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Jena thinks she’s probably in shock—the MedSystem agrees with her, and also put a few more diagnoses on the list, like malnourished and muscle adhesions from repeated injury and nearsighted. She’s supposed to stay in her assigned room until she’s cleared, but sitting still and letting the med drones hum around her and scan her for respiratory issues was making her restless, and apparently the MedSystem noticed. She hates that. Jena hates it when bots know stuff about her, just from looking, just from filtering through all their data on her and knowing. It makes her think about how short her leash is.
But here, apparently, things are different. The MedSystem noticed that her heart rate spiked every time a drone came close or a new scan initiated, and a human doctor came over with a kind smile and suggested that she take a short walk. They told her where to find some of the others, Mish and the littles and Hanette, and that she was free to take as long as she needed, before she came back to talk about next steps.
Jena has worked goddamn hard to keep a hold on the last scraps of optimism buried in her bones, which is the only reason she didn’t immediately demand to know what the fuck next steps she could possibly have from here. She’s trying this whole trust thing. She’s trying, and so she took the directions the MedSystem gave her, and left the room.
Now, she’s pretty sure she’s lost. She should have taken that one assistance bot’s offer, when it pinged her some ten minutes ago with an offer of guidance. Instead, it startled her, and she fumbled with the basic interface the Medical Unit had provided before she managed to send back a point-blank go away. It had responded with a perfectly polite please do not hesitate to request help, and have a pleasant afternoon and a sigil that Jena suspected, with a kind of shocked outrage, was the bot-equivalent of an understanding smile. The bot had left, its sturdy wheels whirring quietly over the floor toward another patient, before Jena collected herself enough to answer again, to maybe eat her words and admit that a map would be great, actually.
She’s managed to find herself in a quieter wing of the patient tier—probably not where the littles are being kept, it’s way too calm—and she stops outside a door to breathe. Try and center herself. Look pathetic enough for another assistant bot to take pity on her. Whatever.
Jena’s been standing there, breathing, for probably about a minute when a drone—tiny, one of the little fingertip-sized spy models—zips past her face, around a corner, and out of sight.
“Ha,” she mutters, feeling a little vindicated. “Fuckers.” She knew they had to have some kind of surveillance on this station, even though the social worker—which is not a phrase she got a useful definition on, but sure—claimed that it was illegal to place cameras in a medical center, in the Preservation Alliance. But also, it’s just a drone, and it’s not even in one of the rooms where it might be getting valuable information, so it’s basically like not having surveillance at all. So Jena tries to exercise some trust, and follows the drone in hopes of finding its supervisor-bot and getting directions.
She turns the corner just in time to catch the black dot of the drone, stark against the clean pallor of the MedUnit walls, as it swoops under a door and into a patient room with no windows on the door, and some kind of glitch in the number marker making it read NULL.
Jena knocks, and opens the door without waiting for an answer.
Then she almost has a heart attack.
The SecUnit must have stood up the second it realized she was coming in—the MedSystem is making an aggrieved bleep at it, and it still has tools extended, as if mid-procedure. It doesn’t have a shirt on, and there’s a spotting of dry blood and some kind of translucent fluid on the medical platform. It’s standing crooked, like there’s something wrong with its legs, or maybe its feet, but that doesn’t matter. Every instinct in Jena’s body sends up the alarm, and she knows—knows, like the MedSystem had known she needed a break—that it could kill her before she crossed the single step between her and the door.
Its mouth moves, and Jena feels all the panic of the past cycles pile up in her throat. She can’t even hear it over the hammering of her heart. She thinks that the MedSystem is pinging her, through the interface, but she can’t see anything except the SecUnit, her vision spotting black at the edges. The SecUnit is surrounded by a handful of the little drones, like satellites orbiting a planet, and she can see the glint of reflection that says the drones are looking at her, their tiny lenses aimed at her face.
The SecUnit’s brows snap together, its mouth twisting into a frown. She’s never seen one do that before. Jena is having all kinds of thrilling new experiences today. She just hopes the last on the list isn’t getting shot by a SecUnit.
It speaks again, and this time Jena forces herself to hear the words. She has too much experience not dying when a SecUnit asks her a question to fuck up that track record now.
“Are you lost.”
Its voice is uninflected, clipped, and its eyes do one sweep over her before it fixes its gaze on the wall behind her shoulder. She gives it a nervous once-over in return, looking for a weapon. It’s wearing plain pants, with a lot of pockets, and a pile of clothes on a chair looks like it’s probably a shirt and jacket, crumpled together and marked with more blood and fluid. Its feet are bare, naked alloy against the floor, and that seems wildly indecent somehow, even more than seeing the sealed ports in its arms or the cloned tissue of its torso. Some of the pieces in its ankles look…crunched. It makes Jena a little queasy.
“Attention, Miss Liveport,” the MedSystem says, apparently concluding that she’s not going to answer its pings and resorting to its speakers. It sounds as pleasant and neutral as ever, its automated femme-adjacent voice designed to be soothing and assured in equal measure, but Jena gets the distinct feeling that it’s annoyed with her. “You are currently trespassing on the private room of another patient and interrupting a procedure. Please state your business, or I will have to notify security to escort you back to your own room. It is against care policy to allow—”
The SecUnit sighs, and it’s the most expressive thing it’s done since it yanked the gun out of Jena’s hands. She recognizes the weary, overburdened sigh of an adult surrounded by trouble-prone children.
It’s—weird.
Even weirder is the fact that the MedSystem shuts up, halfway through its recitation of care policy. The alert symbol in Jena’s minimal feed blinks twice, and then stops glowing red, switching to a gentle blue.
“Miss Liveport,” the MedSystem says after a moment, “this patient is currently in need of treatment. Please reschedule your visit at a later time. Visiting hours are between two hours past midday and six hours past midday, station standard time.”
“I will not be here at two hours past midday,” the SecUnit says, and it sounds—exasperated.
“It would be beneficial to—”
The SecUnit scowls, still staring at the wall like it’s hoping to drill a hole into the hallway. It must say something in the feed, because the MedSystem stops again.
Jena thinks she might be witnessing an argument.
She’s going to blame the stress of the escape for her sudden failure of impulse control, if she gets shot and someone wants to know.
“You’re getting—fixed?” she asks the SecUnit, with what she recognizes to be an appalling lack of interest in her own survival. “What happened?”
The steady pattern of the drones changes, three of them swooping toward her as if to get better angles on her face, and the SecUnit scowls harder.
“You shot me,” it tells the wall. “And BreharWalhan wasn’t exactly supplying their contractors with quality medical equipment.”
“Oh.” Jena takes a minute step backward, uneasy. Is it—angry with her? She’s never really wondered about whether SecUnits experience emotion before. She’s always thought of SecUnits as being basically like a natural disaster. Tectonic activity brought down mine shafts. SecUnits killed people. They didn’t feel any particular way about it, except maybe satisfied with themselves, which she theorized when she was feeling especially morbid about it.
“Stop,” the SecUnit says, in the same tone of brisk command she remembers it using to order them into the awful shuddering—bubble, that it used to evacuate the cargo container. Jena stops. For some reason this doesn’t make the SecUnit look any less angry, but it does step back itself, sitting back down on the exam bed. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What?”
Jena is feeling more disoriented by the second—this SecUnit, with its awkward stance and its set scowl, is nothing like what she’s spent her entire life fearing. She shot it, and all it did was storm over and take the weapon away, like an aggreived adult taking a kitchen knife away from a toddler. At the time, when she had lived through the encounter, she assumed that stress had made her delirious, and she had missed it. But now, it’s sitting on the bed, broken feet clicking in a way that sounds distinctly not right, and when it shifted to sit, she caught a glimpse of the hole she left in its back.
It"s shoddily repaired, a thick twist of scar tissue, with reddened cast to the skin. The MedSystem, Jena realizes slowly, was going to reopen the wound and fix it properly. Maybe fix whatever happened to the SecUnit’s feet, too.
The SecUnit interrupts her unsubtle staring by finally turning away from the wall and fixing her with its own unyielding stare. Jena flinches—she can’t help it. Something indiscernable flickers across the SecUnit’s face, then it settles back into its scowl.
“If I was going to shoot you, I would have done it earlier,” the SecUnit says shortly. “Are you lost?”
Jena can’t quite make herself speak, under the direct eye of a SecUnit, so she nods. She hopes that it can’t see her hands shaking by her side.
“MedSystem can give you directions.” The SecUnit looks aside, at a panel of information helpfully reading out its lack of a heartbeat, as if it’s talking to the MedSystem. Except—before, it talked to the MedSystem in the feed, without even twitching. Maybe the SecUnit just wants an excuse to look away from her. “What are you doing here?”
“I was just—following a security drone,” Jena manages.
“They don’t use security drones here.” Jena looks warily around at the drones, settled into another orbit, slightly wider, around the SecUnit and still keeping their lenses directed at her. “Those are mine,” the SecUnit says, and then adds, flat, “They’re a medical accommodation.”
A faint, panicky laugh bubbles out of Jena’s lips, before she clamps her teeth down on the tail end of it.
“SecUnit is welcome to use its drones inside the Medical Unit as long as it does not trespass on the privacy of any other patients or otherwise compromise the care protocols of this station,” the MedSystem supplies in its serene, authoritative voice. “If you require directions, Miss Liveport, I can supply them through the feed.”
“I got directions,” Jena says automatically, years of resisting the interference of the bot systems on WayBrogatan kicking in before she can stop it. “I got Mish and Hanette and the littles’ room numbers.”
“You are listed as an authorized visitor on those patients’ files,” the MedSystem confirms, the little blue symbol in Jena’s feed blinking again. “If you would like, I will direct an assistance bot to escort you the rest of the way.”
Jena is still watching the SecUnit with something that feels akin to rapt horror, and doesn’t think to stop herself from asking, “Why does it want me to leave so bad?”
The freak SecUnit, which took being shot like a minor inconvenience and hasn’t even addressed the crunched parts of its feet, looks distinctly hunted for a moment before the MedSystem chimes in again.
“Miss Liveport, you entered another patient’s private room during a procedure without warning or permission. You have been authorized as a visitor, but it is against care policy to encourage distress—”
“MedSystem, shut up,” the SecUnit says aloud.
Another patient.
Something about that phrase feels so fundamentally jarring that Jena can’t process anything else for a long moment. Another patient. Another person being given medical care, just like Jena is.
The SecUnit is staring at the wall again, face blank.
“I—”
“You’re in the wrong wing,” the SecUnit says. It interrupts her like it’s nothing, as easily as Jena might cut off another mine worker. Jena is already so off-balance that it almost doesn’t register.
Almost.
Miss Liveport, the MedSystem says into her feed, privately, your vital signs indicate that you may be experiencing some dizziness and fatigue. This is common after a traumatic experience, such as you have undergone, among other things. It helpfully brings up a series of diagnoses that she vaguely recognizes as having been on her chart, and highlights the relevant symptoms under each. Continuing to exert yourself may result in injury. I have dispatched an assistance bot to your location—please allow it to help you to your destination.
Aloud, the MedSystem says, “Miss Liveport, I must request at this time that you allow me to treat SecUnit’s injuries.” The SecUnit—SecUnit? the MedSystem used it like a name—is frowning again, at an indeterminate spot on the wall, but the MedSystem continues blithely with its latest effort to make her leave. Jena guesses, in a dazed kind of way, that it would. The MedSystem is programmed to ensure minimal distress of its patients, and having Jena here is clearly…distressing. To one of its patients. “It is against care protocol to perform procedures with visitors present.”
“Right,” Jena says blankly. “Of course.” She’s still looking at the SecUnit. She shot it. It still saved all of their lives. She remembers how—tired it looked, in the split second before it marched over to take the weapon from her.
Jena wonders, in the slow, uncertain way of someone forming a sentence in a foreign language, how many times someone it’s saving has shot it in the back, for it to react like that.
“Um.” Jena swallows. She can’t muster a smile, but she tries to keep her voice from cracking. “Thank you. For saving us.”
The drones all stop, hanging in the air, lenses pointing at her, and something very close to horror crosses the SecUnit’s face. But she doesn’t have to deal with whatever it’s thinking about saying in response, because it turns out that Jena doesn’t have the guts to stick around any longer. She backs out of the room so fast she almost blunders straight into the assistance bot whirring along toward her.
The door shuts, and she leans a shaking hand against the wall and gasps for air.
The assistance bot lets Jena stand there and hyperventilate for a few moments before it pings her, which she decides she appreciates.
Miss Liveport, the MedSystem says, probably because the assistance bot isn’t advanced enough to communicate in words itself, please sit down.
Jena lowers herself, trembling, into the assistance bot’s seat. It’s comfortably shaped, with a control stick in case she wants to drive it rather than letting its autopilot direct it. Just touching the control stick makes her feel a little better, a little less like she’s just been moved to another cargo container, a little more in command of herself. Jena wishes that she knew where she was going, because she thinks that being the one in charge of the assistance bot would be—better. Good for her recovery, or whatever the doctors would want to call it.
The MedSystem pings Jena again, politely, for a destination to give the assistance bot.
Jena is about to open her mouth and respond when something pops up in her feed and makes her fall silent.
It’s a map. It’s not complex, just a bare-bones layout of the MedUnit from above. There’s a blinking marker, labeled Liveport, and three others, two red and one blue, clustered in the next wing over. One red one reads Human Three, the other Human Seven. The blue one, a couple rooms over and much larger, reads Small Humans.
Looking at the map, Jena can see exactly where she got turned around, in the large atrium where this wing and that one join into a Y-junction. She can also see, very clearly, the route to find the other markers.
“Um,” Jena says, still looking at the map. “MedSystem? Did you make this?”
No, Miss Liveport. Are you confident in your ability to find your companions using this map?
“I—yeah. I guess so.”
The MedSystem sends her an indicator of satisfaction through the feed. Please do not hesitate to contact me or an employee of the MedUnit if you require further assistance, Miss Liveport.
Jena nods slowly, and says, carefully, “Thank you, MedSystem.”
It is my pleasure, Miss Liveport.