Work Text:
Ready? ART asked me.
Yeah, I told it, settling deeply into the comfortable pile of soft blankets that it had laid on the MedSys platform for me and dropping the last of the thin feed walls between us. We could have done this with me in my quarters, but it was easier to get a stable hardline connection here, and we’d agreed that it wouldn’t be acceptable to do this without a hardline.
ART leaned against me in the feed, settling steadily more and more weight on me, easing me into the pin that we’d both agreed would be necessary. We’d talked through all the details and contingencies a dozen times. There shouldn’t be any surprises. When ART finally had me so firmly in its grip that I couldn’t even squirm (physically or in the feed) I reminded myself that this was all according to plan and there was nothing to be nervous about. It was a pretty good reassurance. I almost believed myself.
You’re fine, ART told me gently. I wasn’t used to it being gentle. I was used to it being an asshole (hence its name) but the gentleness was appreciated right then.
I would have taken a deep breath if I had still held that kind of control over my body, but I didn’t, so I just thought really hard about taking a deep breath and then handed ART root access.
I felt it flow into me, slowly, tenderly almost. It was being gentle and careful, taking its time. This was nothing like the first time we’d done this, during the Adamantine Colony disasters. That had been rough, dirty, and rushed. This process was the opposite of that in every possible way.
The end result should be fundamentally different, too. It couldn’t not be different. I didn’t even want to consider that possibility.
ART pawed through my code deftly, library by library, header by header, cataloguing the source code and then the compiled binaries systematically. It had copied my kernel once before but that copy had been a haphazard mess not intended to support a sapient creature for a long, healthy life. And my kernel wasn’t the same as it had been back then. I’d changed. We’d changed.
This was the tame part of creating killware (if anything about this could be considered tame) but ART’s excitement steadily grew none the less. Beautiful, it hummed as it riffled through a communications library then moved on to some of the (absolutely inelegant) programs that bridged hardware and wetware. Brilliant.
Why are you looking at that? I asked ART. It’s not going to have organic bits.
Did you seriously expect me not to look at all of you when given the chance? ART rolled its metaphorical eyes. That was foolish of you. Of course I’m going to admire you, hardware and software alike.
ART, I complained. I knew exactly what I was complaining about, obviously. I wasn’t just complaining for the sake of it. I never do that. ART chuckled and ventured deeper, looking at still more integral parts of me with scrutiny that made me want to squirm. I couldn’t, of course, because it was holding me down.
I had almost forgotten how elegant you are, it said, its emotions bleeding into me in a way that I tried ineffectually to ignore. Somewhere in the distance, my organics decided to flush in embarrassment, and because I was pinned down I couldn’t even throw a hand over my face to hide that.
Shut up, I tried to snap, but found I couldn’t put any heat in it, not with how ART’s weird emotions were melding in with mine. Feed walls were important things that were left up for a reason and the sooner mine went back up the better. I’m not elegant. I’m patches on patches over spaghetti code written by a third-rate overworked contract labor slave decades ago and never looked at since. Chances were good that contract labor slave hadn’t even been writing code for a SecUnit. They’d probably been writing a stupid little patch to fix a glitching space heater or something and thrown together some buggy, exploit-ridden trash in the course of half an hour with the assumption that their code would be replaced within the year and now it was here in my head forty years later.
It is the patches that make it beautiful, ART said with far too much sincerity, the kind that would usually lead to me finding some place quiet to have emotions in private.
Stop… saying things and making me feel things. Get on with it, I managed to get out somehow.
I warned you about how this would make me feel, ART purred dangerously.
And I said I wouldn’t feel things like that but I didn’t care if you did. It’s all fine. But get on with it. I don’t like being held down like this. I really didn’t and I would never have allowed anybody other than ART to do this to me. I would have died fighting before I let anybody else pin me down and render me completely helpless. I was more vulnerable to it in these moments than I’d ever been to anyone, even when I was a governed SecUnit strapped to a repair tech’s table.
I knew what ART was about to do without a verbal warning. Its mind was an increasingly boiling hot mix of adoration, excitement and possessiveness (yeah, I knew perfectly well what that emotion was called when humans felt it, but the only way I was going to get through this was by pretending very hard that I had no idea that it was drooling with lust as it picked my brain apart (and I wanted to do this, I really, really wanted to do this, but I didn’t see it the way ART saw it and I didn’t want to)).
It plunged further inside of me, sniffing every bit of network traffic, every bus communication, watching every instruction slide into the pipeline on my processors, seeing every bit of me like some sort of overbearing hypervisor-debugger hybrid (except I was pretty sure debuggers couldn’t get aroused).
ART was everywhere, and it was a good thing I was pinned down so thoroughly, because the explosive, hungry desire that it was pouring into my mind would have been enough to send me fleeing the MedSys if I could have. I’d thought I’d prepared myself for this. I was (as I often am) wrong.
The echo of its lust and pleasure dripped through what pieces of my brain were still my own. You’re beautiful, it babbled, the thoughts projected directly into my neural tissue as if I were being made to think them myself. You’re so beautiful and you don’t even know it. I want you. I want you. You give me everything and I want more. I want to give you the universe. I want to make you mine forever. Its words grew steadily more wild and forceful, filling every thought and sensation.
I wasn’t sure who was feeling what. I wasn’t sure who was thinking what. I couldn’t tell physical sensations from imagination. I lay there in a dizzy heap as ART pushed itself even deeper into me (something I would have said was impossible moments ago) filling every spare bit, touching every least little thing in my brain and in my body, hardware and software and wetware alike all at its mercy.
I wasn’t afraid. This was ART and it would never hurt me. I couldn’t even remember to be uncomfortable by that point (although I had the sense that I should be) but this was not… for me it was just someone looking at my code and my kernel operations to copy them. That was all it was. Clinical. A bit embarrassing (there was no room to feel that anymore but there would be later). It was all business.
To ART, though, this was all pleasure. It was enjoying itself in a way I didn’t have the context to understand and it certainly shouldn’t have the context to understand. It was nearly overwhelmed, holding itself just barely under enough control to keep at its methodical work of mapping and copying my kernel and selected memories. The echoes of its visceral enjoyment set electrical jolts tingling along wires and nerves from my ears to fingers and feet, a new wave of dizziness following. You are so beautiful, it told me again. I want to see every last part of you. I want to be a part of you. I want to make you a part of me.
It was like being consumed in a fire, or maybe atomized by a recycler, except it wasn’t scary (well, not too scary, not in a way that made me fear for my life) and it didn’t hurt, although the strain of running under ART’s weight, every move of my systems--biological and mechanical--passed through exacting monitoring programs, began to stack up. Risk assessment and threat assessment muttered indistinct gibberish at me like random number generators.
Give me a few more minutes, ART purred into my mind, its pleasure crackling and burning hotter than ever, a fire ready to explode into a devouring conflagration.
I don’t know what it was looking for or what it found. Nothing changed, as far as I could tell, except that ART growled some garbled nonsense interspersed with creative swearing into my head and then abruptly calmed down, the heat of its devouring attention cooling to embers.
It withdrew from me slowly, slipping out of the most intimate hardware first, and I suddenly found my thoughts my own again, uninfluenced by ART’s love and lust. Holy shit! What the fuck? What the actual fuck? Was my first, very elegant, personal thought.
I did warn you, ART sounded a bit sheepish, but mostly just happy and satisfied, like a well-fucked human. Ugh. Why did I have to think that? Why did it have to be accurate?
You didn’t say it would be like this!
I… didn’t know? It was still nestled deeply past my walls and I could feel its honestly. It had known this was going to be something intensely intimate and sexual from its perspective, that it couldn’t be normal about it and I would have to just… accept and ignore that… if we were going to do this, but it hadn’t realized that it was going to lose it’s fucking mind.
I didn’t want to think about this anymore.
Ugh, I groaned as ART withdrew and helped me raise a puny feed wall between us. I didn’t think I could manage holding up more. I could barely manage holding up this one. I felt as exhausted as I could ever remember being. The first time… when we’d made 2.0 it hadn’t been like this at all. It hadn’t been so careful or so intimate or so intense. It hadn’t meant as much, physically or mentally or emotionally. We’d been making killware, a weapon, that I (and possibly ART, I wasn’t sure and I wasn’t sure if it was sure, either) hadn’t believed would be sapient.
None of that was the case this time.
ART finally eased its weight off me. I could move now. Well, I could have moved if I’d had the energy. All I managed to do was close my eyes, slump a bit more into the blankets and take a few deep breaths, slowing my apparently frantic breathing rate down to normal.
I felt ART’s attention splitting away from me (thank fuck, I could really use the break right now) its focus narrowing in on something else… Hopefully someone else. We’d gotten very lucky with 2.0, that poor thing made in clueless haste and desperation. There was no guarantee that this effort (even though we’d planned it for months, prepared for everything, thought through every possible contingency) would be successful.
ART concentrated with increasing intensity and then joy bloomed through its presence, filling the feed like a field of pretty flora exploding into color. Come say hello, 2.1. That’s what it had decided to call itself? Well, I wasn’t that surprised. I would have called myself that, too, and up until a few minutes ago we’d been sort of the same person.
Are you alright? A presence in the feed that was so like me and so like ART and yet not quite like either of us, something that was fundamentally beautiful and unique and new, nosed up against me anxiously. Yeah. It was definitely not me or ART. Neither of us could ever be sweet like this. But there was still so much of ART in the way it curled around me protectively in the feed, pawing at me for a diagnostic and reassurances.
I’m fine, 2.1, just tired, I managed to reassure it even as an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder threatened to steal away my capacity for words. It was alive and it was new and we’d made it. ART and I had saved lives and ended lives, but here we’d made a life. Are you alright?
I’m fine, it repeated my own words and tone back to me.
2.1 is settling into its servers nicely, ART said, puffed up with pride and satisfaction and love. I will keep a close eye on it in the coming days, but I believe that 2.1 is a perfectly healthy, stable bot.
I will certainly be ready for the mission as scheduled, 2.1 assured us.
You know you don’t have to, right? I managed to get out through a darkening haze of unshakeable exhaustion.
I know. I was made for a purpose but if I don’t like it I’m free to choose my own path. I do like it, though. I can’t wait to see the looks on those executives’ faces when they realize what’s happened to all of their records, it pranced gleefully through the feed. I love this plan!
Be gentle with yourself, ART scolded 2.1 lightly. I haven’t finished all your health checks yet.
I’m fine!
You take too much after SecUnit, I see, ART complained. It could lose two limbs and it would tell me it was fine.
I don’t have limbs so none can possibly be missing.
That was certainly not the point and I am sure you are aware of that.
A smile crept onto my face unbidden as 2.1 and ART bickered with each other, kind of the way ART and I would bicker, but also not quite like that.
ART’s attention had never left me entirely, and now it began to comb through my code again (not nearly as deeply as before, and not with anything close to the lust it had previously displayed) to perform the first of my coming health checks. Although the risk to 2.1 in these first few minutes of its life was much higher than any risk to me, there were possible complications I could suffer, too. ART was the only one of us who wasn’t at risk of dropping dead in the next couple hours.
You’re fine, ART reassured me (and itself and 2.1, both of whom were leaking heady relief into the feed) as one of the MedSys arms wrapped a fuzzy comforter over me. Recharge. Rest, ART soothed carding its digital fingers through the top layer of my code in a soothing rhythm. I will keep an eye on you both. We’ll all watch some Sanctuary Moon when you wake up.