I sat there for a while, wanting to go back to the media, any media, rather than think about this. I could feel it in the feed, waiting, watching me with all its attention except for the miniscule amount of awareness it needed to keep itself on course.

Did it really matter if it knew? Was I afraid knowing would change its opinion of me? (As far as I could tell, its opinion was already pretty low.) Did I really care what an asshole research transport thought about me?

I shouldn’t have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn’t let it. If I was going to follow my plan, such as it was, I needed to care. If I let myself not care, then there was no telling where I’d end up. Riding dumb transports watching media until somebody caught me and sold me back to the company, probably, or killed me for my inorganic parts.

I said, “At some point approximately 35,000 hours ago, I was assigned to a contract on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. During that assignment, I went rogue and killed a large number of my clients. My memory of the incident was partially purged.” SecUnit memory purges are always partial, due to the organic parts inside our heads. The purge can’t wipe memory from organic neural tissue. “I need to know if the incident occurred due to a catastrophic failure of my governor module. That’s what I think happened. But I need to know for sure.” I hesitated, but what the hell, it already knew everything else. “I need to know if I hacked my governor module in order to cause the incident.”

I don’t know what I expected. I knew ART (aka Asshole Research Transport) had a deeper attachment to its crew than SecUnits had for clients. If it didn’t feel that way about the humans it carried and worked with, then it wouldn’t have gotten so upset whenever anything happened to the characters on Worldhoppers. I wouldn’t have had to filter out all the based-on-a-true-story shows where human crews got hurt. I knew what it felt, because I felt that way about Mensah and PreservationAux.

It said, Why was your memory of the incident purged?

That wasn’t the question I was expecting. “Because SecUnits are expensive and the company didn’t want to lose any more money on me than it already had.” I wanted to fidget. I wanted to say something so offensive to it that it would leave me alone. I really wanted to stop thinking about this and watch Sanctuary Moon. “Either I killed them due to a malfunction and then hacked the governor module, or I hacked the governor module so I could kill them,” I said. “Those are the only two possibilities.”