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One of the things I enjoyed most about my relationship with ART was, although I occasionally had to acknowledge to others that one existed, ART itself had never subjected me to that particular indignity.
When that all changed, nothing important was actually happening.
That was new. I’m used to shifts in the status quo waiting until I’m shot halfway apart and leaking all over the floor, or explaining that I need to be killed because some hostile consciousness is overtaking mine, or…come to think of it, it’s usually both at the same time.
This was different.
ART was docked adjacent to a planet that could barely be called one. It was some kind of recently and lackadaisically terraformed mass with mostly transient humans on it. It was nominally owned by a corporation so far away it didn’t pay much attention to it, as long as it regularly sent a massive portion of the minuscule amount of resources it was capable of producing. It did, the corporation continued ignoring it, and no one really knew what the deal was with the people who lived there.
The reason for checking it out had something to do with finding out if the permanent residents might be angling to rid themselves of their corporate tithe. Poverty kept them stuck on the mass, along with a surprising number of bots. No one really knew what the deal was there, either. I was slightly more interested in that, although slightly more of zero is still kind of zero.
(I was far more interested in hearing ART be offended by 33 hours of a truly anomalous program I’d snatched a moving download of on a far edge of the system we just left. It involved simulated combat between masked corporate “Champions” in order to decide who would become the “The Champion”. It was called Cosmic Champions, and nothing in the description indicated the reason they needed to become what they already were. Perhaps viewing it might shed some light on the mystery, but I had a suspicion it would only become more of one. ART was going to fucking hate it, and I couldn’t wait.)
ART’s crew wanted to find out if they might have some kind of arrangement similar to Preservation Alliance (the bots on HandelBrax, which was the name of the mass, not Cosmic Champions), which had actually bothered codifying protection for “free” bots into law. Even here, my legal owner is Dr Mensah of Preservation Alliance, and I'm being loaned to the crew of the Perihelion for an indeterminate amount of time.
Even though they call an owner a “guardian” on Preservation, it means the same thing in my log. And this is my log. The important thing is that my governor module is disabled so no one can actually own my thoughts, and Mensah doesn’t prevent me from leaving, so I suppose technically my body’s movements are also voluntary.
(I have belligerently not asked about the legalities of my situation in regard to the government/university that claims to own ART, who technically is not supposed to exist as a person and is accountable to no one, as far as I can tell. So far no one seems to have noticed the belligerence nor the omission of questions, not even ART. Which I am not disappointed by. Even a little.)
Iris and her father were talking about some “cultural event” with programming happening down on the planet. It was mildly interesting to learn they had a culture, although I was already watching the Cosmic debacle with ART at the time. We had only recently discovered that just as much entertainment could be had from watching poor-quality media as actually good ones, as long as you knew you were doing it on purpose. We were kind of excited about it.
That’s why I wasn’t paying much attention to humans doing expected things in expected places, all of which I was also watching on my drones’ cameras in case that changed suddenly and/or fatally. Which is also why I started paying a little more attention once they started discussing leaving the transport for recreational reconnaissance. None of them had ever asked me to perform the kind of duties a SecUnit would normally perform, but I did them anyway, and no one objected.
I sometimes wondered what ART had “told” them about me before they’d met me. Being shown my face with its strategic alterations had instantly branded me to them as “Peri’s SecUnit.” This was a nickname related to ART’s official designation being Perihelion, and ART being an anagram (I still won’t look up the real word for that because I don’t care) I’d dubbed it with after we’d spent all of a few hours together.
I’d have been a lot more flustered about 'belonging' to an Asshole Research Transport if I hadn’t been in the middle of rescuing them from a hostile, alien-remnant-contaminated population in the middle of some kind of civil war. I started thinking of them as my clients then, and never really stopped. Now I’m just “SecUnit”, and that’s mostly tolerable.
“There’s a live concert that’s supposedly some sort of historical-musical,” Seth said. “HandelBrax has only existed for about 20 years, so I’m not really sure of what. Does SecUnit know about it? I should see if it wants to head down with us.”
“Not right now,” Iris said. “SecUnit’s having private time with ART.”
“I’ll just leave a message, then,” Seth said, face going vague like humans do when they’re reading something in the feed. “If they get done before it ends, it can-”
I didn’t realize you were so emotionally invested in BeelAux Champion’s promotional speech, ART said dryly. He isn’t really going to break his opponent into literal half, you know. The combat portion is simulated with image-manips.
“Private time??” I managed to choke. “Could they make it sound any more venereal?”
ART stopped the playback, the lights dimming in sarcastic indulgence. Implying I was having an emotional outburst, which was needlessly rude.
I told them to ignore the drones because they make you more comfortable, ART said. I can tell them to stop ignoring the drones if you’re going to pout about what you see on them.
“Pouting?” I said, not at all poutily. It’s true they didn’t care once they figured out I am the opposite of interested in their bodily functions, and mostly just want to know if I need to kill something in the near future, or hide from someone looking for an impromptu relationship counselor. I have trusted ART with my life, several of my limbs, my brain, and a lot of other things I’d rather not do without. I don’t trust it not to foist some kind of uncomfortable interpersonal situation on me, hence using my drones instead of its not-so-secret cameras in the living areas.
ART sent me an image of my own face from its cameras, as if I couldn’t see it perfectly well in my own. I also wondered since ART could alter my features as much as it already had, if it could also just have them removed entirely. The only thing stopping me from asking where its medical suite’s Remove Face button is located was imagining what ART might replace mine with.
“I’m not pouting,” is what I said. “Your humans are disgusting.”
ART was quiet for 3.4 seconds, which should really have tipped me off. Instead, I naively allowed it to send me a greatest hits compilation from its onboard cameras of my own humans being disgusting.
Ratthi: “So, you have a relationship with this transport.”
A close up of my face: looking increasingly removable.
“The way they say it makes it sound like sex.” Which ART knew, since even Ratthi had immediately reassured me he hadn’t meant a sexual relationship. I had not been appeased then, and I wasn’t now. “I don’t even have those parts!” Which ART also knows. “Wait, they know that, right? That SecUnits don’t-”
Most of them have seen all of your parts, including the ones that are supposed to stay inside, ART said flatly. Which, by the way, are hard to clean out of my upholstery.
“You don’t clean it, you just replace it,” I said, a little stung by that.
With clean upholstery, ART snipped, and do I really have to point out that I don’t have those parts either? I mean, where would someone even put-
“I’m not having this discussion,” I interrupted desperately. “I just wish they’d stop using those kind of euphemisms for…”
I trailed off, since I expected to be interrupted six words ago and therefore didn’t bother constructing the rest of that sentence. The fact that I wasn’t interrupted should have warned me. It did not.
It’s not a euphemism, it’s literal, ART said. It’s not like anyone else is here.
In my room, which it did not say.
That was something new, and I hadn’t entirely come to terms with it yet. Sure, I’d been offered something like that a few times back on Preservation. In the end, I’d had to dust off my ‘stand facing the wall until they stop talking to me’ method. The obvious regression had led Mensah to quietly direct her family members to cease their attempted hospitality.
In contrast, ART’s crew just sort of silently and unanimously decided that this room is mine, and behaved accordingly. Like it already happened. As in: order slurry for the processor, it’s time for a rest cycle, put that bedding pac in SecUnit’s cabin, and that had been that.
I could have fussed about the foisting.
And then I didn’t.
“Anyone could come in,” I said. It sounded weak, even to me.
But, strangely enough, they don’t. I wondered if its usual tone sounded as sarcastic to ART as it does to everyone else. We’re busy.
“We’re watching a terrible serial program where humans and manips pretend to fight each other for entirely symbolic prizes and then yell about it,” I corrected. I could fit my forearm in the brace of zeroes after the decimal point describing the fraction of a percentage of ART’s processing ability necessary to do that with me. While also doing everything else it needs to be doing simultaneously.
Instead, it was using close a third of its processing ability to do that. ART uses a lot more of itself to pay attention to me than it needs to pretty much all the time. I’d gotten used to that without really noticing. Smooth moves, Murderbot. Good job looking out for the status quo change feelings pit.
Yes, I was there for that part, ART replied dryly. Unfortunately. You’re the one who started coming in here when we watch media together.
That should not have caused a bloom of stress chemicals from my organic parts, but it did.
“I can keep an eye on them with my drones,” I said, and it came out all defensive for no reason.
I’m not the one acting like it’s a problem, ART said, correctly, which I resented. Besides, you don’t like them being able to look at your face when I show you things sometimes.
“Um.” Um.
“What?” What.
Your face does things sometimes when we play media, it said. When it reminds you of things that happened to you, or me. Like it is now.
“Incorrect,” I said, weirdly, through a face doing something even weirder.
We have discussed this, ART said. I tried to read some sarcasm into it, but it just sounded confused. Which was suddenly unacceptable. I tell you when media reminds me of real things. You said it happens to you, too.
“I just didn’t want you to feel bad for being an anomaly,” I said, which. Okay. Probably not my most heroic moment.
And that’s when ART showed me a clip of a scene from Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, in which a nervous character has their first sexual experience and ends up enjoying it immensely with their confident, experienced partner. It was the culminating scene for a midseason filler b-plot arc, unobtrusive enough I rarely even bothered skipping it. I wouldn’t even have flipped my entire shit if it weren’t for how the context clearly indicated this reminded ART of something it and I had done together.
I stopped the playback immediately.
“Absolutely not,” I said, perfectly calm. I didn’t even vomit or anything, since I don’t have a digestive system. “Fuck no. Did you forget the part where I said sex is gross the last forty six times? Do you need to run a diagnostic?”
I don’t mean the sex, ART said in what it probably believed was a perfectly reasonable tone. It wasn’t. Watch, the part where he says- ART was already zooming in on one of the coital expressions, and I stopped the clip again.
“No. We are not having some kind of moistly private sex-watching time.”
Moisture aside, you envision me watching media with you like a giant person leaning against your shoulder and breathing heavily, ART said petulantly. I don’t see how this is different.
It wasn’t, except for how it extremely was.
Several of ART’s humans were putting finishing touches on their reconnaissance excursion to the surface of the planet, which again, barely counted as one, to peruse the selection of trinkets and toys for sale during what barely counted as a cultural festival.
I hate planets, and don’t tend to go on them when I have any other options available to me.
“I’m going to go on the planet,” I said.
And then I did.
***
ART’s crew aren’t as naive as my humans.
That doesn’t mean they’re physically capable of being as hypervigilant and paranoid as I am. Which is why Seth ended up taking one step too many into a kiosk of various doodads on sale at the festival. It happened while I was not pouting and paying complete and total attention to things that weren’t the argument I had just had with the world’s biggest asshole of a research transport.
(I certainly wasn’t facing away because of course the kiosk specialized in representations of genitals, which humans appear to find ceaselessly entertaining. It’s like they know how disgusting they are.)
Seth was going in to examine a selection of items further toward the back of the kiosk, and a suspiciously placed drapery near the door obscured him from my peripheral vision. More importantly, his movement hid him from my carefully positioned and concealed drone. All of a sudden, I no longer had eyes on my client.
Anything could have been behind that curtain. A human with a club, waiting to bash his brains in for the hard currency card in his pocket. A team of corporate spies planning on holding him for ransom. A Combat SecUnit bristling with armor-piercing projectile weapons, which instead of the usual pew pew noise made a lethal pop suspiciously similar to the novelty items that release a big puff of colored smoke when you pull a string, which were being sold in the kiosk next to the ha-ha-funny-genitals one.
So. Charging in, scooping Seth into my arms, and running away at full speed was a perfectly natural response.
Running up a wall and latching on to a support pillar made to look like a tree, then clinging to it with my legs while holding a human slightly larger than me like a toddler might have been excessive, but that’s arguable. It was the best defensive position available in the crowded festival. The problem was, acting like a SecUnit had made the humans and augmented humans notice I might be one. And not the augmented human I had allowed them to assume I was before I started performing completely necessary superhuman feats.
“I think we can probably go back down now,” Seth said after a few minutes.
And we had. Well, I’d gone down, and brought Seth with me. Then I’d gone over (to the shuttle), back (to the storage lockers and hid in one), up (to ART once it become clear I was being sort-of-ordered to do that), and then I’d just sort of laid down. I needed to lie down more, but I was already lying down. Since I couldn’t figure out a way to do that, I decided to not think about it for a while. I just passively took in information from my drones, which were still in their accustomed positions around the living areas.
The rest of ART’s crew were doing the usual things in the usual places. Mostly taking care of needs I don’t have, like eating, sleeping, bodily functions, and going into rooms together with expressions that mean I won’t send a drone into that room under any circumstances. Some of them were in the lounge playing a game that’d been purchased on the planet and sent up with the disgraced and unstable rogue SecUnit. Now that I was recording with a half-formed idea to construct a playable media file out of it later. Maybe see if there would be a point challenging ART to a round at some point, having built in a way to cheat enough so I could win.
I was in my cabin instead of watching with my eyes, hiding my shame in outing myself and creating the need to explain both my presence and completely explicable behavior. Which the crew members on the surface were probably giving. Everyone was acting like it wasn’t a big deal, which just made it worse.
Speaking of making things worse.
It bothers you, ART said succinctly out of nowhere, which is what it does instead of asking questions whenever possible.
A question just hangs there expectant and vulnerable like a dangly human part. Making a statement means you win unless there’s a refutation.
I know because I do the same thing. That doesn’t mean I like it being directed at me.
“No it doesn’t.”
Yes it does.
“What does?”
What I showed you. Bothers you.
I also don’t like being the one bothered by something that isn’t a big deal, except it is.
“Everything bothers me,” I said. “You’re not special.”
ART is definitely special, which was also somehow part of the problem. ART is a massive entity capable of all sorts of things transports aren’t supposed to be. Like talk, or watch media, or crush my brain out of existence while simultaneously mapping an uncharted system, reupholstering its entire interior, and winning a firefight against hostiles to protect its….crew. Who do all the gross human things right inside its cabins pretty much constantly.
That is when it occurred to me that ART’s attitudes towards all the gross things humans do, often in private (although ugh, not always) might be considerably different than mine. ART was saying that it bothers me, because it doesn’t bother ART. It is aware of my opinion there, but doesn’t actually understand. It kept making statements because it wanted to know why (it’s a fucking research transport, Murderbot, of course it does)…. which unfortunately led to me considering why. I try to do that as infrequently as I can manage.
One of the obnoxious things about ART, of which there are many, is that it is good at getting you to talk about what it wanted you to talk about. Even more annoying is that it gets you to think about what it wanted you to talk about in different ways. I was angry the same way I'd been angry when Gurathin told a room full of humans and augmented humans that I call myself Murderbot. Having my privacy violated forced me into the excruciating experience of having to also tell them I have a 'private'. It hurt.
It occurred to me I had never explained about the data mining back when the company had owned me.
“You know I had to record everything the clients did, check it for proprietary information or leverage, and send it to the company,” I said.
When you worked for them, ART replied, using the same not-exactly-a-euphemism I do.
“I had to record them having sex.”
I could practically hear ART’s processors churning towards the obvious conclusion.
Those recordings were used to….hurt them.
“I don’t know that they were,” I said tightly, even though I did. There’s a reason I came up with a workaround. I saved the logs in SecSystem’s buffer when I knew it was due for an update. The updates deleted the footage and made it look like an accident. It was for when I didn’t hate the clients as much as usual. Like the augmented human who was sleeping with someone on the job and had had no clue that person had a marital partner elsewhere, would have lost her position if they’d been found out anyhow, and had thanked me for stopping her from entering a contaminated room.
(I’d only realized her interface was faulty at the last second, and the hazard marker wasn’t showing up. She’d swayed with exhaustion and belated fear, gripping my steadying arm and either ignoring the gunport or not realizing that’s what it was. I’d have gone right the fuck in there, she’d said weakly, covering her eyes with a hand. Holy shit. Thank you, she’d said, given me a pat, then gone to medical to get her implanted interface looked at.)
I thought ART would back off. Not so much. Sometimes ART’s ingenuous attitude about the finer corporate prints in life gets the better of both of us.
But hurting your clients is against your function, it blurted.
(The update had been delayed because corporations suck. The company blackmailed her into sabotaging a terraforming machine for them and she’d ended up indentured.)
I sealed myself off from the feed. Sort of like walking into another room and slamming the door, except it not really. There isn’t anything inside the ship ART can’t see and hear in some way. In this case it was a slightly off-model SecUnit curled up facing the wall and staring at nothing. Well, the wall. Which is still ART.
I covered my face with the blanket. With my blanket. Then I closed my eyes so I wasn’t staring at anything anymore. I don’t actually do that very often. Without ART poking at me, I didn’t have to wonder why. Then I stopped looking through my drones’ cameras, too. It turns out having the choice to not look at anything at all made it seem like I could say things without having to think about them. It wasn't true, but it still helped.
“On some jobs I had to make annotations involving which parts went where, so they could compare it to the list of profitable individual deviations from relative cultural norms,” I told the inside of the blanket after a while. “Because apparently some humans think some kinds of sex are more disgusting than others.” They’re really wrong about that, but the ones that care, care a lot. “Enough that if the company wanted to keep something even more disgusting that they were doing a secret, blackmail was the standard procedure for obtaining silence.” I sighed, which I can do much better than ART can. “If not, they just held on to it. Or sold it to whoever wanted it.”
“That’s disgusting,” ART said faintly, out loud since I was shutting it out.
“Yes,” I said in my best imitation of ART’s smarmy-polite ambient bot voice that it uses to say things out loud. “It’s almost like you heard me after the forty seventh time.”
ART was quiet for nearly five minutes. I didn’t look at or think about anything. It was almost restful.
“I wasn’t trying to say it’s like sex,” ART says in an almost contrite tone. “I meant that sometimes they do that for the same reason we do our things.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said. “What does that even mean, ART?”
“Well?” I said after the sixth minute of silence.
“To have feelings. About things.”
Together, which it did not say. Small mercies.
“Not about real things,” I said quickly. The distinction was very important to me. “I still don’t know what you mean. And if you can’t explain-”
“I can’t exactly show you if you won’t look,” ART interrupted, not even a little moistly. I was suddenly, absurdly re-grateful for ART’s reliable dryness in nearly all situations. Enough that I reconnected to the feed, but that was all.
ART played a clip of Overse and Arada having a fight about the meeting with the Barish-Estranza corporates, then going into a room together to have a relationship discussion and/or sex, which I studiously had ignored. I relaxed slightly once I realized ART wasn’t going to try and show me the interior of that room.
Then it showed me myself, absolutely not sulking while locked in a restroom. It skipped the mutual apologizing (it for kidnapping me and my humans, and me for calling it a fucker for doing so). Instead, it just cut to me putting on ART’s favorite program which is World Hoppers, and ART looming heavily in the feed after 27 minutes of mutual code-writing.
The apologies had been necessary; having a shared objective involving busywork had helped a lot. Starting the show had been an invitation, and ART had taken it. It’s our thing that we like to do, and how whatever this is started. Experiencing media together was both enjoyable, and a tacit admission that we were still interested in spending more time doing that. We were already working in tandem towards a goal, so it hadn’t even been necessary.
That part was just for us.
“Oh,” is all I said.
There are also other things. Not-sex things.
I didn’t do anything to stop it, so it went right on ahead. That’s just how ART is.
ART showed me a clip from MedCenter Argala, in which one of the main characters holds their love interest’s hand as they go through some very unlikely brain surgery. Because the love interest is also the person performing the brain surgery. One-handed. While they recite poetry together.
I was about to ask what the hell that could remind it of, when it just sort of whacked into me.
The time ART had partitioned off a bit of its consciousness to exist in the isolation box with me, keeping me company and playing media while it removed a hostile alien remnant from my body and mind. Just another of the completely unnecessary and unasked-for ways we comfort each other times times of undue stress and/or existential peril. Sometimes I play the World Hoppers theme music for ART when its crew are doing something it wishes they weren’t, and ART plays media in the background when well-meaning humans and augmented humans ask me questions about what being a SecUnit is like.
“I suppose we could lower the unrealistic rating of that episode from wildly to flagrantly,” is all I said about it.
Does that fix it?
“Not really.”
Because...?
“Because now I have to decide how to feel about something all over again.”
Is it really that bad having feelings?
“YES!!” I cried, so offended I actually uncovered my face and sat up. Having real feelings about fake things together is one thing; having real feelings about real things (like each other) and being expected to talk about them (with each other) is something very else.
“It’s not like I’m even supposed to have them, anyways! I’m a heartless killing machine!”
You like doing things you’re not supposed to, ART pointed out mercilessly.
Well. ART kind of had me there. So of course I did the only thing a calm, mature, and reliably performing killing machine could do in that situation.
I laid back down and initiated a voluntary shutdown sequence and recharge cycle.
***
When my recharge cycle started up and I came back online, ART left me alone for a bit. And by ‘a bit’, I mean two full cycles. ART is easily outraged when it doesn’t get what it wants immediately….and is also capable of the kind of patience only bots can manage when it’s being stubborn.
Since I was still determinedly avoiding the crew, I got bored quickly. Well, whatever. It’s nothing compared to being shipped in a box to a job site. I could handle a little boredom. It’s not like the existential angst was going to settle in or anything.
(I found out much later that Seth had bought one of the genital representations from the booth, and had planned to give it to me as a lighthearted joke to show that there were no ‘hard feelings’. ART had gently informed Seth that was probably a bad idea, and to just keep it. He’d given it to ART instead, who had been flattered and pleased, and the whole crew ended up with an in-joke around how ART was now the only transport with genitals in the known universe. The joke is how I eventually found out about it.)
Anyway, when the existential angst settled in I played media and ignored it. It didn’t work as well as usual, which was distressing. Although my favorites continued to be soothing, the familiarity allowed me to think too much in the backburner areas of my processing capability. I tried a few new ones, but for some reason, their novelty failed to appeal.
I even tried watching Cosmic Champions on my own. Without ART complaining about the manip’s physically impossible proportions (and the clipping when they got too near each other, which during the combat portions was constant), it lost a lot of its former value. I wasn’t prepared to confront the fact that there were some things that were only fun when ART and I did them together. That made the whole thing worse, somehow.
ART was infuriatingly allowing me to ignore it. It was also dealing with compiling recordings and information from every crew member who’d been to the surface into some sort of fully cited (and updated in real time) dossier on the barely-a-planet situation, separately counseling a weeping couple who’d just broken up in their cabins, and handling a medical situation from an explosion. (It turned out ART was the nearest medical facility capable of handling that many burn patients, and when it comes to pointless human suffering, it’s a fucking softie. Whatever the explanation of me had entailed, it currently involved me staying up here instead of down there preventing that sort of thing in the first place. Which didn’t really help the existential angst situation much.)
I was sort of hoping ART would be distracted, which was very stupid of me.
“You don’t need a SecUnit.”
If that were true, I probably wouldn't have bothered kidnapping you, it said crisply in our private channel. Ugh, private. I briefly considered purging the word from my memory, but I had a feeling that might cause other problems. Having a problem that wasn’t me realizing I might think of ART as my client and the panic it caused had its charms anyways, but I resisted the temptation.
“What do you even get out of having me here?” I was definitely baiting it. Maybe it was all that Champion stuff, but I was tired of being on the defensive. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to start an interrogation instead of waiting for one to be aimed at me.
I like the way you give things names, ART said.
My attack turned into a rout more or less instantly. That was another statement, not a question. It dangled there vulnerably nevertheless.
“Anyone can do that,” I said, normally, in a normal way.
But they don’t.
“I don’t get what there is to like or not like about that.”
Because it’s, a nanosecond’s pause. ...fun. And we’re not supposed to be able to do that.
“Do what?”
Have fun, ART explained. I also enjoy doing things I’m not supposed to. Occasionally.
That made sense. Dammit. I’m not even supposed to have a name, much less have the gall to give them to other things. Or people. Which ART and I are, even though we’re not supposed to be. Not that we have a choice about that.
I think of them that way on my own sometimes, ART added. It meant its crew. With your nicknames.
I looked down at my feet and just kind of didn’t think about anything.
Well, I thought about my feet. They don’t have any organic parts, which I’m grateful for. If they did, it might be possible this room, my room, would have that dirty-sock human smell. I liked that it didn’t. I liked….my feet. Which sounds even weirder than it feels, but whatever.
The list of things I could say I like without scare quotes is a short one. I like media. I like soft hooded sweatshirts, pants with lots of sealable pockets, Dr. Mensah, and small, soft humans and augmented humans who listen to me and let me prevent them from getting murdered or eaten. And okay, I’ll admit it. I like ART when it’s not under the intolerable impression that we’re having some kind of sweaty human-ish relationship with digital analogs for sex.
I wiggled my toes, which do not resemble human augments at all. They remained reassuringly inhuman-looking.
“How do you think of me on your own?” I asked after a while.
Your real name, obviously.
My local feed address, the name humans can’t say and also possibly don’t have a concept for. The one ART had used as a passcode to unlock its copied kernel from the food production formula storage it had hidden it in while an evil alien-remnant-powered hivemind (hivemind status contested) had taken over its body. That was after it had kidnapped me from another sector of space through a wormhole to rescue it, because it was alone and terrified and had absolutely no one else in the universe it could turn to for that sort of thing.
Yeah, okay. So. We have history. It’s complicated.
“I meant personal logs,” I clarified.
Long term storage, not temp. The ones like this, right now. ART knows it’s important to me how I describe things here; one of the few things I have control over. Mostly. (I can’t remove the corporate logos carved into my synthetic bones, but I can refuse to say the company’s name in my personal logs. It’s the little things, you know?)
Murderbot, it admitted eventually. And sometimes...I’m ART, instead of Perihelion, it said after even longer. I can stop if you want me to.
I didn’t, though.
Instead I asked ART about the layered recording-response again. It politely passed it to me as a separate file. I played it on my own, added my newfound perspective to it, then passed it back the same way.
I reached out and touched the wall, which is, of course, still ART. Then I touched the spot on my body over its comm. It’s still stored carefully in the compartment beneath my ribs, and hadn’t been removed once since I originally put it there on RaviHyral. I thought about how I’d let it make massive surgical changes to my body. Even more...I’d let all of it into my brain before.
Sure, it had been that or die. Myself, my clients, and a dozen innocent humans and augmented humans would have exploded instantly and messily once the pilotless shuttle crashed into the moon in 7.6 seconds. But. There have been plenty of times I’d chosen to die instead of something else I didn’t want to do. (The fact that people keep preventing that for their own mysterious reasons hasn’t exactly been a deterrent. Although it is a little annoying to be undermined constantly, I suppose I’ll live. (That is a joke.))
I had cried out to ART for help. Let me in, ART had said, cool and calm as if we were discussing which show to watch next. And I’d let it do that more than once. The sensation is much like letting someone use your head as a stepstone in a stream, and somehow believing they won’t drown you.
(I highly doubt ART would let me do it back, but that’s probably because trying to extend my processing capabilities into ART’s body even for sensory input, much less try and use it for anything, would dissolve my brain like a drop of nutrient solution in a smallish to midsize planetary ocean.)
Dr. Bharadwaj once asked me if I trusted anyone. Despite the context of the situation making the question appropriate, I remember what I said. The circumstances of being a bot-human construct, of being inherently disposable, have made me both hard to kill and a surprisingly good liar for someone whose performance reliability drops at the mere prospect of making direct eye contact.
Despite the circumstances, once I’d let it in I couldn’t help thinking of it as my Asshole Research Transport. Sure, I’d been staring into the moldering wreckage of the worst thing that ever happened to me, but still. I’d wished it was there with me, and thought of ART as mine. I spent pretty much the whole time away from it wishing it was there, especially at the moments when hearing it talk shit would have made the actual shit I was immersed in more bearable.
I felt ART's accustomed and massive attention lean in the feed, so we could maybe watch it together. It’s not a sensation even augmented humans can feel very well, but for bots that’s considerably more contact than just the sort that involves eyes. I’m still grateful ART doesn’t have any, but we all have physical preferences, I suppose.
I should have felt nervous, like I did the first time I ART really let me feel how big it is. How it could swat me like a fly. But now, that size feels like it’s something positioned between me and all the things that I don’t like. The fact that I wasn’t afraid when I technically should be made me nervous instead, which reminded me of something else.
I reached for my media, because seeing that feeling outside myself somehow made it easier to explain. And to….have it be there.
Instead of ART’s file, I pulled another clip. One where a human face changes expression very abruptly, because the situation isn’t what he thought. There’s someone else in the room, and he doesn’t know who yet.
In my memory, ART speaks the first three words it ever said to me:
You were lucky.
I added my realization that I was aboard something other than a bot-piloted vessel to the clip, along with an approximation of the scary chemicals my organic parts release when I’m really feeling the OhShitness of it all. It was the same way I’d shown it from my own memory what being punished by my governor module had felt like. Back when I’d told it that SecUnits don’t sulk, and shown it why.
(It’s possible that’s also why I do it so much now.)
“That is...distracting,” ART said, a wibble in the middle of distracting that did an unexpectedly good job of expressing how it feels.
“Yes,” I said, but instead of coming out in my sarcastic ART-impression voice, it just came out like me saying yes.
We got to the part where ART said Do not attempt to hack my systems, then dropped its wall for the .000001 of a second that changed us both forever. Because my first thought had been that it was like something from a drama serial, full of evil bots sentient enough to be mean. It had reminded me of that, and something else, too. My first impression of ART had reminded me of me, enough that I wondered if it too had cloned organic brain tissue buried somewhere in its transport-guts.
But it doesn’t.
I know that, just as much as ART knows I’m not some leaky human who wants to squirt nasty bodily fluids all over its chairs. Even though I have done that, but it was usually because I’d been shot with projectiles and parts of my body were falling off. That's different, and we both know it. Thinking of me as half-human and half-bot is a mistake, and not one ART would make. I’m one whole bot-human construct sentient enough to be depressed, mean enough to be the first entity to call it a fucker, and alive enough to be traumatized by my own existence. Much less all the horrible shit that’s occurred during it.
What ART’s humans think matters, but not as much as what ART thinks. My performance reliability went from 92% all the way up to 99%, and I let ART play the clip with our layered response-filters over it. It went a lot better the second time around. Since I knew it was going to happen, I could pay attention to what ART was trying to show me.
ART doesn’t feel what the characters felt. They’re not real. It’s just a recording of actors pretending to have sex; one that happened to remind ART of the first time we watched media together. It had become our habitual thing once ART realized my responses became part of the data in ways humans’ don’t...when it watches with me.
ART had been trying to show me that it can do that now, too. Because once I wasn’t distracted by what it was, I realized that’s what I’d perceived. On both clips, including the MedCenter Argala one. The association hadn’t happened on its own.
ART has its own contexts to add now regarding media that isn’t about ships and crews and things. Even ones like Cosmic Championship, where human actors or visual manipulations thereof pretend to fight. But the ship ones are still its favorite….and the clip that had reminded it of me was from my favorite.
When we first met, ART had accepted my media-packet entry bribe, but had poked at it without seeing the point. Then it watched me play it on my own, and have what was obviously a soothing and pleasurable experience. It wanted in on that, and it wasn’t until after we’d been watching together for a while that I realized it wanted to do it with me because it basically didn’t know how.
(The part ART had been trying to show me:
character 1: “Well, tell me what you like.”
character 2: “I don’t...know what I like yet.”
character 1: “I can help you figure it out, if you want me to.”)
It had taken an entire cycle to help ART figure out that there were at least two musical instruments it absolutely abhorred the sound of, and that is why it kept stopping songs that included them. And then there was the episode of World Hoppers it could only watch in two-minute increments, with long breaks in between to process what it just saw. It was that emotionally invested, and I hadn’t minded one bit. I’d….really liked it, actually. Almost as much as finding The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It had been the first thing I watched after hacking my governor module, and why I knew how to help ART process those kinds of feelings.
Because I was confident, and experienced, and I really wanted ART to have a nice time.
It’s possible that ART just understands why humans have sex better than I do. Well, ART’s welcome to it, because I don’t fucking want to. Luckily I didn’t have to, and it turns out ART wasn’t going to try and make me. Which, it was possible I had been. Slightly concerned about.
I’ve spent most of my existence trying to avoid things I don’t like and failing. I have less experience moving toward something I do like, but it’s possible deciding to spend more time with ART was...something like that.
“So, I don’t really like sex scenes much,” is what I said.
You don’t like ones with SecUnits in them, either.
“That’s definitely the worst kind of sex scene.”
A nanopause.
There are sex scenes with SecUnits? That’s-
“Not realistic,” I interrupted.
I haven’t seen anything with that, ART said, although it was just a statement, not a question. Not an accusation.
“I run a filter over the dialogue before I watch something new,” I admitted. Considering ART’s likes and dislikes, it’s not that surprising it hasn’t sought out shows that sordid (and inaccurate in ways that sincerely annoy it) on its own.
Why?
I hesitated, then showed ART how I’d created a content filter for potential media for us to watch that first trip together. I had put aside programs based on true stories where bad things happen to human crews, because of how badly ART had been upset by them. (For that matter, I also don’t like shows where helpless humans get eaten by hostile fauna on abandoned colonies and have depressing endings.) It was what made me understand that ART, despite being a massive entity that could smash my consciousness like a blanket-mite, might need me to protect it in certain ways, too. It’s probably what made me accept its help. Made me able to….trust it. It really had trusted me first.
And that was the first step towards ending up where I am right now. For me at least.
Oh, ART said. I don’t think I would enjoy those much.
None of those were sexual experiences, including the one I’m describing now. It was, however, an intimate one. In retrospect, I realized that is probably what ART was trying to explain. It’s not our fault there aren’t words for bot-specific feelings, not that I want there to be any. At least not any that humans and augmented humans can say.
“Fine.” I can’t really take deep breaths for the same reason I can’t perform rescue breathing, but it was something like that. My pride in my sighing abilities isn’t unwarranted. “I accept that you don’t mean what your crew means when they say private time.”
I don’t think they mean what you think they mean, ART corrected gently. The gentleness seemed extremely unnecessary.
“How the hell would you know?”
Because they don’t know, ART said. They have no idea what we’re doing. They can’t see it, no matter where we are when we do it. Despite that, you go into a room where no one can see you.
“You can see me,” I protested.
Yes, ART said in a tone layered with so much smarmy significance I almost snapped at it.
Then I stopped and thought about it instead, which is….maybe another new thing. New-ish? New, like going into a room where only ART can see the things my stupid face does. Unless I cover it with a blanket while curled up facing a wall on my bunk so I can have an emotion that absolutely no one can see. Not even ART. So I can do other private things like leaving my firewall down in its general direction, out of comfortable habit and open-ended interest.
I’m really used to the only thing ‘privacy’ meaning is the space inside my own heavily-armored cranium, which is why I spend so much fucking time there. Except.
That’s also where ART and I watch media together. And that’s where it took my invitation to go, settling into its usual comfortable position as it casually thumbed through my media storage. It’s not the underwater-feeling it of actually occupying my brain, which tends to be especially stressful on the organic parts of it. ART only uses part of itself to pay attention to me, which is still considerably more than necessary, and it didn’t bother me at all.
It was comforting.
We can do whatever we want, ART said. It isn’t anyone else’s business.
“It’s private,” I said into the blanket. Then I took the blanket away.
Yes.
Like it doesn’t get how terrifying that is.
As if either of us, at any point, have belonged to ourselves.
As if we could ever belong to each other.
“This is our private time,” I said.
Of course humans don’t understand, ART said to me during our private time. I don’t really want them to.
Then it restarted the episode of Cosmic Championship.
And that, Dr. Mensah, is why I won’t allow this log to be used in any sort of grand project for codifying the legalities of bot-bot relationship status inside Preservation-controlled territories. It’s not because I don’t care, although that’s maybe half of it. The rest involves having a life I don’t spend in planetary courts trying to prove I’m actually alive.
I know I probably didn’t have to explain any of this, either. I could have just said no.
Another new-ish thing: wanting to tell someone I care about…things involving someone else I also care about. Because I could decide to also not do that. I’m pretty sure ART tells Iris….things. About me? Us? I try not to think about it too much because it makes me feel weird, and because it’s possible it is also somehow maybe none of my business despite being about me. I don’t know.
That idea also feels weird and new, like having a room. Like Seth’s shaky hydroponic garden with its experimental hybrids that may or may not “make it.” Like the concept that maybe humans shouldn’t have to understand private things in order to respect that they exist and have importance.
But hey, what do I know?
I’m just a Murderbot.
However.
Say you happen to come across a short drama entitled Sense of Security starring stolen Cosmic Champions manips on a series of also-stolen proprietary stock backgrounds? If its story involves a large bot-piloted transport finding a heroic rogue human form bot abandoned with the other broken equipment on a failed colony? Don’t worry that the dialogue and soundtrack is all distorted samples from other shows. And don’t ask anyone how it got mixed in with the packets of downloadable media on random stations on the Corporate Rim (and in the possession of bot piloted transports who may have accessed it somehow). No one will know what it is, who made it, or how it got there. Its very existence is highly illegal, and it will be deleted immediately.
Or you could download it, watch it, and find out if it makes you feel something you don’t have a name for.