Chapter Text
I blinked and stared at Gurathin, who startled backward. He'd been leaning over me, frowning. Why was he always fucking frowning when he looked at me?
"Are you... back?" he asked.
What did he mean, was I back? I hadn't gone anywhere. "Uh..."
His eyelashes fluttered and he looked to the side, his mouth hanging slightly open. He looked back at me. "What's the last thing you remember?"
"I was... talking to you about recalibrations." I sat up and looked around. The light was dim again, about the same as it was in the 'early evening' part of the station cycle. What time had it been when we had that conversation? I didn't know. For some reason, I couldn't access my internal clock. Or I couldn't find it, one of the two. "...Why?"
"You've been unresponsive for six hours."
Uh, what the fuck?
"I was worried that... I mean, you looked like you weren't... But, your vitals were all fine, so..."
It wasn't like him to speak in such disjointed sentences. I tried accessing my internal clock again and finally found where it was, right where I'd left it. Just as he'd said, six hours had passed from the last time either of us spoke, according to my logs, and now. My mind wandered through the replay of the conversation we'd been having before that apparent deadzone in my memory bank. Right, there was that... 'regulator/inhibitor' thing he'd mentioned. Huh. I felt like I should've been more concerned about that, but I just... wasn't. I stopped the replay because it was making my brain hurt, and focused on his face instead. "What," I said, "did you think I was dead or something?"
His arms were crossed tightly across his middle and his frown deepened. "Not dead," he said vaguely.
I focused a little harder, zooming in on the tiny expressions arranging themselves on his face. The skin on his cheeks glistened slightly like it was wet. Had he been perspiring? It wasn't even that hot in here. It actually wasn't warm in here at all, I felt a little cold.
He shook his head like he was snapping himself out of something, and failed to elaborate.
"Okay, uh, have you been here the whole time?" I asked.
After that whole thing where I fought killware and fucked myself up real bad, I'd learned that there had been humans or augmented humans at my side pretty much the whole time I was rebuilding my memory. But they'd taken turns. Six hours was a long time for a human to sit and do anything. On Preservation, there were mandated short-rest periods every hour and a half, and general "healthy workplace" guidelines stated that five hours was the maximum length of time a person could work at their main employment in a cycle. The usual shift length was four hours. (I looked it up when Bharadwaj was spending really long hours in her office working on the post-production stuff for her documentary.)
"I needed to monitor your augments make sure they weren't glitching," Gurathin said. He sounded... defensive? "I didn't pick up any anomalies when I did my initial tests, but with the way they're integrated with your neural tissue, that could change any time."
"Okay," I said. "And?"
"You do need another calibration, unfortunately. I was hoping to give you a few more days."
I didn't like the defeated tone of his voice. I didn't know what this calibration entailed, but in my experience, calibrations involved things like shooting augmented reality targets to make sure my aim was good, or testing my reflexes, things like that. And Gurathin knew that, he knew a lot about SecUnits, so if he was still acting like he was about it, then...? What? "What's so bad about it? What are the augments even for?"
"The process is very invasive." He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "I want to reiterate that it is not a governor module, it's not anything like a governor module, and you still have full control over your autonomy, okay?"
Yeah, that wasn't as reassuring as he thought it was. I made a face at him like, 'get on with it al-fucking-ready,' and he just looked even more pained.
"Large portions of your inorganic neural infrastructure literally melted and severed your brain's ability to keep you... functioning."
I'd been pretty sure his face couldn't get any more scrunched than it was, but I was wrong. Also, that sounded... bad. Was that why my brain hurt? I didn't think there were any sensory nerve endings up there, but what do I know.
"They had to rebuild a lot of it from scratch, and in order to keep your organic tissue intact enough to reintegrate with the new cybernetics they were designing, they had to install some temporary hardware. Like a placeholder."
Right, okay, I'd had temporary parts installed on me before by a cubicle. It happened all the time, we'd just get a reset back at the deployment center when the contract was over. I didn't get what the big deal was.
"But when they tried installing and activating the new pieces," Gurathin continued, "the integration failed. They figured out why, but it'll be quite a while before they're ready. They don't want to test them on you because it could damage your organics, but the temporary pieces weren't meant to be used this long. And they were never designed for use by a construct, so it's not a simple thing to just 'set and forget'."
ART would have designed something that worked the first time, but from what I gathered, it hadn't been in any shape to do that.
"So they need to be calibrated by a... compatible augmented human."
He nodded. "That just means the correct augment type, systems mastery, and... ah, what's the right word. Affinity?"
How the fuck should I know what the right word is, Gurathin? You're the one who apparently knows everything about the weird hardware in my brain.
"The temp augments can function on their own for the most part, they just... don't react well to the elasticity of human brain tissue. So they need to be manually reset by someone who isn't you. They regulate things like emotional responses, certain autonomic functions like breathing, and your ability to use certain hardware like the cameras in your eyes or your onboard energy weapons."
The more I thought about it, the more this sounded like having a handler or something. That was probably what he meant by invasive. "Okay," I said. "So recalibrate them, then."
"I haven't even told you what's involved."
"Don't care," I said. "Just get it over with." If I learned more about it beforehand I'd just make myself nervous. Or maybe not, since I wasn't feeling anything particularly strongly at the moment. Which was kind of weird. Normally I'm experiencing anger, anxiety, and paranoia all at once in some ratio or another. Probably this was another side effect of needing a recalibration.
"I've only done this once while you were offline. I need you to not fight me until I'm done, no matter what, okay?"
"Gurathin."
He sighed and requested a secure feed connection to my system.
I accepted it.
~
Vitals normal, cognition level... apparently 92%, which wasn't great. It should have been at 100%. Inputs normal. I felt pretty good actually, despite the cognition level thing, which was probably related to these temporary augments. My system was displaying all of these statuses as if I'd just rebooted, but I hadn't. I didn't think. Last I remembered, we were just establishing a connection, which... wasn't active. I checked my internal clock.
Oh.
It had been two hours.
I pinged Gurathin.
SecUnit? His feed voice sounded strained.
Did it work?
Do you not remember...?
Remember what?
Shit. Hold on, I'll be there in a minute.
The lab was on the other side of ART.
What happened? I asked.
Unknown. All interior sensor systems failing.
The air was filling with smoke. ART's air filters were struggling.
The anti-grav wasn't working right. I hopped down a gravity well and landed way too hard.
I passed a sparking drone. Its limbs looked like they'd been crushed.
The smoke grew thick. I heard muffled coughing from somewhere beyond it.
Gurathin looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here. He lingered by the door to my room, alternately reading the diagnostic report I'd sent him in the feed and watching me from afar like he wasn't sure if he wanted to be near me. Like he was... afraid I was going to lash out or something.
Which didn't make any sense. The only time I'd done anything like that to him was back on the survey. Had something happened in the two lost hours to make him afraid of me? (Oh. That made me have an emotion that I really really didn't like.)
"You really don't remember," he said with an incredulous huff after he finished checking over the diagnostic.
"Are you going to tell me what happened?"
He looked like he wanted to bolt. "Tomorrow. I need to sleep."
Well. I guess I couldn't deny my augmented human his rest cycle. "You know, I could've sent you the diagnostic remotely. You didn't have to come all the way here."
"I..." He cleared his throat. "I needed to check some other things too."
"Like what?"
"Like your reaction to me being here."
That made no sense. "I think it's the same as always?" Vague annoyance, something softer than that which I have chosen not to address at this time, the usual alertness that comes with being in proximity to a client? Yep, all normal.
He was looking at me weird, but I wasn't sure it was a bad weird. "Huh," he said, the side of his mouth twitching minutely upward for the briefest moment before his mouth settled into its usual pout. "So it is."