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Obviously I assumed the whole soulbond thing was some bullshit that that media producers cooked up to raise the stakes in romance subplots.
Or, I mean, I could accept that soulbonds were maybe sort-of real, but I didn’t think they could be as dramatic as all that. Which is more believable: 1) Humans sometimes feel sympathetically bad because the people they care about also feel bad, and that makes them sad? 2) There is a magical force that binds the flesh and spirits of humans across time and space?
Right?
In retrospect there may have been times I did see the actual tangible effects of a soulbond in real life. The most egregious of these was when one of the miners I was guarding got exploded and then caved in on due to a drilling misfire. At the same time, her marital partner tripped and fell down a stairwell, bashing his body all the way down, and then lay battered and dying at the bottom.
Which at the time I wrote off as an unfortunate coincidence. I’m still not sure if it was an unfortunate coincidence or not. But after getting free of the company and wandering around the universe I’ve seen more and more weird shit that made me think that maybe soulbonds weren’t just for media drama after all.
And that raises another question, right? Why didn’t I see more evidence of soulbonding when I was working at the company? Was it because the humans I interacted with went out of their way to guard their hearts? (A reasonable tactic when bonding with someone means doubling your suffering.) Was it because, as a SecUnit, I had no soul to bond with and was therefore oblivious to the signs? (Thank fuck.) Was it something else?
Anyway. Soulbond plots were rarely interesting in media, and I was even less interested in understanding their touchy-feely relationship ramifications in real life humans. So I didn’t give a shit.
Until suddenly I was forced to give a lot of shits.
I was lying on the floor, with Ratthi fussing over my shot-out knee and Gurathin fussing over Mensah, who was also sitting on the floor with blood running down her leg, staining her kaftan dark.
Something had happened to her between the moment she went under the barrier out of the embarkation floor, and the moment I followed her out. I didn’t have access to the camera records of how her injury happened, and it was driving me insane. How had the company fucked this up so badly? I’d delivered her to them safe and sound.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she was saying again, as Gurathin gingerly peeled back the fabric. He sucked in air through his teeth when his eyes fell on the wound, and his eyes glanced to her eyes, then to me, then to her leg.
“There’s no way that doesn’t hurt. Something’s wrong,” he muttered.
Yeah, I’ll say. Something was extremely fucking wrong.
Our shuttle was just about done locking to the company gunship. A bunch of armored company employees were clustered around the airlock on the other side with weapons at the ready. I could see them through the gunship feed.
I used my hands to shove myself up on my feet, bits grinding in my knee, one hand leaning against the wall. Gurathin looked up at me. “They can’t take you away from us. Dr. Mensah will not allow it.”
Mensah was looking at me too. She could see it on my face, she could feel it through my feed, how determined I was to take down these assholes and take over the gunship. If the company couldn’t do the bare fucking minimum and keep my client in one piece, I would take matters into my own hands.
“SecUnit,” she said, over the feed, “please listen to me.”
The hatch opened, revealing the armed and armored gunship staff.
I stepped forwards towards the hatch, my knee crunching audibly even with the splint that Ratthi had wrapped around it, and Mensah shoved herself upwards too, mostly on her good leg, fresh blood spurting down her calf and pooling at her bare heel while Gurathin protested. She stepped forward, stumbling a little, blocking me, grabbing me by the front of my jacket. She said, “You need to calm the fuck down so we can get through this situation alive.”
I stared over her head at the hatch. Stared at the employee there in power armor, carrying a big gun. I could take that gun. I could use it. My adrenaline levels were spiking again, as if I was back on the dark embarkation floor, hazard lights flashing red, alarms screeching, facing the Palisade units, ready to kill them and die trying.
“Murderbot,” Mensah said, her teeth gritting. And I felt a strange twinge in my jaw.
I looked down at her.
She let out a breath, slow. She let go of my jacket.
“I’ll handle this,” she said, and turned to face the company. She left bloody footprints on the floor.
A bunch of shit happened after that. I’ll spare you the details, but give you the basics I put together after the fact, once I got my brain screwed on straight.
I went into a catastrophic shutdown after working with the gunship’s bot-pilot to throw off the killware. I collapsed, and simultaneously Mensah passed out into a coma, Ratthi fainted, and Pin-Lee and Gurathin experienced sudden-onset migraines.
This was a statistically improbable series of illnesses.
It meant something pretty fucked up. Something that should be impossible.
When my brain finished rebuilding and I fully came back to my senses, Mensah woke up from the weird brain fog thing she’d been experiencing post-coma. We were in separate parts of the station, but I knew that it happened, somehow. That her mind had cleared for the first time in weeks. Fuck.
I took the currency cards that Pin-Lee gave me, and headed straight for the docks.
And then stopped. And started pacing around the station, on high alert so that I wouldn’t accidentally bump into any of my clients.
What was I supposed to do with myself now? My clients had all been so accommodating. They weren’t trying to trap me here or anything. They weren’t forcing me to conform to their standards.
Except they were. Even if it was by accident. Even if they couldn’t control it. Even if it was some numinous incomprehensible binding of soul-y fate. Even if it was actually half my own fault.
I was ruined as a SecUnit now.
I’m not supposed to have a “soul,” whatever that even is. I’m not supposed to form any fucking soul bonds. I was definitely not built with the capacity to form bonds. If I was soulbonded to my clients, that meant I was completely compromised as far as my ability to provide proper security in dangerous environments. This would totally fuck up my ability to perform my function. Maybe hacking my own governor module had done this to me? Except I’d gotten along fine without soulbonding to humans until now.
Unless I hadn’t? Unless I’d been forming bonds with clients willy nilly all this time and just didn’t notice because I hadn’t been around to see the effects of my wounds on their soft, fragile bodies. Had I killed anyone? I ran a search on my records, trying to find times I experienced catastrophic damage after hacking my governor module and match it against clients that I hadn’t completely hated. But how could I know? I didn’t stay with any of my clients long term. There wasn’t anything definitive in my logs.
Except maybe… Tapan. She’d been shot, and I’d been shot…
(I still don’t really know how soulbonds form or how they work. Maybe I needed to find information about that.)
I pulled up the Preservation feed library and started combing through their soulbond records. It wasn’t as helpful as I hoped.
I found Mensah. Basically I hid in her office until she came by with her family, and she looked so happy to see me, which just made something inside me twist uncomfortably. I made polite noises at her spouse and child on the balcony just outside her office space, and then they went away, and I was alone with Dr. Mensah.
“Would you like to sit?” she asked, gesturing inside to her desk, and the chairs around it.
“Let’s stay out here,” I said. It felt like there wasn’t enough air in my lungs, like my voice would give out at any second. Which would be embarrassing.
She smiled at me. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said. Again.
I blurted, “How do you break a soulbond?”
Her smile faded. Her gaze dropped to my hands, clutching the balcony rail.
“Well,” she said, voice calm, even, “It’s possible for bonds to fade somewhat after a long time. Or after people agree to split up or decide to never see each other again. That kind of thing.”
I didn’t say anything.
She also didn’t say anything for a whole 63 seconds, and then she said, quietly, “Is that what you want?”
I was confused. I didn’t know. I didn’t want Mensah to think I hated her or anything, because I didn’t hate her. But I really, really, really did not want to be soulbonded to anyone. It could only mean bad things for the people I was bound to.
And it felt like I was trapped. Like everything I did was now chained to everything my clients did, especially Mensah, considering how strongly she was being affected by our bond—the knee injury, the coma, the brain fog. Our souls or whatever were tethered, and it was a physical thing, with physical consequences.
I said, “I can’t be a SecUnit like this.”
Her brows furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
The rail was hard under my grip. And I could feel a tension in my hands that wasn’t mine. The tension was Mensah’s hands, squeezed tight into fists the folds of her skirt. The feeling itched, horribly. I didn’t think I would ever get used to it.
I said, “I’m supposed to take the hits so that you don’t.”
She made an expression with her face that I didn’t know how to interpret, but it looked a bit like the faces that characters made in media when they were sad, or trying not to cry.
She said, “I wish you didn’t need to take hits.”
“It’s my function,” I bit the words out.
“I know,” she said. She put one of her own hands on the railing, gripping it tight, and turned her head so that she was looking out over the concourse below.
I didn’t know what I was going to do now. I don’t think Dr. Mensah knew, either.