#the old version is still available on ao3 for posterity ive just stripped it of tags n stuff. this ver is a total rewrite!

[umbraastaff]

There's something wrong with the planet.

I know, that sounds really dramatic. And probably exaggerated, knowing how much anxiety and paranoia is all but designed into my cheap fucking systems. It's not like I have much of a frame of reference, either: I only have linear memories of the last 160 hours of my life, barring the activation and maintenance between previous contracts. The rest is in bits and pieces, most of them ghosts of old feelings and reactions from my organic parts.

But that's how I know. There's a sense of wrongness in my organics, telling me things are different than how they should be -- how they used to be, at least. People keep bringing up the event from two months ago. I wasn't around for it, (or at least I don't remember it), but from my understanding, something fell from the sky, and now everyone's acting really weird.

They call it the Light of Creation, and yes, they capitalize it.

As far as I can tell, it isn't a power source, and nobody's considering selling it, but it's somehow helping with an important project. It's being held by the IPRE, the same entity that rented out my contract starting a week ago… for a two-month mission that's going to start ten months from now. They're paying for a year's worth of SecUnit for a mission a fraction of that time away.

I can't complain about that, exactly. Ten months of hanging around a bunch of boring researchers is a lot better than ten months of being a regular Murderbot, cycling between memory erasure and panic over the lives of various clients. It makes it easier not to get my brain painfully zapped by my governor module, too, when there are less crises. But it still feels highly unusual, and weird behavior is always going to make me uneasy.

"Let's run through this one more time," says Captain Davenport. Speaking of weird behavior.

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