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I was with Gurathin in his quarters, arguing, when the malware hit. (Why was I in Gurathin's quarters? We'd been talking; he was completely wrong about something, and I'd felt the need to tell him to his face how wrong he was. What were we talking about? Fuck off.)
Gurathin's face blanched and sagged; he collapsed to the floor. I extended my senses towards him in the feed, and yup, there it was, fucking malware. I started analyzing the code attacking Gurathin's augments, and checked the drone cameras to confirm my suspicions. Yeah, augmented humans were dropping like flies - every augmented human. This was bad .
My initial scan of the code wasn't promising - I couldn't root this shit out of his brain on my own. He'd need a MedSystem. On the plus side, I could tell it was designed to incapacitate, not to kill. Any augmented humans on the station would be in agony until the code could be extracted, but they’d be mostly okay in the long run. (There was always someone who'd fall wrong and break their face, but I couldn't do anything about that, so I just tried to ignore it.)
Gurathin, at least, hadn't broken his face when he'd fallen. His quarters didn't have much furniture; turned out that sometimes he liked to pace when he was thinking, which required lots of room to move. Gurathin had been pacing while we argued - I'd been hoping to get him riled up enough to start talking with his hands, which was a rare sight and extremely funny . I hadn't been close enough to catch him when he fell, but he’d tucked and rolled. He'd practiced how to fall safely, then, at some point. (It’s so stupid that humans have to learn that. It should be instinctive.)
Via my drones, I could see augmented humans clutching their heads, screaming in agony, wailing for help, for someone to make it stop. (It looked sort of like how getting shocked by the governor module felt, except that SecUnits have to keep still when that happens.) Gurathin was curled up tight, emitting small whimpers, like he couldn't afford to draw attention with a louder cry. My organic insides twisted.
I gave myself a mental shake. I had to focus. First, start tracing back the code to its origin point. Fuck, it had come from a device with a time-delay. That meant whoever left it here was already long gone. (Later, after investigating, I'd find a charismatic traveller had given their hosts lots of charming little souveniers as thanks for their hospitality. Fucking humans and their fucking stuff. Of course they hadn’t thought to scan the gifts for hidden surprises, this is fucking Preservation where everyone is just so fucking trusting .)
Focus, Murderbot.
You can't fix the malware yourself, you can't stop it from getting any worse, what can you do?
I knelt down, picked Gurathin up, and started walking towards MedSys. I had one arm under his knees, the other arm around his back. I turned my body temperature up, for shock, and kept my gait smooth, to avoid jostling him. With physical contact, I was getting a lot more impressions from Gurathin via the feed than normal, and I could feel the pain in his head. I reached out into his augments, to see if I could maybe get a better idea of how this malware shit worked.
As I slid into Gurathin's augments, all the tension in his body suddenly relaxed. That was unexpected, to say the least. I looked at the connections between his augments and the rest of him, and - oh, that's why. My presence functioned as a buffer between Gurathin and the worst of the malware's effects - I could still feel disorientation and vertigo coming through loud and clear, but the pain was so muted in comparison that it was practically gone. Feelings of relief and safety were radiating off Gurathin in waves.
This was a lot. People don't generally feel safe when a SecUnit is holding them - they're either too far gone to know what's happening, or they're terrified. Either of you, or whatever's trying to kill them. And if I was rescuing a human, that meant shit was going down and I had to focus on whatever I was rescuing them from . This was so far outside a normal rescue that I struggled to categorize it. Whatever. I did my best to keep my face still as I walked down the station mall. I wasn't the only one carrying an incapacitated augmented human, so I didn't even stand out.
I reviewed data on previous missions. Another reason this was strange: I'd never had to save Gurathin from anything before. He'd always been there in the background, quietly providing support. Shit, he'd rescued me a few times, and never even mentioned it later. Fuck, I needed to stop thinking about this, or my face was going to do something. Focus.
There was a crowd around the MedCenter, unsurprisingly. The medtechs were doing their best, but they couldn't do much for this. Everyone just had to wait their turn. there were multiple medbays, but it was slow, specialized work. Someone had brought a few chairs outside for the crowd. A human tried to catch my eye and offer me a seat-I guess it looked uncomfortable for me to be standing around holding someone, but this was as easy as my job got. I shook my head and reflexively tightened my arms around Gurathin. They shrugged and offered the seat to someone else.
I'd done everything I could. Gurathin was better off than the other augmented humans waiting here. I thought about trying to talk to him, but he was still pretty out of it. Besides, I could feel the malware on the other side, just waiting for an opening to push through me and back into Gurathin, and fuck that .
I settled in to wait.