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Ayda Mensah steps out of the gloomy council residence, and blinks beneath the bright overhead lights of Kell Station. For almost three hours she has been looking forward to this moment, holding it in the back of her mind while she sat by the Kell councillor’s sickbed, conducting hushed planning discussions with his team. Now it that’s finally here, the contrast seems too abrupt, the life and bustle of the Station’s main corridor almost nauseating after so much worried quiet.
Grimacing to herself, she retreats temporarily back into the building’s vestibule, and takes a moment to stretch out her stiff neck and shoulders where there is no-one else to see. She also pings Ratthi and SecUnit, with separate but simultaneous messages.
All meetings finally finished, I’m leaving now and heading for Rhodda’s. (When Ayda realised she was going to have to come all the way in person to see councillor Joenn, she made herself a fitting appointment at a local tailors’ workshop on the station, in the hope it might lift her spirits a little.) Are either of you finished yet?
She’s hoping, honestly, that the answer will be yes, and that someone will come to keep her company as she waits for her appointment and flips through fabric swatches. Not that it’s exactly easy to imagine SecUnit in the role of clothing advisor. But she always feels a little safer when it’s nearer, and it would at least be distracting to hear it complain in bemusement.
And Ratthi would be helpful with the clothes.
Yes, the reply comes in quickly from Ratthi, all done, I’m going to hang out on the transport until you guys get back. Should probably get some some work done on the feed.
Ratthi has been ‘catching up with a friend’ – Ayda has an idea she knows what that means – who lives on a nearby station. She’ll admit to being a little disappointed he didn’t suggest coming to Rhodda’s, but she certainly isn’t going to ask him outright to sit through her personal errand if he doesn’t want to.
Meanwhile, another reply is arriving:
Almost. I could be done here in twenty minutes. Do you want me to come and find you?
SecUnit, on the other hand, actually has been catching up with a friend, although it would describe itself as ‘consulting with a tech specialist’. After Pin-Lee heard about the joke with all the requisitions forms, she put SecUnit onto a Kell-based transport tech, Alli, who has an absolutely excellent reputation throughout the Alliance for adding unofficial defence (and sometimes offence) systems to any kind of vessel. The pair have had an incomprehensible and fairly involved comms exchange ongoing ever since; which at least makes Ayda feel slightly better about dragging SecUnit along for the excursion.
No , she replies to it now, don’t hurry. Take as much time as you need.
I’ll ping you when we’re done.
She doesn’t insist further. Instead, she gathers herself, steps back out of the vestibule, and re-enters the busy central corridor, where she takes a left turn and starts walking purposefully towards Rhodda’s workshop, dodging various groups of people as she goes.
Kell Station – which is tiny – isn’t usually busy like this. The irregular situation can be explained by the midsize passenger transport which docked here during the previous cycle, bringing leisure visitors from a mix of polities. Kell is one of the smallest and least inhabited planets in the Preservation Alliance, but its flora and landforms are picturesque enough to draw the occasional batch of sightseers like this one; they mill around the public spaces of the station, filling them beyond their usual sparseness, and looking for the most part totally out of place.
Some of them are even from the Rim, Ayda has noted. It’s rare for anyone from the CR to venture into non-corporate territory like this, but some of the spots on this particular transport have been chartered by a specialist ‘adventure’ outfit, who make their money essentially by offering their customers bragging rights, as if going on holiday to a planet like Kell proves some particular form of originality or daring. Ayda doesn’t like it – doesn’t want them here – but the council hasn’t reached a consensus yet on the need to block this kind of visit. Is it wrong, she wonders, to hope something bad enough will happen with one of these tourists to convince the others a blanket ban is needed?
Yes. Probably. She sounds like Gurathin.
Ayda sighs to herself as she walks into Rhodda’s. She is, frankly, a little tuned out of her surroundings as she waits to be signed in by the assistant at the welcome desk, more focused on sending some brief confidential updates back to her colleagues on Preservation Station than on what is going on around her.
So when she finally turns away from the desk, she’s particularly surprised to find SecUnit waiting there behind her.
‘Oh, you’re here already. Did you have a good chat?’
‘Excuse me?’
Ayda stops and blinks. That isn’t SecUnit. Why in the world had she thought it was? That’s an average-height human in a smart green suit, looking well-fed and well-rested and well-coiffed. They even have an elegant wedding tattoo on their neck, in the Delune tradition. They look, in short, nothing like SecUnit, apart from the –
Well, apart from the face.
‘Sorry,’ says Ayda, staring. ‘I mistook you for someone else.’
‘Okay,’ replies the stranger, not looking particularly inclined to forgive the mistake.
She needs to stop staring. She needs to walk away. Ayda forces her eyes to leave the stranger’s face and goes to take a seat on a purple couch, waiting for her name to be called.
Still, she keeps watching; carefully, in sideways glances. She watches them go up to the welcome desk and have the same brief conversation with the assistant that she just did. Then she watches them take their own seat on the other side of the waiting area, their eyes going into soft-focus suddenly as they tune in to their feed. They move comfortably, unguardedly. Ayda watches the emotions that play fleetingly over their face – relief, amusement, consternation – at whatever they are seeing on the feed.
Is it possible, she wonders, that this is a trick of the mind, some uncomfortable new symptom of the psychological strain she has been under? Whenever she dares to look at the stranger directly for a few seconds, the idea in her mind starts to seem preposterous: clearly, this is just an unfamiliar middle-aged human from Delune.
But if she looks away for a moment, and then looks back again, in that first instant of perception it is obvious – obvious. She cannot get around it.
Before she knows it she is on her feet, and approaching the stranger again. Mindful not to appear intimidating, she doesn’t sit next to them, but remains standing, stopping just far enough away so as not to loom into their personal space.
‘Excuse me,’ she says, quiet but authoritative.
The stranger’s eyes refocus as they disengage from their feed, then flick upwards and latch onto Ayda’s gaze. The muscles around them tighten with wary unease.
Ayda can’t see what else to do, except open her mouth and say outright:
‘I realize this will seem like a strange question, but I have to ask: you wouldn’t happen to have sold any of your DNA to a corporate at some point, would you?’
This line of enquiry gets the response it probably deserves.
‘Remind me again,’ says the stranger, uncrossing their legs and leaning forward a little. ‘Who exactly the fuck are you?’
Perhaps she needn’t have worried about intimidating them. Ayda is feeling more and more unsettled by the second.
‘You’re right. I apologize. None of my business.’ She turns away, as if to return to her spot. Then turns back. ‘It’s just...’
‘Just what?’
Some parts of her mind are moving very slowly, but other parts, very fast.
‘Just that I wonder whether someone who had done that – signed over their DNA – might ever take an interest in what became of the sample.’ The stranger cocks an incredulous eyebrow. ‘That is, whether they’d ever consider pursuing the company over anything unethical they found out was being done with it. To it. If a situation like that came to their attention.’
‘Pursuing them legally, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
If there is one thing this stranger is good at it, it’s eye contact. Soul-piercing, ego-withering eye contact.
‘Any idiot who had sold their DNA to a corporate,’ they point out, ‘would know damn well what those contracts say about waiving every right and interest in it.’
‘I know,’ replies Ayda, ‘but say the contracts weren’t bulletproof, or say they broke the terms themselves; say someone put together a legal challenge they couldn’t stand up to – ’
‘I really don’t see,’ interrupts the stranger, ‘what that would have to do with me.’
Ayda decides to stare them down for a moment or two, just to see what happens. What happens is that they hold her gaze and put their head on one side slightly, communicating quiet belligerence.
Slowly, she nods defeat.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’
‘Now are you going to leave me alone, or am I going to have to call Station Security?’
‘Ha. No need.’ She raises a pacifying hand, moves further away. ‘I won’t disturb you again. Enjoy your visit.’
The stranger turns away from her without replying.
Ayda takes her seat again. If only she didn’t have to wait here, now, for this stupid fitting appointment. She tunes in to her feed and tries to pay attention to the messages she’s just received from her colleagues; tries not to look over and over again at the human on the other side of the seating area. Who is definitely a total and complete stranger.
And who is... not the kind of person she can picture selling off their own DNA, actually. But then she checks herself – what had she pictured? A starving orphan, a desperate refugee trying to avoid a labor contract? That’s not what people are like, or at least, not what they have to be like in order to deserve consideration. So this stranger looks pretty well-off, with the immaculate outfit and the carved quartz feed interface. So what? If they ever did sign one of those contracts, it would have been years ago. They could have been struggling back then. They might even have been a child, someone whose parents sold their data before they could consent. There’s no reason to think they just let themselves be cloned for a trivial reason, for a little extra hard currency, so they could get whatever the latest fashionable shoes were on Delune.
No reason to think that at all.
Then – oh, for the love of something – SecUnit is pinging her.
All done with the tech, joining you at Rhodda’s.
No, don’t come here.
What is she doing? Of all the things she could say to make SecUnit want to reach her as fast as possible, this must rank in the top three.
What’s wrong? it’s asking, instantly.
Nothing’s wrong.
That’s not true.
Okay, yes, something’s wrong, but I’m not in danger. And it’s not a good idea for you to come here right now.
Why not?
She doesn’t want to say it; she doesn’t need to say it, because SecUnit is probably already checking the drones it has monitoring her and will figure out why not before she can find the words to explain.
She should say it, anyway, because there is a right way and a wrong way of going about things.
But what if – what if she is, indeed, unwell right now? Experiencing some kind of hallucination? And nobody in the world except her is going to look at this stranger and leap to the same irrational conclusion?
There is a noticeable silence over the feed.
SecUnit, I –
Understood, Dr Mensah. I’ll wait for you at our transport.
It withdraws contact abruptly. Shit. Ayda stands up, suddenly baffled as to how it could have seemed necessary to keep the fitting appointment. She makes her apologies at the desk, and starts walking rapidly back to where the transport is docked.
---
‘Where’s SecUnit?’
On board the trim little vessel that is going to take them back to Preservation Station, Ratthi is in a laid-back mood, enjoying a box of protein nuggets he picked up somewhere after his ‘meeting’; he looks taken aback by the abruptness of Mensah’s question. ‘I thought with you?’
‘No, it said it would meet me here. But it should have arrived before me.’
She’s managing to sound far less rattled than she feels, but Ratthi knows her well enough to read the tension in her voice. He puts his snack down, switching gears rapidly.
‘I haven’t had comms from it. Was there a threat? Do we need to worry?’
‘No threat. I just don’t know where it’s gone, if it didn’t come straight to – ’
‘It’s here,’ says SecUnit from behind her, and stomps on board.
‘Oh, that’s a relief.’ Ayda turns, and smiles futilely at it. ‘What happened?’
‘I stopped at the plaza so I would have time to finish a media download before we left. I assume that’s acceptable.’
‘Absolutely. Of course. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Should I not be?’
Ratthi’s eyes are going back and forth between the two of them, obviously hungry for backstory.
Ayda draws in breath, and then lets it out.
‘Should doesn’t come into it,’ she says.
‘Good to know.’ SecUnit manoeuvres itself into a corner seat at the back of the transport, where it is almost completely hidden by the row of seats in front of it, and goes silent.
Okay. Great. This is fine.
Sensing that the wisest option for now is to give it space to watch its new media, Ayda turns to the transport controls and instructs the hatch to close and lock, and the autopilot to start readying itself for flight. During the same process at Preservation Station this morning, SecUnit had been all up in her feed as she went through these motions, unable to pilot but wanting to co-operate, to help, to be the one to notify the authorities of their imminent departure from the port. Now she sends the notifications to the tiny Kell Port Authority office herself. Next to her, Ratthi has taken the co-pilot seat. For a few moments he quietly watches her keep busy, then he gives in and asks:
‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it.’
‘Oooo–kay.’
Once their journey is under way, Ratthi gets up and wanders to the back of the transport, where he sits carefully not next to SecUnit but near it. After a few minutes Ayda begins to hear a back and forth between the two of them, in low, calm voices; a banal one, as far as she can tell, about the new serial SecUnit downloaded on Kell Station.
She releases a fraction of the tension she is holding and continues to monitor the flight displays.
SecUnit continues to say absolutely nothing to her on their private feed.
---
Five hours later, when they have finally arrived back at Preservation Station, she says to SecUnit,
‘Wait here a minute.’
It stops, begrudgingly, in the process of heading for the hatch. So does Ratthi, his face one giant question mark, but she gestures for him to go on his way.
‘No, you go get some sleep, Ratthi; I think I only need one person to help me with this.’
‘Uh-huh,’ says Ratthi. ‘Sure. Well… Catch you later.’
You are going to have to fill me in at some point, he tells her on a private feed connection.
Maybe. She nods at him imperceptibly. He looks reluctant, but lifts his bag onto his shoulder, waves, and leaves.
‘You should rest, too,’ says SecUnit.
Ayda sits back down on the pilot seat, which she has swivelled around so that it faces the interior of the transport.
‘Yes, I need sleep,’ she says. ‘But this is more important. Can you sit?’
It obliges, although it does not sit facing her, but instead angles its entire body towards the hatch it so clearly wants to exit through.
Ayda perseveres.
‘I’m guessing you’ve reviewed the drone footage from Rhodda’s.’
‘The footage of you talking to that human from Delune, you mean?’
She nods, slowly. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ve reviewed it.’
Right. It’s going to be hard to get SecUnit to admit it’s having complicated feelings over this; even harder to help it process them. But Ayda really does feel she’s getting better at figuring out the right words for these conversations.
She leans forward, lowers her voice, and hears herself ask in a frightened tone:
‘SecUnit – am I going mad?’
It’s so startled by this question that it turns to look at her for a few long moments. (Frankly, Ayda is startled herself.)
‘No,’ it admits. ‘Your hypothesis makes sense.’
‘I didn’t think it worked like that.’
‘It doesn’t. Every construct is supposed to have a unique genetic imprint. But…’
‘But that’s probably expensive,’ Ayda fills in.
‘Especially if there's a risk of generating faulty DNA, yes. It might be easier to just fiddle around with a base genome you already know is biologically viable.’
‘So it wouldn’t be surprising if someone at the company had cut corners with the occasional illegal copy-paste.’ She sighs, and rubs at her forehead with her thumb. ‘You would think it would bother the seller, to find that out.’
‘Would you?’
The question trips lightly from SecUnit’s tongue, like any number of off-handed cynical remarks it makes on a daily basis.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I would.’ And then: ‘I’d think it would bother you.’
SecUnit is quiet for a short period.
‘It might do,’ it says, speculatively, ‘if that human were to come along and try to assert a legal claim over my existence, or something like that. Yeah, I think that would get me pretty bothered.’
Oh.
Ayda realises, with awful belatedness, that SecUnit has not been acting so withdrawn and standoffish since they left Kell simply because it’s upset.
It’s doing all that because it’s livid.
‘SecUnit, no, that’s not what I was suggesting.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No! I just thought – well, it wasn’t a fully-formed plan yet. I just thought there might be an angle.’
‘Yeah. There is an angle. The one where all my organic parts belong to that asshole, actually.’
‘I – ’ Ayda stops herself, because she realises she’s still looking for a self-defence, a justification. And she needs to cut that shit out, right now. ‘Okay,’ she relents – just to buy conversational time – and finds her head falling into her hands.
She wouldn’t, she knows, slump dejectedly like this in front of anyone else from the survey team.
‘You’re right,’ she says after a moment or two, raising her head. ‘They would have had every reason to think that’s what I was implying, and I should have realised. It was the wrong approach. I’m sorry.’
She delivers the apology seriously, wholeheartedly; but SecUnit has been sitting there simmering all through the flight, and it isn’t done chewing her out just yet.
‘Why would you even risk talking to them if you hadn’t thought your plan through?’ it demands, fists clenched. ‘Actually, why would you bother talking to them at all?’
And there, she thinks, there it is: that little shard of blind, unreasoning hurt.
‘Because I had to,’ she tells it, firmly. ‘If there was any possibility they could be an ally, I had to know. We need allies.’
‘There were approximately three hundred random humans on the transport they came in on. I didn’t see you trying to make an ally out of anyone else.’
‘But this wasn’t just a random human.’
‘Yes,’ says SecUnit impatiently. ‘It was.’
‘It…’ Ayda weighs her next words with care. ‘… That fact is clear now, yes. But we couldn’t have known it for sure without speaking to them.’
‘You couldn’t. I could.’ All of a sudden SecUnit pushes itself up from its seat, and then pauses with a slightly disorientated air, as if it doesn’t know what it was planning to do once it was on its feet. ‘I...’ it begins, and then doesn’t finish. ‘You really should get some sleep, Dr Mensah.’
‘Can’t we finish talking about this?’
‘No,’ it says straightforwardly, then turns and walks out of the transport.
It’s right, of course. She absolutely should go to bed. Instead she sits alone on board the transport a while longer, drafting a proposal to send to the Council, which recommends in strongly worded terms that they implement a stricter permit system for incoming leisure transports from outside the Alliance.
---
The next cycle is a rest day, according to Preservation’s traditional weekly calendar; meaning Ayda’s schedule is quiet and empty for once. Even more unusually, she decides to keep it that way, rather than finding extra items on her tasklist she can work on. Over the feed, she encourages SecUnit to take some time to relax too, an invitation which it does not acknowledge, and which will anyway not affect what it chooses to do. (If Ayda was to guess: it will lock the door to its private quarters and rewatch something it likes, while still keeping background tabs on everyone in the vicinity in case of danger.)
(That, or start looking at departure schedules for the next fastest transport out of here.)
(Which of course it has freedom to do. Which Ayda wants it to have freedom to do. She only wants it stay here on Preservation Station if that is truly what’s best for it.)
(One of these days, she thinks, she’s going to say that last part to herself and actually believe it.)
Trying not to let herself ruminate, Ayda cooks and shares a leisurely breakfast with the family members who are currently living with her on station. After eating, they bring up the big display screen in the living area and start a video call to some of the in-laws down on the planet. Farai brings out a set of pigment paints, and the kids sit making pictures while the adults enjoy a long, dawdling, low-stakes conversation over the video feed.
It’s what she needs: normal, restful. But after a certain point, when the discussion turns to an ongoing minor family disagreement that Ayda has repeated her views on a hundred times, she finds her mind wandering inevitably back to SecUnit, and to their unfinished argument of the night before.
She knows she has just had a painful reminder of the dangers of assuming what her non-human friend is feeling. Even so, she feels an urge to peel back the surface of the conversation, to look underneath SecUnit’s stated objections and find the bigger, deeper anxieties lurking there. It was concerned the human might try to claim legal authority over it, yes. And that would have triggered all its fears around re-enslavement, of course. But there’s another problem, Ayda feels, in addition to that one. Not bigger necessarily, but slightly to the left of it. Something she still hasn’t understood yet.
Why did you bother talking to them at all?
There’s a warm soft tap at her knee. Ayda comes back into the room. Her youngest daughter Chari has, as she often does, brought her finished picture over to present to her mother as a gift.
Ayda looks down for a few long moments at the painting she has been handed. Then she kisses Chari gratefully, and tells her she is going to go and display it in her bedroom straight away.
---
‘Dr Mensah. You wanted me to come and talk to you?’
Ayda looks up from the shelf of family portraits that she has been rearranging to make space for Chari’s new painting. SecUnit is standing in the doorway of her bedroom, the hostility of its mood evident in its firmly ‘on contract’ style posture, arms stiff at its sides.
Ayda puts down the picture frame she is currently holding. ‘Yes.’ She folds her arms. ‘I was going to give you an explainer on how humans are wired to calculate risk. But then I realised that would be a silly thing to do.’
‘Because you’re so damn bad at it?’
‘Because you already understand perfectly well what matters to us, even if you like to pretend otherwise for the purpose of facetious commentary.’
SecUnit receives this observation in silence.
‘When we first met,’ continues Ayda, ‘on the survey mission, I asked you to take off your helmet, to help the others see you as a part of the team. You didn’t need me to explain to you why that would help reassure them.’
‘Humans like faces,’ it summarises, in a flat tone.
‘That might be a bit of an understatement.’
It inclines its head.
‘You are,’ it corrects itself, and allows the whole I-am-such-an-aloof-Murderbot thing to drop slightly, ‘obsessed with them.’
‘Yep.’
Ayda picks up Chari’s painting from where she has left it on her desk, and then positions it carefully on her portrait shelf, in the new space she has just created by rearranging older images. Once it is propped up safely, she stands back and surveys them all for a moment, this line of glowing, smiling faces – her friends and family, captured in pixels or in paint, and then arrayed here to keep her company in her room in case she ever feels lonely. SecUnit doesn’t exactly watch her do this – it remains focused on some unspecific patch of air in front of its face – but she thinks one of its drones might be re-angling slightly to get a better look. Unless that’s wishful thinking.
She turns, walks across the room, and sits down on her bed facing SecUnit, clasping her hands in her lap. Then she goes on:
‘I asked you to come so I could remind you that for most humans, when it comes to identifying other humans and deciding whether to trust them, there is no data point our minds will prioritise higher than their face. And it is old, old genetic code making us think that way. The oldest. It’s not like we could change it, even if we wanted to.’ She pauses. ‘It’s a good reason for unauthorised cloning to be very illegal, actually.’
SecUnit has yet to shift from its sentinel position in the doorway. But its expression is more contemplative, less stiff, than it was before.
‘The Delune human threw your threat assessment module,’ it says, eventually.
‘That… sounds like the right analogy, yes.’ Ayda rearranges her skirts. ‘I completely underestimated the danger that human could pose to you – and to the rest of us – because they looked like someone I trust. Someone I trust very much, in fact. I’m not saying that makes it okay. But I did want you to understand.’
‘You did a little bit more than underestimate the danger.’
‘I did. I had to talk to them. I had to know what they would say. Not because they could be useful, or anything rational, that was only an excuse. Just because they reminded me of you. You are the only reason I mistook them for someone important.’
After another pause, SecUnit finally steps forward into the room. It goes over to the shelf of portraits, and picks up the new one she has just put down.
Ayda turns her head towards the other wall, so as not to watch it while it examines this. Chari’s painting shows two people holding hands, terribly out of proportion, with their smiling heads taking up most of the canvas and their bodies squashed in at the bottom as afterthoughts. They look more like kid’s drawings than they look like anyone in the real world, but still, the one on the left has Ayda’s current pattern of braids and her distinctively-shaped mouth, while the other has shorter hair and a more regular set of features. Also, guns on its arms.
She only looks back at SecUnit when it asks:
‘This is supposed to be me, right?’
‘Yes. You made a big impression on all my kids with that dramatic rescue video, in case you didn’t realise. I only wish the rest of the family were so easy to win over.’
It puts Chari’s picture carefully back down on the shelf, mulling this over. The next thing it says is unexpected.
‘Now you point it out, I’m pretty sure only a human would have spotted what you did, yesterday.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘With all the gene-editing they do for SecUnits, my DNA wouldn’t be close enough to theirs to flag a database match. And facial recognition programs are incredibly good at looking for differences, not similarities, which is why the Kell security systems didn’t freak out about the two of us being on station.’ It pauses. ‘To be honest with you, even with the neural tissue I have... if I had been in the same room as that human, it’s unlikely I would have noticed anything unless I had some kind of reason to look closely at them.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Really.’
It’s delicate, hard to read, but Ayda takes a bet on raising her eyebrows and asking:
‘Is that you admitting we might sometimes not be useless?’
‘Possibly.’
She leans back, relaxing just a little.
‘Do you wish I hadn’t spotted it?’ she asks.
SecUnit is still looking at her picture collection, not at her. It wrinkles its nose, considering this.
‘Kind of. But – given it’s such a fucking liability of a situation – it’s probably better to know, than not know.’
‘I agree. I just… regret that I asked them the wrong things.’
It shrugs.
‘Look, before we left the station I grabbed as much footage as I could find of that human’s interactions on Kell. I’m pretty sure you could have asked them anything, and they still would have looked at you like you were shit on their shoe. In case that helps.’
‘Not much,’ says Ayda, softly. She hesitates. ‘I’m sorry, SecUnit.’
It looks askance at her, and doesn’t ask what she’s apologising for.
Then both of their attentions are turned by a gentle knocking sound in the bedroom doorway. Chari is standing there, looking impatient.
‘Mom,’ she says, ‘you need to come back and watch media with us.’
Ayda gives SecUnit a wry look.
‘Apparently I need to go back and watch media with them,’ she echoes, deadpan.
Seeing her mother address SecUnit, Chari also turns to it, hopefully.
‘Are you going to come too?’
‘That depends,’ it replies. ‘Do you want to watch Blood Seekers: System Five?’
‘No,’ interjects Ayda. ‘She doesn’t. I’m coming, Chari, give me just one more minute.’
‘Okay!’
The child races away again in the direction of the communal area.
Watching her go, a more pragmatic kind of thought strikes Ayda. Getting to her feet, she says:
‘You know, you’re right about the situation being a liability. Even if they don’t seem interested in us for now, I don’t think we can afford to completely ignore the fact you have a twin running around. Maybe we should sit together and agree on some protocols for different scenarios. So that we’ll be on the same page about how to handle it, if they pop up again down the line.’
‘We can do that,’ says SecUnit.
‘Not right now, though.’
‘Not right now.’ It nods towards the door. ‘You’ve got to go and do human stuff.’
‘I do. And you, what do you want to do?’
‘Murderbot stuff, I guess.’
She smiles at the sound of its name. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ But she finds herself pausing before she moves to leave. ‘Tell me, is this okay?’
It seems keen to bat the question away, whether confused by it or just feeling contrary. ‘Is anything?’
‘No, I mean, are we okay? It’s just – I want so much for you to be able to trust me.’
In response to this it turns away and moves in the direction of her bedroom window, turning its face out towards the view of the biodome garden behind the residence. It takes so long to reply, she starts to think maybe it isn’t going to, but then it says:
‘I want that, too.’
Ayda swallows.
‘Well then,’ she says. ‘We can keep on figuring it out.’
And she leaves it alone, to watch the cultivated trees sway in the artificial breeze.