Chapter Text
"That's it. I'm done."
I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms, keeping my eyes fixed on the corner of the room where two walls met the ceiling. Through my drones, I could see that Pin-Lee, Ratthi, Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj, and Gurathin were all staring at me. For most of the time that I was talking, they'd looked away, either at various points in the room or at each other. I actually wasn't sure when they'd all started looking at my face. I didn't want to play back the recording to check. It was sort of creeping me out. Pin-Lee even seemed to have forgotten about the bowl of popcorn on her lap, which she'd been sharing with Ratthi.
"That was very good, SecUnit," said Dr. Mensah. She was the only one who wasn't looking at me, and hadn't the entire time as far as I'd noticed. "Have you considered writing a book?"
"No." That sounded like a great way to get even more attention than I already did, and thanks to the stupid feed ID that identified me as a SecUnit, I already got noticed a lot whenever I went out.
Ratthi swallowed, and said (in a slightly higher octave than normal), "You're not allowed to tell ghost stories anymore, SecUnit."
That was fine by me. I shrugged. "You insisted."
"Well, yeah, but I thought you'd just have some canned crap you heard from a client once. Not—"
"It was great," Pin-Lee interrupted, firmly. "But maybe a little overkill, having the bit about the two humans and one of them was dead, on top of the thing in the mine itself."
"You definitely have a knack for storytelling," added Bharadwaj. "In a variety of genres, apparently."
They'd all calmed down by this point and were looking at different parts of the room again, which was better for me, but the silence that hung in the air was almost as bad. After a 9.4 second eternity, Ratthi said, "Okay, Gurathin. Your turn."
"Pass."
"You always pass," complained Arada. "You read a lot, you've got to have something you can pare down and tell."
"I don't read horror," Gurathin replied. "Mostly nonfiction and geology journals. Do you want a story about haunted rocks?"
Ratthi, Arada, Overse, and Pin-Lee all made booing noises. Pin-Lee tossed a piece of popcorn at Gurathin and hit him directly between the eyes.
"Fine, then, I'll go again!" said Ratthi. "It was a dark and stormy night—"
Everyone groaned. I started up an episode of Sanctuary Moon as background noise, but I didn't completely tune out Ratthi's story. It was silly, and not at all scary, but that was kind of nice in its own way. Preservation is lacking in proper ghost stories, because Preservation is lacking in proper ghosts.