#rrauruahfurhgusdfuhrughr. yknow?

[tunastime]

Hello beloved tuna 💚

How about a number 9 for the spotify wrapped?? (And if u feel like throwing any SEN guys in there I would simply love to see them)

HI THEO. you can tell I've been listening/reading too much murderbot when I start writing in the cadence that freaking kevin r free uses to do the audiobooks. so here, have some SEN ranchers. this song is actually on the SEN ranchers playlist! so I drummed up a little something that I think takes place around that time, where tango is about to receive notice that he's to come back to the Prometheus

(794 words)

Jimmy feels the pressure of all his emotions in his chest like a bubble about to burst. He's made of complex metal lattice, wires and tiny fibers that move like muscle, tubes and chambers holding cooling fluids and lubricants, silicon that filled spaces left behind and protected the various moving parts, made up his skin filled with sensors. Still, the part of him that felt, that processed emotion in a way he wasn't sure he was supposed to, still created that sense of feeling in his chest, as if the air filters and chambers of fluid had seized up all at once and were grinding to start again.

It wasn't a bad feeling though. This one he liked. A lot. It was the closest he had felt to being real in a long time. But it sucked to know that he liked it, and that he only liked it because it made him feel present, because the present was a time in which he knew minutes were slipping through his hands in a way his internal clock couldn't properly count. 

Way back, when Tango first arrived, almost three months ago, he had told Jimmy that he was only there for a month. The successes and failures of their botanical project had meant Tango had stayed longer. It had given them more than enough time to become friends, dissect the little things that made them something other than human, find a piece of each other within the parts most similar. It was odd. And good. And Jimmy liked the idea of being like someone, rather than so different from his shipmates.  

Tango was in his room now—their room, maybe, if Jimmy were feeling brave. The thought of sharing, be that personal space, personal data, personal storage, memory, RAM, emotion, feeling, thought, was a thing that was equally as confusing as it was terrifying. Jimmy was made of emotion—concocted from a hacked emotional core that HASA allowed to be installed in him, and with no way of processing any of the emotion, to filter it through subroutines designed to handle it, to manage it, with the secondary buffer it was supposed to have, Jimmy had too many times fallen victim to its overwhelming charge of his system. So sharing that very large, very vulnerable part of him wasn’t something he thought Tango could handle. Tango simply wasn’t housing an emotional core. Sure, his processor was large, and the long-term storage he had was complex (and Jimmy would know, they’d both poked around in his code and parts as a fun side project, considering Tango had finally decided that Jimmy should simply upload the rest of his data into Tango’s memory in case their project ended early. Tango had been reluctant to do that when he first arrived—he was built to learn, not to just store and retrieve. But what was learning but storing and retrieving, Jimmy had argued, and by the time their three months were meeting a yet-unknown close, they’d gone and backed up the data into Tango’s skull, and looked for fun), but he didn’t have the emotional capacity Jimmy did. And maybe he wouldn’t for a long time.

But he’d let him in. Just like Tango had let Jimmy root around inside his code and trusted him not to delete something essential. And Jimmy hated the idea that he might be losing this soon. He’d overheard Fwhip at some point, talking low to Tango in the hallway. Something about callbacks and data transfers, names of admirals Jimmy had never heard of, but sounded important. He had meant to ask Tango, but had never summoned the strength or reason to do so.

Jimmy watches Tango out of the side of his vision. Tango stayed because he had something to do. Maybe if Jimmy sabotaged their data, Tango would stay. Maybe if he changed something, fixed part of the system but not another, took data into long-term storage where they couldn't access it. Whatever he could do. Tango would stay here. And he wouldn't be alone.

But he couldn't do that to Tango. Which is why this feeling hurts so much. He liked it, because it hurt. And he hated it, because it meant he was coming to terms with the idea that Tango was leaving.

Scott called it grief. Jimmy thinks that robots shouldn't have learned how to grieve. It made looking at his friend Tango that much harder. It made watching him try to laugh and smile that much more difficult. But tucked away in Jimmy's room, watching the display surface show reruns of media Jimmy had long since seen, Tango laughs, and Jimmy grins his way. He’s getting better at that—laughing. Jimmy likes it.

And maybe he likes grief. Just a little.

(send me a number 1-100 and I'll try to write a little something based on the song!)