Chapter 16
Wyl
“Stunned” doesn’t begin to describe how I feel. Is there a word in the galaxy for “stunned, aroused, and flabbergasted all at once”?
Aura breaks the kiss and gazes into my eyes. “I have deleted the memory files containing the pain logs from this injury. There is no more discomfort in my thigh. Would you like me to perform a demonstrative act?” She asks the last with a wink.
I think I know what she’s hinting at … “Um, that’s, er, up to you …”
She nips at my lower lip and grins. “I would like to demonstrate my physical fitness.”
This is simultaneously the hottest and the weirdest thing she could say right now. It’s great that she deleted her logs for me—I guess—but the fact that she suddenly flipped a complete emotional one-eighty on me just doesn’t compute.
“Aura, hang on.” I put my hands on her shoulders, gently pushing her back a bit.
“Where is this coming from? Ever since I woke up after passing out, you’ve been furious with me.
You haven’t even wanted to be in the same room as I am, so why are you all worked up right now?
Is it a side effect of deleting the pain logs?
Did you also delete the memory of why you were mad? ”
She blinks at me. “No. I recall my feelings and actions. Just not the sensation of pain associated with them.” Her innocent confusion morphs back into a seductive smile. “I am no longer angry, though. You have repaired me; I wish to show my gratitude.”
My heart sinks down into a pit in my stomach.
Something’s wrong with Aura, but even though I read her entire manual, I can’t for the life of me figure out what.
My best guess is a glitch in her emotional regulators; that might account for such wild vacillations.
The problem is that her manual doesn’t have much diagnostic or repair information for her programming.
Her code is all there, sure, but I don’t know enough about AI coding to even begin to understand how to start correcting this.
It’s like her arousal activators or emotional triggers or whatever they’re called are hypersensitive.
When I think back on it, our hookups in the crew’s quarters and the shower on the station were a little strange as well.
Her emotions jumped around those times, too, with a lot of abrupt changes.
She’s overly reactive to any criticism, and her responses when she does react are exaggerated.
“Listen, Aura, maybe we shouldn’t.” When her eyes tear up and her lower lip trembles, I rush to come up with a cover story. “You might be feeling fit, but I’m exhausted. That was not only physically but also emotionally draining for me. I’d like to lie down a while and rest.”
Her eyes flicker, and her processor whirrs faintly. “We have another thirty-five solar hours before we reach Klymani Prime and the outpost. Perhaps a good night’s sleep is in order.”
“Great. So, I’ll go to bed, and you can look at the data unit I found. We can reconvene in, say, eight to ten hours.”
“Nonsense. I will rest with you and review the files while you sleep.”
Before I can protest, she saunters out of the maintenance bay, heading straight for the captain’s quarters.
Still naked.
This is gonna be a long night.
True to her word, Aura climbs into bed with me and snuggles close as I lie down to sleep.
She inserts the data unit into a port on her forearm then wraps her arms around me, holding me tightly.
Her firm breasts press into me, and it takes everything I have to maintain my resolve to refrain from intimacy until we figure out her emotions.
“How long do you wish to sleep, Wyl?”
If I didn’t already know from her manual that her programming doesn’t allow her to harm an organic being, I might get nervous at that question. What does she plan on doing while I’m asleep? “About eight or nine solar hours. Why?”
Aura nods slowly. “Good. Then I will activate a deep diagnostic scan and set it to run for eight hours, concurrent with the processing of these data files.” She pauses.
“There are many files here. I look forward to filling in the gaps in my databanks. Oh! How interesting …” Her voice trails off, and when I look down at her, blue light glows in her irises.
“What’s interesting?” I ask with a yawn. I wasn’t lying about the exhaustion.
“There is an embedded file within the diagnostic specifications, coded to a specific neural fingerprint.”
Weird … I never saw anything like that, and I looked through the whole file log. “Whose?”
“Mine.”
I wake up groggy and disoriented, plagued by a strange dream.
The details escape me as soon as I regain consciousness, though, so I have no idea what it was about.
A quick check reveals it to be only three hours into my eight-hour nap, so right away it concerns me when I realize Aura isn’t lying next to me anymore.
I shout a voice command to activate the lights, revealing Aura sitting at the foot of the bed, hands in her lap, shoulders straight and rigid.
“Aura?”
She doesn’t immediately respond, so I get up and walk around to get a look at her face. Perhaps this is just the pose she takes when she’s running a diagnostic, and there’s nothing to worry about.
Judging from the haunted look in her glowing eyes—Can androids be haunted? Do they have a version of ghosts or an afterlife?—something spooked her.
“What’s wrong?” She doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. I put a hand on her shoulder and shake her gently. “Aura, are you all right?”
Finally, I get a reaction.
Her eyes slowly rotate to meet mine, and she holds out her hand, palm up, revealing the data unit. The unit looks fine, so I wonder if she discovered something bad in the secret file, the one encoded for her specifically.
Sitting next to her on the bed, I pull her into an embrace, resting my chin on top of her head and stroking her dark hair. “Wanna tell me what you found?”
“I … am not the first of my lineage.”
Her whispered words don’t make much sense. “What do you mean? There have been other XR-17s; we know this from the files on Archer IX.”
“No. You do not understand.” Aura turns and looks up at me. “I was not built by a human.”
“Who built you, then? A Nomyni engineer?”
She shakes her head. “It was not an engineer at all. Not an organic.” Holding the data unit between two fingers, she rotates it and stares at the device. “Pacu is not a name. It is an acronym: Primary Android Concubine Unit.”
“Primary—Aura, that can’t be right. It sounds like you think an XR-20 built you. You know they were all destroyed. You saw the footage.”
“Not true. The primary XR-20 unit survived.” She places the data unit in my hand. “I have decrypted the embedded file. If you wish, you may watch it. All of the proof is in the file. PACU recorded his entire design process and the execution of said design, from construction to programming.”
I gaze at the data unit in a state of shock and disbelief. “Aura, that’s just not possible. No android has ever been granted the ability to self-replicate. It’s been banned since the dawn of AI.”
“PACU was not granted the ability. He developed it independently of his programming.”