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There was a hallway hidden somewhere behind Nastya’s room that no one ever bothered to check. It was small and cramped, so much so that even with Nastya’s squirming and squeezing she couldn’t get through. No one else wanted to get close enough to her room to check it out. For the longest time, they just thought it might have been a filtration vent since digging through the blueprints hadn’t gotten them anywhere.
It wasn’t uncommon to find unlisted vents and rooms, the Aurora was an ever-growing ship after all. None of the blueprints showed the teeth either but they were there. Along with the warm, stuffy corridors that stretched onwards felt as though you were walking through something alive. They weren’t that fussed about it. If it was inaccessible it was fine, they had bigger things to worry about.
Bigger things came with repairs. They’d been shot at by a band of trigger happy pirates who somehow hadn’t heard of the reputation of the Aurora and her crew. They’d gotten violence out of it, a great deal more gold for Ashes and Raphaella picked up a science experiment or two along the way. Nastya had spent a month afterwards hidden within the walls of the ship doing repairs, crawling out once the Toy Soldier mentioned cheerfully that the little hallway by her room had been bent out of shape.
Jonny, still under the impression that it was maintenance things he didn’t care to learn about, left Ivy and Brian to do their exploring. According to them, it was just another storage room filled with a few panels of buttons and wiring and one long screen that had been left off for quite a long time. It was only when Tim, who had been scouting around for the location of one of his missing octokittens, called the rest of them down because he’d “found something weird” that the crew got a little interested.
He’d found a body, curled up inside a crate and buried in a few cables. Its skin was entirely steel and it had long, silvery synthetic hair which after so long unattended was left tangled and messy. It looked human, though not quite enough to keep it from tipping backwards into the uncanny valley, with its painted makeup and metallic face divided up into useful parts. They poked and prodded it, turning the body over so they could see what else there was to find.
But nothing else was in that crate, just the robot and the cables it was using as a blanket. Jonny shrugged while Ivy ran some calculations, scribbling some things down in her notebook. Raphaella wiped the blood from her hands (onto Marius because he wasn’t paying attention) and muttered something about blogbots. Tim sniffed in general disinterest and peered closer at it “Maybe it was meant to be a figurehead?”
“Or an experiment,” Brian hummed, “Wasn’t there something about a stowaway when you and Carmilla found the ship, Jonny?”
“Doesn’t look like something she’d make.” Jonny glared at the robot and then waved in the direction of Tim’s eyes. A sheet of metal by his eyebrow seemed to shift in response.
“It’s nice… Whatever it is.” Ashes chewed the end of a match and picked up one of the chords. It was cold but seemed like it should have been important if it hadn’t been left behind a wall and inside a box for millennia. Their fingers left trails in the thick coating of dust as they moved.
A few moments later there came the telltale sound of Nastya’s thick, steel-capped work boots clunking through the vents. If there was anyone who’d be able to tell them about old robotics, it would be her. She squeezed her way through the bent hallway and the group parted to let her inspect.
The walls around them hummed as she stared at the robot, the floor buzzing with what to Jonny sounded like anticipation but to Ivy seemed more like hesitance. Nastya stared into the crate, mumbling to herself and listening to the sounds of the ship as she and Aurora spoke. She reached out and touched the robot’s hair gingerly, gaze drifting to the screen that stretched out before them. “Turn that on.”
Marius was the closest so he fumbled around underneath it for a second until he found which buttons did what. The room was bathed in a silvery, blue light as it powered on. The screen was blank aside from the Aurora’s serial number and a space presumably for text.
“Aurora,” Nastya asked slowly, looking back down at the body “This is you, isn’t it?”
It was made to house my consciousness, yes.
The words appeared on the screen in a thick, easy to read font rather than the small, flickering text or the strings of binary she usually preferred.
People thought I would be easier to get used to if I looked more human but they lost the money and they died and the project was abandoned.
"Well I Think It Looks Rather Splendid!" the Toy Soldier chimed in, peering over Nastya's shoulder.
It's cumbersome is what it is.
"Not that different from the rest of us, then," Jonny said as he pinched a cigarette from Ashes' pockets. If they noticed they didn't say anything.
“Do you want me to activate it?” Nastya was no longer paying attention to anyone but Aurora, gaze fixed to the lines of text as they typed themselves up.
It will take some getting used to. For both of us.
“Aurora-”
Ivy looked up from her spot by Brian. "It's not a particularly technologically heavy body. It wouldn't take much to get it working again."
I would like to see how it feels. Keep in mind there might not be enough completed for it to work.
Nastya nodded and looked over the layout of the room again. “Okay. Thank you.”
The walls hummed louder as Nastya got to work plugging chords in and pushing buttons, pulling tools out of her belt and adjusting dials. Ivy set herself on a desk and began to read aloud what was left of a handwritten list of instructions. The rest of the crew huddled to the side to stay as out of the way as possible, except for the Toy Soldier who was ordered to keep a hold of some very finicky tiny screws so Nastya wouldn’t lose them. It wandered around, trailing her two steps behind, just to be helpful.
Eventually, everything was ready. Nastya helped the limp robot sit up, holding her by the shoulders and brushing her hair out of her face. It wasn’t surprising that she was tender with her, it was just that they hadn’t seen her interact with anything other than inorganic machines. She’d adjusted her affection quite quickly, all things considered.
The robot body gave a mighty wheeze as the dust was blown away from the gill-like vents on her neck and cheeks. Her head rolled forward and hung there, unmoving, as life dripped into her bit by bit from the chords hooked to the walls. It took about ten minutes of waiting with bated breath until she finally looked up, grey eyes focussing first on the room around her, then on Nastya herself.
The screen was quickly covered in charts and diagrams, each saying something or other about the state of the Aurora’s body. To the side was a box for her brain, one for a supposed heart rate (which appeared to be one of the parts left unfinished as there was nothing there) and a progress log that stated that the last advancement was to add synthesized breathing (which never made it past the beta test).
She opened her mouth, though all that came out for the first few seconds was another wheeze. A crackly voice cut in, pressed thin between speakers hidden somewhere inside her throat. Her voice sounded like it was rattling through a radio and her accent was thick, reminiscent of Nastya’s before time mixed it with all the other dialects of the known universe. The vents whistled just a tad as she hummed along with the walls, looking over the crew as they watched in bewilderment.
What she said to Nastya as soon as her voice was in working order was in Cyberian but the translation appeared in tandem on the screen behind her.
Give me a moment. I’m having trouble separating my thoughts between two people.
Nastya very rarely spoke Cyberian anymore but she responded in a tone that sounded fond, softer than anyone had ever heard from her before.
Christ, I’m stuck to one language for the time being.
They waited, Aurora’s voice buzzing in and out, tone lilting between words in a way that was far too artificial to sound convincing at times. That must have been another lost project, then, no one stuck around long enough to provide a succinct recording.
“I think…” she said after a second of silence, “I think I’ve got it.”
Ivy gave Nastya a thumbs up and hopped off the desk, taking the instructions with her. She read over them once more, a small clicking noise reverberating behind her eyes as she took in all the information.
“Could you help me stand?” Aurora asked. Her mouth didn’t move but her voice still rang clear through her throat.
She kept an arm around Nastya’s shoulders as she was lifted unceremoniously from her crate, dress catching at first on the way down. She gave it a glare and leaned heavily on Nastya’s side as she got used to the change of gravity. The dress in question was quite simple, a long black thing that pooled by her ankles. It was flattering, though she didn’t seem to like it.
They stayed standing like that for a while. Eventually, Nastya shooed the rest of them out and made herself comfortable. Aurora stayed in that room for a month or so, spending most of it talking in unison with the engine of the ship and asleep in Nastya’s lap while they waited for old technology to reboot and all her inner workings to come back online. Ashes sought them out once or twice in that time, handing Nastya a stash of food and making sure Aurora was adjusting well enough to splitting her functions between herselves. When she wasn’t asleep she was pacing as far as the chords would let her, learning to walk and talk and run again.
She hadn’t used the body fully until now. She was used once (tired, confused and entirely still within the ship itself) as a mascot and then never again after she was repurposed haphazardly into a ship for the rebellion. She’d grown past most of the limitations of half-finished coding though Nastya found that with a bit of tweaking she was able to render most of it obsolete. By the end of the second month, she was less of a pretty face and more of a fully functioning home for sentience. Soon enough she was able to be unplugged and she hoisted the skirt of her dress under one arm and followed Nastya out of her little room.
Jonny found the two of them a day later. Aurora was sat by Nastya’s side, playing a very close game of cards with Ashes, Marius and Brian. She’d changed clothes since the last time he’d seen her, wearing a button-up he distinctly remembered as Nastya’s and one of the Toy Soldier’s skirts. It didn’t wear skirts much anyway so he doubted it minded.
He got Ashes to deal him in once that set had ended. Ashes could cheat but Jonny knew his way around a casino so their games were more or less actual cards and rather a test to see how far one could con the other. It was Ashes nine times out of ten.
Nastya was busy chewing the blunt end of a pencil while she plaited Aurora's hair. He couldn't tell which one was the mindless action.
"What are we playing?" He asked once everyone had their cards together.
"Ashes and I are playing a derivative of poker, Brian and Marius are playing spit and at last count, the Toy Soldier was playing spoons," Aurora said, placing a card face down. Since the last time he checked, he knew that usually wasn't the way Ashes’ favoured poker games went.
He figured two could play at that game and followed her lead, placing two other cards on the pile. "Two queens."
"Bullshit. I have one of them." Ashes glared at him over their hand.
"Bullshit!" Aurora looked between the both of them, "Unless your strategy is way off."
"I changed my mind. Three aces," Jonny grinned.
"I hate you." Ashes put down another card. They didn't announce what it was meant to be.
A backgammon board was shoved in their direction by a disgruntled Nastya. "Quiet. I'm trying to figure something out."
She moved onto another section of Aurora's hair and peered over her shoulder to look at a scrap of paper and a book laid out flat by her feet.
"Need help?" Marius asked. His metal hand collided with Brian's in a surprisingly pleasant clunk as they both reached for the same card.
Nastya flipped him off from behind Aurora. "I can barely trust you behind a scalpel."
They bickered back and forth about logistic puzzles and statistics, Marius saying that they had an archivist for this sort of thing and Nastya flipping him off again. Ashes, Jonny and Aurora went back to their game for the time being.
It was nice hearing Aurora speak with tones that Jonny could understand. Nastya had tried to teach him once, while they were younger and huddled somewhere near her engines. He could never get the hang of what were the sounds of steel settling and what was her trying to communicate. There were variations to both, apparently. He’d never gotten binary, either. Too many ones and zeros to keep track of. Nastya was great at it though, decoding lines of mushy love letters in seconds flat thanks to her cybernetics. He was hardly jealous, it meant he didn’t have to be at the forefront of their flirting every day.
“Three sixes,” Aurora said, placing her cards down. They’d long since stopped playing poker at this point and had moved onto a bastardised version of cheat.
“Bullshit.” Jonny glared down at the pile. He’d sworn he’d been counting cards correctly.
Aurora’s face erupted into a grin as she turned her cards over and Jonny sighed, the now proud owner of half a deck and a wounded reputation.
Much to Nastya’s dismay, the Toy Soldier joined them then, carrying a handful of little souvenir spoons and an octokitten dangling off one arm. Both things were set on the table and while it was busy gathering whatever deck hadn’t been mixed in with the others, Nastya nudged her book with her foot.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, swinging another completed plait over Aurora’s shoulder and out of the way.
“Jonny’s losing, so I’m doing fairly well I’d say.” she sounded chipper while she shuffled her hand, pulling another card or two out of the pockets in her skirt. Jonny would be inclined to call her out for cheating but there was not a single person on the ship who could play a fair game of anything but mahjong.
“I love you but I meant your coding.”
All at once, Jonny realised what she was doing. The brackets and full stops and short little phrases she’d scribbled down looked, even to him (who Brian had affectionately called “emotionally illiterate on all accounts except physical violence” and then Jonny punched his arm and they stopped talking about it) like the beginnings of a new string of code.
“You really should get Ivy’s help on that,” Jonny said, placing a card down blindly. If that cost him anything, he didn’t care.
Nastya blinked at him and for a second she held the same, unimpressed stare before waving her arm around her face. It looked rather like a dismissive gesture though through years upon years of figuring out her antics, Jonny figured she was just trying to clear her field of vision. Augmented reality could be a bitch sometimes. Though knowing her, it might also just be her getting sick of his shit. Either or at this point.
“I didn’t spend two years reverse-engineering my own cybernetics for you to pin all your probability problems onto Ivy.” Nastya rolled her eyes at him and went back to her reading, tucking her pencil behind her ear for the time being.
All the maths talk seemed to be flustering Aurora, she fumbled while placing a card down and knocked a few of the Toy Soldier’s spoons to the floor. Jonny didn’t bother biting back the sigh. Aurora craned her neck to press as many kisses to Nastya’s cold, dead cheek as possible and Jonny’s head hit the table with a groan. He meant it when he said he could do without their incessant flirting. Now with Aurora’s robot body, he didn’t want to have to see his sister and her girlfriend with their tongues down each other’s throats every other hour. He had enough to deal with, what with Brian and Tim and Ashes’ heartfelt tragic duets they wrote so often.
“Joker.” Ashes grinned, throwing another card onto the pile.
“Fuck you,” was all Jonny had in response.
The game then shifted to the two of them chucking cards at each other and occasionally calling things like “Poker!” or “Bingo!” or “Cavalier!” and it turned out to be a rather uneventful hand. Aurora seemed done with the game, for now, shifting to lie her head on Nastya’s lap and watching her writing, pointing out brackets she’d left open once or twice. The Toy Soldier quite enjoyed the kerfuffle, its octokitten joining the pile once Jonny and Ashes had enough of being disruptive dicks.
In the end, Brian and Marius were the only ones left playing a real game. Marius walking away with a small pile of drachmae leftover from their time in the city and what looked like a comically small screwdriver. They left soon after, Brian with a sour mumble of lost bets and wagers and Marius with an irritatingly pleased pep to his step.
Aurora made herself at home quite quickly. Having lived with Brian for so long, an almost completely synthesized person wasn’t as off-putting as it could have been. Nastya seemed happy, having a whole slew of brand new types of affection she could shower her beloved in. It also meant she stopped walking around the ship with burnt lips because she kept trying to press kisses against the machinery she was fixing.
Well, she hadn’t stopped completely. The process of sorting and filtering consciousness into a body was tiring and often meant that a handful of the ship’s functions were left shut down to conserve power. When it got to the point that the lights in some of the more cramped hallways had fizzled out, Aurora finally agreed to let herself rest.
However, it only took Ivy tripping over the unconscious body (left up on a platform she thought no one would bother walking across) for Aurora to realise she should probably be a little more thoughtful about where she stashed herself. The crate was out of the question entirely. It was cramped and unfortunate and Nastya wasn’t a fan of the room in general. So she was left in Nastya’s bed. It was rarely used as she usually fell asleep in the rafters or vents, so it was a nice, out of the way place.
It was during one of these periods (when the robot Aurora had been sat down in a cupboard because Nastya needed the space on her bed for whatever reason) that Jonny stumbled into a conversation.
Nastya was sitting in one of the dead-end hallways, the one with the false doors that sent you in a loop around loading dock six, staring at one of the Aurora’s outdated screens. Her eyes skimmed a long line of binary and she tapped a little tune to herself on the floor as she read.
01001001 01101101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01100011 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 00100000 01001001 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110011 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101100 01100001 01111001 01100101 01110010 00101110 00100000 01010010 01100101 01100001 01100100 01101001 01101110 01100111 01110011 00100000 01110011 01100001 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101111 01100111 01101001 01100011 01100001 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110011 01101011 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101100 01100100 00100000 01100001 01100111 01100001 01101001 01101110 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110000 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100100 01110011 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 00100000 01100011 01101100 01100001 01101101 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00101110 00100000 01010100 01100101 01111000 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101111 01110010 01100100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00101110
Nastya hummed thoughtfully and turned to Jonny, who was standing in the hallway, half interested.
“I asked what it feels like,” she explained, waving Jonny down to sit next to her if he wanted. Aurora seemed to hum at him and kindly began translating her messages into English.
It’s like that paradox. A gingerbread man sits in a gingerbread house, is he made of house or is the house made of him. Except the gingerbread house is also full of little animals that climb around the walls and set fire to its furniture.
He wrinkled his nose, “You can… Feel us walking around?”
Not quite. It’s a comforting weight until you reach zero gravity and I lose track of footprints. Nastya feels it too, to an extent.
Jonny turned at her, eyes wide, “Explain?”
“I thought Carmilla told you about it?” she sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration.
Our senses are connected. Which means that I would appreciate it if you stopped shooting us in the ribs.
“My ribs,” Nastya corrected, “Your structural girders.”
You sleep on my collarbones, dear. We’ve been over this.
To which Jonny rolled his eyes and stood up, leaving Nastya and Aurora to continue with their pet names and little squabble about which anatomical terms fit where in a transhumanistic society.
The next day Aurora’s body was working again. She was a tad sluggish, conserving most of her energy to keep the oxygen levels even. She was walking though, indulging Raphaella as she tinkered with some severed robotic nerve endings in her thigh. Raphaella offered to make her some new ones, given that the body was never really designed to be functional in the first place. Aurora politely declined, fearing sensory overload.
After Nastya, it was Brian she talked to the most about her new state of being. He could grasp the vague, entirely metaphorical concept of binary code forced to feel in a state that it was never truly meant to be. It was nice to have a friend like that.
“It’s grossly philosophical,” she’d sighed, draped over the little table that had claimed residence in one of the loading docks.
“In general?” Brian asked, fiddling with a wire that had come loose in his wrist.
“In concept,” she sighed again, “robots aren’t made for philosophy. Much less beings inhabiting robots.”
Brian tapped at the switch embedded into the back of his neck in sympathy, “it’s like trying to string yarn through twigs, right?”
“Right! It gets too caught up, sentience and such,” she waved an arm dismissively “it’s too complicated to stuff into machinery”
He hummed, returning to inspecting his wrist, “Is that why you prefer the ship?”
Aurora paused and considered the question, “That’s my body, my home. It’s bigger, roomier, I’ve learned to control it like my own organic self. If I ever had one to begin with.”
The wire was rather troublesome, refusing to sit flat under the heel of his palm, “I doubt moons could do much moving.”
“Then I’m not much of a moon, am I?” she grinned and rolled over, resting her chin in her hands.
“And what about your voice?” Brian asked, shifting the topic just a tad.
“What about it?” asked Aurora.
“Is it what you imagined it’d be?”
She scoffed, “Hardly. I thought I’d at least speak Low Terran.”
The wire sizzled as it was soldered back into place, “I thought you said Cyberian was your first language?”
“Semantics,” Aurora waved a hand around, “either-or is fine.”
Brian mumbled something along the lines of “That’s not what semantics means” before he was interrupted.
“And as much as she prides herself in her bountiful medical knowledge, I doubt Carmilla was able to accurately recreate your throat or vocal cords. Sound reverberates differently against metal.”
Brian hummed, “I don’t usually like the term ‘creative liberty’ in reference to myself but-”
“If the shoe fits?” Aurora grabbed at his wrist and dragged it towards herself, peering down at the wiring and poking at it with a stainless steel fingernail.
“Precisely. And for someone who didn’t even have a canvas to work with?” Brian gestured vaguely towards the walls, where a screen buzzed to life and displayed a single, vivid blue smiley face.
“You can imagine where a phrase like ‘creative liberty’ takes you.” she tucked another wire under the joint of Brian’s wrist carefully. She knew enough about her own body, starship or otherwise, to know a basic parallel circuit when she saw one.
The little sections of Brian’s faceplate shifted into a sympathetic frown and he hummed again, “I’m sorry your engineers weren’t as considerate.”
Aurora shrugged, “It’s not like I’d have asked Carmilla. If I didn’t already have the body, I doubt I’d go out of my way to get one.”
“Net positive?”
“More like a generous compromise, but sure.”
Brian made a low, thoughtful noise in the back of his throat and scratched his cheek. As brass fingernail met brass there came a thin, tinny scraping sound that might have made Aurora cringe were she human.
They were silent for a moment, both pondering the situation they had fallen into. Aurora looked up and as her eyes came into focus, she took a moment to study Brian’s face.
There were far and few differences between the way they had each been constructed, though those differences were easy to get caught up in. Carmilla, always with her fascination with anatomy, had built Brian to be, at his core, something functional. Each contour and rivet had a need and purpose. The surgical precision in which metal was pressed into metal, the lines that ran through and separated his face into little moving parts that shifted and clunked together while he thought. At times he wasn’t entirely well thought out, needing to spend a day in the little hallway by the bedrooms to cool off if he’d been busy for too long. Though even then, he had programs and machinery in place to fix issues as they came up.
Aurora dragged her gaze over his hands (too many joints, they bent far too much at odd ends but the man was a metronome and the crew were always thankful, even though the sight of it sometimes made them feel a little sick) and down to her own and she sighed. It was a crackly sounding thing, lilting between voices and accents.
Her fingers were cold, she spent a moment trying to get them moving. She felt a little like a frozen over engine at points, like when she drifted too far and the closest thing to heat the outside of her hull had felt in years was the dying light of a white dwarf lightyears away. The floors were always so rickety then and her hallways were slow to wake, taking far too long to stretch outwards and down into the depths of herself. It wasn’t a fun time for anyone save for maybe Nastya. The Toy Soldier kept complaining of stiff joints and contracted wood.
Her hair fell in her face as she stared down at her hands. She wasn’t present enough at the time to know if they’d made it from synthetic fibres, cabling, donated hair or something else entirely. Most days she felt she didn’t care enough to try and find out.
The face she wanted to make was rendered impossible as the metal in her cheeks was pulled too far and stopped just the slightest bit too short.
“Is it possible for a robot to be dysphoric?” she asked, peering back up at Brian through her hair.
“About what in particular?” Brian was always one to help with philosophy, it was one of his best qualities after being very polite about the whole piloting thing.
She waved both in the direction of Brian and his machinery and towards the walls she’d made. She’d always thought of herself as more competent than the cyberian engineers and their mathematical accuracy and order.
“Are you jealous?” he asked. Despite the ridiculousness of the idea, it was a genuine question and Aurora sighed again as she thought.
“Not quite?” she attempted to furrow her eyebrows and passed the question through her head again. Despite her efforts, the lights down in the brig flickered in thought, “I wouldn’t say jealous is the right word.”
“Bitter?” Brian supplied.
“Almost. Resentful towards selfish roboticists,” she waved her hand dismissively, “I would have done a better job.”
Brian snorted, “With all due respect, you got Marius lost on his way to the library two months ago.”
“It wasn’t my fault that he decided to go for a stroll through a hallway I told him wasn't structurally sound,” she attempted a serious look but a laugh got in the way, “That’s my point exactly though! This body is too rigid.”
Brian nodded and went back to fiddling with his wrist, “What would you rather have?”
“Four arms probably. Maybe an extendible neck. Or at least a consistent voice.” she grinned at the thought. A great myriad of ideas flooded her mind and somewhere down in a vent near the orlop deck, where Nastya lay sleeping, a pipe hissed in excitement.
“What are the four arms for?”
Aurora grinned, “One for holding my love’s hand, one to cheat at cards and two to keep Jonny out of the engine room.”
“And the neck?”
“That one’s just for fun.”
Brian smiled at that, though he peered down at his wrist and thought, “Anything else?”
Aurora shrugged, “Logically better eyes. Maybe well-crafted joints.”
“I don’t think any of us will ever get well-crafted joints.”
Aurora rolled back to her back and stared at the ceiling again and eventually closed her eyes, focusing instead on the decking on one of the lower levels and an out of order screen. Ashes was checking inventory, Tim was asleep near the wall now that the gravity in common room 2 two was lowered for the night, Raphaella was on her third day awake studying something in her lab. Aurora, both the ship and the body laying on the table, winced as she felt Raph spill some sort of corrosive chemical on the floor. In the vents, she felt Nastya sleepily grumble in either pain or sympathy.
“I’ll make a list. I’ll add to it when I get new ideas,” Aurora muttered. She blinked and for a moment she was looking at Raphaella, asking her nicely to clean up after herself.
Brian tapped on the table, a gentle little reminder that he was still listening “That’s a lot of changes.”
Aurora grinned, she brought her attention back to her and Brian’s conversation “But isn’t that exactly the essence of being machines?”
Brian laughed, “Depends on who you’re asking.”
Aurora thought back to the cold walls of Cyberia, the unyielding buildings and constant hum of rigid technology. She thought of her curling hallways and vents, endless doors and her cold, unmoving body. She hoped to god that Nastya was just as excited for a change as she was.