After that, Mensah, who was very angry but pretending not to be, gave me two boxes of intel drones, the tiny ones. （Indah had objected and Mensah had told her that it was a medical issue, that I needed them to fully interact with my environment and communicate.）
I think Mensah had already ordered the drones, as a sort-of bribe for me not continuing to point out that she hadn’t had any trauma treatment or retrieved client protocol after what had happened to her on TranRollinHyfa. Indah didn’t know that, right, so she thought Mensah getting the drones for me （giving intel drones to a rogue SecUnit nobody wanted around anyway） was Mensah’s way of telling her to fuck off.
She wasn’t wrong. Mensah’s really smart, she can sort-of bribe me and tell Indah to fuck off simultaneously.
I did have other things to do besides watch for GrayCris assassination agents and keep track of Station Security’s attempts to shove me out of the Preservation Alliance. Dr. Bharadwaj had started the preliminary research for her documentary on constructs, so I had been to her office five times to talk to her about it, and she wanted to set up a regular schedule of meetings with me.
（Dr. Bharadwaj was easy to talk to, for a human. On the first visit, after the photo of me was in the newsstream, we had talked about why humans and augmented humans are afraid of constructs, which I hadn’t meant to talk about and somehow ended up talking about anyway. She said she understood the fear because she had felt that way to a certain extent herself before I had stopped her from being eaten to death by a giant alien hostile. And she was trying to think how other humans could come to this understanding without the shared experience of almost being chewed up together in an alien fauna’s mouth. （Obviously she didn’t use those exact words but that’s what she meant.）
The second time we had talked I had somehow just come out and told her that I thought being here on Preservation Station as myself, and not pretending to be an augmented human or a robot, was disturbing and complicated and I didn’t know if I could keep doing it. She had said that it would be strange if I didn’t find it disturbing and complicated, because my whole situation was objectively disturbing and complicated. For some reason that made me feel better.）
I had also been helping Ratthi with the data analysis for his survey reports, and he was trying to convince me that could be a job I could do for other researchers. Which, sure, I mean, it could. If I wanted to be almost as bored as when a lot of my job had been standing in one place unable to move and staring at a wall. It wasn’t boring with Ratthi, but not all researchers were going to be so happy about the reports we constructed, or get me to go with them to live performances in the Station’s theater.
But whatever, now I just needed intel for threat assessment so I could figure out if GrayCris had killed the dead human or not and go back to my happy boring life on Preservation Fucking Station.
I knew from my drones that Mensah was back in the council offices （I had a routine in place to check my various task groups of drone sentries every seventeen seconds）。 If the station had better surveillance, or if I had access to what little surveillance was installed in the transit ring, I could start an image search for the dead human, get a timestamp of when they arrived, and match it to the Port Authority’s record of entry. Probably before Station Security managed to get the body scan from Medical.
It did seem unlikely that the dead human had been a GrayCris agent, because somebody had killed him. As far as I knew, I was the only one currently on the station looking for GrayCris agents to kill.
I just realized I don’t like the phrase “as far as I knew” because it implies how much you actually don’t know. I’m not going to stop using it, but. I don’t like it as much anymore.
And speaking of not knowing things, I couldn’t be sure the dead human wasn’t tangentially involved in a GrayCris operation. He could have been sent by a rival corporate, even by the company, to shadow GrayCris activity, and been killed by an actual GrayCris operative.
Right, so while the corporate-operative-killed-by-GrayCris-agent thing was a scenario that made sense, there was zero data to indicate that it was actually connected in any way to reality. But the fact was, looking for anomalous activity is how you detect security breaches. A murder in a very non-murdery station like Preservation was definitely anomalous.
Unless the dead human had been here to visit other humans, they would have needed a place to sleep and put their stuff. Humans need stuff, I had never seen one travel without at least something.