Work Text:
The topic arises when V2 awakens from its low-power state to discover five urgent system notifications crowding its vision.
All but one are large, bright yellow; loudly proclaiming its remaining allocated memory is about to be depleted, and (in smaller text) it will no longer be able to store short-term memories if it does not expand its data storage as soon as possible. So dramatic, it thinks vaguely as it dismisses the windows, enters its software settings, and clears its cache. At the same time, it opens a subroutine (a rudimentary terminal command it programmed for itself recently) and expands the partition for that part of its memory up a few hundred gigabytes. Theoretically, it could afford to expand to a few terabytes, but then they'd run the risk of overclocking the RAM on their already-strained systems. Its cached files are taking up a lot of memory space too, so it runs a script to scrub them before it shuts the terminal.
V2 is thankful Mirage was able to upgrade this part of their hardware, despite her being unable to decrypt their corrupted memory of the events before and during the New Peace. Perhaps some day they'd be able to salvage parts of it.
Mirage, on the other hand, is annoyed. It can hear her fans huff from where they're lying on top of her.
"Get your arm out of my book." She's not serious; just wants to talk. She'd move them herself if she really cared.
"No," V2 replies, raising its arm to elbow her in the chin. "I require your undivided attention at all times." It's still getting the hang of creating a sarcastic deadpan tone that's distinct from its normal monotone, but the point gets across.
"Asshole," she pushes them away with a quiet laugh. "I heard your notifications freak out for a second, what happened?"
"Short term memory space was nearly depleted. No issue."
"You have a petabyte of space. You should be good for the next, uh, forever."
"I only have about forty gigabytes partitioned for that particular section."
Mirage gives them a confused look, her eye narrowing, and V2 dreads what she's going to say next. "...You partition your memory?"
Oh, no.
Suddenly, a few things about their partner make more sense.
"Let me organize your files. Please. No wonder you comment on your thoughts being foggy so frequently," V2's vocal synthesizer clips in exasperation.
"I'll be fine. It's not a big deal," she attempts to downplay. "Besides, I've got a decade of junk in here. You'd never get through it, and who knows what type of compatibility issues you'd have to struggle with trying to organize them all?
"Let me try, at least."
"Uuugh," she draws out the exclamation to an almost comical degree, tapping her fingers on V2's back. "Whatever. Okay. How long will this take."
V2 pauses. "A few hours... This afternoon, if you have nothing else planned. I can do it while you nap."
Mirage sighs. "That's alright, I guess. If I sleep, though, you better not systematically delete all my memories of you so I don't remember you when I wake up."
"Wh-"
"A movie. It's the plot of a movie," she interrupts them. "Not implying anything."
"Oh. I see," it says, hoisting itself off of her and padding over to her desk. "Where did you put the transfer cables?"
It takes a while to figure everything out, physically. The relevant ports are buried within their respective chassis: Mirage's are tightly nestled in her collar, a location she optimized for her own ease of use; but as they both learned when she updated V2's data storage systems, hooking it up to anything requires removing their entire breastplate. Its chest plating now sits next to them on the bed.
"We really need to get you cleaned up in here. There's crusty bits of blood and loose tubing stuck in your abdomen," Mirage says from where she's straddled on V2's lap. She insists the cables are too short for her to sit anywhere else besides sitting face-to-face like this, and although she's wrong, they don't particularly feel the need to correct her.
"Later, perhaps." Their HUD notifies them that a new system has been connected to their internal network. "Connection successful. You have not given me root access, however."
"Can you-" V2 transfers the plain text terminal command to her system so she can execute it. "-Oh. Thanks."
A few seconds later, they're granted access. A new pop-up appears in their vision; a long list of newly accessible external folders and files. Judging by their near-nonsensical titles, it has its work cut out for it.
"Make yourself comfortable. You are highly disorganized, so this may take a while."
"Can I do anything besides sit here?" Mirage leans into them, hands drifting behind their back to fidget with the soft elastic waistband of their pants.
"Not recommended, unless you want this to take double the estimated time. Just sleep."
"Bossy," she mumbles; despite her gripe they watch her CPU usage lower to a mere 10%, then feel her go limp in their arms a moment later. It's not good for her system to be manually shut down like this, but it prevents anything major from getting damaged as they work. Speaking of, they should get to work.
The way Mirage's mind is formatted is alien to the other machine. This doesn't come as a surprise to V2; she's had years to tear apart and customize her life to her exact standards and this is no exception, but it's difficult to physically navigate.
It takes them a whole ten minutes of scrounging around directories titled (and filled with) gibberish words before it realizes everything is encoded in a slightly different language than their own system, and then when it manages to finally decode them they're... just keysmashes, anyway. It quickly sets an algorithm to re-title the files and folders as their respective creation dates (DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS, starting with 0001 as the earliest year; it's not going to wager any guesses as to the current year).
A significant section of her memory is simple junk data it can clear out (the cache for her short term-memory has a few hundred gigabytes of data and takes full minutes to delete); and much more is devoted to her own thoughts: thousands of indecipherable text documents only able to be read by Mirage's system, but easily organized algorithmically. It hopes the renaming doesn't render them unreadable, but something tells them she wasn't really able to access these files directly anyway.
And then, after a few dozen minutes, V2 has managed to work its course in Mirage's head. Effectively, her mind has been reassembled. Her higher functions will be able to sort them out again, but it will take more time. For now, it must wait.
V2 drags its palm up its partner's back absentmindedly, then pokes her.
It knows she's practically shut down at this point in her data reprocess, yet it still expects some sort of reaction from her, a small curse pointed in their direction; a vague mumble. Instead, they're met with the lazy, stable hum of her fans blowing down her spine.
V2 is struck with a pang of loneliness.
They watch the progress bar slowly filling the most recent line of their connected terminal window.
They wonder what Mirage sees. What she's thinking, right now.
Nothing, at least for now. Her memory banks are being reorganized. There's nowhere for her thoughts to be stored.
Something catches its eye while it waits for their new drive partitions to process in her system: a folder in her home directory inconspicuously titled "Media". It wouldn't have paid it any mind if it hadn't noticed the sheer amount of content within: nearly five thousand audio, video, and photo files; named and ordered in a somewhat coherent fashion, much to its surprise.
It glances through the file previews, shuffling through various subfolders. Lots of little snippets; small parts of their partner's daily life she deemed important enough to file away. Primarily footage of the outdoors, but also photos of herself reflected in mirrors, blurry clips of roads through the driver's seat of her van, audio clips titled "waves043", "rainstorm(22)", "synth_test(shit)(1)".
And, perhaps obviously, many photos of V2 itself. It scrolls through a vast array of thumbnails displaying itself at various angles. That makes them curious.
It's not as though they don't know what Mirage thinks of it, she's very plain about her feelings on them (both good and bad), but that's not the same as seeing them, quite literally, in her own eyes. Perhaps it's a self-centered thought, but doesn't it deserve to be vain sometimes?
It pauses, directing its cursor up and down the terminal window absently. If Mirage didn't want them to look at these, she would have told them beforehand, right? She doesn't have anything to hide, and if she wanted to look at its archival footage, she could just ask.
V2 hugs her closer, careful not to dislodge the wires that link their processing units together.
A quick peek couldn't hurt. It's not like she would know, anyway.
As it turns out, most of the media that includes them is disappointingly mundane.
Many of them simply depict them doing things around the apartment, taken from odd angles as she was presumably lying on the floor or sitting on the bed. It counts at least sixteen pictures of them reading books, all taken on different days; and dozens more of them sleeping, glancing over at her, trying out clothes. There are a few close-up images of their body; their empty shoulder joint, a few of the circuitry under their chestplate, and a couple of their abdomen. Why she would bother taking these, it's not sure.
The audio clips primarily consist of them saying her name, its unnerving, stilted "laugh", more than a few compliments and jokes at her expense; many of which it wasn't sure she enjoyed at the time, but it seems she did in the end.
There aren't many videos, but they're mostly excerpts from their ventures outdoors: long walks they took back in the warmer seasons, swimming in the ocean a few miles from her apartment, some blurry clips of their wings glowing in the dark while they were camping in the woods a few months ago.
Another folder is at the bottom of the video directory, titled "new folder(1)". It has a few dozen files in it.
V2 opens it to reveal... a lot of thumbnails for media of itself, mostly from very close up, and from various angles. A lot of its abdomen and legs, it seems. Some are just of her in front of a mirror in her underwear, as well. Were these a mistake, it wonders, sending one to its media player. It could clear up a few extra gigabytes here if they're just accidental videos she took-
Oh.
Never mind. Two minutes in, and it knows exactly what these clips are. It's going to have a very fun time teasing her for recording these.
Mirage's... amateur films aside, V2 feels as though they might be missing something here; some important link between these that reveal a larger picture. Maybe they're for a larger project; a timelapse, references for artwork, a documentary of their lives. V2's recall is effectively perfect on its own, and although it carefully documents her and itself in its own way, it's not nearly to this extent.
Mirage's drive has been successfully partitioned, and the altered files within seem to be compatible with her memory recall system.
It sends her a ping through the file link to wake her up, stroking their thumb over her shoulder as she stirs.
"Hello," it bumps their heads together, a little awkwardly due to the angle. "Did you sleep well?"
"My head hurts. But, huh." The shorter machine pauses, squinting as her eye calibrates. "I feel like I'm thinking a little clearer now. Maybe it's just placebo, though."
"I doubt it. I thoroughly organized your internal memory system and wiped your cached files, so it is likely much easier for your system to process real-time input now. Tell me if you receive any errors."
"Yeah, fine." She sits up, rolling her shoulders.
"If I may ask," V2 asks, and Mirage gives a quiet noise of assent, "why are you documenting your life so acutely?"
Their partner looks at them, a little blearily. "Oh. It's... hm." She hesitates. "I'm going to miss all of this someday, and I want to be able to look back at it with a clear eye."
Mirage gently unplugs herself from V2 and stands up, fetching their disconnected breastplate and the stray screwdriver lying next to it. "Mostly, it's just fun to take pictures. Here, I'll help you put this back on."
"I see." V2 slides off the bed, then pauses to let the other machine reapply their chest plating. "Did you have plans for the rest of the day?"
"Uh, not really. We could go for a walk, if you want. Otherwise I just wanted to finish the rest of my book," she glances to a small, plain novella sitting on the table.
"You may do that, then." V2 walks over to the coat stand next to the apartment's patio door and grabs a light jacket. "I will return before dark."
"Sure. You don't usually go off by yourself, what's up?"
V2 shrugs, a very deliberately executed action that makes it look comically stiff. "I will figure that out along the way."
"Very daring of you to go out without an detailed itemized list of activities like you usually do," she prods them. "Come back soon, V."
They look back at her as they slide open the screen door. She's leaning on the dining room table with her arms crossed, and the afternoon light is hitting her optical sensor in such a way that she's squinting unconsciously. Her sweatpants are stained on the knees and her shirt is much too large for her. She looks pretty.
"What are you staring at?" Mirage cocks her head.
"Nothing, sunshine," it squints at her, and she makes a small noise of mortified annoyance.
It takes a photo as she turns away to pick up her book. Her hand is blurred, and the lighting is a little off, but they don't mind.
V2 steps out of the house, locking the door behind itself. It's a cool day out, snowflakes drifting through the sky, but the warm light that hits their plating reminds them it'll be spring soon.
It creates a new partition in its hard drive, and labels it "Recorded Media". With all the photos they're going to take, they'll need it.