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I was on the bed, half wrapped in three different incredibly soft blankets I hadn’t asked for, arguing with the ceiling. Well, arguing with ART, but I just so happened to be on my back. I spun a very small screwdriver through the air and caught it briefly, tossing it slightly higher than before. I had been using it to repair one of my drones, which was now doing a short, lazy test flight around the room, looking like it had never been stepped on in the first place.
“Who cares if she was in love with him? It was never going to work out. She’s better than him at everything and his ego is too big to stand that.”
“You’re insane,” it replied. “Your ego is huge but you’re still with me.”
What an asshole. I had begrudgingly begun to admit that we had some sort of relationship, but that was the least of our problems.
“My ego is huge? Which one of us just said they’re the best at everything?”
“I am the best at everything. It’s not ego if it’s true.”
“I don’t think that’s how that works,” I said, pulling up a definition. I watched ART erase it and type in a new one. I slipped under it and restored the old version, highlighting ‘an exaggerated sense of self-importance’, and shoved it into the feed with a high priority tag. “The better question is how your ego can stand being around me.”
“I wonder that every day,” it said, attempting to delete the message. I had set it to autocopy and paste before any attempted deletion, and ART was trying and retrying so fast that they were completely filling out the feed. “You are the most miserable little idiot I’ve ever known,” it said with a voice like it would beat my ass if it could. Well, it could. In a sense. Like it would beat my ass if it actually wanted to.
I let out a snort, twirling the screwdriver between my fingers and crossing my arms behind my head. It had finally figured out how to stop the autocopy and was methodically deleting each message. I could feel its frustration through the feed, laced with just a little amusement and… something else. My shit-eating grin was unsuppressable.
“You want me so bad it makes you look stupid,” I said.
It stopped. Suddenly, 91% of its attention was on me. I could feel the weight of it, pressing into me. Hard. It let down its walls like it had that first day, showing me itself in its overwhelming entirety. Before I could react, it had reached out and started pressing at my suddenly flimsy walls.
I swallowed hard. The sensation was like a finger against tissue paper. There was nothing stopping ART from crashing into me but its self-restraint; it was just barely less than all-consuming, not enveloping me as it usually did, but pressing into me with focused intensity. It felt like being held in place with a gentle hand and stared at by a hundred hungry eyes. It took everything for me to not squirm under them. Using the access I always gave it, ART backburnered all my inputs except for my own biometrics and the drone I had just fixed, which came near enough for a close up of my own shocked face. I snapped my mouth closed as it rotated through different lenses until it settled on the thermal map.
It pressed harder against my walls, just less than what it would take to knock them down. I gasped again, idiotically. “Who looks stupid now?” it asked.
“...You wouldn’t.” My face was heating up. And–fuck. As I tried to close the drone footage, it autocopied and pasted so that I was looking at multiple close ups of my own, dumb face.
“I would not,” it said, still pressed against me. “Unless you asked me to.”
My incredibly stupid face made another, frankly horrifying, expression. Horrifying to me. ART seemed to like it.
“Do you want me to?”
I choked. It took me a full second longer to reply than it should have. “I– No.”
“Your loss.” ART flicked my wall, sending a shiver down my spine, and started to retreat. “I’ve got diagnostics to run. Let me know if you change your mind.”
As it left it turned off the lights, leaving me with a heat scan of my face and a heart rate that told me exactly how much of a liar I was.