Work Text:
This is one of the weirder things ART has convinced me to do, which is saying something considering the amount of experimental surgery between us is nonzero.
I don't get much feedback from my insides in terms of raw sensations, as a general rule. My organics expect there to be more organics in there than there actually are and will sometimes hallucinate some very unwanted twisty feelings when I might puke if I had a stomach, but mainly I'm getting diagnostic data, which is actually helpful in keeping up my performance reliability. Yet another score for inorganics.
Right now though? I'm getting an amount of sensation proportionate to the level of bizarre that is ART stuffing its freakishly elastic new drone into my chest compartment and forming itself snugly around the communicator. It had wanted to remove it to make room, but that was where I drew the line.
Do I logically understand that it could just put it back after this round of mad science? Yes. Was that enough to make me allow it to boot out the reassuringly hard-cased device in favor of its creepy, wriggly new drone? Absolutely the fuck not. I have standards.
ART, sensing that if it pushed the matter it would lose out on the chance to obtain valuable data, compromised by only squirming most of the mid sized drone's strangely flexible appendages into my chest cavity. I must have been making an expression, because even though I had already locked my joints, the drone pauses in its motions until I ping for ART to get on with it already.
It knows damn well that I'm fine. It's riding my inputs for reasons that it's vague about but I'm fairly sure I'm better off not knowing, and also so that it can keep tabs on my pain sensors. This doesn't hurt at all with how freakishly soft the appendages are, even as they move fluidly (ew) around the communicator to bunch up at the back of my rib cavity. They must compress even more than I thought, because I see more and more of the semi-translucent drone eagerly pressing itself through the open seam in my skin without visibly deforming anything.
I can feel it though. The strange, internal pressure that's too diffuse yet localized to feel like getting crushed or impaled like I would have assumed. I feel it even more when I take a breathe and the negligible weight of the drone shifts inside me. I don't know why ART dedicates even more attention to this experiment, but I don't bother looking at my own face. In fact, I lift an arm to partially cover it. Nobody needs to see what it's doing right now, least of all me.
Of course, the motion of lifting my arm also moves the freaky tentacle drone and I involuntarily gasp as it makes use of the new position to nestle itself almost entirely inside my rib cavity. It still doesn't hurt.
"I told you we didn't need lubricant," I say with some smugness. ART had been insistent about needing the appendages to be slathered in the stuff, but like hell was I having fluids introduced to this.
So you did. Clearly I was mistaken in my evaluation of your capability to adapt. ART doesn't even have the grace not to be dedicating way too much processing power to my inputs, shamelessly wallowing in whatever this is. I did not believe you would be able to comfortably take both my newest drone and the communicator. I roll my eyes and pointedly do not take another breath so that the last few tentacles can finish their disappearing act.
The drone had already been warmed to my exact temperature, but I can still feel the slight resistance of the drone's material when I disengage my joint locks, and I definitely feel when ART doesn't settle the fuck down and does something in there that I want to call squirmy or twisty, but feels nothing like what I would normally describe that way coming from my organics. It's not bad, but it is distracting.
I lift a hand to feel the seam where ART-drone had inserted itself, running my finger along it to confirm it still managed to seal properly around the intrusion. Yep, looks totally normal despite the stowaway.
It pings me and I have to say, being pinged from inside my own body is a unique experience. I sigh and the resulting movement is totally expected and doesn't make me shudder. ART still notes down an internal muscle spasm in our shared workspace and I shove that shit right out my view. I know perfectly well that this is stimulating nerves internally, thank you very much.
A single tentacle pokes out to wave in the air and I simply tuck it back inside so it stops rubbing at the skin around the seam. ART is ridiculously pleased by this and I don't reward that with a response. I'm already doing plenty by sitting here like a glorified drone storage compartment.
You could handle a larger drone with minimal discomfort, ART says. I flip off one of its cameras and cover the seam of my rib compartment with my hand. It's not going to take this thing out of me until I say it can.