Work Text:
In the six years since I arrived on Preservation, I have had a total of one attempted relationship— attempted, because after the first date they let me down, gently but unmistakably. To be honest I wasn’t that let down about it. I had more or less resigned myself to getting what emotional interaction I could on the level of friends or coworkers because the simple fact was that my preferred partners weren’t anywhere to be found in the Preservation Alliance. Constructs were abundant within the Corporation Rim and nearly unknown outside of it.
While it was generally accepted throughout the Rim that sexual involvement with constructs was a common and not noteworthy thing, being oriented toward them specifically was still seen as a form of perversion. I hadn’t needed to hide my robosexuality, but the fact that I was roboromantic as well was something I kept tight to my chest, knowing it could and would be used against me if the corporation holding my leash was to find out.
Constructs were just… easier to communicate with, for me. Humans would lie and betray and abandon, would take more than I offered and act like they were doing me a favor. That had never been the case with any ComfortUnit I’d known, especially once I had established a relationship with one. Not that it would have considered what we had to be a relationship aside from a professional one, but at least in my mind, there had been affection and concern and kindness inside our frequent transactional encounters. I had felt those emotions, anyhow, and I could have sworn I felt them returned.
When I left the Corporation Rim, I hadn’t known I would also be leaving behind any chance of a relationship that suited my preferences, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that it was worth the tradeoff— sex was a small price to pay for sobriety and control over my own life, for freedom beyond anything I could have imagined when I was strung out and played like a puppet for the good of a corporation which did no good to or for anyone but its shareholders. So what if I fell asleep in tears after a depressing jerk-off session like once a week, curled into a fetal position and missing the strength of a partially inorganic body wrapped around mine. So what if I constantly felt like there was a hollowness inside me that no friendly touch could fill, that swallowed hugs and claps on the shoulder like a yawning abyss that could only be satisfied by the hands of a type of person I expected to never meet again in my life.
Port FreeCommerce was not unusual in its construction or makeup— offices of many corporate entities, hotels at all price points, print-on-demand shops and fast-food eateries and recreational amusements both physical and feed-based common to stations that catered to a lot of transient visitors, in all the familiar franchises that stretched from one end of the Rim to the other. The sort of places that were dirt-common within the Rim and absolutely unknown in Preservation space, where everything was handmade, homegrown, and provided without charge, from food to lodging to medical care.
There were three establishments where ComfortUnits could be rented, one very close to where the Preservation Auxiliary team was staying before we would be transported to the survey planet. I locked myself into my room within an hour of arriving on Port FreeCommerce and didn’t come out unless Ayda summoned me for a meal or for a team-bonding activity. It wasn’t worth the pain of re-acclimating myself to the loneliness after having it sated so briefly and so shallowly.
Being forced into hiring a SecUnit for the survey was bad enough. Knowing that Ayda ignored my recommendation to avoid the cheapest kind available stung, on top of it, especially since I’d come along on the survey explicitly to help her navigate the complexities of Rim corporate maneuvering. But it wasn’t until we reached the planet and our SecUnit was activated that I realized how much of a problem it was going to be for me personally to be sharing a habitat with a construct, even one that was nearly anonymous behind its armor and helmet.
When the SecUnit lowered its helmet, that was when I realized how fucked in the bad way I was. For two reasons: the SecUnit was clearly operating outside of its designed function, coaxing Arada away from the site of the attack with friendly words; and the SecUnit was gorgeous, as beautiful as any ComfortUnit I had known before my escape from the Rim. In the panic of getting Bharadwaj hooked up to MedSys and stabilized, I hadn’t realized the depths of the crisis waiting for me. The moment I had the time to review the footage from Arada’s feed in the breakdown of the calamity, I felt two conflicting, coexisting feelings deep in the pit of my stomach: molten heat from a painful surge of attraction, and bitter cold from my rising suspicions that this beautiful SecUnit was not what it seemed.
I’m skilled at hiding my feelings, always have been. Part of my strategy is to cover the feelings that need to be cloaked with something as strong or stronger. So when I shoved down the heat of attraction and paved it over with the ice of suspicion, I knew it would work. It had to work. At least for the month it would take to get off this planet and away from the fascinating SecUnit, back to my free but lonely life surrounded by humans and bots with no constructs to be found anywhere in Preservation space.
Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone— I’d been a spy, and the role had suited me because my whole life I’ve been inherently nosy as fuck, always pushing to find out why, which was useful when I was milking a target for information and literally physically painful when I was trying to get even a scrap of reaction out of our awkward and avoidant SecUnit. Forcing it to make eye contact with me was clearly uncomfortable for it; I hoped that it couldn’t tell how uncomfortable I was at the same time, staring into beautiful blue eyes while I said cruel and accusatory things. When I pressed it on the difference between a SecUnit and a ComfortUnit, that was as much a reminder and a chiding to myself as a way to tease out more information about the refurbished SecUnit: this construct was built for pain, not for pleasure, and I couldn’t be masochistic enough or stupid enough to chase after a construct with guns instead of genitals.
I had to remind myself of that fact, over and over. I knew the SecUnit was monitoring everything we said and did in the hab, so I didn’t even have the reckless pleasure of jerking off thinking about its pretty, awkward face and its smooth voice. Anyways, it was clearly malfunctioning in some way, and if it was a danger to my friends, that outweighed any potential pleasure to be found. (That pleasure was only possible to be found if it was malfunctioning didn’t factor strongly enough into my attempts to convince myself away from being attracted to it.)
When the SecUnit was carried back into the hab by Ayda and Pin-Lee and Ratthi, leaking fluids and utterly nonfunctional, I felt a harsh twist in my chest that wasn’t alleviated at all when they told me about the combat module and the alteration to the SecUnit’s programming. I could fix it, almost certainly— but that would require a hard-wired connection to it. A chance to dig around and see what its malfunction was, not only justified but required by the situation.
What I found— the deactivated governor module, the months worth of media— fascinated me, but I had to shove that fascination down under a layer of panic. Mother gods forbid that anyone on the team realize my hidden feelings, but I went too far in the other direction in my attempt to direct away from my own inappropriate feelings, too far into suspicion and accusation and hostility. I went too far— and then the SecUnit went even farther, pinning me to the wall with its hand around my throat in a way that vividly recalled the ComfortUnit I’d bonded with around the time the corporation had switched me from common painkillers to their proprietary drugs. For a split second, I remembered Joesie and its firm, perfect grip as it held me down and made me beg, and that was long enough to let me scrape together my fear as an imperfect shield for the yearning that had been brewing inside me since my first glimpse of our SecUnit’s face and the sound of its unfiltered voice.
I couldn’t let anyone know. I thought that I would rather die than let anyone know— until I was there at the verge of death, burning with fever from the gunshot wound in my leg rotting away. Despite the risk to my life, I couldn’t fall back into the grip of painkillers— better to suffer in the grip of the belligerent and beautiful SecUnit who was the only one strong enough to hold me still for the necessary operation. Then we both had the same idea at the same time, the only thing that might help and the one thing that terrified me most: connecting to the SecUnit while we were both conscious, letting the construct into my mind the way I’d delved into its own, to let it block my nerves with its own pain override as a relay.
It would see into me, without any filter between us. It would see the feelings I’d been hiding, and it would know, and it would hate me even more, if that was possible after what I’d said and done to it in my attempts to hold myself away from it. I couldn’t let that happen, but I couldn’t refuse it, either.
Maybe I’ll die, I thought in a flash of black humor, maybe it’ll see and pull away and I’ll seize up on the chair and the scalpels will slash me open and the surgery will fail and I’ll die. Maybe that would be easier.
It would rummage around inside me— I’d done that to it first, it deserved to pay me back in kind— and my loneliness and fascination and shame and yearning were too big, too close, to be hidden for long if it went looking.
Maybe I’ll die, I thought, as its hand delved into my pocket for my data cable. Maybe it’ll kill me after all. I wasn’t sure whether the thought was a fear, or a hope.
In the weeks we’d been on the survey planet, I had done cowardly and cruel things in my desperate attempt to prevent any sort of relationship forming between me and the beautiful, broken SecUnit— attempt, because despite my cruelty and its avoidance, we had been on the same wavelength more often than not. As it connected to my augment port and swiftly, blessedly turned off the pain radiating from my leg through the rest of my body, as Ayda gripped my hand for reassurance, I gave myself over to the construct who I could feel rifling through my brain already, full of curiosity but not malice, helping me despite how awful I’d been to it.
Maybe you’ll live, I thought I heard its voice, as I felt it pry up my suspicions and peer at what lurked beneath them. Maybe you’ll stop being a fucking idiot and live.