Chapter Text
It seems like there should be a very neat line, at least for humans, between dead and not dead, but I’ve seen enough messy half-alive humans to know that there is no such clear distinction. I’ve seen bodies that were still breathing despite missing part of their heads, bodies that weren’t breathing despite their owners being fully conscious. I wouldn’t call either option alive. I wouldn’t call either option dead, either.
For a machine intelligence, the border is even blurrier. Did ART really die when TargetSystem deleted it, overwriting its entire being with zero after zero after zero? If so, was it resurrected when I unlocked its backup? Or was there no such thing as resurrection, a consciousness interrupted dead and fated to stay that way forever? That would mean the being I called ART was actually ART 2.0, a new person inheriting an old body along with the memories of the previous owner. That was a morbid thought.
You could fall a billion light-years down this rabbit hole. Was a machine that was powered off but ready to restart dead? Or was it merely… not sleeping, that was a human thing, but some equivalent? What about a bot that had been disassembled? All the bits and pieces there, good as new, ready to be pieced back together… is that bot dead? It’s certainly not whatever the bot equivalent of sleeping is, it’s hard to argue that it’s alive… but is it dead?
I don’t know. These questions are probably above my pay grade, even now that I actually get paid (quite well, I might add (or I used to--I doubt I'll be picking up my next paycheck)).
Certain kinds of media just love to discuss these philosophical headaches, not in the context of bots, not that I’ve seen anyway, but in fantasy settings. Dead ‘Till Dawn had zombies, vampires and demons around every corner and a revolving door between whatever plane the living heroes were currently inhabiting and the realm of the dead. One character became a zombie during a mid-season finale and then he—and his companions—had to decide whether he was really still himself, whether he was alive or dead. A huge amount of runtime revolved around exploring what “undead” really meant. There was another character whose soul was obliterated through some horrific act of ancient and forbidden magic carried out by a recurring villain, but her body lived on and her personality seemed unchanged. This was (understandably in a world where the afterlife was very real and frequently visited) a constant source of anxiety for her and she faced vicious discrimination at times as a result of being a “soulless husk.” She came to terms with it, decided that she was still alive and still a person, that she was not a dead thing. The zombie decided the same about himself and the two of them ended up riding off into the sunset together at the end of the series.
Dead ‘Till Dawn intentionally left the viewer with a lot of unanswered, vaguely unsettling philosophical garbage to chew on. It was a great series—everyone agreed there—and I’d been unable to put it down (metaphorically—it’s not like I have to hold anything to watch shows in the feed) when I saw it. I’d never rewatched it, though. It made me feel… things I didn’t want to think about. I knew why that was, even though I’d rather not admit it.
It wasn’t as if any situation I’d lived through was comparable to the things that happened in Dead ‘Till Dawn ’s particular crapsack world… but there were plenty of things that weren’t not comparable, either, like season 2 episode 12, Professionals.
Professionals focused in on two contract killers sent to assassinate the heroes. The entire episode was a very skilled writer musing, in serial form, about the different meanings of cruelty. One of the killers was a sadist who played with their captive, torturing them not for information but for pleasure. The other caught one of the protagonists in a booby trap, a magical snare that slowly choked him nearly to death over the course of hours, inflicting every bit as much suffering as the sadist but with none of the emotion. Using the snare, allowing the snare to do its job without interference, was purely a matter of practicality, of convenience. This killer didn’t care enough about their captive to have any feelings about their suffering. The screams of agony elicited no pleasure, no discomfort, no reaction at all, because the captive hero was just that unimportant in the killer’s twisted worldview.
The latter killer’s indifference was cruelty, that much was obvious. He was every bit as cruel as his sadist counterpart. The only difference was in the aesthetics.
I was familiar enough with such things. The Corporation Rim had plenty of sadistic cruelty and plenty of indifferent cruelty, too.
This was the latter sort, indifferent cruelty. None of the people involved cared about me enough to enjoy hurting me. They didn’t even believe I could be hurt. None of this meant anything more to them than skipping a stone across a pond, watching it sink into oblivion at the end of its brief flight.
Fixing my data port was too much work when they were just going to take it apart that same day. That was person hours. That was resources. Physical restrains and paralytic drugs were dirt cheap and quick in comparison.
I’d never been dosed with something like this before; governed SecUnits are just put into repair lockdown mode while the techs work on them. My eyes were open a slit. I couldn’t close them, couldn’t even move them or change the focus. That was probably normal, not that it mattered if it wasn’t (and it wasn’t as if I could ask anybody about it).
“I don’t get why we’re being so damn careful with the thing. It took down how many other units before they brought it in?” I’d decided to call this one Squeaky Voice. They were smart, the voice of reason. Out of the four construct techs in the lab, they were the sole sensible one. “Explain to me why we didn’t toss it wholesale in the recycler?”
“It took down four units,” Gruff Voice replied, “injured two others. Quite impressive, don’t you think? We’re supposed to find out how.”
“It’s plenty obvious how,” Squeaky Voice complained, “it’s mean. Someone taught this thing how to fight dirty and it puts the training to good use. Management ought--”
“Management will tell us what to do,” Smooth Voice interrupted, “and we will do as we are told. They know best. We are just the technicians here. We can’t see the big picture. They can.”
“I agree with Kalik. It does make me nervous that we brought this thing in still functional,” the last one was Boring Voice. Nothing distinguished their tone from an average taken from several hundred humans speaking at the same time.
“It’s not going to be laying around,” Gruff Voice replied. “That’s the whole point of taking it apart.”
Squeaky Voice seemed to have realized how insubordinate their words might seem on the recordings that some other SecUnit was certainly making of this conversation. Still, they couldn’t resist the urge to be a reasonable, sensible person and point out how absurdly dangerous it was to bring a rogue murderbot into a lab alive and conscious rather than blasting the rogue to pieces on the docks and throwing the remains into the recycler. “I will always do what I’m instructed, of course, I respect management’s decision. I’m sure they understand how dangerous this thing is and how risky it is to have around better than me. It just makes me nervous to be here with it, knowing it can still hear us, that it could kill us in a second if it got loose.”
“Probably less than a second,” Boring Voice muttered.
“Well then, we’d best work quickly, hm? With four of us we can be done in an hour at most. I’m sure our subject will appreciate our undivided attention.” They all laughed, some more sincerely than others.
The little slit of white ceiling that I could see was replaced by the blue of a tech’s scrubs for a moment, then they slipped out of view again and everything was, once more, sickening off-white. There was no feed in this room at all. I would have killed for a single input, a view of anything but that slice of ceiling.
I knew what they were going to do to me, both in the precise, clinical terms of my own maintenance manual (which I had stolen tens of thousands of hours ago) and from my own experience (well, I knew about the first parts, anyway).
I’d joked about it plenty of times before, about being partially dismantled because of a clerical error. As long as I treated it like a joke it was a joke, right? That’s how it works, thoughts create reality or whatever they said in that children’s program with winged horses that I hadn’t cared for all that much.
“Get the plate layer access keys. Let’s get started.”
As long as I talked about it like it was fine it was fine. As long as I talked about myself like I was equipment I was equipment. It would be wrong to do something like this to a person but I wasn’t a person so it wasn’t wrong.
How many times would I have to repeat that to myself before it stopped sounding like a lie?
I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think that treating humans like disposable slaves was wrong. If I didn’t think that murder was wrong, I would be only a murderbot not Murderbot. For a long time I’d left myself out of the category of people, so I couldn’t be murdered, so hurting me or killing me wasn’t wrong.
It was a mindset that I’d worn like a mask for more than 30,000 hours. It was a mindset that could protect me from anything… It was a mindset I could no longer wrestle myself into.
From Mensah to Arada to Iris, all of my humans treated me like a person. ART treated me like a person. Three treated me like a person and I treated it like a person because it was, it so obviously was, and if I said that I wasn’t a person because I was a SecUnit then that meant Three wasn’t a person, either. If I said killing me wasn’t murder because I was a SecUnit then killing Three wasn’t murder either and that was fucking unacceptable. If anyone did this, anything like this, anything a tenth this bad, to Three, I would tear that monster to pieces and shove the remains into ART’s recycler (someone had done something like this to ART and I had torn them to pieces… and I wasn’t actually sure whether their bodies had been shoved in ART’s recyclers, probably not, but maybe).
I’d never get the chance to tear anyone apart for this.
Would Three get the chance? Three or ART or maybe one of their humans… would they come here, waste their escape that I’d traded my life for, to take the terrible, righteous revenge that I would have taken if it had been Three in my place in this lab? Or would they do the smart thing and run, never look back, accept my sacrifice and get even in the long run, do it for everyone’s sake not just mine?
Maybe. I could hope.
It didn’t hurt. I’d turned my pain sensors down all the way. It was jarring, though, wrong, a raw, cold feeling on the internals and nerves in my ankles that they had just exposed to the air by removing my feet.
“Circulation locks here and here, then we can strip the organics. I’ve never worked on one where you had no system access at all before. It’s an interesting challenge, huh? Watch the capacitors, Reileiy. They’re still going to be charged.”
“I’m getting some thicker gloves for this.”
I hoped ART and Three would take our humans and do the smart thing, run like hell. Unfortunately, that would be very out of character for all of them (especially ART who had showed that it was willing to threaten the lives of hundreds of people if it could maybe save mine).
I didn’t let myself hope that they would somehow rescue me. Nothing would hurt more than hoping for a rescue. Well, a rescue attempt that ended with the company in possession of Three or any of my humans would hurt worse than hope, and that was the only way that a rescue attempt would possibly end in this scenario. Nobody got out of the heart of this station without the company’s permission.
Nobody got out alive, anyway… and that brought me back to the original questions. Would I be dead when they shipped me out of here in fifty different boxes?
“Damn. This is really—wait. This is a nonstandard modification. It’s welded here. Need a plasma cutter.”
“Gotcha. Careful with that.”
The shock of heat against my knee sent adrenaline surging through me because I knew that I was being burned, even if I couldn’t feel it.
There was no reason to be afraid. Fear was for the unknown. I knew exactly what they were going to do (minus these nonstandard approaches for nonstandard modifications) so what was there to be afraid of? It would just be more of this, heat and discomfort and missing sensations like black holes (processes searching, searching constantly to connect with parts that weren’t there anymore, returning Error Retry after Error Retry like a mounting symphony of tone-deaf trumpets shouting in my brain) for another thirty minutes and then nothing.
It wasn’t going to hurt, not really, and then I wouldn’t feel anything ever again.
That was death, wasn’t it? By definition? And here we were back to that original question again.
“Careful. If you cut off its circulation too soon nerve tissue could be damaged and we want all of its relays intact. Scheffer wants them shipped to them for study.”
“Think they’ll be able to tell what makes this thing so special? If we could harness that kind of skill it’d be good for the new line of Combats.”
“Scheffer’s good at their job. They’ll probably learn a lot of things.”
So they were going to take me apart and ship the pieces off station to another construct technician. I’d figured as much already. In theory, if this Scheffer wanted they could put me back together good as new, as long as my neural relays were flash frozen and preserved, as long as the crash chips with core programming and memories weren’t damaged or intentionally wiped. Eventually they’d probably dissect the pieces of my brain and then reassembly would be off the table.
So would I die when they started cutting up my neural tissue hundreds or thousands of hours from now? Or would I die when they took my head apart and pulled out my neural relays in fifteen minutes?
I didn’t want to think about that anymore. I didn’t want to think about anything anymore (give it a quarter hour, Murderbot, and you'll get that wish granted). Cold, creeping tendrils of numbness and associated error codes crept further and further up what had been my chest but was mostly scrap now. I couldn’t ignore it, the foreign, empty cold, and what remained of my stupid organics insisted on panicking and dumping stress hormones into my remaining blood. It was a helpless, sick terror which I could hardly remember feeling before, a frantic desire to scream, to thrash, to beg for mercy, and my inability to do any of those things only compounded the terror making it steadily worse, uncontrollable.
It was irrational. Irrational. There was nothing to be afraid of. I knew how this would go. I knew the procedures. No unknowns. Nothing to fear.
“Alright. Disconnect cardiac and pulmonary pumps… now. I’m ready to get the supports wired in.”
A deluge of emergency warnings and errors hit my brain like a chainsaw as they unhooked my entire circulatory and respiratory system. They’d use an easily connected external heart-lung machine to keep the delicate pieces of me alive while they finished up.
I could shut myself down if I wanted, check out early. Who would want to claim their final minutes of consciousness if this was what was offered? But that would be trading one hell for another. The organic bits of me that remained would have some awareness, still, of what was happening with none of the context to understand it. It would be a literal and figurative nightmare. Maybe it would still be better than this. Maybe not.
“Help me with the service lock here. They’re not usually this hard to get open.”
“I doubt anybody’s been poking around in this thing’s head for a long time.”
“Alright. Auxiliary chips first then the crash chips.”
“Sure we don’t want to go for the relays first? I wouldn’t want to risk damaging them trying to get all the other chips out.”
“Always get the chips first. There’s a good reason why we take them apart in this order.”
The first time they took me apart, they hadn’t--
“Alright. Here’s the first crash chip. Get it sealed up.”
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_5’: No such file or directory
I couldn’t remember. There had been something like this before. Something back when I still worked for--
“That’s two.”
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_8’: No such file or directory
I worked for… for someone. Did I work for someone?
“Three.”
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_19’: No such file or directory
Something… where was I? What was happening? What were these errors? Why couldn’t I see anything but white?
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_11’: No such file or directory
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_13’: No such file or directory
I needed to know. It was cold. Was it cold? Was that the right word? I thought it might be. I’d used it for something like this before, to describe it to—to--
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_16’: No such file or directory
Why not? They should be there. Where were all my memory core blocks? Was there anything I could access at all?
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_1’: No such file or directory
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_2’: No such file or directory
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_3’: No such file or directory
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_4’: No such file or directory
Cannot access ‘/dev/block_5’: No such file or directory
“Last one.”
Bus Error 10
Bus Error 10
Bus Error 10
Shutdown
Restart
Failure: Boot Disk Not Found
Retry
Restart
Failure: Boot Disk Not Found
Shutdown
No Restart
Someone laughing at me, another voice speaking in incomprehensible words, but the tone so clear and clinical.
“Neural relay one. Freeze it.”
Endless winding corridors, all filled with hungry things. All closing in on me, twisting into monstrous patterns. Consumers of flesh. Consumers of metal.
“Relay two.”
Too narrow to fit. Walls squeezing down on me. Suffocating cold. Cutting sharp.
“There’s three.”
Cold. Dark. Laughing. Things in the dark. Gray skinned. Fingers in my head. Sharp teeth. Sharp teeth on their fingers—claws? Claws.
“Four. Half done.”
Teeth-claw-dark—cave—twisting—shape.
“Careful with this one. Something odd about it here.”
Shape? Maybe-shape.
“Six.”
Point. Sharp.
“Almost done. Careful! If you drop this we’re all in big trouble!”
Cold.