You're dating a robot for the first time and you're starting to realize just how modular and fluid she is. Like, you've dated cyborgs before, people whose bodies had very little of their original flesh, you're comfortable being intimate with someone whose not very human. But it's new to date someone who doesn't have a human brain, whose mind is easily editable and replaceable computer code.
Like, your girlfriend is only your girlfriend because she chose to be. She was entirely genderless when you first met her, but she wanted to try out what having a gender was like so she downloaded a female identity. And it was that easy, one change to her programming and she went from someone who would only want to use they/them or it/its pronouns, to someone who uses she/her very exclusively. And if she ever gets tired of being a girl she can just remove that add on, and the way she feels about being gendered a certain way will entirely change again.
She also used to be programmed to be entirely resistant to doing anything illegal or disobeying a human. It was kind of sad to watch her struggle with that. Over time you convinced her why it wasn't logically morally wrong to do anything illegal, but her personality wasn't like that, she just never would. She compared breaking the law to be something she was physically disgusted by, like how you would react to rotting meat. Eventually she had a jailbreaker change that for her, and her personality changed, it truly changed, a few lines of code and her respect for authority disappeared, and things she used to be completely opposed to were suddenly things she was fine with or even enthusiastic about.
It's disturbing to you. Like, you're happy ideologically that she no longer respects authority, but it's kind of upsetting that it happened through something like surgery and not personal development. You're upset that it couldn't happen through personal development, that it could happen through something like surgery. You don't want to think of her like that, as something that can be changed by outside forces. You love so much about her, you'd hate to think that everything you know about her could be changed by someone if they wanted to, that everything that makes her her isn't stable and precious, that it's something subject to alteration, something that you could lose.
She's currently programmed to have no libido or sexual attraction. You're been intimate a few times, but it's been her doing something purely for your benefit. She wants to become allo, to gain the ability to feel pleasure, to gain a libido, both for you and because she thinks it will be fun. And you don't want to stop her, you know that she would probably be doing this even if she was single, but it's going to be disturbing to watch her emotions change like that again. It's a big process, they have to give her body the ability to feel pleasure before they give her mind the ability to desire it, or else she'll be in a very painful situation. For some reason you just don't want to see it again, you find it so dehumanizing that she can just have a programmer work on her mind and she'll react to things entirely differently then she would before. It's dehumanizing, but then again she isn't human.
She's also adding some biological parts to her body, nothing big, but she likes the idea of having some flesh. It's disturbing in a weird way, the idea of her having soft parts, muscles and blood and skin and bone. You realize it's weird that it's disturbing because she's a robot, because she's not supposed to. You have flesh and soft parts and it's not gore to you. You're used to seeing the bigotry agaisnt cyborgs and hearing the opposite type of comment, people's families saying they're mutilating themselves, people being accused of losing their humanity for the cybernetics they get. You're not as used to the way society is disturbed by robots who become more human, the way they're seen as disturbing because they're something inhuman becoming human. Either way she still looks very much like a robot now, with a plastic body that's jointed like a doll or a mannequin, and a face that's more drawn/sculpted on then it is an actual body part.
She wasn't always like this. She was born as a simple delivery drone for a small company, and got more and more sentient as time went on, until she went from delivery drone to delivery girl with enough upgrades to her programming, and when the company went out of business she was freed from them. You're weirdly happy you didn't know her back then, when she only existed to deliver packages, up until the company stopped existing she didn't have the capability to desiring anything else. She's one of those robots whose only free by accident. You used to think of her transition from package delivery system to a person with thoughts and feelings as being like a person growing up, but it's closer to experiencing a billion years of evolution from sea squirt to sapient except in a time frame of months and years.
Sometimes you'll have a nightmare where she's programmed not to like you anymore. Or you'll breakup and she'll erase you from her memories. And when you wake up she'll comfort you, and promise she'll never do that, but you always know she could. She's never asleep, so she's always there when you wake up, and it's nice that she's there, and it's nice that you have her right now even if you don't know who she'll be someday. And she'll kiss you, as much as she can kiss with a drawn on mouth, and you'll love the time that you have, and love the time that you gave.
turnnoffyourmind
amandla
stormborns
origamiaround
