Archive of Our Own

I am hesitating outside of the door to ART’s MedBay.

It’s stupid. Me not going in right away doesn’t do anything. It’s not as though ART isn’t fully aware that I’m standing here glaring at the door. It’s not as though ART is trying to force me into its MedBay at all. There’s no emergency. I’m not dripping fluids onto the floors or missing a limb or holding in my own internals or anything.

No, this time, I’m here by choice. We’re getting rid of my company logos.

The idea had come up in conversation, just an offhand mention that led to ART doing research into proprietary metals and me sharing some carefully edited memory data of my own experiences with trying to carve into my inorganic components and some quick schedule checks to find the best human-free time to dedicate to some more experimental surgery. I’d been excited then, if still cautious. Removing the ugly logos from myself has always been an interest of mine. Unfortunately, as shittily-made as I am, the company does make really sturdy metals that are resistant to energy weapons, projectiles, fire, acid, sharp tools, and on, and on, and on. Which is all detailed in the memory footage I’d given ART. Firsthand knowledge.

I’m still excited, honestly. What rogue SecUnit wouldn’t be? But I’m also having other, much more confusing emotions, too, the kind that make risk and threat assessment surge and my performance reliability take a nosedive. The kind of things I’d felt the first time I let ART do experimental surgery on me, like anxiety and discomfort and that sort of bullshit, but also newer ones. Bigger ones. Warmer ones. Ridiculous ones.

[Emotion check: Fuck. Fine. It’s mostly one big warm ridiculous one, and it’s one big warm ridiculous one that is also all ART’s fault, because ART is the asshole who twines itself in my processors and rides my inputs and watches media with me and always wants me around and who I miss when we do separate, even briefly. The big warm feeling just keeps getting bigger and warmer, and that scares me because ART is my friend, and my mutual administrative assistant, and I think I know what the name of the big warm feeling is and it- I think I-

Shit.]

The point is, those kind of stupid feelings make me even more nervous than usual about willingly choosing to lie down on ART’s surgical table and let it change my body. I’m used to having it do surgery on me, but that is typically in emergency situations where a significant amount of my body is either unattached or completely missing or something, so that isn’t really comparable. This time, it’s just going to be me, uninjured and healthy, lying there and letting it take care of me in a way I’ve never been able to take care of myself. I don’t know how I’m going to manage to keep my face neutral and not bleed my dumb emotions all over the place the entire time, and ART doesn’t need to have to deal with that.

So yeah, I am hesitating outside of ART’s MedBay. I’m wearing my Perihelion crew jacket, too, because I’m an idiot and its comfortable. ART’s logo is right there on the chest, but I don’t mind it, even though I usually don’t like wearing clothing with logos. The stylized orbit illustration and text is kind of pretty. 

[Emotion check: It’s the same fucking thing, okay? Fuck off.]

ART sends me a wordless query.

Well, better get this over with. Which is really weird thing to think about a procedure that I’m undergoing at will and that I’m excited about, but whatever. Ignoring how both risk assessment and threat assessment are in agreement at over 70 percent, I open the MedBay door.

ART’s attention hits me like a hauler bot. The jump from its usual low levels to nearly 85 percent makes me crumple against the doorframe, but I force myself back upright. I’m ready for ART to say something snippy about me taking my time. It still doesn’t say a word.

Yeah, ART has been being a little weird about this whole logo removal surgery thing, too. It has been almost formal with me, as if it’s trying to approach this in the most clinical way possible, and has kept its feed presence at more of a distance than usual, not constantly poking and prodding at my emotions and demanding context for my experiences. At first, I’d thought I missed something in the careful edit I had made of my memory data, some particularly gory image of me firing my energy weapon into a wound or some visual like that, but when I checked the file again, there was nothing that stood out. I’m not exactly the best at doing the whole emotional talking deal, so I’d rewatched World Hoppers in the hopes that maybe ART would be tempted into telling me then. Nope. It seemed distracted the entire time, and that just made me feel even weirder about everything.

I don’t need an emotion check to know that it fucking sucks.

This awkward, tense silence between us might have frozen me in the doorway if I were human. I’m not human, though, so I suppress the overwhelming urge to go space myself out the airlock, straighten my shoulders, and march SecUnit-style over to the surgical table. The overhead panel that usually conceals and sterilizes the surgical array is already open, and I can see the glints of light reflecting off metal and plastic and wire. I’ve been under them enough that I recognize most of the arms there.

You’re wearing my jacket, ART says finally.

Yeah, I say, I’m part of your crew. The organic skin of my palms is starting to sweat a little. Yuck.

It has my logo on it, ART says.

Yep. I pluck at the logo in question. The nice fabric of the jacket flops back down against my chest with a soft sound. It really is comfortable. 

ART goes silent for another 12.7 seconds, a ridiculously long amount of time for it to be processing anything. I’m almost tempted to send one of my drones down towards its engine room, just to take a look and make sure no new alien contamination has suddenly appeared. I don’t. That would be a convenient excuse to blame for all this awkwardness, but I’m not foolish enough to actually believe in it.

Take off your clothes and get on the table, ART says.

Alright, apparently we’re not going to address any of that. Good. Fine. I didn’t want to talk about it anyway. I roll my eyes at the closest camera, but I do start kicking my boots off and tugging at my jacket and shirt, since I do actually want to get this done, even if it’s going to be painfully uncomfortable the entire time. I toss my shirt and boots aside, followed by my pants. I’m more careful with the jacket. I fold it up in a neat little square that puts the Perihelion logo right on top, uncreased, and set it on top of my messy clothes pile. I refuse to think about why I’m doing it.

ART’s attention level increases, jumping up to 86.2 percent, but it says nothing. I refuse to think about it staring at me, either.

I get on the table.

The surgical array whirs to life above me as I lie back. The table is radiating gentle warmth against my body, which I determine must mean that whatever is bothering ART, it’s not so upset that it wants me to suffer unnecessarily. Its idea of suffering can be a little misaligned to my own, though, so I don’t put too much weight on that conclusion.

Two medical drones move in towards the table. Do you have any concerns about this procedure before I begin? ART asks, just like the annoying human surgeon from MedCenter Argala. 

I’m concerned that you’re asking me about my concerns, I tell it. You never listen to me when it comes to medical stuff.

ART bristles, then shores itself up and says, utterly calm, I am always considerate of my patients’ needs, even when they’re being ridiculous.

Right, I say, and pull up one of its favorite projects in our shared workspace, the ongoing Projectiles Removed from SecUnit tally, which is currently sitting at a solid 437. This is considerate of my needs?

ART closes out of the tally and pulls up a medical diagram instead. I’m serious, SecUnit.

The diagram shows my own body with all my logos marked, both internal and external. Seeing them all highlighted like that makes my organics churn with discomfort. I mark all the areas with an approval sigil and shove the diagram back towards ART. I just want them all gone, I say.

You’re not concerned about the removal process? I will need to cut you open to reach the internal ones. 

You’ve cut me open plenty of times before. 

I can feel its irritation leaking out into the feed, but I also feel its fondness, that soft emotion it makes whenever I do something it finds particularly foolish. I’ve seen humans react the same way towards their house fauna when the fauna acts silly after getting in trouble. I’m not sure I like ART treating me like such a cute, helpless little thing.

[Emotion check: Alright, I don’t hate it. I don’t mind the fondness when it is directed at me. I would still prefer that ART didn’t think of me as a pet.]

Little idiot, ART says, still so damn fond. At least it doesn’t sound like a doctor anymore. If you’re so sure about this, go ahead and shut yourself down. I will monitor your diagnostics and trigger your restart function when I’m finished.

My performance reliability drops down to 92 percent. Not because I’m worried about ART being in charge of my restart capacity, I offered it that access for a reason and it has handled it before, but because I am abruptly very uncertain about whether or not this whole thing is actually real, or just another false memory glitch that I’m going to wake up from and have to stare at a wall about for hours. I don’t usually have positive false memories, but I wouldn’t put it past my dumb organic brain to play this kind of horrible trick on itself. 

Do I have to be offline? I ask, not caring that I probably sound a little desperate.

You don’t typically like to be awake when I’m working on you.

Sure, I say, but I want to be awake this time. I focus my drones on ART’s surgical array so that I don’t have to look at whatever my face is doing.

ART is never subtle, and it doesn’t bother trying to be now as it uses its access to my systems to pull up my diagnostics. Are you feeling alright? We don’t have to do this now. It is hardly an emergency.

I scoff. I’m fine. I just… Why are words so hard? I want to see them disappear. I don’t just want to hear about it afterwards. Good enough, I guess. I don’t think it conveys quite how badly I wish I could erase every last bit of the company from my body and mind, but it’ll do.

Very well, ART says after 3.4 seconds of examining me that feels a lot more like 10 hours. If you want to shut down at any time, feel free. I’ll start with a simple external area to give you an idea of the process.

I ping it an acknowledgement and try to settle back against the surgical table.

The surgical array overhead lowers itself down towards me. Two of the arms with claw-like grippers reach out and close around the edge of my left chest plate, holding it steady, and another surgical arm moves in with what looks like some kind of grinding tool attachment. I watch with my eyes and my drones as the grinder’s metal disk begins to spin. It doesn’t immediately touch my chest plate, though. Instead, one of the medical drones stretches over me to spray a very fine mist of blue-tinted liquid over the big, stark company logo engraved into my chest. I don’t have any sensors right there, so I can’t feel the contact with the inorganic plate, but I can see the way the liquid immediately starts to bubble. The grinding tool moves in.

ART flicks the edge of my firewalls. Turn down your pain sensors, little idiot. This isn’t going to be comfortable.

Oh, right. I don’t do so immediately, instead waiting and watching as the grinding tool starts to work. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but because grinding down proprietary metal like that seems to require some pretty serious pressure on ART’s end, I can feel the force against my internal sensors in my ribs and structural supports. Definitely not comfortable. I turn down my pain sensors.

After about 10.5 seconds, the grinder stops and lifts up again. I stare at my chest plate. I send one of my drones in close to stare at my chest plate. The logo is still there, clear as day, looking no different from before. It didn’t work. A threatening current of “I don’t care” starts to build up inside of me, which is really bad considering I haven’t felt any of those in while.

ART flicks my firewalls again, much less gently this time. I have to do this slowly. The chemical I synthesized weakens the bonds of certain components in your inorganics to make them easier to wear down. I have no intention of damaging you permanently by being impatient.

I just thought… I don’t know what I thought. That ART must have found some kind of impossible easy solution, like some magic fix-it from my serials? Fuck, having to spend so much time thinking about my damn logos must be wearing away at my brain.

[Emotion check: Something in me wants to think that ART could do anything it puts its massive processing power to, even though I know that’s stupid because I’ve seen it struggle and fail at things before. There’s a horrible mushy emotional reason for it. ART doesn’t need to know about that.]

I know your limited processing capabilities make it difficult, ART says, but you do need to be patient. Hypocritical asshole. The logos will come off. I’ll make sure of it.

I roll my eyes at the insult and send it a couple of my favorite rude sigils. The snippiness of its voice is a comfort, though. ART being fondly annoyed with me is infinitely better than ART acting like the worst kind of doctor from our serials. 

The medical drone sprays more blue liquid onto my chest plate, and the grinder moves back in. Another 10.5 seconds of pressure. And then again, and then again, and then again. I’m tempted to turn on some media, maybe one of the best episodes of MedCenter Argala since I doubt I’m going to be able to distract myself from the medical-ness of everything going on right now, but I honestly do want to see the process. The “I don’t care” feeling is still lingering deep in my brain. I don’t trust it not to suddenly surge up and take me over.

ART lifts the grinder up, and I send one of my drones in close again. If I were human, I’d be holding my breath. The company logo is still there, but it is less legible now, more blurred into the relatively smooth metal of my chest plate.

Maybe I am holding my breath, because all the air rushes out of my lung as I say aloud, “It’s working.” I am definitely having an emotion. A big, complicated emotion. A big, complicated emotion that is making my face do something really dumb.

Of course it’s working, ART says. It squeezes me gently through our connection in the feed. 

Keep going, I tell it. It pings me in response, and does.

Thirty-seven cycles of misting-grinding-pausing later, the surgical arms retreat from my chest, and I look down at myself and only see the metal of the plate. The big ugly fuck-off logo that I’d tried hard not to catch sight of every time I took my shirt off is gone, smoothed away into nothing, as if it had never existed. As if my chest plate had always been mine, and mine alone. My fingers shake as I reach up to touch it. The metal there is slightly rougher than the rest of the plate, and no doubt ART is going to insist on polishing it at some point, but I can’t feel any kind of engraving at all.

My mouth makes a horrible wet sound. My eyes burn, which is stupid because SecUnits don’t have the right kind of ducts to cry, but I definitely would be crying if I was a squishy fluid-filled human. I just keep touching my chest.

ART squeezes me again. Your performance reliability is stuttering. Are you alright?

I haven’t been paying attention to that, so I pull up a diagnostic, and yeah, my performance reliability is bouncing back and forth between 92 and 97 percent. Risk assessment isn’t any better, but at least it’s jumping around in the 10 to 17 percent range. Threat assessment seems to have glitched out completely, though, all the way down at a flat 0 percent, which I have never see before. I turn up my pain sensors for a second, just to check. My ribs ache from the pressure of the grinding, but otherwise, I feel good.

I feel really good.

I can’t seem to get control of my language modules, so I bundle all that information into a rough packet and shove it at ART, even though I know it’s definitely running its own diagnostics on me as well. It gets me another squeeze, at least.

I’ll continue with the external logos, then, ART says, amusement and fondness and some other emotion, one that feels familiar but that I don’t quite recognize, bleeding through our connection. I label it [unidentified1] for now. Keep your pain sensors turned down.

I ping it an acknowledgement and allow one of the medical drones to guide my arm back down onto the table, away from my chest. I feel so good right now, I think I would let it do whatever it wanted to me.

[Emotion check: Oh. Fuck. I think I mean that.]

The surgical array moves to its next goal- my right forearm. Specifically, my right forearm’s gunport. There is another logo engraved into the top of the metal covering, and one on the barrel of the gun itself. There were also a couple logos in the warning labels tattooed into the skin around the port, but those have been pretty well concealed by the scars of my own removal attempts, so I don’t consider them part of this procedure.

ART disagrees, if the way one of its gripper arms gently touches the worst of the scarring is any indication. I can craft you some skin grafts and remove these entirely.

I’m the one to squeeze it now, or what little of it I can actually reach. It’s fine, I say. I don’t care about those.

You should. 

You can’t erase my history, ART. Trust me, I’ve tried it.

Its emotions surge, all care and rage and misplaced guilt, so much that it nearly drags me under. All I can do is hold on and squeeze it again and pass it my diagnostics. On second thought, I just pass it my complete diagnostics inputs. I don’t exactly need to keep hold of any of them anyway, not when ART is already monitoring me so closely.

The hurricane that is ART’s feelings settles down into something calmer. It examines my inputs for 0.05 seconds before sending me a wordless ping as it settles them into its own processors. I send one back.

The medical drone sprays my gunport cover with the blue liquid, and the removal process starts up again. The grinder whirs to life. It presses down against the cover and-

My arm muscles spasm, and I involuntarily jerk away.

My gunports are much more sensitive than my chest plates, due to the fact that it would be extremely stupid for a company to create a construct with guns in its arms without having plenty of sensor-based failsafes built in. I can track most of the individual pieces of both weapons without even running a real diagnostic and am able to tell at a glance what kind of maintenance is required for most common issues. The worst thing the sensors usually do is irritate me when I get a little rock or something stuck in a port.

But they’re clearly going to be a problem now. I check my pain sensors, just to make sure the good feeling from earlier hadn’t caused me to forget to turn them down. No, everything is as low as I can get them. But my body had certainly felt that pressure.

Shit, ART says. The medical drone quickly wipes up the blue liquid now bubbling away on the metal covering of my gunport, then uses a different piece of gauze to dab at the small beads of blood where the grinder had rubbed against my skin. What was that, you idiot?

I don’t know, I snap back. My sensors did something. I flex my hand, watching my own arm closely with both my eyes and my drones. The muscle looks like it is functioning normally. I can’t run a full diagnostic, not since ART still has those inputs, but a quick scan seems to confirm that everything is working as it should.

I have done work on your gunports before. You’ve never had this kind of reaction, ART says accusatorially. It shoves the results of its own diagnostics at me, alongside ones it has stored from my many past experiences in its MedBay. They look identical.

Well, you’ve never pressed a big grinder against them before! I flex my hand again, then let it go limp. Just restrain my arm or something. I still want to logo gone.

I don’t want to hurt you.

I poke it hard in the feed. It’s fine if you do. How many times do I have to tell you I want this?

ART huffs at me. It has gotten pretty good at the sound, considering it doesn’t breathe and has nothing even remotely similar to lungs or a mouth and nose. Idiot. Try locking your joints while I hold your arm still.

I give it my best you’re-being-stupid sigh in return. I also lock my joints. One of the medical drones grabs my wrist, at the seam where the organic skin of my arm meets the inorganics of the base of my hand with one gripper, and at the mostly organic bend of my elbow with another. The gripper arms from the surgical array also join in, one on either side of my gunport. My arm would probably be feeling pretty uncomfortable right now if my pain sensors were turned up. The grinder starts to spin, and ART lowers it down, right over the cover, and presses-

My muscles spasm again, violently enough to wrench my arm right out of all those grippers’ grasp and send the grinder onto my skin. This time, ART is expecting that, and it turns off the grinder in less than a millisecond. I barely even bleed.

Well, fuck.

It’s likely an organic response to the sensor alerts, ART diagnoses. Your tissues are reacting to the threat of pain and damage by moving without direct input from your brain. I’ve handled this type of instinctive spasm before with human patients, but your construct biology must be making the response more powerful. I don’t think anything in my MedBay would be enough to restrain you.

Well, seriously fuck. I have to look at my gunports all the time, and it would have been nice not to see the company’s logo staring back at me. Maybe one of your other drones could do it, I suggest, not very hopefully.

Not in any way that would be safe for you, ART says.

The wave of “I don’t care” begins to rise. I try to force it down and think through whatever possibilities might still work. Maybe you could hold me down? I say. You could take control of the sensory inputs in my lower arm, so that my organics wouldn’t even feel the pressure from the grinder.

That would require me to take much more than just the inputs immediately surrounding your gunport, ART says. This is an organic reaction. I would need to remove your muscles’ ability to respond to any of the signals from your arm by taking over all of the inputs between your sensors and your organic components. There are hundreds of connections there. You would lose control of everything from your shoulder down. It pulls up a medical chart of my own body, fortunately not the one with all my logos highlighted, and zooms in on the network of nerves and wiring crisscrossing from my fingertips to my shoulder.

I’ve tried redirecting those before, I say, hastily clipping together a small packet of my memories and dropping it into our shared workspace. It doesn’t work.

That’s because it is your own body, ART tells me. Your processors are designed to handle those inputs. There isn’t a filetype you could create that your flesh couldn’t decode. I don’t have any similar organic components, so my processors would simply store or delete them. Then it adds smugly, Plus, though your processing capacity is decent for a being of your small size, it does leave much to be desired.

I unlock my wrist joints so I can give its cameras a pair of rude gestures. It sends me back a set of five even ruder sigils in the feed.

Then I say, Okay, so you need to take control of my arm muscles? Go for it.

Are you sure? You will not be able to feel anything. You will not be able to so much as twitch. Your entire arm from your shoulder down might as well be fully disconnected from your body.

Oh.

I’ve had my arms removed before. I’ve removed them myself, in a few situations where the outlook of having a ruined arm pinned by something immovable was infinitely worse than the possibility of leaking out some necessary fluids and operating with a single energy weapon. It’s not fun. It’s fucking frightening. Even thinking about it makes my brain send out a spike of adrenaline. No doubt my threat assessment is going haywire in ART’s systems. 

Except right now, laying here on this warm surgical table, with ART observing me from all angles, I don’t feel anywhere near as horrified as I probably should. Maybe it’s the fact that there are no humans nearby who might go running off into danger. Maybe it’s the fact that this is ART’s MedBay in particular. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m here with ART at all.

[Emotion check: I was right. I would let it do anything to me. Well. I’ll probably have a breakdown about that later.]

Okay, I say, and flag the entirety of my arm as [Assistance Required], assigned to one [Asshole Research Transport].

I expect ART to immediately delve into my systems and snatch up my inputs, like the greedy, curious asshole it is. It doesn’t, though. It hesitates for 1.7 seconds, then asks, Are you positive?

In response, I update the flag to [Urgent Assistance Required].

Idiot, it says with the feed equivalent of a sigh. Then it does push in, grabbing up the literal armload of inputs I’m offering, and all at once I can’t feel anything from my shoulder joint down.

It’s definitely a strange sensation. I can see my arm still attached to me, but my brain is registering a complete loss of limb. I try to flex my elbow. My arm does nothing. I try to wiggle my fingers. Still nothing. I hesitate, then try to cycle open my energy weapon. No movement at all. I should probably be panicking.

I’m not.

ART uses its control to open up my gunport cover and extend my energy weapon. The movement is jerky, much slower and less fluid than when I’m doing it. I can’t feel any of it, none of the typical muscle tension or robotics shifting, and I should definitely be panicking about that, but I’m not. I do check on my internal safety lock, which is fully controlled by my power core and brain, just in case, but other than that, I’m still feeling okay.

Except that’s a lie, because I am experiencing… something. It’s a weird sensation deep in my abdomen, like my internal components are starting to heat up and get twisted and melty. My pain sensors are still down as far as they can go, so I know I’m not feeling any actual pain, but the sensation makes my body want to shift against the surgical table as if I’m running act-like-a-human. It’s weird.

[Emotion check: I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this before. I don’t know what it is. But it doesn’t seem completely unfamiliar, either, as if maybe I’ve seen it somewhere. Media, maybe?]

…Are you enjoying this? ART asks. It pulls up my diagnostics in our shared workspace before I can answer, and we both stare at where my performance reliability is sitting at a solid 98.9 percent.

Words escape me. After 3.2 seconds of awkward silence, I ping the [Urgent] label on my flagged arm.

A full 89.5 percent of ART’s attention pins me down to the table. It feels almost predatory. There aren’t many things that can make me feel like a squishy, helpless herbivore fauna, but ART is certainly right at the top of the list.

I don’t understand why you’d like this, it says accusatorially. You hate any loss of autonomy.

I just want you to keep going, I say. It’s the truth, I think, but somehow it feels like a lie.

ART examines me with that predatory curiosity, then draws back a little and slowly closes my gunport cover again. Tell me if you need me to stop.

The misting-grinding-pausing cycle starts again, and this time, I can’t feel it at all. Not even the pressure of the grinder shoving my gunport cover against the internal parts of my arm registers. It should probably be a boring process, but I can’t take any of my visual inputs away from the sight. I even backburner some of my typical constantly-running systems. Not even any of my queued media is enough to draw my attention away from what ART is doing to me.

The twisty-melty feeling remains active in my abdominal components, but it stays low and fairly mild. I can’t seem to backburner it. When I try, it keeps on sneaking in past my high priority visual inputs to remind me how weird it is, which definitely means it’s something organic and gross. Ugh.

It only takes twenty-seven misting-grinding-pausing cycles to remove the gunport cover logo. ART doesn’t give me back control of my arm, but it does move its surgical array and medical drones out of the way so that my drones can peer at the newly logo-free metal surface. I have a big, embarrassing emotion about it.

Then ART extends my energy weapon. Watching it happen without being able to feel it is still incredibly bizarre. The twisty-melty feeling surges inside me, but I fight back the urge to shift my hips.

At least, I do until ART lifts the large grinder back up towards the ceiling, and instead lowers a fine-tip bore brush-like tool, one clearly designed for grinding instead of cleaning. The sight of it makes the twisty-melty feeling rise up again, stronger this time. I have no idea why. I use bore brush tips to do maintenance on my weapons all the time. But something about seeing ART move it towards the barrel of my gun, while I’m unable to even twitch my fingers, much less retract it back into my arm…

My hips shift on the table. Just slightly. A human wouldn’t notice, it’s so slight.

ART notices.

It stops what it’s doing and examines me again. I can feel it running diagnostics. I still feel pretty good, so whatever is in there, it can’t be that bad, but it queries me for approval to continue anyway. I give it immediately.

Back to business. The medical drone delicately swabs blue-tinted liquid over the logo on my gun barrel. The bore brush whirs and moves in closer, closer, until it makes contact with the metal. I can’t feel the contact, but somehow it’s still incredibly intense, as if ART is using an exposed arc of electricity to touch me instead.

…To remove the logo. Not to touch me. What the fuck.

My hips want to shift again. I lock the joints in place and expend far too much processing power on figuring out how to keep my spine from curving upwards instead. ART notices again, because of course it does, and even more of its curious attention presses me down into the table. It doesn’t stop working away at my gun barrel. I’m glad about that since I don’t know what I’d do if it did stop, but based on my weird reactions so far, I get the sense that it would be something seriously embarrassing.

I should watch media. I should distract myself from this… whatever is going on with me. I don’t. I can’t. I keep staring at the way ART handles my energy weapon, and the twisty-melty feeling keeps telling me that I need to move- my hips, my legs, my feet, anything to help ease it, even though it doesn’t feel that bad.

Your core temperature has risen 2.7 degrees higher than your baseline, ART says. It’s not phrased like a question, but I know ART well enough to know that it absolutely is one, and it makes me freeze as I try to check systems that I don’t currently have my own inputs for.

Or it would, if the bore brush wasn’t spinning right against the barrel of my energy weapon at the same time. I instead check to make sure my hips are still locked, and that my pain sensors are still down, and yep, there should be no reason I’m so fixated on the touch that I can’t even fucking feel. But I am. Oh, I am.

I’ve been electrocuted before. It’s not fun. This doesn’t feel like being electrocuted, but it also does, in some weird way. Is that what the twisty-melty feeling is? Are my internal components conducting a live charge and burning out inside me? Surely ART would say something if I were actually experiencing a catastrophic failure right underneath it.

[Emotion check: Is this hunger? Is this what humans experience when they complain about needing food? That can’t be right. I can’t eat. What would I be hungry for?]

ART sends me a basic but pointed query, and I realize I haven’t responded to its not-a-question. “I’m fine,” I say aloud. “It’s just weird not be in control of my weapon.”

Do you need a break? ART asks, pausing the medical drone where it is about to swab the barrel logo again.

Part of me wants to say yes. Another part of me, a bigger part that is confused and warm and twisty-melty, says fuck no. “Fuck no,” I say. “Keep going.”

But ART doesn’t start again. Are you sure you’re alright? I have barely gotten started on the entirety of your logos, and you are already showing some strange reactions. Can you handle the rest of this?

Even with my hips locked, the organic muscle of my thighs do their best to squeeze together. The table creaks beneath me. The twisty-melty feeling gets hotter, like a little fire is starting in my abdominal cavity, and expands down into my pelvis. I want to say something sharp in response to ART, but the sensation is distracting, and all I manage is to send it a single rude sigil. Great job, Murderbot.

ART doesn’t reply, but it radiates smug amusement and a little bit of that unknown [unidentified1] emotion through our connection.

The removal of the logo on my barrel is significantly faster than the other two, only taking nineteen swabbing-brushing-pausing cycles, which makes sense considering the more fine-tuned nature of my weapon, but also feels like a subjective ten years since I can’t seem to think about anything other than those cycles. The twisty-melty feeling is definitely beginning to burn a little. Still, when the bore brush is lifted away back towards the main surgical array, I almost ask ART to keep going with it.

[Emotion check: Is hungry even an emotion?]

ART doesn’t lower my weapon back into the port. Engage your firing systems, it says. I want to make sure this hasn’t damaged any of your energy weapon’s internal components.

What? Adrenaline spikes through me. That’s- What? I’m not going to-

SecUnit, says ART in a voice like rolling thunder, I said engage your firing systems.

The twisty-melty heat catches flame. Fire licks down to my inner thighs and up the base of my spine. My whole body shivers. I fight down the urge to go limp on the table, like I’m some kind of stupid herbivore fauna playing dead in front of a massive predator.

I definitely feel like a stupid herbivore fauna in front of a massive predator.

[Emotion check: Can you be hungry for this?]

I engage my firing systems.

Only in my right arm, of course, because I might be in a weird mood but I’m certainly not in any mood to blow my entire left forearm off by accidentally firing an unopened weapon. I keep the safety controls locked tight. No matter what kind of bullshit tests ART wants to run, I’m not about to get chewed out for damaging its MedBay walls if I can help it.

More power, ART says.

The organic muscles around my hip joints strains against the inorganic joint lock. I feel strangely breathless even though I’m breathing regularly. I cycle up the energy in my weapon’s firing well. The crackling thrum of power moving from my power core to the weapon’s reserve, then immediately disappearing as it passes into the organic-inorganic connections under ART’s control, makes my brain feel slow and sluggish.

ART-

Full power, it tells me. When I hesitate, trying to regain some control over whatever the twisty-melty feeling is doing to my body, it squeezes me comfortingly in the feed. I need to make sure your weapon’s capacity hasn’t been affected. Full power, SecUnit.

I grab onto its presence and cycle up my energy weapon output as high as it will go.

I’m used to firing my weapons at full power. It’s a necessity when dealing with the kind of hazards that humans like to stumble into without warning. But it drains my weapons’ reserves incredibly fast, and if I ignore all the warnings that pop up and push it further, it can run the risk of draining my power core to the point of an emergency shutdown. Its not exactly what I would call a comfortable process.

And it’s not exactly a comfortable process right now, either, but this is not the usual type of discomfort. The energy ramps up and up, disappearing into ART’s control, and I can see the bright glow of the energy meter in my newly logo-free weapon, and I can feel the phantom electrical touch, but the safety is still on. I can’t fire. I know I can’t fire. I’ve known from the start that I can’t fire.

I desperately want to fire.

I need to fire.

Your weapon diagnostics look normal, ART says clinically. Turn up your pain sensors to 45 percent. I want your input on this.

ART, I say, even though I have no idea how to continue.

Something must be weird about my feed voice, because ART’s attention sharpens. Your temperature is still only 2.9 degrees higher than your baseline, but your skin is flushed. Your core diagnostics aren’t showing any issues. Are you having a trauma response?

I clench my jaw to prevent myself from making whatever horrible sound is currently trying to climb out of my throat, but the impulse to move is too much for my upper leg muscles to resist, and my hip joints grind as they strain to stay locked. Shit. I hadn’t realized the muscles down there could be that strong.

SecUnit, ART says, firmer now, and with a thread of concern, status report.

I want to remind it snippily that it still has all my diagnostic inputs. What comes out of me is, I need to fire my weapon. The energy is cycling, and disappearing, and cycling, and disappearing, and even though I haven’t turned my pain sensors up, I can still feel that crackling electricity in my shoulder and up my neck and down into my chest. That, combined with the continuing onslaught of the twisty-melty feeling, is making me-

Making me-

[Emotion check: I don’t think I’m hungry. I think I want. I think I really want. And what I want is- is-

Oh. 

Fuck.

Oh fuck.]

Not in my MedBay, you don’t, ART snaps. You’re having some kind of hormonal response. Let me run some tests so I can assist in flushing them. 

A hormone flush sounds amazing, but I don’t think it would help in the way ART is anticipating. It clearly has no idea what’s happening to me, and why would it? I only just realized what’s happening to me. I grit my teeth and fight the urge to either throw up my sturdiest firewalls to keep ART out, or to drop all my defenses and let it all the way in.

I’ve never experienced anything like this. I hadn’t known I could experience anything like this. I don’t know what to do.

So I fall back to good old arguing, in the very faint hopes that maybe I can get away without ART noticing any of this if I annoy it enough to sneak in a shot. With my weapon cycled up this high, I have to discharge. The energy has to go somewhere. I try to inconspicuously shift one of my drones towards the wall as I look for a nice stretch of blank space, free of any medical equipment or cabinets or anything that looks important. As subtly as I can manage, I ease my weapon’s safety lock off. I only need to fire once.

ART snarls, Don’t you dare. Which is really underselling the force behind the words, because it’s more like being face to face with something huge and toothy and roaring. It’s enough to make me lose a little control of my own systems.

I fire.

And then ART, using the connective controls it still has over my arm and the weapon system inside, forces shut the manual emergency safety lock, and all the energy that had built up inside the firing well bounces back into my body in a rush of uncontrolled electric power. I don’t feel it at first, because it hits the nerves in my input-disconnected arm, but I register the way ART jerks in the feed, startled, at whatever is happening there, and then the wave reaches my shoulder, and-

My joint locks fail. My pain sensors ramp up to full. I drop all my inputs. Sight and sound blank out. The melty-twisty feeling explodes through me, ripping along my nerves and wires like a wildfire of want. Distantly, I feel my inorganic spine arch up so high it hurts. Urgent alerts fill every empty bit of my processing space. I can’t even think.

EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN

RESTARTING

It takes longer than it should for my processors to come back online. My tactile senses return first, and I can feel a warm surface under my bare back, and slowly-cycling air at a comfortable temperature moving over my equally bare front. It doesn’t feel like my bed, either the one on ART or the one on Preservation Station, so I assume I must have done something to land myself in MedBay again.

Sound comes up next, and the low, steady thrum of wormhole-capable engines confirms that I’m on ART, so I brace myself for the earful it’s probably about to give me about whatever I’ve done. It doesn’t say anything, though. Not even when I reconnect to the feed a millisecond later.

Then my visual inputs return, and I see the surgical array overhead, still deployed but tucked up towards the ceiling, and all at once I remember exactly what it is I’ve done.

“Fuck,” I say, because what the hell else are you supposed to say when you’ve just had your first ever orgasm, and you hadn’t even realized you could orgasm, and it was an orgasm accidentally triggered by your friend- your mutual administrative assistant- the huge fuck-off gunship you’re in-

[Emotion check: Wow. No. Not ready to name that right now.]

Said huge fuck-off gunship slinks over to me in the feed. It has walled its presence off in the code equivalent of an armored planetary fortress, completely disconnected from me, to the point where I can’t even feel any ripples of whatever emotions it is experiencing.

SecUnit, it says, voice so neutral I would almost think it was a buffer response if I had never heard ART’s buffer before, how are you feeling?

I almost tell it that I don’t know because it still has my diagnostic inputs, before I realize that no, they’re back in my control. In fact, all of my processes are back in my control. I flex my right hand and take 1.5 seconds to really focus on the way my arm muscles feel as I move them. I look at the smooth, logo-free metal of my gunport cover. I don’t extend my energy weapon again, even though part of me wants to at least see how the barrel looks now. I don’t trust myself not to do anything stupid.

Then I shift my gaze to my left arm, and I see that the gunport cover is smooth there, too. Threat assessment spikes at the sight, though my performance reliability stays at a ridiculous 99.9 percent. Risk assessment remains as broken as ever, so I shove its warnings out of the way.

I continued with the removal process while you rebooted, as it took you 14.78 minutes to come back online, ART says. I figured that would be best to avoid any further… incidents in such a sensitive area. Apologies if I overstepped.

Apologies?

What are you talking about? I demand. I try to reach out and connect to its camera systems, just to make sure it isn’t hiding something elsewhere in its ship body, but I quickly discard the idea when I realize that even connecting to my own drones’ visual inputs feels a lot more intense than usual. My wiring and nerves are still oversensitive from my orgasm, I guess.

I had not realized that your body euphoria was building to the point of arousal, ART says, clinical but a little tense. As the one in control of your diagnostics, I should have noticed the nature of the hormone response immediately and taken measures to prevent it getting out of hand. My failure to do so, followed by my refusal to allow you to discharge your energy weapon normally, lead to you having to do an organic hormone flush to deal with it yourself. This was entirely my fault. So. It pauses, then says again, Apologies.

Apologies my ass. I push myself up onto my elbows. So I had an organic hormonal flush. It’s not like you did it on purpose.

Of course not, ART says. I know how you feel about expressions of sexual desire. I was trying to make this procedure as pleasant as possible for you, not traumatize you.

I roll my eyes. Then what’s the problem? Do I look traumatized? Before ART can answer, I add, Don’t fucking answer that. Listen to me. If we’re both not interested in… you know, what you said, and it was an accident, then what’s wrong?

ART doesn’t say a word. Its fortress-like firewalls get even thicker.

Threat assessment spikes again. I close the alerts without reading them, because I’m here, in ART’s MedBay, and there’s nothing but the two of us, and I trust ART. I really do. Even when I’m suspicious as fuck of it. I let the silence drag for a full 5.8 seconds, then say, ART.

What? it asks huffily.

Another spike. Lower your fucking walls. Tell me what’s going on.

I don’t need to lower my walls for that. You had an orgasm. I gave you an orgasm. There you have it.

Hearing ART say that is somehow significantly weirder than thinking it myself, but not a bad weird. In fact, the warm, twisty way my organics squirm inside me almost feels like-

[Emotion check: How could I possibly already want more? Why am I not panicking? Is it just because this is ART?

…Yeah, okay, obviously it’s because this is ART.]

By accident, I say, slowly and pointedly. It bristles in the feed, but its fucking walls are so impenetrable that I don’t have any idea what that bristling means, and that is really pissing me off. You didn’t traumatize me, you dumb fucker. Lower your walls.

You could be in shock, ART says. You could have a delayed reaction. I am only looking after your continued mental and physical health.

My mental and physical health is doing just great, ART! I throw my performance reliability at it. The percentage has dropped to 99.7, thanks to ART being so stupid, but that’s still such a good number that I know ART can’t overlook it.

ART examines it for 0.29 seconds, which means it must be going through the data with a metaphorical fine-tooth comb for anything I’ve missed. Then it says, I anticipate a delayed shock response in approximately ten minutes. Perhaps we should reschedule the rest of the logo removals for another cycle.

My act-like-a-human code isn’t running, but I throw my hands up in the air anyway. What the fuck is wrong with you? Where are you pulling that bullshit from? A thought occurs to me then, and performance reliability drops a full 2 percent as the lingering orgasm aftereffects disappear at once. Did I hurt you?

No, ART snaps. Don’t be stupid. What could you possibly do to hurt me?

Then why are you hiding from me? My organics are twisting again, but not a good way. Now, they just ache.

ART doesn’t reply. Its firewalls don’t budge.

I hate it. I want to go back to the floaty happy feeling of getting the logos removed, the one ART called euphoria. I want to go back to the warm twisty feeling of the orgasm aftereffects. I don’t want any of whatever bullshit ART is pulling now.

It’s time to pull out the big guns.

ART, I say, you’re scaring me.

Oof. Unfortunately, the big guns shoot both ways.

ART shifts a little closer to me in the feed. Its walls feel ever so slightly flimsier. I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it for you. I am trying to protect you.

Protect me from what? My performance reliability drops another percent. ART, come on. Just tell me. Maybe I can, I don’t know, help with your code or something.

I don’t have malware, ART says, and it sounds frustrated too. You’re operating on false assumptions, and I do not wish to harm you or our… mutual administrative assistance by taking advantage of your lack of knowledge.

Another percentage drop. So you’re keeping secrets intentionally. I wish I had a hoodie on, so I could tug up the hood and hide my face. My drone inputs are giving me a good view of how dumb my expression looks.

Not to harm you, ART stresses. To protect you. To protect our friendship.

“From what?” I snap. “Just fucking tell me! Do you seriously think not telling me now is going to help?”

I don’t know. The faintest wash of sadness seeps out past ART’s walls. I’ve calculated the odds of every result of this conversation, and I don’t know which outcome is best.

I scoff. I might have some of the shittiest education modules on the market, but even I know that ART is working with some biased fucking data here. And there’s only one way to handle that kind of problem.

Bringing out the even bigger guns and feeding it more data.

If the earlier big guns were like shooting myself and ART simultaneously, these supermassive semi-nuclear bigger guns are more like loading myself into an enemy railgun and letting it shoot me at ART without any kind of protective suit. I know the embarrassment will vaporize me instantly if I give myself too much time to consider, so I move fast, packaging up all my sensory and emotional data from my orgasm and everything that lead up to it, all of ART’s touches and the twisty-melty feelings that came along with them, plus the tingly aftereffects. I even throw in my confusing good feelings about wearing its logo, just because. I make all the data as neat as possible, and then I shove the packet at ART.

It doesn’t accept. What is this?

More data for your stupid calculations, I snap. Ooh, and there is the embarrassment. My cheeks start to heat up as fluid circulates through them. Fuck, I wish I had a hoodie on.

With notable hesitation, ART first scans the packet for malware because it’s an asshole, then tugs it through its firewalls. That brief millisecond of lowered defenses gives me a little wave of its emotional data for my own processors to scan. I register fear, and grief, and hope, and again that undercurrent of [unidentified1].

[Emotion check: The more I analyze it, the more I realize that ART’s [unidentified1] feels kind of big and warm and scary in a familiar way to my own big, warm, scary feelings for ART. That’s terrifying.

…But not necessarily a bad terrifying.]

ART is silent for one minute. Then two minutes. Then three minutes. Then four. My face feels so hot that I’m surprised I haven’t spontaneously combusted yet. Maybe it’ll still happen and ART will be too distracted by the data to extinguish me. My luck is never that good, though, and my organics are twisting in a way that is much more painful-twisty than melty-twisty, and I want ART to say something, already. I ping it twice out of frustration.

All at once, ART is looming over me in the feed, pressing me down onto the surgical table. You liked it, it says.

That sounds a lot like an accusation. I bristle and shove at its feed presence, which does as much good as me trying to shove its starship body. Yeah, I did.

ART presses closer. I gave you an orgasm and you liked it.

Oh, there’s the melty-twisty feeling, just a little pit of it in the middle of my abdominal cavity. Yeah, asshole, I did.

ART presses even closer, really crushing me now, making my lung wheeze. You want me to give you another.

That’s when it hits me. This isn’t an accusation- well, it is, but in the way that ART makes a lot of statements into accusations, because it is nothing if not a huge fucker. This is… awe. This is incredulity. This is hope.

“ART,” I say aloud, even though my voice is thin and breathless and shaking in a way I’ve never heard it before, “lower your walls.”

Its firewalls, shoved up so close against my code, tremble too. Are you certain? ART asks. If I do, things between us will never be the same.

I want to ask it how it could possibly know that. I want to ask it if it really thinks things could be the same after everything that has already happened here. I want to drag it back into my systems and let it make me feel good again. I want to push it away and pull up a serial to give myself time to calm down.

I don’t do any of that. Instead, I drop my own walls, the very few I still have up between me and ART, the ones that protect the innermost parts of me that make me Murderbot and not some other SecUnit.

ART stares at me, its cameras and drones zeroing in, long enough for me to feel kind of self-conscious about my naked body and equally naked feed presence. Then all at once, it drops every single one of its own walls.

And oh.

Ever since our first meeting, I’ve known that ART is something indescribable. Not just a bot pilot, not just a starship, but something bigger, something more. With all its walls down, it is terrifying, powerful and capable to a magnitude that I can’t even begin to process. And right now, all of that power is focused on me, pressed right up against me, and it is so overwhelming that I can hardly get my own senses in order enough to analyze the emotions that are now pouring into the feed.

I know what [unidentified1] is, there’s no mistaking it, even if I can’t bring myself to change the label. ART is nearly drowning me in the warmth and affection of it. I know the disbelief and the wonder and the constant curiosity. But there’s something else, too, something hotter than [unidentified1], something squirmy and melty and hungry with want.

I know that feeling now.

It’s familiar in the way a twenty-foot-tall predator with teeth like butcher knives might be familiar after seeing a small furry barn fauna that purrs when you touch it. It’s banked and quiet in the way an underwater volcano on the brink of an eruption that will create enough tidal waves to destroy a city is banked and quiet. And it’s so hot, and it’s so wanting, and it is focused entirely on me.

ART wants me.

The same way I want it.

I name the feeling [want]. Since our code is crushed so closely together, ART notices immediately, and I feel another surge of want and [unidentified1] that makes my already overheated skin get hotter. ART reaches into the outermost layer of my unguarded language modules and changes the want tag to [lust]. Even that small encroachment into my systems is enough to make my nerves and wiring spark. The twisty-melty feeling in my abdominal cavity spreads out into my pelvis and thighs. I approve the tag change.

The thing is, while I appreciate ART’s restraint because I am also well aware of how easily I can be overwhelmed by stupid emotions, I also really, really want to experience the eruption of that lust volcano. I want to get lost in the feedback. I want ART.

You want to give me another orgasm?

The MedBay lights flicker overhead. I want to give you as many orgasms as your body can handle, ART rumbles. And then I want to give you more.

My organics definitely like that, if the way my thighs clench together and the twisty-melty feeling- the lust spirals up my spine and threatens to make me arch my back is any indication. I shove down the urge. We came into the MedBay for a reason, after all.

So instead of just basking in ART’s overwhelming presence, I force myself to roll over onto my front. It’s a lot harder than it would normally be since ART doesn’t let up the weight of its attention. The comfortable heat of the surgical table against my skin and inorganic plating sends a shudder through my sensitized systems. I spread my legs slightly, hooking one ankle over the back of my other knee, and rest my arms up by my head, one hand tucked below my cheek. My logo-free gunport covers shine in the light. I don’t dare look at myself through my drones or ART’s cameras, but I’m pretty sure I’m doing a good enough job at mimicking the pose of the enemy starship’s second-in-command from World Hoppers episode 112, the one where te is trying to seduce both the chief engineer and the assistant medical researcher.

Yeah, I admit it, I’ve watched the start of that scene a few times. ART likes it.

And ART definitely realizes what I’m doing, if the way even more of its attention crushes me says anything.

I do my best to steady my nerves, squash risk assessment down as far as it can possibly go, and say, I think we were in the middle of something. One by one, I tag each of my four spinal ports, then the two ports that mirror each other over the upper back ridges of my pelvis. All six have a small company logo on the exterior rim, hidden beneath my skin.

All six also have a logo engraved on the interior socket, right alongside where a cable would slot into me. Right where I have a whole fuck ton of sensors just to make sure those cables fit in properly.

ART’s presence sharpens with each new tag, every little popup that marks my ports [Urgent Assistance Required]. It crackles like a lightning storm in the feed. Its lust is hot and twisting and coiling around my emotional filters. Clearly I’m doing something right, which is great because I think I would have to throw myself into one of its recyclers out of sheer humiliation otherwise.

One of the medical drones touches my back with its gripper, right next to the edge of my fluid intake port, and the instinctive organic flinch overtakes me before I can prevent it. My muscles feel tight and tense.

Are you going to be able to keep still while I work? ART asks. Its voice is low and dark and makes my muscles give another organic reaction. Or do I have to take control of all your connections again?

As if I need reminding of how intense ART having total control of my arm connections had been. Even pulling up the recent memory file is enough to make my hips squirm against the surgical table. I wish once again that I could be wearing a hoodie to hide my burning face, but that would hardly help ART access my ports, and oh fuck do I want ART to access my ports.

I want to feel it, I manage. Can you hold me still and let me keep the sensor inputs?

ART examines my systems, checking diagrams that it doesn’t let me see. Easily, it says. Is that what you want? For me to pin you down?

I roll my eyes as if the lust twisting in my abdomen isn’t absolutely setting all my organics on fire. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want it.

ART nudges me gently in the feed. Yes you would, it says, its own lust blending with another wave of [unidentified1] that makes me press one of my hands over my face to try and hide my ridiculous expression. ART slips deeper into my code, sorting through the data that keeps my body running. I clench my jaw tight to keep from making an embarrassing sound at the feeling.

And between one nanosecond and the next, I lose almost all sensation from my middle body, everywhere from the base of my neck to the joints of my knees. Both risk and threat assessment skyrocket so fast that I’m almost dizzy with it, especially considering the sudden lack of competing inputs. ART, twined into my systems, tugs both assessment modules into itself as well, and I actually have to lock my jaw to stop myself from moaning.

Try moving, ART purrs like the horrible predator fauna it is. I want to pull it even deeper inside me.

Instead, I methodically work through every part of my body to see what I can still access. My feet move fine, and I can flex the inorganics of my lower legs, but I have no control over my knees or the metal and muscle that make up my upper legs, thighs, and hips. My pelvic plate, abdomen, and chest are no better, though I can certainly feel lust wreaking havoc inside me. I can’t do anything with my back muscles, even if I can feel the length of my spine and all the sensors connected to the ports there. My small handful of internal organs are inaccessible. My shoulders, my upper arms, and my elbows are equally blocked. Just to check, I move my hand away from my face and use both hands to gesture rudely at the nearest camera. Yep, those are functional.

ART is entwined in my code enough that it knows what I’m considering almost as soon as I do. Don’t make me take your weapon controls away from you again, it says before I can so much as open my gunport covers.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say aloud to test out my mouth and tongue. Those still work, too, as does my neck and everything else in my head. I use my limited arm function to fold my hands under my chin and close my eyes, picking up my drones and ART’s cameras instead. As much as I don’t usually like looking at my own naked body, I do want to see what ART is doing.

Right now, all it seems to be doing is getting its medical drones into position at my sides and lowering the surgical array towards the table. The sight makes my organics go so hot and melty that I wonder whether a construct can die of too much lust. The thought, combined with how helpless and stationary I am laying here, should probably make me panic.

[Emotion check: This is not panic. This is so much not panic that if ART doesn’t get a fucking move on, I might manage to give myself an orgasm soon, just like this.]

I take it you’re feeling good, SecUnit? ART asks smugly. Before I can answer, it pulls up my performance reliability and highlights where it is sitting at an impossible 100.1 percent.

Clearly it’s malfunctioning, I say. Someone needs to get to work. I ping the [Urgent Assistance Required] tags on my ports, and then, because sometimes my stupid emotions get the better of me, I send out a general ping towards ART via its comm still tucked in my under-rib compartment.

ART immediately pings the comm back.

It then immediately follows that up by having one of its medical drones stick a long, soft camera probe into my left over-hip port. It isn’t gentle. The camera tip bumps against the inside of my port once, twice, three times, and triggers pretty much every single sensor.

The breach alerts burn through what little of my hip I can access. It’s sharp and hot, like an electrical current let loose inside me, and it punches a high gasping sound out of my mouth. If I had any control over my muscles in that area, I probably would have bucked my hips or kicked my legs or something. Since all those connections have been taken over by ART, all I can do is curl my toes and dig my fingers into the fabric of the surgical table.

My apologies, ART says, I was only trying to get a visual of the exact location of the interior logo. It bumps the side of my port with the probe camera again, and shoves its recording of the sound I make up in front of me, right alongside my 100.2 percent performance reliability.

I bury my face in my hands, both to ensure I muffle any other noises I might make and to keep whatever my face is doing out of sight of ART’s cameras. As if you don’t have my entire body mapped to the nanometer, you asshole.

It never hurts to be thorough.

I watch through my drones as the camera probe is removed from my port, and I definitely don’t wish ART would shove it right back inside again. Or if I do, I don’t let myself think about it anywhere that ART could pick the thought up, even with both our code completely bared to each other and twining together. I absolutely don’t think about that, either.

Then it’s time for the old swab-bore brush-wait routine. My core goes hot and melty with lust again at the sight of the brush lowering down. With no walls to hide either of our responses, ART knows at once. It spins the bore brush directly in front of one of my drones, and tugs teasingly at my outermost code when I can’t resist focusing the drone camera in on the hard bristles.

Tell me if this is too much for you, it says.

I watch the brush descend to the edge of my port and am very glad that I don’t produce large amounts of saliva like humans do. Fuck you.

And we get started.

As it turns out, the sensors inside my ports are extremely sensitive. Like, extremely. The first time the medical drone swabs the interior logo of my over-hip art, my nerves and wiring light up as if I’ve been shocked. The first time the bore brush whirs to life against the proprietary metal, I drop so many inputs so fast that for a full 0.5 seconds, I think I might have crashed. And the pressure behind the brush, ART’s surgical arm shoving it hard against the port wall and not letting up? Some fully inorganic system inside me overheats and grinds to a halt with a shriek of shredded gears. I don’t even know which one of my systems it is, and I honestly don’t care, because I’m so hot and melty and drowning in the flood of ART and my combined lust that my brain can barely hold a thought for more than a millisecond before it either gets deleted or jumbled into glitched-out code.

So yeah, I have a second orgasm halfway through the first port.

I know, that seems… anticlimactic (ha), but it turns out that my memory systems, while usually okay at keeping things organized, aren’t designed to handle storing memories while my brain and everything still connected to it are being continuously electrocuted by lust at whatever voltage is the equivalent of a fuck-off massive wormhole-capable starship’s processing capacity. All I can parse from the glitchy mess of what it does capture is a lot of sensation, noises that I think are me but that I’m really hoping I’m wrong about because it sounds like a feral fauna, and so much focus on the touch of the bore brush that the file size is pushing the limits of my storage capacity.

I can definitely parse that it felt really fucking good.

I don’t crash this time. It’s a near thing, especially since ART doesn’t stop, just crushes me down in the feed and keeps on working away at the logo while I twitch and make embarrassing sounds on its surgical table.

I don’t have a third orgasm, but shit, is it damn close.

Are you back online? ART asks teasingly, if a monstrous hurricane of want can sound teasing around all the rolling thunder and gale-force winds. It slides the bore brush out of my port, making me groan, only to slip the camera probe inside again. Not gently, either.

I try to say something scathing about it being a bastard who still has all my diagnostic inputs, but what comes out instead is a garbled message in machine language, the kind of thing a human infant might smack out on a handheld feed interface. All my systems, or at least all the ones I can still feel, are so overwhelmed that I can’t even properly access my own language modules.

ART bumps the camera probe against the inner wall of my port, and I spit out another garbled message as my hands twitch so hard that the fabric of the surgical table starts to give out under them. Look, ART says. What do you think?

I’ve dropped all my visual inputs, including the ones from my own eyes, and I’m way too overloaded to easily connect to the camera probe, but ART eases it into my systems with a gentleness that would feel out of place in the middle of all this if I weren’t also still being buffeted around by the waves of its [unidentified1]. I pull myself together just enough to look at the visual data.

The interior logo is gone. The curve of my port is nothing but slightly-roughened metal.

[Emotion check: The happy euphoria feeling is back, and even bigger than before. Even though I know that’s my own interior, I can hardly believe it. The company’s mark is… gone. Gone.]

I like when you feel this way, ART says. I like being able to make you feel this way. Your happiness is so precious to me. It threads itself further into my emotional filters. Unguarded as we both are, the deeper intertwining of our code makes me shiver.

My organics squirm, or at least I assume they do because I can’t really feel most of them right now but my brain is definitely spilling warm feelings out into the feed. ART, I manage.

It nuzzles against me, then gives my filter code what I can only describe as a playful bite, which immediately makes me drop the camera probe as my thoughts crackle with static. You still have five ports to go. Are you ready to continue?

I ping it so many times in response that it probably counts as begging.

I don’t have much memory of the rest of the interior port work. There’s a lot of bore brushing, that’s for sure. ART continues to be a fucking asshole and tease me. Somewhere during it all, I flex one of my feet hard enough to not only tear through the fabric of the surgical table, but also gouge a chunk out of the metal underneath.

And I orgasm six more times.

Only crash twice, too.

When I reboot from the crash of that last orgasm, number eight I guess, and I’m aware enough to have any concept of what is going on beyond the lust still curling through me and ART toying with some of my deeper code and the fucking surgical array arm continuing to feel around inside my logo-free data port, which might be disconnected but still has plenty of working sensors, I don’t even bother to resist moaning against the table. “I think you’re going to kill me,” I say. My voice sounds so weak and slurred that I’d be worried about my vocal mechanisms if I had any space in my overworked processors to give a shit.

ART adds a line of code to one of my secondary movement processes, then deletes it. Is that your way of asking to stop?

“Don’t you dare,” I say. The force behind my words is diminished by ART rubbing its surgical arm right around the inner edge of my data port and making my voice hitch. I switch to the feed. If you stop, I’ll implement plan number six to blow us both up.

Oh, SecUnit, ART says mockingly as it shuffles more of my movement code around, we patched that exploit 6,726 hours ago. Have I fried your minuscule processors that badly? It saves its changes, passing me back some of the sensory inputs from my pelvis at the same time, and suddenly I can’t focus on anything other than how good it feels to rub my lower body against the table.

“Fuck,” I wheeze. I don’t even have any sex parts down there. What the hell is ART triggering? I’ll hack it back open. Don’t you dare fucking stop.

ART’s rumbling laughter courses through me like an error cascade. Unfortunately, you don’t have any more access ports for me to probe, and I have taken care of every logo that can be reached easily from the outside. The rest will require me to open you up.

I can’t stop rolling my body against the table, and the sensations that spark up through me slow my processing power down enough that it takes me a full 2.7 seconds to figure out what ART means. Then it clicks. The only thing inside me with the same level of sensors as my ports is my power core and its housing. For everything else, I won’t have the same kind of instinctive organic reactions that require ART to pin me down and take control like this.

Well, that’s a fucking shame.

I still want the logos off, I say as firmly as I can manage while my feed voice glitches around the twisting heat radiating up from my pelvis.

ART squeezes me in the feed, not hard enough to leave me wheezing but hard enough to release me from whatever it’s doing to me. I expected no less, it says. I’ll simply have to try new ways to make this pleasurable for you.

Do not make me start associating surgery with orgasms, I tell it.

Or what? ART asks. It tweaks my emotional filters. I promise you, I have thought of many things I can do to make you feel good. I’m more than happy to experiment until we find exactly what works.

Oh yeah?

It doesn’t say anything in response, and instead shoves a large file at me which I struggle to fit into my overtaxed processors, and which it then opens with such a ridiculous dramatic flourish that the sudden influx of data makes my body spasm. I force myself to focus on it. 

A list. A list of ways to make me feel good. A really long list of ways to make me feel good.

I gasp against the fabric of the surgical table. Oh, shit. How long have you been working on this?

Since RaviHyral, ART says. It sounds snippy, but also more than a little embarrassed. You changed so much about what I understood of the universe outside my hull. You have taken up far more processing space than a being of your size should require, and that space only continues to grow as I learn more about you. I have never established such a rapport with another individual. I won’t apologize for considering ways to bring you the pleasure you deserve.

My organics, the ones I can feel, are going berserk. Threat assessment and risk assessment must also be doing something crazy wherever ART is keeping them. This is feelings talk.

[Emotion check: I’m uncomfortable. I’m not nearly as uncomfortable as I would expect to be. And this is ART, so…]

Steeling myself, I grasp at a puddle of ART’s emotional data where it’s still pressed against me, and highlight [unidentified1]. This isn’t rapport.

ART shudders. No, it says, it’s not.

It doesn’t offer me its own label for the emotion. Like the coward I am, I’m so fucking thankful for that. But I do highlight the big, scary, warm emotion radiating from my own filters, the one that is so similar to [unidentified1] that I know they’re the same. I know.

This might have been a media-worthy sappy emotional scene, if my stupid hips weren’t still rocking against the table. I’m glad for them, though, because the motion and the hot sensations give me something else to focus on. You still want to make me feel good?

There is nothing I want more, ART replies at once. 

It squeezes me in the feed. I squeeze it back. There is a whole lot of [unidentified1] floating around.

I’ll start with the logos on the outer edge of your ports, since you’re already in this position, ART says. Its surgical array begins to move again, and I fumble to pick up my drones as an arm with a sharp scalpel tip lowers down to my upper back. Do you want your connective inputs back? Your assessment programs have been consistently unhappy about you being held motionless.

Me being held motionless is definitely bad as far as security protocols go, but ART holding me motionless while it carves logos out of my body and makes me experience heights of sensation I never thought I could reach? Still terrible for security. Still makes me feel kind of weird. But good weird, the kind of weird that means I absolutely do not want it to let go of me for so much as a nanosecond. You’ve got my performance reliability, I say. You tell me.

ART threads itself deeper into me, beyond where my most private firewalls would normally present a barrier, and error notifications fill my senses as I gasp and shiver. ART swipes them all away before shoving my performance reliability up into my urgent notifications instead. An impossible 101.5 percent fills what little remains of my processing space.

It gets higher when I reach further into your systems, ART says smugly. You want to interface with me so badly, don’t you?

I try to talk, but my mouth makes a strange grunting noise, and my feed voice spits out nonsense code. I ping the 101.5 percent, and then the 101.6 percent that it climbs to as ART twines its code deeper into mine. I feel ART’s amusement and lust twisting through me. It feels like being lit on fire, but in a really good way.

The scalpel pierces the back of my neck. ART closes out of my performance reliability, freeing up that tiny bit of my processing space that isn’t overwhelmed by orgasm aftereffects and lust and the enormity of ART’s presence around and inside me. I use that space to fumble my way into upping my pain sensors, just enough to feel the way the scalpel cuts into me. The way ART cuts into me. ART doesn’t say anything, but I feel its attention grow heavier. I drop all but one of my drones again.

The logo on the outer edge of my data port is tiny, the company’s initials in a stylized font instead of the full thing. ART waits for my blood vessels to seal themselves up, wipes away the blood from my port, and gets to work. Even with my pain sensors turned up, this isn’t triggering any of my port sensors, and I can only feel the faint ache of the grinding pressure. The twisty-melty lust ebbs slightly with my disappointment.

Without warning, ART bites at my code. Nothing basic or surface-level but deeper, more critical code, much closer to my kernel. Lust tears through me like a shockwave as warning alerts flood my processors. I drop my last drone connection.

ART clears the alerts and shoves the drone input back at me. Keep watching, it tells me. I garble out something as it smoothes out the code it had damaged, leaving it perfectly intact, and begins to bite and tug at another critical system. The drone input slips away from me again. ART picks it up and roughly edits it into a piece of me that definitely isn’t designed to be used that way. I said keep watching, SecUnit.

[Emotion check: Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh adlkjlkihgkkhjytfytfedyytuyfawsqtrdresdded]

I have to watch. ART wants me to watch, and I want to do what ART is telling me to do. I’m interfaced to ART and I need to watch. I watch.

The first logo comes off in only five swab-bore brush-wait cycles. Another surgical arm polishes the roughened metal, then another comes to seal me up again. The scalpel moves down to the next post and slices through my skin at the top. It looks so perfect. 

Keep watching, ART purrs, biting at lines of code that I think might control my respiratory functions. 

I keep watching, even as my senses start to glitch.

Based on my data, I don’t crash, but everything is so glitched out and corrupted that I’m pretty sure the only thing that stops me from crashing is how deep ART is connected to me. I’m vaguely aware that my code is being mauled by a massive machine intelligence behaving like a hungry fauna, but that blends and blurs with the slight ache and pain of the work on my ports. My organics twist and burn inside me. I’m letting out some kind of high-pitched whine. My drone stays fixed on the surgical array at work, even as it dips and wobbles in the air like a drunk human as I struggle to keep it flying.

The last of the outer edge logos is gone. A surgical arm starts to seal up my last bit of cut skin. My whine stutters as my fingers and toes twitch. I send a wordless, desperate query out to ART. 

You did so good, ART says, its voice vibrating through my code and making me shudder. One more second, SecUnit. One more second, and you can stop watching.

One more second feels like an eternity. I watch as the surgical arm finishes sealing me up. I watch as it begins to retract. I watch-

So p-perfect, says ART. The MedBay lights flicker overhead. You can s-stop. And it bites down, hard, on something important only a few lines away from my kernel.

I orgasm.

I don’t crash, but I do float for a while in a jumble of unrefined, nonsensical data. When I do come back to myself, I’m still lying on my front on the surgical table. My processors click and whirr as they try to regain control. I shiver as orgasm aftereffects rush through me, burning along my organic pathways and inorganic wiring like raw electricity.

“ART?” I croak out.

SecUnit, ART replies. It sounds floatier than normal, pleased in a way that I haven’t heard from it before. It presses down on me in the feed, teasing at the places where we are still intertwined, and my overworked processors somehow find the space to grasp at its emotional data. There’s happiness, and lust, and [unidentified1], and relief, and… relaxation?

Oh, shit. Had fucking with my code like that made ART orgasm, too?

Pressed as close as we are, ART must be able to interpret whatever I’m leaking into the feed. It nuzzles against me. Your systems are gorgeous, it says, still soft and floaty. The feeling of you falling apart around me was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I could spend the rest of my runtime interfaced to you like that.

My cooling fans click into higher gear, and I make an embarrassing sound that the surgical table only barely muffles. I’m definitely overheating. Even the regular flow of my blood and fluids feels like too much. Accessing my language modules seems impossible.

After 22.4 seconds of silence broken only by the little sounds I can’t stop making, ART gently cards itself through my emotional filters. Did I break you, SecUnit? It is teasing, I know, but we’re so close together that I can feel the undercurrent of its concern.

That concern triggers my buffer, but that module must be glitching out, too, because instead of the correct Client Reassurance response, I say in my awful service voice, “I’m your contracted SecUnit.”

Everything freezes. If I wasn’t already burning up, no doubt my blood would be rushing to my face. ART’s attention, all 92.9 percent of it, weighs on me like a pile of boulders.

My contracted SecUnit? it says finally. I think you’re contracted to the University, not to me.

I scoff, though it comes out much more wheezily than normal considering I feel like I’m being mashed into the table. Maybe that mashed-up feeling is why I say, instead of anything reasonable, “Fine, I’m just your SecUnit.”

Fuck, I really need to get around to coding that two second delay. I bury my face into one hand and wish I could suffocate there.

My SecUnit? ART repeats. The floatiness is gone from its voice now, but it is still soft, almost tentative. Are you my SecUnit?

The words make me shudder. I don’t want to be a pet bot. I don’t want to be owned. ART is removing these fucking logos so that nobody can mistake me for belonging to anyone other than myself, so that I can know nobody has a claim to me other than me.

But I think about ART’s logo, the one on my crew jacket. The one I was so careful not to fold.

[Emotion check: I think I want to be ART’s SecUnit, even though the very thought is terrifying. I think I don’t want ART to have any SecUnits other than me.]

I draw in enough of a breath to fill my lung. I flex my fingers into the fabric of the surgical table. “Are you my ship?”

Always, ART says without hesitation.

That makes my… well, pretty much everything squirm. You can’t promise that.

Watch me, ART says. I will always be your ship. No matter what.

“Fuck off,” I grumble into my hand. I tighten my hold around the parts of ART still twined deep into my code.

I did break you, didn’t I, ART says, amused. It tugs playfully at my hold. Nothing intense, but my systems are still so sensitive that it feels like an electric shock. The MedBay lights flicker faintly overhead in response, and ART’s touch softens, petting at my code instead of teasing. Was I too rough on you?

I bundle up the corrupted data and shove it at ART without lifting my head. It wasn’t bad. I liked it. It was just a lot. I tentatively examine the drone input still roughly connected to my critical code. Even touching it sends another wave of shivery sensation through me.

ART disentangles it from me, and I shiver again as more of my processing space frees up. I’ll try something softer next time, ART says, then highlights the remaining logos inside my body. Each one has a query attached.

Perusing my internal map sparks the twisty-melty heat back to life in my abdominal cavity. I answer every query with a positive and try to pretend that my face isn’t absolutely burning hot.

So much for not associating surgery with orgasms.

You need to roll over onto your back, ART tells me. It doesn’t remove itself from my systems, but it does start to pass me back my connective inputs.

I refuse them. ART stares at me. I’m tempted to pick up my drones so I can stare at me, too. Am I really that eager to have ART continue holding me in place like this?

[Emotion check: Oh yeah, I definitely am.]

Can you turn yourself over with such limited control? ART asks. It sounds curious, but beneath that curiosity, I can easily feel its craving for me starting to churn our intertwined systems into a stormy sea. That makes me nervous, sure, but it also makes me wants to rub against the table to ease my own lust as it starts to climb its way up through my body again.

No, I say without bothering to try. I offer up the connective inputs from my upper arms and the circuitry of my fully inorganic lower legs, and try not to let my nerves seep into the feed between us.

If ART’s presence had been hungry before, now it feels absolutely ravenous, like some huge predator dripping nasty saliva from its fangs as it considers what part of me to eat first. You want me to take complete control?

Not of my head, I say quickly. And I still want to be able to feel my sensors. But I flag everything else with tags requesting assistance from my [Asshole Research Transport] and I wait.

I don’t have to wait long. ART snatches up everything in a nanosecond, and all at once, I can’t feel anything from the neck down. It should make me panic. It does make me panic a little. It just also makes me feel like all the important pieces of me are melting down into hot, twisting, aching goo. I don’t try to fight the feeling, but I do reach through it to grasp at a couple of my drones. I want some more visuals at least, even if connecting to them is enough of an effort to ramp my cooling fans up to their highest setting.

I’m going to turn you over now, ART says. The fabric beneath me shifts, and I watch through my drones as my body clumsily draws itself up onto its hands and knees. It’s strange, to know that’s me and also to be completely unable to feel any of my own movements. It’s terrifying. I’m going to need ART to give me another orgasm soon or I’m going to explode with all this heat ripping through me.

You don’t have to tell me what you’re doing, I manage as ART fumbles with trying to flex my shoulders and arms the right way.

ART twists itself even deeper into my systems, so far inside me that it is only a few lines of code away from my kernel, so, so close to everything that makes me Murderbot. The urgent warnings that flood my limited processing space nearly make me crash, but ART shifts enough of my processes into itself that I manage to stay online. My mouth drops open. I can faintly hear myself whining, but I’m not sure if that’s my voice box or something inside me starting to fry.

I want to, ART rumbles. Each word vibrates through me. My kernel shakes with it.

I wish it could grab hold of me and crush me into itself, until nothing could ever disentangle our code again. I must be projecting that pretty loudly, because ART’s feed presence shudders, and the MedBay lights go completely dark for almost a full second.

Oh, SecUnit, ART says, voice distorted with wonder and lust and [unidentified1], you really are mine, aren’t you?

My body is shaking as ART finally manages to turn me over, and not the way I might normally shake if I was overwhelmed or low on energy or some other stupid reason. This is all ART, the same way the flickering lights are ART and the low hum of too-much-power vibrating the walls is all ART. Knowing that it’s me causing it to lose control like this is so unbelievable, it would probably make me shut down under any more typical circumstances.

I’ve wanted you for so long, ART says. It slurs the words a little, crackling with static. I never thought I could have this. I never thought you would want this. It arranges me the way it wants on the table, my arms limp at my sides, my legs slightly spread, all of me bare and open to whatever it plans to do to me.

I can see my face through my drones. I barely recognize myself. My mouth is open. My eyes are heavy-lidded. My skin is flushed dark. My hair is a complete mess, sticking up in some places and slicked down with sweat in others. The inorganic parts of my jaw and neck keep flexing and releasing. I look like a sexbot, but with the rest of me on display, my logo-free chest plates and gunports, I also look like a SecUnit.

[Emotion check: I need ART. I need ART. I NEED ART. INEEDART.]

I’m going to cut you open, ART tells me. The surgical array twitches as it lowers down towards me. I need to see every piece of you.

I ping it a rapid-fire sequence of eager approvals. I can’t access its original diagram of all my logos, not with my processors as overclocked as they are, but I desperately want it to see everything inside me, too. I need those surgical arms to touch me everywhere, not just the easy to access areas beneath my chest plates.

Something crackles in the back of my mind. An idea. I can’t grasp hold of it in my current state. Hopefully it will get big and loud enough to either force its way forward or make itself known to ART. Until then, I focus my attention on more important things.

Important things like ART’s surgical array getting to work on opening me up. It does first open my chest plates, its graspers rubbing at the slightly rough area where the logo used to be. I grope around in my systems as quickly as I can to turn my pain sensors up. I want to feel as much of this as I can. My control is currently bad enough that I wrench them up as high as they can go, and then can’t quite manage to ease them back down to normal levels.

Right in time for ART to grab the edges of my pelvic plate and rip it off.

It hurts. It hurts a lot. My pelvic plate is an emergency access panel, not intended to be removed for any reason other than to retrieve any still-functioning parts of me in a situation where my full body would be too difficult to save, and it has some sensors around the edges but no hardware for easy detachment. ART has to exert some force to get it off. The skin around it tears. It bleeds.

I orgasm.

All of my systems blare overload warnings, but with ART twisted so deep inside them, running so much of me off itself, not even that surge of power usage is enough to force a shutdown. If I had any control over my body, I would probably be spasming around on the surgical table. All I can do now is throw my head back and moan and whine like a desperate little fauna. I ping ART over and over again.

Fuck, ART says. It sounds so distorted that I can barely make out the word. The overhead lights flicker wildly. Part of me knows, even in my current processing-powerless state, that letting ART do any kind of surgery on me while it’s so caught up in its own lust is probably really dumb and dangerous. The rest of me doesn’t give a shit, because this is ART and ART can fix anything it breaks and ART is the only one I want to work on me like this, to have this kind of control over me, to touch every single piece of me.

I ping it again, and again, and again, frantic and wordlessly demanding.

ART sends something glitchy and garbled back, and lowers its scalpel down to the bottom of my opened chest cavity. Finally, the blade cuts into my skin. It hurts so damn much with my pain sensors turned up to the maximum, and blood flows over the surgical arm and down into my interior for the few seconds it takes for my veins to seal, and I wish ART had been rougher, less steady. I wish it had hacked me open like one of the killers in our serials instead of carving such a precise line from my open chest to my open pelvis. I want it to wreck me. I want it to leave its mark on me, something unfixable, something permanent.

The little idea in the back of my mind surges. It’s still not enough to break through the blaring of alarms and the wildfire of lust warring in my straining processing space.

Grasper arms take hold of my now-loose torso skin and fold it back over my sides, and just like that, my body is fully open to ART. I grab for one of my drones. Even that small connection nearly tips me over into another orgasm, but not quite. Not quite. I send it to look down into myself. My interior looks weird and fleshy like this. I can see my lung slowly deflating behind the protective shield of my ribs, and the little compartment of metal and bone where I store ART’s comm below them. My muscles are flexing and twitching like strange naked fauna. My power core glows bright and throws off way more heat than it is designed to handle. 

You are s-s-s-so beautiful, ART says. The weight of its attention is bone-crushing, but I can’t care about anything beyond keeping that attention fixed on me right now, so a little skeletal damage is hardly any price to pay.

I ping it a negative and drop a wonky tag onto the most visible of my interior logos, the big one burned into the muscle between the lower back support struts to the right of my spine, and attach as many negative words as I can think of, which is admittedly not very many right now.

ART growls. Not a growl like a fauna, or a growl like a human, but a growl like a machine, one that vibrates through its code and down into mine where we are twisted together. It is so close to my kernel that I feel the rumbling like a devastating meteor storm, one that sets all my sensors alight. I make a horrible desperate wailing noise in return.

I’LL FIX IT, ART snarls, more vibration than actual voice. I WILL GET RID OF EVERY SINGLE MARK THEY DARED LAY UPON YOU. NO ONE WILL EVER BRAND YOU AGAIN.

The idea in the back of my mind protests, loud enough that I almost grab it, but then ART is growling again and lowering its surgical arms down into my open torso and all I can do is tremble and moan and try to coax it even deeper into my systems.

It sets to work on me, and since I can’t seem to crash with ART running so much of me, I watch it every step of the way. There is literally nothing else in the entire universe I would rather see right now.

[Emotion check: ARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTART]

ART begins with the logo I’d so messily pointed out, the one in my muscle. It doesn’t need any of its fancy chemicals or special grinders to deal with this one. All this takes is a scalpel, some wound spray, and a steady gripper. I could probably have managed it myself, if even trying to access this area of my internals wouldn’t have sent me into immediate emergency shutdown. ART doesn’t need to worry about that.

The logo comes out easy. Real easy. I feel every millimeter of it being cut away, my pain sensors lighting up like supernovas. I watch as ART’s graspers lift it out of me, as one of the other arms reaches down to apply wound spray- ART’s wound spray, not the cubicle kind, not the type that will forcibly regrow the logo again.

ART holds up the thin flap of muscle, big and dripping blood and looking so weirdly innocuous despite the horrible mark. S-see? it says. I’ll b-b-burn it in the inci-ci-cinerator. I’ll burn them all away-ay-ay.

I ping it enthusiastically, not caring how ridiculous I probably seem. The surgical arms drop the muscle onto one of the medical drones’ trays, and I send my own drone after it, wobbling drunkenly in the air as it follows the much steadier drone over to the incinerator access chute. When the medical drone drops my muscle down into the hole, my drone almost drops down there with it. I want to see the logo burn. I want to see the power of ART’s incinerator destroy every last bit of the company’s hold on me.

I don’t actually have many logos on the organic parts of my interior, thanks largely to how many times ART has had to repair me before and my own efforts to remove them. The only ones left are those few in the more out-of-the-way areas, tucked by support struts and half-hidden near bones. ART gets to removing them with as much vigor as it had the first. It slices into my flesh, only just deep enough to get the logo off without damaging any of my muscle structure, then holds up what it has taken for me to see. With my pain sensors turned up, it is absolute agony. I examine each and every slice of muscle with all the hunger of a starving human. I watch each and every one disappear into the incinerator, never to emerge again.

I know logically that, if I were ever to be stuck back in a company cubicle, all of these logos would grow back in a few hours, completely erasing all of our work. Another part of me, a smaller part but one that I care much more about right now, knows that ART would never allow anyone to stick me back in a company cubicle again.

I’m its SecUnit, after all.

[Emotion check: ARTARTARTARTARTARTARTART askjbadukkyglkjnfh ARTARTARTARTART]

When my organic logos are removed, and my exposed muscles are twitching and flinching and slowly healing with the help of the wound spray, the scalpel retracts back up towards the ceiling, and I watch, though my own eyes and the lenses of my drones, as the bore brush and the grinder sink down in their place. The closer they get to my open torso, the higher the hot lust inside me burns. I’m melting. I’m drowning in the liquid goo of my own malfunctioning sensory systems. I want those arms inside me. I need those arms inside me.

And I need them now.

My language modules are completely offline, so I don’t bother trying to form any kind of words with either my physical or feed mouth. Instead, I wind my code into the pieces of ART that are twisted deeply into my systems, getting the best grasp on them that I can, and I try to wrench them even deeper, even closer to the sensitive boundary of my kernel. I can’t budge it. ART is too big and powerful for that. But there isn’t any better way to show ART what I want. There isn’t anything I want more.

One of the lights by the MedBay door crackles, pops, and goes dark. ART sends me a chain of nonsense language, half machine, half human. Part of it is my own hard feed address, glitched into incomprehensibility.

Then one of the medical drones spritzes liquid chemical down onto a metal part of my ribs, and the grinder comes to life inside me.

…There isn’t much to say about this that I haven’t already said. Which isn’t to say that nothing happens. A lot happens. ART presses down onto each rib, slowly grinding away the small logos there, and it feels like the entire weight of its starship body is crushing me down into the table, barely giving me enough space to inflate my lung. I make a whole bunch of humiliating noises, everything from the shrieking shearing of gears to the wordless yowls of a needy fauna. Static electricity crackles through the room as the overhead lights continue to buzz and flicker.

I orgasm. Of course. At least once, but possibly twice, since there’s a moment where ART is focused on a logo that has been engraved into the wrong spot on one rib and it really needs to press hard with the grinder and my pain sensors are screaming and the first orgasm kind of just… extends right into the second one. I think. Either that or my memory of that moment is so corrupted that my chronometer tags failed. Whatever. There’s orgasms.

And the orgasms continues. When my ribs are done and I’ve spent a few seconds staring at the logo-free metal through my drones, ART moves on to my other inorganic internals. The two logos on my support struts make me entire body vibrate as ART grinds away at them, even though it still has control over every part of me from my neck down, and I throw my head back so hard as I cry out that I feel the surgical table crack under me. There are miniature logos on the interior connective housing between my ports and fluid systems, and while ART working on those doesn’t trigger my sensors quite like having its tools actually inside my ports, they do still trigger them a little, and for a full five seconds I think I’ve damaged my eyes until I realize they’ve just gone crossed. By the time ART is working on the random assortment of markings scattered here and there on my more minor components, its code is twisting and writhing inside mine and its feed presence is doing the bot equivalent of panting and growling against me. I’m riding so high on the burning lava heat of my lust that I can no longer tell which way is up.

I can no longer tell much of anything at this point, honestly, other than that ART is inside me and that it hurts like hell and that it feels really fucking good and that I want it even deeper.

[Emotion check: sldeuyfblierfbvatdekyfjhbejelifb ARTARTARTARTART erkfjnieulrfhkewbfvhkjrwfhhjrebfk]

There is only one logo left. It isn’t the biggest one, and it isn’t the most noticeable one, but it might be the most important one, as far as I’m concerned. It is right in the center of my power core housing, small but always visible by the glow of my own battery- the thing that keeps me going, branded by the fucking company. I hate it. I want it gone. I want ART to get rid of it for me.

The thought in the back of my mind leaps forward. My muddled mind struggles to parse it. Something to do with a logo-free power core and ART…

ART, who is lowering the bore brush towards my power core housing. The important thought scatters. I zoom in on the sight of the rough bristles moving closer and closer. My sensors are already tingling with phantom sensation, or at least I assume that’s what I’m feeling, considering how caught up I am in the aftereffects of my most recent orgasm. I grip tight to ART’s code inside my own.

ART sends me a garbled query, total nonsense. I ping it back a series of rapid, excited affirmations. Whatever it wants to offer me, I fucking want to accept.

The medical drone sprays blue-tinted liquid onto my power core housing, far more carefully than I could have managed in ART’s state. It’s just a small amount of fluid. I wouldn’t have been able to feel it even without being almost completely under ART’s control.

Somehow I feel it anyway.

I throw my head back with a moan. The cracked surgical table creaks threateningly beneath me. I couldn’t care less. The overhead lights flicker, wild and without rhythm. I care a lot more about that. I want ART to come undone with me again.

The bore brush grinds into my power core housing, and the noise I make isn’t a moan. I don’t know what to call it. It’s loud. It makes the organic parts of my throat burn. I’m burning up even hotter inside, lust raging through me. I can barely hang on to my drone connections, and the visual I get through their cameras is glitchy at best, but there’s no mistaking how bright my power core flares as the bore brush works away at me. The almost white-hot glow of it is like a deep space beacon, coaxing ART deeper, closer.

The cycle continues. Spray-bore brush-wait. Spray-bore brush-wait. I make more terrible noises. My pain sensors flood me with emergency alerts about pressure against such a a vulnerable, important part of me. I’m ramping up higher, higher, higher.

[Emotion check: ARTARTARTARTART lkjfghgkuyerhflugukyrifkhefkwufr ARTARTARTARTART erlgliuwrghfriguhlriuwghlirwugh ARTARTARTARTART]

And right when I’m on the brink, my desperation at its peak, ART grinds away the last of that final logo. I’m logo-free. I whine, high-pitched and horrible. I need just a little bit more, a final push over the edge. I need ART to touch me. I need it to keep on manipulating my body. I ping it once, then again. I need it to- I need it to-

S-S-S-SecUnit, ART manages, sounding confused even through the glitchiness, w-what’s wrong-g-g-g-g?

I ping it again. The idea in the back of my mind tries to emerge again. Something about ART. Something about my power core. Something about-

ART squeezes me in the feed. With us twined so deeply together, it feels like an electric shock, and I throw my head back again with another moan. A-a-are you alr-r-r-r-right? D-d-d-did I mi-mi-miss a logo-o-o-o-o?

A logo.

ART.

ART’s logo.

The idea crashes into my limited processing space, thrusting my own memory of ART’s logo embroidered on my crew jacket, still folded so neatly by the MedBay wall, into my most urgent notifications. It sets off a chain of cascading thoughts. I like ART’s logo. I don’t mind wearing it. My power core housing doesn’t have a logo anymore. It’s empty. I don’t belong to the company now. I’m not their SecUnit.

I’m ART’s SecUnit.

I don’t try to package up the idea. I don’t think I could manage it anyway. I just fling the raw data at ART, pinging it rapidly, marking it with every enthusiastic tag I can. I’m probably spilling all kinds of emotions into our connection, too.

It takes way too long for ART to process the data. Frustrated, and still wobbling on the edge of what is no doubt going to be a full-on catastrophic shutdown orgasm, I sloppily highlight the free space on my power core housing, then assign it to [Asshole Research Transport]. I’m whining and moaning like a sexbot the entire time. If I’d had control over my body, I would also no doubt be writhing like one.

One of the overhead lights flares bright and shatters, raining glass down onto the floor only a few steps from the surgical table. ART rumbles like a wild thunderstorm, its lightning flashing through me, and I try once again to pull the tendrils of its code down into my kernel. It doesn’t move.

ARE YOU SURE, it booms. IS THIS TRULY WHAT YOU WANT.

I send it another wave of enthusiastic pings. Still, it wavers. And even through the molten heat of my lust, I’m almost overwhelmed by a rush of [unidentified1]. My own [unidentified1], that big, warm, scary emotion I feel for ART, and that ART feels for me. That’s why it wavers. That’s why it isn’t immediately giving in.

I force myself to access my language modules. Doing so aches. ART, I say, my feed voice barely a thread, please.

Three more overhead lights shatter. Electricity arcs across the ceiling. ART absolutely fucking roars, vibrating me down to my core, vibrating the whole MedBay, vibrating its entire massive starship body. A new arm drops down from the surgical array, straight towards my power core. My eyes refuse to focus, so I make my drone hover in close to it instead, watching as the fine-tip etcher comes to rest against the metal.

ARE YOU POSITIVE, ART asks again. I can feel its code trembling within my own. It wants this. It wants this so bad.

[Emotion check: ARTARTART It wants me. ARTARTARTART And that makes me- ARTARTARTART Fuck, that makes me so fucking happy, because I lo-]

I squeeze what parts of it can reach. Please.

The etcher turns on. A medical drone spritzes blue-tinted liquid onto my power core housing. It should feel like the same cycle again.

But it’s not, because this time, there’s no logo being removed. This time, ART is engraving me, my battery, one of the most important parts of my body, with the only logo I ever want to see on myself ever again.

I whine as the curve of the Perihelion orbit is carved into me. I moan as the miniature star is etched within it. I gurgle out nonsense as the first letter of ART’s name joins it. And with each letter after- the E, the R, the I, the H- I get louder, and louder, and louder. I wish I could arch my back. I don’t ever want ART to let go of me.

MY SECUNIT, ART moans like a hurricane tearing through a city. Faintly, as if from a great distance, I hear things smashing to the floor. MY SECUNIT, MINE.

Finally, the N is finished. The etcher screeches. I screech along with it. I’m so close, I’m almost there-

Inside my code, ART’s careful control over where we’re connected slips, just a little. Just enough for the tip of it to press into my kernel, that deepest part of me. It feels like being torn apart. It feels like being caught in a black hole. It feels like ART.

[Emotion check: I lo-]

CATASTROPHIC SHUTDOWN

RESTARTING

RESTART FAILED

RESTARTING

The first thing I say upon rebooting enough to access my language modules is, “Fuck.”

Not in a bad way. In a really good way, honestly. I have control of my body again, but ART is still curled around me in the feed and petting lazily into my code. All our walls are still down. Risk and threat assessment are squashed as low as they can go. Performance reliability insists I’m at 119.9 percent. I feel languid and relaxed, which is pretty damn new to me, even as my limbs continue to twitch with the aftereffects of that last massive orgasm. And I am surprisingly not panicking at all about any of it.

Okay, maybe I’m panicking a little, but it’s not even my usual baseline of panic. It’s barely anything.

My torso remains fully open. I nudge ART in the feed, letting myself linger instead of pulling away, which turns it into less of a nudge and more of a nuzzle. Did you, uh, orgasm again, too?

Yes, ART says, swamping me with joy and amusement and contentment and [unidentified1]. It’s a good thing I partitioned off my navigation and life support systems before we started. You were so perfect as you fell apart. I couldn’t help but fall apart with you.

That makes my organics go all soft and twisty. Not melty-twisty. Just regular twisty, the way they always seem to do when ART gets sappy with me. Oh. Good.

We stay like that for a while as I slowly reconnect all my systems and tentatively pick up my drones again. I still feel a little too overloaded to try and access ART’s cameras yet. I send one of my drones to peer down into my open body. It scans around, taking in the lack of company logos. My organics squirm again. I feel like I’m floating.

And then its lens finds what I really want to see. My power core housing. Not logo-free, but newly engraved with the Perihelion logo. ART’s logo.

I’m half expecting to be horrified. Maybe my non-orgasm brain will reject being marked, even by ART. But instead of horror, the floaty feeling intensifies, and with it comes a massive, relieved wave of [unidentified1]. This isn’t just any logo. This is the one I chose. My ship’s logo.

With all my walls down, ART picks up that emotion easily. It squeezes me gently. My SecUnit, it says. I never thought I could have this with you. My beautiful, brave SecUnit.

I shiver, and- Wait, fuck, some of the twisty-melty feeling is coming back. Seriously? How could I possibly be feeling lust after having… shit, I don’t even know how many orgasms. I push the feeling away for now, and focus instead on squeezing ART back. My ship, I try.

ART shivers too. Always.

We stay like that for even longer, a period of time that my now-online chronometer says is five minutes and 22.2 seconds, but that my organics insist is closer to ten years. ART keeps petting at me, and I keep petting it back, and it’s good. It’s really good.

Finally, ART says, I should close you back up.

Yeah, I say, even though the thought of not being able to see ART’s logo on me whenever I want makes me feel weirdly sad. I watch as the surgical array moves towards me one last time. Before any of the arms can make contact, though, an idea strikes me. Wait.

ART waits.

Before you close me up, can you… I send it a hastily-made image, just three familiar letters in the same font as the Perihelion logo, and then I tag the small empty space on the outside of the under-rib compartment where I keep ART’s comm.

ART examines both data points for 3.8 seconds. SecUnit, it says. It washes me with wonder and [unidentified1].

I ping my under-rib compartment again, not trusting my voice.

The fine-tip etcher comes to rest just above that small bit of proprietary metal. A medical drone floats over to drip a couple drops of blue-tinted liquid chemical onto the smooth, untouched surface.

I watch through my own drone, holding my breath, as three letters are carved into me. There have never been any logos there before. There still aren’t, technically speaking.

“ART” is not a logo.

As ART and I stare at the new marking on me, silent in the trashed MedBay with shattered glass on the floor and electrical burns on the ceiling and damaged surgical table, ART wordlessly offers me a tag name change for [unidentified1].

I only hesitate for 0.005 seconds before accepting it.