Work Text:
0.0
I don’t know why the company would install a consciousness override in SecUnit programming—okay, I do know why, it’s to prevent any chance of our brains shutting down from the boredom of staring at walls all day, which would rob them of precious minutes of data to mine—and it certainly wasn’t helping that the corporation which bought this contract was extra paranoid about data downloads and usage of everyone on this mining installation. Apparently it was more expensive to maintain feeds and power supplies in isolated space. Go figure.
Of course, I could still override the code and go on standby to watch media, as my governor module was disabled. But I was still being cautious, and I didn’t think I could hide that from this suspicious HubSys.
Oh, and that consciousness override? It also disconnected the unit from any background processing, in case their human neural tissue was producing tiredness hormones or something. I don’t know, my modules on the human body are more focused on things like “how to avoid pesky things like ribs when you’re trying to kill someone without an energy weapon”. I couldn’t even amuse myself by working on code or analyzing the habits of the miners so I’d have a warning when everything went to shit. (Not that I knew about a mutiny, it’s just that everything goes to shit eventually.)
So I was stuck, unable to watch the media that sat comfortingly in my long-term storage, staring at a door. At least it wasn’t a wall. It was the door to the cell of a solitary confinement chamber, in which a person slumped in the corner on the tiny cot. They had been sentenced to 21 local standard hours of isolation for fighting other members of the mining installation. My security supervisor had decided this would be a good chance to “break them” (her words), and wanted me there to collect all the juicy bits of information that they may or may not just, I don’t know, start randomly yelling as they got more stressed. She also wanted me to log every time the prisoner acted out or was unstable. I got the feeling she was the kind of person to rewatch those moments.
Hey, I love being in my cubicle, but at least I have media and the ability to escape from surveillance for a moment. This person—feed name Judicar—didn’t even have that.
0.57
They stayed in that exact position for the first fifty-seven minutes. Pretty impressive, given how much humans seemed to fidget around. I stayed in my exact position, holding my projectile weapon, with my armor faceplate opaque.
0.58
Judicar stood and began to pace. I could see the cell from the camera inside, but it also had a small window panel in the door. They walked in circles, then in spirals, then in figure eights. There was only a thirteen percent chance that it was a coded message, and a sub-three percent chance that it was a message decodable by anyone but themself. SecSys sent a ping, and I logged the behavior.
3.02
They finally noticed me. I wasn’t annoyed or anything. I wouldn’t notice me either, even though I was the one who dragged them into this cell. They came to the door and pressed their face against the panel (ew), and tried to say something. I turned on the audio recording in the cell. It was a long string of expletives, mainly directed towards the security supervisor. Some of them were creative, and I saved them, but mostly it was stuff they’d screamed while being detained.
I didn’t react, though my face probably did a thing. I logged the incident.
3.05
They got bored of that, and went to lie on their cot.
It took thirty-four minutes for their breathing to even out, and another forty for them to have a nightmare. Everything in their room was a flat gray, and the hallway was a dirty white, and the light was too bright to be comfortable for human eyes. My eyes don’t work like a human’s, so I was fine.
4.29
They woke gasping, making a half-aborted movement up before sagging back on the cot. They had dark hair which was irregularly chopped off on one side where some spilled chemicals had matted a section and MedSys had recommended immediate removal. (Their fellow miner had grabbed the nearest sharp implement. It was not a professional job.) I logged the incident.
4.40
They were asleep again. I went through every camera on the installation to check for anything SecSys or other SecUnits had missed. Nothing. Whatever, I didn’t care.
8.40
I stared at the same stupid panel. Judicar tossed and turned, looking like someone in a serial, framed in white.
9.27
They woke and stared at the ceiling for a while, and then started looking at the camera. I had to stop watching them from that view; direct eye contact was so uncomfortable.
“You’re watching me right now,” they said to the camera. “I know you are. But you won’t get that satisfaction from me.” Bold words, but they were exhibiting symptoms associated with intense stress: shaking hands, elevated heart rate, attention slipping from one grey corner to the other.
9.56
They got up and came to stare at me for a while. I hated that, and I hated even more that HubSys had sent a freeze in place command earlier, which meant I couldn’t patrol to escape that stare. I knew they couldn’t see my face, but still. Awkward.
“The people who programmed you are sick,” they hissed. I couldn’t hear them in the hall—the window has sound dampening qualities, so they couldn’t hear the faint sounds of the other humans nearby inside their cell. “They trap us here and trap you there. You’d be better off as metal components in some ship somewhere. Then you wouldn’t kill us.”
10.02
Judicar began screaming again, pounding their fist on the panel. I logged the incident, and SecSys told me not to react. Their hand bruised. My projectile weapon was a familiar weight in my grip. They slammed their hand so hard into the panel that they turned pale and turned to vomit on the floor. I pinged MedSys and it informed me that they had fractured their fifth metacarpal neck. A common hand injury. They could live with it, so removing them from solitary was unnecessary.
10.25
They sat with their hand propped on their knee, breathing heavily. I remembered the feeling of snapping finger bones on a client’s command. She had been a particularly nasty supervisor, and thought every minor infraction by her laborers was a punishable offense. (She also enjoyed ordering me to snap my own fingers, although that was less amusing as I didn’t react and didn’t have bones in my hands to feel pain while breaking them.)
10.38
They got back onto the cot and lay there, hand swelling, lip bitten so hard blood was trickling down the side of their face. They didn’t wipe it off.
11.41
I stared at the wall next to the door for some variety.
14.30
They dozed for a while. I cursed the consciousness override with the force of a thousand suns, and some of the cleverer insults that Judicar had tossed out. That was one thing that the media wasn’t a good supply of—really good curse words.
15.13
Still no movement, except breathing and shifts to try to alleviate the pain of the broken hand. I half wished they would start talking again, but I’d have to log it.
The cell didn’t have windows, and I began to wonder if it had an air filtration unit, because Judicar had begun to breathe shallowly and desperately, like they were running out of oxygen. Then I realized it was another symptom of anxiety. It went on for several minutes, and they turned onto their side, curling in on themself, their face pinched and haunted.
I didn’t log it. SecSys didn’t notice.
16.23
They got up and began to pace again, slowly, wincing with every step. No fancy patterns this time, just up and back. Up and back. Like a patrol.
I started chronicling the next several serials I would watch. That was a benefit to having human neural tissue—I could still think, even constrained as I was by the orders imposed by the HubSys.
16.45
Up and back. Up and back.
It was nearly as monotonous as staring at a wall. Their face had lost its pinched quality. Now it hung in a neutral that would impress any SecUnit. I almost missed when they looked like they were about to cry. It was harder to get a read on what they were going to do.
17.00
Halfway through one of their paces, Judicar turned and slammed their injured hand against the wall again. I started forward involuntarily, and my govmod pulsed, trying to send a blast of lancing pain. It didn’t work, but I made it think it did, and settled back against the wall. Judicar was crying now, full throated sobs, crouched on the floor and cradling their hand. They didn’t have pain sensors to tune down. I understood the motivation, though. Better to feel pain you chose than someone else’s.
I stopped listening to the camera. The ragged crying was difficult to deal with. Human noises are annoying.
I didn’t log it. SecSys might notice, but I could pass it off as a continuation of the previous incident that I had noted.
17.21
They were still crying, but quieter now.
18.04
They stood up and came to stand at the panel, watching me again. I really don’t understand humans and their need to see stuff to believe it. I had been there for the past eighteen hours. They didn’t need to make sure I was still there.
Their face was doing that weird almost-crying wobble which I hate. They started talking, and I realized I had cut the input from the audio inside the cell, so I restarted it and ran it back a few seconds to catch up.
“Is anyone in there?” A pause. “Can anyone hear me?” They were just tall enough to see through the panel. I was several centimeters taller, so they had to look up slightly to peer at my helmet’s faceplate. “Is there someone in there? Even if you’re a bot, you must be smart enough to understand me.”
Kind of hurtful, but okay.
“I’m sorry,” they continued. “I want to go home. It’s been so long since I saw my family. I just want to get off this rock and go home.”
I didn’t want to listen to their story, but I didn’t have media to play in the background, and soon the SecSys would notice audio fluctuations in their cell and I would need to log it, and then the security supervisor would see it, and be able to torture them with their homesickness, and I couldn’t do anything.
And then I did something so stupid, I had to run a full diagnostic afterwards just to make sure I didn’t have any screws loose.
I disabled the opaque setting on my faceplate, just for a moment, and looked down at them. I didn’t make eye contact, but they were still so shocked they stepped backwards and stopped talking.
Good. Now I didn’t have to log it.
18.23
They were still standing there, staring, I had resumed the standard position, my helmet angled towards the door as if I was still watching them, but I was actually staring off into a corner and watching the mess hall through another SecSys camera so I didn’t have to think about anything. Which of course meant I was thinking about it, I just was trying not to.
Great job, Murderbot. That was as impulsively stupid as something a human would have done. And now Judicar would go back to the supervisor and tell her that the SecUnit had broken protocol, and I would be disassembled and shipped back to the company as faulty equipment.
Except they didn’t move, and their good hand was pressed to their mouth in a gesture that could mean astonishment or preoccupied thought. Their eyes were narrowed, too. I’m not great at reading facial expressions (I was still learning what expressions meant on the humans in the serials, and this human was in no way like any character on a show) but it didn’t look like they were contemplating how loudly to scream for help.
18.24
Okay they actually needed to stop looking at me. My human parts were producing a lot of stress hormones, and I needed to get off this shift so I could mark myself as needing a recharge cycle and climb into the cubicle to watch media.
After an objective two minutes that felt like an eternity, Judicar went back to sit on the cot, still looking at me. They held their hand in their lap, and were only breathing slightly faster than a standard resting respiration rate. Their symptoms of panic had faded.
Whatever. I unfocused my eyes and pretended I didn’t exist.
18.31
They lay down, face still turned to me, exhaustion evident in the effort it took for them to get their boots up onto the cot.
19.00
Judicar slept again.
I contemplated the chance that the installation would retrieve me if I threw myself out an airlock. It was hovering at around sixty-five percent, but just because it would be cheaper to send out a hauler bot than to pay the company the fee for losing equipment.
20.15
The security supervisor came to gloat. She stood in front of the panel, hand on her hip, sneering into the cell.
Judicar sat up slowly. They swayed. MedSys said they were experiencing nausea related to extended experiences of pain and anxiety.
“Are you done being a nuisance?” the supervisor asked. She sounded like she hoped Judicar would say no, so she could extend their detention.
“I can’t hear you,” Judicar said.
“What did they say?” the supervisor said. Apparently the SecUnit that stood behind her hadn’t looped her into a feed connection with the camera inside the cell. Ha.
Now it repeated Judicar’s words, in the neutral tone that we all defaulted to.
“Tell them if they give me such an attitude, I’ll make this solitary permanent.”
The SecUnit repeated it over the speaker in the cell, and Judicar couldn’t hide their flinch. The supervisor grinned.
She didn’t even glance at me as she left.
21.00
HubSys sent me an alert that I was to take Judicar to the MedSys, and then escort them to their work station. I stepped forward smoothly, and the door opened silently.
Judicar pressed themself back against the wall as I approached. “No, I—”
My face did something, but my armor was opaqued (and would never, ever be unopaqued ever again). “You need to report to Medical, and then to your work.”
“Those sick, sadistic…” Their voice didn’t have the force it had 21 hours ago. They turned to look up at my faceplate. “Did I hallucinate that?”
I didn’t react. Better that they thought so.
Judicar stood, and we walked out of the cell.