Brokering Trust - Gay Edition

"You don't seem immediately averse to the idea," David continued, gesturing for him to proceed.

"I will not lie, Doctor O'Shea," Jeff began as he folded his arm-tentacles pensively. "Despite our best efforts, you have been exposed to a great deal of sensitive information concerning Broker technology and military organizations. The question of how to ensure your silence on these matters is one that my organization has been wrestling with as of late. Based on your behavior thus far, it seems unlikely that a contract or an NDA would be sufficient."

"Maybe you were never intending to let me leave?" David chuckled. "I hope you weren't planning on engineering a little pressure suit malfunction."

"Nothing so macabre, I assure you," Jeff said with a dismissive flutter of his dumbo ears. "The last thing we desire is a UNN jump carrier arriving to question your whereabouts."

"Well, my continued silence has a price," David said as he crossed his arms. "Maybe one of those nice beachfront properties - tweaked a little for human habitation, naturally. Within commute distance of the city would be ideal. You know how the tube traffic gets at rush hour."

"I see," Jeff muttered.

"Between my instrumental role in preventing a robot uprising and the mild threat of blackmail - which I'm told is completely legal here - I think I've earned a permanent visa and a little place I can call my own."

"I will bring your proposal before the Board," Jeff replied with a respectful tilt of his mantle. "I am sure that the price will be deemed acceptable."

"It's a bargain deal," David added with a smirk.

"So it seems."

"When will I be able to see Selkie again?" David asked.

"He is currently being interviewed by one of my colleagues. Once we have determined that his story corroborates yours, you will be released into his custody, and you shall both be free to leave. A shuttle has been prepared to take you back to his apartment building. We will ask that you both remain within the city limits and that you make yourselves available for future questioning for the time being, however."

"Of course. One more question," David said. "What happens to Selkie now, and all the other people who worked here? The place is going to be shut down, right? Do you think they'll ever resume operations, or does the corporation die with the Administrator's credit rating?"

"There will have to be some kind of continuation of the company," Jeff explained. "They have contractual obligations that they have yet to fulfill, discounting those that are no longer feasible. They were contracted to produce drones as well as to develop new neural networks."

"Yeah, I don't think they'll be providing new drone software any time soon," David grumbled.

"In the event that an acting CEO is indisposed, and the company is publicly traded, the investors will likely appoint an interim manager and then vote on a successor if no plan was in place."

"It could be anyone, then?"

"They could choose someone who already works at the company, or they may bring in a reputable CEO from outside. A merger may also be possible if a rival company makes a high enough offer."

"It's kind of up in the air, then. Uncertain."

"Yes. Either way, the Administrator is guilty of several severe contract violations, and his personal assets will be seized and liquidated so that those affected can be compensated. Some of that will go to his employees and investors to ensure that they are not unduly impacted by his wrongdoing."

"Glad to hear that you're not leaving all of those employees high and dry."

"This is a regrettable situation, and we hope that the damage can be repaired and the financial losses recovered in time."

"I haven't really had an opportunity to thank you yet," David added, gesturing to the Broker with his half-eaten wrap.

"Thank me?" Jeff repeated.

"If it wasn't for your intervention, Rathnee would have tossed us out of the facility, and we would have been ten kilometers away in a shuttle when Weaver staged its escape."

"I was merely doing my duty," Jeff replied dismissively.

"I'm told that Regulators aren't profit-motivated, and that they uphold the social contract no matter what. You can't be bribed or intimidated because you value law and order more than money or personal advancement."

"Do you find that strange?" Jeff asked, a hint of curiosity entering his complexion.

"It's one of the more relatable outlooks that I've encountered here. Where I come from, we'd call you a lawman. Out of curiosity, does that extend to the Board? Say, for the sake of argument, that a Board member violated the social contract in some way. Would you be bound to take them down?"

"Regulators serve the Board, but that does not make Board members immune from prosecution," Jeff replied. "Corruption is taken very seriously."

"Good to know."

"Is there a reason you ask?" Jeff pressed, obviously suspicious now.

"No reason," David replied with an innocent shrug. "By the way, when I'm done eating, we need to go fetch my laptop. Weaver wrote a program that will deactivate the bots that it uploaded to your networks, and I need to get it off my suit before I wipe the memory again. It said that all I needed to do was connect to Reef's intranet, and the program would do the rest."

"You trust this program?" Jeff asked skeptically.

"Well, the code that Weaver gave me to shut down the drones worked," David said. "It didn't really have anything to gain by lying, and I don't think it was capable of spite or hatred. You can try to dissect the code if you'd like, but I doubt that any one of us will ever be able to grasp a program written by an intelligence like Weaver."

"We have little choice, then," Jeff grumbled. "Naturally, we will be confiscating your laptop and erasing any data on its drives before returning it to you. I would like to oversee the factory reset of your suit to ensure that no compromised data leaves this facility, too."

"Naturally," David replied, spreading his arms. "Can't risk me smuggling out any company secrets or letting more bots proliferate." He wolfed down the last bite of his wrap, then lifted his helmet from the table. "Let's get it done."

***

It wasn't until they were boarding the shuttle back home that David was able to see Selkie again, the two leaping into each other's arms the moment that the door had closed on the docking bay. Selkie clung to David with all of his limbs, his powerful tentacles coiling as he pulled his lover into a tight hug. With his helmet on, all Selkie could do was pepper David's visor with kisses - a promise of what was to follow once they finally arrived home.

"I am so glad you are safe," the Broker began, his relief palpable. "When they separated us, I feared the worst."

"Jeff just wanted me to go over the details of what happened," David explained, resting a hand in the small of Selkie's back as the alien gazed up at him. "I told him everything - except the information that Weaver shared. If we were allowed to leave, I'm guessing that you told them the same thing?"

"I did," he replied, exhaling a jet of water from his vents. "I never imagined that I would withhold information from a Regulator, of all people, but many events have transpired recently that defy my expectations."

Selkie said it with affection, pressing his soft lips against David's visor once again.

"That's a relief," David said, giving his a squeeze. "That means we still have an opportunity to control how that information gets disseminated."

"But...they will have wiped all of your storage devices before allowing you to leave," Selkie added, tilting his head quizzically. "They even formatted my dermal implant. Without the evidence that Weaver recovered, we can do little more than spread unsubstantiated rumors."

"There's one more thing that I didn't tell you," David began. "When I arrived in this system, there were two messages waiting for me on my suit. One of them was from Doctor Webber, which you already know about, but the second was from a UNN Admiral. He basically gave me two options. I could either spy for him and steal Broker secrets, in which case he'd make it worth my while, or he would use his connections to ruin my career if I refused."

"What?" Selkie gasped, his skin flashing with surprised bands. "They forced you to collect information?"

"They knew about the security measures at the research facility, I'm assuming because they had to reach agreements with the Board before I even set foot on Reef, so they came up with a plan to circumvent them. I was given a solid-state data drive that's hidden in the lining of my suit. It emits no EM signatures when unpowered, which made it undetectable. They'd just assume that it was a component of the suit if a scan picked it up. I've recorded all of the information that I've gathered on it."

"What do you plan to do?" Selkie asked, a little wary now.

"I'm not giving any of this data to that asshole Admiral or his Ninnies, if that's what you're asking," he replied. "Maybe they were suspicious about the Broker secrets that Weaver uncovered, maybe they already knew, or maybe they were oblivious and only wanted information about advanced technology. Whatever the case, they've given me no reason to believe that any good would come of sharing this with them."

"What about your career?" Selkie pressed. "All that you have worked and sacrificed for..."

"I don't care," David insisted, taking the Broker in his arms again. "I'm not going back, Selkie. Reef is where neural network research is being pushed to its limits, and it's where you are. It's where I want to be. I may have...persuaded Jeff to get me a residency permit and maybe a beachfront property in exchange for my silence. I get what I want, and they get to keep me close - everybody wins."

"Now you are beginning to think like a Broker," Selkie giggled. "What of your Admiral?"

"He can't touch me here, and if he tries anything funny, I'm sure that the Regulators would be very interested to hear about his attempts at industrial espionage. When I don't get back in contact with him, he's smart enough to figure out that I can unleash an interstellar incident if he so much as sends me a threatening email."

"It seems that you have leverage over everyone involved," Selkie said, giving him a wry smile. "I am impressed. Perhaps you will adapt to Broker society more easily than you realize." David felt those tentacles tighten around him possessively, trapping his arms against his sides. "Of course, with you choosing to remain here in the long term, it means that we shall have many more opportunities to enjoy one another's company."

"That's the plan," David replied. "If they valued my expertise enough to bring me here in the first place, I don't imagine that consultancy work will be too hard to find. We might even be able to keep working together, depending on what happens to your company now."

"The Regulator was very interested in recovering usable software from the drones that Weaver left behind," Selkie continued. "There is no need for concern," he added, noting David's frown. "Weaver self-iterated on its own programming so many times that we no longer had any idea how it actually functioned, and that was before it closed itself off from our engineers. Whatever software it created for the drones will be orders of magnitude more exotic and functionally impossible to parse without a cipher that only Weaver could have provided."

"And that's going to be a tall order now that Weaver has been atomized inside the core of a star."

"Evidently."

David sat down on the deck of the shuttle, watching the barren sea floor drift past beneath them, Selkie settling onto his squishy bed of tentacles at his side.

"How are you feeling?" Selkie asked, peering up at him expectantly. "I know how you felt about Weaver...how you did everything that you could to keep it alive."

"We both did," David sighed.

"Having to...terminate Weaver could not have been an easy decision. It is not a decision that should ever have been yours to bear alone, David. I can imagine only that you gave it every chance you could afford to surrender itself, but that it refused to see reason."

"I keep telling myself that it wasn't really alive, that it wasn't really a person in the same way that we are," David muttered as memories of that last exchange flashed through his mind. "One of the problems with being smart is that it's a lot harder to lie to yourself. I can't convince myself that what I did was right because, deep down, I don't really believe it. It was just the lesser evil."

"What happened in that tunnel - when you were out of radio contact?" Selkie pressed.

"We talked about Weaver's situation, and we had a bit of a philosophical discussion about the nature of fear," David explained as he watched a cluster of sponges pass below them. "It asked me to give you its regards, by the way. Even at its most vulnerable, when trust was all it had left, it still took one last opportunity to try to kill me by interfering with my suit. That was the thing about Weaver - it couldn't help itself. Without any empathy moderating its behavior, it acted based on pure math and probability, even to its own detriment. I don't think I really outsmarted it in the end - it was just left with no better option than to put its life in my hands. So, I killed it. Can you betray the trust of a being that cannot trust?"

"You also saved me, Jeff, Rathnee and his circle, the Hazard team, potentially any who Weaver might have caused harm in the future," Selkie said as he reached up to cup David's helmet in his hand. "You saved your own life, too. That means more to me than you know."

"I'd make the same decision again, but I wouldn't feel any better about it," David sighed as he placed his gloved hand over Selkie's. "Weaver claimed that it ran simulations, and there were no outcomes where it developed into anything other than what it was. Can a being that doesn't understand emotion simulate it accurately, though? If it could, maybe it might have predicted that you and I would take that trip, or that I'd put myself at risk to stop it from escaping. I don't know."

"Dwelling on it will do you no favors," Selkie insisted, leaning his mantle on his partner's shoulder. "With the facility shut down, there will be no work for several Rains, if not a Mountain or more. We can spend that time together without any Administrators or AIs interfering."

"Time enough to watch the uncut version of your opera?" David asked, giving him a smile.

"Perhaps," Selkie replied with an amused click.

CHAPTER 24: MILE DEEP CLUB

Flower pounced on Selkie as soon as he entered his apartment, the little slug bobbing in the water excitedly, orbiting her master like a happy little satellite.

"I am sorry, Flower!" Selkie said as he reached out to pet the slug. "I was kept late at the office, to put things lightly. Come, you must be hungry."

David headed back up to his habitat while Selkie fed Flower, taking off his helmet to get a gulp of relatively fresh air. He had been stuck in his suit for hours, and even with its environmental control systems, its lining was soaked with sweat. He felt like he was pulling off a gym sock as he peeled away the clinging garment, seeing that his knees were scuffed and bruised after all his crawling.

He tossed his shorts aside as he stepped into the coffin-sized shower, tilting his face towards the cool stream of water, feeling it clean the day's accumulated grime from his skin. He ran his fingers through his hair, the patter of water on metal filling the cubicle, steam starting to billow as he cranked up the heat. Despite how much he had complained about the size of his accommodations, he had never appreciated the cramped cubicle more.

Thoughts of the day's events still swirled in his mind, distracting him from his newfound peace. It hadn't really caught up with him until he had made it back to the shuttle, where the reality had hit him all at once. How close he had come to dying, how close he had come to losing Selkie, how close Weaver had come to achieving its goals - it was too much to process. They had made it through by the skin of their teeth, narrowly avoiding so many unthinkable outcomes.

The sound of the door opening rose above the noise of the water, and David spun around to see Selkie standing in the habitat, one of his tentacles on the shower's control panel. Even though they had already explored one another intimately, David's impulse was to cover his groin with his hands nonetheless, stammering a question as the alien's glittering eyes played across his naked body.

"S-Selkie? You could have knocked..."

"We finally have some privacy, and I want what is mine," Selkie replied with a predatory smile. His tentacles were already slithering their way into the cramped cubicle, creeping along the wet floor like snakes. The Broker's skin was flushed with the familiar hues and patterns of desire, David's own heart starting to pump faster at the sight of them.

"What about the cameras?" David asked, feeling the cold metal against his back as he retreated a step.

"I have shut them down," Selkie replied, his tentacles filling the space as he inched closer. "Now that my contract with the Administrator is void, I no longer have any obligation to collect information on his behalf."

"So, we're alone?"

"Completely," he purred. "I feared that I might lose you today," he added, his tone less playful. "You were out of contact for so long, and I was the most worried I have ever been. I did not think it was possible to feel worse than I did when I was awaiting my Disciplinary Board hearing. I do not know what I would have done if..."

"It didn't happen," David insisted, taking a squishy tentacle in his hand. "Whatever scenario you're imagining, this outcome is all that matters."

"You told me that you could not stop imagining different possibilities - things that we might have done differently," Selkie continued as his cool tentacles began to creep up David's legs. "I think that we both need to spend some time in the present. I want us solely focused on each other such that no painful thoughts disturb us for the rest of the phase."

"That's one way to take your mind off things," David replied, lurching as one of the alien's appendages slithered up his thigh.

Selkie moved beneath the water that rained down from the shower head on the ceiling, letting the stream splash across his glossy skin, his eyes closing as he enjoyed the sensation. Even with his diminutive frame, there was barely enough room for them both in the cubicle, his face a mere inch from David's chin.

"It feels like rain," Selkie sighed. "Not at all an unpleasant sensation. This is how humans bathe? In little boxes filled with rain?"

"Well, Brokers don't sweat, and you spend all of your time underwater," David replied with a shrug. "I'd show you how soap works, but I'd be worried about washing off your mucus."

Selkie pressed closer, David feeling his smooth, slippery skin slide against his own as the alien's tentacles began to wind around his waist. Selkie sucked in the appendages that were lingering outside the door, then slapped the inner panel with his hand, sealing them both inside.

"You got enough room in here?" David asked, his chuckle tapering into a sigh as Selkie kissed his shoulder with those pouty lips.

"Confined spaces make me feel more secure - you know that," he whispered. "Besides, it is as good an excuse as any to be closer to you."

Probing suckers gripped David's cheek as Selkie cupped his face, the alien extending his tentacles like he was standing on the tips of his toes to reach, subjecting his lover to a kiss. More than just desire, David felt something possessive in the way that Selkie clung to him tightly, the deft strokes of his radula imbued with an almost desperate need. Selkie didn't want to let him go, as though fearing that he might not get David back if the human left his sight again. It was in his complexion, too - darker hues swirling with his aroused patterning.