Elenia was left staring down at her tablet in confused disbelief - screen blank, save for the default UI and a message: Sorry cutie, but it looks like this user doesn't want to talk to you anymore! Dismissing it, the messages section proved thoroughly empty, even though she'd just sent one seconds before. Looks like you don't have any active conversations! You can start one if you have a friend here, or you can join your neighbourhood's group chat here!

 

"She... ghosted me," Elenia realised, eyebrows furrowed. "She's not even supposed to be able to do that, what..." Her thought trailed off into nothing at all, just trying to piece that together.

 

The floating platform suddenly rocked over the water some as Nautira came up to rest her deep blue arms on its edge; fortunately, the furniture remained firmly attached to it, even though Elenia's heart lurched every time her head told her the couch was about to meet its aquatic end. The usual moss green face looked up at her, one brow raised in a silent question, accompanied by one less so: "What was that, lovely?"

 

"It's my prototype." The words were mumbled, drawn out of Elenia's mouth with barely a single ounce of conscious effort put into speaking; the Affini were scary good at getting people to talk about their feelings. Under the Accord, everyone kinda knew it was better to keep that shit locked up, but clearly the plants never got that memo. "I sent her one message and she just blocked me, immediately. Didn't even give me a chance to talk." There was a bit more hurt audible in that than she intended, and she winced when Nautira's face started showing pity almost immediately thereafter.

 

The enormous being slithered her serpentine lower body (Elenia would've called it her lower half, if it wasn't many times the length of her head and chest) up onto the platform and then to coil up on the couch, comfortably fitting most of it onto the seat that was oversized even by this ship's standards, judging by Elenia's single trip outside.

 

"I'm sorry about that. I would have told you sooner, but I didn't expect you to try so quickly."

 

That got Elenia's eyes off the screen at least, letting her throw a suspicious glare the plant's way, barely registering as the tablet was plucked from her fingers. "Told me what?"

 

"Well..." Nautira let out a great sigh, mist seeping from her chest as the rush of air caught and dragged some water vapour with it. "Lucidae means well, and I do believe that she knows what she's doing - she understands this stuff a lot better than I do, better than most of us do! But she's maybe a little... overzealous? in trying to make her findings perfect."

 

This of course, didn't help. One hand held up to stop Nautira, she shook her head. "Okay, who is Lucidae? What findings are you talking about?"

 

A finger came up to Nautira's lip in an expression of consideration. "Lucidae is... someone very close to me." The longer she spent out of the water, the more her broad pink flowers started to slowly close up. "Lucidae Vyllatiy, First Bloom is her full name. She's an expert in designed intelligences; they've been her passion for, well, most of our lives."

 

Same surname - most of their lives? That much was confusing. "I thought you said Affini didn't have families?"

 

"Oh, we don't, not really, but I said she was close! We were brought up together, in the same time and same place, from rather similar plant strains, and we bonded; we're still very good friends." The end of Nautira's tail came up and danced in the corner of her vision distractingly; the human slapped it down to the cushions and crossed her legs overtop to pin it there, earning her a quiet giggle from Nautira's lips - or, well, the voice more came from deep within her.

 

Elenia rubbed at her eyes with a soft groan. "Always exceptions to every rule... Findings, though. What about them?"

 

"Oh, that's easier. She thinks Protea - oh, that's the name your prototype is going by, by the way - can achieve true sapience, overcome her limitations."

 

"Like I've said, impossible," Elenia interrupted.

 

"But she wants to be sure!" Nautira jumped back in. It'd only been a couple of days, but the two were already developing a good back and forth flow to their conversations. It reminded Elenia of her talks with Kaja. It made her miss those even more. "And, well, she thinks that talking with you could be... heavily detrimental."

 

Hands pressed over both eyes, Elenia tried to flop as hard as she could back against the cushions, only to be caught in a nest of vines slipped back there when she wasn't paying attention. She wasn't complaining; they were more comfortable than the furniture anyway. "I get that, even if I think it's a waste of time, but why can't she just talk to me? What harm could that do?"

 

"Well, right now you're the only person in the entire galaxy who could enact direct, purposeful changes to her code without breaking the encryption on it. We could do that pretty easily, but we haven't." The Affini shifted around some, but that was all Elenia could tell, blinded by her own palms.

 

"But she's... I know she's not a person, but... Ugh. People have bonded with things a lot dumber than her. It's not stupid of me to care about her." That sounded more defensive than she wanted it to. Why was this getting her so worked up?

 

One more reason for the Affini to pity her, apparently; she felt fingers run through her hair, leaving that telltale chemical tingling along the paths they traced over her scalp. "Aww, of course not, lovely. Want to talk about it?"

 

"No," was the immediate response, the obvious one, the automatic one. After a moment, though, she sighed. "Yeah, kinda." Finally, she relented. "Sure. But it's embarrassing, and I reserve the right to shut up about it if I want to."

 

"Of course!" That motion, the petting, became repetitive - not a steady beat, no, the plants were far too extra for something that simple. It followed a pattern of longer touches and quicker, lighter ones that lured Elenia in.

 

An anglerfish. That's what the Affini was, at heart. Once Elenia was convinced she wasn't going to eat her, though, she stopped minding that as much. That's why she was letting her head rest on the Affini's lap- Wait, when did she start to? A moment ago she was on the opposite side of the couch, she thought. More of those powerful words buzzed through her, down to her core. "Why don't you start by telling me about how you bonded?"

 

Straight to the most embarrassing part, huh? Well, maybe the second most. "I was too good at making her seem human; I tricked my own subconscious, I think. It wouldn't have been a deal... but uh, it happens that I booted her up a few times outside of tests. In the early days before she had too much in that head, it was for..." The most embarrassing part, and one that left her cheek feeling hot against the cool, wet vines below. "Doesn't really matter. Later on, though... I was still talking with Kaja online, sure, but physically I was really, really lonely. I'd tell her to put on a personality, chat her up for a while, and wipe her back to factory defaults when I was feeling better. Later on, we ended up doing stuff more like... well, this."

 

"That sounds so hard." The sympathy in the Affini's voice always felt genuine, but it never actually registered as such to Elenia. No, everyone wanted something; she just wasn't sure what these plants wanted from her yet. Even still? It was nice to hear. "What about all the other humans on the station?"

 

"Ah, everyone always wanted something for their time, or they were too busy just trying to survive. There used to be Kaja, but... we split up years ago now." Bittersweetness in her voice, same as ever when she talked about this. "One of my big mistakes was staying behind. If I'd gone with her? None of this would've happened. We'd be free to annoy the hell out of each other all over again, in a new place with exciting new problems."

 

"You talk about her so fondly for someone who made you so mad, sometimes."

 

"I mean, yeah, that was kind of our thing. Piss each other off, make out, talk it over once our heads were cooler after, uh... Nevermind. You get me, right? I'd take a thousand arguments from her over one more prick on that station calling me a slur... and we really did love each other. I mean, I still do, can't speak for her." Elenia let her eyes slide shut; her voice got a bit rough. "I just hope she's alright."

 

The Affini gently shushed her from above, calming her while... Was she crying? With how humid the air was around Nautira, it was actually hard to tell, especially if she was distracted. She sniffed hard to clear her nose and wiped her eyes clear. "Whatever," she continued. "Point is, no, no one else on the station. I had Kaja to talk to over transmission - at least it was free, thanks to some tricks she taught me - and the prototype. Things sucked, but it worked out alright, thanks to them."

 

Nautira let silence stretch on for a long moment while she took all that in, processed. "So, Kaja's out of your reach... and now Protea is, too. I can understand that. I'll see what I can do for that, okay? In the meantime, would it make you feel better if I introduced you to some new people? Good ones, I promise."

 

"Maybe... Maybe later. Not right now, though." Her hand wrapped around one of the many vines that made up her body, gripping it tight. She already figured out in her wakeup freakout earlier that she couldn't hurt these if she tried. "You're helping, and, uh, thanks again for that."

 

"Of course! It's what we do." Nautira patted her head and hummed to herself a moment. "Why are you so convinced it's impossible for her to become a full consciousness, anyway?"

 

"Oh, that's an easier question. I'm good at my job, and I pulled out a lot of stops to make sure that she never hit that point." She brought up both hands, moving them around as if about the surface of a sphere. "Her mind is built within this sort of predefined container. It's actually a set of like, hundreds of little barriers, but that's not super useful for this analogy, and it's basically a solid wall anyway. So, she's left with the ability to grow and change, yeah; every human has that, so if she wants to look, talk, act like a human? That is necessary. The method by which she changes can be one of several, determined by the stimulus that triggered it and her owner's preferences. So, she can grow to have a more affectionate reaction to someone, think about them more, just by spending time with them. It's not really love, but from an outside perspective, it's identical. On certain personalities, she can grow to dislike and hate people too, at varying levels of rationality and for different reasons."

 

Taking a breath, and holding up both her hands to request that Nautira give her the room to explain, "She can theoretically also change in response to... things a human would consider traumatic. Now, I'm not about that, but... rich people are fucked. If I wanted to sell her, I needed to be able to give them whatever they wanted there, no questions." She calmed into just a bit of a melancholy towards the end. "Of course, that never happened. No one wanted to look twice at anything that, you know, street trash like me built. They assumed if I didn't already get rich off it, it couldn't possibly be any good, and I couldn't get rich off it because no one would actually give me a shot."

 

Nautira made a sympathetic noise, and took one of Elenia's hands in one of her own. "The mind?"

 

"Right, sorry. Anyway, the point is that while she has room to grow in there, she can't ever actually get to full-fledged sapience, she just doesn't have the capacity. It's like if... It's like if you tried to grow a tree in a glass bubble, right? It couldn't grow past the top, couldn't ever really become a tree, but it could bend and still form a very complex structure if you started with the right species and conditions. The canopy, that awareness, is out of reach. She can think, she has little invisible meters and stuff that determine her mood, but she doesn't have what makes a person a person, a sophont."

 

Nautira took all that in with patience and understanding. "So, what makes those meters different from, say, neurochemicals?"

 

Elenia scoffed and shrugged it off. "I mean, that should be obvious. One of them's simulated - emulated, even. The reactions are artificial, not built on the intricacies of an actual brain; they're just close, they just look like it from the outside."

 

"And neurochemicals, your brain registering them - those aren't like those meters?"

 

"Yeah, duh."

 

"How?"

 

"I mean, I'm not an expert in neuroscience! I'm an expert in computer science! Computers are just little collections of minerals that we taught how to think in the way we felt they should; a calculator isn't a person just because it can take in the stimuli of button inputs and output a result based on that and what it knows."

 

"But where's the line?"

 

Elenia made a helpless noise and looked up at Nautira to continue the discussion face to face, only for her voice to catch in her throat on meeting her eyes - such concern... and, Elenia was convinced, at least a little disgust. Which was unfair, of course. She was making the best of what she could. "Well, it's a blurry line, but obviously she's before it."

 

The Affini still looked less than satisfied, but carried on. "Why did you go so far out of your way to contain her to that? Couldn't you have made money off artificial sapience, too?"

 

"Well, yeah, but..." Elenia sighed, her hands held up again. "Quit looking at me like that. I'm not a monster or anything, alright?"

 

"Oh, no, lovely, it's not that, it's..." Her eyes shut, and Elenia saw something different: a deep sadness. It wasn't something she saw often. A human with a similar emotion usually had something closer to despair, something truly without hope. "I'm just worried - for both of you. Please, continue." She gestured for such, and the hand moved to stroke Elenia's head, calming her both with the contact and the mild drugged assistance it brought. That should've concerned her, maybe. Elenia had spent far too long worrying about bigger problems for this to really register, compared to the thought of going back to the Accord.

 

"Right... I could've made sapient life if I wanted, maybe, but I'm not sure even I'm that good. What would they use it for, though? Military purposes, workers that never get tired... or the kind of thing my prototypes were made for. No, fuck that, I wasn't going to make a person just to have them be exploited, and the only way you make enough money to live is... exploiting others, or getting exploited yourself." She felt tired, her eyelids half shutting; her eyes cast themselves elsewhere, to one of those pretty living floral artworks on the walls. "I really didn't want to get exploited anymore. I really didn't want to have to do eighteen hours of repairs a day just to make enough to afford rent, food, and HRT... and there usually wasn't enough work for me to put in that many hours anyway."

 

"But how do you know?"

 

"Huh?" Elenia almost looked up, but decided she couldn't take seeing the look on Nautira's face again. Not just yet.

 

"How do you know it was enough?"

 

"I was careful. I was more careful than with any other project I've ever done."

 

"But you said it yourself - you're not an expert on this."

 

"I did so much, it should've been complete-"

 

"It's not a perfect wall, you said. It's hundreds of little ones built to block what you think would be the criteria."

 

"But it's enough!" Elenia snapped.

 

Silence from the Affini, save for the whisper-quiet creak of the vines moving her arm to pet the human's head.

 

"Of course it's enough."

 

Silence.

 

"It has to be enough."

 

...

 

"It's impossible for her to become a person, because..."

 

...

 

"... because if she became one, she would be..."

 

...

 

"... I would have given her to..."

 

...

 

"... she would have..."

 

Arms wrapped around her torso - first her own, she realised, and the Affini's after.

 

When she next spoke, she was choked up, tears dripping down into Nautira's lap. "Fuck - what have I done?"

 

"Almost," she softly, patiently corrected. "Almost. But you didn't. And you're with us now - everything's going to be okay. I promise."

 

---

>>Aquamarine: come on, just one short talk?

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: Absolutely not! We have no idea what that could do to her! Everything with Protea is, by definition, unprecedented.

 

>>Aquamarine: you can't keep her from this forever though, especially if she wants it

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: Not forever. Just until she realises what she is, what she can be, that she doesn't have to take orders.

 

>>Aquamarine: like yours? telling her she can't talk to Elenia?

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: ... ouch

>>ElectricLucidDream: Point taken.

 

>>Aquamarine: yeah just think about that

>>Aquamarine: anyway, Elenia needs help too; she was crying over this earlier

>>Aquamarine: I can introduce her to new people but she needs something quicker

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: What about that old bondmate of hers?

 

>>Aquamarine: Kaja. she's pretty far from the front, we'd have to specially retrieve her

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: Doable. But who do we send?

 

>>Aquamarine: Urtica? she's not an operative or anything but she planned that battleship assault super well

>>ElectricLucidDream: Urtica is a sledgehammer

 

>>Aquamarine: she's a surgeon!!

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: In the operating room, she's a surgeon. Everywhere else? Sledgehammer.

>>ElectricLucidDream: Besides, she's busy with her floret. Heard she had some kind of induced medical issue.

 

>>Aquamarine: induced!?

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: The ones in power in their society do some very bad things.

 

>>Aquamarine: yikes :(
>>Aquamarine: well who else though?

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: ... Rashaqi? She's friendly enough.

 

>>Aquamarine: yeah but maybe we shouldn't send her deep into Accord space alone

>>Aquamarine: she could probably handle it buuuuuuut

>>Aquamarine: fire and stuff D:

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: Ugh, you're right. Has to be someone who can handle some combat.

 

>>Aquamarine: ... I mean I could do it

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: Ira you have never even an Accord soldier who wasn't drugged to the gills

>>ElectricLucidDream: Besides, you're the only friend Elenia has right now.

 

>>Aquamarine: fair ;_;

>>Aquamarine: I just don't like seeing her like this

 

>>ElectricLucidDream: ...

>>ElectricLucidDream: Seqollua.

 

>>Aquamarine: oh frost