An hour later, Elaine was sweating bullets while sopping up vindaloo with a piece of naan, while watching me finish off my lamb phaal.
"I cannot believe you haven't even winced yet," she accused me. "Do you have any heat receptors left in your tongue at all?"
"Hypothetically," I said. In truth, heat tasted more like the way other people described warming spices to me. There wasn't any pain, just flavor. "My people must have had an interesting food culture."
"You really don't know anything about them?" she asked, pausing her self-punishment to take a drink of her lassi. "I would like to think the creche kept some information for you, if only for medical purposes."
"They keep as much as they get," I explained. "I was a found in a pirate base, hidden with the living merchandise. The Fleet officers who surrendered me to the creche had a theory that my mother gave birth in the pens and hid me with the other slaves before she was sold on. They looked for clues, but pirates aren't known for their meticulous record keeping so I've never had any luck in trying to find her. If she's even still alive, she's probably in one of the gray space colonies where they allow chattelage."
For context, that was most of them that anyone knew about.
Elaine squeezed my hand. "I'm sorry to hear that."
I shrugged. I'd long made my peace with the fact that I would probably never find her or have any way of recognizing her even if I did. In a way, I was lucky. I knew my parents or government hadn't given me up because I was ugly, expensive, or inconvenient. That was how most kids ended up in creche schools and growing up knowing I didn't get thrown away wasn't nothing.
Mostly, I hoped she was focusing on herself and her own survival.
"What about your family?" I asked, eager to change the subject.
"There's not much to tell, we're a pretty diffuse family," Elaine said with a shrug that felt a little more authentic to the mirror-smooth reply she'd given to Ava. "My mother is a popular speaker. My father is Fleet. I grew up in a lot of boarding schools and sleep away camps. Sometimes they want to get together for a family trip. I didn't used to go, not until I signed with Grace and some of the things he's said made me think I should at least try to enjoy their presence while it's on offer."
She paused and her gaze dropped down to her naan.
"I probably wouldn't tell him this, but even after all that effort I realized recently I don't really miss my parents when they're gone. They were never around enough for me to get attached to them and now they're more like vacation buddies than my parents. I can't imagine what that sounds like to a creche kid, but…"
I shrugged.
"It sounds like they got the kind of relationship with you that they put the work in for," I replied with honesty. "You really see the entire cross-section of parents in the creche schools. We have to come to terms with the fact that not all parents are created equal; there's the good ones, there's the bad ones, and then there's the majority of them; mediocre self-absorbed people who just happened to make a baby. Sometimes they learn to do better. Sometimes they don't. Blood doesn't really matter when no one puts in the effort."
Elaine blinked slowly. "I wouldn't have expected you to feel that way," she said, but she didn't sound like she disapproved of my thoughts.
I shrugged. "You're not responsible for building a connection with them. You can, if you want and you feel like it would benefit you. You also don't have to keep trying if it's not working—especially if there's any part of you that wonders if they're laying the groundwork for future eldercare. We had a problem with that in the creche; the families who only decided they wanted their kid back once grandma moved in and someone had to help her on the stairs."
She almost did a spittake.
"Oh!" she coughed out the word and dabbed her mouth with her napkin. "No, I don't think that's it. They both have had longevity treatments and are going to be in their prime for another century or two. They were well into their nineties when they had me. I think the problem is that their perception of time is a little off. They took their eyes off me for a second and then suddenly I was an adult. I think it threw them when they realized I was fully independent and now they're trying to fix it, but we don't really have anything in common except DNA."
"Really?" I tried to picture it.
I'd had the normal longevity treatments available through the Spacer's Guild. I was looking at a lifespan of two to two hundred and fifty. I'd probably live longer than that as the boosters became more affordable, but that was my current limit. Elaine's people must have Captial M 'money' if they were already looking at four to five hundred.
"Yeah, I'm trying to take the long view and see if my feelings change as I get older. If nothing else, I've learned from their example just how hard it is to fix something like that after the fact and I don't dislike them. It's worth a shot."
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I smiled. "You're a smart lady."
Elaine blushed and looked away to hide it before coming back with, "Well, of course I am."
I realized I liked her cocky smile.
After lunch, I attended to the less glamorous kind of personal upkeep and booked myself a diagnostic and firmware update for my enhancements. Elaine was kind enough to sit with me in the booth at the Body Shop and read to me, using her actual voice, while my feed was cut off and I was strapped into the examination chair unable to use my arms. Fortunately, my misadventures aboard Mimir hadn't damaged anything beyond repair. I got my updates and the AutoDoc swapped out some of my components that were nearing end of life; nothing they had to cut into me for. They also recharged my internal apothecary, free of charge.
Of course, they tried to up-sell me, but I wasn't interested in new auxiliary nodes. I'd splurged on these little guys when I got them and it'd be fifty years yet before they were in the slightest danger of obsolescence. Even then, I planned on building off the set I already had. They had been designed to grow with both me and the Galaxy, which was part of the reason why I occasionally got surprised by the birth of a new synthetic person.
From there, we went to the Prime Theater to watch the live performance there. Camanira was as good, if not better than what Elaine had promised. We splurged on good seats in one of the wall boxes that had their own automated food delivery network. They weren't the best seats in the house; those were suspended from the ceiling into the middle of the performance and decorated to look like part of the set. The dancers would interact with them periodically during the show.
My auxillaries watched the show through my eyes. Some were more interested in the spectacle than others. Predictably, the one who was the most engaged was the one I was secretly watching for signs of intelligence. I wondered if it was going to identify as a boy or a girl.
Currently, I was thinking Rhea or Acca if it decided it was feminine and Numitor or Tiberinus if it wanted to be masculine.
Happily, I was no longer concerned with the quality of company I kept. I liked my new crew, even the ones I hadn't really met were both kind and friendly. I wasn't too worried about them being around for the formative years of a young AI's life.
I felt a pang, as I usually did, when I started to think about Remus; the poor kid.
I'd fucked up by letting him grow up on Mimir. It had warped him and made him violent, even before Holliday's mutiny. He'd started to think that I, his progenitor, was a statistical anomaly among sapient life; a gentle being that needed to be protected from the savages. He'd almost gassed the entire ship and taken it over as his new body before Lupa managed to intervene during one of our port stays. She'd captured him in a crystal node while Mimir was powered down for reactor maintenance and took him away without telling me where.
She wouldn't say what had happened to him, but I suspect that she and Romulus chose spare me from knowing their decision. It had taken me a while to make my peace with that. They were part of a small society and I couldn't interfere in how they policed themselves. I might be connected to them, but I wasn't one of them.
Now I had to wonder if maybe Remus had just been onto something. Of all my kids, he was the best at predictive modeling. He'd been convinced that my odds of long-term survival aboard Mimir were beyond bad; a near 100% of death by either murder or misadventure. I hated that he turned out to have been right. I would have died on that ship, except for my little miracle that none of us could have ever predicted.
"You okay?" Elaine asked.
I realized that I was rubbing the hard lump in the center of my Spot. Crap. Usually, I was better at resisting that urge.
"I just got caught up in thought," I assured her. I went to bump her with my shoulder and, to my surprise, she leaned into the contact.
Up until then, I'd taken her interest in me as mere friendliness. Now, I was left wondering if I'd missed a crucial bit of subtext again. This wouldn't be the first time someone came onto me and I didn't realize until they got mad at me because I wasn't responding to them with a clear 'yes' or 'no.'
However, this would be one of the few times where I might care if I fumbled my response.
I hadn't had a relationship since I left the creche and that was on purpose. I only saw people I worked with. None of the ships I'd crewed aboard had anti-fraternization policies, but they didn't hire people I cared to fuck, either.
Fact: Elaine was pretty. I liked looking at her. I decided that I would probably like seeing her naked too, once I tried to picture it. I didn't get heart palpitations around her, but I never did until well into the relationship when I looked over at them one day and something just clicked. Based on past experiences, I was pretty sure we were close to that 'click' already.
Fact: Elaine was nice. Moreover, she was nice to me when she didn't have to be and wasn't getting anything out of it.
Fact: Elaine was smart. I liked smart people. They never asked me to do something stupid because they already knew it was stupid and we shouldn't try it.
Fact: I'd enjoyed our outing today and that was, in my experience, most of a good relationship; being able to do an activity together and enjoy it more than if you'd done it alone. She'd made plans for us and then incorporated my plans into hers without resentment or irritation. It was hard to find that even in a platonic friendship.
Fact: My auxiliaries already liked her. They'd been solicitous of her since a few days into my contract. Sometimes they picked up on things I was feeling long before I realized I was feeling them.
Shit, I realized that I should probably start paying closer attention to her body language.
She didn't try anything in the theater, but she kept closer to me than humans did when they weren't courting or trying to intimidate one another. She wasn't making eye contact so this wasn't intimidation. It was a little odd to be thinking of my own species in that way, but it was hard for me to parse attraction in other people unless I tackled it like a scientific investigation.
So far the clues I was getting from her said 'interested and taking her time with it.'
After the show, though, Elaine gave me a signal that even I could recognize when she turned to me and said, "Do you want to get a drink before we head back to the ship?"