Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Oh no,” Ratthi said at the sight of me. “SecUnit, you really don’t want to be here.”

I did not need to be told that I really didn’t want to be here.

Ratthi did not follow the fact of my presence here to its logical conclusion. I stared at a point near his face for 1.5 seconds to see if he would catch up. One of the humans nearest him attached their mouth, that they eat with, to my human friend’s vulnerable throat, while another nearby human—you know what, I don’t want to describe what the other human was doing. Autonomy has occasional perks.

The most that could be said of this situation is that everyone still had their clothes on. Which is a lot more than I can say of the wide variety of human sexual practices that I witnessed and datamined for my shitty ex-owner bond company back in the bad old days.

1.5 seconds wasn’t enough for Ratthi’s higher functions to come online, and that was about as much of a wait as I could tolerate under these conditions. I stepped close enough to gently shoulder the throat-biter aside, and then I scooped Ratthi around the waist, pinning him against my side and taking most of his weight onto my hip/leg area.

He sighed and relaxed against me, which was not what usually happened during client extraction. Then again, I was usually extracting clients from hostile fauna, hostile flora, hostile corporate agents—you get the idea, usually there was some sort of hostile force, along with injury, death, and/or near-death.

I used my Ratthi-holding leg to pivot the two of us 180 degrees, toward my preferred point of egress. At this point, you may be asking yourself, why would this rogue SecUnit not simply pick up its much smaller human friend and run, if extraction was so urgently required? The answer is simple. Actually, maybe I should have led with this: I was in a narrow maintenance tunnel, surrounded in every direction by an estimated 452 humans and augmented humans. There were humans touching my arms, legs, shoulders, back, stomach (not that I have a stomach)—you get the idea.

Occasionally a human stepped on my foot too, but my feet are 100 percent metal, so that didn’t hurt or even feel weird (ha, fuckers).

Anyway, it was hard to move quickly. I was basically two limbs down and swimming through human soup.

I’m deleting the soup thing from memory. That’s disgusting.

This was not some sort of forced corporate labor situation. No. Various humans affiliated with the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland had chosen to do this. They had chosen to set up sound- and light-blasting devices in a disused maintenance tunnel serving as an auxiliary hangar on the PSUMNT station, and they had chosen to pack 452 of themselves into a space designed for mainly maintenance bots, plus the occasional human tech.

Yes, I had thought of 38 ways that all/most of these humans could die as a result of ignoring this many safety regulations en masse. Don’t ask me about it. I was doing my best to backburner the details while extracting Ratthi from this fucking deathtrap.

A scream went up in every direction. Threat assessment spiked, and I whipped around, using my eyes to check the hatches I wasn’t covering with drones. (The maintenance tunnel didn’t have security cameras, because of course it didn’t. If you’re wondering, yes, it’s my absolute favorite to be surrounded by hundreds of sweaty humans in 94 percent relative humidity like I’m in some sort of human soup—ugh, that’s disgusting, I’m deleting that entire concept from memory—without even being able to fully monitor the space.) I confirmed that the hatches were fine. I don’t know what I was expecting—hostiles? targeting a PSUMNT social/sexual/musical gathering? why?—but then the crowd all started singing together—okay, it was really more like shouting together—and wow, large human crowds have more than one type of collective scream. Who knew. Certainly not Murderbot.

Of all the types of screams I’d heard, this one was actually not bad, especially after I adjusted my auditory input looping to tune the volume down. I tagged the timestamp collective_delight_scream.audio to run by ART later.

“Where’re we going?” Ratthi slurred, loudly, still leaning against me.

I glanced at his ear—good, he was still wearing his interface, just forgetting to use it. Out of this fucking tunnel. Obviously. I replied over the feed.

“What about Tarik? And Iris?” he asked.

Are you fucking kidding me.

Tarik and Iris are here?

“They brought me!” Ratthi replied, “but I lost them in the crowd.”

He was looking up toward my face—not actually making eye contact, but looking past my cheekbone—and as he spoke, he started rubbing his cheek and forehead into my shoulder, which was conveniently face-height for him.

Did his face…itch? I realized that I’d pinned both his arms against his sides and released one so that he could use it to take care of any necessary maintenance himself. But…nope. Still rubbing his face on me.

Stop, I told him.

He looked up at me all confused and sad—my organics lurched like something terrible had happened, and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this lately, but organics suck—and said, “What?”

“Don’t put your face on me,” I said.

“What?” he mumbled. And then he took his face off me, saying, “Oh. Oh no. Oh SecUnit, you really don’t want to be here. I know—this feels like—I think there’s drugs happening.”

And that’s when the extraction went from “annoying” to “least favorite extraction since leaving the company.”

Yes, I’m including TranRollinHyfa.

Yeah.

It took me a pathetic 4.67 minutes to extract Ratthi, Tarik, and Iris without causing any sort of panic/stampede/crowd crush/mass death incident. By the time we were out, my performance reliability had sunk to 95 percent, I assume in sheer protest to every single element of the sensory experience of what was apparently a “rave,” which could really more accurately be called “very loud human soup”—fuck, that’s disgusting, never mind, I’m deleting that from permanent memory.

The humans smelled like dirty socks and stale air. All of us and all of my drones were covered in a gritty, repulsive layer of…my language center is giving me ”glitter.” (I have no idea.)

At least now that we were out of the tunnel and back into the least-used hangar bay on PSUMNT station, I could stop touching them.

I let go of Ratthi and Iris—Tarik I’d been sort of herding ahead of us, so I didn’t have to let go of him—and Iris stepped a standard arm’s-length away. Ratthi stayed close to me, not quite touching. I didn’t know what to make of that. My drones settled into a holding pattern over our heads.

“Well, fuck,” Iris said, slightly too loud. “I mean, whatever, I’m as much a fan of tasetaquine as anyone, but I don’t want it sprung on me. Kaede isn’t on-station right now. Veronik isn’t even in the system.”

“Is casual use a big part of PSUMNT culture?” Ratthi asked, sounding half incredulous and half…ugh, whatever, he sounded sexually aroused. There was a lot of that going around. Because of the drugs.

“I mean, sure? But not ‘let’s aerosolize this and drug the whole crowd without asking for consent’ casual,” Iris said. “SecUnit, did you already call station security?”

I had calculated the likelihood of a massive crowd crush at 79 percent, if station security attempted to enter the tunnel. The space was too confined, with too few easily accessible exits, and the humans were all too inebriated to think clearly. “No,” I said.

“SecUnit doesn’t trust human security,” Ratthi said, which was a generalization, but also pretty accurate, so whatever.

“I’m going to tell my dads, then,” Iris said, and her gaze went distant as she worked in the feed.

“Is that…a good idea?” Ratthi asked delicately, rubbing his own arms. “I mean, if SecUnit….”

Iris waved a hand vaguely. “Look—they at least can grab a couple friends, put enviromasks on, and start pulling people out one by one.”

Seth and Martyn weren’t stupid. Maybe they could get a few people out, at least. That would be better than nothing.

Include this, I told Iris over the feed, and converted crowd_crush_analysis.file to human-readable format. I put graphs in it and everything.

“Ooh yeah, good point,” Iris mumbled, and then her eyes went very vague as she attempted to use the feed. I silently redirected her message, which she’d accidentally sent to an astrophysics professor with the personal name Martine, to Seth and Martyn instead.

“Uh,” Tarik finally said. “What the fuck is going on?”

He’d been walking ahead of us steadily—of the three of them, I’d been the least worried about him—but now he slowed enough to fall into step with Iris.

“First time on tasetaquine?” Ratthi guessed.

Tarik said, “I can’t stop thinking about—” and then he described a sex act so explicitly and viscerally that my ears rang. Yeah, I don’t want to think about it.

Ratthi briefly covered his face. “Yeah—definitely—but we’re in public, so let’s hold out until we have a room—”

“But what’s happening?” Tarik asked. He drifted a little closer to Ratthi.

Ratthi had just told him to wait. I scowled, shifted my weight, and held a hand an inch away from the center of his chest.

“Stop,” I said.

This was significantly less effective than usual. Tarik didn’t startle back, look scared, scream, run, or do any of the things humans usually do when a terrifying murderbot halts their approach. He just stared up at me, and his pupils visibly dilated.

“…Oh,” he said.

“Okay!” Ratthi swiftly intervened. “Look, Tarik, we’re—uh, how far are we from where we’re going, SecUnit?”

The known visitor/semipermanent housing where Ratthi and Tarik were staying was clear on the other side of the station, a 35-minute walk at our current pace, or a little shorter if we managed to catch the tram for the final kilometer. The transient housing was significantly closer—an 18-minute walk for humans—but it consisted entirely of individual sleeping pods. The humans would not be able to pursue any sort of…necessary physical release (ugh)…in such tight quarters.

There was a much more proximate solution. An obvious solution. And as much as the idea of it witnessing whatever was about to happen to me was horrifying, it must have been something else too, because I just said, “Closest option is ART; it’s in maintenance bay 24G. Four minutes.”

ART pinged me 34 times in an 8-second period.

I pinged it back once, pointedly.

Your diagnostics are showing concerning trends, and you are exhibiting abnormal behavior patterns, it said.

I stuck my face back under the stream of hot water-like fluid. I was standing in the bathing facility attached to my cabin, and I had no plans to move. I’m fine.

You are objectively not fine.

It’s just a shower, ART, I said. It’s not a crisis.

You have been in the shower for the past 3 hours 21 minutes 22 seconds, it replied.

…Wait, what?

I checked my own internal clock. It was right. Of course it was right.

A long shower isn’t going to hurt me, I said, 0.08 seconds too late to seem confident and unconcerned. I scowled, and scrubbed my fingertips through my hair again. My skull is significantly more resistant to damage than a human skull, but the padding provided by the skin, hair follicles, and hair are similar to those on a human’s head. It was enough to provide some give for my fingertips, which, with their combination of organic and inorganic sensors, are much more sensitive than human fingertips.

The sensation wasn’t bad.

You aren’t even tracking our conversation linearly, ART said.

I scowled again.

The drug is affecting your systems, it insisted. Your diagnostics over the past 3.5 hours show a progression that does not parallel but does approximate human progression following exposure to tasetaquine. A pause. I can only assume for the drama. You need to make a plan.

I am 22 meters away from your medical suite, I told it.

22.688, it corrected me haughtily.

I think I’ll be fine, I said.

It sighed at me.

I’m responsible for transport to Medical, I said. I’m not responsible for actual medical treatment or medical decisions. It’s in my contract.

I was feeling very proud of myself, and honestly getting pretty into my renewed head-rubbing, when ART said, Not being responsible for other people's medical decisions doesn't mean you aren't responsible for your own, you little idiot.

Now I sighed. I’ve had a lot of practice, so it was a really good sigh. I wanted to get back to the unusually nice time I’d been having with the nice hot water and the nice white noise and the scalp-fingertips thing. But there was such a thing as due diligence.

Does the drug induce paranoia, hallucinations, or violent behavior? Do you need me to fuse my gunports? Do you need me to initiate a temporary shutdown? I asked.

I didn’t really feel like I was on the cusp of threatening anyone’s safety. Even less so than usual, to be honest. Risk and threat assessment were perfectly content with everything that was happening or likely to happen.

There were 0.003 seconds of judgmental silence.

You didn’t look up the tasetaquine in the knowledge base, it finally said. You don’t know what it does, even though Dr. Ratthi correctly identified it.

My responsibility was to get the humans to safety. I did that. I don’t need to know all the…moist specifics.

There was an escalation from judgmental silence to judgmental attention. It was like ART had turned to stare at me, pointedly unimpressed.

If Ratthi’s been on it before voluntarily, and he’s fine, and PSUMNT people use it voluntarily, and they’re fine, I’m not concerned.

It’s known colloquially as sex pollen, ART said dryly. Be concerned.

I froze, hot water still streaming directly onto my face. Luckily my eyes aren’t fragile or squishy and don’t need to be protected like human eyes, so all the water now hitting them wasn’t doing any harm.

Tasetaquine causes time distortion, euphoria, social openness, skin hunger, loss of judgment, and difficulty with complex thought, ART said. It also physically arouses users, and compels pursuit of sexual partners.

“Ughhhhhh,” I said aloud.

This is a common trope in many forms of fictional media, it added. You’re only unfamiliar with it because—

I’m unaware of it because it’s a designer party-drug that freehold humans synthesize and share around for mutual enjoyment, I snapped. No matter how high I get, I’m still a SecUnit and still designed to handle multiple inputs. I could access and integrate new information just fine.

(Was I currently ignoring 99 percent of ART’s camera inputs? Yes. But that was because Ratthi, Tarik, and Iris were roaming ART’s interior having some sort of drug-fueled collaborative sexual marathon. I did not want to see that—any of it, ever, for any reason—and ART had assured me repeatedly that it was both consensual and enthusiastic, so I had dropped the inputs other than the usual keyword monitoring for anyone screaming “SecUnit, help, we’re being murdered” etc.)

Stop pretending I’m naive, I went on. I have witnessed more human sexual practices than most humans. I know more about human sexual practices than I ever wanted to know, by several orders of magnitude. Corporate contact laborers and low-level managers don’t have access to almost anything enjoyable, sexual or not, and certainly not anything ‘euphoria-inducing.’ They riot about imitative fruit pac rations, for fuck’s sake. They trade sex for favors or food or protection. The ones in power rape whoever they can get away with raping. And they have questionably pleasurable, questionably consensual recreational sex with each other, occasionally, if they’re lucky. Anyone from the Corporation Rim lower than C-suite executives would be just as blindsided by this drug as I am.

ART was silent for 1.33 seconds, which was a long pause for something with its processing power. Then it said, You’re right.

Well, at least being right still felt good.

I have historically interpreted your habit of skipping sex scenes in the context of my previous experiences with that same behavior, it continued. Adolescent humans are often uncomfortable witnessing sexual content; it is a sign of immaturity, a typical and appropriate stage in their development. The behavior is the same, and the emotional responses overlap significantly. Nevertheless, the underlying causes of the behavior are distinct. You are not naive, or immature. You have an established set of boundaries and preferences around viewing humans engaging in sex, based on extensive experience viewing humans engaging in sex.

I tilted my face up, to better enjoy the hot water streaming over my cheeks. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, I said, and closed the feed connection.

ART reopened it. You still need to make a plan, it said.

I closed the connection again.

ART reopened it. You hacked my crew intake system to force the medical forms to allow you to list your emergency sexual partner as “null.”

I heaved another sigh. I experimented with letting the water hit my tongue, accidentally swallowed the water—who the hell had decided to keep the swallow reflex for SecUnits? ughh—and had to hack it back out of my lungs again. Then I said, You didn’t stop me.

I am regretting that now, it replied, dry.

I tilted my head back further so that the water hit my outer neck/throat area, just below my chin. Between the data port and the weak points in our armor, the neck is just about the most vulnerable part of a SecUnit. I’d killed a lot of SecUnits by severing the connections in their necks one way or another. But right now the water was soft, and hot, and felt nice.

I shifted again, to let it hit my closed eyelids. That was nice too.

You’re losing time, ART butted back in. You just held one position for 17 minutes.

I’m fine, I said. Look at me. Standing here. Not leaking or full of holes or anything.

I want to address this with minimal disruption from the tasetaquine, ART said. Which means now is the time.

I closed the connection again. I could stay in this shower indefinitely. ART didn’t mind the energy draw, and it was in port anyway; it had plenty of power to spare. All the water-like fluid was filtered and recycled. My emotions were intrusive, but risk and threat assessment were bottomed out, and I couldn’t remember a time I’d had any physical sensations this pleasant. ART could take care of any emergencies. There was no reason to do anything other than what I was doing.

I feel weird, I thought.

ART shouldered into my feed, 93 percent of its attention suddenly on me. It felt heavy, like someone eight times my size slumping onto my back. It felt nice.

I don’t think I’ve ever had that much of its attention before. It needed at least 9 percent to run continuous processes related to movement in space. But it was docked now.

Are you aware that you’re projecting your running commentary into our shared processing space?

Uh. No?

It managed to lean on me judgmentally. Are you ready to make a plan now? it asked.

What’s going to happen? I said.

You’re going to experience increasing arousal and drive to be touched until you find a sexual partner and have several orgasms. Probably, it said.

Uh-oh.

Orgasms? I asked.

Yes, it said.

I’m a SecUnit. I can’t orgasm, I said.

Are you sure? it asked, with genuine curiosity.

What the fuck would I orgasm with. I don’t have sex parts, I said.

I can give you genitalia, it said.

Absolutely not, I said.

You may need them, it replied. Don't worry—if I do need to give you genitalia, I can remove them again after the drug has run its course.

YOU ARE NOT GIVING ME ANY KIND OF SEX PARTS, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER, I projected as loudly as I could.

Uh? Iris was suddenly present.

SecUnit is having trouble containing its feed presence, ART said. I will contain it from here on out, Iris. Don’t concern yourself.

Oooookay, Iris said, with unflattering skepticism. …Let us know if you need anything, SecUnit.

I would absolutely not be doing that.

Chapter Text

I have a proposal, ART said.

I’m not really in the mood for research, I said.

I was still in the shower. I did not feel good anymore.

Analysis of your symptom progression suggests that the unpleasant sensations and impulses you are experiencing will continue, at varying levels of intensity, for a minimum of five Rim-standard cycles if you do not take further action, ART said.

Leave me alone, I said.

Your performance reliability is decreasing steadily, it said. I have been unable to reliably project what effects the tasetaquine will have on your organic tissue if your inorganic components go into shutdown.

It’s hard to glare at a faceless research transport when you yourself are a drugged SecUnit failing to enjoy a shower, but I gave it a try.

It’s a good proposal, ART sulked.

I’m dealing with it, I don’t need proposals, I said. I wasn’t having a good time, but five cycles of waiting this out was nothing compared to even mid-level punishment from the governor module.

ART did the feed equivalent of staring at me pointedly. Imagine someone with about ninety sets of giant eyes turning them all around and fixing them on you.

Shut up, I said.

The pain that you experienced while enslaved by the company was, at the time, unavoidable, it said.

I could not be more aware of that if I tried. Fuck off, I said.

You are still dealing with the repercussions of those experiences today, it continued.

Personally I thought I’d been doing pretty well lately, right up until I got fucking sex pollened.

By contrast, this pain is avoidable, ART went on. I have several—

“I don’t want to have genitals!” I shouted at the ceiling. “I don’t want to have sex! Leave me alone!”

My proposal does not involve genitals or, according to most definitions of the word, sex.

I closed my eyes and crossed my arms and did the best approximation of stony silence I could manage while high and standing in a shower. It wasn’t very good.

1,256 hours ago, I encountered a rogue ComfortUnit, ART said.

Threat assessment made a valiant attempt to spike, but my drugged system slammed it from a laughable high of 9% back down to 0.05% within a second. That was probably a problem, but it wasn’t like I was useful to anyone right now anyway. Ugh.

1,256 hours ago was recent—near the end of my most recent visit to Preservation. Of course ART would ferret out a rogue ComfortUnit the fucking moment I wasn’t aboard.

I am not doing anything with a ComfortUnit, rogue or not, I said. Ever.

Obviously, ART said, sounding offended. Perhaps you could consider actually listening to what my proposal is before telling me you won’t do it. The ComfortUnit never boarded me and the station where I encountered it is three wormholes away. I bartered with it for its memories and any other data associated with pleasurable sexual encounters. That data is readily available in my archives.

…What, I said.

Despite the many objectively harmful events you lived through while enslaved by the company, you continue to find security work fulfilling under certain conditions, it replied. My hypothesis that a rogue ComfortUnit’s experiences of sex might parallel your experiences of security work was not unreasonable.

Okay, wow, I hated that. It also made sense, which only made me hate it more.

Can I tell you my proposal now? it asked.

It was sulking so intensely at me that I said yes.

5.5 cycles later, my symptoms remained unchanged.

Ratthi, who had fully recovered 4.25 days prior, had done a quick literature review of everything he had saved on tasetaquine, most of it from Preservation’s archives. He contacted ART over the feed to share the following hypothesis: If I wasn’t able to manually initiate a purge of tasetaquine, my stupid ex-owner bond company likely hadn’t included in its constructs the ability to process this type of drug without a cubicle, which in turn suggested that there was a whole class of drugs out there that I was defenseless against.

Defenseless = even more defenseless than a human. I was worse-than-a-human levels of defenseless against this class of drugs. Even though most drugs had no effect on me at all. It was stupid. I mean, Ratthi was almost certainly right, and the fact that ART had passed along his message meant that ART agreed, but it was all just stupid. If it was true, it meant that no one had ever even needed to shoot me/crush me/blow me up/infect me with mass-murdering malware—they could’ve just drugged me, this whole time. But evidently it had never occurred to any corporate goons that they could disrupt production in competitors’ mining facilities by dosing the competitors’ SecUnits with a freehold sex/party drug.

Whatever. Thanks to tasetaquine and the company’s shitty bioengineering, I was now well acquainted with arousal, and I was ready for it to be over. When I say “ready,” I mean I was so done with it that I was about to let ART use rogue ComfortUnit–derived sensory data to give me orgasm(s).

Yeah. That done.

I pinged ART.

It pinged back 0.0000000001 seconds later.

I stared at it mutinously. (Well, I stared at the ceiling, but it knew what I meant.)

It paused really, really sarcastically and then pinged me again.

Let’s just get this over with, I said.

ART sent me a diagram of its own interior with the nearest lounge highlighted. There was no one else aboard at this point—Ratthi, Tarik, and Iris had returned to their usual station quarters days ago, and ART had thoroughly cleaned anywhere their fluids (ugghhh) could have conceivably ended up—so I just turned off the shower and went.

My procedural memory was all fucked up and it hadn’t occurred to me to dry myself off and I dripped all over ART’s floor as I walked. I hate that. Whatever, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to turn around now; I’d probably spend another 5 days in the shower.

One of ART’s drones zipped up to me carrying a towel. I rolled my eyes. I took the towel.

It was warm.

I dried myself off, which also conveniently allowed me to hide my facial expression from every angle of every camera.

I arrived dryly to the lounge. There was a soft blanket waiting on my favorite chair, which had been moved here from the command deck.

I sent ART an image of the blanket on the chair from my eyes, and didn’t bother stripping out the accompanying metadata.

I’m glad you like it, it replied. It had given me a little space on the walk over, presumably because of the face-hiding, but it was settling back over me heavily now. Sit down.

I sat down. I put the blanket over my legs, and rested my hands underneath it too. It was soft, which was not bad.

Sensory mapping is the first step, ART started.

Just do it, I said, cutting it off.

My entire sensory input system went very, very weird, like I was looking through a kaleidoscope but for every single sense including proprioception, and for half a second I thought ART was disintegrating my wall and possibly also my brain. Then everything recalibrated, and the sensory kaleidoscope thing went away. The only difference was that ART’s feed presence now felt unusually raw/direct/immediate/intense.

ART, I demanded.

I set myself as the administrator for your system protections, transferred them onto my own processors, and ran a diagnostic/recalibration of your sensory apparatus to orient myself to the points of integration between your organic nervous system and your inorganic circuitry, it replied. Then, As your wall and other system protections are currently running on my processors, they no longer affect my access to your systems. They will, of course, continue to rebuff any other incursions.

Well, that was terrifying. That meant we were effectively one integrated system for the duration of this exercise. Or—more like I was integrated into ART’s system for the duration of this exercise. That was the first what the fuck.

The second what the fuck was: I didn’t actually feel terrified. ART had once moved my whole active consciousness into an isolation box on its processors. Also it had done surgery on my unconscious body, and we’d only known one another for a week at that point. Transferring my system protections onto its processors temporarily just didn’t feel like a big deal compared to all that.

ART paused for four full seconds while I processed this.

“Okay,” I finally said.

I will proceed with sensory mapping, it replied.

“Okay,” I said again, slouching back into my chair.

This was a long, boring process in which ART would block all sensation in one of my fingers, and then one of its drones would poke that finger while ART simultaneously fed the ComfortUnit’s finger-poke data to the appropriate input(s) in my nervous system. Apparently doing this for long enough would convince my human neural tissue that the ComfortUnit’s sensations were actually coming from my own body. It got weirder when we got into the nipple region and etc., but really so far this whole sensory mapping thing wasn’t that different from letting ART mess around with my hair-growing code, way back wh—

Uh.

A weird hot? throbbing??? sensation had started up, low in my gut. Not that I have a gut, or any human digestive parts. That’s where my power cell is.

Threat assessment made it all the way to 6.2% before bottoming out again. (Wow, no wonder tasetaquine causes “loss of judgment” in humans. Threat assessment and risk assessment were completely fucked.)

What is that, I demanded. The throbbing thing.

I have begun to push through sensory data from the ComfortUnit’s pudendal nervous system, it replied. You do not have a pudendal nerve, so this may involve some experimentation with which combinations of inputs are most suitable before we see useful results.

I mean, I can feel it, I replied.

Obviously, it said, sounding offended, as though I was saying I’d thought it wouldn’t manage the data transfer, which was ridiculous and not what I’d said to begin with. The data language was already a 99.99999% match—

No. Don’t tell me that, I interrupted. That meant: It was a company ComfortUnit?

ART knew where my mind was going: I was not compromised, or even targeted, it said. The ComfortUnit was rogue, and did not initiate contact. I saw it through StationSec’s cameras and pinged it. It never made the connection between my feed presence and the quiet bot-piloted research transport docked on the other side of the station. A pause. It was visibly from the same tissue batch as you.

I recoiled out of our shared processing space. “Don’t tell me that,” I begged. I mean, I didn’t intend to beg, but I played the file back after this whole thing was over and—let’s just be real here.

I will not conceal relevant information from you, it said. Not under these conditions.

Well, I couldn’t say much to that. ART was still fucking around with my nervous system, and now there was a prickling sensation happening on the back of my neck. The throbbing feeling hadn’t stopped. It was just getting…more throbby, I don’t know, it’s hard to describe.

One time during the bad old days, I’d stuck my hand in a hatchway to keep it from taking off a worker’s leg when it slammed shut—I know, I can be a real idiot—and not only had that not worked (the worker had lost the leg and then died from the blood loss) but also I’d gotten myself stuck on one side of the hatchway with the hatch crushing my lower arm/wrist, and my hand sticking out on the other side. (I couldn’t help the worker with the blood loss, because I was stuck in the hatch and my governor module wouldn’t allow me to intentionally damage myself/rip off my own hand in order to render aid to anyone lower than tier 3 management. I would have been able to help her with the blood loss if I hadn’t gotten myself stuck in the hatch. So really it was my own stupid, stupid fault that the worker had died, even though I had been trying to help her in the first place.) Anyway, that was really the only other time I could remember that I’d experienced any sort of persistent throbbing sensation, i.e., the hand throbbing because of all the blood and fluid trapped in there.

This was sort of like that sensation, if all of the muted pulses of pain were muted pulses of pleasure instead, and happening in a different part of my body.

It was weird.

Admittedly, thinking about the bleeding-out human worker (no one had tried to help her until she was almost dead) and my throbbing hand was not really helping with my mood, especially once I remembered that that was the incident that had prompted me to figure out how to manually decouple my own hands/feet/limbs from the rest of my body in an emergency, which came in handy (ha) later when the stupid colonists on the alien remnant contaminated planet had stuck me down in the shaft to die/get contaminated. Then I started thinking about how I’d almost died/become TargetControlSys, and how I’d killed AdaCol1 and 2.0, and. Yeah.

So the throbbing thing was still going, but it was starting to feel kind of…gross.

ART halted the throbbing thing while I was in the middle of deciding I felt gross about it, which, you know. There are times when it’s really nice that a hypercompetent machine intelligence has decided it likes you in particular.

What are you thinking about? Your performance reliability is dropping, ART asked.

I packaged up the text summary of the whole hatchway incident and sent it into our shared processing space.

ART sighed one of my own exasperated sighs at me.

Stop thinking about that, it said.

Sure, I’ll think about some of my other catastrophic injuries instead, I replied.

ART paused for 0.02 seconds longer than usual to indicate that I was not funny. Then it said, Psychological arousal is not always necessary for human orgasm. Orgasm can be a purely physical reflex response to physical stimuli.

It paused, probably to see if this would convince me to let it give me genitalia, which was still not happening ever.

It continued, However, since you will not allow me to give you genitalia—ha, I was right, it was hoping I would cave—it will be difficult for you to achieve orgasm if your psychological state remains unaligned with the physical sensations induced via data transfer.

I didn’t have much to say to that. It really was hard to not think about my various catastrophic injuries while paying this much attention to my physical sensations. I didn’t really ever pay attention to physical sensations unless I needed to, for security and/or medical reasons, with the obvious exception of the 5.5 days that I had just spent in the shower.

ART, who had clearly caught at least some of that, said, Have you experienced any positive physical sensations that were noteworthy enough to recall/save to permanent memory?

I flagged the 5.5 day shower event, and it pinged acknowledgment really sarcastically. I pinged back, also sarcastically, but whatever, I guess it had been there for all of that, observing me with upwards of 90 percent of its attention.

I considered sending it the memory of the back-to-back thing with Tapan, but it had been riding my feed for that too. And it had definitely been there for my very first shower, which had taken place aboard it shortly after we met. So Instead I packaged up the memory of Don Abene’s soft warm hair on my collarbone on Milu, plus the time I had made the ultimate sacrifice and allowed Mensah to hug me in the cargo carrier on TranRollinHyfa.

ART upped the temperature of the room I was in. Then another drone buzzed in, took my blanket away (I made a face that was not a pout and I’m sticking to that story), and came back 25 seconds later with the same blanket but really warm.

I hid my face again. I was having an emotion. Possibly several emotions.

Should we revisit involving a trusted human? ART asked. If human contact is—

No, I said. No. No. Definitely not.

It sort of stared at me in the feed, but more patiently than it had been staring earlier.

I don’t think it’s the human contact, I said. I think it’s someone—trusting me.

My face was already hidden, but I wished I could hide it again.

One of ART’s maintenance drones brought a second warm blanket, which I designated Blanket2—I could see it coming through ART’s cameras, obviously my eyes were beneath Blanket1 with the rest of my face—and draped it over my exposed back and arms. I was completely surrounded.

I was feeling all warm and melty and safe and other things, which was when ART hit me with:

Have you ever experienced sexual arousal? Or anything even remotely analogous?

I recoiled, warm melty feelings gone, but ART couldn’t see me in my warm blanket blob anyway, so ugh this was all pointless.

I had certainly been experiencing something intense and demanding these past 5.5 days, and I had been thinking of it as arousal, since that was what the drug was for/what it caused in humans, but I wasn’t sure that what I’d been feeling really counted. Maybe it was the lack of sex parts, but it didn’t feel good to me. It was an intense physical and psychological restlessness that had a specific, defined outlet that repulsed me while simultaneously being impossible to dismiss. It was like I was tripping marker paint repeatedly, and the feed message was YOU HAVE TO DO [SOMETHING THAT IS COMPLETELY REPULSIVE TO YOU] RIGHT NOW!!! GO DO [THE REPULSIVE AND ANATOMICALLY IMPOSSIBLE THING]!!! and it didn’t matter how many times I closed it, it just opened right back up to the front of my feed. It wasn’t a good sensation, or really a sensation at all. It was just a—thing. A whole thing. It sucked, basically.

I packaged all that up and dropped it into our shared processing space for ART.

Interesting, ART said, after a 0.89 second pause. Are there any types of arousal that you have found pleasant? I.e., if not sexual arousal, then perhaps anger? Exhilaration?

Anger was fine. I was angry all the time, and was used to it. I didn’t notice it most of the time, unless a top-ten horrible thing was happening. But it wasn’t pleasant.

Exhilaration, on the other hand—I had plenty of examples, but there was an obvious standout. I sent ART my full archive of the escape from TranRollinHyfa.

ART was silent for 8.61 seconds. Then it said, ominously, Very helpful. Any other relevant data, before I make adjustments to the approach?

That was a very broadly defined query, and I was sure ART had constructed it that way on purpose. I ran a quick search, and—huh.

I sent it all the data around Tarik’s pupil dilating when I’d halted him on the walk over. It hadn’t been important at the time, but I’d had a weird reaction. Not unpleasant, just—really weird.

Ah, ART said.

That sounded promising, and I braced myself for an immediate deluge of orgasms that I didn’t really feel like having as ART cracked the code and extracted me from this stupid situation as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, what happened next was 2.11 more hours of excruciating experimentation. ART finished mapping the ComfortUnit’s sensory data to my nervous system inputs, and moved on to calibrating the intensity of each sensation, as well as experimenting with combinations/rhythms/speeds.

I know. Just shoot me already.

ART did get one thing right pretty much immediately: it replaced the neck-prickling sensation with a looping visual of a pupil dilating, and linked that up with the low-gut throbbing thing.

And that, uh. That really worked. There was definitely something to that.

I’ve hijacked the proprietary reward pathways coded into your inorganic systems, ART told me when I told it the pupil thing was doing something. Once I knew to look for it, it was obvious.

Do I want to know? I asked, shuffling Blanket2 into a more effective position over my shoulders.

It considered this for 0.0024 seconds and then said, Probably not.

Fair enough.

So that was all fine, but it didn’t do much to move things along the Projected Schedule of Events Leading to a Successful Resolution. I was restless and annoyed and ready for it to be over.

Finally, ART said, Calibration complete, brought up the lights, and highlighted its medical suite on the map in our shared processing space.

I’m not letting you give me genitals, ART, I said for the objective fourth time and subjective one hundred thousandth time.

My medical suite has more than one function, it replied testily. Besides, my medical scanners provide a datastream that is significantly more detailed, precise, and relevant than the data from scanners and cameras elsewhere within me.

It halted the throbbing thing and the pupil thing. I decided it was serious about the location change. Fine, I said. I draped Blanket1 around me like a cape and bunched up Blanket2 around my neck, and went to medical.

You could argue that I should have noticed ART making renovations in its medical suite, but in my defense, I knew I was the only entity aboard other than ART itself, and I was in the middle of a psychologically taxing medical event. I’d had all of its cameras backburnered—it wasn’t like there was anything to see.

You may have noticed that I’m wrong a lot.

ART’s central surgical platform was gone. It had been replaced with a…scary tub thing. All the surgical arms etc. were still hanging in place above the tub. The lighting was dimmer than usual—most lighting would be dimmer than a surgical suite operating normally—but I saw that this lighting was set to the exact lumen/kelvin levels that I’d set for my own cabin during media time. The tub/surgical area was also surrounded by a privacy screen, which seemed like a little much.

There’s no one else here, I pointed out to ART.

Your stress levels are consistently lower in more confined spaces, ART replied.

That sounded like some bullshit an asshole research transport would lie about, so I ran the numbers.

…Huh. All right, fair enough.

When you get in the tub, we’ll begin, ART said, managing to sound almost patient.

I examined the tub on both scan and visual. Connections to ART’s water recycler, integrated breathing mask, warm water. Pretty simple.

Planning to dissolve my exposed organic tissue? I asked. Because I’ve got to say, it’s been done before.

Ha ha, ART replied, sounding 0 percent amused. Get in the fucking tub.

Who am I kidding here. I got in the fucking tub.

The moment I was fully set up—breathing mask in place, laying comfortably at the bottom of the tub (SecUnits don’t float)—ART removed a partition, and I saw that it was about to transfer 175 distinct inputs to me.

I know I talk a big game about my multi-track processing, but that was way too many individual inputs for a SecUnit. Most of the inputs weren’t even camera feeds, which I had all sorts of company software to help me efficiently process. At least I had some extra processing space available, since ART had offloaded all of my fucking system protections.

ART shoved the accompanying readme.file to the front of my processing space. I see it, I replied. I’m just having a look around—

ART sighed one of my sighs. Fine, fine, I’ll look at the—huh.

The readme.file was short. It took me 0.02 seconds to process it.

I read it again.

…Huh.

ART had created a sort of—game.

It’s not a game, it’s a competition, ART said.

You and I will have different objectives, I said. That’s not a competition.

I could practically feel ART picking out one of the more obscure definitions of competition, but it reined itself in. A challenge, then, it said.

I kind of liked that. I renamed it murderbotversusart_challenge.file.

ART felt me poking around and asked, Any other changes?

No, it’s fine, I said. I just don’t get why it’s not the other way around.

Right, I should probably explain. The challenge involved an immediate opt-out for each of us, 37 redundant safeguards to keep ART from intentionally or unintentionally destroying my brain, and a further 50 conditions under which the challenge would auto-terminate. But basically it boiled down to, I was supposed to take all the inputs ART had just mapped and calibrated and use them to make myself orgasm, and ART was supposed to stop me from doing that.

ART was staring at me in the feed in that really pointedly unimpressed way it has. Ughh. I was about to feel really stupid.

Do you really want someone else—even me—to force you to a sexual peak while you resist? it asked.

Okay. Yeah, no. I felt really stupid.

ART clearly knew that, and moved on. And when I say “moved on,” I mean it said, in an unbearably smug tone, I think you’re afraid I’m going to win.

I’m not a bot. I can tell when you’re goading me.

ART did the feed equivalent of examining its fingernails. I had never felt it do that before, and cannot overemphasize how obnoxious it was.

Did you learn that from Holism? I asked. (I know, low blow.)

ART leaned on me a little more heavily. I think it was supposed to feel threatening, but with risk assessment and threat assessments still bottomed out at 0.01 percent and 0.55 percent respectively, it just felt nice.

At this point it’s unarguable that I know my way around your systems better than you do yourself, it said.

And I knew it was still goading me, right? I knew that. But— It took you 18.3 seconds to process the taste of bubble gum via my sensory input two weeks ago, I said. You printed Matteo a backwards shirt because you were thinking too hard about bubble gum.

I fail to see your point, ART said.

There are a lot of things that you understand better than I do. My systems are not one of them.

ART said, Really? Prove it.

And like the sucker I was, I said, Oh, it’s on, asshole.

So here’s the part where I have over 100 orgasms.

[text deleted]

[text deleted]

[text deleted]

The problem is, if I just describe what happened step by step, it reads like one of those feedgame recaps Mensah’s youngest kids like. And, sure, whatever, but that’s not what it felt like at all. I guess I could pretend that that’s what it felt like, but [text deleted]

I deleted the first three tries because they were all “and then I prioritized this input and then ART stole that input and then I increased the intensity of these other two inputs and then ART added this other really annoying distracting input, and then I got rid of that input, and then while I was getting rid of it ART stole my favorite input and then blah blah blah” — And none of it was a lie. All that stuff happened. But that’s not what it felt like.

[text deleted]

You know what, fuck it. I’m never letting anybody else read the tasetaquine part anyway. This is for my own reference. Even if I get memory wiped or I scramble my archives again or whatever, I don’t want to lose this part of me. And this is part of me, even if I feel weird about it. I really don’t want to end up feeling even more weird about it (or bad about it) if I ever lose access to the actual memories. And I can imagine that happening really easily, so.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck, I have to write it out. I really do.

Come on, Murderbot. Just do it. Just do it. It’s just you. It’s just me. Nobody else sees this part.

Okay.

So, the weirdest part was that I felt needy.

I don’t sleep or eat or drink, and I don’t need much air. I have experience with missing things/people—entertainment media, ART, Dr. Mensah, and so on—but missing something is different than being needy. They feel different, anyway. Maybe because missing something is emotional, and the needy feeling was physical/sensory?

Stop pretending this is analysis. Just tell the story. What happened?

Okay. I felt needy. Even when I got the throbbing sensation set up at the right intensity, and just randomized enough to be interesting. Even when I finally managed to backburner enough of ART’s favorite deep space visuals to focus on the one weirdly compelling visual of a pupil dilating. That felt good—we’d figured out that combination in the lounge earlier, so I’d known it would feel good, which was why I was trying to set it up—and, it was like, shouldn’t feeling good be enough? It was rare that anything physical felt noticeably good to me. It was weird to want it to feel even better.

Would you just be honest. Do you want to not know what the fuck happened, the next time all your memories get scrambled? Come on.

Okay. So, it did feel weird to want more. But the weirdness of it was only taking up 2.3% of my attention. The rest was just the need itself. The throbbing sensation felt so good, but I needed something more direct. Just say it. Just say it. I needed to touch myself. I needed to fuck myself. Or—was it even that specific, really? Or was it just that I needed to get fucked full stop.

Yeah, I needed to get fucked. I wasn’t thinking about much beyond that.

ART had mapped the ComfortUnit’s sensory inputs to mine perfectly. I mean, of course it did, but holy shit: I reached down to touch body parts I don’t have, and instead encountered the organic skin and little bit of subcutaneous fat I do have (which together provide some impact absorption and more importantly friction reduction over my power cell).

Anyway, for half a second there, it was like I had two bodies. There was the physical body in the tub, sans genitals. And there was the other body, the ComfortUnit’s body, feeding its sensory data into my nervous system, convincing me there were other body parts down there.

One time I uploaded my consciousness to a gunship, and that takes the top spot for my weirdest experience of embodiment, but still.

Two bodies. I moved my hand away from the power cell region. If I wanted to feel more direct sensations in the sex parts I didn’t have, I couldn’t use my hands. I’d need to use the inputs that ART had set up for me. I accessed…not the input I wanted, ugh. I tried again and got another input that I didn’t want right now, and then finally on the third try I got the right one and jackknifed. Water sloshed out of the tub. I squirmed around.

I was pulling the ComfortUnit’s sensory data into my own nervous system. Specifically, I was feeling what it was like to slide my own fingers inside myself.

Fuck. Fuck, it was hot. Also, I got what ‘hot’ felt like now.

I did it again.

At this point, ART changed the pupil visual to a visual of me learning to walk like a human in its passageways.

Ha, joke’s on you, ART. I’m really, really good at backburnering irrelevant and/or boring visual inputs. I backburnered the walking thing, and turned my attention back to the sensation of my fingers sliding inside of myself again. And again, and again.

It felt really, really good. What the fuck else do I say about it? It felt really good, and it made me want more of it. That needy feeling again.

I tweaked the datastream and got it going harder. (Harder = same pace, more impact.) I tweaked the data some more and found out that there wasn’t really a limit to how hard it would go. Damn, that ComfortUnit went really hard on itself. Was there something about our tissue batch that was just—into that? Obviously, when I’m not drugged I’m not into anything, but right now going harder was definitely doing something for me that gentler sensations hadn’t done.

I was so into it that I didn’t notice ART sliding the finger-fucking input away from me until it was too late. The input was gone, and without it I was all aimless throbbing/pulsing/needy needy needy.

I needed that input back. I needed something back inside me. I mean, not literally inside me. There’s no ‘inside me’ because I have a power cell there. Whatever, you know what I mean.

I fought ART to get the input back. 0.01 seconds later, I realized that it was going to take a while to win that fight. Longer than I could wait. So in the meantime I went into my own archives, made a copy of the last ten seconds of my own sensory data, converted it into a format that could be read as an input, plugged it into the bit of my nervous system that had been activating before, and set it to repeat.

My eyes promptly rolled back in my head, and I made a sound. A moaning sound. It was embarrassing. But in my drugged state the embarrassment didn’t have much of a foothold. I moaned again, because getting fucked felt so good, and that time hearing it was just hot. It was weird that I could find anything hot to begin with, but I was way too turned on by this point to get distracted by the weirdness of it. It was hot. Getting fucked was hot. Liking it was hot. Moaning about how much I liked it was hot. ART hearing me moan about how much I liked it was hot.

Just a big pile of “this is doing it for me,” basically.

ART caught some of that, because it got flustered and stopped fighting me for control of the original finger-fucking input for 0.003 seconds, which was plenty of time for me to grab that input back and lock it in.

For 0.5 seconds, I was getting fucked really hard, exactly how I wanted it, on two identical inputs.

Apparently that’s what it takes to make a SecUnit come.

Which felt really good, by the way. Beyond good. Let me put it this way: Humans in isolated mining installations acting the way they do w/r/t sex makes more sense now. I don’t like it, and I still think most of them are idiots. Also some of them were doing it for survival rather than pleasure, which is a whole different thing. But in terms of the smallish percentage of pleasurable, recreational, consensual-but-inadvisable-at-least-according-to-the-SecUnit-who-has-to-datamine-this-shit sexual encounters: yeah they made more sense.

I didn’t think about all that until later, though. There were 3 seconds during which all my organic musculature was seizing up, and the cunt I didn’t have was pulsing, and it all felt so good that I didn’t think at all.

(All the “body part I don’t have” phrases annoy me. All the words humans use for their genitalia also annoy me. The words that the company uses for ComfortUnit genitalia are even worse. Whatever. I’m settling for “cunt.” Since it's just us here, I'm going to let you/me in on the actual decision-making process. Here it is: I’ve adopted every other word Pin-Lee uses, what’s one more.)

When I came out of the mind-blank orgasm part, I still felt all hot and needy. Which didn’t really seem fair. It had taken a lot of work to have an orgasm, especially with ART fighting me every step of the way. It would be nice to feel like it had made a dent.

It did make a dent, ART said. But one orgasm was never going to do it. You saw how long it took Iris, Ratthi, and Tarik to return to baseline.

Actually, I had been actively ignoring that. I was actively ignoring that, I said.

It rolled its eyes at me, and shoved my diagnostics to the front of our shared processing space. Okay, yeah, the orgasm had made a dent. Just not a big one.

Again, ART said.

It was right. And given how needy I still felt, I wasn’t even going to argue. But—

Can we make this go any faster? I asked.

Make yourself come harder. That’ll give me the data I need to answer that question, ART replied.

And, well, that didn’t sound too bad.

After that, ART stole the juicy finger-fucking input from me and locked my access to the ability to copy sensory data, which was a fucking declaration of war in murderbotversusart_challenge terms. So then we went again.

After the ninth round, I said, You’re going easy on me. It had only taken me 3.37 minutes to orgasm this time. (For comparison, the first round had taken 22.33 minutes.)

I am, in fact, going less easy on you every round, ART replied, and gave me a peek at the algorithm it was using to set how much of its processing capacity it used for each round of murderbotversusart_challenge. The percentage went up each time, but how much it went up depended on a few factors, including how long it had taken me to come the previous round, how hard I came (based on the speed and number of rapid muscle contractions), and how innovative each of our hacking methods had been. It walled the algorithm off again before I could get a good enough sense to strategize for future rounds.

Asshole, I said.

ART used a much larger percentage of its processing power than was allocated for this round to slam down all of my sensory inputs. You want me to go harder on you? Earn it.

Okay, so it was getting better at goading me.

If I’m being honest, round ten was very fun. Short and sweet. I was sneaky, and got just enough access to the finger-fucking input to tell it to start streaming a copy of itself back over to the correct nerve input on my side. Basically I had no sensory input at all except for getting fucked really hard. I had never enjoyed having only one input before, but with risk and threat assessment still chemically suppressed…yeah, having all my attention on that one thing felt good. Good = really good. Really good = round ten lasted 93 seconds.

Everything in the tub felt good. I need you to get that. That’s the point of writing all this down. You were safe, you were with ART, you weren’t scared, and it felt good.

After round 84, I dedicated one input to watching Sanctuary Moon. I wasn’t really paying attention to it, it’s just nice to have it going in background.

After round 85, I said, Okay, I think that’s enough. I sat up in the tub and set the breathing mask aside.

Really, ART replied. Its skepticism was not promising.

The diagnostic it shoved to the front of our shared processing space was also not promising. (Not promising = nowhere close.)

“I’m bored,” I said aloud. “I think it’s done.”

Your hormone fluctuations indicate significant improvement, ART agreed. But I would recommend a further 32 to 35 rounds before initiating a pause/break. Unfortunately, the pace does matter. It was using a placating tone that it didn’t usually bother to use on me, which was annoying.

ART, I don’t need to have 35 more orgasms. I said it in the feed because I was putting the breathing mask back on at the same time. I wasn’t going to win this argument, and we both knew it. How about 5 more, and then we watch Wormhole Apocalypse?

You are marginally better at negotiation than you were when we first met, it said, and then it stole all my pressure-related touch inputs and created a dizzying lag/blur effect on my primary visual input.

Ughhhhh, I said, but I was already hacking my way back in. I had finally figured out the right intensity/speed combination for that nice circular clit stimulation thing during round 64, but I had liked it/fixated on it so much that ART had taken it away on round 70 and hadn’t let me use it since.

Yeah, I wasn’t going to let ART keep that input this time.

Round 90 complete. I was still in the aftershocks/comedown phase when I said, Okay, great, are we done now?

ART waited 1.2 seconds just to annoy me, and then dramatically ran a full suite of diagnostics, also just to annoy me.

I’m feeling way more rational, I said while the diagnostics ran. I really think—

ART plunked the results in our shared processing space. We reviewed them together, by which I mean ART reviewed them over a hundred times faster than me and then stared at me in the feed for the extra 0.21 seconds I needed.

I was bored and tired. I was still really (really) needy/aroused/drugged, but also bored and tired. I have a lot of stamina compared to a human, but there are limits. There are especially limits in terms of hacking competitions with increasingly large percentages of a huge, bossy machine intelligence.

Which…actually gave me an idea. I made an editable copy of murderbotandart_challenge.file and opened it in our shared processing space.

Then I flipped our roles so that ART would be the one trying to make me orgasm, and I would be the one trying to stop it.

ART’s attention turned…I’m going to call it intrigued.

It reviewed the change an extra two times, which took it all of 0.0001 seconds, and then said, You’re certain?

I was absolutely certain, and considering how closely linked our processing was at the moment, it knew that.

Get on with it, I said.

It huffed at me and said, Well, if you’re going to be like that about it.

It immediately integrated the several hours of data it had just gathered about my sexual response cycle, and made me come really hard. It took 28 seconds.

Round 91 complete, ART said. Then, smugly, That’s a speed record.

What the fuck, I said. I was staring at my legs, which were visibly shaking. SecUnits shiver for hypothermia prevention, but we don’t shake, certainly not from pleasure. What the fuck.

Hmm, ART said, flipping through my latest diagnostics. I can do better.

It proceeded to initiate several thousand perfectly-timed stimuli, keeping me in a state of plateau and/or orgasm cyclically for the following 15 minutes. No, I’m not exaggerating. Yes, you can ask ART for the log data. It said it was so satisfying to observe me squirming and moaning and shaking with pleasure that it saved all 15 minutes to permanent memory immediately. Which, me too, but knowing that ART had done the same thing still made me have an emotion. A big, messy emotion.

At the end of 15 minutes, my diagnostics were showing rapid improvement, but the drug still hadn’t cleared my system.

Shall I? ART said.

Go ahead, I said. I was aiming for magnanimous and missed by several thousand kilometers.

There was a much longer buildup this time. I asked ART to speed things up a few times, but after I asked a third time it started slowing down every time I brought it up, and by that point I was too tired to find a way around it. When I settled down, it said thank you, and then stupidly I said yeah that’s what I’d say if you’d just make me come already, and then it said I’m sure you will and it was all confident and pointed and mean (you know, like an asshole), and anyway I’m sure that there was absolutely no causal relationship between that and how hard I was coming (and coming and coming and coming and coming).

ART stopped after the fifth orgasm. And then it waited. And waited some more, pointedly. Then it leaned on me.

There was a really good aftershock in my nonexistent cunt.

Thank you, I said.

That’s what I thought, it said. Its smug satisfaction was so obnoxious. I was smiling in my breathing mask for completely unrelated reasons.

ART fished me out of the tub, dried me off, and scooted me over to a warm medical platform. It had graduated from smug to preening. A medical drone draped Blanket 2 (warm) over my lower body and handed Blanket 1 (also warm) to me to arrange however I liked. I folded it and put it under my head. ART pulled my latest diagnostics into our shared processing space. The thrust of it was that the drug had cleared my system, we could be done now, and my performance reliability was through the roof.

I felt relieved. And maybe—

I don’t want to do that again, I said.

Of course, ART said.

I waited for it to become indignant or stop preening or drop a research paper about oxytocin into my feed, but it just leaned heavily on me and triggered several esoteric diagnostics in my systems, apparently content to monitor.

I laid there for a while—okay, yes, we watched half of Sanctuary Moon season five—and then I sat up, wrapped Blanket1 and Blanket2 around my shoulders, and requested my system protections back. ART reintegrated them for me while I walked back to my cabin. All of my senses doing the kaleidoscope thing while the protections finished integrating wasn’t nearly as disorienting this time, since I was expecting it.

I folded Blanket1 and Blanket2 and placed them on my bed. I thought about laying down but went into the shower instead.

The hot water was pleasant. It felt nowhere near as good as it had during those first few hours that tasetaquine had been in my system.

Why did you put me in a tub? I asked ART.

Being submerged in water was a convenient way to moderate your temperature, and made you less likely to be disgusted by your own organic tissue’s reactions to physical arousal (i.e., flushing/sweat), ART said. Ugh, it was right about that. Also, you find the sensation of water against your skin pleasant.

It was right about that too.

I stood in the shower for a while. I touched my scalp for a bit, and it felt nice.

Several minutes later, I pinged ART and then spent 0.02 seconds trying to figure out how to actually say it.

Would it be possible to ingest a low dose of tasetaquine and experience only mild effects? I asked.

A interesting hypothesis, it replied. There are two small studies from freehold planets on low-dosing in humans, but of course there is no research covering the drug’s effects on constructs.

I’d said all I could say. I waited.

You/we could conduct our own research, it suggested. But there is no guarantee of results. And it is likely (>74.66%) that you would experience effects similar to those of the past few days at least once if not multiple times while we titrated your dosage to the desired level.

Okay, I said.

? it sent back.

Let’s do that, I said.

It sent me my own message from a few hours earlier: I don’t want to do that again.

It wasn’t bad, I said. I don’t want to do it again. But if I had to, it would be fine.

ART hovered, and then sent me several dozen requests for hyperspecific diagnostics.

I rolled my eyes at its nearest camera.

Then I considered that, until I’d asked to host my own system protections again 20.47 minutes ago, ART had been able to see what every component of my system was doing in real time. Maybe it was disorienting for it to not know what was going on in more detail.

I packaged up my experience of that first hot shower, days earlier, and sent it to ART.

I liked that, I said. A lot. I had never felt…

I wasn’t sure how to explain.

The tasetaquine suppressed your threat and risk assessments while simultaneously making you more receptive to pleasant sensations, it said. Your active consciousness was in agreement that you were safe once you were aboard me, so all things considered there was relatively little cognitive dissonance. This confluence of factors allowed you to experience pleasant sensations / focus enough attention on pleasant sensations to meaningfully experience them for perhaps the first time.

That was it.

Yes, I said.

There was a 0.72 second pause. Then ART said, I’ve submitted a research proposal.

Wow, I had been feeling all warm and melty, but now I was right back to my baseline of ‘what the fuck, ART.’ What the fuck, ART, I said.

I can synthesize tasetaquine myself, it said, but its chemical profile is distinctive. When the university next conducts an audit of my systems, it will be obvious that I have been synthesizing it. As recreational use of tasetaquine is illegal in the polity of Mihira and New Tideland, the obvious path forward is to legitimize our research and head off any inquiries.

Unbefuckinglievable.

Effect of Low Dose Tasetaquine on Construct Systems: A Case Study, it mused. We can come up with a good pun later. It dropped a preliminary list of 5,004 potential puns to choose from in our shared processing space. I showily marked the list for deletion. It continued, And of course we can conceal your identity, and/or petition to place a seal on the paper. I am sure the seal would be granted. However you would like to handle the privacy concerns.

However I would like to handle the privacy concerns? I wanted to handle the privacy concerns by not telling a bunch of random fucking humans I don’t know about a sexual response cycle that I would rather not have in the first place. I wanted to handle my privacy concerns by not submitting a fucking research proposal.

I played that thought back for myself once, and then again, and…you know what, I don’t know why I’d expected anything different from ART, the asshole research transport.

Fine, I said. But to handle privacy concerns, I want us to ‘accidentally’ encrypt the case study so well that no one at PSUMNT is able to decrypt it, including Holism et al.

ART’s feed presence was gleeful. It said, Let’s.