MY MEMORY WAS IN fragments. I didn’t feel great about it, but it wasn’t the disaster it would have been for a full bot. My human neural tissue, normally the weak link in my whole data storage system, couldn’t be wiped. I had to rely on it to put the fragments back in order and unfortunately its access speed was terrible.

It was taking fucking forever.

I wandered through random images, bursts of pain, landscapes, corridors, walls. Wow, that was a lot of walls.

(Unidentified voices on audio: “Any change?”

“Not yet.” A hesitation. “Do you think we should have let them put it in the cubicle? If it can’t—”

“No. No, absolutely not. They’ve got to want to know how it beat its governor module. If they had the opportunity … We can’t trust them.”)

The worst part was that I couldn’t remember (hah) how long I had been in this state. What little diagnostic info I had suggested a catastrophic failure of some sort.

Maybe that was obvious without the diagnostic data.

A complex series of neural connections, all positive, led me to a large intact section of protected storage … What the hell was this? The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon? I started to review it.

And boom, hundreds of thousands of connections blossomed. I had control over my processes again and initiated a diagnostic and data repair sequence. Memories started to sort and order at a higher rate.

(Voice on audio: “Good news! Diagnostics are showing greatly accelerated activity. It’s putting itself back together.”)

(Partial identification: client?)

A curved ceiling instead of a wall. That was different. I was lying on a padded surface. I had enough access to memory to know that was unusual, and that unusual usually meant bad. More fragments resolved into coherency, just not in the right order. Transports, Ship, ART. Right, not so unusual then. I was wearing human clothes and not a suit skin and armor, so that matched. Access to another set of connections let me identify the objects overhead as equipment associated with MedSystems. ART? I tried to ping. No, that memory was out of order. I’d taken Tapan back to her friends and left ART.

(Ratthi asked me, “How do you feel?”

The only tag I can access on Ratthi is a partial that says my human friend. That’s strange and unlikely, but the pre-catastrophic-failure version of me seemed sure about it, and I don’t have anything else to go on. “Fine.”

Possibly it’s obvious that I’m not fine. Ratthi said, “Do you know where you are?”

I didn’t have an answer. My buffer said, “Please wait while I search for that information.”

“Okay,” Ratthi said. “Okay.”)