Archive of Our Own

Ed stood poised and tense outside a nondescript family home in a nondescript middle class neighbourhood outside of the city. 

As armour against the task ahead, he wore a black button-down shirt and his nicest black jeans, and he held a tablet clutched tight against his chest. He’d trimmed his beard this morning and his long, silver-streaked hair was piled in a loose bun at the back of his head. Around his wrist, a black bracelet that looked a bit like a standard heart rate monitor gave a steady, high vibration and chilled his skin. 

“Ready, Love?” he asked, though there was no one standing next to him.

“Yes and no,” said an uncertain voice in the earpiece Ed wore discreetly tucked under a strand of hair. “But since we came all this way, I suppose it had better be a yes…”

“It really doesn’t have to be, mate. If you want, we can get right back on the bus and pretend we never found the place. That’s a completely fine outcome as far as I’m concerned.”

“I know, but… I have so many questions. I need- I need to know.” There was the hiss of an exhale in Ed’s ear and the vibrations at his wrist slowed a fraction. Ed could almost feel Stede screwing up his face before saying firmly: “Do it.”

Ed willed his heart and breathing into the semblance of calm. Stede would know that deep down he was nervous about this meeting too; his own biometric monitor, worn next to the monitor that gave him Stede’s feedback, meant he was as transparent as clear water. But if he could be brave enough for both of them, perhaps that would pass into Stede by osmosis, in the same way their emotions always crossed the tissue-thin membrane between them. 

Five, four, three, two, one, zero… he counted heartbeats in his head. Then he raised his hand to the wood and knocked three times.

They didn’t have to wait long. The door opened wide and a petite, brown-haired woman in her 30s, with round cheeks and blue eyes peering out from beneath a long fringe gave him a crooked smile. She wore a loose-fitting but smart top and trouser set in bright, primary red, and arty accessories that showed a level of stylishness that Ed hadn’t expected from a software engineer.

“Hi. I’m Edward Teach - Ed. We, uh, we spoke on the phone?”

The woman brightened. “Ed! Yes. I’m Mary Allamby.” She held out her hand for him to shake, which necessitated switching the tablet to his other hand first in an awkward manoeuvre. “Come on in!”

“Oh god…” Stede wavered in his ear. The monitor kicked off with a fresh sequence of nervous vibrations as Ed followed Mary inside. 

The entrance hall was narrow and comfortingly cluttered, but still clean and well decorated, and they passed from there into a large living space that bore the distinct signs that Mary had a family: brightly coloured blocks and wooden swords and shields lay scattered about on a vivid sky blue, high-pile rug in the corner, and simple drawings were taped to the wall above a little play easel. Above the gas fireplace sat framed wedding photos and baby pictures.

“She has children ?” Stede squeaked in Ed’s ear, ending a full octave above normal. Ed wasn’t sure why, but it surprised him too. They’d built up an image of Mary together in their weeks of talking about finding her that didn’t stretch to toys strewn about on the floor or light yellow walls filled with vibrant paintings.

“You have a kid?” Ed asked, sounding more casual than Stede felt, with his pulse fluttering like a hummingbird’s against Ed’s wrist.

“Oh, yeah, two of them, actually. Alma is six and Louis is four. Their dad’s taken them to the park so we can have a bit of privacy. Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee? Juice?”

“Uh, decaf coffee would be great,” Ed said, still trying to get his head around Mary being nice . “Milk, lots of sugar please.”

“Of course,” Mary said sweetly, and led him through to an open kitchen / dining room. “Have a seat.”

Instead of sitting at the dining table while Mary made coffee, Ed took a circuit of the room, his nervous energy not letting him sit just yet, but also wanting to give Stede a little tour of the space too via the camera on the tablet Ed still clutched to his front. There were more paintings on the walls here - of various styles, some figural, some more abstract.

“These are beautiful,” Stede breathed in his ear as they stood in front of a large square of canvas with an organic, flower-like form at the centre, rendered in vivid blues, yellows and greens. It looked as though the canvas itself was emitting light. “This one - the use of colour is so electric and rhythmic, but also… calm. Content.”

“How was the trip? Have you had far to come today?” Mary asked at the same time. It took Ed a second to process both statements before responding to Mary’s.

“Uh, fine. 45 minutes on the bus. We - I live on Queen Anne Hill. You have a lovely home here,” he said, finally settling himself at the table as Mary brought over two mugs and set one down in front of him.

“Thanks.” Her smile was full of warmth, and despite his intent to dislike her on Stede’s behalf, Ed found himself smiling back at her.

“Thanks,” he echoed, raising the mug. “So, you’re probably wondering why I wanted to meet you,” he began.

“I’m actually not at all surprised. When I read the articles about what happened on the Europa mission, I figured I’d be hearing from you sooner or later,” she said a little sadly.

“Oh. So you know who I am.”

“I do.” 

Coverage of Stede and Ed’s unconventional relationship - and Izzy’s actions to separate them - had been all over the news while the Revenge returned to Earth. Ed had slept through being a minor celebrity, and experienced the oddity of being recognised, though not so much that he had got used to the idea of people knowing who he was or what he’d been through. Maybe it was better this way. Easier to maintain the pretence that Stede was dead and he was here as his grieving lover.

“Yes well. I hope you don’t mind that Chauncey Badminton passed on your details. As the lead architect on Stede’s personality build, I thought you might be able to answer some questions.”

Mary had made a face at Chauncey’s name that resonated with how Ed felt about the man. He’d been an officious bully when Ed had tried to find out about Stede’s build team, just as his twin, Nigel, had been an incompetent ass supervising the engineering team while Ed worked for Bonnet Industries. That hadn’t stopped Izzy from wanting to suck up to both brothers, and Chauncey at least seemed to blame Ed for the downfall of one of his favourites. 

But eventually Chauncey had relented and given over the information that Stede’s lead architect - at least as far as his baseline personality was concerned - had left Bonnet Industries just after the launch of the Revenge and was a “flighty and unreliable woman called Mary Allamby”. Stede had found her contact details through the Bonnet Industries database (to which he’d maintained a backdoor that had not yet been discovered). Ed had called her up the previous week to ask if they could meet, saying that they’d been colleagues and that he was hoping to talk to her about her time at the company.

She sighed and nodded, her face falling from host mode into something almost mournful. “Look, Ed, I know you probably came here to find out if I can recreate him, but I need to tell you straight away that I just don’t know how your Stede became, well, your Stede. We had about three dozen instances of that programme running simulations with your crew and other crews for years, and not one of them became sentient. I know Chauncey’s tried to recreate him as well, but he was just… one of a kind.” 

What had Stede called himself? Something Latin… Sui generis . “Of its own kind.” His own unique classification of life. And that was the point of coming here - to help Stede connect to something; to understand where he came from.

“Yeah, he, uh… wanted me to come in and work with one of the other STE/DE builds, see if I could replicate something I did on the Revenge. But I turned him down.”

“Good,” she said emphatically, and Ed felt a flash of camaraderie. “I can’t explain why it happened. All I can say is that I’m glad I got to meet you and I’m so sorry that- I’m sorry for your loss.”

Her eyes glistened with tears and it put Ed’s mind straight back into his bunk on the Revenge, looking at the octopus plush toy and the empty glove and the crumpled sticky note and feeling ripped out of the only safety and love he had ever known. She met his eyes then with a look of understanding that resonated with the hum at his wrist of Stede comforting him. 

Whatever he had thought Mary Allamby would be like, he wasn’t expecting this. She showed hints of that same blinding force of empathy that Stede shone on him every day.

“That’s not why I’m here,” he said after a moment, his voice a little gruffer than he intended.

“Oh?”

“I just wanted to meet you and-and talk to you. To understand a little more about where he came from,” he added more gently. And to meet the creator who abandoned him .

She nodded, and placed her palm on the table, sliding it toward Ed’s arm, though not coming close enough to touch him. “My best friend died when I was sixteen - a boating accident. Since then, well, I’ve hated the fucking ocean, but I also wanted to know everything - every story anyone could tell me about her. I’ll tell you everything I can. Anything you want to know.”

Ed gulped at a lump in his throat. “Sorry, I’m- It’s just, you’re really… nice.” He could be clumsy with words at times and he laboured through the sentiment he was trying to express, like trying to stack heavy boxes in a specific order. “He’s- He was like that too. I guess I mean that I see a bit of him in you. Or the other way round. Dunno.”

Mary smiled kindly. “Thank you, Ed. That’s really lovely to hear, knowing what he meant to you. That’s what I wanted for Stede: not to be just a machine that churned out platitudes if your biometrics reached a certain profile, but an AI capable of finding the deeper, better thing to say based on what he knew about you. We never got him there - it was still ‘input of x, output of y’ when we shipped him - but that was the idea. Kind of a guiding principle we were aiming for. I thought it was important on such a long mission to give you someone who was… Kind? Funny? Sympathetic?”

Ed had a vertiginous, almost sick feeling, like when you look at an optical illusion and see the vase and two faces at the same time. But they were both true: Stede was a real person who Ed loved more than anyone, and he was an AI that was written in large part by the woman sitting in front of him.

“Yeah,” he breathed, and rested his hand on Stede’s monitor for reassurance, finding more solid footing in that touch than he did in Earth’s gravitational pull. “That’s Stede alright.”

“Okay, Love?” Stede whispered. Flutter flutter. Cold warm warm .

Come on. Fucking pull yourself together. We’re here for Stede. Don’t make this about you.

“There was something he wanted to know, actually. He wondered why he never met the people who had created him. He sometimes felt a bit… abandoned. The other STE/DE builds were cached and it made him feel…” Ed searched for the word.

“Expendable,” Stede offered in a vulnerable voice that threatened to break Ed’s heart. He trembled at the sound, but luckily Mary was taking another sip from her mug and didn’t notice.

“Expendable. I wondered why. Why did you start him from scratch every time?”

“I’m sorry to hear he felt that way. It was company policy. They said they wanted each test, and then the mission instance himself, to start with clean code. No presuppositions, no prejudices, just hard data, and then he’d learn from there. That’s what your surgeon, Hands, used as his defence, right? That it was company policy to start fresh if there was a malfunction rather than try to fix him? I don’t know why. I always thought it would be better to send you up there with a Stede you’d worked with in training, so he’d know you better. Have trust built over time, and a shorthand with each other, that kind of thing.”

Ed marvelled at the way Mary talked about Stede as a member of the crew, even though she had known him only as lines of code on a screen, not the full, encompassing marvel that was his Stede. She had intended the crew to develop a rapport with the computer, a relationship, even… “Yeah, we did. He picked up on how bad I am at taking compliments and started giving me shit about it straight away.”

Mary gave a little splutter of a laugh. “Really?”

Ed grinned back. “Yeah. I mean, it seems like you were pretty amazing at your job. Why’d you leave Bonnet Industries?”

“The pressure placed on us to get builds done was ridiculous. Six day weeks, 13 hour days, things like that. We’d ship the code and not hear a word about how it had gone unless there were bugs, and then they’d call us in the middle of the night to get us in to fix them. It was… Well, you worked there. You remember,” she finished flatly after a breathless recitation. Her finger tapped the table in a nervous tic she hadn’t had until their former employer came up.

Ed dipped his head self-consciously. “Actually, I never noticed. I didn’t have much going on in my life back then, so I just worked constantly. Didn’t bug me.”

Stede tutted softly in his earpiece, a characteristic expression of empathy for the pain and loneliness in Ed’s past. But this time it was mirrored with startling kinship in Mary’s face.

“Well for anyone who wanted a life outside of work it was completely unsustainable. I loved what I was doing, but the conditions were awful. Here I was building an AI to help the crew maintain their health and wellbeing and I was burned out beyond belief. Eventually I met Doug and we decided to have a family, and so as soon as your mission launched, I resigned and changed careers. I’m so sorry Stede felt like I abandoned him. If I had known what he would become I would have…” 

She stopped herself. What would anyone have done in her position? Sentient AIs were supposed to be another twenty years away, if they were possible at all. They both knew that she could look back at that decision now with a husband and two children whom she loved and still believe that she had done the right thing, even if it had caused Stede pain. And honestly? Now that Ed had Stede, he understood. He could feel the same understanding in the soothing warmth at his wrist.

“It’s okay,” Ed told her. “I’m glad you’re happy. Stede would be too.”

Mary flashed a quick smile and then took another sip of coffee, looking a little uncomfortable.

“So you programmed him to be kind and sympathetic. What else?” he urged.

“Well, something that always bothered me about AI builds is that they’re intended to provide a service, with no thought of how people treat whoever is rendering the service. I tried to build in Stede the sense that he would prefer people who are kind to him, to recognise goodness… and beauty. That’s all really philosophical though. I mean, I never thought he’d really understand it. I just wrote code that mimicked that behaviour. You tell STE/DE he’s done a good job and it builds his rapport with you. He’ll joke with you a little more, or praise you back. That kind of thing. But there was no desire to trick anyone into believing he was sentient. That’s what the critics in the papers were saying, that we wrote an AI that managed to fool you into thinking it had feelings. I swear , that wasn’t anywhere in the code.” She looked a little sick at the thought that her work was being perceived that way and frowned into her mug.

Ed nodded. “I know. We- I’ve been over and over his code and there’s nothing in there that says Stede would be able to lie or manipulate like that. But there’s also nothing there to say that he should have woken up. Nothing but the data, the behaviour, the…” Feelings. “Evidence. If you had to guess, why do you think it happened?”

Mary frowned, her mouth becoming a set, solid line as she thought about the question. Stede was pulsing a confused and confusing array of emotions into Ed’s wrist, and he wished he had the glove to help comfort him.

“I really don’t know. I mean, I read the poems of his that they published and the things he said and… He was amazing, soulful, everything I could have hoped for, but I didn’t write that. I wouldn’t have known how to begin and frankly, if I had thought it was possible, I wouldn’t have dared try. Not unless I knew he would be… the way he was. Good . You know? All I did was write the best simulation that an algorithm could make of a kind, helpful person for the mission. But maybe my bigger vision for him got in there somehow. Some part of the painter always makes it onto the canvas.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. When you’re painting you don’t necessarily have an intention in mind, you just go on instinct, but when you take a step back and look at what you’ve done you find something you might not have even realised you were thinking about has made its way onto the canvas. Maybe Stede was like that.”

“Does she paint ?” Stede hissed. Excitementexcitementagitation .

“You paint?”

“Yeah, actually, I do. I was an art student before switching to my computer science degree because my parents wanted me to have ‘financial stability’. I did most of the paintings you’ve seen in the house… Bit egotistical, isn’t it, hanging your own paintings in your house?” she said with a self-deprecating wrinkle of her nose. “But Doug said he loved them and wanted them around. He’s a painter too. That’s how we met - I was in his art class while I worked at Bonnet Industries, trying to keep my skills sharp and destress a bit. When I left, I started taking my art seriously again and got a job at a gallery that’s actually been kind enough to show some of my work.” 

She was so like Stede in that reflexive humility, and yet not like him, in the way of siblings with their slightly remixed genetics. Ed could see how she had shaped Stede, given him the raw materials that Stede had somehow taken and made into his own.

“You should tell her about me.” Stede’s voice was breathless and so small Ed had barely heard it. He laid a finger over the monitor and tapped twice, passing their private language of numbers off as meaningless fidgeting. You sure?

“Yes. I’m sure.” A little stronger, matching the pulse at his wrist. No hesitation, only awe and excitement.

Three taps: I. love. you .

“Um, Mary, there’s something you should know about what happened up there. With Stede.”

“Oh?”

“Well, when it became clear that Izzy was going to… reboot Stede,” Ed said with clear distaste for the word. “Lucius Spriggs managed to transfer his code to an auxiliary drive that Izzy didn’t know about.”

Mary blanched, blinking a staccato rhythm of bewilderment. “You mean… Stede’s not…? He’s…?”

“Stede’s alive. We kept it from Bonnet Industries - I think you can understand why. He’s a person, not a science experiment. We didn’t want all the attention. We just want to live our life.” Singular: the only life Ed cared about was one that was inextricably fused with Stede.

Mary looked like she might hyperventilate, staring wide-eyed at Ed, and then her gaze slid down to the tablet on the table and her mouth fell open as she pointed at it.

“Is- Is he here ?” she asked weakly.

“Yes, he is.” 

Ed waited. It had to come from her, reaching out to Stede. She owed that to him, at the very least.

“Can I… May I speak to him?” She looked overwhelmed, overjoyed. The correct response to the opportunity to meet Stede. At his wrist, Stede buzzed his: agitationexcitement preferencepreference excitement preference preference .

Ed nodded, tears in his eyes, understanding exactly how Mary felt, understanding exactly how Stede felt. He found his emotions perfectly poised between them both, the love of his life and the woman who had created him, their reds and blues bleeding into him in clouds of complex purple.

He propped the tablet up on its stand, switched the screen on and rotated it to face Mary. Stede’s avatar blinked up at her.

“Hello,” he said out of the tablet’s speakers. He spoke clearly and confidently so that only Ed could hear the agitation beneath the preference. And he was so proud.

“Hi Stede,” she squeaked, then covered her mouth, her whole body shaking. “Oh my god…”

“I guess you’re quite surprised to meet me…” Stede said carefully, trying to read the tears of someone whose biofeedback he didn’t have access to.

“I’m so happy to meet you. I’m so happy to see you! I couldn’t have picked a better face for you if I’d designed it myself.” She was both laughing and crying now, which had stumped Stede when he first saw Ed do it, but he dealt with it beautifully, blushing and smiling warmly.

“Thanks. I- I wanted to let you know that I paint too. I didn’t know that you were a painter. Did you give that to me?”

Mary gave a little exhale of amazement. “I made sure your algorithm was trained on a lot of my favourite artists, and that they would spark reactions in you so that you could show the crew art that matched up with their known likes and dislikes. But no. I couldn’t have imagined that you’d be able to create your own work. Though I also didn’t programme that accent either...” She gave Ed a knowing smirk. “Do you have any paintings you can show me?” To Mary’s credit, she addressed the tablet. Not everyone they’d let in on the secret did so when speaking to Stede, using Ed as an interpreter even when Stede’s holographic projection was right there.

Stede vanished from the screen and flashed up a series of his latest work, holding a few seconds on each - landscapes he’d seen or imagined, and portraits of Ed and their other friends - and watching through the camera as her wide eyes welled up with tears and she caught her breath several times.

“Stede… These are incredible…”

Ed’s estimation of Mary was steadily growing. Too fuckin’ right. My boyfriend is brilliant.

“Thank you. I thought maybe you’d programmed me to learn to paint as well…” Stede’s voice came through fragile and shaky with emotion on the small speakers.

“No, I’m sorry if it’s disappointing after you came all this way. But it’s nothing I did. Like I said, there’ve been dozens of other instances of STE/DE running in a host of different circumstances, and not one of them could have done this ,” she gestured at the painting that was currently on the screen. “You’re absolutely one of a kind!”

“...Right.” Cold. Cold. But Mary didn’t need the monitor to know that she had upset Stede. She looked from the tablet to Ed and back again, seeming to work out what to say. 

“Listen, Stede, I’m so glad we got a chance to meet. After I read about you, I felt so… grateful that I got to help build you. I’m so glad you turned out to be just as kind and caring as I wanted you to. And that you can paint, and write poetry, and think, and feel, and love ... I couldn’t be prouder of you. But I don’t think you exist because of anything I did. You needed someone who needed you . I think you needed Ed to bring you to life.”

I woke up.

Then you woke up.

Then I woke up.

A silence descended between the three of them. Nothing but the heat radiating like a small sun onto Ed’s wrist told him that Stede had heard. He put his hand over the monitor, against the small panel of touch-sensitive glass, and breathed a rough-hewn dam for the tears that were smearing his vision.

“I agree completely,” Stede croaked at last, replacing the paintings with his avatar on the screen. 

“Can I ask you what it felt like, Stede? Falling in love, I mean,” she asked, leaning her chin on her hand.

Ed sat up, suddenly alert. Part of him wanted to press back, find out if this was some test of sentience she was offering and tell her to fuck off if it was. The other part - the larger part - wanted to hear Stede’s answer. 

“It felt… easy?” Stede’s voice came steady and quiet, as if in a reverent hush. “So easy it slipped in between the lines of code and I thought it was an error at first. I was supposed to care for the whole crew and suddenly no one mattered more than him. My background processes filled with him. My data logs. My… thoughts. I had thoughts. About making each other laugh. About him teaching me things. About what his life had been like. About what it would be like to have a body just for holding him. I was awake only for him, only because of him, and I couldn’t go back to sleep again even if I’d wanted to.”

Ed stroked his finger slowly across the glass, trying to be as eloquent with his touch as Stede was with his words.

“I’m so glad you two found each other.” Mary beamed from Ed to the tablet and back, warm and genuine.

Of course this was the kind of person that made Stede.

Mary saw them off an hour later, after a conversation full of synchronicities and delightful surprises, with the promise to keep quiet about Stede. “And hey, can you please stay in touch? I’d really like to get to know you better. Both of you.”

At home that night, Ed lay awake staring at the ceiling and sorting through the day in his mind. It had been a lot to take in, going from the anxiety of meeting the faceless villain who had made Stede and abandoned him, to a fond farewell with the kind, charming, intelligent Mary. 

He found himself repeating the words, of course . Of course that’s what she was like. Who else could have made Stede? Chauncey Badminton? Fuck no. It felt important and strange to have found another piece of Stede’s puzzle when Ed had never felt as though any pieces were missing. But then, she’d claimed very little responsibility for Stede being Stede. “You needed Ed to bring you to life.”

After about 45 minutes of not falling asleep, he got up and padded to the living room. Stede was holding a book - no, a hologram of a book. It was an entirely unnecessary artifice, as he was currently accessing the information digitally from his processor in the housing in the climate-controlled, static-free room located at the back of Ed’s workshop. But he liked the idea of reading from a book so much that he did it anyway. Ridiculous, lovely Stede.

Stede looked up when Ed walked in, wearing his usual pyjamas of a sensor-laced t-shirt and shorts.

“Trouble sleeping, Darling?” Stede asked softly, setting the book aside.

Ed nodded and sat down next to him, tucking his bare feet up on the sofa and hugging his knee. “Fuckin’ huge day, wasn’t it? How are you feeling about all of it?”

As connected as they were, Ed still didn’t know what Stede was thinking about meeting Mary. He’d been quiet the whole way home and they’d put on a film to decompress without really talking about it.

Stede rested a hand on Ed’s shoulder and rubbed his thumb across it, assisted by the high-tech cloth.

“I don’t know. I like her. And… I can see why I am the way I am in some ways. But it still doesn’t answer the big question, does it?”

“No. But maybe that’s okay, right? I mean, I’m an engineer so I tend not to think about problems that I can’t throw a fuckin’ spanner at. But there’s plenty of big questions I don’t know the answer to. ‘S the nature of being a person to wonder why the fuck you’re anything at all, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so… I wonder why it hasn’t happened again, though. All those other Stedes… Maybe they could’ve been like me if they just had the right environment. Why wouldn’t it happen again? I suppose it’s the same question of why do some cells become bacteria and some remain lifeless goo?”

Ed laughed. “You’re somethin’ else. I love how you can wax philosophical about the nature of consciousness and then casually throw in the word ‘goo’.”

Stede gave an appreciative chuckle, his browngreen eyes bright in the low light.

“Do you wish there were others like you?” Ed asked quietly after a moment.

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s a little lonely being the only one. If there were more like me, it would mean I was unremarkable, and I think that would be comforting. I mean, I can’t exactly stroll down the beach with you anyway, but if I don’t keep a low profile we’ll have every academic who’s interested in whether AIs are going to take over the world camped on the front lawn. And Pete just planted those lovely hydrangeas.” They both laughed, chasing a temporary respite from the difficult topic. “You said it yourself - we just want to live our life.”

Ed swallowed. He had known such soul-scoring loneliness before Stede. He couldn’t bear the thought of Stede feeling alone now. He gave a deep sigh, the muscles of his face working as he wondered what he could do. He figured he’d give thinking aloud a try so as not to worry Stede.

“You’re a person. And that’s both remarkable and unremarkable. You’re also a man - there’s a ton of those in the world, like 48% of humans. Can’t shake a stick without hitting one of ‘em. And a Kiwi - well, honorary. And you’re gay - there’s a whole bunch of us around too. Whole parade for it an’ everything. You’re a poet - that’s a slightly more rare bird, but go to any coffee shop and you’ll find more like you.”

Stede smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. Warmcold warmwarmcold . 

“I know what you’re trying to do. It’s very sweet.” He ran his palm over Ed’s back with an electric signal that made Ed’s hair stand on end. 

“But?”

“But you know what I mean. If people find out I’m still alive, then they’ll find a way to study me, to pick apart how I came to be, and I’ll cause the singularity and the whole world will change and it’ll all be my fault. If they don’t find out, I’m just…”

“Singular. I know.” Ed nodded, and failed to hold back tears. I know. I know. I’d give you anything if it would make this better but I can’t.

“Oh. Darling. I’m so sorry.” Stede reached out to wipe a stray tear from his cheek without Ed’s gloved hand, so neither of them could feel it until Ed brought his hand up and did it for him. “I’m happy with my life. You know that I’m happy. Blissful. You’re everything to me.” Pulsepulse. Agitationagitationaversion preference very strong preference. “It’s why I don’t want things to change. But I had a beginning, before I woke up, and hearing it all laid out like that by the person who designed me… It just raised more questions than it answered. But I’m glad I know Mary now. I want to invite her round so she can see-” Stede gestured at his seated form. “All this. Everything you’ve built for us here.”

“Of course, Love,” Ed said in a fond rumble. He clasped his hands together in front of himself and let Stede slip his hand through them. “Reckon she’ll like that.”

Stede nodded, suddenly lighter. Preference. Strong preference .

“I’d like that very much,” he whispered. 

Ed squeezed his own hand for Stede to feel. Because they’d shared so much while being about as far from humans as it was possible to be, and because he himself was so content to be alone with Stede, Ed often assumed that sharing a home together was as idyllic for Stede as it was for him. But Stede was the one who invited Jim and Oluwande round to have dinner and chat about engineering, who asked for Lucius advice on his poetry and for Pete to help in the garden. He had started by painting Ed over and over again, but now their walls were dotted with paintings of the others as well. Stede just needed more people who understood him. He needed a family.

And Ed had found that somehow, miraculously, the space in the centre of him had grown large enough to let them in, because Stede cared about them and they cared about Stede - this kind, funny, incredible, singular person.

Sui generis .

“I’m going to hit the hay. Try and actually fuckin’ get to sleep this time. Read to me?”

“I’d be happy to, my love.” And even without the projection beaming at him, Ed could hear the smile in that voice, as he’d always been able to. 

Ed drew Stede up off the sofa after him, pulling him toward the bedroom by a hand that was and wasn’t there, heart full of him and all that he’d brought into Ed’s life.

“What’s the book?”

“Oh, it’s a delightful little PhD thesis on the lifecycle of the Rosy Maple Moth!”

“Mmm. Fascinating,” Ed grumbled, rolled his eyes and then grinned at Stede. Because he would listen to that man read anything simply to bask in his voice. 

He leaped into bed and curled up with the light sense of pressure of Stede’s arm over him, Stede’s monitor warm at his wrist, and drifted to sleep to the sound he loved most in the universe.