Another Murderbot prompt: while running from CR bullshit, Gurathin's augments - all of them - are temporarily out of commission and he has to rely on Murderbot to get him to safety while he's terribly out of it. <3
I felt it happen, but didn't realize at first what it was or how much of a problem it was going to be. The feed blipped out, then came back. My firewalls were fine. I lost my drones for an instant, but restored the connection before they could do more than bounce off the wall.
Beside me, Gurathin stumbled and caught himself heavily on the wall.
I should have known our escape was going too well.
What's wrong? I asked him in the feed. When he didn't respond, I repeated it out loud.
"Didn't you feel that?" He coughed a little. "Augment kill. I guess it wouldn't affect you."
I didn't like the word "kill" in there. I hadn't actually realized that was a thing. "Are your augments offline?"
I guess his voice wasn't augmented. Unfortunately.
But when he hesitated to take a step forward, I realized we had a problem. A big one. Like most humans who were augmented on his level, Gurathin's augments ran data to and from his visual cortex. That was a pretty common way of doing it, because humans liked to "see" things, and running data to the visual cortex was a common way of displaying it. Iris had that, too. However, this meant that his augments were handling the input from his eyes. It was why I was able to tap into the flow of date from his eyes like a camera, when he let me, and why I'd been able to cut it off when we were hardwired that one time.
And now something -- StationSec, probably -- had just done that for him.
Meanwhile I was in the system feed for the CR station we were currently trying to escape from, pulling all the data I could from StationSys. They wouldn't just do that for no reason. There was no station-wide alert, but I could feel busy little hives of activity in StationSec, which I hadn't bothered hacking into before because I was handling it from the hub end -- no need to hack security if security never knew there was a threat.
Apparently they now knew there was a threat. I threw a couple of processes toward getting into their systems, and started another one searching for increased security presence -- oh yeah, there were extra guards on the docks. Wonderful. It was pretty clear from the lack of a high alert that they didn't know exactly what was going on, but they'd definitely figured out something was.
Gurathin was still standing there, looking blank. I guess I would too, if someone cut my visuals. I wondered what else he'd lost and how much this was going to slow us down. I couldn't feel him at all, which was weird, and without hardwiring, which we couldn't stop for, there was nothing I could do to help. The system wasn't actively blocking him. It had simply caused him to go offline. I couldn't imagine how horrible that would feel for me, but Gurathin was a lot more organic than I was. This had never really seemed like a benefit to me before.
I grabbed his arm, the way I was used to moving my humans around when they were being slow and I needed to. I'd done it with him plenty of times. But he jumped. Of course, he didn't know I was going to do that because he couldn't see me. Stupid Murderbot. Stupid Gurathin too, for letting this happen to him.
"I can't see," he said unnecessarily. His arm had gone still in my grasp.
"I know. That's why I'm touching you. I wouldn't be doing it otherwise," I said, already pulling him into motion. That made him smile, but he stumbled a little, almost walking into me. That wasn't normal. Humans relied on their sight to orient themselves in space, I knew that because some aspects of my own processing were similar, but he shouldn't be that disoriented. "I'll take you where you need to go. Tell me what's offline. The important functions, the ones that matter." Deity knew what random augments he had. I certainly didn't want to hear about it in any more detail than I had to.
"Well, uh, visual processing, obviously," he began as I guided him down the hall as swiftly as I could get him to move, meanwhile spreading out my drones into a wider perimeter. I dropped the dock inputs for now; we wouldn't be there for a little while, so it didn't matter yet, and I needed to get that processing power back if I was going to get into StationSec properly.
"What else?" I asked, because he had paused to navigate the floor.
"Uh, some of my proprioception is handled through my augments." He was still unstable, legs trying to tangle up, which bothered me in a way I wasn't going to think about. He brought his own hand around to grip the hand I had on his arm, putting his hand over mine, then realized he was doing and jerked it away. I could tell he was looking for additional stability.
"You can do that," I said. "Just let go if I do." He nodded, and although I didn't want to admit I didn't know, I asked anyway because I figured that I needed to know for mission purposes. "What's proprioception?" Stupid shitty language models.
"My awareness of myself in space. Balance, stuff like that."
"Why in the world would you have augments for that?"
"It helps with coordination and speed. Not getting sick in zero gee. That kind of thing."
"Humans," I muttered. I hadn't noticed Gurathin being any more coordinated than your average human, and considerably less so than some. Maybe he'd been really terrible at it before. "What else?"
"There's also one that's -- that is, was supporting some of the nerve functions in my knee from that thing on the survey planet." With all of his other wobbling around, I hadn't noticed, but it was true that he was moving his legs a little oddly. He hesitated briefly, then said, "Those are the only ones that matter to us now."
My drones alerted me to a security patrol up ahead, so I had to guide us a different way to the lift network than I was planning to go. "What else?" I asked. "From the way you said that, there are other ones."
"You said you only need to know about the ones that matter."
"Okay, for the sake of information, just tell me what else there is."
I couldn't understand his hesitation until he started talking again. "Liver and kidneys. Those are down right now."
I couldn't remember off the top of my head what human livers and kidneys did, but I was pretty sure they were necessary. "Is it normal to have augments for that?"
"No, SecUnit," he said impatiently. "We'll talk about it later."
I added a brand new process, which was pulling information off the station feed on human organ function. I hoped it wasn't too gross. "How long until that becomes a problem?"
After a pause which was probably not as long for him as it felt like for me, he said, "Longer than it'll take us to get to a transport, and if we aren't there by then, it won't be our biggest problem."
I put a priority flag on that download.
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