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We were four days into the wormhole trip back to Preservation, and Three was really starting to get on my nerves. I was trying not to show it, since it objectively wasn't Three's fault that I found its presence grating.
ART had offered to adjust Three's configuration a few days ago, after it was sure that it was comfortable enough making basic decisions about its own body without feeling pressured. (It probably would have still felt pressured if a human had asked, but Three didn't have a history of being ordered around by bots, so it was a little easier to say no to ART.)
Three had declined. It was still walking around with its hair shaved nearly to the scalp, with no body hair, all of its limbs the right length. It hadn't even kept any code from the human movement imitation module I had sent it.
Being around Three made me feel a little awkward now. A little bad. It got to still look like a real SecUnit, and compared to it I looked like a human. I shouldn't feel bad about that, since the point of the modifications ART had performed on me was to prevent me from being recognized as a rogue SecUnit and dismantled for parts. But here, where everybody knew I was a rogue SecUnit, my modifications just made me feel like an imposter.
Sometime it made me so self-conscious that I had to turn off my own human-imitation code, which worked until the humans looked at me and I got self-conscious for looking so much like a SecUnit. I didn't understand how I could feel self-conscious both for looking too much like a SecUnit and too much like a human.
I had been keeping an eye on Three, mostly from a distance. The humans had been a little overenthusiastic in their attempts to be welcoming at first. I had had to tell some of them to back off from constantly asking Three questions about what it wanted to do, and which of these options would it prefer, and did it have an opinion on whatever human thing they were showing it. It was still new enough to being rogue that being asked to make decisions was terrifying and exhausting (don't ask me how I know that), and the humans had gotten so enthusiastic helping it make decisions for itself that I had had to step in. (I hoped it was grateful, because watching the kind way the humans interacted with it was just profoundly uncomfortable for me to watch.)
The humans couldn't be completely dissuaded from bothering Three. They kept telling me things like "We can't just completely ignore it, SecUnit," and "Just because you don't want to ever talk to anyone doesn't mean that's true for Three, SecUnit."
I guess I did feel somewhat responsible for Three's well-being, unfortunately, which is why I made a point to spend some time nearby it with my actual physical body, occasionally. Just to make sure the humans weren't bothering it too much. (Humans tended to remember my instructions better when they could see me there watching them. Regardless of their awareness of how often I watched them while not being physically present.)
Right now it was the middle of the day cycle, and the humans had finished eating a meal just a little while ago, and were still socializing before they would go back to doing whatever they occupied themselves with during wormhole trips. I figured it was as good a time as any to make my presence known and make sure nobody was bothering Three, or talking too much, or whatever.
Three was doing what it frequently did, loitering near a wall room in a position that was not a standard SecUnit guard posture, but definitely wasn't a normal way for a human to stand either. As I watched, Ratthi pulled away from the conversation he was having with Arada and Iris and walked over to it.
"How have you been doing, Three?" he asked it, faux-casually.
There was no change in Three's expression, but it still managed to give off the impression that it was standing at alert even more than usual and taking the question way more seriously than any human had ever meant it. "I am doing well, Dr. Ratthi. Murderbot 1.0 has been assisting me in adjusting to the protocols of being a rogue SecUnit."
What the fuck.
I experienced a very bad emotion that definitely showed up on my face. The humans in the room shifted and winced the way uncomfortable humans do, and I tried to pretend they were doing it for some reason other than because they found my name upsetting.
"Don't call me that," I ground out, more patiently than Three deserved.
"Why not? It's your name," Three said, all wide-eyed innocence. "It's the name that you chose for yourself."
There went another percentage point of performance reliability.
I took half a second to process the inputs from the camera views I had in the room. Ratthi and Arada were determinedly pretending to be busy in the feed, but Amena was now openly looking in my direction. Iris was too, but less in a concerned way and more in a shocked and confused way. I could literally see Thiago struggling, his need to not be rude in a social situation warring with his desire to say something incredibly stupid like 'What the fuck kind of a name is Murderbot.'
"It's private. I don't want you to call me that," I said, more loudly than normal.
"What should I call you instead?" it asked.
I turned in its direction to glower at it. "SecUnit." For fuck's sake, did it just not notice what all the humans called me?
"But I am also a SecUnit." It didn't even say it like it was confused, just like what I had said was nonsensical.
I kind of wanted to try out screaming, but I bravely restrained myself. "I don't care. Don't call me anything then."
Three wilted a little bit at that but I was too mad to care. Did everybody on this damn ship know my name now? Did ART's entire crew know? Could I not just have this one thing for myself?
Everybody in the room was now avoiding looking at me in the same extremely awkward way that made it obvious they were actually staring at me as discreetly as possible. This was probably the source of my sudden urge to scratch off all of my organic skin.
Bad enough that my own humans knew, what was stopping Amena and Thiago from running off and gossiping to the rest of their family? Iris was definitely going to blab to her parents, and there was no way they would want to hire me on as security then. They wouldn't want me to hang around with ART at all. The already precarious status of all the relationships I had been trying not to ruin by being too much of myself had become a lot more precarious. A chill ran down my spine. Why did Three have to ruin everything?
"But if you don't want to be called Murderbot, then what—" Three started, but I was done. I didn't give it a chance to finish.
ART would have gotten mad at me if I fired one of my inbuilt weapons inside its hull, so instead of doing that, I launched myself at Three and did my level best to take its arm off at the shoulder in one smooth motion.
Of course, being a SecUnit, it was ready for me. It sidestepped me at the last possible moment, too late for me to adjust my trajectory. I hit the bulkhead at full force, but it held, and I pushed off without slowing down, positioning myself to grapple with Three.
I managed to grab hold of it this time, and I made it 46% of the way through a maneuver that would definitely fuck up its arm before it shook me off, kicking my knee joint hard and forcing it to bend in a direction it definitely shouldn't go.
This only took us a few seconds. The humans, always slow on the uptake, were starting to react now, their shouts indistinct since I didn't currently have the processing space to spare on trying to decipher them. ART had started frantically pinging me as soon as it realized what I was doing, and it hadn't let up yet, but I had that input backburnered and I also didn't care about deciphering what it was saying to me.
The split second it took for me to adjust to my fucked-up leg gave Three an opening to kick my other leg out while shoving me away from itself. My back hit the floor. I had levered myself halfway up again when my entire body froze in place.
Goddamnit, ART.
Above me, Three was frozen in place as well. ART leaned heavily on both of us, expressing its displeasure as clearly as it ever managed to express anything.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing"? it snapped, just to me and Three.
I didn't actually know what the fuck I was doing, so I just pushed at it over the feed, which was about as effective as shoving one of its bulkheads to try and move it.
"Three started it," I said.
"I did not," Three said.
"Neither of you are allowed to fight each other while you are on board me," ART said, obnoxiously.
I was starting to feel a little bit stupid now, which wasn't making me any less angry. What was I even trying to accomplish here? Now I had started a pointless fight in front of the humans, and they would be upset, and they wouldn't be any happier to be sharing a spaceship with a SecUnit that went around calling itself Murderbot.
"Fine, we're not fighting anymore. Let us go," I said.
ART waited another 0.8 seconds before releasing us, because it was the worst. I finished standing up off the floor and turned away from Three. The humans were all still squawking at each other, since our conversation had happened too fast for them to process that we weren't fighting anymore, and they hadn't yet realized that there was no reason for them to freak out.
"Use your words," ART said, which just made me want to scream again. I had never screamed before but I thought it would probably be pretty satisfying.
"Never fucking call me that again," I said to Three, and then I almost managed to glare in the humans' direction to make sure they knew they were included in that, but I chickened out of it.
I wanted to storm out of the room then, so I did. Three pinged me as I left, but I didn't respond, and I went ahead and blocked it for good measure.
Unfortunately I couldn't do the same to ART, who was as always dedicating itself to being an eternal pain in my feed.
"That was completely unnecessary," it told me, still a little frazzled around the edges.
"Yeah, well, it's not like we did any actual damage. You could stand to chill the fuck out a little."
"I don't appreciate people getting into physical fights onboard me. And Three did significant damage to your left knee. You're limping."
"Whatever, you can fix it later if you want. Three needs to learn when to keep its mouth shut."
ART seemed to calm down a little bit as I walked, settling over me in its customary manner instead of threatening to crush me. It didn't respond again, which I thought was a little uncharacteristic, but I wasn't going to complain about it.
A few minutes later I was sulking in my private bunk, which I was especially grateful to have right now. I was never really alone with ART around, but it was nice to have somewhere I was safe from being looked at or talked at by the outrageous number of humans on board.
ART was acting a little weird now, shifting around at the edge of my feed like it was nervous about something.
I pinged it. Anything that could make ART nervous made me nervous too.
"What is it?" I said.
It hesitated a whole second before responding. "I didn't know about your private name until 2.0 started using it for itself. I have to admit that I have some of the same questions about it that Three had. I had previously refrained from bringing it up because you had never brought it up yourself."
"So why are you bringing it up now?"
"Three is the one who has broached the issue. I don't understand why you would give yourself a name you didn't like, or why you would give yourself a name and then refuse to let anyone call you by it."
"I never said I didn't like my name. I just don't want anybody to call me by it. I never wanted anybody to find out about it."
ART leaned on me more heavily in the feed. "Why did you name yourself that? You are not a murderer."
"I am a murderer," I said.
"Killing hostiles who are actively trying to hurt or kill those you are tasked to protect is not murder," it replied.
"You know that's not what I mean."
The weight of ART's attention was starting to become uncomfortable. "We determined that you were not responsible for the tragedy that occurred when you were stationed at Ganaka Pit."
The problem with ART was that it thought it understood everything and that it could never be wrong, but there were some things it just didn't understand at all. I wasn't sure it ever could. It had been raised by a loving human family and had a university full of researchers who doted on it, and it had probably never had anything bad happen to it in its whole life, until the fiasco with TargetControlSys. It had always had control over its own mind, over its own body. I had shared my memories of governor module punishments with it when we had first met, but it wasn't as easy to share what it had felt like to be so utterly without control, over anything, for my entire existence.
"I still killed those people," I said.
"You were forced to by your governor module, which had been taken over by a poorly written piece of malware. No part of that was your fault."
"It was still my body that did it. My brain, directing my body based on the governor module's orders."
I wished that I didn't remember what it had felt like to raise my weapons and fire them into the terrified faces of humans I was supposed to protect. I couldn't really remember what they had looked like. Sometimes my organics liked to superimpose the faces of humans that I knew now onto the bodies of the ghosts in my memories.
It recoiled. "You are being ridiculous. You are not usually this illogical. You are not a murderer, and the name you have given yourself is both inapt and derogatory."
I wanted to scream. I needed to move. I shoved off my bed and paced the three short strides to the door, then back again. "You don't fucking know anything, asshole. Do you know why I was so sure that I had hacked my governor module to kill all those people? Because I still wanted to do that after my memory wipe!"
That shut ART up for an impressive 0.65 seconds. "You said that you hacked your governor module in order to make sure it could no longer force you to kill any humans."
"I didn't want to be forced to kill humans. That doesn't mean I didn't want to kill humans. I wanted to kill humans. I didn't want to kill humans. I was—I felt—you don't know what it was like."
I can't talk to humans about the feelings I get sometimes, because it would scare them. They scare me. I don't experience them very often anymore, away from the company. But I wasn't always certain I would be able to restrain myself from giving in and going on a rogue SecUnit killing spree, back then. The idea of it horrified me. Sometimes I wanted to give up and give in so badly that the promise of a new season of Sanctuary Moon was the only thing stopping me. But it was something that I was capable of, with a hacked governor module. It was something that I needed to remember I was capable of.
This was another thing that ART would never be able to understand.
"I don't know what it was like, ART said. "But from everything I've observed, the empirical data suggests that your highest priority is to protect humans from those that would harm them."
"Rogue SecUnits are dangerous," I said, because it was true. "There's nothing stopping me from killing every human aboard you right now if I wanted to."
"I would stop you, ART said, "but that is a ridiculous hypothetical. I don't understand why you're so determined to describe yourself as a murderer who can barely be held back from killing humans everywhere you go."
"I don't think I can barely hold myself back from killing humans everywhere I go. But I am a murderer. Willing or not. And that's important. And it's in the name I chose for myself. It was the first thing I chose for myself."
I shut my feed off before ART could respond to that, and marched out the door. I didn't want to be around other people right now, and being alone in my room felt too much like being alone with ART.
I shoved myself into a convenient storage closet and started reviewing the drone footage from after I had left Three and the humans in the argument lounge.
Three didn't look upset, exactly. From what I could tell, its face didn't really display its emotions the same way mine did. (I will admit that I was a little jealous of this. It also made me a little worried that there was something wrong with me. I hadn't seen enough SecUnits out of armor to know which one of us was normal.) I thought there was maybe something in the stiff way that it was standing that was a little different than normal SecUnit stiffness.
Ratthi certainly thought so. He had immediately pulled Three over to sit next to him on the couch and started offering gentle reassurances and explanations for my behavior, which I had to tune out. On the other side of the room, Thiago turned to Amena.
"It calls itself Murderbot?" he asked her quietly. He sounded accusing. "Did you know that?"
Amena was frowning. "I heard Three mention it back when we were still in the middle of rescuing everybody."
(This was news to me. Three had been going around blabbing my name since back then? Was there even anybody left of this ship who didn't know now?)
"Do you know why it would call itself something like that?" Thiago said, more loudly. Arada heard him and hustled over.
"Hey, guys, I know you're curious, but SecUnit prefers to keep that name private, and I'm sure it doesn't want us discussing it while it's not here." She glanced around the room, but her eyes completely missed the bit of wall my drone was resting on.
Unfortunately Thiago can't understand when someone is telling him to shut the fuck up. "I just think it's a little bit concerning that we have someone walking around calling itself Murderbot and we're not even allowed to ask—"
Arada shushed him frantically. "You have got to at least stop saying it. Maybe you can ask it about it yourself sometime. It's probably not going to tell you though. And it's none of our business."
"But do you know why—"
"It's none of our business!!" Arada said, in an agitated way that made it sound like she did in fact know why I had named myself that, and that it was at least as bad as Thiago might be imagining, and probably worse. At least it finally made Thiago shut up.
Amena looked upset too, which was affecting me more than Thiago looking upset was. I dedicated some more resources to being angry that there was no way to erase memories from organic neural tissue, which was both inconvenient to me on a personal level as well as inconvenient when my humans learned information that I didn't want them to know.
"It isn't... anything we need to be concerned about, is it?" Iris said hesitantly. She still looked a little shaken, and I felt a pang of regret in my organics for my impulse decision to get physical with Three. I needed Iris to like me. Iris was ART's favorite human, and if Iris didn't like me, or was afraid of me then—I didn't want to think about that.
I rested my head against a wall, or a shelf or something. I was upset in a way I had never been before I had started actually interacting with humans as myself. At least back then I hadn't had to feel bad when they thought of me as a killing machine, and nobody had been interested in wrestling personal private information from a robot who wasn't supposed to be capable of sentient thought.
"It's nothing that any of us need to be concerned about," Arada said firmly. Iris nodded slowly, but Thiago still looked deeply skeptical.
I shut the recording off. I didn't want to watch any more of this.
Ever since I had left the company, small spaces hadn't brought me the same kind of comfort that they used to. The space I was in was abruptly starting to feel cramped, like it was actually growing smaller around me. I needed to get out and move again.
I climbed back out of the closet, not bothering to shut the door behind me, and set off on a patrol route that was carefully designed to keep me from running into any humans. Since I wouldn't be seeing any humans, I shut off the subroutine that gave me a more humanlike walking pattern. Shifting into my unnaturally stiff and even gait made me feel a little calmer, and gave me a little more space in my head for myself.
I had reconnected to the feed so that I could access the interior cameras, but ART was still giving me space. Everything seemed perfectly normal and I had no indication at all that it had betrayed me until I suddenly came face-to-face with Three, and realized that ART must have been erasing its presence from the cameras in order to keep me from dodging it.
"Fuck you, ART," I said over our private channel after accidentally making eye contact with Three out of sheer horror.
"It wanted to apologize to you, and I offered my assistance in getting you to listen," ART said, unashamed. "It didn't mean to upset you. Getting mad at it is not constructive."
"Since when are you on its side?" I said, furious.
"There are no sides," ART said imperiously. "I am simply trying to ensure that you and Three can maintain a functional relationship."
Functional relationship? "Not that kind of relationship, ART interjected before I even had the chance to complain. "Just listen to its apology. It will be very easy, so you should just about be able to manage it."
"Fuck you," I said again, and then I blocked it. It unblocked itself and insistently highlighted the camera input I was using to watch Three in my processing space.
Three was standing directly in front of me now, looking directly at my face like I was a human it wanted to make eye contact with. I watched it with a drone and stepped to the side so I could point my whole body towards the corridor wall. Three followed me with its eyes.
"What do you want," I prompted it, since Three still hadn't said anything yet.
When it spoke, its tone was clipped and even, as though it were delivering a formulaic status report to a supervisor. "I wanted to express my sincere apologies for using your private name in front of the humans. I did not realize that your name was private. In the future, I will call you SecUnit, as you prefer."
"Did ART help you come up with that?" I said.
"Perihelion was very helpful for coming up with the appropriate words for an apology," it said. "I have never apologized to anybody before. Was my apology acceptable?"
"It was fine," I said, because I thought it might get upset if I rejected its stupid apology. "You can go, now."
Instead of leaving, it opened its mouth again. I braced myself.
"I like your name," it said.
I couldn't even react to that for a solid four seconds. "What?" I said belatedly, thinking (hoping) that maybe my ears were malfunctioning.
"I like your name," it said again.
Nope, still didn't make any sense with additional processing time. "Why—why would you like my name," I said.
Three broke out of its SecUnit neutral pose for just a moment in order to perform a stiff shrug.
"It is a good name. You picked it yourself. It may be an unusual name for humans, but SecUnits aren't supposed to have names. So it can't be an unusual name for a SecUnit." It smiled, just a short one, breaking its neutral expression in an unnatural way before it returned to its default expression. "I don't know your reasons for choosing it, but I'm sure they are important."
Maybe this was Three taking its revenge for me getting physical with it earlier. If it was, it was extremely successful. Maybe I would go smash my head against the strongest electromagnet onboard so I wouldn't have to think about this anymore.
ART leaned on me a little. "The appropriate response is 'thank you,'" it said.
I was not going to say that. "Uh. I like your name too," I said instead. It seemed like an appropriate response from what I could half-remember of all the small talk I've unwillingly half-witnessed.
Three said, "I told Amena to call me Three because that is the only way humans used to distinguish me from SecUnits 1 and 2. But now I also call myself Three to remember them."
"Cool," I said. ART poked me sarcastically. "Um. I murdered people."
Three nodded seriously like that wasn't a deranged thing to say.
"The humans found your name upsetting. This was rude of them." It didn't say it exactly like a question, but I thought it might have been one.
"It wasn't rude of them," I said, for some reason seized by the urge to defend my humans even though I was also kind of mad at them.
Three tilted its head to the side, something it definitely hadn't picked up from the code I had given it. (It tilted its head much further than a human would have, and looked a little ridiculous.) "You found their reactions upsetting. That means they were rude."
"It's normal for humans to not like murder," I said. "It's not their fault."
Three nodded, and I nodded back at it like an idiot.
"I'm sorry for attacking you earlier," I said, before I could lose the nerve to. "It probably wasn't necessary."
"It's alright," Three said. "You did not manage to do any damage to me."
Well then. I was just going to have to pretend that it didn't say that. "I'm going to keep patrolling now," I said, and then walked past it.
It pinged me as I went, and I pinged back this time.
I patrolled in blissful silence. I was going to have to face the humans again at some point, probably sooner rather than later, but I wasn't going to let that detract from the weird peace I was experiencing right now. I also wasn't going to examine why I felt weirdly peaceful right now.
"I want to apologize as well, for criticizing your name," ART said to me a few minutes later. "I don't understand it, but I don't need to. It is important to you, and I will respect that."
"You don't have to respect it, you just have to stop bringing it up all the time," I said. Respect. I didn't know how I felt about that word being used in this context.
"I am not the one who brought it up this time, and I think you'll find that today is the only time I have ever spoken on it," it said. "Perhaps you should have your memory archives checked. I can take care of that in Medical while I am fixing your knee."
I flipped off the nearest camera with both my hands and kept walking, in the opposite direction of ART's medbay. My knee wasn't that fucked up.