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Gurathin was acting weird. Well, Gurathin was always acting weird, so I guess that shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I mean he was acting weirder than normal. As in, outside of his designated ‘weird’ parameters. I had picked up on the change a few weeks ago and had been monitoring it ever since.
Preservation Station was secure for the time being (I had personally made sure of that), but I still kept a drone on each of my humans, just to be safe. They all were used to it by now, though Mensah and Ratthi had forbidden theirs from entering their bedrooms, which was fine by me, because I didn’t want to see what was happening in there anyway.
All of my humans engaged in sexual activity to some extent, which was still gross but easy to ignore once you knew how to look for the signs. Increased heart rate and strange, incoherent vocalizations meant shut that camera off, asap. Of my humans, though, Gurathin was the one who participated in this ritual the least, and he did so invariably by himself and in near total silence, which meant that it was a lot harder for me to know when that kind of stuff was going on, especially if I wasn’t paying attention (which was a lot of the time – what? Murderbots get distracted, too).
Recently, though, he had begun doing something… else.
I’m not sure how to describe it. It was definitely sexual – all the vital signs for arousal were there – but when I checked the drone footage, he just… sat there. No removal of outer garments, no touching himself or anything else, minimal sound, just Gurathin sitting cross legged on his bed with his eyes closed, visibly aroused beneath his clothing, his hands occasionally twitching like he was in the feed or sorting through data.
I wanted to know what he was doing, because it was my job to make sure my humans (yes, even my annoying augmented human) were safe, and if Gurathin was getting involved in anything that was potentially dangerous or could pose a security threat, I needed to know about it. My disgust for the whole sex thing was still present, obviously, but unfortunately so was my curiosity, and one of those two things tends to get the better of me most of the time.
So I went looking, poking around in the back channels of the feed until I came across an encrypted data packet that seemed to be the right size as what I was searching for. I checked the access log and found that they matched the dates and times I had recorded Gurathin doing… whatever it was he was doing. The encryption was easy for me to break, and I saved the unencrypted data in my files for processing.
I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to experience whatever was in the packet firsthand (humans are gross, remember? who knows what Gurathin was up to in there), so I ran it through one of my subprocessors and instructed it to summarize the contents of the package instead. I expected there to be visual data, probably sex media of some kind, something weird that Gurathin didn’t want anyone else to find out about – the kind of thing I would have to scan for bugs and malware and then be done with and try to forget about – but weirdly enough, the report returned that the only contents of the packet were pure sensory data. Not just sensory data, exactly, but sensory data specifically designed to be processed by augment implants as physical stimuli.
Huh. I didn’t even know that kind of stuff existed. Well, mystery solved, I guess. Gurathin had downloaded some kind of gross, freaky augment porn, and all I had to do was scan it for bad stuff and not investigate any further.
Except… well, I kind of wanted to know what it was.
My first thought was to download the data packet straight into my sensory processors and just ride out whatever the hell was in them, but that seemed like a bad idea, even by my standards. The data was specifically designed to interface with augments, not SecUnits, and there was a non-zero chance that running it could damage something in my own sensory array, if it ran at all. If it did run… well, then there was a ninety-eight percent chance that whatever it was would be so awful and overwhelming that I would have to shut down immediately and initiate a localized memory wipe to purge it from my systems.
The second option was that I could emulate Gurathin’s augments and run the program externally there, but that would basically just give me the same information that the subprocessor already had, which was next to none – not great, either.
That left me with the thing I really, really didn’t want to do: ask Gurathin. Ugh. I knew that if I asked him about it, he would probably get all weird and clammy, but if I pressed him hard enough, he would tell me eventually. My risk analysis module predicted that interactions between us would be tense for at least three weeks and up to two months afterwards, but foresaw no other major repercussions to this action. Not ideal, but not completely unmanageable.
Fuck it. I pinged Gurathin. He pinged me back but didn’t say anything, which meant I was going to have to do the talking.
What are the contents of the encrypted packet you downloaded three weeks ago?
Maybe if I pretended I hadn’t already scanned the data, he wouldn’t react as badly to my probing. I already could see Gurathin starting to respond in the feed, which was good.
Some new specs for my augments. Not that it’s any of your business.
Not so good. Gurathin, you fucking liar.
That’s a lie, I shot back. And it is my business, because station security is my business. Officially.
So you go through the downloaded data packets for every single person on the station? I could hear his sarcasm through the feed, even if it hadn’t already been embedded in the metadata.
No, that would be stupid.
Why are you going through mine, then? he asked, still obviously irritated and trying to deflect from the real topic at hand.
I only go through the downloads of the humans I actually give a shit about.
Well. That came out differently than I’d intended. I set a reminder to program a two second delay in my feed responses. I needed to start thinking before I spoke, or whatever it was that Mensah always said.
The sentence gave Gurathin pause for some reason, and I watched him stutter in the feed for a few seconds before replying.
Oh.
Oh? That was it? That was all he had to say for himself?
It was time to push.
So, what was in the data packet? I asked again, this time making sure the metadata was heavy with the force of my words.
It’s none of your business, Gurathin repeated. I already scanned it to make sure it didn’t have any malware in it.
Yeah, well I didn’t. And I’m way better at detecting malware than you are.
Murderbot, just don’t. The words were laden with layers of frustrated metadata coming off them in waves. It was rare that he used my real name, and he knew I didn’t like it when he did, which was how I knew that he was being serious. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t care.
Tell me. What was in. The packet.
Through the feed, I felt him go limp. Good. That meant he was giving up. Murderbot: 1, Gurathin: 0.
It’s a… sexual program, he said at last.
What kind of sexual program? I prompted.
Why do you care? he shot back, obviously upset at having been made to give up that information.
Shit. Why did I care? That was a good question, not that I wanted him to know that. As usual, I made something up.
Station security.
Right, he said.
Okay, so maybe in hindsight, station security was a weak explanation. I redirected a few megabytes of processing power to coming up with a better excuse, but Gurathin put me out of my misery before I could say anything else.
It’s a sensory program. For augments. He paused. But I think you knew that already.
Without any further reason to lie, I opted to come clean.
I did.
So why ask me about it? The metadata for the question was… odd. I’d expected more hostility, but instead there was only the undercurrent of curiosity, mixed with a little leftover tired annoyance.
I don’t know, I responded. I was curious. Silence in the feed. When you run it, it doesn’t look like any sexual activity I have recorded in my database, I added. Most of that involved ugly human bodies mushing up against each other and inevitably getting covered in fluids, which was disgusting. I didn’t find what Gurathin did disgusting, exactly, which was… something I would have to look into later. Or never.
Gurathin paused again before responding.
You’ve… watched me use it.
Fuck. I really needed to program that two second delay. I couldn’t lie to him now and say that I hadn’t watched him, because I’d already admitted that I’d seen him use the program. That had been extremely stupid of me. I briefly considered exiting the feed and just dealing with the consequences later, but that would only delay the inevitable confrontation we were going to have, because people on Preservation Station really liked to talk about their feelings even when certain SecUnits really didn’t want to.
Honesty was my only option.
Yes?
That’s a huge breach of privacy, SecUnit. Through the feed, he didn’t sound mad, exactly, which was almost more worrisome than if he had sounded upset.
You never told me to turn my drone off in your quarters, I said defensively. And I deleted the recordings after.
But you watched it. I didn’t understand why he was asking for confirmation again after I’d already told him that I had.
Yes.
A few seconds passed. Then: How did you feel about what you saw?
I considered my answer for 0.8 milliseconds, which is a long time for a SecUnit.
Not bad.
It hadn’t been good exactly, watching Gurathin, but… it hadn’t been horrible either. Interesting. Intriguing, maybe. Enough that I had been willing to set aside my discomfort enough to ask him about it. Enough that I still had more questions. Gurathin was silent in the feed, but since he still didn’t seem angry, I decided to push my luck.
How does it feel? I asked.
Sorry? came his immediate response.
The program, I reiterated irritatedly. Why was he always asking me to repeat myself? How does it make you feel?
A beat. SecUnit, I really don’t think you want me to describe my sexual experiences to you.
Usually, the answer to that would be a resounding fuck no, I don’t, but right now… did I want him to explain it to me? I felt conflicted about my answer, so I took a millisecond to run down the list of things I knew about my current situation.
- Murderbots don’t have any interest in sex or sex parts.
- Gurathin’s program had to do with sex and sex parts, which meant I shouldn’t be interested in it.
- Gurathin’s program did not look like any kind of sex or sex part that I had seen in media or come into contact with as a SecUnit.
- I really, really wanted to know what was in Gurathin’s sex program.
The list cleared approximately zero things up. So much for thinking before I spoke.
I wanted to ask Gurathin to explain to me how the program made him feel, but if I did that, it would probably get really awkward. Plus, it would basically be the same as me asking the subprocessor to give me a more detailed description of the sensory data in the file, only with a lot more stuttering and a lot less accuracy.
But if he ran the program… if he ran the program while I was hardwired to him, then I could slip into his augments and process the sensory stimuli as he experienced it, which would give me a much more comprehensive understanding of the data. And it wasn’t like I would be watching him actually have sex, because in all the times my drone had recorded him running the program, he never moved, and he always stayed fully clothed.
SecUnit?
Fuck. I had taken more than a few seconds to process the information, which meant Gurathin had noticed the cognitive delay. Of course he had.
I don’t want you to explain it to me, I said.
That’s what I thought, he responded immediately. I felt him starting to exit the feed, so I pushed the second part of my thought out as fast as I could, which was extremely fast.
I want you to run the program.
Gurathin stopped trying to leave the feed. I could feel him freeze on the other end of the connection.
If I’m wired to you, I explained, I can process all the sensory data myself. You wouldn’t have to explain anything.
Gurathin considered this. I’m… not sure that’s a good idea, SecUnit.
Why not? I asked.
Well, you’d have to be in the room with me, for starters.
Yes, I’m aware. Irritation spiked through me. Did he not think I’d already run through all of the situation parameters for what I was proposing?
Okay, Gurathin said.
Wait. What?
Okay? I responded, unsure if he meant okay like okay, I guess you have thought about us being in the same room, or okay, let’s do this, or some other kind of nebulous okay that I wasn’t aware of yet.
Yes, fine, he said, the metadata oozing impatience and… something else. Anxiety? Nervousness? I wasn’t sure. Come over here.
Now? I asked, surprised that he had capitulated so easily to my request. I’d expected to spend at least another twenty-two minutes strong arming him into the idea.
He didn’t respond, just sent me the location of his apartment, which I already knew from hacking the station’s directory information when I’d first arrived and from my drone’s location telemetry. Still, I guess it was a considerate gesture on his part, if I hadn’t been a SecUnit.
Speaking of my drone, I tuned in to its visual feeds and watched Gurathin as I made my way over to his apartment. He picked at his nails, put his knitting needles away, and shoved a few half-eaten meals into the recycler. His movements didn’t seem frantic, exactly, but they weren’t calm either. His vital signs spiked slightly, then fell, then spiked again. The muscle in his jaw was tight as he paced across the floor, waiting for me. Huh.
My threat assessment module was doing some really bizarre things the whole walk over, but finally, I reached his apartment and knocked on his door. I could have hacked the door controls, but I felt like that would be impolite given that he had invited me over to his home to watch him engage in… sexual activity – I forced myself to actually think the words. It was weird, solo, augmented sexual activity, yes, but it was sexual activity. The idea made me feel strange, but not bad. I didn’t want to examine why that was.
Gurathin opened the door and stared at me like he couldn’t believe I was standing there. I almost couldn’t believe it myself.
“SecUnit,” he said. “Come in.”
I nodded and entered his apartment. “Where–” I started to ask, but he interrupted me, anticipating my question.
“In the bedroom. If– if that’s okay.”
“The bedroom is acceptable,” I said, and followed him to the aforementioned space.
It was small, but cozy, by human standards. Several warmly colored knitted blankets covered the bed, all no doubt made by Gurathin himself, and I felt an unfamiliar surge of fondness run through me at the sight. However, I wasn’t here to appreciate his skill at fiber arts.
“I’ll be on the bed. You can sit on the chair or the bed, whichever you prefer.” He gestured to the seating options. Humans and their sitting. They really never got tired of it, even for sexual purposes, it seemed.
Presented with the choice of where to sit, my organic matter suddenly started to itch. What was I doing here? Were we really doing this? How the hell had I even found myself in this situation?
Oh, right. I had proposed this whole experiment.
“I’ll sit on the bed,” I said. “It will be easier for you to access my dataport that way.”
Gurathin nodded, pulling his hardwire out of his pocket where he usually kept it. He sat cross-legged on the bed, the way I’d noticed he always did before he ran the sex program. I sat awkwardly on the side of the bed, my legs hanging off of it, feet still on the floor. I trained the four drones that I always kept with me on him, as well as the drone that trailed him all the time. I wanted to be sure I got good documentation of his physical reactions, as well, in case the sensory data from his augments didn’t map properly. Between the two data sets, I could probably reconstruct an accurate model of the experience. Through the drone cameras, I saw that Gurathin was looking at me intently. It made my skin feel weird.
“If at any point, it’s too much,” he said, “just disconnect the hardwire. Okay?”
I wanted to make some kind of sarcastic remark about being able to handle a lot more than a couple minutes of transmuted physical stimulus, but I got the sense that the request was important to him, and something about the way he said it made my organics go all melty and soft, so I didn’t.
“Okay,” I agreed.
He nodded swiftly and connected the hardwire to himself, then passed the other end to me. I connected to it and slid across the wiring and into the circuitry of his augments, settling into the weird, swirling, half-organic mush of his processing center.
“Ready?” he asked, slightly breathless. My cameras picked up on a slight flush to his skin, even before the program had begun. Strange.
“Ready,” I confirmed. I felt him reach into his downloads and unzip the data file.
A warm heat spread along Gurathin’s chest, followed by a pressure right at the center of it, pushing him. I vaguely registered it was about the same width and force as a human hand would have been able to apply. Processing through Gurathin’s augments didn’t feel like someone was touching me, exactly. More like I was able to experience an echo of sensation as it bounced off of him, gathering physical data without the full force of the feeling itself. I found myself grateful that I hadn’t decided to run the program on myself earlier. The amount of touching would have been too much for me to handle.
The pressure on Gurathin’s chest started to move down, and I saw his vitals spike on my monitor. I was still staring at the wall in front of me, but through the drone cameras, I saw his chest start to rise and fall more rapidly, pushing up against the soft fabric of his shirt. The flush already on his cheeks darkened by several hex codes, and I was surprised to find that drew my attention as much as it did. I trained one drone on his face for further observation.
I expected the pressure hand sensation provided by the program would go directly to Gurathin’s genitals, which had already begun to firm up under his garments, but it didn’t. Instead, it went towards his hip, increasing in pressure as the phantom grip was joined by a twin on the other side of his body. I frowned as the pressure continued to increase, almost simulating the sensation of being pinned down. I was familiar with that sensation, at least from the other side. It’s part of the base SecUnit combat module. Did Gurathin like that feeling? It had never occurred to me that a person could.
Carefully, I tapped further into Gurathin’s augments, curious about his own physiological reaction to the program. Through the drones, I could see the light sheen of sweat that was beginning to gather on his skin, though whether it was from nerves or arousal, I couldn’t tell. As the pressure of the program increased, his hands, which had previously lay relaxed on the bedspread, began to flex, and his jaw ticked where the muscles became tense. I could tell that he was trying to regulate his own breathing, but him exerting control over his own physiological responses to the program wasn’t the point of this exercise, so I pinged him in the feed.
Don’t do that.
Do what? he asked. Interesting. He sounded different in the feed, too, the subvocalizations more strained, less controlled than usual.
Regulate your breathing, I told him. It messes with my data.
Apologies for trying to maintain some semblance of my dignity, he retorted, subvocals strained, but still sounding very much like Gurathin.
I don’t want you to maintain your dignity, I said.
A low sound slipped from his throat then, almost a groan, but was quickly tamped down, his fingers bunching up the blanket under him with the effort. His usual control was slipping, and I found myself fascinated by his reactions, by the way his breathing sped up after I instructed him not to try to control it, and by the way the flush was spreading down his neck now and under his clothes. I wondered how far down it went, and what kind of stimulus it would take for him to make that sound again. How much could he take until his control broke entirely?
One of the phantom hands was trailing its way up his back, now, ghost fingers running along his spine, the other one still pinning his hips down. I took note of the way the haptic data I was getting from his augments prickled like the shudder that ran down his body at the touch. His lips were slightly parted now as he panted, his eyes tightly closed, brow furrowed in something that looked like concentration but wasn’t. I could see that his sexual organ was pushing against the seam of his pants, fully aroused. Did it really take so little to make him like this?
Why this instead of a sexual partner? I asked. There are probably people on the station who would have sex with you. I was given to understand that Gurathin was not entirely unattractive by human standards, even if he didn’t look like any of the actors on Sanctuary Moon.
“Yes, well,” he ground out between breaths, evidently too overwhelmed to respond in the feed. Hearing him speak out loud was better anyway. He sounded ragged, and I found myself wishing he would make the sound he’d made earlier again. “Maybe I don’t want to have sex with them.”
“Why not?” I asked, returning to vocalizing.
Gurathin managed to huff a laugh, breathless and disbelieving, but the sound turned into something strangled and keening as the program shifted into the next phase, and the hand sensation on his back moved to apply pressure to his throat instead. Pleasure spiked in his augments, buzzing through his body, and to a lesser extent, my own.
What the fuck?
First, the pinning sensation, and now this – both things I understood as violence, and yet they registered to Gurathin as pleasure. It was bizarre. From his vitals and the way he was reacting, it seemed like he was genuinely aroused by the physical inputs from the program, including and maybe especially by the new pressure on his throat. I didn’t understand how Gurathin could be so aroused by feeling so out of control. If he liked being in control, maybe I could understand the sexual response, but this seemed beyond the realm of possibility.
You like this? I couldn’t bring myself to say the sentence with my vocal chords, so the feed would have to suffice.
Gurathin’s vitals spiked when I spoke to him, and he swallowed another soft, aborted noise down in his throat. I made a note of that in my records for later.
“Answer me,” I said out loud.
“Yes,” he gritted out. “I– like this.”
I felt the phantom hand squeeze his throat harder, not actually obstructing his airway, because it was intangible – though if there had been a real hand on his throat in its place, it would have.
A thought occurred to me – a memory, pulled from just a few weeks after our first meeting.
Did you like it when I choked you on the survey? I asked.
Gurathin sputtered, obviously surprised at the question, his face flushing even redder, going splotchy in the places where his skin was paler than the skin surrounding it.
“SecUnit, I–” he started, but before he could answer, the sensation on his hip moved lower, down to the top of his thigh, squeezing hard at the place where it met his pelvis. A choked groan spilled out of his mouth, and my threat assessment level spiked by ten percent – I made a mental note to run diagnostics on it later. I hadn’t realized that so many parts of the human body were capable of functioning as erogenous zones. In my shows, the scenes I skipped over were nothing like this. I had always assumed that sex for humans was just a matter of mouths and sex parts, but it seemed now like maybe that wasn’t the case, or at least it wasn’t the case for Gurathin.
In any case, he still hadn’t answered my question, so I asked it again.
Did it make you feel like this? I’m not sure why, but I took a still capture from one of my drone’s cameras – one of him sitting flushed and panting, barely keeping it together – and pushed it to him through the feed. His reaction to seeing himself was beyond what I had imagined it might be – his vitals spiked high as his eyes squeezed closed even tighter, his jaw snapping shut as something that sounded like a whimper threatened to escape his throat.
Then shakily, he nodded once, sharp and quick. I blinked in surprise.
Oh.
I expected disgust to roil through me at any second, but it just… didn’t. Huh.
I don’t remember thinking about what I did next, I just did it. Slowly, I turned to face him and lifted my hand to extend it towards his neck, fingertips brushing the delicate, flushed skin of his throat before putting my hand all the way around it. I didn’t apply any pressure at first, testing the feel of his skin on my palm, but then I tightened my grip incrementally, until I was mirroring the pressure of the program’s fake hand with my own, real one. I kept careful track of Gurathin’s vitals, ensuring I wasn’t applying too much pressure or cutting off his air supply.
His eyes flew open at my touch, and I watched him search my face like he was looking for something – an explanation, maybe. His chest heaved and his head tilted slightly up to expose the fragile column of his throat as my fingers started to make indents on his skin. I wanted to… not touch him, not more than I already was, but affect him somehow, the same way the program had affected him. Privately, I thought I could probably do a hell of a lot better than the program.
Do you like this? I asked again, tightening my hand on his throat a little more. I didn’t squeeze that hard, because I wanted to hear his response (and also because I do actually care about Gurathin’s wellbeing, but I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about that at this point). He was still panting, and I could feel his throat working against my hand for a few seconds before he gasped out his response.
“ Fuck, I– yes. Yes,” he hissed. “Is, ah, is that what you wanted to hear?”
He sounded completely wrecked. Through the haptic data from his augments, I could feel his body rapidly becoming overwhelmed by sensation and pleasure from the program and, now, my hand on his neck. Hearing Gurathin, who was usually so well-spoken and reserved, sound like that sent a kind of thrill I’d never experienced before through my organic components, which were already thrumming with the dulled feedback from being wired to him. I knew I was severely out of my depth and rapidly approaching a point at which I would have no fucking clue what to do, but I kept pushing anyway. I combed through the feed for the backdoor to the sensory array of his augments array, found it, and proceeded to turn the whole sexual program off.
Gurathin pulled himself together enough to send me a ? in the feed, which I responded to by starting to push myself into his sensory array, gradually replacing the space the program had occupied there. I knew at this point that I should probably check in and ask if what I was doing was okay with Gurathin, but I really didn’t know how to go about doing that, so I just went slowly instead, giving him ample time to put up firewalls or attempt to block my entry into his systems. His eyes widened as he felt me fill the array, but he didn’t do either of those things, and I settled into his augments without issue. It took me a moment (read: less than 2 milliseconds) to figure out how everything worked, but from there, it was almost too easy.
I started by reinstating the feeling of pressure on his hips, which caused him to inhale sharply and jerk his pelvis forward, seeking friction at the site of his arousal. I couldn’t explain why, but I wanted him to make more of those undignified noises from earlier, so I directed the points of phantom touch to start exploring his body, seeking out the places and the kinds of stimuli that made him the most responsive. I still kept the pinning sensation on his hips, but I took my actual hand off of his throat and replaced it with the phantom pressure again. It wasn’t that the touch had bothered me so much as I didn’t want to hurt him accidentally. Without my governor module in place, I had no built in failsafe if I actually started crushing his windpipe.
“Lay back,” I instructed. He obeyed the order without question, and that caused a lot of my internal sensors to return some really unusual readings.
With him laying back on the bed, I saw through my drones how Gurathin’s dark hair fanned out on the pillow where it wasn’t stuck to his forehead with sweat, and how his chest and stomach rose and fell with heavy breaths under his shirt.
“SecUnit,” Gurathin breathed. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t know.
“It’s easier for me to collect data if I’m directly controlling the stimuli,” I responded, too busy concentrating on the stimuli in question to come up with a better answer. I upped the temperature of the ghost sensations on Gurathin’s body and felt his vitals tick up. He liked that. Good.
When he spoke again, I could tell it took a concerted amount of effort. “I thought you – hah, fuck – wanted to collect data on the program?”
Shit, I had said that, hadn’t I? Somewhere along the line, my mission parameters had shifted from obtaining sensory information about Gurathin’s sexual program to obtaining sensory information about Gurathin. That was… mildly alarming. And definitely a sign of potential malfunction. But also, I didn’t want to stop.
“I would rather collect data on you,” I said truthfully, then immediately felt weird about telling the truth. “If– if that’s alright.”
I lessened the pressure on Gurathin’s body, lingering in his augments but suddenly aware that I had probably overstepped approximately one million personal boundaries, not to mention several security measures. Gurathin looked up at me from where he was laying, a soft but cautious expression on his face.
“It’s okay with me,” he said, “if it’s okay with you.”
“It’s okay with me,” I said.
It was okay with me. It was more than okay with me, for reasons I didn’t really understand and would probably have to devote significant energy to figuring out later. Stupid feelings and their stupidly complicated causes.
Gurathin nodded. Okay, he said in the feed. Then go ahead.
I went slower this time. Gradually, I reintroduced the pressure on his hips and then his throat, pleased when his vitals started rising again from where they had calmed down to during our brief conversation. Because I was controlling the sensory inputs directly from his augments and not using my hands, nothing said I was limited to two points of contact, so I created two more phantom hand sensations on his thighs, skimming down them before directing them to tease inwards and grasp at the softest part of them, right below his groin. His lips parted in a soft, shaky gasp, and without thinking I saved the sound to my permanent memory.
Then, I had a new thought. I increased the pressure on his thighs until it felt like a pushing sensation, curious if he would get the idea of what I was directing him to do. Like with my verbal command to lay down, he parted his legs almost immediately, letting out another low, quiet groan as he did so. I felt my threat assessment spike again, and another thrill ran down my spine.
Okay, so I liked it when he obeyed me. I liked it a lot. ‘
Maybe I should try more of that.
“Touch yourself,” I instructed, and watched the way Gurathin swallowed at the command. It was gratifying to see him so malleable, so easily affected by my words.
“Where?” he asked, voice slightly hoarse.
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Human mouths were sensitive, right? They were always using them for this kind of stuff in media.
“Your mouth,” I said, hoping that was a good answer. It seemed like I had chosen well, because he let out a soft sound and moved two painted fingers to his lips. Through the hardwire, I could feel the way his breath warmed the pads of his fingers with each heavy exhale, and the sensors of his augments recorded a burst of pleasure low in his stomach at the touch. He ran his fingers along the curve of his lower lip, parting them as he did so. Then, he opened his eyes, looked directly at one of my drones, and pushed both fingers into his mouth.
I immediately turned down the sensory input from the hardwire so I wouldn’t have to feel the echo of the wet feeling on his fingers, but the visual alone was so arresting that I thought I might have developed some kind of cognitive delay just from viewing it. Quickly, I saved the drone footage into my permanent memory to rewatch later. I watched from multiple angles as Gurathin sucked on the tips of his own fingers, swallowing around them. On impulse, I increased the pressure on his throat slightly, and he made a muffled sound and shut his eyes again, back arching slightly up from the bed, his head tilted back.
Gurathin sent ? again in the feed, but the metadata was different this time, suffused with desire and warmth and a kind of searching urgency I was unfamiliar with. I was pretty sure that was his way of checking in with me when he didn’t have the use of his mouth and wasn’t able to form full subvocal sentences, but I didn’t know what kind of response he was looking for. Probably not a systems functionality readout.
I am getting the data I require, I said, and immediately knew that was the wrong thing to say, so I searched my media archives quickly for something else that was more appropriate but still truthful. You look good like this.
A shudder ran down Gurathin’s body at that, the sensors in his augments going haywire. Through our connection, I could feel him approaching some kind of horizon, his body and (to some extent) my mind straining towards something, and though I wasn’t sure exactly what that thing was, I knew that I wanted to push him over its edge. He had liked it when I told him he looked good, so maybe he would like it even more if I told him about some of the other things I liked.
I like how obedient you are, I tried, and his breath hitched, warmth spreading in his abdomen and turning hot. That was encouraging. I like the noises you make. At that, he moaned full-throated around his fingers, which were still in his mouth. The sensations in his body turned sharp and aching, and his hips lifted off of the blankets again, seeking something – friction, probably. Relief.
I could give him that. Trying not to think too hard about the meaning and importance of what I was about to do (or what kind of self reassessment I might have to do later), I dipped back into his sensory array and created a new phantom touch where the line of his erection was pushing against the fabric of his pants, pressing firmly against it – not as hard as the pressure at his throat, but enough to make him really feel it.
That was apparently all it took for the taut, white-hot thing inside him to snap. His fist flew to his mouth to block the keening sound that came tumbling out as he spilled over, and his pleasure ran back up through the hardwire and washed over me in waves, hot and buzzing. It felt really good, and I allowed myself to think that maybe humans did have some point to the whole sex thing after all.
I watched as Gurathin’s breathing slowly returned to normal, and our connection through the wire became fuzzy and warm, swimming with all of the good chemicals that had been released in Gurathin’s brain. He seemed content to just lay there, and on an impulse I couldn’t identify, I pushed myself farther onto the bed and laid down next to him, still connected by the wire, but not touching.
“Do all humans get tired after that?” I asked. I could feel the heaviness of his eyelids through the connection.
“After sex, you mean?” he said, turning his head so that he could look at me next to him. I sent a drone to hover above us, so I could see what we looked like side by side.
I still wasn’t sure what we had done counted as sex, technically, especially considering I’d barely touched him, but if Gurathin thought it was sex, then I guessed his assessment was better than mine. “Yes.”
“Usually,” he answered. I had to fight a frown off of my face. That seemed like a serious design flaw.
“You never answered my question from earlier,” I reminded him.
He huffed a small laugh. “What question? I was a little distracted.”
I could feel his eyes still on me, but I fixed my gaze on the ceiling. “Why don’t you have sexual partners on the station? Why use a program instead?”
“I…” he started, then trailed off, silent for a few seconds. “It can get complicated.”
“Complicated how?” I pushed.
He sighed and rolled back to face the ceiling, chewing on his bottom lip before he spoke again. “As you’ve so astutely observed in the past, I’m not great with eye contact. That applies to sexual encounters, too. I don’t like… a lot of things, when it comes to sex. For reasons I’d rather not get into right now.” Gurathin took a deep breath. “And sometimes– sometimes, it’s kind of hard for a partner to understand that. If I don’t want them to touch me, or I don’t want to touch them, then they feel like they’ve done something wrong, or like they’re not good enough…” he paused again. “It’s just complicated. So, I use the augments instead.”
That… made a lot of sense, actually.
“I think I might understand,” I said softly. He glanced over at me again.
“Yeah,” he said, the edges of his mouth pushing up into a soft smile. “I guess you might.”