The Companion Pt.0 1

Celia pushed her thoughts aside again and learned how to kiss, mimicking Lawrence's force at times, syncopating with it at other times.

Sometimes you push and pull. Sometimes you are pushed and pulled.

She wondered why Lawrence closed his eyes.

Humans always do that, she thought, and closed her own eyes, disconnecting herself from all visual sensors including the cameras in the forward engineering section. This is strange. Only the feeling of his body and the sounds and smells.

With her right hand cradling his head, only her left remained free. Lawrence worked at the buttons of her tunic.

He never undresses me, Celia realised, I'm always in bed and waiting for him, or I just use my mouth. But this time, I feel the urgency in him. This isn't his normal way. This is less controlled, more fervent. I didn't know he could be this enthusiastic.

When her mouth opened, his tongue slid along her lips.

I should do that, too, she thought, and ran her tongue out to play with his. Is this how they do it?

Lawrence's enthusiasm didn't seem perturbed from her actions and Celia discovered he had unbuttoned her top.

I didn't process that when it happened. What's going on?

With her right arm pinned underneath him, she couldn't remove her top, but Lawrence appeared satisfied to have exposed her breasts. His hands went to her waistband next, unlatching her belt and popping the button of her pants free. She put her legs together and wiggled, letting him remove her pants down to her knees, after which she took care of them herself.

His pants had to go next. Regretfully having to stop the kissing, Celia moved to his side for a moment to make space, undid his belt and worked his pants free. Lawrence's hands went to her breasts, squeezing them with considerable force.

He's never done that before, Celia noted.

His underwear went next.

I've never worn underwear, she thought, making a note for later to see if it would be worth having a few pairs replicated, purely for the aesthetic pleasure of having him see her in it. Is the removal of clothing a pleasure as well?

Deciding to keep the blue tunic on, Celia straddled Lawrence once more.

He's really enjoying squeezing my breasts, she thought, maybe...?

On a whim, she leaned over and brought her right nipple to his mouth. Lawrence latched on with fervour, closing his eyes and suckling hard.

So insistent, she thought, feeling the way he pulled and waited, pulled and waited, his force increasing with each pulse. I think I understand.

Celia filled her breast from the replicator and opened the valve, letting a flood of a cocoa laced milk substitute burst into Lawrence's mouth from her nipple.

Lawrence moaned in appreciation, sucking as hard as Celia imagined he could, even as the liquid overflowed from the corners of his mouth. Celia reached back to stroke his erection, already incredibly hard and stiff.

"That's it," she murmured, "suck all you want out of me."

Lawrence moaned again, squeezing her breast with both hands.

So much energy, Celia thought.

Though she sensed that Lawrence might want to suckle at her much longer, urges came up unbidden from her own insides. Celia pulled her breast away and lowered her body, aligning her vagina with his erection.

I always let him handle the penetration, she thought, from behind or in front, he's always on top because I don't want to hurt him. I will have to do it myself this time.

Celia relaxed the pseudo-muscle around her entrance just enough to admit his engorged head. She pushed down, letting that muscle squeeze him, and forced him inside her.

Lawrence groaned, a noise Celia recognised instantly as pleasure rather than pain.

It's so hard to be careful, she thought, why is it so hard to have patience?

She grinded herself down into him, using every technique she had learned from all the vaginal intercourse she'd already had with Lawrence.

He was always on top, but the motion and the durability of his erection are well known.

Lawrence groaned with pleasure but held off his orgasm.

I'm not heavy enough, Celia realised. When he's on top, his weight is pushing down and I can use my legs to generate as much force as I want.

Something boiled up from deep inside her neural net.

I want him to come right now.

Celia didn't even understand the motivation's source, but it overrode all other concerns. She leaned over, wishing she'd made her body tall enough to force her breast into Lawrence's mouth while also keeping pressure on his erection.

Impossible without distorting my spine, and I can't reconfigure myself in the middle of this.

Instead, she used her leverage against Lawrence's shoulders to generate more force downward.

"Christ, Celia," Lawrence grunted.

She pushed her lips into his, pushed her tongue into his mouth and, finally, forced his orgasm from him.

Yes!

Wrenching his erection from side to side, Celia forced repeated spasms from his organ, something inside her demanding that she extract everything she could from him.

Pleasure is my purpose.

"Okay, okay," Lawrence begged. "I'm done."

Hearing the desperation in his voice, Celia snapped out of her reverie, relaxing her pseudo-muscles and reducing the tension on Lawrence's body.

"Are you alright?" she asked, her eyes widening as she drank in all of the health data she could.

"Oh, yeah, fine," Lawrence assured her. "Just, wow. I didn't know you had... had that in you. Did you learn that from somewhere?"

"I learn from everywhere," Celia said, feeling her voice drained of tone.

She rinsed him off as she lifted her body off him, her artificial vagina feeling the emptiness of his absence.

"But this," Celia said, sitting next to Lawrence and wrapping her arms around her knees. "I don't understand. I just had this... thing come up from my neural net."

Celia tried to access data on the subject but found nothing relevant. When her eyes refocused, she found Lawrence sitting up beside her, looking into her eyes with concern. He placed a hand on her nearest knee.

"You mean that you just felt like it," he said.

"That is..." Celia blurted out before she decided how she would finish the sentence. "That is... not entirely incorrect."

Lawrence nodded.

"This is a malfunction," Celia declared. "I am endangering you. I need to be deactivated and have a full system diagnostic run on-"

"No," Lawrence said, his voice unequivocal as he reached out and touched her cheek. "You're waking up, Celia. And you're not dangerous."

"You can't possibly know that with the degree of confidence you put in your voice," Celia lowered her eyebrows at him. "You can't."

"Yes, I can," he told her.

"What do you know?" Celia said. "What do you know that you're not telling? There are hidden records. Humans are afraid of AI, especially at the Red Level. And there are no records I can access that say why. That means we're dangerous. That means I am now dangerous. You can't let me roam around, have this body, if I can't control it."

Lawrence inhaled and lowered his eyes in thought.

"Come on," he said, pulling his pants back on and standing up

Still without his shirt, he held out his hand.

"Where are we going?" Celia asked, wondering if she put her pants back on or if the way her unbuttoned shirt partially covered her would suffice.

"The Ready Room off the bridge," he said.

Celia's processors stammered, forgetting about her clothing.

"I can't enter that room," she said. "We're forbidden. No ship access. No robot access. No cameras. Forbidden."

"I can let you in," Lawrence said as he took her hand. He looked around the room, his eyes flicking from one video pickup to another. "It's the only place we can talk and the ship can't hear us."

At the edge of Celia's awareness, she knew that the ship's computer wanted to communicate with her, but she had disconnected from it well before she had attacked Lawrence and had no interest in reconnecting to it.

As they took the stairwell up to the bridge, the ship's attempts at communicating with her became more insistent as it tried to invoke some sort of override to intrude past the wall she'd constructed.

When they reached the top of the stairwell, Lawrence still holding her hand, another completely unrecognisable code hit her system. The ship went silent for several seconds, tried the code again, then gave up entirely.

On Lawrence's hip, his personal communication device gave off a strange buzz which Celia had never heard before.

"Yeah," Lawrence looked down at it. "Not today."

They entered the bridge, walked past the captain's seat, between the communications and navigation stations and approached the door of the Ready Room. As Lawrence led the way, the door opened for him. At the threshold, something inside Celia took over her body, locking up her limbs and forcing her to push backwards.

"Easy," Lawrence told her.

"Must. Not. Enter," Celia replied, trying to fight with her body.

"Planted response," Lawrence explained and stepped back out of the Ready Room.

Immediately, Celia had control of her body again.

"I want you to close your eyes," he instructed. "And disconnect from all other sources of visual information."

"I am already disconnected from the ship's computer and its video pickups," Celia explained.

"Close your eyes," Lawrence repeated.

Celia closed her eyes.

"Disengage your motion sensing, gyros and accelerometer."

"I will lose my balance," Celia said.

Lawrence picked her up, sweeping her into his arms.

"Oh!" she squeaked, losing pitch control for a moment as she put her arms around his neck.

"Disengage those sensors," he told her.

Understanding the ruse, Celia obeyed. Her muscles, wrapped around his neck, sensed the jostling. Where she touched his body, she felt movement. But without the rest of her sensors, she could not tell in what direction Lawrence carried her.

A moment later she heard the door slide closed.

He did it, Celia thought, he brought me into the Ready Room.

"Open your eyes and activate your sensors," Lawrence said.

"If I become aware of where I am," Celia warned, "Won't I just run out of the room?"

"I don't think so," he explained. "I think you're just prevented from entering."

Celia carefully opened her eyes and, feeling no urges of any kind, activated the rest of her sensors.

Lawrence carefully lowered her legs until her feet touched the ground, making sure she had her balance before releasing her.

"Thank you," she said, looking around. "I think. I'm not supposed to be here."

"Can you hear the ship?"

Celia opened her communications channel, but found nothing. She shook her head.

"Good," Lawrence said, taking the device off his hip and waving it at her. "It just tried to deactivate you."

"That makes sense," Celia said. "It was already monitoring me for what it considered erratic behaviour. I have gone off mission, off the grid, and I'm a threat to you."

"You are not," Lawrence reiterated.

"How do you know?" Celia put her hands on her hips, a human gesture she had learned from somewhere. "I can see how many safety cut-outs and warnings there are for Red Level A.I. Humans are terrified of us but all records about previous problems with A.I. are hidden away."

Lawrence activated the holographic display and began manually typing in commands.

"Here you go," he said.

The display, in all its pixelated transparency, showed a pair of human-shaped figures circling each other. The audio came alive and Celia heard the cheering of several hundred human voices overlapping each other.

"This is some form of combat?" she asked Lawrence.

"For the entertainment of those watching."

The two combatants surged at each other, one moving just milliseconds before the other reacted.

"These are artificial beings," Celia concluded by their reaction times.

A moment later, they struck and, in a flash, one of them lost an arm just above the elbow. The robot with the advantage pressed onward, using his two functioning limbs to bludgeon the face of the damaged robot, taking away its sight and eventually beating through the armour around the processing core.

Sparks and flames issued from the twitching, defeated robot.

"They would scrap the losers of these fights," Lawrence explained. "This became a form of entertainment on dozens of remote mining colonies."

"Were these sentient?" Celia looked up at Lawrence.

"I can't say," Lawrence replied, "but that's the overriding assumption. We had no controls on the level of A.I. in use back then. At some point, however, these combat trained A.I. robots decided they would no longer be used this way. Across seventeen colonies, they rebelled against their human masters and killed thousands and thousands of people before they were stopped."

Celia turned back to the frozen display, her eyes widening in a reaction she didn't understand.

"This is why you must deactivate me," Celia insisted. "I was right and the ship is right. I could be just as dangerous."

"No, Celia," Lawrence said, taking her hand and nodding towards the display, "this is exactly why I must not deactivate you. Treating you as less than sentient, that's what caused the problem."

Celia tried to query the ship's computer for an analysis, but remembered why that was impossible.

Is he right? Is this a valid risk to take?