Space Duck

Pin-Lee said, “He means SecUnit. SecUnit is the deadly weapon.” She hesitated, then sent to me in the feed, I’m going to touch you, don’t freak out. Uh, okay. I tapped back an acknowledgment because I was frantically working to bring the hotel’s main and secondary relays back up and I had to get in ahead of the repair techs. Pin-Lee put her hand on my shoulder and I did not freak out. She leaned in toward Serrat and said, “This is not a deadly weapon. This is a person. An angry person, who wants you to answer the question. Are you bringing Mensah here?”

also here are the hand-holdy moments, for posterity

As we stepped out of the pod, I took Mensah’s hand. We crossed through the busy mall area and the milling humans around the vending and booking kiosks. The crowd was about the same as when I’d arrived, with an approximately 5 percent increase. I’d never done this while walking with a human and it made the process more complicated and somehow, strangely, more natural.

What’s notable about this is how narrow an escape it was despite the fact that Preservation Security (headed by Indah), SecUnit, and the rest of PresAux all knew it was coming. Yet they couldn’t prevent it.

Prior to this attempt, they’d already decided that the risk of assassination needed to be kept under wraps. Afterwards, this was more important than ever. As SecUnit put it:

We had to keep GrayCris from knowing this attack had nearly succeeded. It would give them too much intel about what to do next.

Quite a lot of people know. All of PresAux at least know the general situation. Multiple Preservation Council members were present in the room with Mensah and witnessed the assassination attempt. The station security team who responded knows. But specifically, Mensah’s family doesn’t.

To be fair, Mensah’s extended family is extremely large. But it’s strongly suggested that even Tano and Farai, her marital partners, don’t know. For certain, Mensah’s brother, sister, and Thiago don’t know.

And Thiago trying to find out doesn’t go well. When he asks, she messages SecUnit for a rescue. It walks in on this conversation:

Thiago was saying, “I don’t know why you can’t just talk to us.” “I told you why,” Mensah said, and she sounded normal, calm and firm. Except that was also how she sounded when humans were trying to kill us, so.

Mensah grabs SecUnit’s hand and continues to clutch it even through her own wife kissing her goodbye.

Later, to SecUnit:

She [Mensah] hesitated. “Farai and Tano understand, but I haven’t explained to my brother and sister and Thiago and the others why I can’t just rely on them for emotional support about this, as usual.” Her face turned grim. “They don’t understand what it’s like to be under corporate authority.”

It’s true, they don’t! And Mensah isn’t up to educating them. So she just stonewalls them, avoids them while clinging to SecUnit, right up to the point where she holds its hand while accepting a kiss from her wife.

So due to circumstances, some of her family are naturally worried and confused about what the heck is going on with Mensah’s relationship to SecUnit. One possible candidate is that it’s romantic:

Then Amena said, “Do you love my second mother? Thiago thinks so.” I should have known this was going to turn into an interrogation. I said, “Not the way he thinks.”

And Farai had already asked what their relationship is, and when being told “I’m her SecUnit,” asked for clarification.

And then there’s the kidnapping. Again, so many details must have ended up classified that it would have been hard for her family to make sense of things. ART’s very existence is classified. So is the forging of the documents which helped AdaCol. Then ART sticks around the old Adamantine colony for the events of System Collapse.

Then, after System Collapse, Amena goes off to college at PSUMNT. Thiago goes home and Mensah doesn’t.

Why? She’s going to…help people. Unspecified people, in unspecified ways. Possibly some of it has to do with AdaCol:

Mensah had acted as an arbitrator at the colonists’ request, and then helped the University of Mihira and New Tideland push through the colonists’ claim on the planet, and get the ones who wanted to leave refuge in a non-corporate polity. Barish-Estranza had been screwed right out of the system.

But she’s not still on AdaCol when her family gets kidnapped. She’s attending a conference at PSUMNT:

Farai, Naja, and Sofi had been taking a trip to visit Amena at the University, and Mensah, who was at a conference there.

So why didn’t Mensah go home? How long does she plan to stay away? Did she stay on in part to make sure SecUnit was getting treated right? Is she planning to enlist in PSUMNT’s anti-corporate activities and never mind her many children?

I doubt it was anything quite that dire as leaving her family. But it does feel like she’s in no rush to go home. I think Mensah is in a head space where she’s pouring her energy into solving other peoples’ problems and can’t tackle the difficult job of explaining her own to people who she loves but who struggle to understand.

But given the choices she’s made, it’s no wonder that Farai tells SecUnit:

And Ayda … I suppose, to Tano and me, and some of the others, you represent her life without us.