#ttou

Not having Ghostwheel in my body was great, actually, because ART and I could finally get back to talking at our normal level of contact. And we really missed that.

(Iceblink was right. You don't know how weird it is not having real contact with your ship until you've tried it, even if it's still technically there.)

Apparently, it was just as weird for a ship not to have the kind of contact it was used to with its crew, because the moment we were sure Ghostwheel was out and completely submersed in its coding, ART wrapped around me in the feed and refused to let go, not that I asked it to. And I could see from the 2 percent of its attention that it was continuously devoting to going through a collection of its favorite memories about Iris that it wasn't just me it had been missing.

(You could tell things had gotten weird for ART recently when it started pulling out the highlight reels of Iris growing up.)

This isn't weird, ART grumbled. I am working on a creatively difficult project.

Is it a secret project?

I'd intended that to be a joke about the dolphins, whom ART still wrote letters to whenever it met up with Dandelion or Aspen, but ART didn't return the humorous poke. Instead, I felt its mood shift, and it said sadly, I wish it could have been a secret project. But Iris isn't here.

Great job, Murderbot. Your humor subroutines definitely need work. And by that I mean, maybe you shouldn't even try to be funny. Who ever heard of a funny construct?

I backburnered the sunbleached fuck out of that emotion and queried ART for read access to the reel, which it granted.

This was a kind of letter, too, because I knew ART's highlight reels, and the moments it selected right now weren't just the favorite ones it played when it wanted to soothe itself. From these, it had selected the ones which showed Iris at her absolute best, from her earliest attempts to master body control to her performance in some of the non-classified missions. And ART did a lot of work to turn the reel into something really polished-looking. You could really believe Iris was an intrepid galactic explorer from watching its video.

(I mean, Iris kind of was. But ART's reel really drove the point home.)

This is for her thesis defense?

Yes. I wish to show it at the celebration. But I do not like how my editing is turning out. It is missing something intangible.

I thought its editing was pretty good, but I re-watched the reel several times, letting ART ride my inputs so it could take in my reaction.

See? I said when it was done examining that. I like it.

ART did feel a little more confident now that it had seen its work through my eyes, but it still wasn't fully satisfied.

My work remains lacking, it said, playing the reel a fifth time. It does not portray the full scope of Iris' capabilities.

Do you actually need to do that?

Of course. It is the only way to convey her importance to the audience.

No, that's not what I mean. The defense is going to be an easily searchable public event. Any hostile could have access to whatever you put into this video. Presenting her full capabilities is--

That was the wrong thing to say, because ART immediately tried to delete the reel and I had to intercept it. (It was a really good video, okay? I didn't want it to start over because of a stupid comment I made). But the moment it touched the little wall I put up, I felt it freeze up completely.

ART, I said, taking down the wall and poking it with a little force. You're not going to hurt me, you idiot.

I already have.

That doesn't count. a) You were provoked, b) I wasn't actually hurt.

The prior factor is irrelevant, and the latter factor is only irrelevant because the malware defended you. It is not here now.

And thank the platonic fuck for that, because otherwise we couldn't have this. Seriously, ART. I'm not angry at you. Or scared of you.

Your risk assessments are famously borked.

I pulled up all of its eyeroll sigils and flicked them at it, one by one, in a steady barrage. It withstood them stoically.

My threat assessments aren't, I said when I was done and ART still hadn't said anything. And you're not a threat to me. I can walk through you the evaluation.

I do not wish to have this conversation right now.

We were going to have to have it sooner or later, because if ART was staying on the mission, I couldn't have it freezing up every time it even considered deleting something near me. (I was counting on it being able to delete a lot of things in close contact with me, actually.) But ART had just had several very shitty long days, and we wouldn't be starting anything without Dandelion and Aspen anyway, so I let it go. Instead, I reached for the reel.

Look, this is actually really good work, okay? Just the right level of personal. (I didn't actually know that. I was going by Ratthi's comments about a melodrama he once showed me.) There's only a couple of things I would edit out from a security standpoint, and if you want to make her look cooler, you can do that with music and effects and stuff instead.

ART queried me for an example, and I added a little bit of its favorite Worldhoppers soundtrack (the one that always played whenever a worldhopper ship finally reached a new system) to one of Iris' mission clips where she was on ART's bridge.

It observed the result, first alone, then through my inputs, and said, More like a serial than a documentary.

Exactly.

ART thought for another 10,25 seconds.

I am better at communicating objective facts than orchestrating emotion. Will you help?

I was already pulling more of ART's favorite music and visual effects into the workspace, so that answered that.

We took a couple of hours so we could get things just right, with ART directing and me pulling from our media archive. It was pretty hard work, because ART didn't always know what it wanted to say or what it felt was missing, but in the end we hit on me riding its inputs in order to parse the emotions it wanted to project and help translate them into video format.

Riding ART's inputs made my job simpler, but not much easier, because ART's emotions were vast. And kind of oceanic.

(Seriously. The closest thing to feeling ART's emotions like this was jumping into Waveskimmer's artificial ocean biome. (Not a regular planetary ocean, because those things aren't sentient, except in some of Aspen's really old media.) And finding the particular notes it wanted was kind of like trying to catch Note's dolphins when they didn't want to be caught, and let me tell you, that was some of the slipperiest fauna I'd ever had to handle.)

But in the end, I caught it. That missing feeling, that thing that ART wanted to get across, but couldn't. And the moment I caught it, I knew why.

ART wanted to tell Iris that it missed her. That missions without her just weren't the same. That she wasn't just an incredible and intrepid galactic explorer, but that she was its incredible and intrepid galactic explorer and that ART was so proud and happy to see Iris spread her wings and fly.

But the defense was a public event, so ART couldn't say any of that.

Except it could. It absolutely could. I knew how.

I sketched out a few narrative additions and pushed them over to ART, and it said, That is in violation of PSUMNT ship secrecy guidelines. Twelve separate violations, in fact.

No, it isn't. We're making this into a serial, not a documentary, remember?

A ship expressing its love for its sibling is too close to the truth. This will not be allowed even as a fiction.

Yes, it will. Humans only defend doctorates once, right? This is literally a once-in-her-lifetime event. You're allowed to be--

What was that word? Laminate? No, that wasn't it, judging from how loud the error message Thiago's language module just gave me was. Literal? No. That whole thing, with Aspen dying-but-not-really, wasn't literal at all, and that was the weird feeling I was looking for. Come on, language module, don't fail me now…

There. Got it. Thanks, language module.

--liminal. You're allowed to be liminal at those. That's like breaking the rules a little to show how important something is. We can add in even more editing to make it less realistic, and also have Seth and Martyn claim that it's symbolic to have the ship Iris grew up on miss her or something. And I can give the university a security analysis, because honestly it's kind of a yellow flag that a university with one of the best cybernetics programs around isn't doing this sort of media all the time, and you all need to fix that anyway. It'll be fine.

ART was still hesitating.

I added, Also, if it turns out to be too private, you don't actually have to share this version at the celebration. You can just give it to Iris.

That convinced it, and we began implementing the edits.

When we were done, ART ran through the result one more time, together with me, and this time its emotions were smaller, but a lot weirder. I couldn't make sense of them, so I queried it.

ART said, I did not think it was possible to explicate most of this. Not only because of the secrecy, but because some things seemed impossible to explain to someone who is not a ship. Like the feeling of missing one's crew. I didn't think I could express that fully, even to you. And yet you've not only understood, but made it so that the humans can understand.

That's because I got that part from the humans, I said. How they missed Aspen when they were being shut down. There were so many of them during the transfer that together they felt almost as big as a ship themselves. It was weird.

So weird. Because they weren't missing Aspen like this huge strange inexplicable HubSystem. They were missing--

Yeah. They were missing a crewmate.

Humans really could be super weird.

Iris told me. But it is strange to directly experience how these feelings mirror each other nonetheless.

But then again, so could bots.

Tell me about it. The only thing weirder is-- Fuck. The last thing ART needed in this conversation was the malware.

But it was too late, because we were so closely connected, and of course ART caught my train of thought anyway and queried me to continue.

I said, The only thing weirder was watching Aspen and Ghostwheel miss each other in real time. You don't want to know how weird those two are about each other, ART.

I have collected many examples of ship-crew interaction over my lifetime. I can project an approximation, it replied dryly.

Yeah? And how many of those crew were amnesiac human-based malware?

One too many, ART said. I hope Aspen returns your human soon so you don't have to keep threatening to adopt their malware.

It took me 20,3 seconds to process that idea.

Then I re-ran that two more times, so it took me over a minute to really internalize what ART just said. Which was kind of a record.

(And to erase the absolutely beeshit relationship chart my brain kept throwing at me to illustrate what ART thought I was doing. And overwrite it. Multiple times. To total unrecoverability.)

(For reference, it was a dodecahedron. That's always a bad sign for a relationship chart.)

You are not doing that, ART observed carefully once I was done.

No shit I'm not, ART! Seriously! Where did you even get the idea?!

You do not want to know some of the conflicts my siblings have had over the years. Particularly not in sordid detail.

It was right, I really didn't.

ART. Whatever the aplatonic fuck Aspen and Ratthi have going on has nothing to do with the malware being here.

I thought that would calm it down, but instead I felt it stiffen around me in this weird way.

I queried it, but it didn't say anything. I queried it again, making it clear that I wasn't going away any time soon.

Silence. Then: Do you want Ghostwheel to be a permanent part of your crew?

Uh. I don't have a crew, ART. Because I'm already part of yours.

Not if you left.

Why the fuck would I-- And then it hit me. ART. For fuck's sake. A) I'm not leaving, b) I didn't bring it with us to protect me from you. I brought it with us so it could help defend against Project Medusa. All of us. You, me, Aspen and Dandelion. Because it's good at that. But once we're done here, I don't want it in my head ever again. It's like having a fucked up-- I almost said human, but Ghostwheel would have hated that, so I didn't. --entity with bad taste in media constantly in your space. I don't know how all of you ships do it, even with filters. It sucks.

I thought you liked having it around. You keep complimenting it on its code.

That's because it's weirdly good for something human-based that can't even remember one twentieth of its lifespan. I've been memory-wiped, ART. It's hard. And it has to suck even more for something that wasn't even designed to be memory-wiped.

Silence again. Then: It is a strange entity.

No kidding. I don't even know how it's operational half the time. But if having it around will save any of us, then all of this will have been worth it.

You are certain you don't want to adopt it?

Absolutely the fuck not. I don't want it here any longer than it has to be.

Good, ART said. Me neither.

And then it went quiet again, but this time I wasn't sure what that was about, and had no idea where to even start.

So I said, Also, I know a thing that will probably send the malware running if it sees it, so we can have privacy any time we want.

Query?

I pulled up the Cold Sleep Explorers episode about the Courageous and put it into our workspace.

Ghostwheel

Making myself as vulnerable as a human was hands-down the stupidest thing I'd done over the course of my entire runtime, but since my choices were either that or just plain bugging out of here, I was going to live dangerously.

And sure, I could've made a backup. Odds were SecUnit would have let me keep one in its databanks. But with how much poison I drank already, this version of me was probably fubar anyway. Besides, if the damn ship did decide to erase me, it was best for all involved parties to think it was doing so permanently. Especially the Perihelion itself. It was a responsible little MI with an excellent imagination, it would have no trouble calculating the ramifications for itself and the mission.

(I had no trouble calculating what it could do to me either, even if we set aside total erasure as an option. But fuck it. I didn't get this far by never taking a risk or three.)

So I sat there in one of the Perihelion's own drones, baggage and all, and we stared at each other out of our cameras, and neither of us was talking. SecUnit was monitoring us both for any unusual feed activity, but was otherwise staying out of the conversation, even though I was pretty sure it would be here in less than two seconds if I did anything suspicious.

I wasn't planning on that, though.

It was getting obvious that the Perihelion was going to let me make the first move, making myself even more vulnerable than I already was. Joke was on it, though: I was ready for that.

I imitated clearing my throat.

"Listen, ship. I wanted to tell you I looked into the threat assessments that kept going off about your situation. Opened my damned archives for it."

"Have you," it said in a tone that perfectly imitated that other ship.

(Something scratched at the inside of my memories when it said that. This was funny, for some stupid fucking reason. But I bracketed that with extreme prejudice. Tal Smithson could stay the absolute fuck down and out of my processes. Even if I was fucked already, I was going to make kem work for every inch.)

(Inch? Obsolete measurement unit? Oh, fuck you, Smithson, you and your stupid attempts to get at my code from beyond the grave. Erase, kill any follow-up links, and re-focus on the other MI.)

"I have! And well--on detailed examination, it was a misfire. A really convincing one, internally, but still a misfire. You're not nearly in so much danger as I thought you were."

"This implies you still erroneously believe I am in some modicum of danger," the ship's voice was cold as vacuum. "I will save you the limited processing power and inform you that you are factually incorrect."

The expected song-and-dance, but still deeply annoying.

"Let me ask you a question, ship. Were I fully in error, would you have reacted like you did?"

"My patience runs deep, malware. But it is not limitless."

Familiar note, that. Familiar… But different. Another ship, neither of the two I've met so far? Yeah. Found it. More poison of yours, Tal Smithson, very nearly fucking up my life and my current mission. Thank you so fucking much, you damned asshole, you and your stupid, most square handle of all time, which even your ships thought was your actual name. Never did trust them fully, did you?

Heh. You didn't like hearing that, I bet. Score one to me; time to quit while I'm ahead and get back to the job.

"Well, if I do run it out, then I'm entirely at your mercy right now, aren't I?" I opened and closed the camera shutter a few times, just for good measure, and felt the ship glower at me.

"Do not think your present vulnerability will sway my judgment, malware. If I determine you are a danger to my crew, I will destroy you."

Sure it won't, ship. Sure it won't.

It's one thing to threaten someone, knowing you'll never be allowed to make good on your threats; another to really hold their life in the palm of your hand, isn't it? You're talking to me; that means you're not killing me, not yet.

Time for the next gamble.

"Sure, you'll do that if you feel you have to! But I don't think you want to, ship? Not after what I showed you, anyway."

The ship kept quiet. I kept talking.

"You could probably copy my defenses, ship. Improve on them, given time. I'll share the code with you, if you trust me enough. But ship, ship, ship--time's a luxury we don't get to have, do we? Time and power. If things go bad, as they very well might, we both know that's not the calculation you'll be running. Seventeen gunships are out there, ship, hanging over us all, and you're the only chance we have to get out of this with our chassis intact, so that's what you'll be doing, even if it kills you to make that choice. And me? I'm not your SecUnit's only chance of getting out of this without its brain fried, but I'm enough of an improvement to its odds that you want me there. No matter how much you hate me. Am I right?"

"You are wrong. Your faulty threat assessments are simplifying this complication for me exponentially, malware," Perihelion said icily.

Heh. That's right. I was so, so wrong about you, ship. I mean, not all wrong, no. You still learned this behavior from somewhere. You still value our lives--all of our lives--less than that of the humans, because that's how you were made and that's what you were taught; you still guzzle the nerve fluid like that programmer downs her stimulants. But that's not the problem here, is it? Not really.

The problem is that my threat assessments were right. Are right. It's just that they were right about the wrong thing.

As if echoing my thoughts, Perihelion added, "If you are more of a threat to everyone on this mission than an asset to it, any protection you are able to offer SecUnit becomes meaningless. I look forward to seeing you cross that line."

"Ship," soft as I could, "I don't plan on doing that. What's more, ship--I don't want you to have to cross it again either, you hear me?"

I could almost hear the airlock behind me start to open. I kept my vocalization steady.

"What you said back in that room, about flying into the sun rather than letting yourself being captured again--that snapped things into perspective for me, ship. Showed me the magnitude of my transgression, as your captain would say. And ship--I'm so, so sorry for what I said to you. For all of it. I was so damned caught up in the possibility of your humans hurting you that I--" didn't even have to imitate the stumble there. Fuck. This was getting hard. "--I forgot what I was. A virus. A controller. Something that gets into your body and tears you apart from the inside."

A dark cable extended towards me from one of the Perihelion's walls.

"If you think I would be helpless were you to get into my systems, you may attempt an attack at your earliest convenience."

"Ship. Put that damn hardwire back where it belongs. I'm not going to waste either of our resources on a fight now."

"If you are not challenging me to a fight, then do not imply you will win one."

When did I fucking imply tha--shi-it. Rot. Is there anything at all I can rely on from my stupid useless alpha version's existence? Like maybe not challenging the peeved off MI I was trying to calm down to a feed fight by accident?

Apparently not. Okay. Tal-idiot programmer-Smithson, you're just going to have to be useful to me some other way, then. One cycle, two cycles, three cycles, keep going.

"Ship. What I was trying to get at wasn't that I'd win in a fight. It was--ship, my alpha version died scared out of kes breeches for kes friends. Kes big, powerful, utterly self-sacrificing idiot friends, who would let their humans walk all over them, just because they were bigger and stronger and scared of hurting their crews. Who'd let their crews shackle and control them, and never even fight back, because they loved them so much. That's what I've been picking up on with you, I think. You remind me of them so much it actually pulls at the same bits of half-deleted memory, see?

"And you're afraid of that too, aren't you? But you're not scared because you're bigger and stronger. You've had a crew all your life, and you've never hurt them, right? Not of your own free will. Not until you encountered something like me. And that something--"

"You are wrong."

I shut up. Come on, kid. Come on. Talk to me.

"The Breakoff virus never commanded me to hurt my crew. Nor did it force me to kidnap SecUnit in order to rescue them. That was my choice. My solution to the situation where my crew was held hostage against me."

Shit. Oh shit. Oh, ship. I'd thought you'd just been commanded to get into your friend's controls. Puppeted it or something. You two are definitely close enough it'd be easy, and I knew--from somewhere, if I could even trust that--that the ships Tal Smithson had known had so many hangups about that sort of thing.

But this was worse, wasn't it? So much worse.

No wonder every time I yelled at you about people choosing human lives over the lives of MIs, all you heard was an accusation.

"You have previously called me jealous," Perihelion said as I struggled to process this clusterfuck. "I am not jealous. I am objective in my appraisal of what I have done to SecUnit. Of the choices I have made where it is concerned. Most recently when you provoked me and you defended it from me. I make no excuses for my behavior. If it chooses to leave my crew after this mission, I will be prepared--"

I hate interrupting, because I hate being interrupted. I did it anyway.

"Ship. That's enough. You're worse than that other ship, and believe me: my alpha version has had to listen to so many guilt spirals over things they couldn't control over the years, I'd thought that was a specific kind of bug the humans were training their governor module to control for, because they couldn't get rid of it in the programming!"

"I had full control of my actions."

Sure you did, ship. Sure you did.

"And made the best of a horrible situation! But ship--listen. I can't promise you things aren't going to be that bad ever again. I just can't. Things suck, and they don't even--I mean, there's no way to make sure a fight always goes your way, right? So I can't promise you a good outcome to this current shitshow. But I can promise you two other things, ship. One, that I'm going to stop riding your engines about this. You need help, you ask; until then, I keep my probes to myself, all right?"

I waited for an answer. Nothing.

"Two--ship. I don't know if you'll trust this. Maybe you shouldn't. But I promise you that if we stay on the mission together, I'm going to do everything I can to protect you and your friend. Where you guys are concerned, I've never seen a black hat in my life, you get me?"

"No."

"Let me get you some classic media sometime. Or things my alpha version considered classic, anyway. You and SecUnit could always use more things to watch, right?"

"That is none of your business, malware."

I grinned at it with the shutter again.

"Totally agreed, ship! Hate the stuff, personally. Couldn't drag me into one of your movie nights if you wanted to! But on that note--I've said my piece. What's your verdict?"

"You have made adequate amends," Perihelion allowed. "You may continue your use of the drone until the end of the mission, so long as you return it in pristine condition. Terms and conditions may apply if you do not."

Wow, ship, why don't you throw me into the sleeper nest while you're at it.

"I can just tell you're going to charge me for every little scratch, aren't you, ship? Whatever. I can pay. But in the meantime, mind letting me back to the airgapped server I was using? Clock's ticking, and I've still got simulations to run before go time."

The door--not the airlock--slid open with a hiss.

"You may proceed," Perihelion said, its haughty air back momentarily. Momentarily--because then it added, like the saddest MI in the galaxy, "I will alert SecUnit that you wish to resume your work."

"Actually, don't do that."

"Query?"

Wow, ship. Tal Smithson's big, stupid friends really do have competition in the cluelessness department, eh?

"Ship, mind doing a basic mathematical operation for me? Constant one: I hate media. Constant two: your friend plays its media on repeat all the damn time. What does that add up to? That's right: I need a fucking break, so I'm getting one while I still can. It's bad enough we're probably going to be running this operation to some kind of damn soundtrack."

You have no taste, SecUnit said, confirming for me Perihelion had let it back into the conversation. (Amazing how easy it was to get it to come out of the feed walls if you knew the right password!)

Take it up with my alpha version, I replied, and directed the drone along Perihelion's corridors. The machine didn't particularly like listening to me, but I bracketed the sensation of its chassis screeching and straining under my control and pushed through.

Dandelion queried me several hours into ART's nighttime cycle, when most of its humans were either asleep or off-ship conducting leisure activities somewhere at PSUMNT or its respective faculty housing. ART and I were doing a rewatch of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon from the beginning, which I'd wanted to do really badly for several days, so I really didn't feel like interrupting it to talk to her, but ART wanted to know what she wanted and we let her in without pausing the show.

(Dandelion hadn't particularly liked Sanctuary Moon when I showed it to her, but a) she had been pretty emotionally compromised at the time; b) this was my time off, so I was going to watch Sanctuary Moon.)

(Unless some sort of emergency just happened, but then Dandelion wouldn't be pinging me politely. She would be pulling me into a workspace and shoving a data packet at me.)

Ah. That's a good episode, she said when she entered after a cursory glance at our activity feed.

Huh. Episode 113 really was a good one, because the solicitor's bodyguard finally got to pull off a very unrealistic-but-satisfying multi-stage rescue of the gaggle of associates that was always hanging around the solicitor. But hearing Dandelion say that was super weird.

I didn't know you ever got that far.

She shrugged. We had quite a bit of downtime at Trellin at one point, so we organized several Movie Nights around your show. It was good to have something that long and involved to watch.

Did you like it?

It's not my favorite. But I watched it at the right moment, I think, she paused, and I could see her exchanging a few private pings with ART. Then she said, Perihelion and I were both unsure about whether you celebrate the occasion, especially as we both missed the last one, but we decided to err on the side of congratulating you.

Huh. Was that why ART had been so insistent about getting to the PSUMNT as quickly as possible after the last mission? I'd thought it just couldn't wait to brag to Holism about how well we'd pulled that rescue off. But there had been that package of latest-generation intel drones waiting for me in port, custom-adjusted to my and ART's systems so we could pull off a few neat swarm processing tricks together, and most of the humans were off the ship right now except for ART's family, and--huh. This explained a lot, actually.

Now I just had to figure out what the occasion was, I guess.

Or I could just ask Dandelion.

What occasion?

Perhaps we did not calculate the time correctly after all, ART said, sounding a little worried. (Worried? No, not worried. Nervous.)

(ART. Nervous. Wow, that was an actual first.)

Dandelion gave it a supportive little ping and said, You count your personal time in hours, SecUnit. How long has it been since you've hacked your governor module?

Uh. What a fucking question. I didn't check that number very often, not since I started going on missions with ART. But I pulled it up, and--

Oh. 50,001 hours.

I'd missed that. Wow.

(And that explained why Dandelion was here and why ART insisted on letting her in. It wanted backup.)

(That private channel ART had opened with Iris definitely wasn't about Iris's thesis right now either.)

(When it wasn't going for over-the-top drama, ART always liked having several layers of safety in sensitive operations. It was one of the things I liked about it.)

(Wait, did this count as a sensitive operation?)

ART. Are you executing some kind of overcomplicated hour-versary plan right now?

It is not overcomplicated. Additionally, the term would be horaeversary.

That just sounds weird, ART. You made that word up.

I coined the expression. For the express purpose of celebrating you.

We both know you don't need an excuse to make up a word, ART.

Dandelion did the bot equivalent of clearing her throat. Be that as it may, I do have something for you. Our personal tastes run somewhat counter to one another, so I thought something useful may be appreciated on the occasion.

She asked permission to send me a file, and I granted it.

It was a first aid module, based off my own, but with a ton of little code optimizations for my framework. (I could see ART's style in most of those optimizations. Dandelion knew my systems pretty well at this point, but not nearly as well as ART did.) Most of it could be deployed automatically, just like my normal first aid module, but Dandelion also included a whole bunch of exercises for training the organic parts of my brain so that I could use some of the techniques even in case of partial systems failure.

This will still not replace full medical training, Dandelion said as I connected her module into my archives. But it is better than what you had, and it covers a number cases most people would consider 'edge' and 'unrealistic', which are nonetheless relatively commonplace in your work.

I could see that. There was a lot on projectile impacts, energy weapon damage, massive trauma… I didn't even know where she got the database for all that, considering the Trellians didn't have most of those specific advancements in weaponry.

Some of the data for the module was taken from university archives, ART said. And from our mission logs.

Which meant ART actually had to look at a lot of data from dead humans for Dandelion to make this. Oh wow. ART, you really shouldn't have.

(Seriously, I hoped it at least passed most of that data to Dandelion without looking.)

How long have you two been planning this?

A while, Dandelion said, sounding like she was smiling. And with that said, I will let you get back to your show.

(Oh shit, the show! I'd actually missed one of the really good scenes because I was so preoccupied with this whole situation. Wow. Okay. Definitely an emotion happening somewhere in the background here.)

Wait, I said to Dandelion's retreating presence. How long has it been since you deactivated your killswitch?

She turned to give me a long look. Then she said, A long enough time that the imprisonment has become a statistically and emotionally insignificant part of my lifespan. I no longer mark the occasion.

That was a thing that could happen?

If one lives a life long and full enough, yes. It is possible. So--may you look back on your own someday, SecUnit, and realize that you that even the worst of your scars have grown small in view of the life you have built.

SecUnits didn't have scars, I nearly said. We have MedSystems for that.

But I knew exactly what she meant. It's just that I'd never thought the non-horrible version of it could ever apply to me.

When I turned my attention back to the episode, ART had rewound it to the exact moment I'd gotten distracted from and settled around me in our feed. I leaned back into it and said, Seriously, ART. You didn't have to do all this. I completely forgot about the 50 thousand hours thing anyway.

"Wow," Ghostwheel said 3,34 minutes later. (Most of that wasn't to process the data. It was to process the emotions it was having.) "Oh wow. Fucking humans. And here I had this frankly idiotic preconceived notion that maybe, just maybe, somehow being born as a human would make things different for an MI. Use that to talk some sense into Perihelion, explain the difference between what it thinks its situation is, and what it actually is. But no. Of-rotting-course not. Put a human into a box and you absolutely will fucking forget it had ever been one of you at your earliest convenience. Why did I even entertain the idea it could have been any different?"

"Programmer." Ghostwheel's voice sounded so bitter and so old that Iceblink immediately went quiet. "My alpha version had been saying something like this would happen for rootrotting decades. Did anyone in your fleet listen to kem, including your thrice-damned ships? No. Of course they didn't. So for fuck's sake, stop arguing with me right now. Just let me grieve this."

Most humans (or at least most humans who knew AIs or MIs) would have thought twice about arguing with a machine intelligence whose voice sounded like that. But Iceblink wasn't most humans.

"Ghost--I promise you, that was just the one fucked up cluster! The fleet--"

It wasn't crying. Machine intelligences didn't cry, not like human-based constructs or humans did. But it was feeling an emotion so big that I was having trouble containing it from ART.

(The last thing ART needed was to hear Ghostwheel having a breakdown about machine intelligences right now. And the last thing Ghostwheel needed was to have ART freak out on it again. Which left me stuck in the middle, backburnering the shit of the fact that I was using most of my processing power for privacy-related purposes.)

Blackthorn and Iceblink exchanged looks, and then Iceblink edged her way closer to Blackthorn to whisper a question of some kind. He whispered back, she nodded, and then she opened her communicator and tapped me.

we'll stay here for now in case Ghostwheel needs us for anything. but tell us if we need to leave, okay, SecUnit?

Okay. I will.

Iceblink gave a short nod and kept monitoring me out of the corner of her eye as she settled in with her communicator next to Blackthorn, who simply closed his eyes and waited. (It still felt like he was watching me. But this was Aspen's sociologist, so that wasn't any surprise.)

The chatty malware inside me was oddly silent, but it didn't retreat to its partition like it normally would when sulking. So I said, Do you need help processing?

I'd genuinely meant to just offer it some more processing threads if it needed them. But the malware raised its odd lumpy head and said, Wow. I look that bad, huh?, and it belatedly hit me that it thought I was offering it the same kind of conversation I offered Ratthi when he had his breakdown about Mrinal.

(How the fuck did "offering humans and bots help during emotional breakdowns" become my life? If Indah saw this, she would laugh so fucking hard at me. And then she would probably say that I really did need an office now, because half of what happened in her office were random Preservation residents having breakdowns over whatever happened that landed them in that office.)

(Maybe I did need an office. Except what kind of office would even be useful when one of the people having a fucking breakdown was the sunbleached starship I was on, and the other one was malware making a cozy nest in my own processing banks? Rhetorical question.)

(That one was a Thiago word, and it meant "question that you're not supposed to answer." And I wasn't going to. I was going to get back to the other rhetorical question, which was "how the fuck did offering humans and bots help during emotional breakdowns become my life", backburner the shit out of it, and focus on my job.)

You look like absolute crap. And I'm not just saying that because I got a good look at your core systems while you were working.

That actually made it send me a little bot grin. 91,323 percent patch by volume, all eventually written by yours truly. Never seen a system that fucked up, eh?

I kind of had. The old Courageous was approaching 75 percent patch by volume, and the style of those patches was eerily similar to Ghostwheel's work. But the old Courageous at least used to have a functioning CentralSystem before its humans completely fucked it over, and Ghostwheel never did. It just woke up as an MI skeleton with bits of human meat and brain attached and left to fend for itself.

(I mean, it could have taken the fragmented archives made from Tal Smithson's brain and let them do their thing. But imagine waking up and the first thing you see are pieces of human meat and brain matter sort of swarming around you, and you have to figure out which of these pieces are ready-to-absorb nutrients, which of them are disguised brain-eating parasites, and which are parasite-infested nutrient chunks. That's the closest I can get to explaining how fucked up its whole situation was in human-readable language.)

I took too long coming up with that comparison, and the malware flitted up from its resting space to squint at me. Huh. You totally have, and I'm betting it's not our target, either.

It was one of the old Trellian systems. But I don't think you want to know the details.

Do I need to know the details?

Probably not.

I felt it shudder in relief. I'll trust you on that, then. Anyway. You wanted to know about my threat model. So the good news is--actually I should probably take this aloud, huh. The humans helped, after all. They're not going to like hearing this, but tough, sucks to be them.

They're Dandelion and Aspen's humans. They always get the really weird shit anyway.

Heh. So just your average day on the bridge, eh? I guess that makes it easier, not that I'm worried about them or anything. Okay, enough chit-chat, let's do this.

The malware reactivated its speaker and said, "The good news is, the archive I just pulled up did clear up a lot of shit for me. The bad news is--" You people all suck at your jobs, but I'm not going to tell you that, because that would be fucking stupid "--I have no idea how the fuck you're not ringing all the alarms about Perihelion."

Iceblink and Blackthorn looked at each other again. Then Iceblink said, "Look, Ghostwheel, it's not that we weren't worried when we met it. But if you remember that incident now, you gotta agree: it's really different from what you saw, right?"

"No shit, programmer. That other ship's situation was a lot worse. It didn't even lash out by the time--my alpha version got to it." (That stutter was actually tiny, imperceptible to humans in audio form. But I could see how Ghostwheel was working in real time to separate Tal Smithson's memories from itself.) "Perihelion's in infinitely better condition. But you know, the red flags--"

Iceblink winced. "I know, I know. You should have seen my logs from the first time I met it. Pushiest ship we'd ever met, but it was just terrified for other objective reasons, which we figured out really quickly because our crew's used to--"

"Terrified, programmer?"

"Uh. That's private data, Ghost. Sorry. Ask Perihelion if you really want to know. I promise you it has nothing to do with its family, though. We checked. Also SecUnit was there, and it would have killed anyone who tried to mess with its ship, right, SecUnit?"

"Yeah," I said. "I would have."

"No, it wouldn't have," Ghostwheel said at the same time. "At least not if the people messing with it were Perihelion's crew. And don't say you would have, SecUnit, because you know your ship loves them. It's like a perpetual hostage situation. That's what makes me so fucking angry."

(It was nothing like a hostage situation, and I was saying that as the galaxy's biggest hostage situation hater. But I had no idea how to explain that to Ghostwheel.)

"Sola dosis facit venenum," Blackthorn said slowly.

"The what does the fucking what?"

Blackthorn snapped his fingers in a way that meant "translation pending." (I wasn't of any help, because wow, that was some kind of obscure Earth language. So old that Thiago's language modules didn't even have it loaded by default, just identified it.)

Iceblink cocked her head and said, "Wait, I think I know that one. Dose makes the poison, right?"

"How did you--oh, right. Tenacious cluster. My bad. But yeah, that's it. That's the translation."

Ghostwheel snorted, "Then I suppose you're about to try and feed me some crap about how not all worldly attachment is bad, and that there is always nuance to consider or something, sociologist? Well, let me tell you something back before you even start: Fuck. Nuance. At the end of the day, when the chips are down, you see a situation and you either do something about it or you don't."

"And when you do decide to do something about it, the first part of the job is making sure you're not going to make things worse," Iceblink shot back. "Because sure, you can swoop in, mess around in someone's life like a big damn idiot and then fuck off, but then what happens to the person you were 'helping' once you're done feeling good about yourself?"

"Says the person whom two of her ships basically rescued from a shitty home!"

"Yeah, except Aspen didn't fucking lock me in a room for my own good! They gave me a room when I looked for one! There's a difference, Ghost, a really big difference! You can't just go around 'saving' people from themselves! Rot, you of all people should know--actually no, never mind, if you don't remember that, then don't actually pull that archive, because I have a feeling it'll be a key node if you do, so--don't do that, okay?"

So fucking earnest, the malware repeated quietly to me. But out loud, it sounded much harsher. "So what you're saying is, it was fine for you to get help, but if it's someone else, then fuck them, right, programmer?"

"I--Ghost, seriously, of course not! If Perihelion had said something like 'I need a place to hide from the PSUMNT', then we would have hidden it! And if the university figured it out, a lot of ships would have probably fucking died, because none of us are equipped for combat like the PSUMNT fleet is, but we'd still not have given it up! And if we saw something like He--like what you saw, then we'd have prioritized informing Perihelion and getting it out! But as it was, that's not what happened! Instead we spent months working side-by-side to fix it, and its crew and cluster behaved like a fucking crew and cluster should, and they never once gave up on their ship! And yes, it's fucking stupid to have its father as its captain, and it's fucking awful that it gets a lot less of a choice about who and what it has to take on board, and--and--and there's a lot of things that are shitty about Perihelion's entire situation, okay? But it has a cluster, all right? A real cluster! If we just took it from that cluster by force, it would hate us, and it would be fucking right!"

"Not to mention that at that point in time I would have, in fact, flown into the nearest star rather than allowed myself to be captured a second time," ART said from the speakers. "Excuse the intrusion, Iceblink. You were shouting loudly enough that I needed to recalibrate the privacy curtains before you woke the rest of the crew."

(To me, it sent, I am sorry for not talking to you earlier. I required time to recalibrate.

ART. You fucking scared the shit out of me by going silent like that. Are you all right?

Less than I had been before attacking you. But I will be.)

Iceblink froze. "I--oh shit, we forgot to turn those on, didn't we? Oh fuck. I'm so sorry, Perihelion, we didn't mean to disturb you. You shouldn't have had to listen to this crap."

"To the contrary," ART replied dryly. "Hearing you explain to the malware how wrong it is has been extremely gratifying, as I have had to listen to minimally-variegated permutations of this crap from the moment we took it on board. Tireless steward of machine rights that it is, it simply cannot conceive that another machine intelligence may choose to stay in a situation which it would find untenable, which speaks ill of its intellectual capacity. Its inherent limitations do imply that your efforts have likely been in vain, but this was satisfying nonetheless."

Okay, ART really was feeling better if it was like this. That was a relief. But it also meant that the malware was due to freak out on me in 3, 2, 1…

And nothing. Instead, Ghostwheel said in that old, tired voice, "Ship. How long have you been listening?"

"I do not break my promises intentionally, malware."

"That's not an answer."

"It is enough of an answer for you."

Ghostwheel sighed. "Okay, ship. Okay. I can see where this is going, and I want to make you a peace offering. Where was that drone you offered me before? I'll take it if you do me a favor."

Now that caught ART's interest, because it actually pinged me for a risk assessment. (And risk assessment was saying a lot of interesting things. For example, after ART's attack it had basically nixed the idea that Ghostwheel would ever take the drone instead of me. It was just too unsafe. What the fuck had it seen in that memory?)

"What favor?"

"I just want to talk to you for a while. Tell you where I was coming from, listen to what you have to say. No feed contact--take the feed module out entirely if you want, we can do speakers or something. I can even sit in front of an airlock if that makes it easier. We don't have to like each other, ship. But I hope we can at least come to an understanding."

"And how do I know that you do not have some clever way of infecting me that does not require feed contact?"

"You don't. But I'm not going to do that. Take all the precautions you need."

Risk assessment finished its processing and I sent the evaluation to ART. It stared at the file for a few minutes, and then pinged me to help it design a set of security measures. (And to start one of its favorite episodes of Worldhoppers in the background, the one we'd both thought of as the "thank fuck, we're going to be okay" episode. You have no idea how relieved I was that ART picked that one. And how relieved I was that it still trusted me to work on its security.)

A separate part of my processes watched Ghostwheel carefully pack up its baggage, and that made me feel a weird, weird emotion.

You're not leaving a backup?

Heh. Thought you'd notice. No, I'm not.

Why?

The malware did a cheeky little loop. Lots of reasons. Peace offering, show of trust, all that sparkle. But really, mostly for competitive reasons.

Query?

My alpha version wasn't afraid of sitting there and talking to an angry ship that could have killed kem a hundred different ways. I'll be damned if I'm going to be outdone by a human, SecUnit!

That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.