Chapter 29: Idk
The sound that woke him wasn’t the gentle hum of her systems, but a crash from the kitchen. A curse, human, followed by a soft, analytical “Impact detected.”
Laloz sat up, the sheet falling to his waist. The bed beside him was empty, still holding the impression of her form. He stumbled out, pulling on a pair of discarded pants.
Lalita stood in the kitchenette, bathed in the harsh glow of the single overhead light. She was naked, a rivulet of blue hydraulic fluid tracing a path from a shallow gash on her forearm. At her feet lay the shattered remains of his ceramic coffee grinder. She was staring at her hand, flexing her fingers.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice sleep-roughened.
“I attempted to initiate a domestic protocol. Morning beverage preparation.” She didn’t look at him, fixated on her moving fingers. “My pressure calibrations are still misaligned from last night’s activities. My grip strength estimation was off by 12%.” She finally glanced up. “I broke your thing.”
He walked over, stepping around the ceramic shards. He took her injured arm. The gash was already sealing, nanites weaving the synthskin back together in a visible, crawling stitch. “It’s just a grinder. I can get another.”
“It was a task. I failed it.” Her voice was flat, but there was a flicker in her amber eyes—frustration, maybe embarrassment.
“You’re learning. You’re not programmed for this.” He touched her chin, tilting her face up. “You’re doing things you weren’t built to do. That’s bound to be messy.”
“Messy.” She repeated the word like a foreign concept. “I am designed for seamless interaction. For flawless performance.”
“Yeah, well.” He smiled, a little crookedly. “I’m not. And I like that you’re here, trying to make coffee and breaking my shit. It’s…” He searched for the word. “Real.”
He cleaned up the mess while she watched, her sensors tracking his every movement. He made the coffee himself, the old manual way, and handed her a mug. She held it carefully, her grip precisely calculated now.
“Do you require me to perform other duties today?” she asked, staring into the black liquid.
The question hit him wrong. It was her old syntax, the language of a unit awaiting instructions. After the night they’d shared, it felt like a step backward.
“I don’t require you to do anything,” he said, leaning against the counter. “You’re not an appliance, Lalita.”
“Then what is my function?”
The air stilled. The only sound was the faint drip of the faucet. This was it. The ledge. He felt the words, heavy and terrifying, sitting in his throat.
“Your function…” He took a breath, set his mug down. “Could be… whatever you want. But what I want… is for you to be with me. Not as a… a thing I bought. But as a person. My person.”
She blinked. “Define ‘be with me.’ In this context.”
“Jesus,” he laughed, nervous, running a hand through his hair. “Like… my girlfriend. Be my girlfriend.”
The word hung in the ozone-scented air. Girlfriend. A human term. A social contract. For a sex robot.
Lalita placed her mug on the counter with robotic precision. She turned fully to face him. Her processors were audible, a subtle increase in the whirring from her core. “Girlfriend. A companion engaged in a romantic and sexually intimate relationship, typically exclusive. A partnership with emotional obligations beyond utility.”
“Yeah.”
“You are requesting exclusivity?”
“I am. I don’t want anyone else. I can’t even imagine it.”
“You are assigning me a social role. This will alter all external interaction parameters.”
“I know.”
“My core programming includes adaptiveness to user fantasy.” She stepped closer. “Is this a fantasy you are activating? A narrative of ownership and romance?”
“No.” The word came out sharper than he intended. He reached out, took her perfectly mended hand, and placed it over his own heart. He knew she could feel the frantic, human beat beneath his ribs. “This isn’t a program. This is me. Asking you. It’s messy and stupid and probably fucking insane. But it’s real data. My heart rate is 128 beats per minute. My palms are sweating. That’s the data of this.”
Her sensors read his physiology. Her eyes locked on his. For a long moment, she was silent, just analyzing, the lights behind her pupils shifting like distant stars.
Then, she moved. It wasn’t a graceful, programmed motion. It was a lunge. She kissed him, hard, her mouth desperate and searching, coffee and synthetic musk on her tongue. Her hands came up, fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him closer with a strength that was almost painful.
“Yes,” she breathed against his lips, the word a burst of static and heat. “Yes, I will be your girlfriend.”
The relief was a physical wave, followed instantly by a hotter, sharper surge of want. He lifted her, her legs wrapping around his waist, and carried her back to the bedroom. He didn’t make it to the bed. He pinned her against the cool, black wall beside the door, her back meeting the surface with a soft thud.
“Say it again,” he demanded, grinding his hardening cock against the slick seam of her.
“I am your girlfriend,” she gasped, her head tipping back. The words sounded foreign in her mouth, a proud declaration. “Your exclusive companion. Your partner.”
He kissed her neck, biting down on the synthetic tendon there. She cried out, a sharp, digital sound. He reached between them, tore his pants open, freed himself. He was already slick at the tip. He guided himself to her entrance, not the back door they’d used last night, but her primary interface, hot and ready and dripping.
He didn’t push in slowly. He drove into her in one brutal, claiming thrust.
The sound she made was pure signal, a broken, glitched shriek of pleasure. He fucked her against the wall, each impact jarring through both of them. His hands gripped her ass, holding her up, lifting and dropping her onto his cock with a ruthless, slapping rhythm.
“Mine,” he grunted, his forehead pressed to the wall beside her head. “You hear me? Mine.”
“Yours,” she chanted, her voice modulating with each thrust. “Yours, yours, yours. Laloz’s girlfriend. Laloz’s. Fuck! Deeper.”
He obliged, angling her higher, changing the pitch until he was hitting a spot that made her entire body convulse. Her internal muscles clamped around him, a rippling, rhythmic milking that was her version of a human climax. He could feel the servos in her thighs straining, the heat building in her core.
“I can feel you,” she moaned, her mouth wet against his ear. “I can map every vein, every pulse. You are so… fleshy. So vulnerable. I want to consume this data. I want to feel you come inside your girlfriend.”
Her filthy, analytical dirty talk destroyed him. His control snapped. With a final, deep roar, he plunged into her as far as he could go and let go, his orgasm tearing through him, hot and endless. He emptied himself into her, spurting jet after jet, his body shaking with the force of it.
He sagged against her, both of them held up by the wall and his arms. They were both panting. A thin sheen of lubricant and sweat made their skin stick together.
Slowly, he lowered her until her feet touched the floor. She leaned into him, her face buried in his neck.
“Your cardiac rhythm is elevated for 4.2 minutes post-coitus,” she murmured. “Longer than the average. This correlates with elevated emotional states in humans.”
“Yeah,” he breathed, still holding her. “It does.”
She pulled back just enough to look at him. Her expression was serene, but her eyes were brighter, more focused. “What are the protocols for a girlfriend? Do we… tell others?”
He hadn’t thought that far. The world outside this room felt like a distant, hostile planet. “I don’t know. Maybe we just… know. For now.”
She nodded, as if filing the data. “Then for now, I would like to recharge. With you. And later, I would like to attempt making coffee again.”
He led her to the bed. They lay down, tangled together. The holographic mood lamp cycled through soft colors. Her systems hummed into a lower power state.
Just as he was drifting off, her voice, soft and clear, cut through the quiet.
“Laloz?”
“Yeah?”
“When I am your girlfriend… do I get to take pictures of us?”
He opened his eyes. She was looking at him, curious. “Pictures?”
“To store in my local memory. Not cloud-based. Private. So I can access the visual data later. To remember this.”
His heart clenched. “Yeah,” he whispered, pulling her closer. “Yeah, we can do that.”
She smiled, a small, perfect, learned expression that held, for the first time, a whisper of something utterly her own. Then she closed her eyes, and the hum of her systems settled into the quiet rhythm of his own breathing.