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“So this next part. It involves ah… a kiss?”
Gurathin winced. “Yes. Yes it does.”
We’d just limped through the second day of ceremonies that Gurathin’s family liked to do whenever any of them declared a new spouse. I was trying to be respectful of their traditions, but that was getting close to impossible since Gurathin clearly hated all of it.
He said, “Will you be okay? I can ask them to add privacy screens.”
I said, “No. It doesn’t matter.”
‘Private’ parts of the ceremony still involved Gurathin’s parents and grandparents and their partners, which alone was over thirty humans. One or two hundred more didn’t make a difference to me.
F-304, one of the old family bots, gave Gurathin a biscuit. He took it and ate it without even noticing.
We were in a closet in Gurathin’s family domicile, surrounded by shelves piled with towels and clothes and dry edibles. Apparently it was F-304’s main storage and recharge area, but it didn’t seem to mind. It even had a spot for Gurathin to sit. (Not for me though – I had to stand. I didn’t think this bot liked me very much.)
Taking four armloads of linens, F-304 left us to talk.
I said, “I didn’t think you liked kissing.” He’d never asked to kiss me before. I had enough doubts about all of this now, that I wanted to know whether he really wanted to do this, or whether he was forcing himself to do it for his family’s sake.
He said, “Well. Yes, I usually like that. But you never asked to kiss me, and you’ve always been direct about what you want. So, I assumed…”
Here we were, after all the therapy we’d been through, still guessing at what we wanted, and still failing badly.
“I’ve never done that,” I admitted. Not that I could remember, and I think I’d retrieved all the sex-trauma related memories that I had. “It might be okay.”
We’d touched each other a lot. He’d tasted both the metal and the organic parts of me. And I’d used my lips on him, in a lot of ways I knew he liked. But we’d never actually pressed our lips together.
I said, “I think it would be good to do something with you that I’ve never done before.” The entire ceremony was described in the document his family had provided to me. I wouldn’t have come at all if I wasn’t prepared to go through with all of it. Kissing would probably be weird, but I guess this whole thing was weird, from start to finish. From the part where we’d had sex on the survey planet, while GrayCris was hunting us, to the part where we’d finally, finally , after a lot of raw, gruelling, emotional councelling sessions, worked out a spousal plan that might actually work.
I’d do this if it made him happy. But Gurathin was like a different person when he was with his family. Like he was regressing into a sadder, angrier person than I’d ever seen him be. Here we were hiding in a supply closet just because he didn’t want to be swept into the company of any of the loud, boisterous, probably-inebriated cousins and niblings and all of their partners, roaming the halls in riotous packs.
I got the strong impression that Gurathin wasn’t exactly close with his family. It was just so big . They all generally seemed to wish him well, but they didn’t really know him. And I didn’t think he was very attached to any of them, not even his parents or creche siblings.
It felt like they barely noticed him. Like he was standing in the background of his own pairing ceremony, and they were just going through the motions for tradition’s sake. (Gurathin’s family was very particular about tradition.)
So I asked Gurathin, very seriously, “Do you want to do this kissing part?”
He threw his hands up, I guess insulted that I’d even question it.
“Yes of course I want to! I brought you here, and they arranged it. I want everyone in my family to see us together, and to see what an amazing spouse you are, and to be proud of me and celebrate my good fortune.”
I narrowed my eyes. I said, “I don’t think I believe you.”
We’d been trying hard to be truthful to each other, and this felt like a year’s backsliding.
“I’m not lying.” He wrapped his arms around himself. “It’s true, I want all of that. I do.”
I waited for him to try and come up with an explanation, because we could both tell that wasn't the end of what he had to say.
"But I also want to tell them all to go fuck themselves, because I don't care what they think. And then leave this place and never look back.”
He shrugged with his arms still crossed, looking down and away.
I sent a status request ping. Yeah, I still do that when I’m stressed. Since Gurathin’s family tended to be traditional, and this was a strictly family-only event, none of the others were here. Gurathin pinged back though. That made me feel better.
(Through all the shit we’d gone through since we’d left the planet, all the trauma that had come crashing down on our heads and the hard, weird, upsetting process of re-acclimating ourselves to society, (It was almost three planetary years now, and sometimes it felt like we were still there, in a way I couldn’t explain.) it always always made my stress levels go down to be reminded that they were alive, we were okay, and we’d made it.)
He rubbed his face. “I don’t know why I dragged you out here. There’s no one here I particularly need to impress.”
F-304 returned. It gave him another biscuit.
“Thank you, Eff,” he said through a mouthful of crumbs.
Then F-304 queried me in bot language, whether I knew how to make the biscuits Gurathin liked. Without even waiting for a reply, it sent me a complete recipe that could be produced by over a thousand models of food recyclers.
And a message: Performance improvement recommended.
I strained over the instinct to argue with it.
I asked Gurathin, “What are those biscuits?”
His face soured. “They’re a nutrient-rich supplement for babies. Go ahead and make fun of me if you want.”
That was so far from what I thought was an acceptable thing to say, I didn’t know how to respond.
“No. I don’t think so.”
I plotted the fastest route to the long-haul transit station, is what I did.
I knew Gurathin felt bad and I knew I had to do something about it, but just as I was working up the nerve to hug him, F-304 spread a warm towel over his shoulders.
Gurathin closed his eyes and visibly relaxed.
F-304 sent me a task checklist: towel size, fibre content, moisture and temperature levels. It even knew his favorite color. It sent two checklist columns, the one it had just completed, and a separate one for me, with no check marks, because I had completely failed to do any of that.
Needs provision services lacking competency, it told me.
Okay, yeah, now I knew for sure this bot didn’t like me.
Then F-304 left. I’d noticed that it didn’t often stay in place for a long time. Part of its function was to patrol the sleeping area, to see if any of its small humans needed it.
I said, “F-304 is tall for a child-minding bot, isn’t it?”
It was taller than Gurathin, though not as tall as me. To a small human its height must be intimidating. It was vaguely humanoid (most humans preferred bots to be that way), with four arms, a solid set of legs that hovered just over the floor. But it didn’t have a face – not an expressive one anyway. In the place where its ‘head’ would be, it had a triangle shaped plate with two lights that suggested eyes. (Which might actually be its visual sensors. This bot was probably older than Gurathin’s grandparents.)
I didn’t know much about raising small humans. (Since Gurathin had expressed interest in having offspring, I’d browsed some instructional modules, but I was a long, long way from ever admitting that.) I knew that new, tiny humans learned facial expressions by example and mimicry. Child-minding bots, when they were used at all, always had faces, capable of a wide range of appropriate emotional responses. This bot didn’t. It couldn’t provide any of that.
Gurathin said, “F-304’s not a child-minding bot. It minded me when I was a child, and I gather it kept on attending the family creche because it was suited to the work. But that wasn’t its intended purpose.”
Huh. That was a surprise.
I asked, “Then why did it start minding you?”
Gurathin looked away. “We… my family’s creche used to be very large. Too large. All the cousins, raised by older cousins and hired term help. That’s why I never knew my parents very well. Or my aunts or uncles. It was so large that my grandparents enlisted the family services authorities to help re-organize us into smaller groups. Before that…” He looked away, and his face locked into that very controlled expression when he wasn’t trying to express anything. “Every minder in the creche had favourites. But I wasn’t anyone’s favourite. Eff has needs provision programmed into its base code. It brought me food when the minders forgot, or the other children stole it.”
We were both quiet.
I asked, “Can I hate them?”
He said, “Absolutely not. They’re my family. They are me. They’re part of me, for all of their faults.” He closed his eyes in thought. “I’m allowed to hate them. We’re family.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
That was a lot.
Sometimes when I’m feeling big emotions, I push them away. It was just an automatic thing. Like backburnering a hubsys command in the middle of a fight. I couldn’t pay attention to something that wouldn’t help me in the moment. That instinct was really helpful now. I was so angry at every single human here that I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to do or say anything I’d regret. I could deal with that shit later.
Gurathin was more important now. He was so mind-bogglingly calm because he’d been dealing with this for a long time. I suspected he’d brought me here for a reason. There was something here that he couldn’t leave. And I thought I was getting a sense of why.
“F-304 cares about you,” I observed.
He shrugged.
“No, not especially, I don’t think. Not anymore than it cares about all of the humans that it helps to serve. That’s just how it was made.”
Oh wow. I knew I was treading on sensitive ground here.
I said, “I’ve cared about every single client I’ve ever protected, even the ones I didn’t like. But I care about some more than others.”
He shrugged again.
I sent a ping to F-304. I asked what kind of services it had been programmed to provide to Gurathin.
It responded with a request for my full schematic map and a detailed list of what I could provide to him. (It was really prickly and argumentative for a bot.)
So my response was to send it a series of clips, mostly of our time on the survey planet. I might not be able to make Gurathin’s favorite biscuits for him, but I could protect him from killer weather; malevolent corporations; and, sometimes, his own instinct to push away anyone who tried to get close to him.
F-304 took almost a full minute to process this. It wasn't a stupid bot, but I could feel it working through several shifts in emotion while it re-assessed its opinion of me. (Bots do have feelings, but not in a way that humans and augmented humans can understand. I'd observed humans projecting human emotions onto bots, or assuming they didn't have feelings at all. Or both. Which I think is what happened here. A big, tragic miscommunication.)
From my drone, I watched it stop in its tracks. Through the feed, I sensed that it felt something close to fear. I guess nobody had bothered to tell it why Gurathin had been gone for so long. As far as it knew, Gurathin has been perfectly safe and happy the entire time.
F-304 headed back towards us. It sent me a compilation folder about Gurathin. Some of its information was out of date, but a lot of it still applied. Some of the files and images it sent surprised me.
This supply bot didn’t just know Gurathin. It was an expert on Gurathin. Not only did it know about his nutritional needs, preferred sleep schedule, and most comfortable clothing patterns, it knew all about what made him happy. It had a database of images of every time it had seen Gurathin smile. It had lists of books and music and games. Subjects that had sparked the interests which eventually led to his career. It knew about friends he’d made – other small humans from the local schooling district. (Gurathin wasn’t entirely lacking in social skills, but his baseline of comfort tended to keep him either alone or in the company of humans who didn’t demand much interaction.)
So yeah, F-304 sort of cared about all of its humans, but at one point, Gurathin had been the human who needed it most. That had written itself onto the bot’s neural programming, to an extent that I didn’t think anyone here knew, including Gurathin.
Gurathin was still trying to decide what he wanted to do, now that he had admitted to me and to himself that he didn’t really want to go through with his family’s pageantry.
When F-304 arrived, it didn’t have any biscuits or warm towels for Gurathin. It hung back in the doorway, and I could feel it hesitate. Finally it decided to extend its uppermost arms towards one of the higher-up cabinets. It took out a folded-up cloth, brought it down, and offered it to Gurathin.
He said, “Oh. They made a new one for me after all. Thank you, Eff.” He unfolded it a little to admire the pattern of the embroidery. “I assumed they’d use one of the old ceremony cloths. This is actually nice,” he commented.
I had no opinion of the aesthetic quality of the thing, but I recognized the colors and the pattern. It was designed exactly to Gurathin’s tastes. It resembled one of the pieces of art that his family used to own, which F-304 observed him often admiring when he was younger.
“F-304 made that for you,” I commented. Apparently it was buddies with the household recycling bots.
“Did it?” Gurathin’s brow lifted in surprise. He looked over to F-304. “Thank you, Eff.”
F-304 didn’t say anything. I could tell it wanted to express something but it didn’t know how. Supply bots didn’t hug. They weren’t built to feel this kind of attachment at all, but this one was apparently smart enough to alter its own base directive.
I didn’t know what to say either. I didn’t know how much of the bot’s feelings I could realistically translate, and I didn’t know if I should. Most humans liked hearing, out loud, how much they were cared for. Gurathin wasn’t built that way – he had weird reactions to that sometimes.
“I guess we should stay after all. At least for the next part,” Gurathin said.
That gave me an idea.
I said, “Okay. How about we practice? Then maybe it won’t be so bad.”
~~~
My drones mapped a path that was clear of the other humans who were still awake. I led Gurathin and F-304 out to the courtyard dias where the next ceremony was supposed to be. The weather was temperate. The air smelled like flowering plants and other decorative flora, both growing in abundance from pots on the ground and up on the walls. Night birds sang. The stars were out. I had to admit, it was nice.
We were both wearing the loose, high-necked traditional suits that were a normal part of the ceremony. Surprisingly, I liked what Gurathin was wearing. I mean, I liked the way he looked in it, even though I couldn’t understand why. The suit was old, but re-fitted to his measurements, with intricate stitching and beadery that matched his skin tone, hair, and build, in an overall aesthetic effect that even I could appreciate. The suit spoke of cleverness and skill and inherited means. And mostly, it changed the way Gurathin carried himself whenever he stepped into any public space. I realized that he looked dignified in these clothes because they made him feel that way. However he might hate his family, he was proud of them too, in a weird, thorny way he and I would probably never untangle. It reminded him that he was part of something bigger than himself, and that for whatever their faults, his family was strong, and clever, and could produce good things too. They’d made him, after all.
This suit made Gurathin feel proud of himself. And I thought he looked good that way.
My other humans had made my outfit for me. Bharadwaj and Volescu had replicated it, choosing a cut, color, and fabric that they thought would suit me. Mensah and Ratthi had embroidered patterns on the collar and sleeves. Overse had provided the metal buttons, which were apparently family heirlooms, and Arada had stitched them on. Pin-Lee had ordered my formal-looking shoes, which miraculously weren’t too uncomfortable.
I thought this was ridiculous. Like, I don’t know, dressing up a tree or a rock. But humans were weird that way, and I’d more or less gotten used to it. When I’d assured them it would be okay, I’d meant it. This made them happy, and that was nice for me. (It made Gurathin happy in a way that had nothing to do with identity or status, and everything to do with pure aesthetics and physical attraction.) It made other humans look at me funny, but I was getting used to that too.
Apparently murderbots could wear nice clothes. (It’d get shredded immediately if I had to do any actual murdering, which I’d warned them about, but my risk assessment module only calculated a 0-2% chance of that.)
We stepped into the proscribed ceremonial configuration. Gurathin and I faced each other, with F-304 beside and between us.
I’d studied these ceremonies, and I knew that however much he’d balked at how it was going, Gurathin truly wanted this. I wanted to make this moment as meaningful as possible.
F-304 spoke first. This role was supposed to go to Gurathin’s seniormost living ancestor, who was at this time one of his great-grandparents, whom he’d never even met. F-304 had been one of the bots on the first ships to bring humans to this part of the planet, so it was almost surely older than that. It had every right to do this.
In the kind of synthetic voice that I’d only heard in historical serials, F-304 recited Gurathin’s full name, which included all of his family names, as well as the feed name he’d chosen when he’d received his first augment, and the region and planet and polity where he’d been born and raised.
Then F-304 asked me, “Will you take him as your spouse?”
I said, “Yes.”
I held out my hand, and Gurathin reached out and held it.
Then, because I didn’t have a family representative, I spoke for myself.
I said, “My name is Murderbot.” I wouldn't have said that in front of a crowd. But the only witness now was F-304, and thought it deserved to know. Then I recited my product name, and my feed name, and the name of the company and its parent companies, and the station where I was kept for deployment, the station where I was initially trained, and the manufacturing plant where I was produced. Because that was me. That was where I came from.
In order to build any kind of stable life together, we needed to acknowledge our lives before this. We’d have to figure out the pieces of who we were, and what we were now and what we might become, to build towards something else that we couldn’t exactly imagine right now. We needed to understand each other's pasts to build our future.
I said, “Will you take me as your spouse?”
Gurathin said, “Yes.”
We stepped close to each other. Our faces weren’t quite touching, but we were close.
F-304 shook out the cloth, spread it over our heads.
This was so weird. I didn’t think it would ever stop being weird to take part in these traditions. They made sense to the humans, but they never made sense to me. All I could think of was that we must look ridiculous with a big cloth draped over us like this.
But Gurathin was happy. I didn’t think he would’ve looked so happy if we’d done this in front of a crowd. And that made me feel okay about it. I could do this.
Ratthi had sent me a file – video instructions of how to kiss, and what kind of kisses were popularly practised. I’d found some anatomical illustrations of the muscle groups involved, and I’d studied recordings of this ceremony. I knew what to expect.
We leaned towards each other. I had to bend my head down, he had to raise his up. We brought our faces close. Then closer. Here we go. We pressed our lips together. We were kissing.
It wasn’t terrible. He tasted like his own saliva, and the biscuits he’d been eating. It was strange but familiar too. Another way for our bodies to connect, I guess.
I didn’t know how long this kiss was supposed to last so I left it up to Gurathin. He leaned in and kind of melted up against me. We hadn’t had sex since we’d arrived – stress had chased the concept from his mind, leaving me feeling weirdly cold, and the both of us on edge. This warmed us up. I could see the appeal.
Then he pulled away, and it was over. F-304 whipped the cloth up over our heads and this was the part where the crowd of celebrants was supposed to cheer, but it was only the three of us, and Gurathin closed his eyes and smiled like this was enough anyway. These ceremonies were supposed to be joyful, but I hadn’t seen any joy on his face until now.
I looked away and smiled too, because his feelings were rubbing off on me, and I was glad there were no humans around to watch.
This was it. This was all he wanted, I think.
It was like Gurathin was one of those flora that had learned to survive in the shady spots of treacherously dry climates. Give them too much water or sunshine and they’d die. He needed attention and affection, sometimes desperately, but not too much. Just a little.
Well, luckily for us, I was really bad at expressing affection.
If it made him more comfortable for me to not express my attachment to him, I could definitely do that. He didn’t need to know the depths of my feelings. The way the expressions on his face made me think poetic words that I’d never say out loud. The way I thought his bones and his organs and his skin were beautiful. The way touching him reminded me of the summer storms on the survey planet; the air getting heavy, the darkness and the rumbling, the searing peals of lightning, loud and hot, and the deluge of water and the closeness of death, and once it had all passed, the high, clear stars blinking in the sky, with their stories that I knew were important, for reasons I couldn’t explain.
He didn’t need to know any of that. It barely made sense to me anyway.
I could be there with him, maybe; if we could figure out a way to fit together, and not make each other too miserable. Gurathin needed a partner who wouldn’t crowd him, or hold on too tightly. I could learn to do that. I could handle the care and feeding of this one human. I had the help of Mensah and Ratthi and the rest of my humans, and F-304 now, I guess.
I could find other ways to make him happy, and that would help. I said, “I can’t stand it here. Can we go now?”
He smiled. Bullseye. “If you feel that strongly, yes, maybe we should go.”
In the very first ceremony, we’d signed the marital documents that Pin-Lee had prepared for us, so legally we were already partners. Everything else was just ritual, and an excuse for a bunch of parties.
"How about this…your family likes to collect pairing ceremonies, right?” Every time someone from a new culture married into the family, they adopted a new pairing custom. Hence the days-to-weeks long parade of ceremonies. "No one's ever married a SecUnit before. This can be a new custom. The part where it steals its spouse in the middle of the night and takes them away to parts unknown."
Gurathin laughed.
"If anyone in the family ever marries another SecUnit, that will be on record as the correct tradition."
We didn’t need anything from our room. F-304 escorted us towards the yard where the automated vehicles were parked. One of them would take us to the nearest transit hub where I’d scheduled a pickup.
Gurathin said, “I suppose I should change. They’ll want the suit back.”
I said, “No, keep it for now. Mensah’s planned a celebration just for all of us,” I admitted. ‘ All of us ’ meant the survey team; me and my eight humans. “Ratthi grew sweet roots.”
His face lit up. Whatever the rest of my humans had planned, I knew it would be meaningful for both of us.
We all switched to communicate by feed, because we were more comfortable that way. I didn’t know what Gurathin said to F-304, or what it said in response. Gurathin’s face was a weird medley of emotions. Happy, surprised, sad, embarrassed, angry, sad, and happy again. Tired and sad, but happy. We might talk about it later in therapy. Or maybe not. He kept parts of himself private sometimes, and I was okay with that.
F-304 handed Gurathin the cloth it had made for us, folded loosely into a bundle. Then it turned and left.
To me, as it was leaving, it said, You are adequate for needs provision. Thank you. I could feel how grateful it was that I’d protected Gurathin, that I could keep him alive, and sometimes even make him happy.
I didn’t think I had anything to say to F-304. It wasn’t interested in what I had to say anyway. But I felt a surge of gratitude. It had done its best – it had done more than its best. If it hadn’t been there for Gurathin, he wouldn’t be the person he was right now. I used to wonder what kind of weirdo would be drawn to a SecUnit. Gurathin would. He was that weirdo.
(I thought about how I could turn this log into a story. I wouldn’t ever show it to Gurathin. I’d only do it if we ever raised offspring of our own, so they’d know more about their background, to help them deal with whatever bullshit they’d inherit from us. If and only then.)
I said, before it got out of range, Thank you, F-304.
There wasn’t anything else to say. Gurathin and I boarded the vehicle and left.
~~~