So that was how I was alone in the universe, in a dark container full of an unidentified dangerous powder, with no one else for company.

(Yeah, I tried not to think about packing myself in an enclosed space with the mutagenic powder too much just to obscure my transponder. I didn't know what Inhalation Hazard was, exactly, because the chem IDs were all proprietary, but the intact packs were encased in multiple layers of packaging, so even with Crypsis's door open, the powder wouldn't harm me in the near-term. Theoretically. And the other chems were liquids or had properties that were even worse than mutagenicity, so it was another calculated risk.)

Well, maybe there wasn't literally no one in the cargo hold. Cyan could be in the cargo hold with me—I didn't know for sure yet.

I flipped through surveillance footage but I didn't see any ComfortUnits in private quarters, walking around halls, or anything. It raised the probability that Cyan was 1. in the cargo hold with me, or 2. in the decommissioned equipment room lockers. Or maybe 3. not aboard Moiety at all, but I'd consider that if the time came.

I had to wait until there weren't any humans around to catch me being weird. There was a shift rotation scheduled soon, which would be my opportunity to be weird and look for a (discarded?) ComfortUnit that didn't want to be here.

So now I just had to wait.

I thought about how if everything in my plan went sideways, I could still hide inside the cloaked vehicle to obscure my stupid ass transponder.

Alone time was excellent because I finally had enough time and quiet to listen to Mariroko's Out of Pocket album the way that the artist had intended.

It was bad news because my brain decided that quiet time for replaying my worst memories in horrifying detail. Bad thoughts were familiar, but bad thoughts with this intensity had never happened before.

I'd offloaded the recordings that would fact-check my organic memory to a secure server and deleted the copies in my head. Maybe I'd wanted to forget, but it wasn't that easy, apparently. I had a feeling that my brain was exaggerating how badly the kidnapped humans at Proving Ground 71b had convulsed to death as toxic gasses permeated through their safety gear, while I stood motionless—

Anyway, I'd come back to a subsidiary of GiDeon to steal Cyan from the company.

Yes, it was a stupid thing to do. But I am stupid, so.

~~~

[Footnote 3: You may wonder why an agrochem/ chemical weapons corporation has ComfortUnits.

(Oh, that's not what you were wondering? Well, fuck you, this is what I want to talk about.)

GiDeon used ComfortUnits to steal proprietary information to cut R&D costs when, you know, it was deemed too dangerous to send humans. Some companies, like Barish-Estranza, realized that ComfortUnits were engaged in corporate espionage. They supplied suspected spies with false information in order to waste company time and resources on unachievable synthetic routes. Sometimes, though, the red herrings were accidentally productive. B-E slipped falsified data into GiDeon's grubby hands about a wholly new chemical weapon that all the best researchers at the time thought would be impossible. GiDeon, of course, made Nervous Breakdown anyway, because we had none of the best researchers.

/End of footnote 3.]

~~~

In order for humans to like me, I had to be nothing like myself. I'd made contacts here because the cargo ship's crew was small, so I wouldn't be able to blend into a crowd. But I had based all of my different characters—Anghen, Jin, and Itsyu—on an existing character that I'd played during a short-term assignment at Barish-Estranza, with a couple of traits changed to appeal to my new marks. Now that I was back at a GiDeon company, I wondered if that had been a mistake. I wondered if they would notice one of their own pretending to be one of their own fake personalities.

(My long-term assignment was pretending to be a B-E SecUnit.) (I pretended to be a SecUnit that data mined for B-E but I was passing the real information to my handler at GiDeon and fictitious data to B-E. I didn't have a transponder in my brain at the time. It would have given me away.) (Only constructs that GiDeon suspected would one day try to escape and live among humans by using the skills we'd learned at the corporation got the transponder. I digress.)

(You may notice I digress a lot.)

My most important mark was Mandali, who had partial ownership over Cyan. The owner was technically Deontologic but Mandali would at least know where Cyan was stored. I'd already initiated contact with her through some kind of weird social feed thing that humans used for meeting new humans. (I know, I was asking for another fake romance scenario. But Moiety had listed "damaged equipment" for scrap, so it was an emergency and it was the only way for me to contact her.)

There was the shift rotation. I watched the humans de-gown for the end of their shift. I pressed myself out of the cloaked vehicle. I brought my bag with me but I left the drones inside the vehicle because I wouldn't need them.

I stood at the edge of the container and got the container door open wide enough for me to squeeze out. I climbed my way to the top of the stack and stayed there.

I was about eighty percent ready. I couldn't open portals, but I'd coded the portal device to myself so only I could enter coordinates. If someone else were to steal the portal device, it would open my coordinates, not theirs. It was a bug that I hadn't fixed yet. (Ideally no one would be able to open portals except for me.) (Ideally no alarms would sound, either.) There were a lot of eighty percent complete things like that.

So I wasn't ready, but I moved Plan B-0, Phase 2 down anyway. No, wait, did I move the plan up? back? I moved it sooner, is what I mean.

I waited until there were no humans in the cargo area. I didn't have to wait long. Cargo ships, including Moiety, employed as few humans as possible. (The few humans that they did employ were stressed and sleep-deprived.) (Most cargo vessels were unmanned, but there were humans who had to wrangle bots to make sure they didn't accidentally blow up all of the cargo. GiDeon thought cargo was more valuable than contracted laborers.)

I squeezed myself along the ceiling—holy hell, Nine, make sure there's enough room next time—and I peeked at the grated floor below me. It was a lot higher up than it looked in the surveillance footage. I could make the jump without hurting myself, but I wasn't too fond of throwing myself from tall places.

I had a bag from Yimenes secured to my torso. I had Code Breaker in my left palm, my lock picks in my right arm, my portal device on my chest (which I promised myself I wouldn't use, but you know, it was a comfort thing), and I had a jury-rigged part of Crypsis nav system that would be a signal device to reveal Cy's transponder. I'd tested it on myself so I knew it would work for Cy. In theory.

My first attempt to leap down aborted when some kind of last-moment organic instinct kicked in and made me grab the edge. I dangled from the precipice.

I knew it was a safe distance to jump down (my calculations are good even if my judgment isn't) but my stupid organic brain thought I was going to die.

I took a few moments to compose myself. I closed my organic eyes and I pushed off the stack and hurtled down. I opened my eyes. I fell for a subjective forever but I landed feet first.

I rolled to protect the shoulder bag. I shoved to my feet. My landing was a little wobbly, hardly something an acrobat would be proud of, but I was just glad I hadn't damaged myself.

The grated metal floor thrummed with the engine of the enormous ship. Mysterious green splash stains pockmarked the walls. The air was heavy with the stench of chems. I didn't see Cy connected to the feed, so I used my jury-rigged nav system/signal device to make its transponder passively send back the characteristic ComfortUnit (7) signal.

I picked the lock on someone's locker so that I could take their Deontologic coveralls. (Sorry, John.)

I worked my way through the entire cargo bay. Humans coming in for their next shift didn't do a double-take or wonder why a SecUnit was wandering around with a weird jury-rigged signal device in its hands. No one Good.me much attention at all. Good.

I walked around the entire cargo bay but I received no signal. I walked around again, more carefully this time, and made sure to point it at every place a ComfortUnit might have been shoved into a container. Still nothing.

I had done a lot of walking around so I stopped to think. It could be packed too deeply inside the containers to receive a response. Maybe it wasn't being transported as cargo in the same place that cargo had just been loaded. It had already been listed on the manifest as cargo, so it could be in a different sector of the ship. Also Moiety used an older design; it was a wheel-shaped thing that spun around a literal HubSystem to generate the feeling of gravity.

I recalibrated the signal to take the spinning motion into account.

There were four doors on two deck levels. I waved the signal device, not expecting anything.

I got a weak signal matching Cyan's.

The metallic cargo bay door was locked. The company map of the locked area showed that it contained proprietary and sensitive cargo, but the map was so vague that it might as well have been blank.

In order to rescue the Cyan, I needed to get through that door.

~~~

A/N: Thank you for reading! Votes and comments are appreciated.