Sapphtember Prompts are Here!
"I do not trust her."
The tone was crisp, that dull AI voice that people had thought was soothing for ages. Minthe was not used to it coming from a speaker in her uplink, right on what used to be her shoulder blades.
It grated on her nerves, the reminder that she had to dump all of Atticus' core into her uplink, that their enemies had tried to wipe him from existence. She would have to download more voice styles for Atticus as soon as she was allowed access to the extranet.
"You don't have to trust her. I don't trust her either, but she saved us and you don't currently have a housing, so we'll be playing by her rules for now," Minthe was trying to focus on the papers(real paper!) in front of her.
The current page in the thick packet she was working on was a medical history form, asking for allergies, past procedures, medications, current illnesses, and complaints. She had to fill out the last locales she had been at as well, it seemed that the station was very careful about outsiders and anything they might introduce to the non-AI crew. Minthe felt embarrassed about how little she knew about her own body. Past procedures had been carved into her skin, but allergies, medications, complaints??? These were things that had been drilled into her that she would have to trust to a shock collar.
"She's a witch," The pleasant voice tried to sound angry and menacing, but came off as petulant and whining.
Minthe scrawled in a drippy pen over the real paper, her letters felt barely legible, a cramped, tight fisted affair that finally paused again at these words.
"Atticus," Minthe's tone brooked no nonsense, "You can say you don't like her. You can say you don't trust her. But it better be borne of something tangible, like Persephone being an entire pirate station. Calling a femme entity a witch has many cruel, misogynistic origins from Terra. I don't know where you picked that up, but you best excise it from your programming now."
The Bonded Personality was so shocked by the words, by the exploration of base knowledge and fundamentals he found there that the speakers on her back seemed to whine from empty air for a moment. Minthe mused on the silence, on what it must be like for a war machine to become sentient, aware and alive in the midst of battles. She knew the heat of anger in the pit of her stomach, the way it fueled her desire to live in the heat of a fight, but she also was well trained in containing it to fights only.
Atticus had had no such training. He was essentially a child. A war machine that could kill, and had killed, many in his anger, in his protection of her. He had been bright and delighted to name her and make friends. He was sweet and protective. But without anything to guide the smaller, base thoughts below, there was the bias of the information he could access. Literature that made him furious compared her to something lesser, so of course when he wanted to hurt another or express that displeasure he would mimic the behavior.
The pilot let out a long sigh at the unfamiliar robotic sensations that tingled up her uplink. He was feeling new things, experiencing forming his own ideas after having so much information available to him and no one to guide his growth. That would have to be her then, which when decided didn't feel so daunting. It wasn't like he would have anyone better for the time being.
"Atticus, when we get approved for extranet access, we'll discuss more. But for now, none of this witch stuff. We're surviving right now and that's what matters."
A flip of a page, a long suffering groan at seeing the words 'Mental Health Evaluation' escaped her as she readied her pen again.
