Work Text:
There was a problem with Preservation Station’s MedSystem.
Well, okay, that wasn’t entirely accurate. More accurately, MedSystem had a problem. Which was, in short, me. It was designed for humans and augmented humans, not messed-up second-hand SecUnits. Oh, it did a great job anyway, once it had been tweaked a bit to adapt to my own systems. Almost as good as a cubicle, and far more comfortable, which I very much appreciated.
But.
Key word there - almost . It fixed up organics just fine, it even repaired damage to my inorganic parts without a problem once we’d adjusted it.
But it didn’t have a resupply lead.
And that was starting to be a problem.
I was a closed system that didn’t need to eat or drink or expel waste (thank fuck). But if I got damaged enough to start losing blood and fluids, those needed to be replaced eventually. The MedSystem could handle replacing blood just fine, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was the construct-specific fluids that my inorganic parts needed to function optimally (or at all). MedSystem had no way of resupplying those. I didn’t even know what most of them were or what exactly they did, so I had no way of figuring out alternatives. My user manual only mentioned that substitutes shouldn’t be used, and that constructs should always be resupplied by an approved company cubicle, and blah blah blah proprietary information blah blah blah void the warranty. I’d tried to find more information, but being out here on Preservation instead of in the CR where I’d have access to company servers made that all but impossible.
So I was kind of stuck.
Almost literally, in some cases. My left shoulder was practically locked in place by now; it made horrible little crackling crunching noises if I tried to move that arm, which was not at all comfortable. My knees were grinding painfully with every step, and my hips and ankles weren’t much better. Basically, it had gotten to the point where it hurt to move, so I spent a lot of time just standing still or lying on my bed in my room in blessed privacy while watching serials. At least this wasn’t particularly unusual behaviour for me, so my humans hadn’t noticed, I think. (I’d caught a couple of them giving me odd looks, and at one point Ratthi outright asked me if I was all right. I told him I was fine, and he hadn’t asked again.)
I don’t know why I hadn’t said anything to them about it. Or, well. I kind of suspected why. There were a lot of reasons. This was a… weakness. A vulnerability. I hate that. I hate other people knowing about those even more. If people know about your weaknesses, they can exploit them, use them against you. Even though I didn’t think most of my humans would do anything like that, I still didn’t want to take that chance.
Then there was the fact that Mensah had already spent so much money on me - buying me from the company, paying the additional (stupid and unecessary) bond to get me onto the gunship, paying me hard currency cards to do security upgrades that I would have done anyway… If she knew, there was the chance that she would want to fix it, and that would likely cost even more money. I didn’t want her to spend any more on me than she had already. I owed more than I could ever repay as it was.
There was also the… concern… that they might just decide that I was too much trouble to keep around after all. Too difficult, too expensive to maintain, and what was the point of keeping a malfunctioning SecUnit around in a place that didn’t really need SecUnits to start with, anyway? I couldn’t think of any reason.
So, I hadn’t told anyone. But I also couldn’t spend all my time in my room, no matter how much I wanted to. There was some kind of informal social gathering happening on the Station soon, and of course Mensah wanted me to be there. That was fine. I’d decided to arrive early to reduce the number of people who saw me walking, just in case anything showed in my movements. I could still keep my motions relatively smooth, but oh, it hurt, even with my pain sensors dialled down as far as they would go, and I had to pause every now and then to recover a bit. It was a relief to get to the gathering area and move to an out of the way corner where I could keep an eye on things but not have to move anywhere for the entirety of the event. Hopefully.
I set my drones up in a patrol pattern and waited, playing an episode of Sanctuary Moon in the background to keep me occupied. It wasn’t long before people started arriving, greeting each other, chatting and laughing. I checked the feed IDs of everyone who came in, making sure there wasn’t anyone unknown or who shouldn’t be here, and my drones scanned for anything out of place.
I’d picked my spot well - most people didn’t even notice me, and those that did chose to ignore me, for the most part. Bharadwaj, Ratthi, Arada and Overse all drifted by at one point or another to smile at me and say hello though before wandering off again to mingle with everyone else. Gurathin also spotted me but didn’t come over, he just gave me a brief nod which I replied to in kind. When Mensah arrived, she came over almost immediately to greet me, then stayed nearby instead of drifting around like everyone else. I assigned a drone to her specifically; when she noticed it hovering nearby, it seemed to make her feel better.
The event had been going for an hour or so when I noticed that it was getting oddly warm in here. Hot, even. That was strange. Normally the temperature was kept at a comfortable level by the station environmental controls. Maybe it was malfunctioning? Maybe someone had adjusted it upwards for some reason? Maybe there were just too many people gathered in a small area? I almost regretted wearing my jacket today. Maybe I should have left that in my room - my shirt covered enough. A performance alert popped up but I dismissed it automatically without bothering to check it; I’d been getting them consistently for days now, but there wasn’t anything I could do about any of them.
I absently checked my humans for signs of discomfort, but they all looked fine. Weird. My own organic parts were sweating, making my clothes stick to my skin. That was gross. It was making me feel… off. I cycled through my drone inputs, and realised that I’d somehow dropped a few of them without noticing. Huh. I picked them back up again, but it seemed… difficult. I felt lethargic. Slow.
[Performance reliability dropping. Overheat reaching critical levels.]
… Wait, what? I wasn’t–
[Initiating Emergency Shutdown.]