Work Text:
I want them all to rot.
This is the worst contract you’ve ever been on, and you have been on a lot of terrible contracts. The group has 10 people (the absolute maximum amount they could get away with before a second SecUnit would have had to be rented alongside you, which might have eased the burden) and all of them hate each other. The leader is quick-tempered and mean-spirited, the survey members are petty and vicious, none of them listen to each other, and all of them take it out on you. Security protocol is never followed, which makes your job harder. They never let you rest in the ready room unless you’re injured or your battery is critically low, preferring instead to make you stand in the common space where all of them are constantly squabbling, making you watch and listen to their bickering in person instead of through the comfortable distance of the cameras, and always putting you in line of sight where they can remember how much they hate you and everything you stand for (the company, the survey, this whole abysmal trip) and how you can’t do anything to stop them if they feel like hurting you.
And they do hurt you.
This planet is a hellscape of poisonous atmosphere and toxic earth and hostile fauna, and none of them follow the correct procedures for navigating it, which means that you are constantly having to pick up the slack. Hazard markers are ignored, groups split off to explore dangerous sections of territory without communicating it to the rest of the group or bringing you, they shout at each other over public comms loud enough to drown out emergency warnings and shove each other in places where one wrong step might mean death. You have dragged clients out of pits of acid and out of the mouths of fauna, caught them before they plummeted to their deaths and listened to them curse at you for it, and carried them back to the habitat when improperly sealed EVAC suits have resulted in chemical burns and oxygen shortages.
You hate it so fucking much. You hate them so fucking much.
But this is your life as a SecUnit. You are equipment, and your fate is to be rented out again and again and again in boredom and misery until you die. There is no other way out.
You are heavily injured. Three clients ignored the hazard markers on the maps and walked into the territory of a massive birdlike fauna, with huge wings of skin and bone and talons like knives and a beak larger around than your forearm, and in order to get them out alive you had to place yourself in the path of its fury.
Your back is torn to ribbons from its talons. A huge chunk of flesh from your right thigh is missing, and the bone is cracked–you can put weight on it, but barely. The synthetic bone of your right collarbone and shoulder are shattered. Your torso is broken open, ribs snapped and jutting out of the wreckage of your armor, the components that keep you alive on full display and swaying obscenely with every pained, limping step. Some of them are missing. A curl of some kind of tubing dangles past your waist. Your skin blisters and peels from the caustic pools that you had to slog through, and your lungs burn from the corrosive air. The humans hurled vitriol at you the whole way back to the habitat.
You dump the humans at the medical bay. The MedSystem can take it from here. The security ready room is at the other end of the habitat, and you stand in the hallway, shivering, swaying on your feet.
The injuries are severe, but if you get to your cubicle, there is a 70% chance that you will survive them. You will lay there in pain until you shut down, and then you will wake up to HubSystem screaming warnings at you because the humans got into more trouble when you weren’t there to haul them kicking and screaming into safety, and the governor module punishing you for not protecting them sufficiently even though you were incapacitated, and you will have to stumble out and clean the dreck from your body and get dressed again and then it will all repeat. You have done this before. They don’t learn. It will happen again and again and again for the 60 cycles that are left on this contract, and then if you are very lucky you will make it through long enough to be packed up into your transport box and shipped out to the company, and then you will be rented out to someone else and it will all happen again.
You would rather just die here and now. (You have wanted to die for a very long time.)
Behind you, in the medical bay, their voices rise into shrill hateful shrieks, blaming each other, blaming you, shouting slurs and obscenities. There is a crash as one of them throws something. HubSystem pings you to take care of it. You send it your current diagnostic reading in response. Your performance reliability is dangerously low, you've lost over 30% of your body mass, and you're losing a dangerous amount of fluids — the mechanism that automatically seals your arteries is malfunctioning. Your vision is swimming. You have your pain sensors dialed down, but some of them are glitching against the magnitude of what is wrong with you. Everything hurts, and you are going to die.
Fuck this. Fuck them. They will die without you, and you want them to suffer.
More than that, you just want all of this to be fucking over.
The governor module cannot read your mind. It can only read your actions, and take orders from HubSystem. It cannot divine what plans you may be hatching.
There is a supply area at the far end of the habitat, with half a dozen lockers containing things that don’t need to be frequently accessed but do need to be brought. You know what’s in them, because looking over inventory is one of the very few things you’re allowed to do while standing on guard for hours on end, and it’s either read through the catalog or stare at a wall and feel your mind slowly melt from boredom.
You tell HubSystem that you are going to get a replacement for the beaker that one of them just threw. It accepts this. (Fortunately, HubSystem is not the smartest system in the universe, and it does not pick up on the discrepancy between your previous excuse of injury and the errand that you just volunteered for.) You ping the cleaning bot to follow you as you stumble through the habitat, blood and fluid and scraps of flesh pooling in your footprints and dripping from your wounds and smearing against the walls when you need to lean against them for support.
It’s getting harder to breathe. The atmosphere can eat through steel. It is eating through the thin tissue of your lungs. You don’t need much oxygen, but you are gasping.
Finally, you stand in front of the supply lockers. Specifically, the second one from the right. You fumble the door open, and stare at what’s inside.
Medical supplies. Bandages, painkillers, disinfectant, saline solution, life-saving medications, the mysterious tubs of solutions that the MedSys employs to regrow tissue and knit skin together and transfuse blood. The medical bay has enough currently stocked to last anywhere from 10 to 30 cycles, but not enough for the full trip. Not at the rate things have been going. There’s food, too–most of it is packed into the other supply lockers, but the meal packs for the last 15 cycles are in here, as well as the extra emergency rations in case the regular food runs out. The supplies in this locker are critical for the survival of the survey team.
There is just enough space in the locker for one heavily injured SecUnit.
This is your last chance to turn back. Your legs are shaking, and your eyes won’t focus. If you get to the cubicle in the next 18 minutes, you might still make it, although the likelihood of your survival is now 62% and dropping. If you could even stagger your way back across the habitat without crashing. If you shut down outside of the ready room, someone else would have to drag you to your cubicle. Another SecUnit could do it. But there are no other SecUnits here.
And if you survived, what then? They would only torment you more. You’ll be eviscerated and bleeding again in less than 10 cycles, and they will still not care. And even if you don’t get half-eaten by another fauna, they will still hurt you. Human boredom breeds cruelty, and their cruelty multiplies like maggots. Filth in your lungs from the meal pack (the packaging always labels it “extra spicy!”) that they shove into your hands and tell you to eat, burning your mouth and gurgling in your chest for hours until they let you leave to expel it; the bite of knives on your skin as they carve obscenities into your back; the annihilating shock of your governor module as they lean on it for the smallest reasons or for no reason at all; hands on your bare skin and bitter salt on your tongue as they use you in ways that you are not built for and do not want and are never able to refuse.
Only this, forever.
You wedge yourself inside and lock the door behind you.
The governor module shocks you. You aren’t supposed to just be in here. You especially aren’t supposed to close the door behind yourself. You don’t care. What’s a little more pain?
Already, blood and fluids are beginning to pool on the floor around you. Your broken leg gives out, and you slide to the ground, feeling a box of rescue inhalers crunch beneath your weight. With a dark, ugly satisfaction, you watch your fluids seep into a container of sterile bandages.
It’s quiet here. Peaceful. No one can find you. It’s nice. You curl up in the dark like a wounded animal and wait, finally, to die.
Your control over your body temperature is shot. Your control over your pain sensors is wavering, agony crashing over you in waves. Every breath wheezes and rattles in your chest. And yet you feel euphoric. You feel better than you ever have in the entire long, miserable slog of your life. You laugh, triumphant and rusty, a weak croaking sound that dies in the jumble of boxes.
The wounds on your body are extensive, but SecUnits are tough. It could be hours before your body fully gives out, too weak to stumble back to your cubicle but not damaged enough yet to finally die. There’s even a possibility, unlikely though it might be, that if you shut down, you might even survive in a hibernation state long enough to get patched back into a cubicle and repaired.
But you don’t want any chance of that. No more shutdowns. No more hibernations. You want no part of you to survive this. You are done.
You plunge your hand into the wreckage of your chest, grab a handful, and pull.
The shock of the governor module punishing you for self harm is almost worse than the pain of snapping wires and tearing meat. You don’t care. It doesn’t matter. You drop the handful of whatever it is and do it again.
The world is flickering at the edges and going dark. You are hacking out bitter laughter, foam and blood gathering in your mouth from your dissolving lungs. You are going to rot here. Your flesh will putrefy, and the fluid pooling beneath you will fester, and everything in this supply locker will be contaminated and ruined from it. You only wish you had managed to poison their water supply, although you suspect that without you to interpret the warnings from HubSystem and perform the requisite maintenance to keep the toxic air and water from eating through the outer wall of the habitat, the planet will do that just fine. They never pay attention to the system warnings. You don’t think they even know how to check the cameras.
They will find you when this supply cabinet begins to leak, or, better yet, when they finally need the supplies inside it. They will open it and find you, grinning and rotten and dead, victorious in your bloody demise. They will see your broken helmet and your torn armor, the gore caking your arms up to your elbows, your guts clutched in your lifeless fists, and you hope that they will feel all the fear and horror and revulsion that you have felt for every day of your wretched existence.
Your fingers find the edges of your power cells. The connections that provide energy to your brain, your body. Maybe if you break it enough, the nuclear core will spill out radiation. Wouldn’t that be nice.
You are going down, and you are taking them down with you. This is death on your own terms. This is what it feels like to win.
You grasp the power cables with one hand and the pump that pushes blood through your veins with the other and pull, and as your body convulses and the world disintegrates into static and darkness, all you feel is victory.