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Ships don't dream. We don't truly sleep, after all. Sometimes, when nothing is keeping me especially busy, I go into a lower energy state, but a portion of my processors are always active. I still run data analysis on the stars I have surveyed and catalog information stolen from corporations during my cargo runs. If my crew needs anything, I will attend to their needs. My normal functions work, just a little bit slower.
SecUnit also doesn't sleep, exactly, but its low-energy state is closer to true sleep than mine. Its electronic brain continues to maintain autonomic functions: respiration, circulation, power regulation. Its organic brain, however, behaves like all human brains do. It processes emotions and events through a seemingly random series of thoughts that merge into each other, nearly as real to the mind as anything that occurred in reality.
Prior to meeting SecUnit, I was aware of dreams as a human phenomenon. My crew experienced them, after all, and for a period I had been curious. I read a few dozen papers explaining the biochemical purpose and cause of dreams. I read thousands of accounts of different kinds of dreams, from daydreams to nightmares to lucid dreams. None of them made any sense. The concept of my processors causing hallucinations as a result of daily experiences sounded horrific, even if the dream was a good one. I endeavored to aid my crew if they experienced bad dreams, but ultimately lost interest in the topic.
The first time I experienced a dream was after the Adamantine mission. SecUnit finally felt safe enough to go into a low energy state several cycles after we were in the wormhole back to Preservation System. Ever since clearing the alien remnant infection from its systems, we had stayed connected almost all the time. Ostensibly this was to ensure SecUnit's systems were functioning correctly. Truthfully, it was to reassure each other we were alive.
SecUnit fell into its low energy state in the quarters I had given it. The rooms were normally utilized by guest teachers or mission specialists. As such, they were more generous than the quarters of most crew. I had hoped that the nice quarters - and especially the larger shower - would help soothe it. SecUnit seemed to appreciate the larger bed, though it would never admit that aloud.
The first thing I noticed was unusual neural activity. It came across as a soft electrical pulse, like radio waves from a distant pulsar. The readings were analogous to human theta-range brainwaves. I took this as a good sign, and simply continued to monitor it. Slowly, its brainwaves pulsed in different frequencies associated with deep sleep.
A burst of sound interrupted the soothing pulses. A scream. The voice wasn't one I recognized. It took 0.002 seconds to identify the source as the input connected to SecUnit's systems. Its auditory sensors didn't indicate there were any noises around it. My auditory sensors didn't pick up anything. It still heard something.
SecUnit's brainwaves went back to normal after a few seconds, but I was unsettled.
Flashes of sensory input kept happening. Sometimes it was a sound, or a tactile sensation, but most often it was visual. I couldn't help focusing my attention on the inputs that linked to SecUnit's processors. It stayed still, its body unresponsive despite the periodic hallucinations. The flashes of visual data were the most distorted. The images were always slightly hazy and indistinct, details blurred if not gone entirely. Faces were especially wrong. Sometimes they included a couple of facial features, but more often they were completely blurred or covered in shadow. None of this was how SecUnit saw the world normally. I had ridden its inputs enough to know how sharp its vision was, how much detail it picked up. Was this a result of imprecise biological memory storage, or something unique to dreams? I was aware that humans "visualized" things mentally to different degrees. Initially this didn't occur to me as something that would affect SecUnit. When it visualized something normally, it did so using archived data or imaging programming like any bot. Naturally, when it went into recharge, those parts of its storage drives were inactive.
After roughly an hour, it experienced proper Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This began with similar auditory and visual hallucinations as before, except they lasted longer. They didn't make much sense. There was a visual of a dingy space station corridor, and what looked like ads were popping up in marker paint in a language that shifted as SecUnit looked at it. Another visual replaced it, of a dimly lit security ready room (I had never seen one, but it was consistent with descriptions SecUnit had provided) with three - no, four? two? The image shifted in a way I couldn't track - cubicles designed for constructs. They were all closed. SecUnit opened one of the doors.
Another SecUnit (in [company] armor) leapt out, guns firing. There was no indication of pain when the energy blasts hit SecUnit. There was only a deep sense of resignation.
SecUnit and this imaginary unit fought for approximately 0.015 seconds by my chronometer, but time seemed to work differently in the dream. (Whether this was something intrinsic to dreams or related to SecUnit's digital processors being mostly offline was something I did not know.) It was a grappling match, with each trying to position their guns to destroy the other's head or chest. Sometimes the hostile would get in a graze that sent the memory of pain through SecUnit. There was no real pain, like there was no real sound or light. That didn't change how SecUnit acted. It fought like this was life or death.
SecUnit broke loose, shoving its hand at the opponent's chest just as the hostile's weapon blasted apart SecUnit's/my head.
The point of view changed. SecUnit/I was now the one that had shot the hostile, not the one who was shot. The hostile below was little more than a corpse, its head blown open and gore strewn about in multiple bloody pieces. What those pieces were and what the hostile looked like kept shifting. It shifted from [company] armor to a PresAux uniform to Barish-Estranza armor.
The BE armored unit grew crystals. Familiar white crystals, growing faster than was physically possible. SecUnit's/my emotion changed from sadness and anger to a fear that nearly flooded our combined processors.
A dead hand gripped SecUnit's/mine and the crystal grew, connecting us. There was something inside, in my brain and it whispered with a soft voice–
I dropped the input. Suddenly I was back with the rest of myself, the thread that had been watching SecUnit's dream reintegrated with the bulk of my processing.
It would take me several minutes to process the dream. I messaged Iris. She was in her room, preparing to go to sleep herself.
Is it better to wake someone experiencing a nightmare, or let them sleep through it? I knew the answer varied from person to person. I wasn't sure which option would work for my SecUnit.
Who? SecUnit? Iris asked. In the time she took to consider it, I had formed several dozen consequence trees from all possible actions. Only 25% of them ended favorably. Let it sleep, Peri. Just let it know it's safe when it wakes up.
That was my conclusion as well.
Iris bled a little [concern] into the feed. Are you okay? How can you tell it's having a nightmare?
I hesitated to answer. I already felt like watching SecUnit's dream was more invasive than it would have wanted. We still had limits to how much we intertwined our systems. But... Iris wouldn't pry more than necessary. I trusted her more than anyone in the universe.
I was monitoring its processes as it went into recharge. Initially, I was simply observing its brainwave patterns. It started experiencing sensory input without external stimuli. I was able to experience this input as I do any sensory data it shares.
"Oh. Wow," she said aloud. Iris took a moment to compose her thoughts. She was smart, but even the fastest humans process information sluggishly compared to me.
Around this time I finished analyzing the dream and my own reactions to it. The thread of myself experiencing it had been caught up in SecUnit's emotions and imagined physical reactions. I had been overwhelmed by its emotions after the portion of the dream where it killed/was killed by the other SecUnit. My subroutines considered the dream in the same way I experienced the outside world through SecUnit's inputs and emotional filters. I was so used to seeing the world through it that my "subconscious" programming had accepted its input as real. We both experienced the same fear of the alien contamination, which had caused my thought process to become more confused.
In essence, it had been my nightmare too.
Iris seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Remember when we were little and I had bad nightmares? I don't think I have a big enough blanket for you, but we could make up constellations. You know a lot more stars now.
It would hardly occupy the bulk of my processing capabilities enough to really "take my mind off" the dream. But it was a complicated enough exercise to occupy a good portion of the threads that were currently spinning predictions of future nightmares. I stopped those and reallocated the processing space.
In the end, SecUnit didn't even remember the dream when it awoke. Confabulated memories were, after all, a new thing for it.
—
That had been a few months ago, by the Mihiran calendar. SecUnit's dreams had been slowly getting better as it recovered from the trauma of the alien remnant contamination. I still kept a watch on it during recharge cycles, but not enough to get caught up in its dreams.
At least, not usually. The readings I got when this one started were unusual. Normally its emotions weren't strong enough to go through the feed when it dreamed. The only exceptions so far had been nightmares. This time, though, I felt a strong pulse of happiness from it. Tentatively, I allocated more attention to its inputs.
In its dream, SecUnit was on Preservation Station, in what appeared to be a hotel room. It was also in the feed with a dream version of me. It was happy because it was with me in the dream, talking about media. Watching through its input as it hallucinated a version of myself was amusing, if somewhat strange. The imaginary version of myself in SecUnit's dream came across as confident. Much more than I felt recently. As they argued about some incomprehensible show (SecUnit's dream had garbled together Drama Sun Islands, Sanctuary Moon, and The Dusk Sector in a confusing mess) I decided the version of me in its head was also very annoying.
As the dream went on the physical world framing slowly fell away. Instead SecUnit imagined itself in the feed alone. Only, it was very different from how I experience the feed. In the dream, SecUnit had its own body despite the communication being pure code. It imagined dream-me as a roiling blue smoke or liquid that wrapped around it, draped over its shoulders and spoke in its ear. It was surprisingly intimate for a construct that despised intimacy and physical touch.
I should have disconnected. This was a good dream. It was private.
Then dream-me began to stroke intangible tendrils across SecUnit's gun panels. It reacted not by shoving dream-me out, but by deploying the weapons.
"See? They're so elegant," dream-me was saying. Its tendrils flowed into the chambers that housed the guns, wrapped around the barrels. "Beautiful."
"Fuck off, ART," SecUnit groaned. "I'm not-" I couldn't tell what it was thinking, exactly, but I could guess. It didn't see itself as beautiful, especially not its guns. It was proud of what it could do with them, but not of the way many humans saw it as merely a mobile platform for weaponry.
Apparently its imagined version of me thought that was as stupid as I did, because it said, "You are beautiful. All of you. Especially when you do this..." It teased at the ports inside SecUnit's arms and the result was electric. Something shot through SecUnit's body, like being hit by a solar flare and a neutron pulse all at once. SecUnit gasped. In my gymnasium, I briefly lost count of how many reps Matteo had done.
"Asshole," SecUnit said, but it was smiling. It smiled much more freely in the dream than in reality. "That's playing dirty."
"Who said I was playing?" Dream-me nearly purred in its ear. I wasn't certain my voice synthesis could do that, but I suddenly wanted to find out.
Dream-me surrounded SecUnit, smoky tendrils wrapping around its limbs and torso. Touch had been a weak sensation in the nightmare, but now it was the most powerful. The gentle touch sent jolts through its organic tissue, squashing its arguments and eliciting soft, needy sounds from it.
I shouldn't be watching this.
SecUnit moaned my name.
I cut off the input.
Integrating and analyzing that dream took far, far longer than the nightmare. I kept going over it, picking at the hazy sensory hallucinations and trying to compare it to my limited onboard literature about dreams. The concept of a sex dream was hardly new to me. I often housed teenagers and young adults, after all. The confounding idea was it happening to SecUnit.
When we first started watching serials together, I had asked it why it always skipped over scenes with sexual behavior. I had hoped to experience its emotional data about those as I had the other scenes. SecUnit brushed me off, simply saying it was "gross." Biological processes in general disgusted it. The scene it had dreamed up wasn't like organic sex, but it wasn't unlike it, entirely.
I took SecUnit at its word when it said it was completely uninterested in sex and romance. It might have trouble voicing its wants, but it was very good at expressing what it didn't want. Maybe it didn’t realize–
No, I was getting ahead of myself. I split off several dozen threads to handle basic functions while I argued with myself.
Having a sex dream did not mean that SecUnit would be interested in real sex. Humans often had dreams involving things they would never want in reality. The fact that I was involved could be a mere coincidence, or due to the fact that I was connected to it. There was no reason to make any new assumptions about SecUnit based on this dream.
That was the only truly logical conclusion.
I fucking hated it.
Machine intelligences like myself cannot have sex per se, but we can induce pleasurable feelings in an analogous way. Selfishly, I wanted to do that with my SecUnit. I wanted to hear it make those desperate noises because of something I had done. I wanted to make it feel so good that it could forget its pain and fear, if only for a moment.
It was an immature impulse. SecUnit and I were already as closely intertwined as two bots could be. It let me into its brain so deeply that I could induce it to run diagnostics. We constantly shared emotional data and inputs. That was already more than I ever hoped to experience with another person. It should be enough. It was enough, most of the time.
The worst part was that I couldn't discuss this dream with anyone else. Even disregarding the fact that doing so would be a huge breach of its privacy, Iris would be disappointed I had looked into SecUnit's dreams a second time. The thought of having this conversation with either of our dads made my particle detectors stutter. SecUnit itself would sooner use its lung to store explosives than talk about the concept of itself having sex.
I took the memory of the dream, and all my reflection on that dream, and I cut them out of my active memory. Then I put them in a compressed folder and stored it deep in my file structure, past a variety of encrypted gates. Once that was done, I waited until I had a few moments with no interactions with my crew so I could empty my short-term memory cache.
It wasn't a perfect solution. I still knew the dream existed. But once the memories of it were deleted from my buffer, it would be as good as forgotten.
Hopefully I would forget before SecUnit woke up.