update: 500ish words about this beautiful drawing bc I needed to write them.
It’s quiet inside Dr. Gurathin’s head, right now. It’s peaceful.
I know this, because we are hardwired together. We started doing this a few weeks after I rejoined my Preservation humans, when I could see him getting overwhelmed by stress. I can sort and process some of his thoughts (superior processing power has its perks), and it gives me something to do while watching media. Gurathin has to be close enough for the wire to stay connected, so at times like this we sit side by side and he rests his head on my shoulder, letting all the tension slip from his body. His soft hair is tucked against my neck, and his forehead is warm where it rests on my cheek.
It might be surprising, after the way we started, to see us this way. I didn’t pick up on it at the time, but Gurathin was letting me know his feelings before I even left the PresAux team the first time. Reviewing the memory now, I can see it. I know his face so much better, his small expressions. He doesn’t show much. You have to be very patient and look closely.
As a Murderbot, I have had many opportunities to develop patience.
Sometimes Gurathin falls asleep like this. He’s warm, and soft, and I’m learning about the kind of touching that makes him feel safe. Being a solid presence for him to just unravel against, all his worries and fears abandoned to subconscious space as he focuses on the part of me that is holding him up.
I let the ghost of a smile wash over my face as I remember how much I didn’t like him, at first. How he let me not like him, and still treated me like a person once he knew I had free will. My drones hover around our heads, giving me both a clear view of danger and of the blissful, peaceful expression on Gurathin’s face. He feels safe, leaning against me. I am a good SecUnit, not just for the clients I choose, but for the humans I will choose forever. He is one of them. Dr. Mensah will always be my favorite human, but he’s my… most surprising human.
If I were more daring, I’d pull him into my lap and kiss him like the humans do on some of my shows, in the scenes I fast forward through but still see anyway. I know them well enough to re-create the movements.
I never wanted to do that before.
But with Gurathin’s warmth pressing into my side, I think I’m starting to see the appeal. I wonder if he’d let me kiss him. If he’d like it. His lips look soft, too. I wonder what they taste like. I think he would hold onto me if I held him like that. He might even kiss me back.
I am still too shy to make any sort of advance, and I’m pretty sure Gurathin is, too. I’ve kept clear of the organic goo of feelings when we are hardwired, but I think I’d find some tender feelings toward me in there now, if I looked. If there was more - if he wanted more - I’m not sure what I’d do. Easier to avoid it, for now.
I don’t want to disturb the quiet inside us, just yet.
Being critical of your interests is sooooo fun when you have the critic gene & then you sound kind of insane to the average tv watcher when you're like "this is my favorite show, It's Racist" & then you try to clarify what you mean & get that [Speech (legendary) - FAILURE] "the racism is really interesting though"
[Speech (legendary) - SUCCESS] I find the sociopolitical context of pulpy old sci-fi born circa the civil rights movement really fascinating to analyze especially when it was progressive for its time but still reveals the writers' unexamined biases in the subtext
There's something about lazily studying Mandarin Chinese that's made language learning seem far more approachable. It would be cool to be fluent one day, but I've always been clear with myself that I don't have an actual goal with this besides maintaining a streak in my language app for a certain amount of days. I can quit whenever I want, which is remarkably good at making me not quit. Sometimes I study Chinese for hours because I'm having a good time, but mostly I'm lazily plucking at this language for sometimes literally a minute. After a year of doing this, even though Chinese is so difficult and different from English, it turns out I can still get from knowing absolutely nothing to knowing slightly more than nothing in a pretty short period. An incredible jump in knowledge with not that much work. In fact, the gap between English and Chinese is so vast that microscopic progress feels incredible. When I have to write out literally any pinyin by memory, and I get 75% of the letters and none of the tones correct, I feel like a genius. Today I almost spelled 音乐会/yīnyuèhuì correctly on my first try, and I wanted to call everyone over to see how I effortlessly nailed two-thirds of it.
It's much more encouraging than any of the "easier" languages I've studied. My primary emotion when studying Spanish was embarrassment that I was still so bad at Spanish. Meanwhile, now I'm like, "If I can suck at Chinese, I can suck at anything," which is very inspirational because doing something really, really badly means that you are in fact doing it. I saw an ad for Hebrew language learning course and had the realization that I could probably get really, really, really, really bad at Hebrew in what, a couple months? The thought made me very excited. I could get horrendous at any language in a couple months. I could get horrendous at anything. With a little time and not that much effort, I could nail two-thirds of shooting a basketball. The sky's the limit, but if you don't care about getting all the way up there, one inch off the ground can still be pretty impressive.
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