Work Text:
“Hold on I’ve got another good one.”
“That’s what you said about the last one, Tourist.”
“Just gimme a chance, it can’t hurt can it?”
“…”
“I’ll take your silence as permission. So, a horse walks into a bar accompanied by a cowboy. Both of them sit at the counter and the cowboy orders a beer and the horse just gets a club soda. They keep this up for a few more rounds until the bartender asks the cowboy, ‘hey how come your friend doesn’t ask for something stronger?’ So the cowboy says ‘Well I can bring him here but I can’t get him to drink.’”
“…”
“No good, Chatty?”
“I’m starting to think you don’t have a very good sense of humor, tourist.”
“Carla thinks I’m funny!” 621 responded slowly as he always did despite his mock anger. The speech centers of his brain had been damaged during augmentation. He could still talk, but he spoke haltingly, knowing the words in his mind but struggling to make his lips form the sounds.
Carla did think he was funny.
“Yes, but usually not when you’re trying to be funny on purpose,” Chatty replied with his usual terseness.
“Fuck off,” 621 laughed. It made Chatty feel strange, not quite the feeling of accomplishing a task, or the feeling of watching a tv show that he enjoyed (it had taken him a while to even come to appreciate art), but something else pleasant. Something soft and airy. Maybe comfort was the closest thing, but Chatty didn’t think that fit entirely.
The flat head of 621’s Basho rig tilted up slightly.
“Coyotes.” He inclined his head downwards. Switching to a more economical style of speech now that their targets had arrived. Right, the mission. They had Coyotes rooting around in their trash again, and Carla wanted them taken care of.
621 crashed down from their perch high up on the grid like a brick. If Chatty was human, he might’ve winced at the bits of debris that shook off the ancient industrial sprawl as 621 landed, but he wasn’t and he didn’t waste valuable time trying to pretend to be. Instead he got to work laying down missile cover. 621 barreled through them like a bulldozer on a rampage, flinging toy box units off the sides of the grid with his pile bunker and blasting MTs with his shot gun. The tourist was outdoing himself as usual, at least until a Coyote Tetrapod MT pilot thought it would be a good idea to try to pull off the same entrance as WORKMAN’S COMP, crashing down onto the grid.
Chatty heard the pained wailing of the girders first, then the panels of the grid cracked. 621 was knocked off his feet as the ground shook, orange hands grasping at the tearing ground. Chatty engaged his boosters but CIRCUS wasn’t designed for air speed. All he could do was watch helplessly as 621 slipped off the edge of grid 86.
It took hours to find 621 again. Chatty didn’t know why he didn’t just report back to Carla. The mission was complete, she had far more resources than a single AC at her disposal, it would’ve been faster to mobilize search teams for him to go at it alone, but some part of him that should not have existed, was afraid if he took the time, he would be too late. Too late for what he didn’t know, he just knew the nameless panic of it. It was enough that he had spent the last three hours combing for debris, until he found an orange right hand sticking out of the rubble.
WORKMAN’S COMP was completely trashed. A feeling Carla told him was called his stomach twisting shot through him as he took in its warped legs. It wouldn’t be able to walk.
“Tourist, can you hear me?” Chatty tried to connect to 621’s dead comms. Nothing. He flipped WORKMAN’S COMP onto its stomach and pulled the emergency release hatch on its back, opening up the cockpit. “Tourist?” He begged over his external speakers. 621 climbed out of the cockpit. He was bleeding from a cut in his forehead. It was messy, but it didn’t look serious.
“Took you long enough.” 621 grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling softly. There was that pleasant feeling again, the one Chatty couldn’t identify.
“You’ll need a ride out.” Again, Chatty didn’t know why he did it. It would make far more sense to have Carla bring down the old, beat up, early model Basho they had in storage. This was risky, this was… this was almost a form of intimacy. Chatty let 621 stand on his hand and brought him to his back, before opening the hatch to his cockpit.
“You sure it won’t be too crowded in there?” 621 asked.
“I’m sure.” Chatty answered.
Raven gingerly stepped inside. Chatty could see 621 on his internal cameras as he quietly looked around, his calloused fingers lingering on the leather of his pilot’s chair.
“I didn’t realize it would be empty.”
“You know I’m not human, Tourist.”
“I know, I just figured there’d be a computer tower in the pilot’s seat or something.”
“It wouldn’t be necessary.”
621 put his hand on Chatty’s dashboard, running his fingers along his buttons and switches in a way that made him feel strange. He couldn’t feel the physical sensation of rough hands gently moving across glass, metal, and plastic, but it made him feel something. A thing curling deep in the recesses of his code. He didn’t know what it was, much less how to put it into words, so instead he said “You should probably sit down, Tourist, I’m about to start moving.”
“Oh sorry.” 621 hurriedly sat down as if he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. Maybe he knew what that feeling was, maybe 621 felt it too, but Chatty wasn’t in the business of unfounded speculation. He’d have to ask Carla about this later.
621 buckled himself in, instinctively grabbing onto Chatty’s twin control sticks and then just as quickly pulling his hands back like he’d been burned.
“Sorry, force of habit,” He apologized.
“They’re disconnected right now, touching them won’t interfere with anything.”
“It’s the principle,” 621 blushed, “I shouldn’t have touched you like that without asking.”
“You can touch me.” There was that feeling again, what was that? He didn’t feel like this when he was getting maintenance done, he’d never had sense of anticipation that he was feeling now as 621’s hands shakily returned to the controls.
“Is this alright?” He asked slowly, carefully.
Again, it didn’t feel like anything physically, he could see 621’s thumb nervously rubbing the top of his left control stick, but he couldn’t feel the brush of it against his plastic. Yet, Chatty still felt that something.
“Yes.” He kept his response brief as usual, trying to sort through the mix of his emotions. The process used more of his processing power than he liked, but it was valuable to him. It taught him more about himself, about how he thought, about how humans, or at least Carla, thought to program him in such a way.
Chatty did a quick scan of 621 before they left. Elevated heart rate, likely due to lingering adrenaline from the fall, but no signs of a concussion or anything else out of the ordinary.
“Ready to go, Tourist?”
“Yeah,” he replied, adopting Chatty’s economical pattern of speech.
As Chatty was about to begin wheeling away, he felt something just at the edge of his scanner range. He quickly diverted his processing power away from sorting out his feelings and towards cross checking the reading on his sensors against ALLMIND’s pilot database.
“What’s wrong?” 621 sat bolt upright, somehow picking up on Chatty’s nerves.
“I’m picking up another AC, not sure if they’re hostile yet, but we’re going to need to tread carefully, Tourist.”
“Who?”
“DEADSLED,”
621 cursed under his breath.
“Tourist, I’m going to enable my nerve uplinks.”
“Why?” Chatty could see 621’s shocked face through his cameras, his hands twitching on the controls.
“I’m a bot pilot, Tourist. I’m good but I’m not that good.”
Despite his shakiness, 621 nodded in understanding, reaching behind himself to plug Chatty into the augment ports in the back of his neck.
Now Chatty really felt strange, like there was a second set of hands gently resting just above his own.
“Woah.” He felt the thought come over their connection. It was so alien feeling compared to his own, yet he could practically feel the structure of 621’s broken neural pathways against his synthetic ones. He could sense the ways that their ways of thinking overlapped just beyond the static of the background calculations 621’s brain was making to keep his heart beating and his lungs breathing. Chatty was so simple in comparison. “You’re so big.” 621 finished.
“I’m glad you finally realized, Tourist.”
“No I mean, wait, was that a joke, Chatty? That felt like a joke.”
“Cold Call.”
“Right, sorry.” 621 gently pushed CIRCUS forward. Chatty felt DEADSLED shift at the edges of his scanner range, backing out of his field of perception, but he didn’t try to assert control of CIRCUS again quite yet. He sat back into himself, relaxing into the feeling of a hand guiding his own. 621 was gentle with him, carefully navigating CIRCUS through the tangle of the industrial grid. It was cute almost, Chatty could sustain gunfire to a point, there was no need to be gentle with him. At the same time, he wondered if this was what humans meant when they said they felt cared for by another person, if this was what it was to feel protected, even if it was his chassis that shielded 621’s fragile body. Maybe this feeling could be reciprocal, maybe it buzzed along in the static of the thousands of background calculations in 621’s brain and Chatty just couldn’t see it beyond the noise.
After a while of picking through the grid, they came to a shut down freight elevator.
“I think I might be able to get this thing moving.” As 621 began the process of connecting to the elevator’s control systems, Chatty felt something shoot into sensor range.
“Tourist!”
621 whipped around, nailing DEADSLED with a grenade.
“Shit!”
“Hmm, I didn’t expect to find you so quickly after accepting the lad’s contract, Raven. Nothing personal, you two, just business.” Coldcall applied a repair kit and fired at them with his laser shot gun. 621 was already moving, drifting past him and firing their bazooka as they dodged the blast. He fired off CIRCUS’s cluster missiles experimenting now with the unfamiliar AC’s capabilities, trying to feel the strategy that chatty had been built for. In moments he seemed to understand.
Coldcall intuited it too and tried to closed the distance between them, but it was too late, 621 had already grasped it. CIRCUS kited DEADSLED, wheels spinning, engines firing on all cylinders, missiles flying like a swarm of death. The second Coldcall dodged there was a grenade or a rocket waiting for him. All 621 had to do was keep away, thread the needle of the collapsing girders and rusted mesh of the grid. Somehow he did. It was as if he could see in all directions. Chatty could see in all directions, but he knew from experience that humans had difficulty taking in so much visual information themselves. It had to be his augmentations, the tiny pinpricks of coral red hidden within his eyes, or maybe, he was just that good.
Chatty felt CIRCUS’s arm swing upwards as DEADSLED made one final desperate charge, his legs extended for a kick. The rocket that shot out of their bazooka struck true, knocking Coldcall deeper into the tangle of ancient industrial structures. 621 calmly wheeled back to the freight elevator and reinitiated the connection process, as if it was no big deal that he had guided Chatty through a fight that would have normally been insurmountable for him.
“Elevator’s fixed,” 621 said, oddly breathless, shaking slightly in his seat.
“Good,” Chatty replied, “thank you.”
“Do you want me to disconnect?” 621 asked, bringing a hand to the cable at the back of his neck.
“No.” Chatty was surprised at the speed and forcefulness of his own response. “Apologies. I mean there’s no need, disconnecting would take too long and leave us too vulnerable.”
“Right.” The back of 621’s neck had turned red. “Of course.”
Once they got back to RAD headquarters, Carla chewed him out for going against protocol, but not too hard. He could tell she was hiding her excitement at the fact that he had disobeyed protocol at all, even if neither of them understood why he’d done it.
621 grimaced a bit upon seeing the loader Carla had provided for him to get back to base, but a ride was a ride. He waved to Chatty before he took off and the AI felt that same soft and airy feeling again. As he watched him disappear over the horizon he turned towards Carla, leaning on the scaffolding of the hanger.
“Chief, I’m having a feeling I’m having difficulty identifying,” He said simply. “Could you please help me figure out what it is?”
“Huh, what brought this on?” Carla asked, crossing her wrists as she stood up straighter.
“I’m not entirely sure.” He answered honestly.
“Would you mind letting me review any relevant footage?” Carla always asked him before doing so, even though she didn’t need to. She believed having a degree of privacy in his own thoughts was vital to healthy development of his persona.
“Sure.” He sent her a package of footage and data from that day to review. As Carla perused the data her eyes began to widen, she stood up straighter, grasping her laptop tighter as her hands shook with excitement.
“This is the real data, Chatty? You aren’t pulling my leg?”
“Yes, Chief.”
“Holy shit, Chatty, I think you have a crush!”
Chatty stood in shock for a moment, and then the logic of his programming made a strange leap. Chatty began to laugh.