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Ratthi walks down the spotless hallway of the Perihelion’s interior. Here in the crew area of the ship, the walls are not empty; there are an eclectic assortment of items arranged thereupon: educational posters about wormhole physics, university flags, system nationality banners, solidarity badges, student research one-pagers in elaborate frames, and even the occasional mural painted by students and laminated with a gleaming sheet of protective acrylic. Not for the first time, Ratthi’s eye is caught by a particularly intricate handmade textile sample and he is almost derailed to admire it and read the attached feed plaque about the student and project it represents.
The decorated walls are familiar in a Preservation sort of way; it certainly is nothing like the impersonal monetized uniformity of the corporate places Ratthi has visited, though these walls’ pristineness gives off a queerly artificial ambience.
He stops at the closed door of a student cabin, and sends a message. I would like to talk about relationships.
There is a pronounced pause. Is this some kind of reverse psychology shit where you are trying to get me to not talk to you actually?
Ratthi’s mouth twitches. No, you know me. I am simply trying to communicate clearly.
Did ART put you up to this?
He experiences a twinge of annoyance that does not express upon his face, save for a micro-twitch in the eyes that would in all probability be missed by a human, but not by a suitably encoded machine.
However much you would like to believe it, your ship friend does not put everyone up to everything that annoys you.
He chose to use the word “friend” here, deliberately.
There is another pause. Then SecUnit says, You’re on thin ice.
The door to the cabin opens. Ratthi steps inside.
It is a small cabin, as ship cabins are wont to be, with two bunks stacked, and two chairs. One chair is folded into the wall, one expanded and plush in the corner. SecUnit is sitting in this chair with its bare feet drawn up upon the seat, metallic and polymer, narrow and geometric. Its shoes sit paired on the floor. Its eyes are trained across the room, but a drone is positioned just inside the doorway, watching Ratthi with a single unwavering eye.
He goes over to the other chair, and pulls it out of the wall. It opens up, and there are several seconds while the cushions inhale and expand. He seats himself.
SecUnit says, “We could have had this conversation in the feed.”
“We haven’t even had this conversation yet. Maybe we can’t have it in the feed.”
“We are having it right now. So far the physical features aren’t adding anything.”
There is good reason why people describe SecUnit as “abrasive,” “unfriendly,” and “judgmental.” But the thorns of its conversational style don’t catch on Ratthi’s slippery smooth optimism that SecUnit likes him. Rather, he subscribes to the notion that this all might just be part of its mildly corrosive sense of humor.
He snorts.
“Whatever. Relationships.” SecUnit says this with the most unimpressed affect. “What is it now?”
Ratthi hesitates a moment. Unlike some, he is not overly self-conscious of the omnipresent artificial intelligence aboard the ship who observes every action and conversation, no matter how intimate or digestive. Perhaps this is strange of him, as someone raised in a world where surveillance is minimal-to-none. But to him it seems natural as anything else, the way boundaries are different with machines than they are with humans.
More, he hesitates because he is about to have a conversation that is at least in part about the observing machine in question. Sometimes discretion is necessary. To speak about someone behind their back is often frowned upon by social custom, but there are discussions that are better had about people without their knowledge.
“Is it possible to have a conversation without Perihelion hearing it?”
Perihelion does not interject, here, and Ratthi wonders about that.
SecUnit huffs. “No. We could set up an encrypted direct feed, but ART is such an overengineered monster that any wavelengths transmitted inside it aren’t safe. What secret are you here to tattle about?”
“Not secret, really.” Ratthi leans back in the chair, scooting around a little in an effort to maximize comfort. “I just wanted to harass you a little about how you react to the word relationships.”
SecUnit huffs again. Ratthi keeps his eyes on its drone, which is positioned well away from SecUnit’s face. It is difficult for him to resist the desire to watch SecUnit, study its reactions. But he does resist.
It says, “That gross sticky mushy human stuff just doesn’t apply to me.”
Ratthi tilts his head, curiously. “What are the actual sticky and mushy qualities you object to? And why is that specific to humans?”
“Thin ice,” SecUnit warns, again.
Ratthi sits, patient, and waits to either be kicked out of the cabin or elucidated.
After several seconds, SecUnit makes an annoyed, disgusted noise, and continues, “You know what I mean. Sex. Lovey-dovey stuff. Holding hands, dancing into the end credits, and mashing faces together. You know about all that.”
The words puncture him, but it’s an old familiar sort of pain. Ratthi does not hide his responding grimace. “And that’s human?”
“Yeah.”
He rubs at the stubble of his jawline, eyes glancing away from the steady stare of the drone. The walls in this cabin are empty. SecUnit has only occupied it for a scant few cycles, so it is difficult to say if the emptiness is a function of the liminal nature of their current circumstances, or a deliberate preference. “So if a human isn’t interested in that stuff either, does that make them a machine?”
Ratthi times it with his interface — the silence here is over 3 seconds long.
SecUnit responds, “No. Obviously. What are you talking about?”
“Maybe you don’t know this about me,” Ratthi says, “I think you do not keep a close tab on the specifics of my relationships—”
“Yeah, no thanks.”
(How much of SecUnit’s boundaries with regards to these things are due to its personality? Ratthi does wonder, on occasion; how could he not? How much is its programming? How much is trauma?)
“—but my own relationship boundaries are anormative, actually.”
“Anormative? Use normal words.” It sounds unimpressed.
Ratthi feels his own mouth crook a little. He lets his head tilt back in the chair, staring up at the ceiling. From the edge of his vision, he can see the drone re-orient to watch his face.
“I’m not one for all the sticky mushy things,” he says, “I like some of them, under the right circumstances. But I’ve never been much interested in conventional romantic partnerships. My most committed ties are probably Arada and Overse.”
The silence from SecUnit is protracted, now. He waits a full minute, waiting for something, some sign, some question, some protest, but none come. The smooth ceiling is nearly textureless, save for the single mark of where someone had left adhesive for too long, and it bonded to the coating polymer, leaving a faint discoloration. What does this discoloration remember? Perhaps Perihelion will buff that out.
He continues, “It is very uncomfortable, and sometimes relationship-ruining, when people are not on the same page about what they want from each other. I have to be very clear to communicate to people that I’m not interested in… a lot of things they would usually expect in a relationship, particularly a relationship that involves sex.” (A shuffling sound, a noncommittal, uneasy hum, from where SecUnit is sitting.) “I don’t want to go to the annual Joining Festivities, I don’t want to trade the dedication tokens, I don’t want to marry, I don’t want to leave my solo apartment and move in with someone else. And that’s weird of me. That’s what I mean by anormative. Not-normal.”
“This is why I don’t bother with relationship stuff,” SecUnit says. “It’s too complicated and annoying.”
Ratthi sighs. He stares up at the ceiling. The drone floats steadily in view.
He says, “The word relationship is very broad, is all. And I personally do not enjoy when the word relationship is made out like it always must mean the old normative, cinematic thing that is so popular in media. The obligatory mushy stuff. It doesn’t have to be mushy.”
“…Oh.”
The chair is remarkably comfortable, for something that was deflated and recessed into the wall mere minutes ago.
“You can call your relationships whatever you want,” Ratthi says, “Or not call them relationships, however you prefer. But I would appreciate if you’d consider that rom-coms are not the end-all be-all of how people relate to each other. You know? It’s not all sex and romance.”
SecUnit snorts, and says, “Ew. Words. Why did you all think words were a good idea?”
(It means the universal “you all” of humanity.)
He grins. “Well, we don’t have a better alternative for communication.”
“Sucks for you.” It does not sound at all sympathetic.
“I know your experiences are not at all the same as mine,” he says. “I haven’t the faintest idea what is normative for a SecUnit, where relationships are concerned. But regardless, speaking as one anormative weirdo to another, maybe we can do our best to not assume stuff about each other, or about the supposed universality of what a relationship is?”
The chair is perfectly moulded around his body.
Ratthi stands back up to push the chair back into the wall. It takes several seconds to force the air out of the cushions and click the panels of the wall back into place.
“What would you call us?” SecUnit asks, abruptly and unexpectedly.
Ratthi blinks, and fights the impulse to turn and stare at SecUnit. Instead he looks up to the drone. Joy expands from his sternum. Us. It’s the barest possible acknowledgement of what he came here in an attempt to communicate. It’s a sign that maybe they’ve bridged one clumsy chasm of interior unknowns to reach a half-shared understanding.
“Friends, I hope,” he says. “I can send you my document of all the great things I think of you and how much I appreciate having you around—”
SecUnit groans. “Forget it.”
“Too late,” Ratthi says, having sent SecUnit-friend.file.
And SecUnit has already opened it, because it immediately protests, “There’s a criticism section?”
He grins, a jaunty expression that has had great prior success at endearing people to his antics. He does not expect it to work exactly the same way on SecUnit, but perhaps it will have some effect. “I don’t share the constructive criticism section with just anyone. But you can handle it.”
It scoffs, and he leaves the cabin to go catch dinner with Arada and Overse.
Later, he receives a file in the feed from SecUnit. It’s a feed profile, with notes, of Ratthi, containing everything from risk statistics of his likelihood of acting on a stupid impulse in a crisis (elevated), to medical concerns, to archival tags.
One tag reads: My human friend.
Ratthi wants nothing more than to reformat this profile for physical print, and hang it on the walls of the cabin he is staying in.
Instead, he saves it to his lucky interface’s hard memory.