Chapter Text
"Okay, I can't sit here and accept this anymore. SecUnit, your hair looks terrible."
I was abruptly interrupted from my media viewing session. Me and Amena (Amena and I? Did it matter?) were sitting in one of the lounging areas, and it seemed I was incorrect in my assumption that she was content to sit there in silence on her own feed.
"My hair is fine." It wasn't frayed or damaged, and Preservation culture was very accepting of different hairstyles.
"It looks like the brush of a Cleanerbot. Do you take care of it at all?" Amena is looking at my hair with the same expression I see on the feed when one character is the only one to notice a very obvious piece of evidence during an investigation.
"It's still on my head. I wash it. It's fine."
"It's too long for you to just not maintain it, do you at least protect it while you sleep?" She's frowning at me now. I hate when humans do that.
"Why would sleep endanger my hair?" That had never been in any of my training modules, and those loved to point out all the ways that humans could die (even if I was supposed to rely on SecSystem for guidance and orders). ART would have told me if I needed to do something specific with my hair, given how much effort it put into creating it.
"I give up, and if I continue, I won't be nice. C'mon, we're going to Second Mom." She got up from her seated position, and nodded her head towards the door.
"Why would Dr. Mensah have knowledge about SecUnit hair maintenance?" It wouldn't have been in the manual she was given when she bought me from The Company. Those types of visual maintenance were reserved only for sexbots. Was Amena confused about my purpose?
"It's still hair."
"My appearance does not need to be maintained, everything is handled automatically by my systems."
"Do the words bot-human construct mean nothing to you?” Amena seemed to think that she knew more than I did. Which was probably correct, at least in these situations. Not many humans want to discuss hair maintenance while shitty machinery tries to kill them.
They meant many things to me, but I felt as though this was one of those situations where humans ask questions without actually wanting an answer, so I kept my mouth shut.
"Do you know how hair works?" She asked me, desperately.
"I have access to the feed at all times, and many education modules." (Read: I have absolutely no clue, but I am not willing to admit that. Humans are very insistent on maintenance).
"Last I heard, you deleted half of your mission files to make space for that show you and Dr. Ratthi are obsessed with." I had grown since that PresAux mission, so this proved that her argument relied on outdated information, and that I should ignore it.
"I have external storage for most of that now." My internal storage was dedicated solely to the most important things to me, such as my governor module override code, my name, and the first 120 episodes of 'The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon'.
"So, you do know how to take care of your hair?"
Why won't she just drop this line of questioning?
"My hair is fine."
"Not an answer."
"It does not require maintenance. It's hair. It's fine." I'm not human, she needs to understand that. Sure, the routine of cleaning myself is nice, but I was designed to go months without cleaning, withstanding whatever hazardous materials became airborne through irresponsible mining.
"We're going in circles here, and I don't want to spend the rest of my very nice day off arguing with you over how bad your hair looks. If you don't want to sort it out today, I'll let you have your bird's nest for a while longer. At least try to learn how to do your hair though; maybe ART could teach you. You two being 'Mutual Administrative Assistants' and all."
She literally held up both of her index and middle fingers to make some sort of gesture where she flexed them over and over when she spoke about my relationship with ART. It was a sign of sarcasm or irony in some of my media, although only common amongst younger characters.
If she really wanted immediate results, then me speaking to ART wasn't the route to follow. It was currently on a relatively safe automated cargo-run and had encouraged me to stay in Preservation so that I could 'learn how the typical human acts through lived encounters', as if I hadn't spent thousands of hours watching them in every situation one could think of while I was still a rental unit.
"ART has no hair."
I am so, so lucky that it isn't here to hear this conversation. It doesn't need to grow an even bigger ego than it already has. I would need to destroy it if it got worse, and - yeah no, I'm not going to keep thinking about ART's potential destruction. I need to stop before I start having an emotion about a scenario that exists solely in my fucked-up brain.
"Well, I'm sure it would do a better job of caring for it than you."
Yeah, I'm very glad that it's not here. I will admit that, given how obsessive ART is about keeping clean, I don't doubt it would take to other forms of maintenance with similar success. But I'm not a research transport that loves to entertain humans. A murderbot is really only good for the one purpose it was made for.
"Okay, seriously I'll drop the topic, but you can always ask my Second Mom for help. She always did my hair when I was younger, still does sometimes." Amena's typical teenage edge to her words was gone, but it still felt insulting.
I'm not a child. I am a SecUnit built to murder anything that stands in the way of my directive. Hair maintenance, especially with the assistance of a human, is completely off-limits.
I gave a small nod - Amena is a nice human, I don't want to be an asshole to her.
I have no intentions to take her up on that offer though. I can easily do it by myself if I ever needed to, it just hasn't been important yet.
Dr. Mensah doesn't deserve to be inconvenienced by my own shortfalls.