An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
@synthwaveangel and I have been having such a blast with this story!
Such is the way of fandom, isn’t it?
Step 1: Slide into someone’s dm’s to chat about a silly idea,
Step 2: bond over brainstorming about robot brain sex,
Step 3: friendship???
Anyways, enjoy!
When shit goes sideways on a mission, Murderbot and ART realize just how important Three has become to them.
I know I’ve said that I don’t like media that’s realistic, and I don’t usually like documentaries. But spending over a year with Three onboard ART as security specialists was expanding my horizons. At ART’s suggestion, every fifth cycle had now been designated “docu-series night” and we were all in the argument lounge watching another season of Three’s new favourite, Nights on Preservation.
(ART and I had both vetoed any documentaries that talked about shipping disasters, SecUnits, mining installations, or anything where humans died in horrible painful ways. Three had agreed, and as a further compromise, the cycle after docu-series night, it would always join us for “How Bad Could It Be?” where ART, Iris, Turi and I were competing to find the absolute worst fictional serials in existence. Three only agreed to attend because the whole point was to criticize how stupid the shows were. And they were very stupid.)
Nights on Preservation was all about unique nocturnal fauna across the Preservation Alliance. I had seen lots of fauna on all my different planetary surveys, but I had never paid much attention to their behaviour, unless that behaviour was “attempting to kill and/or eat my clients.”
The narrator sounded really enthusiastic about all the different fauna on the screen, in a way that kind of reminded me of Arada. Even when the cute little pygmy lark got caught by a big lizard, her voice still sounded excited as she talked about how it had caught the bird through its heat-sensing vision (kind of like my night vision filter), and how the pygmy lark would sustain the lizard’s young.
Three was hovering in the feed monitoring my reactions, and I felt it focusing on me intently as the lizard munched the bird. I sent it a nudge through my emotional buffer, signalling [I’m fine/interested/not upset.] I had said in our agreement that fauna violence and death was ok, but it still always checked in on me during these scenes, especially if the fauna were of the “cute” variety. It was kind of nice, in a way that made my insides feel weird.
The other thing we practiced during these group media nights was “non-threatening touch.” Since we had officially become part of ART’s crew, PSUMNT had decided that we should both get some kind of trauma treatment, which I would have pushed back on a lot more before [redacted]. Because the University didn’t have any pre-existing trauma recovery protocols for constructs (I know, shocking, right?) developing this module was the first project for the newly instituted (and highly confidential) Construct Research Laboratory. Dr. Bharadwaj had even moved temporarily to PSUMNT to help establish it. I had a lot of feelings about that, but the trauma recovery module hadn’t made me unpack them yet, so I wasn’t in a rush.
Anyway, what’s relevant here is that the trauma recovery module had decided that Three and I would both benefit from experiencing non-violent physical contact. So during media nights, Three and I would agree on a point of physical contact between us, and try to maintain that physical contact for the duration of an episode.
The module had said it was good for Three, because it missed the physical contact it received from 001 and 002, and it was good for me because even the times I hadn’t completely hated being touched had all still been in very high stress situations. That, apparently, had only reinforced my aversion to physical touch. Which I guess made sense.
It was also way easier to do this with Three than with any of the humans. (I still hadn’t really wanted to do this, but the module was insistent, and I didn’t have a good argument about why I shouldn’t have to.)
Anyway, this is all to say that Three and I were spending this docu-series night sitting next to each other on the couch, with the sides of our feet and lower legs touching. I didn’t want to admit it, but it wasn’t… the worst thing ever. And practicing physical contact like this was actually helping me be less jumpy around our humans. Ugh. I hated it when the trauma recovery module was right.
