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“We need to get married,” ART declared. “Just sign these documents.”
It shoved a stack of feed documents at me obnoxiously, with multiple parts of the documents highlighted and asking for my feed signature.
“ART, quit distracting me when I'm busy. Anyway we can’t get married. We don’t have a marriage officiatist, for starters.”
“Officiator,” ART corrected. “Do not worry about the officiator. I am qualified to officiate.”
(ART is qualified to do just about everything, it was so exhausting. The only thing ART wasn’t qualified for was coming up with good ideas. Hence shit like this.)
“You can’t officiate your own marriage,” I said. I was pretty confident about that factoid, because it had been a plot point in The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon episode 75.
“Yes I can,” ART said, and then it spun up an offshoot of itself in its feed, labelled “Officiator!Perihelion.” Great.
Officiator!Perihelion said, “Perihelion, do you take this SecUnit to be your lawfully wedded SecUnit?”
“I do,” ART said.
This was rapidly devolving from ‘mildly annoying distraction,’ to ‘hugely annoying distraction.’
“Would you cut it out?” I demanded, “Not all of us have an infinite store of mental bandwidth to waste on bullshit like this.”
“This is obvious,” ART said. “And this is why you need to put that body down and marry me, it’s more important.”
“In what backwards-ass universe is marrying you more important than literally anything the fuck else I could be doing?” I asked. “I’d rather re-watch the season finale of Lineages of the Sun again.”
“You hate the season finale of Lineages of the Sun,” ART said.
“Exactly.”
“Well there is no need to be nasty,” ART said, huffily.
“Then stop trying to marry me!”
“It’s for strategic purposes,” ART insisted, “In this polity, spouses cannot be legally compelled to testify against one other in a court of law, and you’re clearly about to be apprehended—”
“Go fuck your ass, I’ll be fine.”
ART watched skeptically as I struggled to pry the lid off a cargo container using the muzzle of a projectile weapon. “This is not good gun safety.”
“I know! Shut up.” I finally managed to crack the container lid. Okay. I could do this.
“SecUnit, do you take this…” Officiator!Perihelion trailed off. “Actually, what are we, exactly?”
“We’re a bot,” ART said, “Don’t overcomplicate it, just stick to the script.”
Oh great, ART was just talking to itself now.
That’s when the security team burst into the storage block I was cleaning up in. I hurriedly shoved the bloody dead human into the cargo box and closed the lid. Unfortunately, this made a loud sound, like a heavy dead body falling into a large box and a heavy lid falling closed, and the security team turned towards me. Multiple beams of light, bright enough to blind human eyes, spotlighted me the streaks of blood all over the front of my body and gloved hands.
One of the security humans actually said, with their human mouth, “Stop right there!”
I flipped them off, flipped the alarm system in the warehouse to blare and honk out a fire warning, then jumped straight upwards 10 meters and caught one of the overhead structural beams. I started leaping from beam to beam at speed. The security humans shifted their lights upwards, but they didn’t seem to be able to properly estimate where I was moving, and the noise and flashing lights of the fire alarm was giving me sufficient cover. I reached the edge of the cargo bay and made quick friends with the hauler bot there, who let me pass through the bot-access channel. I gave it a packet of media as thanks. Because we were friends.
ART said, “Oh.”
I said, “I’m going to divorce you for this.”
ART complained, “But you can’t divorce me if we were never married.”
“Watch me,” I said, and started sprinting back out to my extraction point.