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Chapter Text

When I left Gurathin’s apartment, I was 96.7% confident that I wasn’t going to freak out about what had happened, but then I got back to my room and immediately freaked out about it. So much for my threat assessment module. Whatever, I already knew it was a piece of crap anyways. 

Okay, that’s a lie. Kind of. The first thing I actually did when I got back to my room was replay the clip I had saved of Gurathin putting his fingers in his mouth while looking at my drone camera. It made me experience the same cognitive delay as it had before, so I did a complete system reboot and played the clip again. Same result. 

Then I started freaking out. 

After it was over, Gurathin had called what had happened sex, but none of my metrics for sexual activity mapped to what we had done at all. Maybe there was another term that was more applicable. Did humans have a word for when two people were in the same room together and one of those people was pursuing sexual gratification but the other one wasn’t, and neither of them were touching each other, but also the second person was hardwired to the first one and kind of, sort of participating/trying to provoke reactions in the first person via the wired connection, and also the first person was an augmented human and the second person was a SecUnit who really didn’t know what it was doing? 

Probably not.

I must have been malfunctioning, because I queried the stations data banks for anything regarding the word ‘sex,’ which pulled up about two and a half million results in the span of nanoseconds and was immediately so overwhelming that I canceled the query and erased it from my data logs. Then I went and stood in the corner for six minutes. 

Had Gurathin and I had sex? I had no idea. The fact that ‘yes’ was a possible answer to that question (and also Gurathin’s answer to it) made my performance reliability rating drop by seven percentage points, and my threat assessment module to increase by four. Oh, so now it decided to start working again. 

If we had had sex– and there my thought pattern relays buffered while trying to grasp the concept – I knew that I had done a lot of things that you definitely shouldn’t do during sex. Like taking complete control over Gurathin’s augments without asking. And putting my hand around his throat, also without asking. Just because he had liked it when the program did it didn’t mean he would like it when I did it. I mean, he had. But I hadn’t known that. 

Preservation culture put a lot of emphasis on communication and talking about things before you did them, particularly when it came to sexual contact, and I hadn’t done any of those things. Gurathin hadn’t seemed mad when I left, but now that his body wasn’t flooded with hormones and feel-good chemicals anymore, he would be realizing that, too. And he would probably hate me for it. Shit. 

Sex or no sex, I had completely and totally fucked things up. So, I did what any SecUnit would do in my situation: I avoided the problem.

.   .   .

Avoiding Gurathin was easy. I could access his public schedule in the feed, and my drone was still following him around (though I hadn’t tuned into its visual or audio channels since what I was now labelling in my files as The Incident). If my drone reported that he was getting too close, I could just change trajectory or slip into a different corridor. He definitely knew I was avoiding him, but I thought he probably appreciated the distance, too, considering the sheer magnitude of my planetary-system-sized fuck up.

Avoiding actually thinking about what had happened proved to be… more difficult. 

At first, I just did what I normally do when I’m trying to distract myself from something, which is watch Sanctuary Moon. I got twenty four episodes in before I realized that it wasn’t working like it usually did, and I was still thinking about Gurathin. That was a problem. I considered deleting my memory of the entire Incident, but eventually decided against that. It probably wouldn’t even have worked anyway, because Gurathin would inevitably bring it up, and then I would have to go trudging through my piles of deleted data to see what the hell he was talking about, get super mortified, and end up in the same position I was already in. No thanks.

I really needed to delete the video footage of The Incident that I’d saved from the drone, though, because instead of watching Sanctuary Moon, I just kept replaying it over and over again. I still didn’t know why I was doing that (probably some kind of compulsive systems glitch), but every couple of hours, I would loop it on a ten minute cycle and get the same cognitive delay and slow, warm feeling in my lower stomach. Then a few more hours would go by, and I would loop it for another ten minutes. Eventually I got sick of not being able to regulate my own behavior and set up a three day encrypted lock on the video so that I wouldn’t look at it anymore. Hopefully after the time elapsed, whatever was malfunctioning would have resolved itself.

I spent the first two days after I encrypted the file in my room, alternating between watching Sanctuary Moon, some new show called Intergalactic Reporter Blue, and staring at my wall. 

On the third day, Mensah messaged me in the feed. 

SecUnit, how are you? 

Well, that was ominous. 

Fine, I said. 

Really? she said. That’s good. We hadn’t heard from you in a few days, so I thought I’d check in.

Ugh. For the humans of Preservation Station, ‘checking in’ really meant ‘about to pry for unnecessary details regarding your emotional wellbeing.’ It made me miss the days when all I had to do to ‘check in’ was give a half-assed status report.

I’m doing fine, I repeated, hoping that she would accept that as an answer and go away. I had other, bigger things to avoid. 

Right, she said, but the metadata was practically hemorrhaging her disbelief. Well, if you aren’t fine, you know where to find me. 

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. After a few minutes, I felt her disconnect from the feed, which was a huge fucking relief. 

On the fourth day, the encryption on the memory timed out, and I watched the video clip again, one hundred and twenty-seven times in a row. 

By the fifth day, I had a stomach ache. 

Having a stomach ache should have been impossible for me, considering that I have no stomach, so that was really fucking great, by which I mean that it was cause for mild concern. (Okay, maybe it was cause for more than mild concern, but I was dealing with a lot of other stuff, so it didn’t make it onto the ‘serious issue’ list. Sue me.) SecUnits don’t have stomachs, but we do have a lot of wiring, tubing, and other inorganic stuff we need down there, so having something go wrong with that area was still pretty bad. And it hurt – a lot. SecUnits also don’t get sick, so unless I was uniquely cursed in that regard, I was experiencing a very real, potentially dangerous malfunction with my inorganic components. I ran a systems diagnostic, which only returned that I was functioning at 87% of my physical capacity and was within operational parameters. Of fucking course. The company never built more detail than that into our self-diagnostic routines, because a SecUnit who is aware that it is dying is much more dangerous than a SecUnit who isn’t. 

I wasn’t dying. Probably. Yet. I dialed my pain sensors down and considered my options. First, I needed to figure out what the malfunction was. If I had still had access to my repair cubicle, I wouldn’t even have to figure that part out – I could have just put myself in repair mode and watched my shows while the cubicle did its work – but for obvious reasons, Preservation Station didn’t have repair cubicles for SecUnits. Ratthi and Arada were still updating Preservation’s MedSys to be compatible with bot constructs, so going there wasn’t an option either, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to let some random engineer rummage around my insides. 

So, I was kind of just fucked. Turns out, if you’re a rogue SecUnit, and you happen to be broken, it’s pretty hard to find someone who knows how to fix you. I almost considered pinging Gurathin, then immediately discarded that possibility. Instead, I checked the location of my other drones, saw that Mensah’s was in her quarters, and decided to go there. Maybe she would know what to do. 

.   .   .

Mensah’s door notified her that I was outside, then a few seconds later slid open to reveal her standing in the entranceway.

“SecUnit,” she said, smiling. “What a lovely surprise.” 

“May I come in?” I asked. 

“Yes! Yes, of course. Always.” She moved away from the doorway and gestured for me to go inside. I noted that she was wearing her feed and briefly wondered if I had interrupted a call with her children. I had been in her station quarters before, but every time I was there, I was struck by just how Mensah they felt. The room was practical, but still warm and welcoming. Like her. 

The door closed, and she turned to look at me, obviously waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. 

“Well, are you going to tell me why you’ve shown up at my door this evening, or shall I guess?” she finally asked. “Not that I don’t appreciate the visit, SecUnit, but we both know it isn’t like you to make house calls.” 

She was right, but hey. I wasn’t looking at her, because I was watching through my drones, but I still could feel her eyes on me. 

“Don’t look at me.” I wouldn’t be able to say what I needed to say if she was looking directly at me. Mensah immediately averted her eyes, which is another reason why she’s my favorite human. Now I just had to tell her what was wrong with me, which was going to be about as easy as fighting a Combat SecUnit, which is to say: not at all. 

I reverted to the technical explanation. “I believe I am experiencing a moderate-to-severe malfunction in the lower half of my internal inorganic systems.” 

Mensah kept her eyes averted, but when she spoke, she sounded worried. “And by moderate-to-severe, you mean…?”

I considered my response carefully, because I didn’t want to freak her out. Humans didn’t operate well when they were freaked out. “Should it go unaddressed, it could potentially jeopardize my long-term functionality.”

“Potentially jeopardize your long-term functionality,” she repeated back to me. “You mean it might be life-threatening.” 

That was certainly a possibility.

“I’m unable to say without further examination,” I told her. 

“Well, I’ll call Gurathin down here right now, and he can take a look at you to see what–”

Oh fuck, no. Fear zinged down the wiring of my spinal column. 

“Don’t,” I said immediately, before I could think of something better and way less suspicious to say.  

Mensah frowned. “SecUnit,” she said, “Gurathin is the only one of us with any practical experience working with the kind of proprietary technology that makes up your inorganic systems. I know it’s not pleasant, but he won’t harm you in any way.” 

I knew that. But I also absolutely, 100% could not see Gurathin right now. 

“Isn’t there anybody else on the Station?” I asked. 

Mensah’s frown deepened. “No, there isn’t. And you know that.” 

“Don’t call Gurathin,” I said again. “I’ll… figure something out.” I turned to leave before she could stop me. 

“Did something happen between you and Gurathin that I’m not aware of?” Mensah asked. My knee joint malfunctioned and locked in place.

“No.” As soon as the word was out of my mouth, I knew I had responded way too quickly. Most people probably wouldn’t pick up on it, but Mensah would. Fuck. 

“SecUnit,” she said exasperatedly, “if you’re refusing Gurathin’s help just because of some disagreement between you two…”

“It’s not that.” I was so glad that I was facing the door and not her, because I was pretty sure that my face was doing something I really didn’t want it to do.

“Then what is it?” She sounded upset. I didn’t like making Mensah upset, but I also couldn’t talk about what had happened.

“It’s private.” 

Mensah sighed. “Whatever issues you have with Gurathin are your own business, SecUnit, and I hope you know by now that I will always respect that.” Her voice hardened. Uh oh. “But if you are endangering your own wellbeing because you can’t talk about whatever obviously happened between the two of you, then I’m afraid ‘it’s private’ isn’t going to cut it as an explanation for why you won’t seek Gurathin’s help.”

I dialed my pain sensors back up to assess how bad the situation really was and nearly doubled over (to humans, it would just look like I shuddered for a second, which is the SecUnit equivalent of writhing on the floor in agony). Okay, so whatever was wrong had gotten worse. Like, a lot worse. Which meant I needed diagnostics and repairs immediately. Which meant…

“SecUnit.” 

Fuck, I was going to have to tell her, wasn’t I? 

“SecUnit,” Mensah said again, “if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going to have to–”

“Gurathin and I–” I started, but my vocal relay couldn’t complete the sequence and started to buffer. “We–” 

We what? Engaged in something that might have been sex but might not have been, and now I was freaking out because I didn’t know which one it was? I didn’t know how to explain my feelings to her. Hell, I didn’t even know what I was feeling. Why does everything involving humans have to be so hard?

“Had an argument?” Mensah guessed. 

“No.” 

“A disagreement, then?” she pressed.

“No.” Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Well, what?” 

I took an unnecessarily deep breath, then tried again. Maybe something vague could do the trick. “There was an Incident.” 

“An incident,” she repeated.

Fine, so I should have known that wasn’t going to work, but I was panicking, okay? Cut me some slack.

“An incident that afterwards, Gurathin referred to as engaging in…” my vocal relay timed out again and tried to buffer, but I forced it to push through the error it was throwing. “Sex.” 

Holy shit. I had actually said it.

“You and Gurathin had sex?” Mensah asked, and I cringed. 

“I– don’t know.” How fast could I throw myself out of the nearest airlock?

“But because of that, you now won’t see him, even though you need his expertise.”

This was so, so much worse than suffocating to death in space. Or experiencing any number of other horrible, painful ways to die, really. Hell, I would even take an acid bath at this point. I’d swim fucking laps in it. 

“Because you didn’t like it?” Mensah pressed again, and I felt the band that had been winding up tight within me for the past week snap.

“I don’t know!” I shouted. My knee joint finally unlocked, and I whipped around to face her. She looked taken aback, and I instantly regretted modulating my volume. “I’m sorry.”  

“It’s alright,” she said. “I understand that this is a new and stressful situation.”

I took another unnecessarily deep breath. In for a credit…

“I– didn’t hate what I did with Gurathin.” I shut off my drone feeds so that I didn’t have to look at Mensah at all – that’s how difficult this was. My entire visual feed went black. “I just don’t like that it might have been sex.”

“Because that would mean you like sex,” Mensah finished the thought. “Or at least, some version of it.” Well, at least I didn’t have to say that part. Thank fuck. “Have you considered talking with Gurathin about this?” she asked. 

Of course I had, I’m not an idiot. 

“I believe that course of action would be unwise at this time.”

I expected her to argue with me, but instead she was silent for a while. 

“You know,” she finally began, “that it doesn’t necessarily have to matter?” 

What? “What?” I said. I reconnected to one of my drone’s visual inputs.

“Sex is nebulous.” She smiled gently at me and affection skittered through my relays, despite the dire situation at hand. “Sometimes, it’s one thing, and sometimes it’s another. There is no one definition of it, not even for humans. What one person considers sex, another may not consider sex in a million years.” Her brown eyes looked at me in the soft lighting of her quarters. “I knew a woman when I was in school,” she continued, her smile growing broader, “who insisted that she was having sex with the sun. And one day I asked her how she did it, and she said that every morning, she just took her cup of coffee out on her patio and looked up. That was it. That was sex for her.” 

Well, that sounded really fucking stupid. I mean, who would want to do that with the sun? It was a big ball of gas in the sky that was also on fire. For every time I thought that I had finally learned the true extent of human weirdness, there was a human out there who wanted to have sex with the fucking sun. 

“What does that have to do with me and Gurathin?” I asked. 

Mensah shrugged. “Maybe what’s sex for him isn’t sex for you. Or maybe sex can be whatever you want it to be. You’re not bound by what we humans do. You’re a SecUnit. Maybe what you do isn’t human sex, it's SecUnit sex.” 

Oh. I’d actually never thought about it like that.

The door chime rang.

“I called Gurathin over in the feed about ten minutes ago,” Mensah said, answering my question before I even asked it. That sneaky little fucker – she’d been stalling me this whole time, distracting me away from her feed communications by forcing me to engage in (ugh) feelings talk. “You’re in pain, and you need someone to look you over. He’s the best one to do it.” She raised the eyebrow that meant no nonsense. “Come in!”

The door slid open to reveal Gurathin standing outside it, mobile toolkit in hand. His expression was one of schooled neutrality, and I wondered if that meant that he was as nervous as I felt. He stepped over the threshold.

“Mensah,” he said, nodding at her before his eyes rested on me. “SecUnit.” 

“Gurathin,” I acknowledged. This was fine. I could be normal about this. 

“I would offer you the use of my quarters,” Mensah said, “but I think you’d probably prefer to do this in your own room, wouldn’t you, SecUnit?”

Yes, yes, I would. I nodded. 

“Good, then it’s settled,” she said, smiling as if we hadn’t just had a full conversation about why this was the Worst Idea Ever. “Gurathin, you’ll run the diagnostic in SecUnit’s quarters.” Over the feed, she said to me, Deep breaths. Gurathin will figure out what’s wrong with you, and then you two can figure out the rest of what you need to figure out later. Don’t panic.

.   .   .

I panicked the whole walk back to my room. Gurathin also didn’t say anything, and when I tapped the feed connection between us, I could feel the faint buzz of nervousness rattling around inside. It wasn’t the same kind of nervousness as last time, though. He was nervous-bad, not nervous-good, which boded super well for pretty much absolutely nothing. I considered using my superior speed to outrun him and escape the diagnostic altogether, but what would be the point? Mensah would find out eventually and figure out some other way to trap us in a room together until he could figure out what was wrong with my internal systems. 

Even with my pain sensors dialed all the way down, I was beginning to feel lightheaded and kind of glitchy, so I didn’t have that long to avoid this anyway. I’d just have to suck it up and let Gurathin figure out what the problem was.

When we reached my room, Gurathin still didn’t speak, just busied himself with configuring the little maintenance drone he had brought with him in his toolkit. I pulled up a chair and sat down on it, waiting. (I know, sitting isn’t my preferred state, but I thought I would need to be seated for the diagnostic, which turned out to be correct.) When the drone was operational, I felt him connect to it with his augments and turn back towards me. 

“I need you to take off your shirt,” he said.

My thought relay stuttered for 0.02 seconds. “What?” 

Gurathin’s cheeks darkened a shade, and he quickly looked back at the drone instead of me. “Mensah said the malfunction was in the lower half of your systems. I need to access the maintenance panel on your torso.” 

Oh. Right. I leaned forward and pulled my shirt off, depositing it on the floor beside me. ART’s adjustments had made the seams of my skin paneling a lot less visible, but Gurathin would still be able to see them with his augments, if he was looking for them. The panel on my torso was shaped like an upside down trapezoid and started 6.5 cm below my pectorals. The lower seam ran in a line between my hip joints. 

Gurathin studied it, then powered up the drone. “Are you able to remove the panelling on your own, or do you need assistance?” 

“I can do it.” I reached around in my code for the unsealing mechanism, ignoring the  rapidly climbing percentages of my threat assessment module as I did so. The panel decompressed with a low hiss and I pressed at the corners of it with my fingers to release it fully. It came away in my hands, and I examined its smooth mesh interior, where the organic musculature was bonded to the wiring and mechanical components. Gurathin’s vitals spiked for a split second in my monitor before returning to normal levels – probably just his regular human reaction to watching a SecUnit remove a part of itself like it was nothing, or to seeing my internal components. I don’t know why that caused a weird sinking feeling in my organics. SecUnit bodies were offputting to humans – I knew that already. There was no reason why Gurathin would feel any different.

The drone hovered in front of my exposed internals, its camera no doubt transmitting a magnified visual of them to Gurathin so he could perform the necessary inspection. I was curious as to what I looked like inside. I had my schematics saved in my permanent storage, of course, so I knew what components went where, but I’d never really seen it, unless you count the glimpses of myself I’d gotten on missions where something had blasted a hole in me. I wanted to ask Gurathin to send me a copy of the drone’s visual feed while he worked, but then I remembered what had happened the last time I’d gotten curious about something where Gurathin was involved and decided against it. If I slid back in the chair some and positioned my drones at the right angles, I could see enough of what was going on.

When humans had performed maintenance on me in the past, it had always been done by company techs, and they had always deactivated and magnetized me to the maintenance table while they worked – part of the company safety protocol to ensure that I didn’t suddenly go rogue and kill everyone in the room. Not that I had much interest in doing that, but hey, no one ever asked me. So, this would be the first time I’d actually been, you know, fully present for a maintenance session. Of course, it had to be with fucking Gurathin. 

Tiny little arms extended from the drone, and I watched Gurathin’s hands twitch as he guided it closer towards me. 

“I would say this might tickle,” he said, finally breaking the silence, “but I actually have no idea how it will feel for you.”

I don’t have touch receptors on the inside of me, not like I do on my hands or the rest of my skin, but I do have pain receptors, which, even though I had them dialed down at the moment, would be enough to alert me if something was going horribly wrong. Two of the drone’s arms reached inside me, one of them gathering up the bundle of wires that covered my auxiliary power core, the other pulling the surrounding wires back to look deeper inside me. It didn’t hurt, but watching them invade my body made my throat feel tight, and my threat assessment module started to tick up. The company techs had used similar maintenance drones. Half-memories of being restrained by the maintenance table as I was taken apart and reassembled jostled for attention in my memory cortex, and I tried to ignore them and remind myself of where I was and who I was with. Gurathin was the one controlling the drone, not a company tech, and for all Gurathin’s faults, he wouldn’t ever hurt me on purpose. Would not erase me. The tightness in my throat didn’t ease, but the third slim, metal arm of the drone slid inside me, pushing past my auxiliary power core and even deeper, probing around my torso and heading back towards my fluid storage units, pushing and prodding and rummaging around inside me. The urge to rip it out of me grew stronger as my threat assessment module kept going up and up and up, until– 

No. Nope. Bad. Badbadbadbadbad. I fumbled for the feed and sent Gurathin an abort message, too panicked to even form my thoughts into human speech patterns. I immediately felt the drone’s arms retract from my internals, and the pressure in my throat relaxed slightly. 

“SecUnit?” Gurathin was saying. He looked concerned. “SecUnit, are you okay?” 

“I’m fine,” I said, again a little too quickly. I caught sight of the maintenance drone in one of my own drones’ camera and felt cold. 

“You’re not fine,” he said. “You sent me an abort code.”

Okay, so I wasn’t fine. How very perceptive of him.

“The company techs,” I said, keeping my voice in careful, SecUnit neutral, “they used similar maintenance drones.” 

Understanding, subtle but present, dawned in Gurathin’s eyes, and thank fuck for that, because I really didn’t want to have to explain it any further. He nodded. 

“Would it help if you shut your eyes?” he asked. “Or if I explained what I was going to do as I did it?” 

“Could you just–” I couldn’t believe I was about to ask for this, but I really hated the way the drone made me feel, and I didn’t want to risk a potentially even more embarrassing breakdown by using it again. “Could you just use your hands, instead?” 

Gurathin swallowed. “I could, but it will be less precise. I may not be able to–”

“That’s fine,” I said. At this point, I just wanted to get it over with.

His vitals spiked again – likely nerves resulting from having to conduct the diagnostic by hand (or from having to stick his hands inside me at all) – but he nodded. “Okay.” 

I watched as he powered down the drone and removed a bottle of heavy duty sanitizer from his toolkit instead. He poured it into his palms, then spread it all over his hands and his hand augment. I appreciated him taking precautions not to get his dirty human oils all over my internal components. 

“Do you have something to kneel on?” he asked. I frowned, not understanding, and a spark ran down my spine. Weird. “I, um, need to be at eye level to do this,” he explained. 

That made sense. “There’s a pillow on the bed.” 

He retrieved it, and then I watched as he lowered himself to his knees in front of me. Unthinkingly, I spread my legs to give him better access, and he shuffled forward into the extra space, flushing slightly, like he had when we– I deleted the data before I even had time to complete the thought. That’s not what this was. 

On his knees, Gurathin looked… correct. I deleted that thought, too. 

I’m going to touch you, now. Gurathin switched over to talking in the feed. Let me know if anything is uncomfortable, or if I should stop.

I sent an affirmative ping and watched through my drones as his right hand brushed over my wiring, gentler than the drone arm had been. Carefully, he pulled the wiring to the side, exposing my auxiliary power supply again. I found myself grateful that I didn’t have touch sensors inside me – it gave me the ability to focus on the interesting visuals from my drone rather than on the uncomfortable feeling of his hands on me.

Everything seems okay with your power supply, Gurathin said, running his hand over the body of it, checking for abnormalities. No corrosion or unusual energy fluctuations. 

His fingers skimmed over the circuitry of my backup memory hard drives, checking the jumper pins and the soldering on the connection points where the drives were wired into the rest of my system. 

All good here. His fingers brushed over the jumper pins again. You’re well made. 

That almost certainly wasn’t true, but it made me feel… weird. Warm. 

Two of his fingers probed deeper inside me, presumably searching for my fluid intake valve, which would be the logical next thing to check. I watched them disappear into my wiring, seeking out their target. In the drone feed, Gurathin’s hands looked… elegant, I decided was the correct word. They were efficient and capable, the way good code should be, and there was something mesmerizing about seeing them push into me. The linked memory of Gurathin pushing those same painted fingers between his parted lips glitched out my memory cortex for 0.5 seconds before I wrestled the visual back into its proper file. Now was not the time. 

Gurathin frowned, his fingers pausing in their exploration. 

What? I asked. 

Your processor module is getting warm, he said. It might be overheating.

My processor is fine, I said impatiently. Just find the actual problem and fix it. I really needed him to get this over with – I didn’t want to experience any more unusual reactions to Gurathin’s proximity than I already had. 

Gurathin glanced up at me, unamused. What do you think I’m doing down here on my knees? 

I didn’t answer that question. His fingers disappeared back into the wires in my torso until they reached the fluid intake valve that circulated coolant through my systems. I watched in my drone feed as he twisted his hand, feeling around inside me. I could see him parsing the data he was getting from his hand augment, his eyes flicking back and forth as he read the invisible outputs. Then his hand stilled, and he looked up at me.  

“I think you have a leak.” 

“What?” 

A leak should have been impossible. SecUnits don’t get leaks unless we’ve gotten pieces of us blown up in combat, and I hadn’t gotten blown up in months.

“Theres a micro tear in your fluid valve that’s allowing coolant to leak out into the rest of you,” he said. “It probably corroded some of the wires in the surrounding area, which is what set your pain sensors off.” 

“That can’t happen.” I was a shitty piece of equipment, sure, but I wasn’t that shitty. I couldn’t just develop micro tears out of nowhere.

“It’s possible it was caused by overuse of the system.” Gurathin removed his hand from my wiring, and I immediately missed the visual input of it inside me – which, what the fuck? “The fluid itself is acidic,” Gurathin continued, turning away from me to retrieve his toolkit, still staying on his knees, “so if you were cycling too much coolant in too short a time frame, it could have eaten away at the tubing and caused the leak.” 

That was a dumb explanation, because my system only needed extra cooling off when I was exerting a lot of energy in a fight, or occasionally when I experienced high levels of stressful inputs over and over and– oh. 

Oh, that was so, so stupid. I had malfunctioned because I was worried about what had happened with Gurathin? Someone was pulling the world’s worst prank on me, and it was really, really not funny. 

I could see Gurathin spinning possibilities in his head, too. I needed to distract him before he came to the same conclusion I had, and we had to actually (please, no) talk about it. 

“Can you repair it?”

He nodded, rummaging around in his tool kit. “I have a sealant patch for the valve. The wiring may take a little more work, because I don’t know which ones are corroded, but I should be able to remove the affected portions and splice them back together once I figure that out.”

I nodded. “Do it.” 

Gurathin hesitated, looking at the wall directly past my head. “I know, ah, the drone isn’t your favorite, but…” he swallowed, “if your goal is to get me out of here as quickly as possible, it would get this done a lot faster than I can on my own.”

“No drones.” The words were in and out of my vocal array before my neural processor was even aware that I was saying them. “I mean– your hands are fine.” 

Truthfully, I wanted to watch Gurathin’s hands work inside of me again. I didn’t investigate which subroutine that thought had originated from. 

Gurathin took a deep breath through his nose, looking very much like he’d swallowed a dead aquatic fauna of some kind, which wasn’t good. He opened and closed his mouth a few times before speaking. 

“My hand augment isn’t as sophisticated as the drone. I won’t be able to identify exactly which wires need replacing without, um, access to more data.” He glanced back down at his tool kit as he said it, but he sounded strained. Wound up. 

More data meant that he needed access to my internal specs, which meant hardwiring. Which was a problem. His tone clearly indicated that he was uncomfortable with the idea, likely because of the (stupid fucking useless construct) liberties I had taken with the hardwire last time. Shit. A human (idiot idiot–) in my place would know how to talk about this, how to give reassurance. A human would know how to apologize. I didn’t have a subroutine for reassurance (–idiot, he hates you now), so I did what I always do when I have no fucking clue what to say and pulled something from Sanctuary Moon. 

“You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t hurt you.” 

Gurathin’s expression did something sour, his jaw tightening. “That’s not exactly what I’m worried about,” he muttered. 

Okay, so clearly I had picked the wrong dialogue option. Maybe he would have liked the line from season 17, episode 138 better. Whatever, it was too late now. 

Gurathin bit the inside of his cheek and was quiet for a moment. 

“Just don’t– don’t go into my augments, okay?” he said finally. I could tell through the drone cameras that he still was avoiding looking at me. Usually, I would have preferred that, but now it just felt wrong. 

“I won’t,” I said, suddenly feeling like more than just wires had corroded inside my stomach. “I–” I started, then clamped my mouth shut as my processor caught up to what was queued in my vocal array: I’m sorry. “--won’t,” I finished.

Gurathin gave a sharp nod. “Good.” 

He still sounded tense, which didn’t make any sense, because I had just promised that I wouldn’t go into his augments again. His mouth was doing the thing where it got small and pulled down at the corners, but he didn’t say anything else and pulled the hardwire out of his pocket to connect it to his data port. He still wasn’t really looking at me when he handed me the other end. I took it and connected it to myself, making sure to stay on my side of the wire. 

I’m going to disconnect the part of you I’ll be working on from the rest of your systems, so I don’t get electrocuted, he said. I wasn’t sure why he’d switched back to the feed. Maybe it was easier for him to concentrate when he wasn’t talking out loud. 

Okay, I said. I felt him moving around in our connection, searching through my protocols for the switch to turn the part that he needed to work on off. I wasn’t used to having a human poking around in my programming like this. If anyone had ever done it before, I didn’t remember it. Finally, he found the switch, and I felt power drain away from some of my internals. It made me uncomfortable to be partially powered down in front of him. I felt exposed. Vulnerable. 

I’m going to touch you again, now. The metadata on that was… weird. I didn’t know how to parse it, and I got the vague impression that he was trying to shield it from me. My immediate thought was to hack into his augments and find out what metadata he was hiding, but then I remembered that I’d already told him I wouldn’t pry, and because I now have some annoyingly human sense of morality or ethics or something, I didn’t. 

Okay, I repeated, and watched in my drone feeds as his hand brushed through my wiring again, finding the bundle closest to my fluid intake valve and tugging at it gently until he could see it better. I could feel the tugs like a dull pressure in my torso cavity. 

I’m patching your fluid valve with this. His other hand reached for the small sealing strip in his toolkit, showed it to me, and then proceeded to press it firmly onto the valve. Should only take a second for the patch to bond. I watched through the drone as the material of the patch melted into the rest of the valve. There, he said.

“Thank you.” I’m not sure why I felt the need to thank him. Whatever the reason, it made Gurathin glance up at me and then away, so he evidently didn’t appreciate it very much. Then, his hands returned to my wiring, combing through the bundle to start separating the individual wires from each other. 

So, he started, what I’m going to do is use the hardwire connection to trigger a small electrical pulse in each wire. If the pulse gets interrupted, then we’ll know that wire is corroded, and I’ll tag it to be replaced. Alright?

I didn’t know why he was talking me through and asking my permission for everything. When the company techs had worked on me, they just did whatever it was that they needed (or wanted) to do to me. 

Fine, I said. There were only about twenty-five different wires in the bundle he had pulled out, so hopefully it would be over quickly. 

I felt Gurathin searching around in my protocols again. Triggering the first pulse, he said. 

The sharp spark of electricity zipped through me, and I locked my joints in place to prevent me from jolting at the sensation. It wasn’t bad, really, just unusual and new. If the torso panel with my muscular overlay had been in place instead of resting beside me, it probably would have clenched at the feeling. I wanted him to do it again, now that I was better prepared for the sensory input. 

That wire’s fine, he told me, slipping two nimble fingers under it to separate it from the rest of the bundle. I felt the dull tugging sensation in my stomach area again – less intensely this time, because it was only one wire and not the whole bunch. I wanted him to do that again, too. Huh. This whole thing was making me feel weird. Not bad weird, just weird weird. 

Next one, he said, and the electrical pulse ran through my second wire, hot and fast. I was glad my joints were locked. Good. Gurathin slipped his fingers under that wire too, and this time the tug compounded with the leftover heat in my wiring, and I nearly vocalized. 

Fuck. What was wrong with me? Maintenance had never felt like this before. 

Another one, he warned me, and shit, he was speeding up the time in between pulses as he worked on me more efficiently. The zing of the electricity ran all the way through me, and he sorted that wire out, too. I watched his hands through one of my drone feeds – his left hand buried in my wiring and the painted fingers of his right hand making the small movements I had come to associate with him navigating his augments. I saved the image to my permanent storage.

He sent the next three pulses in quick succession – pulse/tug, pulse/tug, pulse/tug – and it felt like my entire torso had been turned into one huge electrified wire, white hot and quivering with energy. My processor warmed, and I locked my jaw, too, because the inputs were so unusual that I was concerned my vocal array might throw a difficult-to-explain error. On impulse, I switched over my visuals to the drone that was farther away so that I could see how we both were arranged: me, seated, and Gurathin on his knees in front of me, one hand pushed wrist-deep into my torso. It made my internals heat, even without the electricity running through them – that must have been another malfunction. 

Gurathin shifted his weight from one knee to the other.

“Are you uncomfortable?” I asked. I’d had missions where I had to be on my knees or crawling around in uncomfortable mine shafts for hours at a time, and they had ranged from moderately uncomfortable to oh-fuck-please-get-me-out-of-here-now levels of awful. 

With you? he replied, and, okay, that was definitely not what I had meant, but it made the corroded feeling in my stomach come back. I stared at my drone in the corner.

“No. With kneeling for a long period of time,” I clarified. 

Oh. No. A wry smile flitted across Gurathin’s face. I mean, it’s a little uncomfortable, he amended, but I’ve knelt for a lot longer than this before.

I wondered what scenarios had required him to do that in the past, how long he’d been required to kneel for, and if he’d had bruises on his knees afterwards. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to know the answers to those questions so badly. 

“Are you–” I started, thought better of it, and then asked the question anyway (my risk assessment module must have been offline for maintenance or malfunctioning, I wasn’t sure which). “Are you uncomfortable with me?”

Gurathin’s face did something weird, and his cheeks reddened slightly. I made a note of that in my logs. 

No, he said. His vital readings fluctuated. 

He could have been lying. Humans lie about how they feel about other humans all the time.

Good, I replied in the feed. The blush on his cheeks deepened, which was… not something I could afford to devote processing power to right now. Not while his hand was tangled in my wiring. 

Next pulse, he said, but his subvocalizations wavered slightly. Something about our conversation had knocked him off balance, and I wanted to push him further in that direction. My memory algorithm tried to autofeed me a clip from last week of him laying on his bed, flushed and panting, and I immediately deleted it. Fuck. Bad Murderbot. The urge to push Gurathin around was becoming a little of a problem… 

(If I just took over his sensory array again, I could make him feel like he’d felt last week.)

…okay, so, maybe it was becoming a big problem. It unsettled me, because I don’t get impulses like that – or I hadn’t until recently. It was like someone had installed a new programming module in me called make_gurathin_squirm.exe. If I had known last week that asking Gurathin to run his sexual program for me would have resulted in this kind of total systems malfunction, I never would have… actually, I probably still would have done it, to be honest (no, I’m not gonna think about that, either).

The hot bolt of electricity ran through my wiring, but fizzled out before it could complete its circuit. The failure of the charge to get to its intended destination left me frustrated and a little bit restless, and I unlocked my joints to shift in the chair slightly. 

Are you okay? Gurathin asked me immediately. Of fucking course he would notice.

Fine, I assured him. I don’t know if he believed me or not.

This wire needs to be cut and respliced. He tugged on the wire in question, and I locked my joints again just in time to avoid a reaction. It shouldn’t hurt, he said. 

I wasn’t worried about it hurting. I was worried about it being… something else. Something that I didn’t understand.

Gurathin dug around in his toolkit for the wirecutters, and then I watched as he used them to carefully snip the corroded section away from the wire. I didn’t feel anything physically, but it was weird anyway, watching him literally cut away a part of me. I didn’t know how to feel about it. He traded the wirecutters for a small knife, which he used to slice the protective plastic insulation away from each of the ends and expose the wiring itself. I retargeted one of my drones on Gurathin’s chipped varnished fingernails as they delicately twisted the exposed wire ends together and wrapped electrical sealant around the newly repaired connection. 

“You’ve done this before,” I observed.

Gurathin glanced up at me for a second before responding. “When I lived on the Corporation Rim, I used to repair my own augments.” Wow, okay. That sounded difficult. And also really dangerous. “I couldn’t afford to go to a technician, so I just…” he shrugged, trailing off. “Picked up stuff that way.”  

That made a whole lot of things about Gurathin make more sense.

I’m going to test the new connection now, he continued in the feed. It’ll be a little bit of a bigger pulse this time – just need to make sure the new splice can handle your full electrical input. 

I barely had time to think the word fuck before he triggered the input in my protocols, and the live current came rolling through me with ten times the intensity of the others, heat zinging down the wire like blue lightning. 

That was when I learned that, apparently, I can make sound even when my jaw is locked.

Shit.

I felt Gurathin freeze, and I replayed the drone audio of my muffled vocalization back. Without thinking about what I was doing or why, I ran a memory bank pattern match analysis on the sound, and 0.02 seconds later, the results returned that– ohhhhh shit. 

The best pattern match for the data was the vocalizations I had saved from Gurathin last week. How was that even possible? I didn’t feel things like that, I didn’t–

Gurathin pulled his hands out of my wiring, and I shut my vocal array off entirely. 

Fuck – did I hurt you? he asked, urgency bleeding through the feed. His eyes scanned my internals for possible harm and I felt him running diagnostic checks on my components through the hardwire. I couldn’t look at him.  

No. 

I couldn’t do this. Fuck. Something was wrong with me. Seriously wrong. I was malfunctioning.

SecUnit, Gurathin chastised, his data firm in the feed. I can’t work on you if you won’t tell me when what I’m doing hurts. 

It doesn’t hurt, I snapped, and why the fuck was I saying that, when I could just pretend that what he’d done was painful instead of… not?

Gurathin hesitated in the feed. His vitals spiked, then fell. That was never good. I heard his breath stutter almost imperceptibly, then, slowly, he reached a hand back into my torso cavity and placed his palm flat on my processing core. I watched his vitals start to tick up again.

Your processor is really warm, he said after a few seconds. 

It was only an observation, but the data in the feed was too casual and controlled – almost blank. I searched for the accompanying metadata to his question and realized that he had managed to completely wall it off from me. That took a considerable amount of effort on his part – it would almost have been impressive, if it hadn’t been so irritating. 

We stayed like that with his hand on my processor for a few long seconds. In the dead silence of the room, I could hear the faint buzz of my internals on overdrive. Shit, shit, shit. 

Okay, he said eventually, still shielding his metadata.  So it doesn’t hurt. He paused again and swallowed. Does that mean it feels good?

My processing core whirred even louder in my ears.

“I… don’t know.” I took an unnecessarily deep breath and looked away from him. I watched in the drone feed as his hand crept from my processor core back up to my wiring. “Don’t–”

Do you want to find out? It shouldn’t have been possible to sound breathless in the feed, but that was how he sounded. I got the terrifying urge to wrap my hand around his throat again and make him sound like that for real. 

I opened my mouth to respond and realized that I’d forgotten to turn my vocal array back on. That was fine, because I had no fucking idea what I was going to say anyway. 

Before I could say anything, however, Gurathin ripped the hardwire from his data port and abruptly dropped our feed connection. 

“Sorry,” he said, pulling away from between my legs and standing up to take a few stumbling steps back. I missed the visual input of seeing him there almost immediately. “Sorry,” he repeated, looking everywhere but at me, “I don’t know what I was thinking, I–” He took a deep, shaky breath. “I know that what happened last week was a one-off, I know, and I have no right to expect a repeat performance, I just–” he stopped himself. “I had no right. We can finish the repair next week, when I– when I’ve…” Gurathin closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, breathing in sharply through his nostrils. “When I won’t react… like this,” he ground out. 

Hold on. What? I thought I was the one reacting weird. My vocal array finally came back online.

“I don’t understand,” I said. That was an understatement. My risk assessment module was fluctuating wildly and sending me so many warning signals that I had to mute it. 

The muscle in Gurathin’s jaw twitched with the force of him clenching it. He had crossed his arms tightly in front of himself, and he stared at the ceiling for an agonizing 34.8 seconds before responding. I wished he hadn’t shut off the feed connection – then I could at least know some of what was going on inside him. 

Finally, he took another deep breath and muttered something to himself. I replayed it back with enhanced audio in order to make sure I’d heard it correctly, but yeah, there it was.

“We can talk about this.” 

To tell the truth, I wasn’t so sure we could (or at least, I wasn’t sure that I could), but I wanted to hear what he had to say, so I waited. It was another 22.3 seconds before he said anything. 

“Your, ah, interest in my program last week was… unexpected. And,” Gurathin paused, obviously steeling himself for whatever confession he was about to make, “also one of the most fulfilling sexual experiences of my life. And I– I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about it since.” His face turned an interesting shade of red at the admission. “I thought that I could be professional about how I– how you make me feel, but obviously I can’t,” he exhaled heavily, “so. I’m sorry, SecUnit. I never meant–”

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it either,” I blurted out. Fuckkkkkk. Since when was I in the habit of divulging personal information to Gurathin, of all people? “I’ve been… experiencing malfunctions,” I explained awkwardly. I watched him through the drones as he finally lifted his head to look at me.

Gurathin regarded me warily. “What kind of malfunctions?” 

My threat assessment module spiked by twelve percent – fucking hell, this whole ‘talking it out’ thing sucked. I never should have said anything. The only idea I’d ever had that was actually worse than engaging with Gurathin’s sexual program last week was talking to him about it now. There was no way that I could have a conversation with him about any of this, especially not when he was standing in front of me and waiting for an answer, not after he’d made me feel like– like this, like I wanted to shove him around and make him turn red, like I wanted to hear those sounds he’d made over and over and– alright enough. I shut my visual inputs off, and everything went black. 

That was better. Calming. I started up an episode of Sanctuary Moon, scrubbed through the intro, then turned it off. I thought about shutting down entirely and waiting for Gurathin to leave, but it didn’t seem like he was going anywhere, and Gurathin could be an idiotically stubborn motherfucker when he wanted to be. For as much as I didn’t want to talk about this, we were already talking about it. Right now, apparently. 

He had asked me a question. So, very, very calmly, I pulled up the log of malfunctions that I had been keeping since last week, ignored the glitch in my voice box, and read it out.  

“Malfunctions included but not limited to: unregulated memory callbacks to the incident. Overheating of internal systems and unexplained sensations regarding routine maintenance procedures performed by Dr. Gurathin. Unusual reactions to visual and auditory stimuli where Dr. Gurathin is involved.” I paused and forced myself to execute the command to read the last item. “Unexplained urges to– to recreate the circumstances of the incident or similar incident. With Dr. Gurathin.” 

Gurathin was silent, so I cautiously picked my visual inputs back up. He was staring at me with a look I’d never seen before on his face, lips slightly parted as if in surprise, eyes locked onto my own. The blush that had bloomed on his cheeks spread down onto his neck and under the collar of his shirt. He looked… open, maybe? Unguarded in a way that was rare for him, and that made me want to… do something. 

I was getting pretty tired of not knowing what that something was.

“SecUnit,” Gurathin said quietly, carefully, “Would you like me to finish your repairs?”

Okay, well, that was not at all what I expected him to say. When I didn’t respond, Gurathin stepped forward and slowly picked up the hardwire from where it had fallen on the floor. He handed one end to me. 

Here. 

Confused, I took it from him and watched as he stepped even closer to me and connected the other end to himself. Were we really doing this again? Not knowing what else to do, I connected the wire to my data port and felt the connection firm up between us. I guess we were. I resisted the immediate urge to take over his augments and flood his sensors with phantom sensations, just to see how he’d react. Nope. Not doing that. He was going to finish my repairs, and I was going to sit there and act fucking normal about it. Gurathin bent down to grab the things he needed from his toolkit again. 

I’ll stay on my side of the wire, I promised him again awkwardly.   

You don’t have to, he said, still not looking at me, if– if you don’t want to. Oh, fuck, that made me feel weird. The look he was giving the toolkit turned mildly sheepish. You didn’t last time.

My stomach turned to static.

The correct Preservation protocol for invasive procedures is to ask before performing them, I said, the empty feeling in my gut spreading up into my chest. I broke protocol. 

Gurathin shrugged, his gaze shifting from the kit to the wall behind me as he stood back up. Not asking isn’t the worst thing you could have done.

Oh. Okay. There was obviously some baggage hanging behind that statement, but Gurathin clearly didn’t want to talk about it right now, and honestly, neither did I. I saved the info for future reference and tried to ignore the flash of anger that went through me at the thought of whatever had been done to him.

Then, I nearly gasped as I felt Gurathin lower the shields around his augments slowly, deliberately. I pinged him, and he glanced at me but didn’t say anything. What the hell? Gurathin was basically offering me the same access that I’d taken last time, the same ability to manipulate his sensory data, to affect him as I had affected him before, to make him feel warm everywhere and produce all those noises that I had saved and catalogued and replayed over and over. Did he– did he want me to do that again? 

How had he phrased it? One of the most fulfilling sexual experiences of his life, right?

Oh, this was a really bad idea. Still, the allure of the open, totally unguarded connection did things to my internals that I didn’t want to think about.  

So, I didn’t think. 

Carefully, I nudged at his augments, making damn sure that his shields were really as dismantled as they felt like they were through the wire. He let me in without resistance, and I sank into his systems, flooding his neural processors with my presence. I felt several of his programs glitch at the sheer weight of my processing system overpowering his. 

I couldn’t figure out how to ask him if everything was okay, so I pinged him again in the feed instead. Whatever I was doing – whatever we were doing – I wanted to make sure I was doing it right this time. He sent an affirmative ping back. Okay. That was good.

You still have some repairs to complete, I told him. I believe that requires you to be on your knees. 

Gurathin made a soft sound and sank to his knees instantly with one fluid motion. Fuck. I parted my legs again to allow him to slot better between them. His hands rested on his thighs, but I saw them twitch as his gaze locked in on my wiring, pupils dilating and vitals spiking. I felt him block an emotional impulse as it started to travel from him through the hardwire, and I carefully froze the code he’d patched in so the data stalled in the space between us. I wanted to know what Gurathin was feeling, but I didn’t want to force my way in. 

Show me, I told him. His jaw tensed, but after a few seconds he removed the patch code from our connection. My muscles clenched as a feeling I now could identify as arousal — Gurathin’s arousal —  surged back down through the hardwire. Oh. 

His reaction to seeing my internal systems earlier hadn’t been one of discomfort. It had been this. 

Wow, I said, and okay maybe that wasn’t the most suave thing to say in this situation, but it was all I could come up with, alright? Give me a break, I’d never done this before (except for the one time I had, but that was an accident). 

Yeah, was all Gurathin said in reply. Then, after 4.2 seconds went by, he asked, Can I touch you, SecUnit? His face remained neutral, but he sounded anticipatory and also kind of… reverent, maybe? I don’t know if I’m using that word right, but whatever. 

I wanted him to touch my wires again, but part of me also wanted to deny him even more. 

Not yet. 

I felt a slight spike in Gurathin’s pleasure through the hardwire. Did he like it when I denied him, too? Human sexuality was so strange. Gurathin obviously wanted me to grant his request, but he also liked it when I didn’t. Huh. Apparently there was a lot of weird shit that humans (or maybe it was just Gurathin?) were aroused by that didn’t show up in the scenes in media at all. 

This was different from a scene in my shows, or even Gurathin’s sexual program, though. I skipped the sex parts in media, and the whole program thing had been incidental. This wasn’t. And I wasn’t just curious anymore – I was choosing to be here. I was choosing to make this happen, and that was scary as fuck, but it also made my whole spinal column buzz with more than electricity. 

Fuck it. I’d already done this once. What was one more time?

I eased myself deeper into his augments, finding the controls for his sensory array and pressing on them, just enough to show him where I was in his systems. He breathed in sharply, and his hands flexed against his thighs. 

What do you want? I asked him. For some reason I wanted to hear him say it.

To finish your repairs, he said. 

Remember what I said about Gurathin being a stubborn motherfucker? Yeah. I found the sensory array in his augments, started up a phantom sensation on his left thigh in retaliation, and felt his muscles tense through the hardwire. SecUnit– he stuttered, but he didn’t finish the sentence because another phantom hand joined the first, this time on his right thigh. I didn’t manipulate the sensations to have any pressure, yet. I just let them sit there, warm and palm-sized, as a kind of reminder. 

I didn’t ask what you were going to do, I told him, I asked you what you wanted.  

Twin irritation and arousal sparked down the hardwire. Interesting. 

I want to finish your repairs… and I– I want to touch you, he admitted, the end of his sentence all pushed together in the feed.

Where? I shifted the phantom sensations up Gurathin’s thighs, increasing the pressure as I went, and his vitals made some very interesting fluctuations. I could feel the dull echo of the pressure on my own thighs through our connection, his haptic sensors sending data to my own.

The current of Gurathin’s irritation grew stronger and I forced down the unwanted grin that threatened to spread across my face. This was fun. 

Fucking– your wires, okay? I want to put my hands in your wires. Happy? 

Yes, I answered truthfully. Ask me again. Out loud. Teasing Gurathin was way too much fun. It was also making me feel really warm, but I was trying not to focus on that. I watched Gurathin’s pupils dilate – hopefully that meant that this was okay, and he liked the teasing, too. 

“I want to touch your wiring again,” he repeated, voice slightly strained. 

I created another sensation on the small of his back and rubbed back and forth in almost a petting movement. Gurathin’s spine arched, and he bit back another soft, strangled sound. I quickly set up a program that would automatically save any noise he made to my permanent storage, so I wouldn’t have to worry about doing that for the rest of however long this went on. His breathing was heavier than usual, and I could already see the visual evidence in his pants that he was getting aroused. A week ago, that would have grossed me the fuck out. Now, it just felt gratifying as hell. 

Again, I said, and increased the pressure on his thighs, adding another touching sensation on the front of his chest, running over his collarbones. 

“SecUnit, fuck,” he panted, “please.” Heat rippled through my open torso cavity at the word please, and Gurathin let out a choked groan. Oops. I forgot the hardwire connection went both ways. 

Again. I had no idea why I kept making him repeat it, but I manipulated the phantom hands on his thighs to feel like they were shoving them apart, and Gurathin breathed in sharply and let his legs part even more, sinking down to the ground. 

“Deity–” he cursed, then groaned. “Please, hah, let me put my hands in your wiring again. Please, SecUnit.” 

I could feel how hot his face was through the hardwire and was struck, not for the first time, with wondering just how far down his body that heat spread. 

Take your shirt off, I ordered him. 

Gurathin balked. Shit.

“What?” he stuttered out, his eyes widening as his head snapped to look up at me.

“Or not!” I amended out loud quickly. I felt my face warm, which was way less fun than when Gurathin’s face did it. I didn’t even know why I’d asked him to take his shirt off, really. That had been stupid. I actually didn’t know why I’d said any of the things I’d said. 

Gurathin switched to the feed, his vitals slowly falling to sort of normal levels. 

It’s fine, he said. It’s just that I sort of thought you weren’t interested in seeing me undressed?

I’m not.

Was I? It seemed like a lot of things I knew about myself became very very blurry when Gurathin got involved. 

…did you get the line about taking my shirt off from a show? Gurathin asked.

No! I– Shit, the thought really had come from me, hadn’t it? I didn’t want to touch you. At least I knew that was still true. Mostly true. I was interested to see how far down on your body your blush went. 

That made the slightly abated flush in Gurathin’s cheeks come back in full force. His vitals started to rise again.

Oh. 

You don’t have to take your shirt off, I said. This was super awkward. Things had been going well, until I fucked them up, which was typical of how things usually went for me.

I know. Gurathin’s fingers played with the hemline of his shirt and he bit his bottom lip in thought before pulling the garment off and depositing it on the floor in one swift motion. 

Holy shit. I readjusted the positioning of my drones to get a better view – it turned out that the flush from his cheeks did extend down his neck and onto his chest, which was also covered in a smattering of dark hair that got thicker as it drew towards his navel and disappeared below the waist of his pants. His body didn’t look anything like the hard, muscle-y bodies of the actors in my shows, but also, he was soft in a way that I kind of liked? Not in a sex way, but… I filed that thought away for later. 

I felt like I should say something.

You’re so pink. 

Great. Good one, Murderbot. Super sexy. Hold on, was I trying to sound sexy?

Gurathin’s blush deepened, and I tagged the hex code for the color in my files. “You, um,” he began, not looking at me, “you kind of have that effect on me,” he mumbled. 

That made my processor whir louder. I directed the hand sensation on his chest to follow the trail of hair down to his waistband and back up, curious as to whether the hair signified an increased sensitivity in those areas. He shuddered and warmth cascaded down the hardwire. 

“Please,” he whispered, and holy fuck, I hadn’t even asked him for that one, he’d just said it. 

Go ahead, I told him.

“What?” he breathed, dazed.

Repair me. 

Anticipation skittered through the hardwire, but I couldn’t tell whether it had originated from me or Gurathin. I felt him reenter my processing systems, and his hands lifted from his thighs to hover over my wiring before pushing back into my torso. Painted, nimble fingers carefully started to comb through my wires to find the bundle he’d been working on. Now that it wouldn’t seem weird (probably), I repositioned one of my drones closer to my open torso, so I could see everything Gurathin’s hands were doing. I watched through the drone camera, mesmerized, as he tugged on my wire bundle, which had retracted back into my torso, and the strange pressure in my stomach area returned. Gurathin was still being efficient, but his left hand tangled in my wires more this time while his right ran slowly across my rapidly warming processor and brushed over my jumper pins again, feeling out the soldering points where my wires joined to my hard drives.

“Fuck,” he said softly, like he couldn’t help himself. 

It was obvious from both his physical reactions and our hardwire connection that Gurathin liked seeing me like this – I just didn’t know why. Outside, I’m a scary SecUnit, but inside, I’m just a bunch of wires and cheaply printed components all welded together by some indentured CR factory tech. I’m not an expert on sexual relations among humans, but I know for a fact that there’s nothing remotely sexy about that.  

I’m going to start the electrical pulses again, Gurathin informed me, then glanced up at me from beneath his lashes. Tell me what feels good?

I didn’t even know if I would know what felt good, but I nodded anyway. 

Then I downloaded a data packet of pure sensory pleasure straight into his augments, just to fuck with him. His augments and haptics exploded with white hot data points, and he couldn’t hold back the moan that slipped from his mouth.

“Fuck, SecUnit, what–”

I shut the pleasure packet down. Don’t you have work to be doing?

Okay, so maybe I liked being a little mean to him. After all, he was still Gurathin. I thought that he might push back, but instead he just nodded and returned to examining my wires. 

“First pulse,” he said a few seconds later, and electricity rushed through the wire, sweet and hot – hotter than before – and my whole body went rigid with the sensation as I drew in a sharp breath.   

I switched to speaking out loud. “What the fuck?” 

Gurathin glanced up at me and swallowed, his color rising. “I, uh, I may have upped the voltage. By a little bit.” 

Fucking Gurathin. That’s why it felt way more intense than before. I could have told him to turn the voltage back down, but I didn’t. 

Go on. 

Gurathin slipped his ring and middle fingers under the wire and gave it a tug to separate it into the not-corroded bundle, and I refused to let my reaction show on my face. I let the warm sensation on his chest spread a bit and made a third one, this time on his neck. 

Alright, so I wanted to choke him again. What? His reactions the first time had been fascinating, and I only wanted to see if I could reproduce the data set. I tightened the phantom hand incrementally, and my haptic sensors buzzed with the mirrored data from Gurathin’s body. He felt warm all over, but particularly in his cheeks and stomach, where his arousal seemed to coil the tightest. I wondered if I was physically capable of feeling something similar, and whether the sensation would gather in the same places. 

You like this so much. 

Gurathin made a little choked off sound, which was funny, because I wasn’t actually choking him, just manipulating his augments to make him feel like I was. His hands stalled in my wiring.

Keep working, I reminded him. 

“Second– second pulse,” he panted. 

Energy arced through the next wire, and I malfunctioned, accidentally sending a command to the phantom hand on Gurathin’s throat to tighten even more. I was grateful that it wasn’t my real hand, because if it had been, there was a high probability that his windpipe would have been partially crushed. As it was, Gurathin sputtered helplessly around the sensation and I watched, fascinated, as his vitals spiked up, and up, and up. He really liked that, apparently. The mirror sensation from his stomach turned to magma, and I loosened my grip just a little bit, still kind of afraid that I could hurt him, even through the feed. 

What else makes you feel like that? I asked. He couldn’t only be that aroused by me choking him, right? There had to be other stuff that produced similar results. Not that I wanted to try those out, or anything. 

“What do you mean?” Another jolt of electricity ricocheted through me, and, caught off guard, I vocalized. The sound I made caused Gurathin’s vitals to spike, too. Interesting. Maybe he liked hearing me as much as I liked hearing him. 

You like it when I choke you. 

Despite all of the evidence confirming my statement, Gurathin’s face still warmed. 

What else do you like?

A slightly panicked sensation travelled down the hardwire. Okay, that was bad. Maybe humans who were having s– who were doing whatever it was that we were doing didn’t ask each other those questions. Maybe I was just supposed to figure it out. 

You don’t have to answer, I said quickly. I tapped into the drone that I had apparently trained on Gurathin’s body at some point, watching the rhythmic way his chest rose and fell with his breaths, and started poking around in his sensory array for any controls I hadn’t explored yet. 

Gurathin eventually got himself together enough to speak. “Humans have something called, um, erogenous zones.” 

I know that, I huffed. I did know that. I might not have known where all of them were, exactly, but I knew that they existed. 

“And they can be different for different people,” he continued. 

Oh. I’d just assumed that humans had all the same parts that did all the same things, like SecUnits. Apparently, that was wrong. And annoying. 

Where are yours?

“Ah,” Gurathin said, turning red. Fine. If he wasn’t going to talk, I would do it myself. 

I redirected the sensation on his neck to run down his spine. Here?

Gurathin shuddered, his hands still trying to separate out the wires in my torso. “Y-yeah. Feels good.” 

I fired up a new sensation on his neck – not choking, just caressing this time. It ran from the nape of his neck to his shoulder and back up. Here? 

“Yeah,” he breathed. Then, “Next pulse.” 

I swear the little fucker was making them higher and higher in voltage each time, because this one ran through me like I had been struck by lightning, then fizzled out before it could reach the endpoint. Fuck. Gurathin whimpered, and I’d forgotten again that he was experiencing the electric sensations through the hardwire, too. 

“I’ll,” he said, sounding kind of wrecked, “I’ll have to splice that one.” 

Curious, I brushed the phantom hand on his spine down to his backside and squeezed. 

“Fuck!” Gurathin gasped, and oh, that was so rewarding that I did it again. “SecUnit,” he moaned, and my processor heated by several degrees. Why did he have to sound so– so– 

Come on, Murderbot, just fucking admit it. Gurathin sounded hot.

My memory files autofed me a clip from last week, and I played it. Huh, yeah. He had liked it a lot when I talked to him before. 

Maybe he would like it if I did that again. I could do that, right? How hard was it to say a single fucking sentence?

Really hard, apparently. Still, I pushed the command through.

Hearing your voice is… hot. My voice glitched on the last word. And I want– My entire vocal array malfunctioned for 0.3 seconds, but I wrangled it back into working order. I want to make you make that sound again.

Gurathin gasped and looked up at me, mouth slack and pupils blowing wide. 

“Void, please,” he groaned. “Do whatever you want with me, please, SecUnit.” 

Oh fuck. The pressure in my torso grew.

Stop obfuscating, I said, my sensations trailing up to squeeze his hips, hard. Answer my question from earlier. 

“Which, fuck, which one?” he asked. 

He knew which one, so I sent him the video clip of me asking him what he liked in lieu of an answer. It had the added visual bonus of showing a very flushed Gurathin kneeling at my feet, and my little stunt was rewarded with a change in his breathing patterns and a clenching of his fingers inside my wiring. My own breath hitched, and I swallowed an unintentional vocalization down my throat.  

“Thought you didn’t like hearing about that stuff,” he murmured, reaching blindly into his toolkit for his wirecutters. 

I like hearing about it from you. I didn’t examine that statement too closely. I modulated my tone to my best scary-SecUnit-is-telling-you-to-do-something-so-you-better-fucking-do-it voice. Tell me.

That seemed to work, though not in the way that I intended, because instead of getting scared, Gurathin’s arousal bloomed even more in the hardwire. What a weird man. 

“I, um,” he started quietly, “I like it when you choke me.”

Obviously. I kept up the sensations on his body, moving them around and tagging which areas produced the biggest responses.

“My neck in general is sensitive,” he pushed out. “My thighs, ah, and– and my nipples,” he finished quietly, retrieving the wire cutters to snip away the corroded segment of wire. I admired his concentration, but I also wanted to break it. 

Nipples are so impractical, I said. Still, I drew the phantom hand towards Gurathin’s, and he bit back a pleading sound. What the fuck? I repeated the sensation, and he cursed softly and jerked forward. 

You’re so sensitive, I observed, which caused another low sound to come out of his mouth. It’s like everywhere is an erogenous zone.

“SecUnit, don’t– don’t say things like that,” he panted. 

I frowned. Had I said something wrong? 

“I thought you liked it,” I said. “You vocalized and your heart rate went up by nine percent.” 

“Yes, but I’m trying to do my job.”

So do your job. 

I brushed the phantom sensations over his nipples again, then turned them sharp on impulse, like they were being pinched. Gurathin groaned, his hands stalling in their work inside my torso. Huh.

Do you like it when I hurt you? I asked him. I’d been wondering since last time.

Gurathin swallowed. “Kind of,” he whispered. 

Well that didn’t clear anything up at all. ‘Kind of’ was just ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time. 

What does that mean? I did the nipple thing again, and Gurathin whimpered. I felt him reenter the feed, which was strange. 

I’ll tell you, if you want to know, he said. But it might make you uncomfortable, and I don’t really want to do that. 

Something in my chest went melty. 

Tell me anyways, I responded. I could handle it. Probably. I felt Gurathin start to respond in the feed and interrupted him. Out loud. 

For some reason, I liked hearing his voice (especially when he was like this, but I had neutral-to-positive associations with his everyday speaking voice, too) (not that I would ever tell him that). 

“O-kay,” he said shakily. “I– I guess that I would like it if you did some things that hurt,” he panted, “but, um, not others.” He took a deep breath then plunged ahead. “I wouldn’t like it if you, I don’t know, started shooting me or something, but…” 

But?

“But if you slapped me,” he continued, face heating with each word, “or, or pulled my hair, then I, ah, I would like that, yeah.”  

I was momentarily struck by a very vivid mental simulation of me slapping Gurathin across the face and was so overwhelmed that I had to delete it and the accompanying subroutines that had started to construct themselves in its wake. I had no idea how to even parse how I felt about that, and I didn’t have the time to process it right now, or maybe ever. 

Pulling his hair, though…

“I know that, um,” Gurathin continued nervously, “doing either those things would require you to touch me, and I don’t want you to think that I expect anything like that or–” 

I slid my hand into his hair and tightened my fingers, jerking his head back a little. That shut him up pretty quick. It didn’t even feel bad – Gurathin’s hair was soft and thick, and it was kinda… cozy? Nice, in a weird way. Grounding. 

Like this?

“Y– yeah, yes,” he hissed, chest suddenly heaving with every breath he took. He squeezed his eyes shut, and I felt his arousal crash down the hardwire in waves. “Fuck.”

On impulse, I moved my hand towards the back of his head and made my fingers into a fist, pulling his head back sharply so that he had no choice but to look at me. He moaned, loud and throaty – almost like the sound had been punched out of him – and my internals felt so hot that I worried they might melt straight out of me. Still on his knees, I watched as Gurathin’s dark, desperate eyes glazed over with lust, and holy fuck, did that me feel powerful. I felt the echoed sensation of the sting in his scalp through the hardwire and tightened my grip.

Don’t move. 

He swallowed down a pleading sound. 

You like it when I tell you what to do, don’t you? I wanted to order him around so badly, could feel the commands welling up inside my programming, but I needed confirmation. I wasn’t sure my risk assessment module was functioning properly anymore. 

“Fuck, yes,” Gurathin gasped, all overexposed nervous endings and pleasure and heat in the hardwire. “Please.” Fucking hell, he sounded so good like this – almost broken. 

I felt kind of broken too, overwhelmed and out of control of the things I wanted, the things I said and was doing to him. I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t know if I could.

Okay. Here’s what you’re going to do, I told him. You’re going to finish repairing my wiring. Orders suddenly poured out of me like the buffer between my organic grey matter and my vocal array had shut down. And I’m going to pull your hair and play with your augments while you do it. Understand? 

“Yes, SecUnit,” he groaned, and electricity sparked down my spinal column.

Good. You’re going to tell me what you’re doing as you do it. You’re also going to let me hear every noise you make, and I’m going to record them all. I’d been recording them the whole time, but he didn’t have to know that. 

“Deity,” Gurathin cursed.  

So obedient. That sent a shockwave of arousal down the hardwire. Maybe he liked praise, too? I pushed another packet of pleasure data through our connection, just a short burst, kind of like a reward. He made another deliciously wrecked sound.    

I watched through the drone as Gurathin’s hands fumble inside my torso cavity, then used my grip on his hair to guide his head down until he was eye level with my exposed wiring. I locked the joints of my arm in place, holding him there. He almost felt as if he was trembling, and a small sliver of pride shot through me that I had done that to him. Go ahead. 

“I– I’m splicing the wire now.”

Gurathin’s fingers pinched the cut ends of the wire and started to slowly twist them back together. I stroked the phantom hands up and down his chest and thighs, teasing him there. 

I like you on your knees. Oh yeah, my buffer was completely shot. Gurathin’s hands faltered in my wiring, and I watched in my drone feed as he sucked in a sharp breath. You look like you belong there. 

“...maybe I do,” he said quietly, swallowing back a sound in his throat.

Don’t do that, I reminded him, and pushed another pleasure data packet into the hardwire. That immediately got the response I was aiming for, and a loud, involuntary groan spilled from his mouth. 

“Shit, I can’t fucking– can’t concentrate when you do that, SecUnit.” 

Good. I sent another pulse of pleasure straight into his augments, overwhelming his sensory processors on purpose, and was rewarded with a half-strangled keen. I noted with interest that the flush that covered his chest now spread down onto his stomach, and waited until he had gotten himself back together enough to start twisting the wires together again before downloading yet another packet into his systems. At that, Gurathin’s knees buckled, and I felt his abdomen clench through his haptic relays as he almost doubled over – for a few seconds, his head was held up only by the strength of my grip on his hair, chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. 

“Fuck,” Gurathin said. “Gonna– gonna test the connection, now,” he managed to pant out, and I realized that he’d somehow managed to finish splicing the wires together, even in the wake of my onslaught against his augments. My processor warmed with anticipation. I was… excited, I realized. Excited to feel the electric pulse in my wiring again. 

I felt Gurathin trigger my systems, and then electricity ripped through me like a planet-side electrical storm. I didn’t need Gurathin to tell me in order to know that he’d upped the voltage again, because holy fuck. It felt like my entire torso was suddenly full of raw, exposed wiring. I went entirely rigid with the shock of the sensation — my whole internal system buzzed with heat and energy and something else I couldn’t name. Gurathin tugged at the newly-repaired wire, probably making sure that the physical connection was sturdy, and I felt his arousal spike in the hardwire before I registered that I’d moaned out loud as the tugging sensation combined with the remaining charge of the pulse, making another wave of heat roll through me. Shit. I needed to get a grip.  

“Did that– did it feel good?” he asked breathlessly, still kind of trembling below me. 

Did it feel good? It had certainly felt like a lot, but I still didn’t really understand what he was asking when he asked me if it felt good. Maybe if he felt the full force of it, Gurathin would know. I concentrated on solidifying the connection between us.

Again, I demanded, ignoring his question.  

Ever obedient, Gurathin triggered another electric pulse, and this time I shifted all my effort into transferring as much of the sensory data over the hardwire as I possibly could. He cried out, back arching as the sensation tore through him, his soft, vulnerable body heating as the floodgates of arousal opened in the hardwire and nearly overwhelmed my own systems with their force. 

Did that feel ‘good’? I asked. I kind of knew the answer already from his reactions, but I needed to hear it from him.

“Yes,” he moaned. “Void. Feels so fucking good.” 

There was my answer then. I needed a couple milliseconds to process the implications. 

I was capable of feeling good. 

I was capable of feeling really fucking good, apparently. 

What else could I do that I didn’t know about? 

Gurathin swallowed. “Two wires left to test.”

Oh, right. I’d almost forgotten what we were doing. That kind of lapse in memory was definitely a security risk, and something I would have to investigate later, but for now, I ignored it. 

Because he’s a fucking bastard, Gurathin sent the next two pulses into my wiring one after the other, and a sound I’d never made before escaped from my mouth as my fingers tightened reflexively in Gurathin’s hair, causing him to whine. I immediately checked the connection for any signs that I had damaged him, but the hardwire, and therefore Gurathin, were swimming in good data. 

Does this hurt? I unclenched my hand then tightened it again, pulling his head all the way back to expose the straining column of his neck. Gurathin let out another high pitched sound. I knew that it probably stung pretty fucking bad, but I just wanted to see what he would say. 

“Yes,” he gasped out. “Hurts good.” 

My processor grew even warmer. 

“Can I– can I play with your wiring some more?” Gurathin’s face turned red. “Want to make you feel good,” he begged. “Please, let me make you feel good?”

I nodded without thinking, loosening my grip on his hair. 

“Thank you, SecUnit,” he breathed, shuffling closer to me. If I’d had haptic sensors in my torso cavity, I might have been able to feel the warmth of his breath on my internal components. 

Carefully, his fingers tangled in my wires, and he tugged on several of them at once. The pressure in my stomach area grew, and my threat assessment module plunged and spiked wildly. My face felt like it was making an expression, but I didn’t want to know what it was.

“More?” Gurathin asked.

Yes. 

Gurathin’s fingers tightened in my wires as several lower-voltage electrical currents pulsed through my wiring in quick succession. Fuck, wow, yeah, that felt… my hips shifted in the chair where I sat, chasing the sensation. 

“How’s it feel?” he mumbled quietly, eagerly, his fingers still pulling at my wiring, weaving themselves artfully between them like latticework. I watched as he wound a wire around his forefinger and tugged, his middle and ring fingers dipping into the middle of the bundle. The visual alone made my core tighten.  

Keep, ah, keep going, I managed to say in the feed. 

“Feels good?” He still sounded a little desperate, but there was an undertone of satisfaction in his voice.

…shut up, Gurathin. 

He answered me by triggering several more pulses at a higher voltage level, and my entire abdominal musculature clenched with the energy of it, straining as the electricity buzzed through me. 

“Oh, fuck,” I said involuntarily. I would have to get my vocal relay checked out, too – it had malfunctioned way too much today. Gurathin’s breath hitched and I saw his hips stutter upwards in one of my drone cameras, seeking friction on the sexual organ that now strained against the front of his pants. If I concentrated on the hardwire, I could feel just how badly he ached, how much his body was straining towards release.

I ran my fingers through his hair, not pulling really, just petting him, and he leaned his head into it, still breathing heavily.

You’re so eager, I observed, letting the ghost hand rub circles on his thigh. Gurathin’s face heated by several degrees. And warm. 

“I can’t help it,” he mumbled. His brown eyes shone in the dim lighting of my room. “Can’t believe I get to touch you like this, fuck. Fucking look at you.” He tugged on my wiring again, and I made another short sound I didn’t know I was capable of producing. Gurathin sounded like he was in a daze, “Pretty wiring, pretty components, getting so warm in my hands.” People have described me in a lot of different ways (‘killing machine’, ‘heartless killing machine’, ‘killer robot’, and ‘holy shit is that a rogue SecUnit?!’ are usually the favorites), but no one had ever described any part of me as ‘pretty’ before. I didn’t know how to react. Another pulse arced through me and I moaned, my own face heating at my lack of control. “Void, SecUnit,” he groaned. “You have no idea how you make me feel.” 

I actually didn’t. I wondered if SecUnit internals turned all humans on this much, or if Gurathin was just uniquely fucked in the head. It was probably just Gurathin, that little freak.  

My hand tightened in his hair until his scalp stung. Keep doing that.    

“Doing what?” he breathed.

Talking, I said. And the electricity thing. It… feels good. I rolled the word ‘good’ around in the feed, testing it out. 

“Yeah?” he whined. “It does?” Gurathin’s hips made another little aborted thrusting movement, and I realized that my own were shifting in the chair again, rocking back and forth slightly in rhythmic sympathy. What the hell? It must have been the hardwire connection. I could feel Gurathin groping around in my electrical systems, but I didn’t feel what he was doing until the low buzz of electricity started to simmer in all of my wires. Oh. Oh. 

Gurathin’s fingers wound through my wiring.

“So well made.” I wasn’t even sure Gurathin knew what he was saying. “Want to help you feel good. Want you to use me–” he pushed the fingers of his other hand into a different wire bundle and tugged, “use me however you need.” 

My brain fogged up with random scraps of code that my systems hadn’t purged because they were too busy overheating. Gurathin wanted me to use him? Like how people used bots, or– or SecUnits. Like how people had used me. 

Well, that didn’t make any fucking sense. So why did it make my organics feel hot all over?

I felt Gurathin up the voltage of the electricity that coursed through me by a little bit. What the hell did using a human even mean? Just that I could do whatever I wanted to him? I didn’t know what that was, but I forced my code to cooperate long enough to make a list. 

1. I wanted Gurathin to keep increasing the amount of electricity in my wiring. It seemed like he was already going to do that, so I didn’t have to take any action on that front. 
2. I wanted to break him, just a little bit, just enough that he couldn’t form sentences anymore. 
3. I wanted to see him reach that peak that he’d reached before, last week. What did humans call it? Right. Climax. 

I wanted Gurathin to climax. And I kind of wanted to be the one to make him do that. Before I could freak out about what all of that meant, I came up with a plan.

Brace yourself.

Gurathin didn’t even have time to say anything before I opened the hardwire connection as wide as I could and filled up his augments completely, pushing myself into every last binary digit of his programming and overwhelming his entire sensory array with my presence. At the same time, I upped the pressure of the phantom sensations on every part of Gurathin’s body, squeezing his thighs and his throat, pinning his waist and squeezing his backside again as my real hand pulled his hair. Gurathin let out a wail at the intrusion that quickly transformed into a sobbing moan, and his whole body went taut, hips jerking upwards in earnest, desperate for something, anything to relieve the almost-painful ache in his genitals. Fuck, he looked so, so good like that. I pushed packet after packet of pleasure data down the hardwire into his augments and wrang a string of strangled whines from his throat. 

“Please, please,” he begged between heaving breaths, “Fuck, deity, please.” 

The electricity in my wires continued to build (I thought Gurathin might have set up a program to increase the voltage incrementally, but my systems were glitching so much that I couldn’t verify). I made an undignified noise as the voltage amped up again. The heat and pressure in my wiring were becoming nearly unbearable, and my whole torso felt like it had been lit up with electrical stimulation. I pushed another pleasure packet through the connection, and Gurathin’s hands spasmed where they were still pushed into my wiring, which only made my situation worse. It felt like enough electricity for a whole data center had been shoved into my wires, arcing and crackling through me without anywhere to go, the charge just building and building and building until… I actually didn’t know what would happen when it got to be too much for my systems to handle, but I knew that I was probably going to find out. 

Gurathin gasped as the feedback ran back along our connection, desperately pulling on my wires as the voltage built inside of me. “It’s so much,” he moaned. His hips rocked back and forth, rutting into the air, and I could feel his whole body straining for release in the hardwire. “I’m, um,” he stuttered out, “I’m close. Fuck.” 

I could… 

But did I want to?

Yeah. Yeah, I really did. 

Here, I said, extending my leg towards him and slotting it in between his thighs until my shin pressed against his crotch. Gurathin sucked in a sharp breath, eyes widening.

“SecUnit?”

I nudged his engorged sexual organ with my leg. Go on. 

A trickle of embarrassment bled down the hardwire alongside the wash of arousal. Uh oh. I really hoped I wasn’t making a big fucking mistake, and that Gurathin didn’t find this insulting or something. 

Gurathin pressed himself up against my leg and moaned. Okay, not insulting then. Maybe embarrassment felt good for him, too. His vitals spiked in my monitor as he rolled his hips carefully against my shin, then did it again. His face scrunched up. “Hah, fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck– thank you, ah, thank you, SecUnit.” 

I felt like my processors were going to overload any second now. My stomach felt hot to the touch. I stroked my hand through Gurathin’s hair again, tugging a little bit, and he keened, hips stuttering against my leg as he pressed himself into it. I shifted the phantom hands towards his hips to encourage him, and he leaned his forehead against my thigh, stuttering breaths huffing from his parted lips. Gurathin’s hips jerked against me in desperate little motions as he humped my leg, whimpers slipping out of his mouth uncontrollably. Through two layers of clothing – his and mine – it wasn’t even that bad. It might even have been… good? I directed my drones to download their camera feeds straight into my permanent storage, for later study. It felt like all of my software was glitching. Somehow, Gurathin managed to ramp up the charge in my wires even more, and my hand clenched in his hair, the other bunching the fabric of my pants where it rested on my thigh. My own hips twitched in time with his. 

I needed– 

I needed. 

I needed something. Fuck! What was it? 

“Oh, fuck,” Gurathin managed. “Please, SecUnit.”

Please what? I asked. Wasn’t he going to climax? That was the whole point of this, right?

“Please let me– I’m so close, can I–?” He was so wrecked that he couldn’t even get a full sentence out. “Fuck, hah, fuck, please. Please, can I come?”

Gurathin was asking my permission to… perform a basic bodily function. Wow. That shouldn’t have made me feel the way it did. 

“Fuck,” I said. My voice sounded different. All of my internal sensors screamed under the weight of the electrical build up in my body. 

Gurathin wanted to come? I could make him do that. I wanted to make him do that.

Without warning, I downloaded as many gigabytes of pleasurable data into his systems as his augments could handle, stimulating every pleasure center I could find, and he cried out, his back arching as he rutted against me, whimpering and moaning. I felt Gurathin fumble blindly in my systems, and then the electrical charge in my wiring increased rapidly, filling me up with pure energy, all of my wires suddenly at their maximum voltage capacity, physically unable to take anymore before they caught on fire and burnt out. My whole body thrummed, pulled taut like an electrical wire, buzzing like an electrostatic charge with nowhere to go. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I had no idea I was even capable of feeling like this. No wonder this shit wasn’t in the SecUnit manual. It was totally overwhelming, but so, so good. 

I didn’t know what to say, unable to form the words to give him permission, so I just sent him an affirmative ping in the feed and hoped he understood.

Gurathin’s elegant hands, still tangled up to the wrists in my wiring, pulled hard at the same time as he let out a choked-off moan. His orgasm crashed through the hardwire and into me, and holy fucking shit. My modules spat out a dozen error codes as we became one live wire – a completed circuit of pleasure data and electricity flowing from him to me and me to him, until it was impossible to tell where one sensation ended and another began, or which feeling originated from who. I had never felt so good in my entire fucking life. All my systems glitched and I had to drop my drone inputs as he thrust up against my leg one more time, riding out his orgasm, tears welling up in his eyes, and then another error code flashed in front of my eyes before everything went black.

.   .   .

When my systems rebooted, Gurathin’s hands had disentangled themselves from my wiring, but he was still slumped at my feet, so I figured I couldn’t have shut down for that long. I pinged him while my vocal array came back online. He pinged me back, and that made me feel kind of relieved. I hadn’t broken him. Now I just had to make sure I hadn’t broken myself. 

After 1.2 minutes passed, Gurathin pinged me a ? in the feed. 

I’m okay. I really didn’t trust my voice box right now. The weird thing was, I was okay. I mean, my world had been turned pretty much upside down, but besides that, I was okay. I tried to bundle up that feeling and push it to Gurathin through the hardwire, and he made a little high-pitched noise. Oh. His augments were probably still kind of sensitive from… everything. That made sense. My internal components were still kind of sensitive, too, and I shifted in my seat to try to dispel the uncomfortable leftover static. 

“Don’t–” he said out loud, hand wrapping around my ankle to keep me in place. Then, in the feed: Don’t leave.

Right. The last time we had done this, after I’d left, I hadn’t spoken to him for a week. Great idea, Murderbot. Really forward thinking of me. 

I won’t, I assured him. Then, awkwardly, I’m sorry for avoiding you.

You had every right, he responded. I had a responsibility to not let things go too far, and I took advantage–

You didn’t take advantage of me, I said firmly. You’re not taking advantage of me. 

Gurathin’s head lifted from where it had been resting against my knee. 

You don’t like sex, he said. Thank you, Flight Commander Obvious.

That was still true. I didn’t like the sex that people had in media, or the sex I’d been forced to witness clients have on assignment, but maybe Mensah was right. Maybe there was a way that I could do this thing that felt good and not freak out about what to call it. 

I like… you. 

Gurathin’s cheeks pinked up, and that made me feel kind of melty. 

And you liked what we, um, did? Gurathin sounded shy, as if he couldn’t believe it, even though my reactions had definitely made it completely fucking obvious how affected I’d been by whole thing. Fucking humans and their inability to accept data as its given to them. What was that human saying – never look a gift space ship in the gravimetric field displacement manifold? Or something like that.

I– The admission got stuck in my buffer. Once I could write off as an accident, a malfunction, maybe a passing curiosity. Twice was… a pattern. And patterns were always indicative of something. Yes. 

Is it because of my augments?

I paused for 0.9 seconds, trying to format my words into the correct order. Did the Preservation humans have conversations like this all the time? It was exhausting. 

Yes. And no, I finally said. I like that you don’t like to be touched. Your augments just make it easier to… not do that, I guess. I like making you feel good. I like how responsive you are. You make me feel… I searched my databases for the right word (results: good/warm/melty/weird/powerful) – hot. 

A small, floaty smile crept onto Gurathin’s face. I make you feel hot?

My face warmed. The words humans use for this kind of thing are confusing.

Gurathin huffed a small laugh into my leg. You don’t have to have it all figured out right now. It takes some humans decades to understand how they feel. He hesitated. It certainly took me a long time.

Good, I said, because I have no fucking clue what’s going on. 

Gurathin’s smile broadened, then a sudden nervousness skittered through the hardwire. 

Just don’t– don’t disappear again, okay? He looked up at me. We don’t ever have to do this again if you don’t want to, but I don’t want to never see you again, just because we… he trailed off.

We can… talk about this. I repeated the words he’d said much earlier in the evening. They sounded weird coming from me, but they seemed to make Gurathin feel better. His feed presence relaxed.

Yeah, he agreed. We can talk about this. A few seconds passed between us, and I could feed Gurathin hesitating in the feed.

What? I asked. 

Nothing. 

Gurathin… I did my best menacing SecUnit impression in the feed. What happened to talking about shit?

It’s nothing, really, he insisted, like the liar he was. But if you… if you ever want to, ah, do something like this again, just– just let me know, okay? 

Did I want to do something like this again? I kind of felt like I had just survived a planetary explosion, but, like, a good planetary explosion? Which was a lot of words for saying that I didn’t know. Maybe. One day.

I nodded. Okay. 

Gurathin let out a breath I hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Okay, he echoed. 

“Can I use your shower?” he asked out loud, his voice apparently mostly recovered from our, uh, activities. “Because I kind of made a mess of my pants.” 

My cheeks flamed again at the reminder of what I’d done to him. 

“Sure. It’s just behind that door.” 

He hauled himself up from the ground and went inside the bathroom. I heard the shower start, and my memory banks started to autoplay a clip of him from twenty minutes ago, which I shut down immediately. There would be time for that later. Right now, I was still overwhelmed. I had a lot to think about, and even more digging to do about SecUnit components and wiring. 

Because what the fuck.