Work Text:
Content filters for Janets were complicated things. They weren’t robots, after all, and certainly not computers (click wheel aside on Janet version 1.0). Their very purpose was to deliver information, and a firewall or some such nonsense would be against everything they were created to do. Yet every Janet had to prioritize certain content over others, or the loading time would be interminable. No one could know the number of shoelaces worn by Michael Jordan during his professional career, and the PH of every river on earth, and what made tequila so much more appealing after midnight, all at the same time. Sure, Janets were meant to know everything in the universe, to use that knowledge in the creation of their neighborhoods, and to dispense that knowledge in convenient, easily-digestible pieces whenever a human or Architect wanted something. But everyone has priorities, even vessels of knowledge.
The Janet assigned to Neighborhood 12358W chose to specialize in pop culture references of the 1990’s, fried cuisine of the southern US, London couture, and human history. All of it. She wasn’t sure what parts might come in handy, but she learned everything, just in case.
Kissing, though. That was in a grey area in the middle. Very few grand historical events began or ended with kissing. Most instances in theater, literature, and daytime TV used kissing as a stepping stone on the way to other things. She understood sex and the biological reason people liked it. But kissing was different. It served no distinct purpose, yet remained popular despite being unhygienic and apparently quite difficult to master. It confused her, and that made her uncomfortable. Nothing was supposed to confuse her. Why did kissing leave her feeling awkward and ignorant? Why did she lose confidence whenever she thought about kissing someone herself? And why was the tongue involved? Tongues were for tasting, and surely that wasn’t supposed to be part of it. Jason tasted mostly of Flaming Hot Cheetos, not that she’d minded. She’d never had to wonder what she tasted like before she married Jason, and spending hours in the blank emptiness of her void contemplating whether or not a Janet might benefit from breath mints was a surreal experience. Then again, what wasn’t surreal these days?
Kissing was achievable intimacy. Janets were not built like humans, and were never meant to procreate biologically. Therefore, sexual organs were superfluous. Janet couldn’t help but wonder, though, whether the Bad Janets had managed to get around that particular obstacle. They certainly dressed as though they had. (Throwing shade was so much fun). She wished there was a way to ask them, but the Bad and Good sides of the extended Janet family never really spoke. It was hard to carry on a conversation with someone who kept farting and then giving their own flatulence a rating on a 5-star scale. Regardless, sex was complicated. Whereas kissing ought to have been simple. She had a mouth, after all, and a tongue. Jason had said one tongue was enough, which was good, because the times she’d played with having more than one she’d ended up spluttering and unable to speak without lisping and spitting. Not an attractive quality. The point was, her default appearance came equipped with the correct anatomy for kissing. And she was essentially all-knowing. So really, she ought to have been the best kisser ever.
She was not the best kisser ever.
Even after revisiting every novel ever written, not to mention 13,000 episodes of “Days of our Lives”, she still wasn’t sure she’d gotten the hang of it. She’d even suffered through rewatching her own memories in order to critique her own work after the fact, but it hadn’t helped. The only person who could really tell her if she’d improved was currently married to someone else (though they swore it was for legal reasons only). At this rate it looked like she’d never get a chance to kiss Jason again, to ask him whether this time she’d kissed him properly.
In her worst moments of doubt, when she questioned every change that had worked its way into her system over the course of 802 reboots, she had to remind herself that Jason’s memories had been wiped clean. She understood the process of rebooting, for herself and for humans. She remembered. He did not. Yet a sad, guilty part of her thought that if only she’d learned about kissing sooner, if only she’d been good at it from the very beginning, if only she’d known how important it would be and done her research a little more thoroughly, then maybe, just maybe . . .
He’d have remembered, too.