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Ratthi thought it would be a great idea—he said that he knew I liked serials, and that I’d complained a lot about the portrayal of SecUnits in them. I didn’t think I had complained that much, but running through my logs it turned out that I had complained about that in his presence 6 times, which I didn’t think was a lot, really, when accounting for just how many serials I had watched with ridiculous portrayals of SecUnits.
Pin-Lee was skeptical, but said if I chose to go for it she’d help go over my contracts. I’d never had a contract where I wasn’t the thing being contracted. It was weird. I said maybe.
Dr. Mensah gently suggested that it could be a more comfortable way to engage in Preservation society, if that’s what I wanted.
Gurathin snorted and said it would just make me miserable and I knew it.
So of course after that I had to at least meet with the production agent.
I quickly regretted this, as anyone with half a brain could have guessed. I have about half of a human brain by mass in the organic parts of my head, so that could be my defense, if anyone asks. I however have much more processing power and a much better brain than any human, so I will not actually use that defense, if anyone asks. But because I have enough processing power to spare, as the augmented human media production agent Mahara sat across the table in the neat conference room and cheerfully outlined her idea for a media serial that starred a heroic SecUnit inspired by my experiences, I made sure to section off a portion of my processing dedicated just to cursing at myself, and also Gurathin.
“It will be a limited series,” she chatted on, excitedly, “about this SecUnit travelling the systems, doing all sorts of traditional protagonist things, you know, solving crimes and helping people, and the season finale will have this SecUnit staging a heroic rescue on a Corporation Rim station—which I would so love your perspective on, nutmeg, so we can make it more real! Though of course I don’t mean to pry. Dr. Mensah informed me that you like your privacy.”
I didn’t like cute terms of endearment. I didn’t like that Dr. Mensah had talked about me. I didn’t like that this agent had to go through Dr. Mensah at all, because she was my guardian, the human in charge of me now. I didn’t like that my drones spread across the hallway outside showed that there were humans walking around so bolting out of the room would cause a scene. I didn’t like this.
Maybe Mahara didn’t notice my stiff discomfort, or maybe she assumed it was a natural SecUnit thing. She kept talking. “If you’re interested, and only if you’re interested of course, you should come over to my house for dinner some night and we can hash out details! What you want included, what you’d like to see, what you think of my pitch—”
“I don’t want to do that,” I said. I probably could have come up with something else to say if I had spent a few more milliseconds, but my threat assessment was climbing and that was the only thing running through my brain at the moment.
“Oh?” She blinked behind her glasses, and peered at me, and I think it was the first time she saw me, really, a deeply uncomfortable construct that was not human and would not react like she was used to humans on Preservation reacting. I wanted to leave. I wanted to leave very fast.
I comforted myself a little bit with the knowledge that I could leave, any moment, if I really wanted to. The energy weapons in my arms could shoot a hole through the light organic wall in 1.3 seconds and I could leave. And I did really want to. But I didn’t want to see that quiet disappointment in Dr. Mensah’s eyes that she tried so hard to hold back, and I didn’t want to prove Gurathin right, and I didn’t want Mahara putting my panicked bolting from the room into a media serial. So I stood there, a very authentic and very uncomfortable SecUnit.
“I don’t eat,” I said, “I don’t like being in other people’s houses, and I don’t want to meet any of your marital partners in a large room with lots of people.”
“Oh,” Mahara said, “oh, don’t worry about that, nutmeg, I don’t have any marital partners. I was going to invite my best friend over, we eat dinner together most nights, but that won’t be a concern.”
“I also don’t want to be called any cute names,” I said. There. My restrictions laid out. Then, after what seemed like an excruciating half hour but was objectively only an excruciating 3.8 seconds of her continuing to look at me, I added, cautiously, “You live by yourself? No other people in your house?”
“It’s part of a complex, just one house around the plazita, so it hardly feels like living by myself, really, but I like my own space,” Mahara said. “I’ve heard you do too, don’t you? You can relate!” She laughed lightly; assessing the tone of her voice and the cadence of her laugh against many, many hours of recordings of people being mocking or cruel, it didn’t sound mocking or cruel at all. My processors whirred and my threat assessment went down by 2%.
“Okay,” I said, still cautious not only despite but because of her apparent friendliness, “what kind of things are in the pitch that you’ll want to discuss?” I didn’t want to talk to a strange human any longer than I had to. Couldn’t she give the pitch here? Or better, put together a feed package and send it over to me? I didn’t know how much she knew—did she know about ART? I didn’t really want to tell her about ART. That was private. Or Miki? I didn’t want to talk about Miki. And the massacre on RaviHyral, the deaths under the Company—she did not need to know about that. I would not talk about that. My performance reliability started dropping even thinking about talking to her about that. I was sure she’d be more interested in Preservation-related politics anyway, but I didn’t really know how much I had to say about Preservation. I guess she’d probably make things up; it was a fictionalized serial, after all. She would probably invent Corporation Rim company crimes for the SecUnit-that-was-totally-not-me to solve, that’s what serial writers did. Or…
A horrible thought struck me and my performance reliability tanked. “The pitch doesn’t have any romance subplot, does it?”
She had been taking notes in the feed, and her eyes unglazed and snapped back to attention on me. “Do you want there to be?”
“No,” I said, as emphatically as a human mouth can manage.
“Understood! Understood,” she said, her eyes widening at my expression (probably horror) and then, when I made my face go solidly neutral-expression again, she continued, “No romance subplots for the SecUnit character. I understand fully and agree fully. There are so many other things that would free up script space for us to explore, and I wish more movies and serials would do that.” She grinned in a way I guess she thought was soothing. “Aren’t you a—” and I saw her stumble, saw her face twitch as she scrambled for the right word— “a person after my own heart!”
I didn’t know how I felt being called a “person” by an augmented human I didn’t know. I didn’t know how I felt about the .9 seconds it took her to decide that was the right word. I considered blasting a hole in the wall and leaving again.
But… she was accommodating. I hacked into her feed a little bit, even though I wasn’t supposed to, just to see what she was looking at, and she was keeping notes of our conversation that included things like Reduce dialogue—it doesn’t like to talk much—voiceover? and No romance plot! Good. She had Bharadwaj’s documentary in a linked file, SecUnit specs from the Company site, and lists of potential actors to tap for different parts, none of which seemed 1:1 for anyone I knew. It wasn’t critical. She seemed excited.
So I said, “Why do you want to make a serial about a SecUnit, anyway?”
“People are fascinated by your story, nu— Mx. SecUnit,” Mahara said. “The drama! The heroism! And there’s never been a serial with a SecUnit as the star character before—” (Yeah. Trust me. I knew.) “—and the few movies and shorts that have, seem woefully… inapplicable to your situation.”
I think I knew what she was talking about, and yeah, The Killer Finds Love was insulting garbage and that’s not just me, everyone thought so. Many reviews, in fact, expressed mockery of the idea of a human falling in love with a SecUnit. I had the same mockery for a different reason.
“So I thought,” Mahara continued, after I kept looking at her and didn’t say anything because I was pulling up The Killer Finds Love on my feed to remind myself that yep, I hated it, “I would come to you, get your thoughts on what would make a good serial that you’d like to see about a SecUnit. It’s inspired by you, so you would know best what would be good to include and what wouldn’t, and what you do and don’t want in it.”
It still shocked me that people on Preservation cared about that kind of thing. About consulting and accuracy and permission. It was a weird feeling. Everything on Preservation was still a weird feeling.
I said, still cautious because when am I not, “So what do you want me to look over?”
“Well,” Mahara said, “I thought you could come over and we could hash out an outline, but, hmm. You don’t want to come over. Go for a walk in a park, then?”
“I don’t like being outside,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true but was mostly true.
“What do you like?”
I wished on some irrational and likely organic level that she was getting testy and impatient with me; that I knew how to deal with, and that I wouldn’t have to regret in any way walking away. But by her face and her voice, she seemed curious. Like she wanted to work with me. Why was she being so patient? She didn’t know me! This was weird! Preservation people were all so weird!
“I like watching media,” I said.
“I’m augmented,” she offered, which maybe wasn’t immediately obvious to humans but had been immediately obvious to me, “so maybe we could… be in different rooms, and watch media together, and you can tell me what things you like and what you don’t like in the media I have in mind as an inspiration, and I we can work from there?”
Would you look at that, a good suggestion. I didn’t know humans or augmented humans were capable of those. My performance reliability started creeping back up as I thought about watching media and even giving my opinions on it. I had opinions on all of it, naturally, but it would be a weird feeling actually saying so to an augmented human.
But there was something appealing about being able to tell an actual media production agent what was good and what was bad in media, so the first SecUnit serial would come out as something I actually wanted to watch.
And, it was embarrassing to admit it, but as long as it was fictionalized enough (and fictionalized in a non-obnoxious way)… I did want to watch it.
“That works,” I said.
Mahara beamed. “I can’t wait to work with you.”
That was the first time anyone had ever expressed that sentiment while knowing full well I was a SecUnit.
Living on Preservation was giving me all sorts of experiences I didn’t know how to feel about.