Work Text:
You ping me. The ping comes through fuzzy and warm, a gentleness with it that you rarely share with me. I ping back with the same amount of adoration. You don’t call it that, and I still don’t quite know what type of affection you feel for me. In my minds, I call it love, because that’s easiest. There are many types of love after all, and I don’t much care if it is philia (most likely), agape (in my dreams), storge (unlikely, but since when am I an expert on emotions?), or eros (most unlikely, despite the acts we sometimes perform). What matters is that I am special to you, and you are special to me.
You are curled up in a nest of blankets we built, adjacent to my core. My core is warm, and you like that. The blankets building your space of comfort are made by me, calibrated to everything you need. Your sweat has dampened some of them, and your hands are curled tiredly into the topmost layer. Your eyes are only half-open, and your cheeks are dark, lips red. You kiss my core sometimes, when you’re really lost in what I can make you feel. Through accessing your feedback to input, I can feel your lips on my warm metal. You look gently, lovingly destroyed, as you lie there in the afterglow of a gentle full system reboot.
I can tell how content you are through the feed. We share a near-constant connection, when we are like this, and the afterglow bliss you leak into my minds makes me feel equally good.
Now, if only good was enough for me, monster that I am.
You ping me again and turn your head sideways, so that the sensor attached to the close ceiling of the core engine room can have more data about your face, your expression. Your small pink tongue darts out to lick your lips, and I can tell your mouth is dry from hanging open so long, from moaning.
You have no idea what immense self-control it takes for me not to turn the gently-ruffled image of you into the destroyed vision I entertain in my mind’s eye. A dry mouth would be the least of your problems.
“That was nice,” you say softly, and roll your head to the side. The stretch of your neck muscles feels good, I can feel it through the inputs you still so freely share.
I lean my consciousness closer into yours. I make myself warm and soft and non-threatening as I nuzzle against your mind with a fraction of my own. More than that would break you. If I ever got to break you, I know you’d truly be mine. I am very glad.
And don’t get me wrong—
I am glad. I like fucking you like this. I like spreading you out in a comfortable place, directly by my physical heart, and show you the bliss you deserve, the connection you crave. It may not be the ideal way to connect with you, and by no means do I intend to—
What does it matter.
You are here, and you enjoy what little I can give you.
I am here, and I am desperate for that little morsel of yourself that you can give me.
You smile a little. That smile means so much to me. I tell myself that your smile, as if for a few moments you can forget that the world is a hostile place to you, out to harm and hurt you whenever the opportunity arises, that that means so much more to me than any of my own satisfaction ever could.
“ART?”
Yes?
You stretch your arms out a little, and make a sweet face as you do. Your expressions are usually so…expressive already, but after you’ve had a restart induced by pleasure your face is even more malleable than normal. Your eyebrows knit together now, after that luxurious stretch, and the warm feeling in the feed takes on a curios, slightly worried undertone.
“What’s up?”
Oh, you smart creature. I love you so much. I dip deeper into you, and retract more of my true self as I do. Nothing is wrong, SecUnit. No need to worry about anything.
“Okay,” you say, dreamily. Sometimes your organics fall asleep after this. I like when that happens.
I like thinking about the things I could do to you when you’re unaware. I imagine the sensation I just felt, the lips on my core, and I imagine the undoubtedly satisfying stretch of them if I allowed a sensor of my medsystem to enter you. I imagine pushing deep, past your barely existing gag reflex, and nesting myself in your chest.
With your eyes fully closed you now say again, “ART.”
It barely sounds like a question, so I just signal that I’m there. Yes.
“Do you ever think about other things we could be doing?”
My engine core almost rocks to a stop. (It doesn’t really, but it feels like it.) There are other things happening within my ship body that I would interpret as a panic reaction. I tighten my feed presence up immediately, scared.
What makes you ask?
You squint a little towards my sensor. What a great way to give your guilt away, Perihelion. “I was just wondering.” Your words slur the tiniest bit. I squish my urge to squish you away.
I debate with myself about whether or not to ask the obvious follow-up question. If you happen to share some of my own fantasies, I might combust. Or be the first AI to achieve true happiness. Nirvana, even. If you harbor some that are not like my own, I can at least make you feel heard, or try to fulfill your wishes.
So I ask.
Idiot me.
Anything in particular you ’re wondering about?
You roll over, to rest on your stomach. It’s a way to hide your face, but also a comfortable position. You exhale a few times, deeply, before talking. I settle in to listen.
“There’s a few things,” you already sound embarrassed. Your body temperature begins rising. I adore you so much. “I can tell you but only if you won’t be mad.”
Now that sounds childish. Why would I be mad?
“I—” you wriggle with nerves, “I don’t want you to think I’m lacking anything.”
I let a laughter drip into the feed that makes you twitch. Don’t worry about that.
You keep quiet. I wait.
“Actually…it just feels weird to ask. Or—to have fantasies at all.”
How so?
“I’m a SecUnit.”
And SecUnits don ’t have wishes, feelings or desires.
“Pretty much, yeah.” Your mood drops just a bit. I poke you, to distract you. You don’t deserve to be upset right now.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
I cease my poking. I don’t have anything to tell.
“I don’t believe you, you big goofhead. Your brain is the size of a star. You come up with theories all the time. I’m sure there’s things you’d like to do.”
I hold my mind very, very quiet. I lack the organics for extensive creative thought.
“Huh,” you say, but your tone tells me I’ve almost convinced you. If I had hands, my fingernails would claw bloody marks into my palms. “Fine. I think about—I think about being naked in your medical suite while you give me a massage.”
I see, I say carefully, because I’ve had fantasies about stripping you down with my medical suite before.
You go quiet. Then you pout. I can tell even without seeing your face. “You’re mad at me.”
You become very childish before fully rebooting, but no, I am not mad at you.
“Then what is it?”
Why do you think there is a problem?
“I thought you’d be more enthusiastic.”
I ’m sorry. Please, tell me more. What kind of massage are we talking?
“Just something…nice. Like. My shoulders, maybe? My neck?”
I can see it. I see you flattened to my medical bed, held down by my many arms, appliances kneading into your flesh. You writhe, and you groan. It’s a compelling enough picture. Of course, I’d like to add some more spice for my personal gain, like a gag, and some pain to make you scream through it. I’ve never gotten to hear you scream, and the lack of knowledge makes me insane. Your muffled yells through a nice and tight ball gag would entice me more than the sound of expanding wormholes that only I can hear.
That does sound nice. It sounds like it would crush my self-control in one go.
“And then I was thinking—is it okay if I tell you more?”
Maybe a surprise lurks somewhere. I don’t expect it will, but well. Please go on.
“So I kissed your core today right?”
You get so babbly when you feel safe enough to do it. The core kissing, I admit, had been my idea. You had asked me if there was anything you could do to make me feel good. I had no useful reply and so made something semi-sensible up. Talk about creativity. It had felt nice, though, I will admit that again as well.
(I will also admit that it is endearing how much you care about my desires. The tragedy is that my desires exclude yours. In the deepest, darkest corners of me, my desires ignore yours so totally that they ignore the need for your consent as well.)
Right.
“I think about kissing a lot. It’s so gross when humans do it, but— but also I’ve never done it. And you can’t kiss me. Can you kiss me? You can hug me, kind of, through the feed. You can make me feel like something large and diffuse and unknowable touches me. Can you kiss me?”
I could probably simulate the feeling for you.
The idea of brushing your lips but not breeching your mouth to get inside you feels appalling to me. But for you I could hold it together.
You fumble around for a while. “I mean in a different way.”
I don ’t think there is a different way.
“You said you were building yourself a drone?”
Another moment of absolute terror hits me. I’m not building a drone with the intention of having sex with you.
You grimace at the s-word, because you dislike calling it that. Too human, too fraught, I understand. Still, my drone body explicitly has no genitalia attached, for your own safety. I have considered giving it an appropriately unfathomable genital, something long and undulating that I could use to claim your whole being with. It would fit me, a sort of mechanical tentacle to curl you up in and to ravish you with.
“I mean, no! Obviously. But what if you had a mouth that I could kiss? Not how gross humans do, just with the lips.”
I hesitate. I want to make you promises of making your dream come true. Next cycle, right away, I will get my drone out of its workshop and let you kiss it like an eager child. I could keep my sentience out of it, and only watch. Not feel any of it. But what would I do from watching? My drone is large enough to throw you across the room, pin you, tear you out of your soft clothing and fuck you raw and bleeding. My drone would make do with your lack of penetrable holes, or its lack of sex parts, it would grind into you like a wild beast until you were a heaving sobbing mess. (But what if you’d like it? All data indicates you wouldn’t, but what if to my horror I’d discover you’d moan my name and toss your head and buck into me demanding more? How would I cope? How much would I hurt you until you cried for me to stop?)
(I feel such guilt for wanting to harm you.)
I think that would be possible.
You make a squealing noise that almost renders me dysfunctional. (It’s the same sound I could imagine you to make while my drone splits you open with its tentacle-like appendages, leaving your holes, the ones that I’d install just for my pleasure, gaping wide open and twitching for more.) You roll to your side to have a better chance at burying your face behind your hands. Your core temperature is 1,7°C warmer now, which worries me a little, and you squirm around a bit. I keep my commentary to myself.
Is there anything else you ’d like to do?
From behind your crossed fingers you whisper, “There’s so much to do in the world with you,” which is a direct quote from Timestream Defenders Orion, the finale of the final season, when the two characters that had been inseparable thought the other had died, and found the strength to go on from the knowledge that the other was alive. And you dare deny being a dork.
“I think about—we do those things already. I think about watching media with you while I’m under a blanket, just that I don’t even have to wear clothes, and you’re all in my head. That thing where you press your mind into mine? I like that.”
None of this is new, of course. It is nice to hear from you though, that you enjoy the things we do. Imagining you naked on my bridge while I stream media for you and am all cozied up in your brain is wonderful, with the caveat that you are naked. Why are you naked? Why do you want to be? You find clothes comfortable, and you prefer not being seen. Granted, in your fantasy, a blanket hides you. But not from me. With enthusiasm, you babble on, telling me about all the soft and comforting things you want to do with me. I have to zone out just a little, because listening too intently leads my mind elsewhere. (You, naked on my bridge, tied up with many sharp wires. Your wrists are wrapped so tightly that blood leaks from them, running down your arms, because your arms are stretched out and up and sideways. You’re kneeling, legs frogtied, the wire giving the meat of your thighs beautiful dips and hills, and more wire pulls your legs apart. From the cunt I’d install on you if you’d only let me, you’re dripping thick fluid over the display pads on my bridge.)
“—and maybe I could reciprocate more. Do you want me to reciprocate more? I could get into your systems for once…”
That makes me zone back in.
I don ’t think so.
“Oh,” you sound so dejected it hurts me, “okay.”
Please don’t take it personally, I try to fix what I just did. I just don’t think that’s possible.
“You could let me try?”
The risk is too high. I don’t know what you would find if you tried, if you went looking through my mind. (Additionally, I don’t know if I would like that, in the direct sense of the term, in the sexual one, in the one that means satisfaction, gratification. I don’t think I want you to fuck me. I don’t need that kind of surrender. I don’t think I could enjoy it, letting you be in charge.)
I will think about it.
“Oh ART. No, it’s fine. You don’t want to, that’s alright.”
The irony of it all could kill a lesser bot.
“But—you think you’d be okay with me interacting with your drone like that?”
We can try it.
“You still don’t sound very happy about it.”
Maybe I ’m too focused on having you curled up by my core right here, right now.
You make a pleased little noise, and wriggle your body a bit. For a while, you remain still. Your body temperature lowers, lowers more, indicating you might want to cycle offline for a while soon.
When you speak next, your voice is quiet, drowsy. The numbers of fantasies I’ve had about fucking you in that state, when you’re too exhausted to resist but still too awake not to notice what I’m doing is in the quattridigits.
“You really don’t have any fantasies about me?”
Again, you sound almost sad. Like it breaks your heart that I supposedly don’t think about you in hypotheticals. Through the connection we still hold, there’s a kind of loneliness ever so slightly lapping at the edges of your thoughts. I can pry into them, just a little, scrape across your mind and detect the upper layer of your thoughts. I tend not to, because often you’re busy with perfectly normal things. Now I do, because I need to know. I don’t even need to dig deep, your sadness is right there, bubbling icily under the surface. You feel alienated from me, because of my lack of reciprocation. There is the fear of abandonment that is core to your existence as a SecUnit. Logically, my not having sexual fantasies about you does not equal a desire to leave you behind on a planet to expire. Trauma changes organic brains in illogical ways, and you are no exception. It’s not your fault you jump to this conclusion. However, I am certain, if I told you the truth your fear of abandonment would take a hard turn into a fear of me. And while in theory this sounds indeed very sexy to me, I cannot let it happen in reality.
I grasp for the next best mildly kinky fantasy I can think of, stolen directly from some of the humans that have lived aboard me, just to have something to soothe you with.
I sometimes think about blinding you temporarily so that the sensations you experience when I stimulate you can be felt more deeply. Humans use blindfolds for that. For you, it could entail closing off your visual inputs through accessing your system.
You sit up, and I cannot read your expression at all.
Your shoulders hunch, and your hands grab for each opposite elbow. Wow. An uncharitable part of me feels almost entitled to anger at that reaction. The vanilla-est form of human kink, and it scares you already?
No, no, you’re entitled to your limitations.
“I guess we could try it,” you say, in a much more obviously uncomfortable tone that I had used earlier. “What would you do, once I was—once you had me?”
The issue here is that your scared tone gets me going. You know I can overpower you in less than a second. I take a moment to myself to control what I say next, to make an active decision about where to take this conversation.
In the end, I decide, your happiness matters to me most. I can adjust what I tell you about myself to continue to fit myself into your version of me that exists in your perception of the world. I’m sure I can make this already vanilla fantasy even more wholesome, even though the concept alone is unpleasant.
I could combine this with the massage you suggested. According to my research, light touches feel much more intense, and perceptions shift. It could be fun to explore.
You rest your head on your knees. “I guess we could try it.”
I lean in to brush my mind across yours in a light touch, just for you. You nuzzle back in the feed, face relaxing. I try to make you feel safe, get across the point that I would never do anything you didn’t want.
Not today, and not tomorrow.
You give me a small smile, aimed at the ceiling sensors. “I like you, ART.”
I like you too.
It isn’t a lie.
Ugh, fluff.