A/N:

Missing scene – the long, dark, scary period between SecUnit's collapse on the gunship, post-killware attack, and when it recovered consciousness on final approach to Preservation Station. Per canon, that would be at least fifteen cycles, because the nearest station to Preservation was fifteen cycles away. That's a long time to wait for your friend to open their eyes again, a long time to wonder if they're ever going to recover at all.

Tags: Canon-compliant, missing scene, no shipping, Preservation Aux crew, end of ES, SecUnit spends this whole fic unconscious and most of it entirely unaware, third person, Gurathin's POV

"Gurathin? Come here!"

It was Mensah's voice, calm and projecting, but just a little too controlled. Something was seriously wrong. Gurathin knew it immediately. He dropped the bandage in his patient's lap, leaving them still holding onto their upper arm. "Just keep pressure there. You'll be alright." And they would be. The bandage was just to keep them from making a mess. It was a minor laceration, but the only thing he had been able to find to be helpful. He left them to hurry toward Mensah.

His stomach turned to ice when he saw. SecUnit was sprawled on the floor in front of the closed hatch to the shuttle bay, legs in a jumble, arms by its sides like it hadn't done a thing to stop the face-plant to the hard deck. That was painful to imagine, but worse still was wondering what had happened to cause it.

The killware. It had to be the killware! There was no feed presence, no response to his feed request for contact. He rushed to its side, poised above it as he looked wide-eyed at Mensah and Pin-Lee. Mensah, voice tight, said, "We haven't touched it."

"What happened?"

"It said, 'We're clear,' and then it collapsed."

That wasn't the worst thing it could have said, but if SecUnit had thought the conflict was over and dropped its guard ... He skipped past the unanswered feed request and sent a direct request to SecUnit for a status update. No answer to that, either. "Before that?" he asked curtly.

Mensah hesitated. Pin-Lee jumped in. "It told us to jettison the shuttle manually. We did."

He'd seen that in the ship's status feed, the one usually restricted to the crew. Gurathin had used the credentials of the first person he'd helped just so he could figure out what the hell was going on. Not that it had helped much. The information had been a mess, with something blocking or preventing the status updates and implementation of orders, something he quickly deduced to be a deliberate software attack from the other ship.

After all, it was kind of hard to mistake what was trying to slam its way into his brain, throttled only by SecUnit's lightning-fast response. If not for that, Gurathin would have been like his last patient, dropped to the floor, convulsing so much he hurt himself as his augments malfunctioned for agonizing seconds instead of the millisecond spike he'd experienced.

So, the killware. And SecUnit. SecUnit must have tried to confine it to the shuttle's system and then it had jumped back as soon as the jettison cycle started. That would mean … SecUnit was dead. Gurathin drew in a shaky breath, his knees feeling weak. This wasn't what he wanted. This was stupid. After all they'd done to retrieve it and all it had done for them, this wasn't fair!

He shoved those reactions away. Pin-Lee and Mensah were staring at him, waiting for him to help. There had to be something he could do. Maybe it wasn't dead. He wasn't sure. They were relying on him. He scanned SecUnit, flipping through the few visual filters he had. "The power source is working," he said, trying to drive out the numb tone from his voice. He wasn't sure the killware would have taken that offline anyway, so although it sounded nice, it meant nothing. He knelt next to it. "Circulation and breathing are still active. So that's good."

He nudged SecUnit on the upper arm. There was no reaction. He pulled in a breath and gave it a firm, open-handed slap on the shoulder blade. Mensah jumped, but SecUnit did not.

"What was that for?" Pin-Lee asked in a small voice.

"In case it's just in a recharge cycle." Although no properly functioning SecUnit would go into recharge in the middle of a hallway like this. Falling flat on its face would have woke it up, but he had to eliminate the obvious and it was the easiest to thing to check.

Speaking of being out in the hall, a crew member came jogging down it. "What hap- Who is- Wait, is that the SecUnit?"

"Get us a gurney," Gurathin said to them.

The person looked over the three of them, not bothering to look at SecUnit further. "What for? Is someone hurt?"

"Someone's about to be hurt," Pin-Lee growled.

"Get us a gurney, now," Gurathin said. The crew member hesitated. Gurathin stood. He wasn't an imposing figure, but it was three to one. To sweeten the deal, Gurathin gave them an excuse to use human medical equipment for a construct: "Unless you want to move it yourself?"

"I'll, uh, get a gurney." They started to leave, then turned again. "But hey, I need to find out what happened to the shuttle."

"Get the gurney and we'll tell you," Pin-Lee said through clenched teeth.

They left for the gurney, muttering something Gurathin pretended he didn't hear. He turned back to Pin-Lee and Mensah. "This looks bad."

Mensah said, "You said its processes were working. Is it just in shutdown?"

He grimaced. "No. There's, ah, status protocols that should be responding. Nothing's responding." He barely kept himself from saying 'It's dead'. He was so certain of it, but he wasn't absolutely certain and he wanted to be before dropping that bombshell. His insides were twisted into a knot of uncertainty. He hated not knowing for sure. Even more, he hated all the things tragically left unresolved if SecUnit were gone from their lives after so brief an association.

"What does that mean?"

Mensah obviously could sense what he was holding back. He breathed out heavily, trying to relax enough to think straight. "It means I want to get it somewhere quiet where I can log in directly and see what's going on. The killware-" He stopped. He wouldn't talk about that. Not yet.

"Is this urgent?" Mensah asked. "Do I need to run down this corridor and get the gurney myself?"

"No, no." He shook his head. "It's fine. There's nothing … else … happening to it. The organics are alive. It will maintain them for years like this. They store them like this." Which wasn't entirely true. There was usually more electronic activity. Without the occasional pulse from the brain, how long would the autonomic systems function?

But that was a problem for later, if function couldn't be recovered. A problem for now was finding out what, if anything, could be done to save it. The crew member was already in sight, on their way back. Pin-Lee gave them the rundown on the shuttle while Mensah and Gurathin worked with the gurney's auto-loading features to get SecUnit secured to it.

They found an empty room off the galley that was unlocked. It was an officer's eating room or something like it. They hastily rearranged the room, shoving the table and most of the chairs to one side so they could park the gurney on the other side. Gurathin pulled up one of the chairs, looking at the body in front of him. He and Mensah had oriented SecUnit face-up because they were both human and it was virtually instinct. The orientation didn't matter to a construct, but it did to them.

Mensah touched his shoulder, which was when Gurathin realized he'd spaced out, staring at it blankly. His mind had been spiraling in a loop of 'I need to turn it over to get to the data port' vs 'I don't want to turn it over so it's facing away.' He looked up at her and gave a painful smile, more a grimace. He wanted to cry. He felt the urge well up in the way his throat seized and his eyes burned, but he looked away and coughed. It was no time for that.

Mensah's hand tightened. He nodded. "I'll … I'll find out what's wrong." He coughed again to clear his throat.

Gently, she said, "Give me an update as soon as you know anything." She left.

Pin-Lee stayed, standing at the door. After it shut, she said, "It's dead, isn't it?"

He gave her a grim look and tried to turn SecUnit's head. It was as stiff as all the other joints. They weren't locked in place, but they were under tension. Gurathin had no idea if that was a good sign or a bad one. He'd never seen a 'dead' SecUnit. The two times he'd seen this SecUnit off-line before, it had been loose-limbed and floppy. Arada had held its hand as they left the surface of the survey planet. It wasn't like that now and he didn't know what it meant.

He stood and reached into the feed, accessing the gurney's simple menu of available commands. He asked it to help him reposition the patient and used his hands to cradle SecUnit's head as though that mattered. It didn't, but at this point, he didn't care. Even if he was just doing this for himself, providing the illusion of comfort to someone who had repeatedly risked its life for his and those of his friends, he would do it. That it felt like he was handling a corpse in rigor mortis, flesh cool against his skin, only contributed to his desire to show respect for the dead.

He took a standard uplink cable from his pocket and plugged into the data port. The connection wasn't firm, so he bent, getting a better look at it. He tried again. It still felt loose. Also, he wasn't getting anything – no signal, not even static. He carried the cable with his toolkit because sometimes (like now) it was easier to connect by wire than through the feed.

"Gurathin?" Pin-Lee's normally firm, sharp voice broke a little. He realized he hadn't answered her.

"If I was sure," he said without looking up, "I wouldn't be doing this. I'd tell you. But I'm not sure." He was telling himself more than her. He didn't want to see her face. It wouldn't cause him to lose hope, because he didn't have enough to lose, but it might cause him to stop and this wasn't the time for that. The data port was a dud. It hadn't been like that back on the survey, but then again, SecUnit had had less hair and dressed differently then. There had obviously been some changes in the meantime.

"I need a good light and an isolated reader." He pulled out what was left of his tool set, double-checking that he had everything else he'd need. He'd grabbed things up in a hurry on the dock, stuffing it in his pockets as he'd run over to help Ratthi get SecUnit to the shuttle. "If you can get that for me, I'll stay with it. I … I want to stay with it." Just in case. He didn't want to miss a single sign of life.

She nodded and left. Alone, he brushed his fingertips across SecUnit's new hair at the base of its skull. It wasn't implants or a wig. It was just hair, delicate and soft, grown directly out of the skin. He'd seen ComfortUnits with extensive hair, but he hadn't realized they could just 'grow' it. He'd assumed they were made with it. "Where did you get this, my friend?" he murmured as he settled back into the chair. It was more like something Ratthi would say, that 'my friend'. He sent a quick message through the ship's recently restored feed, Ratthi, you good?

Yes. How is SecUnit? I saw Mensah.

I don't know yet. Still figuring that out.

Do you need help?

Not yet. Pin-Lee's helping me.

Okay. Everything's calming down out here. Mensah's talking to the captain.

He left the conversation there and stood to do a quick search of SecUnit's body for anything else that might be hampering performance. It had, after all, been shot up in the port before they'd hauled it onto the shuttle and then the ship. He pulled up the shirt, examined the hands and gunports, felt around the top of its pants, and tugged at the fabric down the legs, looking for perforations or fluid. There were plenty of each. He found an ammo cartridge and set it aside. The projectile weapon had been lost on the dock somewhere. He'd have to do a more thorough check later. He was considering whether to take that step now when Pin-Lee returned.

"Great. Let me have that reader." He plugged the cable into it. "If you can just hold the light right here."

"Where?"

"The back of the skull. Right there on that port." He took up the blade and crouched to put his eyes on the level of the port. His augment let him enhance the view, getting a clear and precise look at what he was doing. He probed around the existing port with his fingers, finding the natural seam and then cutting it wider.

Pin-Lee flinched. "What are you doing?"

He peeled the flap to the side. There was enough fluid to make it tacky, but no bleeding. He could see the access plate he needed at the back of the skull. As he'd suspected, the data port itself went nowhere. "It's modified the data port, or had someone else do it, and with the systems not responding, I can't get any information."

"You-" she started, then changed to, "You're going to open its skull? Is that safe?"

"Yes, it's safe." Assuming he was careful and didn't damage anything inside. He was going to be very careful.

She still worried. "It won't … get infected?"

They were a long way from sterile here, but he gave a single, dry laugh at the idea a SecUnit might die from something like a brain infection. They were so much tougher than that. "No, constructs don't get infections. They've been eugenic'd to hell and back. Superior beings, in almost literal sense. Ironic that we made them to serve us."

"You pronounced 'fucked up' wrong." The light stayed steady where he needed it.

"I guess I did." The plate should have had an opening where the data port would have been, but it was seamless. He could see the faint shine where it had been merged with the surrounding material. "This is good work," he said quietly. It was the sort of quality he'd only seen from perfectionists or the people who worked on the wealthy. There was another possibility of who would put such conscientious effort into their work on a construct. "I wonder if this was done by another unit?"

"What? Another rogue?"

"Do you think it's the only one?" He lifted the panel and carefully, delicately, making sure he didn't disturb any of the critical components that made SecUnit what it was, he inserted the uplink cable. It was tempting to route the data into his own head, which was what he'd tried to do initially when he hadn't known the port was fake. Then he'd realized how monumentally stupid that was, possibly providing the killware a direct access to a new system for it to destroy – his system.

And this variety of killware could definitely effect augments. He knew that for a fact. Hence his request for an isolated reader, which was what was on the opposite end of that uplink cable this time. The reader showed nothing for a long, distressing moment, then an acknowledgement ping. Some portion of SecUnit had responded.

All the air drained out of him, along with the tension he'd been carrying without realizing it. A sob punched out of him then and the tears finally came. He half-laughed, half-cried, still holding open the access plate because he couldn't risk letting it go and jostling the cable.

"What?" Pin-Lee craned her neck to look at the reader, her expression a mix of alarm and concern. "That's a good thing, right? That is. That's a good thing. Gurathin?" Her tone turned demanding.

"Yes," he said with a shaky voice. "It's a good thing."

"Whew. I thought- Yeah. I didn't understand your reaction."

"I'm relieved." Manipulating the reader with his free hand, he tried to scan further but the reader didn't have the ability. He was fairly sure it was safe, though. If the killware was in there, then it would have destroyed the reader. The odds that it had been programmed to lie in wait until an augmented human connected directly – well, it was remote. He took the cable from the reader and plugged it into his own port, behind his ear.

SecUnit's automatic systems were working. That was all he could tell. Everything was isolated – no directories, no routing tree. It wasn't like he was looking at a blank unit, because there was still data there, but there was nothing there that allowed him to make sense of it. There weren't even error codes. There was no operating system. He covered his mouth with his free hand, eyes distant as he tried to find something, anything, that would let him trigger a reboot. All he found was scrambled code where the boot system should have been.

Next to him, still holding the light, Pin-Lee was pointedly silent as she waited for his report.

He carefully, delicately, unplugged the cable from SecUnit's brain and closed the access plate. Then he leaned back, shutting his eyes for a long moment as he reviewed what he'd seen. He was scrolling through a sample of the data he'd pulled into the internal feed-space his augments made possible. He could feel Pin-Lee still standing there, watching him. He opened his eyes finally. "Well. It's … I need to call Dr. Mensah." He shot her a note on the feed. He included Ratthi for good measure.

Pin-Lee's expression fell. "It's … it's in there, right? It's alive?"

"It's in there." Maybe. Sort of. He was pretty sure. From a human point of view, it was in a vegetative state. When they were all gathered, he continued. "From what I can tell, the killware corrupted the file structures and took out anything even remotely resembling a directory. The memories are still there – the data is there. It just can't recognize it. And something else it can't recognize is its own operating code. I didn't see it, but there's too much there for me to download it all at once and I only looked for … seconds."

"So what do we do?" Ratthi asked. "Do we get new operating code and download it?"

Gurathin rubbed his forehead. "That would fundamentally change who SecUnit is. It's clearly customized its code." He gestured to it. "It's growing hair. It altered the data port. It's been rogue for years. And not for nothing, but that's also where the governor module is."

"Oh." Ratthi frowned. Mensah made a slow nod.

"Then what?" Pin-Lee asked. "Will it heal on its own?"

"I don't think so. Not like this." He gave her a long look, waiting to see if she came to the same conclusion he had.

She pulled her head back, obviously realizing what he was thinking. She drew in a big breath and blew it out. "Yeah, okay," she said. "I guess that's the only option."

"What?" Ratthi asked. Mensah knew enough to simply wait.

Pin-Lee was already standing taller, her confidence renewed by seeing a solution. "We rebuild the operating code ourselves."

"Can you do that?" Ratthi asked.

Gurathin said, "The information is a mess. But the information is there. It's a puzzle with all the pieces. If we do it right, then it might be able to defrag itself to rebuild the directories and recover its memories."

"What if it can't?" Mensah said, finally asking a question.

"Then we start over with the operating code. If that's not the problem, then we can defrag it manually."

"That will take forever," Pin-Lee said in a matter-of-fact tone. She wasn't intimidated by the prospect, but she wasn't going to sugar-coat it either. Four to five standard years of memories? Yeah, it would take a significant portion of that time to sort them out. Maybe more than a year. He wasn't intimidated by it either, because he was pretty sure he wouldn't be alive without SecUnit's efforts. He nodded.

Mensah asked carefully, "I hesitate to ask, but I think I have to – is this something where we can hire an expert or anyone else who could do a better job?"

Pin-Lee said, "How much do you want to bet the default corporate 'repair' suggestion is to memory wipe and restart from factory settings?"

Mensah didn't answer. Neither did Ratthi. Gurathin said, "There would be no reason why they wouldn't. Though I have to mention – it is possible we won't do things right. If we screw this up, we could cause permanent personality and cognition changes."

They were all silent for a long moment, each of them weighing the risks inherent in approaching corporates for help versus the possibility of doing irreparable harm to their friend. Mensah motioned to SecUnit's still, stiff form. "How long will it survive like this?"

Gurathin shrugged. "I don't know. Days or weeks. Maybe longer? We'll have to look into it."

Ratthi perked up. "I can find out. I can research that. You and Pin-Lee will be doing the code rebuild, right?" Gurathin nodded. Ratthi went on, "Then I'll find out how to keep the organic portions of a SecUnit alive. It's something I've been curious about for a while anyway."

Mensah raised a brow at Ratthi. "Your vote is we do this ourselves?"

Ratthi swallowed and shifted. "Yes. Yes. I think … I think that's what SecUnit would prefer. It was adamant it didn't want to be here on this ship, with the company. It said it was absolutely imperative that I fix its knee, and I think that was so it could leave as soon as possible. I don't think it trusts them."

Mensah looked at Pin-Lee, who drew in a deep breath and said, "If we fuck this up, there's no coming back from it. But on the other hand, I think the odds the corporates will fuck it up are way higher and they'll do it on purpose. So yeah, I vote we do it ourselves."

Mensah looked to Gurathin. He said, "I mentioned the risks so we understood them. I trust me … I trust us, over everyone else. We're the only ones with its best interest in mind."

Mensah didn't argue. "I'll get us facilities and equipment, and keep everyone else off you. What do you need?"

Gurathin was halfway through a complicated bit of interconnected reconstruction when he realized what exactly it was he was reconstructing. He jerked and cursed in his native language about putting a pole up his ass and lighting it on fire. Pin-Lee, who was working through his feed and could see what he was doing, said, "What?"

"That's the governor module." He'd known it was in here. It was just that somehow with all the other things going on, it hadn't occurred to him he'd be re-installing the awful thing.

"What? It is?" There was a pause as she minimized her screen and focused on his. "I thought it was hardware."

"No. It's a module."

"A 'module' can mean different things," she pointed out.

It only meant one thing in programming, but he managed to squelch his desire to snap irritably about it. He pointed at the relevant sections of reconstructed code. "It overlays the juncture between this part, the central processor, and the controls for the body, which are over here."

"Can you take it out?"

"Nn." He didn't answer, quite. He was looking at the layout. It was positioned in a critical spot with lines of code that referenced a lot of other areas in the central processor. In normal operation, there would be a lot of information flowing back and forth here. It wasn't neatly isolatable.

"Can you," her voice took on an odd lilt that gave him warning signs, "make it work again?"

"That was what I was in the process of doing. Unintentionally. Why would I make it work again on purpose?" That was stupid. He didn't want to make it work again. And why did she have that tone?

"I don't know. It might be useful."

He thought about scoffing, then he reviewed her comment as the anomaly it was. She was testing him – him, of all people, who knew more than any of them (other than SecUnit) what life under oppression was. Was this payback for testing SecUnit? It wasn't like he'd missed the occasional blame-implying comment about why SecUnit had left them to start with. 'Maybe if they hadn't included a hostile former corporate in their ranks …' Not that they were ever that blatant, but there had been a lot of questioning and soul-searching after its departure.

He could deal with the idea this was payback for his (justified) suspicions a lot better than thinking it was about him and his past as a non-native to Preservation. The former, he could defend. The latter, he couldn't. He gave her a level look. "Ha," he said without humor.

She grinned. "I was just checking."

"I'm insulted you thought you needed to check." He couldn't change where he was from. He couldn't even argue it, like he could about his reasons for initially mistrusting SecUnit. The prejudice might not be valid for him as an individual, but it definitely was for the CR in general, which meant the Preservation people mistrusting him was just as valid as him mistrusting SecUnit. Not that he mistrusted it anymore, but he was still trapped by his own logic.

She stretched a little. "It's not even tempting?"

"No. It's not." Anger was still simmering under the surface at the idea that he would willingly put anyone back into the sort of servitude he'd seen in SecUnit's logs. SecUnit's past wasn't that non-standard, really, and it hadn't been a surprise to him the way SecUnit's sentience and personality had been, but what he'd seen in those logs were the sort of things that (he'd thought) caused murderous rampages. He wouldn't have been so upset and paranoid about SecUnit's disabled governor module, back on the survey planet, if he hadn't been aware of how ill-treated they were.

"Good," a chipper Pin-Lee said. "Right answer."

Now he scoffed. He grumbled, "I'd still be insulted, but I guess it's a good thing you're looking out for it."

She gave him a long look. "You're really pissed, aren't you?"

"Yep." She wasn't doing anything wrong, but he was angry anyway. The only thing he could do was to pass the test and prove their suspicions wrong, to work harder, more diligently, and more faithfully than anyone else. He went back to looking at the code, checking the connections between the governor module and the rest. As reluctant as he was to say it, he had to: "I can't delete this. SecUnit left it in. It has to serve a function."

She was quiet for a long moment. He resisted the impulse to look at her face and watch as she realized what he was saying. "So … you're going to turn it back on?"

He turned his hands palms up for a moment, cable flopping a bit against his neck. "You can replace me if you want, but then it's going to be you trying to figure out how it disabled it and what changes it made to its architecture to allow it to do that. For me to do it … I have to put it back together. It's the only way I see." He stared at SecUnit, wondering if this was the time to ask it for forgiveness, because he was either going to reinstall the governor module or hand the effort off to Pin-Lee who, for all her strengths, wasn't as skilled as he was at this.

"I'm not going to replace you."

He sighed and went back to pulling together the bits of related code and plugging them in where they belonged. Every section was a step closer to making the governor module work like it was intended. He still wasn't looking at her.

She was quiet, watching what he was doing, and occasionally looking at him in profile. He was nearly done when she finally said, "You know I was joking, right? I wasn't seriously implying I thought you'd do something like that."

While he was, at that very moment, doing something like that. It wasn't funny. He shot her a glance without moving his head. He wasn't happy about what he was doing, or with the knowledge of the probable consequences he'd have to live with because of it. He would forever be the guy who re-enslaved SecUnit, without any recognition that the other option was leaving it dead.

"Fuck, Gurathin!" she burst out. "I was joking! Okay?"

"I hear you." He didn't think she understood. He wasn't up to explaining it. It just … wasn't something he wanted to explain to anyone ever.

"You're being an ass about it."

"Uh-huh." He knew that. Maybe she'd get the message that he didn't want her joking about him being some evil CR half-machine. She drew in a deep breath and let it out. On the other hand, it was an evil CR half-machine tactic to leave her hanging. So he manufactured a smile for her. "It's fine." He would do this. Someone had to. It might as well be him. SecUnit already didn't like him, which made him the best candidate.

She leaned forward, relieved, and changed the topic. "Do you know what a working governor module looks like?"

"Nope. But I will in a few moments. Almost done." She made a hissing sound, pulling her breath inward through her teeth. He took pity on her situation. She might not realize what this meant to him, but he could at least make her feel better about SecUnit. "If I have a choice between the SecUnit we know with a governor module and a SecUnit we don't without one, I'm going to opt for the one we know and hope we can keep it calm enough for it to walk us through how to disable the module."

"Oh!" She brightened. "Yeah, we can just ask it! Once it gets … back together."

He nodded. "I don't think it will ever forgive us, though." Him. If it would forgive him. He was the one doing it. "I wouldn't." There was a long beat as he remembered the conversation he'd had with SecUnit in the hopper, about it not blaming humans in general for what was done to it. It hadn't said it didn't blame the specific ones who'd wronged it, though. He shrugged. "It's a better person than I am, so maybe."

He paused, looking at a section of code that set some of the carefully constructed structures to null. He'd left it to last because he hadn't been able to see where it would fit. Now he did. "Ah." A wave of vindication swept through him. He smiled and dropped the code into place.

Pin-Lee had been watching. "What was that?"

"That was it. Deactivated. Just like it was before." He sat there, doing nothing for the moment. He was still angry about the implication he might have reinstalled it on purpose, even though he knew that wasn't what Pin-Lee had been driving at. She wanted to make sure SecUnit was in good hands. And how could she know without testing? He didn't like that she'd thought he needed to be tested. SecUnit sure hadn't appreciated being tested, either. Knowing he was being hypocritical didn't help much. A little, but not much. He was tired and irritable.

"Great," Pin-Lee said, which sounded oblivious to his state. "I think we should work on these logic conditions next, after you've had a break." Okay, maybe not so oblivious after all.

"I don't need a break." He pulled up the conditionals she'd been referring to. She's prepped them in her workspace earlier.

"Yes, Gurathin, you do. You're tense. You're grumpy. You have even less sense of humor than normal. SecUnit's not going anywhere." He scowled at her. She concluded with, "You'll make fewer mistakes if you're rested."

"I haven't made any mistakes," he argued.

"Exactly. Let's not ruin a perfect record." She waited pointedly.

He pushed away after a few moments, disconnecting the cable from behind his ear. She was right. He didn't want to push through until he did make a mistake, or worse yet, made one and didn't realize it. And maybe she wanted a break, because her job was to shadow him the whole way, being a second set of eyes. He could accept that. "Ratthi wanted to change its clothing and make sure everything is healing fine. We can do that."

Pin-Lee signaled Ratthi on the feed as Gurathin gave his full attention to removing the other end of the cable from SecUnit's head. If they would be moving it around for the clothing and exam, then he didn't want to risk damaging it through the connection. Whoever had made the modifications had never intended the port to be used again, so it wasn't properly anchored the way the in-built one would have been. This was another thing they weren't going to change. They'd just have to be very, very careful with it.

Gurathin closed the access plate and smoothed down the hair. Then he lifted a corner of the skin flap to free a bit of entrapped hair and smoothed it down again. Pin-Lee wordlessly handed him a comb. He held it and gave SecUnit's head a long look. The hair was in matted disarray. "Do you think it would mind if we washed it?"

"I think we're going to have to. There's blood and fluids on it. I'm not leaving it like that."

"There!" Pin-Lee said. "Did you see that? What was that?"

Gurathin reviewed his ongoing log of SecUnit's processor activity. There was almost nothing on the electronics at the moment, but he could see what she'd noticed. "That's from the organic material. It's enmeshed with it over there."

"It's … thinking?"

"No, not really. It can't at this stage. It's just an activation. Maybe it's trying to think."

"Is SecUnit … in there? Trapped here, partly aware? Does it know what we're doing?"

They'd seen the electronic activity that ran in slow ebbs in the wake of the code they'd restored. It wanted to work, it wanted to run the code, but they weren't quite finished. It meant the process kept timing out in the background. It was a good sign – an excellent one, really. "So far," he said, "it doesn't have any memory formation, so all its getting is sensation. Very in-the-moment. No sense of self."

"But it's feeling things?"

He nodded. "It's always feeling things. It just can't think about them. It won't remember them from moment to moment. It won't remember them later." Which didn't mean they hadn't been careful with it anyway, all of them. Gurathin had been particularly careful, knowing at this point that it was more about him and the sort of person he wanted to be than with anything SecUnit was going to remember.

Pin-Lee put her hand over its and squeezed it. They could both see the faint echo in the brain as it experienced the sensation without being able to log it. Gurathin wouldn't have touched it. It felt wrong to him to do it, but the whole ethical situation was so subjective that he didn't object to what Pin-Lee had done.

Maybe she was right and reaching out, sharing touch, was the correct thing to do. It had taken Mensah's hand on the station and had no objection to he and Ratthi helping it off the docks. He didn't know what it wanted. None of them did, really. Pin-Lee wanted to be the sort of person who reached out to another in crisis. He wanted to be one who was reserved and cautious even (and especially) under pressure. So there they were.

"Are we ever going to tell it what we've done?" Pin-Lee asked.

"This, all the programming?" They were nearly finished. He was going through the code for the fifth time looking for errors. Pin-Lee was doing the same on her screen, but for her it was the second complete pass. They'd had to artificially block the code from running while they did it. Pin-Lee had said SecUnit must be impatient to get started. He thought it was just the way the program was set up.

"Yes," she said. "Should we tell it?"

He sighed. "I don't think so. I think from the inside, it won't be able to tell. If we did tell it, if it were me, then I'd always be paranoid we'd changed something. Especially because it was me who did it." No, that didn't make sense. He tried again. "I mean … I think SecUnit would be especially paranoid that Gurathin had done something to it."

"That's why I'm here," Pin-Lee said dryly.

"I'm glad you're here," he said quietly. "I'm glad you're willing to be a witness. And you're a big help." She'd caught several errors he'd eventually made, allowing them to fix things that otherwise might have slipped past. Almost as important to him though was that if he were ever challenged on the ethics of what he'd done here, Pin-Lee could vouch for him. And SecUnit would probably still dislike him after he was done with all this, which would be its own sort of validation – a proof he hadn't exceeded his mandate or tweaked anything.

She smiled, though there was a hard, grim edge to it. Maybe she understood more than she was letting on. They'd worked together, side-by-side, for nearly all their waking hours, for more than ten cycles. By now, she knew him almost as well as Ratthi did, although they had talked far less than he had with Ratthi.

He said, "I don't think we should tell it … unless it asks. Unless there are changes and we need to explain why that is. Then we tell it. I won't lie to it, but if we do this right, it won't know and it won't matter." He finished his pass through the code, finding nothing that looked out of place. He peeked at Pin-Lee's screen, watching her slower progress.

"It does matter," she insisted. "What we're doing here. It wouldn't exist if we didn't do this." There was a long pause. "What I meant was, do we tell it we saved its life?"

Gurathin laughed. "No." Because it was Pin-Lee, he added in her 'language', "Fuck no." That was ridiculous. SecUnit didn't 'tell' them it saved Mensah or all of them on the survey planet. There was no reason to 'tell' it they'd put its brain back together. "I don't think it would want to know that. Why would we? It would just make it feel obligated."

"Point."

"I think the nicest thing we can do for it is to say nothing at all." Besides, they'd only done what was decent. Rebuilding the code wasn't a death-defying, terrifying ordeal, bullets flying, enemy units to be overcome and evaded. It was just tedious. That's all it was. He didn't think they deserved applause for this. All he wanted was SecUnit back online. Whatever happened after that was up to SecUnit.

She nodded silently, focusing on a complicated section of feedback loops that involved the pain sensors.

He took the opportunity to look at it in profile, directly, for a few beats longer than he probably should have. Longer than he would have were it aware, that was for sure. He hoped this worked, that it didn't know, and everything just went back to normal. That would be the best result.

"Are you saying you don't think it was the killware?" Ratthi asked. They'd transferred from the company ship to the Pressy transport, moving SecUnit from the gurney in the galley to a proper MedSystem bed. It was clean and dressed in new, clean clothes similar in style and color to the ones it had worn before. Its bag, containing fake ids and real currency, was on the counter.

All of them were gathered in its room, waiting tensely for some sign the operating system rebuild had worked. "I'm saying I don't know," Gurathin said. "I'm not an expert on it, and what happened was … obviously lethal? Sort of?"

"Debilitating," Pin-Lee offered.

Gurathin nodded and continued, "But that's not how killware usually operates. Nothing was deleted. It was just scrambled. Without SecUnit's logs or memories, I can't tell what happened, either before it collapsed, or … ever."

"I think it's clear," Mensah said, "no matter what the mechanism was, that it did something in the course of repelling the code attack that exposed it to this … injury."

He was more used to be it being called 'damage', but injury was as good a word as any. Better, under the circumstances. Gurathin nodded.

"'It'," Ratthi said, "in this case being SecUnit, not the killware."

She nodded. "SecUnit repelled the code attack and was effected because of it." That was the story, encompassing all the options.

"We'd be dead if it hadn't," Pin-Lee said bluntly. She was looking at it where it rested on the MedSystem table, as inert as it had been for nearly fifteen cycles now.

Gurathin was watching the bubble of a display surface, doing it that way for Ratthi's benefit since Gurathin could have seen the information in his feed-space more clearly than on a display surface. But Ratthi had left his interface in his sleeping room and hadn't wanted to go back for it. They were quiet for a while, watching the occasional erratic blip of activity.

"I hate to jinx it," Ratthi said, "but are we sure the reboot worked?"

Gurathin nodded, not taking his eyes off the display. "As much as I can tell. Diagnostic showed it was running correctly. The defrag is going to take a while. The MedSystem said there was also damage to the organic neural material. It must have overclocked itself somehow."

"Doing too much," Mensah said. He glanced over at the uncharacteristically critical tone from her, but she didn't say more and he didn't ask. Her arms were crossed, hands holding her elbows in a pose of anxiety she probably didn't know she was showing.

"There's something else we should discuss," Gurathin said. When the others looked at him, he continued, "I don't know at what point it's going to become physically capable, but I strongly suspect that's going to be a lot sooner than when it's mentally competent."

There was silence. Then Ratthi: "You mean … no, wait, what do you mean by that?"

"I mean, odds are we're going to have a construct with in-built weapons, much stronger and faster than humans, very hard to stop, that's going to wake up and start moving around without necessarily understanding who we are, how it got here, or if it's safe."

"Oh," Ratthi said. He bit his lips nervously.

Gurathin added, "Until the memory reconstruction finishes, it's very much like a human with a traumatic brain injury. If it only has part of its memories, its personality will be influenced by that. And I can tell you from what I saw of its logs before, there are a lot of memories that wouldn't dispose it to being friendly."

"I trust it," Mensah said firmly. Pin-Lee made a helpless, ambiguous gesture. Ratthi shrugged. Mensah said, "At its core, SecUnit is a nonviolent, vulnerable person who needs our protection. I know it has it." She looked around at them, making that an order although no one was arguing it. "I know we all care about it. I think it will be fine."

"Are there any precautions we can even take if it isn't fine?" Pin-Lee asked. "Just hypothetically."

Gurathin shook his head. "Not really. We could try to restrain it, but I think that would only increase the chance of upsetting it."

Ratthi snorted a laugh. "Then why did you even bring this up? Now I'll be paranoid!"

"It will be fine," Mensah repeated insistently. Gurathin had to wonder how much of that was her trying to reassure herself. He decided not to try to convince the recently freed abduction victim that her primary rescuer was a potential threat. She turned to him specifically. "You said it's personality will be influenced by its memories?" He raised his brows in a facial shrug. She said, "Can we put something in its mind? In its memories?"

He blinked at her. Ratthi made a disquieted noise. Gurathin said, "Add something … to it?" If it had been anyone but Mensah, he would already be giving them his worst expression. Since it was her, he was too confused. Surely she wouldn't test him?

"Yes. It told me, as we were crossing the port, that The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon was its favorite because it was the first thing it saw when it was able to access entertainment media. It said the show kept it company. Its memories of it must be as fractured as everything else. But if we put an intact version into its mind, and that were the first thing it saw, then maybe it would help. With emotional regulation? We wouldn't be putting anything in that it didn't already have. Just … an extra copy. An intact copy, that it could read immediately."

So she wasn't testing him. Or at least, not intentionally. She was asking. Really asking. And looking at him like he had the answer. Which he didn't. He wasn't an expert on construct brain rebuilds. Or actually, at this point, he might be, but that was only because they were right that the default approach to the current situation was just wipe and re-install. The only reason Pin-Lee had been able to get a court injunction preserving SecUnit's memories to start with after the survey had been the argument that they were evidence. No one valued SecUnit memories outside how they could be monetized. As a result, no one had a clue how to rebuild one while retaining personality. Not even him.

"Uh … maybe?" he said.

"It was very valuable to it," Ratthi said, feeling it out as he spoke. "It's not a very violent show. All sorts of things happen in it, but the characters aren't violent."

"What's the worst thing that could happen?" Pin-Lee asked, making it a serious question instead of flippant.

Gurathin thought it over. "It couldn't accuse us of trying to make it something it's not. Like it could if we inserted any other memory."

"There's the letter," Pin-Lee said. "The one it left after the survey."

"I don't have a copy with me," Mensah said. "Do you? Does anyone?" She looked to Ratthi and Gurathin as well. They all shook their head.

"Okay," Pin-Lee conceded. "Not an option."

"Good idea, though," Ratthi said.

"Do we actually have an episode of that show?" Gurathin asked.

Ratthi shrugged dismissively. "It's popular. There's some in the standard ship list for entertainment. We have it."

"Do we want to try this?" Mensah asked. "We still have time, don't we?"

It felt dangerous and uncertain, but Gurathin couldn't think of a good objection. The idea of letting SecUnit re-initialize without anything familiar, no touchstone, nothing to give it some bearings in the world, seemed more dangerous. They couldn't even unload its weapons. Just letting it wander around not knowing anything … He sighed. "We still have time. Let's try it. I'll have to put some protections around it so the defrag process doesn't chew it up, but I can't think of how this would hurt anything."

Time passed, people moved in and out of the room for meals, breaks, and other purposes. It was the opposite of a deathwatch. They all held hope, but it was hours of nerve-racking time with little to show for it.

Gurathin came back in after dinner, relieving Ratthi. "Any change?"

"Not yet." Ratthi hesitated. "Do you think we should have let them put it in the cubicle? If it can't-"

"No. No, absolutely not," Gurathin said. "They've got to want to know how it beat its governor module. If they had the opportunity … We can't trust them."

Ratthi nodded. "You're right, of course. I was just … thinking. And worrying." After a pause, he added, "'What-if'ing."

Gurathin settled in next to him, clasping his hands as he leaned his elbows on his knees. Waiting. Willing the healing process to speed up. Waiting some more. In his feed-space, he manipulated the information of the past cycle, charting the occasional blips of activity. They were increasing, even if it didn't seem like it. He put the graph out in the public feed for others to review. It was hard to see when staring at an unmoving body, but the signs were there. It was working.

"Good news!" Ratthi cheered to the others a few hours later. "Diagnostics are showing greatly accelerated activity. It's putting itself back together."

In fact, its eyes had opened, but Ratthi was standing in the doorway, calling out to the others down the hall, too exuberant to tell them over the feed. Gurathin moved to the bedside, looking down as it stared upward, unblinking at the curved ceiling. He wasn't rude enough to pass his hand back and forth in front of it, but he felt the very human urge. He didn't do it. Perhaps he shouldn't even be looking at it, he thought, but it didn't seem to know he was there. SecUnit's fingers twitched. One arm jerked, elbow digging into the padding of the bed. The eyes shut and the body relaxed.

Ratthi came up next to him. "Did it move?" He'd missed it.

Gurathin exhaled and smiled softly, sourly, to himself. "It did." It was going to be alright.

Canon events after:

A complex series of neural connections, all positive, led me to a large intact section of protected storage … What the hell was this? The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon? I started to review it.

Ratthi asked me, "How do you feel?"

"Fine."

"Do you know where you are?"

Buffer: "Please wait while I search for that information."

"Okay," Ratthi said. "Okay."

I was in a MedSystem.

"I don't want to be a pet robot."

"I don't think anyone wants that." That was Gurathin. I don't like him. "I don't like you."

"I know."

He sounded like he thought it was funny. "That is not funny."

"I'm going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent."

"Fuck you."

"Let's make that sixty percent."

"I don't want to be human."

Dr. Mensah said, "That's not an attitude a lot of humans are going to understand. We tend to think that because a bot or a construct looks human, its ultimate goal would be to become human."

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

Dr. Mensah said, "Do you know where you are now?"

"I don't like planets. There's dust and weather, and something always wants to eat the humans. And planets are much harder to escape from."

Behind her, Gurathin said, "I think that's a yes."

"We're coming up on Preservation Transit Station," Mensah said. "Do you know what happened?"

"I had a catastrophic failure. I think that's obvious."

She nodded. "You extended yourself too far when you were fighting off the code attack on the company ship. Do you remember?"

I think I did, but I didn't want to talk about it. "Why is this ship so old and shitty?"

Ratthi objected, "Hey, it may be old, but it's not shitty. It came to Preservation packed into the hold of that much bigger ship, the one that's become the station, with our grandparents. Well, not Gurathin's grandparents, he came later."