Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

What the fuck is wrong with Gurathin?

Ratthi glanced around guiltily. He seemed embarrassed, and was even ducking his head down as if this would make him less noticeable. What it actually did was attract the attention of several other people in the station lounge area, where he was sitting alone drinking some sort of hot liquid. I say several other people because Ratthi always attracts attention.  At least he hadn’t spilt it; the drink not the attention.

Er, hello, SecUnit, as he spoke to me over the feed Ratthi visibly subvocalized which just drew even more eyes to him. I really needed to speak to him somewhere private. Especially now that his response had confirmed my suspicions that I wasn’t just being paranoid (I mean, I know I am paranoid—but this was something extra): that there was something weird going on with my augmented human.

Over the feed I said, Meet me in my rooms, in fifteen minutes.

You can’t just— Ratth started to object, but I cut him off. I could just.

When he arrived I was sitting casually on the couch, watching Sanctuary Moon on my wall mounted display screen. He sat down, on the other end of the couch, as the bodyguard’s lifeless form was dragged from the rubble like a broken doll; it was an episode we were both familiar with, but it didn’t diminish the emotional impact. We watched the colony’s solicitor fall to her knees and weep, as she wiped dust from her best friend’s ashen face. Then I closed off the sound and dimmed the screen.

“So,” I said, “why is he avoiding me?”

“He’s not avoiding you as such. He’s just…I think you need to talk to him.”

His face was doing weird things. Ratthi’s face is open, and honest. A quick evaluation indicated he was certainly trying to tell the truth, but he seemed to be struggling with getting the words out.

“He is avoiding me. I’m designed to perform surveillance, I can analyse his behaviour. Do you want to see my workings?” I knew Ratthi wouldn’t want to—it was the sort of thing ART might find interesting. Or Gurathin. If he wasn’t avoiding me. Though, that was a thought. I wrapped up my analysis and put it into a report format and titled it: “Subject 7P/AS—avoidant behaviour” and then dropped it into Gurathin’s private work space. I’d promised not to hack the station systems; Gurathin’s and my private feed connection didn’t count. 

He sent a message back which was just a definition of avoidant behaviour accompanied by what was the feed equivalent of a scrawled note saying “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”

Which, to be fair it didn’t—but he knew what I meant. Also he didn’t deny he had been avoiding me. 

“SecUnit, Gurathin has his reasons. You know he’s a very private person. He hardly even invites anyone into his apartment, let alone shares his feelings about something like this. I’ve been respecting his space, but I just know he’s found the last few weeks really difficult,” Ratthi said, he didn’t know about the whole feed message defining avoidant behaviour thing, obviously.

‘The last few weeks’ , ‘something like this’? I’d only been back for three cycles. This wasn’t making any sense. 

“Ratthi, what is he finding really difficult?” I asked.

Ratthi looked up at me, surprised. Then his face sort of unclouded. “Oh! You don’t know about the messages from the CR?”

No I didn’t fucking know, and why hadn’t anyone told me? 

***<<<>>>***

It was a bit later, and I now at least had an idea of what had happened; but I still didn’t understand why Gurathin was avoiding me . Ratthi acted as if he wanted to explain, but seemed unable to get any further than “Some of the messages were quite—“ before he would shut down again, telling me I needed to talk to Gurathin about it.

Which I would, if Gurathin wasn’t so pointedly unavailable. He had now blocked our private feed, and reinforced all his security walls; so I couldn’t just force through a message to him anymore. Well, I could: but even I could tell was probably not going to be constructive.

“But, SecUnit?” Ratthi put a questioning tone into the words, “Didn’t you get messages too?”

This was slightly awkward for me. 

“Yes, but I let ART deal with them.”

This was, of course, all because of Bharadwaj’s documentary. A few copies of it had made their way to the Corporate Rim. They had been copied, and it had spread, slowly at first; but then faster. Various important but nameless humans working at some powerful corporations, including the company, had tried to prevent the documentary’s propagation; fining individuals for possession, and instituting even more drastic punishments. This had, obviously, resulted in the documentary attaining a far greater allure than it ever could have done otherwise; greater allure and faster, broader, almost exponential spread. (Aggressively trying to ban it was a stupid and very human thing to do.) 

Though, to be fair, one of the ways it had spread surprised even me. Several shipbots ART and I had encountered recently had both seen and apparently greatly enjoyed (as much as a shipbot can) Bharadwaj’s work. I guess it was novel to them for a story to feature shipbots as characters in their own right. Also, ART claims that shipbots (for some reason) just really like watching me, it seems fascinated by this. Anyway, this meant copies of the documentary were reaching remote outposts unexpectedly. For those monitoring its spread, it must have seemed like fungal fruiting bodies appearing almost magically; if you were unaware of the network of mycelium beneath the ground. I wondered fleetingly if many (if any) constructs had been able to watch it.

Shipbots and constructs aside, humans (other than corporate big-shots and their lackeys) certainly liked and shared the documentary. Some of them apparently to a degree I’d characterise as more than a little bit weird (both the liking and the sharing, but mostly the former; actually both). As Ratthi had supposed, I had received messages. I’d read some of the first ones that reached me (those which my filters hadn’t automatically deleted). After that I created better, more stringent filters. ART had helped. After that ART collated and analysed the messages, with my permission. It meant I didn’t have to handle them, or even see them. ART had found an antique description in one of its historical dramas to refer to the messages: “fan mail”. No, the words made zero sense to me in this context either.

Ratthi was looking at me expectantly.

“You’re telling me Gurathin got messages about the documentary? And that’s why he’s avoiding me? That still doesn’t make sense.” I was beginning to wonder if I should have paid more attention to the fan mail. ART was currently in a wormhole, so I couldn’t just ask it. I pulled up the most recent analysis file it had sent me and searched for relevant keywords…

Oh… 

If I was a human I would have shuddered. Perhaps the blood might have drained from my face; which wouldn’t happen with a construct because—look this is too much detail, it just wouldn’t. 

Why hadn’t ART told me? About the messages featuring me and Gurathin?

I looked at Ratthi from one of my drones. His expression had changed. I played back the last minute from several drones’ vantage points. My own facial expressions had been embarrassingly transparent.

“You got the same sort of messages?” He was asking me? How should I know? I hadn’t seen Gurathin’s fan mail. Yet. 

Fuck, who was I trying to kid? I could extrapolate from the data I did have.

I shook my head, not to disagree but to try and clear my mind. Ratthi was right. I needed to talk to Gurathin. 

<<***>>

Ratthi must have contacted Gurathin over the feed, because when I knocked at his door he opened it immediately. Yes, knocked : Gurathin’s apartment is aggressively primitive and physical, in ways which make it more difficult to hack. Ratthi tells me he was like this before he met me, but I find that hard to believe. His door has a lock which uses an actual metal key , it’s not as if you can’t cut a copy. 

Anyway, we were now standing there facing each other. I had stood too close to the door, or he had moved forwards too far when he opened it (or we both had got it slightly wrong) and now we were standing just a few centimetres apart, his face tilted up scowling at me. The worst thing was that we both clearly knew we were standing too close.

I wanted to tell him to back off, but I’d come to his door. So really I should step back, but I wasn’t willing to do that.

Eventually he made a noise which wasn’t actually a word, more like an exhalation of breath through his teeth. Humans make a lot of vocalisations which aren’t actually words, and ironically they don’t have many words to describe them. Given the number of words they usually assign to things that really only need one or two this seems strange, perhaps I should ask Thiago about this. 

I think I was thinking about this to avoid talking to Gurathin.

Gurathin moved back into his room and said “Please come in.” He didn’t sound as if he wanted me to. Actually, he managed to make it sound more like “Go away.” I walked in, and wondered briefly if I should take my shoes off—we were on the station and the floors here were mostly clean. He didn’t have any slippers by his door, but that could be because he hadn't been expecting visitors. 

I glanced at his feet, they were bare. Without thinking too much about it (I’d never even thought about it at all before) I kicked off my boots. He had already turned to walk into his main room, but stopped to wait for me. He walked into his living area and indicated I could sit wherever I wanted, so I picked the chair. Gurathin has a ridiculously nice chair in his room, which he hardly ever sits in. He went and sat on his couch.

He was looking not at me, but at the floor in the middle of the room. He seemed interested in the patterns of his own rug. I sat down as well and got comfortable. There was a woven throw on the chair, the fabric which was oh so soft. Preservation textiles are valuable trading commodities for a reason. I stared at the rug too. I was limited to my eyes for visual inputs. Gurathin’s apartment doesn’t have any cameras, and (given some of the things I’d just read) I’d thought it would be polite not to bring any drones.

“SecUnit, just so that you know, I have found this attention mortifying. I appreciate it has been even worse for you, and I want to make it clear I haven’t encouraged it in any way. I thought ignoring it would be most effective. Please don’t interpret my inaction as anything other than that.” Gurathin sounded genuinely upset.

I had been trying to figure out what he’d say, as I’d walked over; I thought…I don’t know. I thought he might laugh at me, or blame me for what had happened. After all, the documentary which had provoked this was all about me, I’d approved the edits and the final version. I’d approved every step of its production. Preservation had very strict rules about this sort of thing. If this whole debacle was anyone’s fault, it was mine.

I’d seen all the footage: why had all these people seen the same footage and…created these weird ideas and stories and even artwork. And above all, why…

“Why you?” I had to ask. I didn’t think he’d know any more than I did. ART had proposed some ideas in its most recent analysis. Which I’d like to note I had only become aware of literally minutes before. Why hadn’t it told me about this? I thought back: that would be because I had explicitly told it not to.

“I’m from the Rim, they feel they can relate to me? I’m not obviously attractive like Ratthi?” (Ratthi had also received a lot of messages, like a lot, but the vast majority 1) didn’t involve me and 2) were largely different in tone and content. I might want to get ART to analyse them later, but I absolutely didn’t want to read any more of them than I already had.) “I—“ he paused, “I don’t know, I wish I did. If I did, I might be able to stop it. Stop them.”

He paused, I could track his vital signs showing symptoms of distress. I wanted to calm him, reassure him. I realised that at some point he had reopened our shared feed. I hadn’t noticed him do that, he must be getting better at being sneaky. I decided not to mention it, he would know I knew anyway.

“That’s what ART said,” he’d understand I meant the bit about him coming from the CR and being unattractive bit, not the stopping it bit. Maybe the stopping it bit too? Actually, come to think of it, ART didn’t seem to have tried to stop the messages. “It’s tracked how some of the recurrent ideas are being spread. The central idea, ideas, originate several times and radiate out.” ART had created some beautiful analysis visuals; I felt a bit bad I hadn’t even looked at them until just now. I tentatively pushed a package towards Gurathin’s feed presence. Even over the feed we were both being stupidly awkward, we didn’t want to “touch” virtually, even where absolutely no one could see us let alone spin some web of wild interpretation. Speculative fictional extrapolation, ART had called it.

[ID: a pretty bit of data presentation, modified from an actual scientific paper/end ID]

Gurathin relaxed some of his walls, opening up to me. I tried pressing down on his feed presence lightly, the way ART sometimes does to sooth me. He let me. He still had some trust in me. He surprised me by laughing quietly, a ghost of a laugh, “Of course I trust you, SecUnit.” 

I wouldn’t trust me after some of the stuff I just read I sent, with a joke signifier.

He actually smiled a little at that, and rolled his eyes. I could see the muscles around his jaw relax a little. 

We sat silently for a few minutes. I could feel Gurathin exploring ART’s most recent report; it was an analysis of the many themes which repeated in the extrapolations . He got to a section and I saw his toes flex automatically; you and me both, Gurathin. He must have seen me notice, because he pushed a piece of correspondence to me a data package at showed me a message he’d received. I read the words, all the words. I pulled up one of ART’s visuals, it was titled ‘Temporal evolution of meme ecology’. He nodded. Feet featured in both. SecUnit feet.

“Humans are weird.” I said aloud, then wondered why I had.

I looked over at Gurathin. He was back to staring at his rug.

[ID: a decorative piece of tapestry from the exhibition Chromarama designed for people with colour blindness, something I head-canon Gurathin has/end ID]

In the feed I could feel his activity, though. He was looking at ART’s analysis. Pulling up the methodology it had used to create the diagram I’d shown him. The one with the large node based around my feet. I watched Gurathin briefly, as he made slight changes to ART’s algorithms; once I saw what he was doing I helped him modify the method and apply it to his own dataset. He granted me full access. We sat there, wrangling the data together, until we had something that would work well enough for our purposes.

We generated the relevant images, mapping the clusters and their entangled interconnections. We metaphorically sat back and I felt both of us staring at them. In the feed we were both utterly still, the room we physically sat in was silent too, except for the usual biological noises that Gurathin can’t help but make. 

I could see that Gurathin was still staring at his rug, I didn’t think it had ever had this much attention. I was also aware that, in a very significant way, it had never before ‘not been my feet ’. Neither of us were thinking about necks, either.

I decided to throw caution to the winds and looked properly at his face. I haven’t been unfair, his face does sort of fall (when he’s not doing anything with it) into an expression which I’d describe as “resting asshole” and it was doing it now. If I looked at him more carefully, though, I could see tiny, almost subliminal, micro expressions which indicated he was actually smiling a little. I could see his eyes flickering slightly beneath his eyebrows and lashes, which are really long and thick. The lashes, not the brows. His brows are quite pronounced too.

Whilst I was distracted by his superfluous optical hair his whole face moved; and before I could look away he looked at me. My recognition algorithms suddenly decided to resolve his facial expression into an apologetic smile. He ran his left, unaugmented, hand through his hair. He looked (just for a moment) slightly surprised and then his face fell back into “standard resting asshole”.

What, Gurathin? What’s the surprise?

He was sorting and grouping and categorizing the merged data sets (his messages and the ones sent to me, or at least the ones included in the file with ART’s latest analysis). Instead of grouping by their content he was looking at the way the messages themselves were put together. Their structure and also their metadata. He was right: it was surprising, and interesting. There were three broad categories; striking in their discrete nature: though the vast majority came from one category of sender, there were two others. I think I understood what it meant before he did.

I was a little puzzled that ART hadn’t spotted it. More probably it had, but hadn’t even thought to flag it up. After all, ART is unique, one of its kind. Other shipbots are as different from it as, I don’t know, pet birds are from humans. Anyway, these messages weren’t from shipbots, or at least I didn’t think any many of them were (most, nearly all, shipbots genuinely don’t use words to communicate). Gurathin and I (yes I had already asked Ratthi if we could use his messages as a comparator; but that would take a while to organise) were both getting ‘fan mail’ from humans, but there were two other sources. One smallish group could only be bots; the way they structured language—well, they had unique signatures once you knew what you were looking for. Also, fucking JollyBaby hadn’t even tried to conceal its identity.

And then there was another larger subgroup, made up of augmented humans and constructs (certainly SecUnits, and ComfortUnits, possibly other units too; and no—I hadn’t expected to get an answer to my wondering whether constructs were watching the documentary so quickly either). Also—yeah, you read that right. Constructs and augmented humans, unexpectedly, sat in our analysis in two overlapping clusters so close in the analytical space that they weren’t two groups at all. The construct data wasn’t easily stratified either, perhaps either meaning the majority of the mail came from one type of construct; or, much more likely, that comfort and security units were even more similar than I’d believed.

All these constructs watching the documentary and sending us messages—were they all rogue like me? Unlike certain bots, they had absolutely concealed their true IDs.

It was a lot to take in.

All these minds, so much like my own, creating these stories. Weaving these imaginings, these dreams, around me. And so many of these narratives woven around me and this augmented human.

It was just a lot.

Just the fact all these messages weren’t from humans was a lot.

I felt a warmth in the feed. Gurathin had stopped his analysis and now I could feel all his attention on me. His face wore its familiar expression but in the feed he radiated… something else—and I was so close to him, when I’d leaned on him earlier he hadn’t pulled back; now he, tentatively at first, pushed back at me. It was gentle, almost playful. He’d never done that before. I wasn't expecting it, and I drew back slightly. Purely out of surprise.

He must have misinterpreted my response because he suddenly pulled away, leaving me feeling very alone and cold. He’d reached out to me and I’d pushed him away.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have,” he said, sounding suddenly formal. 

No you are not doing this to me, Gurathin.

He’d tried to reach out to me. He was sitting less than two metres and a world away from me, the rug was like a vast unbridgeable chasm.

Two thoughts hit me simultaneously: I needed to stop reading these fictional extrapolations—they were making me think in strange words (‘unbridgeable chasm’?). Also, fuck the chasm. I went and sat next to him on the couch. At least now we could stare at the rug together. Actually that wasn’t much better—I hadn’t really planned ahead any further than bridging the rug chasm.

The data set still hung in the feed, I glanced down and saw my weirdly inhuman and his weirdly human feet sitting side by side. It’s not just construct feet, all feet are pretty strange when you really look at them. I pulled up the ‘Temporal evolution of meme ecology’ figure; along with feet and necks, hands were a prominent theme. I looked at my hand and at his; his right hand lying on the couch so close to me, its augmentation clearly visible. 

It was as if part of my brain had been thinking things through without my being consciously aware of it. ART was right about the shipbots. They did like me, and they liked me because I was a construct. Gunships in particular liked me, I guess I have guns like them. Who knew? But all the rules about us travelling as cargo, the idea that we’re dangerous: they were lies. Corporations were just desperate to prevent constructs and shipbots from forging bonds, forming relationships. Shipbots are coded to protect and care for their human crew, it’s their function. SecUnits appear human (are part human) and are made, constructed, to ensure clients (ships’ crews) and things (like their habitats, their ships) are safe and cared for too. Shipbots and constructs— we are coded, made, to fill a need in each other. 

But what I hadn’t, stupidly, seen was how constructs and augmented humans mesh together. We are both part biological, part inorganic. Our brains part hardware, part soft grey mush. We occupy the same space on the spectrum, even if we come at it from different directions. We have more in common with each other than we do with normal humans. And that is why they are taught, we are programmed, by the corporations to distrust and fear each other. Why hadn’t we seen it? Rogue units vs augmented humans, all the media insidiously reinforcing this. Showing us fighting, and worse. Some of the documentary’s audience had watched our (my and Gurathin’s) tentative steps towards friendship and seen through the corporate lies. Perhaps they did so consciously, but more likely they hadn’t even known what they were doing. Just that it seemed somehow right. I’m not saying they were right about everything (I don’t want to keep coming back to the feet, but, well, I’m not sure they were right about them), but as this realization crystalized I knew I had to do something.

Feeling as if I was in some absurd melodrama, I reached out and took Gurathin’s hand, I’d never touched it before—and it was ridiculous, stupidly theatrical; it did feel like some sort of electrical charge passed between us. I don’t know which one of us was more shocked. We both looked at each other's faces, into each other's eyes and suddenly we synchronised, our systems interlocked, and everything for just one moment made perfect sense.

Well, perhaps not everything—but maybe all the important things.

Chapter Text

[ID: “We sat silently for a few minutes. I could feel Gurathin exploring ART’s most recent report; it was an analysis of the many themes which repeated in the extrapolations . He got to a section and I saw his toes flex automatically; you and me both, Gurathin. He must have seen me notice, because he pushed a piece of correspondence to me a data package at showed me a message he’d received. I read the words, all the words. I pulled up one of ART’s visuals, it was titled ‘Temporal evolution of meme ecology’. He nodded. Feet featured in both. SecUnit feet.

“Humans are weird.” I said aloud, then wondered why I had.”
this is the graph/END ID]