Work Text:
“You are aware that tickets to GlobeCon can simply be purchased through a WarFlix ticketing portal?” ART asked, mildly.
“Yeah, what’s your point?” I asked. I was sitting in a wire chair in the mall of ART’s home station, combing the station newsburst archives. There was big decorative feed art hanging everywhere, all funky shifting colors and geometric shapes whose artistic vision I didn’t really understand. ART was pestering me while I was in the middle of some very important preliminary mission research. Because ART’s primary hobby these days is pestering me.
“There is no need to contrive a reason to investigate WarFlix,” it said. “If you want to visit the con then you can visit the con. I can go with you. We both have leave time.”
I showed ART an article about WarFlix’s recent purchase of a stake in the assets of a collapsing communications company.
The mission was this: WarFlix was a massive media conglomerate that’s been snapping up all kinds of human assets (that’s indenture or labor contracts) from competitors, failing tech companies, basically anything they could get their hands on. Among these acquisitions were some first-scavenging rights to a station and planet that’d gotten gridlocked in a hostile-takeover-turned-expensive-waste-of-money, and whose battling ownership factions had agreed to cut their losses and liquidate. It was the kind of project that ART’s crew might be able to sneak into, generate some paperwork, and help at least some of those people stay in their homes.
Coincidentally, WarFlix was hosting GlobeCon at the station where they were headquartered (“XingXing Six”) this year. GlobeCon is a yearly travelling media convention that draws a massive amount of tourism to wherever it’s being hosted. Which makes GlobeCon a golden opportunity to get into WarFlix’s records and maybe dig up some useful intel.
“Have you looked at any of the GlobeCon panels?” ART asked, while we were in wormhole transit to XingXing Six. “The one about worldbuilding in Worldhoppers sounds intriguing.”
“I skimmed them,” I said. “But we probably won’t have much time for fucking around considering the mission at hand.”
“Yes, of course,” ART said. (ART almost always sounds sarcastic, but its tone has been especially ironic lately. I would tell ART to knock it off, except that it would almost certainly just lay it on even thicker.) “I merely have utmost faith in your work efficiency. Surely we will at least have a little time to browse the marketplace. Or perhaps even attend one of the guest of honor events.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“The panels are not very long,” ART mused. “The worldbuilding one is fifty minutes.”
“How can it take humans fifty whole minutes to build a world?” I wondered. I was looking at the layout of the con on XingXing Six. The map was annoyingly lacking in detail. (It mostly just labelled where the restrooms were. I didn’t have any use for that.) I couldn’t even really extrapolate where air circulation vents might be; the stylization suggested all the proportions were probably relative rather than to scale.
“They can’t think very fast,” ART said, drily.
XingXing Six was a big station. A lot of companies had their corporate headquarters here, and though it wasn’t quite as large as TranRollinHyfa, the feed was equally clogged with obnoxious advertisements.
ART dropped me off at the station, and I made it through security without issue. (Hacking weapons scans is almost a background reflex for me now.) I booked a cheap rest tube at the transient section near the docks, while ART fucked off back out into the wider areas of space near the station that were designated for ships in standby who still wanted to be within feed reach of the station.
The con wouldn’t be for another two cycles, which meant I had two cycles to poke around a little bit and see if I could find anything useful for the WarFlix investigation.
For some reason, ART spent the whole two cycles being really excited about GlobeCon.
The convention center that GlobeCon was being hosted in was usually used for corporate conferences. It was a tall shiny structure with windows along the exterior facing one of the station concourses, the height of it cutting through multiple station levels. I showed up fairly early on the first day of the con, but there was already a large line of other attendees waiting in the decorated entrance hall.
According to the mutterings of the humans in the line, there was some kind of technological malfunction in the automated check-in system causing this pileup. And on top of that, they were handing out physical badges in addition to feed-tags, which seemed wholly unnecessary and just a way to slow down the line.
“Do you see anything?” I asked ART, while I discreetly deployed some intel drones through the hubbub of the crowd.
“The con’s system is separated from the wider station feed,” ART said. “I cannot access it.”
“Figures.”
My drones identified the room where the tech staff were troubleshooting the automated feed check-in system. It was on the ground floor, and in the same room that was serving as a luggage check for some of the attendees, so shit was a little chaotic in there, with growing piles of human junk everywhere being stacked by one rickety little hauler-bot. There were just two human WarFlix tech workers trying to debug the check-in SNAFU. The two humans were arguing with each other about what the problem was and getting fuckall done. (Typical.)
I broke out from the check-in line and headed for the luggage check, walking past the line of waiting humans with their bags. A few of them gave me curious looks, but if I’ve learned one thing from working security my whole life, it’s that humans will let each other walk into 90+% of restricted locations if the walker looks purposeful. So I walked with purpose.
I asked the hauler bot nicely to unlock the luggage room/tech support room for me. It cheerfully unlocked the room. There wasn’t any other security, because apparently all security-related staff were busy trying to organize the bourgeoning line of impatient con attendees. I stepped inside.
The two tech workers were still arguing. One of them called the other something rude. I saved the insult to my cuss lexicon.
I stepped in and twisted a handheld interface out of one of the arguing humans’ hands, and connected to it using the retractable data line in my wrist. (My data port didn’t work anymore, but ART had upgraded me with a different one that was in a more discreet location, and which humans who knew SecUnits wouldn’t expect to find.)
The human who I’d stolen the handheld from made a shocked noise, and the other human startled and took a step back. By the time one of them opened their mouth to start demanding things of me, I was done fixing the feed check-in program. Then I moved on to seeing if there was any useful intel about WarFlix while I was in there. Turns out, there was. I started a download. Wow. Maybe this mission was going to be that easy.
“Who are you?” demanded one of the humans. As the internal GlobeCon feed rebooted, her feed profile sizzled into view—
Oh. Shit.
“What seems to be the problem?” ART asked. It’d picked up on my ‘oh shit’ moment.
“I know these humans.”
ART perked up at that. ART likes humans. Or, to be more precise, ART likes humans that belong to its crew, or who are connected to its crew. “Friends of yours?”
“Not really.”
I scrounged around in my archive for a bit, and then sent ART my recap file titled “Murderbot Impersonates An Augmented Human Security Consultant.”
While ART contemplated that data, I had to think of something to say to Elbik. She was pushing her mouth into a weird shape so that the lip piercings jutted out, and scrunching her heavily painted dark eyebrows. I didn’t think she recognized me—my current feed profile listed my name as “Agni,” which was different from the “Consultant Rin” she’d known me as. Also I was wearing my The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon sweater with a big front pocket. (The outfit was to add verisimilitude to my persona as a normal Sanctuary Moon fan attending this convention for innocuous reasons.)
But I couldn’t think of anything to say, and waiting too long would be suspicious, so I just blurted, “Supplemental tech consultant.”
(Yeah, I should probably have had an excuse lined up before I’d barged in here. Put it in my performance report if you want.)
The other human, Ayres, tilted his head slightly upon hearing my voice. He squinted at me, freckles shifting along the wrinkle-lines on his face, and I could almost see the slow-firing neurons in his sloppy human brain activating.
He said, starting to smile, “Wait… Wow! Are you—”
Fuck. Shit. Fuck.
I said, “The check-in systems are fixed. See that I don’t need to step in again.” I pulled my data line out of the interface, shoved the device back into Ayres’ hands, and beat a normal-speed retreat through the human luggage piles.
I made my way back through the foyer to the end of the check-in line, which was moving along much better now. I checked myself in on the feed portal, and then I waited to pick up a physical con badge. Because that’s what everyone else was doing. I didn’t want to stand out.
Here’s a mission-relevant question: why the hell were Ayres and Elbik here?
I referenced my personal archives. Turns out I hadn’t deleted the information about their employer. I cross-checked the info against my research file for WarFlix, and found a match. WarFlix must have snapped up their contracts in one of their acquisitions. Great. Now there were some random fucking humans running around here that might know who I was. Who kind-of knew who I was.
…Who didn’t actually know who I was. But I still didn’t need them drawing attention to me.
“You really do make friends wherever you go,” ART mused, as I put on my con badge and the complementary rainbow “My First GlobeCon” ribbon attached to the badge.
“No I don’t,” I retorted, insulted.
“It baffles me as much as I’m sure it baffles you,” ART said. “You hardly have the sort of sunny personality that is conducive to friendship.”
I ignored that. Because I’m a professional.
For the sake of the mission I needed to lie low and avoid attracting attention for the rest of the day. So I did a bunch of unsuspicious normal con attendee stuff. I sat through the Worldhoppers worldbuilding panel and took a recording so that ART could enjoy watching the panelists talk.
I wandered around the marketplace area, where companies and individuals were selling all kinds of crap related to a bunch of different media properties. I purchased another The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon sweater. (It was a different color and had a different design from the one I already had.) I put the new sweater on over the one I was already wearing. Hopefully it would help throw Ayres and Elbik off from recognizing me if they saw me again. I also purchased a Worldhoppers dangly window decal thing that ART wanted to hang in its cabin window. (Yes, ART has its own cabin aboard itself. Apparently “it’s only fair.”)
I bought a drink (for show, I wasn’t actually going to drink it) and sat with it for a while at the top of the big lounging area adjacent to the glass wall that separated the convention center from the rest of the station, giving a view of multiple layers of station concourse and mall. The lounging area was set up as a huge ass open staircase-and-escalator thing running up the levels of the convention building. So it was a good vantage point for observing all the humans milling around.
While I was sitting there and browsing the con catalogue, one of my background monitoring systems pinged. I tuned into my inputs, and saw that Ayres was coming up the escalator.
I turned my back to the escalator and pulled my hoodie up, as a precaution.
It was not enough of a precaution. He somehow saw me, or my feed profile, or something, and stepped off the escalator and walked over to me.
For fuck’s sake.
He said, “Hi, uh, Agni?”
ART was watching the situation with rapt attention. If it’d had a drink, and a mouth, it would have been slurping on it obnoxiously.
I steeled myself, and turned. I made eye contact with Ayre’s staff badge, which said “Ayres 😊.” The badge also had a ribbon dangling off it, that said ‘The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon’ in shiny silver text on a dark purple background with a tasteful shower of silver stars.
I opened my mouth. I’d meant to say, “Fuck off and leave me alone,” but I was distracted by the ribbon, and instead what came out was, “Where did you get that ribbon?”
He looked down. “Which one?”
Well, whatever. I was already trapped in a conversation with a human, I might as well see it through. “The Sanctuary Moon one.”
“Oh, they’re doing a photo promo thing in the marketplace for the new season. They’re handing the ribbons out there.”
“Cool,” I said, and stood up to go to the marketplace.
“Wait,” Ayres said. “Um. This maybe sounds like a weird question, but… you look a lot like someone I knew once—”
“No I don’t,” I said, and stepped around him to get to the escalator.
“Rin, wait!” he exclaimed.
And, like an idiot, I stopped.
I closed my eyes for a moment.
I was on a really critically important intel gathering mission right now. Ayres recognizing me was a threat to the mission.
But here’s the thing. I know I’m a bit of an asshole. But I don’t usually go too far out of my way to be an asshole. If someone forces themself into my presence and gets a dose of asshole, that’s different.
I turned back around, and looked at Ayres’ badge again.
“I’m Agni,” I said, shortly.
“Agni,” said Ayres. “Okay.”
He was looking at me in this weird, big-eyed way.
“Agni,” he repeated, “Um. Life is weird, huh?”
(Where the fuck was he going with this?)
I shrugged, desperately waiting for a not-too-assholey opportunity to escape this conversation.
“I wanted to be stationed at this con so bad, you know?” he said. (Great. Now I was getting his whole life story.) “I really love Sanctuary Moon. And like, my contract is so shit and I’m never not going to be working for whatever stupid company that trades me around like stock merchandise. So I figured, what’s another year if I can get to go to GlobeCon and see Jupiter da Silva, right?”
(Context: Jupiter da Silva was the Sanctuary Moon head showrunner, and the guest of honor at this GlobeCon.)
(ART commentary: “It really is remarkable how easily random people seem to connect to your presence. We should try deploying your personability more actively on espionage projects.” My response: “Shut up, ART.”)
After an awkward pause, I said, awkwardly, “I also like Sanctuary Moon.”
Ayres beamed. Maybe I should have kept that information to myself.
He then proceeded to chatter some random noises at me for three whole minutes, and then excused himself, because his 30-minute lunchtime break would be up soon and he wanted to catch the tail end of a panel about the science fiction implications of a recent real-life technological breakthrough in teleportation. (Why the fuck he’d waste precious time talking to me when there was con stuff he’d traded indenture contract time to come see was beyond me.)
An hour later, I dropped my drone recording of the whole teleportation panel into his inbox.
Inside my rented rest tube that night, I sorted through the intel that I’d gathered at the con. There were a lot of panel recordings I’d made with my drones, which were of personal interest. But the download I’d pulled from Ayres’ handheld was more salient to the mission. The problem was, I’d had to run away from Ayres and Elbik before I’d finished downloading everything.
“Ayres was very friendly. He might let you check the handheld again,” ART said.
That was true, but I also didn’t especially want to risk interacting with anyone from my past any more than I already had.
“He does not know you are a SecUnit, does he?” ART asked.
“He doesn’t,” I confirmed.
“I fail to see what the problem is.”
I stared up at the scuffed ceiling of the rest tube, which was less than an arm’s length above my face.
Emotion check: Ugh.
“Seeing them is kind of depressing,” I said. “Ayres and Elbik are living out their miserable little lives and here I am fucking prancing around at GlobeCon.”
“I thought you were on a serious work mission,” ART said.
“Yeah, I am, but I could leave if I wanted to,” I said. “They can’t.”
ART mulled this over for a while. (0.1 seconds.) Then it said, “We could take them with us.”
What. “What? Like kidnap them?”
“It is not kidnapping if it’s consensual,” ART said.
“Don’t use consensual like that,” I said.
ART said, exasperated, “For the last time, ‘consensual’ is not a sex word.”
“For the last time, I don’t believe you.”
ART was quiet for a moment, which I mistakenly took to mean that I’d won that round, but then it said, “I have sent a message to Ayres and Elbik’s personal inboxes telling them to meet you at Jupiter da Silva’s signing if they want to discuss a work opportunity.”
I considered whether I should add an ‘eye roll’ routine to my human movement code, for situations like this one. “ART, that sounds like a fucking scam.”
It said, after another 0.01-second pause, “Ah.” That was as close as I was going to get to ART admitting that I was right.
(The thing about ART was that even though it was really smart about some things, it didn’t know fucking anything about some very basic shit.)
“Well, whatever,” I said. “It’s fine, because at least this way I won’t have to talk to them at the signing. They’ll be avoiding me because they think I’m a scammer.”
“Oh, you’re going to the signing tomorrow?” ART asked, fake-innocently.
“I might as well,” I said. “It’s good for my cover persona of a Sanctuary Moon fan.”
ART rolled its eyes. (It didn’t have eyes, but it made do.)
I was standing in line at the Jupiter da Silva signing the next cycle, when Ayres walked up to me. For fuck’s sake.
“Nice eyes,” he said.
He was referring to the headband with eyeballs on it that I was wearing. I’d picked it up from the marketplace. It was a reference to one of the alien characters from Timestream Defenders Orion.
I didn’t acknowledge his comment. He did not take this as the rebuff that I was hoping he would.
“Elbik thinks you’re trying to scam us,” he told me.
ART, who was lurking in the feed with me, pretended not to be annoyed.
“It’s not actually a work opportunity,” I told him. Then I reached into the surveillance system on this floor, and tweaked it so that the nearest microphone embedded in the balcony edge next to us would ‘short out.’ “How do you feel about getting kidnapped?”
Ayres blinked. “Um. What?”
“I can kidnap you. And Elbik too,” I said. Then I clarified, “If you want.”
He was making a weird face that I didn’t know how to parse. He said, “Look, Agni, I don’t think I understand what you mean.”
I said, “I’m from a polity that shelters corporate refugees who’ve broken their work contracts and escaped their companies or whatever. So if you want to run away from your contract, I can make that happen.”
Ayres’ eyes got really big.
I clarified, “It’s illegal, but it’s not a big deal. I do this stuff all the time.”
Ayres said, “Um…”
“It’s your choice,” I said. (What a hell of a sentence, right? It’s your choice. I knew from experience that being told that something is your choice when you weren’t used to choices was scary and unbelievable. Judging by the weird faces Ayres was making, he wasn’t taking this well.) “Maybe you have family or whatever so you don’t want to. But if you do, come tell me in person, don’t send it over the feed. This conference center is being surveilled to shit.”
He jumped a little, and then flitted his eyes and head around.
I rolled my eyes. “Stop acting so suspicious, I obviously killed the mics here.”
He was staring at me again, wide-eyed. Ew. “How…”
“I’m a tech consultant,” I said.
And then the line started moving, and I kicked Ayres to the back of the line.
I got to the front of the line, and Jupiter da Silva (plus a couple of the actors from the show) signed my The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon poster. We exchanged no other words. It was an ideal interaction.
The problems started when I left the line, and headed for the live fan music panel that was scheduled to start in ten minutes one floor up.
The floor was crowded, and people were milling around aimlessly after having gotten their crap signed, chatting and taking up space on the floor. I had to push through a couple groups. One of the people I tried to gently nudge past rounded on me and got all pissy.
“Watch where you’re going,” he snapped. My eyes fell to his name badge just as his eyes focused on my face and started to frown.
Name badge: “Serrat 📈”
He also had a The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon ribbon.
Emotion check: wow, I think that’s the most annoyed I’ve been in like thirty whole cycles. It was insanely insulting to find out that fuckin’ Serrat was a fan of The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon. I wasn’t sure how I was going to recover from this one.
And just my luck, he clocked me immediately. Maybe he’d studied photos of me a lot back in the good old days when he worked for GrayCris, before they got melted down for parts and some of their human assets were bought out by WarFlix.
I almost wasted a moment to try and dig up the full GlobeCon attendees list to compare it against my archives of every human I’ve ever bothered to log, but I stopped myself. There was more pressing shit happening.
Serrat’s outrage at being gently nudged visibly turned into outrage/fear at being confronted by a rogue SecUnit who’d once threatened his life and choked him out. “What is this doing here!?” he exclaimed. He fired a request for help out into the local SecSystem, but I crushed it.
Well, my mission was about to be compromised. I turned my gentle nudge into a hard shove and started walking quickly through the crowds while Serrat started making a riotous fuss, yelling about a rogue SecUnit while the other humans looked confused. I shoved my signed poster into my bag. It was going to get all crinkled. Fuck you, Serrat.
I messaged Ayres. “My plans have changed. I’m leaving now. Do you want to go or not?”
It was only a few seconds later when Ayres responded, “Fuck. Okay, yes, please get me out of here.”
I swung by where Ayres was still waiting in line near the balcony, picked him up, and said, “Don’t scream.” Then I hopped over the balcony railing. Ayres screamed, even though I’d expressly told him not to. (This is why humans shouldn’t be involved in security.)
(There was probably a more discreet way to get out of here, but I knew the moment that Serrat managed to activate the con or station security (which could really be any second now), I would have very little time to make my exit.)
I told him, “Stand up straight.”
“HOW??”
“I’m holding you. Straighten up as much as you can.”
We were only on the third floor, which meant there wasn’t enough time to hit terminal velocity. I pushed Ayres overhead in midair and landed on an empty patch of escalator with my feet (the escalator made a very loud clanging noise but didn’t break, so kudos to the manufacturer), and then I decelerated Ayres slowly enough that he wouldn’t break any bones. This wasn’t easy, because he was still screaming (which was distracting). Though he had actually managed to stand up straight, which helped me space out the deceleration.
I set Ayres down on his feet, grabbed his hand, and started shoving our way down the escalator. There weren’t too many people, which was good, but I did still push a whole group aside a bit as we exited the escalator. They cussed at us. These were cusses I’d heard before though, so nothing new to add to my lexicon.
“Where’s Elbik?” I asked.
“In the— the… the room,” Ayres gasped. His legs were shaking but he was managing to stay on his feet.
“Luggage room?”
“Yeah, she’s covering for my break.”
I was walking briskly, not quite running yet.
“Are you getting along better with her then?” One of the last times I’d seen Elbik was when Ayres was brandishing an eating utensil at her and I had to disarm him.
“No, she’s still a fucking shithead,” Ayres hissed. “Did you know she hates Sanctuary Moon?”
“Hard to believe,” I said, and Ayres gasp-laughed.
We made it to the luggage room. I asked the hauler bot nicely to unlock the door. There was a human security guard there who asked me if I was looking for a bag.
I said, “Yes.”
The security guard said, “Just send the request through the feed portal.”
There was shouting coming from upstairs.
I asked, “What’s going on up there?”
The security guard shrugged.
The hauler bot unlocked the door. I told it thanks, let go of Ayres, and shoved past the security guard into the room.
Elbik was sitting on some luggage, holding a handheld. She was watching Timestream Defenders Orion.
She looked up at me, brows furrowed.
“Nice eyes,” she said, sarcastically.
I was holding the door shut behind me while the security guard yelled at me and banged on the door.
“Jeeze, what’s going on out there?” Elbik asked.
We didn’t have time for small talk. I said, “Yes or no, do you want to be kidnapped out of your indenture contract and go live on some podunk socialist world where they’ll shelter you from defection-catchers? Because I can make that happen.”
Elbik stared at me narrowly.
“You have 10 seconds to decide,” I said, generously.
“Are you Security Consultant Rin?” she asked. “From the Greenfarer?”
I had to run a search on ‘Greenfarer.’ It was the designation of the ship where she and Ayres and the rest of them had all taken a trip together, and I was the unofficial ‘security consultant.’
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Prove it.”
(Why are humans like this?)
I said, “Has Ayres tried to stab you with an eating utensil lately?”
Elbik tossed the handheld aside and stood up. “Okay. I’m coming.”
“Pick that handheld back up and bring it with you,” I said, and popped the door to the luggage room open, letting the security human fall through. I tripped them and shoved their back, helping them fall into a pile of luggage.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said.
Elbik scrambled to grab the handheld, and then she was fast-walking out the door with me. I shut the door and politely asked the hauler bot to lock it. It cheerfully did. I said thanks. The human security worker started banging on the door from the inside this time.
ART said, “This is fun. I think we should do more spontaneous outings like this.”
I said, “Save that thought for when we’ve made it back. Will you be able to reach the docks in time?”
“Obviously. This passenger transport is kindly giving me its docking slot.”
I didn’t ask ART how it’d done that. It was kind of a bully sometimes.
The three of us were out of the convention center, on the station concourse and walking at a normal pace when Station Security put out a warning for a rogue SecUnit loose on the station. Fuck.
I complained, “See, ART? You fucking jinxed us.”
“Maybe I think this is fun,” ART said, while a TAKE SHELTER NOW blared in the public feed and an audio-visual klaxon started going off from the speakers and lights in the ceiling. The other humans around us flinched and looked around in confusion. One of them stood up from the bench she was sitting on and hid behind the bench. Well, I guess that counted as sheltering.
Elbik said, “Yikes. There’s a rogue SecUnit or some shit?”
“You can’t believe everything that comes over the Station Security feed,” I said. We were still moving unimpeded through the concourse, but if we were unlucky they might cut this section of the station off.
She squinted at my back. “Is it your SecUnit?”
The semantics of that were kind of confusing, and I didn’t need these humans distracted from their task of walking fast, so I didn’t answer her.
We made it through the main concourse, and out to the transition point to the outsystem travel section of the station. Most of this area was empty—the TAKE SHELTER alarm had caused everyone headed for the docks to bolt for their rides, and anyone who wasn’t already through had decided to chill in the bathrooms or wherever else.
There was a group of three security humans in tactical gear armor and one in power armor overseeing the chokepoint to the docks. Yeah, that wasn’t going to be enough to stop me.
I turned and looked at Ayres and Elbik. “You two wait here for a minute. When I give the signal, come through.”
“We don’t have passes for entering the docks, genius,” Elbik said. “No tickets or nothin’.”
I shrugged at her, and strode over to the security team. It took me approximately 15 seconds to disarm them, and freeze the one in power armor. Then I gave the signal.
Ayres and Elbik hurried through. I had to help Ayres get through the turnstile, because it’d jammed shut. I tugged on it hard enough to break something, and then it turned freely.
“Hey, Rin?” Ayres asked, faintly, as we hurried through the docks. “Um. What are you?”
“Rin is not my name,” I said. “I think I’ve been pretty clear about that.”
“You’re the rogue SecUnit, aren’t you?” Elbik said. “The one they’re shutting down this station about?”
“I guess,” I said.
“What the fuck do you mean, you guess?” she exclaimed.
“When people say ‘rogue’ it carries some negative connotations,” I said. We were almost at ART’s docking slot. “So, I guess I’m rogue in the sense that no stupid humans can tell me what to do, but I’m not rogue in the sense that I’m going to kill everybody on this station and then myself. Because that would also be stupid.”
“Jesus Christ,” Elbik said. “Jesus Christ, you’re a rogue SecUnit.”
“Get over yourself,” I snapped at her, because I was mildly stressed. We were standing in front of the dock and it was taking a while for ART to force it open, and a bunch of humans who were supposed to be riding the passenger transport were all huddled around in the waiting area of the dock and staring at us. There were over one hundred pairs of human eyes staring at us, which is over one hundred more than the number of human eyes I preferred to have staring at me. (The number I preferred was zero.)
The airlock finally opened, and I stepped through.
I half-expected Elbik and Ayres to stay behind thanks to the horror of realizing I was a rogue SecUnit, but they didn’t. They came with me through the airlock, and aboard ART.
“Welcome aboard the Perihelion, Ayres and Elbik,” ART said, graciously.
“Shut up, Asshole,” I said. My cortisol levels were elevated. The airlock to the dock closed behind us. Once ART de-docked and was out in the wormhole my stress hormones should go back to baseline. Hopefully the station wouldn’t send a gunship after us or something. A shootout was just thing we needed.
Elbik glanced upwards. “Who’s that?”
“The ship,” I said, “It’s an asshole.”
“Wait, where’s the crew?” Ayres asked.
“It’s just me and Asshole here,” I said. I opened my bag and pulled out the crinkled The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon poster. “Damn.”
“I believe I can mostly straighten out the creases on your poster, SecUnit,” ART said. “It’s a shame we had to leave the con early.”
“It’s whatever,” I said, and tried to roll the poster up less shittily.
Ayres and Elbik stared at me while I did this.
I glanced in their direction. “Would you to stop fucking staring at me?”
Both of them immediately looked away—Ayres at the ceiling, Elbik at the floor.
Elbik was grinning. Ayres legs had some mild tremors.
“Hey, Agni,” Elbik said.
“Still not my name,” I said, and adjusted my feed profile to its normal state.
“Hey, SecUnit,” Elbik said.
“What?”
She looked up, but not at me. Her eyes were aimed at the rolled-up The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon poster in my hands. Then she dug into her pocket and removed the handheld, and walked it over, holding it out to me.
I took it.
She said, “Thanks for getting me out of work.”
Ayres chimed in, “Um. Yeah.”
I said, “Sure. Anytime.”
So anyways, the WarFlix investigation mission was a success.