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“Welcome to the team, SecUnit!”, Iris beamed at my right ear.
“Whoa, they look great! Exactly what you wanted, aren’t they?” Ratthi said, grinning at the drone I was using to look at them.
I speechlessly stared at the boxes of drones stacked in ART’s storage locker.
EIGHT boxes, each containing sixty to a hundred drones. Bigger ones with combat capabilities, one about the size of Iris’s hand (small) with various scanning functions, and tiny surveillance drones, my favourite type. All were of the high-end, if not the highest, models available.
“Er,” I said, the filler from my talk-like-a-human code set, but couldn’t think of any less direct way of asking the question, in the following 2.7 seconds. So I asked, “You mean, these are for me?”
Seth replied with a smile, “Sure, these are technically in Peri’s equipment inventory, but as our security consultant, you can use them as you like. Yours, SecUnit.”
Turi corrected, “Six of these are in Peri’s inventory. These two belong to just SecUnit, off the inventory”, pointing to the boxes stacked closest to us. “We all wanted to get you something to express our gratitude for what you did for us back in the Adamantine system and also as a welcome gift. Peri said you’d want the drones.”
ART chimed in with, It needs them. SecUnit goes through them faster than Seth goes through his carbohydrate snacks.
“Hey!”
“I only sacrifice them when absolutely necessary!”
Seth and I protested, but we knew ART was just teasing.
“Thank you,” I said, staring down at the boxes.
“Hope you find them useful,” Seth said with a grin. “Peri and Tarik selected them.”
Tarik’s contribution, if any, was to criticise my choice, which he had obviously considered as constructive, ART said dryly.
“Be fair, Peri,” said Martyn said with a chuckle, “he was only concerned about the number and the grade of the combat drones you were going to order. It might have drawn unwanted attention no matter how carefully we obtained it.”
Just how many military-grade combat drones was ART going to obtain, I wondered.
I’m fully capable of making our purchase untraceable, ART said with a sniff, I only conceded as our upcoming missions were unlikely to require combat drones and we have my armed drones if necessary.
“Of course, Peri,” Iris said soothingly. “Dr. Arada had told us multiple times how SecUnit needed small drones as an extension of its sensory inputs. So did Dr. Mensah. These tiny ones are probably better for that purpose, aren’t they?”
My drone and ART’s camera feeds showed that the humans were looking at me expectantly.
“Yes,” I said, realising that an answer from me was expected. “Surveillance drones are more useful on most occasions. They can fit in my pockets, too.”
Iris, Seth, Martyn, Turi and Ratthi were still standing there looking at me with big smiles, but carefully avoiding any direct eye contact.
It was getting to be really awkward. Was I supposed to open these boxes, clasp my hands and squeal like humans do in media?
Then Ratthi looked at his wristwatch (he claims that this antiquated piece of equipment can be more useful than just relying on the feed-clock, as the exaggerated gesture of looking at them can convey a lot more to the nearby humans) and said, “We’d better get going, as the welcome reception drink is starting soon.”
They still had sufficient time not to rush off, but Ratthi briefly smiled at my drone and I knew that he knew I was getting a little overwhelmed. That’s why Ratthi is my friend.
Soon the humans disembarked, leaving me alone with ART. I liked ART’s humans (now mine, too?), but it was still a relief not to have them staring at me. It was also nice to have the enormous presence of my giant research transport in the feed again.
Are you going to look at your new drones or do you prefer to just stand there, having a moment with me? ART said in my feed, still reassuringly an asshole. I know you’ve missed me.
“Speak for yourself,” I retorted, making a rude gesture to the nearest camera, causing ART’s amusement rippling in the feed.
Nice to see our seven months of separation haven’t changed you, it said. Indeed I’ve missed your childish rude gestures.
So I rewarded it with another one.
After the Adamantine misadventures, I decided to accept ART’s offer to join its crew for its next mission. I had assumed we could just go together from there (we were all desperate to leave that system. At least I was). However, it turned out that ART’s engines needed more thorough decontamination and repair as well as careful checkup and some upgrade. It also meant that Pin-Lee would have more time to draft the contract for me and I’d have the time to ensure that security on Preservation met its newly found fame (or infame?) in my absence. It was meant to be about 4 months, but whatever was going on at ART’s university or its local planet, various things delayed their departure by over 2 months. So it had been four hundred twenty-nine cycles since we parted ways by the wormhole.
During that time, our humans had communicated and it was agreed that some humans from PSUMNT’s hash-hash department and some more from Mihira and New Tideland’s hash-hash office would come on ART so that they could make the cooperative association between them and Preservation (not all of the polity, obviously) more official through memorandum of understanding or something like that.
So, this time only Iris, Seth, Martyn, Karime and Turi came from ART’s crew, along with five more humans. It was also agreed that Ratthi was to return to PSUMNT with us as he had been invited to participate in a symposium as a guest speaker, and then to discuss possible collaboration research. This makes me feel better because it feels less like I’m leaving Mensah and my other humans to join ART and its humans, but more like we’re forming a bridge between our humans.
I picked out the four boxes containing different types of drones, leaving the others which were the duplicates, and carefully placed them on a table for closer inspection.
I first examined the combat drones. These were about 30 centimetres in diameter, smaller than the ones I had hacked and used on Milu. Its shape has no front or back, being able to scan and shoot in any directions. They don’t carry projectiles but have energy weapons powerful and acute enough to shoot down hostile drones about 600 meters away. They can also jam various signals, record and analyse what they scan, quickly create digest, etc.
Then, I looked at the hand-sized ones. I was not very familiar with them, looking similar to the ones humans used for mapping structures and terrains. Humans, even augmented humans, cannot control many drones or handle multiple inputs all at once, so their drones have limited ability to work in swarms. But looking through its functions upon connection, I could tell that these drones were fully capable of working in swarms, in close proximity to each other, sending each other real-time data and create a larger whole dataset. They could also project holographic images around them, as well as mask their sounds during flight, making them less easy to spot as drones.
“These are interesting,” I said to ART who was doing the feed equivalent of breathing down my neck, staring down at what I was looking at over my shoulder. “But aren’t small intel drones more discreet and easier to smuggle in?”
They are in most places, ART agreed. But these are less likely to trigger weapons scanner and be spotted in a stark empty environment where even a small intel drone can draw attention. This model has various visual and auditory camouflage functions, fooling security systems and humans to assume they’re just some aerial fauna.
I thought I knew at least three, no, four ways of using my intel drones in a stark environment without detection, but the idea of making the drone pretend to be fauna was weird and interesting. I’ve decided to play around with them later.
I moved on to the next box in ART’s equipment inventory. These drones were familiar. They were similar to the ones Mensah had bought for me, then Mensah and Senior Officer Indah had bought some more for station security recently. (I have programmed sets of codes so that station security humans can use in my absence and get the station SecSystem to log, analyse and report to them.)
Finally, I took out a drone from the box given to me as a present. It was a tiny drone, barely one centimetre in length, elongated in shape with a sharp, pointy nose like a needle. These are expensive, specialised intel drones, the kind the company used only for clients who are willing to spend a lot. I was most frequently deployed at mining sites with clients that only needed SecUnits to keep their slaves (workers) in order, so I only had limited experience of using such high-end intel drones, but it was a pleasure.
I activated six of them to try them out. They immediately acknowledged me as the primary user, pinged me, and smoothly formed a holding pattern above my head. I sent them out to patrol the corridors, crew lounges, galley, and control deck, separately and then together. I could selectively receive visual, auditory, infrared raw data as well as the processed data through their scanners without any delay, and the incoming data was dizzyingly crisp and clear.
ART, always very curious, was in my feed, experiencing what I was sensing through my feed and I could tell it was impressed with the input and pleased with my pleasure.
It still asked me; Do you like them?
“Yes, very much,” I said honestly. “Are you sure your university doesn’t want them to be in your inventory as their property?” They are quite expensive after all.
The university doesn’t need to know, as we didn’t use their funding, ART said airily. We have our private source which we use when we don’t want every expenditure examined and critiqued.
Yeah, we all know how much ART loves to be critiqued.
ART said, You are good at your job, but we saw that even with your expertise, working underequipped severely limited your functions. Our jobs are often dangerous. We need our security consultant to be in an optimal condition, so giving you state-of-the-art intel drones only makes sense.
Wow. “Okay, thanks,” I said.
Then something that ART had just said triggered a flicker of something in my memory. After going through my memory archives for 4.7 seconds, I found it.
I said, “ART, you remembered that I had talked about them.”
When we first met over a year ago (it feels like even a lot longer time ago), after ART threatening to squash my brain, doing an experimental surgery on me, we talked about various things, besides watching media together. As we discussed how best to get the data I wanted (before ART came up with its brilliant plan of me getting a job as an augmented human security consultant), I told it how I’d wished I had my drones which would make my job so much easier. ART was not familiar with the kind of drones we used, so I showed various images from my memory data, including those similar to the ones currently in a circulating formation near the upper bulkhead along with the four drones that I brought with me. I remember calling them “state-of-the-art intel drones”.
Of course, ART said. You were rather eloquent on how useful they were. It paused for 2.1 seconds and added, We looked for something similar and obtained them.
It’s probably no surprise that ART, with its gigantic memory capacity, remembered what I’d said over a year ago. But it was still touching that it remembered what I’d liked and selected these for me once I agreed to join its crew.
Being in my feed, ART probably sensed my emotions. It lightly poked me in the feed and said I should go join the humans.
“I don’t eat. I don’t need to go to their reception,” I argued.
I am well aware that you don’t eat or drink, ART said, but don’t you need to go and sort out your contract with Pin-Lee and Dempsey?
Oh. Dempsey was the lawyer that came from PSUMNT who’s currently in meetings with Pin-Lee about the collaboration between MNT and Preservation, as well as about my contract. I was supposed to meet them to get explanations before signing it. Contracts and meetings are boring. But I knew Pin-Lee was trying to make sure to protect my rights (still a weird concept), so I went.
Eighty-nine minutes later, with the contract sorted, I was passing the reception venue when Turi came out. They were looking for a hygiene facility, so I offered to show the way. They were carrying a small backpack with something solid inside.
“Is that the infamous hardcopy ledger?” I asked. Turi flinched which made me regret (again) not having added 2 seconds delay to what I say.
“What do you know about that?” They asked.
“Martyn told me,” I hurriedly explained. “He said ART had a creative way of doing its accounting, but it always ends up with extra numbers which are untraceable. He said you need to keep a hardcopy ledger so that ART can’t tamper with.”
“Well, yeah,” they exhaled with a grin. “Very true. It could be so cunning that it could do something to the ledger as well if left attended, so now I’m in a habit of carrying it around with me when nobody is aboard Peri.”
That was totally understandable, and it’s not paranoia. It’s very reasonable caution, knowing how sneaky ART is.
“Do you have to keep two records, like when you were making the records of drone purchases?”, I said conversationally as Turi’s backpack looked heavy for their small frame.
Now Turi looked thoroughly alarmed. They stopped in the empty corridor we were walking down and turned to me, alarming me in turn.
“How do you know about Peri’s secret ledger? Did it tell you?”
I was so surprised that I actually made a brief eye contact with Turi.
“What do you mean, Peri’s secret ledger? ART gets you to keep its secret ledger?”
“Oh shit,” Turi groaned, covering their face with their small delicate hands. “You meant one for our team funds and the other for the university finance department, didn’t you?
I nodded. “Don’t you do that?”
“No,” Turi said as they pulled their hands down the face, still flushed. “Peri can do the university one and it keeps the numbers straight. No mysterious additions or subtractions. It’s the team fund it gets creative with.”
That made sense. Turi’s hardcopy was there to prevent ART from altering numbers for their team funds.
What did they mean by Peri’s secret ledger, then?
“Are you cooking the books for ART?” I asked.
Turi flushed even more deeply.
“You make it sound so sinister, SecUnit,” they protested. “It’s just… Peri doesn’t do anything really bad. But it wants to keep some private funds so that it can pay for things without worrying the captain unduly.”
Like the time when it had used its medical supplies on me and Tapan, bribed the port authorities for unscheduled docking of the shuttle and earlier departure, I guess.
Then something occurred to me.
“Did ART use its private funds to pay for my drones?” I asked.
Turi sighed with resignation and replied, “Yes, but only partially as your drones were more expensive than the budget Seth had approved.”
We had reached the hygiene facility.
Before entering, Turi turned to me.
“Please, SecUnit, don’t tell anyone! Not to Peri, either!”
I acknowledged, not wanting to drop Turi in any shit with Seth or ART.
Still, I got curious. Back in my rooms in the station’s hotel, I started checking through the catalogues that I had been collecting. (They take up too much room if kept in my non-organic memory archive, so I left them as external files.)
I discovered that compared to the surveillance drones Mensah bought me, the new ones in ART’s inventory are about 20% more expensive, and the special intel drones they gave me as a present were 72% more expensive than them. Whoa. I didn’t know that.
Then something else caught my attention.
While I was test-driving the new drones, I unconsciously made a mental note of their model number and batch serial codes. I now found that the particular model had been renewed (different looks, but not better. If any, less good, in my view). The manufacturer had stopped taking orders about a year ago and stopped manufacturing about two months after that. This kind of specialised drones are made to order and hardly ever kept in storage or resold.
The simplest explanation is that ART had ordered the drones before it kidnapped me. Not long after RaviHyral.
What the fuck, ART??
I must have thought it loudly enough to draw ART’s attention. Or whatever.
I was still in my rooms at the station, but ART slid into my feed using its own comm stored inside my rib compartment.
What, you want more drones? It teased, noting the catalogues.
Ignoring the question, I asked, “ART, when did you order my intel drones?”
ART didn’t answer immediately. Then it said, “Did Turi tell you something?”
“No,” I lied, “I just suspected that Turi, being so soft, might be sometimes assisting you cooking the books. But that’s not what I’m asking about.”
I don’t know what you’re getting at, ART said evasively. Cooking the books is a rather quaint expression…
Cutting it off, I said, “That model had been discontinued since about a year ago. You couldn’t have ordered them after the Adamantine.”
Ah. was the only thing ART said.
“Did you get them before the Adamantine?” I asked again.
Yes, ART admitted.
“When, exactly?”
Fifty-seven cycles after I returned from that trip to RaviHyral.
I was confused. “Were you going to use them yourself?”
Yes, ART said. I thought they could be valuable for our missions.
I felt crestfallen a bit, but why should I be? These are good drones. Once it found out that I’d join the crew, it decided to give them to me as a present.
“I see,” I said. “Makes sense.”
ART poked me hard in the feed.
Of course I bought them for you, you little idiot, ART said. I wouldn’t be able to control them with sufficient efficacy, especially outside of my hull.
“But you didn’t even know if we would ever meet again,” I said.
I always knew I was going to see you again, ART said. I was going to engineer a fucking chance meeting, if necessary. Though not quite the way it actually turned out.
The idea of ART ordering the drones for me, the ones that I’d said I wanted, with no guarantee of ever meeting me again, so soon after we parted ways rendered me speechless.
Perhaps you can show me how to use your drones, and I’ll show you how to control my pathfinders, ART said when I was silent for 8.5 seconds, for emergency.
“I’d like that,” I said. “But if for emergency you could teach me how to pilot a shuttle first.”
No, ART fucking refused. Your processors won’t be able to handle my shuttles.
“For fuck’s sake, ART,” I protested. “Arada could pilot it. Tarik can pilot it. I can handle what humans can handle. Even Three has a piloting module. Can’t be any harder than controlling your pathfinders.”
True, ART said. But I prefer to pilot it myself with you tensing inside. I also need to monitor that you don’t jump out of it at 20 metres high.
I sighed in exasperation.
“I’m glad that you still are such an asshole. Missed that," I told my asshole research transport.