Murderbot Maladies day 1: inhaled a drone
I am unlikely to do it exactly on time or manage all the days, but I decided to do at least some of the prompts in @murderbot-maladies-event. This is for the absolutely delightful Day 1 prompt: Inhaled a Drone.
It was a perfectly normal day on a planet, which is to say: full of annoyances and hazards that my humans seemed completely oblivious to. Okay, the planet was Preservation, which doesn't have large wild fauna and has a less than 6% chance of armed humans showing up to try to kill my humans. But there were still small poisonous fauna, contact poisons in some of the flora, and all the other dangers inherent in planetary biomes: landslides, extreme weather, flash floods, mud holes, broken limbs, dangerous temperature extremes ...
To be fair, right now very few of those were likely because it was early morning on a sunny day in the middle of the warm season and everyone was walking through a field. The group consisted of Amena, Ratthi, and Arada. They were engaged in an activity that involved staring at the flying fauna in and around the field, and attempting to look up and check off the names of the fauna on their feed interfaces, with a lot of giggling and one-upping each other's list of check marks.
Amena had invited me along. I knew I could say no. Dr. Mensah had even reminded me of it, along with a reminder that absolutely no one else in the household planned to get up at dawn to do this. But I didn't sleep anyway, and I could walk and watch media at the same time, and who knew what kind of dangers a group of humans that included an adolescent and Ratthi could get into?
"That was definitely a scissor-tailed flycatcher," Ratthi whispered loudly. "They're incredibly rare on this continent! Did anyone else see it?"
"I missed it completely!" Amena whispered back. Everyone was whispering instead of talking over their feeds, as would actually make sense. Okay, so the feed was kind of spotty in this particular location -- also a good reason to stay home in my opinion.
"SecUnit probably got a picture." Ratthi looked at me hopefully.
I didn't know or care about whatever that was, but I ran back my drone footage -- I had the usual drone perimeter spread out around us -- and found a blurry shot of some sort of fauna launching itself off a branch, and sent it to everyone. They all very quietly freaked out to a degree that concerned me enough that I started scanning for toxins in the flora. Ratthi was literally jumping up and down, until suddenly he choked and doubled over.
"Ratthi? What? What is it?" Arada started smacking him on the back. Amena had the wide-eyed frozen look of a young human confronted with adult humans in trouble and not sure what to do. (Okay, that was a pretty common human reaction, and it was definitely preferable to "run towards the trouble" which was what a lot of adult humans did. For the record, don't do this.)
I, however, knew exactly what was wrong because I was receiving drone telemetry at all times, and this was not okay. On many levels. Ratthi was making all kinds of horrible biological noises until he expelled my drone, which was hurtled into the ground flora and lay there, not actually damaged, I think, but not responding to my signals. Ratthi's vitals seemed normal enough. My drone, on the other hand ...
"Ow," Ratthi managed at last. "Did I swallow a fly or something?"
"Worse," Amena said. She bent over to look for it, parting the grass.
I'd had my drones punch through actual human bodies while in combat, so I knew they could physically handle a lot more than a few seconds inside someone's mouth and .... other bodily cavities, but that was a protecting-my-humans sort of situation. Like with emergency first aid, the usual rules didn't apply. Having a drone covered in a hostile's bodily fluids was, it turned out, a lot less gross than having it inside a human I knew.
Arada was helping Ratthi sit down. Amena picked up my drone with the tail of her shirt and carefully wiped it off. (Ew.) It just sat there in her palm, and she brought it to me cautiously. "Is it hurt, SecUnit?"
"No," I said. I was finally getting telemetry again, and I realized that rather than being traumatized, which would have been reasonable, the drone had been trying not to send me upsetting telemetry while it was all .... ugh. "It's all right. Thank you."
The drone powered up again, and rose off her hand a few inches, then zipped to rest on her shoulder.
(I hadn't told it to do that. The more expensive type of drones, which I now had, were semi-autonomous.)
"My mouth tastes weird," Ratthi complained, while Arada patted his shoulder. He appeared to be fine. "Seriously, what did I eat?"
Amena looked at me, and although I wasn't any better at reading young human faces than most human faces, I didn't have too much trouble decoding her mischievous body language. My drone nestled under her collar.
"A bug," I said, and Amena giggled.
I mean. It was sort of true.