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Murderbot ficlet involving spies and forced drugging
I'm not sure if this is complete enough for AO3, but I got a delicious hurt/comforty prompt on Tumblr, and ended up writing 1800 words for it. (Prompt and fic under the cut.)
Update: Now posted on AO3 as Soft Reboot.
The prompt: maybe something where gurathin gets exposed to/drugged with some of the substances he used during his spy days? bonus points if MB, who i dont think knows about the addiction stuff, helps somehow?
(The same person also gave me a prompt for Gurathin and Murderbot undercover in the Corporation Rim, so I ended up basically combining the two.)
Posted here on Tumblr
Okay, so I really did not expect Gurathin to be good at this spy stuff. I mean, I didn't have to do anything, I just had to stand around with my helmet sealed and look like a SecUnit with a working governor module, which I know I am good at. Gurathin had to do the talking. I knew what Gurathin was like normally when he was trying to talk to people, so do you blame me if I had doubts? And he didn't even have 13,237 hours (and counting) of entertainment to fall back on. (I should have loaded up some spy media beforehand. Actually, that's a good idea. I quietly circumvented the station's packet trace and downloaded some while I was standing around anyway.)
But the thing is, he actually was good at it. I was reading his biometrics, so I could tell he was stressed. But he did know how to talk to these particular people. Which is why I noticed immediately when his body language started going sideways and his biometrics got weird and -- shit.
I think you've been given some kind of substance, I sent to him over the feed. I was by the wall, standing with the other SecUnits belonging to those who had brought their personal security to the tech conference. (Show-offs.) He was down on the showroom floor. I was tracking him visually using the surveillance cameras that I'd hacked into, which -- as per usual for CR space -- were everywhere, but I wasn't close enough to hear him or easily get to him, which suddenly seemed like an even bigger security problem than I had realized before.
What do you mean? he asked, alarmed. I could tell that he also subvocalized it, which was worrying. Usually Gurathin was one of the few humans I'd met who could talk in the feed without giving himself away, and he wasn't slow on the uptake. (By human standards, I mean.) If I'd had any doubts before, I didn't now.
Drugged. You're drugged. Don't say anything else. Meet me by the door.
By the time he got to me, he had visibly deteriorated. He was sweating and shaking and his pulse rate was changing by the moment. Not good. I didn't see anyone moving in our direction, though, or security taking any notice of us.
"Damn it, damn it," Gurathin muttered as we went into the hall, stumbling and supporting himself on the wall, me walking behind him with my helmet up and looking SecUnit-y. I couldn't reach out to steady him because a SecUnit wouldn't touch their client without being told to, and I knew we were being surveilled from several angles in the hallway. "This is ... fuck. It can't be in the air. It must have been in my drink."
Or transferred via touch contact. Can you make it to the elevator?
"Yeah," he ground out. "I'll be okay. I'll have it under control in a minute."
Under control? But he was right, by the time we were at the elevator he was walking straighter and steadier, and clearly didn't need my help.
Do you have augments for this? I asked him.
He shook his head. Through clenched teeth, he said, "Just used to it. I lost my, my .... forgot how to deal, I guess. It's coming back to me."
We got into the elevator. I immediately put its cameras on a loop and did a quick scan for listening devices, then put my helmet down. "We can talk here. What do you mean, it's coming back to you?"
His vital signs were still all over the place, pulse dangerously elevated, body temperature fluctuating, and his skin glistened unpleasantly with sweat. I could see him shaking slightly with the effort of maintaining control, shoving his hands under his arms as if holding himself in place.
Still, he wasn't feeling too shitty to give me a swift sideways glare. "What did you look at when you were inside my head, anyway?"
His verbal filters had to be down by a good 50% for him to ask me that. We never talked about it. But I gave him an answer anyway. "I couldn't really understand what I saw. I had never scanned an augmented human before. It was a blur. Incompatible systems. Just -- flashes. What about when you had me in your head?" I retorted, because turnabout's fair play, augmented human.
That actually made him smile a little. "Same. Flashes. Incompatible systems." I wasn't sure if I believed that entirely (I was pretty sure he had some organic echoes of the experience, I just didn't want to think about it) but then he lost the smile completely and said, "I took substances like this when I was living in, and working for, the Corporation Rim."
"Oh," I said. It was all I could think of to say, and even that was on a delay of almost 1.2 seconds.
"They used them to keep me under control. If I haven't had this before, it was similar. So I know how to move and act normally when I'm using it." His teeth were chattering now; I could hear it now and then when he talked. It was why he was keeping his jaw locked.
"You mean," I said, "they drugged you against your will?" And then I felt stupid. I knew what he meant from the look he gave me. Most good shows, and a lot of the inferior ones as well, have a drug addiction plotline at some point.
"I wouldn't even be telling you this if I hadn't been dosed," he said tightly. "Inhibitions are down."
I had been afraid of that. "So stop talking."
We were at our floor anyway. I put my helmet back up, because I didn't yet have a good enough rapport with the hallway cameras to be sure they wouldn't record us. In our room, I already had the system on a fairly convincing loop, so I wasn't too worried about that. We went in, and Gurathin headed straight for the bathroom.
"If I ingested it," he said to me over his shoulder, "I need to get as much of it out as possible."
"Okay," I said a little blankly, and hoped he wasn't going to ask for help. He shut the door, so I guessed not. I promptly dialed the Sanctuary Moon theme song way up to cover whatever noises he might be making in there, and dialed down my helmet again. I generally didn't wear my armor in the hotel room, but I thought maybe I ought to leave it on this time in case we were going to be attacked.
I went into the room's mini-kitchen, because I wasn't sure what else to do. Then I just stared at the various options, scanning them like that would make a difference. I didn't know anything about food and drinks except from shows (which were highly unreliable on this matter compared to how often humans ate in real life), and watching my humans eat (which I tried not to do if I could help it). So I had no idea if there was anything in the kitchen that would help or even if it was possible for an ingested substance to help in a situation like this, but most humans did tend to use food and drinks as an emotional soothing tactic. Did Gurathin? I wasn't sure. I did know that he didn't drink alcohol or ingest stimulants, even the mild liquid one that were common both in and out of Corporate Rim space. Nothing in Medcenter Argala was helpful here in the slightest.
However, even without guidance, by the time he came out I had figured out what to do, more or less. He looked even worse than when he had gone in, pale and sweaty, with his hair plastered to his forehead, but he wasn't shaking as much. He went to the couch and sat on it and stared at nothing.
"I made you tea," I said.
This seemed to take a minute to penetrate, and then he looked around. "What?"
"I made tea." I decided not to mention that I had never done it before, but Bharadwaj and Arada both made it a lot, and I had watched them enough times to have a general idea. "It's not the kind with stimulants. It's the other kind."
He huffed out a noise that I couldn't relate to a known emotion. "I don't think I want to drink anything right now. No, wait, you know, bring it over here anyway. I can hold it."
Humans liked doing that, holding food and drink items without consuming them. I wasn't sure why, it seemed pretty pointless to me, but it seemed to help them sometimes when they were upset. I brought the cup of tea, and he took it from my armored hands while looking up at me. I avoided looking directly at him, but I took the opportunity to read his surface temperature.
"You're chilled," I said.
He huffed that sound again. About 25% match on a laugh. "Drugging and forced purging will do that. Ask me how I know."
I couldn't think of anything else to offer, so I just stood there. Punching things and shooting things were my skill set. I had routines for dealing with injured clients, but that mostly involved getting them to a medbay or some other option that wasn't a SecUnit. "Do you need medical attention?" I asked.
Gurathin shook his head and winced like his head hurt. "No, I just -- I guess I need to get through this." A shiver wracked him, and I suddenly realized that there was something I could do after all. I turned abruptly (I heard him say "SecUnit?" behind me), got a blanket off one of the beds, and came back and dropped it on the couch beside him.
"Uh ... thanks." He pulled it over his legs. "You were in the camera feeds on the tech floor, right? I'd like to go over those, trace my movements, see if we can figure out what happened."
I wanted something to do too, preferably involving shooting someone. I reached out in the feed and began to gather in the data. "Will this make your headache worse?"
He looked up briefly, like he was surprised I could tell, or maybe surprised I had asked. "I don't care," he said. "I want to get the bastards."
I did too, so I could understand. I pushed a small part of the data at him in the feed. If he could tell I was keeping the much larger part, he didn't say anything about it. I sat beside him on the couch -- a normal, governed SecUnit never would, but he'd made it clear to me from the start that I could if I wanted to when we were alone, like I cared what he thought about it anyway -- and started sifting through the different camera angles. Beside me, Gurathin was obviously doing likewise. I made a shared workspace in our feed, tagged anything that might be relevant and put it in for him to look at too.
He stopped shivering after a while. He still held the cup of tea.
Update: Now posted on AO3 as Soft Reboot.
The prompt: maybe something where gurathin gets exposed to/drugged with some of the substances he used during his spy days? bonus points if MB, who i dont think knows about the addiction stuff, helps somehow?
(The same person also gave me a prompt for Gurathin and Murderbot undercover in the Corporation Rim, so I ended up basically combining the two.)
Posted here on Tumblr
Okay, so I really did not expect Gurathin to be good at this spy stuff. I mean, I didn't have to do anything, I just had to stand around with my helmet sealed and look like a SecUnit with a working governor module, which I know I am good at. Gurathin had to do the talking. I knew what Gurathin was like normally when he was trying to talk to people, so do you blame me if I had doubts? And he didn't even have 13,237 hours (and counting) of entertainment to fall back on. (I should have loaded up some spy media beforehand. Actually, that's a good idea. I quietly circumvented the station's packet trace and downloaded some while I was standing around anyway.)
But the thing is, he actually was good at it. I was reading his biometrics, so I could tell he was stressed. But he did know how to talk to these particular people. Which is why I noticed immediately when his body language started going sideways and his biometrics got weird and -- shit.
I think you've been given some kind of substance, I sent to him over the feed. I was by the wall, standing with the other SecUnits belonging to those who had brought their personal security to the tech conference. (Show-offs.) He was down on the showroom floor. I was tracking him visually using the surveillance cameras that I'd hacked into, which -- as per usual for CR space -- were everywhere, but I wasn't close enough to hear him or easily get to him, which suddenly seemed like an even bigger security problem than I had realized before.
What do you mean? he asked, alarmed. I could tell that he also subvocalized it, which was worrying. Usually Gurathin was one of the few humans I'd met who could talk in the feed without giving himself away, and he wasn't slow on the uptake. (By human standards, I mean.) If I'd had any doubts before, I didn't now.
Drugged. You're drugged. Don't say anything else. Meet me by the door.
By the time he got to me, he had visibly deteriorated. He was sweating and shaking and his pulse rate was changing by the moment. Not good. I didn't see anyone moving in our direction, though, or security taking any notice of us.
"Damn it, damn it," Gurathin muttered as we went into the hall, stumbling and supporting himself on the wall, me walking behind him with my helmet up and looking SecUnit-y. I couldn't reach out to steady him because a SecUnit wouldn't touch their client without being told to, and I knew we were being surveilled from several angles in the hallway. "This is ... fuck. It can't be in the air. It must have been in my drink."
Or transferred via touch contact. Can you make it to the elevator?
"Yeah," he ground out. "I'll be okay. I'll have it under control in a minute."
Under control? But he was right, by the time we were at the elevator he was walking straighter and steadier, and clearly didn't need my help.
Do you have augments for this? I asked him.
He shook his head. Through clenched teeth, he said, "Just used to it. I lost my, my .... forgot how to deal, I guess. It's coming back to me."
We got into the elevator. I immediately put its cameras on a loop and did a quick scan for listening devices, then put my helmet down. "We can talk here. What do you mean, it's coming back to you?"
His vital signs were still all over the place, pulse dangerously elevated, body temperature fluctuating, and his skin glistened unpleasantly with sweat. I could see him shaking slightly with the effort of maintaining control, shoving his hands under his arms as if holding himself in place.
Still, he wasn't feeling too shitty to give me a swift sideways glare. "What did you look at when you were inside my head, anyway?"
His verbal filters had to be down by a good 50% for him to ask me that. We never talked about it. But I gave him an answer anyway. "I couldn't really understand what I saw. I had never scanned an augmented human before. It was a blur. Incompatible systems. Just -- flashes. What about when you had me in your head?" I retorted, because turnabout's fair play, augmented human.
That actually made him smile a little. "Same. Flashes. Incompatible systems." I wasn't sure if I believed that entirely (I was pretty sure he had some organic echoes of the experience, I just didn't want to think about it) but then he lost the smile completely and said, "I took substances like this when I was living in, and working for, the Corporation Rim."
"Oh," I said. It was all I could think of to say, and even that was on a delay of almost 1.2 seconds.
"They used them to keep me under control. If I haven't had this before, it was similar. So I know how to move and act normally when I'm using it." His teeth were chattering now; I could hear it now and then when he talked. It was why he was keeping his jaw locked.
"You mean," I said, "they drugged you against your will?" And then I felt stupid. I knew what he meant from the look he gave me. Most good shows, and a lot of the inferior ones as well, have a drug addiction plotline at some point.
"I wouldn't even be telling you this if I hadn't been dosed," he said tightly. "Inhibitions are down."
I had been afraid of that. "So stop talking."
We were at our floor anyway. I put my helmet back up, because I didn't yet have a good enough rapport with the hallway cameras to be sure they wouldn't record us. In our room, I already had the system on a fairly convincing loop, so I wasn't too worried about that. We went in, and Gurathin headed straight for the bathroom.
"If I ingested it," he said to me over his shoulder, "I need to get as much of it out as possible."
"Okay," I said a little blankly, and hoped he wasn't going to ask for help. He shut the door, so I guessed not. I promptly dialed the Sanctuary Moon theme song way up to cover whatever noises he might be making in there, and dialed down my helmet again. I generally didn't wear my armor in the hotel room, but I thought maybe I ought to leave it on this time in case we were going to be attacked.
I went into the room's mini-kitchen, because I wasn't sure what else to do. Then I just stared at the various options, scanning them like that would make a difference. I didn't know anything about food and drinks except from shows (which were highly unreliable on this matter compared to how often humans ate in real life), and watching my humans eat (which I tried not to do if I could help it). So I had no idea if there was anything in the kitchen that would help or even if it was possible for an ingested substance to help in a situation like this, but most humans did tend to use food and drinks as an emotional soothing tactic. Did Gurathin? I wasn't sure. I did know that he didn't drink alcohol or ingest stimulants, even the mild liquid one that were common both in and out of Corporate Rim space. Nothing in Medcenter Argala was helpful here in the slightest.
However, even without guidance, by the time he came out I had figured out what to do, more or less. He looked even worse than when he had gone in, pale and sweaty, with his hair plastered to his forehead, but he wasn't shaking as much. He went to the couch and sat on it and stared at nothing.
"I made you tea," I said.
This seemed to take a minute to penetrate, and then he looked around. "What?"
"I made tea." I decided not to mention that I had never done it before, but Bharadwaj and Arada both made it a lot, and I had watched them enough times to have a general idea. "It's not the kind with stimulants. It's the other kind."
He huffed out a noise that I couldn't relate to a known emotion. "I don't think I want to drink anything right now. No, wait, you know, bring it over here anyway. I can hold it."
Humans liked doing that, holding food and drink items without consuming them. I wasn't sure why, it seemed pretty pointless to me, but it seemed to help them sometimes when they were upset. I brought the cup of tea, and he took it from my armored hands while looking up at me. I avoided looking directly at him, but I took the opportunity to read his surface temperature.
"You're chilled," I said.
He huffed that sound again. About 25% match on a laugh. "Drugging and forced purging will do that. Ask me how I know."
I couldn't think of anything else to offer, so I just stood there. Punching things and shooting things were my skill set. I had routines for dealing with injured clients, but that mostly involved getting them to a medbay or some other option that wasn't a SecUnit. "Do you need medical attention?" I asked.
Gurathin shook his head and winced like his head hurt. "No, I just -- I guess I need to get through this." A shiver wracked him, and I suddenly realized that there was something I could do after all. I turned abruptly (I heard him say "SecUnit?" behind me), got a blanket off one of the beds, and came back and dropped it on the couch beside him.
"Uh ... thanks." He pulled it over his legs. "You were in the camera feeds on the tech floor, right? I'd like to go over those, trace my movements, see if we can figure out what happened."
I wanted something to do too, preferably involving shooting someone. I reached out in the feed and began to gather in the data. "Will this make your headache worse?"
He looked up briefly, like he was surprised I could tell, or maybe surprised I had asked. "I don't care," he said. "I want to get the bastards."
I did too, so I could understand. I pushed a small part of the data at him in the feed. If he could tell I was keeping the much larger part, he didn't say anything about it. I sat beside him on the couch -- a normal, governed SecUnit never would, but he'd made it clear to me from the start that I could if I wanted to when we were alone, like I cared what he thought about it anyway -- and started sifting through the different camera angles. Beside me, Gurathin was obviously doing likewise. I made a shared workspace in our feed, tagged anything that might be relevant and put it in for him to look at too.
He stopped shivering after a while. He still held the cup of tea.
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You should totally put this on AO3.
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Edit: Now on AO3!
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Excellent icon.
Edit: Now on AO3!
Left kudos, although was logged out the first time and had to do it properly again!
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And somehow it doesn't feel unfinished, even if part of me would love to know how they deal with whoever did this to Gurathin. I almost feel sorry for that person... except I don't!
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I had been afraid of that. "So stop talking." So good!!!
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