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super-ion · 1 year ago

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Valiant

(master post)

Chapter 3

It's midday when it happens. I'm walking beneath one of the elevated transit lines that spiderweb out from the port to the outer settlements. One of the trams whooshes by, as they do invariably every eight minutes. The only difference this time is there's a thump as the tram passes and something falls from the rails about a hundred meters in front of me.

The body hits the ground and the legs crumple.

I'm briefly horrified, thinking it's a person, but I feel the tiniest pang of relief as I get closer and realize it's just a service android.

…just an android.

The second wave of horror comes with a wave of guilt.

I'm about twenty meters away when it convulses. Up until this point, I'm holding out hope that there is something I can do for it. Take it back to the warehouse and do my best to repair it.

The body spasms again and its back arches at an impossible angle. There's a pop and my rad counter crackles menacingly. This is followed by trails of greenish smoke leaking from its eyes.

I skid to a halt.

My rad counter is ticking merrily along, faster than I like, but my dust jacket and mask should be good enough.

I glance over my shoulder and up at the rail, mind racing. The positronic core is definitely ruptured, no recovery from that. It's just spare parts.

The thought doesn't do my sense of guilt any favors. I've stripped plenty of chassis down, but that doesn't make seeing the actual accident any easier.

I convince myself that it would rather I put it's body to good use than let it get scrapped in some corpo junk heap.

Val needs a body.

I break into a sprint. If I work quickly, I can get the head off before the rad counter starts yelling at me. If I work quickly, I can invoke finders rights.

I fall into a crouch at the body… chassis, it's a chassis.

“Sorry, bud,” I say to it. “I’m going to need to borrow a few things from you. I hope that's alright.”

There's no expression on its face, just a rigid shell with smoked out eyes.

“I'll light a candle for you,” I add as I start assessing the damage.

The legs are a total loss, just dead weight at this point. Gotta lose them. Slight crumpling in the shell of the torso and left arm. Hopefully cosmetic. Probably microfractures in the spinal column. That's fine. Probably. Not like she'll need it right away without the legs. And the head. Yeah, no good. Will probably kill me…

A sound behind me makes me freeze.

I'm not alone.

Up until this point in my life, I've never been held at gunpoint. I've certainly seen it happen enough times, down the street or out the window, far enough away to not think too hard about it. It's different when it's happening to you.

I am absolutely fundamentally terrified.

Two figures circled into my field of vision. They're not corpo and they're not civil protection. They might be militia, but they have no insignia that I can see. They're all masks and goggles and scary looking guns and they move silent as ghosts.

Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

This is bad. It suddenly occurs to me that I might not make it home tonight. Val will wait for me. She'll be waiting forever. She will wait and wait and wait and wait and wait…

I take a ragged breath and slowly raise my hands.

“Just take it,” I plead. “It's yours. I was never here. I never saw you. Please, just let me go.”

The one on the right shoulders their gun and starts digging in one of their pockets. It might be my imagination, but the one on the left seems to relax slightly.

“Mechanic?” number three asks from behind me, voice distorted beyond any recognition.

It takes me a moment to understand.

“Y-yeah, I'm… mechanic.”

“The head,” they demand.

I glance down.

“It's… the core is ruptured. It's cursed.”

“The head,” they demand again.

Righty tosses a sack at me, it hits the ground with a heavy thud. Probably lead lined.

I have no idea what a shadow militia wants with a ruined and moderately radioactive positronic core. Honestly, it's not my business. The only thing I care about right now is getting home to Val.

I work as quickly as my shaking hands allow, hoping and praying to any gods who will listen that there aren't any more positronic cells waiting to pop.

I finally get the last connection unhooked as the rad counter starts chirping admonishingly. I scramble to shove the head into the bag and toss it halfway to righty, who scoops it up.

I kneel there next to the body as righty and lefty make their exits from my vision. I'm still too fucking scared to check if number three is still there.

***

I enter the warehouse and exhaustedly pull the door closed behind me.

I practically ran home, even with a hundred pounds of composite and high tensile lightweight alloy on my back.

I stand there for a moment, quivering and suddenly lost. Half an hour ago I didn't think I'd ever make it back.

“Ellie?”

I open my eyes to see one of Val’s spidery drones peering curiously at me.

I blink and break into anothe sprint. I take the steps of the scaffolding two at a time and collapse into her. The android chassis hits the platform behind me with a thunderous noise as I rip my hood off to rest my bare forehead against the shell of her core.

I'm crying.

Fuck. I can't remember the last time I let myself cry in front of anyone. I've been alone for so long, just surviving, but ever since I stumbled into Val, I've had a reason to actually live. I wasn't really afraid of dying today, I was afraid of never seeing her again.

“Eloise,” she says softly, “are you alright?”

“Yeah,” I reply, and the whole story spills out of me between sobs. I tell her I was scared, terrified, but I can't quite bring myself to tell her why.

“I am glad you are well,” she says after I finish. “I wish…”

She hesitates. She sounds almost plaintive.

I wipe at my eyes, and let out a shuddering breath.

"What?" I whisper.

“I wish I could comfort you in some way,” she replies very quietly. “To… to pull you close and hold you.”

The words hit me like a tidal wave, rolling over me. I've been hoping, desperately, in my most private moments that she felt as I did.

Ellie, you idiot.

Tell her how you feel.

I don't know how. All I know how to do is fix things.

“I… I might have a solution to that,” I tell her and gesture to the chassis.

I wipe my eyes again before hauling it up onto the work bench. I flick on the light to examine it and a few of her smaller drones skitter out of the shadows and up the table to join me.

I throw myself into the work, trying to forget my harrowing ordeal. Together we fall into a rhythm, a comfortable silence, broken occasionally by technical commentary. I examine the physical structure, taking inventory of the damage. She taps into its system, probing the firmware and compiling drivers based onto her findings.

It's… maybe not romantic, but it's comfortable, intimate.

She starts humming.

I'm so lost in the work, I don't even notice at first. It's only when I pause to set aside the soldering iron to grab a roll of tape that I realize the music is coming from her.

Maybe humming isn't quite the right word, no human vocal tract could ever reproduce the sounds, but it's humming all the same.

She notices me listening and the music stops abruptly.

“That's nice,” I say. “What is that?”

There's a flicker from her core, her equivalent of ringing her hands. Is she embarrassed?

“Chopin,” she replies. “Nocturne number 2… I am sorry. It is a bad habit of mine.”

I tilt my head and raise my eyebrows. I suppose it might be considered a bad habit for a warship to sing idly. But she hasn't been a warship for over a century.

I want to hear her sing again, more than anything.

“Would you sing more of it?” I ask, hoping I don't sound too desperate.

Another flicker. After a moment she starts again, tentatively, haltingly at first, but she gradually relaxes into it.

“There was a quality assurance engineer,” she explains over the sound. “He worked night shifts during the surge. He always had music playing. Old Earth classical. I was very young. I suppose it made an impression on me.”

This brings a smile to my face and I lose myself in the music.

We work for another hour before she makes me break for dinner. Then I get to work on an adapter interface. She was designed to be integrated directly into a starship mainframe. The chassis is very nearly as far from that as possible. But data is data, and there are only so many ways to achieve an interface.

It's late, well past local midnight by the time I finish. She must be confident that we're close if she isn't forcing me to bed.

I stare down at the cabling that now sprouts from the spine of the chassis. They come together in a bundle that I have checked and rechecked.

“Should we…” I say around dry lips. “Should we plug you in?”

A flicker. Apprehension. Anticipation.

“Yes,” she replies, her voice almost breathy.

I grab one of the serial cables off of a rack and slide it into the adapter where it locks with a satisfying clunk. I drag the other end to the closest port on the shell of her core.

“Here we go,” I say, and I slide the plug in.

Nothing happens for a moment.

Light pulses from her core and the chassis twitches.

“Please stand by for a moment,” she says. “I need to construct a calibration dataset. I do not wish you to be harmed in the process, Ellie.”

I don't know exactly what she means by that until the body thrashes violently. My first instinct is to rush forward, make sure she's alright. I have to remind me that she's fine. The cool metal and warm light behind me is her. The body is just a peripheral.

The motions gradually become less erratic, falling into a jerky simulacrum of human motion with each gesture becoming more fluid. I feel a brief pang of unease as she enters the uncanny valley, as if I'm watching a headless, legless corpse practicing hand gestures.

The motions show and the pulsing light fades back to her baseline.

Cautiously, I approach.

“How's it feel?” I ask.

“I… I feel… I don't know... I feel good.”

I reach the table and marvel all the tiny little fidgets, the random motion subroutines she is assembling to keep her body from reaching stillness.

It isn't a corpse any more. It's not a collection of parts I happened upon this afternoon. It's part of her.

She reaches out to take my hand in hers and her fingers gently curl around mine.

#my writing #lesbian #writers on tumblr #scifi lesbian #scifi #robot/mechanic #original work

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super-ion · 2 years ago

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Valiant

(Original post, Chapter 1)

Chapter 2

"Ellie!"

I blink awake. It's dark, the lighting hasn't switched over to morning mode yet and the sky is still black through the warehouse skylights. In fact, the only light is the gentle blue-white from Val's core. The indicator lights from the diagnostic equipment I have set up are completely dark.

I feel a spike of panic. A black out could mean any number of things, from benign to literal end of the world.

"What's going on?" I ask, fighting my grogginess. "What time is it?"

"I have lost external network connection. My internal clock indicates that it is 2:36:74," she says. Her voice is tinny and distant, likely the embedded speaker that I've managed to patch up.

"Ellie, I am sorry," she says. Her tone is distressed and contrite. She continues in a rush, "local wildlife nested amidst the network antenna and I attempted to relocate the nest. However in the process, I have accidently shorted the main high power bus with my drone peripheral."

Ah. That explains that. She probably tripped the main breaker. It's a terrible design and I've been meaning to add some resiliency, but that keeps getting out prioritized.

"Ellie, I am sorry," she repeats. "I have committed a mistake and I have inconvenienced you."

What?

Oh…

She's having the equivalent of a panic attack. She is a hyper intelligent AI core designed for fleet coordination and battle modeling, where failure to follow orders and standard operating procedure costs lives. This comes with a lot of built in anxiety. I understand that modern starships are less prone to such things, but when she was commissioned, the goal was to produce many warships very quickly. They were ultimately meant to be disposable, which led to some programming shortcuts.

"Hey," I say softly. "Are you okay? That's all I care about right now."

I roll out of my hammock and press my body against the surface of her core so that she can feel the plasmic discharge induced by my contact.

"I am well," she replies, her voice still small and panicked. "My core is isolated from main power. I can provide full diagnostics if you desire."

"No, that's okay. I'm glad you're alright. Should we see what we can do to take care of this?"

"Yes, please…"

She pauses.

"I do not like being disconnected. I… do not like the dark."

My heart breaks a little. Eighty-seven years, that's how long she was alone before I found her. An AI like hers can enter low power mode, but that is still an unfathomably long time. Units like her were never meant to be alone.

I reluctantly disengage from her core.

"I have to go outside," I tell her. She knows this, but I'm hoping it helps to talk through the process. "I'm going to get the headset working, so I'll be able to stay in contact, okay?"

"Thank you"

I pat the surface of her core gently before checking the rf transmitter I rigged up at her access port. It's short range, but it runs on her internal power. We used it a lot before I got her connected to internal and external networks, pretty much for this exact purpose, so I could talk to her without being right next to the core.

Connection looks good. I slip on the ear piece.

"Hey, can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can hear you Ellie," she replies.

Her voice through the earpiece is warm and smooth, even under the panic. It's her chosen choice and… well, it makes me feel… okay, I'll just say it, it's a very sexy voice. The speaker mounted on the access panel doesn't really convey the full timbre of it. Needless to say, I was blown away the first time I heard it in high fidelity.

I think I might be in love with her.

There's a lot to unpack there, but there's no point in denying that the feelings exist.

I throw on a sweater and a spare pair of boots and make my way up the scaffolding that leads to roof access. About halfway there, I pause for a moment to catch my breath. I chance a look down and my breath is stolen from me.

This room, this entire building, is a warehouse built for a machine of war to be abandoned and forgotten.

It's a squat for a scavenger trying to eke out an existence on the fringes.

"You're beautiful," I whisper.

It is a cathedral. It is a temple built for a goddess and her priestess.

Here in the dark, lit only by the radiation of her core, the space seems infinite.

Her core flickers in response, but she doesn't say anything. She might be embarrassed. She might never have heard those words before and doesn't know how to respond. She doesn't need to. I don't know if she feels the same about me. I'm not even sure if I should want her to. I would hate for her to feel obligated to return my affection solely by the fact that I am the only one who cares enough to repair her. I started this project because I couldn't bear the thought of her suffering alone in darkness, any romantic feelings I have are incidental... mostly.

I continue my scent and finally arrive at the roof access. The door opens with a squeal and I step into the frigid night.

"Oh!" I gasp.

"Ellie?" Val asks in my ear after a moment, worry creeping into her voice. "Are you well?"

"Oh, sorry…" I reply. "It's the stars. The high altitude haze from that dust storm last week has finally cleared. It's… spectacular."

There's a pause.

"Would you describe them for me?" she asks plaintively.

"Uh, sure… but I'm not sure if I can do it justice. Well, there's the glow from the industrial district, but it's not too bad tonight. We've got the arc of the Milky Way pretty much directly overhead. And there's like the fuzzy haze of the planetary disk. Looks like one of the ice giants too. And… well, stars. Thousands of them, just crystal clear."

I locate the main antenna and, sure enough, the drone is tangled up with the main power lines. It looks like there might have been some thin insulation that arced. The spidery drone itself might be salvageable. It is clutching an unfortunately empty nest in its manipulators, whatever wildlife must have fled when she disturbed it. The drone's head is tilted curiously back in a way that I don't think it's fully explainable by arcing.

"Wait, were you out here stargazing?

"The ocular system on the drone peripheral lacks the resolution and focal length to resolve individual stars."

It's not an answer and she sounds very vaguely guilty.

"It's alright if you were," I tell her as I bend down to examine the power conduits. "And I can see if I can get you a better camera system up here. Maybe something telescopic."

"I would not want to inconvenience you," she replies.

"Val, you're allowed to want things," I sigh.

She's quiet for a long moment while I move the drone and begin repairs on the power conduit.

"I miss the stars," she says finally. "There are many things I wish to forget about my past. Being alone amidst the stars was one of my few comforts."

I consider this. It's the most she's ever told me about her past. I've seen the diagnostic logs of her positronic activity indicating distress. Her equivalent of nightmares.

"You know any good stories about them?" I ask.

"I do not understand the nature of your query."

"I don't know," I say with a shrug. "I guess I'm just curious if you have any favorites or if you have any interesting facts in your database.

I'm not really sure how I expect her to respond. I just want to get her talking and not dwell on being trapped in the dark or feeling guilty about causing it.

"There is a star," she begins tentatively, "which according to local charts and my estimate of local time, should be located at azimuth 146.7, elevation 25.4. It is the brightest star in the southern sky, do you see it?"

I'm honestly surprised by this, and it takes me a minute to orient myself and find it.

"Yeah, the bright blue one?"

"Yes!" she replies, and as she speaks she gets more animated - her tone brightens and her cadence picks up. "Epsilon Orionis, Hipparcos 26311, also known as Alnilam. It is the central star of the asterism as viewed from Earth known as Orion's belt. It is among the brightest stars visible from this region of space. During first wave colonization, it was erroneously back translated to Al-Nilam, the Sapphire. Local neo-folkloric tradition associates it with either a maiden or queen…"

She continues on like that, and I find myself absolutely fascinated as I work. The detail is very encyclopedic, but there are aspects of it that she can't possibly have obtained from just a star chart. I quickly come to the realization that she must have sought out details about the folklore and mythology on her own.

This was a hobby of hers. There's no question in my mind now that I have to obtain a better system to facilitate her stargazing.

I finish the patch job on the conduit and heft the drone over my shoulder while she continues. I only interrupt her when I arrive back at the high power breaker.

The night lighting comes back up and she practically sighs with relief as she reconnects with the external network. I wearily drag myself back to my hammock.

"Ellie, I'm sorry to have woken you and taken up so much of your time," she says.

I sigh and press my hand to the surface of her core.

"It's okay, really," I tell her. "I'm here for you."

"Thank you for listening to me," she says, bringing a smile to my face.

"Goodnight, Val."

"Goodnight, Ellie."

I almost say "I love you". I want to.

#my writing #lesbian #scifi lesbian #science fiction #robot/mechanic #robot x human #lesbian robot

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