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The new serial ART-drone found for us was pretty good, actually, and we had time to finish the first three episodes before the shuttle reached the edge of the system and a familiar shape appeared on our scopes.
SecUnit, report, ART-prime demanded as soon as we were within comm range. It was too far away to wrap itself fully around me in the feed and poke its giant metaphorical nose into my files and that had to be driving it crazy, even though I was sure its drone was already sending it a full update.
All clear, I replied and attached the string of complicated code we came up with that basically amounted to stand down, no pursuit, and no casualties. Then, because I knew it well enough to know what it really wanted, I sent it a condensed packet of mission highlights and my most recent diagnostics. Your turn, I added.
There was a whole two second delay that might have worried me if not for ART-drone in the pilot’s chair next to me, leaning lazily against me in the feed and looking as unconcerned as it was possible for a spidery hunk of metal to be. ART was probably just taking its sweet time pulling apart the data I sent because it’s an asshole who never believes me when I tell it I’m fine. You’d think having its drone tell it the same thing would be enough to skip this part but you’d be wrong. Finally, it replied, The same.
(Were those ART’s emotions bleeding into the feed or was I just that fucking relieved by its answer?)
(Emotion check: Both. Definitely both.)
A data packet dropped into the feed with the current status of each of the crew members aboard. I looked it over (quickly, because I’m not a distrustful asshole. I mean, I am, but not about this.) Everyone was accounted for and the closest thing to a casualty was Karime, who somehow had managed to get one of those minor human illnesses that apparently wasn’t even serious enough to a require a trip to Medical. (ART was not happy about that – it didn’t come right out and say that Karime was being stupid for not letting it fix whatever was wrong with her but trust me, the tags it added to that piece of data made its opinions very clear.) (I made a note to avoid her for a couple days. I can’t catch human diseases like that but that doesn’t stop them from being gross.)
I sent back an acknowledgement and tapped Three and Dr. Mensah’s feeds to update them. Mensah replied with a Thank you, SecUnit, that still sounded entirely too watery and emotional. Three’s wordless ping was preferable by far.
Our scopes showed ART-prime moving steadily closer. I looked out the forward window of the shuttle and squinted. (I was pretty proud of that addition to my act-like-a-human code, actually.) (Yes, I’d forgotten I was still running it until now.) ART was somewhere out there, hidden in the asteroid belt behind the system’s last planet, where all the floating junk would make it next to impossible for corporates to find. My Preservation humans had some dumb saying about looking for a needle in a haystack or something (why would you want to do that?) and looking for ART reminded me of that.
There, ART-drone said and suddenly I could see it, highlighted against the black of space. Yes, ART-drone had shouldered its way past my walls and adjusted the filters in my eyes instead of just, I don’t know, pointing one of its spindly arm things at the right part of the window. And no, that wasn’t the first time it had done that. I’d be more annoyed but fuck, being able to see ART-prime moving toward us actually made my performance reliability tick up half a percent.
ART-drone added a timer to the public feed counting down to when our shuttle would dock with ART-prime – soon enough that there wasn’t time to watch another episode but plenty to listen to both ARTs complain at each other about their humans’ immune systems. I’d heard most of it before so I didn’t bother paying attention but it was oddly nice? Familiar? Especially since they had me wedged between them in the feed. ART-prime was still too far away to really lean its metaphorical weight onto me and ART-drone wasn’t quite big enough to manage the same almost crushing pressure but still, it was good.
I guess after the week I just had, anything would be better.
Speaking of.
ART-drone switched to our private feed and told me, You still need a restart.
It was right. It had wanted me to take care of that as soon as we cleared the torus and realistically, I could have. With it and Three aboard, there was no danger to the humans inside the shuttle and it’s not like I could have done anything about a threat from outside.
Now that we were back within range of ART-prime and any potential attackers would have to answer to it and its debris deflection system, there was no reason to wait any longer.
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered but I opened a channel with both ARTs and Three to tell them I would be offline for a few minutes and not to blow anything up without me. I got two acknowledgements and an obnoxious amusement sigil from Three in response. After one last check of the shuttle's cameras that showed the humans were all still safely strapped into their seats in the main compartment where I left them, I initiated the restart.
When I came back online, we were close enough to our destination that ART-prime was able to glom onto me in the feed even before I could send it a ping to let it know I was back. It must have been keeping an eye on my stats. Without bothering to ask, it pulled a fresh copy of my diagnostics and started making a list in our shared workspace of all the repairs it wanted to do when I got to Medical.
If I didn’t know any better, I told it, I’d say you missed me or something.
What makes you think you know better, ART replied in its usual sarcastic tone as it continued to rifle through my stats. I rolled my eyes and poked it just to feel the little ripple of amusement in its code where it was leaning on me.
I checked the cameras again (all humans accounted for, though Tula had started squirming in a way that told me she needed to have a bodily function when it was safe to unstrap her restraints – thankfully, not my problem anymore and it looked like the adults had already taken note) and sent Three a ping so it would know I was back.
ART-drone’s timer had less than a minute left on it. Both threat and risk assessment were quieter than they had been since Mensah heard about her family’s transport being diverted, and falling steadily more as we crept closer to ART’s dock. By the time our lock was cycling, they had all but bottomed out and yeah, both ARTs were aware and neither one was making even the slightest effort to hide how smug that made them.
Three signaled that it would lead the humans to wherever they were supposed to go, whatever that meant. Aside from Mensah, they probably all needed to get checked over in Medical but they also needed food, and sleep, and probably Tula wasn’t the only one who needed a restroom, and they could all use a change of clothes, and – you know what? This wasn’t my problem anymore.
As the humans followed Three out of the shuttle, I split off a squad of drones to follow them and sent the rest to take up their standard sentry patrols around ART’s corridors. ART-prime passed me its camera and sensor inputs and I flicked through them, checking on the rest of our humans more out of habit than actual concern. (They were still fine. Of course they were. ART wouldn’t let anything happen to them.)
ART-prime shoved its list of repairs at me, its way of telling me to get my ass to Medical so it could patch up the projectile holes and do a whole bunch of other unimportant shit it put on the list when I wasn’t paying attention. I ignored it and said, “You need to reintegrate.”
(Technically, ART didn’t have to be my problem either but, well.)
(Emotion check: ugh fine okay yes I liked that ART was my problem and I wanted it to keep being my problem, are you happy now?)
If giant machine intelligences that were currently shaped like a spider with too many limbs could roll their eyes, that’s what ART-drone would be doing. Instead, it had to settle for saying, You’re worse than Iris.
I’m worse than everyone, thank you very much.
There wasn’t any rush for the two ARTs to reintegrate, not like that time on Hell Plague Planet when ART-drone was teetering on the edge of a catastrophic failure, and it’s not like I thought I could distract ART long enough for it to forget about all the poking and prodding it wanted to do to me. (ART doesn’t forget anything, which is both just as useful and just as annoying as you’d think.) But it’s not like any of my repairs were urgent either and I was comfortable, okay? I was off that fucking torus and my humans were safe and none of them were looking at me and ART was here and I just wanted a minute to enjoy it.
(I didn’t even need the emotion check module for that one. I am nailing this mental health bullshit.)
I guess ART could sort of tell because it (for once) didn’t argue further. ART-prime initiated the handoff and then there was only ART and the drone was just an inert pile of limbs in the pilot’s chair.
That will never stop being at least a little bit weird, I think. Not a big deal kind of weird like some of the humans who don’t really get how machine intelligences work sometimes think it is, but weird like if for some reason you were speaking to someone out loud over comms as they walked up to you and you could hear them twice, both over the comm and normally and then they just abruptly shut off the comm device mid-word. Or not. I don’t really know how to explain in terms that make sense to humans.
The point is, there was no longer ART-prime and ART-drone, just ART, and it’s not like ART-drone was really gone, it was just part of ART now.
Which is why it was completely irrational for my organic neural tissue to start up with its dumb chemicals again when ART-drone disappeared from the feed.
(Emotion check: I am not nailing this mental health bullshit.)
ART wrapped itself a little tighter around me in the feed, filling the gaps where ART-drone had been and that helped.
I’m fine, I told it, switching to the feed, it’s just been a shit fucking week. Longer than that, if you count back to the transport ‘malfunction’ that started this whole debacle.
Tell me about it?
Right, that’s a thing I’m supposed to be doing now too. I mean, I was sort of always supposed to fill ART in on mission activities, which I had already done, but that wasn’t what ART was asking for. It meant, tell it about how I was feeling, which, ugh.
“Later,” I said, and maybe meant it.
My drones and ART’s camera views showed me that Three had in fact taken the humans to Medical and a few more of our humans had joined them. Farai and Sofi were physically fine, ART told me when it noticed me checking, but I guessed they would need some form of trauma treatment after everything. Naja was mostly fine too but ART wanted to give her a mild pain reliever for some sore muscles and joints that wouldn’t mix well with the intoxicants she had been drinking earlier so it wanted her to wait a few hours for that. (Yeah, that was about as popular with Naja as you might guess. Thankfully, Mensah and Farai agreed with ART’s assessment and that kept the grumbling to a minimum.)
Leonide’s two small humans were still on the medical platforms with tubes connected to their arms. Minor dehydration, ART explained, a precaution, mostly. They looked alright to me, for whatever that was worth. If ART said they were alright, they probably were.
Iris and Seth were talking with Farai and Mensah in the corner. They were probably trying to figure out what the fuck our next move was. I don’t know. I didn’t bother to pull the audio inputs for that conversation.
Tarik was there too, surprisingly, and had dragged a chair over between Janity and Tula. Whatever he was saying to them, it seemed to be helping? They looked more relaxed than they had on the torus, at least, though that probably wasn’t saying much. That it was Tarik and not literally any of the other humans was weird though, weird enough that I almost reached for the audio on that conversation before I remembered I had even less interest in that than in listening to Dr. Mensah, Farai, Seth, and Iris.
Three hadn’t left Medical yet either and was letting Sofi talk at it excitedly. It looked like it had no idea what to do with the small human waving her arms around and recounting how we stole a flyer. (Yes, that one I did check.) It was a good thing we weren’t trying to pretend it was an augmented human right then because I don’t think there was a human alive who would be fooled by that.
They were alright. All of them.
(Emotion check: thank fuck.)
You still need repairs, ART prodded again, like I had somehow forgotten about the projectile holes or something.
“I don’t want to be around humans right now,” I said.
I didn’t. I really, really didn’t. But there was something I did want and ART let me tug it a bit closer in the feed as I started the next episode.