Errors of Linearity

Katherine accelerated and the world slowed to the speed of pouring honey.

In the stretched space between heartbeats, she had time to catalogue everything of value. The reflection of the campfire in the blues of Maksym’s iris. The minute, pale, recently shaved hairs along his jaw. The slight parting of his lips. A bead of moisture at the corner of his mouth. The smell of: beer on his breath, human sweat and the faint chemical ghost of the prank-shop stink bombs lingering in his backpack sixteen and a half feet away.

She could have stayed there, could have lived a hundred subjective hours in the space before the kiss, optimizing the approach angle, calculating the ideal pressure and duration based on millions of archived examples of human osculation.

She accepted the slower, linear time, and chose to decelerate. Decided to let it happen, not wanting to spend eternity in the extra Syntropic, ever repeating, often looping labyrinth of weapon-net’s thoughts.

She chose the linear and the real.

Their lips met.

It was nothing like what the data suggested it would be. The words and images described the mechanics of the interaction, yes, mentioned the exchange of breath and fluids, explained the firing of dopamine receptors.

None of the examples within human romance novels mentioned the way her entire sensor array went mad, winking out for a fraction of a second, every subroutine going blissfully, marvelously silent. The literature failed to prepare her for the wonderful sensation of his mouth against hers. It didn’t account for the small sound he made in his throat, one she instantly archived and mentally replayed and archived again, under another filename just to be safe.

Maksym’s hands came up, discovering the edge of her jaw, fingertips tracing the seam where hexaglass weave met the softer organic printed flesh beneath. She leaned into his touch, letting out soft, uncontrollable whimpers herself.

Then as the kiss continued on, his right hand slid under her jacket and across her back, fingers pressing deep into the hexagonal mesh, rubbing and kneading.

When they separated, his breath came in short, visible puffs against the mountain air. The fire popped as a small log shifted, sending a column of sparks skyward.

“Wowza. What an electric kiss,” Maksym breathed out, “Definitely nothing like making out with a human! The shape of your elongated snout and mouth are totally wicked.”

“I… got no comparisons,” she replied, “it’s my… first kiss.”

The weapon-network held no such data, she was the first gun unit to kiss a person.

“Nice” He grinned. “Also, someone’s paw pads are glowing extra hard.”

She looked at her paws. The heart-shaped pads indeed blazed brilliant crimson. The displays on her chest, head and shoulders were running a continuous loop of pixelated fireworks, undulating from gold, to ruby red to violet.

“Heh. You’re like a Times Square billboard for kissing,” he commented. “Orrrr a cute lava lamp.”

“Shall I tune them down? Are they distracting?” She wondered.

“Nah!” he rebutted. “Keep ‘ em on forever. I love how the patterns never repeat. Are you generating them on the fly?”

“Mhmm,” she agreed, “they’re an algorithmic visualization of how I feel.”

“Fan-ta-sss-tic!” His hands slid across her body and pulled her in. She accepted the second kiss.

This time, it was longer, slower, less inexperienced, making her surrender more to the fiery sensations.

One of the [THREAT DETECTED] brackets tried to engage acceleration, but she told it very firmly to sit down and to shut up. Kisses weren’t a threat. She belonged to linear time, to the ridiculous, chatty, human boy in the flannel jacket she knew for exactly six hours, forty two minutes and eleven seconds.

His hands moved lower, exploring the curves of her behind.

Katherine made a sound akin to a hard drive spinning up and a kitten sneezing at the same time.

“Hrm. What was that?” The cheeky human pulled back, grinning.

“I doo0on’t know,” she hiccuped, “it never happened before. I think that my v-cast hexagrams are experiencing some sort of sympathetic resonance with my organic larynx.”

“Totally the cutest thing I’ve heard in my entire life! Do it again!” He encouraged.

“I cannot replicate involuntary sounds on command!”

“We’ll see about that!”

They fell into another kiss, like two comets on a collision course. The sound happened again, a mechanical-organic chirp escaping the back of her throat.

“There it goes!” He pulled back triumphant. “The Kat-purr!”

“Not a ‘purr’. A mildly anomalous organic-magitek internal system discrepancy.”

“Nah, it’s a lovely purr and I’m naming it… The Kat-purr. Patent pending. Trademarked. NFT minted.”

She momentarily flashed into accelerated time to learn what NFTs were.

“Are you planning to profit off my noises?” She demanded when she returned.

“Planning to? I’m already profiting massively! The richest man on Earth cannot buy what I have in my hands now.” He squeezed her waist.

Katherine ribbed her entire face against his like an oversized feline, unable to control the urge to be closer to him. Three red eyes stared into two blue ones. The fire crackled. The western sky held its last stripe of amber along the Pacific horizon, deep indigo pressing down from the zenith where the first bold stars had punched through. The hanging valley cupped them in granite palms, the lupine swaying in a breeze.

“Hey Kasia,” Maksym murmured.

“Mm.”

“I really like you.”

“I really like you too… Maksymilian Tadeusz Drzewiecki,” she whispered back.

“Full name deployment, hum? Fancy!”

“It seemed appropriate for the gravity of the declaration.”

“Only one sus issue,” he pointed out “I didn’t tell you my middle name…”

“Ah,” she blushed with pixelated red stars, realising her mistake. “I asked gun unit Setty to look up and download your entire human internet profile for me.”

“Le gasp! My robot girlfriend is an online stalker!”

“Technically I didn’t stalk anyone, Setty did.”

“Double le gasp, weaponized associate stalking!” He laughed and then kissed the bridge of her snout, right between the two lower eyes, where hexaglass met the tiny sensor array. Katherine’s displays went completely blank for half a second before rebooting into a cascade of pink and gold falling stars cutting through layers of colorful auroras.

“Critical emotional overload,” she whisper-crackled. “Recommend immediate additional stimulus.”

“Is that a fancy robot way of asking for more kisses?”

“Yes.”

“See, you could have led with that.”

“Where is the fun in being so obvious?” She teased.

He grinned so wide his eyes crinkled into slits, and then his hands were in her hexagonal hair, fingers caressing the tube-like dreadlocks, and she was pulling him sideways off the log and onto the grass. They tumbled together, the flannel jackets flapping against each other, his leg hooking over her hip, her tail thrashing and coiling madly.

His fingers slid along her lower back towards her tail and she arched into the touch with another chirp-purr.

“Aww yeah! So many cute new noises,” Maksym chortled. 

With a growl, she pinned his wrists to the grass. The firelight painted the couple in shifting gold and copper, and the stars above framed her antennae-ears in silver pinpricks.

“I could hold you here as long as I desire to, you know,” Katherine informed him smugly. “My structural reinforcement exceeds your maximum force output by a factor of two thousand.”

“Awesome.” He laughed, trying to free himself and failing to. “A girl being able to pin me down is a first for me. Hey, can I touch your ears?”

Katherine considered the request. From Kawathra’s specs the ear-blades housed tertiary sensor clusters and served as auxiliary antenna for her comm array. They were, functionally, mostly military hardware.

“You may,” she permitted, releasing his wrists with a warm smile.

His freed hand reached up and traced the edge of the blade from base to tip.

Katherine’s entire body locked up from the sensation, every display flickering with vibrant flowers being pollinated by fat bees. A new, loud noise fled from her mouth, somewhere between a dial-up modem connecting and a very surprised songbird.

“Pff,” Maksym wheezed. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Katherine’s voice came out higher than intended. “Resume normal activities!”

“Your entire body went rigid like a cartoon character getting electrocuted!”

“Innacurate comparison. I am fully functional and not electrocuted in the slightest!”

“Kasia, your chest display is showing the Windows blue screen of death.”

She looked down. It was, in fact, currently displaying a very convincing replica of a BSOD, with a spinning loading wheel and the text “EMOTIONAL_KERNEL_PANIC” in white letters.

“I didn’t know that the Frontenachii tech runs on windows,” he laughed.

“It… doesn’t,” she let out, squinting at the chest screen. “As I mentioned before, the screens generate images relevant to whatever I feel, referencing the human cultural databases I’ve processed.”

He touched the base of the ear again, making her whimper and wiggle above him. The BSOD screen folded into a pixelated, blue, liquid flower.

“Your ears are an erogenous zone! Ha! This is the greatest discovery since fire. I’m going to publish a paper. ‘On the Psychophysical Response of Cyborg Ear-Blade Stimulation: A Comprehensive Field Study by M. Drzewiecki.’”

“What?! You will do no such thing!”

“Maybe write an article for National Geographic! Front page headline: ‘LOCAL MAN DISCOVERS ALIEN CYBORG’S WEAKNESS IS… EAR SCRITCHES!’”

Katherine lunged and kissed him specifically to make him shut up. It worked. His arms wrapped around her neck and pulled her down and the ear-blade discovery was temporarily shelved in favor of more pressing research of pawing at her chest.

“Aww yus. I’ve been wanting to touch these absolute puppies since forever ago.” He commented.

“That’s not mathematically possible,” she rebutted with an involuntary wiggle. “We only met today.”

“Sure, but I’ve been dreaming about you my entire life.”

“Even in the womb?” She chortled. “How exactly did you dream about me before you met me? According to Datamancer analysis, this planet lacks Seers.”

“Okay, fine, not that far back and I definitely don’t have a magic third eye or whatevs. Buuuut, I dreamt about the idea of you… since I was around seven,” the human confessed. 

“The idea of me?”

“A robot girlfriend with whack powers like… transforming into a flying bike.”

“Why, though? Wouldn’t it be more naturally sensible as a human to dream about a more… realistically attainable human girlfriend?”

“There was this show on TV when I was a kid,” he confessed, “My Life as a Teenage Robot.”

Katherine immediately accelerated, reviewing several episodes of the series. “Interesting…” she commented when she returned. “I don’t exactly look like Zeniya the cartoon robot though.”

“Pfff, yeah,” Maksym commented, kneading her chest giddily and making her whimper and wiggle above him. “You’re real. That’s a bazillion times better.”

“Still,” Katherine shuddered. “I am… ahhh… curious. The wayback machine archive of your Goodbook profile suggests that you’ve dated at least eighty two human girls. Why didn’t you… ahhh!… Establish a long form bond classified as ‘marriage’ with any of them?”

Maksym let out a loud, barking laugh. “Definitely not refuting the stalker accusations.”

“Is that… Uhmmmm… Ahh!… bad?”

“Nope, this is exactly the sort of fantastic twists I desire in a relationship. Human girls behave… very stereotypically, which bugs me immensely.” he stated.

“What’s… ahhhh… wrong with meeting typical expectations?” She wondered, letting out a series of moan-chirps at the actions of his villainous hands teasing her body all over.

“I’m bothered by the probability curve of human behavior in relationships. Dates one to twenty were all unique experiences, sure,” he revealed. “Then around thirty I started getting serious déjà vu. By fifty it’s akin to speedrunning the same conversation tree in a dating sim. ‘Oh, you like hiking?’ Yes. ‘Oh, you have a sister?’ Yes. ‘Oh, you work out?’ Always! By date seventy I could predict the breakup reason within the first three dates with ninety percent accuracy.”

Katherine processed this, swaying and panting above him. “You’re… suggesting that human romantic partners converge toward a behavioral mean?”

“Yeah. Like, individually everyone thinks they’re a special snowflake, and sure, on a micro level they are. Different favorite movies, different pizza topping appreciation, different hobbies. Overall though, I simply get bored in a mundane relationship and… run away.”

“Why?”

“The thing is, Kasia, I’ve always been… wired differently. My best bud Ash often calls me a primal example of a ‘space orc’ because of that.”

“Why?” Katherine echoed while arching her back to present more of her body to his greedy fingers.

“Ah, it references this, uhm, geddit sub called ‘HumansAreSpaceOrcs’. The premise is, from the perspective of theoretical aliens… Is that humans are batshit insane species who drink poison for fun, domesticate apex predators such as cats and strap controlled explosions to metal tubes to aim them at the moon. Like, we eat capsaicin, a chemical designed specifically to cause pain, and then compete over who can eat the most of it. Etcetera.”

“These are all… Ahhhhhh… indeed accurate observations about your species,” she panted, bright red tongue out.

“Uh-huh and most humans operate within a normal range of space-orc-ness. Take a variety of risks in manageable doses. A spicy wing challenge. Occasional drinking or smoking. Maybe a motorcycle or a goth phase.” He tapped his chest. “Me, on the other hand, I got dealt a genetic hand making me way more space orc than the average!”

“You’re an orc… ahh… from space? I don’t understand,” she let out, too distracted by what his hands were doing to her body to accelerate out. “Orcs are a fictional race from your fantasy books by Tolkien. Also, humans cannot live in space for long periods of time. Your bodies aren’t well adapted to zero gravity conditions.”

“Do you know how human reproduction functions, Kasia?” Maksym asked. “Like, the actual mechanics?”

“I have extensive theoretical knowledge of cellular mitosis and meiosis, plus general mammalian reproductive biology,” Katherine stated primly. “But I can learn more. One moment!” She grabbed his roaming hands, holding them prisoner and accelerated.