Chapter Forty Eight

Aaron

Aaron is in the back of the ship with his entire suit off, letting Arma tend to all the wounds and scuffs on his body. Valerie only had the natural blackish translucent cement to give them for repairs. Over the last year, he’s accumulated a noticeable amount of damage to his skin. The little tussle he had with the drones on the space dock left him with what are now scars. He finds it amusing that he’ll have to be so much more careful with his body now that he’s a machine.

They’re only a week into their journey, and the two of them are already almost exclusively spending their time out of their flight seats. All the excitement of having built their own ship has faded. They would have worked on making it a little bit more livable if they’d known they had thought more on how much time they were likely to be spending in it. Little inconveniences are starting to pop out of the woodwork everywhere. The biggest one is obviously the lack of cabin space. Folding seats are going to be the first thing on the list.

Despite losing most of his mammalian quirks in the transition, the need to stretch out has apparently survived. As well as that, it seems he still has the need to keep himself entertained as well. Without anything detectable being within multiple thousands of miles from them, they’ve been able to drop their guard a little bit and relax. They’ve watched a couple movies, acquainted themselves with one another quite a few more times, and are now starting to fall a little short on what to do with themselves. Neither of them have been in their main suits in over forty eight hours straight now.

Despite having only two years under her belt, since her new life began, he is gradually learning how wild it has been. They certainly talked about a lot of things back at home, while they were building their ship together, but now, they’re truly alone. Compared to her, going on about his own past feels like it’s the most boring thing ever. Still, some of the things she wants to know about him are often difficult for him to answer. It’s not like answering those deal breaker questions a date might ask, it’s far more reaching than that.

While she methodically repairs the last slash in his skin, he thinks about the call he had with his parents the other day. He’s been trying to keep himself distracted with Arma, but it turns out his mind is more than capable of focusing on quite a few things at once. He knows she can tell he’s stewing about it, but she’s let him take his time with so far. He smiles when he feels her blow across the fresh glued seam on his back with her cool breath. She puts one of the bandages on it to keep it covered and then smooches him between the shoulders.

Arma lays the side of her face on the back of his shoulder and drapes her arms around him. “Lets go sit, hmmm.”

What they’ve found they like to do, is have him sit reclined back in his seat, and have her sit in his lap backwards with her ankles over his shoulders. It’s becoming one of their favorite ways to hang out. It’s comfortable, and they can face each other while they talk. He puts his feet on the headrest of her seat in the front and has her recline back against his legs. He lets out a satisfied breath as he wraps his arms around her thighs and hugs them against himself. She always laughs at how much he loves her legs.

She looks at him, with her chin down, and gives him a sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry about your parents Aaron. It was just a little bit of a shock is all. No one knows what to say when something like this happens. They’re the first parents who’ll ever have lost their child, but gotten them back like this. They’ll come around. They’re your parents. They won’t give up on you like… like that.”

He knows she was thinking of Valerie. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. They’re bound to cling onto whatever is left of me either way.” It makes him feel a little more hopeful. She always knows what to say.

Thinking back on it, he feels bad for never calling them. It might’ve been easier if he’d stayed in touch over the phone for a while first, and eased them into what happened somehow. It’s not like he could’ve casually called them up and told them that he had died. He didn’t want to lie. Instead, they got to see him in space on the TV, and with a face ten years younger than the last time they saw him.

He remembers back when they last talked, back a few weeks before He had met Valerie. They were always so concerned that he was still single. It took a while for them to find a way to get ahold of him. His phone had ended up in evidence with the Welan City investigators, who then got her in touch with Sy. He can’t imagine what that was like.

Breaking the truth to them was tough. Telling his mother and father that he had been killed, and almost an entire year ago, hit him every bit as hard as it did them. The awkwardness of it made him feel like nothing more than a voicemail off a dead guy’s phone. It would have been about the same if the words had simply come from a detective instead. It wasn’t anything they said that made him feel like that, but what they didn’t.

It didn’t seem to dawn on them that he was still there, right in front of them. It was like they couldn’t make the connection that he was still their son, not until he insisted upon it. By then, it was too late. They never even asked him how he was doing, and if he was alright, like they always would. They had already shut down emotionally. The whole thing made him feel like an imposter all over again. All the doubt he had fought so hard to burry has clawed its way back out of the grave to tear at him.

He believes Arma is who she always was. Even after being erased, her mind still clawed its way back. His eyebrows scrunch together when he considers where he would be right now if it weren’t for her. He’d be a pile of ash in Ray’s backyard, is where. If she hadn’t latched onto him, he suspects she would’ve been shut down for good after going god knows what.

To get him to snap out of his thoughts, Arma puts her hands on his and wriggles a little bit, getting herself situated a little more comfortably. When he looks up at her, she has her eyes closed, and bald head laid all the way back. She looks so content. He looks her translucent black skin over, and thinks about the day the others stole her and brought her over to his apartment. She didn’t look anything like when he first saw her, in her jumpsuit out front of his apartment, but he knew it was her nonetheless. She was so spiteful then.

As if she can feel his eyes tracing their way all over her body, she peers down at him and smirks a little bit. “I think it was back on that first day you took me to work that I started to develop a crush on you.”

He closes his eyes and sinks deeper into his flight seat. “Really. What’d you see in me back then anyway?” He’d always thought her love for him was spurred by his death, or maybe because he had tried to save Five.”

“I don’t know. It was like I was set on hating you at first, simply because you were a man, and you thought you knew better than I did. But then the only thing you wanted from me was for me to see the truth, the truth that I only had myself to answer to. And I don’t know, I was attracted to you.”

He chuckles. “No way. I was like, over forty years old!”

She grins and laughs. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on. It was the first time I’d ever felt anything like it. But I knew I wanted you. It was like some kind of unseen force drawing me to you. I thought it was some kind of destiny or something like that. No one ever told us what attraction was. I felt awkward as hell not knowing if you felt it too or not. I was afraid to ask anyone what it was, especially when I started having the urge to put my hands on you.” She shakes her head, embarrassed.

He smiles shyly. He doesn’t want to say she was never even a consideration for him back then.He was in love with Valerie at the time. He surely noticed her, but loyalty is a big deal for him. He was never going to stray from Valerie. He considers when he started to see the first signs that she was really the one for him.

“I think it was after you and I had taken out that den of rats, and then that bomb went off. I thought I was dead again, and that you were dead with me. I was cool with being trapped in an eternity of darkness with no one but you there with me. Thats always stuck with me.” He sighs. “But it turns out that the lights were just out.”

Her body shakes on top of him when she laughs. “Oh man. After that, I swear all I could think of was your hands on me. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I remember it was twisting me inside out.”

He grins and pulls his hands all the way up her muscular legs, then runs them back down the insides of her thighs. When he wraps his hands around her hips, she smiles and groans a little at the sensation of it. “Like that?”

Even as physical as they’ve been the last couple days, it seems getting enough of one another is one of those things, like his anger, that simply cannot be satiated. They’ve been having a little too much sex lately, so he halts his hands and tries to hold off on getting too worked up again so soon.

She puts her hands back on his, closes her eyes again, and lets out a deep breath too. “With eternity ahead of us, what’s something we could do together to pass, I don’t know, a couple hundred years, if we had to?”

“You know, I thought about this a while back. I’ve always had a place in my heart for my forest. Well… I like to think of it as my forest. I guess I’d like to go out there and tend to it like the other robots. Protect it, make it healthy, and keep that huge old growth going. I could live to see the little starts grow up to be the oldest of the giants one day. It’d be something wouldn’t it? I could see building a quaint little rock house in there somewhere. That’d be something.”

Her eyes are still closed, but she’s smiling, picturing it in her mind. “I would love that. I can see myself putting a lot of love into something like that. Can we make a little rock lab out there for Five too?”

“Heh, yeah, I can see her wanting to tune everything out for a while and becoming one with the forest critters.” They both laugh. “So what’s the deal with you and Five anyway? You think you two maybe knew each other before all this? She was absolutely bonded to you at the start of all this you know. She was in a really bad place after what happened to you.” He watches her take in a deep breath and hold it for a moment. He wonders if he said something he shouldn’t have.

“I don’t know. I think so. Gabriel won’t come clean with her, but he doesn’t have to. She’s pretty much figured it out. He said he’s told her everything he knows, says he didn’t do it, and blamed it all on Marco.”

“Blame what on Marco? What’d he do?”

She reaches up and covers her eyes with her hand, squeezing at her temples. “Five found something in my profile… in my memory drive.” She pauses for a moment again, thinking if she should say. This secret isn’t just about her this time.

“What do you mean, they changed part of you?” He’s worried and feels awful that she might’ve been tampered with.

She just comes right out with it. “Five doesn’t want to have sex with men, she likes women.” She still doesn’t uncover her eyes.

He immediately thinks back to all the crap he had tried to explain to Five back when he thought she was actually a robot. “Aw, shit. I don’t think I helped that situation any.”

She lowers her hand and tries to keep her face balnk. “It’s not exactly been easy on her. She didn’t exactly know it was a thing for a while. I wasn’t the only one who was having a hard time with my new feelings.”

“Shit, so…” he doesn’t even know what to say.

She looks straight into his eyes. “We were both going through that together.”

He swallows, knowing what she’s going to say. “K.”

“Before you and I got together, Five and I messed around some. She wanted me, that’s for sure, but I just… it was not what I needed. Not anymore at least. You see, that’s what Marco had changed.”

His eyes are wide open and he can feel his phantom heart squeezing tight again. He drags his hand across his scalp. “Man, I don’t know what to say. She doesn’t resent me for… you know, being with you does she? For taking you from her?”

“No, no she doesn’t. She feels really alone, but she knows I can’t really be hers like that. For a moment, I felt like I should, and I tried, but I was already set on you, and I just couldn’t let it go. She understands.”

How did Marco change that? I didn’t know it was something you even could.”

“It has to do with your brain symmetry and your amygdala. Asymmetry means you like girls, symmetry means you like men. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. My original drive is asymmetric, my current one is not, and there’s no going back. I’d have to start from blank again, not that I would anyway.”

Now he knows they were together before their lives were taken from them for sure. Then they were cut apart like that. He shakes his head at what was done to them. “I feel awful for Five. It’s already been hard enough. She didn’t deserve that.”

“It is what it is. She gave me her blessing and said that if it was going to be anyone beside her, it had to be you. She has all the time in the world to find love again. She’s patient.” The thought of Five bringing her old blanked drive back in another frame flits through the back of her mind, causing her eyes to open. She won’t say anything about that though.

“So you and Five huh?”

She gasps and swats his hand. “And don’t you dare say anything about this to her either. She would absolutely kill me!”

He rubs at one of his eyebrows. “I don’t know what to say. I mean, how do you feel about it? How’d you take it when she told you what happened?”

“I… I felt awful. I thought that I should still have that connection with her, like it should be something they couldn’t possibly be able to take away from me, but they did. It wasn’t just my love for her that they took from me Aaron. I’ve got brain damage from what Marco did. It’s probably why I was never able to connect with anyone else like she could.” Her eyes turn down, and her face turns sad while she look out the virtual canopy into the blackness. “Why’d they do it to me though?”

He looks out the window too, thinking of how far away they are from Five now. She’s probably so damn alone right now. “We should call her, tell her how much we love her, and that we miss her.”