After analyzing human movement, I wrote some code for myself, to cause me to make a random series of movements periodically if I was standing still. To change my respiration to react to changes in the air quality. To vary my walking speed, to make sure I reacted to stimuli physically instead of just scanning and noting it. This code had gotten me through the second transit ring. But would I be all right on a ring or installation frequented by humans who often saw or worked with SecUnits?

I tweaked my code a little and asked ART to record me again as I moved around its corridors and compartments. I tried to make myself look as much like a human as possible. I’m used to feeling mentally awkward around humans, and I took that sensation and tried to express it in my physical movements. I felt pretty good about the result. Until I looked at the recordings and compared them to ART’s recordings of its crew and my recordings of other SecUnits.

The only one I was fooling here was myself.

The change in movement made me look more human but my proportions exactly matched the other SecUnits. I was good enough to fool humans who weren’t looking for me, since humans tend to ignore non-standard behavior in transitional public spaces. But anyone who had set out to find me, who was alert to the possibility of a rogue SecUnit, might not be fooled, and a simple scan calibrated to search for SecUnit size, height, and weight was certain to find me.

It was the logical choice, it was the obvious choice, and I would still rather peel my human skin off than do it.

I was going to have to do it.

*   *   *

After a lot of argument, we agreed the easiest change for the best result was to take two centimeters of length out of my legs and arms. It doesn’t sound like a big change, but it meant my physical proportions would no longer match Unit standard. It would change the way I walked, the way I moved. It made sense and I was fine with it.

Then ART said we also needed to change the code controlling my organic parts, so they could grow hair.

My first reaction to that was no fucking way. I had hair on my head, and eyebrows; that was a part of SecUnit configuration that was shared with sexbots, though the code controlling it kept SecUnit head hair short to keep it from interfering with the armor. The whole idea of constructs is that we look human, so we don’t make the clients uncomfortable with our appearance. (I could have told the company that the fact that SecUnits are terrifying killing machines does, in fact, make humans nervous regardless of what we look like, but nobody listens to me.) But the rest of my skin was hairless.