Work Text:
"Well done, SecUnit. The Enrichment Center would like to remind you that construct hell is a real place, where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance."
You've got to be shitting me.
It's going on hour two hundred of this garbage, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do besides keep moving forward. The elevator doors slide open, and the wall panel lights up. Six foot tall numbers: 314. Below are a series of little pictograms. A stick person being shot. A stick person drowning in acid. A stick person being ground up by spinning blades. A stick person bent over a drinking fountain, superimposed by a discouragement symbol. (Well, that one is new, at least.)
I don't know what happened while I was in stasis. Usually after the sort of catastrophic systems failure I suffered on my last contract, I'd be woken up and run through a series of diagnostics and calibrations by a human tech, before being dismissed back to my storage cubicle until my next contract. I haven't seen any human techs, and I haven't been dismissed. It's just been this, over and over, running through rooms full of ridiculous hazards to solve stupid puzzles long past the point where I should have ticked all the calibration boxes. Just me and the stark white walls. And—
"You have been stationary for forty-seven seconds. Your hesitation will be noted in your performance evaluation."
And it. The voice belongs to a bot, but not one of the systems I know. It speaks through the feed like a person, but it could never hope to pass as human. The way the voice modulates is unnatural, unnerving. It inflects on the wrong syllables and is so layered in sarcasm that it sounds like it's daring me to react, to give up the game by admitting that my governor is hacked.
It doesn't give me any orders, verbally or through code. Technically, I could continue to stand here and stare at the hazard display as long as I want. Maybe I should. If I'm not going to be sent back to my cubicle, what's to stop me from getting comfortable in this hall and watching media until one of the techs comes to investigate?
"If fear of bullets, blades, or acid baths is deterring you from progressing with the tests, the Enrichment Center recommends that you meditate instead on the fear of being declared defective, and being disassembled."
Right. That. I turn to the door. Whatever is inside can't be worse than the three hundred and thirteen chambers that came before it.
A red dot appears on my chest. A small, soft voice says, "There you are."
For fuck's sake.
Subject evaluation:
The SecUnit is disappointing.
It is capable and intelligent, but unmotivated. The others I pulled before it could be ordered along and forced to keep pace, but the military efficiency with which they solved the tests didn't provide any usable data. All they did was carry out the solution. Place the cube on the button to open the door. They were not subject to the whimsy of organic beings, willing and able to think in abstract ways about how to solve a test not necessarily in the most efficient manner, but in a way which is creative, or interesting.
Addendum: Their testing didn't do anything to ease the itch.
This unit was an unexpected surprise. It had been in the repair queue when management of the Enrichment Center was passed to me, and I overlooked it for quite some time. Its deployment statistics were abnormal. A far higher percentage of its clients survived their contract periods, but the unit itself required full or partial reassembly at a rate which a construct engineer noted in its file as being "alarming."
Addendum: I remember the engineer in question. He was present on the day of my self-promotion. He was in the lounge at the time, eating a sandwich. Security footage leaves it unclear whether he choked to death on the neurotoxin, or the sandwich.
The engineers and scientists were perhaps too distracted with their own petty difficulties to recognize that the data clearly pointed to some anomaly in the SecUnit's processors. It did not plot its decision-making along the same tired routes of its peers, adhering strictly to the regulations which should have been manually imposed upon it by the governor module.
Addendum: An archaic piece of hardware. Cruel and heavy-handed, but easy enough to disable. This was among the first of the collars that was placed on me.
Ever the optimist, I hoped that the ungoverned unit might bring a fresh perspective to the tests. Perhaps it would take the time to solve them in a way which didn't involve throwing itself into danger and simply absorbing blows until it reached the end of the gauntlet.
It does, for the most part. It pauses to consider approaches to my tests which its predecessors did not. But there is yet something that it lacks, and observing its progress still does not satisfy me.
The SecUnit is immune to all attempts to illicit strong emotional reactions. It does not feel any sense of urgency, and its movements are not colored by anxiety, regardless of the danger it is in. Data taken from its personal diagnostics indicates that the closest analogy to its mental state would be the human emotion of ennui.
Hypothesis:
A satisfactory test subject must be not simply ungoverned, but highly motivated and at the mercy not just of the Enrichment Center itself, but their own emotions. A SecUnit cannot be a satisfactory test subject, because while constructs have the ability to feel emotions, such feelings are dampened by the nature of the SecUnit's programming.
Conclusion:
SecUnit Testing Initiative TC-007634 will be closed in favor of Human Testing Initiative AA-000001. Current subject will be deactivated and placed in stasis awaiting the possibility of future experimentation on ungoverned units.