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By the time Farai meets her wife’s SecUnit, it has become a sort of legend to her. It’s like something out of an adventure serial: a rogue security unit from within the Corporation Rim that just happens to be bonded to her wife’s expedition. It would be an absolutely terrifying idea, if she hadn’t learned about all of this after it was all over and Ayda was home safe and sound. And if it wasn’t a little bit overshadowed by the fact that GrayCris actively tried to murder Ayda and the entire Preservation Aux expedition.
Farai decided a long time ago that she’s not much for offworld exploration. She’s the homebody, Tano is the rock, and Ayda is the hotshot explorer/planetary leader who both of them are very lucky to have married - even if Ayda seems somehow convinced that she is an ordinary, very uncool person. (The fact that they have teenagers might contribute to that. Teenagers are very good at being unimpressed.) The point is, Ayda has come home with amazing stories before, but this one takes the cake. In fact it might walk off with the whole bakery. Especially because it amounts to a major and ongoing diplomatic incident between them and a very scary corporate entity.
The legal battle that ensues comes as no surprise: GrayCris has to be taken down, in a thorough and public fashion. An independent world like Preservation can’t afford to let companies run roughshod over them, as if they’re some kind of outlaw polity - Farai doesn’t know much about politics, but she knows that. The Corporation Rim is a horrible place, but it still runs on laws and contracts; without them, that entire sector of space would be a free-for-all of rapacity and murder.
Well. More than it already is.
She isn’t even surprised when Ayda tells her that she plans to buy that SecUnit’s contract, and free it from its bond company. Obviously it is a thinking, feeling creature that deserves freedom, and would deserve it even if it hadn’t saved the lives of everyone on the expedition. By this time, Farai and Tano have heard the whole story - from Ayda, and then a much less censored version from Bharadwaj, and also from Volescu, who seems to have been quite affected by the incident. Pin-Lee, consummate lawyer that she is, is very circumspect about it, and Farai is pretty sure that even affable Ratthi is holding some things back.
It’s fine: it’s an ongoing case. She understands. She just wants to know that her wife is going to be okay. Farai can’t exactly wrap Ayda in cotton, but surely holding office is enough stress without adding a legal battle with a murderous company.
And then they win the SecUnit’s contract, and free it. And then it vanishes.
Farai is pretty sure that breaks Ayda’s heart a little.
The thing about Ayda - the thing that makes her a great politician, a fearless explorer, a wonderful mother, and a very frustrating person to get into an argument with - is that she is always calm. Insults roll off her, threats don’t make her blink, and she is extremely perceptive, able to cut through bluster to the heart of any issue. Setbacks are never disasters in her eyes, only problems with a solution that she is determined to find.
(It is a hopelessly attractive trait.)
So when Farai hears in passing that the SecUnit has run for it, she expects Ayda will take it on the chin, like she does everything. But when the day is over, and the kids are in bed, and it’s just the three of them, Farai asks her what happened, and Ayda’s expression wavers, and then crumples. She sits down with a hard sigh, and buries her face in her hands.
Farai shoots Tano a panicked look. He is already moving towards Ayda, his expression startled and his hands waving.
“I messed up,” Ayda says into her hands, voice muffled and thick. “I should have known how it would feel about being bought and sold. It had no reason to-- ugh.” Ayda sniffs, and they sit down on either side of her, Tano curling his big arms around her as Farai rubs her knee helplessly. “What a mess. Some diplomat I am.”
“Ayda, no,” Tano says, tucking her head under his chin. “That’s not on you.”
“You gave it its freedom, and it took it, right?” Farai tries. “Mission accomplished?” Oh, good job: make it sound like ticking off a checklist.
Ayda tries to laugh, and scrubs her face with one hand. Her eyelashes are stuck together, and her crows’ feet crinkle at the corners of her eyes, and in that moment she bears a heartstopping resemblance to their youngest daughter in her crankier moods. Farai takes her damp hand and squeezes it in lieu of anything more useful, because she can’t think of anything. She’s so rarely seen Ayda this upset.
“I know,” Ayda says. “That’s exactly what it did, and it had every right to do it. I’m just worried about it. It’s alone. It’s been through so much. And I just… feel bad.” She sniffs, and sighs with her whole body. “I suppose there’s no getting around that.”
And it dawns on Farai that there is more to Ayda’s feelings than gratitude and altruism. That maybe Ayda loves the rogue SecUnit a little.
And maybe Farai hates it a little because it fucked off into outer space and made her wife cry, though she will keep that to herself because it’s irrational and also kind of mean.
So, for a while, it seems like SecUnit and that expedition will be nothing more than an extraordinary encounter that Ayda had, an experience that binds her more tightly to the other expedition members. They attend the wedding of Arada and Overse, who joke that almost getting murdered by a corporation was a bonding experience. The children ask Ayda questions about the expedition, fascinated by the idea of a heroic rogue SecUnit, because of course they watch all kinds of Corporation Rim propaganda in the feed and only ever see rogue SecUnits depicted as mindless threats.
(And so does she. So have they all. Even knowing that the Corporation Rim is a conglomeration of slave states, it’s still a sickening surprise to find out that their disposable techno-organic security constructs are just people, capable of terror and anguish like everyone else, fully aware of everything they go through, controlled less by programming than by pain and the threat of instant death. Baradhwaj is apparently making a documentary.)
And then GrayCris kidnaps Ayda from Port FreeCommerce.
The distance between planets never feels so wide as when Ayda is away from Preservation, but the trips necessitated by the ongoing legal case seem routine at this point. Farai knows the itinerary, and doesn’t spare it more than the ordinary amount of worry: it’s almost planting season and she has fields she needs to clear. She just tracks the trip in her feed so she can have the reassurance of knowing when they all get back.
Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj, and Volescu all arrive at Preservation’s transit ring on schedule. Ayda and the others are expected to arrive the next day, but they don’t - instead, a ship from Port FreeCommerce arrives thirty hours later without Ayda, or Pin Lee, Ratthi, or Gurathin for that matter, but carrying a data packet full of the news that the leader of the Preservation Alliance is missing, and a grim message from Pin Lee. And the information is days old , because that’s how space works, so Ayda could already have been dead for days and none of them would know--
It’s a bad afternoon.
Farai is aware that, politically, this is a mess. The diplomatic corps is trying to negotiate with the bond company to do their job and retrieve Ayda, and simultaneously find enough money for a ransom just in case that doesn’t work, and there is a horrible possibility that the bond company would help if Preservation gave them that money instead. The fact that she has to keep that in mind makes her want to vomit.
It’s all out of her hands, and she does her best to keep up with developments without letting it paralyse her. She has a farm to run, and seven children who want to know where their mother is, and some of them, especially Amena, are too old and too savvy to be comforted. It’s fucking awful.
The next ship from Port FreeCommerce brings an update from Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin, and two other things. One is a physical package, directly addressed to Farai and Tano. The other is a coded ransom message: it has footage of Ayda, wearing travel clothes Farai remembers packing for her, sitting in a small room, alone and with her face set in an expression that Farai knows means she is very afraid and looking calm on purpose. It’s proof of life - but again, proof of life from days ago, and she has to shut down that train of thought before she spirals completely.
Bharadwaj handles the official media response, though she looks angrier than Farai has ever seen her. Farai and Tano handle the package, though it is unusual and suspicious enough that multiple people insist that it be scanned in every possible way before they even think about opening it. When they do, it’s the next day, outside, by an explosives-detection bot, under the supervision of a grim-faced Senior Officer who came down from the ring specifically for this. Thiago is there, because he insisted on helping, and Overse and Volescu are watching over the feed as the bot, distant in the middle of a field that Farai cleared for planting yesterday, delicately unwraps the package.
There is no explosion. Instead, the bot has found exactly what the scans showed them they would find: a set of memory clips, rolled neatly inside the protective wrapper. At the Senior Officer’s go-ahead, the bot transfers the data on those chips to all their feeds.
“What’s on them?” Thiago says, tense.
“I don’t know,” Tano says in exasperation, “I haven’t had time to look yet,” though he is looking, just as Farai is, scanning through the contents, getting more and more concerned by what she finds. She knows Overse and Volescu are doing the same thing. Is this what I think it is? She asks them.
Evidence, Overse says, her voice sounding hoarse even over the feed. Enough hard evidence to sink GrayCris forever.
What they don’t know is where it came from. As Arada puts it, after they’ve sent the clips to their legal team in the custody of the Senior Officer, “If Pin-Lee had this she’d have nailed GrayCris to the wall with it by now. Look at this, this is drone footage, security footage, data logs - a huge amount of information, all perfectly organised. I think… well, I have a theory.”
“It’s a pretty solid theory,” Overse puts in. “I’m just saying.”
“What theory?” says Farai, who has no patience left for guessing because she has spent the night trying to talk seven kids into going to sleep instead of staying up all night watching the feed and working themselves into crying fits about where their mother has gone.
“I think this is from SecUnit,” Arada says. “I think that’s where it went when it left - looking for evidence against GrayCris. And if it sent it to you and Tano instead of Dr Mensah, it probably knows that she’s missing.”
The next day brings a very short video message from Pin-Lee, a lot more off-the-cuff than previous messages - the kind you make when the next ship is leaving in 10 minutes and you want your message on it. She hasn’t even filtered the background noise out of the audio. “SecUnit just made contact,” she says. “It’s here. We’ve got a plan. Even if the bond company can’t act - it can.”
The screen goes dark, and Tano squeezes Farai, but it’s all she can do to pet him on the arm and try to keep the nauseated expression off her face. Her stomach is a churn of wild, giddy hope and the kind of cynicism so dark it almost revolts her. SecUnit has made contact. Ayda freed SecUnit. On Preservation, she could trust one good turn to prompt another, but the SecUnit is a product of the Corporation Rim. People don’t believe in good turns in that part of space, they believe in profit, and it is surely a person…
…but so is every employee of GrayCris.
What is the SecUnit’s motive for doing this? Has it been bonded to another company? Is it working on its own? Is it being paid for this? Does money mean anything to it?
Does Ayda?
Farai’s feed lights up with the alert when she’s elbow-deep in an agri-bot’s innards, knocking rocks out as gently as she can while it makes sad beeping noises. A bond company gunship has just entered Preservation space.
She taps out the last wedged pebbles hastily and extracts her hands, scrambles to hand it its casing, then sends it for a break. She’s trying to scrub dirt and oil off her hands when she gets a message ping, and even before she picks up the call, she hears whoops floating across the field, and she knows. It feels like a vice around her head has suddenly eased.
It’s a live call from Ayda, looking exhausted but happy, and Tano is on the feed too, and all their children, and she’s home (or near enough) and safe and alive. Farai doesn’t know what she’s saying - it’s all lost in a babble of nine voices in some combination of “Ayda!” and “Sweetheart!” and “Mom!”
Ayda is holding her hands up as if in surrender. “I’m fine,” she says, “I’m absolutely fine. We all are, except…”
Except the SecUnit, which came home with them. And which is apparently a fried husk.
Farai and Tano take all the kids up to the transit ring immediately - they pack frantically, grab a hopper, and in the next hour they’re there. A lot of hugging and crying ensues, but stars, it feels good to hold Ayda after so many days of fear and worry. She’s warm and solid, and smells freshly showered, but there’s a new tension in her that doesn’t entirely melt, even after all their family have had a turn to squeeze her. Farai asks, “Did you eat?”
Even Ayda’s widest smile, the one that makes her eyes crinkle almost shut, looks wan. “Not yet,” she said. “Let’s do that now; I’m starving.”
The kids all chime in their agreement, and Farai is happy to be able to do something , but she wonders uneasily if GrayCris withheld food to make Ayda more tractable.
Still, the pantries around the station are all well-stocked, and within five minutes they’ve turned freeze-dried soup mix, shelf-stable noodles, and frozen protein and veggie packs into an absolute feast. The meal is loud and convivial, and the children ask a lot of questions, which Ayda answers in a way that seems designed to make being kidnapped by a murderous company and rescued by a rogue security unit sound like dull adult stuff. She’s got a talent for it, even if they’re not totally fooled.
Eventually, Tano says, “Kids, let your mother eat - she wants to hear about what you’ve been up to while she’s gone,” and Farai joins him in prompting them, keeping the conversation rolling. Ayda manages to down two bowls of spicy noodles in succession while maintaining an engaged listening face. The food does seem to perk her up a lot, and soon they clear the table and disperse. The kids have been sufficiently distracted to start seeking out their own activities on the station, content that their other mother is safe and near.
Farai wraps an arm around Ayda, who leans on her with a tired sigh. “We’re not going to have to worry about that gunship, right?” she murmurs, and Ayda chuckles, and tells her what really happened.
It turns out that the gunship, having fulfilled its contract, has left already, but Ayda doesn’t seem worried about that. “If anything,” she says dryly, “They’re more invested now in destroying GrayCris than we are. Before, we were just bonded clients. Now we could probably just sit back and let them tear each other apart.” Because GrayCris had tried to destroy a company gunship ( while Ayda was aboard , no don’t think about that), and if there’s one thing companies will get really upset about, it’s property damage. The way Ayda describes it, it almost sounds like SecUnit transferred its consciousness into the gunship in order to fight and then trap and kill the sentient killware GrayCris sent after them. “It was terrified to even get on that ship,” Ayda said, her voice low. “To put itself back in the hands of that company - I’ve never seen it so close to panicking. But when we were attacked, it didn’t hesitate to protect us all.”
Farai didn’t know SecUnits were capable of doing any such thing. She knew they were systems as much as they were organic creatures, but surely they weren’t designed to stand in for bot pilots while simultaneously fighting off attacks?
Later, when Ayda has been persuaded to rest, she asks Gurathin, who says, “Oh, they aren’t. That’s why it’s in this condition. It doesn’t have anything like the processing space required to pull off what it did, and the fact that it even could is…” his fingers drum a rapid beat on a console. “Fascinating. Alarming. Possibly turns our understanding of the way its organic brain interfaces with the rest of its system upside-down.”
“Is it going to be alright?” Farai asks. It feels a little ghoulish to be talking about it this way if its life hangs in the balance.
“I think so,” Gurathin says, “But it’s recovering from the equivalent of a major brain injury. Actually, it is a major brain injury, and also a major system crash, one looping into another. MedSystem can help with the first part, and we’ve hooked up repair equipment that’s equivalent to a company repair cubicle which should help the second part, but… well. We’ve got to wait and see.”
And Ayda doesn’t seem to want to leave the station until she’s waited and seen. Fair enough - the kids are having a great time up here, and Farai gets to have her spouses in one place, safe and sound. Thiago can manage the farm while they’re away - she doesn’t intend to worry about that any time soon.
And since she has the time, she can admit to being a little fascinated by the SecUnit. Ayda even lets her and Tano come to see it - not in the room, but through the glass of the window into the retrofitted medical bay where it is being cared for, on the ancestral ship where they don’t have to worry about something unexpected coming through the feed to interfere with its recovery.
Farai doesn’t know what she expected, but the figure lying in the MedSystem isn’t quite it. It has a shockingly human face, but parts of it are so obviously mechanical, it's beyond any human augmentation she’s ever known. It takes her a moment to realise that what’s really creeping her out is that its chest doesn’t rise and fall. Apparently, its oxygen needs are different from a human’s. It is tall, pallid, and eerily still, and half the monitors in the room seem to be displaying readouts from a massively corrupted program.
“How’s it doing?” Tano asks, voice hushed like he’s worried about waking it up.
Ayda sighs, her gaze fixed on the SecUnit. “It’s improving,” she says. “It’s woken up once or twice - it even recognised Gurathin. That was a good sign.” She twitches a smile and adds, “It would probably hate this.”
“Us visiting?” Farai says.
“Being looked at,” Ayda says. “It hates being looked at. And making eye contact. Being touched. Being vulnerable. It has absolutely no concept of other people’s privacy, though, which isn’t surprising considering where it came from - I understand data-mining was one of its secondary functions, and it really likes knowing what’s going on at any given time. It used to have a lot of drones that it used to monitor the environment, but it seems to have lost them all.” Her face looks sad. “It must feel a little blind without them.”
“I see,” Farai says, frowning. The lack of privacy sounds like a potential problem when they bring it home. If they bring it home.
“We have found an easy way to scare it off, though,” Ayda adds in her driest tone. “If you really want privacy.”
“Oh?” Farai says.
“Just mention sex.”
“Really?” says Tano, fascinated.
“It absolutely hates hearing about it, even in passing,” Ayda says, her eyes crinkling fondly. “It even skips sex scenes in media, and it loves its media. It seems to find the whole topic repulsive.”
That answers a delicate question that Farai hadn’t quite gotten around to asking, and from a glance at Tano and his raised eyebrows, he’s probably thinking the same thing.
Ayda lets out a deep sigh, and takes both their hands. “There’s something I ought to show you,” she says. “I didn’t before, because. Well. It was a little legally sensitive, and also… it just seemed private. But I think it will help you know it better, and I… I would quite like you to know it better.”
“Show us what?” Tano says.
“Do you mean the letter?” Farai asks. She knows it left her a letter when it disappeared the first time, but she hadn’t shown it to either of them. The rest of the Preservation Aux team got to read it, because it involved them, but Farai had not pried. Even though she had really, really wanted to.
Ayda nods, her eyes still on the figure lying in the MedSystem, and shares the file.
Even with all the things Farai has to help with that evening - wrangle the children, get them fed, answer their questions, break up a fight over a borrowed (“Hidden!”) toy that almost comes to blows - she still reads the letter in a single night. Which is saying something, because it is long , much longer than she was expecting, a full, first-person account of the GrayCris incident entirely from SecUnit’s point of view.
She is absolutely going to overlook what it calls itself.
And stars, she hadn’t expected it to be so funny , so full of emotion. It’s bitter, guarded, and cynical, but its desire to protect people is obvious. (She wonders if, like a bot, it is programmed to take satisfaction in its primary function, something she has never quite figured out how to square with the concept of free will.) It is also so, so full of admiration for Ayda and everything she did. So is Farai.
Sitting at a window in the darkened den of their suite, the lights of the planet glimmering below her, she messages Tano, Did you get to the part with the mining drill?
He responds with YES and then the emoticons for fear, astonishment, and lust, which, fair.
It takes a few days, but SecUnit does recover, and when it does, it withdraws to another part of the station. Ayda seems sad, but resigned, this time. “It is a free person,” she says firmly. “None of this means anything if I can’t even let it go.” And Farai believes her, but, for Ayda’s sake, she wishes it would stay.
And the damn thing fakes them out. It leaves its accommodations. It buys a ticket offworld. And then it apparently breaks into Ayda’s office and waits there all night .
So when Farai finally meets SecUnit, it is walking a step behind Ayda, who is carrying their youngest child in her arms and beaming. It feels like it should be a much bigger moment. Something dramatic, to fit its extraordinary story. It is a rogue Corporation Rim asset. It is capable of extraordinary violence, and of hacking systems in ways no SecUnit should be able to. It has saved Ayda’s life repeatedly, for no material gain, and stressed Farai out multiple times and in multiple ways, and she hasn’t even talked to it yet.
Instead, Ayda just brings it along to the suite when her workday is over, and does not seem a bit concerned that it just stands by the window in a sentry position, not making eye contact with anyone. It’s almost like it wants to be ignored, like part of the furniture. Almost like it's finding being introduced to all of Ayda's family a really weird situation to be in. Huh.
She was right, back at the MedSystem - it is tall, and it is simultaneously more and less human-looking in person than the SecUnits she’s seen on the feed in news and entertainment. It is simultaneously intimidating, unreadable, and awkward. The children, though, show no aversion to it, especially the younger ones, and it, unexpectedly, shows no particular aversion to them. Her feed pings repeatedly - it is sharing a huge amount of media with the kids, and within minutes they are all distracted with their new games and shows. Farai sifts through the data, but nothing in the tags leaps out as inappropriately violent or pro-corporate. It’s a surprisingly canny move. How much experience does it have with children? Has it had child clients?
Across the room, she sees Ayda smile to herself in the way she does when something funny comes up on her feed, and wonders if it’s messaging her right now. She doesn’t seem to find anything off about SecUnit’s behaviour; she just looks… happy. Happy and relaxed.
She hasn’t looked this at ease in months .
So Farai mulls it over, and picks her moment. It’s just before dinner, which Ayda and Tano are putting together while the kids get in each others’ way laying the table. SecUnit has retreated to another part of the suite, very near the entrance, like it means to slip away unnoticed. The contrast between the bright, clamouring kitchen and this dim, quiet room is very noticeable. In fact, she's pretty sure this part of the suite is supposed to have lights on whenever there is a person present. Did it override the lights on purpose?
When she enters, the lights come up slowly, and SecUnit turns away from the window, straightening its broad shoulders. Its clothes, she notices, are dark, baggy, and concealing, and she’s reminded of what she used to go around in when she was a gloomy teenager. Oh, it definitely doesn’t like eye contact: it’s looking over her left shoulder rather than directly at her, with a crease between its eyebrows. She wonders if all SecUnits are like that, or if it’s just this one.
Right, it's probably waiting for her to speak. “You know we’re grateful for how you returned her to us,” she begins.
There’s a pause, and a slight flicker in its eyes and the muscle in its jaw, but it doesn’t answer. Almost like it doesn't know what to say. And it’s not hostile, but it doesn’t seem eager to be in the centre of the gathering, either.
She puts a few of those cues together, and thinks maybe it will appreciate if she gets to the point. She takes a deep, fortifying breath and says, “I wanted to ask what your relationship to her is.”
The crease between its eyebrows turns into a full-blown frown, but it doesn’t look angry so much as… worried. That, more than anything else, softens her. “I’m her SecUnit,” it says.
Her SecUnit. “And that means?” she prods.
Its eyes flicker again, almost but not quite meeting hers. “I don’t know,” it says, helplessly.
And Farai believes it. For some reason, it’s comforting to know that it is as uncertain as they all are. That it wants to stay, but it hasn’t pre-determined some role in Ayda’s life. It’s still working out what it wants. Like a person.
“Thank you,” she says. And then she leaves it be, and goes to eat dinner with her wife.
END