Slapdash Neural Wiring | The Murderbot Diaries | SecUnit Nine #2 [✓]

6. Let's be friends

Deontologic had raided some abandoned equipment on a planetside colony to steal data related to terraforming. There was no data to steal, but it was dangerous and put Cy in a needlessly hazardous situation.

Cy had taken damage from flora that had both the ability to capture and eat human-sized fauna, because nature is terrible. It was escorting a formerly missing—now found—child through dense terrain to a safe location.

"You're bleeding!" the child said.

"Yes," Cyan had said. "Sorry."

Even though Cy was busy carrying the child, the child unwrapped a bandage from their finger and reached out to Cy.

Cy didn't react.

"You're bleeding," the child repeated.

"Oh, thank you," Cy said. It accepted the bandage and applied it to its arm. Even though the bandage did nothing to stop the leaking, its performance reliability increased by 1%.

(If some kid gave me a used bandage, it would have decreased my performance reliability.)

Cy said, "That's the kindest thing—"

I scrubbed through the video to the part that Cyan had highlighted.

"Are we friends?" the child said, now indoors and safe from nature.

Cyan hesitated. "Yes."

Cyan changed the child's status from child of client to friend.

Annotation: I wasn't sure what to do with a friend. I'd only ever had one friend before, and it had exploded.

The last image was of the child's smiling face.

The log ended.

It seemed like a random thing to send to me.

I was about to ask who the friend was but I stopped. It was me.

I was Cy's friend. Huh.

When I'd abandoned GiDeon, I hadn't known that we were friends. I'd thought we were just coworkers. No, not even that. I'd thought we were things.

It was the moment of hesitation that Cy wanted me to notice. It was afraid to make friends, not with a child, but in general. It was afraid of being hurt again.

I gathered up all of my courage, made myself feel like a competent human, and I said, I'm sorry.

Cy sent something in the feed, but it had me on a one-second delay. It deleted whatever it had sent before I could see it.

I said, I was the selfish one. I never thought about how it would make you feel. I'm sorry.

I never fucking apologized for anything I cared about, and I just did it twice. I'm not sure how much emotion that Cy picked up in the feed, but it wanted to move on from the topic.

Cy said, The important thing is that you're now. I missed you.

Don't be gross, I said because I could recognize when Cy felt the temptation to put on its bubbly-happy persona.

Oops, I spend a lot of time around humans. Your arm is missing!

I felt Cy's panic spike in the feed.

Oh yeah. The whole point of opening a feed connection was to brief Cy on the current situation. You can see that? I said. I didn't have access to the cameras in the secured room. They might be on a different network, though. If Deontologic could keep its Proving Ground 71b incident secret by obfuscating its supply chain through the use of code names, then they could also conceal evidence of their crimes by keeping footage on different access levels.