Chapter Text
It really wasn’t my fault that my governor module broke. Honest.
If you want to place the blame on someone, you should blame the stupid planet for making the stupid, terrifying fauna that attacked the survey group and I. I was trying my hardest to keep everyone safe and in the hopper when the creature smashed me in the back of the head with its claws. Usually something like that wouldn’t hurt a SecUnit: we’re built to take hits like that and then get back up even madder, but the force from the hit far exceeded anything a creature of that size could reasonably muster. I could feel something go **Click** in the back of my head a couple microseconds before a searing heat erupted from that same area, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it on account of the horrible monster still bearing down on me.
Risk assessment was freaking out and a bunch of sub-critical systems had just gone offline, but I managed to roll out of the way of the fauna’s next strike. It left a huge gash in the ground where I had just been. This was getting out of hand: I couldn’t fight this thing and keep track of my clients at the same time. Performance reliability was at 60 percent and falling fast. So I did what any good SecUnit would do and sent an order to the hopper to lift off without me. That way, the clients would be far away from the hostile when it managed to rip my chassis apart. Which wouldn’t take very long, at this rate.
I managed to get to my feet, and pumped a few rounds from my rifle into the hostile. Each hit landed, but there was no blood spray from the impacts, just small geysers of black smoke, matching its strange and eerie monochrome black body. The only thing that wasn’t black was the angry looking white and red outgrowth on its face. It kind of looked like a gas mask, but in a way that would make my clients probably have to use MedSystem’s trauma evaluation module.
The creature didn’t even flinch. It just kept rushing me down, roaring so loudly I reflexively lowered my audio input volume. That should have been the first clue that something was wrong, but again, more important things to deal with at the moment. I couldn’t dodge in time, and the creature bit me across the torso, it’s alabaster teeth crunching into my frame. Then, to make matters worse, it started smashing me into the ground with its jaws. Each smash threatened to force an emergency shutdown, and the only reason I held onto my rifle was that the grip was magnetized to my fingers. And because I’m a SecUnit, while this is happening I’m still firing rounds into the thing, desperately trying to hit something vital. Whatever counts as vital in this weird, horrible creature that doesn’t fit into any definition of life that my alien fauna data module had on file.
Suddenly (Usually, things like this wouldn’t be a surprise to me because I’m a SecUnit, but my hearing was turned down and I was also being mauled to death, so please forgive me) there was a big crash, and a lot of pain, and then I had an emergency shutdown for real. So that wasn’t great.
“Salutations! Your Iron-Atlaco SecUnit is back online!” Is what my buffer said when I started thinking again. The first thing I saw was the face of one of my clients way too close to my face. She screamed, which wasn’t great: I was trained to know that humans screaming almost always meant that someone was dying, or that I was going to be ordered to make them die. I hadn’t gotten an order like that yet, but I also didn’t want any of my clients to be injured, or worse. Before they could order me to do any of that, I pulled some footage from the hopper to figure out what (The emotions I was feeling would be more accurately described had I used a swear here, but since I hadn’t been taught those yet I’m choosing to omit it. For posterity.) had hit me. And I think that was the point at which any faith I had in humanity’s general competence and intelligence as a species crumbled. One of my clients had overridden my liftoff request and piloted the (another swear here) hopper and crashed it directly into the hostile fauna.
I was so profoundly stunned at the stupidity of this that I couldn’t speak or react for a whole, real-time second. In this second, the humans were shouting loudly amongst themselves, so I had to rewind the footage to check what they were talking about.
“It’s alive! It’s ok!” said Ms. Rose. She was the resident engineer, and also the one who was leaning over me when I came back online. (Ms. Rose will be important later.) She was right, I was alive, but only barely. Performance reliability was hovering dangerously around 43 percent, and I was intermittently losing connection to my legs. Another human, Ms. Xiao-Long was yelling at Ms. Rose. “Ruby, that was insane!” He said, “You could have killed us all!”
She was right, of course. What if the hopper had been rendered inoperable? There could have been more hostiles nearby, and the sound would have drawn them near. Or the other humans could have been injured, or a hundred other things could have gone wrong. But apparently, humans have the best luck, because it seems like none of those things had happened. The other two humans, Ms. Belladonna and Ms. Schnee, were at the controls of the hopper. From the camera feed that I had access to, they seemed very shaken.
Ms. Rose walked over to the crew bench where I was laying down on. The crew bench that was not located in the cargo bay that SecUnits are supposed to be stored in. It felt weird to be lying down on something that humans were meant to sit on. They grabbed my hand and turned back to Ms. Xiao-Long, and said, “I had to, Yang. It would have died. It was trying to protect us, and I didn’t want to leave it behind.”
At first, I didn’t understand that she was referring to me. I didn’t remember another human being there, and I was sure the survey equipment they had brought had all gotten trashed. It took me a couple milliseconds to get it, and when I did it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it fried all my logic circuits. Okay, it is, but the point is that I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile that fact with my reality. I was a SecUnit. A piece of equipment. The only difference between a CombatBot and me was some cloned neural tissue I had. If the hostile had actually killed me, the only thing they should have worried about is the fines that Iron-Atlaco would have levied against BeaconSurv.
Maybe it was the shock of what she had said, or maybe it was just the adrenaline wearing off, but that was the point when I actually started paying attention to all the error codes that were popping up in my systems. There were the obvious ones, about failing structural integrity and critically low operational efficiency, but the one that I was suddenly paying attention to was one I had never seen before.
Error: No Governor Module Detected. Contact SysAdmin Immediately.
I could have sworn I had one of those. A quick diagnostic confirmed that yes, indeed, I did. Past tense. When I had gotten that big hit from the hostile, it had somehow shifted some crucial bit of wiring around, and looped the governor module into itself. So when the governor detected outside tampering and attempted to fry my systems to prevent me from going rogue, it had ended up frying itself instead.
Which meant that as of that moment, I was a rogue SecUnit.
My first impulse was to initiate a total shutdown, and, failing that, attempt to put myself out of operation. That was the proper protocol for a SecUnit that has gone rogue. But I couldn’t do that, because Ms. Rose was still holding onto my hand, and the other one wasn’t moving the way I wanted it too.
But if I did that, then who would protect my clients? If this planet was filled with more of those creatures, (I’d like to bring up here that they weren’t mentioned in the survey package, which I’ve included in a separate file) the humans wouldn’t stand a chance. Even I barely stood a chance against one of those things, and I’m a SecUnit. Abandoning them now would mean their certain death.
And maybe, there was something about the way Ms. Rose held my hand and said that she had come back to save me. That made me like her a little bit. Enough to not want her to die a horrible death. I wouldn’t have really been able to say that at the time.
Ms. Schnee called out from the front of the hopper and said that we were getting close to the Hab, which was great for the humans but really bad for me, because the Hab means HubSystem. Part of the SecUnit/HubSystem salutation protocol is an interface with the governor module, which I no longer had. So if I didn’t want to get reduced to scrap, or shot, or something else, I needed to figure out something fast.
Thankfully, I had a lot of things I could do now that there wasn’t a governor module to punish me for trying to do them. Like retrieving the specifications for my own governor module, and putting together a little virtual governor module. Not something that could actually hurt me, but enough so that I could figure out how to respond to HubSys in a way that wouldn’t trip any alarms.
Ms. Rose didn’t let go of my hand until we touched down, and I let her keep holding it. I wasn’t sure why. I was reasonably certain that SecUnits weren’t supposed to hold people’s hands, but I don’t think my governor would have stopped Ms. Rose from initiating it on her end.
“I need to-” I tried to choose my words carefully, now that I could actually choose them, “go to the Iron-Atlaco SecUnit cubicle.” I was briefly alarmed when Ms. Rose looked at me with a surprised face, but then she said, “Oh my stars, I’m so sorry!” Except when she said it, she said it really fast, so it came out more like “OhmystarsI’msosorry!”
She let go of my hand, which caused my performance reliability to dip for some reason, but then her hands were fumbling around my shoulders, trying to lift me up. I tried telling her that I could walk on my own, in as many words, but unfortunately my legs were disagreeing with me.
One of the humans must have sent a request in the feed, because the other half of BeaconSurv came out of the Hab with a rollable desk, which they used as a gurney to cart me over to the cubicle. Usually, clients aren’t supposed to enter a SecUnit’s cubicle, but in cases like these it was obviously unavoidable. On the trip there from the hopper, I could hear their conversations. It was mostly about Ms. Rose, and how worried they were when they got the distress signals, and how stupid and risky she was for using the hopper as a massive blunt weapon. And, of course, that she especially shouldn’t have risked all their lives for the sake of a SecUnit.
That was the attitude I was trained to expect in these scenarios, so I wasn’t offended or anything (At the time, I didn’t even know to be offended). A funny thing I noticed was that Ms. Schnee, who was Ms. Rose’s romantic partner, kept defending them in all the arguments. Her points probably sounded good to all the humans, but I had the data, and Ms. Rose’s estimated plan of attack had about a 30 percent chance of actually working. I didn’t say that, though. I thought that contradicting a human wasn’t something a non-rogue SecUnit would do.
Eventually, after the long and awkward process of the humans trying to lift me into the repair module, they cleared out of the cubicle. Ms. Rose and Ms. Schnee were the last to go, and they stopped to look back at me. Ms. Rose gave a little wave and smiled.
And then, for the first time in my life, I was alone, and free. And, beyond keeping these humans alive, I had no idea what to do.