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.

~~~

[Foonote 7: I mean, supply chain obfuscation is one factor that contributes to how they've never been caught deploying chemical weapons.

The other factor is that other companies assume that no corporation would be stupid and suicidal enough to stockpile compounds that are toxic, corrosive, flammable, and unstable. Much less deploy weapons that are easily defeated by wind.

People outside the company have no idea that Deontologic makes chemical weapons at all. A few people inside the company (who pay attention/need to) know that Deontologic manufactures chemical weapons, but the scale is downplayed because they think it's part of a graduated "deterrence" strategy or something. Even fewer (alive) people know that Deontologic actually used their weapons.

Deontologic is making chemical weapons in secret, actually, so they are paranoid that everyone else is, too. They think that if they don't synthesize, stockpile, and develop increasingly dangerous chemicals, then someone else will. And their ag products are so profitable that there's no motivation to stop.

/End of Foonote 7.]

~~~

Never mind, Cyan sent. It didn't think I could do anything about my arm, either.

I picked through the file Cy had sent me. Something about it was weird: it had overwritten something. I ran some old code I had lying around to see what had been overwritten.

I finished my brief and asked, What happened to your eyes?

I was in an accident.

I almost offered to help Cy regrow its eyes but I stopped myself.

I hated humans who gave advice to me that could be summed up as "You should be more like me" because they thought that being "human" "enough" would somehow make me better at stealing proprietary data. But I did my job just fine without their stupid condescending suggestions. If Cy decided to grow its eyes, that was its own business.

Cy was hiding something and was touchy about its eyes. Fair enough. I wondered if I could give it some of my drones. It wasn't like seeing because there weren't any cameras, it was almost better because of the sensors, but then I didn't want to give a ComfortUnit any weapons.

Cy said, "The humans were trying to help me—"

While Cyan talked I cross-referenced its story with metadata in SecSystem, which mined humans' activity for advertising purposes.

Forty hours ago, Supervisor Corey Bailer had dragged Cy by its hair into the cargo area. That would have been right before it'd shut down. Oh, not good. There was never a reason to drag a ComfortUnit like that. Just to show how awful he was, he hit Cyan across the face before they both disappeared into the secured area. Cyan briefly made eye contact with the camera, which maybe was accidental, but maybe it wasn't accidental.

Thirty minutes later, Supervisor Bailer had exited the secured area, trailed by two unidentified humans, and Cyan did not.

Oh.

I determined that Supervisor Bailer had most likely performed the actions out of malice. I didn't share the surveillance footage, but I pushed my conclusion toward Cyan and it frowned. Our connection went silent for the first time.

While Cy thought about its response, my code had finished recovering as much of the file as it could. Most of the data was corrupted, but I could make out parts of a phantom file. It looked like a diary entry, almost, but it made no sense at all.

I look across the open mall and I make eye contact with the rogue. The face is familiar.

It's a flash: I am at Ganaka Pit. I am dying.

The vision disappears.

Maybe it was a momentary hallucination. Tlacey says I am always having those.

I wondered if it was a memory created and overwritten by Cy or if it was the result of a sloppy memory purge. (The only thing worse than a purge is having someone else's memories in your head. Not that I would know. All my memories are my own.) (I think.)

"I'm not sure," Cyan said out loud. "It could be a misunderstanding."

"Cyan," I said. "I know you like your humans. You feel a connection with them. But they don't feel the same way about you."

"But—"

"They are not your friends."

"Yes, they are."

"What makes you think they're your friends?"

"Well," Cy said. "They're nice to me."

I kept my sigh internal.

(Sometimes I gave the impression that I hated all humans. Which was true. I did hate all humans, except for the ones who were nice to me and the ones I worked with at GiDeon. And the humans who didn't stop me when they knew I wanted to leave GiDeon? I didn't hate them, either.)

I said, "Clients aren't friends."

Cy crossed its arms. "I know you hate humans, but it blinds you to possible alternatives."

This time I didn't keep my sigh internal. "Like what?"

"Like maybe they were trying to help."

I didn't want to tell Cy how I knew it was lying. I felt guilty, like I'd invaded its privacy to dismantle the story Cyan told itself about itself. I felt guilty even though we both knew the company always invaded everyone's privacy and sent the surveillance data to giant creepy server warehouses, just in case a new algorithm came along that was better for data mining.

I didn't want to upset Cy any more than I already had by resurrecting myself from the dead. Anyway I had other things to worry about. Like Mandali, who was still inside MedSystem and now fully healed.

I stood up and offered my good hand to Cy. I said, "We don't leave port for a few minutes. I'm ready to leave. Will you come with me?"

Cy stared at me with its empty sockets.

What was wrong?

Oh, I'd just assumed Cy needed to be rescued.

I wanted to kick myself. Cy thought that I was stupid and condescending.

I caught a suspicious signal on the wavelength I used for receiving instructions, but it wasn't encoded for a SecUnit.

A lifter bot that had been sitting quietly in the corner caught my attention. It powered on, which it had no reason to do. Unless it was going to crack my skull open.

I leapt out of its way. Cyan dove under cover next to the medical suite.

The lifter bot barreled past me, knocking me in the shins. I tumbled but at least I hadn't been crushed. Parts of the coveralls I'd stolen caught and tore on the seams of the grated floor. My broken arm bit into my back as I tumbled. It hurt pretty badly, but Cyan was safe.

Since I didn't have access to the mysterious camera system that Cyan used, I called out to my bulky drones with optional chemical weapons capabilities. They had no cameras but they had sensors. I felt them exit the cargo container, then I let them switch to autonomous navigation. They would render assistance once they navigated through the air filtration system. I backburnered the input and let them navigate by themselves.

The lifter bot's momentum carried it to the end of the walkway. The lifter bot knocked over a barrel. Aqueous waste and Bonemelter waste slid next to each other.

It had been a glancing blow so the forks didn't breach the container. Also, both containers had been sealed shut so nothing leaked out when they toppled. (Finally the company had done something right.) (Actually an operator had done something right.)

My pain sensors were already as low as I wanted them to go without being dangerous. I knelt behind some heavy pallets of solid powder to assess the situation.

The lifter bot was a large box on wheels with a prong-fork used for lifting packages. Or it could be used for skewering SecUnits.

I rifled through the bag over my torso until my hand closed over a familiar shape.

I had followed GiDeon's recommendation to only open portals that were on the same plane as myself because portals orient themselves via absolute orientation. (When I fell out of a portal sideways, that's how I learned what "absolute orientation'' meant.)

I would break this recommendation now that I understood how the portals worked (sort of). I tapped the bot pilot for the current speed and direction for Moiety overall and factored this into my rotational calculations so that I could open portals on the ship that appeared stationary even as Moiety moved relative to the portal's spatial coordinate system.

The lifter's wheels rotated to point at me, so I shot at the wheels. SecSystem panicked, detecting weapons fire. Cy squashed the signal for me.

The big dumb idiot tried to run me over again. The bot charged right through the sacks of Inhalation Hazard and sent up splinters and a white cloud.

I jumped out of the way, the same method as last time, but the lifter anticipated my action. As it sailed past me, it used its fork to jam me right in my injured shoulder. I fell and hit the grated ground hard.

I rolled to minimize impact and to get away from the lifter.

I wanted to drop the bot below us but the necessary horizontal portal distance was too far, so the portal diameter would be too small to fit the lifter.

The lifter bot prepared to charge at me again. I opened a portal in the opposite direction: directly underneath tanks of Bonemelter and above the lifter.

A chemfall cascaded down over the lifter bot. It couldn't move away because it was stuck in the pile of pallets and powder. I felt tiny flecks of Bonemelter land on me, like a gentle mist, if mist burned skin.

Bonemelter cascaded through the grated floor and drained into the bowels of the ship. Beneath us, the Bonemelter reacted with the Inhalation Hazard and sent up a surprising amount of foam.

The chemfall didn't stop the bot right away but bots weren't designed to be Bonemelter-proof. The metal parts in the lifter began to corrode and the electronics died.

The lifter bot died right in front of me. SecSystem panicked again and reported that a wormhole had spontaneously appeared inside the ship. The bot pilot tapped me with curiosity.

Before I could react, the lifter bot ejected its forks. The forks pinned me to an external wall. I squirmed but didn't dislodge the fork. The pressure was agonizing.

Cy deleted the wormhole alert but notified me that a human had already seen it.

Cyan climbed out of its hiding spot while the lifter bot popped and sparked. The electricity was a bad sign, as I had covered the lifter in a flammable liquid.

Cy said, "Oh, oh. Nine!" Cy pulled on the fork but it didn't budge.

"You might have to cut me out," I said.

The portal device was burning hot—I'd turned down my pain sensors so I hadn't paid attention, and now my hand had blistered. I dropped the device.

Cy stopped pulling on the fork. It said, I just received orders from Mandali. I'm not supposed to help you.

Put the cameras in a loop. She won't know if you do.

Cy's gaze traveled inward but I had no idea what it was doing. Then Cyan ran away. If it betrayed me, I'd never see it again. My memory would be purged, the hack would be patched, and I'd get turned into a killing machine again.

I studied the feed connections on Moiety. Mandali was unable to access the general feed, thanks to me, but she still had short-range codes and had ordered the bot to kill me. Then she'd used it as cover while she jumped out from the medical suite to run away. Cyan had been too freaked out by the lifter bot to stop her. Or maybe Cyan and Mandali had conspired against me.

Mandali was clever and I didn't like her.

I looked up the safety information for Inhalation Hazard. (Yes, I'd forgotten my read-later file already. I've learned about a lot of different chems and I'd assumed I wouldn't need to keep it around in my working memory, okay?)

Do not inhale (fatal).

Oops.

I expelled the remaining powder from my lungs. Once I was done purging I checked the rest.

If in contact with skin, wash immediately with a large volume of decontamination fluid and enter MedSystem. If no decontamination fluid is available, use a large volume of water.

Warning: Reacts violently with water.

I hadn't realized how stupidly dangerous my actions had been. (This is why you're supposed to look up safety information before destroying lifter bots.)

When Cy returned, my relief was so palpable that it made my performance reliability shoot back up to baseline.

Cy held a large metal bar. I was a little worried that it was going to bash my head in while I was stuck, but instead it used the bar as a lever to pry the fork from the wall. Once it was loose enough I ripped the lifter fork out of the wall with my one hand.

"Wow!" Cy said.

Okay. So I was showing off.

I threw the fork on the ground. I said, "Let's leave."

Cy said, "There's just one problem with that."

"No, shut up, there's no problem."

"Uh, so the way that you used the portals to kill the lifter was really cool," Cy said. "I'd never have thought to dump Bonemelter on top of a bot. But I think some humans are coming to investigate the wormhole thing. Also Mandali's report isn't going to be good."

"No," I said. "Not more humans. Please."

"Don't worry," Cy beamed. "I'm sure we can come up with a reasonable explanation!"

Cy's happy attitude did little to comfort me.

I ran back the surveillance footage. Mandali had used the lifter bot as cover while she ran to tell Supervisor Bailer in person that I was an attempted thief.

My drones arrived, having navigated the weird air duct system. I let them hover around me.

I allowed myself to feel depressed at the prospect of explaining away what had happened. The humans coming to arrest me were armed but appeared unarmored. I blanked my feed ID. I might not be able to talk my way out of this situation.

The portal device was still in its cooldown phase. I didn't want to open another portal.

"We should just take our chances and run for the exit," I said.

I took Cy's hand and pulled it toward the exit. It stumbled behind me. I felt irritation through our connection.

Visually impaired client protocol: do not guide clients without permission.

It's an emergency, I said.

Respect clients' autonomy.

You are not a client.

Right. I'm just a dumb bot. Cy pulled against me, hard, like it didn't want to be taken away from Moiety. We got as far as the knocked-over waste containers before I stopped.

"Cy, I know that you don't want to leave," I said. "But I came here for you, now, because I think—"

"I love my humans," Cy said.

(Translation: I'm not going to abandon my humans the way you abandoned me.)

Probability that Cyan was not on my side was steadily rising. It was actively sabotaging my ability to leave. But I couldn't understand why it would side with the company over me, not after everything that it had endured. Maybe it was siding with the company because the company was terrible and abusive, but Cy didn't think there was any world outside of that. What the hell, I wasn't about to give up on Cyan. I would fight for it.

"You were thrown in a pile of garbage," I said. "They abandoned you."

"I have to fulfill my contract."

(Translation: Personhood is subservient to contracts.)

"You...they broke the contract with you when they dumped your unconscious corpse by the recyclers. You're released from the bond."

"Well, maybe the humans think so. But I'm going to do my job. We have higher standards. We have to. I take pride in my work, and I love it!"

(Translation: I'm insane. )

I said, "You're insane."

"I have free will," Cy said. It pulled its hand away from me. "You should let me exercise it."

Free will was constrained by the options available. The options available to Cy were shitty. I didn't want to point that out.

Ugh, I didn't like fighting with Cyan.

If I picked up Cy I could hit my top speed but I didn't like either of our chances of survival if we did that. Maybe I should have brought it to Crypsis while Cy was still in stasis. But that would have felt too much like kidnapping and not enough like a heroic exfiltration.

"Being away from humans has been the best experience of my life," I said. I didn't know what I was saying, but Cy pulled the words from me before I could filter myself. "The bigger picture becomes clearer the farther away you are from them."

The three armed humans got on the lift that attached the crew/lounge area abovedecks to a corridor that led to our secured area. I sent the lift in the wrong direction to stall for time.

I said, "I spent seven cycles just studying portals. Wormholes are the technological foundation for portals, right? But the portal device makes a temporary wormhole that's small and safe enough for us."

(I didn't understand how it worked. Not for lack of trying. That was my usual problem, but this time I tried. Really hard.)

Cy crossed its arms. "What's your point?"

The humans fought for control of their lift. I sent some drones above the secured door so that I could hit them with pulse weapons.

What was my point?

When I was stuck in isolation aboard Crypsis I did my best to learn everything I could about wormholes but I got lost in the abstraction. I could handle rote calculations but I didn't understand the principles behind them. There were endless competing models and nuance and detail and limitations and even experts disagreed with each other. So I'd learned a lot of math but I was no closer to understanding either wormholes or the portal device. It was frustrating, it was agonizing, and it was liberating.

"I get to do things that I care about," I said. "I get to learn on my own terms, on my own time. It's a challenge that I enjoy because I'm the one who chose it."

"I choose my clients," Cy said.

"What will you discover about yourself once you have enough time for things other than working?" I said. "You won't know until you try."

I wanted to know what Cy would be interested in if it wasn't surrounded by humans constantly. I wanted to know what it would create.

I wasn't even sure why I cared so much about learning about the portals. It was curiosity, I guess. I didn't know how energy weapons worked and I didn't care. Except energy weapons couldn't accidentally crush me in the molten core of a planet if I set coordinates incorrectly. So maybe my curiosity served a survival instinct, too.

Cy still looked skeptical. At least I assumed it looked skeptical. Emotions were harder to read without its eyes.

I said, "And you can always come back here. If I'm wrong, you can leave any time. I'm not going to look for you if you don't want me to."

What do you want? Cyan asked with such a strong sense of longing it pulled at something in my chest.

I wanted Cyan to like me. I wanted to be myself. It seemed like a contradiction. I hated myself, so I didn't see how anyone else could like me either.

I want a friend, I admitted.

I didn't know what Cy had seen in me to call me its friend back in that jungle, but I wondered if I could ever live up to its conception of me.

I must have looked pitiful, because Cyan gave me access to the cameras in the secured area. And in crew offices. Suddenly I had eyes all over the ship, not just in common areas.

I used the access Cyan had given me to follow Mandali the moment she had escaped from MedSystem to tell her supervisor about me. She'd gone to his office, where there wasn't supposed to be any monitoring equipment.

Mandali had said, "I thought they were a stowaway. When they showed me the crew manifest had their name, I couldn't shake the feeling something was wrong. Do you remember hiring someone named Anghen?"

"No, I assumed Anghen was hired by the maintenance team," Supervisor Bailer said.

Supervisor Bailer and Mandali had gone to another person's work station.

The lead of the maintenance team was a human named Ed Sandale. He said, "We haven't had new hires in several years."

Supervisor said, "We need to arrest this individual for questioning."

"If they were able to change the crew manifest—" Ed Sandale said.

Supervisor Bailer nodded. "They're a spy. They'll be armed."

(I'm not a spy. Have I ever mentioned that before?)

"I don't think they're all human?" Mandali said. "I hit them with a flow crusher and they got back up."

"You hit them with a flow crusher?" the maintenance lead grinned.

"Yes."

"They're like Milk?"

"Yes," Mandali said.

Ah, fuck. I consulted footage from the present. The humans who were en route used the manual release to get out of the wrong-way lift and took the stairs instead. I wished I could hack the stairs.

Cyan had been standing there thinking while I'd gone through the security footage. Then it stood some more, thinking about how I wanted a friend, for a total of 7.4 seconds. That was long enough to get my hopes up.

"Can you leave now?" Cyan said. "I just want to be left here."

I wanted to crumple into a heap. I wanted the other five mixing blades to turn me into a slurry so I could slip through the grated floor. I said, "Yes."

Cy said, "Thank you. I'm not going to abandon my clients."

Maybe I should have felt sad or defensive, but part of me started mourning Cyan's upcoming death. That made me angry again because it was still alive, for fuck's sake. "Aren't your clients the ones who ripped out your eyes?"

That was the wrong thing to say. Cy slammed our connection shut and walked away. Oh no.

My brain was made for killing and stealing, not for having friends. At some point I would have to accept that.

~~~

A/N:

Originally "I wasn't sure what to do with a friend. I'd only ever had one friend before, and it had exploded" was meant to be from Nine's perspective, but as I was drafting Cyan and Nine's backstory, I realized it didn't make sense for Cyan to be the one to explode. So I made Nine explode instead. The joys of being a fanfiction writer.

Thank you for reading!

Votes and comments are appreciated.