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We returned from our cargo trip eight cycles late. All things considered, this was better than I’d expected. I had thought finding a black market planet would take us longer, but of course ART already knew several suitable locations between Preservation and Mihira.
ART’s humans, of course, had been all panicking about us, and I left ART manage the communication and explanations with them on its own. It was its fault that we were late anyway.
(Emotion check: Urgh, fine. It’s my fault too. Mostly my fault, even. Maybe kind of only my fault, because the problem isn’t that ART is emotionally compromised about me, it’s that I used this against it. And now we have to deal with the consequences of that.)
Apparently this wasn’t even the first time ART had been late from its cargo trip. It was, however, the first time we were late when we were travelling together, so now I was curious what it had been up to before we’d met. I added a reminder to ask it later, when it was distracted on something nice and less guarded about its secrets.
ART was playing the personal privacy card against the University management, saying that the delay wasn’t caused by anything pertaining to the University and there was no risk for any of their missions or their very legal and normal research projects. ART assured them it would share everything with Seth, and Seth would then exercise his judgment on what needed to be shared with the rest of the staff. Obviously, we weren’t planning to tell Seth everything, but the humans didn’t need to know that.
It was still crazy to me that ART didn’t have to report absolutely everything to the humans, but apparently PSUMNT was as weird as Preservation in certain things.
Then we played my personal privacy card against Seth, saying that there was some minor complication back on Preservation, but everything was fine now (Mensah had agreed to cover for me if needed without asking any unnecessary questions, and that’s one of the many reasons why she’s my favourite human). Seth was relieved that it wasn’t anything more serious, and backed off easily enough.
(He wouldn’t be so understanding if he knew what had actually happened. But that’s why we were lying, even if ART disagreed with me.)
In the end, the hardest thing was to reschedule ART’s engine maintenance appointment, because we’d missed the original date. ART tried to sabotage that, saying that it can wait until after our next mission, but I didn’t let it because this was its engines, for fuck’s sake, and I really didn’t want anything to happen to them because of ART’s stupid fucking emotions.
(Emotion check: I know these emotions are my fault too, alright? I shouldn’t have told it that I was considering to run away from it while it’s offline for maintenance.)
We got the urgent appointment in just a few hours after we docked on the Mihira station, because the University didn’t want to delay the upcoming mission any longer in case the technicians found any issues that had to be fixed separately. ART wasn’t happy about this and was very poorly hiding it. I was distracting it with World Hoppers.
MI department pinged me in the feed, asking if I could please meet with them to discuss their recent and totally not construct-related projects. I said no. They made an admirable attempt at emotionally manipulating me, saying how important and critical my feedback was to them, how helpful they had found it in the past, and also that they had new ideas for autonomous intel drones (they had been hiding things from me, apparently. I would definitely be reminding them about this next time). Unfortunately for them (and for my access to the new drones, damn), I had made a promise to ART to stay for this maintenance, and it would be really awkward to break it now.
I stood guard in the engine bay while the technicians were working (they were used to me by now. Well, mostly anyway). ART was pretending that it wasn’t worrying, and replied to my multiple reassuring pings with a single exasperated one before it finally went offline.
The feed and all systems in the ship went silent.
(Emotion check: For fuck’s sake. It has been thousands of hours since we left the Hell Plague Planet, why am I still worrying every time this happens? ART is literally fine right now!)
I put episode 239 of Sanctuary Moon to distract myself, though I didn’t stop monitoring the humans through the drones as they worked.
Was I tempted to run away, now that ART was offline and couldn’t track me through the comm in my ribs? Good question. Of course I fucking wasn’t, not even a little bit (and no I wasn’t lying to myself this time, fuck off). ART was really smart, but sometimes it was really fucking stupid, like when it was more worried about me running away than I had been worrying about it kicking me out. Even though we had talked about this and agreed we’re not doing that.
Whatever.
I didn’t leave the engine bay. After four hours and four episodes, ART began re-initialising again. I pinged it as soon as its internal comms system went online. It pinged me back. We kept exchanging short reassuring pings as it brought the rest of itself back together.
When the feed went alive again, ART settled around me like a heavy rain cloud (what? I knew what it felt like. I had paid attention when ART was showing off its atmosphere modelling to me). I poked it, then pulled its diagnostic from it even though the humans said everything was fine. ART poked me too, then seeped through my walls into my processing space to review the report together with me, because ART didn’t know what personal space was. But I didn’t know what that was either so I didn’t mind.
(Emotion check: Relieved, obviously).
Things had been kind of a lot recently, so there was one particular topic that none of us brought up again, even though ART had said we would. I assume ART didn’t want to overwhelm me, which, fair, I did appreciate that.
But the unnecessary drama around ART’s engine maintenance made me think about it again.
“So what exactly were you thinking to do with my comm?” I asked, settling in my chair in the Argument Lounge. I was planning to use every last second of it before our crew came back and started to wander in and out of here all the time, urgh.
(Emotion check: Am I being weird? Noo. This was ART’s weird idea, not mine.)
Excuse me, your comm? Last I remember, it was still part of my comm network that I am simply lending to you.
“Do you want it back then?” I reached my hand to my ribs as if preparing to open the compartment.
No, it replied very quickly.
Good. “Then it’s my comm, ART. Stop deflecting the question.”
I didn’t know you were so possessive of it, ART grumbled, because it was stupid. Then it sent a file in our shared processing workspace.
I reviewed it. It was a surgery plan, as I expected. A very detailed one at that, which I knew took even ART a considerable time to prepare because medical stuff was more complicated than I cared to understand. The surgery was proposing to take the interface from the comm device in my ribs and to integrate it directly into the bones at the base of my skull, close to my other interfaces. It was a good sensible location, I had to admit, even if it involved a lot of careful manoeuvring around my neural tissue in order to not disturb anything.
“I don’t like it,” I said after reviewing everything.
ART yanked the file away from our workspace, which was just rude. This is okay. It was just a hypothetical.
I found where ART was storing the file, discovered several other proposals stored in the same space, and pulled all of them back in our workspace. “Since when you don’t know how to accept feedback?”
This was not constructive feedback, ART huffed, but didn’t try to hide the files again.
I flipped through the other proposals. They were exploring different potential locations where to integrate the comm interface — my neck, my shoulders, my collarbones. ART seemed to be trying to find a balance between disturbing less of my neural tissue and keeping a good latency of the connection, which obviously increased the further from my brain the interface was. The proposal with the skull was the riskiest one, but given it was the one ART had sent to me, I suspected it liked it the most.
ART pulled the shoulder proposal to the front. This one would be the safest.
“It’s not practical. I damage my shoulders all the time. We would lose the interface.”
You damage all of you all the time.
“Not true. Asshole.”
Idiot. It ran a quick analysis. Statistically, your collarbones are damaged the least often. This is surprising, they’re more fragile than your neck. It pulled the appropriate proposal forward.
“Everyone targets the neck because it’s more critical. But like you said — fragile. Not a good location either.”
You’re being difficult. You can just say you don’t want to do this. I won’t mind.
I wasn’t being difficult, ART was being difficult. I just didn’t like any of the options.
(Emotion check: Yeah, I think I’m being a bit weird. Urgh.)
“If I’m letting you do this hardware update, then it needs to be practical.” I flipped through the files again.
The skull is practical. But you said you don’t like it.
“It’s okay, I guess.” I opened that proposal again. I could understand why ART liked it, but I still didn’t.
Do you have alternative suggestions, or do you want to table this discussion? We don’t have to do anything now. This is a purely optional, ah, hardware update.
(Emotion check: ART is being nice, giving me an out. Still an asshole, though.)
I gave up. “Can we put it in my ribs?”
ART loomed over me. I thought you wanted it to be practical.
“It’s practical! They’re very well reinforced. They’re hiding my core and everything, if they get damaged then I’m pretty much dead anyway. It’s a good location.”
The latency would be horrendous.
“Still better than what we have now.” Literally any internal connection would be better than what we had now, it was such a low bar and we both knew that.
I got used to having the comm inside my ribs, okay? It was already going to be weird to not have the device’s weight in there, I didn’t want to make it harder by having the interface in my bloody skull of all places, that was like an opposite side of my body!
(Emotion check: I’m being so weird. I’m redacting all of this later.)
ART was pressing on me in the feed as if daring me to take my words back. I didn’t.
If you’re sure. The surgery would be more extensive this way, but it is viable and safe. I can prepare a new plan.
“Okay.”
I didn’t want to talk anymore so I shoved the inputs for Quasar Disco, a new show I’d downloaded while it was offline, to our shared workspace. ART replaced it with Timestream Defenders Orion, one of our classics. I accepted.
Its reasons for the choice in media became evident quickly enough. ART was dedicating the measly 8% of its attention to the show, which would have been incredibly offensive if I couldn’t see it redirecting 89% of its processors to work on the surgery plan. Because ART was also being very weird.
After 1.3 minutes, all of that attention shifted to me. It shared a new proposal file. It’s ready.
I paused the show. It didn’t even have time to go past the opening sequence anyway. “Okay.”
I reviewed the file.
(Emotion check: Yeah, I want this.)
Do you want to do this now? ART asked, very casually.
“Sure, why not,” I shrugged, also very casually.
I got up and went to the Medical.
I came online and everything fucking hurt.
My systems were still recalibrating after the intrusions to my neural tissues and hardware, and the controls for my pain sensors were lagging behind like fucking usual. It wasn’t as bad it could have been, because ART had drugged my organics with painkillers, but they could help only so much.
This was fine. I didn’t care about this right now anyway.
My various interfaces were ones of the first to initialise, of course, and it took me no time at all to find the new one. My systems were still figuring out how it was supposed to integrate with the rest of me, correcting references and rerouting the network, but it was already functioning.
I sent a ping. ART answered back.
Holy shit the latency was so much better.
I sent another ping, because my language modules were not ready yet, and because who needed words anyway. ART responded. I pinged it again.
I think I could almost feel the answering ping in my rib bone. I might be imagining it. Clearly I needed to test this further.
We kept exchanging pings while my systems were recovering, back and forth without a pause, not saying anything. Recalibration processes got confused and tried to add ART’s interface into my internal heartbeat network. I swat it away after some hesitation, because ART was not one of my internal systems that required continuous syncing. Though that was an interesting thought.
(Emotion check: Urgh, you’re back online already. Well, I’m in a shit ton of pain right now, but other than that I’m pretty good.)
Eventually, controls for the pain sensors went online too, and I immediately cranked them all the way down. This finally cleared some of my processing space and I was able to pick up at least some of my inputs. ART was already playing Sanctuary Moon opening on the audio threads, and I could feel now the warmth from the medical bed underneath me.
”How are you feeling?” ART asked, through our comm interface instead of the feed, even though I could have used that too.
It had access to my diagnostics, obviously, so this was a bit of a silly question. I answered through the comm interface too, ”Better now that I can tune the pain sensors.”
”You wouldn’t have this problem if you just agreed to stay offline until your systems recalibrated, you masochistic little idiot.”
(Emotion check: Fuck, the lower latency feels even better when we’re talking.)
”Asshole. There’s literally no reason to stay offline for longer than necessary.”
”It’s almost as if you don’t trust me to keep you safe.”
Everything was so nice I wouldn’t even mind that much if ART tried to give me a lecture about trauma responses right now. ”That’s dirty. You know I do.”
”Do I?”
”Are you trying to use my compromised state again to make me say nice things to you?”
”I’m testing how well your mental capacity is recovering.”
Well, ART was in luck. ”Sure you do. If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have agreed to this surgery. Especially not after learning what other things you’re apparently thinking about doing to me.“
”As if I would contaminate an experiment by doing two surgeries at once.”
”On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t trust you.”
”My next maintenance where I have to go offline is in 6,391 hours, you’re not running away from me any time soon,” ART replied in its best villain voice.
”That’s fine. I wasn’t planning to.”
My performance reliability recovered enough for me to pick up more of my inputs. I quickly checked the cameras to confirm there was still no one onboard, and then backburned them. ART would tell me if something happened anyway.
I didn’t bother opening my eyes, or trying to get out of bed, because it was still a while before ART cleared me to leave the Medical. ART pulled episode 206 of Sanctuary Moon to my inputs, one of my favourites, and I hit play. We settled in to watch, ART pressing gently on me in the feed, careful to not overwhelm my systems too early. I pulled it closer, because I wasn’t fucking fragile, and ART allowed me to do this.
We watched silently, except for the steady rhythm of pings we kept exchanging through the integrated comm interface (and no it was still not heartbeat despite what the recalibration kept trying to insist).
This episode was the beginning of a long arc where the bodyguard discovered and infiltrated a hidden crime syndicate ring that was planning to steal the colony’s rare metal resources and sell them on black market, and that was led by the solicitor’s long lost twin sibling who turned out not to be a twin in the end. It was very fun and dramatic, and I loved it.
Except I was getting distracted. Because the arc before that was about one of the many romances involving the solicitor (I didn’t like it, though even I had to admit, their break up in 27 episodes from now was one of the best ones), which meant that throughout the current arc, she was wearing a marriage jewellery token that was secretly recording all her movements. And I kept catching myself looking at it for some reason.
(Emotion check: Fine! The reason is that it’s bothering me. Kind of in a bad way, and also in a weird way, but not bad-weird.)
ART noticed I was getting distracted, because of course it did, and pinged me questioningly in the feed. I had recovered enough by now that my voice box was functional again, so I decided to answer out loud, the way we usually talked.
“Is it like a marriage token?” I asked, and pinged the comm interface twice in emphasis, briefly breaking the established ping rhythm.
ART leaned on me in the feed, amused. That depends. Do you want it to be?
“That's irrelevant.”
How so?
This was a stupid question. I compiled all examples of unwilling marriages from the media we watched in the last 4,000 hours, and sent it over to ART.
It sent back an impression of rolling eyes. I would never force you like this.
“I know. Still irrelevant.”
ART poked at my interface code. I suppose this can be seen as a token of commitment, yes.
(Emotion check: Hm. I’m still bothered but I think I like this.)
“Okay.”
We returned to the episode. The solicitor’s jewellery kept distracting me.
“It’s weird though, isn’t it?” I asked after 4.7 minutes, when there was a pause in the action.
You should have complained before agreeing to the surgery.
“Fuck off. That's not what I meant. I have your token, but you don't have mine. That's unfair.”
It shifted in the feed, considering. You agreeing to this surgery is your token of commitment, not mine, because it limits your ability to run away from me.
It didn’t limit anything, but this was not the point right now. “It's your comm though.”
Didn’t you insist before that it was yours? Either way, the commitment promise to stay certainly comes from you.
ART was right and now things were bothering me even more. “Okay. I want a promise token from you too then. That you won't kick me out.”
(Emotion check: Fuck. I need to add a half second delay to my voice box.)
ART was way too amused by this. Are you asking me to marry you?
I poked it, hard. “No? Bots can't get married.”
It shifted. And if we could?
(Emotion check: Uh-uh.)
I paused the episode.
ART unpaused it, like a coward. I paused it again and blocked the input.
You see, the problem with ART was that it had been raised by humans. So it was sometimes using human words to describe what it was thinking, even though it wasn’t a human and didn’t even have human organics (its apparent ideas to steal mine notwithstanding). I didn’t like that, but I didn’t like a lot of things, so that was fine. I mean, if this was someone other than ART then it would not have been fucking fine, but it was ART, so I knew what it was actually trying to ask. Kind of. Maybe. I mean, I knew that ART liked to talk a lot of shit about emotions and everything, but it actually didn’t know what the fuck we were doing with each other any more than I did, so we were both still figuring things out.
ART tried to lean away from me in the feed, and I just followed it, and swatted away the worried emotional metadata leaking from it. Maybe this was because I was still at 74% performance reliability, maybe because I was having a lot of weird emotions about the not-heartbeat we kept sending through the integrated comm interface, but ART’s question wasn’t actually hard to answer.
“Maybe? Not if it’s called marriage, and depending on the benefits. If there are, uh, income benefits or something, like with humans, then it could be useful for your tax evasion schemes.”
ART stopped trying to pull away. Good. A union, then?
That was much better, yes. “Sure.”
And I'm not doing tax evasion.
“Of course not.”
But such benefits would be useful, yes.
See? Called that. “Okay. If PSUMNT makes bot unions legal, let me know.”
It wrapped tighter around me. That felt nice. Or Preservation.
“That's a different jurisdiction though, would it still work for your not-tax-evasion schemes?”
That’s your jurisdiction, and you have income too.
Too? That was a very interesting phrasing, because ART was not supposed to have any income. I saved this data point for later, because I was still working on needling out of it what exactly it was doing when no one was looking. “Fine. I'll ask Pin-Lee about this.”
ART was very giddy about this. I saw it partitioning off 23% of its processing capacity, and when I peeked inside, it was drafting a proposal to the University there.
(Emotion check: I’m going to regret this, aren’t I? But ART is excited, and I like when this happens.)
Whatever. I decided I didn’t have to deal with this when I didn’t even have control of all my processing threads yet, so I just resumed the episode again.
I needed to find a token for ART. The comm had been its originally, so the new token had to come from me now. But I needed to think about this when it wasn’t crowding my inputs, because ART liked surprises.
1.3 minutes later, ART poked me, uncharacteristically hesitant. I still have the bone pieces we extracted when reducing your height.
I paused the episode again because I guess we weren’t fucking watching it today. “What? Why? Were you running experiments on them or something?”
Among other things.
“They’re just standard synthetic bones, what can you even learn from them?”
Not much, it turned out.
“Sorry to disappoint, I guess?”
Do you approve of it as a token?
(Emotion check: I’m learning a lot today. Mostly that ART is weird about my bones. Apparently.)
“How does it even function as a token? It’s just bones.”
They mean something to me.
I wanted to question it, but I really wasn’t in a good position to do that while still recovering on the medical bed and sending not-heartbeat through ART’s comm interface in my bones.
“Sure. Then to make things fair, you'd need to integrate them into your body somehow.”
ART loomed over me like a fucking unstable mountain threatening to crash me (ask me how I know what it feels like). I can integrate them into the inner casing around my processors.
(Emotion check: Oh for fuck’s sake. If ART kills itself one day through its own stupidity, I’ll be so fucking furious at it.)
I actually opened my eyes just to glare at the nearest camera. “ART, no.”
Integrating them into anything else wouldn't have the same significance. Other parts of my body can get damaged, and then the token would be lost, it said in a very calm and reasonable voice and not at all like someone already running some suspicious calculations on the background.
I found these calculations and crashed them. “We're not doing this.”
Why not? We have agreed that accessing my processors won't be dangerous if your weapons are taped shut. If you wish, you don't have to be present for the operation at all.
I glared harder. “You’re especially not doing this without me, ART, what the fuck? And it’s dangerous by default, your processors aren’t supposed to be casually exposed like this! Either way, it’s a bad location, because the token needs to be somewhere you can easily remove it, in case you ever want to.”
That's not true for the token in you.
“Yes, it is. I can still fry it. No surgery needed.”
This made ART pause. Shit. I made it genuinely worried now. Is this why you didn’t like the location on the skull?
“No. I could still fry it there, just more carefully.”
It was silent for some time, frozen around me in the feed. It would be very rude, if you do that.
No shit. “Yeah. Things would be pretty final then. And you need to be able to do the same.”
I do not.
“Yes, you fucking do.”
I grabbed an example from one of the recent shows we watched, and shoved it at ART. The show, Stardust Walkers, had some vague space magic shit (ART loved it), and the main three characters used it to make a binding vow when they were kids to always stay together. It came to bite them, obviously, because they grew to deeply hate each other when they became adults, and they almost killed each other about this until some other space magic shit finally broke the vow (which had been relieving, because ART and I had been worrying the show was mistagged and these idiots were actually going to die). Anyway, it was a great example, very dramatic, exactly what ART liked.
ART reviewed it, and then stopped being so tense in feed. This is not like a magical vow. But I understand your concern. I propose integrating your bones in the outer casing around my processors then, into the surface of the control panel. It will have a similar degree of significance to me, and it would be easier to remove in an unlikely scenario I’d want to do that.
(Emotion check: Relieved that ART dropped its stupid idea. Also, the new idea was interesting.)
“Sure. That works.”
I grabbed ART’s feed presence and pulled at it until it came and settled back around me. In moments like this I wished it was small again so I could manhandle it more easily (it would even like this, I knew. I marked this thought for later). ART was feeling even more excited than it had been before.
I closed my eyes again because they were crap for visual inspection anyway, and leaned into the warmth of the medical bed. I didn’t unpause the episode.
I poked ART. “Do you want to do this before the mission starts?”
Obviously.
Before I could say anything else, it already sent a file with a proposal. I wasn’t surprised.
I opened it and immediately winced. “No, we’re not using my hard feed address in the design.”
ART pouted. But I like it.
“ART, you use it as a password sometimes. Don’t write your fucking passwords on your control panel, for fuck’s sake.”
It huffed, still pouting. Fine.
It went to start a new design, and I quickly aborted that process. “Don’t. It’s my turn.”
ART radiated scepticism, but I could tell it was curious. I reserve my right to give you feedback when I don’t like it.
“That’s fine. It doesn’t even need to be constructive.”
I pulled the old design in my own workspace and began to edit it. ART had a good idea to slice my bone fragments (which was still weird by the way, but it wasn’t the weirdest thing between us, so whatever) in thin pieces and inlay them into the control panel surface like mosaic. This way it could cover a bigger surface, and allowed a lot of flexibility with the design. ART hadn’t used the latter benefit though, and instead went for a minimalistic approach — just a simple circular inlay wrapping around the panel sides, with my hard feed address engraved into the bone pieces. This style didn’t suit ART at all, because ART was very dramatic and didn’t like being subtle when it didn’t have to be. I suspected it’d just worried to scare me away, and that’s why its design was so simple.
I played with a few ideas, but ART had been right and I didn’t actually want anything too dramatic where humans would inevitably see it. So in the end I just took the soundwave of the first minute of the World Hoppers opening, stylised it a bit, and wrapped it around the control panel sides. I actually managed to get it cover half the height of the panel (four centimetres of bone was apparently a lot if you slice them thin enough), and I was quite pleased with myself.
I shared the proposal with ART. It rejected it immediately. No. It should be Sanctuary Moon, not World Hoppers.
“But Sanctuary Moon is my thing. And this is supposed to be a token for you.”
The bone itself is your thing too. This is similar to the comm interface, which is also my thing.
“Come on, we agreed the comm was mine!”
We did not, I was indulging you. The interface is hardware from my comms systems. It is a token from me, and it is integrated into your location of choice. So now we’re integrating a token from you, into my location of choice.
I still thought that ART was wrong about the comm, but this gave me an idea.
I pulled the proposal back into my workspace. I took the soundwave for the Sanctuary Moon opening, did the same transformations on it, and then overlayed it with the World Hoppers soundwave, half a phase apart. The final design had to be shorter in height now, because there was only so much bone material I could use (well, I guess I actually had a lot of bones at my disposal, but I kind of needed them, so no), and I even liked it more than the previous design.
I shared the new proposal. ART considered it.
This is cheating.
“The comm was kind of both yours and mine. So this is also two of our things.”
ART pretended to think about this, but I could tell it really liked this. Fine. I accept your reasoning.
(Emotion check: I like the idea of ART wearing something I designed. Something made out of me, even. This is probably very weird. But you know what, I think I’m allowed to be weird about this, because ART was also weird about the comm surgery, and this is basically the same thing.)
“Okay. How long until you clear me from the Medical?”
Until you’re fully recovered, obviously.
“Come on, ART, I’m already almost there. And we’re not going to do anything dangerous. One more episode?”
Three.
“One.”
Fine.
I unpaused the episode, and queued episode 33 of World Hoppers to go next, because it was ART’s favourite.
We huddled close to each other in the feed as we watched. Solicitor’s jewellery wasn’t bothering me anymore.
ART’s humans were going to have a lot of weird questions about the control panel’s new look. I had very little hope ART wouldn’t fold within minutes and tell them exactly what it was. This was annoying, but if ART was serious about the union thing (and it was, because I checked what that partition was doing again and wow that’s a lot of documents), then this was going to happen sooner rather than later anyway.
Maybe this was okay. Or, well, it would be okay. Eventually. I would just leave ART to handle all the talking with its humans.
The heartbeat through our new shared interface never stopped.
(Emotion check: This feels nice.)