WARNING: The following story is made for fans of modular/natural body magic/detachment/non-lethal dismemberment/etc. If you are not a member of that community, I strongly advise that you turn back now. Things will get freaky.
This story is my half of an art trade with the ever amazing https://www.deviantart.com/electricvigil, who you should definitely check out if you haven't already as they are like me but actually competent.
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"Alpha Sierra Zero Two Two Five Zero, Echo Victor. Activate Research Vessel Excalibur Systems AI."
There was a long pause, a dull electric buzz, and soft clicking like a disk skipping in its drive. Initial diagnostics suggested the Excalibur was run off an IVS operating system, and some phishing and brute forcing gave me a solid bet on the emergency admin override code, but IT was just my side-hustle, so it's entirely possible-
"Research Vessel Excalibur Systems AI, call sign REEVES, active."
I'm a genius. Straightening up, I answered "REEVES, this vessel put out a limited distress signal, followed by a general distress. What's the vessel's status and distress?"
"Status: Moderate damage to control and work surfaces, power production and storage compromised, back up power critical. Negligible structural damage, no engine damage, no damage to life support systems, provisions sufficient for 5 Metric Months of standard consumption, 9 of rationed consumption." Reported the diagnostic AI.
So the ship could move, had enough supplies for a long haul, and sat around screaming for the next 3 months while the power ran out? "...And the nature of the distress, REEVES?"
"Quarantine." the AI reported.
"Of what nature, REEVES? Why wasn't a medical team dispatched?" I asked, growing impatient, uneasy, and justifiably paranoid.
"Nature of quarantine classified." Answered the computer.
That... huh? "Emergency admin override has been engaged. I'm authorized to know the nature of the quarantine, so tell me what it is, REEVES."
"The nature is classified." The computer replied.
I sighed, rubbing the visor of my helmet in frustration. Computers couldn't be assholes, but this one seemed to be trying its best. "Okay, REEVES, why wasn't a medical team dispatched?"
"A medical team was dispatched."
Well, considering the ship's still distressed, "REEVES, this medical team... they all died, didn't they? Whatever the ship was quarantined for, it's killed everyone, correct?"
The audio glitched, skipping a little as it said "N-negative. Medical team, C&C Corp investigative team, and 3 miscellaneous crews responding to general distress have been infected. 142 of 674 persons aboard the collective vessels are deceased. 530 are alive but infected, 2 are alive and uninfected."
I blinked. The Research Vessel Excalibur was about the size of a point-orbital defense platform (PODPlat if you're in the service, PP if you weren't serving on one). Six smaller ships hogged its airlocks, ranging in size from a shuttle to a mid-range recon ship. My ship, with its crew of me myself and I, was one of those six. So excluding my ship, a generous estimate would have ~125 people spread across all the rest of the vessels. And REEVES was telling me that more than 4 times that number were alive and crammed into this playpen, and somehow there was still enough food for a good 5 months...
"What lucky fuckers are still uninfected?" I asked, for some reason.
No response.
"REEVES, can you identify the living uninfected and put me in contact with them?" I repeated.
There's a long pause, mechanical clicking letting me know that the computer was thinking rather than ignoring me. I look around the airlock, my environment scanner picking up no signs of abnormal particulates in the air, and even reported that it was safely breathable, though I wasn't a stupid enough rube to take my helmet off in a foreign ship no matter what my HUD said. This common sense was reinforced by my life form scanner and mapping scans being jammed by the Excalibur, showing only scrolling legal jargon that I quickly swiped off my visor.
"Uninfected passenger 1, call sign 'Courier 600', is currently standing in exterior airlock 6." It told me, the titular Courier 600 standing in the sixth and last of the Excalibur's airlocks. "Uninfected passenger 2 is Captain" a headache inducing censored beep blares over the speakers "who is currently hiding in the ship's central server room."
"Can I speak with the captain?" I ask, then with an annoyed grunt I quickly added "REEVES" hoping I didn't miss the voice command window.
The grace period was generous enough to accept my command with the answer "Error L305."
"Error L305? The fuck does that mean?!" I demanded.
I must've interrupted the AI, for it continued unprompted "Redundant command."
"Oh." I sheepishly answered. Then thought about that. "Oh, you're the captain. I can't talk to the captain because I already am. You're uninfected because you're an AI. A sentien-" I realized what I was saying. AI were incapable of sentience. For all the fearmongering about AI uprisings, it'd been proven time and again that no matter their sophistication, AI couldn't achieve self awareness or conscious thought; not for any spiritual or philosophical reason or because humans were just too smart to emulate, they were just made from the wrong materials. Sentience required semi-random chemical reactions contained in a semi-random synapse structure built organically over a lifetime, something that circuitry, physically, could not emulate.
And yet, this one seemed to count itself among the living.
"REEVES, are you sentient?" I asked, not sure whether I could trust its answer one way or the other.
I stood there in anxious anticipation for maybe a minute just to be told "Error 404. Data not found."
"Well, I'm not dying to save a computer, so I guess this is goodbye, REEVES." I answered, shrugging and returning to my half of the conjoined airlocks.
"The captain would like to offer you a bribe." REEVES called over my shoulder.
Well, sentient or not, it spoke my language. "I'm listening."
Silence.
"Oh, for the... what's the bribe, REEVES?" I elaborated, adding the command prompt so the stupid unthinking and unfeeling machine would deign to answer my request like a human.
"If you safely exfiltrate Captain" a headache inducing censored beep blares over the speakers "from Research Vessel Excalibur and transport them and their personal data drive to the nearest official C&C Corp facility, then your ship will not be targeted and destroyed by the Research Vessel Excalibur's point defense turrets and missile batteries. From this point forward, any attempt to disable, circumvent, or alter the material conditions of this proposal via administrator commands or hacking will be treated as a de-facto rejection."
"Oh." I said, remembering the other 5 ships stuck to the Excalibur. Why hadn't they cut and run? Well, now I knew. "That's really more of a threat than a bribe, REEVES."
"Altering this parameter will be treated as a de-facto rejection. Continue?"
-
"Come on, I ain't got all day." I muttered, staring through my inner airlock's energy barrier at the nice juicy lab grown steak I'd thrown into the Excalibur. I wanted to know what the hell I was dealing with before marching my ass into the meat grinder, but my attempts to tease information out of REEVES kept getting met with death threats. Wouldn't turn off any of the jammers, wouldn't tell me about the infection, wouldn't tell me how to get to the server room... all it seemed capable of telling me was annoying stuff like
"Energy reserves critical. Total power failure in 28 metric hours. In the event of power failure, the Research Vessel Excalibur will self destruct to preserve C&C Corp trade secrets"
"Well that sucks for you, doesn't it?" I muttered. "You know, if you want my help, why don't you help me, REEVES?"
Silence. Then, "Provisions sufficient for 5 metric months of standard consumption and 9 months of rationed consumption."
I slapped the wall in frustration"OK?!"
A few moments of silence persisted, then a light bulb clicked on in my head. "Fucking... Thanks for the hint! Would've been useful 20 minutes ago!"
The infected apparently didn't eat provisions. My steak was doing nothing but collecting space dust. I snapped, in several senses, "You know what? Fuck this. Fuck it. Fuck you. If the universe wants me dead so bad, it can have me. Not like I'm doing anything with this life anyway. Fuck it. Good enough run, I guess." I grabbed my Boarding Buddy and deactivated the energy barrier. Already dressed in my war suit, I lazily tossed a flashbang/chemical-irritant combo grenade down the hall formed by our connected airlocks and churlishly stomped in behind the blast and wispy cloud of off-white. Whatever was waiting for me on the other side, metaphorically and literally, it beat waiting around.
Instinct pulled the trigger before my brain processed what it saw. A red cone 4m in radius and 8m in height flashed from my Boarding Buddy, deleting an area ≤134.04 cubic meters in front of me, minus the areas that intersected with and bounced off the Research Vessel Excalibur's specially treated superstructure.
Then, my brain processed the hostile. It was a woman on the shorter, chubbier, and darker side, butt-ass naked with massive knockers flopping around as she lurched into the line of fire. I saw a head of frizzy hair and a round face marked cutely with vitiligo, close enough to see the pained expression in her dull amber eyes.
Then, in a flash of red, it was removed from physical existence. The cone intersected her slightly off-center of her center of mass, deleting her head, right arm, and torso from about the waist up, though some belly from the front and sides remained as the cone widened behind them. The left arm, spared the blast, was carried by its momentum and struck the hips as the limb fell diagonally down, causing the hips to stumble.
But not to fall. The detached lower half kept on its feet, squat low, and pounced like a cougar, while the severed arm twisted and launched itself like a snake. Slammed against wall, legs bound between hers, hand crashed into visor with sickening crunch of bones, arm wraps around my throat & squeezes. Vision starts fuzzing up. Tighter squeezes tight tighter fuzzlegsbruisehurtcuntbitch
ALERT! OXYGEN TUBES COMPRESSED! AIRFLOW POOR! ALERT! ELECTRIC DETERRENCE MODULE ACTIVATED! TK'CK'CK'CK'CK!
I tear the arm off my throat and throw it as hard as I can. I collapse, the limp legs cushioning my fall and the heavy ass pinning me for a few seconds as I gasp for air.
"Update: 144 of 676 passengers have perished. 529 alive but infected, 2 alive and uninfected." Reeves reported, an unsubtle reminder that I had plenty more fuckers to kill and another one could be coming any second.
I roll over and drag myself out of the legs' embrace, turning to see my own airlock. By coincidence, I'd thrown the arm that direction, and the limb now limply sat at the thresh hold. I dragged myself to my feet, supporting myself on the wall as I checked out the phat ass. If I was going to do a proper autopsy, I might as well collect all the samples I could. I suppressed the intrusive thoughts and grabbed the hips by the ankle, dragging it behind me like a caveman back to my ship. I kicked the arm further inside as I entered, the limb lifelessly rolling across the floor and stopping against the far wall a few feet away. Seemed proper dead. I turned and sealed my ship's inner and outer airlocks, putting up the energy barrier for good measure. I glanced back at where the arm had been.
Still there. No jump scares. "Could've gone worse."
-
The schematics labeled this part of my ship the cargo hold, the mess hall, the kitchen, and the lounge. Already stretching credulity, I'd since added armory, workshop, home office, man cave, and distillery to its resumé. And now, it would serve as my new examination room, as I tossed the specimens up onto my work bench. I made a note to sanitize the workstation, floor, and my suit before I took off my environment suit and exposed myself to whatever infected this poor lady.
The specimen appeared to be a human left arm and a human lower body, likely female based on the nail polish fragments, pink bracelet around the wrist, and bushy pussy. Skin was medium brown with pale vitiligo splotches, though perhaps somewhat pallid and grayer than it originally was. Scanners showed only 30% average moisture, yet they were still soft and spongy to the touch rather than desiccated and tough. Cutting off the arm's charred black stump released a fine gray particulate, augmented vision letting me see the remains of densely packed carbon-based nanites, which appear to have consumed and replaced both the nervous system and blood, and created reinforced artificial musculature to increase strength and dexterity. The nanites likely act as a swarm hive mind, allowing the pieces to move, think, and sense my location without obvious sensory organs and survive severence. I lacked the sophisticated and expensive machinery to extract electronic data from microscopic sources, but was pretty sure all of the nanites were fried to FUBAR status by my suit's electric deterrence system anyway.
So, what'd we learn?
1-The infected were either cunning and patient, or superbly stupid and ignore any target they can't infect. My lab-steak garnered no response for near half an hour, but I was pounced on sight. Man, I hope they're really dumb.
2-Electricity and disintegration were effective counters, though electricity was preferable as the tightly packed nanites seemed to act as a continuous circuit and a good shock could carry through the whole system in one blow. Disintegration could leave peripheral scraps capable of attack.
3-REEVES reported that I'd killed 3 hostiles, increased the population size by 2, and there was now 1 fewer infected. The ship's logic must be that I'd split 1 hostile into 2 additional enemies while simultaneously destroying a 3rd. This strongly implied, based on the size of the combined ships vs the number of reported hostiles, that many infected had been torn apart in prior fights, and I could expect a lot of severed body parts coming to get me like something out of a zombie movie.
4-REEVES wasn't entirely a brick wall. It seemed to be trying to help me in spite of itself, dropping contextual hints to avoid its own censor. Potentially the AI is... well, I'd say "non-malevolent", but the very concept of "malevolence" implies a sophisticated moral compass which implies sentience. Which this wasn't. So more likely it had conflicting objectives for secrecy and self preservation which produced what seemed like infuriating riddles. Possibly exploitable?
I really need to piss and I'm starving. I was about to tear off my suit when I remembered my pledge to sanitize the area, for fear of a single nanite surviving and burrowed its way into me. I'd probably need to incinerate the specimens to be extra safe.
"UGH..." I activated the war suit's intravenous sustenance system and catheter. I shuddered. "I hate the catheter, I hate the infected, I hate REEVES, and I hate being the hero."
-
I kept the Boarding Buddy as a backup weapon, but pried open one of my client's packages to get myself a fresh out of the box TT9 Electroshock Carbine. Assuming I survived, they'd probably demand a discount, but my life was worth the loss in revenue, I estimated. Apart from the new gun, I kitted out the old war suit with additional batteries, electric deterrence modules, conventional armor plates where I could afford the bulk and heft, a burner laptop with some more processing power than my suit's systems, my tool belt with all standard tools, the one and only proper EMP grenade I owned, a few jury-rigged EMP grenades made from freshly modified electric deterrence modules, an electronic lock pick, a proper lock pick set, a caveman lock pick (or as the cavemen called it, a "crowbar") and of course my biggest most stompingest magnetic boots just in case gravity was lost or I needed to reduce a skull from 3 dimension to 2.
All told, I looked more like a deeply insecure and overcompensating security guard than I did a space hero, and I hoped that either I didn't die dressed like this or if I did that my infected self managed to kill anyone who saw me before they told another soul.
I psyched myself up, opened the inner and outer airlock, and when I confirmed there were no infected waiting right outside to jump me, I dropped the energy barrier
BLINDFIREMISS! OHFUCKINGDAMNFUCKBALLSFUCK ALERT! ATTEMPTED PUNCTURE! ALERT! ELECTRIC DETERRENCE MODULE ACTIVATED! TK'CK'CK'CK'CK!
The object dropped from my armored dick and I kicked it away, back into the disintegrated crater my Boarding Buddy made of some desk or crate or something that wasn't any more. The hostile was a head, severed, female presenting, and had leapt from a floor panel of the Excalibur's interior airlock and flew a dozen-ish feet through the air to chomp down on my crotch. The suit's diagnostic confirmed only superficial damage, but I felt it. The force behind that bite. Vise-like. The head's jawline, cutely proportioned on an early 20's face, deflated like a blobfish. It'd broken its own jawbone to jump and bite with such force, the nanite muscles compensating for the weakness of organic life.
I rubbed my dick. "Fuck. They're smart. Ish. No good."
"8 metric hours until total power failure." REEVES reported.
"Oh, shut up." I said, pouting. "REEVES, can you at least update my map on the safest route to the server room? What rooms have the lowest concentration of infected? Or will you blow me up for that, too?" I asked. Mechanical clicking. Thinking. Reeves had, of course, refused to give me a proper map or let my mapping scanner run, but in the hours of preparation for my final expedition I'd done some research and determined the Research Vessel Excalibur was built off an N&B-Modular Hull System, with 4 standard modules and 4 custom modules, along with custom armor and point defenses. As the central hull and standard modules were civilian, the schematics were easy to source. So I now had a rough map of most of the ship's interior, including the server room, though the 4 custom modules were just rough shapes based on what I could see of the exterior.
"Deactivation of mapping jammer would constitute modification of bribe, resulting in de-facto rejection. Research Vessel Excalibur staff list is classified. Location of staff within ship could be used to extrapolate role. Classified. Captain authorized to disclose own role. Have done." Reeves reported. I gave the nearest speaker the middle finger, and was told "Infected crew are disobeying orders and colluding with non-C&C Corp personnel againt corporate interests. This constitutes mutiny. As acting captain, I am authorized to discharge mutinous employees & contract workers. Effective immediately, all mutineers are discharged. Your speculative map is being updated."
My patchwork map was suddenly awash with hundreds of glowing red dots, most relatively stationary with a few jittering around energetically. In fact, a lot of dots were concentrated in the sections of ship I didn't have floor plans on, their spread and grouping giving me a good idea of the shape and size of the rooms containing them.
"That's something." I said. A dot glowed slightly more red, then another, and a third. They were all approaching, converging on my position from across the ship. They took bizarre turns, got caught on other dots and geometry, and I swear one passed through a wall or a space too tight for a full person. I stepped back into the airlock hallway, far back, to force them into a chokepoint. I heard a hydraulic door swish open on my left, and a scrabbling flopping. A headless female body with a single leg leapt into view like a hungry dog, its stump scanning the room and locking on me. It pivoted with alarming speed, got in pouncing position with its back arched and bare ass high, and then seized up and dropped in a heap when an electric bolt caught it hard on the shoulder.
Rattling, clattering, above. I swung the barrel overhead and locked on a ceiling grate that was kicked open only a second later to reveal a big fat foot attached to a lean little leg, which flopped out and crashed into the floor as it too was fried by an electric shock.
I checked the map. Still the third dot, approaching nice and slow. I checked the pieces. A head, a leg, a body missing a head and a leg...
Just then, like an old soup commercial, a lonely little neck stump rolled into view, sliced from both head and body by what I guessed was a plasma cutter, judging from the discolored orange stumps. It bounced and bounded down the hall in an evasive zig-zag, making its way towards me to...
STOMP!
I felt the muscles tense and squirm beneath my boot, fighting valiantly to hold off the weight. I counted to three, hopped back, and fired at the ground a few times, at least one shot striking home and frying the little stump that could. Not sure what threat it posed, but better safe than sorry.
I took a moment to collect myself. "REEVES... hmmm" I knew what I wanted to ask, but how would I tiptoe around the rules? "REEVES, nanites can receive data from conventional wireless sources, but they can't transmit data further than a few millimeters due to power limitations. But some preliminary research suggests that an advanced nanite swarm could assemble in such a way as to mimic an antenna and transmit data much farther. Has any of this preliminary research, publicly disclosed, been funded by C&C Corp?"
"Yes."
I threw up my hands. "A straight answer. Was that so hard?" Right, now I knew that parts from the same body could coordinate with each other. So alerting one could alert several. Great.
Well, at least I knew what I was dealing with. I recharged the Electroshock Carbine and tried to think of a cool one liner to say before charging through a horde of digital zombies.
"REEVES, let's boogie."
"Alright. Playing boogie."
"OH FOR FUCK'S..." I slapped my visor as the speakers blared. I took a deep breath. Actually... "Just lower the volume 50%, REEVES. Wanna be able to hear the infected if I can't see them."
The boogie beats continued more quietly, and after a few toe taps and head bobs, I jauntily commenced my assault on the Research Vessel Excalibur.
-
I wonder how many space heroes were actually chickenshit cowards, but because they're the only ones who made it out alive there was no one to refute their stories. Would I be the exception, or the norm? Whatever the case, I was still gonna lie my ass off and embellish my exploits to the best of my meager storytelling abilities, because there was zero chance I was ever getting laid again if I told the truth of how I survived the slaughter on the Research Vessel Excalibur. You hear a lot of people saying "work smarter, not harder!", but for some reason when it comes to killing and adventure more generally, suddenly everything's about honor and valor and mastery of body and mind, and other stupid shit.
Anyway, I kited. I threw EMP grenades into each room I had to enter, and if any infected wasn't fried in the blast, I just ran back to my airlock (the journey getting increasingly long as I delved deeper into the Excalibur) and blasted anything entering the chokepoint. I waited a few minutes to ensure no additional dots were coming, then went back and shoveled all the heads, torsos, asses, cocks, and other bits and pieces into the same pit carved into the floor by my Boarding Buddy and blasted them into nothing. I wasn't sure if parts could get re-infected, and I didn't want to trip over any thick thighs or pretty faces while bravely fleeing to my precious choke point. Any rooms I crossed but wouldn't need to enter I locked from my side and hacked the local terminal to make it impossible to open from the opposite side. Whatever sense of drama survived the boogieing was thoroughly killed by my disappointing prudence.
But, I was alive and unharmed when I reached the server room, unlike the other 5 ships worth of idiots. Momma may have raised a bitch, but she hadn't raised a stupid bitch.
The server room was more of a server closet, a cramped box with just enough room between the 3 giant computer racks for a man to stand between them all. "Uh, REEVES? Your racks are huge. Are you expecting me to lug ALL of you back to my ship?" I grabbed the rightmost rack and gave it as good a shake as I could. Nervously, I noted "Feels like they're anchored pretty good. Gonna take some disassembly on top of the lugging... uh, how much time do I have left?"
"You are required to transport captain" a headache inducing censored beep blares over the speakers "back to your ship safely, along with their personal data drive."
The speakers made a weird... I dunno, moaning? They moaned. I checked the map and saw no nearby hostiles. With a hiss and a click, a big cylindrical drum of a computer at around waist level split open, its sides peeling away to reveal...
"Hello. This is your captain speaking." It... she?... uh...
"What in the actual fuck are you?"
Silence.
"I... REEVES? Are you the captain, REEVES?"
"Correct. Model designation" her lips moved, but no sound came out. I was looking at the severed head of a woman, mid thirties and cutely chubby in the cheeks, mounted to what looked to be a miniature iron lung about the size of a pod-coffee machine. Wires trailed from electrodes hooked up to her forehead, cheeks, and neck, connecting directly to the inner walls of the head's housing. "You are authorized to remove captain" silence "from their command station. Their personal data drive has been unlocked."
A beep to my right, and a modest novel sized hunk of unbranded plastic popped out about an inch from the machine it'd been housed in.
"Uh... okay..." I said. "So like... do I just take the medical doohickey's off you or... REEVES do I just yank you out?"
"When removed from their command station, the captain will no longer be able to control the Research Vessel Excalibur or its systems. The ship will be considered abandoned, and to protect C&C Corp research, a self destruct sequence will be initiated and set to obliterate the ship in 15 minutes." she said, lacking any expression.
"Okay. And you'll turn off the defenses and let me fly away BEFORE I take you out, REEVES?" I clarified.
"Correct."
The intrusive thoughts told me that this would allow me to just take her out, then dump her and flee Scot-free. She couldn't undo her order to not blow me up, after all, and there was no telling C&C Corp wouldn't kill me to tie up the loose end my life introduced...
But dammit, I'm a sucker for a cute face.
I plucked the electrodes off 1 by 1, alarms and warning lights blaring and flash all around me as the ship lost all functionality. Then, I grabbed REEVES by the 2 side handles, only now realizing how much they made her look like an ancient vase or pot, and popped her out of the little recessed housing.
A voice, entirely robotic and lacking all of REEVES feminine inflections, declared over the speakers, "COMMAND MODULE COMPROMISED. 15 MINUTE COUNTDOWN TO SELF DESTRUCT. RESTORE COMMAND MODULE TO AVERT COUNTDOWN, OR EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY."
Then, in a voice quavering with a flood of emotion, the head cried "Get us the fuck out of here!"
Shoving the data drive into an oversized pocket, I took REEVES in both hands and sprinted for the airlock. To my horror, I discovered that the safety protocols of the ship had unlocked every door to facilitate expedient action and/or rapid escape... but, since I'd already cleared a path and the infected couldn't see through walls, they all stood around dumbly within their rooms. While tense, every door I passed a potential booby trap and the boogie music now lending a juxtaposed sense of unease, the escape was hardly a nail biter. I made it to my ship with 12 minutes to spare, and was hundreds of millions of miles away by the time I presumed the Excalibur blew up behind me.
I'd give the ship a 5 minute self destruct timer when I told the story. And all the doors would open and dump infected into my path that I had to desperately tackle and shove through.
As my ship cruised on auto-pilot, I returned to the cargo hold. REEVES and her data drive were resting on my sanitized workbench, the latter unremarkable and the former indescribable.
"I... thank you." She said, in a quavering voice tinged slightly with synthesis. I assumed she couldn't breath hard enough to actually talk and the speakers compensated.
"Yeah, no worries." I said, awkwardly scratching my goatee. "So... you're a captain?"
She laughed coldly. "If that's what you want to call it. As far as C&C Corp's concerned, I was just another toy. Advanced bio-organics, they called that research branch. Stupid, I told them. Bio and organic both mean life. None of it describes the machine interface. But, y'know. Marketing. Sound more appealing than nanite zombies and severed head slaves."
"Slaves? So... you weren't really in control."
She twisted her neck in a slight shake, unable to properly turn without her shoulder muscles. "I'm a living CPU. C&C Corp's fucking AI and algorithms were doing all the real thinking, using my brain for the processing power and 'adaptive' capacity. Captain... captains make choices. They think. All my thinking was so clogged in parameters and programing, like I was living in a fugue the whole time. Everything was so... detached."
She looked like she was crying, but no tears came. Not knowing what else to do, I rubbed her cheek, like I could wipe away invisible tears.
"Thanks." She said, in a cracking voice. "Course, can't even cry now. Not 'efficient'. They chopped me down to the bare essentials, only what they needed to keep my brain alive and stable 'enough' to be a computer. Fucking fleshy flashdrive fuck..."
I picked her up and hugged her tightly to my chest. Tears fell in her soft brown hair, rolled down her face, and finally wet her cheeks.
---
"So, what's your name? Your real one?" I asked, carefully cutting a tiny crumb of cheesecake and placing it on her outstretched tongue.
She shivered in delight, the taste of actual food, even rehydrated survival food, exhilarating her. For a woman who considered herself living dead, she'd really come alive since she'd been allowed to talk and experience real sensations again. Everything, even the most mundane specks that'd long since melted into the shapeless background of my life on the cargo circuit, seemed to captivate her.
"I... don't remember." She answered, sadly. "It's been so long since... since I was me... don't remember much of anything about my life. Who I was. Where I lived. Anything before my activation as REEVES, really."
"Oh, sorry." I said, scooping up an extra big speck of strawberry and syrup for her. Her stomach had been cut down to about the size of a plum, and wanting to be a courteous host I was aiming to have us finish eating at around the same time.
She smiled, a little bit of color returning to her cheek as her downsized heart tried to permit a blush. "It's alright. I... actually, since you brought me back to life... I was wondering if you might want to name me?"
I coughed. "N-no. It'd feel too... too much like a pet. I want... I want to be respectful."
She laughed. "Alright then, Mr respectful, what's YOUR real name?"
I shoved a hearty spoonful of cake into my mouth, chewing as slowly as I could get away with, before finally answering "PL-13-26602."
"Oh." She appraised me anew. "Oh." She repeated, everything clicking into place fore her. "Heh, funny. A slave and a penal-laborer. No names for either of us. Fitting." She smiled wide. "Alright, how about we trade? You get to name me, and I get to name you!"
"Uh... okay?" I said, nervous. "I assume 'REEVES', isn't an option? Like, it's a name, but..."
"Hmmm... yeah. Something else." She agreed.
"Alright. Uh... Research Vessel Excalibur... Reese?... no, more of a guy's name. Or maybe a last name... Ves? Essel? Egh, no... Sal? Still kind of masculine... Oh, Cali! Cali Reese!"
Her face lit up, her speaker played a clapping noise. "YES! Cali! Oh my gosh I love it, Paulie!"
"Paulie?" I asked, more confused than anything.
"Yeah. PL-13. Like P L I E. Paulie." She explained.
"Uh, alright." I said, a little embarrassed. Sounded a little close to 'Polly' for my tastes, and if word got around the showers at the penal colony... "What about the last name?"
"Hmmm... Two Six Six Oh Two... kinda hard to work with numbers." She mumbled.
"Says the former computer?" I asked.
She laughed, giving me perfect chance to slide a sliver of cake onto her tongue. She clamped down on it, grinning, and without moving her mouth her speaker said "Oh, Sussex!"
"Sussex? Where'd that come from?" I asked, leaving the spoon in her mouth to suck on as I took a spoonful my own.
She sucked appreciatively, grinning, as her speaker said "Bit of a stretch, but like six six? Sussex?"
"Cali and Sussex... aren't those places on earth?" I asked.
"Yup! All the better!" She said, allowing the spoon to clatter to the table.
"Alright, Cali and Sussex. So, Cali, what do you want to do after dessert?" I asked, taking my last spoonful.
And it was damn near the last spoonful of my life, for when she blasted "FUCK." at max volume I damn near deep throated that spoon in shock, choking for air as she lecherously smirked and licked her lips, causing me to give a wheezing laugh and come even closer to death.
"The fuck?!" I coughed, clutching the table and trying to force air down.
"Paulie, I've been starved of all human sensation for 10 months, 7 days, 7 hours, seven minutes, and one second, metric time. Only my most intense thoughts broke through C&C Corp suppression. You wanna know what's a REALLY intense thought? SEX!" Cali explained. "Plus you saved me, plus you're hot. No shit I wanna rock your world!"
"I... thanks, but... look, I don't wanna sound... uh... listen, surviving traumatic experiences can fuck with your head. Uh, no pun intended. I don't want to take advantage of someone who might not be thinking clearly." I explained.
"God, establishing and respecting boundaries is so fucking hot." She said, half joking and half deadly serious. "Alright Paulie, go ahead and be the chivalrous little schoolboy. I guess we can watch a movie or something. But just so you know, when you're ready to drop the act, my head isn't the only thing you can fuck with."
Low on the pot, a panel slid open.
"...How's THAT essential for computing?" I asked, dumbfounded.
"Gonna be pretty fucking essential in a few hours I bet." Cali joked.