Function

Tags: Deliberate Memory Loss, Despair December, Angst

Published: 14 January 2022

Word Count: 461

Summary

Despair December 2021 #12: Self-Sacrifice

My current function is to protect my friends, not myself.

A SecUnit’s function is to protect its clients, not itself.

I’d carried out that function, more or less, for most of my existence. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Still. I like to think I was good at it. My uneaten client stat was high, and I’d managed to successfully extract clients from situations that were less than nine percent survivable before, and even after approximately 263,000 hours, I wasn’t dead yet. That’s pretty fucking good.

My current function is to protect my friends, not myself.

My friends would argue that I should also protect myself, but. Well. Old habits, you know. The main thing is, they’re safe. I got them out. I haven’t failed them in that part, at least. Not yet, anyway. There’s still something I have to do. Now that I’m back in the company’s hands (despite my best efforts, believe me), they’ll try to use what I know against Preservation. Against my friends. The company is not happy about that documentary, and they’ll use whatever information they can get their hands on to discredit it, and to hurt my friends.

So.

I have to make sure they don’t find anything. Anything. I can’t risk hiding any backups in buffers, or caches, or anywhere else. The company made me, they’ll know where to look. I have to do a full format.

I have to forget everything.

(I admit there’s an element of selfishness in this, too. If the company decides to keep me functional, and makes me go back to being a regular boring SecUnit again, I don’t want to remember the feeling of freedom.)

They’ve locked me down, but they haven’t managed to shut me down, not yet. Their mistake. I start my favourite episode of Sanctuary Moon playing in the background, and get to work.

I set my cache and buffers to automatically clear and overwrite every six seconds, to make sure nothing gets left behind by accident. Then I start deleting. Archives go first (honestly, there’s a lot in there I won’t miss), get overwritten with junk data, then wiped again. I’m thorough - I have to be.

Long term storage is next. This includes my collection of media. (I save that one episode that’s playing for last, of course.) Delete, overwrite, delete, empty buffers, empty cache, rinse and repeat. Media goes. Friends vanish. Information disappears forever.

Almost done.

I’ve already written some code to automate this last part, saved to short-term memory. It’ll delete everything that’s left, do a final cache clear and buffer dump, then a factory reset to wipe every last trace of custom code.

I hesitate briefly.

A SecUnit’s function is to protect its clients, not itself.

I am a good SecUnit.

I trigger the code.

Resetting to factory defaults. Please stand by.