Naked Secrecy
A Subnautica: Below Zero fanfiction
Spoiler warning:
This story and its description contain major spoilers for Subnautica: Below Zero.
Description:
Al-An accidentally walks in on Robin when she's naked. Her reaction bewilders the perpetually unclothed Architect, and sparks a conversation about how their different cultures shaped them.
Content warning:
Contains non-explicit nudity and scientific discussions of reproduction.
This story and its description contain major spoilers for Subnautica: Below Zero.
Description:
Al-An accidentally walks in on Robin when she's naked. Her reaction bewilders the perpetually unclothed Architect, and sparks a conversation about how their different cultures shaped them.
Content warning:
Contains non-explicit nudity and scientific discussions of reproduction.
The world was quiet. Far too quiet. Where thousands of voices should have hummed in a constant murmur of comfort and community, there was only the silence of the grave, gnawing the edges of Al-An’s mind.
As much as it was a relief to have their freedom and autonomy again, part of them missed living in Robin’s head. They’d been unable to access her conscious thoughts the way they could their own people’s, but at least they could sense her emotions to some extent, and it had made them feel less alone.
Now there was only emptiness, with their thoughts falling into it like drops into an endless chasm that should have been a sea.
They tried to think louder. Faster. More constantly. To drown out the silence in their head.
But the silence was always louder.
Some days, it was merely uncomfortable. But sometimes, with frightening unpredictability, it suddenly became unbearable.
Focus. Just focus on recording your findings.
They could have done it in seconds by wirelessly transmitting the information in their processing core to the PDA. But that would not have occupied their mind. It wouldn’t fill the silence.
By performing tasks like this manually, they could at least try to keep the emptiness at bay until Robin woke up. Sometimes it almost worked.
Today, it did not.
The void in their head reached out to the hollow space around them, crying to be filled, and they set the PDA on the counter and wrenched themselves away from it as if tearing free from a predator’s grasp.
They needed to find Robin. She couldn’t fill every second of the silence, but at least she could hold it at bay for a few precious moments when she spoke.
If they were lucky, she was awake by now, and they could find a topic that would get her talking for a good long while. She’d mentioned a doctoral thesis – maybe she could recite it from memory?
The sound of running water drew them toward the walled-off space she referred to as the “bathroom” – apparently it was the place where humans performed their waste elimination and hygiene procedures.
They weren’t sure why she’d made it so secluded from the rest of their temporary base; perhaps it was for odor control, but right now the silence in their mind bothered them more than any smell could.
As they drew closer, they could just barely hear Robin humming the tune of one of the songs she’d played on the jukebox. It was pleasant to listen to, even if they didn’t fully understand humans’ emotional connection to music, and they waited until she stopped before stepping through the door.
Her eyes were closed as if in deep thought, and the shower’s pressurized stream of water pounded over her head with a roar that probably drowned out most of the noise in her vicinity. As Al-An debated whether or not to break her concentration, they suddenly realized this was the first time they had seen their human companion without any clothes.
The xenobiologist in them immediately started cataloging and analyzing her various features.
Her skin appeared to be largely uniform in color, except for a few discolored streaks and patches that looked more like scar tissue than normal pigmentation. She’d probably acquired them while scanning hostile fauna at dangerously close quarters; Al-An made a mental note to enhance the range of her handheld scanner.
There were two protrusions on her chest, which reminded the Architect of some of the mammalian species whose DNA was incorporated into their own body. It appeared that she was a member of one of the nursing sexes of her species, assuming they even HAD sexes. How DID humans reproduce?
Their analytical gaze fell to her hips – wide enough to potentially allow the passage of a fairly large infant, which reinforced their theory about her being a pregnancy-capable mammal.
That’s right, they realized, she mentioned that “all humans dream – many other mammals, too,” implying that they are indeed mammals.
Do Earth mammals reproduce the same way as the goats used for Architect vessels?
After all the time they’d spent living with Robin, it was strange to realize how much they still didn’t know about their human friend.
Before they could start to analyze her limbs, her eyes blinked open, lost in thought, and Al-An’s mind went back to the line they were planning to use to start the conversation.
Then Robin screamed.
The sound was so shockingly sudden that it jolted Al-An back a step, and the lines on their skin flared with fear. The human dropped into a crouch, guarding her chest with her arms, and a prickling wave of pins and needles rolled across the Architect’s back as their mind raced with deadly possibilities.
In an instant, they were standing in front of Robin, whirling to face the door and splaying their mechanical arms in readiness to fend off whatever predator had found its way into the base.
An empty room met their gaze, and they stared at it in bewilderment, trying to understand what had just happened. SOMETHING had frightened their much smaller friend, but surely it couldn’t have been them.
“Al-An?!” Robin’s voice was sharp with agitation, and had risen to at least one point five octaves above its usual pitch. “What are you doing?!”
“I had come here to seek conversation with you,” they replied, glancing down at her. For some reason, she continued to crouch, adjusting her hands so they blocked Al-An’s view of her nursing appendages. “When you reacted with alarm, I assumed that a predator had entered the room behind me.”
“Oh…” To their mixed confusion and relief, there was laughter in her still-shaky voice. “No, it’s not that, it’s just – in my culture, it’s really inappropriate to walk in on someone and look at them when they’re naked. You startled me, and… I freaked out a bit.”
“Naked?” the Architect echoed, their mind latching onto the most confusing part of her statement even as they obligingly redirected their gaze to the wall opposite Robin. “But… I am naked all the time, and you never complained. I had therefore assumed that your clothing was purely for thermal regulation purposes.”
A disturbing thought sprang to their mind, and their gaze dropped to their own body. “Is it… inappropriate for me to be naked in your presence?”
“Well… not exactly.”
The sound of bare footsteps pattered behind Al-An, followed by the rustle of fabric rubbing against skin, and they pushed down the inquisitive impulse to visually confirm the source of the sound. It was probably just Robin using a towel.
Instead, they resolutely pinned their gaze on the wall opposite their friend.
“There are specific parts of humans’ bodies that are used for reproduction,” Robin explained, “and we tend to reserve those parts for the people we’re… you know… mating with. For anyone else to look at them is an invasion of privacy.”
“Your people seem to consider a great many things private,” Al-An observed. “My people share all of our thoughts, and no part of our bodies is considered secret or… inappropriate. Is it not…”
“I hope you’re not gonna say ‘inefficient’ or ‘primitive’ again,” she warned them, amid the familiar sound of her putting on her All-Environment Protection Suit.
Annoyance at her touchiness flickered through Al-An, but returning it in kind would only risk causing a chain reaction, so they tempered their tone into one of mildly tested patience. “I was going to say ‘isolating’.”
She went quiet for a moment, and the tension in the Architect’s chest eased slightly as the human stepped into view, now fully clothed and no longer dangerous to look at.
They rested their gaze on her face, and from the glint of compassion in her eyes, they suspected she had already guessed at the feelings behind their comment.
“We don’t tend to think of it that way,” she replied. “Yes, humans can get lonely, and yes, the limits of verbal and physical communication can make it harder for some people to understand each other, which can make it harder for them to make friends.
“But I don’t think that would go away if everyone stopped wearing clothes. Maybe it would if we were networked, but… I don’t think humans have the mental processing power to listen to all the other humans and concentrate on our work at the same time.”
“It is difficult for young Architects as well,” Al-An observed. “But they become accustomed to it, over time.”
“How young are you when you get networked? For that matter, how do you make new Architects?” Robin’s moment of alarm was long gone, and her scientific curiosity had risen fully to the fore. “I mean, if it isn’t inappropriate to ask.”
“Why would it be inappropriate? My people do not have the same focus on privacy that yours do.”
“True. So, how do you do it?” she asked, tugging gently on Al-An’s hand before moving toward the kitchen.
“We are initially grown from fertilized seeds,” they explained as they followed her. “One parent provides the seed; the other provides the material with which to fertilize it. The latter material could be compared to the pollen produced by some flowers, but it is distinct enough that I do not believe there is a human word for it.”
“I see. So it’s sort of like the way humans do it, then,” she observed as she picked a lantern fruit. “Except our ‘seeds’ grow into babies inside the womb.”
“I had suspected as much; the width of your hips implies an adaptation for live birth. In our case, such features are unnecessary; the seed is grown in a controlled environment outside the parents’ bodies, and fitted with external cybernetic components that connect them to the network.”
“You mean like plants in a greenhouse?”
“There are some similarities between our infant-rearing centers and greenhouses, yes, though of course the children growing there require far more training than plants, and their roots develop into feet after the first few years.”
“What happens after that?” Her eyes sparked with fascination, staying fixed on Al-An’s face as she bit into her breakfast.
“During our early years,” they explained, “we are trained by specialized caretakers who observe our thoughts and inclinations, and guide us to pursuits that are suited to our desires and skills. Once our initial bodies are developed enough to reproduce, we are transferred into our first synthetic form.
“Seeds and fertilizing materials are then harvested from the abandoned body and used to create new Architects, while the remainder of the body is then used as raw materials for the construction of enhanced and augmented versions of that form.”
“Huh,” Robin mused, her voice slowing as her mind focused on digesting Al-An’s words. “It sounds… efficient…”
“It is,” the Architect responded, pride warming their voice. But the feeling swiftly cooled when they saw the frown on Robin’s face.
“But it also,” the human continued slowly, “seems kind of… cold.”
“Their environment is always kept at temperature suited to the children’s needs,” Al-An reassured her, even as a nagging suspicion crept over then, whispering that that wasn’t what she was worried about.
Sure enough, Robin was quick to clarify. “I meant emotionally cold. Human babies depend on their parents for everything, from nourishment to guidance to emotional support. If they don’t have frequent, positive physical and emotional contact, they can develop emotional problems. But it sounds like you don’t even know your parents, and your parents didn’t know each other.”
“As I said shortly after we first met, my people do not… did not… think of ourselves as individual, distinct. My caretaker and my biological parents were all a part of the same network, and each child is just as valuable to every adult as the children produced from their own genetic materials.
“If anything, for a child’s mind to grow in isolation, forced to analyze their experiences with nothing but their own limited mental capacity and knowledge, while being driven to conceal parts of their bodies and minds, seems far colder and more lonely than the methods I described, especially if adults besides their parents value them less than their own parents do.”
A thoughtful frown clouded Robin’s face, and the hand that had been rising to take another bite fell away from her face. “I guess… it’s all a matter of perspective, and of what each species needs,” she commented slowly.
“Human children bond deeply with their parents or their primary caregivers in specific, and long-term separation from those caregivers causes serious emotional problems, even if someone else is taking good care of them.
“But I guess if their emotional needs are being met by their trainers, and by the network as a whole, the separation from their parents wouldn’t be so bad.”
“If it is any reassurance,” Al-An noted, “I do not recall having developed any emotional complications as a result of my upbringing.”
“That’s good to hear. Goodness knows life’s been emotionally complicated enough for you without having that on top of it.”
Now that was a reminder they didn’t want. As they so often did when that subject came up, Al-An quickly changed the topic. “You seemed to find it troubling that our parents did not ‘know’ each other – presumably in the sense of having chosen to reproduce with each other in specific.
“Am I to take it your people choose mates with whom to have offspring based on social familiarity?”
“Yeah, that’s part of it. There’s also emotional compatibility, shared life goals, shared beliefs, agreements on how to raise the children… that sort of thing. And, of course, physical attraction – though that’s more of a priority for some people than others.”
“I see. And do you…”
Their voice trailed off, their biological arms pressing tighter against their torso and their mechanical arms curling slightly as their face fell. There is so much I can offer her, as a fellow scientist and as a friend. But this…
“Do I… what?” Robin prompted, watching Al-An closely as she took another bite, and they made themselves face her squarely.
“Do you miss the possibility of finding a mate? I doubt you will find any suitable candidates on the planets we explore.”
A thoughtful frown crossed her face, but to Al-An’s relief, it didn’t seem like a look of regret. They’d learned to identify that expression when she spoke of how she wished she’d told Sam how much she admired her older sister when she had the chance.
“Well,” her musing voice replied, “no, not really. I guess I was always kind of ‘married to my work,’ as the saying goes. Not that I ruled out the possibility of finding someone, but… it was never really a priority.
“And even if I did find a potential partner, I’m happy with the life I have now, so they’d have to be someone who was willing to be a part of that life, not someone who’d ask me to leave it behind for them.”
“I am relieved to hear that,” the Architect admitted, their shoulders relaxing as a tension they hadn’t realized they were carrying drained out of them. “I had begun to worry that I might be holding you back from something you wanted – or that someday you might leave in order to pursue it.”
“Oh, Al-An…” She set the lantern fruit on the table, then turned to face her friend, and their two bodies slipped into a familiar dance that had become as natural as breath.
The human stepped toward the Architect. A mechanical hand bent to face her, the green light of a tractor beam streaming from its center.
Robin rose into the air until she was eye-to-face with Al-An, then her hands gently rose to cradle her friend’s face. “I told you,” she said, her voice husky and soft, “I’m committed to helping you. I’m not going to run off and leave you to mourn your entire species alone.
“Besides, I love the life we have right now. Yes, some parts are hard, and we both have people we miss. And yes, there is a learning curve – sometimes we’re going to screw up, like you walking in on me when I’m naked, or me projecting human childcare needs onto people who aren’t human.
“But it’s part of science, and it’s part of life, to grow, and learn, and get better. And I have more opportunity to do that here than I will have anywhere else I can think of.
“People don’t have to marry to be happy together. There’s a whole universe to discover, and I want to discover it with you.”
A face without eyes could not cry, but that didn’t stop Al-An’s body and voice from trembling. “Thank you, Robin. I… do not know what I’d do without you.”
“I know.” She gave their face a gentle tug, and they reflexively drew her closer, lower, until she could wrap her arms around them and embrace their shoulder with her chin.
“Nobody can guarantee how long they’ll be around,” she whispered as their arms pressed her close, then her body shook against the Architect’s chest in a short, rueful laugh. “Sam’s last lesson to me. But I plan to stay with you as long as I can.”
“I hope that is a very long time,” Al-An replied solemnly, squeezing her a bit tighter. I hope it is forever.
“Yeah,” she said quietly, her hand tracing gentle lines on the back of her friend’s bowed head. “I do, too.”
As much as it was a relief to have their freedom and autonomy again, part of them missed living in Robin’s head. They’d been unable to access her conscious thoughts the way they could their own people’s, but at least they could sense her emotions to some extent, and it had made them feel less alone.
Now there was only emptiness, with their thoughts falling into it like drops into an endless chasm that should have been a sea.
They tried to think louder. Faster. More constantly. To drown out the silence in their head.
But the silence was always louder.
Some days, it was merely uncomfortable. But sometimes, with frightening unpredictability, it suddenly became unbearable.
Focus. Just focus on recording your findings.
They could have done it in seconds by wirelessly transmitting the information in their processing core to the PDA. But that would not have occupied their mind. It wouldn’t fill the silence.
By performing tasks like this manually, they could at least try to keep the emptiness at bay until Robin woke up. Sometimes it almost worked.
Today, it did not.
The void in their head reached out to the hollow space around them, crying to be filled, and they set the PDA on the counter and wrenched themselves away from it as if tearing free from a predator’s grasp.
They needed to find Robin. She couldn’t fill every second of the silence, but at least she could hold it at bay for a few precious moments when she spoke.
If they were lucky, she was awake by now, and they could find a topic that would get her talking for a good long while. She’d mentioned a doctoral thesis – maybe she could recite it from memory?
The sound of running water drew them toward the walled-off space she referred to as the “bathroom” – apparently it was the place where humans performed their waste elimination and hygiene procedures.
They weren’t sure why she’d made it so secluded from the rest of their temporary base; perhaps it was for odor control, but right now the silence in their mind bothered them more than any smell could.
As they drew closer, they could just barely hear Robin humming the tune of one of the songs she’d played on the jukebox. It was pleasant to listen to, even if they didn’t fully understand humans’ emotional connection to music, and they waited until she stopped before stepping through the door.
Her eyes were closed as if in deep thought, and the shower’s pressurized stream of water pounded over her head with a roar that probably drowned out most of the noise in her vicinity. As Al-An debated whether or not to break her concentration, they suddenly realized this was the first time they had seen their human companion without any clothes.
The xenobiologist in them immediately started cataloging and analyzing her various features.
Her skin appeared to be largely uniform in color, except for a few discolored streaks and patches that looked more like scar tissue than normal pigmentation. She’d probably acquired them while scanning hostile fauna at dangerously close quarters; Al-An made a mental note to enhance the range of her handheld scanner.
There were two protrusions on her chest, which reminded the Architect of some of the mammalian species whose DNA was incorporated into their own body. It appeared that she was a member of one of the nursing sexes of her species, assuming they even HAD sexes. How DID humans reproduce?
Their analytical gaze fell to her hips – wide enough to potentially allow the passage of a fairly large infant, which reinforced their theory about her being a pregnancy-capable mammal.
That’s right, they realized, she mentioned that “all humans dream – many other mammals, too,” implying that they are indeed mammals.
Do Earth mammals reproduce the same way as the goats used for Architect vessels?
After all the time they’d spent living with Robin, it was strange to realize how much they still didn’t know about their human friend.
Before they could start to analyze her limbs, her eyes blinked open, lost in thought, and Al-An’s mind went back to the line they were planning to use to start the conversation.
Then Robin screamed.
The sound was so shockingly sudden that it jolted Al-An back a step, and the lines on their skin flared with fear. The human dropped into a crouch, guarding her chest with her arms, and a prickling wave of pins and needles rolled across the Architect’s back as their mind raced with deadly possibilities.
In an instant, they were standing in front of Robin, whirling to face the door and splaying their mechanical arms in readiness to fend off whatever predator had found its way into the base.
An empty room met their gaze, and they stared at it in bewilderment, trying to understand what had just happened. SOMETHING had frightened their much smaller friend, but surely it couldn’t have been them.
“Al-An?!” Robin’s voice was sharp with agitation, and had risen to at least one point five octaves above its usual pitch. “What are you doing?!”
“I had come here to seek conversation with you,” they replied, glancing down at her. For some reason, she continued to crouch, adjusting her hands so they blocked Al-An’s view of her nursing appendages. “When you reacted with alarm, I assumed that a predator had entered the room behind me.”
“Oh…” To their mixed confusion and relief, there was laughter in her still-shaky voice. “No, it’s not that, it’s just – in my culture, it’s really inappropriate to walk in on someone and look at them when they’re naked. You startled me, and… I freaked out a bit.”
“Naked?” the Architect echoed, their mind latching onto the most confusing part of her statement even as they obligingly redirected their gaze to the wall opposite Robin. “But… I am naked all the time, and you never complained. I had therefore assumed that your clothing was purely for thermal regulation purposes.”
A disturbing thought sprang to their mind, and their gaze dropped to their own body. “Is it… inappropriate for me to be naked in your presence?”
“Well… not exactly.”
The sound of bare footsteps pattered behind Al-An, followed by the rustle of fabric rubbing against skin, and they pushed down the inquisitive impulse to visually confirm the source of the sound. It was probably just Robin using a towel.
Instead, they resolutely pinned their gaze on the wall opposite their friend.
“There are specific parts of humans’ bodies that are used for reproduction,” Robin explained, “and we tend to reserve those parts for the people we’re… you know… mating with. For anyone else to look at them is an invasion of privacy.”
“Your people seem to consider a great many things private,” Al-An observed. “My people share all of our thoughts, and no part of our bodies is considered secret or… inappropriate. Is it not…”
“I hope you’re not gonna say ‘inefficient’ or ‘primitive’ again,” she warned them, amid the familiar sound of her putting on her All-Environment Protection Suit.
Annoyance at her touchiness flickered through Al-An, but returning it in kind would only risk causing a chain reaction, so they tempered their tone into one of mildly tested patience. “I was going to say ‘isolating’.”
She went quiet for a moment, and the tension in the Architect’s chest eased slightly as the human stepped into view, now fully clothed and no longer dangerous to look at.
They rested their gaze on her face, and from the glint of compassion in her eyes, they suspected she had already guessed at the feelings behind their comment.
“We don’t tend to think of it that way,” she replied. “Yes, humans can get lonely, and yes, the limits of verbal and physical communication can make it harder for some people to understand each other, which can make it harder for them to make friends.
“But I don’t think that would go away if everyone stopped wearing clothes. Maybe it would if we were networked, but… I don’t think humans have the mental processing power to listen to all the other humans and concentrate on our work at the same time.”
“It is difficult for young Architects as well,” Al-An observed. “But they become accustomed to it, over time.”
“How young are you when you get networked? For that matter, how do you make new Architects?” Robin’s moment of alarm was long gone, and her scientific curiosity had risen fully to the fore. “I mean, if it isn’t inappropriate to ask.”
“Why would it be inappropriate? My people do not have the same focus on privacy that yours do.”
“True. So, how do you do it?” she asked, tugging gently on Al-An’s hand before moving toward the kitchen.
“We are initially grown from fertilized seeds,” they explained as they followed her. “One parent provides the seed; the other provides the material with which to fertilize it. The latter material could be compared to the pollen produced by some flowers, but it is distinct enough that I do not believe there is a human word for it.”
“I see. So it’s sort of like the way humans do it, then,” she observed as she picked a lantern fruit. “Except our ‘seeds’ grow into babies inside the womb.”
“I had suspected as much; the width of your hips implies an adaptation for live birth. In our case, such features are unnecessary; the seed is grown in a controlled environment outside the parents’ bodies, and fitted with external cybernetic components that connect them to the network.”
“You mean like plants in a greenhouse?”
“There are some similarities between our infant-rearing centers and greenhouses, yes, though of course the children growing there require far more training than plants, and their roots develop into feet after the first few years.”
“What happens after that?” Her eyes sparked with fascination, staying fixed on Al-An’s face as she bit into her breakfast.
“During our early years,” they explained, “we are trained by specialized caretakers who observe our thoughts and inclinations, and guide us to pursuits that are suited to our desires and skills. Once our initial bodies are developed enough to reproduce, we are transferred into our first synthetic form.
“Seeds and fertilizing materials are then harvested from the abandoned body and used to create new Architects, while the remainder of the body is then used as raw materials for the construction of enhanced and augmented versions of that form.”
“Huh,” Robin mused, her voice slowing as her mind focused on digesting Al-An’s words. “It sounds… efficient…”
“It is,” the Architect responded, pride warming their voice. But the feeling swiftly cooled when they saw the frown on Robin’s face.
“But it also,” the human continued slowly, “seems kind of… cold.”
“Their environment is always kept at temperature suited to the children’s needs,” Al-An reassured her, even as a nagging suspicion crept over then, whispering that that wasn’t what she was worried about.
Sure enough, Robin was quick to clarify. “I meant emotionally cold. Human babies depend on their parents for everything, from nourishment to guidance to emotional support. If they don’t have frequent, positive physical and emotional contact, they can develop emotional problems. But it sounds like you don’t even know your parents, and your parents didn’t know each other.”
“As I said shortly after we first met, my people do not… did not… think of ourselves as individual, distinct. My caretaker and my biological parents were all a part of the same network, and each child is just as valuable to every adult as the children produced from their own genetic materials.
“If anything, for a child’s mind to grow in isolation, forced to analyze their experiences with nothing but their own limited mental capacity and knowledge, while being driven to conceal parts of their bodies and minds, seems far colder and more lonely than the methods I described, especially if adults besides their parents value them less than their own parents do.”
A thoughtful frown clouded Robin’s face, and the hand that had been rising to take another bite fell away from her face. “I guess… it’s all a matter of perspective, and of what each species needs,” she commented slowly.
“Human children bond deeply with their parents or their primary caregivers in specific, and long-term separation from those caregivers causes serious emotional problems, even if someone else is taking good care of them.
“But I guess if their emotional needs are being met by their trainers, and by the network as a whole, the separation from their parents wouldn’t be so bad.”
“If it is any reassurance,” Al-An noted, “I do not recall having developed any emotional complications as a result of my upbringing.”
“That’s good to hear. Goodness knows life’s been emotionally complicated enough for you without having that on top of it.”
Now that was a reminder they didn’t want. As they so often did when that subject came up, Al-An quickly changed the topic. “You seemed to find it troubling that our parents did not ‘know’ each other – presumably in the sense of having chosen to reproduce with each other in specific.
“Am I to take it your people choose mates with whom to have offspring based on social familiarity?”
“Yeah, that’s part of it. There’s also emotional compatibility, shared life goals, shared beliefs, agreements on how to raise the children… that sort of thing. And, of course, physical attraction – though that’s more of a priority for some people than others.”
“I see. And do you…”
Their voice trailed off, their biological arms pressing tighter against their torso and their mechanical arms curling slightly as their face fell. There is so much I can offer her, as a fellow scientist and as a friend. But this…
“Do I… what?” Robin prompted, watching Al-An closely as she took another bite, and they made themselves face her squarely.
“Do you miss the possibility of finding a mate? I doubt you will find any suitable candidates on the planets we explore.”
A thoughtful frown crossed her face, but to Al-An’s relief, it didn’t seem like a look of regret. They’d learned to identify that expression when she spoke of how she wished she’d told Sam how much she admired her older sister when she had the chance.
“Well,” her musing voice replied, “no, not really. I guess I was always kind of ‘married to my work,’ as the saying goes. Not that I ruled out the possibility of finding someone, but… it was never really a priority.
“And even if I did find a potential partner, I’m happy with the life I have now, so they’d have to be someone who was willing to be a part of that life, not someone who’d ask me to leave it behind for them.”
“I am relieved to hear that,” the Architect admitted, their shoulders relaxing as a tension they hadn’t realized they were carrying drained out of them. “I had begun to worry that I might be holding you back from something you wanted – or that someday you might leave in order to pursue it.”
“Oh, Al-An…” She set the lantern fruit on the table, then turned to face her friend, and their two bodies slipped into a familiar dance that had become as natural as breath.
The human stepped toward the Architect. A mechanical hand bent to face her, the green light of a tractor beam streaming from its center.
Robin rose into the air until she was eye-to-face with Al-An, then her hands gently rose to cradle her friend’s face. “I told you,” she said, her voice husky and soft, “I’m committed to helping you. I’m not going to run off and leave you to mourn your entire species alone.
“Besides, I love the life we have right now. Yes, some parts are hard, and we both have people we miss. And yes, there is a learning curve – sometimes we’re going to screw up, like you walking in on me when I’m naked, or me projecting human childcare needs onto people who aren’t human.
“But it’s part of science, and it’s part of life, to grow, and learn, and get better. And I have more opportunity to do that here than I will have anywhere else I can think of.
“People don’t have to marry to be happy together. There’s a whole universe to discover, and I want to discover it with you.”
A face without eyes could not cry, but that didn’t stop Al-An’s body and voice from trembling. “Thank you, Robin. I… do not know what I’d do without you.”
“I know.” She gave their face a gentle tug, and they reflexively drew her closer, lower, until she could wrap her arms around them and embrace their shoulder with her chin.
“Nobody can guarantee how long they’ll be around,” she whispered as their arms pressed her close, then her body shook against the Architect’s chest in a short, rueful laugh. “Sam’s last lesson to me. But I plan to stay with you as long as I can.”
“I hope that is a very long time,” Al-An replied solemnly, squeezing her a bit tighter. I hope it is forever.
“Yeah,” she said quietly, her hand tracing gentle lines on the back of her friend’s bowed head. “I do, too.”
Author's note:
If you want to read my original stories, you can find them here.
And if you'd like to help me publish new stories faster, please consider supporting me on Patreon, so I can spend more time writing and less time doing other things to make money.
If you want to read my original stories, you can find them here.
And if you'd like to help me publish new stories faster, please consider supporting me on Patreon, so I can spend more time writing and less time doing other things to make money.