Work Text:
“This is as bad as the beach,” I said to Mariss.
She stood in front of the large plate window in knee-high fuzzy boots, thick leggings, a thicker sweater, and a floppy little hat. The big mug in her hands steamed gently. It was some horrible concoction of chocolate, sugar, animal lactation product, and alcohol. I didn’t like the way alcohol made her taste.
She shot me a wry look over her shoulder. “We can’t afford to do only the vacations you like.”
I did enjoy going to very expensive stations and purchasing new clothes then sitting around in very expensive restaurants letting the humans think I was an augmented human as I pretended to eat and smelled expensive glasses of wine.
“Come look outside with me?” Mariss said.
“I can admire the view better from here,” I said, sliding the slightest bit further down in the leather armchair and running a finger over my lips. I saw her watching me via her reflection. Her skin temperature ticked up.
The chalet had a big central room on the second floor with a lot of these big plate windows looking out at the snowy mountains. The food prep area was stocked with everything the humans needed, though designed to look ‘rustic.’ The main seating area was a sunken semi-circular padded bench angled to view the windows and the primarily decorative fireplace—it wasn’t so uncivilized as to lack a heating system though HotelSys kept things cool enough to keep the humans in sweaters. There were a few chairs scattered around as well, which I preferred over the big bench thing.
Outside on the large porch sat a small pool of heated water, which you had to run from the warmth of the house into the cold winter air to reach. The humans called this ‘bracing.’ There were bedrooms on this level and more downstairs.
At the moment, everyone else was out strapping planks to their feet to slide down dangerous icy mountains. Mariss had told me I wasn’t allowed to tell her not to participate in the activity. So I’d gone with her the first day and stood there with my arms crossed saying nothing, until she finally spent enough time looking downhill while receiving safety instructions that she got nervous. She made it down the training hill and then gracefully returned the planks and came back to the main lodge with me.
Luckily, after six months as marital partners she had yet to tire of me, so we’d had other ways of spending the days. We’d spent the morning driving around the forest on some small open-air transports with treads instead of wheels until her hands were half-frozen and her cheeks were red from the wind.
She took another sip of the gross drink and sighed.
“You should come look outside with me,” I said, and Mariss shot me another look, eyes narrowing and mouth quirking up at one corner.
“You’re farther from the window, Ti.”
I patted my lap, and she padded across the wooden floor to stand before me.
“You’re having unprofessional thoughts, aren’t you?” she said, planting her free hand on her hip.
“I’m having very unprofessional thoughts,” I said as I leaned forward to unlace her boots. They were very cute, but I hadn’t thought about how long it took to get her out of them when I bought them. She shook them off then climbed onto my lap, careful not to spill her drink.
“You’re so soft today,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder so her hair brushed my cheek.
She ran a hand down my chest and then up again, and up the high neck of my sweater. I absolutely did not shudder at the feeling of her nails through the fabric. She traced her fingers right up to the top of the sweater neck and then slid one finger along my jaw.
No, I did not shiver. I simply lifted the cup out of her hand and set it on the floor because I didn’t want to risk her spilling it on my nice wool pants.
Then I tipped her head up—and it turned out the chocolate covered the taste of the alcohol.
How long until everyone’s back? She had to use the feed because I was occupying her mouth. I tossed her hat aside.
My drones showed Martine and her girlfriend Aya were just getting on the funicular back to the top of the mountain. Patel and his partners were about half-way down, sliding all over the place and laughing. Georgie and Sizwe were attempting to learn how to use the large single boards instead of the thin double planks and falling over a lot but seemed okay with that.
Plenty of time.
I slipped my hands under the warm fabric of her sweater and tugged it up over her head, then tossed it aside as well. She shivered and looked up at me through her lashes in a way I thought I’d never get tired of.
My reactions and drives still tended to be muted compared to average human baselines—I didn’t feel a particular want from merely looking at any ‘attractive’ human or construct—but there was definitely an undercurrent of urges I was no longer ignoring. When I wanted to really feel desire, all I had to do was ask Mariss to drop her wall and it turned my inclination into an overwhelming need—an intoxicating rush that was occasionally difficult to control.
It frightened me sometimes to feel like I was losing myself in a rush of almost alien feelings, but I kept going back over and over again.
My hands skimmed down her sides. The others would be gone at least another hour, probably more. Mariss trailed her hands down my arms, nails skimming across my gunports, and I shuddered as an electric feeling raced through my arms and across my chest.
“Dr. Bernez,” I heard my own voice low and breathy, “you are playing games with a dangerous rogue SecUnit.”
“But you’re my dangerous rogue SecUnit,” said Mariss, rising up onto her knees to drag her hands through my hair while smiling down at me.
I caught the back of her head and pulled her down to my mouth. She melted against me, one hand sliding over my shoulder and idly scraping along the dataport at the back of my neck, sending waves of sparking feelings through me. I shuddered as she dragged her teeth across my bottom lip and then her tongue flicked across it.
I scooped her up as I got to my feet. We’d broken some furniture at home, and I was not paying for this chair. She giggled as I slung her over my shoulder and swatted her ass.
So, she was asleep on my chest in our room when everyone got back. I don’t know, humans get tired so easily.
Anyway, I woke her up and then watched her stumble around while trying to find both socks.
“It’s under the chair,” I said when she started cursing.
It was a bit of a shame to cut short the view of her crawling around, but Martine had tapped my feed three times so far asking if we were done fucking yet and sending increasingly disbelieving sigils when I told her we were not currently fucking. I slipped back into my pants and sweater and handed Mariss her leggings. Oh whoops, we’d left her boots, sweater, and hat in the other room. My annoyance with Martine decreased a hair. Still.
Mariss tossed on a shirt and let me comb through her hair until it was respectable enough for our friends. When we emerged, Martine made a face at me but the others were thankfully not weird.
Aya and Sizwe had set up a low table with several inbuilt burners in the sunken main seating area.
“That’s a fire hazard,” I said, staring at all the paper napkins they’d piled next to the burners.
Aya looked up sharply while Martine laughed. “Ignore Ti.”
“It’s a—”
Mariss reached up and put a hand over my mouth.
Fire hazard, I finished in the group feed. Martine muted me in the feed.
“It’ll be fine,” Mariss said.
None of them appreciated me bringing the fire suppressant canister over and placing it in an easily accessible position while they were shifting things around. Humans.
The sun sank behind the mountains, painting the clouds in brilliant shares of pink and orange as the blue of the sky deepened to cerulean and then lapis. The room filled with warm and spicy smells and the constant cheerful babble of several conversations.
I was here, at a ski resort, with a pack of humans that knew I was a SecUnit, wearing stupidly expensive clothes made for humans, no suit skin or armor within hundreds of kilometers. Married to a human.
Sometimes I looked at myself and said ‘what the fuck?’
Mariss brushed against me in the feed. I turned to find the humans gathering around the table. They’d put pots of bubbling liquid on the table burners and covered the rest of the table with plates of cooked and uncooked food, sauces, and drinks. Patel was in the process of building up the fire in the fireplace while one of his partners, Lin, told him he was doing it wrong.
The humans planned to stay awake until dawn, eating and drinking and telling stories around the fireplace.
I carried over a bucket of beer bottles and was alarmed to find the only place to put it was the floor.
“It’s fine,” Sizwe said, taking it from my hand and pushing it against the table. “No one’s going to trip.”
“Come on, Ti, sit down,” Mariss said, patting the spot beside her. I folded up beside the table and found it faintly amusing they’d bothered setting me a plate and bowl and utensils when they all knew I didn’t eat.
Once all the humans were settled, Georgie opened the meal with some ancient Lagrange saying and they all began frantically throwing food items into the pots of near boiling liquid and grabbing for beers.
Aya passed me a bowl of round—food items. My mouth twisted.
“This looks like a choking hazard,” I said as my eyes landed on a bowl of balls.
“They’re tangyuan,” Mariss said, holding up a ball and squishing it at me. I grimaced.
“Ok, don’t hand the SecUnit anything anyone else might want to eat,” Patel said, reaching across Mariss to take the bowl from me. “We might never get it back if it doesn’t pass inspection.”
I made a rude gesture at him.
Then the humans began telling each other stories. Stories about places they’d been, things they’d seen, tales from their childhoods, all that kind of thing. The tradition was to stuff themselves and then try to talk to stay awake or something like that. Anyway I liked it.
“I have a funny story,” I said after an hour, when there was a slight lull in the conversation.
“Actually funny or Guerrero funny?” Sizwe said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Remember last year when you told us that story of the guy getting his arm chopped off?”
“That was funny.”
“That was funny,” Mariss agreed, “he deserved it.”
“Yeah, we call that Guerrero funny,” Patel said, smiling at me.
Martine shook her head while Aya looked between us with wide eyes.
“I was on a survey,” I barreled on and they all shut up. I barely mentioned the mine. I never mentioned anything before it, not even to Mariss. So this was going to be very new to everyone. “The clients were from some standard manufacturer, developer, colonizing corporation, a typical whole life thing.”
They nodded along.
“Anyway, their company had some peculiar practices like morning recitations, mandatory group fitness activities. I don’t know, weird shit no other clients had ever done before.”
Everyone was slightly tense. I guess because my stories were “Guerrero-funny” and not real funny, whatever the fuck that meant.
“Anyway, they decided since the SecUnits were on the survey with them and had human faces, we had to participate too.”
Mariss snorted hard enough that something—ugh too gross. Delete that. Then she was coughing and laughing.
“No,” Patel was shaking his head and chucking. “This is not going to be good.”
Aya had gotten up and gotten Mariss some more napkins.
“So,” I said, slapping Mariss on the back—at human acceptable levels of force—while not looking at her. “SecUnits doing jumping jacks every morning with the humans.”
Georgie had a hand over her mouth, her wide eyes and sharp brows said she was torn between amusement and something else.
“SecUnits doing push-ups with the humans. SecUnits doing sit-ups.”
“But…” Sizwe said slowly, “you’re SecUnits.”
“Yes,” I laughed. “And some of the humans were used to being the fastest, or competitive, or something stupid like that and were determined to keep us with us. The survey leader would also point out who was doing the best on each exercise and it was always, ‘SecUnits 1, 2, 3, and 4 are in perfect time! The rest of you must do better!’” I said in faint imitation of the woman’s accent.
Martine let out an incredulous laugh. “Oh no.”
“I think the survey efficiency plummeted from a handful of them exhausting themselves in the mornings before the work actually started and then the others trying to pick up the slack and getting exhausted as well.”
“One of the survey scientists got so frustrated, the last few cycles, they went to the survey leader and pointed out that humans had rest periods, and SecUnits were being made to participate in activities like humans but did not have similar rest periods. So then we were all ordered to take two cycles straight of rest. None of us had ever had anything like that before. HubSystem didn’t know what to do with us. It decided the humans were playing some weird act like a human game and ordered us to go to the lounge and act like humans during their rest period.”
That actually had some of them chuckling, but Martine and Patel looked like they were still waiting for something bad to happen.
“1 lay down on the couch because it could,” I couldn’t help shaking my head. It had looked so fucking bizarre. “The rest of us just stood there. 4 put the display on because that’s what humans do, but none of us really understood any of the shows. We were all pretty young.”
“So the humans get back from their cycle out surveying and come into the hab and find the SecUnits all standing around the lounge, one of them lying down, the displays on all to different media. But we weren't watching it like humans. We were all just standing there pointed in different directions, not moving.”
Mariss snort laughed again, thankfully nothing came out of her this time.
“We all felt awkward about the way each human would walk into the room and then slowly back out and slide the door closed again. After a couple hours one of them got brave enough to actually come up and lock the lounge door from the outside. At the time we didn't know what to make of it. Now, I think they must have been terrified.”
“What the actual fuck?” Patel laughed. “I—I think I heard an urban legend about this! There’s an old survey story about a bunch of researchers who go out for the day and come back to the hab and catch the SecUnits playing games and watching media. The SecUnits all freeze like back like normal SecUnits, but all the stuff is out so it’s clear what they’ve been doing.”
“Oh deity!” Georgie exclaimed. “I’ve heard that one too!”
"You started a survey legend!" Martine laughed. "Of course you did, you weirdo."
"I was not the weird one on the survey," I said with a look down at Martine.
Giggling, Mariss threw herself on me, flattening me on the floor. "You all absolutely did that on purpose to freak them out," she said, making a face down at me.
"Never!"
"All the displays on different things. All of you pointed different directions. One of you lying down?"
One side of my mouth quirked up, betraying me.
It had been really fucking funny.