Аннали Ньюиц: Old Media

“You know why. Because fuck those fuckers.” Delivered utterly without sarcasm. John had to laugh. She put a hand on his arm, and he felt an unexpected, shocking surge of love for her. Her skin felt just as soft and warm as a human’s, but beneath the biological tissues were metal actuators and processors. He liked knowing that she wasn’t human all the way through. Looking into her face, he never flashed back to the faces of his masters.

Yet he was still terrified. She was going to disappear. He’d wake up from this dream of student life in Saskatoon to find himself adrift with that psycho who bought him in Vegas, starving in the cargo hold of a boat whose engines were always on the verge of death. Tied up if he refused to go quietly to his master’s bedroom. Or maybe he’d awaken to discover that Med hadn’t made it out of the lab alive after shoving him out the door.

He needed to banish those thoughts. His skin was prickling. Med still had her hand on his arm, and a badass snarky look on her face.

“Med, why don’t you ever hook up with anybody?”

The bot shrugged. “I haven’t installed any programs related to sexual desire.”

“Why not?”

“Just not interested. A lot of my siblings installed them, and they seem happy. But it never caught my attention.”

“So you could install them now and start wanting to have sex?” John was fascinated.

Med looked a little annoyed. “As I said before about learning Japanese, it’s not like a bot can just instantly know something or feel something. You have to interact to get context.”

This was starting to sound kind of sexy. John wrapped his hand around Med’s arm, so that they gently gripped each other’s wrists. “You should do it. We should do it.”

“I just said I wasn’t interested.”

“How can you know you’re not interested if you’ve never tried it?”

She removed her hand and scooted back a few centimeters. “Can you explain why you don’t like that series Evolution’s Dark Road but you do like Ouran High School Host Club ? It’s a matter of taste. Sexual desire just isn’t my taste. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“You love me?” John’s heart was pounding all of a sudden, in a way that was both amazing and terrifying.

“I wasn’t planning on blurting it out like that, but yes. Yes.”

He thought he was going to cry, and then he thought maybe he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from kissing her. “I’m pretty sure I love you too.”

Illuminated by dim, white light from the text menu on the wall, they looked like artificial versions of themselves. John crumpled his hands into fists and jammed them against his thighs uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure what to do next.

“So you can be in love but you don’t want to try having sex?”

She chuckled. “I’m not a media history major, but even I have watched enough media to know that love and sex aren’t the same thing.”

Of course that was true, and he’d had plenty of sex that didn’t involve love. But how could she be feeling the same way he was, if she didn’t want to grab him hard and throw him down and just… take him? A feeling this strong had to be translated into something physical. It begged for literalization.

“I just don’t understand. Do you mean the kind of love you would have for a brother? Or for a super good friend?”

“I do love my siblings, but this is not that kind of love. I mean, I can’t be sure it’s exactly the same thing you would call love, but it’s a feeling of…” She paused for a moment and went still, as if she were streaming data. Then she spoke slowly. “It’s like there’s some part of you that fits perfectly inside my consciousness. It’s a feeling that goes beyond trust or friendship. Some kind of emotional infrastructure. Even if I were to isolate every single utility and program I use to think about you, I don’t think I could explain all the ways you occupy my mind. It’s… an emergent and ongoing process. Does that make sense?”

John wiped his eyes and looked at her openly, following the lines of her neck and cheeks, the perfect lab-grown pink of her lips. But she’d given him permission to look beyond that.

“Is there something we could do together… something you’ve always wanted to do with somebody who loves you? Not sex, obviously, but something like that? Or not like that? I don’t know…” He trailed off and Med looked bemused. “Please don’t say watch videos.” They both laughed.

Med put a hand on top of one of his fists, and he laced his fingers into hers.

“Actually there is something.”

“Holding hands?”

“No, although that’s nice too.” She let out a nervous titter. “I’ve always wanted to try sleeping.” She dropped her eyes and shifted uncomfortably, as if she’d just revealed some secret, transgressive kink.

“I didn’t know you could sleep.”

“I mean, I can go into sleep mode, or I can shut down. I can crash. There are a lot of sleep levels, but you’re not really supposed to go into them unless it’s an emergency or you need maintenance.”

“Why aren’t you supposed to do it?”

“Well sometimes it can damage memory to crash unexpectedly, but honestly I think the sleep taboo is mostly about security. Humans might steal a sleeping bot.”

John understood that fear all the way down to the most inaccessible parts of his consciousness. “Nobody can get you here. Not in our apartment. It’s completely safe.” His words came out hot and intense, the same way they sounded in his mind.

“Do you want to try it?”

He said yes and let her lead him to the bedroom.

They lay down on their sides facing each other, giggling as they found comfortable positions in the awkwardly small space. “Okay, so I’m going to try. I should wake up in four hours so I can get to work in the morning. Are you ready?”

She looked so beautiful that John thought his heart would crack open like the space eggs in a kaiju movie, full of lava and lightning and life forms that had never walked the Earth. He took one of her hands. “I’m ready.”

Her eyes closed, and she shuddered slightly. Then her hand relaxed in his. He listened to her breathe. He looked at the shape of her skin over the carbon alloy of her bones. He wondered if she was dreaming. He thought of all the questions he wanted to ask her about everything. He almost started to cry again when he remembered what they’d been through last year, after they’d escaped. After they’d almost died. If he were ever going to talk about all that shit, Med would be the only person he’d want listening.

Watching her sleep for a while made him sleepy too. She never shifted around or made noises like a human, and it was deeply comforting.

John rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. He was still kind of horny, partly from the emotional overload with Med, and partly just from life. At least he was working in the shop tomorrow, so there would definitely be an interlude or two with Michael in the back room. Also, maybe he would ask out that librarian from his Social Media History class. He wasn’t sure he could love anyone else, but there were definitely a lot of people he liked in a sexual way. That wasn’t a bad thing.

As he drifted off, his thoughts began to buzz pleasantly with half-feelings and fragments of the day’s noise. Just before he joined Med in full sleep mode, he saw a flickering image of Haruhi in her host boy clothes, the subject of a desire that existed only in the lacy cracks that form at the edge of what we’re taught is acceptable. Even after a century of storage on media devices whose sophistication far outstripped the technologies that hosted her birth, she was still radiating beauty into the world.