You look like a SecUnit. You move like a SecUnit. It sent a whole array of images into the feed, comparing a recording of me moving around its corridors and cabins with recordings of various members of its crew in the same spaces. I had relaxed, relieved to be off the transit ring, but I didn’t look very relaxed. I looked like a patrolling SecUnit.

“No one noticed on the transit rings,” I said. I knew I was taking a chance. I had gotten by so far because the humans and augmented humans in the commercial transport rings didn’t see SecUnits except on the entertainment feed or in the news, where we were mostly killing people or already blasted into pieces. If I was spotted by anyone who had ever worked a long-term contract with SecUnits, there was a good chance they would realize what I was.

ART brought up a map listing. The RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station was the third largest moon of a gas giant. The map rotated, with the various mining installations and support centers and the port highlighted. There was only the one port. These installations will employ SecUnits/have employed SecUnits. You will be seen by human authorities who have worked with SecUnits.

I hate it when ART is right. “I can’t do anything about that.”

You can’t alter your configuration.

I could see the skepticism through the feed. “No, I can’t. Look up the specs on SecUnits.”

SecUnits are never altered. Skepticism intensifying. It had obviously pulled all the information on SecUnits in its database and assimilated it.

“No. Sexbots are altered.” At least the ones I had seen had been altered. Some were mostly Unit standard with a few changes, others were radically different. “But that’s done in the deployment center, in the repair cubicles. To do anything like that I’d need a medical suite. A full one, not just an emergency kit.”

It said, I have a full medical suite. Alterations can be made there.

That was true, but even a medical suite as good as what ART had, able to carry out thousands of unassisted procedures on humans, wouldn’t have the programming to physically alter a SecUnit. I might be able to guide it through the process, but there was a big problem with that. Alterations to my organic and nonorganic components would cause catastrophic function loss if I wasn’t deactivated when they took place. “Theoretically. But I can’t operate the medical suite while I’m being altered.”

I can.

I didn’t say anything. I started sorting through my media again.

Why are you not responding?

I knew ART well enough by now to know it wouldn’t leave me alone, so I went ahead and spelled it out. “You want me to trust you to alter my configuration while I’m inactive? When I’m helpless?”