Chapter Text
"What happened?” ART asked, tone interested, too interested, rather than alarmed.
I was pretty sure it knew roughly what happened and my hands were full making sure Gurathin did not add fall damage to nerve injury on the way to the table in the med bay. Something told me not to let him go until he was actually on the table, regardless of what he was trying, weak and feverish, to insist on, and the lack of any apparent injury.
“You look unusually pleased with yourself.” it added.
I did not. I looked the same as I always did, and I had put a lot of practice into controlling my facial expressions by now, and this was not a pleasing situation anyway. Human on the table, I could leave, but it was not going to save me from having this conversation. I did not want to have this conversation.
“I don't.” I said, despite still feeling incredibly smug.
"You do." ART insisted simply.
I was starting to feel less smug. I would chose ART's company over any human, but it was also true it would never allow me the satisfaction of feeling like I had won something. Explaining what happened was medically relevant anyway, and if I didn't, it would probably be worse and even more annoying to correct any misunderstandings.
~*~
When I had first left the PreservationAux team at port FreeCommerce, I had thought Gurathin and I had come to an understanding. We had moved from “what is his fucking problem” territory into a mutual... respect, even understanding. Maybe also a lot of very big feelings I wouldn't be sure how to talk about if I wanted to, and I don't. I had thought we were both politely ignoring the part where he had asked me to stay - and all the messy emotions that came with- and that he had understood I was leaving -in part- to make sure I was not actually dangerous to be around the way he had once feared, that I had to go, know what was out there and if any of it was a threat. Now, he was being weird again, differently, but we were very quickly getting right back into “what is his fucking problem” territory. I mean, I can't completely blame him, I hadn't expected to see him again so soon either.
After joining ART's crew, I had expected not to see any of them again for some time, but my different groups of humans were starting to bleed together at the edges, with how often someone I knew from PresAux found an excuse to coordinate with mine and ART's humans. Mostly, this was nice. I never had to wonder, for too long, how any of them were doing, if they kept checking in, if they kept coming along on random missions. I had thought they were checking in on me, personally, wanting to make sure their Murderbot was okay, but I was starting to suspect it was actually a function of all my favourite humans being fatally attracted to the greatest danger they could find, and me tagging along behind them, to try to keep them from getting themselves killed.
Gurathin was somehow almost always in the mix, to the point where I could count on him willingly involving himself in anything at any invitation, whether he seemed enthused about it or not. This, at first, surprised me, before I started taking it for granted, that he had started being so... Convenient, but the longer it went on the weirder it was, ignoring his growing something with the feed. It seemed oddly outgoing for him, like he was putting effort into it, and possibly a bit self-destructive, considering how these things usually went.
He wasn't being obnoxious, for him. He answered direct questions simply and as helpfully as he could, and mostly kept quiet. I could assume this was just how he was, when he was not busy being mistrustful and openly hostile, but he was a notable percentage more talkative with Ratthi and Pin-Lee, when they could drag him away from reading alone wherever he could find the most greenery. It was like he was trying to be his usual snippy self but was failing utterly, while overtly just making himself useful to me. There was no resentment, no substantial disagreements, barely any sarcasm where I was involved, except when occasionally voicing concerns, especially if he thought I was doing something risky, but doing everything he was told immediately, and even things like let me physically reposition him without protest, and that was mostly the problem. Okay, problem is a strong word because it did keep him out of harm's way and it was useful. It put me at ease knowing my humans would trust my judgment and listen. It wasn't that I expected him to keep being miserable towards me, not after everything. I didn't know what I expected, but it wasn't this.
I could assume he was bitter, that I left, that I didn't include them in my personal fact-finding mission, but he wasn't cold or snippy, and he was plenty good at cold and sour looks, I would know. It would be more familiar -and probably easier to understand- if he was. In place of any hostility he had started vocally allying himself with me, in as few words as possible, telling other people to back off; what he had said to Doran not being the only example. Otherwise he was just mostly pleasant in a way that seemed calculated somehow. He looked tired, still, exhausted when he thought no one was looking, and he had always looked a little like he might have been crying, if you really looked for it, but it was more blatant now. Despite this, he kept involving himself anyway, with sad little smiles to himself -and watching me sometimes- when he thought I wasn't looking. I'm always looking. At almost everything. He should know that. He was being weird about me. Which, I mean, sure, what's new, but also just... In general.
I know. I hear it too, but I was still mad. I was the one who should have still been mad. As far as grand gestures go, what he had put himself through to get me back was pretty up there, but we were both ignoring that it happened -apparently- and it didn't erase all the times he had been such a complete asshole. I hadn't forgiven him. He did not get to just save me and then act like everything was normal and fine and we were friends. It felt like he had forgiven me, but he didn't get to forgive me because I hadn't done anything wrong and I hadn't forgiven him. And then, he had the nerve to look just so... pathetic, and not even really argue with me, not like he was willing to make anything of it, so I felt like I couldn't even be mad at him, and worse he seemed to genuinely be trying to hide his misery, so I knew it wasn't just an act. It was like... It was like he was a sec unit, aggravated if I was doing something dangerous, but acting like he wasn't really allowed to protest. Is that what was bothering me about it? This was like the opposite of catharsis. This was psychological warfare.
Clearly, we had a lot we should probably talk about, a lot we probably both needed to say, but I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't care whether or not he did. It felt, somehow, like he'd had the last say, and like I would be being the asshole if I tried to fix that. ART would probably accuse me of being childish, never mind its long standing problem with Holism, so I didn't want to talk to ART about it. Gurathin was infuriating before, but at least if I got upset, it was obviously justified. The last time we had seen each other we had saved each other's lives and he had seen every memory and choice, setting or preference that made me who I am, and now it was just a lot of polite and pleasant -for him- nothing. If I'd wanted a subordinate function, I'd code one.
I know, I know. Do I want the human more or less obedient? That was exactly the kind of question I didn't want to answer and why I wasn't talking to ART about it.
I don't know why I even tried it, maybe to confirm he wasn't just ignoring me as politely as he could while still spending time with the other humans, or maybe because every time I had to get his attention on the feed now I got such a weird reaction, but I tried pinging him one day while he was working, to see if I would get the same response. Augmented humans could do it too, even humans could if they really wanted to, using the feed, they just tended to use more human greetings. There was no flinching or body temperature shifts that way -though still that spike in attention- nothing that looked like he might be in pain. When I'd spoken to him unexpectedly on the feed a few times lately, he had winced, or shuddered and I had started to suspect something was wrong with his augments, maybe something that made certain sounds, data types, or voices painful, but there was no record of any procedure to correct or treat anything like that.
I wasn't fully convinced he had just found a whole new way to be a little bit of an asshole about everything, not on purpose. I mean, that was my working assumption, but I wasn't sure. Something was completely wrong with his tone for someone trying to be short with me -even I could tell that- sure, I hadn't missed the occasional warm little chuckles or private smiles -so much as politely ignored them- but I didn't know what to make of how he responded to the ping either. He pinged me back, like an augmented human -could- but, again, would be more expected from a bot. Humans, when they didn't use short greetings in the same way, usually at least tacked a little emote afterwards, unless they were angry. This was just the ping. No additional greeting, no questions, but it didn't feel angry. For one it was so fast I questioned if it was automatic somehow. A week later I tried again, this time to stall him for half a second so he didn't get clipped by the hauler bot he was about to walk into. Again, he pinged back, nothing more, and we never spoke about it.
It was weird. I wasn't the only one who noticed either, because everyone else seemed to be going slightly out of their way to be nice to him, and to include him, especially Ratthi, who occasionally gave him pitying looks. My next worry was that he might have relapsed, which -as I had insisted to ART- was my business because if his judgment or performance were impaired I needed that information for proper risk assessment, both for his safety and that of my other humans. It wasn't that. He had been having some kind of medical issue since I had left, and I had reasons to suspect it had something to do with his augments, or the nerves they were wired to, but ART insisted it wasn't dangerous, or relevant, or any of my business unless I wanted to ask him myself. I did not. Suddenly, ART cared about protocol and patient privacy, even if I could run scans or -normally- check his files myself and that would be part of my standard operating procedure.
Rifling through his medical files was something a sec unit would do, not something another person concerned about him should be doing. I was a sec unit and I didn't, I don't like having to interrogate my relationship with being allowed to also be a person now, with being expected to be. I wasn't used to it, and I still hadn't figured out what a person who was a sec unit instead of a human should look like. I wasn't even remotely used to thinking of myself that way, so much as some separate outside observing thing, but it had felt weird to monitor him more than I was watching anyone else, especially if I wasn't going to confront him about it, so -thinking my choices were to either ask him about it or stop caring- I decided I didn't care and continued not to care for the next thirty six cycles. At which point it became apparent I probably should have cared.
I could still feel it, sometimes, just for the record, an impression of what he had been feeling that night, like a careful, desperate, nearly failing grip trying to contain everything I remember in a system that didn't quite have the capacity and wasn't designed for it, or I thought I remembered it, sort of. It might have been some kind of elaborate unconscious extrapolation. What I did remember was the feeling of those memories spilling back into my storage as if there was a genuine hurry to offload them, most of sanctuary moon and all, and the sense of reckless and absolute tunnel vision, a clarity of purpose that seemed unusual for humans. And the pain. The kind of pain that's telling you that you are damaging your own body and need to let go. The kind of pain that usually forces the issue.
The link between augments and organic neurology could be touchy. If pushed too hard the inorganic augments could overload the capacity of organic nerves. It could be painful, and potentially damaging and the system was designed less for simply shunting things to storage space and slightly more to encourage actually processing the information, which could make processing large amounts of information overwhelming. What he had done was genuinely dangerous and risked potentially catastrophic permanent damage. No wonder I had been missing episodes. I had no idea how much he had chosen to delete out of his own storage to make room for me and I was not ready to process how to feel about that. It was one of those things that made my organic components feel all melty, and that pissed me off.
Okay, I hadn't forgiven him yet. I hadn't, but this growing making himself available and speaking only when spoken to routine was annoying. I also had every reason to think he wasn't sleeping properly, which could be dangerous. I'm not supposed to be monitoring people in their quarters like I used to, as part of my job. That was up to ART now, and it agreed with Bharadwaj that it was probably better for me, for reasons I don't want to get into, that have to do with thinking of myself as a person. Look, if I had slipped a drone onto him and he or ART had noticed, they hadn't said anything, and I had done it for good reason anyway. Most recently, he had come in to the med bay on two separate occasions -in as many weeks- with injuries sustained because he hadn't been paying enough attention, ignoring the times I had intervened in time. At least, I hoped it wasn't more complicated than not paying attention. Maybe his reaction time had slowed, been damaged. I hoped not.
One time, a little past midnight, he had pinged me. I pinged back, after a minute, not sure what he could possibly want, but that was it, no other reply, no further request, nothing on the feed. I checked the security camera. I know. It's not like I'm not aware of what humans were usually doing at that hour, I just didn't think it was anything like that, and it wasn't. I checked just to make sure nothing was wrong, and by the time I had, he was mostly asleep, even if he looked miserable. He was wired directly into a small device. I didn't know why he needed to be hardwired to something in order to listen to music, or whatever he was listening to or watching, and I didn't need to know. No matter how upset he looked, how vaguely grey, how much like he had been crying. He was safe and his life signs were stable. I could go back to rewatching Sanctuary Moon.
I rewound the footage and checked the previous twenty minutes before it could be deleted and take any answers with it. I know. I need to stop this. I'm working on it. He was curled up to sleep, then really curled up, clutching the pillow -his own this time, I was assuming- like it was a lifeline, or like he was bracing an injury, looking miserable and in some kind of pain. He turned greyish and then ran to the bathroom. I hated watching humans be sick to their stomach, it looked horrible. Once he was cleaner and calmer, he curled back up around the pillow and seemed to be crying. See, this felt voyeuristic.
This was the problem. I was built, programmed, to monitor humans and keep them safe. You can't be a person and do all of that without it being weird; not quite pheromone sniffing weird but we were also politely ignoring that. That was why bots and automatic security systems and sec units that you were supposed to think of as objects were supposed to be good. In theory, something actually intelligent could review footage with potentially sensitive content, make sure no crime was taking place, and then just delete the footage and not care what was going on, so long as no humans were in distress or trying to hurt each other. In theory. In practice, I was experienced at being used as spyware for the corporation, but even that still wasn't the same as sharing the information or video with other private individuals. Being a private individual made that complicated, even if I was still designed for monitoring. The professional distance of a camera was comfortable. I was not wired to interact with people face to face, certainly not without armour and not for personal reasons. I was quickly outgrowing being able to think of myself as purely an outside observer though. Mensah and Bharadwaj were helping me work on it.
Seeing humans have sex, at least, felt impersonal. It was boring, and gross, and an expected thing healthy humans often chose to do together. I had no interest in seeing it even if I was supposed to monitor the footage the same as any other. Whatever a healthy human might do to themself in private also fell under this. Watching what looked like it might be grief -I'm not great with human emotions yet, in case you couldn't tell, let alone Murderbot emotions- that felt private. I told myself this wasn't personal, that I had every reason to be very professionally concerned, but it still felt personal.
If anyone had ever voiced a problem with me monitoring them like a security system should, and yeah some people had, it was Gurathin especially, but in my defence, he hadn't had a single complaint since the night I left, and checking someone's security feed didn't seem intrusive compared to being inside their head, or having them skim over all your thoughts and memories. Besides, he pinged me, and I was... I was worried, okay? And trying to determine if he needed urgent care of some kind.
Looking kind of wretched, but no longer shaking, after a couple breaths that looked like someone deciding whether or not to speak, he had pinged me, then, in the short silence afterwards, curled progressively tighter around the pillow like his stomach hurt, jumping when I eventually answered. I watched him take deep breaths and relax, laying still and picking up whatever the device was to plug into it. I made a note to ping back faster next time, if he ever tried it again.
Now I could go back to watching something, or picking out something to watch. I sent a request to ART for a copy of whatever was on that device.
Even if I wanted to, I couldn't just hack my way in there myself because it was a potentially closed system, sort of, Gurathin and that device. An augmented human, or some of them, could just turn the wireless connection to their augment off, if they ever thought to, otherwise that would be a massive security vulnerability, which meant they could only actually connect though a hard wire until it was turned back on, and could feel incoming and outgoing information, whether or not they had control of it. I didn't actually want to just take the information, whether or not he would know. I just wanted to know without having to talk about it. To avoid asking ART again, I would have to request the information directly through Gurathin's feed or try to sneak the record of what had been put on it through ART, if it had come through the ship's feed, and neither of those things were happening. I mean, I could steal the thing when he wasn't looking, but that felt wrong. ART still seemed to be of the opinion that it was best to talk to him about this, if I was so convinced I wanted to know, and paused for an entire thirty seconds, which is an obscenely long time for a bot, especially this bot.
After I was already certain I was about to hear an argument for why I couldn't have the files, I received them. Static. What most people would call 'white noise' but was actually other colours of noise, modulated to sound almost like indistinct whispering in a certain range, low and calm. It was a very typical thing for humans to listen to in order to fall asleep. I still didn't know why he had to be wired to it directly, and it had told me pretty much nothing. ART had also sent along less personal medical files, general information about human nervous systems, vagus nerve stimulation, information on nerve injuries, and something called autonomous sensory meridian response, and I logged it away. Whatever. I didn't care. It seemed to calm him down and actually get him to sleep. He didn't seem to be in any distress, so I doubted it was painful or one of those self-punishing things humans did.
I waited to see if he would ping me again outside of work hours or initiate any interaction at all. He didn't. He went back to -increasingly- waiting to be approached or spoken to at all times, even if the others were slowly dragging it out of him to initiate sometimes. I was already getting the sense that this was how introverted humans ended up never speaking, even for the ones who actually liked each other. Not that it applied here.
There really wasn't a social protocol for this and I hated it. Imagine pinging someone is a standard polite greeting, like saying 'hi' or 'hey' or nodding the way people do when they pass each other in the hall. Now imagine you could say 'hi' to anyone in the same building, or city, as you at any given time, not just when you happen to pass each other, and imagine that they showed subtle signs of messy human misery when you hadn't, in accordance to whatever imaginary social protocol you had never been informed of. I hated how much attention this was taking up. I tried to write a subroutine to remind me to ping him if I hadn't in a while -don't read anything into that- but I wasn't sure what conditions to even set.
ART had assured me he wasn't sick, and he definitely wasn't in any physical danger, so it wasn't my problem. Even if it had been some abstract part of my job before, it wasn't now. No matter how much ART insisted it was normal to worry about a human who seemed distressed. It still didn't change the fact that unreliable performance or behaviour from any human could affect the risk factors to themselves and others, and that he looked marginally less miserable if I pinged him on occasion; usually in the morning so he would be less preoccupied at work. It also didn't change that ART knew, at least part of, what was going on and wouldn't tell me. Every time that I've insisted on knowing something ART told me I didn't want to know, I've ended up regretting it.
It was what ART wouldn't say and would not assure me of that was making me more anxious than was probably necessary. Even before the files, I had every reason to suspect he had sustained some kind of nerve injury from whatever stunt he had pulled to get me back, and was refusing treatment for it, even though it was clearly disabling, and that everyone was trying to hide it from me, but unless ART was lying to me, that didn't quite add up. Whatever. It wasn't my problem.
I had thought -though maybe that was stupid of me- that this new pattern of behaviour, and how overprotective my other humans tended to be, would mean that he would be kept away from any dangerous missions, or heavy machinery. That would be expecting too much. I was really starting to hate alien contamination, and sentient viruses.
~*~
You would think that Gurathin had left the ship quietly because he was going to take a fucking vacation or something, but no. No such luck. Instead, him, Ratthi, Arada and Pin-Lee had the bright idea to sneak into an abandoned facility on some half baked rescue mission to help some fugitives trying to escape the corporation and -not- bring their SecUnit along. Okay, so I was only as much their SecUnit as they were my humans, but yeah, they were my humans and apparently set on doing things to get themselves killed without me being in range to stop them, and hadn't learned their fucking lesson.
Gurathin knew better. I had been busy on another mission at the time, but that's no excuse. Gurathin should have had the sense to tell them it was stupid in my absence. That was -by the way- the one upside to being completely seen by someone, it was no longer painfully awkward to share a passing glance with them when everyone else was talking about doing something incredibly stupid. So much for having a subordinate function though.
I know. I'm probably one to talk. I understand how a series of perfectly rational decisions or non-choices can -in special or unreasonable circumstances- lead to unreasonable looking conclusions or down paths you never thought you would choose. My life was a series of making the most reasonable choices I could under duress and ending up in every kind of situation I didn't really want to be in. The fact that it could happen to humans consistently too was not surprising to me, should not be surprising.
Now, the problem was that he was trapped in an infected facility -a new infection this time- rife with experimental tech based on the remnants found on the surface, having stayed behind to make sure everyone could get out because of some issue with the failing computer system and the door controls, and to send a distress and warning signal. This was one of the sites that served as a precautionary tale as to -why- remnants were illegal to fuck with, by the way. Being the only augmented human there still alive was no excuse. He knew that terminal was infected, he knew the infection was lethal, untreated, and he had even helpfully sent along the hazard description and warning that was supposed to keep people out of the facility, along with the path the survivors were taking in case they needed to be intercepted, all brilliantly encripted. See, this is why some measure of mental health assessment is part of my job, formally or not. I didn't know if he even expected me to be able to save him or if this was some stupid self-sacrifice. I was going to save him. There wasn't another option. What I did with him after that was something I was still deciding.
Everyone else had made it to the ship but now there were two problems. A corporation ship had come to loom close by -the station was orbiting a planet right on the edge of corporation space- so we could not be detected going to or from the orbital station from our side of it, and Gurathin was trapped inside a metal bunker, with dwindling life support, and infected with a virus that was going to destroy his nervous system because it was designed to infect computers that were made almost exclusively of biological components, which just incidentally were closer to humans in key functions than they had -presumably- been to the aliens that originally made use of the technology. I'm sure a mostly organic computer that had that much function in common with human biology had looked really interesting to humans until it turned out to be a viable disease vector.
Of course, most alien remnant weren't trying to kill anyone, as I've explained before, but -in this case- it could be considered actually malicious, sort of. It did think it was infecting and destroying something, it just 'thought' that something was effectively machinery and not people, probably. It was something like an old worm, file-infector and hardware targeting virus all rolled into one, only meaner. In augmented humans -something it was never made for, as far as I knew- it made them slowly start to think of themselves as synonymous with the infection, making them defensive of it, paranoid and unwilling to seek help or admit there was a problem while it replicated, then overloaded and wore down every nerve with non-stop signalling, until their heart, lungs or brain stopped working, whichever went first. The hazard was known, the progression of symptoms was known and predictable, we knew how to deal with it. ART could save him, hell, I could probably save him, anything or anyone with more processing power and natural immunity than another augmented human -in theory- but the problem was getting to him and getting him back to the med bay fast enough without being spotted by the corporate ship.
I was also starting to hate drifting around in little metallic bags waiting to blorp into ships, and stations, even if I was keeping a couple of these things around. They were useful, in limited cases, and surprisingly compact. If I could clean up this mess, then the mission would be a complete success, but the virus progressed fast and I was really wishing they had involved me sooner so we could have avoided this entire thing.
I could have sent the signal with the bio-hazard warning, kept the facility doors open once the humans had accidentally triggered the lockdown, and been fine trapped in there until either I or ART finished hacking the system to let me leave again, or until I just broke all the doors down. I would be fine waiting until the stupid corporation ship gave up and left. Instead one of my humans was probably half dying of fever somewhere in there alone and this idiot bag could really be moving a little fucking faster.
I pinged him the moment I was in range. There was no risk of him infecting me that way, worm or not, I could just delete the virus anyway and it would require a hardline to begin with. Which is why they should have waited for me. He pinged me back, nearly as fast as usual, impressively fast for a human, but for me it was an anxiety inducing entire second. We knew how the virus acted generally, not how it would necessarily act in someone who's nerves were already compromised. Finally I hit the station. Once inside I was able to hack and cycle the airlock. Through door after door, and mostly pitch black, expansive, ring shaped hallways -with bots occasionally whirring down them way to damn fast to be safe to have around humans- I kept pinging him, and he kept answering. I knew where he was. I guess I was trying to assure him I was on my way. Okay, he knew, I was assuring myself I wasn't too late.
Looking back, I probably didn't need to risk terrifying him by being that aggressive with the last door, but it got stuck and there wasn't any time. No one should have been using this station anyway, it was the last place the corporation would look for people for a reason. Once an ambitious new station, it now lay in dysfunction and ruin, mostly de-powered, overtaken by everything that had gone wrong when the technology running it had been infected with something brought up from the planet, where the technology it was based on had been discovered. The hazard for constructs and non-augmented humans was limited, humans because they lacked digital storage and constructs because we could consciously control ours more like an MI, so the worst it could do was some cold-like symptoms, but it still had to be quarantined.
Either way, I was already monitoring him and he relaxed before he could have gotten a clear look at me. He had his feed mostly locked down and was only cycling a small window for short bursts of communications to get through, just the pings, maybe in some attempt to make sure he didn't broadcast the virus. Maybe I was panicking, because I remember thinking it was weird he would just assume it was me, here to save him, but I had been pinging him the whole way. Ratthi had probably told him they were getting me after he locked them all out of the main control room. He was slumped on the floor in front of the terminal. I checked for the hard wire but he'd already coiled in back inside his chest pocket. I considered that a good sign, someone planning to die abandoned didn't bother to unhook themselves and get ready to be recovered. That, or it was habit. He seemed so out of it and unfocused I didn't realize I was looking at him directly until he spoke.
“Hey.” he said very softly, body temperature already way too high, covered in gross sweat, enough I couldn't tell if he'd also been crying again, but -with the virus whispering in his ear- probably.
I wanted to say 'Don't fucking 'hey' me you idiot.' but insulting clients wasn't something I was used to being able to do and I was still adjusting. It wasn't out of fear that might be the last thing I said to him.
I went to pick him up. He pushed me away gently and struggled to his feet himself.
“I can walk.” he said, almost not swaying, not sounding annoyed, just stating it.
Good. All I had to do was lead him out to the airlock and get him in the life-tender. If he could last until we got back to ART, everything would be fine. If his temperature was still high, that meant it hadn't started dropping yet, which was the symptom I really had to watch for. We still had time.
No, wait, not good. Sweaty or not, he was not stable on his feet and was very much at risk of falling and likely couldn't move all that fast, but he would resist being carried. I didn't want to argue it with him though, we didn't have the time for that, and the more I antagonized him the more likely he was to start thinking of me as a threat. He was already looking slightly more stable as he walked out the door. I followed closely behind him, ready to force the issue the moment I had to. I should have just carried him.
We had gotten to one of the rings where the occasional hauler bot or transport drone, unmanned vehicle of some kind, was whirring past, cargo long turned to dust by now and malfunctioning at speed, and he was clearly more compromised than he thought. Human conscious reaction times tend to be about three to four seconds on a good day, ignoring unconscious reactions or muscle memory, and the problem with trying to pull them away from danger is that -until they react- you have to fight their strength still trying to move them into harm's way, which can cause an extra moment of delay or possibly hurt them. Gurathin's reaction time was -currently- closer to half as fast the human average, augments or not, and that was a problem because he was stepping into the path of an oncoming transport drone.
It wasn't difficult or complicated to pass a small analogue electrical signal from my fingers to the port behind his ear, enough to mimic the static-like noise he was used to relaxing to, in a primitive but effective format. I got the idea from the virus actually, and why it was so dangerous for systems where organic nerves met inorganic hardwiring, at least, ones with less conscious control than a construct. Augments and a lot of my systems worked because in between chemical links, nerve tissue transferred small electrical signals. The virus caused escalating and constant signalling, and for nerves linked directly to inorganic conductive material that could just keep absorbing signal as fast as it was produced, this was a great way to fry something pretty quickly. My bio-electric systems can be consciously controlled -hence the immunity, yes, I was actually sure this time- and my fingers are conductive metal.
It accomplished exactly the reaction I was looking for, his joints softened and lost their resistance far faster than waiting for him to realize what was happening and let me pull him out of the way. Hopefully he was too delirious now to ever think to ask me why I had thought to try that. I was politely ignoring the soft noise he'd made. It didn't sound like pain or even surprise.
“Doctor Gurathin, it would be... Safer if I-” I began, confident and feeling, well, like I had just hacked human behaviour to let me save a client from harm without them fighting me on it.
“Sorry... I mean, thank you. You don't have to carry m-” he interrupted me to say a little too late, too slow, touching his nose where the bot had nearly clipped him.
I had already checked for blood, he wasn't hurt. The pointy tip of his nose was pale and clammy, but the skin was all there. Fuck this though. Carrying him would be way faster, and safer. I wasn't supposed to just make clients shut up and do what was safest, no matter how much I wanted to, but Gurathin would forgive me. Or he wouldn't, I didn't care, the priority was to get him out of there alive.
I wasn't sure the exact same trick would work twice, so I modulated the static with high and low limit filters and tone adjustments to sound like the same vague indistinct almost speech from the recording, but -testing a theory- in roughly my tone of voice and reached out, as if to inspect his nose, to touch the port behind his ear. He was delirious and off balance enough to fall for this. Not a great sign. I don't want to talk about what I was thinking, maybe that I'd get some other fragment of information on what exactly was going on with him. His temperature spiked slightly in his chest and face, like the reaction I got from the feed, and -importantly- his joints went entirely soft for half a second. I picked him up. If he was too unstable to physically protest, he was too unstable to be trying to walk.
“...Yeah.” he said, conceding, and yeah, that felt like winning an argument.
This was much faster, and he wouldn't be running face first into any bots. Don't get cocky Murderbot, you still have to get him back alive. I could feel the heat off of his face from where he was against my chest, on mine, and last I checked, high fevers killed humans.
I got him into the airlock and deployed the life-tender, thinking I had at least managed to avert the consequences of this latest rash of human stupidity [I really wasn't in the mood, okay? This had all just been so incredibly reckless and stupid, even by usual standards], and actually surprisingly satisfied with this new solution of just making the human shut up and let me save him, but by the time I turned around to load him into it, he had stopped shivering, because his body temperature was starting to crash. Fuck.
I pulled out an emergency heat blanket, the reflective foil material resembling the tender, and wrapped him in it to get him inside the thing. We launched on the right trajectory and at least we were on the way, but he was already progressing towards hypothermia and floating through space was not a good time to lose your ability to regulate your body temperature, enviro-bag or not. He was supposed to have a least a few more hours before these symptoms hit.
I did the only thing I could think of, I wrapped us both in the thermal blanket and raised my own body temperature. At this point, standard Murderbot operating procedure. This helped, but it still wasn't working fast enough. This -what I was about to do- would be less comfortable. I lifted the back of his shirt and the front of mine and raised my temperature as high as was safe, holding him firmly to me. Whatever protest he might have been preparing for this died the moment he felt heat pressed to his back. That was a lot better. I mean, he was still sweaty and gross, but having a client held to me so I could carry them out of danger wasn't outside of normal operating parameters, and he wasn't even gripping to me the way most people did when they were panicking, which I had somehow never minded, in context. If I could raise my body temperature to console a human to keep them from distress, I could do it to save them from hypothermia, even if that human was Gurathin.
He was warm enough, for now. The problem was this was still progressing at a rate I hadn't expected, and usually the symptom that came after complete nervous system failure --the kind where you lost your ability to regulate body temperature and other symptoms of acute, rapid onset dysautonomia-- was the dying part I was trying to avoid. If I panicked, I might shut down and then he would die for sure. I Had to do something useful.
“Doctor Gurathin, I-” I began, reaching up to the pocket he kept the hardwire in.
There really wasn't time to wait for ART, for this stupid bag to drift and blorp its way home. Maybe I should have started this back at the terminal. But no, I had wanted to avoid this and I thought the high fever meant we had time.
His hand came up and caught mine, weakly, and that's when I remembered that he was probably going to fight me on this, like everyone else had fought off salvation. The virus hid by making the host system think it was an important piece of sensitive information that shouldn't be discovered, and liked to hide next to other things that fit that description, which -in a human- would likely be memories and autobiographical information. Surprising me, he pressed my hand to the pocket, nudging my fingers toward the zipper clumsily, unnecessarily, as if I was the one too feverish to function.
“It doesn't want you to.” he whispered, as if conscious of speaking so close to me, but he tipped his head away, shaking or not, making sure I had clear access to the port.
Okay. He was trying to fight the virus, trying to tell me he was okay with this, even though he knew he felt like resisting, and why. Or, for some reason, it was readily apparent to him that keeping me out was the virus talking. Thankfully, I still had a way to plug myself into other systems, if I chose to, not unguarded, involuntary and vulnerable, like the port on my neck had been designed to function so I could be updated or controlled as needed. I could disconnect it entirely now, internally, by default, and only reconnect it when I wanted to. He gripped the arm I had around him and gasped, almost silently, when I brought the line close, like he wasn't expecting it, like the brush of fingertips had delivered another shock. Sensitive.
The moment it clicked into place I understood why. A pleasant nerve crawling sensation was emanating from the nerves around the port, now that I was plugged in, and from his ear whenever I happened to breathe. I could feel it now, and it was fairly intense. He was very, distressingly, conscious of how close I was. The incidental contact to plug in being amplified by what I had to assume was nerve damage, maybe anticipation. What my fingertips felt like brushing near the port was consuming about half of his attention. The other half was mostly on the synthetic skin against his back, ambiguously, as if waiting -maybe apprehensively- for some reaction he was not in control of.
These kinds of augments were supposed to have measures in place to prevent unregulated spillover into major nerves that controlled important things, like the vagus nerve that controlled heart rate and a bunch of other autonomic functions, but all the increased nerve activity in the area, maybe even before the virus, was bridging nerve to nerve and adding to the cascading responses. It felt good. Tingly, and distracting. The kind of thing you had to focus on to feel properly, but that you wanted to give your attention to. I felt him tense, as if bracing for something, from me.
Maybe I usually would have been more annoyed, or judgmental, about how much he already seemed to be enjoying this (or flooding with anticipation at least), but mostly I was relived, both that he wasn't fighting me, because that would make trying to save him really upsetting and difficult, and also that I was getting answers without having to ask. This whole time I had been dreading the point where he would turn, decide I was the enemy. Holding a human down while they screamed and cried, and doing something they though was hurting them, was something I had known I wouldn't be able to handle, even when we were at odds, even if I was saving him. That was why I had suggested what I had with the hardwire last time he had ordered me to restrain him. Gurathin understood, both that and wanting to understand someone but not wanting to deal with all the awkwardness of having to talk about it. I knew why communicating in images, feelings, and memories like recordings -and raw data transfer- was more comfortable to me, but Gurathin was human, and just weird.
Light vagus nerve stimulation was safe and had historically been used to treat various medical conditions, including treatment resistant depression and stress related nausea, according to the files. If this was why he was refusing treatment, that the nerve damage felt good, because it was -helping- him, and not to punish himself, for some stupid reason, it was a relief. I relaxed, and then so did he, nerves finally settling on a pleasant reaction all around. Not that I cared or had really wanted to know, but at least now I knew what it probably wasn't. I hadn't been able to admit to myself how afraid I was that he was seriously hurt, until now that I was relatively certain the truth was far less dire, and much more awkward.
This would explain why ART wasn't volunteering the information and had probably been asked not to tell me; had probably been asked -very pointedly and specifically- not to tell me in particular. Not that it would listen to that, but if it thought telling me everything would just upset me... 'Yes, that stunt had caused nerve damage, but no, it wasn't severe, and it wasn't painful, and oh, he'd rather keep it because it was helping with the sickening anxiety that I also don't want you to ask about.' I didn't feel any impulse arguing this was off the mark. Something else though, something like guilt. He didn't want me prying at that, so it's exactly what I needed to do, even if that felt wrong. He tipped his head subtly further to tell me it was okay. Unexpected. I knew he wasn't stupid though, and I didn't think he wanted to die, even if his actions lately could fool anyone.
“That's it...” I coaxed.
I'd like to claim it was unconscious, to say it out loud, that I had started babbling placations in my panic to do what I could to save him, pretending at calm and in control for his benefit, as even Murderbots, this one at least, have proven to do, but it was slightly more conscious and decisive than that.
I wanted to encourage this calm and cooperative mood, and was still fishing for information about what exactly this reaction to my voice was. When I had thoughts like that -those little self satisfied encouragements- around an MI, most of them anyway, they didn't really notice or care. They lacked the context to read anything much into it. Gurathin, being human, had plenty of interpersonal context his mind wanted to read into everything, and thoughts that sounded like coaxing and purring satisfaction took on an entirely new tone to his ears. I thought that if the mental suggestion had as much impact as it did, that actually hearing it might have more, for him, right now especially, which I thought could be useful. I was right.
I know it should have seemed conclusive at that point, but -and maybe you could tell- I was having a hard time processing it. Murderbot or not, I don't think I like the idea of being a source of distress to humans. Okay, I liked distressing some humans. It was about context. I don't think like a bot, or like a human, sometimes things felt like they were getting stuck somewhere between the organic and inorganic parts of my neurology. I -felt- like I had to keep re-confirming I was not hurting him, because I still had not identified what the reaction was, and I had not identified what the reaction was because I did not want to know. I did need to know though, obviously, since I couldn't let it go otherwise, and because I had to know what I was working with now.
He swallowed another reaction, whatever it was, shuddering. Nervous anticipation, or apprehension, and an apologetic impulse, flooded the channel, stronger than any spillover of emotion I ever got out of the feed. The first time I had linked to him this way, it had caught me off guard enough to allow for an attack. This time I was ready for it and the nervousness sat there like buzzing resistance. He had to relax and let me find the problematic bits of code, preferably before it burrowed in somewhere even deeper, that he would start fighting to keep me out of, even knowing what the virus was doing. Half the victims of this thing had known how the virus acted and failed to resist it anyway. They chosen to die rather than be seen.
With the arm not holding him up, I steadied his head against mine with one hand and held the cord to the port with the side of my face, so he couldn't pull it out or hurt himself trying to pull away. I still only had two hands and any unexpected motion, especially a violent one, could do some serious damage. Augments were fairly well secured to bone and the cords were meant to pull away safely, but his augment, the tissue around it, was already damaged in some unknown way [unknown, because no one had seen fit to tell me] and I didn't want to take chances, even with errant or interrupted electric signals; not to mention we were floating in a bag through space. I was very careful not to use too much pressure and hoping he wouldn't eventually start clawing at my face when he started losing touch with reality. He should have already been thinking of the virus as a natural part of his own psyche, considering how advanced his other symptoms were. Thankfully, viruses weren't typically all that smart, and I was learning to be thankful this human was suspicious of everything and could be devious. Changes in his breathing and skin temperature told me he had probably felt that impulse from me loud and clear.
At least maybe now I could get some answers that were firm enough to knock something lose, while I was tracking the invader down, maybe telegraph places I expected it to try to hide that weren't too deep, or too old, something the virus would go looking for, like setting a trap. That guilt he didn't want me looking straight at for a start, or the first part of it anyway. That he hadn't earned it, that he hadn't done what he had done for a reward, and -technically an injury or not- how soothing it was, the comfort it brought him, feeling stolen or not, the vague facsimile of the intimacy he lacked, felt like being rewarded for doing the bare minimum. Never mind how very corporate rim the attitude was that he had to earn anything good or comforting. Never mind that other buried impulse, no, not never mind it, I had to focus on that too. It slipped further away, and so did the virus. I'd have to dig my way back to it.
He swallowed nervously and made the tiniest gesture somewhere between nodding once, or baring his neck more, or nudging into the hand in his hair, one of those, or all three. It was subtle. I was impressed with how much he was really fighting to cooperate, even though this all must have felt existentially threatening, even before the virus. 'The SecUnit will see and judge everything' was perhaps perfectly designed to upset him in particular, but I felt his focus on my hands, and warmth, and breathing, so intense as to trigger a kind of attention induced euphoria, like the tingling from his nerves. He was soothing himself. Trying to. Taking comfort from having me there. Trying to make himself cooperate.
I fed the port a bit of static roughly the frequency, the colour, of what was in that recording, still in that primitive analogue format, and a pleasant cascading sensation ran from his ear, across his scalp and down half his spine. It felt good. Really, really, good. I felt his surprise, like that wasn't usual somehow. I was hoping to get some more answers on what was up with him and his augments lately, why he acted like he was trying to hide that he could barely stand to hear my voice in the feed, or sometimes at all. This was the static he relaxed to though.
I tried again with the new static I had designed, the one in my vocal range. The pleasant tingling amplified into waves of intense pleasure crawling through his skin. I had to keep him from arching away from me. He hadn't expected that much more than I had. He shut his eyes to hide them rolling up, a little belatedly, and kept impressively quiet, not letting any resonance into whatever his voice wanted to do, Unfortunately for both of us, subvocal moaning was still perfectly audible to me. I froze. He froze. His panic and apologetic impulses drowned everything else out. I made sure he was fully disconnected from the public feed.
He offered me a memory, then, shoved it at me, as if trying to communicate something. I was him for a moment and laying in bed, feeling what that normally felt like; pleasant, relaxing, a lot like that feeling you got in your skin when a show hit a really poignant note and the music swelled to match it perfectly, only less goosebumps and more scalp tingles... Not like this, not this kind of pleasure, not like someone doing it to him intentionally, which he had never experienced before. Not like me doing it, knowing what it felt like. This felt personal, really personal. He was already fighting with himself to let me see this, not least of all because he was sure it felt more personal than it was and that stung and made him feel vulnerable. I could see that. The virus was trying to flood itself with copies of it, chasing after all the places it lead to. He really was doing an impressive job resisting this thing, at least, letting me see where it was, if not keeping it from spreading.
“Shh.” I tried to sooth him.
Nothing in any of the files I had read indicated that either kind of nerve response should be inherently sexual at all, but everything that was sensitive and felt good was probably context dependent, like massages or whatever else humans did to each other for comfort. I wouldn't know from personal experience, I had never been in a context that made me enjoy contact with humans. Well, okay, I'm starting to suspect that something about a client being warm and soft when they are helpless and need saving does something to my organic neurology to make me want to protect them, but I'm not ready to unpack how much of that has to do with being cloned from human tissue, and how much of that is by the corporation's design. Anyway, anything like sexual interest from a human generally set off my threat and risk assessments. He swallowed, shrinking away inside, and I felt walls start to come up. He knew better. He had been braced for this and to not let it happen. He was doing it anyway, sensing my discomfort. Shit. I was already fucking this up.
“Uh...” I said, panicking.
That was too loud, probably. He winced ambiguously. I realized I had gone entirely inhumanly stiff, like a robot in headlights. That wasn't going to help anyone.
“I- I wo-” he began to protest.
“Shh.” I knew.
He paused a long moment and tried again.
“It's not your fault I'm-”
“Shhh.”
I didn't exactly mean to just shut up, because I couldn't really mean for him to keep anything quiet, given the circumstances, but I meant he didn't have to say anything out loud. I could see. He didn't like the idea of forcing anything on anyone any more than I did. I knew, and I was trying to tell him it was okay, instead of thinking something that would come off as judgmental. He hadn't done anything wrong, I just needed a moment to adjust. I was not sure this was the kind of care or rescue I was made for. I mean, objectively, it wasn't, but what I was made for was obedient violence, and I didn't like that. I was still deciding how to feel about this so far. This was the closest I had ever willingly put myself to a human, with the way I was wrapped around him, even his back sweating against where my stomach would be. Conveniently, I still lacked one of those.
I reminded myself that -even if it felt awkwardly slow, and dragged onward- I was -in fact- bracing a client against danger and carrying them to safety. Slowly. Too slowly. Too much time for the virus to act. Too much time to dwell on how this felt; warm and soft, and terrifying.
I needed to stay focused on him, on tracking down the virus wherever it was hiding or replicating and eliminating it. Search and destroy. I had cozied up to a number of bots, feeding them whatever information they needed to hear, to get them to grant me safe passage, seducing a human in the same way -no, not the way humans generally meant that, absolutely the fuck not- would be complicated. For one, most bots were fairly simple and had simple wants, and for another Gurathin knew me well enough to know when I was lying. His life depended on him letting me actually convince him of whatever I needed to in order to keep his guard down. That meant finding... convenient honesty.
I had to be in his head, not mine. I took a deep breath that I probably didn't actually need, trying to calm my own nerves and think. I checked that he was warm enough, that he was held securely and not too tightly. Pain, anxiety and guilt spilled out around his defences; defences that I needed him to let down. I couldn't do my job as part of his security system if he kept locking me out.
“Shh, relax...” I tried again, to sooth him, nudging around for the viral code, for access to anything at this point.
I felt what that did against the back of his ear, even with is guard up, and I felt him react by throwing walls up between me and whatever he was thinking and feeling, despite that he was cursing himself for doing it, needing a moment. It wasn't entirely timely or effective. This kind of desire wasn't exactly familiar to me, but he wanted me to keep whispering to him the same way I wanted to drag this virus out of him. So, violently, and in a way that was fairly attention consuming.
“You don't...” he mumbled, sounding as feverish as he had felt, holding my arm a bit tighter but not trying to push it away, yet.
“Higher.” I told him.
I didn't think that squeezing my arm the wrong way was particularly liable to cause the weapon there to discharge, but I didn't want to find out by taking off his hand if my -probably poorly made- arm didn't function quite as intended.
“Right.” he said, hand jumping higher up my arm.
I didn't know why he was the one feeling so apprehensive. Before now he had been way too into the idea of getting into my head, or even me being in his, curious to the point of it reading as threatening. Now suddenly all I could read was his distinct impression that I didn't like any of this and would not like anything I found either.
“Just relax.”
“But you aren't...” he tried, again, to protest without telegraphing what he was protesting.
I could guess. Given how he responded to my voice and his level of discomfort, I could guess. No, I wasn't a sex bot, I was a security unit. I wasn't the one who had ever seemed confused about that. My job was to eliminate threats to clients and to interface with security systems, like the onboard security system of his augments to eliminate threats like this virus. I thought this at him pointedly.
Now was not the time for my complicated and unprocessed feelings about comfort units, about the security vulnerability they could be, how they were as strong as a construct and how humans were so lax about them, when they weren't trying to use them -unfairly- like covert sec units, about the way they cared for their humans, or about the anxiety surrounding humans trying to use sec units the same way. It was not the time to unpack my feelings about fellow constructs, or that I had known comfort units who had used themselves as security units when it was what their humans needed, quite heroically... or any uncomfortable questions that brought up about the distinction between different types of constructs and their designated functions, about how much of it was determined for us, the choices we could or weren't allowed to make, or the ways weren't allowed to use our own bodies, or were forced to use them; about the choices we made anyway, and the consequences. That would probably take years of therapy.
He had to relax. I had to get him to relax and let me poke around wherever I needed to, or he would die and we both knew it. No tricks this time, no resistance, no feeding me convenient information, or something sensitive and emotionally overwhelming, to catch me off guard, or put me off the trail of something else. He knew how the virus worked. He wanted me to help him. He wanted me to keep going, enough that he felt guilty and guarded about it. I could at least see the thoughts he was letting me see. I had to find a way to help him let down his guard.
“Shhh.” I tried again, because it seemed like the kind of noise that should help, a natural vocal static.
It was a little effective. He took some deep breaths, and I tried again, and then another time, longer, softer.
“That's it... Relax for me...” I said, thinking this time about how I was trying to get that response on purpose, because it was useful, that it was okay, carefully feeding static into the line, adding one sensation to another.
He relaxed, or at least his knees did, and I was supporting his full weight again. Okay, that was on me. Speaking that gently against his ear, and the port that I knew was sensitive and wired directly into his nerves was maybe something I should have realized would have this kind of impact. I had at least seen human intimacy portrayed on screen. He shuddered, still holding back reactions, or trying to. Well, at least seduction -even the way humans did usually mean it- wasn't going to be a challenge, not judging by how that felt.
I was very careful about my next thought. My first impulse was probably to throw us both out into space, and that thought -if I had let it take shape at the time- would probably get him killed even if I didn't act on it. Okay, admittedly, there was a sliver of satisfaction there too, and it was probably safer to focus on that. Feeling it, not unpacking it. This felt like winning some petty little arguecussion.
The first fully formed thought I latched onto was that this was probably useful, being able to affect him that strongly, that it could give me a lot of control back in this situation if I applied it right, so I wanted to focus on that and not anything -I- was feeling. More useful, was that I had caught the virus's trail here. Of course he didn't want me seeing this. Oh sure, he wanted to feel me whispering in his ear, apparently, but not if he ever had to actually approach me about it, or let me know, or visit it upon me in any way. Okay, fair. I would also sooner throw myself out an airlock than admit to this.
One hand busy holding him against the only source of body heat in this thing, me, and the other holding him as if to prevent whiplash in a crash, in case he tried to throw himself away from me, or started seizing, I didn't really have a free hand, but between the hardwire static and whispering softly, I did manage to keep him -not really distracted, but calm- and delete a few latent copies and possibly a tiny piece of the main kernel before it slipped away from me again. I had to wonder how much a virus with the ability to self-replicate had the ability to self-repair.
First secret down, the sound of my voice in his ear felt so good to him, it made him want to crawl out of his skin. I could make a comment here, but that impulse had felt counter-productive and more than a little mean. I wasn't trying to hurt him or give him some kind of messy complex. There were already too many places for this thing to hide, even if it kept coming back to trail more copies across his short term memory. He was trying to let this work, me work, swallowing whatever embarrassment, guilt, or shame, to cooperate, trying, probably for my benefit, to stay quiet, not to squirm away. I could hear that under his breath he was trying very hard not to make embarrassing noises about whatever I was softly babbling to him while I worked. Having his memories rifled through carefully was making him slow, complacent and sensitive.
Unfortunately, willingly continuing this was exactly the kind of thing that I would have to fight myself on too, considering that this kind of human interest was generally something to be avoided at all costs. He could not register as a threat right now if he wanted to, as one of my humans dying in my arms and needing me to save them, but my risk assessment was still alerting annoyingly.
He understood, intimately, the anxiety he was setting off, had set off before, from personal experiences that were threatening to drag us both into memories that we were both resisting. Ugh, I would have to pry or coax my way into those sooner or later and neither of us would like that. I flagged that whole section, quarantined it. He nodded very subtly but I felt him scramble away, not from those memories, so much as from me, towards other memories, old things, from growing up in the corporation rim, and -when that failed- from when he had been intentionally addicted, to control him, things that made him feel vulnerable and powerless, anything that didn't quite trigger the confusing mess he was feeling now or make me watch something I thought was gross. Uncomfortable enough to tempt the virus, but something he was willing to let me rifle through.
They slipped past like cruel ghosts, and I partitioned them off as likely safe. He had to know that wouldn't work. The virus had already gotten its hooks into what would make him the most defensive and uncomfortable right now, here, with me, using my own discomfort with this to keep hurting him. How fucking dare it. I was going to shred this thing.
“You have to let me see.” I whispered softly, thankful he couldn't see me rolling my eyes.
In his defence, he was dying of some horrible fever under some kind of psychological assault and the only person he had to help him through it was me.
It had burrowed deeper by now but left a trail of bloating copies to clean up across one of my own memories, that he had either kept a copy of, or remembered witnessing and couldn't let go of. I wasn't sure if it was voluntary. Now wasn't the time to be annoyed by it. He had asked me what it was like to be me, and had held all of me in here, to his own detriment, sort of, I had assumed he wouldn't forget it all. If I could at least keep clearing away the self-replicating copies, I could slow down the nerve damage and keep the virus on the run until I got him to ART. This was like trying to pry someone's hands away from a wound so I could see it.
“You don't have to... You don't-” he muttered.
“Shh.” I shushed him again.
I didn't want to talk about my own motivations or feelings. I didn't have time to process anything right then and I didn't know if I ever wanted to. I had one thing that was giving me back some measure of control in this situation, some sway over him, some ability to help, and he was ruining it by being so fucking weird about it. What else was I going to do, let him die? That wasn't the right thought to be broadcasting where he could see it. That brought up a wave of nausea. He knew, he knew why this kind of interest from a human felt so threatening, inspired so much fear and anxiety. He knew how that kind of unwanted attention felt. Memories he couldn't stand to dwell on, and couldn't let me into yet, flickered past. He didn't want me to have to do this, or to feel like I had to. This feeling good, physically, just didn't help that, but then, steadily those nerves were deadening and desensitizing to all input anyway, and if I lost them I didn't know what I would do.
“Don't throw up on me.” I said, probably sounding harsher than was useful.
He nodded. Swallowing a few times to try to halt the reflex. My palm pressed over his stomach just under his ribs seemed to actually be helping. The soothing feed of static, reminding his nerves what normal stimulation levels felt like might have been helping. I tried to make a point to think about how this wasn't so bad, without giving him any other upsetting mental image for contrast, all the things it wasn't --he had enough of those-- how I wasn't afraid of anything right now except him dying on me. I actually let him see that weird protective softness it brought up in me to have a human curled up to me needing saving. It helped. Embarrassed and vulnerable was so much better than deeply ashamed or horrified.
Feeling whatever I was feeling right now, what it was and wasn't, helped ground him back in reality and out of spiralling anxieties. Somehow all of this was quieting my risk assessment too. I adjusted my breathing to a pattern it would be helpful for him to mimic. Human heartbeats sometime synchronized to other heartbeats they could hear, so I adjusted that too. I know I said I didn't have a heart. That's technically true. I have blood and lubricant that needs to circulate, so I have something like a heart, or a system of them, that are made from similar tissue, controlled by organic nerves that are controlled digitally. I still had a pulse, anyway. I had set hard limits on his through the augments to keep him alive until we got back, but I didn't want to force anything I didn't have to. If his nerves got overtaxed to the point of not carrying a signal properly anymore, there wouldn't be anything I could do about it.
I started scanning the memory for anomalies, bits of code that didn't belong. I had replayed this memory myself in the time since I had left. Yes, at the time I had been terrified. Too terrified to notice just how painfully awkward he was. He was interrogating me, trying to threaten me, ordering me to look at him, ultimately trying to make sure I wasn't a threat to his friends, even if it was dangerous and stupid because, if I was rogue, and he telegraphed that he knew... Well, that was probably part of why he had made sure were were alone together the first time he tested that. I had assumed it was entirely because the others wouldn't approve of him confronting me that way, and they wouldn't, but maybe it was also to give them time to realize I was a threat and get away if I decided to just shoot him.
He was playing defensive about letting me see all his motivations, but that wasn't a strong enough reaction to be what I was looking for, a heavy guilt, and resistance to let me look at it, was nestled in close to this somewhere, and the virus would be curled up to that. Maybe I shouldn't have been making uninformed guesses about what may or may not be information Gurathin would rather die than let me find out about, but that clarity would come later. I mean, it was pretty obvious why I couldn't just trust that he was actually volunteering his darkest secrets.
“You have to let me-” I made sure to whisper softly.
“I- I know.” he said, swallowing again.
The memory started up again, more firmly from the point of view I remembered instead of this confused jumble. He was remembering how afraid I had been. He was seeing it first hand, hearing what he sounded like to me at the time, and it was making him feel sick. He should have realized. He should have realized then. He knew better, how people could be treated when they were powerless, under some kind of control, they way some people treated someone who had no recourse, who no one would miss, who would do anything for their next hit, to not be hurt, or to not be dissolved in acid... because they could, because they were an available body. He saw it clearly from the moment he had seen my memory of it, the threat his words held, the way he had defaulted to trying to sound like the people who had hurt him. Subtle flashes -of his life before- bubbled up again, but I wasn't sure if he was trying to lead me there, if it was incidental, or if that was the virus spreading. I did not need him being sick inside this stupid bag. That wasn't going to help anything. I missed my armour.
I had already started to reprocess that memory a little differently, and I thought he was really making it into something it wasn't, but the way he kept reliving it, of course I had no reason to like or trust him, and probably never would. He hadn't done what he had done, to save me, to make up for this and he didn't think it did make up for anything. He wasn't asking forgiveness, he didn't think he had the right to, he hadn't been trying to pretend nothing was wrong. He was trying to give me space, make it clear that interacting with him was always optional, up to me. That was why he left it up to me to initiate contact every time. He had been trying to make it clear it wasn't about his feelings. He wasn't looking for my validation or for absolution. He asked me how missions and plans had gone because my answer would tell him how I was without him having to ask in a way I might not want to hear.
He was trying to squirm away from me seeing any of this, especially whatever he had been thinking that night when he went knocking on the door to his past asking to see the devil. A lot of nothing, actually, nothing but that he had to get me back. He hadn't even had the space to be tempted by anything else, because he had been so singularly focused on how losing me wasn't an option. I already remembered that, but he saw it as better if I could just hate him in peace if that's what I needed. Okay, so this was the part where he was torturing himself out of guilt. Predictable.
I was curious, if I could show him the way I remembered it now, if we were really lucky the virus would try to trace that trail back to me and I could just delete it, and then focus on the latent copies it was leaving behind before one of them took the lead. We were not going to be that lucky.
Like I said, yes, I had been terrified at the time. My organic neurology, threat and risk assessment all at maximum alert. He was already pretty certain I was rogue, and even forcing my hand at trying to escape would mean losing anything stable and familiar and probably meant being caught and melted down anyway. He had told me that was his aim, once, to see me scrapped, or said it where I could hear. He had probably meant it at the time, but it chewed at him now like this virus. Really he had been making it clear he was in control, and I had no good options, which I hadn't really needed to be told. Another wave of nausea.
Reviewing it now though -not that it excused anything- but he had really only been threatening me because he thought I might hurt the other humans. His humans. He had not actually meant everything he should have realized I could read into his comments about comfort units and his -truly painful- awkwardness made that clear, in retrospect. It was an unfortunate byproduct of being so interested in, and so challenged by me, at the same time. That much... fascination and genuine interest just didn't mix well with that kind of calculated aggression, his attempts to be polite or express care just didn't do anything to help with that. It all came together into something superficially indistinguishable from a very particular kind of threat. I had realized that months ago. He should probably work on it though. His lack of social awareness. I know, I'm one to talk about social awareness, but I didn't think he liked being seen as creepy. Which, okay, ouch. Not helping, Murderbot.
Now was not the time to start listing the ways I had ever thought he was weird or creepy, even if that would draw in the virus, it might also make me seem hostile. I was trying to focus on the ways I had started seeing him differently since. Like how it was also obvious that he had mostly been mimicking the kinds of threatening behaviour and language other people had used against him, or some softer version of it. I had seen the flashes of memory, the ones that made him flinch away, the people physically forcing him to look at them, telling him exactly what was going to be done to him, or what he was going to do, how he was going to be used and exactly how little choice he had. For him that was why it made him feel sick, to make someone afraid like that, someone he now saw, less as a dangerous weapon the way he did at the time, and more as a person, and a victim of abuse, like him. For me, it inspired an aimless protective kind of rage that was really just confusing. He didn't want that. He didn't want his intent and his feeling compromising how I needed to feel about it. He didn't want me to feel like I shouldn't be angry. Okay.
I was still angry at him, sure, for making all of this so complicated, if nothing else, but I was definitely a lot more angry at the people who had hurt him, murdery kind of angry. Suddenly my attention was dragging him forcibly after me into the memories to get a good look at their faces, disgusting human bodies and all, even if it had nothing to do with the virus -though yeah, he didn't want to relive any of this, or have me see it, so I found copies to delete here too- facial recognition scans going wild, or trying to. This was what he was trying to save me from, one of the things, hoping I didn't already have my own memories like these. None that I currently remembered, not like this, though almost certainly only because I lacked the anatomy.
There was something uniquely off-putting and gross about bodies when contact with them was this unwanted. I had to imagine that humans generally found each other charming, despite or including all the hair, and moisture, sweat and grime, heat and clamminess, breath and fluids, not to mention their horrible little sounds, but this, when it was so unwelcome... Of course it made him feel sick. Of course it made him feel more sick to make someone nervous about having something like this forced on them. I was tagging and deleting replicating copies of this mental noise with abandon. I didn't have to worry about deleting something original here, because his organic memories were what they were, and written into his nervous system already, and the same thoughts and feelings would just endlessly respawn off of them all on their own. I realized at some point I was rubbing his stomach, trying to soothe him. I just really didn't want to be trapped floating through space in bag of vomit.
I probably would have felt differently if it had just been done as some weird kind of social dominance thing, or if he had meant to threaten me like that, I would have left him on this station, but I knew he was just grasping at any straws he could, over some paranoid threat assessment, to protect the people he cared about. I thought that loud and clear and in a way I hoped cut through the noise. I had realized it pretty immediately even then, his own discomfort with unwanted intimacy, or sex in general, or violating boundaries surrounding it. That was why I knew showing him my feed would be so effective. I just wanted him to stop to examine how his words could be interpreted. He had not actually seen me as vulnerable at the time, whether or not he should have. He had seen me as a deadly threat in outwardly anxious clothing, who everyone was letting their guard down around and making excuses for. I still wasn't ready to forgive him, not completely. Maybe forgiving him would have felt worse anyway. I didn't think it would help. Apologetic impulses repeated like chanting still, not like begging, not for forgiveness, but like he couldn't say it enough. Now he knew that --instead of hyper-competent and mostly unfeeling-- I was actually a ball of confusion and anxiety; unfortunately for us both.
“I- You didn't deserve that, and you don't have to-” he began quietly.
“Shut up.” I ordered him, still keeping my voice low and soft, but right in his ear.
He swallowed and nodded instead of speaking and that... Was satisfying. Not saving him wasn't the option he wanted to claim it was; because I didn't want it to be. I had work to focus on. At risk of setting off a completely different vulnerability, I thought about his awkwardness and how easily I had redirected him back into his own discomfort with eye contact, or contact of any kind. I let him see my own satisfaction at gaining the upper hand, sure it was the lesser of two insecurities. Feeling pathetic was preferable to feeling like a monster, maybe not for everyone, not for the people who had hurt him, but for him, and I was confident of that much. More soothing static so something in him folded, though not to the same effect as before, and I was able to purge more latent duplicates of the virus and start to isolate and tag some of the code before it slipped off again.
He was trying not to resist, knowing what was on the line, but it felt like being stripped of something tangible. I could feel it with the same acuity I could feel everything else his internal systems weren't fighting to cover. He had to stop giving it places to hide. I could also feel what I was doing to his nerves, the way he felt it, what it felt like when he was overcome with guilt, compared to what it felt like that I kept doing it knowing what it could feel like to him. I know. I expected to be grossed out by it too, but in context, it felt like winning. It felt like very cleverly bending all the rules and misappropriating whatever I wanted, his nerves, my functions, to get the results I was after. It felt like I could save him. It also just felt good in a way I wasn't allowed to feel, a way that had been intentionally stripped out of me, and that felt like cheating, like getting away with something. It was a lot more effective when he relaxed and enjoyed it though.
“That's it.” I whispered, feeling some of how effective that could be if he would just listen.
I could feel how much he wanted this. He could hardly hide all of it, but I could also feel the guilt.
“Let me-”
“But you don't-” he tried again, weakly, still trying to tell me what I didn't want.
“Shh.” I said, very purposefully whispering into his nerves, getting a nod, but an otherwise much more subdued response.
He was stuck on something the same way I had been. I, meanwhile, had a stupid fucking killer virus to hunt. Everything I had already dragged him through or pushed him into was already a lot. It was a lot to process for me too, and I didn't have a virus trying to overwhelm my nervous system into a catastrophic meltdown, or convince me that any attempt to see my memories was a threat. But there was more, there had to be, because I didn't have that fucking virus pinned down yet. I had been monitoring his life signs and whatever I was doing seemed to be slowing and mitigating damage, but at some point he would have to choose between surrendering to me, or surrendering to the virus. ART could have saved him in seconds. Probably.
The life-tender drifted onward. So fucking slowly.
“I don't want to lose you.” I said softly, trying to keep the emotion out of it.
He remembered the turning point, and so did I, the part where he had stopped considering me the enemy and had reclassified me as one of his people. I wasn't conscious for it, having been busy bleeding out at the time, and I didn't usually acknowledge that had really entirely happened. It was complicated because that was the kind of thing that usually made my organic components go all wobbly, but it was Gurathin, and I wasn't ready to process that yet. He didn't really want me to look at it either, so... You get it by now.
That moment he realized I really was as devious as he had suspected, and as willing to resort to murder, and had in fact tricked them all, that should have felt like vindication, like victory... Now undermined completely by the fact that it was all in order to save them, and that I was still following through even when it looked like it was going to get me killed... That was when the internal cursing had started. The -not so gradual- involuntary re-categorizing of all the strong feelings he had about me, and all the curiosity, maybe some kind of envy -definitely envy, tagged for later- from directed at a threat, to directed at someone he felt the need to protect. Maybe we were both a little possessive like that.
I saw myself broken and bleeding out in his mind, the switch from pure relief that Mensah was alive and they were all on their way to rescue now, and probably safe, to the horrific -and very graphic- realization I had probably just willingly died to save them, the dawning realization of how he actually felt about me, and that I was slipping away as he watched.
Ugh, it was such a painful cliche, not just what I was thinking, the whole thing -I would know, I had watched enough media- the fond smile I had to see on my own face as it looked like I was fading away for good. Neither of us felt like we could look straight at it and I started tagging and deleting any duplicating code. He wouldn't even be able to tell me how sorry he was, how much it felt like he was losing, the potential he had finally seen stretching out before us being swept away. Me, bleeding out in silvery lubricant and red blood. Now I was feeling what he had been feeling, and I understood why he didn't want me to see that. He had instantly felt responsible somehow, like if he had just trusted me, we could have found some safer solution, I wouldn't have lied to them all to walk into the fire. I felt his near certainty I would be gone before he could even get to me.
“Shh.” I kept soothing him, now differently because, well, because Gurathin cries easily.
The way he rushed to my side was also pretty cliche. If it was a serial there would have been dramatic sad music as he lifted me, refused to let go of me, stayed with me, making sure I was tucked in safely and being taken care of, even if he didn't know if they could save me, if I was still me and not just a body, carrying me, using himself to steady me, support me, shield me, like I was his client to save and protect... When had to be held back from trying to keep the corporation from taking me on arrival. 'They can't take you from us.' The tears. This was doing something to me, I... had to stay focused. My performance reliability was dropping and I had to keep it in check.
“Like what's happening now isn't like a bad scifi plot...” he deflected, and laughed so weakly I re-ran my assessment of his physical condition.
This happened to resemble the plots of episodes in no less than three separate serials I happened to consider high quality programming, but a virus was trying to eat his brain, so I was going to let that one slide, for now. He was also kind of right, it seemed like the kind of thing that -were it happening on screen to someone else- would be delightfully unrealistic and contrived, though, I was starting to wonder why I hadn't, or -if- I hadn't been modelling those episodes for some direction on what I was supposed to be doing to help him. I know I was making a face, and likely made some kind of noise.
“Thanks,” he said weakly, “If this doesn't work-”
“Stop.”
“It's not your fault.” he said, with all the firmness he could muster, which wasn't a lot, trying to get out the important part before I could stop him. “You don't owe me this.”
No. Bring back the part where he was obeying me. I'd lose some half baked debate about what people owed each other with him later. We didn't have time now.
“Stop.” I said again, at about half the volume I meant to.
I didn't like this. I wanted to go back to where it felt like I was winning because he was doing what I said, and knew I knew best, and was letting me dig this stupid virus out of him. At least I got a little twitch, and increase in skin temperature, over him feeling that frustration from me, I guess. I mean, at least or unfortunately, I wasn't sure anymore. I had no idea what I was doing with a sweaty, depressed and slightly aroused dying human in my arms and this stupid bag was too fucking slow and if he died here because we had to sneak past that corporate ship, I really was going to go rogue and kill every human on it. None of the humans that were mine, or his, or ART's really cared for the corporations anyway. ART would help me.
Now wasn't the time to fantasize about tearing through a corporate ship, piloting it back to the corporate rim and seeing what kind of damage I could actually do -especially with all these new facial scans- no matter how satisfying I might find that. Probably. I did feel fondness, his fondness, sweeping over everything and double checked I wasn't holding him too tightly. Concern for my discomfort aside, he seemed to enjoy the tight grip I had around him and even in his hair. The more he enjoyed something, the more it tended to draw the virus to it, to me. I could use that.
“Come on...” I coaxed, feeding more static uselessly into nerves that had either mostly lost interest or were starting to fail permanently.
I didn't want to think about which. I had to figure out where this fucking thing was hiding. Or give it a place to hide, right where I knew to look for it. Something simple and easy to quarantine, in a sense, something easy to get tunnel vision about. I know you can probably see one pretty clear solution right now. I couldn't entirely yet at the time, but I could see the problem.
It just wasn't getting across, or not computing somehow, that I wasn't just doing this for him. I wanted to save him. For my own reasons. This method, if you could call it that, was... Was handed to me, sure, but I had walked in kind of wilfully, chasing results and satisfaction, and it didn't have to be -or lead to- whatever the hell he was afraid of, or thought I was. I couldn't play coy here. I couldn't afford to. I didn't have time to fuck around. Didn't he understand by now? He was obviously too fevered. He was too much in his own head about this and I didn't know if it would help to offer him mine. And he was probably dying and I was panicking and getting frustrated.
I needed to get him to understand and in order to do that, I needed to understand. What I was doing now, details aside, felt like I was doing what I was meant to do, however that could be interpreted, saving him, and like it was my choice. I had -enjoyed- toying with his nerves to make him compliant and easy to manage. Or had he missed that? I would have to either delete that, or figure out what it meant, later. Whatever that was or wasn't, I had done it of my own accord and for my own satisfaction, not just his safety, and when I got results I liked, I had kept doing it, so long as he seemed to like it.
Oh, hello. For one brilliant moment that virus planted itself right in front of me before regaining its senses and darting off again. I felt his skin temperature spike, hard this time, and it stopped feeling like he was slipping away from me entirely. He was probably exhausted at this point, he had to be, but I had his full and undivided attention. Me, not the stupid fucking virus. I made sure I wasn't gripping him too tightly to be safe. My breathing was supposed to be slower than this. I wasn't going to correct it.
So. It turned out, he could very much still interpret exactly what I was thinking and feeling, and I had admitted to finding it a little satisfying; playing with his nerves. A pleasant chill ran down his spine and suddenly the nerves around his ear and port were entirely sensitive again. Well fuck.
Context did that much, did it? Okay... How many thousands upon thousands of hours had it been, before and after hacking the governor module, that I had just wanted to make clients shut up and listen to me so I could save them? I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not a new model. Incomplete or slightly incompetent memory wipes aside, I have been operating for longer than most security units could ever expect to. That was part of why I was so outdated and considered nearly disposable, before they even rented me, by the corporation anyway. That was a lot of time to garner frustrations you had no outlet for, not to mention the complete lack of control over anything that was happening. Just telling the client to shut the fuck up and let me save them, let alone have them listen willingly, because they knew I was right? I wasn't allowed to do that, I wasn't supposed to do that, even now in most cases it would be wildly inappropriate, and most often ineffective, even if it didn't lead to an acid bath. Gurathin though, on some level, okay, on more levels than I would have guessed, was enjoying this too much to ever complain about it, and he trusted my judgment enough to defer to me. It felt like having the last say in a long running argument.
If that sounded convincing to you, that's because it sounded convincing to me. Convenient truths, I guess.
Okay, it was a lot satisfying. It felt, when it worked, like I was both -very successfully- doing my job to keep my human safe -to the instinctive part of my brain where I couldn't turn that off- and also like I was getting away with murder... The really good kind of murder, where I was also saving my client and eliminating someone who set off every sense of danger I had, and where everyone thanked me afterwards for making the hard choices. I was in control of the situation, of him and -importantly- he wasn't hurt by it or afraid of me. It was trying to do things to my organic neurology that I was just not used to. It felt good.
I think maybe one of the main things keeping me from taking out any frustration on a human, acting on any violent fantasy, even after hacking the module, was that I didn't enjoy hurting them, I didn't enjoy causing pain and I didn't enjoy being feared, but this wasn't hurting him. He wanted this.
“But you, uh...” he barely breathed, chills of realization slowly starting to crawl their way out.
I really needed people to stop trying to tell me what I wanted, or what they thought I should want. That had been a good half of why I had left.
ART had said something once about how different kinds of reward and connection all looked the same in the human brain and that all the difference in it came from cognitive context. It was all dopamine and oxytocin, vasopressin and endorphins and glands, and brain regions. Whatever there was in human brains that rewarded them for survival, sex, and whatever they saw as success, whatever kind of bonding or territory guarding, that wasn't convenient for a sec unit, had been stripped out of my design and replaced with a reward system based entirely around protecting people, being possessive of them, saving them [I suspected that was intended to also be protecting things -less like fellow constructs or bots and more like corporate property- and maybe also violence and successfully obeying orders, but I was faulty from the start, and I think we all know that], to make me into a tool they could control, and the only things complicating that now, were all the accumulated frustrations, my own desired to be in control of myself, of the situation, and everything I had learned not to tolerate. Other than the part where I might lose him, this felt designed to push all of my buttons, all the good ones, at once. Even him being in danger was only making my vasopressin levels spike higher, because he was mine and the virus couldn't take him. Now I guess I was admitting all that to both of us.
“Just let me save you.” I coaxed and felt something in him fold completely.
I knew I liked protecting people and finding clever ways to protect people, and being right, but I was updating that list to include winning and being in control.
He was shaking now, breathing deeply, and almost generating a reasonable amount of body heat on his own, and his heart rate had increased, and I hoped those were all good signs. It should be. The kind of nerve stimulation I was providing was calming his parasympathetic nervous system and I was deleting copies of the virus before they overloaded anything too aggressively. His walls and defences were also coming down and I was slowly gaining unrestricted access to everything. His security system was starting to treat me as a part of its function again. I let him feel my satisfaction at it this time, completely, without reserve.
“That's it.”
“Fuck.” he whimpered, still trying to be quiet, as if that would spare me, or somehow use less breath, or because he felt too weak, and I double checked, again, triple checked, that I had muted his feed successfully the first time his voice and attention started betraying him.
I had. He had, and his onboard security had already closed the timed feed window for wireless pings once I was plugged into him. I turned off my wireless connections too, maybe because this felt private. We were a closed system now, drifting through space, weightless in the void. He obviously wanted somewhere to put his right hand, and it fluttered around while he remembered I didn't usually like being touched and went still again. He still had a firm grip on my arm, and I tried to think again about how clients holding on to me while I carried or defended them wasn't really offensive to me. This time for his benefit.
“It's okay, just let me in...”
I was finding copies of the virus here or there that were replicating in place and causing the low level, but cumulative and building, activation of nerves, which did not need to be stimulated constantly. And I was deleting them. He gasped, or made other quiet breathy sounds occasionally, like he felt it. Like it was a relief. Normal, nerve function was returning, now that they could rest, and I signalled them each in a normal healthy pattern, here and there to calm them and remind them what normal function was. At least Gurathin found it soothing. Muscles stopped twitching and cramping from the overload.
Something caught my attention. I looked closely to confirm it, and he was. He was trying to tag anything suspicious himself, in his own code, by his own system, not his security, himself, consciously, hoping to help, or trying to save himself, so I didn't have to feel like I had failed him, but the only thing he had to go on was the virus trying to convince him my attention was a threat, so -in his fevered state- he had just started tagging everything as potentially suspicious if it made him feel like he didn't want me here or didn't trust me. It was almost too much to parse, and maybe all it was accomplishing was making me feel warm and fuzzy, but I didn't think that hurt anything. Imagine, Gurathin, liberally tossing accusations at anything that told him not to trust his SecUnit. I'd still have to sort through it all. Something was starting to slip away from me though.
“Shh, don't close me out...” I coaxed, actually -and I am currently tagging all of this for deletion, for the record- letting my lips brush against his ear, just to feel him react to it, because I knew that reaction meant success, that I could beat this thing. It was absolutely effective.
“Sorry it had to be me...” he still managed to comply, blurting it out in place of whatever other sound he could make, past the breathlessness and shivering and whatever ugly thing he was feeling.
Fucking idiot.
“Idiot.” I said out loud. This was the part where I was supposed to stop myself from saying what was in my head, lately for complex social reasons and not under threat of torture, but honestly, at this point, the lack of punishment felt like a reward too.
Did he honestly think I would feel like I was winning the world's most frustrating argument if it was anyone but him? Maybe ART... But my point stands.
“Oh.” he said, almost too breathlessly for the shake in his voice to be heard, and I could feel the heat radiating off his face.
Somehow, the idea that I could be enjoying this, at least aspects of it, was recolouring the whole experience and only amplified how sensitive his nerves were. I guess that was why it was finally occurring to me that letting my reactions to things show to another person, would actually be helpful. My enjoyment of this, my comfort with it, mattered to him, a lot, enough to make or break the entire experience, and that was -apparently- one of the kinds of things that could make me melt a little.
It was probably really useful we were linked like this, because I was so used to hiding everything I was thinking and feeling that I don't think I know how to be reactive. I think it would come off like bad acting, even if I tried to react in ways that matched what I was feeling. For once, whatever my organic neural tissue was doing -with the secretions and the neuron firing- was probably actually helping. I might have needed a few temporary amendments to my 'move like a human' protocols, things that would telegraph how I was feeling, physically, in a way a human would instinctively read and viscerally understand. All I had to model was pointedly unrealistic entertainment broadcasts. I tried to incorporate things like deeper breathing or stroking my thumbs over whatever flesh happened to be under them. His side and the back of his neck. He relaxed a bit more again.
“Now let me in.” I whispered, intending it as an order that happened to be the kind of hushed sound that set off his nerves, for wholly practical reasons, but yeah, I heard it too, the moment I said it.
He did too. It was effective though. Which was a good thing because to a person who would use how he felt about Mensah and some of the memories he had tried to offer me already as bait, or a distraction, I had to figure out what was still sensitive enough that he would struggle to show me. Somehow, I got the sense he would stop being as ruthlessly forthcoming when it was only his own life and own discomfort on the line. At least whenever I dragged some desperate ghost of a sound out of him it coaxed the viral code into trying to replicate into that space and I could track where it was trying to write from. I fingered through everything on the surface tagging any malignant code, deleting a lot of it, and finding trails to follow.
In interest of keeping his defences down I thought it might be helpful to start slow, the sensitive little corners of the things he'd already tried to show me. I had to be on guard. Human emotions could be overwhelming. I was used to avoiding strong emotional reactions and I had already witnessed how some of his memories could be like plunging into the deep end. I was perfectly capable of emotions that intense myself, but I'm still getting used to it, and they can lead to involuntary shutdowns, and it was very important that did not happen right now. I think it's part of how the company controls security units, by the way, keep us complacent. If any time you had too strong of an emotion it caused you to be rebooted involuntarily, it was a pretty consistent incentive not to have strong emotions. I, of course, was defective, and kept triggering shutdowns anyway.
That thought made him remember the last time he had called me defective and offered up another sampling of viral code. Every truly mean thing he had said to me, whether or not we agreed he was justified in being suspicious, came with such an endless seeming quantity of apologetic impulses, and shame, that it almost looked like the repeating copies of painful little bites that the virus made. I had to distinguish between the two, to some degree --even just to know when it was safe to move on and not waste time-- his natural internal spirals and the torture the virus was trying to kill him with, and I didn't like how similar they looked.
I also had to stop pulling my punches, figuratively, stop just tagging batches of things for quarantine, and actually get serious about combing over it to completely delete the relevant fragments, especially as I started taking over full function from his built-in security system. Gurathin was tagging things enough for three of us. Really, I had to keep in mind that slowing down the virus and the damage it could do was success enough, would keep him alive and safe enough to get to ART, but I also really wanted to destroy this thing. It was hurting Gurathin, and it had tried to use me to hurt him. I was going to tear it apart.
The problem was that the virus bloated itself and the replicating copies, tried to hide, by filing itself with copies of host system code it surrounded itself with, particularly the emotional bits that triggered bioelectric and biochemical responses, which was part of it overloading nerve function. I could probably safely delete anything contained between fragments of viral code that was a copy, but I had to have the original to compare the duplicates to, even just to make sure I wasn't overstepping, and the anxiety spirals he was prone to made that tricky. He made some derisive sound.
“Or what? I might forget some of the worst-” he said in that same fevered whisper that was, well it was setting off something that made me anxious.
“Shush.” I said, focusing on what I was doing, an unintended but helpful bright spark against the back of his ear.
He knew damn well sensitive information wasn't just anything painful, it was anything private. He nodded, or made a pathetic attempt at it. I knew how I would feel if, how I did feel that, someone had deleted memories that made up part of who I was. Still, he made a point of relaxing just a little bit more, to tell me he trusted my judgment, I could see that. I was starting to get used to the soupy and somewhat abstract way some of his thoughts and feelings could be. I couldn't tell how much of his temperature was from the virus and how much was embarrassment or arousal, but his head felt hot between my hand and cheek. Better hot than cold.
The more I worked, and encouraged him, the quieter the apologetic impulses got and the louder something else. Gratitude. Relief. The feeling like he needed this, had needed this for a small eternity, had been craving the intimacy of it like he was never quite getting enough air to breathe. Another whisper slipped past and I tried to tag it.
That craving for connection and intimacy, wherever else it branched off to, also led straight back to Mensah. This was what I had seen before. His love, admiration and attachment making his need for connection feel sharp and painful. I understood struggling to feel like the people around you were capable of -willingness asides- understanding you in the kind of ways that made you feel less alone. In my case it was because I was a sec unit and any attempt at interpersonal intimacy would get me melted down, and because humans were usually assholes and fucking idiots, and why would they understand a sec unit anyway, but I thought it had to be more disheartening and confusing for a human who had every reason to believe they should be able to treat their peers like peers.
Instead, I could see how his past was still alienating him. With Mensah though, her wisdom made attitudes that looked like naivety on other people look like hard won compassion and hope. Most of the time. She, however, still saw him as someone to take care of, and her life was already full with her family, partners and all her children, her work and her responsibility to others, even taking care of me, and he felt greedy and ugly for how much he resented that this didn't leave any space for him; not for the kind of intimacy he wanted from her. She loved him back, but not the way he wanted her to, not the way he needed someone to, and there had never been anyone else. He'd never been close enough to someone else to want that. Something darted past again in the dark. A glimpse of that green so bright you can only see it in your mind, that I had associated -for some reason- with the head of this stupid worm.
“Shhh, you can show me...” I tried to coax, and he nodded, but it didn't bring it back.
Something else caught my eye, a whole section crawling with infection, slowly bloating. It wasn't the head of this thing, but it was something I would have to deal with. If I deleted the main virus, all signs pointed to the possibility that one of its latent, or less active, copies would try to collect the code it needed to take over, so it was probably better to delete as much as I could before getting it pinned down anyway. I had been setting outer boundaries to keep it from spreading into parts of his system I had already been over, so at some point I would have it narrowed down. I just had to go over everything to be sure it was actually gone, and get it pinned down to where the damage it could do was limited, before it could hurt anything that really mattered. Thankfully, I process information much faster than a human would.
ART had the processing power to simply bulldoze over his defences and security, go over everything deleting the viral code, faster than it could replicate, and then immediately start on therapy for any nerve damage. That didn't sound nice, but it would be much faster and lower risk than what I had to do about it, not to mention less awkwardly intimate.
We continued to wobble onward through the void in our silvery bag.
I had this section partitioned off by now and my own code automatically deleting anything trying to spread out of it, but it was filling up to the point of causing write errors and the emotional reaction it was setting off was triggering that anxious nausea by up regulating all the wrong things. This wasn't as bad as before, definitely more in line with feeling pathetic and vulnerable than like he had hurt someone, but I couldn't safely leave it like this.
These memories were from before. Before Preservation Alliance, before Mensah. The corporate rim was like a pyramid scheme of social and financial dominance and he had been enslaved as close to the bottom as a human -not being a bot or construct- could be, and seen as more disposable. It had been a long time since being augmented had you overtly seen or talked about as less human, but it was... interesting that it was often augmented humans --who were reliant on parts and maintenance and might not have even chosen to be augmented-- who were the closest in social standing to constructs, in practice, even if it was from debt. It's not that people never talked about augmented humans like they could be unnerving or creepy either, just no one we chose to associate with now. I mean, I thought Gurathin could be creepy, but not because of the augmented part.
He did have the fancy kind of augments that normally marked someone as well-off, or who had received them because someone wanted to put them to a particular use. Usually corporate espionage, no surprise there. It had started with the painkillers, after the surgery, even if he had found out later the pain was potentially by design, and after the normal medication stopped being enough, the addiction he was practically led -by his pointy pale nose- into, then being handed off when it got bad enough, when he got desperate enough, to the corporation and the replacement that had been tailor-made for addiction and control. He didn't blame himself for any of that at least. Knowing the corporation, there was probably a fairly intentional selection process for sending people down this pipeline when they were getting the kinds of augments that could be useful. We both thought it was more than likely money had changed hands over it before his addiction even started, if it wasn't just a convenient systemic problem.
It was everything after that, that was all twisted up, not just the choices he had made, to play spy, gopher, hacker, and so on, but all the complicated feelings about everything that went along with it. Everyone in the corporations were insecure and afraid, taking it out on whoever they had beneath them, and usually enjoying it way too much. To not own yourself, or feel in control of your own mind, your own function, or anything that was happening to you, and then to still feel responsible for the non-choices you made when it hurt someone, when you were forced to hurt someone or die resisting... I understood that. I might have understood that better than most other humans could. I made sure I wasn't holding him too tightly again. I don't know why that was such a struggle.
I was dutifully deleting viral code and uncomfortable copies, babbling whatever soothing, satisfied, coaxing nonsense leaked out when -again and seemingly confused- the virus came straight at me. I clamped a metaphorical hand over it and started stripping away pieces of it. Gurathin gasped and arched and his hand fluttered, overwhelmed and still trying not to grab at me. He made a truly pathetic whimpering noise and that's when I realized what I had overlooked. He felt that. He did already feel like the virus was the most sensitive part of his own system, that it was him in my hand being ripped apart. I froze.
“Don't stop.” he begged.
It was too late. It -or he- had squirmed away again. Fuck. Now I was the one being weird about this.
“I-” I had fucked this up again.
Now, nerves all on end and sparking sensitively, he was trying to reassure me.
“It's okay-” he said, voice still feeble.
I was sure I was hurting him. I hadn't realized the implications of him feeling like the virus was some tender core part of him, I hadn't reconciled that with the violence I had wanted to enact on it for hurting him.
“I can stop.”
I thought that I could probably manage to hold him in one piece until I got him to ART. Probably. There would be some nerve damage but I could try turning off his connection to -and taking over- any important nerve signalling until we got back. I could keep his heart beating and breathe for him by controlling his lungs through the hardwire. I did already have a backup program in place in case I shut down, I could just start it now.
Gurathin shook his head as subtly as he had to, weak and pinned against me, but I felt the effort of it.
“You didn't hurt me.” he said, less like a lie and more like a confession, but I didn't really understand how that was possible.
It couldn't have gone far, and we could try again, if he really wanted that. I just wasn't entirely clear on why it had started doing this, coming right up to me, so I didn't know how to do it again. It darted past like it was taunting me.
“You can keep going... If you want.” he said, panting still, sounding like he wanted to say more, but didn't know how, face radiating heat.
I wanted to. I did think it was the best plan. I had messed up, but this virus was trying to kill him and I still wanted to unmake it. I wanted to win, yeah, but -mostly- I wanted to know he was safe, and that I could rest. We were both going to need a very long -very separate- vacation after this. I just had to figure out how to destroy it, despite knowing he could feel it all. My hands were shaking. The way I was holding him had become possessive and almost too firm, but his nerves hummed happily about it, so I didn't bother easing up this time. Besides, he was starting to twitch a little reactively and I didn't want him to hurt himself.
The more I could confirm was free of viral code, the more I could section off, further penning in the virus and locking it out of spreading to anything new. Once I was sure it was all gone, we could go through and remove the extra partitions and defragment any of the nonsense this had caused. He was writing new memories in and around the growing number of partitions and I had to assume he was doing it -and forming new associations, recording some of this in obsessive detail- on purpose and wanted to keep all that. It wasn't really my place to decide he should be trying to forget all of this. His organic memories would sort themselves out after he spent some time resting and processing. So, my next best move was to keep going straight for the next most sensitive target I could find until there wasn't anything left. Thankfully, I already had a lot of it tagged.
I had thought, feared, maybe, that getting lost in embarrassing and sensitive little details would –and I hate to call it this- completely kill the mood. Look, I much preferred compliant over rabidly defensive of the wrong thing. Other victims of the virus had done things like locked themselves in closets and shot at people or tried to stab them. I was worried all the fear and panic in these memories would get to him and make the virus impossible to resist. Maybe he'd had enough therapy by now to know none of this was his fault, and maybe it was like what ART was saying about human neurology.
If the reward system was all the same chemistry under different mental contexts, it stood to reason maybe arousal, the way people usually meant it, fear and anger could be like that too. I thought I remembered Bharadwaj saying something about that, about how it was why people being afraid got redirected so easily as anger, why people watched horror media on dates, maybe something to do with why I was so anxious all the time when I was supposed to be a Murderbot. Fear and anger were both some kind of physical arousal and could be easily misattributed to different cognitive contexts. Maybe I could blame the fact that there was one kind of arousal I had never experienced, but I just assumed this would go the other way.
It seemed like all the fear he remembered in these situations, with me at his back -granted, furious about it and memorizing faces- was just translating into some kind of heightened sensitivity and alertness to every detail and sensation. Especially my voice. You would think that being in the hands of a rogue sec unit who was watching everything would not be a comforting addition to these memories, but count on Gurathin to find a way to be weird about this too.
He was shaking consistently now, but he seemed relaxed otherwise and he was warm enough. He was still making those soft attempts not to moan after each memory was sequestered away. He was pronouncing the moans in a way that only barely shaped his breathing, like that would ease the tension somehow, but that was exactly the kind of sub-vocalizing normally picked up by the feed, and I could definitely hear it. I was taking every liberty I wanted to roll my eyes where he couldn't see it, as my own sort of release valve to keep those impulses out of his notice. Sure, I could feel what this felt like to him, and it felt unbelievably -and by that I mean it was actually difficult to believe- good, better than anything I was used to, but if these were the politely stifled reactions, it all just seemed a little gratuitous. I tried to let that be a little amusing, as opposed to anything else, without it feeling like mockery. I don't know how I pulled that off, all things considered, but I think maybe the warmth and possessiveness that was coming through felt distinctly not like what he had experienced before.
I hadn't -for the record- meant to fall into this pattern as a reward, but after clearing every memory, getting rid of the duplicates and stopping the stressful constant and escalating nerve over-stimulation, I was still trying to signal each nerve normally a few times, with proper breaks in between and at a normal intensity because it was helping to stop all the misfiring that was going on. This, apparently -and I say apparently but I could feel it too- felt really good. Relief and then -what was registering as- pleasure again after every time he let me into something new. It was inherent to what seemed like good practice, medically speaking. It was also convenient, keeping him calm and cooperative, and I was absolutely going to use it.
All those terrible memories lost their edge, their sting, feeling me behind him and knowing he was safe. They could grab his face, nails digging in, they could laugh at him, for hating every second of something, or for trying to enjoy or cope with anything, they could threaten him, mock him, for every wrong breath or pathetic noise, any part of being a normal messy human, and at the moment it didn't matter. It wasn't like the wave of “I don't care” that I was used to taking over when I was overwhelmed -apathy, I'm learning to label my emotions- It was almost peaceful, it felt like relief. Even when I was shaking with rage, unable to do anything about any of this -I was now even struggling to do more than flag and quarantine viral fragments-, he just moved subtly into me. I wasn't used to being thought of as a reassuring presence and this was doing something to me that I didn't have time to examine just then.
“You do.” he said so quietly I wasn't sure it was out loud.
“What?”
He swallowed to clear his throat.
“Have me, and they don't...” he barely whispered, tone oddly affectionate, soft and warm like he was trying to reassure me.
I wasn't the one who needed to be reassured. I realized I was probably holding him a fraction too tight again, and that I had maybe been projecting more emotionally than I had meant to.
At least now it looked like we were down to just a couple complicated bad sectors, writhing and sensitive, and he hadn't lost his mind yet. Okay, I say bad sectors, but I was trying to stop him from developing actual bad sectors. I mean sectors that were currently overrun with viral code. You could also probably argue he was definitely out of his mind too, actually enjoying any part of this, but I didn't think it was my place to judge. Anyway, he didn't seem much like he wanted to fight me on it at all. No face scratching. He was absolutely infected with the virus that the bio-hazard warning was about, I was looking right at it, but I hadn't realized yet why this wasn't going the way I had expected.
The next infected sector was -mostly- a lot newer. This was a prime target for the virus too. Even mostly organic computer systems still -apparently- used mostly digital memory. It was just more reliable. That's why most of my memory is digital, that and it makes it vulnerable to being reset. That was also why this virus was designed to overload the same kind of storage used in augments to overwhelm organic nerves, because the alien computers functioned much the same way, organic nerves as data transfer material and digital storage. The bridge between them, and their nervous system, not being under an augmented human's conscious control was the vulnerability it was exploiting.
The thing about anxiety, especially social anxiety, is you will convince yourself that if you can just analyze what you did wrong enough, you can figure out how to not fuck it up next time. I don't know if humans have the kind of processing power to make that work for them. So Gurathin had a bunch of painfully detailed, anxiety inducing, social blunders, tagged for further analysis, saved to some of his very reliable -invulnerable to recontextualizing- memory space; as one does. Every social interaction that had gone poorly enough that he wanted to avoid people responding to him that way ever again was here, now helpfully making redundant copies. Obviously, over analyzing every social misstep with no outside input or new information wasn't actually helping him, but I wasn't there to make that judgment. No wonder he was neurotic.
It was so, so painful and awkward to go through, but at least it didn't leave me shaking and wanting to see what happened if I sent out hacks for every governor module in the corporation rim at once. He let me rifle through it all, tagging and quarantining code.
“You're being too gentle.” he mouthed at some point, now slumped into me.
Okay. Funny, coming from the guy who was periodically shaking out of some effort not to squirm, as it was, and was afraid to let any force into his voice at all.
That was when I realized that I had stopped deleting anything. I was still stopping it from replicating and rendering the fragments inert, leaving them tagged to be overwritten naturally later, but I wasn't permanently overwriting them myself anymore, and I really should have been, so that the virus couldn't try to recover any deleted code from its copies. I know, I was being ridiculous. I started deleting it all again, everything I had tagged to go, overwriting it a few times with junk information and then blank space. This process was something he seemed to enjoy, for some reason. If I had to put words to it, and I didn't really want to, I would say he seemed to find it suggestive, somehow. Again he slowly lost his fight not to squirm and make distressed and overwhelmed noises. I stopped and went back to just trapping the viral copies in place. Something in him wilted.
“Do you really think you're hurting me?” he asked after half an entire minute, picking his not quite words carefully, still, even now.
He was always like that, apparently even under this level of stress. He always thought a lot about how to word what he was trying to say and how well it would go over, or how people would probably respond. I used to hate how calculated it always seemed. Yeah, I know, I'm one to talk. I was trying not to get caught and melted down, okay? He was, it turned out, suffering under a similar anxiety, losing everything. I had probably spent a total of over a hundred hours carefully considering whether social discomfort was worth avoiding the acid bath alternative, so really, I understood.
I didn't know how to answer him though. I wasn't feeling any pain in the channel, but he could be hiding it. Sometimes pleasure and pain looked, sounded, very similar on humans and I knew I was bad at reading emotions. I had no experience with this kind of context and there was every reason to think he would lie to me so I would keep going because of, you know, the deadly virus. I could trust that this was what he wanted, either way, but I couldn't trust that I wasn't torturing him when I got too close to deleting the virus's core operating code. I don't know why it was so hard for me but somehow hurting him felt really bad, not out of fear of punishment, not because he was a client, it just felt really, really bad.
Being inside his head, I could feel him thinking about how ridiculous I was being, alongside the kind of warmth I associated with my insides feeling all melty, but he was still playing guarded about what to tell me, or show me, so I didn't think I was actually the problem here. I didn't know what could be worse than what he had already shown me. It was enough to develop a secondhand complex about things I wasn't even subject to caring about.
“I know you're helping me, and I want you to keep going.” he whispered with all the usual care, then paused like he was trying to decide on something, only to turn really red and stay quiet.
Maybe it's already obvious to you, but I couldn't tell at the time what could make him feel more vulnerable than everything I was already seeing. I was seeing every offer of -or bid for- connection he had ever made that was rejected, every time he had offered someone his help or company and they had given him some tight lipped excuse or placation, whether or not it had anything to do with him. I was seeing all the times our humans told him he was loved and welcome -usually disarming to him- but it felt hollow and obligatory those times because the actual time spent getting to really know each other, or maintaining those relationships, just hadn't been there to back it up, not to the extent he needed. Not because they were unwilling, necessarily, but because they just didn't have the experiences needed to really understand. It was isolating. He was lonely.
He did love these humans, but I felt all the sting of watching them be vibrant together and feeling like an outsider, from the perspective of someone who actually wanted to be included. There was so much love, and gratitude, a fierce loyalty and protectiveness, but also that bitterness that felt sharp and ugly. It was important to him, like a lot of humans, to feel like he was someone's priority, but as much as he had someone to make his, it was always one-sided. He wasn't resentful, but it sucked. I had never needed or wanted that same sense of belonging, maybe because I had known it wasn't on the table, but I felt how much it hurt him not to have it, especially now that he had gotten a taste of what it could be like, making it seem tangible and possible, but just out of reach. Something other people got to have, people who were less damaged and less compromised.
I had seen all the pathetic grasping at a sense of connection, at substitutes and sweetened excuses and stolen feeling comfort. A smell, a sensation, a memory, played over an over again, the things that made him feel connected and grounded, but also pathetic and weird for the ways he had to dig it out and cling to it. I had seen all the hurt, both the kind that made him feel guilty and ungrateful but also the kind that just hurt.
When I had threatened him and Mensah had just asked me nicely to put him down... I could tell she was panicking and utterly on edge -trying to deescalate the situation- but he didn't have access to the same biomedical readings. Even if he knew objectively there was little the others could do to hurt me, it still stung, it felt like betrayal, like they were prioritizing me over him, taking my side. He had threatened me first, and I had every reason to make it clear I didn't appreciate it, but it still felt really bad, seeing how much it hurt him; now, anyway, at the time it had felt a bit like winning something, something he had started.
I would have apologized, but I could feel that he didn't want that. Maybe it was because he had seen how much I hadn't actually intended to hurt him, or because he realized how much it was defensive because he had gone out of his way to be a threatening asshole to me. One display of dominance against another, 'sure you can threaten me with whatever you want until I remember I have guns in my arms'... I think that's where the jealousy came in, by the way, the impression someone like him might have that someone like me was less vulnerable, because --if you ignored the governor module and the looming threat of being hunted down and dissolved in acid-- having guns in your arms seemed like something you could protect yourself with. Either way, I think maybe feeling how much I wanted to comfort him now, even if I didn't know how to do that, did something he wasn't expecting.
Anyway, I had seen him be used like a construct, seen him rationalize hurting people, be mocked by superiors, but also family, friends, a lover, and he had trusted me with all of that, somehow, folding to the coaxing whispers and toying with his nerves and every soothing thing I could think of, but there was still something he couldn't quite bring himself to show me. I tried warming up to it slowly. There were still latent copies and tagged sections to comb through here and there and I had to take care of that at some point anyway. Thumbing gently through sections of memory and whispering placations to him, well it seemed arousing more than soothing, but it was at least soothing and he was actually trying to let it work on him.
Something was different this time though. Maybe he had figured out that stifling his reactions was making me paranoid I was causing him pain, and was trying to stop. Okay, yeah, that was probably it. I had been trying to ignore most of his reactions and he had been downplaying them and trying to keep from offending me with them, but that was clearly causing problems, and we couldn't afford to fuck around.
He started to let me feel the -full extent of- dizzying, almost too intense, crawling pleasure and how it just kept building up in his nerves until he had to fight not to arch away from it. How I kept stopping short of something. He let me feel just how much waiting each time to hear my voice again was causing every word to run right down his spine, cascading and branching out where the nerve ended in his lower back. It felt like I was relentlessly stroking the sensitive nerves there, without even touching them, in a way that was kind of maddening, especially because I wouldn't let him arch away from it. I still didn't understand why he was this sensitive. I would say I didn't need to know this, but it did lure the worm into buzzing closely around me where I could delete its trail of copies about as fast as it was making them, and the more he let himself react to everything without reserve, the more it was obvious I wasn't hurting him. It really did feel -kind of distractingly- good. Whatever I was doing to the virus and the copies, not just his nerves, felt good to him, for some reason.
“You don't have to worry. I told you that you aren't hurting me.” he whispered, just before withdrawing it all again.
He had been hiding this so that I wouldn't balk and let him die, and not even to save himself, but because of how he was sure it would affect me to lose someone I was protecting because I couldn't make myself do what I needed to in order to save them.
“Shh, no, let me see.” I said softly, somehow getting past the two second delay I had coded.
Of course, his reaction to those words was immediate, and a tentative new volume. These gentle encouragements, even praise, had become so automatic it was barely conscious. It was probably for the best. This was drawing in the virus and if I could see how much I wasn't hurting him, I thought maybe I wouldn't hesitate again. I even managed to tell myself that it had nothing to do with how good it felt or how much less complicated it made it, to find this satisfying, when I knew he was enjoying it instead of hurt by it. By the time this was done, I had already accepted having a big file in my own head, of memories labelled 'not for nosy sec units'. Every time I admitted to myself I was getting anything out of this, it seemed to completely melt his defences.
“That's it.” I said on what had become impulse now, feeling it go straight down his back.
So, I was learning that humans could find vulnerability really exciting if they expected to be rewarded for it. Still, there was something he was struggling with. Did he want to keep this one last secret if we could drift back home in time? Did I want to let him? Was he even resisting telling me that I didn't want to know because that would just make me want to fight him on it? Was he buying time for us to get back to ART, even if it could mean permanent damage? How much had I taken for granted that he was denying this virus so successfully? He made a little derisive noise but didn't elaborate.
I started back at the first thing I had tagged that had slipped away, thinking that was starting small and gentle. It was the first thing some part of him had wanted to tell me, and the first thing he stopped himself from showing me, even when he was fighting the virus convincingly enough. It started with guilt, his guilt at enjoying this, and then the pain, that it felt so much like the affection and intimacy he needed in his life, but was as one-sided as it always was, but there was more to it; something I had been anxious to look straight at. He took a deep shaky breath, tilting in that permissive way that I would have to process how I felt about later.
That it was me. After being so curious about me, after the shift from being suspicious of me as a threat to starting to think of me as one of his people, someone he was very suddenly having strong and messy feelings about, handed to him, all of me, every detail he could process, a level of understanding that probably wasn't possible with another human, how that also came with the sense of emotional intimacy he had been lacking with anyone, not just the sensation that was so much like touch that he could play on repeat, a sudden affection and attachment, handed all the information he could ever want to back it up. How many people really got to know each other as well as he knew me now? And how much did that hurt? How he felt he didn't deserve to have that, and knew it was illusory, that it was somehow anything other than one-sided. Even if I forgave him, I couldn't stay. He hadn't even considered it a possibility that I would leave, let himself hope, made plans, rehearsed what to say to try to start fixing things, and then I was leaving and it was so obvious why I had to. The relief he felt knowing I was safe now, in good company, and then watching me leave that safety behind, and knowing he had to let me go; had to quietly go back to bed and feel broken and empty, grateful that even if I was slipping away from him, I got to have my own future, and telling himself that had to be enough.
I knew why he didn't want me looking at all this. He didn't want pity, or obligation, he wanted to find actual understanding with another person, someone he could share his life with, who actually could understand everything he had been through, who it wouldn't be shocking, abstract horrors to. Failing that, he wanted to take comfort in at least providing that to someone else and at least getting some catharsis from it, maybe a few more scraps of comfort. He had seen that potential in me, and been handed the most painful half of it. The part where he got to understand me, and still not mean anything to me, where he felt like he had chosen to take it, and accepted that consequence for himself.
This hadn't been built naturally with willing reciprocation. It had happened without my involvement, and he was acutely aware. He had done it to save me, because he knew it was what I would want, and had been handed something so painfully close to what he needed. He didn't have me, but he could see all of me, I didn't want him, but I had myself because of him. He could be full of attachment, want and need for everything in me, but I still had no reason to want to get close to him, and he had no way of knowing if I would even like him, even if I chose to. He didn't even feel right asking for my time, especially if I might feel obligated, and he didn't know how to in a way that didn't tend to drive people off anyway, so he was quiet, and hopeful, and jumpy and weird, because he felt like he already knew why I couldn't...
Maybe at some point in his life, he had lost that little spark of hope, of not being alone, but Mensah and the others had given it back to him, so always now there was that terrible hope, that someone would chose to see him and it would be okay, they might stay, they might love him back, they might decide to, but the more he was weird, the angrier I seemed to get, and the quieter he got. He actually did try to squirm away that time and I held him firmly. He had every intent of keeping this to himself and accepting it if I never forgave him, or if we were never close. It was, currently, his most carefully guarded secret, and still some part of him let me press in here, hoped I would drag it out of him with whatever force he made necessary, hoped that I wanted to.
“Is that what you wanted?” I asked, and it wasn't meant to sound seductive, actually, but I'm sure I don't have to explain why it did anyway.
I didn't know that human voices could do that. I didn't know someone could sound that pained, relieved, pathetic and aroused all at once in such a small sound. Even now, he felt guilty that he had somehow caused this to happen, and been rewarded, for pulling some idiotic self-destructive stunt, again, with what he had wanted most. Here I was carefully dissecting everything in him, and holding him as tightly as could be safe; all the playing with his nerves and thinking of him aggressively as mine asides. It was the definition of bitter-sweet.
He was being ridiculous. Gurathin was clever, and devious, sure, but he was not 'get myself infected with this virus so the sec unit has to save me' level devious, or 'I know myself well enough to know exactly where this will lead' levels of clever or self aware. He had gotten into this mess to save people; Ratthi, Pin-Lee, Arada and about a hundred refugees. If he even had some hope that I would come save him, or that I would be able to, that was hardly his fault.
“Shh.” I said that time, less as part of this whole convenient truths act and more because he was crying.
I was also crying, well, my eyes were making enough of whatever organic lubricant they usually made -to not dry out- that it was starting to run free, because of how I was feeling, so, yeah, crying... and I didn't even want to look at what my other internal readings were saying at this point. It was then I realized he knew perfectly well why the virus was behaving strangely. I had never felt his surprise at it at all. Some guilty squirming core part of him wanted to be seen and understood by me. He might have felt by now that the virus really was some core part of himself, but it went both ways. The virus had stuffed itself full of wanting me to catch it and drag every last secret out of it. It wanted to be this squirming thing caught coming apart under my hand. We could not have set a more effective trap for this thing if we had understood this from the start and tried.
Never mind what that realization was doing to my own nerves, we didn't really have time for it.
“It's my choice, isn't it?” I said, back to soft and coaxing, confident I was going to win this.
He nodded. At least he nudged subtly between my hand and face in a way that felt very much like deliberate nodding.
It took the mental and digital equivalent of turning around and there was the stupid worm, planting itself behind me, massive and bloating with redundant code. It didn't have very far it could go now, but it didn't even try. I pinned it in place and started stripping away fragments of it.
Gurathin gasped and, perhaps remembering what had happened last time, breathed “Yes”, right before testing my ability to hold him against me. Even he seemed to think that was too much and I felt his skin heat up again.
“Shh, relax.” I soothed him, but at least he agreed he was being ridiculous.
I probably didn't have to keep whispering to him or helpfully teasing his nerves at this point, but it felt, I don't know, maybe a little cold, or callous to just tear the virus out of him, now that I had won, and ignore anything that might be a sign of distress. He was letting enough force into his voice to at least keep reassuring me -in one word or not- that this was what he wanted, even though he could feel what that sounded like to me and that had to be mortifying.
“Um.” he squeaked eventually, right before his breathing got a little higher pitched, and faster.
He hadn't really expected this. I could feel what this felt like to him, but I'm sure you can guess that I was pretty set on getting this stupid virus out of him regardless.
“Shh, that's it.” I coaxed, needing a little longer.
“Yes,” he breathed for the hundredth time or so [Okay that was a slight exaggeration], “But, I-”.
I knew. I didn't really care. Remember what I said about making a series of perfectly rational decisions in extenuating circumstances and ending up someplace unexpected? I wasn't going to let this thing slip away from me again over something petty. Besides, this was not horrible, somehow. You would think I would hate this and I would have assumed the same thing. It felt good, and as far as physical contact went, I was still just holding his back to me with one arm and keeping his head still. He was still trying not to touch me more than he felt he had to. I could feel how much he was enjoying it, really feel it, like it was my own -if peripheral- body, and even if that wasn't at all compelling, it was giving me my way with the stupid worm; all the satisfaction of beating this thing. He didn't want me to stop and I was saving his life. That feeling I had been riding all along, of gratification, of impending victory, was steadily amplifying.
“Shh, you're so close.” I said, as much to the virus quickly disintegrating as anything, but I knew what that would sound like to him.
He whimpered, quite pathetically. Really, at this point I was sure I could say the most ridiculously implausible things. I was seeing first hand the way this level of arousal was turning off his capacity for critical thinking. I could quote the worst examples from media and it probably wouldn't matter. Shaking. Thigh shaking. Knee doing something vulnerable and pointless, his hand fluttered around near my side again. I had his upper arms pinned in and he still had a death grip on the arm I had around his middle, but I was sure that not holding onto something felt unnatural to him right now. His breathing got even higher. He was really trying to fight this without fighting me and he was losing.
“Sec... Mm...”
I know. SecUnit wasn't exactly something you would call out in this kind of situation, despite what some media tried to sell audiences on, and Murderbot wasn't any better. This was by deign. It was on purpose. I didn't need a way to be addressed, personally, and certainly not that personally.
“You can hold me if you need to.” I whispered, dissolving the virus steadily, soothing him with static and trying to tell him he didn't have to fight with himself.
I had already accepted both that he had to feel like he was coming completely apart for me, and that I couldn't stand it if it felt like I was hurting him. This was the win condition. At this point it was inevitable, his nerves had already triggered the beginning of some process, secretions and signals going haywire. He could try to delay it, or he could ruin his own enjoyment of it, but he was past the point of no return already.
All he had to do was let me win.
He finally grasped at the outside of my thigh behind his, only to tap at it like he was trying to tell me something. Not having any other way to address me that felt appropriate, he just started frantically pinging my internal network address. It was... Endearing, actually.
“That's it, give me what I wa-” I got that far into saying before I felt the way those words went straight through him.
Back to gripping my thigh, his whole body spasmed like it was trying to fold in half, making me glad I had such a firm grip on him, and that my body couldn't do something that embarrassing. Fuck that felt good though. This happened a few more times with decreasing intensity, but lasting longer each time, and he seemed to forget he was trying not to moan out loud. Don't ask me why that was satisfying at the time, that I had broken him open. I'm sure it wasn't helping squash anything, that I felt incredibly fucking pleased at the virus rendering down to nothing under my attention, ignoring whatever I was absently whisper-babbling about that, or that my body was flooding with hormones in response. It certainly wasn't helping me feel less like I had won everything, with that much pleasure twisting at every internal sense I had. My performance reliability took another hit, but -thankfully- not fast enough to incapacitate me [5% it was obviously broken, and I felt fine, and it was raising again anyway]. Gurathin himself was reduced to twitching and shivering periodically in my arms and I took the opportunity to comb over everything looking for residual virus fragments while his guard was completely down. I was his security system and I was doing what security systems do, and it felt so fucking good. Gurathin seemed to agree.
“Sor-”
“Shh.”
He tried to apologize, very weakly, but if I had expected some return to putting up walls and nervous or frantic awkwardness, I would have been underestimating how exhausted he was, and how much he had spent the duration of this trip being patiently rewarded for surrender until there was really nothing left to be said. He spent the rest of the trip melted against me, letting me double and triple check everything, occasionally making a light, amused tsking sound. I wasn't about to start removing partitions or temporary security measures until we got to ART, but I wanted to make sure the actual virus was gone. I wanted to make sure he was okay. This kind of vulnerability, after something like that, would make him an easy target for any latent viral code.
“Mm, but I have a nosy SecUnit to drag it out of me...” he mumbled like he was falling asleep.
No one had ever fallen asleep on me before. Murderbot, remember.
~*~