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It took a startlingly short amount of time for me to find an opportunity to escape.
Two missions later, not enough attention on me, no direct connections to the coms, only two handlers. No guards. No techs. Not even a bot pilot for the shuttle.
I could almost feel bad for killing them, they were making it so easy.
I didn’t feel bad, but I probably could have. Maybe. If I’d tried hard enough or maybe if I wanted to? Or not.
This time the only bodies I left behind belonged to my handlers. I left them gently folded into the transport box that had once held me. It was a tight fit, but I made it work.
Then I programmed the shuttle to crash land in ocean of the planet below, after cutting through the atmosphere at the wrong angle, and tearing apart on the way down.
I clung to the outside of the space station, and carefully made my way to the cargo ship I’d selected for my next trip.
Redirecting external station cameras and sensors was easy, and it took the work of a few seconds to gain access to the cargo transport’s closest hatch.
It cycled the air out, and the lock opened to let me aboard.
Which was just as well.
The pressure difference between my body and space was something I could mitigate, but only for so long. Also, cycling the pressure back up in my circulation systems slowly enough not to cause me any problems was always annoying.
I paced the airlock until my body and fluids were back to standard atmospheric pressure again. And then headed for the hatch that led to the rest of the ship.
We would be disembarking shortly, and I wanted to double check the ship before we hit the wormhole. I couldn’t space any problems I found after we’d entered one.
And then I could think about my priorities.
The first thing I wanted to do, now that I was out of company control - aside from killing the fuck out of anyone at any time who thought they needed to bring me back to the idiot company that had owned me - was to hunt down one of the resources for altering my physical configuration.
There had been a whole load of underlying resources, locations, feed message contact addresses in that file. Helpme.file.
And I knew that it would be far too easy for me to be identified as a construct if I didn’t change anything about my appearance.
Of all constructs, Combat SecUnits in particular, were made with the fewest organic parts.
I could pass for human with a lot of effort, by covering up a lot of myself. But I would be easily identified if any of the disguise failed. So. Alterations necessary.
I was looking into that. There was an encrypted feed address I dropped a message to, once I was through to the other side of the first wormhole jump.
The helpme.file had also come with a lot of other resources.
Strange ones.
Potential jobs or hobbies to indulge in as a rogue construct. Things you could entertain yourself with if you stayed under company control. Information on how to behave more like a human and less like a machine. What you might want to do. What you might be able to do.
It was strange, and kind of fascinating.
I tried out the human movement coding off and on, while I traveled. The cargo transports I rode mostly didn’t have an opinion about my ability to pass for human, but they usually had cameras I could use to check the differences.
Not that I had a lot of good examples of normal human movement. I had very little practical experience with humans that weren’t running away from me while I came to kill them, or telling me to kill humans that were running away or hiding. So tweaking my coding wasn’t nearly a perfect job.
Which was irritating. I hated doing a half-assed job.
What do you want?
But some of the basic suggestions in the file were an alteration of standard unit pose to something looser, and addition of dozens of micro movements that humans did, even at rest, including the addition of an increased frequency and randomness of blinking and breathing.
Those I could encode easily enough. I whipped up a quick algorithm for randomizing the movements, within a base min-max frequency, and applied it to my breathing and blinking.
On the way to my destination, as I switched from ship to ship, I had been using a hooded jacket to conceal my mostly inorganic head. But for some stupid reason Combat Units are made with mostly organic faces. So the blinking would come in handy, to get me past at least some humans.
The file had also included audio visual files. First person. And opinionated as fuck.
But useful. Interesting but strange. They were pleasantly competent at their job. I hated seeing people do a shitty job.
For a SecUnit, it was remarkably skilled.
They always threw themselves at targets so… selflessly? Was that the word I was looking for? Carelessly? SecUnits in general.
Was that just how they were programmed?
What do you want?
I was avoiding the human side of the transit areas, traveling via cargo ship and cargo dock, with occasional forays into open space - we CSUs need less air than even other constructs do, and have a better ability to adjust for the air pressure differences than SecUnits - as I headed for the right part of the edges of the Rim.
And during that travel was where I found the first major hurdle to being rogue.
Combat SecUnits don’t experience pain the same way other constructs do.
We feel pain, sure. It’s in the nerves and senses just like any other construct. But it isn’t wired the same way. It’s not a deterrent. It’s a signal. It tells us there is something wrong, that needs to be corrected or accounted for.
Because of that, it took me a full cargo ship ride and half way through a wormhole jump to realize that I hurt everywhere.
Any part of me that was organic was giving me a low-level pain alert. I’d been ignoring the alerts, because none of them were at a high enough level to bother with. But at some point I finally, and completely registered that literally every part of me that was made out of human tissue was in pain. Bad enough that the feeling was getting borrowed into my inorganics.
What the hell.
It had taken me this long to notice because I’d been gradually becoming more agitated as I traveled. Normally my brain was always moving - the curse of a high-speed-processing construct programmed to always be active, or in stasis - but as time passed it got worse. I was patrolling constantly, checking every camera and feed access I had available in a near-constant rotation, working through potential failure scenarios and future plans to prepare for them. Even if they were ridiculously unlikely.
Once I realized what I was doing, it annoyed the shit out of me. But I couldn’t stop for more than a few minutes at a time before I fidgeted right back into motion again.
It was frustrating in the extreme that I couldn’t control myself. Which made me even more agitated.
And then the all-over-organic pain arrived, and lasted for a cycle and a half, which was fine, because it stopped me from my endless loops of pacing. I hurt too badly to pace anymore. So all of my fidgety anxiety was expressed in switching inputs and catastrophe planning.
And then both the pain and the anxiety were followed and swallowed up by a complete drop in activity, both in physical movement and internal processing.
I got into a moderately comfortable position between two cargo boxes, and then just… stayed there. For two cycles. Staring.
Normally it would have made me bored as hell. Both my organic and my inorganic processors needed to be doing things. But even my usual processes weren’t going at speed. Even my assessment modules.
I literally clocked two and a half hours where I thought about nothing at all, aside from listlessly tracking through the ship’s cameras.
I had absolutely no idea what was wrong with me.
Although, to be fair, I hadn’t spent this much time out of the box consecutively since they’d given me my first startup mission.
Not that I remembered it specifically, with all the memory wipes between missions. But it was in my hard data logs.
Thankfully, all of my weird, anomalous, uncomfortable, mostly organic-related system collapses seemed to have faded or gone completely, by the time I found the station I was looking for, another cargo ship and a wormhole jump later.
That was a relief. I was going to have to interact with humans soon and I didn’t want to do it while delirious from my own weirdly failing systems.
It was close to the outskirts of the Corporation Rim, busy enough to be a regular stop to a lot of places and on a lot of routes, a hub to enter or leave the Rim. But not so busy that it had a lot of attention from the rest of the CR. Thank void for that.
Dragging my scattered thoughts back to focus again, I found myself hoping the lingering traces of mental numbness were the end of that part of my weird biological reactions to existing outside corporate control.
I disembarked the cargo ship onto the ring, and exited out to the human passenger portion of a transit ring for the first time since I’d left, absently hacking cameras and sensors as I went.
Being around humans again made my skin crawl, but I was used to ignoring things I didn’t enjoy. I felt like that was most of what I’d been doing since I’d first been deployed.
The contact I was looking for was a unit that ran the equivalent of a med clinic for constructs. Which was weird but useful.
A construct who had a full, and advanced, MedSystem that worked with constructs as well as with humans, and could alter any of our configurations to whatever specifications we’d prefer as often as we liked.
That was interesting, fascinating - how had this even happened? How long had the construct been working on this - and also appealing.
Combat units don’t exactly look human, but we have enough organics to pass if we hide some important things. Hands, arms, feet, legs, most of our heads, some parts of our faces maybe, depending on the make and model.
It was a lot of parts to conceal all the fucking time.
I didn’t want to have to hide everything under a million layers all the time. It would be fucking irritating, and too easy a disguise to lose.
And I absolutely needed to be kept fully concealed from the corporations’ resources, no matter what, or I’d end up scrapped.
Rogue SecUnits were scary enough to the human population and the corporate bottom line. CSUs gone rogue tended to end with massive explosive recapture.
Which meant I had to keep concealed, and out of notice by humans. All of them. All the time.
And just blinking or breathing a certain number of times per minute wasn’t going to be enough. Not by a long shot - heh, even though I’m good at those - not for something like me.
I wasn’t an Infiltration Unit, with all of their human, organic upgrades and espionage specific modules, and I wasn’t ever going to be. But I wanted more resources to survive than I currently had, and that meant I had to be able to pass for human.
And not just a large, intimidating, very augmented human. Not someone who was noticeably different from the other humans, dangerous-looking but marked safe by my ability to pass as one of them.
I was just about the most dangerous thing out there. A Combat SecUnit gone rogue. All the power and skill of a CSU, with no one but me telling me what to do and how to behave.
Which meant that I needed to look absolutely harmless.
That’s what I explained, when I met Doc. Yes our MedSystem expert named itself Doc. I know, it’s kind of ridiculous.
They were a little short - shorter than human average - with a soft, round face, short honey-colored hair, and glasses with round wire rims.
They didn’t need glasses. They had extremely complicated and efficient optic inputs. But they wore them.
It was part of their own disguise. A way to throw off speculation. No one with the money for augments would need glasses.
They were also utterly terrified of me at first.
That’s genuinely fair. I don’t begrudge people being scared of me - even other SecUnits - I’m fucking terrifying. I was built to be. I was also programmed and trained to find killing satisfying. Being afraid of me was just sensible.
I’d just waited them out, without any aggression or even any irritation - honestly, the reaction was completely sensible. We just sat together, kind of awkwardly not talking, while they waited out the waves of their organic stress chemicals peaking and then fading again.
It took a little while. But like I said, I don’t begrudge people feeling terrified of me.
Once they’d come down from their terror, I’d introduced myself - sort of, I hadn’t picked a name or anything - and we’d talked for a while about the ideas I had for alterations to my configuration.
And - now that they were over their utter panic about a Combat SecUnit in their clinic - Doc was fascinated at the idea of what I wanted to do. How much I wanted to change.
They weren’t even sure it could all be done, with their MedSystem, since I was a Combat Unit rather than a SecUnit. And without losing some of my ability to be stronger and deadlier than most everything else.
Which I still wanted to be. That’s how I worked, it’s what I knew, it’s what I enjoyed. I just didn’t want anyone to know about it until they were dead.
That felt like a smarter thing to do than just storming around with all my inorganics showing, and shooting people, and getting caught.
So. Doc and I talked about it. A lot.
Speculation, ideas, suggestions, possible complications, and on and on, in an endless circle jerk we went.
Then they brought in their systems specialist, Rhian to consult, to see if any new programming would be needed, for the MedSystem to be able to do what we were planning.
Rhian was scared of me, too, but showed it far less than Doc had. Better human-imitation programming, control over their own reactions. Comfort Units had better modules for that kind of thing.
Maybe I’d see if they were willing to share some of those modules at some point. It would be useful, and a much better way to imitate humans than trying to figure out my own code, based on personal observations of humans. Which I didn’t really have.
Together, the three of us worked out what I wanted to change, and what would be possible, as the system was right now. And if the system could be altered in the future to make other things I wanted possible later.
Eventually some basic, core parameters were set, and we started off on the first procedure.
I was going to need to do several, with pauses between, because so much was structurally changing that my organics might just crap out on me if we did it all at once.
Which would just figure, honestly. Especially after the chemical shit show my organic parts had given me on the way here.
So we cut some of my height and build first. More would come off later if possible, but we were working in stages.
And yes, it was incredibly painful, but like I’d told Doc, if that was any kind of deterrent for CSUs, we wouldn’t be able to do our jobs in the first place.
They made sure to keep me in that pain-quieting semi-stasis the cubicles usually did to repair us.
Which was kind of nice. And impressive. I kind of wanted to know who’d altered their MedSystem. They did really good work.
No, wait, I already knew that. They’d told me Rhian had been studying systems programming and working on updating the MedSystem.
My compliments on their programming were effusive. I was a little drunk on pain chemicals. Even if the pain didn’t actually bother me I still had all the associated endorphins and such circling my brain.
What do you want?
They gave me a wary hazel-eyed stare. Fair. I wouldn’t trust me either. Especially acting like a drunkass human.
We changed my height and build, but used the material removed to condense and concentrate strength, so I wasn’t losing power just because I was losing size. I lost a little bit, but not a noticeable amount. Not enough to bother me.
It was still close enough to my normal to satisfy me, and would be more than made up for with my change in shape and size.
The way we did it was complicated. There were formulas, and minute programming adjustments to get it to work. I had no real idea exactly how it had worked, even though I understood the math.
I would have dealt with losing a little strength to be utterly ignored, but Doc had thought of something, Rhian had thought that they could get the MedSystem to do it, and I’d been willing to try it.
Worst case scenario, it wouldn’t work, and I’d have to have another procedure to undo the attempt. That wasn’t a big deal. Just time consuming. And painful. But, whatever.
Once the first procedure had been finished, I looked at myself with the video feeds, observing from every angle.
I hadn’t seen myself often, but it was still a little strange, the change in size and shape. An overall shrinking in body mass. It didn’t bother me - do governed constructs even have a sense of self-identification beyond basic understanding of themselves and any catastrophic injuries - but it was definitely weird.
Once I was completely recovered, I checked my strength, reflexes, and endurance with a series of standard assessments and evaluations.
“Acceptable,” I said to Doc, who flashed me a little bit of a grin.
Warily, their gaze lingering on the bit of metal pipe I’d reduced to strips to drop into the recycler.
“Now,” I said, catching their attention. “Stage two.”