could be, will be, still am; by god, still am

Arada and Bharadwaj were guiding it gently along as best they could with a minimal amount of touching, using close proximity or gentle, brief pressure to guide it in the right direction. There was a comedy of errors that was much less funny that Gurathin would have liked as they tried to get it through the doorway, finally managed to get it directed towards his couch. It said something, but the words were incomprehensible, although not entirely without meaning, in some strange way. Its gaze flickered around the room, not settling on anything, and Gurathin realized he hadn't seen its drones anywhere, either.

"Uh, it keeps switching languages, I think," Bharadwaj said, her eyes wide. "We understood it a couple of times but then not again."

Arada helped it sit with the lightest of touches to its shoulder. It did so, looking absolutely freaked out, and also very out of it.

"Look, both of you, I want to help, but this -- this is way beyond my skills." Although he didn't say it, he was pretty sure that SecUnit would never forgive him for seeing it like this; whether or not he laughed made no difference. Whatever was happening to it. "It needs a ..."

He hesitated. Needed a what, exactly? A cubicle? Station Medsys was even less qualified to deal with this than he was. There were no doctors he knew of that had a specialty in construct medicine, because it wasn't a medical specialty; it was an engineering one. And it wasn't like Preservation was clamoring to recruit construct technicians, or that Gurathin would have wanted one within a standard astronomical unit of Murderbot anyway.

"Please, Gura," Bharadwaj said. "You've helped before."

Under very different circumstances. "Okay, why don't you tell me what happened."

"Okay," Arada began, "so we were on our usual Tuesday girls and constructs shopping day out --"

"Your what?"

"Arada and I go shopping on the station mall concourse every week, and SecUnit has been providing security for us."

Gurathin turned a skeptical stare on Murderbot, which fortunately was too out of it to notice. "It goes shopping with you?"

"For security purposes," Arada said. "It says. Anyway, we think it was downloading a show or something while we were walking. I think that's mostly what it does, watches media and walks along with us."

That, at least, sounded in character. "And then what?"

"It started ... glitching out, maybe?" Bharadwaj looked at Arada. "Do you think it's offensive to say that?"

He got the rest of it out of them in fits and starts. It sounded like SecUnit had started -- well, glitching, as she'd said, or basically was exhibiting behavior that Gurathin could only think must have looked drunk off its ass to anyone around them: couldn't talk comprehensibly or control its limbs or walk in a straight line. They had taken it as fast as they could to a quiet location and called him, as the person they knew who was most likely to be able to help. Bharadwaj had a whole pocketful of loopy drones, which she showed to Gurathin before he had her put them away again.

"We think it might have some kind of virus," Arada said.

"Yeah, probably." Malware. If they were lucky, it was standard malware and not a worm specifically aimed at SecUnits, which could be .... bad. Very bad. Anything that had gotten past SecUnit's formidable firewalls was bad news anyway.

The fact that it looked scared was a good sign, he thought. It was still at least somewhat coherent in there. Unless all of it that was left was the ability to feel basic emotions like fear. He firmly squashed down on that thought before Arada and Bharadwaj, or, deity bless, SecUnit picked up on it. He didn't think Arada or Bharadwaj had really figured out how bad this could be yet. They were worried, but it was the level of worry was more like what one might feel for a friend who had been roofied, not one who might suffer permanent amnesia or worse.

Gurathin cautiously reached out in the feed and immediately slid off a firewall like an impenetrable fortress. It was absolutely locked down. As much as he'd love to say Fine time to do that, he figured the first thing it had done was try to isolate the virus from the network as much as it could. Because that was the kind of self-sacrificing asshole that it was.

It hadn't moved since Arada helped it sit, except for strange jerky little motions - glitches, like Bharadwaj said. Gurathin got the feeling it was afraid to move. Whatever it was experiencing, disorientation seemed to be a big part of it. At least he hoped that was all it was. But he saw it stir a little when he sat, very carefully, on the couch beside it, telegraphing his motions. Still being very careful to showcase all his movements, and also aware that Arada and Bharadwaj were hovering closely, he took out his hardwire and held it up so SecUnit could see.

"Okay to use this?"

Abruptly a feed connection opened between them, but what came through was absolute gibberish. It was stripped of most emotional metadata, by which he guessed that it was as tightly scrubbed of potential malware as SecUnit could manage.

¶•¢¢§¶]weucqw†ƒç©∆∆&*^*$%%sdss÷÷≥≤#$^%****

(Or something like that.)

"I know it's upsetting," Gurathin said carefully. He not only had no idea what it had just tried to say, but he didn't know if it knew that it was incomprehensible. He couldn't help thinking, although he was trying not to, of certain drug trip experiences of his own, when he'd seemed at least reasonably coherent to himself, but observing himself on security footage afterwards had been horrifying. "I think I can help. I can at least get some diagnostic data. Can you --"

He got a sudden data dump, also scrubbed. Okay, yes. Diagnostics. It really could understand him, more or less, and he was nearly swamped in a wave of relief that was purely his own -- it was okay, it was in there, it was just that its interface with the world and maybe its thinking processes were a little scrambled. He had to grip his thighs for a moment, hard, a physical movement to squash down on any inappropriate emotional responses that would have probably done nothing more than upset it. He began sorting through the data.

At least he tried. Arada and Bharadwaj were so ostentatiously not-hovering that they were going to fall over on top of him and SecUnit any minute.

"Look, why don't you go make some tea?" he said. "And, uh, lunch? I haven't eaten." He had no idea what time it was, but it was true that he hadn't eaten in a while. "This might take a little time."

Assuming he could do anything at all. But the more he looked at SecUnit's diagnostics, the more he thought he could.

It was still risky. In all likelihood, the only thing keeping any virus that could take down SecUnit from taking down his firewalls was -- well, SecUnit itself. But it was clearly struggling to rebuild its own data trees with the virus still scrambling it. And with that thought, he realized that he knew what he could do.

"I'm going to plug in now,"  he said. SecUnit moved in a shaky, uncoordinated way that might have been a flinch. "No, listen. I'm going to start rebuilding your data structure, while you work on the virus and hold it off me. Okay?"

He wasn't sure if it understood. There was a decent chance his input was coming in almost as scrambled as its output. He held up the end of the hardwire, let it see, then carefully reached for its wrist, where the newly modified input port was hidden beneath its sleeve and a skin-colored panel.

SecUnit moved as if to draw its arm back. "You're not going to hurt me," Gurathin said impatiently. He wasn't at all sure that was true, but he could keep the uncertainty out of his voice, and they didn't have a feed connection at the moment. "You can hate me as much as you like for seeing you like this, it's fine. I don't care." He did, but that wasn't important right now. "The only other thing we can do is take you to Medsys, or just let you sit here and burn up your brain."

He wasn't sure how much of that got through, but something must have, if only the tone of his voice. It turned its arm over and exposed the underside of its wrist. The cover snapped back before Gurathin had a chance to touch it, and he plugged in, careful not to touch it more than he had to.

Establishing the connection was .... weird. Even by the already weird standards of wiring into a SecUnit. As in the feed, he kept struggling to get a proper connection, although this time it wasn't exactly trying to keep him out. It was just -- all over the place. Out of it, by human standards, although the construct version was a bit different, more like corrupted machine code.

Gurathin had taken a moment to compress his communication into the simplest possible structure. It was in assembly language, and human-readable, it was more like:

Me = data rebuild You = handle virus

The answer came not in words but a strong sense of metadata, what Gurathin might translate as "well, obviously" with a side connotation of "you jerk."