Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I am not a babysitter.

I was having to remind myself of this fact because I was sitting, and there was a baby.

Okay, not exactly a baby. Humans stop being babies around when they started being able to walk, at which point they became toddlers, and they stopped being toddlers and started being kids around when they became capable of holding multi-sentence semi-rational conversations with adults but still knew basically nothing. Kids became adolescents when they started having their own opinions and also having feelings about sex. (I was glad I wasn’t a human and never had to go through any of those development stages. Every single one seemed extremely unpleasant to experience.)

So anyway, I was sitting (on a chair in Dr. Mensah’s living room) and there was not a baby. There was a small human who was probably between five and ten years old. His name was Wyen, and I was in charge of making sure he didn’t die for a few hours that afternoon. Dr. Mensah and her marital partner Farai had gone to visit Farai’s sibling who had just gotten surgery, and their other marital partner Tano had taken the rest of the children on an outing to a park that had some sort of swimming-based entertainment. Wyen was supposed to go with them, and I was supposed to have had a nice, quiet afternoon watching media by myself, but at the last minute Wyen had claimed to have a stomachache and had asked if he could just stay home. Because I knew it was what Mensah would have wanted me to do, I gritted my teeth and told Tano that Wyen could stay here. With me.

Tano’s expression told me that he was probably struggling to reconcile the fact that he knew I was an evil murderbot with the fact that his spouse definitely trusted me to keep their children alive and that he, in turn, definitely trusted his spouse and therefore me by proxy. Mensah’s influence won. It usually did. He asked Wyen if that was okay with him, and the kid gave a little smile and nodded, and so Tano told me to call him and Mensah and Farai and also medical services if Wyen indicated that his stomachache was getting worse. (He didn’t need to tell me that. I obviously would have done it anyway.)

I expected to regret my offer almost immediately. To my surprise, I was thirty minutes into my temporary babysitter role (babysitter is one of the more fucked up words that humans use, now that I think about it) and wasn’t completely miserable. 

Wyen was probably the quietest of Mensah’s seven children. When he spoke, it was with a pronounced lisp. He wasn’t the easiest to bribe with media because I mostly had shows and he preferred to read books. But then, he also didn’t do any of the behaviors I felt like I had to bribe the other children away from doing, like grabbing me or asking me stupid questions or climbing onto structures precarious and high enough to cause serious injuries when they inevitably fell off. I could sit on my chair while he poked at a book in his feed (he also had a stack of physical books next to him. I had hardly ever seen physical books before coming to Preservation) and watch an episode of Coverstory Chrome and almost forget that he was even there.

But he was there. And 36.3 minutes after everyone else had vacated the house, he picked up the physical book off the top of his little pile and stared at it and then stared at me.

I pretended I didn’t notice him staring at me.

“ThecUnit,” he said when it became clear that I was ignoring him.

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t pause Coverstory Chrome, because they were just getting to the part in the episode where the spy was going to reveal zirself to the rich corporates ze had been tricking.

“ThecUnit, can I read to you?”

I paused the episode. “What.”

“I’m thupposed–supposed to read a few chapters of a book to thssomeone every night. To practice. My s sounds.” He was struggling to enunciate the s sounds, but he was already better at it than he had been a couple months ago when he started his speech therapy at school, the last time I’d visited Preservation between missions with ART. I don’t know why I was logging that information. I had barely noticed his existence when I’d first been around Mensah's family. I guess maybe because he didn’t annoy me as much as most of the small humans did (Amena was still my favorite), I’d started to pay more attention without realizing it.

“...okay,” I said. I looked at the book he was holding. Like all of the books on Preservation, it was bound to last. It wasn’t a cheap, flimsy volume printed by a recycler that would fall apart in less than ten corporate standard days. The cover was blue cloth, and there was a drawing of some kind of fauna on it in white ink. The fauna was wearing clothing.

“It’th an old book,” Wyen said. “Really, really old. My teacher told us it got written on the first planet.”

That didn’t seem right. That didn’t just mean the book was pre-CR, it was way pre-CR. I didn’t think there was any media left from that time. I queried the local databases and found that there were several thousand pieces of media still in existence from before humans left the planet they’d evolved on. Some ancient librarians had worked really hard to save some of their favorite pieces on the limited space they could purchase on the hard drives of the first colony ships. “Weird,” I said out loud. Though I guess if I could ensure that the entirety of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon still existed however many thousand years into the future, I’d give up my life savings, too.

Wyen took a very deep breath. “It’s called The Miraculouth Journey of Edward Tulane.”

I liked the title. So far, so good. I also started playing Coverstory Chrome again because I really wanted to finish the episode. Wyen read slowly enough that I could easily process both media at the same time.

The story was about a child’s toy who was somehow sentient. I don’t think I missed any explanation of how that was supposed to be possible in the fiction. It just went unexplained, which was fine. Lots of media was blatantly unrealistic and could still be interesting. 

It’s just that this book was not interesting. 

The entire first chapter was about how this child’s toy (which was modeled after a fauna called a rabbit) thought that it was very special and beautiful and that the child who owned it also thought it was very special and beautiful and loved it very much. I leaned more of my processing space into Coverstory Chrome while running a short addendum to my act-like-a-human code that had me kind of nodding along encouragingly and offering help only when it was asked for in the ways I had seen Mensah and her marital partners do as Wyen stumbled over and corrected his pronunciations of words.

Wyen read me the second chapter, too. I didn’t pay much attention at first until the toy had a thought about being offended to be referred to as an it rather than a he. My act-like-a-human code almost caused me to roll my eyes. The human writer of the book obviously thought that because the toy was sentient, it–he (I would overwrite my instincts to think of the character how he identified himself, even if I thought the story would have been better if the toy didn’t use gendered or human specific pronouns) would hate being acknowledged as an object. I’d had humans do the same to me. Luckily, I was not a character in a piece of media where the writers shared those biases.

The humans in the story were treating the toy as an object because he (Edward, the sentient toy rabbit) couldn’t move or speak. I didn’t think that this book written for very young humans would go into all of the implications of that generally horrifying situation. I was a sentient object too, and I had only been stuck and unable to move or speak sometimes and that was bad enough. I had watched some media meant for children before (Three actually liked a lot of it), and it usually stayed inside the safe boundaries of nice humans or fauna having nice adventures and being nice to each other so the children would learn how to be nice. In other words, it was boring. I assumed that Edward the sentient toy rabbit would go on those nice adventures with its nice human child, and the implications of being alive and unable to exert any agency onto the world would not go addressed.

And then someone rather violently cleaned Edward the sentient toy rabbit and stuck him high up on a shelf where his human child couldn’t see him at first and the human child had started yelling for him, and he, obviously, couldn’t answer her.

I had to pause Coverstory Chrome for a few seconds. My performance reliability dropped by 0.4%.

The human child located the toy quickly, of course, because this was a book for children and there was not going to be any truly terrible things that happened to the toy rabbit or the child. Edward wasn’t even distressed about the situation and was more annoyed that his clothes had been ruffled than anything else. Again, I had to stop my act-like-a-human code from rolling my eyes.

Wyen was clearly getting tired of reading, but he told me that his teacher had asked him to try for three or four chapters every night. I told him that I wouldn’t tell his teacher if he wanted to stop reading, which made him laugh for some reason. And then he kept reading.

The third and fourth chapters were both pretty short. The human child’s grandmother (who seemed to somehow know that Edward was a sentient toy even though nobody else did) told the human child a bedtime story about a princess who did not love anybody and so a witch turned her into a wild fauna which then got eaten. (Wyen thought that was funny. It mostly confused me.) Edward claimed that most stories were pointless. (I disagreed, but this one did seem to be.)

Earlier, it had been mentioned that Edward liked looking at the stars. He hadn’t been positioned towards the window tonight, so he couldn’t look at them. Instead, he repeated the phrase as bright as the stars on a moonless night from the bedtime story over and over again to himself.

That was the end of the fourth chapter, and Wyen stopped reading to me. He looked at me like he was expecting something.

I pulled out a few phrases I’d heard Mensah say to her various children upon them successfully completing a task. “Well done,” I said. “I could tell you worked very hard on that.”

Wyen beamed. “You don’t interrupt me when I’m trying but I can’t get it right,” he said. “Or get bored like my thiblings.”

I did get bored. I was just better at hiding it. I nodded.

“Thank you,” he added, and I nodded again and turned my attention back to Coverstory Chrome.

Fuck, I hadn’t fully appreciated the big reveal. I replayed the last five minutes so I could properly enjoy it this time.

Thankfully, Wyen didn’t even mention his stomachache again that night. Most of the rest of Mensah’s family returned (Farai was staying the night with her sibling) and Wyen told Tano that he was feeling better now, and Mensah asked me how watching Wyen had been and I said it was fine (which it had been).

“I appreciate you being willing to look after him,” Mensah told me. “He’s always been very shy, and some of his siblings just trample over him for attention and I’m afraid he doesn’t get enough sometimes because he’d rather sit back quietly. Maybe some time with an adult who isn’t his speech therapist was good for him. He behaved for you, right?”

I shrugged. I was feeling the sudden urge to stand in the corner and stare at the wall with an emotion that I absolutely was not going to express to Mensah in any way: guilt that I hadn’t actually been giving Wyen my attention and now Mensah thought that I had. “It was fine,” I repeated, and Mensah left it at that.

I guess Mensah had been right, though, and Wyen had liked thinking he had my full attention for a little while, because he came and found me the next afternoon (even though there were plenty of people around that he could have gone to) when I had been trying to poke around at the small corners of the planet’s SecSys that I was now allowed access to.

“ThecUnit,” he said to me. “Can I read to you again?”

I remembered the guilt I had been feeling the night before. It was going to be very hard and very annoying and very boring not to pull up other media while Wyen was reading aloud. But I’d been on Preservation (and specifically around Mensah and her family) (and also around ART and its students and their teachers) long enough to know that yeah, actually, positive attention from trusted adults was vitally important to the development of children and blah blah blah (I hated that ART had probably been right that one time it told me to tell Amena I cared about her). Also Mensah always gave me the kind of look that made my insides all melty if she saw me spending time with one of her younger kids (I shouldn’t like that look and the melty feeling, but I was sure starting to anyway) even though when and why the hell was I a trusted adult to any child, ever, in any circumstances, and so–

“Yes,” I said. “Go ahead.”

Wyen sat down on the floor in front of me. “Chapter Five,” he said, and he started to read.

It started out exactly as boring as I expected. The book talked about the sentient toy rabbit’s clothes that his human child (Abilene, her name was Abilene) was giving him for a trip on a boat they were taking, and then they got on the boat, and everyone on the boat thought that the sentient toy rabbit was very special and beautiful and they loved him and all wanted to touch him and it was making my organic skin crawl, though I (think that I) kept a neutral enough face through it. That was uncomfortable and boring and I wanted so badly to start up some other media. Maybe I could get away with something I'd already seen, so it would just be going on in the background and I could still nominally be paying attention to the human children on the ship who had taken Edward from Abilene out of spite and were ripping the toy clothes off of him.

What?

And tossing him back and forth without any of his clothes on while Abilene begged them to stop so they didn't break him.

What the fuck?

I was no longer bored. This story was deeply distressing and I found myself wondering why it was being called a children's book. Wyen was still reading, and he had a little frown on his little face, but he didn’t seem to be experiencing anything like the rising panic I was feeling. My performance reliability fell an entire 5%, sending a bunch of alerts up at me.

Wyen's voice faltered as he read silently over the last few sentences of the chapter before saying them out loud.

Edward had gotten thrown overboard. Right out into the ocean.

“ThecUnit,” Wyen said unhappily as he finished the chapter. “Porcelain rabbits can't drown, can they?”

“No,” I said. But then again, they couldn’t think, either, and this book had already surprised me several times in so many unpleasant ways and I didn't feel entirely confident of my answer.

Wyen turned the page, stared at the words. “ThecUnit,” he whispered. “I don't like it when people drown.” He held the book out at me. “Will you read ahead and make sure Edward doethn't drown? Pleathe? I don't wanna read it if he drownth.” (His lisp got worse when he was upset.) (I didn't want him to be upset.)

I took the book automatically. (I had never held a physical book before. It was weird. I wasn't sure if I liked it and I didn't have the processing space right now to figure out why.) No, I wanted to say. I'm not going to read ahead, and neither are you, because this is a shitty book and it should have been lost forever with the rest of humanity's ancient media. Instead, I did something stupid and inexplicable. I read ahead.

The toy rabbit also wondered if he could drown, by the way. That didn't go unacknowledged.

He sank into the ocean and watched the light disappear, and he couldn't close his eyes because he was a toy rabbit and of course he couldn't close his eyes (not because he was brave, but because he had no choice), and it was so fucked up that my performance reliability dropped by another percentage point and I could feel panic rising up in my organic bits. He soon realized that no, he couldn't drown, and from what I understood, porcelain was a very sturdy material. Something had made this stupid poor fucking toy sentient with no easy way to die and now he was trapped at the bottom of the ocean forever and the only person in the world who cared about him was never going to be able to rescue him even if she tried. It was so close to my actual literal worst fears (being lost, being abandoned down some deep dark place on an awful shitty planet, being alone with nothing to do or see or watch or think until my auxiliary batteries finally run out completely) that I almost flung the book across the room before I finished the chapter like I was a human and it was some kind of small skittery biting fauna that I had just discovered on my leg.

Then I finished the chapter.

He experienced his first genuine and true emotion. Edward Tulane was afraid.

Okay. So I didn’t throw the book across the room, but I did close it so quickly and vehemently that Wyen yelped and jumped at the noise.

I needed to go have an emotion somewhere else, somewhere very far away where I could possibly have a complete collapse over this stupid fucking children's book (children's book!!!!!) without any of my humans seeing me. I shoved the book back at Wyen.

“What–” he started, his eyes big and scared.

“Edward does not drown,” I announced. “But I think you shouldn't read any more.” I stood up. “I have to. Go. Outside.” And I fled.

I fled Mensah's house and I skirted around the big sprawling gardens behind it until I was in the woods behind the big sprawling gardens behind the house and then I found a large rock and I sat down on it and pulled my knees up to my chest and–

I maybe had one of my involuntary false memory induced shutdowns.

But we won't talk about that.

I came back online at 91% performance reliability, which is higher than it had been before I had shut down. And I was still panicking, but now it was mostly about the fact that I had probably really freaked Wyen out. I looked through the drone I always left in Mensah's living room.

Wyen was crying. 

Fuck.

Then Mensah walked into the room, her forehead creased, and my performance reliability rose to 92.8%. If anybody could fix me making a mess of her child, she could. “Wyen, baby, what's wrong?” she said, dropping down to the floor next to him and opening her arms.

He launched himself into them. “It doethn't want me to read to it anymore,” he sobbed.

Fuck. What? No. That's not what I said. Frantically, I tapped Mensah in the feed and sent, THAT'S NOT WHAT I SAID.

Because she's Mensah and she's the best human, she didn't immediately freak out that I was listening to their conversation or shouting at her in the feed. She pulled Wyen closer to her and shushed him, and she sent back to me, Alright. I know you didn't mean to upset him. We'll clear this up. Do you want to tell me what happened?

NO.

No. Wait. I did, actually.

I said he shouldn't read more of this book. Because I thought. I thought it might scare him.

“And it ran away,” Wyen kept saying, covering Mensah’s kaftan in tears and other disgusting human child fluids. “I think it'th mad at me.”

I'm not mad at him!

“I promise it's not mad at you,” Mensah soothed. “Take a deep breath, baby, you didn't do anything wrong.” To me, she said, Why did you think it would scare him? What book was he reading?

I didn't answer her.

“Wyen, lovey, what book were you reading?” Mensah asked the child.

He wiped his face on the fabric over Mensah’s shoulder (ew, ew, ew) and stretched out to pull the book out from where he must have stuck it under the chair so he didn’t have to look at it. He handed it to Mensah, and she stared at the cover. Then she closed her eyes for several seconds.

My insides were doing something fluttery.

“Oh, Wyen,” murmured Mensah. “This is one of the books you found on my shelf last month, right?”

“Mm-hmm. You said I could read any of the ones on the bottom two shelves.” He sounded maybe a little defensive.

“And you can,” Mensah assured him. “This one just–it makes lots of people very sad, for lots of different reasons. It’s a very good book, but it…” She sighed, and glanced around the room like she was trying to find the drone I’d left there to stare right at me. Luckily I’d hidden it very well. “What part were you reading to SecUnit, Wyen?”

I stopped watching the video abruptly. I couldn’t bear thinking about her reading over that chapter and thinking about me at the same time. I queued up a dozen of my favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon and planned on sitting on that rock watching it until everyone had forgotten about the incident.

But ten minutes later, Mensah pinged me.

I wanted to ignore her. I wanted to ignore her so badly. I wanted to stop having emotions about a children’s book and I especially wanted to stop anyone else from knowing I was having emotions about a children’s book. But if anyone was going to know I was having emotions about a children’s book, I guess it was better that it was Mensah than anyone else. So I pinged her back, reluctantly, just so she would know I was still functional and somewhere nearby.

Will you come back to the house and talk about it? she asked.

No.

Can I come to you and talk about it?

No, I thought. Yes, I told her. I don’t know why. I guess maybe because I was in distress and someone was coming for me, which made me less scared of being in distress and nobody coming for me because at least I could stay here on my rock in that scenario. I pinged her again with my location and backburnered the channel to keep watching Sanctuary Moon and brace myself for the discussion of emotions that was now inevitable.

When Mensah found me, she sat down on a log near my rock and waited quietly for me to speak first, keeping her gaze on her own hands rather than on me. I got a little melty again, and I kept watching Sanctuary Moon until I felt (mostly) ready to talk.

“I'm not a babysitter,” I stated.

“No,” she agreed without hesitation. “I know.”

“And it's a terrible book.”

She tilted her head. “It’s an excellent book,” she countered. “Just not one I would have recommended to you just now because I would have guessed it might upset you.”

“I'm not upset.” I was very upset. “It was a piece of children’s media, and it was terrible.”

“Agree to disagree,” said Mensah. Her lips did a weird twitchy thing. 

I was finding speaking more difficult than it should be, so I sent Mensah in the feed, query: Emotional state?Wyen like she was a bot. I figured she'd understand the simple question.

“He's…alright,” Mensah said carefully. “He might appreciate some reassurance from you that you aren't angry at him and that it was the contents of the book, not his reading, that upset you.”

Ugh. I nodded.

query: Continue book?Wyen

“Yes,” said Mensah. “But he's going to read it with me and his other parents.”

Do you really think it's okay for him to read a book like that? I asked, in words rather than code now that we were getting into more complicated concepts.

“Absolutely,” said Mensah.

I sent a sigil indicating doubt and another for confusion and tacked on, query: Reasoning.

Mensah paused. “Because,” she said in a tone that told me she was actually taking my question seriously and wasn't going to give some bullshit perfunctory response, “children are people. They are inexperienced at being people, but they are people. And terrible things can happen to people at any age. Being a child is frightening. The world is enormous and very little makes sense and you have all of these emotions that feel too big to be contained in a very small and fragile body. It is so, so easy to get hurt, and children know that. They're much more resilient in the face of real-life hurt if they've been exposed to those concepts–pain, loss, fear–in a safe, fictional context first. It's good practice.”

I also liked media because it was a safe, fictional context through which to understand emotions and become more resilient about them. I didn't say that out loud. I wasn't a child any more than I was a babysitter.

“SecUnit, I think I understand why those first few chapters were so upsetting for you to read,” Mensah added after 46 seconds. “If you want to discuss it, I'm here.”

I didn't want to discuss it. “It wasn't upsetting,” I lied again.

Mensah sighed quietly.

“It was a piece of children's media,” I insisted. “Children’s media is not designed to be upsetting.”

Now Mensah snorted like she was laughing at me. I looked towards her, staring over her shoulder with some kind of expression on my face. “I'm sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “But you must not have seen all that much children's media.”

I hadn't. It seemed boring.

“Do you know how many times I've been reading my children picture books–picture books, mind you, not even chapter books–and have had to pause and grab tissues because they've made me cry?” Mensah asked.

Obviously I didn't know how many times that had happened, so it probably wasn't a real question. I shrugged tightly.

“It’s for children, but it's written by adults. My kids rarely understood why I would be crying over something that, to them, only seemed a little bit sad or poignant. There are a lot of things that aren't upsetting until you have the emotional context for why they would be,” explained Mensah. “And you have plenty of emotional context for why a sentient construct made of both inorganic and organic parts getting denied agency, treated cruelly, and then trapped somewhere dark and lonely is very, very upsetting.”

(Oh, yeah. I had almost forgotten that the porcelain rabbit wasn't just made of porcelain–it had the fur of real rabbits on its ears and tail. That had been so gross to think about that I'd deleted the memory from hard storage. Guess it was still hanging around somewhere in my own organics.)

I wasn't sure how to respond, so I didn't.

“I'm just saying that being upset by a piece of children's media is not only perfectly okay, it is also normal and common,” said Mensah.

It was nice of her to say that, but I was still embarrassed. So I just repeated, “It didn't upset me.”

She didn't press. “Alright. In that case–” And she sent me a data packet labeled with the name of the book. I flinched. “I think you should read to the end,” she told me. “Whether or not it upset you. Not right away, and not on your own. I’d suggest waiting until the next time you embark on a mission with Perihelion. That should give you plenty of time to read it and process it, and somebody I know you’re willing to ask for support from.”

My face did something. I missed ART.

“I’m heading back to the house to help with dinner,” Mensah added. “You’re welcome to walk with me, or not.” She stood up and started walking away.

“Dr. Mensah,” I said quietly.

“Yes?”

I stalled out for a few seconds as I kept sending the question and then retracting it during the 1 second delay I had my mouth on. Then I let it go through. “He doesn’t spend the rest of the book at the bottom of the ocean, does he?”

Mensah had a gentle smile on her face. “No, he doesn’t, I promise. I wouldn’t tell you to finish the book if it had such a sad ending.”

I let her walk away without me because I wasn’t done having emotions. After another few episodes of Sanctuary Moon, it was getting dark and I was feeling less like I was about to have another emotional collapse. I tucked the text file Mensah had sent me into my memory banks and tagged it [read next trip with ART], and did my best to forget about it until then.

Chapter Text

During the next two weeks, which was all the time I had on Preservation until ART came back to snag me for another cargo run, I finished the third season of Coverstory Chrome (and tried to trawl the depths of the feed for any leaks from season four, but I found that they hadn’t even started filming yet), had a few conversations with Bharadwaj where I almost (key word: almost) brought up the incident with the children’s book to ask her opinion, and cleared things up with Wyen and let him read aloud to me from a few more (Mensah-approved as Murderbot-safe) children’s books. Mostly they were boring. A few were pretty good. None made me have the panicky too-close feeling that the first one had, so Wyen and I continued to get along fine.

When ART got within feed distance of Preservation's surface a few hours earlier than we'd expected it to, I was sitting in a chair in the corner during a family-and-crew-get-together that nobody explicitly said but which I knew was so everybody got to see and say goodbye to me before I left. None of them were making a big deal out of it. They let me sit in the corner and watch a show and they talked amongst themselves, and I wasn't excluded but I wasn't uncomfortably pressed in by anybody, either. That was how I liked it.

My humans were the best humans.

Then I felt something slam into my feed with so much force that I think I physically recoiled. Before I could recover from that, I was getting pinged dozens of times in quick succession–gleeful pings, pings that said (not in words) hi and I'm here and I've missed annoying you and hi hi hi hi hi and are you ready to go? and I really really really missed annoying you. 

My face must have been doing something, because my humans looked at me.

“SecUnit? What's going on?” Mensah asked me.

“Perihelion just got here,” Ratthi answered for me, grinning and winking at me. I wrestled my face into something approximating a glare.

“How do you know that,” I told him suspiciously.

“There was just a–” Ratthi waved his hand in front of his face. “Specific look.”

You were probably smiling like a fool, ART told me, settling around me in the feed. 

You can't even see me right now, asshole, I replied. How would you know?

Because if I had a face, I would be, too.

Fuck you.

“It’s early,” Gurathin pointed out. He, at least, was ignoring whatever facial expressions I was inadvertently making. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, because if something was wrong, ART wouldn't be doing the bot-equivalent of purring at me like a domestic feline. And then, because Gurathin and I were both paranoid fuckers, I asked ART, Is something wrong?

No. I'm early because the TranSys scheduler bot at the University very nicely moved my departure up to an earlier slot.

That poor scheduler bot, I snarked at it.

I was polite!

You bullied it, I said.

You weren't there, ART said petulantly. You don't know that.

I know you.

ART pressed closer to me. I felt it clip that little message and save it to its permanent storage. Asshole.

“Are you leaving now, then?” Arada asked. Her legs were tossed over Overse's lap. She stuck her bottom lip out.

“I–” I wanted to, yeah.

“Go,” Mensah told me with a warm smile. “Enjoy your trip. We'll see you back here safely whenever ART needs to go back to PSUMNT for maintenance next.”

It was a plea as much as a statement of intent. She was telling me to be safe, and she knew I'd probably be uncomfortable with her saying it directly.

Don't worry, Dr. Mensah, ART butted in. I promise I'll bring it back safe.

I rolled my eyes pointedly and started making my way out of the house.

“Have fun!” Bharadwaj shouted after me. I sent her an acknowledging ping. 

And if I ran a little bit down the road to get into the city and catch the shuttle up to PresStation where ART was docked waiting for me, well, it was just ART and me who would know about it.

Hurry up, it told me. 

I'm actively running.

You're already late.

I made a rude gesture up towards the station in the sky. Late for WHAT, you absolute nightmare? You're the one who's EARLY.

It pinged me a few times just to be annoying. I thought you'd be sitting at the station waiting for me!

I was going to be. In 4 hours, when you TOLD me you'd be here.

It sent me a melodramatic number of dejected sigils.

You are the worst, I informed it.

I thought you missed me, it teased. I was early, so I thought you'd be early, too.

I would have been if you TOLD me you were going to be here early. Asshole.

I guess I missed you more than you missed me.

It isn't a competition, I said.

It is, and I won. Admit it, coward.

Shut the fuck up, you hypercompetetive horror. Fuck, I had missed it. I moved a little quicker.

When I set foot on its deck, its already very present feed presence became positively smothering. I guess it was probably like the kind of enormous, long, squeezy hugs that humans give each other when they haven't seen each other in a while, except it was different, because this didn't make me want to eject myself forcibly out of my skin.

“Alright, I missed you,” I announced out loud to the physically empty ship. “Happy now, asshole?”

Extremely, it said, and I knew it was telling the truth. We leave in four hours. PresStation uses human schedulers.

“And they aren't as easily bullied.” I made my way through its halls towards the crew lounge with my favorite chair. “So you got here early for nothing. Just to wait around.”

Not for nothing. For you. 

I was absolutely not even going to begin unpacking how that made me feel. I sat down in my chair instead. My performance reliability ticked up above 97% for the first time since the incident with Wyen's book.

What do you want to watch? ART asked.

“We should rewatch the first season of Worldhoppers,” I said, because I was feeling sentimental. “And then I'm showing you Coverstory Chrome because it's a fucking masterpiece. And no spaceships or the humans a ship is protecting get hurt during it, y–.” I almost added, you big baby, but faltered. I didn't really have the high ground to tease it about getting spooked by media that hit too close to home anymore. So I kept talking. “There aren't any ships at all, actually, it all takes place on a CR planet, and–”

ART had grabbed onto my moment of hesitation and was examining it closely, replaying it a few times.

“What the fuck?” I said, trying to push it away from its fixation. “What's wrong with you? I'm trying to tell you about this new show, asshole.”

Are you alright? it asked me.

“I'm literally fine.” 

It squished closer to me in the feed, extending some lines of code to brush against my systems and take basic diagnostic information. I threw a wall up, alarmed by the intensity of its concern. ART humored me and didn't just bulldoze past my walls. Okay, it said, backing off. Let's watch Worldhoppers. And then I want to see this new show.

So I pulled up Worldhoppers and we watched the first few episodes together. Then it was time for ART to leave the station, and navigating out of Preservation Station's orbit space was complex enough that it had to drop its percentage of attention on the show from 65% to 50% (which was still an absurd amount of processing power). I liked the humming that ART made when it was traveling in open space. I started to relax again and drop the supplementary walls.

ART was getting better at subtlety and not just flattening other bots and constructs into doing what it wanted. I like to think I was teaching it that. I wanted to regret it in those moments as it gently combed through my systems, searching for dysfunction, but couldn't bring myself to be mad. It prodded around my recent memory folders, too. The exploration didn't feel too invasive. It actually felt almost nice, which is why I was letting it keep going without complaint.

What's this? it asked suddenly. It pulled a file into our shared workspace, the one I had tagged [read next trip with ART].

I paused Worldhoppers. “Nothing,” I said. “Just a book.”

It started to open it.

I slammed the file closed and pulled it out of our shared space. A spike of anxiety pushed through my chest.

Just a book? ART said skeptically.

“Yes.”

It says to read it with me.

I shrank in on myself, wrapping my arms around my chest. (I think I had picked that gesture up from Gurathin. I really needed to turn off the passive/automatic addendums to my act-like-a-human code.) “Yeah,” I muttered. “Not yet. Okay?”

Burning impatience and curiosity spilled over from it into the feed. Did something happen? Did something hurt you or upset you or????? It sent a string of desperate queries. 

“ART, not now.”

You're acting like something is frightening you. That curiosity was transforming into protectiveness. Tell me what it is so I can destroy it.

“You are overreacting,” I stated.

I think I'm reacting exactly the right amount.

“It’s just a book!” I snapped, frustrated. “It’s a book that freaked me out and Mensah told me I should finish it when I'm here with you. It's just a book. It's not even a very good one. It's stupid. I should have just deleted it when Mensah sent it to me.” For some reason, my threat assessment was inching upwards.

ART poked me. I flinched. You are afraid of me, it realized. Why??

My jaw clenched. Because I don't want you to think I'm fragile, I managed to send.

You are fragile, compared to me. But you are also– It did the bot equivalent of stuttering for about .003 seconds as it tried to pick the right word. Resilient. It is part of what endears you so much to me.

I twisted to bury my face in the back of my chair.

It started playing me the Sanctuary Moon soundtrack softly. After a few minutes of letting me hide, it asked me, Why did this book make you feel fragile?

Instead of answering, I clipped the first 6 chapters from the book and shoved them back at ART. It read them in less than a second, but it read them multiple times so there was a brief pause.

You know I don't fully understand the emotional context of media without your reactions, it said.

I know.

But I do see your reaction to this, even if it isn't in real-time. I think I understand why you are upset.

I hadn't wanted to talk about this yet. Can we just fucking finish Worldhoppers.

ART resumed the episode. It settled around me again with a reassuring ping.

So we finished Worldhoppers. And then we started Coverstory Chrome, and ART didn't like it as much as I did, but it liked the turncoat scientist character until the reveal that he was just using the protagonist to get access to the data centers of the organization ze was spying on.

“Come on, you didn't see that coming?” I asked. I hadn't either the first time, but ART was the one with the unfathomable amount of processing power.

They did not foreshadow it well, it said grumpily. There were none of the usual musical cues indicating a coming betrayal.

“Well, the music in this show just sucks in general,” I agreed. “They get a new lead composer in season three and it gets better. Marginally. Next episode?”

Yes, please.

A couple cycles later, we finished Coverstory Chrome. When we were done talking about it (for now), I asked, “Alright, what next? I know you always pick up new media when you're at PSUMNT. What are the students watching now?” I liked most of the stuff it found there. The students of PSUMNT had a lot of weird media that was very different to the media popular in the Corporation Rim or even on Preservation. Not all of it was good, but almost all of it was interesting.

Instead of producing any media files, ART loomed at me in the feed. 

“What?” I said.

It pulled a file out of my storage and tossed it at me in our shared workspace.

I made a face. “Come on, ART.”

I want to know the rest of the story, ART told me firmly. I can read it without you, if you want.

For some reason, that made my organic parts prickle with anxiety. “No,” I said quickly. “We can read it. It's fine.”

ART pulled open Chapter 7. 

I closed it.

ART opened it again.

I closed it again.

ART poked me hard in the feed.

“Ow.”

We are reading this book.

“I don't want to.” I sounded whiny. “It’s not even good.”

ART pulled out a few hundred reviews of the book and threw them at me. The humans seemed to be in agreement that this book was one of the best examples of pre-space-colonization literature that survived leaving the first planet.

“Humans have terrible taste in media,” I said, which was bullshit and we both knew it.

It didn't even bother responding to me on that. It just opened the book again.

Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I'd just been having a bad day when I had run off to the woods to collapse about it. Maybe the rest of the book really would be a nice little jaunt about a nice (toy) fauna and its nice human friends having nice adventures and being nice, and ART and I could be suitably bored and then forget that this ever happened.

I didn't really think that was likely, but it was possible.

I settled back in the chair and started reading. Slowly, the pace that I'd be reading it if Wyen was reading it aloud to me still. Part of me wanted to get it over with more quickly, but I also felt like I kind of needed to prepare myself for it.

The toy rabbit was trapped at the bottom of the ocean for a long time. Thinking about that immediately made my organic parts freeze up a little again and my performance reliability dip. A storm started churning up the ocean and lifting Edward up towards the surface, and he felt air and saw light for the first time in months. Then he started sinking back down.

This book really is distressing you, ART observed.

“No, it isn't,” I retorted.

It responded by tossing my diagnostics at me. I was experiencing a significant rise in cortisol levels, as well as a few other bad-time neurotransmitters.

“Stop looking at my chemicals.”

No, ART said. And then, weirdly, it added, If you don't want to read any more, it's okay.

It never backed down about anything. I glared at one of its cameras. “Stop being nice.”

No.

I swatted at it in the feed and kept reading. It was curling tighter to my processes, monitoring my systems even closer. If it had asked, I would have told it to fuck off. Since it didn't ask, I just let it hold onto me. In the background, I felt those neurotransmitter levels drop off just slightly again.

A net scooped Edward up and finally the toy rabbit was out of the fucking ocean. I sighed aloud in relief. I made a note to myself to never go anywhere near an ocean (then I deleted the note, because that was dumb). Edward had been caught by a fisherman, who took him home to his wife, who decided to rename Edward ‘Susanna’ and call him by she/her pronouns. I guess it's not like Edward could have corrected her, and he also didn’t mind that much after some initial indignation at being misunderstood.

I was once again thinking that maybe the book would address the fact that since Edward was an object, his gender didn't work/wasn't important like a human's. It didn't, really. Edward kept thinking of himself in the same way and didn't change his name or pronouns internally, he just didn't care that much about what the humans called him. Because…because they cared about him, whatever he was. They loved him and treated him almost like he was a human child, and Edward started to care about them, too.

Whatever. It was back to the (toy) fauna and the humans being nice to each other, and that was boring, and I was relieved.

So when the human couple's bitchy daughter came for a visit and decided she didn't like her parents' attention getting taken up by some object, I still wasn’t thinking that anything really bad would happen in the story again. Maybe the daughter would pick the toy up and feel some burst of connection and joy that had been lost from her in her childhood and blah blah blah and it would be so saccharine I'd want to throw up (except not really, because ew ew ew ew ew).

No. The daughter kidnapped Edward and drove him to some place where humans dumped all of their garbage (I guess this was before humans invented recyclers–ewwww) and threw him into the pile of garbage. And left him there to be covered in garbage. And while he was covered in garbage, he was thinking about those humans who had been kind to him and treated him gently like he was their daughter and loved him, and he missed them, and he wondered if missing someone and wanting to be with them was the same as loving them.

Oh, and he was still covered in garbage, by the way. Did I mention the garbage?

I felt all tight and gross and shaky. I had been trying to ignore my diagnostics for a while, but I checked in now and they were so bad it made me panic more, which made them worse, which–you get it.

I couldn't read any more of it just then. I closed the file. Then I deleted it from my storage for good measure and pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. I was very deliberately not thinking about the book.

ART was slowly pressing closer to me in the feed like it didn't want to startle me. Talk to me, it said.

No.

Please?

Fuck, why did it have to keep being nice? I shook my head petulantly. 

It leaned on me harder and played me the Sanctuary Moon soundtrack again. I almost covered my ears like a human child having a tantrum because I didn't want it trying to make me feel better right now, but I managed to stop myself. I hid my face in my arms, then decided that wasn't enough and stood up to go face a corner and stare at the wall. After 3.8 minutes (an impressively long time for ART to go without getting impatient and bothering me, honestly), I said, “This fucking sucks.”

Which part? ART asked, trying to get me to elaborate and talk about my feelings (like an asshole). I was so mad at it just then.

“I'm tired of having negative emotional reactions to a piece of children's media,” I spat. “I want to stop now. Can we stop now?”

Yes.

That wasn't what I wanted even though it's what I asked for. That just pissed me off even more. 

Before I could think of another whiny thing to say, ART asked me, Do you want to watch some Sanctuary Moon instead?

I sent it a desperate affirmative that I didn't really intend to send. I did immediately start feeling a little better as it put on an episode. But only a little. Something bad was sticking around in my emotions. I had this awful feeling of dread that ART was right and this was one of those times where I might actually feel better if I talked about why I was upset.

Horrible.

I procrastinated it for three episodes of Sanctuary Moon, during which time I didn't stop staring at the wall. At the end of the third episode, I turned the show off and walked to the best sofa in the lounge and threw myself onto it facedown.

Oh? ART asked me.

“Shut up,” I said into the cushion.

It shut up. I hated that so much.

“Why are you being so nice and patient?” I demanded. “I don't get it. You never miss a chance to fuck with me when I'm overreacting about something stupid.”

Do you really want me to answer your question?

“I don't know! Probably not! But yeah, I want you to fucking answer me.”

Instead of answering me like a normal person, it sent me a data log video/audio/feed clip. I watched it. It was from the first time we watched Worldhoppers, when we had just met. Specifically, it was from when we watched the episode about ART's favorite character dying. I had let it pause the show and run its “diagnostics” for as long as it needed to process the intense emotional data that it wasn't used to, and I hadn't even made a big deal out of it.

“So what,” I muttered. “What's your point.” I knew what its point was.

We barely knew each other. You had no reason to be patient with me. You could easily have told me that I was overreacting about something stupid, but you did not do that. Instead, you were kind to me.

“It was in my best interest to be kind to the giant monster I was hitchhiking on so it didn't kick me out into empty space.”

It leaked some emotional metadata at me that mostly translated as [deeply skeptical].

I made a rude gesture with one hand without raising my head. “Also, you were upset because a character died! That is a normal thing to get upset about.” I hate losing conversations with ART because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, but it just kept happening. “This is a fucking children's book about a stupid doll.”

He doesn't like being called a doll, ART said.

“For fuck's sake, ART, that is so not important right now.”

You're right.

I groaned loudly.

What is important is that you usually watch/read media that is very far removed from your personal experiences. And now you're reading something where the things you are afraid of happen to a character similar to you, and it's upsetting you. It paused for a second, like the dramatic bastard it was. Just like me getting upset when a young crewmember on a research ship got killed and the ship could not save her.

Oh, I was walking right into its trap. “There are absolutely no similarities between me and a child's toy. That's the stupidest thing you've ever said.” And there it went. My last chance to wriggle my way out of this discussion.

ART sent me a smug list of similarities between myself and the stupid toy rabbit. It wasn't a long list, but the points were all…very sharp. It made the same observation that Mensah had about the toy and I both being sentient constructs made of organic and inorganic parts that weren't recognized as people by the humans around us because the internal sentience couldn't be expressed as external agency. 

That was bad enough. Then ART told me that it knew that two of the things that scared me the most were 1) being abandoned on a planet where my humans couldn't (or wouldn't) come back for me, especially if the place I was left was dark and confined and I couldn't die quickly and 2) being discarded as garbage while I was still alive and aware.

My throat was all tight and painful. My chest hurt, too. And it didn't go away when I tried to nudge my pain sensors down.

ART sent me a gentle request for acknowledgement.

Acknowledged, I admitted.

Good. So how is this any different, or less normal, or less acceptable than my reaction to that character's death? it asked.

I rolled onto my side, curled up, and buried my face in my arms. I don't know. Because this is just a children's book, I guess.

I think you need to get over that, ART said bluntly. It is a book. It deals with topics that are upsetting to you. Whether it was originally intended to be read by children or adults does not matter.

I sent it another acknowledgement.

Through one of the cameras in the lounge, I watched as a little maintenance drone came over to me with a warm blanket. I stayed very still as ART covered me with it, apart from pushing my face harder into my forearms.

Just so you know, ART told me, I have no intention of letting anybody treat you like broken equipment that should be thrown away. And unlike Nelly and Laurence, I am very large and I have weapons and ways of finding you wherever you are. And I will always come back for you.

Some impossibly big emotion in my organic parts made me shudder slightly. There was no fucking way I could acknowledge that. I felt so tense that I was almost brittle, like I might shatter. Fragile like the stupid porcelain rabbit. Fuck. 

ART put on the next episode, and I stayed in that exact position for the next cycle and a half. We watched an entire season of Sanctuary Moon before I felt at all like myself again. I paused in the middle of the episode and sent ART a single word (the first one I'd managed since it had made its declaration). 

Thanks, I said.

You're welcome, it said casually, and it kept playing the episode.