“Did you?” Startled, Arada stepped back, eyeing the top of my head.

Lack of attention to detail is one of the reasons humans shouldn’t do their own security.

But humans do detect subliminal details and react to them whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. Even on Preservation (especially on Preservation) I ran my code to make my movement and body language more human to keep from drawing attention. I was running it now out of habit. When I stopped it, I’d look a lot more like a “normal” SecUnit even without armor. (Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.)

Arada and Ratthi still wanted to argue, so I said, “If they ask—and they won’t ask—say I’m an academic model designed specifically for your university.”

ART said, I would prefer you go as an augmented human.

What I really needed right now was a giant omniscient machine intelligence second-guessing me. “I don’t care what you prefer,” I said. It was safer this way. We were trying to tell one big lie—that we were ART’s crew—and it would be easier to make that believable if we kept the smaller lies to a minimum. The fact that I was a SecUnit and that Arada had contracted for me as security was true, if in a different way than the corporates would assume. I could have said all that, but instead I said, “It’s my decision and you can shut up.”

“Don’t fight,” Amena said, coming back into the galley. Thiago was heading to the bulk lock to help Overse and Ratthi.

Arada was still watching me dubiously, absently humming and tapping her teeth, and I realized there was another problem. To Arada, I wasn’t her SecUnit, I was her coworker and she was my team captain. That’s a whole different spectrum of body language. Also, she wasn’t even slightly afraid of me, and even my most confident and contemptuous corporate clients had always been just a little nervous, no matter how hard they tried to cover it. (The ones who weren’t confident and contemptuous were incredibly nervous. It hadn’t exactly been fun for me, either.) I asked her, “Can you treat me like a SecUnit?”

On the feed, Overse said, Ummm. She asked Arada, Can you?

“Sure.” Arada shrugged, clearly having absolutely no idea what we meant by that.

Down in the module dock with Ratthi, Overse sighed. She told me, Right. I’ll work on that with her real quick before you go.

I tapped her feed in acknowledgment. Arada demanded, “What?”

I went into an empty bunkroom to change into the crew uniform ART had just made me. It was dark blue, the pants and jacket of a deflective fabric that was way better than what Preservation Station Security had, with lots of sealable pockets for weapons and drones, plus stability-fabric boots so tough I could probably use them to jam a closing hatchway open. It looked like what a human security person would wear, it looked like what a SecUnit should wear instead of a cheaper version of the contract’s uniform. I don’t know, maybe security-company-owned SecUnits wore something like this. It had ART’s crew logo on the jacket, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as usual.