Искусственное состояние

Armor doesn’t have pockets, so score one for ordinary human clothing.

As a SecUnit, I had the responsibility for my clients’ safety but no authority to do anything other than make suggestions, and try to use the company regulations inbuilt in a SecSystem to override the humans’ suicidal stupidity and homicidal impulses.

I wasn’t sure why it had such an impact on them. Maybe I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Maybe it was the two murder attempts.

I was looking at a sexbot.
That is not the official designation, ART said.
The official designation is ComfortUnit but everybody knows what that means.

I was used to having a HubSystem and a SecSystem for backup and ART would be taking their place. (Without the part where those two systems were partly designed to rat me out to the company and trigger punishment through the governor module. ART’s freedom to weigh in on everything I did was punishment enough.)

Part of my job as a SecUnit was to give clients advice when they asked for it, as I was theoretically the one with all the information on security. Not that a lot of them had asked for it, or had listened to me. Not that I’m bitter about that, or anything.

You would think a SecUnit who had been shot to pieces multiple times, blown up, memory purged, and once partially dismantled by accident wouldn’t be on the verge of panic under these circumstances. You’d be wrong.

I said, “We arranged to meet. I’m Eden, the security consultant.” Right, so, it was the name of one of the characters in Sanctuary Moon. You probably aren’t surprised by that.

I put on my best neutral expression, the one I used when the extra download activity had been detected and the deployment center’s supervisor was blaming the human techs for it.

It will be simple, ART insisted. I’ll assist you.
Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.

I didn’t have any parts related to sex and I liked it that way. I had seen humans have sex on the entertainment feed and on my contracts, when I had been required to record everything the clients said and did. No, thank you, no. No.

The whole idea of constructs is that we look human, so we don’t make the clients uncomfortable with our appearance. (I could have told the company that the fact that SecUnits are terrifying killing machines does, in fact, make humans nervous regardless of what we look like, but nobody listens to me.)

I liked humans, I liked watching them on the entertainment feed, where they couldn’t interact with me. Where it was safe. For me and for them.

For my entire existence, at least the parts I could remember, I had done nothing but accept the inevitable. I was tired of it.

But there weren’t any depictions of SecUnits in books, either. I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.

The only SecUnits in entertainment media were rogues, out to kill all humans because they forgot who built the repair cubicles, I guess. In some of the worst shows, SecUnits would sometimes have sex with the human characters. This was weirdly inaccurate and also anatomically complicated.

It’s not supposed to be realistic. It’s a story, not a documentary.

I wanted to keep me the way I was.

I could have lasted on the minimal life support that was all that was provided when no people were aboard, but the transport had upped it a little. I thought that was nice of it.

I was really looking forward to the isolation.