The Bookshop

There’s people, and he’s killing them. Not unusual – he’s killed a lot of people. Not with his bare hands, or with weaponry, to be fair. But he’s lied to, cheated, stolen from, plenty of people. He’s sure some of them died, as a result of what he did. All of it to get a corporate leg-up, or for a bonus, or for another hit. It’s one of those things that he lives with. The guilt. The uncertainty.

But usually it’s not like this, in his dreams. Not energy weapons, not projectiles, not blood spattering hot on his armour. Its armour. Why does he have armour? He’s disoriented. It lifts its other arm, opens its gunport, and Gurathin kills another person, a man, a miner, his head exploding into a shower of wet gore. They go down so easily before him, and yet it feels no satisfaction from the act. No horror, though, either. Instead, it feels nothing at all, or– no. That’s not quite true. Under the nothing, buried deep, he feels a familiar flat, blank horror, the kind that The Company – hell, the whole of the Corporation Rim – is so good at inducing in its property.

And at the very heart of itself, in the only semblance of privacy it has, he feels its envy for the miner it just put a projectile through the skull of.

He wakes shaken, a little, but not concerned. He’s not underground; he’s in a room on a Corporation Rim station, which he can’t claim even as a joke is worse than indentured servitude in the mines. His coworkers are in bunks around him, safe, alive, breathing. He hasn’t killed anyone– at least, not like that, and not recently, anyway. It’s fine.

He gets up, gets washed and dressed before everyone else rises. The images fade slowly from his mind’s eye as he makes his first cup of tea.

It’s out of the ordinary for him to have a nightmare, but not odd. Preservation has good trauma treatments, and he’s good at adhering to them – if not for his own sake, then because he becomes unable to work if he doesn’t, and he owes that to the society (to the person) that rescued him. To be useful. To contribute.

(The trauma treatments tell him that’s not a healthy thought pattern, but on this specifically they can go fuck themselves.)

The fact that the trauma treatments are good doesn’t mean they’re perfect, though. There’s uncertainties with any medical intervention, number-to-treat scores and dose responses and effect drop-off. Sometimes, despite the treatments, he still has nightmares. So, like a good boy, he does his trauma modules again over tea, tries to head any further nightmares off before they can get their hooks in. Sits awkwardly through everyone else’s anxieties about Murder– about it leaving. Sits through more visits from GreyCris reps, from DeltFall reps, deities-know-who reps. Tries not to think about the fact that he now knows exactly where his ex-dealer’s front door is. Tries not to think about the nightmare.

Same old, same fucking old. He hates the Corporation Rim. To be clear, he doesn’t like a lot of things, but he hates the Rim. He’ll be glad when they can leave.

So, the first nightmare isn’t all that unusual.

The next one, the next night, is moreso. Not spectacularly so, but still. It’s been a stressful few weeks. Stress can increase both the frequency and the vividness of the dreams as the brain tries to process events via REM. But it’s still unusual. He doesn’t dream that often. He’s a man of regrets, mostly, not of visions.

It’s somewhere dark and close and silent, and completely, utterly still. And this is not unusual, to be honest – one of the things he liked about the drugs was the way they quieted his brain, detached him from his body. Left him quiet, floating in the dark for a while. Like someone had opened an airlock on him, but without the finality, without the suffocation and pain. It’d been a break. An escape. A temporary relief.

This doesn’t feel almost anything like that, though. There’s no weightlessness, no dissociation, just meat and metal stuck inside yet more metal. He feels he should be disturbed, but it’s not. There’s a sort of peace. No need to do a job, no demands, no risk of correction. Just quiet, and darkness, and peace. Occasionally, he tries to ping any other nearby SecUnits, on the off-chance it’s being transported as part of a group. Assuming it’s being transported at all, that is. It’s not like anyone tells him what’s happening to it. Why would he need to know, after all? He’s only a machine.

There’s no response to his pings, of course. There never is. And that’s fine. Of course it’s fine. Of course he’s fine.

He wakes from that one in a cold sweat, trembling, and not entirely clear whether his hands are his own. He’s not trapped. He’s not trapped, he’s not stuck in the dark and the quiet and with no idea how long it will last, whether it will ever end. It’s dark, but only because it’s the sleep part of the station’s artificial sleep-wake cycle still. It’s quiet because everyone else is asleep. If he listens closely, he can hear their breathing, Ratthi’s little snuffly snore, the slight wheeze on the edge of Pin Lee’s inhale. Ayda’s slow, deep breaths, from the bunk just above his. He’s not trapped. He’s not trapped.

It takes nearly an hour, some breathing exercises, a long and cold shower, and more coffee than is medically advisable for his body to start feeling like his own. For the lack of gun ports, of metal beneath the thin dermal layer over them, to stop inducing such a dizzying sense of not-quite-vertigo. He spends some of the coffee-drinking period of that time trying to work out what the hell this is, see if there’s a name for it, through a series of increasingly frustrated and unhinged feed queries. The best he gets at the end of it is a medical definition of dysphoria, which mostly just pisses him off. He closes the feed connection, and sits there sipping his coffee, until his fingers stop feeling like alien tubes of meat and the others begin to rouse.

The day, again: more corporates. GreyCris, DeltFall, and– The Company, whose name he can no longer quite bring himself to even think, because it induces a crawling sense of horror in the wet meat of his insides. At least today is the last day, though. They’re leaving this evening, boarding a transport just before rest period, headed back out of the Corporation Rim and into non-corporate territory. Back to Preservation space and, eventually, to Preservation Station and Preservation itself. That should help with the nightmares, he thinks. It’s the stress, of everything, but especially of being back fucking here, in this fucking station, where he knows his fucking dealer’s address.

Not that he thinks he’s at major risk of relapse, not really, but he doesn’t enjoy testing himself. Especially not at the moment. And he doesn’t enjoy anything else about being surrounded by corporates, some of whom are from the company that just tried to kill them all. In sum: he’s having a bad time being here. So, leaving will help. Surely leaving will help.

He’s wrong.

There is someone, a corporate, some faceless nameless asshole because they all look the same, and they’re giving it orders. They’re telling it to do something he doesn’t want to do. He thinks, in another life, he might have had the dignity of being able to refuse. It wants to say no – thinks about saying no, however pointless that is. But this time, it’s not the desperation of addiction that pushes him towards self-debasement. There’s no initial pretense at refusal, no play-pretend of moral outrage, no snarky words or scowls. There is no resistance at all. This is because there is something, in his brain, deep in his brain, and he can feel it, crowded up against the inside of his skull, and the moment he thinks of disobeying, it kills him.

Or at least, that’s what it feels like. Lightning down his spine, a bolt from the heavens, hand of a deity, the kind of pain that pulls you out of your own skin and turns your insides liquid. He doesn’t scream, but only because the pain is so absolute he cannot remember how to. And also because the thing that has taken over his brain does not let him.

[Level 4 correction administered] it tells him, and that is how he knows he is not dead, how it knows it is miserably and wretchedly still alive.

The corporate asks it again, impatient. He says yes, instant obedience, because the correction has stripped away all pretense in a way even the addiction never quite managed to. It is clear, now, that he has no right to say no. Not even the merest gesture at the fantasy that he might. He has no moral outrage, it has no pride. It does not even have a self to debase. It has only the terror of the pain, and the constant sensation of the thing in his head, crowded up against his skull–

After that one, it rolls out of bed, and vomits onto the floor uncontrollably until the sound of its retching wakes the others up. It cannot seem to stop, not even when all it’s bringing up is yellowish frothy bile, and there are hands on its shoulders, and voices around it like a cacophony. All it can remember is that pain, the heat of it, the immediacy, the way it came from inside it. The knowledge that it could not disobey – not because it was incapable, but because it would, coward that it is, do anything to avoid feeling that pain.

When it eventually stops – mouth rancid, head throbbing, limbs trembling – it raises a hand and wipes at its lips, and it’s only hands on its shoulders that stop it from tipping over into its own sick. They sit it gently up, move it away from the mess. Prop it up against the side of a bunk. When its eyes focus, it’s to Dr. Mensah in front of it, face far too close to its own.

“Gura,” she says, urgently, hands on its cheeks, its filthy bile-smeared cheeks, and the bit of it still sentient enough to have complex thoughts feels embarrassed about that. “Gura, look at me. What is it? What’s happening?”

Oh, yes. Gurathin. He’s Gurathin. That– makes sense. Sort of.

“Think ‘t’s, mmm.” He stops, his eyelids fluttering. He can’t bring himself to look at her. He looks, instead, at the hands – big hands, brown skin, Ratthi, probably – hovering by his shoulder, ready to steady him if he tips over again “Bleed-over. Uh, residue.” He tries to gesture at his head, but the shaking has shot his coordination. He’s also not entirely convinced that the hands he’s trying to gesture with are its– are his own. Again.

“Bleeding?”

And now she’s frightened, he fucked up– before he can think about it, he flinches, an anticipation of pain. (Of correction. Except, that’s not–)

“No,” he manages, while one of her hands cups his shoulder, the other his head, like he’s an infant who can’t support the weight of it on his own. “No, uh, the, a nightmare.” Talking is hard. Why are they making him talk so much? “The gov– governor module.”

She still sounds worried. “The– what?”

“Governer module.” He’s exhausted, and talking hurts, and he wishes she’d just put him back into bed and let him sleep. Bile and all. Fuck it. He’s slept in worse conditions, back in his CR days. At the height of his addiction, a depressing number of those worse conditions involved his own bodily fluids. “They, um. Reactivated it.”

“Gura,” she says, and now she doesn’t sound worried at all, which is worse. She’s got that deep, calm voice she gets when something is terribly wrong. “Gurathin. Do you know– where you are?”

He thinks the question she actually wants to ask is, do you know who you are?

“Yes. Ship to– Preservation. I’m Gurathin.” He’s pretty sure he’s Gurathin, anyway. He’s not sure his hands are Gurathin’s but that’s a slightly different problem. To distract her from the hands – can she tell, about the hands? – he gives her the date for good measure. “Ayda. ‘S just nightmares. Just residue. I think. It’s–”

And then he doesn’t know what to say, because it’s not fine. There’s no part of torture so bad that even the memory of it induces uncontrollable vomiting that is fine. But it’s also not not fine, either, because– because he doesn’t really know, if he’s being honest. Because the torture is over? Because it’s free, now? Because it is what it fucking is, a phrase he learned in his trauma treatment and which almost certainly shouldn’t be applied here? He’s not quite sure. The things in his nightmares are both so unlike his own experience of the Corporation Rim, and not unlike it, that he can’t quite find the words

In the end, what he says is, “It’s okay,” because that much is probably mostly true, and, “The memories will either integrate or fade, with time. I think. Probably fade,” which might also be true, he just has no way of knowing. The look Ayda gives him suggests she knows that too. So, to be safe, he adds, “Look, I don’t know, okay? No one’s ever uploaded a SecUnit to their brain, before. Outside of serials, anyway. It’s a bit… approximate.”

He’s aware, acutely aware, that everyone else is awake, and sat watching him and Ayda, almost silently. He hates that. Or maybe it hates that, and this is yet more bleed. Maybe both.

Probably both.

“Okay,” says Ayda, slow and calm – because she’s good like that, and doesn’t fight him about his mental health, or about his choices, even when they’re bad and stupid. About the lies he needs to tell himself. “But I’d still like to get you in the MedSystem before we go back to sleep. Call it an abundance of caution, if you want.”

Everyone wants to come with. But Ayda, thank whatever deity is listening, doesn’t let them. Ratthi, particularly enthusiastic to help and insistent in much the same way a puppy is, ends up put on clearing-up-Gurathin’s-vomit duty. If Gurathin were a better person, he would feel a bit bad about this, but he doesn’t. No one should be that perky less than half-way through their sleep-wake cycle.

Pin Lee volunteers to help Ratthi, and Arada volunteers to supervise, which means watch them do it and maybe go get some more cleaning fluid if they’re lucky. Bharadwaj, still recovering from a serious injury – because MedSystems are great, but there’s only so much they can do about something attempting to chew most of your internal organs out of your body – volunteers to do nothing, and to maybe go the fuck back to sleep. Ayda okays them all, and then gets Gurathin to his feet with Ratthi’s overly-cautious assistance, and then they’re off.

So it’s just him and Ayda and the MedSystem, in the end. The MedSystem scans him very thoroughly. Even helpfully brushes his teeth to prevent the bile from damaging the enamel. It also shows absolutely nothing wrong with him. He’s fine. It’s just a nightmare. Just like he’d told Aydah. The fact that it also shows all his implants present and functioning normally – and nothing other than his implants present and functioning – is… fine, also. It’s good, he supposes. Even if it wasn’t really something he was checking for.

(The ghost of something else in there, crowded in amongst the meat and wires, makes him shudder. But it’s not there. It would have showed up on the scans if it was, and it didn’t, so–)

“Okay. All good, then.” Ayda sounds relieved, which means he must have really rattled her. He feels bad about that. “That’s good. Let’s… let’s get you back to bed. The others should have finished cleaning up by now. All… all fixed up.”

“Sure,” says Gurathin, on autopilot. Too busy still staring at the MedSystem report. At its scan of the inside of his own head. He’s pulled that particular image into his feed, keeps rotating it, zooming in and out, increasing contrast. Prodding at it. “Yes. That’s…”

It’s such an entirely stupid thought process, because he does not have and has never had a governor module. He’s pretty sure you can’t even install them in augmented humans. But. Still. The scan should make him feel relieved, but it doesn’t. Why? Is it more bleed? Because he’s never had a governor module, but it does. Disabled, maybe. But it’s still there, will always be there, crammed inside his skull–

He swallows, very hard, and gets up off the MedSystem platform. Lets one half-strange hand go to the nape of his neck. To the data port there that he doesn’t have. He traces up, slowly, up the first few vertebrae of his spine, where the wires would go, to a point low on the back of the skull. His fingers dig into the bone there, for a second.