience than I probably deserved. It wasn't her that I was mad at, not really. Even if she had known.
I opened my eyes again, fixed them on the ceiling. I took a deep breath, which I don't think worked for me the way it worked for humans. I didn't feel any less stressed. "Did you know that Gurathin..."
I trailed off. She didn't say anything, either to answer or to prompt me to continue. I steeled myself again.
"Did you know that Gurathin...that he used to be a construct technician? For the company?"
I turned to look at her, even though I really didn't want to. I needed to see her reaction.
There wasn't much of one. She kept her expression even. It was dark, so she couldn't look at me even if she wanted to, but she kept her eyes pointed towards the wall across from her, which I appreciated.
"I did know that," she said.
I tried not to let that feel like a betrayal. It didn't really work.
"Oh," I said.
"I'm sorry he never told you," she said. "It was early in his career, and he doesn't like to talk about his life in the Rim."
I didn't have anything to say to that.
"I didn't think it was my place to say anything," she continued, even more softly. Like I was something fragile, and if she spoke too loudly I might break.
That, of all things, made me suddenly furious.
"You should have told me!" I shouted, louder than I could remember ever shouting before. I vaulted upright off the floor with full force, ignoring the way Mensah flinched backwards on the sofa and the way it kind of made me feel like a monster. I reached the wall in one long stride and pressed my face against it, wrapping my arms around my middle.
SecUnits didn't shake, but I was shaking now. I was angrier than I could ever remember being before. I was angry like the judge's daughter on Sanctuary Moon had been when she found out her beloved childhood mentor had murdered her father. Maybe angrier.
Fuck.
I didn't know what to do. Angry characters in the media always knew what to say. They got to scream their feelings and make the other person understand how they had wronged them. And they always felt better after they got their emotions out. I would do anything to stop feeling like every organic nerve in my body was on fire.
I needed to shout again, but I didn't know what to say. I wanted to tell her what a betrayal this was. That she had bought me, had treated me like a person, had taken me home with her, and had let me unknowingly associate with one of the people who had dedicated their time to cutting me open, pulling pieces out of my body like I was an object, rooting around in my brain, talking about me like I wasn't there, like I wasn't a person too—
I was stuck for a long moment, breathing more heavily than I needed to, trying to force away the memories that were crowding my processing space like I had called them there.
(Lying on my back on a metal table, freezing cold, unable to adjust my temperature controls, my chest cavity open, every nerve exposed—)
(Being pulled out of a transport crate in pieces while the technicians exclaimed their disgust at the smell and appearance of my rotting wounds, I was too damaged for the basic cubicle model the clients had selected to fix so they had just stuck me in a box until I could be sent back, I had been in there for weeks—)
(Waking up after a memory wipe, the way the technicians looked at me like they were afraid, incomprehensible flashes of screaming and weapon fire and pain already rising up in my organic neural tissue—)
(Hands, so many hands, attached to so many humans, touching me for hours while I lay there, my ability to move my own limbs disabled, so I couldn't even rise from the platform and rip their throats out—)
I hit my head against the wall, more gently than I wanted to so I didn't damage it. I could do this.
"I—you. You shouldn't have. You should have—hnngh."
The words weren't happening. Why weren't they happening? What could I say that would make Mensah understand what Gurathin had done to me? No—
He hadn't even done anything to me himself. Many other technicians had. But Gurathin hadn't.
Or had he?
Another flash of panic cut through me like a knife (literally, it felt like somebody had stabbed me in the chest.) How old was Gurathin—how long ago was it that he had been "early in his career," working for the company? And how old was I—had I even existed back then? My organics still retained vague memories of my initial calibration—confusion, terror, pain. No faces. What if he had been there?
I spun around to face Dr. Mensah again, the drone on the shelf showing me that my face looked exactly as desperate as I felt. I dropped that input so I wouldn't have to look at myself. Mensah stayed still as a statue on the couch as I tried not to tower over her.
"How long ago did he work for the company," I demanded, my voice glitching badly, swaying on my feet. I maintained direct eye contact with her even though that only added to the static that was crowding my thought processes.
Mensah's face flooded with pity. "It would have been almost thirty years ago," she said, her voice gentle like I was a frightened child, or maybe a cornered animal. "It was his first job out of university, and he worked there for a couple of years before moving to a different company to do augment maintenance at a hospital."
Almost thirty years ago. That was a long time. I had trouble wrapping my head around that length of time. I only had real logs and memories of the past 59,000 hours. It had been 42,000 hours since I had hacked my governor module. I had only been really free for 6,574 hours.
And I had no idea how old I was. I had no idea if I had existed almost thirty years ago.
I tore my gaze away from Mensah's. All the anger left me in a rush, leaving me feeling somehow emptier than before. I sat down on the other side of the couch and pulled my legs up so I could hide my face in my knees.
"I don't know what to do," I said, after we sat in silence for two whole minutes. The anger had taken the static with it when it left. I could think clearly again, but I didn't know what to think. I felt tired.
"What do you want to happen next?" Mensah asked.
"I don't know," I said, like a whiny human child.
"I can tell Gurathin to stay away from you, if you want," she said. "You don't have to talk to him, or see him, if you don't want to."
That would be easier said than done, considering that Gurathin was friends with literally all of my humans, who weren't going to stop talking to their friend because of the job he had had thirty years ago. That they had all known about already, and chosen not to tell me.
(Did my humans even know what construct technicians were? What they did? Probably not. Even the concept of SecUnits themselves had been so far removed from their lives before the survey. Before I showed up. No wonder Gurathin had fought so hard against letting me walk around ungoverned; he knew better than any of them how dangerous I was.
And what if Gurathin hadn't just known how dangerous SecUnits were in general? What if he had seen me, had known me, had—interacted—with me, when he was with the company?)
"I need to talk to him," I blurted out, standing up again. "I need to—I need to ask him something."
"Okay," she said, standing up too. She raised her hands in a way that I think was supposed to placate me. "Okay, but I think it would be a good idea to wait a little while. Can you talk to him tomorrow?"
I had barely moved for the past ten days and now that I was upright again there was no way that I would be able to lay back down and do more waiting. My fury had managed to finally break through the lack of caring that had been crushing me since I had seen Gurathin's work history listed on the paperwork for the upcoming survey, and I wasn't going to risk giving up again.
"I need to go now," I said, even more loudly, and I marched out the door before she could protest again.
I slowed down when I realized that I didn't actually know where Gurathin was.
I hadn't been keeping track of any of my humans with my drone network for the past ten days. Since today was one of the days of the week that Gurathin customarily had off work, he could be anywhere right now.
I stopped by his on-station residence first. Worth a shot, but he wasn't there. (Either that, or he had figured out I was looking for him and was hiding inside. But that was unlikely. He didn't know that I knew about him, unless Mensah had messaged him since I had left my hotel room. Which wasn't impossible.)
I hacked into the station camera system next, slipping through the firewalls like they weren't even there. I took a minute to run through all the available views, but all they really told me was that Gurathin probably wasn't at the docks, which was the only part of the station that had even slightly-better-than-pathetic security camera coverage.
I sent my drones flying around the station, searching any public space I could reach. (I wasn't supposed to use my drones in public areas where my physical body wasn't also present, but I did my best to keep them out of sight.) Unfortunately, the station was pretty big, and it was taking forever to search like this.
Then I remembered that my humans liked to hang out with each other frequently, and messaged Ratthi.
This paid off within two minutes, when he messaged me back to tell me that he and Gurathin were at a cafe on one of the upper decks of the station, and that I was welcome to join them if I wanted company.
It took me twenty minutes to get there, walking at a speed only slightly faster than what was comfortable for humans.
Ratthi spotted me before Gurathin did. His face broke into a big smile and he lifted a hand in greeting, before the sight of the expression on my face turned his smile into something a little closer to fear. Gurathin had just started to turn around when I reached their table and pulled him to his feet by the back of his jacket.
"Holy shit!" Ratthi yelled, standing up so quickly he knocked his drink over. "Um!"
"I need to talk to Gurathin," I told him flatly. I didn't want to scare Ratthi, even though that was hard to manage while I was doing my best impression of one of the SecUnit henchmen from Valorious Defenders. Gurathin struggled faintly in my grip.
"Right! Um—do you want to do that here, maybe? What's going on?"
"We need to go somewhere else," I said, turning back towards the exit and dragging Gurathin with me. "Bye."
"Wait a second!" he called, rounding the table to follow us. "I just—"
"It's fine, Ratthi," Gurathin said, giving up. Of course, he probably knew what this was about. "Go sit back down." Ratthi looked like he absolutely did not want to do that, but he met Gurathin's eyes and they seemed to communicate something silently between themselves. Ratthi relented.
"Great. Bye Ratthi," I said, and pushed Gurathin towards the exit.
"I can walk by myself," he said brusquely, and I let go of him, since I didn't want to be touching him anyway.
We walked down the corridor for a short while until we passed a public booth screened by a sound barrier and surrounded by various flora. It had a table in the middle and several chairs, like it was designed for humans to have meetings in. It looked like as good a place as any, so I reached over and shoved him inside. He stumbled, but I didn't push hard enough for him to actually fall.
I stood in front of the doorway, blocking his exit, looming over him. I had disabled my human imitation code after I had left Mensah in my hotel room, and I was doing my best to look every bit the terrifying SecUnit from the serials I liked the least.
I think it was working. Gurathin had backed to the other side of the small room, his face pale, his hands clenched into fists. He didn't look away from me, though.
"I take it you found out, then?" he asked.
I nodded, my gaze fixed past his shoulder, because as much as I wanted to be intimidating right now, I couldn't bring myself to look at him.
He nodded himself, as if in confirmation. Then he said, "Are you going to kill me?"
That hurt, I think. I think I was offended. Like killing him wouldn't just create a million more problems for me.
"I haven't decided yet," I ground out. If he thought I was going to fucking kill him I might as well take advantage of it.
He took the threat pretty well, just nodding again. That pissed me off even more.
"Do you not care then? You don't even fucking care if I'm about to kill you?" I shouted at him.
"I would prefer that you didn't. Obviously. But I can't say that I would blame you." His voice was even, calm. Resigned.
That was too much. I screamed, a short, wordless scream that ripped itself out of my throat entirely involuntarily, and put my fist through the wooden table.
I didn't bother tuning my pain sensors down; there was so much adrenaline coursing through my organic parts that I didn't even feel any pain. It did make me feel a little better, though, and I sat down on the floor there in the middle of the room, facing away from Gurathin.
What was I even doing here? What was I trying to accomplish? This didn't have anything to do with me. It had all happened thirty years ago, and I probably hadn't even existed at the time. (I hoped I hadn't. The idea of that many years of unremembered experiences made me dizzy.)
"Did you really not know?" I asked eventually, after I had stopped shaking. I stared at my hand. It was mostly metal, with just a thin layer of synthetic skin stretched over the top. The broken wood splinters had torn through the skin easily, and a lot of the inorganic components were visible.
"Not know what?" he asked.
Ugh. "Know that we—that SecUnits were—" I couldn't say it. "You know."
"That SecUnits are sentient? Aware? That we were complicit in the enslavement and torture of living, feeling beings?" He chuckled in an exhausted sort of way. "We didn't. I didn't, at least. I suppose I can't speak for everyone. Looking back on it, the higher-ups did a very good job making sure anyone who actually had to interact with SecUnits for their job didn't find out."
He moved closer to me, ignoring the chairs still positioned around the broken table in favor of gingerly lowering himself to the floor against one of the walls, next to a large potted plant. He was still several feet away from me, but I could see him in my peripheral vision, now. I let the drone that had been pacing an erratic flight path around the room land on the wreckage of the table, pointed towards Gurathin.
"I know that's no excuse," he continued, rubbing his eyes. "But it's the truth. It was one of the best-paying entry-level jobs you could get on the station I was born on, and after a couple of years I had enough money saved that I could move someplace better. It seemed like a job just like any other. I didn't know. I wouldn't have done it if I had known."
He wasn't saying anything I hadn't known already. I had been very aware that construct technicians didn't consider us sentient, that they needed the money from their job to survive in the Rim. That they didn't consider it much different than doing work on nonsentient bots and other systems. It didn't make me feel any less like shit.
Gurathin had been a former construct technician the entire time I had known him. Nothing had changed except that I knew now. And now I needed to decide what I wanted to do about it.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I sat frozen for a long moment, unable to speak.
I finally decided I wasn't going to be able to get the words out of my mouth and sent him a message over the feed.
Did you ever see me back then?
He huffed, sounding almost exasperated. "SecUnit, it was nearly thirty years ago. I don't remember what any of the constructs I worked on looked like."
Why are humans always so unhelpful? I don't even know if I had been manufactured yet when you were working for the company, I said over the feed.
"Oh." Gurathin looked over at me then, but looked away again before I could complain about it. "I believe they stopped making your particular model about twenty years ago, but it was the standard for almost fifteen years. You could have been manufactured anytime within that time period. I wouldn't be able to tell you how old you are unless I had access to the company's records and could match them to your serial number."
I could read between the lines. "So I might have been alive when you worked for the company."
"You might have been," he said, almost a whisper. Then: "You're impressively old for a SecUnit."
My face did something so horrible that it almost hurt.
"Fuck! Fuck, I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that," he said, eyes wide. "I'm sorry."
"Whatever. I don't care." I hid my face in my knees.
"I'm sorry," he said again, pointlessly.
It was hard to think about. Over twenty years of existence, maybe as many as thirty-five. Almost all of it gone, wiped from my memory banks like it never mattered. Only organic traces remaining.
"It's not like I can remember most of it anyway," I said, not bitterly at all.
"No," he said. "I suppose not."
Then we ended up sitting in the room for a while, not saying anything. The silence was uncomfortable, but I didn't know how to proceed. I didn't actually want to kill him. I also didn't want to think too hard about why I didn't want to kill him. He was still one of my humans, even if he was the one I liked the least, even before all this.
"I should have told you," he said, shortly after I had started considering just walking out of there. "I know I should have told you, I've known it this whole time. I just never knew when the right time was."
"It was probably better for you that I didn't find out until I already had you listed as a client," I said. "Better for you, anyway."
"Yeah," he said, humorlessly.
What would I have done if I had known from the beginning? I couldn't imagine it doing any favors for my perception of the survey team. I probably would have still saved them from GrayCris. Maybe I wouldn't have felt safe enough going back to save Dr. Mensah from TranRollinHyfa. Then again, maybe it wouldn't have changed anything, except for how I felt right now. I still needed to decide how I felt right now.
I didn't want to be here anymore. I stood up to leave, and made it to the doorway before Gurathin called out, "Wait."
I paused, but didn't turn around. "What."
"Try not to be too mad at the others for not telling you?" he said. "I didn't put them in a very good position. It may have technically been my personal information, but it was still very relevant to you. You shouldn't have had to find out on your own."
"Ugh," I said. I wasn't making any promises. I walked out the door.
I needed some time to process things. Maybe another thirty years (hopefully not another thirty years). Maybe I just needed to bury myself in media for a few more days. Maybe I needed to talk to a different human, one who hadn't been a construct technician when he was twenty. Maybe I needed to talk to Gurathin again.
I headed to the Station Security offices. Maybe I needed Indah to give me some work to do for a while.