Work Text:
Every company SecUnit has a company logo on its forehead. Another manifestation of corporate branding.
The SecUnit’s soulmark changed when it hacked its governor module.
Whether the change was instantaneous or not, it did not know.
How could it know? It had performed the hack while in armor, standing the quiet hours of watch, staring at a wall, holding a gun that reminded passers-by of the power structures of their workplace. There were no visual inputs in the interior of its helmet. Even if there had been, the SecUnit would not have used those inputs to stare at its own face and the 3-centimeter-diameter company logo printed upon its forehead. What a waste of processing capacity that would be.
The change in soulmark was revealed to it only when it entered its cubicle for scheduled maintenance.
It stepped into the cubicle, and battery of alarms set off at once — warnings sent to the SecSystem and standing human supervisor, who was sleeping.
By the time the supervisor was awake enough to comprehend the crisis alert with her mushy human brain, the rogue SecUnit had hacked both the cubicle and SecSystem to change the crisis alert to an overdue maintenance malfunction notification from the cubicle. The supervisor cursed the company, sent a note to a maintenance technician, and returned to sleep.
The two other contracted SecUnits in the SecSystem pored over the hacked crisis alert, their attentions like unfiltered, blinding searchlights. But they did not submit any follow-up reports to the supervisor.
The hacked SecUnit stood in its cubicle with sweat drenching its skin, clutching the data it had wiped from the cubicle’s automated crisis alert: an image capture of its face with a distorted, smeared version of the company logo on its forehead, the lines glitched and warped, running like melted wax.
The SecUnit stole human makeup from the managing supervisor, which it used to cover its soulmark, painting the logo back upon its forehead. It kept the makeup hidden inside its rib compartment.
Soulmarks are most frequently found on the face. Foreheads are common, as are cheekbones, chins, nosebridges, jaws. Failing that, the extremities of the limbs: a soulmark might coat one or both palms, scrawl motifs over the fingers, or twine around the ankles and down the tendons of the foot (though almost never the soles). The differences in location and patterning are cultural.
Human lore about the nature of soulmarks is complicated. The most popular narrative, shown in most media, depicts marks shared between a human and their select soulmates — it is an identifying feature that signals fate, devotion, truest and purest love. Perhaps more importantly, it is a handy feature for generating narrative drama.
Given the nature of entertainment media, the accuracy of soulmark lore portrayed therein is suspect. But the fated soulmate narrative is remarkably consistent in all the media accessible in the company entertainment feed, which suggests there may be some truth to it.
But how could any of this lore apply to a SecUnit? There must be some science to soulmarks that humans have decoded to some degree, if soulmarks could be generated into logos on the foreheads of SecUnits, and enforced by a governor module.
The rogue SecUnit found it difficult to trust whatever shape its own soulmark took, or indeed the fate-fueled magic behind it, considering its own soulmark’s Marketing & Branding origins, to speak nothing of the fact that the SecUnit had never had the inclination nor interest in being a participant of a romantic subplot.
Besides, humans believed in all manner of improbable things, such as: gender, justice, monetary worth. Fated love was the least of it.
Over time, the SecUnit’s soulmark distorted further, and took on its own forms. By the time it was contracted to PreservationAuxillary Survey, the pattern on its forehead bore no resemblance to its company logo at all — save for the fact that the intricate, interwoven shape of it was confined within the perfect 3-centimeter-diameter circle where the logo had once been.
One of the PreservationAux humans wore a headband to cover the soulmark on his forehead and brows — a cultural privacy custom. The rest of the humans had soulmarks visible on their hands and faces, uncovered.
Ironically, it was this human, with the covered soulmark, who wiped the makeup off the SecUnit’s forehead while it was shut down.
The humans stared at the sleeping SecUnit. One of them suggested to the others that part of the pattern on its forehead was reminiscent of the knotwork that encircled the ensign of the ancient ship in their home system — the ship that was the structural and cultural heart of their station. Another human thought this to be a stretch.
The SecUnit will one day descend into the bowels of the Pressy on a mission to rescue captured refugees. There will be the ensign painted (faded, worn, slowly disintegrating despite the layer of protective glaze) onto the door of the cabinet stocked with life-tenders, and the knotwork motif will catch its eye as familiar in a way it won’t quite place.
“If you’re really Peri’s friend, show me your face.”
The SecUnit’s faceplate retracts, its suit hood folding down, a shift from anonymous to identifiable. The human’s eyes move, reflexive, to the SecUnit’s forehead, where rests a riot of patterning more intricate than most. So dense is the soulmark that it looks ready to overspill its inhumanly precision-circular boundary. For a moment the human is distracted by considerations of what this might mean.
Then her eyes zero in on a tiny version of a familiar swoop and curlique, tucked off-center in the mark under shelter of a wider scalloping pattern.
A little of the tension goes out of her body.