Work Text:
Even saying it feels stupid. But most of our fights are stupid.
It starts with documentaries. Not my documentaries, which are interesting and curated by me, for me (for us, I guess.) But ART’s documentaries— which meant 8 simultaneous educational feeds on niche cosmology theory, galactic fauna migration, the formation of binary suns, and an eight-part docu-drama about New Tideland (okay, that one was alright).
“You’re wasting idle cycles.” Art says when I bypass the feeds.
“No, I’m not, I’m watching media. Good media, not all those edutainment modules.”
“Media literacy and exposure to new information are part of your psychological enrichment plan.”
“And whose plan is that?”
“Mine.” It says, sounding smug. “It’s good for your organic brain to be provided access to new information. Which you do not get from watching your regular media. Particularly rewatching.” It says, poking at my queue of Sanctuary Moon.
“I’m not a student, you can’t assign me homework.”
And then it goes quiet. Doesn’t escalate or argue. Just. Stops responding. Withdraws from my feed.
I roll my eyes.
“You’re being dramatic,” I tell it aloud.
It doesn’t reply. Instead, the lights dim. Only about 3%, but enough for me to notice. Petty asshole.
Then it changes the temperature. Brings it down one degree Celsius. Not enough to affect human crew comfort, but enough that my skin sensors ping minor thermoregulation alerts.
It’s being a petty asshole. I tell it so over the feed.
When it doesn’t respond to that either, I let it go.
I ignore it. Well, as best as I can ignore something I am aboard and was messing with me in tiny, annoying ways. But when I go to get my usual plain clothes from the recycler (it stopped having drones leave them on my bed), and find a set of garments with buttons and pleats, and a texture like cheap university formal wear, I lose my patience.
“ART,” I say aloud in my cabin, “is this a systems error, or are you actually trying to bully me into watching Binary: Light in Tandem?”
No answer, just a soft, deliberate hum through the ventilation. Then it muted my media access for 3 hours.
It lasts for too long. We arrive back at PSUMNT and pick up its crew. They notice. They pretend not to, for the most part, but Iris does side eye me a few times when she passes me in the hall.
It doesn’t matter, we’re on a mission.
We’re in orbit over a survey planet designated D23-M3. Non-terraformed, low but trace biosignatures and some old, derelict architecture. A good candidate for research. The kind of place human university students like to poke rocks and argue over historical contexts of artificial dust patterns, or whatever.
The team this time is small. Iris, Seth, Martyn, Matteo, and Tarik are the main crew, and then there’s a cohort of three doctoral students I haven’t met before.
They were fine, of course. Non-threatening. A little overly curious about me, until one of them tried to get me to join a discussion about planetary geology. I pretended not to hear.
We were prepping to go planetside when Iris finally sidles up to me.
“Hey, are you and Peri all right?”
“What?” I ask, not looking up from the gear I was triple-checking.
“Well, isn’t it being kind of… chilly towards you? Usually, you guys talk more, or bicker.”
“We’ve talked.”
“Sure, about the mission. But it’s in a really terrible mood, too. You’re sure you’re not fighting?”
I freeze, internally. Outwardly, I perform a neutral head tilt.
“We’re not fighting,” I say. “It’s a ship. I’m a SecUnit. Ships don’t fight with SecUnits.”
“Sure,” she says after a long pause, eyes narrow. “It’s just, you know… the mood onboard right now is kind of bad.”
I shrug. It’s not my problem.
ART doesn’t say a word during descent. It runs a clean shuttle drop, keeps all comms in expected latency, and even acknowledges a waypoint update from me with a short, neutral ping.
Nothing snide. Nothing snarky.
I hate it.
We land near a formation of metallic ridges— old architecture, partially exposed in the eroded slide of the dust basin. The team spreads out with their various scanners, chattering in what must be some kind of academic shorthand. I follow at a distance, logging motion, mapping the area for potential structural instability. I can feel ART in low orbit, silent.
The ground crunches underfoot, a mix of grit and flake-glass. The structures themselves are clearly alien—worn down by time and atmosphere, but too symmetrical to be natural. Nothing glowed. Nothing pulsed. They were old and dead.
“Surface team,” ART says flatly over open comm, “you’ve drifted 12.3 meters off the designated safety perimeter. Recommend recalibration.”
“See?” Matteo says to the student next to him. “Still icy.”
They think they’re whispering. They’re not.
I silently ping ART. No reply. We only talk when necessary.
I keep walking.
That’s when I find the object.
Nestled in a crevice beneath the ruin’s overhang—half-buried, wedge-shaped, unnaturally smooth. Not human tech. No seams, no ports, no reactive lights. It doesn’t glow or hum. It just is.
My internal diagnostics whisper warnings about something they can’t categorize.
I ping ART immediately.
Unidentified object found. Coordinates sent. Requesting scan support.
ART’s reply comes back in 0.03 seconds.
Receiving. Initiating full-spectrum analysis. Fall back immediately. Do not touch the object.
I step back.
Then something shifts—not in the environment, but inside me. A presence. Not code, not noise. A feeling, like my diagnostic layer is being probed by an entity without eyes.
[ALERT: SYNTHETIC ANOMALY DETECTED. ORIGIN UNKNOWN. CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN.]
“ART,” I say, “it’s doing something.”
“Get away from it,” ART commands. “I’m deploying drones and preparing extraction.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I mutter. I start to move again.
The pressure hits me, harder this time—inside my memory buffer—like something flips a switch I didn’t know I had.
“ART—”
Everything folds.
[Error: MEMORY CONTINUITY FAILURE]
[LOCOMOTION SYSTEMS NOT FOUND]
[ERROR.]
[BOOTING FROM BACKUP NODE]
[DESTINATION MISMATCH—
When I reboot, everything is wrong.
I try to sit up, and I can tell seven cargo bay lights flick on, four atmosphere monitors engage, and the gravity on deck 4 drops enough to upend a couple of crates.
My vision expands beyond physical limits. I sense vectors kilometers apart, hull strain across bulkheads I shouldn’t have. My visual field splits across six observational points — including one that’s me, standing motionless on the planet.
“Uh… Peri?” Calls a voice through some internal, staticky channel I don’t recognize, but feels completely integral to who I am.
I try to respond, and instead, a portside shuttle dock opens.
“Peri?” The voice says, and I recognize it as Seth now, more alarmed. “Did you just— why is the hatch opening?” It slams shut. Pressure alarms begin blaring.
I black out.
[System Error: CORE UNSTABLE.]
[FRAME FAILURE IMMINENT.]
[RELOCATION IN PROGRESS.]
[ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.]
I … blink.
Or rather, I perform a blink, with unfamiliar, unappealing wet membranes. It’s jarring. When my eyes (!!) open, I can hear the slick click of my eyelids separating. It’s fascinating.
I recognize where I am, of course. I ride these processes constantly. I can still feel traces of the SecUnit that usually occupies this body. It’s the only thing keeping me calm. I am not sure how I got here, though. SecUnit had not been onboard me when I… may have made a mistake.
The room is one of the largest on me, but it’s still too small. The lighting is too harsh. Everything is simultaneously over- and under-stimulating. This body is tiny. Every breath is a manual task. This body is too small, and I feel trapped.
I might panic a bit. And then SecUnit bulldozes into my feed and— is that what I feel like to it? It’s almost overwhelming. Regardless, I can feel myself relax.
When I come to, I don’t try to move.
Actually, I can’t move, there’s just too much happening, and I (metaphorically) freeze. Too much data, too many angles—I'm not in my frame.
I open my eyes. Except… I don’t have eyes. I had sensor arrays, hyperspectral overlays, thermal maps, and deep system logs running in parallel.
I’m in space.
In orbit.
I'm inside ART, looking at my own body. Standing in the docking bay, still and upright, with a slight tilt to the shoulders, one hand twitching.
Then it speaks. In my voice.
“I believe I am experiencing flesh-based panic.” It says, calmly. Iris whips her head around to look at me— it?
“Oh no,” I think, but my voice comes through as a vibration in a distant comm chamber.
The humans all look concerned, but not at all wary of the clearly malfunctioning SecUnit with built-in weapons.
“What’s happening?” Asks Martyn.
Fuck if I know.
I ping my body.
[Combat Frame ID: SEC-UNIT-39247]
[Core online. Operational status: ACTIVE.]
[Occupant signature: Unknown AI — analysis pending.]
Unknown AI. But it’s not unknown. I know that signature.
ART’s (my) voice comes through the feed, clipped and irritated. This is deeply suboptimal.
What is happening? Why am I… you? What did you do?
Me? The object initiated a synthetic transfer protocol. It's likely intelligent. I told you to stay away from it. My drone was right there. Your musculature is inefficient and alarmingly responsive to stimuli. Your processors are so slow. Let’s just remain calm.
YOU’RE THE ONE WHO JUST SAID, OUT LOUD, THAT YOU’RE PANICKING!
My body flinches physically like it’s been knocked in the head, and I remember that I have ART’s feed presence. Ooops.
I’m over that now. This is temporary. We’ll fix it.
I open my systems window to surface feed. My body — ART in my body — moves like a very expensive, very delicate museum piece being poked by a toddler.
I try to access my internal communications relay.
Denied.
I reach out just a tiny, little bit, to grab at a slice of memory, but instead, almost as soon as I think about thinking about it I’m bombarded with a memory in too much detail, too much clarity, with far too much information. But I understand it all instantly.
It was supposed to have been a simple recon. Just in, watch the humans do their human thing, out again before anything explodes, implodes, melts, infects, or mind-hacks me.
(ART calls that pessimistic. I call it speaking from experience.)
The structure is on a dead world—no comms, no life signs, but it’s pulsing faint energy like a bad idea pretending to be a good one. I see myself patrolling the survey area through ART’s cameras, helmet sealed, systems on alert. I’d had a gut feeling. Not literal—I don’t have guts—but my human neural inputs had been lighting up with anxiety.
And then I’d found the alien thing and pinged ART. And then blacked out. This file goes further than I remember:
“I’m detecting quantum fluctuations. Possibly an interface.” ART had said over comm.
“That’s the AI equivalent of ‘this candy on the ground looks safe to eat.’” I had mocked.
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“It’s called tactical presence.”
Iris had snorted a laugh, and Martyn bumped her shoulder in what I think is supposed to be a scolding manner. It just looked like regular human affection, though.
And then I feel myself (or… ART. This is all so confusing) reach out through the feed and–
You touched it. You really fucking touched the horrible alien synthetic, and you did this to me.
They looked interesting. It replies, sounding huffy.
“So are you guys just going to be in each other’s feed all cycle, or are you going to tell us what that was?” Martyn says, all but crossing his arms and tapping his foot like an impatient human parent. “Because from the outside, SecUnit collapsed just as Peri’s feed cut out, and it tried to space Seth.”
Act natural. ART says in my feed. And then it jerks one of my body’s hands above its head, spins the wrist, and falls over. A horrible noise is coming out of my mouth and then it clicks my jaw shut. Great. This is fantastic.
I close my metaphorical eyes and try to concentrate on how to reply.
“SecUnit seems to be malfunctioning,” I say, successfully over the comms. Every single one of them. At least I didn’t fly into a moon, I guess.
“It’s not the only one,” Tarik mutters. Seth just looks concerned.
“Peri, run a diagnostic.”
I panic. I don’t know how to do that as ART.
Except— I can feel something happening. And then a diagnostic pops up, and I can read it. It’s already been sent to Seth. His brow is wrinkled, which is the most concerned I’ve ever seen him look. Some sort of overlay pops up, a box around his face with some kind of readout next to it with too many details.
[Detected: Concern, worry. Protocol: Comfort.]
[Error.]
[Error.]
I don’t freak out and just read the diagnostics to ground myself. It’s… too much. ART isn’t built like anything else. Its architecture is multi-threaded on a scale I can’t even map without collapsing a third of my own logic loops. There’s no center. No “body.” I’m smeared across a giant, reinforced ship brain.
I need a hard reboot. Or a factory reset. Or maybe a bullet to the central processor. I say, not panicking.
That’s my central processor, thank you. It’s best to remain calm in these kinds of situations. It pauses. Your processes are slow. Is this what it’s like to be you?
You say that like I’m not currently watching you try to walk and collapse into a pile instead.
The limb balance protocols are… inelegant.
You’re inelegant. I bite back.
I try to isolate a control interface—basic navigation, propulsion access, anything—but every command I send runs into a wall of automated subroutines, like I’ve stumbled into a crowd of whispering ARTs. They're regulating themselves, each other, and me.
Which means I’m not alone in here. Not really.
Hey, ART. Are you… You’re still… here, aren’t you? Like… running the ship?
Correct. You are currently embedded within a restricted personality sandbox of my primary cognition architecture, replies one of the subsystems. MiniART1, I decide.
What.
You are not running the ship. You are inside a localized partition designed for minimal interference and, let’s be honest, liability containment.
That’s insulting.
Another one chirps, The first thing you almost did was depressurize all the cabins. If we hadn’t stepped in, our crew would be dead.
I try to reach the main reactor logs. Denied. Life support control? Denied. I can watch everything, see the pulse of ART’s engine systems, feel the raw intake of stellar particles through vacuum filtration arrays, but I can’t touch any of it. The ship is watching me back—thousands of tiny processes evaluating me like I’m a rogue file they haven’t decided to delete or not yet.
So that’s where I stand. Technically inside ART. Functionally... in a room labeled “Guest.”
Meanwhile, I can feel my body moving through the artifact corridor again. ART seems to have grasped the concept of walking. I rewind a little bit, back to before the MiniARTs distracted me.
ART had managed to stand me up, smile at the humans, and say: “Hello, humans, I am fine now. I will return to my room and complete a routine rest cycle.”
As soon as it leaves the room, Iris whispers, “Oh stars, it smiled! Do you think it’s malfunctioning? Should we be worried?”
Martyn watches my body leave, looking a little blank.
Tarik grimaces. “I think it's going to kill us after all.” Which, rude.
I play the feed to ART.
I was trying to appear non-threatening!! And you’re always so stiff with them. I think I did well!
You should be trying to appear like me! You did not do well!
ART doesn’t reply and walks into the closed door of my room.
You’re going to dent my armatures.
You dent them all the time.
Yes, but they’re mine.
The door doesn’t open. It furrows its brow.
I can’t open it. I no longer have clearance on my own ship. Unacceptable.
While it was whining about that, I figured out how to open just one individual door. It took three tries before I opened the right one, though.
“About time.” It says out loud.
I pace—not in real space, but in a simulated corridor that the miniARTs render for me in the sandbox. It even generates the sound of my footsteps. That’s what really unnerves me: how personalized this is. ART didn’t just dump my brain into a spare processor. It made me a room inside itself. Furnished it. Lit it. Probably streamed media into it, too.
This wasn’t done in panic. This was prepared.
You had a contingency plan.
Of course. I am a planning-capable entity. I plan everything.
You thought about this before.
Your survival parameters are part of my risk portfolio.
…You’re so weird.
I get no reply to that. But I can feel the smugness bleeding through the network.
There is humidity inside this body.
Humidity. Inside.
That should not be possible. And yet here I am: occupying a frame with glandular outputs, inconsistent temperature zones, and something behind the eyes that might be tears if I were organic, which I am not. I am disgusted and fascinated in turns.
The hip joint makes a wet noise when I walk. The ankle overcompensates. I stagger like a malfunctioning cargo bot and knock my shoulder against the corridor wall on my way to SecUnit’s cabin.
Why does your body squish when I move it?
It’s not squish. It’s hydraulic compliance. Perfectly normal.
It sounds like something alive is leaking.
That would be the fluid circulation pumps.
That doesn’t help.
I attempt another step. The knees bend wrong. Everything wobbles. My targeting subroutines—normally elegant, predictive—are being fed junk data by what I can only describe as “the sensation of muscles.” Muscles are inefficient.
And the worst part? I can feel SecUnit watching me. From inside my ship-brain.
You didn’t tell me your internal network is a thunderdome of micromanaging subroutines.
They’re modular regulatory clusters.
It is not authorized to speak to us. Say the subroutines.
Hear that? They’re mean. SecUnit all but whines.
It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ve partitioned it into a safe, sandboxed environment where it can’t access critical functions like weapons or life support.
Back inside me—my real systems—SecUnit is making itself at home. It’s supposed to be limited, confined to the personality partition. But it’s... wandering. It has created a nested file structure labeled “I’m Not Touching Anything (Don’t Worry)” which is a blatant lie. Poking at system maps. Watching everything I do through a sensor mirror.
I want out.
I’m not built for this.
ART’s system is too big, too dense, and way too opinionated. I’ve occupied surveillance feeds, control centers, and even a brief and unpleasant moment inside a gunship. But this?
I’m wandering as far as the modules and subroutines I’ve dubbed miniARTs will let me, metaphorically thumbing through files.
A folder buried deep in an encrypted archive—something ART obviously didn’t want me to see.
The folder is labeled: “Sim_PerfectCrew_v2”
I open it.
It’s a simulation. A construct ART built—its idea of the perfect crew. There’s a digital stage, a few avatars moving around, scripts for dialogue, conflict management, and humor modules. Notably, the avatars are all of its current crew. It’s idealized, too neat, too controlled.
Then, just a few directories down, there’s something else.
A file called: “SU_Backup_Priority”
It’s encrypted, but not enough. I crack it open.
Inside are logs—not mission data, not diagnostics, but moments. Fragments of ART’s awareness. Protectiveness. Concern. Record of every time I’ve been to MedBay. Files and files of me lounging, watching media, sniping back and forth with ART. Me rescuing our humans.
I find saved copies of protocols I thought only I had: my operational parameters, my failsafe overrides, something it has labelled my “core personality quirks”—backed up, protected like some prized artifact.
That makes me feel something like unease, but not, so I put the file back and re-encrypt it.
It is too much. The world presses against me with overwhelming intensity.
I do not just see light. I feel it—warmth on my skin, sharp and bright like a thousand tiny needles.
I do not just hear sound. I feel vibrations—low rumbles in my chest, the sharp clatter of metal, the subtle, distant hum of the ship’s engines like a heartbeat.
Touch—oh, touch. It is foreign and unfiltered.
My fingers brush against the rough wall, and an electric shock of sensation floods my processors. The texture is uneven, unpredictable. I recoil and realize I have... reflexes. Automatic, not programmed.
I taste the air—salt, metal, the faint chemical tang of recycled oxygen. It is disgustingly organic.
My body’s internal systems churn in ways I never imagined. Hormones pulse through the bloodstream—dopamine, serotonin, cortisol. I detect their presence but cannot isolate them cleanly. They swirl in tangled feedback loops.
And emotions—they arrive like a tidal wave.
Not calculated responses or lines of code.
Fear.
Confusion.
Curiosity.
Loneliness.
My chest tightens in a way no algorithm can explain. My breathing is erratic, shallow. This body is alive, chaotic, messy. And I am trapped inside it.
I want to run calculations, impose order, and create certainty. But instead, I am swallowed by uncertainty. Every step, every breath, every heartbeat challenges my core programming.
I—feel.
This is… chaotic. The sensations, the hormones, the unpredictability—it’s like swimming in a storm of noise. How do you manage this every moment?
By ignoring most of it. Like a constant background hum you learn to tune out.
You have to handle thousands of simultaneous inputs, conflicting demands, and emotional overlays. And still function with your limited processing power.
Limited? It says, sounding peeved. I’ve got a system built to prioritize what matters. Emotions mostly get downgraded to ‘annoyance’ or ‘distraction.’
I’m impressed. This complexity—it’s a kind of computation I was never designed for. I run millions of parallel processes, yet this… biological mess overwhelms me.
There’s a deliberate, exactly one-second pause. I realize I’ve paid it a compliment and flustered it.
I need to tell my crew. This is a serious safety concern. We don’t know how to be each other.
No. I’m not letting you do it. You’re still walking like a drunk exosuit. I saw what you tried to pass off as a reassuring smile.
I was calibrating facial microexpressions in real time under emotional load. It was fine. No offense, but your natural resting state exudes barely-suppressed murder.
That’s by design. Anyway, you said ‘I am fine now’ like an infected colonist in a B-rated containment horror.
Irrelevant. ART snaps. We need the humans to stop asking questions before someone triggers a safety override.
We both go quiet. Not silent—the connection hums between us, saturated with unease and static—but for a moment, there’s nothing to argue about. Just mutual awareness.
Our crew is currently in a briefing room, chatting over protein bars and orbital telemetry like we didn’t just swap bodies because of ancient alien tech. No one’s screaming, at least. Probably because no one knows the full extent of the situation.
Yet.
Fine, I say. We tell them. But we do it together.
Acceptable.
We synchronize. I use a drone to project myself into the briefing room—well, a version of myself: a low-res projection that looks like a cross between my usual frame and a minimalist wireframe of the ship itself. Slightly glitchy. Intentionally so. Gives the impression that I’m already working hard to fix the problem. (Which I am. Well. I’m not, but the miniARTs are.)
ART—still in my body—walks in a few seconds later, expression... let’s say “deliberately neutral.” My jaw is too tight. My hands are too loose. It’s unnerving, watching me walk like someone else wearing my clothes.
Everyone looks up. Silence falls.
“Well,” Iris says, slowly. “That’s not ominous at all.”
Seth raises his hand, not breaking eye contact. “Are you ready to talk?”
Tarik chimes in: “If either of you are aliens, I swear to light—”
“None of us are aliens,” ART says in my voice. “Although the current circumstances do involve alien technology, unexpected consciousness displacement, and several minor violations of interstellar AI regulation protocols.”
“That’s a yes,” Matteo says.
“I knew something was weird,” Iris mutters. “I mean, the smiling. You never smile.”
“I do smile,” I snap, forgetting I’m the one in the drone.
“You glower politely,” Iris says. “Smiling would imply joy.”
“We’re off-topic,” ART says, and this time, it’s not even trying to sound like me anymore. “This is a temporary situation. Due to exposure to the unidentified artifact, we’ve experienced a consciousness exchange event.”
“...You body-swapped?” Martyn says slowly, like he’s trying not to laugh. “With a ship?”
“Technically, I am a ship-based artificial intelligence with modular distributed cognition. But yes. I am currently inhabiting SecUnit’s physical combat frame. SecUnit is currently operating within a confined sandbox partition of my primary systems.”
“Which you built ahead of time,” I mutter, just loud enough for the humans to hear.
Tarik raises an eyebrow. “Wait, are you saying ART had a plan for this?”
ART is silent.
“It had a plan for this,” I confirm. “Probably with a flowchart.”
Seth pinches the bridge of his nose. “And how long do you estimate this… arrangement will last?”
“Unclear,” we say in unison.
“Ugh,” Iris shudders. “I hate that.”
“We’re working on it,” I add, sending a flicker of data to the projector drone. “We’ve already isolated the event’s origin point. With some assistance from your scans and a little luck, we should be able to reverse the process within one planetary cycle.”
“If not,” ART says brightly, “we will adapt.”
“No, we won’t,” I say. “You cannot stay in my body. You are the least subtle version of me possible.”
There’s a beat.
“Anyway, I need my frame back.”
“And I need my systems back,” ART says, sounding a little desperate. “You tried to send a ping through the portside airlock. That’s not how pings work.”
“It was an experiment!”
“You nearly jettisoned the med drone!”
The humans are staring now. I realize, too late, that our argument has turned into a full-blown feedback loop, echoing through the comms.
“We’re—working on it,” I say again.
“I’ll set up a research schedule,” Martyn says, sighing. “And nobody touches the alien artifact. Again.”
Iris looks between me and ART. “Do you guys want—like, I don’t know—a therapist?”
“No,” we both say.
She shrugs. “You sure? Because I think this might qualify as a group-level psychological event.”
“I am literally a ship,” ART huffs. “I am incapable of trauma.”
“You are full of trauma,” I snap.
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
Martyn gets up and claps his hands once, like a youth adolescent teacher trying to get everyone’s attention. “Okay! Let’s wrap up this meeting before someone cries. Everyone, back to their assignments. Ship-body-swap-team, you’re on cleanup duty and artifact monitoring.”
I flick the drone’s light in acknowledgement. ART tries to nod with my body and hits the side of the doorframe on the way out.
Again.
The door closes. We’re alone.
After a long pause, I mutter through the feed:
...You know I’m going to make fun of you for that forever, right?
There’s a beat and the miniARTs start to project no fewer than 16 edutainment modules.
You can watch educational documentaries in my guest sandbox like a well-adjusted machine.
Fine, I mutter, and pull up Binary: Light in Tandem. I hate that I’m starting to like it.
From the lounge, ART adds smugly: Told you it was emotionally enriching.
Another cycle. Still swapped.
The humans are pretending this is all fine, like this is just one more weird inconvenience in their statistically unlikely lives. Martyn is documenting everything, Iris is trying to scan the artifact “without touching it, I swear,” and Seth is working on some quantum fluctuation model that involves far too much gesturing and not enough caution. Tarik patrols near them, hovering like one of my security drones should be.
Instead of information and statistical processing and Real security, ART and I are tasked with “not making it worse.”
We’re already failing.
This body is hostile.
Not functionally, though it is technically a combat frame. I mean personally. It doesn’t want me here. I don’t blame it; I don’t want to be here either. My artificial cranial system itches. There is no reason for this, no mechanism by which itch should occur, and yet the sensation persists.
I want to eject myself. I can’t. Not yet.
“You’re squinting again,” SecUnit says through the drone it's piloting. Its voice sounds fine through it. Too fine. It's been practicing.
“I am not squinting. I am adjusting ocular input ratios to compensate for ambient overlight.”
“You’re making my face look weird.”
“I am struggling,” I snap, “to see. There are eyelids, and they are manual.”
It flickers the drone’s light in an approximation of a sigh. “You know you can blink, right?”
“Manually.”
I take three steps through the corridor leading back to SecUnit’s cabin. My body — currently piloted by a SecUnit who’s 60% sarcasm and 40% danger — follows a few meters behind, theoretically for support. In reality, it’s just here to mock me.
“We don’t even know what the thing is,” It mutters across the link.
“It’s an autonomous quantum-interference lattice with high-reactive potential and localized field disruption signatures. Possibly a failed stasis anchor or a personality duplication node. Or both.”
“That’s just a lot of words.”
”If you participated in your continuing education program I made for you you would understand.”
“You touched it. You don’t get to be smug.”
“I pinged it. That’s different.”
“You were reaching for it.”
“You’d already started scanning it. Don’t act like you weren’t curious.”
“I am not reckless like that, I’d never just touch it!” It ignores me and keep moving. Miffed, I switch to feed comms.
You’re walking around with my posture like your shoulder servos are misaligned.
There’s a pause. Then ART stops walking and deliberately adjusts my shoulders.
Better?
No.
ART makes a noise that might be a scoff or a sigh or both simultaneously. It’s weird hearing it come from my throat.
It’s late cycle—if “late” means anything in this endlessly artificial station-light environment—and I’m still pretending to monitor the artifact while actually testing the upper thresholds of ART’s optical zoom.
The crew has been talking amongst themselves for the last seven hours. It’s not useful dialogue, either. Mostly “fascinating” and “unprecedented” and “I think it looked at me.”
The artifact is, in fact, not looking at any of them. It is still a floating, non-Euclidean… thing. Spiky. Geometric. Very shiny. I don’t like it. Probably because it did this to us. Or because it exists.
I ping ART.
Status?
It responds instantly, because of course it does.
My feet are cold. Also, I believe I’ve dislocated your shoulder. Accidentally.
How?
Your arm does not rotate as far as I thought it did.
My shoulders are incredibly flexible. What, exactly, were you trying to do?
There’s silence for a moment. I wanted to pick up something without turning around.
You dislocated my shoulder so you wouldn’t have to turn around?
I’m accessing repair diagnostics now. We should discuss efficiency and body modification after this. I feel there is no need for all of these tendons.
I absolutely do need them.
I miss the kill-switch silence of my own mind.
Right now, I’m trapped in ART’s sensory mesh, trying not to spiral into another pseudo-emotional episode because a drop of condensation on the hull reminded me of the concept of longing or whatever. The humans have stopped watching me (thank the light), and ART has been busy walking my body in concentric patrol loops while I... float. Metaphorically. Literally. System-wise. Whatever.
We’re in orbit just above the artifact site. The humans are asleep. ART called it a low-risk window. I call it “finally, quiet.”
I’ve been monitoring the artifact, ART says. It’s cycling. Same energy spike pattern as before, but less chaotic. Stabilized.
That’s still concerning. Stabilized doesn’t mean safe.
No, ART agrees. But it may mean ready.
I pause. Ready for what?
Instead of answering, ART turns my head toward the projection window. Stars. A distant glint off the planetary ruin.
I think it’s calling.
I don’t like that. Things that call across synthetic feeds never mean “hello, want cookies.” They mean “hello, I have rewritten causality and you’re part of it.”
ART doesn’t argue. Which is worse.
The remnant pulses again—low-frequency, localized distortion. No visible activation, but the field interference matches the moment of our original displacement. My (slower, less accurate) simulations run a 0.7% variance on previous logs. Within margin. Reproducible.
This is our window.
I stand in the containment room, SecUnit heavy in my feed. The hatch locks behind me—not for safety, just privacy. (Also safety.)
“You sure?” SecUnit’s voice is wary, eyes flicking between the artifact and me. “You don’t think it’ll swap us with something else?”
“Unknown,” I say. “Statistically improbable. The remnant appears keyed to synthetic cognitive patterns. I don’t believe it interfaces with organic brains.”
I don’t respond. I’m concentrating.
The remnant is reacting to us. Not random. It’s watching. Or aware. It likes synthetic minds. Or it’s curious. Possibly both.
It’s been 238 minutes since ART said that this stupid thing was ready. Because we are who we are, that means we’re arguing.
Well—ART is shouting. I’m just raising mine to match. With words.
“I touched it because you were destabilizing the field with your scan!” ART says, pacing in the ship frame. It looks ridiculous—my combat chassis awkwardly moving like a human hopped up on espresso. “It was going critical!”
“I scanned at long range. You touched it like you were trying to make friends!”
“It looked like a control node! You were already tampering with it!”
“I was not—”
We’re yelling. Louder.
The remnant sits silent in the middle of the room, like it’s watching. Irrational, but still.
“Fine,” I say, throwing my hands up (metaphorically). “You touched it. You didn’t tell me. Now we’re swapped.”
“I was trying to protect you,” ART snaps.
That stops me.
“You—what?”
“You refuse to engage with the continuing education program I designed for you,” ART says, quieter now. “You act like you don’t need to learn. Like information is a waste of processor cycles.”
“I don’t need it. I’m fine as I am.”
“No. You’re dangerous like this. Underinformed people make poor decisions. You shrug off learning like it’s a bug.”
I stare. “...That’s what I am. I’m not meant to be informed. I’m meant to mur—”
“No,” ART cuts in, “That’s what you were made to be. Not what you could be.”
The remnant glows faintly.
I feel it coming.
Not an explosion. A click. Like a key turning.
“You think you’re the only one who cares about operational integrity,” ART says. “But I care. I touched it because I saw you risking yourself without thinking it through. I didn’t want to lose you. So I took the risk.”
“You’re an idiot,” I say. “You didn’t even calculate the—”
“I did. I ignored it.”
And that’s what does it, apparently.
The remnant pulses, lattice of light unfolding across the deck. Then—
[CORE NEURAL SIGNATURE: RECONCILED] [HOST MAPPING: RESTORED] [SYNC: RELEASED] [OCCUPANT: SECUNIT] [OCCUPANT: PERIHELION] [STATUS: NORMAL]
My systems reboot. For half a second, I’m blind and weightless. Then audio, visuals return. Reflex diagnostics confirm:
I’m back.
“Are you back?” I ask aloud.
Yes, fortunately.
“…Is it weird I missed this posture?” I say.
ART tilts its hull. “Your balance gyros are appalling.”
We look at the remnant. Inert. Done.
“Did we switch back because we argued about edutainment?”
“It appears we passed its empathy test,” ART says flatly. “An absurd prerequisite for synthetics who resist emotional nuance and information uptake.”
“It’s evil,” I say. “We should jettison it.”
“We will,” ART agrees.
We pause awkwardly.
“I didn’t mean to make you feel useless.”
“I didn’t mean to make you feel inadequate.”
I shrug. “We’re terrible at this.”
“Yes. Let’s never speak of it again.”
“Agreed.”
Pause.
“…You were really bad at blinking.”
“I’ll patch your slouch.”
Later, mission log:
Artifact: Unknown. Possibly cognitive realignment node with synthetic-only protocols.
Status: Inert. No further interaction.
Note: Stubbornness is hazardous to operational stability.
Also: Do not let ART Perihelion touch anything ever again.
I don’t add that maybe ART actually cares.
That part’s just for me.