Chapter Text
17,000 hours after I joined ART’s crew, or two years by ART’s calendar, I admitted what I had known all along: that we were in some kind of relationship-like thing. The universe didn’t collapse, and I didn’t start acting like a love-addled human from a serial. Almost nothing changed, actually. ART and I were still ourselves. We still argued and watched media together and disagreed about stupid shit. The only difference was what we were calling it.
It wasn’t just a relief that nothing changed. It made me feel something weird, the same thing I felt when I saw Mensah again and found that it still felt easy and natural to be around her. Consistency, I guess. Stability. I think I started hoping that it could always be like that. Barring a mission going really, really badly, maybe ART and I could… keep being us. That we could continue just as we were for a long time.
Obviously, I was wrong.
We did have a good run. We made it another two years before everything began to change.
Over time, ART and I had figured out a few different things that helped with my inescapable anxiety. Having it lean on me in the feed was something I sometimes found soothing, and at one point when I’d been pacing, unable to relax enough to sit down, I’d asked ART to press on me the way it often did. When that didn’t quite take the edge off, I told it to do it harder.
ART did, and I finally stopped pacing. I was still antsy and stressed, but I could tell that my system was trying to reset.
I could try something more direct if I had access to your sensory inputs, ART said.
I hesitated, but it was just ART. What did I have to hide? I gave it the permissions it needed.
How’s this? ART asked, and gave me a physical, full body feeling of mild compression.
Oh, I said. I stumbled over to a seat and sank into it. More?
ART squeezed me tighter. My eyes involuntarily slid shut. All the tension gradually drained out of me. By my internal chronometer, I stayed like that for five minutes, but subjectively it felt both like an hour and a few seconds.
I’m good now, I said finally, and ART released me. I didn’t move.
Was that acceptable? ART asked. This felt like a bizarre question.
You couldn’t tell?
ART said, more cautiously than I was used to from it, This is more akin to physical touch than what you usually find tolerable.
I knew that, but I didn’t like thinking about it. It was fine.
ART took me at my word for it, and having it squish me became part of the things we did when I was anxious or plagued by stress toxins in my system. Sometimes I asked it to do it even when I was feeling okay. It was a nice feeling. At the time I thought of it as comfortable and relaxing. Without someone physically present touching me, it registered more like the pressure of being underwater, and that just didn’t repulse me like touching skin did.
It’s true that it was relaxing, but the reason I liked it so much was secretly that it felt good. I hadn’t even admitted it to myself at the time, but I kept asking ART to squeeze me, and eventually things escalated.
I was lying on my bed in my room aboard ART, and it was squishing me again. It was nice, and I was relaxed, but my mind was wandering.
Could you mimic specific sensations back at me? I asked.
ART said, Of course, in a tone that implied it thought the smart part of my brain was offline if I had to ask. Did you have something in mind?
I didn’t, actually, so I cast around for ideas. After a moment I raised my arms (I always felt slightly uncoordinated when we did this, even though there was nothing actually impeding my movement) and clasped my hands together, fingers interlaced. What about that?
ART fed the sensation back to my hands, which gave me a weird, double impression of contact. I let go, and the feeling settled. I’d actually expected to find it uncomfortable, but I couldn’t override the part of my brain that knew it was just the feeling of me touching myself rather than someone else’s hands on mine. I shifted to get comfortable again and ended up sprawling out more, hands loosely flopped up near my head.
Still comfortable? ART asked, and I pinged it a wordless agreement. It was a weird feeling. Maybe it was the position, but it did sort of feel like being held down. Somehow knowing that the feeling came from me made it seem even more like ART was holding me down. There wasn’t anyone else who could steal sensations straight from my brain, after all.
It was weird but good, except that I wasn’t as relaxed anymore.
“Can you,” I said, but my voice sounded weird, so I switched to the feed. Can you press more on my chest?
Like this? ART asked. I felt a firm weight against my reinforced sternum, pushing me down, and—
Oh. I reflexively turned my face away and made a weird, breathy kind of noise. That was—a lot. I felt strange, muddled and warm. This was definitely not soothing anymore. I was kind of still relaxed, lying there limply and with my brain too gooey to function, but my feet were restlessly flexing, one leg shifting slowly to rub against the bed.
I hadn’t replied to ART, and it lifted most of the pressure away. I made a wordless sound of complaint and reached for it in the feed, trying to pull it toward me even though I had no capacity to make it do anything and also despite the fact that it hadn’t actually retreated.
ART put some of the pressure back on my chest, maybe only a quarter of the same intensity. Are you sure about this? it asked. Something about the emotions I could vaguely feel from it struck me as odd, but I was too out of it to put anything together.
I made an affirming noise. “’s nice,” I said. “Feels good.” My voice still sounded weird, thready and breathless. It reminded me of something, but I didn’t care enough to try to think of what.
Yes, ART said, and its voice was also a little weird. I see that.
(In retrospect, the fact that I was saying these things must have been an extremely obvious sign that I wasn’t firing on all cylinders anymore.)
So?
So, I think you will be upset with me for not stopping here.
I tugged on it again more forcefully, though still to no actual effect, and it reapplied the full weight of pressure against my chest. I squirmed under the feeling for a moment before subsiding. Another noise caught in my throat.
Sounds like a problem for later, I said.
ART squeezed me a little bit harder all over, and my mouth opened even though no sound came out. Some of the restlessness eased. I lay under it for a while, feeling boneless and content, and eventually I slipped into a recharge cycle.
My organic parts don’t always sleep when I recharge. ART thinks it’s better, healthier, if they get to rest more regularly, though, and it’s gotten pretty good at tricking me into relaxing enough that I’ll drift into sleep at some point during the recharge cycle.
I came back online feeling strongly that there was something I had missed. I quickly skimmed through my last memories.
Oh. Yeah, I had fucking missed something, all right.
I sat up so I wouldn’t be in the same stupid pose I had been in during… the incident, but didn’t ping ART yet. It knew I was back, but it didn’t say anything either, so I got to be crushed under the weight of my humiliation without it spectating, at least.
Don’t worry, everyone. We all know how Murderbot feels about sex. It will definitely never experience sexual feelings about anything or anyone. Everything will be fine forever. We don’t need to ask too many questions about its relationship.
I was such a fucking idiot sometimes.
Eventually it occurred to me that ART had wanted to stop, and I had… been pushy. My stupid organic parts had decided to feel weird organic things at it, and I had put it in the middle of that and not let it withdraw. ART was a full bot. It didn’t feel things like this. I mean, I thought I didn’t either, but…
That felt pretty bad.
I pinged ART.
Sorry.
Simultaneously, ART said, I need to apologize.
I—what? I was confused. What? Why?
I knew you would be uncomfortable with what had occurred, and I allowed things to continue anyway. I let my personal feelings complicate a simple problem.
What the fuck did that mean?
You tried to stop, though, I said. I was—I made you keep going.
You were compromised. It was my responsibility to manage the situation.
Okay, one thing about ART is that when it decides that something was its fault, it was very difficult to persuade it otherwise. And by difficult I actually mean impossible. I had complained about this to Dr. Mensah one time, who had suggested using a phrase that was hard to dispute without denying my autonomy. I now deployed this tactic against ART: The culpability is shared.
It was ominously silent, then said, I do not agree, but fine.
Great. Fine. I could work with that.
Something was nagging at me, and I went back over the conversation. Why had it said its personal feelings made it continue instead of stopping when things started to get weird? What did that mean? (The meaning was extremely obvious, but I couldn’t get my head around it.)
Use your brain, Murderbot. ART thought we should stop. It thought I would be uncomfortable. It didn’t stop, even though it believed it should. Why?
Because of personal feelings.
Because it… didn’t want to stop?
I didn’t understand. I did understand, but it didn’t make sense.
If I was wrong, I was going to feel very stupid, but ART had already seen me squirming and making human sex noises at it. I didn’t think the embarrassment could get much worse than that. Do you, I started, and then stopped to struggle with how to ask. Do you want… Are you interested in… sex things?
ART shrank away from me in the feed, like it was trying to make itself smaller. Yes.
I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there. I was feeling something bad and complicated. Did you know before this?
Yes.
It had let me believe something that wasn’t true, even when I had directly said that bots didn’t feel that way in front of it. Why didn’t you tell me? I asked finally.
ART said, I did not think it would become relevant. I thought you would prefer not to know.
I stood up from the bed, hit by that jittery anxious feeling that often made me want to patrol to calm down. There was something awful about that answer. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know why. ART knew how I felt about sex. I understood why it didn’t tell me, but—
I accessed the public shipwide calendar. We were on an educational trip at the moment, which meant we had a lot of students and faculty from PSUMNT on board. But we were also hosting a visiting scholar from First Landing University who was here to teach about biological research on planetary surveys.
Can I talk to you? I asked Ratthi.
He replied, I’m wrapping up a meeting right now, but I have the rest of the morning open. My office?
I sent an acknowledgment. Needing badly to not just stand here and wait, I left my quarters and started toward Ratthi’s office. He wouldn’t care if I let myself in.
ART said, This is why I didn’t tell you. You shouldn’t have to deal with my desires.
Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.
I was angry. I was furious with ART, and I didn’t know why. I felt like it had lied to me. Objectively it was a good thing that ART wasn’t as averse to sex as I had expected, since I had—reacted that way. But instead I felt…
It was already bad enough to deal with how I had responded to ART holding me down. Ugh, I was avoiding saying it, but: I had been aroused by it. I didn’t know how to deal with that. I should have felt sick.
Maybe it was just that ART was already an exception to so many of the things that bothered me, everything from being touched to wearing logos, but I wasn’t surprised, exactly, that if this was going to happen, it would happen with ART.
I overrode the lock on Ratthi’s office and let myself in. He had a kettle in here, something he had brought from Preservation. I turned it on and got out the things Ratthi used to make tea for himself. Drinking flavored water was one of the least repulsive of all the things humans did with their mouths, and Ratthi said it helped him think.
The thing was that I hadn’t just liked it in the moment. It didn’t feel gross. I felt weird about the fact that it had happened at all, but it was—I had been with ART. That wasn’t scary. I wasn’t recoiling in disgust from what had happened, and that was what scared me. It had felt good. I had liked it.
The feeling was all tainted and mixed up with being mad at ART now.
I want to talk to Ratthi alone, I said.
ART acknowledged. Ugh. I knew it too well not to suspect what it was feeling.
I said, Stop spiraling. I’m not going to leave forever. I hesitated, but ART had managed to drill some understanding of privacy into my brain. (It’s hard to stop being spyware.) Is there stuff you want me to be circumspect about?
ART didn’t reply immediately. After five entire seconds it said, If it’s at all possible, I don’t want to end up being the subject of research for being an MI with sexual feelings.
A little of ART’s emotions seeped through, adding a layer of shame and anxiety to the request.
The idea that ART needed to ask for that felt… bad. Very bad. I sent an acknowledgment.
The door opened, and Ratthi stepped inside. I offered him the cup of tea, and in the drone view I could see his eyebrows shoot up.
“Emotional stuff?” he asked.
Privacy now, I said to ART.
It pulled out of my feed, leaving me feeling unsettled and oddly alone.
“ART isn’t listening,” I told Ratthi.
“I see,” he said, and took the cup, careful not to brush my hand. “I had an idea the other day…” He crossed to the chair at his desk and spun it around so it faced away from the rest of the room. “I won’t be able to look at you, and you can have the rest of the room,” he explained.
It was so quintessentially Ratthi to think of doing that. I had an emotion about it while he sat down. My drones settled into position to let me watch his face while we spoke.
“Thank you for the tea,” he added, and took a sip. Then we lapsed into silence.
Right. Now I just had to use my voice to tell a human that something had sexually aroused me.
Yeah, no. Not happening.
“ART wants to have sex with me,” I said.
“Oh,” Ratthi said, and there was a lot of reaction in that sound. “I… see.” He hesitated, then asked carefully, “Are you here because you need help with… navigating incompatible desires?”
He’d done a good job in wording that question, but I knew what he was really asking: whether I would never have sex with ART, or if it was more complicated.
“No,” I said, and my voice came out small. The idea that I was capable of having a sexual response felt much more real and frightening if I said it aloud. He couldn’t see me, but I turned my face towards the wall anyway. “It let me think it didn’t want that this whole time, though. I only found out today. It said that it didn’t tell me because it thought I wouldn’t want to talk about it. That I would be upset if it did tell me. I don’t know why I’m so angry with it.”
“It excluded you from the decision process,” Ratthi said.
Oh. Yeah. That was the problem.
“Yes,” I said. “Is it—do I have a right to know about that?”
“Definitely,” Ratthi said at once. He sounded very sure. “You’ve made a long term commitment to each other. There shouldn’t be secrets in an association like that.”
This was why Ratthi got to be my friend. I had begrudgingly stopped fighting the word relationship, but he knew it felt like an intrusion to have humans talking about me and ART like that.
“Also, you’ve had a lot of choices taken away from you in your life,” Ratthi added, “so to me it feels especially unpleasant that it happened to you.”
Ugh. He was right, though.
“I don’t know what I want,” I said. “I don’t want things to change, but they’re changing anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” Ratthi said. He looked and sounded genuinely sympathetic.
“Something,” I started, and then diverted. “Don’t tell anyone about this.”
“I won’t.”
Okay. I trusted Ratthi. He could be a bit of an idiot sometimes, but so could I. I knew he could keep a promise.
“Something happened,” I said quietly. I was still standing in the front half of Ratthi’s office. “I don’t know. I’ve never… But I had to watch a lot of humans have sex when I worked for the company. I know what that looks like. I…” It was difficult to put into words. “I deleted a lot of the footage from my memories, but I still saw it. Sorry. I know on Preservation—but I was made to be spyware.”
I was silent for long enough that Ratthi finished his tea. He twisted to set the cup on his desk, gaze still averted from me, then resettled.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked. “It may upset you.”
Wow, that really put me at ease. But we were already talking about so many upsetting things, so, “Sure.”
“On Preservation,” he said, “forcing someone to watch something sexual is a crime. It’s counted as a type of assault.”
Oh, I could not deal with that. For some reason I thought of the survey where I’d met Ratthi and Mensah and the others, and of Ratthi in the hopper saying, “It’s slavery.”
“Anyway,” I said. “I don’t know what to do now. I mean, I get that I need to talk to it.”
“That’s generally my first advice,” Ratthi agreed. “I’ve seen you two fight before. I think you can talk it out and get through this.”
I knew we could, which just made it more frustrating that ART had been lying to me. Did it really think I couldn’t handle one stupid conversation about it being interested in sex? It was confusing, but also maybe… I guess my feelings were hurt, that’s all.
“So the rest of it,” I said, and then immediately got stuck. Ratthi waited patiently. I knew he would sit there until other obligations interfered even if I just stood here silently the whole time.
I pushed the guest chair out of the way and sat down with my back against the desk, facing the door. That made it a little easier to say, “Uh, it was my idea, but ART was messing with my sensory system, and everything got a little—weird. I don’t know if it really counts. It seems sort of obvious now that letting it—do that—could result in… I just didn’t think it ever would. I don’t know that I want it to happen again.” That was kind of a lie. “I mean, it wasn’t awful. But I don’t know how to be okay with it. Or how to—have sex with ART. It wasn’t really sex at all. Was it?”
I was watching Ratthi in the drone cameras, and he seemed fine. Thoughtful, a little concerned, maybe. But he wasn’t treating this as particularly noteworthy beyond the fact that I was asking him for help about anything at all. That made it a little easier to speak. Still, this was more words and much more clumsily than I usually spoke to any human. I made myself shut up.
“The two of you are the only ones who can decide if anything you do is sex or not,” Ratthi said firmly. “Nobody else’s opinions matter on that front. I think what you’re saying is that you’re not sure what you’ll decide to do about any of this, but you also aren’t sure what your options to decide between are. Is that right?”
“Uh, basically, yes,” I said.
“Okay,” Ratthi said. He settled more comfortably in his chair, so I guess we were onto territory he thought would be easier to navigate. “Honestly, even for humans under the best of circumstances, figuring this kind of thing out can be hard and confusing. My general advice is just to take things slowly, and I think that’s especially important if you’re doing something that you’re not totally comfortable with. If you decide to explore what you’ve discovered, do it as a team. You can always stop at any time, for any reason. Honestly, it might help not to think of what you’re doing as trying to have sex. Calling it something else, I don’t know, exploration or messing around or something bot-specific that my human brain isn’t thinking of, that might help reduce some of the pressure around the idea of sex. It’s also important that you feel like you can talk to each other about your interests without feeling judged.”
That was a whole lot. I was really glad he couldn’t see me, because I wanted to record his spiel to deal with later and if he’d seen my face he might’ve stopped.
“Still good?” he asked.
I pinged an acknowledgment, which was vague enough to be okay to send in the feed, where ART would be able to see it if it was looking.
“Okay,” he said. “So, on the other hand, maybe you decide now or later that you don’t want to explore any of this at all. In that case, you’ll probably need to sort out boundaries. What’s off limits? If something happens that either of you reads as potentially sexual, is that okay to just ignore that it’s happening, or do you stop and back off immediately? Are there scenarios where your needs around privacy might have changed, now that you know Perihelion feels this way? Also, you can explore and then decide its not for you, or decide you don’t want to now and change your mind later. There’s no rules around this. Especially since neither of you has a human framework for this, it’ll be a lot of figuring out together what any of this means for you.”
He hesitated, then added, “Also, anything sex-adjacent requires a lot of communication and trust, so if you do go that route, definitely sort out the conflict around this first.”
I sent another acknowledgment, but the next part had to be out loud. I braced myself and said, “You won’t tell anyone if you think ART and I are… doing sex-adjacent things?” I meant it to be a statement, but it came out as a question anyway. “It’s worried that the university will want to study it if anyone finds out about how it feels.”
“I won’t tell anyone about any of this,” Ratthi said, and then amended, “Unless it’s relevant for a life threatening emergency. I don’t know why it would be, but just to cover my bases.”
This was a good security protocol. I had trained my humans well.
“Can I show ART parts of this conversation?” I asked. “Or give it a transcript?”
“Of course,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”
“I’m going to go now,” I said, and then before I lost my nerve, “Thanks for—thanks.”
“Any time,” Ratthi said.