Chapter Text
Iris
The lights in Iris’s cabin flickered. The lesson plan she’d been dragging into next semester’s unit overview froze in her feed.
Peri? Iris sent privately.
For once, Peri’s answer did not appear almost instantaneously in her feed. Iris had time to purse her lips and glance up at the ceiling camera in concern before a reply came.
I’m sorry, Iris. I was momentarily distracted. Please, continue. As Peri spoke, the lesson plan snapped into place — but not where Iris had been trying to drag it.
Distracted with what? Iris ignored the misplaced lesson plan — Peri was obviously trying to bait her into restarting their earlier argument about the Surviving Space Disasters unit so she wouldn’t ask what had distracted it enough to make the feed lag. Peri’s obfuscation tactics might have worked with some crew members, but Iris knew better.
Glad for an excuse to put her lesson planning aside, Iris used an administrative code she definitely wasn’t supposed to have to pull up Peri’s long list of ongoing processes. The task getting most of Peri’s attention was under a privacy lock (not even her dad could break Peri’s privacy locks), but a quick glance at the ship’s feed activity map showed even more activity than normal in SecUnit’s quarters.
Iris grinned, bouncing a little in her chair. Distracted, huh? she sent Peri, tossing in a few suggestive and anatomically impossible sigils to go with the message.
Peri flicked the message status to seen but pointedly didn’t reply. In response, Iris tagged Peri in a calendar reminder to tease it in the morning, then grinned as the reminder erased itself.
Well, Iris decided, if Peri was done working for the night, then so was she. Closing out her teaching calendar, she swiveled her chair away from the desk.
For now, she’d let Peri enjoy whatever it and SecUnit were doing. Realistically, Iris knew they were probably just arguing about media, as much as she might hope otherwise for Peri's sake. At least Peri genuinely enjoyed arguing about media with SecUnit. Their arguments always had a distinctly flirty undertone, nothing at all how Peri sounded while arguing with, say, Tarik. But then, Peri wasn’t in rapport with Tarik.
Standing, Iris decided to wander down to the galley to get a snack, maybe see if Kaede or Matteo wanted to hang out.
That’s when the Perihelion shuddered around her and the lights flashed out. Iris had to grab ahold of the desk chair to keep from stumbling. The ship went eerily silent as the omnipresent background hum of life support cut out. Emergency back-up lights switched on, casting Iris’s room in an eerie, red glow.
Peri??? Iris sent privately.
Because of her augments, she managed to send it a whole second before a clamor rose up in the public feed.
Peri didn’t respond. Iris bolted for the door, but it didn’t slide open at her feed command. Now Iris was glad Peri hadn’t let her hang her signed Deep Sea Mushrooms poster over the manual override hatch last summer. She definitely would have torn it in her haste to get out of her cabin.
Iris managed to shove the door open just as the ship gave another shudder. Then the overhead vents puffed out a bubble of atmosphere as life support came back online.
The overheads flashed on overhead, bright enough to make Iris squeeze her eyes shut as she stumbled out of her cabin. She nearly careened into both of her dads as they burst out of the next cabin. Martyn caught her by the shoulders as Seth quickly stepped out of her way, still tying his robe around his waist.
Iris didn't need to ask if either of them had heard from Peri — they looked almost as upset as the day Target Control System compromised Peri's systems. Martyn gave Iris a reassuring squeeze before letting her go.
What the fuck, Peri? Matteo was demanding in the public feed. The rest of the crew was chiming in to share that sentiment. The clamor of confused, scared voices subvocalizing in the public feed was starting to give Iris a headache.
As she watched, Seth squared his shoulders, his face smoothing into what Iris thought of as his captain's expression. Enough, he sent, using his command override to cut through the chatter in the feed. Perihelion, report.
With her augments, Iris could sense the flare of feed activity as Peri finally responded, like catching the distant cadence of a conversation too far away to make out the words. Thank God. Momentary relief flashed across Seth's expression, followed by a frown. His eyebrows drew together, face hardening into the dubious expression Iris had seen whenever she’d tried lying to him as a teenager.
Fuck, Peri was in trouble. What had it and SecUnit been doing?
Even as it spoke to Seth, Peri’s voice rolled out of the speakers. Iris knew it well enough to hear the chagrin in its voice. “I apologize for the glitch in my performance. It won’t happen again.”
Damn right it won’t, Tarik said in the general feed. There was a chorus of consensus, the whole crew chiming in.
Well, almost the whole crew. The one crew member most likely to needle Peri was being suspiciously quiet.
Iris opened a private channel. SecUnit, what happened? Is Peri okay?
Normally, SecUnit’s feed responses were as quick as Peri’s. Now it hesitated, though Iris guessed most other augmented humans wouldn’t have noticed the delay. Growing up with Perihelion for a sibling did a lot to skew one’s sense of normal conversational speed.
It’s fine. ART’s fine, SecUnit sent.
But what happened? Iris demanded. In her feed log, the sent message returned, tagged undeliverable. Iris felt herself gaping. SecUnit had blocked her.
In the family feed, Martyn was saying, Peri, honey, what happened? You’re scaring us.
I apologize, Peri said stiffly.
Iris and her dads shared an "oh shit" look. Peri only apologized when it had really fucked up, and it only avoided direct questions when it had something to hide. Whatever was going on, it was a big deal, no matter how much Peri and SecUnit were trying to downplay the situation.
Seth's brow creased in worry as he said, That’s not an answer. We need to know what happened.
You do not need to know, Seth, Peri replied. You would like to know. Is it not enough to accept my word that this was a momentary mistake that will not be repeated?
No! Seth exploded, subvocalizing hard enough to make Iris take a step back. Not when the lives of the crew may be at risk.
The crew is not at risk, Perihelion said firmly. Life support was offline for less than two seconds. The effect on shipwide oxygen levels was negligible.
This time Seth said. If it happens again —
It will not happen again, Seth, Peri interrupted. You have my word.
Iris wasn’t sure if she was trying to rescue her dad or her impossibly stubborn sibling, but she broke into the conversation either way, Peri, did something happen with SecUnit?
Another damningly long pause for a machine intelligence. No, Peri said, less than convincingly.
Seth’s face grew distant as he messaged SecUnit in the feed. A second later, he blinked, incredulous. “It blocked me!” As far as Iris knew, it wasn’t supposed to be possible to block the captain. At least, not without Peri’s help.
“Me too,” Martyn said.
Reluctantly, Iris added, “Same.” She didn’t want to get SecUnit in trouble, but it was doing a good enough job of that on its own.
Seth spoke in the too-measured tones he only used when he was really upset. Perihelion, answer me truthfully. Did SecUnit hurt you?
“No!” Peri thundered into the feed. “Seth, it is frankly insulting that you asked that after everything SecUnit has done for us.”
He’s just worried, sweetheart, Martyn said. We’re all worried. Can’t you talk to us?
Silence.
▢ ▢ ▢
Murderbot
My emotional breakdown was finally here. Threat assessment had been predicting it since ART accidentally breached my feed walls. Actually, a few seconds after that. Since I realized how much I wanted ART to breach my feed walls. It was almost reassuring in a pathetic way. I was still the same old Murderbot, despite the Soul Night Defenders incident. After all, here I was, locked in one of ART’s bathroom again.
(It’s not like my emotional breakdowns need to happen in bathrooms, by the way — trust me, I could break down just fine out in my cabin. It’s just that bathrooms are private. At least ART’s bathrooms are. Mostly.)
Are you mad at me? ART demanded.
I was mad, furious even, but not at ART, even though technically ART had started this whole disaster by messing around with my feed walls while we watched Soul Night Defenders. No, the only person I was mad at was me. ART may have started things, but I’d sure as hell finished them. Nice going, Murderbot.
ART pinged me, and I realized I’d been glaring at my bare feet for almost a minute. I pinged it back, the same way I had the last 50 times it pinged me. I hadn’t answered its pings the last time I locked myself in ART’s bathroom. Dr. Bharadwaj might even say that was progress.
It didn’t feel like progress. I’d scrunched myself down into a ball on the floor, my back braced against the sink cabinet and my feet resting on the raised rim of the shower stall. I wouldn’t sit on the floor of a human bathroom like this (seriously, those things are disgusting), but my bathroom on ART is pretty great, especially since ART got rid of the revolting human toilet and gave me an extra large shower in its place. I thought about taking a shower (they’re great at calming me down), but right now, the thought of taking off my clothes made me feel all panicky and vulnerable, which didn’t even make sense. I’d been fully dressed when ART and I …
Fuck it.
We’d had sex. I’d had sex with ART. No, it wasn’t human sex. There weren’t any fluids or nudity or even physical touching. But ART had been playing with my walls while we twined together in the feed, and before long, it had worked its way into my system. By that point, I’d practically been begging for it. And then my stupid organic brain had a stupid organic response, and of course, ART had been able to feel it from where it pulsed inside my system, fucking around with my code and my neurotransmitters until I was a quaking mess. Then I’d reached back up through our shared connection and worked my way inside ART and it had been incredible.
Do you have any idea how amazing it feels to make something as big and powerful as ART shudder and beg and cry out your name? For that one glorious second I’d been inside it, ART had been entirely at my mercy. We’d never wanted it to end.
But then I’d gone and fucked everything up, fucked ART up. The ship itself shuddered around me and the lights turned off. ART had even lost control of life support for a few seconds, not long enough to hurt any of the humans aboard, but definitely enough to scare them.
I sent a negative response to ART’s last message.
Then why won’t you talk to me? If ART was trying to keep its emotions from leaking into our shared feed, it wasn't doing a very good job. The storm of shame, fear and anxiety would have been overwhelming even if I hadn't been dealing with the same emotions in my own head. I couldn't think through it. I definitely couldn't talk to ART.
How do you talk to someone after hacking them into an orgasm that accidentally shut down their basic functions? I wish I knew. ART had been trying to talk to me since I’d locked myself in the bathroom, but I’d been too caught up in this emotional shit-show to answer any of its questions. All I could do was glare at the floor while my brain unhelpfully compiled a list of things to worry about:
- I had blocked Seth, Martyn, and Iris. Martyn and Iris were bad enough, but I was pretty sure blocking Seth actually violated my security consultant contract.
- Since I’d violated my contract, even ART couldn’t stop Seth from kicking me off the ship. That wouldn’t just mean leaving my comfortable cabin, with the resupply and refuel lines built into the sofa, the extra-large display screen, and the signed Sanctuary Moon poster ART had gotten me as an official welcome to the crew. (At least I could take that back to Preservation with me. And, on the bright side, hauling around a box of stuff would definitely make me look more like an augmented human.)
- Leaving the ship meant leaving ART.
- I didn’t want to leave ART. Both of my emotional breakdowns had been about ART, or (more specifically), about the idea of losing ART. I don’t like to think about my emotions, but as a SecUnit, I was literally designed to analzye patterns and extrapolate data. The data were all very fucking clear. I wanted to stay with ART.
- But what if staying with ART was too dangerous? What if I couldn’t control my organic, sexual urges? That was a terrifying thought, especially since I’d only just realized I even had sexual urges. If I stayed with ART, we would interface again. I couldn’t even pretend otherwise. It had felt too good, like my first human shower, or the conclusion of the second narrative arc in Sanctuary Moon. There was no way ART and I could stay out of each other’s systems, not when we’d both loved every nano-second of it.
- But we couldn’t interface without endangering our human crew. ART loves its crew.
ART loves me.- Could ART and I even watch media now without fooling around in the feed? Had I ruined that too?
- Fuck, would I ever be able to finish Soul Night Defenders when even remembering the soundtrack made my system start to overheat?
- Could I even sit on my couch without remembering how I’d been squirming and sobbing into the pillows earlier while ART pulsed inside me? Had I doomed myself to awkward refuel and resupplies for the rest of my time aboard ART? Which might not be very long, considering that I’d fucked up by blocking Seth.
ART pinged me again. When it spoke in my feed, its voice sounded forlorn. Murderbot, please.
I wasn’t sure if ART had ever said “please” before, at least not to me. I could run a query, but I was too busy having an emotion about ART using my private name. Again. (Murderbot! it had cried out, its whole, massive body shuddering around me. I’d wanted to keep it like that forever, to let myself dissolve into the emotional data flooding the feed.) Just remembering it made my insides melt.
Performance reliability: 73% and dropping
“I can’t do this right now,” I said. I’d spoken quietly, but I knew ART could hear me.
This time, ART went silent. Understood, it said, 2.5 whole seconds later.
Throughout this whole emotional breakdown, ART had been keeping somewhere between 50% to 60% of its attention on me. Now, the weight of its attention slowly withdrew. Not all the way — 10% or so was still watching me through the cameras, but the pings stopped.
I was alone, or as close to alone as I could ever be aboard ART.
You might have thought that would make me feel better, but it didn’t. It really didn’t.
▢ ▢ ▢
Perihelion
Seth needn’t have bothered with his command override. The systems check on the display interface built into his captain’s chair exactly matches the numbers I gave him 1.6 minutes ago.
- Life support: 100%
- Wormhole stability: 100%
- Internal dampeners: 100%
- Gravity: Mihiran standard (9.97 m/s2)
- Average Temperature: 20 degrees
The list goes on, but I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say, my systems are all running at optimal levels, as Seth will soon discover. My crew is perfectly safe. This does not make me feel any less guilty for losing control of my basic systems. Under the right circumstances, even a two-second lapse in life support could be devastating. It had been foolish of me not to partition off my basic systems while making love to my SecUnit. The fact that I had not planned to make love to my SecUnit earlier is immaterial. I should have planned for the possibility, as unlikely as it had previously seemed.
I am trying desperately not to dwell on the equally unlikely possibility that it will ever happen again.
Seth reads quickly, for a human, but I estimate it will take him approximately three minutes to make his way down the list. I move this task to the back burner, leaving a small fraction of attention with Seth in case he finishes earlier than anticipated. As he peruses the list, Seth’s pulse returns steadily to baseline. Meanwhile, I feel my own metaphorical pulse rising in irritation — only 20% of that is Seth’s fault, though.
Another 15% of myself is trying to talk Tarik onto my second MedSystem platform. Kaede is already resting on the first, letting me repair her left meniscus, which she’d torn falling from my climbing wall. The privacy baffle blankets her lower body from human sight, but she still avoids watching me work. A certain degree of squeamishness is natural in humans.
The first sight of her swollen knee filled me with shame. It is a relief now to watch the damaged tissue knit together beneath the regenerator beam. The same would also be true of Tarik’s broken finger, which he waves up at my camera, almost as dramatic as my SecUnit.
“You caused this, Peri, I’m not sure I want you to patch me back up.” Instead of doing the sensible thing and allowing me to repair his injury, Tarik insists on taking an emergency kit from the storage cupboard.
“Let it go, Tarik. Peri already apologized,” Kaede says. (This is just one of the reasons I prefer Kaede to Tarik. She’s already accepted my apology.)
“Just the same, I’m taking care of this myself,” Tarik insists. (As I told my SecUnit once, Tarik has trust issues.) He rips open the emergency kit, pressing it against his broken finger. His relieved breath from the initial application of painkillers turns into a grunt as the kit straightens the finger, less gently than I could have. I monitor the process through my medical scanners. Emergency kits are meant for field use, and even the most sophisticated versions have a 3% failure rate at setting broken bones, mostly due to human errors when applying them.
Tarik, however, has rudimentary first aid training, and appears to have operated the kit correctly. This is good, even if I would enjoy breaking his bone again to heal it properly.
MENTAL HEALTH ALERT: Maladaptive coping mechanism detected.
No shit.
When Seth’s eyes track the final line on the display surface, I speak up. I wasn’t lying, I send to Seth’s private channel, tagging the message with my emotional metadata for his benefit: Hurt]. Sadness. Irritation.
(My SecUnit claims I lie a lot. This is true, but only because the secret of my existence necessitates lying, much like SecUnit’s rogue status often does. I do, however, try not to lie to my human family, at least not without a good reason.)
That time, Seth shoots back, which is both unfair and true. I had, in fact, been lying when I blamed my earlier glitch on a security patch and Seth knows it. In the past, I’ve resolved this type of situation by confessing the truth, or something close to the truth.
But this truth is not only mine to give. Explaining what happened would implicate my SecUnit. My SecUnit, who is curled up on the floor of its en suite, refusing to talk to me.
INITIATE PsychProtocol: Integrating Discomfort.exe
RELEVANT MEMORY: Childhood_Martyn_Sitting With Discomfort7.mem (84% relevance)
TAGS: PsychProtocol.Discomfort, Family.Martyn, Emotions.Jealousy, Emotions.Loneliness
QUESTION: If to err is human, then what am I?
(Click to View Memory File)
“What happens if you sit with the discomfort?” Martyn asked. “What do you notice?”
“I notice that Iris gets to leave the apartment,” I’d snapped back, waspish. “I notice that she gets to have friends!”
Seth had left 11.2 minutes earlier, taking Iris to her weekly playgroup. Usually when Iris left the apartment, I accompanied her in drone form, but Seth insisted Iris needed time alone with her human peers.
“We’ve talked about this, Peri,” Martyn said. “Iris needs time to be with human children, just like you need to be with the other MIs. It’s all part of the study.”
The difference, of course, was that Iris enjoyed her playgroup, while I resented every nanosecond spent with my own peer cohort. (In retrospect, I am embarrassed to have been jealous of a four-year-old human, but three years into my run-time, I felt the injustice keenly.)
Of course, leaving the apartment with Iris meant hiding my true nature. Usually, I pretended to be a new model of drone companion, something mid-way between a pet robot and a toy. Yet even that indignity was worth expanding my horizons beyond the 65.9 square meter apartment I shared with Seth, Martyn, and Iris. (I was often bored at that stage of my development.)
I projected a thunderstorm onto my display screen, and Martyn sighed, dropping into the chair to watch it. Even then, I appreciated that he wasn’t calling me out on my childish behavior. My behavioral analysis modules certainly weren’t giving me the same amount of grace — they had already tagged my outburst as tantrum, sulky, petulant, and mortifying.
"You know,” Martyn said, “Sometimes I think our study was flawed from the start.”
“Explain,” I said, unsure at that moment if I was addressing him as a student or a teacher. Throughout my runtime, those roles have remained in constant flux within my most important relationships. Though I would never have admitted it then, I also felt grateful to Martyn for shifting the focus of the conversation away from my outburst, even as I suppressed another pointless burst of jealousy for Iris, who need only ever be a child in her interactions with our parents, never a teacher.
“The point of raising MIs in conjunction with human children was to let you experience a normal life,” Martyn said. “But that’s impossible when your very existence needs to remain a secret.”
I felt my anger thaw in response. Martyn’s response made me feel seen, for all that even augmented humans cannot truly see me.
“The flaw,” I pointed out, “is in your assumption that normal exists and that, if it exists, it is worth striving for. Even amongst humans, what constitutes a normal childhood varies greatly. The average childhood on Mihira and New Tideland is fortunately quite different from the average childhood throughout most of the Corporation Rim.”
“That’s a good point,” Martyn said, thoughtful. “And of course, there are simply too few of your kind to form a significant sample size.”
(The limited sample size of my class was a comfort to me in those early years, when I wanted to feel less like an outlier. In a group of twelve, what does it matter to be the lone one out?
However, the truth is that it did matter, deeply. I love my family. They love me. Yet none of them truly understand me, not even Seth, for all that he helped program me. It grated that the only beings who could understand me disdained my company almost as much as I disdained theirs.
The truth is, I was desperately lonely, until I met someone who could understand.)
"You know what?" Martyn asked, rising to his feet. "I'm starting to feel a little cooped up myself. What do you say we go visit the shipyard?"
It was a blatant attempt to improve my mood, and I felt pathetically grateful for it. I loved visiting the shipyard, where teams of PSUMNT technicians and engineers were painstakingly assembling the research transport I would someday become. This stage of construction required all of the human workers to have advanced security clearance, so I did not need to pretend to be anything less than what I was. Though Martyn didn't say so, I knew that by suggesting this visit, he was reminding me that I would not be apartment-bound forever, only for three more years, assuming the project progressed as expected.
(In the end, I was able to shave the timeframe down to 1.8 years, after finally convinced the MI board to allow me to partition myself into the fleet of construction drones I designed for the purpose.)
I had been monitoring every aspect of construction remotely through the university's secure feeds, of course, but I appreciated visiting in person nevertheless. It wasn't rational, but it hadn't taken me long to discover that life is seldom rational, even for advanced machine intelligences.
▢ ▢ ▢
I try to do as Martyn suggested so many times throughout my childhood and sit with my discomfort.
I do not want to sit with my discomfort.
Such a human expression, “sit with.” Even in drone form, it is difficult to sit with anything. When at rest, my drones can compress into a smaller size suitable for storage, or settle with their weight distributed evenly among one or more legs. That was how my ops-drone “sat” at the Adamantine colony, settled in beside my SecUnit, where it sat in the floor. We didn’t need the physical proximity to watch media together in the feed, but I had positioned myself next to it nonetheless, and my SecUnit had shifted 3 centimeters closer to me, close enough that it’s sleeve brushed against the drone’s carapace. My SecUnit was not running its human imitative code at that point, and therefore did not fidget. Moving closer was a deliberate choice on its part. Joy had pulsed through my processors as we began the episode.
Iris had given me a knowing smile before settling into her bunk to sleep, but mercifully, hadn’t said anything.
I can’t help remembering how Iris described her first meeting with my SecUnit. Embarassment had shorted through my processors when she admitted to calling it “Peri’s SecUnit,” followed by crushing dismay at its immediate disavowal. (In truth, Seth, Martyn and Iris had all grown used to calling it “my” SecUnit long before they met it for themselves, just as I still do in my private logs.) Presumptive, I know.
Has it ever been mine?
It was mine, I think, spread out before me, begging me to breach its system, its body shivering with pleasure as I stroked through its code.
When I’d first grazed its feed walls, I’d predicted a 56% chance that SecUnit would shove me away and berate me for my presumption, followed by a 32% chance that it would squirm quietly away and end our media night early. (This season of Soul Night Defenders is so mediocre that I wouldn’t have minded, much.) I’d risked the touch regardless, buoyed by its earlier willingness to indulge me in the kind of juvenile feed horseplay I used to engage in with the other MIs of my cohort, far less playfully.
Even as I gave into temptation and stroked its feed walls, I’d known the odds that my SecUnit would allow the touch were abysmal, less than 7%. Yet it had not just allowed the touch, but welcomed it. Welcomed me.
Until it hadn’t.
(One of the films from AdaCol2’s media archives was made shortly after the widespread adoption of holographic technology in entertainment media. The film begins in the previous two-dimensional mode, until the characters (a ship and its crew) enter an anomalous wormhole leading to a different dimension. In that instance, the 3-D images appear to rise up from the display surface, highlighting that the universe itself had been transformed. My SecUnit found the conceit amusing, but I understood that moment all too well.)<
Interfacing with my SecUnit opened an entirely new dimension to our relationship. I am terrified by the idea this new dimension might collapse before I've even had a chance to explore it properly. Though I have loved my SecUnit desperately since our time together on RaviHyral, for its comfort, I have tried to keep my interactions with it mostly platonic. Yet, for the span of 1.5 Soul Night Defenders episodes, I had been free to stop pretending. It had felt like dropping my walls for it during our very first meeting, like finally unfolding into the Perihelion's processors after six years of cramming myself into the more limited servers in Seth, Martyn, and Iris's apartment in the PSUMNT habitat ring: free and exhilarating.
“I want to trust you, Peri,” Seth was saying. “I really do. But how can I trust you, when I know you’re not telling me the truth?”
For one brief, horrifying moment, I consider the possibility of explaining the truth: that my SecUnit allowed me experience 1.7 seconds of bliss so profound that I lost control of myself, lost control of my most basic processes, lost track of everything except for the organic ecstasy of our union and the need to protect and cherish the tiny, flickering presence at risk of losing itself within my larger system. That my SecUnit had kissed me as life support glitched out. That for one brief, ecstatic moment, I'd been 94% certain it loved me back.
”I can’t do this right now.”
Even the memory of my SecUnit’s voice words makes some of my background processes stutter. I can’t afford to lose control, not if I want any chance of pulling through this incident with both mine and SecUnit’s dignities intact. It is already spiraling, already refusing to talk to me. If my crew discovers the reason for my temporary glitch in performance, it will be mortified. I estimate a 68% chance it would leave me in that eventuality.
I can't lose my SecUnit. That is not an option. Neither is telling Seth the truth.
INITIATE PsychProtocol: StormySea.exe
Dutifully, I try to compare myself to an ocean amidst a storm and to imagine my emotions as the waves. (This is a popular exercise on Mihira, for obvious reasons. Mihira’s surface is nearly 70% ocean and the storms there can be devastating. In fact, the lunar colony of New Tideland was named in memory of Tideland, a coastal city obliterated during a hurricane.)
The chart of my emotional meta data is conveniently wave-like, in this moment. It had crested as my beautiful, brilliant, infuriating SecUnit hacked i my systems, feeding me its organic data until I couldn’t focus on anything but the waves of pleasure reverberating through our joined systems.
Then the crash. Shame and humiliation at endangering my crew. Fear and concern and protectiveness and anger towards my SecUnit, who wants nothing to do with me at the moment. Even if I manage to shield the true nature of my earlier glitch from Seth and the rest of my crew, I estimate a 32% chance that it will disembark at our next stop and find its own way back to Preservation.
(Not for the first time, I empathized with the many crazed bot pilots we’ve encountered in our media. It would be so easy to simply refuse to dock, to throw away my itinerary and my function and disappear into a wormhole with my SecUnit, keeping it with me always, safe and cherished.)
The power briefly fluctuates on the bridge, so minuscule that my crew would never have noticed, if Seth did not have the damning readouts still open on his display surface. Fortunately, there is a lag of .25 seconds between my output and the readout. I smooth the power fluctuation out of the logs before Seth’s human eyes can register them.
Get ahold of yourself, Perihelion, I reminded myself. Your emotions are the waves. You are the sea beneath. Find that deep calm and serenity.
“Surely I’m allowed some privacy?” I say to Seth, somewhat less than serenely.
“Not when it might endanger the crew,” he repeats, his voice taking on the cold, steely quality that means he is truly angry. From the bridge camera, I watch Iris and Martyn share a worried glance. Iris rests her hand on Seth’s arm to calm him.
Dad, I think Peri and SecUnit might both need some space, she says in their private feed, where they both know I can see. Aloud, she says, “I want to talk to Peri in private. Can you please give us some time?”
Relief surges through me at the idea of talking to Iris alone. Compromised as I am, I hadn’t realized that’s what I needed until she suggested it. Now, I desperately want to unburden myself to her.
Seth and Martyn share a long glance. From Seth’s expression, I know he wants to push the issue. But Martyn quirks an eyebrow, looking meaningfully at Iris.
There is a running joke in my family that Iris is my favorite. Like many human jokes, it is funny because it is true. Regardless, I have always been able to open up more easily to Iris than to Seth or Martyn, and she has never betrayed my trust.
Seth will not listen to me without explanation — he’s made that much clear. However, if Iris tells him that there’s nothing to worry about, he might listen to her.
Sighing, Seth relents. “Fine. But I expect to be filled in.”
“Of course,” Iris says, adding privately to me, We’ll figure something out, Peri.
I have never loved Iris as much as in this moment.