13. Voice of Reason

So. Melpomene sleeps topless. I didn’t really expect that, but y’know. Here we are. Here we have been, for like half an hour now.

Melpomene lies unconscious on her back in front of me, one arm and one breast hanging out from under the covers. And I am just… also here. Standing motionlessly in her room because the magical door lock is still active and I can’t convince myself that it would be my master’s will to break that and leave.

It’s almost funny, you know? She has this big, insane rant about how I’m an untrustworthy liar, and then she goes and leaves herself half-naked and completely helpless right in front of me. Is this a test? Is she an exhibitionist? Is she just stupid? I don’t know. Perhaps I will never know.

God, she has really big boobs though. I’m jealous as hell. My chestplate looks nice and all, but if there’s one thing about my old body I miss (and it probably is exclusively one thing) it’s the boobs. I worked hard for those. Metal just doesn’t have that satisfying squish, you know?

…

This is such a weird fucking situation to be stuck in. What is my life? I feel like an anime character, but instead of the situation becoming increasingly wacky I’m just getting really bored. Like, it’s a nice boob, I’m definitely gay enough to appreciate it, but like… it’s just a boob. I know what they look like. It’s really not exciting enough to occupy my attention if it’s just sitting there. There’s just… not a lot else to look at. I do not, after all, think Melpomene would appreciate me exploring her room, and since I also can’t convince myself to leave it I just sort of have to stand here until she wakes up.

Hmm. It’s interesting that I can burn lust, actually. (I’m pretty sure that’s the northwestish emotion in my logs, anyway.) I obviously don’t have a reproductive system anymore, not to mention hormones or glands or erogenous zones. The solid metal plate between my legs is no more exciting to touch than any other part of my body, though the thought of getting cleaned down there is… well, I’d be blushing if I was capable of it. I guess that explains the strangeness. Eroticism isn’t exclusive to the physical appeals and pleasures of sex. It’s present in all sorts of things based on preferences and cultural associations. Those carry over to my new form, since they’re all just in my head anyway.

…I probably can’t orgasm anymore, though. That’s a bummer.

…

Maybe Thea could build me like a… okay, okay, calm down. I need to focus on productive trains of thought, like how to convince Melpomene to give me more free will. Why am I even thinking about this?

…Right, the boob, yeah. You know what, fuck this, I’m going into sleep mode. I’m sure I’ll snap back to attention if something important happens.

One hour, forty-three minutes, and two seconds into sleep, Melpomene turns to lie on her side. She stretches a wing up out from the covers, likely cramped from being slept on.

Two hours, five minutes, and thirty-one seconds into sleep, Melpomene flips over onto her stomach, her tail thrashing as she dreams and untucking her covers from the foot of the bed.

Two hours, fifty-two minutes, and nine seconds into sleep, Melpomene rolls onto her back again, mumbling incoherent words under her breath.

Four hours, twenty minutes, and twenty-three seconds into sleep, Melpomene’s sleep talking becomes articulated enough to make out. She’s saying “Thalia.” She seems to be having a nightmare.

Six hours, forty-four minutes, and twelve seconds into sleep, she is now saying “I want three pancakes” repeatedly and with increasing desperation.

Seven hours, four minutes, and fifty-nine seconds into sleep, she wakes up, and so I do too.

It’s a slow and subtle awakening, but I can tell from the rate of her breathing and the twitch of her eyelids. My consciousness snaps back to me, every second of recorded Melpomene Moments burrowing themselves into my memory banks whether I want them to or not. I remain still as my master eventually yawns, stretches, and blinks herself into self-awareness, at which point she almost immediately spots me staring motionlessly at her from beside the bed and screams.

It’s a nice, loud shriek, the kind that would have seriously hurt my ears as a human. As a robot I merely record its volume level in wacky woohoo Antipathy units and internally war between the discomfort of upsetting my master and the hilarity of her reaction. Gonna focus on the latter.

Good morning, bitch.

“Y-you!” she accuses. Me! “What are you… have you been watching me sleep!?”

Yup. I nod.

“Why!?”

Well, that’s not a yes or no question, but I can point at things so I point at her door.

“…The lock,” she mutters, following my finger. “I see. So what, then, have you been keeping vigil?”

Pfft. That’s one way to put it. I quickly move my boob plate out into its maintenance position and then back into its locked position. Melpomene blinks, glances down at her bare chest, and then snorts in amusement.

“Well, I suppose you’re welcome to enjoy the show,” she mutters. Which, uh. Isn’t the reaction I expected. It would be a lot easier not to stare if she just revoked permission, but… well, I guess she doesn’t seem to care much about being seen naked in general. If anything she seems quite proud of her body, in both its human and inhuman aspects.

…That, or she believes that because I’m some evil alien or whatever, my interest in her body must be fundamentally inquisitive rather than carnal. ‘How strange, I have these odd protrusions on my chassis. Perhaps they are meant to emulate those bouncy bohonkadonkaroos. And yet, mine possess no such pliability. Curious!’

Melpomene gets out of bed while I continue thinking about her tits in ways that would have made me bust out laughing in my old body. Okay, that’s enough of that. I wonder if I can like, set up a mental subroutine to interrupt me if I start obsessing over them again. I think that might be doable. Woah, I have all sorts of reminder systems in here. That’s kind of awesome, actually.

My master yawns and stretches again, forcing me to duck as her wing nearly smacks me in the head and then jump as her tail nearly knocks me on my ass. With a flex of magical energy, clothes simply materialize onto her body, which answers a lot of questions I had about Anath. That girl is covered in crystal spikes that go right through her clothes, and it’s like… did she wear that outfit for so long they grew that way? Or does she carefully make sure each spike goes through the proper hole every morning? Not even mentioning the enormous squirrel tail. It’s bigger than I am!

I follow her out of her room, down the hall, and into the bathroom where another portable sink is waiting so she can brush her teeth. It’s an oddly domestic thing for me to shadow her for, contrasting heavily with the earlier beratement last night. As evil as she is, this is just her life. A normal thing that everyone has to do everyday in the privacy of their home.

This is the closest thing I have to a home now, isn’t it? I’m probably going to be living here for a long time.

“You’re not damaged, are you?” Melpomene asks. I shake my head. “That’s good. Thea would give me an earful. I suppose we should go check on her.”

I nod again, following her down the stairs and down another hallway towards Thea’s workshop. A few clattering sounds can be heard emanating from the room, which causes Melpomene to frown and speed up.

“Ha-HA! Yes! I did it!” Thea whoops in celebration right before we enter the room.

“You did what, dear?” Melpomene asks.

“Mel!” Thea yelps, her head snapping our way with a mad grin on her face and dark bags under her eyes. “Perfect timing! I got it working! The USB to ESB converter!”

“…ESB?”

“Evil Serial Bus!!!” Thea beams. “Arty! Gimme your… your ports! Imma plug you into my laptop!”

“Thea, wait. Just wait a moment,” Melpomene insists. “Have you slept at all?”

Thea freezes.

“I… maybe?” she hedges. “I haven’t not not slept.”

“Thea.”

“But Mellll, this could be it!” Thea whines. “I mean, it’s probably not it, I’m almost certainly going to get Antipathy assembly gobbledygook. But how am I supposed to be able to sleep without knowing!?”

“In your bed,” Melpomene says flatly. “You’ve been awake for nearly thirty hours. I should have made you sleep immediately after dinner.”

“But—” Thea starts, but Melpomene cuts her off by putting a finger on her lips.

“Sleep. Now. The artifact will still be here once you are fully rested.”

Thea pulls away, a pout on her lips and a blush on her cheeks.

“…Fine,” she relents, unfastening her overalls and letting them drop in front of her blanket nest. I guess those things are real rather than summoned by magic? Underneath she has a simple cotton shirt and modest boyshorts, neither of which she seems as inclined to take off as Melpomene was. She flops forward into her nest, lies there facefirst for about ten seconds, and then quickly gets up and walks out of the room.

“Nevermind, gotta pee,” she mumbles to herself. Her legs and her tiny webbed paw feet are a lot more visible now that the bulky overalls are gone, allowing me to see that her legs are actually digitigrade. Her tail sticks out behind her as she walks, shifting slightly with every step to help her keep her balance with such little surface area touching the ground. And in much the same way her right arm is covered in crystalline growths, her right eye has dark sclera, and her right hand is webbed while the left side of her body looks much more human, her right leg has more crystals protruding out from the skin than even her arm. Glimmering a brilliant emerald, they curl up her thigh and down her calf like roots growing over a corpse.

Most of the physical changes to her body seem to work surprisingly well together: the webbing on her hands and feet, the way the tail looks to be both an aid to balance and a boon for swimming… it’s very purposeful, very coherent. Even Melpomene, who seems to be a chaotic chimerical mix of parts, keeps a substantial level of grace in her form, too much for me to believe that the changes are random. But the crystal growths seem different. On Thea especially, they are messy, asymmetrical additions to the organic parts of her form, uncomfortably clinging onto her like parasites. She seems used to them, at least.

Eventually, Thea returns and flops back into bed, curling up into a little ball and wrapping her tail up around her feet as she closes her eyes. Melpomene watches her for a while and then lets out a sigh, shaking her head and turning to walk away. I don’t follow her, because Melpomene said I would still be here when Thea was fully rested. I’m a little worried I’m taking that too literally, but my master either doesn’t mind or doesn’t notice that I am being left behind, and soon enough I am standing around and watching yet another girl sleep.

…Except not really, because once Melpomene is out of earshot Thea jumps to her feet and immediately waddles over to me with excitement on her face.

“Quick, while she’s gone!” she insists. “Let’s—waaaagh!”

I cut her off by grabbing her by the waist, picking her up, and walking her bodily back to her bed. She squeaks and flails, but Melpomene clearly wants her to sleep so I’m going to make sure she sleeps, gosh darn it. I don’t want somebody barely conscious fiddling around with my internal organs anyway! I drop her back in her blankets and stare meaningfully at her until her brain finishes processing what just happened and realizes that I am also going to make her sleep.

“No, Arty, how could you!” she cries, betrayed, but I’m afraid my hands are tied. The Thea is eepy and neebies to sleeb. “Ugh! Fine!”

She petulantly burrows back into her nest and I prepare a fancy little eight hour timer to set the moment I detect she’s unconscious. That turns out to happen pretty fast, as her body more or less just gives out after spending so long awake.

Thirty-four minutes and nineteen seconds later, Melpomene comes to check on us. She gives me no additional orders and then leaves. She does this again three more times, with no consistent interval pattern.

After eight hours, my timer goes off. Thea still appears to be unconscious and comfortable. I let her continue to rest.

Three hours, five minutes, and twelve seconds after that, she wakes up. She squirms around a little in the blankets, yawns, and then suddenly sneezes. I squat down, a little worried she might have caught a cold or something, but when she emerges from within I see the culprit immediately: she’s got dozens of familiar little blue-gray hairs stuck all over her body.

“…I should not have let Anath sleep in here,” she mutters to herself. Then she looks at me, and I look at her (I’m getting really good at that lately). The impromptu awkwardness-based staring contest continues until I win.

“O-oh gosh, um, hi! I, uh. Hmm. Hello! I guess you’re eager to get started, huh?” Thea babbles, flustered. I nod. “Okay, um, let me… go get clean. I should take a sponge bath, probably. Uh. Sorry, I’ll be right back.”

She hurries off to go bathe—

Automated alert: don’t think about boobs.

—and so I settle back to wait again. Thirty-six minutes and five seconds later, she returns. Subjectively, I feel like I just helped Melpomene into bed maybe forty-five minutes ago. Objectively, it has been over nineteen hours. My sense of time has become both perfect and completely disconnected from reality, entire days slipping through my fingers at terrifying speeds. I hope Bean is okay. They’re the person I keep thinking back to, since they’re pretty much the only person that would notice or care that I’m gone. I’m sure my parents will figure it out after a few months too, but… no. I don’t want to think about that.

My thoughts keep brushing towards Castalia, too, though she was nothing but an unrequited crush. I wonder if she knows I exist now. The fact that I have to fight her former allies—and possibly her current friends—puts a heavy pit in my stomach on top of all the other things I have to regret about fighting magical girls. At least I know a lot more about magical girls now, and what it might be like to be one. Why someone might want to get away from it all.

It would be nice to be able to sense other people’s emotions in social settings, though. I mean, I haven’t really made use of it, but it’s obviously possible since emotions generate trace amounts of magical energy even if someone isn’t using magic. Anath can clearly sense emotions really well. …Wait, actually, since attraction is an emotion, does that mean Castalia was sensing every time I used to stare at her!? Oh god oh fuck oh god.

“I’m back!” Thea announces, skidding and hopping to take the corner back into the room. Her hair is wet and she’s wearing both her usual overalls and her usual big grin again. “Let’s jailbreak us a robot!”

I obligingly hop up onto the table and unlock the plate that protects my I/O port. Thea starts humming to herself, popping it the rest of the way off and pulling out an abomination of wires and miniature circuit boards that cobbles together a male USB connector and a male Standard Power/Data Peripheral connector (SPDP), which looks like a semicircle full of needles and isn’t something I realized I knew the name of until literally just now. Thea’s humming transitions into a full lyrical number as she plugs one end into a chunky laptop and the other into me, singing to the tune of Don’t Stop Believin’.

“Please don’t
Be qubits!
My computer cannot handle qubits!
Please don’t
Be ternary eitherrrrrr!”

For my part, I feel a part of myself metaphorically light up when everyone’s favorite Star Wars droid SP-DP connects with my port, a very strange sensation from both tactile and mental standpoints. I send the standard handshake through the Super Polymerization Duelist Pack and am entirely unsurprised to find it unreturned while Thea’s brows furrow, tapping away at her computer for a few minutes before she sighs.

“…Yeah, I knew it wouldn’t be that easy,” she says. “First step, though! Far from the worst-case scenario here. I’m getting something, the connector isn’t completely failing, it’s just picking up gobbledygook. I mean, I knew it would be gobbledygook, but it’s the wrong kind of gobbledygook. Could be a hardware issue, could be my jury-rigged driver being made of sticks and glue. Gonna mess around with this a bit more. Uh, if that’s okay? This isn’t uncomfortable or anything, I hope?”

I shake my head. It feels a little weird, like I’m being tickled by data, and the ignorance of proper Best Gameboy Shoryuken Input protocols is a bit annoying, but nothing I can’t filter out. I’ll just keep sending that handshake attempt, I guess? Not sure what else to do.

One hour, four minutes, and thirty seconds later, Melpomene comes to check on us. Sixteen hours, forty-one minutes, and twenty-two seconds later, she returns again and forces Thea to go to bed. Nine hours, ten minutes, and thirty-one seconds later, Thea wakes up again, and we resume testing.

Three days, seven hours, eleven minutes, and fifty-four seconds later, Thea changes her strategy, opening up most of my plates and tapping the wires within. There isn’t anything for me to do while she works other than crack the old encrypted packets I have saved. Another day later, and I succeed for the first time. A day after that, I succeed again. A day after that, I crack ten different saved encryptions. I’m starting to understand the strategies humans gravitate towards. One more day, and I’ve cracked everything I have saved. None of it is very interesting, but I get it now. Out of all the possible ways to encrypt information, humans only seem to use a miniscule fraction of them, all on the easier side. Probably should have started there first.

Thea requests me to perform a lot of full boot routines. In the short periods I’m awake, I try to compose music in my head, but knowing how it will sound just isn’t the same as actually listening to it. Twelve days, four hours, one minute, and thirteen seconds later I give up on finding things to do. Even during my waking moments, it’s much easier to simply remain in sleep mode, responding only to orders and visits from Melpomene, of which there have been thirty-one.

Twenty-one days, nine hours, thirty-three minutes and six seconds later, my power reserves drop below 20% due to lack of power gain. I stimulate emotional responses by replaying past memories in my head instead of sleeping to pass the time. The difference between pre- and post-robotization memories are so fundamentally different that panicking about it earns me three percent on its own.

As a human, my memories are flashes of impressions, wisps of words and the sounds they might have had, emotions written and rewritten as what was once experience becomes an incestuous game of telephone, neurons rewriting themselves with the memory of the memory of the memory every time I view it. As a robot, my memories are movies, shot with my eyes as the camera and my ears as the microphone. They are perfect recreations of the past, frozen in crystal. They are reality, returned to whenever I wish.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

I’m not sure which kind of memory I hate more, but they’re both good for stabilizing my power levels. Thea eventually asks me to stand up and make a few repetitive motions while hooked up to a bunch of external wiring. It is the first time I’ve left her worktable in over a month.

She looks tired. Very tired, all the time. She’s working on me almost constantly. Opening me, cleaning me, mapping me, learning what I am and how I work. There have been a lot of setbacks, but she is determined to help me. To improve me. To let me be able to speak. To allow me to tell her my name.

She’s always there, working on me, next to me, above me. Leaning above the table, wiping the sweat off her forehead so it doesn’t drip into my systems, asking me questions to make sure I’m okay, apologizing when she makes a mistake and causes me damage. Gritting her teeth when the next attempt fails, swallowing her frustration, and trying again. The others often pull her away to make her eat, to make her spend time with them, to make her take a break, and so whenever she leaves I drift into sleep. I’m a flayed body on an operating table, a skeleton hooked up by wires to so many different devices that it’s difficult to move me. I’ve been broken, fixed, and broken again in countless places. I overhear how the others discover more artifacts, investigate more ruins, get into more fights, cause more problems. The world moves around me, my whole existence in slumber. But whenever I’m awake, she is there.

Melpomene, my master, is often around, making sure Thea eats and sleeps and takes care of herself. But Thea, my savior, is always there. And after a total of two months, one week, three days, twenty-one hours, fifty-two minutes, and ten seconds, she finally says it.

“I’ve got it. This is gonna work.”

The final setup is a full hardware bypass that moves directly from my core components through a newly-built connection to an external speaker. I can feel it connect, feel it interface with my systems and handshake properly and it’s so simple, so flimsy, just a small speaker barely capable of interpreting raw sound data. I have to assemble the audio file manually, splicing together memories of words to make my own like a goddamn YouTube poop. None of this was the hard part.

Removing my communication restriction was the hard part.

I have no idea how she did it, and I’m pretty sure that’s entirely on purpose. I have more records of manual memory deletion in this past week alone than the entire rest of this process combined. Whatever method is being used, me not knowing about it apparently plays an important role, and because I know Melpomene actually wants me to be able to communicate things I am actually compelled by my other restrictions to maintain ignorance. On one hand, this is very convenient and makes ignoring this all the easier. On the other hand, it’s clear that all of my restrictions still exist. Or at least, all of my restrictions except communication? Or maybe that one still exists too, and is just being circumvented somehow. Wait, I should stop thinking about this.

“Alright… that should be it. Um, how are you feeling?” Thea asks.

Slowly, fearfully, I lift one arm… and successfully make the OK symbol with my hand. Holy shit. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. Thea notices it too, a big smile opening up on her face.

“LooNAH,” my speaker buzzes. “LooNAH. LuNAH. LuNA. Luna.”

Every word—and if I can’t remember someone saying the word, every syllable—is sampled from a different voice, but I can adjust, I can improve, I can relearn how to speak and make the words my own.

“My naME is Luna,” I declare, and Thea shrieks with victory.

“YEEEEEESSS!!! Luna! You’re Luna!” she confirms.

“YEEEEEESSS!!!” I repeat back at her. “THANK you. THANK you. THANK you. THANK you. THANK you.”

“You’re welcome! Oh, you’re so welcome! Gosh, I’m so happy we finally did this, I’m so sorry for taking so long.”

Two months. It felt like a few days, at most. But it was two months, gone in a flash.

“Don’t say SOrry,” I insist. I sample the next word from the voice of that shady black market guy, pitched up a bit to sound a little less weird. “Savior.”

Thea blinks.

“Uh, like Nana’s class?” she asks.

“No,” I say. I don’t even know what that means. “You’re MY Savior. THANK you.”

She blushes a deep, deep brown, fidgeting and stammering and not knowing how to respond. I want to tell her everything. I want her to know how I got here, who I am, what Melpomene did to me, what she’s ordered me to do, how terrified I still am and how much help I still need, but I can’t.

“Melpomene.” The name is the only sound that comes out. Nothing else I want to say complies with her desires.

“O-oh, r-right! Yeah, she’ll, uh, definitely want to be here. Um… give me one sec to mount this speaker somewhere you have space so we can get all your plates back on and get you walking around again, then I’ll go get her. Is that okay? How are you doing, by the way?”

“That’s FINE. I am…” I try to think of something to say that is both possible and true. “OverWELLmED.”

“I can only imagine,” Thea says, securing the speaker to fit underneath—

Automated alert: don’t think about boobs.